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‘Crooner’ (Kazuo Ishiguro)
Tony Gardner had been my mother’s favourite. Back home, back in the communist days, it had been really hard to get records like that, but my mother had pretty much his whole collection. Once when I was a boy, I scratched one of those precious records. The apartment was so cramped, and a boy my age, you just had to move around sometimes, especially during those cold months when you couldn’t go outside. So I was playing this game jumping from our little sofa to the armchair, and one time I misjudged it and hit the record player. The needle went across the record with a zip—this was long before CDs—and my mother came in from the kitchen and began shouting at me. I felt so bad, not just because she was shouting at me, but because I knew it was one of Tony Gardner’s records, and I knew how much it meant to her. And I knew that this one too would now have those popping noises going through it while he crooned those American songs. Years later, when I was working in Warsaw and I got to know about black-market records, I gave my mother replacements of all her worn-out Tony Gardner albums, including that one I scratched. It took me over three years, but I kept getting them, one by one, and each time I went back to see her I’d bring her another.
‘The Proxy Marriage’ (Maile Meloy, The New Yorker, 2012)
A story about a young man and a young woman who take part in proxy marriages for soldiers posted abroad. I wonder why it has not been filmed.
William had no girlfriends in high school, and his mother once sat him down at the table in her spotless kitchen and asked if he was gay. She said it would be fine with her. She loved him unconditionally, and they would figure out a way to tell his father. But William wasn’t gay. He was just absurdly, painfully in love with Bridey Taylor, who leaned on the piano and sang while he played, and he had no way of telling her. He was too shy to pursue other girls, even when the payoff seemed either likely or worth the agony. But he didn’t tell his mother that. It was too humiliating. He just stammered an unconvincing denial.
‘Axis of Happiness’ (Min Jin Lee, Narrative Magazine, 2003)
Pachinko is one the best-received books of 2017 and I need to buy it as soon as possible.
The morning Henry Evans stopped by my office to tell me to go to Chicago, I was in the middle of my chapter-a-day habit: still in the Book of Hosea, much to my dismay, still in the Old Testament after years of dogged reading. This habit required skimming the day’s chapter of the Bible (usually the length of one onion-skin page), then reading the extensive commentaries in the footnotes, then finally reading the chapter again—all of this took on average forty-five minutes. I did this at work because it was where I lived—fourteen hours a day, often six days a week. I couldn’t help knowing some of the Bible because I was a P.K. (preacher’s kid), but I’d started reading this fat copy of the NIV Study Bible with its elephant-gray leather cover because my mother left it for me along with her modest wedding jewelry when she died three years ago.
arah came upstairs with Nigel to bring Rufus the tea and to see
- She looked old now. Her hair was streaked with gray and her
face lined. She walked with a limp.
“Dropped a kettle on my foot,” she said. “Couldn’t walk at all for
a while.” She gave me the feeling that everyone was getting older,
passing me by. She brought me roast beef and bread to eat.
Rufus had a fever now. He didn’t want the tea, but I coaxed and
bullied until he swallowed it. Then we all waited, but all that hap¬
pened was that Rufus’s other leg began to hurt. His eyes bothered him
most because moving them hurt him, and he couldn’t help following
my movements or Nigel’s around the room. Finally, I put a cool
damp cloth over them. That seemed to help. He still had a lot of pain
in his joints—his arms, his legs, everywhere. I thought I could ease
that, so I took his candle and went up to the attic for my bag. I was
just in time to catch a little girl trying to get the top off my Excedrin
bottle. It scared me. She could just as easily have chosen the sleeping
pills. The attic wasn’t as safe a place as I had thought.
“No, honey, give those to me.”
“They yours?”
“Yes.”
“They candy?”
Good Lord. “No, they’re medicine. Nasty medicine.”
“Ugh!” she said, and handed them back to me. She went back to
her pallet next to another child. They were new children. I wondered
whether the two little boys who had preceded them had been sold or
sent to the fields.
I took the Excedrin, what was left of the aspirin, and the sleeping
pills back down with me. I would have to keep them somewhere in
Rufus’s room or eventually one of the kids would figure out how to
get the safety caps off.
Rufus had thrown off the damp cloth and was knotted on his side
in pain when I got back to him. Nigel had lain down on the floor be¬
fore the fireplace and gone to sleep. He could have gone back to his
cabin, but he had asked me if I wanted him to stay since this was my
first night back, and I’d said yes.
I dissolved three aspirins in water and tried to get Rufus to drink
- He wouldn’t even open his mouth. So I woke Nigel, and Nigel
held him down while I held his nose and poured the bad-tasting solu¬
tion into his mouth as he gasped for air. He cursed us both, but after
a while he began to feel a little better. Temporarily.
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KINDRED
It was a bad night. I didn’t get much sleep. Nor was I to get much
for six days and nights following. Whatever Rufus had, it was terri¬
ble. He was in constant pain, he had fever—once I had to call Nigel
to hold him while I tied him down to keep him from hurting himself.
I gave him aspirins—too many, but not as many as he wanted. I made
him take broth and soup and fruit and vegetable juices. He didn’t
want them. He never wanted to eat, but he didn’t want Nigel holding
him down either. He ate.
Alice came in now and then to relieve me. Like Sarah, she looked
older. She also looked harder. She was a cool, bitter older sister to
the girl I had known.
“Folks treat her bad because of Marse Rufe,” Nigel told me.
“They figure if she’s been with him this long, she must like it.”
And Alice said contemptuously, “Who cares what a bunch of
niggers think!”
“She lost two babies,” Nigel told me. “And the one she’s got left is
sickly.”
“White babies,” Alice said. “Look more like him than me. Joe is
even red-headed.” Joe was the single survivor. I almost cried when I
heard that. No Hagar yet. I was so tired of this going back and forth;
I wanted so much for it to be over. I couldn’t even feel sorry for the
friend who had fought for me and taken care of me when I was hurt.
I was too busy feeling sorry for myself.
On the third day of his illness, Rufus’s fever left him. He was weak
and several pounds lighter, but so relieved to be rid of the fever and
the pain that nothing else mattered. He thought he was getting well.
He wasn’t.
The fever and the pain returned for three more days and he got a
rash that itched and eventually peeled . . .
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