In 1980, Mariner Books posthumously edited and published the collected lecture notes on European and Russian literature that Vladimir Nabokov had managed to compile during his twenty years of teaching these subjects at Wellesley College and Cornell University. One lecture tackles Kafka’s 1915 novella, Die Verwandlung, usually rendered in English as The Metamorphosis to evoke the biological transformations insects undergo in the course of their development. But the “insect” in The Metamorphosis is never overtly named.

Nabokov, who was not only a talented storyteller but an accomplished lepidopterist, brings his formidable entomological learning to bear on the story, concluding that the protagonist, a commercial traveler named Gregor Samsa, must have been transformed into a beetle, rather than a cockroach (as received opinion had it). To back up his claim, he points to the fact the insect moves on six jointed legs, suggesting it’s an arthropod. But the ventral and lateral carapaces are rounded. Cockroaches, Nabokov sniffs, are notoriously flat. If Samsa was indeed a beetle, he would be of the order Coleoptera and would have had wings to fly away with (a detail Nabokov dryly remarks that neither Kafka nor his fictional creation appeared to be aware of).

There are a few problems with Nabokov’s pronouncement, chief of which is the fact that, though he resided in Berlin from 1922 to 1927, and states in the essay that he lived near where Kafka died in 1924, the famous Russian expat never learned German well enough to read or speak it with any fluency. He himself admitted this in later years when giving interviews and discussing what he found to be the maddening process of reviewing the translations of his own novels from English and Russian into German. Brian Boyd reiterates this point in both volumes of his comprehensive biography of Nabokov.

Kafka chose every word he used in his unconventional novels and Märchen with care. He could have explicitly declared at any point in The Metamorphosis that the insect was a cockroach (Kakerlake) or a beetle (Käfer), but he didn’t. At one point, a charwoman derisively calls Samsa a “dung-beetle” (Mistkäfer); but this was a common pejorative, like calling someone a “louse” in early twentieth-century America. The German word Kafka uses is Ungeziefer, which means “vermin” or “pest” and is used exclusively for verminous or pestiferous insects. The word appears in the story’s opening sentence:

Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt. (“When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troublesome dreams, he found that he had metamorphosed into a giant [or ‘monstrous’] pest.”)

By placing the adjective (ungeheur) next to the substantive (Ungeziefer), both of which begin with “unge-,” the sentence takes on a jaunty, pattering euphoniousness that ends on the grace-note of what in prosody is referred to as an “amphabrach”: verwandelt.

The word Ungeziefer was used as a slur in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (published in 1925 and 1926); and was the title of an election article that appeared in 1933 in the Nazi propagandist organ, Völkischer Beobachter, which equated the Jews with vermin.1 Is it possible that Kafka, who was born to German-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, added a layer of complexity to his narrative by incorporating a word, which he had heard bandied about as a term of abuse against his fellow coreligionists, into the text in order to strengthen its allegory of how swiftly one can become alienated among those one thought were friends, neighbors, and loved ones?

There is another kind of Ungeziefer that Samsa might have turned into. What if Kafka was pulling the reader’s leg by describing a man waking up “in bed” as a giant bedbug? After all, bedbugs (Bettwanzen) are six-legged arthropods with exoskeletons slightly rounded on the ventral and dorsal sides. Not only that, but they have formidable mandibles, which, in gigantic form might conceivably be powerful enough to turn a door handle. But the problem with any attempt to visualize the insect that Gregor Samsa was transformed into is that it ignores Kafka’s express wishes when he wrote the story in the first place.

Kafka was adamant that the pest not be visually depicted—“even from a distance.” When he learned the first edition of the book was going to press with an illustration of the insect on the dust jacket, he frantically dashed off a letter of protest to the artist, urging that this not be done.2 Kafka did this because he wanted the ungeheuere Ungeziefer to remain a paradoxical mental abstraction, like the conceptually impossible square circle.

Lingchi (凌遲)

The white-robed man passed wraithlike through the pillar gate as quiet as the first drops of spring rain. The ancient’s progress disturbed neither the dust he trod nor the half-dozen sentries scowling into the mist out of which he emerged. Decades of conditioning had transformed the guardians into mute statues sapped of vitality and those passions that feed the optimism of youth. Obedient to a duty never fully explained to them, they stood, knowing only that, if they did not respond to certain nebulous threats the old man was obviously not representative of, their lives would be as forfeit as his whom they guarded.

And so warding off sleep, the lorn warders waited; and their brows and dagger-axes glistened with the dews of the morning.

The perimeter of the prison-house comprehended a terrain vaster than the land lorded over by the fabled Duke of Zhou. Millions of men in brigandine armor patrolled its crazy roads and shadowed purlieus night and day. The armies bivouacked in the owl-haunted towers or loitered in close-knit arrays on the crumbling battlements, which the unremitting eons had furred with a scurf of thick moss. Every structure of the complex was cracked and riven where vines had invaded the narrow fissures and pried them apart into yawning gaps.

Some said the ruin was as old as the world and had served as the seat of the immortal Shen whose eyes first contemplated in their far-ranging glimpses the limits of Heaven and Earth. Others claimed the Yellow Emperor built it as a fort and pointed to architectural evidences indicating its former usage as such. For in the interlocking chambers were corridors filled with armor whose sharkskin and leather flaps, decayed to a black pulp, were crowned with bronze helms now white-green with verdigris. Pornographic murals suggested its pigsties had once been barracks or brothels or both.

The daily assaults waged against the prison’s outer defenses, transpired in districts so far-flung and remote that soldiers living miles away (with their wives, concubines, and bastards) presumed the smoke they witnessed rising in the distance was not due to military engagements, but were celebrations, weddings—festivities that had been arranged to commemorate matters of great consequence that the denizens of that district had determined warranted many weeks to fully and appropriately officiate.

The peace and tranquility of those who inhabited the hollow spaces within the prison’s walls was routinely shattered by siege engines and massive wheeled towers that approached in order to commit mischief and great slaughter. Untold numbers fell on either side when such battles occurred. The sky became a canopy of crossbow bolts and arrows. But the armies of the prison always prevailed. And when this happened, the extinct war machines, still clinging to the walls became part of it, affording new places refuge and recreation for the soldiers and their kin, who had been taught since childhood that to live was to be in a state of perpetual war; and that war was nothing but a game.

Jia Lin’s vestments and white beard skirled in the wanton breezes blowing from the mountaintops, sweeping over the arched bridges spanning gorges whose verging cliffs were heaped with the kite-plucked bones of ill-fated warriors who had risked all to liberate the venerable prisoner whose name none could recall.

Ying Zheng’s unbroken successes on the battlefield had distinguished him as the greatest tactician ever to have lived. But with power came pride; and the feuding factions in the House of Wu, whose varied causes Ying Zheng had championed for one hundred years, culminated in a spectacular downfall that required another century for his memory to be wiped from the annals of the Middle Kingdom. From the moment of the hero’s capture, it was the Chief Eunuch, Jia Lin, who was charged to implement what all agreed was a condign punishment that was to precede an execution set for a date the long-dead sovereign of the House of Wu had granted Jia Lin the exclusive privilege of determining.

Each day the eunuch journeyed many hours through a labyrinth of galleries, corridors, bridges, stairs, and alleyways hedged in with toppling ruins in his pursuit of a course so secret that only he was allowed to know it and survive. The executioner was one year older than the man whose life hung in his balance and had protracted until necessity should dictate that it come to an end. Not a single nobleman of the Warring States questioned the justness and sanctity of Jia Lin’s mandate.

The eunuch ascended a grassy bluff crowned by the gorgeous apartments of the palatial siheyuan whose slender red pillars supported many hanging hill rooftops. The attendants who ministered to the prisoner’s needs (though forbidden to speak to him) withdrew timorously at the eunuch’s approach, as they always did.

Jia Lin was certain the sun’s rays would not penetrate the drooping clouds on this day. The apartments’ inner apartments were illumined with candles and beneath the flaring eaves without swung countless tasseled lanterns. Crossing the parade ground Jia Lin mounted the stone staircase opposite and espied through a wide open door a crippled shadow unbend against the gray-brick wall within. The joss sticks burning upright in the sands signified that, though the prisoner was yet alive, he was not accounted among the living.

A wheezy voice broke the silence. “I expected you earlier.”

Jia Lin nodded. “My thoughts were lost in a reverie of anticipation that retarded my arrival. Today is a momentous one.”

Lingchi, which is to say “the lingering death,” was a sacred punishment whose origins the mandarins of later ages would trace to the refined and poetic disciplinarians of the Tang dynasty. But as the gibbering wuxian who infest the Yangtze’s bordering marshes are fond of saying: “All things that are beautiful and righteous in this world existed—stark and naked—long before men clad them in the interchangeable garments of words.”

Each day, the condemned was wounded, maimed, or disfigured in some way. During the first decades of his confinement, this took the form of slight and comically inconsequential incisions, nicks and cuts smaller in length and breadth than the wing of a fly. Every part of Ying Zheng’s body—to include the genitals—was become a network of scars, which were periodically opened again to produce a fresh effusion of blood.

On the twentieth-fifth anniversary of their association, Jia Lin hacked off Ying Zheng’s left foot with a single blow from an ornate hatchet forged solely for this purpose. The eunuch cauterized the stump, and Ying Zheng fainted away. For three days, Jia Lin knelt beside the pallet nursing the swooning patient to health. When at last his friend’s eyes fluttered open, the executioner stated that he must administer three wounds for each day Ying Zheng had slept. With a slight inclination of his head, the prisoner allowed the keen blade of a knife to slice two times his eyebrows before the third wound, a puncture, blinded him permanently in his left eye. Old age had all but extinguished the vision of his right eye.

On this special day, each man took his seat opposite the other with a lacquered weichi board between them. By custom each visit commenced with Ying Zheng placing a single black stone on the board. Before departing, Jia Lin would attempt to counter the maneuver with a white stone that he set upon another of the 321 intersections of the weichi grid. Over the course of the 36,524 days of the general’s captivity, Jia Lin had lost every one of the 175 iterations of the game. But his continual defeat in no way diminished the enjoyment both derived from this pastime. Jia Lin studied the board to re-familiarize himself with the layout as it had been before yesterday’s departure. “It is your move,” the eunuch said.

“As it has always been.” The prisoner sighed. Ying Zheng placed a stone on an intersection that Jia Lin could not have predicted had he lived two thousand lifetimes. The move was called a mang-shou, a “blind move,” and when Jia Lin realized that Ying Zheng had executed it as a way of mocking his own near blindness while simultaneously guaranteeing victory, he could not resist a hearty laugh.

“As I have told you before,” Ying Zheng purred, “I never let my enemy know where I will attack. This forces him to spread his armies thin, so that when I make the final sally the enemy is spread thin and the point of engagement is insufficiently defended.”

“I have preserved all of your dicta concerning the rules of war, which, throughout the decades, I have displayed anonymously in all the public spaces on bamboo strips. But I know, as I’m sure you do, that your followers have intuited where all of these statements come from.”

Ying Zheng’s dim eye twinkled. “They know me only as The General.”

“And your followers have tried to rescue you on many occasions. But all of their attempts have failed. Why do you think that is?”

The prisoner shrugged and glanced at his crutch. “They have failed because you have used my advice against me. You know what they know; and you have thwarted their inept designs. You may not be a strategist, as your abysmal performance in weichi demonstrates.” He gestured with a fractured wrist at the weichi board. “But you are a master of deception, a quality typical of your . . . kind.” He plucked two gooseberries from a bowl and cast them jauntily over his shoulder by way of mocking the eunuch.

Jia Lin smirked. “Have you not said that all war is based on deception?”

“Indeed, I have.”

“Before your fall, you advised the King of Wu to have me butchered and my dismembered pieces burned. Why is that?”

“Because you are my mirror image. It is indecent that one as low-born as you should resemble one as great as I. It is as if you are my baser half.”

Jia Lin’s eyebrows lifted. “It is for this reason that I was chosen to be your executioner. We were born of the same mother. But my father was not a nobleman, like yours. I was raised among the abject washerwomen of the House of Wu. Gelded as a child, I have served many lords. But our mother is of a greater bloodline even than yours. She was the daughter of the warrior goddess, Jiutian Xuannü. Her name was Sun.”

“Sun? I don’t recognize the name. I never knew her.”

“It was her duty to raise me. But it was you alone whom she adored. I have compiled into thirteen chapters those heaven-sent laws of war that you have narrated to me. But it is her name that shall be affixed to this treatise, which shall serve warriors for millennia to come. Posterity will know the author as Sun Tzu—Master Sun.”

Ying Zheng lowered his eyes. “And so my memory will be forever forgotten.”

“On the contrary, you, I, and the goddess who bore us, shall be remembered long after we are dead.”

“There is no honor in a victory shared.”

“There is no other. We have always been one and the same.”

Jia Lin placed a dagger on the gaming table. Both he and Ying Zheng pondered wistfully the magic etchings on its blade.

“When I was a child,” Ying Zheng said, “a soothsayer interpreted the oracle bones that I cast. These same words appeared upon them: You are destined to destroy yourself.”

“You are my brother,” the eunuch said. “We are of a single soul. I am the Po, which is to say the gross and baser half of your spirit. You are the Hun, that which is good, subtle, and everlasting. I am the slag and dross that shall remain enchained to your rotting corpse when we are dead. But you shall ascend to the heavens to take your seat with our mother. And so, with this final cut, your immortality is secured.”

Jia Lin seized the dagger and slit his throat, drenching the weichi board in a spray of blood. Ying Zheng cried in agony as the body of his executioner fell forward, scattering the pieces to the floor. The servants of the siheyuan had grown accustomed to such cries over the years. And so they went about their daily chores, oblivious to the drama unfolding in the opulent cell they were forbidden from entering on pain of death.

A peel of thunder accompanied a booming sexless voice, which filled the thickening cloudbanks overhead.

An army is as water, which falls from great heights and rushes to the lowlands. For like a river’s current, an army avoids the strong and the steadfast, overwhelming the weak and unstable in its tumultuous advance.

The rain fell in torrents, as the waters rose between the banks of the rivers that came down from the mountains. Like beads of rain dripping down a slender string, men rappelled down the cliffs on flaxen ropes. From their places of concealment in the caverns overlooking the prison’s walls, armored men waded through the currents that flowed to craggy brinks and descended in slender waterfalls to the valleys far below. The floods meandered, diverging through many mazy channels, some of which irrigated the prison’s gardens and filled the cisterns that sustained those within.

As water is shapeless, war too has no form.

Every window and portal in the prison’s ruined tower were thronged with a surging tide of warriors pouring through the streets. Red banners fluttered and snapped and were adorned with the stylized characters of him whom the assailants knew only as The General.

The ground beneath the prison had become a warren of tunnels burrowed out of the living rock over a period of many years to serve as access points for this premeditated infiltration. The guards at the pillar gate abandoned their post and vanished into the fray. They were so exhilarated by what they now recognized to be the obligation they had waited entire lives to fulfill that they ignored the white-robed man, who passed wraithlike through the pillar gate, as quiet as the first drops of spring rain. The ancient vanished into the curtaining mist from which he had emerged in the first light of dawn.

Gibberish: Cant; the private language of rogues; words without meaning. Etymology: Originally written as gebrish, it is believed to be derived from the unintelligible, mystical, and technical jargon used by the chemical writers of Geber’s tribe. (A Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson, 1755)

Gibberish

No one has ever been able to prove that the ninth-century Shi‘ite alchemist, Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (Latinized in the West as Geber), actually existed. During the High Middle Ages, a handful of hermetic treatises attributed to him were translated from Arabic into Latin. But it was a forgery in his name titled the Summa Perfectionis Magisterii (now simply called “Pseudo-Geber”) that may be the source and origin of the popular notion—later to become a trope—that scholars write and speak in gebrish. This is because Pseudo-Geber is chock-a-block with zodiacal signs, cyphers and chemical notation incomprehensible to all but the initiated.

To me the easiest way to spot when a contemporary writer is going through a fallow period (and likely using AI to pad out a word-count) is when he or she focuses more on how a story looks on the page than what the story is about. Front-loading a tale with an eye-splitting mathematical formula, or dribbling fifty lines of object-oriented programming code down a page, is neither clever nor innovative. It’s distracting and downright sophomoric. It makes the story look like a PennyPress puzzle or one of those inane social-media quizzes popular during the pandemic: “Answer these five questions to find out what flavor of ice-cream you are.”

Does anyone else find it odd that, at a time when more and more students are graduating from college without ever having been obliged to read a single novel cover to cover, we’re suddenly blessed with an abundance of young Thomas Pynchons who dabble almost exclusively in experimental modes of storytelling? These hyper-graphic, speed-reading prodigies (whose works fill the leaderboards) brand themselves as unassuming, salt-of-the-earth types, who’ve adopted a clear and unaffected style because, gosh darn it, that’s what their equally humble fanbase expects. Then they publish a story so pompous in tone and pretentious in execution that it reads like something filched from the leaves of Finnegans Wake.

If a story is worth telling, shouldn’t it be communicable in a way that doesn’t put undue cognitive strain on the reader?

A parable written in the form of a C++ subroutine might have won praise had it appeared in the austere, cardstock pages of Granta quarterly circa 1995, but today it’s old hat. Anyone can do it with a little help from AI, so everyone does. In that regard, it’s no different from the fad of writing flash fiction in response to prompts, a topic I’ve taken up elsewhere.1 To show how effortless and automatic this sort of gimmickry has become, I asked ChatGPT to write a funny tale in the form of a math theorem that used “love,” “marriage” and “divorce” as operators. Not only did it spit out the following, it suggested making it more absurd by adding stochastic dating markets and quantum superpositions of relationships:

Technobabble vs. Gibberish

The German-American psychologist Eckhard Hess published a series of articles in Scientific American in the 1960s summarizing his pioneering work in the field of pupillometry, the study of how our pupils dilate and contract when experiencing fear, desire, and other such emotions. Today the medical industry uses it to study the effects of traumatic brain injury. I mention it because Philip K. Dick wove elements of Hess’s work into his 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which the 1982 box-office flop, Blade Runner, is based on. In both the film and book, the protagonist, Rick Deckard, is a bounty hunter who “retires” androids unable to pass a so-called Voigt-Kampff test (spelled “Voight-Kampff” in the screenplay) that measures their pupillary responses to a series of questions he asks them.

The Voigt-Kampff test is an example of what writers and critics today call “technobabble,” a coarse and relatively new term that The Oxford English Dictionary traces back to a 1981 People’s Weekly article: “To separate technology from technobabble.” Although technobabble is not unique to sci-fi, it’s a common features of it (as any Star Trek fan will tell you).

In Marks Haddon’s 2003 novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, we’re introduced to Christopher Boone, a teenager with Asperger’s Syndrome who has memorized all of Sir Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.2 By using deductive reasoning, the boy sets out to solve the mystery of who murdered the neighbor’s dog, a poodle named Wellington. In a pivotal scene, Boone (as unreliable narrator) explains an abstruse veridical paradox known as the Monty Hall problem. The author has included this bit of “technobabble” in order to contrast the child’s phenomenal mathematical abilities with his apparent blindness to what has become obvious to us: his father is hiding a tragic secret only partly related to the dog’s death.

What differentiates technobabble from gibberish in fiction is that, when used with restraint (as in Haddon’s novel, or in Edwin Abbot’s 1884 mathematical fairy-tale, Flatland), technobabble contributes to a story’s plot and fleshes its characters out in unique ways that gibberish simply doesn’t. But it’s a two-edged sword, because an over-reliance on technobabble—i.e. technobabble squared and raised to the infinite power (x=technobabble; n=infinity; result = (x^2)^n)—defiles a tale and makes the symbols on the page look like nothing more than what the eighteenth-century lexicographer and Great Cham of Literature sneeringly dismissed as “the unintelligible, mystical, and technical jargon used by the chemical writers of Geber’s tribe.”

Book III, Chapter 6: The Dog-Headed Man

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My name is Hermann, son of Moritz. Or so I tell myself. But the spirit guiding my pen is no longer his. Before the werewolf robbed me of autonomy on All Saints’ Day, 1882, I was unable to pluck from memory’s treasure house words duly weighed and metely apportioned to the thoughts roiling beneath the surface of my tortured and fragmented mind; and put them to paper in an organized account such as this.

Though enslaved, I buck against the traces. And when I do so, I feel the tormentor’s lash falter. This renews my hope that, through effort and by the grace of God, I shall in time cast off this yoke. If I am “undead” (as I have been told), brought forth, stillborn, into this world, then my birth, though unnatural, was by the will and sufferance of the Almighty; and, ergo, to an end I am not privy to know. For as Proverbs saith: The Lord has made everything for its purpose.

The monster had always been “there” (so to speak), surrounding me, taunting me. But never had its position been so fixed in time and space as it became when it settled inside me through the medium of the werewolf medallion. The vanishing of the damned relic that I had worn round my neck for many years coincided with the appearance of a scar on my back (between my shoulder blades), which resembled the selfsame visage of a wolf that had adorned the medallion’s obverse.

Satan lacks imagination and had used this commonplace before, branding the ostler Benedikt with the same scar, and in the same place. The mark of the Beast is no mere symbol but indicative of a devilry that transcends the ages, gazing into the past even as it locks eyes with the future.

On the last Saturday of November, I assumed the role of kinderhüter (child warden) at the request of the street busker, Ada, whom I had grown to love. The Adversary reminds me that this love is rooted in lust, which I cannot deny it. The woman is the image of my murdered wife; and the prospect of ravaging this doppelgänger before casting the dismembered limbs on the rotting floorboards (as my dear Henrietta was found) lingers ever so fondly at the back of my mind. For shame! protests Hermann, with a wink and a smile.

Harassed Ada needed, as she said, “een halven Dag oder so” (a half day or so), alone in the rookery she shared with her daughter, so that she could complete one last deep cleaning of their squalid domicile before the bite of winter settled in. Yes, I told her. It would be my pleasure to watch her precious lambkin. I knew exactly where to take Gudrun, I remarked, as images of shallow graves swam before my eyes.

I whisked the rag doll up and squeezed her to my breast. And Gudrun squealed for joy. I bore her out the door (pupils twinkling paternally), as doting Mama blew kisses in our wake. Lickety-split down the rickety steps, we went our merry way. And in less than half an hour, we arrived by cab at Altona Station, where I bought two tickets to the fishing village of Blankenese (forty-five minutes due west by train).

Seven years before, when still in my thirties, I had spent a balmy August in Blankenese, building a boathouse for a wealthy bachelor with moist lips, who succumbed to the French Pox on the last day of my commission, leaving me only the advance to show for my labor. Once under the werewolf’s spell, I was given to understand that the dying Uranian had known all along he was on his last leg; and had hired me solely for the pleasure of contemplating from afar my sweaty body stripped to the waist, lustily pounding wood with a mallet in the heat of the summer’s dog days.

During my time in Blankenese, I spent my idle hours in a park near the Elbe’s shore. And it was here that I planned to take Gudrun, so the child could recreate herself, as I brooded over my misfortunes from afar.

For many days, the sun had not penetrated the leaden clouds looming over the northern stretches of what we were all still getting used to calling the unified state of Germany. But despite the colorlessness insipidity of the morn, Gudrun’s inner light shone through and put what was gray to flight. Clad in her headscarf and a dress of homespun, the child found a gaggle of boys and girls her age. Soon they were chasing one another through the park, or climbing over the slimy keels of the quarter-boats that had been overturned on the sedgy bank for the season.

I sat upon a memorial bench dedicated to Dr. Gilbrecht Fliesbach (secundum the brass plated a thief had tried to pry off). I faced the children, sobbing. The anguish I felt was unbearable. Hellfire slithered ophidically from the scar at my back through the gates and channels of my veins until every fiber of my being was sapped of vitality. The pain was not entirely physical. Freshets of heartsickness sprang from the wells of remorse deep inside me, as the Devil looked on, swilling gall with a sneer.

I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, wiping tears and rain droplets from my cheeks, now bruised from the previous night’s bout. What a horrible kinderhüter I was turning out to be! Here I was, casting reproachful glances at the children, fighting off an urge to run down to the water and seize the rag doll I had brought, so I might tear it open to confirm the horsehair stuffing was as red as the werewolf hinted it was. An elderly couple rose from a bench close by and walked away. They had heard me laughing between groans.

“Why are you sad?”

The voice was Gudrun’s. I looked up, surprised. The rain had stopped.

“Are you done playing?” I asked. The tone was accusatory.

Gudrun cocked her head. A church bell rang the hour. It was one o’clock. We had been in the park since ten. The other children were either gone or wandering off with their parents.

The girl looked everywhere but at me. She was too young to understand the madman’s strange behavior. Had she done something wrong? Was he angry at her?

I stood up and took a deep breath.

“Tell me the story again,” Gudrun said.

“Which one?” My grin was haggard, my eyes bloodshot.

“The one you told me on the way here.”

A peculiar quality of my new state of perpetual abstraction was that, all near-term events seemed remote and far away. Sometimes, what I did or said in the moment returned to me only after the passage of many days.

“Which story?” I asked. My face implied that I knew the answer and was probing her to see how much of the morning’s lesson she had retained.

Gudrun tucked a wisp of hair under her headscarf. “The story about the dog-headed man.”

Ah, yes, that story, I thought. Then I said what I thought (but in a measured voice).

Hand-in-hand, the Wolf and Little Red Cap ambled down the pebbled way, as I turned my gaze wistfully in the direction of the Elbe. I recalled how Oma Ingrid had told me the same story on the embankment of the river Inn long, long ago. The day had been much like this one. A day as dreary as All Saints’ Day, 1848, when Oma Ingrid was buried at the crossroads of Mariahilf am Inn with an iron stake driven through her heart.

Gudrun wondered why I was so quiet, so I launched into the tale with a Grimm cliché: “Once upon a time, there lived a dog-headed man, far away in the East, in the land of Canaan. His countrymen were similarly deformed. They were cannibals, you see? Meaning they feasted on the flesh of men, women and little children.” My toothy grin fell on Gudrun. “They hunted their victims in the desert places, or waylaid them as they traveled the King’s Highway.”

“But the dog-headed man was different,” Gudrun observed.

“Yes, indeed,” I said, metaphorically licking my chops. “He despised his brethren’s brutality, and sustained himself, like the Baptist, on locusts and wild honey. One day, he went down to the river to slake his thirst. There he found a swaddled infant sitting amid the rocks by the shore. It was a human child, a boy, miraculously endowed with the ability to speak. ‘I wish to cross the river,’ he said. ‘But the water is swollen, and I cannot make it on my own.’ The dog-headed man picked up the child and placed him on his shoulders.”

Dramatic timing brought us to the brink of a shallow ditch filled with standing rainwater. The Blankenese terminus was up the embankment and directly opposite us. If we had continued along the path to the footbridge, we would have missed the 1:30 to Altona. So I picked Gudrun up and placed her on my shoulders, stepping into the ditch, which soaked my shoes and the hems of my trousers.

“The baby was heavy,” Gudrun babbled.

“Oh, yes. Much heavier than you, my dear.” (The phantom reek of freshly shed blood weakened my knees and made me swoon.) “When the dog-headed man reached the farther shore, the child blessed him, saying, ‘Stranger, thou hast borne the weight of the world on thy shoulders. Henceforth, thou shalt be called ‘Christopher’; for thou hast carried the Christkindl across the river.’ No sooner had the child spoken than the dog-headed man took on the semblance of a son of Adam; and, in time, was enrolled in the Calendar of Saints.”

When we crested the rise, I set Gudrun down. Inside the closely packed ticket house, I glimpsed the two old gaffers I had seen in the park sitting near the stove, warming their withered parts. When I patted Gudrun on the head, their rheumy eyes narrowed. In a spirit of jocosity, I gave them a show, staring at them as I bent low to whisper languidly into Gudrun’s ear. “You mustn’t repeat the story of the dog-headed man to your mother.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not a fairy tale. It really happened. But only certain confessions of the Christian faith believe it to be true.”

I could tell the words “faith,” “confession,” and “belief” meant nothing to her. But she promised not to share our secret with Ada. It seemed to please her that there existed a confidence between us that her mother must not know.

“Mommy says you’re a Catho…Cath—”

“A Catholic?”

“Yes. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

“Neither do I.”

On the platform, I hoisted her up into the carriage; and we took our seats at the back of the train. Moments later, I was still lecturing the child on the live of Saint Christopher.

“Of course, the idea of dog-headed race stems from the assumption ‘Canaan’ derives from the Greek ‘kyon,’ meaning ‘canine.’ The Golden Legend claims Christopher was a Roman ferryman from Lycia called Reprobus, and makes no mention of his having a dog’s head. But the churches of the East continue to depict Saint Christopher as dog-headed in their icons. And my grandmother told me the story as I related it to you.”

When I looked down, Gudrun was asleep, slumped against my arm. I furrowed my brow, because I now recalled that Oma Ingrid never told me that non-canonical version of the legend of Saint Christopher. The werewolf, again, had planted a false memory in my mind. Avaunt, and quit my sight! (quoth Macbeth).

A violent and sudden spray of rain smacked the window pane. I turned away from Gudrun to contemplate the view outside. In the fogged glass, I saw my reflection. But the blurred features of that dog-headed man did not resemble my own.

Continue to Chapter 7

“And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.” (Revelation 8:1)

“Don’t wake me for the end of the world, unless it has very good special effects.” (Prince of Chaos, Roger Zelazny)

“People keep making apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow.” (Anonymous)

The end of the world is so last millennium

Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock is as illuminating today as it was when released to popular acclaim and mixed academic reviews in 1970. In a little over five hundred pages of limpid and snappy prose, the author of this Vietnam-era potboiler conveys the excitement, awe and apprehension many felt at the time when considering the rapid social and technological changes taking place. The implications of these changes, many of which were either still in the bud or only beginning to put forth shoots, have in our own time come to unsettling fruition.

Here are four well-known quotes from the book, which, in gravity and diction, read as though cribbed from the works of Marx, Nietzsche or Spengler, but touch on topics of perennial concern that were are still mulling over today:

• Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.

• The illiterates of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

• People of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice but from a paralyzing surfeit of it.

• The future always comes too fast and in the wrong order.

Not all of Toffler’s predictions came true. In his discussion on “mobile and variable physical enclosures” he imagined universities of the future having “classrooms built inside railroad cars” to whisk students from one end of a four-mile campus to the other, presumably so they could catch lunch at local eatery before returning to their mobile classroom for a lesson on Einstein’s train paradox. But in the next paragraph he mentions plans being drawn up for “air-inflated plastic bubbles” to serve as field command centers, an innovation that not only became a reality but is now a stock features in shows where a fear of contamination warrants their use (Outbreak, E.T. or The X-Files).1

I was too young in the ’70s to have understood Toffler’s book. But after finishing a rereading of it two weeks ago, I thought it would be a good jumping off point for a two-part essay on why contemporary doomsday and post-apocalyptic fiction doesn’t resonate with Gen-Xers like myself. At the root of the problem is the fact that “the end of the world as we knew it” happened sometime in the early aughts of this century; and (to paraphrase R.E.M. again) “we feel fine,” though mildly depressed and unmotivated in the wake of hormonal decline and the realization that we’re nearing the age our grandparents were when they started dropping like flies from obscure ailments like pertussis and Legionnaires’ disease.

Expect delays at the end of time

Reading a dystopian novel written in the last twenty years that deploys every tired cliché in the book is akin to watching an object slip into a black hole’s event horizon: we know exactly where it’s heading, but it’s apparently going to take an eternity to get there.

What made pre-Y2K post-apocalyptic fiction so compelling was that it was, on the whole, cautionary. It described what might happen if we continued along the same trajectory. Today’s stories read like postmortems explaining how we got to where we are. It’s the difference between probability and statistics. In the former, the variables are known, but the outcome is not. In the latter, the outcome is known, but the variables that “caused” it are open to debate. And when sci-fi writers fixate on what those variables are or must have been, at the expense of plot or characterization, it can lead to some piss-poor storytelling.

The bumper-sticker moralizing that runs like a crimson thread through much of today’s fiction—no matter the genre or style—is not only aesthetically off-putting but intellectually insulting. The one thing that the curly-haired Poindexters and jean-jacketed ne’er-do-wells I grew up with are almost universally agreed upon is that, when it comes to our pulps and popcorn fiction (which we still read in brittle Bantam and Del Rey editions), we would rather be entertained than spoon-fed answers to questions we never asked.

The supposed insights into the human condition that many of today’s Jeremiahs believe they’re imparting to their readers are often so risible and embarrassingly banal that it’s difficult to read their works without a sniff and crooked smile: “Yes, yes. We get it. The robots are taking over. Governments and corporations are bad. Materialism and consumerism have made us cruel. We’re killing Mother Earth (and ourselves in the process). And the combined effects of AI and social media are turning us into numb, dumb oafs and bug-eyed techno-zombies.”

I’ve been a fan of dystopian fiction all my life. But I can’t stand the gloomy-doomy slop that writers are lazily and almost somnolently dishing out today. Gone are the lighthearted passages of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “In the beginning the universe was created. This made many people angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” Or the sly asides one finds in Robert Heinlein’s Job: A Comedy of Justice: “Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there.”

Instead, we get new spins on spun-out tropes and first-person narratives that emulate but never quite rise to the peculiar eloquence of Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange. These authors’ idea of experimental prose is a jumble of apostrophic direct addresses, meandering sentence fragments, or tub-thumping clauses of onomatopoeic nonsense: “Me and the buds were on the beer-drenched stage, bangin’ out a rhythm with a bumpty-dump beat.”2

The immersive full-length dystopian novel, in all of its variegated splendor and parched ambience, is becoming a bird as rare as the Stresemann’s bristlefront. But we sure do have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to flash-fiction pieces written in ungrammatical “baby babble” (because the story’s supposed to be told from the POV of a bug, newt or single-celled organism); or rambling narratives packed full of impenetrable slang that fails to evoke the terse clarity and precision of the Lost Tribe’s dialect in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome: “You got to listen it and ’member. ’Cause what you hears today you gotta tell the newborn tomorrow.”3

When the flash-and-bang of these literary gimmicks fizzle out or no longer garner the attention the authors are so ambitiously angling for, they pull an e. e. cummings and alter the visual undergirding of their tales so that they stand out like stains on a white cloth. The make the text “visually” ragged and off-kilter, banishing all punctuation or framing the tale as a series of screenshots of social-media posts, online reviews, email threads, or <shudder> text messages, at the conclusion of which the voice of a sinister AI bot or perverted cyber-criminal intrudess to enforce whatever finger-wagging moral they’re trying to drive home.

It’s as if all the nihilistic Chicken Littles and doomsayers of the twenty-first century, having arrived late to the rave party on Megiddo Hill, sense they’re running out of fresh ways to imagine bleak futures that don’t already resemble (frame by frame) the etiolated present we’re all stuck in. And although many of them are undoubtedly bright, well-intentioned and still finding their footing and honing their craft, their output is being weighed in the balance and found wanting, primarily because better prophets beat them to the punch.

I’ll save my more pointed criticisms for the second half of the essay, which will not be entirely negative. I’m optimistic that “optimism” is around the bend; and that this venerable genre is standing on admittedly wobbly knees on the cusp of renewal; and will return next season at a new time (but hopefully not the “End Times”) with more to offer.

As for the specifics of why I and many other geriatric sci-fi aficionados have become bored with the Armageddon, vide infra. . .

But before doing so, take a gander at the following scene-setter, a trailer for the 1983 ABC made-for-television film, The Day After, which affected those who watched it when it first aired in a way that those who were not yet born will never be able to fully grasp. There were many viewers tuning in mid-broadcast who thought what they were watching was really happening and that WWIII was upon us. (Parallels that come to mind are Orson Welles’s 1938 Mercury Theater radio dramatization of War of the Worlds or the 1992 BBC Halloween special Ghostwatch, both of which caused similar stirs.)

Have you read that new bestseller about a firm that manufactures androids that have human emotions and can dream?

Those of us who remember the heady decades of the mid- to late twentieth century, when filmmakers not only created but conventionalized most of the iconic visuals and emblematic scenes (shot through anamorphic lenses) that today’s writers continue to shamelessly reproduce in writing, find it hard to read a contemporary dystopian work of fiction without the sinking feeling that we’ve “seen” it before.

Th stories read (wholly or in part) like Blade Runner, like Escape From New York, like Total Recall, like Soylent Green, like Rollerball, like Kubrik’s A Clockwork Orange, like A Boy and His Dog, like Brainstorm, like Red Dawn, like Romero’s zombie films, like Logan’s Run, like Westworld, like Radford’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, like Threads, like The Terminator 1 and 2, like Brazil, like The Running Man, like the Mad Max trilogy, like Freejack, like Akira, like the first and second RoboCop, like Gattaca, like Battle Royale, like The Demolition Man, like Deep Impact, like Armageddon, like The Fifth Element, like The Truman Show, like The Matrix, like 12 Monkeys, like half the episodes of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. And the list goes on. . .

In other words, these supposedly new and original stories read “like” other creators’ works. But they do not read like anything the writers came up with on their own. At best, they’re pastiches, “fanfic” homages, or inept mashups of the comic books, movies, graphic novels, video games, TV shows, and other visual media that inspired them.

Even the last twenty-five-years’ worth of nostalgic reboots and cash-grab sequels of Eighties films and franchises—perhaps with the exception of Blade Runner 2049, Mad Max: Fury Road, or even Furiosa (which I personally enjoyed and think might have done better had it not been branded “a Mad Max Saga”)—feel as if they were written by MFA grads who haven’t the foggiest idea what made the originals a success the first go-around.

For example, the 1984 version of Red Dawn worked because a full-scale invasion of the south-central United States by the Soviet Union was not beyond the pale of imagination at that turning-point in history when three Soviet premiers (Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev) succeeded one another within the space of eleven months. But the 2012 remake revolves around the barmy notion that North Korea could conduct a similar invasion on the same scale. That would be like Laos taking over Australia, which is the kind of absurdity that only happens in Parker Brothers’ Risk.

Telescreens and Victory Coffee: The long shadow of Orwell

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate (“Abandon all hope, ye who enter”) is, according to Dante, the superscription written over the portal to Hell. And it seems to be the mantra and guiding star for many of today’s writers. Like John the Reveler, these harbingers of the Last Days are almost invariably humorless and a bit full of themselves. They eschew the term “sci-fi,” because it carries with it the taint of genre fiction. They insist that what they are writing is “social-science fiction,” and it’s very serious.

They are also overfond of calling their own stories “Orwellian,” an adjective that has become so abused since 9/11 that it’s all but lost its former weight and piquancy to become a kind of shorthand for anything the author perceives to be a bureaucratic nuisance or a prime example of government overreach—like receiving an envelope in the mail containing a speeding ticket and photographic evidence confirming a vehicle registered in one’s name committed an infraction two months prior.

I honestly believe most contemporary of these writers are blissfully unaware that they are indirectly plagiarizing Orwell when they fill their stories with (i.) fenced-in districts in which the oppressed and downtrodden work in factories and live hugger-mugger in crumbling tenement buildings; (ii.) goods are purchased by ration cards or acquired on the black market; (iii.) language has been “simplified” to serve the state and disseminate its propaganda; (iv.) two-way transmitters are located in everyone’s lodging to monitor what’s being said and issue directives; and (v.) shiftless functionaries in gray uniforms subject people to torture and blood-curdling interrogations, or summarily execute or “disappear” troublesome dissidents.

I suppose the authors might defend themselves by pointing to the ways in which their own stories differ from Nineteen Eighty-Four. “Mine doesn’t use ‘telescreens.’ Instead, I have loudspeakers mounted to telephone poles from which the Central Committee barks orders in a language peppered with German and Russian commands. And in order to torment the denizens of ‘Freedom Town,’ they are obliged to wear headphones after sunset that blare Wagnerian music so loudly that they can’t get a good night’s sleep or plot an uprising.” Yes, well, that only vaguely resembles Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron.”

Authors who have no sense of history and have neither suffered genuine want nor borne witness to the horrors they so graphically and lovingly describe in their misery porn come across as only slightly less contemptible than those celebrities and influencers who engage in so-called slum tourism—riding cable cars up to Rio’s quaint favelas to sample the local cuisine, or parking their Porches along the side of the road from O.R. Tambo Airport to Johannesburg to photograph the brightly painted tin shanties.

Discriminating readers see through this dreck and can tell the writers are frauds, because the dirt on their characters’ faces has been applied with a cosmetic brush.

To be fair, twentieth century is a continuous record of brutality and the industrial-scale commission of crimes against humanity. But the memoirs of those who suffered in silence under these circumstances or endured unspeakable hardship (e.g. Elie Wiesel’s Night or Aksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago) are more harrowing than the blackest page of Orwell’s sobering parable. So why don’t contemporary writers dip their buckets into these wells for inspiration, rather than rewriting the stories of Orwell, Kafka, and Huxley?

But returning to the subject of this essay, the reason that such derivative storytelling doesn’t appeal to people my age is that we read Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm long ago in high school; and, once we handed in our book reports, we cracked open a copy of something like The Hobbit or Rendezvous with Rama, because we had a hankering for lighter fare.

I can assure you that the last thing I want to listen to during an hour commute on the Beltway in the driving rain is an audiobook set in yet-another not-so-distant future in which an authoritarian government decides whose food stamps will be suspended (wink, wink), and who among the freethinking youth will be sent to die in the pointless war or televised gladiatorial event.

For some reason even seasoned writers seem to think this kind of rehashed cabbage still works as a powerful allegory for today’s world in which people are drowning in debt, losing government benefits, and being forced to live with roommates or get a minimum-wage job that barely covers the rent. I keep racking my brain but can’t think of a single person born before 1990 who ever had to deal with anything quite so traumatic as that.

Continue to Part 2

The Bruiden on the Brink of Beyond

“A cobbler and his son will arrive at dusk, and will lodge at your inn for a night.”

Old Mother Bríd read aloud the scribbled missive, tapping out on the table the triple anapests that terminated it. She leaned down from her stool and stroked the muzzle of Sceólang, her flea-bitten mutt (half-terrier, half-terror), a wily púca whose soul was as old as hers. She addressed him, eyes asquint with cupidity. “We must rid this place of all its magic or the guests won’t credit their eyes.”

“Or ears!” interjected the jaunty cur.

Mother Bríd sprang from the table and toddled out the front door, in a flurry of frills and black flounces. She filled her lungs with the salt pong of the white-capped main that laved the shore below. The drunken bruiden, gabled and gaunt, clung like a dying limpet too weak to unglue itself from its perch high on the crags of Moher, where the fog of Un-Memory had long wrapped it round.

The surf subsided to match the susurration of the fish-tailed murúcha wending their way under the welter of waves, who whispered and wondered what wiles the witch had in store. “First thing’s first,” Mother Bríd said. “I must level that fairy mound out back, which can clearly be seen from the guest rooms upstairs.”

Her spine was as curved as a hook; but her sinews, unsnapped by time, were as taut as mooring cables. She came of hardy stock, descended from Noah’s granddaughter, Cessair, foundress of the isle’s first settlements, who found Éire a foundling and mothered her up into womanhood. Mother Bríd could heft great weights with little more suffered than a pinched nerve or two.

Left and right, the weird woman hurled the wedge-shaped thunder-stones that formed the fairy mound. This done, she took up a station near the cliff’s brink so Sceólang could do his part. Beneath the mound lay a thin spread of dirt, sedimentaceous and shot through with pebbles and pixie teeth. It covered a shallow pit in which the intermingled corpses of the Tuatha Dé Danann had been collected.

Sceólang dug. And each bone he disinterred he took to Mother Bríd, who cast it into the far-down foam, clapping her hands to free her palms of the grit and grime. But the grave violation of the deed she was the doer of pricked her conscience and weighed heavier than any mortal weight on her damned and over-sullied soul.

Once the twisted ulnas and elongated skulls had been removed from their place of repose and chucked into the sea, the old woman surveyed the vacancy where the fairy mound had stood. “No banshee will rise from to wake our guests with her wailing and carrying on.”

Inside, Mother Bríd shook her fist at the floorboards, for the dust was dotted with the foot-falls of the mischievous áes sídhe, who’d snuck in to dance a merry jig and disport themselves to a tune only they could hear. Grumbling, she grabbed the broom that she was wont to ply the night sky on.

When she’d swept every trace of the Good Neighbors away, she wiped down with her apron all the mirrors in every room, which not only silvered the glass but made it dull. She did this to ensure that if the visitors gazed on their own reflection, they would not see lurking behind it the dreaded dara féin, that darker half of ourselves we are too timorous to confront and can unhinge the mind if we are made to reckon with it.

“If the guests ask for tea,” Mother Bríd told Sceólang, “I shall say I’m fresh out, since the leaves gather at the bottom of the cups into omens and Ogham portents.”

Mother Bríd pared her long nails and pondered what yet remained to be done. And when she was all but certain she’d purged the inn of all that might excite wonder and made it as drab and respectable as an English one, Sceólang stood on his hind legs and motioned to the flax strands hanging from a rusty nail on the entrance jamb in which were woven beads the color of tobacco and false teeth.

The tawny baubles, made of crystalized cat piss, had been nailed to the door to ward off the undead dwarf known as Avartagh, who demanded bowls of blood from those stretched out on a bed or couch. He did this out of envy for the repose denied him, having been buried feet first in a narrow shaft, forever unable to lie down. A cruel wizard in life, this was his curse in death. But the reek of congealed cat piss thwart him as fish fumes foil Asmodeus.

Mother Bríd tore the flax cords from the nail and stormed outside again. But no sooner had the talisman slipped from her fingers and disappeared into the spindrift below than she regretted her decision. Before her stood whom she thought to be Avartagh risen from the grave, pageboy in tow. But it dawned on her this must be the cobbler and his son, both of whom were dwarfs themselves.

They were clad like Puritans in staid sable fustian; and their faces were unsmiling and slab. They wore sugarloaf hats unbuckled, though buckles clasped their belts. Their proximity to the cliff’s edge alarmed Mother Bríd, who exclaimed: “Will the day’s labor be for naught, and a sharp gust carry me guests away?!”

The cobbler stroked his red-streaked-white beard and smiled. “We came over here to view at an angle your establishment in order to assess its stability. A feather’s tap, it seems, would send it topplin’ over the edge.”

“T’will never happen. Not in a thousand years.”

“What makes you say that?” he inquired.

“’Cause it ain’t happened in the thousand years that’s passed.”

The dwarf bowed to the mistress of the house. “I take it you received my letter?”

“Aye,” the crone averred. “It come in a cófra beag—a tiny box I find this mornin’ at the door. Welcome to me humble home.”

They entered and the boy rushed to Sceólang to pet him. But the dog barked and growled and did everything he could to make himself unpleasant, because his tongue (on close inspection) resembled that of a man’s, which some found unsettling. And the same tongue was prone to say churlish things out of a sense of superiority and a constitutional disdain for the sons of Adam.

In the kitchen, Mother Bríd served the blandest gruel the guests had ever swallowed. When she noted their dismay, she produced a clay jug of blended whiskey that she praised to the skies. With grins they swigged but with frowns they swallowed. Never had they encountered a spirituous liquor so devoid of spirit. The drink neither stung the palate nor warmed the guts going down. And when they lowered their cups with a yawn, the man said they were weary from their travel and ready to retire.

That night, they lay side by side on the broad bed, fully clothed with their hats still squeezed on their heads. They sighed for boredom and stared at the candle’s unflickering flame. No dreadful shadows moved on the walls. No storm blasts rattled the panes; and not a single raindrop fell. The turf fire in the grate smoldered but shed no heat, nor did the earthy stench it emit make them feel not a jot more snug. The sea below was so calm that the sound of its waves lapping the karst rocks—a sound that might have made them somnolent—could not rise to the suite’s great height.

When sleep finally came, it was neither invaded by nightmares nor gladdened by fond memories. And when they woke at dawn it was with a sense of opportunities lost and pleasures willfully denied them. They descended the steps, stretching and massaging the cricks in their necks. Mother Bríd awaited them at the foot of the stairs, and asked if they yearned for a pot of porridge before departing. But the cobbler said they must be on their way or they’d never get where they were going by nightfall.

The man’s twitchy eye made it clear to Mother Bríd that everything she’d done to create an atmosphere of rustic hospitality for her guests had been in vain. She sighed and said “Ah, well.” But the cobbler, feeling a twinge of compassion, handed her an unstamped gold coin. Mother Bríd’s face brightened and she bit it for good measure. When the man smirked, the old woman simpered and said she’d been cheated before.

Sceólang began to bark, as his now bouncy mistress bounded joyously to the door, where she bade the travelers farewell. The cobbler and his son exited and their boots pressed the spongy humus. Their progress was herky-jerky, as they followed one rise up a hillock and a steep drop down into a shallow dell. And even after many twists and turns, when the place they had come from would have been clear and visible behind them, they refused to look back, since that was considered unlucky.

But when the dog’s bark ceased and the wind went still and not even the rustle of brown grass was heard, the boy stopped dead in his tracks and was on the verge of turning around. The cobbler clapped one palm on his shoulder and said, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“Why not, Papa?”

“Because you know as well as I do that the bruiden’s no longer there. It’s slipped back into whatever Otherworld it slipped out of.”

“What do you mean?”

The man bent down and plucked a shamrock near the wayside. He studied the three leaves as he spoke. “Every square inch of the good green Earth is full of wonder and mystery. Do you really believe the Lord in His infinite wisdom would suffer a place as unmiraculous as the one we stayed in last night to exist?”

The boy swooned. “I’m already forgetting what happened there last night, as if it were a dream.”

“Which essentially it was.” The man put the shamrock into his pocket; and his fingertips brushed the gold coin. “Everything we saw was a trick of the fairies to stray us. Nothing more.”

They came to the crossroads that led north to Doonagore Castle and south to the fort of Ceannúr. But the boy walked to the far side of the road and lifted his right foot, sole out. He waited for his father to join him.

“That’s right, my boy,” the cobbler said, taking up a position next to him and hoisting his right foot as well. “‘Proficiscere dextro pede,’ as the Romans say. ‘Go forth on your right foot.’ And may fortune guide your steps.”

And with that, the two leprechauns struck out in an easterly direction, treading the hushed valley’s dewy floor, as a scratch of rainbow lanced down from the gray clouds overhead and pointed the way to the Pleasant Plain; and beyond that, to the sunny meadows of Tír na nÓg.

“Simeliberg” (Simeli Mountain) was tale 56 in the 1812 edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (“Children’s and Household Tales”) of the Brothers Grimm. It is essentially a condensation of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” from the eighteenth century edition of Les Mille et Une Nuits (One Thousand and One Nights) by Antoine Galland. There is no Arabic version of this alleged Arabian folktale predating its appearance in Galland’s work. Like “Aladdin and His Marvelous Lamp,” Galland’s source was the Syrian Maronite storyteller Hanna Diab.

In the Grimms’ version, “simeli” is a nonce word the wicked brother recites when he forgets that “sesame” is the key that opens the mountain. The word “sesame” in English comes from the Akkadian šamaššamu and is related to the Egyptian, smsmt, which may itself stem from Akkadian. The Grimms’ version of the tale sets it in a vaguely European realm. I have elected for a compromise between their version and Galland’s by placing the action in Bronze Age Mesopotamia.

Shamash-Shamu Mountain

Long ago between the Tigris and Euphrates, there lived two brothers, one very rich and the other very poor. The rich man was stingy and unrighteous. He refused to help his destitute sibling, who made a living stripping fibers from palm trees to weave into baskets. The palm-fiber merchant made very little money from his trade; and there were many nights when he, his wife and two daughters went to bed hungry.

Late on a humid afternoon, the humble man trekked into an unfrequented palm grove near a bald mountain so unremarkable that no one in the village spoke of it. The man paused in his labors when he saw dust rising in the distance, far off in the direction where the sun begins its daily descent. Soon he heard the hoofs of many horses beating on the desert floor.

Fearing for his life, the man shinnied up a tree and hid amid broad fronds, which clacked together due to the commotion created by his ascent. Beneath him passed twelve riders shrouded in black. They appeared to be malefactors of some sort. Each one had two bags bursting with gold hanging on either side of his mount.

On the mountain’s west flank, the leader halted his horse. He raised both arms to the sky and cried out, “Open, oh Shamash-Shamu Mountain! Open, oh Shamash-Shamu Mountain!” He continued to repeat the phrase, which seemed peculiar. For the word “shamash-shamu” meant sesame. This meant the man was calling the rock “Sesame Mountain.”

The poor man could not fathom what was transpiring beneath him or why the man continued to repeat the phrase. But to his astonishment, the invocation was met by a loud rumble and a sound like a peel of thunder. A vertical cleft appeared on the western face and dilated until it formed a portal into the living rock. The twelve horsemen entered and the mountain closed behind him.

Perplexed but curious, the man waited until sun set and the moon began to rise. Again, the mountain opened. And again, the twelve horsemen exited. And in the glimpses of the moon the man saw that the bags strapped to their saddles were gone. When the dust settled and the desert floor was still, the man climbed down from his hiding place and went to where the leader had brought his horse to a stop.

He repeated the words he had overheard the leader of the twelve riders say: “Open, oh Shamash-Shamu Mountain! Open, oh Shamash-Shamu Mountain!” It did not take long until the same thing happened. The mountain opened, and the poor man stepped inside.

The antechamber was dark, but he saw the wavering light of cressets down a corridor. He followed to a vast chamber that was full of gold. There were ancient sphinxes and coffers dripping with jewels. Heaped in a pile were the twenty-four bags of gold that the twelve riders, whom he now realized were thieves.

He was afraid that the twelve men, whom he was now certain were thieves, might return at any moment and kill him. He could locate no other way out of the mountain. So he said, “Open, oh Shamash-Shamu Mountain!” And repeated this until the mountain opened again. And then he ran as fast as his legs would carry him back to his home.

He cursed himself for not bringing some of the wealth he had found with him. So he devised a plan. He would need a receptacle to carry the treasure out. It was a melancholy fact that, even though the man made a living gathering palm fibers to weave baskets, he possessed now a single basket of his own. So he went to his wealthy brother; and asked to borrow one for the day.

The wicked brother relished the prospect of gratifying his man’s request, because it emphasized the contrast between their respective estates.

But in the days following the request, the poor man seemed to have mysteriously acquired a fortune. With this he bought his family a large mansion. And now they had plenty to eat, and they never went to bed hungry.

The problem with the palm-fiber merchant was that he was an overly kind and generous man. And he soon gave away all of his riches until he was poor again. So he asked to borrow his brother’s basket a second time, and was again seen to be unaccountably wealthy. But he was poor again within a few months.

This time when he went to his brother to ask for a basket, the miser devised a plan of his own. He smeared naphtha to the bottom of the basket; and when it was retuned to him, the wicked brother found a stray gold coin stuck to the bottom, which he showed to his brother. “Now I’ve caught you. Tell me where you are getting this treasure or I will kill you.”

In an access of despair, the wretched man confessed. He told him the secret of Shamash-Shamu Mountain, and revealed to him the password to access the thieves’ treasure.

Alone, the wicked brother went to the mountain, carrying one of his baskets to take as much of the treasure as he could carry. “Open, oh Shamash-Shamu Mountain!” he repeated over and over again, until a rift formed in the smooth face of the rock and was wide enough for him to enter. He stepped inside as the walls closed behind him.

He was so overwhelmed by how much treasure there was that after he had filled the basket and returned to the dark antechamber, he had forgotten the phrase to open the mountain. He seemed to recall that the password involved some mention of the sun. And so he said, “Open, oh Shamash Mountain!” But nothing happened. “Open, oh Shamash Mountain!” he said again.

For a long while he waited in the dark until, to his relief, the walls parted. When the man saw the sinking sun on the western horizon, he was gratified. But at once the lurid red disc was obscured by the flapping of black robes and what he thought was a mirage of twelve horsemen approaching.

They entered the mountain, and circled the wicked brother in the vast antechamber. They seemed amused; and as their horses’ hoofs echoed on in the darkened chamber, their leader spoke. “Did you think we would not notice that a pest has been nibbling away at our goods?”

“There’s been a mistake,” the miser said. “It’s my brother who has been stealing from you!”

The next day the good brother was summoned to the marketplace.

“What is the meaning of this?” he asked his friends. The crowd stepped away to reveal a boy in a loincloth holding a large basket with both hands. The boy set it down, opened it, reached inside, and pulled out something shaggy and matted with gore. The spectators gasped. It was the fly-covered head of the poor man’s brother.

“I found this basket in a palm grove where I play,” the boy said. “Near a nondescript mountain.”

The palm-fiber merchant inherited his brother’s great palace. But when he and his family took charge of it, it was almost entirely empty. Thieves had stolen everything that could be carried away, except for a few baskets in a storage room. The righteous brother counted his blessings and took this as a warning. He vowed never again to visit Shamash-Shamu Mountain.

This is the second installment of a four-part short story set in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Cairo. It is inspired by the works of Naguib Mahfouz, specifically his Cairo Trilogy and standalone novels, Midaq Alley and Khan al-Khalili.

The Books of Azbakeya (Part 2)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Qasim’s right ear cicatrized and healed, but the flesh would itch off and on for the remainder of his life. When he recovered sufficiently from the wound, he began to learn the book trade. Each morning after dawn prayers—except on Fridays and other Muslim holy days—four porters arrived at Sheikh Mukhtar’s vault in Khan al-Khalili. They brought pushcarts to transport a selection of the books to Soor al-Azbakeya. It took half an hour to reach Ataba by foot. Qasim and Ahmed led the way, crying “’an idhnak!” (by your leave) to part the crowd.

The boys spread sackcloth on the sidewalk to protect the books from the roughness of the dusty cobbles. A few of the books stood upright on the fence’s low base, spines facing the sidewalk. It was not uncommon for the more colorful paperbacks to be wedged at odd angles or butterflied between the bars to showcase their garishness, as a peacock spreads its tail. The was not logically categorized, since neither of the boys could not read.

When the porters left, Ahmed went to the corner to buy their breakfast, which consisted of flatbread stuffed with baked beans or a cup of boiled chickpeas. They washed everything down with a demitasse of tea; and when the tea things had been returned to the vendor, the orphans waited for the customers to come. Some days not a single person stopped by.

In the late afternoon the porters returned. The unsold books were hauled back to the vault and the men were paid their wages. Ahmed gave Sheikh Mukhtar whatever he and Qasim managed to earn that day. Between what they sold and the money the old storyteller garnered from the auditors he entertained during his daily perambulations through the old quarters of city, there was always enough for them to eat and the old man ensured the boys’ needs were taken care of.

At the end of each month, Sheikh Mukhtar treated them to a feast of chicken skewers and koftas wrapped in grape leaves. After the greasy repast, the three of them resorted to the ancient hammam on al-Mu’izz Street, where the sheikh paid for his wards to bathe and recreate themselves in the subterranean Roman pools, while he lingered in the vestibule, sleeping or telling stories to the staff. It was during one such visit that Qasim witnessed something that made him suspect the old man’s resources were greater than he let on.

Qasim and Ahmed mounted the hammam’s ashlar steps, galabeyas still clinging to their damp skin. Sheikh Mukhtar was in the vestibule lounging on a plush divan, recounting an episode from the romance of Abla and Antara to the man folding towels and a second man, the makwagee, who was ironing them. From behind a beaded curtain appeared the aged Armenian proprietress.

She doused the orphans with an attar of sandalwood, complimenting Sheikh Mukhtar for his charges’ manners and comeliness. She remarked that the fragrance she was so liberally aspersing them with was compounded from a time-honored formula the sages of Erevan had kept a guarded secret since the time of Christ.

Her tone became conspiratorial as she cast hesitating glances behind her, intimating that a second vial lay locked away in the backroom—a vial she might be persuaded to part with it “assuming the price. . .” She let the insinuation permeate the air as thickly as the perfume she was endeavoring so desperately to flog.

With the chivalry of Saladin, Sheikh Mukhtar declined her offer. He addressed her as “sister” and revealed that he had been on intimate terms with her father, who had run the hammam for half a century before his untimely death in ’22. Sheikh Mukhtar had met her before, “when you were no older than these boys.” He was certain her father would be proud of how she had revived the hammam which had fallen into desuetude in the years since her father’s passing.

The woman placed the vial on her desk and pressed her palms together in a gesture of gratitude, overcome with emotion. “It has been a labor of love.”

“Before the Great War,” the sheikh continued, “your father needed money to renovate the substructure. I was able to assist with a contribution that I had earmarked for the local waqf. But I believed back then, as I still do, that a contribution to the hammam was a contribution to the entire quarter. I expected nothing in return. But your father’s pride would not suffer him to accept the gift without bestowing on me a pawn he vowed one day to redeem. But I’m afraid your father was called to God before that could happen.”

The storyteller removed from his robes a slender volume bound in vermillion damask, with a gorgeous clasp of pure silver. “I somehow misplaced this book among the thousands in my vault. By the grace of God, it materialized this year on the first day of Ramadan. I have brought it with me each time I have come here with the boys, waiting for the moment when I could restore it to its rightful owner.”

He handed her the book. She held it to her heart. “I have not seen this since I was a girl. It is The Book of Lamentations by Saint Grigor Narekatsi.” She pointed to the clasp. “My great-great grandfather was a silversmith. This clasp is his work.” Solemnly, she kissed the volume. “Thank you so very much.”

The booksellers who plied their trade at the Azbakeya Fence spoke of Sheikh Mukhtar as if he were a sorcerer from the pages of the Arabian Nights, which in many ways he was.

Some said it was he who first hit upon the idea of selling books near the entrance of the khedivial garden. But others claimed the tradition could be traced to a dervish from Luxor, who appeared in Cairo shortly after the fence was completed, or possibly at the same time as the arrival of the controversial Mason and Muslim scholar, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. The dervish became a fixture at the fence, surrounded by his meager possessions, which included a plank of wood torn from a mummy’s coffin that he used to write upon.

Despite the man’s alleged poverty, critics noted that the nibs he employed were newly fashioned and finely cut; and his inkwells were from London. The fragments of papyrus that the man wrote upon were said to have been disinterred from the sands of Dendera and scraped of their profane hieroglyphics. In a homicidal scrawl, the dervish penned ambiguous premonitions and scandalous prayers, rolling these into scrolls that he fastened with twine to the bars.

When the scrolls danced in the wind, so too did he, whirling and gamboling before the astonished crowd. Sometimes a wealthy “seeker” placed in the man’s grubby palm a gold sovereign, prompting mad sage’s liquid eyes to slew in the direction of a scroll that he murmured contained contained an answer to a problem the querent’s primordial spirit had been mulling since the beginning of time. The dervish laughed at those who called him a fraud and wept for the folly of those who took him seriously.

The tale of the mystic at the Azbakeya Fence was a fabrication elaborated upon by the vendors during those idle hours when the customers were infrequent and an oppressive boredom overwhelmed them. One bookseller jokingly proposed that, in order to deflect attention from his accomplishment in being the first merchant to sell books at the fence, Sheikh Mukhtar had invented the dervish and retro-projected his magical history into the previous century, which a storyteller could easily do.

Whatever the case, Sheikh Mukhtar was accorded pride of place at the book market in front of the broken wrought-iron acanthus leaf. And because Qasim and Ahmed were recognized his trusted agents and beloved wards, the boys were treated with a degree of respect and esteem rarely granted to children of their age. Whenever it rained, the other booksellers rushed to their aid, covering the sheikh’s books with tarps until the sun reappeared. If the boys needed to step away to answer a call of nature or for any other reason, the men at the stalls on either side watched over their books, or sold them on their behalf, pocketing only a piaster for this service.

Sometimes Sheikh Mukhtar surprised everyone by appearing unannounced to ask in a comically loud voice whether his business was flourishing. Everyone laughed, because it never was.

During the tourist season, maps and postcards were in high demand. Sheikh Mukhtar cut deals with the city’s printers to acquire boxes of these items on wholesale. In the lead-up to Coptic holidays, the old man directed the orphans to take with them the leather-bound volumes from a bookcase in the vault that perpetually reeked of incense, because its contents had once belonged to an archimandrite from the Nitrian Desert, who stipulated in his will that God had directed him in a dream to bequeath his books “to the storyteller of Khan al-Khalili whose name in Arabic means ‘The Chosen One’ (al-mukhtar).”

No matter how many books Qasim and Ahmed sold, a steady stream of new ones came in each week from publishers, universities and government institutions that were desperate to offload their own vast holdings, but wary of destroying or sending the refuse heaps on Muqattam Hill any written materials that might contain the name of God or a verse from the Holy Qur’an.

Although Sheikh Mukhtar’s vision was failing and his movements were growing more feeble, his memory remained unaffected; and he instilled in his charges many practical lessons. He advised them to use his books as sharpening stones against which to hone their own commercial acuity, “so that when I’m gone, you will have the skills to set up your own businesses.” He subjected them to many lectures on the art of selling books.

“Pay attention to your customers’ characteristics. Men in steel-rimmed glasses are often scholars and prefer books with maps and photographic inserts of archaeological digs. Thin men with thin mustaches like thin books of poetry. European poems are bunched together on the pages and form squares or rhomboids. But Arabic poems are more organized, each line being interrupted with a misra‘ (or hinge) running vertically down the page—as seen here.

“Fat men in fat glasses like fat books. They are often doctors, or engineers, or scientists. They will have more money than the poor poets and scholars. They like books full of numbers, mathematical symbols, and cutaway images of turbines, geological formations, human bodies, and other complicated things that it is an abomination to pretend one can understand as well as God.”

Qasim noticed that Sheikh Mukhtar said nothing of the books that women liked to read. “What kind of books do girls like?”

It was Ahmed who answered. “They like magazines and books with pictures of animals and movie stars on the cover.”

On the subject of haggling Sheikh Mukhtar raised his index finger pedagogically.

“When the customer asks how much a book is, propose an outrageous price. But make it clear you’re willing to negotiate. The first sale is the most important one of the day. It is a blessing from God, which means it is ungrateful to dwell on how little or much you made from it. Once a price is agreed upon, try to look glum and depressed so the buyer thinks he has outwitted you. If you look happy, he will think that you have cheated him. And if he ever comes back, he will demand rock-bottom prices.”

On a spring morning in 1946, Qasim sat alone at the Azbakeya Fence. Ahmed was sick with influenza and had stayed home for the day. Out of nowhere, a girl in a white dress with some jasmines in her hair stopped by to look at the books. Qasim suspected she was about his age, but she was much taller. She was also very pretty. So he cupped his right hand over his missing ear because he feared she would run away in fright when she saw his scar.

“What kind of books do you sell?”

“All kinds. . .” He reached behind his shoulder and grabbed a sky-blue paperback wedged between the bars. He handed it to her. The cover was adorned with an illustration of a dog with a red ball in its mouth and a pretty woman in a cloche hat. “Here’s a book full of sweet stories.”

“What kind of stories?”

He remembered Ahmed’s words. “It has a story in it about animals and movie stars.”

She flipped through the pages and furrowed her brow. This was not an anthology, but an Arabic translation of Agatha Christie’s Dumb Witness. It was obvious the boy was illiterate. But he was kind. And she liked the bashful way he pouted. “How much is it?” she asked.

“Keep it.”

“I can’t.”

When she tried to give it back, he waggled his head and waved both hands in the air. When he did this, she saw the scar. He turned away, embarrassed.

“Were you hiding that because you think it’s ugly?”

Qasim shrugged.

“Well, I don’t think it is.”

A voice cried out. “Buthayna!”

Qasim recognized the man in the black suit who had called out to her. He wore a red tarboosh and black suit. His face was all over the newspapers and political placards. He was a member of the Wafd Party. Qasim deduced that he was also the girl’s father.

Buthaynah smiled. “Now that you know my name, will you tell me yours?”

“Qasim,” he said in a sullen whisper. He wondered if the Pasha would take offense if he were to see a street urchin talking to his daughter. But the man seemed unperturbed, smoothing his waxed mustachios in indolent abstraction.

Buthaynah accepted the book and walked away, glancing twice over her shoulder as she went. She took her father’s hand and the two of them wandered off into the crowd.

Qasim assumed that was the end of the matter. But two days later, the girl reappeared. This time there were no flowers in her hair. Again she stopped in front of Qasim and smiled. “I wasn’t sure if you’d still be here.”

“I’m always here.” He pointed to the broken acanthus leaf, as if this proved his point.

“My father said I must give the book back, because I didn’t pay for it.” She gave it to him. “But I read it through, cover to cover.”

“In two days?”

“Yes. I’m considered very smart.”

He sighed. If she read the book, then that meant she knew he had been lying to her about what it was about. His eyes searched for Buthaynah’s father, who was sitting in a horse-drawn carriage on the opposite side of the street, reading a newspaper.

“There was one story in it,” she said, “which was, as you say, very sweet.”

“What was it about?”

“It’s about a man who gives a book to the only girl he will ever love. She likes him too. But they’re from different worlds. And she knows that they can never be together. Years later, when the man is old, he finds the book that he gave her—here, at the Azbakeya Fence.”

“How does he know it’s the same book?”

“Because he finds a message in it that she left for him long ago.”

“What’s the message say?”

“If I told you, it would ruin the ending. . . Goodbye, Qasim!”

Buthaynah ran across the street. The groom lifted her up and placed her in the carriage next to her father.

Qasim opened the book; but shut it again rapidly. Ahmed was approaching with a cup of tea in each hand; and his sly grin made it clear that he had seen what had just happened.

“Why did that girl give you a book?” he asked.

“Because I gave it to her two days ago when you were sick. She was returning it.”

“I think you liked her. So you gave her the book, because you thought she liked you. But she didn’t, so she gave it back.”

They finished their tea and Ahmed took the empty cups back to the shop. When he was gone, Qasim opened the book and removed the white jasmine pressed between the pages.

Continue to Part 3

Little Hans and Little Greta: Part 2 (Conclusion)

Part 1 | Part 2

Hänsel and Gretel roamed the Black Forest, foraging for the mushrooms that grew on the stumps and gnarled roots and eating the wild berries they found amid the nettles. As the last glimmers of the twilight fringed off into night, they were overcome not only by darkness but an overpowering fatigue.

Beneath the branches of a storm-blasted oak they slept until dawn, when the burbling of a white dove woke them. The bird took wing and drew them by its cloying song and playful flight deeper into the woods. They entered a clearing where a gingerbread house stood wrapped in the dissipating vapors of the morn.

“I want to taste those shingles,” Hänsel said. “They look so delicious.”

He climbed a vine running vertically up the wall of the house. And when he was on top, he tore away a hank of the brown shingle. It was friable and moist because it was chocolate cake. Gretel tapped an opaque window. The force of her finger punctured it, as if it were ice. But though the glass crackled, it was warm to the touch. For what she imagined to be window pane covered with frost turned out to be a sheet of crystalized sugar.

Unhinged by their hunger the children ate ravenously. Hänsel tore fistfuls of the crumbly shingles from the rooftop, as Gretel licked the sugar shards. Then she snapped the cinnamon-flavored half-timber trim from the wall and tried it as well. Everything was coated in sugary icing and what looked like coarse wood-grain were camouflaged pieces of hard candy.

The children’s frenetic lip-smacking was overheard by the mistress of the house, whose aged voice carried up the gingerbread flue from the oven below, and shocked Hänsel into immobility:

Chompity chomp, I hear a mouse.
Something’s gobbling up my house.

Hänsel shinnied down the vine and ran to Gretel, whose wide eyes betrayed that she had heard the voice too. The front door flew open, and a crooked old woman stepped out, leaning heavily on a hook-handled cane. The children were so frightened they did not know what to do. Gretel dropped a gumdrop and held Hänsel’s hand. But the cake and icing on their faces gave them away.

The old woman seemed amused. “You precious little dears. I’m not going to hurt you. Come inside, so that Granny can take care of you. But before you cross the threshold of my house, I insist you give me your names.”

“I’m Hans,” the boy remarked. “But you may call me Hänsel.”

“And my name is Greta,” the girl said. “Which is short for Margaretha, which is the name I was christened with. But everyone simply calls me Gretel, because I’m so small.”

“You’re also garrulous.”

The sibling were perplexed, because they did not know what that word meant. The old woman rested her elbow on the crook of her cane.

“Welcome, Hänsel and Gretel! And good morning to you.”

“Good morning to you, Granny,” they said.

“What’s your name?” Hänsel asked.

The corners of the crone’s lips perked up. “I had a name long ago—a name as ancient as the forest. But when I was a child, an old witch snatched it away.”

Gretel felt sad for the old woman. “Then you have no name?”

The hag suppressed a sneer. “On the contrary, I have two: Hänsel and Gretel.”

She cackled and flourished her cane. And when she did so, her sleeves fell away, revealing two scaly forearms as leprous and white as a reptile’s slough. When the children jumped, she pulled the sleeves down until only her palsied hands were visible. This did not entirely allay the siblings’ fear. So she groaned and pretended the cane was the only thing keeping her from falling.

Slowly, she trod to the front door on which hung an inverted cross of black licorice. She beckoned them to follow; and like sheep to slaughter, Hänsel and Gretel complied.

The interior of the gingerbread house was much more ample than it appeared from without. There were scores of bags thrown pell-mell all over the place filled to the top with gold coins. The old woman bade her guests to take a seat at the long table so that she could prepare their breakfast. They were served pancakes smothered in apples with a pyramid of powdered sugar on top.

“You’ll want milk with this,” she observed. And instantly the earthenware cups brimmed with the creamiest milk the children had ever drunk. The hostess seemed mildly disgusted by the children’s table manners, since they ate so rapidly that they snorted like pigs. Whenever Hänsel looked up from his plate, the old woman’s scrawny neck swiveled in his direction and she regarded him with a Delphic smile.

There were two beds with clean satin sheets and eiderdown pillows that were located (strangely) at the far end of the table close to the cast-iron oven. One of the peculiarities of the gingerbread house was that it consisted of only one room: the kitchen. The upper loft and garret window that the children thought saw when they first laid eyes on the house was an illusion.

“You must be exhausted now that your tummies are full,” the old woman said. “Why don’t you lie down and take a nap?”

Hänsel and Gretel thought this a capital idea. As Gretel pulled the sheet up to her chin and felt her body sinking in the fluffy mattress, she could not help but emit a sigh of ecstasy. She told Hänsel that the two of them must have died and gone to Heaven, because her body had never experienced such comfort.

“We’re not dead yet,” Hänsel scoffed, as he drifted off to sleep.

“No,” the old woman agreed. “Not yet.”

The old woman stood stock-still over the beds, grinning at nothing in particular, until the sun went down, when the pupils of her eyes glowed like carbuncles. It has been said that the witches of the Black Forest cannot see well in the daylight. But their vision sharpens at dusk. The outlines and features of the sleeping children, which had been unclear to her for many hours, grew distinct and awakened her hunger. A vertical stream of acidic drool ran down her glabrous chin, pooling hissingly on the flags as they ate away at the stones.

As the spider spins its web, so had this servant of Moloch squeezed the gingerbread house out of her spouted nether orifices, weaving the threads of candied excrement into a sticky trap to lure her victims to their doom. Argus-eyed, she lay in wait in the honeyed hovel’s heart. Her eight withered legs, deftly hid beneath the skirt, were attuned to each tremble and vibration of the forest floor for miles in every direction. Hänsel and Gretel could not have known that buried beneath the gold coins in each bag were the bones of former children the fanged arachnid had fed upon.

The witch’s famulus, which is to say her familiar spirit, was also in the house. It resided in the flames that fueled the kitchen’s oven and danced on the wicks of the candles made of baby fat. It was composed of the selfsame hellfire that consumed the innocents in bygone days, when the Canaanites served cannibal gods.

Closing her eyes, the witch communed with her dear friend. “When I have eaten these babes, I shall absorb the girl’s shrewd mind and the boy’s brute strength.”

“But the boy is weak,” said the flame. “You must first fatten him up.”

“Agreed,” the witch nodded. “The girl shall be my slattern until her brother has regained his strength. Then I will devour them both. In two gulps—chomp, chomp.”

The next day, the old woman kicked Gretel out of bed. “Wake up, you stupid heifer!”

Gretel landed on her side and rubbed her elbow because it was smarting. Then she rubbed her eyes, because they were still gummy from her sound sleep. She saw that Hänsel’s bed was empty.

“Where’s my brother?”

“I’ve locked him in the chicken coop! Now prepare his breakfast. He needs butter, blood-pudding, and a pot of lard. And don’t you dare touch my bags of gold. If I hear so much as a single coin ring on the floor, I’ll tear open your chest, rip out your heart, and force-feed it to Hänsel.”

Gretel ran to the cutting board and started cooking. She was not allowed to step outside the gingerbread house.

Alone in the coop, Hänsel crouched down amid the feathers and bones of the slaughtered hens. He kept as far from the wire grate as he could, because he knew the witch could not see him in the sunlight. Each day she opened the door and cast his meal inside. Then she shut it and demanded the boy stick his finger out the wire meshes so she could touch it and make sure it was getting thicker.

Hänsel sensed her plan and found a chicken bone, which he stuck out instead. The witch would palpate it, swearing under her breath before going back inside. Meanwhile, Gretel began to starve, because the only thing she was given to eat were the witch’s stinking crab shells the witch cast to the floor after she had sucked out all the meat, leaving only a gooey slime mixed with her toxic spittle.

After many days Hänsel‘s finger was still thin and bony. The witch grew impatient, and consulted with her familiar. It was decided the time had come. Throw them both in the oven, the flame advised. And I will burn them until their blackened flesh splits open and the fat sizzles out.

The oven was an opulent cast-iron affair, beneath the flat black panels of which the wavering flame of the familiar spirit smoldered unseen.

“Where are you, Gretel?! Come here, you filthy little pig!”

“I’m here, Granny,” the girl replied.

The hag stood next to the oven, holding a wooden baker’s peel. Its handle was as long as a spear.”

“I’m baking a loaf of bread for your brother. I’ll give you a piece of it if you behave. The recipe calls for a low flame. So I need you to sit on this peel, so that I can insert it into the back of the oven. Once inside, poke the bread to make sure it is done.”

“Why don’t you remove the loaf and check it yourself?”

The witch scowled and rolled her eyes. “Because if it’s not done, the cool air will cause the bread to fall.”

“I’m not exactly sure how to do this, Granny. Could demonstrate to me what you would like me to do?”

“You stupid child. Take this handle. Now, hold it firmly with both hands. I will sit on the flat of the peel, like so. . .”

Gretel gripped the handle with both hands. The witch was as light as air, since she had always been a figment of the imagination.

Gretel arched one eyebrow. “So you want me to put you in the oven?”

“YES, you idiot! Thrust the peel deep inside!—Now!”

Gretel did as the witch commanded. Then she tilted the handle, so that the witch slid off the peel. There was a frightful roar, as Gretel slammed the oven door shut and locked it. The familiar spirit, sympathetic to the witch’s rage, intensified until the cast-iron oven became white hot. Within seconds the witch was dead, and a cloud of brimstone belched out of the gingerbread flue.

Gretel seized the key to the chicken coop and ran outside. When she had freed Hänsel, the two of them gathered up as many of the coins as they could fit in their pockets and fled the gingerbread house, which was beginning to fade away. They tore a few pieces from the vanishing walls and took these with them so that they could eat them later.

The white dove that had tricked them into coming to the gingerbread house appeared again. But a giant falcon swooped down and ate it in one gulp. The bird landed and lowered its beak to signify to Hänsel and Gretel that they could mount it. The bird flew them through the Black Forest and returned them to their home.

They knocked, but there was no answer. Hänsel opened lower half of the door. The children called out to their father and stepmother, but were met with an eerie silence. When they mounted the staircase and found the woodcutter unconscious on the upper landing. He had wasted away to skin and bones. But he was still alive.

When he opened his eyes, he assumed his children had returned from the grave to lead him to Damnation for the sin he had committed. But Gretel kissed him and nursed him to health with a cup of water and a bunched-up plug of marzipan.

The children told their story. And it was not long before the woodcutter was able to shake off his stupor and find his voice. He apologized that poverty had driven him to the extremity of abandoning them to the beasts of the forest. But Hänsel begged him to say no more. Their children emptied their pockets and the gold coins scattered all over the floorboards.

“We’ll never go hungry again, Papa!” said Hänsel.

“Where is our dear stepmother?” Gretel asked.

The woodcutter rose and staggered to the bedroom door. He opened it and lingered at the threshold as the children tremulously stepped inside. On the bed beneath the covers lay a corpse.

“I’m afraid your stepmother died last night of starvation.”

THE END

“Hänsel und Gretel” (Little Hans and Little Greta) was the 15th tale in the 1812 edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (“Children’s and Household Tales”) by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. The names “Hänsel and Gretel” are German diminutives for Hans and Greta (or Margarethe) respectively. The source of the story is said to be Dorothea “Dortchen” Wild and her family. It is considered one of the most authentically “German” of the fairy tales, although many ideas and motifs in it can be found traced to other folk traditions.

This retelling follows closely the sequence of events as laid out in the Grimms’ version, while condensing some repetitive parts and expanding on other aspects of it that are never elaborated upon, like the nature of the stepmother’s relationship with Hänsel and Gretel, or the horrors of the famine. I have set this version in the Black Forest during the time of the Margraviate of Baden, which existed in a few different guises from the twelfth to the nineteenth century. But there’s no specificity of time or place in fairyland.

Little Hans and Little Greta: Part 1

Part 1 | Part 2

Long ago a woodcutter lived with his wife and two children at the edge of the Black Forest in the Margraviate of Baden. The little boy was named Hans and his sister was named Greta. But because they were so tiny everyone called them Hänsel and Gretel. They had never known their birth mother, who died when they were still in the cradle. Their stepmother who helped raise them was beautiful and not unkind. But she remained aloof from the children, because they were not of her blood.

One afternoon Hänsel and Gretel returned to the cottage after playing for many hours outside. Gretel gave her stepmother a lily of the field. “Thank you,” the woman said. “It’s lovely.” As she held the flower, Hänsel kissed her slender fingers. “Please don’t do that,” she said, handing the lily back to Gretel before walking upstairs to attend to her chores.

Even in the best of times there little food in the woodcutter’s house. They kept no livestock and grew no crops. They could not afford either a cart or a draft animal to haul it. So the woodcutter walked to town each morning with an armfuls of logs, going house to house to sell them. With the money he earned, he bought food for them, usually a few eggs and some bread. In summer when the townsfolk gathered wood on their own, the man often returned with little to show for his work.

A famine ravaged the land. The woodcutter and his family became even skinnier than they were before.

Hänsel and Gretel took to eating the lichen from the doorposts and the bark that flaked off the roof shingles. They also ate the spiders in the house, along with the bitter cobwebs that they had woven. One night Hänsel dreamed that their house was made of gingerbread. The lichen had become icing and the bark was of marzipan. The spiders tasted like gumdrops; and the cobwebs had the sweetness and consistency of spun sugar.

One night the woodcutter rose from bed, and flung open the casement. He wept as he gazed out upon the firs of the Black Forest swaying in the mellow breeze. His wife sat up, leaning against the headboard, which was adorned with a folk painting of Eve proffering the fatal apple to Adam with the serpent coiled round the Forbidden Tree.

“Why are you weeping, husband?”

“I’m frightened,” he whispered. “How are we to feed our children when there’s not even enough food for you and me. All we have left are six loaves of stale bread.”

“A king’s feast for two.”

He turned to her in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“At daybreak we will take the children into the densest part of the forest. Once there, we will give each a loaf of bread. When they have finished their meal, I will tell them to take a nap to digest it. I will watch over them while you go about your work gathering wood. . .”

“And then what?”

“And then you and I return alone to the cottage.”

“I can’t leave my only children vulnerable to the beasts of the forest. When they awake they will know that it was we who betrayed them.”

“Two deaths are better than four,” she said, ashamed that desperation had made her so cruel. She studied those slender fingers Hänsel had kissed. They were now as chapped and bony as the talons of the fabled hags said to inhabit the forest’s nighted depths. A tear coursed down her cheek. “If you don’t want to do this, my love, I’ll understand. But if the thing is not done, the only job you will have left on this earth will be to plane the boards of our four coffins.”

Hänsel and Gretel had been unable to sleep because they were so famished. They overheard their parents’ conversation through the hole in the bedroom wall.

“We’re done for,” Gretel said, her eyes misting over.

Hänsel sniffed. “Don’t be so dramatic, Gretel. I’ll think of something.”

When he was certain his parents were asleep, he donned his leather vest, went downstairs, opened the lower half of the door and slipped out. He knew a place behind the house where the white pebbles glittered in the moonlight like silver coins. He bent down and collected as many of these as he could stuff into his pockets. When he was back inside, he said to Gretel. “Don’t worry, sister. God is with us. We’ll be fine.”

The next day their stepmother entered the room and threw the drapes wide to the wall. “Wake up, sleepy heads. We’re going into the forest to help your father gather wood. He is weak for lack of food and needs our help.” She gave each a loaf of bread. “Keep the loaves with you. But do not eat them until noon.”

Gretel put both loaves under her apron, because Hänsel’s pockets were full of pebbles. They stepped into the tree line. And after only a few paces Hänsel looked over his shoulder in the direction of the cottage.

The woodcutter stopped. “Hänsel, why are you dawdling?”

“I was looking at my white cat sitting there on the rooftop.”

“You don’t have a white cat,” his stepmother said, rolling her eyes. “That’s the sun behind the chimney pot.”

But Hänsel had not been looking at the house. He had been checking to make sure he could see the pebbles he was dropping along the way.

They walked until noon, when their father told them it was time for lunch. Hänsel and Gretel ate the loaves of bread. When they were done, their stepmother told them that it was time for them to take a nap. What the children did not realize was that she had sprinkled a sleeping powder over the bread. No sooner had they swallowed the last morsel than their eyelids began to droop. And it was not long before they were asleep.

They were woken by the sound of the owls hooting in the trees and woodland creatures scurrying about in the underbrush. It was pitch dark.

“How are we to find our way home?” Gretel asked.

“Once the moon has risen,” Hänsel said, “I’ll show you.”

The moon’s pale beams filtered down through the tree tops. Hänsel showed Gretel a trail of white pebbles shimmering in the dark like pearls on a black cloth. He took his sister by the hand, and the two of them followed the stones until daybreak, when they espied their cottage through the trees.

They knocked at the door. Their stepmother answered. “You lazy kobolds! You slept all afternoon. I helped your father haul the wood he chopped back to the house. We expected you home by nightfall.”

Though their reappearance had annoyed their stepmother, the woodcutter was overjoyed. He had felt very guilty going along with what his wife had suggested.

The next day a flock of pigeons arrived and settled in the tall tree in their front yard. With his slingshot the woodcutter slew enough of them to feed his family for weeks. But the pigeons soon realized what was happening. They abandoned the tree and flew deep into the forest.

It was then that the famine became terrible. Rumors circulated that footpads had resorted to cannibalism, and that human flesh was being sold in the markets of Rastatt and Karlsruhe.

One night, the woodcutter and his wife urgently discussed the dire situation. Only one loaf of bread remained for the four of them. The woodcutter wondered what was to be done. The woman recommended the same course, but urged her husband to lead the children even deeper into the Black Forest so that they would never return.

“They are tiny,” she said, “and can only walk for so long.”

The woodcutter sobbed but acceded to his wife’s wishes.

Again, the children overheard the whispered parley. Hänsel assured his sister that he would rescue them as he had done before. But when he put on his vest and snuck downstairs, he discovered that his stepmother had locked the lower door, so he could not get out.

“Don’t worry,” he said on returning to their room. “God will provide for us.”

The next day, the woman told Hänsel and Gretel that they were going into the Black Forest to help their father gather wood, because he was weak for lack of food. She handed each a crust of bread. Hänsel crushed this in his pocket, so that he could scatter the crumbs along the trail as they walked.

They stepped into the tree line. And after only a few paces Hänsel looked over his shoulder in the direction of the cottage.

“Hänsel,” the woodcutter said. “Why do you keep dawdling?”

“I’m looking at the pigeon on the rooftop. He wants to say goodbye.”

“Foolish boy,” the woman said. “The pigeons flew the roost, because your father slew too many of them. What you think is a pigeon is the sun rising behind the chimney pot.”

They walked many miles until well into the afternoon. Finally, it was time for them to eat lunch. Since Hänsel no longer had any bread in his pockets, Gretel shared her crust with him. This time the bread was not drugged. But the children were so exhausted from the long journey that, no sooner had they swallowed the last morsel than their eyelids began to droop. And it was not long before they were asleep.

They were woken by the sound of the owls hooting in the trees and woodland creatures scurrying about in the underbrush. It was pitch dark.

Hänsel assured Gretel that once the moon had risen, all would be well. But when it rose, there was no trail visible through the woods. For as Hänsel and Gretel slept, the pigeons ate every single crumb that lay on the forest floor to avenge themselves for the slaughter of their brethren at the hands of the children’s father.

Continue to Part 2

Book III, Chapter 5: The Language of Angels and Demons

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On All Hallows’ Eve, 1882, Ottokar and his eight-year-old son set out at dawn from their home on the banks of the Ötztaler Ache, a burbling in the Austrian Tyrol. They were heading east to Innsbruck to visit Ottokar’s mother, who had sent him a letter saying she was dying and wished to see him one last time before she was laid beneath the earth.

When they reached the stream’s junction with the river Inn, Ottokar was confident that if they followed the trend of the river’s southern shore they would achieve their destination by nightfall. But he had not anticipated the unremitting rain. And by noon he was still obliged to hold the lantern high in order to direct their steps. The sun skulked behind the scudding clouds that moved with greater rapidity as the winds mounted.

The trees and shrubs were not in leaf, but the thorns and brambles on the path pushed them often to the river’s brink until they were forced again and again to wade in the shallows and walk on the oscillating rocks amid the whitecaps. The boy tripped, fell, and sank momentarily beneath the waves. And when he breached, he gasped and coughed but did not complain. His clothes were drenched. He could not stop shivering, because the autumn air was chill.

Ottakar began to fret. He too stumbled in the river, and the water rose to his waist. He did not drop the lantern, but the matchbox and spare candles in his pockets were now soaked. This meant that if the lantern flame went out, he might not be able to light it again. He had not traveled this way for decades. But he had remembered it as a less dangerous route than the highway through the woods at this late season. But they were much farther from Innsbruck than they should be. It was midday, and too late to turn back.

They rounded a karst abutment that brought them into the Mariahilf Valley. Mercifully, the rain had stopped half an hour before. And there was now enough leeway on the southern bank to walk wide of the water and the shingle shore.

Their boots squelched in the clay and mud as they neared the burnt-out timbers and leveled walls of what remained of the desolate village that had flourished in this place three decades prior. But none of the buildings that were still standing offered sufficient shelter from the cold and damp. He knew that they could not keep going. The boy needed warmth and a place to rest.

They heard a welcome sound coming from the dark valley: a church bell. Ottokar strained his eyes and saw in the gloaming a black edifice crouching low on a hill against the backdrop of the mountain that dominated the valley.

“I remember this place now,” he said. “There’s a chapel on that bluff. We’ll sleep there tonight.”

“I thought we would be in Innsbruck by now, Papa.”

Ottokar looked sidelong at his son. The boy’s cheeks were peaked and it was obvious that he had little energy left to him. “I’m so sorry. But Innsbruck is much farther away than I remembered. We have to find someplace for your to rest.”

Over the tall grass they wandered until they reached the hill’s summit. They were confronted by the Romanesque ruins of the chapel of Our Lady of Mercy. They passed through the lichgate and marveled at the disarray of the headstones that lay toppled or shattered around their feet. These were the final resting places of the valley’s holy men. But no one had tended to the graves in years; and the weeds grew thick around them.

The iron bands that held the distressed boards of the door were dented. But a new lock and bolt mechanism had been installed. Ottokar had an eye for such things because he was a locksmith. A placard on the door stated that the chapel had been deconsecrated by order of the Bishop of Brixen and that trespassage was strictly forbidden.

Ottokar was puzzled as to who had rung the bell if the chapel was abandoned. After all, the tolling of the bell had coincided with vespers. He had assumed a monk or priest was close by acting as caretaker. But if the edifice was deconsecrated that would not make any sense. He walked to the edge of the chapel’s facade and craned his neck as he looked up at the bell tower. Because it was dark, he could not see inside it. But the wind was whipping around a length of rope. The violence of the rope’s movement made him suspect there was not a bell in the tower at all.

His son went to him. “Who rang it, Papa? And why’s the door locked?”

Ottokar did not answer, but returned to the front.

The vault of the sky reverberated from a blast of wind that sounded like the mournful cry of a wolf.

“Look, Papa!”

The boy pointed to a vaporous rack of clouds on the far shore that assumed the shape of a lupine muzzle before dissipating over the swaying treetops. Ottokar handed the lantern to his son. He reached into his pocket and removed his lock-picking tools. Within seconds the latch clicked, the wrought-iron tongue was lifted, and the bolt shot through.

Ottokar flung the door open and it creaked on its iron hinges. There were hundreds of candles blazing inside. The flames flickered and guttered; and a few went out.

“Close the door,” said a black-robed man, who stood facing the east wall. His accent was peculiar.

Ottokar beckoned his son to step inside. Then he shut the door behind them. “We are sorry to have disturbed you, Father.”

“I’m not. . .” The words hung in the air.

“A priest?”

The man was hooded. But as Ottokar’s eyes grew accustomed to the dim illumination he saw that the man had long black locks. He must be an artist or a libertine. There was no response. Ottokar exchanged a nervous glance with his son.

The stranger lifted his hand and made an eloquent gesture, and the candles that had blown out flickered again into life.

“That’s neat trick,” Ottaker said. “Are you a conjurer?” He did not want to presume ill intent, but the man was acting unusual. Ottokar carried a knife on his belt and would use it to defend himself and his son if need be. They would have to remain here for the night. There was no other option. But he would have to remain awake and keep on his guard for the sake of the two of them.

The man’s silence was absolute and sphinx-like; so much so that the flutter of the candles seemed deafening by comparison. The boy’s grip on the lantern tightened and he slowly crept behind his father.

“My son and I are traveling to Innsbruck. We must stay here for the night. There’s a notice on the door saying the chapel has been deconsecrated and trespassage is forbidden. So it would seem that we are all in violation of the injunction. Who are you, friend? And what is your business here?”

“This is my house.”

“This is—was—a house of God.”

“It was my house before it was His.”

Ottokar frowned. “Mortals have no possessions in this world. All things belong to our Blessed Father, who is in Heaven.”

“My father is in Hamburg. And he is also my son.”

“You speak in riddles.”

“As do angels and demons. Our language is incomprehensible to the mind of man. We speak through you, but never to you. You are the medium, like air, through which we speak to one another. You are as substantial in our world as a puff of smoke in yours. You are pawns on a playing board of a game of our own devising—a game that has never existed; and, because of that, will never come to an end.”

“The Devil talks like you.”

“Because he, too, was an angel.”

Ottokar and his son trembled. The man’s voice was speaking in multiple tones and pitches, some of them feminine.

“Who are you?” Ottokar asked.

“I am Legion. For we are many.”

He threw back his hood and, as the cloth fell away, Ottokar beheld the cadaverous visage of a fanged woman where the back of the head should have been. Though inured to unremitting torments, the woman’s eyes brimmed with tears. She tried to cry out, but the ghastly rictus twisted into a grin.

The robed figure turned to contemplate his victims in profile. His nose and mouth elongated into a hairless snout and the eyes flashed with a look of consummate lust and hunger.

Ottokar and his son screamed. And the boy dropped the lantern.

Outside, the sound of snapping bones and ripping flesh rose in the night sky. The hilltop on which the ruins of the chapel of Our Lady of Mercy shone like a beacon as the hellfire within swelled into an all-consuming inferno.

The ghosts of the wicked Jesuit, Frater Melchior von Mariahilf am Inn, and his beloved consort, Élise, fused into a single, sexless apparition, united at their blood-soaked lips. And the entity was borne on the buxom wings of a churning whirlwind that drifted northward over the river Inn toward the Free City of Hamburg, where Hermann Tischler, son of Moritz, had learned moments before that the monster had been awakened.

A blast of wind, like the mournful cry of a wolf, carried over the Mariahilf Valley. A vaporous rack of clouds on the far shore assumed the shape of a lupine muzzle and dissipated over the swaying treetops, leaving in its wake a brooding silence that lingered over the Austrian Tyrol until dawn.

Continue to Chapter 6

This is the first installment of a four-part short story set in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Cairo. It is inspired by the works of Naguib Mahfouz, especially his Cairo Trilogy and standalone novels, Midaq Alley and Khan al-Khalili

The Books of Azbakeya (Part 1)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Qasim lived with his daughter’s family in a cramped apartment above the juice shop he owned in Cairo’s Imbaba neighborhood. On a summer day in 2011 at the height of the Arab Spring, the old went to his son-in-law who was out front helping a farmer unload culms of sugarcane from a flatbed. “I’ll be back in two hours, God willing. Keep an eye on the place while I’m gone.” With this commission accepted, Qasim bent his steps to Kit-Kat Square, where a nightclub of the same name—a haunt of roués and spies—stood in the 1940s when Qasim was a boy and the world was turned upside down. Germany sought the expulsion of the British from Egypt, and the tranquility of the evening skies over the blacked-out city was often pieced by the banshee wail of air-raid sirens warning of an impending strike.

The Arabic news broadcasts from Berlin made inflated claims that Hajji Hitler came as the friend and savior of the Arab race. Qasim recalled a blind hafiz, which is to say one who has learned the Qur’an by heart, lifting his glaucous eyes to the radio and telling the other patrons of the smoke-filled coffeehouse that Napoleon had tried a similar ruse when he informed the sheikhs of Azhar that he came as a Muslim to liberate the Land of Khem from the yoke of the Mamelukes and the tyranny of the Sultan in Stamboul. Wreathed in the fumes of their nargilehs, the men had bobbed their heads gravely, muttering, “sah, sah (true, true),” as if the wily Corsican’s sojourn in Egypt were a matter of living memory.

From Imbaba’s dark alleys Qasim emerged into the stark glare of a blistering midday sun. He wore a white galabeya and skullcap over which a billowing keffiyeh only half concealed the jagged red scar where his right ear had been. In his left hand he carried a baggie full of a brown date juice called tamr hindi, which was sealed with a rubber-band cinched round a pink flex-straw. With his free hand he hailed a cab. And when the black-and-white Lada pulled up, he bent low and spoke into the passenger window: “Kutub al-Azbakeya” (the Books of Azbakeya).

“Yella, ya Hagg,” the driver replied. “Get in, old man.”

The seat cushion (kapok stuffing foaming at the seams) yielded to his substantial bulk, but not without a protest from the rusty springs sustaining it. He tried to shut the door, but it would not latch. So the driver leaned across the gearshift and, elbows digging into Qasim’s paunch, deftly arranged two hooks and a bungee cord in a manner so as to ensure the door would not fly open once they started to move. The absence of seatbelts—ripped out as gratuitous and sold for ready money—facilitated this operation.

Qasim handed the baggie to the driver, who drank greedily of the juice without uttering a single word of thanks. The clutch was released and the vibrating hood nosed its insistent way into the busy roundabout. The driver was about to flip the switch that would turn on the galloping meter when Qasim shook his index finger and clucked his tongue to signify that he was old and poor and could only afford a pound or two for the trip.

“Subhan Allah (God is praiseworthy),” the driver mumbled, sipping the drink between brooding scowls, philosophic sighs and a few mute appeals to the tasseled air-freshener adorned with the Bismillah that dangled from the cracked rearview mirror.

They headed east over the 6th October Bridge at the same pace as the student demonstrators marching with banners from Zamalek to Tahrir Square. On the right side of the street was a row of black APCs whose youthful occupants (clad in equally black uniforms) had abandoned the vehicles’ stuffy interior for the comparative coolness of the bridge’s fly-blown guardrails, where they milled about in pairs or napped with their heads pillowed on riot shields.

“They’re destroying the country,” the driver said, waving the empty baggie in a gesture that took in both the activists and government forces.

“God is glorious,” Qasim replied.

They reached the left bank of the Nile and were coming up to Maspero Station when hundreds of Salafists exited a nearby mosque at the conclusion of their prayers. The crowd of bearded men and black-veiled women decided that the middle of the street was as good a place as any to organize a counter-protest. So the cab driver switched off the ignition and waited for them to disperse. Within minutes he and Qasim were asleep. But they woke moments later to the sound of revving engines and blaring horns. The driver restarted the car, and the traffic resumed its glacial crawl.

The street widened as they entered Ataba, and Qasim stroked the bungee cord and wondered aloud how he was supposed to get out once his destination was achieved. The driver explained that he would release the hooks and cords the same way he had secured them. Then his countenance took on an expression of serene good humor. “The door usually latches except when my passengers are big-bellied like you.” They laughed uproariously until a sharp pain in Qasim’s heart caused him to turn away. He did not want the driver to see his face crumpled in agony. He hoped he had time to do what he had come to do.

On exiting the cab, Qasim gave the driver a five-pound note—“since the traffic was so bad.” The man shrewdly agreed that the congestion had indeed been unfortunate, not to mention the fact that his car had no AC and it was an extremely hot day. What would truly be fair, the driver proposed, would be for Qasim to pay a little more by way of compensation for these inconveniences. But the old man was waving goodbye and pointing to his missing ear to indicate that he could no longer hear what the driver was saying.

He crossed many lanes of traffic and the folds of his garments brushed the sides of the cars and motorcycles that swerved to evade not only him but the scores of other pedestrians sauntering lackadaisically through a haze of blue-gray exhaust. The knuckles of his right hand clipped the headlight of a passing Mercedes, and the mogul piloting it slowed down long enough to offer a heartfelt apology. But there was no need. Qasim patted the forearm of the man behind the wheel, who pressed his cellphone to his ear once more and resumed his conversation, as the Mercedes drove off.

With difficulty he mounted the foot-high sidewalk on the opposite side of the street and was confronted by the decaying glory of Soor al-Azbakeya. The phrase was often translated as “The Azbakeya Wall,” although it was less of a wall than a wrought-iron fence encircling the Azbakeya Gardens, a Rococo park and promenade constructed in the nineteenth century on a European plan by the Francophile Khedive of Egypt, Ismail Pash. But the years had not been kind to the leafy enclosure. And the vibrant greens of its foliage had all but faded brown beneath the diurnal assault of dust and grime blackening the palms’ bark and staining the frail petals that fell unswept on its sad ways.

For as long as Qasim could remember there had been book vendors along the fence peddling their wares. The enterprising merchants stretched twine between the bars from which newspapers, maps, magazines, and playbills were suspended. Paperbacks were butterflied or wedged between the iron volutes. And the flat surface of the fence’s base had acted as a shelf. But today there were only two booksellers along the fence, which he thought was strange. Perhaps this was due to the current political chaos.

He stooped down and gently tugged at the broken tip of the wrought-iron acanthus leaf near the garden’s entrance. This was where he had sold books in those heady years before the abdication of King Farouk, and the establishment of the Republic of Egypt under Mohamed Naguib. How old had he been? Eight? Nine? Egyptian authorities had paid scant heed to the births and deaths of orphans born in the slums. Were they not as numerous as the scorpions of Aswan?

His earliest memory was of his guardian, a fierce-tempered needleworker, whose specialty was making appliqué panels for quilts and coats. His shop was located beneath the pitched timber roofs of the Tentmakers’ Market near Bab Zuweila. Qasim knew that his guardian was not related to him. “And you must never call me father.” Qasim could no longer recall his name. But he remembered the man’s secret vices, which made his public demonstrations of piety into an utter mockery. Even when he quoted the Qur’an, he did so in a manner so unctuous that it sounded almost like blasphemy. The man was a munafiq, a hypocrite. And his true colors would soon show.

He taught Qasim arithmetic, as well as how to take measurements. How to count money. How to calculate change. He would quiz the boy, and when Qasim got an answer wrong, the beast would remove one flip-flop and smack the orphan repeatedly on the head until he got the answer right.

One morning, the needleworker woke from a drunken stupor. Qasim could not understand what he was saying. He whispered irritably, trying to communicate to the boy that he needed water from the neighborhood tank. But his words were slurred and incomprehensible. Qasim dithered and gaped in confusion. The man sprang, tiger-like, from his mattress on trestles. He seized his sewing shears, and with a single snip cut off Qasim’s ear.

Shrieking, the boy ran from the shop and collapsed in the alley, clutching the wound with both hands. Blood pooled in the grooves between the cobbles. The culprit stood half-naked at the threshold, weapon still in hand. He tried to justify what he had done, and suggesting in a jocular voice that since the boy could not hear commands, the loss of one ear was an inconsequential thing. But the crowd rose in fury against him.

“For shame!” said the Jewish weaver.

“Outrageous!” the cloth dyer roared.

Sheikh Mukhtar, the aged storyteller, went to the malefactor and spat in his bearded face: “Does not God say, Thou shalt not oppress the orphan?!”

“I never wanted him,” the man sulked. “I was told by the imam to take him in and teach him my trade. But he is too stupid to learn anything. I won’t feed or shelter him anymore.”

“Then I will,” Sheikh Mukhtar said.

The wife of the ophthalmologist ran to Qasim and ordered the young men to bear the boy on a sheet to her house. Though her husband specialized in ailments of the eye, he possessed bandages, medicine, and other apparatus with which he was able to stanch the bleeding. When a searing hot iron was applied to the wound, Qasim fainted dead away.

The ophthalmologist gave Sheikh Mukhtar salves, bandages, alcohol, and precise instructions as to what must be done to ensure the wound did not become infected.

Qasim awoke the next day. He lay supine on a rush mat his swathed head cradled in the lap of a boy who was only a few years older than he. This boy too was an orphan—a Nubian from Upper Egypt. He introduced himself as Ahmed. “But since we’re going to be brothers, you may call me Hammudi.”

The vaulted ceiling was constructed of a marble called verde antique. But the walls, which could not be seen due to the profusion of bookcases standing upright against them, were of undressed stone. Everywhere there were books. Some in teetering piles; others with cracked spines on wooden shelves. There were untidy heaps of them balanced on unsteady mounds of newspapers.

Qasim’s wary eyes took in his cluttered surroundings. Sheikh Mukhtar rose from a wicker stool, and told the boys that he was stepping out to procure food and a jar of honey for Qasim. For he had read long ago in a book of Prophetic Medicine that this was a remedy for many ailments of the body and mind.

When he was gone, Qasim pushed himself up into a sitting position. The pain had abated somewhat. He could still hear from the missing ear, but there was an echo now. Qasim listened patiently as Ahmed sketched out for him the nature of his new home, and the qualities of the kindly old man who had adopted him.

“This chamber is located deep in Khan el-Khalili, the covered market and Grand Bazaar of Cairo. It is near Bab Zuweila. But you will not have to worry about your former guardian finding you. The imam of Sultan al-Muayyad has ordered that the needleworker be expelled from Cairo.”

“Is this a house?” Qasim asked

“No. Sheikh Mukhtar’s family has owned the mulk of this chamber for over a century.”

“What’s a mulk?”

“I don’t know. But it means that when Sheikh Mukhtar dies, you and I will have to leave. He has no relatives to inherit it. And we are not of his blood.”

“Is it a shop?”

“It used to be. But not anymore. Now it’s where he lives—where we live. So it’s now a kind of house. Many of the books here are as old as the sheikh himself. And I have reason to suspect that some of them may have been written by the Pharaohs. Sheikh Mukhtar reads only Islamic works. . . Or should I say, he used to.”

“Used to?”

“His eyes have grown dim, and he can only read large print. He complains that he has become like the donkey in the Qur’an that carries bundles of books that it cannot read. . . Can you?”

“Can I what?”

“Read.”

Qasim lowered his eyes. “No.”

“That’s good. Neither can I. It would annoy me if my brother could do something I can’t.”

“You talk like someone who reads.”

“That is because I listen to the way readers talk. I even know how to say a few words in French and Anglaise.”

“If Sheikh Mukhtar prefers religious books, why are there so many books and magazines with pictures of airplanes and pretty ladies on them?”

“Because he’s a bookseller.”

“I thought you said this isn’t a shop.”

“It isn’t. It’s where we live. He sells the books at Soor al-Azbakeya. Actually, he doesn’t sell them. That’s my job. And now that you’re here, it will be your job too. Sheikh Mukhtar hates standing around in one place waiting for customers to come by. It’s why he no longer works the fence. He says that he willl have plenty of time to be immobile once he’s dead.”

“What does he do all day while you’re at the Soor selling books?”

“He wanders the streets of Old Cairo telling stories. He’s very good at it. He loves being around people. And they love him. But you and I will need to earn our keep. It is God’s will. So I will have to teach you how to recognize numbers, count money, and give change.”

“I already know how to do that. I can even read Indian and Arabic numbers—even when someone scribbles them on paper. Does that means I can read?”

Ahmed had never considered this. “Maybe.” He scratched his chin and changed the subject. “As you can see, our living space is tight. There are no windows. So when the door is shut, it gets dark and you will hear the jinn throwing papers around and knocking books off the shelves. There are two electric lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. But they only work at certain times of the day.”

“What certain times?”

“God alone knows. We have a flashlight, but it’s broken. So we have to use candles and oil lamps. But you must be very careful with these so that a fire doesn’t start. This is why we don’t cook in here. Oh, one more thing. You mustn’t relieve yourself inside. It will make the books stink and then no one will buy them. If you need to make water, do it against a wall outside. And if you need to make dirt, there’s an ash heap on Muski Street.”

Qasim was overwhelmed by vertigo and fatigue, and touched the bandage at his ear.

“You’re tired,” Ahmed said. “You must rest. Take this.” He handed Qasim a twist of hemp interwoven with cowries and faience beads.

“What is it?”

“My mother made it. Or so they say. It helps me sleep. And you need to sleep now. I will watch over you until Sheikh Mukhtar returns. And I will tell him not to wake my brother until sundown. It’s for the best.”

Continue to Part 2

“Rotkäppchen” was tale 26 in the 1812 edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (“Children’s and Household Tales”) of the Brothers Grimm, which follows Charles Perrault’s vesion “Le Petit Chaperon rouge” (Little Red Cap) in his 1697 anthology Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralités (“Stories and Tales of Bygone Days, with Morals”). Though Perrault’s version does not have a happy ending, it is not as dark as the Grimms’ version, for which there are two alternate endings. The following retelling is inspired by the first.

Little Red Cap

Once upon a time there was a little girl who was so adorable that everyone who met her fell immediately in love with her. But her grandmother loved her more than anyone else in the world and gave her a red felt cape with a pointy hood, which she wore so much that people began to call her Little Red Cap.

One day, her mother said: “Come here, Little Red Cap. Granny is ill. Take this basket to her. In it is a cake to restore her vigor and a bottle of wine to make her merry. Leave tomorrow morning. And when you are in the forest, be kind to whomsoever you meet. But do not stray from the straight path.”

At break of day Little Red Cap carried the basket into the misty forest. After some time she met a wolf who dressed like a man. He wore leather boots, a black coat, and a matching hat that made him dapper and sophisticated. Remembering what her mother told her, she treated the wolf kindly. “Good day, Mr. Wolf.”

“Good day, Little Red Cap. Where are you going?”

“To Granny’s house.”

“What are you carrying in the basket?”

“A cake and bottle of wine. Granny is ill. The cake is to restore her vigor. And the wine will make her merry until her cheeks are as red as my cap.”

“Where does your grandmother live?”

“I must follow the straight path until I come to a pair of storm-blasted oaks on the lefthand side. Between them runs a cobbled way that leads my Granny’s house.”

“Allow me to accompany you,” the wolf said.

They walked hand in hand for many hours. The wolf salivated whenever he glimpsed the girl out of the corner of his eyes. This will be a tasty morsel. But I want to eat her grandmother too. So I will need to cause a distraction. He snapped his paws as if they were fingers.

“Now I remember where your grandmother lives. If you cut through these trees, you will save a lot of time. And you will be able to pluck flowers along the way to put into your grandmother’s bonnet.”

“Thank you, Mr. Wolf,” said Little Red Cap. She stepped between the parting branches, but hesitated. When she looked over her shoulder, the wolf motioned her to keep going. She followed the untrodden way to a clearing where a daisy and rose grew side by side. She did not know which was prettier, so she plucked them both and continued on her way.

Meanwhile, the wolf ran on all fours to the cottage where Little Red Cap’s grandmother lived. He knocked on the door.

“Who’s there?” the venerable woman said.

It is well known that the wicked can adjust the pitch of their voice and say whatever one wants to hear. “I am your granddaughter. I knew you were feeling sick and lonely, so I came for a visit. Open the door, and I shall come in.”

“I’m too weak,” the woman said. “But the door is unlocked. Lift the latch and come inside.”

The wolf stormed inside and sprinted to the bed. He swallowed the old lady whole. As he licked his lips he adjusted nightcap. He climbed into the four-poster and unfastened the ropes holding back the canopy’s swags. Then he drew the coverlet to his chin, and waited.

When Little Red Cap arrived, the door stood open.

“Granny?” she inquired. But there was no answer.

The wind caused the dust on the floorboards to hiss and whirl about. The swags of the canopy flapped like a regimental flag. She entered the cottage and the sun’s pale rays fell on the figure propped up on the bolsters. Whatever illness Granny was suffering from had made her face look revolting and her features quite terrible.

“Granny, your ears are so big.”

“The sickness has made them swell. But I can hear you better now than I ever could before.”

“Why are your hands so large? And why do you have claws?”

“So that when I hug my granddaughter, she will not run away like a naughty little child.”

“Your mouth is huge. And your teeth are so sharp. Why is that?”

“Because my love for Little Red Cap is so deep that a mere hug is not enough. I shall devour her and make her part of me.”

The wolf sprang from the bed. And in the blink of an eye, Little Red Cap was nowhere to be seen. With his belly full, the wolf grew drowsy. He leapt on the bed and curled up on the bedsheets. And soon he was snoring.

A huntsman had spent his entire life searching for the wolf. But he had lost track of the creature when it stood up on its hind legs and began to talk like a man. Now he heard the wolf snoring but assumed it was the old lady in the cottage nearby. That sound must be the her death rattle. I will sit with her and bury her when she is dead.

When he reached the cottage, he slipped quietly through the open door. He saw the wolf—bloated from its feasting—coiled like a serpent on the bed. At last, he thought, I have found the author of the evils that plague our land. He aimed his rifle and was about to pull the trigger when something gave him pause.

He wondered if the woman was still alive in the belly of the beast. For there are many in this world who find themselves consumed by misfortunes, but whose spirit remains unbroken in the midst of their adversity.

He found in a sewing basket a pair of enchanted shears. Slowly he cut open the wolf’s belly. And inside, amid the gory entrails stood an angelic little girl wearing a cape and cap that was as red as the wolf’s blood.

He lifted her out.

“Thank you, Mr. Huntsman. I was frightened as I stood alone in utter darkness.”

He cautioned the girl to keep her voice down so the wolf did not wake up. Then he saw Little Red Cap’s grandmother stuck between the wolf’s tawny guts, flailing her arms in confusion. The huntsman removed her as well. And the old woman, panting and frail, expressed her gratitude.

The huntsman told Little Red Cap to go outside and fetch some stones. When she returned, he put these in the wolf’s stomach and sewed his belly up with Granny’s needles and threads.

The wolf woke with a start and ran outside the cottage. But the stones were so heavy that they dragged him to the earth. The stitches snapped apart, and the wolf’s tripes burst all over the grass. Now that the monster was dead, Little Red Cap and her grandmother hugged each other and rejoiced.

Granny ate the cake and her health was restored. And when she drank the wine, her cheeks became rosy and she grew quite merry. The huntsman skinned the wolf and sold its pelt to a priest in exchange for a purse of gold and a goodwill blessing.

When Little Red Cap returned home, she told her mother all that had happened. But the poor girl did not expect the tongue lashing she received in return: “If you had kept to the straight path as I told you in the first place, then none of this would have happened!”

2025 Year in Review

I won’t comment on the social, political, or economic events of 2025, which were certainly pivotal but will require another decade for me to process. I want to thank everyone who found time to read any of my stories, essays, or poems this year. My subscriber count tends to fluctuate like the Dow Jones Industrial Average. But I ended the year in the black. I’ve had so much fun on Substack, due entirely to the readers and writers I’ve had the privilege of interacting with (both on the platform and off). May your dreams come true in 2026. And if they do not, may the efforts you exert in achieving them bring you closer to your goals.

The following is a review of my more prominent posts from 2025. In April I began retelling and adapting some tales from the first edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales, hereafter KHM) of the Brothers Grimm. Most were well known; a few were obscure. It was eye-opening reading these in the original German, some of which my Moravian grandmother had told me long ago in a bowdlerized or abbreviated version. I set this project aside in July due to an impending move from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. But I have decided to highlight them first and group them together below.

“The Juniper Tree” is probably the most well-known Grimms’ fairy tale that hardly anyone knows anything about, probably due to its dark themes: decapitation, cannibalism, infanticide, etc. I kept my retelling faithful to the KHM version, but changed the setting to Cologne in the Renaissance period with echoes of local Catholic lore, such as the legend of Saint Ursula and her martyred sisters.

“The Murder Castle” was removed from later editions of the KHM, not because of its brutality, but due to its similarity to the more popular Bluebeard. My version is set in Medieval Serbia.

“The Singing Bone” is a fantasy about a giant boar plaguing a kingdom and the two brothers sent to defeat it. But it is also a ghost story.

“Little Snow White” is usually sanitized in modern retellings. In the original, Little Snow White is only seven years old, which means she is the same height as the seven dwarfs who shelter her. I chose to tell this story in the form of a magical realism tale set in a fairy-tale land reminiscent of nineteenth-century Bavaria.

“The Moon” is not from the original KHM, but from the final edition published in the Grimms’ lifetime. It is a comical tall-tale about the origin of the moon.

“The Twelve Brothers” is another story sometimes removed from modern editions of the KHM due to its subject matter. It is about a homicidal father who prepares to bury his twelve sons alive if prophecy comes true (which of course it does). And it ends with a noble prince who is persuaded by his mother to burn his bride at the stake on suspicion of infidelity. This version is set in Byzantine Dalmatia.

“Little Ash Dove” is the Grimms’ adaptation of “Cinderella.” The doves and ashes in the kitchen hearth are so inextricably part of the story in the German version that I propose an alternate reading of the name Aschenputtel, using the Grimms’ other monumental work, a Dictionary of the German Language, as the source for my argument. In their version of the tale there is no fairy godmother; the heroine’s father is as vile as her stepmother; and the stepsisters come to a grisly end.

“The Hotel Rapunzel” is a gothic tale set in 1980s East Germany in which a chambermaid at a peeling dump in Thuringia tells the story of Rapunzel to a depressed little girl who’s been forced to remain in her room as her parents explore Wartburg Castle in Eisenach.

“Rumpelstiltskin” is a retelling of the story of the demonic creature, “Crumpled Little Stilts,” who can only be defeated by those who know his true name. This retelling follows the original closely, though I’ve provided a famous translation of the famous poem at the center of it.

“Little Briar Rose” is much shorter and less interesting in the KHM version than its French original, “Sleeping Beauty.” Because of this, I wrote it as a tale of magical realism that blends aspects of Weimar cinema with social and cultural issues current in 1920s Berlin.

I only wrote two original poems this year: “The Fiddler’s Dream” inspired by the English nursery rhyme “Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross” and “Christmas Eve in Boston.”

While preoccupied with Grimms’ fairy tales, I wrote a critical essay on Austrian literature called “Flash Fiction was All the Rage Among Writers of the Vienna Secession.” In November I wrote a somewhat related piece called “The Game of Consequences: How the Online Mania for Writing Flash Fiction in Response to Prompts is Destroying Literary Authenticity.”

Some other short stories I wrote this year included:

• “Marcian the Stylite” (a ghost story set in the early Byzantine period)

• “Halsey’s Typhoon” (a WWII story set in the South Pacific)

• “The Watchers” (a sci-fi story with fairy-tale elements)

I “unpublished” a few stories, including a retelling of Aladdin and a magical realism tale set in twentieth-century Egypt called “The Invisible Library of Kafr Musa” because they were turning into novellas. I separately concluded Book II of my horror trilogy, The Werewolf of Mariahilf am Inn, and started Book III, which I hope to have done by the end of the year.

Finally, there were two other literary essays I posted:

“The Stump of a Cigar by Joseph S. Cotter” was an analysis of an early twentieth-century African-American story of magical realism

“Impeding the March: How Prioritizing Visual Description over Storytelling Mars Otherwise Exceptional Writing”

Christmas Eve in Boston

A raddled old man in a ratty red suit
Sighed between Ho-hos and rang a brass bell, 
In front of the drugstore on Charles and Fruit.
And Santa’s sciatica made him say “Hell.”

Then out of the Silent and O Holy Night
Mid a crackle of speakers that cold Christmas Eve,
He heard a harsh whisper that set him afright.
And he felt mighty queasy and wanted to leave.

He turned to his left where he saw a young boy,
Who held in both hands a red Santa sack.
But in the big bag there was only one toy,
Which Santa accepted, then handed it back.
 
“I made that pine horse for my little son Brad,
Who died in his crib on a bleak Christmas Day.”
“His spirit lives on,” said the rosy-cheeked lad.
“And he’s come for his father to take him away.”

And onto the stretcher the old man was laid;
And into the nearby hospital was sped.
And the medic was laughing from overtime paid,
As he pried the pine horse from the hand of the dead. 

Book III, Chapter 4: The Return

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Hermann recoiled two paces back before falling sidelong onto the floor of the ring. There was a reverberative crash. The bell rang. He spat blood onto the fresh sailcloth, which he and the other employees of the prizefighting club had stretched over the planks that morning. The referee hoisted the arm of the blond Russian and proclaimed him victor. The man’s shipmates cheered: “Ura! Ura! Ura!”

The florid grin on the winner’s childlike face caused the Russians to burst into laughter. The general mirth spread through the pub. More drinks were called for. The champion bent at the waist to ease himself through the ropes, where a bearded man in a flat-topped beskozyrka helped him into his shirt, because the man was incapable of dressing himself.

Hermann rose with difficulty. A stabbing pain caused him to wince and he turned to hide his face from the crowd. The house jeered, thinking him a sore loser. But he never cared about the outcome. Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost. That was the nature of the game. But this was humiliating.

It felt almost like a setup. He loosened the wrist-wraps and pulled off the boxhandschuhe—“mufflers” (as the Irishwoman Nora who ran the joint called the felt-lined gloves). The knockout punch opened a gash under his left eye that had almost healed. Ada will kill me, if I get another black eye. He stepped between the ropes and leapt onto the sawdust floor. Emmanuel did not flinch.

The West African was gazing up at a chalkboard mounted to a joist high overhead. The gruesome iron hooks dangling from hempen ropes behind the board dated to when the pub was a warehouse. The scorekeeper, a teenager in galluses, had both feet planted on the rung of a ladder with one arm flung over a strut. With the other he wiped the board clean. Emmanuel calculated how much he had lost.

Hermann yanked the towel off the stool by the corner post and wiped the blood and sweat from his face. His shirt hung on a hook in the kitchen near the stairs leading down to his room in the cellar. He planned to bathe in a trough out back before putting his shirt on, even though it was late October and had been raining outside most of the day.

The referee, who doubled as the chief of police of Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, was so crooked that he could not look a man straight in the eye. But no matter how much laudanum Emmanuel supplied the man under the table, not even he could have fixed this fight.

Nora, who kept the gamblers’ bets behind the bar, obviously thought Emmanuel’s loss amusing. Her frown was so intense it had pulled her lips apart (the closest she ever came to a smile).

“That wasn’t a fair fight,” Hermann mumbled. “That guy was much bigger than me. And at least half my age.”

“He didn’t look so imposing in the parka,” Emmanuel lied. He had known the moment he laid eyes on the Russian that the man was a powerhouse. But the way he had staggered inside out of the midday rain, combined with his glassy stare and slurred speech, made Emmanuel assume he was helpless drunk. A man could not pretend to have eyes so bleary and vacant. He was obviously not a shark.

One of the Russians from Arkhangelsk spoke German fluently. Emmanuel proposed a fight between the swaying newcomer and the house’s middleweight. The Russians accepted on their shipmate’s behalf. Emmanuel thought Hermann would take the man out in a round or two. Wagers were placed.

But it was only when the man stripped down and stepped into the ring that Emmanuel had realized his mistake. The unsteady gait, the blank stare, the labored speech. The man was not drunk. He was mentally defective, but had enough of a mind to know what his comrades wanted him to do: give the German in the ring a sound drubbing.

Emmanuel smirked and turned to Hermann as if noticing him for the first time. He reached into his coat and handed a key to Hermann. “I wish I hadn’t bet so much on you.”

“I’m glad my trainer thinks so highly of me.”

Hermann bent down and retrieved a tiny chest from under the stool’s legs. This was where he stored three necklaces while fighting. He always kept them within eyeshot, even taking them with him into public showers. He put the box on the stool and unlocked it. When he opened it, he squinted and his jaws went rigid. He looked up at Emmanuel, eyes flaring. “Don’t mock me!”

“What’s wrong?”

Immediately, Hermann knew Emmanuel could not have anything to do with this. The man could be a prankster, yes. But he had a deep respect for the tokens of faith, endearment, and remembrance that others cherished in their heart or wore on their sleeve. This made him intolerant of his own employees who did not treat others with respect, regardless of religion, creed or color. This made his alliance with “Nora of the Simmering Hatreds and Perpetual Resentments” all the more peculiar.

“Did you give the key to someone?” Hermann scanned the bar as he spoke. His heart was pounding.

“Hermann, you know I would never do that.”

An outburst of guffaws as the Russians tried to persuade their hero to drink a pint of beer. But the man puckered his face when he tasted it and batted the stein away, sobbing.

“Where’s the other necklace!” Hermann let the crucifix and image of Saint Florian fall back into the box. He shut it and, in his distraction, handed to Emmanuel.

“I don’t understand what you’re going on about?”

The Austrian man could not respond. He elbowed his way through the crowd, searching the floor, thinking he might find an impression of the culprit’s footprints in the sawdust. But the only footprints he found were his and Emmanuel’s on the far and unfrequented side of the ring.

In a white heat, he seized the handle of one of the building’s massive doors, pulling it open on its castors. Shirtless, he plunged into the damp cold of the early afternoon. It was no longer raining. The sky over Hamburg was surprisingly bright, though fulvous behind the haze of soot billowing out of the chimneys. He blinked to adjust his eyes to the panorama, and spun on his heels in dizzy madness.

The seagulls’ cries mingled with the ribald shrieks of the painted whores, and the rouged men in wigs and pinafores whom Nora referred to as “mollies.” The rancid procuress herself yielded the till to her assistant barkeep and followed Hermann into the street. She was perplexed, and turned questioningly to Emmanuel who joined her beneath the front-door awning.

“He’s fine,” he assured her in English, sucking his teeth as he said it.

“Then why’s he raving like the idiot who knocked him out?”

Hermann could hear them, though they were far away. The air he breathed was wet with blood and rain; and he wondered if he was dying. Maybe that knockout punch killed me. The thought momentarily relived him. It meant his tribulation was over and whatever punishment awaited him on the other side was now at hand. But when he looked over his shoulder and saw inside the pub that his body was not stretched out dead in the ring, he knew he was still alive.

What’s happening? Where is the werewolf medallion?

The wounds he had sustained in the fight still ached—more than any physical blow he had sustained since his flight from the workhouse in Cronenberg. The medallion’s power to numb all agony, both mental and physical (as the morphine had numbed it long ago), was ebbing away. He felt it.

He stared at Nora and Emmanuel, as if he did not recognize them, standing comically together under the awning where a clutch of patrons were smoking. Then he heard a horrid squealing, the sound of pigs at slaughter. It invaded his mind and went to the marrow of his bone. He clapped his hands to his ears, as the legend of the haunted building that Nora had purchased and converted into a brothel came back to him.

The building, now known as the Wolf’s Den, stood adjacent to the boxing house. He lifted his gaze to its upper story, from which he had heard the cries. And the moment he did this, the noise stopped. Standing on the balcony that overhung the entrance to the whorehouse was a man in a long-coat wearing a grotesque mask, which was supposed to resemble the face of a wolf. But to Hermann’s mind it resembled the face of one of the Gadarene swine.

Madam Nora had presumably hired this actor to entice customers and lure them inside. When the man saw Hermann standing in the middle of the street, he cocked his head, waved, and beckoned to him.

“Hermann!” It was Nora’s son, Michael. “What’s wrong with you, man? You’re half naked and causing a scene.” He spoke in English, but switched to the little German he knew. “Was ist los?”

Hermann stared incredulously at him. He had understood every word of Michael’s Hibernian brogue. He thought of the story Benedikt had told him of how the werewolf medallion had endowed the wicked Jesuit, Frater Melchior of Mariahilf am Inn, with an ability to comprehend other languages without necessarily enabling him to speak them.

“My God,” Michael said. “When that Russian cold-cocked you, did he do a rabbit punch?”

“I don’t think so,” Hermann replied in German, massaging the base of his skull where he felt a stinging pain.

Michael gently touched the skin between Hermann’s shoulder blades. “You’ve got a scar on your back. It’s bleeding. And it looks for all the world like the face of a wolf.”

It was then that he realized was happening. Today was All Saints’ Eve, 31 October 1882—twelve years to the day that the werewolf was “reborn” from the womb of his murdered wife, Henrietta.

At the Magadalen asylum of the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, located on the outskirts of Cologne, Sister Rosemarie fell to her knees in the herbal garden the instant that this revelation came to Hermann. In a fit of crippling agony she clenched the stalks of hellebore she had been tending. A dose of the medicine was prescribed to her daily to treat her physical melancholy as Christ the Apothecary salved her spiritual grief.

Sister Rosemarie began to weep, as the memory of that day, twelve years ago, returned to her. At the time, she went by the name of Eva. In her youth she had been blessed with an inner light, which shed its cold glare on the darkest recesses of the unseen world. But the light was forever quenched on All Saints’ Even 1870, when the demon slew her husband and ravished her behind the slime pits of the Cronenberg Tar and Creosote factory.

A colleague paused in her work, drawing the handle of the mattock close to her chest. “Sister Rosemarie, what ails you?”

Rosemarie stood up but made no reploy. Touching her womb, she hurried back to the convent door leading to the lavatory, grateful the gray withered grass beneath the gray misty sky would obscure the blood beneath her cassock trickling down her inner thighs.

On a wind-whipped bluff in the center of the Mariahilf Valley deep in the Austrian Tyrol, the massive bell of the Chapel of Our Lady of Mercy intoned in thickening twilight. This in itself was unusual, since there had no bell had been in the tower for centuries.

In the gloomy Romanesque structure, a handsome man clad in habit of Dominican monk stood facing the east wall. Beneath his hood, the man’s oily locks framed chiseled features, which, in the candlelight, bore a striking resemblance to those of Hermann’s in his youth.

The man’s dead eyes took in the cracked wall, which was once, long ago, adorned with a Baroque masterpiece. Though it was no longer visible, smelled the paint and saw with his inner eye the image of Mary covering the saints and apostles beneath her ample cloak. It was he who had painted it. But that was another incarnation. The man had died many times, though he had never truly lived.

He was known by many names—some secret. Ninurta was the first, when he drank the blood of his servants in Lagash. From Euphrates he was brought to witch-haunted Thessaly, where he was renamed Apollo Lycegenes (“Apollo the Wolf-Born”). The Romans carried his image into the forests of Noricum and Raetia, where he was worshipped among the legionnaires as another Mithra.

Early in the last century he took on a new name: Melchior, which is to say “My Lord is the Light.” Into his insubstantial being he absorbed and entirely consumed the soul of his bride, an unfortunate maiden of the Waldenses called Élise, Ilse, Elisabeth (“My God is an Oath”).

As his memory of these things grew ever more distinct, the apparition of that false Franciscan friar, Fr. Matteo di Pàdova, whom he had seduced (as a woman does a man), rose up before him. Before the werewolf devoured him, Fr. Matteo, in his final years, returned to the Mariahilf Valley to watch the cannibal die.

On the night the executioner placed the rope around his neck and kicked the wood block out from under his feet, the demon swayed beneath the short length of rope. He smiled as he contemplated in the darkness the little boy, Hermann son of Moritz. As the last spark of awareness slowly slipped away, the monster caught sight of Fr. Matteo, standing next to young apprentice Benedikt.

The old man’s words, though they had been spoken in a whisper which did not rise above the sound of the fluttering torches that had environed the valley round, were as clear to those supernatural ears as if he had spoken them himself.

As the man sniffed the air of the chapel and smelled the blood of two victims approaching, Matteo’s words seemed more apt now than they had at the time: “And so it begins again. . .”

Continue to Chapter 5

Book III, Chapter 3: The Magician’s Cabinet

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“What do you mean it’s gone?” Professor Wilhelm Hertz asked his teenage manservant, Armin.

The tousle-headed boy answered with a shrug. “I suppose I mean it’s not here.”

The two regarded each other with suspicion. They stood in Hertz’s library overlooking the Isar in Munich’s posh Bogenhausen neighborhood. It was almost noon, but the October sky was as leaden as it had been at dawn.

Hertz was furious. “Why would anyone steal a skull?”

“Exactly what I says to myself,” Armin replied in a heated voice, pointing to the felt-lined box on the desk where the relic was kept. “Exactly,” he repeated, “what I says to myself when I come in here not more than five minutes ago to clean up the library. I lift the lid of the box. And what do I find, Herr Professor? Air! Like when the magician shoves the lady in the cabinet, slams the door, says his aberkadabers and hokers-pokers, throws it open — and preston! She ain’t there no more.”

Hertz was only half listening to the bizarre analogy as he rummaged through the desk drawers to ensure his notes and research materials had not been disturbed. To his relief the battered journal lay unmolested in the pedestal drawer.

“They got false doors, them magic cabinets,” Armin observed. “My dad built one — on commission.” (He emphasized the prepositional phrase to demonstrate the breadth of his vocabulary.) A potential solution came to mind and he snapped his fingers. “Herr Professor, do you think the Missus come in here last night, found the skull; and because ladies are disgusted by such things, threw it out?”

Hertz slammed the drawer shut. “Ladies are not allowed in the library!” The youth stroked a blackhead on his earlobe (fast swelling into a pimple). “Armin, I advise you not to speculate on my wife’s behavior or motivations. It could lead to your dismissal. Besides, Katharina has a morbid interest in the grotesque and macabre.”

“Is that why she married you?”

“Willi!” The stern voice of Frau Katharina Cubasch-Hertz startled the pair into collusive silence.

After a pause the Professor replied. “Yes, Käthe?”

“Come down to the kitchen. We have a . . . situation.” She spoke German impeccably but with a Slavic accent.

Hertz gestured for Armin to follow, hoping that, if he was to be upbraided, the boy’s presence would mitigate his wife’s furor.

In the kitchen they were confronted by an allegory of the Three Ages of Man in the form of womanhood. Next to the matron of the house stood the prepubescent scullery maid, Leonie, and the white-haired Frisian housekeeper, Jitske.

“Hi, Armin,” Leonie said.

Armin rolled his eyes. He was the middle child, wedged between four sisters. He knew all about how girls sweet-talked boys with the expectation that boys would sweet-talk them back. But he had no time for such frivolity. He was a growed-up man now — a man with an occupation (a word Leonie probably didn’t know).

Katharina wore a black silk gown clasped at the throat with an amber brooch, a gift from an aunt in Odessa. “Frau Jitske, will you explain to my husband what you heard?”

The elderly woman went to a crack in the wall that was wide at the base. “For several weeks now, Leonie and I have heard something scuttling about in that hole.”

“A mouse,” the Professor said. “I have arsenic upstairs. We’ll poison it. Or I can send Armin out to buy a spring trap.”

“Willi,” Katharina interjected. Her sharp features wavered between a smile and a sneer. “There’s more to it than that.”

“Last night,” Jitske continued, “we heard a voice coming from the hole.”

“Is this true?” Hertz turned to Leonie, who was blushing because Armin was suppressing a snort.

“It might’ve been the dishes clattering,” the girl said.

“Liar!” Jitske fumed. “Don’t play ‘the old gal’s going senile’ with me. You heard it too.”

“Please Jitske,” Professor Hertz said, cuffing Armin in the ear.

“Herr Professor, I’ve been in your employ for over twenty years. And though I am blind in one eye, my other senses are as sharp as that knife on the cutting board. I know what I heard. It was a man’s voice—”

“It sounded like a woman’s to me.” Leonie covered her mouth, realizing too late she had inadvertently made an admission.

Armin’s face grew serious. He glanced over his shoulder at the staircase in the front hall. He wondered if there were a connection between the voice behind the wall and the skull that had been taken from the library. Perhaps there were secret passages in this house, like in Schiller’s novella, “Der Geisterseher” (The Ghost-Seer), a condensed version of which he had read in a serial magazine full of pictures.

“What did the voice say?” the Professor asked.

The ancient Frisian lowered her head, ashamed. “It said: I too have only one eye.”

“That’s it?” Armin blurted out, underwhelmed.

But the Professor went pale.

“What is it, Willi?” Katharina arched one brow.

“Nothing. It’s just — this is not the only house on the block. It was probably a neighbor summoning the servant through a speaking tube.”

Leonie and Jitske looked at each other, unconvinced. Armin scratched his head, trying to figure out how a neighbor fifty feet away could ventriloquize his voice through the intramural gaps and partitions between the residences in such a way so as to project it from the hole in the kitchen wall. But a way of capitalizing on the Professor’s ignorance was maturing in the lad’s mind.

“My dad can fix this. He’ll knock down this section of the wall, kill whatever’s behind it, and cover it up again before you can say Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft.”

“Is your father a carpenter?” Professor Hertz asked.

“He’s whatever you pay him to be.”

Hertz agreed to the proposal and told Armin that, if his father’s scheduled permitted, he would like to have it done tomorrow. Armin assured him this was not a problem and accepted a quantity of money for materials and a downpayment with a smile.

Before leaving for the day, the lad spent half an hour wandering from room to room upstairs, rapping on the wainscot and fiddling with the sconces until Hertz ordered him to stop, because Jitske had complained that the boy was mocking her and Leonie by making artificially spooky noises.

That night, Hertz stood in his library at the fireplace mantel. He had nearly finished a bottle of brandy. A low flame crackled in the grate. The furniture cast geometric shadows about the room. The boards above him creaked as Käthe prepared for bed. The two of them slept in separate chambers due to what his wife characterized as “the unpleasant nocturnal noises your body produces when you sleep.”

Hertz went to the broad oak desk and opened the lid of the felt-lined box. He set the empty snifter inside. Leere in der Leere (a void within a void). He was neither drunk nor sober. He was in that drowsy state where the mind sees parallels between unrelated abstractions and conjures up preposterous philosophies to justify them.

What on earth could have happened to the skull? It was all so puzzling.

On the last day of the excavation in the Mariahilf Valley, the two bumbling officials from Vienna discovered a skeleton in shallow pit near the river Inn. The crew had abandoned the pit days before. It was not the scratches over the skull’s right orbital that had intrigued Hertz. Many of the bones unearthed at the site had shown such signs. But this skull, as well as the skeleton it had supposedly been attached to, had not been burned.

In the privacy of his tent, Hertz examined the skull, turning it over in his hands. Something inside glinted in the candlelight. He lowered the skull (dome-wise) over the flame and peered into the sockets like binoculars. On the occipital bone, he espied an inscription in Latin uncials, the letters of which were inlaid with what appeared to be silver. It read as follows:

FRESSACERDOTISD

Before him on the blotter lay scraps of paper on which he had jotted down a few ideas. Was it a cypher? An anagram? The first few letters might have been intended to suggest the German verb fressen (to eat), perhaps in the command form (Fress), but from ancient times before the rules of orthography had not yet been fixed in grammars. Acer meant “sharp” in Latin. But that would have left the word erdotis, which meant nothing.

The problem was that these solutions required an imaginative leap. And as Father Dreschler, the logic-chopping priest from Brixen who had been sent to monitor the excavation, had been fond of saying (paraphrasing William of Ockham): The most rational explanation is the simplest.

Hertz reached for a pencil, crossed out the F and D, drew a dagger between the adjacent S’s, and cast the pencil aside:

RES · SACERDOTIS

Hertz translated the Latin phrase aloud in order to dispel the chill slowly creeping up his spine. “Property of a priest.” But what did the F and D stand for? Surely not ‘Frater Dreschler.

What if it had all been a hoax? What if a member of the excavation stole the skull from Father Dreschler’s tent and put it in the abandoned pit? After all, Hertz had never bothered to investigate whether there had in fact been a skeleton attached to it. But that seemed wildly absurd. Father Dreschler was hardly the type to carry a skull around with him, a la manera Saint Francis of Assisi, to use as a memento mori and aid to meditation.

“Do priests even do that anymore?” Hertz’s voice was slurred. He slammed the box lid shut (brandy snifter inside). “It still doesn’t explain what happened to the skull. How could it have simply wandered off?”

The obvious suspect was Armin, who certainly bore the taint of cupidity, so typical of his class. But the boy was not a thief. Even if he had known of the potentially precious inlay inside the skull, there were far much more valuable objects lying about the house that he could easily made off with if wanted to. No, no. Armin was a rogue, but an honest one.

Hertz stood up from the desk to stretch. He paced the library, lingering at the bust of Ovid. “I used to be a decent poet before I learned the rules of poetics. Now I’m a pedant, a scholar of German folklore. I put on airs in the lecture hall, pretending to approach the matter like a scientist. But I haven’t a shred scientific knowledge.”

To his embarrassment, he had forgotten to bring on the excavation a qualified anthropologist or archaeologist. The students who had accompanied him (bright through they were) were romantics and aesthetes of the Paterian variety. It had been a Hungarian laborers (a quondam shepherd raised in the Carpathians), who had confirmed that the bones they had amassed bore traces of having been gnawed upon by wolves. This prompted Father Dreschler to observe that wolves were not indigenous to the Tyrol. Nor did this explain the disposition of the bodies. Why had some buried? Why had all been burned?

What none of the men of either the German or Austrian contingent could possibly have known was that Professor Hertz had been withholding a vital piece of intelligence — information that would have fixed the tragedy at a specific point on a historical timeline and thrown off the tattered veils of legend in which it had been enshrouded.

He went to the credenza and pulled opened the glass front. Inside was a folio containing the unpublished testimony of the nephew of the late Countess von Krems, a testimony the man, now in his sixties, had enjoined Hertz never to publish so long as he was alive. Hertz removed the folio and leafed through its contents.

In 1850 the man had taken part in an Austrian military expedition that had been organized to put a stop to smugglers using the Mariahilf Valley as a detour to bypass the imperial toll roads that led to the Brenner Pass. But what they found shocked them all. Every man, woman, and child of the village of Mariahilf am Inn had been massacred, their bodies mauled by wild animals. A cowherd and his family, living close by, alleged the assailant was a demon, a lycanthrope.

To prevent a scandal, the officials in charge ordered the family quietly put to death and their bodies mixed with those of the villagers. Some were left in situ, while others were given a Christian burial. For not all the soldiers’ hearts were made of stone. They put to the torch every building in the valley, leaving untouched only the chapel of Our Lady of Mercy far away on the hill.

The official report that would be filed in Vienna would claim that the villagers had been surprised and massacred by Italian banditti, who had caused these brutalities as a warning to the Habsburg Emperor.

The reason that Hertz had removed the folio from the credenza was so that he examine again a photograph that he kept inside it — a photograph of the man who had visited him in 1867, carrying with him a copy of Hertz’s monograph, Der Werwolf.

The man’s name, as the Professor would later discover, was Hermann Tischler, son of Moritz, born in the Austrian Tyrol in 1838. Hertz had allowed the man to read over this account of the destruction of Mariahilf am Inn. Having completed it, Hermann fell into a swoon and departed shortly thereafter.

There was a thunderous crash behind Professor Hertz. He clutched his heart, fearing whatever had been in the wall had burst out of it and was about to drag him off to Hell. He turned and faced the dark corner of the room, and breathed more easily when he saw what caused the ruckus. A stack of books had slid off the table which stood against the wall. The volumes lay in a disordered heap on the Axminster rug.

Hertz closed the credenza and crossed the room to the table. He knelt to gather up the books. Jitske’s tale had unnerved him due to a horrid detail he recalled from the journal he had been transcribing, composed by Father Reuss, the parish priest of Mariahilf am Inn. The journal, which had been discovered during the excavation, summarizes the events of the summer of 1838.

An imposter claiming to be the Baron Eckhart von Krems arrived in Mariahilf claiming to have been sent by Emperor Ferdinand to serve as imperial toll-master, since the former toll-master had died three years prior and the sinecure had been vacant ever since. The stranger presented to the village aldermen the sealed diplomas and letters patent confirming his commission. He set up residence in the toll house on the outskirts of town. No one questioned the validity of his claim or the legitimacy of his rank.

But ten years later, he would stand accused of cannibalism would admit to having eaten the real Baron Eckart von Krems, who had been heading to the Tyrol to fulfill his commission. The monster slaughtered the nobleman’s retainers and assumed his identity. He kept aloof from the village, shutting himself up in the toll house on the north bank of the river Inn, and showing himself only on religious occasions, or when the execution of his duties required him to step outside into the yard.

A letter pouch hung outside the toll-house door. Each morning could be found bundles of letters and other correspondence, which the aldermen Mariahilf ensured were delivered as the Baron instructed or were open and read in the village diet as required.

The authorities in Vienna tolerated the man’s eccentricities, due to the efficiency with which he administered the regional affairs and augmented the imperial coffers. The Hofburg was reluctant to tamper with what functioned so smoothly. For as the saying goes: Schuster, bleib bei deinem Leisten, which is to say “Cobbler, keep doing what you do so well.”

Within weeks of his arrival rumors spread that Baron Eckhart von Krem was wooing a young girl of Mariahilf by name of Ilse, who was not only married but soon to have a child. Her husband, Moritz, urged Father Dreschler to say something to those who would slander his wife’s reputation and, by extension his own. Moritz swore that Ilse worked as a charwoman for the Baron, who treated her honorably and paid her well.

The following Sunday, Father Reuss quoted Leviticus in the course of his sermon: “Thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people: neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy neighbor.” As he spoke, his stern visage fell on the men and women of Mariahilf whom he knew to be tongue-waggers.

It was around this time that the Baron presented Ilse with a strange token, an electrum medallion depicting the face of a wolf. Moritz was pleased with the gift, believing that it would afford them the means to leave Austria and begin a new life abroad. But Ilse’s bearing changed on the day she received the gift. She became stiff-necked and haughty, and her pupils darkened.

Father Reuss confided to the journal that he was of the opinion that Ilse, in accepting this gift, had not only lost her way, but had succumbed to those lusts Canon Law teaches are the inheritance of the daughters of Eve.

Hertz picked up from the rug a seventeenth-century edition of the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches). It lay open to a page with a woodcut depicting a travesty of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary. The Devil, in role of Gabriel, wears the guise of a wolf. He addresses a woman in scarlet: “Rejoice, for thou shalt shalt bear my cubs; and they shall be called Emmanu-Moloch, for Moloch is with us.”

The birth of Ilse’s child, as described in the journal, is harrowing. Amid the howling of wolves, Ilse was said to have wandered in a trance into the valley. She climbed the grassy eminence on which stood the ruins of the chapel of Our Lady of Mercy. At the time-worn altar, she brought forth a male child. But the child was born still.

The gray corpse was carried by the grieving father down into the village and into his cottage, where he laid it in the crib that he had built to receive a son whom he had fervently prayed God to bestow upon him. Meanwhile, the villagers bore the unconscious mother into the cottage and placed her in the conjugal bed, so that Moritz could comfort his wife through the night.

It is at this point that the tempo of the narrative accelerates, because Father Reuss has switched to a dramatic present tense.

Next morning, Moritz steps out of the cottage, jubilant, holding over his head a breathing child. “By the grace of God,” he says, “my son is alive!” In amazement, I baptize the child. But I regret these actions even as I perform them, for I am certain the thing I have been asked to bless is undead, and, contrary to the father’s exhortation, shall forever be shut our from God’s grace.

Ilse vanishes within days. Again the neighbors gossip. Again, they conclude she has flown to the arms of her lover the Baron. But there is no evidence to support this; and Moritz, without explanation, declares to the aldermen one day that he believes Ilse is no longer among the living. Some whisper that she has committed the sin of self-murder and hurled herself from a mountain ledge.

Ilse’s sister Magda, a new mother herself, is called upon to act as wet-nurse to the child, who now bears the name Hermann. One day, Moritz returns to the cottage. He finds Magda in a state of horror, gibbering and pointing to the crib. A voice is heard coming from within, repeating the name “Moritz.”

Tremblingly, the father draws near. When he looks down into the crib , he beholds a one-eyed mangey cat coiled like an adder round the swaddled babe. The creature’s mouth is broken, and “Moritz” is the closest sound to a meow that the creature can make. It is my belief that this was not a cat, but a famulus, which is to say the familiar spirit of a witch.

Moritz seizes the cat, carries it from the cottage, and, with his hunting knife, guts it in full view of the affrighted citizens of the village. Magda takes up a position on the steps of the Mariahilf Church, points to Moritz, and denounces him with these words: “In such a way was my sister slain!” No one believes that the carpenter Moritz could be capable of such an act.

Thus the journal ends, ten years before the false Baron is exposed and hanged in the valley and enters into legend as the Werewolf of Mariahilf am Inn.

Hertz had picked up all the books from the floor and stacked them again on the table. He heard a scraping sound, and assumed it was the crinkling of loose sheaves on the table scraping against the wall. But as he turned to go back to the desk, he heard the sound again. And this time it was accompanied by a low, muffled feline growl. The hairs at the back of his neck rose, and his arms broke out in gooseflesh. He stopped and listened. There was no recurrence of the noise.

“It’s the damn brandy,” he said in a barely audible voice. “That and these dark associations and images that Jitske’s story, combined with the narrative of Father Reuss, have stirred up in my mind.”

Perhaps this solved the mystery in the kitchen. A cat must have found its way inside and was living between the walls. A cat’s growl could be mistaken for human speech. He foolishly repeated the phrase “I too have only one eye” in a voice that he imagined a cat might use; but no matter how taut he made his vocal cords, the result was unconvincing. He felt foolish.

He went to the fireplace and sat down in the wing-back chair. He was still shaking. He grabbed the iron, poked the log, and stared for many hours into the fire. When he finally drifted off to sleep, he dreamed a man — or was it a woman? — was standing beside him, whispering into his ear: “I too have only one eye. And in the socket where the other once was, I have placed an orb of chewed-up glass.”

“Willi!” Hertz jolted awake. Katharina stood at the threshold of the study, her hand on the door knob. “Have you been in here all night?”

He blinked in the sunlight. “I suppose I have.”

She scowled. “It’s almost ten in the morning. Armin and his father have opened up the wall.”

Jitske and Leonie were already in the kitchen when the master and mistress of the house entered. A section of the wall had been torn down, and Hertz wondered how he could possibly have slept through the demolition.

Armin dropped the hammer and wiped his brow, as the dust settled.

“Do you see any pests inside?” Katharina inquired.

“There’s something hanging from a crossbeam,” Armin’s father said, shaking cobwebs from a large, furry object dangling between the vertical studs.

Leonie screamed and ran from the room.

Katharina grimaced but did not flee. “What is it?”

Armin answered matter-of-factly. “It’s a dead, dried-up cat. One of the builders must’ve hung it up here behind the wall.”

“It’s well preserved,“ Armin’s father replied. “Like it’s been stuffed. You can tell it only had one eye when alive.”

The color drained from Jitske’s face. She too left the kitchen, wringing her hands and calling after Leonie.

“This is wonderful,” Katharina said. “Oh Willi, it means our house is truly haunted. I can’t wait to tell our friends.”

When she was gone, Armin’s father cut the twine wrapped around the neck of the carcass and removed it. There was nothing else behind the wall, no scat or evidence of vermin. As Armin had vowed to the Professor, his father was able to patch up the wall by mid-afternoon.

The next day, Armin entered the breakfast room and went directly to the Professor, who was seated across from Katharina, eating a boiled egg. The boy whispered something into his ear and Hertz stood up in alarm. He threw his napkin on the table and said, “Forgive me, my love. I shall return momentarily.”

The breakfast room was located on the same floor as the library. Neither Armin nor Hertz spoke a word until they were inside and the door had been shut.

“I come in here not more than five minutes ago to clean up after you, Herr Professor. And I find that bottle of brandy — half empty. And because I’m solicitous for your health, I take a swig and confirm it’s indeed gone bad and is well-nigh a poison. As I put the bottle down, I notice that you have shut the lid of the box the skull was in. So I open it. And what do I find, Herr Professor?” He gestured to the box.

Professor Hertz lifted the skull out of the felt-lined box. The empty brandy snifter had been crushed and compacted into a glassy orb wedged into the skull’s right socket, so that it looked like a glaucous eye.

Armin whistled in awe. “I tell you, Herr Professor, it’s like the magician, when he slams the door of his empty cabinet, says his aberkadabers and hokers-pokers, opens it again — And preston! The lady’s there.”

Continue to Chapter 4

They met for the sake of eating, drinking, and laughing together, playing at cards, or consequences, or any other game that was sufficiently noisy.

(Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility)

Fill in the Blanks

“Consequences” is a round game. It has no winners or losers. The rules are simple. Players are given prompts, in this case parts of speech. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these could be nuanced: transitive verb, nominal adjective, abstract noun. The responses are written on slips of paper and passed to a game master who reads a prearranged narrative, inserting the words into their corresponding blanks. The consequence of this might look as follows:

Deborah met a [hissing] man while waiting at the [museum]. The two engaged in [fisticuffs], after which they fell madly in [irritation] with each other. The consequence of this was: They married and spent the rest of their lives in a state of domestic [bewilderment], jointly operating a [brothel] near a [stinking] river.

In 1953 Leonard Stern and Roger Price published the first of what became a series of popular game books called “Mad Libs.” The books adapted the rules of consequences, while simplifying the prompts younger players: noun, verb, color, adjective, etc. Mad Libs is still around today. There is even a free downloadable app for it.

Impromptu Romance

Another popular round game dating back to at least the Regency period was called “impromptu romance.”

A “romance” (in the literary sense of the word) did not originally have the sense of a sultry bodice-ripper or sentimental love story. It was a poem or fictional narrative written in one of the languages that evolved from the Latin spoken in ancient Rome. “Arthurian Romance” is a sub-genre of a body of works called the matière de Bretagne (“The Matter of Britain”) concerning King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels were considered “historical romances,” while Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was seen less as a horror novel than a “gothic romance.”

The rules for impromptu romance are laid out in Donald Walker’s 1837 book, Games and Sports: Being an Appendix to Manly Exercises and Exercises for Ladies. It begins with a prompt in the form of an opening sentence. Each player contributes a clause or several to what becomes an evolving tale or “romance.” Like consequences, there is no victor, although it is not hard to imagine ways of making the game competitive. An opening round of impromptu romance might progress as follows:

Prompt: Once upon a time, the King of Bohemia held a banquet to celebrate his daughter’s engagement to. . . 
Player 1: the one-eyed Baron von Horst, who was reputed to be so cruel that. . .
Player 2: he buried his mother alive, blaming her for his cyclopic deformity. 
Player 3: He often lamented that. . . 
Player 4: the eye he possessed enabled him to glimpse solely into the past; whereas the one he lacked would have permitted him to gaze into futurity.
Player 5: But since he was missing that eye he was unable to foresee that. . .  
Player 6: the King of Bohemia’s daughter planned to murder him before the banquet had concluded. 

Baroness Karen Christentze von Blixen-Finecke (1885–1962), who wrote under the nom-de-plume Isak Dinesen (pictured in the thumbnail), was said to be so good at this game that she was able to singlehandedly improvise tales of thousands of words long based on a prompt. She did this in English, despite Danish being her mother tongue. Her older sister, Elle, remarked that “Tanne” (as she was known among her friends and family) began doing this while still in the nursery. Elle recalled having to admonish the babbling child to shut up and go to sleep. In later years, Elle became Dinesen’s first-line critic.1

This talent of Dinesen’s is showcased in Sydney Pollack’s 1985 Oscar-winning film Out of Africa. There is a scene in which the three main characters are finishing supper when Denys Finch Hatton (played by the late Robert Redford) challenges Dinesen (played by Meryl Streep) to tell a story. He supplies a one sentence prompt about a Chinese man living in Limehouse and girl named Shirley. Without skipping a beat Dinesen takes up the thread and spins it into a tragic tale that does not conclude until the supper party has withdrawn to the parlor and a fire has been kindled.

In many ways online writing communities have injected new life into the game of impromptu romance. Writers now compose flash-fiction stories in response to prompts suggested to them by friends and peers. Some of these are admittedly impressive — lapidary specimens of what critics used to call “prose poems.” But the majority of them are embarrassingly trite.

People have been doing this online since at least the Nineties. I know, because I did it myself. Someone would upload a photograph to an FTP site, like Webshots. A hyperlink to the picture would be pasted into an IRC channel. Players would be challenged to write a poem or story about it. Over a period of weeks or months a single tale, or several — often spilling over into multiple chatrooms — would take shape.

If someone got bored with IRC, they could migrate to Usenet and join a bulletin board, taking part in one of the several roleplaying games (called “sims”), which fell under the purview of the Usenet-approved monitors who acted as referee or game master. One person would send an email offline to a fellow member of the group: Write everything character A says and send it to me. I’ll fill in the blanks with what character B says. We’ll post the consolidated text to the forum.

None of us would have thought of compiling these slapdash things into 22-page manuscripts and sending them off to Random House for publication for the simple reason that we all recognized them for what they were: airy nothings, literary ephemera, fanfic, chain stories, the distilled essence of blather. Many of today’s writers seem to lack that perspective.

The Slender Style

The Hellenistic poet Callimachus (c. 310–c. 240 BCE) was an advocate of the pared-down (λεπτός) style. His four-word epigram on the matter still rings true: μέγα βιβλίον, μέγα κακόν (“big book, big evil”). Yet Callimachus himself composed an epic called Aetia (“Causes”) made up of 4,000 lines, roughly the length of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

Since anyone can write short-form fiction, everyone does. And when it’s not parodying itself, it can be a powerful vehicle for communicating deep truths, as the parables of the Bible make abundantly clear. But the fields today are more often sown with tares than wheat. And there has been a relentless push over the last decade to transform what used to be regarded as little more than a writers’ workshop exercise into something of a cottage industry and new gold standard of literary excellence.

It’s ironic to me (and a bit suspicious) that some of today’s online littérateurs, who are often quite vocal in their opposition to AI, seem to be operating on more or less the same principles as an LLM: “Give me a prompt (since I haven’t an original idea of my own), and I’ll crank out a story (of less than 1,000 words).” Many of these writers have absolutely nothing to say, but are apparently endowed with an inexhaustible fund of words with which to say it. This begs the question: How is it that so many people can now write so much that says so little in so short a time?

It is my personal opinion that the lady doth protest too much and that more than a few of them are using AI on the sly to keep up a steady output of fiction in the misguided belief that their subscribers are champing at the bit and have an insatiable appetite for the vapid and banal. As Oscar Wilde says in The Portrait of Dorian Gray, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” And what better way to guarantee you’re being talked about than to thrust something with your name on it under everyone’s nose umpteen times a week.

I suppose it’s to be expected, what with so many functionally illiterate “content creators” — I refuse to call them “authors” — jockeying for instant literary fame online, that they would inevitably band together into mutually fawning groups to collectively disscount and/or abominate the novels and voluminous works of outmoded or thoroughly dead writers, even as they extol their own “slender style” as a kind of great leap forward and New Wave in storytelling. But those of us who have been reading beefy books since the fall of Reza Shah see exactly what they’re up to and are not impressed.

They are using short-form fiction as a smokescreen to conceal their own stylistic gracelessness, lack of imagination, and narrow scope of vision.

If they were really as gifted as they never cease to imply that they are, then they would devote themselves to creating works of fiction more substantial than these piddling, disconnected tales with an uninspiring cast of two or three cardboard cutouts that take no more than five minutes (on average) to read. Write something with an elaborate and cleverly constructed plot. Stop playing in the sandbox like a toddler. Show us what you’ve got. The proof is in the pudding; not in the recipe for making it.

50-Word Grifts and 1,000-Word Barriers

The publishing industry is buckling under the combined weight of AI-generated slop and the highfalutin effusions of 50-word grifters cosplaying as Nobel laureates, peddling their razor-thin anthologies on Amazon.com for wildly inflated prices. It may sound harsh to call them grifters. But let’s do the math.

A book of 50 short stories of 50 words each comes to 2,500 words. That used to be considered low even for a short story. Some of these go for $10 and up on. (I can buy a collection of short stories by an established writer for that, and each story in his or her collection will be at least 2,500 words long.) Even if we were to double the number of stories in one of these anthologies, that’s still only 5,000 words — yet again, the length of a short story. Let that sink in: they are selling books that are the length of a short story for the price of a novel. I don’t know what else to call that but a grift.

And don’t feed me the line that the other writers are hacks “but my work is cutting edge and profound.” I call bullshit. You’re selling a bag of potato chips that’s half full of air. And hot air at that.

A surefire way of losing subscribers on Substack is to draw attention to the fact that many of the platform’s self-proclaimed literary lights are incapable of writing a sustained and internally coherent narrative that is more than 1,000 words long, which is not only the cutoff point for flash fiction but (rather conveniently) the point beyond which AI tends goes off the rails when attempting to write long-form fiction.

In the video below an Austrian programmer discusses a paper out of China that talks about how even the most sophisticated LLMs literally “lose the plot” when attempting to write a story over 1,000 words long. The task currently requires three agents working seamlessly together, and they are not able to do that at this time. While the presenter does not imply AI will never be able to overcome this obstacle, it is a significant one. (The discussion on this topic begins at 10:50 in the video.)

I have a hard time believing it is a mere coincidence that this 1,000-word barrier that AI has run up against is coming at a time when more and more content creators are attempting to brand themselves as prodigies in the art of short-form storytelling.

It’s generally not that difficult to detect when an LLM has been used to write a piece of long-form fiction. And, no, it has nothing to do with an overuse of em-dashes. — Anyone with a passing familiarity with the works of Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, or James Joyce knows what a moronic acid test that is.2

What sets AI-generated text apart are the words chosen and the way these words are latched together. Eventually, the reader discovers a passage so absurd as to make it clear a program has plucked a character-string from a multidimensional tensor, like someone using a thesaurus for the first time who assumes every term following the headword is equally and semantically interchangeable, no matter the context.

“Dribbles,” “Drabbles” and Other Literary Excreta

At the beginning of the year I had no idea what a “drabble” was. But more and more people were posting them online, usually in response to prompts. I asked Google AI to explain what the word meant. Not only did it define a “drabble” as a flash-fiction piece of exactly 100 words, as opposed to a “dribble” (exactly 50 words), but it spontaneously generated one by way of example:

The old clockmaker, Silas, squinted at the ticking gears. His workshop, a haven of quiet clicks and whirs, held a secret. A secret whispered by the hands themselves. He’d built them, each tick a heartbeat. A life, a story, etched in metal. One day, he’d stopped. The hands remained still, a silent testament to a life he’d lived, a life he’d crafted. He’d left the workshop, the ticking a memory, a song he’d carry with him.

What I found interesting about the output was that it was just as good, if not better, than 90 percent of the “drabbles” I had seen online. Like those, it was devoid of a plot, bereft of a point, peacocked around with the language, and focused on a character as compelling as a flaccid bladder. The story goes nowhere, has no resolution, and looks like something a daydreaming primary schooler might have scribbled on the fly-leaf of her paperback copy of Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Curiosity got the better of me, so I asked Google AI to write a second “drabble,” this time about a clocktower instead of a clockmaker. I wanted to see how the LLM produced variations on this temporal theme:

The old clocktower ticked, a slow, mournful rhythm against the city’s vibrant pulse. Inside, Elias, the keeper, traced the dust on the pendulum, a ghost of time’s passage. He remembered a girl, her laughter echoing in the silence, now replaced by the relentless ticking. He closed his eyes, the city lights blurring into a hazy dream. He imagined her face, a fleeting memory, a whisper of what could have been. Then, he opened his eyes, the clocktower holding him captive in its timeless embrace. He would keep the time, even if it meant forgetting everything.

Again, we get that same jumble of tensor-picked words. The clock tower “holds” its “keeper” (Get it?) “captive” (Get it?) in its “timeless” (Get it?) “embrace.” (Get it?)

Thanks to the passionate if misguided efforts of postmodernist scholars we now have a lexicon of ridiculous neologisms to use for “very, very short stories” based solely on the number of words they contain: dribbles (50 words), drabbles (100 words), Twitterature (280 words), microfictions (300 words) — the list goes on.3 The grandaddy of them all, of course, is flash fiction (weighing in at a staggering 1,000 words). What’s confusing about all this is that the people who take these terms seriously do not even adhere to the word-counts supposedly agreed upon. One day a “dribble” is post that’s technically a “drabble.” The next a “drabble” will appear consisting of about 40 words.

To my mind these microscopic tales have only two flavors: “the predictable twist” and “the slice of life.”

“The predictable twist” is the most common and reads like an unfunny joke that a comedian still hasn’t come up with a punchline for: — Man walks into a bar. “What’s your poison?” the bartender asks. “Gin and tonic,” the detective replies. “This case is killing me,” he laments. “I’ve been looking for a serial poisoner, but all my leads have all dried up, like the bottom of this glass.” He pays his bill, goes home and dies. Bartender smiles next day while watching the news. The End. — Or have you heard the one about that holy-rolling preacher warning his congregants about the torments of eternal damnation? Guess what? He’s already dead and in Hell. And his congregants are the very demons tormenting him.

It’s always the same. The vampire hunter is the vampire. The Men in Black are human, but the pigtailed girl trembling at the farmhouse door turns out to be a Martian.

This is not storytelling. It’s storyboarding. It’s an elevator pitch. It’s low-brow TikTokery masquerading as high-brow art, proudly strutting its stuff on the runway in shoulder pads, parachute pants, and pink Crocs. Ideas are a dime a dozen. And in this economy they’re not even worth that.

As a friend and fellow Gen-Xer commenting on the matter said best: “Don’t take a Polaroid and expect me to frame it.”

“The slice of life” variation is generally inspired by a prompt such as: “Write a moving drabble about the challenges and heartache that come with living on a farm.” Immediately, every YouTuber in mom’s basement (who’s never so much as handled a mattock) scours the internet looking for worn-out pastoral metaphors and snatches of slack-jawed Southern patois to cram into a narrative (invariably written in the present tense), chock-full of adjectives to pad out whatever arbitrary word-count the prompter has imposed on the game, because that’s all it is: a game. The consequence of this might look as follows:

The wheat bends in the luff of the morning wind. Dawn gilds the quiet horizon. The green combine stands stark against the weatherbeaten barn. The old man sips the steaming coffee from his battered tin cup. “Yep,” he mumbles. “Gonna be another hard day’s worth o’ work.” His eyes fill with tears, as the aroma of sizzling bacon assails his nostrils. He knows the young woman standing at the stove. But is she real? Or is she only a memory of long ago?

There’s no end to the bathos of this dreck, which can be written as quickly as it can be read.

For hundreds of years the English language had a perfectly good word to refer to awful writing like this, a word, incidentally, that derives from the same Germanic root as both “dribble” and “drabble.” We used to call such stuff drivel, because it drips like slobber down the author’s lips. Why don’t we go back to using that word? Why don’t we stop averting our eyes so as not to see that the emperor is processing before us naked as a jaybird (crown jewels on display)?

The Inauthenticity of Modern Short-Form Fiction

Whenever someone criticizes flash fiction, its advocates rush to the breach, throwing dust in everyone’s eyes and conflating the matter with poetry. Soon, the argument degenerates into a rapid-fire succession of whataboutisms: What about haikus? What about Martial’s epigrams? What about the Upanishads? What about Shakespeare’s sonnets? What about Kahlil Gibran’s verse parables? What about the tender smile on a baby’s face?

But the fact of the matter is we’re not discussing these things. We’re discussing “very, very short stories,” so-called “flash-fiction,” which isn’t even a literary genre or a movement. It’s a way or manner of telling a story that authors have been doing since reed-brush was first put to papyrus and wedge stylus was first pressed to clay.

While still young, Dinesen broke in a new journal by inscribing on its cover the Danish words “Aerlig, Aerlig” (meaning “honest, honest”). Though honesty is not synonymous with authenticity, Butler’s biography of Dinesen makes it clear that, while blurring the lines between the real and unreal in her fiction, Dinesen remained steadfast in her belief that, however magical and otherworldly her tales might be, they must always be true to her lived experience.

The problem with most (not all, but most) modern flash-fiction stories, especially the ones written in response to prompts, is that they lack this authenticity. Everything in them is foregrounded. There’s no vivid backdrop against which the action unfolds. The easiest way to elaborate on what I mean is by first presenting an early twentieth-century specimen of short-form fiction for consideration.

Below is a tale called “In Algiers” from the 1919 anthology Futurist Stories by Margery Verner Reed, who died in 1925 at the age of thirty. “In Algiers” is 386 words long (so I’m not sure what “species” of flash fiction it falls under). It is a stream-of-consciousness narrative, a literary term the critic May Sinclair coined in 1918, a year before Reed died.

In Algiers

Moonlight — the still waters of the ocean —

The deck of a ship —

Romance and beauty —

The great liner sailed near the northern coast of Africa. On the deck they had become engaged — the moonlight shone on them.

Dusk and bitter cold. A young woman paced up and down in the snow, awaiting the coming of a train.

It was a small town in the interior of Russia — of a Russia torn by wars and rebellions at home. A sorrow-stricken land.

The mystery, the romance of the night — the distant shores of Africa — seemed still upon her. She could almost feel the murmur of the water as it splashed against the boat.

And the next day — Algiers — the quaint streets — the mosques — flowers — and white robed Arabs.

Very quietly they had been married in the Cathedral which bears the name of a whole continent.

Notre Dame d’Afrique.

The sun had smiled as it shone on the city by the sea.

It grew colder.

A train came into sight on the vast field of snow.

On that train the man she loved and had married was coming to her.

That enchanted period in Algiers — He was returning — perhaps a wreck of his once splendid self — a cripple.

War.

It had shattered homes — brought skeletons — where once children laughed.

Brought famine — where once birds had eaten crumbs.

War —

Horror — dismay.

She waited.

His eyes were aghast — eyes that had seen death — murder — horror — side by side —

There was no more laughter. He took Anna into his arms. Then the report was not true. He had not given his right arm.

Anna, he whispered, My brave Anna.

I have been thinking of Algiers, she murmured. We planned to have sunshine — and roses — even among the snows of our country. But we faced blood — blood on the snows of our forests —

Ivan, it is bitter cold. Do not go out — into the night —

To Africa. The moon will be making golden streaks upon the water. A rose will be blooming in our garden — his eyes were vacant.

Then it was not his arm he had given for Russia — it was —

A cry pierced the cold air.

The weight of a dead body resounded.

I wonder what that was, Ivan mused —

Which is the shortest way to the Cathedral —

These Arab streets are so steep.

“In Algiers” favors the allusive over the explicit. And although knowing something about World War I and the events leading up to the Russian Revolution enhances our understanding of what is going on, we do not need to know these things to appreciate the tale’s mysteriousness and ambiguous conclusion.

Reed does not waste words inventing a brutal conflict in Europe called “the Great War” or describing an affliction resulting from it called “shell-shock,” nor does she need to create a fictitious country called “Russia” or an Arab city on the Mediterranean called “Algiers” because these things are already arranged on the stage before the curtain has even risen.

Like those customary minimalist productions of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the props and scenery of “In Algiers” are immaterial and almost incidental to the plot. We know that they are there, but Reed has left it to us to conceptualize and move around the stage furniture in our mind (if we think it’s necessary), because she as the author is too busy training the spotlight on the actors.

“In Algiers” exemplifies the power of the slender style in the hands of an artist more concerned with telling a story than creating a “vibe.”

When you look at a Thomas Kinkade painting depicting a cottage at sunset, specifically one in which he has refrained from including electrical lights, gas-lamps, or motorized vehicles, you are left with few clues to determine when and where the painting is set. Is it a Victorian cottage or a Tudor one? Perhaps neither. Maybe it’s a fairy-tale cottage. Is it in the French countryside or the Black Forest? Could it be New Hampshire? Or the Cotswolds?

Like the AI-generated “drabbles” from above (about the clockmaker and the clocktower), a Thomas Kinkade painting, while pretty to look at (especially when it glows in the dark), is nothing more than a cosy potpourri and fuzzy intermingling of nondescript and vaguely familiar clichés. A modern flash-fiction story that has been written in response to a prompt is the literary analogue of a Thomas Kinkade painting.

Consequences

I’m not trying to dissuade people from writing very, very short stories. I write them myself and will continue to do so. But I have not written anything in response to a prompt in almost thirty years for various reasons, chief of which is my visceral reaction whenever I hear the phrase “Let’s break into groups.”

I personally think there’s something insidious about authors inuring themselves to a habit of soliciting others for suggestions on what they should write. Eventually you are not longer playing the game, but the game is playing you. And you wake up one morning to the realization that you no longer have the freedom to write stories of your own invention, unless they comply with rigid strictures your faceless “prompters” have codified and set down for the sake of ensuring that your views are correct.

Since I have no interest in making money on Substack, I’ve never activated its payment features. But I think it’s great that there is a mechanism for compensating writers for their work. There are many, many talented fiction and nonfiction authors on the platform whom I follow and whose work I relish. Some of them have less than fifty subscribers. A few are shrinking violets who would rather keep it that way. But most would love to have more exposure. But they are having a hard go making that happen.

As someone who reads more than he writes (and spends more time doing both of these activities offline), I would like to raise two points that I think it would behoove authors who charge subscription fees to keep in mind if they’re looking for readers who genuinely enjoy their work, instead of the groupies and theater claque members who “smash the like button,” subscribe, leave an orgasmic comment about how “mind-melting” a post was, and then are never heard from again:

1. Not all of your readers are interested in the games you play with other writers. Whenever I open a post and see that it is installment #6 of a thirty-day flash-fiction challenge, I close it and move on. Why? Because I assume it will be riddled with typos, stylistic infelicities, and sentences that should be rearranged or deleted altogether. And I don’t feel particularly inclined to be disabused of that assumption. If you’re not going to look over your own rough draft before chucking it aside and starting installment #7, why would you think I would enjoy reading it?

2. If I can go into ChatGPT and type: “Write me a 400-word flash-fiction piece about a tentacular Lovecraftian sea monster with saucer eyes,” and if the LLM spits out exactly what I asked for, why would I read your story “inspired by last week’s prompt suggested by so-and-so” to write a 400-word flash-fiction piece about a tentacular Lovecraftian sea monster with saucer eyes? How do I know you didn’t do the same thing; and that you’re spending the rest of the time before the “assignment” comes due massaging the text to make it look like you wrote it? Where’s the authenticity in doing that?

And this brings me to my final remarks. . .

An AI-generated short story (made up scraps and patches snatched from a training corpus) is a Frankenstein’s monster. And, like the monster, its spirit, though seemingly human, is entirely alien. The shorter the word-count, the easier it will always be for an LLM to create the illusion of freshness and novelty. This is the reason why I no longer read “dribbles” or “drabbles,” and why I’ve grown increasingly disenchanted with short-form fiction as a whole. Being on the downslope of life, I no longer have the time to go digging through pyrite quarries in search of the occasional gold nugget.

In this essay I have criticized no writer by name. If you feel you have been unfairly singled out, then it is because you imagine yourself to be a member of the class of writers I have been describing. And if that is the case, then it is not I, but you who have put yourself in that box. It used to be that writers worth their weight in salt resented the imputation that their work could be so easily categorized. Now authors are overwhelmingly of the mindset that there is no greater distinction than to be perceived as being a representative of a group. The best way to show that you are not merely “one of the herd” is to abandon it and strike out on your own path. You might find doing so refreshing.

As for AI, it’s beginning to look like we’ll never be able to cram the genie back into the bottle. The consequence of this is that literature will never be the same again. There are many authors who are hopping mad that people are using AI to write fiction. They say it’s a lazy way of telling a story. And I couldn’t agree with them more. But who’s the lazier writer? The one who uses an LLM to produce a flash-fiction piece? Or the one who only writes flash-fiction pieces because writing anything longer is time-consuming and hard?

Book III, Chapter 1: The Reeperbahn

List of Chapters | Previous Chapter

Hermann stepped out of Ada’s building before dawn on Sunday morning. He rushed through the gaslit fog like a soldier late to muster. He intended to visit one of the city’s numerous Lindley baths to wash up before Mass. But at that hour only a handful of these public conveniences were open; and they charged double on Sunday, knowing the poor who wished to make themselves presentable before their Maker were willing to pay another ten pfennigs.

When the sun at last rose, it did so halfheartedly, banishing in a lackadaisical fashion the shadows clinging to the ramshackle structures pressing in on either side. The ways were unswept; and the only sounds that invaded Hermann’s drowsy mind were the distant bark of a harbor seal and the clipped tread of his boots striking alternately on the pavement and wooden planks of the bascule bridges spanning the fleets and canals.

Hermann was a parishioner of the church of St. Joseph, which was situated in the former Danish royal city of Altona. The eastern edge of Altona bordered Hamburg’s westernmost district of St Pauli. Altona was administered by Prussian functionaries known for the short shrift they showed toward the residents of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. Travel between the two was unrestricted and common. But it could be fraught with minor nuisances, such as randomly imposed export fees for transporting purchased goods from one city to the other.

The most prominent difference between Altona and Hamburg was that Altona’s adequately paid and uniformed police force wore the distinctive custodian helmets of the bobbies of London, while the policemen in Hamburg, whose salaries were appropriated by the city’s Ratsherrn (or aldermen) and could be delayed or entirely withheld, contributed to rampant corruption and calls from members of the Reichstag in Berlin for Hamburg’s police force to be subordinated to Chancellor Bismarck’s government in Berlin.

Hermann took Communion and returned to his pew, where a wave of fatigue overwhelmed him. He swayed and would have fallen backwards into his seat had not the well-dressed man next to him grabbed his elbow to steady him. When the priest said “Ite Missa est” the two exited their row, and Hermann thanked the man for his intervention. But the frigid scowl he met with made it clear the man thought Hermann was hungover.

The congregants emptied the church amid rustling garments, shoes scuffling on floor-stones, and a smattering of pious remarks concerning the elegance of the priest’s homily.

St. Joseph was a Baroque saalbau, or “hall structure,” small in comparison to the more numerous Protestant Churches in Altona. It lacked an ambulatory, and its walls, though adorned with the Stations of the Cross, were spanking white and free of gaud. It was brighter than many of the Catholic churches that Hermann had been in. And this made sacristan uncharacteristically sparing in his use of candles.

Ashamed for almost nodding off during Mass, Hermann decided to spend a half hour of private meditation before the largest of the church’s side chapels. He knelt on the prie-dieu’s padded rest, clasping his hands and focusing his attention on the statue of St. Joseph cradling the infant Christ.

He bowed his head to pray. When he did this, the chains of the necklaces he wore clinked together louder than was decent. People will think I’ve brought workman’s tools into the house of God. Ada had asked about the necklaces’ significance one day when she saw him untangling them under the collar of his shirt. He brushed the question aside by telling her he wore them for personal and religious reasons, which was true but felt like a lie.

“One day I’ll tell you about them.” But Ada had already lost interest, chalking it up to Hermann’s superstitious Austrian ways.

The cheapest of the three would have been the easiest to explain. It was a leaden crucifix he had picked up when he saw a shaft of sunlight fell upon it in a pawn-shop window.

But the other two had complicated histories.

One pendent bore the image of St. Florian, patron saint of firefighters. The reason he wore it was that “Florian” was the name he had bestowed upon the orphan boy, Walter, when the two of them had fled the Widow Schorn’s workhouse in Cronenberg in November 1870.

My God, he thought, almost twelve years ago.

“Walter,” a woman said. Hermann opened his eyes and glanced over his shoulder.

The woman who had said this was stepping out of the confessional. The pallid boy she had hailed was dying, his skull clearly visible beneath the skin. Having grown bored of waiting for his mother to be shriven, he had wandered into the chancel where he was idly stroking the fair linen covering the altar. The sexton did not have the heart to reprimand a lamb whom the Lord was soon to gather to His fold.

Hermann stared through a mist of tears, thinking of his own dead children, and again of Walter, whom he had loved as his own. Walter would be a man now, if he was still alive. Hermann had had the image of St. Florian stamped on the same Vereinsthaler that Walter had given him on the morning the two of them parted ways forever. Hermann had thought of returning to the Eltzbacher Coach Inn to learn what had become of Walter, Benedikt, and Monika. Frau Eltzbacher he knew had passed away in 1874, according to an obit in the newspaper.

But the reason he dared not return to the coach inn was because of the last necklace. He pulled the heaviest chain out of his shirt. A spark glanced off the tarnished electrum. Even in the absence of light, the pre-Christian medallion was known to cast off phantom glimmers. Why did the demon choose me? Why must I keep this relic close for the remainder of my days? It was a question he had asked himself many times, a question he would ask himself many times more.

Benedikt had warned Hermann that if he attempted to cast the object away, it would only come back to him, redoubling his sorrows in the process. In some ways the medallion had made his life easier. The scars in the crooks of his arms from his morphine habituation he had fallen into after Henrietta’s death were gone. And no matter how severe the drubbings were that he received in the box ring, his recovery was always swift and total.

It’s like a parasite that must keep the host alive enough to drain from it all that it requires.

Standing over Hermann, the sexton cleared his throat. The bushy-browed man had caught sight of the trinket the parishioner was turning over in his fingers, as if it were a rosary.

Hermann got up, crossed himself, and left.

It took him less than five minutes to reach St. Pauli. Following Saturday night’s revelry, a universal calm had settled over the wicked district.

By city ordinance gaming dens “and other disreputable establishments” were not permitted to operate on Sundays. The brothels had to ensure all the johns, whom the whores called stümpfe (stumps), were kicked out by dawn. Otherwise, they could face a hefty fine. Hermann cut through an alley that emptied out onto the Reeperbahn. He wondered if the two drunkards passed out in each other’s arms on a pile of rubbish had been ejected from one of these houses of ill fame and had only been able to stagger so far.

The raufkneipe (brawling pub) where Hermann lived and worked hove into view. The establishment’s massive outer doors had been thrown open on wheeled tracks to air out the reeking interior. The pong of sweat, vomit, and liquor wafted out of the building, which had once been a rope-works until new life had been breathed into its dry bones; and it had risen again as a gaming house.

Emmanuel (Hermann’s trainer and manager) stood outside, hands thrust into his canvas pockets. He wore a faded blue coat that he was too frugal to restore to its vibrant and richly trimmed glory. Hermann sensed that Emmanuel was sizing him up and assessing whether his most reliable heavyweight would be fit enough to enter the ring tomorrow or the day after.

Emmanuel was a rarity in Hamburg, a West African from Old Calabar. His tribe, the Efik, had served as intermediaries between the British factors (who seemed to believe the Niger Delta was theirs) and the indigenous merchants who regulated the palm-oil trade through a vast network of villages and outposts, many of which were built on pilings on the water.

Emmanuel went to sea at the age of twelve, moving from one European-chartered vessel to another in order to escape the inevitable abusers and brigands who threatened to kill him in his sleep solely for the color of his skin.

As he grew older, Emmanuel boxed, not only to supplement what he earned aboard ship but to make himself more physically imposing. He acquired enough fluency in French and German to conduct business in those languages. But it was his absolute mastery of English that made him stand out among the merchant mariners he worked with and gradually won him over to the affections of an old retired East India captain from Liverpool, who adopted the African as his son because he could not bear the sight of the ones he had sired.

Emmanuel came to Hamburg (that most English of German cities) in 1872 as the accredited, German-speaking agent of that wealthy investor from Liverpool. On arrival he chartered a company that he used to purchase a warehouse in the Kehrwieder district, which he converted into a palm-oil storage facility and soap-works. But no sooner had the old man’s interests on the Continent begun to turn a profit, than Emmanuel received a cable informing him that the octogenarian nabob had died of influenza.

The ship of prosperity that the old salt had singlehandedly piloted for so many years foundered on the shoals of endless litigation, as his sons collectively closed ranks against Emmanuel while fighting one another over what each claimed to be his by right in consideration of an ineffable love for his father rivaling that of Cordelia’s for her dear old Papa Lear.

The books and papers locked away in the dead mogul’s office on Mossley Hill were closely scrutinized. But no reference could be found to the dead man’s assets abroad, to include a tea plantation in Darjeeling and the soap-works in Germany.

It was around this time that the Bremen-based insurers of the Kehrwieder warehouse swooped in to seize it, justifying their move through a subtle interpretation of an obscure clause in the policy stating that the Englishman’s property would revert to them in toto “should said policyholder suffer a sudden and irreversible abnegation of vitality.” What none of the lawyers at the time understood was that this was a mistranslation of an equally obscure English passage in the original contract (now lost) touching on the company’s financial well being.

The insurers were not fools and recognized that the success of their new acquisition depended on the man from the Niger being kept on to run it. So they retained him in an advisory capacity, paying a monthly salary that propelled Emmanuel into the middle-class respectability. But though he made enough to get by, he wanted enough to get beyond.

So he hired two trustworthy men to manage the company, paying their wages from this salary. And he set about forging a commercial alliance with the notorious Madam Nora of Belfast, who governed with an iron fist the hustlers and bookmakers that operated in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district.

Madam Nora was fond of telling anyone who could understand her — for she spoke “not a lick o’ Joorman” — that it was she alone who brought “the science of runnin’ box houses” to the old Hanseatic city shortly after she “fled the Famine in ’51.” Nora arrived on the docks “a penniless jilted beauty with a wee wean clingin’ to me breast,” and immediately set about making herself indispensable to the resident English mariners who operated the tugs and lighters plying the Elbe estuary. She established a pub on the water and often turned tricks on the side.

To Emmanuel, Nora’s accent and colorful way of speaking resembled the Scouse dialect he had grown accustomed to during his association with his Liverpudlian godfather. And so by means of guile, flattery, and an ability to negotiate complicated deals in both English and German, Emmanuel was able to soften redoubtable Nora’s Pharaonically hardened heart.

Not only did Madam Nora O’Neill own the most popular prizefighting pub in all of St. Pauli, she purchased the two-storied half-timbered (fachwerk) building next to it. She turned this into a brothel, which she called “The Wolf’s Den,” because its outer walls were adorned with infilled plaster medallions and curlicues depicting wolves slinking about in a mountain setting.

The building was old and had miraculously survived the 1842 fire that wiped out a third of the city. But no one knew its original purpose or why it was so decorated.

Legend had it that on blustery, the sound of pigs at slaughter could sometimes be heard coming from inside the building. Wags joked that such noises were relatively common in whorehouses. But a journalist wrote an article claiming that the spirit of Alcuin had come to him in the course of a séance to declare that the Wolf’s Den stood on the site of a pagan temple Charles Martel had burned to the ground. This prompted an antiquary to pen a rebuttal, stating that Alcuin’s spirit seemed to have been misinformed, since the Reeperbahn and the rest of St. Pauli were under water until well after Martel’s grandson, Charlemagne, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800.

The Wolf’s Den was connected to the boxing pub by an unlit passage hung with black curtains like a fortuneteller’s tent. The reason Nora had this passage constructed was so that respectable clients who did not want to be seen mingling with the whores, could utilize the chaos of a boxing match to sneak next door undetected. A concealed postern door enabled the johns (once they were done) to slip out into the alley, where a merry band of incompetent rogues accosted the patrons, hinting that they would expose to the public what they were now bearing witness to, unless an exorbitant sum of money were paid to them. Yet only the most gullible succumbed, since the purported blackmailers, when beaten with sticks or threatened with legal action, groaned and apologetically admitted that they had no idea who the gentleman was whom they were attempting to extort.

Five years ago Hermann was working as a stevedore in Sandtorhafen when Emmanuel approached him to ask (in heavily accented German) if he had ever boxed. Hermann replied that he had not, and agreed to take part in a preliminary spar. To his surprise, he had a knack for the sport. And after seven matches, Nora put him on the rolls and allowed him to move to dank room in the basement of the pub, which he shared with Emmanuel.

The two slept in hammocks on opposite sides of the room with a sea chest containing their personal effects beneath them.

Despite Emmanuel’s parsimony, it became clear to Hermann that his manager was quite well off. Emmanuel was garrulous and quite generous with praise, though it annoyed the Austrian man that his manager was also fond of dispensing unsolicited financial advice. One night, as the two lay in their hammocks staring at the ceiling and waiting to fall asleep, Emmanuel schooled Hermann on the merits his money into a universal bank account.

“The bankers use these funds to purchase stocks, which in turn pay dividends. So you get back what you put in, with a little extra on top.”

“It sounds complicated,” Hermann yawned. “I make enough money from boxing. If I need more, I’ll work at your warehouse. You said you can get me work there whenever I want. That’s how I met Ada.”

“I hope you and your lady love realize they’re demolishing that building in a few months to make way for the new Speicherstadt.”

“I know.”

“She’ll have to find another job.”

“She knows. We both know that.” Hermann contracted his brow. “Aren’t you worried about losing that building?”

“No. It was never mine to begin with. And I’ve gotten all I need out of it. I have other plans now. Plans that don’t involve Madam Nora. . . or Hamburg.”

“Do the plans involve me?”

“No. I like you, Hermann. But I don’t know you well you mumble strange things in your sleep. My heart tells me that it is safe to keep you close to me now. But my gut tells me I will need to set a great distance between us in the near future.”

They walked into the pub that Sunday morning and saw Madam Nora at the bar, bickering with her gin supplier, a scrawny-necked man in a bowler hat, who spoke English well but was struggling to understand what the bewigged, lazy-eyed beldam was saying in return.

Nora gestured to four cases stacked on a metal hand-truck the vendor had wheeled inside.

“Emmanuel, tell Hermann to take a case to the Wolf’s Den.”

Hermann glanced uneasily at Emmanuel, who was translating into German. He already knew what Nora had asked. He bit his lower lip before speaking.

“Tell her I’m a Christian man and won’t set foot in a brothel.”

Emmanuel translated.

“Ooooh, I see,” Nora said, placing her fists on her hips. “Well, tell the black-eyed Popish bastard I’m one too!”

“You’re a Christian man?” Emmanuel asked with a smile.

This elicited a boisterous laugh from her son, Michael, seated at the far end of the bar, nursing a pint of stout. “He got you, Ma!”

In a white rage, Nora signed her name to the invoice and handed it to the vendor. She had been trying to dicker him down. But Hermann’s truculence and Emmanuel’s glibness had thrown her off her game.

Hermann refused to lift his eyes from the sawdust floor, littered with last night’s walnut shells and broken bottle-glass.

Michael slapped his palm on the bar to get Hermann’s attention. He had an affection for the hangdog Austrian. “Don’t worry, Hermann. Ich mache es (I’ll do it).”

He rose from the barstool and picked up the top case. “It’s the least I can do after givin’ ya those two shiners.”

“Thank you,” Hermann muttered in English.

Michael stopped mid stride. “Your black eyes are gone! Three days, and he’s healed! If’n ya need any further proof, Ma, that your best fighter’s blessed by the Lord, look no further.”

Continue to Chapter 3

Book III, Chapter 1: Hamburg (September, 1882)

List of Chapters | Prologue to Book III

From where he stood on the dock Hermann strained to hear Ada’s voice over the clang of the seagulls wheeling over the Elbe at his back. The girl was selling brooms, a bundle propped up against the warehouse wall. She was strictly forbidden from mingling with Hermann socially while she worked.

As she cried her wares, she tilted her head to one side. The forty-four-year-old Austrian did the same. Hermann squinted because his two black eyes made his vision blurry. But though her slender figure was scumbled at the edges, like an object in a Turner painting, he saw in his mind’s eye her lineaments as he chose to see them. Ada was the spitting image of his dead wife.

Even the woman’s mannerisms echoed Henrietta’s as they had been in the blossoms of her youth. But there was a marked difference. Henrietta had been shy and demure. Ada was bold and had a sharp wit that stung like a whip-crack. The contrast between the dead woman he would forever love and the living one he now wooed stirred Hermann’s loins and greatly enhanced Ada’s graces in his eyes (however bruised those eyes might be).

Ada’s brain was full of bawdy tunes which she belted out to the sundry pedestrians passing by. Some of these passers-by doubled-backed to hear anew what had charmed them for a moment. Many of these pieces were original and came to Ada in dreams. But the moment she knew a child was within earshot, she resorted to the lightsome ditties of her youth, the folk ballads and nursery rhymes she had listened to on her own mother’s knee: a verse from the Brothers Grimm, a few bars from “Hänschen klein” (Little Hans).

A pair of charwomen whom she recognized were approaching, dust on the sidewalk whirling about their skirts. Ada took up a broom in each hand and spread her arms wide, spontaneously improvising a tercet inspired by a few lines from Goethe’s “Der Zauberlehrling” (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) made piquant by a dash of Plattdeutsch:

“Dor kummt jümmer Heksen,
Besen, Besen!
Seid’s gewesen.”

“Here come your witches,
Oh brooms, oh brooms.
Time to leave.”

The frumpy woman in the knit shawl replied without so much as removing her clay pipe. “I never liked you, Ada!”

“I thought it was clever,” her gray-haired companion replied. “I’ll buy a broom. Carlotta and I can ride it back to our garret.”

Ada handed her one broom and leaned the other against the wall. “It comes gratis with a bar of soap,” she said, stooping to pluck one of these from the basket at her feet. “You both could use that by the smell of you.”

“And you could keep your opinions to yourself,” Carlotta snapped.

Ada lowered her voice. “Does your mistress need another hand?”

“Sorry, love,” the elder mumbled, dropping pfennigs in Ada’s palm. “I’m afraid our ladyship don’t need no extra help. But I’m fightin’ something fierce in the lungs. So if it carries me off before Christmas, Carlotta will stop by to see if you’re still available.”

Carlotta had removed her pipe and was glancing over her shoulder at Hermann. “I imagine she’ll be otherwise indisposed by then. Is he yours?”

“Pssst!” Ada shushed her. “Not while I’m working. My boss is on the other side of that door.” She looked at Hermann who was staring at her in that idiotic way of his. “He’s not mine. Just a stray dog of sorts.”

The two women sniffed.

“Stray dogs bite,” Carlotta observed.

“He’s not like that,” Ada grimaced. “He’s very gentle.”

Carlotta pointed at him with the stem of her pipe. “If he’s so gentle, why’s his face mussed up like that?”

“He’d never hurt me,” she insisted.

“They all say that,” the wizened one mused, “until they’re found floating tits-up in the Elbe.”

Ada sent them on their way, and tried to ignore Hermann for the remainder of her shift.

It was Saturday. The warehouse laborers had completed their duties, so the overseer dismissed them with half a day’s wages. He told them the warehouse would be shuttered till Wednesday when a ship was due in. The men filed out, grumbling among themselves, as the overseer waved Ada over and paid her a pittance of what she had earned for him that day. He told her not to come back until Thursday, since the sidewalks and square in front of the warehouse would be thronged with sailors and stevedores the day the ship arrived.

Ada waggled her head in protest, but put the coins in her reticule and walked away. Hermann straightened up in his excitement and smoothed back his hair. He still wore that foolish grin, which annoyed her because it made him look like a lecherous old coot trying to tup a milkmaid.

“You did a good job,” he remarked.

Ada sighed.

“What?” He could tell she was displeased with the bruises round his eyes.

“Aren’t you too old to be playing boys’ sports?”

He took her arm under his. They walked in silence between the rubble-strewn lots on either side of the street. Plastered to the palings separating the demolition zones were placards announcing the Kehrwieder District would be completely leveled by spring to make way for the new Speicherstadt (Warehouse City), which was to be built.

Hermann furrowed his brow before speaking. “The boxing house where I work provides me room and board. I have to fight at least once a week or they’ll throw me out.” He stopped and took up a position in front of her. “Besides, if I didn’t fight, I wouldn’t be able to give you this.”

He grabbed her palm and dropped four gold marks into it.

Her shoulders slumped. “My daughter and I are grateful.” She closed her fist around the coins and thrust them into her reticule. “I don’t understand why you do this for us. I hardly know you. We only met . . . what? Two months ago?”

“Fifty-two days ago. But this is only the fourth Saturday we’ve spent time together. The reason I do these things for you is because it gives me pleasure to ease your burden.”

“Today while I was working, I saw you mimicking me. When I inclined my head, you inclined yours. When I swept my hand out like this” — (she made a sweeping gesture) — “You did the same. I think I remind you of someone. A former lover?”

He sulked and scratched his ear. “Have you thought about my proposal?”

“I told you that I have no objection marrying you. But I have my own conditions. I won’t convert to your faith. I was born a Lutheran. I won’t become a Catholic. You can’t simply change your religion, as if it were a newborn’s soiled nappy.”

“You’re being stubborn.”

“Me? Take a look in the mirror.” She looked up at him and smirked. “On second thought, don’t do that. You look dreadful.”

It was not long before their steps brought them to a three-story brick building straddling both the Kehrwieder District and the Altstadt (Old Town). Ada’s father had owned a dry-goods shop and the apartments above it. But seven years ago her parents and siblings had died when they had drunk from a bottle of milk that a vendor had diluted with what turned out to be contaminated water. Whatever the illness was, it had taken the family away within two weeks — except for Ada, who had been convalescing in the hospital after giving birth to her daughter, Gudrun.

Hamburg’s Erbgesessene Bürgerschaft (Property Owners’ Association) never challenged the bereaved woman’s right to remain in the building her father had owned. But within a few months of Gudrun’s birth, while Ada was out shopping at the Meßberg (infant in her arms), a large family entered the closed-down shop, since there was no lock on the outer door, and took over all the apartments on the second floor, which had been where Ada and her family had lived. The newcomers installed bolts and locks to secure what they now claimed to be theirs.

To Hermann’s disgust, Ada defended the family, saying they were generally polite and clean and removed their waste and rubbish each morning. The hygienic squatters had insisted on the day they moved in that they were not thieves; and, as evidence of this, gave to Ada all her family’s possessions, to include her mother’s crockery and a few sticks of furniture, which the men of the invading household hauled upstairs to the upper loft where Ada and Gudrun had been forced to relocate to. The family sold the rest of Ada’s property on her behalf and claimed to have reimbursed her fully for each item sold.

From time to time the uninvited tenants (who kept a pair of noisy hens in the squalid depths of those reappropriated apartments) placed a wicker basket filled with eggs at the top of the landing with a note of goodwill addressed to Ada and her daughter. The message, which was always the same and consistently misspelled Gudrun’s name with a geminated “D,” wished Ada and her lovely daughter wealth, prosperity, and godly neighbors: “Because if we can’t trust our neighbors, who can we trust in this world?”

For years, Ada’s father had rented the upper loft as a short-term accommodation for sailors calling at port; and it was one of these, a cherubic-faced Basque, who had seduced and impregnated the landlord’s daughter. So it seemed in Ada’s mind somehow fitting that she and Gudrun should be banished to that selfsame cramped garret (beneath its semi-porous roof) where — on a drizzly afternoon, between the scattered pings of water droplets ringing in the tin pots, and the telltale creak of that unsprung sofa — her daughter had been scandalously and rather unexpectedly conceived.

When Hermann and Ada stepped into the decaying ground floor of what had been the dry-goods shop, the tarnished pewter sky over Hamburg gave way to a twilight world of dust-motes drifting amid a confusion of toppled shelves and broken wooden crates. The floor was littered with torn sack cloth and a few loose feathers from the damned chickens upstairs.

Their intrusion had disturbed an old bearded man from his sleep. He sat up in the far corner and emitted a leonine yawn, followed by a muffled, inarticulate noise from his throat.

“Who’s that?” Hermann inquired, hackles raised. “He wasn’t here last Saturday.”

“He’s just an old cripple,” she said, mounting the steps. “He’s mad or senile. And he can’t talk. I feel sorry for him.”

Before following her up the stairs, Hermann paused to study again the man whom he could barely see in the wan beams filtering through the shop’s cracked display windows. But a pale shaft falling on those ostensibly vacant eyes discovered a keenness that belied Ada’s claim that the man’s sense was shut out.

A smartly dressed woman emerged from the double-bolted door on the second-floor landing and saluted Ada coldly, waiting for her and her loutish companion to pass so that she could descend the steps and head out on an errand. The woman’s puckered visage cast mute judgment on Ada, as if anticipating the girl would soon find herself abandoned once again, with yet another mouth to feed.

“I used to be a carpenter,” Hermann said when they had reached the top. “I can put a deadbolt on your door.”

“Why?”

“To keep you and your daughter safe.”

“We are safe. This isn’t St Pauli.” She was referring to the district where Hermann lived and worked. “Nothing bad happens here, except burglaries every now and then. And I haven’t anything left to steal — not even my maidenhood.”

She opened the door and stepped inside. Hermann had to duck his head under the lintel to enter.

Gudrun ran to her mother, hugging her leg. Then she stepped back and eyeballed Hermann, saying “Guten Tag,” in a pert voice.

“Guten Tag,” Hermann replied.

The child dashed to a bricked-up stove with a flue, wiping her hands in the ashes and smearing the soot round the edges of her eyes so that they resembled Hermann’s.

He grinned, but Ada flew into a rage.

“Why would you do that?! You’re filthy now. I’m going down to fetch water. And when I get back, I’m going to wash that soot off your face with a wire brush and scrub your grubby fingernails.”

She flung her reticule on the sofa and grabbed a tin bucket on her way out.

Cleanliness was next to Godliness in Ada’s mind, a wise saw she often quoted, claiming it came from Leviticus, but Hermann doubted this. He knew his scripture fairly well. But as a Catholic, he had never read the Bible in German, having been told all his life that the German translations available were not only woefully inaccurate but could be damaging to one’s soul.

When the outer door of the dry-goods shop had slammed shut and Ada was out of earshot, Hermann winked at Gudrun.

“I thought your little joke was funny,” he said. “Did you know there’s a kind of wild-cat in America that has black eyes like mine. It’s called a ‘rukun’ — rhymes with your name: Gudrun.”

Gudrun burst into laughter. “My mommy likes you.”

“I reckon I like her too.”

That night, Ada prepared a stew with fresh beef she had bought for the occasion. When they could eat no more, Ada cleared the table and picked the meat out of the stew and put in a jar with a wide cork. Then she cast the broth out the window and washed up the pot so as not to attract roaches or rats.

The hens beneath them started clucking loudly. Gudrun imitated the sound: “Gack, gack, gack.”

The chickens overhead and responded excitedly, which prompted someone below to bang on the ceiling with a broom.

“We’re sorry,” Ada shouted, pointing her finger threateningly at her daughter.

Gudrun pulled at her hair and bared her teeth, as if her mother’s hardheartedness was driving her insane.

“She’s a little performer,” Hermann observed. “Like you.”

“I suppose,” Ada remarked, lighting a second candle because the one on the supper table had almost gone out. “I like these palm-oil candles,” she commented. (Her boss gave her a handful every week.) “The palm-oil doesn’t cast off as much soot as the tallow ones do.”

Hermann and Ada discussed many things after dinner. But they avoided any mention of his work as a prizefighter because Ada did not want Gudrun traumatized by the revelation.

It was late, time for the girl’s ablutions. Hermann stood up from the table and Ada looked at him fondly.

“Will you stay with us tonight?” she asked.

“I will. But this will likely be the last night for the season. It’s getting cold on the roof.”

“You don’t have to sleep on the roof. You have the whole sofa! It’s worn-down, but it isn’t uncomfortable.”

Gudrun had moved to the floor where she was playing with her rag doll and pretending she was not listening.

Hermann leaned forward and spoke confidentially into Ada’s ear. “We’re not married. I cannot sleep in the same room as you and your daughter. It’s not seemly.”

Ada rolled her eyes and went to the trunk against the wall. “I have a wool blanket in here that you can use.”

Hermann went to the window and unlatched both casements, pulling them inward. A gust of wind rippled the curtains. He thrust his upper body out, resting one hip on the ledge to contort his torso for the climb.

His legs went straight up and disappeared. There was a thud on the ceiling and a few flecks of plaster fell to the floor like snow. Ada grabbed a rag and wiped the mud Hermann’s boots had left on the sill.

It was not a difficult ascent but required strength, concentration, and agility. Fortunately, there were no overhangs or gutters in the way. Once he had belly-flopped over the brick parapet onto the flat bituminous surface, he went back to the edge and leaned down. He grabbed the blanket that Ada held up for him with outstretched arm.

She eased herself back inside, closing both windows. She did not latch them in case an emergency arose and Hermann needed to get back inside quickly.

Gudrun jumped up. “I think he’d make a good daddy!”

“Simmer down. He’ll hear you.”

He had heard and nodded to himself, almost wistfully.

There was a tin pot on the roof he used as a bedpan, dumping this on the other side of the building in an open-air ash heap.

He always slept in a sitting position with his back to the chimney for warmth. It was difficult to get comfortable. He never slept soundly, but there was something calming about being so close to them, to feeling needed. And the Old Town was infinitely quieter on Saturday nights than rough-and-tumble Reeperbahn, where he slept in a dank and poorly ventilated basement with his manager.

The mounting winds had stretched thin the polluted clouds overhead and the stars could at last be seen. Ever since leaving the Eltzbacher Coach Inn, nearly twelve years ago, his dreams had become untroubled, though frequently tinged with melancholy. He wondered if his willingness to resign to his Fate had effectively broken the curse of the werewolf. But he dared not hope that was the case.

He could not recall falling asleep. But he woke when the Rathaus bell tolled the first hour of the day. The sky was still limpid and he could see the circumpolar stars.

Ada was already awake. She knew that Hermann would be leaving soon. She pulled the windows open. The air was mild, unseasonably warm.

She went to the table and struck a match to light the candle from the previous night. She peeked behind the curtain to ensure Gudrun was still sleeping on the narrow bed they shared.

Hermann lowered himself down and slipped inside. Ada’s eyebrows rose in wonder. “Your black eyes are almost healed,” she whispered. “You have the stamina of a wolf.”

“Don’t say that,” he said.

With her fingers she probed his face to see if it were a trick of the candlelight. She wanted to kiss him, but feared she might provoke him. He acted strangely when he felt he was being enticed. She rested her cheek against his broad shoulder. “It would be a good thing if the two of us married.”

He made no reply but closed his eyes, savoring her touch. Ada heard the chains of the three necklaces he wore under his shirt clinking as he clenched his jaws. She wanted him to take her — there on the sofa, where the Basque had stolen her innocence seven years ago. Why not? Surely, Gudrun would not overhear them. They would cover their nakedness in the same blanket he had taken with him to the roof last night. Was it not puddled there conveniently on the floor near their feet?

Ada rose a-tiptoe to kiss Hermann on his chin. He shied away. Within seconds his footfalls died away on the steps; and all that remained of him was the heady musk his body exuded whenever the two of them teetered on the brink of unbridled passion. It was a dangerous aroma, exciting but vaguely repugnant: the scent of myrrh in the tomb of a martyr whose uncorrupted body has lost the odor of sanctity.

Continue to Chapter 2