Eulora Forward Looking Statement, August 2016

From the player's perspective, we intend to make another client release sometime in the Summer of 2017. This client will include two major items : a first implementation of the "practically infinite landscape" as discussed previously ; and a migration to RSA-based authentication for both client and server. There will probably be numerous other fixes, changes, improvements etc bundled in, but these two are the pillars.

We are also working on a graphics marketplace pipeline. The ideal functioning of this item is as follows : interested player creates game resourcei ; registers it with the server ; server advertises the item to players ; which players can elect to use the item in question in their own client ; which usage produces ECu royalties for the author. This system leverages some very significant synergies - not merely the technical inclination of the playerbase, but also the fundamental adequacy of our Bitcoin-based economic modelii for the creation of functional markets and economic systems, much in opposition to extant fiat shitcoins. We therefore expect it to be massively successful, once it overwhelms the original state of human sin.

There are also some discussions of a text-only client being thrown together by teh community.

From a technical perspective, the RSA migration is intended to work on the following scheme : RSA privkey is generated correctly ; this key and the server's key are usediii to pass OTPs between client and server ; the OTPs are used to encode normal messages back and forth. With this scheme the client and the server both maintain caches of the other's OTP material, and the security vs speed tradeoff can be managed explicitly. The thing is yet in its infancy, so your theoretical considerations are certainly welcome, please use the comment section below.iv

We are also doing a full server side refactoring, using the familiarity with the codebase's warts and foibles gained throughout the adventure, but especially in the transition to 64 bit ints, with the ultimate goal of having complete and correct test coveragev for the entire codebase. This will put us in a much better position to accept outside contributions ; as well as manage the effort of outside contributors on a much finer grain than is currently possible.

From a financial perspective, we will be increasing our expenditure - to include B5.45 payroll starting next month, and more significant expenses over the course of the year and especially next. We're currently running a market research project as suggested by a previous discussion, which is producing numerous leads we aren't currently pursuing. As the game becomes more polished and especially as our exploitation pipelines mature and become truly functional, expect significant investment in marketing Eulora (to proceed always with an eye to positive ROI, and in its substance entirely similar to the process of feeding the pools - a similarity which raises interesting points about the intellectual & cultural value of Bitcoin as humanity's greatest noetic achievement to date).

———This will rely on blender, and have to follow specifications. Bearing in mind that as Eulora currently holds the FOSS-wide record for "least painful compilation", I have much confidence in the ability of the team to create useful, effective and efficacious instructions and technical manuals. [↩]Not only because of the sovereignity of The Most Serene Republic in the largest sense ; but also for very minute reasons such as - if the usage of your thing by a hundred people over fifteen months should yield you ten bucks, then per-person and per-day fees would come to 10 / 650 / 100 / 15 / 30 * 100000000 = 34 ECu and change. That Bitcoin can meaningfully price such tiny quanta of usage is no small advantage ; and contrary to the unwelcome opinions of Bitcoin outsiders, Eulora is the correct model for exploiting this advantage in practice. [↩]No, not in the sense of "encrypting a symmetric session key".

As should be obvious from the design, that "state of the art" functioning can be emulated by simply... never changing the OTP. Hurr. [↩]And also remember that the current CTO started her career with Minigame by writing an (unsolicited) bot to automate some client side activities. This goes generally and universally - he who sits and waits for whatever event to wake him up will never see the light of day again ; while he who does is and forever will be. [↩]This currently does not exist. Seriously. Imagine that. [↩]

« You are not a person ; and you don't get a vote.

No Such lAbs (S.NSA), July 2016 Statement »

Category: S.MG

Friday, 05 August, Year 8 d.Tr.

Eulora : Auctions and Bilbulations

As to the auction part :

The following itemsi will be offered for auction on behalf of S.MG on March the 27th, 2016 starting at 17:00 ART :

50 Toil of Bouquinism, q 200, qBV 2`452, TV 122`600 ECu.

50 Toil of Gumbo, q 200, qBV 2`452, TV 122`600 ECu.

50 Toil of Lapidary, q 200, qBV 2`452, TV 122`600 ECu.

50 Toil of McGuyver, q 200, qBV 2`452, TV 122`600 ECu.

50 Toil of Tinkering, q 200, qBV 2`452, TV 122`600 ECu.

250 Questionable Flagon Designs, q 200, qBV 1`324, TV 331`000 ECu.

250 Water of Anamnesia Plans, q 200, qBV 2`450, TV 612`500 ECu.

The total base value of this package comes to 1`556`500 ECu, which will be the minimum bid as per usual.ii

As to the bilbulationiii part :

mircea_popescu Of course now the debate of all time : should I use low quality basic tools to make imp tools, thus getting shitty ones and wasting the bps ?iv

mircea_popescu OR should i use high q basic tools to make imp tools, thus getting good ones and wasting the basic tool durability ?v

mircea_popescu I'm sure the true value as established by free market mechanisms such as the auction will provide a directly usable input to discern this dilemma /svi

DianaComan so I would "waste" the basic tools for imps, but maybe that's just me

mircea_popescu well sure, i can also make a call arbitrarily, but I was looking for you know, a logic.

If you wish to consider this problem / help along with a solution, it will remain open for a while. The specifics are as follows :

Each Basic tool is produced out of the bill of materials detailed here

Each Improved tool is produced taking 3 Basic tools and adding 5 Base Metal Studs and a 12 further Slag, therefore needing 6 clicks of Bandar Toolkit decay to the Basic tools' 0.

The benefit in terms of output quality of a higher input quality is marked, but unfortunately not yet well understood vii though there are definite diminishing returns effects visible.viii This perhaps suggests that a technical optimum point exists unrelated to economical considerations in terms of use-value also.

Let me know!

———This package is principally of Lapidary interest. [↩]This auction is almost an exact copy of the one that took place on February the 21st. [↩]Bilbul is a Hebrew word with Romanian overtones. [↩]BPs, aka blue prints, are required to craft items. There exists a process to produce them, but it is difficult and expensive. Some of the lower value more common blueprints have already been reportedly produced, such as Slag and Braided Coarse Thread. The more expensive (in terms of base value) and thus putatively rare ones, such as the Improved versions of the mining tools, have not yet been in fact produced, even if it is expected they would be obtained in the same way.

This means that the currently extant stock of such blueprints is a strategic good, and its utility should be carefully maximized. Because of apparent fungibility in tools, making two hoes of durability 10k each appear equivalent in practice to a single hoe of durability 20k, it then follows that every percentile point discounted on the output production quality is in fact equivalent to a percentile point discount on the blueprint stock count! [↩]If one maximizes the output production quality (and implicitly durability) when making Improved tools, one must use high durability basic tools as raw materials, which necessarily means those same tools won't be used for mining.

Given that the utility-value of mining tools comes from using them in mining, the problem of whether to sacrifice one type of mining tools to improve production of the other type should probably admit only one correct solution in any particular context. [↩]Obviously, the particular context would not be known to the economic agent in sufficient detail to allow a hard resolution of the above problem (even admitting that the processes involved were sufficiently documented to answer basic questions such as "how many points of Improved tool are a fair trade for this many points of Basic tool ?", which is not the case).

The Economic vulgate now fashionable proposes that while such knowledge of context is not available to the rational agent individually, it is somehow mystically accessible to the "group of agents", taken together, as if a crowd were both a sufficient substitute of omnisicient divinity and a workable mechanism of intermediation readily provided in a neat, convenient package - just add water in the form of holding an auction or organising a voting booth.

The sheer nonsense of this view is not only directly apparent theoretically, but also painfully evident in practice, given that auctions don't work worth a crap even in cases where rational agents do in fact obtain reasonably close approximate answers on their own power. That pious fraud and sheer mutual hallucination may provide apparent proof to the contrary should not surprise - the measured charge of the electron also varied over time, historically. Yet there is absolutely no wisdom in the crowd, not of any kind, not to any degree - just as there is nothing else of any value in any crowd ; nor ever was ; nor ever could be. [↩]Datapoints from that same log : Imp c hoe, bp value 6`353, bundle q 103, comes out 24`143 ; imp c hoe, bp value 8`515, bundle q 103, comes out. 27`951. ; imp pickaxe, bp value 10`191, bundle q 104, comes out 30`727 so it would appear the blueprint quality also plays a role. [↩]Quality 279 Solid Branches turned into quality 298 Particularly Promising Branches, which is a slight quality gain. Meanwhile quality 414 grass turned into quality 362 thread, which is a slight loss, and quality 822 grass turned into quality 564 thread, which is a more significant loss. [↩]

« The chick incident

Slums of Beverly Hills »

Category: S.MG

Saturday, 19 March, Year 8 d.Tr.

Eulora auction, March 6th

The February 28th auction went pretty well. Here's the log :

================================================

Sun 28-Feb-2016 15:08:01 Mircea Mircescu

------------------------------------------------

(15:08:01) >Welcome to the gossip channel! 4 players in this channel.

(15:08:01) >When a NPC marries, it exchanges the attentions of many

players for the neglect of one.

(15:08:53) >Mircea Mircescu dropped 30 Rock Double Distillate Thesises.

(15:08:57) >Mircea Mircescu dropped 30 Wood Double Distillate Thesises.

(15:09:01) >Mircea Mircescu dropped 50 Doubtful Tome Doodles.

(15:09:05) >Mircea Mircescu dropped 100 Giant's Rotten Canines.

(15:09:21) Mircea says: so as Trilema dictates, i have before me in the

approximater shape of a penis.

(15:09:38) Mircea says: some distillate recipes, some long rotten teeth

and other dubious items of certain value.

(15:09:48) Mircea says: the lot to belong to the winner of the auction!

(15:10:04) Mircea says: and we're off to the races, starting at 12,5mn ECu

(15:10:07) Mircea says: anyone got 12.5 ?

(15:10:12) Foxy says: 12.5

(15:10:22) Mircea says: 12.5 heard from the foxy lady on my left

(15:10:30) Grenadine says: 13.5

(15:10:44) Mircea says: and 13.5 from the other lady strategically placed

at the tip

(15:10:54) Foxy says: 15

(15:10:55) Mircea says: 13.5 + tip going inonce...

(15:11:01) Mircea says: 15 heard! back at the fox farm!

(15:11:11) Grenadine says: 17

(15:11:12) Mircea says: and going once...

(15:11:15) Mircea says: 17 heard!

(15:11:28) Mircea says: ah sweet 17! can anyone beat 17 ?

(15:11:41) Mircea says: well... some can and some others do, but anyway!

going... twice!

(15:11:43) Daniel says: 17.9

(15:11:50) Mircea says: 17.9 heard frtom the gent.

(15:11:57) Grenadine says: 19

(15:12:00) Mircea says: apparently he likes coming in late

(15:12:07) Mircea says: and 19mn from Grenadine

(15:12:15) Mircea says: who got more than 19 ?

(15:12:16) Daniel says: 20

(15:12:23) Mircea says: 20 heard!

(15:12:33) Mircea says: aaand 20 going once...

(15:12:35) Foxy goes back to making shaped slag

(15:12:41) Grenadine says: 22

(15:12:45) Mircea says: aaaand going... 22 heard!

(15:12:53) Daniel says: 23.1

(15:13:05) Grenadine says: 24.5

(15:13:07) Mircea says: 23.1 heard back at the ranch

(15:13:17) Mircea says: and 24.5 just this much short of a full quarter

bitcoin!

(15:13:21) Daniel says: 25.8

(15:13:26) Mircea says: the almost quarter going once...

(15:13:31) Mircea says: 25.8 heard

(15:13:36) Grenadine says: 27.5

(15:13:44) Mircea says: and 27.5!

(15:13:57) Mircea says: 27.5 going....going...

(15:14:00) Daniel says: 28.9

(15:14:05) Mircea says: 28.9 heard.

(15:14:18) Grenadine says: 30.5

(15:14:20) Mircea says: who can beat 28.9 million ECu for the dentistry

discardments ?

(15:14:24) Mircea says: 30.5 heard!

(15:14:34) Mircea says: and going once

(15:14:37) Daniel says: 32.1

(15:14:46) Mircea says: 32.1 heard!

(15:14:50) Grenadine says: 34

(15:14:53) Mircea says: thats a nice counting sum.

(15:14:58) Daniel says: 35.7

(15:14:58) Mircea says: and 34 heard!

(15:15:03) Mircea says: and 35.7 in turn

(15:15:04) Grenadine says: 38

(15:15:05) >Korgan Stonekrusher has died!

(15:15:07) Mircea says: who's got 50 ? lemme see it ?

(15:15:11) Daniel says: 40

(15:15:12) Mircea says: 38 heard!

(15:15:14) Mircea says: and 40

(15:15:18) Grenadine says: 45

(15:15:21) Mircea says: and 45!

(15:15:28) Daniel says: 47.3

(15:15:31) Mircea says: 45 going once, who's got the 50 comeon

(15:15:33) Mircea says: 47.3!

(15:15:37) Grenadine says: 50 here

(15:15:44) Mircea says: 50 heard at long last! meat today!

(15:15:45) Daniel says: 52.5

(15:15:51) Mircea says: and 52.5 heard. and going.... once

(15:15:53) Grenadine says: 60

(15:15:57) Mircea says: 60 heard!

(15:16:02) Mircea says: who can beat 60 ?

(15:16:16) Mircea says: check out Foxy way over there doing slag

(15:16:16) Daniel says: 63

(15:16:19) Mircea waves

(15:16:23) Mircea says: and 63 heard!

(15:16:31) Grenadine says: 70

(15:16:37) Foxy waves back

(15:16:39) Daniel conceeds

(15:16:43) Mircea says: 70 heavens to betsy!

(15:16:50) Mircea says: 70 going once.... and going twice...

(15:16:50) Foxy says: of

(15:17:08) Mircea says: if anyone of the everyone here wants it more than

70 say now because....

(15:17:20) Mircea says: SOLD! to Grenadine Sippycup for 70 shiny millions!

(15:17:28) Foxy says: congrats Grenadine

(15:17:31) >Mircea Mircescu picked up 30 Rock Double Distillate Thesises

(15:17:32) Grenadine says: sweet that oughta solve my taxidermy problems

(15:17:32) >Mircea Mircescu picked up 50 Doubtful Tome Doodles

(15:17:34) >Mircea Mircescu picked up 30 Wood Double Distillate Thesises

(15:17:35) >You struggle under the weight of your inventory and must drop

something.

(15:17:35) >Mircea Mircescu picked up 100 Giant's Rotten Canines

(15:17:49) Mircea says: lol. trade me if you will mlady

(15:17:53) >Grenadine asks to trade with you.

(15:17:54) >You agree to trade.

(15:18:07) >Grenadine gave Mircea 70000000 Copper.

(15:18:07) >Mircea gave Grenadine 30 Rock Double Distillate Thesises, 30

Wood Double Distillate Thesises, 100 Giant's Rotten Canines, and 50

Doubtful Tome Doodles.

(15:18:07) >Trade complete

(15:18:11) Mircea says: eenjoy!

(15:18:27) Grenadine says: ty

(15:18:30) Mircea goes back to digging rr

(15:19:43) >You start to explore.

(15:25:40) >You've gained some practice points in Gathering.

(15:25:40) >You got a Small Rickety Reeds Exploration Marker!

Pretty neat, huh ? This third auction's 70 mn ECu added to the previous auction's 20.5 mn ECu and to the February the 21st's 23 mn ECu as well as to the February 14th's whopperi of 140mn ECu mark an absolute high mark for S.MG monthly sales : 253.5 mn ECu, or a little over two and a half Bitcoin's worth of virtual game coinage.ii

Since there's still significant shortages that have to be remedied from the outside, the Sunday Auctions will continue with

3 Small Grotesque Altar Conceptions, q 200, qB 76`662 ECu, 229`986 TV ECu.

to be offered at public auction on behalf of S.MG on March 6th, 2016 starting at 17:00 ART, for an opening bid of 230`000 ECu.

See you there!

———The variance is pretty dazzling, I must observe. They do say that auctions are the best price discovery mechanism available, but then it would follow that the bundles auctioned were actually worth sums in this wild a swinging array of digits ? Or maybe auctions aren't all they're cracked out to be and people aren't quite as rational as they think themselves ? Questions for wiser people than I. [↩]Add to this the ~250 mn ECu Electron Spirover put aside as mark-up on his massively successful mining bundle offerings that sold nigh on a billion's worth, and all of a sudden we're talking some serious dough.

This also means that the cash floating in game literally fell off a cliff - cash reduction in February 2016 is the most significant of any month to date, from a high of 3`032 mn to a low of 1`805 mn - which nevertheless and quite notably STILL leaves the cash volume in game above the 1`346 mn level it was at the close of January. [↩]

« So you're a rational fellow, right ?

What MP wants MP gets, the funarg problem and other Mecano considerations »

Category: S.MG

Monday, 29 February, Year 8 d.Tr.

Eulora auction, March 13th

In today's random cool screenshot,

In today's random cool auction announcement, the following items will be offered for auction on behalf of S.MG on March the 13th, 2016 starting at 17:00 ART :

500 (five hundred) Black of Desspayr Recipes, quality 50 ;

500 (five hundred) Misshaped Ampoule Designs, quality 50 ;

1`000 (one whole thousand!) Pointedly Odorous Charcoal Conceptions, quality 50 ;

Each of these three packages will be auctioned separately. On account of my being too lazy to figure out the base value, this auction will start with a minimum bid of one Denariusi. Bring your own calculators.

See you there!

———The 10k copper coin. For some reason the coins are named, Copper, Argent, Denarius, Bitcent. [↩]

« The greatly anticipated BitBet (S.BBET) February 2016 Statement

The color of money »

Category: S.MG

Monday, 07 March, Year 8 d.Tr.

Eulora auction, February the 28th

The previous official S.MG auction came to 23 million through some pretty circuitous bidding actioni, which is a healthy 1`284% on the 1`794`424 ECu BV of the package.

Because Eulora is still short various odds and ends necessary for smooth operationsii, there's going to be another auction, on February 28th, 2016 starting at 17:00 ART, during which the following items will be offered for sale as a package :

30x Rock Double Distillate Thesis, q 200, qBV 72`456, TV 2`173`680 ECu.

30x Wood Double Distillate Thesis, q 200, qBV 72`786, TV 2`183`580 ECu.

50x Doubtful Tome Doodle, q 200, qBV 17`692, TV 884`600 ECu.

100x Giant's Rotten Canine, q 1`337, qBV 72`345, TV 7`234`507 ECu.

The total base value of this package comes to 12`476`367 ECu, which will be the minimum bid as per usual.

See you Sunday!

———Log for the curious :

Mircea says: hey there folks!

Foxy waves

Mircea says: ready for the auction ?

Daniel says: yes

Foxy says: ready

>Foxy Foxster takes a seat by Small Polished Small Stone Exploration Marker.

Mircea says: aite, so as per the announcement on trilema, minigame is proud to present for your bidding pleasure :

Blaz says: accept

>Foxy Foxster stands up.

Mircea says: 3 TW ; 50 ToB ; 50 ToG ; 50 ToL ; 50 ToMcG ; 50 ToT, 250 QFd ; 250 WAP.

Grenadine says: oh boy more delicious acronyms to digest

Foxy says: TW??

Mircea says: items of geat wondcer and mystery mostly realted to the lapidary skill to go on the block at 1.8mn

Foxy says: or the bps only?

Mircea says: do i hear 1.8 ?

Foxy says: 1.8

Grenadine says: 2mn

Mircea says: 2 mn heard!

Foxy says: 2.25

Mircea says: who's 2.25 heard!

Mircea says: CATFIGHT

Foxy says: Grenadine check the tables around as I think a few are yours lol

Mircea says: any gent care to step in ?

Grenadine says: 2.4

Mircea says: 2.4 heard

Grenadine says: o ty foxy lol

Mircea says: and 2.4 going once

Foxy says: 2.6

Mircea says: any 2.6 heard!

Grenadine says: 2.8

Foxy says: 3

Mircea says: why so conservative! bring out your 10s , your 20s!

Mircea says: 3 mn heard!

Mircea says: aaaand going once!

Grenadine says: 3.4

Daniel says: 3.57

Mircea says: anyone beatt 3 mn 3.4 mn from the auctioneer'sd favourite!

Foxy says: 3.75

Mircea says: and 3.57 in a baritone for once

Mircea says: 3.75 back to lady russia over there.

Daniel says: 4

Mircea says: and 4 mn heard!

Blaz says: thanks

Mircea says: are the ladies spent ? shall we hear no more past 4 ?

Grenadine says: 4.5

Mircea says: 4.5!!! o happy days!

Daniel says: 4.73

Mircea says: i only get paid if the base triples you know.

Foxy says: 5

Mircea says: and 4.73 and 5 heard!

Daniel says: 5.25

Grenadine says: 5.5

Mircea says: 5 going... 5.25!

Mircea says: and fife-fiddy!

Foxy says: 5.75

Mircea says: five-fiddy going once! 5.75 heard!

Mircea says: who's got more than foxy ?

Daniel says: 6.04

Mircea says: alsmot-six going o look at that, 6.04!

Foxy says: 6.3

Mircea says: six and change going once...

Mircea says: sixty three dimes! going once!

Mircea says: aaaand twice. who can beat the foxy dimes ?

Daniel says: 6.62

Mircea says: 6.62 heard

Foxy says: bwahaha

Foxy says: 7

Mircea says: aaaand going once and going to 7

Korgan says: aye

Mircea says: hey we'll be out of puberty soon!

Mircea says: who wanna put some $@!$ on this bid ? anyone ?

Grenadine says: lol

Daniel says: 7.35

Foxy says: yay, might even learn Maths at this rate

Mircea says: 7mn going 7.35!

Foxy says: 7.6

Korgan says: Blaz, directly forward from where my dude is looking is the grass

Mircea says: 7.35 and 7.6 heard justnow!

Daniel says: 7.98

Foxy says: there's grass everywhere!

Korgan says: you';ll eventually see a hill with a bunch of grass claims

Mircea says: 7.6 going to 7.98

Blaz says: Ah need to get even more thread tho

Mircea says: who's got more ?

Foxy says: 8.25

Blaz says: i only have 26 thread left lol

Mircea says: 8 and a quarter! heard!

Daniel says: 8.67

Mircea says: and going once

Foxy says: 9

Mircea says: and went to 8.67! the gent's in front! and 9! ma'am got it!

Daniel says: 9.45

Mircea says: ah the turmoil and excitement of gavel days.

Mircea says: 9.45 heard!

Foxy says: 10mn

Mircea says: will they keep going ? o may god a 10!

Grenadine says: whee

Daniel says: 10.5

Mircea says: one whole and 10.5!

Foxy says: 11

Mircea says: 10.5 going once for this lovely set of never seen before items of great import

Mircea says: and 11!

Daniel says: 11.55

Mircea says: who's got o look at that, 11.55!

>Korgan Stonekrusher takes a seat.

>Korgan Stonekrusher stands up.

Mircea says: who's got more ? who wants to spend a lot ? speak up!

Mircea says: 11.55 going once....

Foxy says: 12mn

Mircea says: 12 mn heard!

Daniel says: 12.6

Foxy says: 13

Mircea says: and 12.6 - whi's got 13.3 or something ?

Mircea says: Foxy im not gonna hear .4 increase, too tiny by now.

Foxy says: lol, will add 2 coppers to it

Daniel says: 13.01

Daniel says: ah good

Daniel says: what's the highest then?

Mircea says: 12.6 going once

>Korgan Stonekrusher has died!

Foxy says: 14mn

Mircea says: 14mn heard!

Daniel says: 14.7

Blaz says: Lol here i am with only 50k on me

Foxy says: 16mn

Mircea says: and 14.7! millions! each copper coin weighs down a pocket!

Mircea says: 16mn heard!

Korgan says: its outta my bank roll too blaz, always a good show :D

Daniel says: 16.8

Mircea says: and 16.8 heard from the gent!

Foxy says: 17.8

Mircea says: who's gonna win the war of the amnesia flagons!

Mircea says: 17.8 heard from foxy

Foxy says: since somehow people like decimals or something

Mircea says: aaaand going once.

Mircea says: hey, some ca do math in their head foxy :D

Daniel says: 20

Mircea says: 20 heard!

Daniel says: i use a calculator

Grenadine sells both Foxy and Daniel commemorative tennants, act now!

Grenadine says: er pennants.

Mircea says: the fabulous 20 mn sum is on the table! going once!

Blaz says: Add a dragon egg to the game which you can auction away and you will be able to hatch it and have your own mini dragon pet :D

Blaz says: That would be pretty cool

Mircea says: aaaand going twice.

Mircea says: who wants to beat daniel

Foxy says: neah, he uses a calculator!

Mircea says: speak now, because the next thing sends the paperwork to him.

Foxy says: 20.5

Grenadine says: 21

Mircea says: WOW. 20.5 heard! what i was typing out was aaaaaaaaand SOLD! to the fine gentleman that used to win all auctions but has been sickly for a period hence.

Mircea says: aaand 21!

Mircea says: 21 going oncve for the fellow ruined by my slow typing...

Foxy says: 22

Mircea says: and 21 going twice. aaaaand 22!

Mircea says: the ladies are at it again!

Mircea says: who has more than 22 ?

Grenadine defers to foxy

Mircea says: 22 going once....

Mircea says: 22 million ECu going twice... speak now if you will beat the fox

Daniel says: 23.05

Mircea says: for the next thing i say gives it to HER

Foxy says: ahahah

Mircea says: and 23.05 heard from daniel!

Mircea says: this is one of the best auctions to date huh.

Mircea says: 23.05 heard and going once

Mircea says: aaand going twice....

Mircea says: speak now you sly ones, because if you do not, the next thing is gonna be sold.

Mircea says: SOLD! to daniel for 23.05 millionz!

Foxy says: congrats daniel

Daniel says: thanks

Blaz says: grats

Grenadine says: congrats daniel

Foxy says: plan to sell any of the package?

[↩]Can you believe Rotten Canines have still not been mined, half a year later ? Or that nobody seriously explored high McGuyver or Gung-Ho blueprints back when these were still lootable through plain overcraft ? Ahh, the endless trails of regrets are paved with large slabs of petrified retrospective incredulity. [↩]

« Valmont

Please stop using DNS already, and other considerations »

Category: S.MG

Monday, 22 February, Year 8 d.Tr.

Eulora auction, February the 21st

Given the unmitigated success of the previous auction - which broke more records than one - I feel obligated to continue.

Therefore, the following itemsi will be offered for auction on behalf of S.MG on February 21th, 2016 starting at 17:00 ART :

3 Turning Wheel Recipes, q 200, qBVii 79`308 ECuiii, 237`924 TViv ECu.

50 Toil of Bouquinism, q 200, qBV 2`452, TV 122`600 ECu.

50 Toil of Gumbo, q 200, qBV 2`452, TV 122`600 ECu.

50 Toil of Lapidary, q 200, qBV 2`452, TV 122`600 ECu.

50 Toil of McGuyver, q 200, qBV 2`452, TV 122`600 ECu.

50 Toil of Tinkering, q 200, qBV 2`452, TV 122`600 ECu.

250 Questionable Flagon Designs, q 200, qBV 1`324, TV 331`000 ECu.

250 Water of Anamnesia Plans, q 200, qBV 2`450, TV 612`500 ECu.

The total base value of this package comes to 1`794`424 ECu, which will be the minimum bid as per usual.

See you there!

———This package is principally of Lapidary interest. [↩]Quality-adjusted base value. [↩]Eulora coppers. Because Cu stands for copper, see. [↩]Total value.

It gets complicated, because "basic" base values are all calculated for quality 100 items. Thus a quality 150 item of BV 100 for which someone is paying a 30% premium would end up costing 100 * 1.5 * 1.3 = 195. [↩]

« The woman's fault

Letters from the stupid country »

Category: S.MG

Tuesday, 16 February, Year 8 d.Tr.

Eulora as seen by Mircescu, one year later.

Exactly one year ago I was publishing a graphical summary of my exploratory adventures in Eulora at the time.

Here's this year's :

The principal difference being that if last year's explore log was 10MB, this year's is slightly heavier : 24.2 MB, worth 381`781 linesi. This then results in a thicker, fuller drawing than last time - however not by all that much - the negative white space still grossly overwhelms the colored blobs.ii

See you next year, huh!

———Considering I'm pretty sure I never went barehand mining, and leaving aside the one or two thousand hits with Chetty Sticks, taking a middle-of-the-road tool decay value of 180 ECu we then find I've explored worth 68`720`580 ECu in the past year, which is to say a shade over two thirds of a Bitcoin. (Building, of course, is separate from this, but I'd guess in fairness these were at least 100k Small Claims, which then means seventy or so stacks of CFT!) [↩]Speaking of which, I vaguely recall negotiations to have the whole map grid-explored at some point, but I don't think they ever went anywhere. [↩]

« Romania's a dumb slut! Long live Pharmacy! My fuckstick!

This Nick Cave thing isn't even horrible. »

Category: Trolloludens

Sunday, 11 December, Year 8 d.Tr.

Eulora 0.1.2

As previously announced, the new Eulora version is here. We're expecting to migrate the server Wednesday the 3rd of August, at the usual timei.

To prepare for that moment, you will have to :

Download the new client version. It will be published in the usual place, and linked in the comment section here.

Compile the new client version. The easiest way to do this would be to create a new directory in the same directory that currently holds your eulora directory, named something else - eulora-0.1.2 for instance. Then in that directory run the compilation steps (such as for instance) starting at step 7. This leverages your already extant and compiled upstream material, which we're not currently changing.

The whole process took me ~15 minutes (most of which soaked up by ftjam, obviously) and produced no errors - all smooth sailing. I wouldn't expect you should have much trouble with it either.

And now, time for some visuals.

E. X. Celsior.

———17:00 ART. [↩]

« The ideal Bitcoin wallet

Qntra (S.QNTR) July 2016 Statement »

Category: S.MG

Sunday, 31 July, Year 8 d.Tr.

Etude

The title means "study". Because it is.

Street corner with fire pit, motorcycle and hanging dead baby.

What's that, you say ? Shall we take a closer look, you ask ? Sure thing!

What now ?

Forward, I say, there's also a car, parked since at least 1999 on that very same street corner. Like so :

Time to move on, to the interiors of this very nice cafe where I've had splendid coffee, cheesecake, biscuits, milkshakes and so on and so forth. First, the picture :

Second, the painting :

Observe the badly drawn hand ; the hair strand that so nicely supported and elevated the otherwise common mouth turned into a piece that is there for purely ritualistic reasons - "it has to be" - rather than its original function ; or for that matter the metamorphosis of the very mouth in question from merely unfortunate to outright abominable.

Art imitates technology, or how did it go.

« Pisi dot ar y otras temas.

Il Magnifico Cornuto »

Category: La pas prin lume

Saturday, 13 August, Year 8 d.Tr.

Esteemed James L. Caldwell...

The honorable judge stood up from his tea and lumbered up the stairs with some difficulty. The stairwell became ever narrower with each passing year, correspondingly to the judge's growing satisfaction with his lucrative position. A judgeship! Now that's a job a man can do and enjoy! Being a judge! It even says so - honourable! That's right! Excellent.

He sat down at his desk, heavy curtains beside opened just enough to let some light and the impression of the pond inside ; he reached into the pile of letters his servant had prepared out of the day's offerings and began to read.

Esteemed James L. Caldwell,

The case of Menderschmidt vs Hurr registered in your docket is the unforeseen result of the draft of a literary piece which, being carelessly left among business papers on my desk was picked up by my clerk and erroneously filed.

I would be eternally grateful if you'd kindly strike it, and have your clerk inform any inquiring parties an unfortunate name coincidence may have alarmed that as far as anyone knows no suit with the particulars is currently being either prosecuted or contemplated.

Please accept my most sincere assurances of my high regard for your highly esteemable character,

John H. Konqwist, esq.

The judge furrowed his brow. He proceeded to read the piece again, his slow, wet gaze snailing along the lines. Esteemed. Shouldn't it be Honourable ?

He paused to reflect. It should be Honourable, shouldn't it. Then again you could change it, especially these literary types, they hate repeating themselves. Of course, he repeats esteemed. Hm.

The judge furrowed his brow again, and cleared his throat for good measure. It should have been Honourable. But then again you can change it, although one really shouldn't, but in any case it should be for something better. Esteemed's not better than Honourable.

Is esteemed better than Honourable ? The judge paused, his eyes lost out the window, through the slit in between the two heavy drapes. They curled back around like two overgenerous buttocks. Esteemed isn't better than Honourable.

The judge frowned outright. It really should be Honourable, not this esteemed, what in God's glory eternal is this "esteemed"! A shameful display. A deliberate provocation, and an assault on the dignity of the judgeship. Total scandal!

As he sat in his chair by the window, while his brain slowly digested the first letter in the pile of the day and his stomach slowly digested the penultimate or antepenultimate meal in the lengthy string of the day, the judge's anger seethingly grew. He reached for a sheed of writing paper, but then thought better of it. Such miserable insults aren't worthy of reply in the hand of an Honourable judge!

He reached for the paper again, and changed his hand again before his fingers could fetch the sheet. Maybe he should have Bill the butler write the letter. But then no doubt that literary fancy nancy will chuckle with all his friends at Bill's penmanship. The conundrum of governance, thought the Honorable James L. Caldwell to himself, is of such nature that the enemy perpetually forces upon you the dilemma of whether to engage him with your best men and waste their lives in meaningless engagements with loudmouthed provocateurs or else engage him with your very worst and have him claim superiority in all sorts of fashionable, feigned ways.

The judge's healthy red was turning into splenic apoplexion, especially around the temples and the bridge of the nose by the time Bill came up to announce dinner's ready. Cursing in his mind, at the cook and that Konqwist wonk and Bill himself and everyone else, the whole nonsensical world conspiring to ruin the ease and quiet enjoyment of a respected, which is to say Honourable man, the Honorable James L. Caldwell stood up from his desk and lumbered down the stairs with some difficulty.

« MiniGame (S.MG), November 2016 Statement

A collection of distinctions »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Saturday, 03 December, Year 8 d.Tr.

El Pompenal

I have no fucking idea.

Considering the building on the left is one of the few still functioning sinagogues in Buenos Aires, what do you suppose they're carrying ?

It's a Torah, isnt it.

The LED display explains why the entire town was thrown in disarray : MANIFESTAC! The infestation in question is the favourite passtime of this samba-si-trabajo-no people, they absolutely love blocking traffic on the main artery poorly serving a severely ischemic city (av. Corrientes).

That's the other side. The MANIFESTAC is fifty or so parked cabs. Note the FOUR! news vans complete with satellite links, there to report on... what the fuck exactly ? fifty parked cabs ? I suppose it makes sense, that'd be the largest cab stand in the entire fucking country.

And now for a moment of silence.

« All my sons

Files from the War on the Web. Today, PBNation. »

Category: Zsilnic

Thursday, 19 May, Year 8 d.Tr.

El Gueto. Donde Hay Gatas.

I. Gueto.

II. Gatas.

« They're not progressive, they're just lazy - a practical exercise

Liberals ? What liberals ? »

Category: Zsilnic

Thursday, 17 November, Year 8 d.Tr.

Do you know who did this ?

I'd love something like that (but with more nudity, and more fantasy) for Eulora. If the maker can be identified I'd love to know who it is!

Thanks, Internet.

« Republican History of Jewry

Better Off Dead »

Category: Meta psihoza

Thursday, 24 March, Year 8 d.Tr.

Disgrace - You say you have not

'You say you have not sought legal advice. Have you consulted anyone - a priest, for instance, or a counsellor? Would you be prepared to undergo counselling?'

The question comes from the young woman from the Business School. He can feel himself bristling. 'No, I have not sought counselling nor do I intend to seek it. I am a grown man. I am not receptive to being counselled. I am beyond the reach of counselling.' He turns to Mathabane. 'I have made my plea. Is there any reason why this debate should go on?'

There is a whispered consultation between Mathabane and Hakim.

'It has been proposed', says Mathabane, 'that the committee recess to discuss Professor Lurie's plea.'

A round of nods.

'Professor Lurie, could I ask you to step outside for a few minutes, you and Ms van Wyk, while we deliberate?'

He and the student observer retire to Hakim's office. No word passes between them; clearly the girl feels awkward. 'YOUR DAYS ARE OVER, CASANOVA.' What does she think of Casanova now that she meets him face to face?

They are called back in. The atmosphere in the room is not good: sour, it seems to him.

'So,' says Mathabane, 'to resume: Professor Lurie, you say you accept the truth of the charges brought against you?'

'I accept whatever Ms Isaacs alleges.'

'Dr Rassool, you have something you wish to say?'

'Yes. I want to register an objection to these responses of Professor Lurie's, which I regard as fundamentally evasive. Professor Lurie says he accepts the charges. Yet when we try to pin him down on what it is that he actually accepts, all we get is subtle mockery. To me that suggests that he accepts the charges only in name. In a case with overtones like this one, the wider community is entitled -'

He cannot let that go. 'What overtones would those be ? Are you trying to say the young woman's the wrong color for her statement to be accepted as true ?'

'Mr. Lurie!'

'A few days ago, a man I had never met before, dressed in ill fitted clothes, a man who works for a living surprised me. He came from behind, and he said this is a nest of vipers. I could think of nothing to say, not then to him, not hence. It is a nest of vipers. It is. We do not teach these children anything, in any conceivable sense of the word. They leave this den of iniquity, of special procedure and sprawled shamanism knowing less than when they came. What Ms Isaacs alleges in her complaint is more of an education than any other student got.'

There is shocked, blank silence for a moment, then the woman continues as if nothing happened. 'The wider community is entitled to know what it is specifically that Professor Lurie acknowledges and therefore what it is that he is being censured for.'

Mathabane: 'If he is censured.'

'If he is censured. We fail to perform our duty if we are not crystal clear in our minds, and if we do not make it crystal clear in our recommendations, what Professor Lurie is being censured for.'

'In our own minds I believe we are crystal clear, Dr Rassool. The question is whether Professor Lurie is crystal clear in his mind.'

'Exactly. You have expressed exactly what I wanted to say.'

It would be wiser to shut up, but he does not. 'Ole, quid ad te ? What goes on in my mind is my business, Farodia,' he says. 'What goes on in your mind should be your business, but instead you choose to flatter yourself with crystalline fantasies. You want not a response but a confession, because all that hard crystal packed into a skull is bound to hurt. Well, I make no confession. I put forward a plea, as is my right. Guilty as charged. That is my plea. That is as far as I am willing to go.'

'Mr Chair, I must protest. The issue goes beyond mere technicalities. Professor Lurie pleads guilty, but I ask myself, does he accept his guilt or is he simply going through the motions in the hope that the case will be buried under paper and forgotten? If he is simply going through the motions, I urge that we impose the severest penalty.'

'Let me remind you again, Dr Rassool,' says Mathabane, 'it is not up to us to impose penalties.'

'The woman wants to impose penalties, what. Let her impose penalties. What harshest penalties shall you impose, darling ?'

'Then we should recommend the severest penalty. That Professor Lurie be dismissed with immediate effect and forfeit all benefits and privileges.' She is very livid, speaking with difficulty through clenched jaw.

'David?' The voice comes from Desmond Swarts, who has not spoken hitherto. 'David, are you sure you are handling the situation in the best way?' Swarts turns to the chair. 'Mr Chair, as I said while Professor Lurie was out of the room, I do believe that as members of a university community we ought not to proceed against a colleague in a coldly formalistic way. David, are you sure you don't want a postponement to give yourself time to reflect and perhaps consult?'

'On what should I consult, Desmond ?'

'You should meditate and perhaps consult on the gravity of your situation, which I am not sure you appreciate.'

'My situation! This whole thing is not going to look any less ridiculous in a week, or in a month.'

'You stand to lose your job. That's no joke in these days.'

'I have no intention to continue with the University. The only reason I am here, in fact, is because Aram Hakim insisted. But if you actually decide to try and defraud me pecuniarily, you will have to take leave of the pretense and face an actual court. From what I understand it is quite likely to be a lot more trouble than it's worth. Certainly as far as I'm concerned I'll do whatever I can to put this sorry carcass of an institution out of its misery, should it come to that.'

'In light of Mr. Swarts very collegial position, Mr. Lurie, I might propose that neither your tone nor your attitude are very adequate to these proceedings, or to your own stature.' Mathabane touched his fingers of one hand with the respective fingers of the other while carefully measuring his words.

'Then what do you advise me to do? Remove what Dr Rassool for some reason calls the subtle mockery from my tone? Shed tears of contrition? What will be enough to save me? This is not a job, this is madness, and while in a sense I admire all who can put up with it, there must be a limit somewhere.'

'You may find this hard to believe, David, but we around this table are not your enemies. We have our weak moments, all of us, we are only human. Your case is not unique. We would like to find a way for you to continue with your career.'

'My case is apparently unique in an unexpected way. It turns out someone's been running prostitutes out of student quarters. Evidently everyone around this whole campus has their weak moments, but be that as it may I'm sure everyone around this table found out about it the same way I did - from the very useful and widely circulated campus newspaper, while looking up the latest about David Lurie.'

Easily Hakim joins in. 'We would like to help you, David, to find a way out of what must be a nightmare.'

They are his friends. They want to save him from his weakness, to wake him from his nightmare. They do not want to see him begging in the streets. They want him back in the classroom. 'In this chorus of goodwill,' he says, 'I hear no female voice.'

There is silence.

'Very well,' he says, 'since you ask let me confess. The story begins one evening, I forget the date, but not long past. I was walking through the old college gardens and so, it happened, was the young woman in question, Ms Isaacs. Our paths crossed. Words passed between us, and at that moment something happened which, not being a poet, I will not try to describe. Suffice it to say that Eros entered. After that I was not the same.'

'You were not the same as what?' asks the businesswoman cautiously.

'This is a good question, and perhaps in time you will find an answer. For today suffice to say I was not myself. I was no longer a fifty-year-old divorcee at a loose end. I became a servant of Eros.'

'Is this a defence you are offering us? Ungovernable impulse?'

'It is not a defence. You want a confession, I give you a confession. As for the impulse, it was far from ungovernable. I have denied similar impulses many times in the past, I am ashamed to say.'

'Don't you think', says Swarts, 'that by its nature academic life must call for certain sacrifices? That for the good of the whole we have to deny ourselves certain gratifications?'

'For the good of the whole let us cut the parts apart. You have in mind a ban on intimacy across the generations?'

'No, not necessarily. But as teachers we occupy positions of power. Perhaps a ban on mixing power relations with sexual relations. Which, I sense, is what was going on in this case. Or at the least extreme caution.'

'Sexual relations untinged by power relations ? Sometimes I wonder what you do all day in that building over there, Desmond.'

Farodia Rassool intervenes. 'We are again going round in circles, Mr Chair. Yes, he says, he is guilty; but when we try to get specificity, all of a sudden it is not abuse of a young woman he is confessing to, just an impulse he could not resist, with no mention of the pain he has caused, no mention of the long history of exploitation of which this is part. That is why I say it is futile to go on debating with Professor Lurie. We must take his plea at face value and recommend accordingly.'

Abuse: he was waiting for the word. Spoken in a voice quivering with righteousness. What does she see, when she looks at him, that keeps her at such a pitch of anger? A shark among the helpless little fishies? Or does she have another vision: of a great thick-boned male bearing down on a girl-child, a huge hand stifling her cries? How absurd! Then he remembers: they were gathered here yesterday in this same room, and she was before them, Melanie, who barely comes to his shoulder. Unequal: how can he deny that? Moreover, why would he want to or have to ?

'I tend to agree with Dr Rassool,' says the businesswoman. 'Unless there is something that Professor Lurie wants to add, I think we should proceed to a decision.'

'Before we do that, Mr Chair,' says Swarts, 'I would like to plead with Professor Lurie one last time. Is there any form of statement he would be prepared to subscribe to?'

'Why? Why is it so important that I subscribe to a statement?'

'Because it would help to cool down what has become a very heated situation. Ideally we would all have preferred to resolve this case out of the glare of the media. But that has not been possible. It has received a lot of attention, it has acquired overtones that are beyond our control. All eyes are on the university to see how we handle it. I get the impression, listening to you, David, that you believe you are being treated unfairly. That is quite mistaken. We on this committee see ourselves as trying to work out a compromise which will allow you to keep your job. That is why I ask whether there is not a form of public statement that you could live with and that would allow us to recommend something less than the most severe sanction, namely, dismissal with censure.'

'You mean, will I humble myself and ask for clemency? Does the great mother demand a sacrifice, you know, for the good of the hole ?'

Swarts sighs. 'David, it doesn't help to sneer at our efforts. At least accept an adjournment, so that you can think your position over.'

'What do you want the statement to contain?'

'An admission that you were wrong.'

'I have admitted that. Freely. I am guilty of the charges brought against me.'

'Don't play games with us, David. There is a difference between pleading guilty to a charge and admitting you were wrong, and you know that.'

'And that will satisfy you: an admission I was wrong?'

'No,' says Farodia Rassool. 'That would be back to front. First Professor Lurie must make his statement. Then we can decide whether to accept it in mitigation. We don't negotiate first on what should be in his statement. The statement should come from him, in his own words. Then we can see if it comes from his heart.'

'And you trust yourself to divine that, from the words I use - to divine whether it comes from my heart? Such a romantic notion. Shouldn't you rather in a more scientific manner directly examine the heart ?'

'We will see what attitude you express. We will see whether you express contrition.'

'Oh you will, will you. Very well. I took advantage of my position vis-a-vis Ms Isaacs. It was wrong, and I regret it. Is that good enough for you?'

'The question is not whether it is good enough for me, Professor Lurie, the question is whether it is good enough for you. Does it reflect your sincere feelings?'

He shakes his head. 'I have said the words for you, under the pretense you put forth that you can tell. Now it turns out that you can't tell, that you lied to me, yet you press on, unapologetic, undeterred : you want more, you want me to somehow demonstrate the sincerity of words. Perhaps I should buy you flowers and send you sweets. It is preposterous, this surrogate dating game you aim to force upon unwilling participants. What do you think it does, you think it neutralizes rape somehow, perhaps by volume ?'

'Right,' says Mathabane from the chair. 'If there are no more questions for Professor Lurie, I will thank him for attending and excuse him.'

On to the next chapter, "At first they do not..."

« Disgrace - It is raining.

Disgrace - At first they do not »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Friday, 30 December, Year 8 d.Tr.

Disgrace - Yet neither he nor she

Yet neither he nor she can put aside what has happened. The two little boys become presences between them, playing quiet as shadows in a corner of the room where their mother opens herself for and wraps herself around the man they do not know. The man they must not know. Why not ? Because it is her secret. In Soraya's arms he becomes, fleetingly, their father: foster-father, step-father, shadow-father. This is her secret. For the brief time Soraya is, after a fashion, his, her children are shadows, and after a fashion, dead. This is also her secret. Leaving her bed afterwards, he feels their eyes flicker over him covertly, curiously. He is her secret. His thoughts turn, despite himself, to the other father, the real one. Does he have any inkling of what his wife is up to, or has he elected the bliss of ignorance?

He himself hasn't a son. His childhood was spent in a family of women. As mother, aunts, sisters fell away, they were replaced in due course by mistresses, wives, a daughter. The company of women made of him a lover of women and, to an extent, a womanizer. With his height, his good bones, his olive skin, his flowing hair, he could always count on a degree of magnetism. If he looked at a woman in a certain way, with a certain intent, she would return his look. He could rely on that much, or rather he could at least rely on not remembering the ones that didn't.

That was how he lived; for years, for decades, that was the backbone of his life. Then one day it all ended. Suddenly, it seemed. Much too soon, it seemed, and without a warning all his powers fled. Glances that would once have responded to his slid over, past, through him. Overnight he became a ghost. If he wanted a woman he had to learn to pursue her; often, in one way or another, to buy her. He existed in an anxious flurry of promiscuity. He had affairs with the wives of colleagues; he picked up tourists in bars on the waterfront or at the Club Italia; he slept with whores.

His introduction to Soraya took place in a dim little sitting-room off the front office of Discreet Escorts, with Venetian blinds over the windows, pot plants in the corners, stale smoke hanging in the air. She was on their books under 'Exotic'. The photograph showed her with a red passion-flower in her hair and the faintest of lines at the corners of her eyes. The entry said 'Afternoons only'. That was what decided him: the promise of shuttered rooms, cool sheets, stolen hours.

From the beginning it was satisfactory, just what he wanted. A bull's eye. In a year he has not needed to go back to the agency. Then the accident in St George's Street, and the strangeness that has followed. Though Soraya still keeps her appointments, he feels a growing coolness as she transforms -- herself, into just another woman ; and him, into just another husband. The children, the bills... the facts of life creeping in.

He has a shrewd idea of how prostitutes speak among themselves about the men who frequent them, the older men in particular. It is not so very different from the way wives speak among themselves, especially the older ones. They tell stories, they laugh, but they shudder, too. They shudder as one shudders at a cockroach in a washbasin in the middle of the night. Soon, daintily, maliciously, he will be shuddered over. It is a fate he fears, like the cockroach ; and just like the cockroach it is a fate he cannot escape. Holding women in line is hard enough for their owner, forget about by-the-hour rentals.

On the fourth Thursday after the incident, as he is leaving the apartment, Soraya makes the announcement he has been steeling himself against. 'My mother is ill. I'm going to take a break to look after her. I won't be here next week.'

'Will I see you the week after?'

'I'm not sure. It depends on how she gets on. You had better phone first.'

'I don't have a number.'

'Phone the agency. They'll know.'

He waits a few days, then telephones the agency. Soraya? Soraya has left us, says the man. No, we cannot put you in touch with her, that would be against house rules. Would you like an introduction to another of our hostesses? Lots of exotics to choose from -Malaysian, Thai, Chinese, you name it.

He spends an hour with another Soraya - Soraya has become, it seems, a popular nom de commerce in the hotel rooms of Long Street. This one is maybe seventeen, unpractised, to his mind coarse. 'So what do you do?' she says as she slips off her clothes unconcerned. 'Export-import,' he says. 'You don't say,' she says.

There is a new secretary in his department. He takes her to lunch at a restaurant a discreet distance from the campus and listens while, over shrimp salad, she complains about her sons' school. Drug-pedlars hang around the playing-fields, she says, and the police do nothing. For the past three years she and her husband have had their name on a list at the New Zealand consulate, to emigrate. 'You people had it easier. I mean, whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, at least you knew where you were.'

'You people?' he inquires. 'What people?'

'I mean your generation. Now people just pick and choose which laws they want to obey. It's anarchy. How can you bring up children when there's anarchy all around?'

Her name is Dawn. The second time he takes her out they stop at his house and have sex. It is a failure. Bucking and clawing, she works herself into a froth of excitement that in the end only repels him. He lends her a comb, drives her back to the campus. After that he avoids her, taking care to skirt the office where she works. In return she gives him a hurt look, then snubs him. How can you bring up women when they just pick and choose which lessons to learn ?

He ought to give up. He ought to retire, from the vocational "university", from the sexual market, from everything. Let the pretense rest on the younger shoulders of more eager men. At what age, he wonders, did Origen castrate himself? Not the most graceful of solutions, but then aging is not usually graceful business. A clearing of the decks, at least, so that one can turn one's mind to the proper business of the old: preparing to die. Strangely enough at some point aging actually was rather graceful, he thinks. Maybe the gracelessness was just under-reported, as the medical inventors of diseases and conditions say. Schizophrenia was under-reported which is why there's so much mental disease all around, and with it the indignity of aging also. Why not.

Might one approach a doctor and ask for it? A simple enough operation, surely: they do it to animals every day, and animals survive well enough, if one ignores a certain residue of sadness. Severing, tying off: with local anaesthetic and a steady hand and a modicum of phlegm one might even do it oneself, out of a textbook. A man on a chair snipping away between his own legs, excising himself. An ugly sight, but no uglier, from a certain point of view, than the same man exercising himself on the body of a woman.

There is still Soraya. He ought to close that chapter. Instead, he pays a detective agency to track her down. Within days he has her real name, her address, her telephone number. He telephones at nine in the morning, expecting the husband and children to be out. 'Soraya?' he says. 'This is David. How are you? When can I see you again?'

A long silence before she speaks. A shadow of envy passes over him for the husband he has never seen, while Soraya-on-the-phone is silent and Soraya-in-his-mind speaks. 'I don't know who you are,' she says at last. 'You are harassing me in my own house. I demand you will never phone me here again, never.'

Demand. She means command. Her shrillness surprises him: there has been no intimation of it before. She may have been a snake in a snake's bed while lying there with the snakes - but at home, Soraya is a wife and a mother, just like any other. Competency is hard enough a bar, but to expect it extemporaneous ? He puts down the telephone, his envy gone.

Without the Thursday interludes the week is as featureless as a desert, and just as dry. There are days when he does not know what to do with himself. He spends more time in the university library, reading all he can find on the wider Byron circle, adding to notes that already fill two fat files. He enjoys the late-afternoon quiet of the reading room, enjoys the walk home afterwards: the brisk winter air, the damp, gleaming streets. Scholarity has that much in common with the Street, that it will take all comers, and for as long as they wish to stay.

He is returning home one Friday evening, taking the long route through the old college gardens, when he notices one of his students on the path ahead of him. Her name is Melanie Isaacs, from his Romantics course. Not the best student but not the worst either: clever enough, but unengaged. She is dawdling; he soon catches up with her. 'Hello,' he says. She smiles back, bobbing her head, her smile sly rather than shy. She is small and thin, with close-cropped black hair, wide, almost Chinese cheekbones, large, dark eyes. Her outfits are always striking. Today she wears a maroon miniskirt with a mustard-coloured sweater and black tights; the gold baubles on her belt match the gold balls of her earrings.

He is mildly smitten with her. It is no great matter: barely a term passes when he does not fall for one or other of his charges. Cape Town: a city prodigal of beauty, of beauties. Does she know he has an eye on her? Maybe. Women are sensitive to it, to the weight of the desiring gaze, and there's not so much child left in university students. Is there ?

It has been raining; from the pathside runnels comes the soft rush of water.

'My favourite season, my favourite time of day,' he remarks. 'Do you live around here?'

'Across the line. I share a flat.'

'Is Cape Town your home?'

'No, I grew up in George.'

'I live just nearby. Can I invite you in for a drink?'

A pause, cautious. 'OK. But I have to be back by seven-thirty.'

From the gardens they pass into the quiet residential pocket where he has lived for the past twelve years, first with Rosalind, then, after the divorce, alone. He unlocks the security gate, unlocks the door, ushers the girl in. He switches on lights, takes her bag. There are raindrops on her hair. He stares, frankly ravished. She lowers her eyes, offering the same evasive and perhaps even coquettish little smile as before.

In the kitchen he opens a bottle of Meerlust and sets out biscuits and cheese. When he returns she is standing at the bookshelves, head on one side, reading titles. He puts on music: the Mozart clarinet quintet.

Wine, music ; beer, noise : a ritual that men and women play out with each other. Nothing wrong with rituals, they were invented to ease the awkward passages. But the girl he has brought home is not just thirty years his junior: she is a student, his student, under his tutelage. No matter what passes between them now, they will have to meet again. Is he prepared for that?

'Are you enjoying the course?' he asks.

'I liked Blake. I liked the Wonderhorn stuff.

'Wunderhorn.'

'I'm not so crazy about Wordsworth.'

'You shouldn't be saying that to me. Wordsworth has been one of my masters.'

It is true. For as long as he can remember, the harmonies of The Prelude have echoed within him.

'Maybe by the end of the course I'll appreciate him more. Maybe he'll grow on me.'

'Maybe. But in my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.'

Like falling in love. Do the young still fall in love, or is that mechanism obsolete by now, unnecessary, quaint, like steam locomotion? He is out of touch, out of date. Falling in love could have fallen out of fashion and come back again half a dozen times, for all he knows. 'Do you write poetry yourself?' he asks.

'I did when I was at school. I wasn't very good. I haven't got the time now.'

'And passions? Do you have any literary passions?'

She frowns at the strange word. 'We did Adrienne Rich and Toni Morrison in my second year. And Alice Walker. I got pretty involved. But I wouldn't call it a passion exactly.'

He begins to scowl at the enumeration of inept niggers pretending themselves people, and writers and whatnot. Just like he likes to think himself a Professor, the thought starts to form, but he banishes it, and with it the scowl. So: not a creature of passion. In the most roundabout of ways, is she warning him off?

'I am going to throw together some supper,' he says. Will you join me? It will be very simple.'

She looks doubtful.

'Come on!' he says. 'Say yes!'

'Ah... ok. But I have to make a phone call first.'

The call takes longer than he'd expect. From the kitchen he hears murmurings, silences.

'What are your career plans?' he asks afterwards.

'Stagecraft and design. I'm doing a diploma in theatre.'

'And what is your reason for taking a course in Romantic poetry?'

She ponders, wrinkling her nose. 'It's mainly for a change in the atmosphere that I chose it,' she says. 'I didn't want to take Shakespeare again. I took Shakespeare last year.'

On to the next chapter, "What he throws together..."

« Disgrace - For a man of his age

Disgrace - What he throws together »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Thursday, 29 December, Year 8 d.Tr.

Disgrace - Well, you're welcome

'Well, you're welcome to stay.'

'It's nice of you to say so, my dear, but I'd like to keep your friendship. Long visits don't make for good friends.' And as he says this, he believes this. He thinks it apt that a daughter should be her father's friend, that a father should be his daughter's friend. Why friend and not lover, then ? He does not ask. Who shall be his daughter, if his daughter is his friend, he does not ask. The only children he can have are children he imagines but can not see, for as long as he can not see them. For as long as they are shadows playing in the corner, quietly, and above all absently. For just as long, and for not an iota longer. A life of the mind.

'What if we don't call it a visit? What if we call it refuge? Would you accept refuge on an indefinite basis?'

'You mean asylum? It's not as bad as that, Lucy. I'm not a fugitive.'

'Roz said the atmosphere was nasty.'

'I'm sure she said so gleefully.' He pauses. 'I brought it on myself. I was offered a compromise, which I wouldn't accept.'

'What kind of compromise?'

'Re-education. Reformation of the character. The code-word was counselling.'

'And are you so perfect that you can't do with a little counselling?'

'I suppose I am, yes. There's a difference between a compromised woman and a raped woman ; I have absolutely no intention of confirming their claims to power. The whole thing reminds me too much of Mao's China. Recantation, self-criticism, public apology. I'm old-fashioned, I would prefer simply to be put against a wall and shot. Have it done with.'

'Shot? For having an affair with a student? A bit extreme, don't you think, David? It must go on all the time. It certainly went on when I was a student. If they prosecuted every case the profession would be decimated.'

'No, not for having an affair with a student, half of the "commission" if you call it that buy "students" if you can call them that for a few cents the hour. No, at issue as they say was the "attitude". I told the rector that the only statement I'm willing to sign will have to include his apology for running a bunk, as you say, and a retraction of all degrees issued to date as fraudulent.'

'You said that?' her eyes are open wide in plain and unadorned amazement.

He shrugs. 'These are infantile times of an infantile people. Private life is public business is toothpaste advertisements, all the same together, boiling steadily in the same pot. Prurience is respectable, prurience and sentiment. The monkey's interests. They wanted a spectacle: breast-beating, remorse, tears if possible. A TV show, in fact, if at all possible. They figured they're entitled to the TV production of my life, much like the farmer figures himself entitled to the canned tomatoes of the tomato plant. I wouldn't oblige, and that's intolerable. Imagine, if the beet took to flight one fine day, taking all your careful cultivation work with it.' He was going to add, 'The truth is, they wanted me castrated,' but he cannot say the words, not to his daughter. In fact, now that he hears it through another's ears, his whole tirade sounds melodramatic, excessive.

'It sounds almost like raising children.'

'I suppose it does. I have no doubt that in their mind I am a child-professor, just as the students are children, just as the voters are children. We have to be educated, that's all, and all of us. Equally so, in fact.'

'So you stood your ground and they stood theirs. Is that how it was?'

'More or less. I stood my ground ; they stood their clouds. The happenstance that they're insubstantial enough for clouds to steadily support does not keep them up at night.'

'You shouldn't be so unbending, David. It isn't heroic to be unbending. Is there still time to reconsider?'

'There's always time to reconsider, in a hundred years if I go to them and say "Hey, I changed my mind, I think you're important now" they'll fall over in unrestrained glee.'

'But you won't?'

'I can't be bothered to. They mean nothing -- not to me, not to anybody. Anybody at all. Not that I'm complaining. One can't plead guilty to charges of lubricity and expect a flood of sympathy in return. Not after a certain age, at any rate. After a certain age one is simply no longer appealing, and that's that. One just has to buckle down and live out the rest of one's life. Serve one's time.'

'Well, that's a pity. Stay here as long as you like. On whatever grounds.'

He goes to bed early. In the middle of the night he is woken by a flurry of barking. One dog mechanically, without cease; the others intermittently, loath to admit defeat, join in again and again.

'Does that go on every night?'

'One gets used to it. I'm sorry.'

He shakes his head.

He has forgotten how cold winter mornings can be in the uplands of the Eastern Cape. He has not brought the right clothes: he has to borrow a sweater from Lucy, an exercise which changes his mind -- she's downright heavy. Hands in pockets, he wanders among the flowerbeds. Out of sight on the Kenton road a car roars past, the sound lingering on the still air. Geese fly in echelon high overhead. What is he going to do with his time?

'Would you like to go for a walk?' says Lucy behind him.

They take three of the dogs along: two young Dobermanns, whom Lucy keeps on a leash, and the tan bulldog bitch. The sad, abandoned one. After a hundred paces, pinning her ears back, the bitch tries to defecate. Nothing comes.

'She is having problems,' says Lucy. 'I'll have to dose her.'

The bitch continues to strain, hanging her tongue out, glancing around shiftily as if ashamed to be watched. They leave the road, walk through scrubland, then through sparse pine forest.

'The girl you were involved with,' says Lucy - 'was it serious?'

'Didn't Rosalind tell you the story?'

'Not in any detail.'

'She came from this part of the world. From George. She was in one of my classes. Only middling as a student, but I found her attractive. Not more so than plenty of others. I don't know. Was it serious? Maybe it was serious. It certainly had serious consequences.'

'But it's over with now? You're not still hankering after her?' Is it over with? Does he hanker yet? 'Maybe. I haven't seen her since', he says.

'Why did she denounce you?'

'She never did say; I didn't have a chance to ask. She was in a difficult position, I suppose. There was an obnoxious bravo, a lover or ex-lover, bullying her. There were the strains of the classroom. She was living with some sort of joyless fat old woman, a cousin or something, sharing a flat. Her parents got wind of the matter and descended on Cape Town. The pressure became too much, I suppose.'

'And there was you.'

'Yes, there was me. I don't suppose I was easy.'

They have arrived at a gate with a sign that says 'SAPPI Industries - Trespassers will be Prosecuted'. They turn.

'Well,' says Lucy, 'you have paid your price. Perhaps, looking back, she won't think too harshly of you. Women can be surprisingly forgiving.'

'Women can be surprisingly self-centered, also. I am not interested in her forgiving anything.'

There is silence. Is Lucy, his child, presuming to tell him about women? He wants to say something about how forgiveness is his sole and indisputable priviledge, or about how her only proper place is on her knees, begging for it, or something else vaguely to that effect and in that direction. Nothing clearly comes to mind.

'Have you thought of getting married again?' she asks after a while.

'To someone of my own generation, do you mean? I have no need of an old woman to pester me with her elaborate delusions of self-importance. What do you think could possibly entice me to tolerate one ?'

'But - '

'But what? But it is unseemly to go on preying on children? Melani was twenty.'

'I didn't mean that. Just... you are going to find it more difficult, not easier, as time passes. Doesn't the thought scare you ?'

Never before have he and Lucy spoken about his intimate life, or hers for that matter. It is not proving easy. But if not to her, then to whom can he speak?

'Do you remember Blake?' he says. 'Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse an unacted desire'?

'Why do you quote that to me?'

'Unacted desires can turn as ugly in the old as in the young.'

'Therefore?'

'Every woman I have been close to has taught me something about myself. To that extent they have made me a better person.'

'I hope you are not claiming the reverse as well. That knowing you has turned your women into better people.'

He looks at her sharply. She smiles.

'My women. I've never thought of them this way.' he blurts out, surprised.

'Just joking,' she says.

They return along the tar road. Was she joking ? Does she know what she is saying ? His women. He never thought of them this way. He wasn't even aware he hadn't, and the blurted out confession embarasses him in retrospect. His women. He pictures them, all of them, in one large hall, together. Quiet. His women. At the turnoff to the smallholding there is a painted sign he has not noticed before: 'CUT FLOWERS. CYCADS,' with an arrow:

'Cycads?' he says. 'Are they illegal?'

'It's illegal to dig them up in the wild. I grow them from seed. I'll show you.'

They walk on, the young dogs tugging to be free, the bitch padding behind, panting.

'And you? Is this what you want in life?' He waves a hand toward the garden, toward the house with sunlight glinting from its roof.

'It will do,' comes the reply, quietly.

It is Saturday, market day. Lucy wakes him at five, as arranged, with coffee. Swaddled against the cold, they join Petrus in the garden, where by the light of a halogen lamp he is already cutting flowers. He offers to take over from Petrus, but his fingers are soon so cold that he cannot tie the bunches. He passes the twine back to Petrus and instead wraps and packs. By seven, with dawn touching the hills and the dogs beginning to stir, the job is done. The kombi is loaded with boxes of flowers, pockets of potatoes, onions, cabbage. Lucy drives, Petrus stays behind. The heater does not work; peering through the misted windscreen, she takes the Grahamstown road. He sits beside her, eating the sandwiches she has made. His nose drips; he hopes she does not notice. So: a new adventure. His daughter, whom once upon a time he used to drive to school and ballet class, to the circus and the skating rink, is taking him on an outing, showing him life, showing him this other, unfamiliar world. He feels a strange contentment well up inside of him, and worries, diffusely. So this is old age, he thinks to himself. It is.

On Donkin Square stallholders are already setting up trestle tables and laying out their wares. There is a smell of burning meat. A cold mist hangs over the town; people rub their hands, stamp their feet, curse. There is a show of bonhomie from which Lucy, to his relief, holds herself apart. They are in what appears to be the produce quarter. On their left are three African women with milk, masa, butter to sell; also, from a bucket with a wet cloth over it, soup-bones. On their right are an old Afrikaner couple whom Lucy greets as Tante Miems and Oom Koos, and a little assistant in a balaclava cap who cannot be more than ten. Like Lucy, they have potatoes and onions to sell, but also bottled jams, preserves, dried fruit, packets of buchu tea, honeybush tea, herbs.

Lucy has brought two canvas stools. They drink coffee from a thermos flask, waiting for the first customers. Two weeks ago he was in a classroom explaining to the bored youth of the country the distinction between drink and drink up, burned and burnt. The perfective, signifying an action carried through to its conclusion. How far away it all seems! I live, I have lived, I lived. Lucy's potatoes, tumbled out into a bushel basket, have been washed clean. Koos and Miems's are still speckled with earth. In the course of the morning Lucy takes in nearly four Bitcents. Her flowers sell steadily; at eleven o'clock she drops her prices and the last of the produce goes. There is plenty of trade too at the milk-and-meat stall; but the old couple, seated side by side wooden and unsmiling, do less well.

Many of Lucy's customers know her by name: middle-aged women, most of them, with a touch of the proprietary in their attitude to her, as though her success were theirs too. Each time she introduces him:

'Meet my father, David Lurie, on a visit from Cape Town.'

'You must be proud of your daughter, Mr Lurie,' they say. 'Yes, very proud,' he replies.

'Bev runs the animal refuge,' says Lucy, after one of the introductions. 'I give her a hand sometimes. We'll drop in at her place on the way back, if that is all right with you.'

He's unimpressed with Bev Shaw, a dumpy, bustling little woman with black freckles, close-cropped, wiry hair, and no neck. What is the point of even making a woman without the neck ? He does not like women who make no effort to be attractive. It is a resistance he has had to Lucy's friends before, she apparently selects them for this insufferable, dehumanizing quality. Geese, rather than women. His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough.

The Animal Welfare League, once an active charity in Grahamstown, has had to close down its operation for lack of public interest. However, a handful of volunteers led by Bev Shaw still runs a clinic from the old premises. He has nothing against the animal lovers with whom Lucy has been mixed up as long as he can remember, much like he has nothing against most other brands of harmless fools. For a long while this part of the round globe was home to a sect convinced the earth must nevertheless be flat and on the whole they did a whole lot less harm than their better informed competitors. When Bev Shaw opens her front door he puts on a good face, though in fact he is quite repelled by the odours of cat urine and dog mange and Jeyes Fluid that ooze past her to greet them.

On to the next chapter, "The house is just as..."

« Disgrace - Don't the dogs get

Disgrace - The house is just as »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Saturday, 31 December, Year 8 d.Tr.

Disgrace - The sign outside the clinic

The sign outside the clinic reads ANIMAL WELFARE LEAGUE W.O. 1529. Below is a line stating the daily hours, but this has been taped over. At the door is a line of waiting people, some with animals. As soon as he gets out of his car there are children all around him, begging for money or just staring. He makes his way through the crush, and through a sudden cacophony as two dogs, held back by their owners, snarl and snap at each other. The small, bare waiting-room is packed. He has to step over someone's legs to get in.

'Mrs Shaw?' he inquires.

An old woman nods toward a doorway closed off with a plastic curtain. The woman holds a goat on a short rope; it glares nervously, eyeing the dogs, its hooves clicking on the hard floor. In the inner room, which smells pungently of urine, Bev Shaw is working at a low steel-topped table. With a pencil-light she is peering down the throat of a young dog that looks like a cross between a ridgeback and a jackal. Kneeling on the table a barefoot child, evidently the owner, has the dog's head clamped under his arm and is trying to hold its jaws open. A low, gurgling snarl comes from its throat; its powerful hindquarters strain. Awkwardly he joins in the tussle, pressing the dog's hind legs together, forcing it to sit on its haunches.

'Thank you,' says Bev Shaw. Her face is flushed. 'There's an abscess here from an impacted tooth. We have no antibiotics, so -- hold him still, boytjie! -- so we'll just have to lance it and hope for the best.'

She probes inside the mouth with a lancet. The dog gives a tremendous jerk, breaks free of him, almost breaks free of the boy. He grasps it as it scrabbles to get off the table; for a moment the dog's eyes, full of rage and full of fear, glare into his.

'On his side - so,' says Bev Shaw. Making crooning noises, she expertly trips up the dog and turns it on its side. 'The belt,' she says. He passes a belt around its body and she buckles it. 'So,' says Bev Shaw. 'Think comforting thoughts, think strong thoughts. They can smell what you are thinking.'

He leans his full weight on the dog. Gingerly, one hand wrapped in an old rag, the child prises open the jaws again. The dog's eyes roll in terror. They can smell what you are thinking: what romantic nonsense! 'There, there!' he murmurs. Bev Shaw probes again with the lancet. The dog gags, goes rigid, then relaxes.

'So,' she says, 'now we must let nature take her course.' She unbuckles the belt, speaks to the child in what sounds like very halting Xhosa. The dog, on its feet, cowers under the table. There is a spattering of blood and saliva on the surface; Bev wipes it off. The child coaxes the dog out.

'Thank you, Mr Lurie. You have a good presence. I sense that you like animals.'

'Do I like animals? I eat them, so I suppose I must like them, at least partially.' What ridiculous nonsense, she "senses", cold calling him like a drunken bum who used to be a two bit stage magician in his prime, decades ago. Her hair is a mass of little curls. Does she make the curls herself, with tongs? Unlikely: it would take hours every day. They must grow that way. He has never seen such a tessitura from close by. The veins on her ears are visible as a filigree of red and purple. The veins of her nose too. And then a chin that comes straight out of her chest, like a pouter pigeon's. As an ensemble, remarkably unattractive. She is pondering his words, whose tone she appears to have missed.

'Yes, we eat up a lot of animals in this country,' she says. 'It doesn't seem to do us much good. I'm not sure how we will justify it to them.' Then: 'Shall we start on the next one?'

Leaving aside the suggestion nonsense, justify it? Really? When, at the Great Reckoning? Is this the next step of modern foolishness, seting up charities under false pretenses, detouring the proceeds to arm animals, to entice underage penguins to spend months "training" after a fashion in Zambia and the Mozambique so they can then be parachuted into Rhodesia, submachinegun in hand? To fight for hallucinated rights and impossible freedoms, to save the country by burning it down ? Confused zebras, evidently out of place, and loud orangoutans to lead yet another revolution, to invent yet another set of entirely novel and nonsensical "institutions" and "procedures", sensible to them owing to their complete and deliberate lack of the most basic literacy ? Set up reconcilement commissions where everyone can go and confess his steaks and sausages, then perhaps set up land bureaus to give "grants", more unearned money so the pig can set up a truffle farm on Oom Koos' land, so he can be, after a while and a few wives and girlfriends, a substantial pig by a pig's standards ? That isn't scandalous, of course, that's just what pigs do, it comes natural to them, and naturalia non turpia. And then, what then, the plants ? Bacteria, algae, dr. Rassool's crystal skull ? He would be curious to hear more, but this is not the time. The goat, a fullgrown buck, can barely walk. One half of his scrotum, yellow and purple, is swollen like a balloon; the other half is a mass of caked blood and dirt. He has been savaged by dogs, the old woman says. But he seems bright enough, cheery, combative. While Bev Shaw is examining him, he passes a short burst of pellets on to the floor. Standing at his head, gripping his horns, the woman pretends to reprove him. Bev Shaw touches the scrotum with a swab. The goat kicks.

'Will you fasten his legs?' she asks, and indicates how. He straps the right hind leg to the right foreleg. The goat tries to kick again, teeters. She swabs the wound gently. The goat trembles, gives a bleat: an ugly sound, low and hoarse. As the dirt comes away, he sees that the wound is alive with white grubs waving their blind heads in the air. Evidently, they aren't about to be treated too well, let's hope they won't expect written confessions also. Could we perhaps find it within ourselves to live with this prepared statement ? He shudders.

'Blowfly,' says Bev Shaw. 'At least a week old.' She purses her lips. 'You should have brought him in long ago,' she says to the woman.

'Yes,' says the woman. 'Every night the dogs come. It is too, too bad. Three Bitcents you pay for a man like him.'

Bev Shaw straightens up. 'I don't know what we can do. I don't have the experience to try a removal. She can wait for Dr. Oosthuizen on Thursday, but the old fellow will come out sterile anyway, and does she want that? And then there is the question of antibiotics. Is she prepared to spend money on antibiotics?' She kneels down again beside the goat, nuzzles his throat, stroking the throat upward with her own hair. The goat trembles but is still. She motions to the woman to let go of the horns. The woman obeys. The goat does not stir. She is whispering. 'What do you say, my friend?' he hears her say. 'What do you say? Is it enough?' The goat stands stock still as if hypnotized. Bev Shaw continues to stroke him with her head. She seems to have lapsed into a trance of her own. She collects herself and gets to her feet.

'I'm afraid it's too late,' she says to the woman. 'I can't make him better. You can wait for the doctor on Thursday, or you can leave him with me. I can give him a quiet end. He will let me do that for him. Shall I? Shall I keep him here?'

The woman wavers, then shakes her head. She begins to tug the goat toward the door.

'You can have him back afterwards,' says Bev Shaw. 'I will help him through, that's all.' Though she tries to control her voice, he can hear the accents of defeat. The goat hears them too: he kicks against the strap, bucking and plunging, the obscene bulge quivering behind him. The woman drags the strap loose, casts it aside. Then they are gone.

'What was that all about?' he asks.

Bev Shaw hides her face, blows her nose. It's nothing. I keep enough lethal for bad cases, but we can't force the owners. It's their animal, they like to slaughter in their own way. What a pity! Such a good old fellow, so brave and straight and confident!'

Lethal: the name of a drug? He would not put it beyond the drug companies. Sudden darkness, from the waters of Lethe. 'Perhaps he understands more than you guess,' he says. To his own surprise, he is trying to comfort her. 'Perhaps he has already been through it. Born with foreknowledge, so to speak. This is Africa, after all. There have been goats here since the beginning of time. They don't have to be told what steel is for, and fire. They know how death comes to a goat. They are born prepared.'

'Do you think so?' she says. 'I'm not sure. I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.'

Things are beginning to fall into place. He has a first inkling of the task this ugly little woman has set herself. This bleak building is a place not of healing - her doctoring is too amateurish for that - but of last resort. He recalls the story of- who was it? St Hubert? - who gave refuge to a deer that clattered into his chapel, panting and distraught, fleeing the huntsmen's dogs. Bev Shaw, not a veterinarian but a priestess, unread, uncouth, full of New Age mumbo jumbo, trying, absurdly, to lighten the load of Africa's suffering beasts. Lucy thought he would find her interesting. But Lucy is wrong. Interesting is not the word. He finds her demented, entirely and completely a child of the times. A fear of death, that is the very long as well as the very short story of it all, that's what makes the whole hell up, the structure and the substance of the entire ensemble.

He was not much of a father, not because he couldn't have been, not because he didn't want to be. Not for lack of love for his daughter, but for too much love. He was afraid he wouldn't be a father good enough, and out of that fear, he wasn't a father at all. And he wasn't a husband to his wives, either of them, which is why they aren't his wives, two, or three, or four, however many they were. Why not ? Fear. Fear of what ? What was that ridiculous kid going to do to him, was he afraid of what, a vandalized car ? A broken jaw ? No, not that, not exactly that. Death, the mother of all fear, the end of all life.

His daughter dares not be a woman, why not ? She is not with a man, she is not with child, why not ? She says so herself, and as she says she doesn't hear herself : she is afraid, of death. Not of "what she may come back as", that is nonsense, she pretends to be afraid of that so she doesn't have to admit to the real thing. She doesn't think she has a soul yet thinks she'll come back as a pig ? She does not. She is simply afraid, completely, entirely, afraid of death. And for that fear of death, she can not live. Her life is a shadow, she is playing, silently, quietly, as a child, in the corners of a little plot lost in the bush, where a man who isn't her father lives, with his wives and children.

Soraya, was she afraid of him ? No, but of death, the exotic whore civilised enough to have caught not the clap from the white man, but the fear of death. That the lie will end, that with the lie her life will end, she was afraid of it ; and Rosalind, throughout, one fear to unite all experience, going like a red thread through all quarrel and through all intimacy, the vermilion thread of fear, the deepest fear of them all. One day, she'll die, and until that day she can think of nothing else. None of them can. None of them ever will.

Nothing was lost. Nothing is ever lost, just given away.

Yet he sometimes thinks of other things. To them, it seems akin to a disease. Is it a disease ? Pathological, a deformity, monstrous, irreconcilable with humanity. Is it ? He spends all afternoon in the surgery, helping as far as he is able. When the last of the day's cases has been dealt with, Bev Shaw shows him around the yard. In the avian cage there is only one bird, a young fish-eagle with a splinted wing. For the rest there are dogs: not Lucy's well-groomed thoroughbreds but a mob of scrawny mongrels filling two pens to bursting point, barking, yapping, whining, leaping with excitement.

He helps her pour out dry food and fill the water-troughs. They empty two ten-kilogram bags. 'How do you pay for this stuff?' he asks.

'We get it wholesale. We hold public collections. We get donations. We offer a free neutering service, and get a grant for that.'

'Who does the neutering?

'Dr Oosthuizen, our vet. But he comes in only one afternoon a week.'

He is watching the dogs eat. It surprises him how little fighting there is. The small, the weak hold back, accepting their lot, waiting their turn.

'The trouble is, there are just too many of them,' says Bev Shaw. 'They don't understand it, of course, and we have no way of telling them. Too many by our standards, not by theirs. They would just multiply and multiply if they had their way, until they filled the earth. They don't think it's a bad thing to have lots of offspring. The more the jollier. Cats the same.'

'And rats.'

'And rats. Which reminds me: check yourself for fleas when you get home.'

One of the dogs, replete, eyes shining with wellbeing, sniffs his fingers through the mesh, licks them.

'They are very egalitarian, aren't they,' he remarks. 'No classes. No one too high and mighty to smell another's backside.' He squats, allows the dog to smell his face, his breath. It has what he thinks of as an intelligent look, though it is probably nothing of the kind.

On to the next chapter, "Are they all going to die..."

« Disgrace - The house is just as

Disgrace - Are they all going to die »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Saturday, 31 December, Year 8 d.Tr.

Disgrace - Petrus has invited us

'Petrus has invited us to a party,' he tells Lucy. 'Why is he throwing a party?'

'Because of the transfer, probably. The land goes to him officially on the first of next month. It's a big day for him.'

'He is going to slaughter the two sheep. I wouldn't have thought two sheep would go very far.'

'Petrus is a pennypincher. In the old days it would have been an ox.'

'I'm not sure I like the way he does things - bringing the slaughter-beasts home to acquaint them with the people who are going to eat them.'

'What would you prefer? That the slaughtering be done in an abattoir, so that you needn't think about it?'

'Yes.'

'Wake up, David. This is the country. This is Africa.'

'Are we going ?'

'I must go.'

'Then I will come with you.'

'Ok.'

There is a snappishness to Lucy nowadays that he sees no justification for. His usual response is to withdraw into silence. There are spells when the two of them are like strangers in the same house. He tells himself that he must be patient, that Lucy is still living in the shadow of the attack, that time needs to pass before she will be herself. But what if he is wrong? What if, after an attack like that, one is never oneself again? What if an attack like that turns one into a darker person altogether?

There is an even more sinister explanation for Lucy's moodiness, one that he cannot put from his mind.

'Lucy,' he asks the same day, out of the blue, 'you aren't hiding something from me, are you? You didn't pick up something from those men?'

She is sitting on the sofa in pyjamas and dressing-gown, playing with the cat. It is past noon. The cat is young, alert, skittish. Lucy dangles the belt of the gown before it. The cat slaps at the belt, quick, light paw-blows, one-two-three-four.

'Men?' she says. 'Which men?' She flicks the belt to one side; the cat dives after it.

Which men? His heart stops. Has she gone mad? Is she refusing to remember? But, it would appear, she is only teasing him. 'David, I am not a child anymore. I have seen a doctor, I have had tests, I have done everything one can reasonably do. Now I can only wait.'

'I see. And how long will that take?'

She shrugs. 'Science has not yet put a limit on how long one has to wait. For ever, maybe.'

The cat makes a quick pounce at the belt, but the game is over now. He sits down beside his daughter; the cat jumps off the sofa, stalks away. He takes her hand. Now that he is close to her, a faint smell of staleness, unwashedness, reaches him. 'At least it won't be for ever, my dearest,' he says. 'At least you will be spared that.'

The sheep spend the rest of the day near the dam where he has tethered them. The next morning they are back on the barren patch beside the stable. Presumably they have until Saturday morning, two days. It seems a miserable way to spend the last two days of one's life. Country ways - that is what Lucy calls this kind of thing. He has other words: indifference, or hardheartedness. If the country can pass judgment on the city, then the city can pass judgment on the country, too, and it will probably count for just as much.

The thought of buying the two blackfaced sheep from Petrus has occured to him. It occurs periodically. But what would such a feat accomplish, in the end? Petrus will only use the money to buy new slaughter-animals, and pocket the difference. Money, a strange source of power, unreliable, ineffectual. Petrus can use it to buy sheep and eat them ; but David can not use it to buy Petrus' sheep so Petrus doesn't eat sheep. And what will he do with the two sheep anyway, once he has bought them out of the bonds of slavery? Set them free on the public road? Pen them up in the dog-cages and feed them hay? Teach them to read and write, send them to church ? Give them land somewhere, a land to call their own at the other end of the continent on which their fore-ewes and fore-bucks have lived ten thousand years and more ? Then what besides, sell them rockets and fighter airplanes ? A bond seems to have come into existence between himself and the two Persians, he does not know how. The bond is not one of affection. It is not even a bond with these two in particular, whom he could not pick out from a mob in a field. Nevertheless, suddenly and without reason, their lot has become important to him.

He stands before them, under the sun, waiting for the buzz in his mind to settle, waiting for a sign. There is a fly trying to creep into the ear of one of them. The ear twitches. The fly takes off; circles, returns, settles. The ear twitches again. He takes a step forward. The sheep backs away uneasily to the limit of its chain. He remembers Bev Shaw nuzzling the old billy-goat with the ravaged testicles, stroking him, comforting him, entering into his life. How does she get it right, this communion with the animals? Some trick he does not have. Some old parlor trick of a tramp down on his luck. One has to be a certain kind of person, perhaps, with fewer complications. One has to speak in another kind of voice, to another kind of ear. The sun beats on his face in all its springtime radiance. Do I have to change ? he wonders. Do I have to become like Bev Shaw?

He speaks to Lucy. 'I have been thinking about this party of Petrus'. On the whole, I would prefer not to go. Is that possible without being rude?'

'Anything to do with his slaughter-sheep?'

'Yes. No. I haven't changed my ideas, if that is what you mean. I still don't believe that animals have properly individual lives. Which among them get to live, which get to die, is not, as far as I am concerned, worth agonizing over. Nevertheless...'

'Nevertheless?'

'Nevertheless, in this case I am disturbed. I can't say why.'

'Well, Petrus and his guests are certainly not going to give up their mutton chops out of deference to you and your sensibilities.'

'I'm sure. Nevertheless, I would just prefer not to be one of the party, not this time. I'm sorry. I never imagined I would end up talking in this way.'

'God moves in mysterious ways, Dad.'

'Don't mock me.'

Saturday is looming, market day. 'Should we run the stall?' he asks Lucy. She shrugs. 'You decide,' she returns. He does not run the stall. She does not question his decision ; if anything she seems relieved. Preparations for Petrus' festivities begin at noon on Saturday with the arrival of a band of women half a dozen strong, not one under three feet thick, decked in what looks to him like churchgoing finery. Behind the stable they get a fire going. Soon there comes on the wind the stench of boiling offal, from which he infers that the deed has been done, the double deed, that it is all over.

Will he mourn? Is it proper to mourn the death of beings who do not practise mourning among themselves? Looking into his heart, he can find only a vague sadness. Too close, he thinks: we live too close to Petrus. It is like sharing a house with strangers, sharing noises, sharing smells. He knocks at Lucy's door. 'Do you want to go for a walk?' he asks.

'Thanks, but no. Take Katy.'

He takes the bulldog, but she is so slow and sulky that he grows irritated, chases her back to the farm, and sets off alone on an eight-kilometre loop, walking fast, trying to tire himself out. At five o'clock the guests start arriving, by car, by overflowing tiny trucklets, or on foot. He watches from behind the kitchen curtain. Most are of their host's generation, staid, solid. There is one old woman over whom a particular fuss is made: wearing his blue suit and a garish pink shirt, Petrus comes all the way down the path to welcome her.

It is dark before the younger folk make an appearance. On the breeze comes a murmur of talk, laughter and music, music that he associates with the Johannesburg of his own youth. Quite tolerable, he thinks to himself- quite jolly, even.

'It's time,' says Lucy. 'Are you coming after all?'

Unusually, she is wearing a knee-length dress and high heels, with a necklace of painted wooden beads and matching earrings. He is not sure he likes the effect.

'All right, I'll come. I'm ready.'

'Haven't you got a suit here?'

'No.'

'Then at least put on a tie.'

'I thought we were in the country.'

'All the more reason to dress up. This is a big day in Petrus' life.'

She carries a tiny flashlight. They walk up the track to Petrus' house, father and daughter arm in arm, she lighting the way, he bearing their offering. At the open door they pause, smiling. Petrus is nowhere to be seen, but a little girl in a party dress comes up and leads them in. The old stable has no ceiling and no proper floor, but at least it is spacious and at least it has electricity. Shaded lamps and pictures on the walls (Van Gogh's sunflowers, a Tretchikoff lady in blue, Jane Fonda in her Barbarella outfit, Doctor Khumaloi scoring a goal) soften the bleakness.

They are the only whites. There is dancing going on, to the old-fashioned African jazz he had heard. Curious glances are cast at the two of them, or perhaps only at his skullcap. Lucy knows some of the women. She commences introductions. Then Petrus appears at their side. He does not play the eager host, does not offer them a drink, but does say, 'No more dogs. I am not any more the dog-man,' which Lucy chooses to accept in mirth ; so all, it appears, is well. 'We have brought you something,' says Lucy; 'but perhaps we should give it to your wife. It is for the house.'

From the kitchen area, if that is what they are to call it, Petrus summons his wife. It is the first time he has seen her from close by. She is young - younger than Lucy - pleasant-faced rather than pretty, shy, clearly pregnant. She takes Lucy's hand but does not take his, nor does she meet his eyes. Lucy speaks a few words in Xhosa and presents her with the package. There are by now half a dozen onlookers around them. 'She must unwrap it,' says Petrus.

'Yes, you must unwrap it,' says Lucy.

Carefully, at pains not to tear the festive paper with its mandolins and sprigs of laurel, the young wife opens the package. It is a cloth in a rather attractive Ashanti design. 'Thank you,' she whispers in English.

'It's a bedspread,' Lucy explains to Petrus.

'Very good,' says Petrus; and then, to Lucy: 'Very good.'

A distasteful word, it seems to him, double-edged, souring the moment. Yet can Petrus be blamed? The language he draws on with such aplomb is, if he only knew it, tired, cracked, friable, eaten from the inside as if by termites. Only the monosyllables can still be relied on, and not even all of them. What is to be done? Nothing that he, the one-time teacher of communications, can see. Nothing short of starting all over again with the ABC. By the time the big words come back reconstructed, purified, fit to be trusted once more, he will be long dead.

He shivers, as if a goose has trodden on his grave.

'The baby - when are you expecting the baby?' he asks Petrus' wife.

She looks at him uncomprehendingly.

'In November,' Petrus intervenes. 'The baby is coming in November. He will be ngeekatsi. Like you say, Scorpion.'

'He ? What have you got against girls?'

'We are praying for a boy,' says Petrus. 'Always it is best if the first one is a boy. Then he can show his sisters - show them how to behave. Yes.' He pauses. 'A girl is very expensive.' He rubs thumb and forefinger together. 'Always money, money, money.'

A long time since he last saw that gesture. Used of Jews, in the old days: money-money-money, with the same meaningful cock of the head. But presumably Petrus is innocent of that snippet of African tradition.

'Boys can be expensive too,' he remarks, doing his bit for the conversation.

'You must buy them this, you must buy them that,' continues Petrus, getting into his stride, no longer listening. 'Now, today, the man does not pay for the woman. I pay.' He floats a hand above his wife's head; modestly she drops her eyes. 'I pay. But that is old fashion. Clothes, nice things, it is all the same: pay, pay, pay.' He repeats the finger-rubbing. 'No, a boy is better. Except your daughter. Your daughter is different. Your daughter is as good as a boy. Almost!' He laughs at his sally. 'Hey, Lucy!'

Lucy smiles, but he knows she is embarrassed. 'I'm going to dance,' she murmurs, and moves away.

On the floor she dances by herself in the solipsistic way that now seems to be the mode. Soon she is joined by a young man, tall, loose-limbed, nattily dressed. He dances opposite her, snapping his fingers, flashing her smiles, courting her. Women are beginning to come in from outside, carrying trays of grilled meat. The air is full of appetizing smells. A new contingent of guests floods in, young, noisy, lively, not old fashioned at all. The night segment, the social party is getting into its swing, coming into its own after the arid bloodline politicking of the afternoon. A plate of food finds its way into his hands. He passes it on to Petrus.

'No,' says Petrus - ' is for you. Otherwise we are passing plates all night.'

Petrus and his wife are spending a lot of time with him, making him feel at home. Kind people, he thinks. Country people.

On to the next chapter, "He glances across at Lucy..."

———This bears some discussion. What would you expect the vocation would be of a man named Theophilus Doctorson Khumalo, nicknamed "Doctor" ? Banjo player ? Bartender ? Corn chucker ? What if I added that he was also known as "16 valve" ? Singer ? Car mechanic ? Butcher ?

Let us add that he owes the beginning of his soccer career to one Ted Dumitru, a Romanian coach who died this year, who promoted him from juniors, and be done with it.

Africa, you see. Que voulez-vous, ils sont au-dela, aux portes de la folie, ou tout est pris a la manie. [↩]

« Disgrace - In spite of all that

Disgrace - He glances across at Lucy »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Saturday, 31 December, Year 8 d.Tr.

Disgrace - Lucy returns

Lucy returns. 'They've let down the tyres of the kombi,' she says. 'I'm walking over to Ettinger's. I won't be long.' She pauses. 'David, when people ask, would you mind keeping to your own story, to what happened to you?'

He does not understand.

'You tell what happened to you, I tell what happened to me,' she repeats.

'You're making a mistake,' he says in a voice that is fast descending to a croak.

'No I'm not,' she says.

'My child, my child!' he says, holding out his arms to her. When she does not come, he puts aside his blanket, stands up, and takes her in his arms. In his embrace she is stiff as a pole, yielding nothing.

Ettinger is a surly old man who speaks English with a marked German accent. His wife is dead, his children have gone back to Germany, he is the only one left in Africa. He arrives in his three-litre pickup with Lucy at his side and waits with the engine running.

'Yes, I never go anywhere without my Beretta,' he observes once they are on the Grahamstown road. He pats the holster at his hip. 'The best is, you save yourself, because the police are not going to save you, not any more, you can be sure.'

Is Ettinger right? If he had had a gun, would he have saved Lucy? He doubts it. If he had had a gun, he would probably be dead now, he and Lucy both. His hands, he notices, are trembling ever so lightly. Lucy has her arms folded across her breasts. Is that because she is trembling too?

He was expecting Ettinger to take them to the police station. But, it turns out, Lucy has told him to drive to the hospital.

'For my sake or for yours?' he asks her.

'For yours.'

'Won't the police want to see me too?'

'There is nothing you can tell them that I can't,' she replies. 'Or is there?'

At the hospital she strides ahead through the door marked CASUALTIES, fills out the form for him, seats him in the waiting room. She is all strength, all purposefulness, whereas the trembling seems to have spread to his whole body. 'If they discharge you, wait here,' she instructs him. 'I will be back to fetch you.'

'What about yourself?'

She shrugs. If she is trembling, she shows no sign of it.

He finds a seat between two hefty girls who might be sisters, one of them holding a moaning child, and a man with bloody wadding over his hand. He is twelfth in line. The clock on the wall says 5.45. He closes his good eye and slips into a swoon in which the two sisters continue to whisper together, chuchotantes. When he opens his eye the clock still says 5.45. Is it broken? No: the minute hand jerks and comes to rest on 5.46.

Two hours pass before a nurse calls him, and there is more waiting before his turn comes to see the sole doctor on duty, a young Indian woman. The burns on his scalp are not serious, she says, though he must be wary of infection. She spends more time on his eye. The upper and lower lids are stuck together; separating them proves extraordinarily painful.

'You are lucky,' she comments after the examination. 'There is no damage to the eye itself. If they had used petrol it would be a different story.'

He emerges with his head dressed and bandaged, his eye covered, an ice-pack strapped to his wrist. In the waiting-room he is surprised to find Bill Shaw. Bill, who is a head shorter than he, grips him by the shoulders. 'Shocking, absolutely shocking,' he says. 'Lucy is over at our place. She was going to fetch you herself but Bev wouldn't hear of it. How are you?'

'I'm all right. Light burns, nothing serious. I'm sorry we've ruined your evening.'

'Nonsense!' says Bill Shaw. 'What else are friends for? You would have done the same.'

Spoken without irony, the words stay with him and will not go away. Bill Shaw believes that if he, Bill Shaw, had been hit over the head and set on fire, then he, David Lurie, would have driven to the hospital and sat waiting, without so much as a newspaper to read, to fetch him home. Bill Shaw believes that, because he and David Lurie once had a cup of tea together, David Lurie is his friend, and the two of them have obligations towards each other. Is Bill Shaw wrong or right? Moreover, is he outright fucking insane ? Has Bill Shaw, who was born in Hankey, not two hundred kilometres away, and works in a hardware shop, seen so little of the world that he does not know there are men who do not readily make friends, whose attitude toward friendships between men is corroded with skepticism? Modern English friend from Old English freond, from freon, to love. Does the drinking of tea seal a love-bond, in the eyes of Bill Shaw? Yet but for Bill and Bev Shaw, but for old Ettinger, but for bonds of some kind, where would he be now? On the ruined farm with the broken telephone, amid dead dogs.

'A shocking business,' says Bill Shaw again in the car. 'Atrocious. It's bad enough when you read about it in the paper, but when it happens to someone you know' - he shakes his head - 'that really brings it home to you. It's like being in a war all over again.'

He does not bother to reply. The day is not dead yet but living. War, atrocity: every word with which one tries to wrap up this day, the day swallows down its black throat.

Bev Shaw meets them at the door. Lucy has taken a sedative, she announces, and is lying down; best not to disturb her.

'Has she been to the police?'

'Yes, there's a bulletin out for your car.'

'And she has seen a doctor?'

'All attended to. How about you? Lucy says you were badly burned.'

'I have burns, but they are not as bad as they look.'

'Then you should eat and get some rest.'

'I'm not hungry.'

She runs water for him in their big, old-fashioned, cast-iron bath. He stretches out his pale length in the steaming water and tries to relax. But when it is time to get out, he slips and almost falls: he is as weak as a baby, and lightheaded too. He has to call Bill Shaw and suffer the ignominy of being helped out of the bath, helped to dry himself, helped into borrowed pyjamas. Later he hears Bill and Bev talking in low voices, and knows it is he they are talking about.

He has come away from the hospital with a tube of painkillers, a packet of burn dressings, and a little aluminium gadget to prop his head on. Bev Shaw settles him on a sofa that smells of cats; with surprising ease he falls asleep. In the middle of the night he awakes in a state of the utmost clarity. He has had a vision: Lucy has spoken to him; her words - 'Come to me, save me!' - still echo in his ears. In the vision she stands, hands outstretched, wet hair combed back, in a field of white light.

He gets up, stumbles against a chair, sends it flying. A light goes on and Bev Shaw is before him in her nightdress. 'I have to speak to Lucy,' he mumbles: his mouth is dry, his tongue thick. The door to Lucy's room opens. Lucy is not at all as in the vision. Her face is puffy with sleep, she is tying the belt of a dressing-gown that is clearly not hers.

'I'm sorry, I had a dream,' he says. The word vision is suddenly too old-fashioned, too queer. 'I thought you were calling me.' Lucy shakes her head. 'I wasn't. Go to sleep now.' She is right, of course. It is three in the morning. But he cannot fail to notice that for the second time in a day she has spoken to him as if to a child - a child, or an old man. He tries to get back to sleep but he cannot. It must be an effect of the pills, he tells himself: not a vision, not even a dream, just a chemical hallucination. Nevertheless, the figure of the woman in the field of light stays before him. 'Save me!' cries his daughter, her words clear, ringing, immediate. Is it possible that Lucy's soul did indeed leave her body and come to him? May people who do not believe in souls yet have them, and may their souls lead an independent life?

Hours yet before sunrise. His wrist aches, his eyes burn, his scalp is sore and irritable. Cautiously he switches on the lamp and gets up. With a blanket wrapped around him he pushes open Lucy's door and enters. There is a chair by the bedside; he sits down. His senses tell him she is awake. What is he doing? He is watching over his little girl, guarding her from harm, warding off the bad spirits. After a long while he feels her begin to relax. A soft pop as her lips separate, and the gentlest of snores. It is morning. Bev Shaw serves him a breakfast of cornflakes and tea, then disappears into Lucy's room.

'How is she?' he asks when she comes back.

Bev Shaw responds only with a terse shake of the head. Not your business, she seems to be saying.

Menstruation, parturition, violation, and their aftermath: blood-matters.i A woman's burden, women's preserve. Of no interest, without public projection. To be kept quiet, a shame, a secret. Another kind of secret. Is it actually another kind ? Perhaps all secrets are the same one secret after all.

Not for the first time, he wonders whether women would not be happier living in communities of women, accepting visits from men only when they choose. His experience supports the notion, but then again has he known any women ? Who was a woman, Melanie ? Rosalind ? Thirty years between them, yet in the end what was the difference ? Such a naive contrivance, "when they choose". What will they choose, and who will care what their choice was ?

Perhaps he is wrong to think of Lucy as homosexual. Perhaps she simply is immature, and thus inclined to female company, like any young girl. Perhaps that is all that lesbians are: girls trapped in women's bodies they have no actual use for. Little girls whose minds have not yet caught up with their bodies, infantile, not having so far managed come to terms with their body's need of men. No wonder they are so vehement against rape, she and Helen. Rape, god of chaos and mixture, violator of seclusions. The definitive solvent of all the complicated secretions women surround themselves with to insulate their anatomy from its physiology. To support the willing suspension of disbelief a female worldview requires, to permit the sweet illusion of the self take root, in fits and spurts. Rape, for the longest time the single and unique manner of reproduction ; in most sexuate species still the normative sexual behaviour. Anything else, perverse, abnormal, decadent. The arrival of speech changed all that, for a select brand of chimp, the normative of yesteryear became today's unthinkable atrocity. Rather, unspeakable.

Raping a lesbian. Worse than raping a virgin ? Perhaps more of a blow, stronger a statement. Did they know what they were up to, those men? Had the word got around? The rapist and the lesbian, a strange encounter of troglodytes. He, from a time before speech, behaving in a manner... not manly, othermanly perhaps. A throwback to times so old they left no record. Marks, yes, but no records. She, from an age before puberty, behaving in a manner... not womanly, for sure, asexual, infantile. The worst possible pairing, like the furious impotent and the placid nymphomaniac, like the blind poet with the deaf nymph, a radical coupling of Eros and Psyche. She can never hear him, for he can't speak, and he can't ever feel her, for she doesn't know she has a soul.

And in a single, sublime moment a flash coallesces all these stray thoughts grazing on the craggly fields of the inside of his skull -- yes, it is true, he has never met a woman. He hasn't ever met a woman because he is not a man. The fear of death, the ultimate fear, turns out to not be so ultimate after all. If he had a gun he would probably be dead now, he and Lucy both. He thought this, this was his thought. Death, the ultimate fear, given in token, to cover up for what ? The old German had a gun, and he wasn't dead. How did he manage this ? Luck, is it ? It is not. He was never before afraid to follow a thought, a wayward strand of thought, wherever it may lead -- but now he is. If he were a man, he'd have had a gun, and maybe died, or maybe killed, some dogs, some boys, but that's not the important part. If he were a man, Rosalind would have been a woman, and Lucy's mother before her, and Lucy herself. Raped still, perhaps, at another juncture perhaps, yes, but not as a child. Not as a child.

The absent difference between one and another, across thirty years, he realises now, is him. Him. The reason he has lived half a century without meeting any women, he realises now, is entirely like the reason a rapist can live out his entire life and never hear an ode. Women in love will come up with hymns to glorify the man they love, he knows this, he can on some level, mentally feel this. It has left record. Yet the rapist doesn't speak, and cannot hear. A deaf nymph, using elaborately carved furniture for kindling, unable to distinguish loud flatulence and a string quartet.

At nine o'clock, after Bill Shaw has gone off to work, he taps on Lucy's door. She is lying with her face turned to the wall. He sits down beside her, touches her cheek. It is wet with tears.

'Have you seen a doctor?'

She sits up and blows her nose. 'I saw my GP last night.'

'What do you want to do ?'

'Go back to the farm and clean up.'

'And then?'

'Then to go on as before.'

'On the farm?'

'Yes of course. On the farm.'

'Be sensible, Lucy. We can't just pick up where we left off.'

'Why not?'

'Because it's not a good idea. Because it's not safe. Things have changed.'

'It was never safe, and it's not an idea, good or bad. I'm not going back for the sake of an idea. I'm just going back.' Sitting up in her borrowed nightdress, she confronts him, neck stiff, eyes glittering. Not her father's little girl, not any longer. 'I live there. On that farm.' she says flatly.

On to the next chapter, "Before they set off..."

———Yes, the girl affecting sensitivity to splattered blood is merely furthering a conceit. Always affecting, always a conceit. Just like a crab pretending to perceive pincers atrociously outrageous rather than comfortably natural. Men prefer women different for the rest, for men abhor the in-itself-abhorent female herd ; and what's more different, further afield than absurdity ? [↩]

« Disgrace - Three men are coming

Disgrace - Before they set off »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Saturday, 31 December, Year 8 d.Tr.

Disgrace - Katy is coaxed

Katy is coaxed out of her hiding-place and settled in the kitchen. She is subdued and timorous, following Lucy about, keeping close to her heels. Life, from moment to moment, is not as before. The house feels alien, violated. They are continually on the alert, listening for sounds. Or maybe just he is.

Then Petrus makes his return. An old lorry groans up the rutted driveway and stops beside the stable. Petrus steps down from the cab, wearing a suit too tight for him, followed by his wife and the driver. From the back of the lorry the two men unload cartons, creosoted poles, sheets of galvanized iron, a roll of plastic piping, and finally, with much noise and commotion, two halfgrown sheep, which Petrus tethers to a fence-post. The lorry makes a wide sweep around the stable and thunders back down the driveway. Petrus and his wife disappear inside. A plume of smoke begins to rise from the asbestos-pipe chimney. He continues to watch. In a while, Petrus's wife emerges and with a broad, easy movement empties a slop bucket. A handsome woman, he thinks to himself, with her long skirt and her headcloth piled high, country fashion. A handsome woman and a lucky man. But where have they been?

'Petrus is back,' he tells Lucy. 'With a load of building materials.'

'Good.'

'Why didn't he tell you he was going away? Doesn't it strike you as fishy that he should disappear at precisely this time?'

'I can't order Petrus about. I am not his master. Neither are you.'

A non sequitur, but he lets it pass. They look at each other, plainly, unseeing.

'Did you set the dog on the boy?' she asks, at a last.

'What boy?' He retorts, in the grip of confusion.

'The men had a boy with them, did they ? He was left outside. With you.'

'Yes.'

'You set the dog on him ?'

'Yes, I set the dog on him.'

'What did you do that for ?'

'Excuse me ?' His confusion is giving way to anger now, a sheer, unmitigated, even anger.

'What were you planning to do ? Set an old bulldog on a young man and then what ?'

He is nearly apoplectic, and for the first time in many years can't find his words. No set of quotes from the classics of culture come, as is their habit, to offer themselves for his use and be discarded on slim grounds, like the "inadequacy" of the audience. He opens and closes his mouth a few times, letting out no sound. He does not say: I had no plan, really. He does not say: It seemed like a good idea at the time. He does not say: I just thought that's what's done, in polite company, under the circumstances. Instead he opens and closes his mouth, and lets out no sound.

"You are a burden, David." she continues, flatly. "I did not say anything because I do not mind. I am sure at a time I was a burden to you, myself. I think perhaps you minded, but I do not care. It makes no difference. There is no point in thinking about that.' She draws a breath, sharply, and continues. 'I said you could stay here for as long as you liked, and I meant it. I will say it again : please stay here for as long as you like. But understand one thing : if you are to stay here, then you are to stay here', she accentuates the word, tickly, 'here, as this here is. Not as you think it to be, nor as you think it should be, nor as you think Ettinger would agree with you nor any other imagined thing. As it is. Do you understand me ?'

'No.' he says plainly because indeed, he hasn't the faintest inkling as to what she might be telling him.

'I may no longer keep dogs, now.' she says, a soft whisp of regret wrapping around her crumbly, skeletal words like wool on long dead, dry thistles.

Another non sequitur, which he lets pass. He has decided to let everything pass, with Lucy, for the time being. Lucy keeps to herself, expresses no feelings, shows no interest in anything around her as far as he can see. It is he, ignorant as he is about farming, who must let the ducks out of their pen, master the sluice system and lead water to save the garden from parching. Lucy spends hour after hour lying on her bed, staring into space or looking at old magazines, of which she seems to have an unlimited store. She flicks through them impatiently, as though searching for something that is not there. Of Edwin Drood there is no more sign. He spies Petrus out at the dam, in his work overalls. It seems odd that the man has not yet reported to Lucy.

He strolls over, exchanges greetings. 'You must have heard, we had a big robbery on Wednesday while you were away.'

'Yes,' says Petrus, 'I heard. It is very bad, a very bad thing. But you are all right now.'

Is he all right? Is Lucy all right? Is Petrus asking a question? It does not sound like a question, but he cannot take it otherwise, not decently. The question is, what is the answer?

'I am alive,' he says. 'As long as one is alive one is all right, I suppose. So yes, I am all right.' He pauses, waits, allows a silence to develop, a silence which Petrus ought to fill with the next question: And how is Lucy? He is betrayed in his expectation. Admitting Petrus wishes to know how Lucy is, evidently Petrus does not believe David the proper source to inquire. 'Will Lucy go to the market tomorrow?' asks Petrus instead.

'I don't know.'

'Because she will lose her stall if she does not go,' says Petrus. 'Maybe.'

'Petrus wants to know if you are going to market tomorrow,' he informs Lucy. 'He is afraid you might lose your stall.'

'Why don't the two of you go,' she says. 'I don't feel up to it.'

'Are you sure? Getting out of this room may do you some good.' he offers, meekly.

She does not reply. She would rather hide her face, and he knows why. Because of the disgrace. Because of the shame. That is what their visitors have achieved; that is what they have done to this confident, modern young lesbian, this great equalitarian, this animal lover. This child. The girl without a soul is now bereft also of face. She has no public visage that she can use in public places, not anymore. She now belongs in beds, cloistered inside rooms, kept behind doors, past gates and fences. Inside a fortress, outside of the world, a fortress in a fortress in a fortress, her thoughts within her body within the cage. Well out of wind and sunlight, rain and thunderstorm.

Like a worm in a cocoon, like a snake shedding its skin, his daughter, his child is finally separating from the body he has given her, he and her mother both. The body they had tried to give her that she never quite accepted, that she never quite fit. The body politic, twenty six centuries of mostly unbroken tradition, with all the gaps filled smooth by the bodies of countless women, so one could walk over the whole length, one splendid bridge from Thales in Miletus to Chomsky in Philadelphia. Is this death, then, is he watching his only remaining hope die ? Will she emerge ? Women are not like thoughts, at all, he tries to comfort himself. Women will re-emerge, he prays in himself, to himself, softly. Women re-emerge. On the ashes of violated bodies of girls, women emerge.

Like an oil stain the story is spreading across the very liquid district. Carried by the water of speech, not her story to spread but theirs. They are the tellers of her story ; she is the object of their story. They are the owners of the story of how they put her in her place, the story of how they showed her what a woman was for, the story of Lucy the boervrou and her life in Africa. Her history, her personal history. How she took it, how she hurt with it, how she squirmed with it, how she begged for it. Why not ? He thinks, again, of Melani. The black one. Did the white one go the same way as the black one ? Did she go soft, did she go limp but helpful, raising her shoulders and her hips to ease them access ?

With his one eye and his white skullcap, he has his own measure of shyness about showing himself in public. But for Lucy's sake he goes through with the market business, sitting beside Petrus at the stall, enduring the stares of the curious, responding politely to those friends of Lucy's who choose to commiserate. 'Yes, we lost a car,' he says. 'And the dogs, of course, all but one. No, my daughter is fine, just not feeling well today. No, we are not hopeful, the police are overstretched, as I'm sure you know. Yes, I'll be sure to tell her.'

He reads their story as reported in the Herald. Unknown assailants the men are called. 'Three unknown assailants have attacked Ms Lucy Lurie and her elderly father on their smallholding outside Salem, making off with clothes, electronic goods and a firearm. In a bizarre twist, the robbers also shot and killed six watchdogs before escaping in a 1993 Toyota Corolla, registration CA 507644. Mr Lurie, who received light injuries during the attack, was treated at Settlers Hospital and discharged.'

David Lurie, who is no longer a professor, also is no longer a man. It used to be that a story would read 'David Lurie and his daughter, Lucy', not so very long ago. Nowadays the story reads 'Lucy Lurie and her elderly father.' He does not need a name ; there are no protests, no "WAR activists" to "verbally spar" with, the perpetrators aren't alledged and don't get surrounded by a mob of curious young women that are unsure of spelling but certain of the facts of life, as they perceive them, of what's what and who's who and where it's all headed. Was she raped ?

The question jolts him, painfully, body responding to an absent but immense charge of nervous electricity. He is glad that no connection is made between the victim, elderly father of Ms Lurie and the man, David Lurie, disciple of nature poet William Wordsworth, servant of Eros and until recently also professor at the Cape Technical University. As for the actual trading, there is little for him to do. Petrus is the one who swiftly and efficiently lays out their wares, the one who knows the prices, takes the money, makes the change. Petrus is in fact the one who does the work, while he sits and warms his hands. He does not presume to give Petrus orders, he has not the slightest expectation that Petrus would obey them if he did, and he has no idea what he should bid him do in any case. A trinity, expanded from a quiet duality. Petrus does what needs to be done, and that is that.

Nevertheless, their takings are down: less than two Bitcents. The reason is Lucy's absence, no doubt about that. Boxes of flowers, bags of vegetables have to be loaded back into the kombi. Petrus shakes his head. 'Not good,' he says.

This strange community, if one can call it that, this strange beast, ill shod, uncomprehending agglutination of black men and women is not merely disinterested in the fate of animals. Anywhere else within "the Realm" as it is pompously called, anywhere else in "the Commonwealth", once "Empire", that mythical place "beyond the seas" wherein Churchill proposed not so long ago the font of carrying on the struggle endlessly lies, the victim's produce would have been entirely sold out. It is not much to think -- the woman is not here, she is maybe ill, she is maybe in bed, I will buy a potato. I will buy a flower, not to send it to her, no need to go that far. To feed it to the goats, to throw it in the wind, to float it away on the river. But no, not in Africa.

Anywhere else but here. Or in India. Or anywhere else. In any other part of the colonial empire except for the capitol, in fact. Thousands and thousands of men, poor, desperate, leaving behind women in need and children in danger, "armed by the British Fleet", that ancient institution principally famous for kidnappings and white slavery, went to France, when to the beaches, over the seas and oceans, to defend "their" island, whatever the cost may be. The cost was high enough, the island, once defended, quickly forgot about them all. The police is stretched thin, of course. He had an older brother, a young man who never came back, an older brother whom he never met. Had that young man never left, would the police still be stretched thin today ?

As yet Petrus has offered no explanation for his absence. Petrus has the right to come and go as he wishes, apparently, these days. Whether he has such right or not, he exercises it. He is entitled to his silence, perhaps, but whether entitled or not he is in fact silent. Yet questions remain. Does Petrus know who the strangers were? Was it because of some word Petrus let drop that they made Lucy their target rather than, say, Ettinger? Did Petrus know in advance what they were planning? In the old days one could have had it out with Petrus. In the old days one could have had it out to the extent of losing one's temper, beating him black and blue then sending him rolling down the hill. Graciously allowing any other of the indistinct crowd to eagerly eat up his place. But though Petrus is paid a wage, and allowed to make his nest on the property, Petrus is no longer, strictly speaking, hired help.

It is hard to say what Petrus is, strictly speaking. The word that seems to serve best, however, is neighbour. Petrus is a neighbour who at present happens to sell his labour, because that is what suits him. He sells his labour under contract, unwritten contract, and that contract makes no provision for dismissal on grounds of suspicion. It is a new world they live in, he and Lucy and Petrus. Petrus knows it, and he knows it, and Petrus knows that he knows it.

On to the next chapter, "In spite of all that..."

« Disgrace - Before they set off

Disgrace - In spite of all that »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Saturday, 31 December, Year 8 d.Tr.