Nonscandanavian Crime

Words Without Borders: The Online Magazine for International Literature

Editorial Director Susan Harris

Editor Rohan Kamicheril

Book Review Editor Jonathan Blitzer

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Consulting Editors Esther Allen, Peter Constantine, Heinz Insu Fenkl, Edward Gauvin, Jason Grunebaum, Michael Heim, Ilya Kaminsky, Lawrence Venuti

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Web Developer Bud Parr Words without Borders, Inc., is a nonproﬁt tax-exempt corporation organized for literary and educational purposes, publicly supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, foundations, corporations, and individuals. Donations to Words without Borders are charitable contributions December 2012: (Non-Scandinavian) Crime

The Killer’s Monologue

Belle

False Faces: An Imagined Life of the Wig Gang

The Shades who Periscope Through Flowers to the Sky from “Butterﬂy Skin”

Confession

Deﬁled Woman from “Horses of God” from “Nanga” from “You Don’t Know: A Maﬁa Dictionary”

New Writing from South Korea

Marilyn Monroe and Lady Gaga’s Korea, and Korean Literature

Beauty

The Chef’s Nail “Is That So, I’m a Giraffe” My Arithmetic The Train Is Now Arriving A Nearby Roof Is That So? I’m A Girafe

Book Reviews

The Canvas

Contributors Book Reviews Translators December 2012: (Non-Scandinavian) Crime

Image: Q. Sakamaki, "A policeman stands in front of a bus set ﬁre. . ." Rio, Brazil, May 24 2007.

We're wrapping up the year with a look at crime, non-Scandinavian style. You'll find no dragon tattoos or icy fjords here, only an abundance of lawlessness from the rest of the world. In two chilling monologues, Umar Timol's murderer speaks to a dead audience, and Sergey Kuznetsov's sociopath finds killing is always in season. Rubem Fonseca's contract killer works both sides, Care Santos's exasperated writer sends a pesky journalist to his final deadline, and Italian best seller Andrea Camilleri defines a Mafia vocabulary. Washington Cucurto returns to the scene of a Cortazar crime. China's Sun Yisheng's police extract an unexpected confession. French graphic superstar David B. and Herve Tanquerelle track a bank heist; Willy Uribe's fugitive cuts to the chase; Morocco's Mahi Binebine shows a suicide bomber's first murder. To skip this issue would be, well, criminal.

In our feature on New Writing from Korea, writer Kim Young-ha selects and introduces three dazzling works from Korea. Sim Sangdae observes fatal beauty, Park Mingyu looks at jammed subways and hollow families, and Yun Ko-eun follows a woman whose work drives her crazy. We thank the Korea Literature Translation Institute for their generous support of this special section on new Korean writing. The Killer’s Monologue Fiction by Umar Timol

Translated from French by David Ball and Nicole Ball

OK, obviously you don’t believe me. You can’t help laughing. You tell me I’m not serious, I’m taking you for an idiot, a nitwit, I’m trying to put one over on you. Hey, did I ask you your opinion? Did I ask any questions?

Do I know what they say about me? Sure I do. I’m an old schmuck who never did a thing in his life and still doesn’t do anything. I’m a loser; at forty I’m rotting away in a two-room ﬂat, I have a face that would scare the hell out of a vampire, I got a belly like a hot-air balloon, I never got married, I don’t have any kids, and I’m taking it easy while everybody else is breaking their ass.

So what d’you think? You think a moron can’t be a hit man, I must be talking bullshit. Me. I look like a loser, a goof-off. Maybe a guy with no principles, no morals, whatever, but a killer, come on, you're sure I’m putting you on big time.

I should tell you you're right? Well, no, you're totally wrong. In fact I have the reputation of being one of the best. It’s true that over the years I did perfect my art. You could even say I’m a master. Not a great master but someone who knows what he’s doing, with experience, someone you can trust. The secret of my success, if I can put it that way, is that I’m not greedy or sadistic. I don’t do it to rake in as much dough as possible, my price is more than reasonable and I don’t get a kick out of killing. I’m not like those retards who enjoy torturing the victim before whacking him. To each his own, and it’s none of my business but let’s say that for me, I get my kicks in a different way. I’m methodical, precise, organized, and I do a good, clean job. You might even say I do it out of love. I operate at night, in silence, and I grant a calm, serene death to my target. If that’s not love what is? He or she dies in their sleep, doesn’t have time to ask questions or have any regrets, think about their insurance, think about their lover or their mistress, or think about all the useless crap that can ruin a life. I intervene like the hand of God and I send them off to eternal peace.

What pushed me into this trade? Hey, you're beginning to get the jitters. What’s with you, turning red like that? You weren’t expecting that, right? When you saw me you told yourself, oh it’s that old guy, I’m gonna talk to him, I’m sure he wants to tell me about himself, I’m gonna do some listening, a little social work never does any harm and then, the boot. And what do you find out? Tell me what you’re finding out. I can’t hear you. Louder. You’re finding out I have the face of an asshole but a heart of stone. Right. Good. So you see appearances can be deceiving. Gotta watch out, see, scratch the surface a little and you might see the monster spring up before the dope.

When I was twenty, something happened to me all of sudden, like a hammer that smashed my spirit to pieces. OK I’m not gonna give you a lecture in social philosophy but let’s say that society offers you two paths, submission or revolt. When I say submission I’m talking about a guy like my dad. He was an honest man but what a cruddy life, years and years working like a dog to buy a little house, pay off the loan, raise the kids, dream of a promotion that another guy with political connections stole from under his nose—you know, a whole bunch of shitty problems and he finally dies at forty-five from a heart attack. You can’t be more pathetic than that. On his deathbed, he made me promise ki mo pou reste touzours, that I’d always stay on the straight and narrow. Really, Pop, what were you thinking? You think you're a role model? You call that a life? You think I want a career in the ass-licking sector? You never got into your head that while you were grinding away, playing Mister Respectable, poor-but-nice, Mister PhD-in- Bootlicking, other people were making it big, stealing, cheating and stuffing their pockets. Poor Pop, but all right you can’t live your life over again.

Did I want a better society? Hey, you crazy or what? You can’t change man, he is what he is, a wolf, a wild animal, a jackal, a hyena, whatever, and there’s nothing you can do about it. So what does it mean to revolt? It means subverting the system, using it without being used by it.

Do I feel remorse? Of course not. If I kill them they deserve it—people in fishy situations like that might as well have a sign on their skull with “Kill me” on it. Look, think of that old lady I eliminated recently, she didn’t deserve it? She was filthy rich but she wouldn't give anything to her kids and some of them were poor as hell. So they agreed to get rid of her. And guess who did the dirty job? Yours truly. The one and only. I admit the old asshole almost ruined my evening. I was just about to stick two bullets in her head when she woke up. And she began to beg. Non missié na pas touye moi. Mo pou donne cinq mille roupies. No sir, no kill me. Me can give five thousan roupies. And to think I was counting on giving her a beautiful death, no more pangs of greed. She started to holler, not a pretty sight. But OK I’m a professional and feelings go into the garbage can, so I shoved a rag in her mouth before I executed her. You got to know how to deal with the unexpected or you might lose control of the situation. And anything that’s out of the ordinary can wreck your reputation.

I have another memory, don’t know if you're interested? But really, that was so great, they asked me to knock off a young couple, very respectable, the gentleman was a teacher and the lady an accountant, a nice house in Sodnac and a pretty bungalow under construction in Palmar but they had one bad flaw, they liked to play the races, so much that they got into debt with people who don’t kid around, if you know what I mean. And one fine evening I found myself in their bedroom. They were a handsome couple and the woman was gorgeous. I walked over to her and stroked her hair for a long time. I even cried and a few tears flowed onto her forehead. I love to watch people sleep because that’s when you really find out who they are. And this woman had the face of an angel. First I stabbed the husband brutally and then, slowly, very slowly, I strangled the woman; it was lovely, even sublime, to see her beauty fade away and disappear forever. I still think of her face often.

What I do when I’m not working? Well I like to go to nightclubs. There’s a discotheque in Grand-Baie I particularly like. You mainly meet hookers, tourists, and a few young people there. But mostly I go there to dance. I let the music ﬂood my body and I feel light, I whirl around, I see sparks dancing in my head. I feel so much pleasure I could come, and I can stay like that for hours on end. Sometimes I pick up a girl, one of those young birdbrains who think you have to show everything and say anything at all. I take her back home and we screw like crazy. The problem is when they want to hang on, you’d think they were Superglue, I get mad and I get rid of them.

No no, I don’t kill them. I’m not that stupid. I send them back home with a few wads of bills in their pockets. That’s enough to cool their ardor. For me, there’s nothing dumber than the bullshit of love, I love you, you love me, it’s nice for a while but afterwards it gets rancid, it gives off a smell of puke. I’d rather have a good hard come in the girl’s body and then adios.

My future? Well now there’s a word I hate. I chose to live in the moment but since you insist, why not. I’m planning on retiring soon. I still like my job just as much but you gotta know when to stop. And since I still have twenty years or so to live, I plan to commit suicide at sixty. Those illnesses—Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, God knows what other crap—hell no, not for me thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Same for depending on a bunch of retards in a nursing home or standing in line to get that horrible disability pension. Might as well get everything you can out of what you got. I have a nice little pile I keep in a safe and I plan to use it. And you can bet I’m gonna live la dolce vita, by the seaside, do the clubs every Friday and Saturday night and above all let myself be rocked by the gentle melody of the waves from dawn to midnight. Out of this world. Nirvana.

All right, I’m not gonna hang around any more. I got work waiting for me. Let me feel your forehead to see where you’re at. Hey, you're completely cold. Man, you're really a quick one.

OK, I’m outta here and since I’m polite, I’m gonna call the police and tell them there’s a stinking corpse in your house.

Translated from Portuguese by Clifford E. Landers

"The Walther's hot, if they catch you with it, we’ll get dragged into it. After you do the job, throw it away, in the ocean or the lake."

"Leave it to me," I said.

The Dispatcher went on. "Remember the Glock and the shit storm it caused?" As if I could forget the black guy who pretended he was living in the rocks with the cockroaches but wasn’t one of us, and smelled of scented soap and wore a fancy watch and when he stuck his hand in his waistband to pull out the piece I shot him in the head and took his weapon, a Glock 18, automatic, a beauty, the best thing to ever come out of Austria. But it was hot and when they caught me with it they worked me over and broke two teeth here in front, maimed my right hand. They wanted me to confess to killing the black guy and said they'd go easy on me if I told them who'd hired me, but I didn’t open my trap and didn’t confess to a goddamn thing.

"You didn’t know who ordered it."

"By the victim you suspect who’s behind it. It's simple. Want me to say his name? Don’t fuck with me, old pal, look at my false teeth, my gimpy hand. I knew, I was tortured, and I didn’t rat anyone out."

"They broke the wrong hand," said the Dispatcher. "If they knew you were a lefty…"

I walked away with the fool still talking to himself. I went to the hotel where the customer was staying. That was the name, customer, we used for the guy who was going to be hit, and I called my girlfriend to be beside me at the doorbell.

I don’t enjoy popping anybody, but it's my job. The Dispatcher told me one day he read in a book that a man just needs two things, fucking and working, but all I needed was fucking; work is for shit. But I use a disguise; to everyone I’m a vendor of computer products, and I always carry around a small leather briefcase full of brochures.

Before we went to the hotel, my girlfriend arrived at my apartment and took off her clothes and her white body ﬁlled the darkened room with light and I looked at her ass to see if it had any marks from her bikini or the sun. She knew if she showed the least hint of a tan I’d beat the hell out of her, but her ass was whiter than an ambulance.

Her name was Belinha, she was eighteen, she liked me because I was an outlaw, and because she knew my hard-on was for real. She despised those guys who take pills to get it up, said she couldn’t love a man who faked it like that. And she sucked my cock and I made her get on her knees on the bed and I sucked her pussy, she got off on being sucked like that. I would stick my tongue in there and sometimes she'd ask me to put my nose in. Her pussy was fragrant and I would stick my nose in. I forgot to say that besides a large cock I also have a large nose. Then I’d ram my cock in and she would come, that was the beginning.

She didn’t know the kind of work I did, she thought it was something to do with smuggling or drugs and asked to see my tools and said she liked being an outlaw's girl, but I couldn’t explain my job to her, I myself didn’t really know what was behind it all. The Dispatcher would call me and say he had a job and give me the ﬁle on the customer. Sometimes it was some important guy whose name was in the newspapers, I’ve even done foreigners. I was well-paid, trustworthy, proof of which were the false teeth in my mouth, the scar on my face, and my busted right hand with ﬁngers bent like thick pieces of wire.

My girlfriend came from an important family rolling in dough, was educated in the ﬁnest schools, and spoke French. She called herself Belinha or Isabel or Isabella or Belle. I preferred Belle because she was the most beautiful girl in the world. We were in my apartment waiting to go to the hotel where I was going to meet the customer. Lying in bed after fucking, she said, "Explain that stuff about pistols and revolvers, the difference." I said that in a revolver the bullets are in a cylinder we call a drum, each cartridge has its own ignition chamber, and after each shot the cylinder rotates, bringing a new cartridge into alignment with the barrel. There are six- cartridge drums, the most common, and nine-cartridge, depending on the size of the revolver. A pistol, like the Walther semi-automatic P99, has a clip with cartridges that slides into the handle, and after each shot the empty cartridge is ejected automatically and a new bullet from the clip is placed in position for ﬁring.

She also wanted to know why I used a pistol and not a revolver, so I explained, while she held the Walther as if it were a dead rat, that pistols were smaller, lighter, and more reliable, and besides, a pistol allowed the use of a silencer. "This fucker screwed into the barrel of the pistol is the silencer. There’s no such thing as silencers for revolvers—I mean, there is, but they're bulky mothers that enclose the drum and make the weapon too heavy. Nobody uses them, they're a museum piece."

She also asked what I felt when I snuffed a guy and I answered I didn’t think about anything, just like a soldier in war. The difference is that I didn’t win a medal when I killed the enemy.

I put on a coat and she dressed in some high-class women's clothes and we went to the customer's hotel and waited in the lobby for the guy to arrive. Belle was an elegant girl when it came to dressing, sitting, speaking. Anyone who looked at her would say, This is a well-born girl from a good family. That’s why I told her I’d beat the hell out of her if she got a tattoo like she'd been talking about doing.

My appearance is nondescript, I’m a thin guy with a big nose, an inoffensive look, hair starting to go gray. Wearing that dark suit I looked like an insurance salesman. The Dispatcher had told me the customer was going to a meeting away from the hotel and should be back around nine that night. I had two pictures of his face in my pocket. Then the customer showed up. I was a bit surprised to see him, not much, I’m an old whore and don’t really get surprised. But the guy was in a wheelchair, being pushed by a young woman who looked like a nurse. That fucker the Dispatcher hadn’t told me the customer was a cripple.

"Wait here for me," I told Belle, and got into the elevator with the nurse and the crippled guy.

I got out on the same ﬂoor. The corridor was empty, I could snuff the two of them right there, but my jobs are always done intelligently. I took a paper from my pocket and pretended I was trying to read something on it, while looking nearsightedly at the numbers on the doors and following the wheelchair. I waited for the nurse to open the door of the apartment and when she went in, pushing the wheelchair, I went in too. Her eyes widened, but before she could make a peep I shot her in the head. I always go for the head.

"Take it easy," said the customer, facing me with both hands palms outward. He was in the business, he looked me in the eye. "We can make a deal, I’ll pay you more," he said.

I ﬁred two shots into his head. Then I unscrewed the silencer, stuck the Walther in my belt, the silencer in my pocket and left, shutting the door. I got in the elevator and went downstairs. If I was lucky, it'd be some time before they found the pair of stiffs.

When I got to the lobby, I took Belle by the arm and we left. No one looked at me, anyone looking in our direction would see only Belle.

I got in the car and said, "Let's go to the lake." But when we arrived at the lake I didn’t have the heart to toss the pistol in the water. Shit, a Walther P99, the best thing to ever come out of Germany.

"Let's go to the movies," Belle said. We went to see a detective ﬁlm, she was crazy about detective ﬁlms. If she ever cuckolded me, it'd be with a cop.

We got out of the theater at midnight and Belle said she wanted to go dancing at the discotheque. But ﬁrst we stopped at my place and I put away the Walther, after patting it like it was a puppy.

At the discotheque Belle led me to the ﬂoor right away to dance. Watching her dance was mind- blowing, but I danced shaking like a dead tree branch in a high wind. Then we had a drink and she asked what I thought when I saw I was about to kill a cripple. "Nothing," I answered, "and you, what did you think?" She said she thought it better to kill a cripple than a healthy guy who could dance and work out on a treadmill.

When we got back to the apartment, Belle, in bed, said she wanted to talk to me about something serious. Her father was threatening to cut off her allowance.

"Fuck your father's allowance, I’ll give you the money," I said.

"But that’s not all, he’s so pissed at me that he says he’s going to leave everything to charity, so that when he dies I won't inherit a penny."

"Fuck your father's money, I’ll support you." "Man, it's a lot of money," she said. "I think it's very cruel, I’m only eighteen, I’m going to last at least another sixty. Can you imagine sixty years in poverty?"

"I’ve already said I’ll take care of you," I insisted.

She looked at me pensively and said, "Sweetheart, I love you, but who can guarantee that you— in the business you’re in, that you’re, you're . . ."

She stopped, and I ﬁnished the thought for her: "Who can say if I’m going to be around for long, isn’t that it?"

She answered, "That's it, I’m very sorry, but that is it." Then she gave me lots of little kisses and told me she loved me, and added that she had a proposition for me.

"Leave it till tomorrow," I said. "Let's go to sleep, it's almost dawn, and if day breaks I can’t sleep once the sun comes up.." I took off my clothes, stripping down to my undershorts, and got into bed. She remained seated in the armchair.

When I woke up, Belle was still sitting in the chair.

"I couldn’t sleep," she said, "can we talk now?"

"Talk about what?"

"My proposition," she replied.

"Talk," I said.

She got up from the chair and sat down beside me on the bed. "I want you to kill my father."

I remained silent. Shit, I thought, you can kill everybody, except your own father and mother.

"Give it some thought," I said.

And she answered, "I spent all night thinking about it, and all week. There’s nothing left to think about. What’s the problem? Since I’ve known you you've killed ﬁve people. Yesterday you killed a cripple, and now you've got scruples about killing my son-of-a-bitch father who wants to leave me without a penny? If you tell me to jump off a bridge I’ll do it, and I ask you for one little thing and you hesitate, is that how much you love me?"

She bent over me, took off my shorts and started sucking my cock. "Is that good?"

Some ﬁve hundred women have sucked my cock, but none of them had a mouth as magical as hers. "Is that good?" After repeating that, she stopped, sat down on the bed, and said, "If you don’t kill my father I’m leaving you. You'll have to ﬁnd some other girl to fuck."

There wasn’t another girl like her in the whole world. But Belle wanting to kill her father made her ugly, and my cock wilted. "I’ll think about it," I said.

"I’ll give you a week," she said.

I shadowed her father during that week. He was a tall man with white hair, nice- looking, who left the house every day and got into the chauffeured car waiting in front. One day, before he got into the car, I went up to him and said, "Excuse me, I’m not from here. How do I get downtown?"

He answered, "I’m heading there, I’ll give you a lift. Please, get in."

We talked in the car. I told him I was from Minas Gerais and was looking for work. It could be as a servant, anything, I just needed work, and he handed me a card and wrote a name on the back.

"This is Dona Estela, my secretary. I’m going to tell her to look for a position for you. Come to this address tomorrow morning and speak to her."

I thought it was time to leave and said, "I’ll get out here. Thank you very much, I’ll be there tomorrow."

I got out of the car and walked down the street, thinking. When I got to my apartment there was a message from Belle on the answering machine asking me to call her.

"How’s it coming?" she asked.

"I’m setting things up," I said, "it won't be long. I’ll do the job in a few days."

"I’ll come by there later," Belle said, "and I’m giving you my sweet little ass."

Normally that would have aroused me, but that day, I don't know why, it was disagreeable. "I can’t today, I’ve got a meeting with the Dispatcher."

The next day I went to look for Dona Estela. She was very pleasant and said she'd found me a position as a driver and that I should bring my documents to her as soon as possible.

At that moment Belle's father came into the waiting room and clapped me on the back, saying, "Everything all right? Is there anything you need, an advance?"

"No, Sir. Thank you very much."

When I got to the apartment I called Belle and said that doing her father at the ofﬁce would be hard; it had to be on the street or at his home.

"I’ll arrange a key for you," Belle said. "I’m coming over there so we can fool around a bit, I want to suck you off.."

"It's not possible today either," I said. "Hey," said Belle, "I miss that big dick."

"There’s been a screw-up," I said. "I’ve got another meeting with the Dispatcher to straighten it out."

She gave me a key.

"What about the servants?" I asked.

"Not to worry, they stay in an apartment over the garage."

I called Belle and asked, "Is tonight OK?"

"Yes," she replied, "he always takes a sleeping pill around eleven. Get here at midnight, but when you arrive, ﬁrst let's go to my room to fool around a little."

I got there at exactly midnight, the Walther with its silencer in my pocket. When I entered, Belle was standing in the living room waiting for me. We went upstairs. "His room is that one over there, and mine is here. Come on." We went into her room and Belle immediately got naked and asked, "What do you want, my ass? Want me to suck you off? Want to suck me? Whatever you want, that’s what I want."

That talk didn’t appeal to me anymore. It used to get me excited, now it kind of disgusted me. She lay down on her stomach, arching her ass. In the world, the entire world, there wasn’t a prettier ass than hers, and she knew it. I approached Belle, took the Walther out of my pocket and shot her in the head, right in the back of the neck, for her to die instantaneously and painlessly. Then I covered her body with a sheet and left, closing the door to the street. How could anyone want to kill their father or mother?

Now the Walther was really hot. I drove to the lake and sat down, thinking, without the heart to throw that jewel in the water. Day was starting to break, and I could feel something happening to me, I felt like crying, but crying is for fags, and I didn’t cry. I took the Walther and threw it as far as I could. It hit the water without making much noise. The sun was so white it hurt my eyes.

by David B. and Hervé Tanquerelle

Translated from French by Edward Gauvin

The Shades who Periscope Through Flowers to the Sky Fiction by Sun Yisheng

Translated from Chinese by Nicky Harman

1. Heavenly Body

Rocky Wang was sitting in Tianxiang Park. The ﬂagstones were cool, and pale in the moonlight. The couple starting kissing. (This was before it happened.) Rocky put his hand in the front of his jacket, his mind empty. He wasn’t waiting for anyone in particular—though he felt something was going to happen. The dog that hung around every night turned up and barked at him. Rocky got angry and bared his teeth, and it went off into another frenzy of barking. Then Rocky jumped up and set off toward them. The grass soaked his feet.

Afterward, Rocky cut through the bamboo thicket, through the ribbons of moonlight, and away.

He took the No.13 bus. When he got off, he was some distance from home. He didn’t quite know where he was till he turned the corner and saw the abandoned Hong Yun Building compound.

In the center of the county town on Stone Toad Street was a patch of land. Ten years previously, the developers had fallen foul of the law, and plans to complete the buildings were shelved. The odd thing was that a succession of local ofﬁcials had all failed to get this lame-duck project back on its feet. Once, a Feng Shui master from many miles away had been invited in, but had beaten a hasty retreat leaving behind just the cryptic words, “Blood will ﬂow.” Moss covered the walls of all the buildings and the site seemed gloomy even under the summer sun. The place was littered with dead birds, their blood–blackened feathers sticking up like rushes. A bone-chilling wind whistled through the site and no sunlight ever penetrated.

With the aid of some distant streetlights, Rocky made his way along the potholed street, his head down. Sometimes he heard sounds, stopped and looked around, and nocturnal cats shot past him. He got over the perimeter fence and brushed the rust off his hands. He felt the grass around his ankles and the sudden chill struck him. He took a piss against a wall, then wondered why the normally noisy streets outside were quiet as the grave. He walked on, the gravel crunching loudly under his feet. Suddenly, he was surrounded by flashlight beams slanting up and down. People rushed at him and, before Rocky could count how many there were, he was thrown to the ground. Damp earth stuck to his face and dust filled his nostrils. He twisted but could not move. He was being held down and savagely beaten and kicked by countless hands and feet. The scuffling drowned out the noise of barking dogs and screeching cats. Vehicle headlights swept along the road, shining at him between a forest of legs. He closed his eyes to shut out the racket.

A volley of ﬁrecrackers made the room shake. It was pitch–dark. The window had been bricked up and there was not a glimmer of light. Rocky struggled unsuccessfully to get to his feet. That damned dog must have taken a chunk out of his thigh—it hurt like hell. He tried to pull himself upright with his arms but couldn’t move. Dammit, they’d tied his whole body to the chair! The lights came on, turning the walls ochre. Something black loomed over him, then moved away. It lowered itself into the chair on the other side of the table. It was that fucker Liu, with his gloomy, pockmarked face. To his right sat Yan scribbling away furiously, his mop of hair obscuring his features.

Liu: “Spit it out.”

Rocky: “Spit what out?”

Name, surname, place and date of birth, address. Then:

Liu: “Where were you this afternoon? What were you doing?”

Rocky: “Nothing.”

Liu: “You’d better confess. You know the policy?”

Rocky: “What policy?”

He knew: Treat confession with leniency, treat resistance with severity. And he knew what severity meant. No one spoke.

Liu: “Did you hear me?”

Rocky: “I really didn’t do anything.”

Liu: “You just tell me everything. I don’t want to ﬁnd you missed anything out.”

Rocky: “I didn’t do anything. What do you want me to say?”

Liu got to his feet, and his shadow wavered over the wall behind him.

Rocky: “OK, OK, I’ll confess everything!”

He began:

We hadn’t made any arrangements. I was standing on Jade Dragon Bridge waiting for a bit of sunshine. A mob came running past, as if there had been a murder, but I didn’t pay any attention. The trees hung over the surface of the river, which was thick with filth. Then, just as the sun began to go down behind the treetops, I got a text. It said: Come over. Just two words, not even a period. It took me ten minutes. I was in a hurry, but I still looked at my reflection in the window of a passing car so I could tidy my hair. When I got to the second floor, the door opened and I ducked inside.

E had been washing her hair and there was still shampoo in it. “Sit down a moment,” she said and went back to the bathroom. I could hear running water. I tiptoed over to the sofa, trying not to make a sound, but it was in such a mess, I didn’t dare sit down.

E came out, rubbing her hair with a towel. “What are you poking around there for?”

“No reason.”

I took half a step back and bumped into the chair. The noise made me jump away and I banged against the wall clock.

E smiled. She opened her bath towel and folded it round me. Her hands worked their way up my body, inside my clothes, and then got hold of my dick. There were still drops of water on the back of her neck. I slid down the wall and we fell on the sofa, our feet resting on the coffee table, making the teacups jump.

I tried to get on top of her but she kept wriggling. We were panting and groaning. She laughed and jerked away from me. I wasn’t scared any more. I pulled her back to me, I wanted to ride her.

“No,” she said, “I like being on top.”

. . . Afterward, we sat stark naked on the sofa, not feeling the cold, our feet resting on the table among the upturned cups. The clock ticked away. We heard a noise from downstairs.

“You better go,” she said. “He’ll be home soon.”

Me: “We’ve still got time.”

Her: “Best to go a bit early.”

Me: “I don’t want to go.”

Her: “Be good and do as I say. Don’t act like a little boy.”

Me: “Can’t we go somewhere else next time and have a bit longer?”

Her: “What’s wrong with here?”

Me: “Nothing’s wrong. It’s just that I’m on tenterhooks all the time. It’s really scary.”

Her: “Doesn’t that make it more fun?”

Me: “You think that’s fun?”

Her: “Don’t you?” Me: “But I’ve got real feelings for you . . .”

Her: “We’re both grown-ups. Don’t be such a child.”

Me: “But . . .”

Her: “Are you going to bang on about the same old thing and spoil everything?”

Me: “That’s not what I want.”

Her: “Well, that’s what you’ve done. Why do you keep on with all that stupid thinking?”

Me: “But I really like you.”

Her: “Don’t make me sick.” Then she yelled: “Just get out of here now!” She leaped at me, her breasts jiggling. “Get out! Fuck off back home!”

There was a scratching sound as Yan wrote it all down. Liu sat solid as a black locust tree. A door, which Rocky hadn’t known was there, suddenly opened, and Police Chief Zhang came silently in, looking serious. He put his hand on Liu’s shoulder to stop him from getting up and disappeared into a corner.

Liu: “Is that all?”

Rocky: “That’s all.”

Liu: “What happened next?”

Rocky: “After that I went home.”

Liu pulled the notebook toward him, shook his head, then gave it back. “Why did you kill them?”

Rocky: “How did you ﬁnd out?”

Liu: “Why do you think we picked you up?”

Rocky: “Framed me, didn’t you?”

Liu: “Tell me the truth. And hurry up.”

Rocky: “Tell you what?”

Liu: “What the hell do you think? Why did you kill them?”

Rocky: “I dunno.”

Liu: “You piece of shit.” Ofﬁcer Zhang’s shadow moved and he gave a couple of coughs. Liu tilted his chair back. Then the chair legs came to rest again and Liu seemed to have calmed down. He leaned forward.

“Don’t jerk us around. What did you do then?”

I went home . . . The door to the back room was half-open, the air hazy with smoke and I could hear the clack of chess pieces. My father was playing Chinese chess again. I saw him lean forward, make a move, and win a point. His friend Li, who was playing the red pieces, crossed the river with his chariot. With his right hand, he piled the ﬁve pieces on top of each other. With each move, he raised the front of one shoe then lowered it down again.

I went to my room for a nap. I pushed the bedroom door open, didn’t even bother to have a drink, just went to sleep with my clothes on. And dreamed: I pulled on the string and sent up a kite- cloud, then ﬁred two shots, and the cloud came tumbling down and fell into the water, making pools of blood.

I don’t know what time it was, but I was woken by shouting. I came out of my room. My mother was hurling the broom at my father’s head, and it caught the tea mug in my hand as it ﬂew past and smashed it. The window frames rattled. It was raining.

I shouted at them: You never stop ﬁghting! Knock it off, will you!

The two of them paused and looked at me. My mother’s hand hung empty and I could see it trembling. My father was standing, hunched over the chess table, rubbing his hands on his trousers. They started arguing again. I went to the wall and gave it a thump. The rain thudded harder against the windowpanes.

“Just shut up!” my father was shouting. “You’re never satisﬁed with me, you just want to kick me out.”

“It’s not true,” said my mother. “That’s just what you think.”

“Hey, hey, hey!” I shouted at them, but they ignored me.

“You just can’t bear to see me happy,” said my father.

“You’re so good at it, you just carry on then!” my mother yelled.

“Hey, hey, hey!” I shouted at them, and smacked my head against the wall this time.

My father stood there, even more bent over, I could see his coat quivering. My mother turned and looked at me. I stuck my hands in my trouser pockets. “Have you stopped ﬁghting now?”

They said nothing.

“That’s better,” I said. I started to leave, then glanced at my mother, and crooked my ﬁngers at her. “Gimme some cash.”

My mother picked up something and threw it. “I’ll give you some cash. I’ll give you the whole damned lot,” she said.

“Not like that,” I said.

My mother ﬂung her arms in the air and yelled: “You’re useless. You just spend every cent we have.”

My father half-turned and took two steps back into the room. Then we heard the chessboard being overturned and the rhino-horn pieces clattering and rolling over the ﬂoor. And rolling again.

The police chief took a step out of the shadows, the light catching ﬁrst half his face, then half his torso.

Liu: “You’re telling me there was only your mother and father left at home then?”

Rocky: “Uh-huh.”

Liu: “Your dad’s friend Li had gone by then?”

Rocky: “He must have.”

Liu turned to Yan and whispered a few words in his ear, then turned back: “Go on.”

I went on:

I left the house in a hurry. I saw someone smashing a windowpane with a stone, and more people rushing past. I didn’t know where I was going. All the streetlamps were on, each lamppost planted in its hole like a tree pushing upward. I turned down Brickyard Lane and stumbled over the broken bricks. On one side, there was a squat building with a rusty roof and ceramic tigers hanging from the eaves. Its windows were dark.

The place was deserted except for a dog, which dashed past like a dark shadow. I sneaked into an alley. It was unlit but the light from the main street showed me two people kissing. I hid behind a tree and pressed myself against its trunk till my legs went numb Then I jumped at them, pulling out my knife, and poked the young man in the back: “Get out all your money!” The girl was terriﬁed, but she didn’t try to run away or shriek. I yelled frantically: “Fucking hurry up!” The man reached for his wallet. The girl started to sob. I grabbed the wallet and told them: “Get going!” They stumbled away together but they hadn’t gone far when they turned and looked—at me or at something behind me. I wanted to shout again: “Get going!” But before I did, they’d gone. Just a minute later, someone rushed at me. I didn’t have time to pull my knife, just felt an ice-cold pain in my back. “Give me the money,” the man growled. He stank. I wanted to shout but when I opened my mouth, I couldn’t get a sound out.

“Here, take it, but don’t hurt me,” I said eventually.

“Don’t give me that bullshit.”

I looked at him. I could see the side of his face and one eye.

“Turn your head away,” he said.

Before I had time to do that, a hand shot out and wrenched my head away. Still cursing, he grabbed the wallet in my hand. Then he aimed a kick at me and I shot forward.

He rushed out of the alley into the road. The lamp light fell on him for a second, he disappeared into the shadows, then I saw him cross a patch of grass, and jump into the trees down the middle of the road. As he turned, his knife glinted in the moonlight.

Liu: “Don’t give me that bullshit.”

Rocky: “OK, I admit it, I made the last bit up. But everything before that was absolutely true.”

Liu: “Just be straight with me, and fucking around.”

Rocky: “OK, I’ll be straight from now on.”

I left the house in a hurry. I didn’t know where I was going. I slowed down and went down Rice Flower Alley. It had high, bare, brick walls on each side and locust trees which made deep shadows. If I went much further in, bits of brick might drop off the walls. The whitewash had gone yellow and crumbly—if you tried climbing, you’d get dust all over you. The wall was covered in giant propaganda slogans, each character a meter wide. I came out again, there was no pedestrian crossing so I walked straight across the road into a square. It was crowded and noisy, full of people ﬂying balloons and kites. I went to the opposite corner, found a convenience store and knocked on the door. The shopkeeper peered through a hole in the mesh and asked what I wanted. A packet of cigs, I said. He rolled the shutter up and let me in. Three ﬁfty. But then he just stood there, holding my money.

“What’s up?” I asked.

The shopkeeper pursed his lips. I turned and saw a small girl staring at me, clutching a steamed bun in her hand.

Me: “I don’t know her.”

Shopkeeper: “I saw her come in with you.”

Me: “Shit, I don’t know her.” The girl was still staring at me. “Dammit, don’t stare at me like that.” I waved her away. The corners of her lips turned down as if she was going to cry, but she didn’t, and I let out a breath, turned back to the shopkeeper, and got my cigs.

I left the shop and hurried away. The girl was still following me, with the same expression on her grubby, sunburnt face.

I bent down: “Where are your mom and dad?” I asked.

Tears had made pink tracks through the dirt on her face.

I glanced quickly around. “Where’s your home?”

She stared at me, pouting. Her lips were purplish and covered in ﬂakes of white skin.

“I’ve given you some money. What else do you want?”

The girl stuck out the tip of her tongue and gave her lips a quick lick.

“Don’t keep following me. Go home right now,” I said.

I walked alongside South Lake. It was cold. After a bit, I looked back. She was trotting after me. I sped up and the wind whistled in my ears. At the next crossroads, I stopped and looked back. There was no one. I looked up at the crumbling, red-brick walls then, after a moment, retraced my steps. Just as I got back to the square, I caught sight of the girl. People were pushing against her as they passed by, nearly knocking her over. I went back and tried to give her a pat on the head, but as I reached out, a big guy shouted at me and hit me. As soon as the girl saw him, she looked panic-stricken and burst into tears. I was trying to explain when he kicked me down. Then I saw him being pulled away by some of the passersby. I bent my legs under me and tried to get up but my back hurt like hell. A hand reached out to help me up—I looked at it, then up the arm to the shoulder and the neck and a bony face. Then the big guy came back, straightening his clothes. He shoved me out of the way, picked up the little girl, and carried her away, still crying. The man who’d helped me up let go of me and sat back down on the steps. I squatted down and read the wooden sign on the ground between his feet. On it was written: “Fortune-Telling.”

“Get home straightaway,” said the fortune-teller.

Me: “No, I’m not going home.”

Fortune-teller: “If you don’t go home, there’ll be bloodshed.”

Me: “You’re kidding me?”

Fortune-teller: “If you don’t go home, there really will be bloodshed.”

I was about to leave when the fortune-teller grabbed my arm: “You better do as I say.”

Someone in the crowd said: “He always says there’ll be bloodshed, whoever it is.” I looked around but I couldn’t tell who had spoken. Soon, people began to leave.

“No, I’m not going home,” I said.

Half an hour later, I left the square. In front of me I saw the gates to Tianxiang Park.

Liu: “I’m waiting for you to tell me how you killed them, and you still haven’t got to the point.”

Rocky: “I’m coming to it right now!”

I was sitting in Tianxiang Park. The ﬂagstones were cool, and pale in the moonlight. The couple started kissing. (This was before it happened.) I wasn’t waiting for anyone in particular—though something was going to happen, I was sure. The dog that hung around every night turned up and barked at me. I got angry and bared my teeth at it, and it went off into another frenzy of barking. Then I jumped up and set off toward them. The grass soaked my feet.

The street lights had been turned down and it was very dark. There was a gust of wind from the bamboo grove which blew on my face. I felt something like a bamboo leaf go down the back of my jacket but when I reached up, there was nothing. It felt cold and I got one arm down the back of my jacket and scratched, but it was no good. I bent over and shook hard, stood up again and the cold thing, whatever it was, went but still I cursed myself furiously. Any other time, if I got something stuck inside my jacket, I could take it off and shake it out. But not today. I turned up my collar against the wind, and breathed more quietly. I couldn’t see a lot, only enough to go in a straight line. The rooftops, walls, and trees had all faded into the darkness. I mustn’t make a mistake, I warned myself. I thought the man and the woman must surely have seen me, but at least they didn’t know who I was. The man had a bright red tie on, tied so tight that as I got closer, I could almost see the blue veins standing out on his neck.

I slowed down so I could reconnoitre and the man and woman looked up and saw me. I took my hand out of my jacket. I brandished the kitchen knife and ran toward them.

Liu: “Hang on, hang on. What are you talking about? You say you had a kitchen knife in your hand?”

Rocky: “That’s right.”

Liu: “Wrong. It was an axe.”

Rocky: “It wasn’t an axe, it was a kitchen knife.”

Liu: “Axe.”

Rocky: “Kitchen knife.”

Liu: “Asshole!”

Rocky: “Axe.” He went on:

The couple stood there, and the man stuck his hand in his pocket. He turned to look at me. He had a black mole on his face. He looked surprised then, after a minute, he turned back and whispered something to her. The girl didn’t turn around, she was facing him so I could only see her proﬁle. There was a tremor at the corner of her mouth. She slowly dropped her gaze, then looked up and opened her mouth but no sound came out.

I stood still and watched her. Then the man looked at me, and I looked right back at him. Neither of us said anything. A long time passed. Suddenly I heard a cough and I jumped. I should make a dash for it.

“Hey!” the man called abruptly. His voice was low and abrupt.

“Hey!” I answered back.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Me?” I acted surprised. “Nothing. Just going for a stroll.”

“Don’t mess with me.”

“I’m not kidding you. I really am just going for a stroll.” The man grabbed my arm. “What are you doing?” I yelled.

“Don’t kid me. Tell me why you followed us here!”

“What’s up with you? You’re nuts!” I yanked my arm away, so my jacket came half off.

“Quick, or I’ll start getting nasty,” he said.

“What’s up with you?” I was starting to panic, worried that I’d never get home.

The woman tugged at the man. “That’s enough, let him go. He was only going for a stroll.” The man took no notice except to ward her off with his other arm. “You saw him! He followed us all the way here. He was deﬁnitely up to something.”

“I wasn’t following you, honest, I was going my own way,” I said. I was getting even more frantic and my voice came out as a squeak.

“That’s enough now! Just let him go! I’m scared,” the girl said with a sob in her voice.

“I saw you sneaking along like a ghost!”

“When was I sneaking along like a ghost?” I protested, still trying to pull my arm free. “Let me go! Let me go right now! If you don’t let me know, I’ll start getting nasty!”

“Nasty? I’d like to see you getting nasty. Come on, tell me what you were up to.” “This fucking knife in my hand will tell you what I was up to.”

“Knife? What knife?”

The girl really burst into tears now.

“This knife.” I stopped pulling away from him, and leaned in so close I could feel his body warmth and see the blood pumping in his veins. I got on tiptoe and sliced hard across his neck with the knife, which was blunt, and then hacked downward. The man fell on his back, a great gash across his neck, his face covered in blood. Before the woman had realized what was happening, I grabbed her round the shoulders, digging the ﬁngers of one hand into her ﬂesh, and with the other hand slashed her neck too, just like that. Her eyes closed, I let her go, her body jerked a couple of times and the blood spurted out, a lot of it spraying over me. I raced away through the bamboo thicket, through the ribbons of moonlight.

Liu: “Finished?”

Rocky: “Uh-huh.”

Liu: “You didn’t go back home?”

Rocky: “What would I go back home for?”

Liu: “What happened then?”

Rocky: “Nothing. I’ve told you everything.”

Liu: “No you didn’t.”

Rocky: “What do you mean?”

Liu: “You really didn’t go home?”

Rocky: “I really didn’t.”

Liu: “You’re saying you killed a couple in Tianxiang Park?”

Rocky: “Yes, I just told you.”

Liu: “With an axe.”

Rocky: “You said to say it was an axe.”

“Wrong,” said the police chief, emerging from the shadows. Liu got up too, and walked over to the door, leaned again the frame and echoed the police chief: “Wrong.” He went out. Yan looked after him, startled, then he pushed the stool back, picked up the pen and notebook and went over to Rocky. Rocky signed his name, then wrote on the next line: “July 2009,” stopped and looked at Yan. “It’s the twenty-ﬁrst,” said Yan. There was a clatter of footsteps, and a whole lot of people squeezed in, ﬁlling the room to bursting. The police chief pushed his way through, leaned over and seized Rocky by the scruff of the neck. “Did you kill them?” he yelled, and pulled Rocky away from the table. The chief’s face was so close, he could see the hairs, all covered in dust.

“I just told you I killed them.”

“You didn’t kill your mum and dad?”

“What have my mum and dad got to do with it?” said Rocky, his feet back on the ground now. After a minute he asked: “What did you just say? What’s happened to my mum and dad?”

“Your mum and dad had their heads cut off with an axe,” said the chief, “and the strangest thing is that the corpse of your dad’s friend Li was stuffed under your bed.”

2. Eclipsed

The next day, Liu opened the cell door and took Rocky out. They went to another room, and Liu handcuffed Rocky to the window frame, then left him. An empty chair, its paint peeling, stood opposite the TV, which was turned off. Rocky felt a draft on his face. The sunlight was pleasant and bright. The row of buildings on the opposite side of the street had regular blocks of shadow in front of them, which spread into the road. A woman came from somewhere Rocky couldn’t see, stepped into the sunlight, and crossed the road. Then she stepped into the shadows, and went in through a door in one of the buildings. Rocky nudged his left hand to one side and picked a large shard of glass from the windowsill. He held it so the sunlight reflected from it out into the street. He moved it from side to side and a circular ray of light with a dark splotch on it appeared on the wall of the building opposite. It wavered again, then homed in on its target, slipping into the house and shining on the woman’s body. She had her back to the street, and began to take her clothes off, beginning with her coat and her top. He could see her bra underneath. Rocky tried his best to keep his hand steady, but the ray jiggled like crazy. The woman felt around her back and began to undo the bra hooks. Rocky breathed out hard, raising dust from the windowsill. The ray of light slid off her back but he repositioned it again. She was stripping completely. Then suddenly the light ray was gone and it wouldn’t come back no matter how much Rocky moved his shard of glass. The sky gradually grew dark. He could only see the outlines of the trees and the buildings. Rocky swore and looked up. He thought it must have clouded over but soon there was no light at all. It was as dark as night, and stars had come out. This was a solar eclipse. Rocky was terrified, he put both hands through the window frame with its bits of glass sticking to it, and gripped the bars. “Let me out!” he yelled. He hauled himself up so his feet left the ground and pressed himself to the wall. The street lights began to come on, and by their feeble glow, Rocky saw people coming out of the buildings. They massed in the road, in every corner and on the roofs. They didn’t talk, just quietly looked up into the sky. They looked like the rebels in the film V for Vendetta. Every face wore a rigid plastic mask with a severe and mournful expression on it.

Translated from Russian by Andrew Bromﬁeld

It is good to kill in winter. Especially if it has snowed overnight, and the ground is covered with a delicate blanket of white. You put the bound naked body on it. The blood from the wounds flows more freely in the cold frosty air, and the warmth of life departs with it. If you are lucky and she does not die too quickly, she will see the solid film of ice cover what was flowing through her veins so recently. Red on white, there is no more beautiful combination than that.

They say freezing to death is like going to sleep. Put her head on your knees, watch as the pupils glaze over, as the eyes close, gently stroke the cooling skin, rouse her occasionally with searing blows of the knife, so that she shudders in pain and returns to life for a moment, catch the ﬁnal glimmers of consciousness in her eyes, sing a quiet lullaby, touch her forehead like mum did when you were ill as a child and she checked to see if you were feverish. Repeat that gesture all these years later, check, feel the skin getting colder and colder every time, as if the Snow Queen is wafting her breath over her, notice that the blows no longer make her shudder. Then you can cut the ropes, take the gag out of her mouth, sit down beside her and cry, watching as your tears mingle with the blood that is already starting to congeal.

It is good to kill in spring. Especially when the first leaves are opening and the forest you look out at through the window is covered with the delicate green mildew of new life. On days like this it is good to gather fresh branches of pussy willow, full of spring sap, and go down into the deep basement where she is already waiting for you, crucified on ropes between the floor and the ceiling. Take out the gag, let her scream, walk round her a few times, and then strike the first blow. Gradually, shriek after shriek, her thighs, back, stomach and breasts will be covered with a network of weals and a reddish mildew of blood. Then loosen the ropes, put her on her knees, lean down and ask what her name is. It’s very important to know the girl’s name in order to call to her when she’s leaving, to keep her here as long as possible.

They say in China bamboo grows so fast that if you tie a man to the ground, the young shoots pierce right through his body overnight. I wish the spring grass had the same strength, so that the new life and the new death would fuse into one, and the red drops would freeze like flowers on the broad leaves of the snowdrops blossoming in her crotch, on the yellow inflorescences of the dandelions growing up between her breasts that have already been torn open by the thrust of the bitter wormwood. So that she would be lying there, still alive, among all the flowers that have grown though her body, and her final breath would mingle with their spring scent.

It is good to kill in summer. The naked body is at its most natural in summer – most natural and most defenceless. Hammer a dozen pegs into the ground of the yard, bring the weakened girl up out of the basement, tie her down quickly, without giving her a chance to gather her wits, spreading her arms and legs as wide as possible and not forgetting to check the gag properly, because in summer there are people everywhere and there will always be some do-gooder who will hear the screams and knock on the gate in the tall fence and ask what is going on here.

I would like to take him by the hand and lead him over to where the girl is lying naked, like someone on a nudist beach. She knows she is going to die soon. I would like to tell him to squat down and look into her eyes. That is what terror looks like, I would tell him, that is what despair looks like when it condenses so much that you can touch it. Do not be afraid, touch her hand, touch the slippery watering spheres of her eyes. I will give you one of them as a souvenir, if you like.

But if the gag is inserted properly, there will not be any scream, and you will have to look into her eyes alone and listen closely to the shuddering of the body that responds so subtly to each new stroke, each new ﬂourish of the design that you burn into her skin with a magnifying glass. The heat of the sun, so highly concentrated that it can’t help but move her. The ﬂesh chars, the small pink mounds of the nipples darken in front of your eyes, the clitoris can no longer hide in the undergrowth of the hairs that have been shaven off, or in the hood of skin that has been cut away in advance.

Do not forget to wipe the sweat off her forehead, do not let it ﬂood her eyes, let her see the sky, the sun and the green leaves. Have a damp towel ready, remember what mummy used to do for you when you were sick, wipe the sweat off her forehead, look into her eyes, try to ﬁnd the glimmer of your childhood anguish in them.

It is good to kill in autumn. The blood cannot be seen on the red leaves and the yellow leaves ﬂoat in the crimson puddles like little toy boats. Tie her to a tree, arm yourself with a set of darts and play at St. Sebastian with her. Remember, a dart lodges best of all in the breasts, and there is no chance at all that it will stick in the forehead.

Leave her tied there overnight, if you like. In the morning you will ﬁnd her freezing cold, but still alive. Untie her from the tree, take her into the warm basement, take the gag out of the mouth torn by its own silent screams, let her cry a little, feed her the breakfast you have cooked yourself, and then take her tenderly, as if this is your wedding night, and you have been waiting for it for two years. Lick the drops of blood off the marks from your darts, in a certain sense they are Cupid’s arrows too. When you come, tie her up again, take her out into the yard and start all over again from the beginning.

Autumn is a time of slow dying. There is no need to hurry. The leaves will have time to shrivel, the branches of the trees will be denuded, the leaden clouds will drift across the sky. On one chilly rainy night go out into the yard and approach the unconscious body slumped helplessly in the ropes and look to see what is left of the woman you brought here a month ago. If you are lucky, she will survive the daily crucifixion between the branches of the old apple tree, the blows of the darts, the tender, stifling lovemaking in the cellar, your rough tongue licking her fresh wounds. Pick up a lump of soil swollen with rain and rub this mud over her tortured body. We shall all lie in earth like that sooner or later. Look at her one last time, take the gag out of her mouth and hope that the sound of the pouring rain will drown out her final screams. Take a knife and kill her with a few blows, before winter begins. That’s what my calendar is like. My four seasons. Pictures from an exhibition.

I’d like to write a book like that. A beautiful and bitter book, in which the beauty of nature and the beauty of death would merge into one. But unfortunately I cannot do it, for everything I have said is a lie.

When you kill, you do not think about the seasons of the year. When you kill, you just kill. And there is nothing inside you but horror.

Horror and arousal.

Translated from Spanish by Megan Berkobien

I admit it: I once killed a journalist.

I’ve tried to forget it, to keep quiet, to pretend, but it doesn’t make sense to continue deceiving myself. No one can escape their memories.

The recollection of that unlucky wretch follows me, by day and by night. And when I say that it pursues me, I mean exactly that: when I open my eyes at dawn, frightened by some presence that I don’t recognize as real, I find that fool by my side, watching me with those bulging eyes, devising nightmarish questions for me. I can’t take it anymore. Perhaps the place I’ve chosen for this confession might prove surprising to some. Those who have at one time or another accused me of foolishness, of being a trivial and frivolous person, will feel justified at last. I believe that none of that really matters much now; the stories exist, independent of what we contribute to them. And the places—like the events—choose you, so that you can better fill them with meaning.

Anyway, I don’t want to beat around the bush. In my defense, I should say that we aren’t dealing with one of those hardened journalists, someone who is always found searching for the right word or snifﬁng around where the things that actually interest us happen. No. This reporter belonged to an expendable class of cultural journalists, one of those specialists dealing in rehashed press notes, in the distortion of statements and in the savage copying of previous articles, ﬁshed from the Internet and always penned by someone more brilliant. Moreover, he wasn’t technically a headline journalist. Merely an intern, he was one of those recent arrivals to the Culture section from the womb of the School of Information Sciences—Ha! Sciences?; Ha! Information?—who still confuse horoscopes with art criticism. And what’s worse: not because they are inexperienced, but rather because they will never, in their fucking lives, have the mental capacity to tell one thing from the other.

What's more, he belonged to that subclass of interviewers who never record a conversation, taking notes instead. They usually seat themselves across from you brandishing a square notebook and a plastic pen, ﬁring off questions like someone hurling stones into a well and spending the rest of the time scribbling at full speed in their notepad, frowning and without looking you in the eyes even once. Sometimes they implore:

“Could you speak a bit slower, please?”

When that happens, I make an effort to express myself as quickly as possible. It has been proven that the amount of your words that they are able to retain on the ﬂy while you make an effort to propose a rational argument really makes no difference. It doesn’t matter what you say, because they will interpret it as they please, and what’s worse, they will shape your speech like they would their own. Then, the next day, all the readers leaﬁng through the newspaper will be thinking to themselves what an idiot you are, and how, if she hardly knows how to conjugate and that the secrets of the agreement between subject and verb remain unknown to her, could she have the nerve to publish a book?

Aﬁcionados of morbid details, you will be asking yourselves what method I used. Needless to say, I had never done it before, so I had to think about it beforehand, although that lasted all of three-hundredths of a second. I could have smashed the glass ashtray that rested on the table between us against his head, I could have slit his throat with the glass that he was drinking tonic out of. Save for those weapons, I had nothing else at hand, and so I opted for the old standby, which always provides good results: I grabbed hold of him by the neck and I twisted until he exhaled his last breath. It happened just like that, without further ado, as I took advantage of his confusion (what journalist could foresee that his interviewee would behave that way?) and his smallish stature (he couldn’t have weighed more than 155 pounds or stood more than ﬁve feet four inches).

Strictly speaking, I should admit that it wasn’t as easy as I had believed it would be. He kicked his legs up, writhed in pain, tried to scratch me with his chewed fingernails, tried to defend himself by throwing the tape recorder at me (the one he had not connected so that he wouldn’t waste his precious time having to listen to the recording), he launched one of his moccasins in the air, and even tried to attack me with the plastic pen, but none of that mattered much. I squeezed and squeezed and squeezed, until I saw an intense flush come over his cheeks and I realized that his tongue had started to droop, flaccid, between his jaws. Then I threw him down. He fell with a muffled plop against the soft rug. I looked to my left and right; I was alone in that corner of the café. I put down five euros for the drinks and left the place, adjusting my woolen scarf around my neck.

It’s ﬁne, I agree—I was somewhat brusque. It had everything to do with blind rage. I proceeded with the same vehemence with which I ﬁnd myself now hammering down on this keyboard, in an effort to expel this out-of-sorts confession that has burned in my memory all this time. I can’t understand how I could have waited so long, and without going crazy at that. Eight and a half years. That much time has passed since I abandoned the intern’s sickly cadaver on the blood- colored rug in the Gran Hotel España in Oviedo, and I left to walk the streets, to recapture the city that had always seemed beautiful and that all the nonsense about the book tour had forced me to forget.

***

It’s paradoxical, but I know vrtually nothing about the life of that unfortunate man, except that I ended it. Months after that evening when the rain fell over Oviedo, I learned that he had a girlfriend, which then turned out to be two (exclusive loves don’t exist). His editor thought him an idiot, which helped ease my conscience at the time (“One less idiot in the world,” I thought, “they should give me an award for this, and not for writing novels”); he maintained an unnaturally close relationship with his father (his mother had died when he was just a boy). His name was the only thing that was clear to me from the start, although I won’t say it here— not out of respect (that would be ridiculous, at this point) but rather out of decency. We’ll call him M.M. (and beg pardon of all of you who, I know, hate characters known only by their initials; I hope that in this case you can understand there’s no other option). Thanks to the fact that I knew his name from the very beginning, I could carry out the necessary inquiries in order to know how much I had veriﬁed (one of his two girlfriends had a blog where she liked to explain all her trivial observations, the majority of which also concerned him as well).

As for what I did after the murder, I wouldn’t know how to put it into words. I’ve already said that I took to walking the streets skirting the cathedral, quite happy and much calmer than I had been in weeks, since the book tour had begun. I entered la librería Cervantes to browse the shelves when I happened upon my friend Concha Quirós. Straightaway I thought that she might notice something strange in my appearance, a tell-tale trembling or pallor, I don’t know, the type of thing that in detective novels always represents the deﬁnitive clue to solving the case. To my surprise, nothing special happened. We had a conversation about the marvelous bookstore and about my desire to quit traveling and return home, where I would be able to continue writing at my own leisure, with a certain calmness that I had needed to learn to hide away from predators. Concha agreed with me.

“Believe me, I pity all of you,” she said. “So many cities and so many different people, with you all having to explain the same thing again and again…it’s like a divine punishment.”

How correct Concha Quirós always was, I thought. And how beautiful the name of this woman; Concha, Quirós. Two words that are a pleasure to pronounce. Like pul-pa, like tán-talo, like plantí-grado.

She was the only good thing that happened to me that evening. When she gave her statement to the police, Concha Quirós said that she hadn’t noticed anything strange about me. I never knew if she did it to protect me or because I had really managed to deceive her. I’d like to take advantage of this occasion to thank her for it, as I couldn’t do in person like I would have wished.

***

That Asturian dawn, in room 307 of the Gran Hotel Regente, I had my ﬁrst contact with the ghost of the dimwit who I had killed. Behold an infallible axiom: if someone was an idiot in life, he will continue to be one after death. That pitiful individual was condemned, by my hand, to being a scruffy intern and pea-brain for all eternity. Similarly, I had to put up with his vengeful spirit and to resist his nudges during the rest of my human existence.

It started with something simple: he sat himself down on the bed, at my side, and asked the same question all night. It was the question that had made me decide to throw myself at his neck, after vacillating some. It’s understandable that, as he had died with that question lodged between his lips, it became something that he couldn’t leave on Earth as he departed for the afterlife. He had carried it with him and repeated it with the persistence of a horseﬂy. He had done it one thousand four hundred eleven other times. Do I know this for some concrete reason? Of course—I have counted them. I had to entertain myself somehow, while that dead dimwit stared at me, and bombarded me with a curiosity never to be satiated again.

It would be four in the morning when he shifted gears and let out the sentence that he wouldn’t stop repeating until dawn:

“What do you think about Women’s writing? What do you think about Women’s writing? What do you think about Women’s writing? What do you think about Women’s writing? What do you think about Women’s writing? What do you think about Women’s writing?”

What a sadistic punishment.

From then on, my life turned into hell on earth. Not because I found my bones in prison, after a rather short police investigation and an extensive trial that brought my defense lawyer to the brink of depression (although only after negotiating a drastically reduced sentence on the grounds of temporary insanity, and, among other things, contrition). No, no, just the opposite, my imprisonment is a pleasure: I have ﬁnally found a convincing excuse to say “no” to all of my obligations and I have stopped judging panels, attending literary roundtables, talks in secondary schools, and literary festivities organized in praise of others, all of which had robbed me of my free time in the past. In the Wad-Ras prison, moreover, I feel understood and well-treated; I teach literary workshops to a dozen enthusiastic students and I have more time than ever to write. Moreover, I receive company, enjoying the odd conjugal visit, with permission to leave on the weekend (this privilege, only for the past two months).

The problem is something else. The problem is that it doesn’t matter what happens during the day, which people I meet, which places I set foot in for the ﬁrst—or last—time. The small or large banalities that season the day-to-day life of the only living woman author imprisoned for homicide don’t matter much, because at night I keep bumping into the intern’s vengeful and stubborn spirit. Keep in mind that I killed him eight and a half years ago. Which brings the count to three thousand one hundred and two nights that I’ve spent in his less-than-desirable company. One can understand that I haven’t been able to rest, to forget, to recover. Let alone ﬁnd a partner. Starting a family is an unthinkable undertaking for me.

I had a husband when all of this happened—as some might remember—but he left me a while after I was sentenced, unable to understand nor able to ask questions. Since I only enjoy two nights a week outside these walls, it’s not easy to find someone willing to converse night after night with the idiot, who inexplicably has the habit of firing off questions at my lovers as well. This has happened, at least, with the few men who have shared my bed so far. I feel sorry for one in particular, who got up to take a piss in the middle of the night and returned asking me why there was a strange gentleman with rings under his eyes in the middle of the corridor, who just finished asking him his opinion about the outlook of contemporary Spanish fiction. By morning the ghost was no longer in the corridor, though the lover wasn’t in my bed either.

I think you can see that there's very little time left between now and my descent into madness. And, as those who have had contact with ghostly presences know, the beings of the afterlife have inﬁnite patience. It’s because clocks don’t matter much there where they live. The case is that they can permit themselves a calendar-proof tenacity. They always go out with their own. Perseverance eventually conquers all—as long as it’s taken to the necessary extreme—they seem to want to teach us.

Well, anyway. Here I am, a shell of my former self. Award-winning novelist and madwoman. Wherever I am—be it my dear cell in Wad-Ras prison, hotel, home, camping, or a friend’s house —I will always share my bed with the journalist from La Nueva España who never stopped interviewing me. What’s more, he’s always doing so at four or ﬁve in the morning, when I have ﬁnally managed to get to sleep and forget his presence, when I am immersed in a happy dream where I have a husband, three children, and a house with a dog, rug, and dryer, in that moment the sadistic man shakes me with his lifeless hands, grabbing me by the shoulders mercilessly, forcing me to face my sleeplessness with his bulging eyes and the spit that he has been spitting out for three thousand one hundred two nights, only missing one, with the urgency of a drowned man and his incurable stupidity, so much so that I killed him for it:

“You´re Ángela Vallvey, right? Would you mind spelling your last name for me?” Deﬁled Woman Fiction by Washington Cucurto

Translated from Spanish by Gabriel T. Saxton-Ruiz

The experts, the adolescent girl readers with headbands and tote bags, the eternal dreamers of the world will here discern the origin of the rip-off perpetrated by an important Argentine writer of the Boom.

On the banks of the Riachuelo, some of us brothers lived in the slums. Of course, friends, these cribs bore no resemblance to the colorful corrugated iron dwellings which, a century later, Calabrian and Neapolitan immigrants, arriving in pure and virgin America from Imperial Europe, would popularize.

Let’s be honest: they were little shacks with straw roofs and a beam of carob wood which exhibited the spirit, the air, and the drama of the tenements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that is to say, a den of sex, rabble-rousing, music, labor, passion, and injustice of all types. It was a pleasure to live in those shacks. I was twelve years and thirty-three days old and dreamed of the leader of the revolution, who by 1800 made himself public with blessed cries in pamphlets and newspapers of the period.

I lived with two Negroes “liberated” by the Spanish crown. For these fresh beings, not paralyzed by positions, without a political party or religion, with no greater ambition than to live each day, with a desire to sexualize life to such a point that that’s all there was, brought from Africa in coal boats, imagine what the discovery of the city could provoke.

Imagine living with beings who up until a few days ago had less social standing than a table, a chair, a wardrobe, and all of a sudden—boom!—liberty. They would walk the streets without chains, without the horrifying need to hold the master’s candle. They crashed against the crosspiece of liberty. They lost control in a sickening way: party, party, and pussy.

Clodoaldo Maripili and Azulino Sepúlveda were from southern Nigeria. I met them on the street, we entered the shack and that’s where we lived. We spent the days shut in, fucking like crazy; there were always some shorties willing to surrender their asses in pursuit of a good African cock. It’s incredible the sexual pathology of certain bitches, how they’d get excited by slaves, the forbidden fruit. After all, a woman who was discovered stroking a Negro’s shaft would be burned alive like during the Inquisition. And we’d ﬁnd honeys like crazy, even distinguished ladies, wives of political bosses, leaders of the crown in the Viceroyalty!

As I was saying, it was unreal; us brothers had a hundred-point rating with the ladies.

But we don’t need to go there, or maybe we should! Fuck, don’t be a pussy; give it up for the triumphant-master-schlongs of my boys Clodo and Azul from Africa. After a while—we got bored of dancing cumb and drinking Condorina beer—two Spanish damsels arrived to tear up the land, two lethal sisters, Victrola and Irene Campos, members of the oligarchy with a frighteningly bourgeois spirit. The two were poets, and Victrola even played the ﬂute as well.

We picked them up on the street, and they took us to their three-story mansion with a small backyard garden and black roses from Africa. Bourgeois to the max. Piano, crystal glasses, polished pine ﬂooring, chandeliers with three thousand pieces of glass. Carpets.

They were seeing two losers who spent their days reading French literature. Some dudes bored with leisure, who talked about weird shit, and were half-faggoty. How is it being half-faggoty? All right, let’s stop fucking around, ain’t no time to sniff at everyone’s anal-self!

We hooked up with these posh bitches near the Retiro pier. And when they opened the door to their house, everything changed in our lives. The Africans and I were bitten by the bug of luxury; we had never been in a house so big. Is that how Spain was? Spanishness crawled up our asses. The house was spacious and properly colonial (so removed from the shack where we lived and fucked wretched black bitches, that we even missed it with melancholic vanity!). According to loose lips, the house was once the property of General San Martín and was used to host secret parties for members of the First Junta of the Government. Oh, the sex the brothers Moreno must have had on those ﬁne corduroy sofas! And the former sisters Campos, how many times did they get rammed from behind thanks to their inﬂuence with the Crown?

We were upset by the idea of only staying there for a few hours, and then in the end, as always happens to us, we would be expelled from the story with a swift kick in the ass.

But before continuing to talk about the house, the Negroes, and the fags, which are my topic, I’ll share with you how things quickly escalated: after the in-out-in-out, with their stomachs numb from African semen, the two posh bourgeois honeys wanted to kick us out so that they could immediately bring in other brothers.

“Well, guys, it’s time for you to leave . . .”

At dawn everything was deserted as I looked through the window. Clodoaldo, in a ﬁt of rage, without processing anything in his illiterate immigrant brain (the Crown had changed the status of the black slaves, calling them immigrants), since the second-rate Spanish lady was not getting out of bed and worshipping him, or at least giving him a kiss on the tip of his cock, stood off the bed violently.

“Fucking ho, I’m going to make soup out of you! At least go and make some fried eggs for breakfast!”

And with wasp-like strokes, he slapped her twice. Spain was on her knees on the carpet of the bedroom. Irene, my love, tried to defend her sister and I was obliged to smack her with the bedside table. There’s nothing more discomﬁting! And well, how should I say this, we deﬁled them beautifully, we enslaved them and dragged them through the mud for a time. Weeks later we appeared in the newspapers, but too late, because the newspapers always arrive late to the slaughter.

And this is how, broadly speaking, the incident began. We loved luxury, the poetic life of the bourgeois and the little crustless sandwiches. Regarding the faggots, we kicked their asses out on the street. We threw out the piano, the contents of the library, the glass coffee tables, the wardrobe that even had crystal shoes. A piano, a wardrobe, a library, we never saw such useless things!

And we kept for ourselves the Campos sisters and the house. What need would a soul have to return to a shack on the banks of the river, with so many rooms at our disposal?

The house is our concern and that of forty million Argentines. The always impossible house, the eternal dream, the distant failing of our poverty. How could I forget the luxury and the comforts of the house? A balcony with a full view of the river. From those heights, on clear days, one could see the shores of Montevideo. At the rear end of the terrace, turning away from the river and Montevideo, one could see the pergola of Cabildo and the frauds of the First Junta. An erudite typesetter and fascist pro-American once said, “The best thing that could happen to us is to be a colony, that way we will end once and for all this triumvirate.”

The dining room was a sight. I will never forget it, a table for twelve guests, a living room for doing nothing and ﬁve bedrooms in the back. Fear kept me from entering those rooms, which by all accounts seemed to be locked. Neither Clodo nor Azu from Africa dared set foot inside them; we didn’t want any surprises.

With Victrola and Irene destroyed, what were the three of us going to do in such a mansion by ourselves?

The entrance of the house gave onto the Calle Roma and from the other side, one could see a rectangular plot of land; it was the west side of the Plaza Buenos Aires (today Plaza de Mayo). One entered the house through a hallway, which left no one unscathed. There was furniture in the dark and the girls could fall down and there were other things…The hallway was full of doors that opened up to the bedrooms of the house. In other words, one could leave a bedroom and go toward the street without having to greet someone.

Peace inundated the grounds and we passed the time inside without the need to go out. The kitchen was stocked with a supply of cold cuts that could last months. A burlap sack was full of a mixture of yerba and marijuana, so we smoked and drank yerba mate, both with the same effect.

My two homies from Africa spent the whole damn day lying in bed or drinking mate in the fountained patio of the house. Azu read erotic Spanish comics, the ﬁrst of their kind in the world. Clodo wanted to learn French and read the bourgeois classics left behind by the two dead women. And that’s how we spent our days, scratching our balls.

One morning we woke up craving some ladyﬁngers and went to the kitchen. The door was closed. We attempted to open it, but to no avail: someone had locked it from the inside. My homies from Africa, who don’t believe in ghosts and were hungry, broke the door down with blows from an ax. And we sat down to drink maté in the cold.

As a fairly sharp person, the fact that the door was locked surprised me. Who had shut it and why? Evidently, if it wasn’t one of the three of us, then someone else lived here. Could it be the spirit of one of the Campos sisters? Had the faggots returned and neglected to notify us? I favored the last possibility and forgot about the matter, but not before promising myself that I’d conduct some nocturnal patrols to uncover the joker.

My homies from Africa kept on reading comics and eating in close quarters. The house was littered with dirty clothes and leftover foods. After a week, we were inundated with waste. Clodo proposed we hide it in one of the bedrooms in the back, accessible after passing through the patio.

“Well, who’s going?”

“I’m not, I’m reading Condorito,” said Clodo.

“Fine, I’ll go,” I told them so as not to prolong the conversation. “You guys continue doing nothing . . .”

And I went to the rooms slightly disgusted. Night was falling in shards. In a second, I found myself alone in the dark patio with the locked bedrooms. Something was shaking the wooden doors from inside the rooms. Unfortunately for me, Clodoaldo turned off the last light of the dining room and went to sleep. Something hit the door of the bedroom again, wanting to get out. I ran to the dining room to tell my friends, who got up from their sofas pissed off.

“What’s the matter with you, Cucurtú?”

“I heard noises in the bedrooms in the back . . .”

“Come on, quit fucking around, ain’t nobody there . . .”

“All right, it’s OK, go take the trash out to the street . . .”

And when I got to the street I discovered a mob of kids, women, old folks, Clodoaldo Maripili’s people, who had recently arrived from Nigeria. I forgot the incident.

I wanted to die! The relentless peace was about to be extinguished. Luckily, some mulatto bitches came over and I enjoyed myself with them for a while. But they were pigs, they didn’t clean anything, they relieved themselves on the armchairs as if they were in a mangrove swamp in Africa. They would get it on beautifully and without stopping.

The next day at daybreak the door to the kitchen was closed. No doubt one of the fags was there trying to scare us. We didn’t give it much importance and forced it open again.

The following day, things had gotten complicated. All of the doors were locked, even the bathrooms located next to the rooms in the back. We had no other choice but to settle ourselves in the dining room and the patio.

Clodoaldo Maripili’s grandfather, an elderly man of more than a hundred years of solitude, told us trembling:

“Guys, as we can see, there is only one room. There is no space in this house. The dining room will be taken over by the family.”

“The rest can go to the patio,” said one of the mulatto bitches.

Each day the chaos became more and more intense, and then, one day the door to the dining room was closed and we remained in the patio, exposed to the elements.

The family stayed in the house, in the dining room, strangely shut in. They believed they were safe, but it became evident that something was shutting them in forever. Four generations of people, grandfather, mother, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, were kept safe from the injustices of the world.

I, a fairly sharp person, realized that the same thing had occurred in the rest of the rooms that had been taken over by force; in them remained people who were shut in.

It was then that I noticed that the key in the dining room lock turned incessantly.

We decided to head out before becoming locked in ourselves. We ran toward the inner door of the entryway and tried to open it, but it was locked. The key was inside the body of one of the Campos sisters. I don’t recall which one, Victrola or Irene? When we ﬁnally opened the door and got to the street, we experienced a unique sensation of freedom. The door closed suddenly, leaving us outside. At last, we had been liberated from Spain. We left with what we had on, while the kids and Little Africa continued thriving to the max inside the house.

We were happy, and once back on the street, three shorties appeared and we took them back to our illustrious crib by the river to drink some beers.

“Clodo, throw the keys away!” I told him with a bitch on my arm.

“Are you crazy? A junkman will give me two pesos for the copper.” from “Horses of God” Fiction by Mahi Binebine

Translated from French by Lulu Norman

In another garage, in another slum, there’s the photo of me that Abu Zoubeir pinned to the wall alongside photos of the other martyrs: Nabil smiling beatifically; Khalil with a fixed grin; Blackie, his dark complexion gone, staring with his wide protruding eyes and making a victory sign; and my brother Hamid, true to form, displaying all the swagger of a born leader. This way, Abu Zoubeir glorifies us forever in the fight against the infidels. Looking at our portraits, other boys will dream of justice and sacrifice, as we once did, watching videos of the Palestinian or Chechen martyrs.

Abu Zoubeir, our spiritual guide, wasn’t always religious. For a long time he’d led a debauched life, which he didn’t attempt to hide. On the contrary, he’d use it to convince us of the virtues of abstinence. He could be completely objective because he’d been down that road. Like many of the chosen ones who’d been touched by grace, he’d fought a relentless battle against the mediocrity of vice. Being close to the light, he was now ﬁlled with inexpressible bliss, an inner peace superior in every way to that produced by hashish. Abu Zoubeir knew the right words, the greedy words to implant in the memory, which, as they grow, ingest all the waste piled up there. He’d been born and raised in Douar Lahjar, a shantytown even more run-down than ours, if it’s possible to compare derelictions. His encounter with God took place in Kenitra prison, where he spent the best part of a decade. He didn’t like to talk about his crime, but we knew that rape and fraud were involved. It was a period of his life he described as supremely wayward. He used to say that prison had saved him from himself; having the luck to meet men of faith there was a gift from heaven. So he felt obliged to give back some of the blessings he’d received. His new purpose was to help us purify our souls, to lead us on to the path of righteousness. In fact, that path led straight to death, our own and that of our fellow man, whom we were meant to love. Slam into a blind wall, surrounded by nothingness, where there’s only regret, remorse, solitude, and desolation. Slam, slam, slam . . .

It felt good, being in the garage. The prayer mats on the walls were embroidered with verses from the Koran, in gold-thread calligraphy. The sparse furniture consisted of a rafﬁa mat, a low table, a television, and a bookcase. Sitting cross-legged, dressed all in white, his beard carefully trimmed, Abu Zoubeir radiated a strange light. When his eyes rested on one of us, we had the impression he was reading our hearts, like a book. He had a sixth sense for discerning our innermost thoughts, our doubts, and our questions, to which he had clear and precise answers.

How old were we when those meetings began? Fifteen, maybe sixteen. Hamid was the first to start visiting Abu Zoubeir. I’d see them nattering away for hours over by the cesspools, near where we’d buried Morad. Hamid seemed fascinated by the eloquent conversation of his friend, whom he referred to as a guardian angel. To me he was more like a demon. In the beginning, I hated him, because my brother didn’t notice me anymore, he ignored me. It was as if, overnight, I’d ceased to exist. Hamid was no longer interested in the Sunday games, or the fights that came after. Or even in his own business, which wasn’t doing well. The boys he employed at the dump were stealing from him with complete impunity; but he couldn’t care less. He’d lost all authority over the glue sniffers and his other flunkies, who’d gone freelance. Worse, he’d stopped getting high and, to crown it all, he’d begun to pray five times a day. The transformation was complete. Yemma was happy because he’d taken a job selling shoes in the city with a friend of Abu Zoubeir’s. Nothing was the same as before. He’d bore the pants off us with his piety. On Fridays, he’d go to the mosque and take his place in the front row next to Abu Zoubeir, who’d then give a speech. He let his beard grow; he was a shadow of his former self. Gone was the dandy always up for a fight, sharp as a razor, organizing his own life and everyone else’s. Mine especially. I’d grown up and could look after myself now, but I missed him. If, in a game, I made a spectacular save, I’d glance around for him, in case he was admiring my exploits from afar. I needed his applause, his yelling, his sudden storming of the field to give me a hug. But he wasn’t there. His time was divided between the shop, the garage, and home, where he only came to eat. Gone, too, was the gaiety he usually spread around the table, the ridiculous stories that had Yemma in stitches. He could even extract a smile from my father’s mummified face. He’d jeer at my brothers and no one would be able to get a word in edgewise, he was always so talkative, so funny. All that was gone. He managed to spin a kind of austere web that gradually entangled us all. We couldn’t watch TV in peace because he’d be doing our heads in with his diatribes about the American-Zionist conspiracy that was brainwashing us all, corrupting our morals and insidiously infecting each one of us. Yemma didn’t understand a word he was saying, but depriving her of her Egyptian and Brazilian soaps was out of the question. So, just to irritate us, he’d start noisily reciting the Koran in the room next door.

As time passed, Hamid would come home less and less. Eventually he set himself up in a shack near the garage, lent to him by Abu Zoubeir. That hurt a lot, because he left a gaping hole at home. I went on loving him in spite of it all. He was still my idol, on par with Yachine, my soccer hero. I’d get up at dawn to go and meet him before he left for work. He’d take me to Belkabir’s, a stallholder who made doughnuts that were second to none. Sitting behind a huge vat of oil, the man with the spreading paunch would fling rounds of sticky dough into boiling oil. They’d instantly swell as they floated, giving off an exquisite smell. We’d buy a big crisp ring of them and take it to the café, order mint tea and happily munch away. Hamid said I ought to find myself a job so I’d be able to feed myself properly. He’d have a word with Abu Zoubeir, who had friends everywhere. I agreed, because I adored doughnuts. Sometimes he’d put me off my food by talking about hell so early in the morning. He’d insist that on the day of the Last Judgment the infidels would be thrown into vats of boiling oil, that their skin would keep growing back so they’d carry on frying and the suffering would be atrocious. That gave me goose bumps. I told him I believed in God and I’d never get fried like a doughnut. That’s how I became an apprentice mechanic with Ba Moussa. A grubby job, but one I was conscientious about. And since Nabil was bored and kept hanging around the bikes I was fixing, he was taken on too. Together, we made a great team. So much so that Ba Moussa, who was an inveterate kif smoker, came to rely on us and we became professionals.

The shop consisted of two connecting rooms. The one at the back, which was tiny, dark, and airless, was where the boss lived. It had a bed and a table, on top of which, enjoying pride of place, was a transistor radio, which blared from morning till night, and a suitcase in which he kept his clothes. A bare bulb, emitting a faint glow, hung from the low ceiling. We were always knocking our heads on it. The other room was our workshop: there was a crate full of tools, some old tires, nuts and bolts, screws, and a mountain of ill-assorted scrap metal that could be reused. But in fact, except when it rained, we always worked outside. The bicycle held no mysteries for us anymore. And then we progressed to the next level: mopeds. That was a whole different story, but we knuckled down. Moussa would give us easy jobs to start with, and more complicated ones as we went on. And if, when we made a mistake, he took the liberty of giving us a beating, it was for our own good. We knew that. You have to be tough on apprentices at times, even if Ba Moussa, when he was annoyed, could deliver a real drubbing. I learned to keep out of the way, but Nabil had a knack for being in range. He bore the brunt of it. But hey, that was the deal.

It took us a few months to get the hang of the work. We learned to strip an engine in next to no time, lubricate it, replace the faulty parts, and reassemble it. I’d be ecstatic when an engine started up first time; I’d take it for a trial run on the tracks over at the dump. My friends, seeing me roar past, would howl with jealousy. Some of them threw stones and shouted: “Bourgeois filth!” I’d give them the finger and keep going. The boss was proud of us. As was Hamid, who’d come to visit, bringing bread, a tin of sardines, and potatoes. It was great. In those days, I was stuffing myself, spending half my salary on food. The rest I’d give to Yemma, who’d give it back to me in different ways. She bought balls of wool and knitted us jumpers, gloves, hats, and socks; she’d buy me a pair of espadrilles or anything else she could find at the souk that was cheap and useful. I’d put on weight and had grown about ten centimeters. It was all going so well. But in Sidi Moumen, the moment an engine is running smoothly, a bit of grit will get in to jam it. Without fail. It was woven into the fabric of our destinies.

If Nabil was a graceful creature, it wasn’t his fault. If men did a double take as he walked by, he hadn’t chosen to have a pert ass, or white skin, or silky curls. The older he got, the more desirable he became. I’m not saying I was immune to his charm. His feline, delicate beauty attracted me just as much as the others. I’m not saying I’d never considered it, but I’d quickly banish those appalling thoughts from my mind. The memory of that night in his shack with the Stars still makes my stomach heave. Nabil was dogged by bad luck, which is contagious. It was an easy life, for sure, now that we were no longer scavenging on the dump. We had a cushy job that brought in a hundred dirhams a week and elevated us to the rank of princes. Not for a moment did giving it up cross our minds. But that damned ass of Nabil’s only ever caused us grief. One evening, when he was staying late at the shop to ﬁx a bike, Ba Moussa came back from prayers and lowered the metal grille. He took off his djellaba and went over to Nabil, who instantly recognized the look in his boss’s eyes. He stayed on his guard, going on with his work as if nothing were amiss. Ba Moussa’s voice was soft and syrupy, quite different from his daytime one, which was harsh and grating. He leaned over him and pinched his cheeks: “You know you’re a beautiful boy!” Without thinking for a second, Nabil grabbed the wrench in his grease-blackened hands and struck him violently on the temple—a mufﬂed, frightening sound— and the man’s full weight fell on the scrap metal. No doubt it was panic that had unleashed Nabil’s strength, to make him knock him out like that. He might have left it there, pulled up the grille and walked out. Events might have taken a different turn. A reconciliation might have been possible the next day: a couple of slaps and order would have been restored. But Nabil was in the grip of some demon that made him go on with the attack and lay into his aggressor, who was lying on the ground, barely conscious. He bent over him and, blinded with rage, pounded him again and again, shattering his skull. And as if that weren’t enough, he grabbed hold of the hammer that was lying around and began to batter him furiously in the balls. He was battering the man but also the fate that had condemned him from birth. The spurting blood only excited him more. And he went on until he was exhausted, until he could no longer hold the tool in his hand; then he lay down on top of the boss and stayed there motionless a long while, like a wild beast, sated, slumped over its prey.

Seeing him a few hours later, not far from where we lived, I was afraid. His face was pale, his clothes were soaked in blood, and he was incapable of uttering a word. I brought him a glass of water and we sat down on the step by our door. It took a long time for him to pull himself together, then, with unnerving calm, he said:

“I’ve killed the boss.”

I was stunned.

“Are you sure?”

“I hit him hard, very hard, the disgusting pig.”

“Maybe you just knocked him out.”

Nabil looked down and didn’t answer. I realized that he was serious and that that meant the end of our stint as mechanics. Together we went to explain the situation to my brother Hamid, who, once again calling on his garage friends, rescued us from that nightmare. Ba Moussa was buried in the dump that same night, near where Morad lay. And to avoid the risk of anyone finding the two corpses, they set fire to the whole area. We’d gone with them and it was a beautiful sight, the fire in the night. It crackled, it glowed red. The high flames pierced the black sky and, as we danced under the gaze of the silent stars, our deformed shadows trailed over the filth. Abu Zoubeir and Hamid said a prayer. I’d have liked to join in, but I didn’t know the words. I was afraid the fire would spread and said so to Hamid, who dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand, since it had rained the day before. I wasn’t entirely reassured. Thinking about it, he was right. He knew the dump better than anyone. Little by little, the flames died out, as if they were tired, over the ashes of Morad and the boss. On the way back, we barely spoke. Near Omar the coalman’s shop, Abu Zoubeir turned to my brother and said: “You ought to invite them to the garage! It would do them good to be closer to God.” Hamid agreed.

Apart from a distant cousin who visited him once a year, Ba Moussa didn’t have any family. So no one asked questions about his disappearance. Besides, the denizens of Sidi Moumen were used to people moving in and out in a hurry. People come and go without anyone really knowing why. Others take their place, make a home in an empty hovel, improvise, adapt, and maintain the general decrepitude, as if to ensure the survival of our species.

After he’d cleaned the shop, Hamid brought us the crate of tools, saying that it might be useful, seeing as we’d learned the trade. He advised us to clear off, make ourselves scarce until things settled down. Which we did. And life resumed its course, as if old Moussa had never existed. From Horses of God, forthcoming in 2013 from Tin House Books. By arrangement with the publisher. Translation © 2013 by Lulu Norman. All rights reserved. from “Nanga” Fiction by Willy Uribe

Translated from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead

The day always began before dawn in Lasma. The ﬁshermen preparing the bait and the seasonal coconut pickers making their way to the plantation. I'd hear the latter singing as they came past my hut—it was a happy tune but one that, sung over and over, became nothing more than a hymn to drudgery. The voices were subdued, as was the shufﬂing footfall, seemingly dragged or forced forward along the coastal path and into another long day working in the searing heat. I'd hear them from the mattress where I lay, my sheet barely covering me as I slept the last few hours before the sun would come and tear up the Asuh mountains.

Raima Raigami, the youngest of Metha Raigami's seven sons, was a late riser too. Maybe it was that same idleness that made him one of the least quarrelsome of the Raigami clan. He'd go along quietly, grudgingly, safe and anonymous in that peloton of criminal brothers. So I was surprised when he was the ﬁrst one who came and tried to blackmail me. He came up stealthily, I didn't hear him let himself into my hut; I was combing out my knotty hair when there he was in the mirror, sitting behind me on my clothes chest.

"What do you think you're doing?" I said, almost shouting. "How about knocking?"

He got up, went calmly over to the door, and closed it. Then came back and sat down on the chest again.

"We're going to talk business, Tim."

"I don’t think so. I've got nothing to sell and nothing I need. I went to Dompu two days ago."

"But you can pay me to keep my mouth shut."

Unnerved, and though looking at Raima straight on, I was still seeing him as if reﬂected in the mirror, between the fractures in the glass and the dark of the hut interior, situated somewhere between mystery and fear. His pronounced cheeks, his small, dull, almond-shaped eyes, the shitty whir of his thoughts.

"And what would you be keeping your mouth shut about?" I asked, managing to keep my voice level.

"I know someone's after you."

I smiled. It wasn't easy, but I managed to smile. "You think we're totally cut off here, don't you, Tim? The news mightn't be instant like they say it is in Europe, but it gets to us in the end. I was in Sirombu two days again. Your picture was in the paper."

"Couldn't have been. No one's taken my photo in years."

"Oh, it was you all right. Younger, maybe, yes. But it was you, a hundred percent."

"Raima, Raima, Raima. You're wasting your time. You won’t get a rupee out of me, plus I'll only have to go and speak with your father."

He said nothing for a few moments. Then got up. His hand dived for his belt and then, before I knew it, he'd sprung forward and was pressing a curved dagger to my gut.

"What are you hiding, Lope Urrutia?"

Now I really was frightened. It wasn't the point of the dagger that worried me, but the total absence of light in Raima Raigami's eyes.

"Raima, gut me and you know you'll be going straight to jail." My legs were trembling, my voice too, now. "The police will come, you'll spend years in a shitty jail, eating shit, sleeping in shit. Think about it. You Raigamis are thieves, not murderers."

"No one saw me coming in," he said, and with such innocence that I immediately felt relieved; no one was going to see him leaving either.

I managed to make him put the dagger away, sit down again and drink a little of the rum I keep for special occasions. I let him feel in control, confessed who I really was, and when we got onto the money, he relaxed. Everything became much easier then. He didn't become suspicious when I went through into the bathroom, so I was able to take down the machete from where it hung next to the shower and, quiet as a cormorant skimming the reef, come up behind him and press the blade to his throat with all my strength. No crying out, no fuss, nice and clean. I even had time to staunch the wound—once I was sure his shitbag of a soul had departed—and his blood barely hit the floor. Dragging the body to the shower, I wrapped up the bloody clothes in an old shirt and wiped the machete clean. Then I went back to bed. My legs had stopped trembling the moment I knew I was going to have to kill him; to let Raima live would have only meant a truce until the next time, until he came to squeeze me for more money or until he decided the reward would suit him better. But I felt utterly tired, I felt filled and weighed down with a deep despondency. I felt the mattress's broken springs stabbing into me, and the sweat of everyone who had ever slept in that room before me. My thoughts turned leaden too, dragging me to the depths, to a cold place, a place with dank, stifled, flotsam winters that last half the year. This was the second time I'd had to kill a man, and though it was a high price, I felt I still had plenty in reserve. The peace I'd come in search of—no one was going to try and rob me of that and get away with it.

Translated from Italian by Elizabeth Harris

The following are selected from Andrea Camilleri’s Voi non sapete (You Don’t Know), a Maﬁa dictionary of sorts, largely based on the typed notes of “the boss of bosses,” Bernardo Provenzano, who was captured in Sicily in 2006. Camilleri had access to Provenzano’s typewritten notes, his “pizzini,” which Provenzano used to communicate within his organization for over forty years. Proceeds from the sale of this book go to the families of police killed by the Maﬁa.

AMORE. “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife” is the most respected (and enforced) commandment for the Maﬁosi.

A true Maﬁoso remains faithful to the woman he loves his entire life, whether married to that woman or living with her. This is a point of absolute honor, irrefutable.

A Maﬁoso who betrays his wife is a man without merit, not to be trusted, a weathervane turning in the wind.

Everyone remembers Toto Riina’s disdain, his look of disgust during his televised trial, when he spoke of the informant Tommaso Buscetta: “A real lady’s man, a guy who loves the ladies.”

That he was married and had so many women made him subhuman, lower than a snitch.

During this same trial, Rinna’s defense lawyer pushed Buscetta to admit he was expelled from Cosa Nostra for having too many women. The informant’s response: “If we’re opening the book on private matters, I’m ready.”

The attorney, writes journalist Franceso La Licata, “beat a hasty retreat, sensing Buscetta knew what he’d been up to behind the scenes: a few years before, Cosa Nostra wanted him killed for his affair with a client’s wife—a capital ‘offense.’ ”

So the rule that a Mafioso can be punished by death for having an affair with the wife of another imprisoned Mafioso also applies to a Mafioso’s lawyer. Of course a gay son is an absolute disgrace, an intolerable situation for a Mafioso, and results in the homosexual son having to stay away from his family and from the city where his father lives and works.

Obviously, a gay Maﬁoso is out of the question, counter to nature.

When it comes to adultery, however, sometimes you have to turn a blind eye.

Maﬁoso Francesco Marino Mannoia (according to Pietro Grasso in his book of interviews with Francesco La Licata) was married to the daughter of crime boss Pietro Vernengo. Then he fell in love with another woman, and they had a daughter together. So he went to his father-in-law and said he wanted to separate from his wife “to make things right with this other woman.” Vernengo told him, though, that a divorce in the family was unthinkable and that a separated woman would no longer be considered decent. Vernego’s answer was, “Let it alone. Do what you want, but at night you go home to sleep.”

But according to Grasso, when Marino Mannoia wound up arrested and then turned state’s witness, Verengo would be forced to change his moral code, his views on the sanctity of marriage, and would persuade his daughter to ask for a divorce. Better off betrayed and divorced than the wife of a turncoat.

Another case in point is with Giovanni Motisi’s wife. Motisi, also known as ‘u pacchiuni (“fatso”), was in hiding for years, and his wife, Caterina Pecora, the young daughter of contractors with Maﬁa ties, was sick and tired of being a virtual widow and wanted to be free to divorce: but she couldn’t get permission for quite some time. “This sort of thing just doesn’t go on in our families,” said Nino Rotolo, one of the most powerful of Palermo’s district bosses, in direct contact with Provenzano. After a few years, though, Rotolo had second thoughts, reasoning this way: “One of [Giovanni Motisi’s] sisters kicked her husband out and started living with her lover—and her sister moved in with them. That makes both sisters in the wrong.” So the family’s honor was already seriously compromised and Caterina might as well get a divorce. This obvious dishonor justiﬁed breaking the rule!

But betraying one’s spouse is still the rare exception. Though it does seem the generally lax moral code so many worry over these days has reached even the Maﬁa, straining its iron law of ﬁdelity.

Yet Giuffrè is so attached to his wife that after he was arrested and could no longer see her as much as he wanted, he decided to become an informant just to be with her again.

And everyone knows about ferocious Leoluca Bagarella, who came home from a short trip, discovered his wife had hanged herself, and started weeping uncontrollably. As in a small, bourgeois Greek tragedy, she’d committed suicide because her brother had begun to cooperate with the state and so was now an enemy of her husband.

Provenzano isn’t married to the woman who’s given him two children, but when he was arrested and the PMs asked him if he was married, he answered: “I am in my conscience, yes.” The pizzini that Signora Saveria sends to Provenzano always begin in the same way, Vita mia, my life, and end with Vita, I hold you close. Sometimes she calls him Amore.

These aren’t idle words, empty phrases devoid of feeling. These pizzini are brimming with true love, real devotion. And the same goes for Provenzano.

Some nights, the police listening in on Signora Saveria can hear her crying in her bed.

ARMS. The lupara, the sawed-off shotgun used for hunting wolves, or lupi (hence the name), was the signature weapon of the Maﬁa. It had the advantage of being easily hidden under a cloak or coat or, for those members of various devotional confraternities, under the long habit worn for religious festivals.

Then the Kalashnikov became the weapon of choice.

True, this gun is heavy and bulky, but it has a great ﬁring capacity, it’s an arrusciaturi—a real watering can. It was put to the test in Palermo. One night somebody opened up with a Kalashnikov against the bullet-proof window of a jewelry store (though the store was empty), and the window shattered. Proof those submachine-gun bullets could penetrate like nothing else.

Over time, the Maﬁa started using car bombs, TNT, and other more elaborate explosives from Eastern-bloc countries.

It’s worth noting that no Maﬁa boss, at the moment of arrest, has been armed. Perhaps the bosses want to distinguish themselves from armed thugs who engage in shootouts, want to show their strength through order.

During the time of the hero-outlaw Salvatore Giuliano, the State sent carabinieri ofﬁcer Ugo Luca, head of the CFRB (Control Force for the Repression of Banditry), to Sicily. The result: frequent shoot-outs and many dead outlaws. But some suspected these deaths were nothing less than summary executions: Sicilian banditry had enjoyed a high level of political protection, and as everyone knows, the dead don’t talk. One Sicilian newspaper published a cartoon showing Sicily covered in crosses. The caption came from Dante: “Ove non è che Luca”—where nothing gleams.

When Giuliano’s right-hand man Pisciotta was arrested, the police chief declared, accusing General Luca: “We’re taking them alive.” But then someone got to Pisciotta in prison, poisoned him.

Totò Rinna’s hideout, an apartment in Palermo, was never searched due to a misunderstanding (!) between the public prosecutor’s ofﬁce and the arresting carabinieri.

When they finally went in, they didn’t find a thing. The Mafia had removed all traces of him and afterward carefully whitewashed the walls. But one thing’s certain: there wasn’t a single weapon in that apartment. Just like there weren’t any on Provenzano’s farm.

JUSTICE. Cu havi dinari e amicizia teni ‘n culu la Giustizia (People with friends and wealth can tell Justice to go fuck itself). Judici , prisidenti e avvucati/ in Paradisu nun ‘nni truvati (Judges, lawyers and others of the Court,/ up in Heaven, you’ll never find that sort). La furca è pi lu poviri, la Giustizia pi lu fissa (Gallows for the poor, Justice for the fool). La liggi pi’ l’amici s’interpreta, pi’ l’autri s’applica (For your friends, you interpret the law, for everyone else, you apply it). Lu codici è fattu da li cappeddi pi jiri ‘n culo a li coppuli (Laws are created by gentlemen in hats to shove up the ass of poor bastards in caps). During one phone interception, the investigators managed to hear a nice little saying coined by Nino Rotolo: Trials are like muluna, like watermelons: you’ve got to break them open to find out what’s inside.

There are hundreds of these sayings in dialect that show just how little the Sicilians trust Justice and its laws created by the ruling class to subjugate and oppress the poor.

For centuries, the Maﬁa has thrived in this cultivated ﬁeld, providing an alternative to State justice, knowing how to maintain respect for its laws and how to apply those laws, more than any police, carabinieri, or prosecuting magistrates ever knew what to do (or could do) with Italian law.

There was a time when the true Maﬁa boss felt he wore the authority of a singular judge, a severe, impartial administer of justice.

A judge able to condemn a man to death before any defense attorney or witness could ever make use of him. A judge who decided a man’s fate using one and one criteria only, his sense of justice (Maﬁa justice): his respect for unwritten law.

Usually the motivation behind the sentence was there on the condemned man’s corpse: a rock in the mouth (betrayal), shoes still on (attempting to flee), genitals cut off (sexual offense), prickly- pear pad in a pocket (stealing Mafia money), testicles cut off and stuffed in the man’s mouth (adultery with the wife of a Mafioso).

In a similar vein, killing wasn’t a crime; it was an execution, an act of justice, and so the judge himself might serve as executioner and, from his high place, not feel the least degraded by the role.

This is Provenzano’s achievement with the Maﬁa, a return to the elite, tried-and-true methods of old.

First you reason, weigh your options, consider, calculate, and then and only then, as extrema ratio, you move on to execution. But you must try to the very last not to impose the death sentence. Because in the end, a death is always damaging.

MAFIA. In all of Provenzano’s pizzini, there’s not a single trace of this word.

And it never appears in any of the pizzini he receives, either. Excuse the comparison, but this is like the managing director of Fiat and all the Fiat dealers, in all their business correspondence, not mentioning Fiat even once.

PIZZINI, SYSTEM OF. That Provenzano typed his hidden orders on a pizzino, then sent this note by a long, circuitous route, passing through many hands, until it ﬁnally reached its recipient, might seem like an absolutely primitive method of correspondence. In keeping with this modest man who, seen on TV at the time of his arrest, looked like a peasant; in keeping with the bare, rustic farm where he hid those last years; in keeping with the bitter surrounding countryside.

But if you thought the pizzini system was primitive, you’d be wrong.

Because this system he’d concocted and that he (modestly) insisted had come to him directly from Divine Providence, was, in the end, the most secure option, since they had to avoid the mail and landlines and cell phones, as these were all too easily intercepted.

Plus, the hand-delivered letter has illustrious precedent: it’s no accident that Gabriele D’Annunzio had private messengers carry his secret love letters by train from city to city.

And doesn’t our State Auditors’ Department have a “walker” on staff, who hand-delivers important documents?

Other so-called primitive methods, like carrier pigeons and smoke signals (and why not?—if he found them even remotely useful, Provenzano would surely have adopted them), were ruled out, the ﬁrst because it required a permanent base (so, not compatible with sudden necessary relocations), the second because it was just too visible.

If the pizzini system was complicated, it also had one great advantage over the telephone, which Provenzano was ingenuous enough to exploit: with pizzini, there was almost zero room for equivocations or misunderstandings, intentional or otherwise.

So the handy line—“But I didn’t understand: I thought you were saying”—couldn’t be used. Scripta manent et verba volant.

In fact, when Provenzano was communicating the written opinion of one party to another, he’d faithfully copy that opinion into his own pizzino.

As compared to actual conversation, the pizzini system had another solid advantage: you couldn’t reply right away to the “advice” you received. By the time you got a pizzino and then returned one disagreeing in any way with Provenzano, your resolve was weakened and any reasons for disagreeing were diluted or stamped out entirely.

Plus: with the mysterious distance it covered, its unknown place of origin, its impersonal, typewritten nature, and the authority it exuded, the pizzino took on the power of a supreme oracle, and was hard to respond to, argue against, because in the end, any opposition seemed like sacrilege.

TYPEWRITER. All of the pizzini are typewritten.

And when it came to typewriters, Provenzano wasn’t very thrifty.

By studying the different type alignments, the way certain letters struck the page, police experts concluded that Provenzano used a good ﬁve typewriters, electric and manual, over the years.

The police found an old Olivetti when they raided the farm, plus a newer electric model. And the other three?

Probably left behind in the rush to escape, in old hideouts the investigators haven’t discovered.

What’s beautiful is that the police scientiﬁc-experts managed to identify Provenzano’s typewriters through one word in particular, augurio, which means “wish,” as in tanti auguri— best wishes—and which he used constantly.

On the second (manual) typewriter, the letters G and U were oddly spaced, and the O tended to be raised. The third typewriter was an electric Olivetti with a U that slanted to the left, the letters GU that overlapped at times, and an O that leaned to the right. On the fourth typewriter, the A was high.

In short, the augurio Provenzano sent to others didn’t wish him very well.

But why was he so set on typing? Was holding a pen just too much effort?

Maybe the reasons were more pointed, more subtle.

In the end, something typewritten, though it can reveal the personal characteristics of the writer, does maintain the quality of being impersonal, while something handwritten inevitably betrays the writer’s feelings at the time.

And, really, isn’t this impersonal quality how Provanzo maintains the distance he wants between himself and his outside collaborators?

Provenzano can’t call the bosses together anymore because someone’s always right on his heels, but maybe that’s not really a situation that he minds. Instead, he reveals himself through a machine that registers his thoughts, and in this way, moves closer and closer to that abstract entity he’d like to become.

There might be another good reason for using a typewriter.

Once Provenzano had become the absolute boss, he probably felt a bit uncomfortable showing himself for what he really was: semi-illiterate. If he wrote things out by hand, the errors would be his. On a typewriter, he can pass off grammar errors as bad typing. And in fact, with some of the pizzini, when he asks to be excused for his errors, it’s not clear what errors he’s talking about, and he doesn’t explain…

YOU DON’T KNOW. When Deputy Police Superintendent Renato Cortese breaks into Montagna dei Cavalli’s barn, he surprises Provenzo at his electric typewriter, composing a pizzino to his life-long love.

On the table are two satchels, one with recently delivered pizzini and the other with those to be sent out; plus an Italian dictionary (which, given all the errors in his pizzini, we can assume Provenzano never consults) and his favorite Bible, the 1978 edition (which, given all the citations in the pizzini, he must consult all the time).

The TV’s on in the corner: the election results. The center-left has won by a slight margin. Perhaps while Provenzo was writing his lover, he was distracted by the possible repercussions of this new political climate.

Cortese doesn’t ask him the typical question, if he’s Provenzano; he declares it outright: “You’re Bernardo Provenzano.”

And then: “You’re under arrest.”

Surprised, Provenzano doesn’t react at ﬁrst; then he gives a slight wave of annoyance and mutters just loud enough for them all to hear: “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Instead Deputy Police Superintendent Cortese and his men could say they knew exactly what they were doing: after eight years of obsessive investigation, they were ﬁnally arresting him.

It was the end of an era. From that moment on, the lives of the men they were arresting would change, become disorientingly normal.

Provenzano’s comment, however, is fairly enigmatic and can be read in a number of ways.

One interpretation is that Provenzano imagined a bloody war of succession to the throne.

But it’s not likely he was thinking of anybody but himself just then.

Another interpretation is that Provenzano feared his arrest would result in the Maﬁa’s returning to its militant ways, to the bombings and mass murders which, through his authority, he’d managed to quell. In short, he was afraid his painstaking efforts and belief in submersion would be repudiated by his heirs. And that the submarine he’d kept at periscope depth would break the surface ﬁring like crazy. In short, his comment meant: arrest me, you open Pandora’s box.

Of course it’s only natural for the CEO of any large company to worry about what will happen when he’s gone. But this wasn’t a matter of a director’s resignation or his worries; this was an arrest presaging jail for life, after forty-three years in hiding. Is it conceivable that Provenzano was worried just then about the fate of the Maﬁa business?

Perhaps, since Provenzano was an avid reader of the New Testament, what popped into his head at this moment was a passage from his favorite gospel, Luke:

And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they cruciﬁed him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left. Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.

Just a coincidence?

New Writing from South Korea Marilyn Monroe and Lady Gaga’s Korea, and Korean Literature Nonﬁction by Kim Young-ha

Translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell

Marilyn Monroe came to South Korea in February of 1954. While honeymooning in Tokyo with Joe DiMaggio, she had boarded a military plane and was en route to Seoul even before the marriage was fully consummated. At the airport, she was swarmed by hundreds of GIs who had been awaiting her arrival. When she came down the gangway, Monroe was dressed in a flight suit. Reporters noted that “half of the buttons on the top were undone, offering tantalizing glimpses of her chest, which got the troops even more riled up.” According to Korean news reports from the time, the GIs were disappointed to see her immediately board a helicopter bound for the frontlines and asked her when she would return, to which she “turned on the charm like a mother comforting a child” and replied, “I’ll be right back.” By February of 1954, the Korean War, which had lasted for three years, had already been brought to an end under the pretext of a ceasefire, but tens of thousands of American soldiers were still stationed in South Korea. Monroe gave dozens of performances, visited wounded soldiers in field hospitals, and posed on top of tanks. In archival photos, the soldiers’ excitement as they greet her is palpable. In colorless, dirt- covered barracks, Monroe alone stands out in color, as if someone had come along later and photoshopped her into the pictures. Before thousands of soldiers seated on a low hill devoid of even a single tree, she spreads her arms wide and sings in time with a piano. The images look like they could have come from a 1960s rock festival.

Yeouido Island, where Monroe alighted from the plane that brought her from Tokyo, is now the center of Seoul. It is crowded with high-rise buildings that house television stations and ﬁnance companies. The spot where the airport once stood has been turned into a park. Monroe died never having said anything special about Korea. Which is how it had to be. Because the Korea that she saw in 1954 would have been nothing more than scorched earth, razed to the ground by bombs and cheering GIs.

About half a century after Monroe visited Korea, Lady Gaga came to call. She was giving a concert sponsored by the Korean credit card company Hyundai Card. While Monroe had worn a ﬂight suit, Gaga wore a mask. Where she did resemble Monroe was in her deeply low-cut dress that offered tantalizing glimpses of her chest. The concert was held in April of this year. Though the Korean War has long been over, the scale of U.S. troops stationed in Korea has not lessened much. But Lady Gaga was not here to “comfort” the troops. Instead, she gave what was for her a very modest performance for the tens of thousands of fans, as well as board members of Hyundai Card and their VIP customers, who attended the concert. Also in attendance outside of the concert arena were protestors. You might think they were all old-timers who cling to Confucian tradition, but in fact the protests were led by conservative Christian groups who are inﬂuenced by evangelical Christianity in the United States. The close connection between Korean Christianity and American evangelical tradition likewise dates back to the Korean War. After the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered, the U.S. military entered the Korean peninsula and established a military government. Then the Korean War took place, followed by a succession of pro-American dictatorships in South Korea. To the eyes of Koreans, who had suffered through Japanese colonialism and civil war, the United States was the strongest country in the world, and therefore the God that Americans believed in must also be all-powerful. Korean Christianity grew and grew, and they opposed Lady Gaga just as conservative American Christians did.

Lady Gaga spent three days and two nights in Korea. Of the news reports detailing her movements, the one that caught my attention was a story that took place in a Korean restaurant, where she had gone to eat with her entourage. According to the report, she ate the banchan, the small dishes that accompany a Korean meal, with her hands instead of the chopsticks that had been set out. The January 2012 issue of Vanity Fair describes her wearing Chanel and skillfully making whole-wheat pasta at her parents’ house on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Somehow I doubt she ate that pasta with her fingers. If she had, the reporter would have been sure to include such an amusing detail. Yet three months after that interview took place, Lady Gaga was eating with her hands in a hotel restaurant in Seoul. Perhaps someone had given her the wrong information. Koreans consider it impolite to eat with one’s hands. Nevertheless, Gaga was not criticized for it. It was merely seen as amusing. Perhaps that is because she is not only famous for her eccentric behavior but was also a guest from a faraway place. But if eating with her fingers was not part of her unique style of eccentricity, then it’s interesting. Throughout her stay in Korea, she barely did anything provocative that would make her audience uncomfortable. Instead, it was her excessively well-behaved and courteous behavior that drew attention. Given the way she behaved during her trip to Korea, eating banchan with her fingers may have even been a kind of gesture of respect. For Koreans, the difference between eating with chopsticks and eating with your hands is like night and day, but for Lady Gaga, there may have been little difference at all. Perhaps in her mind, there is the culture of forks and knives and the “other” culture of everything else.

The Korea that Marilyn Monroe saw was a battleground. The Koreans that Lady Gaga imagined were people who eat with their fingers. Sixty years have passed since Marilyn Monroe boarded a propeller plane and flew here to visit American GIs, but it is possible that views of Korea from the outside have not changed very much. Korea still brings to mind words like war, division, nuclear North Korea, and the Great Leader Kim Jong-il. In literature, as well, the first works to be translated were those that included such themes. Of course, Gaga’s generation is a bit different from Monroe’s. They are more interested in Korean culture than politics (which isn’t very cool), and probably give little thought to an old war that broke out in the 1950s or in a Stalinist state where students march in lockstep down city streets. They probably see Korea as a country of exotic foods and strange living habits. To them, Korea seems to be symbolized by bulgogi and bibimbap, boy groups wearing makeup who command legions of girl fans, and art films rife with cruelty and violence. I encountered both stereotypes frequently while living in New York for two years.

The real Korea lies somewhere between, or perhaps somewhere beyond, Monroe’s Korea and Gaga’s Korea. And as is the case with any country’s serious literature, Korean writers are fighting these stereotypes and working to create their own world. In particular, after the 1990s, when Korea’s economic development accelerated, Korean literature broke free of nationalistic narcissism, the struggle against dictatorship, and the epic narratives of national division and the trauma of war, and began to focus on conspicuously individual issues. Writers who had devoted themselves to social issues began to look inward and question what they could do through language and through fiction. The result was the astonishing diversification of Korean literature. Now, in 2012, I can say that it is all but impossible to briefly summarize current trends in Korean literature.

For this special issue, I selected three short stories. They are all departures from the kinds of stereotypes that readily come to mind when one speaks of Korea or of Korean literature, but at the same time, they show what Korean literature is like at present.

Sim Sangdae’s “Beauty,” written in a mythic style, takes place in a run-down coal mining town. The town, which was once prosperous but is now in ruins, is probably similar to the image of Korea that Monroe would have seen from the airplane: denuded mountains, scorched earth, colorless beings scraping out a living. But even back then, there were those who went to extremes in search of beauty. And that ill-matched aesthetic impulse ends tragically.

Park Mingyu’s “Is That So? I’m a Giraffe” is set in the subways of Seoul. After the Korean War, U.S. foreign aid became the seed money for South Korea’s rapid economic development. As urbanization quickly progressed, people crowded into the cities, particularly Seoul. The subway system was hurriedly built in order to ferry people to work, but the pace of construction could not keep up. In the early 2000s, when Park’s story takes place, “pushers” (pushimaen) could be found working in the subway stations. These young men, who were hired by the construction companies to prevent people from spilling out of the subway cars and keeping the doors from closing, would stand on the train platforms during rush hour and shove people into the cars to ensure that the doors closed and the trains left on time. People headed off to work as tightly packed as bean sprouts. In Park’s story, these economic “losers” endure the daily grind with humor and self-deprecation.

Yun Ko-eun is the youngest of the three writers. Her story, which was written in 2011, also takes place on the subway. But it is different from Park’s subway of ten years ago. Park’s pushers are left behind on the platform when the train leaves, but Yun’s characters ride the “Circle Line” around the city all day. For these people, whose job is to advertise books by pretending to read them, the subway is an inescapable reality, a Mobius strip. Their only way out is to become the books that they are selling, and in the end, that is what happens. They are easily replaced and disposed of. In 2011, South Korea was economically more afﬂuent, and yet the prospects for young people in this country have never been bleaker and less stable.

Several months after Hyundai Card invited Lady Gaga to Korea, they also invited Eminem. In the middle of his concert, Eminem raised his arms to form a heart and perplexed the audience, who had been expecting bad manners and crude gestures. Both Lady Gaga and Eminem were so polite and well-behaved. They probably meant no ill intent whatsoever when they ate with their ﬁngers and made hearts with their arms. We all live with misunderstandings about others. And sometimes that’s the more comfortable path. But isn’t literature an art that struggles to overcome stereotypes and easy misunderstandings? I hope that the readers of this special edition will enjoy these three unfamiliar stories from South Korea sent to them from afar.

Translated from Korean by Amber Hyun Jung Kim

I grew up in a harbor town by Korea’s east coast where the hill and sea meet. Back then, the town was colorless and empty of any striking buildings. Come winter, it made for a dreary sight, cloaked in a dark, solid color. Serving as a fishing port, a military port, and a seaport for coal and cement, the town was often enveloped in a suffocating haze of coal ash and cement dust scattered by the sea winds. In the summer, rain fell ceaselessly over the rotting smell of fish guts. Then the blazing sun reappeared, as flies buzzed noisily underneath the eaves. When winter came again, the depressing color took over once more. When it snowed, the town was all black and white. It seemed to mire its people in a bog of chaotic madness. Surrounded by the endless black and white, the people shuddered against the sound of the ships’ horns and the cold sea wind that pounded against their impoverished souls. The black-and-white world was a place of fear to all who dwelled in it.

Then one day, an incident occurred that threw splashes of vivid color against the monochrome backdrop of the town. It was a symbolic, cathartic event that moved the wretched townspeople gripped with the urge to self-destruct into a hushed silence.

It all began at a small beauty parlor located on one side of a half-frozen stream. The shop was near a cement bridge that crossed the stream. Piles of dirty slush, kicked up by passing cars and the scurrying feet of pedestrians, accumulated on the corners of the bridge, the center of which stayed slick and muddy. The small beauty parlor stood bravely at the edge of this depressing picture. In our town, the beauty parlor served as an exciting distraction from the otherwise boring landscape. It was like a small lighthouse that directed our bodily impulses away from the oppressions of the world. From a poster on the parlor’s front window, a brightly smiling woman looked out at the black-and-white world. A cozy plume of steam billowed from the pipe jutting out the window. The place was indeed a shrine to true beauty.

On the morning of the day in question, I was sitting alone in a comic book store across from the beauty parlor. Sitting on the edge of a wooden chair in a corner of the dark, cold store, I was buried deep in a story about an old busker who sang on the streets in the winter with his little daughter in tow. I wasn’t interested in his accordion or his music; what I was interested in was his pretty young daughter. It wasn’t until much later that I realized the kind of music he produced soothed the souls of the wounded. On that morning, however, I found myself hoping that people would spare more dimes for the young girl. I couldn’t feel anything for the passion of her old father who kept his eyes closed and wordlessly played his accordion.

There was no one else at the comic book store. It was still early, and the one stove in the store was cold. On it was a battered nickel pot full of cold odeng soup. The elderly storekeeper should have gotten up and pushed a fresh coal briquette into the stove but it was much too early, so the shop was cold. The storekeeper’s mute wife, who’d gotten up and opened the door when I knocked on the window, had gone back to bed. Her husband was lying down on the floor with one of his wife’s sweaters covering his forehead to keep warm as he silently kept count of the books I was taking off the shelves. Both he and his wife knew I read at the speed of light. After finishing the story of the busker and his daughter, I went on to read about a French farmer running to the German troops to snitch on a resistance fighter hiding in his house. The farmer’s wife was treating a gunshot wound to the young fighter’s chest.

Not only was I a fast reader of comic books but I was also a good student, a fact that made my teachers and neighbors extremely uncomfortable and unhappy, as I was a skinny, ill-bred kid from a dysfunctional home. Some of our neighbors declared my good grades were all thanks to my whore mom.

All of the neighbors knew my mom suffered from alopecia, a condition that rendered her pubic area hairless. My dad, a ﬁsherman sixteen years her senior who was always out at sea, was the only one who wasn’t aware that everyone else knew. On that fateful morning, my mom handed me cash and shooed me off to the comic book store. I guessed that her lover, the widowed carpenter, would be crawling into our house soon. The carpenter, the father of a classmate, was one of many men in town who lusted after Mom’s pale, ﬂeshy pussy.

Ever since I was much younger, my mom had often dragged men into her bedroom. Each time it happened, I was kicked out. She didn’t care what anyone else said but, apparently, she didn’t want me witnessing her sleeping around with men other than my father. Thanks to that, I got enough cash to read as many comic books and eat as much odeng as I wanted. If I’d gotten smart from reading all those comic books, then I guess the neighbors’ argument that I got good grades because my mom was a slut makes sense. Although my mom made sure I wasn’t around to see the men, she let my brother, who was younger by one year, stay in the room. So when she was fucking the owner of the unlicensed acid factory or the kept man married to a barkeep, my brother stayed in a corner of the room under his sheets, not daring to make a sound. He was blind in one eye, while I was a smart kid with all my features intact. Mom treated him as if he were an animal or an insect.

“Look, you idiot, look at this, you worthless fool,” my mom said to my brother one summer day, as she walked into our front yard. “Look at your sibling.”

She tossed something soft wrapped in newspaper on the floor of the living room. She didn’t stop to think I might be in the room. Unaware I was watching everything through a crack in my door, she sat on the floor and, with one finger, gingerly lifted the paper to show my brother what lay underneath.

“I brought it to show you, you useless piece of shit.”

Inside was a lump of flesh covered in blood. I realized immediately it was a fetus, her own. She’d walked home in the heat after she’d gone under the knife to get the bloody mess scraped out of her. Her face was pale as chalk. But I didn’t feel bad for her. I knew the lump of pink, shiny flesh, cut up into small pieces like so many portions of short ribs, was someone else’s child, not my father’s. I stood behind the door, staring at the mangled fetus wrapped in newspaper. But my brother sidled up to the lump and, with his finger, lifted the newspaper to peer closely at the body. To my mom, he asked, “And? Is this a boy or girl?”

Chuckling, she answered, “Girl. Why’s it matter, you fool?”

Looking down at the bloody mess, he remarked, “She’s pretty.”

A drop of sweat rolled down my forehead into my eye. I wiped it away with the back of my hand. I imagined that the fetus would soon rot and start to stink in this heat. It was desperately hot. Suddenly, my brother stopped poking at the dismembered chunks of meat and glanced at where I was hiding in the room. His one good eye looked the other way, but his glazed-over blind eye met mine directly. It shone.

He had lost his sight in that eye two years earlier. It was winter, and he and I were riding our sled over the frozen stream. It was a very cold day. No one else was there. During the summer monsoon season, the stream swelled with muddy water, but the ﬂow was usually feeble. That winter’s drought had made it worse. There was only a narrow, bumpy patch of ice to ride on, with sharp rocks sticking up in places. When our sled crashed into a rock and we were sent ﬂying, the ice pick I had in my hand accidentally became lodged in my brother’s eye. Whimpering, he brought both hands up to his eye. The ice pick refused to come out and stayed there, wobbling. Even then he didn’t scream or shout. And with the pick still dangling from his eye, he pleaded, “Don’t tell Mom. I’ll tell her I did it. Say you don’t know anything about it, OK?”

He was in the third grade when I turned him blind. He never told anyone what I did. But I never became the loving brother I should have been. There were a couple of reasons for that but, mostly, I was jealous that while I had to wander out in the cold while my mom was fucking those men, he got to stay in the room and witness the sex unfold before him. Only he got to see Mom fucking a sailor from out of town and hear their cursing and filthy banter. I shivered as I imagined the hordes of strange men grunting on top of Mom as sweat dripped over her heaving breasts. I couldn’t stop imagining the sight of my mom biting down on her lip and struggling to hold in her screams as the skinny, tubercular taffy-seller groaned on top of her, the veins in his forehead throbbing. I wanted so much to see it for myself. But only my brother was to be that lucky. All I could turn to was a poster on the gas station wall of a coyly posing actress and lame lewd stories told by the older boys behind the elementary school gates. When I came home from these solitary wanderings, my mom and brother greeted me as if nothing had happened. One summer night I went home early, determined to catch Mom in the act. Throwing open the doors to her room, I saw it was empty. The man had left not too long ago. The room was heavy with the smell of sweat and semen and my mom and brother were both lying weakly on the floor, as if they’d just had an epileptic fit. Buried in a tangle of sheets and trying to steady his breath, my brother fixed me with an innocent gaze.

I treated him like a one-eyed freak. So did my mom. After he was struck blind, he went to work for a deliveryman to earn some extra cash because my mom told him to. He was in the fourth grade at the time. While he was busy delivering briquettes to our neighbors, his boss came over to our house to swig rice wine and finger our mom’s pale pussy with his soot-stained hands. One day, my brother caught them in the act and quit his job. He opened the door to the kitchen and peered in to see Mom kneeling on the floor before his boss’s pulsating penis. She had tears flowing down her cheeks. In a choked voice, my brother cried out, “You dirty hairless whore!”

That was the ﬁrst and last time he rebelled against Mom. She was very disappointed. The next day, instead of going to work at the coal briquette factory, my brother went back to school. He didn’t show it, but after he went back to school on Mom’s orders, he seemed to regret his one act of rebellion.

But, back to the morning of the incident at the beauty parlor. I was kicked out of the house and my brother was probably crouching silently in Mom’s room as the widowed carpenter grunted and grinded against Mom’s hairless pussy. I was busy reading about a thirteen-year-old princess who has just been asked for her hand in marriage by a prince from a neighboring kingdom. She’s walking in her garden with a servant girl when she suddenly runs into a young knight. He had an athletic build and was in long leather boots, with a short sword strapped to his side.

The princess meets the knight again at the royal ball. The knight, now handsomely attired bows gallantly before the princess and asks for a dance. As I was about to turn the page, the storekeeper’s wife emerged with a coal brazier from her room. I kept my head buried in my books until the stove was lit and a pot of fresh odeng soup came to a boil, ﬁlling the store with steam and the smell of ﬁshcakes. Cold wind blew in through the cracks in the glass window. The sky was clear but it was very cold that day. In the empty lot next to the comic book store where a bare persimmon tree stood, the wind swept up dry bits of snow from the ground. Kids started coming to the store in ones and twos. Only after the thick chunk of radish in the odeng soup turned completely soft did I lift my head at the sudden noise I heard outside. Hurrying over to the window, I looked across the stream at the beauty parlor. Several townspeople, hands tucked underneath their armpits to keep warm, were forming a crowd.

The incident had occurred early that morning but it only became known toward noon. The police had already come to close down the scene. Arriving late at the scene, I pushed my way into the crowd, my heart beating wildly. Because I hadn’t seen it go down, I had no idea what had happened or what the inside looked like. But the neighbors had put together a story through hearsay already, despite the fact no one had gone in.

That morning, the beauty parlor opened for business earlier than usual because a customer had called the day before to request an early appointment. The only hairdresser there, also the owner of the place, was a thin, short spinster who looked much older than her age. She received her customer early in the morning as promised. The customer hurried inside, though the stove had yet to warm up the place. She was the mayor’s youngest daughter and one of the few girls from the area who’d gone to college, and a college in Seoul at that. She was nineteen years old, a good age, and extraordinarily pretty. She was to leave for Seoul that morning, so she’d come to the beauty parlor to get her hair done by the spinster, who was praised in town for her skill.

The mayor’s daughter, a freshman, was the object of desire for every guy in town. She didn’t give any of them the time of day, but all the guys—from Ochi’s older brother who never made it past elementary school and was working as the ﬁsh market broker’s assistant, to Big Head’s uncle who was attending a vocational school at another town, to my own teacher—scrambled to clear the path for her whenever they ran into her in the street. Though shy and helpless whenever she was around, when the guys got together at their usual gathering place near the school’s monkey bars, they bragged they could have her anytime they wanted. Sometimes, they got into ﬁghts that even involved knives, vying for the love of the same woman. Even while baring their teeth at each other, the guys complained about their impossible and repressed urges.

A while ago, a big fight broke out. “What did you say, asshole? You had nothing but odeng your whole life?” It was Chilsung’s brother, who was studying for a civil service exam, who started the fight. It began as an argument over the mayor’s daughter but turned into a fight after what Ochi’s brother said.

“Yeah, you bastard. Go down to the market. Go on, go down to the market and ask the people there. Ask them if I have odeng every day or not,” retorted Ochi’s brother. Now that he had a job, he’d bought himself a pair of tight leather pants which he was wearing that day.

“You piece of shit!” Chilsung’s brother jumped down from the monkey bars and head-butted Ochi’s brother. He must have been pissed that this guy, an elementary school dropout who moved crates at the ﬁsh market, was competing for the same college girl he liked, when he, after all, had gone to high school.

“Hey!” Blood flowed from Ochi’s brother’s nose. Crouched on the floor, he moved to lift the hem of his pants and swiftly grabbed the jackknife tucked into his sock. Chilsung’s brother took off at a run, but Ochi’s brother chased him down and stabbed him in his shoulder blade. After they’d run across the school grounds and past the monkey bars where one of them finally ended up stabbed, I left from where I was watching and stole away to the comic book store. Usually, once fights like those ended and both the bruised fighters and the onlookers had settled down, there was one last rite they went through. And that involved me and my family. As a final rite, they’d glance over at our house and burst out in knowing laughter, exchanging jokes about my mom’s hairless pussy.

Of all the rumors surrounding the mayor’s daughter, the one started by Mina’s uncle, who supposedly took the same English and math classes she did, was the most believable. The two were playing badminton one day when their shuttlecock ﬂew into a nearby shed. They crawled inside together to retrieve it and ended up doing more. Mina’s uncle, who was rather good- looking, was on his second year studying to get into college. He bragged that he pulled her close and kissed her in the dark. But Big Head’s uncle, he of the vocational school, snorted at the rumor.

“Fucking crazy nonsense.”

If it weren’t for the fact that people were already pissed at me for getting good grades in school when I was the son of a slut, I might have harbored feelings for the mayor’s daughter as well. I was certainly mesmerized by her. When she was in high school, I was passing by her house when I saw her hanging laundry in her backyard. She was hanging up her white school uniform, standing on tiptoe. I caught a glimpse of her pale, soft lower back as she reached up and grabbed at the uniform. As she did, her blouse revealed a couple inches of skin. But that was more than enough. Already a mature kid by then with a lively imagination, I felt as if I’d stolen a piece of her soul. But that ecstasy was snuffed out when I came across her radiant face one night when she saw me at my most humiliated.

I was coming home from math class late that night. The unforgiving cold of the night swept the street, and the sky and ground were the color of ink. There were no streetlights. The stores were closed and dark, so I had near zero visibility on the road. I was passing by an iron foundry after emerging from a railroad overpass. I was walking with my abacus and notebook under one arm when, suddenly, I fell down a hole by the road and into a pool of water that had collected inside. The hole had been dug that afternoon to clean the sewer. The sewage stank terribly. Willing myself to stay alert, I crawled out of the hole like a rat dragging itself out from a pail of shit. Shivering with the abacus still under my arm, I hurried off. Along with feeling humiliated and angry, though, I was strangely elated. If no one had seen me, I’d have run home instead of walking, loudly spitting out the dirty water. I was amused by the fact that nothing could make me filthier than I already was. I didn’t have to worry about choosing the driest, cleanest path. I had no inhibitions. The biting cold and the inky blackness didn’t bother me in the least. It was when I’d reached the top of a hill, still coughing and dragging my squeaking sneakers, that I saw a flickering streetlight standing outside the mayor’s house. The light cast its glow over the surrounding areas. As soon as I saw the light, I felt the cold around me, which I’d forgotten until then. I also felt I could smell the sewer on me again. My clothes were stuck to me. It was in that state that I saw that figure of beauty standing under the light. It was the mayor’s daughter. She was standing under the streetlight with that bright, pretty face of hers, watching me as I passed by.

That’s how we passed each other. After I came home, I was sick for a full three days. Somehow, I felt a wave of relief from knowing I’d never lust after her again. Many years passed until I realized why we had to meet when I was at my worst, covered in piss and dirt. The face I saw in the light was one of true, unbearable beauty. I was the son of an old ﬁsherman and his whore wife whereas she was a princess from a fairy tale who existed as a symbol inside a precious, secret castle.

On the day of the incident, she’d already bought a ticket for the eleven o’clock train to Seoul. Arriving at the beauty parlor, she complained she had no time. She begged the skinny hairdresser to hurry. Neither she nor the hairdresser had time to complain about the cold inside the beauty parlor.

“I want my hair to look nice, but please hurry! Brr, it’s cold!”

It began quickly and well. The stove soon warmed up. But the styling didn’t end. Things were getting more and more feverish, not just from the stove and the sparks that flew from the coal. The fever came from the pretty customer’s pride in her looks and the proud hairdresser’s obsession over her skills. Like this, no like that, just a little more, just a little more, they urged each other, as they took up more and more time. What’s worse, they agreed to do her makeup as well. And it didn’t end there. At first, their greed kept them going but over time, it was the hairdresser’s crazed obsession that simply couldn’t be curbed. Later, when the hairdresser was giving her statement at the police station, she explained, “The more I worked on her, the prettier she became, a thousand, ten thousand times prettier. I couldn’t stop.” The mayor’s daughter was also greedy, at first. She knew she had to leave in time to catch the train but she was too caught up in seeing her transformation in the mirror. A few times, she attempted to tell the hairdresser it was time to go, but the stylist refused to listen, asking for a few more minutes, just a few more minutes. Each time she swept a makeup brush against the girl’s cheeks, her hair needed another touchup, and because the hair was newly styled, her cheek and eye makeup had to be done over. This is what presaged the incident. The mayor’s daughter, though amazed by her increasing beauty, realized she was out of time. When the hairdresser didn’t stop, however, she became annoyed. But even then, her stylist seemed unable to hear what she was saying.

“That’s when she grabbed my scissors and threw them on the ﬂoor,” the hairdresser later testiﬁed before the cops. “So I yelled at her, ‘Hey! Keep still!’”

At that, the mayor’s daughter angrily got up from her chair. The hairdresser reached down to pick up the scissors as the girl was about to leave. Calmly, the skinny hairdresser picked up the scissors, grabbed the girl’s arm, and pulled her roughly to the chair. Forcing her feet back on the chair prop, she shoved her into the chair.

“Don’t touch me! What are you doing!” The girl shouted and fought back.

“Hold still! Don’t move, don’t move . . .”

“Why are you doing this? I said stop! Stop it, you’re scaring me!”

“So hold still! Come now, don’t you want to look pretty?” Coaxed the hairdresser, as she lifted the glittering pair of scissors and stabbed it deep into the girl’s throat. The mayor’s daughter let out a low sigh. When the blades were thrust deep into her neck, she slumped across the chair and was finally silenced. A thin line of blood trickled down the round metal grip of the scissors. But it didn’t lead to a big pool of blood. Reassured, the hairdresser stood in front of the beautiful girl. Sighing, she resumed working on her face and hair again. She rearranged the girl’s hair and makeup then stepped back to admire her work, repeating this back and forth until she was completely satisfied. It took a while for the skinny hairdresser to finish dressing up the girl’s hair and makeup, finally stepping back with a little sigh of pleasure.

“There, all ﬁnished!” She gave a satisﬁed smile as the adrenaline left her body. “It’s perfect.”

The girl, draped across the chair with the blades still lodged in her throat, looked perfect, indeed. The hairdresser lowered her arms and gazed dumbstruck at her work. Even when the mayor’s wife ﬁnally burst into the beauty parlor after hurrying through the mud on the bridge and past the snow in search of her lost daughter, the hairdresser was reportedly still standing there, gazing in stupefaction at her ﬁrst customer of the day.

I was standing with the other onlookers in the snow. The hairdresser had already been taken away by the police but the ambulance had only just arrived to pick up the body. Soon, the body of the mayor’s daughter was brought out, as everyone craned their heads to look. And behind the stretcher were my mom and brother. Mom was looking down at the ground. The onlookers and I were shocked and wondered how it was they had access to the beauty parlor. Because her head was down, I couldn’t see Mom’s expression but my brother was staring back at us with his one glazed-over eye. He used his good eye to inspect the ground and make sure Mom didn’t slip in the snow. They walked out behind the girl’s body covered in white cloth and past the crowd of onlookers.

I stood there with my mouth twisted open and my eyes full of uncontrollable jealousy. The others felt the same. All of us wanted desperately to take a look inside but no one could. No one knew what had transpired in there or what the scene looked like. And we certainly didn’t know how my mom and one-eyed brother got in there, what they saw, and how they felt walking outside. Even after several days had passed, we still didn’t get to hear anything. No one could go inside that beauty parlor. It wasn’t receiving any customers, for a different, obvious reason this time. But I was still gripped by a jealous rage, because I wanted so much to see the inside of that beauty parlor.

My mom and brother never spoke of that incident. A dozen years later, my brother died at sea. It was a few years after Mom’s own death. Skinnier than ever, she’d bled for a few days before succumbing to death. Her life ended in vivid color, the same way all life is snuffed out. One day, she lifted her bony, pale frame from the kitchen floor and saw she’d left blood as red as camellia blossoms. As she struggled to get up, the bare light bulb in the kitchen cast its harsh glare over her face. After she finally drew her last breath atop her own blood, my brother and I went our separate ways. I entered a high school in another town while my brother joined our dad on a fishing boat. That’s when he took up drinking with the other men. One day, he got into a fight with the other fishermen, was beaten up and thrown into the freezer in the hull of the boat, where he froze to death, his body as stiff as frozen fish.

Apparently, while drinking with the other men, he’d thrown a ﬁt and yelled that his hairless slut of a mother was living in a place far away where none of us could go. He declared the place to be in a green valley surrounded by white snow-capped mountains from which sprang a clear, babbling brook. Peach trees adorned the valley, showering their pale pink blossoms over the brook which merrily carried them off, as beautiful women with red, red lips danced by the waters. As he ranted, my brother was said to have struck the other men. Then, sobbing, he took off his clothes, crying that he was going to swim to that magical village. He must have been describing the scene inside the beauty parlor which he’d kept quiet about until then. He was attempting to describe a place where only abandoned, unfortunate souls could enter.

After he froze to death, the captain and boatswain tied his body with rope, threw it overboard, and sailed at full speed all night in an attempt to thaw his frozen corpse. Fortunately, the ﬁsh didn’t chew him up, but the next morning, when the men brought up the corpse, it hadn’t thawed. Until he died at sea like a frozen piece of ﬁsh, he never told anyone, least of all me, what he’d seen in that beauty parlor.

I still want to go inside the parlor. When I do, I’ll get to see the world’s most beautiful woman still sitting in her chair, a trickle of blood dripping down the scissors stuck in her throat, and the ﬂames from the two dozen holes of the coal briquettes dancing in the heat of the stove. I want to open the glass door to the beauty parlor and witness that most beautiful sight with my own eyes. But I never got the chance, not even after I’d become an adult. The world stamped out my desperate urge to see that place of fever and passion for myself. The beauty parlor was soon torn down, never to be rebuilt. I never saw another one like it anywhere.

Now the town has prospered and looks nothing like it did in the past. Even in the winter, it doesn’t become shrouded in gray gloom like it once did. During the day, women in green scarves can be seen crossing the street with children playing with colorful balloons. At night, neon lights illuminate the town, as women wearing rich red lipstick ﬂag down bright yellow cabs to meet their dates. But when the snow comes, its whiteness descends over all the urges, the madness, extravagance, and pleasures, and the people tear out their hair and wallow in the urge to self- destruct as they hurry home in the night. People still clamor, the ships’ horns pierce, and cold sea winds blow, yet the woman who’d sobbed kneeling before the coal deliveryman’s throbbing penis, and the silent, one-eyed boy, are no more. The skinny hairdresser, and the beauty parlor, are no more.

Translated from Korean by Charles La Shure

If only she had not misread “The Chef's Mail” as “The Chef's Nail,” none of this ever would have happened. It all began a few months ago, at the moment Jung misread that sign hanging outside a shop. When she saw the sign reading “The Chef's Nail” from a distance, she took another look at the note on her cellphone. She had thought that the client was a restaurant, but upon seeing the sign she was momentarily confused as to what sort of business it was.

Jung wrote advertisements for a local newspaper. She was a person who saw countless signs and read countless company names each day. But a chef's fingernail? That struck her as being not so much novel or fresh, but bizarre. It probably would have been fine to call a nail art shop “The Chef's Nail.” She didn't want to think of it as the name of a restaurant, though. With a sign like “The Chef's Nail” hanging over them, the patrons eating there would certainly have a sneaking suspicion that the place was filthy. But that phrase was not to be found anywhere. The sign read “The Chef's Mail,” and the shop was an Italian restaurant. It was just a brief incident.

That brief incident led to the printing of five thousand copies that were scattered around area shopping centers, houses, and alleys. Somehow Jung had ended up writing “The Chef's Nail” in her ad as well. The two ideas had become entangled in her mind, leading to this confusion. “Mail” had transformed into “Nail,” and that word was printed without raising the slightest suspicion from anyone. It was Jung's responsibility, but there were others whose eyes had let them down as well. It was, after all, a company where even a draft with the date “November 37, 2010” on it could be approved. In the end, it was right after the lot had been printed and distributed that Jung's manager noticed the difference between “Mail” and “Nail” and frantically called for her with the same urgency that one might call for an anticonvulsant. At that moment, Jung was standing in front of the office door, putting her thumb against the fingerprint reader at the start of the day. Her fingerprint hadn't changed in the three years she had worked there, but all of a sudden she was getting a message that her fingerprint wasn't recognized. Please try again . . . please try again... she obeyed the electronic voice and tried again several times, but it would not recognize her fingerprint. She took out some hand cream and rubbed it on her thumb. It could be because it was too dry.

“What are you rubbing on there? How can you be doing your makeup at a time like this?”

Her manager appeared, planted in front of her, as soon as her fingerprint was recognized and the door opened. Behind him were 15,000 stickers with the word “Mail” on them. There were three places in the advertisement where “Nail” was mentioned. Jung took those stickers and visited one hundred distribution centers. She affixed the stickers one at a time to all the papers that had not yet been distributed. Her thumbprint began to gradually wear away. The misprints were as filthy as fingernails in a dish of food. The misprints that had already been distributed were as horrible as fingernails that had found their way from the food into the mouths of patrons.

“I'm telling you, if we put these stickers on the papers, there will be people who will peel them off to see what is underneath.”

Kwak, a newer employee at the company, made this comment as she helped Jung with the stickers. Kwak said that she was one of those people, and that the sticker just piqued her curiosity. Jung was not one of those people. And she was not the type of person to make this sort of mistake often. She consoled herself with the thought that she had just been unlucky enough to have been scraped by a chef's nail. She might have continued to think that way had she not gotten her buses confused on her way home that day. She got on the wrong bus and ended up going far out of her way. She should have gotten on the No. 4, but when she got on she found herself on the No. 8. The lines for the No. 4 and No. 8 buses always stretched out from the stops, and the ends of those lines were twisted like a pretzel. It was easy to get them confused, but before that evening Jung had always gotten on the No. 4. She had never even thought of it as challenging.

There must have been a lot of people like Kwak who peeled off the stickers, because the company received several phone calls complaining about the ad. And Jung's thumbprint still didn't work too well with the ﬁngerprint reader. Even after she rubbed on some hand cream, the machine reported her failure.

“Is your thumbprint faulty now, too?”

It was only when she heard her manager make this comment behind her that she realized she was holding up her left thumb when it was her right thumbprint that was on ﬁle. She had simply switched right for left, and—because she had switched right for left—her thumbprint was not recognized. So it was that she came to be judged faulty.

“Now take Jung here,” her manager said at a company dinner after work one day. “Even after making such a big blunder, she is unrufﬂed.”

Then he said that her fatal ﬂaw was her tendency to slip up so many times these days. What her manager said usually went in one ear and out the other, but the phrase “these days” caught her attention. Since she had misread that sign that one time, she had been making a lot of trivial mistakes. Confusing the hand that held a gum wrapper with the hand that held a train ticket, or even squirting dish soap into a hot frying pan. She sometimes stood in front of the automatic book return machine and accidentally put in a book she had intended to mail instead of the book she was supposed to return. She had even bought some Listerine at a convenience store, twisted off the cap, and nearly drunk the mouthwash. She had confused it with an energy drink. It was all because she was overworked, Kwak said. Wait, had it been her manager who had said that? Anyway, someone had said something like that. That everything was because of overwork, that all deaths in this world were ultimately death from overwork.

When they had finished dinner and were getting ready to go out for drinks, Jung found herself standing in front of a fish tank outside a sushi place. She was with her coworkers, but it felt like she was standing there alone. A mackerel inside the tank quickly turned around. The current was so strong that the fish could not but turn, and thus the tank felt like the ocean. That mackerel might have even thought it was swimming under its own power. There were only two ways to find out if it was swimming passively or actively: the current could be stopped, or the mackerel could leap out of the tank. But outside there was only hard asphalt.

“Our company is like that ﬁsh tank,” Jung said to no one in particular.

As soon as she said this, a few of her coworkers pretended to climb into the ﬁsh tank. They were ﬁne with being swept away like that. They were cub reporters new to the paper.

“Isn't that the way of the world?” one of them said. Everyone laughed. Jung laughed, too. She did it to suppress an impulse. She had suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to take a dive. Not into the tank, but out of it. That is, into hard reality.

The next morning, she ran into her director in the elevator on the way up to the ofﬁce. Her director, who was on the phone, motioned to Jung for a pen. Jung quickly reached into her bag, took out a pen, and held it out to him. At that moment her director's face froze. Jung's face froze as well. What she had brought out of her bag was not a pen but a piece of dried pollock from the night before. While they were out drinking, one of the cub reporters had slipped the pollock into her bag.

“It reminds me of the expression on your face.”

The unexpected appearance of the gray, shriveled pollock struck Jung speechless. For a moment she thought that she really did look like the dried snack from the night before. Her director must have thought something similar. Jung explained herself. It was just a mistake, it wasn't intentional. Her director seemed to understand. But then he said: “I think you need a vacation. What's inside your bag and what’s inside your head is all jumbled up, that's why you're confused, isn't it? What if you were to confuse the brake pedal with the accelerator?”

Jung wanted to protest—why did you sign off on a draft with the date November 37, the person who made up the date November 37 is still working here without a problem, it was just a single mistake—but she made no sound. The elevator door opened and that day Jung had no work to do. She put her thumb up to the ﬁngerprint reader on her way home at the end of the day, but it didn't recognize her thumbprint. Well, that was to be expected. She wasn't an employee at that paper anymore.

Technically speaking she was being transferred to a different department, but it was actually part of a restructuring at the paper, and in this way Jung leapt out of the ﬁsh tank. She felt relieved that she didn't have to hold her thumb up to a machine that everyone rubbed their hands all over. When she thought of the ﬁngerprint reader as a toilet in a public restroom, she felt a little less hurt. Kwak followed her out of the building a few steps and asked where she would go next.

“I guess I'll just ride the subway and read a book or something.” Kwak looked at her with pity in her eyes and held out a business card. She said that it would help. Jung mechanically looked down at the card and then put it into her bag. And thus she fell onto the asphalt street. It was an escape. But still she couldn't shake the feeling that she was a piece of trash that even the trash can rejected, and she grew depressed.

Since she spent all day at home, every day felt like Sunday, no matter what day of the week it was. The next day was Sunday, too. And the day after that. After three Sundays in a row, Sunday was no longer Sunday. On the fourth Sunday in a row, her misgivings became reality. According to the natural sequence of events, she received a call from the apartment manager. She was informed that she had to leave the apartment within forty-five days of her resignation. Jung knew about the regulation. She just hadn't thought that the regulation would be applied to her so suddenly and against her will. The reason she had stayed with the paper despite the long hours and low pay was the company housing. It was an attractive benefit to someone like Jung, who came from a different region. Jung had been fortunate enough to get an apartment only a year after she started working for the company, and thus she had lived comfortably the last two years. But not anymore. She didn't know if this was also part of the natural sequence of events, but she was also notified by her boyfriend that he was leaving her. They had both been so busy that they might have seen each other once a month at best. With her employment, housing, and love life brought to an end all at once, Jung suddenly found herself independent. The vacuum made her so uneasy that she felt something like ecstasy.

Jung lay down on the sofa and stared at the wallpaper across from her. Eight years of city life passed before her eyes. The first home she had chosen in this city was on the third basement level of a building. Depending on how you looked at it, it was either on the second basement level or the third. That meant that if she jumped as high as she could she would be on the second basement level, and if she fell back down to the floor she would be on the third basement level. There was only one thing the house didn't have: windows. The reality exceeded anything she had ever experienced or could ever imagine. In every house that Jung knew of, or in any house that Jung could imagine, there were windows, whether big or small, but here was clearly a house with no windows. Although, depending on how you looked at it, you could say that there was a window. Except that it wasn't a window in a wall, but in the floor. When she opened the window facing downward in this third (or second) basement level house, she found a flight of stairs. And at the bottom of those stairs was a storage room that was about a quarter of the size of the room above. Jung put things that she wasn't using at the moment in that storage room, and she did not open it back up until the day she left that house. On the day she left she opened that downward- facing window and took the things out of the room, but then she immediately set them out with the trash. She couldn't remember what those things were.

After that basement place and two rooftop rooms, the fourth home Jung chose was on the second floor of a corridor apartment building, and only then did Jung feel that she had truly settled down in the city. Both the floor and ceiling of the house were warm and toasty. That home was the one she was living in right now. But soon she would have to look for a fifth home.

When she found the strange sign on her front door, it really was Sunday. After five or so Sundays in a row, when Sunday actually came around, Jung opened up the door to set out the dishes from her delivery food, just like she did every other Sunday. The cold air rushed in. She was relieved to see that she was not the only person putting dishes out in the hallway. But in the very next moment she noticed a difference between her apartment and her neighbor's. It was a number. On the front door of Jung's apartment, the number “237” was written in marker. Judging by the excessively straight lettering and positioning, it looked more like a notification than graffiti. There was a rumor that criminals marked houses where someone lived alone. This might be something like that. The 237th target, or maybe the target for February 37—no, wait, the 37th was a date that would only make sense at her old company, wasn't it? Jung stuck a cigarette in her mouth and lit it, but this was no time for growing hazy on cigarette smoke. If this disaster were not to pass over her home, then she had to at least make sure she wasn't in its way. Because of that “237,” Jung scoured the corridor apartment for the first time from the first floor to the top. She didn't see another “237” anywhere.

Jung had no idea how long the number 237 had been written on her door. Had she not broken up with him, she might have called her boyfriend about now. Of course, when she thought back over the past, there was probably a greater chance that she wouldn't have. On their one-year anniversary, he gave her a vibrator. It was not the sort of gift you gave a girlfriend on your one- year anniversary, but Jung laughed. Jung gave him a lighter, but he just smiled awkwardly and said: “I quit smoking.” The steaks were growing cold on their plates. Jung didn't actually like steak all that much. Her boyfriend didn't like steak all that much, either. Neither of them knew why they were sitting there with steaks on their plates. They spoke on the phone a few times after that, but that night was the last time they saw each other. Only now did Jung take the vibrator out of the box. She ﬂipped the switch as she held it in the air. The vibrator cleaved the wind and burrowed into the air. But these were just words in her mind; she could not know what effect this gently vibrating instrument would have unless she brought it into her lonely core. To look at it, it seemed no more than a quiet wind vane.

Before dawn the next day, the notiﬁcation spread to all the doors of the apartment building. Jung slept late. She did not feel well after breathing in the cold air of early morning. She agonized over whether to mark all the doors with 237 or to continue on with 238, but in the end she chose 237. After all, unless the numbers were meant to be counted backward, she would rather not be the ﬁrst victim in that building.

“I see you've only ever done business with us on credit,” said the bank employee. A loan was impossible. She called here and there, but could not ﬁnd a suitable job. The bag that she always wore over her shoulder was lying crumpled by the front door, where she had left it on the day she had leaped out of her old job. When she held the bag upside down, about twenty business cards fell out with the rubbish. She couldn't tell where she had gotten them, whether from clients or just randomly on the street. The one that read “Bookworm Advertising Agency” must have been the one that Kwak had given her.

Within ten days she was working again. All she had to do was ride the vibrating subway from six in the evening to eleven at night, stylishly reading a book all the while. The company had around five hundred employees in the Seoul metropolitan area alone. The amazing thing was that this company had been operating for fifteen years already. In secret. It was hard to believe, but until she found a new job, it would do as part-time work. The pay, 15,000 won an hour, was not bad. It might even have been better than her salary at her old job. “A man is reading a book with flair. He's completely engrossed in it, and he even laughs from time to time. So what would you think? Wouldn't you want to know what book he is reading? Or how about a woman, quite the intellectual, who can't take her eyes off a book. When women pass by someone wearing a nice perfume, they will often quietly ask what fragrance it is, won't they? Sure they will, if they are curious enough. But they won't even have to ask what the title of the book is. Because this woman is reading it so the title is clear for all to see. Wouldn't you be curious? But, anyway, is that your real name? Jung Bangbae? Like the subway station? Ha ha, we'll have to assign you to the No. 2 line, then.”

A manager at the Bookworm Advertising Agency looked at Jung's resume as he spoke. There was something about his appearance that reminded of her manager at her old company. The manager was relieved to see Jung's neatly trimmed ﬁngernails. It had already been two weeks since she had been to the nail art shop, so the edges of her ﬁngernails were worn, but the manager didn't catch that detail. The “bookworms” were essentially walking billboards, so they had to be smartly attired. Jung passed that test with ease. They recognized her experience with the local newspaper as well, so her training was completed in just a day. Usually it took two days, they said.

“Don't underestimate the job. But once you get used to it, you'll ﬁnd that no job is easier. All you have to do is sit on the subway and read books. You know those subtle product placements in movies? The ones that make the audience buy a Coke when the movie is over? In the same way, we are planting book titles in the subconscious of people riding the subway. Our bookworms just have to expose people to the titles often. Of course, it's important to make sure that people are aware of you as you read your books on the subway. It's no use if people just think of you as an extra and pass you by. The advertisers investing in you will be disappointed, too. It's a waste of their investment, after all.”

The manager told her that readers these days did not have time to choose their own books, so someone had to arouse their curiosity. That was precisely what the bookworms did.

“I guess these advertisements are effective. Do you sell a lot more books?”

The manager sniffed. “We have been in this business for ﬁfteen years.”

Jung was deployed on the evening subway. Now her coming to and going from work was proven not by a fingerprint reader but by a transportation card. The transportation card, which was provided to her by the agency, was examined by the agency on a monthly basis. On the subway, people did not look in front of them or to either side, but straight down at their knees. There were more people who read books or stared into the palms of their hands, where they held all sorts of video players, than people who looked around them. In order to grab their attention, she needed to catch their eyes from the moment she got on the subway. On her first day on the job, Jung wore five-inch heels and an eleven-inch miniskirt. Jung looked over the subway map—this was all part of the plan—and took an empty seat. Then she checked her cellphone—this, too, was part of the plan—and took a book from her bag. On the bright yellow cover was the title: The Slug's House. This was the book that Jung had to read. After reading about ten pages she laughed once. It felt a bit awkward. A light “heh,” would have been perfect, but no “heh” came out and her smile seemed too forced. She glanced up and locked eyes with a woman sitting across from her. Jung quickly glanced back down again. After twenty pages she laughed again. This time the “heh” didn't sound right. When she thought about it, she realized that she was not the type of person who laughed aloud. Her laughs had always been silent. She took a pen and a ruler out of her bag and underlined a portion of the text. She felt the eyes next to her boring down on the book. After a few more pages, her shoulders felt stiff. The most important thing to remember was not to lay the book down on her knees or her bag for long periods of time. She had to hold the book up lightly with one hand, or perhaps two, so that those sitting across from or next to her could see the title. Jung stood up and gave up her seat. The No. 2 line—the only circle line on the Seoul subway—had already completed one circuit. She was back at the start. According to her training, she should have read about forty pages by now. Jung was turning the pages too slowly. The muscles at the corners of her mouth began to spasm ever so slightly. For that trip around the city, she was the only person who had occupied the same seat. She had been reading something, but in the end she had come back to the start. She didn't remember a single line.

“He gathered up the slugs and put them into a jar filled with coarse salt. He closed the lid and, five minutes later, opened it again to find the slugs gone. Only a sticky fluid remained.”

Jung began work with those lines. From page 237 to page 242 was ﬁve stops, from page 242 to page 250 was eight stops, and as she moved back and forth like this in the subway, she realized that she had adapted to the current and was swimming under her own power. After seven in the evening the human tide rose, and sometime after nine it ebbed back out again. No matter where she began her journey, it took around ninety minutes for the No. 2 line to complete a circuit. Jung worked non-stop for two weeks, three circuits a day. One day her nose was buried in the book, and when she looked around she discovered that she was alone. There was only her own reﬂection in the window, barreling through the darkness. A reader, with a book drawn up above her nose, breathing into the pages.

Three weeks passed, but Jung read the same book, always starting from the same place. She would have to read this book for another month. At first it was tedious, but it became a little easier when she thought of it as the script of a play. Jung's facial expressions improved day by day. She even cried twice. Crying was of course many times harder than laughing, but Jung succeeded at wringing out tears after only three weeks. Even when the tears fell like hailstones on the slanted pages, she did not forget to regularly—but naturally—turn those pages. One of those times the woman sitting next to her held out a tissue and asked her what it was she was reading that made her cry so. The other time no one said anything to her, but they could not hide the fact that their gazes were fixed on the book she held. Of course, Jung was not crying because of the book. The tears simply came out like any other waste product. Jung did not usually cry, but it wasn't too difficult if she thought of it as work.

When she lifted her eyes from the book and glanced into a corner of the subway car, she saw a tiny speck crawling slowly across the ﬂoor. It was a slug. The sight should have been strange, but instead it was familiar. It was because of the job. Reading The Slug's House every day, even if she did not put her heart into those lines, they grew familiar. Jung always followed the same course, but one day she deviated from this course. All she had to do was follow the main No. 2 line, but she got onto the branch line at Seongsu Station instead. It was because the words that had ﬁrst given birth to the error in her mind passed by her once again. It was not “The Chef's Mail,” but clearly “The Chef's Nail.” Even the font was visibly similar to the font used on the sign. The sign that Jung had misread, the sign that did not exist anywhere on this earth. She was supposed to ride the No. 2 line to Sincheon Station, but Jung followed “The Chef's Nail” and got off the train. It was the title of a book some man was carrying. She walked, branching off from the circle line as she went. Only those few printed letters were her signpost. But somewhere along the way she lost sight of those letters.

Jung looked at her calendar. She only had two weeks left before she had to leave her apartment. She ran into the apartment manager on her way to work, and he asked when she was going to move. Jung replied that she was looking for a new place. That was the truth. Before she left for work she looked around this neighborhood and that, but there were no suitable houses to be found. Jung wasn't that picky. Naturally, a few of the houses had fatal flaws—although the flaws were so many that even the word “fatal” was not sufficient to describe them. Jung didn't want to live in a rooftop room or in a basement apartment. Her two experiences with rooftop rooms had taught her that the heating bill could sometimes be more than the rent, and her experience with a basement apartment was that it came with a nearly atopic rash caused by mold—although she didn't know whether mold really caused atopy—like a tax added onto her stay. Yet as she looked for a house on her limited budget, Jung gradually grew more tolerant. While Jung had been learning that sunlight or windows were not prerequisites for a home, she had grown old. No, she had been worn down.

Even though it was company housing, no one Jung knew lived on her ﬂoor. There were other companies besides the paper Jung had worked for that used these apartments, so most of the residents were unfamiliar to her. And yet it seemed like her neighbors knew about her resignation, that she was living on borrowed time. Jung lived in the last apartment on that ﬂoor, and in front of the apartment next door was a pile of cabbage large enough to block her way—it was kimchi-making season again. A slug was slowly making its way from the pile toward Jung's front door. Jung blinked hard. She was back on the No. 2 line.

A man walked through the ﬁrst door on the second subway car and stood in the middle of the car. Her advertising would lose its effectiveness if she looked away from the book for too long, so no matter who passed by she buried her nose in her book. Just then, though, a few words rang clearly in her ears: The Chef's Nail.

“The title of the book I have written is The Chef's Nail. This is the only copy of this book in the world. I wrote it myself—well, of course, I did—I mean that I wrote the book with my own hand. You'll see when you look at it, of course, but it is all written by hand, and I wrote the page numbers myself, too. I even bound it with thread. From the birth of the story to the packaging of the book, I did everything myself. A book is like a door: you have to open it to go inside. And once you go in you might never come out again. The hardcover binding is quite heavy. And expensive, too. This is a hardcover book. But how wonderful is the world of books! Please enter my book.” With his white padded jacket and the red scarf wrapped around his neck, the man did look something like a chef. As the chef took the book by its cover and opened it, the pages inside spread out like a folding fan. He looked like an accordion player. The book did not sell. A few people looked at the chef with curiosity in their eyes, but even at 30% off, the price of 56,000 won was far too steep for something being sold on the subway. Even if it was the only book of its kind in the world. But it was The Chef's Nail. This was the third time these words had appeared before Jung. The ﬁrst time was an error, the second time was real, and now she stood at a fork between the two. The frequent appearance of those words made Jung uneasy. And they also made her curious. She stood up.

It was a black hardcover book, roughly the size of a restaurant menu, with three hundred pages in total. On the front of the book in gold lettering was written “The Chef's Nail,” and on the back was a sticker that read, “List Price: 80,000 won.” The contents of the book were similar to the book of Genesis. It was a very long list of things. There were not only people but also animals, plants, and even works of art, as well as things like car tire brands and limited edition lipstick. This list of things was not arranged randomly; instead, one thing led to the next, like a word- association exercise. So, for example, the chef's fingernail led to a heel insert inside the sneaker of the customer who ordered the food the nail was discovered in, and this led to the address of the factory where that heel insert had been made, and this led to a postman who delivered mail to that address, and this begat something else, which begat something else, which begat something else until it was shown that the whole world was in fact connected. She could not read it all in a single night. Jung flipped through the book from beginning to end, spotted her name somewhere along the way, and then quickly flipped back through the book to find that section. But it was not there. There didn't seem to be any words that even looked like “Jung Bangbae.” It wasn't exactly an interesting read, but as she read it she couldn't shake the feeling that she might discover a thing or two somewhere that had something to do with her. According to the book, the chef's nail possessed a mystical power, so all those who became aware of it were somehow connected to each other. Jung wondered if the same wasn't true of herself. Perhaps that fingernail, which had not been emasculated but remained virile, had bewitched Jung without her knowing, and as she thought this she forgot all about the fact that she soon had to leave her apartment, and that she had to find a new job. But she couldn't remain in that state the whole day.

When she opened the door on her way to work she discovered a memo stuck to it like an eviction notice. It said that she had one week left in the apartment. She was thankful that at least it had been placed in an envelope so no one else could see it.

While the subway spun round and round the waist of the city like a hula hoop, Jung read her book. But she simply read mechanically, following the same routine as always—she wasn't actually reading the book.

Jung ran into Kwak about an hour before she was to get off work. Kwak smelled like she had just come from dinner with her coworkers. Jung felt a little awkward to think that she was making such earnest use of the business card Kwak had given her. It was embarrassing, too. She was on the job, but this was an unexpected interruption, so she closed her book. However, she did not put it back in her bag but placed it on her lap. They sat next to each other and ﬂowed in one direction. After a few words from Kwak, Jung realized that the business card Kwak had given her on the day she left the paper was not the card for the bookworms. What she had given her had been a coupon for three free Thai massages. A coupon the size of a business card. But when Kwak asked if she had enjoyed the massages, Jung thanked her. She did not mention the bookworms. The massage coupon was probably already past its expiration date, and even if it wasn't, it would already be heading for the great wastepaper basket of the city. Whatever the case, the result wasn't bad. Had she not taken this job she would have never come to own The Chef's Nail. And she was now working at a pace that suited her, with an enthusiasm that suited her, was she not?

Kwak spoke. “Do you remember what you said? About that mackerel at the sushi place. We still talk about that sometimes. Even now. Me, though, I'm just going to look ahead. If you give your body up to the current, you don't have to think about anything else. Even if it is a little tiring. If a mackerel just watches the tail of the mackerel in front of him, he won't have time to think about whether he is really swimming or not. I'm just staring at the rear end of the mackerel in front of me right now, you know? I'm swimming my heart out.”

Jung mumbled: I looked to the side instead of looking ahead, and I saw my own reflection in the glass of the fish tank, that's why I was fired. Kwak looked at her for a moment with pity in her eyes. After Jung left the paper, she did not contact anyone for fear of seeing or hearing such sympathy. Not even her friends who lived in the same city, and especially not her parents, who lived in a different city. It was probably easier to bare her soul to the people at the nail art shop, the beauty salon, and the skin-care center. But even that now felt awkward.

“Ah, I almost forgot!” Kwak said, as if she had just remembered something, and took something out of her bag. For the fourth time, The Chef's Nail appeared before Jung. This time it should not have appeared. Jung already owned the only existing copy, so how could another The Chef's Nail appear? And at the same size, the same thickness, and the same color at that.

What was different was the price. Kwak had been on her way home from covering a story when she bought the book for 48,000 won.

“This is the ﬁrst time I've ever bought anything on the subway. Look at the title! I had no idea it actually existed. Maybe you read this book and got confused? The author himself was selling it, saying that it was the only one of its kind. I read a little of it, but it doesn't seem to be all that interesting.”

A brief look showed that it was nearly the same. Jung did not tell Kwak that she too owned the book, or that she had paid 56,000 won for it. Kwak asked Jung where she was getting off. Kwak seemed to think that Jung had already moved out of the company apartment. Jung answered her question with another question.

“Do you know how long it takes for the No. 2 line to make a full circuit?”

“I don't know. Two hours? An hour?”

“Eighty-seven minutes.” Ah, Kwak nodded. Kwak's stop was still a way off, so Jung got off ﬁrst. It was Sindorim Station. After the train carrying Kwak left the station, Jung sat down on a bench on the platform and took The Chef's Nail out of her bag. She rubbed her thumb in the dust on the platform ﬂoor and then pressed her thumb against a corner of one of the pages. That faulty thumbprint looked as subtle and profound as some nameless nebula. These spirals that everyone had, but that were the same for no two people... in this way Jung's thumb left its imprint on the page. Now Jung had a book that was different from all other copies, from all other chef's nails. She put the book back in her bag and took out The Slug's House. The next train was already pulling into the station.

The subway ﬂowed over the rough and uneven city at a constant speed. The commuter subway wrapped around the city's waist like a tape measure. Jung glanced at the names of the stations arranged at even intervals on the subway map, like gradations. On occasion there were two stations that seemed to be farther apart, but that was where a new station would soon be opened. Those endlessly expanding subway lines looked like they would eventually be tangled together like strands of hair in a shower drain, and they made her dizzy. But when night came the subway became a little more peaceful. It ran up and down, or down and up over the city like an iron. It was a peacefulness that did not matter whether or not Jung was there. Even if she weren't there, the subway would continue to iron out the city.

A slug crawling across the ﬂoor of the subway car caught her eye. The slug crawled slowly toward the door and then stopped in front of it. At last the door opened. Jung watched to see what the slug would do. How would the slug cross a void that was some ten times the length of its own body? Wouldn't it fall into the gap between the door and the platform? Neither happened. Right before it reached the door—that is, right before it attempted to cross the void—the slug was stepped on. The solid object was ﬂattened and left behind a green stain.

“Restructuring,” they called it. Half of the bookworms were ﬁred. Jung barely survived. But she was subject to a telephone evaluation from her manager. Her manager recited: “Buying an item while on the job: one time. Chatting for a long period of time while on the job: one time. Leaving the route while on the job: four times....”

As a result, Jung only received half of her monthly pay. There were no shadows underground, but it seemed that an unseen shadow had attached itself to Jung. Eyes were everywhere. Jung was being monitored. Above those read were those who pretended to read, and above those who pretended to read were those who made sure they were pretending to read. Only then did Jung discover that the bookworm monitors made more than the bookworms themselves. Of course, not just anyone could be a bookworm monitor. You had to be promoted. Her manager told her that she would have to give it more effort. He told her that some of the new bookworm employees held doctoral degrees, were Miss Korea winners, or had been actors from the Daehangno district.

“The economy is so bad these days, people are desperate to ﬁnd work. You know how it is.”

Jung did not want to do any more or any less, she just wanted to live somewhere in the middle, but that was the hardest thing to do. Those who stopped in the middle fell to the bottom. After all, those who had fallen while leaping for the top had grabbed on to the middle on their way down. Jung had an idea of what sort of attitude she had to maintain if she wanted to stay in the middle. For starters, since she had entered the tank, she had to swim around at the speed demanded by the tank. Jung did not have a speed regulator. And so, once again, Jung was swimming around inside a ﬁsh tank.

Jung went to work regularly and, with her nose buried in her book, stole glances at the world beyond the letters, the world beyond the book cover. She knew that she was not the only player on the stages of these six- or ten-car lumps of metal, but when she first saw the evidence with her own eyes she was a little ashamed. Jung saw as many as three people holding The Slug's House. They could be bookworms, or they could be actual readers. One woman deliberately, although not so openly as to be discovered, bumped into other people. She was using a more direct marketing method, either picking up The Slug's House when it fell or taking it from others when they picked it up for her. For thirty minutes she repeatedly bumped into far too many people and dropped her book. Of course, it was quite effective. As the book was repeatedly dropped and picked up again, the title and cover ofThe Slug's House was more actively exposed. One man was dozing off. He would repeatedly doze off while holding The Slug's House in one hand and then wake up again and continue reading. Dozing off while holding the book he was supposed to be advertising would be a definite black mark, but there was something so unique about his expression and his posture that he drew a lot of attention, and that was a plus. What the agency demanded was that The Slug's House be driven into people's subconscious, so just because he was dozing off while reading a book did not mean that he had failed to advertise that book. He was clearly succeeding at attracting attention, and he was deflecting all of those gazes with The Slug's House. Another woman was just quietly reading The Slug's House. Her actions were basically what the bookworms required, but there was nothing special about her. Jung spoke to her.

“If a mackerel just watches the tail of the mackerel in front of him, he won't have time to think about whether he is really swimming or not. I'm just staring at the rear end of the mackerel in front of me right now, you know? We have to swim our hearts out.”

The woman didn't reply. Just a person reading a book within the human tide, with an expression like a dried pollock. The woman was Jung herself.

The subway read her movements. Her transportation card, the CCTV camera, and many people that Jung could not recognize all read her movements. She would soon have to leave her apartment. She had three days left there. Her cellphone rang so much that it interfered with her work. It was enough to put a crimp in her image as a natural reader. She turned off the ringer and buried the phone deep in her bag. Some time later she checked the phone to see that she had gotten six calls and one text message. The message was from the apartment manager. Someone was waiting for the apartment, so could she please pack her things before the end of the week. This person was scheduled to move in next Monday. Strangely enough, though, she read these letters from a distance, like she read the sentences in the book she read for work. It didn't feel like it was happening to her. Jung laughed cheerfully once every ten minutes, and more often than that she underlined a line in the text. As she did so, she thought about where she could go in three days. And she was skilled enough not to let those thoughts show. She had become quite skilled. “Oh, it's snowing,” someone on the subway said. Truly, beyond her book the snow was falling like a powdery drug. She almost felt she would become intoxicated.

In the blizzard the No. 1 line came to an occasional stop, and the No. 2 line circled the drooping city as if it were choking it. Like a pair of handcuffs tight around the wrists, or like a rope around the neck.

On the day a cold front launched a surprise attack over the snow that had not yet melted, the subway was ﬁlled with the smell of mothballs. Fabrics like alpaca ﬂeece, wool, and nylon shrugged off the weight of their hibernation and mingled together. Jung watched as the number of slugs grew exponentially within that smell of mothballs.

Jung returned home mechanically. Sunday was already over and it was twenty minutes into Monday.

Your stay has expired. Your belongings will be collected this morning and stored elsewhere.

Not long after Jung had entered the house the doorbell rang. It was the manager. Jung held her breath. A confrontation between a tenant and a landlord, just like she had seen on the news, was taking place right here, right now. She had not yet found a new place. She had long since turned off her cellphone. She didn't want to turn it on. At the sound of pounding on the door Jung became a nail being struck by a hammer. If there had been another door in the apartment, she would have ﬂed through it.

Jung opened up The Chef's Nail, which might have been just one of many copies, and fumbled for the part she had been reading like one might part a child's hair. Jung liked how the pages within the book spread out like a folding fan when the two hardback covers lay flat on the ground, so she had deliberately chosen not to use a bookmark. Jung put one of the pages up to her ear and bent over. She put one page under her cheek like a pillow, and as the next page rose up toward her nose, she covered her face with it like a blanket. What would it be like to just lie here quietly between the pages and be pressed flat? There was no other way to compress time within space—that is, to seize flowing time—but pressed flower art. Beneath the weight of time and space, moisture would evaporate, and she would be preserved for all eternity. Those moments that had been preserved in Jung's book had already become a handful of pressed flowers.

If she listened carefully, between the thudding sounds of the manager pounding on her door, Jung thought she could hear another sound: the echo of a book reading itself, tired of the time of this world, weary of the space of this world. The motions of a book that, all the while feigning innocence, was digging a way out with its back foot.

When morning came, an emergency key was used to open Jung's door. When the manager opened the door and looked around the inside of the apartment, there was nothing in sight. It was an empty house, as if the previous tenant had moved out.

At that moment, Jung was on her third lap around the No. 2 line. Jung had left for work far earlier than usual. She might not have even been working. The slug moved slowly over the page. It seemed to be gnawing not at leaves but on the wind. As Jung watched, the slug crawled over the letters like an eraser, but then disappeared without a trace. It had gone back into the book. Everything was as it was before. With consummate skill, the slug had been compressed from a solid object to a ﬂat surface. Jung underlined some text. In mid-underline, she decided to go there herself. All of the names in The Chef's Nail were granted their own necessary reason why they had to appear in that book. If that place truly did exist, there was no reason Jung could not go there. Jung cocked an eye at the subway map. The subway stretched out in all directions like an umbilical cord. The last stops might not even be the last stops. If she kept going beyond the last stops and the train depots, the umbilical cord of salvation might stretch on.

It was already past time for her to go home. She could not even guess how many times she had circled the city. Jung put The Slug's House into her bag and took out The Chef's Nail. The two pages that spread out looked like windows. As she read the book where names begat names and so on and so on, Jung rode the subway from one end to the other. The subway stretched from the No. 2 line to the No. 5 line to the No. 8 line, and even on to the No. 12 line. As she stared hard at page 237, the page furtively slid aside like a door. Time beyond the last stop, beyond the train depot approaching in the form of a long and dark space. When this time passed, the world of The Chef's Nail would open up before her. Jung moved through subway lines that had not yet been born, into earth that had not even been dug. And at long last she entered into the book. From solid object to ﬂat surface.

It was her ﬁfth home.

If only she had not misread “The Chef's Mail” as “The Chef's Nail,” none of this ever would have happened. No, if only she had not confused The Chef's Nail with The Slug's House, none of this would have happened. But even if it had not been for all the confusion, maybe these things would have happened anyway.

Jung entered into the book as she had hoped, but the chef's nail was nowhere to be seen, either in letter or in life. It was only when she saw a single slug crossing the street like a comma some way off that she realized: she had come to the wrong place. The world she had wanted to enter was that of The Chef's Nail, but somehow she had entered The Slug's House. She had clearly put The Slug's House in her bag and taken out a different book, but she must have confused her right hand with her left, her work with what was not her work, night with day, and many other pairs of things. It was probably because of overwork.

Jung read the letters that ﬂowed beneath her body, letters that were bigger than her body.

“He gathered up the slugs and put them into a jar filled with coarse salt. He closed the lid and, five minutes later, opened it again to find the slugs gone. Only a sticky fluid remained.”

As she crawled over these sentences, the air and gazes shriveled up Jung's body like coarse salt. Jung felt like a slug stuck to the page of someone else's book, and she shrunk even more. In the distance she saw that third basement level house with the window in the floor, her first home in the city. A person as small as a slug that had lost its home went inside the house. The low sound of a vibrator could be heard, and then black letters began to pour down like rocks. A few of those letters squashed the house. As her shoulders were crushed and her back was bent, everything was flattened. There was not a trace of her left where she had passed. Jung Bangbae was left between the lines.

By the time Kwak opened the book, Jung had already been crushed to death between the pages. Somewhere after page 237 was Jung's epitaph. But there was no one who could read that epitaph. Kwak saw that the pages after page 237 were all stuck together and would not come apart, and she thought it odd. She stuck her long ﬁngernails in between the pages and tried to pry them apart, but those pages stubbornly kept their mouths shut tight, and she only succeeded at tearing out a small piece of paper, like a piece of ﬂesh.

The book was also a relic of Jung. On the CCTV footage, it didn't look so much like Jung had thrown herself onto the tracks as it did that she had leaned into the book and her whole life had ended up falling over. After that footage hit the news, the number of people reading The Slug's House exploded. There was no way of telling whether it was an expansion of the Bookworm Advertising Agency or whether the number of actual readers increased, but one thing was certain: Jung's death made The Slug's House famous. The woman who threw herself in front of the train with the book held tightly in both hands drew the attention of many. A few people who knew that the woman was Jung felt goose bumps on their arms, but as with all goosebumps in this world these, too, soon disappeared. Those who had seen Jung on the subway regularly said of her suicide: she was always reading a book. Sometimes she cried, sometimes she laughed.

The No. 2 line went round and round. Kwak thought of the night she had ridden the subway with Jung. She had sensed nothing strange at all from her. Jung was just ordinary. Except that Jung's statement that it took eighty-seven minutes for the No. 2 line to make a full circuit, now that she thought about it, somehow seemed signiﬁcant. Kwak did not have the time to test those eighty- seven minutes for herself. Kwak moved into the company apartment on Monday. She did not know that that was where Jung had lived, but it wouldn't have changed anything even if she had known. From the company apartments to the ofﬁce it was four stops on the No. 2 line. It was time to get off.

As Kwak went to put her book in her bag, the book flapped like a bird. And then it flew up from her bag, through the metal roof of the subway, and into the sky. The rustling sound grew as loud as a storm. Tens of thousands of books that had lain quietly underground spread their pages like seagulls and began to fly upward. Some of them flew low and some of them flew high, and they passed through an entire world. At that moment the letters flew off like feathers. The books flew up high. Several meters in the air, with their mouths open wide, they flew off in search of other targets, yawning as they went.

The subway car with the hole in its roof ﬂowed on without incident, and people read their books. A few lines of wind blew in.

Translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell

My Arithmetic

Must be nice to be a Martian. The summer that year was so muggy I couldn’t help thinking that way. The vocational high school’s summer vacation was longer than I’d thought, so I wouldn’t have been able to stand it if I didn’t at least daydream about Mars. It was a long, long summer, and to make matters worse, I was holding down two jobs: the gas station in the afternoon, the convenience store at night. Sure, there were girls at each place, neither good nor bad, and since they were neither good nor bad, I was bored all the same. Did the rays of the sun that passed Mercury, Venus, and the neither-good-nor-bad stars, all the way to Earth feel the way I did? Mars —not hot, nice and far.

Going from job to job, it was only natural that all kinds of problems would arise, and that was exactly the case that summer. Since I was only making ﬁfteen hundred won an hour at the gas station and a thousand won at the convenience store, I felt disgruntled all the time. I mean, it had started off OK, but I became disgruntled. My boss at the convenience store said that’s how you learn about the world—Come on, would it really kill anyone for me to earn an extra thousand an hour while I learn? Then how come you shower so much money on your own kids?—but I always thought that what I was doing was worth at least two thousand an hour. Seriously? Only a thousand? Too hot, too stingy Earth.

It was around that time that Coach came to the store one morning. How’s it going? Fine. Since he was the one who’d gotten me the gig in the first place, I had no choice but to say it was fine. You could say he had the corner on all the part-time jobs in the area, so he liked helping the younger guys find work and coaching them on this and that. Well, that’s convenient, I thought, taking a Capri Sun out of the fridge compartment and handing it to him. It’s on me. I said it with a smile, but as I glanced up at the clock, I thought, I hope you know that’s worth twenty-five minutes of my life. This place I’m working now, the boss is an idiot . . . Just today he touched a girl’s thigh . . . Man! How do you get away with that? Right or wrong, if you touch a girl’s thigh, I think you should at least pay her ten thousand an hour. There’s nothing wrong with touching. But there is something wrong with only paying her a thousand. Anyway that’s what I thought.

Say, are you good at push-ups? Push-ups? You know, press-ups. I automatically said I was. Saying yes automatically was what you had to do to get a job—that was already the basics of the basics by then. The pay’s good. Three thousand an hour . . . but it’s a little hard on your body. Three thousand? That was all I needed to hear. The words three thousand an hour knocked the wax right out of my ears. To think that a business with such a high rate of return existed near me! Even just getting the offer made me feel like I had suddenly become a member of a highly advanced industrial society. No problem! Do the rays of the sun that reach Mars at last, after passing Mercury, Venus, and Earth, feel the way I do? So long, neither-good-nor-bad, whether-I- get-the-job-or-not Earth!

That's the reason I became a pusher. The good thing is that I get to ride the subway for free, my arms get strong, and it doesn't even interfere with my other jobs. In other words, once I'm done here, I head over to the station, take my turn in the ring, and that's it. Clean and easy. The pay is guaranteed since it's through the city, food tastes better because it's good exercise, and I can keep working at the gas station . . . Coach's nonstop coaching was reason enough, but more than anything, my reason was the three thousand won. So what you're saying is, it’s like doing heavier weights with shorter sets? Yeah . . . I guess you could look at it that way. Coach looked confused, but I thought, that's deﬁnitely how it is. That was my arithmetic. Laugh if you want, but there are people in this world who have to do that kind of arithmetic to get by. There just are.

I’m sorry.

That's what Dad always said. There he goes again. It was the same every time I so much as mentioned work. I liked hearing it the first time, but now it had lost all meaning. Thirty-five hundred won an hour at the age of forty-five, that was Dad's arithmetic. In any case, he worked for some trading company, the kind of place you just called Some Trading Company. Just once, I went to see him there. It was back when I was in middle school and Mom had sent me to deliver his lunch. Is this map right? I kept checking the map she’d drawn for me and wandering through the neighboring alleyways. I barely managed to track down Dad's office—anyway, it was just sort of there, one of those types of offices: fluorescent lights, paint peeling off the wooden door, a dimly lit hallway that looked like it was used by mice. I felt like I’d stumbled into some foreign country, it was such a “godforsaken” place. That’s weird, I thought, where did that word come from? We weren't well-off or anything, but I used to listen to a lot of Metallica and stuff back then. I used to think maybe life would be kind of like an ESP Flying V (the guitar used by Metallica) someday. At least, I used to think that, but then I opened the door and saw my dad sitting at his desk. He had the wan expression of a man who obediently ate a packed lunch every single day. Dad, I'm here.

I used to be the playful type, but after that day, oddly enough, I turned into a quiet kid. I didn't realize why at the time, but I guess it was because some sense of my own arithmetic popped up inside me. Looking back on it now, I think that's what happened. It wasn't anything to be happy or sad about, and deﬁnitely wasn't anything to feel bitter about. It was literally just numbers. Instead of running off at the mouth, I started working hard at part-time jobs and saving my money. Go for the big payoff. My friends seemed to pity me, but I knew the drill. In the end, they, too, would have to do the same arithmetic. So what are you gonna do? Me? I dunno. Lately I’ve been thinking maybe something in showbiz.

When it comes to people, everybody has their own arithmetic. And it's a sure thing that one day you'll discover this. Of course in this world, there are some lives that need higher mathematics, but for most, it ends at arithmetic. Like picking and eating a leaf from the highest branch—you painfully add to and subtract from your tiny, unchanging pile of money, until one day your life draws to a close: The End. Maybe that day I saw Dad's arithmetic with my own eyes, or saw the answer to the mathematical operation or, who knows, maybe I even inherited it in its entirety. That was pretty much the case. Hand him his lunch, take his arithmetic. Handed him his lunch, took his arithmetic. And by instinct, I turned into someone who never let the words "Dad, can I have some money" cross his lips again.

Seriously, that arithmetic of mine.

I'm sorry. Dad always said that, but I thought, Dad, this is my arithmetic. CD, CD, and a regular savings account. When I thought about my hourly wages of ﬁfteen hundred won and a thousand won each growing bit by bit in those accounts, there was no such thing as hard work. I guess you could say that's how it was for everyone I knew. Even Coach had ﬁve accounts of his own. Coach didn't have a dad but, then again, he didn't have a sick grandma at home either. Same, same. His mom worked in a restaurant, and I don't know the rest because he never talked about it. I’d heard that Coach was known for being a glue sniffer in middle school but I didn't believe a word of it at the time. Well, everybody has to get by on their own arithmetic. That's why I say,

MY arithmetic.

The Train Is Now Arriving

Passengers, please stand behind the yellow line. Which is impossible. Everyone has to get on the train, but there’s no more room. If you don't get on, you’ll be late. The body's yellow line may be here, but life's yellow line is inside the train. Which one would you choose?

I’ll never forget that moment when the ﬁrst train arrived. I mean, not really a train, but a freakishly huge animal that crawled up to the platform and wheezed, paah, haah, then ripped its sides open and spewed out people like it was vomiting. Argh, I moaned involuntarily. It looked like a dam breaking, and I could feel the inside of my head ﬁlling with vomit through my eyes, ears, and nose. Hey! If Coach hadn't yelled at me, I might have fallen prey to the beast. When I snapped out of it, I saw that the creature’s sides were sucking the pool of vomit back up. It did so with enough force to generate electricity. Just then, Coach yelled, Push! So, despite myself, with a heave ho, I began shoving at spongy things, hard things, but even now I couldn't tell you what they were. Seriously, how dare I say they were human beings?

As the train left, Coach came up and gave me a ﬁrm warning: Keep it together. Yes, Sir. I took a deep breath, but my legs shook all the same. Don’t think of them as people. Think of them as cargo, or something. Got it? Got it? Just as he said “Got it?” again, another train was pulling in, so I braced myself once more. Paah, haah. The train bound for Uijeongbu threw up twice as many people. It seemed like all of humanity this time.

It went on for an hour. When I came to my senses, I was slumped outside the yellow line, i.e. the Please Stand Behind point. And before my eyes—three tiepins, two buttons, and the broken arm from a pair of glasses, like the crutch of an injured soldier, were lying there. The glasses must have been horn-rimmed. Collecting these lost articles of mankind, I realized suddenly that my entire body was soaked in sweat. Like I said, must be nice to be a Martian. Seriously, nice.

A week went by. Witness the tragedy of mankind by morning, catnap before noon, then work the gas station in the afternoon and convenience store at night. My body hurt so much. You could say my head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes ached all day, and then the next day, my head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes, and knees ached, and then after that, it was the head, shoulders, toes, knees and toes, head, shoulders, knees and ears, nose, ears. This . . . shouldn't this pay at least thirty thousand won an hour? I felt disgruntled again but Coach asked, Wouldn’t it be a shame to quit now? Coach’s coaching made sense, so I gritted my teeth and kept going to work. Maybe that was the secret behind the pyramids: Would be a shame to quit now. Maybe, just maybe, that was the slaves’ arithmetic.

Oddly enough, once I gritted my teeth and gave it my all, the work began to take on a fun of its own. My head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes no longer hurt or ached, and, what the hell, I was having a good time. The early summer mornings were fresh and cool, and Coach was usually smoking a cigarette by the Gaebong Station entrance. We would get free tickets from Eldest Brother (that’s what Coach called the ticket booth guy). Then, standing on the platform, we would wait for the train at the very front of the line—as if it were a privilege. The old me would have automatically waited in line near the eighth exit (where I always stood because it was the closest to my house), but that summer I was a pusher. Following Coach’s cue, we would bow respectfully to the drivers, and they would usually open the door to the engineer’s seat or the conductor’s seat for us. How cool was that?

People hail us as legends. I even liked listening to the talks Chief gave in the night duty room— you could call them instructions or, rather, sermons. Age, experience, arm strength, cast-iron work ethic, and mongrel philosophy . . . our leader in every respect, we called him Chief. Since he was in charge of the pushers, his word wasn’t just the light and the life, it was Sir! Yes, Sir! Of course, of course! The point was always that we were the backbone of the nation’s economy, the Dutch boy (you know, the one who plugged the dike) preventing trafﬁc chaos, not to mention legends of the trade. Sir! Yes, Sir!

None of us wanted to be the Dutch boy for three thousand won an hour, but we all agreed with what Chief said: We were “worth a hundred men each.” The best of the best. Chief always preached on and on that those who were not worth-a-hundred, best-of-the-best, were not worthy of the post of pusher at Sindorim Station. He gave us tips on how to push people, how to rescue a person whose foot got caught in the gap, or how many people one train was supposed to hold— on top of that, he had a knack for catching a person off guard by suddenly saying something like: There’s a new cookie called Oh Yes. It’s really good. And then asking you which you liked better, Choco Pie or Oh Yes? Ha, ha! Sir! Yes, Sir!

A lot of things happened. A kid sandwiched in a crowd of adults blacked out. Who in the world would let their kid ride the subway at this time of day? Chief muttered, all worked up and looking around for the kid’s parents, but parents like that weren’t the type to be on the train themselves. When the kid opened his eyes in the night duty room, he burst into tears, bawling that he was supposed to be at a math contest and he was really going to get it from his mom. Chief offered to buy the kid, who said he lived in Bucheon, a Coke and an Oh Yes with his own money. The youngest guy should go get it, he said. I took the thirty minutes of his—Chief's—life that he handed me and surprised myself by answering briskly, Yes, Sir!

Please . . . I’m late. A girl said that to me one day. Just the back or shoulders . . . I was still having a hard time pushing a woman’s body any which way. So I hesitated while two trains went by. She started crying right in front of me; it was too much for me to take. So I called for Coach. A train for Uijeongbu pulled in, but it was so full that even Coach couldn’t squeeze her in. In the end, Chief was the one who got her in. Don’t face the train. Here, look at me. I saw that he had no problem pushing her on the chest and stuff and shoved her in easily. Listen up. Guys go in easier facing forward, and girls facing back. Got it? Why is that? Doesn’t matter, they just do.

One time, one of the pushers got swept onto the train. He was shoved by the passengers behind him, and it happened in a flash. It was just something that could happen any time, but the problem was what happened next. One of the passengers picked a fight with him and punched him in the head. The reason was simple: he thought pushers were all jerks. The guy he punched wasn’t actually all that nice, so the fight got bigger and bigger. The passengers all ganged up on the pusher and beat him. Took the pusher three weeks to recover. None of the passengers that ran off were caught, so the guy had to pay for his new front teeth with his own money. After that, we never saw him again.

As for me, I saw a lot of perverts. And even when I didn’t see one, I could tell by the way a woman shrieked that there was a pervert somewhere in the train car. Once, a guy in his forties was caught red-handed smearing semen on a woman’s skirt. How did he have room to move his hands? I thought it was amazing, both trying something like that in there and then us managing to catch the guy. There’re a lot of them, a whole lot. Coach shook his head. But Coach . . . no matter how badly they want to do it . . . Why would they want to get on that crowded train? I have no idea. Who knows what perverts are thinking? I have this friend who just became a cop. He said that one day he got a report of a thirty-year-old naked guy eating flowers in a garden. Did you say flowers? Yup, flowers.

The man who got caught ejaculating turned out to be a habitual offender. His face was pasty and covered in moles, and he had a quiet look about him. Sweat kept dripping along the folds of his fat neck. Looks like the pervert's been to Hawaii or something, Chief said, mocking him, but the guy never raised his head. For no other reason, just that his ﬂowery aloha shirt next to the uniform on the cop standing next to him looked so beautiful, I was struck by a sudden thought: Are there subways in Hawaii, too? Is there a stark naked guy eating ﬂowers in a garden in Hawaii, too? And in Hawaii, are there pushers? Since the earth is round, if you keep on walking, then it’s like, Aloha ‘Oe.

Maybe in the end all human beings are habitual offenders, I thought. We habitually ride the subway, habitually work, habitually eat meals, habitually make money, habitually have fun, habitually harass others, habitually lie, habitually misunderstand, habitually hang out, habitually converse, habitually hold meetings, habitually get educated, habitually ache in our head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes, habitually feel lonely, habitually have sex, habitually sleep, and, habitually, die. Seung-il! Put your whole body into it, your whole body! I started pushing people again. With my whole body, habitually. By August I’d started getting the hang of things. Plus we kept getting more newbies. That was partly fallout from the fight on the train, and partly because the job was so tough that a lot of guys quit. As a result, I gradually moved closer to the center of the trains. There were more and more people, and the more I pushed, the more people poured out. Of course I was treated better, and there were fewer difficulties since everyone saw that I had guts, but the real problem lay elsewhere. Of course, the money was good, but witnessing the suffering of countless people every morning was turning into one big headache. Each time the doors squeaked closed, I would be confronted with someone’s face pressed up against the glass. Ever seen a balloon like that? I laughed until my stomach hurt at first to see all those squashed cheeks and lips about to burst and the flattened piggy noses, but as the days went on, the laughter went away. I would have felt awful if someone from Mars had asked me, Great, that’s all fine, but I want you to describe the face of humanity as you remember it. What a sad sketch of humanity to show to someone from another planet! The train is now approaching. Paah, haah.That’s right, just ride the train, don’t even think about the Galaxy Express. If this is what humanity is.

I got pushed over another car by a newbie, and found myself in charge of train door number eight. 8. Looking down at the number embossed in yellow, I suddenly thought of My Arithmetic. Why do I have to live this way? It seemed like a foolish question, but I consoled myself by saying, Arithmetic is nothing more than numbers. My head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes felt especially heavy that morning. Paah, haah. Then the train came in as usual, the doors slid open, and someone popped out of the train car from the pressure of the other passengers. When I looked, there was Dad.

How can I put this? I felt like throwing off all my clothes once work was over and heading for the nearest garden to eat the flowers. D-Dad . . . I don’t remember whether I actually said that out loud or not. He only had to get to Sinseol-dong Station, but like the first time I had to push a woman, I just, I couldn’t push him in, and I pushed a little anyway but he, he wouldn’t go in. The train doors closed. Paah, haah. I bent over and put my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath. Paah, haah. Dad stood there adjusting his crooked tie with an awkward look on his face. Then, briefly, a moment—barely long enough to tie a Windsor but with a knot so tight it would never come undone—passed between us, weaving us together. It was really odd. Outside the knot, it was as noisy as could be, but something resembling the silence of outer space pooled between my dad and me. Into that silence, streaming over the wall where we could not meet each other’s eyes, came the announcement once again.

The train is now arriving.

A Nearby Roof

Sometimes you realize the earth really is spinning. This was especially true after work, when Coach and I would sit side by side on a bench in the station. If I stretched my legs out and leaned my head back just a bit more, I could see the clouds outside drifting past. It made me a little dizzy but it also made me realize, Aha, the earth really is spinning. I liked that feeling. So, I lay on the bench a lot. I did it again the day I saw Dad.

Seung-il . . . I’ve got to get on the train this time. Two trains went by without Dad on them. When the third one came in, Chief, who had figured out that the current was against us, came over to help. Push! Push! He had no idea the cargo we were trying to load was my dad but, still, he was too rough, jamming his head down, ramming his elbows hard into Dad’s back, shoving him in. GET in. GOT in. Just then, a faint sound, now you hear it now you don’t, seemed to seep out of Dad’s thorax: paah, haah. But the train snapped its own thorax shut, trapping Dad’s sound deep inside its lungs, and I had no way of figuring out what that sound was. Anyway, just like an air bubble, like a sound or a breath trapped inside the depths of a train at rush hour, it was a stifling and long, strange summer. Coach, the earth is spinning. Is it? I’d meant to say something about my dad, but that popped out of my mouth instead, totally unexpected. Coach offered to buy me a soda. So I drank the cup of Mirinda he got for me and, well, that was it. After that, I bumped into Dad pretty often. Slowly, we developed a kind of immunity toward each other, but even with that immunity they were not happy encounters. Sometimes I managed to push him into the train just right, though it took me most of the summer to figure out how. On those days, I treated myself to a soda. The distant clouds drifted along and, well, I was thirsty.

That’s how I spent my summer. When vacation ended, my days as a pusher ended as well, and I returned to school for the second semester. It was complete chaos. No jobs, the upperclassmen said in chorus but, chorus or not, everyone knew about the global recession. It didn’t matter if you were qualiﬁed or not, and the assumption that changing the name of the school to Information Technology High School would raise the employment rate was nothing more than wishful thinking. The seniors were losing heart, the clouds still drifted by, and I was thirsty. The world was one big train. It could only hold 180 people, but there were 400 who needed to get on —the stiﬂing and long, strange summer ended, but a long, strange autumn took its place. And just when September was on the verge of ending, Mom collapsed. She had been working for a long time as a cleaning lady at a shopping center, and she collapsed from overworking or something. Luckily she was taken to the hospital right away, but they couldn’t tell what was wrong with her, and for the time being they said that her nerves or something were totally shot. Let’s keep running tests. That’s what he said, the doctor. I guess we’ll just keep running tests, then. Because that’s what he said, the doctor.

When I went into her hospital room, I saw Dad holding Mom’s hand. How is she? He stared at me wordlessly. It was a dark, dazed look—like an ostrich that’s suddenly lost the use of one leg in the middle of a savannah. I thought he had been walking, no, running along pretty well all that time. But with Mom’s soon-to-be-lost wages, Grandma’s continuing medical bills, and Mom’s soon-to-be doctor’s bills . . . That was when I ﬁrst realized Dad’s eyes were an ashy gray. I guess you could say they were the same shade of gray as the dead display on a calculator that’s run out of batteries. Now, the numbers weren’t adding up. I couldn’t add it up, either. In the unlit emergency stairwell of the hospital, I called Coach.

My faculty advisor, who had also worked his way through school, was a pretty understanding guy. Hang in there, he said. I'll take care of things for you. Thanks to him, I started skipping first period and became a pusher again. It was once again up to me to control that tidal wave of humanity, and I often saw my dad floating in there like a strand of seaweed. Oh right, where’s my head? What did Dad do for lunch? Did he go hungry? I pushed Dad, who was one lunchbox lighter, again and again. Pushed by my hands, my father felt as if he were sometimes crouching, sometimes drooping, sometimes flapping in the chilly autumn wind. A children’s song suddenly came to mind: Morning wind, cold wind, wild goose cries and flies off.

Coach never stopped trying to hook me up with this or that part-time gig. Thanks, Coach. So even though my thanks were as stiff as a carved wooden goose, I actually wanted to cry. The days passed by like new, insignificant figures flickering past on the display of a calculator with a fresh set of batteries. That's how it felt. One day when I looked in the mirror, I saw those ash- colored eyes. Two concentric circles the same shade as Dad's—I was my dad’s mathematical operation after all. 3.1415926535897 . . . And there was trouble with my boss at the convenience store. He hadn’t paid me yet, and when I asked for the money, it became clearer and clearer that he was trying to stiff me. We squabbled over it and I wound up shoving him; even I was surprised to see how far he flew. He made a big stink about it, saying that his back hurt and he was going to press charges but, as always, Coach straightened it out. All he did was talk to him briefly in a low voice, and my boss came out and handed me the money. Or rather, he threw it at me. Let's pick it up. If oh-so-calm Coach hadn't been there, I might have gone for one more push. Is it all there? It's a thousand won short. Hey! You’re a thousand won short! Coach yelled.

Oddly enough, I pushed Dad hard, really hard, that morning. I wasn’t proud of it, but that’s the mood I was in. Maybe it’s because I had to pick the money up from the ﬂoor, one bill after the other. That’s probably why. No matter how hard I tried to console myself, my mood didn’t get any better. Seung-il. Wait . . . wait. Hang on a second. Dad's groan pushed its way into my ear, but weirdly enough, I didn't feel a thing. Dad, come home safe.

Home safe, Dad opened up to me that night about this and that. In a word, it came down to arithmetic. The company is doing worse and worse. I'm looking for another job. I'm sorry, we each have to pull a little more weight for a while. I'm not struggling, I said. The next morning I ran into my apologetic dad again, but I couldn’t push him properly for feeling sorry. Dad, come home safe.

I stretched out my legs and leaned my head back, watched the clouds drifting by and said, Coach, the earth really is spinning. Oh yeah? When I feel the earth turning like this, it makes me think. What? Well . . . we really are living on a planet . . . in outer space. So? So I mean, why do we have to live like this? Coach was silent for a moment then stood up and said, Let’s get a soda. I sat up and straightened my head to stop the earth from spinning, and there was a cup of Mirinda, extra full because he’d pushed the No Ice button, ﬂoating before my eyes. On the stopped earth, once again, a train was now arriving. Want to hear something funny?

After the now-arriving train had left, Coach suddenly threw that question out there. I figured, well, may as well skip second period, too, and wound up staying on the bench that day. His story was more weird than funny: This was back when I was sniffing glue all the time. As usual I thought I was as high as I was going to get, when suddenly I was floating over the roof. The funny thing was that I could see myself down below with my head shoved in the bag, and the me who was watching this was giving off a strange glow. I automatically thought, Am I dead now? It was so scary. I looked around, and there was another guy floating like me way over by Oryu- dong. His name was Jinho, and he used to hang out there all the time, sniffing glue. So of course I thought, is he dead, too? Then, how long did it take? I came to and sobered up. Or should I say I came back to life, which is how I thought of it back then. I breathed a sigh of relief but later that afternoon the craziest thing happened. Jinho came to see me. He asked if I’d been sniffing glue the night before. I said I had. Then he asked if I’d seen him floating in the air. He said that he’d seen me. I was shocked.

After that I became a totally different person. I quit snifﬁng glue, though I don't really know why. I mean, what if I left my body at some random moment, and went ﬂoating over a roof somewhere nearby? So, I thought, maybe there's no other way but to live life to the fullest. A roof somewhere nearby? Yeah, a roof somewhere nearby.

Is That So? I’m A Girafe

Must be nice to be a Venusian. The winter that year was so bitterly cold I couldn’t help thinking that way. The vocational high school’s winter vacation was harsher than I’d expected, and I wouldn’t have been able to stand it if I didn’t at least daydream about Venus. All winter long, I was still working odd jobs. From the early-morning subway station to the late-night kitchen of the barbecue joint to the paper route of three apartment complexes at the crack of dawn. Paah, haah. The puff of my breath and the sweat beneath my clothes. Looking back, it felt as if I were looking down at myself from a roof somewhere nearby. As if from their point of view, the Venusians’.

The early morning subway was like the Galaxy Express. I would have said the same thing even if someone from Venus had been grilling me: Are you comfortable saying that? The dawn was vast and dark, and the biting air was always harsh. Just as it says in the Thousand Character Classic, “The universe (宇宙) is vast (洪) and wild (荒).” And me, I was alone. Everyone is sleeping, everyone is safe, I assured myself as I swayed in the darkness of the rails past Guil and Guro to Sindorim. Inch by inch, the train swayed along and, inch by inch, so did my heart. Life, the world, was always in sway.

Not one of us was passing through life safely. Coach quit working part-time and got a job selling apartment shares on the sly, and in a month he was a changed person. He got a car, albeit a used one, and spent more money than before. I bumped into him once on the street but he seemed like someone who only bore a passing resemblance to the Coach I used to know. But a passing resemblance isn’t the same as passing through life safely. Chief was the same as ever, but he wasn’t passing safely through, either. Rumor was that he’d been hit by a marriage scam, and afterward didn’t show up for work for ten days. Then suddenly he was back. He didn’t say anything, and neither did we. People have to learn. He would say that out of the blue, and I would respond briskly, Yes, Sir! When I thought he was done talking, he would suddenly ask me, Have you tried the new cookie called Chic Choc? Which do you like better, Oh Yes or Chic Choc? he would ask. Sir! Yes, sir! Then it happened one day that winter.

My dad disappeared.

He really was gone. He had shown no signs of leaving, and I’d had no way of guessing. At ﬁrst I thought there’d been an accident and searched everywhere for him, but there was no trace of an accident anywhere. Can you tell us his last known whereabouts? I was the last one to see Dad so of course I had something to say: I saw him that morning in the subway station. In the subway station? Yes, he was on his way to work and I was working there part-time. We ran into each other now and then, and that day as well I helped push him onto the train like I always did. Was there anything different about him? Hmm . . . Come to think of it, Dad had said, Wait, I’ll take the next one, and stood aside. He’d never done that before? No, I don’t think so. So what did you do? I just thought he was tired. So I put him on the next train. He didn’t resist? No, he didn’t seem to.

And that was the last of Dad. He didn’t show up at work, and he didn’t come home. He was, literally, missing. The police tried to comfort me by saying there were a lot of people like him nowadays, but what’s the use of knowing there were lots of people like my dad? After that, my memory . . . is all jumbled up. I got the two months’ pay from Dad’s company that they had been withholding, which wasn’t an easy thing to do, and I prepared all the documents to send Grandma to an old folks’ home, which was also a really complicated and difﬁcult thing to do, went back and forth between the police station and the hospital, and to work as usual, as I had to. Sometimes, when I put my tired body on the subway at dawn, I felt like someone was shoving me into the darkness. Don’t push. Stop pushing, I said! Why is the world full of pushers? Why are there only pushers in this world and no pullers? And, why is this train, life, the world, always swaying? That’s how the swaying winter passed, and spring came. That spring was enough to make both the Venusians and Martians jealous. Dad didn’t come home, but Mom miraculously recovered consciousness. I cried with joy, not so much because she had recovered, but because she wouldn’t have to stay in the hospital anymore. Well, with as sad a reason as that, who wouldn’t cry? Now she just needs physical therapy. That’s what the doctor said. So she just needs physical therapy. Because that’s what the doctor said.

That’s how our family started breathing again. Because even though Dad had disappeared, we didn’t have the burden of Grandma, and Mom was earning enough again to pay her own medical bills. If you were watching us from a roof somewhere nearby, it probably would have looked a lot like a small shoot sprouting out of a lawn. We were alive. We were far from passing through safely, but how great a blessing was it that I could still do similar arithmetic? Before we disappear, before we disappear, I mean.

How perfect was that spring day? After finishing work, I dozed off on the station bench and fell into a perfect sleep. Then I opened my eyes. I was thirsty. I drank my usual cup of Mirinda, and felt the fizzy rays of the spring sun prick my skin. The sun’s rays, which were naturally No Ice, held that much more warmth. Aah. I stretched out my legs and leaned my head back. The clouds were still drifting and the earth was spinning, and when I straightened my head, I spotted a strange face floating near the roof of the platform on the other side. No way, that can’t be a giraffe. It really was a giraffe. The giraffe was smartly dressed in a suit and was slowly strolling back and forth along the platform. The station wasn’t very crowded, but even so, people were acting like it was no big deal—the looks on their faces said stranger things had happened. I kept a close eye on the giraffe, thinking, Come on, shouldn’t at least one person be alarmed by this? Bobbing its head, the giraffe walked to a bench near the corner and stopped. Then, it SAT. I have to say it that way because it was such a sweeping, disjointed movement. The weird thing is, right at that moment, I knew the giraffe was my dad. I don’t know why, but I was sure of it. I was already running through the station. Before he disappears, before he disappears.

To my relief, the giraffe was sitting completely still. I hesitantly made my way over to it, then carefully and hesitantly sat next to it. Once I was sitting, I realized how tall the giraffe was, even when it was sitting, and on the whole it seemed gentle and indifferent. The giraffe didn’t even look my way, but I was crying. Strangely enough, the tears wouldn’t stop coming. Dad . . . I pulled out the word that was in my heart and placed my hand on the giraffe’s knee. Through my trembling palm, I could feel the texture of the suit that only someone who had pushed it before with his hands would remember. The shadow of the clouds zoomed by. The giraffe didn’t react. Dad, Dad, it’s you, right?

What happened? I shook the giraffe’s knee but ﬁnally gave up on getting a response and talked instead about how the family was. I told him about Grandma, about Mom’s recovery, about how I could learn how to do real estate, and how one of the older guys was trying to get me into the trade, there’s an opening, how he said there’s an opening. The economy’s going to get better, they say. Moody's or whatever it’s called upgraded our credit ratings, so things are getting better. So come home. You don’t have to worry anymore. The shadow of the clouds zoomed past again. Dad, just tell me one thing then, OK? It’s you, right? Just tell me that.

The indifferent but ash-colored eyes turned to look at me vacantly. The giraffe lay its hoof over my hand and, slowly, it said:

Is that so? I’m a giraffe.

Reviewed by Shaun Randol

“There’s inevitably something terribly contrived about the standard novel,” bemoaned W.G. Sebald.

“You can always feel the wheels grinding and going on.”

What a treat it is, then, for the inquisitive reader to meet an experimental novel. So it is with great anticipation that the intrepid reader approaches Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas, an inventively constructed novel, printed inversely from each side; the reader must literally turn the book over and start again from the other side to complete the story.

Ostensibly, The Canvas is a mystery told from the alternating perspectives of Jan Wechsler and Amnon Zichroni, whose tale—or tales—meet in the middle, structurally and thematically.

Wechsler’s story unfolds from one end of the book. In a suitcase mysteriously left at his doorstep he uncovers, among other items, Masquerades, a book written by a “Jan Wechsler.” Masquerades, an arousing exposé, questions the account of Minsky, a memoirist who gained fame writing about his family’s struggles during the Holocaust. Is the author of Masquerades the same Wechsler, or is there an author with the same name? As Wechsler dives into the mystery, his memory and notions of self-identity unravel.

From the other side of the book comes Zichroni’s story. Zichroni is a devout, Orthodox Jew and a psychiatrist with the divine gift of being able to read other people’s memories. His talents come into question with one patient, Minsky. The very same Minsky ripped apart by “Jan Wechsler’s” Masquerades. Zichroni wonders if he may be to blame for Minsky’s downfall.

In the middle, the narratives meet, but the connections between Zichroni and Wechsler remain blurry. From Zichroni:

I didn’t comprehend just how much the tide of malice had taken on a life of its own, and how irrational it had become, until I found myself in the media’s crosshairs. When they began to claim that I had treated Minsky and invented the memories in his book for him and with him, I grasped once and for all that this whole matter was not, as everyone vociferously claimed, about documenting the truth.

. . . In all of this there was a hero, who was more than happy to bask in his success, and in general recognition that he deserved the credit for bringing Minsky to justice. That was Jan Wechsler, who had gotten the witch-hunt rolling. As a reviewer, I’ll go no further with the connections between Wechsler, Zichroni, and Minsky. More links are revealed throughout both accounts, but discussing them risks spoiling the suspense. Much of The Canvas is precisely about wending one’s own way through the stories and drawing conclusions accordingly.

Stein’s novel is an invitation to the reader to partake in a particularly interactive experience. A note at the beginning of both stories notiﬁes the reader: “There are two main paths and intertwined side-trails running through this novel.” The main paths of Wechsler’s and Zichroni’s stories are clear enough. The branching and intertwining side-stories, however, are a challenge to parse.

“You can follow the narrative on one side until you get to the middle of the book, then ﬂip it over and continue reading from the beginning of the other side,” suggests the author’s note. Or, “to follow one of the side-trails, turn the book over after each chapter, and continue reading where you left off before.”

I chose the latter strategy, beginning with Zichroni Chapter One, then Wechsler Chapter Two; Zichroni Three, and Wechsler Four (and so on). When I reached the middle of the book I read the alternate chapters: Wechsler One, Zichroni Two, etc., until again I reached the middle and thus, the conclusion.

The Canvas is a mystery, but not in the whodunit tradition. There is a crime, or a suggestion of a crime, at the center of the story, but one is less concerned about who is at fault and more engaged in discovering just how the stories of Wechsler and Zichroni interweave. The mystery is only the vehicle by which Stein delivers a Kafkaesque tale that constantly toys with memory, truth, and identity. Zichroni wonders: “What . . . is the value of a truth that kills, compared to a truth that allows a person to live?” Wechsler, too, struggles for a grip on reality: “I’m a liar, or I’m completely insane. What else am I supposed to think?” Indeed, what is the reader to think?

Wechsler’s tale is more interesting than Zichroni’s because Zichroni’s cultural and personal experiences can sometimes feel remote. For example, reconciling his religious practice and a medical treatment was “as great a paradox as the one Elisha ben Avuya is said to have once faced.” It is an esoteric reference, in character for Zichroni but demanding of the casual reader. A glossary of Ashkenazi, Yiddish, and Hebrew words and Jewish legal terms is included for those not familiar with Zichroni’s culture, but too often the words I looked up were not included. The omissions may be frustrating for some readers.

That’s not to say half of The Canvas is inaccessible. The major plot lines are easily picked up in Zichroni’s narrative without needing deep knowledge of Orthodox Jewish culture. And literary ﬂourishes do surface occasionally. Take, for example, this look into the psyche of a young Zichroni:

Was there anything about me that shimmered? There was no trace of brilliant cut to be found. I had no color. I felt like a magnifying glass, nothing more than a simple convex piece of glass over the tightly printed lines of a Talmud page. Much of the memorable text, however, teases the mystery and heightens the mental fragility of the two main characters. “What had I done when, and why?” Wechsler asks himself. “The way things are, I’ll never have any certainty or ﬁnd out the truth, and from now on, I’ll have to live day in, day out with the fear that maybe I’m a murderer, and my guilt just hasn’t been uncovered yet.”

What happened between Wechsler and Zichroni? Each chapter tantalizes with suggestive and scattered clues. But the mystery remains stubborn, in part because its resolution hides behind a trick of perspective. Contributors Umar Timol

Umar Timol is the author of three collections of poetry, La Parole Testament, Sang, and Vagabondages, published by Editions l'Harmattan. He contributed to numerous anthologies in Mauritius and abroad. He also wrote a text for a graphic, Les yeux des autres, which was published in the anthology Visions of Africa (Harmattan). He is a founding member of Point barre, a Mauritian cross-disciplinary poetry journal that publishes poets from around the world. He was awarded a grant by the Centre National du Livre ( CNL ) to attend a writers residency at the Festival des Francophonies at Limoges. His novel Journal de la vieie foe was published in 2012 by Editions l'Harmattan in the series Lettres de l’Océan Indien.

Rubem Fonseca

Rubem Fonseca is one of Brazil's most popular and distinguished novelists and screenwriters. He has written many novels including Bufo & Spaanzani and High Art, which was made into the ﬁlm Exposure. His work has been translated into German, French, Spanish, and Italian, among other languages. He lives in Rio de Janeiro.

Sun Yisheng

Sun Yisheng was born in 1986 in Shandong province. He has worked as a security guard at a cement factory, a waiter, a factory operator, a technician in pesticides factory, and an editor, and has published short stories inChutzpah magazine and Shanghai Literature. Sergey Kuznetsov

Sergey Kuznetsov was born in Moscow in 1966. In the late ’90s he became a leading Russian film and pop-culture critic, and achieved prominence as one of the pioneers of the Internet in Russia. He has actively contributed to magazines such as Harper's Bazaar, Playboy, Vogue, and L'Officiel. In 2001 he became the first Russian journalist to be awarded the Knight Fellowship in Stanford University.

Kuznetsov is the author of The Nineties: A Fairy Tale, a detective trilogy, and PG21, a futuristic novel (together with Linor Goralik). His novel Butterﬂy Skin has acquired cult status in Russia and has been translated into ﬁve languages including German (Heyne). His story "Moscow Reincarnations" was included in the anthology Moscow Noir (Akashic Books, 2010). The English translation of his critically acclaimed novel The Round Dance of Water is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press.

He lives in Moscow with his wife and two children.

Care Santos

Care Santos was born in 1970 in Mataro, a city just north of Barcelona, Spain. She began writing at eight years old, and never wanted to be anything but a writer. At fourteen she won her first writing competition, and at twenty-five published her first book, a collection of short stories. Since then, she has published six novels, six collections of short stories, two collections of poetry, and a great many books for children and young adults. Santos is one of Spain's most read children's book authors, and her work has been translated into German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Lithuanian, and Korean. She's the founder of the Association for Young Spanish Writers, and served as the organization's president for eight years. Currently, she gives literary workshops throughout Spain and the Americas, and serves as a literary critic for the national Spanish newspaper El Mundo. Santos dedicates the rest of her time to raising her three children who, in the author's own words, "are [her] greatest works of art." Her latest novel, Habitaciones Cerradas, was published by Planeta in 2011.

Washington Cucurto

Washington Cucurto is the pseudonym of Santiago Vega, an Argentine poet, narrator and editor born in 1973 in Quilmes, a city in the province of Buenos Aires. He is the author of several poetry collections including the award-winning Zelarayán (1998), La máquina de hacer paraguayitos (1999), Hatuchay (2005) and other compilations. Cosas de negros (2003), El curandero del amor (2006), 1810 - La Revolución de Mayo vivida por los negros (2008) and Hasta quitarle Panamá a los yanquis (2010) are among his most important novels. In 2002 he founded Eloísa Cartonera, an extremely successful non-proﬁt publishing house specializing in handmade and aﬀordable books from recycled materials. As a testament to its success, Eloísa Cartonera was recognized with the prestigious Prince Claus Fund’s 2012 Principal Award.

Mahi Binebine

Mahi Binebine was born in Marrakech in 1959. He studied in Paris and taught mathematics, until he became recognized ﬁrst as a painter, then as a novelist. Between 1994 and 1999 he lived in New York, where his paintings began to be acquired by the Guggenheim Museum. He now lives in Marrakech with his family. Willy Uribe

Willy Uribe was born in Bilbao in 1965. He has been the editor of Marejada Surf magazine. He has worked as a freelance photographer and editor since 2000, collaborating with several national and international publications. He has published two short-story collections (Cuentos revueltos, in 1986, and Ciudad Bilboa, in 1998), as well as a compilation of his articles, tales, and reports on surfing written between 1998 and 2003, Crónicas del salitre,and five novels. His first novel, Nanga, was shortlisted for the Euskadi Literature Prize in 2007. He was awarded the Silverio Cañada Prize 2009 and the Farolillo Prize of the Basque Booksellers Association for Sé que mi padre decía (I Know What My Father Said) and was a finalist for the Tusquets Prize for the Novel for Cuadrante Las Planas.

Andrea Camilleri

Andrea Camilleri is the author of many books, including his wildly popular Montalbano series, which has been adapted for Italian television and translated into nine languages. He lives in Rome.

Kim Young-ha

Born in 1968, Kim Young-ha kicked off his writing career with his first novel I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, which won him the much-coveted Munhak-dongne prize in 1996. Since then, he has gained a reputation as the most talented and prolific Korean writer of his generation, publishing five novels and four collections of short stories. Kim began to earn his international recognition with a French translation of his first novel, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, which was published by Philippe Picquier in February 1998; the novel is set to be published in nine other languages, including English and German. A French version of The Empire of Light came out early in 2009 and gained favorable attention from such leading newspapers as Le Monde and Liberation. This novel was published in the United States in 2010 under a different title: Your Republic Is Caing You. Recently in October, his third book, Black Flower, has just come out in the States. Kim previously worked as a professor in the Drama School at Korean National University of Arts and on a regular basis hosted a book- themed radio program.

Sim Sangdae

Sim Sangdae was born in Gangneung of Gangwon-do Province, Korea, on January 25, 1960. He made his literary debut in 1990 through the journal Literature of the World. With an aesthetic style rare to most Korean writers, Sim explores life’s critical moments and the concept of beauty in his works. He was brought to attention for his ﬁrst novel Once Known as Mukho which illustrated his exquisite grasp of the Korean language, his technical ﬂair, and his unique tone.

Yun Ko-eun

Yun Ko-eun believes that there are eyes in the air and ears in the stillness. Her works aim a microscope at the air and push a stethoscope through the cracks in the stillness. She has signed countless contracts, but she has never actually had an oﬃce job. The only thing that appears on her name card is her name. She likes traveling as a stranger, whether in lands strange or familiar. She was born in Seoul in 1980 and graduated from the Creative Literature Department of Dongguk University. She debuted in 2004 with her short story “Piercing,” which won the Second Daesan Literary Award for College Students. She won the Hankyoreh Literature Award in 2008 for her book, The Zero G Syndrome. Her books include Table For One. Park Mingyu

Born in South Korea in 1968, Park Mingyu debuted in 2003. As his writing style was so new, it sent shockwaves through the Korean literary world. Unusual metaphors and descriptions, sentences and paragraphs that ignored the rules of grammar, narrative structures that broke down logical causality, and characters that behaved in exaggerated ways like cartoon characters—there was no aspect of his writing that wasn’t unconventional. Though his unusual fiction style earns him his self-designated title of “ruleless hybrid writer,” Park’s writing is entertaining and accessible rather than difficult to understand. His novels include: Legend of Earth’s Heroes (2003), The Sammi Superstars’ Last Fan Club (2003), Ping Pong (2006), Pavane for a Dead Princess (2009). His short fictions are: Castea (2005) and Double (2010). He has won many literary awards including Munhakdonge New Writer’s Award (2003), the Hankyoreh Literary Award (2003), the Yi Hyo-seok Literary Award (2007), the Hwang Sun-won Literary Award (2009) and the Yi Sang Literary Award (2010).

Book Reviews

Shaun Randol

Shaun Randol is the founder and editor in chief of The Mantle , an Associate Fellow at World Policy Institute, and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Translators

David Ball

David and Nicole Ball have signed three book-length translations together, most recently Abdourahman A. Waberi’s Passage of Tears (Seagull Books, 2011) and In the United States of Africa (University of Nebraska Press, 2009). They have also co- translated half a dozen shorter pieces by Waberi for journals such as Words Without Borders, the Literary Review, AGNI, and Calaloo. David’s own booklength translations include Alfred Jarry’s Ubu the King in The Norton Anthology of Drama (2009) and Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984 , which won the Modern Language Association’s prize for outstanding literary translation in 1996. David translated three stories in Haiti Noir (Akashic Books, 2011).

Nicole Ball

David and Nicole Ball have signed three book-length translations together, most recently Abdourahman A. Waberi’s Passage of Tears (Seagull Books, 2011) and In the United States of Africa (University of Nebraska Press, 2009). They have also co- translated half a dozen shorter pieces by Waberi for journals such as Words Without Borders, the Literary Review, AGNI, and Calaloo. Nicole Ball has translated two books from French to English—Maryse Condé’s Land of Many Colors (University of Nebraska Press, 1999) and Catherine Clément’s The Weary Sons of Freud (Verso, 1987) —and a Jonathan Kellerman thriller from English to French: La Sourde (Seuil, 1999.) She translated four stories in Haiti Noir (Akashic Books, 2011). Cliford E. Landers

Cliﬀord E. Landers has translated from Brazilian Portuguese novels by Rubem Fonseca, Jorge Amado, João Ubaldo Ribeiro, Patrícia Melo, Jô Soares, Chico Buarque, Marcos Rey, Paulo Coelho, and José de Alencar and shorter ﬁction by Lima Barreto, Rachel de Queiroz, Osman Lins, and Moacyr Scliar. His translation of Pedro Rosa Mendes's Bay of Tigers: An African Odyssey was published by Harcourt. He received the Mario Ferreira Award in 1999 and a Prose Translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for 2004. His Literary Translation: A Practical Guide was published by Multilingual Matters Ltd. in 2001. A professor emeritus at New Jersey City University, he now lives in Naples, Florida.

Nicky Harman

Nicky Harman lives in the UK. She has worked as a literary translator for a dozen years and, until the spring of 2011, also lectured at Imperial College London. Now, in addition to translating, she organizes translation-focused events and mentors new translators from Chinese. She led the Chinese–English workshop at the British Centre for Literary Translation Summer School from 2009 to 2011 and in 2011 was Translator–in–Residence at the London Free Word Centre. Authors she has translated include Zhang Ling (Gold Mountain Blues); Yan Geling (Flowers of War), Han Dong (A Phone Ca om Dalian: Coected Poems, and Banished!), Hong Ying (K–The Art of Love), and Xinran.

Andrew Bromﬁeld Andrew Bromﬁeld was born in Hull in Yorkshire, England. He co-founded and edited the literary journal Glas, and now lives and works in rural Surrey. He has translated works by Boris Akunin, Vladimir Voinovich, Irina Denezhkina, and Victor Pelevin.

Megan Berkobien

Megan Berkobien is a translator living in Spain. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, where she founded the school's undergraduate translation journal, Canon Translation Review. She is currently working on the translation of Cristina Peri Rossi’s short story collection Cosmoagonías.

Gabriel T. Saxton-Ruiz

Gabriel T. Saxton-Ruiz is a professor of Humanistic Studies and Spanish at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He received his BA in Spanish and French from Virginia Tech, and his MA and PhD in Modern Foreign Languages from the University of Tennessee. His research interests include 20th and 21st century Latin American literature, popular culture studies and representations of violence in cultural productions. He is the author ofForasteros en tierra extraña: La nueva narrativa peruana y la violencia política (2012) which explores the complex relationship between literature and the recent violent history of Peru. His current book project is a translation anthology tentatively titled Bajo un nuevo sol: Peruvian Fiction in the Twenty-First Century. Lulu Norman

Lulu Norman lives in London. Working from French and Spanish, she has translated Ricardo Arrieta, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Albert Cossery, Mahmoud Darwish, and Serge Gainsbourg, and written for the Guardian, theIndependent, and the London Review of Books. Her translation of Mahi Binebine's Welcome to Paradise was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2004 and Horses of God has just been awarded a 2013 English PEN Award for outstanding writing in translation.

Her most recent translations include Lebanese Cuisine by Andrée Maalouf and Karim Haïdar (Saqi Books, 2010) with Sophie Lewis, three stories in the Penguin Anthology of African Writing, Gods and Soldiers (Penguin Books 2009), Paris Noir (Serpents Tail, 2007), The Bey of the Atlantic by Fatou Diome (Serpents Tail, 2006), The Star of Algiers by Aziz Chouaki (Graywolf 2004, Serpents Tail 2006), all with Ros Schwartz, and The Demented Dance by Mounsi (Black Amber, 2003). She also works as a freelance editor and is an editorial assistant at Banipal, the journal of modern Arab literature.

Thomas Bunstead

Thomas Bunstead is a video editor and subtitler by trade. He lived in Madrid from 2005-2008, where he worked for Real Madrid TV and met Zinedine Zidane. Back in England, and away from the footballing pantheon, he was one of a number of translators chosen to take part in the British Centre for Literary Translation's 2011 mentorship scheme, working, in his case, with Margaret Jull Costa.

He has Spanish to English translations forthcoming of work by Aixa de la Cruz, Eduardo Halfon, Luis Rafael Sánchez and Enrique Vila-Matas. Also an author in his own right, with numerous short stories to his name, in 2011 he completed his ﬁrst novel, a work of historical ﬁction. He also contributes to The Independent on Sunday, the Times Literary Supplement, 3ammagazine.com, the Paris Review Blog, www.readysteadybook.com, and blogs at www.throwyourlaptopdownthestairs.blogspot.com.

Elizabeth Harris

Elizabeth Harris teaches creative writing at the University of North Dakota. She has translated ﬁction by Mario Rigoni Stern, Giulio Mozzi, Marco Candida, and others. Her translations have appeared in the Literary Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, AGNI, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Her translations have also appeared twice in Dalkey Archive Press's annual Best European Fiction anthology, with work by Mozzi (2010) and Candida (2011). Her translation of Rigoni Stern's novel Giacomo's Seasons (Le stagioni di Giacomo) and Mozzi's story collection This is the Garden (Questo e' il giardino) are forthcoming from Autumn Hill Books and Open Letter Books. GET INVOLVED Click here to support or get involved with Words Without Borders