Freeman's Conclusions E-Book

John Freeman

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 413

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Over the course of ten years, Freeman's has introduced the English-speaking world to countless writers of international import and acclaim, from Olga Tokarczuk to Valeria Luiselli, while also spotlighting brilliant writers working in English, from Tommy Orange to Tess Gunty. Now, in its last issue, this unique literary project ponders all the ways of reaching a fitting conclusion. For Sayaka Murata, keeping up with the comings and goings of fashion and its changing emotional landscapes can mean being left behind, and in her poem 'Amenorrhea' Julia Alverez experiences the end of the line as menopause takes hold. Yet sometimes an end is merely a beginning, as Barry Lopez meditates while walking through the snowy Oregonian landscapes. While Chinelo Okparanta's story 'Fatu' confronts the end of a relationship under the spectre of new life, other writers look towards aging as an opportunity for rebirth, such as Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, who takes on the role of being her own elder, comforting herself in the ways that her grandmother used to. Finally, in his comic story 'Everyone at Dinner Has a Max Von Sydow Story,' Dave Eggers suggests that sometimes stories don't have neat or clean endings - that sometimes the middle is enough. With new writing from Sandra Cisneros, Colum McCann, Omar El Akkad and Mieko Kawakami, Freeman's: Conclusions is a testament to the startling power of literature to conclude in a state of beauty, fear and promise.

Leseprobe

Previous Issues

Freeman’s: Arrival

Freeman’s: Family

Freeman’s: Home

Freeman’s: The Future of New Writing

Freeman’s: Power

Freeman’s: California

Freeman’s: Love

Freeman’s: Change

Freeman’s: Animals

First published in the United States of America in 2023 by Grove Atlantic

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © 2023 by John Freeman

Managing Editor: Julia Berner-Tobin

Assistant Editor: Emily Burns

Copy Editor: Kirsten Giebutowski

All pieces are copyright © 2023 by the author of the piece. Permission to use any individual piece must be obtained from its author.

The moral right of the authors contained herein to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Grove Press UKOrmond House

26–27 Boswell StreetLondon

WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 80471 064 7

Ebook ISBN 978 1 80471 065 4

Printed in Great Britain

Contents

Introduction

John Freeman

Eight Shorts

Barry Lopez

Rebecca Makkai

Semezdin Mehmedinović

Tommy Orange

Aleksandar Hemon

A. Kendra Greene

Colum McCann

Mona Kareem

Serene

Rachel Khong

P-town

Denis Johnson

On the Occasion of Our Fourth Divorce Anniversary

Lana Bastašić

Un Gordito Calls Me Hermosa

Sandra Cisneros

Madison Square

Andrew Holleran

Three Poems

Li Qingzhao

Fatu

Chinelo Okparanta

i am my own elder now

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Pillory

Omar El Akkad

Che si fugge

Hannah Lillith Assadi

Stars Aligned

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

Cairo After You

Sara Elkamel

The Endlings

Tania James

Blessings, Suspect and True

Louise Erdrich

Transmogrification

Sayaka Murata

Samson Mythologies

Kelsey Day

Embroidery Thread

Mieko Kawakami

Amenorrhea

Julia Alvarez

Everyone at Dinner Has a Max von Sydow Story

Dave Eggers

$

Allegra Goodman

Love List

Matt Sumell

The Creek, the Wind, the Holly

Lacy M. Johnson

A Short Manifesto

Barry Lopez

Contributor Notes

About the Editor

Introduction

JOHN FREEMAN

IN THE LATE OUGHTS, I BECAME friends with the writer Barry Lopez. I was in my mid-thirties, and Barry had dedicated his life to seeing and experiencing the world, and sharing that with others. He had traveled to seventy countries, and spent long stretches of time sleeping outdoors, either alone, or near wild animals. Much of it in the Arctic. He wore this experience lightly, though. If a lassitude fell upon the conversation, he did not whip it back into shape—or toward himself—with a tale of wolverine tracking in northern Alaska. Of marvels seen in Afghanistan. He asked a question. A suburban kid from Northern California, whose wild animal encounters mostly involved small skunks on early morning winter bike rides, I was stupefied by this quiet, persistent generosity. As if our lives contained equal multitudes, let alone pressures. Indeed, for the last decade of his life, Barry was suffering from cancer, and often in great pain. Yet he never seemed to project his inner weather outward, at least with me.

This ability to discern the difference between inner and outer weather made Barry one of the finest observers to ever write a sentence. It was a hard-won poise. A survivor, Barry had spent his days answering a call he felt had saved him, and wondering if he deserved that rescue. (It had come, he wrote, in the voice of the mother Mary, telling him a childhood assault he’d experienced would not destroy him.) The acute pressure Barry put on himself—to live up to his own survival—was to try and hear, to try and see everything with the humblest clarity. Thus he became a great appreciator of music, of the outdoors, of any kind of machine. People, artwork. He loved praising a meal. Sniffing at the natural world, he was more accurate than Apple Weather. Once we spent an hour in an art gallery and emerged in the near dark of a late fall evening, the air heavy. What is that smell? I asked. Water, he said, opening the car door. A minute later rain came down.

That night, and on so many others, when we had been among a group and then were alone, Barry didn’t break the silence by commenting on the people we’d just seen. It’s one of the easiest— and sometimes most delicious—pleasures: to come to a series of conclusions about people outside their company. As if they are suppositions, the chat presumes, you have the perspicacity to solve. Barry didn’t play this game. He didn’t even talk about not playing it. He just assumed people were far more complex than we could give them credit for being, and why waste time—when our time was so limited, to begin with—pretending otherwise. I think he also preferred the company of animals to people. If I remember correctly, that night after the gallery we sat in silence, listening to the rain ping off the roof of his car, and then came to a decision about where to eat.

THIS MEAL—this ten-course meal, which Freeman’s has attempted to be—is now coming to a close. I wish we were all sitting around a table, could push back our seats, untuck our shirts, and heed the call Aleksandar Hemon says his father gave to his family at the end of each visit: Conclusions! As in, what do we think now? Someone could light a pipe. Another could pass around coffee or tea. Having attended at least one such Hemonmade meal, I know that the request for conclusions was usually followed by yet more stories. Watching his family’s narrative lazy-Susan on such a night, I came to a new understanding of what stories and storying allows us. Not the freedom to come to conclusions, but to live in a world in which we know conclusions are nowhere near enough to sustain us.

It has been my hope that in a time which stokes our desire for conclusiveness—and our fear that life without conclusions is irresponsible—that Freeman’s could be a happy cafeteria for the doubt-friendly, the narrative-hungry. The beauty-starved. The curious and the willing. That it could keep just a skerrick of diminishing certitude at bay. When I began to assemble the first issue, almost ten years ago, its headwind was mostly speed. How to publish a paper-based journal in a culture of sped-up attention. Of screens. Of bots. Though widespread disinformation was already being tested in nations in Central Europe and Latin America, it had not, as we say, gone mainstream. Anxiety was less of a drumbeat. The sense of an ending, as we approach the need to confront our climate collapse, seemed less like a threat fossil fuel industries were willing to fight to our very death. People be damned. While earning record profits. The Covid-19 pandemic was years away, and the millions it would wipe from the earth walked among us.

IN LIGHT OF these ongoing situations, stories seem to me more important than ever. How to make sense of an ending without a conclusion? Or a conclusion—like the declared end of, say, the Covid pandemic, which kills hundreds daily, still—which isn’t an ending? So many pieces in this final issue of Freeman’s deal with this strange double-paradox of existing in a world made up of equal parts known and unfathomable. Of danger and delight. Can we live in such a world openheartedly? Chinelo Okparanta is one of our best writers of love stories alive, and in “Fatu,” she tells an acute tale of longing and motherhood, in which her heroine finds herself pulled in opposite directions: the past and a necessary romantic repair, unfinished; and a hard-to-conceive future, possibly alone.

In certain situations, where spaces of care are gone and people must face an uncertain, even dangerous future, this predicament—to face alone what is difficult or nearly impossible to bear—can feel like a form of abandonment. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad describes how the people of Yemen were, by and large, left to the presumed destruction of their state and how some of them adapted to what the war would teach them. Meanwhile, the protagonists of Sayaka Murata’s novella, translated here by Ginny Tapley Takemori, suffer under a different but no less totalizing sense that they live in a world indifferent to their need for a future. And it makes them very, very angry.

IT IS NOT SURPRISING that people would want to avoid this fate, actual or metaphorical, and would do whatever it takes to avoid being adrift. Unwatched out for; unattached. Still, the pair of sisters thawed from ice who animate Tania James’s twenty-first-century fable, “The Endlings,” have decided that perhaps the modern world is not the civilized wonder it purports to be, given their encounters with visitors to the Virginia theme park of sorts where they live. When they turn up hiding in the closet of a guesthouse where one woman is staying, they find solidarity across the hundred generations that divide them from her, and ultimately the woman decides it is her moral duty to protect them, and to aid in their escape. In a brief memoir, Lacy M. Johnson sketches the arc of a declining farm life and reveals how the finely tuned skills of observation that helped her see its luster and beauties aid her in spotting the end of some crucial spark of life in her father.

Forestalling a conclusion is often a site of drama. The narrator of Rachel Khong’s story works at a factory in China that assembles sex dolls for overseas customers. Rewriting Pygmalion as a twenty-first-century captivity narrative with robots, Khong shows what happens when her heroine unexpectedly connects with one of the dolls. Meantime, in Omar El Akkad’s story, humans have figured out how to be reborn in other people’s bodies, prolonging—for some—their lives. But at what cost to the offspring, the narrator must ask, when he comes face-to-face with someone bearing a familiar set of memories.

Can you use it up? This willingness to exist in a life of known conclusions—we all die, we all must move on from some places— as if they don’t happen. Perhaps this is what gives our lives a natural sense of periodicity, of cycles of being. Sometimes these eras are only apparent to us when we stay and others have left, as in Sara Elkamel’s mournful prose poem about being left behind in Cario, after her friends have departed. Or the shape of an epoch might heave into view when we come back to visit the stayers, as the narrator of Andrew Holleran’s novella does, returning to a post-plague New York City, where he avoids and finally sees an old friend, once young and handsome, now nearly elderly, and alone, wracked with survivor’s guilt like him.

COMING TO THE END of anything forces an accounting. A new assessment. The short story, as a form, would not exist without this genre of thinking. Allegra Goodman has written a classic of the type, in which a man facing life in a downsized economy finds himself driven into a job-for-hire that seems designed to prey on people with ambitions like his. Did he really want to become such a person? Asked to account for the end of a marriage, the narrator of Lana Bastašić’s short tale asks a similar question of herself, backtracking through her marriage for the clue, the blinking light, the warning that presaged the end to come—as if she should have seen what was going to happen.

Heartache makes fools of us all. In a series of poems translated by Wendy Chen, Li Qingzhao, one of China’s greatest and most beloved ancient poets, emerges, spookily bright, as if time hasn’t dimmed an electron of power from her longing. Who is to say how many years before the heart should give up its anguishes, or whether it should at all? In Sarajevo, after the Olympics, Semezdin Mehmedinović painted houses with a friend. In a vignette translated by Celia Hawkesworth, he tells of how one day they came across an elderly woman from whose apartment they could see an artwork that told the story of a passionate love affair.

Age does not dim, it merely refracts the light of passion differently. Even for the gazed upon. Walking uphill toward home in Mexico, approaching her seventieth year, Sandra Cisneros finds herself accepting the whispered compliment of a passing man in a way she would never have done at thirty, forty, or even fifty: but she also knows, in ways she didn’t then, how much she deserves it.

Indeed, new stages of life allow us to see new things, not simply our present selves, but all the selves each of us contains. In a poem of contrapuntal power, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers comes to grips with being the ancestor of her own life, the person to whom she must turn for advice, solace, comfort. Meanwhile, in a prose poem, Tommy Orange imagines all the things he wouldn’t have known as a boy, traveling in a car like the one his parents used to take him in, all the forms of precariousness his parents would have worked to overcome. Even his wiser siblings’ awareness didn’t break through. It took time for Orange’s narrator to truly see.

MAYBE love exists in ways we don’t understand until its aftermath, which explains the vertigo it gives us in the present. In a never-before-published poem, Denis Johnson wanders the streets of a wintry Provincetown, Massachusetts, turned into a ghost in his own life by the state of his loneliness—like a land-bound, ancient mariner of love. Meanwhile, across the world in present-day Dublin, putting his sick mother to bed in the hospital, Colum McCann tries to yoke the coming aftermath to the present, so he can appreciate every waking moment he has left with her. Perhaps our moments of greatest tenderness come when we acknowledge an end is coming.

HOW OFTEN, when someone has died, we do not go all the way back to the beginning, when death was a mere rumor, but to the point where we knew our time was limited. As her father falls ill, Hannah Lillith Assadi struggles to recreate that time when they knew enough to ask for more time—wishing the open-ended question it presented to her, of what it means to be a Palestinian without a home, would not become hers alone to carry. In a blackly comic essay, Rebecca Makkai wonders how many more orbits of the sun before she can give her grandfather, a Hungarian émigré with a complicated past, the burial he requested—his ashes to be scattered in three places, including along the Danube, where he made decisions decades ago that upended the lives of thousands—or if he even deserves it.

HOME isn’t a conclusion, but in its final form, it can become one. Next to it, every other conclusion is temporary. Still, passing inner states can be so vivid they beg an unpacking, as in Mona Kareem’s dream of her mother traveling down Broadway, in New York City, with an empty stroller, which is translated by Sara Elkamel. What does it mean? she wonders, as the substance of the vision slips through her fingers. Similarly, Louise Erdrich tries to find a pattern in the blessings that befall her as she raises children, and tumbles with abandon in and out of love.

The body is its own end point. It is where I becomes me, a conclusion sharpened by pain or change. In her poem, “Amenorrhea,” Julia Alvarez memorializes the end of menstruation in just eighty words, this lifetime of activity, after which what will happen? In a palm-of-hand-sized tale, brought into English by Hitomi Yoshio, Mieko Kawakami chronicles the inner life of a woman carved so much around forms of pain that she must gently inflict it upon herself, to orient herself in the world.

Seen from the outside, there are people to whom a body is a question. What are you? In their poem, Kelsey Day elegantly scrambles the ways such thinking shuts down forms of delight. It’s why we tell stories when we get together, no? That delight, the magic of a chance encounter—for someone like the actor Max von Sydow to wander into our lives, as the actor does in a tale by Dave Eggers. Three times he emerges unexpectedly, and three times the encounter ends differently, each with that mist you feel upon meeting a special man.

IN THE BEGINNING, I worried a little over how to describe my relationship to Barry. I wasn’t looking for, nor was he offering himself up as, a mentor. My father, whom I love deeply, is very much alive, and Barry had stepchildren he cared deeply about, and so we weren’t surrogates to one another, I don’t think. Even though I was the age of a possible son. We were too warm and intimate to call ourselves colleagues, we were too infrequently in touch to say we were best pals. He was, rightly, adored by many, and so I also didn’t want to use a word that was also a claim.

Ultimately, actions did the shaping for us. We caught up, we corresponded, we did things together. We shared in the pleasure of each other’s company. It’s a simple thing but as a summation of our friendship, it has to be one of the primary pillars. Often I felt Barry wanted me to see the things, the places, he cared about, as if to say, this mattered to me, this has brought me so much joy: a library, a gallery, a diner, a street in the Bay Area, friendship as a rolling catalogue of delights. As a gift last year, his wife presented me with the tale you find here, a never-before-published description of a walk home to their house along the river in Oregon.

I hope Freeman’s has been a friend to you in a similar way— this issue and the nine that precede it. That its pages have said, look here, this is wonderful, or marvelous, or important. Or amusing. From portraits of people and places to wild animals and dogs, both lost and breeds unknown, like the mutt who wanders through the pages of A. Kendra Greene’s vignette here— befuddling all until Greene gives the dog a made-up breed name, allowing people to accept the lovely animal for simply existing.

Maybe in the end a catalogue is the truest form of tribute. Matt Sumell provides one here that is like a chronicle of tactile delights. Read between the lines and there are messages in his list: that much of what sustains us, we encounter as children; from stunts and pranks, to bike rides at night, when it’s warm out. Perhaps it’s possible to make a manifesto defending our capacity to exist, which means to enthuse, as well, to open up the world, rather than reduce it. Barry seemed to think so. In his lifetime, he wrote and published just one poem, which I reproduce here in conclusion, not as an ending, but as a road map to defending what is worth caring about, so we can remain a while longer to do so mindfully. As if any other way would provide real succor, or satisfaction.

Eight Shorts

WINTERING UP

I long for a view of Nebraska in the spring as I cut up this icy creek bed near my western Oregon home, walking through piebald winter skeletons of red alder. But the longing is not deep or careful; one scattered thought follows another in this silence. I work out of habit at throwing everything out of my mind, and the mind, with creek beds of its own to follow, cuts to visions of Nebraska, as a man reaches easily for store-bought peaches after winter.

It’s cool, snowing, nearly dusk. I move up Quartz Creek in the Cascades, wearing parka and hip boots, walking in the water with no thought of getting home soon. The snow will hold light enough to see by until I am worn out with walking. It has been months since I have walked in here, and I want the taste of it.

There is but one sound: the water’s plop and gurgle, and the occasional notes of winter wrens. And the sudden whirr of their wings in the still air as they leave a bare tree. And farther on, I know, will be a deeper, more plunging and throaty sound, for I am walking up a thin, nameless flanking tributary of Quartz Creek, a thousand-yard independent sojourn on the western edge of the high valley’s gradient. (There must be some special advantage here that I am blind to.)

Weasel tracks.

So the plop and gurgle is all. The other sounds are voices you think you hear or will hear or know from other walks. The voices are good until they become distractions, then you’re lost in memory and anticipation and you miss what is at your feet. Such as the trout that shot so fast past my boots in this gray dark light I am brought right to it from somewhere in my belly. Riveted. Plop and gurgle of the creek.

I don’t mind walking with the dog. I enjoy the pleasure he takes in poking and sniffing. I am appreciative of the distance he knows to keep, too, as if he has grasped an idea of privacy, or the thought that one might desire to offer a prayer, quickly, at the sharp edge of some moment, in the denouement of silence. That mule deer doe I can’t release sight of from the thicket of willows except when I look sideways and catch her on the tips of shade-sensitive rods on retinas at the ends of coils of optic nerves anchored deep in memory of deer. Two minutes ago my fingertips brushing the twin flower petals of her track in wet sand. That kind of prayer.

The dog tracks trails in the snow that I cannot see and I move as quietly as I am able, keeping the sound of my boots beneath the sound of the creek. I think of Nebraska because the alders here crowd the creek so, and the firs and cedars crowd the alders, and the hills come right to the creeks and the mountains crowd the hills. In Nebraska I could see for miles—a horizon even.

No wind. We’ve not had a wind for days. Snow falls straight as stones. The only windy movement is the shudder and nod of willows caught in the creek’s current. I know this jade-green water of early winter: the first snows that melt and catch light this way. It triggers thoughts of Japanese screens. Snowstorms on Hokkaido, and here, where it has stopped snowing, where the alders are blacker now like a hysterical calligraphy against the snow lit by dusk’s pearl gray. Plop and gurgle. And one unmistakable sign: dimple of yellowing-tan on the darkening bank where a willow has been cropped. Beaver. Tatters of bark lie among the stones.

Most of the birds have gone by now.

I can’t tell from today’s melting and this evening’s scatter of new flakes if this is a fox’s track in the snow in front of me or not. I don’t know who else it could be. My fingers can’t take its shape without breaking it; I get down on my knees to peer in, to see if I can detect tiny claw marks inside the prints. Yes.

I walk on with my hands thrust away from my body because of the failing light. At its fork, the tributary I have been following breaks from the main rush of Quartz Creek and I head back north along the creek’s west bank. Stronger, deeper water here. I glimpse the dog slipping through dark alders in the white snow.

The long dusk of winter begins to sting. I know without looking how fat and red my hands are from the surge of warming blood in them. If there was a wind I’d need gloves. (Nebraska has winds; in the spring those winds are comforting enough to put you to sleep.) My hands laid in the creek tell me the water is about forty degrees. Snow melt, promise of ice if it gets cold enough tonight.

Below the spot where Quartz Creek divides, a gravel bar lies at the mouth of yet another creek. I wade out and feel the heavy current mold my hip boots around my thighs, fight my footing. I want to get nearer that sound—the plunging of jade-colored water at dusk. From the edge of the bar it is only twenty feet across a lunging boil of white water to where the other creek pours in. I squat to see better where the water cuts the edge of the gravel bar, in case there is anything going on here that I never knew. With my head that close to the water the plunging sound expands, falls an octave and reverberates. I feel a yatter of wind now in my hair.

I am afraid to be out here, but am here anyways. It is not bravado, for it is only me and my dog. It has to do with health and age, the ways we have of holding on.

I see the dog standing still in the shallows watching something in the trees. I marvel at the way he stands bare-legged, oblivious, in the freezing water.

At this time of year the sun no longer gets to the bottom of the valley. I have not seen its face for weeks. I have never seen the sun rise here, on the lee side of the Cascades, or set, because of the height of the trees, the thickness of the forests, the steepness of the valleys. When the sun is gone the valley glows during the day with a gray light that fallen snow turns pearlish. Winter is a long dream. The snow smothers murmurs of the earth; the creeks rattle on until they freeze; there is no wind. The birds are gone. I wade back to the creek bank and continue north toward the McKenzie River.

Last week I was in Denver. It rained here a record six inches in twenty-four hours. I came home to Quartz Creek boiling, uprooting trees and cracking boulders. Up ahead now I can see a logging bridge on I-beam piling knocked asunder and farther on a big-leaf maple lying full across the creek, a hundred feet or more. When I reach the bridge I cross over its back—the water looks too wild here—and descend the slope of beamed earth and riprap at its base to resume my walk in the creek. It is easier to walk in the stream than in the tangle of bank willows and alders. And I want this intimacy with the water, swelled and colored by the melt of early snows. I study the water as I go and test it with my boots—and still try to look around for any owl that might be caught against the strip of open sky over the creek.

Quartz Creek is one of hundreds of streams that run out into the McKenzie, which this evening carries them in the thick cables of its current. Its back rolls and arches and falls. It heaves with memory. I stand in the creek and stare at the river, realizing that beyond a rudimentary knowledge of hydraulics and the breeding of salmon, I know nothing of it. Here at dusk, as it enters the hollow bowl of night, the river has a stature that is almost surreal—as though it were about to become something else. Like the Himalayas. Or buffalo running on the night prairie.

At the mouth of Quartz Creek I walk up onto a gravel bar that bends downriver, curves like a crescent moon to a sharp terminal point where the water deepens. I notice the dog emerge from the trees with a wish to cross over to me. He can’t find a path he can hold against the creek’s current, so I go back and carry him over, teetering under his sixty pounds.

My rubber hip boots raise a clatter in the stones; the air seems crisper and holds sound more readily here than in the damp muffled stillness near the banks. The river washed snow from this gravel bar yesterday, or the day before. I feel exposed here, away from the trees. The dog stands with his hip to my knee, wagging his tail with his head lowered at the water. Out here in the open there is more light, but what light there is is not enough to see clearly by; the greenish water, the blackish woods lined with white, the grayish sky is all the color now. I walk to the very end. I hear nothing but the vibration of the river, which is physical in my head, and the churlish hissing and hushing suck of fast black water licking at rocks. At the tip of the gravel bar I feel the river in the long muscles of my legs and the damp night air is like the touch of iron on my face. Deer will soon break ice here to drink. I turn suddenly to find the dog watching me, in inquiry, faintly wagging his tail. I turn back, toward home. Black bears have gone to ground. I bow deeply, my hands folded before my chest.

—Barry Lopez

THE SCATTERING

My grandfather, not a simple man, had a complicated final wish: that his only child, my father, pour a third of his ashes in the Danube, a third in the Pacific, a third in Lake Michigan. Budapest was his original home, Hawaii his adopted one, and my father and sister and I lived in Chicago. It had a fine ring to it, this watery triad.

I was fifteen when he died in 1994, and hadn’t seen him in years—a mercy, since his final days were spent in squalor and extreme, sometimes violent, senility. His last chapter sounded like cosmic payment for wrongs done, a punishment best reserved for the afterlife. A visitor described him, in those years when he wouldn’t eat and couldn’t die, as an Auschwitz skeleton.

I remember him as a playful yoga instructor who lived on the beach, one who’d blow raspberries inside my elbow and work my arm like a well pump, filling me “with aloha.” This was the same man who, as a member of Parliament in 1939, authored the second Hungarian anti-Jewish law. Later he spoke out against the Nazis—anti-Hitler and antisemitic sentiments being perfectly capable of coexisting—and was jailed by the Gestapo. Gestapo prison was, improbably, where he discovered yoga. If anyone ever contained multitudes, if anyone needed more than one body of water to tell his life story, it was this guy.

My father and stepmother flew to Honolulu to settle his affairs, and tossed the first third of the ashes off a boat. Back in Chicago, my sister and I were summoned to my father’s apartment, where he pulled out another third in a Ziploc bag.

Human ashes weren’t like I’d thought. The soft ashes in the fireplace come from wood. These ashes were mostly bone— some small pieces like cat litter, and some longer, unmistakable splinters.

In the fall of 2022, while in Berlin for research, I visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. I learned that in the camp’s early days, administrators sold the ashes of executed prisoners back to their families. Except, of course, they were never the correct ashes. Perhaps the families told themselves they were the right ones, or perhaps they understood they were paying for the comingled remains of many departed souls, all of whom deserved burial.

That night in 1994 we walked onto a pier and—it was dark, no one stared—each tossed handfuls of ashes to the waves. On the way back, my father handed me the Ziploc to throw in a city trash can.

My grandfather’s wish for the final third of the ashes would have been nearly impossible a few years earlier, but by the 1990s Hungary had opened up and it was no longer dangerous for my father, a refugee following the failed 1956 Revolution, to return. He ended up retiring to Budapest in 2015, and died there in early 2020.

That was difficult timing, and my sister and I missed his funeral; I was only able to return that fall, alone, to sort through his things and visit his grave.

My grandmother, married just three years to my grandfather, was a notable author. Her grave is a national protected site, and before his death my father had to arrange special dispensation for his ashes to be interred in his mother’s plot. Imagine a raised garden bed, coffin-sized, stone perimeter, dirt in the middle. My grandmother’s memorial, a traditional Transylvanian wooden monument called a kopjafa, towers over a plaque for my father.

My stepmother arranged a cab to the cemetery. Before we left, she pulled out a small wooden box, the kind you might get in a Hawaiian souvenir shop. She said, “We never put these in the river.” She lifted the lid. Inside, another Ziploc bag. The last third of the ashes. Twenty-six years later.

I’d had no idea. The most sense I can make of it: On previous visits to Budapest, they hadn’t wanted to deal with ash transportation. Almost as soon as they moved back, my father became too weak to walk much, and wouldn’t have sent his wife to do this alone.

My grandfather’s bones wouldn’t have been the only ones in the Danube. For one thing: In the last winter of the war, the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party shot Jewish prisoners on the banks, where they’d fall into the river. When bullets were scarce, they tied two prisoners together. They shot only one, but both plummeted into the water and the second would drown.

You might think my stepmother would suggest we cross one of the many bridges connecting Buda to Pest and pour the ashes off the side, so they could flow past Parliament as my grandfather wanted. Instead, she stuck the ashes and a soup spoon into her purse and announced that we could simply add these to the gravesite.

You might think I protested. But I know better than to argue with the woman. And I was fairly stunned.

The New Public Cemetery, home to three million dead, is the largest in Central Europe: mazes of tended and untended graves, kiosks selling candles and flowers, and, right before All Souls’ Day, thousands of visitors. At the grave next to my grandmother’s, a family came and went, then another branch of the same family came and went. When the area was clear, my stepmother handed me the spoon, for digging, and the Ziploc.

I registered three problems as I dug: 1) This was still a protected national site, and we were breaking the law. 2) This was very much not the Danube. 3) I never knew my grandmother— she died when I was a baby—but I couldn’t imagine that after forty-three years of eternal rest, she’d suddenly welcome her ex’s ashes.

I decided this arrangement would be temporary. I tried to memorize the spot so that whenever my sister and I returned, we wouldn’t have to dig long before we found the bone shards. We could drop them off Margaret Bridge, and they’d flow south. A final wish was a final wish.

My grandfather did not, technically, murder anyone. He dropped no bombs, flipped no switch. He condoned no death camp. What happened would have happened without him. But he was there. His words became law, and the laws flowed down the Danube from Parliament and into every village. He unleashed the sentences that begat more sentences that became life sentences.

It was right after Budapest that I went to Berlin, and to Sachsenhausen. Our guide, a sweet man, could emotionally handle only one tour a week. I asked what the hardest part was, and he said every few tours, someone would mention—often partway through—that their father died there, their uncle, their great-grandmother. These descendants had been denied ashes, a body to bury. What they had instead was a place—a cursed and impossibly heavy place.

I’ve been left with the opposite: ashes and no home for them. They’ve wandered the earth for a quarter century like a sad and angry ghost, and their journey isn’t done.

They ask questions I’ve never had answers for: This mess of a man—where do you put him? The fragmentary remains of his legacy—are you allowed to let them go? What on earth, on this wretched earth, do you do with it all?

—Rebecca Makkai

I LIKE ALL COLORS

In one of the months leading up to the Sarajevo Winter Olympics, and afterwards, after the big snowfalls, my friend Grof painted flats in the city. And he had so much work at that time that he needed an assistant. He didn’t have much serious benefit from my skills as a craftsman, I was completing my studies of literature at the time, but through the Students’ Agency, in my name, Grof was able to charge for his painter’s services. In that way I was of use to him. And I knew how to make a hat with a double-page of the Oslobođenje newspaper, so as to protect our heads from the paint.

I quite liked going into unknown apartments, meeting people and listening to their stories. When we arrived in a new one, Grof’s first question was:

“What color do you want us to paint it?”

And there would always be an unusual demand. But, regardless of which paint was chosen, more often than not the owners of the flat would have some criticism. It was never the color they had imagined in their head. Grof knew that, so he took certain preliminary actions in order to protect himself. For instance, after the first application of color, while everything could still be put right, he asked for permission to continue. Is this the color you want? Our people are strange. One pensioner demanded that his walls be painted fern green. But none of the greens we tried had quite the nuance he had imagined.

Grof was an artist in his painting work as well. In every flat, in those hidden places, where there was a cupboard against the wall, or some other piece of furniture we had to remove temporarily, he would secretly paint a miniature, which in his understanding would have a connection with the person who lived there. Then he would hide it so the flat’s owner didn’t know about his handiwork. For an inveterate smoker, he would paint a packet of Drina cigarettes on the wall. One woman who owned a flat in the Napredak building in Titova Street had a framed black-and-white photograph of herself on her bedroom wall opposite a mirror. Grof painted a hyperreal version of that same photograph behind the mirror. He spent more time on painting that than painting the whole apartment. But it was a real work of art. I may be a bit biased, but I don’t know whether any artist ever used a mirror so effectively in his work. I didn’t understand some of his decisions: behind the wall clock in one flat in Višnjik, for instance, he painted the Argentinian flag. He had no explanation for this choice. “It just came to me,” he said. And sometimes, if the residents appeared indifferent, he would paint a banana on the wall because he was obsessed with Warhol. Once, in the apartment of a political functionary he drew a red star and knocked a rusty nail into it.

So, in every apartment where Grof had been there remained a secret that, after we left, at the very least, made that place more interesting. In the autumn of 1984, in one of those narrow streets that lead from the Evropa Hotel toward the bank of the Miljacka River, we went into an old Austrian building and on the second floor we were met by a smiling elderly woman. She let us in and immediately offered us tea. And when Grof asked her what color she would like, she smiled and spread her arms, saying:

“Whatever, my dear! I like all colors.”

She was called Minka. She could have been seventy, maybe seventy-five. She was lonely, she would launch into a story in order to draw us into a conversation and offered us coffee and cakes. She didn’t let me use the formal “you” with her. She delayed us in our work, Grof grumbled a bit, but I found conversation with her entertaining. First, we took some interesting pictures down from the walls, including two small Ljubović oil paintings and a Parisian sketch by Ismet Mujezinović, which I recognized. And then, the choice of books on her shelf was interesting, mainly because they were in several languages. The Gallimard edition of Camus. Beckett. And when she saw that her books interested me, she took down Andrić’s Bosnian Chronicle and opened it to show me the dedication. The ink from the writer’s pen was a bit smudged so that I couldn’t read all the words under “Dear Minka,” but the dedication ended “your Iv. An.” I remembered that. When I asked how the two of them had met and grown close, she waved her hand and said: “It was a long time ago . . .” And when I teased her that there must have been some mutual attraction, she laughed and repeated: “No, no, no . . . Heaven forbid! He was my neighbor, you know, at the time when he lived in Sarajevo.” And all my later efforts to discover something more about her acquaintance with Andrić met a brick wall and she would change the subject. Once when she offered us tea, she said, “This one, rosehip, was the one Ivo liked best.”

I wanted to know what Grof was going to paint secretly in Minka’s flat and was surprised when he admitted he wouldn’t be painting anything, because she had not “opened up” to him; “I don’t have anything to say about her”; “she hides everything about herself.” I found his explanation interesting. He usually flattered himself that with the practiced eye of an artist he saw more than others, yet now he admitted that he had a problem with his painter’s intuition.

There was no television set in the flat and I asked the old lady why. She said that news from the outside world didn’t interest her. “That’s fine,” I said, “but you could watch a film, for fun.”

“I used to go to the cinema, but there aren’t any good films anymore. Like Casablanca, or Doctor Zhivago. Now there are only those violent ones from Vietnam, and I don’t like them. I didn’t like our own, Partisan, ones either,” she explained.

Our work in her flat took three, perhaps four days at most. We would finish before the first darkness, but when we had gathered our tools and paint pots, Minka would ask me to move her heavy armchair to the window. After that she would appear in a new dress and sink into her armchair with a book in her hand, gazing out the window for a while. I felt that this was the evening ritual of a lonely old lady.

On the last day we cleaned everything up, returned the paintings to the walls, put the furniture and everything else back in its place. Grof was already at the door. It was the seventh of November, he was in more of a hurry than I was because Željo1 was playing a return match against the Swiss Sion in the UEFA Cup. When I had finally placed the armchair by the window, Minka appeared in a white dress, as though she were getting ready for an evening outing to town; she didn’t have a necklace, or earrings, just a gold brooch as her only ornament. “Look at you,” I said, “ready for a wedding.” She laughed.

Someone put on the lights in a neighboring flat. It was only then that I noticed that the gap between the buildings on one side of the street and the other was quite small. On the wall of the room in the flat opposite I saw a large canvas, the portrait of a beautiful girl in a white dress. And then I understood. That was why at the end of the day I had to move her armchair to the window. “That’s you!” I said. Minka nodded, glad I had recognized her. “That was me, when I was young.” She pointed to the window behind which her portrait hung, and then touched the brooch on her chest with the tips of her fingers and said: “This is the same gold and diamond branch as in the picture.” And I think at that moment she was ready to tell me her story. But I was in a hurry. Why wasn’t the portrait on her own wall? Who was the owner of the flat in the building opposite? Who was the artist who had painted Minka’s portrait in a white dress? I didn’t discover any of that. In haste, I said goodbye to the old lady and took the empty paint pots out of her flat. I never saw her again.

A lot of time has passed since then. For years I have been preparing to describe this event, and perhaps to invent the missing pieces. But I’m afraid of invention. The older I get, the more I am drawn to what is incomplete. Unfinished paintings, uncompleted books. And I am ever less attracted to what already contains its end. Out of habit, I have been calling in at the Evropa Hotel for coffee for years now, and whenever I find a table by the window, so that I can look out at the narrow street, which has certainly in the meantime changed its name, and at the building where Minka lived, I think, and sometimes even say aloud: “Gold and diamond branch.” Words that go together really well. Our memory is imprisoned in language.

It sometimes happens that someone asks me to make a choice between two or three things, but I have never been good at making up my mind. It’s easier to leave it to others. And then I almost always do something that I adopted long ago as an appropriate procedure: I spread my arms, smile, and say: “Whatever, my dear! I like all colors.”

—Semezdin MehmedinovićTranslated by Celia Hawkesworth

ZEBRA

1.

The past begins again every day. New as any Tuesday morning view of soft light through the kitchen window curtain. Memory is the elephant in every room. Watch it when you can, when it occurs to you. Once you were looking through the front windshield of your family’s minivan on the way out to Oklahoma from Oakland. You had always been afraid of driving at night, afraid of what shapes your mind made shadows become. But up ahead you saw a whole field of lights like you’d never seen before, some vast array of brightly colored circles, fixed to poles so they looked like lollipops, as if for city systems to suck from. The longer you stared at the lights the deeper into them you went. To get away from the doomed sound of your parents scream-whispering an argument they would not remember. The fighting never stopped. Until it did. Disappear inside the lights was not what anyone told you to do when you did it so naturally, when you disappeared inside them like an egg back into its nested bird. Your sisters were whispering to you a darkness about your family, about your father, they were asking you if you thought he was an ogre too. Those days spent back and forth between Oakland and that former Indian territory where your father was born, and where your mother was reborn, saved by Jesus and Jerry Falwell in front of the light of the TV on a dark afternoon your father had been too drunk to remember where home had ever been.

2.

The occurrence of memory is always asking you why this why now? Follow it hiccuping down the halls of your collapsing hippocampus. Two fingers at your temple thumbs-up is a gun you have always owned. A gun upside your temple, up there inside where every color is hued and imbued with not meaning but the insistence of itself. Come find out they say. The memories occur to you, which is another way of saying memory happens to you, which is another way of saying you are the one hiccuping down the halls of your collapsing hippocampus, drunk on a word you wish meant love, a word you’re afraid to speak. Memory only rents a room inside your head, striking against its walls the days. Look they aren’t more than scratches, tallies stacked in fives. The prisoner telling stories to the one listening on the other side of the wall is not a prisoner but a thief. Listen to their voices for their tones. Are you mad? Are they? The paper won’t not get wet. Let it ink through. Bleed more. Bleed the most. Or why else can’t you seem to remember enough is a question you don’t want to have to ask, that you can’t not ask in the absence of there being enough to remember. Yet look what amounts in you. Amounts as you. That little amount there in your empty hand held out like a bowl. The nothing nothing nothing nothing. You say give me more of this.

3.

T