Rick Harsch's Blog, page 10

Letters from Paul

Source: Letters from Paul

Kramberger, to the end

Chapter Forty

Captive Learners

 

 

This was also found in his hotel room, the last correspondence from his editor.

Todd, this is all I could find, and really the last help you’ll get from me if you don’t explain yourself and all this delay. The promise of a bombshell would be more convincing if you were in Minsk.

I might add that for his last few days at the hotel that he was hogging the internet. The hotel has but one computer for its guests.

 

From the notes of Dr. Zachary Biedermeyer, former head of St. Bonaventure University dept. of zoology:

 

Seven bonobos kept at the Cincinnati zoo in conditions as near as possible to those in the wild; in fact, perhaps somewhat better—this is wild speculation, of course—in that no bombing could be heard from the environments; seven bonobos were studied by our team in the late 1960s without a grant, the studies conducted by myself and a few diligent, passionate graduate students, none of whom, unfortunately, have pursued primatology. Over the course of several years and several HUNDRED interviews with these bonobos, all but one of which survived our experiment (inexplicably, one female we called Anastasia hurled herself against the bars of our interview room until unconscious, lapsed into a coma and finally died. I have only the notes of my student, Flora Manganez, to go on, but nothing in her notes provides an explanation for the outburst, which occurred just after Ms. Manganez had written: ‘I have tried to signal to Ana that today’s session will be without physical contact’.

Extensive communication with the remaining six bonobos–Marc, Ellie, Uhuru, Zachary, Toby, and Furry Elise—led us to arrive at a number of conclusions, not least of which is that for the bonobo formal human speech is a soporific. Most graphically, as Churchill dramatically droned ‘We will never surrender…’ all six nodded off, though in the case of both Z and FE the behaviour appeared to have been imitative (if not outright mocking…of whom? Of us? Of Churchill? Of their companions?) Countless further examples are enumerated in the index, most notably the apparent group laughter at a speech by the American president John F. Kennedy in which he asks not what the country can do for you but what you can do for your country. Radical theorists have noted the temporal proximity of that date to the assassination of Lumumba, but we have (really) of course no reason to pursue this line of reasoning. Instead, we conclude again that the bonobo has no time for the aural inanities (their phrase, arrived at through established codes and some independent deduction of my own) of formal speech, no matter the content, the depth of conviction, the hand gestures harkening back to past gestures, all of which are foreign to the bonobo…

…What then does this most linguistic of primates respond favorably to? Let us examine the limerick. We have absolute evidence that though the bonobo is capable of communicating through an intricate array of symbols, he does not understand human speech word for word. Nonetheless there was a significant difference in the response to the ‘dirty’ limerick as opposed to the ‘clean’ limerick. For instance, There once was a man from Nantucket (you know how it goes…whose dick was so long he could suck it…) elicited laugher and much sexual hijinks (for lack of a better term), while, my personal favorite, I had lunch with the duchess of tea…only produced a reaction upon the emphasis of the word ‘fart’, whereupon as if a battle plan had been prepared, the apes gassified the laboratory to such an extent that study was postponed for a full three days, and my staff and myself were then forced to continue our study over a weekend, something of which the  bonobo seems to have no concept. Interestingly, the limerick ‘The ‘Horrible Whore of Lahore’ produced such mayhem of laughter and gross intergenerational sexuality that we were forced to suspend operation indefinitely. This apparent fondness for alliteration was underscored by many further examples that likewise led to such a ‘pleasing event’ despite rather different contexts (Kissinger kicked the kid until the kid was killed in Kilkenny).

Likewise, our subjects responded with intense positive agitation to the famous poem of Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky, indicating a fondness for, let me say poetically, salubrious word play and invention. In a clear mockery event, the apes feigned horror at beware, and genuine delight at calloo callay, and, further, a rapt silence at Twas brillig, etc., a mood setting classic of nonsense that suggested that to the bonobo sense and sound are linked more than word and mood.

Further, my experiment with pure rhyme, suggested by the response to limerick and the timely rhyming of Jabberwocky led me to test pure rhyme, having invented the following: Ham lamb beef ram dog frog hog, at which the subjects first exhibited intense pleasure through a solid hour of intensive unabating sexual activity including front to front sex, gg rubbing to the point of rubbed raw bleeding genitals, and the inclusion of all ages of ‘minors’ in all sexual acts. This simian orgy was followed by the most remarkable period of frustration in which the subjects clearly attempted to add to the rhyme yet could not but indicate the desired word—hundreds of hours watching the tape led me to determine that they simply wanted to hear agog or even, interestingly, perhaps Magog, yet their frustration leading to anger and the most horrific cacophony I finally shouted Clam!, at which point, though I had yet to realize I had added to the rhyme, they howled with laughter and a second orgy commenced.

The final experiment in this particular regard was a reading of Hamlet by one of my assistants, the aforesaid Ms. Manganez, which alternately held the apes rapt yet again, and led to a sort of choral cacophony that coincided astonishingly with moments in the play that rose above the stream of natural tension, whether positive or negative, so to speak. Two instances will suffice: the running through of Polonius led to a wild virtually scripted chanting (I theorize that they imitate the beat of jungle drums) as happened when Hamlet was first informed of the manner of the death of his father. The only inexplicable outburst occurred during the famous To be or no soliloquy, which, were I to go out on a limb, suggested impatience with Hamlet’s indecision.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Forty-one

Indaba: Simian Song

 

 

Somewhere deep in the jungle, and only I can hear the encroaching bombs…

 

Chimplifying the discourse:

 

Commence indaba the lubricious innocents are here

Defense of perimeters secure with howliest howlers

Hark! Hear that leopard roar harmlessly?

Stark improvement over rattlerguns

Owooooo! Big cat alarm: thank you Bobo.

How do you doooooo, pretty cat: to the trees.

Baby Bobo can you listen while you fondle

Maybe Hobo Bobo is apropared?

My thought is brained in strange terrain again:

Where did hobo bobo bonobo go?

There: in northern Balkania, southern Germania, central Insania

Dreadnought zeppelin nuee ardente

Juggernaut argonaut ergo naught

Cept violence, murder slaughter and rape is

Kept taboo.

Rape?

Aperape. To fuck without consent.

Who would not consent?

You would not consent if you knew their torturee methods.

Torture?

Scorcher torture bongee beaty bungee reaming

Wolf rape, wolf bite dwarf toss skinslice

 

(Chorus)

 

Bonobo Bobo: Bobo Bobo Bobo Bobo

Bobo Bobo Bobo Bobo

Bobo Bobo Bobo Bobo

Bobo Bobo Bobo Bobo

Bobo Bobo Bobo Bobo

BOBO BOBO BOBO BOBO BOBO BOBO BOBO BOBO

BOBO!

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Forty-two

Fuck the Polish Swimmer

 

 

                And now the final document. Fullmer made much of the fact that a Polish knight swam the Danube in full armor in retreat during the battle of Nicopolis in 1396. It’s the kind of fact that a prestidigitator of historical events comes across and since it is so astonishing, the fact that it is relevant to nothing he writes does not prevent him from including it in his columns; in fact, over his 13 year career with Political Sleeze he mentions the incident no less than 27 times.

In this bizarre document, the whole seems to posit the swimmer as the truth, the end truth, as it were, before his mind zings from the orbit of the document towards another certainty, and a rented car, an Opel, these days the top choice for renters in Europe, and sped toward Jurovski dol, the place of Kramberger’s assassination. I believe his deadly haste to arrive led to his accident, and hard-hearted as it may seem, released him from the captivity of an obsession gone mad, and so he died a relatively unknown, if highly respected in his ‘field’, expert on something.

The bottle, of course, was empty.

Carry on madman:

 

1396, Nicopolis

SWIMMERY, SWAMMERY, SWUMMERY

Lummoxery, flummoxery, or Christian dumb oxery?

 

I watched the best knights’ degeneration, deployed by madmen, stark raving fakers climbing the bubo-free peaks like fawns, while we in dungeons of armor carrying swords outweighing the dead—angry pricksall–leaving behind chickens, damsels, distress of diarrhetic infants, towns infarcted in giant coffins, ash from my ass: Cineraria Europa, anglegrinding lipsters lying for the latest heavenly erection of the babelous chicanery of soul’s night.

Hejnał! Your towns are shattered and fallow—lies! Corpses sit up flaming preternatural expartures of contagion leaping from rat to rat infiltrating jizz.

Hejnał! Bare your balls to god like El Cid slaughtering Mohammedan children floating from Gibraltar to Morocco.

Hejnał! Tatar arrows pass through throats thirsty for therianthropic thertainties and Bakelite telephones.

Hejnał! Expel the foreigner if ye thinks ye can finger him out with yer finger in yer ass with yer Beowulf and Bible.

Hejnał! Unshowered arrayed cross shaven plains in armor burning under campaign season sun, terrified terrorers awaiting Turk terrors: Bashee Bazooks! Gadzooks!

Hejnał! To be busted by ball yataghan and again.

Hejnał! This de Coucey coursy of coursee a valley of death unpurgatorial march of knight as if in dreams spawned by nightmare of dark angelic monks pissing cock after cock to nonpareil translucent nuns shuddering orgasm taroted spasm of vision of dervish leaping toward Poles, Franks, Gauls—gall adamantine, a wall of nebulo god-drunken savagery illuminating Balkan Time,

Scrotal stupidity of Gaul, grabass Magyar decimatory feuds til

dawn, swine sottery on foot on horseback,

riverfront back and hail ye of steelhead rawhide, ne: un-blinking

raptured eyes, stunned anoon anonanonanon, three visitations

in the boring splintered sucks of knightsoul delirium Frankly

chichirevelry for king and kind without mind,

Hejnał! Strappeezed themselves to crosses for the endless ride from Buddha to poxypest on trampolines

until the roil of shpiels like children brought

them schtuddering haltslack and scattered paper shitcannedplan

devoid of goitery, spoilery thus unfearing despite Bazoo

Hejnał! Stanking knights all subcutaneous zeal at riverford

floating rafts they stood lancetly loutish, pale

desolation within tincans sniffing the crack

of ass lusting headbox

Hejnał! Seventy hours from bank to

muck to bluff to backview to reasonlost to the unborn

midge,

lost battalian’s plutonium odors convertorialists humping

peasants who jumped off straw roofs on fire

entire in spate from the blue danoob,

Oh! to be torn twixt love and duty

what of all this leader disputy

what if I lose my eyeballs too…

whose the buffoon?

Eye: buttholes engorging total mace all seven

hundred miles ebullient snake-eyes, meat for the

cathedrals spermed on the Wallachian,

Hejnał! Vanish assended into oblačery heaven leaving a

vapory tracery unambigague fever hardening frantic

pitiless Gaul,

stuffing Balkan fruits, plums and apples into codpieces

for the time-grinding siege ahead across seas of dice,

waves of ejaculate steins on foot on horseback

Hejnał! Wondery in rounds sung at midnight making Magyar merry

wanderwont wearywarts

For broken tents

Hejnał! Sit sotten riders on oxcarts oxcarts oxcarts

aflame game uncle lend me your match

landbound meteoric

O grandees farter night

Hejnał! Giant cat a study

a-mornins plots Pow! Sank John

across a swamp and Slup!

cabal Anglais afound afeared a Frank figgered the fraud

Hejnał! Order! Be discrete in seeking vivisecting angles if set

your sect on angels

Hejnał! and all for one madness ecstatic cannibal Christers

aclustered ex-cloister bareskin in steel

Hejnał! Jump in limp aubergines

Turk figurines in your pestoral dreams

in Spain!

O the pain in Spain!

Hejnał! Lunge hungrily loathsome in rupture slicing jowls

or sacks or saps

you followed brilliantined Israelites bogus miles

convert invert about armhair and refurbishing empty cells

with a  leaky roof at that

and so on to vulgar bulgarlandia

Hejnał! Harry’s tic disappeared when John went drown

leaving behind shadows and hungaree and the sword, the halberd, VOLANT!

piss

breast on a plate with coffee

Hejnał! horsemanely on the plane

Hejnał! rutten wheels groak skidways deeper to slow the

march as knights row boatic synchronshiny sunshunned in

clanketly hilarity for laster morsels of mortals

one sank without a clank: trade-off

Hejnał!

What? Hark! FUCK THE POLISH SWIMMER!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter forty-three

Bidding is, After All, Bidding

 

FUCKING JUDAS!

 

bloodstains on page

 

exeunt, I suppose

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter forty-four

Life Goes On

 

 

I think the worst aspect of the tragedy is that Todd Fullmer never got to see the eviscerated corpse of Mandrake Pizdamonavić on the altar of Kramberger’s last stand. You do, do you? What a clever fucking faux sentiment: he never even knew Pizdamonavić existed, remember? How did you even get this job? What a trite—

Yes, in fact I do, even god loves a good quick garotting…I’ll be damned–look at that little car.

Todd Fullmer often pondered but never explored in print the effects of the assassinations that obsessed him. Of intensemost banality was the thought of how life just goes on, life as a log in a Conrad flood. What matter the manner of Stambulov’s death, what of that marvelous dismemberment? What of what Fullmer called the Latins of little ado? Kennedy’s death did not prevent an additional million Vietnamese deaths. Kramberger’s death did not disturb the placid dragons of Ljubljana, a city quite without the capacity for, let’s conjugate some Slovene here, zloveščitude; Ljubljana may be the least sinister capitol city in the world. And all the reporters of Minsk? Reported on, them that lived.

So perhaps for those who know his story, those who survive him, most poignant is the family in the station wagon, an old paneled American affair, husband driving, mother beside, three freckled red heads with elongated necks gawking at the same goddamn countryside that lingers by every time they have to go to the fucking home in Maribor to see Grandpa, who recognizes none of them and never speaks, though the doctor believes him capable, gawking like meerkats, yet not spotting the accordion car up against the tree as they all looked right on the curve, and yet each spotting just on the fringe of the road a tiny automobile, going their way, apparently under its own power, but far too small to make good time.

‘Look at that car.’

The middle meerkat looked back just in time to make it out: 65 GTO

 

 

 

Epilogue

Warning?

 

Beltch and Obscure are also dead

And no kind bullet to the head

Obscure belched and hemorrhaged

Mack ‘obscured’ for protests pledged

Both, they say, excessively bled

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kramberger with Monkey, Erazemattazzem, ch. 38, 39

We here near the thematic simpanzeree and the veering of the lingo frankly: Our fearless translators merely said there are chapters here we cannot translate properly. So they translated them improperly, but printed the English as an afterword of sorts. The three chapters in question are 39, which for the reason will be plain, 41, which makes use of the rhyming technique of ancient Tamil poetry, and 42 which riffs Ginsberg’s Howl in crusader times. But where is the narration now and who hallucy who? That’s the most quaint of cryptic hints.

Chapter thirty-eight

Going Apeshit

 

 

“Sex occurs in virtually all partner combinations and in a unique variety of positions” and among other behaviours bonobos regularly engage in homosexual sex, face-to-face mating, and masturbation. Sex has many uses other than reproduction: for pleasure, for resolving tensions over food, and as an alternative to confrontation. (De Waal theorises that the origins of these traits lie in the importance of avoiding infanticide: while infanticide is a common cause of death for chimpanzee infants, it seems to be non-existent in bonobos.)

 

—Danny Yee, reviewing Frances De Waal’s Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape

 

That’s not an epitaph, friends, and if you really want to understand the tragedy that was Todd Fullmer, you have to follow his mind-frenzy right off the fucking canopy into the abyss.

The name of the hotel in Postojna, a town boasting the ugliest micro-climate in Slovenija, a town of barren hill surrounds, and scrub flats, and that ugliest of all mountains Nanos, almost ‘no nose’ yet looking like nothing if not a goddamn nose of Easter Island, only bigger, was MyMoon, just like that, in English. MyMoon.

Fullmer was exhausted by the time he got there, after hours at the castle, where nothing untoward happened, even if Fullmer had to sit and wait out an alien vertigo, and not just after looking down into the stream from Erazem’s dining room window, three times.  He was exhausted. The effortless mental exercise of piecing together puzzling events had acquired a new strain, a grandiose theme that weighed far more than it appeared, a sort of Nanosian plot beyond the edge of reason, obscured by crisp clean thin air…if only it could be lifted.

Poor fucker.

And then the last thing he needed: at the MyMoon shank, the only English reading was an old National Geographic. He must have read that Danny Yee paragraph fifty times while the fižol juha (bean soup) cooled.

On the 75th read, he opened the bottle from Z.

Later, he would recall the second shot, the decision to take the third upstairs, and the difficulty breaking away from the text, seeing himself ‘back then’ like caramel man, some of the eye actually stuck to the print. And then opening the bottle, pouring a healthy

serving into your classic hotel glass—probably near three deci.

The next 10 to 20 hours were lost to dream, hallucination, and a sad, Jamesian certainty of discovery and vital truth. William James was dreaming the same thing every night, waking with a start, as they say, and it would be, I suppose, but for his going back to sleep so that he woke with the hangover of a man who spent the last 9 hours in the library following a false lead. The answer was simple: keep pencil and paper by the bed, write this Truth down as soon as he wakes up. The dream came as expected the first night the pencil and paper awaited. The next morning James saw what he had written:

Higamous hogamous, woman is monogamous

Hogomous, higomaous man is polygamous.

The effect on Fullmer wore off gradually, as he sat on the edge of his bed holding an invisible cantaloupe, turning it in his hands, chanting: ‘Bobo, bobo, bobo…’–for an hour!

Flashes of the dreams/hallucinations worked on him all day next day. Monkeys. Vaginas. Bullets. Mutton. Caves. He milled about the hotel lobby and restaurant and bar, and not until sleepy time did he return to the bottle and his room.

The following day was virtually a mirror of the first. Fullmer knew something important was happening. And he knew about James.

The rest follows in the next chapters, and grieve not should it appear a grotesque bloodwormblob of a mind torn open. I don’t know how much he wrote at which time, but there are distinct sections. And I don’t know if he wrote these sections in long stretches. Hell, you know crazy folks; he might have been wide awake the whole time. Certainly he left no šlivović behind.

Chapter thirty-nine

Somewhere Valvasorry

 

Painfully priapic, the prickly pallbearer of paltry pigballs pranced apelikely impudent to the enemy camp spilling soup of sweinbeutel swishing upsides the cauldron only a canny homunculus could carry yet not calm.

Grab the dwarf! cried Ravbar.

Seventeen steaming stews of stinking stones astirring, leave me be, responded the pinioned puny spooner.

Seventeen? Queried Ravbar. And they make you to carry each?

Who be more worthy than the worthlessmost. Leave me be.

Release the dwarf! Ravbar reconsidered without rancour.

And the dwarf dwarfwaddled off and up up up for the castle was high in the mist opacitating the cavemouth.

O dragsome winter, we spew, we spray, day after day no one to slay. They do not come, they do not go, yet happy they feast whilst we fam in snow.

Zakaj means why and we don’t know.

Down again comethe dwarf from fog to fro, steaming cauldron sizzling path through snow. Pigballs for the enemy, we beseech the besiegers lest your absence make us fonder of heart, so eat hearty and I will return sixteen times more that all may sup soup, announced the dwarf.

Beutel bearded swillagery slap soaked and sweating soup—and sated—Ravbar rapped wood spoons upon heads left and right.

Vexmani, Sordzwiller: what thinks ye if brains be now up arisen aloft of bowels?

Two thugly tholdiers eyesidled as if two shots apiece rattling the volant. Peace alist.

What! Sons of Magyar mutts! Mute! Like as if a pigball be resided in my beard.

And so it is lord, Vexmani vouched unsafe.

So? Then ye (Sordzwiller), cowardly pusillanigist, take a bite of my beard yet let not hair be besnagged in yer teeth if ye want not be tied and tossed in treacherously trickly torrent subterr—rain yet fed–stream legend states the frigidmost fore of the Frigidus.

Uncomely comedy, puerile punishment; onlookers’ levity fear-veiled: stunishment.

Will swallow, Sordz, will?

As if apple of Adam shook free by burry from tree in hurry. Descent assent!

Good, now we proceed forth aheadward. What have we glained of dwarf terrain? Wherefrom the midge?

A rapist, lord, captured in yon woods or where near woods be not. From east travelling west.

(Yes! I fucked a child! She was my size!)

(Hello!)

Captured? Captured so captive. Captivating. Could cap this crap.

We cudgel the cuddly cunt for revenge?

Simpletons! Anglegrinders! Fartnoise of gaseous thinks…It stinks! Crapulous cohorts besmirch me no more. Bastards! We bridge the midge. Here to yon-there. Espy me espionage engenderment? Erase Erazem eagerly dwarf would to escape these woods. Soft now: when in the course of human events Triestine soldiers freeze in tents, intense intents needs be tendered timely toward abfahrt and aimly bamboozlery for to finally finish off the menemy. Or if nought be nary but a one, Erazem and vamoose.

Vamoose?

Viennese. Spoken with contempt for to valorize the vouchfor.

Meaning—

He knoweth not what but beget and begone.

Truth be told. Miracle behold. Fargonetooth, ye understood your Lord. Bote a yoos guys.

Bugeared smiles of teethgapes ate the night’s frosty air.

On abouts the last dish deliver we nab said dwarf and praytell he will tell what is to tell and we then send Erazem to dark darkly hell. Said Sordzwiller.

Meanwhile back in the castle…his tormentual soul all embrassle, Prince Erazem brooded with gloombeglommed glee over goatgut. Behind him on the wall his portrait with two wolves in all, sat erect and stout Otto II and Lazar, oblivious in portrait and life to sarcasm and strife, yet the dour grandeur of the Prince exceedeth the portratoor’s normal tour of subject, for his grim begrizzled exceemal grunge, whirlpooled eyes of vision notwithstanding a man of his standing. All in all, and whatall if that not all, an accurate portrait, for this prince of men above his men in pain had one mellow plaint, for he knew well that men of kith and ken were naught but men and men were naught but beast endenned. His den.

Bruno anglegrinded Baba the Wench into the baldspotting corner as was his want and her wish it won’t, whilst his other loyal grum, Babić sported the dwarf outboundward with buskin in buttskin—as was his want.

(another gherkin in my jerkin)

Mutterith Erazem into his gizzard golaž, the dwarf will betray me. Bruno will deny me. Babić will weep falls of falsity over my fall—slap slobbery syphilism—here in my sylvan crepuscularium. And that is not all. Goat in gut maketh me groan, good god I am engorged yet foreget me meal not, for I am fully filled and the lower of the bowels beltray me. I must evacuate yet I feels eviscerate. A drum for a tum. I needs be oiled. Seven days brez kaka. Tis not natural. I shit you not and I shit not. O groaning guttering gut, sing to me of release and lightening of geese. Ja, twas geese yesterday. O fault be not mine, but I divine the betrayal of surcease of blackmail, and turning of coat I foresee Bruno on boat in yon Adriat Sea with Babiči cock going pee, foregone and forgot, Prince Erazem is not an historical figure to be.

How far is Ravbar? A turd up his nose, a Viennese cure, outfoxed him I have, but his plight is a spur to my generosity and gall, a stone is his pall, I bear him a year, his weakness is mirth for the free man who so near bringeth down dozens of deer. Venison in plenison, I feed my foe, yet ask him to leave and the answer is no…I guess I behaved badly in Veen out of my natural spleen…A turd to the Lord a turd to his men, who wake up enturded to smell it again. Such is the way after drunken fray. Like it or not a turd is your snot. And my best, yest, the best of my men, pardon if mention Bruno and Babić again, yet back then they were with me, no dreams of the sea, a permanent place in Ostro-phallocracy. Dipships, dolts, damn dung dangerees, turning their coats for the promise of sea. Ravbar will roast them in Vipava vallee.

Aye but the dwarf, from where did he spring?

Good lord! Is such pallor of mien and demeanor in our lord of the manor such as to beglory our well-crafted banner?

Ja! Suck not a thumb what wouldst befit up yer bum.

Even apt question from where springeth dwarf ill-betimed for the dwarf sprungst now forth.

Ravbar to the dwarf said: but two names may have thee, one be slave and t’other be free. Slave to Erazem or free made by me.

Something I’ve thought, said the dwarf to the men, something I’ve thought of again and again. But as I am a dwarf and great lord is thee tis not natural eye to eye for us be. Have these brutes put me aground.

A point there is made. Sordzwiller, Vexmani, gentlemen knights, diselevate the guest, fear not flight til behest.

Truer woo of word hast ne’er been spoke, for I have up my hump for Erazem one joke.

A joke! Meanst thou plan?

A mean plan yet a joke.

Feasible?

And pleasable.

This not be funnery?

Nay, stunnery if accurate gunnery.

High swinery?

Assuming cannonic refinery.

We have the balls!

I’ll let that pass.

He means can—

Speak not lest ye be broken. Dwarfspeak.

Hearty laughter forged a gorge to rising, whereupon the midge made in ape mode a lightning leap to Vex and Sordz, gibbonging their heads like as if gongly gourds. They fell to flat, by nature groped up on all fours, vertiginous and vomitus, weltanschauungs ne’er to be as before.

Dwarf or monkey be ye be?

I be exhausted with midge mirth that strength of swallowing insult gassed in me and blew as a fructivourous fart, a new ardence.  Amends if necessary.

Nay, tis good for the goonery of me gang. Ha! Fructivorous indeed, I shall not insult thee. Sordzwiller, Vexmani, eradicate eructification and be gone. Now, mitey midge, may we proceed forth ahead ravnostly? If I be clarified ye be calamitously, nay, callously, crapped upon by Earitable Erazem. Story. Clap clap.

Aye, most downtroddenly donned a dingbat and shitshat, tossed here, tossed there, wrastling wroom and wolf’s lair, cookpot steamed and buttocks reamed, anglegrinded by hound (wolf) and nightly bound (Babić), slapt round, face forced in shit on ground, ‘Toss me the midge, ha ha, dropped him’ til bones be sore and bruise galore—subtile jokery, nothing more. Ha! I have a plan. Yet only one man needs pay for this midi-evil play.

Might I intrude a word regarding this lord of a turd? Hast he a kennel of cattle, a den of deer, a goatroom of goats? How does he feed us, us besieging unfortunate hapless harriers, bravely bearing the barriestmost of barriers, castle on high above gorge before cave, get him the Veen’s said, make of him a slave or cadaver, take him take him, no what or no matter. Tis done, said I in my ignoble ignorammy, my army is strong and my fire is flammy. Yet a day’s march we make this castle to take and chagrin is our meet when we find wherein is he in. Bombs and bazoodles, brimstones and brass, yet Erazem laughs and says kiss my ass. A fondness developed, I grant, him for me yet not without oppositely. A turdstuffer yes, a violent turk, but what of this besiegement, what the fuck will work?  As a man, is he, is he different from me?

About that we will see.

Nay, Dwarf, you are safe if I can trust thee. Pray answer.

High above, in the forest, a wind starts like a mad fart and blows down to the sea, from alpinic cold through Vipava vallee. Up here we are under unsuspecting are ye, up here we are still under some high forestry. Centuries pass, millenia flee, the Roman the Goth the Venezian armees, til you and your men and all stick to vallee whilst the autochthon and local live as previously, in cave mouth, on hilltop, and if necessary, in alpinic slope in time of hungree.

Riddle me not, for I may not patient be. Riddle me not, I am unlettered, you see.

A cave is a hole and a hole is a cave, but a hole in its whole is not a cave if you brave the ascent to top where wild animal roam free—until they meet arrows of Erazem whilst trying to flee (and full of fleas they be). You see? A vast panoply of game, a wild menagerie. Where? Up there? (I forgot bear.) Don’t look you won’t see, but the forest is vast, believe you in me. Yet Erazem is clever, the most clever of men, eventually Ravbar will kindle his ken, so here we have the dwarf: a purpose for me! A narrower crevasse, further in, further in, and here’s his story: ‘When I was a child I chased after a viper what wouldst flee until lodged deep in a cleft, hissing and pissing and hoping I’d left, but a stick I grabbed and poked that vipee, poked him stoked him to bring him to me, but he hissed and he pissed and I skewered him straight, when I figured his brain defect for him it was late. So you see dwarfly dicker, what I need of thee, to explore every crevasse to find one enough agape to allow an escape from this perpetual fartaround with Ravbar and his Triestineree.’ Otto II, wolf one, nibbled me foot to foot eating cheese, Lazar, wolf two, sniffed and gnawed my well stuffed, overpawed codpiece, nearing that flare of flesh that is reason to be, if crawling with fleas. Yet, lord, it is true escape is possiblee, escape thirteen kilometers to Vipava vallee, the river it runs, it runs I suspect from Erazem’s folly, it runs thirteen kilos underground, don’t you see, but midge is my size, and dwarf is my fate, and cleft after cleft Erazem would send me up viperlyate, til lodged under Nanos, til crevassed and harassed as his childhood viper, to  poked by stick after stick as if neither human nor beast, no more of a man that burnt pig at a feast—and that is not tossed in to engrabulate the tale, for many a night I slept or did not suspended over a pail—cookpot, really, a holy for my family, cookpot, the symbol of janissary—but that’s another tale. The time is nigh for Erazem shall send me up high, up high methinks to die. Do you see?

O Frigidus Midgidus, I feel for thee, but nought make it nought, for I have but one enduree: to reduce Erazem to obediencey.

Nay, he will die, he will die, don’t you see, capture his host, his spectre, his ghost, is but insane fantasy, but capture his corpse, now that I can see. Nay, that I promise thee. Yet the time to act is nigh, for his diet and contumely have combined to block his intestinery. The lord can’t shit, yet shit he much must, and so does he sit for hours on yon pottery.

Yon?

Yon levo, left, separate so no stinkery, I am surprised you surmised not this cave anatomy.

That? That there? That there is…That there is a…That there is a toity? That there is a toity trap?

Trap indeed. Godspeed bungstuffed tough. Ye shall be buried heavier than yer size merits, fodder for cannons, cannons that ferret yer throne as you sit there alone, pushing and grunting, cursing gravity, groaning and moaning bemoaning your gravidy. The great man hath not shat for a week. Next vacation Erazem will be away for hours, suffering a buffeting from the meat he devours at speed in such haste as if afraid it will waste and yet tis his waist where roast like rest most. Ah, shot on the pot, his kingdom for a turd will be his last word, oh the curses that byzantine cavemaze to the ears of his befeared. Laugh not lest ye be flushed or gorgethrown. Now I leave you, Erazem begrieve you not, just be sure a straight shot. When he goeth to pot a room on same level—there with windows beveled, a flag I will post and the shitter bedeviled, the toity engrevelled and this siege be not, your liege.

Meanwhile, back in the castle…Erazem with intestines did wrassle still with bowels encrusted with last week’s swill, his temper thwarted by philosophy, looking inward he did not see dreck but betrayeree.

Poor bastard.

Human nature being a thing fickle, a leader who can crap naught, not even a trickle, balls gigantic, his inwardly frantic gastritial pain to subordinates overly plain so that each sought what each could gain if this battle and game was destined to turn out the same as previous imperial hijinkery, they whispered gaseous high stinkery treasonous ass-savings while Babić anglegrinded Baba in the corner.

The dwarf will betray me.

Bruno will deny me.

Anglegrinder Babić will anglegrind to Ravbar and himself be anglegrinded til death does its part.

My kingdom for a turd, he said, and with that word he wandered toward his toiletour fate, his bowels overriding his dwarf-fear. Alas, too late to prevent the shenanigans of that midgety gent who burned a candle in the room of the wolves and place a flag in the window to show Ravbar it was time to let go the cannons.

Meanwhile on the pot, the shit was there but would not descend to ravine as if mere to vex the spleen of the lord of the secret riverrine, Erazem instinctualizing gravity undiscovered yet function not yet a theory debunktual plugs metaphorical dog turds into the nose of a devilish god: My kingdom for a turd! is heard through byzantine passages where linger underlings quiet, afraid even to sing, perhaps the midge wouldst crawl up rectum with trowel to dislodge the blockage in byzantine bowel: O I wouldst rather be blasted from this paradise double-crossed by treacherous nature, stomach betraying, all is lost, for eventual logic leads to giant bag of shit if not soon dislogic…Die, die, I would rather die…Hark, they are at it again, a cannon blasts—when will these men I offer live it up give it up, pain again, breath now shitty, a lord a genius on the pot of self pity—Hark!

And the toity was no more.

Kramberger with Monkey, Ch. 34-37

Chapter Thirty-Four

Nobody Likes a Master Stylist

At dawn as they headed out to the fields they found him, a bent black shape slumped against a tree. Just as the hops were tied to their posts, he was tied to his. Marko Medved first identified the odd shape as that of a man, and his predator eyes, honed by years drinking his own pelinkovec on the balcony watching for an event to approach his horizon. He covered his wife’s eyes. ‘This is something you must never see,’ he told Ljudmilla with great portent. ‘You mean that dead guy?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Okay husband, I will return home and prepare a vat of soup for our lunch.’ So she saw him, all right, but she didn’t see the black stain that had run from his seed source to form a delta of death on the fecund earth before him; nor would she ever know that the pipe in his mouth was not a pipe, but his own penis.

The police had no clues, not even to his identity. He had been spotted in Celje, and only one man at the tavern called the Dvojina Dolfe was found who had spoken with him. ‘He said he was a master stylist. I don’t remember anything else.’

Chapter Thirty-Five

He Never Writes, He Never Calls

You remember the one about the nun raped by the gorilla in Central Park?

Yeah, I never knew why it had to be Central Park. Wouldn’t it be better if it started with a gorilla escaping from a zoo?

Sure, probably, but it’s that damn punch line, that stupid fucking punch line that gets to me every time.

Me too.

Who visits her in the hospital?

Depends who’s telling the joke. I like it being the Mother Superior.

Right. I like it being a psychiatrist called in by the Mother Superior after several months of lingering despondency.

Yeah, that’s good.

So then what?

Well, he simply says I know you’ve been through a hell of a trauma, but a long time has passed, and you refuse to speak, you hardly eat. We want to help you, but you have to begin to open up, at least a little. She lays there silently. Can you put into words what’s bothering you? And she turns to the shrink, tears in her eyes, and says, He never writes, he never calls.

Funny as hell. Gets me every time.

He never writes, he never calls. God, I love it.

Why’d they have us put it here?

Don’t know.

Can you indulge in conjecture?

Safety in numbers, though at this point…

That last one was pretty gruesome.

The man over-reached, why fret?

True enough, but it was pretty gruesome.

So is this bit.

Among the worst.

Like Stambulov, only apparently not politically motivated.

Very funny.

Well.

Anyway, who keeps a gorilla for a pet?

Dead transvestites, as far as we know.

But in Ljubljana of all places?

And in Ljubljana’s high places.

Talk about quashing an investigation.

So what do we know?

Famous surgeon, worked on the elites, managed to keep a pet gorilla for a few years without but a few in her circle finding out. Hopefully a smaller circle engaged in sexual intercourse with the gorilla while it was drugged, some even—

Not so willing like the one in the joke…

I love that joke.

Yeah.

So the autopsy showed signs of remarkable sadism, not only the enlarged and torn rectum and torn tunnel, but badly healed broken bones. Some really sick shit was going on.

And that old report about the gorilla attacking a young girl—

Who irony of ironies is now a nun.

It says right in the report, his giant thing, something like that. Pink of course. The power of pink when it’s not where things should be pink. I mean, not that the penis itself was in the wrong place…

Right, anyway, now that’s our gorilla from the joke.

Unproven, little speculated on, but yes, it would seem so.

Motivation?

Well, I think we know the gorilla’s.

The doctor. Are we to accept that it’s merely another instance of human perversity? Is that acceptable?

It happened. The only thing is, to start with, the doctor is a woman who thinks she should have been a man. That alone is either fucking nuts—

I like that.

Yeah, me too. Where was I?

Nuts.

Maybe its nuts enough to be a woman and think you should be a man. It stands to reason that someone with such feelings would just become a lesbian. Why, if a sort of alteration of nature, further alter your nature?

Good point.

But she does, probably because at the time a few famous cases existed. In a little way, so to speak, it was the thing to do. So she gets her cock—

From a factory and a surgeon, not a gorilla.

Funny.

I am, believe it or not—I know we have to get this done—I am on the verge of fucking pissing myself.

All right, let’s finish quick. But the cock is an early model and…

No, no, fine, get it out of your system…

Ready?

Think—

Look, now you’re spitting up.

Okay, okay, I got it. Control, I got control. But a dollop of piss actually did come out.

That may be for the best. In our circumstance little we do can be considered odd.

In comparison.

Nothing compares. But the prosthesis didn’t work, no better than an elongated limp penis. It was supposed to work, so it didn’t have proper…stiffness. So the theory is she is remarkably frustrated, and the leap from there to what she did is a fucking chasm, a broad and hideous fucking chasm, onto this side of which we must remain far from the edge.

You said it.

Police report?

Neighbors heard banging. Presumably she was already dead, but the gorilla was definitely going to have his fun. When the cops finally arrived—it wasn’t reported as an emergency—it was quiet, so they knocked. They knew whose house it was. They were about to walk away when they heard something knocked over in the garage, a bicycle I think. The door was unlocked. They walked in, saw blood and limbs everywhere, the bitch was fucking skull flensed, not a typical gorilla maneuver—even some toes and fingers were bit off and spit out. Her tongue was half torn out, leading to the belief that the gorilla showed aggression—he woke up, perhaps having grown too used to the usual dose—she began to scream, he went after her tongue. The gorilla had a very minor bite mark on his right hand. And he was right handed. So the cops see this, and a fucking gorilla—imagine the surprise—

Right, just like the nun in the joke.

Absolutely. They see this contrite giant ancestor having backed into a corner, knocking over a bicycle—he heard them outside and assumed they were coming in after him. He was finished, ready to turn himself in, but the cops were in a state of grievous alarm, shock, and they emptied their revolvers into him so fast he died right there in the corner.

Which is why he never writes or calls.

That’s funny. Really.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Wow! What a Fucking Assassination!

Get the door.

You get the door.

Sounds like the door’s going to get us.

What a bunch of hyped up, triped up, and unfortunately typed up, nonsense. Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes emphatically fucking yes fucking yes fucking yes, while Todd Fullmer was in Ljubljana a bizarre incident happened. But not to anyone anyone knew, and it wasn’t a fucking gorilla. A mastiff killed its owner. End of fucking story. And to think those two were going to go on about…Well, just to think they were going to go on.

I won’t say whether I followed him or not, as it has already been established that the first person can pass for omniscient and the character nihiliscient. The point is simply that he followed up immediately, by taxi, license plate LJ 77Z4, all the way to Predjamska Grad, where he was surprised at so little ado about—just one kiosk, where three euros were required for entrance, just 150 meters ahead, passing benches on which several visitors rested.

As he walked, reading the brochure about Erazem’s taunting of the Austros and the Austros sending of Ravbar to besiege the castle and Erazem’s secret tunnels that led to the land above, where he hunted, often tossing fresh dead carcasses down to Ravbar’s starving besiegers, and the eventual betrayal of Erazem, someone placing a flag in a window to alert Ravbar to Erazem’s retreat to the toilet room, off to the left of the façade, an easy enough target, a cannonball, the end, about a 37 second read, a paragraph in Valvasor, Fullmer saw a little car, yes—a 65 GTO—scooting in front of him. He stopped, smiled, then went and picked up the car…a child cried out, a father pounced, recovered the car with his left, raising his right in threatfist, a befuddled fullmer apologizing to thin air, a family of three looking over their shoulders at the rude man on their way to the parking lot. The kind of asshole who’d kick your little white dog if it barked at him.

A dejected Fullmer trod on, head down, sardonically flagellating himself, ‘Birdy num num.’

‘Birdy num num,’ responded Z, Beograd rules in force.

‘But…’

‘Sheer coincidence.’

‘I suppose we don’t need it here, anyway.’

Z sat on the next to last bench, looking out at the layer of cloud on the hills, watching the rise of mist from the valley far below.

He pulled the 65 GTO from his pocket.

‘Of course we do. Move down a little’, he said, for Fullmer had sat at a natural distance.

Z spoke into the hood.

The car veered and slipped through two bench slats.

Fullmer retrieved it and opened the trunk, which said, ‘What’s this diversion all about?’

Fullmer manipulated the four-wheeled device.

The car told Z, ‘Assassination—long before Kramberger.’

Z told the tiny engine, which trapped the words in the trunk for Fullmer, ‘That was no assassination. It was war. And they cut off the rebel army at the top. Interesting and all that, but no goddamn assassination.’

‘I hate to argue through a car,’ the car told Z, ‘but I beg to differ. It sounds like one of the most magnificent assassinations in history. Better than von Webern’s.’

Z pocketed the car. ‘Well, anyway, here you are at the scene of the crime. Have at it. Maybe you can figure out who betrayed him.’ Z pulled a bottle from his coat. ‘Meanwhile, I brought this for you from Beograd. Home made šlivović, the best. Get a hotel down in Postojna, eat some meat, take the bottle up to your room and try to think of your editor. And b…’ Z pulled the car out again, opening the hood. The trunk told Fullmer, ‘Be careful, I think you’re being followed.’

Chapter thirty-seven

The Smoking Cigar

As an author I have no interest in belittling any characters, much less the relatively protagonal Fullmer. But I would be less than honest were I to allow such a reference as Fullmer’s to Z, who didn’t bat an eye, regarding the death of von Webern, which is known by history to be an accident, partly because the shooter, an American soldier, is said to have become depressed by the incident and died just ten years later of alcoholism. First off, if you could die from alcoholism at such an early age (the guy was 33) there would never have been a Yugoslavia. Second, the circumstances were clear, there were witnesses—soldiers everywhere. Salzburg, 1945, the allies are trying to prevent a second Vienna in the city of Mozart. A curfew is on—composers not omitted. Old Anton steps outside after dark to smoke a cigar. He lights it, the light attracts attention, a shot rings out. The ‘great’ von Webern is dead, the cigar lies there smoking.

And Fullmer? He posits total serialism, as opposed to the other monikers it has, the sudden addition of total, as in attrition, codes, Webern was anti-fascist all along, and now with the war over the Americans want fascists, not lefties like von.

Drivel? Twaddle? Claptrap? I will subject you to but one published passage by Fullmer on the subject:

“I was naturally quite curious when I came across the fact that his son-in-law had been arrested—for ‘black market’ activities that same day. And I began to wonder, why Salzburg? Why not Vienna? He had gone to school in Vienna, but had never worked there, the place to be for an Austrian artist of any kind. So I thought, let’s see where he did work, see if some reason emerges. Klagenfurt. Fine, normal enough. Stettin. Odd choice, that, but not the outpost that Ischl was. Ischl? A fucking resort, a little known resort. Teaching British travelers or what. Now I knew I was on to something. Danzig—strange, again the Baltic. Arnhem, must like the climate. Teplitz? Another resort, or maybe a Napoleon fetish. Prague—a feint. Augsburg, big deal, could happen to anyone, but then, get this: Aarhus. Three As. Who do you know who has ever even visited three As. Finally, and doesn’t this say it all: Linz.

Look:

Klagenfurt.

Stettin.

Ischl.

Danzig.

Arnhem.

Teplitz.

Prague.

Augsburg.

Aarhus.

Linz.

See it? See the anagram?

Danzig.

Aarhus.

Stettin.

Klagenfurt.

Augsburg.

Prague.

Ischl.

Teplitz.

Arnhem.

Linz.

I would call that Total Serialism! He lived out a code!…”

Enough? Insane, right?

kramberger with monkey, ch. 30-33 (is Nihče really Milan Kučan?)

Slovenes have often asked me whether Niko Nihče of chapters 31-33 is actually Milan Kučan. I have but one photo of each. You be the judge.

 

Chapter Thirty

Smaller Coffins

 

This is probably the right time to

I’ve worked on better projects. More accurately, I’ve had better thoughts. Blood! Mother: blood! My mama, too! My mama, too! I used to write in the fetal position. Now I can do so again.

In peace.

Requisciat in pace.

Scrive in pace.

I always wondered why they don’t bury the dead in the fetal position. Especially the ones who died that way. Maybe in some cultures they do.

Smaller coffins.

More room for the dead.

Especially now that people are getting bigger.

They found a Neanderthal in ice up in Switzerland. He would have been four and a half feet tall. But he was in the fetal position.

Nobody knows what he was doing up there.

Get it?

He could have been a writer.

He got cold and fell to sleep in the fetal position.

Never woke up.

Thawed out.

They say the womb is like an oven.

But he did not wake up.

Fakirs wake up. Then they take another breath and get into the fetal position. When they are uncovered after fifty days they straighten out again, just before the lid opens.

Chapter Thirty-One

A Fracas

 

An elderly lady named Špela Horvat was walking past the outdoor tables of a coffee shop across from the Hotel Park in Ljubljana when she had a dizzy spell and fell into the table of a man with a droopy moustache and hostile eyes, spilling hot coffee on his lap. The irritable man reacted spontaneously, shoving the lady to the ground and shouting “Pizda!” (cunt). Some young men, university students, appalled at such treatment of an elderly woman, confronted the man, much swearing ensued, and the largest of the students moved to strike the man, who deftly—especially for a man of his age, roughly fifty—slipped the punch, captured and rapidly broke the arm of the student. The other two students moved in on the aggressive coffee drinker, were thrown off, to the ground, and before the man could kick their ribs, two other men joined the fracas, one of them grabbing the man by the hair, receiving an elbow to the ribs, while the other actually got a punch in that made the moustached man smile before he felled him to unconsciousness with a right cross. By this time the two intact students were up, and joined by two more students who had been inside the coffee shop. Surrounded by four young and fit men, the fifty year old did what anyone capable of doing so in that situation would do: he went berserk—in rapid succession flooring all four of them, one of whom he was kicking in the ribs when the man who had grabbed his hair did so again. Mandrake Pizdamonavić turned around and smiled, surprising the hair grabber, who paused in his assault long enough that Mandrake was able to smash his nose with his upper forehead, leaving himself surrounded again by the same four students he had just floored. He looked at them, shrugged, and floored all four of them again, by which time two police officers had arrived and were each in succession flipped onto tables—wood, splintered—leaving, what?, eight, nine? men writhing on the ground, when a police van pulled up and serious enforcers of law hopped out with clubs, the third of which stunned Mandrake, the fourth of which stopped his individual mayhem, and the fifth of which knocked him unconscious. Oddly, by this time the old woman had disappeared. No one saw her leave. Her testimony that the brawl was initiated by her rough treatment at the hands of Mandrake Pizdamonavić was therefore unavailable, and after a couple of hours at the police station, Pizdamonavić was released without charges. But by that time Todd Fullmer, if there is any connection, had left the Hotel Park and was on his way to meet Niko Nihče.

Of course, being a master stylist I wrote as if in the third person. If anybody noticed I’ll chop my own cock off and stuff it in my mouth.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Green Dragons and Fox Hunts

 

Dear M__________,

Listen M_________, before I forget, there’s something I want you to look into regarding the Kennedy assassination. It involves Israel. See, I was waiting for Nihče to arrive at his watering hole, when I struck up a conversation with this professor who seems to have the idea that the Jews run things over there. But he wasn’t a crackpot, per se.

I was gazing forward to my interview with Nihče, thinking what an impossibly quaint, even tidy, little country this is, with this little capitol: it’s famous for its dragons, for the three bridges over the slime green yet unslimy Ljubljanica stream. I know because, for one thing, hanging about a sort of tiny square by a statue of Prešeren their sad national poet, who I have it on good authority was a drunk like every single great Slovene literary man, when I heard an unmistakeably British voice asking, ‘Could you tell me where the three bridges are?’ And without waiting for a response, explained, ‘You see, I’m told there is a sporting shop near there and I must purchase cartridges, for I am off to hunt foxes.’ The dragons are green, as much gargoyle as dragon, and sit about atop the bridge railings like toys. This was all running through my mind, and as much so the fact that the former independence leader of the new nation could be found simply by asking about and learning where he takes his morning coffee, I was thinking all this, sitting before my own cooling coffee, when I realized this man was looking at me.

‘Mossad’, he said with a trace of wonderment. A light bulb had just flickered enough to subdue the triumph of discovery. He wore an Austrian mustache, not a Hitler, but shaven just too much in from the expanse of the lip as to look absurd and bureaucratic.

‘Mossad?’

He too was in reverie, as it turned out.

‘What? No, I wasn’t speaking to you.’

‘How do you know to speak English to me?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Well…fine. But what’s this eruption of “Mossad”’

‘Mossad, yes, well you see I was just reading an article in Delo that put it all together. We Slovenes, understand, don’t care all that much for American mysteries, but we are aware of them, and when they bear on world events we perk up our ears. I was just perking up my ears.’

‘Might I be privy?’

‘Funny—might you be privy. I love your language, teach it at university in fact. You go to the privy, to defecate or whatnot—‘

‘Whatnot, for the most part.’

‘Yet so casually ask if you may be privy. But never mind. Yes, you see the fact is that your Kennedy—’

‘Sorry to be a stickler, but I haven’t a Kennedy to my name.’

‘What a language, figures of speech. John F., I mean. On the rare occasion a discussion of American affairs leads to…to…well, such matters as Kennedy’s assassination, I do feel rather the need to respond with an opinion, even if it be rather light of, of aspect, or, or, or—’

‘I do know what you mean. What do you tell them?’

‘I tell them it’s hardly likely that Oswald acted alone, that his Russian connection by itself demands that conspiracy be asserted. But that from the little available evidence from the little reading I have done, most of which assured me that there is little available evidence, I would guess that he was killed by rogue elements within the C.I.A. combined with mobsters and Cuban exiles. But now it appears that the C.I.A. is being more forthright about its assassination programs and so I would amend that to ‘elements within the C.I.A. And that the alternative is quite simple: inasmuch as he invaded Cuba, risked world war over Cuba’s right to behave as Turkey did—and the European media covers a few things you Americans probably never even hear of, but it is beyond question by now that during that famous October crisis, so quaintly put: ‘Missiles of October’. No offense. It is beyond question that we were spared all out nuclear war by sheer luck, for a Russian in a submarine was mistakenly given the order to fire and the attempt failed somehow. And added to that, the numerous attempts to assassinate Castro, and the likelihood of typical C.I.A. economic subversion. Taken together, why couldn’t it simply have been Castro who organized the assassination?’

‘Indeed. Yet we began with Mossad.’

‘Why not Mossad and Castro? You see, Kennedy had it in his power to demand atomic facility inspections in Israel and was going to do it, in fact was hell bent—perhaps that’s not fit here: is one hell bent in protracted diplomatic behaviour? Kennedy, in short—oh, look, here comes Niko Nihče: you know who he is?’

‘In fact, that’s why I’m here, to speak with him about the assassination of Kramberger.’

‘What a bundle of coincidences,’ he remarked and unfolded like an origami stork to a surprising height (probably only 6 2 or 3, but nonetheless surprising in the way big birds always are, and with a terrifying wing span).

‘Yes, but you were saying…’

‘No, that’s about it: Mossad has to factor in. Kennedy was not going to allow them to construct nuclear weapons.’

So, M_______, if you can dig up anything I would appreciate it. It appears I won’t be privy to a good English library in the near future.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Did Kramberger Kramp your Style?

So M_______, Nihče showed up just then, actually took the professor’s seat, and all that was remarkable about the man was that he is even shorter than one is led to believe by the fact that every single description of him refers to his dwarfery. That, and remarkable, brilliant white, tufts of hair muzzling his ears—without affecting his hearing. It was as if he had baby rabbits in there. Otherwise, he had a full head of well groomed white hair on his head and not another hair—oh, of course he did have eyebrows—not a single nose hair and a closely shaven, nearly adolescent face.

‘Dr. Nihče,’ I started right in. ‘I’m Todd Fullmer, American writer. I work assassinations. They tell me you speak excellent English.’

‘That’s very kind of them.’

A bulimic girl, a faint perfume of vomit trailing her, taking a moment of orbital pause before following her back inside, placed a coffee with milk before him.

‘Voda,’ he reminder her, and in seconds she had returned with a glass of water.

‘Can I ask you some questions? I know it’s not generally polite to go about an interview this way, but I didn’t mean to sandbag you, it’s just that I was told you were easy to find, an accessible man, open to conversation.’

‘Quite right. Formalities be damned. Sandbag. Means ambush, right? Bushwhack, drygulch. I watch a lot of American westerns. Best films in the world. My favorite is Ben Johnson. Especially as Bob Emery.’

‘One-Eyed Jacks.’

‘I’ll talk to any man who knows his westerns.’

‘I’m afraid the topic is unpleasant.’

‘Assassination is unpleasant. If you’re talking to me, you must be interested in Kramberger. Or his monkey.’

‘Well…’

‘Good bet. Nihče does all the fighting for liberty, Kramberger returns a rich man with a chip on one shoulder and a monkey on the other, becomes a friend of the common man, picks up 20 percent of the vote. Maybe Nihče won’t survive politically to enjoy his own accomplishments. And there’s the cover story: drunken hunter. Even I don’t buy that, not for a second. The problem is, Todd if I may call you Todd, that I have absolutely no idea who had him killed, or why. If you intend to look, to keep looking, look to the right. It was the right he was sucking votes from.’

‘That’s all very persuasive, Dr.—‘

‘Niko. I’m just an old fart at a coffee shop…’

‘I do intend to pursue it, I always pursue until I am satisfied.’

‘It’s all for nothing, Will. It’s all for nothing.’

‘High Noon.’

‘Excellent.’

‘But it’s not all for nothing. In this case, it’s for money for me, and to be quite frank, to keep me in this country long enough that my editor decides I need not go to Minsk, a place that, again, frankly, scares the shit out of me.’

‘Dead journalists. Are those assassinations?’

‘Of course they are. Why? You have any of those?’

‘Probably, but none that I know of. This has rapidly become a very cynical country. Not much is expected of our journalists.’

‘What if one was able to prove a connection between you and the assassination of Kramberger?’

‘But he couldn’t. I think I have explained why. I gave my word.’

‘That one’s particularly easy—on of my favorites: The Wild Bunch.’

‘Yep. You’re a real straight shooter, son. But so am I. You can dig all you want. If you find something I may or may not be interested—it may or may not matter to me. And besides, chances are, the main perpetrators are dead. The noonday train will bring Frank Miller. If I’m a man I must be brave…’

‘Now there’s something to tell the folks back home. The father of Slovene independence is making fun of me.’

‘Not really. I’m just having a little fun. The retired life does agree with me, but I do admit sometimes missing the gravity of events.’

‘Like on Brijuni?’

‘What archery!’

‘That’s not a western.’

‘No but it could have been, could have been one of the best.’

‘So you were saying about Brijuni: I hit the target.’

‘You mean, of course that I cut a deal with those two swine.’

‘Yes. You had to know Tuđman and Milošević were going to go all out for Bosnia. The deal was Slovenia kicks off the gala brawl, the price is the Yugo army let’s you go.’

‘After a phony war.’

‘Right.’

‘Of course, that’s exactly what happened.’

M, can you believe it. I looked at him at least a minute. He blinked, but only once or twice. No guile visible in the least.

‘You’re not making fun of me are you?’

‘No.’

‘But this is huge—why admit it to me?’

‘Because it’s obvious. If you walk out of a hotel room with a smile on your face and your wife sees you and checks to see who is still in the room and she’s smiling to, and naked on the bed…Well, you get the point, I suppose.’

‘I’m not writing about it, if that’s what you think. I’m not going to be thrown off the scent of the only political assassination in the history of Slovenia just for yet another goddamn Balkan wars story.’

‘The only political assassination in the history of Slovenia? Good god, son, have you done no research?’

I admitted that I had not, the whole business being new to me and all.

‘Go west, young man! Perhaps rather more south: about nine miles from Postojna, above. It’s called Predjamska grad, and there in 1484 you had the most spectacular assassination in our history, one of the finest assassinations in the history of the world.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘I just did.’

He hadn’t touched his coffee. Now he did. People around here often do it that way. A long slurp and they’re off.

He didn’t even say goodbye. I wanted to call out, But stranger, I didn’t git yer name.

https://ujetblog.wordpress.com/2015/1...

https://ujetblog.wordpress.com/2015/10/25/ujet/

Kramberger with Monkey, Chaper Nineteen: Birdy Num Num

Chapter Nineteen

Birdy Num Num

 

“Birdy num num.”

“Birdy num num.”

Despite the fact that they had met more than a dozen times, source Z insisted on Beograd rules, as he called it, which meant if it was safe to talk they began with the above exchange. Todd Fullmer never knew when it wasn’t safe.

They met in the coffee shop of the Hotel Balkan, heedless of the proximity—next table, window chair, stirring coffee, maybe the same one as last time herein—of a mustached man with what some might call a stony gaze, a man known as, you got it, Mandrake Pizdamonavić.

Z was a cherub. A full grown man, perhaps, but nonetheless a cherub, gray curly hair, but the gray curly hair of a cherub. He had little fleshy lips and gave off the air of one insatiably attracted to sweets, and for whom the entire world was coated in sugar. He was also an electronic genius and refused to speak with Todd Fullmer before displaying his latest toy or invention.

“See here,” he said, setting a 60s era Ford Sedan the size of a match box on the table.

“Watch,” he said. Fullmer didn’t see any movement on the part of Z, yet the car rolled up to him, turned around and opened its trunk.

“Okay, lean forward and whisper into the boot.”

Todd leaned forward, and whispered toward the toy car, “Ivan Kramberger.”

Immediately, the trunk slammed—relatively—shut, and the car dashed across the table to Z, again without any discernable movements made by Z. When the car reached the end of the table it stopped, the hood flipped open, and it said “Ivan Kramberger”, barely louder than Todd Fullmer had.

Z leaned down and the car turned around and showed its open trunk while shutting its hood.

“What about him?” Z whispered.

The car whizzed over to Todd Fullmer.

“Anything,” Todd said to the trunk after it burped up Z’s question.

Back at station Z, the car opened its hood, repeated “Anything,” and turned around, closing its hood and opening its trunk.

“I don’t know much, but I’m glad that’s your question because I hadn’t heard of any assassinations in these parts and your contact made me a little suspicious. I even thought it might not be you…”

Todd noticed a man at the table behind theirs, a mustached man with a stony gaze, craning as if to try to hear what Z was telling the car.

“…Anyway, Kramberger was killed because he was too popular for someone who had just returned to the country and was saying a bunch of sensible things, all of them honest, even the hare-brained ones. You see, Kučan and company over-estimated their roles as heroes of the Slovene freedom movement and underestimate their reek of Beograd to the Slovene people. Kramberger either figured this out or knew it intuitively. He got around 20% of the vote representing the Homeland Peasant Party, a brilliant name, both humble and subtly reminiscent of the Home Guard, so it appealed to both reactionaries and little folk…and maybe to the reds who didn’t really mind a free Slovenia but didn’t want it to be reactionary. But back to that percentage, the thing is that the 20% could easily have grown. Kramberger had all the makings of a populist, a demagogue, or both. I believe the Kučani got the idea, or the information, that the number was climbing and climbing fast. So they hired a patsy who was paid to take the rap and a professional marksman to gun him down. Who actually hired him? Someone of Kučani interests, which covers a wide range that includes Kučan and his ilk, the business interests that exploited the new market as rapidly as possible, even the Germans, even a mafia. Who actually did it? Could have been anyone, anyone who could shoot a rifle. Other than that I couldn’t say. Look outside, look at that guy, look at the guy at the table behind me—could have been anybody.”

The car stalled on the way over to Todd, and whether or not this is related, it is related here—Z blinked his right eye rapidly about ten times and the car resumed its tete a tete, releasing Z’s speech to Todd, turning, receiving Todd’s “Thanks,” and returning to the garage—Z’s pocket.

“Por nada, hombre,” Z said rising. “Have a very nice stay in Beograd.”

As they parted, Todd Fullmer detected no communication of any kind between source Z and anyone else inside or outside the Hotel Balkan, not even anyone at a nearby table, not even anyone at the very next table. In fact, Fullmer and source Z did not actually separate until they were outside and they turned their separate ways, Fullmer toward Kalemegdan and source Z toward Nova Beograd.

Geography Answers

Time ran out early.

Here are the geography answers:

1. Puerto Rico even has its own TRENCH!

2. Because so often non-USers apologize for getting US states wrong, I decided maybe some people ought to know what state one of India’s three biggest cities is in. It’s in Maharashtra.

3. I started this quiz the moment I saw how high Cuba rated among the largest islands in the world. It’s really big.  Bigger than Andorra.

4. The clever student of geography guesses the US because of Hawaii, or Canada because of its odd western coastline; and they are right to be suspicious of the question. The answer, though, is India, for its Meghalaya, where the rain drains down to Bangladesh, of course.

5. One longitudinal question per quiz. This one gave me an excuse to disinter Rangoon, one of my favorite capitol city names when it was one.

6. Istanbul is farther north. But I had to check, hoping some place in the north of Africa was farther north.

7. Another disappointment. Neruda was born south of Santiago by some hundreds of miles (370 kms) and Can Themba simply couldn’t. I should have chosen an Australian maybe. No, a Tasmanian, southern.

8. The equator passes through Colombia and Brazil, but not the other two. I found out it didn’t pass through Peru and that’s when I decided it would be a good question.

9. This wasn’t meant to be a trick question; in fact, just a half hour ago I examined the two close enough to realize they overlap. Taiwan is the better answer…or is Hawaii? Depends how you think about it.

10. The US has done dark deeds in each place. The right answer is ‘Are you kidding me?’

Geographicus interruptus

Geography Test #3

Answers will be posted in two days

Geography Quiz #3

The deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean is closest to which island?

-Puerto Rico

-St. Helena

-Candlemas (South Sandwich chain)

-Manhattan

In which Indian state is Mumbai?
Which is largest?

– Cuba

– Iceland

– Mindanao

– Liechtenstein

In which country is there a place that gets more rain than any place in the other three countries?

– India

– U.S.

– Canada

– Papua New Guinea

Lake Baikal is closest in longitude to which of these cities?

– Vishakapattanam

– Rangoon

– Ho Chi Minh City

Which is farther north, Istanbul or Oran?
Which writer was born farther south, the Chilean Pablo Neruda or the South African Can Themba?
Which of these countries does the equator not pass through?

– Brazil

– Peru

– Colombia

– Venezuela

Which is farther north, Hawaii or Taiwan?
The United States has never invaded or been involved in invading:

– Grenada

– Panama

– Africa

– Bangladesh

– Japan

Kramberger, chapters 15-18

Chapter Fifteen

Some Really Secret Monkey Business

 

The amazing thing about an assassination like the Kennedy business is that secrets are so hard to keep, yet the conspiracy remains un(entirely)resolved. Nobody really knows for sure, not even Skip, though he thinks he does. The only known instance of monkey assassination, revealed right now for the first time, was actually recorded by Jane Goodall, herself a victim of assassination, by human hand we have no reason to doubt, but suppressed for fairly obvious reasons. The only other human witness was an internee who was beside her when a rival chimp speared the head chimp from a tree, with a spear stolen from a nearby human forest tribe. There was no question it was intentional and planned. Goodall swore the student to silence, and the student kept silent. She had written a few lines summarizing the event before Goodall discussed with her the implications of the assassination becoming public knowledge, but she forgot to destroy the notes. Somehow, someone gained access to the notes, and without bad intentions forgot about it until the moment when she found it irresistible to say, Promise you won’t tell anybody this…And word eventually got around to one of our most reliable sources who broke into the student’s (she was by then a professor at Drake University) house and photographed the notes which were by then under lock and key. Eventually this woman had the determination to burn the notes, but we have seen the photo of the entry and have no reason to suspect its validity, veracity, or the virginity of the not

Chapter Sixteen

Slovenia ’s Got One!

 

Assignment Minsk: journalists dropping like flies, Lukashenko berserk.

Todd Fullmer’s flight landed in Beograd, but before he could see much of the city he was at its oddly decrepit and small train station, waiting for a train to Sarajevo. He had always had a vague desire to see where the archduke got shot, see where Gavrilo Princip was standing when he fired the bullets that provided the excuse for World War Two (not a misprint—for would we have two if not for one? Idea taken from the notes of Todd Fullmer). Not for a minute did Todd Fullmer buy the notion that that assassination was the spark that set off the war. The station at Sarajevo was quite different from that at Beograd, not decrepit so much as abandoned, at the edge of town it seemed, whereas in Beograd it was like a little dirty lot in the center of the city. He stopped for coffee at the one coffee shop that seemed opened, a small shop facing the city itself. The proprietor was an old man who moved slowly and had a gentle ease about him, a desire to talk coupled with an awareness that most people were not the least interested in what he had to say. Todd Fullmer was interested in what everybody had to say so it was without much discomfort that they had begun a conversation. Fullmer was surprised that the man, Samo, assumed he, an American reporter, was not there to see about the famous assassination, rather to take the tour of the remaining evidence of the shelling and sniping of the 90s. Yet Samo didn’t seem appalled at the new phenomenon of war-damage tourism. Todd was, at least initially, but when the conversation turned into a monologue and Samo talked about his personal role in the ‘war’, Todd began to understand. When a nightmare happens during the day you want it to end but you don’t want others to forget you had it. “See up on that hill? The Serbs were shelling from there. Every window in the city was gone. What was it…I think the UN had to buy 5 million windows for us. Snipers were everywhere. If we knew where they were it wouldn’t have been so dangerous. In the best of cases we knew where they were likely to target. That’s why everybody has the image of us crouching at a corner and then running across an open space. But some places we couldn’t run. The place where I had to get water every day three or four people were killed—every day.” He told it all with a sort of resignation. The story had its own pathos; Samo didn’t need to add any. Yet Todd Fullmer was struck at his lack of bitterness. He would have been bitter. Samo was diabetic and had to spend much of the ‘war’ without insulin. He nearly died several times. The war added twenty or thirty years to his appearance. He was in his early fifties but Todd would have believed him if Samo had said he was 83. He had fought, too. Every two weeks he went out to the battlefields or returned to the city to take care of his family. Apparently a lot of people did that. While it’s true that the Muslims press ganged a number of people, they were also quite understanding about family members. When Samo had returned to the ‘front’ once, he had their full trust and was allowed to come and go as he pleased as long as it was in two week intervals. They talked about how the station itself seemed abandoned. Before the war, Samo told him, there were thousands of people there at all times of the day and night. He had run a highly profitable clothing store, selling clothes he bought in regular runs to Italy. “I had to pass through Slovenia. Have you been there? It’s a beautiful place, and I always liked the Slovene people…” At that point Samo began rambling along a confusing story about two young Slovenes who had recently broken his most important beer mugs is a row that had started over their obscene comments about a waitress he had who wore a miniskirt to draw customers. Todd couldn’t tell if this was before, during or after the war, for aspects of the story clearly placed it in all three time frames. The story ended sadly with the Slovenes paying for the glasses in tolars, Slovene money—which means during or after the war—something Samo had never seen and mistakenly valued at quite too high a rate, as he subsequently found out on a trip to Budapest: “Not even enough for a coffee”. “We had so many customers then” (before the war?), “but those two were so arrogant—yet they didn’t know the difference between me and a Serb. Vuk Drašković had been shot in Montenegro (long after the war) and they were telling what barbarians we all were south of the Kolpa. I said you wait—see what happens to your great Kramberger (shot during the war). Of course, Kramberger wasn’t great, but I knew he was in for it. I had met him in Ljubljana on one of my last trips through. He gave me a spin in his Bugatti.” And seeing this obscure reference intrigued his listener, Samo dropped the story of the rowdy Slovenes and the tragedy of the glasses—something which, perhaps combined with the business about all the broken glass in Sarajevo, Todd was haunted by, labeling it in his mind as Samo’s personal Kristallnacht–and went on to report what he knew about the assassination, which had happened soon after he predicted it would.

Truth be told, there isn’t a lot interesting about a street or a street corner where an archduke was shot 80 or 90 years earlier. The event simply doesn’t resonate. Todd wandered into Baščarčija and became a war tourist, marveling at how the copper smiths turned shells into objects of ambivalent beauty, pounding intricate, classical designs onto these weapons that were trying to destroy them not so long before. He didn’t buy one, though. He was just killing time before the train back to Beograd, in a state of insuppressible excitement over the prospect of investigating this obscure Slovene assassination of a self-made millionaire—something with dialysis machines in Austria or Germany, Samo wasn’t sure—who drove about in a Bugatti he had put together himself, selling his own books, speaking with a monkey on his shoulder, head of the Homeland Peasant Party, which had received a significant—20%?, 30%–of the vote, and been killed by a ‘drunken hunter’, before Slovenia’s first elections as a free nation.

As soon as he returned to Beograd he wrote his editor, admitting where he was, and exclaimed, Slovenia’s got one!

Meanwhile, we should point out, guess who was sitting at the coffee shop at the train station in Sarajevo listening in on the conversation Todd Fullmer was having with Samo?

Did you guess Mandrake Pizdamonavić? Wrong. Just some shambling shell-shocked shoe shiner with out any shoes to shine. Mandrake Pizdamonavić was at that very minute stirring an espresso diligently at the Hotel Balkan in Beograd, sitting by himself, minding his own business (let that phraseology carry the weight you choose.)

 

 

Chapter Seventeen

The Consequences of Passing up Minsk

 

Transcript of the exchange between Todd Fullmer and his editor:

Slovenia ’s got one!

So?

So?

So I’m paying for a story about dead journalists in Minsk. What’s the matter, are you afraid you’ll become one of them?

Don’t insult me—besides, that’s not such a bad motive for avoiding Minsk, not that there aren’t plenty of others. No, listen M_______, this Slovene thing is perfect for us. Nobody knows about it, the victim was a colorful guy—he went around with a monkey on his shoulder, for christs’ sake—the story, I mean the cover up, is obviously bogus…the whole thing—it’s virgin territory.

Virginity isn’t news. Whores are news. Lukashenko’s a whore, so forget this Slovak thing and get up there now.

Slovene, not Slovak.

Fast, slow, Czech, Moldovan, I don’t give a shit. You’re not yet bigger than this magazine and while I’m still editor you will go where I send you.

I’m not saying I won’t go. I’m saying I’ll stop in Slovenia for a while on the way.

No, you’ll stop in Slovojvodina after you’ve reported from Minsk.

Look, M_________, Lukashenko will be killing journalists for the next ten years. What’s the hurry? Arguably, the longer I wait, the more there will be to report.

I’m not going to argue anymore. Get your ass to Minsk or you’ll find yourself working at the New York Times!

Don’t get nasty with me. How many times have you followed my hunches and it turned out I got a scoop. Like with Yushchenko.

You call that a scoop?

Given that the story was unscoopable, I call it a fucking miracle that sold magazines.

We sold more magazines when you wrote about why you weren’t writing about Lady Die.

That was because of the ingenuity of your typesetter or whatever they’re called these days.

Still, it was brilliant and it sold magazines. Yushchenko didn’t sell magazines, not like we expect your articles to.

You ever eat a goldfish?

What?

What about a fresh eyeball? They say Ante Pavelić popped them like olives.

What are you getting at?

Don’t demean my work. No way, no fucking way you would have touched that face.

 

 

Chapter Eighteen

Yushchenko’s Face

 

Ukraine is one of those restless countries that moves around now and then, hides, moves again, emerges fresh and strong, kills some enemies within, some without, moves around a little more, hides again, emerges fresh and strong and chaotic, kills mostly within but occasionally by rocket without. For some, such a country is a refreshing change. Aren’t you little bored with, say, the borders of the United States? How long has it been since they changed? On the other hand, for the people in a city like, say, L’viv, change can be disorienting. One day it’s Lvov and it’s Polish, next day it’s got an apostrophe and it’s Ukrainian. Even central Ukraine can be fickle. One day it’s a breadbasket, next day a slaughterhouse; or a famine riddled grim place where no one vacations—all that bread and people dying of hunger…it can be very confusing. Then there’s the rain: one day water, next day acid (as they say). One day an historic city of the Pripet Marshes is bustling, next day a ghost town. And of course there are the people. Every country is heterogeneous by nature piled upon nature. So Ukraine had all these Jews and now where are they? In Pinsk, you say? Maybe, but they lost Pinsk to Belarus, which had to have Minsk, and if you’ve got Minsk and a loose Pinsk, the logic of politicals and rhymes says you needs to combines. You may not believe it but there are people on this Earth who are missing their Pinsk.

O sad Ukraine

O sad Ukraine

You lost so much and what did you gain?

And what didn’t you lose? Moskva, Moscow, Muskovy. The smarmy grappler Putin. Putting his nose in where he just can’t get that it doesn’t belong. Can’t he tell a Lukashenko from a Yushchenko? Not at first, but then western media broadcast Yukashchenko’s handsome grass roots face all over the tubes all over the world and next thing you know Ukraine has a fifty fifty itch for ‘freedom’. Stop laughing. Death threats delivered against Yushchenko, Yushchenko meets secret agents, ‘ex’-KGB, has a bowl of soup and his dioxin level multiplies by thousands. What is dioxin? Ask some Vietnamese peasants. The point is, Yushchenko developed a mysterious illness that should have killed him (What the fuck do we have to do, for Val’s sake!). The problem for Todd Fullmer was that the media was crawling all over the Yushchenko story like maggots in a rotting gut before the poisoning. So when he got poisoned, there was no original angle, no uncovered angle, no scoop, for Todd Fullmer and PS. Doctors in Vienna said we don’t know what’s wrong, but there’s hardly an organ in his body that isn’t deformed, swollen, and crawling with something not maggots. Reporters were on the thing day and night for months. Yushchenko put on a brave face, but it was a mask, a distortion of his own face, mislabeled pocked by a baffled press. Pitted, some said. As if burned, said others. It had turned gray, sometimes shading to Pripet green, boils gaping with enlarged pores. It looked like Chernobyl. It looked like the kind of thing that you expect will rub off on you if you touch it.

If you touch it…if you touch it…If you touch it! That’s the scoop. Todd Fullmer would be the only reporter to actually touch it.

As things turned out, Todd had no problem at all. Yushchenko advertised his grotesque face, he wanted all Ukrainians to know what the old guard had done and would continue to do—my face is Ukraine, he said—if he weren’t elected. Ukraine needed new blood, no matter the dioxin level. Nervously, Todd Fullmer visited Kiev. Nervous because it’s hard to believe how close the capitol is to Chernobyl (I’d have let Belarus have Chernobyl and moved the capitol to the Crimea, Todd wrote). He got an appointment with Yushchenko, brought along a photographer, told Yushchenko straight out he just wanted to touch his face, Yushchenko thought it was a good idea, Todd reached, pulled his arm back, gathered courage, reached again and…Yuk! It wasn’t one of those things that looks like it will rub off on you if you touch it—it did rub off. Slime. If you’ve ever picked up a Mediterranean snail, the kind with beautiful racing stripes on it, which you can only see when it’s crossing the street looking for its shell, dropped it off on the other side of the street only to find out that fifty percent of the snails body weight is slime on your hand that does not wash off—it has to be scrubbed and scraped and washed over and over again for at least an hour—well, that was what it was like touching Yushchenko’s face, except the slime had that same ashen color…