Nova objava - 07.04.2020 19:24 Prevod sa engleskog jezika-materijal za osmu sedmicu, Translation into Montenegrin, week 8;
Slingshot by Souvankham Thammavongsa (Harper’s)
Souvankham Thammavongsa won the O. Henry Award in 2018 for this short story.
“There’s no such thing as love. It’s a construct,” Richard told me one day when I went over to his apartment. I had gotten a package of his in my mail. “You know anyone who is in love?”
I thought of Rose, who always said she was in love whenever she met a new guy and then would wait by the phone all day, crying. Then I thought of my friends and my own experience. We had all known it, but it was something that happened a long time ago, not something we sat around thinking about. It happened, and when it’s happened, there is no need to think too hard about it.
“Maybe,” I said, “you haven’t had much time to know a range of people.”
He told me he knew a lot of people. Thousands was the number he gave me. I got the feeling that what I wanted to say to him was about the quality of closeness, not what he was talking about. A few minutes passed between us, and he said, “People say that they are in love all the time, but they’re not. I don’t believe them. They think they should say it because it’s what you say. Doesn’t mean they really know what it is.”
Lulu by Te-Ping Chen (The New Yorker)
Te-Ping Chen’s story charts the destiny of two siblings whose lives follow different paths although they are born just a few minutes from each other. I look forward to her short story collection, Land of Big Numbers.
Dr. Feng had operated on our mother as a favor to our uncle, his old classmate. Otherwise we would have been born in the hospital down the street, where a woman had bled to death after a botched Cesarean the previous year. The family had been in the waiting room for hours, and at last the father-to-be pounded on the doors of the operating room. When no one responded, the family pushed them open to find the lifeless woman on the table, blood pooling on the ground. She was alone: the staff had stripped the medical certificates that bore their names from the wall and fled as soon as the surgery went wrong.
From the start we were lucky, not least because we had each other. As twins we’d been spared the reach of the government’s family-planning policies. For the first few weeks of our life, our skulls had matching indentations from where they’d been pressed against each other in the womb, like two interlocking puzzle pieces. Later in life, when we were apart, I used to touch my hand to the back of my skull when I thought of her, as if seeking a phantom limb.
…………………………….
In our second year of school, I searched idly for one of Lulu’s statuses and found just one result: a public microblog with a profile photo featuring a yawning yellow cat. There were several dozen posts, mostly the same kinds of snippets of poetry that Lulu had been posting to her statuses, and by the time I finished scrolling through them I was sure the account was hers. For the bio she’d written qiushi, a reference to the old Communist maxim “to seek truth from facts,” but the name of her account was qiu zhushi, “to seek carbohydrates,” which made me laugh. You wouldn’t have suspected it to look at her, but Lulu was a glutton—she could eat reams of noodles or fried crullers without missing a beat.
One day in the dorm, I answered a knock at our door to find aclassmate grinning at me. “Your sister’s here,” he said. I gaped and went downstairs. There she was, wearing an old-fashioned padded blue coat, the kind common in the fifties. Lulu had her hair in two braids, carried a knapsack slung over one shoulder, and was smiling. She’d joined the college debate club, she said, and they were travelling for a competition. “Big Brother,” she said—it was an old joke of hers, since I was born only a minute or so before her—“want to buy me dinner?”
I suggested the cafeteria. She said she had something nicer in mind, and took me by the arm to a coffee shop near the campus entrance. The place called itself Pretty O.J.; its sign advertised Italian noodles. I’d walked by dozens of times and never gone in. Inside, the tables were topped with glass and the seats were an uncomfortable white wicker that crackled when you shifted and there were white vases to match, filled with plastic flowers. Lulu took hold of the menu and confidently ordered a pizza and tomato pasta for us as though she’d done it many times before. “With coffee, please,” she added, “and bring us some bread.”
I stared at her. “You look happy,” I said. She was. She was debating at a college an hour’s drive south, she said, and had taken a bus to come and see me. I asked her if our parents knew, if she was planning to see them as well.
“No,” she said, smiling. “We fly back tomorrow night, but I wanted to see you.”