With Gods On My Side

This month's assignment was to write precisely 500 words based on either the following photograph or alternatively on a quotation from a Jorge Luis Borges' short story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."
The quotation is "Some limited and waning memory of Herbert Ashe, an engineer for the Southern Railway Line, still lingers in the hotel at Androgué, among the effusive honeysuckle vines and in the illusory depths of the mirrors."

For this story I chose the photograph rather than the quotation.

With Gods On My Side

So what happened to the old Norse gods? Whither the Greek and Roman pantheon, the myriad local pagan deities of wood and water, starlight and love, upon the terrible rise of monotheism?

As belief waned, so did their power, and yet the gods being immortal have not died, but simply faded.
Many, embittered, are reduced to hiding car keys or making underwear ride up. The more malevolent deities have naturally gravitated toward bureaucracy and government.
Yet not all have fallen so low, for as I have discovered there live still the gods of joyous Misrule.

Hearken, dear reader.
The twin naiads, Capucine and Clothilde, have in recent years chosen to dwell in the window of a bookshop on the Quai de Valmy in Paris, overlooking the canal that joins the Bassin de Vilette to the Seine.
Their self-assigned rôle is to pluck a single thought from the mind of each passer-by, simultaneously replacing it with one from another person. Whether gift or curse depends upon their whim, one twin being good, the other evil.

I discovered their existence quite by chance when one evening I found myself in sudden and unaccountable possession of a passable facility with conversational Turkish. Retracing my steps toward the point of this revelation I observed the following: as people walked past a certain window their expressions changed, some to delight, others consternation, but most to momentary bafflement before they walked on.
The window merely displayed a selection of volumes on twentieth century art. From a certain angle, however, and fleetingly as if viewed through a blind spot, an image appeared of two girls in sylvan parkland, elegantly attired, masked and beautiful.

I was still reeling from this apparent trick of the light when a woman passed the window and to my horror, the twin apparitions appeared to reach inside her head.
It was only for an instant. The woman paused momentarily, her expression one of confusion as if losing her thread of thought, before regaining her composure and walking on as if nothing had happened.

From my vantage point on the canal path I stood transfixed, observing a dozen passers-by endure the same strange ritual. At last I could withstand the mystery no longer and crossed the street, determined to pass the window myself, to pause at that very spot and divine the truth.

I have since passed that window at every conceivable opportunity.
Their strength returning with my growing belief, the goddesses have favoured me, ridding my mind of clutter and junk, of painful or unwanted memories and redistributing them among a baffled population, replacing them in return with snippets and snatches of other people’s minds; their experiences, abilities, memories and emotions, their most intimate delights and desires.

I hereby bequeath my soul to the goddesses Capucine and Clothilde in the hope that upon my death all that is me; every last scintilla of my conscious and unconscious mind will be gifted, thought by thought, to the collective consciousness of Paris.
Heaven indeed.

An Englishman In Paris

This month's assignment was to write precisely 500 words based on the following photograph:

An Englishman In Paris

Smythe paced.

She was late, but he had always believed that to be a woman's prerogative. "Fashionably late" she would call it when eventually she arrived, high heels awkward on the ubiquitous kitty-litter with which all Parisian parks are inexplicably paved, a breathless kiss rouging his cheek.

"Meet me in the Tuileries, by Rodin's ROFL" she had whispered.

His expression of helpless bafflement was sufficiently eloquent for her to add, "Look at the statues and figure it out for yourself, silly. God, you are so square it's adorable."

And then she was gone.

Smythe paused in his pacing, glancing down at his shoes. Immaculate only minutes before, the shiny black leather was now sueded grey with dust. The godawful muck might well be kinder to horse's hooves than cobbles or asphalt but this was twenty-bloody-eleven and he shuddered to think what chaos might ensue were he to ride a horse to the Tuileries through Parisian lunchtime traffic. It must be a conspiracy by Paris cobblers and boot-polish manufacturers. He was grateful the stuff was dry; on rainy days he had to chisel his shoes clean.

For a moment he considered standing on the grass but this was not allowed by park ordnances and Smythe would never dream of transgressing such authority. The grass was for the statues to roll about on; mere humans were forced to trail through the cat-litter.

An Englishman in Paris, he mused, was always a fish out of water. He had lived here for most of his life but would never be Parisian. It was much the same for the English in America. There were Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, African-Americans, even a few Native-Americans, but never – ever – English-Americans. He would always be “an Englishman in America” just as he was “an Englishman in Paris:” a small and misunderstood island of quiet desperation with a slight air of Dickensian fustiness, a constant twenty years behind his immediate surroundings.

He checked his watch: almost half an hour late. That was well within the bounds of prerogative and he was happy to wait. Scattered throughout the park, casual groups of empty green chairs held mysterious conclave but he was loath to sit in one. Some part of him knew that it would be inelegant to be caught seated when she arrived. It must appear as if he had just got here himself. The Englishman again. A Parisian would have been sprawled in a chair for ages by now; indeed would probably have charmed a passing girl and disappeared, reeking of Gauloises and stale coffee.

He waited, feigning nonchalance as he scanned the paths for her, determined not to wave like a gauche American but to pretend he had not seen her until she startled him with her presence.

The statue caught his eye. What had she called it? “Rodin’s ROFL.” The phrase drifted through his mind and he tried to picture what kind of person might really talk like that …

She arrived, fashionably late, but Smythe had fled.

Beach Blanket Blitzkrieg

This week's sentence was from H. G. Wells' classic, 'The War Of The Worlds.'

It was:

'There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty.'

Beach Blanket Blitzkrieg

There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty.
It made guttural sounds, belched and turned over.
‘What the fuck IS that?’ Candice blinked, reached for her glasses and then gaped in disbelief.
‘A German naturist. Every summer it's the same around here: Fritzie and his fraü get all nostalgic for the Third Reich and invade the rest of Europe. Only these days they do it naked. Makes me kind of miss the days of blitzkrieg.’
'Certainly puts you off bratwürst for life.'
'And a whole lot else besides. By lunchtime this beach will be filled with fat flesh and geriatric German genitalia roasting floppily in the sun. I think it's time we fled the scene of the crime. What say we take refuge in a coffee?'
'Good idea,' Candice removed her glasses again to save her eyes from further assault. 'I need some caffeine to get over the shock.'

The café terrace gave a nice view of the Atlantic, blue under clear Lusitanian skies. Mercifully a low wall hid the naturist from view.
Arnë sipped his espresso and took a long, admiring look at his companion. Candice smiled, happy to be an object of adoration, if only for the length of her vacation. She reflected that the two of them looked somewhat better naked than the German on the beach.
She had met Arnë just yesterday and this morning had woken up in his apartment, their bodies lost in a tangle of sheets, the sea breeze cooling them deliciously. Sure, he was a little older than she would have liked, and a little flabbier, but he had a nice smile and after all, Candice herself was, let's be honest, a pretty plain, bordering on frumpy, late-thirties myopic typist named Tracey, out for one last attempt at the Shirley Valentine experience. Tracey could lie about Arnë all she liked when she got home but for now, "Candice" was out for guilt-free, casual holiday sex, and lots of it.

Her first day back, Tracey rushed round to see her sister and insisted on regaling her with every lurid detail of her "non-stop shag-fest" with "sexy surfer Arnë." Jane had begged her for pictures but Tracey said her camera had been stolen at the airport. Better her sister didn't know the flabby, middle-aged truth.
Jane was pouring a second coffee when the doorbell rang.
‘I’ll get it!’ yelled Tracey.
She froze in sudden horror on the doorstep. There stood Arnë with a huge bunch of flowers. Her jaw dropped. How had he found her? Was he some kind of creepy stalker? And how in heaven’s name could she get rid of him before her sister saw him.
Jane dashed from the kitchen, beaming.
‘Tracey, I’d like you to meet my boss, Andy. He’s back from a business trip. I suppose I can tell you the big secret now: we’re engaged to be married!’
‘Oh, fuck.’ said Arnë.
‘Oh, fuck.’ said Candice.

Prelude To An Incident On Somerleyton Marshes

This week’s sentence was taken from L. Frank Baum’s ‘The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz’.

It was:
‘Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions.’

Prelude To An Incident On Somerleyton Marshes

Blindingly bright shivers of light sparked off the water, breeze-ruffled, disturbed by the passage of mallard and water vole. Green-mottled beneath the surface shimmer lurked a sly old pike, invisible in the weeds, cold as the death awaiting unwary stickleback or perch.
Lacking the patience of pike, the boy raised his eyes from the river and the world swept to the horizontal.
Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. Only the broken brick stumps of windpumps, mostly long-derelict dared raise their heads above that endless ochre ocean, their graceful white sails long since replaced by diesel pumps hidden in nasty little fletton boxes alongside the myriad dykes and ditches of this trackless world of bog and fen.
Black peat oozed black water over the boy's boots as he walked, filling his footprints, leaving a trail of miniature lakes in his wake.
The soft squelch followed him, yet the vast expanse was far from silent. A cacophony of song from warbler, coot, moorhen and mallard accompanied him. Across the marsh came the low boom of a bittern, and far above the water meadows a single skylark trilled it's brilliant song to the world. The boy craned his neck and squinted into the sun until he spotted the tiny dot. It must have nested on the riverbank, the thin ribbon of short, duck-cropped grass snaking through the crowding, hissing reeds.
The breeze gave the marsh its sibilant voice and brushed its fingers softly through the surface sending waves, sea-like flowing across the reedbeds, hypnotising the boy into daydreams of pirate ships and the cries of gulls.

Tiny stained patches of dull green-black alder carr stitched the join between the flattened disc of dull gold and a sky far bigger than the world.
There above him spanned a monstrous arch of universal unreal blue, intense as lapiz lazuli on Tamurlane’s domes in far Samarkand. The boy gazed upward in awe, his dreams now sent flying by magic carpet into the worlds he loved: of exotic Arabian nights and tales of caravanserai along the ancient silk road.
That great bullying, overbearing sky pressed down on him and on this land flatter than freshly ironed linen, dwarfing the world, squeezing it into these few square miles of waterlogged flood plain where he wandered twixt mead and mere, an insignificant ant traversing a devastating emptiness.

Up ahead he heard at last the swish and crackle of scythes through Norfolk reed and the low mardling of Habbo and Roly in their flatboats cutting bundles for thatching, their harvest soon to gleam gold on church and cottage roof, lovingly entwined with hazel spars. The thatch would be good for another eighty years of blazing hot summers and those bitter Norfolk winters that lashed down from the arctic, their bellies replete with invading hordes of swan and tern.

Habbo looked up as the boy waded closer.

Misrememberie

This week's sentence was taken from E.M. Forster's 'A Room With A View'.

It was:
'It tasted partly of the paper in which it was wrapped, partly of hair oil, partly of the great unknown.'

Misrememberie

It was a small room and very dark after the dazzling sunshine. The intense blues and greens of the square outside were replaced by smoky browns, massive dark-wood dressers leaving only squeeze-room around the big family table, spread with a dull orange plastic tablecloth. I saw why Ana's parents had chosen to greet me outside; there was no room in here for their ubiquitous and effusive Lusitanian hugs and kisses.
We sat. Rosalinda, painfully Portuguese; small, fat, black-shawled, grey-haired and very likely the image of her tall, slim, beautiful daughter twenty years hence. José, his English worse than my Portuguese, dashed into the kitchen, returning with a small parcel wrapped in newspaper.
Ana conspiratorial: 'Don't act grossed-out! It's pig's ear in jelly. Pãe makes it himself.'
The old man leaned forward, urging me with gestures to open the package and devour its contents. I decided to play along; the foolish foreigner falling for José’s favourite joke. After all, I like pork; what could be so bad?
With a display of reverence, I unwrapped the parcel. There on a bed of sodden grey newsprint, glistening in a coating of gelatinous ooze that looked suspiciously like semen but which I hoped was merely pork jelly, nestled what was unmistakably a whole pig's ear, mercifully sliced into bite-sized pieces. Anticipating José’s laughter I picked up a piece and put it in my mouth.
If it was a joke, he was playing it to the hilt. His expression was one of genuine concern as to the quality of his gross offering.
Not wishing to give offence, I felt compelled to eat the damned thing. It tasted partly of the paper in which it was wrapped, partly of hair oil, partly of the great unknown. In texture it was not unlike tough raw squid, if ever a squid harboured such a disgusting quantity of gristle, but I fought back a wave of nausea and chewed doggedly on, nodding and smiling in such a way as to hopefully satisfy my host's expectant expression as to the incomparable deliciousness of this most rare and delicate morsel.
Saved by the old man raising a glass, I eagerly joined him, the lubrication allowing me finally to force down the revolting gobbet.
I grinned widely and nodded my thanks, praying that my demonstration of enthusiasm would not produce a whole barrel of pork gristle from the kitchen.
I need not have worried. The ice broken, great bowls of avocado salad and piri-piri prawns materialised on the table, accompanied by José's home-grown pink olives, marinaded in orange and herbs and a small mountain of the fabulous local bread, chilled vinho verde and (with a cackle from José) a bottle of throat-stripping aguardente.
Lunch over, Rosalinda beamed at her daughter and dragged her into the kitchen. José slammed a carved box down on the table, opening it with great ceremony to reveal his personal, home-made set of dominoes: teak with inset brass dots.
He grinned. I had become part of the family.


This is a deliberate mis-remembering of two separate meals, one in Cascais and one in Sintra.
My first meeting with Ana’s parents (Mãe and Pãe: Rosalinda and José) involved José sacrificing one of his scrawny chickens, which he grilled on a workman’s brazier in the road outside. It was one of the best pieces of chicken I had ever tasted.
Even though I was vegetarian back then the Portuguese had no understanding of the concept (we’re talking late 1980s) and so chicken, pork and fish were on all the vegetarian menus and I didn’t want to abuse their hospitality.
The pig’s ear was part of a feast laid on by João and Carla. They presented us with Feijoada, which is a traditional festival dish including (heaped on a gigantic platter) black beans, bacon, smoked ribs, trotters, tail, various sausages made from the more adventurous parts of the pig, and of course the ears. It was fabulous apart from the ears, which were pretty much as I described them in the story.

I still have Pãe’s infamous dominoes, which he presented me as a gift. I soon figured out the reason he was unbeatable: the handmade teak dominoes are beautifully grained and all slightly irregular in shape and he had simply learned what each one looked like from the back so always picked the pieces he needed to win, the sly old fox.

Things Become Interesting For Otto

This week's sentence was taken from John Steinbeck's 'Cannery Row.'

It was:
'It was not so interesting driving at night.'

Things Become Interesting For Otto

Absently flicking through radio stations Otto at last settled on one that might annoy him slightly less than the others and headed south out of Mechelen on the E19. He was dragging a container-load of patio furniture to Évora for no readily apparent reason, but a job's a job and Otto drove trucks and that's all there was to it. Why the Portuguese wanted Belgian patio furniture was not something he was going to waste his life pondering; neither would he muse much on the whys and wherefores of the boxes of glazed tiles he would be towing on his return.
It was not so interesting driving at night. On the rare occasions he got to drive in daylight there was a whole world of colour and shapes, of fields and forests, buildings, cars, oh, and pretty girls of course.
But at night? Unless he drove through a town everything outside of his headlight beams might as well not exist. And these days with most places by-passed he could drive clean across Europe and not see a single town or city until he reached his destination.
Mostly Otto drove at night so it was just him and the dark. The living world was reduced to a glow on the horizon or swarms of tiny amber lights swimming in the big black. Otto existed in his own personal pool of light; a hundred yards of floodlit asphalt surrounded by a whole universe of nothingness, his sole relief being the headlights of oncoming cars and the tail-lights of those who passed him.
White.
Red.
Black.
Daytimes he would sleep in his cab, waking at sunset to blink in the garish glare of over-lit service areas. A greenish world of artificial light. Bright halogen on shiny plastic. Conflicting shadows. Endless cloned cafés, endless bitter coffees, microwaved factory food and the stink of urinal cake. His fellow denizens of the night hunched, anonymous figures scattered sparsely across the tables; uncommunicative, avoiding eye contact; the occasional nod or grunt and then alone again and back out into the void, driving caffeinated at the blackness. Visual stimulus restricted to the patch of asphalt rushing at the front of his truck, Otto's universe contracted until his thoughts roamed no further than the insides of his own skull. Not that there was a whole lot in there to keep him entertained.
About five miles outside of Lille he suddenly caught sight of something at the side of the road. His headlights picked it out clear as day but in the few seconds it took his brain to register what he was seeing he had almost passed it. He slammed on the brakes as hard as he dared, concentrating on not jack-knifing his trailer. A rush of airbrakes and squealing tyres and then all was silent except for the ticking of the cooling engine.
"Holy shit!"
Otto took a deep breath, his heart pounding.
What the hell was THAT doing there?
Then, slowly, he reached for the door handle.

Breaking Point

This week's sentence was take from Dickens' 'A Tale Of Two Cities'.

The sentence was:
"Through the rusted bars, tastes, rather than glimpses, were caught of the jumbled neighbourhood; and nothing within range, nearer or lower than the summits of the two-great towers of Notre-Dame, had any promise on it of healthy life or wholesome aspirations."

Breaking Point

A short stroll from the Cathedral, beneath the spreading chestnuts that line the ornate façade of the Hotel Dieu brings you, dear reader, to the forbidding iron gates of the Paris police headquarters, behind the bars of which you might find, on this particular day, two pathetic figures pitifully weeping and hunched over as if attempting to escape the weight of the world bearing down on them.
Through the rusted bars, tastes, rather than glimpses, were caught of the jumbled neighbourhood; and nothing within range, nearer or lower than the summits of the two-great towers of Notre-Dame, had any promise on it of healthy life or wholesome aspirations.
Far above our forlorn pair the sun shone in a clear blue sky but their eyes were blinded by an inner reek and fog that sucked all colour and warmth from their surroundings and all joy from their hearts, leaving their very souls blackened and desecrated.
Day after dreadful day, their unrelenting ordeal had ground them unmercifully well beyond the breaking point of any sane man until now, bereft of hope they waited grimly for death's release.
Their torturer smiled with sickening self-satisfaction eliciting another wail of grief from the first of his helpless victims.
"God, make it stop!"
His companion slowly shook his bowed head.
"God? God has abandoned us, my old friend."
He paused and winced in pain.
"No God would ever allow such tortures to exist outside Hell, and I regret to say that I believe we are still in the land of the living."
"Barely, though. And not for much longer if this goes on."
"The thought that God could allow such foulness within sight of His house beggars belief. But perhaps if we were to renounce our belief in God we could renounce Hell as well and so escape."
"And what then? Oblivion?"
His companion paused and sighed heavily; tears coursed down his haggard face.
"Oblivion. Blesséd oblivion. How I yearn for its embrace. Anything to stop this unspeakable torment."
He leaned against the old stone wall, deriving scant comfort from its cold, hard surface.
Squinting across at his friend he attempted a last desperate smile, though it seemed to the other that he saw only the rictus grin of a long-dead corpse.
"We could always kill ourselves."
"Hmm. Tempting; though I know that I, for one, no longer have the strength. Perhaps we could kill one another?"
"Or kill HIM!"
A dry chuckle escaped their throats.
"Ah, but if we kill him another will only take his place. Face it, my old friend, this torture will continue until we are dead and - if there is indeed such a cruel thing as God - for all eternity."

But perhaps there is a God, for at that very moment the busker put down his guitar and an ecstatic rush of colour, light, life and hope returned to the two policemen at the gate.

"If he comes back again tomorrow I'm gonna throw that fucker in the Seine."


The busker was just behind the middle of the three people on the right of the photo.
Believe me when I say he was just as bad as the two policemen described him.
What a pity that those folk who have to work in the square and have such a beautiful sight to look at are forced to suffer such appalling noise.

Two Sous

This week's sentence was taken from Victor Hugo's 'Les Misérables'.

It was: 'Between the walls of the two yards there was a dark and narrow street, the Rue de Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine, which seemed to be exactly what he was looking for.'

Two Sous

Nobody gave a second glance to the stocky figure, black clad, bespectacled and riotously moustachioed, as he lugged a canvas sack through the dank labyrinth of Parisian slums which in those years clung desperately to the riverside; a pestilential netherworld of fester and reek, of crime and destitution. Down here life was as cheap and vile as the compendious varieties of vice available in every cellar and alley.
Émile, in his mire-bespattered element had been wandering for days through this godforsaken gehenna, alert at all times for the slightest glimpse of his quarry. His client's requirements were exacting but he knew the area well and was certain he would find the right girl in this most wretched and hopeless human sewer.
By mid-morning the rain had cleared and low grey clouds were scudding on a brisk breeze. Émile found himself betwixt a coopers' yard and that of a tannery, the stench from which would have been unbearable had the bitter wind not borne it away from him.
Between the walls of the two yards there was a dark and narrow street, the Rue de Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine, which seemed to be exactly what he was looking for. Scarcely wide enough for a handcart it ran for thirty paces between crumbling, ivy-clad walls before opening slightly into a ramshackle terrace of dingy drinking dens and squalid tenements, the cobbles slick with refuse and worse, the buildings leaning at crazy angles, falling forward like drunks and leaving the street below in perpetual semi-darkness.
Émile's eye had been drawn to the pitiful sight of a small girl attempting to clear some kind of pathway through the filth. A tiny, starved waif, dwarfed by the broom she was using, clad in tattered rags; her lank, matted hair soaked from the earlier rain.
He smiled. The child was perfect. He approached slowly, trying not to startle her.
A woman's shout stopped him dead and froze the girl to the spot. Emerging from a narrow alley like some slimy behemoth, a monstrous harridan charged at him.
"Bastard! Pervert!" she yelled accusingly.
Émile, conciliatory, arms out, palms upturned.
"Madame, your daughter?"
"For shame! She is much too young."
She looked him up and down, haughtily.
"I do, however, have a girl more suited. Do you have money?"
"Madame, please! You misunderstand."
He proffered his hand.
"My name is Émile Bayard. I am an artist and merely wish to sketch the child. I can offer you money but all I ask is the chance to draw her just as she stands. She would add a certain character to an illustration I have planned."
The woman looked from Émile to her daughter and back again.
"Two sous!"
Émile produced the money.
"I really am most grateful, Madame. If you would ask your daughter to stand just as she is for a few minutes …"

The girl's wide, frightened eyes stared up at them as Émile peeled back the proof from his etching plate.
Victor gasped, his own eyes suddenly wet with tears.

Émile Bayard's original illustration for Cosette.

My own treasured copy of Les Misérables, bound (beautifully but inexplicably) in bright blue leather.

I have no idea if Bayard found the model for Cosette on the streets.
Perhaps she was paid to pose in a studio, though from the diaries of Bayard's contemporaries whose works I collect it seems likely that Cosette was indeed a street urchin sketched en plein air or at best the daughter of a friend.
I do wonder - when I see those eyes everywhere advertising the musical derived from Hugo's story - what she might think if only she knew how famous her face would become.

Berlin. Afternoon of November 10, 1938. The Butler Hüber Awakes …

This week's sentence is from Cicero's 'Second Philippic Against Mark Antony'.

"The household found these repulsive goings on completely unendurable."

Berlin. Afternoon of November 10, 1938. The Butler Hüber Awakes …

Jerked out of his reverie Hüber blinked at the light and sucked his old lips.
Raising a hand slowly to wipe the drool from the corner of his mouth he heard now the tinkling of the shattered glass and knew what had woken him.

Rheumy eyes roamed the room.
Across whitewashed walls long turned grey splashed a creamy yellow wedge of dusty late-afternoon sunlight, its apex pointing accusingly at Hüber where he sat jammed into a spartan chair that seemed a very part of his own spidery frame.

His gaze settled on the distorted image of the window thrown by the setting sun.
Not yet, he mused. Plenty of time.

Faint and muffled through the mired, grimy glass, sounds sneaked inside his sanctuary: thuggish jeering; the clatter of running boots on cobbles.
Sturmabteilung, Hüber grimaced with distaste. Too rowdy for Schutzstaffel.

That would be the bakery again, though who would have thought there might be anything left to smash after last night?
Nice old lady. They took her husband this morning according to the kitchen tittle-tattle. The maids had whined about having to walk further now to fetch bread.

Hüber shook his head and sighed. Filthy brownshirts going about their filthy business.

The household found these repulsive goings on completely unendurable.
Somehow though, he knew they would endure it all - both the household and the servants downstairs – and with admirable Prussian stoicism.
His master after all was a solid German citizen and so could show no public sympathy for the plight of the Jüden. Those untermensch may have been bearable in the old Republic but they had no place in the new Reich. You don’t argue with the party line. At least not in a nice, respectable household.
This respectable household just wished things could be done with a modicum more decorum; nobody had managed to get a wink of sleep last night.

Hüber of course held no opinion; he knew his place.

Dozing in his chair below stairs, watching the wall and waiting.
Not yet.
Once the wedge of sunlight touched the corner wainscotting it would be time.
Time for him to disentangle himself from the chair, to creak his weary way up the small bare back stair - old knees cracking like the ancient treads - and to array his master in evening dress.

The sunlight crawled across the wall.
Plenty of time …

Nervous footsteps.
A maid flitted through to the kitchen to fetch water, averting her gaze from him as was only proper.

Vaguely distressing sounds brushed softly at his ears, seemingly beseeching him from the street.
Weeping …
The old baker’s wife.

What could you do?
He repeated to himself.
What could you do?
Hüber glanced at the clock and shrugged.
He would do nothing.
All of them would do nothing.

Blanking out the sounds from the street, he hunched his scrawny neck deeper into the greasy, threadbare felt collar of his jacket, closed his eyes and tried to slip back unnoticed into his dream.

The Luck Of The Irish

This week's sentence was from James Joyce's 'Ulysses':
At this intelligence, in which he seemingly evinced little interest, Mr. Bloom gazed abstractedly for the space of a half a second or so in the direction of a bucketdredger, rejoicing in the farfamed name of Eblana, moored alongside Customhouse quay and quite possibly out of repair, whereupon he observed evasively: "Everybody gets their own ration of luck, they say."

The Luck Of The Irish

"As a dodo, Mister Bloom … as a veritable dodo. A very unlucky turn of events."

At this intelligence, in which he seemingly evinced little interest, Mr. Bloom gazed abstractedly for the space of a half a second or so in the direction of a bucketdredger, rejoicing in the farfamed name of Eblana, moored alongside Customhouse quay and quite possibly out of repair, whereupon he observed evasively:

"Everybody gets their own ration of luck, they say."

"Aye, so they do, Mister Bloom, so they do, but good or bad; there's the rub."

Bloom nodded, warily.
"She's a fickle mistress to be sure."

He waited for his companion to continue, contriving at the same time to glance with feigned nonchalance at the liner waiting beyond the Eblana; the liner bound for New York and new life.
The steward by the boarding ramp was checking his watch.

"Now take as an example our recently departed acquaintance Master Dædalus. Some might say that before she frowned so unmercifully, Lady Luck had cast her smiling countenance upon him."

"How so, Inspector?"

"It seems that, just prior to his untimely and tragic demise at the hand of person or persons unknown Master Dædalus had come into possession of what might be described as a very considerable fortune … a fortune that it appears has … disappeared.”

Bloom swallowed hard. Finding the Inspector waiting on the dock was shock enough, but now …

"Master Dædalus lies in the mortuary with his throat slit. His run of luck has, it seems run out.
Of course some folk contrive to make their own luck, do they not, Mister Bloom?”
He paused.

“Now that's a pretty heavy pair of suitcases you're toting. Would you be, by any chance, heading for that ocean liner? And would these cases be stuffed with Master Dædalus' missing money?
I think you should hand me your ticket and boarding pass, Mister Bloom. It's a different voyage you'll be making today."

The jig was up.
Or was it?
Reluctantly Bloom fished out his documents and handed them over.
At the same time he let the blade drop from his sleeve into his palm.
One stab was all he needed.
Yes, Inspector - he thought – Some people make their own luck …

Before he could act, however, out from the shadow of the Custom House stepped a uniformed policeman. The Inspector turned to him.

"Constable, would you be so kind as to place Mister Bloom under arrest."

Bloom panicked. He took a step backwards, and a second, then turned and fled for his life, the constable in hot pursuit.

The Inspector looked down at the heavy cases.
He looked at the boarding pass and ticket in his hand.
He paused for a moment’s contemplation, turning his face up to the rain.
It was always raining in Cork.

Aye, Mister Bloom, you have to make your own luck.

A purser checked his papers at the top of the boarding ramp.
"Welcome aboard the Titanic, Mister Bloom."