Ben Sonnenberg

Jean Stein

Fording the Stream of Consciousness

Author(s): Dubravka Ugrešić and Michael Henry Heim
Source: Grand Street, No. 39 (1991), pp. 10-25
Published by: Jean Stein
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25007474
Accessed: 01-12-2015 17:50 UTC

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 DUBRAVKA UGRESIC

Fording the

Stream of Consciousness

JoseRamonEspeso arrivedat theZagreb Intercontinentalat

approximately 6 A.M.The first thing he did in his room was
to open the curtains. A gray morning light crept in. Then he
went back to his bag to unpack. He hung his suit carefully
on a hanger. The click of the hanger against the rod in the
closet broke themorning silence.He laidout his neatly folded
tie and white shirt on the bed-he was planning to wear them
to themeeting-and fifteen copies of his paper, "Poetry and
theCensor," on the desk.Then he went into the bathroom,put
down his toilet bag, and took out a toothbrush and toothpaste.
He removed the paper cover from the toilet seat and tossed it
into thewastepaper basket.He did the samewith the cellophane
on the tumblers,placing the toothbrushand toothpaste in one
of them. Jose Ramon enjoyed mastering things and space in a
hotel room.
Then he returned to the desk and tested the lamp, turning
it on and off. He took several picture postcards of Zagreb out of
his pocket-he had bought them just after leavingthe station
and addressed one of them immediately. He had written a short
poem on the train and decided to copy it onto the postcard and
send it to his mother, Luisa.
Itwas just seven when he finished. He checked the program:

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 DUBRAVKA UGRE SIC

Lundi, le 5 mai, 10 heures: Inauguration solennelle du Colloque

et Exposed'introduction.The opening ceremoniesweren't until
ten. He looked around the room, his glance resting on the neatly
folded shirt. The gray light had crept under the collar and cast
a stingy, barely noticeable shadow. Jose' Ram6n decided to go
down and have breakfast.
For breakfast he ordered two soft-boiled eggs and tea. He
stroked one egg with the ball of his index finger and tapped
the top with his spoon. He liked the sound and the ritual of
it. He then made a round opening in the shell and carefully
extracted the soft contents. When the waiter brought a bowl
with curlicues of butter, Jose Ramon allowed himself a thin slice
of thinly buttered bread. He ran his index finger along the edge
of the starched white napkin, then along the edge of the teacup,
and after taking a sip of tea, he counted the number of prongs
on the idle fork. If by some chance these objects-the napkin,
the cup, the fork-were to vanish, an observer might conclude
that Jose Ramon was drawing magic lines in the air. In fact,
however, Jose Ram6n was reviewing lines of the new poem, and
the progress of his unconscious index finger along the edge of
the starched white napkin more likely than not corresponded to
the length of a line, its progress along the edge of the teacup the
length of another . . .
As a result of his communist sympathies Jose Ram6n Espeso
had served several prison sentences during the Franco regime.
And although he still considered himself a communist, neither he
nor those around him thought it particularly important anymore.
Surrounded by the walls of the Carabanchelo, he often imagined
the rows of bricks beneath the plaster-their shape, their size,
their number. It helped him to structure his inner world and
curb his fear. When Jose Ram6n wrote poetry, he perceived
words as he did the bricks. He could feel their roughness or
smoothness, their porosity or solidity, their edges, as if he were
holding them in his hand, weighing them, and he fitted them
together in his poems as if he were laying bricks, building
solid walls of words. He became particularly adept at finding
a single brick to serve as a key to the whole wall and open it
up, yet itwas elusive, requiring a long, arduous search, tapping,
feeling, listening attentively. Jose'Ramon began walling up in his

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 STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

poems the sort of brick-word that, once found, would shift, alter,
reverse, or expand the poem's meaning, shed a new light on it,
through a crack, from behind. Sometimes there was more than
one such word, there were whole lines of them, and sometimes
he himself discovered the new meaning only after the fact: it
had come about without his help.
At first he did it to evade the censors-he enjoyed the secret,
private game of hide-and-seek involved; later he did it for its
own sake. The only thing that annoyed him was that critics were
lazy and incapable of decoding the word-ciphers. They read the
poems as if staring at a wall without the slightest notion that
one of the bricks in itmight be deceiving them. Jose Ramon had
gone so far as towrite commentaries on several poems and store
them in his mother's flat.
It was still only half past seven when he finished breakfast.
Strolling through the nearly empty entrance hall, he stopped
at the reception desk to find out where the Crystal Conference
Hall was and learned quite by accident from the amiable man on
duty that the hotel had a pool and a sauna.
The sudden possibility of having a swim before the meeting
began appealed greatly to Jose Ramon, and when the young
woman at the entrance to the pool told him he could rent
a bathing suit, bathing cap, and towel, he decided to take
immediate advantage of it.
"You have also music, no?" he asked in his broken English,
as if he considered a pool without an audio system a rarity.
"Um . . . yes, we have," the woman said, surprised she
had admitted it. The pool was empty, and the only time they
turned on the music was when there was a crowd-in other
words, almost never. (She may also have been nonplussed by
Jose Ramon's unusual appearance. The old man had put on the
transparent nylon bathing cap and his bald pate shone through
it like a fantastic onion dome. In fact, everything about him
described a sort of good-natured circle: the nose, the cheeks, the
salt-and-pepper beard, the glasses, the paunch . .. The paunch
and the onion dome perching on a pair of skinny legs reminded
the woman of a picture-book illustration of a less than successful
sorcerer.)
The man smiled and said, "Gracias, sefiorita," and waddled

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 D UBRA VKA UGRESIC

off in the direction of the pool. The woman smiled too, then
shrugged and put on a cassette that had been given to her the
year before by another early swimmer, an American.
Jose Ramon had three loves: his mother, his poetry, and
opera. They were quite enough for one life. And when the room
suddenly filled with the strains of Carmen, he was in seventh
heaven. He dived into the water as if diving into the music, just
as he dived into music as if diving into water. Floating on his
back, he could see the blue sky through the glass roof and count
the treetops along the other side of the street, and the clouds
and green poplars swam with him, and when Maria Callas's voice
flew up to the treetops and rustled them like a breeze, they
turned first silver, then dark, and when it flew back down like a
shooting star through the glass and the water, Jose'Ram6n dived
under to catch it.
A few minutes later the young woman peeked out of her
booth to see what the unusual guest was up to; she saw him
waving his arms, kicking his legs, spouting spray, ducking under,
popping up for air, snorting, floating, splashing, then slowly
sinking again, leaving only the cap to glide along the surface.
He looked like a fat, old, uncommonly happy seal; in fact, the
young woman had rarely seen a person so perfectly happy.
After a long float on his back he glanced at his watch, flipped
onto his stomach, and paddled over to the steps. Watching him
emerge, the young woman thought she saw a smile on his face.
But just then, as if feeling her eyes on him, he twisted away
with a jerk and, in so doing, slipped and fell backward. Trying to
regain his balance, he flung out his arms, but his head came down
hard on the edge of the pool. The woman ran up to him with her
arms stretched out helplessly, then ran back to the telephone and
dialed First Aid with a trembling finger.
". . . It's an emergency!" she cried into the phone.
"Would you turn down that music, for Christ's sake!" the
voice on the other end cried back.
Jose Ram6n's mother, Luisa, who liked exciting, emotion
packed scenes, would have enjoyed this one immensely-had
anyone but her son been the protagonist.
Jose Ramon's personal effects were listed and packed during
a routine search of his room in the presence of the young Spanish

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 S TR EA M OF CONS CIO USNES S

consul. Noticing the postcard on the desk, the consul picked

it up, read it-he was the only person in the room capable of
doing so-and placed it in his pocket, which was not altogether
in keeping with the rules. He had decided to send it personally
to Seniora Luisa and enclose his condolences: the consul, like all
Spaniards in this world, had amother.

* *c

W hat do you say to another round, baby?" Vanda

moaned coyly, tickling the Minister just below his
belly button.
Baby stroked his worried brow with one hand and patted
Vanda's behind with the other.
"No go, baby. I'm late for work as it is."
The Minister reluctantly crawled out of bed and started
gathering his clothes from various parts of the room.
"Then I'll go and make some coffee, ok baby?" Vanda said
obligingly, winding her plump charms in a Chinese housecoat
the Minister had bought for her in London and sidling off to the
kitchen.
"I really love you, baby."
"I love you tooooo," he heard Vanda's voice sailing out of
the kitchen on the toot of the espresso maker. Italian. Bought in
Trieste the year before.
Oh, that hat! She'd bought a sex manual not too long ago
The First Hundred Positions or something like that-and picked
the ten best suited to them. Then she'd copied them out on slips
of paper and put them in a little hat she'd crocheted especially
for the purpose. And these last few months they'd had their
own little erotic lottery. First theMinister would draw-with his
eyes closed, of course-then Vanda. Vanda would always squeal
with joy, as if she'd won amillion dinars instead of a copulation.
Today they'd drawn the missionary position, which, if the truth
be known, the Minister found most to his liking-or should we
say loving. You had to hand it to her. She was terrific in bed.
She had a heart of gold, too. A few months ago they'd taken the
upright position out of the hat because it gave the Minister a
sciatica attack. Vanda had torn up the paper and tossed it in the

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wastepaper basket, and that was the end of that nasty position.
It was nine by the time the Minister had tied his tie and
combed his thinninghair.
"Coffee, baby," he heard Vanda's voice calling from the
kitchen just as the telephone began to ring. He gave a start when
she handed him the receiver. It had to be Prsa. He was the only
one who knew about him and Vanda.
"Listen, can you get down here right away?" asked the
receiver in Prsa's most anxious tones. "There's been a rather
unpleasant accident . .. No, no, nothing like that, don't worry.
It's just that I think ... Yes, I'm at the hotel ... Right . . ."
Getting into his overcoat, which the solicitous Vanda, his
mistress and secretary, had readied for him, the Minister said,
"They need me down at the Intercontinental. See you later."
And so saying, he gave her a peck on the lips.

* * i

T o tell the truth, the Minister didn't really feel like a

minister. How can you be aminister if anyone at all can
nag you about anything at all? No, he was a politician,
that's all, part of the "machine." They'd kicked him upstairs
before pensioning him off, and what had they given him? The
lowest of the low. Writers. The only good part about it was
Vanda, it had brought him Vanda. And Vanda was the best thing
that had happened to him in his whole life. During the war and
just after it, everything had been clear and simple, everything
had been-human. Later it all clouded over, and once you
were in you couldn't get out, you were a cog in the wheel.
He had just finished his apprenticeship at the local butcher's
when the war came along and pushed him into the partisans.
After the war he actually did a stint as a butcher, but when
things started being nationalized he was given special training,
first in administration, then in education. That's how it was
in those days. Then radio, newspapers, television-he had a
biography richer than Jack London's! And today's crop-what
did they know? Nothing. They had nothing to offer, not even
a trade, while he could still make blood sausage with the best
of them. And why were those damn writers always after him

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 STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

to be tolerant and accept other people's views?He was their

political representative, not their maitre d'! Of course, they had
nothing to do but grind out theircompletely andutterly useless
drivel. Oh, and moan and groan and run down one another and
the system,beating their chests and raisingtheirvoices against
every piddling "miscarriage of justice." Now he'd put himself on
the line for his beliefs; he could have ended up in jail, he could
have been killed in the war. These young people wanted no
riskbeliefs. The freedom to say anything theypleased-against
the system,of course-and the right to system-generatedstatus,
unemployment insurance,old-agepensions, subsidizedhousing,
trips abroad, high pay-you name it. And what did they give
in exchange? A thin volume of poems that they and one or two
criticspronounced"brilliant"because it represented"culture,"
andwhere would we be without culture?Well, the hell with
culture. First showme you're a Shakespeare,then talkculture.
Where else did they pay you like we do? No country I know.
Try starving a little.Weren't artists supposed to starve?Not
only did we pay them, we gave them perks like this colloquium.
Colloquium! A four-day spree for them and their foreign cronies.
Not that our ignorant bastards knew enough of their languages
to say two words to them. And what about the foreigners? Who
were they, anyway? The ones from the Eastern bloc came to
buy their wives bras and panties, and the ones from theWest to
wash down their cevapci ci with plenty of slivovica. Two years
ago a self-styled Slavist from Stockholm had kept tugging at my
sleeve, asking me about "the eye." "What eye?" I finally asked,
and he said, "I hear you eat sheep eye. Big Yugoslav delicacy."
So we found him one. Someone said he was a member of the
Nobel Prize committee. Big deal. Cultural exchange! Our writers
foisting their books off on foreignerswho regularly left them
behind for the chambermaids. At least the chambermaids knew
the language. All they really wanted was to force their latest
masterpiece on us. And we, fools that we are, we go and publish
them. Wouldn't want to miss anything, would we? Got to keep
up with the world. But did the world keep up with us? The world
didn't give a fuck about us. All right, calm down. Think of your
pension. Vanda and the pension. When you retire you'll move in
with Vanda and leave the flat and the car and the house by the sea

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 DUBRA VKA UGRESIC

to the snake. The other house, too. Everything. To her and that
dimwit, that thirty-year-old rock 'n' roller who couldn't get into
the army, not tomention the university, the slouch, the sluggard,
the good-for-nothing deadbeat. Why didn't I smack him around
while there was still time? It was all those damn "pedagogical
values" he now so prized. Open-mindedness, democracy, all that
shit...
"'Oh, Minister!" he suddenly heard as he entered the
Intercontinental. It was Prsa, waving his arms like a madman.
"Well, out with it."
"It's catastrophic! We'll have to rewrite your opening
remarks. Or at least call for aminute of silence at the end. One
of the guests, a Spaniard, he slipped in the pool and cracked his
head open."
"Oh God," said the Minister. "How old was he?'" he added,
as if the man had died of an illness rather than an accident.

*0 *

A s Pipo Fink of the bouncy walk approached the Crystal

Conference Hall, he was welcomed by a loud babble and
a large crowd. Some people were standing, others sitting,
yet others milling or makinlg their way to the table where they
could pick up programs, copies of the talks, and headsets for
simultaneous translation. Pipo peeked into the hall and gave it
one of his pan shots. At the other end he could see Prsa trotting
around, talking, waving his arms and scowling, the way people
in charge tend to wave their arms and scowl. One man had
taken a seat in the front row and was fiddling with his headset,
trying to make out whether things had started yet. A man who
trusts his ears more than his eyes, Pipo thought. Prsa stopped a
gliding waiter and said something with a wave of the arms and
a contraction of the brows; the waiter's face remained perfectly
aloof. They were used to it; there were functions here every
week: a congress of sociologists, a symposium of cardiologists, a
conventionofKremlinologists,a seminarof archaeologists,elec
tions for the most valuable athlete of the year, gastronomical ex
travaganzas ... There is no difference between awriter, a cyclist,
and a sociologist. Not from a waiter's perspective, at least.

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 STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Back in the foyer, Pipo surveyed the terrain for the safest
spot. He stationed himself next to a well-developed ficus. Then
he switched back to his camera mode, focusing on three tiny,
shriveled old women with thin, gray hair, lackluster eyes, and
bobbling heads.Under closer scrutiny they turned into sweet
little hens with shiny black feathers and white spots. Children's
book writers. Periodically hatching lyrical, gaily painted eggs.
All my love, chickadees! he called out to them silently, deeply
moved, and one of them, as if she had heard him, turned and
gave him a blissful smile of nonrecognition.
Suddenly amass of muscles blocked Pipo's lens. Itwas domi
nated by a protuberant chest and jutting jaw of such inexorable,
relentless determination that it took the cameraman's breath
away. Ivan Ljustina, the critic, was on the move. Pipo uncon
sciously clutched at a leaf of the ficus. But just as Ljustina was
about to plow into him, he swerved his authoritative body with
great dignity. Ox, boar, or yak? Pipo wondered, stroking the
smooth surface of the leaf with a compassionate thumb. Having
reached the opposite wall, the critic turned and started making
his way in Pipo's direction again, but Pipo unconsciously took a
step to the side, thereby placing himself out of range.
Pipo's internal camera now turned to a small group listening
to the famous novelist Mraz. Mraz reminded Pipo of a walrus.
He huffed and puffed, twisted his head this way and that (Pipo
zoomed in on the tough wrinkled hide at the back of his neck
and counted three fatty folds), waved his flippers, wiggled his
fleshy bottom, snorted and honked. For amoment Pipo thought
he saw a cloud of steam over his head. His strategic position
in the middle of the room and his nonchalant, walrusy good
nature combined to give the impression to all and sundry that
the real reason they were there was to celebrate his birthday. Or
something of the sort. Soon he'll be handing out his latest book
to the foreigners, thought Pipo maliciously.
The next group caught by Pipo's kino-eye was a trio of poets
whispering confidentially under the cover of a coquettish pot
ted plant. Why do all our poets have greasy hair that hangs in
noodles over their necks and cheeks, a sickly, gray, and, yes,
oily complexion, bent backs, and tiny, beady, squinty, perfid
ious eyes? Pipo wondered. The novelists were a healthier lot

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 DUBRAVKA UGRESIC

somehow. The mouselike glint in the poets' eyes made Pipo

decide that when he finally got down towriting his Animal King
dom he'd put the poets in the "Vermin" chapter. Meanwhile, a
fourth poet had joined the group: a small man in a neat suit and
tie. Pipo zoomed in on his sleeves, which were a bit too long,
though not so long as to hide a pair of chubby little hands. What
was this teddy bear doing among the grizzlies? Pipo thought,
and capriciously crossed him off the list of writers, beasts, and
beings.
Women were in the minority, and most of those present were
young and good-looking, language students from the university
brought in to serve as interpreters. They're much too smooth and
shiny to be animals, Pipo concluded, too sleek, too aerodynamic.
(Look at her, will you? a friend of Pipo's had said the other
day, commenting on a girl in the street. A sight for sore eyes!
A regular DC-10!)
Panning again, Pipo registered noisy packs of badgers,
crocodiles, monkeys, bears, and a lone gray eagle. Prsa went
too far when he said a writer was a wolf to other writers; no, a
writer might be a mouse or, say, a rat, but not a wolf. Besides,
writers made you think of people, and people always made you
think of animals, and with that conciliatory thought Pipo stopped
his camera long enough to have a good look at the long shot
in front of him. In the background he noticed two or three
middle-aged women, each seriously leafing through the typed
versions of the talks.Foreigners.Translators.Translatorswere:
1. plain women past their prime (who else would devote so
much energy to translating the writers of a "minor" literature?);
2. pale and shopworn (from spending all their time indoors
translating); 3. less than stylishly dressed (because their pay
is so low); and 4. modest (because of the very nature of their
undertaking). How did they get caught in such a useless and
out-of-the-way literature? Pipo wondered. Maybe in their youth
they'd had a fling with one or another local writer and, seduced
and abandoned, they'd kept translating out of loyalty to the fling
and because, having learned an otherwise worthless language,
they might as well do what little they could with it.
"Look who's here!" Pipo heard a voice call out. It was Ena,
a.k.a. the Bell Tower, a journalist and friend from his student

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days. Ena was tall, almost as tall as Pipo, and was known for her
tragicomicalungainliness,which showedmore in theway she
moved than in the way she was put together. She seemed so
surprisedat being able towalk that she periodically forgothow
to go about it, and her nickname, acquired early in her studies,
derived not so much from her height as from her long neck,
her smallhead, and her outlandishly large feet. The Bell Tower
had penetrating dark eyes and an unbearably sad expression;
she wore her despair-and had worn it as long as anyone could
remember-like an old-fashionedbrooch. She was a mythical
beast-half ostrich, half giraffe. Pipo caught a brief view of Ena's
profile.What could a person do with that silhouette, that soul,
and those feet?Pipo thought,and suddenlyrememberedthathe
and the Bell Tower had in the distant past ... once or twice only,
three timesat themost. Therewere timesPipo thoughtshewas
in lovewith him, the times she snuggledup andwouldn't speak.
A kind of adhesive tape.
"What'sup?" saidPipo nonchalantly.
"Nothing," said the giraffe, the ostrich, and the Bell Tower,
heading towardthe conference hall. "Aren'tyou going in?"
"Not just yet," said Pipo, starting the camera up again. His
new perspective-he had a bird's-eye view this time-revealed
considerable movement on the right, and he took pleasure in
registering the funnel effect of a mass of people flowing out of
the frame.
No, this was neither his time nor his place. He just happened
to have been born here, to have gotten stuck here. He wasn't
even a member of the animal kingdom. He lacked the greasy
hair, the beady eyes. In his dreams he had other plans, he was
different. I'm different! he called out mentally to the last human
figure to enter the conference hall, after which he switched off
his internal camera and went into the hall himself, picking up
a headset on the way. The minute he sat down-in the last
row, as near to the door as possible-he set the dial to English,
superimposed the female English-speaking voice onto Prsa's face
as he ran through the organizational details, and pushed off on
his own.
Pipo was wakened by a light touch on the shoulder. He
turned to see a BERKELEY
T-shirt.

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 D UBRA VKA UGRESI C

"Hi!" said the T-shirt in English. "Mind if I join you?"

Pipo moved over and the young man sat down. Pipo
noticed he was wearing a headset and an almost happy smile.
Stupid Yank, thought Pipo. Ready to beam at the most inane
introductory remarks. When the young man realized that Pipo
was looking at him, his smile broadened. He took off his headset,
gave Pipo another nudge, and offered it to him. This guy's
crazy, Pipo thought, but took off his earphones and put on the
American's. Suddenly his head exploded with the Talking Heads'
latesthit.
Meanwhile the rest of the writers heard:

Comrades, Fellow Writers!

It is a great pleasure and a great honor for me to open
this year's Zagreb Literary Colloquium, which will be devoted
to the theme of "Contemporary Literature: Its Trends and
Tendencies in the Dialectics ofWorld Events." Our city, well
known for its hospitality, takes particular pride in playing
annual host to this gathering of national and international
literary celebrities. All of you-poets, novelists, artists
contribute freely of your labors to the cause of peace, breaking
down geographic, political, and ideological borders to form a
neutral ground of the written word where you can wield that
proverbial pen which is stronger than the sword ...

* * 0

T hings picked up considerably after the opening cere

monies. The participants were more at ease in the lobby
and started circulating, peering at the name tags on one
another's lapels, making friends, forming groups. One of the lo
cals, Ranko Les, who considered eccentricity a poet's prime re
sponsibility, had pinned the badge to his trousers, just to the left
of the crotch.
The French representative, Jean-Paul Flagus, an elderly
gentleman with watery blue goggle-eyes, thick, wet lips, and
a slightly protruding neck that gave him the look of a turtle, had
gathered a group of French-speaking writers around him and
was talking animatedly, puffing occasional smoke rings from his
thick cigar.

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 STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

"Much as Imourn our colleague Jose Ramon Espeso, we all

know that bizarre deaths are far from exceptional in the artistic
world."
"What do you mean?" asked Cecilia S0rensen, the Danish
representative.
"Death by water, for example. Let me pass over water's
symbolic nature, interesting as it is, and concentrate on concrete
instances. The first that comes to my mind-and doubtless
yours-is that of the Chinese poet Li Po, an inveterate tippler,
who fell from a boat in his cups and drowned while trying to
embrace the reflection of the moon in the water. Or Menander,
who, stricken with a cramp while swimming off Piraeus one day,
descended to a watery grave. Or Shelley . . .
"Or Virginia Woolf," Cecilia interjected.
"Evelyn Waugh had apparently meant to die by water,"
Jean-Paul Flagus continued, peacefully puffing on his cigar, "but
the school of jellyfish he fell upon kept him from going under.
If one can believe W. H. Auden, that is . . .
"Aristotle is said to have drowned," the toy poet piped up.
"But then," he piped down, "maybe he didn't."
"Drowning doesn't strike me as particularly bizarre," said
Ranko Leg.
Monsieur Flagus turned and stared at him with a puff and a
smile and said, "Then here is something much more bizarre and
something you must have heard of. The Greek poet Terpander
choked and died while giving a recitation, because a fig that
a member of the audience threw at him flew straight into his
mouth and lodged in his windpipe."
"Pushkin and Lermontov both died in duels," the toy poet
tried again, softly. "That's no ordinary death." But as he spoke,
he heard how banal it sounded and added, "And Gorky was
poisoned!"
"Right you are," said Monsieur Flagus, "but let's take a
happier example. Sir Thomas Urquhart is said to have died
laughing when he learned that Charles II had been removed
from the throne."
The writers were a bit nonplussed, uncertain whether to take
his words as the truth or a joke. Moreover, no one but Thomas
Kiely could quite place Sir Thomas Urquhart.

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 DUBRA VKA UGRESIC

"Well, our poet Mikl6s Zrinyi was killed by a wild boar,"

said Ilona Kovaics, the Hungarian representative. "But that was
back in the seventeenth century," she added, as if it could only
have happened then, the seventeenth century being known for
its poets and boars.
"You mean our poet Nikola Zrinski," said the poet Ranko
Le-, cocking his nose at her as if itwere a dangerous beak.
"That's a matter of opinion," said the poet Ilona Kovacs,
sighing coquettishly and giving Les a quick but open once-over.
"Very interesting," said Jean-Paul Flagus benignly, "'and of
course you know that the famous William Thackeray died of
gluttony."
"Francis Thompson committed suicide because he was
visited by Thomas Chatterton, who had killed himself two
centuries earlier and ordered him to follow suit," said Thomas
Kiely the Irishman.
"What's so bizarre about suicide?" said Ranko Les, ever
protesting. "You might at least have mentioned Marlowe, who
was stabbed to death in a tavern."
"For not paying his bill!" cried a voice behind his back.
Everyone laughed.
"Lionel Johnson," said the Irishman serenely, "died from
injuries sustained when he fell off a bar stool . . . "-again the
writers burst out laughing-"and James Agee and Robert Lowell
died in a taxi.
"Nothing unusual in that," Leg interposed again.
"As unusual as dying in a hotel pool," said the Irishman.
"Another interesting case," Monsieur Flagus continued,
calm and collected, "is that of Sholom Aleichem, who was
so deathly afraid of the number thirteen that none of his
manuscripts had a page with that number. He died on 13 May
1916, but the date engraved on his tombstone is 12-a."
The writers felt somehow personally involved in the fate of
Sholom Aleichem, and their buzzing died down.
"There are any number of such instances," Monsieur Flagus
went on. "William Cullen Bryant died in June, as he foresaw
in his poem 'June.' Nathaniel Hawthorne claimed the number
sixty-four played amystical role in his life; he died in 1864 . . ."
"That's not an unusual death; that's a coincidence," said

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 STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Cecilia S0rensen coldly, implying either that she was tired of

all this talk about death or that she felt it had gone too far.
"All right, then," said Monsieur Flagus. "How about
SherwoodAnderson,who died of intestinalcomplicationsafter
swallowing a toothpick at a cocktail party? And now, how about
calling it a day, because here comes awaiter with drinks." And in
fact awaiter was pushing a cart laden with drinks in the direction
of the group. The writers suddenly came to life.When each had
a drink in hand, Monsieur Flagus said with dignity and natural
elegance, "I propose a toast to the late Jose Ramon Espeso."
The writers drained their glasses. Noticing that Cecilia
S0rensen was drinking mineral water, Monsieur Flagus added
with a diabolical grin, "Oh, by the way, did you know thatArnold
Bennett died in Paris of typhoid fever from drinking a glass of
water? He wanted to prove the water was untainted."
Once more the writers laughed, and Cecilia S0rensen,
clutching her glass of mineral water, withdrew.

Translated by Michael Henry Heim

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