‘Nor Any Drop To Drink’

“So, you want to know why I didn’t want to visit France for the 70th anniversary of the D-Day Normandy landings?”

“Yes. That’s why I’m here”, said Kevin Martin, a trainee reporter with the New Hampshire and Dorset Review, who was struggling to interview 90-year-old British veteran, Arthur Horton  at Westview Sheltered Housing in Portsmouth.  

“Well, I’ll  tell you something I’ve never told anyone before”, said Arthur, clearing his throat.   

“I wouldn’t be doing it now if our warden here at Westview hadn’t gone squealing to your newspaper. But I suppose I’d better explain myself to set the record straight”.

“Thanks, Arthur”, said Kevin. “I appreciate your time”.

“Hmm! We’ll  see about that! Anyway, what I’d told Mr Blabbermouth was that after we’d won the Battle of Caen and erected ‘Port Churchill’ at Arromanches, the bastard French refused to give us any drinking water”.

“What?”

“Yes! That’s right. When the 1st Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment  had embarked here  at Portsmouth I was even younger than you – barely  more than 20; a scared,  scrawny kid who had become an instant chain-smoker, trying to look  bigger, braver – and much older - than  my years.

“But I didn’t have to pretend for long. Twenty-four hours later I already felt old! Every time I think about it  I’m lost in a fog of cordite and ripped, burning flesh. I can even hear the moans of other lads my age, weeping for their mothers.

“As we landed and saw the dead and maimed tossed about in bloodied sea water near the shore, we couldn’t stop to help. So we just pushed the corpses and the injured men out of our way. We had no choice. We had a job to do”.

“But I don’t understand”, said Kevin. “At college, our tutors say  journalists write the first draft of history. Now you’re rewriting what the books say. Thousands of men like you helped to liberate Caen and Arromanches. This is what other D-Day veterans and world leaders have celebrated. But you’re saying that your intervention became self-preservation and that you weren’t welcome, anyway”.

“Oh, the locals wanted our help, make no mistake. They just didn’t want us hanging around begging for basics. Don’t forget, there were thousands of  soldiers and the war had been going on for almost five years. So when they saw us walking towards their homes they hid in the back or slammed their front doors in our faces.  They just wanted us to disappear once we’d done our job!

“But we – I - got over it. I grew up fast and got very hard. In the end I was even promoted to sergeant. I’m a great British patriot. If I was still young and healthy, despite everything, I’m sure I’d do it all again. But those at the top who were supposed to be running the show for the Allies kept dropping us in it. So the rest of us became like the lads who landed before me on Gold Beach – just swept up by the tide of events – tiny bits of wreckage bobbing on the sea.

“What happened to you after D-Day?”

“Things have gone a bit hazy in my mind, but all of us in our unit fought across Europe for what seemed ever-and-a-day until we reached Germany.

“But hang on!”, added Arthur suddenly, before Kevin could interrupt. “I’ve just remembered that I once got a free ticket to the official opening of the film, A Bridge Too Far as I’d fought in the real campaign in Holland that was code- named ‘Operation Market Garden’. It was as much a miracle for me that I got through everything with no more than a few scratches as it was when the Germans couldn’t blow up the bridge at Nijmegen because the wires to the detonator had been cut. I kept staring at the screen that night in town muttering ‘I was there, I was there’! Amazing, really!”

“Did you help to liberate any concentration camps”?

“Now that’s a good question. No, I didn’t. But before I was demobbed, I helped to form the guard for that bloody  murdering   sadist  cow,  Irma  Grese when she was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint for her crimes at Belsen. It was thirsty work! We all went for a jar after the hangings. Albert liked his pint. That was a good day!”

“Arthur, you seem much more bitter about these events than a lot of other people your age. Why?”

“It’s not that I’m ‘bitter’. I’ve led a quiet life since the war. I’ve not done anything you might call ‘exciting’. I stayed single and kept busy as a carpenter. I’ve always been good with my hands and I’ve made a lot of furniture for myself. Funny though, despite my army rank, I never got far at work although I made sure I always did what I was told.

“At one time I went up north to make coffins for the Co-operative Society but I came back here as it’s where I belong. Now”, added Arthur, wiping his eyes, “it won’t be long before someone makes a box for me”.

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

This story first appeared as Little Water, Less Love in the July 2014 edition of Live Encounters magazine (http://liveencounters.net/?p=7860) edited by Mark Ulyseas, a faithful supporter of Israel and all matters Jewish.

Technorati Tags: #fridayflash,#Flash Fiction,#Natalie Irene Wood,#PerfectlyWriteFamilyTales,#'Nor Any Drop To Drink',#D-Day 70th Anniversary,#Live Encounters Magazine,#Mark Ulyseas

Natalie Wood

(© Natalie Irene Wood – 27 June 2014)

‘She’s Got Them – Under Her Skin!'

Dr. Ludovic Bouland gripped a scalpel between his right thumb and forefinger, using his left hand to smooth the wide rectangle of flesh he was about to cut.

“Madame Nul de Nulle Part – Mrs No-one from Nowhere”, he muttered, arcing his arm over the prone form on the dissecting table before him, “my work here will give you posthumous fame and glory! The skin off your back is to serve as the binding for an important book, Des Destinées de L’âme – Destinies of the Soul. This is  a profound meditation on the soul and life after death by my dear friend, the distinguished essayist and poet, Arsène Houssaye”.   

But the doctor’s reverie was interrupted by a shrill, disembodied female voice.  

“You, who cup my corpse in the palm of your hand, how can you know what Heaven has ordained for my soul or the after life? You seem to cherish books more than living beings. Why is this?

“Here, where I now dwell, there is neither time nor space that you could recognise. Yet we know everything – past, future, good and evil.

“In the time to come the world will learn that my husband flung me into the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris,  claiming falsely  that  I  was an ‘hysteric’. This was after I’d told his mother that I  had caught him in our bed with his mistress!

“So before dying unattended of a sudden stroke, I spent my prime years lying in the gloom on a thin straw pallet with inadequate food and no visitors.

“All this, mark you monsieur, was while  my husband enjoyed sex with the over-fed, hideously painted cuckoo which had usurped my place and laid her putrid eggs on our goose-feathered mattress!

“Now I can tell you that within the first score years of the 21st century, savages living in what is presently named the Ottoman Administration  of Iraq, will burst into a police officer’s   house, hack off his head and tell the world ‘this is our football. It is made of skin’. The world, Monsieur Le Docteur, will become less human than you, a polished Parisian clinician and bibliophile, could possibly imagine.

“Before that though, in the mid-years of the 20th century, millions of people will be incarcerated in prisons far worse even than the hospital where you’re dissecting me, only to be starved, beaten, tortured, gassed then burnt. These barbarities will occur simply because the victims have not conformed to a peculiar notion of sterile purity.

“What will follow? Eternal arguments on earth as to whether these ghost people – like me, given numbers instead of names  – also had had their skins reused – to cover a cigarette case, maybe – or to make a nice lampshade, perhaps two. I’ve yet to extract the truth from another so-called doctor, Josef Mengele, who was chief among the faux surgeons in these hellish prison camps”.

But Dr Bouland was unmoved by her speech. Surely, he mused,  he was hallucinating, having spent much too long in the deepest bowels of the hospital, butchering human flesh.

“This book”, he said aloud,  “will be bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament will be stamped to preserve its elegance. By looking carefully, the viewer will easily distinguish the pores of the skin.

 

“It is interesting to see the different aspects that change this skin according to the method of preparation to which it is subjected. Compare it, for example, with the small volume I have in my library, Séverin Pineau’s De Integritatis & Corruptionis  Virginum  Notis  - (The  Characteristics of Integrity and Corruption of Maidens).

 

“This is also bound in human skin but tanned with sumac. A book about the human soul deserves to be dressed in a human covering. It seems more fitting, somehow,  like  the  confessions  of   criminals bound in their own skin.

“That reminds me, Madame. Are you sure your husband was the guilty party?Perhaps I should start to investigate who you really were”.

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

Author’s Note: Houghton Library at Harvard College, USA is the main repository for the university’s rare books and manuscripts. Arsène Houssaye’s Des Destinées de L’âme(FC8.H8177.879dc), bound in human skin, is considered to be among its most sinister. 

Technorati Tags: #fridayflash,#Flash Fiction,#Natalie Irene Wood,#PerfectlyWriteFamilyTales,#'She's Got Them - Under Her Skin!',#Arsene Housseye,#Dr Ludovic Bouland,#anthropodermic bibliopegy

Natalie Wood

(© Natalie Irene Wood –14 June 2014)

‘The House That Was Leper, Heretic, King’

‘Without his evil inclination, a person would not build a house, marry, or have children’ (Bereshit Rabbah 9:7).

“In my beginning when I was created from stone and wood I believed I would stand forever.

“My facade glowed and my scarcely-seasoned timbers rippled, restless, unreposed, yearning for the scented forest from which they’d been most artfully hewn.

“How long did my crystal-eyed windows dance dust-motes on rays of the glancing sun? How often did my broad-backed, gardened roof shelter those beneath in winter or offer  relief to the sleepless on airless August nights?

“I was magnificent! The holy city of Tiberias was my fiefdom and I was emperor-king.

“But on a day since embedded in my foundations, my owner went away.

“’Dear house’, he whispered, brushing the amulet on my doorpost with a graceful finger before putting it to his lips, ‘without you and my beloved wife, who’s borne me four fine sons, I would have shamed myself, achieved nought. Now we must leave. But I promise to provide a new occupant worthy of your noble frame’.

“With that, he blessed me, intoned a prayer for his family’s safety on their journey to I know not where, then left without a further word.

“But he had lied. No visitor called. I’d been abandoned; was forsaken; felt betrayed.

“Days, weeks, months, until what seemed like forty  years vanished in a breath. I could not comprehend how an edifice like me, the nearest neighbour of the tomb of the great sage and physician Rabbi  Moses Ben Maimon  could be neglected for so long.

“I had become invisible. The glass in my windows clouded and crazed as the frames warped and buckled with age. The columns of my portico  cracked and sagged; my vast main door lost its varnish, became deformed, swinging idle in the path of any  aimless breeze.

“Much worse was how the walls of my once grand reception rooms  grew deaf, then leprous with  sinister hollow streaks of green and red. The very chambers that had hosted the devout at prayer, solemn study sessions and joyous banquets were now exposed to all that was dishonoured and disgraced.

“I had become untouchable; exiled, not only from grand society, but from the very piety I once had held so dear.

“What great sin was mine? To have revelled in my departed majesty? If  so, I swiftly learned humility.  Paradise had become wilderness and a different, degraded life took charge.

“Next I was reclaimed by nature and feral animals made me their home. A donkey grazed on weeds in the once carefully tended courtyard while a family of hyraxes that first used my rock garden as a burrow, wandered in through my broken basement window for comfort against the rain.

“One sad day I was spotted by a rabid she-wolf in her final throes. Everything nearby froze in fear  as the bitch juddered through my main entrance, her foaming jaws agape, desperate for  relief.

“But she could cause no harm; collapsed exhausted in the centre of my  ante-room, convulsed, then died.

“Still, she was my near undoing. Her remains lay rotting for so long that their stench attracted wicked men  whose antics drove me almost manic with despair.

“Yes.  Even I, chief guardian mansion of the Rambam’s final resting place, became a vagrants’ den. I was now a worthless, wretched crack house for the depraved and dispossessed.

“My internal torment continued unabated until I begged Heaven  for the reason for my woes.

“Was my arrogance the sin behind my ruin? Had I caused the Rambam’s feet – and mine – to be dangled in vile muck? Was old pride why  my walls were violated and now half-submerged in the lewd language of the semi-literate and  profane?

“Thus I  hungered for insensibility; begged to return to the dust and ashes from which I’d come. Could I will myself to  shrivel to oblivion? Could I simply vanish, truly invisible, into the dense, black void?

“But I was granted no relief. Rather, during the coldest, deepest part of one night before another dreary dawn my walls heard a faint, familiar  voice.

“’Adon Bayit – Mr House’, it said. ‘You must keep faith. Do not disappoint Me. Hold fast and you will be renewed; be bright and bold as in ancient days’.

“And so it came to pass. My evil years had ended as new owners visited and effected the many cures that have nursed me back to health.

“If I could speak a human tongue they would know that I have welcomed their thousand kindnesses even as my freshly clad facade is furbished by the warmth and honeyed light of each new day.

“Once more I am a fitting eyrie for the ‘Great Eagle’ of Torah. Again I am a place for earnest study and sincerest prayer.

“But now I recognise that I can’t exist forever. Like the wood and stone from which I first appeared, I must age and wither, perhaps to be reshaped for use in different guise.

“So with Heaven’s grace I would like to conclude with thanks for this life regained:

“’Thank you, eternal King. You have mercifully restored my soul within me, allowing me to be a place of deepest study and devout prayer. Your faithfulness is great and only You will last forever’. Let me say ‘Amen’”.

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

The Maimonides Heritage Centre -  Mercaz Moreshet HaRambam - was founded in the Autumn of 2003 by American Rabbi Yamin Levy and a group of colleagues in Tiberias – one of the four holy cities of Israel. The full story may be read at: http://www.mhcny.org/?page=ourstory

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

Technorati Tags: #fridayflash,#Flash Fiction,#Natalie Irene Wood,#PerfectlyWriteFamilyTales,#'The House That Was Leper,Heretic,King',#Israel,#Tiberias,#Maimonides Heritage Centre,#Rabbi Yamin Levy

Natalie Wood
(© Natalie Irene Wood –19 May 2014)

‘Like Putting Band Aid on a Weeping Wound’

It wasn’t all peaches for

Ms Geldof. She preferred

Sprouts. Or juice.

Once a day.

 

So she’s been returned from

Whence she came to the

Half-crazed mum who tried

To hurtle her to freedom

Through the window

Of a moving car.

Now they’re both in it.

Together.

‘The  wittiest,  prettiest,

Smartest – most bonkers

Of us all’, said her dad, Bob,

Who fed the world, but

Never checked on her.

Now Tom, a nice Jewish boy

Who married her in church,

Is left bereft, holding two

Sweetly misnamed babes,

Whose love can never

Staunch the angry flow

Of baffled grief her

Parting’s left behind.   

But never mind.

They’ll know it’s

Christmas in the

Geldof  House when

There’s no peaches

With the pud.

 

Life’s terrible cruel.

And so is Peter Pan.

 

Technorati Tags: #fridayflash,Flash Fiction,Natalie Irene Wood,PerfectlyWriteFamilyTales,‘Like Putting Band Aid on a Weeping Wound’,Peaches Geldof,Bob Geldof,Thomas Cohen,Band Aid,Do They Know It's Christmas?,Anorexia

Natalie Wood

(© Natalie Irene Wood –10 April 2014)

 

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Perfectlywritefamilytales

‘It Was a Gas, Gas, Gas!’

Hey!

Is that Jumpin’ Jack Flash?

I’ve run out of cash.

You’ve always been

So big down under.

 

And that’s where you were

When I needed you most.

Down under.

But it’s too late now.

Paint it black, Jack.

As tears go by, Jack.

Never much good at being

Mother’s little helper.

 

 You promised me

I’d not fade away.

Not true tho’,

Was it, Jack?

 

Never mind, eh?

You can’t always Get what you want.

 

Hey, Jack.

Can you hear me?

I’ll go check if there’s sympathy

For the devil where

I now reside.

It was a gas while it lasted,

Jackie boy – Jack -

Help me,

God help me ….

Technorati Tags: #fridayflash,Flash Fiction,Natalie Irene Wood,PerfectlyWriteFamilyTales,'It Was a Gas,Gas Gas',Rolling Stones,Jumpin’ Jack Flash,Mick Jagger,L'Wren Scott

Natalie Wood

(© Natalie Irene Wood –18 March 2014)

‘What Made Maggie Fly?’

There had been the gorgeous gown, splendid church service and a sumptuous banquet with dancing till dawn. No wonder Maggie saw stars.

“Thank you,  Mummy. Thank you, Daddy”, she said. “Colin and I have had a wonderful day”.

“Shush!”, said Dad, putting his finger to her lips. “We wanted to show how much we love you”.

“Yes”, said Mum. “We’ve only ever wished the best for you. Enjoy your new life. Now promise not to think about us – not even once – until you and Colin return”.

So they flew to a Caribbean island – a magical land overflowing with gold-tipped sands, shimmering seas and waving palms.

On their first night – and three nights after – Colin put his finger on Maggie’s lips – just like Dad.

But not quite. More like his entire hand. No wonder Maggie saw  different stars: garish, purple-yellow bruising lights whose spikes dug deep inside her, ripping her apart in dreadful, secret   places until a soothing blanket  of thick black nothingness took the pain away.

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

Later, as Detective Inspector Edwin Daniel arrived at the St Mark’s Beachfront Plaza Hotel to investigate how and why a bride had plunged eight storeys and ninety feet to her death, Maggie’s parents opened an email.

“Dear Mummy and Daddy” they read, “I’m coming home. But not the way you’d want. I’ve got to escape Colin. He’s changed. He keeps hurting me. He wasn’t like this when we were courting.

“It’s like he wore a mask that he ripped off the moment we closed the door of our hotel bedroom.

“He lunged at me, pressed his hand hard on my mouth and whispered, ‘You’re mine now, Maggie. I can do whatever I like with you’.

“Mummy – Daddy - I can’t live like this, but please know that you’ve been the best parents a daughter could have.

“I’ll love you always.

“Maggie xxx”

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

After the shaming inquest, trial and demeaning publicity, Maggie’s Mum said, “It’s funny how life turns on a hair”.

“What?”, said Dad.

“The night before we got married my own mother shared a confidence. She said my Grandma Olive had told her it had been almost a miracle that she was born”.

“How’s that?”

“Olive had no trouble conceiving. It was because she had to – umm - take the initiative. My grandfather was  diffident about intimate relations and Mum was the result of their one full act of love”.

“But I recall your grandparents as utterly devoted. People to be emulated”, said Dad.

“Yes”, you’re right”, said Mum, struggling to remember Olive’s words, third-hand:

“Grandpa Roland  was somehow ‘asexual’. He loved and admired my grandmother more than he could say. So he put her on a pedestal and shrank from defloration. For him, the act was like a desecration. He wasn’t bothered about starting a family. Although he was a loving, first-class father, he wanted to keep Olive for himself”.

“So”, said Maggie’s Dad, now anxious to end the conversation. “Roland maintained Olive  in mint condition. Just how he liked her. I don’t know about you, but as it’s almost midnight, I think it’s time for bed”.

Technorati Tags: #fridayflash,Flash Fiction,Natalie Irene Wood,PerfectlyWriteFamilyTales,'What Made Maggie Fly?',Marriage,Rape,The Honeybus,'I Can't Let Maggie Go',Honeymoon,Asexuality,Caribbean

Natalie Wood

(© Natalie Irene Wood –15 March 2014)

‘The Charge of the Hate Brigade’

‘All things move, not in progress, but in a ceaseless round’ (William Hazlitt)

Aunt Khava had sliced lemon, sliver-thin.

“This is how we served it in the old country” she said, lighting the samovar  for our tea. “I prefer life without oranges”. 

This was silly. Khava habitually pares  all her food super-fine. This is because she’s known only privation, not glut; so hates waste and loves oranges!

“Is this about the synagogue attacked at Simferopol, Aunty”?

“Yes! Also ancient and more recent outrages in places all over the  Ukraine and Crimea you’ve never heard of. You must live through events to truly understand them”.

Her disquiet was infectious and I began crumbling a biscuit into tiny shards as she spoke.

“Do you feel like telling me more”?

Khava smiled faintly. “Don’t fret about me. I learned to cope with hard facts long before I came here to Israel – many years before you were born. But I’ll never stop worrying about things there. Don’t forget, for me it’s where the world began.

“Still” she went on,  “no matter what other people think, I don’t compare Putin with Hitler or Stalin. He’s his own man”.

“What”?

“We may see historic parallels in his actions but we should look at curves – not lines.  What we see is simply  the wheel of history continuing to spin”.

I nodded in respectful silence. Here I’d found my aunt’s hidden depths. 

“As a child in Crimea, I caught adult whispers about our area becoming another Soviet homeland for Jews, like the one in Birobidzhan. But Stalin changed all that. Allowing the birth of a socialist State of Israel was good. It would strengthen Soviet influence in the Middle East and speed the end of British imperialism to boot. But the Jews at home? Feh! Better a dead Zhid than one disloyal to Mother Russia. So, he had our intelligentsia scythed,  one by one”.

Then I spoke.

“But why did so many of our cousins stay on after Communism collapsed, scorning the chance to flee to Israel and join us here in Kfar  Zuskin”?

“You’re still young”, said Khava. “Perhaps too youthful to appreciate the comfort  that familiarity affords. They made – invented – reasons -  not  excuses. But what could they justify? Most had long denied, if not simply forgotten their Jewish roots. They didn’t want to learn from history; admit that the Jewish story in the Ukraine is the universal one”. 

“Antisemitism”? 

“That, of course. But like everywhere else, the personal terrors are pooled with those of people on the outside. I’ve already said that it’s too easy to compare Putin and Hitler; to match everything that happens  in 21st century Ukraine to Nazi activity in Europe during the 1930s”.

“From what I’ve read” I said, interrupting her flow, “the entire region’s history is streaked with Jewish blood”.

“Ha! Most poetic! But while the naked facts bear no decoration I’ll indulge in one simile.  Let’s say that while Arik Sharon’s anti-terrorist security fence on our West Bank is built with concrete and razor-wire, Jews were welcomed to the Ukraine by Catherine the Great as a human wall against the neighbouring Turks. But when we became too successful and were accused by surrounding non-Jews of all sorts of trickery, Empress Catherine fenced us in, behind the notorious Pale of Settlement.

“Life occasionally became better before it got much worse. But nothing that the Nazis or Stalin did – or anything that Putin may imagine he can do now – will be different from what’s always happened”.

“Aunty, I’m not sure I understand”.

“All right. Let’s examine, by example, the pogroms during the Russian Revolution, when at least 100,000 Ukrainian Jews were massacred between 1918 and 1921 on an industrial scale. In one incident,  800 Jews were decapitated at a sitting – a fine example to set the Nazis! And as an aside, who do you think first invented the ‘big lie’? Neither  Goebbels nor Hitler. They pinched the idea from Lenin”.

Then Khava lowered her voice as if to share a secret.

“But all this is a prelude to a rarely told family story that I hope you’ll pass on after I’ve gone. Please wait until then.

“Even as the British soldiers involved in the  ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ were entering their ‘valley of death’ at Balaclava, Jewish boys in Crimea as young as ten had tumbled headlong into a graveyard of their own.

“Your grandmother had two great-uncles, Fishel and Zamel.  Fishel died before he would have been barmitzvah  but Zamel lived until his thirties, long enough to produce Leya and Shaya, so being your great-great-great uncle”.

“What happened”?

“Czar Nicholas 1  decided on enforced Jewish army conscription, which involved young boys known as kantonists entering the elementary schools established for soldiers’ children and orphans. The kids were given basic military training and schooling until they were aged 18. This was followed by twenty-five years’ regular army service.

“But many Jewish boys like Fishel died from the extreme conditions and drastic punishments they received as a way of forcing them to baptise. The Czar’s insane, brutal idea was that the Jews would become Christian on demand once torn from their natural families. Fishel died aged 12 after endless beatings and bizarre torture”.

“And Zamel”?

“As the elder, he was tougher and somehow escaped after enduring the notorious steam torture. But the experience so weakened his constitution that he coughed himself to death aged 35”.

Finally,  I understood. It was the fruit of orange scented revolution my aunt so deplored.

Technorati Tags: #fridayflash,Flash Fiction,PerfectlyWriteFamilyTales,‘The Charge of the Hate Brigade’,Orange Revolution,Ukraine,Crimea,Russian Revolution,Pogroms,Antisemitism,Israel,Charge of the Light Brigade,23rd Psalm,William Hazlitt

Natalie Wood

(© Natalie Irene Wood – 09 March 2014)