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Issue # 47 Fall 2022

Prose

Edited by Dorian Gossy

 

Ron F. Berisha
The Talking Calf

 

There were fifteen inmates in that cell, when old Dhimitraq arrived.  Some playing dice, some talking literature and art, some killing fleas or pissing in their personal pots.  Two praying; one learning Esperanto. 

Dhimitraq’s late arrival aroused interest.  He had been shipped off from another jail – for ‘staring angrily’ at a portrait of the Great Leader, during an interview in the warden’s office. 

 “What are you in for, uncle?” asked the bony men. “What are you doing in the worst prison in Albania?”

His crumpled face gave few signs of life; but his gaze, though wistful, remained intact. 

“My calf denounced me,” he replied. 

“What do you mean ‘your calf’?”

“My calf,” repeated the old timer. “A calf is a young bullock—”

“We know what it is.  It’s the ‘denunciation’ bit we don’t understand.”

“Well, he did.  He was my child, my friend, and he denounced me because I abandoned him—”

*

Dhimitraq had been a dairy farmer before his arrest; a simple man, who had tried hard to be good to his family and community.  His family consisted of his loyal wife Vasilika, and the several animals that lived downstairs, in the same two-storey house as the humans.   Dhimitraq did not discriminate; he loved the animals, as he would’ve loved his children, had the Good God blessed him with some.  He cared for them, raised them, washed and fed them, and in return they gave him milk, meat, wool, workforce, transport and love.  He loved his donkey, Ramo, he loved his goat, Pezevengi, he loved his cow, Mama Milka, but most of all, he loved his calf, whom he had named Murroi.  He was a beautiful brown calf of Busha breed, very well-known breed in the Balkans.  Dhimitraq had seen Murroi come to life: had raised him, educated him, nursed him when he’d suffered from rinderpest.  Murroi had grown handsome and strong.  He worked well, loved his master, was very promising with regards to future breeding.  Every evening before going to bed, Dhimitraq, like a good father, would go downstairs and fondle his animals, one by one; speak to them for a few minutes, before bidding them a warm, sweet, good night. 

Dhimitraq cared little for wars, politics, governments.  Had seen many of them come, and many of them go.

But then, in 1946, something happened that had never happened before: the collectivisation. 

 Men and women in uniform, with five-pointed stars on their hats and shoulders, turned up and tried to explain the Agrarian Reform to Dhimitraq; the fairness and the benefits of it all, the sacrifice needed for it to succeed, the time required for it to bear fruit – real fruit; and so on.  Dhimitraq did not understand very well – especially the part about the benefits – but he was all for it.  He felt sure the people in power knew what they are doing.  They were, after all, the liberators.  They had liberated people, from the evils of oppression, and now they were liberating animals, giving them the chance to fulfil their true potential. 

The matter became more complex when they asked him to give up Murroi for the cooperative.  It is like asking a father, he said, to give up a son.  The regional commissar had the answer ready: how many fathers, he said, have given up their sons, and daughters, during the National-Liberation War?  Sacrificing them at the altar of the cause?  I tell you exactly: 28 000.  Dhimitraq reflected awhile: on the number and the word ‘sacrifice’.  He could not find the words to counter such a good and learned man like the commissar.  Still, surrendering Murroi seemed—beyond the realms of the graspable…

“Couldn’t you take me instead,” he pleaded. “I can work hard – like a horse; I will pull the ploughing cart myself, if need be.”

“You will have that chance,” the commissar said, “to prove your loyalty and good will; for the moment The People need your cattle.  And you must give it, of your own free will.” 

Finally, Dhimitraq caved in.

“Be it as you see fit,” he said, as the noise of loading submachineguns caught his ear. 

They left.

Dhimitraq grew sad and melancholic. 

What is wrong, asked his good wife Vasilika one day (while combing her greasy hair in front of the mirror) but quickly bit her lip in regret.  She knew the answer only too well. 

Still, it was alright for a while.  Dhimitraq had Ramo, his ancient donkey, and Sylesh, his half-blind dog, the only two animals he had been allowed to keep (for now), and they consoled him.  

He worked hard in the new cooperative, yet the harder he worked, the less he got in return.  Dairy products, like money and good manners, kept getting scarcer.  And although he could not make head or tail of any of it, he kept his head down and his work up.  They must know what they’re doing, he kept telling himself; they are, after all, the liberators.  

A year went by.  Then another.  Wheat bread and olive oil became delicacies.  Yet Dhimitraq never lost hope in the days of plenty to come. 

One day, as he rode his donkey home, after cutting some branches in the beech forest, he noticed, outside a barn, which belonged to the cooperative, a familiar-looking animal. 

Could it be him?  My Murroi?  His heart began to race. 

He spurred his old donkey and approached. 

There was little doubt in his mind now; tied up, by some haystacks—Murroi. 

He was all skin and bone, barely recognisable.  His brown body covered in dirt, ripped and bleeding all over.  Front feet nastily wounded; teeth black and corroded.  He hung his head in a pained pose, and his eyes registered sadness, deep as the Ionian Sea.  But even then, when he noticed his old master approaching, Murroi recognised him – and reacted. 

Dhimitraq climbed off his donkey and hugged Murroi. 

Murroi mooed achingly and licked his face, and that broke Dhimitraq’s heart into tiny pieces; he began to weep.  He rubbed the animal’s scrawny neck, kissed his scratched forehead, and talked to him, as he had done back in the day.  What have they done to you, my dear boy.  Your pain is my pain, he said to him, and your grief my grief. And whatever they’ve done to you, they’ve done it unto me.  May I be buried alive for having abandoned you.  I should’ve fought them, with all my strength.  But I will make up for my shameful deed; I will come at nightfall and take you away from these devils.  May lightning strike me dead if I do not keep my word. 

Dhimitraq returned home and waited anxiously for nightfall.  When time came, he took his oil lamp, his axe, and headed for the cooperative barn.  He had hatched a plan, about how and where to hide and cure Murroi—

“Halt!” shouted a male voice in the dark.

Out of the shadows emerged a local police officer, escorted by two female soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs. Dhimitraq was stunned but did not lose his nerve.  He could not possibly be arrested for strolling in the dark.

At the local police station, they told him they knew ‘everything’. 

Everything? 

“You have spoken against collectivisation,” the chief police told him. “Called cooperative officials ‘devils’ (imagine!), accused them of cruelty against animals.”

Dhimitraq was completely struck with amazement and did not answer; could not.

“You planned to take your calf back,” said the uniformed man, “Steal it from its rightful place and owners.  The People are now his rightful owners, not you...”

In court, Dhimitraq was read his charges: obstructing the Agrarian Reform, attempted theft, defending private ownership…

Eight years.

*

 “Well,” said Tish, who was doing twenty for agitprop, attempting to escape and harbouring dangerous elements. “Your calf has not denounced you.  You can put your mind at rest.”

 Dhimitraq rubbed the back of his neck.

 “It was him,” he said, in a tragic tone, “my Murroi.  Because I abandoned him and failed to protect him.”

 “You could not do otherwise,” said Father Leon, an old monk and muralist, in an attempt to console.

 “I gave my child away without a fight.  I don’t blame him for turning against me.”

 Zef, grave-looking man with untamed hair, offered the old timer a cigarette and the latter accepted it.

 “He did not turn against you,” said Zef, who had been a police operative, before being arrested for ‘attempting to overthrow the people’s government’.

 “Then who did?  There was no one there.”

 “Of course there was.”

 “Even if there was,” insisted Dhimitraq, who was very much in earnest, “they would’ve been at a distance, could’ve never heard what I said to Murroi.”

“You said there were haystacks there,” said Tish, while miraculously dividing a small sugar cube into six pieces.

“Yes, there were.  Three of them.”

“There you go; there’s your answer.  Somebody was hidden there.  Three of them, maybe.”

  The old man shook his bristly head.

  “I would’ve heard them move.  Ramo would’ve heard them move.  He had the sharpest ears in the world.”

  “Who’s Ramo?” asked Tish.

  “My donkey.”

  “See, maybe the names are the issue here.  Maybe your animals weren’t all that happy with the names you gave them.”

  “I tried my best.”

  “Well, you should have consulted others, maybe.  What did you say your dog was called?”

  “Sylesh.”

  “There you go.  I think we’ve identified the problem here.  Maybe Murroi was not ecstatic about the name you gave him, that is why he informed on you.”

  Father Leon raised his hand up as if to rebuke the jokers.

  “I called him Murroi for a reason, like I called my dog Sylesh for a reason.  My calf was brown, mainly, light brown—hence the name.  My dog shaggy-eyed—”

  “Well,” said Tish, “maybe he did not like that name; did not like the sound of it—when you called him.”

 “What should I have called him?”

 “I don’t know.  Mario is one example.”

 “Mario? What are you talking about?”

Tish turned his head slightly and noticed that Zef was shaking with silent laughter.

 “Hey!” he yelled, “I made Zef laugh!” 

He jumped to his feet:

“Hey, you over that side, listen up: I made Zef laugh!”  

*

Zef had not laughed since his baby brother had been buried alive by governmental forces during a crackdown on enemy activity in the area.  Men had been tied up in twos, one of whom was shot under the armpit, before they were both thrown into open graves and covered with dirt.

Zef laughed to himself, throughout the night.

Dhimitraq slept soundly, comforted by the idea that maybe, just maybe, his calf (that beautiful boy!), may have not been the one to denounce him after all. 

 

                         In Memoriam Uran Kostreci, political prisoner

 

 

Mark Lewandowski
The Widower

 Jay woke with his heart racing and sweat trickling down his heaving, bare chest.  The pillows, the sheet, the blankets.  All were damp.

“You were dreaming,” Urka said.

“No.  I was barely asleep.”

“You yelled in your sleep.  You had a nightmare?  Tell me.  It was about her, yes?” 

“Not really.”

“I can stay longer.  Will you?”  She burrowed under the blanket and sheet and closed her eyes.  When he didn’t join her, she tugged his arm.  “Tell me more about her.”

Outside the bedroom door, Urka’s nieces played.  The youngest—Jay couldn’t remember her name—pressed her open mouth against the frosted glass and belched.  Both kids scrambled away, screeching.

“The kids want their room back,” Jay said.  He got out of bed and tugged on a sock.  His big toe went through it.  Urka laughed.

“I just bought these at the Russian market,” he said.

“You are surprised they are no good?”

Jay didn’t answer, just put on the rest of his wrinkled clothes and slid his feet into the slippers Urka’s sister reserved for him.

 “Marta invites you for dinner,” Urka said.

“Another time.  I have basketball, and I’m already gonna be late.”  He opened the door and peeked around the corner.  The two girls sprang from the kitchen table and ran towards him.

“American!” they squealed in unison.

“That’s me.” 

They laughed even harder and squeezed through the door, jumping into bed with Urka while she snapped on her bra.

“It’s supposed to be even colder tomorrow,” Jay said.  “Can you give me a ride to school?”

“Of course,” she said.

“I need some laundry done, too,” he said.  “If you don’t mind.”

“Yes, yes.  I will even fix your sock.”

He left Urka to her nieces.  Her sister and brother-in-law sat at the kitchen table.  When Jay walked into view Adam grinned and gave him a thumb’s up.

“There is cutlet,” Marta said.  “You stay?”

“I’m sorry, but no,” Jay said.  “Next time.  I promise.”  He placed the slippers in the basket next to the front door and pulled on his Timberlands.  He had most certainly tracked in ice and snow, but Marta must have dried them off.  Both Marta and Adam appeared to like him, and they didn’t seem bothered by the fact that Urka and Jay used their daughters’ bedroom for their trysts.  Most likely Marta hoped Urka would leave her husband for Jay.

How long can I keep doing this, he asked himself.

*

A few months earlier, two weeks into the fall term, Jay lounged on the table at the front of the college’s only classroom, which was smaller than his parents’ kitchen back in Indianapolis.  In order to get to the table he had to crawl over the students’ desks.   The college rented the room from a high school.  It was in the wing for music and art classes.  Out of tune pianos lined the hallway.  Students pounded away at them all day, every day. 

Even though there was a break between classes, all his students were back, some munching paczki or sweet rolls, what Poles referred to as “second breakfast.”  Just like hobbits, Jay thought.  The students hoped he would teach them American slang during these breaks, and as the days shortened, and they grew less suspicious of his lackadaisical teaching style, they asked more and more questions about his life in Indiana. It was 1991, just two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, before Americans swarmed into Poland, and other countries in Eastern Europe, looking for adventure and cheap beer.  He was the first American most of them had met.

"Why are you here?" one of the Malgosias asked. Of the eleven female students, five were named "Malgosia."

"What do you mean?" Jay asked. "I'm in the Peace Corps. There are Peace Corps Volunteers all over the world. I just happened to come to Poland. I told you all this."

"Yes, but why? You don't like the army?"

"The army?"

"I saw in this movie Animal House. People in it say to join the Peace Corps and they don't go to the army."

"It's not that way anymore. There hasn't been a draft in a long time. I like your taste in movies, though."

"I don't understand. Why come to Poland? Why not stay in America where it is so nice?"

What else am I supposed to do with an MA from a second rate university, Jay thought. This gave him two years to avoid the decision to go on for a Phd. Plus, there was the adventure and the cheap beer.

"It's hard to explain," he said.

"You should be married," another Malgosia said.

Pretty much every other female student nodded. The four males booed.

"I was married," Jay blurted out.

There were gasps all around.

"Is that why you are here, to avoid your wife?" Arek said. The other three men laughed.

The women shushed them.

"I was married. Not anymore."

"What is her name?" Malgosia II asked.

"Carrie," Jay said.

The students sounded the name out a couple times, like they did with any new vocabulary words he taught them.

"You are so young," the first Malgosia said. "25, yes? Why you leave this Carrie? She not cook for you? Maybe you should cook."

"I'm not divorced. I'm a widower."

Bozena, the quietest, yet strongest student in the group, loudly sucked in her breath.  The rest of the students looked back at her.  She said something quickly in Polish, and when they returned their gazes to the front of the room their faces were blank.  A moment passed.  Some of the students wrote in their notebooks while others moved their lips, mumbling repeatedly, Jay knew, “widower, widower, widower” until the word sank in.

“Maybe we should start our lesson,” Jay said.  The students didn’t protest at all.  That was new.  Jay smiled.  The students opened their grammar books and waited for his next words.

*

At lunch, in the cafeteria, not one of the high school teachers gave him the stink eye, as they had all term when he made it clear he’d rather eat with his students than with them at the designated teacher’s table.  One of the teachers, twice as old as Jay, at least, heavily made up and dressed entirely in purple, sauntered over, patted him on the shoulder and murmured something in Polish.  He didn’t understand it, but given the blushes among the Malgosias it was likely something lascivious.  And before Jay left for the day, the director of the college pressed her sister’s phone number into his hand.

“When you visit Warsaw, you stay with her,” she said.  “She loves Americans and her husband works in Libya.  Call!  A happy personal life means a happy professional life, yes?”

While he waited for the bus, Urka screeched to a stop in her Polski Fiat and offered him a ride home.

It took him a moment to place her.  He had only met her once before, at an introductory meeting with the director at the beginning of the term.  He had found her strikingly beautiful:  bright green eyes, large and sparkling, small button nose, slightly pointed chin, all framed in a pixie cut.  Like an elf, he thought.  He remembered that the bottom button on her blouse at come undone.  He found it endearing somehow, and for the months their affair lasted, he often noticed that she was always just a tiny bit disheveled.  Sometimes her top didn’t quite match her skirt, or one eye was more made up than the other, or there was a clear run in her panty hose. 

He bent down and looked at her through the passenger side window.  She’s so out of my league, he thought.  A ride’s a ride, though.  The bus back to his flat necessitated a change in the central square.  Sometimes it took longer than a half hour.

“Yes or no,” Urka said, pushing open the door.  “The bus is behind me.”

Jay shimmied into the Porta-Potty-sized Fiat.  Once in he managed to sling his book bag into the backseat without hitting Urka’s incredible face.  Even though he wasn’t tall, he had to bend his legs to get in the seat and still his knees cleared the cracked dashboard.  As he reached for the seat belt, he twisted his neck to take in Urka.  She smelled like what?  Baby powder?  Subtle and pleasant, not all like the noxious brew blanketing the woman who had patted his shoulder at lunch.  All of Urka’s buttons were in place, but right above her right knee a paper clip was snagged in her skirt.  Before he could situate himself comfortably in the seat and latch the buckle, she slammed on the accelerator.  Jay grabbed his knees.

“Holy shit!” he yelled.

“What?” Urka asked as she sped into the opposite lane to pass another Fiat, putting them in the direct path of an oncoming truck.  With just a couple feet to spare, she swung back into the proper lane, narrowly missing a dog pissing in the gutter.  Jay squeezed his knees into his stomach.

Urka sighed.  “My husband and I are not happy.  We do not sleep together any longer.”

“Oh, God,” Jay said, as they nearly sideswiped a taxi.

“Like so many Polish people, I was married too young…”

Through what appeared to Jay as one near death experience after another, Urka spilled out her guts in a calm, steady tone.  Her husband managed the children’s clothes store on the first floor of their house, but he often closed it for weeks at a time to “make business” in the Netherlands.  When he was home he spent most of his day playing his guitar and singing songs.  Unlike most Poles, he wasn’t Catholic, but some kind of Born Again; Urka didn’t go into details about it.  At any one time, Urka tutored a dozen students privately.  Many of the students at the college had been hers in the past.  Now the college’s school year had started, and she kept the private lessons, despite her responsibilities at not only the college, but a secondary school across town.  She also had her five-year old to care for.  Her husband couldn’t be bothered with that, let alone cooking or cleaning.  He had his songs to sing.

“My life is very full,” she finished, “but I am very lonely.”

They skidded to a stop in front of the rectory, a gargantuan, multi-winged structure with a red steepled roof and walls of red brick.  The director of the college had told Jay that people in town called it “Malbork,” after the Teutonic castle near Gdansk.  Next to it stood the beginnings of the church, the walls just a few feet high.  Nobody in the parish was pleased that the rectory was completed first.  It benefited Jay just fine, however.  The college rented a flat in the rectory for him that was far bigger than what most families in Poland had.

Jay swallowed stomach acid and grimaced.  “Did I even tell you where I lived?”

“Everyone knows this.”

“Oh, right.”

Now that they were stopped, and his stomach was calm and he could look at Urka steadily again, he wondered how he should respond to her confessions, or if he should at all.  When he first arrived in Poland in June, Urka’s abrupt revelation about her love life would have shocked him, but not now.  Right before the Peace Corps training ended, a Polish teacher drove Jay and two other volunteers to Warsaw to hear President Bush, who was speaking in the main square of Old Town.  The teacher prattled on about how much she would miss teaching the classes.  She hoped the Peace Corps would ask her back for the next group.  She then looked at Michael, one of the other volunteers, in the rear view mirror.

"I don't want to miss you, Michael. I want you," she said, in a very serious tone.

"Excuse me?" Michael said.

"I want to have sexual relations with you."

"Well, gee, maybe we should talk about it another time."

"Why? You are leaving soon. Maybe the Peace Corps puts you far from me."

"Yeah, but this is awkward, with these other dudes here."

"Why? They are adults."

"Guys, can you help me out?"

Jay didn't know what to offer, and he didn't know how things turned out between the teacher and Michael. He was just glad when the interminable summer training ended. Besides the language lessons, the most interesting classes were with the cross-cultural trainer, a Phd student at Warsaw University. She had told them that, in her dormitory, "Everybody slept with everybody." Americans shouldn't be fooled by the "Church's propaganda." Most Poles had no problems with premarital sex, or extramarital affairs. Under Communism, sexuality was one of the few freedoms people had. The government couldn't control what they did with their bodies.

But she warned them, especially the men, not to take it for granted. She said that Polish women would show them a lot of attention. Many of them would just be looking for Green cards. Polish women were still expected to marry, the younger the better. They will not just "give out free sex." Maybe to a Pole they would, like the women in her dorm, but not to an American. With us they will have high expectations. At one point during the summer, a Peace Corps nurse gave them an obligatory lesson about proper condom usage. "Virtually all the cases of AIDS in Poland have been attributed to dirty needles," she said, "but the other STDs? You name them, Poland's got them. We'll send you to the site with as many condoms as you can carry. Run out, and we'll mail to you as many as you want, no questions asked."

After, the cross-cultural trainer told volunteers that the Peace Corps was far more worried about unwanted pregnancies than diseases. 

Jay’s initial supply of condoms were packed away, untouched, with Band-aids and Pepto and whatnot in the large blue plastic box given to each volunteer.

  Urka looked at him patiently.

   “You drive like a bat of out hell,” Jay said.

  “I have heard this expression ‘bat out of hell.’  It means ‘really fast,’ yes.  I don’t understand.  Why are bats in a hurry to leave hell?  Don’t bats like hell?”

  “I see your point.”

  Jay reached back for his book bag, lightly brushing Urka’s cheek with the back of his hand.  It made him shiver.

“Well, thanks for the lift,” he said.

“The what?  ‘Lift?’  Like an elevator?”

“No.”  Jay laughed.  “It just means a ‘ride.’”

“Oh, I see, Pan Professor.  ‘Gotcha,’ yes?”

“Exactly, Pani Professor.”

“I will learn a lot from you,” Urka said.  “I live over there.  I can almost see my home from here.  You need anything, you come to me, yes?” 

She smiled and leaned towards him.  He thought she might have expected a kiss.  He might have done it but for the nasty acidy taste in his mouth.

After she sped away, he walked slowly up to the front door of the rectory.  Why now, he thought?  When we first met she had paid little attention to me.  What was all this about?

And then he remembered.  What he had said to the class.  That he was a widower.  For some reason that had spurned her on, and likely his director and the teacher in the cafeteria. 

Well that’s crazy, he thought.  Why would that attract her?  Maybe she wasn’t coming on to him.  Maybe she was just being nice and friendly.

Tomorrow he should probably tell everyone that he wasn’t serious, that he had never been married. 

He just made it up.

*

The next morning, as the bus meandered its way towards school, he thought of a lesson.  The students could interview each other and then after, write up imaginary obituaries.  The whole widower thing was just preparation, he’ll tell them.

Wasn’t perfect, but it was all he could come up with.

When he got off the bus, Arek was waiting for him.

“Pan Professor,” he said, “you like basketball?”

“It is a religion where I come from,” Jay said.

Arek just looked at him and scratched an ear.  “You like it then?”

“Very much.”

Arek smiled and looked relieved.   He told Jay his uncle was a custodian at his old high school—the same one Urka taught in, Jay would realize later—and it was possible for them to play in the gym on evenings and weekends.  They could even use the showers afterwards.  Jay was thrilled.  Arek promised enough players for a good game.

Outside the classroom stood one of the Kasias.  She looked nervous, swaying some and biting on her thumb.  Arek smiled at her and nodded, which seemed to put her at ease.

“Pan Professor…” she started.

She and two other students were from Warsaw and lived in a dorm.  Every Wednesday evening they went to the one decent restaurant in town.  Wouldn’t he join them?  They could practice their English, or he could practice his Polish.  Whatever he wanted.

Jay had spent many an evening bored.  He had a television in his flat, but no cable; there were only two channels.  Most of the Polish shows were either talk shows, or tapes of Polish children lip-synching to popular American music.  Occasionally an American sitcom would air, or maybe even a movie, but they were dubbed over, not with actors, just one guy repeating the dialogue in Polish.  You could still hear the original English underneath.  Since Jay’s grasp of Polish remained pretty meager, he pressed his ear to the television’s speaker, anything to hear the scraps of English beneath the monotone Polish.  When nothing American was on, he mindlessly pressed the button that changed the station, back and forth, back and forth, sometimes twenty times in a row.  Sometimes good movies showed at the town’s theater, a repurposed Jewish synagogue.  It was a bit of a crapshoot.  In order to prolong the life of the projector’s bulb they’d only show the film if at least eight people bought a ticket.  A couple times Jay waited fruitlessly next to the box office window mentally willing pedestrians passing by to come inside.

 “That sounds wonderful,” Jay said.  “Thank you so much.”

Kasia reddened and skipped into class.

Perhaps they think I’m sad, Jay thought, and they just want to keep me here.   No one really seemed to understand why an American would give up two years of his life to live in Poland.  At least five other volunteers from his training group apparently couldn’t figure it out either; they’d already ETd, or “Early Terminated.”

He decided to scrap the whole obituary thing.  So they thought he had a dead wife.  Is that such a bad thing?

*

A couple weeks later, the night before Halloween, the students arranged a costume party at a just opened café.  “We love American holidays,” one of the Malgosias said.  “Polish holidays are so boring.  Boring old men reading boring speeches.  It is so boring!”

Jay pulled the sheet off his bed and wrapped it into a makeshift toga.  When he first moved in the rectory’s housekeeper gave him a houseplant.  He sawed off some of the leaves and fashioned them into a laurel.  At the party he survived his first real Polish drunk, matching Arek shot for shot.  After five, Arek slapped him on the back and said he was becoming a real Pole.  Jay vaguely remembered lecturing on the genius of Larry Bird and dancing to Polish techno, and kissing a bunch of women there, students and otherwise.  And Urka.  But not much more than that.  He couldn’t even remember how he got home.

The next evening he was trying his best to appreciate a cassette his baby brother had sent.  Nirvana, it was, a new band some people were crazy about.  Someone knocked on the door, which gave him an excuse to turn off the tape.

It was Urka.

“Is it a bad time?” she asked.

“Not at all.  Would you like to come in?”

“Of course,” she said.

He told her he was expecting a telegram from a Peace Corps buddy.  They were hoping to meet with some others for Thanksgiving.  Since volunteers had no phones, telegrams were the only way to remain in contact.  They were delivered at all times of day by strange men in street clothes.

“We cheat a bit, I’m sorry to say,” Jay said.  “They charge by the word, so we combine them since the people at the post office can’t read English.”

“No one will come tonight.  Tomorrow is All Saint’s Day,” Urka said.

“Oh, right.”

She wandered around his flat and read the post it notes he had plastered all over the place.  On each was written the Polish word for the object.

“Does it help?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.  “Polish is like Martian.”

“Our President Walesa might agree.  His Polish is terrible.”

“I’ve heard that,” Jay said, “Herbata?”

 “Prosze.”

 Jay’s kitchen was equipped like a dorm room: a compact refrigerator as loud as a freight train, a two-burner hot plate and an electric kettle.  As the water boiled, he sliced a lemon. He had bought a tea set at a small department store in the center of town.  The teacups were small drinking glasses you inserted into decorative metal holders.  The set came with a tray, a sugar bowl and small matching plates.  When he placed the tray on the table, complete with packaged cookies, Urka said,

 "You drink vodka like a Pole. Now tea."

"I just have to start smoking and my conversion will be complete."

"Please don't," Urka said. She unpacked the plastic bag she had brought: carrots, mushrooms and a half dozen eggs still spattered with bits of feathers and goo.

"From my mother," she said.

"Umm. Thanks?"

Urka laughed, revealing a smudge of lipstick on a front tooth.

"She is a doctor," she said. "In Poland medical care is free, but my mother has so many patients. If they want good treatment, they give her things. Too much for her, too much for me, so now for you."

"Thank you. And thank your mother. If I ever get sick I'll bring her some M&Ms." 

Urka sipped her tea. "Too hot."

She wandered over to the easy chairs in front of the television.  Like his bed, they flipped open on hinges to reveal storages spaces.  They weren’t very comfortable.  Jay had stacked a bunch of paperbacks on one.

“You must like Charles Dickens,” Urka said.

“I guess.  There’s not much choice of novels in English here and they’re kinda expensive.  His books are long.  More pages per zloty.”

She nodded and turned back to the books.

 “You kissed me at the party last night,” she said.

“I think I kissed everyone at the party. Even Arek. I was drunk.”

“Can I take this one?”

She held up a copy of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.  Jay’s mother had sent it to him; he hadn’t gotten to it yet.

“If you want.”

“You also said my dupa was the reason why Michelangelo became a sculptor,” she said.

Jay’s mouth went dry.  “Did I?”

Her back to him still, Urka reached down and oh so slowly lifted up her skirt.  When the edge of the wool reached the bottom of her cheeks she paused for a moment, before sliding it up to her waist.  She wore nothing underneath.

She looked back over her shoulder, revealing just the profile of her face.

“Still think so?” she asked.

*

Over the next month Urka visited once or twice a week, usually without warning.  She wouldn’t stay long, typically darting off soon after they had sex, often leaving behind his freshly laundered clothes or supplies from her mother’s larder.  Once she showed up with pictures of an apartment in a typical Stalinist building, its walls bare cinderblock.

“You can live there cheap,” she said.

“Why in the world would I do that?  I live here for free.”

“Maybe the school will pay…”

“This place is great, Urka.  Look at the size of it.  It’s quiet, it’s safe, and the priests don’t bother me at all.”

“They bother me,” she said.  “They look at me like I’m kurwa.”

“Fuck’em.”

A week passed and she didn’t show up at all.  The next day in school she told him the Probost, the head priest, wouldn’t let her into the rectory.  If she came again, he said, he would pay a visit to her husband.

*

 How long can I keep doing this?

As soon as Jay opened the front door of the apartment building a gust of wind blasted him, stinging his eyes.  He instantly regretted not staying for dinner.  Marta always laid out a nice spread.  Not too far away, though, a taxi idled at the stand, so he wrapped himself up and sprinted over.  He never had to give the address to the taxi driver; he’d just say “Malbork” and the guy would chuckle and drive off to the rectory.

Despite the weather, all six of them showed up for basketball.  Filip sported a new pair of sneakers, some kind of knock-off brand he probably bought at the Russian market.  The other guys oohed and ahhed.  The sneakers were shiny white, and at least looked expensive, but as soon as he ran out onto the court, the sole of one of them detached itself completely.  He shuffled back to it with only an upper and black sock on one foot.  Jay and the rest burst out laughing.

Filip wasn’t so amused.  His reddened face strained.  It looked as if was going to cry.  He tore off the other shoe and threw both it and the remains of its match to the other side of the gym.  He announced he was going home.  Arek offered to buy him a beer after the game.  He huffed and puffed, but still slid on his street loafers and joined them on the court.

At one point, late in the session, Jay drove towards the basket but was immediately met with a double team.  Caught on his pivot foot, and no passing lane open, he flung the ball over his head.  It inexplicably went in.

“Nothing but net,” Arek said.

There was clapping too, and a little yelp.  All of the players turned and looked at Urka, who was standing in the doorway.

“Ah, your girlfriend, yes?”  Filip laughed and elbowed him in the chest.  “Little pussy,” he said.  “Little pussy.”

The others snickered.

They finished the game.  Urka stayed through the shower.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Jay told her in the hallway.

“I wanted to see you.”

“We just saw each other.”

“So?”

“All these guys know now.  Eventually your husband is going to find out about us.”

Urka shrugged.

Just end it, Jay thought.  Do it now.

“That’s your business,” he said, turning away.  “I’m going home.”

She put her fingers on his arm.  “No, you are not.”

He turned back to her. 

Not too far away, on the other side of at open door, Arek and Filip were on their knees, wiping away the black marks left from Filip’s shoes with wet paper towels.  Meanwhile, Jay dropped to his and buried his head in Urka’s crotch.

*

By and large, Jay’s students respected his “grief.”  They rarely asked about Carrie.  Urka rarely did, either.

For Jay, though, the false memory grew in his mind.  The more he thought about it, the more detailed and complete it became.  He actually did know a Carrie, at least for a little while.  They were in the same British Lit survey one summer.  She wore the skimpiest little sun dresses.  Drove him nuts.  He was never brave enough to talk to her.  That didn’t stop his imagination.  Sometimes he even dreamt about her and it woke him up.  Her imaginary death often appeared to him, in various versions of this:

They meet in their first year at Indiana University in Bloomington, and marry the week after graduation.  Carrie’s parents bankroll their honeymoon: two weeks in New England and Nova Scotia.  On Cape Breton, after a few days of eating lobsters and cod sandwiches, of hiking every marked trail they came across, of fighting wind and rain, they find themselves on a narrow road at the very northern tip of the island, where they hope to stay at a small inn they read about in their Frommer’s.

The accident happens when they are still miles away.

Jay wants a Coke from the cooler in the back seat of the rental car.  Carrie turns to reach for it, but she can’t get to it without first undoing the belt.  So there she is, between the two seats as she fumbles for a can amongst the melted ice and cups of yogurt.  Meanwhile, Jay steers with one hand and fondles her ass with the other.

“Keep it up, Mister,” she says, “and that’s all the play…”

These are the last words she ever speaks, for then there is an oncoming pickup truck, a squeal of tires, a slamming of brakes, and finally a shower of glass.  When the car comes to a stop in the ditch on the side of the road, Jay’s long, whitened fingers have gripped the wheel so tightly his nails punctured the skin right above the wrists.

He looks over to the passenger side.

“Are you okay?”

He sees her.  He knows she is there.

Carrie tilts her head and smiles slightly.  It is a smile not of amusement, but of resignation.  She doesn’t answer his question.  They sit and look at each other.  Waiting.  He doesn’t know for how long.  He doesn’t tear his gaze away until the driver of the truck raps his knuckles on the window.

“Are you okay?  You need to come out of there, sir.”

Jay blinks.  He nods and acknowledges the other driver.  Only then does he feel the ocean breeze blowing on his face.  Then he sees the blood, and the bits of hair and cloth caught on the broken teeth of what remains of the windshield.   He looks back to the passenger seat, to see again that resigned smile.  It’s empty but for bits of broken glass.

*

    Jay picked the raisins off his sweet bun and popped them into his mouth.  He poked between the folds of the bun in case he’d missed one.

“I don’t understand,” Malgosia said.  “Why eat this way?  There are buns with no raisins.”

“I like buns and I like raisins,” Jay said.  “Just not together.”  He quickly scarfed the bun before shoving his hands back into his pockets.  Like his students he still wore his winter coat.  Apparently the high school had rented the college the coldest room in the building.

“What did this Carrie look like?” Malgosia asked, wiping crumbs from her chin.

“I’d rather talk about second breakfast options.”

“Was she good looking?  Show us a picture.”

 “I don’t have one with me.”

 “What hair color?”

 Jay thought back to British Lit.  He typically sat in the row behind her, on the right side.

 “Brown,” he said.  “Very curly.”

 “Was she pretty like Professor Kowalska?”

 Jay paused.  Half the students looked at him expectantly, the others down at their desks, as if embarrassed.

Did they know about Urka? Had Arek told all of them? Or someone else he played basketball with? Does her husband now know?

"There are many beautiful women in Poland," he said.

"You should marry Professor Kowalska," Malgosia said.

"I don't think her husband would go along with that."

"No problem."

All the students were whispering now. Except Bozena. She quickly made the sign of the cross and buttoned up the top of her coat.

"Perhaps we can get started again," Jay said.

"She is older. That is okay," Malgosia said. "Men die sooner than women, yes? This way you die together. It is very romantic."

Bozena hissed something at her in Polish. Malgosia frowned and threw up her arms.

"Don't listen to her," she said. "We want you happy. That is all."

"Why thank you. I want you to be happy, too," Jay said. "Now where were we…"

"You marry Professor Kowalska and we be happy. You stay all two years and more. We graduate with you. You happy. She happy. Everyone happy!"

Maybe just the class knows, Jay hoped.

Before lunch, one of the high school teachers, a man Jay had never spoken to, wrapped his meaty arm around his shoulders and shouted, "You are full man!"

So not just the class.

It was bound to get out. Biala Podlaska wasn't a big town, and Jay, as the only American, was news. Earlier in the school year he was even interviewed on local television. How long before Urka's husband came pounding on his door? Would the priests turn him out?

At basketball, he was morose and quiet. He couldn't buy a basket and he didn't joke with the guys in the locker room.

Perhaps to appease him, Arek arranged a day out in the woods for the following Sunday.  Fresh snow had fallen, and a family friend owned some horses and a sleigh.  He and his parents picked Jay up in the morning.  Urka was in the back seat waiting for him.

I guess they don’t care either, Jay thought.  What a strange country this is.

They drove out to a nature preserve on the River Bug, the border between Poland and Belarus.  Mikhail, the caretaker of the preserve, a giant of a man with long hair and thick black beard, immediately pulled Jay into an embrace.

“My new American friend!” he shouted.

 Before the sleigh ride they fortified themselves with brown bread, homemade pickles, and kielbasa roasted on sticks over a bon fire, washing it down with a breakfast vodka, according to Arek’s mother, one mixed with egg yolks and cream.  For once the sky shimmered a clear blue and the sun shone bright just above the bare trees.  Long-legged dogs, coats as black as their master’s beard, frolicked in the snow, occasionally bounding, tongues wagging, toward the fire to pounce on fallen kielbasa.  Beyond the low, wooden house with gabled roof and stone chimney, the horses neighed and snorted, setting off the cows and pigs, even the chickens.

Stomachs warm with food and vodka, the old folks, with Jay and Urka as honorary members, slid under thick, woolen blankets, while Arek and some of the other students (a Malgosia, a Kasia, Artur and Magda) tied toboggans onto the back of the sleigh, and off through the woods they slid and sliced, bells jingling, bare trees creaking.  More drink, always more drink, something hot this time from a dented thermos.  Occasionally Mikhail reached for a branch and snapped it back, showering his cackling passengers with powdery snow.  When the light began to fail single stars twinkled awake between the branches of the trees.  The sleigh made its way along the riverbank and under the shadow of rickety guard towers left over from the war, then back through the trees and onto the house.  They stomped in, shaking away snow and ice, laying saturated gloves and hats in front of the fire crackling and spitting in the stone hearth.

Mikhail’s wife waited with a cauldron of tripe soup, platters of roast veal, sided with mountains of boiled potatoes covered in butter and parsley, more pickles, more bread and more drink, always more drink.  Over the steaming plates, Mikhail regaled them with tales filled with heroic but full-hardy patriots, and the awful fire fights between Russians and Germans while starving Poles huddled in bombed out houses, and earlier, the crazy Polish king who took target practice on the bison he ordered launched from catapults.

“Raining bison!  Can you imagine the idiocy?  Is it any wonder why Poland was cut into three pieces?”  Mikhail said.  Then the top half of the kitchen door creaked open, and there were two horses, bobbing and neighing.  Mikhail jumped up, cursing.

“To hell with you,” he shouted, jumping from his chair.  “Shoo!  This is no place for you, beasts of burden.  Out!”  When he reached them he slipped apples into their mouths, cooing and brushing their snouts.

He came back to the table with new bottles of Zubrowka, the vodka infused with bison grass, plucked, he said, from fields just a few kilometers away.

All the guests squeezed together around a rustic table made of thick-cut planks.  Jay held Urka’s hand underneath, as he had for most of the day.  Others began telling stories.  Artur’s grandfather had been sent to Siberia.  After he returned to Poland, every night he put a piece of bread under his pillow just to make sure he had something to eat in the morning.  Kasia’s great grandfather, a colonel in the Polish army, was executed at Katyn in 1940.  Magda’s great aunt contracted syphilis when gang raped by Russian soldiers after the war.  Before committing suicide she had unprotected sex with every Russian and Polish Communist she could find.  There were stories of priests tortured by the Nazis, of unborn children cut from the bellies of mothers, of whole extended families locked into barns and burned alive.

  When things got too dark, the stories switched to more recent history, to everlasting lines for anything that might be for sale in the shops, of too many residents in too small flats, of exchanging mimeographed copies of banned books, of romantic trysts in the Museum of Communism because it was one of the few places you wouldn’t be disturbed.

The stories were related for Jay’s benefit, he knew.  In a lull he thought he should contribute, but what did he have besides an imaginary dead wife?  So he told the group about hearing George Bush in Warsaw.

“I had to come to Poland to see an American president,” he said.  “He was the first American president to ever come here, yes?”

“It was very special to many people,” Mikhail said.

“So many people were crying,” Jay said.  “Especially the babcias.  For Bush?  Cracks me up.”

“There was hope he change the visa requirements for Polish people,” Arek said.

“Bah!” Mikhail stood and poured more shots of Zubrowka.  “Too many people want to leave Poland.  The smart people leave, and the neo-Nazis stay.  Do you know, my good friend Jay, about Kosciuszko and Pulaski?  They fight in your revolution, eh?”

Jay nodded.

“Pulaski die there, yes?  Such idiocy! And still Polish people want to go to America.   You get Kosciuszko and Pulaski.  You give us Madonna and McDonalds.  Ha!”

“And Jay,” Urka said.  “They give us Jay.  For two years.”

“My good American friend.  How do I forget!”  Mikhail reached across the table, grabbed Jay’s head and gave him a big sloppy kiss, right on the lips.

“To Jay,” Mikhail said, raising a shot glass.  “Na zdrowie!”

And so while the horses chuffed in the kitchen, they drank, and ate, and laughed even more. On the way home, before he fell asleep against Urka in the back seat, Jay thought about the question Malgosia had asked him one day in class:  “Why are you here?”

For days like this.

*

The next Sunday Adam’s father was celebrating his Name Day, so the whole family went off to Lublin, leaving Urka and Jay the run of their flat.  They were lounging on the couch, naked under itchy, woolen blankets.  The remains of the meal Urka had cooked—stuffed cabbage, boiled potatoes, leek salad--were scattered on the coffee table.

“Marek is with his father?” Jay asked.

Urka shook her head.  “My parents.”

“Of course.”

 “My husband was a good man, when he was young,” Urka said.

“That’s why you married him, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

 They were once political activists.  They met in high school, during the darkest days of martial law.  After school, into the 1980’s, she had been briefly imprisoned, her husband three times.  The third time he languished for five months, even though no formal charges had been filed against him.  They were married by then, and Urka was pregnant with Marek.

“There was a man,” Urka said, “a Communist official.  He was old and fat and sat behind this big desk.  Some friends tell me this old fat man had power.  I should petition him.  So I went to this office.  I wore a tight shirt so he can see my pregnancy.  I begged and cried.  He said nothing, this man.  I thought I failed.  But then he stands up and comes to me.  Still he says nothing.  He stands right in front of me and pulls down his trousers and waits for me.  Silent.  Doesn’t ask.  Just waits.”

“Holy shit,” Jay said.

“My husband is out of jail the next week.  But he is different.  He is not the same man I fell in love with.  Now Marek is everything.”

It’s time, Jay thought.  Just tell her.  He lied.  He’d never been married.  But he didn’t.  He sat in silence.  The sound of cars out on the street seemed very loud, as did the ticking of the clock on the wall above the television.  Instead of confessing and begging Urka for pardon, he silently allowed the story he had woven himself into expand:

After his Peace Corps stint, he visits Carrie’s gravesite on the anniversary of her death.  Her parents and Ann, a younger sister, are there.  He waits at a distance.  He hasn’t even talked to them since the funeral.  The three stand there quietly.  Suddenly, Jay’s one time mother-in-law lets go of her surviving daughter’s hand and lunges for the gravestone.  She hugs it, sobbing loudly.  Carrie’s father does nothing to stop it, but even from this distance, Jay can see the man waver.  He then simply collapses, like he’s been shot.  He too begins to sob, lying there on his side.  Perhaps to stifle the cries, he buries his face in the freshly mown grass of his daughter’s grave.

Ann still stands.  For no apparent reason—Jay is deathly quiet—she looks in his direction.  He quickly ducks behind a tree, breathing heavily.  While he allows his breathing to slow, he stares down at the cheap bouquet of flowers he bought at the supermarket on his way to the cemetery.

Urka had picked up the television remote.

“Sometimes I don’t think I ever really loved her,” Jay said.  “Carrie, my wife.”

 Urka raised an eyebrow.

“But you still marry her?”

“I was young.  You were young when you got married, too.”

Urka nodded and looked at Jay.

When he said no more she clicked on the television.  The Olympics were on.  Dorothy Hamill and some guy Jay didn’t recognize talked into microphones, but whatever they were saying was dubbed over in Polish.  Certainly it was about women’s figure skating.  Jay had read in his Newsweek that either Tonya Harding or Kristi Yamaguchi would win the gold.   As soon as Jay remembered this, they showed highlights from Yamaguchi’s routine.

“This woman won the gold medal,” Urka said.

“That’s good,” Jay said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.  She’s nice.  I like her.”

“But she is not an American,” Urka said.

“What are you talking about?  Of course she’s American.  She’s as American as me.”

“But look at her.  She’s not like you.  She’s a China girl.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“What?”

“You know nothing about my country.”

“I was joking,” Urka said.  “What do you Americans say?  ‘Lighten up?’”

“Besides, Kristi Yamaguchi is of Japanese descent.”

“Yes, sir.”  She took a magazine and started leafing through it, humming a tune that sounded familiar to him but couldn’t quite place.

“Excuse me,” he said.  “I have to use the bathroom.”

Naked, he padded across the cold floor.  In the bathroom he waited for a few minutes before flushing the toilet he didn’t use.  He scrubbed the smells of dinner from his hands and the dried semen from his dick.  He splashed his face with water and studied himself in the mirror.  He looked the same as he always did: receding hairline, beady little eyes and an infected blemish on his neck that just wouldn’t go away.

He left the bathroom and went into the nieces’ bedroom.  The sheets and pillows were strewn all about, and clothes were twisted in them.  Jay found his underwear and a sock.  He put them on, but had no luck finding the other sock.  He sat on the edge of the bed.  Urka was still humming that tune, louder than the television.

While she was in prison, he thought, I was in my parents’ basement, pulling bongs and listening to Genesis on the headphones.  When she was bribing some Commie bastard with a blow job, I was feeling up a girlfriend, or jacking off to a Penthouse.

How can I ever compete against that?

He couldn’t.  Maybe it didn’t matter.  His life had flowered open.  He had his Wednesdays at the restaurant, and basketball games, and all the time he met interesting new people like Mikhail.  Poland was a wondrous place.  He could extend his two years’ Peace Corps service to three, to be with his students when they graduated.

Urka continued to hum.  Urka, sweet little Urka, his elven princess.  He loved her.  He knew.  Just then he knew.  He didn’t care about her husband, or her son, or whether or not she was looking for a green card.  Even his deception.  All could be overcome.  He had so many years ahead of him.  With her.

He peeled off his underwear and his one sock and went back to the living room.  He finally recognized the tune and sang along:  “Oh Oh Oh Ohhh Oh, Little China Girl…”

“You like that song, too?” Urka asked.

“It’s good, but no ‘Warszawa,’ mind you.”

“Ah, Bowie’s Berlin period.  Not so easy to hum.  He did a lot of drugs then.”

“You are a very interesting woman, Urka.”

She smiled and lifted up the sheet. He crawled back in next to her. The Olympic coverage had shifted to skiing.

"There's skiing in Zakopane?" Jay asked.

"Of course."

"We should go there. We can stop in Cracow. Maybe make a week of it. You can bring along Marek. I'll have to get to know him eventually…"

"Jay."

"But I guess it'll be too late for skiing once classes are out. But hiking, right? We can rent a cabin in the…

"Jay," Urka said, a little louder this time. She had taken his hand and was patting it. The sheet had fallen away from her shoulder, revealing her right breast.

"You must understand," she said. "This is it. This is all we get. Please tell me you understand."

 

Zach Murphy
Blackout

 

My roommate took off right before I lost my job at the pizza place. The only thing he left behind was a note that read, “Moved back home.” If only the unpaid rent were attached to it.

I sit at the wobbly kitchen table, gazing at the floating dust particles that you can only see when the sunlight shines in at the perfect angle. Sometimes, you have to convince yourself that they aren’t old skin.

The air conditioner moans, as if it’s irritated that it has to work so hard. I haven’t left the apartment in four days, for fear that the hellish temperature might melt away my spirit even more. Is a heat wave a heat wave if it doesn’t end? I gulp down the remainder of my orange juice. The pulp sticks to the side of the glass. It always bothers me when that happens.

As I stand up to go put my head into the freezer, the air conditioner suddenly goes on a strike of silence and the refrigerator releases a final gasp. I walk across the room and flip the light switch. Nothing.

There’s a knock at the door. I peer through the peephole. It’s the lady with the beehive hair from across the hall. I crack the door open.

“Is your power out?” she asks.

“Yes,” I answer.

“It must be the whole building,” she says.

“Maybe the whole city,” I say.

“The food in your fridge will go bad after four hours,” she says.

I’d take that information to heart if I had any food in the refrigerator.

“Thanks,” I say as I close the door.

When the power goes out, it’s amazing how all of your habits remind you that you’re nothing without it. The TV isn’t going to turn on and your phone isn’t going to charge.

There’s another knock at the door. It’s the guy from downstairs who exclusively wears jorts. “Do you want a new roommate?” he asks.

“What?”

He nods his head to the left. I glance down the hallway and see a scraggly, black cat with a patch of white fur on its chest.

“It was out lying in the sun,” the guy says. “Looked a bit overheated, so I let it inside.”

Before I can say anything, the cat walks through the doorway and rubs against my leg.

“Catch you later,” the guy says.

I fill up a bowl with some cold water and set it on the floor. The cat dashes over and drinks furiously.

At least water is free, I think to myself. Kind of.

I head into my dingy bedroom and grab the coin jar off of my dresser. “This should be enough to get you some food,” I say.

I step out the apartment door and look back at the cat.

“I think I’ll call you Blackout.”

 

 

 

Mary Sanders Shartle
The Wives of Immanuel Kant

“The greatest modern philosopher was moved by nothing more than duty.

His life, in consequence, was unremarkable.”  Roger Scruton, Kant

 

Kant considered marriage twice.  This much has been reported by his biographers and scholars.  Twice, they say, he delayed so long in proposing that his intendeds accepted the offers of other gentlemen instead.

Recently, however, a scholar named Malcolm Beistly was sorting through a box which had long been buried in the archives of the University of Krakow.  The box contained what Beistly believed to be the letters of Kant and Moses Mendelssohn, the “German Plato,” author of Phaidon, oder Über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele, and grandfather of the composer, Felix.  According to Beistly, the letters reveal the profoundly shocking fact that Kant not only considered marriage twice, but actually did marry not once but three separate times, and the scandal that ensued both at the University of Koenigsberg and in the town was so great that his colleagues and neighbors engineered a massive cover-up involving the forging of several of Kant’s supposed, post-Critical works, the destruction of large numbers of legal and personal records in all corners of Europe, and the impersonation of Kant by his servant, Lampe.

*

Understand: this is the kind academic holocaust that makes scholars tear out fistfuls of matted, graying hair.  Peak-capped, pipe-smoking Kantians murmuring over whist and Medoc, flagellating themselves over their hirsutely tweeded backs until the room fills with dust like a storm in the Gobi Desert, calling Beistly a bandicoot and a nasty old whistleblower.  At night in their chaste beds like powdery-skinned babies, they dream of driving hot needles under poor Beistly’s fingernails.  Fierce chaps, scholars, when it comes to defending their own. 

*

Did Kant anticipate Freud?  Did he love his mother?  Did he base his philosophy upon the doctrines of her faith?  What other woman but Anna Regina, with her stout fingers and round bosom, ever knew him naked, cleaned under his foreskin, wound her fingers through the curls of his tiny, tiny wig?  Kant, unlike many men, could remember the sensation of resting his head against the broad silken cushion of his mother’s Teutonic breast and the sweet taste of her milk.  (Because he was sickly, she nursed him for a very long time.)

She was a low-born German, married a harness maker.  She bore nine children and saw three of them to the cemetery as infants.  “All in God’s grace,” she said and set her sights on Immanuel (“God with us”).  She was bright enough to realize her son was brighter.  She made sure he went to school.  Pietist--fire and brimstone, prayers every hour.  Children are born in original sin, with minds full of devilish mischief.  It was not the happiest, carefree childhood, mind you, but one of sober contemplation befitting a budding young scholar.  Anna Regina saw fit to do him such a kindness. 

Anna’s heart was as lofty as the Caucasian Mountains.  Her faith in God sounded the great depths of her soul.  But her duty to her fellow man killed her.  A friend fell ill with fevers and refused to take the medicine left by the doctor.  Anna Regina was nursing her.

“Now you must have your tasties, dear.  Doc says so.  He says it’s got peppermint in it.  Nice and good.”

“Neh,” said the woman, thrashing in her sheets.

“Drink up now, love.  There’s a good girl.  Here’s your spoon.  Open wide.”

“Neh!  Neh!”

“S’not poison, precious.  Be the good girl then.”

“Neh, nehnehneh.”

“Here.  Watch Mother Anna now.  Like this.”

And with that, Anna Regina took the woman’s spoon, recently used for broth, and sipped the medicine herself.  Within a fortnight she, too, was a victim of the fevers.

Kant was thirteen.  What a tender age:  the first fleshy cravings, the first skin eruptions, the sweats, the nocturnal emissions.  Most of us assumed that Kant buried these along with his mother and on that day became a wise and venerable old philosopher.

*

Dear Moses:  I’m so bored today, I could spit nails.  I lectured at seven this morning on Hume, the old fart, and all the while was thinking how lovely my first piece of tail was.  She was a tight-waisted, ample-bosomed meadowlark who undermaided at the stately home wherein I tutored.  She got me in the kitchen closet, my back up against a broom.  I had it in both ends, so to speak and came like a four-in-hand at full gallop.  Got pregnant, poor thing.  Threatened me with a paternity suit.  I did my duty by her.  Married her, but she died in childbirth, poor soul.  Don’t breathe a word of this.  My reputation, you know.  Kant.

*

A pupil of Kant’s named Jachmann called it his “exalted sense of duty to others.”  Any other man would have paid the girl off.  Not Kant.  Were it not for the Reformation, Anna Regina and the chambermaid, he might have been a Cistercian monk—poor, chaste, silent and illiterate.  Who can fathom the noumenon—the thing in itself that propels a man to act or not to act, to know or have to learn?  Is it in the monads or the gonads?

After the loss of his chambermaid (and one wonders not a little relieved at God’s myopic judgment of their sin), Kant tutored until he was thirty-one.  Ten years rapping the knuckles of noble sons in short pants.  Kant raided their daddies’ libraries and brandy stores and slaved late into the candle-smoked darkness, his mind on the Milky Way, his hand on his smallish member.  (Remind me to tell you a limerick later.)  He saw island universes in space, populated like earth, revolving, spinning and dancing, disappearing into the heavenly kitchen closet (unh-h-h).  He had it—the Theorie des Himmels—a nebular hypothesis, sidereal motion (ah-ah-ah-h-h).  Kant made his mark on the underside of the desk.

*

The University made him a privatdozent, lecturing 20 hours a week on logic, metaphysics and math.  He gave such a good show, the boys lined up out on the Kohl Markt at 6 a.m. to get a good seat. 

*

Work and Pietism made Immanuel a dull boy. The Countess von Keyserling tutored the tutor. "Here's a fork, darling. Here's how you hold it. Good! Now, this is wine. Sip, don't gulp!"

She had lots of great parties. "Oh God! Here goes Kant again with the antimacassar on his head. He's describing the London Bridge. The Colonel believes he's the architect! Isn't he a stitch?"

*

In 1764, Kant was forty. He wrote Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen. He had to imagine the beautiful and sublime. He'd never seen the Alps any more then he'd seen the London Bridge. He read about them and memorized every word. The Alps are sublime, he said, capable of instilling awe. Women are merely beautiful. He may never have seen the Alps, but women he could not avoid. Countess von Keyserling introduced him to a gorgeous blonde with enormous breasts. He came to here on her. She found him fascinating. She had read his Observations on the Sense of the Beautiful and Sublime and wanted to argue about it. He yawned and drank too much Medoc. It made him sick. She followed him to the water closet and continued her rant while he retched. What a dame, he thought. She never let him out of her sight for three days. She bullied her way into his lectures and then pretended to faint. She screamed at him when he sat down before her or forgot to open the door. When she announced she had to return to Hungary the next day, he said, "Goodbye, good luck," to her tits. She began to weep and scream, "But I love you. I want you. I will have you. I will make you love me!"

When he fainted, she carried him to bed with her.

The next morning she was filled with remorse.

"Darling, you have defiled me." She followed him to the bathroom again.

"Won't you miss your coach?" he asked.

It was the wrong thing to say to a Hungarian.

*

Dear Kant:  Your letter regarding your first fuck was an eye-opener.  Come, oh come, Immanuel!  You mean you’re a mere mortal after all?  Visiting the stews just like the rest of us?  Here we all thought you were just a meshuggah professor with a brain full of lofty thoughts, a caved-in chest, and no prick.  Do tell me!  Moses.

*

 

  There is a reason for marriage.  The lineage of the masses continues.  There are enough men to keep the books, till the fields, man the armies and fill the prisons.  There are enough women of variety to bare their breasts for the men that mate them and the children they bear, and so on.  But there are so many ill-matched couples:  she’s lazy, he’s industrious, or he’s lazy, she’s industrious.  People go blindly into matrimony who might better act with more consideration.  One marries for love, one for money, one for lust, one for duty to one’s parents’ wishes.  Are all these unions happy, ideal?  Of course not.  Marriage is an institution of tribulation and learning, much as a university.

  Kant’s second wife (oh yes, she got him) married him for opportunity, conquest.  She thought Kant would soon be a wealthy man—university chairs, court appointments, world travel!  She was desperate.  She had clung for years to the fringes of society, but the very timbre of her voice set men’s teeth on edge.  Her manner drove them away.  Kant was her last hope. 

  One could forgive it of an ordinary man, a man with feathers for brains.  But Kant!  How dismal that a great man should fall prey to such a harpy.

*

Dear Moses:  No prick?  You do me a great disservice.  I have a very fine prick, extremely suitable to the task when called upon, which I admit has not been as frequent as a man of more normal drive and less scholarly passion.  But let me tell you of my second wife.  (How little do you know of me.)  A Hungarian harridan.  She could not copulate without raking her nails across my back.  She would thrash and carry on as though she was being murdered!  How she’d  cry out!  After a single night with this maniac, I felt heroic to have survived.  Six times, Moses, I was assailed and vanquished.  I married her to keep her quiet.  The scandal she threatened would have cost me my reputation.  Needless to say, I don’t speak of her.  Some women are wretched by their own doing.  She was one.  Wanted to go to Paris, Rome.  Paris, says I, you must be off your nut.  Society, she says.  Very well, says I, you can entertain my students and colleagues here.  That is my society, says I.  Says she, I need so many thaler a month to maintain myself.  My dear, says I, it is to laugh.  When she realized what she’d got instead of a well-off, nobleman’s genius—a saddle maker’s boy!—she became hysterical.  Begged me for a divorce.  I tried to convince her of her wifely duty.  I tried to coax her into a more seemly temper.  I refused her a divorce categorically.  We had taken our vows before God.  Divorce is an act against His Will, against Nature.  Her hysteria became profound.  She retreated to an upstairs room from which she did not emerge for twelve years.  She had a little bell that she rang when she wanted something.  If Lampe wasn’t quick enough, she would shriek like the north wind off the Baltic.  No one else ever saw her except the doctor and myself, or course.  (Oh, those nails!)  After some time, she announced she was a Humeian empiricist.  I’m sure it was just to irritate me.  However, she goaded me out of my dogmatic slumber.  In those twelve years I formulated the Critique of Pure Reason.  She was undone.       Then came Celestine!

*

Celestine?  Kant was fifty-seven when the Critik der reinen Vernunft was published.  It was 1781.  Between Kant and the American and French Revolutions, the face of the world would never be the same.  While Kant tapped his foot to military marches (the only music he approved of), Mozart was working on quartets.  Fishbein was painting Goethe and the gang down in Weimar.  Celestine shook everything up.  She was better than the Lisbon earthquake.

*

When he was much younger, Kant taught her brothers.  She, the eldest, would sit in the library by the stove playing Patience.  She sat quietly, never interfered, but she was always alert and listening.  And as he suspected, quite rightly, she absorbed and memorized every word.  She never cheated at the cards either, but played a game as scrupulously honest as a child of God who would be called to reckoning.  She never won.

She never married either.  Because she was raised only among men, her openness and honesty bordered on the shocking.  She never understood that with “ladies” there was an acceptable difference of demeanor.  Although she could not be called “masculine,” she was outspoken enough to pull men off center.  She was not overly virtuous, which was not to impugn her chastity, for she was undoubtedly chaste, but she was well read on the prurient, and she was not given to airs of sanctity.  She was more than thirty when she met Kant again.  It had been long enough to harbor all those secret desires.

 

*

If it was known that Kant had an Hungarian wife upstairs, it was never mentioned among his colleagues or students.  The neighbors were certainly aware, since her voice penetrated through brick and mortar.  Herr Doctor Hurst, who lived next door, was frequently called to attend to the wife.  It was he who counseled her (out of sympathy for Kant alone and no good medical reason) to go to the baths at Baden-bei-Wein.  Kant could not accompany her because of his schedule at the University.  Lampe and the Doctor carried her to a private coach (she would not travel any other way) where Kant bade her goodbye and handed her a copy of his newly finished Critik.  She read it on the way, and upon reaching the Danube, threw both the manuscript and herself into the waters.  The whole matter was a mess.  Records were mislaid.  In the furious backlash following the Critik der reinen Vernunft, one hysterical Hungarian is eminently forgettable.

 

*

Dear Moses:  I have met, or should say re-met, the sweetest bit of apple cream puff.  I have put aside my Prolegamena to write poetry for her.  She’s my heart’s delight, my rapturous dream…but oh, so pure and divine.  I adore her.  I want to go squoosha, squoosha on her boobies and poka, poka you-know-where and you-know-where-else, too.  I’m so bored with my own work.  I’m thinking of retiring.  I’ve said everything that needs to be said.  Let the clerics and scholars pick away at it.  I want my beautiful, bountiful Celestine.  Some young whippersnapper who can reason a little quicker that I will wander into town someday and then I’ll be pushing up daisies.  Once Old Fritz’s arse is in the ground, I’m a goner anyway, likely to be burned at the stake.  I’ve had it, I tell you.  Wish me well.

Kant.

*

Now for that limerick:

            Kant found his Critique was so boring,

            He went into town to go whoring.

            Though he probed a priori

            And posteriori,

            His limited depth left them snoring.

*

News of Celestine soon leaked out.  It was clear that Kant was becoming inattentive to his lectures.  His voice would wander off.  He would stare off at the distant, dust-thickened windows and imagine the clouds, the high-flying sea birds and fragile butterflies.  In the middle of a sentence on the logic of illusion:  “All objects that can be given to us can be conceptualized in two ways: on the one hand (Celestine’s left breast), as appearances (hmmm); on the other hand, (Celestine’s right buttock) as things in themselves.  (Yes-s-s-s-, oh-h-h-h).”

*

In the summer, Kant disappeared.  Koenigsberg began to murmur.  Two gentlemen of the University met by the Schloss Teich at the corner of Münzstrasses and Tragheimer. 

 "Have you heard about Herr Kant?" said the one with spectacles.

"Yes, and I don't believe a word of it," replied the other without.

"Well, it's true."

"It's nonsense. He's well over fifty."

"So was Gewulf."

"Gewulf was a man of means, stature, and a hedonist."

"Well, who knows what dark secrets Kant has been harboring all these years. There are rumors."

"Rumors?"

"Of other women. Of other wives."

"Nonsense! Everyone's gone mad. I've known Kant for years."

"So have I. So have we all."

"He would hardly take a wife at his age, in his state of penury. The poor man only aspires to five feet. His chest looks like it was hit by a cannonball. You'd think a brisk north wind would carry him away."

"But it's true, I tell you. I've seen her."

"Who is she?"

"The daughter of a family he was tutoring some twenty years ago. She's over thirty, I'd say, never married. Quite plump and respectable."

"Hah! She'll squash him…"

"Spent her life reading books…"

"Preposterous…"

"…they spent the last fortnight in Italy."

"Now I know you are mad. He's never left Koenigsberg in his entire life! Some say he's never even seen the sea!"

"It is not I who is mad, dear colleague, I fear it is Kant. What of his work? What will happen to his work?"

"He will be the butt end joke of our university. Of Europe. No one will ever take us seriously again."

*

Frau Hurst had prepared her husband's coffee for the late afternoon when he came in the surgery below stairs.

"Marga!" he cried, "Did you see?"

"I did! Just now from the window."

The doctor rubbed his hands together and laughed in a high register.

"She was holding his umbrella. Lampe was on the other side of them."

His wife spoke as she handed him a blue Dresden cup.

"Not a fraction off his schedule!"

"Not a second. Mercy me." She bustled towards the mantelpiece. "In all the excitement, I forgot to wind the clock."

"It's true," the doctor sighed, "He's married again. Looks as happy as a herring in brine. You must pay a call. She can't be as bad as the one I sent off to the baths. We must pay a call, and take some of your sweet cakes."

"Send a card first."

"Of course. Don't wish to intrude too soon."

"We'll ask when it would be convenient."

"You're right. He's fussy yet. Not a second off!"

"Bless his soul. I'm happy for him."

"But the poor girl! Not yet thirty."

"She's thirty-five, if she's a day. Don't be dotty."

"Still young enough. She looks like a healthy one, eh Marga?" The doctor started to laugh again, not clinically and dispassionately as a doctor should laugh.

"Now Franz," said his wife, "Don't be coarse."

*

Three students of the university raised their steins of lager at the Kohl Markt Biergarten and fell to whispering.

"You what?" said one.

"I asked Professor Muller."

"And…"

"And he said I was an impertinent son of a Turk."

"The lout. Did you strike him?"

"I did not. I had no wish to see a grown man cry."

"And that's all?"

"Of course not. I expressed my devotion and concern for our beloved Sage of Koenigsberg…"

"To which he said?"

"Well, first he blushed. He blushed a shade of red to shame a rose. Then behind his long, lean hand suppressed a most indelicate giggle. 'I b'lieve it to be so,'" the student mimicked. "'Kant has taken a wife.'"

"By Old Fritz's arse. Can you believe it?"

"I thought he was married to Lampe all these years."

"Who is the poor girl, then?"

"Someone said she's Jachmann's sister."

"Jachmann has a sister? Let's rescue her?"

"Ach! Can't you see us? It's three in the morning. We rest the ladder against the side of his house. As we climb up, we hear the sounds, oh such sounds. She's moaning, she's crying out…Kant! Give it to me!"

*

Dear Moses:  I am possessed.  She has entered my very being. I have even been to the Cathedral to question God.  How can it be that I love?  She is divine, of course.  God has entered (can it be?) my soul.  I cannot feel who loves me more, My God or my Celestine? But then it is all one great Love, one bountiful Love, one explosion of the senses.  How can I have lived so long without knowing this feeling?  I have bloomed.  I am the happiest man alive.  She thinks I am such an old fuddy-duddy.  I am, aren't I?  Just an old fuddy-duddy.  Ach, but her flesh turns me inside out—the mountains of her breasts which I climb to place the flag of my tongue.  I am ruined and complete!  Kant.

 

*

Immanuel Kant awoke at 4 a.m. as always.  He was a man of keen and regular habits, fastidious and prompt, thoughtful and premeditated.  Normally at five o’clock he would have a cup of tea and a pipe of tobacco.  He would dress in a robe and nightcap and over the nightcap a tricorn to shade his eyes from the light.  He’d prepare for his lecture at seven.  After lectures, he’d dress in his robe and slippers and work until noon.  Friends came for lunch and Medoc.  Or he would go out.  At precisely 3:30 he donned his grey coat to take his daily, without fail, in-all-weathers walk beneath the lindens.

Kant took snuff. As he worked, he would leave his handkerchief on a chair at the opposite side of the room. Everytime he had to use it, he was forced to get up and walk over to the chair. Aside from his daily walk, this was his only exercise. Bedtime was ten o'clock.

But on this morning he turned in his bed and gazed at his wife and felt such stirrings in his body, both reverent and irreverent, that the sacrament of marriage could not contain them both.

"This," he thought, "is devoid of reason."

She turned to him when he touched her shoulder and asked "Is it morning already?"

And he said, "Yes, time to get up."

So she rolled over and rubbed her eyes to erase the darkness, but it remained dark.

"You know," she said, "some morning you should allow yourself the luxury of staying in bed an extra hour or two. Too much asceticism withers the mind. The Buddha discovered that and advised against it."

"Ah. A pantheist. I've married a pantheist."

"I am not," she said, smoothing back a strand of her honey-colored hair. "I'm simply quoting. Besides, you have me now. Why did you marry me?"

"For companionship." And he knew he was being coy.

"I'm no great beauty, but you can do better with your imagination, I think." She was laughing. The shoulder of her chemise was slipping down. He was staring at her magnificent breasts. 

"I'm not a monk," he said, "I'm a man. I'm a philosopher."

"Do you have a God somewhere in your philosophy?"

"Not a logical, scientific, mathematical God. No."

"But you believe in the state of Holy Matrimony."

"Evidently."

"Then you know that God provided for pleasure in marriage. For women, too."

Kant was trembling. She moved closer to him and whispered in his ear very softly and very low.

"You must give me pleasure, too. Don't take everything for yourself. You must hold yourself in. Give me time."

Kant perspired and shook.

"Then," she continued, "I will do whatever you like." She whispered again, "Rousseau liked to be spanked, you know." He turned violently red.

"How would you know such a thing?"

"You tutored me. I've read his Confessions."

Kant was shocked that a woman should know, or speak, such an obscenity. But her expression was guileless, and her eyes were full of mischief. He turned his back to her in consternation. She pinched him hard on the buttocks. He cried out.

"There," she said, "You old Pietist. You like it, too."

That morning they both knew pleasure, and he discovered that women were, after all, sublime.

*

Kant and Celestine dined alone at lunch.

"I'm honest like you," she told him over cod cakes, coarse bread and broth. "You picked me because I was plump, healthy, respectable and able."

He sopped his crust neatly and wondered where this line of thought would lead. "You make yourself sound like a melon," he said, "to be selected from a vast field of melons."

"Well, there aren't many like me."

"That is to be sure."

"We're getting a late start, you and I," she added. "Since we are both bright, mature and honest, candor should be the means by which we come to a mutual understanding."

Noting an expression of growing discomfort on her husband's face, she paused to consider her next words carefully. She was amused, and he knew she was. He mopped his mouth with a brown muslin napkin.

She continued, "I shall support you and nurture you in all your other daily routines and habits, if you agree to spend one extra hour in bed with me each morning."

He coughed quietly. He began to feel a fiery warmth in his cheeks. He could feel himself going hard again. He could not control it.

She gathered her dishes and his and started for the kitchen. Lampe came in with the daily marketing bag full of turnips, potatoes and several loaves of bread. He took one look at his master and asked "Have you taken a fever now?"

Kant could hear her musical laughter behind the door, and the memory of her round and ample bottom occupied his thoughts for the next hour and a half and disturbed his work.

*

She was sewing by the stove in the evening, fashioning for him a jacket with pouches for padding to fill out the concavity of his chest.

"Cleverly done," he said, as he examined the close, even stitches. "But you will make me vain."

"I'm sure that is as impossible as reversing the orbit of the earth."

He lit his pipe and sat next to her.

"What if I should have a child?" she asked him.

"Then I shall have a son or daughter."

"I've never understood how women avoid it," she said. "Prostitutes for instance."

Kant clenched his teeth on the tip of his pipe. 

She pursued. "There are other orifices, of course."

He stood and knocked his pipe against the stove. 

"I've also heard that men wear skins over them, like a goat's skin. You see? Sometimes with a bit of the hair left on."

He did not reply.

She pulled her shawl about her, for she was shivering.

"Have you ever petted a goat?" she asked.

"No," he choked.

"I have."

She mused for a moment as if remembering the texture—sleek and smooth in one direction, bristly and coarse in the other.

"Quite a sensation," she continued and wondered if he was sufficiently aroused and guessed he was.

*

Composers and philosophers need powerful antagonisms to set them working. For composers it is affliction and women. For philosophers, it is merely affliction. Affliction is the memory of death, of hives and syphilis, gout and goiter, sins and secrets of the flesh—these are the reminders of mortality, the nearness of death and judgment.

Women, however, tend to bestow immortality by bearing children. With a woman around, it's hard to concentrate on abstract concepts. It is difficult, when one is concerned for bread and rent on the behalf of another, to remember that there are really only three questions: "What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?" Kant, who had spent a great portion of his life deliberating these questions, could only now see three answers: "Celestine. Celestine. Celestine."

*

It did not take long for the members of the University faculty to form a committee to discuss the problem of Kant. Needless to say, none of them had ever found the answers to the questions above. They were dry men, men of chalk dust, old bones and pages yellowed with age. Their hosen bagged at the knees. Their knuckles were white from gripping the backs of chairs, canes, whatever came to hand, as if to steady the room and keep it from spinning around.

One of them, a Leibnizian Pangloss said, "It's bad enough he has cracked open the finest heads of Europe. Robespierre is merely killing kings. Kant has destroyed God. Throw his cap into the dusk. Break his pointer!"

Another, older mathematician replied, "Let's not be hasty. He is the finest mind of the century, and he is ours. He is Koenigsberg's. Let us not so casually discard him."

"But what of his work?"

Added one Greek historian, "Three days ago he wandered off from his lecture on astronomy and began to describe her thighs."

"It was magnificent. The students were thrilled. Some claimed they attained superior enlightenment."

"Thighs, astronomy, Kant. We will be the laughing stock of all Europe. His disgrace is ours. He must be dismissed."

It was a long time before anyone noticed him, and when they did, they started then stared at their feet and then at each other like guilty children. Kant had entered from the back of the room, so they did not see him. He sat silently in the shadows at one end of the long table, his hands folded across his concave chest, newly padded out by the careful handiwork of his beloved Celestine.

"Kant," began the mathematician quietly, "We have met today to discuss our future, your future, the future of Koenigsberg, in fact the future of philosophy. The world's eyes are upon us."

Kant pulled at his nose. "I didn't think you were here to discuss Euler's Seven Bridges and unicursal curves." Kant lifted a valise onto the table and put up his feet next to it.

"Kant, what is to become of us?"

"What of your work, Professor?"

"Your lectures are becoming distracting to the students."

"My lectures are more popular than ever. I have been speaking of love."

"Precisely! We fail to see how that relates to universal laws and the transcendental dialectic."

"Pity," said Kant.

"And it all obviously comes down to your recent nuptials. Is this, can this be the man who said of matrimony that it is merely the agreement between two people for the reciprocal use of their sexual organs?"

"I never said 'merely'."

There was a silence, brief but profound, while the men again stared at their shoes, embarrassed for Kant, for themselves.

The mathematician spoke again with a pleading tone, "Kant! What of your philosophy?"

Then Kant pointed to the valise on the table and said, "I have in the past several months written fairly detailed outlines for one more Critique and a piece on morals. I'm sure, using the language of the University, you can write as poorly as I."

The men stared at each other in horror.

"My dear Kant. What can you mean?"

*

The following letter was dated 1784:

Dear Moses:  We’ll join you within the week, but can only stay a fortnight, as I wish to see something of the world with my Celestine.  How I look forward to seeing you and introducing her to you.  The University agreed to accept my papers and paid me a sum.  Lampe will be acting as my double.  We outfitted him with a wig and umbrella of mine, as well as my gray coat.  He will take my walks and act in every way as I would.  Those who cannot be fooled have been coerced into keeping their silence for the good of Mother Prussia.  So Koenigsberg has her paper sage.  I have my freedom at last from the ever-tightening yoke of duty and responsibility, except, of course, to my darling wife.  It is my highest duty to bring her to unspeakable pleasures as I mount and ride her to oblivion and back.  Oh Moses!  Where her tongue has been!  What delights she has taught me!

*

And so Kant became one with Celestine and settled on the island of Capri under an assumed name and wrote poetry after the style of Lucretius.  Night and morning the sound of Kant and his wife making love echoed down the hillsides and the peasant women thought them unholy.

But all did not end happily for the couple.  There stood Celestine, watching as her husband gazed out to sea.  She fretted as the reams of vacuous, sunstruck, iambic pentameter piled upon the floor of his balcony.  She’d pick up a page and discard it.  The poems were like embarrassing childhood habits—drooling, nail-biting, nose-picking.  They were as erotic as all that—not a fitting tribute to her.  Not worthy of Kant.  And as Kant saw her kick through the pages of his little poetic promise, he wrote less and less and brooded more and more.  The more he brooded, the more she turned her gaze toward Tuscany and finally, her back was set against him.  He knew after all that his great love was a malignant folly.

*

Moses Mendelssohn died in 1786, the same year as Old Fritz, Frederick the Great.  Kant’s correspondence to his friend ceased some time before.  Mendelssohn entrusted the letters of Kant to his son, from whom he extracted a solemn oath of secrecy. 

Kant returned alone to Koenigsberg in 1787 in time to do the bulk of the work the faculty had started on the Critik der Urtheilscraft (not surprisingly a disorganized and distracted work).  He melted back into the University scene without so much as a ripple in the River Pregel.  Everyone, most of all poor Lampe, was relieved to have him return.  But everyone noticed the change in him.  He was not a happy man.

Schopenhauer was later to say:  “Kant’s virtue, which at first bore itself so bravely towards happiness, loses its independence later, and holds out its hand for a tip.”

Kant wrote his last major work in 1793—Die Religion ennerhelb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, returning to the problem of insufficient proof of the existence of God (and therefore love?)  He was threatened and censured by the new Minister of Education under Frederick William II for undermining Christian doctrine and Biblical truths.  He was seventy—to old and sad to be up the fight.  He withdrew the piece and agreed not to lecture or write on such topics again.  (At least until Frederick William was dead, but by that time, well…)

In 1795 he wrote, “We might suppose, like the Hindu, that the earth is a place for the expiation of old and forgotten sins.”  Under the title Zum ewigen Frieden, (Eternal Peace, Kant hinted darkly of his future by copying a Dutch innkeeper’s sign with a rendering of a boneyard.

*

 Kant’s last lecture was in 1796.  He was then seventy-two.  The end of the century, the success of the French and American Revolutions—he foresaw a brighter future for the world.  But for himself, there was only a slow dwindling into senility.  He believed electricity in the air was exerting pressure on his brain.  He thought the same electricity had caused a cat epidemic in Vienna, Copenhagen and elsewhere, so he closely watched the weather.  He breathed only through his nose. If he felt a sweat coming on, he held still until the danger had passed.  He held his stockings up with a spring contraption anchored in his pockets.  He despised finding even the smallest thing out of order in his house.  His ablutions before bedtime became a compulsive ritual.  His remaining friends learned to listen patiently to his physical accounts and never dared to contradict his wildest notions.  He suffered from terrifying nightmares.  He became more and more despondent with life.  “Life is a burden to me, I am tired of bearing it,” he said.

 Kant always maintained a soft spot for womanly charm and beauty.  The fiancée of his best friend’s son pleased him particularly, and he always asked her to sit where he could see her, but in writing about women in his last years, he was not so kind:  “Woman is vengeful…Because she is weak, she is sly…It is laughable that a man wants to make himself loved by a young woman by means of understanding and great merits…Woman makes of man what she wishes.  Formerly she made heroes and now she makes apes…”

 In 1804, when he was eighty years old, Kant died.  His last words were “Es is gut.”   He was buried in a great public ceremony.  The bells of Koenigsburg tolled.  His body was born by University students.  He was buried in the Philosopher’s Vault.  The vault deteriorated with time and was restored in 1881.  In 1950, unknown persons broke into the vault and removed whatever bits of Kant’s body remained.

*

 Schopenhauer said to his mother, presumably after she had kicked him down the stairs, “History shall only remember you through me.”  Of the three wives of Kant, no history remains.  Celestine disappeared without a trace.  No one will ever know what Kant said to her the day she left him.

 When Malcolm Beistly discovered the box of letters in Krakow, there was a folded note thought to be in the hand of Moses Mendelssohn.  It read:

“I commend these pages to another age—perhaps the Golden One itself, where democracy speaks for a man’s will and men are not constrained by the artifice of religious, political and social dogma.  Kant was, after all, a man.  He was a creature of his will, as we all are.  And as long as his will was toward a lofty and idealistic duty, he did not betray his philosophy.  He loved.  In the end he knew both truths—the ecstatic and the merely hidebound dullness of everyday life and great works.”

 

 

Jake Zawlacki
Bargain

 

 I tried to sell my soul to the devil but the devil said, “Are you sure?”

_In Hell_: Old definition. Cold. Dark. No Dante stuff. Thousands of melded human bodies in the form of a ball.

“Yes, I’m sure. Why else would I have bothered to bring this up?”

The devil looks away in thought.

_Devil _: Invert common stereotype. Not red. Not horned. Maybe a woman?

“I just don’t think you know what you’re getting into. You said you wanted to be a better writer?”

I nod.

“Could you define better for me?” she asks.

“Okay. I want to be great,” I say. “I want to write the best metafiction that’s ever been written.”

“Metafiction?” the devil scoffs. She looks up at the words above. “I mean, even what you’re doing here is like a hundred years old.”

_Backstory_: Failed writer, failing writer? Verge of insanity. Nothing new or creative. Feels like everything’s been done before.

"Which is why I'm here," I say.

"Okay, so you want to be the best metafiction writer."

"Yes."

The devil shakes her head. "I don't think I can help you."

"What?" I ask.

"Well, I do best in the world. Not really subgenre."

"You're kidding."

"You ever thought about more mainstream stuff? Adventure? Mystery? Maybe a memoir?"

"What? No. I write to push the bounds of storytelling forward, not just common trash. I write what's important."

"To you."

"To the idea of fiction itself."

The devil shrugs.

_Speech_: Postures. Powerful. "Anyway, it would be a lot easier if you were looking to save someone, or something, or you loved somebody, or wanted to conquer something, but to be the best at something nobody cares about? That's not really what I do. You need to be in a kind of vice, not this Christian self-improvement stuff."

"But it's misguided," I interrupt. "Ego-driven."

"Maybe, but it'd just be a lot easier if you asked me to kill someone, for revenge. Then I could give you chains and make you my errand boy for a thousand years. I mean, did you want some chains? Flaming appendages? That sort of thing?"

"No, I'm trying to be a great writer. Why is this getting so much resistance?"

_Aside_: Frustrated from Devil's rejection. Memories of childhood somehow. Or past relationship? Parental rejection?

The devil shrugs. "I'd love to help you, really." She points to the mound of human flesh that breathes and shifts. A shuddering moan emerges from it. "Your soul would go great with all of them. But you're asking the wrong person."

"Then who do I ask?"

"Probably other writers. Alive, of course. All the ones down here," she thumbs to the heaving flesh ball, "I don't think they're going to be too helpful."

 

_Dive Bar_: Two barflies, maybe one. Lighting dim. An oiliness or greasiness to everything. Sticky. Sit alone. Sulk.

A writer walks up.

"Urgent, eh?" says the writer, not the failing one.

"Yeah, it's urgent. What the hell am I doing?"

"I don't know. What are you?"

_Writer (Not Failing)_ Traditional. Handsome. Charismatic. Mixture of Hemingway and Cary Grant. Better than the failing writer in all possible ways.

"I tried to sell my soul to the devil."

"What'd he say?"

"She. She said 'no.'"

The better writer laughs. "Hates your stuff that much, huh?"

I clang the ice around in my drink. "She said she doesn't do subgenre."

"Well, then write something else. Or don't write at all. Do something worthy of the devil, I guess."

"But this is worthy of the devil. I'm doing such a small niche thing, the only way anyone will read it is if it's great. Otherwise, no one will care. It has to be the best."

"I think it's okay to have your own audience. It doesn't need to be for everyone."

_Cary Hemingway's Writing_: Popular. Trash. Popular. Boring. Popular. Pap. Popular.

"She said, 'if you wanted to kill someone or conquer something,' like what I want is so meaningless. I'm trying to be the greatest, the best, at the pinnacle. That doesn't count for something?"

_Feelings_: Insecure. Sad. Hollow. Shriveled. Sunken.

The better writer shrugs. "You can also just write because you want to tell stories. It doesn't need to be the best anything."

"But it has to. I have to be the greatest, or else it's a farce. How can I do it?"

"I don't know. Change the scenario? Mix up the variables and maybe you can trick him."

"Her."

"Trick her."

"Trick her?"

"Yeah, why not?"

_Thought_: Joy. Total freedom. Mind reeling. Is this possible? To trick a primordial demon? Must be. Plot turn.

 

_Devil Interrupts_: Devil interrupts? How? On accident? Purpose?

"Okay, let me stop you right there."

"Sorry?"

"I'm so sick and tired of being thrown into writer's stories."

I'm unsure who this is.

"It's the devil."

"Okay."

"A little dumbstruck now, aren't you? Loss for words?"

_Me_: Dumbstruck.

"I just don't know how you're here."

"I'm here because you wrote me here and it's stupid and I don't want to be a part of your religious commentary."

"Oh, it's not religious—"

"I don't care what it is. This meta-thing you're doing. Leave me out of it."

"But I really do want to be the greatest metafiction writer there ever was."

"That's fine, but it's got nothing to do with me. This little Faustian-deal-with-the-devil-inversion thing. Don't care. Goodbye."

_Devil leaves_: Puff of smoke. Smoke cliché? Change. Immediate. New setting.

 

_Study_: Antiquated. Exactly "writer's study."

"That was weird," I say to no one. I put pen to paper again.

 

_In Hell_: Classic Dante now. Fire. Sulphur (spelled with f or ph?). Damned souls. Human flesh ball stays. Funny.

_Devil_: Classic version. Tall. Muscled. Lazily whips human flesh ball. Disconnected arms, legs, faces? Flinch.

"I don't think you know what you're getting into," he says.

"I do. I know exactly what I'm getting into. Pain. Suffering. All the rest."

_Nouns_: Pain, suffering too vague. Easy.

The devil takes the plume, a crow's feather, and dips it in a bottle of blood. He looks down at the contract, but the point suspends above the paper.

"What kind of writer did you say again?" he asks.

"Metafiction."

"And why?"

"Because this is all there is. This is storytelling in its purest form. Stories within stories."

"Huh. Okay." He nods and puts the blood-tipped pen to paper. First devil shows up.

_First Devil_: First Devil? From before?

"No, no. He's not signing that," says first devil.

"I'm not?" second devil asks.

"He's not?" I ask.

_Devils_: Married couple. Just couple? Invert associations. Gender roles? Invert traditional gender roles? Single.

"Stop. This is more of your contrived bullshit."

"I thought this felt familiar," says second devil.

"It's not familiar," says first devil, "it's literally the same thing. Just a slightly altered setting. I told you to leave me," he points to the second devil, "Us, out of it."

"I just want to—"

Second devil interrupts, "You ever think about just writing? Maybe you'll get better that way?"

 

_Dive Bar_: Two weeks later. A month. Cary Hemingway writer needs time because he's famous. Three months later?

"They won't let me write them into any of my stories."

"They?"

"The devils."

"Multiple devils?"

"Yeah. But I'm trying to do something interesting with it. Like invert the overdone selling-my-soul thing."

"Maybe just write something else."

"I can't. This is the only thing that matters. This is about the craft. This is about why we do what we do."

"I do it because it's fun."

"Fun. I wish it was fun. It's agony, baring souls."

"It's pretty fun for me."

"That's easy for you to say. You write two novels a year like they're vacations. I can't even write a story in a year."

He shakes his head.

_Head_: Face chiseled. Critique on attractiveness and success. Subtle though. Hide authorial insecurity.

 

_Cabinet of Curiosities Study_: Back in time. 1500s, 1000s? Faust myth. Look up year of legend origin.

I, an old man, sit under the light of a single candle.

"If only I had more time, more knowledge, my studies would be complete." I dip a quill into an inkpot and scribble more words in Latin.

_Latin_: Double check that. Italian? German?

The great demon Mephistopheles stands behind me.

_Mephistopheles_: Demonic but not classic devil trope. Black fur. Batlike. Wings? Twisted horns.

"I can give you time," Mephistopheles says.

I don't look behind me. "What is it you want?"

"Only your soul."

I turn in my chair to face him.

_Face_: Face same as the swamp creature from my childhood nightmares. Or more generic. Shadow figure? Link to past somehow.

"What is a soul to a man with time?" I ask.

The demon Mephistopheles smiles, teeth twisted and curved like vines. "A fair question." He plucks a scroll from nowhere and lays it on the table with a claw.

"May I add something?"

The demon twists his head to the side, curious. "You may," he says.

I write the additional condition and hand it to the demon who holds it close to his face. "Metafiction?" he asks.

 

_Other Devils_: Goddamn it.

First devil: "See, I told you," she says to the second devil. "Another scheme."

Second devil: "You were right."

Mephistopheles stands lost. He looks to the two devils.

"Ah," says the first, "he's unfamiliar with this nonsense." To Mephistopheles: "Consider yourself lucky, friend. You exist in a time before this," the first devil motions to the words, "existed." First devil takes the contract and crumples it.

"Don't you guys have other things to do?" I ask.

"I told you. No more bullshit devil stuff."

"We don't like it. If you—"

Mephistopheles interrupts, "he's done this before?" he asks.

The two devils nod.

"Then why not just give it to him?"

"It's personal, now," says the second devil. "He won't listen to us."

Mephistopheles runs his hand over his bony horns and nods.

"Is it like a coalition or something?" I ask.

"Just stop, would you?"

"Do something else."

Mephistopheles points a claw at me, his wings spreading. "Consider yourself lucky." 

"Lucky?" I ask. "Lucky to be stuck writing this?"

"Lucky we're letting you write us out of it."

_Devils_: Disappear. Flash? Instant. Gone.

 

_Dive Bar_: Repeat Scene with Writer.

"Still no luck?" he asks.

"Still no luck."

"Maybe you're just really stuck on the whole devil thing. Aren't they going to be on the lookout for that sort of stuff?"

_Brilliance_: Hope once more. Break repetition. Final act.

"Maybe you need to take the metaphor to its logical conclusion. What's a parallel to signing away your soul in a totally non-Devil way?"

"Like any contract?" I ask.

"I don't know," he says, "try it."

 

_NBA Draft_: Tall guys everywhere. In suits. Some families? Some from video? Old White Guy stands at podium.

"And the thirty-fifth selection in the (Year) NBA Draft by the (Team) is (My Name)."

I walk to the podium, my body tall and powerful. The Old White Guy hands me a hat with (Team Animal) on it and I put it on and smile to cameras.

"Congratulations," he says.

I nod and walk off the stage to meet my agent.

_Agent_: Greasy. Slicked hair. Huge, polished teeth.

"All right, kid. You made it. Ready for that contract?"

"Yessir," I say.

We walk to a room behind all the show and sit down at a table. He takes a stack of papers and points to different lines on them for me to sign.

I hold the pen in my hand.

"Can I add something?"

My agent smiles. "Kid, you take the money and you go to (City of Team) and you don't add a word."

I set the pen down.

 

_Dive Bar_: Repeat. Same, same, same.

I slap the table. "Shit."

The Ernest Grant hybrid looks at me. "What's got you all flustered?"

"It's not working. The situations aren't allowing me to change them."

"Then do another one. That's what my publisher always says. Just do—"

"That's it!"

 

_Publishing House_: New York. Everyone wears horn-rimmed glasses. Stylish.

_Me_: Slob writer. Baggy clothes. Stains.

_Publisher_: Perfect gray hair. Grey? Elegant. Incisive.

I sit across from the publisher as she reads through the contract.

"You want us to market you how again?" she asks, a grin slipping in.

"As the greatest metafiction writer ever."

She leans back in her chair and shrugs. "Sure," she says. "We can do that. Your stuff is pretty good, you know."

I smile at the compliment.

She slides the paperwork over to me. I grab a pen and sign furiously before any devils show up. None do.

"Anxious?" she asks.

"Yeah, I've just been trying to do this for a while now."

"Of course," she says. "I'm happy we could work it out."

"Me too," I say. "So, I'll be seeing my book out pretty soon then?"

_Her_: Uneasy. Pause. Looks away? Something tangible.

"Oh," she says. "The small press we work with on these things tends to be a little behind."

"Small press?"

"Yes, your agent did tell you that, right?"

_Agent_: Shit. WRITE LITERARY AGENT EARLIER.

"I hadn't talked to him about the specifics. I just trusted he had my best interests in mind."

"Oh, he did. It's just that, well, to put it bluntly, sir, there isn't a huge audience for this."

"Huge audience?" I ask. "Be blunter."

_Her_: Sighs. Smiles. Laughs?

"Nobody really reads this."

"Pardon?" I say.

_Despair_: Panic. Void. Aether. Torment. Dante. Sisyphus. Dread.

"I apologize. I just meant that there is a specific audience for what you excel at and it's pretty small. Art for art's sake, if you know what I mean."

"But you agreed to say that I'm the greatest metafiction writer of all time."

"That's right. And truthfully, you may very well be the greatest metafiction writer there ever was. It's just that not many people will, um, know."

 

_In Hell_: Two devils. Mephistopheles. Me. Human flesh ball.

The devils laugh.

"It's not funny."

"Jesus Christ, I thought we were bad." First devil whips the flesh human ball. It cries out.

The second devil wipes tears from his eyes. "It's literally worse than hell. To be genuinely great at something and nobody cares, at all."

"And he signed his soul away."

"No, I didn't," I protest. "You don't have my soul."

"That's right. We don't. Your publisher does."

Mephistopheles laughs and when I see that gnarled mouth, I cut the scene.

 

_Dive Bar_: Cary Hemingway writer. One barfly. My book in hand.

"I really liked it," says the better writer.

"Really?" I ask.

"Yeah, I did. I think it's fantastic."

 

_In Hell_: Three devils again.

"Hey, get out of here," I say.

"Not that easy." The devils all smile gruesome teeth, chunks of flesh stuck between.

"Fine," I say. "I'll leave."

 

_Dive Bar_: Continue.

"Oh, wow. That means a lot," I say.

"I don't think a lot of people are going to get it," says the better writer.

"Oh."

 

_In Hell_: Three devils. HOW?

"Stop it!" I yell and they all recoil. Then they laugh.

"Don't you get it?" says the first devil.

"Get what?"

"This is where your soul is now."

"Where? In hell?" I ask.

Mephistopheles nods.

Cut scene.

 

_Dive Bar_: Again.

"It's just, a little…" he says and waits.

"Pretentious."

"No, no! I was going to say philosophical. Maybe a bit abstract."

I look down at the table and catch my finger on the gouges.

 

_In Hell_: AGAIN?

"You wrote yourself into this," says the first devil. "This is what you wanted."

"I didn't want to go to hell."

"You wanted to sell your soul," says the second devil. Mephistopheles smiles. Shudder.

"Wait, I thought you didn't want to be in fiction anymore? Why are you bothering me?"

"Oh, we didn't, but we're loving where you're taking this."

_Speech_: Finger pointing. "I got what I wanted. I tricked you and signed a contract and am now the greatest metafiction writer to have ever lived. Yes, it's true; I won't be widely read. Many people will not know my name, but that doesn't matter. I made my pact with the publisher, who believes in me, by the way, and I'll be the greatest there ever was."

"And no one will care," says the second devil.

"Which is why you're here," says the first devil.

 

_Dive Bar_:

"But it's art, right? You do it because you're compelled to."

"Yeah."

He takes a drink and sets it down. "Not because it'll be here forever. It won't, you know. None of this will. It only matters because we make it matter. It matters in the moment. You get that, right?"

I look away. "Uh huh. Sure."

He finishes the drink in a gulp and stares at me. "Well, I'm off to a reading. Publicity thing. You'll . . ."

"Be right here."

"Keep at it, friend. Try and enjoy it." He points at my book in his hand. "And if you don't, at least you're the best there ever was."

 

_In Hell/Dive Bar_: No separation. Loneliness. Unappreciated. Best at what? Does it matter? It doesn't matter.

_Meaning_: Meta greatness to satisfy ego. What's real greatness? Real meaning? Forgotten the why. Why I do this. Greatness as solipsism. Meta-invented greatness. Invented failure. Real greatness. Greatness for what? I've forgotten it. The real meaning for this meaning-making. What is that meaning? What is the meaning of all this meaning-making? Forgotten. Rewrite this.

Is that hell?

 

_Devil(s)_:

"Yes."

 

 

 

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