The Migration of the Stork

Ismail Kadare

Walking on Pisha Street one gray afternoon—the sort of afternoon from which only dreary things can be expected—I happened upon R.P. standing on the curb opposite me.

R.P. was the drollest person imaginable. It was too late to avoid him, even in a shameless way. The narrow street made that impossible. It would have been better simply to yell from afar: I hate you, you bore! than to pretend not to notice him.

Alas, there was no time for philosophizing. He stepped off the sidewalk cheerfully and crossed the street. This is not the end of the world, I told myself. You will repeat the same "Hello, how are you," mechanically, idiotically, until this torture ends, and each goes his separate way.

"Hello, how are you?" he said, shaking my hand.

"Hello, how are you?" I repeated, without bothering to hide my lack of interest.

Bastard! I thought to myself. Why can't you understand the misery you cause? The most maddening thing about this man was precisely his obliviousness to the vexation he provoked in people, a vexation that many displayed quite openly.

If you yourself know how you are, why bother going out? (And if you don't know, that is worse yet.)

"So, anything new," he asked for the third or fourth time in a row, while I kept thinking: How can such a person be alive; how can the ground hold him up?

"Nothing much, anything new with you," I said.

"Nothing much, just the usual."

Villain! I wanted to scream. What terrible stroke of fate put you in my path, on a day as hopeless as this, when I so desperately need the antithesis of monotony.

"Well, see you," I said with the same droning voice, surprised at how the sentiment "I hope never to see you" could be so calmly translated into its opposite.

"See you," he replied and shook my hand, after which I almost groaned in his face.

I had already advanced several steps when I heard him calling me. I spun around as if someone had shot me in the back. I could not believe my ears—

could this evil really be so insistent?

My dismay was so grossly apparent that he couldn't help but ask, "What's wrong?"

What's wrong with you? I almost yelled. But he, cheerful as always, continued:

"I forgot to tell you. Did you hear? Lasgush Poradeci has been having an affair this summer."

"What?!"

Lois and Varga by Lisa Taddeo

It was a regular old bar, except there was a stripper pole in an unremarkable corner of the room. The reason for its existence had a lot to do with how Al lost his wife. The other thirty percent of the reason was that the stripper who lived in the town, Varga, had suggested it to Al. She said it would be good for the economy of the island, that it would be interesting and fun for regulars and, during the high season, it would bring in a load of business. But most of the time, Varga said, it would be super chill. Most of the time nobody would even know it existed. The regulars would drink Pabst and casually glance over from time to time.

This is not, she said, about selling sex. I’m just going to season the room with it.

It was only topless. Varga kept thong panties on. She wore a regular rotation of panties in primary colors with girlish and white eyelet scalloping, which the regulars joked was a good way of knowing what day it was if they hadn’t read the paper that morning. She did about four stripteases a night. Each dance lasted two songs, one of which was almost always a Springsteen.

It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list “killed”. He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.

She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.

There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.