“And he looked at his wife, not with a smile now, but with hatred. She glanced at him too, and also with hatred and anger. She had her own daydreams, her own plans, her own reflections; she understood perfectly well what her husband’s dreams were. She knew who would be the first to try and grab her winnings.

“It’s very nice making daydreams at other people’s expense!” is what her eyes expressed. “No, don’t you dare!”

Her husband understood her look; hatred began stirring again in his breast, and in order to annoy his wife he glanced quickly, to spite her at the fourth page on the newspaper and read out triumphantly:

“Series 9,499, number 46! Not 26!”

Hatred and hope both disappeared at once, and it began immediately to seem to Ivan Dmitritch and his wife that their rooms were dark and small and low-pitched, that the supper they had been eating was not doing them good, but lying heavy on their stomachs, that the evenings were long and wearisome. . . .

“What the devil’s the meaning of it?” said Ivan Dmitritch, beginning to be ill-humoured. “Wherever one steps there are bits of paper under one’s feet, crumbs, husks. The rooms are never swept! One is simply forced to go out. Damnation take my soul entirely! I shall go and hang myself on the first aspen-tree!”

The Lottery Ticket by Anton Chekhov

http://www.readprint.com/work-301/The-Lottery-Ticket-Anton-Chekhov/4#ixzz17L5Z7qL5

“Wherever one steps, there are bits of paper, crumbs, and husks under one’s feet. The rooms are never swept.”  That was how he felt. The moment was when suddenly the euphoria he had felt hardly a few minutes ago over the fascinating new world being opened up by the winning lottery ticket suddenly vanished to give rise to hatred for his wife who had a better claim on the lottery .If it meant going on an idyllic holiday abroad that was most certainly without her, her poker-faced relations and his own greedy people. There was no pure happiness. One’s pursuit of happiness seldom ended in unmixed joy .There are now bits of paper, torn lottery tickets of  unachieved happiness all over the floor and our rooms  basically remain unswept and filthy.  And the rooms were once again dark, small and low-pitched .The supper they had been eating was lying heavy on their stomachs. And the evenings were long and wearisome.

“Even chances,” said the doctor, taking Sue’s thin, shaking hand in his. “With good nursing you’ll win. And now I must see another case I have downstairs. Behrman, his name is—some kind of an artist, I believe. Pneumonia, too. He is an old, weak man, and the attack is acute. There is no hope for him; but he goes to the hospital to-day to be made more comfortable.”

The next day the doctor said to Sue: “She’s out of danger. You’ve won. Nutrition and care now—that’s all.”

And that afternoon Sue came to the bed where Johnsy lay, contentedly knitting a very blue and very useless woolen shoulder scarf, and put one arm around her, pillows and all.

“I have something to tell you, white mouse,” she said. “Mr. Behrman died of pneumonia to-day in the hospital. He was ill only two days. The janitor found him on the morning of the first day in his room downstairs helpless with pain. His shoes and clothing were wet through and icy cold. They couldn’t imagine where he had been on such a dreadful night. And then they found a lantern, still lighted, and a ladder that had been dragged from its place, and some scattered brushes, and a palette with green and yellow colors mixed on it, and—look out the window, dear, at the last ivy leaf on the wall. Didn’t you wonder why it never fluttered or moved when the wind blew? Ah, darling, it’s Behrman’s masterpiece—he painted it there the night that the last leaf fell.”

The Last Leaf: A short story by O’Henry

http://www.shortstoryarchive.com/h/last_leaf.html

In this beautiful short story , my personal favorite in the undergraduate days, the moment comes in the last paragraph in which Sue tells  a recovered Johnsy that Behrman has saved her life by painting the Last Leaf and in doing so staked his own life . The whole denouement comes in this one single paragraph .As Sue tells Johnsy , she tells us too what has happened to Behrman. Behrman’s dream of painting his masterpiece some day has been achieved and now that Johnsy has survived her illness she will some day be able to paint the Bay of Naples, her own masterpiece. Behrman’s masterpiece will live for ever, wind or rain. He has turned over a new leaf, so to speak.

The recollection was like this. Another boy had insulted him and he had run to his father and told him about it. His father let him talk as if he were not listening or did not understand; and he took down from the wall a bronze dagger, beautiful and charged with power, which the boy had secretly coveted. Now he had it in his hands and the surprise of possession obliterated the affront he had suffered. But his father’s voice was saying, “Let someone know you are a man,” and there was a command in his voice. The night blotted out the paths; clutching the dagger, in which he felt the foreboding of a magic power, he descended the rough hillside that surrounded the house and ran to the seashore, dreaming he was Ajax and Perseus and peopling the salty darkness with battles and wounds. The exact taste of that moment was what he was seeking now; the rest did not matter: the insults of the duel, the rude combat, the return home with the bloody blade.”

From The Maker (El Hacedor) :: J. L. Borges

The poet was slowly losing his vision. He was becoming desperate as nights and days passed over the dark prospect of the world getting lost to him for ever. It was to memory that he had to turn, the dark and deep memory which he had not delved into all these years when the world was still real and not a wisp of memory. He needed one of those memories which gave him strength to face the new inner world of darkness. That is when this scrap of memory comes up like a coin glistening on the road on a dark rainy night.

This is the moment when he is suddenly empowered .His father’s words echo in his ears: let it be known that you are a man .The very words which had empowered him when another boy’s insults left him helpless and impotent.

Fate is partial to repetitions, variations, symmetries. Nineteen centuries later, in the southern part of the province of Buenos Aires, a gaucho is set upon by other gauchos, as he falls he recognises a godson of his, and says to him in gentle remonstrance and slow surprise (these words must be heard, not read): Pero, Ische .He dies but he does not know that he has died so that a scene can be played out again.

The gaucho is set upon by other gauchos ,one of whom he recognizes as his godson. Pero Ische ? is a repeat of the et tu? of Caesar played out thousands of years earlier.

The irony is that he does not know that he has died so that a scene can be played out again.

saw waxy red flowers in the pomegranate trees and a man

pegging brilliant white napkins on a clothesline against the wind.

We didn’t live there and those who lived there didn’t care about

the buses passing through at all times of the day, right up against the

mauve beef hanging in its pockets of fat, and the shops with shiny strips

of tobacco showing through shadows, and the new houses and the

old houses where the same sort of people lived, or at least that’s

how we felt, passing through in buses for seventeen years.But we won’t be doing it anymore — looking out of a window

at a patch of maize in its copper earth, eggs in a wire basket,

hand-painted signs near open doorways that remind us

of sunlit drawings in children’s books about places that grow

sad in their unreality with every passing year, simple signs in

white paint — hangne ngi die tiar, hangne ngi suh jainsem.

We’ll forget what they looked like, the rough golden clapboard shops

with their unwrapped cakes of soap, the windows in houses no

bigger than a man’s handkerchief, and it will be difficult to remember

where each of the cherry trees stood because they flowered so briefly

before lapsing back into their dark green anonymity.

The graveyard on a gentle slope, the fence weighed down with roses!

We’ll want to urgently tell someone, if we ever happen to return,

that we knew this place, passed through it in a bus for seventeen years,

but having said that we won’t know what else to say about Mawlai

because we never really got off there or bought things from its shops

or stepped into someone’s boiled-vegetables-smelling house

to watch the street through netted curtains. We’ll keep quiet then

and try to ignore that sense which is not pain but has pain’s cloudiness

and its regret and its way of going and returning.
http://india.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=10596

The moment here is the realization that for seventeen years we have passed through this place and all that is over and we shall never be returning to this place .The moment is the town of Mawlai lapsing into green anonymity.“We shall keep quiet and ignore that sense which is not pain but has pain’s cloudiness ,its regret and its way of going and returning.”

The moment is that we have all experienced when we pass through villages and towns in our bus journeys and as time passes and the journeys go on in the unfamiliarity of anonymous places ,they acquire a pain-cloudiness which returns again and again.

That prisoner dreamed that he was in prison. Naturally, the dreams had details and patterns. For example, on the wall of the dream there was a poster from Paris; on the real wall there was only a dark water stain. Running along the floor of the dream was a wall lizard; looking at him from the real floor was a rat.

The prisoner dreamed that he was in prison. Someone was massaging his back and he was starting to feel better. He couldn’t see who it was, but he was sure it was his mother, who was an expert at that. The morning sun entered through the wide window and he welcomed it like a sign of liberty. When he opened his eyes, there was no sun. The small barred window (sixteen by twenty-four inches) led to an air shaft, to another wall of shadow.

The prisoner dreamed that he was in prison, that he was thirsty and was drinking an abundant amount of ice water. And the water was immediately streaming from his eyes in the form of tears. He knew why he was crying, but he wouldn’t confess this even to himself. He looked at his idle hands, the ones that before had constructed torsos, chalk faces, legs, bound bodies, marble women. When he awoke, his eyes were dry, his hands were dirty, the door hinges were rusty, his pulse was racing, his lungs had no air, and the ceiling was leaking.

At that point, the prisoner decided that it was better to dream that he was in prison. He closed his eyes and saw himself with a photograph of Milagros in his hands. But he wasn’t satisfied with just the photograph. He wanted Milagros in person, and she appeared with a big smile and a sky-blue nightgown. She approached so that he could remove it, and of course, he did so. Naturally, Milagros’ nakedness was miraculous and he was observing her with total recall and complete joy. He didn’t want to wake up, but he did, a few seconds before the dreamlike, virtual orgasm. And no one was there; no photograph, no Milagros, no sky-blue nightgown. He accepted that solitude could be unbearable.

The prisoner dreamed that he was in prison. His mother had stopped the massages, among other activities, because she had died years before. He was overcome by nostalgia for her look, her singing, her lap, her caresses, her reproaches, her forgiveness. He hugged himself, but it wasn’t the same. Milagros was waving good-bye from very far away. To him it looked like it was from a cemetery. But that couldn’t be. It was from a park. But there wasn’t any park in the cell, so that even though he was inside the dream, he was aware that’s what it was: a dream. He raised his arm to wave good-bye also. But his hand was only a fist, and, as is well known, fists haven’t learned to wave good-bye.

When he opened his eyes, the familiar old cot gave off a stark chill. Trembling and numb, he tried to warm his hands with his breath. But he couldn’t breathe. There, in the corner, the rat continued to look at him; it was just as cold as he was. He moved a hand and the rat moved a leg forward. They were old acquaintances. Sometimes, he would hurl a piece of his horrible, despicable food toward it.

Despite that, the prisoner missed the green and very agile lizard of his dreams and fell asleep to retrieve it. He discovered that the lizard had lost its tail. A dream like that was no longer worth dreaming. Nevertheless, he started to use his fingers to count the number of years he had left: One, two, three, four, and woke up. It was six total, and he had completed three. He counted again, but now with his fingers awake.

He didn’t have a radio, nor a watch, nor books, nor a pencil, nor a notebook. Sometimes, he would sing softly to precariously fill the void. But he was remembering fewer and fewer songs. As a child he had also learned a few prayers that his grandmother had taught him. But now, who was he going to pray to? He felt deceived by God, but he also didn’t want to deceive God.

The prisoner dreamed that he was in prison and that God would arrive and he would confess to Him that he felt tired, that he suffered from insomnia and that that exhausted him, and that sometimes, when he was finally able to fall asleep, he would have nightmares in which Jesus would ask God for help from the cross, but God was preoccupied and wouldn’t render it.

“Worst of all,” God would tell him, “is that I don’t have a God to entrust myself to. I’m like an Orphan with a capital O.” The prisoner felt pity for that very lonely and abandoned God. In any case, he understood that God’s illness was solitude, because His unwithering and perpetual fame as the Supreme frightened the saints, the regulars as well as the substitutes. When he woke up and remembered that he was an atheist, he stopped feeling pity for God, and instead felt pity for himself, confined, lonely, and immersed in filth and tedium.

After countless dreams and vigils, there came an afternoon when he was shaken awake without the customary abruptness and told by a guard to get up because he had been granted his freedom. The prisoner convinced himself that he wasn’t dreaming only when he felt the coldness of the cot and verified the eternal presence of the rat. He greeted it with pity and then went with the guard so that he could be given his clothes, some money, his watch, a pen, a leather wallet, the little that had been confiscated from him when he was jailed.

No one was waiting for him upon his exit from the prison. He started walking. He walked for about two days, sleeping on the side of the road or among the trees. In a bar on the outskirts, he ate two sandwiches and drank a beer which had an old, recognizable taste. When he finally arrived at his sister’s house, she almost fainted from the surprise. They remained in an embrace for about ten minutes. After she cried for a while, she asked him what he planned to do. “For now, a shower and sleep, I’m very exhausted,” he replied. After he showered, she led him up to the attic, where there was a bed, not a filthy cot, but a clean bed, soft and decent. He slept for more than twelve hours straight. Strangely, during that long rest, the ex-prisoner dreamed that he was in prison, with a wall lizard and everything.
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/?lab=BenedettiPrison

A beautiful narrative. The prisoner dreamed repeatedly  that he was in prison ,the prison which did not have the rat looking at him coldly.The prison he dreamed he was in has a green lizard along the floor of the prison. Not a rat he gave a crumb of the horrible prison bread to. The green lizard which was worth dreaming about. The same dream in which the prison had posters from Paris instead of a water stain on the wall. His dream had clear patterns and details. When he was out of the prison  and he tasted the first taste of life outside ,he slept in his sister’s house for twelve hours .He dreamed again that he was in prison with a wall-lizard and everything.

The narrative see-saws between dream and reality as he re-lives the several events of his life which get mixed up with the present -his mother who has massaged his back ,the lover whose photograph stirs memories and makes him long for her re-appearance in the dream when she would make love to him, his own work .He looked at his idle hands, the ones that before had constructed torsos, chalk faces, legs, bound bodies, marble women.

The biggest irony is the prisoner asking to dream that he is prison.The prisoner dreams that he is in prison ,while being in prison and again, after he is out of the prison.The prison continues wherever he is ,whether he is in the dingy cell with a rat for company or he is free and enjoys a restful sleep in his sister’s house.All that he asks is the continuance of the dream in which the prison has  a green wall lizard with its tail intact.

(taken from www.shortstoryarchive.com)  

(The following story is reprinted from The Horse Stealers and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Macmillan, 1921.)

UZELKOV, an architect with the rank of civil councillor, arrived in his native town, to which he had been invited to restore the church in the cemetery. He had been born in the town, had been at school, had grown up and married in it. But when he got out of the train he scarcely recognized it. Everything was changed. . . . Eighteen years ago when he had moved to Petersburg the street-boys used to catch marmots, for instance, on the spot where now the station was standing; now when one drove into the chief street, a hotel of four storeys stood facing one; in old days there was an ugly grey fence just there; but nothing–neither fences nor houses–had changed as much as the people. From his enquiries of the hotel waiter Uzelkov learned that more than half of the people he remembered were dead, reduced to poverty, forgotten.

“And do you remember Uzelkov?” he asked the old waiter about himself. “Uzelkov the architect who divorced his wife? He used to have a house in Svirebeyevsky Street . . . you must remember.”

“I don’t remember, sir.”

“How is it you don’t remember? The case made a lot of noise, even the cabmen all knew about it. Think, now! Shapkin the attorney managed my divorce for me, the rascal . . . the notorious cardsharper, the fellow who got a thrashing at the club. . . .”

“Ivan Nikolaitch?”

“Yes, yes. . . . Well, is he alive? Is he dead?”

“Alive, sir, thank God. He is a notary now and has an office. He is very well off. He has two houses in Kirpitchny Street. . . . His daughter was married the other day.”

Uzelkov paced up and down the room, thought a bit, and in his boredom made up his mind to go and see Shapkin at his office. When he walked out of the hotel and sauntered slowly towards Kirpitchny Street it was midday. He found Shapkin at his office and scarcely recognized him. From the once well-made, adroit attorney with a mobile, insolent, and always drunken face Shapkin had changed into a modest, grey-headed, decrepit old man.

“You don’t recognize me, you have forgotten me,” began Uzelkov. “I am your old client, Uzelkov.”

“Uzelkov, what Uzelkov? Ah!” Shapkin remembered, recognized, and was struck all of a heap. There followed a shower of exclamations, questions, recollections.

“This is a surprise! This is unexpected!” cackled Shapkin. “What can I offer you? Do you care for champagne? Perhaps you would like oysters? My dear fellow, I have had so much from you in my time that I can’t offer you anything equal to the occasion. . . .”

“Please don’t put yourself out . . .” said Uzelkov. “I have no time to spare. I must go at once to the cemetery and examine the church; I have undertaken the restoration of it.”

“That’s capital! We’ll have a snack and a drink and drive together. I have capital horses. I’ll take you there and introduce you to the church-warden; I will arrange it all. . . . But why is it, my angel, you seem to be afraid of me and hold me at arm’s length? Sit a little nearer! There is no need for you to be afraid of me nowadays. He-he! . . . At one time, it is true, I was a cunning blade, a dog of a fellow . . . no one dared approach me; but now I am stiller than water and humbler than the grass. I have grown old, I am a family man, I have children. It’s time I was dead.”

The friends had lunch, had a drink, and with a pair of horses drove out of the town to the cemetery.

“Yes, those were times!” Shapkin recalled as he sat in the sledge. “When you remember them you simply can’t believe in them. Do you remember how you divorced your wife? It’s nearly twenty years ago, and I dare say you have forgotten it all; but I remember it as though I’d divorced you yesterday. Good Lord, what a lot of worry I had over it! I was a sharp fellow, tricky and cunning, a desperate character. . . . Sometimes I was burning to tackle some ticklish business, especially if the fee were a good one, as, for instance, in your case. What did you pay me then? Five or six thousand! That was worth taking trouble for, wasn’t it? You went off to Petersburg and left the whole thing in my hands to do the best I could, and, though Sofya Mihailovna, your wife, came only of a merchant family, she was proud and dignified. To bribe her to take the guilt on herself was difficult, awfully difficult! I would go to negotiate with her, and as soon as she saw me she called to her maid: ‘Masha, didn’t I tell you not to admit that scoundrel?’ Well, I tried one thing and another. . . . I wrote her letters and contrived to meet her accidentally–it was no use! I had to act through a third person. I had a lot of trouble with her for a long time, and she only gave in when you agreed to give her ten thousand. . . . She couldn’t resist ten thousand, she couldn’t hold out. . . . She cried, she spat in my face, but she consented, she took the guilt on herself!”

“I thought it was fifteen thousand she had from me, not ten,” said Uzelkov.

“Yes, yes . . . fifteen–I made a mistake,” said Shapkin in confusion. “It’s all over and done with, though, it’s no use concealing it. I gave her ten and the other five I collared for myself. I deceived you both. . . . It’s all over and done with, it’s no use to be ashamed. And indeed, judge for yourself, Boris Petrovitch, weren’t you the very person for me to get money out of? . . . You were a wealthy man and had everything you wanted. . . . Your marriage was an idle whim, and so was your divorce. You were making a lot of money. . . . I remember you made a scoop of twenty thousand over one contract. Whom should I have fleeced if not you? And I must own I envied you. If you grabbed anything they took off their caps to you, while they would thrash me for a rouble and slap me in the face at the club. . . . But there, why recall it? It is high time to forget it.”

“Tell me, please, how did Sofya Mihailovna get on afterwards?”

“With her ten thousand? Very badly. God knows what it was–she lost her head, perhaps, or maybe her pride and her conscience tormented her at having sold her honour, or perhaps she loved you; but, do you know, she took to drink. . . . As soon as she got her money she was off driving about with officers. It was drunkenness, dissipation, debauchery. . . . When she went to a restaurant with officers she was not content with port or anything light, she must have strong brandy, fiery stuff to stupefy her.”

“Yes, she was eccentric. . . . I had a lot to put up with from her . . . sometimes she would take offence at something and begin being hysterical. . . . And what happened afterwards?”

“One week passed and then another. . . . I was sitting at home, writing something. All at once the door opened and she walked in . . . drunk. ‘Take back your cursed money,’ she said, and flung a roll of notes in my face. . . . So she could not keep it up. I picked up the notes and counted them. It was five hundred short of the ten thousand, so she had only managed to get through five hundred.”

“Where did you put the money?”

“It’s all ancient history . . . there’s no reason to conceal it now. . . . In my pocket, of course. Why do you look at me like that? Wait a bit for what will come later. . . . It’s a regular novel, a pathological study. A couple of months later I was going home one night in a nasty drunken condition. . . . I lighted a candle, and lo and behold! Sofya Mihailovna was sitting on my sofa, and she was drunk, too, and in a frantic state–as wild as though she had run out of Bedlam. ‘Give me back my money,’ she said, ‘I have changed my mind; if I must go to ruin I won’t do it by halves, I’ll have my fling! Be quick, you scoundrel, give me my money!’ A disgraceful scene!”

“And you . . . gave it her?”

“I gave her, I remember, ten roubles.”

“Oh! How could you?” cried Uzelkov, frowning. “If you couldn’t or wouldn’t have given it her, you might have written to me. . . . And I didn’t know! I didn’t know!”

“My dear fellow, what use would it have been for me to write, considering that she wrote to you herself when she was lying in the hospital afterwards?”

“Yes, but I was so taken up then with my second marriage. I was in such a whirl that I had no thoughts to spare for letters. . . . But you were an outsider, you had no antipathy for Sofya. . . why didn’t you give her a helping hand? . . .”

“You can’t judge by the standards of to-day, Boris Petrovitch; that’s how we look at it now, but at the time we thought very differently. . . . Now maybe I’d give her a thousand roubles, but then even that ten-rouble note I did not give her for nothing. It was a bad business! . . . We must forget it. . . . But here we are. . . .”

The sledge stopped at the cemetery gates. Uzelkov and Shapkin got out of the sledge, went in at the gate, and walked up a long, broad avenue. The bare cherry-trees and acacias, the grey crosses and tombstones, were silvered with hoar-frost, every little grain of snow reflected the bright, sunny day. There was the smell there always is in cemeteries, the smell of incense and freshly dug earth. . . .

“Our cemetery is a pretty one,” said Uzelkov, “quite a garden!”

“Yes, but it is a pity thieves steal the tombstones. . . . And over there, beyond that iron monument on the right, Sofya Mihailovna is buried. Would you like to see?”

The friends turned to the right and walked through the deep snow to the iron monument.

“Here it is,” said Shapkin, pointing to a little slab of white marble. “A lieutenant put the stone on her grave.”

Uzelkov slowly took off his cap and exposed his bald head to the sun. Shapkin, looking at him, took off his cap too, and another bald patch gleamed in the sunlight. There was the stillness of the tomb all around as though the air, too, were dead. The friends looked at the grave, pondered, and said nothing.

“She sleeps in peace,” said Shapkin, breaking the silence. “It’s nothing to her now that she took the blame on herself and drank brandy. You must own, Boris Petrovitch . . . .”

“Own what?” Uzelkov asked gloomily.

“Why. . . . However hateful the past, it was better than this.”

And Shapkin pointed to his grey head.

“I used not to think of the hour of death. . . . I fancied I could have given death points and won the game if we had had an encounter; but now. . . . But what’s the good of talking!”

Uzelkov was overcome with melancholy. He suddenly had a passionate longing to weep, as once he had longed for love, and he felt those tears would have tasted sweet and refreshing. A moisture came into his eyes and there was a lump in his throat, but . . . Shapkin was standing beside him and Uzelkov was ashamed to show weakness before a witness. He turned back abruptly and went into the church.

Only two hours later, after talking to the churchwarden and looking over the church, he seized a moment when Shapkin was in conversation with the priest and hastened away to weep. . . . He stole up to the grave secretly, furtively, looking round him every minute. The little white slab looked at him pensively, mournfully, and innocently as though a little girl lay under it instead of a dissolute, divorced wife.

“To weep, to weep!” thought Uzelkov.

But the moment for tears had been missed; though the old man blinked his eyes, though he worked up his feelings, the tears did not flow nor the lump come in his throat. After standing for ten minutes, with a gesture of despair, Uzelkov went to look for Shapkin.”

   The moment here is the visit by the architect to ex-wife’s cemetery accompanied by the very person who was instrumental in his divorce from her and played a key role in her gradual degeneration leading up to death . The remarkable thing about the story is the wonderful pen portrait of a typically greedy divorce lawyer who goes to any lengths to prove guilt on the part of the spouse in order to get a divorce and ruin the lives of the couples who are on the way to incompatibility and break-up. The moment is poignant when the architect now sees clearly the terrible fate which had overtaken his ex-wife and feels guilty about his own role in the whole thing. He tries to weep to atone for his failure but can hardly bring himself up to it when he is no longer young and is unable to repair the damage already done on account of his own failure and the greed and avariciousness of this lawyer. The old age creeps in on him leaving him sterile in the mind and the heart with hardly any tears left in his eyes.

His hair was cropped very short — so short that the scalp showed at places. On top of that, he had a long piece of twine thread wrapped several times around his forehead. The winding was so tight that it made his eyes fiery and his veins swollen. But the oddities did not end there. To make things worse, his hairy nostrils were filled with phelgm and snuff. A few days’ beard added to the effect and produced a sight which, to say the least, was not pleasing.

A baby girl was crying in the hallway at the top of her voice. In the room, another was lying ill.

“Krittibas! Where are you?”

Mr. H looked fiercely towards the door.

“I say, Kité –”

But Krittibas was certainly not around.

He shouted even louder — “Kité –”

No one showed up.

This time in a thundering voice — “Kité, you stupid bastard–”

His shoutings woke up the girl in the sick-bed and she started crying. It was very faint, almost a whining. The other child had been crying all along. Her voice was not faint — it was rather strong. Mr. H became even more furious by these two completely different styles of crying. He screamed furiously at a high voice — “Kité, Kité, you damn –”

It worked this time.

Kité did not show up of course, but in came a fat woman with marks of spices on her saree. This had an immediate effect. Mr. H suddenly subsided and started looking around with an embarrassed smile on his face. But the woman was not the least embarrassed. Nor, for that matter, did she show any sign of truce. She frowned at Mr. H for a while. She then put one hand on her waist, shook the other hand militantly and asked him, “What’s the matter? The way you are screaming, anyone would think that the house is on fire.”

Mr. H fumbled, “Is the hot water …?”

“What about it? How can I bring you the hot water now? I have only two hands, as you might have noticed!”

“No no, I didn’t ask you. Where is Kité?”

“He has gone to the market.”

“I thought you had sent him to the market once in the morning.”

“I have sent him again.”

“Oh, that’s all right.”

Mr. H did not dare say anything more. At that instant, Krittibas himself appeared at the door and said, “I got the spices, Ma’m.”

Mr. H now fixed his fiery gaze on Krittibas. Krittibas said apologetically, “I’ll bring your water right away, sir. I had put it on the stove before leaving. I think it’s ready by now –”

Krittibas left the room. The lady left as well. On her way, she stopped in the hallway, slapped the child a few times and said, “Wailing all the time! All day, all night! What a pain in the neck!”

The crying became louder. The sick girl groaned, “Dad, my headache kills me.”

Recalling his wife’s mood, Mr. H did not consider it wise to ask her for anything. Instead, he got up and fetched the thermometer. He found that the girl’s fever had gone up to 105 degrees. He looked helplessly at the thermometer for a while. Then, when a sigh was expected to come out of him, he burst into a shout–

“Try to sleep, don’t scream.”

The five-year old girl rolled by her side with the hope of getting some sleep.

A loud rap at the door followed. Mr. H opened the door and found the person he was most afraid of. It was the grocer. He had come with the monthly bill.

Mr. H said, “Maybe day after tomorrow — I’m terribly short of money at the moment.”

The man swore and left.

“Here’s your water, sir.”

Mr. H looked around and found Krittibas standing there with a kettle in his hand.

“Bring me a pan.”

Krittibas rested the kettle on the floor and brought a large pan and some cold water. Mr. H mixed some hot and cold water into the pan and felt the temperature with his hands. He found that it did not suit him. He was about to pour some more hot water when the sick girl started throwing up.

“Kité — come here — look at her –”

Krittibas came to take care of the child. Mr. H mixed hot and cold water in right proportions. Then he looked at Krittibas and said, “Now leave her alone. Bring me my small table, the pen and some paper.”

Mr. H sat down in a chair whose arms were broken. He dipped his feet into the warm water and started enjoying the footbath. Krittibas presently brought paper, pen, ink and the small writing table.

The bugs in the chair began biting Mr. H; two dogs started quarrelling loudly in the road outside; the baby in the hallway continued crying at the top of her voice; and Mr. H felt a splitting headache. He kept rubbing his forehead with his left hand, closed his eyes and started thinking. He must finish it today. The editor of the journal was pestering, and Mr. H also had his own reasons. With a friendly frown appearing on his face, Mr. H began to think of a plot for a real funny story. He was a renowned humorist.

http://www.parabaas.com/translation/database/translations/stories/bonophul_funny.html

Mr.H was no doubt a renowned humorist .After all that we have heard about him there can be no doubt that the story he is going to write will be really a funny story. The irony is delicious. Here is a man whose life is full of expected surprises like a child crying and another crying in a different style,a child who is running 105 degrees of fever and is throwing up in a corner ,a wife who is making pickles and sends the servant on spice-bringing errands , a servant who seems to be the only normal person around etc.etc. The picture is complete with the bugs on the broken chair biting the author into the next bout of creativity,an editor who is pestering for another story , a grocery man who comes to collect his dues, a really humorous story taking shape in his mind as over a splitting headache a friendly frown appears on his face.

Mr. H is no doubt a renowned humorist.

(Translated from the German by Saša Stanišić and Janet Hendrickson : taken from www.wordswithoutborders.org
On a flight to Budapest I was sitting next to a very young girl who immediately won me over with her green eyes and blonde pigtails. Her mother was also blonde and green-eyed and sunk in Brigitte, a sort of German cross between Martha Stewart Living and Cosmopolitan. I forgave her because her daughter was such a pretty child, in a serious, obedient way, a miniature mixture of Susan Sontag, Jessica Valenti, and Paris Hilton’s chihuahua, Tinkerbell.

“What’s your name?” I asked her after take-off, eager to make some kiddie small talk.

“Johann Sebastian Bach,” answered the munchkin and stole a pack of gum out of her mother’s Gucci purse.

I burst out laughing and said, with one of my famous conspiratorial grins, “And I’m Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart!”

Johann Sebastian gave me the finger.

I was petrified with shock. Can a child do that? I asked myself and shook my head. At this the girl stuffed five sticks of gum into her mouth all at once, threw the empty pack in my lap, and let out a heartbreaking scream. The mother closed her magazine and looked at her daughter, who then pointed at me.

Mother: “What did the evil man do to you?”

Daughter (mouth full of gum): “Waaaaaah!”

M: “Jo, where did you get that gum from?”

D: “The evil man gave it to me. He told me to chew it all at once. And he said his name is Mozart, and he wants to make music with me, waaaaah!”

M: “You what!” (Her green eyes flash in my direction as the little one spit the huge wad of gum into her mother’s hand.)

Now, what can you do in a situation like this? The mother is convinced her blonde angel doesn’t even know what lying is, and worse, I held the empty pack of gum in my hand. Also, “make music with me” sounded damn unsettling. No one would have believed me if I said that the little girl was playing a perverse game with me, as innocent as she looked and as unshaven as I was. And when the mother identified the gum as her own—”Wait a minute! Have you been digging through my purse?”—every single person in the plane turned and stared at the pedophile pickpocket.

In tears the girl secretly gave me the finger again.

“I say!” said I, trying to defend myself, “Johann Sebastian Bach isn’t blameless here!”

“Bach?” the outraged mother cried out in unison with a flight attendant who’d come by on a diplomatic mission to settle the argument. With that I was deemed a crackpot for the rest of the flight.

“And Mister Mozart didn’t fasten his seatbelt either,” the little monster tattled, her face a symphony of innocence. Flying without a seatbelt—that’s no minor sin, it’s a capital offense as serious as armed robbery.

“Are you violating our security guidelines, Sir?” the stewardess politely screamed at me. Before I could answer, my phone rang. The mother cleared her throat as aggressively as her vocal cords would permit, and even louder the longer I looked for the damn thing, which was playing “A Little Night Music.”

“Sir, turn off your cell phone this instant!” commanded the flight attendant with such urgency that some of the passengers frantically put on their life vests.

“He should have turned it off before we started,” the little smartass said and then added a sentence in Hungarian, which caused her mother and the stewardess to laugh maniacally. At last the ringing stopped, and the flight attendant departed, swinging her hips with disdain (later: no beer for me, only tea).

It was time to take responsibility for the girl’s education: “You don’t do things this way, little girl! You don’t lie, you don’t steal, and you only give the finger in traffic!” I wanted to tell her, but mother and daughter had swapped seats and there was no point in trying to educate a woman who reads Brigitte. The girl sat in the window seat, her face bathed in sunlight, and whistled a Bach fugue.

Translation of “Immerhin haben wir uns gewehrt: Klassische Erziehung.” Copyright Saša Stanišić. By arrangement with the author. Translation copyright 2007 by Saša Stanišić and Janet Hendrickson. All rights reserved.
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/?lab=StanisicClassical

 A hilarious piece. So this is what classical education should be. The little girl has devised her own piece of inflight entertainment while the author  has his own fixed notions of what education should be like. The mother reads Brigitt but the daughter is educated enough to call herself Bach and go along with the author who calls himself Mozart. In the end the girl sits near the window and hums a Bach fugue. The little girl is clever enough to make this unknown adult companion look rather silly in the flight. It is not time to take responsibility for the girl’s education but rather his own education has begun now.

One afternoon in that last week of blurred faces and indistinct shapes, my friends and I clambered over the fence of the largely vacant complex of al-Madina al-Seyahiya, a guarded compound of holiday homes that stood by the sea in Tripoli near where we lived. We liked to play football on its empty, perfect lawns. The patch of ground we selected for our pitch ascended into low hills before dipping down toward a group of villas. The hills concealed us from view. When the time came to choose sides the usual quarrel broke out over which team would have to take me; by this time I had resigned myself to the fact that I was not a good player. I was always asked to play goalie, and because I rarely saw the ball in time to obstruct it, I spent most of the time fetching, searching for the hazy white blob. We began to play and I was jumping about uncertainly around the net when the ball shot by, so fast that I barely had time to register where it had gone. I turned round and blindly scanned the landscape. “Over the hill,” one of the boys said.

When I got to the top of the hill, I could see the shapes of people sitting outside one of the villas. I ran down the slope toward the group, hoping they might help me find the ball. As I got closer I saw that there were two men sitting a meter or so apart on garden chairs. Two large men stood a few paces behind the seated figures. One of the seated men was larger and darker than the other. He beckoned me over. The closer I came, the darker and more forbidding he became. Then I saw the ball; it was right beneath his chair. His size made it hard for him to bend down, but eventually he got hold of the ball and made as if to throw it to me. This made him chuckle. He held the ball out and asked me to come and get it. Just as I was reaching to take it, he quickly threw it behind him and grabbed hold of me. He laughed an awful laugh that showed his fat red tongue. I began to cry. He put me on his knee and patted his heavy palm on my back; with each pat the wicker chair beneath us creaked. There was a suffocating smell of cologne. Suddenly he inflated his cheeks and bulged his eyes at me. You could have fit a date in each of his nostrils. It was at that moment that I recognized the paler man sitting in the other chair. It was our Leader. Even my broken eyes could not have avoided the huge posters on the streets of Tripoli, sometimes covering the entire windowless side of a block of flats. Every day the Colonel looked down at us from his life-size portrait on the classroom wall. Qaddafi was looking at me now, his expression seeming to hover between boredom and disgust. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. “What’s your name?” the man on whose knee I was seated asked. When I didn’t answer, he looked at Qaddafi and said, “How sweet.”

I heard one of the boys call my name. The dark man smiled and cupped his hand round his ear, as if he was listening out for their voices. My name was called again. “Hisham,” he said, “Your name is Hisham,” and he laughed. Colonel Qaddafi attempted a smile. The man behind him, with a Kalashnikov slung over one shoulder, tilted his head and looked benevolently down at me. The Leader ordered the guard to fetch the ball. I grabbed it and ran back up the hill, quickly wiping the tears from my face before reaching the summit and climbing down to our improvised pitch on the other side. When the boys asked what had taken so long, I shrugged and kicked the ball as hard as I could toward the sky.

One afternoon, a few days later, bespectacled now and completely addicted to television, I was watching the news when on the screen appeared the same two middle-aged men I had seen on the day of the football game. They sat side by side like before, this time indoors and without the armed guards. As I gazed at the television I heard the broadcaster say their names: the Leader and Idi Amin. Idi Amin, the man who took my football, sat in his chair, looking at me through the lens of the television set. At that moment I wished I had told the boys that day about the people on the other side of the hill. No one would believe me now.

Copyright 2007 by Hisham Matar. By arrangement with the author. All rights reserved.
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/?lab=Themenoverthe

A moment well captured.A narrative by an adult as  he went back to those days for a brief while and re-lived the moment as a child .I like the way the child describes the hugely grotesque face of Idi Amin whom the child hardly knew at that time as the inhuman dictator he would later become .The hideous nature of the dictator with the cruelty of a reported cannibal hardly comes through in this encounter of a foot-ball fetching child with him “over the hills” and instead ,here is an Idi Amin who loved to frolic with a child placing him on his knee.Col.Gaddafi too comes through as another interesting character. Surprisingly he only attempted a smile while Idi Amin laughed heartily as the child remained silent over his name.