[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thanks, Alison.
This program is in its 10th year.
I think that's kind of a landmark.
And the program has involved 40 different writers
in 16 different states throughout the US,
creating, what I think, Alison is right,
a community of writers that is spread throughout this country.
And hopefully, we'll continue as the years go by.
I would like to just say a couple
of thank you's and then get right to the work, which
is why you're here.
First of all, thanks to Alison Deming
and to Karen Falkenstrom who put this program together and has
made our visit here so far quite wonderful.
I'd also like to thank all the writers that we have met
and will meet tomorrow as well who have given generously
of their time and have shared their experiences
in writing and just in living, which is also a part of writing.
And last but not least, the judges for this program.
The poet Mark Doty, who I believe
read here last year, who selected Laura's work.
And Melissa Pritchard, who is here
this evening, and who I had the good fortune
to meet in New Mexico, I guess, about four years ago,
and who selected David Reynolds's work.
I'd like now to introduce Melissa Pritchard.
Melissa Pritchard received the Flannery O'Connor Award
for her first book, Spirit Seizures.
Her stories have been anthologized and cited
in prized stories, including the O. Henry Awards, Best
of the West, The Literary Ghost: Great Contemporary Ghost
Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories.
She's received grants from the National Endowment
for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council.
Her novel Phoenix was published by Cane Hill Press.
And stories from her second collection,
The Instinct for Bliss, have appeared
in the Paris Review, the Southern Review,
and other magazines.
She teaches in a creative writing program at Arizona State
University.
And I think probably the best thing--
the most important thing about Melissa Pritchard
is that when you read her stories,
they are extraordinarily powerful, mystic,
and they stay with you.
And so it's my pleasure to welcome Melissa Pritchard.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Before I introduce the two winners of this year's Poets
& Writers Exchange Program, I'd like
to say how much I wish Mark Doty, who
served as this year's poetry judge, was with us this evening.
He is a valiant and compassionate artist, surely
one of the best poets writing today.
And how quickly he must have recognized a similar courage
and compassion shaping the poems of this year's winner in poetry,
Laura Kasischke.
Reading her manuscript, Housekeeping in a Dream,
I was struck by her rigorous commitment
to the expression of truths, whether home truths
or foreign ones.
Always in her work, I found the unmistakable urgency
of the human heart speaking with clarity
of what it knows and feels.
In imagery, nothing short of wondrous.
Laura Kasischke received her Bachelor of Arts and Master
of Fine Arts degree from the University of Michigan
at Ann Arbor.
Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines,
including the Antioch Review, the Kenyon Review, the Missouri
Review, Ploughshares Poetry, and the most current edition
of The Pushcart Prize.
In 1993, she received the Alice Fay Di Castagnola
Award for a work-in-progress from the Poetry Society
of America.
This year, she was awarded a fellowship
from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Her first volume of poetry, Wild Brides, selected by Sharon Olds,
received the Elmer Bobst Award for emerging writers
and was published by New York University Press.
Poetry, said W.H. Auden, can do 101 things; delight, sadden,
disturb, amuse, instruct.
It may express every possible shade of emotion
and describe every conceivable kind of event,
but there is only one thing that all poetry must do.
It must praise all it can for being and happening.
Laura Kasischke's poetry, beyond its excellent measure of craft
and beyond its clear impression upon the heart
indeed praises all it can.
I'd like to introduce this year's winner of the Poets
& Writers Exchange Program of Poetry, Laura Kasischke.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much.
And I'd also very much like to thank
all the poets and writers, people
who have been so good to us.
And Frazier Russell, in particular,
for just really babysitting us really well for what
has probably been a long week for him.
So this first poem is called "Lady Luck."
And it's a new poem.
And I wrote it after thinking about some various tabloid type
tragedies that have been in the news lately
and the kind of combination of bad luck or predetermination
that seems to rule our lives.
And so this is about Lady Luck and God falling in love.
Somewhere, there's a sad blue dress,
and a woman's wearing it to work.
God gawks down at her on Earth, but all he sees
is just a smeared blue something, something watery
or melted, something spread like blue milk
spilled all over a wax white tray.
The corn is female too and grows magenta hair by August.
And it smells like teenage girls on horses,
sweating in the fields.
Flesh and leather and that hair, magenta wet.
The wind creaks with corn.
And the planet's a foggy oyster from up there, a sad blue dress,
and overrun with rabbits.
Phantom ovaries shine behind a glistening wish of rabbit bone,
like microscopic pearls let loose all over the world.
When God falls in love with Lady Luck,
something's torn from a parchment sack
and born, and scampers off on soft white paws that
stir up and scratch off the church's dress of dust.
And the woman, on her way to work,
who wears the sad blue dress she'll never know
is the whole cloth of Earth.
She never sees the sky, the cloud, the girl's damp blood
hair of corn.
Detergents churn the streams.
A crucifixion in the fields wears a farmer's shirt
and scares the bony birds with its empty, open flannel arms.
And white powder falls from their wire feet,
as if their startled hungry fear could dance
to talc the moon's gym floor.
When God asks Lady Luck to dance, nothing's sacred anymore.
The serial killer orders a piece of apple pie
at a diner in Arizona.
The jury is moved by the TV movie
and decides to set him free.
The hunters shoot each other, thinking
that they've seen neon-orange deer fleeing between the trees.
And the lottery is never won by a man who loves his wife.
Bullet wind is silver, and the air around the bullet
is a razor.
And the singe above it's like a silver finger nail
file that's dusted with fingernail, filed down
to human flour, and August's ground to chalky powder.
And the horses do not know the teenage girls will soon fall out
of love with them and into love with men, while the woman's
dress rips open like a gift of sadness, appetite, or chance,
equestrian and blinding as a white car's headlights
on a whitewashed day.
This was not an accident, the detectives say.
The boys had not been drinking, and the witnesses
saw nothing but a bird's pure scream.
I read somewhere that Malaysian superstition
is that if a person's face is painted while they're sleeping,
well, when they fall asleep, their soul will leave their body
and it can't find its way back because their face is painted.
And this made me think of my mother,
how she would demand always that I not wear makeup
when I was a teenager to bed.
Something like your face would rot off
or something if you wore it.
You can wear it on your face all day,
but you can't wear it overnight.
So I thought maybe this was--
somehow, these things seem connected to me.
And this is called "Self-fulfilling Prophecies."
And I begin it with a quote about the Malaysians' fancy
that if a person's face is painted while he sleeps,
the soul, which has gone out of him,
will not recognize the body.
And the sleeper will die or awake a kind of female zombie
in a cold, dark space.
On Sunday, I'm in a department store
choosing a crayon for my eyes.
The cosmetic counter floats towards me
like a ship of fluorescent light.
And the girl behind it is perfect, half goddess
in a tight white dress.
Though I see she has eaten her fingernails off
by the bloody stumps of her fingers
and the flesh between her teeth.
Still, it's true what they say that each beautiful woman must
bear a flaw of some kind.
Some must draw on the mark themselves
with an eyebrow pencil, and some must chew up their hands
to get at it.
She looks at my face and suggests a dark, coal
color to match my soul.
Where is it, I ask her.
And she happens to know.
She takes me into a storage room, where shelves
sag with the weight of lipstick crates,
and a white mouse struggles in a trap of glue.
It rips off its tail to try to get loose, just
to get stuck on its face.
It's clear there is no escape.
Here, she says, we kept it just in case you came.
She is so lovely, I end up buying twice as much as I need.
And when I get home, I decorate my face like a birthday cake
until my lips can be seen red and pleading, miles
and miles away.
I wear it all night in the empty bed,
while my soul is freeze-dried in the sky,
and the janitor buries his bag of mice and a hole in the yard.
Their little human hands are stiff,
and their pink eyes blink open and shut, shut and open
like baby dolls in the grave.
This poem is called "Local Legend."
And I had a terrible experience of finding a dead dog a year ago
in the spring in the backyard.
It had obviously been there all winter.
And it was full of bees, actually.
And as soon as I saw it, I immediately thought of the town
that I grew up in.
Somehow, there was just an absolute connection right there.
And so I wrote this poem sort of combining the description
of the dog and the description of the town, "Local Legend."
This morning, the awful surprise of a dead
greyhound in lilies, silver on silver and hollow.
The sky goes wild with laughter, and the seeds of doubt
sprout small bald chutes in ground and glimmer
like rosary beads in the hands of our local legend, Sister
Lucianne, who claimed they turned from glass to gold one
day at mass.
But we knew they never did.
Sister Lucianne was lonely and getting old.
And she wanted her name in the paper the way some of us
want to be held and are perfectly willing to spin straw
into fool's gold for it.
And anyway, we knew the last real miracle here was when
Catholics Central slaughtered Rockford 42-10.
There was blood in the parking lot then.
Glass shattered and sparkled like white eels
on a church lawn.
Toilet paper strung umbilical cords
through trees, streaming wet by morning,
and white as ghouls against a purple October sky.
They say two pom-pom girls in the Catholic cemetery
took on the whole team themselves that night.
There was the cold sweat of marble
in the air, stale green carnations, the Earth
kiss of mulch, and wild hair.
I know.
I was there.
"Heed a warning," the horoscope in the local paper almost never
says.
And that may be because Linda Lovelace is the only true star
this town has ever had.
And Tuesday is usually the tepid day of death.
Though today, it's just this empty boat
of a silver dog, thumped with a buzzing fist of gold.
Bees have attached a hive to its spine
and they drone in and out of it like a handbag stuffed
with gossip, and honey, and another story that
goes, In 1967, a wagon load of angry clowns passed
through this town.
And all the Catholic girls stepped out
in night frost and no clothes.
Though the Shriners still deny it,
that procession lasted four nights.
And I say, who's to say a clown, however bitter, however old,
couldn't sire a human child among us like a God?
Here it is, I tell you.
Bend down here today and look at this strange harp,
this jeweled and busy zither, dead and alive at the same time.
Here God is.
I'm going to read an older poem that I had planned
to write for years and years.
I carried around a clipping with me with the headline,
and which is the title of the poem,
"Woman Kills Sweetheart With Bowling Ball."
And this woman really did do that in Bloomington, Indiana.
She dropped her lover's bowling ball on his head
over and over again while he slept.
I just really wanted to write a poem about it,
but it took me a long time to get to it.
And it very much scared my husband
who wondered why I carried this clipping around with me
everywhere.
But this is the poem, "Woman Kills Sweetheart With Bowling
Ball."
The moon is loose in the gutter tonight,
and it rolls without kisses or hand-prints between us.
Its mouth is an O of surprise.
Oh, tonight, the phantasma of love
climbs the stairs while we sleep.
She sags with exhaustion and booze and pills,
while her skin hangs heavy and empty as hate.
She floats so slow, she floats as if she
is swimming through blood.
Shh, shh.
The lights are out.
And the little suspicion sleeps and dreams and whimpers
in its crib.
Its tongue is ugly and blue.
She climbs, she climbs in silence and fury,
spinning groggy in darkness and wind.
Look, her left hand bears for you
sweetly a gift of lightning and lilies to please you.
Though, oh, tonight, in her right hand, she,
she has invented gravity.
This is "Babysitter."
When I was 16, I decided to eat the underworld fruit.
What the hell, I said.
It was juicy and cold.
My hair was black, so I dyed it black,
and I wore nothing but black.
I still have the skull tattooed on my ass.
I never cried and I never laughed.
I decided to reinvent silence right in my own home.
My father's hair went white overnight,
and he hung up his mailman blues and retired.
My mother fell down the stairs and died.
My father said he was glad at least
she couldn't see what would become of me.
That winter, I divided the bear arrows up among my friends.
Aim to kill, I said.
And I tacked its head to the post of my bed.
At night, it sang its grisly song to me,
and I slipped my neck between its teeth.
I trust you completely, I said.
For attention at school, I swallowed fire,
I ate crows whole, and once, I jumped out from behind a bush
and scared a priest to death.
At 16, I discovered sex in the back seat of a cannibal's car.
Though, we only went so far.
It was my first taste of human flesh,
and it was tender and sweet.
When I was 16, the beast came looking for me.
Some of my friends impaled themselves on rusty knives,
while I was granted eternal life.
I don't know why.
Wild dogs followed me home.
Rabid bats ate from my hand.
And children, children loved me.
At night, while you were out dancing,
your children gathered around me and put their little raccoon
hands in mine.
I imagine a lot of you have seen the movie A Place in the Sun.
And this poem is called "Thunder,
or a Place in the Sun."
And the part that refers to that movie,
I'm sure you know the scene where Montgomery Clift is
going to knock his wife or his pregnant girlfriend, who he--
they're not married yet-- his pregnant girlfriend
into the water.
And she can't swim.
And even though it seems really like a bad thing
to do since she's pregnant and she's so homely and everything,
you really want him to because she looks so ugly
and he could marry Elizabeth Taylor and be happy.
And so you just really want to see him just like whack her out
of the boat, or I do, anyway.
So that's what this poem is about.
"Thunder, or a Place in the Sun."
One.
The Gods are bowling in heaven tonight.
Their wives cry into their own black hair,
while the kitchen's strange machinery minces and hatches.
I arrange this.
I arrange that.
I move from room to room.
Two.
Lightning strikes me as similar to love.
The ruins in some countries are tooth-white and stunning in sun.
Pillars holding up nothing but blue air and light.
He writes on the back of the postcard I knew something
somewhere was holding that up.
Didn't you?
Three.
My friend tells me that high heels
were invented to keep housewives from running away,
like the fists of bound feet in China.
Lovely as doves and blunt as clubs.
True enough, I tell her, I've never run,
but my heart is a boot with blood on it.
Four.
There's a long line outside the liquor
store on Fridays in the summer.
The lottery and beer.
We're all in the same line, the same boat here.
In a place in the sun, there is the old woman
warble of loons, and square-jawed Alice,
her face grows larger and larger in our boat.
Behind us, the slim hope of the idle rich.
Before us, fog crinolines out of the Campbell's soup.
A muddle of plaid furniture and empty shoes.
We'd also rather die than be stuck with our own lives,
our own homely wives.
Both of them thick and dopey, and she can't swim.
Back there, something gorgeous as Liz Taylor
waits between layers and layers of light, white cake if we win.
Five.
I stare at my own feet a long time outside the liquor store.
True, I've never run in these red heels,
but I've been run from.
I've watched one husband cuff his hands around a bullet hole
as if to keep the river in him.
Lungs hissing a bit, like the teapot wanting to boil.
When he opened his mouth, a pink froth came out,
a silver wind in my face.
This is called "Prayers to Saint Vanity."
One.
My dry well, I beseech thee.
This old lighthouse.
Once, it could catch fire and burn the woman inside alive.
Two.
In Alpena, they'll tell you a lightkeeper's wife
haunts Lake Huron out of spite.
She wails over the waves.
Her ghost is a gull, a cloud, a rag, a trout with wings in gray.
They say the light-keeper locked her in the lighthouse
every night, then went to visit a girl in town.
Finally, she burned it down with herself inside, alive.
Three.
Saint Vanity, my body is that burning tower
tonight with that mad wife inside,
with that feverish girl outside, waiting for him in town.
Lake Huron is a blue, black churning urged to drown,
colder and more filmy than a tooth.
Some mornings, I ride my stationary bike
all the way to Vietnam.
There, my husband is 18, and either he's
kissing a pretty whore or cradling a corpse.
I see how close the bullets sing to his sweet feet.
How unlikely is this life.
Those bullets peel.
And when I wake, he's still asleep, beside me in Alpena
at the Fountain of Youth RV Park.
Now, I could sew my own shroud closed,
or a dead marine could unzip his own body bag,
glistening with rain and green, the zither of plastic
and a zipper's nasty teeth.
And my husband could step out.
Love, he'd say, is bloodless, wonderful and dull
as death by natural causes.
Four.
At Youth Saint Vanity, you wear silver sandals,
and you perch on my shoulder every morning.
You're a little Betty Grable with 40-year-old legs.
Ships have sunk, with trunks of money
and all our mother's lovers, just because the light
in that lighthouse was out.
My dry well, I tell you.
When my husband touches me, my insides
are a herd of skinny girls, running backwards, laughing,
making kisses at the sky.
Five.
Saint Vanity, you know so well the differences between
the fears of the rich, the fears of the poor,
the fears of the beautiful, the fears of the homely,
the fears of the young, the fears of the old,
the desire to die, and the act of dying,
and you cannot bless us all.
And this last poem is called "Ravine."
At night, we crawled out of our windows
with our parents' bottles while they were
drunk and locked in combat.
Dogs would strain their chains at the stars and the smell
of girls' underwear in backyards,
as we shuffled over the summer stumps of suburban grass.
We wore our hair orange in those days, ugly and amazing as grace.
We talked on and on about boys as if we knew one.
And now, I bleed with nostalgia to think of that.
The wet banks of the ravine where
we slid down to drink, just two girls
getting immaterial on wine.
Maybe smoking, if we had one.
Sucking the kitchen lights in the distance down,
like a smoldering forest of pines.
The heart named us sisters, with its dull thumping.
I loved her with pain like handfuls of ice.
She loved me enough to let me go on and on as no one ever
has about my body parts, my optimistic theory
about development and growth, while we were in the bubbling
test tube of it.
Sometimes, we would lift our arms up
and sing, while the moon trampled us with green light.
Mindless, we were that young.
And in the little light we got, once or twice we
found in that damp slash, evidence
that other life existed, a milky rubber dried up
and open-mouthed as a baby bird, hauled out
of a nest to its death by gravity and wind.
Thinking, as it shriveled bald and wet through air,
that at least it knew what flight would be
like if it had feathers to do it.
We poked it up with a stick and whipped it into the air.
It thrilled us as much as sex ever would,
as if something had shed its better skin in our path.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
And now, I have the pleasure of introducing
a second remarkable writer to you.
Winner of this year's Poets & Writers Exchange
in fiction, David Reynolds.
David Reynolds received his Bachelor of Arts
from University of California at Santa Cruz,
and his Master of Fine Arts degree
from the University of Michigan.
His stories have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Passages
North, and a chapter from his novel-in-progress
appears in the 1994 Best of Writers At Work Anthology.
He currently writes and edits for the physics department
at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
The manuscript David submitted to this competition
is an excerpt from the novel he's currently working on,
In the Waiting World.
Set in Russia at the turn of the century,
more specifically set in the Jewish village of Rafalivka,
we see the once ordered and calm lives
of people encroached upon first by rumors
of pogroms in other parts of Russia,
increasing rumors of persecution, and finally
no rumor at all, with the ominous arrival
of a troop of Cossacks to Rafalivka
and the traumatic chain of events
occasioned by this hostile, ultimately terrible event.
Told with grace, grave authority, and a lyrical grasp
of language that is often breathtaking,
David Reynolds, with delicate precision,
reconstructs a tragic episode in Russian Jewish history.
In so doing, he disrupts our own peace,
disturbs, and forces us to look at the grotesquely barbarous
behaviors of human beings toward one another.
Lulled, even entranced, by the surety
of his gift for observation and narrative control,
we detach easily from our own age and specific moral dilemmas,
and attach ourselves instead to the tragic plight of men, women,
and children forced by hostile circumstance
to extraordinary and even heroic response.
The literary critic John Barber has said tragedy
raises a basic religious question.
How can the worth of human existence
be affirmed in the light of our experience of evil and suffering
and in light of our knowledge of man's inhumanity to man?
Tragedy offers a reaffirmation of a particular kind of virtue.
It provides trust or confidence in the worth
of human existence in spite of its threats
and terrors and failures.
In being the bad conscience of their time, authors of tragedy
perform the service Nietzsche demanded
of the ideal philosopher.
When one is as sincerely regretful
to come to the end of this manuscript as I was,
when one longs to read on, when one's emotional investment
in character and event is so strong as to create
a kind of nostalgia for what is yet missing,
it seems clear that the author of this artistry, this story
magic, David Reynolds, is well deserving of this award, as well
as his readers' enthusiastic praise.
David.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks very much.
That was very nice.
I want to thank Poets & Writers and certainly Frazier Russell.
This has been a very nice week, and you really put yourself out
for us.
And thanks, Laura, for a great reading,
and all of you for coming.
I'm going to read a pretty edited chapter.
What you have to know, I guess, aside
from what Melissa Pritchard told you is that the father is absent
because he's in America.
The rest of the action is in Russia.
The year is 1905.
And this chapter is called "Hush Noah."
Noah remembered mama taking him to Moshe [? Kalek ?] for shoes.
The shop faced the street at its muddiest, or on market Monday,
the peasants roam their pigs, five doors down from the mildewy
storefront, where Ephraim taught Noah and seven other boys Torah.
He remembered the capable hands, while they held his foot.
The knuckles were knobbed like burls
swollen from little branches, the skin calloused and gnawed
by tanning acid.
And Noah trusted him to build a good shoe.
There was something pleasant, and intimate,
and unsettling in the way [? Kalek's ?] fingers
touched the bones in the top of Noah's foot.
And his thumb pressed the sole as
if they could tell things about him from the
give in the cartilage, from the thickness of the boy's
first innocent calluses.
The peculiar intimacy made Noah furrow his brow
to look remote and keep from smiling.
And even as a boy of eight, he thought
[? Kalek's ?] hand beautiful, like a body,
that having done the same work for years, molds
to the shape of its activity.
Noah's added two more to the hundreds of feet
he had measured and touched.
Maybe [? Kalek ?] was pleased by the variety of feet
that had walked in and out of his door, that had been warmed
by his hands, but maybe he never thought about it
and worked with pleasureless concentration.
While wrapping his tape measure around Noah's foot and toes
and ticking the numbers in his head,
somewhere at the sides of his tongue,
he looked forward to his wife's chicken
and beets without a thought for a Noah's foot or for Noah.
Some people are like that.
They're having a moment's curiosity about others,
and Moshe always seemed to be one of these people,
with nothing on his mind but measuring tape and leather.
Mama chatted with him about the cold coming in
behind the clouds, and the water in the street that they all knew
would freeze in a matter of weeks.
Mostly, [? Kalek ?] worked quietly,
arching his back in such a way that his face stayed
angled towards Noah's feet and showed
that he didn't feel talkative.
Sometimes, it's hard to reconcile
a person you know with things that you
know have happened to him.
You hear a painful story and in your mind,
you superimpose an image of its events
on to an image of that person you know, whomever
it happened to.
It's a way of coming to believe what you know is true but can't
get your imagination to wrap around, to suckle and cradle,
to make it feel real.
Sometimes, when a terrible thing happens to someone,
your mind rearranges its picture of him
until he's the type of person to whom bad things happen,
someone marked since birth for tragedy
whose life has spent itself unfolding
towards certain grim and inevitable moments.
1905's revolutionary agitation had
spread from bigger cities along the railroads.
It touched port cities such as Odessa.
It touched towns with major railroad exchanges.
Though Rafalivka saw no outward sign of these distant events.
No posters hastily pasted on walls by moonlight
and torn down or replaced by morning.
No predawn arrests of political men or newspaper editors,
as in Pinsk.
No demonstrations or riots broke out.
No fistfights, as in Lodz, where somebody burned the post office
after an argument, stopping all Rafalivka-bound mail.
No one in Rafalivka noticed that the railroad briefly
stopped running because no railroad came near the village.
But the year began with stories of attacks on Jews
in Southern towns.
Noah's mother tried to protect him from such stories,
but it was impossible.
In a distant town, the mother of a family friend
was set on fire by neighbors.
And in summer, [? Labal ?], the shopkeeper,
learned that his cousin, a rabbi in the south, had been hanged.
The apprehensive mood in Rafalivka by late summer
had thickened from the nervousness
of the beginning of the year into a sort of languid anxiety.
As the leaves began turning, a widespread insomnia
sent townspeople into the streets
at night, all tired, and helpless, and quiet.
And it was common to see people reclining on the town
square benches at all hours in the starlight, grimly
contemplating their fingers, the mud and pebbles
on the ground, the sparkle on the insides of their eyelids
that kept them awake.
It was as if the fear had stirred some viral sleeplessness
from the marshes, and the collective insomnia settled
so thick, the town council voted to light the four gas lamps
at the corners of the square.
The lights gave a mangy flicker to all the shadows,
as if the town had been submerged under water,
and all the sleepless Jews wandered on a lake floor.
And a traveler might think he had stumbled
on a weird convergence of ghosts of angels,
who would, without notice, begin to lift from their benches
until the sky would fill with the black shape
of sleeplessness.
A band of soldiers, Cossacks, a dozen or so
who must have separated from their regiment,
was seen on the outskirts of town,
apparently stabling their horses with peasants
near [INAUDIBLE] Mill.
For about a week, it was a regular occurrence for Jews
to encounter them, but without incident.
The Cossacks ignored the Jews, and the Jews passed them
with polite and uneasy calm.
One week had passed by the time four of them
rode into town to [? Labal's ?] store for provisions.
This was a polite robbery.
Like any customers, upon entering, the last of them
closed the door gently behind him rather than let it slam.
They collected kerosene, kasha, horse feed, and beans,
and hard candy from Warsaw.
When they collected what they wanted,
the ranking officer quickly bowed to [? Labal ?]
and led the others out to their horses.
They didn't live up to their reputation for wildness,
but their calm was frightening.
They had brought a wintry quiet into town
on the clapping of their horses' hooves.
And their officer quietly upset the Jews
with his way of looking at buildings,
but never people, as if even the most
crowded Sabbath Eve street were empty.
This calm ended after one of them rode into town on Sabbath
and took Moshe [? Kalek's ?] three hens.
He rode in the middle of the street slowly.
And later, Nitti, who saw everything,
said that he seemed to be prowling
for a young girl and not just hens.
The Cossack had been sitting for hours on his horse
at the top of the road without moving, as if a copper
statue had been erected at night,
staring down into town with something blunt and metallic
in the ankle of his shoulders, and a quality in his eyes
like settled metal filings that wouldn't stir.
He trampled the beans and green onions
and pulled the door from the hen house,
while Moshe huddled inside with his wife and an arm
around each of his two daughters, Gossie and Rena.
Gossie is 10, and Rena is 13.
In this moment, Noah's teacher, Ephraim,
passed the home on his way to shul.
But instead of watching from a careful distance,
like the others in the road, he walked to the edge
of [? Kalek's ?] yard.
Later in the evening, when everyone gathered around him
at shul, Ephraim didn't remember exactly what he had said,
only that he was scared and he was mad at the Cossacks
for scaring people, for scaring him,
and for stealing so brazenly.
The Rafalivkers had first treated the teacher
as the bravest man in the world.
And their awe must have made him feel strong.
In another situation, the Rafalivkers
would have exaggerated their stories
about the incident wildly, exchanging reports
that would grow more ludicrous with each telling,
as if each storyteller competed with the last
and had to tell the story better than the person he heard it
from.
Often in their town, tales inflated to such nonsense,
people simply stopped telling them out of embarrassment.
We might have heard that Ephraim had leapt into the mud yard
and wrenched the hens from the Cossack
and chastised them as he would his own people.
And the Cossack had returned the hens in repentant shame
and joined a monastery.
But the moment was too unsettling for the Rafalivkers
to allow that sort of exaggeration,
and the story was told much as it happened.
The teacher had said, those aren't your hens.
It seems stupid.
What a ridiculous thing.
He knew he couldn't order the Cossack
to put the chickens down.
A Cossack wound his cord around the neck
of the jerking sack of chickens and tied it to his saddlebags.
When they were secure, he swung his body up
and rode into the street, where he stopped
in front of the teacher.
His horse lifted its hooves one at a time from the mud,
impatient, but the Cossack was unhurried.
Now, the teacher must have been scared crazy,
but he began shouting at the Cossack.
A flood of barely intelligible curses in Russian,
calling him a robber, a thug, cursing his genitals
and descendants.
By the time he seemed to realize what he was doing,
it was too late to stop, so he just
kept on until he exhausted himself and then caught
his breath.
And those watching were amazed the Cossack hadn't chopped him
in two.
A few had stopped on the far side of the road,
but none did anything to help.
What could be done?
The Cossack stared dully at Ephraim.
He hadn't changed his expression from the concentration
with which he stuffed chickens into the sacks.
The teacher, his sense returned, said in Russian, what,
are you going to kill me?
The Cossack smiled.
He seemed to think about this.
He seemed to think about it with the muscles around his mouth
and the way he wet his mustache with his lip,
as if the taste of the hair told him what he thought.
When he seemed to have tasted enough to make a decision,
he reached his hand down and touched the teacher's face.
His fingers stroked Ephraim's cheek and jaw.
The tenderness of his touch chilled
the people in the street.
And when the Cossack pulled his hand back and rode away,
they crowded around the flustered teacher
to see if he was all right.
Moshe [? Kalek ?] came from his house with a bottle
of [? slivovitz ?] and sat Ephraim on the windowsill
to make him drink.
You'll spill it the way your hands are shaking,
said [? Kalek ?].
And he held the bottle for the teacher
as if he fed milk to a baby.
That night, mama told Noah that he would go to his teacher
in the morning as usual.
He's a good man, she said.
Soldiers will come after him, said Noah.
Mama was busy knitting.
Noah stared at her to make her look at him.
You'll be the only boy in cheder tomorrow, she said.
Are you scared, Noah?
I'm not scared, he said.
Some of our friends are treating your teacher badly, she said.
He hated her frank tone.
She was too grave and serious with him,
and he shifted around in a seat to keep from running away.
He behaved very bravely, she said,
but some people think he shouldn't have.
She put down her knitting, and he climbed into her lap.
They're afraid and they don't want their children
to go near him because they think he's in danger.
But we don't want to abandon him, do we, Noah?
We don't want him to feel alone.
She probed his face to see if he understood.
I'm not afraid of anything in the world,
she said, as long as you are safe.
He thought she was going to cry.
I'm safe, he said.
I want you to understand why you're going
to Ephraim tomorrow, she said.
Her voice was shaky, and Noah began to cry.
You can cry for a minute, Noah, she said.
She let him cry, and then she said, now you have to stop.
He hugged her harder and wouldn't
let go when she pushed him gently from her lap.
My knitting is all crushed, she said.
Now go wash.
No, he said, rubbing his eyes.
Go wash, she said again.
He slapped her on the arm and then stared at her,
waiting for her to rage.
But instead of losing her temper,
she took up her knitting.
She looked away from him with such disappointment,
as if he was nothing, that he fled to his bed and hid
in the covers.
As mama had said, there were no other boys in cheder.
Ephraim looked as though he'd been up all night.
He lurched to the door to greet Noah, smelly,
his shirts flapping, and as if nothing were unusual,
asked after his parents.
Noah said his mother was mending sheets and winter blankets.
The teacher said it was a good thing
to mend winter blankets because the air would be cold soon
and it would be time to put in the winter windows.
Noah kept his hands at his sides on the chair.
The teacher said that late every winter,
the cotton he put between the window
panes to soak the moisture mildewed
and that was how he knew that winter was ending
and the time to remove the extra glass had come.
And wasn't that a good time of year
when the season changes into spring
and we can again look forward to warm weather?
Noah said, yes, sir, that's a good time of year.
Should I send you home, Noah, the teacher blurted.
He looked embarrassed hearing himself,
and Noah was embarrassed for him.
Did your papa ever take you to see them ride, the teacher said.
Their horsemanship shows their magic.
No, said Noah.
You would think they could fly.
They spook their horses to incredible feats.
My father took me when I was your age.
I was a bit older than you.
It was the Don Cossacks, and they
had set up outside of Odessa.
My father never took me, said Noah.
No.
They can jump a horse through a flaming hoop, said Ephraim.
It's wonderful.
We cheered until our throats were too scratched to talk.
They can ride at you in full gallop
and spear a pear in your mouth and leap over you
without disturbing your hat.
Noah's mother insisted that he had seen his teacher be shot.
Even when he denied it, when he shook his little head
vigorously, his mother didn't seem to hear,
or else she decided his denial was too emphatic to be believed.
Ephraim had ordered Noah to open his book.
And then, they had heard glass breaking down the street.
It was followed by the crash of a window falling in on itself.
And the teacher, without any sign of surprise,
stiffened his neck and touched his window for a moment
as he looked into the street.
He crossed from the window to the back of the room,
to a trunk behind the long tables, where
the boys ate lunch.
His face was stern when he looked at Noah,
but also reassuring.
And Noah didn't want to look away.
He just wanted to look at that face
and be sure everything would be all right.
The teacher pulled an arm load of blankets from the trunk
and heaped them onto the floor.
As he emptied the trunk and made Noah get inside,
he had a peculiar expression, as if he
was separating from his body, that it was acting on its own
without thought of bravery or fear,
and that he had stepped back behind some translucent screen
of disbelief through which he would watch the moments unfold.
In the street, people shouted and more glass broke.
Noah thought he recognized the voices
and he worried about his mother.
She would be home doing chores at that time,
or she might be in the garden, where she could
be seen by anybody passing.
Ephraim ordered Noah into the trunk.
Noah wanted to go home and find his mother,
but he climbed into the trunk because Ephraim's instructions
were so firm.
You mustn't let anyone know you're in there,
said the teacher.
The trunk smelled of wood and wool from the blankets
that the teacher had just removed.
He shut the lid, and Noah curled with his side
hard against the base of the box.
With his hands pressed beneath his mouth,
he listened, but heard nothing of what
happened outside of his trunk.
No hiss of fire and no breaking glass.
There were only smells and darkness.
The old smell of the spruce, which still held itself faintly
beneath the stronger smells of the blankets, and a living
smell even softer than these, as if it
had been carried in the blankets and scooped away with them,
but still left a residue.
It was the smell of an adult's body at night.
The sweeping smell secreted from skin and breath into wool.
Noah inhaled through his nose to get
the smell deep into him, into his throat and onto his tongue,
as if it would accompany him and shield him from whatever
was about to happen.
Even his mother came into that box
because he had been lying there so long, his body ached.
She was just behind his head, forgiving him
for having hit her.
She was looking down at the back of his neck
and reaching her hand for him, preparing to stroke
the hair at the base of his skull.
She held her hand inches from his head without touching.
He tightened his arm around his knees and waited.
Noah remained in the trunk until the rabbi opened it and lifted
him out by the arms.
All that happened while he was hidden inside
was told over and over for years,
but Noah did not remember any of it.
Ephraim was shot through the window, but didn't die.
He was shot in the mouth and also injured
by broken glass, which resulted in complications and lingering
infections, which confined him to a sanitarium in Pinsk
where he spent the rest of his life.
The Cossacks had either noticed [? Kalek's ?] daughters
or had heard about them from their hen-stealing companion.
On a whim, one of the Cossacks threw lamp oil
on Moshe [? Kalek's ?] roof and set it on fire.
The girls ran out of the house with her father
to escape from burning.
Two Cossacks threw the girls over their saddles
and sat on them to stop them from swinging their fists.
[? Kalek ?] wailed and threw himself at the horses.
The Cossacks swung their bayonets at him,
striking him lightly with the flats,
pleased to make him watch as they prepared
to ride off with his children.
He tried to put out the eye of one of the horses,
but stepped on a piece of fallen burning roof,
and had to dance on one foot to put out the flame that
started on his pant leg.
The Cossacks couldn't decide what to name this dance.
Sort of a lame-footed kazotsky, they said.
But they appreciated his talent and they clapped for him,
saying that for an older man, he was very nimble,
and that he must have been a charmer for the ladies
when they danced to their Jew dances.
He did not attack them again.
And it seemed to those who saw that fear overwhelmed
his fatherly love, though he managed
to run after them for a short distance
while they rode out of town.
Noah was only eight, but he knew what the Cossacks did to Rena,
because adults can lose their sense of discretion
when shaken and sometimes say too much, even around children.
He knew that the girls were never found.
But that several days after the raid, after a week or 10 days,
someone found, and he didn't know who.
Some man out walking.
Maybe a peasant.
Maybe Yosef, the rabbi's simple helper who took
long walks for his heart.
Or someone who had bought something from a peasant
and was returning with buttons, or leather, or nails.
And it was never determined to whom they belonged,
but they were a young person, a young woman's.
Somebody found hands.
They held a funeral for the girls
and buried the hands in a child's coffin,
designating the grave as a grave for both girls.
I won't go into the fighting over whether it was appropriate
or even permitted to assume both girls dead, but in the end,
this is what was done, partly to keep Moshe [? Kalek ?]
from wandering helplessly through the countryside looking
for them.
Though it didn't quell the hope that they were alive somewhere,
perhaps taken by the Cossacks to a convent
where they would be raised as Christians.
And Noah was tormented by the thought
that, one day, as an old man in some dim Arctic railroad
station, with frost on the metal benches,
and snow garnishing the window panes,
he would encounter an elderly nun who had no hands.
After the raid, Noah's mother treated him
as though the attack had transformed him.
He was now needy and traumatized.
He wanted to return to his normal self,
but she wouldn't let him.
And things as minor as a stubbed toe
inspired her pity, a nightmare, and she
bought him sugared crackers and sat with him in the dark,
rubbing the damp hair over his temples
long after he wanted her to leave him.
Every solicitous painfully exaggerated expression
of concern from his mother reminded him
that something bad had not only happened to him
but had changed him.
It made him think that he had been weakened,
like the occasional sickly and moribund child who
appears in cheder for a few months,
never speaks, and just as mysteriously disappears.
[AUDIO OUT] fingers and looked at her
as though she were a stranger.
On the third Monday after the girls disappeared,
mama brought Noah with her to the markets,
along with his friend [? Yudel ?].
She was preparing to pay a condolence call on Moshe
[? Kalek ?] when [? Kalek ?] burst from his store
and ran at a peasant's pig who stood in the water in the road.
[? Kalek ?] ran out to chase it off,
as Mama approached his store.
Noah could see as [? Kalek ?] ran from the doorway
that something was not right.
His face was screwed up and frenzied
as he bore down on the pig.
Without even lifting his hands to block the impact,
Moshe ran right against its side.
His big belly thumped the pig's ribs,
and then he dropped hard onto his back.
The pig looked down at him.
Not even its knees had shuddered on impact.
Mama touched her finger to her lip in alarm.
[? Kalek ?] rolled on his back in the puddle.
Mama told the boys to go into the butcher shop and not look.
[? Kalek ?] began to shout obscene curses about peasants,
and he wouldn't stand.
At this moment, Noah decided he hated him.
His vehemence was like a bile he couldn't swallow,
and as it came up, he wanted to kick that balding head open.
The pig watched [? Kalek ?] as if it also wanted to kick him.
Noah's mother lifted [? Kalek ?] by the arm, smoothed his shirt
and hair, and let him into his store
where she lowered the blinds.
After the blinds had been drawn, Noah
patted the pig because they both hated [? Kalek ?] now.
And then the boys began laughing.
Noah couldn't remember having laughed so hard.
When he tried to stop, he could only laugh harder.
It was a sort of laughing that hurt his stomach
and brought tears to his eyes and made
him worry about vomiting.
Both of the boys laughed and they argued
about who had laughed first.
After they disagreed for a few minutes,
Noah punched [? Yudel ?] in the eye.
[? Yudel ?] hit him back, and they wrestled each other
to the ground.
Finally, Noah's mother ran from Moshe [? Kalek's ?] shop
and separated them, yanking them to their feet
and slapping her hand hard across both of their faces.
Although [? Kalek ?] loved his daughters more than himself
and would, in a lucid moment, give his life for either
of theirs, the suddenness of fire
on his roof, the window smashing on each side at once,
the Cossacks surrounding the house
and rearing up on their horses, and the horses' fear
of the flames all seemed to force everything out of him.
One moment, he heard disturbance in the street.
The next, he was rushing his girls
into the arms of these soldiers, who took them so fast,
he must have been paralyzed.
For a moment, he just stopped.
Things were happening all around him.
He couldn't have fully believed the moment
in which he found himself.
And then, his girls were flung across the saddles
with soldiers sitting on them.
Years later, in a frank and drunken moment,
[? Kalek ?] remembered to several men
how the saddles were slung with sharp things, metal
clasps, poorly sheathed blades, and that he
had worried that the girls would be cut or struck by something.
As if for a moment, he had lost the fact
that they were being taken away.
Isn't that stupid, he had said.
He didn't become aware of himself
again until he had been running in the road for some time,
already outside of town and following its curve
into the marshy woods.
He had hurt his foot in the fire.
The Cossacks were long out of sight.
Neighbors had put out his burning roof.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]