Fallon

       Fallon

   When Lonergin arrived at the Fallon airport he hired a taxi to drive him to the hotel in the center of town. From what he could see out the cab window it seemed an average little mill town, tucked into a fold in the foothills and surrounded by lush green meadows and verdant forest. A tributary river, carrying runoff from that section of the foothills some five hundred kilometers to where it flowed into the big river running north, split the town into two equal sections. Strangely the houses along the banks seemed the same as those farther in. “Where are the houses of the rich?” he asked the cabbie.
“Ten Kilometers north,” replied the cabbie.
“Out of town?”
“O yes,” said the cabbie. “Taxes.”
“And outside on the south?” asked Lonergin.
   “That’s where I live. Can you guess?” The back of the cabbies hand resting on the steering wheel was brown. Darker in the summer perhaps but even in deep winter it would be brown.
   “I don’t have to,” said Lonergin. The cabbie laughed. “There are small farms out there, going way back. With a little farming and occasional work in town, people survive.”
   “And the mill?”
 
 “Only town people work at the mill.”  The mill, out of town and to the west, was hidden by series of small hills. These hills protected the town from the stench in all weather excepting that blowing a direct east wind and that was rare. Today the wind was from the northwest and all you could smell was freshly cut grass, moist air carrying the scent of water from the river and the rich forest smell coming from the fully leafed trees both in the town itself and the woods surrounding.

   Lonergin felt a little depressed. In the past ten years he had been in so many of these little towns and they were all similar, all depressingly the same. He came, unannounced, with a briefcase full of authorizations, his mind full of barked verbal orders from his superiors, to put out fires, to squeeze things down so they wouldn’t cause problems, so everything would appear normal, happy, running with the smooth precision of oiled machinery. Lately he found himself doing his job with all his usual cool efficiency but his heart wasn’t in it. In the fall he would apply for a transfer. When the leaves came down he would get an internal job, stay in the city and perhaps revive a few of the hobbies he had abandoned years ago.
   When they retrieved his bags from the trunk the cabbie offered to carry them but Lonergin waved him off. The cabbie shrugged and Lonergin paid, him adding on a generous tip. He didn’t like other people carrying his bags. He could bloody well carry them himself. He wasn’t a Lord or a rich magnate, just a bureaucrat and a rather lowly one at that. But when he checked in at the desk he allowed the skinny young bellhop to carry his bags to the elevator and then into his room. How would the poor bastard make a living otherwise? The bellhop’s skin was brown too and he had a long, thin, elegant nose you would think would be perched on the face of an English aristocrat. Perhaps it was. There were a lot of remittance men out this way in the old days.
“Do you live in town?” he asked.
“No, sir.”
“Where, then?”
“On a farm to the south.”
“Cattle?”
“Some. Pigs and chickens too and a big garden.”
“Is there money in that?”
“Not much but there’s food in it. We eat well.”
“Well, that’s half the battle, isn’t it?’
“Yes it is, sir.”
   Lonergin tipped him three times the going rate and the boy left smiling. They never queried his expense accounts. If he had a larcenous mind he could have made lots of money out of it but he couldn’t see any reason to bother. He made far more than he spent, the excess going into investments handled by a brother-in-law. Very conservative, very balanced investments, half of it government bonds. He already had enough to live in some warm country for the rest of his natural life, so why bother skulking about to pile up even more? His wife was a bureaucrat too. She made more than he did. The kids were grown and into lucrative professions, one a medical specialist, the other a businessman. It was ludicrous really. Money came to them like they were sponges absorbing water.
   He watched a movie before going to bed. A space opera. Formulaic, granted, but well done with good actors and a good script. He was happy when the corner was turned and the good guys won without too much bloody annihilation. When it was over he read his book for an hour and went to bed.
   The meeting was set up on a phone call from the Big Boss in the city. That’s the way it was always done. It sent a message to whomever that lack of cooperation would bring out the big guns, that the investigator was the voice of power and authority. Lonergin was grateful for this method of procedure. It meant he didn’t have to convince anyone of anything. He just had to ask questions.
   The mayor was a rolly poly man. He sat behind a gargantuan desk in an oversized chair, behind him a window overlooking the river. He wore a three piece suit, tailor made, containing enough material for two or three lesser men. He was telling Lonergin his version of the history of the town, the usual highly edited edition told by mayors, full of mercantile wonders and heroic members of the Chamber of Commerce. Lonergin was an old pro at listening to this sort of thing. He listened with one part of his mind while another part wandered about the back streets looking for other faces and other stories. He thought of the bellhop. He thought of the cabbie. He thought of the woman who served him bacon and eggs in the hotel restaurant. He thought of the young woman who knocked on his door just before he went to bed and asked him if he would like to have ‘a good time’. He didn’t. Professional sex was far too sad an affair for him to find pleasure in.
   The mayor was a verbose but ignorant man. His language never rose above the deep fried rhetoric of tourist brochures and town council resolutions. His syntax was tortured, his thought without leaven and he was totally humourless. His smile never touched his eyes and not a single thing he said had even the slightest whiff of the genuine to it. He took himself very seriously and assumed through a fog of ponderous, bright, highly upbeat projections, that everyone else did so as well. In short he was a pompous ass. But Lonergin neither liked nor disliked him. To him the mayor was like a cow in a field chewing her cud, with the exception that the cow, as lowly as many might see her to be in the hierarchy of creation, was at least engaged in the performance of an act having behind it the full force of her animal nature. When the Mayor came to a pause in what Lonergin judged to be a far too long oration, which, if allowed to continue, would not only consume the morning but poison it as well, he broke in.
   “Is there a union at the mill?”

   “No,” said the Mayor. His face took on an expression of deep displeasure as if while speaking with a man he had assumed to be a sympathetic gentleman, it had suddenly been revealed to him that he was conversing with an unsavory character.
   “Not so unusual in this day and age, is it?”
   “People around here settle things through the family.”
   “What family?’
   “We like to think of the town as one big family.”
   “You may like to think of it that way but is it true?”
   “I think so.”
   Lonergin took his eyes away from the mayor’s face and looked out the window. It was mid morning. The bright sun was lighting up the surface of the river in a great display of sparkling and reflection. He studied this for a while. The mayor was pretending to look at the papers on his desk but he was really studying him surreptitiously to see what was coming next. Without removing his eyes from the river Lonergin asked, “Did they tell you why I am here?’
   “Yes.” the mayor replied.
   “Five young men murdered within a single year. Rather unusual, isn’t it? Perhaps you have an opinion on the subject?”
   “Not really,” said the mayor.
   “OK, if you don’t have an opinion on that subject perhaps you have one on another. Five young men murdered and yet no one charged. In fact, according to the reports forwarded by your Chief of Police, not only are there no charges but there seems to be no evidence or suspects either.”
  “The police do the best they can. We don’t have the big bucks out here like they do where you come from.”
   “O, I don’t know,” said Lonergin. “On my walk from the hotel it seemed to me that this is a prosperous little town.”
   “And it stays that way by not wasting money on useless investigations.”
   “Useless? Isn’t that a strange word to apply to a murder investigation?”

   “Well, perhaps useless isn’t the right word. What I mean is we have limited resources and we must use them judiciously.”
   “Yet surely you are aware that in a situation like this you can apply to the central government for extra funds. Five murders in a single year for a town this size would almost certainly qualify. Yet you haven’t applied. Perhaps you could tell me why?”
   “If a gang of thugs outside the town want to kill one another why should we waste money getting too excited about it?”
   “So you think the murders were committed by outsiders against outsiders.”
   “Exactly.”
   “Why?”
   “My Chief tells me that’s where the body’s were found.”
   “Bodies can be moved, Mr. Mayor.”
   “The Chief tells me they were killed where they were found.”
   “Did he? It seemed to me from the reports that that was a matter of opinion rather than investigative fact. In the reports there seemed to be a great scarcity of investigative fact, almost as if the Chief didn’t have time to find any.”
   “Well, he is a busy man.”
   “And you too are a busy man, Mayor.”
   “Yes.”
   “Good. Then you will be pleased when I tell you that an investigative team arrives tomorrow to give you a hand. To take over the investigation in fact. When do you come into the office in the morning, Mr. Mayor?”
   “About nine.”
   “Keep the first hour open then for the team. For the next two weeks or so.”
   “Well, I don’t know…”
   “Do what you like then. If they want to speak to you they will simply walk in and order anyone present to leave. It’s up to you.”
   “Well of course then. I’ll keep it open.”
   When Lonergin reached the door he opened it and turned. “Why are you convinced these murders are revenge, the settling of debts, whatever, among the outside people?”
   “They are lawless ruffians. None of them have a pot to piss in. You always find high murder rates among those kind of people.”
   “Then why is it,” asked Lonergin, “that before these five murders, for a period going back twenty years, was there not a single murder among them?”
   “These things go up and down,” said the Mayor. Lonergin stepped into the outer office and closed the door.
 
                                                               
   The Police Chief, in contrast to the mayor, was an exceedingly thin man. So much so that at first Lonergin thought he might be ill with a wasting disease. When the investigative team arrived he had them look into it. The Chief was actually in robust health. Apparently even as a young man he had been cadaverously thin. He had a sad face filled with successive lines of rumpled skin. There was a blue black bag under each eye. He had a long, thin nose which reminded Lonergin of the plows the old people used to turn sod. His eyes were round like saucers, watery and pale blue and surprisingly kind and sympathetic, surprisingly to Lonergin for he had expected something else. He sat behind a modest wooden desk with not a thing on it but a small bowl of jelly beans. From this bowl, every few minutes or so he took a few jellybeans and popped them into his mouth. He offered the bowl to Lonergin, as a substitute, perhaps, for a glass of scotch. The Chief didn’t drink. To be sociable Lonergin took a few and tossed them into his mouth. They were truly delicious jellybeans.
   
  “The reports, Chief.”
   “Are lousy, I know.”
  Lonergin was taken aback. The chief smiled. “You didn’t expect that, did you?”
   “No.”
   “They were done by a Lieutenant on the Mayor’s orders. I just signed them.”
   “You could have refused.”
   “I have seven children. They eat. But I also have a conscience. It eats too if you don’t pay attention. There are sub reports, you might call them, put away where only I know where to find them. They are not much better than the official reports for almost no follow up was done. The bereaved were interviewed for form’s sake. There were no suspects because the Lieutenant was ordered not to look for any. But there is some physical evidence which didn’t go into the official reports and a much better detailing of the condition of the bodies - when they were found, time, place etc.”
   “Autopsies? I didn’t see any reports in the files.”
   “That’s because none were done. I know that’s illegal but the town refused to authorize payment for them.”
   “And the bodies now?”
   “Cremated a week after death.”
   “Christ. Did the relatives give permission?”
   “No. It was just done. But in my reports there is a very accurate summation of the condition of the bodies, the immediate surroundings, approximate time of death and some physical evidence.”
   “Such as.”
   “Shell casings. A footprint in one case. Threads of fabric in the victim’s hand in another. I gathered all that surreptitiously, sometimes going back to the scene at night when no one was there.”
   “Why?’
   “Because I wasn’t in charge of the investigation.”
   “Who was then?”
   “The Mayor and the Lieutenant. The Lieutenant is the Mayor’s son-in-law.”
   The Chief rose from his desk to pour them coffee. When he placed the full cups on the desk Lonergin asked him. “Who and why?”
   The Chief popped in a few more jellybeans. “I really don’t know, at least in a concrete evidence based sort of way. I have hunches. I have intuitive leaps. I have educated guesses. But I don’t have knowledge.”
   “Give me some of your educated guesses, then.”
   “OK.” The Chief opened a desk drawer and took out a package of cigarettes. “Mind if I smoke?” he asked.
   “No.” said Lonergin.
   He lit the cigarette with an old time zippo lighter. He reached out with a long leg and pulled over the waste basket for an ashtray.
   “Two years ago the outsiders figured they were not being given a very good deal. Low class jobs. None on the police force. In fact not a single one as an employee of the town. And none at the mill. That’s were the real money is. Even a labourer at the mill, with overtime, makes as much money as I do. I suppose they figured if they didn’t do something it would go on that way for ever. So they decided to do something. They looked around them and came to a conclusion – a very intelligent conclusion but also very dangerous. The outsiders come into town to buy everything – food, hardware, booze, building supplies, farm supplies, everything. There are ten thousand people in the town but the outsider population is perhaps twice that amount. Some of the younger one’s who had been away to the university decided to set up a co-op. They held meetings and started the process of registering the co-op with the central government. Apparently they planned to set up a general store carrying practically everything. With volunteer labour they started to renovate an old barn about twenty klicks from here. They were about half done when the first murder occurred but they kept going. After two and three things slowed down to a crawl and after the fourth, a particularly grisly torture murder, they stopped altogether. It’s still out there on the 1169 if you want to take a look. Some say it would have been burned down but the outsiders, at least I’ve been told so, guard it around the clock carrying shotguns.”
   “So that’s why. Now who?”
   “The Mayor’s son-in-law. But he is on a leash and the holding end of the leash is held by the Mayor and four or five of his pals. Now I say this and am 99% sure of it but there is absolutely no proof that will stand up in a court of law. The bodies are gone. No autopsies. The physical evidence I gathered will never convict anyone. It might give an intelligent investigator who knows the situation a good idea of what happened but it will never convict anybody. But I doubt if it will matter anyway.”
   “Why do you say that?”
   “Because they tortured the last guy before they killed him. Somebody gave the family pictures of the body before it was cremated and a detailed list of its wounds. The outsiders are on the bottom end of the social scale but that doesn’t mean they are stupid. They have their clods like all groups of people do but there are many among them who are resourceful, ingenuous and intelligent. What would you do if someone tortured your son, killed him and then set it up so they could not get caught?”
   Lonergin didn’t say anything.
   “You know what you would do but you just don’t want to say you being a law abiding government official. You know what you would do, don’t you?”
   Lonergin took a long time to reply but the Chief waited patiently. Finally he said. “Yes. I know what I would do.”
   “Well, I think that’s what the outsiders are going to do.”

   The team arrived the next day and set to work. The Chief gave them the sub reports and drove them around the gravel roads to interview the victims’ familiars. They worked for three weeks out of a room in the Police Station. But it was as the Chief had predicted. They arrived at a fairly accurate picture of what happened but had no evidence which would stand up in a court of law. The Lieutenant and a suspected cohort had lawyers at their interviews and said practically nothing. The Mayor refused to be interviewed and without solid evidence they couldn’t force it. The Mayor’s pals were even farther away. They were ghosts moving across the far edge of a field in the twilight. The team wrapped up its work and flew back to the city to file its report. Lonergin decided to stay another day.
   He was woken by the phone beside his bed at five in the morning. “This is Phil Gillis,” the voice on the other end of the line said, “the Chief. There’s a body at 506 Compton you should take a look at. I’ll send a car.”
   When the car arrived Lonergin was in the Lobby. First light was beginning on the eastern horizon but the town was still dark. When they came to the house the Chief was on the porch smoking a cigarette. There were two police cars in the driveway and the Identification van was at the curb. When Lonergin came up the stair the Chief, sitting in a lawn chair, offered the empty one nearby with a gesture of his left hand. Lonergin sat down.
   “It’s the Lieutenant, of course,” said the Chief.
   “Right,” said Lonergin.
   “Do you want to go in and see?”
   “Yes.”
   “Did you ever see this sort of thing before?”
   “Once or twice.”
   “Probably not like this though. They were vengeful. People have nightmares for two years after seeing something like this. A lot of times it doesn’t even hit people for two or three weeks. It takes time to sink in. Then they wake up at night hollering, covered in sweat. Still want to see?” Lonergin shook his head.
  “You are a wise man. There are enough terrible things we have to see in this world without volunteering for more. I look because I’m a cop. I have no choice. When I was young I should have went into the gardening business with my uncles but at the time I had fool ignorant notions about noble heroes and so on. By the time I realized they were fool and ignorant it was too late. Five kids and twins on the way. I should have worked flower beds and used contraception.”
   Two identification officers came out of the house carrying plastic cases. They walked over to the van, loaded the cases and drove away.

   The Chief waved his cigarette towards the departing van. “They’ll find a few things. They are pretty good and they always do. But it won’t be of any use. There won’t be anyone to match it to. The guys who did this are already gone. We will ask questions but no one will answer them. Remind you of another situation? That’s just what it will be like.”
   “Won’t it matter that he was a cop?”
   “Not really. There will be a little of that but not much. Everyone in the force hated his guts. They all thought him a sadistic son of a bitch. He would have been fired years ago if he wasn’t the Mayor’s son-in-law. He was killed because he deserved it. Just about nobody who knows anything about all this will really care if the killers are never caught.”
   “What did they do to him?”
   “Probably when he got off shift yesterday morning at eight and climbed into his car they knocked him out with something. He lived in this house alone. How could anyone live with a man like that? They drove him home and into the garage. He always kept the door opener on the dash of the car. Took him down into the basement and strung him up by his hands with his feet a few inches off the floor. They duct taped his mouth. When he woke up first they castrated him. They duct taped his genitals onto his forehead. Then they shot out first his ankle joints, then his knees, then his hips, then his elbows and then his shoulders. They let him hang there for a while I suppose then they shot him through the head three times.”
   “Just like the last outsider.”
   “Just like the last outsider.”
   “What a horrible way to die.”
   “And what a horrible way to make someone die.”

   The murder of the Lieutenant terrified the suspected cohort. He left town and then, after some sober afterthought, never came back. But the Mayor refused to leave. The Chief provided him with a twenty four hour bodyguard. “Do your best but don’t get too close to him. Do you know what I mean?” he told the guards and they all nodded. Even the dull witted ones nodded.

   Lonergin was back in the capital when the Mayor was killed. It was on a September day with a nice fresh breeze coming in the window one of the night cleaning staff left open. When the Mayor arrived he found it so refreshing that he decided not to close it. They shot him through the window with a 222, a rifle with a flat trajectory, and as the window was open, there was no glass imperfections or glare to cause sighting problems for the shooter. The shot was well aimed. The slug entered the back of his head at the joint of the spine and the skull. The slug was hollow point. It broke into four parts rattling around the inside of his skull chewing up his brain as if it had been placed in a blender. The Mayor wasn’t the sort of man to have regrets. This was just as well for the way it turned out he was given no time to have them.

   There is a co op now operating on the 1169. It does a good business. Most of its customers are outsiders but it does a sprinkling of business from townies who come out for the bargains. There are now two outsider police officers and three outsiders have just started to work at the mill.

   Lonergin decided not to tell his wife about the details of the murders. So when he began to wake at night hollering, flailing his arms about, he told her it was the return of childhood nightmares. After the third night of this she demanded he go to a psychologist and he did. The psychologist, who considered himself to be a radical shaman type of healer, told him he was a spoilt bureaucrat, a soft and useless creature and thus easy prey for malignant furies. He suggested Lonergin sell his sailboat and give the money to the poor. As Lonergin did not have a sailboat he was unable to follow this advice. Instead he bought a membership in a gym and took up weight lifting. After three months of pumping iron the nightmares went away and he was able to leave the guestroom and rejoin his wife in the connubial bed.

   Chief Gillis retired early, a year after the Mayor’s murder. He and his family moved to a farm outside town where they breed sheep and Lamas. At first the kids complained bitterly but they stopped when their mother bought them three horses and they started to play hockey with the outsider kids on the local pond. The new co -op is just down from their farm which pleases the Chief for since his retirement he doesn’t like going into town. He finds the streets too crowded and the faces too innocent and imbecilic. Saturday mornings the Chief can be seen at the coop hovering his hawk’s nose above the tool displays while his wife does the grocery shopping. Saturday afternoons he sits on his front verandah drinking coca cola and eating jelly beans. Old friends from town, out for a drive in the country, sometimes join him there along with people from around the neighbourhood. Everybody gets along. Sometimes they even sit down together at the Chief’s table for supper and have a delicious meal of fresh pork and garden vegetables.

Marriage Arising from Intellectual Speculation

Marriage Arising from Intellectual Speculation




Gregor wrote metaphysical poetry. He had begun writing it at the age of sixteen due to an excess of eros combined with a Catholic upbringing. He didn’t want to write metaphysical poetry; rather he would have infinitely preferred to write love poetry or poetry celebrating the lush earth or political poetry, anything other than metaphysical poetry which was completely out of fashion, and, to many, a sign of weakness of mind. But he couldn’t help himself. Try as he might to write other kinds of poetry it always turned out metaphysical. This disgusted him so much that for several years in his thirties and forties he wrote no poetry at all and in fact swore to all his friends he would never write another line. But he was spitting into a powerful wind. Regardless of his own opinions on the matter he came back to writing poetry and the poetry was metaphysical.

At one time, in his thirties, he worked out a theory that time would break him of the habit eventually and a new type of poetry would emerge. Time, he told himself, robs us of our illusions and surely his biggest illusion was the existence of something above the physical. He was willing to admit that something mixed in with the physical was possible, even probable, but above was ridiculous. But this theory of his turned out untrue. At the age of sixty, when he retired from his ragtag patchwork of small jobs –apartment caretaker, proofreader for a German newspaper, unpaid editor for a magazine publishing metaphysical poetry, newspaper vendor and so on – he said to himself, “Well, now that is all done, thank goodness.” But it wasn’t. After a brief hiatus of writing two detective novels filled with metaphysical speculations, but no poetry, he began once again on his lifelong obsession with writing metaphysical poetry. Finally, at the age of sixty-three, after thinking seriously about throwing himself into the river, he woke one day filled with what was at first was a bitter but then a hopeful acceptance of his lot. For some strange reason he had been born to write metaphysical poetry and any more rebellion on his part would be fruitless and sterile. He had finally come to the point where he accepted his fate.

“There is no such thing as fate!” said Andrew in response to his explanation of the above process.

“So there is no DNA then?” replied Gregor.

“DNA and fate are two completely different things.”

“No they aren’t,” said Rudolf. “They are two different words, yes, but they mean much the same thing.”

“Nonsense,” said Andrew. “The idea that we are preprogrammed, that we merely act out the instructions of The Great Computer, is pernicious.”

“But neither fate nor DNA implies that, Andrew,” said Gregor. “What you are speaking of is the old Calvinist view of predestination. There is no reason why you can’t have fate  interacting with individual initiative. Surely that is a maturer vision than a romantic notion of Great Prometheus or the Hero Totally Self Determined. Even our common sense tells us that many things are laid down for us. And then there is the whole question of culture which influences how our minds move, what kind of questions we ask. We can’t dismiss all this and claim a separated existence in a vacuum.”

“Granted there are a lot of things laid down,” said Gregor. “I’m not arguing there isn’t but I am saying there is still a huge area where our own initiative has great play.”

They argued on like this for some time until Rudolf grew extremely bored and offered to buy everyone tea and cinnamon buns if they would agree to change the topic. It was just before the end of the month and Gregor and Andrew, broke and hungry, agreed immediately.

The buns were heated and when Rudolf brought them to the table they slavered them with butter, ate enthusiastically and washed it all down with hot tea. Behind the counter Fritz was rubbing his hands at selling something extra to the ‘three grumblers’ as he called them privately, who seldom bought anything but three cups of tea over which they spent entire afternoons arguing. Occasionally one of the grumblers would hit the jackpot and buy a tray of deli sandwiches but this only happened once or twice a year. In the winter, especially a cold one, he doubted if they paid for their share of the heat, the old freeloaders. He called them grumblers because they always seemed to be complaining about something. They complained about the present state of literature. They complained about politics. They complained about the crappy books being published of late. The only thing they didn’t complain about was the weather. The weather, whatever it was, was always fine to them. If it was raining that was great. If the sun was shining that was fine too. If it was cold it was invigorating, bracing. If hot, it was just the kind of diauretic old men needed. They were radical acceptors of the weather. About everything else they complained.

Yet Fritz didn’t mind their complaining. On the whole the place was rather dead. People sat lined up one at a table staring at their computer screens lost in the la la land of cyberspace. Sometimes the café was totally filled with these kind of people and there was not a single conversation. But when the three grumblers showed up they shook the place up. They knew many of the patrons and teased them mercilessly. They sat in a corner near the window and talked so loudly you could follow their conversation from the other side of the café. The screen addicts glanced at them irritably. If the professor was at his usual table with a crony or two he literally growled at them. Rudolf growled back. “How are you doing you old hypocrite?” Rudolf shouted across the tables at him. “Have the police been around to pick you up yet?”

The professor showed his yellow tombstones to indicate he could take a joke which was untrue but socially necessary. At least once a month he dreamed of murdering Rudolf in a gruesome way. Once he slowly lowered him into a vat of acid. Another time he tossed him off the roof of a high rise. During each murder Rudolf admitted the error of his ways and pleaded for mercy but the professor was relentless.

Asking if the police had come round to pick up the professor was ironically ridiculous, for if there was a man less likely to be sought by the police than the professor it was hard to imagine whom he would be. Other than the occasional lapse with women and that a matter of impious propositioning rather than illegality, the professor was scrupulously law abiding. He had a reverence for authority which leaned towards preferring absolutist government over what he considered to be inefficient, squabbling democracy. Rudolf’s anarchism, to the professor, was dangerously disrespectful of duly constituted authority and unpatriotic. If the old standards had not ‘gone by the boards’, as the professor phrased it, Rudolf would have long ago, along with his black flag friends, been put in jail on meager rations until he came to his senses. Why he was allowed to move about in respectable society spreading his poisons was beyond him. He had spoken several times to Fritz about barring such persons from the café but Fritz just laughed. “I don’t care what they think as long as they eat and drink,” he said. Fritz didn’t care much about ideas and political struggles but he liked Rudolf who was lively and jolly. The professor, on the other hand, was morose. He had much of the undertaker to him - a presbyterian dead pan seriousness. When the professor laughed it was from reasons of policy. He hadn’t laughed out of a sense of delight for more than fifty years.

After buns and tea the old friends decided to go for a walk. The café was close to the river and along this section there was a paved path. They strolled along the path for a kilometer and then sat down on one of the benches in a grassy area leading down to the water. They sat on the bench for some time in silent companionship. Just beyond them there were two young men casting out into midstream. On the grass beside them were three silver coloured fish. They must have been caught some time ago for they were dead and still. Above them stretched enormous cottonwoods, fully canopied and spreading about them a delicious coolness.

After they had sat for five minutes without saying a word, two young women came along the path. They were wearing long cotton dresses and sunhats for the day was hot and the sun full. One of the young women walked slightly ahead of the other. The two did not even glance at the men on the bench and seemed to be about to pass them by when the last in line suddenly stopped and turned to face them. She looked at them with an intensity which seemed out of place for such a casual encounter between a young woman and three older men on a bench. Her companion also stopped. She said something to her which the men could not make out. The young woman made a brisk gesture with her right hand as if to brush her off. Then she walked up to where the men were sitting and said, “Are you all married?” She had a slight Spanish accent but the words were enunciated clearly and the friends had no trouble understanding what she asked them.

Andrew answered, perhaps because in his job he dealt with marriages and young women, and it seemed to him most natural that he do so. First he smiled, a generous wide smile half professional, half arising from his usual overflowing spirits. “Why do you ask?” he said.

The young woman considered this question for a moment. Then she said, “I need a husband to stay in the country. Otherwise they will send me back. If I am sent back they will kill me.”

“Where is back?” asked Rudolf.

“Mexico.”

“And who will kill you?”

“The gangsters. Or maybe even the police who are bribed by the gangsters. My husband was assassinated. He was a drug dealer. I managed to escape and come here but now they are going to send me back. The lawyer says if I can find someone to marry me then I can apply under a different section and will be allowed to stay.”

“How do you know that if you go back they will kill you?” asked Gregor.

“That’s the way they do things. They kill the man and the wife too.”

During this question and answer the other young woman came up behind her companion and said, “Please excuse her, sirs. She is distraught. Up until now she has been able to restrain herself. This is the first time she has approached strangers.”

The second young woman reached out and took the first’s hand and tried pulling her away but the first ignored her. She stood her ground and kept looking at the men.

“I need friends,” she said. “I need someone to help me.”

“But I am your friend, Estanza,” said the other young woman.

“Yes you are but you can’t marry me. I need a man to marry me.”

“This requires further investigation,” said Rudolf. “And this is not the place to do it. Not far from here there is a Vietnamese restaurant. Let’s go there and have lunch. During lunch we can talk.”

At the restaurant they had lunch and talked for an hour and a half. The friends decided than Estanza was telling the truth. They considered it their duty to find her a husband.

“What kind of a husband do you want?” asked Andrew.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Estanza. “As long as he is free to marry and healthy enough to stand up during the ceremony.” She laughed.

“What I mean is,” said Andrew, “Do you want us to look for a real husband or is it to be a marriage of convenience.”

“What is a marriage of convenience?” asked Estanza.

“Real legally so that you can be landed but you don’t live with the man and when things are settled you can get a divorce.”

“I guess one of those then,” said Estanza. “There isn’t enough time for me to find one I would want to live with.”

The friends told the two women to meet them at the restaurant at same time two days from now. They figured by then they would have found a husband. Julia, Estanza’s friend, a cousin who had immigrated as a child, gave Andrew her address and phone number and they went off.


 “Do you have anyone in mind?” Andrew asked Rudolf.

“Vaguely.”

“Who?”

“There are a number of old anarchists who might step into the gap.”

Gregor had several bachelor friends, one of whom might be willing to assist them. Andrew had three old gentlemen in his congregation he would ask. They agreed to meet for breakfast the day after tomorrow.



Rudolf, being the most solvent among them, insisted on paying for the breakfast and later for lunch at the Vietnamese restaurant. They ate breakfast in a tiny place just down from the café.

“So?” said Andrew.

“I asked three of the old anarchists I thought might be willing but they all said no,” said Rudolf. “They claimed they were old and set in their ways. ‘What does that have to do with it?’ I asked them. ‘All you have to do is mumble a few ritual phrases and go home.’ But no they said, they were too old to get mixed up with women and complicated arrangements.”

“Last night I went to visit my three bachelors,” said Gregor. “It was the same with them. They didn’t want to get involved. The woman might come after their pension. There might be complications. The immigration people might accuse them of fraud and they would have to hire lawyers.”

“Well,” said Andrew, “ I drew a blank too. The old gentlemen are all widowers and each told me their children would scream bloody murder if they married a young woman. Their grandchildren would accuse them of being lechers.”

“My, my,” said Rudolf. “That means we will have to activate a scheme I have been revolving in my mind since we met Estanza yesterday.”

“What scheme?” asked Gregor.

“The professor.”

“No,” said Andrew.

“What do you mean, no?” asked Rudolf.

“The man is a lecher. Even at his age he would insist on his conjugal rights.”

“Yes,” said Gregor, “but would he be capable of exercising them?”

“I doubt it,” said Rudolf. “He’s eighty-eight and has a bad heart.”

“Maybe,” said Andrew, “but you never know with some of these old guys. And there are the new drugs.”

“We wouldn’t be able to tell him it is a marriage of convenience,” said Rudolf. “Perhaps we could convince him that Estanza has seen him everyday going by her window and decided that, although a little on the older side, he was a fine figure of a man. And now she must marry or be deported why not approach this fine old gentleman whom she had been admiring for some months. Stoke up the old buzzard’s vanity. Lay it on with a trowel. Freely admit Estanza has an ulterior motive, yes, but why not combine it with marrying a handsome old man with an aura of prestige and standing in the community?”


Andrew was delegated to talk with the professor. They invented an address for Estanza which put her on the professor's walk to the café every morning. Andrew was a little queasy about the ethics involved in such a deception but he was convinced that if Estanza was deported she would be murdered. The situation demanded bold steps; to be overly scrupulous was to be an accessory to murder.

The professor was interested. “Mexican, you say?” he asked. He had often dreamed of dark skinned senoritas flinging themselves about in flaming flamingo dance routines. Many years ago he had been in love with the Mexican actress Ida Lupino. Andrew convinced the old man that Estanza had watched him walk by her window every day for some months and thought him very attractive. It was all he could do to get this out without bursting into laughter. The professor went for it hook line and sinker. When could he meet the young woman? If speed was necessary then it would have to be a quiet affair. But then at his age he wasn’t interested in hoopla and fancy celebrations. Perhaps Andrew could perform the ceremony. Keep it in the family so to speak. Andrew promised to phone him that very afternoon.

“I’ll take my chances,” Estanza said when they explained the situation to her.


The Professor and Estanza were married two weeks later in the Unitarian church. Andrew preformed the ceremony, Gregor was the best man, Julia the bridesmaid. Rudolf, not wanting to antagonize the old man, or give him reason to suspect a plot, stayed away. Afterwards the professor took everyone out to an upscale restaurant where they ate steak and lobster tails and drank six bottles of expensive wine. When the dinner was over, the professor, bride on his arm, left the restaurant and the newlyweds took a cab to the professor’s home, a stately brick three story on the riverbank not far from the café.

There the professor, who drank one and a half bottles of wine by himself, fell asleep on the sofa. Estanza, a strong young woman outweighing the professor by thirty pounds, carried him into the bedroom and undressed him. She found a pair of pyjamas in the bureau drawer and put them on the old man. Then she covered him with a light blanket and left the bedroom. In the kitchen she wrote a note to the professor thanking him for a night of delirious love which, to be frank, she had never thought she would experience with an older man. Such passion! She was gone off to do some errands but would be back in the early evening. She left the note on the kitchen table.

When the professor woke he went into the kitchen and read the note. He was pleased. Although he could not remember the previous evening with any accuracy he was delighted that nature had taken its course and his bride had been satisfied. He was somewhat exhausted after his night of celebrating and went back to bed and slept until noon.

This became the pattern of Estanza’s and the professor’s nights of love. She convinced him that a man of his age must build up a reserve and once a month was the most to be expected. The professor was an imbiber of wine and she always made sure there was three or four bottles of his favourite for their special nights. Together with the effects of the wine, which invariably made him sleepy after a bottle and a half, and the professor having reached the point in his mental activity where dreaming he had done something and having done it was much the same, he was convinced he and Estanza had a night of successful passion every month. He was a little surprised that such happy completion had come upon him in his old age and was most grateful to Estanza who with her round cheeks and peasant face he saw as a grounded, earthy, everyday version of Ida Lupino.

After his marriage the professor became close with the three friends. What is marriage if there are no friends attached to it? He even extended the hand of comradeship (not the anarchist kind, of course) to Rudolf for the sake of his friendship with Gregor and Andrew. They came for supper every second Saturday. Estanza made tamales or burritos and, after dinner, they watched a movie on the professor’s big screen TV (formerly used by the professor exclusively for watching porno flicks).

The professor died at the age of ninety-one, at night, in his own bed. Estanza found him in the morning cold as ice but with a peaceful look upon his face as if he had been dreaming something pleasant when death came by to take him.

Estanza inherited everything, which was substantial for the professor never had a family and was a frugal man. During the three years of her marriage she had become an anarchist under the tutelage of Rudolf. After the funeral she had an apartment built in the third floor of the house for her own quarters and gave the first two floors over to Black Flag Society, the new anarchist organization recently started by Rudolf.











Redemption By Jews

           Redemption By Jews


   Jacob was sixty-one when he came to the Philippines.  He had been divorced two years before and had just wrapped up the sale of his carpentry company to a young man who had worked for him as an assistant for ten years. He decided to try the hot countries where he had never been to see if he might like to retire there.

   The divorce was Jacob’s third. His wives accused him of insensitivity, irritability and ill temper, all of which were true. He had violent temper tantrums in which he smashed crockery, broke windows and hurled things at his terrified wives, fortunately without hitting them. They said he was insanely jealous and controlling, which was also true. All of these accusations were on the record for each of his divorces went to court. What his wives did not say, out of delicacy, or on the advice of their lawyers, or both, was that even in his fifties he was oversexed, demanding sex two or three times a day at the very least. His wives found this at first flattering but later tiring. They also did not put on the record that he was a raging antisemite, a significant portion of whose conversation was composed of rants against the Jews. He babbled the usual ragbag of inane shibboleths from the tradition of that particular obsession at them until they were driven almost mad. Perhaps the lawyers advised them not to mention this for Jacob himself was a Jew, on both his mother and father’s side, and it might introduce an element of confusion into the court proceedings. It should also be mentioned that Jacob was an exceedingly handsome man, highly intelligent, capable in business and very charming. Not in court, for obvious reasons, but privately to their lawyers (women, all) they mentioned that for some time after their marriage to Jacob they were very much in love and were convinced they had made a wonderful match.

     When Jacob landed in Manila he stayed over only one night. For the past five years he had lived on a farm outside the medium sized city were he ran his business, commuting every day. Over this time he had come to see cities as the old prophets saw Sodom and Gomorrah, as cesspools of moral slackness and depravity. After his night surrounded by such dangers on every side he took a bus on a day’s journey to a small provincial town he had once read about in a magazine. Here he put up in a small hotel, not a tourist hotel for the town was far off the beaten track and had no tourist trade to speak of. The other guests were mostly business travelers, salesmen and small contractors. The management gave him a very reasonable monthly rate, including meals in the restaurant, and he decided to stay for at least a few months.

   The town was on the sea as just about all towns there are, for the Philippines is a country of islands. It was hot, in the high thirties centigrade, with brilliant sunshine. Every day he walked to the beach a kilometer from the hotel and swam in the sea. In the afternoons he bicycled on the gravel roads leading out of town through little villages with houses built on stilts and thatched with straw, past groups of people working in the fields. He brought a sandwich and a bottle of juice with him and had a mid afternoon snack usually on a hill where he could look off into the distance while he ate. He was back at the hotel for supper at six. Afterward he climbed the stairs to his room on the third floor and took a nap.

   Every evening at nine o’clock on the dot, for Jacob was man of clocklike routine, he left his room with its tiny balcony overlooking the town and descended the stairs to the lobby. At the foot of the stair he turned right, and, crossing in front of the main desk, passed through a set of double mahogany doors leading to the bar. The bar was much larger than needed for the guests because it served not only the hotel but also the surrounding community. Jacob sat at a table in the corner frequented by a small group of European and North American ex patriots. There were about twelve regulars, most retired and a little older than Jacob. Since it was Wednesday night and the full complement appeared only on Friday and Saturday evenings, there were only five present. As Jacob approached the table it struck him for the twentieth time how brightly their pale skins shone pink and strange in that sea of brown Filipinos made even browner by so much time outside under the hot season sun. This was accentuated for three of the men who had taken to combating baldness by shaving their heads. Jacob gave a general wave and, when the very attentive waiter appeared almost immediately, ordered a beer.

   “Over there, Jacob,” said the man on his left, one of the billiard balls whose jet black eyebrows appeared as finger clouds crossing the face of a pale full moon. This was Carson, a retired pharmacist from the American mid west who lived in the hotel eight months a year and dabbled in local real estate. Jacob didn’t remember his first name or even if he had ever heard it. Everyone called him Carson. Even Carson referred to himself as Carson. Jacob turned his head to follow the pointing finger until his eyes came to a stop at a table where four young women were drinking beer.

   “The closest one on the left,” said Carson.

   The closest one on the left was wearing a bright yellow dress printed with figures of elegant blue and white flowers. She was beautiful with the particular kind of beauty that only a mixture of Melanesian, Spanish and American blood can bring. Even, perfectly formed features, high cheek bones, flawless skin, a lovely rich brown, jet black hair done up in a bun secured by a comb at the back of her head, and almond eyes which were perhaps Formosan, perhaps American Eurasian, or perhaps even the eyes of a Castilian Duchess come to rest after many years of restless wandering, here in this little provincial town. She was talking animatedly to her friends who were also speaking animatedly so that one wondered if they had some magical ability to speak and listen at the same time. There were no men at their table. While he was watching a young man approached the women, but after a brief, polite exchange, he went on his way.

   “And what about her?” Jacob asked.

   “A widow looking for a husband. Preferably a rich one.”

   “How do you know?”

   “I bribe waiters. I have intimate conversations with my barber.”

   “How did she get to be a widow? Arsenic?”

   “Ha ha, very funny. And with some of these women not far from the truth. In her case, however, it was perfectly above board. He was a fisherman and died in a storm at sea. That would be difficult for even the most malicious wife to manage.”

   “What about age?”

   “My informants tell me she is amenable with a top range of late sixties. That is, of course, if there is enough money involved so there is no need for her to be embarrassed by lack of a dowry. Her husband took the boat which her dowry helped to buy to the bottom of the sea with him.”

    “She’s very beautiful, Carson. Perhaps a little rich for my blood.”

   “O, I don’t know. This is a poor place and a Westerner of even modest savings is quite a catch, the equivalent of a multi millionaire back home.”

   Jacob and his friends went on to talk of other things and he forgot about the young woman. But an hour later when the band got up to play he walked across the floor and asked her to dance. She rose, took his hand and followed him onto the floor. A waltz. She held herself at arm’s length of course, for it was unseemly for strangers to dance close like lovers or a married couple. When the dance was over she invited him to sit at her table and was introduced to her friends. Jacob bought a round of beer – a European beer, which they claimed, on its arrival and a few sips, to be inferior to their local beer with the added penalty of being twice as expensive. Jacob stayed at the table for the rest of the evening, dancing with Julia, the young woman, six or seven times and once with each of her girlfriends. When he was crossing the lobby to ascend the stairs to his room, Carson, who was leaning on the front desk chatting to the clerk, said to him, “well, I guess we won’t be seeing you for a while.”

   Jacob chuckled politely but kept on his way.

    Julia came to the bar on Wednesday and Saturday nights. Jacob spent these evenings at her table but they were seldom alone. There was at least one girlfriend, sometimes three or four. Julia worked in the laundry at the local hospital and the girlfriends were all co-workers. After two months of this, one evening, Jacob was sitting alone with one of the girlfriends, a plump, affable young woman named Rose. Julia was late coming for some family reason and the other two girlfriends at the table were up dancing. After she had scrutinized him for some moments with her dark eyes, Rosa asked, “are you married?”

   “Divorced,” replied Jacob, not insulted at all by the question. He was delighted that someone was finally coming to the point.

   “Retired?”

   “Yes.”

   “Are you going to live here full time now?”

   “Probably.”

   “Julia doesn’t want to leave. She’s a home girl.”

    Jacob said nothing to this and a few moments passed by until Rose brought her eyes back from the dance floor where they had wandered and asked, “if you married would you be bringing your property here?”

   “Yes.”

   “How much?”

   Rather blunt but how else could you ask such a question? Jacob mentioned a figure.

   “American?”

   “American.”

   “You will invest here?”

   “Yes.”

   “Julia has connections through which mortgages could be let out.”

   “And how much would such mortgages amount to?”

   “Two hundred thousand American.”

   “A lot.”

   “Yes. Such beauty has a high premium.”

   “The mortgages are to be let out to family?”

   “Some but not all. Will you buy a house?”

    “I suppose, yes.”

    “Julia has three children, a mother and an older sister who live with her.”

   “I see.”

   “They come with her is what I mean to say.”

   “Fine.”

   “And am I correct in assuming that it is marriage you have in mind?”

   “Of course.”

   “Julia trusts me. I will make the arrangements.”


   Two days later Jacob and Rose met in the hotel restaurant and made the arrangements. He gave her a sum in cash to cover the costs and six weeks later Julia and he were married in the Catholic Church for she and all her family were devout Catholics or at least Catholics. There were four bridesmaids, three flower girls and three hundred and fifty guests who did not have to jam themselves into the small parish hall for it was a warm nightand after loading their plates with food and clutching bottles of beer in the crooks of their arms, went out under the stars and ate sitting on the ground. Jacob, at Julia’s insistence, wore a rented tuxedo for the ceremony but changed into shorts and T shirt for the reception. Julia wore her bridal dress all evening until they left to catch the late night bus taking them to the other side of the island for their honeymoon.

   The honeymoon was not a great success but not an unmitigated disaster either. They had sex but Julia’s participation was tepid and Jacobs’s rife with performance anxiety. They stayed in a rented cabin by the sea and went swimming every day. Afternoons Julia went off by herself to visit relatives in the area. They had supper at the local restaurant and danced afterward when the band came on later in the evening. After two weeks Jacob was quite smitten with his new wife but Julia was bored to tears with her new husband. He spoke of little besides house construction, brick laying and Jews. He had a great passion of hatred for the Jews and accused them of terrible deeds in high places. He was an atheist. He hated the Christian God as much as he hated the Jews. He made loud, peasant like sounds slurping his soup at the restaurant. He complained when she bought trinkets at the local market to take home to her relatives. His love making was almost unbearable. He aroused no desire in her so she had to pretend like a woman in a bordello. He didn’t seem to notice. When he slept he snored all night, tremendous pig like snortings from deep caverns beneath his long, fleshy, North American nose.

   Jacob bought a modest but roomy house not far from the hotel. He did not consult his wife for it was his opinion that such matters should be decided by the male. Fortunately, by blind luck, he had bought just the house which Julia and her mother looked at and fell in love with some weeks before. This had something to do with the fact that the real estate agent recommended by Rosa was Julia’s cousin. It was single story, spreading itself out over most of a large lot. It had a central courtyard opening onto a back lot overlooking the sea. There were fifteen rooms, one of them a long, wide living room/dining room, with a lean to kitchen at the back. Julia’s three children, mother, older sister and two elderly women cousins moved in with them. In the mornings, after seeing the children off to school, the women set up their work stations in the living room. One of the cousins worked a loom upon which she wove rugs and wall hangings. Julia, her mother and sister wove straw baskets. The other cousin made ornaments people buy to decorate children’s birthday parties. They worked from nine in the morning till supper time. At noon Julia and her mother walked to the market to buy food. Usually mama, as Julia called her, cooked supper.

   Julia insisted that Jacob replace the old stove in the kitchen. They went out together and she picked out a gas stove with a large oven. As soon as it was installed two of Julia’s younger sisters came every night except Saturday and worked from midnight until seven in the morning baking bread, muffins and cookies. After breakfast they loaded their baked goods onto a handcart and pushed it off to the local market. Jacob complained. “Somebody is running a bakery out of my kitchen.”

   “Our kitchen,” Julia replied.

   “OK. Somebody is running a bakery out of our kitchen.”

   “They are my sisters.”

   “And what does that have to do with it?”

   “My sisters are welcome in my house.”

   “All night, every night, running a bakery?”

   “The oven is just perfect they say.”

   “I’m sure they do. And I’m sure they find the free gas is also perfect.”

   Jacob did not know that he was also buying the flour, yeast, raisins, baking powder, etc which went into the baked goods. Julia was an expert at jiggling household accounts so that turning a repair bill into bags of flour was no problem for her. But Jacob decided not to press his complaint. There were women everywhere, baking, weaving, painting walls, cooking, cleaning, talking, arguing and he felt a little intimidated. When the day ended the house filled up with cousins, nieces, nephews, uncles, aunts, a seemingly endless parade of Julia’s family. Some came and went. Others stayed for a month, others for longer, and still others never seemed to leave. It seemed to Jacob that there were at least five children, besides Julia’s, who lived with them full time. When he brought this up to Julia she was vague. When he spoke to mama she told him that yes, ‘some’ children were with them for a bit because their parents were off working in Manila. She was vague about exactly how many. They were good children who ate very little and only required a tiny space to sleep in. (actually they slept in hammocks hung in a room which thus resembled the focsle in an old time sailing ship) The parents would be back any day now she assured him. But months went by and they still had not come. Jacob learned their names. In the evenings he sometimes took them for a walk on the beach along with Julia’s children and bought them ice cream from the little stand a few hundred yards down from the house. Eventually he ceased to ask when the parents would arrive.

   At the far west corner of the house was a two room suite, the rooms separated by a short hallway in turn closed off from the rest of the house by a rough plank door. Here, where it was quiet no matter what was going on in the rest of the house, Jacob had his bedroom. The second room served as his study. Julia slept with him here once or twice a week. The rest of the week she slept in some other room. Where he was unsure. At first Jacob complained but eventually he gave it up. He was of an age when often his number one priority was a night of undisturbed sleep. Julia was restless in bed. She often got up in the middle of the night and helped her sisters baking bread. Mama was especially solicitous of Jacob’s sleep. After he said good night and went through the door to his suite she had one of the older children help her cover the door with two heavy rugs to muffle the sound from the main part of the house. Jacob slept well in his bedroom and when the noise and bustle in the house became intolerable to him he had a quite place to retreat away from it all.

   Four months after the wedding, on a rainy day, when the whole world seemed composed of rain beating on the steel roof and water rushing from the gutters, Rose came through the kitchen and onto the patio where Jacob was having his coffee watching the torrents of rain fall into the sea. He was happy to see her for he considered Rose an affable, business like person with whom one could deal in a direct manner and get some results. This was very different from the women in his house who were slippery as eels, elusive as weasels. Rose carried a cup of mama’s coffee with her and sat down opposite him at the ornate wrought iron table. After the usual formalities and a pause, Rose, as was her way, got to the point.

   “The mortgages,” she said.

   “O yes,” said Jacob.

   “Julia has a cousin lawyer who can draw up the agreements. He has already done the preliminary work.”

   “Fine,” said Jacob.

   “He can come tomorrow afternoon for the signing of the papers and the transfer of the money. You can go to the bank in the morning.”

   In the morning Jacob went to the bank and made the arrangements. The lawyer came after lunch, an enormously fat man who sat at the long kitchen table and unburdened an immense briefcase of a tall pile of documents. Jacob signed. Julia signed. The lawyer signed. Mama and the older sister signed as witnesses. They were small amount mortgage agreements, a thousand here, two there, the largest being ten thousand. Some were on agricultural land, some on houses and small businesses in town. When this was completed Jacob made out and signed a series of cheques certified on the spot by a clerk sent over by the bank. The documents and cheques then went into the lawyer’s case and mama and the older sister brought out several plates piled high with the younger sisters’ baking and a tray of gleaming bottles of beer wet from the ice bucket. The lawyer proposed an elaborate and comical toast and everyone laughed heartily. When the plates and tray were empty the lawyer rose and, accompanied by Julia in her best dress with her hair drawn up in a bun with a comb as it was the first time Jacob saw her, left through the front door to climb into his late model Japanese car to drive the documents and cheques around to the owners of the properties. Jacob walked them to the door and then went to his suite for his afternoon nap.

   Julia did not come back until after dark. Jacob was having his beer on the patio and she came out to join him. She talked excitedly about where she had gone and the people she had seen, for driving in the car and meeting with so many people happy to conclude a hopeful business arrangement, stimulated her. Jacob listened impatiently. When she wound down he asked her once again about the baking sisters.

   “I suppose you want their children to go hungry,” Julia said.

   “What does that have to do with a bakery being operated in my house?”

   “That’s how they feed their children.”

   “Don’t they have husbands?”

   “The husbands are fishermen. How can a fisherman feed all those children?”

   Jacob had no answer for this. Julia took the opportunity to rise in triumphant and stately dignity and go back into the house. When he came through the kitchen mama stared at him censoriously. The elderly cousins sitting at the table turned their eyes away. He continued down the hallway to his study where he sat in his armchair and brooded.


   One morning, some months later, Jacob cornered Julia alone in the kitchen. All of the other women had stayed up all night baking for a festival and were now off selling their wares at the market. He sat down at the long table opposite her and said, “mortgages have income.”

   “Of course mortgages have income,” replied Julia.

   “Then where is it?”

   “The lawyer says some payments are late and others have been deferred for unavoidable reasons. The income from the others is just fine.”

    “Just fine?”

   “Yes. Just fine.”

   “What does that mean, ‘just fine’?”

   “It means it went to places it was needed.”

   “Such as?”

   “The Fuentes cousin needed dental work.”

   “I see.”

   “School just started and the children needed clothing and supplies.”

   “I see.”

   “Consuela’s husband had his tools stolen and they had to be replaced. Carpentry tools are expensive as you should know.”

   “But Julia, don’t you see that mortgage money is capital money? If the income is spent on expenses then the money is frittered away and the capital disappears.”

  “Of course.”

   “Of course what?”

   “Necessary things must be dealt with whatever you call the money. After all you can call it various names but in the long run it is just money.”

   “Just money?”

   “Yes.”

   “Well, I would like you to give me an accounting of the mortgages, income, expenses and so on.”

   “No problem. The lawyer is good at giving accountings and making lists. I will speak to him.”

   Whether Julia spoke to the lawyer or not Jacob did not know but some time passed by and he was still without an accounting. Six times he spoke to Julia who each time claimed the lawyer was about to appear any day but he never did. The last time she gave him this answer Jacob became enraged. He shouted at her in the kitchen. He chased her around the long table but she was much too lithe and quick for the likes of an aging, arthritic carpenter. He grabbed a cup from the table and was about to throw it at her when mama and the two baking sisters appeared in the doorway. They stared at him with terrible neutral looks on their faces. He placed the cup back on the table and went out through the patio door. He could hear the kitchen filling up with the other women, talking in excited voices. No doubt they had ways to rid themselves of unreasonable foreigners. Perhaps they threw them down a well then buried them alive with a rain of useless mortgage agreements, piano lessons, gas ovens, dental bills and the mouths of hungry fishermen’s children.

   Julia refused to speak to him for a month after this event. She did not come to sleep in his room. The other women spoke to him but distantly. It was a week before the little children came to sit on his lap as they had before. But after another month it blew over. Julia came back to sleep with him but now only once a week. The children once again ragged him after supper until he took them down the beach for ice cream. Mama began once again to tease him occasionally about the fact that he was ten years older than her and the baking sisters to leave a few delicacies for his morning coffee. He had to admit to himself that these women had generous hearts. They did not carry grudges and they wanted very much that their house not become a place of war and division.

   Mama and her daughters were possessed of an age old tradition of household gender relations. The man was officially recognized as the head of the house, the titular power. Jacob was seated at the head of the table and fed the choice cuts of meat. His coffee cup was filled before he mustered a desire that it be so. On all official occasions, family gatherings, he was treated like a grandee. His clothes were cleaned, pressed, adjusted and fussed over as if he were the King of France or the Emperor of all the Russias. On very special occasions one of the older sisters even shaved him for they claimed he did not pay close enough attention to the corners. He sat in the big chair in the living room while all the guests came to greet him, shaking his hand and kissing him on his cheek. Adorable children were plunked into his lap and he obediently fed them with the chocolate candies the woman had stuffed into his pocket. Even though he was not a Christian he was called upon to say the grace before meals, taught to him by Julia. His suite at the back of the house was sacrosanct. When he was sleeping the children were kept away from it with a stern discipline. In matters of household renovations he was deferred to. Was the patio to be retiled? Julia brought it up with him. Should the screened porch on the front be enlarged? Mama discussed it with Jacob over coffee. They allowed themselves to be guided by his wishes.

   In the matter of children’s expenses, however, it was another matter. After all men are lazy creatures of pleasure and did not bear children. In such matters their wishes, instructions, were to be interpreted in a broad fashion and not taken literally. Jacob did not want to pay for art lessons for Julio, Julia’s eldest? Fine. Then the grocery money could be squeezed, extra loaves of bread baked.  The contractor cousin who did the patio could be asked to give a finder’s fee. That dense man should have offered it himself before he was asked. As a last resort there was the mortgage income, managed by Julia out of an ancient iron safe, a relic from the days of the Spanish and left in the house by its former inhabitants who perhaps did not have the energy to carry its many hundreds of pounds out the door. But only as a last resort for Julia was a careful manager. Not long after the letting out of the mortgages she was a part owner of several hectares of crop land and had a controlling share in a fabric shop.
 
   All of this went along reasonably well but it was obvious that something was building up in Jacob. He began to feel he was living at the edge of a terrible tyranny of women. To be fair to the poor man he did his best to find some way to release the pressure and stop paranoia blossoming in his mind as a single, overwhelming obsession. But he failed. He became moody. He spent long hours alone in his room. Then one day he got up from a night of broken sleep and changed his mind about everything. He dressed in his old carpentry overalls, stormed into the main part of the house and began shouting at the women. Even Julio, who was often able to calm him, was brushed off to the side. The women scattered like chickens before a diving hawk. Lifting up young children into their arms they rushed out the kitchen door onto the patio.

   Jacob stood in the doorway and hurled insults at them. They were deceivers, witches, devils from the nether regions of hell, thieves, manipulators, foul fornicators, workers of dark arts, destroyers of the minds of men, evil, devouring vulvas, depraved monsters. He would have no more to do with them. He would have no more to do with their money sucking brats, their one long endless meal, their decorations and renovations, their whinings and wheedlings, their cajolings, their cunning, their steady, inexorable chisellings. All this he was leaving behind him. All this he was now, at this very moment and forever, banishing from his mind. “No more!” he screeched at them in a spray of spittle. “No more you evil, torturing, squeezing bitches. No more!” And with that he collapsed in a heap in the doorway.

   The women had watched this performance quite dispassionately as if they were watching a speech given by a politician from Manila. But when he collapsed they rushed in a body to see if he was dead. He wasn’t. He was breathing regularly and his pulse was strong. Mama sent one of the daughters for the doctor. The older sister brought a blanket and spread it out on the floor beside him. They tugged and rolled him until he was lying face up on the blanket and lifted him up with many hands and carried him into the bedroom. They laid him on his bed, positioning his hands on his stomach as if he were laid out in his coffin.




   When the doctor came out of the bedroom into the kitchen he said that Jacob was perfectly healthy. “The man is as sound as a two year old donkey.”

   “And of much the same nature,” Julia replied.

   The doctor laughed. After pocketing his fee, delicately folded into a linen envelope, he wrote a prescription for a sedative. “Three days in bed,” he said. “All that shouting and frothing at the mouth is hard on the system.”

   Jacob was enervated by his bout of rage. He lay quietly in his bed studying the ceiling while the pills the doctor gave him loosened his muscles and set his mind pleasantly drifting. Julio sat by his bedside reading one of his textbooks. His concentration was intense. He turned the pages with a deft movement of his right hand. After watching him for a while Jacob reached over, covered the text with his hand and looked into Julio’s face, a pleasant, evenly featured face every bit as beautiful as Julia’s. “I am afraid, my dear Julio, that for many years I have been wrongly maligning the Jews. What are they, after all, but poor fellow wanderers seeking to place their feet firmly on the ground wherever their ill stared fate has led them? For this they should be hated? I don’t think so. Hereafter my policy will be not to love them, for that would be condescending, but to create for them in my mind a warm limbo of nonjudgment where they can be free to be whatever they are going to be. As there is, apart from myself, not a single Jew in this town or even on this island, they will not notice my change of heart but I will and that is what counts.” Then he smiled and Julio smiled back. He removed his hand from the book, replaced it with the other on his stomach and went to sleep.

   He did not rise from his bed for three days. Julia looked after him. She was careful not to say anything which might upset him and he himself avoided all contentious subjects. He asked her about the children. He talked about the weather, wondering why it was that the people here on the island dreaded the rainy season while he, a foreigner, loved it dearly. He told her of his childhood when he and his brothers slid down snow covered hills on a wooden toboggan and made snowballs with their mittened hands to hurl at one another. He spoke of his mother, a large, warm hearted woman whose sons teased her mercilessly. He asked her to bring him an umbrella from the market and gave her two one hundred dollar bills from the drawer beside the bed. He told her to spend what was left over on clothing for the children.

   When he rose on the fourth morning, before breakfast and his morning coffee, for a great necessity lay upon him, Jacob removed all the furniture from the study excepting the roll top desk holding his personal papers. Julia, mama and a staying over cousin helped him carry it out the back door and put it in the storage shed. The women wanted to clean the resulting dusty corners but he would not allow them. He took broom, dustpan, mop and pail from the closet off the kitchen and cleaned the room himself. When he was done he had breakfast on the patio and then walked to the lumber store pulling one of the toddlers along behind him in a bright blue wagon.

   That afternoon a truck delivered a pile of lumber and plastic bags filled with nails and hardware. Jacob had the men carry the lumber through the house and lay it on the floor of the study. When they were gone, after mama had fed them cinnamon buns and coffee at the kitchen table and Jacob tucked tips into their pockets at the door, he began constructing a workbench along one wall of the room. It took him three days to finish and then he put a series of shelves and pegboards above it on the wall. The women kept peeking in to see what he was doing but they did not ask any questions, fearing it might set him off. They watched him silently for a few moments and then left. When the toddlers came he did not chase them away. He sat them in the corner and gave them blocks and wood shavings to play with.

   When everything was finished he closed the door and would not let any adults see inside for two months. He spent ten hours a day inside the room he now referred to as the shop. When the toddlers knocked on the door and called his name he let them in and reclosed the door. When they were tired of playing with the blocks he gave them he let them out again. Sometimes he went to the lumber store and brought back chunky blocks of wood. In the evening he strolled along the beach stopping to look at the fishing boats pulled up on the sandy beach.

   When the two months were up he opened the door and thereafter seldom closed it. Everyone came to look. The toddlers squeezed through the legs of the women and headed for the corner where Jacob had left a pile of ends and shavings. Along the workbench was a line of fishing boats carved from softwood and painted the same bright colours the fishermen painted their own boats. There were masts, tiny sails, oars, and figures of fishermen, some looking off over the sea, others leaning over the gunwales pulling up their nets. There were twenty or so, all of slightly different sizes and designs. They were propped up with small chocks. They were awash in the soft light of the day glow lamps Jacob hung from the ceiling, and, as he had painted the top of the bench blue, it was as if they were floating upon a magically created, strangely calm, indoor sea. The women’s eyes grew as round as saucers. They entered the room and spread themselves out along the bench peering closely, sucking in their breath in silent admiration.

    The next day while Jacob was drinking his morning coffee with Julia on the patio, he handed her a letter. The letter gave her sole rights to the mortgages he had signed a few years before. It listed them – the lawyer cousin had done this for him – in a long column extending to a second page. It was notarized by the lawyer, signed by Jacob and witnessed by two clerks in the lawyer’s office. Julia read the letter, thanked him very solemnly and kissed him on the cheek. What was hers practically was now hers in the eyes of the law. She showed the letter to her mother and put it away in the safe.

   In his sixty-fifth year Jacob took a piece of white wood and etched upon its surface “Forgive me dear Jews”, first in English and then, below in letters the same size, in Latin. The translation was supplied by the lawyer who spent his Saturday afternoons reading Tacitus and Ovid in the original. Lettering complete, he framed it with a thin border of mahogany and hung it on the wall above his workbench.

   When Julia saw the plaque she asked him what it meant. “The Jews whom I hated for so many years have redeemed me,” he said. It was obvious from Julia’s expression that she did not understand but he gave no further explanations.

   When Julia came into the kitchen her mother asked, “What did he say?”

   “Something about Jews and redeeming but I really don’t understand it.”

   “Seems a strange thing to put up on the wall when there is not a Jew within a hundred miles. Did he do bad things to them when he was young?”

   “No. He just hated them. He feels bad because he hated them. I suppose the plaque is a propitiation, a kind of blood payment. Maybe they do that where he comes from.”

   Mama said nothing but she was worried Jacob might be going crazy again. Perhaps all the carving was only a temporary abatement of his madness. For her the Jews were people she heard about in school who had a tiny country half way round the world. To make plaques asking them for forgiveness as if they were spirits floating around in the air, seemed to her not quite sane.
PAGE


PAGE  58

Cornelius' Departure

                  Cornelius’ Departure


   The night his first wife, dead sixteen years, three days and fourteen hours, knocked on the door of the security wall surrounding Cornelius’ compound was a disturbing one. The time elapsed since her death had included his fifty-fourth into his seventieth year. The watchman who answered the door, a distant cousin of his second wife, didn’t recognize her for he had never seen her in the land of the living. But as the dead woman was dressed well and spoke her request to have Cornelius summoned in a clear, educated diction, he let her into the warm watchman’s shed while he went off to the main house to talk to the boss. It was raining, a cold, steady rain coming down in a medium drone for so many days now that it seemed to Raoul, the watchman, that it had always been raining and sunny days, or even cloudy rainless days, were a distant dream.

   Cornelius was in his bedroom and just about to disrobe and climb into bed when the knock came on the door.

   “What kind of woman?” he asked.

   “About thirty. Black hair, hazel eyes. She’s wearing a heavy cloak and over that a slicker like fishermen wear. The slicker is even blacker than her hair.”

   “Face?”

   “Pretty. Pale. In fact, when I think of it, exceptionally pale.”

   A description general enough to include any of a thousand women in the city surrounding.

   “No name?”

   “She refused to give one. Said it would be indelicate.”

   This was not a word Raoul would ordinarily use. It’s vagueness, the lack of a concrete object to hang its hat on, so to speak, would normally have aroused in him a mild disgust. Cornelius decided that the woman must be more than pretty; she must be beautiful. For Raoul, who had an eye for women, her beauty would make the word real for him.

   “Very well. Show her into the first parlor.”

    Raoul smiled a thin smile that was very close to being a smirk. Perhaps he thought it amusing that such a beautiful young woman would come to visit such an old man late at night. If so Cornelius found the smile deplorable and was about to say something but Raoul, realizing that his expression had let slip an emotion he should be concealing, assumed his usual passionless mask, did an about turn and marched quickly through the door. Five minutes later, after washing his face and hands and combing his hair in the adjoining bathroom, Cornelius followed.

   The first parlor was left off the entrance vestibule, a smallish room with two sofas pulled up to a wood burning fireplace. In addition to the entrance off the vestibule there was a door at the rear off a corridor leading to the stair descending to the kitchen and the servants’ quarters. Cornelius entered through this door, first clearing his throat for he thought it proper to announce himself before entering a room where a guest awaits, especially if it is a woman.

   Wood and paper were always laid and Raoul must have lit it for she was sitting on the nearest sofa gazing into the fire. She did not turn towards him though it was clear from the tilt of her head, the line of her shoulders that she heard him but deliberately decided to slow her response. She didn’t turn full toward him until he reached the sofa. Always one to milk a dramatic situation, Sophia. After all it is seldom that a wife, dead sixteen years, returns to confront her husband.

   “Good evening, Cornelius.”

   “Good evening, my dear.” Cornelius replied as if she had just returned, perhaps, from a visit to her sister’s, a day’s ride north. Cornelius was a polite man and thought it appropriate in such a bizarre situation to let the dead party set the tone.

   “You have a new watchman I see.”

   “I do.”

   “A dull witted, phlegmatic type.”
 
   Cornelius thought about this for a moment and then replied, “Raoul could be described as comfortable in his groove but I wouldn’t call him dull witted. The opposite, I’m afraid – very clever.”

   “I believe he thinks me a lady of the night.”

   “And indeed you are, Sophia, though a different from the kind Raoul is thinking.”

   “So you still entertain ladies of the night, Cornelius?”

   “On occasion but not here. I go there.”

   “And your present wife?”

   “Dead to me as you are Sophia. She lives in the guest wing and we see each other once a week for dinner.”

   “She was too young, Cornelius. Such a thing was inevitable. Does she have a lover?”

   “I believe Raoul is her lover.”

   “Not much of an improvement.”

  “Although he looks older, Raoul is only forty.”

   “And you, Cornelius, how old are you?”

   “Seventy.”

   “An old man.”

   “Yes.”

   “Do you feel as if you are an old man?”

   “Sometimes, but mostly no.”

   “Sometimes?”

   “In the mornings, for instance, when I first get out of bed.”

   “Come sit by me,” she said, patting the sofa seat beside her.

   “I’ll sit, but not there,” Cornelius said. He walked behind her and sat on the other sofa at the end closest to her.

   “Shy, are we?”

   “You are dead, Sophia. It’s only natural I prefer to keep a certain distance between us.”

   “There was a certain distance between us when I was alive, Cornelius.”

   “Yes. But isn’t there always a certain distance between two living beings even if they are lovers or husband and wife?”

   “Always the philosophical one, Cornelius.”

   “I’m afraid I don’t see the philosophy, Sophia. What I said was merely a commonplace observation.”

    Sophia took this mild rebuke without offence, smiling into the fire. After examining it for a moment, studying the play of blue and yellow flames licking up from the growing char, she said.  “You are forgetting your manners, Cornelius. You should offer me tea and a bite to eat.”

   “The dead eat?”

   “I eat.”

   This surprised Cornelius but then he supposed if she could walk and speak she very well may eat as well so he left the room by the back door and descended the stair into the empty kitchen. He made tea and assembled a tray of bread and butter, cold chicken, cookies and an apple. When the tea was steeped he set it on the tray and, returning to Sophia, placed it on the coffee table before her. Without a word she set to consuming the contents of the tray with a steady yet unhurried determination until it was all gone. Then she poured herself a cup of tea and, balancing cup and saucer on one knee, leaned back on the sofa.

   “Thank you, Cornelius. It’s been a long time since I ate last.”

   “How long?”

   “Oh, some years I suppose.”

   “Do the dead eat in their graves?”

   “No but when they rise from them they do.”

   “Rise?”

   “The word as simple description. No religious connotations. Are you still an atheist? They say men become religious when they grow old.”

   “Not an atheist. Not even an agnostic. I’m not interested in intellectual speculations anymore.”

   “Well if you’ve left the intellect behind then what about feeling, Cornelius? Have you left that behind as well?”

   “No. I have come to see that the feelings of the moment which I once looked upon with distain, as our only reality.”

   “So no God?”

   “One part of me has no argument with God but another sees Him as obviously a projection of the human ego. Filling the universe with projections seems to me a kind of horror show yet, on the whole, it’s what we seem to do.”

   “So that we are not alone?”

    “I suppose, although for me having relationships with imaginary beings is far worst than being alone. But what about you, Sophia? Do the dead have insights into these matters?”

   “Not really. Women, as you know Cornelius, have a connection to the sensate world few men have. That suffices for many of us and I am one of them. Although I can’t claim to speak for the others, death brought me no revelations or mystical insights.”

   “And what was it like to lay there for sixteen years, my dear?”

   “Four weeks only, Cornelius, and then I left the grave. During those four weeks I had no consciousness of passing time, just a kind of steady hum, so to speak, not at all disagreeable.”



   Cornelius did not reply to this. He felt that it would be impolite to ask for the details of her disinterment and inquisitorial to ask what she had been doing since that time. He glanced at the tray thinking he might fill the gap in conversation with a cookie but they were all gone. Even the teapot, a glass one, was empty. In life Sophia, despite her trim figure, her long, lithely muscled body, had been a hearty eater. It seems she was so even in death.

   “You will be wondering what I have been doing since I left the grave, Cornelius. And perhaps also how I left the grave. You were always curious, a man hungry for details.”

   “Now that you bring it up I must admit that I am curious.”

   “Then you will be disappointed. The dead know as little as the living it seems. As far as leaving the grave goes one moment I was in it and then the next I was out, standing on the bank of a river, with heavy twilight coming down. How I got there or by what process, I am truly ignorant.”

   “But no one reported a disturbance of the grave. Surely the caretakers would have noticed?”

   “Of that I know nothing. I have never returned to the churchyard. Why should I? Perhaps the grave might reopen and swallow me up.”

   “But where have you been in the meantime, Sophia?”

   “Close by, actually. As you know some ways up the river there is an area of wasteland inhabited by a few impoverished rural people. I have a cottage there at the edge of the moor.”

   “But how could you afford a cottage?”

   “Jewelry, Cornelius. You seem to have forgotten how much you loved me, dear man. You buried me with all my rings, bracelets, broaches, necklaces, pendants and whatever. A small fortune. Not to one who lives grandly like yourself but to a poor cottager more than enough.”

   “You sold them, then?”

   “Of course. I hitched a ride on a river barge to the great city and sold them there. You will remember that I knew jewelry very well.”

   “Yes.”

  “And I knew from my previous time in the great city where to go, who to deal with.”

   “Yes, of course.”

   “I was a courtesan, Cornelius.”

    “Yes, I know.”

   “You know but you were never comfortable with me mentioning it, were you?”

   “No, but that’s my upbringing, Sophia. You will have to forgive me. Believe me I have never for a moment judged you or thought lesser of you because of it.”

   “I know that, Cornelius. And the arts my past brought with me to the marriage were not to be despised, were they dear?”

   “Not at all, Sophia. Rather they were to be treasured and applauded. For nine years we were happy together and surely our sexual joy, our satisfaction in our play together was the fundament of our happiness. One sees this even more clearly as we get older.”

   “I wouldn’t know Cornelius. After all I’m only thirty.”

   “And the sixteen years?”

   “Seems not to have had the least effect.”

   Cornelius took his eyes from the fire and looked at her closely. For a moment the afterimage of the coloured flames moved across the surface of her face but then vanished to reveal the very pale skin as smooth and perfect as porcelain. Its paleness was accentuated by the frame of black hair drawn up in a chignon secured by a delicate silver comb; accentuated to such a degree that the skin shone with a kind of mild luminescence. She was right. In fact, if anything, Sophia seemed younger than the last time he remembered seeing her in the bloom of healthy young womanhood.

   “I suppose the dead, being dead, do not age.”

    “I suppose,” she replied.

   Cornelius rose and put a log on the fire. With the poker he positioned it in the center of the flames and pressed it down. When he came back to the sofa, Sophia was standing.

   “I have to be going now, Cornelius.”

   “Surely not.”

   “Yes I do. Most surely in fact.”

   “Do you sleep in your grave, Sophia?”

  “No, no. I sleep in a stone room completely devoid of light but not in the grave. I built the room onto the cottage with my own hands. I am afraid that although I look quite alive that I am a creature of shadows. I can tolerate mild daylight and can go about for an hour or two on cloudy, rainy days but on most days I sleep in the room.”

   “But you eat, Sophia.”

   “Yes, dear, I do. But the daylight is not for me and dawn not far away.”

   “I could drive you in the car.”

   “I have my own car waiting at the gate.”

   “But perhaps I could accompany you nonetheless.”

   “Why, Cornelius? The dead don’t fear the dark and there is nothing I fear any longer from the living.”

   “I was not thinking of that.”

   “Then of what?”

   “I would like the pleasure of your company.”

   They were in the vestibule. Sophia retrieved her cloak and slicker from the closet, settling the cloak loosely about her shoulders. She looked at Cornelius sharply. He hadn’t aged much. He was a bit stooped, yes, but his bony, aquiline face would strangely belie his years for some time to come. He was gazing at her with a steady, expectant patience.

   “I am dead, Cornelius.”

   “Then why did you come?”

   “For old time’s sake I suppose.”

   “The old times are the things which are truly dead, Sophia.”

   “That may be but so am I.”

   “But you walk about; you smile; you speak. How can you be dead?”

   “I don’t know. I just know that I am no longer connected to the living.”

   “Neither am I, dear Sophia.”

   “I inhabit the night, Cornelius. Storms and clouds are my sunshine, bright day my fear and avoidance. I breath, apparently, but only shallowly. Sometimes I wonder what I breath. Particles of dark perhaps. Yet I don’t perceive the dark in the same way the living do. It is my natural milieu, my comfort. I do not age. Surely this cuts me off from the living whose iron law is aging. I eat with relish, yes, but I suspect this is merely habit. I am not a natural creature, Cornelius. I speak to the living in a series of symbols I must consciously remember the meaning of. I spent the first five years in my cottage without seeing or speaking to a soul and felt not the slightest lack. I do not lust after the living like the popular tales say the dead do. I have no desire for blood, either human or animal. Yet I am not a normal living being. If there is blood moving in my veins it does not move in the way it used to do. I still have my beauty but it is the beauty of a stone. I see in your eyes that you see it as a precious stone but a precious stone is still a stone.”

  “Still, I would accompany you.”

   “Where?”

   “To your cottage.”

   “And sleep in a cold stone room with a dead woman?”

   “No. To talk to a dead woman when she awakes in the evening.”

    “Meagre fare, dear man, for one as hot blooded as you used to be.”

   “My want of women in that way is dying.”

   “But not dead?”

   “No.”

   “Well then,” she said and put her hand upon the door handle.

   “Perhaps just as far as the moor.”

   “I suppose, if you must. You were kind enough to receive me. I can at least give you that.”

    So Cornelius left with Sophia but he did not part with her at the moor. He went with her to the cottage and the two of them lived together there not as husband and wife but as brother and sister. His people assumed he was dead. A brooding, eccentric man, no doubt he slipped himself into the waters of the moor to avoid the sufferings of old age. When the legally required time had elapsed he was declared deceased and his wife inherited.  A month later she married Raoul.

   The cottage has one glass window. Its light can be seen for miles across the flat moor land it inhabits. Lit by two candles and the open fireplace it shines all night long no matter what the weather or the time of year. Sometimes, during the day, a man can be seen in the yard; an old man sawing and splitting wood he gathers from a series of poplar copses a quarter mile distant. He waves if someone waves to him but if approached he makes it quite clear that he is not interested in conversation or human company.

   Some say in the heavy twilight they have seen the old man walking with a young beautiful woman. The more bestial among them say she is his incubus which he has called from the infernal regions to satisfy his lust. But most believe this to be a nasty invention arising from their own morbid desires and projected onto a harmless old man who prefers to spend his last few years alone, away from others. He comes to the little village twice a year for supplies. He is polite but distant and leaves immediately once his business is completed.

   Occasionally local boys make an excursion to creep toward the window on dark nights, to peer in and discover its mysteries, but as they exit the bushes into the open yard, croaching low to conceal themselves, they become seized by such an awful fear they turn and run the two miles back to the road at breakneck speed. They are too ashamed of their cowardice to make up stories of what they saw, or rather, what they did not see. They make a pact of silence between themselves and honor it.

   What they would see, if fear did not prevent them from crossing the yard, is the simplest of all things  - a man and woman sitting before a fire at a round table eating bread and cheese and drinking tea. They are companionable, interrupting their meal frequently to speak to one another in a lively manner. The man is old but somehow in their communications age is lifted from his shoulders and tossed into one of the darkened corners. The woman is young, pale and beautiful. Her beauty is the striking beauty men sometimes see from across a room, a beauty which leaves them shattered and reminds them how deep their loneliness is and how impossible the chasm they must cross to relieve it.