Showing posts with label Lit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lit. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 4, 2026
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Friday, March 20, 2026
In The Hills, The Cities (1984) by Clive Barker
It wasn’t until the first week of the Yugoslavian trip that Mick discovered what a political bigot he’d chosen as a lover. Certainly, he’d been warned. One of the queens at the Baths had told him Judd was to the Right of Attila the Hun, but the man had been one of Judd’s ex-affairs, and Mick had presumed there was more spite than perception in the character assassination.
If only he’d listened. Then he wouldn’t be driving along an interminable road in a Volkswagen that suddenly seemed the size of a coffin, listening to Judd’s views on Soviet expansionism. Jesus, he was so boring. He didn’t converse, he lectured, and endlessly. In Italy the sermon had been on the way the Communists had exploited the peasant vote. Now, in Yugoslavia, Judd had really warmed to his theme, and Mick was just about ready to take a hammer to his self-opinionated head.
It wasn’t that he disagreed with everything Judd said. Some of the arguments (the ones Mick understood) seemed quite sensible. But then, what did he know? He was a dance teacher. Judd was a journalist, a professional pundit. He felt, like most journalists Mick had encountered, that he was obliged to have an opinion on everything under the sun. Especially politics; that was the best trough to wallow in. You could get your snout, eyes, head and front hooves in that mess of muck and have a fine old time splashing around. It was an inexhaustible subject to devour, a swill with a little of everything in it, because everything, according to Judd, was political. The arts were political. Sex was political. Religion, commerce, gardening, eating, drinking and farting — all political.
Jesus, it was mind-blowingly boring; killingly, love -deadeningly boring.
Worse still, Judd didn’t seem to notice how bored Mick had become, or if he noticed, he didn’t care. He just rambled on, his arguments getting windier and windier, his sentences lengthening with every mile they drove.
Judd, Mick had decided, was a selfish bastard, and as soon as their honeymoon was over he’d part with the guy.
It was not until their trip, that endless, motiveless caravan through the graveyards of mid-European culture, that Judd realized what a political lightweight he had in Mick. The guy showed precious little interest in the economics or the politics of the countries they passed through. He registered indifference to the full facts behind the Italian situation, and yawned, yes, yawned when he tried (and failed) to debate the Russian threat to world peace. He had to face the bitter truth: Mick was a queen; there was no other word for him. All right, perhaps he didn’t mince or wear jewellery to excess, but he was a queen nevertheless, happy to wallow in a dream-world of early Renaissance frescoes and Yugoslavian icons. The complexities, the contradictions, even the agonies that made those cultures blossom and wither were just tiresome to him. His mind was no deeper than his looks; he was a well-groomed nobody.
Some honeymoon.
The road south from Belgrade to Novi Pazar was, by Yugoslavian standards, a good one. There were fewer pot-holes than on many of the roads they’d travelled, and it was relatively straight. The town of Novi Pazar lay in the valley of the River Raska, south of the city named after the river. It wasn’t an area particularly popular with the tourists. Despite the good road it was still inaccessible, and lacked sophisticated amenities; but Mick was determined to see the monastery at Sopocani, to the west of the town and after some bitter argument, he’d won.
The journey had proved uninspiring. On either side of the road the cultivated fields looked parched and dusty. The summer had been unusually hot, and droughts were affecting many of the villages. Crops had failed, and livestock had been prematurely slaughtered to prevent them dying of malnutrition. There was a defeated look about the few faces they glimpsed at the roadside. Even the children had dour expressions; brows as heavy as the stale heat that hung over the valley.
Now, with the cards on the table after a row at Belgrade, they drove in silence most of the time; but the straight road, like most straight roads, invited dispute. When the driving was easy, the mind rooted for something to keep it engaged. What better than a fight?
‘Why the hell do you want to see this damn monastery?’ Judd demanded.
It was an unmistakable invitation.
‘We’ve come all this way …‘ Mick tried to keep the tone conversational. He wasn’t in the mood for an argument.
‘More fucking Virgins, is it?’ Keeping his voice as even as he could, Mick picked up the Guide and read aloud from it… ‘there, some of the greatest works of Serbian painting can still be seen and enjoyed, including what many commentators agree to be the enduring masterpiece of the Raska school: “The Dormition of the Virgin.”’
Silence.
Then Judd: ‘I’m up to here with churches.’
‘It’s a masterpiece.’
‘They’re all masterpieces according to that bloody book.’
Mick felt his control slipping.
‘Two and a half hours at most —, ‘I told you, I don’t want to see another church; the smell of the places makes me sick. Stale incense, old sweat and lies…’
‘It’s a short detour; then we can get back on to the road and you can give me another lecture on farming subsidies in the Sandzak.’
‘I’m just trying to get some decent conversation going instead of this endless tripe about Serbian fucking mas-terpieces —,
‘Stop the car!’
‘What?’
‘Stop the car!’
Judd pulled the Volkswagen into the side of the road. Mick got out.
The road was hot, but there was a slight breeze. He took a deep breath, and wandered into the middle of the road. Empty of traffic and of pedestrians in both directions. In every direction, empty. The hills shimmered in the heat off the fields. There were wild poppies growing in the ditches. Mick crossed the road, squatted on his haunches and picked one.
Behind him he heard the VW’s door slam. ‘What did you stop us for?’ Judd said. His voice was edgy, still hoping for that argument, begging for it.
Mick stood up, playing with the poppy. It was close to seeding, late in the season. The petals fell from the receptacle as soon as he touched them, little splashes of red fluttering down on to the grey tarmac.
‘I asked you a question,’ Judd said again.
Mick looked round. Judd was standing the far side of the car, his brows a knitted line of burgeoning anger. But handsome; oh yes; a face that made women weep with frustration that he was gay. A heavy black moustache (perfectly trimmed) and eyes you could watch forever, and never see the same light in them twice. Why in God’s name, thought Mick, does a man as fine as that have to be such an insensitive little shit?
Judd returned the look of contemptuous appraisal, staring at the pouting pretty boy across the road. It made him want to puke, seeing the little act Mick was performing for his benefit. It might just have been plausible in a sixteen-year-old virgin. In a twenty-five-year-old, it lacked credibility.
Mick dropped the flower, and untucked his T-shirt from his jeans. A tight stomach, then a slim, smooth chest were revealed as he pulled it off. His hair was ruffled when his head re-appeared, and his face wore a broad grin. Judd looked at the torso. Neat, not too muscular. An appendix scar peering over his faded jeans. A gold chain, small but catching the sun, dipped in the hollow of his throat. Without meaning to, he returned Mick’s grin, and a kind of peace was made between them.
Mick was unbuckling his belt.
‘Want to fuck?’ he said, the grin not faltering.
‘It’s no use,’ came an answer, though not to that question.
‘What isn’t?’ ‘We’re not compatible.’
‘Want a bet?’
Now he was unzipped, and turning away towards the wheat-field that bordered the road.
Judd watched as Mick cut a swathe through the swaying sea, his back the colour of the grain, so that he was almost camouflaged by it. It was a dangerous game, screwing in the open air — this wasn’t San Francisco, or even Hampstead Heath. Nervously, Judd glanced along the road. Still empty in both directions. And Mick was turning, deep in the field, turning and smiling and waving like a swimmer buoyed up in a golden surf. What the hell there was nobody to see, nobody to know. Just the hills, liquid in the heat-haze, their forested backs bent to the business of the earth, and a lost dog, sitting at the edge of the road, waiting for some lost master.
Judd followed Mick’s path through the wheat, unbut-toning his shirt as he walked. Field-mice ran ahead of him, scurrying through the stalks as the giant came their way, his feet like thunder. Judd saw their panic, and smiled. He meant no harm to them, but then how were they to know that? Maybe he’d put out a hundred lives, mice, beetles, worms, before he reached the spot where Mick was lying, stark bollock naked, on a bed of trampled grain, still grinning.
It was good love they made, good, strong love, equal in pleasure for both; there was a precision to their passion, sensing the moment when effortless delight became urgent, when desire became necessity. They locked together, limb around limb, tongue around tongue, in a knot only orgasm could untie, their backs alternately scorched and scratched as they rolled around exchanging blows and kisses. In the thick of it, creaming together, they heard the phut-phut-phut of a tractor passing by; but they were past caring. They made their way back to the Volkswagen with body-threshed wheat in their hair and their ears, in their socks and between their toes. Their grins had been replaced with easy smiles: the truce, if not permanent, would last a few hours at least.
The car was baking hot, and they had to open all the windows and doors to let the breeze cool it before they started towards Novi Pazar. It was four o’clock, and there was still an hour’s driving ahead.
As they got into the car Mick said, ‘We’ll forget the monastery, eh?’ Judd gaped. ‘I thought —, ‘I couldn’t bear another fucking Virgin —‘
They laughed lightly together, then kissed, tasting each other and themselves, a mingling of saliva, and the aftertaste of salt semen.
The following day was bright, but not particularly warm. No blue skies: just an even layer of white cloud. The morning air was sharp in the lining of the nostrils, like ether, or peppermint.
Vaslav Jelovsek watched the pigeons in the main square of Popolac courting death as they skipped and fluttered ahead of the vehicles that were buzzing around. Some about military business, some civilian. An air of sober intention barely suppressed the excitement he felt on this day, an excitement he knew was shared by every man, woman and child in Popolac. Shared by the pigeons too for all he knew. Maybe that was why they played under the wheels with such dexterity, knowing that on this day of days no harm could come to them.
He scanned the sky again, that same white sky he’d been peering at since dawn. The cloud-layer was low; not ideal for the celebrations. A phrase passed through his mind, an English phrase he’d heard from a friend, ‘to have your head in the clouds’. It meant, he gathered, to be lost in a reverie, in a white, sightless dream. That, he thought wryly, was all the West knew about clouds, that they stood for dreams. It took a vision they lacked to make a truth out of that casual turn of phrase. Here, in these secret hills, wouldn’t they create a spectacular reality from those idle words? A living proverb.
A head in the clouds.
Already the first contingent was assembling in the square. There were one or two absentees owing to illness, but the auxiliaries were ready and waiting to take their places. Such eagerness! Such wide smiles when an auxiliary heard his or her name and number called and was taken out of line to join the limb that was already taking shape. On every side, miracles of organization. Everyone with a job to do and a place to go. There was no shouting or pushing: indeed, voices were scarcely raised above an eager whisper. He watched in admiration as the work of positioning and buckling and roping went on.
It was going to be a long and arduous day. Vaslav had been in the square since an hour before dawn, drinking coffee from imported plastic cups, discussing the half-hourly meteorological reports coming in from Pristina and Mitrovica, and watching the starless sky as the grey light of morning crept across it. Now he was drinking his sixth coffee of the day, and it was still barely seven o’clock. Across the square Metzinger looked as tired and as anxious as Vaslav felt.
They’d watched the dawn seep out of the east together, Metzinger and he. But now they had separated, forgetting previous companionship, and would not speak until the contest was over. After all Metzinger was from Podujevo. He had his own city to support in the coming battle. Tomorrow they’d exchange tales of their adventures, but for today they must behave as if they didn’t know each other, not even to exchange a smile. For today they had to be utterly partisan, caring only for the victory of their own city over the opposition.
Now the first leg of Popolac was erected, to the mutual satisfaction of Metzinger and Vaslav. All the safety checks had been meticulously made, and the leg left the square, its shadow falling hugely across the face of the Town Hall.
Vaslav sipped his sweet, sweet coffee and allowed himself a little grunt of satisfaction. Such days, such days. Days filled with glory, with snapping flags and high, stomach-turning sights, enough to last a man a lifetime. It was a golden foretaste of Heaven.
Let America have its simple pleasures, its cartoon mice, its candy-coated castles, its cults and its technologies, he wanted none of it. The greatest wonder of the world was here, hidden in the hills.
Ah, such days.
In the main square of Podujevo the scene was no less animated, and no less inspiring. Perhaps there was a muted sense of sadness underlying this year’s celebration, but that was understandable. Nita Obrenovic, Podujevo’s loved and respected organizer, was no longer living. The previous winter had claimed her at the age of ninety-four, leaving the city bereft of her fierce opinions and her fiercer proportions. For sixty years Nita had worked with the citizens of Podujevo, always planning for the next contest and improving on the designs, her energies spent on making the next creation more ambitious and more life-like than the last.
Now she was dead, and sorely missed. There was no disorganization in the streets without her, the people were far too disciplined for that, but they were already falling behind schedule, and it was almost seven-twenty-five. Nita’s daughter had taken over in her mother’s stead, but she lacked Nita’s power to galvanize the people into action. She was, in a word, too gentle for the job in hand. It required a leader who was part prophet and part ringmaster, to coax and bully and inspire the citizens into their places. Maybe, after two or three decades, and with a few more contests under her belt, Nita Obrenovic’s daughter would make the grade. But for today Podujevo was behindhand; safety-checks were being overlooked; nervous looks replaced the confidence of earlier years.
Nevertheless, at six minutes before eight the first limb of Podujevo made its way out of the city to the assembly point, to wait for its fellow.
By that time the flanks were already lashed together in Popolac, and armed contingents were awaiting orders in the Town Square.
Mick woke promptly at seven, though there was no alarm clock in their simply furnished room at the Hotel Beograd. He lay in his bed and listened to Judd’s regular breathing from the twin bed across the room. A dull morning light whimpered through the thin curtains, not encouraging an early departure. After a few minutes’ staring at the cracked paintwork on the ceiling, and a while longer at the crudely carved crucifix on the opposite wall, Mick got up and went to the window. It was a dull day, as he had guessed. The sky was overcast, and the roofs of Novi Pazar were grey and featureless in the flat morning light. But beyond the roofs, to the east, he could see the hills. There was sun there. He could see shafts of light catching the blue-green of the forest, inviting a visit to their slopes.
Today maybe they would go south to Kosovska Mitrovica. There was a market there, wasn’t there, and a museum? And they could drive down the valley of the Ibar, following the road beside the river, where the hills rose wild and shining on either side. The hills, yes; today he decided they would see the hills.
It was eight-fifteen.
By nine the main bodies of Popolac and Podujevo were substantially assembled. In their allotted districts the limbs of both cities were ready and waiting to join their expectant torsos.
Vaslav Jelovsek capped his gloved hands over his eyes and surveyed the sky. The cloud-base had risen in the last hour, no doubt of it, and there were breaks in the clouds to the west; even, on occasion, a few glimpses of the sun. It wouldn’t be a perfect day for the contest perhaps, but certainly adequate.
Mick and Judd breakfasted late on hemendeks — roughly translated as ham and eggs — and several cups of good black coffee. It was brightening up, even in Novi Pazar, and their ambitions were set high. Kosovska Mitrovica by lunchtime, and maybe a visit to the hill-castle of Zvecan in the afternoon.
About nine-thirty they motored out of Novi Pazar and took the Srbovac road south to the Ibar valley. Not a good road, but the bumps and pot-holes couldn’t spoil the new day. The road was empty, except for the occasional pedes-trian; and in place of the maize and corn fields they’d passed on the previous day the road was flanked by undulating hills, whose sides were thickly and darkly forested. Apart from a few birds, they saw no wildlife. Even their infrequent travelling companions petered out altogether after a few miles, and the occasional farmhouse they drove by appeared locked and shuttered up. Black pigs ran unattended in the yard, with no child to feed them. Washing snapped and billowed on a sagging line, with no washerwoman in sight.
At first this solitary journey through the hills was refreshing in its lack of human contact, but as the morning drew on, an uneasiness grew on them. ‘Shouldn’t we have seen a signpost to Mitrovica, Mick?’
He peered at the map.
‘Maybe…‘
‘— we’ve taken the wrong road.’
‘If there’d been a sign, I’d have seen it. I think we should try and get off this road, bear south a bit more — meet the valley closer to Mitrovica than we’d planned.’
‘How do we get off this bloody road?’ ‘There’ve been a couple of turnings…‘ ‘Dirt-tracks.’
‘Well it’s either that or going on the way we are.’ Judd pursed his lips.
‘Cigarette?’ he asked.
‘Finished them miles back.’
In front of them, the hills formed an impenetrable line. There was no sign of life ahead; no frail wisp of chimney smoke, no sound of voice or vehicle.
‘All right,’ said Judd, ‘we take the next turning. Any-thing’s better than this.’
They drove on. The road was deteriorating rapidly, the pot-holes becoming craters, the hummocks feeling like bodies beneath the wheels.
Then:
‘There!’
A turning: a palpable turning. Not a major road, certainly. In fact barely the dirt-track Judd had described the other roads as being, but it was an escape from the endless perspective of the road they were trapped on.
‘This is becoming a bloody safari,’ said Judd as the VW be-gan to bump and grind its way along the doleful little track. ‘Where’s your sense of adventure?’
‘I forgot to pack it.’
They were beginning to climb now, as the track wound its way up into the hills. The forest closed over them, blotting out the sky, so a shifting patchwork of light and shadow scooted over the bonnet as they drove. There was birdsong suddenly, vacuous and optimistic, and a smell of new pine and undug earth. A fox crossed the track, up ahead, and watched a long moment as the car grumbled up towards it. Then, with the leisurely stride of a fearless prince, it sauntered away into the trees.
Wherever they were going, Mick thought, this was better than the road they’d left. Soon maybe they’d stop, and walk a while, to find a promontory from which they could see the valley, even Novi Pazar, nestled behind them.
The two men were still an hour’s drive from Popolac when the head of the contingent at last marched out of the Town Square and took up its position with the main body.
This last exit left the city completely deserted. Not even the sick or the old were neglected on this day; no-one was to be denied the spectacle and the triumph of the contest. Every single citizen, however young or infirm, the blind, the crippled, babes in arms, pregnant women — all made their way up from their proud city to the stamping ground. It was the law that they should attend: but it needed no enforcing. No citizen of either city would have missed the chance to see that sight — to experience the thrill of that contest.
The confrontation had to be total, city against city. This was the way it had always been.
So the cities went up into the hills. By noon they were gathered, the citizens of Popolac and Podujevo, in the secret well of the hills, hidden from civilized eyes, to do ancient and ceremonial battle. Tens of thousands of hearts beat faster. Tens of thou-sands of bodies stretched and strained and sweated as the twin cities took their positions. The shadows of the bodies darkened tracts of land the size of small towns; the weight of their feet trampled the grass to a green milk; their movement killed animals, crushed bushes and threw down trees. The earth literally reverberated with their passage, the hills echoing with the booming din of their steps.
In the towering body of Podujevo, a few technical hitches were becoming apparent. A slight flaw in the knitting of the left flank had resulted in a weakness there: and there were consequent problems in the swivelling mechanism of the hips. It was stiffer than it should be, and the movements were not smooth. As a result there was considerable strain being put upon that region of the city. It was being dealt with bravely; after all, the contest was intended to press the contestants to their limits. But breaking point was closer than anyone would have dared to admit. The citizens were not as resilient as they had been in previous contests. A bad decade for crops had produced bodies less well-nourished, spines less supple, wills less resolute. The badly knitted flank might not have caused an accident in itself, but further weakened by the frailty of the competitors it set a scene for death on an unprecedented scale.
They stopped the car.
‘Hear that?’
Mick shook his head. His hearing hadn’t been good since he was an adolescent. Too many rock shows had blown his eardrums to hell.
Judd got out of the car.
The birds were quieter now. The noise he’d heard as they drove came again. It wasn’t simply a noise: it was almost a motion in the earth, a roar that seemed seated in the substance of the hills.
Thunder, was it?
No, too rhythmical. It came again, through the soles of the feet —Boom.
Mick heard it this time. He leaned out of the car window.
‘It’s up ahead somewhere. I hear it now.’ Judd nodded.
Boom.
The earth-thunder sounded again. ‘What the hell is it?’ said Mick. ‘Whatever it is, I want to see it —, Judd got back into the Volkswagen, smiling.
‘Sounds almost like guns,’ he said, starting the car. ‘Big guns.’
Through his Russian-made binoculars Vaslav Jelovsek watched the starting-official raise his pistol. He saw the feather of white smoke rise from the barrel, and a second later heard the sound of the shot across the valley.
The contest had begun.
He looked up at twin towers of Popolac and Podujevo. Heads in the clouds — well almost. They practically stretched to touch the sky. It was an awesome sight, a breath-stopping, sleep-stabbing sight. Two cities swaying and writhing and preparing to take their first steps towards each other in this ritual battle.
Of the two, Podujevo seemed the less stable. There was a slight hesitation as the city raised its left leg to begin its march. Nothing serious, just a little difficulty in co-ordinating hip and thigh muscles. A couple of steps and the city would find its rhythm; a couple more and its inhabitants would be moving as one creature, one perfect giant set to match its grace and power against its mirror-image.
The gunshot had sent flurries of birds up from the trees that banked the hidden valley. They rose up in celebration of the great contest, chattering their excitement as they swooped over the stamping-ground.
‘Did you hear a shot?’ asked Judd.
Mick nodded.
‘Military exercises …?‘ Judd’s smile had broadened. He could see the headlines already — exclusive reports of secret manoeuvres in the depths of the Yugoslavian countryside. Russian tanks perhaps, tactical exercises being held out of the West’s prying sight. With luck, he would be the carrier of this news.
Boom.
Boom.
There were birds in the air. The thunder was louder now.
It did sound like guns.
‘It’s over the next ridge …‘ said Judd.
‘I don’t think we should go any further.’
‘I have to see.’
‘I don’t. We’re not supposed to be here.’
‘I don’t see any signs.’
‘They’ll cart us away; deport us - I don’t know - I just think -, Boom.
‘I’ve got to see.’
The words were scarcely out of his mouth when the screaming started.
Podujevo was screaming: a death-cry. Someone buried in the weak flank had died of the strain, and had begun a chain of decay in the system. One man loosed his neighbour and that neighbour loosed his, spreading a cancer of chaos through the body of the city. The coherence of the towering structure deteriorated with terrifying rapidity as the failure of one part of the anatomy put unendurable pressure on the other.
The masterpiece that the good citizens of Podujevo had constructed of their own flesh and blood tottered and then
—a dynamited skyscraper, it began to fall.
The broken flank spewed citizens like a slashed artery spitting blood. Then, with a graceful sloth that made the agonies of the citizens all the more horrible, it bowed towards the earth, all its limbs dissembling as it fell.
The huge head, that had brushed the clouds so recently, was flung back on its thick neck. Ten thousand mouths spoke a single scream for its vast mouth, a wordless, infinitely pitiable appeal to the sky. A howl of loss, a howl of anticipation, a howl of puzzlement. How, that scream demanded, could the day of days end like this, in a welter of falling bodies?
‘Did you hear that?’
It was unmistakably human, though almost deafeningly loud. Judd’s stomach convulsed. He looked across at Mick, who was as white as a sheet.
Judd stopped the car.
‘No,’ said Mick.
‘Listen — for Christ’s sake —, The din of dying moans, appeals and imprecations flooded the air. It was very close.
‘We’ve got to go on now,’ Mick implored.
Judd shook his head. He was prepared for some military spectacle — all the Russian army massed over the next hill
— but that noise in his ears was the noise of human flesh
— too human for words. It reminded him of his childhood
imaginings of Hell; the endless, unspeakable torments his mother had threatened him with if he failed to embrace Christ. It was a terror he’d forgotten for twenty years. But suddenly, here it was again, fresh-faced. Maybe the pit itself gaped just over the next horizon, with his mother standing at its lip, inviting him to taste its punishments.
‘If you won’t drive, I will.’
Mick got out of the car and crossed in front of it, glancing up the track as he did so. There was a moment’s hesitation, no more than a moment’s, when his eyes flickered with disbelief, before he turned towards the windscreen, his face even paler than it had been previously and said:
‘Jesus Christ…‘ in a voice that was thick with suppressed nausea.
His lover was still sitting behind the wheel, his head in his hands, trying to blot out memories.
‘Judd.. .‘
Judd looked up, slowly. Mick was staring at him like a wildman, his face shining with a sudden, icy sweat. Judd looked past him. A few metres ahead the track had mysteriously darkened, as a tide edged towards the car, a thick, deep tide of blood. Judd’s reason twisted and turned to make any other sense of the sight than that inevitable conclusion. But there was no saner explanation. It was blood, in unendurable abundance, blood without end —And now, in the breeze, there was the flavour of freshly - opened carcasses: the smell out of the depths of the human body, part sweet, part savoury.
Mick stumbled back to the passenger’s side of the VW and fumbled weakly at the handle. The door opened suddenly and he lurched inside, his eyes glazed.
‘Back up,’ he said.
Judd reached for the ignition. The tide of blood was already sloshing against the front wheels. Ahead, the world had been painted red.
‘Drive, for fuck’s sake, drive!’ Judd was making no attempt to start the car.
‘We must look,’ he said, without conviction, ‘we have to.’
‘We don’t have to do anything,’ said Mick, ‘but get the hell out of here. It’s not our business …‘
‘Plane-crash —, ‘There’s no smoke.’ ‘Those are human voices.’
Mick’s instinct was to leave well alone. He could read about the tragedy in a newspaper — he could see the pictures tomorrow when they were grey and grainy. Today it was too fresh, too unpredictable —Anything could be at the end of that track, bleeding —‘We must —‘
Judd started the car, while beside him Mick began to moan quietly. The VW began to edge forward, nosing through the river of blood, its wheels spinning in the queasy, foaming tide.
‘No,’ said Mick, very quietly, ‘please, no . . ‘We must,’ was Judd’s reply. ‘We must. We must.’
Only a few yards away the surviving city of Popolac was recovering from its first convulsions. It stared, with a thousand eyes, at the ruins of its ritual enemy, now spread in a tangle of rope and bodies over the impacted ground, shattered forever. Popolac staggered back from the sight, its vast legs flattening the forest that bounded the stamping-ground, its arms flailing the air. But it kept its balance, even as a common insanity, woken by the horror at its feet, surged through its sinews and curdled its brain. The order went out: the body thrashed and twisted and turned from the grisly carpet of Podujevo, and fled into the hills.
As it headed into oblivion, its towering form passed between the car and the sun, throwing its cold shadow over the bloody road. Mick saw nothing through his tears, and Judd, his eyes narrowed against the sight he feared seeing around the next bend, only dimly registered that something had blotted the light for a minute. A cloud, perhaps. A flock of birds.
Had he looked up at that moment, just stolen a glance out towards the north-east, he would have seen Popolac’s head, the vast, swarming head of a maddened city, disappearing below his line of vision, as it marched into the hills. He would have known that this territory was beyond his comprehension; and that there was no healing to be done in this corner of Hell. But he didn’t see the city, and he and Mick’s last turning-point had passed. From now on, like Popolac and its dead twin, they were lost to sanity, and to all hope of life.
They rounded the bend, and the ruins of Podujevo came into sight. Their domesticated imaginations had never conceived of a sight so unspeakably brutal.
Perhaps in the battlefields of Europe as many corpses had been heaped together: but had so many of them been women and children, locked together with the corpses of men? There had been piles of dead as high, but ever so many so recently abundant with life? There had been cities laid waste as quickly, but ever an entire city lost to the simple dictate of gravity?
It was a sight beyond sickness. In the face of it the mind slowed to a snail’s pace, the forces of reason picked over the evidence with meticulous hands, searching for a flaw in it, a place where it could say:
This is not happening. This is a dream of death, not death itself.
But reason could find no weakness in the wall. This was true. It was death indeed. Podujevo had fallen.
Thirty-eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty-five citizens were spread on the ground, or rather flung in ungainly, seeping piles. Those who had not died of the fall, or of suffocation, were dying. There would be no survivors from that city except that bundle of onlookers that had traipsed out of their homes to watch the contest. Those few Podujevians, the crippled, the sick, the ancient few, were now staring, like Mick and Judd, at the carnage, trying not to believe.
Judd was first out of the car. The ground beneath his suedes was sticky with coagulating gore. He surveyed the carnage. There was no wreckage: no sign of a plane crash, no fire, no smell of fuel. Just tens of thousands of fresh bodies, all either naked or dressed in an identical grey serge, men, women and children alike. Some of them, he could see, wore leather harnesses, tightly buckled around their upper chests, and snaking out from these contraptions were lengths of rope, miles and miles of it. The closer he looked, the more he saw of the extraordinary system of knots and lashings that still held the bodies together. For some reason these people had been tied together, side by side. Some were yoked on their neighbours’ shoulders, straddling them like boys playing at horse back riding. Others were locked arm in arm, knitted together with threads of rope in a wall of muscle and bone. Yet others were trussed in a ball, with their heads tucked between their knees. All were in some way connected up with their fellows, tied together as though in some insane collective bondage game.
Another shot.
Mick looked up.
Across the field a solitary man, dressed in a drab overcoat, was walking amongst the bodies with a revolver, dispatching the dying. It was a pitifully inadequate act of mercy, but he went on nevertheless, choosing the suffering children first. Emptying the revolver, filling it again, emptying it, filling it, emptying it —Mick let go.
He yelled at the top of his voice over the moans of the injured.
‘What is this?’
The man looked up from his appalling duty, his face as dead-grey as his coat.
‘Uh?’ he grunted, frowning at the two interlopers through his thick spectacles.
‘What’s happened here?’ Mick shouted across at him. It felt good to shout, it felt good to sound angry at the man. Maybe he was to blame. It would be a fine thing, just to have someone to blame.
‘Tell us —‘ Mick said. He could hear the tears throbbing in his voice. ‘Tell us, for God’s sake. Explain.’
Grey-coat shook his head. He didn’t understand a word this young idiot was saying. It was English he spoke, but that’s all he knew. Mick began to walk towards him, feeling all the time the eyes of the dead on him. Eyes like black, shining gems set in broken faces: eyes looking at him upside down, on heads severed from their seating. Eyes in heads that had solid howls for voices. Eyes in heads beyond howls, beyond breath. Thousands of eyes.
He reached Grey-coat, whose gun was almost empty. He had taken off his spectacles and thrown them aside. He too was weeping, little jerks ran through his big, ungainly body.
At Mick’s feet, somebody was reaching for him. He didn’t want to look, but the hand touched his shoe and he had no choice but to see its owner. A young man, lying like a flesh swastika, every joint smashed. A child lay under him, her bloody legs poking out like two pink sticks. He wanted the man’s revolver, to stop the hand from touching him. Better still he wanted a machine-gun, a flame-thrower, anything to wipe the agony away.
As he looked up from the broken body, Mick saw Grey-coat raise the revolver.
‘Judd —‘ he said, but as the word left his lips the muzzle of the revolver was slipped into Grey-coat’s mouth and the trigger was pulled.
Grey-coat had saved the last bullet for himself. The back of his head opened like a dropped egg, the shell of his skull flying off. His body went limp and sank to the ground, the revolver still between his lips.
‘We must —, began Mick, saying the words to nobody. ‘We must …‘
What was the imperative? In this situation, what must they do?
‘We must —‘Judd was behind him. ‘Help —‘ he said to Mick.
‘Yes. We must get help. We must —, ‘Go.’
Go! That was what they must do. On any pretext, for any fragile, cowardly reason, they must go. Get out of the battlefield, get out of the reach of a dying hand with a wound in place of a body.
‘We have to tell the authorities. Find a town. Get help —‘
‘Priests,’ said Mick. ‘They need priests.’
It was absurd, to think of giving the Last Rites to so many people. It would take an army of priests, a water cannon filled with holy water, a loudspeaker to pronounce the benedictions.
They turned away, together, from the horror, and wrapped their arms around each other, then picked their way through the carnage to the car. It was occupied.
Saturday, January 3, 2026
Tagore, Rabindranath, 1861-1941. Rabindranath Tagore papers, ca. 1910-1918 and undated
https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:23682322$79i
Wednesday, December 24, 2025
The Shop Of Ghosts - G.K Chesterton
Nearly all the best and most precious things in the universe you can
get for a halfpenny. I make an exception, of course, of the sun,
the moon, the earth, people, stars, thunderstorms, and such trifles.
You can get them for nothing. Also I make an exception of another thing,
which I am not allowed to mention in this paper, and of which
the lowest price is a penny halfpenny. But the general principle
will be at once apparent. In the street behind me, for instance,
you can now get a ride on an electric tram for a halfpenny.
To be on an electric tram is to be on a flying castle in a fairy tale.
You can get quite a large number of brightly coloured sweets for
a halfpenny. Also you can get the chance of reading this article
for a halfpenny; along, of course, with other and irrelevant matter.
But if you want to see what a vast and bewildering array
of valuable things you can get at a halfpenny each you
should do as I was doing last night. I was gluing my nose
against the glass of a very small and dimly lit toy shop
in one of the greyest and leanest of the streets of Battersea.
But dim as was that square of light, it was filled (as a
child once said to me) with all the colours God ever made.
Those toys of the poor were like the children who buy them;
they were all dirty; but they were all bright. For my part,
I think brightness more important than cleanliness; since
the first is of the soul, and the second of the body. You
must excuse me; I am a democrat; I know I am out of fashion
in the modern world.
. . . . .
As I looked at that palace of pigmy wonders, at small green omnibuses,
at small blue elephants, at small black dolls, and small red
Noah's arks, I must have fallen into some sort of unnatural trance.
That lit shop-window became like the brilliantly lit
stage when one is watching some highly coloured comedy.
I forgot the grey houses and the grimy people behind me as one
forgets the dark galleries and the dim crowds at a theatre.
It seemed as if the little objects behind the glass were small,
not because they were toys, but because they were objects far away.
The green omnibus was really a green omnibus, a green Bayswater omnibus,
passing across some huge desert on its ordinary way to Bayswater.
The blue elephant was no longer blue with paint; he was blue
with distance. The black doll was really a negro relieved against
passionate tropic foliage in the land where every weed is flaming
and only man is black. The red Noah's ark was really the enormous
ship of earthly salvation riding on the rain-swollen sea,
red in the first morning of hope.
Every one, I suppose, knows such stunning instants of abstraction,
such brilliant blanks in the mind. In such moments one can see the
face of one's own best friend as an unmeaning pattern of spectacles
or moustaches. They are commonly marked by the two signs of the
slowness of their growth and the suddenness of their termination.
The return to real thinking is often as abrupt as bumping into a man.
Very often indeed (in my case) it is bumping into a man.
But in any case the awakening is always emphatic and,
generally speaking, it is always complete. Now, in this case,
I did come back with a shock of sanity to the consciousness
that I was, after all, only staring into a dingy little toy-shop;
but in some strange way the mental cure did not seem to be final.
There was still in my mind an unmanageable something that told
me that I had strayed into some odd atmosphere, or that I
had already done some odd thing. I felt as if I had worked
a miracle or committed a sin. It was as if I had at any rate,
stepped across some border in the soul.
To shake off this dangerous and dreamy sense I went into the shop
and tried to buy wooden soldiers. The man in the shop was very old
and broken, with confused white hair covering his head and half
his face, hair so startlingly white that it looked almost artificial.
Yet though he was senile and even sick, there was nothing of suffering
in his eyes; he looked rather as if he were gradually falling
asleep in a not unkindly decay. He gave me the wooden soldiers,
but when I put down the money he did not at first seem to see it;
then he blinked at it feebly, and then he pushed it feebly away.
"No, no," he said vaguely. "I never have. I never have.
We are rather old-fashioned here."
"Not taking money," I replied, "seems to me more like an uncommonly
new fashion than an old one."
"I never have," said the old man, blinking and blowing his nose;
"I've always given presents. I'm too old to stop."
"Good heavens!" I said. "What can you mean? Why, you might
be Father Christmas."
"I am Father Christmas," he said apologetically, and blew
his nose again.
The lamps could not have been lighted yet in the street outside.
At any rate, I could see nothing against the darkness but the shining
shop-window. There were no sounds of steps or voices in the street;
I might have strayed into some new and sunless world.
But something had cut the chords of common sense, and I could
not feel even surprise except sleepily. Something made me say,
"You look ill, Father Christmas."
"I am dying," he said.
I did not speak, and it was he who spoke again.
"All the new people have left my shop. I cannot understand it.
They seem to object to me on such curious and inconsistent
sort of grounds, these scientific men, and these innovators.
They say that I give people superstitions and make them too visionary;
they say I give people sausages and make them too coarse.
They say my heavenly parts are too heavenly; they say my earthly
parts are too earthly; I don't know what they want, I'm sure.
How can heavenly things be too heavenly, or earthly things
too earthly? How can one be too good, or too jolly?
I don't understand. But I understand one thing well enough.
These modern people are living and I am dead."
"You may be dead," I replied. "You ought to know.
But as for what they are doing, do not call it living."
. . . . .
A silence fell suddenly between us which I somehow expected
to be unbroken. But it had not fallen for more than a few
seconds when, in the utter stillness, I distinctly heard
a very rapid step coming nearer and nearer along the street.
The next moment a figure flung itself into the shop and stood
framed in the doorway. He wore a large white hat tilted back
as if in impatience; he had tight black old-fashioned pantaloons,
a gaudy old-fashioned stock and waistcoat, and an old fantastic coat.
He had large, wide-open, luminous eyes like those of an arresting actor;
he had a pale, nervous face, and a fringe of beard. He took in the
shop and the old man in a look that seemed literally a flash and
uttered the exclamation of a man utterly staggered.
"Good lord!" he cried out; "it can't be you! It isn't you!
I came to ask where your grave was."
"I'm not dead yet, Mr. Dickens," said the old gentleman, with a
feeble smile; "but I'm dying," he hastened to add reassuringly.
"But, dash it all, you were dying in my time," said Mr. Charles Dickens
with animation; "and you don't look a day older."
"I've felt like this for a long time," said Father Christmas.
Mr. Dickens turned his back and put his head out of the door
into the darkness.
"Dick," he roared at the top of his voice; "he's still alive."
. . . . .
Another shadow darkened the doorway, and a much larger and more
full-blooded gentleman in an enormous periwig came in, fanning his
flushed face with a military hat of the cut of Queen Anne.
He carried his head well back like a soldier, and his hot face
had even a look of arrogance, which was suddenly contradicted
by his eyes, which were literally as humble as a dog's. His sword
made a great clatter, as if the shop were too small for it.
"Indeed," said Sir Richard Steele, "'tis a most prodigious matter,
for the man was dying when I wrote about Sir Roger de Coverley
and his Christmas Day."
My senses were growing dimmer and the room darker.
It seemed to be filled with newcomers.
"It hath ever been understood," said a burly man, who carried
his head humorously and obstinately a little on one side--I think
he was Ben Jonson--"It hath ever been understood, consule Jacobo,
under our King James and her late Majesty, that such good and hearty
customs were fallen sick, and like to pass from the world.
This grey beard most surely was no lustier when I knew him than now."
And I also thought I heard a green-clad man, like Robin Hood,
say in some mixed Norman French, "But I saw the man dying."
"I have felt like this a long time," said Father Christmas,
in his feeble way again.
Mr. Charles Dickens suddenly leant across to him.
"Since when?" he asked. "Since you were born?"
"Yes," said the old man, and sank shaking into a chair.
"I have been always dying."
Mr. Dickens took off his hat with a flourish like a man calling
a mob to rise.
"I understand it now," he cried, "you will never die."
Monday, November 10, 2025
Friday, October 24, 2025
Monday, September 8, 2025
Tuesday, August 12, 2025
Moby Dick reading marathons
https://www.whalingmuseum.org/program/moby-dick-marathon-2025/
https://caniosculturalcafe.org/moby-dick-marathon/
Tuesday, August 5, 2025
Zamiatin: I am Afraid
Evgenii Zamiatin, I am Afraid. 1921
I am afraid that we preserve too fondly too much of what we have inherited from the palaces. Take these gilded chairs-yes, surely, they must be preserved: they are so graceful, they embrace so tenderly any rear end deposited in them. And it may, perhaps, be true that court poets resemble the exquisite gilded chairs in their grace and tenderness. But is it not a mistake to preserve the institution of court poets with as much solicitude as we preserve the gilded chairs? After all, only the palaces remain; the court is no longer here.
I am afraid that we are too kind, and that the French Revolution was more ruthless in destroying everything connected with the court. On the eleventh day of Messidor, in 1794, Payan, chairman of the Commission on Public Education, issued a decree, which stated, among other things:
We have a multitude of nimble authors, who keep a constant eye on the latest trend; they know the fashion and color of the given season; they know when it is time to don the red cap, and when to discard it … As a result, they merely corrupt and degrade art. True genius creates thoughtfully and embodies its ideas in bronze, but mediocrity, hiding under the aegis of freedom, snatches a fleeting triumph in its name and plucks the flowers of ephemeral success.
With this contemptuous decree, the French Revolution guillotined the masquerading court poets. But we offer the writings of these “nimble authors, who know when to don the red cap, and when to discard it,” when to sing hail to the tsar, and when to the hammer and sickle-we offer them to the people as a literature worthy of the revolution. And the literary centaurs rush, kicking and crushing one another, in a race for the splendid prize -the monopoly on the scribbling of odes, the monopoly on the knightly pursuit of slinging mud at the intelligentsia. I am afraid Payan was right-this merely corrupts and degrades art. And I am afraid that, if this continues, the entire recent period in Russian literature will become known in history as the age of the nimble school, for those who are not nimble have been silent now for the past two years.
And what was contributed to literature by those who were not silent?
The nimblest of all were the Futurists. Without a moment’s pause, they proclaimed themselves the court school. And for a year we heard nothing but their yellow, green, and raspberry red triumphant cries. However, the combination of the red sans-culotte cap with the yellow blouse and yesterday’s still visible blue flower on the cheek proved too blasphemously glaring even for the least demanding. The Futurists were politely shown the door by those in whose name these self-appointed heralds galloped. Futurism disappeared. And as before, a single beacon rises amid the tin-flat Futurist sea-Maiakovskii. Because he is not one of the nimble. He sang the revolution when others, sitting in Petersburg, were firing their long-range verses at Berlin. But even this magnificent beacon is still burning with the old reserves of his “I” and “Simple as Lowing.” In the “Heroes and Victims of the Revolution,” in “Doughnuts” and the poem about the peasant woman and Vrangel, it is no longer the same Maiakovskii, the Edison, the pioneer whose every step was hacked out in the jungle. From the jungle he has come out upon the well-trodden highway; he has dedicated himself to perfecting official themes and rhythms. But, then, why not? Edison, too, perfected Bell’s invention.
The “horsism” of the Moscow Imaginists is too obviously weighed down by the cast-iron shadow of Maiakovskii. No matter how they exert themselves to smell bad and to shout, they will not outsmell and outshout Maiakovskii. The Imaginist America, alas, has been discovered long before. Back in the era of Serafino, one who considered himself the greatest of poets wrote: “Were I not fearful of disturbing the air of your modesty with a golden cloud of honors, I could not have refrained from decking the windows of the edifice of fame with the bright vestments with which the hands of praise adorn the backs of names that are the portion of superior beings” (Letter from Pietro Aretino to the Duchess of Urbino). “The hands of praise,” “the backs of names”-isn’t this Imaginism? An excellent and pungent means-the image-has become an end in itself; the cart pulls the horse.
The proletarian writers and poets are diligently trying to be aviators astride a locomotive. The locomotive huffs and puffs sincerely and assiduously, but it does not look as if it can rise aloft. With small exceptions (such as Mikhail Volkov of the Moscow “Smithy”), all the practitioners of proletarian culture have the most revolutionary content and the most reactionary form. The Proletkult art is, thus far, a step back, to the 1860s. And I am afraid that the airplanes from among the nimble will always outstrip the honest locomotives and, “hiding under the aegis of freedom,” will snatch a fleeting triumph in its name.
Fortunately, the masses have a keener nose than they are given credit for. And therefore, the triumph of the nimble is only momentary. Thus, the fleeting triumph of the Futurists, and the equally fleeting triumph of Kliuev, after his patriotic verses about the base Wilhelm and his enthusiasm over the “rebuff in decrees” and the machine gun (a ravishing rhyme: machine-gunning and honey!). And even this brief measure of success was apparently denied to Gorodetskii: at the evening in the Duma hall he had a cool reception, and his own evening at the House of the Arts was attended by fewer than ten people.
And the non-nimble are silent. Blok’s “Twelve” struck two years ago-and after the last, twelfth stroke, Blok fell silent. Barely noticed, the “Scythians” rushed, long ago, down the dark, trolleyless streets. Last year’s Notes of Dreamers [a series of anthologies of the Symbolist group, published by the Alkonost publishing house in 1919-22], published by Alkonost are but a dim, solitary glimmer in the dark yesterday. And in them, we hear Andrei Belyi complaining:
The conditions under which we live are tearing us to pieces. The writer often collapses under the burden of work that is alien to him. For months, he has no opportunity to concentrate and finish an uncompleted phrase. Frequently of late the author has asked himself whether anyone needs him-that is, whether anyone needs Petersburg or The Silver Dove. Perhaps he is needed only as a teacher of “poetic science”? If so, he would immediately put down his pen and try to find a job as a street cleaner, rather than violate his soul by surrogates of literary activity.
Yes, this is one of the reasons for the silence of true literature. The writer who cannot be nimble must trudge to an office with a briefcase if he wants to stay alive. In our day, Gogol would be running with a briefcase to the Theater Section; Turgenev would undoubtedly be translating Balzac and Flaubert for World Literature; Herzen would lecture to the sailors of the Baltic fleet; and Chekhov would be working for the Commissariat of Public Health. Otherwise-to live as a student did five years ago on his forty rubles-Gogol would have to write four Inspector Generals a month, Turgenev would have to turn out three Fathers and Sons every two months, and Chekhov would have to produce a hundred stories every month. This sounds like a preposterous joke, but unfortunately it is not a joke; these are realistic figures. The work of a literary artist, who “embodies his ideas in bronze” with pain and joy, and the work of a prolific windbag – the work of Chekhov and that of Breshko-Breshkovskii – are today appraised in the same way: by the yard, by the sheet. And the writer faces the choice: either he becomes a Breshko-Breshkovskii or he is silent. To the genuine writer or poet the choice is clear.
But even this is not the main thing. Russian writers are accustomed to going hungry. The main reason for their silence is not lack of bread or lack of paper; the reason is far weightier, far tougher, far more ironclad. It is that true literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics. But when a writer must be sensible and rigidly orthodox, when he must make himself useful today, when he cannot lash out at everyone, like Swift, or smile at everything, like Anatole France, there can be no bronze literature, there can be only a paper literature, a newspaper literature, which is read today, and used for wrapping soap tomorrow.
Those who are trying to build a new culture in our extraordinary time often turn their eyes to the distant past-to the stadium, the theater, the games of the Athenian demos. The retrospection is correct. But it must not be forgotten that the Athenian agora, the Athenian people, knew how to listen to more than odes; it had no fear of the harsh scourge of Aristophanes either. And we-how far we are from Aristophanes when even the utterly innocuous Toiler of Wordstreams by Gorky is withdrawn from the repertory to shield that foolish infant, the Russian demos, from temptation!
I am afraid that we shall have no genuine literature until we cease to regard the Russian demos as a child whose innocence must be protected. I am afraid that we shall have no genuine literature until we cure ourselves of this new brand of Catholicism, which is as fearful as the old of every heretical word. And if this sickness is incurable, then I am afraid that the only future possible to Russian literature is its past.
Source: Evgenii Zamiatin, A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1970).
