[[" \nHALF-LIFE\nALSO BY FRANK CLOSE\n\n_The Infinity Puzzle_\n\n_Neutrino_\n\n_Nothing_\n\n_Antimatter_\n\n_The Cosmic Onion_\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2015 by Frank Close\n\nPublished by Basic Books\n\nA Member of the Perseus Books Group\n\nAll rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10107.\n\nBooks published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.\n\nDesigned by Trish Wilkinson\n\nSet in 11 point Minion Pro\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nClose, F. E.\n\nHalf life : the divided life of Bruno Pontecorvo, physicist or spy / Frank Close.\n\npages cm\n\nIncludes bibliographical references and index.\n\nISBN 978-0-465-06998-9 (ebook) 1. Pontecorvo, B. (Bruno), 1913\u20131993. 2. Nuclear physicists\u2014Soviet Union\u2014Biography. 3. Nuclear physicists\u2014Italy\u2014Biography. 4. Spies\u2014Soviet Union\u2014Biography. 5. Spies\u2014Italy\u2014Biography. I. Title.\n\nQC774.P66C56 2014\n\n530.092\u2014dc23\n\n[B]\n\n2014041019\n\n10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1\n_To Abingdonians, present and past_\nContents\n\nPreface\n\nPrologue: Midway on Life's Journey\n\nFIRST HALF\n\nONE From Pisa to Rome\n\nTWO Slow Neutrons and Fast Reactions: 1934\u20131936\n\nTHREE Paris and Politics: 1936\u20131940\n\nFOUR The First Escape: 1940\n\nFIVE Neutrons for Oil and War: 1940\u20131941\n\nSIX East and West: 1941\u20131942\n\nSEVEN The Pile at Chalk River: 1943\u20131945\n\nEIGHT Physics in the Open: 1945\u20131948\n\nNINE Maneuvers: 1945\u20131950\n\nINTERLUDE\n\nWest to East\n\nHALF TIME\n\nTEN Chain Reaction: 1949\u20131950\n\nELEVEN From Abingdon\u2014to Where? 1950\n\nTWELVE The Dear Departed: 1950\n\nTHIRTEEN The MI5 Letters\n\nSECOND HALF\n\nFOURTEEN In Dark Woods\n\nFIFTEEN Exile\n\nSIXTEEN Resurrection\n\nSEVENTEEN Mr. Neutrino\n\nEIGHTEEN Private Bruno\n\nAFTERLIFE\n\nNINETEEN The Right Road Lost\n\nAfterword\n\nAcknowledgments\n\nAcronyms\n\nNotes\n\nBibliography\n\nIndex\nPreface\n\n\"DID MI5 GET BACK TO YOU AFTER I FORWARDED THEM YOUR LETTER?\"\n\nWhen I started to research the life of Bruno Pontecorvo, the nuclear physicist who disappeared through the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War in 1950, I didn't anticipate receiving such an inquiry, let alone replying in the affirmative. Nevertheless, my correspondence with the British intelligence agency led me to solve a sixty-year-old enigma: Why did Pontecorvo flee so suddenly, just a few months after the conviction of his colleague, atomic spy Klaus Fuchs? The obvious answer\u2014that Pontecorvo was \"the second deadliest spy in history,\" as the US Congress later described him\u2014has hung around for decades, but no proof that he passed atomic secrets to the Soviets has ever been presented, nor has there been any suggestion of the information he might have disclosed. Contrary to popular wisdom, neither the FBI nor MI5 ever located evidence against him. So if Bruno Pontecorvo was a spy, he was most successful. Pontecorvo, a communist who had managed to evade detection and join the Manhattan Project, always insisted that he fled for idealistic reasons, having felt persecuted following Fuchs's arrest.\n\nBruno Pontecorvo's passage through the Iron Curtain split his life into two almost-equal halves. This chronological split defined his scientific life: great insights at the end of the first half were frustrated by his move to the Soviet Union and may have cost him his share of a Nobel Prize. His personality was also divided into two complementary halves. On one hand there was Bruno Pontecorvo, the extroverted, highly visible, brilliant scientist, and on the other was his alter ego: Bruno Maximovitch, the enigmatic, shadowy figure who was secretly committed to the communist dream.\n\nThere are already two excellent books that provide extensive assessments of Bruno Pontecorvo: _The Pontecorvo Affair_ , by Simone Turchetti, and _Il lungo freddo_ , an Italian text by Miriam Mafai. Turchetti focuses on the first half of Pontecorvo's life, the political implications of his defection, and how the British government in particular downplayed his significance at the time of his disappearance. I have profited on many occasions from discussions with Turchetti, not least in evaluating some of the new facts that have come to light during my own investigation. Mafai's book is Bruno's life story as he would wish it to appear, based on a series of interviews with Pontecorvo late in his life.\n\n_Half-Life_ takes a different approach. I am myself a physicist, and so I focused initially on Bruno Pontecorvo's life as a scientist. Klaus Fuchs, Alan Nunn May, and other players in the atomic spy saga were quality scientists, but are known only because of their role in the passing of secrets; Pontecorvo is unique in that he could merit a biography for his scientific contributions alone. The fact that his name has long been associated with those of proven atomic spies simply adds to his interest. Thus I also sought to understand his value to the USSR once he arrived there, to assess what information he could have transmitted to the Soviets before 1950, and to filter truth from myth with regard to his real agenda. I do not examine in any detail the interactions between MI5, the FBI, and their respective governments, mainly because Turchetti in his book, and Timothy Gibbs in his Cambridge University PhD thesis, have already done so. Nor do I offer any sociopolitical commentary on his political beliefs or his reactions to the profound changes he experienced during the dissolution of the USSR; Mafai has covered this, although her personal communist perspective mingles with that of Pontecorvo, and it is not always clear whether her views or his are on display. In order to make the scientific concepts digestible, I have avoided technicalities in several places. Readers who want a more in-depth study of Pontecorvo's work and its context can find it in the article \"Bruno Pontecorvo: From Slow Neutrons to Oscillating Neutrinos\" by Luisa Bonolis.\n\n_Frank Close_\n\n_Abingdon, March 10, 2014_\nPrologue: Midway on Life's Journey\n\n_1950: The Gathering Storm_\n\nNEW YEAR'S DAY 1950: THE FULCRUM OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. When the century began, no one knew that the atomic nucleus existed, let alone that it was the custodian of huge reserves of energy. By the century's end, humanity had learned to live with the possibility of a thermonuclear holocaust. As 1950 dawned, however, less than five years had passed since the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had ended World War II, and society was only beginning to realize the awful implications.\n\nIn a historic English market town near Oxford, one of the fathers of the atomic age celebrated the New Year with his family. Bruno Pontecorvo was thirty-six years old. Sixteen years earlier, as a student of physics, he had contributed to a discovery that would herald a new world of nuclear reactors and atomic weapons. That breakthrough would determine his destiny. By 1950, he had earned a reputation as one of the world's leading nuclear physicists, had recently published two papers that would lead to Nobel Prizes, and was being courted by physics institutions in both Europe and North America. This brilliant Italian scientist appeared to have an idyllic life. He lived comfortably in a pleasant home near the River Thames. He had an attractive Swedish wife and three young sons.\n\nAll seemed perfect, carefree. But Bruno Pontecorvo had a secret.\n\nFor more than ten years he had been a member of the Communist Party. At first glance, this might hardly seem to merit comment. Many intellectuals who had grown up in the 1930s and witnessed the vicious effects of fascism had chosen to ally themselves with the communist movement. By 1950, however, anticommunist hysteria was growing in the West and many lives were being ruined. For Bruno it was imperative that his communist links remain secret. During World War II his work had related to the atomic bomb, and now he was again engaged in secret work, at Harwell in the heart of England, where the United Kingdom was building the first nuclear reactor in Europe.\n\nAs it happened, the British and American intelligence agencies were already interested in Dr. Pontecorvo, and during the next few months their files on him would grow rapidly. Before February 1950, when his colleague Klaus Fuchs was arrested for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, Bruno Pontecorvo's communist beliefs did not hinder his work or his life in general. Everyone involved in classified work had a security file; Pontecorvo was but one among many. But hysteria grew after Fuchs's arrest and conviction. Events were about to move out of Pontecorvo's control, leading ultimately to his midlife crisis.\n\nGUY LIDDELL, DEPUTY DIRECTOR GENERAL OF THE BRITISH SECURITY service, MI5, sat down before his diary. A new year meant a new book, its blank pages soon to be filled with an insider's personal record of international affairs. On New Year's Day 1950, the implications of atomic weapons were at the top of his agenda.\n\nThe scientists who had built these weapons were regarded as heroes. They had managed to unleash the immense forces contained within the atomic nucleus of a rare form of the element uranium, and also of a newly synthesized element, plutonium. It is hard today to fully appreciate the cataclysmic impact these developments had on the international scientific community. The war against fascism had been won, but with a Faustian pact: victory came with the release of the atomic genie. The explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had shocked the world, but scientists already knew that even more devastating weapons were feasible. The fact that a major industrial city could be flattened by a single atomic bomb was bad enough; the next stage of nuclear technology, involving thermonuclear or \"hydrogen\" bombs, would have the potential to destroy life on earth.\n\nThe Western Allies briefly thought they had the power to rule the world, as they were the exclusive owners of these terrifying new weapons. The United Kingdom, especially, was proud that its scientists had first conceived of the new technology, and then played leading roles in its development. However, the illusion of Western omnipotence was shattered irrevocably in 1949. Liddell began his diary, \"The event of [1949] has been the explosion of an atomic bomb in Russia, which has thrown everyone's calculations out of date.\" Although the USSR had been an ally in the war against the Nazis, it had not been party to the Manhattan Project, which built the atomic bomb. As the West's relationship with the USSR grew increasingly tense in the years after the war, this fact provided some solace. Between 1945 and 1950, however, there were disquieting clues that some of those heroic Western scientists had been passing secret information about the weapon to Moscow. The Soviet Union had survived the war with large military reserves, capable of threatening American dominance. If Soviet espionage managed to neutralize the West's trump card (exclusive possession of the atomic bomb), the USSR would be a formidable enemy.\n\nThe first hint of this duplicity had come as early as the fall of 1945. That was when Western intelligence agencies learned that British physicist Alan Nunn May had taken samples crucial to the atomic bomb project from his laboratory in Canada and passed them to the Soviet Union. By the start of 1950, Western counterespionage had discovered the treachery of Klaus Fuchs as well.\n\nFuchs had passed substantial information to the Soviets, both during the war (when he was working on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos) and later, following his move to Harwell. Indeed, he transmitted enough high-quality data to the USSR to threaten the balance of world power. Liddell concluded his diary entry for the first day of 1950 by writing, \"It is clear that by 1957 the Russians should have sufficient atomic bombs to blot this country out entirely.\"\n\nHe meant it. Two bombs had reduced the major Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to rubble. Given that a city could be destroyed by just a single atomic bomb, the Soviet Union could decimate the nerve centers of Great Britain with little more than a handful. If that wasn't enough to worry him, thermonuclear hydrogen bombs were already being developed in the United States and, we now know, in the USSR. In 1957, when British prime minister Harold Macmillan asked his science adviser, Sir William Penney, how many H-bombs would render the United Kingdom useless, Penney (a gentle, peaceful man, who was no Dr. Strangelove) replied, \"Five! Or let's say eight to be on the safe side.\"\n\nThe atomic spies had given the USSR a fast track to this Promethean technology. Instead of a Western monopoly on nuclear weapons, the world now headed toward an unstable balance of mutually assured destruction.\n\nIn February 1950, Klaus Fuchs was arrested in London. The interrogation of Fuchs soon led to the arrest of Harry Gold, his courier in the United States, where Fuchs had worked (and spied) during the war. Gold's arrest and confession led the FBI to a Soviet spy ring, which included David Greenglass as well as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were destined for execution by electric chair. In the US, Senator Joseph McCarthy started a witch hunt with his claim to have a list of 205 communists working at the heart of the American government. Today we know that this was fantasy, but in the ensuing hysteria it became risky for Americans to express views that were even slightly left-of-center. One chemist who worked at the University of Wisconsin, in McCarthy's home state, later recalled, \"We would not talk about anything if a third person might be listening.\"\n\nUntil 1950, Bruno Pontecorvo had successfully hidden his life as a communist, but now his well-kept secret was threatened. A sister and a brother were also communists, as was a cousin, Emilio Sereni, who worked for the Italian government. It would be easy for Western intelligence agencies to discover this, should they choose to investigate. Bruno felt certain that they would do so. For, with the exposure of Klaus Fuchs, his colleague at Harwell, lightning had struck twice in his vicinity: four years earlier, Bruno Pontecorvo had been working in Canada alongside Alan Nunn May.\n\nThe British security services interviewed Pontecorvo in March, and again in April. His security clearance was withdrawn, and the authorities prepared to transfer him to a university, away from classified work at Harwell. In the feverish atmosphere of the times, Pontecorvo's communist associations were enough to foster suspicions that he too had passed secrets to the USSR. The intelligence agencies had no proof, but Pontecorvo was in the dark as to the contents of MI5's files. Klaus Fuchs and Alan Nunn May were prosecuted because they had confessed, and offered the intelligence agencies critical information that would condemn them. The atomic spy Ted Hall, by contrast, admitted nothing, was never arrested, and only came to public attention decades later. In Pontecorvo's case, there was one crucial question: Who would blink first in the game of cat and mouse? Suddenly, Pontecorvo disappeared, along with his wife and their three sons\u2014Antonio (age five), Tito (age six), and Gil (the eldest at twelve). They went on vacation to Italy, flew to Stockholm and Helsinki, and then disappeared completely, only resurfacing five years later\u2014in the USSR.\n\nTHE BRITISH GOVERNMENT DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE WHAT HAD HAPPENED. Bruno's brother Guido, who lived in Glasgow, didn't either. As of September 1, 1950, Bruno Pontecorvo had officially vanished. Even several years later, Pontecorvo's former teacher and mentor Enrico Fermi remained ignorant of his whereabouts, as Fermi's biography, written by his wife, Laura, in 1954, makes clear:\n\nOver three years have now passed since the Pontecorvos' disappearance. No word has been heard from them. Nobody has seen them. Their relatives deny knowing anything about them. Enrico and I have come to accept that Bruno and his family have probably passed to the other side of the Iron Curtain.\n\nThe British Government has made no charge against Bruno. If anything at all has been found in England that could be construed as evidence against him, the existence of this evidence has never been revealed. And all this happened in the twentieth century\n\nI read Laura Fermi's book in the 1960s, when I was a physics student at Oxford. Her tale of the unsolved mystery of Bruno Pontecorvo was the first time I had heard his name. So it was a shock when, a few weeks later, I saw a new article in the scientific journal _Physics Letters_ written by none other than Bruno Pontecorvo. His professional address was given as the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), in Dubna, near Moscow. \"Did anyone realize?\" I wondered. My interest in Pontecorvo began at that moment.\n\nFortunately, the head of my group at Oxford was Rudolf Peierls, a man whose knowledge of the atomic bomb and the spy sagas it had spawned was second to none. In 1940, Peierls had calculated that an atomic explosion would require no more than a few kilograms of a rare form of uranium, a calculation that would prove crucial to the Allies' Manhattan Project, which culminated in the explosions over Japan. He went on to play a central role in the project at Los Alamos, where he had worked actively with Klaus Fuchs and been his closest friend. After the war, they both returned to the UK, and when Fuchs was exposed as an atomic spy, Peierls came under suspicion himself. Peierls had also known Pontecorvo, and told me that Pontecorvo's defection had been hardly less of a shock to him than Fuchs's exposure. Many colleagues dismissed the idea that Pontecorvo, extroverted and superficially naive, could have been a spy. However, in Peierls's opinion Fuchs had also given no hints of his secret life, so one could never be sure.\n\nBut there was one thing Peierls did know: Pontecorvo's presence in the USSR had been revealed in 1955. The Soviets, for reasons best known to them, had kept his defection a secret for five years, and then suddenly revealed him to the world's media. As shocking as it was, the disclosure had actually explained very little; questions as to why he had defected so suddenly, whether he had been coerced, and whether he had anything to hide remained unresolved.\n\nMoreover, even after Pontecorvo's location had been revealed, little had been seen of him. His research reports were published in Russian journals, their English translations appearing only months later. These papers were like the tip of an iceberg, the visible sign of Pontecorvo's professional existence, while his life, and the circumstances that took him to the USSR, remained out of sight.\n\nIn 1973 I went to Eastern Europe to attend a specialized physics school, where I met Russian scientists for the first time. Pontecorvo had been listed as one of the lecturers, but he never materialized, and one of his research collaborators stood in for him. One evening, my confidence boosted by vodka, I asked my Russian colleagues about Pontecorvo but came away little wiser. Perhaps my companions were more expert with vodka than I. Pontecorvo the scientist was easy to learn about, but the man was an enigma. _Charismatic, extrovert_ , and _life and soul of the party_ were the headline descriptions, sentiments that I have heard repeated subsequently by numerous other colleagues. However, as to what lay behind this exterior, I learned little.\n\nOne of the Russians I got to know during this time was Alexei Sissakian. Alexei, who decades later would become the director of Dubna, was then, like me, a young theoretician. The tale of Bruno Pontecorvo fascinated him too. Alexei told me that he had heard Pontecorvo's name \"while still a schoolboy. Its unusually ardent ring surprised me. It was always surrounded by an aura of mystery and legend. Very little was written about him. Schoolchildren and students of my generation knew little about him. We only knew that there was a 'secret' professor at Dubna, who for ideological reasons had decided to transfer with his family to the USSR. . . . I think we shall never succeed in understanding the mystery of his transfer to the Soviet Union.\"\n\nTwo years after that encounter, I was working in England, at a laboratory adjacent to the one Pontecorvo had fled. What's more, I discovered that I was living five minutes from Pontecorvo's former home in Abingdon-on-Thames, and was working with some of his former colleagues. Some senior members of the Abingdon tennis club remembered him: he had been a champion, always neatly dressed in white. His son would ride a bicycle around the courts while he played.\n\nMY INTEREST IN PONTECORVO THE PHYSICIST WAS REAWAKENED IN 2006 following the death of Ray Davis, an American physicist who had won a Nobel Prize at the age of eighty-seven by building on one of Pontecorvo's ideas. Pontecorvo had died in 1993, and so missed out on a share of the prize. As I researched Davis's life, first for an obituary and then for a book about him, I discovered the extent of Pontecorvo's own brilliant contributions to physics.\n\nPontecorvo devoted much of his later career to the study of the enigmatic neutrino, a subatomic particle produced in nuclear reactors and in stars. His work inspired a new branch of science: neutrino astronomy. Pontecorvo's lack of recognition by the Nobel committees was no fault of theirs; rather, it resulted from a combination of bad luck and Pontecorvo's choice to live in the USSR. The vagaries of Soviet politics prevented him from performing critical experiments. His theoretical ideas were secreted for years in Russian journals, unknown in the West. Thus, instead of being one of the most famous scientists of the twentieth century, Pontecorvo is largely unknown, except as one of the \"traitors\" who leaked the secrets of the atomic bomb.\n\nThe question of whether he was in fact a spy has been a cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre for more than half a century. KGB agents have named him as one, but he himself never confirmed it. The intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada all vetted him. None found any conclusive evidence. On more than one occasion they cleared him for classified work.\n\nDecryptions of Soviet ciphers show that there were several spies operating in the West during the time in question, each identified by a nom de guerre, such as Elli, Kelly, and Moor, whose true identities have never been unambiguously established. For over sixty years there has been speculation as to whether Bruno Pontecorvo was one of them. Following his disappearance in 1950, the Western media claimed that he had been on the verge of being exposed as a spy, like Fuchs and Nunn May before him, and so had jumped ship. The British government, misled by their security services, attempted damage control by portraying Pontecorvo as a scientist who had never worked on the atomic bomb and, by implication, had no worthwhile secrets to give to the USSR. Meanwhile, British intelligence began a forensic investigation into Pontecorvo's disappearance, led by Ronnie Reed, the head of counterespionage against the USSR.\n\nAlthough Central Casting might have chosen the dashing Bruno Pontecorvo for the role of James Bond, the real-world intelligence officer could have passed for a bank clerk. Three years younger than his quarry, slightly built, with large ears, a prominent nose, and a wispy mustache, Reed was unlikely to strike fear into a suspect through his physical presence. Nonetheless, this former electronics engineer had monitored communications between secret agents during World War II, and in the war's aftermath had proved adept at identifying fleeing Nazis who had disguised themselves as civilians. Though Reed was no scientist, he shared Bruno's talent for methodical investigation, as well as his persistence, insightfulness, and healthy skepticism. He would need to uncover the mechanics of the Pontecorvos' flight, but this was less important than understanding the reasons. Reed prepared to build a complete picture of his prey: his expertise, his colleagues, and his politics. To do this, he began by researching Bruno Pontecorvo's history.\n\nLIKE REED, I BEGAN MY WORK BY EXAMINING PONTECORVO'S BACKGROUND. Sixty years have passed since Reed's investigation, so I had several advantages. We now know what became of Pontecorvo, how the Soviets regarded him, and how he, in turn, regarded them. Also, being a nuclear physicist myself, I could assess Pontecorvo's scientific value\u2014to the international community of physics throughout his life, and to the USSR in 1950. In any case, one thing was clear to me from the start: if he was a spy, he paid a huge personal price, greater even than the price paid by Klaus Fuchs and Alan Nunn May, who each spent but a short period in jail. The Soviets placed severe restrictions on Pontecorvo's freedom (similar to the constraints placed on on British traitors Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby, fellow \u00e9migr\u00e9s to the USSR), and for years cut him off from all contact with his family in the West. They also placed restrictions on his scientific research. Nevertheless, my knowledge of nuclear physics had for some time led me to suspect that Pontecorvo's significance to the USSR, during the final years of Stalin's tyranny, was probably far greater than has been generally recognized. After 1950, the USSR was desperate to build nuclear reactors, as well as other equipment that would enable them to develop an arsenal of atomic weapons, and hydrogen bombs in particular. Fuchs had passed atomic secrets to the Soviets before 1950, as had other spies, but his expertise was not available to them during Stalin's final years. Pontecorvo, however, was in the USSR, where his knowledge of nuclear science could be tapped by both the scientific community and the government.\n\nThis possibility crystallized my personal quest to resolve the lingering questions surrounding Bruno Pontecorvo's defection: Why did he go? What happened to him in the USSR? Did he claim, like Edith Piaf, \" _Je ne regrette rien_ \"? In the 1980s I had discovered that his eldest son, Gil, who had been twelve years old at the time of his father's defection, was now a scientist based at Dubna, and part of a team doing experiments in Geneva, at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. I too had worked at CERN, but we never overlapped. Recently, by chance, I found myself on a CERN committee that periodically reviewed the team's progress. In 2011, after half a lifetime, Gil and I finally made contact.\n\n\"You want to see Volga River?\"\n\nThanks to the marvels of Skype, Gil Pontecorvo's face filled the screen of my laptop. Then he turned his camera around, so that it showed the view through the window of his apartment: the Volga, four thousand miles away from my living room in Abingdon, and from the house he had left sixty years before.\n\nAt last I could learn firsthand what had happened.\nFIRST HALF\n\n\" **Midway on our life's journey** , I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost.\"\n\n_\u2014Dante's Inferno_\nONE\n\nFROM PISA TO ROME\n\nMOST OF THE SCIENTISTS WHO WORKED ON THE MANHATTAN PROJECT grew up in the 1930s, in an era when fascism was on the rise. Large numbers of intellectuals rejected such tyranny; many chose to follow the red banner of communism instead. Bruno Pontecorvo was not unusual in this regard. The events that would lead to his singular role in the history of the Cold War stemmed from experiences during his youth and early manhood, and flowered as a result of the influential people he came in contact with. Their seeds lay in his family history.\n\nThe Pontecorvos of Pisa were a wealthy and intellectually gifted Jewish family. In the nineteenth century, Pellegrino Pontecorvo introduced the spinning jenny to the Italian textile industry. His son Massimo, Bruno's father, expanded the business, eventually owning three textile factories, which employed well over a thousand people.\n\nBruno hardly knew his grandfather, as he was only five years old when Pellegrino died. Pellegrino nevertheless established the mold within which his children, and later their children, were formed. He was active in the international Jewish community, and in the 1880s rescued Jews fleeing the pogroms in Russia. He inspired the family's liberal ethics, which became more radical and explicitly antifascist following Mussolini's rise to power. Bruno and several of his relatives joined the Communist Party in the 1930s.\n\nPellegrino's funeral in 1918 was a big affair. The Russian Revolution of the previous year had inspired unrest among workers throughout Europe, not least in Italy. Even though many Italian tradesmen were threatening to rise against their bosses, the community's respect for Pellegrino was such that \"laborers and industrialists alike\" came en masse to his funeral to celebrate his life. Indeed, Pellegrino was held in such high esteem that he was given the title of _Cavaliere del lavoro_ , similar to a knighthood in the United Kingdom, in recognition of his dedication to laborers' rights.\n\nThat same year marked a sea change in global politics. World War I ended; the November Revolution overthrew the German Empire; Italy was in turmoil due to high unemployment and social conflict. The Bolsheviks had taken power in Russia, and there was a real possibility of revolution in Italy too. Into the mess goose-stepped Benito Mussolini.\n\nIn Pisa there was an antifascist demonstration in which several of Massimo's workers were involved. The local fascist leader, Guido Buffarini Guidi, came to the factory and ordered Massimo to reveal the names of the participants, and the ringleader in particular. Massimo refused. Buffarini Guidi challenged him to a duel. Fortunately the duel never took place, but Massimo's workers always remembered the support their boss had given them. Bruno's sister Anna recalled that when one of them saw her father in the street many years later, the man threw his arms around Massimo's shoulders and exclaimed that it was \"like seeing the Lord resurrected.\"\n\nIt was into such a family, with antifascism at its heart, that Bruno Pontecorvo was born on August 22, 1913. Bruno was the fourth of eight children\u2014three girls and five boys. Those were days of rigid gender roles: the girls were educated in the liberal arts; the boys were encouraged toward science and technical matters. The most intelligent of the children, in their parents' opinion, was the eldest, Guido, born in 1907. He emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1938 as part of the Jewish exodus from fascism. There, he became a distinguished geneticist, and a fellow of the Royal Society. Paolo, \"the most serious,\" was born in 1909. In 1938 he moved to the United States, where he worked on radar and microwaves during World War II. The eldest of the three sisters, Giuliana, born in 1911, was \"the most cultured.\" She became a journalist and prominent communist.\n\nBruno was followed by brother Gillo in 1919, sisters Laura and Anna in 1921 and 1924, and finally, in 1926, the youngest brother, Giovanni. The children's French governess, Mlle Gaveron, said there would be no need for her to spend time in purgatory \"as she had been there already looking after the children\u2014except for Bruno, who was heaven.\"\n\n**IMAGE 1.1.** Bruno Pontecorvo as a child. (COURTESY GIL PONTECORVO; PONTECORVO FAMILY ARCHIVES.)\n\nEach child was talented, so much so that Massimo and his wife, Maria, did not regard Bruno as particularly intelligent in comparison to his siblings. Years later, Bruno remembered that his parents described him as \"the most gentle but the most limited.\" They also said that his eyes showed him to be \"sweet but not intelligent,\" an opinion that left him with a shy disposition and an \"inferiority complex that haunted me for the rest of my life.\"\n\nBruno inherited a natural aptitude for sports. Friends recall his love for alpine skiing, underwater swimming, and, above all, tennis. Throughout his life, Bruno would recount how, at age sixteen, he had been included on Italy's national junior tennis team and been invited to attend a training camp in France. His parents refused to allow him to go, as they regarded the activity to be a distraction from serious study and wanted him to spend his time preparing for college. The disappointment of a young boy came across in the tale, even after nearly half a century had passed. His parents consoled him. They assured Bruno that his achievements in physics were also first-rate, and that with suitable dedication he could achieve great things there too. Bruno acquiesced\u2014sort of: \"Yes, but I would also like to be the Italian tennis champion.\"\n\nBruno's mother, Maria, had grown up in a highly cultured family. Her father, Arrigo Maroni, had been the director of a hospital in Milan, enjoyed the opera at La Scala, and was well known in Milanese society. Her religious background was Protestant. Massimo Pontecorvo, however, was still a traditional Jew when Bruno was born. After Pellegrino's death, Massimo continued to lead the family rituals, but attitudes toward religion in the home were changing. The younger members took part in the ceremonies, but they did so halfheartedly. Their mother was Christian, and the children were not actively Jewish. A young brother\u2014probably Giovanni\u2014even asked one of his older sisters about circumcision, only to be informed that she didn't know what it was. There were no bar mitzvahs in the Pontecorvo family, no bris rituals, no burials in Jewish cemeteries, but nonetheless they \"were Jewish enough for Mussolini.\"\n\nIndeed, the Pontecorvos' privileged and idyllic life began to unravel with the onset of Mussolini's anti-Semitic laws. The family dispersed. Guido had already settled in Britain, and in 1939, with the threat of war looming, Giovanni, Laura, and Anna, still teenagers, moved there too. The three siblings completed their education in Britain, becoming, respectively, an agriculturalist, nurse, and language teacher. Bruno's exodus in 1936, the first of his three great upheavals, had been more gradual.\n\nMany Italian intellectuals\u2014Jewish and Christian alike\u2014believed strongly in the ideals of liberal socialism. Those Jews who foresaw the consequences of fascism from the start had adopted strong antifascist positions long before anti-Semitism became formalized. Bruno's cousin Emilio Sereni was especially prominent in this regard. Sereni's mother, Alfonsina, was Bruno's father's sister. Emilio, born in 1907, was a powerful intellectual, with a strong personality of almost overpowering intensity. By the age of twenty he was reading Marxist classics avidly, and he soon married Xenichka Zilberberg, the daughter of two heroes of the Russian Revolution. Sereni joined the Communist Party of Italy in 1927. In 1929, following in the tradition of his parents-in-law, Sereni, along with his colleague Manlio Rossi-Doria, founded an underground communist organization in Italy. The following year, the fascist police arrested Sereni and Rossi-Doria, and the Special Court of State Security, which the fascists had created to \"defend the state,\" sentenced them to fifteen years in prison. Granted amnesty and freed in 1935, Sereni fled from Italy to Paris, where he became the cultural manager of the Communist Party of Italy, and the chief editor of _Lo stato operaio_ ( _The Workers' State_ ). It was during this period, in prewar Paris, two years after Bruno left Italy, that Emilio Sereni would begin to have a considerable influence over his younger cousin\u2014an influence that would frame the course of Bruno's life.\n\nPHYSICS IN ROME\n\nIt was far from obvious that Bruno would end up a great physicist. Initially he followed the same route as his older brother Paolo, and at age sixteen enrolled at the University of Pisa to study engineering. After two years, he was doing well but disliked technical drawing, so he quit engineering and, in 1931, decided to concentrate on physics.\n\nAs it happened, Bruno's childhood coincided with the emergence of atomic physics. He was born in the same year as the insight that every atom is like a miniature solar system, in which \"planetary\" electrons orbit a compact nucleus at the core. He was a student when physicists realized that an atom's ability to shed energy through radioactivity results from the instability of the nucleus and began to home in on the neutron, a still-hypothetical constituent of the nucleus. This is when his eldest brother, Guido, made a pivotal intervention.\n\nGuido was insistent: \"For physics you must go to Rome.\" Enrico Fermi was there, building a huge reputation. In 1926 Fermi had been appointed, at just twenty-five years of age, to a professorship at the University of Rome, funded by Orso Corbino, an influential Sicilian. At the time, nuclear physics was an exciting new field. Quantum theory was being used to build mathematical models of the properties of the nucleus, but experimentally it remained virgin territory. Fermi decided that the best way to revitalize Italian physics was to understand the atomic nucleus, in terms of both constituents and construction, and the relationships between the nuclei of different elements. With Corbino's support, Fermi established a laboratory in the physics department on the Via Panisperna, in Rione Monti, a few minutes' walk from the main railway station; to help in the endeavor, he gathered a team of young experimental scientists\u2014a group that became known as the \"Via Panisperna Boys.\"\n\nGuido's insistence that Bruno go to Rome stemmed from his friendship with one of the Via Panisperna Boys, Franco Rasetti. He and Guido had been friends for years and had explored the Alps together as hiking companions. At that time, Bruno was a child, patronizingly known as \"the cub.\" Rasetti paid him little attention. Years later, when Bruno presented himself to Rasetti, announcing that he wished to complete his studies in Rome, Rasetti teased him: \"Just out of your diapers and you want to become a physicist!\"\n\nAlthough he was confident and spoke with ease\u2014and was, in the words of Laura Fermi, \"uncommonly good looking\"\u2014Bruno had a tendency to blush at the least provocation. In response to Rasetti's joke about his youth, Bruno gave one of his familiar blushes, but Rasetti\u2014well aware of the intellectual strength of the Pontecorvo family\u2014encouraged Fermi to take a look at him.\n\nFermi gave him an informal exam. Years later, Bruno claimed that he showed only \"mediocre knowledge.\" Fermi explained to him that there were two categories of physicists: theoreticians and experimentalists. He then added: \"If a theorist does not have exceptional ability, his work does not make sense. As for experimental physics, there exists the possibility of useful work, even if the person has only average intelligence.\"\n\nFermi was infamously slow to praise and blunt in his criticism. It's unclear if Fermi was delicately giving his opinion, so as to guide Bruno toward experiment, or simply providing idiosyncratic commentary. In any case, in 1931 Bruno Pontecorvo entered the third year of physics at the University of Rome. This meant he had the good fortune to be studying physics in the annus mirabilis of 1932, when the atomic nucleus was discovered to have a labyrinthine structure of it own. By 1934 Bruno was ready to take part in genuine research as a member of Fermi's team, right at the dawning of a new science: nuclear physics. At age twenty-one, he was destined to be at the epicenter of one of the greatest and most far-reaching discoveries of the twentieth century.\n\nTHE PREHISTORY OF NUCLEAR PHYSICS\n\nAt the end of the nineteenth century, atoms were believed to be the fundamental seeds of all matter. The standard model of that time asserted that all atoms of the same element were identical, that different elements consisted of different types of atoms, and that compounds formed from atoms of the constituent elements. Much of this remains true today. However, the scientists of yesteryear also believed that atoms were indestructible and impenetrable objects, like miniature billiard balls. This is not the case.\n\nIn 1911, working in Manchester, Ernest Rutherford discovered that an atom is mostly empty space, with a massive, dense kernel at its center carrying a positive electric charge\u2014a kernel that he called the nucleus. In 1913, the year of Bruno's birth, Rutherford's colleague, Danish theorist Niels Bohr, proposed that atoms are held together by the electrical attraction of opposite charges. In this model, negatively charged electrons orbit the positively charged nucleus.\n\nAt that stage, no one knew what an atomic nucleus consisted of. By the time Bruno started school, Rutherford had shown that the nucleus of a hydrogen atom is the simplest of all, consisting of a single positively charged particle, which he called a proton. Rutherford had deduced that the proton was fundamental to the nuclei of all atomic elements. As a student, Bruno would have learned that atomic nuclei are lumps of positive charge, made up of protons, and that the more protons there are in the lump, the greater the charge. It is the amount of this positive charge that determines how many negatively charged electrons can be ensnared in the outer regions of the atom. The chemical elements are distinguished by the complexity of their atoms\u2014hydrogen, the simplest, consists of a single electron encircling a single proton, while helium has two protons in its nucleus, carbon has six\u2014onward to uranium with ninety-two. The chemical identity of an element is a result of its electrons, and chemical reactions occur when electrons move from one atom to another.\n\nThis simple picture first started to change in 1932, when James Chadwick of Cambridge University discovered a third basic seed of matter, the neutron. Neutrons are similar to protons but carry no electric charge; they cluster in atomic nuclei and add to the nuclear mass without changing the total charge. We now know that neutrons are an essential component of all atomic nuclei, except for that of hydrogen, which normally consists of just a single proton.\n\nEvery atom of the element uranium has ninety-two protons in its nucleus. The number of neutrons may vary, however. A rare form of uranium known as U-235 contains 143 neutrons, while the most common form, known as U-238, has 146. Adding the neutrons to the ninety-two protons in each case gives a total of 235 or 238 constituents, respectively. These varying forms are called isotopes, from the Greek _isos_ and _topos_ \u2014meaning \"the same place\" (in the periodic table of atomic elements). Although all the isotopes of a particular element have the same chemical identity, the behavior of their atomic nuclei can vary dramatically. Indeed, the neutron number is the key to extracting energy from the nucleus, either gradually in nuclear reactors or explosively in weapons. For example, U-235 forms the raw material for both nuclear power plants and atomic bombs.\n\nAn atomic nucleus, then, is more than just a core: it is a new level of reality. Within its labyrinthine structures, powerful forces are at work, which are unfamiliar in the wider world. The presence of these forces is suggested by the otherwise paradoxical fact that nuclei exist. Why do the protons, which all have the same electric charge, not repel each other and cause the nucleus to disintegrate? The answer is that there is a strong attractive force that grips protons and neutrons when they are in contact with one another. Within the nucleus this strong attraction between a pair of protons is over a hundred times more powerful than the electrical repulsion.\n\nThere is a limit, however, to the number of protons that can coexist like this. For any individual proton, the attractive glue acts only between it and its immediate neighbors. The electrical disruption, however, acts across the entire volume of the group. In a large nucleus, the total amount of electrical repulsion can exceed the localized attraction, in which case the nucleus cannot survive. The neutron, being electrically neutral, helps counteract this disruption and stabilize the nucleus. Even so, many neutrons are needed to do this, especially in larger nuclei. Uranium, with ninety-two protons, is the largest stable example in practice, requiring 140 neutrons to stabilize its protons. Yet the counterbalance is so delicate that the slightest disturbance can split a uranium atom in two, in the phenomenon known as fission.\n\nIt turns out that the strong attractive force acts most efficiently when the constituent neutrons and protons pair off exactly. Thus U-238, which has an even number of neutrons, is more stable than U-235, which has one odd neutron without a partner.\n\nEven the simplest element of all, hydrogen, has isotopes. A proton accompanied by one neutron forms a stable isotope, known as a deuteron, the nucleus of deuterium. Water (H2O) contains hydrogen; the analogous molecule consisting of deuterium\u2014D2O\u2014forms \"heavy water.\" A proton accompanied by two neutrons forms the nucleus of tritium. Tritium is mildly unstable, however, with a half-life of about twelve years. These are all the possible isotopes of hydrogen; \"quadium\" or \"H4,\" in which a proton is joined by three neutrons, does not exist.\n\nWhy don't clusters of tens or hundreds of neutrons exist on their own, without any protons mixed in? In short, it is because neutrons are inherently unstable. A neutron is slightly heavier than a proton. Given Einstein's equivalence between mass and energy, this implies that a neutron has slightly more energy locked within it than a proton does. This extra energy leads to instability\u2014so much so that an isolated neutron cannot survive for more than a few minutes on average, whereas a single proton can exist for eons, possibly even forever. As a general rule: if there are too many neutrons in a nucleus, the assembly becomes unstable.\n\nThe result of all this is that only a limited number of stable isotopes exist, namely those where the number of neutrons is close to, or larger than, the number of protons. As we go further up the periodic table of the elements, the atomic nuclei become larger, and the number of excess neutrons expands as well.\n\nIt is difficult to predict in advance which isotopes will be stable and which will not. Much of the work on atomic weapons and nuclear reactors in the 1940s and 1950s would rely on experimental tests or rules of thumb. The different isotopes of uranium, plutonium, and hydrogen would become central players in this saga, all as a result of the discovery of the neutron. Indeed, the whole course of history was changed as a result of this discovery, causing the astrophysicist Hans Bethe to describe the years leading up to 1932 as the \"prehistory of nuclear physics.\" Everything that came after was history.\n\nIt was the perfect moment for an ambitious young scientist to start a career\u2014a moment when he could investigate the mysteries of the atomic nucleus. And Enrico Fermi's group in Rome was ideal. Bruno Pontecorvo was about to become an expert in neutron physics.\nTWO\n\nSLOW NEUTRONS AND FAST REACTIONS\n\n_1934\u20131936_\n\nIT WAS IN 1934, JUST AS BRUNO WAS ABOUT TO JOIN THE TEAM, THAT Enrico Fermi's genius began to bear fruit. The circumstances that inspired him resulted from a setback in his attempt to explain one of the fundamental natural processes: a form of radioactivity known as beta decay.\n\nErnest Rutherford had identified three different varieties of radioactivity in 1899, and named them after the first three letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha, beta, and gamma. Alpha radiation consists of massive, positively charged particles, which emerge in a staccato burst when spontaneously emitted by substances such as radium. (Despite its name, the \"alpha particle\" is not a fundamental particle, since it is built from protons and neutrons\u2014two of each, or four particles in all. However, the quartet is so commonly produced in radioactive decays that it was identified before its nuclear structure was recognized, and the name stuck.) Beta radiation consists of electrons, not those preexisting in the atom but ones created when an unstable isotope changes into a more durable form. Gamma radiation involves high-energy photons, with much shorter wavelengths than visible light. Although these three forms of radioactivity were known at the start of the twentieth century, no one understood how they arose, or what effects they had on the nucleus, for another two decades.\n\nBeta decay was especially tantalizing, since energy seemed to be disappearing without a trace. As an explanation, Austrian theorist Wolfgang Pauli proposed in 1930 that the electron\u2014the beta particle\u2014is accompanied by an unseen, electrically neutral particle, which carries away the missing energy. This is the neutrino, literally the \"little neutral.\" Unfortunately, Pauli's hypothetical neutrino was so ghostly that he feared it might never be detected. The idea of the neutrino excited Fermi, however, who used it in a theory of beta decay in 1933.\n\nFermi's inspiration came when he visualized a nucleus made from neutrons and protons. He realized that a neutron behaves much like a proton with its electric charge removed, and he guessed that the neutrino might be similarly related to the electron. He proposed that beta decay occurs when a neutron, within a nucleus, spontaneously changes into a proton, conservation of electric charge is maintained due to the appearance of an electron, and the overall energy balances due to the creation of a neutrino.\n\nToday we know that Fermi was fundamentally correct. However, the editor of _Nature_ , the journal to which Fermi submitted his paper, \"Tentative Theory of Beta Rays,\" for publication, rejected it on the grounds that it contained \"speculations too remote from reality to be of interest to the reader.\" Fermi's paper was eventually published in another journal, but the arguments with the editor of _Nature_ had exhausted Fermi to such an extent that he decided to switch from theory to experiments \"for a short while.\" In fact, this change of focus lasted for the rest of his life.\n\nIn January 1934, Fermi went on a skiing trip to the Alps. It was on his return that he saw the way forward, thanks to a discovery made in France by Ir\u00e8ne Joliot-Curie (the daughter of Marie Curie) and her husband, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric. The Joliot-Curies had been exploring the uncharted inner space of the atomic nucleus since at least 1930. Four years later, after a series of misadventures, they made a discovery that would inspire Fermi and his group\u2014including its new member Bruno Pontecorvo.\n\nThis discovery was made possible through the investigation of radioactivity, which enabled scientists to unravel the deep structure of atomic nuclei. Radioactivity intrigued many physicists, but for Ir\u00e8ne and Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric there was a special motivation. Ir\u00e8ne's mother, Marie Curie, had discovered that the element radium is so highly radioactive that it is warm\u2014one can literally feel it pour out energy spontaneously. This energy is carried off by alpha particles. A few grams of radium can therefore function as a practical source of large numbers of alpha particles, which are like atomic bullets, able to smash into atoms of other elements. In this respect, Ir\u00e8ne and Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric were in a privileged position. Thanks to Marie Curie, their laboratory in Paris had access to more radium than anywhere else in the world. This inspired the Joliot-Curies to use this invaluable element as a source of alpha particles, which they used to bombard atoms of other elements. The result was a memorable series of experiments in the early 1930s. In one such experiment, the Joliot-Curies bombarded a sample of aluminum with alpha particles. A Geiger counter near the target sample started crackling when the irradiation began; when the barrage ended, the crackling continued, decreasing to half its original intensity after about three minutes.\n\nThis is what had happened: An aluminum nucleus consists of thirteen protons and fourteen neutrons. The addition of an alpha particle to the mix temporarily supplies two more protons and two more neutrons; however, the collision of the particles chips off a single neutron from the nucleus, leaving a cluster of 15 neutrons and 15 protons. This group of thirty is a radioactive isotope of phosphorus, called phosphorus-30. It decays with a half-life of three minutes, which explains the behavior of the Joliot-Curies' Geiger counter.\n\nThis was revolutionary work. In 1933, Ernest Rutherford had famously remarked that anyone who believed in extracting energy from the atomic nucleus was talking \"moonshine.\" If natural radioactivity had been the only possible kind, Rutherford would have been right. However, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric and Ir\u00e8ne had discovered that it is possible to alter the nucleus, and thereby induce radioactivity in otherwise inert material, such as ordinary aluminum. Their experiment showed that it is possible to liberate part of an atom's latent nuclear energy at will, potentially in amounts far exceeding anything known to chemistry.\n\nThe vista the Joliot-Curies revealed included a wealth of opportunities for medicine, science, and technology. Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric and Ir\u00e8ne received a Nobel Prize for their discovery in 1935. Upon receiving the award, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric presciently remarked that by modifying atoms this way it might be possible to \"bring about transmutations of an explosive type.\" He went on: \"If such transmutations do succeed in spreading in matter, the enormous liberation of useful energy can be imagined.\" It was a chance observation by Bruno Pontecorvo that began the transformation of this idea from imagination to reality, and marked the start of a new age.\n\nTHE VIA PANISPERNA BOYS\n\nFermi's group of young researchers, based at the laboratory on Rome's Via Panisperna, had been working together for about a year when Bruno joined them. This team of brilliant individuals was the brainchild of Orso Corbino, the head of the physics department at the University of Rome. Combative and quick, the Sicilian Corbino was an astute politician with sound judgment, and he would tirelessly pursue any goal that enthused him. He saw Fermi's talent, hired him, and provided the funds to build a research team.\n\nPart of what enabled Corbino to accomplish this was his membership in Mussolini's cabinet, despite never having joined the Fascist Party. Fermi, although barely in his thirties, had enough political acumen to appreciate the delicacy of the situation, realizing that the group's resources were ultimately a gift of the government. He therefore insisted that physics and politics be kept separate within his team. This meant that Bruno's first experience of scientific research was as an apolitical enterprise. Much would change later.\n\nWith Corbino's support, Fermi attracted a handful of talented young people to the group. The eldest, Franco Rasetti, born in 1901, was the same age as Fermi. He would burst into high-pitched cackles of laughter at the least provocation. The two whom Bruno was closest to throughout his life were Emilio Segr\u00e8 and Edoardo Amaldi. Segr\u00e8, four years younger than Fermi and Rasetti, was the most serious of the group, cautious and not inclined to go along with the tomfoolery of some of his colleagues. Amaldi, two years younger than Segr\u00e8, with a cherubic face and a mass of brown hair, was the baby until Bruno's arrival. Fermi, with his infallible intellect, became known as the Pope; Corbino, holding the purse strings, was the Eternal Father; Rasetti, Fermi's deputy, was the Cardinal Vicar. Segr\u00e8 was called the Basilisk, reflecting what the others perceived as his rather irritable character, and Amaldi was called the Child. The final member of this holy caucus was Giulio Trabacchi, who provided them with a source of neutrons, which became key to their research; Trabacchi was thus known as the Divine Providence. When Bruno arrived, five years younger than Amaldi, he became known as the Puppy.\n\nBruno's first piece of research followed the discovery by Amaldi and Segr\u00e8 that the spectra of the gaseous form of certain elements alter when other gases are present. Fermi theorized that this is because the electrons at the periphery of heavy elements are nearly free, move relatively slowly, and bounce off the surrounding atoms. This changes the energy of the electrons and, in turn, the spectrum of light they emit. To test Fermi's theory, Bruno repeated the experiment, and measured the spectrum of mercury vapor in the presence of various gases. The measurements were delicate; their analysis complicated. Based on this work, Bruno published the first paper of his life, at the age of twenty-one. Fermi must have been impressed, for in the summer of 1934 he co-opted the young experimenter onto his team.\n\nBY THIS TIME, FERMI AND THE VIA PANISPERNA BOYS HAD BEEN working on induced radioactivity for six months\u2014ever since Fermi had returned from his ski vacation and learned of the Joliot-Curies' discovery. Fermi had decided this phenomenon was ripe for his team to investigate\u2014not using alpha particles, as the Joliot-Curies had, but neutrons.\n\nIn hindsight, this is an obvious idea, but at the time it was radical. The fact that others hadn't immediately tried it came down to logistics: free neutrons are very rare. To create beams of neutrons, you first have to bombard atoms of the element beryllium with alpha particles. Because most of these fail to hit the beryllium nuclei, the process generates only one neutron per 100,000 alpha particles. This seemed so wasteful that most laboratories dismissed the project, if they considered it at all.\n\nNonetheless, Fermi persevered with neutrons because they had one huge advantage over alphas: neutrons are electrically neutral. Because alphas are electrically charged, like the atomic nuclei they are invading, getting an alpha particle into a nucleus is like forcing the north poles of two magnets to touch. When alphas (like those used by the Joliot-Curies) enter the dense forest of atoms in a bulk target, they are rejected by the positive nuclei and ensnared by the negative electrons, usually within a fraction of a millimeter of the sample's surface; even a sheet of paper can absorb them. There is little chance of an alpha particle hitting an atomic nucleus in so short a journey. Neutrons, being electrically neutral, can enter a nucleus without this difficulty. On March 20, 1934, Fermi accomplished his goal, inducing radioactivity in aluminum by means of neutrons, before doing the same with fluorine. In each case the balance of neutrons and protons in the target atoms is delicate, and the invader disturbs it. The new grouping gives up some energy and attains equilibrium by readjusting the ratio of neutrons and protons, which it achieves by emitting an electron or a positron\u2014the phenomenon of beta radioactivity. Fermi announced his discovery in a letter to _La ricerca scientifica_ on March 25, 1934: \"Radioactivity induced by neutron bombardment.\"\n\nNext, Fermi attacked heavier elements. Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric and Ir\u00e8ne Joliot-Curie had successfully induced radioactivity only in elements that were relatively light, mainly because such elements had only a limited amount of charge with which to resist the alpha-particle invader. Fermi saw that neutrons had a huge advantage when it came to bombarding heavier atoms, so he decided to launch a systematic attack\u2014firing neutrons at every element on the periodic table.\n\nThis would require a team effort, so Fermi co-opted Amaldi, Segr\u00e8, and Rasetti, as well as a young chemist named Oscar D'Agostino. By the summer of 1934, they had tested about sixty elements, and induced radioactivity in about forty of them. Some elements released more radioactivity than others\u2014hydrogen gave none; fluorine a little; aluminum more. These qualitative differences were clearly real, but some means of quantifying the results was needed.\n\nFermi's team developed a standard scale based on silver, which had been in the middle of the qualitative range. By this stage the team had mastered the techniques, meaning that the continuing work of recording these measurements was straightforward, ideally suited to a novice. So the task of building the scale fell to Bruno Pontecorvo, working with Amaldi.\n\nBRUNO EXPERIENCES A MIRACLE\n\nThe team's protocol called for samples of each element to be engineered into hollow cylinders, into which they placed the neutron source. To protect the surroundings from radiation, they placed the sample and the source inside a box of lead and left them, giving the neutrons time to activate the sample. After a while they removed the sample and measured its activity.\n\nEventually Bruno noticed something odd: the position of the sample within the box, and the box within the room, influenced its ultimate degree of radioactivity, as if some strange telepathy linked it to surrounding objects. Bruno recalled his astonishment later: \"There were wooden tables in the laboratory which had miraculous properties. Silver irradiated on these tables became much more radioactive than when an identical sample was irradiated on the marble tabletops in the room.\" Bruno and his partner described this phenomenon to Rasetti\u2014the Cardinal Vicar\u2014who thought it was nonsense. Although he knew that Bruno had precocious abilities, Rasetti considered his laboratory work \"extremely clumsy\" and feared that Pontecorvo's sloppiness had infected Amaldi. Hearing of their observations, he diplomatically suggested that their results were nothing more than evidence of \"anomalies due to statistical error and inaccuracy of measurements.\"\n\nFermi agreed that \"the results did not make sense at all,\" leaving Amaldi and Pontecorvo to suffer a terrible couple of weeks. However, as Fermi was always open-minded about the surprises nature might contain, he decided to investigate the phenomenon for himself, despite his misgivings. He later recalled, \"It occurred to me to see what would happen if I put a piece of lead in front of the source of neutrons\"\u2014that is, between the source and the silver. He was preparing the lead on a lathe very carefully, when he noticed a piece of paraffin wax lying around. Then, \"without any conscious reason,\" he left the lathe and decided to use the paraffin instead of the lead. He confirmed that the radioactivity of the silver was much higher than it had been without the paraffin. Perhaps his criticism of Amaldi and Pontecorvo had been unfair.\n\nIt was the morning of Saturday, October 20. Amaldi, Rasetti, and Pontecorvo were in their offices. Fermi showed them his results, and then it was time for lunch. What happened next would become part of the folklore of physics.\n\nDuring lunch, Fermi continued to ruminate. What do paraffin and wood have that marble does not? He visualized a neutron in flight, bumping into atoms in its surroundings and slowing down. A lightweight atom, such as hydrogen, would be especially good at reducing the neutron's speed. Hydrogen is present in water, which is found in wood but not marble. It is also present in paraffin. Could slowed-down neutrons be the key to the riddle? Then he saw the answer: whereas alpha particles have a positive charge and need high speed to penetrate the repulsive electric fields that surround a nucleus, neutrons don't need any such aid. For neutral neutrons, impervious to electrical impediment, the rule is: the slower, the better. Lumbering neutrons, slowed to the point that their motion is no more than thermal agitation, remain in the vicinity of the target atoms for longer than fast-moving ones, giving them a greater chance of being captured and activating the sample. Fermi had experienced an epiphany: slow neutrons are especially good at inducing nuclear reactions.\n\nThis was a remarkably bold conclusion. Up to that time, the received wisdom had been that the harder you hit a nucleus, the more likely it is to fragment. If Fermi was correct, then this wisdom was wrong: nature is more subtle. In fact the radioactivity would become especially strong if there were some means of slowing the neutrons radically. His musings had already suggested a way to do this: use a substance containing plenty of hydrogen, such as water.\n\nHydrogen is the lightest element of all, its atomic nucleus consisting of a single proton. For our purposes, the key feature is that the proton has almost the same mass as a neutron. As can be seen in the analogy of two billiard balls colliding, it is when two particles of the same or similar masses collide that energy is most rapidly dissipated. Bounce a billiard ball against the edge of the massive table, and the ball bounces back at (almost) the same speed; in the case of a neutron, this is analogous to the neutron hitting a massive atom of lead and recoiling unslowed. However, if one billiard ball hits another ball, which was initially stationary, they both recoil, the first ball slowing in the process. As for billiard balls, so for neutrons and protons. It was the presence of hydrogen\u2014each atom of which contains but a single proton\u2014that slowed the neutrons most efficiently. The presence of hydrogen atoms in the wooden tabletop, and their absence in the marble, thus explained the difference in behavior that Pontecorvo and Amaldi had noticed. The hydrogen in the paraffin explained Fermi's results too.\n\nThis conclusion had not been obvious. The place to test it, however, was. Senator Corbino, who had founded Fermi's laboratory, had a spacious apartment in the building, with access to a walled garden. Enclosed by the physics buildings and the church of San Lorenzo in Panisperna, it contained an almond tree, a classical water fountain, and a goldfish pond. The physicists rushed to Corbino's pond, armed with their neutron source and silver sample. They put them underwater and watched expectantly. Corbino's goldfish continued to swim unperturbed while the scientists leaned over the edge of the pond, full of eager anticipation. That historic afternoon\u2014October 22, 1934\u2014they found the answer. The activity in the silver rose dramatically. That same evening, highly excited, they drafted a paper for publication in a scientific journal.\n\nBeyond supplying the pond, Corbino had not been involved, but he was always interested in the work of his \"Boys.\" Sensing their animation, he asked what was going on. Once he was told about the slow-neutron phenomenon, he became excited, and joined them in Amaldi's small apartment as they drafted a paper. Corbino was initially relaxed, but when they started to write a second paper he erupted. He waved his hands and screamed, \"Are you crazy?\" This Sicilian man of the world had realized what the young scientists, living in an ivory tower, had not: their discovery could have industrial applications. Previously, the quantity of radioactive material that could be created using alpha particles or neutrons had been trifling. However, the slow-neutron technique could produce it a hundred times more abundantly, and the practical implications were tantalizing. \"Take a patent before you give out more details on how to make radioactive substances,\" he urged.\n\nSATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING\n\nThe story just related was told by Laura Fermi in her biography of her husband, Enrico. The book was a best-seller, which helped turn the tale into folklore, and then into received wisdom. The story was then retold by Edoardo Amaldi and repeated by many, including Enrico Fermi himself. However some details are wrong, and reveal the tricks of false memory.\n\nEnrico Fermi's laboratory notebook shows that the first hint of the breakthrough came on Saturday, October 20, as stated above. However, Laura Fermi, Edoardo Amaldi, and Emilio Segr\u00e8, who wrote later from memory, placed it on the same day that they drafted the paper: October 22. Fermi's logbook, which dates from the time in question, shows that two days elapsed between the epiphany and the paper. What really happened?\n\nFermi's own record shows that he performed tests, with and without paraffin, on Saturday, October 20. His insight about water matured during lunchtime. However, one cannot immediately rush to a pond, dunk samples in it, and see them spontaneously burst into radioactive life. First you have to irradiate the samples with neutrons, underwater, for some considerable time.\n\nThere seems to have been a bucket of water in the laboratory, which a cleaner had left. Fermi immersed samples of cesium and rubidium nitrate in this water, and irradiated them overnight, from Saturday night to Sunday morning. On Sunday, he measured the amount of induced activity in these two samples.\n\nThe results convinced him that he was on the right track, so he continued the exercise. He now prepared samples of sodium carbonate, lithium hydroxide, platinum, ruthenium, and strontium. Overnight, from Sunday to Monday, he irradiated them \"in the water.\" On Monday morning, October 22, he measured the amounts of induced radioactivity in each sample. He began with the sodium carbonate at 9:45 a.m., continued with lithium and platinum during the late morning, and completed the task with ruthenium and strontium after midday.\n\nThe two-day discrepancy with regard to the date is not important in itself, other than as proof that memory can be an unreliable guide. The story of Corbino's pond is so delightful that I hope it really happened. By the afternoon of the twenty-second, Fermi was satisfied that the samples had become more active underwater. If the cleaner had removed the water bucket, as in some versions of the story, it is plausible that the excited youngsters would make a student demonstration in the goldfish pond. In any case, the fact that the paper was drafted on the evening of the twenty-second is certain. This took place at Edoardo Amaldi's house. His son Ugo, who was then just a baby, recalls being told at several family gatherings that \"I was asleep upstairs\" on that fateful night, and also that the next day Ugo's nanny asked his mother whether the \"signori the night before had been tipsy.\"\n\n**IMAGE 2.1.** The Via Panisperna Boys, from left to right: Oscar D'Agostino, Emilio Segr\u00e8, Edoardo Amaldi, Franco Rasetti, and Enrico Fermi. The photograph was taken by Bruno Pontecorvo. (COURTESY GIL PONTECORVO AND DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS, SAPIENZA UNIVERSITY OF ROME.)\n\nPAPERS AND PATENTS\n\nFermi's name appeared as the first author on the paper. This reflected his leadership in the discovery. His collaborators then appeared in alphabetical order: Amaldi, Pontecorvo, Rasetti and Segr\u00e8. Four days later, the discovery became the subject of a patent: \"To increase the production of artificial radioactivity with neutron bombardment.\" The patent owners are the above quintet, along with chemist Oscar D'Agostino and Giulio Trabacchi, who had provided the neutron sources.\n\nThe scientists knew they had stumbled upon something with potentially immense importance. To record the moment they took a photograph, which has since become iconic. It shows the young men\u2014Fermi, Rasetti, Amaldi, and Segr\u00e8\u2014and D'Agostino the chemist. Years later, Edoardo Amaldi's son Ugo asked Bruno why he too was not in the famous picture. The answer: \"I was on the other side of the camera.\" As the youngest member of the team, Bruno was given the responsibility of taking the photograph.\n\nAlthough Bruno was the last person to join the team, his role in the discovery had been honored by his inclusion on the patent. On November 1, he received more formal recognition, receiving an appointment as a temporary assistant at the Royal Institute of Physics and the University of Rome. On November 7, his significance was further highlighted when a second paper about slow neutrons was sent to _La ricerca scientifica_ for publication. This one had just three authors: Fermi, Pontecorvo, and Rasetti. This was an outstanding achievement: Pontecorvo's name stood alone between those of the two senior professors on the team.\n\nThis paper provided experimental confirmation of Fermi's conjecture: it is indeed the presence of hydrogen that causes neutrons to slow. It also reported that, in addition to being activated, the targets absorb the slow neutrons. Furthermore, the team discovered that there is an enormous range in the ability of various substances to absorb slow neutrons. This would become important later in selecting materials for use in nuclear reactors.\n\nSoon afterward, Pontecorvo performed a series of experiments using substances that contained no hydrogen. He measured how effectively they slowed neutrons, and published a paper as sole author in April 1935. In less than a year he had become an expert in a new field of huge importance.\n\nThe key to nuclear power is to slow neutrons efficiently, and the most effective way to do so is to use either heavy water or graphite. At the time, however, it didn't occur to Fermi's team that this could be the key to practical nuclear power\u2014further discoveries would be needed before that route opened.\n\nEven so, others were already anticipating the future. Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard believed that energy could be liberated from the atomic nucleus so abundantly and cheaply that an \"industrial revolution could be expected.\" Corbino remarked that nuclear physics could become a new \"super-chemistry,\" producing more energy than conventional chemical reactions, with potential benefits for national electricity production. In 1934, however, these were little more than well-considered speculations.\n\nBruno Pontecorvo's first real steps into physics had led to a patent for a means of inducing radioactivity through the use of slow neutrons. Years later he recalled how the process was sold to the US Government, leading to payments for many years\u2014to \"everyone except me.\" The US patent, which was filed on October 3, 1935, includes the assertion \"To obtain radioactive substances in quantities of practical importance.\" Uranium is explicitly mentioned. The implications of this discovery, and the corresponding patents, were to prove far-reaching. They would affect both the world at large and Bruno Pontecorvo's personal destiny. He had been a midwife at the birth of the nuclear age.\n\nNIELS BOHR EXPLAINS THE NUCLEUS\n\nDespite their success, Fermi's team was still exploring in the dark. They had stumbled on a phenomenon\u2014the efficacy of slow neutrons\u2014and exploited it, but the breakthrough had given them no real understanding of what was going on deep in the atomic nucleus.\n\nIn Copenhagen, Niels Bohr was puzzled by the Italian team's discovery that slow neutrons affected the nuclei of some elements more than others. Years before, he had published his model of the atom, which treated electrons like planets orbiting a central nuclear sun. He turned now to the nature of the nucleus itself.\n\nGiven the miniscule diameter of an atomic nucleus, a speeding neutron would pass through one in a billionth of a trillionth of a second. To capture a neutron, the nucleus first has to stop it, which involves absorbing its kinetic energy somehow. Because overall energy must be conserved, this kinetic energy has to be transferred somewhere, and there was no obvious way of getting rid of it in such a short time span. Fermi's measurements unambiguously showed that the neutrons were captured. Bohr took it upon himself to find where the energy went.\n\nOne day in 1935, while listening to a seminar in Copenhagen describing these problems, Niels Bohr suddenly \"sat still, his face completely dead.\" Others in the audience at first thought that he was ill. Then he stood up from his seat and exclaimed, \"Now I understand it!\"\n\nBohr went to the board and explained his vision of the atomic nucleus. He saw it not as a single lump of charge acting like a lone particle, but as a tightly packed cluster of protons and neutrons, which touch one another. During a reaction the constituents are excited into a temporarily unstable compound state, which returns to a stable configuration once the reaction is over.\n\nBohr's picture explained how Fermi's neutrons were slowed, reduced in energy, and captured, all in a way that was consistent with what the Rome team had found. Like a cue ball in pool hitting the rack, a neutron hitting a crowded nucleus gives up its energy to the nucleus's individual components, which recoil, bump into one another, and spread the impact around, sharing the energy among themselves. The nucleus becomes hot, and then cools down by radiating gamma rays, but no individual constituent member escapes. Having been the first to envision a picture of the atom, he had now come up with the model of the nucleus that is still, in essence, the foundation of modern nuclear theory.\n\nThe discovery by the Via Panisperna Boys had inspired Bohr's explanation of the dynamics of atomic nuclei, and this, along with the breakthrough by the Joliot-Curies, opened up possibilities for mining the energy latent within the nucleus. By the mid-1930s, nuclear physics was fast becoming the frontier area of research worldwide. In the opinion of Maurice Goldhaber, one of the foremost Americans in the field, the leaders were Rutherford's group in Cambridge, followed by Fermi's group in Rome and the Joliot-Curies' group in Paris. Igor Kurchatov, in Leningrad, led the team that Goldhaber ranked fourth.\n\nKnown as \"the General\" because he was a leader and liked to give orders, Igor Kurchatov was energetic, argumentative, and prone to expressive swearing. In 1932, at the age of twenty-nine, Kurchatov heard about the discovery of the neutron and the Joliot-Curies' breakthrough. Although he had been working on the electrical properties of materials, he abruptly changed course to nuclear physics, and when the Via Panisperna Boys discovered the slow-neutron phenomenon, Kurchatov immediately saw its importance and decided to specialize in neutron physics. Between July 1934 and February 1936, his team published seventeen papers on induced radioactivity, one of which particularly impressed Bruno Pontecorvo.\n\nKurchatov was at the start of a stellar career. Within ten years, he would lead the Soviet efforts to develop nuclear weapons, and be recognized as the father of the Soviet atomic bomb. In the 1930s, the number of scientists working in the field of nuclear physics was still small, and its practitioners around the world were all known to one another. The possibility that its future would be full of secrecy, paranoia, and military applications was still undreamed of.\n\nTHE VIA PANISPERNA BOYS HAD BECOME ACKNOWLEDGED LEADERS of a new field of physics. Although their famous breakthrough involved little more than a bucket of water (or perhaps a goldfish pond), many attacks on nuclear structure required large machines. In Cambridge, during 1932, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton had built a five-meter tower of capacitors, which they could charge to about 500,000 volts. This created powerful electric fields, enabling the Cambridge team to accelerate electrically charged particles, such as protons. When these high-energy protons hit the nuclei of atoms in a target, Cockcroft and Walton discovered that these nuclei were shattered. They had built what later became known as an \"atom smasher.\"\n\nIn Berkeley, California, Ernest Lawrence built a machine that used a mix of electric and magnetic fields to guide charged particles around curves, speeding them up as the arc grew bigger. This invention, known as a cyclotron, gave birth to what is known today as high-energy physics. Although Rutherford was reluctant to embrace large-scale physics at Cambridge, elsewhere\u2014most notably in Berkeley\u2014a new age of particle accelerators was beginning. Those who didn't join this new adventure were in danger of being left behind. James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron, was disappointed in Rutherford's reluctance and left Cambridge in 1935. He moved to Liverpool, where he built a cyclotron with help from Cockcroft.\n\nFermi and his team recognized the importance of this new strategy, but they were unable to get the financial support needed to build an accelerator. The team began to break up, partly due to this difficulty, and partly due to the growing threat of fascism. For Pontecorvo, young and ambitious, it was time to move on.\n\nIn 1935, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric and Ir\u00e8ne Joliot-Curie won the Nobel Prize for the work that had inspired Fermi and set Pontecorvo on his own research path. Whereas Fermi's Italian team had shone like a supernova, bursting into brilliance and then fading, the Joliot-Curies' lab in Paris was emerging as a steady star of nuclear physics. The couple began to attract foreigners to their lab. That same year, Pontecorvo won a scholarship from the Italian Ministry of National Education. Funded by this award, he moved to Paris in 1936 to work alongside the Joliot-Curies. Pontecorvo was certainly well placed within the scientific community: he was a member of one internationally famous team of nuclear researchers and about to join another.\nTHREE\n\nPARIS AND POLITICS\n\n_1936\u20131940_\n\nBRUNO PONTECORVO'S CHILDHOOD, ADOLESCENCE, AND EARLY adulthood spanned an era bracketed by two world wars. He was born just before World War I started, was five when it ended, and had recently graduated from college when World War II began. It is a clich\u00e9 to say that much had changed during that quarter century, but for Bruno Pontecorvo and his family this was cruelly true.\n\nAlthough Italy was involved in World War I for only three years, it spent more money in that short time than it had during the previous half century, and nearly two million Italian citizens were killed or wounded. Having suffered such extreme costs, both financial and personal, the Italians expected some reward for their contribution to the victory. Such hopes were soon dashed. At the Paris Peace Conference that followed the war, the \"Big Three\"\u2014the United States, the United Kingdom, and France\u2014regarded Italy's delegation as minor players. This slap in the face generated great resentment. Italians viewed their government as weak; dissatisfaction festered. Unions were formed. Demonstrations, strikes, and militancy quickly followed.\n\nSoon, Italy was in turmoil. During 1920, many factories were occupied. Industrial unrest spread rapidly, and at one point half a million workers were involved, spearheaded by the Italian socialist and communist parties. Fascism too began its rise. Benito Mussolini, having been expelled by the socialists in 1914, formed the National Fascist Party. By 1922 he was prime minister, and by 1925 he was the self-styled \"Il Duce\"\u2014the Leader.\n\nThe Pontecorvo family's reaction was typical of many intellectuals opposed to fascist rule, with its censorship, overweening propaganda, and (later) active anti-Semitism. In 1936, following Hitler's example in Germany, Mussolini enacted laws forbidding Jews from holding positions of authority, such as in universities, and limiting their right to work in a variety of ways. Anti-Semitism soon erupted into violent persecution.\n\nAt the time, Italy had large numbers of people who were technically Jewish but didn't actively practice the religion. The Pontecorvos fell squarely into this category. However, in such a vicious environment, you became Jewish whether you liked it or not. It was in this climate that the Pontecorvo family dispersed.\n\nThe rise of fascism also led to the breakup of Fermi's group in Rome. Fermi himself emigrated to the United States in 1938. By this time Bruno had already moved to Paris, where he'd joined the team of Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric and Ir\u00e8ne Joliot-Curie. As it happened, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric was an active communist, and Ir\u00e8ne was a fellow traveler. Against the backdrop of the 1936\u20131939 Spanish Civil War, which caused thinking people around the world to declare their political allegiances, Bruno soon joined Europe's intellectual nexus in the fight against fascism.\n\nYEARS LATER, AFTER BRUNO DISAPPEARED INTO THE SOVIET UNION, the British security services would identify the Paris years as the time when Bruno Pontecorvo had been \"exposed to the virus of communism.\" Their informant identified several communists present in Bruno's circle, including his cousin Emilio Sereni, as well as Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot and a certain Professor Langevin.\n\nPaul Langevin was a physicist who had been Marie Curie's lover after the death of her husband in 1906. Two decades later, his influence pervaded the Joliot-Curies' laboratory. Indeed, he had been Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric's mentor, and it was through Langevin that Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric had gained his introduction to the Curie laboratory. As fascism threatened to engulf Europe, Langevin, like many intellectuals, had chosen communism. By the 1930s, he was one of the most influential people in France, and dreamed of setting up a workers' university in Paris, built according to Marxist ideals. When Langevin proposed this idea, both Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric and Ir\u00e8ne offered to give lectures.\n\nLangevin was also a foreign member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1933, when he invited Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric to join him for ten days of scientific meetings in Leningrad and Moscow, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric was only too happy to come along. Langevin introduced him to many Soviet intellectuals. On that occasion, Ir\u00e8ne was unwell and stayed in France, but she joined her husband on several visits to the Soviet Union later.\n\nWith the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, France had become a haven for left-wing intellectuals fleeing fascist persecution. Communists in France joined the strategic Popular Front, which included all the parties of the left and center. Ir\u00e8ne and Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric were strong supporters.\n\nThis vibrant cosmopolitan community awaited Bruno as he set out from Italy in February 1936. After an overnight train journey, during which he had to stand, leaning against a window, Bruno Pontecorvo arrived at the Gare de Lyon in Paris on Leap Day, February 29.\n\nIr\u00e8ne and Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot-Curie were at the height of their power and influence: they had won the Nobel Prize the previous December for their discovery of induced radioactivity; in the month of Bruno's arrival they attended the first Mendeleev Conference in Moscow, where Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric gave the opening address, discussing their breakthrough. Following the conference, the couple spent nearly a month in the Soviet Union, meeting many influential people, in both science and government. Meanwhile, in France, within weeks of Bruno's arrival, the Popular Front swept to power, led by L\u00e9on Blum. Blum immediately invited Irene to serve as undersecretary of state for scientific research.\n\nAt twenty-three years of age, Bruno Pontecorvo could hardly have failed to be impressed.\n\nLEFT WING ON THE LEFT BANK\n\nThe picturesque narrow streets of Paris's Latin Quarter, on the Left Bank of the River Seine, weave in and around the buildings of the Sorbonne and the Coll\u00e8ge de France. A ten-minute walk south of the former Joliot-Curie laboratory is the Panth\u00e9on. Originally a church, the Panth\u00e9on is now a secular mausoleum, containing the remains of French \"national heroes,\" including Pierre and Marie Curie, though not their daughter or son-in-law. Immediately in front of the edifice is the Place du Panth\u00e9on, where, among the caf\u00e9s and offices, stands an eighteenth-century building: the H\u00f4tel des Grands Hommes. Eighty years ago, when Bruno arrived in Paris, this grandly named residence was quite basic, even sleazy. Its main attraction for students and young researchers at the Coll\u00e8ge de France was that the accommodations were cheap.\n\nBruno rented a room there. As it happened, the owner supplemented his income by renting out rooms by the hour during the day for assignations. Bruno discovered this when he arrived home one afternoon and encountered the novelist Andr\u00e9 Malraux in the corridor, along with a \"very showy girl.\"\n\nThe rooms were cheap, but even so the bed linens were changed once a week, and there was a sink in each room, though it only provided cold water. The toilet was in the corridor, and if you gave reasonable notice, and paid in advance, you could bathe in the communal bathroom. Such was student life in prewar Paris. During this period, Bruno met and befriended several people who would have a huge influence on his life, both by establishing him as one of the world's leading nuclear experts and by igniting his passionate belief in communist ideology.\n\nIn Germany, Nazi thugs were rampant. Anti-Semitic laws were expanded, an axis of alliance with Mussolini was formed, and the Berlin Olympics were exploited to promote Nazism and Aryan supremacy. In Spain, with its brewing civil war, the contest between fascism and socialism was about to erupt into violence. Meanwhile, in France, L\u00e9on Blum led the democratically elected Popular Front of socialists and communists. After the Popular Front's victory in May (but before Blum took office as prime minister in June), the workers' movement launched a general strike, which led to a series of agreements known as the \"Magna Carta of French Labor.\" Bruno Pontecorvo thus arrived in Paris at a time of vibrant political activism. His background had prepared him for such an environment. In Italy, his friends had embraced the Italian antifascist movement, as well as the ideals of Antonio Gramsci, founder of the Communist Party of Italy.\n\nNonetheless, Paris opened his eyes to a whole new way of life. Workers mingled with students and ate with them in the canteen. Back home, Bruno's only contact with a manual worker had been when one of his father's employees periodically came to their home for discussions. However, Bruno later recalled, \"I never ate at the same table\" as the worker.\n\nIn Rome, Fermi had always claimed that his research work left him uninterested in politics. Bruno had formed the impression that this was a general truth in science. However, at the university in Paris he was surrounded by political activism, quite unlike his previous experiences. Rome and Pisa began to seem rather provincial, while Paris seemed like the center of the world.\n\nBruno had gone to Paris because he was impressed by the Joliot-Curies as scientists. When he visited Ir\u00e8ne and Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric at their home, he was surprised by their intense discussions of politics. What's more, the majority of his colleagues were actively left-wing or communist. All the framework was in place for Bruno's political confirmation. The completion of his journey, from antifascism to a lifelong belief in communism, occurred through the influence of his cousin Emilio Sereni.\n\nSereni had fled from the Italian fascist police in 1935, and immediately became immersed in the communist organization in France. When the cousins met again in Paris\u2014Sereni now thirty years old, and Bruno just twenty-three\u2014Sereni had a huge effect on his young relative. Sereni took Bruno along to political rallies, where they befriended communist intellectuals and party officials. Soon Bruno was attending meetings almost daily.\n\nIn particular Bruno recalled joining Sereni and a group of Italian \u00e9migr\u00e9s in the fall of 1936 at a large rally led by Maurice Thorez, head of the French Communist Party. Decades later, Bruno still had a vivid memory of the enthusiastic and excited crowd, who waved flags, raised their fists, and had red handkerchiefs or scarves wrapped around their necks.\n\nSereni inspired in Bruno a surge of enthusiasm for what was happening in the Soviet Union \"where the proletariat were in power\" and were constructing \"the new man.\" Bruno made no attempt to hide these sympathies, at least while he was in France. In fact, he inspired his older sister, Giuliana, and his younger siblings Laura and Gillo to convert to communism. Years later, in the 1980s, Bruno confirmed, \"I went over to politics when I went to Paris in 1936, the years of the Popular Front, and had the opportunity to meet with political emigrants such as Sereni, Luigi Longo [a leader of the Communist Party of Italy, who became its secretary in the 1960s], Giuseppe Dozza [later elected five times as the communist mayor of Bologna] . . . and others.\"\n\nBruno Pontecorvo's life would confirm Ernest Hemingway's observation: \"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you.\"\n\nMARIANNE\n\nDuring the spring of 1936, as Bruno was becoming immersed in Parisian life, eighteen-year-old Marianne Nordblom was nearing the end of a yearlong correspondence course in Sweden. In May she graduated with a pass in shorthand, and distinction in typing. As for commercial correspondence, she passed in Swedish but was \"not approved\" in German, English, or French. At the end of the summer, on September 7, she spent the day packing suitcases. The following day she left her parents' home in Sandviken, took the train one hundred miles south to Stockholm, and boarded the SS _Burgundie_. Her final destination would be France, where she planned to work as a nanny, study the language, and have adventures.\n\nHer diary records that there was \"lots of rough sea. Everyone was ill except for a few\u2014including me.\" She arrived at the Gare de Lyon in Paris late on the afternoon of September 15, reached her lodgings at 37 rue d'Anjou, north of the Place de la Concorde, and spent the next day \"unpacking.\" Her visa would allow her to stay for up to two years.\n\nShe had been in Paris a fortnight when she was introduced to La Boh\u00e8me\u2014a dance club in Montparnasse frequented by students. She went there regularly. On the evening of Thursday, November 12, Bruno too was at La Boh\u00e8me. Marianne noted the fateful encounter in her diary: \"At La Boh\u00e8me, met Bruno Pontecorvo.\"\n\nSlender and fair-haired, with high cheekbones, Marianne had classic Nordic features, the blond counterpart to Bruno, with his dark Latin charms. The encounter seems to have been a _coup de foudre_ , as her diary records that they met regularly. Their first date occurred just two evenings later, on Saturday the fourteenth, when she accompanied Bruno to a \"big ball at the Cit\u00e9 Universitaire.\" Her diary includes the comment \"great.\" The two were soon spending a lot of time together. Sometimes they went to see the Paris Opera Ballet or visited a museum, but dancing at La Boh\u00e8me seems to have remained one of their favorite activities.\n\nIn those days, few people owned a telephone, so invitations were sent in the form of brief letters. Bruno was very busy at the laboratory at the end of December, which made it difficult for him to book a table for a planned dinner on New Year's Eve. The mail, however, was very efficient, as demonstrated by the fact that Bruno wrote to Marianne at 11:00 p.m. on December 30\u2014to make arrangements for the thirty-first. His letter arrived in time and they successfully met, at 9:00 p.m. on New Year's Eve; in accord with Bruno's instructions, they wore \"evening dress.\" They dined, celebrated the arrival of the New Year, and then went to a club where they played _pile ou face_ until 2:00 a.m.\n\n**IMAGE 3.1.** Bruno Pontecorvo and Marianne Nordblom in Paris, c. 1937. (COURTESY GIL PONTECORVO; PONTECORVO FAMILY ARCHIVES.)\n\nBruno was struck by Marianne's \"slender grace, sweet temperament and long careful silences\" as well as her \"childlike need for protection.\" Everyone who knew Bruno Pontecorvo remembers the charismatic extrovert, who loved sports, games, and performing tricks such as riding a bicycle backwards or balancing a stick on his foot or nose. It would seem that Marianne's experience was the same; after a lunch together in February, she wrote, \"Italian\u2014he's stupid.\"\n\nMEANWHILE, BRUNO HAD BECOME GOOD FRIENDS WITH THE JOLIOT-CURIES. Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric and Ir\u00e8ne sailed in the summer, skied in the winter, and researched together at the Radium Institute. Bruno's interest in sports and his charismatic personality made him a favorite with the couple. He was a frequent visitor to their home.\n\nLiberal ethics ran deep for the Joliot-Curies. Ir\u00e8ne's parents, Pierre and Marie Curie, decided not to patent the process for extracting and purifying radium because radium was an element that \"belongs to all the people and [is] not meant to enrich any one person.\" As a young woman, Ir\u00e8ne Curie had accompanied Marie around the battlefields of World War I to X-ray wounded men. This helped forge her belief in pacifism.\n\nIr\u00e8ne was often blunt and undiplomatic. A telling example can be found in a letter in which she declined an invitation to some tedious function. Her secretary had included the formal mantra \"regret that I cannot attend,\" only for Ir\u00e8ne to delete it. Like Edith Piaf, she declared, \" _Je ne regrette rien_.\" Her husband, by contrast, was thoroughly outgoing and loved spending time with people. Tall and slim, with a distinguished, lean face and dark, brushed-back hair, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric had socialism in his genes. His father, who was reasonably prosperous, had been exiled from France in 1871 because he had fought for the Paris Commune, the government of the workers' revolution. In 1880 he was granted amnesty and allowed to return.\n\nFr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot, born in 1900, was the sixth and youngest child of the family, and in his youth was so enthused by Pierre and Marie Curie that he had a photograph of them mounted on his bedroom wall. In 1924, he went to Marie's laboratory and asked for a position as her assistant. Marie assigned him to work with her austere daughter, Ir\u00e8ne, who was just completing her doctorate.\n\nAt first, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric was an outsider in France's hierarchy, which was very much linked by family ties. Some in the establishment felt he was selected by Ir\u00e8ne as the \"prince consort to the princess,\" his \"coarse good looks\" fitting that image. But Joliot was a first-rate scientist and a good judge of ability. He correctly believed that he was better than many who sneered at him, and this made him bitter. Even after he and Ir\u00e8ne won the Nobel Prize, his genius was only grudgingly recognized.\n\nISOMERISM\n\nBruno's scholarship would last for a year. In 1937 he declined the chance to apply to the University of Rome for a tenured post. His reasons are not known, but the fascist situation in Italy surely did not help. By this stage, his relationship with Marianne was becoming serious, which may have also played a role, and he had begun to impress Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot-Curie. His work also attracted the attention of Igor Kurchatov. The link between Bruno Pontecorvo and Igor Kurchatov stemmed from a common interest in a strange nuclear phenomenon known as isomerism, which Kurchatov had recently brought to light in Moscow.\n\nIn 1935 Igor Kurchatov was inspired by the work of the Via Panisperna Boys, and while checking the slow-neutron phenomenon for himself, he noticed something unusual: after a neutron of a given speed hits a nucleus, the radioactivity of the resulting isotope varies from one experiment to the next, even though it has the same number of neutrons and protons. With this exception, the new isotopes appear to be identical. This phenomenon\u2014in which isotopes of the same mass give off different levels of radioactivity\u2014became known as isomerism, from the Greek for \"equal masses.\" Kurchatov discovered the first definitive example of an isomer when he bombarded bromine with neutrons in 1935. Within months, the number of isomers began to grow rapidly. The question was: What was happening?\n\nFr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot-Curie held Kurchatov's work on isomers in high regard. This respect was reciprocated: Kurchatov followed the work of the French group closely. When Bruno arrived at the Joliot-Curies' laboratory, he started to investigate Kurchatov's phenomenon himself. His success in this quest helped solidify his emerging reputation as a leading expert in the use of neutrons in nuclear physics.\n\nSince the year of Bruno's birth, the atomic model of Niels Bohr had successfully posited that electrons in atoms cannot go wherever they please, but are restricted, like someone on a ladder who can only step on individual rungs. When an electron drops from a rung with high energy to one that is lower down, the excess energy is carried away by a photon of light. The spectrum of these photons reveals the pattern of energy levels within the atom.\n\nBy the time Bruno started doing research, the fundamental explanation for this behavior had been found in the equations of quantum mechanics. When Niels Bohr proposed his model of the nucleus, built from neutrons and protons in contact, many scientists wondered if quantum mechanics not only applied to the electrons in atoms but also determined the energy levels of the neutrons and protons in atomic nuclei. Bruno's experiments in Paris helped confirm that quantum mechanics does indeed control the atomic nucleus.\n\nNuclei in \"excited\" states, with one or more protons or neutrons on a high rung, give up energy by emitting photons of light, much like electrons do. The main difference between the case of electrons and the case of atomic nuclei is the nature of the radiated light. In the former the light may be in the visible spectrum, made up of photons with relatively low energy, whereas in the latter (the case of nuclei) the light consists of X-rays and gamma rays, whose photons have energies that are up to a million times greater. Whereas light radiated by atomic electrons may be seen with the eye, the photons emitted from nuclei can only be detected with special instruments. Pontecorvo became an expert in this art.\n\nIf this were the whole story, it might not be particularly remarkable that nuclei can form excited states, similar to those of atomic electrons. Typically, a neutron might be captured by a nucleus and form an excited state, which then decays by emitting gamma rays, leaving a highly stable state. If this stable state were the lowest rung of the ladder\u2014the ground state\u2014all would be straightforward. However, there was an unexpected and tantalizing development: there seemed to be various different end-states (the isomers), all with the same number of protons and neutrons, and all highly stable, lasting for more than a day in some cases.\n\nThe addition of isomers to the rich variety of nuclear states created confusion, until quantum mechanics provided the explanation. Quantum mechanics had successfully described nature at atomic scales, 100,000 times smaller than the macroscopic world where Newton's classical mechanics rule. The nucleus is smaller than the atom by a similar factor, so it was a revelation to discover that quantum mechanics applies there too. For example, according to the theory, if a nucleus is rotating much more rapidly\u2014has more angular momentum\u2014than the ground state, it can have unusual stability. The origin of so many highly stable isomers was thus explained: they were nuclei with a large amount of angular momentum.\n\nBruno Pontecorvo entered this new field with enthusiasm. Driven by some theoretical ideas of his own, he worked mostly alone, receiving occasional advice from Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot-Curie. During the first half of 1937 he began what would become excellent pioneering work in the field.\n\n1937\n\nIt's said that in years past, Parisians did not include August in their diaries; the city closed down and its residents departed for a summer vacation. In 1937, Marianne accompanied the family she worked for to Boissy L'Aillerie, a village north of Paris, to stay at a delightful hotel: L'Oiseau Bleu. With a park where the children could roam freely while Marianne looked after them, the location was ideal. Bruno, meanwhile, was in the Italian Alps, and sent Marianne a postcard of San Martino di Castrozza, a beautiful mountain resort. He briefly hoped that she might be able to join him there, but on September 1 he wrote her at L'Oiseau Bleu to say that he would have to leave on the twelfth to attend a congress in Venice.\n\nBruno and Marianne were apart until the start of October. That same month, Bruno delivered his first public report on his work on isomers at a congress at Paris's Palais de la D\u00e9couverte.\n\nMeanwhile Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric, now thirty-seven years old, was appointed as a professor at the Coll\u00e8ge de France, the most prestigious post in France. His eminence brought influence along with it. He persuaded the National Funds for Scientific Research to buy an old electrical plant in Ivry-sur-Seine, a suburb southeast of Paris, and convert it into a nuclear physics laboratory. His plan was for this lab to provide man-made radioactive elements for use in research. He assembled a small but talented team, which included Bruno. Ir\u00e8ne, meanwhile, remained with her own research team at the Radium Institute.\n\nThere were two members of Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric's group who would have a significant impact on Bruno's life and career: Lew Kowarski and Hans von Halban. Kowarski was large, a veritable Russian bear who could have become a concert pianist had his fingers not grown too big for the keys. In 1937 Kowarski was thirty years old, and lacked confidence, fearing that he was already too old to make a mark with his talent for electronic gadgets. In Kowarski's opinion, \"Pontecorvo and von Halban were the two most outstanding personalities in the laboratory after Joliot.\"\n\nAt the age of twenty-nine, Halban was already an established physicist. Bruno was still only twenty-four years old, a student, but, with his work on isomers now added to his earlier research in Rome, he was rapidly gaining an international reputation. Halban and Bruno shared a love of outdoor sports, especially mountain climbing and skiing. In terms of personality, however, they couldn't have been more different. Whereas Bruno was everyone's friend\u2014the stereotypical warm, extroverted Italian\u2014the arrogant Halban, who hailed from from Leipzig, was \"intensely unpleasant, brutal with the weak,\" and carried himself \"like a Prussian officer.\"\n\nKowarski had developed an electronic gadget to measure radiation over a greater range of intensity than was previously possible. Joliot-Curie had no need for it in his research at the time, so in early 1938 Kowarski consulted Bruno, who, he knew, \"could teach me a lot.\" Kowarski's impression was that Bruno wasn't exactly discouraging but nevertheless gave him the unspoken message, \"Why should I be interested; it doesn't look promising and you're too old anyway.\" This seems unlike the Bruno of most people's memory, and it probably reveals more about Kowarski's self-image than about Bruno's opinion. However, Bruno did make an offer that had profound consequences: he introduced Kowarski to Halban.\n\nBruno's lack of interest in Kowarski's overtures might also provide a glimpse of the personal pressure that Bruno was under at the time. For Bruno, the carefree joy of 1937 was now replaced by worry. His financial situation was insecure, but more serious was the looming responsibility he now had, as Marianne was expecting their child later that year. Added to this was the emotional worry regarding her visa, which was due to expire soon afterward. On January 4, 1938, Marianne left her lodgings to live with Bruno, at the H\u00f4tel des Grands Hommes, on the Place du Panth\u00e9on.\n\nOn July 5, 1938, Marianne celebrated her twenty-first birthday with Bruno. On July 30, their first son, Gil, was born. Marianne's position was grim: she was unmarried, and in six weeks she would have to leave France. It isn't clear why Bruno didn't marry Marianne at this time, since it would appear to have been the obvious means of enabling them to stay together with Gil in France. To make matters worse, Marianne's baby was apparently unwelcome in her Swedish family home. Whatever the reasoning was behind this attitude, the reality was that Gil would be unable to come to Sweden with Marianne.\n\nSo Marianne and Bruno placed Gil in a residential nursery, Le Nid (The Nest), on the avenue de la Terrasse in Montmorency, a northern suburb of Paris. In September, when Gil was only a few weeks old, Marianne and Bruno made their way to her home in Sweden. En route they visited Holland and Denmark, where they stayed in youth hostels, and they spent the last week of September in Copenhagen, where Bruno attended a physics conference. Here he met one of his friends from Rome, the theoretical physicist Gian Carlo Wick. Years later, Wick recalled seeing Bruno, in the company of a \"very pretty Swedish girl.\" He was surprised by the change in Bruno's political attitudes. He remembered that during their time in Rome Bruno had been uninterested in politics, but now \"he was very keen about international events.\" Wick was especially struck by \"the strength of his belief in the USSR.\"\n\nBruno and Marianne at last reached Sandviken, her hometown in Sweden. Two years earlier, shortly after her nineteenth birthday, Marianne had left home, carefree and set on adventure. Now she returned to the small, conservative town, twenty-one years old, her Italian boyfriend in tow, their six-week-old son left behind in a French nursery. In 1938, being an unmarried mother was not accepted as easily as it is now. Bruno returned to Paris alone, after a few days. This would be the only time he visited Marianne's family.\n\nLater in her life, Marianne would suffer from depression and experience chronic periods of mental breakdown, which required treatment in a sanatorium. One can only imagine her distress in 1938, as a new mother subject to postpartum depression, her child a thousand miles away, across borders closed to her by the bureaucracy of visas.\n\nAFTER LEAVING SANDVIKEN, BRUNO MEANDERED BACK TO PARIS. HIS first stop was Stockholm, where he attended another physics congress. On October 11, he went to dinner at the home of Professor Manne Siegbahn, the Swedish Nobel laureate; of the thirty guests, only Bruno and Gian Carlo Wick were not in evening dress. The next day he met Lisa Meitner and Niels Bohr.\n\nMeitner, who was Jewish, had escaped from Nazi Germany just two months earlier. She had been working in the same laboratory as Otto Hahn, with whom she had performed experiments that would lead to the discovery of nuclear fission in December. Bohr, having offered the world both his conceptual picture of the nuclear atom and his celebrated explanation of nuclear structure, had established himself as the foremost theorist in atomic physics. Bohr was based in Copenhagen, but visited Stockholm regularly. (It would be on one such visit early in 1939 that he would learn from Meitner about fission's awesome potential.) Bohr's presence in October 1938 was the excuse for another \"grand dinner,\" as Bruno described it to Marianne in his second letter from Stockholm. He ended with a P.S.: \"Don't fail to give my best wishes to your parents and to your brother.\"\n\nBruno's journey back to Paris was difficult. He traveled via Cologne, Germany, and then spent five hours at the Belgian border because he didn't have a visa. He had to return to the Belgian consulate in Germany to obtain one. When he finally arrived at the Gare du Nord in Paris, he spent four hours with the police commissariat and paid 150 francs to amend his French visa due to a recent change in the law. The next day he visited Gil at the nursery.\n\nThe following Saturday, he was invited to dinner at Halban's home. The invitation, which asked him to bring \"the blond Scandinavian lady,\" suggests that Bruno had kept some distance between Marianne and his colleagues. On Sunday Bruno again visited the nursery in Montmorency, and wrote to Marianne about Gil's progress. During the ensuing months, Bruno's letters to Marianne would be written on the way back from Montmorency; they contained reports of visits to Gil, occasional allusions to progress in physics, and plans to obtain a visa for one or the other, allowing them to get together. Bruno's only mention of politics came in November, when he confessed his fear that \"fascism will come to France.\" The correspondence is in line with the opinion of family friends who insist that Marianne had no interest in politics. There are, however, clues that all was not well with her. On more than one occasion Bruno alluded to Marianne's health: \"I hope to find in your letter that you are not sick at all\"; \"are you ill?\"; \"what is the illness you have?\"\n\nDuring the rest of 1938 and much of 1939, Bruno remained in Paris, apart from Marianne. Bruno's brother Gillo\u2014still a teenager\u2014had stayed behind in Italy, where he \"continued to pretend to be a playboy\u2014granted with the defect of being Jewish.\" Bruno sent Gillo tickets, allowing his brother to join him in Paris. It was during this period that Bruno introduced Gillo to communism. It was also the time of his most significant work on nuclear isomers.\n\nVIEWED WITH THE EXPERIENCE AND HINDSIGHT OF EIGHTY YEARS, Pontecorvo's first entrance into nuclear isomerism was as a descriptive taxonomist, who collects species and classifies them, but does not offer any insights into their behavior and evolution, let alone their DNA. He predicted that relatively stable nuclear isomers should exist, and he found the first example when he bombarded cadmium with fast neutrons. In 1938 and 1939, he performed two significant experiments. One helped establish the correlation of angular momentum with stability; the other measured nuclear energy levels. In due course, these results helped others develop the theory of nuclear structure.\n\nOne way to find out how much angular momentum a nucleus has is to detect the gamma rays when it eventually decays. Several physicists had tried but failed to find the anticipated rays. This is where Pontecorvo made a notable contribution.\n\nHe suggested that electrons in the outer reaches of the atom capture the gamma rays. The energy of the gamma ray is passed to the electron, and the impact knocks the electron out of the atom. He proposed a test: look for electrons with a specific amount of energy\u2014namely, that of the \"lost\" gamma ray. This is very different from the case of beta radioactivity, whose electrons emerge with a range of energies.\n\nBruno performed the experiment and found an example in an isotope of rhodium, where electrons always emerged with the same energy, as he had predicted. This result proved the hypothesis that the original isomer had a large amount of angular momentum.\n\nBy 1939 Joliot-Curie's electrostatic accelerator at Ivry was ready. One of Ir\u00e8ne's assistants, Andr\u00e9 Lazard, had designed a Van de Graaff generator with her years before, and Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric had commissioned him to build the machine at Ivry. Bruno and Lazard now joined forces at Ivry, and discovered what Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot-Curie would call \"nuclear phosphorescence.\"\n\nOrdinary phosphorescence, in molecules and atoms, occurs when light is absorbed, stored, and later released gradually as a glow, visible in the dark. In these cases, the electrons in the atoms are kicked to higher rungs on the energy ladder, and then release this energy as they fall back to ground. Pontecorvo and Lazard found analogous phenomena in atomic nuclei. Instead of visible light, they used X rays\u2014higher-energy photons. This raised neutrons and protons up the energy ladder, while the nucleus remained intact. If one of the high-energy rungs was unusually stable, the neutron or proton stored the energy for a time, and later shed it when it fell to a lower rung, slowly emitting an X-ray in the process.\n\nThe energies of these X-rays are like a bar code that reveals the energy states of the nucleus, analogous to the atomic spectra that can reveal the electronic structure of atoms. Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric sent Bruno fulsome congratulations for this discovery, which gave him great joy. During his time in Rome, Bruno had felt that Fermi only really respected him for his prowess at tennis; Joliot-Curie's praise assured him that he had now proved himself in physics.\n\nThe phenomenon of isomerism was important in establishing that a nucleus is a rich collection of constituents, which can move, orbit, and vibrate relative to one another. It has applications in industry and medicine. The expertise that Pontecorvo gained in his studies of isomerism, in which he used neutrons and detected gamma rays, would prove invaluable throughout his career.\n\nFISSION\n\nUranium nuclei are so large and fragile that a mere touch by a slow neutron is enough to split the pack: the phenomenon known as nuclear fission. This was so unexpected that when Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discovered the phenomenon in Germany on December 17, 1938, they didn't realize what they had achieved. The discovery came when they irradiated uranium with slow neutrons, and identified the light element barium among the products. Up to that time nuclei had been modified subtly, by chipping off just one or two constituents, transmuting the target into an immediate neighbor on the periodic table. The appearance of barium, far removed from uranium, was bizarre. Hahn and Strassmann announced their results, and said little more about them. Only during 1939 were the full implications of their breakthrough understood.\n\nThe Germans' paper arrived in Paris on January 16, 1939. Joliot-Curie immediately understood what must have happened; Ir\u00e8ne had seen a similar phenomenon the previous year, though she had not been confident enough to confront the criticism of her results, and had backed down. Now Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric suspected that she had been correct after all, and that the neutrons must have split the uranium in two. For the next few days the news was the hot topic of discussion throughout the group. Kowarski recalled that \"nobody talked of anything else.\" Ir\u00e8ne raged at having missed out on getting credit for the discovery, and told Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric, \"What fools we have been,\" or probably used \"a somewhat stronger word.\"\n\nFr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot-Curie wrote to certain Soviet physicists about the phenomenon. As a result, Igor Kurchatov immediately investigated whether any secondary neutrons were produced during the fission process, as did Joliot-Curie himself in Paris, and others in the United States. The critical question was whether more than one neutron was released for every neutron that caused the fission in the first place. If this was so, a self-sustaining reaction could occur.\n\nA uranium nucleus contains more than 140 neutrons, more than enough to satisfy the needs of smaller nuclei, such as barium, krypton, or lanthanum, the likely debris. So it seemed plausible that, during the fission of uranium, some extra neutrons would also be liberated. Joliot-Curie immediately devised a simple experiment to detect these neutrons\u2014and failed. The source of neutrons irradiating the uranium was so intense that his attempt to identify additional particles was like trying to detect a rain shower while standing beneath a waterfall.\n\nOver the next few days Joliot-Curie designed a new experiment, one that would look for evidence of radioactivity in the debris when the neutrons hit uranium. Halban had left Paris to go skiing, and so missed the ensuing drama. Kowarski, however, was present.\n\nJoliot-Curie had engineered two brass tubes, one of which was coated with uranium. He also had some Bakelite cylinders, which were larger than the tubes and could surround them like napkin rings. He had already verified that none of these tubes or rings was radioactive, even after they were irradiated with neutrons. Now all was ready for the experiment. First he placed a neutron source inside the brass tube that was free of uranium; then he placed the Bakelite ring around the tube. After a few minutes he removed the ring, took it to a Geiger counter, and verified that there was still no radioactivity. Next he repeated the exercise, but this time used the uranium-coated brass cylinder; as before, the tube was surrounded by the Bakelite ring. When he removed the ring on this occasion, and took it to the Geiger counter, it set the device clicking. This showed that radioactive fragments of uranium had adhered to the Bakelite, which proved that the uranium had been shattered.\n\nJoliot-Curie did this in the presence of Kowarski during the morning of January 26. He repeated the demonstration that afternoon before four witnesses, including Ir\u00e8ne and Bruno Pontecorvo. The next day Bruno wrote to Marianne, \"Work at Ivry goes very well and if it continues will be very important.\"\n\nHalban returned from his ski vacation to find the laboratory in a state of excitement. He and Kowarski soon found a clever way to detect the liberated neutrons. The trick was to irradiate the uranium with slow neutrons, and use a detector sensitive only to fast ones. By this means, they could distinguish the liberated, fast neutrons from the slow ones emitted by the source. They began this experiment during the last week of February.\n\nBruno was occupied with his experiments on nuclear phosphorescence, at the Ivry laboratory in the suburbs, so he did not take part in this fission experiment personally; nonetheless, he was deeply involved intellectually. Joliot-Curie was away at the ski resort of Val d'Is\u00e8re. On March 3 he wrote to Kowarski to ensure that Bruno, who was due to join him at the resort along with the Joliot-Curies' daughter, H\u00e9l\u00e8ne, brought the latest news. Bruno duly arrived to report great progress. On March 27 he wrote to Marianne and mentioned physics for only the second time that year: \"Physics goes very well,\" he wrote, underlining the words.\n\nFission might have been little more than a curiosity, except for two features. First, when the nucleus of a uranium atom splits, the total energy released is about a hundred times as much as that released by radioactivity, and up to a hundred million times the amounts in chemical reactions. Here was the first hint of how to liberate nuclear energy on a larger scale than had hitherto appeared possible. In April, Halban and Kowarski finally demonstrated that the fission of a uranium nucleus liberates more than one neutron. The potential consequences of this discovery were nothing short of awesome. The possibility that these freed neutrons could initiate further fissions and produce a self-sustaining nuclear reaction was out in the open.\n\nSuppose, for example, that when a single neutron splits the uranium nucleus into two chunks, two neutrons are liberated. There is a chance that these neutrons will hit two additional uranium atoms and repeat the fission. If the same thing happens during this and subsequent collisions, there will now be four neutrons freed to make four fissions, leading to eight, sixteen, and so on\u2014the number of neutrons doubles at each step. Thus it would only be necessary to irradiate uranium with a few neutrons to set off reactions that would continue spontaneously until all of the uranium was used up. This creates the potential for an immense release of energy.\n\nAs soon as this news arrived in the United Kingdom, scientists alerted the government to uranium's strategic importance. Enrico Fermi was in the United States; he too immediately realized fission's implications. In Germany there was a similarly intense response: all reference to atomic energy and uranium reactions was immediately censored in the German media.\n\nIn France, Joliot-Curie sprang into action. On April 22, he announced that his team had established that a chain reaction was possible, and in the first week of May he applied for three patents. Two dealt with the potential application of fission to nuclear power, and the third, which was secret, related to explosives. On May 8, he went to Brussels to negotiate the acquisition of uranium stocks from the Belgian Congo, with a view to building a uranium bomb in the French Sahara.\n\nMEANWHILE WORLD EVENTS MADE THE LIKELIHOOD OF WAR MORE certain. Early in 1939, Bruno became seriously worried about the march of fascism, and its effect on his future. He had no idea when\u2014or if\u2014he and Marianne would have the chance to be together, and Gil's future also weighed ever larger on his conscience. In February he wrote Marianne a long letter, which in parts takes the form of a manifesto: \"(a) If democracy survives in France and if I will be paid after to live with you and Gil, I shall stay in France. (b) If there is a war, and if that war is a democratic war against fascism, provoked by the axis powers, I will take part in that war. (c) If fascism comes to France, I shall go to the USA. Write me if you find that _juste_.\"\n\nShe replied, and agreed with his plan.\n\nBruno then followed up on his manifesto and encouraged Marianne to come \"immediately\" to Paris: \"I don't want to influence you but if you decide to come I think it would be better as soon as possible, not only for the pleasure of you being here but also because we have many things to decide, for the little one and for us.\" It seems that, at this stage, Gil was totally the responsibility of Bruno, although financial support came periodically from Sweden. Discussions with Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot-Curie had increased Bruno's conviction that France, and indeed Europe, was on a path to disaster, and that war was probably inevitable. If Gil remained in the nursery at Montmorency, Bruno would be tied to Paris. In April, therefore, Bruno signed a legal document, which would be deposited in a sealed envelope, to the effect that if anything happened to him, \"Mademoiselle Marianne Nordblom . . . [will] decide at her discretion the fate of my son Gil Pontecorvo.\"\n\nDuring Marianne's absence, Bruno discussed Marxism with his cousin Emilio Sereni and, along with Gillo, deepened his links with communist groups. Gillo's son, Ludo, later described the situation: \"My father [who believed strongly in communism] always said he felt that Bruno believed even stronger than him. Bruno was literally a big brother, five years older than my father\u2014a similar age gap as between Emilio Sereni and Bruno.\" Sereni influenced Bruno, and Bruno influenced Gillo. It wasn't just physicists who took note of Bruno's emerging intellect; Pontecorvo's involvement with communists was noticed in fascist Italy, where the local intelligence agency opened a file on the young scientist. It is not known whether Swedish officials were aware of Bruno's communist activities; in any event, he soon discovered that he was persona non grata in that country.\n\nIn June 1939, Bruno applied to visit Stockholm and \"possibly Sandviken\" where \"I have friends.\" He named Marianne as a reference for both personal and financial guarantees, and stated that he had visited there previously. There was no mention in the application that they were the parents of a one-year-old boy. The records show that Stockholm police constable Berger Hassler phoned Marianne to verify the legitimacy of the application. She confirmed everything and fully expected to see Bruno. But a few weeks later he learned that his application had been rejected.\n\n**IMAGE 3.2.** Bruno's unsuccessful application to visit Marianne in Sweden in 1939. (SVEN-OLAF EKMAN AND SWEDISH NATIONAL ARCHIVES.)\n\nBruno now started encouraging Marianne ever more desperately to return to France with an appropriate visa, asking, \"Why not come to Paris immediately?\" He added that he didn't \"want to influence her\" but put strong pressure on her with the remark, \"we have many things to decide,\" for \" _le petit_ [Gil] and for us.\"\n\nMarianne's reply seems to have mentioned that she was not well. This was clearly a recurring theme, as Bruno replied, \"But what I would like to know absolutely is\u2014what is the illness you have?\" On August 7, when he left Paris for Zurich, he had still heard nothing from her. As soon as he was back in Paris, Bruno visited Gil, as always. He wrote to Marianne the next day, having heard nothing for several weeks. He reminded her again that they must \"decide many things\" for Gil. Two days later a card arrived from Marianne, saying that she would arrive in Paris the next week.\n\nThe following day, August 23, Stalin agreed to a nonaggression pact with fascism's high priest, Adolf Hitler. \"A Victory for Peace\" was the headline in _L'Humanit\u00e9_ , the organ of the French Communist Party. It reported that fascism had been \"forced\" to deal with \"the very power that it has always declared to be its implacable enemy.\" The USSR was portrayed as a peacemaker, which had \"imposed [the pact] on Mr. Hitler.\" In summary this was a \"triumph of Stalinist politics.\" For a twenty-six-year-old living in the heady atmosphere of socialist Paris, the message of _L'Humanit\u00e9_ was overpowering. That same day, Bruno joined the Communist Party, \"to prove his faith with Russia.\"\n\nHe frequented party meetings, and took part in their passionate debates. At these meetings, all were free to speak, although \"the leaders always had the last word.\" The young, ardent physicist, who had attracted international attention with his scientific achievements, had already begun to be noticed by members of Comintern, the international communist organization. Marianne, meanwhile, was still living with her socially conservative family, far removed from such politics. She did not return to Paris until September 6, 1939, just days after the Nazis invaded Poland, and war in Europe threatened to cut Bruno off entirely. Her French visa now very correctly referred to \"Mademoiselle Nordblom accompanied by Gil, born in Paris 30/7/38.\"\n\nYears later, following the Pontecorvos' flight to the USSR, several reports in the conservative British media referred to Marianne as Bruno's unmarried lover, or mistress, which helped bolster their portrayal of the Pontecorvos as \"immoral.\" In fact Bruno and Marianne married on January 9, 1940, which enabled them to obtain visas for North America when the Nazis invaded France in June.\n\nDURING THOSE TUMULTUOUS MONTHS OF 1939, THE FISSION experiments of Bruno's French colleagues gave tantalizing hints that a chain reaction could be made. The scientists desperately wanted to be the first to achieve this, as the promise of unlimited energy was akin to finding the philosopher's stone. As five tons of uranium would be required for the attempt, the operation was moved from the university to the more spacious laboratory at Ivry. Of course, the laboratory required financial support. During the summer of 1939, as war loomed, Kowarski and Halban performed demonstrations to impress the French Ministry of Supply, rather than pursue \"scientifically impeccable proofs.\"\n\nIn the fall of 1939 _Time_ magazine was so impressed with the team's work that it included Joliot-Curie on its front cover. The team's actual scientific paper, which was also their last open publication before secrecy enveloped nuclear physics worldwide, was less impressive. Kowarski recalls that one of Fermi's colleagues once asked the great scientist, \"What do you think of this paper by Joliot?\" Fermi replied, \"Not much.\" Kowarski himself admitted, \"Fermi was quite right. Scientifically the paper was not very impressive [although] as a demonstration [it was].\"\n\nAs the team began their work at Ivry, ordinary water was their first choice as a moderator, but it was not actually the best option. When a neutron hits a hydrogen atom in a water molecule, it may bounce off and lose energy\u2014which is the key to its speed being \"moderated,\" thus raising its ability to cause fission. If that were the whole story, everything would be fine. However, the neutron may instead be captured by the hydrogen atom and lost, in which case the reaction dies. This latter effect is so probable that ordinary water kills rather than feeds the chain reaction. If instead of using ordinary water you use _heavy_ water, however, neutrons are no longer captured. When a neutron encounters an atom of heavy water, it bounces off and slows, which is ideal.\n\nOne question that immediately struck scientists was this: If a chain reaction can indeed liberate energy explosively, why are the rocks around us, which contain uranium and are being hit continuously by cosmic rays, not liable to detonate spontaneously?\n\nNiels Bohr's unique ability to visualize the labyrinth of an atomic nucleus gave him a key insight about fission: the quirks of nuclear structure imply that fission is more likely in an isotope with an odd number of constituents, such as U-235, than in one with an even number, such as U-238. Slow neutrons bounce off U-238 without causing it to fission. U-238 can also act as a blanket that covers any nearby U-235, making a succession of fissions rare, and the chance of a chain reaction negligible. Only if the neutrons encounter some of the rare isotope U-235 before exiting the uranium target will fission occur.\n\nThus, the fission of natural rocks is rare because they contain so little U-235. While that is good news for our daily affairs, it makes it difficult to extract nuclear energy from raw uranium. To do so effectively one must first increase the amount of U-235 in the target, a process known as enrichment. This is difficult but, as would soon become clear, not impossible. Bohr published his insight in _Physical Review_ in September 1939. It is ironic that the means that would help bring World War II to a close made its debut in the same week that the war in Europe began.\n\nBy January 1940 the French team had decided that heavy water was the best means to moderate the neutrons, as the first step toward unlocking nuclear energy from uranium. Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot-Curie alerted the French Minister of Supply that uranium could be the key to abundant energy or to a weapon of immense power. Also, he emphasized the special role that heavy water could play. The only European producer of heavy water in large amounts was the Norsk Hydro electric company in Norway; Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric explained that they would need \"the whole of this stock.\"\n\nThen the team had a lucky break. On February 20, they learned that one of the minister's military contacts, Jacques Allier, had been a banker before being called up. The good fortune was that Allier's bank was the majority stakeholder in the Norwegian factory.\n\nAllier, accompanied by some members of the French secret service, went to Norway and explained the situation. They stressed to the Norwegians that it was essential to \"rescue\" the entire stock of heavy water before the Germans invaded Norway. The Norwegian government feared a German invasion and was trying to appear neutral, even though its sympathies were transparent.\n\nThe French delegation was successful. In the second week of March 1940, the scientists received a telegram with the heading \"absolute secrecy.\" It summoned them to a meeting where they learned that the entire stock of heavy water\u2014some forty gallons\u2014had arrived. At last they could plan experiments to determine the necessary conditions for a chain reaction.\n\nWithin weeks, the Germans invaded France and entered Paris. Kowarski and Halban set out on an odyssey, escaping to England with the heavy water to keep it out of Nazi hands. If Joliot-Curie had gotten his wish, Pontecorvo would have been with them, but the British authorities vetoed this plan. When British security viewed Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric's list of scientists, it gave the following assessment: \"Dr PONTECORVO, a collaborator of Professor JOLIOT, is regarded as 'mildly' undesirable: might possibly be allowed to work if vital to the war effort, but even if working should be watched.\" There was no reason given for their description of Bruno as \"undesirable.\" In any event, Bruno had to make other arrangements.\n\nThe precious liquid would eventually end up in Canada, where, by a sequence of coincidences, Halban and Kowarski would be reunited with Pontecorvo. After the invasion, Joliot-Curie remained in Paris, where he became active in the French Resistance. Pontecorvo, being a Jew, was a target for the Nazis, and, as an Italian in France, he was an enemy alien. The options he'd laid out in his manifesto, which Marianne had agreed to, had now crystallized. Fascism had come to France; it was time to escape to the United States.\nFOUR\n\nTHE FIRST ESCAPE\n\n_1940_\n\nON THE MOONLIT NIGHT OF MAY 10, 1940, GERMAN TANKS BREACHED the Maginot Line; the Nazi army invaded France. The French tried to mount a defense along the Somme and Aisne Rivers in the north, but failed and withdrew to the Loire, south of Paris. Within two weeks the Allies had sacrificed northern France in service of a greater strategy: \"He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.\" A desperate evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk began on May 27, and was completed by June 4.\n\nIn April, while still in Paris, Halban and Kowarski had made a few preliminary measurements using the heavy water. But as events began to unfold, and the German army approached, urgency turned to panic. On May 16, Raoul Dautry, the Minister of Armaments, phoned Joliot-Curie and urged him to transfer his project out of Paris. In the belief that the Loire would act as a southern limit to the German advance, they decided that Halban and an assistant would go to Clermont-Ferrand, about 260 miles south of Paris, and rent a villa, which could be used as an emergency laboratory. Kowarski and the heavy water would then join them there.\n\nHundreds of thousands of refugees began to flee south from Paris and its environs. In the midst of the mayhem, Bruno met with a tense and anxious Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot-Curie. Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric was a French patriot and decided to remain in the country. He urged Bruno to leave, however, adding, \"It is best that you do so very soon.\" Joliot-Curie understood the awful conundrum of Bruno's position. As an Italian, he was now technically an enemy of France; as a Jew, he was no ally of the Nazis.\n\nAt this juncture, Bruno experienced a piece of good fortune, thanks to Emilio Segr\u00e8, his old physics colleague. Segr\u00e8 had gone to Berkeley on a summer visit in 1938. While he was there, Mussolini had passed the anti-Semitic laws, which barred Jews from university posts in Italy. Segr\u00e8 was Jewish, and, having become excluded from work in Italy, he remained in Berkeley. One day in 1939 he attended a meeting of European \u00e9migr\u00e9s living in California, where he met two other migrants\u2014nuclear physicists who were prospecting for oil, and on the lookout for a neutron expert. Segr\u00e8 appeared to be manna from heaven. The physicists invited him to visit their laboratory in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In May 1940 he did so, but they were unable to tempt him to join them permanently; Tulsa was no competition for Berkeley, where Lawrence had built his cutting-edge cyclotron, and Segr\u00e8 could watch the sun set behind the Golden Gate Bridge, across San Francisco Bay. Segr\u00e8 turned their offer down, but, in doing so, he recommended Pontecorvo.\n\nSegr\u00e8 wrote to Bruno, saying, \"There is a good chance I can get you a job.\" Thus it came to pass that, in the spring of 1940, Pontecorvo had an offer of employment in the United States, just days before the Nazis occupied Paris.\n\nBruno had already escaped fascism once, when he left Italy in 1936. Now, with his family in tow, he did so again. Bruno's sister Giuliana, and her husband, Duccio Tabet, had also quit Italy, in 1938, and had rented a house in Toulouse. They had told Bruno, Gillo, and their cousin Emilio Sereni that if ever the occasion arose, they could regard the house as their home. That moment had arrived.\n\nOn May 24, Marianne and Gil received papers of safe-conduct, which allowed them to make a single journey by train, or as passengers in a car, to Toulouse. The documents were valid for three days, starting on June 2.\n\nMarianne, loaded with baggage, and Gil, deeply upset but too young to understand the crisis, crammed onto the train to Toulouse. When they arrived there, Duccio Tabet immediately drafted a written declaration that Marianne and Gil were guests in his house, at 16 rue Edouard Baudrimont. The Toulouse police approved this arrangement on June 7. Meanwhile, Bruno remained in Paris.\n\n**IMAGE 4.1.** Safe-conduct document allowing Marianne and Gil to travel to Toulouse in 1940. (AUTHOR, CHURCHILL ARCHIVES CENTRE.)\n\nTHE START OF JUNE WAS HOT. THE SUN SHONE FROM A CLOUDLESS SKY. Even the nights were warm; stars twinkled in the crystal clear air. Two miles above the city, a German pilot could see twelve boulevards radiating from the Arc de Triomphe, as if it were at the center of a clock face. The Seine meandered through the suburbs, and separated in two to embrace the \u00cele de la Cit\u00e9 at the city's heart, where stood Notre Dame, which had survived centuries of history and revolution. To the immediate south of the cathedral, the narrow streets of the Left Bank were laid out like a map. That is where Bruno Pontecorvo suddenly awoke, on the night of Monday, June 3, as the German aircraft released its bombs.\n\nAlso in Paris were Bruno's brother Gillo, their cousin Emilio Sereni, and Gillo's French girlfriend, Henrietta. Bruno's friend Salvador Luria, an Italian research colleague at the Radium Institute and a Sephardic Jew, was also worried about the Nazi advance. Among others for whom that night would frame the rest of their lives was Ir\u00e8ne N\u00e9mirovsky, a Jewish writer. She depicted the events in her novel _Suite Fran\u00e7aise._ Some of her characters, such as the members of the P\u00e9ricand family, started to evacuate immediately. Others, like the Michauds, hesitated until it was almost too late, even giving their apartment a final clean before they departed forever, naively dreaming that they would return someday. Her fictional refugees portrayed in microcosm the experiences of a million real ones, including the Pontecorvos, Sereni, and Luria.\n\nJust before dawn on Tuesday, June 4, air-raid sirens sounded and the exodus began. During the final days of May, Kowarski had cleared out the laboratory he'd shared with Halban and prepared to move everything to Clermont-Ferrand, where he would join his colleague. In addition to the heavy water, he had to gather electronic amplifiers, radiation detectors, and a precious sample of radium and beryllium, which would provide their neutrons. The biggest task was moving several tons of lead bricks, used as radiation shields in the experiments.\n\nBy the fifth or sixth of June, Kowarski had loaded all of the lead, along with the rest of the equipment, onto several army trucks. Then, accompanied by half a dozen soldiers, the entire caravan joined the tide of humanity headed south from Paris, away from the Nazi army. Kowarski's convoy reached Clermont-Ferrand on Friday the seventh; for security purposes he stored the heavy water in the nearby women's prison, in Riom. His wife and child managed to join him by train a few days later.\n\nBY THAT WEEKEND THE MAIN STREETS OF PARIS WERE ALMOST EMPTY. Metallic shutters covered the windows of shops, abandoned by their owners, who had joined the throng of refugees. However, some still believed that the flight was the result of \"hysterical rumors\" circulated by \"traitors.\"\n\nAny doubts were removed on June 9, when the Germans assaulted the city. All major monuments were surrounded with sandbags; windows rattled, and \"from the top of every monument birds rose into the sky\" as the sounds of gunfire thundered across the rooftops. \"The Germans have crossed the Seine . . . even animals can sense the danger,\" declared one of N\u00e9mirovsky's anxious refugees, whose husband still seemed in a state of denial. Gillo Pontecorvo vividly recalled that someone in the street shouted, \"The Germans are at Pontoise\"\u2014about 15 miles northwest of the center of Paris.\n\nThe attack on the city and the rupture of the French defenses were so rapid that many were caught unprepared. For anyone with special reason to fear life under Nazi rule, the time had come to flee by any means possible: train, car, truck, or bicycle.\n\nFrightened hordes descended on the railway stations. Their plans to escape were frustrated, however, when they found the platforms closed, guarded by soldiers. Would-be fugitives flooded the surrounding streets and offered taxi drivers small fortunes to take them out of the city. Money had ceased to have meaning; people, not possessions, were what mattered. But the taxis didn't have enough gas to reach even the relative sanctuary of Orl\u00e9ans, about 70 miles to the south. Those without train permits or gasoline, which was almost everyone, set off on foot. The roads south of Paris were clogged, as up to a million refugees dragged their luggage behind them, or humped it in wheelbarrows and carts.\n\nThese were the last days of freedom in Paris. As the crescent moon rose, the clear night sky was suddenly obscured. What at first appeared to be storm clouds was actually a smoke screen, put up deliberately to save the city from being bombed. On Thursday the thirteenth, Paris was declared an open city, as the French government fled to Bordeaux. At this eleventh hour, Bruno, Gillo, Henrietta, and Emilio Sereni, along with Salvador Luria, joined the exodus\u2014on bicycles. They were almost too late. The next day, June 14, the German army entered Paris.\n\nAFTER SO MANY CLEAR, HOT DAYS, THE WEATHER BROKE ON JUNE 13. The rain showers may help explain the apparently casual nature of the group's departure; having cycled hardly more than a mile, they stopped to say farewell to friends on the rue Mouffetard. These acquaintances could have been models for the Michaud family, who delayed until it was almost too late, or they might have been among those who were brave or foolish enough to remain and take their chances with the occupation. In any event, they insisted that the travelers stay a while and have something to eat.\n\nGillo, just twenty years old, and his girlfriend, Henrietta, seemed to regard the whole enterprise as a diversion, a frisson of excitement in the life of a self-confessed playboy. Their carefree attitude infected Bruno, who helped himself to two cream macaroons. Salvador Luria, a year older than Bruno and seemingly more aware of the seriousness of the situation, was shocked at his companions' casual attitude. They had wasted precious time and he urged them to leave. By nightfall they reached a guesthouse about forty-five miles south of the city limits.\n\nThe next morning, when Gillo opened the bedroom window, he discovered that the square below was full of German tanks. The previous day's carefree adventure was replaced by panic. He thought that further flight was pointless and that it would be better to return to Paris. However, Henrietta convinced him to continue the journey with the others. \"Henrietta wanted to carry on south,\" he later explained. \"And so we did.\"\n\nWhereas the day before they had been part of a steady exodus, now the streets were crowded and disorderly. People, desperate to escape, lined the roadside in the hope of finding some form of transportation. Thousands of cars littered the shoulders, broken down or out of gas. Streams of refugees and army vehicles were on the move. The main line of cars, their roofs piled high with suitcases, crowned with mattresses, looked like unstable piles of bric-a-brac on wheels. A procession of cars, vans, trucks, tractors, anything with four wheels, lumbered along in single file. The vehicles, which crept forward like snails, obstructed the torrent of pedestrians and horse-drawn wagons. In turn, the crush of refugees traveling on foot, meandering around and between the vehicles, blocked the roads and interfered with oncoming traffic.\n\nLike a scene from a film noir, this mayhem formed the backdrop as Gillo and Henrietta, clad in shorts and carrying skis, cycled past on a tandem, along with Bruno, Sereni, and Luria. Someone shouted contemptuously, \"Look at those bourgeois, going on holiday!\"\n\nUp to that point their travels had indeed been like a vacation, in that they had stayed overnight at a hostel. Now everything abruptly changed. At Orl\u00e9ans and beyond, there wasn't a single bed free. People slept\u2014or at least tried to\u2014in their cars, in shop doorways, or even on the sidewalk, using suitcases as pillows. Sonia Tamara, a correspondent for the _New York Herald Tribune_ , was in Orl\u00e9ans a day before the Pontecorvo party, and recalled that the scene near the railway station was \"appalling.\" People lay on the floors inside, and filled the town square outside. Children were crying, and there was nothing to eat in the entire town.\n\nRefugees were everywhere. Some, like the Pontecorvos, had a specific destination in mind. Others just wanted to get away. No one knew where or when the Germans would appear to cut off their escape. The choice of the best route was a lottery. Many roads were closed, which forced refugees to take detours as soldiers and police made desperate attempts to let army vehicles through. Piles of stones and bricks blocked the outskirts of every village. In revolutionary tradition, peasants manned these makeshift barricades and examined the papers of the fugitives.\n\nYet in the midst of this mayhem the postal service appears to have kept functioning, at least in the south, away from Paris. For on June 14 Bruno wrote a postcard to Marianne, which reached her in Toulouse. It would seem that by that evening the group had reached Beaugency, about ten miles south of Orl\u00e9ans and eighty from Paris, as it was there that he had time to write the postcard. It began, \" _J'ai quitt\u00e9 Paris depuis deux jours en v\u00e9lo_.\" He continued, \"I hope to get a train at Blois or some other place. If I can't I shall come to Toulouse by bike but I don't know when [I will arrive]. In Paris I didn't receive any letter from you but I understand the post is not operating [there] anymore. The Hotel Grands Hommes was closed as I was leaving. I can tell you more when I arrive.\"\n\nOn the morning of the fifteenth, the group set off once more toward Blois, thirty miles to the south. Their hopes of finding a train there were dashed, however, and by nightfall they had progressed to Vierzon, south of Blois. They had logged a total of about fifty miles for the day, and 130 in all from Paris. That evening, Bruno mailed the postcard to Marianne from Vierzon. There were still nearly three hundred miles to go.\n\nEmilio Sereni decided to travel by trails and minor roads, which he felt would be more secure. The Pontecorvos decided to take their chances with the shortest, fastest route. They reached Toulouse in about ten days; Sereni took a few days longer. At some point Salvador Luria left his friends and joined a different group of refugees, eventually reaching Marseilles. He later made it to the United States, and in 1969 won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the genetic structures and reproduction of viruses.\n\nFRANCE SURRENDERS\n\nHalban, Kowarski, and the precious heavy water, meanwhile, had arrived safely in Clermont-Ferrand. However, by the time Bruno started his odyssey southward, the plans of his former colleagues had been thrown into disarray.\n\nOn June 16, the prime minister resigned, to be succeeded by Marshal Philippe P\u00e9tain, who negotiated an armistice. This was signed on June 22. In 1918, Germany had formally surrendered to its World War I enemies in a railway carriage. In 1940, Germany's revenge (and France's humiliation) was completed when the French surrendered to Hitler in the very same carriage, at the very same spot. Germany now occupied the north and west of France. The south, which included Toulouse and Marseilles, was nominally independent. P\u00e9tain took charge of this area.\n\nOn the day of the prime minister's resignation, Joliot-Curie had arrived in Clermont-Ferrand, in the independent south. He explained to Halban and Kowarski that, in his opinion, and that of government officials, France would remain divided for a period, but eventually the Germans would occupy the whole of the country. The plans for fission experiments at Clermont-Ferrand were therefore in jeopardy. Halban and Kowarski were ordered to go to Bordeaux at dawn the next day, June 17, along with the heavy water. Once there, they would receive further instructions.\n\nThey set off in two cars. In one was the Halban family; the other, a station wagon, contained the Kowarskis, along with twenty cans of heavy water piled in the back. They traveled roughly from west to east, crossing innumerable roads that spread southward from Paris. These roads, unsurprisingly, were full of refugees. It was dark when they reached Bordeaux and received their orders: \"Proceed to England by ship.\"\n\nYears later, Kowarski still recalled the drama and timing of these events. The P\u00e9tain government had been formed, and an armistice called for, but on this one day, June 17, the previous government was still concluding its business. As a last desperate act of defiance, the government \"put its faith into these two departing magicians,\" with heavy water serving as their magic wand. It was clear to the pair that they were \"carriers of a mission,\" entrusted with something of the greatest importance for the honor of France.\n\nOfficials from the Ministry of Armament, assisted by highly ranked military officers, carried the scientists' household belongings and the cans of heavy water to the ship _Broompark._ By midnight Halban and Kowarski were on board, along with several other scientists. The few cabins had been assigned to women and children, so Halban and Kowarski had to fend for themselves. They eventually fell asleep on a heap of coal. The next day, Marshal P\u00e9tain ordered France to stop fighting, and surrendered to the Germans.\n\nThe heavy water had begun its own odyssey, first to England and then to North America. It arrived in England on June 21, just as Bruno Pontecorvo was reaching Toulouse and completing the first stage of his own adventure. Three years would pass before he would meet his colleagues again, across the ocean.\n\nFROM VICHY FRANCE TO THE NEW WORLD\n\nThe south of France was the starting point for a great migration of refugees to North America. The Emergency Rescue Committee issued permits for immigration to America but only if the applicants satisfied very rigid criteria. Bruno, at least, had a job to go to. He now entered the corrupt lottery necessary to obtain the exit visas from the Vichy government. The character of Captain Louis Renault in the film _Casablanca_ is a perfect reflection of Vichy officialdom: people who had France in their hearts, but were forced to work within the tight constraints of realpolitik. Their motives were mixed. Power over peoples' lives led to greed and corruption. Bruno Pontecorvo had to find his way through this labyrinth. The family planned to travel by ship from Lisbon, which required them to pass through Spain. So he also had to deal with the Spanish and Portuguese governments to obtain the necessary transit permits. Chaos and unpredictability reigned.\n\nBruno's attempt to leave Europe seems to have started on June 26 with a visit to the Portuguese consulate in Toulouse. He then made a three-hundred-mile round trip to Bordeaux to visit the American consulate, on June 29, seeking permission to immigrate to the United States. This cost nine dollars per person.\n\nThe following week was a rare period of relative calm before Bruno resumed crisscrossing France, accumulating further documents for his family's departure. On July 9, he was issued a visa in Perpignan\u2014120 miles away from Toulouse, near the Spanish border\u2014allowing them to travel across France \"for the USA via Portugal and Spain.\" The visa was only valid until July 17; time was short. He stayed overnight in Perpignan. The next day, he visited the Spanish consulate, which issued more visas to the Pontecorvos, \"good for a single voyage from Marseilles via Spain en route to Portugal.\"\n\nHaving acquired Spanish entry and transit documents, Bruno next visited Marseilles\u2014nearly 200 miles away\u2014to obtain Portuguese documents, which he succeeded in doing on July 12: \"Good for Portugal in transit to USA, valid for 30 days.\" Finally, with all these papers in place, official permission to undertake the actual journey and exit France seems to have been required; on July 17, the prefecture of the Haute Garonne department, in Toulouse, issued the last set of visas to Bruno's family, permitting them to leave France for the United States via Spain and Portugal.\n\nHaving come so far together, the band of refugees now went their separate ways. Gillo and Henrietta remained in southern France, as did Emilio Sereni and his family. Giuliana and Duccio joined Marianne, Bruno, and Gil en route to Portugal and the Americas.\n\nAt last they set off by train from Toulouse. They crossed the frontier into Spain at Portbou, on the Mediterranean coast, on July 19. They had traveled through France for half a day. It would be a further 500 miles before they reached Madrid, and five more days before they arrived in Portugal.\n\nTHE TRAIN FROM MADRID WAS PACKED SOLID WITH REFUGEES. THEIR luggage, stacked in the corridors, served as makeshift furniture for those who had not managed to grab seats. To add to the discomfort, it was the height of summer, very hot, and there was no water. Giuliana was pregnant, but stoically managed to deal with the hardships. Not so Marianne, who was also pregnant, and in pain. She felt a little better when she was lying down, but lost consciousness several times. Bruno did not know what to do. For a long time she was able to sleep only by lying on the floor of the corridor.\n\nOn July 24 they reached the border with Portugal, and from there proceeded to Lisbon, the only port from which it was possible to reach the United States. Thousands of exhausted and frightened migrants were pouring into the city. Many had abandoned comfortable homes, and sold their precious possessions in order to buy tickets, or to bribe officials in exchange for the necessary permits. And so it was for Bruno. After handing over yet more money, he obtained a permit for the group to reside in Lisbon for thirty days. They rented rooms in a small hotel.\n\nAfter the privations of the journey, Lisbon was like heaven. Sunny and cooled by the breeze from the sea, the city also boasted coffee shops and the smells of pine trees, which added to the general ambience. The war was miles away, in all senses of the phrase. Marianne still had the \"pallor of a sick child,\" however, and a few days before they were due to board the ship for the United States, she had a miscarriage.\n\nShe was in no state to travel, but they had come so far and had to continue. On the ninth of August, the two families set out together across the Atlantic Ocean, the final leg of their escape. Their privations were not yet over, however. Although the weather was good, the voyage on the liner _Quanza_ was awful. The Pontecorvos' cabin was low down in the ship, where the heat was insufferable. Marianne and Giuliana were seasick.\n\nTo arrive in Manhattan after crossing the Atlantic by ship is, judging from my own experience, one of the great moments in world travel. After days of gray sea, with no distinguishing features to give a sense of distance or speed, the low-lying dunes of Long Island appear on the starboard, or right-hand, side. After another hour, the coast of the mainland becomes ever more prominent on the port side. You appear to be headed for disaster as the two landmasses of the North American continent and Long Island come together in front of you. Then, gradually, a narrow channel appears between Staten Island and Brooklyn. This is the strait known as the Narrows.\n\nSince 1964 the Narrows have been spanned by a suspension bridge. On a modern liner, such as the _Queen Mary 2,_ the funnels of the ship seem certain to pierce the bridge above you. So it is with both relief and surprise that you rush beneath, and are suddenly within the confines of the continent. In 1940 there was no bridge, but the dramatic sense of arrival and relief as the Pontecorvos passed through the Narrows, from the Atlantic Ocean to the inland waters, would have been the same. The _Quanza_ entered the Upper Bay, and turned to starboard, revealing the skyscrapers of Manhattan Island.\n\nBut first, for all travelers, and especially for refugees, there is one symbolic moment to savor: the sight of the Statue of Liberty. It was thus ironic that, on the day the Pontecorvos arrived, humid mist obscured this symbol of freedom. In any case, the ship reached New York on August 19; Bruno Pontecorvo was three days shy of his twenty-seventh birthday, which he spent with his brother Paolo at 503 West 121st Street. This was to be Bruno, Marianne, and Gil's temporary home until they moved to Tulsa.\n\nPARALLEL LIVES\n\nWhen Bruno, Giuliana, and their families left France and headed for the United States, Gillo and Henrietta stayed behind. They moved to Saint-Tropez, where a strange assortment of individuals who were trying to escape the war had gathered. Gillo gave tennis lessons to the local bourgeoisie, and met exiled intellectuals such as the musician Ren\u00e9 Leibowitz, who taught him piano, harmony, and counterpoint.\n\nGillo later described this period, when war raged everywhere except this bizarre bubble, as \"living outside history.\" Then he found a way to reenter it. Having been converted to communism by Bruno, Gillo became a clandestine member of the Communist Party of Italy in 1942. While living in Saint-Tropez, he met Giorgio Amendola, an Italian communist who was secretly organizing opposition to the Mussolini regime. Amendola was desperate to find someone willing to go to Italy and reestablish contact with the antifascists and communists there. Previous agents who had made the attempt had been arrested just past the border. Gillo offered to try\u2014and succeeded, using a variety of false identities.\n\nSoon he was making regular visits to Milan on courier and news-gathering missions. He worked on the party's underground newspaper, _l'Unit\u00e0_ , throughout the summer of 1943, while Milan suffered constant Allied bombardment. In 1944 Gillo was forced to go into hiding, but then went to Turin, where he began to organize young factory workers. After the liberation, he became the director of _Pattuglia_ , a journal for communist and socialist youth, and then returned to Paris to become the Italian representative of the communist-backed World Federation of Democratic Youth.\n\nSalvador Luria, as we saw earlier, reached Marseilles, and emigrated to the United States. Thus, our heroes survived, unlike some of N\u00e9mirovsky's fictional ones, or indeed N\u00e9mirovsky herself. Her chronicle of the flight from Paris mirrors the experiences of our group, but her own tale ended tragically: arrested by the Gestapo, she died at Auschwitz. Emilio Sereni, the final member of the group that fled Paris with Bruno, almost suffered a similar fate.\n\nAfter fleeing Paris, Sereni was prominent in the communist partisan movement. Based in Nice, he encouraged Italians to resist Mussolini, and published a radical newspaper, _The World of the Soldier._ In June 1943 he was arrested, sent back to Italy, and sentenced to eighteen years in prison. He tried to escape, but was recaptured and sent to an SS camp in Turin, where he spent seven months, under threat of execution. In August 1944 he made a second escape attempt. This time he succeeded, and lived undercover for the few remaining months of the war.\n\nAfter the war ended, Emilio Sereni\u2014by now a hero as well as a prominent communist\u2014took up politics full-time and became Minister of Public Works in the postwar government. At the Fifth Congress of the Italian Communist Party in 1945, he was elected as a member of the Central Committee and the Directorate. He soon became an influential member of Comintern, or the Communist International\u2014the organization whose goal was to create an international Soviet republic. By 1950 Emilio Sereni would be a regular visitor to Eastern Europe, and well connected in Moscow.\nFIVE\n\nNEUTRONS FOR OIL AND WAR\n\n_1940\u20131941_\n\nBRUNO'S NEW CAREER AS AN OIL PROSPECTOR TOOK HIM AWAY FROM the frontiers of nuclear physics, which were now dominated by fission and the attempt to create a chain reaction. Meanwhile, Hans von Halban and Lew Kowarski had decamped to England with the precious heavy water, and begun experiments in Cambridge. The results of these tests appeared to show that a chain reaction might be possible in uranium when heavy water is used a moderator.\n\nEven before Bruno's departure, the critical questions were obvious to physicists worldwide. In 1939 Niels Bohr had pointed out that using U-235 rather than U-238 was key, but how much uranium would be required to make a chain reaction in practice? And was uranium the only possible material that could be used? It's worth noting that if this quest was successful, it would highlight the irony of Hitler's persecution of the Jews: many brilliant Jewish scientists fled central Europe and became key players in the scientific war against the Nazis.\n\nIn England, at the University of Birmingham, two of these refugees, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, focused on the questions of whether a chain reaction could occur if fast neutrons hit a lump of pure U-235 and how much would be required to make a significant explosion.\n\nIn March 1940 the two young theoreticians worked out the equations and were astonished by the answer: \"The energy liberated by a 5kg bomb would be equivalent to that of several thousand tons of dynamite.\" The British, already at war with Germany, took immediate action: Frisch and Peierls's work was classified as top secret\u2014so secret, in fact, that the two \u00e9migr\u00e9s (technically \"enemy aliens\") who had made the discovery were barred from the official committee that first evaluated it.\n\nThe idea was not implemented efficiently, however, because of doubts that such a weapon could be built in time to influence the war, or even that it would work. The enrichment of uranium to produce the necessary levels of U-235 would be a huge industrial enterprise. This inspired a new thought: Could there be other elements whose nuclei might fission easily? Scientists hypothesized that there existed unstable elements beyond uranium\u2014now known as neptunium and plutonium\u2014and that these could be likely candidates. However, no one knew whether they would be so in practice. Several grams of these exotic elements would be needed to find the answer, and because these \"transuranium\" elements do not occur naturally it would be necessary to make them.\n\nTransuranium elements are occasionally produced, one atom at a time, when neutrons hit uranium. In June 1940, American physicists Edwin McMillan and Philip Abelson duly bombarded uranium, performed a chemical analysis of the sample, and identified the presence of some atoms of element 93\u2014neptunium. They suggested that plutonium, element 94, might also be formed in such a way. In Cambridge, Egon Bretscher and Norman Feather predicted that plutonium would have a strong capacity to fission, much like U-235. To test whether this was true in practice would require a lot of plutonium, which in turn would require tons of uranium, intense sources of neutrons, and an efficient means to moderate them. A nuclear reactor is the ideal machine for the task. Indeed, the production of these transuranium elements would become one of the major motivations behind the development of nuclear reactors.\n\nThe project in the United Kingdom was already classified secret. When Abelson and McMillan's paper about neptunium and plutonium appeared in _Physical Review_ that summer, available for anyone to see, scientists in both Britain and the US protested. In Britain, a nation already at war, the dangers of advertising such a strategically important discovery were obvious. Although the United States was not yet involved in the war, influential refugees from fascism, such as Einstein and Fermi, were already in the country, and others, including Bruno Pontecorvo, were on their way. Thus, the Americans too became concerned at the potential implications of these discoveries. Starting in the summer of 1940, all research on fission in the West became a closely guarded secret, and no further papers on the subject were published in the open literature.\n\nThere were three main strategies in the quest for a chain reaction. One was to find some way to enrich uranium\u2014that is, to increase the amount of the U-235 isotope. Another was to find some other fissile element\u2014such as plutonium\u2014and use that. In the USSR, Igor Kurchatov examined a third possibility: Could fast neutrons fission both U-235 and U-238 and initiate a chain reaction in natural uranium without the need for enrichment?\n\nEarly in 1940, at Kurchatov's suggestion, two junior colleagues\u2014Georgii Flerov and Konstantin Petrzhak\u2014used a range of sources that emit neutrons with different energies, put them inside a sphere of uranium, and measured how the neutrons flowed. They found that fast neutrons create an insignificant amount of fission but also discovered something unexpected: fission appeared to occur sporadically in uranium without any neutron bombardment at all.\n\nTheir initial explanation was that cosmic rays from outer space were hitting the uranium atoms and splitting them apart. To guard against this possibility, they repeated the experiment underground in Moscow's Dinamo subway station, where the earth and rocks would shield the uranium sample. The spontaneous fission persisted. This proved that it was a real phenomenon, albeit rare. The team announced their findings at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in May 1940, and Kurchatov sent a short report to the American _Physical Review_ , which published it in July.\n\nWe now know that spontaneous fission occurs because even natural uranium is slightly unstable. Although the phenomenon is too rare to be a source of energy, it can nonetheless interfere with the delicate design of an atomic weapon. In a nutshell: to make a nuclear blast, fission must grow exponentially within a fraction of a second. Spontaneous fission, and fission induced by cosmic rays, can cause the nuclear energy to be released prematurely, before a chain reaction develops. Within a couple of years, this phenomenon would become one of the many problems to solve in designing a successful uranium bomb.\n\nIn the USSR\u2014which was not yet at war\u2014investigations continued. On August 29, 1940, Kurchatov, Flerov, and some colleagues drew up a plan for the \"utilization of the energy of uranium fission in a chain reaction.\" There was a lot of discussion about the plan in November at the Fifth All-Union Conference on Nuclear Physics, in Moscow. The need for large amounts of uranium was immediately obvious. How the USSR would find supplies of the scarce element, however, was not.\n\nTwo young Russian theoreticians, Yulii Khariton and Yakov Zel'dovich, now turned their attention to the same question that, unknown to them, Frisch and Peierls had already answered in March: How much pure U-235 was needed? In the fall of 1940 they found the same result as the British pair: a few kilograms of U-235 would do. The Soviet Union recognized the strategic importance of this discovery and classified their work as secret. The Soviets already suspected that a secret nuclear physics project was under way in the West. Their hunch had developed during the summer, when Flerov and Petrzhak's paper appeared in _Physical Review_. Their discovery of spontaneous fission was of immense significance, and yet there was a complete lack of (visible) reaction to this in the United States.\n\nUntil this time, every knowledgeable physicist could keep abreast of global developments in the field. There was no need for spies. The major secret in the West was the discovery made by Frisch and Peierls. Bruno knew nothing of this. The Soviets, however, thanks to Khariton and Zel'dovich had discovered it for themselves. The big unknown, of course, was what was going on in Germany. The potential of a chain reaction to fulfill the Promethean dream of creating unlimited amounts of atomic energy was common knowledge, and a year earlier, in April 1939, Germany had banned the export of uranium and started conducting experiments on fission. That was enough to spur the allies to develop nuclear technology.\n\nIt would be two years before Bruno rejoined the world of cutting-edge physics. During that time much would change, as nuclear physics became a tool of war, its research classified as secret. This secrecy applied not only to novel results but also to the nature of the quest itself.\n\nBRUNO THE OIL PROSPECTOR\n\nWhen the Pontecorvos arrived in the United States in August 1940, Enrico Fermi was based at Columbia University, in New York. One of the first things Bruno did upon arrival was visit the Fermis at their home in Leonia, New Jersey, two miles from Manhattan, across the Hudson River. Years later, Enrico's wife, Laura, remembered that this visit had disturbed her.\n\nShe recalled that Bruno had come alone. He explained that Marianne was \"worn out\" from the sea crossing and needed to rest. Laura had never met Marianne or Gil, and was disappointed that Bruno hadn't brought them along. She added that although Marianne's fatigue was understandable so soon after an \"ocean journey on a boat crowded with European refugees,\" she was perturbed that Bruno declined her offer to visit Marianne, or to help her in any way.\n\nLaura Fermi wrote her account in 1953, at a time when Pontecorvo had disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, his whereabouts still unknown. Her account helped fuel the media myth that Marianne was a mysterious Svengali, silent because she had so many secrets to conceal. However, the real explanation of her behavior is perhaps much simpler, and also more tragic. As we have seen, Marianne had been through a painful pregnancy and miscarried just days before crossing the Atlantic. Laura Fermi was presumably unaware of this. Marianne could also be painfully shy, at ease with friends but uncomfortable with strangers.\n\nAfter a brief stay in New York at the home of Bruno's brother Paolo, the Pontecorvos set off on the final leg of their journey: 1,300 miles southwest to Tulsa, Oklahoma, the home of Well Surveys, where Bruno was to become an oil prospector.\n\nBUILD A BETTER MOUSETRAP AND THE WORLD WILL BEAT A PATH TO your door.\n\nIn the 1930s, as the need for gasoline grew in the United States, the \"world\" meant the likes of Standard Oil, Texaco, and Phillips; the mousetrap, a means to locate precious new oil fields.\n\nWell Surveys of Oklahoma was a company that specialized in oil prospecting; their big idea was that the natural radioactivity in rocks might reveal the geological formations where oil could be found. To realize this dream they needed an expert in nuclear physics and radioactivity, and, thanks to Emilio Segr\u00e8's recommendation, they hired Bruno Pontecorvo.\n\nTwo of the scientists at Well Surveys\u2014who were instrumental in hiring Bruno\u2014were colorful characters whose backgrounds would later attract the attention of the nation's security agencies. Their names were Jakov (also known as Jake or Jack) Neufeld, a Polish \u00e9migr\u00e9, and Serge Alexandrovich Scherbatskoy, a Russian who had been born in Turkey.\n\nNeufeld had been born in 1906, learned nuclear physics at the University of Li\u00e8ge in Belgium, and then took a position at Cornell University. It was from there that he joined Seismic Surveys Corporation, a forerunner of Well Surveys. At the time, Scherbatskoy was the research director of the company.\n\nScherbatskoy had been born in 1908 in Constantinople, where his father, Alexander, was a diplomat at the Russian consulate. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Alexander worked in the League of Nations offices in Berlin, and then moved to Paris. While the family was based in Germany, Serge studied engineering at Stuttgart. After the move to France, he enrolled at the Sorbonne, where he graduated in physics in 1926.\n\nIn 1929 he arrived in the United States, just before the stock market crashed. According to some accounts he had no passport, but in any event he was admitted, Serge Alexandrovich being reborn as Serge Alexander. He worked on telephones at Bell Labs, but he was laid off in 1932 due to the effects of the Depression, after which he took a variety of jobs in electronics. In 1936 he joined Seismic Services Corporation in Tulsa.\n\nIt was there that he met Neufeld. They used their combined experience in electronics and nuclear physics to design devices that detected gamma rays, which are emitted by radioactive atoms in rocks. Shales, which are harbingers of oil fields, contain uranium and thorium, which are radioactive. Sands and limestones, by contrast, are not. Their detectors could identify shale-rich oil fields more successfully than other techniques, which had failed or were at best inefficient.\n\nStandard Oil was impressed with their research, and poured in money. In 1937, this led the pair to create Well Surveys, where Scherbatskoy was research director and Neufeld was at his side. Their plan was to find new ways of applying nuclear physics to prospecting.\n\nInspired by Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric and Ir\u00e8ne Joliot-Curie's discovery of induced radioactivity, and the Via Panisperna Boys' demonstration that neutrons are especially efficient at activating it, Neufeld and Scherbatskoy decided to use this breakthrough to induce radioactivity in rocks. By this means, they believed that underground strata could be made to shine brightly\u2014in terms of gamma rays\u2014relative to the faint glimmer that is typical of natural radioactivity. This is what led them to hire Bruno Pontecorvo.\n\nBruno now set about developing the first industrial application of neutrons in locating oil-bearing rocks, a technique still in use more than half a century later. His invention paid off handsomely for his employers. In a 1990 interview he commented wryly, \"I could have been a millionaire if I had patented my discovery. Instead I did not make anything, and now the patent belongs to the company I worked for. I do not have any practical sense.\" Soon Bruno's invention would be used by the Manhattan Project to map the vast mineral resources in the Canadian wilderness, where it was secretly turned into a remarkably efficient way to find uranium. This would have profound implications for the development of nuclear energy, as well as for Cold War politics.\n\nTHERE ARE THREE PARTS TO THE CHALLENGE OF USING NEUTRONS to find oil. First, you must produce neutrons; then, having lowered the neutron source down a hole, you need to detect signals coming from the interaction between those neutrons and the underground minerals. Finally\u2014the aim of the exercise\u2014you need to decode the signals to learn about the nature of the strata.\n\nFor Bruno, making beams of neutrons was child's play. Typically he used radium, which produces a steady stream of alpha particles, and mixed it with beryllium, whose atoms emit neutrons when they're hit by alpha particles. In searching for oil-bearing rocks, the basic idea is that the neutrons interact with atoms in the vicinity of the borehole. Most bounce gently off other particles and pass through the rocks, never to be seen again, but some are reflected back toward the detector, or are absorbed by elements in the rocks. When neutrons are absorbed by a material, they convert the nuclei of the material's atoms into miniature transmitters. The end result is that information returns to the detector in the form of radiation, such as gamma rays, or the reflected neutrons themselves.\n\nThe whole apparatus that Bruno developed was contained in a thin cylinder, about two meters long and a mere ten centimeters in diameter, which could be lowered into deep boreholes. The cylinder contained his neutron source, an ionization chamber (similar to a Geiger counter), and an electronic amplifier for recording the faint signals created when radiation passed through the ionization chamber.\n\nIn Rome, Bruno had been party to the discovery that heavy nuclei tend to absorb slow neutrons. This induces radioactivity in the nuclei, which may respond by emitting gamma rays. In this new application, the spectrum of these gamma rays could be used to identify isotopes of heavy elements present in the rocks. The data reports that were obtained from the neutron irradiation of rocks in prospective oil fields were therefore known as \"neutron-gamma\" logs.\n\nPontecorvo also developed an independent recording method\u2014the \"neutron-neutron\" log\u2014in which neutrons recoiling from the strata were detected. When a neutron hits a heavy element, the bulky atom stays where it is and the reflected neutron retains most of its energy. Light elements can also deflect neutrons, even reflecting them back to the source, but in this case the neutron has less energy than when it set out. Thus, if you could record the actual energies of the reflected neutrons, you would have a way (albeit a rough one) of differentiating between light and heavy elements.\n\nThis basic idea was simple, but there were challenges to overcome before it could be put into practice. For example, the source produced fast neutrons, whereas the detector was most efficient at recording slow ones. To resolve this issue, Pontecorvo embedded the detector in paraffin, which slowed the neutrons. Although this made his device more efficient, it created a problem of its own: to convert the number of counts in the detector into meaningful information about the neutron intensity, he needed to know what percentage of the original fast neutrons had slowed, and by how much. To find the answer, he performed a series of experiments in the lab. First he determined how his detector responded to a known source of neutrons, and then compared data from the field with these benchmarks.\n\nHe also needed to decide on the optimum amount of paraffin. A small amount would slow few, if any, of the neutrons to the low speeds necessitated by the detector. At the other extreme, a large amount of paraffin would absorb so many neutrons that very few would get through. Hence there must be some intermediate situation in which the intensity of slow neutrons is at a maximum. Only after these calibrations were done in the lab would it be possible to identify strata in the field.\n\nDuring his time in Italy, Bruno had learned that the amount of radioactivity induced in heavy elements depends greatly on the speed of the incident neutrons. At a certain speed a neutron could have only a moderate effect, whereas if it were slightly faster or slower, the response could be huge. In 1936 Fermi and Edoardo Amaldi had measured the absorption and diffusion of neutrons in various materials, and plotted graphs\u2014known as Amaldi-Fermi (or AF) curves\u2014which in effect showed how the response varied with neutron speed. AF curves were important in the practical interpretation of nuclear measurements, so Pontecorvo decided to build on that experience by seeing what happened when neutrons bombarded various strata containing a smorgasbord of minerals, and using the curves to help him interpret the results.\n\nIn doing this, he had to shield his detector from the source of neutrons; otherwise, radiation from the source itself would swamp the delicate signals from the surrounding rocks. This raised another question: Could he discriminate between the radiation coming from the rocks and the radiation coming directly from the source? He discovered that the source produced a steady level of radiation, while that from the rocks varied dramatically as the device passed from one stratum to another while being lowered down the hole. The amount of variation turned out to be sharp enough for him to identify the genuine signal. In June 1941 Bruno reported on the trials he had performed, and on the ability of the data to reveal the chemical composition and porosity of rocks. His report showed that different rock strata give distinctive radioactive responses, providing remarkably clear differentiation between shale, limestone, and sandstone. What's more, this method of rock assessment was superior to the existing techniques, such as the gamma-ray device that Neufeld and Scherbatskoy had first used.\n\nThat same year, Bruno published a report in the _Oil and Gas Journal_ , showing the superb correlations between signals in his detector and different varieties of rocks. He also identified a key asset of his device: \"The strength of the neutron source can be made quite large, [so] the surveying speed which may be realized with [this] new method is very great.\" This report, in the open literature, included what amounted to an advertisement: \"If favorable tests continue, the new process will be offered to the trade shortly.\"\n\nNext Bruno had to decide on the best neutron source. His use of paraffin to slow the neutrons limited the precision of his measurements. He began looking for sources of lower-energy neutrons, so that he could do away with the paraffin entirely. This led him to seek out companies that provided radioactive materials such as polonium and actinium, to replace the radium-beryllium mixture he had used before. This occupied him throughout much of 1941. By the end of the year Bruno was sure that neutrons were a remarkable new tool, which could reveal the transitions between layers of sandstone and shale, or between layers of sandstone and limestone.\n\nThe concept of \"neutron\" was entering the public awareness in unexpected ways. Periodically Bruno joined teams of engineers in the oil fields. During one of these visits, a truck suddenly stopped and its driver shouted to him, \"Have you seen the neutrons?\" The trucker was looking for one of his colleagues, who had the team's exploration equipment, including one of Pontecorvo's neutron sources. For the driver, this source had become simply \"the neutrons.\" Pontecorvo was quite humbled, and proud that \"a particle dear to me, connected with my research with Fermi, had already entered the life of men, at least in the oil fields.\" Bruno was establishing a whole new industry: one that used neutrons to locate the minerals that herald oil.\n\nDURING THIS TIME, BRUNO, MARIANNE, AND GIL WERE HAPPILY settled in a typical American house in Tulsa. It was considerably more spacious than the student housing they'd occupied in Paris, with its communal bathroom. In Tulsa they had a home to themselves, with bedrooms upstairs, a large living room, and a backyard. The local newspaper carried the story of the handsome, dark-haired Italian, his blond Swedish wife, and their curly-haired young son, who had escaped from the war in Europe. They were popular in the community, and planned to settle permanently in the United States.\n\nMuch changed, however, when the US entered the war in December 1941. President Roosevelt declared that \"an invasion or predatory incursion [was] threatened on the United States\" by Germany and Italy, and Bruno had once more become an enemy alien. In this climate, Bruno decided to investigate the possibility of becoming a naturalized American citizen.\n\n**IMAGE 5.1.** The Pontecorvo family in Tulsa, 1940. (COURTESY GIL PONTECORVO; PONTECORVO FAMILY ARCHIVES.)\nSIX\n\nEAST AND WEST\n\n_1941\u20131942_\n\nIN JUNE 1941, THE NAZI ARMY INVADED THE SOVIET UNION AND headed toward Moscow. The Soviets viewed fission as a potential source of destructive power for a future war, but not relevant to the present one. The difficulty of extracting U-235 and controlling fission so as to guarantee an explosion seemed to be insurmountable challenges at the time. Pragmatism ruled: Why pursue fission, a long-term project of dubious success, when Moscow might fall within a few weeks? The Soviet work on fission ground to a halt.\n\nGeorgii Flerov, Kurchatov's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 who had discovered spontaneous fission, thought this strategy was wrong. In his opinion, it would be a disaster to lose the race for the atomic bomb. He estimated that fast neutrons might initiate a chain reaction equivalent to 100,000 tons of TNT, without the need to increase the amount of U-235 through enrichment. He even designed a bomb, which, unknown to him, was quite similar to the one secretly envisioned by Frisch and Peierls in the UK. In December 1941 he sent a letter to Kurchatov, outlining his concerns. Unfortunately Kurchatov was ill with pneumonia and never replied.\n\nAt this stage Russia and the United States were ostensibly allies, if only in the sense that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. In reality there was mutual suspicion. The US and UK kept their plans for an atomic weapon secret from their Soviet ally. However, this did not mean that the Soviets were unaware of it.\n\nKlaus Fuchs was another refugee from fascism\u2014a theoretical physicist who in 1941 was working with Rudolf Peierls in Birmingham. Following the German invasion of the USSR, Fuchs, who was a communist, decided that the Soviet Union had the right to know what the British were working on. Fuchs contacted the military attach\u00e9 in the Soviet consulate in the summer of 1941 and told him about the British plans for separating U-235. In addition to information obtained from spies such as Fuchs, there were also clues about the secret programs to be found in the open literature, provided that one knew how to interpret them.\n\nEarly in 1942, Georgii Flerov was in the Soviet military. He had been removed from the relative luxury of physics and sent to fight at the front near Voronezh, about 300 miles south of Moscow. By this point, Voronezh State University had been evacuated, but the library shelves were full of the latest international journals. One day, when he had a few hours to spare, Flerov visited the library to read the latest American news on fission. He was astonished at what he found: there wasn't any.\n\nInitially puzzled, Flerov flipped through the pages of the available Western journals and found papers on other areas of physics by a variety of authors, but on fission\u2014nothing. That was only half of it: not only had papers on fission disappeared, but the leading nuclear physicists had also. None of the field's most prominent researchers\u2014such as Fermi, Bethe, and Bohr\u2014had published anything for several months.\n\nThen Flerov realized the explanation: the papers were absent because American research on fission had become secret. This also explained the disappearance of the nuclear scientists: they were keeping silent as they worked on a nuclear weapon.\n\nAt least the Americans and the Soviets were on the same side in the war. What worried him was that there were also first-class scientists in Nazi Germany, who might have similar ideas. What's more, they also had access to large amounts of uranium and the means to enrich it. To sound the alarm, he wrote to Stalin in April 1942, urging him to call a meeting of the nation's leading nuclear scientists. Flerov's intervention was backed up by information he wasn't aware of: the secrets obtained from Klaus Fuchs. Whether Stalin himself actually saw Flerov's letter is unknown, but Soviet scientists were eventually alerted.\n\nBy the spring of 1942 the Kremlin's attitude toward nuclear research was changing. One reason for this was that the immediate German threat to Moscow had been repulsed. More to the point, Stalin's henchman Lavrenti Beria, who chaired the Special Committee on the Atomic Bomb, knew from Klaus Fuchs that work was under way in the UK to separate U-235. Thus Beria knew that the British considered the challenge of the atomic bomb to have been solved in principle. Its construction would now be an engineering project.\n\nDuring 1942, the Germans regained the upper hand in their fight with the Red Army, overrunning Sevastopol and moving toward Stalingrad. This threat to the survival of the Soviet Union occupied most of Stalin's attention, but Beria's knowledge that a bomb was possible finally stimulated the establishment of a dedicated program in the USSR. Although the information in Flerov's letter was probably old news, thanks to spies like Fuchs, the communication had an effect: it singled him out as an expert. In mid-July of 1942 Flerov was withdrawn from the southwestern front, summoned to Moscow, and put back into neutron research. In September, Kurchatov was brought on board. During October, while the Battle of Stalingrad was at its height, he was put in charge of the Soviet Union's quest for an atomic bomb.\n\nMEANWHILE, IN THE UNITED KINGDOM, SCIENTISTS HAD BEEN investigating the practicalities of a nuclear weapon, building on the breakthrough made by Frisch and Peierls. By 1941, the British had the lead. They had investigated U-235 enrichment in experiments at Oxford, and were well advanced in the theoretical workings of a uranium bomb.\n\nJames Chadwick, who had started the saga by discovering the neutron, was now involved both in experiments and in organizing collaboration between the various teams in the United Kingdom. This dapper, hardworking experimentalist was now showing his brilliance as an administrator of science. Like many experts, including those in the Soviet Union, Chadwick initially thought that nothing would come of this work until after the war. Then, in the spring of 1941, British scientists found that it was possible to separate the fissile U-235 from naturally occurring uranium. What's more, the costs involved made this practical. Fuchs, who was party to this secret, duly passed the news on to the USSR. Chadwick's reaction was also dramatic, though more personal. Upon realizing that a nuclear bomb was not only possible but inevitable, he later recalled, \"I had to take sleeping pills. It was the only remedy.\"\n\nChadwick wrote a report, summarizing his conclusion that an atomic weapon was feasible, and by the end of 1941 Winston Churchill gave the top-secret project the go-ahead, under the bland code name \"Tube Alloys.\" As before, the Soviets learned about this development from spies.\n\nTube Alloys involved many scientists and engineers, but was managed by Wallace Akers, the research director of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), along with the company's senior administrator, Michael Perrin. By this point, Halban and Kowarski were in Cambridge, with the heavy water. Working with a team of physicists at Cambridge University, their goal was to create a chain reaction as a means of producing nuclear power. Although ICI was managing the enterprise on behalf of the war effort, the company saw excellent commercial possibility in the development of nuclear power, once the war was over.\n\nThe heavy-water project now had real urgency. German interest in heavy water hinted that they too were on the hunt for nuclear technology. Although the United Kingdom was protected from enemy occupation by the English Channel, and had survived the aerial Battle of Britain in 1940, the possibility of a Nazi invasion remained real. Separating U-235, exploiting nuclear fission, and then building a bomb would be an industrial-scale enterprise, which would be vulnerable to enemy attack if based in England. Eventually, this undertaking would be subsumed within the Manhattan Project in the United States. In 1942, to safeguard the precious heavy-water project and, we may assume, to maintain control over its commercial potential, the operation was relocated to the relative safety of Canada. Thus began the Anglo-Canadian arm of Tube Alloys, based initially in Montreal and built around the senior personnel from Halban and Kowarski's Cambridge University team.\n\nHalban's personality turned out to be a problem, both when forming the Canadian team and later when working with the Americans. He presented the group's work on heavy water in a self-aggrandizing manner. Kowarski resented Halban's habit of using their joint work for personal glory, and refused to go to Canada as second fiddle. So Kowarski remained in Cambridge. Halban, meanwhile, visited the United States in 1942 to build the team, and to discuss nuclear strategy with Enrico Fermi.\n\nFERMI'S PILE: 1942\n\nWhen Fermi had first started researching the possibility of a chain reaction in the United States, he had used water as moderator. Like the French, he soon realized that this was not efficient because the water tends to capture neutrons from the beam. Heavy water was scarce in the United States, so Fermi decided to try graphite instead. Graphite contains carbon, which is light and slows neutrons efficiently.\n\nDuring 1942, Fermi worked urgently to create a self-sustaining chain reaction using neutrons and uranium. To do so, he had to produce intense sources of neutrons, and assess which uranium compounds were most efficient. In addition he had to select suitable materials to moderate the neutrons\u2014that is, to slow them to the optimal speeds that induce fission.\n\nFrom his earlier work with Pontecorvo, Fermi knew which materials worked well in small-scale tests. Now he needed to attempt the same feat on a much larger scale, appropriate to a working reactor. In Chicago research into the properties of plutonium was under way, and, because one goal of a nuclear reactor would be to produce plutonium, Chicago became the logical place for Fermi to build the first reactor prototype.\n\nThe reactor he built there consisted of a stock of uranium oxide, in lumps about the size of tennis balls, embedded in solid blocks of graphite. The graphite blocks were stacked in a pile, which is the source for the colloquial description of this type of nuclear reactor as a \"pile.\" Add a source of neutrons and you have the essence of a nuclear reactor\u2014in theory. In practice the reactor includes a lot of additional hardware, such as metals and concrete, which form the floor and general infrastructure. When the neutrons hit these materials, they are scattered or absorbed, which influences their ability to cause fission in the heart of the reactor. So to construct a working reactor Fermi would need to know how neutrons react with a whole variety of elements, in complex mixtures and ores, not just with uranium. To obtain this knowledge would require an extensive series of tests, in which compounds were irradiated with neutrons to see how much energy is lost when they scatter, or if the neutrons are absorbed. While Fermi was in the early stages of planning this strategy, Bruno Pontecorvo paid him a visit.\n\nBruno had been outside this secret world for twenty months. However, although he was ignorant of the West's growing interest in nuclear reactors, he had unwittingly become an expert in the topics that are central to their design. Indeed, by 1942, when Fermi was beginning to build the pile, Bruno knew more than Fermi himself in some areas.\n\nBRUNO MEETS WITH FERMI\u2014AND HALBAN\n\nToward the end of 1941 Bruno was finding it increasingly difficult to obtain radioactive materials for his work. Radium was plentiful, but supplies of less common materials seemed to have dried up, as if someone was cornering the market. The reason, of course, is that the research work that would ultimately spawn the Manhattan Project was already using up most of the available resources. Bruno, a member of the general public, knew nothing of this, although he was aware that something was amiss. On November 17, 1941, he wrote a report about the shortage of radioactive sources and its effect on the development of new strategies for prospecting. In April 1942 Bruno met with his mentor, Enrico Fermi, in hope of getting access to more supplies.\n\nFermi had spent the winter shuttling back and forth between New York and Chicago, in preparation for his reactor experiment. He too was an \"enemy alien\" and had to get permission every time he made the trip. After April, Fermi moved to Chicago permanently but was still in New York when Bruno visited him. Bruno's colleague from Paris, Hans von Halban, and Czech physicist George Placzek were also present.\n\nDuring the get-together, Bruno told the scientists about his work on neutron well-logging, including some of the technical details. Fermi was especially interested, making suggestions, showing deep knowledge of the subject, and asking questions. Bruno, who knew nothing of Fermi's secret project, was surprised. He assumed that his work had no obvious relevance outside the field of oil prospecting, yet Fermi showed a keen thirst for information. Of course, Fermi's interest stemmed from the reactor project. To build a successful reactor, Fermi would have to irradiate uranium with neutrons in the presence of graphite and other materials, so it was essential for him to understand as much as possible about how neutrons behave.\n\nBruno was unsuccessful in obtaining any essential materials from Fermi, but the meeting must have confirmed his suspicions that a major nuclear project was under way. Given Fermi's questions, the presence of Halban (who had demonstrated fission alongside Bruno in 1939), and Bruno's general knowledge of the state of nuclear physics before secrecy took over, it is inconceivable that he did not deduce what Fermi was up to. The details of the nuclear pile would have remained unknown to him, although it is clear that Fermi shared some of his own neutron data with Pontecorvo: in a report of this visit, written on April 15, Bruno commented that the data he had received from Fermi \"had not been published, and cannot be published for a long time to come, because of their confidential character.\"\n\nContrary to the spin propagated by the British government after Pontecorvo's defection in 1950, it seems he was aware of at least some frontline data in 1942, several months before Fermi completed the first nuclear reactor. Moreover, Pontecorvo now knew that neutrons had become central to wartime nuclear research.\n\nBruno was not alone in deducing what was going on. Others in the US had also put two and two together. Bruno's brother, Paolo, knew Harry Lipkin, who later became a distinguished nuclear theorist but at the time was specializing in microwaves. Working together, Paolo and Lipkin were testing a receiver designed to provide early warning of planes coming over the sea, and in 1943 the pair spent two weeks together in Maine's Acadia National Park. During this time they became friends. In Lipkin's opinion, Paolo had concluded that the Americans were working on the atomic bomb. Paolo had come to this opinion because so many of Bruno's Italian nuclear-physicist friends, including Fermi, had suddenly disappeared, and their research publications had abruptly stopped. Furthermore, the only way to contact them was to send a letter to a PO box that gave no hint of its location. It was obvious that there was a supersecret project going on, and it was clear to Paolo and Harry what it must be.\n\nBruno Pontecorvo's visit to Enrico Fermi in April 1942 would lead him too to become part of that project. It was not Fermi, however, who recruited his former pupil; Bruno joined Halban's Anglo-Canadian team.\n\nTHE CANADIAN CONNECTION\n\nIn 1930, Gilbert LaBine, a Canadian mineral prospector, had discovered deposits of radium and uranium in the Northwest Territories of Canada. At that time radium was highly valued, due to its benefits in cancer treatment, but uranium was considered useless. The world supply of radium was shared between the Canadian deposits and mines in the Belgian Congo. When the war started in Europe, markets for radium shrank and the Canadian mining operation struggled to make ends meet. Everything changed with the discovery of the chain reaction and uranium's potential as an enormous energy resource.\n\nIn 1942 LaBine's Eldorado Mine started to supply the US with uranium for Fermi's reactor. The company was taken over by the Canadian government in 1943.\n\nThe agent for LaBine's Canadian mine was Boris Pregel, based in New York. Pregel, who came from the Ukraine, had moved to Paris after the October Revolution in 1917, and then escaped, like Bruno, when the Nazis invaded in 1940. Upon arriving in the US, Pregel set up the Canadian Radium and Uranium Corporation of New York, which made radioactive neutron sources and luminescent signs, as well as trading in Canadian ores. This explains Pregel's interest in Bruno Pontecorvo, and toward the end of 1942 Pregel began to court him. His goal was to persuade Bruno to join his New York laboratory.\n\nAs luck would have it, Pontecorvo was becoming increasingly frustrated at Well Surveys. His quest for radioactive materials, which were necessary for his work, was getting nowhere. He was about to accept Pregel's offer when fate intervened in the form of three former colleagues from his Paris days: Bertrand Goldschmidt, Hans von Halban, and Pierre Auger.\n\nGoldschmidt (a chemist) and Auger (a physicist) were about to join Halban at the Anglo-Canadian reactor project in Montreal. Auger was to be the head of the physics division, while the head of theoretical physics would be George Placzek, who had been present when Pontecorvo visited Fermi's laboratory earlier that year. The pivotal piece of the puzzle, Goldschmidt was to be the section leader of the chemistry division. Goldschmidt is central to our story because he had been working at Pregel's New York laboratory, where Pontecorvo had been offered a position. In Goldschmidt's judgment, that job was beneath Pontecorvo's talent, and he recommended that Halban hire Bruno.\n\nBy the time the project was operating, about one hundred scientists and engineers were involved. In building his team, Halban, protective of his patent ambitions, had been careful to keep at arm's length anyone who might have claims of their own. This was one reason for Kowarski's exclusion, and was also a bonus for Bruno. Bruno had the expertise, and had watched the heavy-water experiments in Paris, but had not been involved in the patents. Thus, as Halban knew Pontecorvo from their time in Paris, and Placzek had met him earlier that year, they arranged an interview in November 1942. On the basis of this interview, they invited Pontecorvo to join the Anglo-Canadian reactor team. The team's goal was to design a nuclear reactor whose fundamental ingredients would be uranium and heavy water, in contrast to Fermi's uranium-and-graphite reactor in Chicago. Ostensibly the Canadian reactor's purpose was to provide nuclear power in the postwar era; however, it would also produce plutonium and more exotic forms of uranium, which would later have applications for atomic weapons.\n\nTHE OPPORTUNITY TO MOVE TO CANADA CAME AT A GOOD TIME FOR Bruno, as life in the United States had begun to have some unwelcome consequences.\n\nBeing a foreigner in the United States during the war could involve unexpected hazards. One day Bruno was driving a truck full of geophysical instruments, and made some illegal maneuver on the road. Some police officers noticed the indiscretion, and set off in pursuit. Bruno stopped, but the police became suspicious when they noticed the array of unusual instruments in the truck, covered with Bakelite knobs and dials. When Bruno started to explain the purpose of the instruments in the van, they realized he wasn't American and exclaimed, \"Enemy alien!\" Bruno then attempted to retrieve his documents from his back pocket. In what he described as \"like a scene from a movie,\" the police, who thought he was reaching for a gun, immediately immobilized him. When they finally understood the nature of the situation, the police explained that he had risked being killed on the spot.\n\nThis incident ended happily, and left Bruno with a story to add to his collection. Another experience would end less happily, however\u2014a visit by the FBI, whose consequences are reminiscent of chaos theory, in which the flapping of a butterfly's wings can cause a storm far across the globe.\n\nOn September 25, 1942, two FBI agents visited Bruno's home, in view of his status as \"enemy alien.\" Bruno was away for several days at the oil fields, so the agents spoke to Marianne. At the time this seemed of little consequence except for one thing: the agents noticed \"25 or 30 books or pamphlets containing Communist literature\" in the house. They asked Marianne whether Bruno was a communist. She replied that she \"didn't understand and didn't know what a communist was.\" The agents noted that Marianne \"spoke English well and appeared to understand all questions that had previously been asked.\" According to the agents she also said that Bruno \"studied under Madame Curie while he was in France,\" which shows that there was a misunderstanding somewhere. Years later Bruno commented that in America he had felt an \"intense anti-Sovietism\" and that no one had seemed to share his \"passion for the USSR.\"\nSEVEN\n\nTHE PILE AT CHALK RIVER\n\n_1943\u20131945_\n\nWHILE BRUNO HAD BEEN OUTSIDE THE BUBBLE OF SECRECY, MUCH had happened. The events that would eventually absorb him began in 1941, when British prime minister Winston Churchill made the decision to develop nuclear weapons, under the aegis of the Tube Alloys project\u2014which by the time Bruno joined was about to be subsumed into the Manhattan Project.\n\nThe Manhattan Project itself included several components. At Oak Ridge, Tennessee, hundreds of acres of forest were cleared to make room for an immense gaseous diffusion plant, its purpose to separate the fissile U-235 from naturally occurring uranium. The actual design and construction of the atomic bomb occurred at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Among the nuclear physicists who moved from the UK to Los Alamos as part of Tube Alloys were Rudolf Peierls, who had first realized the bomb's capability, and his colleague Klaus Fuchs, who was already passing information to the Soviet Union.\n\nNuclear reactors were a key part of the Manhattan strategy, as they had the potential to make plutonium for a bomb. Led by the pugnacious General Leslie Groves, the project began in earnest on December 2, 1942, the day that Fermi's pile became a self-sustaining fission engine, which liberated energy at a steady rate. In the jargon, the pile became \"critical.\" The development of nuclear reactors was the strand of the Tube Alloys project to which Bruno Pontecorvo would soon be co-opted.\n\nThe project was of course top secret, and its members were thoroughly vetted. The fact that Halban's operation was known as the Anglo-Canadian project is ironic as its genesis was in France, and its early members more French than English. The senior team consisted almost exclusively of \u00e9migr\u00e9s from France and central Europe, who had been working together at Cambridge University with Halban and Kowarski. When Halban proposed that Bruno Pontecorvo join the project, Edward Appleton, the secretary of the British Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), initially objected that he did not want to \"add to the number of non-British nationals\" working on this secret project. In light of later events, this objection was ironic: the sole British member of the team borrowed from Cambridge was Alan Nunn May, later imprisoned for passing secrets to the Soviets. It is not clear how the Czech George Placzek and French Pierre Auger, who were already deeply involved in the project, felt about Appleton's insular attitude. In any event, they argued successfully that \"the brilliant physicist Pontecorvo\" should be included.\n\nBruno had worked with neutrons for nearly a decade, and had been trained by Fermi in both experiment and theory. A further attraction was that Bruno would be able to consult his mentor in Chicago, to the obvious advantage of the Anglo-Canadian project. Bruno's work in Tulsa had taught him how neutrons behave in a range of minerals, which would be key issues in designing a working reactor. At the time, the judgment was that there was \"no specialist of the same character [as Bruno Pontecorvo] available in North America.\"\n\nOn November 4, 1942, the DSIR asked the British embassy in Washington, DC, to make \"discreet enquiries [about Pontecorvo] before any direct approach to employ him.\" On November 30 the embassy's reply deemed him \"quite satisfactory from point of view of security for employment by any British agency.\" It added, rather patronizingly, that Pontecorvo is \"Italian by birth and Hebrew by race, but his record makes it quite clear that he is entirely in sympathy with the Allied Cause.\"\n\nOn December 9, the British security authorities gave Bruno \"an unusually enthusiastic report.\" The recommendation described him as follows: \"One of the ablest of the younger Nuclear Physicists and is acknowledged to be an expert on slow neutron physics\u2014a subject on which he was doing research before the Atomic Energy project was started.\"\n\nBRUNO RESIGNED FROM THE OIL BUSINESS, AND MADE PREPARATIONS to move to Canada. On January 7, 1943, he traveled from Tulsa to Kansas to obtain a passport, returned home the next day, and then went to New York on the fifteenth to be formally appointed to Tube Alloys. He spent the rest of January in the city, where he was briefed about the project, and finally transferred to Montreal with his family on February 7. He would work on secret nuclear physics programs for the Allies and the British for the next seven years.\n\nUnknown to the security authorities in Canada, a fortnight after Pontecorvo's appointment three letters were exchanged between the FBI and the British Security Coordination in Washington. The FBI was concerned about Pontecorvo's sympathies with communism. The origin of this concern was the visit by the two agents to his home in Tulsa a few months earlier, when they had quizzed Marianne in Bruno's absence. Although the letters were exchanged _after_ Bruno's initial appointment to Tube Alloys, he was still only a probationer, and his final approval had yet to take place. Inexplicably, \"by some organizational error,\" these letters were not available to the relevant authorities, and on March 3, 1943, his security clearance was approved.\n\nCanada would be strategically important for the Allies. There were vast deposits of uranium at Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, and a uranium refinery at Port Hope, Ontario. Bruno's skill in locating minerals underground would be put to good use. The objective of the reactor program was to complete the Nuclear Reactor X (NRX), the most powerful source of neutrons in the Western world, and a groundbreaking source of nuclear power. The Chalk River reactor in Canada would be the experimental facility from which Britain's postwar nuclear program would grow, and it would also serve as a means to produce plutonium, as a \"second string to the nuclear bow.\" As a result, Chalk River would become a key target for Soviet agents. Whereas overt communists, such as Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot-Curie, had been excluded from the Manhattan Project for security reasons, Bruno Pontecorvo had hidden his enthusiasm and slipped through the net.\n\n**IMAGE 7.1.** Bruno Pontecorvo's security clearance, issued March 3, 1943. (AUTHOR, THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES.)\n\nARRIVING IN MONTREAL\n\nBruno Pontecorvo's move from Oklahoma to Montreal was a shock. Having grown up in the warmth of Italy and lived for six years in France and Tulsa, where winters were mild, Montreal was brutally cold, dipping below zero even on the Fahrenheit scale. Bruno's breath turned to icicles in front of his face, as the deep freeze continued for several weeks. There were a couple of days in February when the temperature peaked at the freezing point before plummeting once more, to \u201320 degrees Fahrenheit.\n\nThe Pontecorvos rented an apartment at the south end of Mount Royal, in a side street off Chemin de la C\u00f4te-des-Neiges, about two miles from the city center. The family home was not large by North American standards, but was comfortable nonetheless, with a good view of Saint Joseph's Oratory, an imposing landmark that was reached by ascending a large number of steps. Bruno liked to entertain guests by taking them out on the balcony to watch the worshippers who mounted the stone staircase on their knees.\n\nFor Europeans, who constituted much of the membership of the Anglo-Canadian project, 1940s Quebec was a cultural backwater, dominated by religious divisions. The French Catholic province had backed the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, and was now supporting Marshall P\u00e9tain's collaboration with the Nazis in France. This contrasted with the local English-speaking community, who had favored the Spanish Republicans and now supported the French Resistance. There was little science being practiced at the University of Montreal, and faculty membership was restricted to practicing members of the Roman Catholic Church. This astonished the newcomers, who found it hard to believe the immense control that the Church exercised. It censored books and films. It also banned drive-in movie theaters, which it regarded as dens of immorality.\n\nOn the plus side, downtown Montreal was cosmopolitan, with a large selection of restaurants: French, Chinese, and especially Jewish. This area was located some distance from the university laboratory, so although downtown was a popular dinner destination, midday lunch tended to consist of sandwiches eaten in the university common room. Over lunch, conversation thrived. The members of the team came from around the world, and had a wide range of backgrounds. Chatter initially centered on world affairs, but soon more formal lunch-hour discussions were organized on a range of issues.\n\nIt was at these gatherings that Bruno began to make his mark. They not only informed him about all aspects of the project and physics at large, but also made Bruno Pontecorvo known to everyone in the laboratory. In this way, he managed to cut through some of the bureaucracy. The formal pattern of work was divided between senior and junior members. Bruno was in the former class, even though he was barely thirty years old. The senior scientists tended to work closely with one another, whereas the junior staff was assigned specialized tasks, subject to the \"need to know\" principle, with little interaction between members of different groups. In the memory of one junior scientist: \"Hierarchy prevailed. The atmosphere was more military than academic.\"\n\nAnd there, in a nutshell, is the tension, common among scientists throughout the war years. Science advances through free-ranging discussion, the sharing of half-baked ideas, from which unexpected synergies emerge. Military administrators such as General Groves were obsessed with security, however, and wanted to create firewalls to keep pockets of knowledge contained within small groups. For them, the ideal was that information should be compartmentalized, so that only a handful of bosses would have the complete picture. This was anathema for scientists, who were reared on skepticism and imbued, then as now, with a distrust of \"the suits.\" Stories of how these rules were bypassed at Los Alamos are legion; in Canada the same was true. Scientists talk together; it's a fact of life. It's great for making progress, but a nightmare for security during wartime.\n\nOne member of the theoretical physics group recalled that Bruno had a broad interest in physics, science, and philosophy. Although his primary role in the project was that of an experimentalist, theory remained close to his heart. He began to seek out the theoretical group's members in order to have discussions about physics that went beyond the project's immediate problems.\n\nThe theoretical team consisted mainly of young mathematicians with limited knowledge of nuclear physics. Bruno's interaction with them was a two-way street. His expertise in neutrons gave them the background they needed to apply theory to problems in nuclear physics; in return, these regular contacts brought his own talents in theoretical physics to life.\n\nSeveral of these discussions touched on the fundamental ideas underlying radioactivity and nuclear transmutations. It was these talks that led Bruno to appreciate the singular role and importance of the still-hypothetical neutrino, the ghostly particle that had briefly interested his mentor Fermi years before, when Bruno was a student. After the war's end, the neutrino would become a lifelong interest for Bruno.\n\nHALBANIA\n\nBruno's first task was to catch up with the progress that had been made on fission. In Paris he had been party to the experiments with heavy water, and he knew that his colleagues believed that each act of fission liberated two or three neutrons. Now he learned that, during his interregnum, Halban and Kowarski's experiments at Cambridge had convinced them that a chain reaction should be feasible.\n\nUnlike Enrico Fermi, whose uranium-and-graphite pile had become critical on December 2, Halban's team had not established this fact. Yet the aggressive and arrogant Halban appeared to believe that his \"proof,\" achieved in Paris and Cambridge, that a chain reaction could be produced using uranium and heavy water gave him a patent claim over all future work. The Americans were not impressed, questioned the French patents' validity, and even doubted the results on which they were based. In their opinion, the fact that Enrico Fermi (who distrusted Halban's results) had produced a chain reaction in practice moved the question far beyond mere theoretical possibility. Any collaboration between the British and the Americans would be under Fermi's scientific control, something that the autocratic and prickly Halban could not accept.\n\nThus Bruno found himself at a laboratory where stimulating research had yet to blossom. Even before his arrival, heated arguments had developed in the higher echelons of politics about the respective national interests of the US and UK. The atomic bomb had been conceived in Europe and was being developed in America; who would control it postwar? For the US administration and General Groves, the answer was obvious: the United States, on whose soil the bomb would be built, and whose taxpayers were funding most of the work. The British, however, regarded the bomb as their invention. Their scientists had conceived the possibility, developed the early ideas, demonstrated that U-235 could be separated in principle, and were prominent in North America.\n\nAnother goal of the Allied collaboration was the development of nuclear power, potentially the solution to the world's energy needs, and perhaps the most valuable prize of all. It did not sit well with the United States that ICI, who was managing Tube Alloys, had a clear commercial interest in developing nuclear power. The British, on the other hand, suspected that the official US agenda was hegemony in nuclear technology after the war. So, despite being united in fighting a common enemy, the two nations' divergent long-term political agendas created the need for firewalls, which held back sensitive data. Fermi's breakthrough, in December 1942, changed the politics considerably, and from that moment the American policy was to severely limit information exchange with the Anglo-Canadian project in Montreal.\n\nThe fact that the Montreal team was unhappy is no surprise, but there was also strong dissatisfaction among the American team of scientists with the policy of restricting access to data. Ultimately, members of both teams found ways around this imposition. In February 1943, for example, Pierre Auger\u2014head of the Montreal experimental physics program, and Bruno's immediate boss\u2014visited Fermi's team in Chicago, along with chemist Bertrand Goldschmidt. The pair had been consultants at Fermi's laboratory and still retained their security passes, so they simply walked in the front door. They found the American scientists welcoming and helpful. Auger and Goldschmidt returned to Montreal the same evening, having persuaded the Americans to give Auger the basic details of the pile, and to give Goldschmidt two tubes, one containing a portion of fission products, the other containing four micrograms of plutonium.\n\nWhen a reactor is operating, the uranium inside is flooded with neutrons. Those that cause fission liberate energy, which is the goal, but many are captured and lost. The result of adding two neutrons to uranium is that, after a few days, natural radioactivity produces plutonium in the residue. By 1943, physicists knew that plutonium was a better fuel for chain reactions than U-235, and, by implication, a better fuel for weapons as well. Thus, although a reactor physicist might be driven by the goal of producing power for the good of society, and not wish to be party to weapons research, the reactor itself makes no such distinction. Plutonium is plutonium. To make use of plutonium, however, you have to remove it from the reactor by some chemical means, as tons of uranium lead to the creation of mere grams of plutonium per day. As a result of Goldschmidt's success in Chicago, the radiochemists in Montreal now had enough material to learn how to extract the element.\n\nBruno, meanwhile, set out to establish the facts about heavy water and fission. During his first weeks in Montreal, he had \"many discussions on the Halban-Kowarski papers\" with the head of the theoretical physics group, George Placzek, and with experimentalist Alan Nunn May. Nunn May, who boasted pince-nez spectacles and a small mustache, was a caricature of the 1940s egghead scientist, in marked contrast to the film star glamour of Bruno Pontecorvo. A nuclear physicist from Cambridge University, Nunn May was an expert in making precision measurements of nuclear processes. He was also a communist, a fact that seems to have escaped notice when he was vetted for the Anglo-Canadian team, even though his views were well known to his colleagues in Canada.\n\nHalban as director was a mixed blessing. True, he had been intimately involved with fission from the outset, but many viewed him as having more ostentation than substance. His self-confident arrogance was pithily summarized by a remark in his obituary: \"He moved easily from the laboratory, through the ministerial office, into the board room.\" Halban's style and chutzpa were on full display at a meeting of the British and American teams in New York. On a Saturday morning he phoned his colleagues in Montreal, demanding that they take some documents from the Top Secret drawer and courier them immediately under diplomatic cover to New York. A call came back from Montreal, checking which papers he needed. \"Any will do,\" Halban replied. \"It doesn't matter which.\" The purpose, in Nunn May's opinion, was simply to make grand theater, to impress the Americans. The feeling among some members of the Anglo-Canadian team was that the purpose of the heavy-water work was less to further scientific knowledge than to bolster Halban's and ICI's commercial visions. Nunn May in particular felt that the scientists in Montreal were \"pawns in a game between the British and Americans\" and living in a state of \"Halbanian politics.\"\n\nSPENDING ONE'S TIME EVALUATING THE RELIABILITY OF HALBAN'S DATA on fission and chain reactions is a poor substitute for real experimental work. In 1943, the only immediate source of heavy water in Montreal was the batch that Halban and Kowarski had rescued, but these 185 kilograms were still in Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Even if this batch made it overseas, the team would still face problems: this limited amount of heavy water would be enough for the initial research process, but was utterly inadequate for a large-scale reactor, in which more than a ton of the liquid would be needed. The Anglo-Canadian project was in danger of being stillborn. Many found these early months frustrating, with Alan Nunn May later recalling, \"The purpose of [going to Canada] seemed to have evaporated. [We] had no equipment, no laboratory, and no prospect of obtaining any materials, and the Americans were cut off [from us].\"\n\nAt last, in the spring of 1943, the heavy water arrived from Cambridge by air. Serious investigations could now begin. One of the first tasks was to repeat the Halban-Kowarski experiments with more sensitive detection equipment. The original findings\u2014that fission released neutrons, capable of initiating a chain reaction\u2014were confirmed, to great relief. Morale slowly declined, however, as the British and American authorities continued to argue over the control of the whole atomic project.\n\nIn August 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt met in Quebec. Part of the agreement they came to called for greater cooperation between the two teams. This raised the Anglo-Canadians' hopes. They eagerly anticipated the arrival of sufficient uranium and heavy water to start their project in earnest. The Americans, however, were slow to respond to the agreement, and it was not until December that preparations began for the first conference between the two teams, held in Chicago in January 1944.\n\nIn the interim, an important change had occurred: Halban had quit as director and stepped down to head the physics department. The new director of the Anglo-Canadian project was John Cockcroft. Cockcroft was famous for developing the particle accelerator at Cambridge that first split the atomic nucleus in 1932, and by 1944 he had become an effective administrator of scientific research on radar. As the Soviet army pushed the Germans back, however, research on radar was deemed to be less urgent than the development of nuclear physics, which was seen as vital. Cockcroft's arrival would transform the Anglo-Canadian project, as well as the fate of Bruno Pontecorvo.\n\nSPYING FOR BRITAIN\n\nCockcroft soon gave the project a new impetus. When he arrived, the reactor was still on the drawing board, and the possibility of a serious accident occurring when it was completed convinced him that it should be constructed at least 100 miles from any major city. He found a suitable location in the forests about 130 miles west of Ottawa: the village of Chalk River. The nearby Ottawa River would provide water to cool the reactor.\n\nOne of Cockcroft's first actions was to encourage his team to coax information from the Americans. One result of the political constraints imposed by the nations' governments and militaries was that the Americans would give aid to the Canadian team in their pursuit of a heavy-water reactor, but not in relation to other technologies, such as the graphite reactor. Britain, with an eye to the future, saw graphite reactors as key to its postwar energy needs (as indeed was the case). Consequently, the British, who regarded the political restrictions as unreasonable, did their best to extract information about graphite reactors from the Americans. Thus was born the officially sanctioned strategy in which the governing authorities were bypassed, and the community of scientists shared data and ideas among themselves.\n\nOne example of such sharing occurred in March 1944, when Nunn May and a Canadian colleague, Ted Hincks, shipped equipment to Chicago for use in an experiment. In Chicago, the head of experiments at the pile was a man named Herbert Anderson. Nunn May talked with him. Anderson agreed that General Groves's instructions were too restrictive, and were being applied overzealously. The Canadian team's engineers and physicists, frustrated by the difficulty of obtaining information from the Americans, had given Nunn May a \"shopping list\" of urgent questions, for which they wanted answers. Nunn May was successful, as Anderson allowed him to read several reports that had not yet been released to Montreal. This open sharing of data became a regular occurrence during a series of visits.\n\nLater in the war, after the atomic bomb tests, several leading scientists from Los Alamos passed through Canada en route to Europe. They were \"debriefed\" at Cockcroft's insistence. When Aage Bohr, the son of Niels and a future Nobel laureate, visited Canada, Cockcroft ordered Bruno Pontecorvo and Nunn May to \"pump him dry.\"\n\nSince Nunn May was spying for the USSR during this time, and it has been alleged that Pontecorvo was also, it is ironic that Cockcroft in effect ordered them to spy on behalf of the UK. During 1944 and 1945, Nunn May was given access to Fermi's laboratory to perform several experiments. The possibility that Bruno Pontecorvo was passing information to the Soviets at this stage has been suggested, but never established. In any event, his intimate involvement with Nunn May would leave him compromised when the latter was exposed as a spy in 1945.\n\nYears later, Pavel Sudoplatov, who was the deputy director of atomic espionage for the USSR during World War II, claimed that the Soviets obtained information from Pontecorvo, along with Bohr, Fermi, and others. Many have taken this claim to mean that these famous scientists were active spies, which in the case of Bohr and Fermi is so bizarre that some have dismissed Sudoplatov as a fantasist. Although some of Sudoplatov's claims have inconsistencies, the accusation of \"fantasist\" might be due to a misunderstanding on the part of his critics: it is now clear that the Soviets did receive information, via Nunn May if not Pontecorvo, which _originated_ with Fermi and other leading members of the American side of the Manhattan Project. It is also clear, as we saw earlier, that Fermi indiscreetly shared secret data with Pontecorvo in April 1942; while there is no evidence that this data would be of any interest to the Soviet Union, or even that Pontecorvo passed this information to anyone other than his colleagues at Well Surveys, the fact that Fermi was occasionally casual with information cannot be discounted.\n\nOf course, Pontecorvo had never tried very hard to hide his commitment to communism. His brother Gillo later said that Bruno had made no attempt to hide the fact that he was a communist in France or the United States, but that when he was invited to join the atomic project in Canada, he immediately became \"nonpolitical.\" Gillo was convinced that this was a cover because whenever they met after the war, Bruno \"was too well informed on communist literature and events.\" However, even after the move to Canada, there were clues as to Pontecorvo's political affiliations. When Bruno and Marianne's second son was born in March 1944, they named him Tito Nils\u2014 _Nils_ after Bruno's scientific hero, Niels Bohr, and Tito, as Bruno explained later, \"in honor of the communist who had led the war of liberation in Yugoslavia.\" Two years after Marianne had claimed to the FBI that she didn't know what a communist was, here was a public display of the family's sympathies.\n\n1944\n\nBruno was part of the small group that visited Fermi's team in Chicago regularly during 1944 and 1945. To design a working reactor, one needs precise data on how neutrons interact with a variety of materials. In Montreal, there was no source of neutrons powerful enough to make good measurements. The Chicago reactor, however, produced more intense beams of neutrons, which could give clear answers. Obtaining these answers involved several collaborative visits and exchanges of information. Upon returning to Canada, the experts would report the new data to their colleagues, evaluate them, and plan new lines of attack. Bruno was the author of several of these reports.\n\nA successful nuclear reactor needs to maximize the number of neutrons available as fission-creating bullets in the reactor's core. Therefore, one must avoid materials that absorb them. Neutrons can travel anywhere. They might induce radioactivity in unexpected ways and poison the reactor. In extremis, it is possible that this could cripple it fatally. In designing the reactor, it would be necessary to know the chance of neutrons being captured by all manner of elements\u2014not only how they interacted with the fuel (the uranium and the heavy water or graphite) but also how they interacted with the concrete blocks and the potpourri of other materials in the assembly and surroundings. This was one of the reasons Fermi had been so interested in Pontecorvo's work with neutrons in 1942. The team was working in a new field, where hands-on, practical experience trumped any amount of theory. Thus Bruno's expertise in this area would now be invaluable in Canada.\n\nThe first of Bruno Pontecorvo's visits to Chicago occurred in January 1944, when he made the journey with Nunn May, Auger, and other senior members of the team. In line with the usual practice of compartmentalization, physicists such as Pontecorvo were only present for discussions of the physics program; chemistry and engineering were discussed in separate groups. This visit to Chicago kick-started the Canadian work on the nuclear reactor. Just nine people were involved in the discussions at the first two meetings, which evaluated detailed questions about the materials for the reactor and their optimal use.\n\nThe Canadian team visited Chicago on several occasions, and Bruno generally wrote the reports. These reports confirm the significance of this work, and justify the British government's description of his role in both planning and research to have been \"indeed of the greatest importance.\" Bruno was in Chicago during the first week of March, and returned home in time for the birth of Tito Nils on March 20. Then he left for Chicago once again during the first week of April.\n\nThe physical principles of a chain reaction might be relatively straightforward, but the construction of a nuclear reactor is not. As the Canadian team forged ahead on the project, one problem after another arose.\n\nIn a heavy-water reactor, for example, is it better to mix some uranium compound with tons of heavy water to form a homogeneous sludge, or instead to immerse solid rods throughout the liquid? If the former, what is the optimal mixture? If the latter, what is the best matrix arrangement?\n\nSome problems were relatively mundane but potentially serious nonetheless. One example is the fact that a working reactor produces energy, and gets hot. Solid uranium rods might expand or even buckle; how dangerous was this for a working reactor? Was it better to cool the rods by bubbling air or other gases through the heavy water, or by running ordinary water through pipes? Ordinary water could keep the uranium rods cool, but it might absorb some neutrons, slowing the reactor or stalling it completely. At their next meeting in May, the two teams discussed this issue. The knowledge gained in solving such problems took time to achieve, but was invaluable. Igor Kurchatov, the scientific head of the Soviet atomic bomb project, knew that if he could obtain solutions through agents in North America, a Soviet reactor program could save months or even years of effort. Even so, having access to all the data and rules of best practice is no substitute for hands-on experience.\n\nOne of many uncertainties the reactor physicists faced in 1944 was what happened when neutrons hit heavy water. Experiments by the team in Chalk River and the Americans in Chicago gave contradictory results. So Nunn May went to Chicago in the spring of 1944 to make use of the American team's intense beam of neutrons and repeat the experiment there.\n\nAT THE TIME, SCIENTISTS HAD ALREADY ESTABLISHED THAT FISSION IS most likely to happen in isotopes that contain an odd number of neutrons. Uranium-235 and plutonium-239 are well-known examples, but there was a possibility that another odd-numbered isotope of uranium, U-233, might be a suitable fuel too. Consequently, a third line of collaborative research focused on creating uranium-233 in the Chicago pile, one nucleus at a time, until there was enough to determine its properties.\n\nUranium-233 had two apparent advantages over its competitors. First, the chemists thought it would be easier to refine than plutonium. This was the scientific reason for pursuing this strategy, as understood by both the Anglo-Canadian and American teams. However, there was a covert political reason too. To breed U-233, neutrons are fired at atoms of the element thorium. This excited the British, as thorium was plentiful in India, which at the time was under British rule. The strategy was especially seductive because natural uranium, the seed for breeding plutonium, was in short supply. Thus, the British saw a potential niche market for thorium, which they'd be able to dominate, though they withheld this motivation from the Americans; on paper, the potential ease of refining U-233 was reason enough to be interested. With this scientific goal in mind, the Americans used their reactor to irradiate thorium and make a few milligrams of U-233, enough to compare it against U-235.\n\nNunn May went to Chicago to carry out these comparisons in September 1944. This too was in collaboration with Herbert Anderson, as part of the program agreed to in January. Thanks to Anderson's collegial indiscretion, Nunn May received a small sample of U-233\u2014and he was fortunate to receive it. At the time, Chicago was the only source of U-233 in the world.\n\nCockcroft's diary records pithily that \"Alan Nunn May returned to Montreal with very useful information.\" He returned with more than that, of course. Nunn May kept his sample of U-233 initially, but then passed it to a Soviet contact.\n\nBRUNO THE URANIUM PROSPECTOR\n\nUsing electronic instruments to detect radiation and identify its source was Bruno's professional forte. This expertise now bore fruit, as his techniques were applied to the search for uranium, and other scarce minerals essential to the atomic project. Specifically, the technique was used to map areas of northern Canada.\n\nIn January 1944, Bruno once again traveled to the United States, this time to New York to see Gilbert LaBine, the Canadian mining entrepreneur we met in Chapter 6. LaBine's Eldorado Mine had already supplied the US with uranium for Fermi's pile, but to fill the needs of the Chalk River reactor and the overall Manhattan Project would require new sources of the element. As an outcome of the New York meeting, LaBine commissioned some of Bruno's former colleagues from Tulsa, including Serge Scherbatskoy, to determine the optimal means of locating further deposits by performing tests in areas of Canada known to have uranium. This occupied the group during the summer and fall of 1944. For five days in September, Bruno himself joined them at Port Radium, near Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories.\n\nThe team compared different ways of detecting uranium in pitchblende, a naturally occurring ore. They found that although ionization chambers and Geiger counters were equally likely to locate the mineral when the rocks were in outcrops, the ionization-chamber technique was better when the rocks were a foot or more beneath the surface. The group performed surveys using lightweight instruments in helicopters, as well as ground surveys in trucks, which carried more cumbersome apparatuses. Bruno's favored technology, ionization chambers, worked best for identifying the radioactivity of ordinary rocks and pebbles. The challenge in this case was to identify the signal of uranium amid the morass of other radioactivity.\n\nBruno presented Cockcroft with an extensive summary of the group's findings, and then announced the conclusions in October, at a special meeting in New York. Senior members of the US military were present. This marriage of nuclear physics and geology proved so successful as a means of finding uranium that the Manhattan Project adopted it. This was another area where Pontecorvo's expertise would later have potentially huge importance for the USSR.\n\nZEEP AND THE END OF THE WAR\n\nThe uranium quest was Pontecorvo's primary endeavor during the summer and fall of 1944. Then, for much of the first half of 1945, he investigated whether the fission products of radium-226 and uranium-233 might contaminate the reactor. Also, starting in June 1944, he was involved in a new project, which was the brainchild of Alan Nunn May: the Zero Energy Experimental Pile, or ZEEP.\n\nHalban left Canada in 1944, and Nunn May took over as head of the physics division. He proposed that a small reactor\u2014ZEEP\u2014be built in order to test the soundness of the team's theoretical calculations on the optimal distribution of the uranium rods in the tank of heavy water for the NRX. Big enough to be a reactor, but small enough that it produced negligible power and thus didn't need concrete shielding or a cooling plant, ZEEP could be used to test different configurations of rods.\n\nIn Nunn May's conception, ZEEP had a secondary benefit, not stated in the official documents. Although he only discussed the idea verbally, Nunn May felt it was imperative that, when the war ended, the Anglo-Canadian team be able to demonstrate a working reactor to politicians and journalists. This was a problem because it was clear from the outset that it would take a long time to complete the NRX.\n\nLew Kowarski had remained in Cambridge since 1940, but with his b\u00eate noire, Halban, no longer in Canada, Kowarski now joined the project. He was given special responsibility for constructing ZEEP. Kowarski later recalled his first sight of a working reactor, when he visited Chicago in September 1944. To outward appearances the machine was unimpressive, merely a cube of painted concrete. Herbert Anderson took Kowarski over to the pile and said, \"Touch it. It's warm.\"\n\nThis visit helped Kowarski decide on his plan for ZEEP. Pontecorvo briefed him on the basics of constructing a pile, knowledge that had emerged from the American team's work since December 1942. Kowarski recalled that Bruno did so \"in a sort of lecture in a single afternoon, which was quite enough.\"\n\nAlthough ZEEP was important for the Anglo-Canadian project, back in the United States General Groves was skeptical. His goal was to complete the atomic bomb and win the war. On a visit to Chalk River, Groves met Kowarski and bluntly asked, \"Are you the man who is building this damn fool unnecessary experimental reactor?\" Kowarski confirmed that he was, to which Groves replied, \"America gives most of the heavy water for it, and it's very very costly stuff. Make sure that you don't squander it.\" Although stated brusquely, the point was well made: heavy water was precious.\n\nZEEP went critical on September 5, 1945, three days after Japan surrendered and brought an end to World War II. The team held a party to celebrate their success with ZEEP, and Nunn May made a speech. He declared that Kowarski should receive an accolade and, because Kowarski came from France, Nunn May proceeded to kiss him on both cheeks. The timing was ironic. Nunn May, who had been passing information to the Soviets, was about to be exposed. At the very moment when the celebrations began, Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk at the Soviet consulate in Ottawa, was feverishly filling his briefcase with a wealth of documents. These papers contained information about a ring of spies working for the Soviet Union. Gouzenko intended them to be the down payment on his application for asylum in Canada. The information in Gouzenko's briefcase would lead to the arrest and conviction of Alan Nunn May six months later, in March 1946.\n\nBy the end of the war, Pontecorvo was a much sought-after prize, the recipient of several job offers at universities in North America and Europe. To the surprise of several colleagues, in February 1946 he chose to join the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, the infant nuclear laboratory in Harwell, England. Then, having made this unexpected choice, that same month he prevaricated and decided to stay in Canada. His stated reason was that he wanted to work on the NRX reactor, which was the focus of the project. From 1943 to 1945 he had devoted a huge amount of effort to its design, writing some twenty-five reactor-related reports. In 1945 and 1946 he developed sensitive neutron monitors for the initial start-up of the NRX, capable of confirming the transition from zero flux to the first feeble reactions. Because of this responsibility, Bruno was one of only four physicists allowed in the NRX control room at the start-up.\n\nThe NRX became critical on July 21, 1947; by 1949 it was the most powerful neutron flux in the Western world, a status it held for several years. By that time, however, Pontecorvo had indeed moved to Harwell, to work on the British reactor program. Why he chose this course is one of the questions that came up following his defection: Was it a personal choice or part of a clever strategy orchestrated by others? As we shall see, there were seemingly legitimate personal reasons for Pontecorvo's decision. On the other hand, its timing also fits uncannily with events involving Nunn May and Fuchs, and some regard this as being more than a coincidence.\nEIGHT\n\nPHYSICS IN THE OPEN\n\n_1945\u20131948_\n\nIN 1945, WITH PEACE RESTORED, BRUNO PONTECORVO HAD SOME TIME to devote to pure science.\n\nBy the 1940s the fundamental building blocks of atoms had been identified as electrons, protons, and neutrons. In addition there was the neutrino, theoretically predicted by Wolfgang Pauli, which was likened to an electron but without electric charge or mass.\n\nAlthough the idea of neutrinos had been around for two decades, and Enrico Fermi had incorporated them into his 1934 theory of beta radioactivity, no one had been able to establish their existence experimentally. It was now that Bruno began what turned into a lifelong quest: to understand this ghostly and enigmatic particle.\n\nTHE GHOSTLY NEUTRINO\n\nToday, neutrinos are the focus of investigations both in particle physics and in a new branch of science: neutrino astronomy. Pontecorvo's interest in the subject had begun while he was still a student, when he had learned about the theory of the neutrino and beta decay from his teacher and mentor, Enrico Fermi. According to Fermi's theory, a nucleus undergoing beta decay emits a neutrino; however, when a neutrino hits an atomic nucleus, this transmutation can happen in reverse: the neutrino becomes a negatively charged electron, while the nucleus increases its positive charge. In effect, the atom moves one place forward in the periodic table, becoming an entirely new element, all due to the action of the neutrino.\n\nThus, like H. G. Wells's Invisible Man jostling the crowd, a neutrino may reveal its presence by bumping into something. The problem was that, according to Fermi's theory, the chance of this happening was so small that it would be extremely difficult to detect. Most people believed it to be impossible.\n\nIn 1945 Bruno began to think about neutrinos a great deal. He was ideally placed to make a breakthrough. Having set Fermi on the road to nuclear power in 1934, Bruno was now designing a nuclear reactor. These experiences in nuclear technology inspired a thought: if Fermi's theory were correct, a uranium reactor should make over a million billion neutrinos each second.\n\nIn Pontecorvo's opinion, the goal of finding the neutrino was \"not out of the question.\" Although there is almost no chance of capturing a neutrino, _almost_ is not the same as _none_. An individual neutrino produced by beta decay may travel for several light-years without interruption, but when you have an intense source producing billions of neutrinos each second, one or two might occasionally get caught in the atomic net of a sophisticated detector. He believed that, with \"modern experimental facilities\" such as a nuclear reactor, it could be done.\n\nBruno considered the requirements. He realized that, to capture elusive neutrinos, the target must be large, so its material would have to be cheap. A liquid was ideal, as its volume would be limited only by the size of the container. If the atoms resulting from neutrino capture were radioactive, their decays could be recorded by a suitable detector, giving proof of their transitory existence. The fact that they had existed at all would then be evidence that a neutrino had struck.\n\nCleaning fluid is cheap, and contains chlorine atoms in the form of carbon tetrachloride; sporadic hits by neutrinos will convert chlorine into argon, one atom at a time. Argon is chemically inert, and can be extracted simply by boiling the liquid. The argon atoms created by the neutrino collisions are mildly radioactive, and survive long enough for these metaphorical needles in a haystack to be extracted and identified. If you wait long enough, the amount of argon created will be large enough to be measured, and the neutrino's existence will be confirmed. This, in a nutshell, is the basic strategy for pinning down the neutrino's existence, as articulated by Bruno Pontecorvo in his publicly available report, written in 1946.\n\nHowever, this report derives from an earlier document, written on May 21, 1945, which shows that Pontecorvo did not develop these ideas alone. First, the original 1945 paper credits the idea of using carbon tetrachloride to Jules Gu\u00e9ron. Gu\u00e9ron, a squat Frenchman with a chubby face and high forehead, was a chemist at Chalk River. He was also an expert in radioactivity. It was Gu\u00e9ron, too, who suggested that the production of radioactive argon atoms could be key to the endeavor.\n\nSecond, the pursuit of the neutrino appears to have inspired wide interest at the Chalk River laboratory. Gu\u00e9ron's observation about radioactive argon inspired a further discussion between \"the author and Dr. Frisch.\" This led Bruno to conclude that argon's advantage of being chemically inert made the carbon tetrachloride strategy \"the most promising method according to Dr. Frisch and the writer.\"\n\nBruno estimated that several cubic meters of cleaning fluid would give him a reasonable chance of winning the lottery if the fluid was located near a nuclear reactor. A small quantity of radioactive argon atoms would be produced, their number revealed by the amount of radiation they emitted. From this, one could deduce how many neutrinos had struck. Thus the idea that the vicinity of a nuclear reactor would be a good place to search for neutrinos was original to Bruno; many details, however, were not. And the actual discovery of the neutrino\u2014in 1956, by two American physicists, Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan\u2014did not use this technique, as the chlorine-argon method was not actually appropriate for the emissions from a reactor. No one knew then what we do today: reactors produce antineutrinos\u2014the antimatter counterparts of neutrinos\u2014rather than neutrinos themselves.\n\nFinally, we come to the idea of solar neutrinos, for which Bruno subsequently became famous. In the body of his original paper, Pontecorvo had focused exclusively on the opportunities offered by a nuclear reactor; there is no mention of solar neutrinos at all. He had concluded that a reactor with just a little more power than the one being designed in Canada might produce enough neutrinos to give success. At the end of the paper, however, after Bruno's signature, there is a footnote. This appendage is an afterthought, inspired by Maurice Pryce, a British theoretician at Chalk River.\n\nPryce pointed out to Bruno that if the sun is indeed powered by nuclear fusion, as astrophysicists theorized, it could be irradiating the earth with a neutrino flux of 10 billion neutrinos per square centimeter every second. Bruno Pontecorvo credits Maurice Pryce unambiguously with this suggestion: \"Dr. Pryce pointed out to the author that the flux of neutrinos from the sun is quite considerable.\"\n\nThus, the father of the solar neutrino idea is Maurice Pryce. However, at the time, he and Bruno dismissed it because the intensity of solar neutrinos at the earth's surface would be \"too low for an experiment of the type suggested.\" They estimated that a flux a million times stronger than this would be required for success.\n\nSuch was the sensitivity to anything \"nuclear\" that this paper was immediately classified as secret, and remained so for two decades. On September 4, 1946, however, these attempts at secrecy became moot when Bruno gave a talk at a nuclear physics conference at Chalk River, which was subsequently published as a paper. It is this latter version that has entered the public record and become famous. As this document does not mention the source of the solar neutrino idea, or the roles of Gu\u00e9ron and Pryce, Pontecorvo has been credited with a string of ideas that actually originated elsewhere.\n\nIN 1948, AMERICAN CHEMIST RAY DAVIS JOINED BROOKHAVEN National Laboratory in Long Island, New York, a facility that specializes in the research of fundamental science. During the war Davis had become an expert on chemical explosives, and at its close he had joined the US Atomic Energy Commission to work on radiochemistry\u2014the chemistry of radioactive materials. Davis's new boss at Brookhaven advised him to visit the library, read the research literature, and \"choose a project that appeals to you.\"\n\nHis good fortune, which determined his life's work, was to find in the library an article about neutrinos. Davis had heard mention of this hypothetical particle, but that was the sum of his knowledge. Here was a chance to learn something. As he began to read the article, he quickly discovered that no one else was much wiser. He had stumbled upon a field that was wide open, and rich in problems. Then his excitement grew. The paper briefly mentioned that in 1946 Bruno Pontecorvo had suggested a method of finding the neutrino using chlorine and radiochemistry. Davis realized that this was right up his alley.\n\nFor Davis, Bruno's proposed experiment seemed all too easy, and so it was. His first attempt at the Brookhaven reactor failed because the impacts of cosmic rays were so numerous that it was impossible to discern any faint signals of neutrinos coming from the reactor. In 1955 he built a large detector, using 4,000 liters of carbon tetrachloride, at the powerful reactor near the Savannah River in South Carolina; Davis dutifully shielded the detector from cosmic rays, but saw no sign of the neutrino. This eventually helped confirm that reactors produce antineutrinos, to which the chlorine-argon method is not sensitive, rather than neutrinos.\n\nDavis missed out on discovering the neutrino, but by 1956 the existence of the ephemeral particle had been confirmed, and the subtle difference between the processes at work in a nuclear reactor, which produce antineutrinos, and those in the sun, which produce neutrinos, were also understood. Thus, in 1959, Davis set out to use Bruno Pontecorvo's method for a slightly different application: looking for neutrinos that have come from the sun.\n\nForty years would elapse before the quest for \"solar neutrinos\" was completed to everyone's satisfaction, and Davis, at the age of eighty-seven, received his Nobel Prize having spent his career \"doing just what I wanted and getting paid for it.\"\n\nWHO ORDERED THAT?\n\nWhile at Chalk River, Pontecorvo had an insight that now forms a cornerstone of the Standard Model of particle physics. Its genesis involved cosmic radiation.\n\nDuring the 1930s and 1940s, cosmic rays\u2014high-energy particles from outer space\u2014revealed varieties of matter previously unknown to scientists. For nuclear physicists, interested in the basic particles from which matter is built, cosmic rays became the new frontier. Earth's upper atmosphere is being continuously bombarded by extraterrestrial radiation, including the nuclei of elements, many of which were produced during the explosion of distant stars. When these rays hit the upper atmosphere their energy dissipates as they disrupt atoms in the air, creating showers of less powerful subatomic particles. These finally reach the ground as a gentle \"rain,\" which is interesting to scientists but poses no real hazard to humans.\n\nAmong the debris produced in collisions between the primary rays and the atmosphere were new forms of matter, previously unknown. The first example of antimatter\u2014the positron, or antielectron\u2014was discovered in cosmic rays as early as 1932. Other discoveries included the muon in 1937, as well as the so-called \"strange\" particles and the pion, both in 1947.\n\nElectromagnetic forces give rise to radiation, such as light, which in quantum theory occurs in staccato bundles\u2014the particles known as photons. In 1935, Japanese theorist Hideki Yukawa predicted that a similar phenomenon should arise from the strong nuclear force that holds atomic nuclei together; agitate an atomic nucleus violently and, under certain circumstances, it might radiate energy in the form of the particles later known as pions.\n\nWithin two years, cosmic rays had revealed novel particles that seemed to confirm Yukawa's theory. This discovery formed the frontier of fundamental physics as World War II began, and was still the frontier as physicists, including Bruno Pontecorvo, took up open science again in 1945. The cosmic rays seemed to have completed the fundamental understanding of atomic nuclei and particles.\n\nHowever, scientists soon realized that they had caught the wrong suspect. Three young Italians, hiding from the Germans in Rome toward the end of the war, had set up a makeshift laboratory in a basement. They used an array of Geiger counters to reveal the passage of cosmic rays; their hope was to measure the lifetime of Yukawa's novel particles. Yukawa's theory predicted that the negatively charged versions should be attracted by the positively charged nuclei of atoms, and thus would be captured and absorbed by the strong force before having a chance to decay. Positively charged particles, by contrast, should be repelled and then decay. The Italians' experiment succeeded, but with a surprise: they saw both negative and positive versions decay. This implied that the novel particle had no affinity for the atomic nucleus, and so could not be the pion that Yukawa had predicted. The eventual discovery of the pion in 1947 completed the understanding of the powerful forces of the nucleus, but left scientists with an enigma: What was this other particle that had been discovered in 1937?\n\nTo distinguish it from the pion, physicists gave it a name: _muon_. A name is a form of classification, and provides a sense of control perhaps, but is not an explanation. The discovery of the pion now thrust the question of the muon's identity to center stage. This seems to have been the moment when Bruno shifted his focus from nuclear reactors to cosmic rays and the nature of the muon.\n\nAs we have seen, Bruno was familiar with the phenomenon of beta radioactivity, which causes the transmutation of elements in nuclear reactors, and, we now know, in stars. Nature also plays this sequence in reverse: it is possible for a proton in a nucleus to capture an electron. This is known as the \"inverse beta process.\" Bruno noticed that an atomic nucleus captures a muon in a similar fashion, and took the brave step of assuming this similarity to be significant. His conclusion: the muon is a heavier version of the electron. \"Who ordered that?\" physicist Isadore Rabi famously exclaimed, and more than thirty years would pass before the beginnings of an answer emerged.\n\nA first step toward answering Rabi's question was to find how muons are born. Experiments quickly established that the muon is produced when pions decay. Bruno proposed that this process is fundamentally analogous to ordinary beta radioactivity. He then turned his attention to how muons decay. Unlike electrons, which are stable, muons only live for about a millionth of a second before decaying into other particles. Bruno addressed the question of what the resulting particles might be. An electron is the only electrically charged particle that is lighter than the muon, and because the muon is electrically charged, the only way that the electric charge can survive when the muon decays is if an electron is created. To balance the total energy and momentum in the transmutation, one or more other particles must be created also. The most likely candidates were a single photon, some previously unknown massive particle, or a pair of neutrinos. If a muon was simply a heavy form of an electron, the muon should be able to shed energy by radiating a photon, thereby converting to an electron and a photon. If the muon's relationship to the electron was more subtle, however, this decay would be very rare or absent. To decide between these alternatives, he devised an experimental test.\n\nIf a muon decayed into an electron and a photon, the latter pair would emerge back-to-back, with each carrying a specific amount of energy. If the decay produced an electron and two neutrinos, however, the energy could be shared among the particles in a variety of ways. So Bruno proposed a test: measure the energy of the electron in hundreds of examples of muon decay, and determine whether its energy is always the same (suggesting the presence of a photon), or whether it has a range of values (suggesting the alternative). He completed a paper that laid out this proposal in June 1947, and it was published later that year.\n\nHaving proposed the idea, Bruno then began to set up the experiment, along with his colleague Ted Hincks. The basic idea was to have the electrons hit a sheet of material that would absorb them. The more energy an electron has, the more material it can pass through. So they measured the quantity of electrons that managed to penetrate the material, to see how this varied with its thickness. If the decay of muons always produced electrons with the same energy, as in the electron-photon scenario, the quantity of electrons getting through the absorber would suddenly drop when its thickness reached a critical level. However, the quantity would change gradually if the electrons' energies covered a range of values, as would be the case if each electron were accompanied by two neutrinos.\n\nTheir experimental results appeared in 1948. Pontecorvo and Hincks were able to show that the muon does not decay into an electron and a single massive particle, but the question of whether the electron was accompanied by a photon or two neutrinos remained unresolved. In any event, Jack Steinberger, an American physicist working in Chicago, beat them to the finish line. Steinberger conducted a similar experiment, and published his findings in the same journal. He was the first to show that the scenario in which a muon decayed into an electron and two lightweight particles (neutrinos) fitted best with the experimental results. This would not be the last time that Steinberger beat Bruno to a crucial discovery.\n\nTHE UNIVERSAL WEAK FORCE\n\nIn the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton realized that the rise and fall of ocean tides, the orbits of the moon and planets, and the descent of apples to the ground were all manifestations of the universal force of gravity. In 1947, halfway through the twentieth century, Bruno Pontecorvo proposed that a variety of apparently diverse phenomena in atomic physics could be due to a universal \"weak\" force. These included the transmutation of the elements in beta decay, the production and decay of the muon, the instability of the pion, and the behavior of \"strange particles.\"\n\nIt would be disingenuous to push the comparison with Newton too far. In both cases, a variety of disparate phenomena were recognized to have a common fundamental origin. In the case of gravity, Newton both recognized its universal character and worked out the quantitative laws governing its behavior. Pontecorvo made a qualitative insight regarding the existence of the weak force, and performed experiments that helped establish its reality. However, another quarter of a century would pass before the quantitative theory of the weak force was established by others. Nonetheless, this time span itself bears witness to Pontecorvo's foresight in recognizing the presence of the universal weak force, which choreographed the dance of these particles.\n\nToday, the weak force is recognized as one of the four fundamental forces of nature, along with gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. The discovery of the universal weak force is one of the most significant scientific advances of the twentieth century. Bruno also realized that this universality held the key to understanding how the electron, muon, and neutrino are related. Having confirmed that the muon is a sibling of the electron, he later applied this same idea to the neutrino, which he saw as having two varieties: one appears to be a sibling of the electron; the other of the muon. Bruno's pairing of these fundamental particles into distinct families was the seed for the modern Standard Model of particles and forces.\n\nThese insights regarding the weak force and the choreography of particles are of Nobel Prize quality. Bruno Pontecorvo would be involved in all of them.\n\nBRUNO THE INSTRUMENT MAKER\n\nBetween Bruno's 1947 paper on the muon's genealogy, and his investigation of its decay, he traveled to Europe to see his parents, visit Harwell, and spend a few days with his brother Guido in Glasgow.\n\nAt this time, Bruno and his colleagues at Chalk River were developing a novel instrument, in preparation for the experiment on muon decay. Today known as the proportional counter, this instrument measures the energy of radiation. If radiation has enough energy, it can knock electrons from atoms in an inert gas, leaving positively charged ions in its wake; low energy radiation, however, has no such effect. The liberated electron and the positively charged ion are known as an \"ion pair.\" In a proportional counter, the radiation passes through a small chamber filled with an inert gas, creating ion pairs. In the process, the radiation loses energy until eventually it is unable to create further ions. Thus the number of ions is proportional to the energy of the initial radiation. These electrically charged ion pairs create a signal in a detector, whose magnitude reveals the energy of the original radiation. Thus a proportional counter is especially good at measuring the energy of radiation, a technique in which Bruno Pontecorvo became an expert.\n\nMeanwhile, in the physics department of the University of Glasgow, Samuel Curran, an expert on Geiger counters, was collaborating with John Angus, a research student of nuclear physics. Their goal was to develop new ways of detecting beta particles and measuring their energy. Their interests were very similar to Bruno's. During his visit to Guido, Bruno called on the Glasgow physics department and met with Curran.\n\nThere is no record of whether Bruno was already aware of Curran's work, and was making the visit to compare notes, or whether he learned of the project only when they met. In any event, the Glasgow team apparently felt that they had given out more information than they had gained, as a dispute arose over the invention of their technique. The relevant university documents note that, during the course of the Glasgow team's work, \"Curran had described the method to a member of the staff at Chalk River Laboratory, Canada.\"\n\nIn the August 21, 1948, edition of the journal _Nature_ , Curran and Angus included a brief description of their new technique, as the second paragraph in a letter on the beta decay of tritium. One week later, Bruno and two colleagues described a similar idea in _Physical Review._ The Canadian group had submitted their paper in June, two months before the Glasgow team's letter appeared. The submission date of the letter is not known.\n\nWith implicit reference to Pontecorvo's visit the previous fall, the University of Glasgow record includes this comment: \"One week after Curran's letter to 'Nature' a rival paper from the Chalk River group (including Pontecorvo) appeared.\" Given the similar expertise of the teams, it is possible that the ideas were in the air and would have developed independently in any event. As to who influenced whom, this we must add to the unresolved mysteries of this tale.\n\nBruno also visited Harwell \"for a few weeks\" during the fall, before flying to Italy on December 8. He gave a talk in Rome on December 17, which inspired the Italian state oil company, Agip, to use his neutron well-logging technique; Bruno supplied circuit diagrams of the electronics and other information.\n\nAs part of Harwell's normal vetting process, the British security authorities were already building a profile of Bruno Pontecorvo. They noted that he traveled back to Canada via Paris, where he spent New Year's Eve in Montmartre with his former colleague Jules Gu\u00e9ron. The MI5 watchers reported that the trip seemed to be made for purposes of \"jollification\" and that \"no other scientific contact was made.\"\n\nThe British authorities, with traditional xenophobia, suspected the political allegiance of French scientists in general, and of Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot-Curie, a declared communist, in particular. Bruno spent just twenty-four hours in Paris, and then passed through England en route to Canada on January 6. The Harwell security officer reported to MI5 that Bruno was a \"straightforward fellow with no political leanings.\"\n\nIN CANADA, AND SUBSEQUENTLY AT HARWELL, BRUNO PRESENTED himself as apolitical and unsophisticated in world affairs. In 1950, after Bruno's disappearance, his brother Gillo told MI5, \"My parents as well as [our eldest brother] Guido told me that they had the impression that Bruno after the war was no longer interested in politics and was avoiding any connection with communism, both in the form of literature and in personal contacts. My parents attributed this to his position at Chalk River and Harwell.\" Gillo, who was especially close to his brother, saw through the charade. When Bruno visited Italy in June 1946, Gillo perceived that Bruno's professed lack of interest in politics \"was phoney, because Bruno was so well informed of details of certain questions that were so much at the heart of communism.\" For example, Gillo pointed out that Bruno had a deep understanding of the motives of Yugoslavian dictator Josip Tito. Gillo concluded, \"He must have kept thoroughly up to date with communist literature.\"\n\nAn example of Bruno's tact can be seen in his reaction to the news that the atomic bomb had been successfully tested in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. When the news came in, everyone on the Canadian team began to discuss global politics, in an attempt to understand the implications of the test. The big question was whether the bomb would be used on Japan. In the memory of one of those present, Bruno alone was \"certain of the answer.\" He insisted that the Americans would have to use the bomb \"for political reasons, before the Japanese surrender and before the Russians could play a role in their surrender.\" As events transpired, this was completely accurate. Hiroshima was bombed on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. Late on the evening of the eighth, Stalin declared war on Japan. Soon after midnight Soviet troops invaded and annexed Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and North Korea. Japan surrendered to the Americans on September 2, 1945.\nNINE\n\nMANEUVERS\n\n_1945\u20131950_\n\nTHE BOMBING OF HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI NOT ONLY BROUGHT A conclusion to World War II; it also ended the collaborative wartime work on nuclear physics, and heralded the start of national nuclear energy programs\u2014with both peaceful and military goals. In the UK, the development of nuclear power for peaceful purposes began at a new facility called the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, or Harwell.\n\nHarwell's goal was to design and build the first nuclear reactors in the UK and, indeed, in Western Europe. It was operated by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, and on January 1, 1946, was established under the formal charge of the Ministry of Supply. John Cockcroft left Chalk River to become the first director of the British reactor project. Bruno had been invaluable in the design of the reactor at Chalk River, so in 1945 the British invited him to join their own new venture.\n\nThat same year, Bruno had been offered several highly prestigious and lucrative positions at American institutions, but in the end he chose Harwell. His decision raised eyebrows, including those of Emilio Segr\u00e8, who later told the FBI that he believed Bruno's choice to have been influenced by communist relatives in Europe, with dark hints of Soviet malevolence. According to Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB double agent who came over to the United Kingdom in 1985, Bruno Pontecorvo had been a valuable source for the KGB since 1943. If this is true, then Segr\u00e8's suspicions may have been correct.\n\nBruno had visited the University of Michigan, which wanted to hire him, and had received very attractive offers from the University of Rochester and the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, home of Emilio Segr\u00e8. He also exchanged letters with luminaries such as Hans Bethe at Cornell, Robert Marshak at Rochester, Arnold Siegert at Syracuse, and the chairman of the physics department at MIT. Bruno dithered about his decision. In part this was the natural reaction of a talented physicist, much in demand, who wanted to weigh his options to achieve the best outcome for his career and his family. However, the correspondence also hints that Bruno was unsure about when he would be able to decide, as if he was not completely in charge of his own destiny.\n\nSeveral letters came from the University of Rochester. They offered Bruno a position as an associate professor at $6,000 a year, to begin \"any time at your convenience or availability between now and Sept 1946.\" The facilities were superb: there was \"already a small cyclotron operating\" and the university \"[hoped] to build a uranium neutron reactor.\" In addition to these obvious advantages, the authors of the letters pointed out that Rochester was only ninety miles from Cornell, home of leading nuclear theorist Hans Bethe. In the meantime, Bruno told Michigan that he would decide in January 1946, after seeing some people \"at the British project.\" This referred to Bruno's discussions with James Chadwick about the restrictions Harwell would impose on him.\n\nThis was a difficult time for Bruno. For several months, he and other non-British members of the Canadian team had been severely restricted in their freedom. Security had become very tight as the test of the first atomic bomb approached. General Groves was suspicious of international collaborations, and the FBI was concerned about the number of foreign scientists involved, especially in Canada. This tension had been present for some time, but now it was growing worse. After the Normandy invasion in June 1944 and the liberation of Paris in August, several of the French scientists on the Anglo-Canadian project wished to return home and celebrate, but permission for these trips was denied.\n\nIn September 1944, Churchill wanted all visas for non-British members of Tube Alloys to be withdrawn. Around this same time, Halban visited France and talked to Joliot-Curie about developments in fission. He did this because he believed that he and Joliot-Curie held patent rights in the field. General Groves was furious about the visit, which created trouble for everyone. Bruno, like his French colleagues, wished to visit his relatives in Europe as soon as possible, but travel for all non-British members had been curtailed, and in the summer of 1945 Bruno's request to visit Italy was rejected.\n\nAt this stage, James Chadwick was directing British nuclear policy from Washington. He decreed that any offer of employment at Harwell should carry the condition that Pontecorvo was forbidden to travel to mainland Europe to visit his parents. Bruno, however, would not tolerate such a long-term lack of liberty, especially now that the war had ended, and just before Christmas 1945 he visited Chadwick in Washington, DC, to discuss this. This initial meeting proved inconclusive.\n\nIn 1946, Bruno visited New York and Washington from January 23 to January 29 for the meeting of the American Physical Society, and it was then that his decision seems to have crystallized. During the conference, he was courted by several potential employers. General Electric thought he was still in the market, and on February 7 they wrote him with an offer. Bruno immediately declined, saying it would be a \"pity to leave the Canadian pile just as research rather than engineering starts\" and that he would stay in Canada \"for at least one year.\" At the conference Arnold Siegert, a physicist at Syracuse University, also inquired about Bruno's availability, but on February 13 Bruno thanked him for asking but stated unequivocally, \"I am staying here.\"\n\nMeanwhile, on February 4, Otto Frisch had written from Los Alamos to extol the scientific excitement that the new laboratory in Harwell would offer, and encouraged Bruno to accept a position there. Frisch also mentioned \"Uncle James\" (Chadwick), and remarked that \"the big show\" in Canada\u2014namely, the NRX reactor\u2014was expected to start in mid-March.\n\nBruno finally informed Harwell that he would accept their offer only if he was allowed to travel. He stressed that one of Harwell's attractions for him was that it would allow him to be closer to his Italian roots and family, after ten years of absence. Harwell must have eventually agreed to his terms, as on February 21 Otto Frisch wrote of his pleasure that Bruno had accepted the job in England.\n\nHiring Bruno Pontecorvo was a coup for British science, despite the government's reluctance to employ non-British nationals. This xenophobic attitude, which had surfaced when Bruno had been recommended to Chalk River in 1943, now came up again. Harwell needed him desperately, but his Italian origins threatened to kill the deal.\n\nThe question of his reliability was raised with General Groves. Chadwick confirmed that Pontecorvo would be employed by the British government at the Harwell nuclear establishment, and, to break the impasse, he suggested that Pontecorvo would \"probably take steps to acquire British citizenship.\" In fact, Bruno became a naturalized British citizen later, on February 7, 1948, on the basis that he had been involved in a British project for five years. A report to Prime Minister Clement Attlee, specifically about Bruno, commented, \"It is believed Pontecorvo had already taken out first papers in the US but had expressed a preference for British naturalization if he could get it.\" In hindsight, this may reflect Bruno's concerns regarding American attitudes toward communism.\n\nThe lengths to which the British went to obtain Bruno Pontecorvo\u2014even sending a report to the prime minister\u2014shows how important the Italian physicist was for them. The number of quality institutions that had bid for him in North America also testifies to his international stature. Bruno held all the cards. In 1946 he could make a career wherever he wanted.\n\nDespite claims that Bruno's move to Harwell was related to espionage, many of his colleagues have argued that there were innocent reasons for his choice. Given that John Cockcroft left Canada to become the director at Harwell in 1946, and that several other Canadian colleagues made the move too, continuity in research was one obvious advantage. One Harwell scientist, Godfrey Stafford, who later became the director of Harwell's neighbor, the Rutherford Laboratory, judged that the atmosphere at Harwell was key: \"At Harwell at that time there was a blank canvas,\" he explained. He recalled that an attraction of Harwell was the implicit invitation, \"Come here and do what you like.\" So it is plausible that Harwell, with its close proximity to the leading physics departments at the Universities of Oxford, Bristol, and London, had a competitive edge, notwithstanding Bruno's North American offers. Being nearer to Italy after his decade-long absence was also attractive, as he himself claimed.\n\nSegr\u00e8's allegations that Bruno's move had communist motives, which he made in 1949 to the security authorities, may have been sour grapes because Bruno had chosen Harwell over Berkeley; nonetheless they would later have consequences. Segr\u00e8's report coincided with the growing anticommunist hysteria in the United States, fueled by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, who pursued witch hunts against communists in government, science, and Hollywood. Eventually, their spotlight would shine on Bruno Pontecorvo.\n\nMEANWHILE, ATTRACTIVE OFFERS OF EMPLOYMENT IN THE UNITED States continued to come Bruno's way. In 1947 Bruno visited Cornell, and Hans Bethe offered him a position as a tenured associate professor at a salary of $7,000 a year, requiring him to teach \"no more than 6 hours a week.\"\n\nThe tone of Bethe's letter, written as if Bruno was still open to offers, suggests that even then Bruno's mind was not yet totally made up. This may indeed have been the case, as Bruno stayed in Canada until the end of 1948, while acting as a consultant to Harwell. The Production Pile Discussion Group was formed to advise the British reactor design team. James Kendall, the engineer responsible for pile design at Harwell, reported back from one meeting in Canada that the help from Pontecorvo \"was worth that of all the others put together.\"\n\nPRIVATE LIFE IN CANADA\n\nBruno's time in Canada was when fault lines in his public image first began to appear. For example, he presented himself as apolitical to friends and colleagues, but he was in reality a member of the Communist Party. His reasons for keeping this a secret are obvious, of course. The fact that he succeeded so comprehensively, however, shows that he was not naive in these matters. What's more, this ability to keep inconvenient truths hidden shows that he was more sophisticated than he often appeared to friends and colleagues. As a family man, his persona was that of a naive extrovert, the life and soul of the party, always pleased to be in the limelight; his home life, on the other hand, was more complex.\n\nLaura Fermi recalled two incidents that reveal the nature of the man and his private life.\n\nIn January 1944, during a visit to Chicago, Bruno called on the Fermis at their home. He had broken his leg skiing, and was hopping about on crutches. This made him the center of attention, which stimulated him to prance around even more dramatically. Having gained people's attention, he milked it. Such was the public image of Bruno Pontecorvo, the showman. However, even though everyone perceived him as happy-go-lucky, he described himself as having an inferiority complex. This he traced back to his childhood, when, as the fourth of eight talented children, he had to compete for attention. His handsome exterior and bubbly personality were thus cloaks that helped mask his insecurity.\n\nLaura Fermi also hints that Marianne was less sociable than her husband. We have seen how the Fermis were upset not to have met Marianne and Gil in 1940, soon after the Pontecorvos arrived in America. Laura recorded that she was disappointed again in 1943, when Bruno visited the Fermis en route to Canada, but, as on the previous occasion, \"his wife and son were not with him.\" The first and only time that the Fermis met Marianne was at the end of November 1948, shortly before Bruno moved to Harwell. Bruno and Enrico had been attending a meeting of the American Physical Society in Chicago, and Enrico invited the family to dinner. The occasion was memorable for the impression that Marianne made.\n\nEarlier, she had been in the city shopping, and had become lost on her way back to the hotel. This made the Pontecorvos late for dinner, which upset Bruno \"out of proportion to the trouble it might have caused.\" Throughout the evening, Bruno talked \"as easily and volubly as ever,\" but was clearly annoyed. Marianne, by contrast, \"kept silent,\" and in Laura's opinion was \"painfully shy.\"\n\nA colleague from Canada recalled Marianne at that time as a beauty. Of Bruno, he said, \"Handsome, flirtatious, very Italian, he was the heartthrob of all the single women.\" These memories mirror those of David Jackson, who in 1947 was a graduate student, doing routine computations for the experimenters at Chalk River. Although he had been only a junior member of the laboratory, Jackson recalled, \"we all were aware of Ponte, the glamorous Italian who played a lot of tennis and cavorted with the single young women at [the nearby town of] Deep River. I am sure Marianne was not happy, although she was also a very attractive woman then.\"\n\nThere is a story from that era in which Bruno and his colleague Ted Hincks, while traveling to a conference in Montreal in June 1947, gave a ride to two attractive girls\u2014in some accounts, secretaries from the laboratory chemistry division. The two women wanted to visit their family in the Montreal area for a few days, and the two physicists obligingly provided transportation. The plan was to bring the women back to Deep River after the conference, but during the convention a science issue arose, which Bruno felt could be answered if he and Hincks consulted another physicist at MIT, outside of Boston. The name of the physicist is long forgotten, but what happened next would become part of Chalk River folklore: Bruno and Hincks invited the two secretaries to join them on the trip to Boston, after which they would take the women back to Deep River. Meanwhile, other participants from the Montreal meeting returned to Chalk River, and word got around of Bruno's latest exploit. Marianne took offense, withdrew all of Bruno's money from the bank (a sum of $1,800), and went to the Canadian resort town of Banff with the three children\u2014Gil and Tito now had a younger brother, Antonio, born in July 1945. Marianne and the three boys stayed in Banff for some time. When Bruno returned, three days late, he asked friends if they knew where Marianne had gone; finally, one of these friends managed to find Marianne and convince her to return home.\n\nAs a result of this adventure, for the rest of his time in Canada, Bruno was saddled with the nickname of \"Ramon Novarro,\" a film actor who had become the latest sex symbol following the death of Rudolph Valentino. Novarro and Bruno bore a vague resemblance: the same dark, slicked-back hair, bedroom eyes, and Latin elegance. Marianne, with her fair skin, blond hair, and Nordic features, contrasted with Bruno physically no less than she did temperamentally. A colleague who knew the couple in both Canada and Harwell recalled Marianne as very quiet and beautiful, but also as a \"mixed up Scandinavian, [who] seemed a funny choice for a randy Italian.\"\n\nToward the end of his life, Bruno was interviewed by the Italian journalist Miriam Mafai. She concluded that Marianne's reticence and long silences were exacerbated by the fact that \"Bruno was very much courted and wooed, and this could not please his wife.\" This, however, was only part of a more serious problem: during their time in Canada, Marianne began to show the first signs of a nervous condition, which peaked years later.\n\nBruno told Mafai he had noticed that Marianne had a \"few oddities,\" which first manifested themselves when they were invited to social functions. For instance, when they were about to leave home to go to a friend's house for dinner (such as the Fermis' perhaps), Marianne would suddenly announce that she was not coming. Bruno, naturally cross, would say, \"You're crazy,\" in what he described as \"a normal voice,\" unaware that her intense shyness was a symptom of a deep malaise.\n\nThese descriptions were given by Bruno later in life, after Marianne had suffered a catastrophic mental collapse in the USSR. However, signs of trouble had been there all along. As we've seen, in 1938, during her yearlong separation from baby Gil, Bruno's letters refer to a mysterious illness, which she seems unwilling to discuss. For a girl predisposed to depression, abandoning Gil to a French nursery when he was only weeks old could only have added to her misery. Let's now consider the ensuing years from Marianne's point of view: Reunited with Gil and Bruno, she flees to North America immediately after having a miscarriage. Her parents and siblings now thousands of miles away, her life is built around the demands of her husband's career. By 1943 she is living in the United States with a closet communist, who is about to work on a secret project in Canada. When such experiences are added to her inherent shyness, one can understand her reluctance to meet her husband's teacher, a world-famous Nobel Laureate. A woman in her situation merited sensitivity and support.\n\nMarianne was as pretty as Bruno was handsome. Bruno, the peacock, enjoyed presenting himself in the company of his attractive wife. He was the charmer, everyone's best friend. Whether his scientific intelligence was matched by emotional maturity is less clear. On the other hand, it's possible that Bruno's decision to move to Harwell was influenced by a consideration of Marianne, who, like Bruno, would be within easy reach of her family, and might therefore feel more at ease. Although there is no proof that this was a factor in his decision, it could have been a powerful attraction.\n\nWhatever the reasons for the move, by the end of 1948 the Pontecorvos' time in North America was coming to an end. From November 2 to December 3, 1948, Bruno used his accumulated vacation time to visit the western United States. This trip included visits to various West Coast universities and a side trip to Mexico. From that point on, Bruno's career moved ever eastward. The Pontecorvos left Chalk River for the last time on January 24, 1949, and flew to Britain, via New York. Bruno started work at Harwell on the first of February.\nINTERLUDE\nWEST TO EAST\n\nBACK IN 1942, WHEN THE AWESOME IMPLICATIONS OF FISSION WERE first realized, scientists in the USSR had doubted that an atomic bomb could be made in time to influence the war. Furthermore, Klaus Fuchs had sent information that the British and American nuclear teams were working on an industrial scale. Thus, by 1943, Stalin had received enough intelligence to know that, for the immediate war, a Soviet bomb was irrelevant. The relatively small atomic bomb project that he authorized was a \"hedge against future uncertainties\"\n\nWhen Igor Kurchatov took on the design of the Soviet atomic bomb, one of the first things he did was to find out what was known elsewhere. He spent several days in the Kremlin, where he studied material relating to the British atomic project. The information from Fuchs enabled Kurchatov \"to bypass many labor-intensive phases of working out the problem.\"\n\nThe news, gathered from spies, that a chain reaction could take place in a mixture of uranium and heavy water was invaluable for Kurchatov. Soviet scientists had believed this to be impossible, because they thought the chance of a neutron being absorbed by material before meeting a nucleus of U-235 was too high. Soviet physicists didn't have enough heavy water to perform the test for themselves, so \"borrowing\" the data from others was critical.\n\nOther borrowed intelligence concerned plutonium. Kurchatov checked the last published papers before secrecy had taken over, and deduced that plutonium could be a novel route to the bomb, which would eliminate the need to separate U-235. He arrived at this realization due to the interest in plutonium revealed in these final open papers, as well as his general knowledge of nuclear physics and some technical calculations of his own. However, he lacked some critical data on the subject. He needed to know the answers to two questions: Is plutonium fission caused by slow neutrons or fast ones? And does it suffer from spontaneous fission?\n\nThe phenomenon of spontaneous fission limited the amount of uranium that could be kept in one place. Neutrons released by fission may induce further fissions if they hit appropriate nuclei, or alternatively may escape from the sample entirely without hitting anything. The latter is more likely for small samples than for large ones. The reason is that the ratio of volume (where fission can occur) to surface area (which enables neutrons to escape) grows with the radius of the sample. A tiny baby needs to be kept wrapped up even when a mature adult is lightly clad because, relative to its size, the baby has a greater surface area through which it can lose body heat. Analogously, small samples of uranium lose neutrons more easily than large lumps of the element. There is a critical mass of uranium or plutonium below which fission is not self-sustaining.\n\nFission might occur accidentally, for example due to a cosmic ray colliding with a uranium atom, or due to spontaneous radioactivity. This carries the danger of causing a spontaneous chain reaction and an uncontrolled explosion. To prevent this, the size of enriched uranium samples is kept small enough that that neutrons are more likely to escape through their surface than feed a chain reaction within their heart. To make an atomic bomb from U-235, two such \"subcritical\" samples need to be prepared; later, the samples must be brought together very rapidly to trigger the explosion. Kurchatov understood this principle in the USSR, and discovered that the West had understood it too.\n\nKurchatov prepared a research-and-development plan, which outlined the problems to be solved, and in March 1943 he drew up a list of laboratories in North America where solutions might have already been found. The Soviet intelligence agency, the NKVD (the forerunner to the KGB), sent the questions on to its agents abroad.\n\nThe USSR was already setting up a network of informants scattered throughout the West's atomic project. At the end of 1942 or early in 1943, Peter Ivanov, an employee of the Soviet consulate in San Francisco, asked British engineer George Eltenton, who had worked in Leningrad but was now at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, to obtain secret information about its research. Ivanov spoke to Haakon Chevalier, a communist friend of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who in turn approached Oppenheimer, but the latter would have nothing to do with the scheme. Ivanov then approached others at the Radiation Laboratory in search of information. He seems to have been successful.\n\nThe Soviets spread their intelligence net very wide among the US laboratories. The Gouzenko defection and the arrest of Nunn May show that the net encompassed Canada too. Ever since Bruno Pontecorvo fled to the USSR in 1950, there has been debate about whether he too passed information. The members of the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy seemed to have no doubt. They dubbed him the \"second deadliest betrayer,\" but no evidence other than his disappearance was produced. Their report, issued in 1951, included this cogent assessment: \"Whether or not Pontecorvo in fact betrayed secrets before disappearing behind the Iron Curtain, his recollection of those secrets is now available to Russia. His unusual scientific mind is also available for Soviet reactor development.\"\n\nIf Pontecorvo was indeed as important to the Soviets during the 1940s as some have claimed, then he must have left a footprint. By studying the known history of the Soviet atomic project, including the chronology of what the Soviets knew about Western progress and when, one might hope to identify his contributions, or lack thereof. For example, it seems plausible to dismiss one claim immediately\u2014namely, that Pontecorvo gave the Soviets information about Fermi's successful nuclear-pile experiment in December 1942.\n\nIn Kurchatov's memo, written on March 22, 1943, which specified the questions that agents should answer, he recorded that it was \"still unclear if a natural uranium and graphite system is possible.\" As this was the very method that Fermi had already demonstrated with his Chicago reactor three months earlier, news of the Americans' success had clearly not yet reached the USSR. As we have seen, Pontecorvo visited Fermi in April 1942, and although they discussed aspects of the experiment, this was long before the outcome of Fermi's experiment was known. Pontecorvo didn't join the Anglo-Canadian project until 1943, and had no direct contact with Fermi's operation until 1944. Thus he initially had limited knowledge of the Chicago pile. Given that Kurchatov's own memorandum suggests his ignorance of Fermi's success, it seems unlikely that Pontecorvo had leaked the information.\n\nDuring 1943 and 1944, several employees at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago were suspected of having passed information to the Soviets and were summarily dismissed. It is more natural to suspect that one of these employees eventually informed the USSR about Fermi's operation, rather than the remote and disconnected Pontecorvo.\n\nThe US intelligence network suspected that information about the gaseous diffusion plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was also being sent to the USSR. Pontecorvo had no involvement with Oak Ridge at any stage. If he passed any information to the Soviets at all, it would be restricted to knowledge gained during his time in Canada, from 1943 to 1948, or at Harwell, from 1949 to 1950.\n\nOLEG GORDIEVSKY, THE FORMER KGB DOUBLE AGENT, ASSERTS THAT Pontecorvo passed significant amounts of information to the Soviets. The claims are fairly specific, but unsubstantiated. For example, in a book coauthored with the historian Christopher Andrew, who later wrote the authorized history of MI5, he stated that \"at some point\" after joining the Canadian project, Bruno had made contact with the Soviet embassy, \"probably\" in Ottawa. The tale becomes more detailed in claiming that Bruno's report was sent not to the GRU (the USSR's military intelligence agency) but to its \"neighbor,\" the KGB. The KGB \"resident\" at the embassy initially ignored Pontecorvo, apparently suspicious that he was a provocateur working on behalf of the Canadians. Eventually convinced of Pontecorvo's reliability, the KGB adopted him. Years later, contacts in the KGB told Gordievsky that they \"rated Pontecorvo's work as an atom spy almost as highly as that of Fuchs.\"\n\nWhen Gordievsky subsequently repeated this claim to me, he added, \"Bruno Pontecorvo was an agent of the KGB for a long time. Probably he was recruited during the Spanish war. His information was very valuable.\" When pressed, Gordievsky did not provide any source or even specific facts, such as what secrets Pontecorvo had supposedly passed. Nor did Gordievsky substantiate the allusion to Pontecorvo's \"probable\" recruitment during the Spanish Civil War.\n\nThis latter claim in particular is hard to reconcile with Gordievsky's previous account, in which the Soviet agents in Canada were initially suspicious of Pontecorvo's aims. Furthermore, the chronology does not fit well. The Spanish Civil War overlapped with Pontecorvo's time in Paris. During this period he had nothing to offer as a spy: there was no reason to suspect that he would become involved in a program whose existence had yet to be imagined, and whose core focus (nuclear fission) had yet to be discovered; what's more, once fission had been discovered, research on the subject occurred in the open for some time. It is possible, even likely, that Pontecorvo attracted attention as a prominent communist sympathizer, with a glittering scientific career ahead of him. As such, he might well have been singled out by the Soviets, especially as he joined the Communist Party in 1939. However, this still does not fit easily with Gordievsky's original account of Pontecorvo's approach to the Soviets in Canada.\n\nON APRIL 12, 1943, \"LABORATORY NUMBER TWO\" (THE CODE NAME for the Soviet Union's reactor project) was set up on Kurchatov's behalf. He estimated that a reactor would require two tons of uranium and fifteen tons of heavy water (for a heavy-water pile), or fifty to one hundred tons of uranium and one thousand tons of graphite (for a graphite pile). Graphite was easier to obtain than heavy water, so he chose the latter route. He didn't have the uranium but asked theoreticians to figure out how to optimize the construction of the reactor. One of these theoreticians was Isaak Pomeranchuk, a superb theoretical physicist who would later meet with Pontecorvo.\n\nAs it would take years to construct a practical reactor, Kurchatov built a cyclotron to make small quantities of plutonium for research as fast as possible. The cyclotron, which worked by accelerating a beam of deuterons (the nuclei of heavy hydrogen), began operation on September 25, 1944. Even with this advanced machine, however, the Soviets didn't succeed in separating plutonium from irradiated uranium until 1946.\n\nKurchatov's biggest problem was obtaining uranium and ultrapure graphite for the pile. At the very start, in January 1943, the Soviet government asked the US for ten kilograms of uranium metal and one hundred kilograms of uranium compounds under the Lend-Lease arrangement. This was a clever move. The USSR was an ally, and, within the context of the war effort, the request might appear to be entirely innocent. For the US, of course, uranium was highly valued, its importance a jealously guarded secret. General Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, agreed to the request in order to avoid raising suspicion, unaware that the Soviets already knew about about the West's \"secret\" atomic project. The search for local uranium in the USSR ramped up starting in 1943, but, given that Stalin was only hedging for the long-term future, it received a low priority. Not until 1945 did large-scale exploration begin.\n\nIN JULY 1943 KURCHATOV WROTE ANOTHER REPORT FOR THE KREMLIN. Like the March memo, it reveals that his knowledge about nuclear projects in the West was of a general nature and short on detail. Indeed, his knowledge at this time was less complete than it had been in 1941 and 1942, when he had received reports of British progress via Klaus Fuchs. He stressed that he needed information about elements 93 and 94 (neptunium and plutonium), which were being researched by Emilio Segr\u00e8 and Glenn Seaborg at Berkeley.\n\nIn December 1943, Fuchs traveled from England to New York; for most of the following year he worked on the gaseous-diffusion method for separating the rare U-235 from the dominant, and heavier, U-238. During this period he informed the Soviet Union that the United States had chosen gaseous diffusion as the means to separate the isotopes, and that this was occurring on an industrial scale. However, Fuchs knew nothing of the significance of plutonium, nor of the nuclear reactor pile in Chicago. Nonetheless, by the start of 1945 the Soviets had a broad idea of the West's program and were convinced that an atomic bomb was possible.\n\nThe Anglo-Canadian reactor project also was \"penetrated by Soviet agents.\" We have already seen one of these agents at work: during his time in Canada, Alan Nunn May handed over microscopic samples of U-235 and U-233 to the USSR. Soviet records show that Kurchatov was very excited to receive these samples, and issued a high-priority demand for more, ideally several grams' worth.\n\nAt some point, blueprints of the heavy-water reactor also made their way to the USSR, but their source is not known. If Pontecorvo was responsible, this would substantiate Gordievsky's claim that knowledgeable KGB officers \"rated Pontecorvo's work as an atom spy almost as highly as that of Fuchs.\" If this description is justified, it raises questions such as: What was transmitted, to whom, and how? Pontecorvo's colleague Herbert Skinner shared his thoughts on the third question with MI5 in 1950, remarking on Bruno's \"frequent\" visits to the US-Canadian border, \"where he could have met someone.\" Furthermore, it is intriguing that when Pontecorvo was photographed with colleagues during this period, he invariably looked away from the camera. (See Images I.1 and I.2 on the preceding page.) Although it doesn't constitute evidence, this behavior appears to be quite deliberate and evasive, and unique to this period in his life.\n\n**IMAGES I.1 AND I.2**. Two pictures of the senior scientists at Chalk River, with Bruno avoiding the camera. The scientists, from right to left, are Henry Seligman, Bruno Pontecorvo, Bertrand Goldschmidt, Jules Gu\u00e9ron, Hans von Halban, and Pierre Auger. (IMAGE I.1, WITH BRUNO SECOND FROM THE RIGHT, LOOKING AT HIS FEET, COURTESY PAUL BRODA AND ALAN NUNN MAY COLLECTION. IMAGE I.2, WITH BRUNO SECOND FROM THE RIGHT, LOOKING TO THE SIDE, COURTESY AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS.)\n\nAfter Nunn May was arrested, scientists at Chalk River, including Pontecorvo, were vetted by Western intelligence agencies once more. The fact that Bruno passed this test is not really significant, as the vetting process seems to have been inefficient or even flawed. For example, Nunn May's colleagues knew he was a communist, yet this was missed by MI5. Fuchs also slipped through the net, yet there were apparently many incriminating clues. The authorities' desire to have the best experts on call occasionally caused them to turn a blind eye to politics. Fuchs's case shows that this failing persisted, perhaps unconsciously, even after Nunn May had been exposed. Similarly, the vetting of Pontecorvo also failed to identify his communist affiliation.\n\nNonetheless, apart from Gordievsky's claims, there is no evidence that Pontecorvo was involved in transmitting blueprints, samples of uranium, or indeed any information from the Anglo-Canadian project. However, it is harder to dismiss the hypothesis that at some stage he was approached by the Soviet Union.\n\nIt seems unlikely that the KGB, under active instruction from Kurchatov to recruit agents at North American laboratories, would have been unaware that a member of the Communist Party was working at Chalk River\u2014a leading expert on nuclear reactors and uranium, whose early research in nuclear physics had meshed so well with Kurchatov's own. Indeed, while Pontecorvo was working in Joliot-Curie's laboratory, he and Kurchatov had cited each other's papers. It is improbable that a \"penetration by Soviet agents,\" resulting from Kurchatov's initiative, would not have included some approach to Pontecorvo. What reaction he had is unknown.\n\nTHE OTTAWA SPY RING\n\nIn June 1943, in response to Kurchatov's intervention with Stalin, the Soviet military intelligence agency, the GRU, sent a new team to Ottawa. Its head was Colonel Nikolai Zabotin, who ended up in a labor camp following the defection of the team's cipher clerk, Lieutenant Igor Gouzenko. Other members included Lieutenant Pavel Angelov, who made contact with Nunn May, and Colonel Pavel Motinov, who later transported Nunn May's uranium samples to Moscow.\n\nAt the time, the head of the KGB was Lavrenti Beria, who also became overlord of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Under Beria's watch, atomic espionage was deemed so important that the KGB recruited its own agents using the Comintern.\n\nThe KGB was also responsible for counterintelligence at Soviet embassies. Their operations in Ottawa, overseen by resident agent Vitaly Pavlov, were on a smaller scale than the GRU's, but were important nonetheless. The KGB kept a watch on the GRU. The GRU, for its part, had no access to KGB communications.\n\nStalin usually required agents of both the GRU and the KGB to supply information independently before he would trust it. For example, information about the bomb work at Los Alamos, sent by Ted Hall, confirmed the information sent by Klaus Fuchs, and vice versa. Stalin \"distrusted intelligence\" until it was received from \"at least two independent sources.\"\n\nThis is significant if one accepts Gordievsky's claims about Pontecorvo. Bruno's cousin Emilio Sereni was well connected in the Comintern, which the Soviets used as a vehicle to recruit contacts. If Pontecorvo was passing information on behalf of the KGB, Gouzenko\u2014a GRU operative\u2014would not have known. And, as we shall see later, the KGB used a uniquely successful courier in Canada whose history had some intriguing overlap with Pontecorvo's own.\n\nThe GRU's Colonel Zabotin had not been in Ottawa long before he had earned a reputation as a lover of the high life, an eager party host, ever ready to charm the wives of diplomats. Boisterous and charismatic, he became a great favorite on the diplomatic circuit. As a means of getting to know the inner secrets of a community, this was ideal. This frenetic pace slowed, however, when the wives of the team members arrived from Russia. The presence of the KGB also sobered the GRU team, at least metaphorically.\n\nThe Soviets became aware of the Chalk River laboratory but were unable to penetrate its security, and so initially had no real idea of its purpose. Nunn May's evidently communist sympathies were known in Moscow, since the GRU chief in Moscow, Fyodor Kuznetsov, instructed Zabotin to make contact with the scientist. Zabotin assigned Angelov to be Nunn May's contact, and Nunn May was given the code name _Alek_ , which was a somewhat transparent cover for his real name, _Alan_.\n\nFollowing Nunn May's exposure, the Canadian Royal Commission that investigated the matter noted, \"In view of his background and the position he occupied, he was a logical person from whom the Russians could expect to obtain the available knowledge on atomic energy.\" Nunn May himself told his stepson, Paul Broda, that he was approached by the Soviets early in 1945. At that stage, Angelov was completely unaware of the Chalk River laboratory's role in nuclear physics, and erroneously thought it to be a factory for making conventional explosives. Even allowing for the firewalls between the GRU and the KGB, this makes it unlikely that anyone, let alone Pontecorvo, had been passing significant information since 1943.\n\nOver several weekends, Nunn May borrowed reports from the Chalk River library on Friday evenings. He would hand them to Angelov, who would hand them back on Sunday evening, enabling Nunn May to return them to the library on Monday morning. In this way, they worked through much of the \"basic material\" on the chemistry of uranium and plutonium, the design of the Chicago graphite reactor, and basic nuclear data. Nunn May did not pass any specific details or blueprints of the heavy-water reactor, however. As we saw earlier, Kurchatov had decided to pursue graphite rather than the heavy-water approach. At the time, ZEEP was near completion, while the NRX was still three years away.\n\nNunn May delivered the fateful samples of U-233 and U-235 to Angelov in the first week of July 1945. The Soviet embassy informed Moscow by telegram: \"ALEK [Nunn May] handed over to us . . . 162 micrograms of uranium 233 in the form of oxide in a thin lamina.\" The news must have caused a sensation in Moscow, because Colonel Motinov\u2014the assistant military attach\u00e9 in Ottawa\u2014was ordered to bring them from Canada to Moscow personally.\n\nOn July 28, 1945, \"The Director\" in Moscow sent a telegram to Colonel Zabotin in Ottawa: \"Try to get from him [ALEK] before [his return to England] detailed information on the progress of the work on uranium. Discuss with him: does he think it expedient for our undertaking to stay on the spot; will he be able to do that or is it more useful for him and necessary to depart for London?\"\n\nIn August, Zabotin visited a friend who lived near Chalk River, and took a cruise along the river so as to take a look at the plant himself. He reported back to Moscow. His superiors replied on August 14, asking him if the friend had contacts in the plant. They followed up on August 22 with the instruction, \"Take measures to organize acquisition of documentary materials on the atomic bomb! The technical process, drawings, calculations.\"\n\nSo far, Zabotin had not received any assessment from Moscow about the value of the information that he had already sent, so he telegraphed his superiors as follows: \"I beg you to inform me to what extent have ALEK's materials on the question of uranium satisfied you and our scientists (his reports on production etc.). This is necessary for us to know _in order that we may be able to set forth a number of tasks on this question to other clients_.\" (Italics added.) The GRU clearly had identified Chalk River as a priority. It is inconceivable that the KGB had not done so also.\n\nIgor Gouzenko's defection from the Ottawa embassy in September 1945 had a huge impact in Moscow. Stalin ordered Lavrenti Beria to initiate damage limitation. Both the GRU and KGB immediately severed contact with their agents, without explanation. Better to preserve agents for the long term, even if it meant experiencing a slump in intelligence for a while.\n\nAccording to Gordievsky, Gouzenko's defection did not compromise all the Soviet agents in Canada. Nunn May had been working with the GRU network. This was shut down by the Soviets following his exposure. A network of KGB agents remained, however, relatively unscathed. Gordievsky's contacts in the KGB insist that one of these was Bruno Pontecorvo.\n\nTHE UBIQUITOUS KIM PHILBY\n\nGouzenko's defection, which occurred just three days after the Japanese signed the documents of surrender, was the moment when the Western powers knew for sure that their former ally had become an adversary. The most surprising and important name that Gouzenko revealed was that of Bruno's colleague, Alan Nunn May. The news emerged around this time that Bruno was weighing offers from Harwell and various American institutions. Whether or not his decision was influenced by these events, there is one common thread between them: the role of the infamous double agent Kim Philby.\n\nAt the time, Philby was the head of Soviet counterespionage in London\u2014or at least this was his official job. In reality, Philby was a double agent who worked for the Soviet Union but was paid by the British and would not be exposed until the 1950s. When he learned of Gouzenko's defection and its aftermath, Philby alerted Moscow that Nunn May was under suspicion. We know this because later decrypts of Soviet diplomatic cables show that, on September 17, Pavel Fitin, a high-ranking NKVD official in Moscow, sent a message to the NKVD resident in London, asking for verification of Philby's news about the \"GRU in Ottawa.\"\n\nNunn May was due to return to the United Kingdom in the fall of 1945, and take up a position at King's College London. In addition to his duties at the university, one of his tasks would be to advise the government on the incipient British nuclear research program, including the new laboratory at Harwell. This would have placed him in a powerful position, with significant interest for the Soviets. At that stage the British did not have solid enough evidence to prosecute Nunn May, so, following his return to England on September 16, security officers from MI5 followed him, hoping to catch him in the act of passing information to a contact. Philby was aware of this. He succeeded in alerting the Soviets, who canceled a meeting between Nunn May and his Soviet contact, planned for October 7 in London. This was the first of three crucial interventions that Philby would make with regard to atomic scientists, as we shall see. It wasn't until March 1946 that the British felt confident enough to arrest and prosecute Nunn May.\n\nFollowing Gouzenko's explosive revelations, Western authorities were worried that the Soviets might have targeted other scientists. Pontecorvo was vetted again, along with others at Chalk River. However, these inquiries produced no evidence that anyone else had collaborated with the Soviets, or shared any secret information with unauthorized people\u2014at least, as far as the Canadian team was concerned. As we have seen, Pontecorvo had been weighing various attractive job offers from American institutions during the latter half of 1945, only to turn them down in favor of Harwell, a fact that Segr\u00e8 later regarded with suspicion. If Segr\u00e8's worries have any basis in fact, then the timing of this choice, which came just as Philby had made the Soviets aware of Nunn May's exposure, is intriguing. And these weren't the only pieces moving on the chessboard of Pontecorvo's destiny at this time.\n\nKlaus Fuchs, for example, was still at Los Alamos, free from suspicion. In September 1945, Fuchs told his Soviet controller that he would return to England after the war. In November he was interviewed for a position at Harwell, and his appointment there was arranged. Fuchs then prepared to leave the United States, which he did in June 1946, eventually starting work at Harwell in August.\n\nIn the meantime, with the Nunn May affair known to the authorities, but not yet to the public, Chadwick agreed to hire Pontecorvo at Harwell, with no constraints on his travel. In response, Bruno suddenly announced that he wanted to stay in Canada, at least for a while.\n\nAs the facility at Harwell was still under construction, and many decisions about its personnel were being made, it is possible that these intermingled events were nothing more than chronological coincidences. However, if one gives credence to the claims that Pontecorvo had been working for the Soviets since 1943, the timing becomes more tantalizing. In any event, the role of Philby\u2014who first alerted the Soviets about the Western intelligence community's interest in Nunn May, then later tipped them off about Fuchs, and later still, as we shall see, about Pontecorvo\u2014will become central to the whole affair.\n\nLONA COHEN A.K.A. HELEN KROGER\n\nNunn May had worked exclusively with the GRU. Meanwhile, the KGB had its own ring of spies. At Los Alamos these included the brilliant young prodigy Ted Hall. Hall had entered Harvard at age sixteen, and two years later joined the team at Los Alamos, where he was one of the youngest scientists to work on the bomb. Unknown to his colleagues, discussions with his roommates at Harvard had crystallized Hall's interest in Marxist ideology. He felt that it was essential for the USSR to build a bomb, to prevent a US monopoly.\n\nHall probably had a deeper knowledge of the bomb's dynamics than Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs is well known because in 1950 he was exposed and then convicted with much publicity. Hall's name is not as well known. He was only identified as a result of VENONA decrypts that mentioned an agent code-named MLAD, Russian for \"youngster.\" The decoded messages also revealed the details of MLAD's travels, which enabled his true identity to be pinpointed in the spring of 1950. Nonetheless his name only became public knowledge in the 1990s.\n\nThe reasons Hall was never prosecuted are complex, but a crucial factor was that he refused to confess, unlike Fuchs and Nunn May. Another key to his success was his KGB contact: the American Lona Cohen. Lona Cohen and her husband, Morris, were arguably the most successful of all the couriers and organizers that the Soviets had in North America, and were later celebrated as \"heroes of Soviet intelligence.\"\n\nBorn in Connecticut just four months before Bruno in 1913, Lona was born to Jewish immigrants, the fifth of ten children, just as Bruno was number four out of eight. Lona's parents worked in textile mills, whereas Bruno's father owned one. Bruno led a life of relative privilege, leaving at age twenty-three for Paris, where his intellectual curiosity led him to communism. Lona grew up in the hard reality of the Great Depression, and watched her parents scrimp and save to raise the children. Lona left home at age thirteen to find work in New York, where she witnessed social injustice firsthand, became a committed leftist, and in 1935 joined the US Communist Party.\n\nBruno met Marianne in 1936, and the course of their lives was ultimately determined by his commitment to communism. Lona met Morris in July of 1937, and was later recruited by her husband as an agent for the Soviet Union. She was given the code name _Helen_ , which would later have ironic resonance.\n\nWhen the United States entered the war, Morris was drafted into the US Army, so \"Helen\" took over his network of seven agents. She was one of the mules of Soviet espionage. Her job was to pick up clandestine copies of documents that had been smuggled out of research centers, carry them secretly across the country, and deliver them to the central controller\u2014in her case, the Soviet resident in New York. This separated the source of information from the central controller, who would know the source's nom de guerre but not always his or her true identity. Lona was so successful that the resident soon assigned her more sources; in the spring of 1945, she was put in contact with the young Los Alamos physicist Ted Hall.\n\nSome of the most important atomic papers received by the Soviets originated with Hall, and were couriered by the woman he knew only as Helen. The fact that Hall remained undetected for so long (and ultimately refused to confess) also protected the identity of the Cohens throughout the war and for nearly two decades thereafter.\n\nBefore \"Helen\" began her work as a courier to and from Los Alamos, she traveled to the Canadian border to meet a contact who handed over papers that had originated in Canada. This occurred in early 1945. The name of her contact has never been revealed. Although it is tempting to speculate that her appointment might have been with Bruno Pontecorvo, especially given Skinner's observation that Bruno traveled to the US-Canadian border regularly, the dates when Pontecorvo is known to have made such trips do not mesh easily with those of Lona Cohen. Pontecorvo visited the United States briefly during the 1944 New Year, and returned to Canada on January 2; however the KGB didn't activate Lona Cohen in Canada until January 11. When interviewed years later, she remembered her first courier visit to the Canadian border as being \"sometime in the first chilly months of 1945.\" Pontecorvo's next recorded trip into the United States occurred in May, which does not fit with Cohen's description, although it's possible her memory of the time frame is unreliable.\n\nBy the end of the war, Lona Cohen was deeply involved in smuggling information both from Los Alamos and from Canada. In November 1945, Morris was discharged from the army and immediately signed on again with the KGB. Although Gouzenko's defection in September had directly compromised only the GRU networks, the KGB took care to protect itself by putting its agents into effective hibernation for two years. Thus, the Cohens went dormant, and carried on with their lives like model US citizens. Years later, when a historian of the KGB interviewed Lona and Morris in Moscow, she turned to her husband and said, \"Remember the Canadian case? We are connected.\"\n\nBy the end of 1947, Lavrenti Beria was desperate to know about recent Western progress with nuclear weapons. It was around this time that he reactivated the wartime networks. In England, Klaus Fuchs, who had been quiet since 1946, linked up again with a Soviet contact and informed him that Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller, now at the University of Chicago, were interested in creating a thermonuclear \"hydrogen\" bomb, which used tritium and deuterium. In North America, the Cohens also resurfaced. As it happened, Ted Hall was working at the University of Chicago, and the Cohens, sensing a pathway to news about Fermi and Teller, renewed contact with him.\n\nTed Hall's wife, Joan, recalls a meeting that she and Ted had with the Cohens in 1949. Morris Cohen had met Ted Hall the previous year, and put great pressure on him to become active again as a spy. Cohen was successful, but within a year Hall wanted to disconnect once more, which led to the meeting of Joan and Ted Hall with Lona and Morris Cohen in a New York park. In Joan Hall's opinion, the Cohens were trying hard to renew their old contacts, in part to prove to Moscow that they, Lona and Morris, were still a powerful force.\n\nThe Cohens were able to renew their link with Hall, at least in 1948 and 1949. They also succeeded with an agent based in Canada.\n\nLona Cohen's official KGB biography reveals that, around this time, she \"obtained a sample of uranium from Canada,\" which she transported to her Soviet contact in New York. V. N. Krasnikov, the KGB's resident deputy in New York, recalled that in the later part of the 1940s he was not only interested in the H-bomb, but also in uranium ores: \"We contacted people on this issue. In my safebox in New York there was an envelope with powdered uranium.\" He added, \"The only uranium known to have come to New York is credited by Russian intelligence to Lona Cohen.\"\n\nLona Cohen's uranium sample was not the same as Nunn May's, which had been handed over in the summer of 1945 and taken under close guard from Ottawa to Moscow. After Nunn May's uranium arrived in Moscow, Igor Kurchatov asked for more samples. Cohen's uranium was then obtained \"on orders of the Centre.\" Combined with Krasnikov's account given above, this suggests that Cohen's uranium was obtained later than 1945. Furthermore, uranium from the Canadian reactor was only available after 1947, and the Cohens had gone underground from late 1945 until the start of 1948.\n\nBy 1948, the NRX reactor at Chalk River was working. It produced both plutonium and U-233. Joan Hall's impression that the Cohens were under pressure to reactivate their networks at this time would suggest that, in addition to approaching Ted Hall, they also contacted their former source or sources in Canada. This period of the late 1940s is also when the Soviets began to show interest in developing a hydrogen bomb; this requires tritium, which can be produced in a heavy-water reactor. Hence the Soviets would have had a real interest in obtaining the blueprints of the Canadian reactor, as well as uranium samples, at this stage.\n\nLona's source in Canada has never been identified. If Gordievsky is wrong about Pontecorvo being the source, some other individual has managed to keep their secret ever since.\nHALF TIME\nTEN\n\nCHAIN REACTION\n\n_1949\u20131950_\n\nIN 1949, BRUNO'S ODYSSEY BROUGHT HIM TO HARWELL, IN THE HEART of England, to work on the British nuclear reactor program. He also devoted some of his time to fundamental work studying cosmic rays. However, his other love, the neutrino, would remain tantalizingly out of reach\u2014the reactors being designed at Harwell would be unable to generate enough neutrinos for his needs.\n\nHarwell village, with its half-timbered, thatched cottages, could serve as a model for a classic English picture postcard. The Downs, as the uplands of southern England are known, cross the landscape about ten miles to the south. For most of the 1930s this area was a peaceful idyll, which was shattered in 1939 when an airfield was built to house Wellington bombers. After the end of the war, in 1946, this site was taken over by \"the Atomic,\" as Harwell Laboratory was affectionately known.\n\nThe Atomic had an air of mystery, even of menace. Tall chimneys, tower blocks, and offices of red brick, prettified with sash windows, gave the place the appearance of an industrial site, which in effect it was. The runways of the former airfield became roads, and the vast areas of concrete where the planes had once taxied became bus terminals: large numbers of coaches were needed to ferry workers between the laboratory and the surrounding villages, which were several miles away. Behind the security fence, which was manned by armed police officers, the abandoned aircraft hangars became laboratories. Those allowed inside would discover the postwar state of the art in big science. The walls within the hangars housed three stories of offices and labs, which were reached by metal staircases. From walkways, high above the hangar floor, you could look down on piles of graphite and concrete blocks, which eventually would house a nuclear reactor.\n\nThe scientists wore suits and ties. Many completed the ensemble with a waistcoat, within which a pencil or fountain pen would nestle, ready to record data. They smoked pipes as they watched lights flicker on monitors, recorded the readings from dials, or adjusted Bakelite knobs on the electronics. That was how science was done in the Britain of the 1940s.\n\nSeen from sixty years later, there is inevitability to Bruno Pontecorvo's disappearance, a domino effect as world events cascaded through the first half of 1950 toward a terrible personal climax.\n\nBruno had, after all, always felt pursued: by the fascists in Italy, by the Nazis in France, by the FBI in America; he later sensed a general atmosphere of suspicion in Canada. He had only been at Harwell a year when, in February 1950, his colleague, Klaus Fuchs, was arrested. Pontecorvo and Fuchs were independent colleagues, but shared common ideals, and the effect on Bruno can't have been calming.\n\nWhen tectonic plates shift on the ocean floor, waves spread imperceptibly until, perhaps thousands of miles away, a tsunami reaches land and wreaks havoc. For Pontecorvo, the disaster struck in September 1950. Unseen waves had been building for months, but their source, the metaphorical quake that set the whole saga in motion, took place back in 1949, in the United States. It was Bruno's old friend, Emilio Segr\u00e8, who set the fateful events in motion.\n\nIn the US, Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch hunts and the persecution of \"Reds\" initially began as a Kafkaesque loyalty test: to prove your loyalty, give us the names of people known to you to be communists, or to have professed views that are communist, or left of center, or. . . . And names would be duly provided. Anyone who refused to take the test was immediately damned. It is a marked irony that the US was adopting practices that were de rigeur in the USSR, the very regime that was being painted as the new Satan.\n\nWhich is how Emilio Segr\u00e8 was cast as Judas Iscariot.\n\nSegr\u00e8, like Pontecorvo, was one of the Via Panisperna Boys. During the war, as we saw, their research was appropriated by the military. Now, postwar, the US government's newly formed Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was taking over this area. The slow-neutron method, developed and patented by the Via Panisperna Boys, was pivotal to their vision. Segr\u00e8 was financially sophisticated and eager for the monetary rewards that this patent promised. Negotiations between the AEC and the patent holders were dragging on, however, and the US government was making strategic investigations into the political background of the \"Boys,\" looking for dirt to bolster its case against them.\n\nSegr\u00e8 felt compromised. He was now working at the University of California, which became infamous for its enthusiastic application of the loyalty test to its employees. Segr\u00e8 knew Pontecorvo's family well. He was aware that Bruno's siblings included professed communists, and that his cousin Emilio Sereni was a communist member of the Italian government. Segr\u00e8 feared that his former association with Pontecorvo could call his own loyalty into question. So on November 9, 1949, Segr\u00e8 met with Robert Thornton, an old friend from Berkeley who was now an official at the AEC, and told him about Bruno's communist associations. Thornton passed this information on to the FBI.\n\nThe FBI checked their files and, realizing that Pontecorvo was working at Harwell in the UK, duly informed the British security services. The FBI also gave MI5 a second piece of information that corroborated what Segr\u00e8 had said. Sent on December 15, the note \"regarding possible communist or pro-communist tendencies of two nuclear physicists and a biologist,\" keeps the names of its sources secret, but the content shows that the informant is not Segr\u00e8. The note reads, in part:\n\nInformant A of proven reliability on communist matters vouched for the reliability of informant B who said he was acquainted with three individuals in Paris under Prof Langevin who were exposed to the virus of communism. These were Bruno Pontecorvo, Sergio de Benedetto and Salvatore Luria. [B] said that he later met Bruno Pontecorvo on the ship Quanza and through him met Benedetto and Luria in New York City socially. [B] reported that he gained the impression in Paris that these three were either pro-communist or outright communists. He said that conversations that he had with them in the USA tended to strengthen his belief. The last time he saw them was in 1944. [B] reported that all three were friendly with Mr Sereni, a communist.\n\nMI5 took note. Someone highlighted the above paragraph in Pontecorvo's file.\n\nThe testimony continued: \"[B] reported Ambroglio and Berti had returned to Italy and Sereni had not been in the USA. [B] reported that Pontecorvo at one time was definitely aligned with the communists. In addition he reported that his brother-in-law (Ducio Tabet) was also pro-communist and had returned to Italy.\" The FBI followed up on Bruno's family and discovered that Bruno's sister Giuliana, who had also come to their attention as a possible communist, lived a couple of doors away from an alleged member of Comintern.\n\nThe emerging picture of Bruno Pontecorvo at the FBI was of a nuclear scientist who was a communist, in an extended family of communists whose members were in all likelihood well connected with Comintern. If Segr\u00e8 had hoped to smooth his own vetting process, and his claim on the patent, the attempt had backfired. Segr\u00e8 and \"Informant B\" merely fed the anticommunist hysteria already rampant within the Atomic Energy Commission and the FBI. Segr\u00e8's attempt to provide security for himself, by naming Pontecorvo, instead encouraged the AEC to dig deeper into Bruno's activities. During 1949 and early 1950, the FBI doggedly investigated Pontecorvo's politics.\n\nIn the United Kingdom, by contrast, MI5 did nothing. Their lack of action at this time is possibly due to the fact that when the news of Pontecorvo's communist associations arrived in 1949, the Harwell security team and MI5 were heavily occupied with the case of Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs was interrogated on December 21, again on the thirtieth, and for a third time on January 13. By the end of January, the investigation of Fuchs was complete, and he was arrested on Friday, February 3, 1950.\n\nThe following week, starting on the tenth, Harwell hosted a four-day conference to decide which items in the field of nuclear physics should remain secret and which could be declassified now that the war was over. It was during this gathering that news of America's growing concerns about Bruno reached Harwell and sealed his fate.\n\nOn the Saturday evening there was a reception at Ridgeway House\u2014an austere, government-standard brick building, which was used as a hostel for visitors, and doubled as an event center thanks to its large hall. Bruno had been invited to the reception by Sir John Cockcroft, \"to meet the US and Canadian Delegates.\" The American delegation from the AEC included Robert Thornton. Although on the surface the occasion was gregarious, with colleagues recalling their times together during the war, the undercurrent must have been cool. Thornton had already transmitted Segr\u00e8's information about Bruno to the FBI. Now, at some point during the conference, he told Cockcroft that Pontecorvo and his family were communists.\n\nThis news worried Cockcroft. He had known Bruno as both a colleague and a friend during their time in Canada, and had expressed concerns about his background in 1946 when his transfer to Harwell was first mooted. However, there had been no direct linkage of Pontecorvo to communism at that stage\u2014the FBI's 1942 message about the communist literature in Pontecorvo's house having gone astray. Now Cockcroft passed Thornton's news to his security chief, Wing Commander Henry Arnold, and instructed him to get to the bottom of it.\n\nArnold, slightly built and suave, was a model \"English gentleman.\" Lorna Arnold, the distinguished historian of the British hydrogen bomb (and no relation to Henry), described him as the \"perfect intelligence officer.\" At the end of the 1950s, Henry and Lorna worked in the same branch of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, and the internal mail service kept getting their correspondence mixed up. As a result, Lorna recalled, \"Henry was always coming to my office.\" She remembered him as \"very kindly, pleasant and courteous; average in height and build.\" He was the perfect intelligence officer, she explained, because \"his unobtrusive build and his personality helped him merge into the background. He was very observant and very tuned into people.\" He was also very good at understanding the psychology of suspects, winning their confidence and then destabilizing them.\n\nArnold's style was \"softly, softly.\" He maintained discretion by meeting with Pontecorvo in connection with his regular work. At the time, Pontecorvo's research was focused on cosmic rays, and he was hoping to go to the Swiss Alps to work on an experiment being conducted on the Jungfraujoch. Trips abroad required approval from the security division, so Arnold used this formality to make seemingly innocent conversation about Pontecorvo's trip. Arnold asked whether he would be visiting his parents, who lived in Milan, or his siblings elsewhere in Italy. Bruno confirmed that he had last seen his brother Gillo at an international conference in Lake Como in 1949, and he expected to meet him during the trip. During this discussion, Arnold wheedled out significant information, as he reported on March 1 in a phone call to MI5: \"Pontecorvo disclosed that his brother, who is also a scientist with an international background, was an active communist.\"\n\nThis set alarm bells ringing, if only quietly at first. Arnold went on to report that Bruno had recently been offered a job at the University of Liverpool. An easy way to eliminate any possible security risk would be to transfer Bruno Pontecorvo there, away from the classified work at Harwell. Arnold promised to send MI5 the latest facts about the Pontecorvo family, \"so that [MI5] could offer advice in due course.\"\n\nMore information about Pontecorvo's family arrived at MI5 the next day. This news came not from Arnold but from an unexpected quarter. The Special Branch of the British police, which focused on security issues, reported that a source in Sweden had unequivocally asserted that Pontecorvo's wife, Marianne, was a communist: \"In Enskede, a suburb of Stockholm, there lives a Fru PONTE CORVO a Swedish national married to Italian born subject whose present nationality is unknown. Mr PONTE CORVO lives in England where he works in one of the British Atom Installations. Fru PONTE CORVO was in England in summer 49 with her two [ _sic_ ] sons. Both she and her husband are described as avowed communists.\"\n\nThis last remark has been highlighted with two solid lines in the margin. The letter commented, \"This report would appear to refer to Bruno Pontecorvo employed in [Harwell].\"\n\nAlthough the broad details are right, the letter is a classic case of the game of \"telephone.\" Somehow the Swedish authorities thought Bruno had six sisters and one brother, rather than three and four, and that he had two rather than three children. More significant is that in reality \"Fru PONTE CORVO\" lived in England and had only been visiting her parents in Sweden. When such errors are discovered, the recipient has to decide whether they are trivial flaws in transmission, or instead constitute evidence that the subject of the report has been misidentified. A few weeks later these errors were cleared up, with an apology from Special Branch. In addition, perhaps to save face, the writer insisted that their source \"re-emphasises the authority of the informant.\"\n\nIn March, Arnold must have been busy with other matters as he sent MI5 no further information about Pontecorvo. In the meantime the directors and their deputies in the MI5 divisions of Counter-espionage (section B), Examination of Credentials (section C), and Security (section D) were exchanging minutes and papers about Pontecorvo. They had to assess the level of threat, and then decide what to do about it. On March 20 Colonel John Collard of section C judged that the credibility of the Swedish source needed to be determined. Collard's opposite number in Counter-espionage, J. Robertson, decided that further investigation should be undertaken by his own branch. Robertson's colleague W. S. Mars, concerned about the lack of progress, also added a note to the file on March 20: \"Is any news expected from Arnold soon?\" On March 26 Collard spoke by phone with Arnold, who \"undertook to see Pontecorvo again at a suitable opportunity.\"\n\nThe language of these exchanges gives a mixed impression of the government's sense of concern and urgency. On one hand, the information that trickled in from sources such as Segr\u00e8, the FBI, and the Swedish informants\u2014sources whose identity and reliability were unknown except to a handful\u2014caused a great deal of activity in the London headquarters of MI5. On the other hand, at Harwell, where Pontecorvo was based, Henry Arnold continued his soft touch with little sign of rapid action.\n\nDuring the March 26 phone call, Collard told Arnold that MI5 was concerned about Pontecorvo's reliability, and urged Arnold to have a more formal meeting with him. The \"suitable opportunity,\" which Collard suggested Arnold look for, arose about a week later. Whether or not Bruno suspected anything previously, this time there was no doubt that the authorities were seriously interested in him. On Wednesday, April 5, Arnold had a \"long talk with Pontecorvo.\" His ability to wheedle information out of people is evident in his report, which states that Pontecorvo once again yielded up \"quite freely\" the information that his \"brother Gilberto [Gillo] is an openly confessed Communist.\" Furthermore, Arnold stated, \"I understand that Gilberto's wife who is French is also of the Brethren.\"\n\nArnold must have asked Pontecorvo directly about his personal beliefs, as his report states:\n\nPontecorvo emphasized that he himself is not a communist and that his politics, if any, are Labour. His views are definitely \"Left\" but I found it difficult to assess exactly how \"Left\" they were. His wife Helene [Marianne] . . . holds very much the same political opinions as her husband, but here again Pontecorvo insisted that neither he nor his wife were communist. [Pontecorvo] expressed the opinion that with such a \"Red\" family background the Security authorities must naturally entertain certain doubts about himself, but he pointed out that on the continent the proportion of communists is far greater than in this country in that it is quite difficult to find an educated family that has not got some communist connections.\n\nLater, after the Pontecorvo family disappeared, MI5 homed in on the fact that Bruno had volunteered information about his communist relatives while at the same time denying that he himself held such views. MI5 viewed Bruno's move as a proactive attempt to defuse any suspicion that might have arisen if the authorities had discovered the existence of these communist relatives for themselves. This interpretation seems likely, as today we know that Bruno's statement was false. As we have seen, he had been an enthusiastic communist ever since his early days in Paris, and at the time of the Soviet-German nonaggression pact in 1939 had become an active member of the French Communist Party. Indeed, it was none other than Bruno who had introduced his siblings Giuliana, Laura, and Gillo to communism.\n\nArnold's perceptive insight is on display in his assessment of Pontecorvo's likely actions, written for MI5 in April 1950: \"My personal view of Pontecorvo is that whereas he has obtained British nationality he would quite readily change it again should it be to his scientific advantage to do so.\" Then, with wonderful irony, he adds, \"Naturally I do not include countries which are under Russian domination [here, someone has penned an exclamation mark] but he has already toyed with the idea of an appointment in Rome University and is at present turning over in his mind an offer which has come to him from America.\"\n\nArnold's assessment: \"From a security point of view it is difficult to regard a person with Pontecorvo's international outlook and family history as reliable and I feel it would be a good thing if he were able to obtain a post at one of the British universities where we might continue to avail ourselves of his undoubted ability as a Consultant in limited fields.\"\n\nColonel John Collard, the case officer at MI5, assessed Arnold's report and reviewed Bruno Pontecorvo's file. Collard identified three new developments since Pontecorvo's appointment. First: Bruno's admission that he had communist relatives abroad, and the \"unsubstantiated\" Swedish report that Bruno and Marianne were themselves communists. When Bruno's suitability for employment at Harwell had first been assessed in 1946, Arnold had given MI5 the opinion that Pontecorvo was a \"straightforward fellow with no political leanings.\" Collard wryly noted the contrast with Arnold's 1950 report.\n\nSecond: Pontecorvo's reference to Rome and the United States showed him to be willing to consider work outside Harwell, even outside the UK \"despite [his] recent naturalization.\" Between the lines, Collard gives a hint of being let down in his memo, disappointed that Pontecorvo is not really a team player, or at least is not committed to the British club.\n\nThird: Harwell no longer regarded Pontecorvo as \"indispensable.\"\n\nBased on this trio of new insights, Collard concluded that the security services should now reassess Pontecorvo's case, after which they should discuss possible actions with Harwell.\n\nBy the end of April, officials at the highest levels of MI5 were increasingly worried. On the twenty-seventh they received a clarification about the earlier Swedish report. Mrs. Pontecorvo, it was now agreed, lived in England and had been visiting her mother in Sweden. At least these facts were now correct. This latest missive stressed that \"Mrs Pontecorvo is known personally to our source\" who reiterated that \"among friends she openly expresses communist sympathies.\" Roger Hollis, the future director general of MI5, saw this note and wrote on the comment page, \"Please discuss this case. Surely we should see if he can be moved.\" Four days later, on May 10, Hollis recorded that he had \"discussed with [Director of Counter-espionage] and we agree there is a security risk here.\" Hollis concluded that Pontecorvo's case was \"not up to purge standards, but nevertheless we cannot feel happy that he should remain where he is.\"\n\nThe next day, Martin Furnival Jones, another rising star of the security services who became the director general of MI5 after Hollis, discussed this with the senior echelons of the security services' legal branch. They were concerned that the case, which was already a headache, could create even more problems if Pontecorvo\u2014a probable communist sympathizer who had somehow slipped through the net\u2014accepted a job in the United States. They proposed that a note be sent to the home secretary, and that Cockcroft transfer Pontecorvo within the UK. Arrangements were thus made to transfer Bruno from Harwell to the University of Liverpool, away from secret work. Although Bruno was not aware of these machinations, Arnold's interviews, supplemented by more general inquiries from laboratory managers in the wake of the Fuchs affair, certainly made him feel persecuted.\n\n**IMAGE 10.1.** Written comments by Roger Hollis in Bruno Pontecorvo's security file, May 1950. Hollis agrees that there is a security issue but that it is \"not up to purge standards.\" He adds that \"nevertheless we cannot feel happy that he should remain where he is\" and welcomes the possibility of a move to the University of Liverpool. (AUTHOR, THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES.)\n\nAT THE END OF APRIL, BRUNO VISITED PARIS TO JOIN THE CELEBRATIONS for Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot-Curie's fiftieth birthday. What transpired would add to his sense of persecution.\n\nBy 1950, Joliot-Curie was the high commissioner of the French atomic energy commission, the CEA. The commission's goal was to build nuclear reactors. Joliot-Curie wanted to produce abundant power for the nation but abhorred the unavoidable consequence\u2014the production of plutonium for bombs. As a result he was a vociferous campaigner against nuclear weapons. Joliot-Curie was in Stockholm on his birthday, March 19, for a meeting of the World Committee of Partisans for Peace, where he signed the Stockholm Appeal, calling for an international ban on nuclear weapons. Millions around the world subsequently signed this document. The American media duly attacked him, and lumped Joliot-Curie's name together with that of the recently arrested Klaus Fuchs. The CIA listed Joliot-Curie and half of the CEA's scientific committee as \"communist sympathizers.\"\n\nAs Joliot-Curie was away from Paris on his birthday, the celebration was postponed. His closest colleagues at the CEA organized an intimate and sumptuous banquet at the Popote des Ailes restaurant in Viroflay, near Versailles, for the evening of April 26. Bruno was one of a small number of associates invited to the celebration. In the meantime, many critical events would transpire.\n\nOn April 5, Joliot-Curie appeared at the National Congress of the French Communist Party, where, to loud cheers, he declared that \"progressive and communist scientists shall not give a jot of their science to make war against the USSR.\" He added that if the French government asked him to make nuclear weapons, he would refuse. On April 26, on the afternoon before the banquet, he was summoned to see the French prime minister, Georges Bidault. Bidault, who had been a comrade of Joliot-Curie's in the Resistance, was distraught as he fired Joliot-Curie from his position as head of the CEA.\n\nThe news was not announced at the start of the banquet. The food and wine were superb, the atmosphere lighthearted\u2014until Joliot-Curie rose to speak. Then everything came out. He rambled on \"for hours, it seemed he could not stop himself.\" Joliot-Curie was a broken man. In witnessing his former colleague's downfall, Bruno Pontecorvo, already under intense pressure from Arnold and MI5, began to fear that the tentacles of McCarthyism had now reached Europe.\n\nBACK IN ENGLAND, MI5 WOULD SOON RECEIVE MORE GOSSIP ABOUT Pontecorvo. In the first week of June, Superintendent Evan Jones of Special Branch received a letter from someone whose name is redacted, but who is clearly a current or former member of Special Branch as he mentions having enjoyed the Branch Dinner. There is a certain quaint charm in the letter's vague allegations, which, though wrong in several details, are nonetheless fundamentally accurate:\n\nDear Evan,\n\nAn old informant, reliable, told me a few days ago that an Italian scientist is employed in, or has some close connection with, a hush-hush factory or laboratory near Bristol. Although he does not profess it, he is a communist, acquainted with Fuchs and when in Town frequents the same restaurant as Fuchs did. My friend and others suspect him. Not much to go on and it might be a wild goose chase but I am sure my friend would not have mentioned it to me unless there was something in it. . . . I have no knowledge of any factory etc near Bristol and so cannot assess the truth or value of this. It is likely the Italian scientist is British born or is naturalized as I cannot conceive an alien being given access to anything in the nature of a research station, especially after the Fuchs affair.\n\nHarwell is in the country, midway between London and Bristol, which suggests that the informant was not strong on geography. The phrase \"in Town\" was the colloquial way of referring to London in the 1950s, but \"frequenting the same restaurant as Fuchs\" seems fanciful and irrelevant, as Fuchs was never known to have used a restaurant as a meeting place.\n\nAs in the case of the Swedish informant, there were hints that the information in this letter might be dubious, but in any event it was duly noted by MI5 on June 9, and added to the growing file of anecdotal evidence about Pontecorvo. Michael Perrin, the former ICI administrator who by 1950 had become the director of atomic energy for the Ministry of Supply, wanted to assess the strength of these various claims, which clearly shared a common theme. He phoned MI5 to inquire about the reliability of the source from Sweden, whose evidence was the most explicit. Internal inquiries were then made within MI5. The record of these inquiries, even today, is heavily redacted, but reveals that an \"R Badham\" of section C \"spoke to [X] on the phone today, and asked if he could let me know the reliability of their 'source'. He phoned me back later to say that the source was 'absolutely reliable.'\"\n\nBadham then phoned Perrin and told him that he could confirm the source to be \"absolutely reliable.\" Perrin, wanting to know more before passing judgment, then started asking questions: Did the source know Pontecorvo personally? Would MI5 guarantee the source as unimpeachable? Badham replied that he had told Perrin as much as he knew. Perrin, frustrated, decided that in order to form a solid assessment he had to get past these internal firewalls and speak directly with Roger Hollis. However, upon further reflection, he backed off and decided that this was not necessary \"at this stage.\"\n\nAnd it would appear either that Perrin never took this any further with Hollis, or that Hollis himself took no action. The next entry in the MI5 files is a letter from the British embassy in Washington, DC, received on July 19; after that, it would seem, everyone took off for the summer. Nothing more was added to the Pontecorvo files until October, when news of his disappearance broke. From that point forward, as we shall see, the files are full of attempts to shut the barn door after the horse has bolted, along with discussions of how to minimize the political damage. It is clear that MI5 and practically the entire British security apparatus were taken unawares. It is my judgment that, in the summer of 1950, not even Bruno Pontecorvo anticipated that he was about to leave England forever.\nELEVEN\n\nFROM ABINGDON\u2014TO WHERE?\n\n_1950_\n\nHARWELL IS A COUNTRY VILLAGE, FIFTEEN MILES SOUTH OF OXFORD, surrounded by farmland, orchards, and racehorse stables. In the 1940s it was a rural backwater. The location suited the government's purpose: it was accessible to London and Oxford University, yet sufficiently isolated that secrecy could be maintained. Except for the small village of Harwell, from which the laboratory took its name, the nearest towns formed a ring about five miles distant. Abingdon, a small market town to the north, midway between the laboratory and Oxford, was a favorite place to live among employees.\n\nAbingdon is located on the River Thames, about fifty miles inland from London; in Tudor times King Henry VIII had briefly lived there to escape the plague. Among the town's several historic buildings was a boys' high school, Roysse's, that had been founded in the twelfth century and whose students ranged in age from eleven to eighteen. Roysse's rose to prominence following the arrival of James Cobban as headmaster in 1947. Although he had missed out on D-Day due to appendicitis, Cobban had a distinguished war record and had risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel due to his work in military intelligence.\n\nWhen Cobban arrived, the school was on the periphery of the town, which was about to be revolutionized by the work at Harwell. The arrival of hundreds of scientists and their families led to a sudden expansion. Abingdon was being transformed into a company town for those associated with \"the Atomic.\"\n\nTo accommodate the influx, an estate of red brick houses was built across the road from the school. The Pontecorvos moved into one of these houses: number 5 Letcombe Avenue, just a five-minute walk from the local tennis club and immediately adjacent to Roysse's. In 1949, many sons of Harwell employees enrolled at the school, Gil Pontecorvo among them.\n\nFor Gil, now eleven years old, the first year at Roysse's was difficult. Having made friends in the school at Chalk River, he had been moved away to a different continent and had to start afresh. In England some students thought he was American, and he remembers them teasing him: \"You Americans! You want to drop bombs on us.\" He also remembers a talk about Moscow he heard at one of the school clubs, which was like \"a story from the Arabian nights, with merchants sitting cross-legged in the street selling their goods, the difference being that instead of streets paved with gold, Moscow was dirty and cold.\" The image of Moscow that this left in his mind was of a Wild West frontier town, lawless, in the badlands. Although this image is extreme relative to my own memories from that era, it was indeed the case in the West that Moscow, and all the lands beyond the Iron Curtain, seemed like some black night, filled with unknown specters: terra (and terror) incognita.\n\nOn September 19, 1949, Gil joined the youngest class of students, along with a boy named Anthony Gardner. Anthony and his younger brother Paul, who lived two doors down from the Pontecorvos, at number 9, became good friends with Gil and his brothers. Their father, John, was an administrator at Harwell, and a very good tennis player, who had formed an immediate kinship with Bruno. Around the corner lived Egon Bretscher, who had come to Harwell from Los Alamos. His son, Mark, who was younger than Gil, was due to start at Roysse's at the beginning of the following school year, in September 1950. Gil and Mark were not close friends but the families knew each other. In the summer of 1950, Gil, who had already had a year's experience at Roysse's by then, agreed to accompany Mark on his first day of school, to introduce him to the strange surroundings.\n\nToday Mark is a distinguished microbiologist, Anthony Gardner is a successful actor, and his brother Paul, now retired, is a long-term Abingdon resident. In interviews with me, all three recalled their memories of Abingdon, in that tense period just after the war when provisions were rationed; families kept chickens, ducks or even goats for eggs and milk; and young boys could cycle in the surrounding countryside on roads almost free of cars.\n\nIN JANUARY 1950, WHEN FUCHS WAS ALREADY UNDER SUSPICION BUT the security services had yet to establish if others at Harwell were involved, an MI5 agent arrived at Roysse's in the guise of a music teacher named Royd \"Doggie\" Barker. At least, that's what several former pupils believe. This fantasy\u2014if fantasy it is\u2014would hardly have been dampened by the events of that year, starting in February with the arrest of Klaus Fuchs, who for a few months had lived on the school premises.\n\nImmediately adjacent to Roysse's campus was an old house called Lacies Court, which had been donated to the school, who used it as a residence for unmarried teachers. During part of his time at Harwell, Fuchs too had lodged there, though he had no formal association with the school itself. His time at Lacies Court was a result of the school's links with Harwell, which helped a lone scientist find temporary lodgings. However, his arrest in February 1950 created excitement among the boys, and led to the whispers about the music teacher.\n\nSuch fantasies about the cloak-and-dagger world of spies were standard stuff for teenage boys in the 1950s, with the Cold War raging. For pupils at Roysse's, who within the space of a few months would twice find themselves associated with intrigue (first with Fuchs, then Pontecorvo), such rumors could easily grow from very little. However, none of the former students I interviewed could recall why Barker had been singled out in this way.\n\nIn any event the boys were remarkably prescient, as Barker subsequently had a stellar career in MI5, rising to become the director of section A, the branch \"responsible for managing the Service's operational capabilities such as its technical and surveillance operations,\" also known as bugging. When he retired in 1984, Barker was honored by Margaret Thatcher for \"conspicuous service to the Crown.\"\n\nRoyd Barker had a peculiar loping stride, which made him rather noticeable. This is not helpful for an intelligence officer who wants to merge into the background, but has advantages for one who wishes to be welcomed and absorbed by a community. He was an extrovert, but also a disciplinarian. Some boys described him as a popular teacher, while others recalled that he always carried a stick, which he used to keep order.\n\nThe arrival of large numbers of clever, talented, highly educated people from around the world injected large amounts of creative energy into the sleepy country town of Abingdon. Theater and music societies thrived. Barker, the musician, took to these like a fish to water. A musician and schoolteacher in that singular community, where he could meet the sons of scientists during his day job and mingle with Harwell employees in choral societies during his leisure time, would be well placed to hear local gossip about \"the Atomic.\"\n\nAs we saw earlier, Roysse's headmaster, James Cobban, had joined the school in 1947 after a distinguished war career in the intelligence services. It is not known if Barker was already a spook, and was placed on the school staff as part of the national security effort, or instead was recognized as a potential recruit for the security services by Cobban. In those days, recruitment to MI5 still happened through the \"old boy network,\" so Cobban could have acted as a scout who recognized talent in one of his employees and recommended Barker to MI5.\n\nOne friend who knew Barker well for many years told me, \"I wondered how he was recruited and thought it was [while a student] at Oxford.\" If this is the case, it would seem that Barker's teaching provided a cover for his MI5 role. Indeed, we now know that this would have been consistent with MI5 policy. In 1946, following Nunn May's exposure, Guy Liddell had recommended that, for security purposes, it was \"most important\" that MI5 \"should place informants\" in the atomic energy laboratories, whose charge would be to know about \"the general mode of living and political views of young scientists.\"\n\nFurther adding to the intrigue, in 1952 Barker requested, and was granted, leave from the school for several weeks \"in order to go off on a musical tour in Yugoslavia.\" There is no record of any musical contacts between Abingdon and communist Yugoslavia in 1952. And indeed, former pupils insist that Barker's link to MI5 was common knowledge at the time and not a later creation.\n\nIf this is correct, Barker's presence at Roysse's in 1950 is intriguing. As events would turn out, however, he seems to have had no forewarning of the Pontecorvo scandal, which was about to hit the community.\n\nTHE GARDNER BROTHERS REMEMBER BRUNO AS A CHARMER, AN ADULT who had retained the gaiety of childhood and could relate to them. Letcombe Avenue sloped gently from one end to the other, and Anthony later recalled \"Bruno riding his bicycle up the rise\u2014backwards.\" This was a favorite among Bruno's many party tricks, and gave credence to his boast: \"I could have been in a circus.\"\n\nThe Gardners often went to Gil's home for tea. In those days, houses tended to remain unlocked and the boys went in and out regularly. They remembered Marianne as \"quiet, nice\" and \"elfin-like with a sweet face,\" always happy to provide teas or, on the occasions when the two families met for dinner, plates of spaghetti\u2014an exotic dish in the middle England of the 1940s.\n\nAnother friend, David Lees, recalled that he was often invited to the Pontecorvos' home on Sundays. He remembered that the house was untidy, with children's toys scattered around, and that Bruno would parade through the house in his pajamas, while speaking a strange language. David was informed that this was Italian, \"the language we speak at home on Sundays.\"\n\nBruno played tennis at the local club in Albert Park, where grass courts nestled among the trees and bushes. Large Edwardian houses fronted the park on three sides; the school completed the square. The entire area embodied the fantasy image of England as propagated in Agatha Christie novels. The grass courts didn't open for the season until late April or May, so it must have been in the weeks immediately prior to the Pontecorvos' departure that the following event took place.\n\nIn the early summer of 1950, Bruno and John Gardner were in the middle of a tennis game when Bruno suddenly stopped. He had noticed someone standing among the trees. \"I have to go and speak to that man,\" Bruno exclaimed, and immediately left the court. A few minutes later, he returned and apologized, but gave no further explanation and carried on with the game. Anthony Gardner's impression is that his father later mentioned this \"because it was so odd.\"\n\nClearly the stranger was not the Harwell security officer, Henry Arnold. There would be no need for Arnold to make such a secretive approach, and in any case Gardner would have recognized him. It might have been an innocent encounter, elevated in Gardner's mind after Bruno's disappearance, though why Bruno declined to provide an explanation is harder to understand. It's also possible that the incident might have been embellished in the retelling.\n\nBRUNO'S YOUNGEST BROTHER, GIOVANNI, LIVED IN AMERSHAM, ABOUT thirty miles from Harwell, and they met in Amersham or Abingdon about once every three weeks. After Bruno disappeared, MI5 would become suspicious about these visits to Amersham: \"In the event of him being contacted by an agent of a foreign power it is unlikely the contact would be near Harwell. It is therefore quite probable that some contact was made with Pontecorvo in this district.\"\n\nOn one occasion, Giovanni and his fianc\u00e9e went to see a play in London with Bruno. Bruno, who was in one of his usual extroverted moods, had acquired a jar of bubble solution and he proceeded to blow bubbles while they waited in line at the theater. Not everyone was amused, as Giovanni's fianc\u00e9e later described Bruno to MI5 as a \"queer fellow\" who was \"very childish.\"\n\nGiovanni ran a poultry farm, and money was tight. In June 1950 he asked Bruno for a loan of thirty pounds. Bruno didn't have the money on hand, but promised to stand as a guarantor for that amount. The brothers met for the last time at Bruno's house at 5 Letcombe Avenue on July 7. On that occasion they discussed Bruno's upcoming camping trip to France, Switzerland, and Italy, and Bruno promised Giovanni that on his return to England they would have a long talk about his poultry business. Bruno explained that he anticipated getting a significant amount of money from the neutron patents, which were currently being argued over by lawyers in the United States. \"When my claim is settled we wont [sic] have to worry,\" Bruno assured his younger brother. \"I will set you up in business.\"\n\nIN JUNE BRUNO AND MARIANNE VISITED LIVERPOOL TO SEE THE university and decide where to live after his transfer, which was planned for January 1951.\n\nThe head of the physics department at Liverpool, Professor Herbert Skinner, knew the Pontecorvos well, from both Canada and Harwell. He was enthusiastic that Bruno might join his department. He recalled that Bruno made an \"obvious effort to sell the job to Marianne,\" who disliked the city because it was \"cold.\" Skinner felt sure that Bruno's acceptance of the post was genuine.\n\nThe University of Liverpool's physics department was building the largest accelerator in Britain, or indeed Europe, at the time. Those of Bruno's colleagues who knew him best agreed that the scientific possibilities at Liverpool would have excited him. Bruno himself told his brother Giovanni that the laboratories were wonderful. Guido, the eldest of the Pontecorvo siblings, visited Liverpool years later and remarked that the house where Bruno and Marianne planned to live was \"very grand.\"\n\nEverything seemed on course for the move to Liverpool. On July 24, the day before the Pontecorvos left for their summer vacation, Bruno wrote to the vice chancellor of the university. He accepted the professorship, and declared that he looked forward to joining them.\n\nTHE END OF GIL'S FIRST YEAR AT ROYSSE'S CAME ON THE SAME DAY that Bruno sent his letter. With his transfer to Liverpool arranged for the following January, Bruno and his family prepared for their summer holiday. The plan was to visit the continent by car, along with his sister Anna, who lived in London.\n\nOne bonus of Bruno's enforced departure from Harwell was that he had accumulated several weeks of leave time. He didn't want to squander this bonanza so he planned the family's vacation to last six weeks. They would camp, visit his parents and siblings in Italy, and return to England by ferry from Dunkirk on September 4, just in time for a physics conference in Harwell on September 7. Gil would start school again on the nineteenth. During the fall, Bruno planned to spend time in Liverpool, in preparation for his permanent move there the following year.\n\nAmong the decisions that had to be made was whether Gil would stay at Abingdon as a boarder, or move to yet another new school in Liverpool. Of course, even as a day pupil, Gil's education wasn't free. The bill for the summer term, which he had just completed, totaled fourteen pounds, four shillings, and seven pence in the old British currency of the time (about \u00a3500, or $800, in modern values). The invoice arrived at 5 Letcombe Avenue after the family had left on their trip.\n\nThe Pontecorvo family owned ducks. These birds were more than pets, serving primarily as a means to produce eggs to supplement their diet, as postwar rationing was still in force. The Gardners, who kept chickens, agreed to look after the ducks while the Pontecorvos were away.\n\nOn July 25 the Pontecorvo family\u2014now including Bruno's sister Anna\u2014crammed into Bruno's precious Standard Vanguard car. With camping equipment, three adults, and three boys all crammed into the car, luggage was limited to essentials, and carried in collapsible canvas sacks. The group carried with them two army-surplus satchels, a floppy zip-up bag, which contained their underclothes and a few outer garments, and a small zip-up briefcase, which Bruno always kept close to him.\n\nPaul Gardner later recalled, \"They were driving up the Avenue in their pale-colored Vanguard car and I waved to say cheerio.\" The car turned left onto Bath Street, and headed south and then east toward Dover and the overnight ferry to Dunkirk. That was the last Paul ever saw of them.\n\nTHE PONTECORVOS CROSSED THE ENGLISH CHANNEL BY FERRY ON THE night of July 25. After arriving in France, they drove through Arras and Dijon, and arrived in Neuch\u00e2tel, Switzerland, on the twenty-eighth. On July 31 they reached the Italian town of Menaggio on Lake Como. There, they bumped into the wife of Professor Piero Caldirola\u2014a nuclear physicist from Milan\u2014who suggested they all meet her husband. Bruno invited Professor Caldirola to the physics conference in Harwell on September 7, gave him his address in Abingdon, and arranged to see him there in the fall. The family camped in Menaggio until August 4. Anna then left the group temporarily, taking a boat to the city of Como, while Bruno and his family went to the Dolomites for a couple of days.\n\nThe holiday continued to be idyllic as Bruno took his family to visit his parents in Milan, on or around the twelfth. Here, Anna rejoined the group as they prepared to complete the final leg of their journey, which would take them to Rome. Before Bruno left his parents' house, he told them that, on his way back to England at the end of the month, he was due to visit the cosmic ray experiment near Chamonix. As this would be an opportunity for the family to be together again, and for his parents to visit the Alps, they arranged to meet in Chamonix on August 24.\n\nBruno's mother's letter to Guido, written after his disappearance, gives her view of the situation in Milan: \"When Bruno and his family came here to see us . . . they were so happy, serene and normal. They could not have had such a great step in mind. They said goodbye, just as one says goodbye to someone one is going to see again very soon, which is what we had arranged.\"\n\nBruno would never see his parents again.\n\nMISADVENTURES\n\nAround August 17, the group arrived at Ladispoli, a small seaside resort near Rome where Bruno's sister Giuliana had rented a summer house. Bruno and Marianne then drove on to Circeo, another seaside town about two hours to the south. There they would camp, swim in the Mediterranean, and catch fish. However, they left their son Antonio at Ladispoli with Anna and Giuliana, as he appeared to be suffering from sunstroke. Anna and Antonio stayed on at Ladispoli until the twenty-first, when they accompanied Giuliana to her home in the San Giovanni district of Rome. Bruno's brother Gillo and his wife, Henrietta, were there also.\n\nAugust 22 was Bruno's thirty-seventh birthday. Gillo was rather annoyed, as Bruno had passed by Rome en route from Ladispoli to Circeo without making the small detour to see them. So Gillo, Henrietta, and Anna drove to Circeo for Bruno's birthday, which they spent scuba diving in the warm waters of the Mediterranean. They spent the night, and drove back to Rome on the twenty-third. Bruno and Marianne stayed in Circeo.\n\nUp to this point, everything appeared normal. Then events become strange, and the exact timeline becomes hazy. On the evening of August 23, Bruno sent a telegram from Circeo to his parents, canceling his visit to Chamonix. He gave no reason for the change but promised to expand in a letter. In the letter he reported that he had gotten into an accident in his car, \"which bent its mudguard and smashed a front light.\" However, none of his siblings in Rome seems to have noticed the damaged car. The location and date of the accident are also confused. It seems to have happened somewhere between Circeo and Rome, on August 23. As it happened, Bruno's temporary car insurance for mainland Europe expired that day. Unless this is the sole clue that he never intended to return, it would seem that Bruno was planning to drive back to England uninsured.\n\nThis oddity pales into insignificance, however, given what was about to transpire. The circumstances of this accident, if there was one, seem connected with Bruno's decision to flee. They certainly reveal deception on Bruno's part. As we shall see, Bruno's parents\u2014as well as MI5\u2014would identify inconsistencies in his version of events.\n\nBRUNO, MARIANNE, AND THE BOYS WERE DUE TO MEET HIS PARENTS in Chamonix on August 24.\n\nHere we see the first hints of duplicity. Only a week earlier Bruno had made the arrangements. Some event must have happened on the twenty-third that forced an urgent change of plans. The journey to Chamonix in 1950 would have required a full day in the car. Yet on August 23, Bruno was alone in his car, and had an accident. At least, that is what he told his parents later. On the day of the alleged accident, in the telegram sent at 6:40 p.m. from Circeo, he bluntly stated, \"Very upset to have put off visit to Chamonix definitely. Please go yourselves, will do you lot of good. Letter follows.\"\n\nThe full text of Bruno's letter, which he sent on August 25, is presented below. It implies that some time has elapsed since he sent the telegram, which he tries to excuse. First, he refers to his telegram of yesterday, whereas two days have actually passed. He also refers explicitly for the first time to an accident, and gives details about it. Furthermore, he claims that the children have become ill, which is another reason for the cancellation.\n\nThis letter follows my telegram of yesterday from Circeo. I had not written before because I had hoped to be able to come to Chamonix, but with the children as they are, it was impossible. Yesterday [August 24] I returned from Rome to have the car mended and saw your cards saying you had left just when I had sent the telegram. Well finally we had trouble with the car having had a fairly serious car accident happily without consequences for us though with consequences for the car. In trying to avoid a cyclist who ran across in front of the car I hit a tree. I was not injured (I was alone at the time) but the car was seriously damaged and is now having repairs. On the other hand the children and I benefited a lot from the sea and they were well until the 23rd but they are now in bed with tummy trouble. We think that one day we caught the sun too much or that they have eaten something. Now we have left Gil [ _sic_ ] at Ladispoli where he is enjoying himself no end and we are in Circeo which is a delightful place and where we have taken a room. As soon as the children are well enough we shall return to England. It is not possible to come to Chamonix as we shall have no time and it would tire the children. I am very sorry not to have been able to meet you or to warn you in time but there was no means. I am slightly consoled that even without us at Chamonix would do a lot of good [for you]. I would hope you don't mind too much. Again a thousand excuses.\n\nBruno's mother realized immediately that something was amiss. Bruno never saw his parents' reply, which they sent a few days later. This letter arrived at his home in Abingdon, where it remained unopened in the empty house until MI5 found it in October. His mother had noticed an inconsistency in Bruno's claim that a sudden indisposition of the children had played a role in his change of plans, and admonished him appropriately: \"But is this REALLY what happened? Because there is something that is not clear to us. Antonio was already ill at Ladispoli [on August 17]. Pitiful lies Bruno is not a good policy.\" This letter is an important clue in our attempt to disentangle the chronology of Bruno's sudden decision to flee.\n\nWithout a doubt, something significant happened to Bruno on August 23. His birthday on the the twenty-second was carefree. By the twenty-fourth, he was sending duplicitous messages to his parents rather than meeting them in Chamonix, and was also apparently spinning yarns to Anna. Now at Giuliana's in Rome, Anna did not see the damaged car herself. Bruno simply told her that \"a front light was smashed and a mudguard was bent and while the car was in good enough condition for minor trips, it was not good enough for traveling about Europe.\" The fact that events were moving out of Bruno's control is obvious from his terse response to Gillo, who remonstrated him for the way he was treating their parents. Bruno replied that \"they must get used to it for once.\" Gillo's wife, Henrietta, repeated this quote to MI5 but in a sharper form: \"They will have to get used to it.\"\n\nWHILE IT SEEMS THAT BRUNO MAY INDEED HAVE DRIVEN SEVENTY miles from Circeo to Rome on Thursday, August 24, or Friday, August 25, in all probability his goal was not to take the car to a mechanic. Car repairs of the relatively cosmetic form that he described hardly merit such a trip, and there is no evidence that he contacted the Standard Vanguard dealership in Rome. Furthermore, he seems to have used his car in the following days before finally dumping it in Rome prior to his disappearance. In any case, Bruno's behavior was growing increasingly erratic. Something singular appears to have happened on Wednesday, August 23, and caused a radical change in his life.\n\nOne event that affected Bruno certainly happened that day. In Giuliana's house, news arrived via _l'Unit\u00e0,_ the organ of the Italian Communist Party. Over the past month, the stories of witch hunts in America had gone from bad to worse. World War III threatened to erupt as the military confrontation in Korea escalated. Then, on the twenty-third, the patent dispute between the Via Panisperna Boys and the US government made headlines. In the version of the story promoted by _l'Unit\u00e0,_ the government had defrauded the team of Italian scientists.\n\nSuddenly Pontecorvo found himself in the spotlight, in conflict with the US government. While this was a big story in Italy due to the involvement of Fermi's team, it was hardly commented upon in the UK. However, Bruno might have feared that the McCarthyist witch hunters would use his communist associations to portray him as a traitor, and that a major public scandal was about to ensue. According to this thesis, Bruno foresaw himself being subjected to further security vetting, which would threaten his ability to continue working as a scientist. And thus he panicked.\n\nAlthough it is possible that the patent crisis set in motion the events that culminated in Bruno's flight to the USSR, this could not have been the sole cause of his disappearance.\n\nThe most influential member of Bruno's family was his cousin Emilio Sereni. Sereni was a leading communist and, more significantly, by 1950 had risen to become a minister in the Italian government as well as a member of Cominform (a successor organization to Comintern). He was also well connected with senior members of the Soviet administration. Sereni had been in Prague from August 14 to August 18, and, it is believed, had contact with Bruno during the final days of the month.\n\nThe political implications of the patent crisis may have been what led Bruno to consult Sereni in Rome on the twenty-third or twenty-fourth. However, far from being reassuring, the news Bruno received was worse. Much worse. While in Rome, possibly during a meeting with Sereni, Bruno learned that the arrests of Fuchs, Greenglass, and the Rosenbergs had not been the end of it: the FBI was interested in Bruno Pontecorvo.\n\nWe shall come later to the story of how this singular information reached the KGB. In any case, this news alone would probably have been sufficient to inspire panic in Bruno. Coming on top of everything else, it precipitated his sudden flight.\n\nToday, we know that by this stage the Soviets were already making preparations for Bruno's future. Thus it seems probable that his trips to and from Rome immediately after his birthday had more to do with Emilio Sereni and other communist contacts than with car repair. It was almost certainly Sereni who both encouraged and arranged the details of Pontecorvo's defection to Russia, as Ronnie Reed of MI5 subsequently concluded.\n\nTHAT WEEKEND, FROM AUGUST 26 TO AUGUST 27, THE CLAN GATHERED in Ladispoli. According to Anna's interview with MI5, Gil and Tito came to Ladispoli from Circeo\u2014Ronnie Reed later commented, \"It's not clear how.\" On Sunday afternoon, Giuliana said she wanted to go to see some friends a few miles away. Bruno offered to take her in his car, but \"when Giuliana told him that her friends were communist or near-communist he refused to take her.\" Later, Reed regarded this as significant, but drew no conclusions from it.\n\nOn Sunday evening, Anna had a spare ticket for the opera. There was some debate about whether Bruno or Marianne should accompany her; Marianne said she would prefer to go to a dance, as she was \"not the intellectual type.\" Anna remembered this event clearly when interviewed by Ronnie Reed, and the chronology agreed with the record of Sunday the twenty-seventh in her diary.\n\nOn Monday, August 28, which was to be Anna's last day in Italy, Marianne went shopping with her in Rome. Anna later told MI5 that Bruno was separated from the group, but joined them at Giuliana's in the afternoon for a family conference about their sister Laura. There was an argument with Bruno about the shopping expedition as the family was extremely short of currency by this time; Bruno had been rationing the milk for the children very carefully, and they had no spare cash at all. In those days there were strict limits on how much currency British tourists could take abroad. The maximum allowance for the Pontecorvo family was \u00a3205 plus \u00a310 for the car, and when they left England Bruno had declared only \u00a3150 in traveler's checks and \u00a310 in cash. His bank accounts in England showed that he had not spirited away large sums of cash. The group's lack of money near the end of their vacation is significant, because within two days Bruno would purchase airline tickets for the whole family, on a flight from Rome to Stockholm, for which he paid 602 American dollars in cash.\n\nMeanwhile, Bruno visited the University of Rome, where he was seen by Giuseppe Fidecaro, who was then a twenty-four-year-old physics student. Bruno had called there in the hope of seeing Edoardo Amaldi, his old colleague. However, Amaldi was away in the United States, so Bruno met with Mario Ageno, another former colleague and tutor to Fidecaro.\n\nFidecaro told me that Bruno came to the institute once during the morning, and then returned for a second visit in the afternoon. He remarked, with a smile, \"I couldn't see Bruno wasting hours of his time running behind [Marianne and Anna] shopping! Conversely I do not see two ladies going around shopping for a full day with a man on their shoulders!\" The university was near Giuliana's house, which enabled Bruno to take part in the family conference that Anna recalled, and then return to the university later.\n\nFidecaro recalled that late that afternoon he accompanied Bruno and Mario on a stroll: \"At the end of the visit we left the Institute walking together 'lento pede' in the warm light of a late summer afternoon in Rome. I think it couldn't be earlier than 6:30\u20137:00 p.m.\" Bruno and Mario were talking \" _del pi\u00f9 e del meno_ \"\u2014engaging in casual and personal chatter. Fidecaro was not party to their conversation. \"After we separated, in the vicinity of the _Stazione Termini_ , everybody went on his own way. Mario and I went home independently.\" Giuliana's house in the San Giovanni district, the Roma Termini railway station, the university, the shopping district, and the garage in Piazza Verdi (to which Bruno would deliver his car the next day) are all in the same area.\n\nThis chronology is consistent with Bruno's memory, decades later, that he took his car in for repairs on August 29. Fidecaro remarked that Mario could have recommended the garage in Piazza Verdi, where Bruno took the Vanguard\u2014and where it remained, abandoned. Sixty years later, Anna would insist that \"there was never any hint of anything unusual\" in Bruno's behavior. Up to the time that Anna left Rome, she saw no change in Bruno or Marianne's manner; Bruno in particular seemed \"relaxed and natural.\" Anna slept at Giuliana's and left at seven thirty on the morning of the twenty-ninth. She did not see Bruno or Marianne that day. When she'd said _arrivederci_ to her brother, there was nothing to suggest that thirty years would pass before they would meet again.\n\nONCE HE'D DECIDED TO FLEE TO RUSSIA, BRUNO NEEDED TO \"LOSE\" THE car without raising suspicion. Giuliana, as an innocent party, would have raised the alarm at once if it had remained at her house; if she were involved in the deception, and failed to alert the authorities that Bruno had disappeared, the car's presence could have created serious problems for her. The story of the \"accident,\" which provided an alibi for Bruno's trip to Rome on the twenty-fourth (not to repair the car but to meet with Sereni) now could be put to further use.\n\nOn August 29 Bruno took his car into the garage at Piazza Verdi. With the car taken care of, that same day he visited the office of Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) in Rome and inquired about tickets for Stockholm.\n\nANNA RADIMSKA, A DARK, SMALL, ATTRACTIVE POLE FROM WARSAW, sold him the tickets, as we know from the subsequent investigation by Ronnie Reed of MI5. She remembered Bruno and Marianne well, because they caused so much trouble. They came to the office on the twenty-ninth and made provisional bookings for themselves and their three children to travel to Stockholm. Bruno booked his ticket under the name of Pontecorvo, and the tickets for Marianne and the children under the name of Nordblom-Pontecorvo. Marianne was \"noticeably upset and tearful and on one occasion drew [Bruno] back from the counter by tugging on his coattails.\" The MI5 report adds that \"[Bruno] Pontecorvo seemed quite unconcerned.\"\n\nMarianne missed her mother terribly, as is clear from letters found in the Abingdon house by MI5. Originally she had hoped to spend two weeks in Sweden that summer, and the rest with Bruno and the boys in Italy, but her mother had insisted that she stay for at least a month, so this plan had been abandoned. Under the circumstances, the prospect of flying to Stockholm with no possibility of seeing her mother would be understandably upsetting. As events transpired, five years would elapse before Marianne had a chance to write home to Sweden, and she would never see her mother again.\n\nThe usual practice was for airline reservations to be confirmed the same day, but Bruno asked for them to be held until the thirtieth, when he promised to confirm and pay. This suggests that there was still some uncertainty about the venture. In response to police inquiries made a few weeks after the Pontecorvos' disappearance, Anna Radimska said that the Pontecorvos didn't look very impressive: \"I was struck by their shabbiness. They seemed kind of crumpled.\" Because she thought they were too poor to afford the fare, she bet a colleague that they would not return. When Bruno failed to appear by noon the next day\u2014the deadline for confirming the reservations\u2014the bet was won and the bookings were canceled. At 4:00 p.m., however, Bruno showed up again, alone. Anna had to get busy and renew the bookings.\n\nThe price of the tickets was equivalent to \u00a3175 and Bruno produced it in lira. But there was a problem: foreigners with less than six months' residence in Italy had to pay in US dollars\u2014$602 in this case. Anna remembered that when she told Bruno of this requirement, the news made him very angry.\n\nBruno, still agitated, told Anna to hold the reservations, and left. He returned shortly before the office closed, with a handful of hundred-dollar bills. Such high-denomination bills were rather rare in Rome at the time, except among US citizens, or the members of clandestine organizations.\n\nThis suggests that Bruno's exodus was organized by the Soviets, at a high level. There would ordinarily be no way for Pontecorvo\u2014a British tourist, subject to strict currency regulations\u2014to obtain so much cash after touring for five weeks abroad. His sister Anna was surprised when she learned of this later, recalling how short of money Bruno had been toward the end of the trip.\n\nBruno was clearly able to change the money from lira to dollars without much difficulty, in a short span of time. In 1950, MI5 saw this as the first solid clue that some third party had orchestrated his flight. No one at the time, of course, suspected that his cousin Emilio had a link to Soviet finances.\n\nOn August 31, Bruno sent a postcard to his colleagues at Harwell, which they received on September 4: \"Had a lot of fun with submarine fishing but I had a lot of car trouble. I will have to postpone my arrival until first day of conference [September 7]. Can you tell Egon Bretscher. Hope everyone has prepared his talk and done good work at Chamonix. I am sorry I missed Chamonix but I could not make it. Goodbye everybody. Bruno.\"\n\nLater, the timing and phrasing of this postcard was forensically debated. The message ended with the phrase \"Goodbye everybody.\" This sounded terminal, whereas the comment that he would \"postpone [his] arrival\" implied a temporary delay. As Bruno knew that he was en route to the USSR at this stage, the postcard has been interpreted as further duplicity. However, this supposes that he knew he would be staying in Russia for good, which is not necessarily true.\n\nThat same day, Bruno sent a final telegram to his parents: \"From your card it is apparent that you have not received my wire to Milan and poste restante [general delivery] in Chamonix. . . . excuses I could not meet you . . . indisposition children damage to car hope mountains did you good. We are now well.\"\n\nAt eight o' clock, on the morning of September 1, 1950, Bruno, Marianne, and the three boys flew from Rome to Munich. In Munich they transferred to a direct flight to Stockholm. Their luggage, which weighed a total of sixty kilograms, was contained in ten bags, each of which would be considered carry-on size today. This is because they were carrying nothing more than the possessions they had taken on their camping holiday, all of which were stashed in small canvas bags.\n\nThe airline manifest reveals more clues about the family's arrangements. The tickets for Marianne and the boys were in one number sequence, but Bruno's ticket came from a different block, and was issued from a different office. There were two male passengers on the flight, named Wittka and Allegrini, whose tickets came from the same block as Bruno's and are almost in sequence with his. These men took the same flights as the Pontecorvos, from Rome to Stockholm, via Munich. One of them was stateless, with no checked baggage; the other, identified as Italian, checked two pieces totaling a mere fifteen kilograms. MI5 later suspected that these mystery men might have been assigned to watch the Pontecorvos. MI5 made investigations in Rome to ascertain why the family had booked tickets separately, and to identify Messrs. R. Allegrini and F. Wittka. The agency was unsuccessful on both counts. In any case, the presence of the mysterious pair fits with the KGB's standard practice of firm control.\n\n**IMAGE 11.1.** Airline manifest of the Pontecorvos' flight from Rome. This shows that Bruno's ticket number is more akin to those of two accompanying passengers\u2014Wittka and Allegrini\u2014than those of his own family. Ticket numbers are listed individually within a block (e.g., 421733) and by the number of the block (e.g., 523). Names are followed by nationality: STL implies stateless, SWE Swedish, and BRI British. The two columns to the right of the ticket number show the number of pieces of luggage and their total weight in kilograms. Thus the Pontecorvo family took ten pieces totaling 60 kilograms. The shaded highlight against the names of Wittka and Allegrini\u2014who also had minimal baggage, a mere 15 kilograms between them\u2014appear to have been made by MI5. (AUTHOR, THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES.)\n\nAt Munich, the Pontecorvos went to the transit lounge with the other passengers and then flew on to Stockholm, where they arrived late that evening. According to MI5 sources, they had booked reservations for the night at a Salvation Army hostel. The sources also reported that Bruno met with a man in Stockholm late that evening. The Stockholm correspondent of the Italian newspaper _Il Tempo_ was more explicit, stating that the Pontecorvos spent the night of September 1 in \"a house occupied by the Soviet Embassy\" and went to the airport \"at about 11 a.m.\" on September 2 \"in a Soviet Embassy car.\" Gil recalls only that they were taken to a small hotel.\n\nWhatever the details, it is certain that they did not visit Marianne's parents, who lived no more than a couple of miles from the airport. Gil later recalled, \"I wanted to go to my grandmother's. I asked\u2014why not?\u2014but I don't recall the answer.\"\n\nON SEPTEMBER 2, THE PONTECORVOS ARRIVED IN HELSINKI, FINLAND. Someone in Stockholm had provided further tickets and money. In Rome Bruno had purchased tickets only as far as Stockholm, and had arrived in Sweden with no US dollars. However, when he reached Helsinki, he had over four hundred dollars in cash.\n\nJust before the plane landed in Helsinki, a man and woman turned up at the airport and told the staff that they had come to meet the Pontecorvo family. The pair asked that the Pontecorvos' luggage be taken to their car, rather than being placed on the airline coach. A customs official told MI5 that these two people had often visited the Helsinki airport, but he didn't know who they were. He had always thought they were officials of the British legation.\n\nThe Swedish newspaper _Dagens Nyheter_ later learned that there had been several slipups by Swedish officials. For example, Marianne and the children were traveling on a temporary Swedish passport, issued by the Swedish embassy in London. This should have been confiscated upon their arrival in Stockholm. The error was compounded the following day, as they should not have been allowed to leave Sweden for Helsinki on this passport. It is thus ironic that the entry into Finland was straightforward for Marianne and the boys, whereas Bruno ran into trouble.\n\nBruno was traveling on his British passport, and there was a hitch when Finnish officials demanded to see his visa\u2014there was none. They impounded his passport and deposited it with the Finnish foreign office. As Bruno was a British citizen, this was not a major issue\u2014a visa would be issued overnight and he could recover the passport the next day. He signed various entry papers without hesitation, stating that tourism was the reason for his visit, and that the length of stay would be about a week. He also told officials that they could get in touch with him at his hotel.\n\nBut there was no hotel, and he never collected the passport. That was the last confirmed sighting of him in the West. On September 2, 1950, the Pontecorvos vanished, not to be heard from again for the next five years.\nTWELVE\n\nTHE DEAR DEPARTED\n\n_1950_\n\nTHE FIRST HINT OF TROUBLE CAME AT THE END OF AUGUST, WHEN Bruno's parents turned up at the Hotel Terminus in Chamonix. Arriving on the twenty-fourth, they expected to spend a few days with Bruno and his family, as they had arranged just a fortnight ago. For three days, they searched all the campsites. They telephoned the cosmic ray laboratory on the Pic du Midi, where Bruno's colleagues were working, and eventually met one of them, Dr. D. P. Price. He told them that he too wanted to see Bruno for help with some experiments, but that the Italian scientist had not been seen.\n\nThe telegram Bruno had sent to Milan on the evening of August 23 didn't reach his parents in Chamonix until the twenty-sixth. On August 31 he sent the second telegram. The letter, which blamed his absence on the car accident and the children's ailments, took longer. After receiving these communications, his parents waited in Chamonix until September 9, hoping to receive a further letter. Then they spent three days in Annecy, and returned to Italy.\n\nThey had received two telegrams and a brief letter, and they naturally expected to hear more from Bruno, who, they believed, should by then have been home in England. On September 11, during their stay in Annecy, his mother sent the first anguished letter to his house in Abingdon: \"Dearest we no longer know what has happened to you and we are very worried. We begged you to send us word as soon as you arrived in England for our peace of mind. You are now in England and you must have got there on the 3rd crossing the sea but still no word. . . . Write IMMEDIATELY to Milan on how the journey went and how the children are: THE WHOLE TRUTH.\"\n\nWhile Bruno's parents had been away, they had received a telegram from Egon Bretscher of Harwell, inviting Bruno to Chamonix to help with the cosmic ray experiment. They wrote to his colleague, Dr. Price, whom they had met in Chamonix, and explained why they had been unable to deliver the telegram to Bruno. Their letter shows their worry. They describe themselves as \"restless,\" as they have been without news of \"their boy\" for some time: \"We've had no communication from him since his telegram and letter. We travelled to Savoie and because he knew we had to change our address in Milan, since we left the furnished rooms that we inhabited, he couldn't write to us anymore. We have sent him in Abingdon our address . . . but he would not get the letter before he returned to Abingdon.\"\n\nOn September 15, their daughter Laura phoned. Unknown to them, she was in Rome. She \"calmed\" them with her news: Bruno had left on August 31, the accident had caused only cosmetic damage to the car, and Bruno and the children were well. The next day, Bruno's father wrote to him in Abingdon. He said that, after all their worries, hearing from Laura had at last put their minds at rest, though a small chastisement was included: \"We had no news and we imagined all sorts of mishaps after the car accident and the children's indisposition. But . . . a postcard to say you had arrived safely as we asked you for should have been sent.\"\n\nBruno's mother, however, was less happy. Her intuition had told her that something was amiss. Here is her postscript to the letter:\n\nMy dear Bruno. I must correct the fact that papa says WE were calmed down by Laura. It would be better if he said he was calmed down because as for me the knowledge that you had taken up your return journey gives me great pleasure but only half sets my mind at ease. To be quite happy about everything we needed just two words (it is not too much to ask and it would be enough) to tell us that you had arrived in England, well, without accident, and without the children being too over-tired! But these words have not arrived up to now. And your silence is inexplicable. Ever since the accident that you had, you should understand that our hearts stood still. And in this state of mind we spent the time at Chamonix and Annecy on the way home. We hope that a line will come from you now and that you will tell us that all is well and the children have got over their indisposition. . . . Never do it again.\n\nHaving admonished him, his mother's maternal love took over, with tragic irony: \"Poor little Bruno. Besides your misfortunes you have had complaints from us but be sure for another time, if there ever is another time dear, think of us. Kisses and love to all [signed] Mama.\" Bruno, by then in the USSR, never received this letter. Which is profoundly sad: there never would be another time.\n\nThis letter eventually arrived at number 5 Letcombe Avenue, in Abingdon. The postman pushed it through the front door, after which it joined the accumulating mail and newspapers on the floor. Bruno's parents' anxieties erupted again when they received no reply. On September 21, in Glasgow, Guido received a letter from them, asking if Bruno had returned to England as \"they had no news of him.\" Guido did his best to find answers; upon drawing a blank, he sent them a telegram on the twenty-third: \"Bruno not back yet. Colleagues enquiring.\" Giovanni, in Amersham, also received a postcard from his parents, on the twenty-fourth. This too expressed their anxiety.\n\nAs they had recently moved to a new apartment in Milan, they worried that news from Bruno might have gone astray. In a desperate hope that he might have written to them at Chamonix, they contacted the Hotel Terminus. On September 26, the manager received their postcard, which pleaded for news of their son. He was unable to help.\n\nENGLAND\n\nDuring their summer absence, the Pontecorvos had canceled the daily deliveries of milk, newspapers, and mail to their Abingdon house. (The deliveries were scheduled to resume again upon their return.) A memory of that long-ago summer has remained with Anthony Gardner ever since: his mother would periodically come into the living room and tell Paul and Anthony, \"The ducks have disappeared again.\"\n\nThe birds needed water. There was no pond in either the Pontecorvos' garden or the Gardners'. Paul and Anthony knew where to look. The River Stert, which was actually more of a stream than a river, flowed near their house, and was the ducks' favorite haunt. When their mother expressed concern, the boys would go to the stream, find the birds, and bring them home.\n\nOn Monday, September 4, soon after dawn, the milkman left bottles on the Pontecorvos' doorstep. This was followed by a delivery of letters and cards. The Gardner family, having spent the summer in a pas de deux with the Pontecorvos' ducks, eagerly anticipated their neighbors' return.\n\nAt first they thought the Pontecorvos had been delayed. Then they began to worry that something awful had happened. Milk bottles accumulated outside the door on a daily basis. The milk turned sour, and deliveries stopped. The Pontecorvos owed money to the dairy for milk delivered both prior to the their departure, and after their (scheduled) return. The dairy owner, John Candy, later sent a bill to the Soviet embassy, but he \"never had a reply and is still waiting for his money.\"\n\nAlthough neighbors, local schoolchildren, and various deliverymen were all aware that the Pontecorvos hadn't returned, no one at Harwell initially suspected anything untoward. However, in hindsight, clues were rapidly accumulating.\n\nJoe Hatton, a physicist who worked with Bruno Pontecorvo at Chalk River and Harwell, in his nineties remained a fountain of knowledge. His memories of Bruno are typical of everyone who knew him: \"He was one of the most delightful men you could imagine. He had an extraordinary presence. He could charm a bullfinch out of a tree.\" As for the summer of 1950, when Pontecorvo disappeared: \"I can remember my reaction. A postcard came [from] somewhere in Italy.\"\n\nJoe recalled that it seemed like a typical holiday postcard, except that it read as if Pontecorvo wasn't going to see him again. He ruminated poignantly: \"I was surprised. I wondered what it meant. He must have sent it when he was about to run for it. . . . Soon after that, it was announced that he had done a bunk.\"\n\nSome weeks elapsed before the truth came to light. Hatton received his postcard a few days before the Harwell conference on nuclear physics. Scheduled to begin on September 7 and last a week, it would be a major international gathering. On opening day, there was no sign of Bruno, but as yet there was no undue concern. Niels Bohr arrived on the eleventh, an event that experts such as Bruno Pontecorvo would not want to miss. Professor Piero Caldirola, whom Bruno had met in Italy and invited to the conference, looked in vain for his new friend. On the final day, Caldirola went to Pontecorvo's house in Abingdon and put a card through the door. It explained that Caldirola had hoped they would meet at the conference, but that this had not been possible as \"you had not arrived\" by the time it finished. Caldirola departed, puzzled.\n\nIt was becoming clear that the Pontecorvos would not return to Abingdon anytime soon\u2014or perhaps at all. The Gardners accepted the inevitable, leading to the first casualties of the \"Pontecorvo affair\": they ate the ducks.\n\nROYSSE'S: SEPTEMBER\n\nAt Roysse's, during the weekend of September 17, the boys were returning for the new school year.\n\nAmong them was Mark Bretscher, whose father, Egon, was a close colleague of Bruno's. Mark was one of the new boys, preparing for his first day at school. As mentioned earlier, the plan was that Gil Pontecorvo, who had been at the school a year already, would be Mark's companion, guiding him through this rite of passage. However, Gil was not home, so Mark had to take the plunge alone. That was when he first realized that \"something was up.\"\n\nThe school records show that fees were due two or three weeks in advance of the term. Hitherto, the Pontecorvos had always paid on time, although as the year went along, the payments got nearer to the deadline. If the previous year was any guide, the fees should have been paid toward the end of August 1950. At first glance, the school records appear to indicate that they were: \"Pontecorvo\u2014fees paid\u2014for the Michaelmas term, which began on 19 September (boarders return 18 September).\"\n\nHowever, this is a pro forma entry, and, in the \"paid\" column, instead of a date, there is a note that the anticipated check had not arrived. Gil Pontecorvo's name is crossed out in pencil, with a question mark beside it. The administrators at Roysse's didn't know what was happening; Gil hadn't showed up and his fees were overdue.\n\nFIRST WORRIES\n\nA Harwell employee who had returned from the Pic du Midi for the nuclear physics conference told his colleagues how Bruno had canceled his visit to Chamonix due to an accident and his children's illness. This news, which originated with Bruno's parents, confirmed Bruno's own written message to Harwell, sent on August 31.\n\nThe conference ended on September 14, and, given that there was still no sign of Bruno, Egon Bretscher sent telegrams to Edoardo Amaldi and Bruno's parents. He asked them to deliver a message to Bruno, if they happened to be in touch with him: the cosmic ray team at Pic du Midi was having some difficulties with their apparatus and would welcome Bruno's help. It was this telegram that first confirmed Bruno's parents' worst fear: their son had not reached home. This stimulated their letters to Guido and Giovanni. Bruno's parents then contacted Dr. Price, at Chamonix, to tell him that they had heard nothing and were becoming \"restless.\" Price forwarded this news to Bretscher at Harwell; it was at this point that events relating to Bruno's disappearance began to be recorded in the British security files. These provide a crucial record of the unfolding crisis.\n\nIt wasn't until September 20 that Cockcroft, the director of Harwell, \"became anxious [and] asked the Security Officer [Henry Arnold] to make enquiries about Pontecorvo's whereabouts.\" These inquiries drew a blank. On the twenty-sixth, Arnold phoned Colonel John Collard, his contact in MI5, to say that Pontecorvo\u2014who had been expected back by the ninth\u2014had not yet returned. Collard advised Arnold to treat this \"initially as an administrative matter.\" He instructed Arnold to make a casual inquiry with Bruno's sister Anna about his movements, but advised that she should not be alerted to the security implications of his disappearance.\n\nThis advice seems to suggest a rather relaxed attitude on the part of both Henry Arnold and MI5, especially given the amount of time that had elapsed. Better late than never, someone finally took action. The fact was that Bruno Pontecorvo had vanished, and there was a strong possibility that he had gone to the USSR. Ronnie Reed, the head of counterespionage against the Soviets at MI5, took charge of the case.\n\nMeanwhile agents of MI6 began making inquiries in Italy, and throughout mainland Europe. Edoardo Amaldi had already received the telegram from Bretscher. Now he was called by \"someone from British Intelligence,\" who asked Amaldi whether Bruno, if he was in Italy, would be likely to come to see him. Amaldi said this was likely, as Bruno was a longtime colleague and friend. \"If he does, please ring this number,\" the caller requested, without elaborating further. The significance of the call only became clear later, when news of Bruno's disappearance broke.\n\nOn October 5, the following note was added to Pontecorvo's file: \"In addition to action taken by MI6, enquiries by Harwell of his Bank Manager and the Automobile Association [confirm] a return passage on the Dunkirk Ferry was booked for PONTECORVO'S car on 4 September but was not used.\" MI5 now decided to examine the Pontecorvo home in Abingdon. A security officer and a local police constable broke into the house \"under the pretext of turning off the water.\" Forcing the locks was child's play. However, getting inside was another matter: the piles of letters, postcards, and newspapers that littered the hallway kept getting trapped under the door.\n\nChildren's toys still lay on the living room floor, and family photos sat in their frames on the sideboard. In the wardrobe upstairs, they found Marianne's fur coat. Ronnie Reed's analysis was that the family had expected to return to Abingdon, and that Bruno's disappearance, far from being preplanned, had come out of the blue: \"Much property and many of his belongings that would have been invaluable to him and his family in Russia had been left behind. Their winter clothes are still there.\" This last point was confirmed by a fellow passenger on the plane from Stockholm to Helsinki, who described the Pontecorvos as \"much worse dressed than the normal aircraft passengers. Marianne did not even appear to have a fur coat.\"\n\nNEWS BREAKS\n\nBy the third week of October, classes at Roysse's had been in session for a month, and still there was no sign of Gil. On Saturday, October 21, Paul Gardner went to the Regal Cinema with David Lees. The name of the film they saw has long been forgotten, but their memories of what happened when they returned home are still fresh, half a century later.\n\nLetcombe Avenue is a quiet street even today. In 1950 it was on the outskirts of Abingdon, bordering the countryside. As Paul turned the corner onto the avenue he found it \"chock-a-block with people. Men in trilby hats were milling around.\" To reach his own house he had to walk past the Pontecorvos', and as he did so \"one man grabbed me and said, 'do you live here?' I said yes\u2014I was ten years old. 'Do you know the family that lives here?' 'Yes' 'Do you have any photos of them?' I said that I didn't know, and at that moment my mother emerged, and pulled me into our house. She said, 'I don't know what's happening out there, but it's obviously something to do with the Pontecorvos.'\"\n\nHis older brother, Anthony, recalls reporters knocking at their door, wanting to know about the Pontecorvos: \"Dad told us to say nothing other than that we were friends.\" Hordes of photographers took pictures of the Pontecorvos' house\u2014\"a very boring house I might add,\" made of red brick, a typical dwelling on a government estate.\n\nDavid Lees too recalled the street outside the Pontecorvo house \"swarming with press reporters and photographers.\" He laughed as he remembered how \"us young lads found it rather flattering to be the best sources of information available.\" His abiding memory is of a London cab, which pulled up on Letcombe Avenue: \"Out stepped a very smartly dressed man in a three piece suit, who exclaimed, 'Hold on, cabbie, I won't be long, keep the engine running. Can anybody tell me anything?' he asked. So we boys all chimed in with our little anecdotes and off he went. It all took about ten minutes.\" Thus many of the \"facts\" about the Pontecorvos' lifestyle, such as the claim that they were looking for a Russian language teacher, had given hints that they were about to disappear, and other fanciful tales that have been propagated over the decades stemmed from the imaginations of ten-year-old boys.\n\nThen the headlines hit the papers: \"Hunt for Missing Atom Scientist: The British Intelligence Service has been brought into the hunt for the missing atom scientist\"; Bruno Pontecorvo \"skipped just ahead of Italian police and British Intelligence\"; \"speculation the family may have gone to the Soviet Union.\"\n\nThe story was front-page news around the world. \"British atom scientist 'lost' in Europe,\" wrote the _Sydney Morning Herald_. In the United States, the _Palm Beach Post_ reported that Finland (where Pontecorvo was last sighted) was being \"combed for the missing atom scientist [who has] evaporated into thin air.\" Newspapers throughout the country ran stories speculating on Pontecorvo's whereabouts, next to stories about spy trials, wars against the \"Reds\" in Asia, and the possibility of an atomic bomb being dropped on the reader's town. By inference, and even by explicit assertion, Pontecorvo was linked to all of these. The Western media had no doubts: Pontecorvo was the third and potentially most dangerous of the \"atom spies\" who had fled to the Soviet Union as the net was about to close around him. A police guard was placed on his vacant home in Abingdon. The Melbourne _Age_ announced that \"to aid MI5\" the Americans had sent \"two G men\" who had \"moved into Abingdon disguised as farmers.\"\n\nThe media then discovered that a Russian ship had apparently left the Helsinki docks, bound for Leningrad, a few hours after the Pontecorvos' arrival in Finland. With echoes of a spy novel, the media revealed that, in addition to eleven \"cabin trunks,\" Bruno Pontecorvo had with him a \"bulging brown briefcase\" that he \"kept close to his person.\" This left little doubt in readers' minds that the contents included atomic secrets.\n\nBecause the Pontecorvos no longer had passports, and there was no record of them staying at any hotel in Finland, it was assumed that they had escaped to Russia on the ship. More careful reporters, however, found that the vessel had actually departed some hours before their plane had arrived. Nonetheless, the debunked theory has remained part of the folk wisdom about the affair.\n\nAnthony Gardner recalled that \"everyone at school who knew Gil was excited. The speculation that he and his family had gone to a communist country behind the Iron Curtain, and indeed that they were now in the USSR, was like reading a spy thriller and taking part in it.\" Anthony was already interested in languages, and considered Gil to be lucky in a way: \"My goodness! He speaks English and Italian, and now he's going to learn Russian.\"\n\nGILLO PONTECORVO'S SON, LUDO, HIMSELF A PHYSICIST, LATER recalled, \"Dad said that when he heard that Bruno had disappeared, 'I knew at once where he'd gone: to USSR.'\" Ugo Amaldi told me that his father, Edoardo, said as much also. But none of them could explain why it all happened so suddenly and catastrophically; everyone who had seen Bruno and Marianne in the dog days of August 1950 remarked how relaxed they had seemed.\n\nBruno's son Gil told me, \"I thought [my aunt] Giuliana was involved. When I stayed with her in Rome in the 1980s, I asked, 'Did you know anything?' She said, 'Of course I didn't.'\" Then Gil added, laughing, \"But that means nothing.\" Gil may be perceptive, as Giuliana's responses to inquiries by the Italian police, made in 1950 on behalf of MI5, suggest that she knew more than she admitted.\n\nWhen the Italian police interviewed Giuliana, early in October, she told them a story whose chronology was demonstrably wrong. She said that Bruno had \"put his car in the garage on the 31 August for minor repairs.\" On the \"5 or 6 September\" the Pontecorvo family had, in her version, \"risen early and said they wanted to return to England in stages.\" She claimed that \"somewhere about the middle of September\" she received letters from Bruno \"datelined Rome,\" asking her to pay the garage expenses and send the car on to England. She could not remember the date or the postmark.\n\nMI5 learned from their Italian colleagues that Giuliana had appeared \"evasive\" while giving answers. The director general of MI5 now asked the Italians to visit her again to clarify this misleading information.\n\nWhen the inconsistencies in her story were pointed out to her at this second interview, which occurred around October 10, she apparently replied, \"Oh, I must have got the dates confused.\"\n\nOther members of the family share Gil's suspicion that Giuliana was party to the flight, although none admitted that she had ever said as much. In 1950, Guido remarked to Ronnie Reed that \"Giuliana and her husband Tabet . . . might have influenced Bruno but could not have organised anything, whereas Emilio Sereni was powerful enough to do so and quite possibly may have done.\" Ronnie Reed was also convinced that Emilio Sereni, Bruno's well-placed communist cousin, was involved. The possibility that Giuliana, his communist sister, was ignorant of his plans seems most unlikely.\n\nDAMAGE CONTROL\n\nWhereas for Gil's friends in Abingdon this was a spy story come true, for others the implications of Pontecorvo's defection were more serious.\n\nWhen news of Pontecorvo's disappearance finally broke on the weekend of October 21, and suspicion grew that he had defected to the USSR, the strategy of the British authorities was to minimize the damage. Given Fuchs's exposure earlier that year, and the resulting strain on Anglo-American relations, this was no time to admit that another spy had slipped through the net.\n\nA telegram sent from the Cabinet Office to the British embassy in Washington on October 20 proposed responses to the anticipated press stories. Marked \"TOP SECRET,\" it concludes, \"There is no definite proof he was bound for Russia and we shall do everything to play down the fact. Please inform State Department and AEC immediately and ask them to reply to any press enquiries on same lines as we are. It is just possible the press here may refrain from publishing anything through fear of libel action if Pontecorvo should turn up here again.\"\n\nMeanwhile Guy Liddell, the deputy director general of MI5, continued to write in his diary. It records that on October 21 he received \"the latest news about the disappearance of PONTECORVO a scientist at Harwell.\" At this same time, Liddell apparently first became aware of the fact that in 1943 the FBI had written to the British Security Coordination in New York to report finding communist literature in Pontecorvo's house. Liddell noted, \"No one knows what happened to these reports, since the records of BSC have been destroyed.\" As we shall see, these letters later became central to the affair.\n\nWITH PONTECORVO ALMOST CERTAINLY IN THE USSR, AN URGENT review of his files began. Harwell security had described him in 1948 as \"a straightforward fellow with no political leanings.\" The records stated that he was \"Not politically minded. Expresses no political views. Dr Cockcroft has confirmed these opinions.\" Bruno had been naturalized as a British citizen while in Canada, rather than the United Kingdom. \"Had he been in the UK,\" the record notes, \"he would have been submitted to the naturalization enquiries by the police.\" The British authorities were already maneuvering to deflect blame toward anyone but themselves.\n\nThere was one troubling aspect of the case, however\u2014the mislaid letters, which the FBI had sent to the British Security Coordination Office in 1943. The MI5 minutes state, \"FBI had reported to BSC on 2/2/43 and again on 19/2/43 about the search of Pontecorvo's home in Oklahoma. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were asked for any adverse information. On 31/12/46 they sent three names but not Pontecorvo. Therefore the Canadians had nothing negative on him in Dec 46.\"\n\nLondon here is attempting to pass any possible blame over to Canada. Meanwhile the Canadian authorities' strategy was to stress their innocence. They noted that Pontecorvo's name had not been mentioned in any of the documents handed over by Gouzenko in 1946, and that \"at no time prior to his disappearance had Canadian authorities received any information [from UK or US sources] indicating him to be a security risk.\" Then came the coup de gr\u00e2ce: \"Pontecorvo was cleared by British security authorities when he came to Canada . . . in accordance with agreed procedure.\" The fact that Bruno was employed by the British atomic energy team, which \"was sent to Canada,\" meant that he should have been \"the responsibility of British authorities for screening.\"\n\nWith Canada off the hook, concern grew in London and Washington that something had gone seriously amiss. The British embassy in Washington sent a secret telegram to London on October 21:\n\nPatterson who has been in touch with the FBI tells us that there have been communications from the FBI in 1943 and [again] recently asking for information about reports that Pontecorvo had communist sympathies.\n\nIf this is so, the FBI may well in response to enquiries from the press here admit that they have been in touch with the British Security Authorities about Pontecorvo. If this happens it will inevitably be concluded that he was under suspicion.\n\nThe question will then be asked over here is why he was allowed to leave the UK if he was under suspicion. This will be a very awkward one to deal with. We are not sure about the exact legal position but presumably it is not feasible to detain persons or to prevent their travelling merely on suspicion. At the same time American public opinion puts the protection of atomic secrets as top priority in the national security. Coming after the Fuchs case it will be hard to persuade them that we were not lax in letting Pontecorvo go if we had suspicions about him.\n\n**IMAGE 12.1.** Secret telegram of October 22, 1950, requesting that \"Philbey\" [ _sic_ ] spearhead the Washington office's efforts to manage the Pontecorvo fallout. Paragraph (2) again refers to the missing FBI communication of 1943. (AUTHOR, THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES.)\n\nThe reply, which came on October 22, is shown in Image 12.1. The request that the matter be handled by Kim Philby, who was later exposed as a Soviet double agent, is ironic.\n\nBy October 23, the British and American authorities were both reviewing their records, to see if they had overlooked anything. As the full implications of the mislaid FBI report were realized, MI5 set in motion what amounts to a cover-up. The strategy was to downplay Pontecorvo's significance not only to the public, but also to the British prime minister.\n\nImmediately after Pontecorvo's disappearance was confirmed, Cockcroft reported that \"for past several years he has had hardly any contact with secret work and has mainly been concerned with Cosmic Ray studies. In the early period in Canada he had access to information about the Pile there and in so far as he has recently had any secret work it has been on detailed problems.\" This narrative was used to brief Prime Minister Clement Attlee. Guy Liddell wrote in his diary about his briefing of Attlee: \"The PM asked how far Pontecorvo had had access to vital information. I said that, according to the answer to the Question to be put down in the House today, D At En [Director of Atomic Energy, Cockcroft] had expressed the view that for several years Pontecorvo had hardly had any contact with secret work.\"\n\nChapman Pincher, who, as scientific correspondent for the _Daily Express_ , covered the Pontecorvo affair in 1950, and has zealously investigated British intelligence for half a century, described Liddell's brief to the prime minister as having \"grossly understated\" Pontecorvo's access to secrets. The statement that \"for several years he had hardly any contact with secret work\" is disingenuous, given what we know about his research. Moreover, it utterly contradicts MI5's own statement to Harwell on April 25 that Pontecorvo was a security risk due to his \"access to top-secret information\"  A line in a report to the Foreign Office, which initially stated, \"Bruno Pontecorvo had access to top secret information,\" was changed to \"From the security standpoint a potential security risk existed.\" This duplicity reveals the pressure that MI5 was under to keep a lid on an internal disaster.\n\nOn Monday, November 6, the UK House of Commons began a debate about Pontecorvo, \"who might have atomic secrets of value to an enemy.\" On Monday morning, before the debate began, Michael Perrin briefed Sir Roger Makins, deputy undersecretary at the Foreign Office, a \"most courteous man, tall and thin with a commanding presence, like a great Norman knight.\" Perrin's briefing to him went as follows:\n\nPontecorvo's main value to the Russian atomic energy project would result from his knowledge of the main NUCLEAR features of the Canadian Heavy Water Research pile. He was unlikely to have expert knowledge of the important technological features of the pile, such as heavy water purification and recombination system; canning procedures etc. He has a good general picture of the possibilities of different types of future reactors likely to be important in a power programme though he would not be able to write out a detailed specification for anyone. He had no contact with atomic weapons work. An outstanding nuclear physicist as he is would, however, be of great general value if he were admitted freely to the project. Previous experience suggests that he is more likely, however, to be interrogated and consulted but not allowed to work on the main project.\n\nWhile the Foreign Office and prime minister were being presented with political spin, J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI in Washington, and his counterpart in London, Sir Percy Sillitoe, director general of MI5, formed their own conspiracy. They agreed to cover up possible failures in their respective agencies relating to the handling of the now-infamous FBI letters.\n\nOn the day of the debate, Roger Hollis of MI5 spoke to his senior colleagues about his briefing of the Minister of Supply, George Strauss. Strauss wanted to know how to respond if he was asked questions during the debate about items in his briefing that were marked \"not for disclosure.\" Hollis told his colleagues that Director General Sillitoe had recently seen J. Edgar Hoover and the two had agreed: \"Neither [would] make press statements about the other's office without first clearing with the other. It was important that nothing be said that give any indication that the FBI had not passed on their information to the British authorities.\" This was an outrageous statement by Hollis, implying that the FBI was to blame. A bland response was concocted for Strauss: \"The British and American security authorities are constantly exchanging information on matters of security interests.\"\n\nIn the ensuing debate in the House of Commons, Strauss claimed that Pontecorvo had had no direct access to secret subjects for some time, \"except in a very limited way.\" However, he admitted that it was impossible to be sure that he had not obtained information from Harwell or Canada that would be of \"value to an enemy.\" He added, \"I have no conclusive evidence of his present whereabouts but I am sure that he is in Russia.\"\n\nAlthough the FBI and MI5 were \"constantly exchanging information\" with each other, they were misleading officials in other branches of government. For example, a letter sent on November 29 from Sir Oliver Franks (the British ambassador in Washington) to Roger Makins referred to a memo that had been shared with the FBI. The version of Franks's letter that was sent to Gordon Arneson in the US State Department, however, omitted a crucial paragraph. The missing passage mentioned that in February 1943 the FBI had sent the damaging memo about Pontecorvo to the British security services, and that the two nations' intelligence agencies had been discussing possible reasons that the memo had been discounted or overlooked. An annotation in the minutes attached to the letter notes, \"It is naturally desirable that these facts should not become public.\" In this the agencies succeeded. These machinations remained secret for nearly half a century.\n\n**IMAGE 12.2.** Part of a letter showing attempts to cover up alleged failings on the part of MI5 and the FBI, linked to the loss of information about Pontecorvo's communist background. (AUTHOR, THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES.)\n\nThere would be an ironic postscript to this fiasco. In 1951, two senior Italian intelligence officers visited Liddell. They confirmed that Bruno Pontecorvo's activities with Emilio Sereni and other prominent communists in 1930s Paris had not gone unnoticed. The Italians had a file on Bruno, which recorded his communist affiliations. Why had no one consulted them in 1943 when Bruno's security was vetted? As Liddell remarked, with a sigh: in 1943 Britain had been at war with Italy, so \"consultation would have been rather difficult.\"\n\nFALLOUT\n\nOn October 23, Guido Pontecorvo wrote his parents about his suspicions that Bruno had gone to the USSR. They replied, \"The whole thing seems mad to us and we cannot believe that our Bruno could have gone entirely of his own free will. Whatever theory one produces comes up against insuperable objections, especially for those, like us, who know him. We seem to be living in a dream.\"\n\nThe press had besieged them; their letter to Guido refers to the \"loathsome press campaign.\" His father wrote, \"I will not tell you about the siege of journalists but we were unable to get away from flash photographs.\" Bruno's mother added, in anguish, \"What has happened to our boy and his dear ones?\"\n\nGuido responded to his parents with a sober assessment of the implications of Bruno's disappearance. They wrote back to him, in turn: \"We do hope they are treated well and that Bruno is not too unhappy. It is all a great and most painful mystery. The fact that we cannot know or receive even one word is insupportable. But you say that with this we must be prepared and we must do everything to assure ourselves that one day everything will be cleared up in the best possible way even though today it is not understandable.\"\n\nAnd finally his mother added, \"I think so much about the three children of Bruno with anguish. They were so happy and it was such a serene little family.\"\n\nMarianne's family was devastated as well, and deeply hurt once it became clear that their daughter and grandchildren had passed through Stockholm without contacting them. Marianne was the favorite sibling of her older brother. Nothing was known of her fate for several years. In 1954 her brother and his wife had a daughter. They baptized her Ann Mari Helen. Her missing aunt's forenames were Helene Marianne.\n\nTHE SECURITY SERVICES CONTINUED TO KEEP A CLOSE WATCH ON members of Bruno's extended family. On April 6, 1952, when Guido and his wife returned to Glasgow from Copenhagen, their arrival at Prestwick Airport was reported to the intelligence authorities.\n\nOn September 6 of that year, Bruno's parents, Massimo and Maria, arrived in Folkestone, England, having crossed the English Channel from Calais. MI5 were informed that \"the examinations showed they were parents of the missing scientist. They said there had been no news of him despite attempts they had made to trace him through the Italian Communist Party. They were here to spend 4 to 6 weeks with David Guido and Anna.\" The record then bears the cozy addition: \"They appeared to be a decent old couple, and were therefore landed conditionally as above.\" Nonetheless, MI5 was informed.\n\nAt least these actions were discreet and had no effect on the couple's lives. However, for Bruno's brother Paolo, who was living in the United States under the anglicized name of Paul, the fallout was severe.\n\nPaul was working for Raytheon, an electronics company involved in national defense. He was on track to become a senior executive in the company, but, after Bruno's disappearance, Paul's promising career mysteriously stalled. This was not his imagination, but the result of government interference. The British had learned that Paul Pontecorvo was employed in the US \"on research work connected with radar,\" and MI5's director general decided that this \"should be reported to the FBI.\" The FBI took note. An FBI file dated December 11, 1950, remarks that Paul Jacob Pontecorvo, a radio engineer at Raytheon with \"access to restricted information,\" is the brother of Bruno, who \"allegedly fled to the USSR on or about 2 September.\" The remainder of the file is blacked out.\n\nBruno's brother Giovanni also suffered. He not only missed out on Bruno's promised financial help with his poultry farm; his business was threatened with collapse when the media hounded him during an agricultural exhibition in London, and clients were put off as a result. He later changed his name from Giovanni David Pontecorvo to David Maroni, adopting his mother's maiden name. Only then was he able to carry on and avoid persecution.\n\nTHE PATENT SAGA\n\nThe patent for the discovery of the slow-neutron phenomenon also became caught up in the Pontecorvo affair, and the Via Panisperna Boys lost their chance to make a fortune. Emilio Segr\u00e8 was a very astute businessman, and for him, more than perhaps any of the others, the promise of riches from the patents was very powerful. Whether Segr\u00e8 was right or wrong about Pontecorvo's motives for choosing Harwell in 1949, the consequences of his intervention with the FBI would prove disastrous\u2014for Bruno as well as for Segr\u00e8 himself.\n\nThe slow-neutron phenomenon that had been discovered by the Via Panisperna Boys was crucial for both nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. The scientists and engineers of the Manhattan Project had exploited it. Now, postwar, the ownership of the rights to the discovery became mired in dispute.\n\nIn 1935, the team had received an Italian patent for their discovery. They were not businessmen, and had no idea how to register patents in other countries. Slow neutrons were a good thing, but slowing their research in order to deal with lawyers was not. A lucky break came their way in the guise of Gabriello Giannini, one of Fermi's first students. Ambitious and eager to make his fortune, Giannini had immigrated in 1930 to the United States, where his quick mind and self-confidence enabled him to succeed, despite the Great Depression. Soon he had gained some legal experience. His former colleagues decided that he was their man, and made a deal with him: if Giannini could register patents in Europe and America for the slow-neutron process, he could become the eighth member of the consortium and receive an eighth of any eventual profits.\n\nGiannini first won some patents in Europe, and then turned to the United States. In October 1935, \"G. M. Giannini & Co.\" filed an application for a patent with the US Patent Office. Five years passed before the authorities agreed that the applicants were the inventors of the slow-neutron process. On July 2, 1940, they received their American patent. Within months, their breakthrough had become the heart of the Manhattan Project, and the patent gave the team a financial stake in the technology the US government was using to make plutonium. After the war ended, the slow-neutron method became central to another new enterprise\u2014the development of nuclear power for peaceful purposes. Suddenly, all sorts of difficulties erupted around the patents.\n\nDuring the war, the Manhattan Project had been a military enterprise, a closed secret. Postwar, the Manhattan Project ended and the civilian Atomic Energy Commission was born. In 1946, the Atomic Energy Act authorized payments to be made for patents that had been used during the war. It looked as if the Via Panisperna Boys were about to become rich, until they learned of a hiccup: Enrico Fermi was an adviser to the AEC. He received no salary, but the government lawyers argued that nonetheless he was a government employee, which meant that he and his coinventors could pursue no claim against the United States.\n\nThere matters rested for four years. Meanwhile, in February 1949, Pontecorvo moved to Harwell. In August of that year, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb. It soon became obvious that atomic secrets had been passed to the Soviet Union not just by Nunn May in Canada, but also from Los Alamos, and paranoia grew that a communist fifth column was at work in the United States. Against a rising clamor of anticommunist persecution, Giannini resumed his efforts to reach an agreement with the AEC over payment for the use of the patent. On August 21, 1950, without having consulted the \"Boys,\" Giannini filed a lawsuit against the government for nonpayment of patent royalties and patent infringement. The claim, for around $100 million in modern values, seemed outrageous to the scientists; the fact that _l'Unit\u00e0_ accused the US government of \"defrauding Enrico Fermi\" inflamed passions even more.\n\nGiannini tried to calm his partners. He explained that this was how the game worked; the vast amount was really an imaginary figure used to get the ball rolling, whereas the actual sum would turn out to be very different. But then an astonishing development occurred. On October 21, before any progress had been made on the lawsuit, the news broke that Pontecorvo\u2014one of the inventors and claimants in the lawsuit\u2014had vanished without a trace, probably having fled behind the Iron Curtain. In those feverish times, it hardly mattered whether Pontecorvo was a spy, as the media speculated, or simply a communist \"fellow traveler.\" Giannini got cold feet. He didn't want to lead a lawsuit against the US government on behalf of a group containing a communist, who had in all probability defected to the Soviet Union. Giannini soon withdrew the suit.\n\nGiannini gave up because, according to him, the group didn't \"wish to be associated even remotely with anyone involved or reputed to be involved in any sort of international mystery.\" Later, in 1953, Giannini reached a settlement with the Atomic Energy Commission for a fraction of the claim. After legal expenses had been paid, each inventor received much less than they had hoped for originally. The British _News Chronicle_ reported in November 1953 that the US government was holding $18,750 for Bruno. The article, whose headline read, \"Pontecorvo\u2014here it is,\" noted that the money was waiting for the missing scientist, but that \"he has to collect it himself.\"\n\nThe Pontecorvo affair created unexpected fallout, whose influence was felt far beyond Bruno, Marianne, and the boys. As for Bruno, he had reached his half-life, slipping from one world to another. It is perhaps appropriate that the term _half-life_ is taken from the realm of nuclear decays; with Bruno's flight to the USSR, his chances of winning a Nobel Prize decayed also.\nTHIRTEEN\n\nTHE MI5 LETTERS\n\n\"DID MI5 GET BACK TO YOU AFTER I FORWARDED THEM YOUR LETTER?\"\n\nThe neat, handwritten note, on House of Lords stationery, was brief and to the point. When I received it, about two years into my research, I had no idea that it would lead me to solve the mystery of Bruno Pontecorvo's sudden disappearance.\n\nMI5 did get back to me, and confirmed what my correspondent had hinted at: that a file of \"lost\" papers regarding Pontecorvo had been \"found.\" The documents in question turned out to contain the history of MI5's interest in Pontecorvo during the months that led up to his defection.\n\nThe final entry in the MI5 record before Bruno Pontecorvo's disappearance was a letter received on July 19, 1950, from the British embassy in Washington. The document, which is marked \"SECRET,\" appears to have had little impact. No action was taken based on its transmission. Years later, however, its contents would embarrass the entire British security apparatus. The question of whether it had truly been lost before my interest was brought to MI5's attention, or whether it had been \"lost\" out of convenience, is for conspiracy theorists to debate. The lack of action should also be intriguing to those who have argued that Roger Hollis, the director general of MI5 from 1956 to 1965, was in reality a double agent working for the Soviet Union. Chapman Pincher, the journalist and veteran spy-catcher, has remarked that Hollis was so reluctant to take action on various occasions that he was either incompetent or deliberately duplicitous. The Pontecorvo file is a notable case in point. Hollis was fully aware of the serious nature of the Pontecorvo case, as he added written comments to the file in May 1950. Yet when the letter from Washington arrived in July, there was no action within MI5. It would, however, lead to action in the Soviet Union. In any event, once I saw the letter, the kaleidoscope of facts began to settle into a clearer picture.\n\nThe significance of the letter will become apparent once we understand certain events that had been taking place in the United States over the preceding months.\n\nA SECRET WAR\n\nIn the years immediately after World War II, the British embassy in Washington, DC, was the weak point of British and Allied security. Unknown to the authorities, it played host to three members of the infamous Cambridge Five spy ring. From 1944 to 1948, one of these spies, Donald Maclean, exploited his position as the British representative on the American-British-Canadian council on the sharing of atomic secrets. He was, of course, privy to these secrets, and passed news about development of the atomic bomb and nuclear power to the Soviets. Meanwhile, another member of the group, Guy Burgess, was based in the Foreign Office in London until late 1950. For a period in 1949 and 1950, Burgess forwarded to the KGB information that had originated with Kim Philby in Washington. This continued until Burgess too moved to the Washington embassy.\n\nKim Philby had arrived at the embassy in September 1949. He formal title was First Secretary but his specific (and covert) role was as a representative of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), or MI6. Ever since World War II, the United Kingdom and the United States have shared intelligence. Thus, one of Philby's duties was to liaise with the CIA, which meant that he was aware of some American operations, in addition to British ones. At this stage of his outstanding career, many saw him as a future \"C\"\u2014Chief of SIS.\n\nIn reality, Philby was a traitor throughout his career, from 1934 until his exposure in 1963. His autobiography admits that he was a double agent, who worked for the Soviet Union but was paid by the British. Philby himself wrote of his \"total commitment to the Soviet Union.\" He regarded his \"SIS appointments purely [as] cover-jobs\" to be carried out only well enough to enable his \"service to the Soviet Union to be most effective.\" Like Maclean and Burgess, Philby was a member of the infamous Cambridge Five ring of traitors, who were groomed at Cambridge University in the 1930s, and who rose to senior positions in the British civil service. His r\u00e9sum\u00e9 of duplicity includes giving alerts to the Soviets when their atomic spies came under suspicion. In 1945, as head of the SIS's Soviet counterintelligence section, Philby kept the Soviets aware of developments in the case of Alan Nunn May. As the net closed around the physicist, Philby warned Moscow that MI5 had caught wind of a meeting planned in London between Nunn May and his Soviet contact. As we saw earlier, Philby's intervention caused the meeting to be aborted. Philby used his position to alert the Soviets not only about Nunn May but also about Fuchs. It now seems that he tipped them off about Pontecorvo too.\n\nPhilby was the center of the Cambridge spy ring. Suspicion about him grew after Burgess and Maclean defected to the USSR in 1951, but Philby himself managed to maintain his double life for another twelve years. The fact that Philby evaded detection for so long was due to a combination of skill and good fortune, as well as his powerful position at the heart of British intelligence operations. This privileged role gave him early access to critical information.\n\nMost significantly, Philby was one of a handful of people who were party to the biggest diplomatic secret in the postwar West: the VENONA project, an American program to intercept and decrypt Soviet intelligence traffic. In the summer of 1949, Meredith Gardner, a lean and gangly American linguist, cracked the Soviet diplomatic codes. Radio messages between Moscow and its Soviet embassies in North America were now open to the West. Philby was briefed about VENONA in September 1949, soon after the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb. He immediately told the Soviets that their codes had been cracked.\n\nThe decrypts contained references to three scientists who had been working on the Manhattan Project. The message revealed that the trio, code-named CHARLZ, QUANTUM and MLAD, had passed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Although we now know that MLAD was Ted Hall, his identity and that of QUANTUM were still a mystery in 1949. Within weeks of his arrival in Washington, however, Philby learned that CHARLZ had been identified as Klaus Fuchs. As we have seen, Fuchs was placed under surveillance by MI5 in October 1949. His arrest and imprisonment occurred despite Philby's best efforts.\n\nPhilby was being ultracareful. The Soviets' intelligence operation at their embassy in Washington was in a turbulent state, two of their residents having been recalled to the USSR in the months prior to Philby's arrival in the city. He therefore refused to deal with any Soviet intelligence officers in the US, and for about a year his only contact with Moscow headquarters was via messages sent through Burgess in London. Through this circuitous route, Philby alerted Moscow that Fuchs had been exposed, and warned that any Soviet agents who had dealt with Fuchs might be compromised. Philby's warning was right: Fuchs confessed and was arrested; next, Fuchs's courier Harry Gold was arrested in the United States in May 1950, and within weeks the US government was pursuing communists\u2014real or imaginary\u2014with a zeal reminiscent of 1930s Nazi Germany. Two weeks later the US invaded Korea, and up to a dozen \"atom bomb spies,\" as the headlines described them, were arrested.\n\nWhen Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a husband-and-wife spy team, were arrested in the summer of 1950, the Soviet network in North America was decimated. Kim Philby's invaluable work as a double agent in the British embassy in Washington continued undetected, but he was an exception. The Soviets now cut their losses and extricated their agents from North America. In late June or early July, for example, Lona and Morris Cohen were rescued. They were first smuggled out of the US to Central America, and then flown to Moscow later that summer. They arrived in the Soviet capital a few weeks before Bruno Pontecorvo.\n\nMeanwhile, back in the United States, Senator Joseph McCarthy continued to rant about a \"Red threat.\" This Cold War hysteria fanned the flames of political intimidation. In New York, mounted police broke up a protest meeting that was calling for a cease-fire in Korea. Hundreds were injured or arrested. Bruno Pontecorvo feared that right-wing extremism, which he had fled in Europe, was now reappearing in the United States; with the downfall of Joliot-Curie, it even seemed to be spreading to France, and was threatening to come to the United Kingdom.\n\nThe pace of events quickened that summer. In June, Philby learned of a new breakthrough in the VENONA decryptions: Soviet telegrams from 1945 had revealed the existence of a ring of spies at the heart of British intelligence. However, the information from VENONA was fragmentary. At this stage, they had only partial decrypts. This was just as well for Philby, who immediately understood that this information referred to himself and his colleagues in the Cambridge Five.\n\nIn order to keep abreast of developments, Philby maneuvered to increase his access to VENONA, and arranged for SIS to provide him immediately with copies of any new VENONA material. The official reason for this arrangement, as stated in a letter sent to the director general of SIS on July 18, 1950, by Geoffrey Patterson, the Washington embassy's liaison with US security, was that it would enable Philby to absorb and analyze new information before he met with the FBI. In reality, of course, Philby was simply trying to protect himself. As a result of these maneuvers, Philby learned that VENONA had identified a code name, HOMER, which he recognized as referring to Maclean. This information was passed on to Moscow. The following year, as the net closed, Maclean\u2014along with Burgess, who had also been compromised\u2014would defect to the USSR.\n\nTim Marten worked in the British embassy in Washington at this time, and one of his responsibilities involved communications on atomic energy. Tim recalled how these messages \"were ultra-secret and therefore went through the MI6 communication channel. . . . So Philby, as head of MI6 in Washington, had direct access to every telegram that I sent or received.\" At this memory, Tim gave an ironic laugh. He then continued: \"But of course I thought Philby was rather a good egg at the time. He appeared to be . . . quite a wheel, in constant touch with the CIA and state department. He was a very highly regarded person all round and obviously very competent. What we didn't know at that moment was that he was passing everything on to the Russians.\"\n\nPhilby's unique access to American and British intelligence enabled him to conduct the espionage orchestra during the critical months of 1950, when the Soviet networks in North America were in danger. In addition to information that affected him directly, or references to the Cambridge spy ring, he kept a careful watch for anything that would interest his real employer, the Soviet Union. In the middle of July, he saw another letter that Patterson had drafted.\n\nWritten on July 13, 1950, and received by the director general of MI5 in London on July 19 (and most probably by Philby's contacts in Moscow soon after), Patterson's letter concerned a subject of particular interest for readers of this book: \"The FBI inform me that it has been reported to them that PONTECORVO is at present employed by AERE at Harwell. They add that they addressed communications dated February 2nd, 10th and 19th, 1943 to British Intelligence on the subject of PONTECORVO. Presumably they must have written either direct to London or to BSC New York because the local SIS representative cannot trace the correspondence. Many of the BSC files were . . . destroyed [at the end of the War].\"\n\n**IMAGE 13.1.** Letter from Geoffrey Patterson to MI5, sent July 13, 1950, received in London July 19, alerting them to the FBI's interest in Bruno Pontecorvo. Note also the reference to Philby on line seven. This was the final entry added to MI5's file on Pontecorvo before he fled to the USSR. (AUTHOR, THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES.)\n\nPatterson then pointed out that Pontecorvo had worked on the Anglo-Canadian atomic energy project during the war, and had also lived in the United States. \"The [FBI] now ask if we can send them any information which may be available to us which would indicate that PONTECORVO may be engaged in Communist activities at the present time or may have been engaged in such activities during his residence in the United States.\"\n\nPatterson's letter, which explicitly mentions the \"local SIS representative\" in Washington, shows that Philby was fully aware of these developments.\n\nPhilby was the overall SIS chief in Washington. He discussed atomic affairs on a regular basis with the embassy's specialist on atomic matters, Dr. Wilfrid Basil Mann. Their offices in the embassy were next to each other. Judging from Tim Marten's testimony on Philby's access to material, and the assessment of others who were familiar with his style and the workings of the Washington embassy at the time, it is most improbable that Philby was unaware of Patterson's letter. As he had done with Alan Nunn May, and then Klaus Fuchs, he now had to tell Moscow of the West's interest in another atomic scientist: Bruno Pontecorvo.\n\nAs stated by Patterson, the British intelligence team in Washington was unable to locate the 1943 letters from the FBI, even when the letters' existence was brought to their attention. Given Philby's reputation, one might imagine that the failure to find the letters occurred because he had destroyed the evidence. However, it seems more likely that, on this occasion, Philby was acting in good faith: the 1943 correspondence was indeed lost, possibly when the British Security Coordination closed at the end of World War II and many files were destroyed.\n\nThe FBI subsequently forwarded copies of the letters to MI5. They showed evidence only of Bruno's communist associations. They did not show evidence that he was a spy. Their resurrection in July 1950 suggests that they were part of a fishing expedition conducted by the Americans, inspired by McCarthyism and a desire to undermine the Via Panisperna Boys' lawsuit against the US government. If Philby had seen these letters, they would have raised little alarm. However, it seems he did not. All he knew was that the FBI was interested in an atomic scientist named Bruno Pontecorvo, that they had written not just one but _three_ letters about him within seventeen days in 1943, and that VENONA had revealed the existence of two still-unidentified spies at the heart of the atomic project, code-named MLAD and QUANTUM.\n\nAs the reader knows, MLAD would eventually be identified as Ted Hall, a brilliant young physicist who was arguably the most successful of the \"atom spies.\" QUANTUM remained an enigma until 2009, when KGB files identified him as Boris Podolsky, a US-born Russian physicist. None of this was known to Philby in 1950. We have no hard evidence that Philby warned Moscow about the FBI's interest in Pontecorvo, or what the warning might have consisted of, but it is most improbable that a warning was not transmitted.\n\nBUT WHAT ABOUT LONDON? WHAT REACTION DID PATTERSON'S LETTER cause there?\n\nA deafening silence, it would seem. The receipt date on the letter is Wednesday, July 19, less than a week before Pontecorvo left the United Kingdom, never to return. There is a penciled note reading \"See Lumes\" (although the script is hard to decipher), but no further mention of the letter in Pontecorvo's file, nor any record of action being taken. Indeed, this is the final entry in the file before news of Pontecorvo's disappearance erupted.\n\nThe personal diary of Guy Liddell records the inside story of MI5 that summer. At the time, there was a lot of concern about the possibility of the British getting involved in a war; the Korean War had begun in June, and the recent news that the Soviets had the atomic bomb worried everyone. His diary also reveals tensions between MI5 and the FBI, which have relevance to the Pontecorvo case.\n\nOn July 29, just ten days after Patterson's letter arrived from Washington, Liddell recorded, \"Hollis is worried about the nature of enquiries we are receiving from the FBI.\" The FBI had recently asked MI5 to place two people under surveillance, and had followed up by seeking information about a third person, who McCarthy had asserted was a spy, without any evidence. Even President Truman denounced McCarthy for this behavior, and MI5 was concerned that if they started making inquiries on behalf of the Americans, they would get bogged down in \"this mud surrounding Senator McCarthy.\" Liddell continued: \"Unfortunately [J. Edgar] Hoover is taking a personal interest, since he doubtless wishes to have a dig at the State Department.\"\n\nIt is clear that there was a history of tension between the two intelligence agencies. Liddell said his primary aim was \"not to exacerbate the rather strained relations between [MI5] and the FBI.\" Ever since Fuchs's arrest, the FBI and Hoover had put pressure on MI5, given the British media information that was detrimental to MI5, and blamed the UK authorities for having been lax. In London patience had worn very thin. Liddell recorded this sorry saga in his diary throughout the spring and early summer. He also suggested that MI5 should \"politely\" point out to the Americans that \"we are not one of their field offices.\"\n\nUnder these circumstances, it is possible that the UK's lack of interest in Bruno Pontecorvo's possible \"Communist activities\" was a case of the FBI having cried wolf too often. Even so, given that MI5 had been interested in Pontecorvo for several months, one would expect some response to Patterson's letter. Although Liddell's diary mentions three subjects of particular interest to the FBI, none of these relate to Pontecorvo. Given Liddell's suggestion that MI5 was being treated as a \"field office\" of the FBI, it's possible that the British agency could have regarded the wording of Patterson's letter as presumptuous and thus not given it high priority. Hollis conspiracy theorists, on the other hand, might add this to their list of his \"unfortunate oversights.\"\n\nUnaware of Philby's duplicity, the security chiefs in England took their vacations, or passed afternoons at the Oval cricket ground that summer, watching the magical West Indian spinners, Sonny Ramadhin and Alf Valentine. It was a more relaxed era than today, the Cold War notwithstanding; a fortnight-long holiday was standard. Liddell, for example, went to Ireland for the last two weeks of August.\n\nEven if MI5 had taken an interest in the FBI's letters, it could not have told Pontecorvo's superiors anything more damning than \"we have reports that Pontecorvo and his wife have expressed communist opinions.\" Although this would be a serious matter for an intellectual in the United States, where anticommunist paranoia was rife, it was no crime in the United Kingdom. For Pontecorvo it would have simply meant that he was a security risk. But that was old news, of course: the transfer to Liverpool had already provided a pragmatic solution to that problem. Even taking into account the new information, MI5 had no evidence that would have justified a \"purge\" (prosecution) of Bruno Pontecorvo.\n\nSo it is unlikely that the inquiry by the FBI would have radically altered Pontecorvo's prospects in the United Kingdom. However, that conclusion could only be drawn by someone who was conversant with the state of knowledge about Pontecorvo in MI5. For Philby in Washington, deeply connected to VENONA but remote from the minutiae of MI5's London office, let alone Harwell security, the reference to the \"Communist activities\" of a nuclear physicist, who might have been MLAD or QUANTUM, demanded action.\n\nAssuming that Philby passed on this information to Burgess for transmission to Moscow, which was his normal modus operandi at the time, there would have been little time for them to act before Bruno left on vacation. The story about the man who interrupted the tennis match might have some sinister significance, but it is hard to square this with Bruno's relaxed attitude, which continued until his final days in Italy. There was a story in the media that two men had contacted Bruno in the Alps, during August, but no source was ever provided. Bruno was camping and on the move; thus the earliest opportunity for the Soviets to make contact with him would have been late in his vacation, through mutual friends in Italy. This fits with his sudden change of behavior during the last week of August. If the Soviet embassy in Rome gave Bruno money to pay for his airline tickets, as was suspected by MI5, this would have been a logical response to Philby's alert. Emilio Sereni, his cousin, the good communist and activist, would have been a convenient liaison in the Soviets' quest to make contact with Bruno.\n\nAs for the decision to flee, Bruno's son Gil told me, \"It looked to me like a sudden decision. [Whatever] the reason, it was [made] quite late.\" Today it seems probable that the letter from Washington was a key\u2014perhaps _the_ key\u2014to his unpremeditated flight.\n\nEARLY IN SEPTEMBER 1950, BRUNO WAS CROSS-EXAMINED IN MOSCOW by the KGB. According to one account, his interrogators included Stalin's enforcer, Lavrenti Beria himself. We do not know the actual date of this interrogation, but there would be no advantage to delaying it. It probably occurred before the following event.\n\nOn September 12, when no one in the West yet realized that Pontecorvo had disappeared, Philby\u2014who happened to be in London\u2014dropped by to see Guy Liddell, the deputy director general of MI5. Philby, of course, was a high-ranking member of MI6, also known as SIS. Liddell's diary records what happened next.\n\n\"I had a long talk with Kim Philby. . . . I thought I discerned a fly thrown over me in the form of a suggestion that it was really unnecessary for us [MI5] to have a Washington representative [Patterson], and that he [Philby] could carry the whole business. . . . I told him that whatever the flow of information I was quite convinced that [MI5] ought to have a man in [Washington].\"\n\nThe reference to a \"fly being thrown\" is an idiom from fishing. The fly is a lure, typically when fishing for trout. The moment the fish takes the fly into its mouth, the angler jerks the line so that the hook penetrates the fish's mouth and captures it. In this scenario, Liddell is the fish; Philby the fisherman.\n\nPhilby's suggestion could be perfectly innocent but this is unlikely: Philby calculated everything with a view toward his personal safety. His colleague Donald Maclean was already under suspicion, and, in the memory of Lorna Arnold, \"looked like he had ants in his pants.\" If, as seems probable, Philby's actions had led to Pontecorvo's flight, there was a potential danger for Philby that he needed to guard against. Given his role in MI6, Philby could be reasonably certain there was no British double agent planted within the KGB, but he could not be sure the same was true of the Americans. If Philby's role became apparent during Bruno's cross-examination by the Soviets, this hypothetical double agent might hear of it. Philby wanted total control over the flow of information between Washington and MI5.\n\nAs it turned out, Philby had no need to worry about any such double agent. No one in the West knew what had become of Bruno Pontecorvo and his family for five more years. By that time, Philby's partners in crime, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had both defected to the USSR, and suspicions about Philby had also come to a boil. On September 12, 1950, however, Philby had little to worry about. He had done his job well; no one suspected that he had played any role in the Pontecorvo affair.\nSECOND HALF\n\n\"Midway on our life's journey, **I found myself in dark woods** , the right road lost.\"\n\n_\u2014Dante's Inferno_\nFOURTEEN\n\nIN DARK WOODS\n\nEVEN TODAY, FINLAND IS A LAND DOMINATED BY FORESTS, WHICH stretch for hundreds of miles.\n\nIn 1950 these dark woods extended from the outskirts of Helsinki into the Soviet Union. That September, two cars sped along empty forest tracks toward the Russian border. One contained Marianne and her three sons; the other contained Bruno hidden in its trunk. Gil Pontecorvo, who was twelve at the time, did not know who the drivers were, but he laughed wryly as he told me, \"They were Russians for sure.\"\n\nGil had no idea where they were. After the idyllic weeks at camps in the mountains, and the long, sunny days by the warm Mediterranean, in the company of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, everything had changed.\n\nWhen the family left Italy for Stockholm, Gil \"thought these journeys were all part of their holiday. I had _no idea_ that we were not going back. We didn't have much luggage [and] had left lots at home.\" But he realized something strange was going on when the family failed to visit his maternal grandmother, who lived near the airport, and instead flew on to Helsinki, to be met by strangers. \"We spent one or two nights there,\" he recalled. So it would have been on the third or fourth of September that they made their drive through the woods. Six decades later, Gil remembers this episode clearly: the forest \"went on for mile after mile, seemingly without end.\" For entertainment, he \"had a book by Jack London to read.\" As for his father being in the trunk of one of the cars: \"I knew something was up.\"\n\nAt the time, some Western reporters imagined that the Pontecorvos had been taken to Porkkala, twenty miles from Helsinki, where a long bridge spanned a creek separating Finland from an area that in 1950 belonged to Russia. There were no guards on the Finnish side, as no Finn \"in their right senses\" would want to cross; the media saw this as an explanation for the fact that the Pontecorvo family had vanished without trace. At the Russian end of the bridge, sentries from the Red Army supposedly welcomed the party. This, however, is one of the many myths about their flight. In reality, they had driven eastward, eventually reaching the USSR at Vyborg, which had been part of Finland until it was lost to the Soviets in the Winter War of 1939\u20131940. Only now, inside the Soviet Union after more than one hundred miles on the road, was Bruno able to come out into the open.\n\nAnother eighty miles brought them to Leningrad (formerly, and again today, known as Saint Petersburg).\n\nTheir KGB guards politely refused Bruno's request to look around the city, explaining that there would be plenty of opportunities to see it once he was settled in the USSR.\n\nDuring his time in the car trunk, Bruno had been preparing a statement. Years later, he claimed that, for him, the die was already cast and the future lay in the USSR. He wanted to send a message to family and colleagues in the West, explaining his actions: the Soviet Union was a peace-loving nation whose ideals he believed in. Exhausted, the family sat down to their first meal in Russia, all the while under guard, and spent a night in an \"anonymous apartment but no one slept very much.\"\n\nTHE NEXT MORNING A MAN AND WOMAN CAME TO THE HOTEL TO accompany the family to the railway station and onto the train to Moscow. The man had short hair and was about Bruno's age; the woman younger. She carried a bunch of flowers, which she presented to Marianne.\n\nUpon arriving in the capital, the Pontecorvos were met by a small delegation. A \"tall and elegant man,\" who stood out as the leader, greeted them with pleasantries. He asked Bruno in English if they'd had a good journey and whether they needed anything. Bruno replied that he had prepared a statement that he wanted to read out on the radio, directed to his colleagues in the West, explaining his support for the Soviet Union. The first hint of the restrictive nature of life in Stalin's fiefdom now showed itself, with the man's polite but firm refusal: \"There will be plenty of time to do so in due course.\" Bruno acquiesced.\n\nThe party got into a pair of black cars, with gray curtains drawn across the windows. Bruno rode in one car, with the senior KGB man, while Marianne and the children rode in another. Separated from Bruno for a while, they tried to sneak peeks at Moscow.\n\nDuring his time at school in Abingdon, Gil had gotten the impression that Moscow was essentially a Wild West town made of concrete, where the rule of law was marginal and unwary travelers were at risk. However, when he saw the city in person for the first time, it appeared no different from the other major cities he had passed through that summer: \"My first shock in Moscow was to discover that it was Moscow!\" The one exception was the traffic: there were very few cars, many old buses, and lots of open trucks containing men dressed in army fatigues, standing shoulder to shoulder. For Bruno, his arrival in Moscow induced profound emotion: \"I felt like the Jew who found the Promised Land.\"\n\nThe car stopped in front of a huge apartment block on a wide boulevard\u2014Gorky Street\u2014not far from the Kremlin. The building had been built just three years before, and one of its luxury apartments had been prepared for the Pontecorvos' arrival; it would be Bruno's Moscow base for the rest of his life.\n\nTheir apartment was large, and located on the seventh floor. There were three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, a dining room, and a study, all filled with traditional furniture. The ceilings were high, embossed with stucco, and the living room had large windows, draped with white curtains that reached the ceiling. Bizarrely, the apartment contained a set of classic French books.\n\nBruno spent many hours reading the French classics to fill the time between Russian language lessons, as the family was effectively \"locked in the house\" for several weeks. Their entire existence was now under state control.\n\nA young KGB officer had been assigned to watch over them. To Bruno's surprise, the man asked him for news of the war in Korea. In the afternoon a copy of the state newspaper, _Pravda_ , arrived, along with an interpreter, who was also eager to hear the headline news from Bruno personally. Already Bruno was starting to realize how news was controlled under Stalin's rule.\n\nOn the day after their arrival, the KGB officer explained that it would be best if Bruno postponed the release of the public statement he had prepared. Bruno was surprised, as he felt that it would benefit the Soviet Union if he explained his decision to his friends and colleagues in the West. The Soviet leaders, he was informed, viewed things differently. He could release his statement \"all in good time.\" In reality five years were to elapse before the time was deemed appropriate, two years after Stalin's death. The officer explained that it was necessary for the Pontecorvos to stay indoors \"for vigilance,\" as \"no one must know\" they were in the USSR; for some unexplained reason, this secrecy was deemed vitally important.\n\nThe most urgent task for the Pontecorvos was to learn Russian. They were provided with a teacher, who spoke English perfectly. First they learned to read the Cyrillic alphabet; then they learned a few basic words, spelling them out in the strange script. This required concentration, discipline, and time. There was no shortage of the latter, and Bruno and Gil set about the task enthusiastically. Marianne, however, did not. Despite the insistence of the teacher, she gave up after a few lessons, complaining that the Russian language was too difficult, and that studying it gave her headaches. That, at least, is what Bruno recalled years later in interviews with Miriam Mafai. Gil's memory of that time differs, however. He recalls his mother as a good linguist. In any event, cut off from her family in Sweden, and from her friends in the West, Marianne was now isolated in a strange land.\n\nHer isolation soon began to deepen, even within her own home. Every morning a fat maid with bleached hair and a gregarious personality came to take care of the family's needs. She cleaned the children's rooms and the kitchen, and prepared food. That much was fine. The problem was that she was very voluble, and tried to talk with Marianne in Russian, asking what she wanted to eat. Marianne generally opted out, wanting to let the maid decide, but the maid kept on asking during every visit. After a few weeks, Marianne found this unbearable, and began locking herself in her room when the woman arrived.\n\nBruno arranged for the maid to be replaced by a younger woman, who didn't talk so much and made her own decisions. Nonetheless, Marianne continued to stay in her room for long periods, incommunicado. Like the rest of the family, she was restricted to staying indoors, based on the KGB's insistence that their whereabouts remain secret, as well as the fact that she did not understand enough Russian to go to the grocery store anyway.\n\nThe difficulty of keeping three young boys occupied added to the family problems. One day, Gil left the apartment and crossed the street. Years later, he still recalled what happened next: \"I bumped into a lady who had a bag full of eggs. I think one of the eggs must have smashed. I didn't understand any Russian and spoke in English.\" One can imagine the scene from the Muscovites' perspective. In 1950, the USSR was tightly controlled, foreigners were regarded with suspicion, and contact with them was restricted. So the appearance on a busy street of a strange boy speaking a foreign language must have created quite a stir. Gil continued: \"A crowd gathered. Someone started shouting. I didn't know what they were saying. A policeman came and dispersed them.\" The incident was so singular that it stayed in Gil's memory, but he has no recollection of his parents' reaction. In any case, the incident can hardly have improved the family's chances of liberation.\n\nSuch events spurred Gil and his younger brothers to ask more and more questions: \"What is happening? Why are we here? When are we going home?\" The family had left Abingdon on July 25, at the end of the summer term at Roysse's. The new school year was due to begin on Tuesday, September 19. Gil remembers being \"promised I would be at school in England by the 16th.\" This deadline was fast approaching, and Gil was getting anxious. After two weeks in Moscow, the date finally came and his fears were confirmed: \"I was hysterical because I was sure I was not going back.\" He threw a fit.\n\nIt is intriguing that, forty-three years later, when father and son were reminiscing, Bruno had no recollection of this event, which to Gil had been one of the singular moments of his life. Gil recalled, \"He seemed well, and I reminisced with him, asking if he remembered my tantrum. I am a placid person and that is the only time in my entire life that I made such a scene. It is surprising how different people remember events. Bruno did not even remember my hysteria.\"\n\nInitially Bruno and Marianne may have seen their move to the USSR as simply another stop on the peripatetic path their lives had taken up until then. After all, they had already left their homelands for France, escaped the Nazis by fleeing to the United States, spent three years in Canada, then moved back to Europe when Bruno joined the team at Harwell. Their relocation to the USSR, the mecca of communism and the home of a new atomic laboratory at Dubna, made some logical sense. Bruno's cousin Emilio Sereni traveled to and from the Soviet Union regularly, so there was initially no reason for Bruno to suppose that he would be treated differently. It seems Bruno thought he could work at Dubna without a major disruption to his life. Once the family was settled in their new home, their friends and relatives in the West could be contacted, Gil's schooling could be dealt with, and life would carry on as before. Unfortunately, life in the USSR of the 1950s was not so simple.\n\nAs we have seen, the first signs of the restrictive environment that awaited the Pontecorvos came soon after their arrival in Moscow, when the authorities refused to allow Bruno to make a statement. He was stranded, unable to explain his reasons for fleeing to the Soviet Union, or even to let his family know that he was safe. This incident, along with a summons to the Kremlin during the family's first few days in Moscow, changed Bruno's view of his situation.\n\nIN 1950, BORIS IOFFE WAS A YOUNG THEORETICAL PHYSICIST WORKING in Moscow at \"Laboratory Number Three.\" Today this lab is home to the Institute of Theoretical Physics, but at the time it was dedicated to the development of nuclear reactors\u2014and thus, indirectly, to the physics of atomic and hydrogen bombs.\n\nIoffe had joined the lab on January 1, and for a few months he worked purely on theoretical problems. In May, however, an order suddenly came \"from the highest level\"\u2014in Ioffe's opinion, from Beria or \"probably even Stalin himself.\" The young scientist was to help design a heavy-water nuclear reactor, using enriched uranium, for the purpose of producing tritium in the shortest possible time. \"All theoreticians were mobilized to make the physical design,\" he recalled later. \"From that time, for years, I worked on pure science in parallel with the physics of nuclear reactors.\"\n\nA hydrogen bomb's explosive power comes from the fusion of tritium and deuterium, two isotopes of hydrogen. At the start of the 1950s, when the possibility of creating this weapon arose, there was practically no tritium in the USSR. The isotope is unstable, with a half-life of twelve years. Only trifling amounts of tritium are found in nature, but it can be made in nuclear reactors, using heavy water and enriched uranium. However, there were no such reactors in the USSR at the time, and design plans had barely begun. The government hoped to produce enough tritium for a weapon in two to three years; it was clear to scientists that this was out of the question, but Stalin insisted that they succeed. Thus there was an urgent push in the Soviet Union to build nuclear reactors, or to find some alternative to tritium. The arrival of Bruno Pontecorvo could hardly have been more opportune.\n\nThe Soviets already had some clues to help them design a heavy-water reactor, including \"blueprints of the Canadian heavy water research reactor.\" Ioffe doesn't know exactly when this information arrived, but he believes it was shortly before he started working at the laboratory at the start of 1950.\n\nHow did the Soviets get hold of these design plans? Nunn May was not the source\u2014he had been jailed in 1946, and his deathbed confession made no mention of the plans. The available facts are consistent with the theory that Pontecorvo was the source, although there is no proof. All we can be sure of is that there was some well-placed collaborator, in addition to Nunn May, who passed information about the Canadian reactor to the USSR.\n\nThe senior theoreticians in the Soviet reactor program included Isaak Pomeranchuk, who was Ioffe's supervisor, and A. D. Galanin, a reactor expert. Ioffe later recalled how, from the middle of 1950 until early 1951, Pomeranchuk was away from the lab, working at Arzamas-16, the Soviet equivalent to Los Alamos. During his absence, one day in the fall of 1950, Galanin was \"summoned to the Kremlin.\" This was a singular occurrence, as, in Ioffe's words, \"People were summoned to various places, but never the Kremlin.\"\n\nWhen Galanin returned to the lab, he said nothing. Ioffe and his colleagues followed the standard rule of life in the USSR: don't ask; if you need to know, you will be told. It wasn't until several years later, after Pontecorvo's presence in the country had become public knowledge, that Galanin revealed what had taken place.\n\nSometime in mid-September, Bruno Pontecorvo's KGB minders ushered him into one of the ubiquitous black sedans with curtained windows, and took him to the Kremlin. There he met with a group of physicists, which included Galanin. Their goal was to find out what Pontecorvo knew about the \"atomic problem\" and Western nuclear technology in general.\n\nThe USSR had no shortage of first-rate scientists. The central problem for the Soviet nuclear program in the postwar years was not a lack of technical know-how, but a lack of access to uranium. The nation's first nuclear reactor, built in 1946, only succeeded due to the Soviet army's chance discovery of one hundred tons of uranium in a German repository during the war. Although the meeting with Pontecorvo taught Soviet scientists nothing significant about nuclear technology (they already had the blueprints of the Canadian reactor), it confirmed their hopes that Pontecorvo's unique expertise in uranium prospecting could be of considerable value to Stalin's nuclear strategy.\n\nIt is interesting, therefore, that during the next five years stories appeared periodically in the Western media claiming that Pontecorvo had been seen at various uranium mining sites in Eastern Europe. At the time, the significance of uranium for the Soviet program was not generally known in the West, nor did anyone know of the Kremlin debriefing, which suggests that these rumors may have had a basis in fact.\n\nWHAT IS HARDER TO EVALUATE IS THE CLAIM THAT PONTECORVO was cross-examined at the Kremlin meeting about matters unrelated to science\u2014including security issues and his reasons for coming to the USSR. The accuracy of this claim, which originates with an anonymous former KGB source, is impossible to assess. However it seems very plausible under the circumstances.\n\nIt is obvious that the KGB would need answers to some big questions. They knew that Pontecorvo had been interviewed by MI5 in April; they needed to find out what he had been asked, and what he had said in response. If he had been spying for the Soviets, they would want to know if he had confessed to the UK. In any case, the KGB would be very interested in finding out what MI5 knew about the spy trail linking Canada to Moscow\u2014and whether the West knew anything about the Cohens, whom the Soviets had rescued from the United States just a few weeks earlier.\n\nBruno had expected to be debriefed about his atomic research in the West, but he was not prepared for this aggressive inquisition into his motives. In a featureless room, lit by low-wattage bulbs, with walls painted dull gray and mustard, the emotionless interrogators pointed out that a spy for the Soviet Union, whose colleagues have been exposed, might obtain immunity from prosecution by agreeing to work for the other side.\n\nWhether or not Pontecorvo was a spy, it is probable that the KGB also had another worry\u2014this one involving the letter composed by Geoffrey Patterson in July, which alerted Philby to the FBI's interest in Pontecorvo. Was this a genuine document, showing that the game was up for Pontecorvo in the West? Or was it an elaborate trap devised by the British, using Pontecorvo as bait to expose Philby and other Soviet agents? After all, if the Soviets were to express a sudden interest in Pontecorvo, this could confirm that Patterson's letter was known in Moscow, allowing the British to reel in Philby.\n\nIf the Soviets truly questioned Bruno about the Cohens, there was no possibility of letting him go. He now knew too much, even if he hadn't before. Furthermore, it's doubtful that Bruno would have been welcome in the West. By this point, Philby's news that the FBI was investigating Bruno and his communist associations had presumably reached him. Having been confronted with this news, Pontecorvo could hardly expect the British to take him back, except perhaps in order to put him in a noose.\n\nThis mention of the death penalty may sound like the stuff of a spy novel, but it is sadly based in reality. Bruno Pontecorvo had worked closely with Alan Nunn May in Canada, and had even helped him pry classified information from the US team in Chicago\u2014some of which had ended up in the USSR. This could easily constitute grounds for a capital charge in the United States. Klaus Fuchs had prepared himself mentally for execution by the British, only to discover that, because he had not passed secrets to an enemy (the USSR was an ally at the time), he was not guilty of a capital offense in the UK. The possibility that he might be extradited to the US, where he could face execution in the electric chair, was a serious concern. This encouraged Fuchs to plead guilty in the British court. While researching this book, I interviewed the immediate relatives of two other confirmed atomic spies from that era\u2014Alan Nunn May and Ted Hall. In both cases, the relatives confirmed that the fear of execution had been very real. Nunn May's stepson stated that the possibility of extradition to (and execution by) the US is what led Nunn May to cooperate so readily with British prosecutors. Ted Hall's wife, Joan, confirmed that he too had feared execution for treason. I asked, \"If Ted had been threatened with exposure in 1950, would you have gone to the USSR?\" This elicited an instant response: \"For sure we would!\"\n\nBruno would always claim that his decision to enter the USSR was made purely for idealistic reasons, based on his profound belief in communism and a wish to use his scientific knowledge for peace, away from the perceived persecution of the West. However, none of this explains why he left on a whim, in the middle of his summer vacation, rather than making an organized transition to the USSR, which would not have been difficult for a man of Bruno's intelligence. In 1946, Bruno had refused to join Harwell unless he was given the freedom to travel; now, by going to the Soviet Union, he had lost all freedom\u2014not only to travel but also to communicate with his parents, siblings, friends, and scientific colleagues. Parting the Iron Curtain in 1950 was like entering a black hole, where people and information could be lost forever. Gil could not return to school in England; Bruno and Marianne could not contact their families in the West; the very fact of the Pontecorvos' presence in the Soviet Union would remain a closely guarded secret for five years. During this period, they were referred to by their relatives as \"the dear departed.\"\n\nBY THE END OF SEPTEMBER, BRUNO, MARIANNE, AND THE CHILDREN were allowed to leave the apartment, as long as they were accompanied by bodyguards. It was not yet winter, but the weather was very cold and the Pontecorvos had only summer clothing. One morning, their Russian teacher arrived with a girl carrying packages of fur-lined coats, hats, gloves, and boots. No wonder Bruno, years later, recalled that they felt like \"privileged guests, protected\" and that these early days in Moscow were \"very peaceful.\" However, it would seem that Marianne might not have shared this positive impression, if the family's first trip out is any guide.\n\nThe Pontecorvos' apartment was close to several of Moscow's major stores, whose windows displayed a range of goods available for the home. On this initial excursion, the family entered one of the shops, where Marianne was \"discontented\" by the sparse offering of products, the long lines, and the sullen attitude of the staff. According to Bruno's recollections, he and Gil scolded Marianne. They told her that in Paris or London the stores were less crowded \"because only the rich could buy and the staff were forced to smile in order not to be made redundant.\" Bruno admitted that the goods were of lesser quality than those in the West, and were poorly packaged and presented, but he argued that this drawback was outweighed by the fact that \"everyone could buy everything,\" and the goods were not merely available to the well-off.\n\nBruno later recalled that Marianne \"did not seem convinced,\" but chose not to discuss the episode further.\n\nAT THE END OF OCTOBER, AFTER SPENDING NEARLY TWO MONTHS marooned in their Moscow apartment, the Pontecorvos were on the move again, being driven for miles on unpaved roads through dark woods of fir trees. They passed a few villages filled with rustic houses, some abandoned and decaying at the side of the road. After two hours they reached Dubna, a village some seventy miles north of Moscow, on the banks of the Volga\u2014the home of a secret nuclear physics research center.\n\nIn former times, Dubna had been a peasant village, far away from the cities, an ideal spot for rest and relaxation. Even after the laboratory took over, it retained a rustic charm, with its quaint streets cut through the forest. Gil recalled, \"In 1950 when we arrived, Dubna was little more than a Russian village, with two or three gravel roads and log cabins. These were similar to what I remembered in Canada.\" He added, with a laugh, \"All governments put nuclear research laboratories in the backwoods.\"\n\nOne of the first things Gil noticed about Dubna was the mosquitoes: \"I had grown up in Canada where they were everywhere, so I was used to them, but Bruno hated them.\" Mosquitoes thrived at Dubna because the village and laboratory were built on reclaimed swampland, formerly part of the Gulag Archipelago. The village itself is situated on an island at the junction of the Volga River, the Dubna River, and a canal that links the Volga to the Moskva. This canal had been dug in the 1930s by inmates from prison camps, who provided forced labor for the laboratory after the war. They dug the foundations, broke rocks, and built the entire edifice of the lab.\n\nIn addition to the town's basic bungalows, there were some more substantial homes where senior scientists lived. The Pontecorvos were presented with an elegant detached house, painted in ocher. It was two stories high, with a third-floor gable at one end. The front door opened on to a stone patio, fringed by an elegant low wall. The property was surrounded by a green wicker fence, which enclosed numerous tall fir trees and a garden. Compared to the brick estate house in Abingdon, this was a land of enchantment. In Dubna the Pontecorvos had space, and a house such as one might find in the forests of North America. After the privations of Moscow, Marianne felt very positive about her new home. Its surroundings reminded her of her native Sweden.\n\nNo one could enter Dubna without special permission, and its entire population was specially selected. One might hope to enjoy a certain amount of freedom within such a protected environment, yet Bruno could not leave his home, even for the short walk to the laboratory, without being accompanied. His protests were met with the explanation that the physicists employed in important research work \"need protection.\"\n\nBruno was beginning to discover the strange reality of his new life in Dubna. Even today, visiting the area can feel like passing through a time warp. Two security fences reminiscent of the Berlin Wall still surround parts of the site. After you pass through the first fence, the door to the outside world closes behind you. Armed guards examine your papers before allowing you to continue. Beyond the second fence, there is nothing other than the laboratory, hidden in the woods, and the mosquitoes.\n\nIn Moscow, Gil had \"hated the loneliness.\" Now he attended the local school, where he enjoyed the company of other children. On his first day of school in Dubna, \"all problems vanished.\" Over sixty years later he still lives there.\nFIFTEEN\n\nEXILE\n\nTHE ATOMIC NUCLEUS HAD REVEALED ITS AWESOME POWER IN THE explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; exploring its deepest structure was the obvious next step for the world's postwar governments, and an intellectual challenge for scientists.\n\nIn 1944 Soviet scientist Vladimir Veksler had shown that it was possible to create stable beams of high-energy particles, which could be used to bombard atomic nuclei and shatter them. The following year, in the United States, Edwin McMillan independently discovered the technique. This breakthrough raised the possibility of revealing the deep secrets of the nucleus by bombarding it with pions produced by a high-energy particle accelerator. This line of research soon became a top priority in the West, and Igor Kurchatov, the father of the Soviet atomic bomb, urged his superiors to make it a priority in the USSR as well. As a result, the Soviet government decided in August 1946 to build a special laboratory\u2014Dubna\u2014that would contain the world's largest high-energy particle accelerator, known as a synchrocyclotron.\n\nUp to that time, energy had been extracted from the nucleus under a limited set of circumstances, which required either a rare isotope of uranium or artificially created plutonium. Even though the results of these methods could be explosively dramatic, the amount of energy they liberated was still less than 1 percent of what was locked inside the nucleus by the powerful nuclear forces.\n\nThe discovery of pions in 1947 gave scientists a new understanding of those forces. Just as photons are the material embodiment of electromagnetic fields, so are pions the material embodiment of the much-stronger nuclear fields. Scientists initially studied pions out of curiosity; their research had no immediate military significance, and high-energy particle physics in the West was developed in the open. Even so, some thought that pions might be able to unleash nuclear energy in quantities that would make all previous methods pale in comparison, which was one reason for Western governments to support this new field.\n\nThe motivations of the scientists at Dubna were probably no different than those of their counterparts in the West; the Soviet government, however, mindful of the strategic possibilities, kept the existence of the Dubna accelerator a secret. Stalin's agenda was to create atomic and hydrogen bombs, for military purposes. He distrusted intellectuals, but realized that he needed physicists to do the job. The advice to Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's security chief, was characteristically direct: \"Let them get on with it; we can always shoot them later.\"\n\nOnce the Soviets decided to build the accelerator, a site had to be chosen. Beria set up a meeting, where three possible locations were discussed. The choices didn't include Dubna, however. Beria, who enjoyed hunting near Dubna, then pointed at the map and announced that the laboratory would be built\u2014right there!\n\nThe Dubna area was hardly an ideal place to construct a particle accelerator, as it was full of swamps. To this objection, Beria announced, \"We will drain them.\" As for the lack of roads: \"We will build them.\" And, as for the workforce, Beria had an answer for that too: the area was full of forced labor camps, part of the Gulag. Throughout the 1950s, in Dubna's early years, scientists traveling from Moscow would routinely see prisoners with shaved heads building the roads.\n\nAnd so Dubna was born. The project's purpose was disguised by the name _Hydro Technical Laboratory._ The construction was completed in December 1949, and in January 1950 physicists from Moscow began conducting experiments at what was then the world's highest-energy accelerator. It retained this honor until 1953, when the Cosmotron accelerator at New York's Brookhaven National Laboratory took the blue ribbon.\n\nTHERE WAS GREAT EXCITEMENT AT DUBNA WHEN, IN THE FALL OF 1950, the senior management learned that Bruno Pontecorvo\u2014\"student of the famous Enrico Fermi\"\u2014had arrived at the laboratory. According to Venedict Dzhelepov, who later became Dubna's director, the fact \"that such a talented and well-known scientist was to work in the then small scientific community of our laboratory was very valuable.\"\n\nOnly a select few knew of Bruno Pontecorvo's presence in Dubna. Irina Pokrovskaya, who served as Bruno's secretary at the laboratory for forty years, initially knew him only as \"the professor,\" a man with no name.\n\nNonetheless, the Western media was sure that Pontecorvo was in the USSR, and over the next five years reporters made some fanciful claims.\n\nOften, half-truths and rumors were elevated to the level of supposedly factual stories. One notable example occurred in November 1951, when newspapers in Rome claimed that Pontecorvo had been arrested by the Russians in an effort to stop their atomic secrets from being leaked to the United States; Pontecorvo, apparently, was suspected of being a double agent. The article quoted unnamed Russian sources. The story's genesis was apparently President Truman's announcement that atomic explosions had taken place in the USSR; as these explosions were meant to be secret, the Soviets thought Truman must have a source, a Western spy among their top-ranking scientists. A Harwell spokesman commented that if the news of the explosions was true, it was intriguing that it had percolated through the Iron Curtain. A closer analysis of the facts, however, reveals the Pontecorvo rumors to be nonsensical. The White House had indeed made the announcement regarding atomic explosions in Russia\u2014but this had happened in the fall of 1949, nearly a year before Pontecorvo disappeared.\n\nAnother story, popular in North America, was that Pontecorvo was in China's Xinjiang Province, working at a \"huge atomic stronghold\" that Russia was setting up there. Such stories were accepted unquestioningly by the _Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune_ , and _Christian Science Monitor_. The _Glasgow Bulletin_ was more skeptical, announcing that Swedish and Finnish sources had poured cold water on the story. The reports of Pontecorvo's presence in China had been ascribed to refugees who had escaped from the USSR to Helsinki and Stockholm. However, inquiries showed that no Soviet refugees had actually reached those cities since Pontecorvo's disappearance. Even so, in 1951 a US congressional committee declared Pontecorvo to be the \"second deadliest\" spy in history (Klaus Fuchs being the first). The committee also claimed that Fuchs and Pontecorvo had advanced the Soviet weapons program by eighteen months.\n\nThe bizarre suggestions that Pontecorvo was working on helium weapons or atomic fogs are best seen as science fiction, and never had any scientific credibility. Reports that he was used in the Soviet quest for uranium are harder to dismiss, as his expertise in this area meshed so well with the USSR's needs at the time. Indeed, uranium mining soon became one of the jobs performed by forced laborers in the Gulag.\n\nBruno always denied having worked on atomic weapons at any stage. Although this may be literally true, Isaak Pomeranchuk, head of the nuclear-reactor research program in Moscow, consulted Bruno frequently during the latter's first five years in Russia. Boris Ioffe recalls that Pomeranchuk \"often visited Dubna at that time and many times said after returning that he discussed such and such a question with 'a professor,' or 'a professor said this.'\" Samoil Bilenky, who would later work closely with Bruno, was a young scientist at that time, and a student of Pomeranchuk. He later recalled a car journey he took with Pomeranchuk and another senior scientist. Pomeranchuk kept repeating, \"Professor said this; professor said that.\" Bilenky remembered the incident because it had seemed so strange. \"Why did he not say the name of the professor? Naturally I knew not to ask.\"\n\nBilenky and Ioffe both stressed the fact that Pomeranchuk \"never said who the professor was.\" Ioffe added that \"mentioning Pontecorvo's name was taboo\" until 1955. Only later did Pomeranchuk confirm what Ioffe already suspected: \"the professor\" was Bruno Pontecorvo.\n\nPOMERANCHUK'S QUEST\n\nWhat did Pomeranchuk need from Pontecorvo? Why did he consult him so frequently?\n\nIn 1945 Pomeranchuk and three colleagues had worked on mathematical problems relating to \"the tube\"\u2014a conceptual method in which deuterium and tritium could be used to make a thermonuclear weapon. A conventional atomic explosion would heat the tritium, which would then provide the spark to ignite the rest of the bomb, which consisted of a tube full of deuterium. Only a small amount of tritium was needed, and because deuterium was cheap, the tube could be made as long as necessary. The plan was for a shock wave to pass down its length and cause the nuclei of deuterium to fuse explosively.\n\nUntil 1949, all the physics research in the USSR had been geared toward making a traditional, fission-based atomic bomb. This was because the Soviets were eager to demonstrate their power to the West, and because a fission explosion is needed to ignite the tritium in a hydrogen bomb\u2014so mastering fission explosions was a necessary first step on the path toward their ultimate goal of a hydrogen bomb. After 1949 the Soviet quest for a hydrogen bomb began in earnest. The basic physical principles behind such a weapon were clear; what was uncertain was whether the reaction would explode or fizzle. One of the unknowns involved how energy would spread through the device. If too much escaped, there would be no explosion. During 1949 and 1950, a group at Arzamas-16, the \"Soviet Los Alamos,\" investigated this intensely. They focused on how energy, carried by gamma-ray photons, would dissipate as the photons bounced off of electrons in the device\u2014a phenomenon known as Compton scattering.\n\nCompton scattering was one of many processes that could be studied using the new breakthroughs in quantum electrodynamics (QED), the quantum theory of light and matter. The theory of QED had been successfully completed in 1947 by theorists in Japan and the US, and subsequently published in the literature. Around the world, physicists investigated its implications. In fact, this is exactly what Boris Ioffe was studying for his PhD thesis. Individual electrons and photons can spin in flight. In 1950 Ioffe was told to calculate how certain properties of Compton scattering depended on the relative orientations of the particles' intrinsic spins. This was, apparently, a question of academic interest, an application of a new theory, which could be used to test its limitations. However, it also had considerable relevance to the innards of a thermonuclear weapon. In order to maintain secrecy, the examining committee for Ioffe's thesis was carefully chosen. At the end of the examination, one of the members, L. V. Groshev, agreed that the thesis was sound but didn't understand one point: Why it was so secret? The chairman, Lev Artsimovich, replied that it was \"very good that you didn't understand it.\"\n\nIoffe was part of Pomeranchuk's team. In the summer of 1950, Pomeranchuk had been sent to Arzamas on a \"long assignment.\" However, he wanted to discuss the revolutionary discoveries in QED with his colleagues in Moscow. He managed to convince the authorities that it would be best if his group returned to Moscow, where he could work on both QED and \"the problem,\" as the bomb project was known. The team's expertise was mainly in reactors, and their research was subject to the highest level of security\u2014\"Top Secret Special Folder.\" At this level, the protocol was so restrictive that reports were not typed by the carefully vetted special secretarial staff, but were written longhand by the scientists themselves.\n\nIn Moscow, Pomeranchuk's group took on the task of assessing how much energy in \"the tube\" would be lost due to Compton scattering. By 1952 they had the answer: so much energy would be lost that the bomb would not work.\n\nThus, at the start of the 1950s, Pomeranchuk's interests included QED as it applied to the H-bomb, and the design of nuclear reactors for making tritium. In the realm of pure physics, he was also interested in how particles scatter off one another at high energy. Which brings us back to our question: What did Pomeranchuk need from Pontecorvo?\n\nIn general, Bruno's focus was different from that of Pomeranchuk. His interests lay in the neutrino, whose existence had yet to be proven; in cosmic rays and the \"strange\" particles that had been discovered within them; and in the relationship between electrons, muons, and the weak force of radioactivity. Moreover, Bruno was primarily an experimentalist, with little to offer a first-rank theorist like Pomeranchuk on subjects like QED or high-energy scattering. If Pomeranchuk needed advice on theoretical physics, he had considerable talent at his disposal in Moscow. It is also unlikely that he made the visits to Dubna to discuss basic physics for the purpose of pure research: Pontecorvo and Pomeranchuk never published a joint paper on basic physics during their lifetimes, nor did their primary interests overlap strongly. It is known that Pomeranchuk asked Bruno about the strange particles, which had interested physicists in Moscow, but this was a transient interest and Pomeranchuk played no role in this field. However, the two men did have a mutual interest in nuclear reactors.\n\nPomeranchuk was, in Ioffe's opinion, the \"main contributor\" in the Soviet Union to the theory of nuclear reactors. In 1947 Pomeranchuk wrote the first text in the world on the principles of nuclear reactors. He was a theoretical physicist, and the reigning expert on the underlying concepts. However, as we saw during the building of the reactor at Chalk River, there is no substitute for hands-on experience. In a way, building a nuclear reactor is like learning to drive: you can read books on the subject, but until you actually go out on the highway, you won't get the experience necessary to pass the test. For the Soviets, it was imperative to build a heavy-water reactor that actually worked. Pomeranchuk had read the books, but he'd never been on the highway. In this regard, the presence of Bruno Pontecorvo, who had already passed the driving test, was invaluable.\n\nIndeed, considered from this angle, the reasons for Pomeranchuk's visits become obvious. When the first reactors were built in the West, a new problem emerged, known as \"creep.\" The intense neutron bombardment, combined with the heat produced by the reactor, deformed the metal in the cooling system and threatened to kill the reactor entirely. By 1946 Kurchatov had four institutions working on ways to seal the uranium rods and avoid this problem. For these purposes, information from agents in the West was useful, but limited. Much of the research at Chalk River and Harwell was not formally recorded, but \"done on chalkboards and by coffee-housing\" and would have been \"taken to the USSR in Bruno's head.\" Indeed, in 1955, when Pontecorvo's presence in Russia was finally acknowledged, he would admit, \"A few years ago I had occasion to discuss with Soviet colleagues some problems regarding radiation protection for nuclear power plants intended for peaceful purposes.\"\n\nGiven the paramount secrecy of the atomic project, it is obvious that Bruno would not have been told the real agenda behind Pomeranchuk's questions. And when we consider the fact that the Soviets' top priority was to construct reactors that could breed tritium, it is naive to suppose that none of Pomeranchuk's discussions with Pontecorvo had any relevance to the \"atomic problem.\" It is also naive to assume that Bruno Pontecorvo would not have deduced what was going on.\n\nTHE SECRET NOTEBOOKS\n\nFor Bruno's first five years in the USSR, he recorded his work at Dubna in classified logbooks. At the end of each day, a letter-sized journal, with \u0441\u0435\u043a\u0440\u0435\u0442 (\"secret\") stamped on its maroon cover, would be deposited in the laboratory safe. There it would remain until Bruno returned.\n\nEach journal consisted of two hundred pages, with every page numbered so that it would be apparent if any were removed. The date of Bruno's arrival in Dubna is established by his first journal entry. The front cover of his first logbook declares, \"\u043d\u0430\u0447\u0430\u0442\u043e 1950\" (started 1950); the handwritten date on the first page is \"1 \u043d\u043e\u044f\u0431\u0440\u044c\" (November 1). The dates are the only entries in Russian, and appear to have been written by someone other than Bruno. His personal log from each day is written in English.\n\n**IMAGE 15.1.** Cover of Bruno Pontecorvo's first secret logbook in the USSR, 1950. (COURTESY OF GIL PONTECORVO AND THE PONTECORVO CENTENARY EXPOSITION, UNIVERSITY OF PISA.)\n\nThe first logbook begins with a brief entry on how to measure the energies of neutrons very precisely. The application of this question becomes apparent in the next entry, on page 2: \"Fission from highly excited states.\"\n\nBy this point in his life, Bruno Pontecorvo was a world-leading authority in this field of instrumentation. In Oklahoma, he'd designed a neutron detector for oil prospectors; in Canada, this device had been used to find uranium; at Harwell, he'd developed more sophisticated detectors. Normal fission happens when high-energy neutrons hit atomic nuclei, which are in their most stable state. In the logbook, Bruno comments, \"As the fission of medium A [nuclei in the middle of the periodic table] shows, there must [occasionally] be fissions arising from _very highly excited states_ \"\u2014states in which one of the constituent neutrons or protons has been raised up the energy ladder temporarily. (Italics added.) He then notes, \"These fissions must . . . release plenty of energy in uranium and thorium.\"\n\nHalfway down the second page we come to another question discussed on Bruno's first day at Dubna: \"Is it possible to detect H4 particles inside the chamber?\"\n\nIn 1955, H4, or quadium, would play a prominent role in the satirical novel _The Mouse That Roared_ as the isotope powering the \"Q-bomb.\" Today we know that quadium is so highly unstable as to be effectively nonexistent and useless for military purposes. However, the Soviets' attempt to isolate this exotic isotope was reasonable, given the tritium shortage that hindered their production of thermonuclear bombs. The scientists at Dubna hoped that when beams of deuterons, or alpha particles, smashed into suitable targets, H4 particles might be produced. If they were, this might be a fast-track solution to Stalin's challenge. But first the scientists would have to successfully detect H4 particles, and for this they turned to Bruno Pontecorvo.\n\nIn his logbook, Bruno suggests using the magnetic fields of the cyclotron to curve the path of \"the electrons\" (the beta particles produced when the H4 isotope decays), and from this deduce the transient presence of quadium. If its existence was established, methods of producing the isotope in greater quantities could be developed. The discussion continued on November 3, when Bruno noted the possibility of performing the experiment with an arrangement of electronic counters.\n\nPontecorvo also evaluated ways of detecting pions. On this same date, he had some ideas on \"Fission [caused] by mu meson.\" However, this last phrase is crossed out and not developed further. In addition, he recorded some thoughts about the strange particles\u2014thoughts that would mature a couple of years later. And, tantalizingly, he considered the possibility that the decay of a muon produces two neutrinos of different characters. This set of ideas is a rough outline of Bruno's initial hopes for his particle physics experiments at Dubna, which would have no immediate military significance.\n\nAfter three days, Bruno's flow of ideas is interrupted, as the November entries suddenly end halfway down page 9 of the logbook. The writing on the lower half of the page is inverted. The explanation for this is given below.\n\nThe above burst of activity seems to reflect an initial period of brainstorming, after Bruno's arrival at Dubna. At the end of this period, he was apparently assigned another task until September 1951. Whatever he did in the intervening ten months was not part of that original program, and was thus not recorded in the logbook. When he resumed writing in the logbook ten months later, he turned it upside down so that the final page became the first. He then maintained his daily research log for Dubna until, by March 1952, he had worked his way \"forward\" to page 9. When Bruno first resumed writing, in September 1951, experiments at the Dubna cyclotron were under way, and his logbook was quickly filled with data. Indeed, his particle physics research, which the authorities would later claim to be his sole activity in the USSR, occupied him full-time from the end of that year onward.\n\nBruno's decision to record these data in the rear of the original logbook, separate from the initial inquiries, is a deliberate act. It would be natural for him to retain space in the logbook for any further work on the original questions; hence the new material is recorded from the rear. However, it is clear that he had given his employers all the information they required on the question of fission and H4 particles, as there is no further mention of them.\n\nThe first notebook having been filled, Bruno began a new one: \"\u043d\u0430\u0447\u0430\u0442\u043e 1952\" (started 1952). This and subsequent logbooks record his ongoing research interests, which from then on appear exclusively to involve experiments at the Dubna cyclotron. Other pages constitute lesson plans or drafts of research papers. This continues until his \"coming out\" in 1955.\n\nSo what can we conclude about Bruno Pontecorvo's first year in the Soviet Union? For one thing, the questions involving H4 and fission, which occupied Bruno during his first days at Dubna, are in marked contrast to his subsequent work there.\n\nThe entries from those first days of November appear to be responses to problems that Dubna had grappled with before Bruno's arrival. It is possible to view them as genuinely \"pure\" physics questions, but their nature and scope make them more obviously applicable to strategic issues related to the release of energy from atomic nuclei. Specifically, the first two entries suggest that the Soviet scientists are looking for ways to increase the energy released by the fission of strategically important elements (that is, elements of relevance to energy release in weapons or reactors, including, but not limited to, uranium and thorium). Such an interest would be esoteric in the context of pure nuclear physics. And to identify the phenomenon with certainty, very precise measurements of the energies of neutrons would be needed; hence a reason for the initial entry. The logbooks suggest that, upon arriving at Dubna, Bruno was consulted on questions relating to the production of atomic and thermonuclear bombs.\n\nOnce this particular task was completed, he was consulted on other secret matters, which explains the ten-month gap in the record. We know that, in general, Bruno discussed aspects of nuclear reactors with Pomeranchuk and others. If he performed any detailed work for the Soviets on reactor physics (or uranium), it must have taken place during this gap, between November 1950 and September 1951. After that, he then took up full-time work on particle physics at Dubna.\n\nSTRANGE PARTICLES\n\nIn 1951, Bruno was thirty-eight years old, and in the prime of life. Over and above his initial significance for the Soviet government's nuclear program, he played an active role in the work at Dubna. He both inspired new lines of research, and helped drive existing lines forward. The most significant new line of inquiry he was involved in dealt with the so-called strange particles.\n\nThree years before Bruno fled to the USSR, physicists had discovered \"strange\" particles in cosmic rays. They were dubbed strange because they lived for about a hundred-millionth of a second, which, although short by everyday standards, is about a million billion times longer than expected. To illustrate the unexpected duration of these particles, one scientist said, \"It's as if Cleopatra fell off her barge in 40 BC and hasn't hit the water yet.\"\n\nAs we saw earlier, one goal of the research at Dubna was to understand pions\u2014the particles that are the embodiment of nuclear energy. A single pion contains about one-seventh of the energy normally locked within a proton or neutron, similar to the amount liberated in a single fission of uranium. So the discovery of a \"strange\" sibling, about three times heavier (and thus possessing three times the energy of a pion), was tantalizing. This new particle became known as the kaon, or K-meson.\n\nThe Dubna synchrocyclotron was powerful enough to make pions, but in 1950 did not have enough energy to make the more massive kaon, and solve the mystery of strangeness. The enigma began to be unraveled after another strange particle turned up in the debris from cosmic collisions in 1951: the Lambda. A Lambda is like a neutron that carries this mysterious strangeness. And, in the Soviet Union, it was Bruno who made the breakthrough that helped scientists understand it.\n\nIn 1951, soon after the discovery of the Lambda, Bruno wrote a classified paper in which he drew attention to the anomalous properties of the strange particles. This articulated the possibility that \"the process of formation of these particles is not the reverse of their decay.\" In other words, even though strange particles are produced by the strong force in pairs, they decay individually due to the weak force\u2014the same universal weak force that Bruno helped identify in 1947. A kaon and a Lambda are born together but die alone. Bruno proposed the idea of what is now called \"associated production\": this states that strange particles are born in pairs, but then part company. The strong interaction only operates when the two of them are close together, after which they are freed from its snare and the weak force takes over. The weak force is very feeble, however, compared to the strong, which is why an isolated strange particle can survive for an unexpectedly long time.\n\nBruno may have been the first scientist to make that insight, but he remained flummoxed as to what made particles such as the kaon and Lambda \"strange,\" whereas the proton, neutron, and pion were \"normal.\" Other scientists would solve that conundrum.\n\nThe answer is that, just as some particles carry electric charge, while others do not, some particles carry this attribute of strangeness. You cannot create a positive or negative electric charge in isolation; every positive charge must be balanced by a negative charge, and vice versa. A similar idea applies to strangeness. The kaon has, let's say, one unit of positive strangeness, and the Lambda has a negative unit of the same value. The protons and neutrons in the nucleus have no strangeness, so when a proton in a cosmic ray or an accelerator collides with a nucleus, the creation of a Lambda (negative strangeness) must be counterbalanced by the simultaneous appearance of a kaon (positive strangeness). The total strangeness remains zero.\n\nBruno, however, had not conceived of positive and negative strangeness, so the system he developed only required that strange particles appear in pairs. For example, we now know that a collision between two neutrons cannot spawn two Lambdas, as the latter pair carries two negative units of strangeness, whereas Bruno mistakenly thought that this reaction was possible.\n\nAlthough Dubna lacked the energy necessary to make kaons, it did have enough to produce Lambdas. In a Dubna report from 1953, which was classified as secret, he proposed a search for the reaction described above, in which two colliding neutrons spawn two Lambdas. However, when Bruno and his colleagues carried out the experiment in 1954, there was no sign of Lambda particles. Indeed, no such reaction has been seen to this day.\n\nBy 1954 the Cosmotron had begun operating in the United States, smashing protons into targets at energies far in excess of what Dubna could achieve. The Cosmotron could even make beams of pions, and direct them at atomic nuclei. The result: a kaon emerged along with a Lambda. Thus Bruno Pontecorvo had correctly identified the phenomenon of associated production, but had failed to realize its deeper significance.\n\nIn any case, he received no credit for his insight. Like the tree that falls in the forest with no one to hear, Pontecorvo's work was unknown outside of Dubna. That same year, in the US, theorist Abraham Pais had independently come up with the idea, and many textbooks credit him alone with the discovery.\n\nThe hypothesis had far-reaching consequences. In 1961, the concept of strangeness inspired American physicist Murray Gell Mann to propose the \"Eightfold Way\" scheme for classifying strongly interacting particles. This in turn led to discovery of a deeper layer of reality that exists within these particles: they are made of smaller particles called quarks.\n\nLIFE IN THE USSR\n\nWhen the Pontecorvos arrived in Dubna in 1950, barrack dormitories surrounded the town. Beria's Gulag prisoners, with uniforms and shaved heads, were building the roads. Bruno saw these workers, but gave them no special attention. Years later he said that he didn't know who they were or why they had been imprisoned, and that \"there are laws in every country and when broken this can lead to imprisonment.\" Yet he was also aware that \"there had been great trials and death sentences. I knew people were detained in camps and prisons. I thought, as a million other communists, that this was the inevitable consequence of the class struggle still in process.\"\n\nBruno too was still a prisoner, albeit in a gilded cage. On one hand, living in Dubna gave him plentiful access to food and conveniences of a higher quality than those available to the general Soviet populace at that time. However, if anyone wanted to leave the limited area around the laboratory encampments, they had to obtain special permission. For Bruno the restrictions were even tighter. No documents or books could be taken from the lab for work at home. His logbooks were locked in the laboratory safe overnight. And there were other, more serious, constraints as well.\n\nWhenever he left his house, even for the short walk to the laboratory, two guards accompanied him, supposedly for protection. Given that Dubna was a restricted area whose inmates\u2014for at times that is how Bruno saw them\u2014were specially selected, the concept of protection seemed absurd. The guards did play an important role, however: they prevented Bruno from speaking to strangers as he walked. One of the guards had a habit of whistling, which annoyed Bruno. When this man was assigned to accompany him, Bruno would walk fast and get to his destination quickly to minimize the time spent in his presence.\n\nThis enforced isolation even extended to his social life.\n\nIn the West, it had been customary for scientists to visit one another's homes, for their families to have dinner together and take communal trips on the weekends. Bruno experienced none of this during his five secret years at Dubna. He worked closely with colleagues at the laboratory, had lunch with them in the canteen, and then returned to his home in the woods, always accompanied by his KGB minders. Social contact with his fellow scientists, whose houses were in glades among the trees near his own, was nonexistent. No one ever invited him to their home. Bruno, the gregarious extrovert who thrived in company, was trapped by a cordon sanitaire.\n\nBRUNO MAXIMOVITCH PONTECORVO\n\nWe have seen how Pomeranchuk would refer to Bruno only as \"the professor.\" Even in Dubna itself, this denial of Pontecorvo's identity was the norm. He was simply the professor, whose first name was Bruno.\n\n**IMAGE 15.2.** Bruno and Marianne at Dubna. (COURTESY GIL PONTECORVO; PONTECORVO FAMILY ARCHIVES.)\n\nRussians traditionally address one another by their given name and their patronymic\u2014this second name essentially meaning \"son or daughter of X.\" Bruno, however, was called simply \"Bruno,\" the only identity allowed for the professor. This caused embarrassment. The formalities of the Soviet Union in the 1950s meant that colleagues could no more address him as \"Bruno\" than a member of the general public in England could have greeted the prime minister as \"Winston.\" The problem was solved when one of Bruno's senior colleagues asked him for the first name of his father. On learning that it was Massimo, his colleagues agreed to call him \"Bruno Maximovitch.\" Once his presence was officially acknowledged in 1955, he would be known socially and professionally as B. M. Pontecorvo.\n\nEven his children had lost their family name. At school they were known as Gil, Tito, and Antonio Ivanov. Gil confirmed that Bruno's presence in Dubna was a state secret, necessitating the peculiar name change: \"Being called Ivanov was strange, but we didn't care much.\" Bruno's assessment was more blunt: \"Some things had to be kept secret.\"\n\nBruno and his family were effectively in exile. In the judgment of a former head of MI5, it sounded like the Soviets didn't trust him. There are similarities here to the cases of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, of the infamous Cambridge Five spy ring. Following their defection to the USSR in 1951, Burgess and Maclean were exiled to the industrial city of Kuibishev for several months, while \"a thorough check of their credentials was made to ensure that they had not been turned.\" Their presence in the Soviet Union was also initially kept secret; Philby's role in both their defection and Bruno's had to be protected. According to Chapman Pincher, \"The KGB always put the safety of its agents first, [and preferred] silence to any short-term propaganda gain.\"\n\nWhereas Bruno suffered, Marianne considered the isolation \"not a problem,\" as she had been almost pathologically averse to social life to begin with. In the United States, when she had balked at meeting the Fermis, Bruno had admonished her. In Dubna, there were no social appointments to avoid. Marianne, who was \"always silent and a little distant,\" was beginning to \"forget names, appointments and things.\" She would \"read for hours, or remain lying on the bed, gazing out of the window at the trees.\" In these descriptions, given to Miriam Mafai years later, Bruno reveals Marianne in a state of depression, en route to the psychological breakdown that would eventually lead to long periods in a sanatorium.\n\nBRUNO AND POLITICS\n\nFor Bruno's first five years in the Soviet Union, he was unknown to all but a handful of people there. To the Western media, his disappearance remained an enigma, as it did to his family and friends.\n\nBruno recalled, \"I read _Pravda_ each day, and occasionally saw _L'Unit\u00e0_. Even so, it was difficult if not impossible to get a rounded view of world events.\" An example of this difficulty occurred in 1953, shortly before Stalin died, during the coverage of the so-called Doctors' Plot, in which several Jewish doctors were arrested \"for aiming to remove by harmful treatment the lives of the active leaders of the USSR.\" Bruno read this coverage in the cloistered confines of Dubna. He decided that the claims might be true: \"I believed it. Not the actual words, as they were simply propaganda, but the substance could have been true. In history there are plenty of examples of political assassinations around the world. It was 1953, the height of the Cold War [and] of rebuilding the Soviet economy. Killing Stalin could have been a real objective.\"\n\nOne of the doctors died in prison, and the others would undoubtedly have been shot if Stalin himself had not died on March 5, 1953. Within weeks, the state news agency announced that the whole case had been a \"misunderstanding\" and that the surviving doctors had been released. Speaking in 1990, Bruno interpreted this as a sign of a \"political struggle taking place within the Kremlin. I did not know much about this fight. It might seem inexplicable now, but [at the time] I believed [the reports].\"\n\nStalin maintained control by the periodic use of terror. Bruno was not overly concerned about this. He defended Stalin's harshness on the grounds that it had saved the October Revolution and defeated Nazism, drawing analogies to the Jacobin Reign of Terror that had saved the French Revolution.\n\nFor many in the Soviet Union, Stalin was a hero, who had saved them from the Nazis. Nonetheless, he feared the power of the United States, as well as the other Western nations, who had attempted to crush the Bolshevik Revolution in its infancy, and then developed atomic weapons without informing their Soviet ally. One reason Fuchs, Nunn May, and other sympathetic Western scientists had passed atomic secrets to the Soviets was because they believed it was vital for the West's power to be balanced by that of the USSR, which would require both sides to possess nuclear weapons.\n\nAt the time of Stalin's death, Bruno, like millions of others in the USSR, still had great faith in the communist state and its leaders. The entire nation went into mourning. Hundreds of thousands filed past Stalin's coffin, and many died of suffocation within the crush of people in Red Square. Bruno, however, was not among them; he was still trapped in Dubna, listening to the radio's coverage of the events. Gil, by then fourteen years old, took note of the occasion: there was \"a week or ten days of solemn music on the radio. It was the first time I appreciated classical music.\"\n\nIn 1954 Bruno joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Whereas this normally involved a lengthy application process, in which two existing members served as guarantors and the applicant was required to surmount various hurdles, Bruno simply told the local party secretary that he wanted to register\u2014\"and my request was automatically accepted.\" He soon found that Soviet party meetings were a far cry from his prewar experiences in Paris, however. In those earlier meetings, \"the leaders had the last word but the debate took place. Here, there was none.\" At Dubna, to Bruno's surprise, \"the meetings discussed more personal matters than politics. Much of the time was taken up with examination of the individual conduct of members of the cell. I found it somewhat medieval, talking about this in public and justifying one's behaviour. I felt it an undue interference in personal life.\" Typically the cell would hear reports of a man who was frequently drunk, or a woman who was betraying her husband. Bruno later confessed, \"I was never able to understand the true meaning of this ceremony, which was a kind of confession of sins where punishment or absolution was administered not by the priest but the secretary of the cell.\"\nSIXTEEN\n\nRESURRECTION\n\nWITHOUT WARNING, IN EARLY 1955, BRUNO SUDDENLY SURFACED. AT the time, there was a global campaign by the World Peace Council, calling for the destruction of all atomic weapons and a ban on building new ones. In February, an article in the Soviet newspaper _Isvestia_ associated Bruno's name with this campaign. Bruno was indeed interviewed by the paper, but he had no idea why the authorities had allowed this to happen: \"No one asked my opinion. A mid-level party official told me that a decision had been taken [that I should do this]. I had already realized that a person at my level does not decide anything.\"\n\nIn the article, he also explained the reasons for his defection. He revealed that in 1936 he had become a committed antifascist, and had learned \"undeniable facts\" about the USSR's leading role in the struggle against war. Later, after the explosion of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he had experienced \"moral suffering\" as a physicist. He also claimed that, in 1950, while still in Britain, he had been subjected to intolerable \"direct questioning and systematic blackmail by the police authorities.\" He had quit the West in order to maintain his personal dignity because preparations for the military use of atomic energy made him \"ashamed of my profession.\"\n\nIn 1950, Guido Pontecorvo told MI5 that, according to Gillo, Bruno had become apolitical at Chalk River and Harwell because it \"suited his circumstances.\" We might similarly conclude that, in 1955, Bruno's professed devotion to peace, and his criticism of Western scientists for their moral failure, suited his circumstances in that it undoubtedly pleased his new masters.\n\nCertainly Bruno's statement ignores the fact that there had been many peace-loving physicists in the UK, who had preached their message throughout his time at Harwell. Given his close relationship with these scientists, and the media attention they received, it is inconceivable that he could have been unaware of their initiative. For example, Herbert Skinner, his former colleague at Harwell, was one of a growing group of British physicists concerned about nuclear weapons. Another member of this group was Rudolf Peierls, who had initiated the atomic project in 1941, was a close friend of Klaus Fuchs, and served as a consultant at Harwell. Peierls had taken part in the Manhattan Project because, as a Jewish \u00e9migr\u00e9 from Nazi Germany, he feared that the Nazis would create a nuclear weapon. When Germany surrendered, the moral justification for working on the atomic bomb ended, as far as he was concerned.\n\nThe same was true for many scientists. Peierls led a significant number of UK physicists in a campaign against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In 1947 this group wrote to the _Times_ , making the case for international arms control. MI5 duly took note of this initiative, as did Senator Joseph McCarthy in the US. In July Skinner was part of a study group that produced a widely publicized paper on the subject, which was even noted by highly placed Soviet politicians. When President Truman revealed the US government's interest in the hydrogen bomb at the start of 1950, the news was so upsetting to many British scientists, including Nobel laureate George Thomson, that they joined with American physicists in urging the president to publicly refuse to use the weapon. Peierls and other scientists published letters in major newspapers. For the rest of the year, there were articles in the media, describing the scientists' concerns about the bomb. The _Daily Mirror_ even ran the story on its front page in March. Throughout Pontecorvo's time at Harwell, such issues were debated widely among physicists, but there was no sign that he himself was ever active in the movement.\n\nThe ultimate irony, perhaps, is that the position offered to Pontecorvo in Liverpool had opened up due to the departure of Joseph Rotblat, who left the Manhattan Project on grounds of conscience, became one of the most vociferous critics of the arms race, and later won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work. In his statement of 1955, Bruno Pontecorvo speaks as if none of this ever happened.\n\nThe timing of Bruno's coming out has some significance. The USSR had by then built an arsenal of atomic weapons and detonated its first hydrogen bomb, and its nuclear-reactor program was well advanced. Stalin had died and his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, was preparing to embrace a new strategy called \"Atoms for Peace\" at the Geneva Summit. This strategy promoted the idea that nuclear energy could be used for peaceful purposes, such as generating electricity or powering ships, rather than for purposes of destruction, and was intended to show that the Soviet Union wanted peaceful coexistence. It therefore suited Soviet propaganda to present Bruno Pontecorvo as a peace lover who had never worked on the atomic bomb.\n\nAlso, two of the key reasons for keeping Pontecorvo's presence in the USSR secret had disappeared a few months earlier. The KGB was always careful to maintain firewalls around its agents, even once they were back in the Soviet Union. In 1954, the Cohens, who had been extracted from the United States in 1950 and brought to Moscow just weeks before Bruno arrived, were sent to England to run a new spy ring under the aliases Helen and Peter Kroger. By this time MI5 also knew of Kim Philby's treachery and had removed him from security work, so in 1955 there were fewer reasons for the KGB to be concerned about Pontecorvo.\n\nALTHOUGH WESTERN GOVERNMENTS HAD LONG SUSPECTED THAT Bruno was in the USSR, this confirmation nonetheless created a sensation in the global media. In response, the Soviets arranged a press conference for March 4, during which selected journalists would speak to Bruno at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Bruno later admitted, \"The prospect of appearing at a press conference bothered me a little. I didn't know what questions I would be asked and I prepared for a long time.\"\n\nAt four o'clock in the afternoon, Bruno arrived in the hall of what used to be the czar's summer palace. He wore a dapper gray suit, with the tip of a white handkerchief poking out from its breast pocket, and sported the gold medal and red ribbon of the Stalin Prize on his right lapel. Two interpreters accompanied him, and he addressed the hall in Italian.\n\nHe began: \"Journalists, friends, companions, I knew that after my appeal many journalists would want to meet me so I have come here for a frank and friendly exchange of views and to have a chat with the world's press. The Atlantic powers want war, [whereas] my time in the USSR has convinced me that the Soviet people want peace. The government of the USSR is taking all possible measures to prevent war. I appeal to all honest men, and in particular scientists, to take a stand. Today one cannot simply remain a spectator.\"\n\nHe concluded his statement by asking the press to send greetings from himself, Marianne, and the children to all their relatives, and in particular to his and Marianne's parents, who for nearly five years had received no news of them. With that, reporters thrust their hands in the air, anxious to ask questions.\n\nWhat followed was a tightly controlled question-and-answer session. When one journalist asked about the circumstances of Bruno's flight to the USSR, he refused to answer. The reporters learned something of his life since his arrival in the country, however. He revealed that he split his time between his Moscow apartment and his house at the Dubna site, near the laboratory, where he conducted experiments with the giant cyclotron, and that he had received the Stalin Prize \"for work on high energy physics.\" In answer to a question about his citizenship, he held up an identity document and announced that he had been a Soviet citizen since 1952.\n\nThe audience wanted to know what his work consisted of. He offered to explain what \"high-energy particle physics\" was, but added, \"I doubt you would understand.\" When asked if this work had any military applications, he replied, \"Absolutely not. I have never worked in areas that could impact the military.\" To the follow-up question (\"Do the results have no applications to atomic weapons?\"), he maintained his position: \"The USSR government has a tireless campaign for the prohibition of atomic weapons, which cannot be said for the USA.\" He added, \"When I came to the USSR I made several proposals in atomic energy, all of a peaceful nature,\" and explained that he had also discussed issues of radiation-protection in nuclear power plants.\n\nAfter two hours, the conference came to an end. One result was that on May 24, 1955, the United Kingdom revoked his citizenship. This is an extremely rare occurrence.\n\nAs far as the Soviets were concerned, Bruno must have performed satisfactorily, as the next day he and Marianne were allowed to write letters to their parents, their first communication with them\u2014or indeed with anyone outside the USSR\u2014in five years. Speaking thirty-five years later to Miriam Mafai, Pontecorvo claimed that communications during the preceding years had not technically been forbidden: \"No one said we could not write. But we did not write.\" Then he added enigmatically, \"There are things that you cannot understand.\" When I asked Mafai for her interpretation of Bruno's statement, she said, \"There are things you can only understand if you are communist.\"\n\n**IMAGE 16.1.** Bruno Pontecorvo's British naturalization certificate, overwritten with removal of citizenship on May 24, 1955. (AUTHOR, THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES.)\n\nWith respect to Bruno and Marianne's parents, letters were as good as it would ever get. Travel outside the USSR remained off limits to the couple. Marianne was refused an exit visa to attend her mother's funeral in 1967. When Bruno's mother died in 1958, and his father in 1975, the Soviets similarly denied him permission to attend the funerals\u2014despite the fact that Gil was granted an exit visa to attend a conference in Italy at the end of 1974. Bruno did invite his parents to the USSR, but they declined. And although though they could write to their son, they could not know where he lived: Bruno's official address in the Soviet Union was a post office box.\n\nAFTER STALIN DIED, NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV OVERSAW SIGNIFICANT changes in the Soviet state and its relations with the West. In 1956, the Hungarian Revolution against Soviet control led to the collapse of the Hungarian government, along with a decision to hold free elections and withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. Moscow could not tolerate this affront to its authority. On November 1, Russian troops entered Hungary and put down the uprising.\n\nFor supporters of communism in the West, this was probably the most serious crisis of conscience since the Soviet pact with the Nazis in 1939. The explanation put out by the Soviet authorities was that dissatisfaction in Hungary had been exploited by fascists and Western powers, which had led Hungarian patriots to call for aid from the USSR in smashing the insurrection. Even within the Soviet Union, a number of intellectuals found this story implausible, but Pontecorvo was prepared to accept the official version of events, and rationalize the invasion as a necessary act.\n\nFor Bruno, loyalty to the USSR was one of the first responsibilities of anyone who believed in communism. Mafai, after interviewing him in 1990, described the focus of a committed communist of the Cold War era as follows: \"Loyalty to the USSR is the essential core of his identity. Every decision, every act of their life is dedicated to support the USSR.\" Bruno was devastated a few months later when he learned that his favorite brother, Gillo, like many European intellectuals, saw the invasion of Hungary as an act of Soviet aggression, and had quit the Italian Communist Party. Bruno could not understand Gillo's lack of commitment to the cause. Nevertheless, in his later years, Bruno seemed to want to distance himself from this loyalist stance. In 1990 he described himself coyly as having been interested in physics and tennis, and not in politics.\n\nPROFESSOR PONTECORVO\n\nDuring his time in the West, Pontecorvo had begun to consider how one might detect neutrinos emitted by nuclear reactors, or by the sun. By 1955, Bruno's existence had been confirmed, but his beloved neutrino still remained hypothetical.\n\nIt was around that time that V. P. Peshkov, one of the top experimentalists at the Institute of Nuclear Problems in Moscow, told one of his graduate students, I. I. Medvedev, to think about how one might detect neutrinos, which, if the prevailing theory was correct, were pouring from nuclear reactors in great numbers. Peshkov was a senior member of the State Committee for Science and Technology, and well connected politically. One consequence of Peshkov's position was that he had access to operating nuclear reactors. It was this that led him to muse about their possible role in revealing the neutrino.\n\nMedvedev knew that Semen Gershtein, one of his fellow students, was interested in the weak interaction (the fundamental force responsible for beta decay) as well as the idea of the neutrino. So he made contact with Gershtein to discuss the problem. Hardly anyone took the pursuit of neutrinos seriously at the time, so when Gershtein and Medvedev learned that Bruno Pontecorvo\u2014one of the world's foremost experts in neutrinos\u2014was in residence at Dubna, with an apartment in Moscow, they decided to consult him about the feasibility of conducting an experiment to detect them. To their surprise, they soon realized that Pontecorvo had the answers ready almost before they had asked the questions.\n\nOne problem in detecting a ghostly neutrino is that, once you have captured a faint signal, how can you be sure it is from a neutrino and not from some other source? Cosmic rays contribute to this problem. Although the atmosphere acts like an umbrella and cuts out or disintegrates the powerful primary cosmic-ray particles, there is still a gentle rain of secondary particles at ground level, enough to mask the faint trace of a neutrino in a detector. Pontecorvo recommended that the students put their detector underneath the reactor so as to increase the protection against cosmic rays. He even estimated their chances of success, and provided details on the necessary equipment.\n\nIt was obvious that he had already given much thought to the subject. At the end of the conversation, Gershtein asked why he had not performed the experiment himself. Bruno blushed, as he frequently did when he felt uncertain, and avoided answering. During further discussions, Gershtein repeated the question, and Pontecorvo reluctantly, and \"with embarrassment,\" revealed that he had wanted to perform the experiment soon after his arrival but was forbidden access \"to any reactor.\"\n\nIgor Kurchatov had been an admirer of Bruno's work for several years, but even he\u2014the father of the Soviet atomic bomb\u2014was unable to convince the authorities to give Pontecorvo access to a reactor. Gershtein was astonished when he learned this, and years later expressed his belief that \"without doubt, if investigations had started in 1950, when many industrial reactors were already operating and new ones under construction, Bruno Pontecorvo could have been the first to detect neutrinos.\"\n\nThis folk wisdom is hard to sustain, however, as Pontecorvo's Dubna logbooks tell a different story. One journal contains notes, written toward the end of 1951, on the possibility of detecting neutrinos by means of the chlorine method, which he had advocated in 1946. He seems to have envisioned an experiment at a nuclear reactor. However, even if he had been given access to a reactor, he would not have succeeded in detecting neutrinos, for the same reason that Ray Davis failed to detect the neutrino in this way at an American reactor in 1955\u2014namely, that a reactor produces antineutrinos, which cannot be detected by this method. In 1956, Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines, working at the Savannah River nuclear reactor in South Carolina, succeeded in confirming the existence of these antineutrinos using a different approach. I found no evidence in Bruno's logbooks that he considered their method.\n\nFORMER FRIENDS\n\nWe saw how, in August 1950, days before Bruno left on his long journey from Rome to the Soviet Union, he had hoped to visit Edoardo Amaldi, but missed him because Amaldi was in the United States. During his time in North America, Amaldi witnessed the construction of the Cosmotron accelerator at Brookhaven, which gave him the idea that a similar accelerator should be constructed in Europe. This was the genesis of CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research, which was formally established in 1954, as a joint venture among twelve Western European countries. CERN's first accelerator was a relatively modest synchrocyclotron, completed in 1957, which was less powerful than that at Dubna. However, by 1959 CERN had finished construction on the Proton Synchrotron, which produced protons with about forty times more energy than Dubna's, and rivaled the Cosmotron for several years as the world's leader.\n\nFollowing CERN's example, the nations of the Warsaw Pact decided to launch a similar venture, based at Dubna. In 1956 the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) was inaugurated, and construction began on the Synchrophasotron, an accelerator with five times the power of Dubna's existing one. As before, most of the construction work was done by prisoners from the Gulag, and the entire site was hidden in the woods behind two fences and a high embankment. The tilled soil between the two rings of fences gave the area the appearance of the border between two rival states, the earth ready to reveal the footprints of anyone trying to sneak across.\n\nThe Synchrophasotron began operation in 1957, allowing scientists to explore new areas in nuclear and high-energy particle physics. However, it was unable to compete against the even-higher energies that would soon be produced by CERN's Proton Synchrotron, or against the sophisticated electronics available to researchers in the West.\n\nBruno's role in invigorating the experimental physics program at Dubna culminated in 1958, with his election to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Members of the Academy and their families enjoyed privileges that were utterly exceptional. In a country where quality goods were in short supply, an Academician had access to special stores that sold Western furniture, perfumes, and wine. Vacations in exclusive hotels also became possible, along with access to first-rate medical care and other benefits shared by those in the highest echelons of the party.\n\nIn terms of privilege and status, this lifestyle far exceeded that of most Western scientists. However, in one area Bruno still lost out: Western scientists were free to take international vacations, and to perform experiments anywhere they liked. In the USSR, foreign travel was all but forbidden, even to celebrated Academicians. Thus the occasion of a major international conference on high-energy particle physics, to be held in Kiev in 1959, gave Bruno a rare opportunity to meet colleagues from around the world.\n\nBY THIS POINT, THE EXISTENCE OF THE NEUTRINO HAD BEEN ESTABLISHED. However, Bruno still had questions about the mysterious particle. For example, under what circumstances do neutrinos maintain an identity, and what determines it?\n\nAt Chalk River, Bruno had pondered the relationship between the electron and the muon. By 1959 he was beginning to extend this line of thinking to neutrinos. He asked the following question: Are neutrinos that are produced along with electrons or positrons in beta decay the same as those produced along with a muon in the pion decay? In other words: Are \"electron-neutrinos\" the same as \"muon-neutrinos\"? At the conference, Bruno proposed that there might indeed be more than one variety of neutrino, and suggested ways of testing this idea in experiments, which will be described in the next chapter.\n\nBruno's presentation at the conference was a triumph; his interactions with his Western colleagues, however, were mixed. Nino Zichichi, then a young Italian researcher, met Bruno at the conference for the first time. He told me of his excitement at meeting Fermi's former student, who had done such important work in his youth and then disappeared. Those who had known Bruno in his former life were less welcoming.\n\nEdoardo Amaldi, who had developed the slow-neutron method with Bruno in 1934, acknowledged his former colleague only with a nod, according to Bruno's great friend from his Via Panisperna days, Gian Carlo Wick. Wick himself, according to Bruno, was \"very cool\" toward him. Luis Alvarez, a leading physicist from Berkeley, who had worked with Fermi and was a colleague of Segr\u00e8, had \"on many occasions expressed his suspicions\" about Bruno, following his defection. When Wick acknowledged Bruno's presence, Alvarez gave him an \"evil look\" for doing so\u2014or at least this is how Wick remembered the occasion later. Emilio Segr\u00e8\u2014in the opinion of Bruno and others who were present\u2014was especially harsh, snubbing his old friend entirely. Bruno's impression, as he told Miriam Mafai years later, was that people he'd regarded as real friends ten years before, were now \"very icy\" and had \"never forgiven him\" for his move to the Soviet Union.\n\n**IMAGE 16.2.** Bruno Pontecorvo, c. 1980, with signature in Cyrillic script. (COURTESY GIL PONTECORVO; PONTECORVO FAMILY ARCHIVES.)\nSEVENTEEN\n\nMR. NEUTRINO\n\nWHEN THE MYSTERIES OF NEUTRINOS WERE FINALLY SOLVED, IT enabled other puzzles in particle physics and cosmology to be solved as well. Bruno Pontecorvo made several seminal contributions in this field. During his time in the West he identified the weak force, and during the second half of his life he realized that neutrinos were the key to learning more about this fundamental force, which is the key to the production of elements in stars. Thanks to neutrinos emitted from the heart of the sun, and to techniques inspired by Bruno Pontecorvo, we have established how the sun creates those elements. Neutrinos emitted by a supernova have even revealed what happens when a star collapses.\n\nBruno Pontecorvo not only inspired the use of neutrinos as a tool in cosmology; he also thought deeply about the nature of the neutrino itself. He was fascinated by the mystery of how a particle that is as close to nothing as anything we know\u2014with no electric charge, a mass so small that it has yet to be determined, and an extraordinary aversion to being detected\u2014could nonetheless come in two distinct varieties: those made of matter and those made of antimatter. How does a neutrino know its identity?\n\nJack Steinberger, who won the Nobel Prize in 1988 for his own work with neutrinos, summarized Pontecorvo's contributions as follows: \"There are few of us who can boast of a single original and important idea. Bruno's wealth of seminal suggestions establish him as a truly unique contributor to the remarkable advances of high energy physics in the latter half of the twentieth century.\"\n\nOf all Bruno's ideas, perhaps the most famous is his insight that neutrinos exist in more than one variety. This great contribution to physics is forever recorded on his memorial at the Campo Cestio in Rome, with an equation that declares the separate identities of the electron-neutrino and the muon-neutrino.\n\nSuch work is why Bruno Pontecorvo has been given the sobriquet \"Mr. Neutrino.\" The reasons he never won a Nobel Prize for any of these contributions are secreted in the closed archives of the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm. However, there is a consensus that this may be the price he paid for his flight to the USSR. Once in the Soviet Union, he was forced to publish in Russian journals, which meant that his work only appeared in English after a gap of about two years\u2014a disastrous delay in a competitive and fast-moving field. Also, because Bruno was not free to travel outside the USSR, he was unable to perform various crucial experiments. These restrictions limited his ability to test his ideas about the enigmatic neutrinos, and other scientists ended up gaining the spoils.\n\nANTIMATTER NEUTRINOS\n\nIn 1956, American physicists Fred Reines and Clyde Cowan confirmed the existence of the neutrino. The discovery owed nothing to Pontecorvo, but it would stimulate him to come up with a series of ideas.\n\nPontecorvo's 1946 paper advocated the use of chlorine as a target, and predicted that the impact of a neutrino would convert a neutron into a proton, thus changing the chlorine into a radioactive form of argon, which lies immediately next to chlorine in the periodic table of the elements. The neutrino, meanwhile, would turn into a negatively charged electron to conserve the total amount of electric charge throughout the process. This was not the approach that Cowan and Reines used. And, in fact, the neutrinos produced by a reactor do not generate this sequence of events. Instead, they convert a proton into a neutron, which would change chlorine into sulfur. And instead of turning into an electron, the neutrino becomes a positron\u2014the positively charged antiparticle of an electron. The conventional way to differentiate between these two alternatives is to say that, in the former case (where an electron emerges), a neutrino has struck, whereas in the latter case (where a positron emerges), it was an _antineutrino_ that made the impact. This makes sense if the terms _matter_ and _antimatter_ have some intrinsic meaning: a neutrino (matter) turns into an electron; an antineutrino (antimatter) turns into an antielectron, or positron. However, this raises the question of what it is about the antineutrino, as it flies through space, that identifies it as such, and differentiates it from a neutrino.\n\nPontecorvo began to ponder this question, and in 1957 gave a talk at the Dubna laboratory in which he suggested that a neutrino might transform into an antineutrino, or vice versa, in midflight. His idea stemmed from two circumstances. The first was a rumor, which turned out to be false, about Ray Davis's quest for neutrinos; the second was a discovery relating to a specific strange particle: the neutral kaon, or K-zero.\n\nBy this time it was clear that there were two electrically neutral strange particles, one with positive strangeness and the other with negative, known as the K-zero and the anti-K-zero, respectively. As their names suggest, one is the antiparticle of the other. Experiments had shown that when either of them decays, the debris can be a pair of pions. Quantum theory implied that a pair of pions from a K-zero decay could then come back together\u2014this time forming an anti-K-zero. Through this two-step process, a piece of electrically neutral matter could turn into antimatter. This possibility fascinated high-energy physicists. In 1957, Bruno wondered if this idea could also apply to neutrinos and antineutrinos.\n\nThe motivation for his conjecture seems to have been a game of telephone. In 1957, a rumor arrived in Dubna to the effect that the American experimentalist Ray Davis, who had been using Bruno's chlorine method, had detected neutrinos from a nuclear reactor. Bruno deduced that if the report was correct, the antineutrino that left the reactor must have have changed into a neutrino capable of triggering Davis's chlorine detector. Unaware that the rumor was false, he proposed that neutrinos and antineutrinos could \"oscillate\" back and forth, shifting their identities from one to the other.\n\nThe idea was extremely audacious, and was regarded by many as the \"fantasy of a prominent physicist.\" Scientists were skeptical because, according to quantum theory, such a transmutation could occur only if the neutrino had mass, and the received wisdom at the time was that it had none. This point became moot when the rumor about Davis's experiment was found to be false. In reality, Davis had not recorded any neutrinos at the reactor. This seemed to confirm the emerging conventional picture: a reactor produces antineutrinos, and there was no reason to suspect that an antineutrino can switch to become a neutrino.\n\nThus, in 1957, Pontecorvo's idea about oscillation was forgotten, though not by him. A few years later, he would resurrect it in a new guise\u2014one that we now know to be correct. For neutrinos are not massless, and although their mass is so trifling that it has not yet been measured, Pontecorvo's theory of \"neutrino oscillations\" has today become the focus of a whole branch of science. I shall return to this point later.\n\nSTELLAR NEUTRINOS\n\nDuring his time at Chalk River Bruno Pontecorvo had been intrigued by the muon. Indeed, it was he who had established that it was a relative of the electron\u2014and also that there was some unique character, other than its mass, that made it distinct from an electron. This enigmatic quality troubled Bruno, as it did many others, and continues to be troubling even today. The image of the muon invaded his mind and would not go away. He did not determine what makes a muon different from an electron, other than its mass, but the kaleidoscope of confusion settled into an unexpected picture: Bruno realized that neutrinos might play an important role in astrophysics and cosmology.\n\nI can only guess how Bruno reached this conclusion, but we do know the basic pieces of his puzzle, and from these a possible path emerges. It is as follows:\n\nMuons are heavier than electrons. Due to Einstein's relation between mass and energy, a muon therefore has more energy locked within its mass than an electron. A muon can convert this energy into an electron, a neutrino, and an antineutrino. This is the traditional way that a muon decays. Bruno now imagined what might happen if an electron had a lot of energy: Could it shed that energy by \"radiating\" a neutrino and an antineutrino, analogous to the decay of a muon? There was no reason why not. How would an energetic electron do this, while maintaining the sacrosanct laws of energy- and momentum-balance? Bruno knew the answer: when an electron passes near an atomic nucleus, it picks up energy from the atom's electric field. It can then shed that energy by transmuting into a lower-energy electron, neutrino, and antineutrino.\n\nBruno's insight was truly novel, and momentous not just for particle physics but for cosmology as well.\n\nThe link lies inside of stars. The production of neutrinos involves the weak force. As its name suggests, the effects of this force are feeble relative to those of the electromagnetic force. This is why the production of neutrinos is normally so rare compared to the radiation of light. However, at high energies the relative power of the weak force grows. Bruno realized that inside stars that are much hotter than the sun, the weak force becomes more powerful, potentially comparable to the electromagnetic force, in which case the production of neutrinos could, in theory, occur as easily as the radiation of photons.\n\nNeutrinos penetrate matter much more easily than photons do. This leads to a startling consequence. Whereas most photons are absorbed within the stellar mass, neutrinos produced in the heart of a star can escape. The implication, which Bruno pointed out in his paper of April 1958, is this: \"At some stage in the evolution of a star, it may well be that the energies radiated into space in the form of neutrinos and photons become comparable.\" Thirty years later this insight would be confirmed when a burst of neutrinos was detected coming from a distant supernova\u2014SN1987A.\n\nTHE FLAVORED NEUTRINO\n\nBruno's work on neutrinos became vital in saving a developing theory of the weak force.\n\nAccording to Fermi's theory of beta decay, the interactions of neutrinos (and weak-force interactions in general) are not always feeble. Instead, the chance of a reaction depends sensitively on the energies of the particles involved. Double their energy and the chance increases fourfold; triple their energy and the chance increases by a factor of nine. In general, the growth is proportional to the square of the energy.\n\nHowever, this chance cannot grow indefinitely in reality, for if it did, at a certain point it would imply that some processes occur with greater than 100 percent probability, even infinite probability, which is nonsense. So Fermi's theory can only be an approximation of some more complete explanation.\n\nIn 1956, Julian Schwinger, the American theorist who shared a Nobel Prize for his work on the electromagnetic force, made a crucial proposal about the weak force, which went beyond Fermi's theory. In a nutshell, Schwinger suggested that the weak force and the electromagnetic force have something in common.\n\nElectromagnetic radiation comes in particle bundles\u2014photons. In quantum theory, the electromagnetic force between two particles arises when they exchange photons. Schwinger suggested that a similar process occurs for the weak force. He predicted the existence of the W (\"weak\") boson, analogous to the photon. In Schwinger's hypothesis, particles experience the weak force when they exchange W bosons.\n\nThis was confirmed in 1983 with the discovery of the W boson, but in 1956 it was just a hypothesis. Nonetheless, the idea was compelling. In addition to its seductive implication that two fundamental forces (electromagnetic and weak) were analogous and could perhaps be united theoretically, it also avoided the nonsensical probabilities implicit in Fermi's original model. When particles interact at high energies, W bosons can be produced. When this new process is included in the quantum accounts, the troubles with Fermi's model disappear.\n\nAlmost immediately there was a problem. Soon after Schwinger had made his suggestion, another American theorist, Gerald Feinberg, noticed that if the weak force is indeed due to the action of W bosons, there is an unwanted implication for the decay of the muon. By this stage it had been established that a muon decays into an electron and two neutrinos. If this occurs through the intermediate action of a W boson, as Schwinger proposed, the laws of quantum mechanics imply that you can do away with the neutrinos and have the muon decay into an electron and a photon. However, no example of such behavior had ever been seen. Feinberg calculated that one in every ten thousand decays should result in an electron and photon. This is a small percentage, but the experimental data already showed that if there were any such decays at all, they at most accounted for one in a hundred million  Schwinger's theory looked to be in trouble.\n\nFeinberg did point out, however, that there was a loophole in his argument: he had assumed that the neutrino associated with the muon and the neutrino paired with the electron were the same. If a \"muon-neutrino\" differs from an \"electron-neutrino,\" there is no problem. Having made this observation, Feinberg took it no further.\n\nBRUNO NOW MADE HIS FIRST INTERVENTION. HIS PAPER ON \"ELECTRON and Muon Neutrinos\" was written on June 29, 1959. He was not actually the first to have pursued the implications of Feinberg's observation\u2014Jogesh Pati and Sadao Oneda in the US had written a paper earlier that year, in which they \"deliberately\" denoted a distinct \"neutral counterpart of the muon\" (the muon-neutrino) as well as a neutral counterpart of the electron (the electron-neutrino). They pointed out that if the two were actually identical, then a muon could decay into an electron and a photon. If they were not identical, then this could not occur. Bruno also understood this. However, his efforts in Dubna would go further toward finding a definitive answer to the problem.\n\nInitially, the primary goal of the scientists at Dubna was to investigate how the strong forces of the atomic nucleus produce pions, which are the material embodiment of the energy latent in the nuclear field. A pion is not stable. It self-destructs, leaving either a muon or an electron, accompanied by a neutrino. The traditional decays of nuclear particles produce electrons (or positrons) and neutrinos. Once in every ten thousand decays, the pion does also, but most of the time it decays into a muon and a neutrino. In 1959 Bruno Pontecorvo started wondering: Are the neutrinos produced when a pion decays into a muon the same as those emitted in conventional beta decays?\n\nHe began by systematically listing all processes in which neutrinos occur, then moved the subject forward by identifying practical experimental ways of identifying a neutrino's character. He showed that although neutrinos and antineutrinos could be identified as distinct, the question remained open empirically as to whether muon- and electron-neutrinos are different or identical.\n\nIn Bruno's paper, one section was titled \"Are muon-neutrino and electron-neutrino identical particles?\" He acknowledged that the possibility that they are distinct would be \"attractive from the point of view of symmetry and the classification of particles.\" His point is that the muon and electron have distinct \"flavors,\" so if their neutral counterparts occur in two flavors also, there would be symmetry among these particles. Today this is a basic plank of the Standard Model, which classifies the fundamental forces and the interactions among them.\n\nBruno evidently suspected that the two neutrinos were indeed different, because in his paper he introduced the nomenclature and notation that is universally used today. The particles became known as \"muon-neutrinos\" and \"electron-neutrinos\" forever onward. In the shorthand notation of particle physicists they are written \u03bd\u03bc and \u03bde, respectively.\n\nIT IS NOT UNUSUAL IN SCIENCE FOR A GREAT IDEA TO OCCUR TO MORE than one person, independently. The fact that one person is remembered and another forgotten can be due to many factors: chance, opportunity, or the confidence to follow through on what others might regard as crazy. And when that \"crazy\" idea turns out to be sensible after all, and winner and loser have talked to each other along the way, versions of history can diverge, as memories differ of who did what.\n\nThe saga of how the idea of two neutrinos matured into established lore is a paradigm of such divergence. This tale begins in Moscow, in 1957, with a colleague of Bruno's named Moisy Markov.\n\nMarkov was interested in the neutrinos that are produced when cosmic rays hit the upper atmosphere. The collisions produce pions and muons, which in turn shed neutrinos. These can have considerable energy, far more than the neutrinos from nuclear reactors, the main source in the 1950s. Markov wondered how scientists could detect these \"atmospheric neutrinos.\" He decided this might be a good project for his student Igor Zheleznykh to investigate.\n\nZheleznykh designed a detector. It contained one cubic meter of lead, and was placed deep underground, where it would be shielded from other cosmic ray particles. By 1958, Zheleznykh had shown that the chance of neutrinos interacting with the target grows considerably with their energy. He also remarked, \"Different numbers of electrons and muons induced by neutrinos in a detector could give evidence of the existence of two types of neutrino.\" Like Feinberg, he did not pursue this any further.\n\nDuring his research, Zheleznykh had stumbled onto a second profound question: Why make calculations only for high-energy atmospheric neutrinos? Why not consider performing neutrino experiments at high-energy accelerators? One evening, late in 1957, Zheleznykh visited Markov at home and asked him.\n\nIt turns out that Markov had already asked himself this very question, in connection with the Synchrophasotron, the new higher-energy accelerator planned for Dubna, but had dismissed the idea as impractical. Impractical at Dubna, maybe, but it was an interesting challenge in principle: the experiment might be feasible somewhere, someday. Zheleznykh's question led Markov to reconsider the problem. He went to discuss the idea with Bruno Pontecorvo: \"I told [Pontecorvo] that I would like to suggest neutrino experiments at accelerators. [He] liked such an idea very much.\"\n\nInspired by Pontecorvo's enthusiasm, Markov gave the problem to another student, Docho Fakirov, who included it in his thesis at Moscow State University in 1958. Markov decided to write a report, titled \"On High Energy Neutrino Physics,\" which he planned to present in 1959 at the conference on high-energy physics in Kiev. However, several colleagues were skeptical, with one influential physicist asking him, \"Are you serious?\" in a manner that clearly suggested the answer to be no. Markov withdrew the paper. It was a big mistake: Bruno Pontecorvo would be braver, and as a result it was he who was remembered for this advance.\n\nFINDING THE NEUTRINO HAD BEEN HARD ENOUGH; PROVING experimentally that there was more than one variety of the phantom particle would present a new level of difficulty. Bruno's idea was to replicate the Cowan-and-Reines discovery of the antineutrino, using a source of muon-antineutrinos instead of a nuclear reactor, which produces the electron variety.\n\nIn Cowan and Reines's experiment, the collision of an antineutrino with a proton converted the proton into a neutron and a positron. This led to the discovery of the electron-antineutrino. Bruno wanted to initiate this same process using antineutrinos produced in association with a muon. If neutrinos have distinct flavors, as he suspected, the subsequent collision with a proton should release a positive muon, not a positron; the production of a positron, on the other hand, would demonstrate that the two neutrinos are identical.\n\nThe next question was how best to conduct such an experiment. He noted that using antineutrinos of high energy would be advantageous, as the chance of interaction increases with energy. Thus a high-energy accelerator was needed. The basic idea was to smash a beam of high-energy protons into a target, which would liberate large numbers of positively charged pions. These decay into muons and antineutrinos. A steel shield would absorb the muons, but would be almost transparent to the antineutrinos. Several meters away, another large target would serve as an antineutrino detector. The antineutrinos would have high energy, and hence there would be a reasonable chance that occasionally one would hit an atom in the detector, pick up electric charge, and reveal itself.\n\nHe calculated that, with a detector similar to the one used by Cowan and Reines, one collision an hour might be detected \"at new accelerators now being discussed in which the intensity of the protons may be [a thousand times larger than at previous accelerators].\" He insisted that experiments to test the identity of muon- and electron-neutrinos \"must be seriously thought over\" when the new accelerators\u2014at CERN in Europe, and Brookhaven in the US\u2014became available.\n\nBruno mentioned some of these ideas at the end of July 1959, during the International Conference on High Energy Physics, in Kiev. He wrote a report under the auspices of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), which was formally published in the _Soviet Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics_ later that year. This article was written in Russian, of course, which limited its international reach. Bruno's remarks at the conference would have been translated, but there is no record that they had any memorable effect.\n\nThe following year Bruno wrote a second paper, in which he developed his earlier ideas. The first paper had dealt with antineutrinos; the 1960 paper considered how to test specifically for neutrinos of different flavors. He advocated using a high-energy accelerator to produce a beam of neutrinos, pointed at a lump of carbon. Any collisions would convert an atom of carbon into nitrogen.\n\nThe beams in an accelerator come in pulses, so the neutrinos they produce also arrive in distinct bursts, separated by a fraction of a second. Bruno realized that with modern electronics it would be possible to record the instant when a burst of neutrinos arrived at the carbon target and see if this coincided with the appearance of an electron. In this way, one could determine if the electron was a genuine signal produced by the collision, or if instead it had strayed out of an atom in the detector itself, and as such was merely background. The nitrogen produced in such a collision would be radioactive and would decay by emitting a positron. This would occur marginally later than the actual collision, and the time delay between the electron and the positron could be used as another check. Bruno had done everything possible to design a realistic experiment; now all that was required was an opportunity to perform it.\n\nUnfortunately, it would be impossible to do the experiment at Dubna. In November 1959, CERN's powerful Proton Synchrotron began operation, and could have served Bruno's purposes, but the Soviet authorities refused to allow him to leave the USSR. Two years would pass before Bruno's ideas were made available in English. By this time, it was too late: he had been scooped.\n\nIN THOSE DAYS, SOVIET IDEAS WERE LARGELY UNKNOWN IN THE US and Europe until they appeared in translation. This meant that ideas often developed independently in the two hemispheres. In New York, during November 1959, Chinese-American theorist T. D. Lee was pondering Fermi's theory on the behavior of weak interactions. Lee was unaware of Bruno Pontecorvo's ideas, let alone Markov's.\n\nAs we have seen, Fermi's theory was only an approximation of some complete explanation, since it gave impossible outcomes for the behavior of neutrinos at very high energy levels. Schwinger's hypothesis of the W boson solved that problem but ran into its own difficulties regarding the decays of muons. Lee therefore wanted to reveal the solutions to these problems experimentally. The challenge was to find a way to probe the weak interaction in high-energy experiments.\n\nWhile leading a discussion on this subject, Lee realized that such an experiment would be hard to perform because when particles collide at high energies, the effects of the electromagnetic and strong forces tend to obscure those of the weak force. Melvin Schwartz, a squat experimentalist with a bubbly personality, was one of those present. The lunchtime discussion must have entered his subconscious mind, as in bed that night Schwartz suddenly had the answer: \"It was incredibly simple. All one had to do was to use neutrinos.\" Neutrinos aren't affected by the strong force, and, being electrically neutral, they aren't affected by electromagnetic forces either. As such, Schwartz realized, they are ideal for probing the weak force. His idea was that the production of pions, and their subsequent decays, might produce neutrinos in sufficient numbers that they could be used in experiments.\n\nHe wrote a short paper outlining his ideas, which was published in 1960. Pontecorvo's paper had just appeared in English translation, and Schwartz included a comment at the end of his paper noting the \"related paper which has just appeared\" by Pontecorvo. He also thanked Lee, and Lee's collaborator C. N. Yang, for emphasizing the importance of high-energy neutrino interactions.\n\nPontecorvo's ideas about the two distinct flavors of neutrinos were not included in Schwartz's paper. However, in the meantime Lee and Yang had been thinking about what might be learned from these experiments. By the summer of 1960 they had reached the same conclusion as Pontecorvo: the absence of muon decay into electron and photon could be the smoking gun proving that the muon-neutrino and electron-neutrino differed. This became the quarry to chase.\n\nIn July 1960 the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) began operations at Brookhaven. Slightly more powerful than CERN's Proton Synchrotron, the AGS was for the next eight years the world's highest-energy machine. One of the first experiments at the new accelerator led to Nobel Prizes for the three leaders\u2014Melvin Schwartz, Jack Steinberger, and Leon Lederman. In essence they performed the experiment that, unknown to them, Bruno had proposed, and found the result that he was hoping for: muon-neutrinos and electron-neutrinos are distinct. In addition they demonstrated that, at the new high-energy accelerators, the neutrinos are less shy, as Zheleznykh had deduced in 1958, and thereby become useful tools for science. During the next four decades, beams of high-energy neutrinos at accelerators throughout the world opened up new vistas in our understanding of the structure of matter, and the profound patterns at work in the fundamental laws of nature.\n\nThe idea that neutrinos have distinct flavors, which parallel those of their electrically charged siblings, electrons and muons, is one of the basic ingredients in the modern theory of fundamental particles, and today Bruno Pontecorvo is recognized as its parent. The American team had the grace to mention his independent insight when they accepted the Nobel Prize in 1988, with Schwartz remarking that Pontecorvo's \"overall contribution to the field of neutrino physics was certainly major.\"\n\nTHE TEAM'S NOBEL PRIZE WAS AWARDED FOR THE EXPERIMENTAL \"demonstration\" of distinct types of neutrino and for the \"neutrino beam method.\" Although Bruno's insights were central to the former, his claims on high-energy neutrino beams are peripheral. As we have seen, others in Moscow, whose work he must have been aware of, had taken the idea somewhat further, but had lacked confidence in their conclusions. Furthermore, as we shall now see, Bruno did not really advocate high-energy beams either.\n\nAlthough the experiment he proposed could have been done at CERN as well as at the AGS in Brookhaven, it is not clear whether Bruno would have chosen to perform it himself, even if he had been allowed to leave the USSR. His 1960 paper suggests that he was rather pessimistic about the practicality of the enterprise. He noted that the chance of a neutrino interacting grows with its energy, but he worried that, at very high energies, the quantity of neutrinos produced would be smaller. This is due to the time-dilation effect of relativity, which causes fast-moving particles to experience time slowed down, which in turn causes them to live longer. Thus high-energy pions, which are faster, live longer than lower-energy ones. It is the decays of pions that give rise to the beams of neutrinos, so if fewer pions decay, the number of neutrinos falls as well. As a result, Pontecorvo focused on neutrinos with moderate energies, rather than on the very high energies available at CERN.\n\nIn fact, he was overly pessimistic. At these high energy levels, the increased chance of interaction more than compensates for the reduction in the number of neutrinos. Also, the effects of collisions at high energy are easier to diagnose. Overall, the rule is: the higher the energy, the better.\n\nBRUNO CONCEIVES THE STANDARD MODEL\n\nEven after the American trio confirmed Bruno's theory that there is more than one variety of neutrino, there remained a further question: Do the two varieties respond to the weak force in precisely the same way? This would be the case if the weak interaction were truly a fundamental force of nature. In 1962 Bruno came up with a way to test the question.\n\nBruno's idea grew out of work that he and Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot-Curie had done twenty-five years before.\n\nIn 1937, Bruno and Joliot-Curie had tried to prove that the beta particles that emerge during radioactive decay are indeed electrons, and not just similar to electrons. They did this by firing electrons at atoms in the hope of inducing the transmutation in reverse\u2014what has become known as the inverse beta process. Their results were inconclusive because there are so many electrons in matter that it was hard to distinguish between signals and background. However, twenty-five years later Bruno remembered their attempt, and now realized that it should be possible to perform the experiment with muons, rather than electrons, and initiate the inverse beta process that way. When it hit the target, the muon would turn into a muon-neutrino, and the experiment could show whether the probability of a muon-induced reaction was the same as that of an electron-induced reaction. Because the neutrino is electrically neutral and would leave no trace as it escaped, it would be important to keep track of the corresponding change in the target to make sure that the reaction had occurred. To do so, he proposed using nuclei of helium-3, in which two protons are bound to a single neutron. If the inverse beta reaction occurred, the helium would convert to tritium\u2014made of one proton and two neutrons.\n\nIf a cloud chamber was filled with the helium-3 gas, any tritium formed by the reaction would recoil and leave a wispy trail. So the chamber would act as both a target and a track detector. The problem was that helium-3 was not easy to come by, especially in the Soviet Union. Fortunately, Igor Kurchatov was interested in Pontecorvo's ideas and provided him with sufficient helium-3 (a product of Kurchatov's nuclear weapon program) for the experiment to succeed.\n\nThe result was everything that Bruno had hoped for. He found that the weak interaction acts on muons and muon-neutrinos with the same strength as it does on electrons and electron-neutrinos. Pontecorvo had established the universal nature of the weak force: it acts on muon and electron flavors impartially.\n\nThis breakthrough, along with Bruno's earlier idea of distinct neutrino flavors, forms the core of today's Standard Model of particles and forces.\n\nSOLAR NEUTRINOS\n\nBruno Pontecorvo's 1946 paper, which had inspired Ray Davis's unsuccessful attempt to catch neutrinos coming from a reactor, only mentioned the sun in two sentences. However, the importance of the underlying concept is immense. Ten million solar neutrinos pass through your eyeballs every second, unseen. This is indeed a lot, but still not enough to be easily detected. Furthermore, the chlorine detector is blind to almost all of them.\n\nTo be seen, a neutrino first has to hit the nucleus of a chlorine atom. That is a rare enough occurrence, but it's still not sufficient to guarantee that the chlorine will convert into argon. The reason is that the argon nucleus has more mass than chlorine, and this extra mass has to be created from the energy of the incident neutrino. The catch is that the neutrinos produced by the main part of the solar fusion engine (the conversion of hydrogen into helium) have too little energy to do the task.\n\nHowever, our sun makes more than just helium; other light elements are created in its nuclear furnace. After hydrogen has been converted into helium, the helium nuclei can fuse and, though a series of processes, produce elements such as boron and beryllium. This also liberates neutrinos, some of which have enough energy to activate a chlorine detector. Although these neutrinos are far outnumbered by those created in the hydrogen-to-helium process, the good news is that the chance of a neutrino being captured grows with energy, as we have seen, and so these higher-energy neutrinos are easier to capture.\n\nAs the 1950s came to a close, Ray Davis began his quest to capture neutrinos from the sun. This story would continue for forty years, with many twists and turns along the way, before its final chapter was written.\n\nIn his first attempt in 1959, Davis used 4,000 liters of cleaning fluid, but he failed to detect anything. He realized that to have any chance he would need to be even more ambitious, so he set out to build a target containing 400,000 liters of the liquid, enough to fill a swimming pool. In 1964 Bruno Pontecorvo held a special seminar in Leningrad to report on Davis's quest. There was a lot of interest in the seminar, but Pontecorvo later said that he was the only person present who believed that the experiment would be successful. Whether this belief was based on insight or simple optimism is hard to say.\n\nBy the end of summer 1966\u2014twenty years after Pontecorvo first advertised chlorine as a way to detect neutrinos\u2014Davis's enlarged experiment was ready to begin.\n\nWith his mammoth detector, located in a South Dakota gold mine more than a mile underground, where it was shielded from cosmic rays, Davis managed to capture only one or two neutrinos a month. Everything known about the sun implied that he should be detecting one solar neutrino every few days. While this might seem like a small detail, it was in fact a serious worry. Many were convinced that Davis was trying the impossible\u2014and proving them right.\n\nBy 1972 Davis had improved his experiment further, and at last managed to convince other scientists that he was indeed seeing solar neutrinos. However, there were still too few of them. Several theorists suggested that our understanding of the sun might be at fault. Bruno Pontecorvo wrote to Davis: \"It starts to be really interesting! It would be nice if all this ends with something unexpected from the point of view of [neutrinos]. Unfortunately it will not be easy to demonstrate this even if nature works that way.\"\n\nPontecorvo was right. Years went by, and Davis accumulated more data, which consistently disagreed with the predictions of the standard solar model. The quest had reached an impasse. The arguments went on for twenty years, with theorists blaming the experiment, while experimentalists (and, to be fair, several theorists) doubted the accuracy of the solar models. Relatively little attention was paid to the possibility that the sun might be innocent and that the neutrinos were to blame.\n\nIronically, Bruno Pontecorvo had proposed the solution to the solar neutrino mystery in 1968, as soon as Davis's first results appeared\u2014and been ignored. Of course, he was not primarily interested in the sun. Instead he was focused on the nature of neutrinos, and his own insight that they come in different flavors.\n\nOSCILLATING NEUTRINOS\n\nOne reason that it took so long to solve the solar neutrino mystery is that neutrinos can change their properties during the flight from the sun to the earth. Only those that retained the attributes they were born with showed up in Davis's experiment, while those that had changed form escaped detection.\n\nIn 1968 Bruno Pontecorvo and a colleague, Vladimir Gribov, resurrected his idea of neutrino oscillations\u2014the possibility that neutrinos can metamorphose from one variety to another. Whereas in 1957 Bruno had proposed that this might occur between neutrinos and antineutrinos, in 1968 he applied the idea to the electron and muon flavors of neutrino.\n\nThe sun produces electron-neutrinos and Davis's detector was sensitive to them, but it was blind to any muon-neutrinos. Thus any electron-neutrinos that metamorphosed into muon-neutrinos en route from the sun would be lost. This would explain why Davis detected fewer neutrinos than he expected.\n\nThe idea that neutrinos produced in the sun could change identity during their journey ran counter to everything in the textbooks. According to the standard theory of particle physics, this was impossible. Or at least it was impossible if, as scientists then believed, neutrinos were massless and traveled through space at the speed of light. However, Pontecorvo and Gribov realized that the laws of quantum mechanics allowed neutrinos to switch from electron to muon variety and back again, \"oscillating\" between one state and another\u2014but only if neutrinos had some mass. It didn't need to be large; in fact it could be trifling, thousands of times smaller than the mass of an electron. All that the theory required was the existence of two varieties of neutrinos, with slightly different masses.\n\nIn quantum mechanics, certainty is replaced by probability, which rises and falls like a wave. If two particles have the same energy, but slightly different masses, the associated waves have slightly different wavelengths, and interfere with each other as they move through space. Two sound waves whose frequencies differ slightly tend to mingle and produce a pulsing beat. The quantum waves associated with two neutrinos of slightly differing masses produce an analogous rise and fall in intensity. Only occasionally along the journey do the two waves match up in the precise form they started out in. At other points along the route, the initial electron-neutrino is a chimera, appearing sometimes as a muon-neutrino, and sometimes in its original form.\n\nWhen the flow of these waves is interrupted\u2014for example, by an atom of chlorine in a tank 4,500 feet beneath the hills of South Dakota\u2014it is impossible to know which variety of neutrino will be revealed. If it is an electron-neutrino, Davis's detector records the fact; if it is a muon-neutrino, it is invisible. All quantum theory can tell us is the probability of finding one or the other. In effect, if enough collisions occur, they will be divided roughly fifty-fifty between electron-neutrinos and muon-neutrinos.\n\nSuch quantum behavior is unfamiliar in the everyday world, but is illustrated in M. C. Escher's _Metamorphosis_ drawings. On the left side, a picture shows a collection of objects, which gradually change into a new form as you traverse the image. In the spirit of Escher, suppose there were some weird hybrid animal that could metamorphose between a cat and a dog. The dog transforms into a cat as it walks along the street. Halfway along the block the transformation is complete. The former dog (now a cat) continues on its way. By the end of the block it will be a dog once more. When you look at the dog-cat, what you see will depend on how far along the block you are.\n\nNow suppose that you are not receptive to dog-cats, only to things that are one or the other: a dog or a cat. If you are near the start or the end of the block, you will most likely interpret the animal as a dog. If you are near the midpoint, you are more likely to interpret it as a cat. However, if your eyes are only capable of seeing dogs, and are blind to cats, you might conclude that the dog had disappeared.\n\nSo it is with neutrinos. In this analogy, the electron-neutrino is the dog and the muon-neutrino is the cat. The sun emitted a dog, and Davis's detector was a dog-catcher. It recorded no reaction when a cat came along. According to this theory, there was nothing wrong with the sun; it was our understanding of neutrinos that was at fault.\n\nIf one accepted Pontecorvo and Gribov's theory of oscillating neutrinos, the apparent shortfall of solar neutrinos in Davis's experiment could be understood. All that was required was to give up the myth that neutrinos were massless and traveled at the speed of light. However, few were prepared to do so at the time. The Russian duo's idea was regarded as little more than a mathematical curiosity. Only after a variety of further experiments would Gribov and Pontecorvo be vindicated. That would take three decades and much would happen in the interim.\n\n\"TEN TO THE FIFTY-EIGHTH NEUTRINOS! ALL IN ONE GO!\"\n\nPhysics seems to be a tradition in the Pontecorvo family. In addition to Bruno's son Gil, two of his nephews have chosen the profession: Giuliana's son Eugenio Tabet, and Gillo's son Ludovico. Born in 1964, Ludovico, or Ludo, is an experimentalist, part of the ATLAS collaboration at CERN, which discovered the Higgs boson in 2012. This is the final piece in the Standard Model of particles and forces, whose origins can be traced back to Bruno Pontecorvo's insights about muons and neutrinos in the 1940s.\n\nIn 1987, Ludo was a graduate student at university in Rome. By this stage the Soviet policy of glasnost allowed Bruno to visit Italy for extended periods, and he spent a lot of time in Ludo's office during his visit that year. Ludo recalled Bruno's intense excitement when his beloved neutrinos made one of the most remarkable contributions in the history of astronomy: \"I arrived at my office where I was doing my thesis. Bruno was already there. I noticed a strange light in his eyes. He said, 'Did you hear what happened today? Ten to the fifty-eighth neutrinos! All in one go!' I said, 'What are you talking about?' and Bruno replied, 'There was a supernova.' I felt he was living for that. [The first thing he said] was not 'supernova'; he said, \"'Ten to the fifty-eighth all in one go!'\"\n\nBruno had suggested in 1958 that supernovas would produce neutrinos in vast amounts, capable of being detected on Earth. A supernova explosion releases more than a hundred times as much energy as the sun has put out in its entire life. Thus the breeze of neutrinos from the sun would be dwarfed by the hurricane from a supernova. The sun, however, is close by, whereas supernovas, thankfully, are not. The one that excited Bruno in 1987 had actually occurred some 160,000 years earlier in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and it had taken that long for the shell of neutrinos to reach us. By this stage they were spread over a huge region, larger than the diameter of our galaxy. The blast wave passed through the earth and continued onward into deep space. A handful of these neutrinos were detected by experiments in underground caverns. From this sparse number, it is possible to deduce how much total energy the supernova released. The results confirmed what astrophysics already believed: a supernova occurs when a star implodes and becomes a neutron star. For the first (and, so far, only) time, humans had witnessed a star collapse by observing its neutrinos. Along with the study of solar neutrinos, this marked the beginning of a new science: neutrino astronomy.\n\nSOLAR NEUTRINOS OBSERVED\n\nIn 1991 Bruno went to Paris again, and stayed at the H\u00f4tel du Panth\u00e9on, located in the square by the mausoleum, near his old residence, the H\u00f4tel des Grands Hommes. He visited the Curie Institute and discussed the neutrino experiments that French scientists were planning to conduct at CERN. By this stage the mystery of solar neutrinos was beginning to be resolved, and Pontecorvo's ideas about oscillations were taken seriously enough that expensive experiments to test them were being designed. Bruno naturally was much in demand.\n\nMeanwhile, after thirty years of pursuing solar neutrinos, Ray Davis was convincing the world that he was seeing some, but not enough. Gribov and Pontecorvo's suggestion that electron-neutrinos were changing form en route from the sun was beginning to be viewed as the most likely explanation. One reason for this shift in thinking was that the scientific community's understanding of neutrinos and their flavors had dramatically evolved in the interim.\n\nBruno's original theory of neutrino flavor had matched two neutrinos, the electron and muon varieties, with the electron and muon themselves. Meanwhile, starting in the 1960s, the study of nuclear particles had revealed a deeper layer of reality\u2014the quarks. Quarks, as it turns out, also come in pairs. The up and down varieties of quark are the constituents of protons and neutrons; strange and charm quarks form a second pair, which are found within strange and other exotic particles. These four types of quarks, when paired off this way, mirror the four types of leptons\u2014the generic name for the electron, electron-neutrino, muon, and muon-neutrino, which are not affected by the strong nuclear force. Bruno's proposal that there were two pairs of leptons reflected the existence of the two pairs of quarks.\n\nIn 1976, a third electrically charged analogue of the electron and muon turned up, known as the tau (the name comes from _t_ as in _third_ ). This was soon followed by the discovery of another variety of quark, known as a bottom quark. Theorists anticipated that each of these would be revealed to be part of a pair, completed by a third neutrino (the tau-neutrino, confirmed in 2000) and a third quark (the top quark, discovered in 1995).\n\nAlthough the third variety of neutrino was not discovered until after Bruno's death, theorists were convinced of its existence from the 1970s onward. One reason was that cosmologists were best able to describe the formation of elements in the early universe if there were three varieties of neutrino. The other reason touched directly on the solar neutrino problem: Davis was seeing only about one-third as many neutrinos as astrophysicists expected. Pontecorvo and Gribov's idea implied that if there were three rather than two alternate guises for an electron-neutrino to take on, then after its 150-million-kilometer trip from the sun, it would be an electron-neutrino one-third of the time, and one of the other varieties two-thirds of the time. Because Davis's experiment was only sensitive to the electron type, he measured one-third as many neutrinos as had set out from the sun.\n\nDavis's shortfall, and the Gribov-Pontecorvo theory, began to appear more and more compelling.\n\nTHE FINAL PIECE IN THE SOLAR NEUTRINO ODYSSEY WOULD COME FROM an experiment conducted at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) in Ontario, less than two hundred miles from Chalk River, the laboratory where forty years earlier Bruno had conceived his ideas about neutrinos. The SNO team would eventually confirm his theory that solar neutrinos change form in their journey across space. Sadly, Bruno would not live to see this.\n\nThe main innovation at SNO was the use of heavy water, the very material that had been key to the nuclear reactor all those years before. However, this time the liquid was used as a detector of neutrinos rather than as a component of a reactor.\n\nIn Davis's experiment, neutrinos that had changed to the muon or tau variety escaped detection. But when any variety of neutrino hits an atom of deuterium, it can bounce off the target and give enough of a kick that the deuterium nucleus breaks up. The recoil of its constituent proton and neutron can then be detected, and the collision of the neutrino can be inferred. The chance that a single neutrino will cause this to happen is given by Fermi's theory, and the number of detected reactions can thus be used to calculate the total number of neutrinos that passed through the target. SNO's results agreed with what the standard theory of the sun had predicted. The team was also able to count the number of collisions caused specifically by electron-neutrinos, as these both split the target atom and convert its neutron into a proton as well. The number of such events was one-third of the total, as suggested by Davis's results. This confirmed that neutrinos are indeed changing form, from the electron type to the other two varieties, on their journey from the sun.\n\nAlthough Bruno never returned to Canada after his move to Dubna, he was able to see the SNO exhibition at Expo '92 in Seville, Spain. He had been nearby in Granada, at the Neutrino 92 physics conference, and had joined an excursion to the exposition in Seville. This was two years after construction had begun on the SNO observatory, but its completion was still several years in the future. Art McDonald, the leader of the project, escorted Bruno around the exhibition. He recalled that the occasion \"was very nice for me,\" because Bruno had been a prominent supporter of the project and was profoundly interested in its aims. For Bruno, \"It was an opportunity to ask about Chalk River.\"\n\n**IMAGE 17.1.** Bruno balancing a stick, in defiance of Parkinson's disease, c. 1990. (COURTESY GIL PONTECORVO; PONTECORVO FAMILY ARCHIVES.)\n\nOne memory from that day has stayed with Art ever since, as it has for others. This was a trick that Bruno performed. Always athletic and keen on sports, Bruno still enjoyed playing to the crowd, for example by balancing a stick on his foot or his nose. By this stage, Bruno was in the advanced stages of Parkinson's disease, which caused him to tremble in his movements. Nonetheless, he got up to his old tricks. \"Strange this disease,\" he mused, as he balanced his walking stick on his foot without any trembling. The moment he took the stick back in his hand, however, the shaking returned.\nEIGHTEEN\n\nPRIVATE BRUNO\n\nTHAT LIFE IN THE SOVIET UNION WOULD PROVE DISASTROUS FOR Marianne was obvious from the start; that Bruno too would suffer only became clear later. Cut off from friends and family, having passed through Stockholm without seeing her mother and siblings, Marianne's only role in Russia was as an appendage to Bruno. He had a career there, restrictions notwithstanding; she had a vacuum to fill.\n\nMarianne's story encapsulates the Pontecorvo enigma. People who knew her before 1950 gave conflicting accounts, some recalling her as vivacious, an extrovert like her husband, while others found her to be withdrawn, morose, secretive. Several media reports in 1950 played up the latter image, implying that she was keeping secrets, aware of the hidden life of her husband, the spy. Marianne was even portrayed as a Mata Hari character, the leader of a communist cell. No source for this allegation was ever given, and there is nothing in the MI5 record to support it. One close relative insisted that she was never a political person and chose to follow Bruno, whom she loved. Gil confirmed this opinion: \"I never thought of her as politically minded. I've heard claims that she was, but I doubt it.\"\n\nWhatever her politics, Marianne missed Sweden terribly. She had left her homeland in 1939 at the start of the war, marrying Bruno just before they began their odyssey to North America as part of the tide of refugees fleeing the Nazis. It is now clear that she experienced frequent emotional crises, suffering highs and lows during their time in Canada and the UK. In the USSR these episodes developed into more serious problems.\n\nAlthough the three boys were happy and in school, Marianne was beginning to suffer from a profound depression. A catastrophic collapse seems to have begun within her first five years in the USSR, around the time Gil was starting college. As we saw in Chapter 15, Marianne became almost pathologically averse to any form of social life, reading for hours while she lay on the bed and stared out the windows at the surrounding forest. Whether this was because the Pontecorvos had no social interaction with colleagues during this period and Marianne felt like an outcast, or because Bruno chose not to bring those colleagues home due to Marianne's withdrawal, is impossible to know. Whatever the cause, it is certain that what began as shyness, withdrawal, and mild depression developed into a long-lasting and debilitating mental disorder.\n\nAt first she left home for short periods to undergo treatment in a clinic. At the end of the 1950s, however, Marianne had \"a more serious crisis than previously\" and began to spend considerable time in a psychiatric hospital. Bruno was now home alone with the boys, the head of an all-male household.\n\nEven when Marianne was released from the clinic to spend time with her family, her condition was transparent. Friends and family who had known her before 1950, and who managed in later years to see the Pontecorvos in the USSR, noticed her decline. In the middle of the 1960s, Bruno's niece Laura Schwarz visited Moscow with the Italian-Soviet Society. She recalled that Bruno had \"the same smile\" as always, but Marianne \"seemed sick to me, sleepy, almost absent.\" Laura Schwarz's memory echoes those of Western colleagues, who had known the Pontecorvos in Canada. At Chalk River, as we saw, Bruno had been the \"heartthrob of all the single women,\" and Marianne was his \"beautiful vivacious wife.\" At a conference in Kiev in 1970, the Pontecorvos' Canadian friends were shocked at how \"downtrodden and discouraged\" Marianne appeared, not at all like the vibrant woman of yore. A photograph from that time shows Bruno, confident and handsome in his shorts and sports shirt, while Marianne wears dark glasses at his side, her mouth pouting, her demeanor passive. Although Bruno was animated, reminiscing about happy times in Canada, Marianne didn't say a word. As the physicist J. David Jackson put it, \"Bruno had his physics to sustain him amidst the difficulties of Soviet life. Marianne evidently had nothing.\" This period, which followed the death of her mother in 1967, must have been especially hard.\n\n**IMAGE 18.1.** From left to right: Bruno Pontecorvo, Marianne Pontecorvo, and Maureen Jackson (daughter of J. David Jackson), 1970. (J. DAVID JACKSON, COURTESY AIP EMILIO SEGR\u00c8 VISUAL ARCHIVES, JACKSON COLLECTION.)\n\nRODAM AMIREDZHIBI\n\nOne summer, at the end of the 1950s, Bruno found himself alone: Marianne was away in a psychiatric hospital, Gil had gone on vacation in the north of the USSR with friends from the university, while Tito and Antonio were at a youth camp in Crimea. Bruno decided to go on vacation himself, armed with underwater fishing gear, to pursue one of his favorite athletic pursuits at Koktebel, a resort on the Black Sea known as the \"Soviet Capri.\" A physicist colleague, Arkady Migdal, joined him.\n\nDuring the day they swam and fished. For Bruno this reawakened memories of the summer of 1950, when he and his brother Gillo had done much the same in the waters south of Rome. The privileges of being an Academician gave Bruno access to exclusive hotels. In Koktebel, Bruno and Migdal took advantage of this, staying in a lavish place of lodging frequented by artists and writers. In this elite company, the physicists relaxed over dinner in the evening, and socialized late into the night.\n\nAmong the guests was Rodam Amiredzhibi, wife of Mikhail Svetlov, the poet. She was Svetlov's third wife, and this marriage was declining like his previous ones, due to his drinking and womanizing. Rodam and Mikhail were already leading separate lives, and she was in Koktebel with a group of friends. Tall, with dark hair, she looked \"like a dark Anita Ekberg.\" Bruno was smitten, and she, in turn, was attracted to the \"sweet, intelligent, sensitive man.\"\n\nSo began an intense and intimate relationship that lasted for the rest of Bruno's life, waxing and waning depending upon whether Marianne was in the sanatorium. A few months later, Marianne was released from the hospital and Bruno resumed his role as husband in Dubna. Then, in Rodam's memory, \"Marianne was hospitalized again, and Bruno was back looking for me.\"\n\nAnecdotal tales of Bruno's keen eye for women were as common during his time in Russia as they had been in Canada. However, the intense relationship with Rodam was more than a passing fancy. A former student recalled that \"on Saturdays and Sundays, Bruno came regularly to Moscow,\" where he and Rodam would spend time together. Some have claimed, erroneously, that she became Bruno's second wife. Their relationship became more public as Marianne's condition declined, with many regarding them as partners. However, a Russian colleague, in halting English, told me enigmatically that she was not his wife \"in the precise definition.\" Even after Rodam's husband died in 1964, Bruno remained married to Marianne. Toward the end of Bruno's life, Miriam Mafai interviewed Rodam. Mafai summarized the situation as follows: \"Bruno is able to lead a satisfying life, spending time with Rodam, while Marianne is in the psychiatric clinic, in a world of her own.\"\n\nBRUNO AND THE STATE\n\nWhen the Pontecorvos arrived in Russia in 1950, Stalin was still in power, terror was widespread, and the possibility of falling out of favor and being transported to the Gulag was very real. Pontecorvo himself was prohibited from traveling outside the Soviet Union, even to Eastern Europe, let alone visiting family in Italy. Following prolonged lobbying by the director of Dubna, in 1959 Bruno was finally allowed to travel to Eastern Europe, China, and Mongolia. Homesick for Italy, Bruno became depressed that it remained off limits.\n\nYet, although he suffered from these restrictions, Bruno remained more devoted to the communist cause than many, with one of his colleagues describing him as \"convinced in the inspiring force of communism, like a person believing a religious credo.\" Some Soviet intellectuals denounced their nation's invasion of Hungary in 1956, for instance, but Bruno rationalized the invasion as necessary to \"save\" the Hungarians. His brother Gillo, by contrast, along with many intellectual communists in the West, left the party in protest. In the USSR, Andrei Sakharov, who played a key role in the development of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, protested the action and was persecuted for years. Although Bruno Pontecorvo remained a party member at this juncture, he refused to sign a letter denouncing Sakharov, even though several other scientists did.\n\nTwo days before Bruno's fifty-fifth birthday, in August 1968, Soviet tanks entered Prague. For Bruno, this was a tipping point. He had a soft spot for Alexander Dubczek, a reformist leader who preferred ice hockey games to political meetings. Bruno kept up with events in Czechoslovakia by reading _l'Unit\u00e0_ , which contained serious analysis of the developing crisis and its background. _Pravda_ , however, was full of attacks on various Czech leaders, its tone ever more belligerent. Whereas previously Bruno had always toed the party line, on the principle that the leaders had more information than he did, he now felt able to judge the situation for himself. It seemed to him that Dubczek was attempting to combine socialism and democracy in a courageous manner that was supported by the Czech population.\n\nMeanwhile, Soviet radio stations broadcast interminable testimonials from soldiers who had taken part in the liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945 and now supported the overthrow of the counterrevolution. On Bruno's birthday he reviewed his life, against the backdrop of the news. He later recalled, \"The flood of words that spilled from the radio, the emphatic declarations, the solemn speeches, interspersed with classical music, made [me] feel more and more alone.\" Without explanation, his subscription to _l'Unit\u00e0_ was canceled and Soviet media became his only source of news. For the first time he began to question whether the party was always correct.\n\nAs Bruno approached his sixties, disillusion set in rapidly. He had lived through a period of great change. As a young man in Italy he had seen the ugly specter of fascism, which threatened to replace culture with barbarism. He had joined a group of intellectuals who saw communism as a way to combat the evil. In these circles, there was an almost irrational belief in a city of the future, built on communist ideals. Bruno Pontecorvo subscribed to that religion, equating capitalism with military adventurism. All such traditional ideologies would have to be overthrown to reach the new world. By Bruno's final years, however, the Soviet Union had fallen apart, as had many of the ideas that had attracted him there. In 1991 he remarked, \"For many years I thought communism a science, but now I see it is not a science but a religion.\"\n\nIf facts disagree with a scientific theory, you change the theory; when they disagree with a religious doctrine, you reinterpret the facts. There in a nutshell is the difference. Gillo described himself and his brother, in their youthful certainty, as being \"like the early Christians, who believed in something beautiful, which did not exist.\" He hinted that the ideals that had driven the two brothers in those days were lost, for himself and for Bruno too: \"We bet on something which turned out to be false.\" After glasnost, when contact with the West was at last restored, Bruno bluntly evaluated his previous convictions for a British reporter: \"I was a cretin.\"\n\nONE RUSSIAN COLLEAGUE, SEMEN GERSHTEIN, REMARKED, \"TO EVERYBODY who knew Bruno it was obvious that he could have achieved much more working in the west and could have realized his ideas himself.\" This led Gershtein to ask the obvious question: \"Why did he come to the USSR?\"\n\nEven in and around Dubna, no one seemed to know. Some in the 1950s believed that it was because he held the \"na\u00efve belief of many foreigners, faithful to the ideals of communism, that the USSR, the country of victorious socialism, was building a communist society.\" Only later, when it became \"more or less safe\" to openly discuss these issues did some people call such ideas \"stupidity.\"\n\nGershtein admitted that a small number of people, rivals of Bruno who envied or disliked him, \"adhered to the version [believed] in America\u2014that he was a Soviet spy who fled when the danger arose of his being unmasked.\" Gershtein, whom I know as a polite and sensitive man, was a friend of Pontecorvo for many years, but never asked him about this issue because he \"understood that it might be quite painful.\" Instead, Gershtein formed his own opinion as to what had happened. One particular event stuck in his mind\u2014a day in the mid-1960s when he sat next to Pontecorvo during a scientific presentation by former atomic spy Klaus Fuchs, who had moved to East Germany after being released from British prison in 1959.\n\nFuchs was giving what Gershtein regarded as a rather tedious presentation, but Pontecorvo was \"very excited.\" Bruno whispered, \"You know\u2014Fermi was very severe in estimating scientists, but he considered Fuchs a star of the first order.\" Gershtein expected that Pontecorvo would talk to Fuchs after the session ended, but he didn't. As they left the auditorium together, Gershtein recalled that Pontecorvo was \"agitated,\" as if remembering the years just before he came\u2014\"or one can say, fled\"\u2014to the USSR.\n\nBruno told Gershtein, \"I would be very interested in reading Fuchs' memoirs if he wrote any,\" and then explained that when Fuchs was arrested, \"we were all sure that it was a police provocation against the communists, since we learned that Fuchs was a communist.\" Pontecorvo claimed that he'd \"had no idea that Fuchs was a spy and thought it was a provocation in the spirit of McCarthyism, which had overflowed America and extended to England.\"\n\nGershtein felt that this had the ring of truth: \"From these words of Bruno it becomes quite clear what he, a communist since 1936, could be afraid of in England after the arrest of Fuchs, and why he decided to change his life so drastically.\"\n\nFor Gershtein, who had lived in the USSR all his life, this was a natural reaction. However, in reality, McCarthyism never reached the United Kingdom. Indeed, Britain often served as a refuge for communist sympathizers from the United States, including the prominent American physicist David Bohm, who became a British citizen. Gershtein's assessment that colleagues who openly regarded Pontecorvo as a Soviet spy were driven by personal motives has some credibility; the opinions of Bruno's friends tend to have been more nuanced. Vladimir Gribov, with whom Bruno wrote his seminal paper on neutrino oscillations, is one example. The two knew one another well, but Gribov claimed, \"I never talked about history; intuitively I knew not to.\" Gribov's view that this was a no-go area was shared by other friends and relatives. This was not because they knew that Bruno had a secret history, for he never admitted this to them; rather, it was because they suspected intuitively that he might have such a history, and they did not want to damage their relationship with Pontecorvo by confirming this.\n\nGershtein's bland interpretation of the incident with Fuchs seems to be an example of this. Bruno was usually gregarious with former colleagues, a \"hail fellow well met.\" And he had worked with Klaus Fuchs for two years. Indeed, Fuchs had invited Bruno to the nuclear physics conference in Edinburgh in 1949, and the two men clearly had much in common. Yet Pontecorvo made no effort to talk to him, as if by choice. However, it is now known that the KGB had placed restrictions on contact with Fuchs, and issued clear instructions to that effect. Even the head of the East German Stasi was forbidden to contact Fuchs of his own volition; it is safe to conclude that Pontecorvo too was briefed in advance.\n\nTITO FIGHTS BACK\n\nAs we have just remarked, it was as the Soviet Union began to fall that Bruno finally accepted that he had made a bad choice. While the changing world was forcing all Soviets to evaluate their beliefs and establish their place in the new society, for Bruno, who remained a communist, there was also a strong family pressure. The effect of his decision to come to the USSR on Marianne was already clear. As for his sons\u2014who \"grew up lonely,\" in the opinion of Bruno's companion, Rodam Amiredzhibi\u2014they displayed a range of attitudes toward their new home.\n\nGil, the eldest, followed in his father's footsteps, in terms of both his interest in science and his belief in communist ideals. He explained how in the postwar period it was quite natural for communists to join the party and to appreciate the Soviet Union as a nation that had made great contributions to the war against Nazism. The goal of equality and social justice\u2014the \"city in the sky\"\u2014had developed during the revolution of 1917 and the USSR was its torchbearer. In Gil's view, that dream still survives, but the means of achieving it has evolved: \"It's like an experiment in physics. You set out to find the truth and discover features that lead you to refine the approach. Your opinion on how to complete the experiment may evolve but the goal remains.\"\n\nGil has remained in Dubna to this day, having watched over Marianne and working as a nuclear physicist. He has never married. Bruno's youngest son, Antonio, lives in Moscow. Married, with a family, he works as a computer scientist. The middle child, Tito, was \"independent, something of a rebel,\" and quit Russia after Bruno's death to live in the United States. It is ironic that the two sons with traditional Italian names have remained in the former Soviet Union, whereas the one named for a communist hero, Josip Tito, has rebelled and returned to North America.\n\nAs it turns out, the seeds of Tito's rebellion go back to the days of the Soviet Union, when he witnessed firsthand his father's strained relations with its oppressive system.\n\nIn the mid-1970s, under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, the USSR expanded its contacts with the outside world. Bruno began to hope that it might be possible for him to visit Italy, either as a member of a scientific delegation or as a guest of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). However, there were tensions between the USSR and the PCI, many of whose members had resigned in protest over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Even though Bruno too was upset by the Czechoslovakian adventure, he did not rock the boat. Nevertheless, his name was never included on the official lists of delegates selected to attend scientific conferences outside the USSR and its satellites, nor did he ever receive an exit visa to travel outside these boundaries. Finally he was forced into action, following a confrontation with Tito.\n\nTito, by then thirty years old, had completed his university studies in Moscow and begun conducting research in oceanography. On the occasions when his team was working in the Arctic or Pacific, outside the territorial waters of the USSR, Tito was not invited to join them. The first few times this happened, Tito thought it was just a coincidence, but when it became a regular occurrence he realized that his exclusion was a deliberate act. The reason, he felt sure, was that although he was a Soviet citizen, he was the son of Bruno Pontecorvo, had been born in the West, and as such was regarded as a security risk. In the eyes of the Soviets, once in a foreign port, Tito might \"escape\" and return to Italy or Canada. He had been blacklisted. The obtuse and perverse apparatchiks of the Soviet state were interfering with his career by cutting him off from essential research.\n\nWhen he raised a protest, he was dismissed with sly disdain: \"Is there not enough ocean in the USSR for you?\" He confronted Bruno, calling him \"an idiot for having left the West to come to the Soviet Union.\" He accused his father of being blind to what was going on, of being seduced by the money and privilege that went along with his status as an Academician, and ruining Tito's opportunity for a career in science. Years later, Bruno admitted, Tito's accusation still rang in his ears.\n\nBruno, meanwhile, was stirred into action.\n\nUntil then he had meekly accepted the state's right to forbid him from traveling outside the borders of the communist world. Following Tito's outburst, Bruno began to feel that he was being treated unfairly. He knew that no one in Dubna had the authority to intervene, so he decided to see someone in the Politburo, the central governing body of the Soviet Communist Party.\n\nIn 1975 there were twenty-three members of the Politburo. It is intriguing that, out of all the possible members, Bruno chose to consult Yuri Andropov, the hawk who had convinced a reluctant Nikita Khrushchev to invade Hungary in 1956 and who had also been a central player in the 1968 invasion of Prague. In 1975, when Bruno Pontecorvo decided to visit, Andropov was head of the KGB.\n\nAnnouncing himself at KGB headquarters as \"Academician Bruno Maximovitch Pontecorvo,\" Bruno asked to see Andropov in person. After some time, he was informed that Andropov was in a meeting but that his deputy was available. Bruno insisted that he had to see Andropov himself. This was not possible, and Bruno left.\n\nNot long afterward, Bruno received a visitor at Dubna: the KGB officer who had been assigned to him a quarter of a century earlier, when the Pontecorvos had first arrived in Moscow. Bruno never revealed the details of their conversation, beyond the fact that he explained to the KGB officer how Tito was unable to pursue his career, and how Bruno himself was never included in the groups that were allowed to travel to the West. The KGB contact promised to arrange for Bruno to meet someone who could make a change.\n\nMore time passed, after which Bruno was summoned to Moscow to meet a \"very important person\" whose identity remains unknown. Bruno told this person that he was now over sixty years old and wanted to see Italy while there was still time, specifically denying any possibility that he would try to defect. It was no use. A few weeks later, Bruno received a call saying that he could not have an exit visa. Tito's situation also remained the same, which drove him to quit oceanography to rear horses in Dubna.\n\nAMALDI IS SEVENTY\n\nBy 1978 Bruno had given up all hope of visiting Italy. One day, however, a message arrived at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, encouraging the group to send a delegate to Rome to take part in a celebration of Edoardo Amaldi's seventieth birthday. Amaldi, with whom Bruno had first shared the discovery that led to the slow-neutron method; Amaldi, the father of CERN, who had indirectly inspired the Warsaw Pact's own high-energy physics program at Dubna; Amaldi, one of Europe's most influential living physicists. Bruno Pontecorvo was the natural candidate to attend this event.\n\nHowever, no one in the Academy nominated him, and Bruno himself said nothing. Another delegate was chosen instead.\n\nThat, at any rate, is how Bruno described things to Miriam Mafai. However, it is hard to believe that this is the whole story. The episode is reminiscent of Pontecorvo's behavior when Fuchs visited Dubna, his silence a response to orders from above. Then fortune smiled. At the last minute the chosen delegate fell ill and could not go. Someone (Bruno says he never knew who) suggested that the Academy send \"Bruno Maximovitch Pontecorvo\" as a replacement. It is not known why the powers that be had a change of heart. There seems to have been a division of opinion at the highest level. Bruno recalled that after he received permission to go, the local KGB tried to dissuade him. They said that it would be safer for him to go to Switzerland or France because in Italy he might be surrounded by police and harassed by the media. He responded unequivocally: \"I don't want to go to France; I don't want to go to Switzerland. I want to go to Italy.\"\n\nWhich he did. On September 6, 1978, almost twenty-eight years to the day since he had left Rome for the USSR, Bruno Maximovitch Pontecorvo returned.\n\nWHEN ITALY HEARD THAT THE PRODIGAL SON WAS ABOUT TO RETURN, Bruno got a foretaste of the excitement. On the eve of his departure a journalist telephoned him from Rome. Bruno was polite but firm, explaining that the purpose of his visit was to celebrate Edoardo Amaldi's seventieth birthday, and that he would not give any interviews. The caller pointed out that the return of Bruno Pontecorvo would be such a big story that journalists would besiege him when he arrived. Bruno repeated his statement, and hung up. Perhaps there was some truth to the KGB's warning. The KGB duly provided Bruno with two minders to accompany him to Italy, masquerading as physics colleagues.\n\nOn the morning of September 6, Bruno arrived at Rome's Leonardo da Vinci Airport. Press photographers vied for the best shots as he entered the terminal, and the flash bulbs of their cameras nearly blinded him. Journalists fired questions as they thrust microphones under his nose. A newsreel camera whirred into action.\n\nBruno had prepared a statement, which he repeated in response to the reporters' questions. It confirmed the essential message of his 1955 press conference, the only other occasion since 1950 that he'd spoken to the general public: \"I have never worked on the atomic bomb, or the H-bomb, not in the West nor in the USSR.\" He praised Edoardo Amaldi, Italian physics in general, and Enrico Fermi, who had helped him so much in his career. He said that he had gone to the USSR of his own accord, and had complete freedom of research there. He refused to be drawn into making further comments.\n\nGillo Pontecorvo, who had come to the airport to see his brother, fought his way through the throng to reach Bruno. There were tears as the two embraced on Italian soil for the first time in nearly thirty years. Bruno finally escaped the crowds and spent the afternoon at his sister Giuliana's home in Cetona, a village near Siena. His KGB limpets came too.\n\nIn 1978 Giuliana's son Eugenio Tabet was a young professor of physics, and he suspected that Bruno's bodyguards were not physics colleagues. So he decided to \"set them a test.\" He explained: \"At the side of my mother's house was a wood-burning stove. It was a good approximation to what physicists call a blackbody radiator. So I asked the guard what wavelength he thought the radiation would be. I wasn't looking for a precise answer. I just wanted [to get] a feel of whether the question made any sense to him. I can't recall exactly how he responded. But it was total nonsense!\"\n\nFor many of the physicists at the conference, it was their first meeting with the legendary Bruno Pontecorvo. Many old friends were seeing him for the first time in decades. There is a famous photo from this time, showing Bruno with Edoardo Amaldi and Emilio Segr\u00e8. Edoardo's son Ugo, a leading physicist himself, described the reality behind the image: \"The photo shows them all smiling. That was just for the camera. I was there the first time Emilio and Bruno met. It was _very_ cool. The handshake was formality, no more. Emilio was [still] very unhappy about the patent.\" Little seemed to have changed since their meeting in Kiev in 1959.\n\nREUNIFICATION\n\nWhen Bruno returned to Dubna, he shared his experiences with Tania Blokhintseva, daughter of Dmitri Blokhintsev, the first director of JINR at Dubna: \"Bruno was absolutely astonished. [It was so long since] he had seen Italy. He said to me, 'You know\u2014the carabinieri\u2014they were very polite.' The amount of traffic made it difficult to cross the road. He was very happy there.\"\n\nReading the media accounts of Bruno's return to Italy in 1978, one could be forgiven for thinking that this was the first time a Pontecorvo had emerged from the Iron Curtain to visit the West. However, Bruno's eldest son, Gil, had actually broken the ice three years earlier, with a trip to Italy in 1975.\n\nWhen Gil mentioned this to me, almost en passant, I was astonished.\n\nHe explained that he had traveled to Turin to work with a team of physicists, who have since served as his collaborators in CERN experiments for several decades. Gil confirmed that he had been allowed to leave Soviet territory even though his brother Tito had not: \"He was the head of [an oceanographic] team but was not allowed to leave the boat. . . . There is no logic to [Soviet] bureaucracy!\"\n\nI imagined Bruno in 1975, still trapped behind the Iron Curtain while his eldest son was in Italy. \"When you returned to Dubna, what did Bruno say?\" I asked.\n\n\"I don't remember it in detail, but you can guess,\" Gil replied, giving a gentle laugh. He did remember the trip itself, however: \"I had a big meeting with the Italian family.\"\n\nI interjected: \"You had seen some in Moscow of course.\"\n\n\"Yes, but this meeting was with the whole clan. There were people there who hadn't seen me since the old times in England.\" He laughed again, as he recalled what sounded like an inquisition: \"It was like a sort of interview. It went on for four hours! Questions like: how can you explain this, how do you explain that? I was sweating at the end. It was all in Italian.\"\n\nPerhaps Gil's successful exit, and safe return to the USSR, helped loosen the straitjacket that entrapped his father. Three years later, the Soviet authorities must have been satisfied with Bruno's performance too, as his 1978 trip to Italy became the start of a regular pilgrimage. The following year he was back in Rome as a guest of the Italian-Soviet Society. He had been invited to give a physics lecture, and those who knew him noticed that a change was taking place: with his trembling movements, Bruno was showing the first signs of Parkinson's disease.\n\nDuring this visit his itinerary gave him a chance to travel around some of Italy. After two-thirds of a lifetime, he returned to his hometown of Pisa. The villa where he had grown up was still there, but had been converted into a hotel. He also visited Tuscany, whose countryside he loved but had not seen for decades; he had feared that he would never set eyes on it again.\n\nNow that the Soviets were more relaxed about him, Bruno returned to Italy each year. In 1982, he sought to visit France as well, to attend a symposium on the history of fundamental particle physics. Unfortunately, this was not to be. France refused him.\n\nThe scientific community, meanwhile, held him in high esteem. Although he sent a paper to the symposium that was read in his absence, many participants were upset that he could not be there in person. They sent him a card, signed \" _vos amis vous saluent_ \" (greetings from your friends). The signers included old friends such as Edoardo Amaldi and Pierre Auger, Nobel laureates C. N. Yang and Julian Schwinger, as well as future laureates (and fellow neutrino chasers) Leon Lederman and Jack Steinberger.\n\nMost physicists regarded Bruno as an international leader in the field of neutrinos, caring little about his past or insisting that he could never have been a spy. Nonetheless, the governments of France and several other Western nations remained suspicious. These attitudes persisted even though no evidence was ever presented against him.\n\nPeter Minkowski, a particle theorist, recalled one example of the West's hostility toward Pontecorvo. In the early 1980s Minkowski was working at Caltech in Pasadena. He had written a paper that anticipated work by Bruno and Samoil Bilenky, and was eager to meet Bruno to discuss physics. During this time, a senior official in charge of nuclear physics at the US Energy Department visited Caltech. Minkowski suggested to him that Pontecorvo be invited to the United States. In Minkowski's memory, \"He went pale. Then he said we cannot do that; there's a warrant for his arrest.\"\n\nIt is hard to know how reliable this story is. Many years have passed and, if such a warrant ever existed, the proof is either lost or overlaid with black ink in the US security files. In any case, no invitation was issued, so the crisis was avoided. At the end of our conversation, Minkowski was in a reflective mood. He repeated to me, quietly: \"He went pale.\"\n\nIn 1984, celebrations were held in Paris to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of induced radioactivity. Once more Bruno was unable to attend. He sent an article instead, which reviewed his early work in Paris on nuclear isomers. There was no restriction that prevented French citizens from visiting Dubna, however, and in June 1984 Bruno met with H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Langevin, the daughter of Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric and Ir\u00e8ne Joliot-Curie, whom Bruno had taught to ski in 1939. Colleagues recalled that both had tears in their eyes.\n\nThe French authorities eventually relented and lifted their ban. In 1989 Bruno returned to Paris for a week. He visited his old haunts at the Curie Institute (formerly the Radium Institute), and on September 11 he led a seminar at the Coll\u00e8ge de France. During his talk, he recalled his encounters with Fermi, Joliot-Curie, and other great scientists of the prewar period. Unfortunately, Parkinson's disease limited his range of movement, and whereas in the past he used to walk up and down the stage during lectures, energizing his audience, he now stood at the podium, speaking elegantly and vivaciously but occasionally having to take a rest as the trembling took over.\n\nUgo Amaldi recalled Bruno's visit to CERN on September 14, 1989. At the time, Ugo was the leader of an experiment at CERN's Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), one of whose achievements was to demonstrate that there are indeed three, and only three, varieties of standard neutrinos. Bruno was thrilled as he and Amaldi visited the collider, located 100 meters underground, at the CERN complex near Geneva. The splendor of the apparatus, which consisted of several layers of sophisticated electronics, wrapped in cylinders the size of a cathedral, was breathtaking. One of the features of Parkinson's disease is that its symptoms become more manifest when the sufferer becomes excited, and Bruno began to shake.\n\nLater that day he was scheduled to give a talk in the CERN auditorium, in front of several hundred scientists, who were very eager to hear him. Ugo recalled that, immediately before the talk, \"Bruno was really shaking.\" Nonetheless, Bruno composed himself, and after an introduction by Jack Steinberger he began to speak. His once-vibrant tones were now faint, yet still commanded authority. Suddenly the shaking began, and he paused. \"Don't pay any attention to my tremors,\" he told the audience. \"This Parkinson's disease looks much worse than it is.\" Then, to settle them, he deployed his everlasting sense of humor: \"Don't worry, I'm not going to die.\"\n\nTHE LONG CHILL\n\nAfter the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union itself began to crumble, Bruno reevaluated his life and the circumstances that had brought him to Russia. In 1990, at the age of seventy-seven, Bruno gave an extensive series of interviews to Miriam Mafai, a communist Italian journalist. These formed the basis for her study of his time in the Soviet Union. Titled _Il lungo freddo_ (The long chill), the book paints a picture of Bruno Pontecorvo as he would have wished to be seen. It has also provided invaluable source material for the present work.\n\nBruno, his eyes perhaps having been opened by his visits to the West, realized what he had lost during his years in the USSR. It was at this stage of his life, when barriers were relaxed thanks to the Soviet policy of d\u00e9tente, that he made his startling admission to a journalist from the London _Independent_ : \"I was a cretin.\" He seemed to regret his former unwavering support of the Soviet agenda, and the experience had left him sad, as his extended interviews with Mafai also showed.\n\nHe had fled to the USSR in 1950, enthused by the hopes symbolized by the red star atop the Kremlin. He was forbidden from contacting the West for five years, and then allowed only to send letters for twenty. Except for the siblings who came to see him in the USSR, he had no contact with his family during this time. Only in 1978 was Bruno freed to travel beyond the Iron Curtain and make contact with relatives, friends, and colleagues in the West. The most poignant meeting was his reunion with his sister Anna. They had not seen each other since August 28, 1950, the day she had returned to England from their fateful vacation. At long last, in the 1980s, brother and sister were reunited.\n\nIf anyone deserved an explanation of Bruno's precipitous disappearance, Anna would be near the top of the list. In 2011, I met her at Cambridge's Churchill College, whose archives contain letters and documents from Bruno's Abingdon home. After I had been waiting for some time, a stooping, white-haired lady came slowly across the quad. Although we had never met, I immediately recognized her: she had the strong nose and long face of her brother.\n\nAnna was now Bruno's only surviving sibling. She smiled wistfully as she recalled seeing Bruno in Rome, where he defied Parkinson's disease by playing the fool and dodging the cars in the road. So what explanation had Bruno offered her for his flight? After so many years apart\u2014nearly three decades\u2014surely she wanted to understand his behavior? But Anna had not asked. She felt that he had been let down by the USSR and considered himself a fool. \"He was so broken by the whole experience,\" she recalled, \"that I did not want to turn another screw.\"\n\nDuring Bruno's final years, his friends and relatives seem to have universally treated such questions as a no-go area. They cite Bruno's manifest anguish at his Soviet misadventures as their reason for steering clear. Even Gil, who was twelve at the time of the family's flight to the USSR and old enough to realize that \"something was up,\" seems to never have discussed the subject during the ensuing four decades. Within the circle of Bruno's loved ones, there was almost an omert\u00e0, a vow of silence. Colleagues outside the family have certainly expressed the opinion, to me and others, that there is a tacit agreement that the subject of Bruno's departure is taboo. They do not ask why Bruno left so suddenly. In their hearts they suspect the answer, but, by not saying it out loud, it is possible to live within a dream.\n\nLAST MEMORIES\n\nIn his seventies, Bruno made several trips to Italy to receive treatment for his Parkinson's. His eightieth birthday came on August 22, 1993. Knowing he would be visiting France and Italy during this time, his colleagues at the Dubna laboratory planned an autumn celebration of the occasion. In July, he visited France for the last time, and attended an international particle physics conference in Marseille.\n\nBy now he often needed assistance, and in Marseilles his nephew Ludo helped him to move around and eat. Lev Okun, a Russian colleague, joined Bruno for lunch at a restaurant, alfresco. The tables were spread across a large patio, at a busy intersection. Bruno chose a table situated so that all the passersby walked between them and the restaurant. Suddenly he turned to Okun as if struck by a sudden insight: \"Lev Borisovitch! Have you noticed how the women in Marseilles are not as beautiful as those in Paris?\" Okun admitted that he had not, and hinted that it was an opinion for which there was no true evidence. Bruno advised him, \"Just count the number of plain women that pass before an attractive one appears.\"\n\nThat was Okun's final memory of his old friend. Nearly eighty, debilitated by Parkinson's, with just weeks to live, Bruno was still the charmer with an eye for a pretty girl, and a scientific approach to all aspects of life.\n\nFrom Marseilles, Bruno went to Italy. He was expected to remain there for several weeks before returning to Dubna. Irina Pokrovskaya, his personal assistant, recalled the surprise among the workers at Dubna when suddenly, without warning, he returned from Italy ahead of schedule. His arrival was so unexpected that there was hardly time for the laboratory director to arrange for a car to meet him at the airport and bring him home. Tania Blokhintseva, the daughter of a former director of Dubna, described his return \"as a deliberate act,\" as if Bruno was aware that he did not have long to live. An informal gathering took place on his birthday, August 22, even though many of his colleagues were still away for the summer.\n\nBruno continued to come to the laboratory, but in the first days of September Irina Pokrovskaya noticed \"an irreversible shadow\" on his face. According to her, Bruno was the first to notice the change. During his visits to the laboratory, he was \"serene and calm, not wanting to disturb anybody.\"\n\nA month after his birthday, he came to the laboratory for the last time. It was evening and he remarked on the beauty of the \"yellow birch trees\" that were visible through the window of Irina's office. Afterward, she escorted him to the laboratory gate, where his son Tito was waiting. Her last memory of him was the fact that he was still joking as they parted.\n\nTwo days later, he died. His famed charisma, modesty, and politeness were with him to the end. As he slipped in and out of consciousness, Bruno's last words to the doctors scurrying around his bed were: \"Thank you.\"\n\nHis funeral was held on September 29. In the morning, the chandelier in the funeral parlor of the Palace of Culture at Dubna was draped in black, and as she helped prepare the flowers Irina's \"fingers were all thumbs.\" Then Bruno Maximovitch's casket was brought in. It was a grand occasion, as Dubna celebrated the life of their much-loved Academician. Mourners took turns standing beside the open casket to honor the body. The music of Mozart filled the room. Outside, the weather resonated with _il lungo freddo_ , the Russian half-life of Bruno Maximovitch. \"It was snowing wet snow,\" Irina recalled. The long chill of the Russian winter had begun.\n\nTHE FINAL IRONY\n\nBruno had arguably lost his chance for a Nobel Prize when Steinberger, Schwartz, and Lederman confirmed his idea that there are distinct varieties of neutrinos. Bruno's death now cost him a more certain share of the 2002 prize, which went to Ray Davis. By official policy, the Nobel is not awarded posthumously. Davis's award was the climax of his forty years of experiments. His endeavors encompassed the full oeuvre of Bruno Pontecorvo, helping to convert the hypothetical neutrino into a precision tool for both physics and astronomy.\n\nBruno's idea had finally borne fruit in the quest for solar neutrinos, because the sun indeed produces neutrinos, rather than antineutrinos. Although Bruno's original 1945 paper had dismissed the search for solar neutrinos as impractical, his paper from the following year nevertheless provided inspiration for Ray Davis. Once the existence of the particle was confirmed, Davis became the first person to look for neutrinos that had traveled from the sun. Unfortunately for Bruno, it took nearly forty years for the scientific community to accept Davis's experiment as reliable and his results as correct. As we've seen, the reason it took so long was that electron-neutrinos oscillate, changing form en route from the sun\u2014another idea proposed by Bruno Pontecorvo.\n\nWhat irony. Had there been no such thing as neutrino oscillations, Bruno would have been right once (with his advocacy of chlorine as a detector) and Davis would have observed solar neutrinos at the expected rate. The world would have applauded immediately. The irony is that Pontecorvo was right more than once. Neutrino oscillations diluted Davis's signal to the point that people doubted his results for decades. Bruno Pontecorvo's insight that there is more than one variety of neutrino, and his subsequent suggestion that neutrino oscillations were responsible for the shortfall in Davis's experiments, were largely ignored. It was not until 2001 that the matter was finally settled, with the completion of the SNO experiment in Canada, so near to where Bruno's neutrino quest had begun.\n\nThe most far-reaching of Bruno Pontecorvo's ideas is surely his insight that muon-neutrinos and electron-neutrinos are different. This led to the modern Standard Model of particle physics, as well as the prediction that different varieties of neutrinos can swap identities, as long as they have some mass. This prediction, which Bruno developed over several years, reached its mature form in 1968, a full year before Davis discovered the solar neutrino anomaly.\n\nPerhaps it is the neutrino saga that best encapsulates the triumph and the tragedy of Pontecorvo's scientific career. It was because of neutrino oscillations that the sun's neutrinos were diluted before arriving in the chlorine tank. Neutrino oscillations were thus a curse. Ray Davis spent decades trying to figure out why he was seeing so few neutrinos. The explanation wasn't confirmed until the turn of the century, leading to Davis's Nobel Prize, which he received in 2002, at the age of eighty-seven. Bruno Pontecorvo, of course, died in 1993, unaware of the great truths he had expounded.\n\nHe didn't live to see the phenomenon of oscillating neutrinos established as a scientific fact. Today, this phenomenon is used to measure the subtlest properties of these ghostly particles. For some theorists, the results suggest that neutrinos may hold the answers to many of the current mysteries of the cosmos, such as why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe at large. The new science of neutrino astronomy, in which neutrinos are recorded by vast detectors under the ice of Antarctica, promises to make quantitative measurements of phenomena whose origins lie far away in the cosmos and in time.\n\nOn two occasions, a Nobel laureate has credited Bruno Pontecorvo with the inspiration for his award. We heard Melvin Schwartz say, \"His overall contribution to the field of neutrino physics was certainly major.\" Ray Davis, in turn, provided this epitaph: \"[Bruno Pontecorvo] opened everyone's eyes with his original insights.\" Like so much else in the story of Bruno Pontecorvo's remarkable life, we can only wonder how much further these insights might have gone if he had not fled through the Iron Curtain in 1950.\n\n**IMAGE 18.2.** Bruno Pontecorvo memorial stone, Rome. (AUTHOR.)\nAFTERLIFE\n\n\"Midway on our life's journey, I found myself in dark woods, **the right road lost**.\"\n\n_\u2014Dante's Inferno_\nNINETEEN\n\nTHE RIGHT ROAD LOST\n\nMI5'S RONNIE REED HAD COMPLETED HIS INITIAL INQUIRY BY December 1950, three months after Bruno Pontecorvo's defection. At the time, the British were oblivious to Philby's duplicity, so no one suspected that the FBI's interest in Pontecorvo was known in Moscow. Although the British government feared that Pontecorvo had fled because he had previously passed classified information to the Soviets, MI5 had no sure evidence, and its investigations led to no certain conclusions. However, in one assessment, at least, Reed was spot-on. In his report he concluded that Bruno was \"likely to be seriously disappointed\" if he had gone to the USSR in the hope of settling there peacefully.\n\nAfter spending five years effectively confined to Dubna, and twenty more to the Eastern Bloc, Bruno finally obtained liberty only as the object of his desire\u2014the USSR\u2014began to fragment. Shortly before he died, Bruno admitted, \"The Promised Land no longer exists; not here [in the USSR] not anywhere else.\" He also described a recurring dream: \"Sometimes during the night, I imagine there is someone in front of me saying all my scientific work is wrong. Some number, some operation was wrong at the beginning, and I worked all my life at that calculation based on that wrong data. Because of that error, all my works have been useless.\" He then added, \"This did not happen in physics\u2014at least.\" If \"dreams reveal the reality which conception lags behind,\" this perhaps reflects Bruno's awareness that, in realms unrelated to science, he lost his way.\n\nBRUNO PONTECORVO: SCIENTIST\n\nAs a scientist, Bruno Pontecorvo's name will forever be associated with neutrinos. His work on the phantom particles climaxed during the latter half of his life, and scientists today regard it as his legacy. He recognized that the weak interaction is a universal force of nature, he identified the muon as a heavy version of the electron that has its own \"flavor,\" and from this he deduced that there are distinct varieties of neutrinos, an idea that culminated in his theory of neutrino oscillations. Of course, some of Bruno's 1946 neutrino report was based on the ideas of Pryce, Gu\u00e9ron, and Frisch, but history has credited him alone. More recently, the idea that a supernova can be observed via neutrinos has given birth to a new science\u2014neutrino astronomy.\n\nBruno was unusual in having made contributions both to theory and to experimental physics. Ugo Amaldi once asked, \"How many have made great contributions in both theory and experiment? Fermi, Rutherford, Pontecorvo\u2014not many at Nobel level.\" Nobel laureate Jack Steinberger placed Bruno Pontecorvo high among the great physicists of the twentieth century, although he also regarded Bruno as a fantasist who in his later years sometimes claimed credit for more than his due.\n\nCompare this with the opinion of Semen Gershtein, who rated Bruno as a great physicist whose career was thwarted by his move to the USSR. Certainly Bruno missed out on getting credit for his independent development of the idea of associated production. However, there is no evidence that he was on the right track to detecting the _anti_ neutrinos coming from reactors.\n\nBruno's early work in nuclear physics in the 1930s touches most directly on the political implications of his defection. This was the period when he made his chance observation in Rome, when he worked on isomers, when he was involved in the birth of the heavy-water fission experiments, and when he designed precision instruments for measuring radiation. The extent of his expertise and innovation in that field gives the lie to the British government's public statements of 1950, which tried to downplay his significance by claiming he had not worked on the atomic bomb, and had no recent knowledge of nuclear secrets.\n\nContrary to this political spin, Bruno Pontecorvo had been at the center of research that was greatly relevant to the USSR's needs. Enrico Fermi's remark was nearer the truth when he said that Pontecorvo's expertise would be of great general value in the USSR if he were freely admitted to the atomic project. The Dubna logbooks confirm Fermi's prediction. They reveal the Soviet interest in fission and \"H4 particles,\" and stand as a record of the advice Pontecorvo gave upon arriving at the laboratory in November 1950. Pomeranchuk made use of Pontecorvo's expertise in heavy-water nuclear reactors, and Bruno himself confirmed that he had given advice in this field.\n\nA former member of the US Atomic Energy Commission, who liaised with British intelligence in Washington around 1950, remarked, \"Surely [Pontecorvo] must have revealed all after his defection but I have never seen a single piece of evidence about what he might have divulged before [1950].\"\n\nBRUNO MAXIMOVITCH PONTECORVO: ENIGMA\n\nIt was once believed that the earth was at the center of the solar system. To explain the planetary orbits required a large number of \"epicycles,\" special refinements added to the model as better data arrived from astronomers. The theory soon became unwieldy. With the single assumption that the planets orbit the sun, however, everything suddenly fits. I take a similar view of the case of Bruno Maximovitch Pontecorvo and his possible role as a spy. One may conclude, based on the absence of evidence against him, that he had no dealings with the Soviets when he was in the West, in which case several independent theses are required to explain the various unresolved questions. On the other hand, if one accepts the hypothesis that Pontecorvo passed secrets before 1950, the kaleidoscope of facts settles into place.\n\nWhat follows is a list of kaleidoscopic facts, along with possible interpretations made on the basis of this hypothesis:\n\n_By 1950 blueprints of the Canadian reactor were in the USSR._\n\nThe source was someone other than Nunn May. It is possible that the Soviets convinced Pontecorvo to hand over the blueprints before his defection, to aid their goal of building a nuclear reactor for the social and economic welfare of their citizens. It would have appeared churlish if Bruno refused such a request to help an ally.\n\n_A second sample of uranium made its way from Canada to the USSR, and Lona Cohen was its courier._\n\nWhereas Nunn May's source of uranium was the American reactor, the second sample almost certainly came from Canada itself, which was only possible after the main reactor began operating in 1947. The previous year, Bruno had turned down job offers from various prestigious US universities in order to go to Harwell, and then dithered, changed the starting date, and suddenly decided to remain in Canada to work on the NRX reactor. This behavior could of course reflect genuine indecision, but it also fits rather conveniently with a portrait of a man required to keep the Soviets abreast of developments in the reactor field.\n\n_Lona Cohen made visits to the US-Canadian border on various occasions between 1944 and 1948, in order to exchange information with someone based in Canada. Bruno Pontecorvo likewise traveled from Montreal to the US border regularly, ostensibly to keep his application for US citizenship active._\n\nIf Bruno was meeting with Lona Cohen, he would have had to take precautions to protect his identity if they were seen together or, worse, if Cohen were ever arrested. We have seen evidence of Bruno's shifty behavior during this period, turning away when forced to be in photographs at Chalk River, as if afraid to let his face become widely recognized. As the best images on a roll are generally the ones that get published, we must conclude that Bruno refused to face the camera throughout this photographic session. Bruno may simply have been in one of his childish modes, but the images at Chalk River are bizarre.\n\n_Geoffrey Patterson sent his letter from Washington, which Philby intercepted, in July 1950, a few days before the family left England prior to Pontecorvo's flight._\n\nThe fact that Bruno made a precipitate decision to flee, rather than planning a more orderly move to the Soviet Union, suggests that he was reacting to a major crisis, rather than moving for personal reasons as a matter of principle. The exfiltration of the Cohens to the USSR in July 1950, only weeks before Pontecorvo's arrival, is another intriguing coincidence.\n\n_The Soviet reaction to his arrival, which included interrogation and five years under guard, are hardly an appropriate welcome for a hero of socialism._\n\nThe fact that Pontecorvo chose Andropov, head of the KGB, as his contact in the Politburo, and refused to deal with anyone else, is another incident that could be quite innocent but nonetheless fits with a pattern. The Kremlin's response is also remarkable: instead of ignoring Pontecorvo, or rejecting his request, they dispatched the same KGB officer that had guarded and helped debrief him immediately after his arrival\u2014the person most conversant with the Pontecorvo affair. This KGB contact then had a lengthy conversation with Pontecorvo, whose details remain unknown.\n\nA lawyer defending Pontecorvo could argue that, as the KGB was all powerful and had helped bring him into the USSR, for whatever reasons, it was natural for Bruno to appeal to the agency for assistance. However, going to Moscow to see Andropov without an appointment would be an extremely naive move, unless Pontecorvo knew that he had considerable leverage. (Would you expect a senior member of your government to see you under such circumstances?)\n\nThe Soviets' treatment of Pontecorvo upon his arrival in the USSR suggested to a former head of MI5 that they didn't trust him. This is perhaps understandable, whatever the reasons for his defection. However, this supposed mistrust fits uneasily with the commitment the Soviets had invested in getting him there, and Pontecorvo's precipitate agreement to go along with the plan. The total picture fits more naturally with the idea that the Soviets were punishing Pontecorvo\u2014that Pontecorvo had been an agent who was \"trying to disengage\" or become independent. He certainly wasn't treated like a hero who had voluntarily chosen to come to the USSR in protest against Western ways.\n\nULTIMATELY, THE QUESTION OF WHETHER BRUNO PONTECORVO PASSED classified information to the Soviets before 1950 is secondary; once he was there, his know-how proved seminal for the Soviets. For all the hype about Klaus Fuchs and other atomic spies, their information soon became obsolete and was of transitory value at best. Bruno Pontecorvo, by contrast, brought with him a unique expertise, which for five years was exploited ruthlessly by the Soviet authorities to further their nuclear ambitions. Even if he passed no secrets before 1950, Bruno Pontecorvo's later presence in the Soviet Union was potentially as significant as anything that the proven \"atom spies\" ever did.\n\nAlan Nunn May was convicted of spying in 1946, and spent seven years in British prison before being released. In 1950, Klaus Fuchs was also jailed, and was released after nine years.\n\nAfter regaining their freedom, both took up science again. Nunn May married, worked for a scientific-instrument company in England, and then became the dean of science at the University of Ghana. He retired in 1978 and returned to Cambridge, where he died in 2003, at the age of ninety-two. Klaus Fuchs returned to East Germany, where he married a friend from his student days. He had considerable success as a scientist. He won the National Prize of East Germany, and became the deputy director of the national nuclear research center in Dresden. Fuchs died in 1988, at the age of seventy-seven.\n\nBy contrast, Bruno Pontecorvo spent forty-three years in Russia, where his scientific career was frustrated, his family was traumatized, and his ideals were slowly crushed in the face of Soviet repression. If Bruno Pontecorvo was a spy, he was punished more than the others.\n\nOCTOBER 1992\n\nIn October 1992, a Russian historian was doing research for a documentary about the Cold War, on behalf of the American television network ABC. A guide from the KGB press office took the researcher to a KGB hospital in Moscow, where the elderly Lona Cohen was a patient. She talked about the \"young physicists\" she had met during her time as a spy, but would not name any names. She confirmed that she went to Niagara Falls around 1945, and again in 1948 or later, \"on a sightseeing pretext,\" to make contact with a source from Canada.\n\nNext, the researcher was taken to another wing of the hospital, where they met with a man named Anatoly Yatskov. Yatskov and Pontecorvo were born just three months apart, and would die within months of each other in 1993. Yatskov confirmed that he met Pontecorvo for the first time while Pontecorvo was \"on his way to the USSR.\" After Bruno arrived, Yatskov served for some time as Bruno's interpreter as well as his aide in entering Soviet life. Given their ages, and Yatskov's experience in atomic affairs, this story is plausible and fits with the descriptions of an unnamed aide that Bruno gave to Miriam Mafai. A fuller biography of Yatskov would record that, in the 1940s, he had been based in New York as the controller of the Soviet atomic spy network, which included Klaus Fuchs, Ted Hall, and Lona Cohen. Yatskov returned to the USSR in 1947. He died of cancer in March 1993, in the same hospital where he met the researcher.\n\nDuring a conversation between the researcher and the KGB guide, the possibility of interviewing Bruno Pontecorvo came up. The KGB host duly asked Pontecorvo for an interview \"just for the record,\" but Pontecorvo robustly declined. The researcher did not speak to Pontecorvo personally, but his response, as related by the KGB contact, \"rung in my ears\":\n\n\" _Ya khochu umeret' kak velikii fizik, a ne kak vash jebanyi shpion._ \"\n\n\"I want to die as a great scientist, not as your fucking spy.\"\nAfterword\n\nWHEN I BEGAN THIS INVESTIGATION, I WAS SKEPTICAL ABOUT CLAIMS that Pontecorvo was a spy.\n\nThe received wisdom has always been that he had committed some indiscretion, and that the KGB called him back to Moscow \"just in time,\" as the \"British/Italian/Canadian [take your pick] police were about to arrest him.\" However, even a cursory examination of the evidence shows such claims to have no sound foundation.\n\nStatements that Pontecorvo was a spy, made in 1951 by the US Congress's Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and propagated in the media at the time, were driven by McCarthyism, or based on theses that were manifestly inaccurate\u2014such as the claim that Pontecorvo was named by Gouzenko (he was not). Often, these charges were simply asserted by fiat without any backup. It is now clear that Reed's report was exploited by MI5, which, through selected journalists, put out versions designed to present the security services in a positive light. There are clues to MI5's influence in many of these stories; for example, Alan Nunn May's name is sometimes misspelled as \"Allan\" in the early literature, as it was in Bruno's personal address book, which had been made available to what in effect was an MI5 ghostwriter.\n\nMore than sixty years later, the secrecy persists: FBI papers on Pontecorvo remain classified, with whole pages blacked out, and several documents in the UK archives have their sources redacted. Others appear to have been mislaid, or misfiled. One example is the pivotal letter from Washington of July 1950, which led Philby to give Moscow the tip-off. This had been described as \"lost\" until December 2012, when, following persistent inquiries, I learned via Peter Hennessy that it had become \"available for inspection.\"\n\nAll available sources confirm that there was no evidence in 1950 that would enable the UK authorities to \"purge\" Pontecorvo. The MI5 files, along with the personal diaries of senior intelligence officers, reveal the hit-or-miss reality of their trade. MI5 often had strategic successes when it infiltrated known left-wing or right-wing extremist organizations, but identifying lone spies\u2014such as scientists who periodically passed information to the USSR for reasons of principle\u2014was like searching for a needle in a haystack. In Pontecorvo's case MI5 was reduced to what was euphemistically called \"amicable elimination.\"\n\nGuy Liddell encapsulated the problem in his diary. On June 2, 1950, he reviewed the case of Klaus Fuchs:\n\nThe FUCHS case showed that another man of his kind might well be recruited for a secret project. Once the decision to hire [such a spy has been] made, there are two [opportunities] for detection: where he gets the information and when he passes it on. As the former was in [the scientist's] brain, and he had it legally, it was impossible [to catch him in the act]. As to the latter, in FUCHS' case there was a period of a year when he didn't operate at all and thereafter only made contact once every three months. Unless you were on his tail for three months without detection\u2014which was very difficult\u2014there was very little chance of a result.\n\nWhen you considered that there were literally hundreds of cases of a prima facie kind where the evidence was far stronger than the case of FUCHS, it would be realised we were up against a formidable problem.\n\nBased on Liddell's diary and MI5 documents, it is clear that if Fuchs had not made a confession at the start of 1950, he would not have been prosecuted but instead would have been \"amicably eliminated\"\u2014transferred from Harwell to a university outside the ring of security. By the spring of that year, the UK authorities were preparing to take that same action in the case of Bruno Pontecorvo; the above remarks could equally well have been made about him. MI5 was essentially impotent if faced with a lone spy who kept his head down. In the case of Pontecorvo, MI5 had suspicions but no proof.\n\nThe most notable subsequent evidence came from Oleg Gordievsky. Gordievsky himself, who joined the KGB in 1963, had no dealings with Pontecorvo, but he claims to have known KGB officers who did. These individuals allegedly told Gordievsky that Pontecorvo had been a hugely valued agent during and after the war, and this anecdotal evidence is now preserved in print. However, when Gordievsky was smuggled out of the USSR into Finland in the trunk of a British diplomatic car (a mirror image of Pontecorvo's trip thirty-five years earlier) he brought no documents bearing Pontecorvo's name. At best, Gordievsky's assertions appear to be based on KGB files he once read, or memories of earlier conversations. No details of the information that Pontecorvo passed to the USSR have been given, and the possibility of genuine error, due to misheard or misremembered accounts, is clearly present.\n\nTo this day, no one who claims that Pontecorvo was a spy has ever produced verifiable evidence, nor even identified what he is supposed to have done. In _Half-Life_ I have identified two pieces of classified material that passed from Chalk River to the USSR\u2014a sample of uranium transferred later than Nunn May's, and blueprints of the nuclear reactor. Although there is no proof that Pontecorvo was the source of these materials, he had both the motive and the opportunity, and on balance can be identified as the prime suspect.\n\nIf Bruno was not approached by the Soviets during his time in Canada, then they missed an open goal. Kurchatov had followed Bruno's career in nuclear physics closely from 1935 onward, and his first action upon taking charge of the Soviet atomic bomb project had been to set up a list of potential contacts in North America.\n\nConsidering how efficiently the KGB responded to Kurchatov's demand to find sources within the Western atomic project, it is unlikely that they overlooked Bruno Pontecorvo. When Kurchatov learned the names of the scientists at Chalk River, he would have recognized Bruno immediately from their joint interest in isomers. Bruno was close with Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric and Ir\u00e8ne Joliot-Curie\u2014whose political sympathies were no secret\u2014and it would also be on record that Bruno had attracted the attention of Communist Party members in Paris, and joined the party himself in 1939.\n\nIf he was approached, what can we assume about Bruno's reaction?\n\nLater in his life, Bruno provided some clues when he commented on the case of Klaus Fuchs: \"I would not have condemned Fuchs. He did what he thought was right and at that time the USSR were allies and not enemies of America.\" Bruno also gave hints of his own allegiance to the communist ideal when his brother Gillo left the party following the invasion of Hungary. When Miriam Mafai interviewed Bruno thirty years later, she reported his reactions as follows: \"He can not understand how Gillo can challenge the analysis of events as taken by Moscow and the leadership of the USSR. Gillo seems to have forgotten that loyalty to the USSR is one of the fundamental principles of the communist conscience.\"\n\nThe last sentence summarizes the dogma of any truly committed communist in that era: if Moscow calls, you obey. It is the closest thing to a confession that Bruno Pontecorvo ever made.\n\nThe KGB maintained a vice-like grip on anyone who gave even a morsel of classified information to Soviet agents. Even a casual gesture on Bruno's part, such as providing blueprints to help his Soviet allies build a nuclear power plant for the benefit of their citizens, would be enough to put the squeeze on him later. Bruno's statement about the importance of obedience to the USSR suggests that the refusal of any such request would have been inconceivable. This is the strongest evidence that exists of Bruno's espionage, unless we take at face value Oleg Gordievsky's claims that Bruno Pontecorvo was a long-term spy of major importance to the USSR who voluntarily proffered secret documents to the Soviet embassy \"probably in Ottawa.\"\n\nSix decades after the flight from Abingdon, Gil is remarkably relaxed about the matter, as if nothing unusual took place. He also has a wry sense of humor. When I told a group of Pontecorvo relatives about Bruno's difficulties in getting visas to exit France and reach the United States in 1940, Gil laughed and said that this probably explained why Bruno was so relaxed in the USSR. A cousin then joked that Bruno's migration to the USSR \"had been handled by a travel agency.\"\n\nSo why did Bruno Pontecorvo leave for the Soviet Union, and who were the \"travel agents\"?\n\nIn my judgment, something sudden and unexpected prompted Pontecorvo's flight. Gil told me that he too felt that the decision was made on the spur of the moment. Bruno's favorite brother, Gillo, had expected to join him on an underwater fishing trip, but Bruno \"had canceled at the end of August.\" Based on the available evidence, the most likely catalyst was the Patterson letter. We can assume that Philby warned Moscow about it, and that Moscow warned Pontecorvo, possibly through the intermediary of Sereni.\n\nIn his 1951 report, when considering who might have orchestrated Pontecorvo's defection, Ronnie Reed identified Sereni as his prime suspect. Bruno's brother Guido had told Reed, \"Giuliana and her husband Tabet and Laura might have influenced Bruno but could not have organised anything, whereas Emilio Sereni was powerful enough to do so and quite possibly may have done.\"\n\nAlthough Bruno's sister Anna never asked him directly for an explanation of his behavior, she thought deeply about the saga in the course of her long life. She told me, \"I thought he had been kidnapped.\" As to who might have kidnapped him, she had no idea, and as to how he was spirited to the USSR, she offered nothing\u2014until after we had said goodbye. Just as her bus arrived, she unexpectedly remarked, \"I never did trust Emilio Sereni.\"\n\nThe full details of Sereni's role in Pontecorvo's defection may never be known. However, the possibility that Philby was its midwife now seems most probable.\n\nAs we've seen, Philby discovered that the FBI was interested in \"PONTECORVO's\" communist activities. It's also been stated that he \"passed on every secret\" to Moscow. Indeed, he had tipped off Moscow about Nunn May, Fuchs, and another Los Alamos spy, Arthur Adams, so we can assume the same to be true in Pontecorvo's case. Thus, by the end of July 1950, Moscow would be aware that the FBI was pursuing Pontecorvo.\n\nBy that stage, Pontecorvo was on a camping trip and would not be in contact with the communist wing of his family until the end of August. It must have been when he made one of his visits to Rome by car that Moscow alerted him. The rest of the scenario is easy to imagine: aware of the FBI interest in him, Pontecorvo suddenly defects.\n\nIt is hard to sustain a case that he would have acted so precipitously if he were totally innocent. He later claimed that a rising tide of anticommunist hysteria in the United Kingdom made him fear that innocence wouldn't protect him, but the claim does not survive scrutiny. Being exposed as communist at that time in the United States was a serious matter, but not in England. If Bruno had been based in the US, this explanation would make sense, but given that he was living in the UK, and was already in the process of being shifted from Harwell to the safety of Liverpool, the explanation seems implausible. On balance, I feel that it would take a more certain threat to make Bruno uproot his wife and children, and his own life and work, so completely. When Philby alerted Moscow, the Soviets would have delivered a stark message to Bruno: \"You're about to be arrested. We've seen the proof.\"\n\nWhat can we conclude about the enigmatic half-life of Bruno Pontecorvo? What further evidence might come to light?\n\nI have met many of the surviving actors from the 1950s, but there are loose ends nonetheless. Some individuals did not reply to my requests; others I was unsuccessful in reaching. I hope that any who read this account and have something significant to add will make contact. If the KGB files were to be opened, many questions might be answered. Meanwhile, the FBI files on Bruno Pontecorvo remain blacked out. Reading between the lines of the MI5 files, which reference collaboration with the FBI, one can infer that at least some of these redactions were driven by a desire to obscure failings by the bureau, as well as cover-ups undertaken with their British counterpart.\n\nThe papers in London that assess the implications of Pontecorvo's defection are notable for their failure to mention the hydrogen bomb. Given that Pontecorvo was an expert on tritium and heavy-water reactors, this is either an oversight (as the concept of the hydrogen bomb was already public knowledge), or a result of the fact that the relevant papers remain classified due to continued sensitivity about the weapon. It was this latter possibility that led me to ask whether other papers on the Pontecorvo affair existed, which in turn led to Peter Hennessy's query, and the discovery of the \"lost\" file revealing Philby's role.\n\nMarianne's story remains to be told. I am grateful to the Pontecorvo family for granting me access to Bruno's half of the correspondence between the pair in 1938\u20131939. Marianne's letters, however, remain private in Sweden, and only her diary was made available to me. Reading Bruno's half of the discourse is like overhearing one end of an intriguing phone call, and making guesses about the content of the other half. There has been speculation that Marianne was a committed communist too, and that she played an active and willing role in their decision to flee. Others, including members of the family, doubt this. A more complete understanding of Bruno's induction into the Communist Party, and of Marianne's attitude toward politics, could be buried in their correspondence from this time.\n\nEmilio Sereni's role has been explored by Simone Turchetti. Sereni's diaries, however, include encoded material, so there may be further opportunities there to determine what part Sereni played in organizing the defection.\n\nWhen I spoke to people who had some knowledge of the affair, but not of Pontecorvo himself, they almost invariably thought that the espionage question had been settled long ago: popular opinion had condemned Bruno Pontecorvo, notwithstanding the lack of evidence against him. This shows the power of the ex cathedra assertions of guilt made long ago, which have gained an aura of established truth through repetition. However, when I asked Bruno's colleagues and friends whether he could ever have been a spy, they almost universally insisted, \"Not Bruno! Impossible.\" One colleague who had worked with Pontecorvo every day at Harwell was \"very vehement\" and \"would stake his life that Bruno was not a spy.\" All who knew him mentioned his openness, his childlike na\u00efvet\u00e9, and his indomitable charisma, which all contributed to their conviction that he could not possibly have had a secret life. Some claimed that Bruno was actually on record denying that he had ever been a spy.\n\nHowever, I have not seen any such explicit denial. At the 1955 press conference, for example, such questions were not allowed, and on other occasions they were avoided. In his 1992 article on Pontecorvo for the _Independent_ , Charles Richards asked, \"Had he spied for Moscow? He still does not talk about it.\"\n\nIn any case, the character testimonials from friends and colleagues cannot be taken at face value. Far from being naive, Bruno successfully kept secrets from his closest colleagues for years. In particular, he hid his Communist Party membership from almost everyone, including Henry Arnold, the security officer at Harwell. Later, Bruno always insisted that he was against atomic weapons, yet during his time in England, when the scientific community started an active protest against militarization in nuclear physics, Bruno kept his thoughts to himself. Charisma and duplicity can coexist within the same person, as Kim Philby ably demonstrated.\n\nIn his rapport with his colleagues, Bruno is actually similar to three established atomic spies: Alan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs, and Ted Hall. Each of them hid their clandestine work from their fellow scientists, who reacted to the subsequent exposures with incredulity.\n\nIf the Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko had not exposed Alan Nunn May, the security authorities might never have been aware of Nunn May's existence. His colleagues, including Bruno Pontecorvo, were astonished at the news of his treachery. When MI5 informed Wallace Akers, the director of Tube Alloys, about Nunn May, he too was \"deeply shocked.\" If Akers had been asked to rank the scientists employed in Canada on the basis of their integrity, he confirmed that he \"would have placed May at the top.\"\n\nFuchs too only surfaced due to the actions of outside parties. In his case, decrypted Soviet messages mentioned specific details that allowed him to be identified as CHARLZ. He had fooled everyone, not least his fellow spy at Los Alamos, Ted Hall, who had thought himself to be \"the only one.\" As Hall's widow explained to me, \"He didn't know about Fuchs.\"\n\nThis takes us back to the beginning of my interest in Bruno Pontecorvo, and my conversation with Rudolf Peierls. Rudi and Genia Peierls had taken Klaus Fuchs into their home, viewing him with sympathy as a fellow \u00e9migr\u00e9 from fascism. They treated him almost as a member of the family, only to discover that he had fooled them. I still recall Rudi Peierls's sadness when I asked him whether Pontecorvo too had been a spy. He replied, \"You never can tell.\"\nAcknowledgments\n\nI MUST ACKNOWLEDGE AT THE OUTSET MY SPECIAL GRATITUDE TO THE members of the extended Pontecorvo family, in particular two first-hand witnesses: Gil Pontecorvo and Anna Newton. Gil, Bruno's eldest son, was twelve years old when the family fled from Abingdon-on-Thames (my current hometown) to the Soviet Union. Gil has first-hand memories of what really happened, in contrast to the many myths that were propagated at the time. A physicist himself, based in Russia, he also helped with translation and access to research notes and papers from Bruno's early years in Dubna. Bruno's sister, Anna Newton, was also invaluable, as she was with Bruno and his family in the days immediately before his defection, and her testimony helped clarify some inconsistencies in the MI5 accounts.\n\nIn addition, I am indebted to many individuals and organizations who provided advice during my research for _Half-Life_ , and to those who have read the manuscript in part or in its entirety. The list of helpful parties includes many scientists, both in the West and the former USSR, along with the families of former spies, members of the intelligence community, residents of Abingdon who knew the Pontecorvo family in 1950, and a host of others whom I would never have had the pleasure of meeting were it not for the surprising receipt of that query about MI5, which came from Peter Hennessy, Baron Hennessy of Nympsfield.\n\nSo thanks to:\n\nJoseph Albright\n\nUgo Amaldi\n\nChristopher Andrew\n\nLorna Arnold\n\nMarlene Baldauf\n\nAlessandro Bettini\n\nSamoil Bilenky\n\nBenny Birnberg\n\nTania Blokhintseva\n\nMark Bretscher\n\nPaul Broda\n\nFranco Buccella\n\nFrances Cairncross\n\nDuncan Campbell\n\nRino Castaldi\n\nDiana Cobban May\n\nChris Collins\n\nGordon Corera\n\nTam Dalyell\n\nThelma Druett\n\nSven-Olof Ekman\n\nGraham Farmelo\n\nGiuseppe Fidecaro\n\nMaria Fidecaro\n\nAnthony Gardner\n\nPaul Gardner\n\nMichael Goodman\n\nOleg Gordievsky\n\nJeremy Grange\n\nVladimir Gribov\n\nTom Griffin\n\nJoan Hall\n\nDavid Hanna\n\nRoger Hanna\n\nJoe Hatton\n\nPeter Hennessy\n\nPeter Higgs\n\nGregory Hutchinson\n\nBoris Ioffe\n\nDavid Jackson\n\nGeorge Kalmus\n\nValery Khoze\n\nJasper and Rita Kirkby\n\nPeter Knight\n\nAnneke Lawrence-Jones\n\nDavid Lees\n\nLuigi di Lella\n\nLev Lipatov\n\nHarry Lipkin\n\nFedele Lizzi\n\nJohn Maddicott\n\nMiriam Mafai\n\nLuciano Maiani\n\nNeil Maroni\n\nVictor Matveev\n\nArt McDonald\n\nHamish McRae\n\nMatt Melvin\n\nCharles Miller\n\nPeter Minkowski\n\nGiorgio Panini\n\nRudolf and Genia Peierls\n\nDon Perkins\n\nMichel Pinault\n\nChapman Pincher\n\nAnna Pontecorvo (Newton), Antonio Pontecorvo, Barbara Pontecorvo, David Pontecorvo, Gil Pontecorvo, Gregory Pontecorvo, Ludo Pontecorvo, Simone Pontecorvo\n\nKate Pyne\n\nNicholas Reed\n\nRichard Rhodes\n\nStella Rimington\n\nJohn Rowlinson\n\nYves Sacquin\n\nJohn Sandalls\n\nDavid Saxon\n\nGino Segr\u00e8\n\nBrian Smith\n\nGodfrey Stafford\n\nJack Steinberger\n\nKellogg Stelle\n\nEugenio Tabet\n\nStan Taylor\n\nI. Todorov\n\nSimone Turchetti\n\nWilliam Tyrer\n\nDavid Wark\n\nForbes Wastie\n\nPeter Watson\n\nNigel West\n\nChristine Wootton\n\nNino Zichichi\n\nSarah Wearne, Michael Triff, and the archives at Abingdon School\n\nAllen Packwood and the staff at the Churchill College archives, Cambridge\n\nCarlo Dionisi and the organizers of the Bruno Pontecorvo centenary conference, Rome\n\nClaire Daniel, Martin Hendry, Lesley Richmond, and David Saxon for research at the University of Glasgow archives\n\nJens Vigen and Tullio Basaglia at the CERN library and their liaison with Dubna\n\nGiuseppe Mussardo and Luisa Bonolis for video interviews in Russia, and the research and evaluation of material from historical archives in France, Italy, and Russia\n\nThree anonymous sources in the former Soviet Union, and two in the United Kingdom\n\nFinally, _Half-Life_ owes much to editorial advice from T. J. Kelleher, John Searcy, and Sandra Beris at Basic, and Robin Dennis and Sam Carter at Oneworld, as well as Michael Marten, who read my first draft in full and encouraged me to rewrite it, and my agent, Patrick Walsh, who helped this project come to life.\nAcronyms\n\nAIP: American Institute of Physics oral history archive (online)\n\nBPSSW: _Bruno Pontecorvo: Selected Scientific Works_\n\nCAC: Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge University\n\nTNA: The National Archives, London\nNotes\n\nPROLOGUE\n\n. Guy Liddell diary, 1950, TNA KV 4/472.\n\n. Recounted in Chapman Pincher, _Treachery_ , chap. 59.\n\n. John Rowlinson interview, November 6, 2012.\n\n. L. Fermi, _Atoms in the Family_ , p. 257.\n\n. This is my memory of Alexei's remarks from four decades past. The quotes are his own words, taken from a memorial for Bruno. Sadly, Alexei Norairovich Sissakian himself died in 2010 and so was unable to develop his memories with me further. The quote as written is excerpted from the memorial. It is consistent with my memory of his remarks to me.\n\n. Thelma Druett interview, February 2012.\n\n. Alan Moorehead's book _The Traitors_ was first published in 1952 and cast Fuchs, Nunn May, and Pontecorvo as the three \"traitors.\" It is now clear that Moorehead was given free rein by MI5 to include Pontecorvo as an atomic spy without any hard evidence. Nonetheless, his book established the perception that Pontecorvo escaped to the USSR as the net was about to close around him. In any event, none of the trio was a traitor to the United Kingdom as the Soviet Union was its ally at the time when Fuchs and Nunn May passed information. As neither Moorehead nor MI5 ever specified what Pontecorvo was supposed to have done, or when, there is no basis for classifying him as a traitor either. Furthermore, he was not a British citizen until 1948.\n\n. N. Reed, _My Father, the Man Who Never Was._ On page 117 Ronnie Reed recalls being \"put in charge of counter-espionage against the Russians in 1951.\" This seems to be a false memory; TNA archives show he was in place in 1950, and Reed himself recalled that this meant he was in \"charge of cases like Klaus Fuchs,\" which straddled the end of 1949 and beginning of 1950. My understanding of Reed's role is also based on e-mails and phone conversations with Nicholas Reed on December 17, 2012, March 12, 2013, and March 20, 2013.\n\nCHAPTER 1\n\n. Anna Pontecorvo interview, November 11, 2011.\n\n. Turchetti, _The Pontecorvo Affair_ , p. 16\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes; Anna Pontecorvo interview, November 11, 2011.\n\n. Anna Pontecorvo interview, November 11, 2011.\n\n. Anna Pontecorvo interview, November 11, 2011.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes.\n\n. Ludo Pontecorvo interview, September 12, 2013. The accuracy of this memory is unclear. Bruno's younger brother Gillo was indeed an international competitor, who took part in the tournament at London's Queen's Club in 1939. Bruno could play a good game, by all accounts, and was the winner of several tournaments at the club level, but never reached the same stratospheric heights as his brother.\n\n. Gil Pontecorvo interview, January 25, 2014. Maria's family belonged to the Chiesa Evangelica Valdese, an evangelical Protestant group that had broken from the Catholic Church.\n\n. Anna Pontecorvo interview, November 11, 2011.\n\n. Neil Maroni interview, December 23, 2013. A remark by an unnamed family member, as quoted by Neil Maroni, son of Giovanni Pontecorvo.\n\n. Another cousin, Eugenio Coloni, joined the antifascist group Justice and Liberty. He was later arrested and eventually killed by fascist militants in 1944. His significance for Bruno's life was limited.\n\n. These were Lev and Xenia Zilberberg. See Chaliand and Blin, _The History of Terrorism_ , or Smadar Sinai, \"Manya Shochat and Xenia Pampilova's Experience of Immigration to Eretz Yisrael: A New Identity or a New Garment?,\" accessible at www.aisisraelstudies.org/papers/AIS2007_SinaiSmadar.pdf, which states, \"In 1926, [Xenia's] daughter Xenichka married Emilio Sereni . . . who became one of the leaders of the communist party in Italy.\"\n\n. Guido Pontecorvo, as quoted in TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. L. Fermi, _Atoms in the Family_ , p. 97.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes.\n\n. The discovery of the neutron in 1932 was key. See Rhodes, _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ for a description of the discovery and its implications.\n\n. This is essentially the atomic model proposed in 1803 by English chemist John Dalton. His model explained the laws of chemical combination and inspired quantitative experiments. This led scientists to measure the relative weights of the atoms of different elements, which range from hydrogen, the lightest element, to uranium, the heaviest normally found on earth.\n\n. Dig uranium from the ground and, in 993 out of every 1,000 atoms, the nucleus will have 146 neutrons, making 238 \"nucleons\" in total\u2014the isotope U-238. The remaining seven atoms will most probably contain only 143 neutrons, making U-235. Even the most common form of uranium, U-238, is radioactive. Half of a sample of the stuff will decay in 4 billion years\u2014we call this its half-life, which means that about half of the uranium found in the rocks of the newborn Earth, 5 billion years ago, has now decayed. The isotope U-235, by contrast, has a half-life of about 700 million years. This time span, which is very long on a human scale, is nonetheless relatively short compared to the age of the earth and the half-life of its sibling, U-238. Thus, over the eons, much more U-235 than U-238 has disappeared from primeval rocks. This explains the dominance of U-238 in natural ores today. This U-238 also acts as a blanket that impedes the fission of U-235, making a succession of fissions rare, and the chance of a chain reaction negligible in uranium ores. Uranium first has to be \"enriched\" by increasing the percentage of U-235 before it can be used as a practical source of energy.\n\n. The half-life is the time after which half of the atoms of a sample will have decayed.\n\n. There is an exception, however. When more than 1058 neutrons come together, the assembly can be held together by the force of gravity. This is a neutron star.\n\n. Hans Bethe, quoted in Rhodes, _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ , p. 165.\n\nCHAPTER 2\n\n. Pauli originally called it a \"neutron,\" but when the constituent of the nucleus was discovered and given that name in 1932, Enrico Fermi proposed the name _neutrino_ for the particle emitted in beta decay.\n\n. Close, _Neutrino_ , pp. 22\u201324.\n\n. Half a century later, the editors admitted that this was their greatest blunder.\n\n. L. Fermi, _Atoms in the Family_ , p. 84.\n\n. Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot, Nobel Prize address, 1935. See <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1935/joliot-fred-lecture.pdf>.\n\n. Ugo Amaldi e-mail, January 12, 2014. Laboratorio di Sanit\u00e0 Pubblica, headed by Trabacchi, was located in the same building on the Via Panisperna and kept one gram of uranium on hand for medical purposes.\n\n. Ugo Amaldi e-mail, January 12, 2014. Amaldi recalled that, during this vacation, Fermi explained his theory of beta decay to the \"Boys.\"\n\n. The idea seems to have originated with Ettore Majorana, a brilliant theorist on Fermi's team. Majorana disappeared in 1938 and was presumed dead. See Turchetti, _The Pontecorvo Affair_ , p. 24.\n\n. The positron is the antimatter sibling of the negatively charged electron. It has the same mass as an electron but is positively charged.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes.\n\n. Edoardo Amaldi as told to Ugo Amaldi; Ugo Amaldi interview, September 12, 2013.\n\n. Fermi's memory of events as told to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. See Fermi, _Note e memorie_ , p. 927; quoted in Robotti and Guerra, \"Bruno Pontecorvo in Italy.\"\n\n. Not October 22, contrary to popular wisdom. See later comments about this.\n\n. Ugo Amaldi e-mail, January 12, 2014. This seems to be a leitmotif for Fermi, as eight years later in Chicago, when his nuclear reactor was about to reach criticality, he said, \"And now we go for lunch.\"\n\n. Ugo Amaldi e-mail, January 12, 2014. Ugo recalls his father, Edoardo, saying that Fermi reached an understanding of the phenomenon during lunch, and that on the way back to the laboratory he explained the idea of slow neutrons to them.\n\n. Edoardo Amaldi interview, AIP, <http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4485_1.html>. Amaldi describes this episode and also considers whether Fermi's insight was inspired by his earlier analysis of electrons bouncing from atoms, which he had made following the measurements of atomic spectra by Amaldi, Segr\u00e8, and Pontecorvo.\n\n. L. Fermi, _Atoms in the Family_ , chap. 11. See also note 20 below, which casts doubt on her version.\n\n. Ugo Amaldi e-mail, January 12, 2014. Ugo Amaldi confirms this. These papers were drafted in the Amaldi apartment when Ugo was asleep, at the age of two months. On more than one occasion his mother later told him that there was so much excitement she was afraid he would be woken.\n\n. L. Fermi, _Atoms in the Family_ , p. 101.\n\n. Historian Alberto De Gregorio studied Enrico Fermi's logbooks, which give October 20 as the date. See his \"Chance and Necessity in Fermi's Discovery of the Properties of the Slow Neutrons\" (<http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0201/0201028.pdf>) for a detailed history and analysis of different memories of these events. I am grateful to Ugo Amaldi for bringing this document to light. Ugo also doubts the goldfish pond episode: his father, Edoardo, never mentioned it, and Emilio Segr\u00e8 claimed to Ugo that it never happened.\n\n. Ugo Amaldi e-mail, January 12, 2014. The history of the water bucket is confused. The variable results of Amaldi and Pontecorvo, which started the saga, were at one point blamed upon a bucket of water, which the cleaner would leave \"now under one table and another time under another.\"\n\n. In November he repeated some of the tests and found the same results as \"those of October 21 [sic].\"\n\n. Ugo Amaldi interview, September 11, 2013; Ugo Amaldi e-mail, January 12, 2014.\n\n. Ugo Amaldi interview, September 11, 2013.\n\n. Robotti, \"The Beginning of a Great Adventure.\"\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo, \"On the Properties of Slow Neutrons\" [in Italian], _Il nuovo cimento_ 12, no. 4 (April 1935): 211\u2013222.\n\n. Graphite is carbon, which is light enough to slow neutrons efficiently, and also cheap. Heavy water, however, is expensive and not readily available.\n\n. Turchetti, _The Pontecorvo Affair_ , chap. 1, note 54.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes.\n\n. Frisch, _What Little I Remember_ , quoted in Rhodes, _The Making of the Atomic Bomb,_ p. 227.\n\n. In 1932 Dmitri Ivanenko, a theoretician in Moscow, invented a model of the atomic nucleus consisting of neutrons and protons, independently of Bohr, but no one seems to have been aware of this. Ivanenko's lack of recognition made him bitter, and in 1949 his morbid obsession led him to attack Soviet physicists who were acknowledging Western ideas.\n\n. Maurice Goldhaber, interview by Gloria Lubkin and Charles Weiner, January 10, 1966, transcript, Niels Bohr Library, American Institute of Physics, New York, p. 27.\n\n. Holloway, _Stalin and the Bomb,_ p. 39.\n\nCHAPTER 3\n\n. Quote from FBI memorandum, November 9, 1949, TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Date stamp in Italian passport 467675, TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Ir\u00e8ne served in Blum's government from June to September 1936, when she gave up the position due to ill health, as she continued to suffer from tuberculosis.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo,_ p. 78. As Malraux had left his wife, and at that time lived with Josette Clotis, with whom he later had two children, this would indeed seem to be a classic example of meeting one's mistress in the hour between leaving work and going home.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes.\n\n. Robotti and Guerra, \"Bruno Pontecorvo in Italy\"; Luisa Bonolis e-mail, January 19, 2014.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo,_ p. 85.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 84.\n\n. Ronnie Reed report paper 206A, dated January 16, 1951, TNA KV 2/1890: \"Gilberto told Guido that Bruno was a very ardent communist and had in fact been responsible for converting both Gilberto and Giuliana to communism in 1940.\"\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes.\n\n. Ernest Hemingway, quoted by his biographer A. E. Hotchner, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Moveable_Feast>.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo papers, CAC; Gil Pontecorvo interview, September 22, 2011: \"She worked for a family of rich Swedes, babysitting.\"\n\n. Marianne Nordblom passport, CAC.\n\n. Diary in Bruno Pontecorvo papers, CAC.\n\n. Until 1984 Paris had a mail service consisting of a network of tubes powered by compressed air. See John Vincour, \"Paris Pneumatique Is Now a Dead Letter,\" _New York Times_ , March 31, 1984, <http://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/31/style/paris-pneumatique-is-now-a-dead-letter.html>.\n\n. The phrase \"pile ou face\" (heads or tails) in Marianne's diary appears to refer to a game of tossing coins.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 93.\n\n. Emling, _Marie Curie and Her Daughters_ , p. 34.\n\n. Quoted in Emling, _Marie Curie and Her Daughters,_ p. 93.\n\n. Lew Kowarski interview, AIP, <http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4717_1.html>.\n\n. Luisa Bonolis interview, January 19, 2014; see also Robotti and Guerra, \"Bruno Pontecorvo in Italy.\"\n\n. Isomerism had been observed long before, but it was Kurchatov who first convincingly demonstrated the phenomenon in the new era of induced radioactivity and inspired a new field of inquiry.\n\n. Close, _The Infinity Puzzle_ , p. 21.\n\n. A photon in the green part of the visible spectrum has an energy of about two electron volts. An electron volt (eV) is the energy that an electron gains when accelerated by a potential of one volt. Thousands and millions of eV are denoted keV and MeV, respectively.\n\n. Emling, _Marie Curie and Her Daughters_ , p. 151.\n\n. His family had fled after the revolution. He joined Joliot-Curie's group in 1934, and became a French citizen on November 16, 1939.\n\n. Lew Kowarski interview, AIP, <http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4717_2.html>. The _von_ moniker was much loved by Hans von Halban, but we shall use the basic surname _Halban_ from here on.\n\n. Lew Kowarski interview, AIP, <http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4717_2.html>. Another colleague, quoted in Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , p. 115, described Halban as \"a playboy, rich from his father and from marrying a banker's daughter.\"\n\n. CAC. The _certificat de domicile_ issued on February 8, 1940, shows that she lived there from January 4 to September 10, 1938, when her French visa was about to expire, and returned on August 28, 1939.\n\n. This is an anecdotal memory from a local source who wished to remain anonymous. If there is any written record, it has not been made public.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 93.\n\n. Sven-Olof Ekman interview, November 28, 2013.\n\n. Letter from Bruno Pontecorvo to Marianne Nordblom, October 12, 1938, Bruno Pontecorvo files CAC.\n\n. Letter from Bruno Pontecorvo to Marianne Nordblom, October 13, 1938, CAC.\n\n. Letter from Bruno Pontecorvo to Marianne Nordblom, October 15, 1938, CAC.\n\n. Quoted in obituary, _The Guardian,_ October 14, 2006.\n\n. Stable relative to beta decay. The paper is \"On the Possible Existence of Beta-Stable Isomers\" [in French], presented at Actes du Congr\u00e8s International du Palais de la D\u00e8couverte, Paris, 1937 (listed in Bruno Pontecorvo bibliography at <http://pontecorvo.jinr.ru/bibliography.html>). At these same proceedings, George Placzek suggested that nuclear levels may be grouped into individual classes that do not intercombine\u2014see note in Bruno Pontecorvo, \"Isomeric Forms of Radio Rhodium,\" _Nature_ 141, no. 3574 (April 30, 1938): 785.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo and M. Dode, \"On a Radioelement Produced in Cadmium under the Action of Fast Neutrons\" [in French], _Comptes Rendus de l'Acad\u00e9mie des Sciences_ 207, no. 4 (1938): 287\u2013293.\n\n. The distribution of these photons in space is related to the difference in angular momentum of the original isomer and the state into which it decays. Technically, this is called their angular distribution, or multipolarity.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo, \"Isomeric Forms of Radio Rhodium,\" _Nature_ 141, no. 3574 (April 30, 1938): 785.\n\n. A minibiography of the Joliot-Curies, which mentions the work at Ivry, can be found at <http://www.analytik.ethz.ch/praktika/radiochemie/unterlagen/biografien/Joliot-Curie.pdf>.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo and A. Lazard, \"Isometric Nuclei Produced by Continuous X-ray Spectra\" [in French], _Comptes Rendus de l'Acad\u00e9mie des Sciences_ 208, no. 2 (1939): 99\u2013101.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes.\n\n. The isomers actually have slightly different masses, but the difference is too small to be measured directly, hence the sobriquet _isomer_ , for what appeared to be \"equal masses.\" Each rung on the energy ladder has a slightly different energy, and by the mass-energy equivalence, this implies a different mass. However, the difference in their masses is equivalent to one part in several thousand. It is this nugatory difference that enables photons to be emitted as the isomers tumble down the energy ladder.\n\n. Lew Kowarski interview, AIP, <http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4717_1.html>.\n\n. Holloway, _Stalin and the Bomb_ , p. 50, note 5. Rhodes, _Dark Sun_ , p. 27 contains the letter sent to Abram Ioffe, with whom Kurchatov began experiments. The KGB double agent Oleg Gordievsky claimed to me on April 30, 2013, that the KGB used Pontecorvo as an agent during this period in Paris. This seems unlikely. Pontecorvo was peripheral to the fission research, unlike Joliot-Curie, who had already told Kurchatov about the phenomenon. None of this work was secret at first.\n\n. He repeated the test with rings of various sizes and verified that the intensity of radiation was less for large rings than for small ones, and that with the largest ring there was no radioactivity at all. This confirmed that the radiation was indeed the result of the uranium and not some other source.\n\n. Pinault, \" _Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot, la science et la soci\u00e9t\u00e9,_ \" p. 152; Michel Pinault e-mail, January 21, 2014.\n\n. Letter from Bruno Pontecorvo to Marianne Nordblom, January 27, 1939, CAC. The mention of Ivry is confusing. The fission demonstration was made at the Coll\u00e8ge de France; it seems unlikely that Bruno would choose to refer to his own work in such splendid terms at that very moment. Later, on March 27, he unambiguously refers to the fission work in another letter to Marianne.\n\n. Rhodes, _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ , p. 290.\n\n. The idea of a chain reaction originated with Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard in 1934. He had not foreseen that uranium would be key, and mistakenly thought that a light element such as beryllium would do. He shared his insight with Rutherford. The concept was thus in the open. The story is told in many books, e.g., Rhodes, _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ , p. 28 and Farmelo, _Churchill's Bomb,_ p. 73 et seq.\n\n. Holloway, _Stalin and the Bomb_ , p. 57.\n\n. Manham, _Snake Dance_ , p. 189, which appears to be based on Ren\u00e9 Brion and Jean-Louis Moreau, _De la mine \u00e0 Mars: la gen\u00e8se d'Umicore_ (Brussels: Lannoo, 2004).\n\n. Letter from Bruno Pontecorvo to Marianne Nordblom, February 1939, CAC.\n\n. Letter from Bruno Pontecorvo to Marianne Nordblom, June 26, 1939, CAC.\n\n. Legal document signed by Bruno Pontecorvo, CAC.\n\n. Ludo Pontecorvo interview, April 18, 2013.\n\n. Guy Liddell diaries, TNA KV 4/472.\n\n. Sven-Olof Ekman e-mail, May 15, 2013, and copy of FBI file on Bruno Pontecorvo.\n\n. Letter from Bruno Pontecorvo to Marianne Nordblom, CAC.\n\n. Guido Pontecorvo to MI5, January 12, 1951, TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 186.\n\n. Weart, _Scientists in Power_ , p. 114.\n\n. Lew Kowarski interview, AIP, <http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4717_1.html>.\n\n. Lew Kowarski interview, AIP, <http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4717_1.html>.\n\n. The fact that we are not in the presence of naturally occurring atomic explosives is the result of a delicate balance. In Russia, Yakov Zel'dovitch and Yuli Khariton calculated that if the amount of U-235 were slightly higher (about twenty rather than seven in every thousand atoms), a chain reaction could happen as long as the neutrons had been slowed (moderated) with water. Their calculations were correct, except for one thing: they assumed water to be a much more efficient moderator than it is in practice.\n\n. Lew Kowarski interview, AIP, <http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4717_1.html>.\n\n. Quote from vetting report dated July 6, 1940, TNA KV 2/1888, memo 117B. This was also noted by Ronnie Reed in his report of 1951. See also Turchetti, _The Pontecorvo Affair_ , p. 71.\n\nCHAPTER 4\n\n. Weart, _Scientists in Power_ , p. 153.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 105.\n\n. Turchetti, _The Pontecorvo Affair_ , p. 44.\n\n. Segr\u00e8, _A Mind Always in Motion_ , p. 160.\n\n. Eugenio Tabet interview, September 12, 2013.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo files, CAC.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo files, CAC.\n\n. See N\u00e9mirovsky, _Suite Fran\u00e7aise_ ; confirmed by M\u00e9t\u00e9o France.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 106.\n\n. Lew Kowarski interview, AIP, <http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4717_1>.\n\n. See N\u00e9mirovsky, _Suite Fran\u00e7aise_ , p. 4.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 105.\n\n. Sonia Tomara, _New York Herald Tribune_ , June 14, 1940, <http://spartacus-educational.com/2WWtomara.htm>.\n\n. Mafai has this as _Muftar_ , which doesn't exist and appears to be Bruno's phonetic memory of _Mouffetard_ fifty years later.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 106.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 107.\n\n. Sonia Tomara, _New York Herald Tribune_ , June 14, 1940, <http://spartacus-educational.com/2WWtomara.htm>.\n\n. The card in the Churchill College archives was written in French; the translation is mine. Bruno and Gillo later told Mafai that they left Paris early on the morning of June 13, which is as I have written here. The card was written on June 14. The distances traveled are consistent with two days of traveling by bicycle, and their memory of a June 13 departure.\n\n. Details of Luria's Nobel Prize are at <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1969/luria-bio.html>.\n\n. Lew Kowarski interview, AIP, <http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4717_1>.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo passport visa, CAC.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo passport visas, CAC. Marianne's visa number is 1209087 and Gil's is 1209090. Marianne is noted as Swedish, and Gil as Italian.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 110.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo passport, CAC.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo passport, CAC.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 111.\n\n. The bridge that spans the Narrows is known as the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. However, the waterway itself is simply called the Narrows, not the Verrazano Narrows, contrary to a common misconception.\n\n. FBI/INS records of arrival number 65-5650 list the date as August 19, and the intended destination as the home of Paolo Pontecorvo at 503 W. 121 St. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 112 has August 20. TNA KV 2/1888, memo 109A claims that Bruno entered the US on August 18, 1950. I have written the date as August 19, using the actual US entry forms as the primary documentary source. The reference to humidity obscuring the view originates with Bruno Pontecorvo as told to Mafai on the page referenced above. This is consistent with the weather data recorded at <http://weatherspark.com/history/31081/1950/New-York-United-States>.\n\n. Gillo Pontecorvo obituary, _The Guardian_ , October 14, 2006, <http://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/oct/14/guardianobituaries.obituaries>.\n\n. Gillo Pontecorvo remarks in Pontecorvo family film, viewed September 12, 2013.\n\nCHAPTER 5\n\n. Frisch and Peierls memorandum, quoted in Rhodes, _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ , p. 324.\n\n. Bureaucracy, politics, and the sheer scale of the challenge delayed action until late in 1941. See Farmelo, _Churchill's Bomb_.\n\n. The story of these experiments is found in Rhodes, _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ , pp. 348\u2013351.\n\n. Sir John Cockcroft, \"The Early Days of Canadian and British Atomic Energy Projects,\" www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull040su/04004701820su.pdf.\n\n. Holloway, _Stalin and the Bomb_ , p. 70.\n\n. Holloway, _Stalin and the Bomb_ , p. 54.\n\n. Kurchatov left his name off the paper, although he had inspired and overseen the experiment, so that the young duo could get the full credit. In 1960, Flerov became the director of the laboratory of nuclear reactions at JINR in Dubna. See also Holloway, _Stalin and the Bomb_ , p. 55.\n\n. Holloway, _Stalin and the Bomb_ , p. 387, note 77.\n\n. This independent discovery remained undisclosed for forty years. See Holloway, _Stalin and the Bomb_ , pp. 66\u201367 and note 98.\n\n. H. York, quoted in Rhodes, _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ , p. 327.\n\n. L. Fermi, _Atoms in the Family_ , p. 254.\n\n. It's not clear how sure Bruno Pontecorvo was that this job was guaranteed when he left Paris. Segr\u00e8 had said at the time that he could \"get you a job.\" Segr\u00e8 wrote to Pontecorvo again in August, by which time the latter was in the US, and urged him to \"get there quickly.\" It seems that there may have been some confusion, as another physicist, Sergio Benedetti, thought that he had also been offered the job. Comments at Bruno Pontecorvo centenary meeting, Rome, 2013.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 115.\n\n. On the order of an electron volt or less.\n\n. E. Amaldi and E. Fermi, \"On the Absorption and the Diffusion of Slow Neutrons,\" _Physical Review_ 50 (November 1936): 899.\n\n. R. Fearon, W. Russell, and B. Pontecorvo, \"Preliminary Field Experiment in Scattered Neutron Well Logging; 25 June 1941,\" S. Scherbatskoy papers, box 1, folder 6, Smithsonian archives. Referenced in Turchetti, _The Pontecorvo Affair_ , p. 45.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo, \"Neutron Well Logging,\" _Oil and Gas Journal_ 40 (1941): 32\u201333.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo, \"Radioactivity Analysis of Oil Well Samples,\" _Geophysics_ 7, no. 1 (1942): 90\u201392.\n\n. Turchetti, _The Pontecorvo Affair_ , p. 45.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 115.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 117.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 115.\n\n. L. Fermi, _Atoms in the Family_ , p. 163.\n\nCHAPTER 6\n\n. Holloway, _Stalin and the Bomb_ , p. 77.\n\n. The separation was accomplished by gaseous diffusion. Fuchs's Russian contact was with the GRU. After late 1943, when Fuchs moved to the United States, he operated with the NKGB (Andrew and Gordievsky, _KGB_ , p. 314). See also note 3 in the \"Interlude\" chapter of the present book and p. ix of Andrew and Gordievsky for some guidance to the labyrinthine histories of the various Soviet security services\n\n. See Holloway, _Stalin and the Bomb_ , p. 79 for more on Flerov's efforts and the slow response of various authorities.\n\n. This was in December 1941.\n\n. James Chadwick interview, AIP, http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/3974_4.html. Farmelo, _Churchill's Bomb_ , p. 179.\n\n. Via Fuchs and also possibly John Cairncross, secretary to the Minister without Portfolio, Lord Hankey, who received Chadwick's report.\n\n. See comments by Alan Nunn May in Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , p. 111 et seq. The ICI patents are discussed in Weart, _Scientists in Power_ , pp. 171\u2013181.\n\n. Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , p. 122.\n\n. Turchetti, _The Pontecorvo Affair_ , p. 47, note 28.\n\n. L. Fermi, _Atoms in the Family_ , p. 168.\n\n. S. Scherbatskoy papers, box 1, folder 6, Smithsonian archives; see Turchetti, _The Pontecorvo Affair_ , p. 47, note 27.\n\n. Harry Lipkin e-mail, February 18, 2011.\n\n. The name was changed to Eldorado Mining and Refining Limited.\n\n. For more information about Boris Pregel, see Turchetti, _The Pontecorvo Affair_ , p. 57 or <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Pregel>.\n\n. Letter from Boris Pregel to Bruno Pontecorvo, November 24, 1942, CAC.\n\n. Bertrand Goldschmidt, quoted in Weart, _Scientists in Power_ , p. 196.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 130.\n\nCHAPTER 7\n\n. Turchetti, _The Pontecorvo Affair_ , p. 52.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1887.\n\n. Gowing, _Britain and Atomic Energy_ , p. 277.\n\n. TNA AB 1/361.\n\n. TNA KV 4/242, memo 23a, dated October 23, 1950.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. TNA KV 4/243.\n\n. The report was \"lost\" for seven years, and only reappeared in 1950. This visit by the FBI seemed inconsequential at the time, but would later prove central to Bruno's sudden decision to flee to the USSR in 1950\u2014see Chapter 13.\n\n. Burke, _The Spy Who Came In from the Co-op_ , p. 132.\n\n. Burke, _The Spy Who Came In from the Co-op_. The claim that \"Chalk River was penetrated by Soviet agents\" is also asserted by Andrew and Mitrokhin, _The Mitrokhin Archive_ , p. 174.\n\n. Weather history for January 1943 can be found at <http://www.weather-warehouse.com/WeatherHistory/PastWeatherData_TulsaIntlArpt_Tulsa_OK_January.html>.\n\n. Wallace, \"Atomic Energy in Canada,\" p. 126. (I am indebted to J. D. Jackson for this source.)\n\n. Wallace, \"Atomic Energy in Canada,\" p. 127.\n\n. These arguments occurred between Sir John Anderson of the British War Cabinet, and Vannevar Bush, head of the US Office of Research and Development. The USORD oversaw the Manhattan Project, of which General Groves was the director.\n\n. See Farmelo, _Churchill's Bomb_ , especially pp. 211\u2013223. Also, John Angus's first name and status per email from Archive Sources, University of Glasgow, September 25, 2014.\n\n. Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , chap. 12.\n\n. This has been well documented in descriptions of life at Los Alamos, so there is no reason to doubt that it was the case in Chicago also. At Los Alamos, the research director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, lobbied against the policy. His colleagues supported him. He organized weekly colloquiums where technical staff from the entire project discussed their ideas freely. Overall, the personnel at Los Alamos shared information in ways that horrified General Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project.\n\n. Goldschmidt, _Les rivalit\u00e9s atomiques,_ p. 44, quoted in Weart, _Scientists in Power_ , p. 198. See also Gowing, _Britain and Atomic Energy_ , p. 160; Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , p. 125.\n\n. Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , p. 108.\n\n. Gibbs, \"British and American Counter-Intelligence.\"\n\n. Quoted in Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , p. 115.\n\n. Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , p. 126.\n\n. Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , p. 126.\n\n. Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , p. 113.\n\n. Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , p. 124.\n\n. Presumably, the Germans were under so much pressure that the threat of a German invasion of the UK\u2014for which radar was the intended defense\u2014was now greatly reduced. Also, with Hitler now on the defensive, there was fear that he might develop his own atomic bomb and hold the Allies hostage in a last stand.\n\n. Paul Broda interview, October 11, 2013.\n\n. Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , p. 131.\n\n. Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , p. 144.\n\n. Sudoplatov et al., _Special Tasks_.\n\n. Sudoplatov did not suggest that these major scientists were Soviet agents, only that they had leaked information to those who were. The possibility that Fermi \"may have spoken indiscreetly on some occasion to his old pupil and colleague Bruno Pontecorvo is far from implausible\" (anonymous analysis of Sudoplatov claims, June 16, 2003, <http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/929408/replies?c=191>). This remark has some support from our Chapter 6, where Pontecorvo admits that data he had received from Fermi \"had not been published, and cannot be published for a long time to come, because of their confidential character.\" Sudoplatov misidentified the Soviet agent MLAD as Pontecorvo, whereas this was in fact Ted Hall. Hall was not publicized as an atomic spy until the appearance of _Bombshell_ in 1997. Sudoplatov's claims were made before 1994, and he may have included disinformation to protect Hall. An exchange of opinions between Jerrold and Leona Schecter (Sudoplatov's coauthors on _Special Tasks_ ) and Thomas Powers on Sudoplatov's more extreme claims appeared in the _New York Review of Books_ in September 1994 (<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1994/sep/22/were-the-atom-scientists-spies-an-exchange/>). This exchange references a denial by John Cairncross that he transmitted news of the Tube Alloys project to the Soviets; Cairncross attributes this leak to Donald Maclean.\n\n. Remarks by Gillo Pontecorvo as reported by Guido Pontecorvo to MI5, January 1951, TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 130. Niels Bohr was Danish; Marianne Pontecorvo was Swedish. _Nils_ is the Swedish variant of _Niels_.\n\n. Before the project started, it was known that light elements, such as boron and nitrogen, absorb slow neutrons. Today this property is exploited in control rods, made of elements such as boron, which can prevent a nuclear fission reaction from getting out of control.\n\n. This was on January 6\u20137. Bruno Pontecorvo was also in the US on January 12 and in New York on January 20\u201324. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , p. 130.\n\n. TNA AB 2/643, AB 2/645, AB 2/647.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. This is in part what Fermi had in mind, following Pontecorvo's defection, when he said that Pontecorvo's presence in the Soviet Union was far more important than any information that he might have passed before 1950.\n\n. Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , p. 128.\n\n. Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , p. 134.\n\n. One idea was to look for helium, as the presence of this gas is a sign of alpha particles\u2014the nuclei of helium atoms.\n\n. The issue was not finally resolved until later that year, after the war had ended. This investigation by B. Pontecorvo and D. West is reported in TNA AB 2/318.\n\n. TNA AB 2/653.\n\n. Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , p. 133 and TNA AB 2/653.\n\n. Lew Kowarski interview, AIP, <http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4717_4.html>.\n\n. Lew Kowarski interview, AIP, <http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4717_4.html>.\n\n. Kowarski recalls that the party began shortly before 4:00 p.m.\n\n. If Alan Nunn May had passed information to an enemy, he could have faced the death penalty for treason. However, the Soviet Union was an ally, and he was convicted of breaking the Official Secrets Act.\n\n. Letter from Geoff Hanna to Giuseppe Fidecaro, October 24, 1996. I am indebted to David Hanna for access to this letter and other correspondence linked to Chalk River.\n\nCHAPTER 8\n\n. B. Pontecorvo, \"Inverse Beta Process,\" Report PD-205, National Research Council of Canada, Division of Atomic Energy, Chalk River, November 13, 1946.\n\n. B. Pontecorvo, \"On a Method for Detecting Free Neutrinos,\" Report PD-141, National Research Council of Canada, Division of Atomic Energy, Chalk River, May 21, 1945.\n\n. This discussion must have occurred when Otto Frisch visited Chalk River from Los Alamos; papers of Otto Frisch, TNA CSAC 87.5.82/A.64.\n\n. When it was declassified in 1964, it was lodged among papers at the National Archives, unnoticed. Most physicists, myself included, were either unaware of its existence, or assumed that it contained nothing more than the public 1946 paper. The received wisdom on the history of Bruno Pontecorvo and solar neutrinos has thus been based on the 1946 paper.\n\n. Pryce's calculation dealt with neutrinos that are produced by the fusion of protons in the sun. The energy of these neutrinos is too low to convert chlorine into argon. There are neutrinos with higher energies, produced by other processes in the sun, for which the chlorine method works. Their quantity, however, is relatively trifling. Ray Davis succeeded in finding these neutrinos, but only after several decades of refinements in his experiment. That story has been told elsewhere, and American theorist John Bahcall plays a leading role in it; see for example Close, _Neutrino_.\n\n. H. R. Crane, \"The Energy and Momentum in Beta-Decay and the Search for the Neutrino,\" _Reviews of Modern Physics_ 20 (1948): 278.\n\n. In 1951, Frederick Reines, who had worked on atomic explosions in the aftermath of the war, expressed interest in looking for neutrinos produced by an atomic blast, but in 1952 he decided to use a reactor instead. Fermi pointed out that a reactor had an advantage over an atomic blast\u2014one could repeat the experiment. Reines and Cowan's first attempt to detect neutrinos at the Hanford nuclear reactor was unsuccessful, but in 1955 they began their successful attempt at the Savannah River reactor in South Carolina, around the same time that Davis was pursuing his own quest. Reines later won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995. Clyde Cowan, who died in 1974, missed out, as Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously.\n\n. Marcello Conversi, Ettore Pancini, and Oreste Piccioni announced their discovery in _Physical Review_ 71 (1947): 209.\n\n. A single neutrino paired with an electron would be unable to balance the rotary angular momentum. A pair of photons would also be unlikely compared to a single photon.\n\n. B. Pontecorvo, \"Nuclear Capture of Mesons and the Meson Decay,\" _Physical Review_ 72, no. 246 (1947).\n\n. E. P. Hincks and B. Pontecorvo, \"The Absorption of Charged Particles from the 2.2-\u03bcsec. Meson Decay,\" _Physical Review_ 74 (1948): 697.\n\n. J. Steinberger, \"On the Range of the Electrons in Meson Decay,\" _Physical Review_ 74 (1948): 500.\n\n. The history of muon decay is as follows: Hincks and Pontecorvo had shown that muon decays don't make an electron and a heavy particle, but they didn't eliminate the possibility that it decays into an electron and a photon. Steinberger measured a spectrum that was consistent with decay into three particles. By January 1949 Steinberger stated that he had \"some evidence\" that the decay produces three light particles ( _Physical Review_ 75: 1136). In March, R. Leighton, C. Anderson, and A. Seriff gave \"strong evidence [that the muon] decayed to an electron and two neutrinos\" ( _Physical Review_ 75: 1432). They showed that the spin of the muon can be the same as the electron. (Technically, they showed that it is \"half-integer,\" like the electron.) They also measured the mass of the muon. Not until later that year did Hincks and Pontecorvo explicitly mention the decay into an \"electron and two neutrinos\" ( _Physical Review_ 77: 102).\n\n. This is widely credited to G. Puppi, _Nuovo Cimento_ 5 (1948): 587. However, Puppi was not the first to come up with this hypothesis. Bruno Pontecorvo had elucidated such ideas in a letter on May 8, 1947, to Gian Carlo Wick (copy in Fondo Wick, Archivio Scuola Superiore Normale di Pisa). This includes the remarks \" _se ne deduce una similarita tra processi beta e processi di assorbimento ed emissione di mesoni, che, assumendo non si tratti di una coincidenza, sembra di carattere fondamentale_ \" (A similarity can be deduced between beta processes and the absorption or emission of mesons [i.e. muons], which, assuming that it is not a coincidence, seems to be of fundamental character.\") In _Physical Review_ 72 (1947): 246, Pontecorvo proposes a \"fundamental analogy between beta processes and the process of emission or absorption of charged mesons.\"\n\n. <http://www.universitystory.gla.ac.uk>\n\n. S. C. Curran, J. Angus, and A. L. Cockcroft, \"Beta Decay of Tritium,\" _Nature_ 162 (1948): 302\u2013303. D. H. W. Kirkwood, B. Pontecorvo, and G. C. Hanna. \"Fluctuations of Ionisation and Low Energy Beta Spectra,\" _Physical Review_ 74 (1948): 497\u2013498.\n\n. <http://www.universitystory.gla.ac.uk>. Curran, Pontecorvo, and their respective teams had developed the concept in order to measure the energy of beta particles. A proportional counter for alpha particles was invented in 1943, by John Simpson in Chicago. See <https://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/proportional%20counters/simpson.htm>\n\n. Giuseppe Fidecaro, \"Bruno Pontecorvo: From Rome to Dubna,\" in BPSSW, <http://www.df.unipi.it/~rossi/PONTE_5.pdf>.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1887.\n\n. Henry Arnold memo of January 5, 1948, TNA KV 2/1887 8a.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1889.\n\n. Wallace, \"Atomic Energy in Canada,\" p. 131.\n\nCHAPTER 9\n\n. Unless otherwise stated, all correspondence is from TNA KV 2/1888 or TNA KV 2/1889, or Churchill College papers.\n\n. Turchetti, _The Pontecorvo Affair,_ chap 2, note 47; Bruno Pontecorvo letter to John Cockcroft, February 2, 1946, CAC.\n\n. On December 29, 1945, Bruno told George Uhlenbeck at the University of Michigan that he would be writing to Segr\u00e8 for advice, but felt it to be unlikely that he would come to Michigan, although \"I am not yet decided.\" On January 5, 1946, Michigan expressed regret that he wouldn't be coming, and upped their offer to that of a full professorship at $5,500 a year. In response, on January 17, Bruno said that he had \"not yet made a decision\" but would do so immediately after a physics meeting in New York, due to take place at the end of the month.\n\n. Formal letter of employment sent June 5, 1946; Pontecorvo accepted on July 8, 1946. TNA KV 2/1892.\n\n. Confirmed in Cabinet Office telegram to British Joint Services Mission, Washington, October 21, 1950, and report to prime minister, TNA KV 2/1888, memo 25a.\n\n. Godfrey Stafford interview, December 20, 2012.\n\n. L. Fermi, _Atoms in the Family_ , p. 254.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes.\n\n. According to Laura Fermi, this was the \"end of 1948\" ( _Atoms in the Family_ , p. 255). The APS meeting in Chicago was held November 26\u201327 and Bruno was present. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. L. Fermi, _Atoms in the Family_ , p. 255.\n\n. J. David Jackson e-mail, August 28, 2012.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1889.\n\n. Peter Watson e-mail, January 2, 2014.\n\n. Anonymous source, 2013.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 127.\n\n. The letters exchanged between Bruno and Marianne in 1938 refer more than once to some unspecified illness, and hint that Marianne changed travel plans at the last minute (see Chapter 3). I am grateful to Sven-Olof Ekman, a Swedish journalist from Marianne's hometown, for help with my research.\n\n. F. W. Marten memo, TNA KV 2/1888.\n\nINTERLUDE\n\n. Holloway, _Stalin and the Bomb_ , p. 90.\n\n. Kurchatov as quoted in Holloway, _Stalin and the Bomb_ , p. 90.\n\n. Holloway, _Stalin and the Bomb_ , p. 94. KGB stands for _Komityet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti_ (Committee for State Security), and the agency of that name was established in 1954. The KGB succeeded the MGB, the Soviet Ministry of State Security, which was itself formed in 1946. The MGB was immediately preceded by the NKGB, in existence from 1943 to 1946, and before that by the NKVD, or _Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del_ (People's Ministry of Internal Affairs), which operated from 1934 to 1943. For a guide through this labyrinth, see Andrew and Gordievsky, _KGB,_ p. 9. For ease of comprehension, I shall refer to all these entities in the main text as the KGB, to distinguish them from the second, independent intelligence agency of the Soviet Union\u2014the GRU, or _Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye_. The GRU was founded in 1926 as the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Red Army.\n\n. The security corps of the Manhattan Project suspected that several scientists were passing information to the Soviet embassy in San Francisco. Holloway, _Stalin and the Bomb_ , p. 103.\n\n. Oleg Gordievsky and Christopher Andrew in various works; Oleg Gordievsky in communications, April 27 and April 30, 2012; Sudoplatov et al., _Special Tasks_.\n\n. Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, \"Soviet Atomic Espionage,\" April 1951, <http://archive.org/stream/sovietatomicespi1951unit/sovietatomicespi1951unit_djvu.txt>.\n\n. See Sudoplatov et al., _Special Tasks,_ p.182, and discussion in footnote on p. 81 of Rhodes, _Dark Sun_.\n\n. Andrew and Gordievsky, _KGB_ , p. 318; Oleg Gordievsky e-mail, April 30, 2012.\n\n. Oleg Gordievsky e-mail, April 30, 2012.\n\n. References are either circular\u2014Gordievsky being cited as the source of the claim in his own book\u2014or anecdotal. There appears to be no clear answer as to how Gordievsky knows all this. See discussion of Gordievsky in Afterword for further commentary.\n\n. Holloway, _Stalin and the Bomb_ , p. 99.\n\n. Holloway, _Stalin and the Bomb_ , p. 104.\n\n. Fuchs's confession to Michael Perrin on March 2, 1950, notes that before August 1944 he had \"no real knowledge of the pile process or of the significance of plutonium.\" This is reprinted in Appendix B of Williams, _Klaus Fuchs_.\n\n. Andrew and Mitrokhin, _The Mitrokhin Archive_ , p. 174.\n\n. Boris Ioffe e-mails and Skype interviews, February 16, March 9, and July 19, 2011; Boris Ioffe interview with Giuseppe Mussardo, 2012. The source seems to be someone other than Nunn May, in that the blueprints were apparently transmitted after he had left Canada. There is also the evidence of Nunn May's deathbed confession. His stepson, Paul Broda, has described this in detail in _Scientist Spies_. In Broda's judgment, Nunn May's statements at that singular time were \"very honest\"; if Nunn May did not mention some significant action at that point, then \"he didn't do it\" (Paul Broda interview, August 12, 2012).\n\n. Andrew and Gordievsky, _KGB_ , p. 318.\n\n. Comment from Skinner to Ronnie Reed, TNA KV 2/1888. Bruno Pontecorvo's stated reason for these periodic trips was that he needed to deal with his ongoing desire to retain US residency status. The dates in his passport confirm these visits occurred at intervals of roughly six months.\n\n. Gibbs, \"British and American Counter-Intelligence.\"\n\n. As mentioned earlier, technically this was the Soviet NKVD (\"People's Ministry of Internal Affairs\"), which later transformed into the KGB (\"Committee for State Security\").\n\n. Pincher, _Treachery_ , chap. 8. Hall's courier, Lona Cohen, worked with the KGB, controlled via the Soviet consulate in New York. Fuchs had worked with the GRU during his time in the UK, but in the US his control was transferred to the KGB. His courier during his time at Los Alamos was Harry Gold. Fuchs and Hall were completely independent. Hall had no knowledge that Fuchs was a spy\u2014Ted's wife, Joan, confirmed that \"Ted thought he was the only one\" (Joan Hall interview, May 1, 2013). There was no direct testimony in Fuchs's trial, but all the evidence suggests that he was also ignorant of Hall's role.\n\n. Report of the Canadian Royal Commission on Espionage (the Kellock-Taschereau Commission). The full title of the report is \"The report of the Royal Commission appointed under Order in Council PC 411 of February 5, 1946, to investigate the facts relating to and the circumstances surrounding the Communication by Public Officials and Other Persons in Positions of Trust, of Secret and Confidential Information to Agents of a Foreign Power.\" Access to the document may be traced through http://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/holdingsInfo?&bibId=8343655&searchId=6517&recPointer=1&recCount=100.\n\n. A Nunn May confession, reported in Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , p. 140; Paul Broda interview, August 12, 2012, and October 10, 2013.\n\n. Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , p. 142.\n\n. During the previous months, Nunn May had become worried about the quality of the people he was dealing with. They offered him money, which he declined. He began to wonder if his information was actually being delivered to qualified scientists in Moscow. So he decided to assess the Soviet reaction by handing over samples of uranium. This would give Moscow proof that he was actually working at an atomic project, and the samples would have to be sent to proper experts to be evaluated. This is why he handed over the minute samples of U-233 and U-235, which he had originally intended to retain as trophies of his time on the project.\n\n. Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, \"Soviet Atomic Espionage,\" April 1951; reprinted from report of the Canadian Royal Commission, June 27, 1946, which states, \"These samples were considered so important by the Russians that upon their receipt, Motinov flew to Moscow with them\" (pp. 447\u2013457). The quoted texts in these paragraphs are accessible online at <http://www.ebooksread.com/authors-eng/united-states-congress-joint-committee-on-atomic/soviet-atomic-espionage-tin.shtml> on pages 9 and 10.\n\n. Pincher, _Treachery_ , Chapter 2, Kindle edition location 421.\n\n. Andrew and Gordievsky, _KGB_ , p. 317.\n\n. However, there is no public record to support this claim. It is clear that although MI5 later expressed strong suspicion of Pontecorvo's motives and freely encouraged authors to accuse him of having spied, it had no evidence that Pontecorvo ever transmitted any classified information to Soviet contacts. This is clear from the released files along with the frank diaries of Guy Liddell (TNA KV 2/1887\u20131891 and KV 4/472). Gordievsky's claims are doubly anecdotal, in that they are his memory of remarks that others had made to him.\n\n. Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945. The formal documents were signed on September 2.\n\n. Philby, _My Silent War_ , Introduction: \"I regarded my SIS [Secret Intelligence Service] appointments purely cover jobs, to be carried out sufficiently well to ensure my attaining positions in which my service to the Soviet Union would be most effective. My connection with SIS must be seen against my prior total commitment to the Soviet Union.\"\n\n. Gibbs, \"British and American Counter-Intelligence,\" note 253 discusses at length Philby's role in the Nunn May case.\n\n. In the summer of 1949, Meredith Gardner, an American linguist, cracked the Soviet diplomatic codes. The resulting decrypts were known by the code name VENONA.\n\n. KGB is a modern name, which, as remarked in note 3, I shall use for convenience. Before 1943 its analogue was known as NKVD. KGB stands for _Komityet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti_ (Committee for State Security). The second, independent intelligence agency of the Soviet Union was GRU, or _Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye_ , founded in 1926 as the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Red Army.\n\n. Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , p. 146.\n\n. Philby's tip-off about Nunn May is discussed in Andrew, _Defence of the Realm_ , p. 344.\n\n. Letter from Bruno Pontecorvo to GEC, February 1946, CAC.\n\n. Albright and Kunstel, _Bombshell_ , p. 100.\n\n. The first mention of MLAD was picked up in codes in 1946. The Fuchs case took up much of the code-breakers' attention, and it was probably in the spring of 1950 that MLAD was identified as Hall. See Albright and Kunstel, _Bombshell_ , chap. 22.\n\n. Andrew and Mitrokhin, _The Mitrokhin Archive_ , p. 173.\n\n. Morris Cohen had become a Soviet agent during the Spanish Civil War, while serving in the International Brigades.\n\n. The story of these adventures has been told in Albright and Kunstel, _Bombshell_. Hall's information was at least as important as that of Fuchs, and possibly more so. There is also speculation that Stalin was wary of Fuchs, who was German, and hence confirmation via Hall proved important.\n\n. Albright and Kunstel, _Bombshell_ , p. 332, note 135; \"first chilly months\" p. 133.\n\n. Albright and Kunstel, _Bombshell_ , pp. 179\u2013181.\n\n. Joseph Albright e-mail, September 17, 2012; Albright and Kunstel, _Bombshell_ , p. 134.\n\n. Joan Hall interview, January 25, 2013; Albright and Kunstel, _Bombshell_ , p. 191.\n\n. There is speculation that Hall may have been involved in some activity from 1948 to 1950 (Albright and Kunstel, _Bombshell_ , pp. 189\u2013192). The possibility that Hall met Lona Cohen again, in February 1950, is discussed in _Bombshell_ , p. 221. The 1949 meeting between the Halls and the Cohens took place in New York's Central Park, according to Morris Cohen in _Bombshell_ , p. 200. The possibility that there were two meetings between Ted Hall and one or more of the Cohens in 1949 is also mentioned there. This could be consistent with Joan Hall's recollection that the four of them met in a park in New York, but \"not Central Park\" (Joan Hall interviews, January 25, 2013, and May 1, 2013).\n\n. Interview reported in Albright and Kunstel, _Bombshell_ , p. 134; Joseph Albright e-mails, September\u2013December 2012.\n\n. Krasnikov family archive, 1993, quoted in Albright and Kunstel, _Bombshell_ , p. 134; I confirmed this with Joseph Albright via e-mail communications, from September to December 2012. There is some uncertainty about when Cohen's uranium odyssey occurred. One account (that of V. N. Karpov, as related in _Bombshell_ , p. 134) places it in \"late 1944 or 1945.\" If this is correct, then it is possible that Lona could have overlapped with Bruno Pontecorvo before the Gouzenko debacle. This scenario would imply that he too had obtained uranium from Chicago, as none was being produced in Canada until much later. However, the dates do not fit with other accounts, which state that Cohen was not reactivated until mid-January 1945. On balance it seems more likely that the uranium originated from Canada in 1948.\n\n. T. M. Samolis, ed., _Veterany vneshnei razvyedki Rossii: Kratkiye biograficheskiye spravochniki_ [Veterans of Russian Foreign Intelligence: Short Biographical Summaries] (Moscow: Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, 1995), as reported in Albright and Kunstel, _Bombshell_ , p. 134.\n\nCHAPTER 10\n\n. The British security files on Pontecorvo show that the authorities were always nervous about his alien background, notwithstanding the fact that he had adopted British nationality. Klaus Fuchs was already under surveillance when, on October 19, 1949, Max Born of the University of Edinburgh wrote to him, encouraging him to send \"one of your men\" (Pontecorvo) to attend a physics conference in the city in November. Born wanted Bruno to speak about his research on cosmic rays. This was open research with no significance for national security, but MI5 nonetheless made a note in Bruno's security file because the invitation had come via Fuchs (19b in TNA KV 2/1887). It is ironic therefore that after Bruno and his family disappeared behind the Iron Curtain in 1950, the version of events put out for public consumption was that Pontecorvo had no relationship with Fuchs at all. _Additional note to readers:_ All quotes in this chapter come from file KV 2/1887 in the National Archives unless stated otherwise.\n\n. TNA KV 4/282.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Segr\u00e8 was not in Paris during Pontecorvo's residency, nor was he on the ship _Quanza_ , as he was based at Berkeley in 1940. He was based in Palermo in 1937, and visited Copenhagen and Germany, but there is no record that he visited Paris or met Pontecorvo anywhere. He immigrated to the United States in June 1938. See Segr\u00e8, _A Mind Always in Motion_.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. AN FBI report recorded by MI5 in TNA KV 2/1888, memo 97a: \"Bruno Pontecorvo's sister Giuliana lived at 1839 Wallace Ave Bronx. At 1845 Giuseppe Berti lived\u2014alleged comintern agent and Italian Communist leader.\"\n\n. Klaus Fuchs files, TNA KV 2/1248\u20131250.\n\n. Copy of invitation in Bruno Pontecorvo files, CAC.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1889 and AB 6/635; Turchetti, _The Pontecorvo Affair_ , p. 108.\n\n. This news may be what stimulated Harwell to send all employees a questionnaire about their families. The advertised reason was the arrest of Fuchs. In turn, this enabled Arnold to talk with Pontecorvo without raising any suspicion. Michael Goodman interview, October 7, 2013.\n\n. Godfrey Stafford interview, December 20, 2012.\n\n. Lorna Arnold interview, January 4, 2013.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1887, memo 20 and 20a.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1887, memo 21a.\n\n. Other documents point to the source as being an MI6 representative in the British embassy in Stockholm.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1887, memo 26a.\n\n. This suggests either some misunderstanding by Arnold, relating to the events of 1946, when Bruno turned down offers from the US in favor of Harwell, or a clever piece of disinformation by Pontecorvo, as there is no record among the extensive Pontecorvo papers of any such opportunity arising in 1950. It seems unlikely that this was a misunderstanding on Arnold's part, first because of his experience as an interrogator, and second because he has carefully said that Bruno \"already toyed\" with Rome, and is \"at present\" considering America. It is unclear what advantage Bruno saw in making such a claim, unless it was to emphasize that he was much sought after.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1887.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1887, minute sheet note 36 (see Image 10.1). In other words, they suspected that he had passed information, but had insufficient proof to arrest him.\n\n. Michael Goodman interview, October 7, 2013.\n\n. Weart, _Scientists in Power_ , p. 259. The CIA claim comes from \"National Intelligence Survey: France,\" CIA archives, 1952, pp. 73\u201373, 73\u201379; US Department of State, _Foreign Relations of the United States: 1949,_ Volume I, pp. 466, 488, 626, cited in Weart, _Scientists in Power,_ p. 328, note 4. Joliot-Curie's speech was reported by Jacques Fauvet in _Le Monde_ , April 4\u20135, 1950, and _L'Humanit\u00e9_ , April 6, cited in Weart, _Scientists in Power,_ p. 328, note 6.\n\n. Weart, _Scientists in Power_ , p. 261.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1887.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1887.\n\n. Chapman Pincher interview, November 13, 2013. Some\u2014e.g. Chapman Pincher in _Treachery_ \u2014have argued that Hollis was in reality a KGB double agent, or at the very least complacent and inept. Although I offer no opinion on the more extreme version of this claim, the lack of action on the Pontecorvo file during the summer of 1950 seems in accord with such criticisms.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1887.\n\nCHAPTER 11\n\n. Laura Arnold interview, March 18, 2013.\n\n. Gil Pontecorvo interview, June 12, 2011.\n\n. The Abingdonian archive; Sarah Wearne interview, October 7, 2011.\n\n. Abingdon record: \"After taking his degree in summer 1949 Mr J F H Barker BA stayed up at Oxford for an extra term\"\n\n. Today this grand house is the head teacher's residence.\n\n. Section A, or A Branch, was involved with bugging, phone tapping, covert entry and specialized secret photography. See <http://www.powerbase.info/index.php/MI5_A_Branch>.\n\n. He was made a Companion of the Bath\u2014a British military order of chivalry.\n\n. One student said that a career in MI5 planting bugs was appropriate for Barker \"because he was a nasty man.\" Another said he was the best teacher in the school.\n\n. Macintyre, _Agent ZigZag,_ p. 70.\n\n. Interview with anonymous source, August 20, 2013.\n\n. Pincher, _Treachery_ , chap. 54 and Chapman Pincher interview, November 13, 2013. Chapman Pincher commented that in those times MI5 had a secret informant in every Fleet Street office. Another person confirmed that MI5 came to them for background, and so it's possible that \"someone could think that I was MI5.\" Having someone in place around Harwell would be consistent practice.\n\n. Guy Liddell diary, July 10, 1946, TNA KV 4/467.\n\n. The memories of former pupils vary. When Barker left the school, one account states that they were told he was \"to return to the Navy\"; another that he was \"to go to intelligence.\"\n\n. Anthony Gardner interview, February 25, 2013.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes.\n\n. Anthony Gardner interview, February 25, 2013; Paul Gardner interview, March 4, 2013.\n\n. David Lees interview, October 15, 2013.\n\n. Anthony Gardner interview, February 25, 2013.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888, memo 117.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888. The fianc\u00e9e was named Jean Archer. The engagement was later terminated.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888, memo 118b.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1887, memo 42a.\n\n. Abingdon School archives. Sarah Wearne interview, October 7, 2011.\n\n. The fees for the term itself totaled fourteen pounds. The remainder consisted of an outstanding four shillings and six pence for a photograph, and one penny owed to the school snack bar.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1887, note 70d.\n\n. His passport subsequently showed that August 6\u20138 was spent in Austria.\n\n. Letter from parents to Guido; translation by Guido in TNA KV 2/1889. The original Italian version was returned to the parents.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888. Bruno's parents arrived in Chamonix on August 24 and started a search when they failed to find him there.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1889.\n\n. Transcriptions of telegrams, translated by MI5, TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Caledonian Insurance Company, policy 4/49BM279, for travel in \"France Italy and Switzerland for the period 25 July to 24 August.\" TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Even today, with the Mont Blanc Tunnel, it takes nearly eight hours.\n\n. Date and time confirmed in TNA KV 2/1888, file 72. These are transcripts, the English translations having been made by Guido for MI5. I have not altered the English. The originals were returned to Bruno's parents in 1951. The MI5 file notes that the letters and telegrams were \"Bruno's last communication to them and they would like to retain them for sentimental reasons.\"\n\n. TNA KV 2/1889, note 161A.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888 and Anna Pontecorvo interview, November 11, 2011.\n\n. Both quotes are as recounted by Guido to MI5, TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Reed's report notes this in TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Years later Bruno claimed to Ugo Amaldi that he feared that a world war was about to erupt, and that he fled to the USSR as he \"didn't want to be on the wrong side\" (Ugo Amaldi interviews, April 18, 2013, and September 12, 2013). This seems fanciful, given Bruno's sudden decision to flee and the other details described here.\n\n. Historian Simone Turchetti has made a compelling case that, after months of pressure, the patent dispute was a tipping point for Bruno. (See Turchetti, _The Pontecorvo Affair._ ) While it seems certain that this played a role, people who knew Bruno are skeptical that the patent dispute alone could have been responsible. Whereas his colleague Emilio Segr\u00e8 was famously concerned about the financial value of the patent, Bruno himself regarded it as a bonus but not in any obsessive way. Giuseppe Fidecaro interview, April 17, 2013, and Ugo Amaldi interview, April 18, 2013.\n\n. There are some uncorroborated claims that Sereni then went to Moscow for about two months, immediately after Bruno's flight. On November 10, Sereni landed at Le Bourget Airport in Paris, having arrived from Prague, but his passport showed that he'd stopped in Prague in transit from Moscow. There is no direct link to Bruno's activities, but MI5's analysis points to suspicion that in mid-August Moscow alerted Sereni to the need for contact with Bruno, and also that later in the year Sereni may have been a contact in the USSR once Bruno arrived there. See TNA KV 2/1889. Sereni's diaries, however, don't support this (Simone Turchetti interview, January 29, 2013). TNA KV 2/1889, memo 289A cites an unnamed source who came over to the West from the USSR in 1952. However, this source also claimed that Pontecorvo had gone to the USSR via Austria. We now know that this is incorrect, so some of the reports about Sereni's movements in TNA may also be suspect.\n\n. Simone Turchetti interview, January 29, 2013.\n\n. Evidence for this will appear in Chapter 13.\n\n. On March 24, 1953, Reed made his final assessment of the evidence and concluded, \"I now think it may have been Emilio Sereni who persuaded Pontecorvo to defect.\" TNA KV 2/1891.\n\n. The MI5 files leave many questions open. In a letter to his parents Bruno mentioned that Antonio was in Ladispoli, which has been interpreted by MI5 and others to suggest that Antonio remained there alone. However, an innocent explanation of how the children got to Ladispoli is that all three were there with Giuliana's children all along. The accounts in TNA, as told to MI5, do not paint a clear picture. There is also confusion about Gil, who in the MI5 files appears to be with his parents in Circeo, yet when Bruno later writes to his parents he says that Gil is in Ladispoli. Gil informed me that he had no memory of Circeo and, moreover, was sure that he had never been there. This has no great significance for this biography but may have relevance for anyone specifically interested in analyzing Bruno's behavior and movements during this period.\n\n. Ronnie Reed summary, TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Anna had no recollection of seeing any car damage, but after so long could not regard this as significant. She said that the children were ferried to and fro between Rome and Ladispoli by coach (Anna Pontecorvo interview, March 21, 2012). Gil also has no memory of ever visiting Circeo. So it is possible that Bruno and Marianne were in Circeo alone, while the children were with Giuliana in Rome or Ladispoli.\n\n. Anna Pontecorvo interview by MI5, TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888\u20131891.\n\n. Anna Pontecorvo interview by MI5, TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo told Miriam Mafai forty years later that his car went into the garage on August 29 (Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 11). Bruno would know that the car only went into the garage immediately prior to his departure from Rome, so this date seems reliable. It also agrees with the garage owner's statements made to Italian police, who interviewed him on behalf of MI5. Mafai's e-mail on March 7, 2012, confirmed that Gillo and his sister Giuliana told her \"the same story.\"\n\n. Anna Pontecorvo interview, November 11, 2011, and phone conversations 2011\u20132012.\n\n. Gil Pontecorvo suspected this and later confronted her. Gil Pontecorvo interview, November 22, 2011.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 11; Miriam Mafai e-mail March 7, 2012.\n\n. August 29 cable from SAS in Rome to Munich, TNA KV 2/1888. Thus the date of August 30, quoted in some accounts, based on a _Sunday Express_ story published at the time, is wrong.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888, memo 105a.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888, memo 119c.\n\n. Marianne had visited her family in 1938, and had not done so again until 1949. Bruno did not accompany her on the latter occasion, and \"had difficulty getting her back\" (Herbert Skinner quote in TNA KV 2/1888, memo 121c). Letters from Marianne's mother to Marianne can be found in TNA KV 2/1888 et seq. and CAC. Letters from Bruno to Marianne are in CAC. Marianne's letters to Bruno are not publicly available.\n\n. Letter from Marianne's mother to Marianne, July 1, 1950, TNA KV 2/1889.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Bruno was by now a naturalized British citizen, as were his sons. Marianne was still Swedish.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Sent August 31, 1950, at 3:15 p.m., TNA KV 2/1889.\n\n. SAS confirmed to MI5 that Bruno Pontecorvo's ticket booking was made in one office and that of Marianne and the boys was made in another. There is no record of when Bruno's ticket was issued or of which specific office was involved. The passenger manifest confirms the different number sequences. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. On October 28, the _Daily Herald_ claimed that Bruno was afraid to return to the UK after a mystery encounter at Lake Como in August with two unknown men, one Italian and the other Czech. He was supposedly overheard to have said to Marianne, \"I dare not go back. I should be sent to prison if I did.\" There is no source given for this story.\n\n. Chapman Pincher notes that a KGB source confirmed that this pattern was used in the defection of Burgess and Maclean, in 1951. Two KGB officers met them as soon as they were out of British territory. Chapman Pincher interview, November 13, 2013.\n\n. At 8:50 p.m., according to MI5 records, TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. According to Henrico Attavilla, the Stockholm correspondent of _Il Tempo_ , MI5 files, TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Gil Pontecorvo interview, November 22, 2011.\n\n. MI5 sources discovered that, upon landing in Stockholm, Bruno declared the money in his possession to total 1,369 Italian lira, 685 Swedish kroner, and 199 Danish kroner, the equivalent of about 18 pounds. However, by the time he arrived in Finland, he had 1,360 lira, 100 Swedish kroner, 80 Danish kroner, and in addition had accumulated 436 US dollars (TNA KV 2/1888). Thus he would appear to have spent kroner to pay for food and accommodations, and acquired a gift of both airline tickets and US dollars. Possible explanations emerged later, when MI5 discovered that Emilio Sereni left for the USSR a few days before Bruno's departure and remained there for a month. MI5's source claimed that Sereni went to the USSR to introduce Bruno to Soviet officials (TNA KV 2/1888). MI5 did not obtain this information until three years later, and there are some reasons to doubt its accuracy, but it was the best information available at the time. MI5 commented in 1953, \"This report is interesting as it fits the theory that [Ronnie Reed] considered the most likely\" when he first reviewed the case in 1951. Reed's judgment was that the good offices of the PCI (Italian Communist Party) or the Soviet embassy had provided the money for Bruno to go to Stockholm. \"The further suggestion was that he there met a Russian representative who persuaded him to go to Finland and subsequently to Russia.\" By 1953, the information in MI5's hands led Reed to conclude, \"I now think it may have been Emilio Sereni who persuaded Pontecorvo to defect\" (Reed review, TNA KV 2/1888). This also resonates with the suspicions of Anna Pontecorvo (Anna Pontecorvo interview, November 11, 2011).\n\n. Finnish customs official report to police, TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. FBI File WF 65-5650.\n\nCHAPTER 12\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888. This is not a direct quote of Bruno's mother's letter, which was written in Italian, but a transcription made by MI5 of Guido's English translation.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888, memo 118b.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1889.\n\n. Anthony Gardner interview, February 25, 2013.\n\n. John Candy as told to Christine Wootton and Dunmore School around 1985, Christine Wootton e-mail January 13, 2014.\n\n. Joe Hatton interview, August 30, 2011.\n\n. Sir John Cockcroft diary, CAC.\n\n. Caldirola's card was found by MI5 and transcribed: TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Mark Bretscher interview January 24, 2013.\n\n. The record states: \"Gil Pontecorvo\u2014fees paid on _20 August 1949_ for the Michaelmas term, which began on 16 September 1949. Pontecorvo\u2014fees paid _4 January 1950_ for the Lent term, which began 17 January 1950. Pontecorvo\u2014fees paid _20 April 1950_ for the Summer term, which began 28 April 1950.\" This completed Gil's first year at Abingdon School (Roysse's). I am indebted to Sarah Wearne for this research.\n\n. Abingdon School (Roysse's) records, Abingdon School archives, c/o Sarah Wearne, viewed October 7, 2011.\n\n. Received at Harwell on Monday, September 4, 1950.\n\n. TNA FO 372/84837.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1887, memo 40a.\n\n. Edoardo Amaldi as recounted to Donald Perkins. Donald Perkins interview, September 16, 2011.\n\n. Amaldi's name went on file, however. In 1953 he arrived in the UK, to see Patrick Blackett and Lord Cherwell to encourage the UK's interest in CERN. At London Airport his name was \"checked against a list.\" His bags were searched, and he was asked if he had heard from Pontecorvo. Donald Perkins interview, September 16, 2011.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1887, memo 42a.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1887, memo 48a.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1889, memo 169b.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1889, memos 188/190.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1889, memo 181a.\n\n. Saturday cinema was a feature of the 1950s, and this is the weekend when the story broke.\n\n. Paul Gardner interview, March 4, 2013.\n\n. Anthony Gardner interview, February 25, 2013.\n\n. Anthony Gardner interview, February 25, 2013; Paul Gardner interview, March 4, 2013; David Lees e-mail, October 7, 2013; David Lees interview, October 15, 2013.\n\n. Newspaper headlines of October 27, 1950, from assorted online sources.\n\n. Newspaper quotes are from _Sydney Morning Herald_ , October 22 and 25, 1950; _Palm Beach Post_ , October 24, 1950; Melbourne _Age_ , October 27, 1950.\n\n. _Sydney Morning Herald_ , October 25, 1950.\n\n. Anthony Gardner interview, February 25, 2013.\n\n. Ludo Pontecorvo interview, September 12, 2013.\n\n. Ugo Amaldi interview, September 12, 2013.\n\n. Gil Pontecorvo interview, November 22, 2011.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1889, memo158a; TNA KV 2/1888, memo 121c.\n\n. In her letter of October 26, Giuliana tells Guido that this was \"about 15 days ago.\" TNA KV 2/1888, memo 120a.\n\n. Giuliana's involvement seems assured, for her account raises further questions: How did the Pontecorvos get from her house to the airport if their car was in a garage? The \"return to England in stages\" and the request to pay the garage expenses are mutually inconsistent, unless Giuliana already knew they had left by plane. Furthermore, the idea that she received this request in a letter, sent from Rome in mid-September, some time after Bruno's departure, is fanciful. On the other hand, there could be an innocent explanation of the confused dates, or at least a partial one. If she consulted a calendar during the interview, she could have identified the wrong week: the date of August 31, given for the car repair, could be a mistake for August 24, and the dates of the Pontecorvos' departure, given as September 5 or 6, could be a mistake for the actual date of September 1.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1889.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Guy Liddell diary, October 21, 1950, TNA KV 4/472.\n\n. TNA FO371/84837.\n\n. Telegram sent October 24, 1950, TNA KV 2/1888, memo 71a.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1889, memo 171a.\n\n. TNA FO371/84837.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1887, memo 62a.\n\n. Guy Liddell diary, October 23, 1950, TNA KV 4/472. Liddell's brief is given in KV 2/1887, memo 62a.\n\n. Pincher, _Treachery_ , Kindle edition location 6298; Chapman Pincher interview, November 14, 2013.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1887, memo 29A.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888 and quoted in Pincher, _Treachery_ , Kindle edition location 6298. Chapman Pincher interview, November 14, 2013.\n\n. The title of the debate is recorded in TNA reports. The admission that Pontecorvo might have \"atomic secrets of value to the enemy\" contradicts other official statements about Pontecorvo's significance at the time. Indeed, the British administration, having been given false information by MI5, downplayed Pontecorvo's significance. Their position was that he had not been involved in secret work, at least none that would have much interest to an enemy. After the revelation that Fuchs and Nunn May were actually Soviet agents, the British government was nervous that the revelation of a third spy would harm relations with the United States. At the time, Britain was desperate to have full access to American atomic know-how.\n\n. Laura Arnold interview, August 30, 2013. Perrin was at this stage the deputy controller of atomic energy at the Ministry of Supply. It was to Perrin that Fuchs made his initial confession.\n\n. TNA FO371/84837.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1889, memo 121B.\n\n. Statements were made in the House of Commons on October 23 and November 6, 1950. On November 19, 1951, member of parliament Frederick Erroll asked the new Minister of Supply, Duncan Sandys, questions about atomic scientists. Sandys confirmed that Pontecorvo was the only atomic scientist to have disappeared, to which Erroll asked, \"Will the Minister make sure no other disappearances take place?\" _Hansard_ 494, no. 18 (November 26, 1951).\n\n. TNA FO371/84837.\n\n. Guy Liddell diary, October 15, 1951, TNA KV 4/473.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888, memo 121d.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1889.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1890, note 279a.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1890, note 283a.\n\n. Barbara Pontecorvo e-mail, August 19, 2011.\n\n. TNA KV 4/242, note 26a, and KV 2/1887, note 65a. On October 23, 1950, Dick White of MI5, in a phone call to Geoffrey Patterson of the British embassy in Washington, said that he had \"learned that morning that Paul [was] employed on research work connected with radar and that this should be reported to the FBI.\"\n\n. Jack Steinberger interview, Rome centenary meeting, September 2013.\n\n. Giannini's lawsuit sought a total claim of $10 million, for both past research uses during the Manhattan Project ($7.5 million) and the anticipated future production of fissile materials, including plutonium ($2.5 million). Simone Turchetti e-mail, August 17, 2014.\n\n. _L'Unit\u00e0_ , August 23, 1950; quoted in Turchetti, _The Pontecorvo Affair_ , p. 112.\n\n. _Calgary Herald_ , October 24, 1950.\n\n. _News Chronicle_ , November 3, 1953, stored at TNA KV 2/1888, memo 303a. In the 1980s a lawsuit in the United States recovered some of the money. However, much of it was taken up in legal fees. Gil Pontecorvo interview, September 11, 2013.\n\nCHAPTER 13\n\n. Peter Hennessy letter to author, December 4, 2012.\n\n. It is the information in those documents that formed the narrative in Chapter 10.\n\n. Chapman Pincher confirmed that he had not seen it during his own research, which spanned several decades. Chapman Pincher interview, November 13, 2013.\n\n. Chapman Pincher interview, November 13, 2013.\n\n. Andrew and Mitrokhin, _The Mitrokhin Archive,_ p. 203: \"For almost a year [after his arrival in late 1949] Philby's sole contact with the Centre was via messages sent to Burgess in London.\"\n\n. He came under suspicion and resigned from MI6 in 1951. However, colleagues in MI6 refused to believe that he could have been a double agent, and it was not until 1963 that Philby's duplicity was made obvious to all, following his defection to the USSR. Philby traveled to the USSR in 1963 from Beirut, where for several years he had been a newspaper correspondent. Although his role as a traitor was suspected by MI5 in 1951, at which time he was \"amicably eliminated\" (removed from the service without prosecution), his colleagues in MI6 continued to believe he was an innocent victim until 1963. This shows that the opinions of colleagues are not always reliable.\n\n. Philby, _My Silent War_ , Introduction.\n\n. Gibbs, \"British and American Counter-Intelligence,\" note 253.\n\n. MLAD was Ted Hall, and QUANTUM (or KVANT) was identified in 2009 as Boris Podolsky, a Russian-born American physicist. See Haynes et al., _The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America_. Some authors have misidentified one or the other of these as Bruno Pontecorvo. QUANTUM was an appropriate name for Podolsky, who is famous in quantum physics for his part in the EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) paradox.\n\n. Andrew and Mitrokhin, _The Mitrokhin Archive,_ p. 204.\n\n. Andrew and Mitrokhin, _The Mitrokhin Archive,_ p. 194.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes; remarks made by Bruno Pontecorvo to Edoardo Amaldi, recounted in Ugo Amaldi interview, September 12, 2013.\n\n. Patterson's identification as security liaison officer, is taken from Andrew, _Defence of the Realm_ , p. 377.\n\n. M. Marten, _Tim Marten_ , p. 129; Michael Marten interview and access to audiotape of Tim Marten, July 3, 2013.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1887, memo 39a.\n\n. Chapman Pincher has alleged that Philby removed critical evidence showing that Pontecorvo was a spy, and then \"told his Soviet controller [which] may well have led the Soviets to warn Pontecorvo of his predicament\" (Pincher, _Too Secret Too Long_ , p. 152; discussed in Turchetti, _The Pontecorvo Affair_ , p. 200). Pincher provided no sources, evidence, or even clear identification of exactly when Philby took these actions. He told me that the account represented his judgment based on what he had unearthed. When he wrote that book, he had not seen the letter of July 1950, which I showed him on November 13, 2013. He described it as a \"very plausible\" factor in Pontecorvo's sudden flight.\n\nIn order to evaluate Philby's role, which is probably pivotal in separating Pontecorvo's life into its two halves, a brief review of these events is worthwhile (see also Turchetti, _The Pontecorvo Affair_ , p. 200 et seq.). First, in line with Turchetti, we can dismiss the idea that Philby was involved in this mini-saga of 1943, when news of the FBI's discovery of communist literature in Pontecorvo's Tulsa home was first transmitted to the British authorities in New York. At that time, Philby was employed at the Special Operations Executive in Beaulieu, England, and was in no position to remove letters in North America. Turchetti also dismisses the possibility that Philby \"sat on\" the 1949 FBI report that recorded Segr\u00e8 and Thornton's information about Pontecorvo; as we have seen, this report was in the hands of MI5 by December 1949. However, now that the letter of July 13, 1950, has come to light, a new interpretation of Philby's role becomes possible, especially if one imagines things from Philby's perspective.\n\nThe allegations that Bruno \"engaged\" in communist activities are sufficiently general that they could cover anything from reading the _Daily Worker_ to full-blown spying, including the murky middle ground of being a member of the Communist Party. When he read the letter, Philby had no means of knowing the reason for the FBI's interest, or the level of Pontecorvo's activities. His subsequent actions can therefore be seen as either ironic or fortuitous, depending on whether Bruno was innocent or guilty of spying. In any event, the result was that Pontecorvo fled to the USSR, which was without doubt to the Soviet Union's great advantage.\n\n. Today there are copies of two letters from the FBI in the British archives, dated February 2 and February 19, though whether these represent the full extent of the correspondence is unclear. Also murky is whether there is indeed a further letter from the FBI, or whether the letter of February 10 is a reply sent by the British. The public evidence is rather bland, at least to modern eyes: in 1943 the FBI reported finding communist literature in Pontecorvo's house, something that would hardly merit such a rapid-fire exchange of letters at the time.\n\nIf that was the sum total of the FBI's evidence, Bruno Pontecorvo had little to fear, although in the McCarthyite frenzy of 1950 there would have been some turbulence. Conspiracy theorists might argue that Philby found these letters in July 1950, destroyed them, informed Patterson that he couldn't find any trace, and then \"alerted Soviet agents,\" in line with Pincher's aforementioned claim.\n\nThis seems unlikely for the following reason: For Philby to have taken such action, the content of the letters would have to have been exceedingly serious, whereas copies of letters from the FBI to BSC are, as we have seen, rather bland. Philby had no wish to draw unnecessary attention to himself. So what content could have led Philby to destroy the letters? It is hard to sustain a plausible case. If the FBI had evidence that Pontecorvo was a spy, it is unlikely that this would have arisen in February 1943, when he had yet to begin serious work in Canada; it is even less likely that such damning evidence would have remained dormant until 1950, and then merely inspire a vague request to the British regarding possible \"Communist activities.\"\n\nAlthough Philby has been credited with almost magical powers of duplicity and stealth, this sequence seems far-fetched. The thesis that Philby would put himself at such serious risk is barely credible. He would have realized that the FBI was hardly likely to let such evidence fade away, and that they would doubtless come back to him with severe questions. Due to VENONA, UK intelligence was already aware that a network of double agents existed within its own organizations, including the Washington embassy itself. Fully aware of this, Philby had no wish to risk demonstrating that he himself held one of the starring roles in the VENONA decrypts.\n\n. In TNA KV 2/1888, file 16a, G. R. Mitchell notes that Cimpermann, the American FBI liaison in London, delivered archival copies of these letters to MI5 on October 23, 1950. File 103a records their receipt by the agency on October 28, as well as Ronnie Reed's confirmation that he personally received them on October 30. Memo 23a states that these letters are \"the only material on PONTECORVO in his [FBI] files,\" which supports the thesis that, in 1950, there was no evidence in either the UK or US that Pontecorvo had broken the Official Secrets Act.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Because the only evidence against Hall was from VENONA, and the authorities were reluctant to reveal their success in breaking the Soviet code, the only way they could prosecute Hall was if he confessed. Hall declined to do so, was never prosecuted, and remained unknown until the final years of his life, when the VENONA decrypts were made public. Fuchs, as we have seen, confessed when confronted by the security authorities in England, and went to jail for fourteen years. Some have suggested that QUANTUM was Bruno Pontecorvo, but this is fanciful: in 1943, QUANTUM passed information about the gaseous diffusion process, under development at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Pontecorvo was never at Oak Ridge, and had no expertise in gaseous diffusion. His specialties were neutrons and nuclear reactors. The information on QUANTUM's activities is consistent with the biography of Boris Podolsky. See also Andrew, _Defence of the Realm_ , p. 375, note 58.\n\n. TNA KV 4/472.\n\n. Anthony Gardner interview, February 25, 2013.\n\n. The MI5 suspicion that these could be the mysterious Messrs Wittka and Allegrini, who accompanied Bruno from Rome to Stockholm, might have substance, however.\n\n. Gil Pontecorvo interview, September 4, 2013.\n\n. Boris Ioffe described this interview in the Kremlin about physics as an \"interrogation\" (Boris Ioffe e-mail, August 5, 2011, and video interview of Ioffe by Giuseppe Mussardo, 2012. I am grateful to Giuseppe Mussardo for a copy of this interview). Another former Soviet scientist, who wished to remain anonymous, told me that soon after 1955, when Pontecorvo's presence became known, a well-connected source (who in the opinion of my informant was extremely reliable) mentioned that Pontecorvo had also been interviewed by the KGB. This is consistent with the claims of former KGB agent F. D. Popov, who goes further and states that Pontecorvo \"was regarded as so important that he was interviewed by Beria\" (quoted in Pincher, _Treachery_ , chap. 48; confirmed in Chapman Pincher interview, November 14, 2013).\n\n. F. D. Popov, quoted in Pincher, _Treachery_ , chap. 48.\n\n. Guy Liddell diary, September 12, 1950, TNA KV 4/472.\n\n. Lorna Arnold interview, 2013.\n\nCHAPTER 14\n\n. Gil Pontecorvo interviews, February 24, 2011 and September 4, 2013; Bruno Pontecorvo in Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 159.\n\n. Gil Pontecorvo interviews, February 24, 2011, and October 12, 2013.\n\n. I have debriefed Gil Pontecorvo about this on several occasions. He is sure the route was not via Porkkala, as the border was unremarkable: \"There were no major military installations for example\" of the kind that one would have expected at the Porkkala base. At most, he recalls passing an unremarkable sentry post in the middle of the woods, after which Bruno emerged from the trunk. A direct journey to the USSR would have taken the family east, whereas Porkkala is to the west. Gil again: \"I did not check the direction of the sun!\" Although Porkkala cannot be ruled out, it seems most likely that the Pontecorvos took a direct eastward road journey to the USSR. Gil confirmed that stories about ships or submarines are nonsense: \"I have never been on a submarine!\"\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 159.\n\n. Background in this section is drawn from Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ ; interviews with Miriam Mafai in 2012; and interviews with Gil Pontecorvo throughout the project.\n\n. Gil Pontecorvo interview, February 24, 2011.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 163.\n\n. It was a rare privilege for a Soviet citizen to meet a foreigner at that time. Even two decades later, in my experience, it was a natural reaction for sophisticated Soviets in that situation to be interested in how events were perceived in the West.\n\n. Gil Pontecorvo interview, September 4, 2013.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 164.\n\n. Gil Pontecorvo interview, January 20, 2012.\n\n. This is the date as Gil recalled it, sixty years later. Actually September 16 is the date he started school in 1949. In 1950 the term started on September 19. This illustrates both the detailed level of Gil's memories, as well as the subtle tricks the mind plays over time.\n\n. Gil Pontecorvo interview, August 25, 2011.\n\n. Sereni's diary shows that he went back and forth between the USSR and the West during this period. This was because he was a major party member, whom the Soviets saw as key to spreading communist influence in the world. It is thus possible that Bruno did not fully realize that he would be cutting himself off so thoroughly; for him, the move to the USSR could have been merely another stop on his life's journey. Simone Turchetti interview, October 5, 2011.\n\n. The early years of Laboratory Number Three are described in Boris Ioffe, \"The First Dozen Years of the History of ITEP Theoretical Physics Laboratory,\" _European Physical Journal H_ 38, no. 1 (January 2013): 83\u2013135.\n\n. Ioffe, \"A Top Secret Assignment,\" p. 31; Boris Ioffe e-mail, August 5, 2011; Giuseppe Mussardo interview, December 12, 2012.\n\n. The eventual success of the Soviet H-bomb occurred because Andrei Sakharov found a way (known as the \"layer cake\") to make a bomb using a minimal amount of tritium, and Vitaly Ginzburg had the insight that tritium could be made within the bomb itself by bombarding lithium deuteride with neutrons.\n\n. Ioffe, \"A Top Secret Assignment,\" p. 31; Boris Ioffe e-mail, August 5, 2011; Giuseppe Mussardo interview, December 12, 2012.\n\n. Laboratory Number Three was officially established in December 1945, but during 1946 \"no real work\" occurred. Serious work happened only from 1947 onward (Boris Ioffe e-mail, August 5, 2011). Nunn May had been exposed in 1945. There is no mention of any blueprints in his deathbed statement (Broda, _Scientist Spies_ , and Paul Broda e-mail, October 10, 2013). Only the final stage of the blueprints' journey is known. Yakov Terletsky, a physics professor at Moscow State University, was a part-time employee of the KGB. His role was to filter all material on atomic projects coming from abroad, and ensure that the information reached the relevant teams in the USSR.\n\n. Ioffe, \"A Top Secret Assignment,\" p. 31; Boris Ioffe e-mail, August 5, 2011; Giuseppe Mussardo interview, December 12, 2012.\n\n. This comes via a trusted scientific colleague from the former Soviet Union, who was involved in the nuclear physics program in the 1950s and heard this from \"the grapevine\" decades ago. While I am confident of the reliability of my colleague, who also trusts his source, now dead, I cannot assess the accuracy of his source or his memory after so long.\n\n. According to Popov, Pontecorvo \"was regarded as so important that he was interviewed by Beria\" (quoted in Pincher, _Treachery_ , chap. 48 and Chapman Pincher interview, November 14, 2014). Given Pontecorvo's significance as a nuclear scientist, the fact that the interview allegedly took place in the Kremlin, and Beria's role in the Soviet atomic program, this is plausible. However, my informant was unable to confirm Beria's presence. \"Gray and mustard\" is artistic license based on my personal experience of Soviet government decor from the 1970s. Henry Ford's cars were famously available in any color as long as it was black. A similar uniformity seems to have applied to walls in the USSR. I have assumed that the same was true on this occasion.\n\n. In Joan Hall's opinion, if Ted had been forced to choose between fleeing to the USSR or facing ten years in jail \"or worse, the electric chair,\" his decision would have been obvious. Joan Hall interview, May 1, 2013.\n\n. Bruno's version of his arrival in the USSR was given decades later. Whether he was genuinely a willing participant, or if this was an example of revisionist history, only he knew. Clearly, if Bruno had the intention to move to the USSR before the Pontecorvos left England, they could have taken more suitable belongings. Anna had asked if she could hitch a ride with them en route to Italy. Her presence made space tight. She had to repack and leave a case behind in England. If Bruno were already planning to leave England forever, it would have been easy for him to politely tell Anna that there was no space for her, and then pack for his own needs more appropriately. Clothing and financial support could be provided by the Soviets, but personal memorabilia and family documents could not. Ronnie Reed of MI5 concluded as much in 1951.\n\n. Remark by anonymous relative, confirmed by Anna Pontecorvo, March 21, 2012.\n\n. This is the account Bruno gave to Miriam Mafai years later. The idea that Gil, at age twelve, had such a sophisticated understanding of socialism as to \"scold\" his mother seems like propaganda. If true, however, it would suggest that the family had discussed communist ideology in the home for some time.\n\n. Gil Pontecorvo interview, February 24, 2011.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo._\n\n. Gil Pontecorvo interview, August 25, 2011.\n\nCHAPTER 15\n\n. Pollock, _Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars_ , p. 91, as quoted in Turchetti, _The Pontecorvo Affair_ , p. 184.\n\n. Ioffe, \"A Top Secret Assignment\"; Boris Ioffe e-mail, August 5, 2011; Giuseppe Mussardo interview, December 12, 2012.\n\n. Dubna could accelerate deuterons to a kinetic energy of 280 MeV, alpha particles to 560 MeV, and protons to 680 MeV.\n\n. Venedict Dzhelepov, in BPSSW. There is also some unsubstantiated gossip that Dzhelepov, who later became director of the laboratory, might have played a role in recruiting Bruno Pontecorvo to Dubna. Ugo Amaldi and Giuseppe Fidecaro interviews, November 9, 2013.\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, \"Soviet Atomic Espionage,\" April 1951, <http://archive.org/stream/sovietatomicespi1951unit/sovietatomicespi1951unit_djvu.txt>.\n\n. For example: \"Prof Pontecorvo is said to have been seen [at Kamenice]\" where \"fresh uranium deposits have turned up\" (\"Two New Czech Atom Plants,\" _Daily Telegraph_ , March 21, 1951).\n\n. Boris Ioffe video interview by Giuseppe Mussardo, 2012 Boris Ioffe e-mail, August 5, 2011; Ioffe's interview by Giuseppe Mussardo, viewed by author December 12, 2012.\n\n. Samoil Bilenky interview, October 12, 2013.\n\n. Boris Ioffe video interview by Giuseppe Mussardo, 2012, viewed by author December 12, 2012.\n\n. This was very similar to the \"classical superbomb\" developed by Edward Teller in the United States. The idea came to the USSR via Klaus Fuchs. See also Rhodes, _Dark Sun_ , p. 256; In \"A Top Secret Assignment,\" p. 25, Ioffe argues that the idea was developed by Soviet physicists but that its true origin was known only to a handful.\n\n. Ioffe, \"A Top Secret Assignment,\" p. 28.\n\n. For the history of Pomeranchuk's book as well as his career, see <http://www.kipt.kharkov.ua/itp/akhiezer/en/recollections/pomeranchuk/>.\n\n. Burke, _The Spy who Came In from the Co-op_ , pp. 13 and 122.\n\n. Lorna Arnold interview, March 18, 2013.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo press conference, 1955; quote is translation of Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 193.\n\n. And there the collection of logbooks stayed for sixty years. In 2013, in preparation for celebrations of Bruno Pontecorvo's hundredth birthday, some documents became available. It was at the celebration, held in Rome in September, that I met Gil and saw their content for the first time.\n\n. The hydrogen in heavy water consists primarily of deuterium, whose atomic nuclei consist of a proton linked to a neutron. As there are two constituents in this hydrogen nucleus, it is sometimes referred to as H2. Tritium, which consists of a proton and two neutrons, is thus H3. \"Quadium,\" or H4, is a proton accompanied by three neutrons.\n\n. Dubna could generate collisions between alpha particles and solid targets. Alpha particles consist of two protons and two neutrons, which offered the hope that H4, which consists of one proton and three neutrons, might be present in the debris.\n\n. The material regarding H4 has no relevance other than as an interesting dead end in the Soviets' thermonuclear strategy. Having spent four decades as a nuclear and particle physicist, I can assert that H4 would be low on anyone's list of interests, if it even appeared at all. If one were to ask any competent students of nuclear physics about H4, they would immediately recognize that it would probably be so unstable as to be in effect nonexistent. Basic quantum theory tells us that at most two neutrons can coexist in a relatively stable state in hydrogen isotopes. H3 (tritium) is already radioactive and unstable. A third neutron, as in H4, would have to be on a higher rung of the energy ladder. The most probable way for H4 to decay would be to release a neutron and leave tritium, which it does in less than a thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of a second.\n\nBruno Pontecorvo, in 1950, was well versed in this field. It would be remarkable if this did not occur to him. Although the theory of the nuclear \"shell model\" is standard fare today, it was formulated only in 1948\u201349 by Maria Goeppert-Mayer and Hans Jensen, for which they later won the Nobel Prize. It is possible that this work was either not known or not accepted in the USSR in 1950. On balance it would seem likely that the Soviets were interested in the strategic possibility of producing \"super-tritium\" (H4), and the question was how to detect it. Bruno responded to this as an experimental challenge, ignoring the fact that well-established theory placed the existence of H4 in great doubt.\n\n. It was during this period that stories linking Pontecorvo with uranium appeared in the Western media and in intelligence reports delivered by Western embassies. For examples, see the _Daily Telegraph_ , March 21, 1951, and the secret report sent from Trieste to MI5 on April 13, 1951: \"PONTECORVO is alleged to be directing extraction of uranium pitchblende in KAMENICE about 100 km SE of PRAGUE\" (TNA KV 2/1889, memo 234).\n\n. It seems implausible that the significance of this interest in fission and H4 particles could have escaped the attention of a nuclear physicist such as Bruno Pontecorvo.\n\n. The alternative theories have various problems. One possibility is that he was ill and unable to work for a year, but there is no evidence for this. Marianne did fall ill, but there is no evidence that this unduly hindered Bruno's physics career, and certainly not to the extent that he would write nothing at all in the logbooks for so long. If he spent his time gathering a team of scientists to conduct experiments, one would expect this activity to be recorded in the logs at some point. However, the entries from this period are not even sporadic; they are nonexistent. I spoke to several experimental nuclear and particle physicists, who were active half a century ago, and they found the lack of records inexplicable, unless Bruno was working on some other project during that period.\n\n. One document from this period has come to light: a brief note from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, signed by Igor Kurchatov on July 27, 1951, and marked with the word \"Approved.\" This document refers to a \"Consolidated Programme of Research Work for Installation M.\" It appears to be an outline for a research program in particle physics, which later formed the core of the work reported in Bruno's logbooks from September 1951 onward. Source: M. G. Sapozhnikov, \"Seminar on B. Pontecorvo's Life and Ideas,\" JINR, Dubna, undated.\n\n. Quoted in Close et al., _The Particle Odyssey_. p. 75.\n\n. Soviet Academy of Sciences, \"Report of the Institute for Nuclear Problems\" [in Russian], 1951, referenced in _Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics_ 29 (1955): 265\u2013273, ref. 2; p. 129 in BPSSW.\n\n. I am grateful to Gil Pontecorvo for accessing and translating this report.\n\n. For example, see <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/438712/Abraham-Pais> and <http://www.webofstories.com/play/murray.gell-mann/68>.\n\n. Strange particles contain one or more strange quarks (or strange antiquarks). Particles without strangeness either have no strange quarks, or the number of strange quarks and antiquarks exactly balance, so that their individual positive and negative amounts of strangeness cancel.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 177.\n\n. Gil Pontecorvo interview, September 4, 2013.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 192.\n\n. Stella Rimington comment to author, June 14, 2013.\n\n. Pincher, _Treachery,_ chap. 55 and Chapman Pincher interview, November 13, 2013.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 189; Miriam Mafai e-mail, 2012.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 189.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 186.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 181.\n\n. Stalin, who had engineered plots throughout his career, imagined conspiracies all around him and used the case of the Jewish doctors as an excuse to launch an anti-Semitic campaign. The obvious question of why these senior medical professionals, some of whom were also university professors, would commit such crimes was answered by a simple, blunt assertion: \"They were agents of foreign powers.\"\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 181.\n\n. Gil Pontecorvo interview, September 4, 2013.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 187.\n\nCHAPTER 16\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 192.\n\n. The two conversational interviews conducted by Arnold hardly merit such a colorful description. Bruno's reaction is more understandable, however, if he had learned in August 1950 that the FBI interest in him had resurfaced, and that the Americans were pressing MI5 for action.\n\n. Quotes taken from British media reports of the _Isvestia_ article and of the press conference, in TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Guido Pontecorvo to MI5, in TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. The scientists' statement (\"Atomic Energy Control,\" _The Times_ , January 21, 1947) was mentioned in a speech to the UN Security Council by Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Union's deputy minister of foreign affairs. Quoted in Laucht, _Elemental Germans_ , chap. 6.\n\n. _Picture Post_ , February 18, 1950: \"British scientists answer the question all world is asking: what should be done about the hydrogen bomb?\"; _Daily Mirror_ , March 25, 1950, front page: \"Scientists jib at H bomb jobs.\"\n\n. Years later, after the Krogers had been arrested in the UK, released, and returned once again to the USSR, Morris Cohen/Peter Kroger happened to run into George Blake, another infamous KGB spy, in Moscow. They arranged to meet. The authorities immediately ordered that no such meetings were to take place.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 192.\n\n. Bruno won the Stalin Prize in 1953. The cash value of the prize in 1950 was about a thousand times a typical monthly income. In other words, the winner received, in effect, a lifetime's salary in advance. Life in the Soviet Union had been hard following the war, and although by the 1950s food was plentiful, there was \"no variety of other goods\" (Sacha Adriana interview, January 23, 2012). In addition, the award also gave the recipient access to special shops, which under the circumstances would have been invaluable. As a leading Academician and member of the party, Bruno also had access to foreign goods, theater tickets, special hotels, and other privileges off limits to the majority of citizens.\n\n. Reports of press conference, for example Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 191 et seq.\n\n. Gil still qualifies for a UK passport; it was Bruno that crossed the line and took his family with him. Gil Pontecorvo interview, August 25, 2011.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 275.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 147.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 205.\n\n. Ioffe, \"A Top Secret Assignment\"; Bruno Ioffe interview, December 2012.\n\n. Semen Gershtein in BPSSW.\n\n. Its proton kinetic energy was 600 MeV or 0.6 GeV. At CERN's synchrotron in 1959, the energy was 28 GeV.\n\n. Nino Zichichi interview, June 30, 2013.\n\n. Gian Carlo Wick, as reported in Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 212; Ugo Amaldi interviews, April 18, 2013, and September 12, 2013.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 212; Miriam Mafai interview, March 2012.\n\nCHAPTER 17\n\n. Jack Steinberger, quoted in U. Dore and L. Zanello, \"Bruno Pontecorvo and Neutrino Physics,\" available at <http://arxiv.org/pdf/0910.1657.pdf>.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo is one of a select group of scientists who have an equation inscribed on their tomb or memorial stone. Ludwig Boltzmann's headstone in Vienna records the thermodynamic passage from order to decay. Paul Dirac's eponymous equation for the electron is set in stone in London's Westminster Abbey.\n\n. The Cowan and Reines discovery paper is available at <http://www.sciencemag.org/content/124/3212/103>.\n\n. In the acknowledgments at the end of the paper, Pontecorvo thanks Pomeranchuk for a comment about an effect of relativity. This appears to be one of only two cases where he and Pomeranchuk had any discussion about fundamental physics; the other dealt with strange particles.\n\n. Venedict Dzhelepov in BPSSW.\n\n. Given that the K-zero turns into an anti-K-zero through a two-step process, what would the analogous mechanism be for a neutrino? Bruno's ideas on this subject seem to have matured when he considered the fact that an electrically neutral atom can be made from a negatively charged electron and a positively charged muon; he realized that a negatively charged muon accompanied by a positron forms a similar system. In 1947, he had showed that a muon decays into an electron and two neutrinos\u2014actually, he now realized, one neutrino and one antineutrino. This implied that the atom (made of a positive muon and an electron) could convert into a neutrino and an antineutrino. In turn, this latter pair of neutral entities could materialize as a negative muon and a positron. The result would be the conversion of an atom into an anti-atom. This does not happen in reality, for reasons that became clear a few years later. However, this idea was an important step in the development of Bruno's thinking about neutrinos. In theory, the process described above could have allowed a neutrino to convert to an antineutrino, or vice versa.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo in _Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics_ 36 (1959): 1615. Quotation taken from English-language version, \"Universal Fermi Interaction and Astrophysics,\" reprinted in BPSSW, p. 164.\n\n. Schwinger combined relativity and quantum theory and applied them to QED (quantum electrodynamics). He won the prize in 1965 for work done in 1947.\n\n. Not entirely. There are subtle problems that remain. The full solution of \"the Infinity Puzzle\" is outlined in my book of that name.\n\n. Half a century later, the limit is about one in a trillion.\n\n. Published in _Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics_ 37 (1959): 1751.\n\n. S. Oneda and J. C. Pati, \"V-A Four-Fermion Interaction and the Intermediate Charged Vector Meson,\" _Physical Review Letters_ 2 (February 1, 1959): 125.\n\n. This is true for pions that carry electric charge. There is an uncharged variety, which decays into two photons.\n\n. Quotes in this page come from Igor Zheleznykh, \"Early Years of High-Energy Neutrino Physics in Cosmic Rays and Neutrino Astronomy (1957\u20131962),\" Proceedings of the ARENA workshop, May 2005.\n\n. Bruno Pontecorvo, \"Electron and Muon Neutrinos,\" in BPSSW, p. 167.\n\n. Dubna report P-376. Gil Pontecorvo was one of the interpreters at the conference, where he provided simultaneous translation from Russian to English. Gil Pontecorvo interview, September 22, 2011.\n\n. The switch from antineutrino to neutrino might appear trivial, but in practice electrons arising from neutrino interactions are more difficult to isolate. This is because of their ubiquitous presence in matter, which increases background noise. We live in a world of matter; this makes antimatter signals easier to identify.\n\n. Melvin Schwartz, Nobel Address, 1988.\n\n. M. Schwartz, \"Feasibility of Using High-Energy Neutrinos to Study the Weak Interactions,\" _Physical Review Letters_ 4 (1960): 306.\n\n. Melvin Schwartz, Nobel Address, 1988.\n\n. Leon Lederman noted that \"Bruno Pontecorvo addressed the right question but with a hopeless approach.\" Namely, Bruno made \"an interesting error\" by assuming that the low number of neutrinos would be fatal\u2014and therefore assumed that he would need an accelerator of huge intensity.\n\n. Where did Kurchatov obtain the crucial helium-3? It is notable that Pontecorvo's paper gave all the necessary details except one: it did not reveal how much helium-3 he had used. This fact had been declared a state secret. The reason, as everyone realized, was that the precious helium-3 was the \"waste\" from the production of tritium\u2014the key ingredient of the hydrogen bomb. Therefore the amount was not revealed, although experimental nuclear physicists could probably have deduced it from the details of the experiment.\n\n. The inspiration here was an American theorist, John Bahcall, who in 1962 pointed out that these higher-energy neutrinos might be detectable. Davis learned of Bahcall's observation and made use of the chlorine-detector idea. This story is told in detail in Close, _Neutrino_ , p. 69.\n\n. Ray Davis recollection, date unknown.\n\n. B. Pontecorvo and V. Gribov, _Physics Letters B_ 28 (1969): 493 and B. Pontecorvo, _Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics_ 26 (1968): 984.\n\n. I first used this analogy in my book _Neutrino_ , which tells the story of Ray Davis.\n\n. 1 followed by 58 zeroes, which is ten billion trillion trillion trillion trillion, or ten octodecillion.\n\n. Ludo Pontecorvo interview, April 18, 2013.\n\n. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has a diameter of roughly 100,000 light-years. The Large Magellanic Cloud is a satellite of the Milky Way, located about 160,000 light-years away. It is visible to the naked eye in the Southern Hemisphere.\n\n. When the electron-neutrinos convert the neutron in deuterium to an easily visible proton, a direct measurement is possible.\n\n. Art McDonald interview, August 30, 2011, and e-mail, December 17, 2011.\n\nCHAPTER 18\n\n. Gil Pontecorvo interview, September 22, 2011.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 200.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 216.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 277.\n\n. Interview with former colleague from Canada, name withheld, 2013.\n\n. Jackson, \"Snapshots of a Physicist's Life,\" p. 23.\n\n. Jackson, \"Snapshots of a Physicist's Life,\" p. 23, and J. David Jackson e-mail, August 28, 2012.\n\n. Gillo Pontecorvo, quoted in Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_.\n\n. Rodam Amiredzhibi, quoted in Mafai, _Il lungo freddo,_ p. 218.\n\n. Giuseppe Longo, presentation at Bruno Pontecorvo centenary conference, Rome, September 12, 2013. At this same conference, various former colleagues confirmed the intensity of Bruno's relationship with Rodam.\n\n. Contrary to a common misconception, they never married. (The Wikipedia biography of Bruno Pontecorvo repeated this misconception, until corrected by me in 2014.)\n\n. Bruno stayed married to Marianne, even late in life. He eventually became concerned that he had no documentary proof of their marriage\u2014the certificate was yet another item they had failed to bring on their flight. Remark by anonymous colleague.\n\n. Interview with Russian colleague, name withheld, 2012.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 218.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 223.\n\n. Gillo Pontecorvo, as related to the author by an anonymous colleague of Bruno Pontecorvo, 2013. This is consistent with Bruno's own statement to Charles Richards, _The Independent,_ August 2, 1992.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 256.\n\n. Semen Gershtein in BPSSW.\n\n. Interview with Charles Richards, _The Independent,_ August 2, 1992.\n\n. Semen Gershtein in BPSSW.\n\n. This is memory of a remark Gribov made to me around 1990; it was corroborated by Valery Khoze on December 6, 2012.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 193.\n\n. Gil Pontecorvo interview, August 26, 2013.\n\n. Anna Pontecorvo interview, November 11, 2011.\n\n. Tito Pontecorvo, quoted in Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 280.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 281.\n\n. A list of Politburo members according to Wikipedia can be found at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_Politburo_of_the_Communist_Party_of_the_Soviet_Union_in_the_1970s>.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 282; Miriam Mafai interview, March 2012.\n\n. Tito bred Akhal-Teke stallions, and became outstandingly successful at it, as this video shows: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaae5M3NgaI>.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 271.\n\n. Tania Blokhintseva interview, August 24, 2012.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 284.\n\n. Eugenio Tabet interview, September 12, 2013; Eugenio Tabet e-mail correspondence, October 2013.\n\n. Ugo Amaldi interview, September 12, 2013.\n\n. Tania Blokhintseva interview, August 24, 2012.\n\n. Gil Pontecorvo interview, August 26, 2013. The visit was during New Year's 1975, and the events described took place in the first week of January.\n\n. J. Laberrigue-Frolow in BPSSW, p. 466.\n\n. Peter Minkowski interview, around July 1, 2013. The visitor from the Energy Department was the late Peter Rosen, a physicist who had been the head of the theoretical physics division at Los Alamos.\n\n. Photo in BPSSW, p. 467.\n\n. A recording of Pontecorvo's talk at CERN is available at <http://cds.cern.ch/record/1002188?ln=it>.\n\n. I was able to talk with Miriam Mafai shortly before she died in 2012 to verify that her narrative came verbatim from Bruno Pontecorvo, and discuss the extent to which it reflected her own vision. In her opinion the comments about life in the Soviet Union reflected Bruno's philosophy, adding enigmatically, \"There are things you cannot understand, _sauf si vous \u00e9tiez communiste_.\" Miriam Mafai interview and e-mails, March 1, 2012.\n\n. Interview with Charles Richards, _The Independent,_ August 2, 1992.\n\n. Anna Pontecorvo interview, November 11, 2011.\n\n. Lev Okun in BPSSW, p. 501.\n\n. Tania Blokhintseva interview, August 24, 2012.\n\n. Irina Pokrovskaya in BPSSW, p. 508.\n\n. Tania Blokhintseva in BPSSW, p. 494.\n\n. Ludo Pontecorvo interview, April 18, 2013.\n\n. Irina Pokrovskaya in BPSSW, p. 508. Marianne Pontecorvo died in 1995.\n\n. The full story involves experiments conducted in Japan, which detected neutrinos produced by cosmic rays, as well as solar neutrinos. This is covered in more detail in Close, _Neutrino_.\n\n. J. Bahcall and R. Davis, \"The Evolution of Neutrino Astronomy,\" _Essays in Nuclear Astrophysics_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 243\u2013285.\n\nCHAPTER 19\n\n. TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 295. Luisa Bonolis, an Italian historian of science, tried to obtain original tapes or transcripts of Mafai's interviews, but was unsuccessful. Bonolis assessed Bruno's responses to Mafai, as reported in the original Italian, and found them to be ambiguous, as if he did not want to face the reasons for his flight. Luisa Bonolis interview, December 13, 2012.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 293.\n\n. Quote originates with Franz Kafka.\n\n. Ugo Amaldi interview, April 18, 2013.\n\n. Jack Steinberger interview, September 13, 2011. At the Rome conference in September 2013, following a presentation by Bilenky, Steinberger publicly attacked the claims that Pontecorvo had demonstrated that the muon does not decay into an electron and a photon, calling them \"inventions of Mr Pontecorvo\" made \"later in life as he remembered [events]. Their work was published a few months after mine, which found the electron spectrum to be continuous [i.e., incompatible with decay into an electron and a photon] and there is no statement in Hincks and Pontecorvo that muon does not decay to electron and photon, which I did later with an Italian student.\" A written version of Steinberger's critique can be found in _CERN Courier_ , February 24, 2014, available at <http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/56229>.\n\n. Semen Gershtein in BPSSW.\n\n. While the H-bomb was still in the future at the time of Pontecorvo's defection, its awful potential was already recognized. Yet there is no mention in any of the available British documents of any expertise that Pontecorvo had that would be relevant to the weapon. President Truman had publicly announced the decision to develop the H-bomb in January 1950, months before the Pontecorvo affair erupted. By the time of his defection, the United Kingdom was already aware of a number of technical details, including the advantage that heavy-water reactors could have in breeding tritium, which is the key ingredient of the bomb. In 1950, Pontecorvo had been working on such a reactor for six years, and was one of the world's leading experts in the field. When he arrived in the USSR, he had already performed experiments involving tritium, and, we now know, he subsequently advised the Soviets on the details of heavy-water reactors. Yet there is not a whiff of concern about these facts in the documents from 1950 that the British have released. It is hard to believe that informed government scientists would have overlooked such a link.\n\nThis peculiar silence contrasts with the very vocal concerns about cosmic rays that were expressed in the media at the time. The discovery of strange forms of matter with weird properties in cosmic rays led to speculation that they might be a route to even-more-devastating weapons. If these unfamiliar particles held such power, and if the Soviets mastered them first, it was possible that the West could be held hostage and subjugated. This very subject was Bruno's latest passion when he defected\u2014which could be seen as quite alarming. Fortunately, cosmic rays are of no use in building weapons of mass destruction, but no one knew that in 1950. This was therefore another aspect of Bruno Pontecorvo's expertise that the British government downplayed at the time.\n\n. Enrico Fermi as quoted by Herbert Skinner, TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Remark by Arnold Kramish to Michael Goodman, Michael Goodman interview, October 7, 2013.\n\n. One possible scenario is that during 1945 Bruno had planned to move to Harwell, but that his plans were disrupted by Nunn May's exposure at the end of that year, and arrest in 1946. With Nunn May out of the picture, Moscow no longer had an expert intimately involved within the Canadian project. Around this same time, Klaus Fuchs, who had been actively spying for Moscow at Los Alamos, was transferred to Harwell. Almost at once, Pontecorvo decided to postpone his own move to the British laboratory. Instead, he announced his desire to remain in Canada. This placed Bruno Pontecorvo at the heart of the Canadian reactor project, during the period when it was producing the novel forms of uranium and other elements essential for atomic weapons and power. During this period, it appears that the Soviets' courier, Lona Cohen, was secretly given uranium for transmission to Moscow. In the meantime Klaus Fuchs continued to pass information to his Soviet contacts from his new post at Harwell. By 1949, Pontecorvo's work in Canada was completed, after which he also moved to Harwell as planned. There, he was confronted with the catastrophe of Fuchs's exposure, in 1950.\n\n. KGB documents that were declassified during Yeltsin's presidency. Albright and Kunstel, _Bombshell_ , pp. 133\u2013134 describes Cohen's Canadian visits. Lona Cohen also described them to a Russian historian in 1992 (confirmed to author in an e-mail from that Russian historian, an anonymous source, March 12, 2014). Bruno's travels are confirmed in TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Comment by Stella Rimington, June 14, 2013.\n\n. Herbert Skinner remark to MI5, TNA KV 2/1888: \"The circumstantial evidence for him having handed over information to an agent while in Canada is extremely strong.\"\n\n. Lona Cohen died on December 23, 1992.\n\n. Yatskov could have been the \"man of about forty\" who first met the Pontecorvos in Leningrad on or around September 3, 1950. Yatskov's claim that he served as an aide-de-camp to Bruno also fits with Bruno's descriptions of the KGB employee who helped him in 1975, and whose identity Bruno refused to reveal.\n\n. Yatskov's career is described in Albright and Kunstel, _Bombshell_.\n\n. William Tyrer e-mails, February 28, 2014; e-mail from anonymous source, March 2, 2014.\n\nAFTERWORD\n\n. Guy Liddell diary, June 2, 1950, TNA KV 4/472.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p. 153.\n\n. Mafai, _Il lungo freddo_ , p 205.\n\n. Oleg Gordievsky e-mail correspondence, April 30, 2012.\n\n. Conversation with Pontecorvo family members, Rome, September 22, 2013.\n\n. As recalled by Gillo's son, Ludo Pontecorvo, interview April 18, 2013.\n\n. Guido Pontecorvo remarks to MI5, TNA KV 2/1888.\n\n. Anna Pontecorvo interview, November 11, 2011.\n\n. Ben MacIntyre, remark in lecture about his book _A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal_ (Bloomsbury 2014).\n\n. Unnamed Harwell scientist, quoted by Godfrey Stafford, interview December 20, 2012.\n\n. Interview with Charles Richards, _The Independent_ , August 2, 1992.\n\n. Quoted in Guy Liddell diary, September 18, 1945, TNA KV 4/466.\n\n. Joan Hall interview, May 1, 2013.\nBibliography\n\nAlbright, Joseph and Marcia Kunstel. _Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy._ New York: Times Books, 1997.\n\nAndrew, Christopher. _The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5_. London: Allen Lane, 2009.\n\nAndrew, Christopher and Oleg Gordievsky. _KGB: The Inside Story_. London: HarperCollins, 1990.\n\nAndrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin. _The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West._ London: Penguin, 2000.\n\nArnold, Lorna. _My Short Century: Memoirs of an Accidental Nuclear Historian._ Palo Alto, CA: Cumnor Hill Books, 2012.\n\nBickel, Lennard. _The Deadly Element: The Men and Women Behind the Story of Uranium._ London: Macmillan, 1979.\n\nBonolis, Luisa. \"Bruno Pontecorvo: From Slow Neutrons to Oscillating Neutrinos.\" _American Journal of Physics_ 73 (2005): 487\u2013499.\n\nBroda, Paul. _Scientist Spies: A Memoir of My Three Parents and the Atom Bomb_. Leicester, UK: Matador, 2011.\n\nBurke, David. _The Spy Who Came In from the Co-op: Melita Norwood and the Ending of Cold War Espionage_. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2009.\n\nChaliand, Gerard and Arnaud Blin. _The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to Al Qaeda_. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.\n\nClose, Frank. _The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe._ New York: Basic Books, 2011.\n\nClose, Frank. _Neutrino_. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.\n\nClose, Frank, Michael Marten, and Christine Sutton. _The Particle Odyssey: A Journey to the Heart of Matter_. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.\n\nEmling, Shelley. _Marie Curie and her Daughters: The Private Lives of Science's First Family_. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.\n\nFarmelo, Graham. _Churchill's Bomb: A Hidden History of Science, War and Politics_. London: Faber and Faber, 2013.\n\nFermi, Enrico. _Note e Memorie (Collected Papers),_ Vol. 1, _Italy 1921\u20131938_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.\n\nFermi, Laura. _Atoms in the Family: My Life with Enrico Fermi, Architect of the Atomic Age._ Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954.\n\nFrisch, Otto. _What Little I Remember_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.\n\nGibbs, Timothy. \"British and American Counter-Intelligence and the Atom Spies 1941\u201350.\" PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2007.\n\nGoldschmidt, Bertrand. _Les rivalit\u00e9s atomiques, 1919\u20131966_. Paris: Fayard, 1967.\n\nGoodman, M. _Spying on the Nuclear Bear: Anglo-American Intelligence and the Soviet Bomb_. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.\n\nGowing, Margaret. _Britain and Atomic Energy, 1939\u20131945._ New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964.\n\nHaynes, John Earl, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev. _Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America_. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.\n\nHolloway, David. _Stalin and the Bomb_. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.\n\nIoffe, Boris. \"A Top Secret Assignment.\" In _At the Frontier of Particle Physics: _Handbook of QCD: Boris Ioffe Festschrift_ , edited by M. Shifman. Singapore: World Scientific, 2002._\n\nJackson, J. D. \"Snapshots of a Physicist's Life.\" _Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science_ 49 (1999): 1\u201333.\n\nJeffery, Keith. _MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909\u20131949._ London: Bloomsbury, 2010.\n\nJeffreys-Jones, Rhodri. _In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence_. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.\n\nJohnson, Charles W. and Charles O. Jackson. _City Behind a Fence: Oak Ridge, Tennessee 1942\u20131946_. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981.\n\nLamphere, Robert J. and Tom Shachtman. _The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent's Story_. London: W. H. Allen, 1987.\n\nLaucht, Christoph. _Elemental Germans: Klaus Fuchs, Rudolf Peierls and the Making of British Nuclear Culture, 1939\u201359._ Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.\n\nLipkin, Harry J. _Andrei Sakharov: Quarks and the Structure of Matter_. Singapore: World Scientific, 2013.\n\nMacintyre, Ben. _Agent Zigzag: The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman, Lover, Betrayer, Hero, Spy._ London: Bloomsbury, 2007.\n\nMacintyre, Ben. _A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal_. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.\n\nMafai, Miriam. _Il lungo freddo: storia di Bruno Pontecorvo, lo scienziato che scelse l'Urss_. Milan: Arnondo Mondadori Editori, 1992.\n\nManham, Patrick. _Snake Dance: Journeys Beneath a Nuclear Sky_. London: Chatto and Windus, 2013.\n\nMarten, Michael. _Tim Marten: Memories_. Raleigh, NC: Snipe Books, 2009. Moorehead, Alan. _The Traitors: The Double Life of Fuchs, Pontecorvo, and Nunn May._ New York: Dell, 1952.\n\nN\u00e9mirovsky, Ir\u00e8ne. _Suite Fran\u00e7aise_. New York: Vintage, 2007.\n\nPais, Abraham. _Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World_. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.\n\nPeierls, Rudolf. _Bird of Passage: Recollections of a Physicist_. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.\n\nPhilby, Kim. _My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy._ New York: Modern Library, 2002.\n\nPinault, Michel. \"Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot, la science et la soci\u00e9t\u00e9,\" thesis, University of Paris, February 1999.\n\nPincher, Chapman. _Too Secret Too Long._ New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984.\n\nPincher, Chapman. _Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders, and Cover-ups: Six Decades of Espionage Against America and Great Britain_. New York: Random House, 2009.\n\nPollock, Ethan. _Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars_. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.\n\nPontecorvo, Bruno. Autobiographical notes (in Russian), 1988. Italian version: \"Una nota autobiografica.\" In _Enciclopedia della Scienza e della Tecnica_. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1988\u20131989.\n\nPontecorvo, Bruno. _Bruno Pontecorvo: Selected Scientific Works._ 2nd ed. Edited by S. M. Bilenky, T. D. Blokhintseva, I. G. Pokrovskaya, and M. G. Sapozhnikov. Bologna: Societ\u00e0 Italiana di Fisica, 2013.\n\nPopov, F. D. _The Atom Bomb and the KGB_. Moscow: 2003.\n\nReed, Nicholas. _My Father, the Man Who Never Was_. Folkestone, UK: Lilburne Press, 2011.\n\nRhodes, Richard. _Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb_. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005.\n\nRhodes, Richard. _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_. New York: Penguin, 1988.\n\nRobotti, Nadia. \"The Beginning of a Great Adventure: Bruno Pontecorvo in Rome and Paris.\" Presented at the Pontecorvo centenary conference, Rome, September 2013.\n\nRobotti, Nadia and Francesco Guerra. \"Bruno Pontecorvo in Italy.\" Presented at the Pontecorvo centenary conference, Rome, September 2013.\n\nSegr\u00e8, Emilio. _A Mind Always in Motion: The Autobiography of Emilio Segr\u00e8_. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.\n\nSmith, Michael. _The Spying Game: The Secret History of British Espionage_. London: Politico's, 2004.\n\nSudoplatov, Pavel, Anatoli Sudoplatov, Jerrold L. Schecter, and Leona P. Schecter. _Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness\u2014A Soviet Spymaster._ New York: Little, Brown, 1994.\n\nTurchetti, Simone. _The Pontecorvo Affair: A Cold War Defection and Nuclear Physics_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.\n\nWallace, P. R. \"Atomic Energy in Canada: Personal Recollections of the Wartime Years.\" _Physics in Canada_ 56, no. 2 (March/April 2000): 123\u2013131.\n\nWeart, Spencer R. _Scientists in Power_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.\n\nWest, Nigel. _The Circus: MI5 Operations 1945\u20131972_. New York: Stein and Day, 1983.\n\nWilliams, Robert Chadwell. _Klaus Fuchs: Atom Spy_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.\n\nZheleznykh, Igor. \"Early Years of High-Energy Neutrino Physics in Cosmic Rays and Neutrino Astronomy (1957\u20131962).\" Proceedings of the ARENA workshop, May 2005.\nIndex\n\nAbelson, Philip,\n\nAbingdon, England, 160\u2013161\n\nAdams, Arthur,\n\n_Age_ (Melbourne), on Bruno's disappearance,\n\nAgeno, Mario,\n\nAgip oil company,\n\nAkers, Wallace, ,\n\nAlexander, Serge. _See_ Scherbatskoy, Serge Alexandrovich\n\nAllegrini, R.,\n\nAllier, Jacques, 51\u201352\n\nAlpha radiation, defined,\n\nAlternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS),\n\nAlvarez, Luis,\n\nAmaldi, Edoardo Amaldi-Fermi (AF) curves, plotting of,\n\nCERN, witness to construction of,\n\ncontact by MI5 about Bruno's disappearance, 185\u2013186\n\ninduced radioactivity, experiments with, 18\u201322\n\nat International Conference on High Energy Physics in Kiev (1959),\n\nseventieth birthday celebration, 285\u2013286\n\nas signer of greeting card for Bruno,\n\nslow neutron phenomenon, patent of,\n\nVia Panisperna Boys, inclusion in, 15\u201316, _ (photo)_\n\nAmaldi, Ugo, , 286\u2013287, ,\n\nAmaldi-Fermi (AF) curves,\n\nAmendola, Giorgio,\n\nAmiredzhibi, Rodam, ,\n\nAnderson, Herbert, , ,\n\nAndrew, Christopher,\n\nAndropov, Yuri,\n\nAngelov, Pavel, 135\u2013136\n\nAnglo-Canadian project\n\naccess to uranium deposits by,\n\nCockcroft's appointment as director,\n\nHalban, as director of,\n\nmembers of,\n\norigin of,\n\nrelocation to Chalk River,\n\nsharing of data in, 91\u201394, 96\u201398\n\ntension between US and UK in, ,\n\ntravel, restrictions on non-British members, 118\u2013119\n\nAngus, John,\n\nAnti-K-zero,\n\nAnti-Semitism, ,\n\nAntielectrons,\n\nAntifascism, ,\n\nAntimatter,\n\nAntineutrinos, , , , ,\n\nAppleton, Edward,\n\nArgon, ,\n\nArneson, Gordon,\n\nArnold, Henry, 151\u2013154,\n\nArnold, Lorna, ,\n\nArtsimovich, Lev,\n\nArzamas-16, ,\n\nAssociated production,\n\nAtmospheric neutrinos,\n\nAtom smasher,\n\nAtomic bomb, , , , , ,\n\nAtomic Energy Commission (AEC), , 198\u2013199\n\nAtomic Energy Research Establishment. _See_ Harwell\n\nAtomic nuclei, composition of, 9\u201310\n\nAttlee, Clement, ,\n\nAuger, Pierre, , , , , _133 (photo),_\n\nBadham, R., 158\u2013159\n\nBarker, Royd \"Doggie,\" 162\u2013164\n\nBenedetto, Sergio de,\n\nBeria, Lavrenti, , , , , ,\n\nBeta decay, 12\u201313\n\nBeta radiation, defined,\n\nBethe, Hans, , ,\n\nBideault, Georges,\n\nBilenky, Samoil,\n\nBlokhintsev, Dmitri,\n\nBlokhintseva, Tania, ,\n\nBlum, L\u00e9on, ,\n\nBohm, David,\n\nBohr, Aage,\n\nBohr, Niels, , 24\u201325, , , ,\n\nBretscher, Egon, , , ,\n\nBretscher, Mark, 161\u2013162,\n\nBrezhnev, Leonid,\n\nBritain. _See_ United Kingdom\n\nBroda, Paul,\n\nBrookhaven National Laboratory, New York, , ,\n\nBurgess, Guy, 201\u2013204, ,\n\nCaldirola, Piero, ,\n\nCambridge Five spy ring, 201\u2013202\n\nCanada, radium and uranium deposits in, 83\u201384,\n\nCandy, John,\n\nCarbon tetrachloride,\n\nCERN (European Council for Nuclear Research),\n\nChadwick, James, , , 79\u201380, 118\u2013120,\n\nChain reaction, , , , ,\n\nChalk River experimental facility, , 96\u2013104, 107\u2013109, 113\u2013115, _ (photo)_,\n\nChevalier, Haakon,\n\nChicago, Fermi's laboratory in, 81\u201383, , , 98\u2013101, , ,\n\nChlorine, as target for neutron bombardment, , ,\n\nChurchill, Winston, , , ,\n\nClermont-Ferrand, France, emergency laboratory at, , , 59\u201360\n\nCloud chamber,\n\nCobban, James, ,\n\nCockcroft, John, , , , , ,\n\nCohen, Lona (aka Helen Kroger), 140\u2013143, , , ,\n\nCohen, Morris, 140\u2013142, ,\n\nCollard, John, , ,\n\nCommunists\n\nin France, 30\u201332\n\nin Italy, , ,\n\npersecution of in US, 148\u2013149,\n\nUK as refuge for,\n\nanticommunist hysteria in West, xii, xiv, , , ,\n\nCompton scattering,\n\nCorbino, Orso, , 20\u201321,\n\nCosmic radiation, 109\u2013112\n\nCosmotron, ,\n\nCowan, Clyde, , , ,\n\nCurie, Marie, , , ,\n\nCurie, Pierre, ,\n\nCurran, Samuel,\n\nCyclotron, ,\n\nCzechoslovakia, invasion of by Soviet Union,\n\nD'Agostino, Oscar, , _ (photo)_,\n\n_Daily Mirror,_ on scientists' concerns about nuclear weapons,\n\nDautry, Raoul,\n\nDavis, Ray, xvii, 108\u2013109, , 255\u2013256, 267\u2013269, , 293\u2013294\n\nDeuterium, , ,\n\nDeuterons, 10\u201311,\n\nDoctors' Plot, 240\u2013241\n\nDozza, Giuseppe,\n\nDubczek, Alexander,\n\nDubna, USSR, particle accelerator in, 225\u2013226\n\nDzhelepov, Venedict,\n\nEightfold Way,\n\nElectromagnetic force,\n\nElectron-neutrinos, 259\u2013260, , ,\n\nElectrons, , , 12\u201313, 16\u201317, 36\u201337, 42\u201343, , 111\u2013114, 229\u2013230, , , 254\u2013269, 272\u2013273,\n\nElectrostatic accelerator,\n\nEltenton, George,\n\nEnrichment of uranium, , 67\u201368\n\nEscher, M. C.,\n\nEuropean Council for Nuclear Research (CERN),\n\nFakirov, Docho,\n\nFascism,\n\nFBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), , , 149\u2013150, , 190\u2013192, , 205\u2013208\n\nFeather, Norman,\n\nFeinberg, Gerald,\n\nFermi, Enrico at University of Chicago, 81\u201383\n\nat Columbia University,\n\ncontrol of British-American collaboration by,\n\nhydrogen bomb, interest in,\n\nneutron bombardment, use of in inducing radioactivity, 17\u201318\n\nnuclear reactor, construction of,\n\nslow-neutron phenomenon, discovery of, 19\u201322\n\nslow-neutron phenomenon, patent of,\n\ntheory about neutrinos, 105\u2013106\n\ntheory of beta decay,\n\ntheory on behavior of spectra of gases,\n\nUniversity of Rome, professorship at, 7\u20138\n\nVia Panisperna Boys and, 15\u201316, _ (photo)_\n\nFermi, Laura, xv, , 20\u201321, , 121\u2013122\n\nFidecaro, Giuseppe,\n\nFission, , 43\u201346, 50\u201351\n\nFission, spontaneous, ,\n\nFitin, Pavel,\n\nFlavored neutrinos, 257\u2013265\n\nFlerov, Georgii, 68\u201369, 77\u201379\n\nFrance, 30\u201332, , 59\u201360,\n\nFranks, Oliver,\n\nFrisch, Otto, , , , ,\n\nFuchs, Klaus\n\narrest of, xii, xiv, , , 202\u2013203\n\nBruno's opinion of, ,\n\ncommunist affiliation, failure of MI5 to identify,\n\nconfession, consequences of, ,\n\nas \"deadliest spy\" in US history,\n\neffect of Fuchs' arrest on Bruno,\n\nfear of execution in US,\n\nat Harwell,\n\nat Los Alamos,\n\nmentioned, , , , , , , , , ,\n\nPeierls, friendship with, xvi\n\nPhilby's alert of Soviets about MI5 suspicion of,\n\npost-prison life, 281\u2013282,\n\nreason for spying,\n\nas spy for Soviet Union, xiii, , , , , ,\n\nFurnival Jones, Martin,\n\nGalanin, A. D.,\n\nGamma radiation, ,\n\nGardner, Anthony, 161\u2013162, 164\u2013165, 182\u2013183, 187\u2013188\n\nGardner, John, ,\n\nGardner, Meredith,\n\nGardner, Paul, 161\u2013162, , , 186\u2013187\n\nGardner family, 183\u2013184\n\nGaseous diffusion,\n\nGeiger counters,\n\nGell Mann, Murray,\n\nGermany, , 59\u201360,\n\nGershtein, Semen, , 280\u2013282,\n\nGiannini, Gabriello, 197\u2013199\n\nGold, Harry, xiv,\n\nGoldhaber, Maurice,\n\nGoldschmidt, Bertrand, , , _ (photo)_\n\nGordievsky, Oleg, , , ,\n\nGouzenko, Igor, , , ,\n\nGramsci, Antonio,\n\nGraphite, **,** ,\n\nGreenglass, David, xiv,\n\nGribov, Vladimir, 268\u2013269, ,\n\nGroshev, L. V.,\n\nGroves, Leslie, , , , , , ,\n\nGRU (Soviet military intelligence agency), 134\u2013137, ,\n\nGu\u00e9ron, Jules, , , _ (photo),_\n\nGuidi, Guido Buffarini,\n\nHahn, Otto, , 43\u201344\n\nHalban, Hans von\n\nat Chalk River, _ (photo)_\n\ndetection of liberated neutrons by,\n\nas director of Anglo-Canadian project,\n\nexperiments with chain reactions, ,\n\nhiring of Bruno for Anglo-Canadian project, 84\u201385,\n\npersonality, 38\u201339, 94\u201395\n\nresignation as director of Anglo-Canadian project,\n\nsplitting uranium atoms, experiments with,\n\ntransfer of heavy water to Canada, , , 59\u201361\n\nvisit to Joliot-Curie, 118\u2013119\n\nvisit with Bruno and Fermi, 82\u201383\n\nHall, Joan, , 221\u2013222\n\nHall, Ted, xiv, , 139\u2013142, , ,\n\nHarwell, xii, , 147\u2013148\n\nHassler, Berger,\n\nHatton, Joe, ,\n\nHeavy water, , , 51\u201352, , 59\u201361, 94\u201395,\n\nHelium-3,\n\nHennessy, Peter,\n\nHenrietta. _See_ Pontecorvo, Henrietta\n\nHideki Yukawa,\n\nHiggs boson,\n\nHincks, Ted, , , 122\u2013123\n\nHiroshima, Japan, US bombing of,\n\nHitler, Adolf,\n\nHollis, Roger, , , , ,\n\nHoover, J. Edgar, , 207\u2013208\n\nHouse Un-American Activities Committee,\n\nHydrogen, isotopes of,\n\nHydrogen bomb, xii, , , , 229\u2013231,\n\n_Independent_ (London), interview with Bruno, ,\n\nInverse beta process,\n\nIoffe, Boris, 218\u2013219, 228\u2013229\n\nIon pairs,\n\nIonization chambers, 101\u2013102\n\nIsomerism, 36\u201338, 42\u201343\n\nIsotopes, defined,\n\n_Isvestia,_ on nuclear nonproliferation campaign,\n\nItaly, , 6\u20137, ,\n\nIvanov, Peter,\n\nIvry-sur-Seine, laboratory at, , 42\u201343, 50\u201351\n\nJackson, J. David,\n\nJackson, Maureen, _ (photo)_\n\nJoint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), ,\n\nJoliot-Curie, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric\n\nas active communist,\n\nalpha particles, use of to induce radioactivity, 13\u201314\n\nbackground of, 35\u201336\n\nchain reaction, patents on,\n\nClermont-Ferrand, France, emergency laboratory in, , 59\u201360\n\ndismissal as head of French atomic energy commission,\n\nfiftieth birthday celebration,\n\nin French Resistance,\n\nheavy water, acquisition of,\n\ninverse beta process, experiments with,\n\nlaboratory at Ivry-sur-Seine, work at, , 42\u201343, 50\u201351\n\nNobel Prize, award to, ,\n\nnuclear fission, experiments with, 44\u201345\n\nnuclear weapons, opposition to,\n\nas professor at Coll\u00e8ge de France,\n\nJoliot-Curie, H\u00e9l\u00e8ne, ,\n\nJoliot-Curie, Ir\u00e8ne\n\nalpha particles, use of to induce radioactivity, 13\u201314\n\ncommunist sympathies of,\n\nNobel Prize, award to, ,\n\nsecondary neutrons in fission process, detection of,\n\nJones, Evan,\n\nK-zero or neutral kaons,\n\nKaons or K-mesons, 235\u2013236\n\nKendall, James,\n\nKGB\n\nBruno's defection and, 176\u2013177\n\nBeria as head of,\n\ncross-examination of Bruno, , 220\u2013221\n\ninterest in Patterson letter,\n\nknowledge of communists at Chalk River,\n\nLona Cohen and, 141\u2013142\n\npossible association with Bruno, 309\u2013310\n\nspy network of, , 139\u2013140\n\nsurveillance of Bruno and family, 214\u2013216\n\nKhariton, Yulii,\n\nKhrushchev, Nikita, , ,\n\nKowarski, Lew, 38\u201339, 45\u201346, , , , 59\u201360, , , 102\u2013103\n\nKrasnikov, V. N.,\n\nKroger, Helen. _See_ Cohen, Lona\n\nKurchatov, Igor\n\nagents in North America, importance of, , 127\u2013129, , ,\n\natomic bomb, quest for,\n\nattempt to gain access to reactor for Bruno,\n\nchain reaction, quest for, , 68\u201369\n\ncyclotron, construction of,\n\nas father of atomic bomb,\n\nisomerism, interest in,\n\nneed for uranium,\n\npersonality,\n\nprovision of helium-3 for Bruno,\n\nrequest for high-energy particle accelerator,\n\nKuznetsov, Fyodor,\n\nLaBine, Gilbert, 83\u201384,\n\nLaboratory Number Three,\n\nLambdas, 236\u2013237\n\nLangevin, H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Joliot-Curie, ,\n\nLangevin, Paul, 29\u201330\n\nLarge Magellanic Cloud,\n\nLawrence, Ernest,\n\nLazard, Andr\u00e9,\n\nLederman, Leon, ,\n\nLee, T. D., 263\u2013264\n\nLees, David, , 186\u2013187\n\nLeibowitz, Ren\u00e9,\n\nLeptons,\n\nLiddell, Guy, xii-xiii, , , , , 207\u2013208, ,\n\nLipkin, Harry,\n\nLongo, Luigi,\n\nLos Alamos, New Mexico, xvi, ,\n\nLuria, Salvador, , 57\u201359, ,\n\nMacLean, Donald, 201\u2013202, , ,\n\nMacmillan, Harold, xiii\n\nMafai, Miriam, interviews with Bruno by, , , , , , , , , ,\n\nMakins, Roger, 193\u2013194\n\nMalraux, Andr\u00e9,\n\nManhattan Project, xiii, xv, , 87\u201388, , ,\n\nMann, Wilfrid Basil,\n\nMarkov, Moisy, 260\u2013261\n\nMaroni, Arrigo,\n\nMars, W. S.,\n\nMarten, Tim,\n\nMay, Alan Nunn ( _see_ Nunn May, Alan)\n\nMcCarthy, Joseph, xiv, , , ,\n\nMcDonald, Art,\n\nMcMillan, Edwin, ,\n\nMedvedev, I. I.,\n\nMeitner, Lisa,\n\n_Metamorphosis_ drawings (Escher),\n\nMI5\n\ncover-up of loss of FBI letters, 192\u2013195, _,  (photos)_\n\nemergence of \"lost\" letters,\n\nfailure to identify communists at Chalk River,\n\ninterest in Bruno, 200\u2013201, 204\u2013209, _ (photo)_\n\ninvestigation of Bruno's communist connections, 152\u2013159, _ (photo)_\n\ninvestigation of Bruno's disappearance, , 170\u2013178, _ (photo),_ 185\u2013186, , , 192\u2013194,\n\nletters from FBI concerning Bruno, 190\u2013192\n\nplacement of Barker at Roysse's School, 162\u2013164\n\nreceipt of information from FBI about possible communists, 149\u2013150\n\nstrained relations with FBI, , 207\u2013208\n\nsurveillance of Bruno,\n\nsurveillance of Fuchs by,\n\nsurveillance of Nunn May,\n\nsuspicions about Bruno's visits to Amersham,\n\nMI6 (Secret Intelligence Service), , ,\n\nMigdal, Arkady,\n\nMinkowski, Peter,\n\nMontreal, Canada, 90\u201391\n\nMotinov, Pavel, 135\u2013136\n\nMuon-neutrinos, 259\u2013260, ,\n\nMuons, 111\u2013112, , , ,\n\nMussolini, Benito, , ,\n\nNagasaki, Japan, bombing of,\n\n_Nature,_ on detection of beta particles,\n\nN\u00e9mirovsky, Ir\u00e8ne, ,\n\nNeptunium, ,\n\nNeufeld, Jakov \"Jake or Jack,\"\n\nNeutrino astronomy, xvii, , ,\n\nNeutrinos\n\natmospheric,\n\nbehavior of, 105\u2013106\n\nBruno's contributions to knowledge of, 253\u2013254\n\ncapture of, 106\u2013107\n\ndefined,\n\ndetection of,\n\nelectron-neutrinos, 259\u2013260,\n\nflavored, 257\u2013265\n\nmuon-neutrinos, 259\u2013260,\n\noscillating, , 268\u2013270, 293\u2013294\n\nproduction of,\n\nreactor-produced, 254\u2013255\n\nrole of in astrophysics and cosmology, 256\u2013257\n\nsolar, 266\u2013268,\n\nstellar, 256\u2013257\n\nNeutron-neutron log,\n\nNeutrons\n\ndiscovery of,\n\nimportance of in nuclear research,\n\nin reactors, , 98\u2013100\n\nslow-neutron phenomenon, 20\u201322\n\npatent on slow-neutron phenomenon, 22\u201323\n\nuse of in locating oil, 72\u201375\n\n_News Chronicle,_ on Bruno's share of patent money,\n\nNewton, Isaac, 112\u2013113\n\nNobel Prize in Physics, award of\n\nto Ir\u00e8ne and Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot-Curie (1935), ,\n\nto Jack Steinberger (1988), ,\n\nto Julian Schwinger (1965),\n\nto Leon Lederman (1988),\n\nto Melvin Schwartz (1988),\n\nto Ray Davis (2002), xvii, ,\n\nNovel particles,\n\nNRX reactor, , ,\n\nNuclear phosphorescence,\n\nNuclear physics, as tool of war, 67\u201369\n\nNuclear physics, prehistory of, 8\u201311\n\nNuclear power, development of,\n\nNuclear proliferation, scientists' concerns about, 244\u2013245\n\nNuclear reactors, xii, , 87\u201389, 98\u2013100, , , , , 218\u2013220, 230\u2013231\n\nNucleus, Bohr's explanation of, , 24\u201325,\n\nNunn May, Alan\n\nin Anglo-Canadian project, , 94\u201395\n\narrest of, ,\n\nfear of execution,\n\nmentioned, , , , , ,\n\nMI5's failure to identify as communist, ,\n\npassage of uranium samples to Moscow, xiii, , ,\n\nPhilby's alert of MI5's interest in,\n\npost-prison life,\n\nreason for passing information to Soviets,\n\nsharing of data,\n\nas Soviet spy, , , ,\n\nsuccess in hiding spying activities,\n\nvisits to Fermi in Chicago, , 100\u2013101\n\nZEEP, construction of, 102\u2013103\n\n_Oil and Gas Journal,_ on Bruno's oil-bearing rock detector,\n\nOkun, Lev,\n\nOneda, Sado,\n\nOppenheimer, J. Robert,\n\nOscillating neutrinos, 268\u2013270, 293\u2013294\n\nPais, Abraham,\n\n_Palm Beach Post,_ on Bruno's disappearance,\n\nParticle accelerator,\n\nPati, Jogesh,\n\nPatterson, Geoffrey, 204\u2013206, ,\n\n_Pattuglia_ (journal),\n\nPauli, Wolfgang, ,\n\nPavlov, Vitaly,\n\nPeierls, Genia,\n\nPeierls, Rudolf, xv-xvi, , , ,\n\nPenney, William, xiii-xiv\n\nPerrin, Michael, , 158\u2013159,\n\nPeshkov, V. P., 248\u2013249\n\nP\u00e9tain, Philippe, 60\u201361\n\nPetrzhak, Konstantin,\n\nPhilby, Kim, 137\u2013139, , 201\u2013206, 209\u2013210, ,\n\nPhotons, , , ,\n\n_Physical Review_\n\non detection of beta particles,\n\non enrichment of uranium,\n\non neptunium and plutonium,\n\non spontaneous fission,\n\nPincher, Chapman, , ,\n\nPions, , , , , ,\n\nPisa, University of,\n\nPlaczek, George, , , ,\n\nPlutonium, xii, , , , , ,\n\nPlutonium-239,\n\nPodolsky, Boris,\n\nPokrovskaya, Irina, ,\n\nPomeranchuk, Isaak, , , 228\u2013231\n\nPontecorvo, Anna (sister), , , 166\u2013168, , 172\u2013175, 290\u2013291,\n\nPontecorvo, Antonio (son), , , ,\n\nPontecorvo, Bruno, early years\n\nchildhood and adolescence, 5\u20136, _ (photo)_\n\nfamily history, 3\u20134\n\nradioactivity, observations of variations of degree of, 18\u201319\n\nslow neutron phenomenon, patent on,\n\nslow neutrons, experiments with,\n\nspectra of gases, published paper on,\n\nat University of Pisa,\n\nat University of Rome, 7\u20138\n\nPontecorvo, Bruno, Paris years\n\naccommodations, 30\u201331\n\napplication to visit Sweden, , _ (photo),_\n\nBohr, introduction to at dinner party,\n\ncommunism and, xi, 29\u201332, ,\n\ncorrelation of angular momentum with stability, experiments with,\n\nescape from Paris to Toulouse, 57\u201359\n\nGil, birth of, 39\u201341\n\nJoliot-Curies, association with, ,\n\nKowarski and Halban, friendship with, 38\u201339\n\nleaving Europe, 61\u201363\n\nMarianne, early relationship with, 33\u201335, _ (photo),_ , 39\u201340,\n\nMarianne, marriage to,\n\nnuclear energy levels, experiments with,\n\nnuclear isomerism, work with, 36\u201338, 42\u201343\n\nnuclear phosphorescence, discovery of,\n\nquantum mechanics and atomic nuclei, experiments with,\n\nPontecorvo, Bruno, in United States\n\nas enemy alien,\n\nneutron-neutron log, development of,\n\noffer of employment in US,\n\nas oil prospector in Oklahoma, 72\u201375\n\nradiation detector, invention of, 72\u201373\n\nsecret project, awareness of, 82\u201383\n\nTulsa, Oklahoma, life in, , _ (photo)_\n\nvisit with Fermis in New Jersey,\n\nPontecorvo, Bruno, with Anglo-Canadian project\n\nappointment to, ,\n\nbirth of Antonio,\n\nat Chalk River, 98\u2013104, _ (photos)_\n\nheavy water and fission, study of,\n\nimpression of non-interest in communism, ,\n\ninteraction with mathematicians in,\n\nin Montreal, Canada, 90\u201396\n\nmuon decay, test of, 111\u2013112\n\nNRX reactor, work on,\n\noffers of employment, 117\u2013118,\n\npersonality, 121\u2013123\n\nas possible Soviet spy, 129\u2013131, ,\n\nproportional counter, development of,\n\nsecurity clearance for, 88\u201389, _ (photo)_\n\nPontecorvo, Bruno, at Harwell\n\nin Abingdon, England, 160\u2013162, 164\u2013165\n\nallegations of communist affiliation, 149\u2013150\n\nArnold, interviews with, 151\u2013152\n\nBritish citizenship of,\n\ndenial of communist membership,\n\nduplicity, evidence of, 168\u2013176\n\nHarwell, reasons for choice of,\n\nHelsinki, Finland, arrival in, 178\u2013179\n\nat Joliot-Curie's birthday celebration in Paris,\n\nMI5, investigation by, 152\u2013159\n\npersonality, ,\n\nas security risk, xiv, , _ (photo)_\n\non summer holiday, 166\u2013168\n\nthird party involvement in flight, clues to, 176\u2013179\n\nUniversity of Liverpool, planned transfer to, xiv, , , _ (photo),_\n\nPontecorvo, Bruno, disappearance of airline manifest for flight to Stockholm, 176\u2013177, _ photo_\n\ncover-up by MI5 and FBI, 190\u2013195, _ (photo)_\n\neffect of on family members, 195\u2013197\n\nfailure to return to Abingdon, 182\u2013185\n\nfamily's perspective on, 188\u2013189\n\ninquiries by MI5 and MI6, 185\u2013186\n\nMI5 interest in, 200\u2013201, 204\u2013209, _ (photo)_\n\nnews media, reaction of, 186\u2013188\n\nparental anxiety about, 180\u2013182\n\nright-wing extremism, fear of,\n\nPontecorvo, Bruno, in the Soviet Union\n\nBritish citizenship, revocation of, , _ (photo)_\n\nCERN, visit to, 289\u2013290\n\nclassified logbooks of, 231\u2013235, _ (photo)_\n\nCommunist Party of Soviet Union, membership in, 241\u2013242\n\ncross-examination by KGB, , 220\u2013221\n\ndeath of,\n\ndefection, political implications of, 300\u2013301\n\ndefection, reasons for, , 280\u2013281\n\ndenial of work on nuclear bombs,\n\ndetection of H4 particles and,\n\ndetection of pions and,\n\ndisillusionment with USSR, , ,\n\nin Dubna, USSR, 223\u2013224, 237\u2013238, __ , _, and  (photos)_\n\nfinal days, 291\u2013293\n\nflavored neutrinos, theory of, 257\u2013265\n\nflight to USSR, 213\u2013214\n\nhigh energy physics, contributions to, 253\u2013254\n\nas inspiration for other physicists,\n\nat International Conference on High Energy Physics in Kiev (1959), 251\u2013252,\n\ninverse beta process, experiments with, 265\u2013266\n\nisolation of, 215\u2013216,\n\nlegacy of, 293\u2013295,\n\nloyalty to USSR, 240\u2013241, , ,\n\nmeasurement of energies of neutrons,\n\nmemorial stone in Rome, _ (photo)_\n\nin Moscow, 214\u2013218, 222\u2013223\n\nas \"Mr. Neutrino,\"\n\nneutrinos, interest in, xvii,\n\nNobel Prize, reasons for lack of, xvii,\n\nand Parkinson's disease, , _ (photo),_ , 289\u2013290\n\nPomeranchuk, conversations with, 230\u2013231,\n\npress conference, 245\u2013246\n\nreappearance of,\n\nreevaluation of life,\n\nin Rome for Amaldi's birthday celebration, 285\u2013287\n\nrumors about, 227\u2013228\n\nsecrecy about identity of, 238\u2013239\n\nsolar neutrino mystery, proposed solution to, 268\u2013269\n\nSoviet Academy of Sciences, election to,\n\nSoviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, reaction to,\n\nspy, possible role as, xvii-xviii, 301\u2013303, 307\u2013314\n\nStalin Prize, award of,\n\nStandard Model of particles and forces, conception of, 265\u2013266\n\ntesting for identity of muon-and electron-neutrinos, 262\u2013263\n\ntravel, restrictions on, xix, 118\u2013119, , , , 288\u2013289\n\nTito Nils, birth of,\n\ntravel, restrictions on, 118\u2013119\n\nUniversity of Glasgow, visit to,\n\nuranium, detection of, 101\u2013102\n\nUSSR, significance to, xi\n\nvisits to Fermi in Chicago, 98\u2013100\n\nweak force, experiments regarding,\n\nPontecorvo, Gil (son)\n\nin Abingdon, England,\n\nbirth of, 39\u201340\n\nin Dubna, USSR, 223\u2013224\n\nescape from Paris to Toulouse,\n\nexit visa, grant of to attend conference in Italy, ,\n\nflight to USSR, ,\n\nfriends' reaction to disappearance of, 187\u2013188\n\non Giuliana's involvement in Bruno's disappearance,\n\nin Moscow, 215\u2013217,\n\nname change,\n\nin Paris nursery, 40\u201341,\n\nas physicist and communist,\n\nat Roysse's School, Abingdon, England, , 166\u2013167, 184\u2013185\n\nStalin's death, reaction to,\n\non suddenness of defection,\n\nin Tulsa, Oklahoma, , _ (photo)_\n\non vacation in 1950, ,\n\nPontecorvo, Gillo (brother)\n\nbirth of,\n\non Bruno's political sympathies, , 115\u2013116\n\ncommunism, introduction to by Bruno, , ,\n\nCommunist Party, resignation from, , ,\n\nCommunist Party of Italy, work for,\n\nescape from Paris, 55\u201358,\n\nreunion with Bruno in Italy,\n\nin Saint-Tropez,\n\nvisit with Bruno at Circeo, ,\n\nPontecorvo, Giovanni (brother), , , , , ,\n\nPontecorvo, Giuliana (sister), , , , 62\u201363, , , , , , ,\n\nPontecorvo, Guido (brother), xv, , 6\u20138, , , , , , , 195\u2013196,\n\nPontecorvo, Henrietta (Gillo's girlfriend, later wife), , 57\u201358, , , ,\n\nPontecorvo, Laura (sister), , , , ,\n\nPontecorvo, Ludovico \"Ludo\" (nephew), , , 270\u2013271,\n\nPontecorvo, Maria (mother), 5\u20136, , , 180\u2013182,\n\nPontecorvo, Marianne Nordblom (wife)\n\nallegation of communist sympathies of, ,\n\nAntonio, birth of,\n\ndefection, role of in, 312\u2013313\n\nin Dubna, USSR, , _ (photo),_ , , 275\u2013277, _ (photo)_\n\nearly relationship with Bruno, 33\u201335, _ (photo),_ ,\n\nFBI, interview with,\n\nGil, birth of, 39\u201340\n\nhealth of, 41\u201342\n\nmarriage to Bruno,\n\nmental health of, 123\u2013124, 275\u2013277\n\nmiscarriage,\n\nin Moscow, , 222\u2013223\n\nparents, inability to visit during or after defection, ,\n\npersonality, , ,\n\nsafe-conduct from Paris to Toulouse, , _ (photo)_\n\nTito Nils, birth of,\n\nTulsa, Oklahoma, life in, , _ (photo)_\n\nPontecorvo, Massimo (father), 3\u20136,\n\nPontecorvo, Paolo (brother), , , , , , 196\u2013197\n\nPontecorvo, Pellegrino (grandfather), 3\u20134\n\nPontecorvo, Tito Nils (son), , , , 283\u2013284\n\nPositrons,\n\n_Pravda,_ on invasion of Czechoslovakia,\n\nPregel, Boris,\n\nPrice, D. P., 180\u2013181,\n\nProportional counter,\n\nProton, defined,\n\nProton Synchrotron, 250\u2013251\n\nPryce, Maurice, ,\n\nQuadium or H4, ,\n\nQuantum electrodynamics (QED),\n\nQuantum mechanics, application of to atomic nuclei, 37\u201338\n\nQuarks, ,\n\nRabi, Isadore,\n\nRadimska, Anna, 174\u2013175\n\nRadioactivity\n\nfission, 43\u201346, 50\u201351\n\ninduced, investigations of, 13\u201314, 17\u201323\n\nisomerism, 36\u201338, 42\u201343\n\nmeasurement of,\n\nslow-neutron phenomenon, patent on, 22\u201323\n\ntypes of,\n\nuranium and, 43\u201346\n\nRadium, 83\u201384\n\nRadium-226,\n\nRadium Institute, ,\n\nRasetti, Franco, , , , _ (photo)_\n\nReed, Ronnie, xviii, , , , , ,\n\nReines, Frederick, , , ,\n\n_La ricerca scientifica,_ Fermi's contributions to, ,\n\nRichards, Charles,\n\nRobertson, J.,\n\nRoosevelt, Franklin D., ,\n\nRosenberg, Julius and Ethel, xiv,\n\nRossi-Doria, Manlio,\n\nRotblat, Joseph, award of Nobel Peace Prize to, 244\u2013245\n\nRoysse's School, 160\u2013164, 184\u2013185\n\nRutherford, Ernest, , , ,\n\nSakharov, Andrei,\n\nScherbatskoy, Serge Alexandrovich (aka Serge Alexander), ,\n\nSchwartz, Laura,\n\nSchwartz, Melvin, ,\n\nSchwinger, Julian, , ,\n\nSeaborg, Glenn,\n\nSecret Intelligence Service (SIS) or MI6, , ,\n\nSegr\u00e9, Emilio\n\nbelief in communist influence on Bruno's choice of Harwell, , ,\n\ninduced radioactivity, experiments with,\n\nmention of Bruno's communist sympathies to FBI, 148\u2013150\n\nneptunium and plutonium, research of,\n\nas one of Via Panisperna Boys, 15\u201316, _ (photo)_\n\nrecommendation of Bruno for job in Oklahoma, ,\n\nslow-neutron phenomenon, patent on,\n\nsnub of Bruno at Amaldi's birthday celebration, 286\u2013287\n\nsnub of Bruno at conference,\n\nSeligman, Henry, _ (photo)_\n\nSereni, Alfonsina,\n\nSereni, Emilio\n\nComintern, connection with, ,\n\nescape from Paris, 57\u201359,\n\ninfluence on Bruno, ,\n\npre\u2013World War II communist activities, 6\u20137\n\nprison experiences of,\n\nas prominent post\u2013World War II communist, , 171\u2013172\n\nsuspected involvement in Bruno's defection, , ,\n\nSiegbahn, Manne,\n\nSiegert, Arnold,\n\nSillitoe, Percy,\n\nSissakian, Alexei, xvi\n\nSkinner, Herbert, , ,\n\nSlow-neutron method,\n\nSlow-neutron phenomenon, patent on, , 197\u2013199\n\nSolar neutrinos, 107\u2013108, 266\u2013268, 271\u2013273,\n\n_Soviet Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics,_ on muon- and electron neutrinos,\n\nSoviet Union\n\natomic bomb, detonation of, xiii,\n\nchain reactions, investigations of,\n\nCzechoslovakia, invasion of,\n\nDoctors' Plot, 240\u2013241\n\nGRU (Soviet Military Intelligence Agency), 134\u2013137, ,\n\nHungarian Revolution (1956), ,\n\nhydrogen bomb, quest for, , 229\u2013231\n\nManchuria, Inner Mongolia, and North Korea, invasion of,\n\nnuclear energy, use of for peaceful purposes,\n\nnuclear reactor program, 131\u2013132, 218\u2013220\n\nnuclear research, interest in, 77\u201379\n\nportrayal of as peacemaker,\n\nrequest for uranium from US, 131\u2013132\n\nspy network, xiv, , , , , , , , 127\u2013130, 134\u2013137,  ( _See also_ Cohen, Lona; Fuchs, Klaus; Hall, Ted; Philby, Kim)\n\n_See also_ KGB\n\nSpies, Soviet. _See_ Soviet Union, spy network\n\nStafford, Godfrey,\n\nStalin, Joseph, , , , , , , , ,\n\nStandard Model of particles and forces, 265\u2013266\n\nSteinberger, Jack, , , , ,\n\nStellar neutrinos, 256\u2013257\n\nStrange particles, , 235\u2013237\n\nStrassmann, Fritz, 43\u201344\n\nStrauss, George,\n\nSudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), Ontario, 273\u2013274\n\nSudoplatov, Pavel,\n\n_Suite Fran\u00e7aise_ (N\u00e9mirovsky),\n\nSun, light elements in,\n\nSupernovas, , ,\n\nSvetlov, Mikhail,\n\n_Sydney Morning Herald,_ on Bruno's disappearance,\n\nSynchrocyclotron, ,\n\nSynchrophasotron, 250\u2013251,\n\nSzilard, Leo,\n\nTabet, Duccio, , ,\n\nTabet, Eugenio, ,\n\nTamara, Sonia,\n\nTau-neutrinos,\n\nTeller, Edward,\n\nThermonuclear \"hydrogen\" bomb, ,\n\nThomson, George,\n\nThorez, Maurice,\n\nThorium,\n\nThornton, Robert, ,\n\n_Time_ magazine, on fission experiments of Joliot-Curie's team,\n\n_Times_ (London), on physicists' nuclear nonproliferation campaign,\n\nTrabacchi, Giulio, 15\u201316,\n\nTransuranium elements,\n\nTritium, , , , , , , ,\n\nTruman, Harry S., ,\n\nTube Alloys project, ,\n\nTurchetti, Simone,\n\nU-233, 100\u2013101,\n\nU-235, 9\u201310, , 66\u201368, ,\n\nU-238, , ,\n\n_L'Unit\u00e0_ (newspaper), , , , ,\n\nUnited Kingdom\n\ngraphite reactors, interest in,\n\nnuclear bomb, discovery of feasibility of, 79\u201380\n\npeaceful uses for nuclear energy, interest in,\n\nas refuge for communist sympathizers,\n\n_See also_ Chalk River experimental facility; MI5\n\nUniversal weak force, 112\u2013113, , 257\u2013258\n\nUranium, xii, 43\u201346, 67\u201369, 83\u201384,\n\n_See also_ U-233; U-235; U-238\n\nUSSR. _See_ Soviet Union\n\nVan de Graaff generator, 42\u201343\n\nVeksler, Vladimir,\n\nVENONA project, 202\u2013204\n\nVia Panisperna Boys, 15\u201324, _ (photo),_\n\nW bosons, ,\n\nWalton, Ernest,\n\nWar, importance of nuclear physics in, 67\u201369\n\nWeak force, 112\u2013113, , 257\u2013258\n\nWell Surveys, 70\u201371\n\nWick, Gian Carlo, , ,\n\nWittka, F.,\n\nYang, C. N., ,\n\nYatskov, Anatoly, 304\u2013305\n\nZabotin, Nikolai, 135\u2013137\n\nZel'dovich, Yakov,\n\nZero Energy Experimental Pile (ZEEP), 102\u2013103\n\nZheleznykh, Igor,\n\nZichichi, Nino,\n\nZilberberg, Xenichka, \n"], [" \n# _Praise for Geoffrey Wolff's_\n\n# A Day at the Beach\n\n\"Elegant.... Provide[s] an upbeat counterpoint to the troubled father-son relationship chronicled in _The Duke of Deception_.... In Geoffrey Wolff, America is blessed.\"\n\n\u2014 _Los Angeles Times_\n\n\"Honest and touching.... [Wolff explores] the romance of building the clean well-lighted sentence.\"\n\n_\u2014Chicago Tribune_\n\n\"Exhilarating.... Conjures up a diversity of scenes, set in locations ranging from Istanbul to Greenwich Village to a Caribbean beach.\"\n\n_\u2014Publishers Weekly_\n\n\"Wolff is one of the all-time great yarn spinners, and the texture of his prose is a marvel.\"\n\n\u2014Frank Conroy\n\n\" _A Day at the Beach_ is at once charming and deeply moving. Anyone who admired _The Duke of Deception_ will be drawn to this compelling memoir.\"\n\n\u2014Richard Selzer\n\n\"It's impossible to read Geoffrey Wolff's essays without being reminded what good writing is for. The complexities, the punishments, the exuberance of having a full life are his subject. There is no parsimony here, no falseness, no evasion. There is just the deeply satisfying familiarity of Wolff's voice. You sense the completeness of the man in the writer.\"\n\n\u2014Verlyn Klinkenborg\n\n\" _A Day at the Beach_ sneaks up on you in several places with remarkably steady views of American values in the face of mortality. It is an absorbing book, literate, full of life and marvelous information.\"\n\n\u2014Thomas McGuane\n\n\"Wolff has ripened through the years to a generous empathy and a supple specificity that mark him as a very special talent. As a story-telling essayist, he can be bravura, gentle or informative, balancing mercy with incongruity. One reads him wishing he were in the room.\"\n\n\u2014Edward Hoagland\n\n# Geoffrey Wolff\n\n# A Day at the Beach\n\nGeoffrey Wolff is the author of six novels and six works of nonfiction, including the memoir _The Duke of Deception_ , which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1994 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. From 1995 to 2006, he directed the Graduate Program in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. For his writing, he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy in Berlin. He lives in Bath, Maine.\n\n# ALSO BY GEOFFREY WOLFF\n\n_The Hard Way Around_\n\n_The Edge of Maine_\n\n_The Art of Burning Bridges_\n\n_The Age of Consent_\n\n_The Final Club_\n\n_Providence_\n\n_The Duke of Deception_\n\n_Inklings_\n\n_Black Sun_\n\n_The Sightseer_\n\n_Bad Debts_\n\nSECOND VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 2013\n\n_Copyright \u00a9 1992, 2013 by Geoffrey Wolff_\n\n_Introduction copyright \u00a9 2013 by Ann Patchett_\n\nAll rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House company, New York. Originally published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, in 1992.\n\nVintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.\n\nPortions of this work were originally published in the following: \"An Illuminated History of a Model Friendship\" (now titled \"The Company Man and the Revolutionary\") and \"A Day at the Beach\" in _Esquire_ ; \"Writers & Booze\" (now titled \"Drinking\") in _Lear's_ ; \"Advice My Brother Never Took\" (now titled \"Apprentice\") in _The New York Times Book Review_ (previously the introduction to _Best American Essays: 1989_ , Ticknor & Fields); \"The Sick Man of Europe\" in _The Paris Review_ ; \"It's the Top\" (now titled \"Matterhorn\") in _Travel & Leisure_; \"Heavy Lifting\" in _The San Diego Reader_ (later published in _Family_ : Pantheon, 1996).\n\nCover design by Mark Abrams  \nCover photograph \u00a9Tobias Titz/ fstop/ Corbis\n\nThe Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:  \nWolff, Geoffrey.  \nA day at the beach: recollections / Geoffrey Wolff.  \n\u20141st Vintage books ed.  \np. cm.  \n1. Wolff, Geoffrey, 1937\u2014\u2013Biography. 2. Authors, American\u2014  \n20th century\u2014Biography. I. Title.  \nPS3573.053z462 1993  \n813'.54\u2014dc20  \n[B] 92-50627\n\n**Vintage ISBN: 978-0-8041-7009-3  \ne-Book ISBN: 978-0-307-82926-9**\n\nwww.vintagebooks.com\n\nv3.1_r1\nFor my deckhands\n\nand yard-maintenance engineers:\n\nyou know who you are\n\n# Contents\n\n_Cover_\n\n_Title Page_\n\n_Copyright_\n\n_Other Books by This Author_\n\n_Dedication_\n\n_Author's Note_\n\n_Introduction by Ann Patchett_\n\nApprentice\n\nThe Great Santa\n\nHeavy Lifting\n\nThe Sick Man of Europe\n\nThe Company Man and the Revolutionary\n\nDrinking\n\nAt the Fair: Dairyness and Human Sacrifice\n\nA Day at the Beach\n\nMatterhorn\n\nWaterway\n\n# Author's Note\n\nAnyone old enough to read these words must agree that second chances are as good as luck gets. Ann Patchett's infectious and unrelenting enthusiasm, put into action by the editorial suggestions of LuAnn Walther and Vintage, have given me and mine another day at the beach. Encouraged as well by Maile Meloy and Binky Urban, I have added to this collection of personal essays \"Heavy Lifting,\" an account of my nearly botched second chance at love and laughter with Toby, my remarkable brother.\n\nThe characters who recur in these narratives\u2014my sons, Justin and Nicholas, my wife, Priscilla\u2014have thrived and kept me close and given me what I hope will be new readers: Ivan, Ruby, Rosemary and Oscar. Readers of this collection's title essay may be relieved to know that the St. Jude aortic heart valve (Model 23A-101, described herein) has since 1987 managed to avoid inclusion on _Consumer Reports'_ recall list.\n\n# Introduction  \n _by Ann Patchett_\n\n_Write what you know_ is a piece of literary advice that is regularly dispensed to would-be writers, but what we writers so often lack is an interesting life from which to draw. The teacher would be better off dismissing the class before it ever got started. \"Get out there and lead fascinating lives, dangerous, meaningful, beautiful lives,\" he should tell us. \"Give yourself time to digest those experiences, and _then_ come back and write what you know.\"\n\nBut that might not work either, because people who know how to live often don't have a clue how to write. They're too busy hoisting a sail or carving a ski slope to learn how to string two good sentences together. It's the rare writer who has lived both the life of the mind and a life of adventure, and who doesn't take himself too seriously doing either. Geoffrey Wolff is that writer. His brilliant essay collection and memoir, _A Day at the Beach_ , is a marvel of the first person: a restless mind recounting, examining, and riffing on what it knows. Like the storytellers in the market in Marrakesh from his opening essay, \"Apprentice,\" he's an entertainer, ready to compete with snake charmers and fire-eaters for your attention, and also to make you think about how and why your attention has been held. He's both performer and critic, often an amused self-critic. He turns over the incidents of his life\u2014amateur theatricals in Istanbul, say, or trying to drop anchor in the rain while another sailboat's pipe-smoking skipper offers advice\u2014to expose the humor and the pathos in them, and occasionally the lesson, too.\n\nInteresting lives, of course, should best be started young, as Wolff demonstrates in \"The Great Santa.\" While childhoods of either nerve-racking poverty or lonesome wealth can be moving, the childhood that swings violently between these two poles is the most interesting: extravagant gifts followed by no gifts at all, dismal boarding houses followed by picturesque country houses, everything wagered and won and lost and lost and lost. If you're lucky enough to have avoided the stability and complacency brought on by regular meals and consistent love, you might have some great material, but don't rest on your laurels. That alone will not be enough to sustain a lifetime of work. The best possible advice for young writers might be to follow Wolff's example and go to Turkey to teach literature, dabble in hashish, rub shoulders with so many spies that you will be accused of being one yourself, head for Cambridge on a prestigious fellowship, wreck your motorcycle, drink too much, love too well, become a newspaperman and a devoted husband and father, have your chest cracked open, climb the Matterhorn (or try), and then sail a little boat up the Eastern seaboard, battered by storms and boarded by Coast Guard agents looking for drugs. In short, take a page from these pages and live so large that you write your life across the night sky in stars.\n\nAnd such beautiful stars. Geoffrey Wolff is a writer who can make reading feel like driving a sports car too fast over a winding Alpine road, in part because reading has been that thrilling for him. \"I was skeptical of all faiths, save bookishness,\" Wolff writes, of his youth; \"I was bone-idle, except around books. Around books I worked like a Turk, reading with a pencil in my hand, reading three or four things at a clip. I had read headlong and helter-skelter since I plowed as a kid through Albert Payson Terhune simultaneously with the Hardy Boys. To read compulsively and to write about reading were my only appetites (of too many appetites) sanctioned as virtues rather than condemned as vices.\" The writing is the all-consuming bonfire onto which the wealth of experience is tossed. Life itself stokes the flames of the writing, makes the words whistle and crack, and draws the reader closer to this warm, bright place.\n\nOh, _A Day at the Beach!_ I've been in love with this book since I first read it, and as is the case with all books that I love, I gave my copy away as soon as I finished. So I bought another copy and gave that one away too, and then I did it again. There were so many people who needed to read this book, and I could always get another one. And I could, and I did, until they got harder to come by. _A Day at the Beach_ went out of print.\n\nShelf life applies to books as it does to cartons of milk, but sometimes it shouldn't. Books arrive in the store and are given a certain amount of time in which they're entitled to their piece of real estate. If not enough copies sell, the book eventually falls out of print. I understand this. So many books are written, and not all of them can stick around, but that doesn't mean mistakes aren't made. I picture a horde of books surging forever forward, pushing the ones in front off a cliff. When there are so many books, and so much pushing, it stands to reason that a bunch of mediocrities could bump off something that is truly great.\n\nBooks of essays are an especially tough sell, but then books of essays are rarely brilliant. They may contain hints of brilliance, two or three or four essays might be very good or even terrific, but the rest is often padding: op-ed pieces and well-written letters and book reviews. The final product does not sing. So how is it that a book like Geoffrey Wolff's, one that offers up a life fully lived and writing sharp enough to cut your fingers on, with an eye for absurdity and a refusal to let one's self off the hook for anything\u2014how does a book like that get pushed off while lesser books clog the shelves?\n\nWho knows? Let's just call this a wrong that has been righted. _A Day at the Beach_ is back, and, in the parlance of Broadway, better than ever. While the original collection was perfect, everybody likes a little something extra, and to that end Geoffrey added the heart-stopping essay \"Heavy Lifting.\" If you were lucky enough to read this book the first time around, you now have a compelling reason to read it again. Here we are reminded that daring lives, brilliant writing, and expansive thinking can sometimes come together. Cherish it.\n\n# Apprentice\n\nThere arrived in my mailbox a _billets-doux_ from my little brother Toby. More specifically, this was a five-page letter to him, from me, with his Post-it self-stick memo stuck to page 1. The letter was dated 13/xi/63\u2014\u00e0 la European mode\u2014and postmarked Cambridge, England, mailed decades before to an eleventh-grader. Single-spaced elite, without margins, it was typed with such manifest urgency that words fly truncated off the right edge of the tissue-thin foolscap; the keys must have been righteously rapped\u2014\"o\"s are little holes.\n\nThe tone of this document owes much to austere dogma, a religion of literary Art. It answers a letter in which Toby seems obscurely to have offended me by an expression of enthusiasm for his country and for some of its better contemporary and popular prose writers. Now Toby is himself one of our better contemporary prose writers, but at that time he was too young to vote, and I wasn't, so I took it upon myself to tell the stripling a thing or two.\n\n\"We live in an age when contraception and the Bomb and rejected opportunities usurp each other [sic] as negative functions... the clich\u00e9 governs by executive function... in the ruined warrens are pockets of beautiful life...\" The bulk of my letter consists of a suggestion that before Toby read another word of William Styron or Norman Mailer (for whom he had confessed such provocative admiration) he turn at once to Donne, Eliot on Donne, Sophocles, Aristotle, John Jones on Aristotle, Racine, Hegel (on tragedy) and I don't know who all else. In short: \"Begin at the beginning and familiarize yourself with literature.\" To this end he was to write weekly essays for me, and I would lead him across the ages, \"working through language and time until you learn how to read, and may discover whether you wish to write.\"\n\nJeepers! Or, as Toby noted on the yellow Post-it: \"I _still_ don't know half the stuff in here, and I'm a Full Professor, Mr. Smarty Pants!! (I thought you might want this back.)\" Let's say Toby has me by the shorts on this one: it's in his archive still\u2014he sent a photocopy, damn him.\n\nFor a letter so passionately typed, mine has an oddly distanced air, save for its _ad hominem, ad extremum_ and _ad absurdum_ assertion that \"every backward glance at our family tree reveals a body hanging from the withered limbs.\" I think I understand the abstracted character of these declarations: whatever the provenance of my athletically typed (and no doubt plagiarized) maxims, all I can now say with confidence is these were thoughts never thunk by me, or never in just these words.\n\nBut there's more too on Toby's Post-it annotation: \"It's a sweet letter. I was touched by it.\" In the spirit of confession may I disclose that I too am touched by my jejune gospel of a literary calling? My correspondence with my brother launched gaudy little vessels of language; my sentences didn't go forth carrying cargo, but in a hope of netting something out there on the vasty deeps. At the end I signed off: \"I'm sorry I have no news; I have little to talk of other than my work. That is everything.\"\n\nIt's simple enough to poke fun at the patchwork boy I was, the ill-matched concoction of attitudes and characteristics I aspired to be. I dressed in motley: three-piece blue pinstripe with gravy stains on the vest (a touch of Edmund Wilson in the waistcoat?), suspenders, wire-rimmed glasses to add even more years to my solemn face pallid from bad diet and irregular habits. (My God\u2014I'd already had my first gout attack.) My Cambridge college tie beneath my Cambridge gown offset bohemian footwear, Army-surplus boots. The Greeks, Jacobeans, Metaphysicals shared my bookshelves with modern poets, William Burroughs, Harold Pinter, Jean Genet and _Europe on Five Dollars a Day_. Parked in front of my digs stood a cherry-red 750-cc Royal Enfield Constellation, with full racing fairing, hell of a bike. George Steiner, my Churchill College tutor, my reason for being at Cambridge, was satisfied by the (literary) books, but sore about the motorcycle. Let's call the ragout of my conflicting circumstances a mess.\n\nBut for all the hotchpotch of my circumstances and styles, for all the egregious posturing and borrowed sentiment and faked-up lingo of my lugubrious letter to my brother, there was also something there I won't disavow. In those overwrought homilies about the long littleness of life and eternal uplift of Art was a felt passion, a longing for something that mattered, might stay, be firm. To learn something, to master something, anything, is as sweet as first love. In fact, it may _be_ first, preceding memory, the blissed-out grin that seems urged by the nervous system to accompany a baby's first solo steps, or a kid's first bicycle ride, or anyone's first unmonitored, unassigned, discretionary experience of reading. Don't you remember the first thing you read? Mine was _Donald Duck_ , and I was sitting in the bay window of a boardinghouse in Saybrook, Connecticut, where a drunk husband and his drunk wife hectored my drunk father about a gambling debt unpaid for fifteen years, and the awful noise went through me like silence through space, because I was elsewhere, living otherwise. And like a great whistler, who can entertain himself at will, or a sixteen-year-old with license, car and gasoline, I had the keys to the cell. To read was to escape, at will, solitary confinement.\n\nLater I was forever pressing books on friends (\"Have you read this? You _must_ read that!\"); now I pitched woo saying poems by heart. I favored, for their periodic drive and lonely outcasts caught in implied sensual contact, the closing lines of _Paradise Lost:_\n\n_The world was all before them, where to choose_\n\n_Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:_\n\n_They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow_\n\n_Through Eden took their solitary way_.\n\nI knew then that a life lived reading and writing could be a life well lived, in good company. That may have been all I knew, but I would not unknow it now.\n\nI was an eager student back then, avid to please, twenty-six going on sixty. The teachers whose good reports I cherished were cultural and literary critics\u2014R. P. Blackmur, George Steiner, F. R. Leavis\u2014for whom it seemed to me (if not to them) that literature of imagination was a secondary artifact, the rough ore from which the precious alloy of criticism might be fabricated. To me, then, the self-consciously impenetrable essays in _Scrutiny, Encounter, Partisan Review_ and _Kenyon Review_ were primary texts, and to read them was to belong to an exclusive guild whose members shared a dense jargon, a chastening insistence on commitment to text, a call to arms in some arcane combat in which a solemn band of initiates guarded the True Faith's gates against a vulgar gang of middlebrow, mid-cult vandals.\n\nI wished to stand stringent sentry among the few initiates. Why? I was a sucker for pulpit oratory (as long as it came delivered from a secular pulpit\u2014say, a lectern), and I was a sucker for whatever was inside the place I was outside. Also, I was skeptical of all faiths, save bookishness; I was bone-idle, except around books. Around books I worked like a Turk, reading with a pencil in my hand, reading three or four things at a clip. I had read headlong and helter-skelter since I'd plowed as a kid through Albert Payson Terhune simultaneously with the Hardy Boys. To read compulsively and to write about reading were my only appetites (of too many appetites) sanctioned as virtues rather than condemned as vices.\n\nThe poet Stanley Kunitz has remarked, reviewing his life's work for a collection of his poems, that evolution is a delusion. We change, but always at a cost: to win this you lose that. I feel sharp-witted these days, like to believe I know the score, would as soon laugh at myself as laugh at another, value lowlife idiom at least as preciously as high sentiment. When my brother forwarded to me that old letter, I paraphrased (shame would not countenance full quotation) its rhetoric and presumptions to a friend of many, many years who had herself been on the receiving end of my bygone puffed-up gravitas. I said to my friend, with what I took to be irony, \"Boy oh boy, I sure was learned then.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said. \"You were.\"\n\nI paused quite a good pause there, and let this soak in, and realized that I was lingering in the dangerous domain of a truth, and I wanted to laugh my way to a comfier neighborhood. \"What do you think happened?\" I asked. \"Wisdom, or just too much television?\"\n\n\"Nah,\" she said. \"You could say car payments. You could blame kids, but basically you eased up is all, wanted to relax.\"\n\nShe was part right, I'm afraid. To be the Man of Letters I aspired to be, avuncular at twenty-six, a virtuoso of the well-timed _harrumph_ , able to contextualize, perspectivize, plumb the subtexts, incite chums and bully a younger brother to do the same\u2014this was sober work, hard work. My friend was also part wrong, for a plunge into language was never joyless work.\n\nA final note about that letter to my brother: it was mailed a little more than a week before President Kennedy was murdered. I know it's recollection's merest commonplace to suggest that what happened to him and to America had something to do with oneself, but it did have something to do with how at bedrock I hoped to regard myself. Fact is, on the stroke of Dallas I no longer wanted to be a knockoff of R. P. Blackmur, John Milton or even George Steiner. I inexplicably and all at once did a U-turn, ambitionwise. I meant to find a voice, apart from the remnants of conflicted idioms in my schoolboy collection, that I might convince myself was truly mine. Moreover, I aspired to act rather than meditate. In brief, an old story: I was an unhappy graduate student, woe was me. So I quit. Graduated. \"Commenced,\" as they nicely say.\n\nI had what seemed to me a dandy cee-vee: Choate, a postgraduate year at an English public school, Princeton, a couple of years teaching literature in Turkey at Istanbul University and Robert College, Fulbright at Cambridge... Moreover, after having decided at Princeton that I was too exquisite to waste on that suburban New World my roughneck country, I was coming home. With arms outstretched. Willing to shake and make up. Put my shoulder to the wheel of American culture where my conspicuous gifts could count, as a journalist, in the nation's capital. How was it, then, that _The Washington Post_ personnel office imposed on me a typing test, which I failed? Never mind, I taught myself to type fast enough to get an interview \"upstairs,\" and was tentatively hired by a managing editor who had a soft spot for Turkey (he was building a vacation house there), and soon (despite my failure of a psychological test in which I declared\u2014what _could_ I have been thinking?\u2014I would rather be a florist than a baseball manager, which I wouldn't rather be, but I had blackened the wrong rectangle on the answer sheet, and try explaining that to an alarmed personnel director while you're wearing an English shirt of peach broadcloth with a white detachable collar) I was at useful work, making a difference, writing about a dozen obituaries a day.\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\n\"I don't suppose you're secretly writing a novel during your time off?\"\n\nHow could Bill Brady, night city editor, have guessed, my first afternoon on the death shift? Was it written on my face? The man was a seer. He saw more than I could possibly show because, yes, while I _meant_ to dream up a novel when I wasn't retailing the death of civil servants and merchants, and who had survived them, and what kinds of Masons they were... while I had every intention\u2014when I wasn't tracking down pix to accompany my little essays (\"Wolff! Have we got art with the Makepeace obit?\")\u2014of doing art, I hadn't yet done art.\n\nI was not, that is, after all, a Writer. I was a would-be Writer. Today such a distinction cannot exist. To want to be a writer is to be one, done and done. If I ask a dozen students in a fiction workshop how many think of themselves as writers, they are confused by the question. I read what they write, don't I? What else is writing? What's the question again? Not that they take everything for granted; quite a few ask, midway through their second semester as artists, whether they will someday be \"first-rate.\" More than a couple have requested my warranty. Will I certify, if they work hard, read the books I have suggested they read, mend the errors of usage I have located, that they will\u2014soon\u2014become \"great\"? Because if labor were to make them merely \"good,\" what's labor's point?\n\nIn my day we defined ourselves as Writers by no more logical a measure: when you were published by a disinterested, consequential (grown-up) publication, then you were a Writer. By this measure a couple of stories in the Choate literary magazine, a couple of excerpts from a novel in the _Nassau Literary Magazine_ and some polemic from the left in _Cambridge Forward_ did not a Writer make. Lest I seem to claim for Kids Back Then proportion and humility superior to the feral ambition of Kids Today, let me confide that I wanted to be a Writer long before I had the dimmest notion what story I wished to write. Let's call the phenomenon, then as now, careerism.\n\nFor someone not a Writer, however, I had sure done a gang of writing. In addition to piling up pages of all those school papers and independent projects and critical essays and book-length college theses, I had taken a year off from Princeton to complete a half-baked, doleful novel. But until I hit the glory hole of material that is any obituary essayist's estate, the principal vessel into which I poured my art was the letter. Love letters were best, but any letters would do. Letters were my apprenticeship: I used them as my commonplace book, as tryouts for characters, to get a purchase on what mattered to me and how I might articulate what mattered. I wrote weather reports and geography lessons, how snow touched the black waters of the Bosporus, how the sun bore down on Lindos, what a ninth consecutive day of rain did to Vienna. Hundreds of these letters, most unanswered. What was the recipient to say? This was not correspondence (as my amused brother now realizes); these were finger exercises, and just about as welcome to my audience as a sixth, ninth, fifteenth run-through of \"Heartaches\" by a first-year student of the tenor sax.\n\nLetters at least gave the illusion of a reader. Journals discouraged me, and for reasons more of character than of genre. Hidden by the privacy of a journal, I was too free to display my worst self. I look back over journal entries from years back\u2014entries that I taught myself to write as though they were public, in which I obliged myself to develop characters as though I were meeting them every time for the first time, in which no information was shorthanded or privileged\u2014and I discover a whiner. Awful. My characteristic voice is aggrieved or furious, condescending or monstrously generous. If that was my voice, who could want to listen?\n\nMy voice was of no interest to _The Washington Post_. Not that I didn't labor to make even that oldest of stories new: \"The world yesterday lost a good man: 'There was never a better dad,' said Trixie A. of the gentle-fingered chiropractor lying this morning in Hulbert's Funeral Parlor.\"\n\n\"Come off it, Wolff! You've got the embalmer spelled wrong! _Hubert!_ Get the stuff right, give me a new lede, hold it to eight inches, where's the art?\"\n\nThey were like Masons, as abstruse in their idiom as New Critics: journalists spelled \"lead\"\u2014for first or _leading_ paragraph (what jargonmeisters today call \"the attack\")\u2014\"lede,\" and they referred to snapshots of the dead as \"art.\" But being among them was good for me. The demented urgency of deadline discouraged my fear of blank paper (although sometimes, later, I should have feared it more, should have left more paper blank); the knowledge that every obituary is read with a jeweler's loupe by the survivors made me feel those few readers at my back, peering over my shoulder as I composed: \"No, you moron! It's 2021 Hillyer Place, not 2201! And he was Deputy Assistant Secretary, not Assistant Deputy!\" And so many dozens gone. The cry was still _they go!_ So many little essays so quickly composed. As a result, to paraphrase the boast of a newspaper colleague who must have been thinking of me: \"I can type faster than anyone who can write better, and write better than anyone who can type faster.\"\n\nFor the poet form is self-imposed, the parabolic net across which one plays Frost's legendary game. For the journalist form is mere circumstance. For me form was prison, and to be its hostage\u2014in an obituary, a news story, book review, police report\u2014was to long for breakout. I graduated from obituaries to night police, and in a ceremony of initiation my predecessor (freed by my elevation to tell stories of zoning in Montgomery County) took me back to the clip files to introduce me to the Gabbett Lede. Harry Gabbett worked night rewrite. If you know your _Front Page_ , I need tell no more of him than that he was all five and a half feet an ace; that he later, when I was on the cultural affairs desk and on final probation at the _Post_ and six weeks short of marriage, \"rewrote\" stories about events I neglected to attend because of some small trouble with alcohol; that he got these stories (about conventions of librarians and disputes between city planners and how many meals can the Washington Hilton prepare in how many minutes for a banquet) on the front page, under my byline; and that he wore, in the newsroom, a Borsalino hat.\n\nThe Gabbett Lede began a story that had been phoned in from police headquarters about a pissant holdup at a movie theater. The desperado got away with small change. Gabbett laconically requested details, perpetrator description, mode of arrival, path of flight, the usual. The reporter, bored by the tedious usual, eager to knock off at 3 a.m., gave Gabbett what meager intelligence he had, and Gabbett wrote his lede: \"A man carrying a briefcase to show he was in business, and pointing a revolver to show what business he was in...\"\n\nThe ceremonial display of the Gabbett Lede was to suggest that there's a great story in anything. It's an old American notion. I was first told back in junior high that in each of God's creatures is a great novel. Huey Long was wrong. Every man is _not_ a king; neither is each a Flaubert. Harry Gabbett, for example, was not a Montaigne, or a Samuel Johnson, or a John McPhee. Harry Gabbett wrote a honey of an introductory sentence, not a great essay. He caught a reader's attention, sure enough, but to what end? It is one thing to want and win a reader's attention, quite another to have a reason to want and hold the reader's attention. Ambition is ubiquitous, purpose rare.\n\nAmbition showed a pleasant face at _The Washington Post_. To work there as a young would-be seemed honorable, was a hoot. I've not had a happier job of work, except writing in solitude. There was a largeheartedness to my colleagues, a pervasive decency. My friends among the reporters were greenhorns like me, and old pros, but they shared an appealing irreverence unsoiled by cynicism, a capacity to be surprised, an affection for newspapering. Out on the newsroom floor there was buzz and bustle and much laughter. Instructed by craft and inclination, daily journalists tell good jokes, good gossip, good stories. They narrate with speed, know how to hear and play back the swinging music of the revealing detail or unforeseen quote.\n\nAs dearly as I loved their company, among the beat reporters\u2014people who gave a day's work for a day's pay\u2014I mingled as an apostate, a curiosity. To a good beat reporter a story was not form but material. Good reporters didn't kick against the box of form except to make it longer by inches, so it could hold more facts, bring newer news. Pro newsmen had a relationship with time different from mine. For them augury was boss. Even more vital than what they knew was when they found it out. Divination was chronology, being wired in _pronto_ , wised up _first_ , having the _breaking_ inside skinny, knowing now what the future held.\n\nAs a night police reporter, I, on the other hand, intended to write for the ages, labored to make a mark as a poet of the mean streets, long on the atmospherics of violent death, writing blowhard Miltonic sentences: \"Beneath a spill of mustard light from the broken streetlamp, in a wet gutter choked with last week's racing forms, wearing a pair of mismatched shoes, lay the victim. Stabbed.\"\n\nBill Brady would shout across the newsroom: \"Wolff! How about a domicile for the stiff! And maybe an age. And perhaps an approximate time of death. And while you're digging, maybe you can let us know his name?\"\n\nThis was not meant to be. When I got sent from police headquarters to chase ambulances, and sometimes caught the ambulances, I wouldn't\u2014couldn't\u2014do the next thing, which was to report. The _Post_ had a yearlong crusade on its editorial page, exhorting drivers to buckle up. To support this campaign, reporters covering automobile accidents were instructed to learn whether victims had worn seat belts. I chanced on a catastrophe one night in a suburban Virginia emergency room, a mother and father dragged from a movie and brought to that hospital to be told that all three children\u2014eldest fourteen, youngest eight\u2014were dead. The eldest had taken his brother and sister for a spin in the family sedan. I was told to ask the parents whether their children had buckled up. I would ask those parents nothing. A reporter was sent to report, and I was fetched back to the newsroom and told how it was, that maybe this was for the best, maybe I'd get down to that novel after all.\n\n\"What novel?\" I asked.\n\n\"Come on, Wolff,\" the city editor said, \"every cub has a novel.\"\n\nTo tell the truth, I had stolen some time on the job to write a little fiction. Sent to cover the dead Herbert Hoover, lying in state at the Capitol Rotunda (and a stately thing he was in that place at that time, believe me), I had done some creative writing on the response aspect of the sober story. I was instructed to get \"responses\" from well-wishers passing puzzled by the late personage, and if you put a gun to my head I'll have to admit my college roommates weren't really there that afternoon, shaking their heads, saying, \"This was a tragedy; they broke the mold when they made Herbert Hoover; the world is a poorer place without him.\"\n\nSo the city editor imagined fiction to be my destiny; if he had read Philip Roth's landmark _Commentary_ essay in 1961, \"Writing American Fiction,\" he'd have known that fact\u2014awful, sensational, numbing, intimidating fact, the fact of the Bomb, the fact of the Holocaust\u2014was where it was at. Who better than a city editor to recognize the limitless bazaar of the bizarre _mondo weirdo_ every morning? Roth wrote, famously: \"The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make _credible_ much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination.\" Maybe that was why this cub didn't have a novel to take up the slack of imminent unemployment.\n\nI wasn't sacked after all. Ben Bradlee saved my bacon, and made me the _Post_ 's book editor. I wrote hundreds of book reviews for _The Washington Post_ , five years of book reviews, three a week, many hundreds. Add two years of book reviews twice weekly for _Newsweek_. Let's not forget five years of book reviews, every two weeks, for _New Times_. (Notice how _new_ everything was?) A dozen or so for _The New Leader_. Book reviews for _The New Republic_. Have we hit a thousand yet? Oh, and _The New York Times Book Review_ , and at the end of this sequence _Esquire_ , who found my book reviewing\u2014how may I put this more delicately than _Esquire_ put it?\u2014old hat, stale. For fifteen years without a break (except to teach, except to write three novels, essays, a biography and an autobiography), I wrote about writing.\n\nI came to have opinions about writing, though casual opinion-mongering, standing hunched on stilts, is the curse of the critic and teacher, deepening his voice an octave, encouraging his vigorous nod of agreement with his own abruptly contrived axiom, lightning-bolt theorem. My overruling opinion was simple enough: I loved what I liked, and hated what I didn't, and what I liked took as many forms as what I didn't\u2014verse, short stories, novels, reporting, biography, autobiography, just about everything that came from the heart (as I understood the heart to have a location _close to the bone_ ), that came to the page felt. Yet eventually I realized I had not had much occasion to love my book reviews.\n\nI look back now at those desiccated, pulpy clips, a quarter century of them, and my heart leaps up and my heart falls. My God, I was always up to something; did I ever say no? Much of my longer, more arduous criticism was written in the early days for _The New Leader_. Calvin Trillin has boasted that his piecework fee from a similarly high-minded periodical was in the high two figures. _The New Leader_ paid me less than a low one-figure wage. And telephoned collect to copyedit the work, and copyedited it skillfully and respectfully, as though what I had written and they would publish was for the ages. It wasn't. For this book reviewer, judgment was everlastingly interim, occasional, hedged by duty. Still the eager-beaver student, I boned up on Haiti, the fall of the Third French Republic, the fall of Algeria (the _Britannica_ was my friend), Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Walter Scott, a world of plenty or a stewpot of trivia, depending on my vantage; my vantage shifted glacially from serenity ( _what a nice position I enjoy!_ ) to instability ( _what am I_ doing _here?_ ).\n\nNot long after I didn't have a novel\u2014not for what Philip Roth lamented but because I had nothing novelistic on my mind\u2014bingo I had one. Looking back twenty-some years at _Bad Debts_ , I think not of what that novel was but of what it wasn't: a book review. I recollect how pinched I felt by the chores that burden reviewers. I had the rudimentary sense to understand I was in print principally to listen, and translate. It is tautological to rehearse the review's iron imperatives: its obligation submissively to compress what is complex without dishonoring that book's integrity. Perimeter, the hedge, duty, equity, perspective... the high-mindedness (not to mention a limit of 800 words, plus or minus two) can be suffocating. To progress (as it seemed) from pint-sized to bottomless, from institutional accountability to unimpeded will\u2014that was the ticket! A novel was open-ended, obliged to no deadline, could be fresh, unfair, low-minded, new, mine alone. My early working title for _Bad Debts_ was \"Accounts Past Due,\" as though I owed it to an impatiently waiting world.\n\nRemember when Miss Bartlett told us in seventh grade each of our lives would make a great novel, and how next year's homeroom teacher advised us to write only from experience, and how the very next year we were instructed _Never, never, never begin a letter or an essay with the first person singular?_ Me, myself and I were tall in the saddle those late sixties; back then writers began many a sentence with \"I.\" In those days, believe me, Willy Loman wouldn't have waited for his widow to insist: _Attention must be paid!_ If you don't have a dog, Delmore Schwartz observed, bark for yourself. Mailer's _Advertisements for Myself_ was merely the leading-edge zephyr of serial hurricanes of self-inflation, good tempests, fine furies, mischief. The writers I most admired then were working way, way up the register and a full crank of the volume knob beyond the Eric Sevareidish sonorities, all hush and long view, which Tom Wolfe described in his preface to _The New Journalism_ as the voice of a \"radio announcer at a tennis match.\" The sixties made a high-voltage, high-pitched corking great ruckus\u2014confrontational, profane, immediate, assertive\u2014and hooray for it.\n\nWhat, after all, is the pleasurable purpose of this calling if it isn't music? What we agree to call voice? I read comic books for the noise that played in my inner ear, drowning the dead stillness of a rainy rural Connecticut afternoon, and by the time I got to Jim on his raft, Mr. Pickwick on his high horse, by the time I was learning poems and passages by heart, I was there to listen, to ride the riffs and changes, hear the solos. _Listen to me!_\n\nNot every voice a great soliloquy makes, a truth at odds with the education of many an American writer, with the education of _this_ American writer. At boarding school in England, writing about Cordelia in the moment when she recognizes how mistaken is her father's measurement of affection, I spent the greater part of my allotted space telling about a tangled misunderstanding between my dad and myself: \"So I understand just how Cordelia felt.\" Of course my teacher wrote \"Who cares?\" Of course he was right to write that: always to filter data through the mesh of personal relevance is to translate voice into a bully, licensing its tyrannical sway over listener and speaker alike. Sometimes it should be okay to take facts in, quietly manipulate them behind an opaque scrim and display them as though the arranger never arranged. It should be all right to mediate, let another voice speak through your spirit medium, pretend as a writer not to be front and center on stage.\n\nBut the music that drew me to the club was the virtuoso solo, the timed bomb of a joke, an unexpected change-up of delivery, the driving cadence of a long list of nouns, a juxtaposition of the decorous with the vulgar, Hamlet on how to deliver a speech, Hamlet on Yorick's skull, Bessie Smith singing \"Up on Black Mountain\" or Edward Hoagland's description of a leopard dropping from a tree on the dog hunting him, \"as heavy as a chunk of iron wrapped in a flag,\" good Anglo-Saxon music, tough, weighty, cargoed with consonants.\n\nAmericans, having been to so many odd schools to get our language, want to be heard. I want to. Why? Why write _Kilroy was here?_ Is the declaration selfish, designed to drown out rival claims? (Kilroy was here and you weren't.) Is it mistakenly self-important? (You'll surely wish to know Kilroy once stood where you now stand; please note the plaque.) Is it generous, an attempt to connect with who comes after? I don't know; I do know that I return compulsively to the first person singular, to read and to write.\n\nStanley Kunitz, wise man, has also written that \"you can say anything as long as it is true, but not everything that's true is worth saying.... You need not be a victim of your shame, but neither should you boast about it.\" Of course he's right, and sometimes I feel so powerfully the simple truth of this judgment that I shut up shop, or simply shut up, or throw my voice to a fictional character, or get an exit visa to another world, anyone's life but this one. I know that the self can be too easy a subject, that candor without the restraint of reticence is so much cheap talk. I know that it's as ugly a lie to be disarmingly hard on oneself as to be charmingly easy.\n\nBecause: who _does_ he think he is? Believe me, I hear the question; believe me, offering a private life to public view, I ask it of myself, and can't answer it otherwise than by blind faith in good faith. If cheap talk won't connect, careful candor might.\n\nBut why me, and why now? The practical consequences of this question are on everyday display in Morocco. In the marketplace of Marrakesh, the Place Jamma Al-F'na, are colorful entertainments: juggling, snake-charming, fire-eating. Scattered cross-legged on rugs among competing acts sits an honored cadre of storytellers, waiting to tell stories. If listeners gather\u2014and you will not find in the Place Jamma Al-F'na storytellers for whom listeners do _not_ gather\u2014the storyteller begins his tale. When he gets to a good place in the story, he stops. He passes a hat. If listeners like what they have heard, and want to hear more, they give. If coins are put in the hat\u2014a sufficiency of love, let's say\u2014the storyteller continues. If coins are not put in the hat, the storyteller returns to his tale's beginning, and tries again. It's a graphic situation\u2014no?\u2014literary criticism in action: coined hat or hat uncoined. And when he begins anew? What then? What if his listeners wander off? Well, then he tries another line of work, an easier racket, tooting at cobras, eating fire, shutting up.\n\n# The Great Santa\n\nWhat a moody cuss He was. Manic-depressive doesn't tell the half of it; recollect His haphazard nighttime unloading of His Christmas Eve cargo\u2014an Omega wristwatch in my stocking one year, a lump of coal the next. The Great Santa, like circumstance itself, blew hot and cold; He was all caprice, chance, crapshoot. Christmas charts the wobbly course of the American Family Wolff, going to and fro on the continent, up and down the greasy pole. When we had a chimney, He slid down it. When we had a roof, He might land on it. So here's how Christmas past was for us, and how it was was unforeseen.\n\nUpside: of No\u00ebl, Yuletide cheer, good will toward man, mistletoe, holly, the wreath, the candy cane, a sugar dust of snow, sleigh bells, Dancer and Prancer and Blixen, Tiny Tim, the roast turkey and cooked goose\u2014Speak, memory! Let me jiggle recall's little glass paperweight and watch the snowflakes spread, settling on an earmuffed cub with wool mittens clipped to his snowsuit; he's dragging a sled. A blue spruce is tied to the sled, and a collie pup, Shep, racing circles around the boy and the boy's freight, buries his muzzle in the powdery flakes. Mom and Dad are giggling, tossing loosely packed, talcumy snowballs at each other. In yonder red barn-boarded farmhouse (with all modern appliances, copper pipes and wired to code), carolers are rehearsing. Mom and Dad and Shep and little Jeffie pause to cock an ear to \"Hark, the Herald Angels Sing\" and \"Good King Wenceslas.\" Dad\u2014not one teensy bit tipsy\u2014pours hot buttered rum from a battered stainless thermos; the good cheer steams atmospherically from a mug.\n\n\"Merry Christmas, dear,\" he says.\n\n\"And Merry Christmas to you, honey,\" says Mom, her eyes misting from a near-excess of warm feeling.\n\nAnd they, in unison, \"Merry Christmas, Jeff.\"\n\nShep, wagging his tail, barks.\n\nUtterly allegorical, right off memory's Hallmark card. Let me deal from a straight deck. My mother was a lapsed Irish Catholic, my father an unacknowledging Jew, the son of an atheist. My mother was as pretty as a picture, with dreamy blue eyes and an appetite for adventure. My father was bright, quick, musical, charming, a wonderful storyteller. He was also a bullshit artist who doctored his bloodline and fabricated his _curriculum vitae_ , becoming the man he felt he should have been rather than the man his history had made. I heard it said of him (at an age when I thought the reference was to pets) that he could weave a pussy out of steel wool. His chosen field of work was aircraft engineering, and he was good at it, bogus academic degrees notwithstanding. Such a family as mine is not designed for constancy, but my single persistent expectation growing up was that Christmas would, by Jesus, be celebrated. My father, who bought on credit, liked to treat himself well, but he relished giving even more than getting.\n\n1941: Farmington, Connecticut\u2014Early December at the Elm Tree Inn. For gift-oriented celebrants of the Christ's birthday these weeks pre-Christmas are more memorable than those post-. So it is that I recall December 7 so clearly. Father is in England, selling P-51s, Mustangs, to the British, Lend-Lease. Mother and I have been batting aimlessly around the country in a new Packard convertible, and this morning she is in the bathtub and I am listening to the radio. I give her the news through the bathroom door that the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor. I am four; she doesn't believe me, but in the excitement of the moment forgets to remove from the bathtub the gift she has been test-driving under the suds, a windup submarine bought at the toy store F. A. O. Schwarz, which is, like the rest of America, on a war footing. I remember this because of the sub, a well-made and satisfying contraption, my first memory provoked by pleasure rather than by having a heavy Packard door shut on my thumb.\n\n *\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\n1944: Birmingham, Alabama\u2014In an oversized, columned and ersatz antebellum house across the golf course from the Mountain Brook Country Club, I'm hanging around the edges of a Christmas Eve party of airplane designers, draftsmen, test pilots, model-makers, gunsmiths, expediters, grease monkeys\u2014can-do men and women, performers. This is a company party; my dad is chief engineer of an airplane modification enterprise that installs refined bombsights, ordnance, armor, navigational equipment. The improved B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators and (later) B-29 Super Fortresses will be returned by ferry pilots to India or Guam or England, wherever the action's hot. In war, time is life, and the pressure on these improvers to perform is measurable even to a youngling; there's nervous static in this room. The crowd's impatient, noisy and raffish, and my father's in their midst making them laugh. He's telling stories I don't understand; I've just turned seven. I'm especially attracted to this one of our many houseguests. He's a carrier-based dive-bombing pilot who was shot down over Rabal and escaped the evil, dread Nips by wooden raft. Now he's a ferry pilot, delivering bombers from Birmingham to the Pacific Theater. He's got up as Santa Claus, the skinny devil. \"Ho, ho, ho, my young flyboy. And what would you like to find under the tree tomorrow morning?\" I think I still believe in the second-story man and chimney sweep, but I know who this is under the beard, wearing dark glasses, drinking Fish House Punch through a bent glass straw. The pilot's face, awfully burned, has been poorly repaired; that face is the first strangeness I have come to take for granted. His face isn't what interests me. What interests me is his railroad empire of HO-gauge model trains he has set up in our basement. What a dream of a world he has contrived: Alpine villages with sheep and goats and cows by the tracks; tunnels, city terminals, fantastic loopy crossovers so intricately knotted that I can't credit the hairbreadth escape of the tightly timed trains vying for right-of-way. Oh, the locomotives whistle, blow steam. So what do I hope to find under the tree tomorrow? Puh-leeze. I remember that night, after the party, spying atavistically from the landing. (\"I Saw Mommy Kissing Santy Claus\"? Not yet, not this Christmas. My mother tonight looks swell in an Auxiliary Red Cross uniform, nipped at the waist, a dove-gray worsted flattering to her curly blond hair.) I witness the tinkerers and wizards of electronics and hydraulics defeated by _my_ little Lionel and its single, symmetrical oval, until they aren't, until they puzzle it out. I remember too the next morning when some hungover bravos of last night's revels, horsing around with my own toy train, pour too many watts into its transformer, till it derails. But what I value of this memory is not the electric train but an atmosphere of competence in the house where I live. This is not an illusion. Surrounding me everyone is busy, working and having fun. It is comforting to have people milling around with matters of more moment than Christmas and me on their minds. I am not starved for attention or affection. I am already overfed on attention, fat on affection.\n\n1945: New York City\u2014 _Pacem in terris_ , alas for the Wolffs. Dad's been sacked. Now I've got a baby brother, cute as a pin, but his diapers are washed in the toilet we share with a Dane (who fills the icebox with his stash, a block of dope as big as his head\u2014personal use only), and with a turbaned Sikh jazz freak, and with the Dane's wife, who's Everyman's friend (but not Everywoman's, not my mom's\u2014the diapers, I guess); she's a la-di-da childhood pal of my dad's and now an editor of the _Daily Worker_. The tenement m\u00e9nage is a walk-up two-bedroom railroad flat on East Fifty-seventh, under the rumbling shadow of the Third Avenue El. Theatrically squalid, a crib\u2014a damned manger, for Christ's sake. Dad looks for work, sort of, and drinks Black Horse Ale, paid for by the trust-fund Communist. Christmas Eve they listen to 78s of Fats Navarro and Bird and Pres. \"Silent Night\" my ass! There's a squabble among the communards, sparked by obscure tinder, division of labor. As I now understand, the to-eaches (from the trust fund) got out of synch with the from-eaches (to the Wolffs). The dispute's fueled by my father's prudish maledictions against reefer (which the flat-sharers call Mary Jane). Could Dad have already caught on to the concept of ambient smoke? Whatever, the fight spills over; I get my first whipping ever for eavesdropping through the door. What door? I don't know yet but I'll know soon how to listen for the special music of my father's voice when spirits take him, when good cheer glooms him, when the o'erbrimming wassail cup drowns his sweetness. It's a trombonish sound, whiny but deep, long-playing, as welcome as an announcement from Herod that he's been thinking about babies.\n\n  (I got Lincoln Logs)\n\n[No Frosties]\n\n1946: Saybrook, Connecticut\u2014Ground-zero bottomed-out misery. My father, hero of the Super Fortress soup-up center, is engaged in the manufacture of a fishing device he has co-invented and co-patented with another childhood friend, a would-be capitalist. The thingamajig is a red flag at the end of a steel spring mounted on a balsa square which floats on the surface of the water. From this bobbing platform depend fishing line, sinker, bait, hook. When the fish bites (which it doesn't), the flag unsprings (which it doesn't). A modification calls for the end of the flag rod to ring a bell, but this makes the gizmo top-heavy, and it capsizes. As I discover when the ice melts a little on the Connecticut River, where I am the invention's test pilot. We live in two tiny rooms of a boardinghouse, a bona fide fleabag with genuine fleas. Our fellow tenants are old geezers limping down the home stretch; they walk their towel racks down the narrow, dark hallways, whispering our name: \"Have the Wolffs paid their rent yet? I bet the Wolffs haven't paid their re-yent yet. Throw the bums out in the snow, they haven't paid their ray-yent. Why should we have to pay our rent when the Wolffs haven't paid their rahyay-ent yet? They never pay their rent, the Wolffs...\"\n\n[No Santas]\n\n[No Frosties]\n\n1947: Old Lyme, Connecticut\u2014Dad got a job, \"bought\" a farmhouse (with the co-signature on the mortgage deed of another childhood well-to-do but ne'er-did-well). No\u00ebl will ne'er seem prettier. Here's the iconographic Yuletide scene, the Holy Birthday avatar. Here's the collie Shep, the snow, the wool mackinaw, the earmuffs, the pretty country lane. Here's the sled. Here's the sun low in the morning's cobalt sky after a sixteen-inch fall of fresh powder. Here I'm belly-down on the new Flexible Flyer at the top of Gin Mill Lane, about to shove off. Here Dad says don't do this, don't go there, don't especially put your tongue against that metal tie-rod. The metal tie-rod tastes okay at first, till I pull my tongue away. The blood tastes salty. It looks pretty, those little rubies set against white. Oh my, another screwed-up Christmas morning, a Wolff Xmas orthodoxy. The night before had started out okay, till Dad fell into the tree, after the chimney fire burned out, after eating the well-done meat. Doesn't everyone cook steak in the fireplace? Over logs? Soaked in gasoline?\n\n1948: Old Lyme, Connecticut\u2014Singing \"O Come, All Ye Faithful\" in Miss Champion's fifth-grade homeroom, standing behind M\u2014\u2014t D\u2014n, kissing like a sneak thief her copper hair, growing a micro-boner in my cuffed blue jeans\u2014will I burn in hell, oh ye faithful? \"Angels We Have Heard on High.\" I'll say. I buy her older brother a Gilbert chemistry set. I've never exchanged a word with him, but I spend my Christmas allowance on a Gilbert chemistry set. I deliver it to him in sixth grade, tell him to tell her to love me. Okay, okay, what would you have done?\n\nDad consoles me in the bar of New London's Mohegan Hotel, where we celebrate having bought the best tree ever. He's up, high. Every year, every tree, best tree ever. Sweet calculus, who can fault it? The bartender misspeaks, calls Dad \"baldy\" or \"buddy\" or \"pal\" or \"Duke,\" which is his name. It doesn't matter what the bartender calls him or says. At a certain point that I can now recognize, the score calls for the trombone. His voice slides down the scale, and we leave the bar\u2014or, rather, we are asked to leave. Someone\u2014bartender or Daddy\u2014says, \"I don't have to listen to that shit on Christmas Eve.\" Such words are being spoken in bars up and down the Christian world on this holy night. \"Fuck you, buddy, and the horse you rode in on.\" Driving home in the '37 Ford station wagon, the old man shows me how to steer out of a skid, almost. Our hides are okay, and we wait in the cold front seat, in the shallow ditch, for the tow truck called by the merry Christmasers whose ditch it is, who have managed so to incense my father (with their \"patronizing\" invitation to have a seat and wait in their warm living room till the truck comes) that he \"fuck-you\"s them... While my dad has a free moment with me, he shares some observations he's recently made. He stares at me as though he's never noticed me before, and I think then maybe he hasn't. I don't feel it coming, this time. From tonight on I'll never not feel it coming, when I hear the trombone tuning. \"Well, you're really something, aren't you? You're quite a number, don't you know? You never weary of kicking me in the ass, do you? You're bleeding me white. You're really something, aren't you?\" _(Repeat chorus.)_\n\nBut: next morning there are sacksful of stuff. Stuffed stocking hanging from the mantel, stuffed clumsily wrapped boxes, heavy with promise, an Erector set, a Gilbert \"Atomic\" chemistry set in a metal traveling case, stuffed turkey with walnut stuffing. Also: apologies, let me make it up to you, how would you like a Raleigh bicycle, a Remington single-shot .22? I say I'd like them fine.\n\n_Christmas was my father's specialty season: it sanctioned impulse buying, excess, radical behavior, time-out from work, lies. At Christmas I had my first inkling how dearly my father loved to lie. \"Oh, we're so broke!\" (This was true.) \"Oh, please understand, there can't be any presents this year.\" Sure. The only doubt was, where had he hid them? Christmas called for deceit right down the line: bogus information on the charge-account application, a sham pre-inventory of the cornucopia that awaited discovery under the tree, a misleading presentation of the booty (camera wrapped in a box suited for a basketball). And, of course, the gifts were hidden. My mother always hid them on the top shelf of her closet, in hatboxes. My father went to extreme ends to protect his secrets: a drug mule couldn't take greater pains. I never found what he had stashed. Forget the attic, the mud-floored cellar. In Old Lyme I fished in an abandoned well, looking for the loot. I levered a manhole cover off our cesspool. Wherever the goods were, I wasn't_.\n\n1949: Sarasota, Florida\u2014Father is in Istanbul, on the lam from the creditors who paid for our redone farmhouse, his sports car, my Christmas presents. He has been working the Bazaar; he entrusts a flow of exotic oddities to my mother's safekeeping. My mother, brother and I\u2014also in flight from those creditors\u2014live in a moist, beaverboarded cabin on Siesta Key. The floorboard splinters can penetrate thick-soled black Keds. The tap water stinks of sulphur. There's a storeroom back of the hovel, and this is where the stuff from Turkey is stored. What will fit in hatboxes is in hatboxes, of course. The ceremonial Turkish sword is under a blanket. Or its hilt is. About a foot of blade is in plain sight. This is careless hiding; like a clock striking thirteen, such desultory deception upsets my sense of the order of things and makes me a little crazy. My pathology expresses itself in unintended parody of my old man's overextended conduct. I stockpile my allowance, steal change and small bills from my mom's purse. I study the Sears catalogue, accumulate Christmas presents for my mother. These are of such a stunning inappropriateness\u2014a sun hat, costume jewelry, a heavy wool blanket, a cheapjack redwood chest in which to hide the tawdry crap\u2014that even then I must have known this venture was bent. In downtown Sarasota\u2014where I cruise for goods to half-hide from my mother, merchandise to surprise her with, stun her, overwhelm her\u2014the sun blazes unwholesomely. Forget snow, we're greased with Coppertone. Tin stars and rubber angels droop forlornly from the overhead phone lines and I hum along to \"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer\" and \"Frosty the Snowman.\" (Has \"Jingle Bell Rock\" been composed yet? If so, it too.) For Mom, I steal a Christmas card, another icon, a fuzzy simulacrum of our Old Lyme _tableau vivant_ (snow, pup, tyke, sled, perfect little tree). It is ornate, and stinks of lavender cologne. \"Too much of a muchness,\" in the oft-repeated formulation of my stepmother, who will replace my mother next year. My rich stepmother, by Santa! My at-first-generous stepmother. My elderly stepmother. My under-certain-misapprehensions-about-my-father's-history-and-prospects stepmother.\n\n1952: Boston\u2014Holy smoke, a suite at the Ritz-Carlton. I've got a privileged, unimpeded view of Boston Public Garden. We dine in the second-floor dining room. A dinner-jacketed and ball-gowned double quartet carols us with \"God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen\" and \"Away in a Manger.\" Master Wolff wears rather a handsome wool suit. It's a well-made garment, the wool neither too charcoalish nor too pale, the tailoring unobtrusively unpinched at the waist, the trousers unpleated (but cuffed, of course), the ensemble unwaistcoated. It shows off to advantage my necktie, deep purple with the gold arms of The Choate School, _quai sivi bona tibi_ , we seeke to do thee goode, which I have already learned to translate \"we seek to do thee: good.\" Oh-oh. My father and stepmother have selected my new wool suit on Newbury Street from Brooks Brothers, where a Chesterfield coat has been exhibited in a display window, with snowflakes applied to its rich wool shoulders and rich velvet collar. \"It looks like dandruff,\" I'd said. Oh heavens, this kind of thing is about to become a problem. Just what Christmas needs, another wisenheimer.\n\nI fly to Sarasota to visit my mother. She works in a Dairy Queen. The night after Christmas her middle-aged boyfriend tries to break down the tiny basement apartment's only door, to get at her. We sit in silence, pretending not to be there. My mother gives me an ivory plastic table radio with a dial lit as mystery green as the middle depths of a tropical sea. Getting into my father's new Jaguar at Boston airport, I drop this, and it breaks. My father promises to replace it with a better radio. This, for a wonder, does not console me.\n\n1954: The Choate School; Wallingford, Connecticut\u2014The evening before vacation begins, in the Hill House dining hall, the Reverend Seymour St. John intones grace most gracefully, with an air of assurance that what we are about to eat is not one calorie less than we deserve; we tuck into roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, fruitcake and plum pudding afterward. Then we go to chapel. I sing baritone in the choir, and put my whole heart into Handel's \"Hallelujah\" Chorus. After Christmas, back in my room, packing for the three-week jamboree ahead, I essay to entertain my roommate. Now, at last, I wasn't born yesterday, I'm wise to the hustle. I monologue him with a routine I've practiced on myself, my best audience: \"Face it, we're talking about a plug-ugly baby, aren't we? Can we agree on this much? Tinted, rouged, lipsticked, as pink as a boiled ham, pudgy little tits. Jesus! Even the masters\u2014I don't know, Bellini, Tintoretto, Rubens, all those\u2014couldn't make that boy cute. _Putti_ , no? Doesn't even have a baby face! Frowning like a wrinkled old codger. And why should His Little Self be merry? How about those gifts? _Caramba, Kings, just what I've always wanted. Frankincense! Myrrh!_ I mean, do you know what myrrh is? It's a spiny shrub, I looked it up. Merry Christmas! And how about those carols, blaring from loudspeakers and rasping tinnily from the vents of elevators, as welcome as 'Happy Birthday' at the next table in an expensive restaurant. And tinsel strung from phone poles, and the Salvation Army putting the arm on you, and Santa Claus darting into an alley to take a hit off a pint bottle in a paper bag before he robs the bank of its Christmas Club deposits. No wonder it's the suicide season.\"\n\nMy roommate says: \"Huh?\"\n\nI confuse him, confound myself, because I'm as soft as a baby too. What I'm soft for is a soft, satiny back beneath my sweaty hand at a fancy-dress ball. A soft breast against my fluttery heart. Soft snow falling past the softly lit streetlamps of Park Avenue, looking from uptown down, to Grand Central. A Checker cab sliding softly past the Central Park South entrance to the Plaza, where I'm about to fox-trot to waltz time (because my stepmother came along too late to have me educated at dancing school, but just in time to lever me onto The List). I'm on The List! I get invited to the Hols, Cols, Gets & Mets (Holiday Ball, Collegiate Dance, Get Togethers, Metropolitan Ball). I've managed, against all odds, to become a junior popinjay, parlor snake, tailor's dummy. I'm training my pipes to drawl Long Island lockjaw. I meet the girl whom I escort Under the Clock at the Biltmore, where we show off our glad rags. I leave after the dance with another, and take her to Jimmy Ryan's, where Wilbur and Sidney DeParis and their Dixieland Ramblers play \"O Tannenbaum,\" Oh, Christmas Tree. I weep like a baby at the beauty of it all, the satin dresses, satin notched collar on my dinner jacket, satin breasts. At the fresh green Christmas-tree smell. I weep from nostalgia even before feeling the feeling that provokes nostalgia. The onset of nostalgia is a dire symptom: I'm now less a creature acted upon than an actor. With the onset of nostalgia I begin to accumulate a history, can contrast time was to time is. I'm responsible; gifts come not from Santa's little helpers but from my own workshop. I'm an existentialist. Time flies: I'm growing old before I grow up. Boo hoo.\n\nNo Santas (He was off the case now. The only gift on my wish list was getting laid for free. Santa didn't read obscene mail.)\n\nFrosties galore\n\n* Note to the reader: I assay my experience of the Holy Birthday according to the convention established by Michelin in its judgment of eating and sightseeing and resting facilities. The quality and quantity of gifts received (by me) is bestowed one to four Santas. What I call quality of life (was an edible holiday feast served in a timely manner? did we live in a house with a fireplace? with a separate bedroom for me? was snow on the ground? was the snow clean? was Daddy shitfaced?), I rate with Frosty the Snowman (or men), one to four.\n\n# Heavy Lifting\n\nOn the hot, fragrant afternoon of my graduation from college it seemed that good fortune was not merely latent but unavoidable, folded and in the bag. I'd worked like a drudge those past years, and my labors had been rewarded and then some with fancy Latin on my Princeton diploma, _summa_ it said and summit I believed. Not one but two ex-girlfriends had come to the ceremony in front of lovely tree-shaded Nassau Hall, and so resolutely happy was I that it didn't even stain my pride to sweat through my shirt and gray worsted suit, to be capped like a monkey in tasseled mortarboard.\n\nEach of my exes had brought me the same gift, a suitcase. It almost occurred to me that unarticulated longings were expressed by these mementos, and coming to them for visits wouldn't have answered their prayers. Sending me off solo on a long voyage would have been in the ballpark, _adi\u00f3s_ was more like it.\n\nAnd that too was as I wished it! All was A-OK, on the come and coming! Admitted, I had no money, but a job was waiting nigh September, far, far away, teaching in Turkey, which was even farther from my father in California than I was now in the Garden State, and the farther the better. The last time I had intersected with him, two years before, he had swept through Princeton in a car sought for repossession, charging clothes and books and jazz records to my accounts. My stepmother, having just left him again and for good, gave me unwelcome word of him a year later; he was in Redondo Beach, in trouble.\n\nFor me, that June, what was trouble? A college friend with a different kind of daddy, the kind who owned a fifty-foot paid-for ketch, had invited me to spend the summer with him on that boat in New England, sailing that _Sea Witch_ from snug harbor to snug harbor, cleaning and polishing and varnishing, making the boat ready for his parents' pleasure if they wanted to come aboard.\n\nNow, a few days after graduation, we were embarked. My suitcases and diploma were stored ashore with my passport and vaccination certificates and Greek tragedies in translation. We tugged at anchor off Cuttyhunk, drinking a rum drink to celebrate our third day at sea. There were four of us, two happy couples laughing and watching sun fall, when my father got through on the radiotelephone. Writing about that conversation half a century later I feel foggy dread, as though I've sailed on a cloudless day through deep clear water bang onto a reef. It's the nature of a radiotelephone conversation that everyone aboard can hear it, not to mention anyone else aboard any vessel within miles who wants to listen in.\n\nMy father stuttered furiously. He did everything flamboyantly, elaborately, but his stuttering was grandiose. Moreover, he couldn't get the hang of the turn-and-turnabout of a radio conversation, in which one either speaks or listens. Listening was not my dad's thing, so I heard myself shouting at him, and worse I heard myself stammering back, so that it must have seemed I was mocking the poor man, when in fact I was falling into the speech defect I had inherited from him\u2014nature or nurture, who cares?\n\nWhile my friends, helplessly obliged to eavesdrop, pretended to have a conversation in the cockpit, I was below, where it was dark and close. I stretched the mike on its snaky cord as far from my friends as possible, but the loudspeaker stayed put, broadcasting his invitation:\n\nMy father wanted me to come to him for the summer, in La Jolla.\n\nI said I wouldn't.\n\nMy father said he missed me.\n\nI said nothing.\n\nMy father tried to tell me he had a j-j-j-job.\n\nI said, really, how nice. (I thought, how novel, what a piquant notion, my dad working for a living.)\n\nMy father said congratulations on the degree.\n\nI wondered how he'd guessed I had one.\n\nHe said congratulations on the job in Turkey; did I remember he'd lived there once upon a time?\n\nI said I remembered.\n\nHe asked did I have a \"popsie\" aboard with me?\n\nI reddened; it was quiet in the cockpit; I said I had to get off now, this was too complicated.\n\nHe said my brother was coming to La Jolla to visit from Washington state. Learned boy that I was, I didn't believe my father. I hadn't seen Toby for seven years.\n\nMy father said it again; Toby was right now on the road from Concrete, Washington, arriving in a couple of days.\n\nI listened to static while gentle waves slapped the _Sea Witch_.\n\nHe said he'd send airfare.\n\nI said sure. I thought fat chance.\n\nI borrowed ticket money from the yachtsman dad and hopped a Trailway in New York. This would be the place to detail the squalor of a cross-country summer bus journey from the noxious flats of Jersey to the uncompromising wasteland of Death Valley\u2014you know the drill, you've ridden a bus. Assume I was sad, hungry and as funky as everyone else aboard our land-yacht. I kept busy asking myself: _How had this happened to me? Why was I here?_\n\nYou might think\u2014noticing the books I was conspicuously reading and annotating, and I'm afraid you were meant to notice them and me\u2014that the question _Why was I here?_ was a Big Question and that I was questing for a vision from Sophocles, Erich Auerbach, Sartre, George Steiner. Boy oh boy, you think you know your aliens! I felt so apart from my fellow-passengers that I believed I needed a visa to visit Earth. But at some point west of Gila Bend and east of El Centro, with the air-conditioning on the blink again, I commenced to reflect on the situation of La Jolla\u2014seaside, wasn't it? Even a martyr had to take time off for a swim.\n\nHedonism, taking care of fun before taking care of business, was a legacy from my father. For this he had been thrown out of one boarding school after another. For buying what he could not afford\u2014sports cars and sports coats, Patek Philippe wristwatches, dinners at Mike Romanoff's and 21, Leicas and Bolexes and Minoxes, Holland & Holland shotguns\u2014he'd been fired from jobs. These jobs as an airplane designer he had conned his way into with faked-up r\u00e9sum\u00e9s. Getting fired would put him in a bad mood, so he'd buy more stuff; buying stuff intoxicated him, and so did booze. Drunk, he'd turn on his first wife, my mother and Toby's. After fourteen years of this, she told Dad to get lost, and I moved in with him. When I was seventeen, his second wife\u2014her fortune and good mood seriously depressed by my old man\u2014took the first of several hikes on him, and then he took one on me. In the Wolff nuclear family, fission was all the rage.\n\nDad met me at the same bus station where he'd met Toby more than a week earlier. Visiting San Diego years later I was hard-pressed to find any site downtown as melodramatically seedy as my memory of that place, a set dressed with tattoo parlors, bucket-of-blood bars, pawnshops and, under the hard light of noon, my dad looking bewildered and lost. I had for many childhood years loved him recklessly. Spare any father such impulsive love as I showered on that man. Later, disabused, when I imagined that I understood Duke Wolff for what he really was\u2014a deadbeat bullshit artist with a veneer of charm rubbed right through from negligent overexercise\u2014I hated him, and like the love before it, that hate too was indulgent, exorbitant.\n\nThis June afternoon outside the bus depot, examining my father blinking behind the thick lenses of owlish Goldwater eyeglasses, I was too wary to indulge contempt. The spectacles, out of register with Duke's formerly stylish presentations, were the least of it. Even at his lowest he'd drawn on extravagant temperamental resources: spritz and nonchalance. Now he seemed timid, dulled. What I saw lumbering toward me was a polyester jacket. This wasn't what I'd have expected: seersucker, maybe, or the soiled white linen suit that Sydney Greenstreet might sport\u2014tits-up in the tropics and all that\u2014but not this rag that needed a cleaning the day it was sold, tarted up with brass crested buttons. Halting toward me was a zombie. Dad Wolff looked as though he'd been shot smack in the heart with about 500cc of Thorazine. Talk about taking the edge off! He looked like they'd sawed through his brain.\n\nMy brother Toby, fifteen, was with him, hanging back gingerly, vigilant. I felt like someone to whom something bad would soon happen; Toby looked like someone to whom it had already happened. This was the more alarming because he looked so wakeful and sharp. He had a strong, bony face, with steady eyes and a jutting chin. He didn't appear vulnerable; he gave an impression of competence, but after all, he was a kid.\n\nThough I hadn't seen Toby during the past seven years, we'd recently been in touch by telephone and letter, and I knew that he'd had a hard time of it with his awful stepfather. Coming across the country to see my only sibling, I'd phoned from a roadside diner to tell Duke which bus to meet and I'd reached Toby. He didn't know where our father had disappeared to. No sooner had Toby arrived than Dad had taken off with a woman friend in a fancy Italian car. He had left his teenaged son with some canned goods and a vague assurance that he'd return to La Jolla in a few days.\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\nBehind the wheel of a rented Pontiac, driving to La Jolla, Duke was stiff and tentative. This was unlike him. I remembered him as a bold driver, fast and cocksure, every little journey to the grocery store a double-clutching adventure with squealing tires. Now Dad held to the slow lane, glancing anxiously in the rearview. His face had once been imposing, Mussolini-monumental; now his nose was bulbous, stippled with burst blood vessels. The few times he spoke, I saw that his false teeth, what he used to call China clippers, were loose against his gums. I had questions: Where had he gone, leaving Toby alone? How could he take time off from his job? Asking this question I gave the impression that I didn't believe he had a job. How soon could he give me cash (I came down hard on _cash_ , to distinguish it from a check, or an I.O.U.) to repay my yachtsman classmate's yachtsman daddy? These questions immediately returned us to our fundamental relationship: I was the hectoring (and mind-dullingly dull) parent; Duke was the irresponsible (and charmingly fun-loving) kid. The exchange didn't leave much for Toby to do, except sit in the back seat and study his fingers.\n\nDuke was miserly with basic information\u2014what exactly he did for a living, where he had gone \"in the desert\" (as he put it) or why. But as we approached La Jolla he became effusive about his \"lady friend.\" This conversation had the effect of making Toby visibly uncomfortable, inasmuch as it had been my father's stated ambition, made explicitly to Toby, to re-up with our mom if everything this summer went swimmingly, as of course it must. This nutty scheme had a certain appeal to my mother, who had a lifelong weakness for nutty schemes. Her marriage to her second husband, like her marriage to Duke before that, was a disaster, and Duke after all did live in Southern California, and my mom, freezing up near the Canadian border, had always had, as she put it, \"sand between my toes.\" But even for this quixotic woman it was on hold as far as a re-enrollment in Dad's program was concerned, waiting to get a report card from Toby on Duke's attendance and comportment.\n\nWhen we rolled up in front of a tiny bungalow, my befuddlement increased. The woman who greeted us, as warily as Toby and I greeted her, was nothing like my father's type. He was drawn to palefaces, to blue eyes, to understated clothes. This woman was sunburnt brown, her leathery skin set off with much jangly jewelry. She wore, for God's sake, cowgirl boots ornamented with horsehair.\n\nWe stood beside the car shaking her hands and listening to her turquoise bracelets ring like chimes; we admired her cactus garden; she got to listen to my father\u2014and not, I suspected, for the first time\u2014inflate my achievements at college and Toby's in high school; she didn't invite Toby or me inside. She didn't invite Dad inside either, but it was clear that inside was where he was going, and without his only children. He gave us rudimentary instructions to \"my flat near the beach.\" Toby, as eager as I to escape, assured me he knew the way. Duke said he'd be along soon, he'd bring home a nice supper. I asked how he'd get home from there, and he waved vaguely, mumbled \"taxi.\" His lady friend seemed as unhappy as a person can be without flooding the earth with tears. Duke, by contrast, had abruptly come awake to joy; he was peppy, full of beans.\n\n\"Don't you two rascals go getting in t-t-t-trouble,\" he warned. \"And if the landlord badgers you about the rent, tell him to go f-f-f-f...\"\n\n\"Go f-f-fish,\" I s-s-s-said.\n\nDriving south through the attractive neighborhoods to our little second-floor studio apartment on Playa del Sur, fifty yards from the beach, I was preoccupied with Toby, glad for the chance to be alone with him. He too relaxed, lit a Lucky Strike expertly with his lighter, inhaled intemperately, remarked that it had been an oddball visit so far. I asked him to steer while I lit a Camel expertly with my lighter, inhaled intemperately, and warned him that smoking was bad for his wind, especially if he planned to make a name for himself playing football at the Hill School back in Pennsylvania, where he was beginning on full scholarship in September.\n\nMy avuncular manner surprised me. I prided myself on being a laissez-faire kind of guy, I'll look out for me, you look out for you. Maybe I was practicing to become a teacher. Maybe I was out of my depth.\n\nI unpacked my worldly goods\u2014mostly books, a few jazz LPs (Bessie Smith, Bud Powell, the Miles Davis quintet with Coltrane) I carried with me everywhere\u2014and Toby offered to show me the beach. This generosity was a family virtue\u2014sharing the good news, keeping alert to fun. By then it was late afternoon, and I worried that Dad might come home to an empty apartment, but Toby argued soberly that he didn't imagine Duke would be rushing home from his friend's house. I saw the wisdom in this hunch.\n\nAnd so, dressed in long trousers and boat shoes and a white Lacoste tennis shirt, I accompanied Toby across Vista del Mar and Neptune Place to the Pump House, and down concrete steps to the beach. The first things I noticed were not the bitchin sets of waves breaking way offshore, nor the surfers paddling way out there waiting to ride, nor the surfers with lots of white hair waxing their boards near the water's edge. I noticed, of course, the babes, and so did Toby.\n\n\"Hubba hubba,\" he said with reassuring irony, a family vice.\n\nSo we sat for a long time on a couple of hand towels, talking about the future, with our eyes cocked on the very here and now, avoiding the subject of our father. Toby was witty, resourceful, a hit parade of corny songs, which he was willing to sing out loud: \"On the Wings of a Dove\" and \"Calendar Girl.\" He could do Chuck Berry's \"Sweet Little Sixteen\" and Hank Williams\u2014\"Hey, hey good lookin', whatcha got cookin', howsabout cookin' something up with me?\" He could do a Jimmie Rodgers yodel in caricature of a locomotive whistle, and he knew the gospel classics, \"The Old Rugged Cross.\" He did tenor lead, I did baritone. The dynamite chicks stared frankly at us and our noise, with what I misimagined that afternoon was interest.\n\nIt didn't get dark till nine or so. We waited. The landlord came asking for rent. He was kind, patient, pretended to believe that we didn't know where our old man could be found. He said it had gone on too long now, that Duke was months behind, that he had no choice...\n\n\"Do what you have to do,\" I said, thinking about a sailboat waiting for me back East.\n\n\"Such a shame,\" he sighed, \"a man of his attainments, with his education!\"\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" I said.\n\nWhen the landlord left, Toby said, \"Tell me something. Did Dad really go to Yale?\"\n\n\"What do you think?\"\n\n\"So that would pretty much rule out his graduate degree from the Sorbonne?\"\n\nToby's always been a quick study.\n\nSometime after midnight we quit talking, stopped listening to my jazz records and Dad's Django Reinhardt and Joe Venuti. We'd eaten a couple of cans of Dinty Moore stew, knocked back some Canadian Club we'd found on a high shelf of the mostly bare cupboard. We'd each asked aloud where the other thought Duke might be. We'd wondered aloud whether we should look for him, but I was sure he was drunk, and he was a mean drunk, and I didn't want to find him. I didn't trust myself to keep my hands to myself while he sat on the edge of his bed in his boxers, snarling about how ungrateful I was, how grievously I had kicked him in the ass when he was down: _You're a real piece of work, aren't you?_ I'd heard it; I didn't think I could hear it again, especially if it came to be Toby's turn.\n\nA couple of hours before dawn his lady friend phoned. She was hysterical, said she didn't know what to do, he wouldn't leave, wouldn't move, wouldn't speak. He'd rock back and forth weeping.\n\n\"You've got to get him out of here. I can't take this. What if my husband comes snooping around?\"\n\nSo I phoned the police. By the time Toby and I got there, the police had called for an ambulance. Dad was breathing, but save for the technicality of being alive, he was gone from this world. His lady friend too said, as so many ex-bosses, ex-friends, ex-wives, creditors, teachers, doctors, parole officers before and after had said, _a man with his educational attainments, such a pity!_\n\nThey checked him into Scripps Memorial Hospital. The police had investigated his wallet and he had Blue Cross. Now _this_ was a shock, because he had Blue Cross owing to the fact that he also had a job! Just as he'd said. He worked for General Dynamics, Astronautics division. By sunup I knew this, and knew as well that he was catatonic, and roughly what catatonia was. He would be removed that afternoon to a \"more appropriate facility,\" and I could guess what that would be. As obdurately as my heart had hardened, I heard myself telling the doctor to tell Dad his sons were here for him, we were behind him all the way. Toby nodded.\n\n\"Well,\" the doctor said, \"he has said a few words. He keeps asking for a woman who lives in town. Could you help out with this, maybe let her know he wants to see her?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said.\n\nThat morning I worked out a deal with the landlord. On principle he wouldn't let us stay in the apartment on which so much rent was due, but he'd let me lease, in my name, an identical unit down the exterior hall, same monthly rent but this time he required an up-front security deposit, first and last month in cash or by cashier's check by the end of business tomorrow.\n\nI borrowed it from a classmate, the roommate of the son of the yachtsman dad from whom I'd borrowed my bus fare. My classmate friend cabled the money from New York that afternoon, and that night Toby and I moved our father's entirely unpaid-for worldly goods to our new residence.\n\nDrunk on resourcefulness, I bought a car and found a job the very next day. The car caught my eye on the lot of Balboa Auto Sales. I'm confident of the name of the dealer because I still have a copy of my stiff reply from Istanbul to a bill collector in San Diego (Hi there, Mr. Ben D. Warren!) begging for the final $150 of the $300 purchase price on a '52 Ford convertible, cream, with torn red vinyl upholstery and bald whitewall tires and an appetite for oil that gave my jaunty wreck a range of about three miles between lube-stops, which made the drive to Tijuana, a popular excursion in the coming weeks, a hardship that only the se\u00f1oritas of the rowdier cantinas could ameliorate. Ask Toby: he was in charge of oil changing.\n\nThe job was easier to cop than the automobile. I simply went to Dad's employer, on the theory that they needed to replace him, and offered my services. A few weeks earlier, getting my diploma, I'd suspected life was going to go smoothly for me, but this... _this_ was silky! To build rockets during the age of the putative missile gap the government had contracted with General Dynamics Astronautics to supply Atlas ICBMs at cost-plus. Now cost-plus, I don't have to remind you, is one sweet deal. The greater the cost, the greater the plus, so human resources basically threw money at me when I walked through its door with a bachelor's degree in English Literature. Every time I opened my mouth to mention courses I'd taken\u2014history, American civilization, Spanish\u2014they tossed in another jackpot, so that by day's end I was an engineering writer for more than eight hundred a month with an advance from the credit union and a complete understanding of how my father had found a job with these cheerful jokers.\n\nDad was embalmed in a private asylum down in Chula Vista, not much of a detour from my weekend line of march to Tijuana. Toby and I were permitted to visit only on Saturdays, which suited my schedule fine, and when we visited he behaved like his old self. He seemed oblivious to any inconvenience he might have caused his sons, made no mention of the carnage of Toby's first week in La Jolla. Quotidian challenges were beneath his notice: whether he'd lost his job (he had), by what transport we'd conveyed ourselves to our audience with him (he did fret about a car \"I had to desert in the desert,\" a play on words that amused him so exceedingly that he neglected the situation's starker implication, soon enough to weigh heavily on him). He was busy with workshop therapy, making a leather portfolio into which he burned my initials. This was a gift difficult to receive, and to recollect.\n\nNot least because it fell into a category of assets\u2014personalized keepsakes\u2014that opened a painful fissure between Toby and me. One thing, and it was a _thing_ , seemed uppermost on my father's mind when my brother and I visited his asylum in Chula Vista. This was a silver cigarette lighter inscribed to him in London during the Blitz by friends in the RAF when he was in England on behalf of North America to deliver P-51 Mustangs. He wanted that lighter; wow, did he _desire_ that silver lighter! He decided that we had lost it during our move from one apartment to another. Oh, was he disappointed! His new friends would like to see that inscribed silver lighter, and he'd like to show it to them. Why didn't we just run back to La Jolla and find it, \"chop-chop\"?\n\nIt's amazing what kids\u2014even kids as old as I was then, old enough to buy a car on the installment plan and to sign a lease\u2014will accept as the way of the world. I don't mean merely that kids are subject to arbitrary tyrannies, though they are; I mean that until I had sons I never really understood how emotionally derelict my father was. I judged the cost of his selfishness on an empirical scale, by the measurable havoc he inflicted on me. It wasn't till I had sons that I began to understand that such lunatic solipsism as Duke's shook the rudiments of his sons' worlds. How else explain us searching together the fifty-foot walkway connecting those two apartments, as well as the shrubs below that walkway, as well as our new apartment? What warped sense of duty provoked us to knock on the door of the new tenants' apartment during the dinner hour to persuade them that we needed to search every inch of their abode for a lost cigarette lighter? And failing to find it, to phone the car rental company, the very company that was seeking payment from our father, to ask if a silver cigarette lighter had been found in one of their Pontiacs?\n\nI think now, considering my own sons, beginning at last to fathom how difficult it is to be anyone's son, that our father drove us insane that summer.\n\nMy life with Toby seemed on the surface, subtracting weekend visits to the loony bin in Chula Vista and the brothels of Tijuana, workaday. After staring at my pencils and at my colleagues staring at their pencils for six of the eight hours I \"worked\" in a hangar, the Ford would stumble up the coast to La Jolla, trailing cloud-banks of exhaust, a whole weather system. I drove with the torn top up to shelter myself from the black fog that swirled around me when I was stopped in traffic.\n\nBut there I go, getting gothic on you. At day's end there was home, simple but clean. And the beach. Ah, Windansea! Remember my first visit there, my eyes as big as plates, those surfer chicks? Well, I hadn't completed my second walk from the Pump House south toward Big Rock Reef when a teen approached me.\n\n\"Hey!\" she said. Her toenails were painted vivid red. Her hair was... guess what color. She was... (Did you guess pretty?)\n\nI cradled my paperback. \"Hey, yourself,\" I came back.\n\n\"You from around here?\" she asked.\n\nI chuckled. \"No. No, not at all, just visiting on my way to Istanbul.\"\n\n\"Is that on the beach?\" (No, of course she didn't ask that. There's no call to get snotty here, just because I was about to have my heart broken.) \"Huh?\" ( _That's_ what she said.)\n\n\"You from around here?\" was my trenchant rejoinder.\n\nShe was, she said, she was. And her business with me was to invite me to a keg party that night down in Pacific Beach. She was glad I could make it. We'd have a lot of fun. Was I sure I had the address written down? She checked what I'd written on the title page of Camus' _The Stranger_.\n\n\"Thing is, me and my friends need some cash to front the keg.\"\n\nThing was, I didn't have any cash in my bathing suit. Could I bring it when I came? No? Okay, hang on, don't go anywhere, I'll just run home and get it, which I did. She was waiting by a VW van, pretty much holding her pretty hand out.\n\nI don't have to tell you how the party went. What party, eh? What Surf Boulevard in Pacific Beach?\n\nSeven years later, reading Tom Wolfe's title essay in _The Pump House Gang_ , I felt a full flush of shame rise from my toes. The keg scam was a chestnut among the surfers and surfer-babes at Windansea. But that was the least of my mortification there. Frank laughter was the worst of it. Back home at the Jersey shore or on the beach at Watch Hill, blinking contemplatively behind my groundbreaking round, silver-framed glasses (so far ahead of the curve that the nickname \"granny glasses\" hadn't yet been invented), in my navy polo shirt to hide my chubby tits, in my Brooks Brothers madras bathing costume, by George I was a stud muffin! Here, carrying a Great Book past those hep long-boarders wearing their Katin baggies, I was a freaking joke!\n\nSo where, during these humiliating hours after work, was Toby? Safe inside, at his books, writing essays I assigned him. It took him a while to forgive me for practicing my apprentice teaching skills on him. To prepare him for the exactions of a classical education at the Hill School, I obliged him to do a day's work while I did a day's work, to read a book a day and write an essay every week: \"Blindness and Insight in _King Lear_ and the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ \"; \"The Boundaries of Sea and River: Liberty and Bondage in _Moby Dick_ and _Huckleberry Finn_.\" I guess what I knew best came in pairs. It was crazy the hoops I made my beleaguered, injured, perplexed little brother jump through. He wrote them; he was a better reader and writer for them. But I was a tin-pot despot, as arbitrary in my edicts as Duke sending us on a treasure hunt for his fire-stick. No wonder Toby stole from his father and lied to me.\n\nDid you guess he'd had the sacred lighter all along? Used it to spark up that Lucky during our ride in the Pontiac from the leathery, jangly lady's bungalow to Dad's sea-near studio apartment.\n\nHe slept on a pullout sofa bed in our one-roomer, and mid-August, when the alarm clock woke me for work, I saw the stupid, pretty thing on the floor beneath his blue jeans. In the sullen light of dawn, I made out an inscription engraved on it. My father's initials in elegant Sans Serif. No RAF flyboys, of course, but another name for sure, a new engraving, commissioned up on Girard Avenue, _TOBY_. I remembered the hours we'd spent together hunting for that goddamned thing, Toby's helpful suggestions where next to search: the beach, Dad's suit pockets, maybe it had fallen out of Dad's trouser pocket into one of the shoes in his closet?\n\nThat morning was awful, and I want to pull a curtain across it. Duke was coming \"home\" from Chula Vista that afternoon; I was meant to pick him up after work. I didn't know what we'd all do, where we'd live, how we'd sit together in a room, how we'd look at one another, what in the world we were supposed to do now. What I knew for sure: Toby hated us both, his father and his brother. I knew why he hated the one, but not the other. Now I think I know all I'll ever know about that aspect of that summer, and all I want to say to Toby is, forgive me. Even though he has pardoned me, and himself, this last time, I'm sorry.\n\nI fetched Duke; he raged at Toby. My brother was sent home to my mother on a bus. As bad as it was between my father and me, after Toby left it got worse. My father wasn't allowed to drink\u2014all that medication\u2014but of course he drank. How many days did the nightmare last? Few, I think. He tried to talk me into staying with him instead of going to Turkey. I managed not to laugh in his face. My work at Astro was a mercy, got me out of the apartment and away from him. And I'd invited a visitor, the Princeton college friend who had loaned me a security deposit for the apartment. He was in the Navy, coming to San Diego to join his aircraft carrier. I'd paid him back; breaking a Wolff family tradition; I'd repaid all my debts to friends that summer.\n\nWhile I awaited this friend's arrival, Duke was arrested in San Diego. For a wonder, he wasn't drunk. He was buying breakfast food at a late-hours store and he'd made an illegal U-turn in my Ford. He'd stuttered when the policeman pulled him over. They took him downtown, came to believe he was not drunk. Before they let him go from the holding tank they \"checked with Sacramento.\" By the time I arrived in a taxi to bail him out, the police got back from Sacramento a complicated story. It went very hard on him, grand theft auto for the Abarth-Allemagne roadster abandoned in the desert, burned and sandblasted by a desert storm. My father asked me to go bail for him, but he wouldn't promise to show up in court, or even to stay in California. I didn't go bail; I went to Istanbul.\n\nThen was then. I try to explain to my wife, to my sons. They try to understand, and they've done a good job of it. The only way I know how to explain is on the page. It's a bitch getting the tone right. Now, writing this, I feel jumpy again after many years of feeling a warm embrace of resignation. That's okay. These shifts aren't spurious, I believe. Family stories are always fluid, and to be emotionally exact is to be inconsistent. Toby and I have talked a lot about this. We've talked a lot about a lot. We talk all the time, and as good as a friendship can get, that's how good I think ours is. When I told him I'd found the apartment where we spent the summer of '61, he seemed interested, sort of. When I told him I'd taken snapshots of the apartment, he didn't ask for copies.\n\nHe lifted a trinket that summer, my father lifted a car. Stealing: Jesus, Princeton had an honor code, it seemed like a really big deal, where would stealing lead? Where did it send my dad?\n\nThat Navy ensign from Princeton who loaned me money? The one coming to visit La Jolla just about the time my dad disappeared into the system and I fled to Asia Minor? He stole my dad's best shoes. He told me this in an expensive automobile driving to a fancy dinner party at a gentlemen's club on Society Hill in Philadelphia. We were purring along in his Mercedes, snug in our navy blue topcoats and leather gloves and cashmere scarves. It was snowing. I had mentioned a few hours earlier to my old chum that I'd been back in La Jolla after all these years, back to the apartment at Playa del Sur. He'd seemed uncomfortable to hear this, and I understood his discomfort to stem from the disgrace visited on my family name that summer.\n\n\"I've been in that apartment,\" my friend said.\n\n\"I don't think so,\" I said. \"You were supposed to visit me there, but then Dad went to jail and I went to...\"\n\n\"... to Istanbul,\" my amigo finished. \"No, I've been there.\"\n\n\"I don't believe...\"\n\n\"Hush,\" he said. \"Let me tell you.\"\n\nWe were purring along the Schuylkill River now, and the headlights from cars on the expressway dimly lit the black water. Big wet flakes flew at our windshield; the dash glowed greenly. The car was heavy and solid; we were heavy and solid. My friend had been successful in business, investing prudently but shrewdly the inheritances of people who trusted his judgment and honor. His voice was measured. He told me. He told me how he had got the landlord at Playa del Sur, who didn't yet know I'd run out on him just after running out on my father, to let him in. How he had waited there. How he had had a beer or two from the fridge, and then a glass or two or three of the Wild Turkey I was drinking back then. How he had listened to the record player. How he had stretched out and taken a nap. How he had wanted to walk down to the beach, but the landlord wouldn't give him a key. How he had waited and waited for me to come back from work. How he began to feel pissed off, put-upon. How he couldn't wait any longer; the _Saratoga_ was cruising west; he was due aboard. How he had noticed my dad's shoes in the closet, really nice shoes, beautifully cared for, Church shoes, dark brown cap-toes. How something\u2014boredom?\u2014had urged him to try those shoes on his own feet. How they had fit as though they were made for him. How he had stolen them.\n\n\"And there was a jacket, too. Nice tweed job. I don't think it was your jacket. I didn't recognize it from college.\"\n\n\"What color?\" I wanted to know.\n\n\"Greenish, heather, I guess you'd call it. Nubby but soft, a really nice tweed sport coat.\"\n\n\"It wouldn't have been mine,\" I said. \"I didn't own a jacket that fits that description,\" I lied.\n\n\"How about that,\" my old friend said.\n\n\"What the hell,\" I said, \"that was a long time ago.\"\n\nYou see, in Philadelphia, so far from Windansea that winter night, at last, I believed I was done with all this, who stole what from whom, who borrowed and who repaid, who was owed what.\n\n# The Sick Man of Europe\n\n## The Making of _Little Mary Sunshine_\n\nIt would be neat to claim I played Billy Jester, but in fact I was just a forest ranger, Hank, in the chorus, Jester's sidekick. I brought to my part a decent baritone voice and peppy want-to. This was the spring musical at Robert College, merry _Little Mary Sunshine_. A cynic might have called the wholesome confection campy, if camp had been around in 1963. How did it go? Finishing-school maidens got sort of lost in the woods, among Injuns, and the forest rangers sort of calmed them and this led to low-key lovey-dovey. Sweet was the ruling principle. In a note to his libretto, Rick Besoyan warned would-be directors, \"It is absolutely essential to the success of the musical that it should be played with the most warmhearted earnestness.\" A YOUNG LADY delivers the prologue: \"Hello: I'd like to take you back to a time when the world was much more simple than ours is today. For instance, good meant good, bad meant bad, virtue was all...\"\n\nI had only one line: during a bit of business with a camera on a tripod, I was to instruct the hoopskirted maidens to say \"cheese.\" This evening was a closed dress rehearsal; my stutter was wrestling the little speech to a draw\u2014\"s-s-s-s-s-s-ay chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh-Camembert\"\u2014when I became aware of a figure coming forward out of the darkness at the back of the auditorium. The maidens were trilling a little tune, tra-la, and then their song trailed off, and I squinted into the gloom.\n\n\"You've been fucking my wife!\" The fellow waved a sidearm, a Webley service revolver, with its thong around his wrist. \"You've been fucking my wife!\" I dove to the stage. So did the wife in question. So did another forest ranger. And another. As many rangers as acted and sang in _Little Mary Sunshine_ dropped like tenpins to the stage. A shot rang\u2014as they say in stage directions\u2014out. Before I was shot dead in Istanbul, my life flashed\u2014as they show in movies\u2014before my eyes.\n\n### The Socratic Method\n\nLess than two years before, I had graduated from college with a degree in English and a high degree of certainty in my high seriousness as a scholar and pedagogue. I came to Byzantium for exotic novelty and to teach. I could say I had chosen a calling as a teacher to evade the draft, but this would tell only the least portion of the truth. In fact, I saw myself as a missionary, crusading to Asia Minor to light a row of candles, the great works of Western Letters agreeable to the New Critics, whose apt and ardent student I was. (When I got word of my job at Robert College, where my Princeton adviser, Richard Blackmur, had lectured, I naturally sought advice. \"Do not on any account have sexual congress with a Turkish melon,\" Blackmur advised. \"It puts the foreskin in jeopardy.\")\n\nRobert College, eight miles from Istanbul and built into the ramparts of Bebek, overlooking Asia and the Bosporus, founded in 1863 by Cyrus Hamlin, an American missionary who had washed clothes for Florence Nightingale's hospital in \u00dcsk\u00fcdar, was the oldest American educational institution abroad. ( _Was_ because in 1971 it was returned to xenophobic Turks and renamed Bogazi\u00e7i Universitesi.) Instruction was in English, and most of the students were cosmopolitan Turks, together with students from ethnic minorities\u2014Jews, Greeks and Armenians\u2014whose parents cherished the visible sign of wealth and social position embodied in a degree from Robert College. During my first year, I was to teach in Robert Academy, a boys' secondary school on the campus of the college. Several of my colleagues were young, and a disproportionate number had been undergraduates at Princeton, where the headmaster of Robert Academy had studied. By an odd juxtaposition of circumstances, my father had lived and worked in Istanbul in the late 1940s, when I was living with my mother and brother in Florida, not quite a teen, easily impressed by the sword, Turkish harem slippers and fez he sent home at Christmas.\n\nFor romance, mystery, murky light, spiced and sour scents, novelty, menace, relentless beauty\u2014nothing has compared. I fell in love, and falling in love with Istanbul was like falling in love with a whore, and in Istanbul I did that too. The city was decadent and worn; to Istanbul, everything had happened. Among its violent tourists had been Arabs, Huns, Tatars, Goths, Vlachs, Crusaders.\n\nWe crusaders on the faculty lived scattered around a hill (which I learned to call The Hill) in college housing, some grand indeed\u2014Victorian houses with huge living rooms and formal gardens. My apartment had an unobstructed view of the Bosporus, and my first night in Turkey I was kept awake by ferries whistling as they steamed from the Golden Horn to the Black Sea, and by nightingales singing in the umbrella pines and cedars outside my window.\n\nA couple of days after flying from New York to Turkey, the morning after the first in an exhausting succession of faculty parties uncompromising in their voluptuary and rakehell excess, I sat in the study of the highest academic officer of Robert College; I had been summoned to be welcomed to my first regular job, the calling for which my training and ambition had prepared me. The sturdy Protestant precepts of the college were given piquant expression by the drink I was offered, _\u00e7ay_ , tea served in a little hourglass shot glass. I felt abstracted: the long flight to an exotic setting, last evening's bender, this morning's awful hangover. The Dean made a steeple with his fingers; he cleared his throat; he looked directly at me; he sniffed the air; he cleared his throat again. We sat. He gestured toward the tea. I shook my head. We sat.\n\nI said, \"Sir, I'm glad to be at Robert College.\"\n\n\"Well,\" he said. \"Well. This is the way of it: what you drink, how much, with whom\u2014that is your business. What you teach, your opinions in the classroom\u2014your department. Whether you teach, whether or not you appear at the appointed hour and in the appointed classroom\u2014my department. Very. My bailiwick. Sexual preferences and energy\u2014your affair. Sexual union with students\u2014mine...\" I cleared my throat now because, hang on just a New York minute here, my students were going to be men. Boys! Better to curse the darkness! The Dean welcoming me to my first teaching job was still speaking. \"... and if I sack you, and believe you me I'd have no hesitation to sack you, there's no place beneath this place to which to fall. From this depth. Don't test the truth of my edict; welcome to Robert College.\"\n\nIf I got an odd greeting, it was no odder than the education I imposed on my students, who ran in age from sixteen to twenty. I was warned that many among them were cunning and rowdy, that they'd cheat me blind, that they'd hunt for the chink in my armor and exploit it mercilessly. In short, except for the cheating part, that they were schoolboys after my own heart. I heard horror stories about a teacher who had been laughed out of the country, about another who had pushed a wise guy out a second-story window. The boys didn't trouble me; I was indifferent to my students' esteem, and they seemed to like this. I found them as tame as pups, and I taught them whatever tricks I wished to teach them. May Allah be my witness, I press-ganged those young Turks into the ranks of the New Criticism.\n\nDuring the three years they were our students, the boys were subjected to a course in literature that went from _Job, Book of_ to _Jarrell, Randall_. We used a three-volume anthology of world literature, condensed as to contents and typography, densely printed on tissue paper. From this horn of plenty we assigned what whim or dogma dictated. Each year's class numbered more or less a hundred boys, and early every week the class would gather to be lectured by one of us. My colleague David Leeming was Professor Mythology: he lectured on the Greeks and the Icelandics. Charlie Klopp had spent a summer in Perugia: he did Dante and Machiavelli. I gave the guys the latest on Pope, Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_ , Arnold, Yeats, Eliot and Stevens. I've got some of my lecture notes before me, but candor has its bounds. Let me say this: there are a quantity of Turkish engineers broadcasting among their Near Eastern friends odd and insubstantial notions about what William Empson remarked to I. A. Richards about John Donne's conceits.\n\nUsing the lectures as points of reference, we met later each week in small discussion groups; in my discussion group all listened to one discuss, and the one was me, which was probably why I got along well with my students, who could never get in a word edgewise. Since I never gave them cause or opportunity to speak, how could I have known if they were contemptuous or insolent?\n\nIn discussion groups I'd ask Hasan G\u00fcnzel: \"What thread connects Goldsmith's 'Comparison Between Sentimental and Laughing Comedy' with Schiller's 'On Simple and Sentimental Poetry'?\" Hasan, a deer caught by a jack-light, would stare at me. \"Very good,\" I'd say. \"Capital! I know what you're thinking, and agree entirely! Art in its highest form requires a certain... how should I phrase this, Seyit? How indeed, you may rejoin; well, let me venture, Halil, a certain... _expansiveness_ of fancy. Just so!\" I was a china shop in a bull corral.\n\n### Payday\n\nI got less than two thousand a year, but in the early 1960s that was enough to finance winter, spring and summer holidays in Western Europe. In addition to my apartment and good meals in a faculty dining room, I also got an allowance in Turkish lira meant to cover incidentals and the odd restaurant meal. It was the custom among the faculty to take this money, paid in cash the first Friday of every month, Downtown. I say it was the custom of \"the faculty\"\u2014I should amend this: the dissolute cohort to which I belonged comprised no more than ninety-seven percent of the American and English males teaching at Robert Academy and Robert College. Two percent were recluses and moral refugees hiding from the world, the law or themselves; perhaps as many as one percent were virtuous and moderate.\n\nWe'd gather in small groups at the bottom of The Hill, along the edge of the Bosporus near the castle Rumeli Hisar, at a dolmus stop. Dolmus means \"stuffed,\" and these jitneys, big old florid tail-finned DeSotos and Hudsons, were overburdened with passengers picked up from stops along the route from the Black Sea to Taksim Square, the center of Istanbul's new quarter. The fare was cheap, the ride raucous with syrupy Turkish love music sung in a wailing falsetto, played at distorting volume on portable 45-rpm phonographs by the drivers, who competed with one another for the flagrant flash of their overdecorated and overequipped pink-and-chartreuse taxis, for their audacity at the wheel, for their fighter-pilot ice-water nerves, for the excessive droop of their mustaches.\n\nFirst stop was the Park Hotel, where my father had lived. From the hilltop of Pera the terrace had a commanding view of onion domes and minarets needling the smoky blue air and of Seraglio Point down in the Golden Horn and in all directions of water busy with shipping. The Park was favored by Western residents and spies, which is a redundancy because all Western residents, not excluding clergy and certainly not excluding teachers, were assumed to be spies. That I was not a spy was a discouraging index of the low degree of trust invested in me by the deans at Princeton, who routinely recommended foreign-bound graduates to the CIA. At the Park my friends and I would prime the pump with rak\u00ed, a licorice-based clear liquor, kin to Pernod and an\u00eds and ouzo, mixed with ice and water, which turns it buttermilk-yellow. Here we'd watch the sun set over the city, and hear amplified an inspired whine, a muezzin's call to prayers.\n\nNext was a manageable walk to Taksim Square and along C\u00fcmhuriyet Caddesi to the Divan Oteli, where I might have my hair cut, beard trimmed, shoes shined. The Divan was small and luxurious in a less-is-more manner. Its cozy bar was favored by the wealthy and amiable Turkish intelligentsia, newspaper editors, bankers, importers, publishers and cosmopolitan layabouts educated at one of two English universities. I've never seen cigarettes smoked with such enthusiasm as they were smoked by Turks in that bar: the men's fingers were bright orange from tar, and the jokes and gossip in French and German and English were delivered hoarse-voiced, with hacking laughter.\n\nI remember my first visit: Adnan Menderes, the increasingly despotic Premier who had been arrested several months earlier, was about to be hanged. Press censorship was tight, but the barflies at the Divan spoke freely about Menderes's coming execution, how excited he must be\u2014how thrilled, really\u2014how he'd been practicing for years by hanging himself with a silk stocking. I confessed bewilderment; the bartender regarded me with astonishment. Did I mean to leave the impression I had never hanged myself just a little? Not even for fun?\n\nMore rak\u00ed here, unless a Turk at the bar with a son studying at Robert College decided to buy a round of Johnny Walker Red Label for the indigent professors. I liked the Divan because it was the stopover for flight crews aboard KLM and BEA and SAS. I'd met a couple of stewardesses on the SAS flight that brought me to Istanbul, Finn sisters who didn't seem to compare notes, unless they did; they'd phone when they came to town, unless they didn't phone because they'd phoned someone else, but that was okay too, because they'd introduced me to other stewardesses, and for me\u2014a survivor of what Richard Pryor has called The Great Pussy Drought of the Fifties\u2014I didn't see how circumstance could have dealt me a better hand. We lived; we lived!\n\nAfter barbering and sipping, our ragtag gang, less a couple of teachers who'd fallen from the pack for lack of stamina, plus a couple of pals gathered from the terrace of the Park and the bar of the Divan, made its way down crowded, narrow Istiklal Caddesi, noisy and raffish despite the old hospitals and libraries and embassy buildings in use before the capital moved to Ankara. The street attacked the senses: the Art Nouveau ironwork balconies were rusting out, and the buildings were falling in on themselves. Stray cats and dogs, thin to the bone, sulked in doorways. In the Ottoman days of empire, this main drag was known as the Grand Rue de Pera, and branching off it were alleys with fanciful names: Street of the Gate of the Thumb, and Street of the Pine-Gum Tree. Along the way we'd stop for refreshments at the caf\u00e9 attached to an art cinema, where bohemian intellectuals\u2014painters and poets and movie directors and actors, dressed a hundred percent in black\u2014drank black coffee. We Americans seemed always welcome in Turkey; American books and movies and clothes and cars and money and slang engaged the hip, and our mastery of nuclear fission engaged the warlike working-class Turks. Everyone hated the neighboring Soviets, so for that too we were celebrated. An American could grow spoiled in Istanbul.\n\nOur destination was Rejans, also called The Old Russian Restaurant, run by three or four ancient sisters also dressed invariably in black, upstairs in a rickety wood building near the Fish Market and Galatasaray Square. Rejans had been memorialized in an early variant of \"The Snows of Kilimanjaro,\" that soap opera in which Hemingway relentlessly misspelled all Turkish place-names. This was my favorite restaurant in Istanbul, which meant then it was my favorite restaurant anywhere. High-ceilinged, with posters on the grimy walls, the tables set far apart and covered with heavy cloth, there was nothing pretty or delicate about the place. I must have eaten thirty or forty dinners there, and I never had a bad time at Rejans. I invariably ate the same things: borscht, cold fish with mayonnaise, beef Stroganoff and\u2014when they were in season\u2014strawberries Chantilly. I don't order any of these dishes anymore, because Rejans, like the Turks, spoiled me. The Russian sisters made their own vodka. The state kept a monopoly on cigarettes and alcohol, and while the wine was excellent, and the beer was excellent, and the rak\u00ed was rak\u00ed, Turkish vodka was awful, awful, awful. We all made our own from 180-proof grain alcohol. This we'd boil and strain and dilute, according to various home recipes, bringing it down to 50 or 60 proof, making it barely suitable for mixing with juice or tonic. The sisters at Rejans, working with the same raw material, worked alchemy; they served their vodka chilled and straight in silver thimbles, and none smoother anywhere ever, with a hint of the Seville oranges they were rumored to grow for no reason other than to impart to their vodka a hint of Seville orange.\n\nWell, now it was time to have some fun, drink a drink. For this we went to the Flower Passage, the courtyard of a building built to billet the Janissaries, elite troops of the sultans during the time of the Ottoman Empire. We meandered among fruit stands equipped with polished brass scales and fastidious arrangements of brass weights, found our way to a gallery of beer stalls where we sat at slate tables on high stools backed with cane, their seats worn smooth by the rub of workingmen's corduroy and whipcord. Or we stood beneath struggling black fan blades, at tables of common wood so many times varnished that the grain had disappeared beneath the shellac's dark luster. The table was pleasing to lean against, almost soft. Here we drank draft ale or dark beer in a quantity known as an Argentine, sometimes smoothed with a shot of vodka, often\u2014too often\u2014taken with a rak\u00ed chaser. The breweries had been designed and built by the Germans during World War I to supply the Kaiser's Janissaries with Bavarian pilsener, and to hell with the Germans, but they did know how to build a brewery that could make a beer a thirsty schoolteacher was happy to drink. We'd drink the beer in iced glasses as capacious as flower vases, and at each table fresh flowers were arranged in heavy beer mugs. We'd continue to eat, almonds and little meatballs and skewered spiced mutton grilled on charcoal braziers set within reach outside the big open windows, stuffed mussels and prawns from the Fish Market next door; the beer stalls were for the pleasure of the workers who stocked and serviced the Fish Market and the Flower Market; customers wore no neckties, and their shirts buttoned all the way up; the beer stalls were raucous with the static and hysteria of a radio broadcast of a football match. Inside were fights, brief but fierce. Outside, men strolled like baby brothers hand in hand, itinerant musicians played little steam calliopes, jugglers juggled, acrobats walked on their hands, magicians attempted tricks with transparent clumsiness that we nevertheless applauded, vendors sold lottery tickets and curiosities. I bought a plastic windmill and a helium balloon in the rough likeness of a cat. (I could have selected from the peddler's bouquet a mouse to go with it.)\n\nAfter the Flower Passage, our paths divided. Some of my friends went to the Turkish baths, which were not necessarily in business to serve men looking for what some of my friends sought, but which were also not in business to deny what some of my friends sought. For \"some of my friends\" read \"fifty percent, about.\" Robert College was a haven for or, depending on one's vantage, a nest of homosexuals. At about the time these friends would grow restless, and declare an intention to \"round up some _boeuf_ ,\" I'd grow restless and declare my intention to go to the nightclubs.\n\nThere was a red-light district near the Flower Market, and I knew how to find my way to it, but my students patronized the whorehouses and reluctantly I had found the inner dignity to honor the bedrock decorum of my vocation; I had decreed the whores off-limits to Meester Wolff. Bar girls were a different breed, of course, and I'd take my balloon cat and plastic windmill down an alley (Street of the Slave's Son) off Istiklal Caddesi to a hole in the wall lit fancifully by neon: Meksim or\u2014my favorite\u2014Fooles Bercer (pronounce the \"c\" as a soft \"g,\" as in _Berg\u00e8re_ ). The Istanbul Follies employed an entertainer, Veilah, and I loved her. She entertained me by letting me tell her how much and in what ways I loved her, and by telling me she loved me too, and by encouraging me to celebrate our abiding love with Turkish pink champagne. Veilah would promise to meet me after closing on a street corner to which she directed me with elaborate maps drawn on the backs of napkins. She spoke bar English and I spoke bar Turkish. We must have lost our way in the translation, because I'd stand on the slick cobbles of a street corner from 4 a.m. till dawn, smelling piss seep through the gutters, my heart beating passionately, and then it would be breakfast time and Veilah would still be searching the city for me, without luck. (You can't know what I was up against, learning to speak her language. The first phrase book I bought taught me this: if I could just manage to say _\"Sizden bir ricam var,\"_ I would have conveyed to my darling \"I have a request to do you,\" or, as the language text renders it phonetically, \"Ay hev a rikuest to du yu.\" On the other hand, I might say, _\"Y\u00fcz\u00fcm\u00fc kestiniz, kaniyor,\"_ and Veilah would understand me to have remarked, \"You have cut my visage, it is bleeding.\" On the contrary, Veilah would retort, _\"Hayir, bay, bir sivilce idi, onu.\"_ \"No, I have not cut your visage, there was only a pimple and I have taken it away\" [\"No, ay hev nat cat yur vizeyc, der uaz onli \u00e9 pimpil end ay hev teykin it evuey\"].) I had seen _The Blue Angel_ , and as drunk as I was I never didn't remember that Emil Jannings was a schoolteacher. But I wasn't a Foole at the Bercer because, as nearly as I can recall, I never crowed like a rooster, or not in public I didn't. It is true that, according to literal interpretation of the aphorism, I might have been mistaken for a Foole, inasmuch as me and my money were soon parted.\n\n### Hill Cocktails\n\nWe went to parties. Typically these were thrown on a week's notice in a young married couple's hillside house. The drink of choice, the Hill Cocktail, was served from a punch bowl and chilled by a block of ice. This was homemade vodka, orange juice and Turkish brandy. It was seductively smooth; it did the devil's work quietly, but by golly it did it.\n\nLet's say there were fifty at the party, twenty or so of them Turks from Istanbul's lively theater community (which had been inspired by a few members of the humanities faculty at Robert College, especially a flamboyantly homosexual Englishman, Hilary Sumner-Boyd, who carried with him rumors of exile from home in the wake of great Oscar Wildean scandal). There would be a few teachers from the American College for Girls, our sister institution in Arnavutk\u00f6y. The party would begin after dinner, build in jollity and veer toward lechery or mercurial rancor; sometimes the shouting matches were inspired by the warning signs of adultery (a husband finding his wife in the bathtub without water but brimming with his best friend), but some of the explosions were sparked by disagreements as to aesthetics. During a spring garden party, a Robert College dean, a sturdy fellow with a porcupine crew cut, insisted on reading aloud his poems in praise of Byzantium; these were singsong rhymed couplets; one pair married _feather_ with _heather_ , making a near-rhyme with _wherever_ and _forever_. When he finished, the dean was weeping great salt tears.\n\nHilary Sumner-Boyd, who had stood listening with his eyes shut, which could have implied ecstatic transport or simple blackout, stirred: \"Oh dear,\" he said.\n\n\"You like my lines,\" said the dean.\n\n\"Oh dear no,\" said Hilary. \"They are odious verses.\"\n\n\"You faggot asshole,\" argued the dean, who was a Marine veteran of a foreign war. \"I've killed Japs on beaches. You wouldn't know a sincere poem if it sucked your cock.\"\n\n\"How exactly,\" asked Hilary, \"would that work? If I'd only known poetry could be so _useful_ , my dear... why do you tell me only _now?_ \"\n\nThe dean disappeared. The dean reappeared with a bayonet, which he stabbed with appropriate exclamations into the tree against which Hilary leaned. Hilary snickered; he said to the dean: \"How curious: you are a coward.\" The poet/dean wept.\n\nJimmy Baldwin came to live among us. He was trying to finish _Another Country_ , and a Turkish theater director he had met in London offered the serenity of a room where he could live and write facing the Bosporus, a place where Baldwin wouldn't have to decide (for a change) whether he was principally a black activist or principally a writer. The first night I met Jimmy, he picked a fight with me. The first night Jimmy met anyone, he picked a fight. I don't recall the details of my quarrel, but from observing later bouts with others, I'm sure it went like this: I would have heard him railing against \"The Man\" or \"Mister Charlie,\" and I would have tuned my ears. Jimmy would deliver a diatribe, a fierce preacherly polemic against white America. Then, with the Colonel Blimpery of a colonizer or a missionary far from the imperial heartland, I'd have protested some excess of rhetoric. I might have said that I wasn't sure I could agree that all white Americans, first to last, were bloodier than Hitler because Hitler at least had acted from passionate belief rather than standing by, smug and indifferent. I must have disagreed with something he declaimed, because I do recollect with perfect acuity Jimmy's astonishing soft eyes bugging out at me, his huge mouth twisting into a sardonic grin I might have mistaken for a sneer, a grin I knew later to have been provoked by the delicious prospect of an argument. How that man relished argument! He would dissent with anything: the excellence of Henry James's sentences (he loved them, unless you loved them), how to cook vegetables. He talked fast and in complete sentences; his voice would grow louder and more emphatic until his opinion climaxed with a shrewd stare. Then he would theatrically lower his voice and\u2014one or the other\u2014laugh or cut you dead. If you had mentioned your dear Aunt Em, who considered her colored maid almost a member of the family, Jimmy would consign you eternally to hell, and good for him. If he laughed, it meant not that he wasn't serious about white guilt, white shame, white lovelessness; if he laughed his ungoverned musical laugh, it meant that the argument would continue\u2014forever, if he had his way. Meantime it was now recess; let's pour another drink and put Bessie Smith on the phonograph.\n\nJimmy liked Istanbul. It was a peculiarity of the Turks that they believed black people to bring good luck. This friendly bias may have been a payoff from the favored status of Nubian slaves among the Ottoman sultans' palace households. Whatever, Jimmy was free to kick back in Turkey, and he soon rented what had been a pasha's library, built above the towers and ramparts and crenellations of Rumeli Hisar. During the years he lived in Istanbul, years when he wrote _The Fire Next Time_ , and visited home to witness Birmingham and the March on Washington, I'm not certain Jimmy knew or cared whether Turkey was ruled by a parliament or a pope or a king or a queen. He very well knew that the doorman at the Divan Oteli was a black man, and in Istanbul a personage, and if this combination of qualities troubled Jimmy, he and trouble were off duty.\n\nAt the tail end of parties there'd be a great pairing-off, or there'd be a Great Idea. Under the rubric _Great Idea_ , maybe I'd persuade a teacher from the Girls' College to ride on the back of my fast, noisy English motorcycle out to the Black Sea beach at Kilyos where we would, conflating a Great Idea with a Great Pairing-Off, swim naked at sunrise. I spent the dawn after my first Hill party, which would have been my first dawn in Turkey, undertaking to swim the Bosporus with John Freely, a Brooklyn-born Irish-American mathematics teacher, a gravedigger's son with a doctorate in experimental physics, courtesy of the GI Bill. Freely knew Istanbul, particularly the Stamboul of mosques and Byzantine churches, better than any Westerner. He wrote the authoritative _Blue Guide: Istanbul_ , but dog-paddling across the full tidal bore of the Bosporus that night, egging me on with cries\u2014Byron had fronted the Hellespont, how could I do less?\u2014he neglected to guide me away from orange peels and fish heads. Seeing a Greek freighter steaming south toward the Sea of Marmara, on a collision course with my unhappy, bobbing self, I made for shore. Freely said the trouble with me was I always left the party before it really began. Since we'd known each other only since nine that night, I was determined to prove Freely a poor prophet, and I did. Who was it after all who drove with him and Bill Hickman across the border of Turkey into the no-man's-land of the Bulgarian frontier, bristling with mines and machine gunners? We'd decided to spend the weekend in Vienna, storm the goddamned gates successfully this time, to make up for S\u00fcleyman the Magnificent's miserable failure in 1529 to take that city. We had neither visas nor money, and Vienna was far, far away. The Bulgarian frontier police returned us to Thrace, dropping us across the border as though they held us with long tongs and we were turds being dropped into trash. They claimed we were drunk. What could we say?\n\nJohn Freely said, \"Consider Sultan Selim the Sot. He'd have a drink now and then. Behold his works!\"\n\n\"He drowned in his bath,\" Bill Hickman said.\n\n### The Sick Man of Europe\n\nThat's what they called Turkey, and if Turkey wasn't, I was. I was in the infirmary. My relationship with the Robert College infirmary got off to a poor start when I put three visiting Princeton friends in a sick ward with some students after a night at the Park, Divan, Rejans, Flower Passage and Fooles Bercer. I guess I'd misplaced my key to the infirmary, or maybe I'd never had one, so my pals had had to check into their room by way of a locked window. Then, as their dinner wore off, one of them sensed a wolf in his stomach and decided he needed a snack. He opened the refrigerator; he'd misplaced _his_ key to the lock on the refrigerator door, so he had to pick the latch with a crowbar. Then he ate a loaf of bread and a beefsteak and a dozen eggs. How could you eat a dozen eggs? I'd asked him. \"I just scrambled them up with cream and butter,\" he said.\n\nSince then I'd been to the infirmary for a jumbo shot of penicillin (before I forswore the red-light district), administered by the Robert College doctor, a Turk so fastidious in his attitude toward the human body that he conducted his examination of my sorry condition while I remained fully dressed, with a sheet draped over my zipped trousers. His investigation of my symptoms was entirely anecdotal, and entirely conclusive, both that time and the next time, about four days after my beloved Veilah found me after all at the street corner to which she had sent me, because, taking a leaf from the spy's instruction manual, I had torn in half and kept one half of the very banknote that would be her banknote if she found me.\n\nNow I was in the infirmary being treated for alcoholic poisoning. While I was there, the headmaster of Robert Academy paid me a visit.\n\n\"Have you ever heard of Dorian Gray?\" the headmaster asked.\n\n\"You mean Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray?\"\n\n\"That Dorian Gray.\"\n\nI said I guessed I had heard of him, saying this with the wariness a fellow might use if he'd been accused of plagiarizing _Moby-Dick_ when in fact he hadn't read _Moby-Dick_. I mean, which would be the greater offense? Larceny or ignorance?\n\nThe (married) headmaster said if I hadn't read _Dorian Gray_ , I should. I might also want to acquaint myself with _The Rake's Progress_. With the picaresque in general\u2014with _Gil Blas_ , perhaps. And how about Boccaccio's _Decameron?_ And perhaps _Under the Volcano_. And by the way, I had been put off-limits\u2014cast from Eden, as it were\u2014by all single female teachers at the American College for Girls.\n\n\"Then that doesn't include wives, sir?\"\n\n### The Unmaking of _Little Mary Sunshine_\n\nAs the gunshot rang out, as I chewed the scenery down there on the stage, I was surrounded by wives. All the forest rangers, mostly bachelors, were surrounded by wives. It had been a merry production. There was no changing room; it was spring; the high spirits backstage had been infectious (but not, thank goodness, as infectious as Veilah). Given the facts, it was impossible to divine who was the subject of the sentence \"You've been fucking my wife!\" In fact, it wouldn't have been possible to know the object had not her husband made himself visible in the rim of the floodlights.\n\nHe was British, which accounted for Her Majesty's Webley with the thong. He fired again. There was silence, what I would have to call an uncomfortable silence. It was broken by a sibilant English schoolgirl's soprano, the very voice whose music had enraptured us these long days and nights of rehearsal: \"If I wasn't a virgin when we were married, I'm most surely a virgin now!\"\n\n\"How would that work?\" whispered the fellow playing the part of Chief Brown Bear, cowering beside me.\n\nShe called out again: \"You go home, you silly boy! And don't come back till you're all grown up, till you've learned to behave yourself!\"\n\nWell, amen to that.\n\n### All Grown Up\n\nI returned to Istanbul three years later with my wife. We stayed with Jimmy Baldwin and David Leeming in the pasha's library. The city was a shock to Priscilla; there's a gorgeous Thelonious Monk piece titled \"Ugly Beauty,\" and for Priscilla Istanbul was like that. The Turks are ugly to animals, for example, and our first afternoon in the Old City she had to watch a beastly man beat his donkey nearly to death. And it wasn't beautiful to watch _hamals_ , human pack animals, bear refrigerators on their backs.\n\nPriscilla was surely bewildered, maybe shocked. It was not only that she was young and a Yankee, and six years earlier a Miss Porter's girl with a perhaps distorted understanding of what constituted sin. She was also newly married to someone she had been warned not to marry. Her defiance of those warnings had been built on her confidence that she knew me even better than I knew me. Now she wasn't so sanguine. Standing on the ramparts of Topkapi Palace with my friends, looking out toward the Column of the Goths and beyond to Seraglio Point, she heard what I believed to be charming stories of bygone human folly: wars, and religious persecutions, and devious eunuchs, and a sultan's wife who had her husband's grand vizier strangled by mutes, who had likewise poisoned her son. It was difficult to articulate how I could take pleasure from such Adamic history, why I'd wanted to do graduate work in depravity, why the stink of offal in the streets made me feel alive rather than ill. When I'd left Istanbul for the land west of Vienna, John Freely had warned me: \"Terrible things will happen to you there. You will grow old. And serious. You will be crushed by falling canned goods in the supermarket. Your wife will join a book club. And I, my friend, will be thigh-deep in wine in the Sea of Marmara, or receiving admiring glances at the Divan, where I will drink with shrimp stains on my tropical suit.\"\n\nA few days into our visit, Priscilla became one of us. It was difficult to locate the place and moment. Perhaps it was at a late-afternoon party given by Emin Bey, an infamously self-indulgent great-grandson of a sultan, at his swaybacked unpainted Palladian wood palace on the Asian shore of the Bosporus, just at the junction of the Sweetwaters of Asia. Emin Bey kept peacocks in his garden, and while they cooed and clucked we listened to him tell in his soft sinister Oxford-Constantinople accent about the palace across the Sweetwaters, with its fa\u00e7ade removed one foggy spring night by a Soviet freighter. No one had repaired it, Emin Bey said. Why? He shrugged. There was the question of cost, of course. And liability. But really, it was possible, in Istanbul, to become used to anything. No?\n\nYes. That night Priscilla and I ate with old friends at a Bebek restaurant built out over the Bosporus. Along the shore bright blue fishing nets were stretched to dry. Priscilla saw rotten fruit floating in the black water among fish heads. But after stuffed grape leaves and cheese-filled pastries and pieces of lamb dipped in cold yogurt, Priscilla ate the fish whose heads now fed other fish. It was delicious _lufer_ , bluefish, and while we ate we watched fishermen catching more, all anyone could want, from saffron and India-red double-ended rowboats lit by kerosene lamps. Now, at slack of tide, the boats converged from up and down the Bosporus, from the ruined palaces of Asia and from the Black Sea and from the Golden Horn. Then I persuaded Priscilla she had heard a nightingale, and that she smelled Judas blossoms, even though they were past their season, and so what if they were? Imagine.\n\n# The Company Man and the Revolutionary\n\nFriends? How does a friend behave? Will a pal survive in captivity? Friendship has inspired no want of homily. Ask Aristotle, he of rational First Principles: \"A single soul dwelling in two bodies\"; that's how you can recognize a friend. Sounds deadly as cancer, unsightly as goiter. _Two_ souls? Show me one. Am I looking at friendship or its end? Gertrude Stein dreamed up a wonderful title: \"Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded.\" She had translated a friend's poem, and he felt she had taken liberties with it, and they fell out. Stein published her version and put her own title on it, and there they were, these friends, on the rocks. But I would like to tell of a case different from the one Stein's perception describes. Mine might have been titled \"Before Friendship Faded, the Flowers of Friendship Faded.\" My title is neither as musical nor as interesting (grammatically); my title adumbrates an odd tale of odd times\u2014a friendship that died after, rather than before, two friends wished it to die.\n\nMy friend\u2014I'll call him Andrew\u2014moves with deliberation and hydraulic ease, as though exploring underwater an eel-ridden cave. He is hipless and smooth, auburn-haired, with pale skin and a kutup kid's saucy freckles. He has the temperament of a cinnamon bear, by turns playful and sullen; people who have known him talk of him\u2014he's an enticement for recollection, gossip, speculation. He has been a painter, sculptor, potter, photographer, actor, mischief-maker. Now he is a filmmaker, and such is his standing among experimental cameramen that one night in New York, when he came late to the screening of another man's movie, the audience rose to applaud what he has done with his life\u2014his work\u2014and what he has meant to do with it.\n\nNot long enough ago I sat beside my wife in our Vermont living room, our children playing around us, and listened to this friend forgive me for my work as an agent of the CIA and for having informed on him and betrayed him. It had been eight years since I had seen Andrew, since he first realized\u2014or first cared\u2014that I was a spook, a mole, a Company Man. The years had fleshed and muscled him, added power to him, and presence, but no visible age. He is of a giving nature, and now he had dropped in on our Vermont solitude like God out of the machine, to make peace with me. Between us, he told me, the war was over. What war? Had he not been best man at my wedding? And had I not loved him? What war?\n\nNever mind the past, he said, and he hugged me, took my shoulders in his hands, turned me this way and that, examined me, puzzled me as he had forever puzzled me. Since I had first met him, eighteen years before, he had liked to make appearances unannounced, materializing without explanation; and until this reunion there had never come a time (well, maybe once) when I had not been happy to find him filling my doorway, pausing in transit somewhere, heedless of whatever rhythm he might have disrupted. Now he was in the company of a pretty young woman, and he mumbled an introduction. He often appeared with strangers, wishing to share with friends his enthusiasm for new discoveries, and the strangers were usually female, often young, always pretty. He had the habit of mumbling introductions. Andrew is not one for the decorums, and his speech is elliptical, so that one listens to him leaning toward him, to catch the sense of what he says before it scatters like mist on the soft breeze of his voice.\n\nThis new girlfriend must have believed her smile was beatific, but it wasn't. She appeared condescending, amused by our house and situation and befuddlement, amused by us. Andrew fussed with my boys, hugged Priscilla, hooked his thumbs in his cowboy belt: \"Well, well, well, hasn't time passed, isn't this more like it?\" It seemed to me, as I watched Andrew's new friend listen to him reconcile himself to my crimes against him and his cause, that she valued his magnanimity but found it soft and damp, a waste of spirit. I wondered what Andrew had told her about me during their drive north from New York.\n\nAndrew and I had met during the spring of 1958 at a Stowe ski lodge, the Round Hearth, favored by school and college kids. Andrew was a guest there, on spring vacation from Harvard, and we met in the lodge's parking lot, where I was lodging in a borrowed van. The Round Hearth wanted four dollars a night for a dormitory bunk, and these were more dollars than I could pony up. Just as I was staying at the Round Hearth (but not quite), so was I on vacation from Princeton (but not quite), having a few months earlier dropped out, to Princeton's relief, while I wrote a novel and Found Myself.\n\nI found Andrew because he had a knockout cousin who had caught my eye, just as he had caught hers. With women this set the pattern: I hunted and he fled. Otherwise we stood as equals: he was my first hipster, I was his. Neither was the other's sidekick; he envied me because I had quit college\u2014a rope's length ahead of the posse\u2014while he merely threatened to. I envied him too many qualities to number, but above all what seemed to me his superior values, his sure sense of the distinction between what was authentic and what was not. His ideals, obliquely articulated without solemnity, were those of an artist (I never doubted he was _that_ ), derisive of team play, nice manners and commercial hurly-burly. We needled the middle class but excepted from it anyone we liked; when we spoke of revolutions, they were cultural rather than political. We liked to believe, and assured each other, that we didn't give a fiddler's fig for the good opinion of our peers.\n\nWe were young. By our precept indifferent to dress, we wore our indifference like a uniform. Our collars were frayed, but the shirts were oxford-cloth button-downs from the \"346\" department of Brooks Brothers. The paint- and ink-stained tweeds we wore with blue jeans and Army boots were tailored by J. Press. We looked like Tweedledee and Tweedledum.\n\nWe spent the summer after we met in Boston; we were bohemian Bauhausers, spartan dwellers in a flat empty of furniture except for mattresses on the floor, a studio couch and an Eames chair. And a state-of-the-art sound system. Gratification cut to the very bone. Except the flat was large and airy, sunny, set on the corner of Charles and Chestnut across from a Beacon Hill florist whose fragrance lifted our stoic spirits. The apartment must have cost a pile. Must have cost Andrew a pile: he paid.\n\nHis father was a Lake Forest lawyer, at the time a Cabinet officer in Eisenhower's administration. The family owned a handsome house on the beach at West Chop, and despite Andrew's aversion to getters and spenders, he was willing to cross to the Vineyard when Beacon Hill's temperature climbed above the comfort zone. There was always plenty of money around, and no little of it was wasted on me.\n\nAndrew indulged me\u2014floated me\u2014for many reasons: because I was generally tits-up broke, because he was generous, because I was trying to write even as he succeeded in painting and for reasons I can now only guess at, reasons that might even have their source in shame for his bankroll. Not to make too much of this, Andrew was not attached to the sturdy Republicanism of his father's government, but neither did he\u2014then\u2014loathe it or wish to undo it. We did not, in the late 1950s, trouble ourselves with politics, or economics, or much of anything apart from our wishes, which we liked to ennoble as _dreams_.\n\nMine was to do a novel, so to Andrew\u2014done and done\u2014I was a novelist. And indeed, during the year I spent apart from Princeton, working at Sikorsky Aircraft in Bridgeport to support myself and my father, I did manage to complete what I fancifully called a novel, _Certain Half-Deserted Streets;_ I was twenty when it was finished. It was about a boy (I called him a \"young man\"), Tony, already seventeen and \"coming to season\" in the \"brutal world,\" a cosmopolitan world of flashy cars and flashing teeth into which Tony, poor baby, had \"never asked to be born.\"\n\nDuring the days that ran into the nights that I scribbled this thing, I worked an hour from my house in Newtown, Connecticut. I write \"my house\" because the rent was paid, the few times it was paid that year, by me rather than by my father. My title at Sikorsky (the helicopter division of United Aircraft Corporation) was Engineering Communications Coordinator, which meant Mail Boy. My pay was two hundred and fifty per month, and during idle moments\u2014when I was not lugging canvas sacks, reading my employers' private communications (just like Faulkner, no?), or sleeping in the can (just like Faulkner)\u2014I was expected to guard the blueprint cage, to assure that parts diagrams were rightly filed. So they were, except when I had stolen them. Those representations that seemed to me expendable or frivolous\u2014diagrams, let's say, of a loading hoist or an exhaust manifold or a strut assembly\u2014I would tuck beneath my shirt, remove to my house and boil. The drawings were on cloth and coated with gelatin, and once this laminate had been boiled off the Irish-linen backing, one was left with glue stuck to the sides of a pot and with handkerchiefs, twelve inches square, of a most elegant texture and tightness of weave.\n\nAndrew was wowed by my indifference to Sikorsky's property and security. I wouldn't swear that he esteemed me as a rebel out on the cutting edge of anarchy (we had been reading Camus' _L'Homme r\u00e9volt\u00e9_ , in French, slowly), but the translation of Air Force documents into linen handkerchiefs seemed to strike him as imaginative disobedience. In fact, as with all else of importance I then knew, the trick had been learned from my old man.\n\nIf for Andrew my chief virtue was my poverty (as though I'd taken a vow of bad luck), and my distinction was an ambition to tell lies in print, then my principal attraction was my odd association with my father. Andrew had not met dads like mine; his was a fellow of rectitude and steady purpose, a product of Princeton and Cambridge universities. Mine was a deadbeat and confidence man who would drink through the night with us, listening to jazz or playing it on an upright squirreled away in a storeroom off the garage.\n\nAndrew at that time had cars much on his mind. His was a '53 Austin-Healey designed for a four-cylinder motor; into the engine compartment he had shoehorned a Corvette power plant and transmission. The mongrel would go from place to place with awesome noise and speed, and Andrew often fussed with it in our Newtown garage, for soon after we met he became frugal with the hours he was willing to waste on a Harvard education.\n\nI too was possessed by a folly, a 1937 Delahaye, just the contraption in which fated couples plunged to their endover-end fiery ends from the Grande Corniche. Longer than a Cadillac, the machine could just seat Andrew and me. My father had found it after volunteering to scout me up practical transportation for the commute to Sikorsky. I'd blame it on him start (which it usually wouldn't) to finish, but fact was, the automobile satisfied me.\n\nMy father's was no less a silly automobile, fast-looking and slow, hideously expensive and utterly unpaid for. Its rightful owner sought its return, but God knows why, for it seldom worked. Neither was it registered, and when it did chance to run at such times as my Delahaye coincidentally would run, my dad and I had a problem, for we owned between us a single set of license plates, and these had belonged to yet another car, my quondam stepmother's. This set of plates my father and I shifted from car to car according to need, and Andrew found this arrangement quite miraculous, a bold and sassy strike by _us_ against _them_. He thought me the luckiest fellow alive to have an outlaw father, just as I imagined him the ditto to have as his father a chap positioned to discuss affairs of state or golf after a prayer breakfast in the White House with a President, even one as unspectacular as Eisenhower. As for the license plates, my father found our deception marginally inconvenient, and I was ashamed of it.\n\nThere was about Andrew something childlike and sometimes childish. In this we were alike, and the first time I visited West Chop with him he persisted for several days in the fiction that I was a foreign-exchange student with little hold on English. We had just seen _The Young Lions_ , and I liked to believe I could make myself sound like Marlon Brando playing a Tyrolean ski instructor and German officer, a curious ambition for a Jew, but I wasn't much of a hand then for behavioral subtexts, and I didn't have much of a talent for accents (how could I, with a stutter?), so we merely puzzled Martha's Vineyard summer folk.\n\nAndrew liked to surprise people. At Harvard he fabricated from the innards of a vacuum cleaner a contrivance that could smoke to their nub a dozen cigars in half a minute and blow their accumulated smoke through the mail slot of the Eliot House room of any student who was in Andrew's disfavor. It was no great trick to earn Andrew's disfavor: gravity, any affectation not on the approved list of affectations, excessive care for dress or furniture\u2014these were just some of the ways. By and by the entire undergraduate body of Harvard, together with its faculty, became the object of Andrew's contumely, and he left school\u2014at the very time I was returning with unseemly eagerness to Princeton.\n\nSo, less than a year after we met, we began to divide, although neither of us knew this then. We still saw much of each other: in Boston and Princeton, in New York (where we listened to Monk at the Five Spot, and where Andrew pronounced judgments about work hung in the Frick and the Guggenheim and MoMA, and where I chased girls whom he disfavored). Often I would telephone Andrew collect near dawn, after a night of drinking with college chums, and confess incomprehensibly that I was frightened. Of what I couldn't have said and can only guess at now. I didn't know enough to be gloomy about my life's limited possibilities; I guess I was terrified by their number. It wasn't only that I didn't know what I wished to be once I grew up\u2014although this figured in my fear\u2014it was that I couldn't guess which of many parts I was most becoming. With one set of friends I played high-stakes poker, drank myself insensible, ran up debts and got myself known in the Dean's office as a scapegrace. Andrew disapproved.\n\nMy better performance was the scholar, or what passed with me as being a scholar. On my return from Sikorsky's mail room, I had been about my books with a will, and I began to collect grades and the approbation of my professors (in an earlier incarnation it had been merit badges and the approval of scoutmasters) with fanatical calculation. In literature I preferred the classical proprieties and among critics the New. I encouraged myself to believe I had the stamina for textual analysis and traded in the hoary anecdotes and jargon of the critical pastime; I could use with a straight face \"impropriety\" and \"conceit\" and \"rigor.\" Another favorite was \"paradox,\" but I failed to comprehend its application to my own case. Ask the Dean about \"impropriety\"! I wrote to Andrew (and to others) that I had quite decided to become Edmund Wilson rather than Scott Fitzgerald (possibilities were more limited than I knew) and would be a steady and knowing professor rather than tempest-tossed and naked to chance, a would-be artist, a mere mountebank and virtuoso. I closed this letter \"Shantih.\" Andrew disapproved.\n\nThe disapproval stung, so I tried to keep Andrew at a distance from my motivational drift and existential turmoils. Words were never Andrew's most fluent medium, and the choices before me didn't clarify when expressed by shrugs and grunts and hand signals. I also knew Andrew well enough to know I didn't wish to be judged by him. I was evasive about my past, and this troubled Andrew. He believed that I was ashamed of my parents' chaos, of my father's brushes with the law, of our poverty\u2014and he was right. When I met Andrew, I had not seen my mother since 1952, six years before; I hadn't heard from her, hadn't written her, didn't know where she lived. To conceal the mystery of her absence, I shrouded it in even thicker vapors, telling Andrew (with visible reluctance) when he asked about my mother that she lived abroad, hinting that her reasons were political. (How did I wish him to imagine her? A Spanish Communist exiled to Russia or a Russian princess exiled to Spain?)\n\nI appeared to Andrew perversely elusive. What I was hiding from him\u2014what seemed then my family's shameful and squalid mismanagement of its affairs, what seems now a merely human circumstance\u2014I couldn't have articulated. One night at Tanglewood, listening on the grass to Mozart, Andrew grilled me about my history, what a suitor's prospective in-laws might call his background. As usual, I hedged and dodged, and in sudden anger Andrew told me we couldn't continue as friends if I kept secrets from him. Very well, I told him, we couldn't continue as friends. He let his anger die, stout fellow. His challenge was certainly fair, but I didn't know how to meet it. I had been in my short time a Life Scout with a full drape of merit badges, a duck-assed comedian of the drive-ins, a prep-school Mister Casual, a Princeton bookworm, a parlor snake, an Engineering Communications Coordinator, a mail boy, a novelist, a defender of academic conventions, an outlaw, a disciple eager to ape and please my elders. I didn't know who I was, whence I had come, whither I meant to go. Because I was effectively without family, I was free to choose without interference what I might become. The world was all before me, and Providence my guide... So how could I know and share some \"simple truth,\" as Andrew called it, about myself? Well, he was right: I should have tried harder.\n\nWhen I would share with Andrew my affection for my teachers, he thought I was kidding. Wasn't I like him? Longing to break out? Did I trust old farts? _Like_ them? Andrew didn't. He liked kid stuff and kids, and kids liked him back. Around Martha's Vineyard he was a Pied Piper, drawing teens to the escapades and art that had his enthusiasm. Young girls had immortal longings for Andrew, giggled and blushed when he came near, and he came near. One, who lived a few houses down the beach from him, became a painter under his influence and persisted in painting long after Andrew abandoned it. As a teenager she would sit hours on the beach hoping to catch a glimpse of him, and now, decades later, he still exercises a powerful hold on her. She's not alone in his grip. When you were liked by Andrew, you felt liked by _someone;_ this felt good, like election.\n\nIf Andrew favored kids, I often felt closer to the fathers of my friends than to their sons, perhaps because I was so used to my father's company, or perhaps because I sought his replacement. I looked old for my age, and took pains to seem older, yet many of my aspirations were even more childish than Andrew's. We spoke sometimes about running off with his money, taking ourselves to the Maritime Alps to open a bar-jazz club-art gallery-bookstore. It was an absurd notion, and it was Andrew who first fully understood this and let it die. For all my solemnity about the life of the mind, I was fundamentally a sensualist, hospitable to any lark that might lead to fun.\n\nIt was just this appetite for novelty that led me to Turkey to teach at Robert College and Istanbul University. To get this job I had approached a teacher at Robert College, an American who had been in the OSS with a Princeton friend's father. Perhaps I had retailed this connection to Andrew? Meantime, Andrew had got himself in a jam. Less from conviction than from carelessness, he had failed to appear for his pre-induction physical exam. He did not \"believe\" in the draft, to be sure, but his detachment from the appointment to present himself for inspection had nothing to do with beliefs. The draft board believed in him, however, and when Andrew's father refused to bail out his boy, Andrew was soon at Fort Dix, where they asked him his profession. He said, \"Painter.\" They said, \"Great! Paint our trucks.\"\n\nAndrew was posted near Orl\u00e9ans just as I arrived in Paris to spend the summer of 1962 on vacation (as though I needed one) from Istanbul. By the blind luck that seems to fall to Americans in foreign places, I managed to set myself up rent-free in a big, sunny flat at 50 Rue Jacob, a couple of blocks from the Place Saint-Germain-des-Pr\u00e9s. Andrew came to visit weekends and whenever else he could escape his duties. I initiated Andrew to hashish, to which I had introduced myself a few months earlier. This commonplace of personal history is worth remarking only because hashish was the first novelty I had led Andrew to before he could lead me. Moreover, that summer was our only time together when he could be said to have been my sidekick. For a wonder, I had the apartment, the motorcycle and the dope.\n\nI wore a beard and dressed in tatters; I was a veritable repertory of props by which the hip artist in exile might be recognized. Andrew's hair was cut close, in the Army way, and he was forever obliged to leave our fun and ruminations for bed check in the Orl\u00e9ans barracks, like a schoolboy racing to beat the bell. The Army fast soured him, and he became even more jumpy and abridged than before; he delivered muttered monologues I couldn't decipher, so I'd nod and look sage.\n\nWe had unlike attitudes toward time that summer in Paris. Andrew was stretching himself thin, giving a portion to the Army and bigger portions to pottery and photography. (He'd abandoned painting and sculpture when his taste and virtuosity could carry him no further without disciplined labor.) He was a busy dabbler, a deft tinkerer. I was idle, putting many hours into listening to the Jazz Messengers and MJQ, _No Sun in Venice_ , while I listlessly snapped cards off a worn deck of Bicycles, cheating at solitaire while I waited for day to close and the jazz clubs to open. Andrew could be a scold, and he didn't try hard to keep to himself his reservations regarding my character. \"Where's the writing going, Geoffers?\" Andrew liked exploration and explosive bursts of progress, kinesis, and there I was, all lassitude and delinquency, waste, and Andrew\u2014more his frugal Scottish-American father's son than he understood\u2014did not approve.\n\nRobert College paid me eighteen hundred a year, deposited quarterly in a New York bank. These dollars I spent in two chunks: five hundred for a month in the winter in Vienna and the Tyrol, and the rest in Paris for the summer. By husbandry (cultivating a taste for pleasures that came free) and by barter (giving a bed or floor-space to friends passing through in exchange for dinner at La Coupole or a few rounds of calvados at Lipp's), I managed to live well, but Andrew couldn't imagine how. He ate and drank less and worse than I but thought nothing of buying a five-hundred-dollar lens for his backup Leica. Observing my comfort and mobility, Andrew puzzled over my means. Where, he wondered, once or twice aloud, did my money come from? He would not believe it came entirely from teaching.\n\nIn fact it didn't. I boosted my salary as opportunity allowed. I tutored the slow-witted, sometimes in literature but more often in poker. Cards and a demure trade in hashish knocked me down about a hundred a month. But I was never invited to suck at the most bountiful of Istanbul's tits, to milk the CIA. Of my colleagues on the faculty of Robert College, many\u2014if not most\u2014supped there.\n\nTypically, an American would be recruited before he left home for Turkey. One colleague told me how it worked\u2014well, there's a lie: _many_ colleagues couldn't wait to explain how it worked. For a certain retainer a newly hired teacher attended a comical training course in Virginia; there the recruit was taught to memorize license-plate numbers (that's not so taxing: my dad and I knew ours by heart), how to recognize and evade a hostile tail, how to write in his pocket with a pencil one inch long. Why, exactly, one inch exactly? Because this primitive instrument could be used to calculate by elementary geometry the height of an American elm exactly one thousand feet from the calculator, and by shrewd extrapolation the height of a rocket erect on its launching pad.\n\nThe spook was sent to Turkey with one-half of a banknote (the Bulgarian lev was in vogue), the other half to be brought later to Istanbul by whoever was running him. These contacts were invariably known as \"Lee,\" though they changed from meeting to meeting. They would telephone the teacher at Robert College to arrange contact, and such was the transparency of their conspiratorial manner that I once heard a man in the faculty lounge paged to a communal telephone thus: \"Mike, for you, it's your spy.\" Good news, payday.\n\nPayday never came for me. No one asked me to \"keep my eyes open\" or \"keep my ears cocked\" or \"hang around the common room\" and report the political inclinations of my students. So far as I knew, they had none and neither did the faculty, including the spies among us. So far as I could tell, every American save yrs. trly. was employed to report on every other American, and since the faculty at Robert College was a glorious aggregation of misfits and scoundrels and layabouts and dreamers and drunks and bards, I felt slighted by the Agency, an Ishmael among pariahs.\n\nThe meeting with the contact was always at the Istanbul Hilton, and I witnessed many of these, including one between a Yugoslavian railroad agent and an English poet who had been recruited in transit to Beirut on a Soviet freighter by the ship's captain in the mistaken impression that the poet was an American engineer, which is what the poet's stolen passport, bought for reasons of his own at Istanbul's Spice Bazaar, said he was. American spies\u2014\"Lees\"\u2014invariably wore a black hat and black trench coat. (This is difficult to take on faith, I know.) I'd never before seen a black trench coat worn by the wearer of a black hat indoors, except maybe in cartoons that featured animals playing spies.\n\nThe runner (full-time spy) would slip down the bar to join his runnee (my teaching colleague), who would show half a Bulgarian lev to \"Lee,\" who would show his own before slipping an envelope stuffed with small bills into the professor's jacket pocket, a transaction witnessed by no more than twenty Turks and rival spies. My colleague would then speak, saying within my earshot, \"I may have been followed, but perhaps I was not.\" To this \"Lee\" would reply: \"Leave at once; wait for a call next month.\" (Oh, this is very difficult to swallow.)\n\nThen came the Cuban Missile Crisis, and many of us in Turkey were politicized, at last, by terror\u2014the effective way. There was speculation about reprisals (what was sauce for the Cuban goose was sauce for the Turkish gander; this made sense to us), and Americans were put on alert by the consulate, whose officers brainstormed wildly impractical plans for our evacuation. My poet friend departed for Athens, wishing (he said theatrically, at the bar of the Divan) to be where It All began when It All ended. He ran out of money and returned, resolved to quit the spy business. Not that he had ever shared intelligence with his employer, but quitting was, he said, a matter of principle, and when \"Lee\" next telephoned, my friend demanded an immediate meeting. In deference to the urgency of the occasion, they found each other at the bar of the Pera Palas, a now seedy hotel of preposterously romantic associations, a shrine for spies, their hall of fame. My friend, having announced his change of heart, was directed by this \"Lee,\" whom he had never before seen, to the men's room. There, standing before the urinals, he was sworn out of service, commanded to accept an oath of silence with his hand raised. \"Lee\" was firm on this point, most insistent, and my friend, having sworn _omert\u00e0_ , ten minutes later told me the whole story, adding that obliged as he had been to raise his gun hand, he had pissed on \"Lee's\" trench coat and last-a-lifetime brogans.\n\nI chose to believe this farce, and passed it along to Andrew with no small pleasure. Andrew was by then in an Army hospital, having at the close of 1962 driven his truck into a tree not far from Verdun. His leg was smashed near the hip, and when the truck began to burn he had dragged himself and his camera from the cab and crawled across the road, pausing every few yards to shoot a picture of his bloody and ruined leg, with the truck aflame in the background. The photographs, taken with a 21-mm Super-Angulon on a Leica M3, display extreme depth of field; they were startlingly composed. Andrew is nothing if not exact in such matters, an artist with a sense\u2014in those days\u2014of distance from his subject.\n\nThe cause of the accident\u2014or, more precisely, the cause of the cause\u2014was never revealed. Had he merely fallen asleep at the wheel? Or had this been an act calculated to free him from what he no longer would bear? There had been hints when I had visited Andrew on post that haphazard contact with strangers, inevitable in the service, was becoming intolerable for him. He had come to despise the touch of people. I could throw an arm around him, brother hugging brother, if he saw it coming. But if a hand fell on his shoulder from behind and without warning, he would recoil. He was offended by the relentless carnality of his comrades, by their vulgar talk, by their roughhouse, by the food he shared with them and the drink he didn't. The Army was turning Andrew into a snob, and he hated the Army for this.\n\nFour months before the accident we had ridden my motorcycle to Chartres on a matchless August morning, brisk for the season, through fields of cut and stacked hay, taking the sensations in our faces and marveling that we had come so far from Stowe and the Round Hearth. We had not, had we an inkling, come so far; we two-for-a-penny American sightseers had made a routine excursion. But we were carried away that day by the day, and by ourselves, and of course by Chartres. Having read Henry Adams on the place, I played guide and scholar, and Andrew played aesthetician. I wish I were back today in that day. That afternoon we rode flat out to Orl\u00e9ans, and walked along the Loire while Andrew skipped stones across the water and spoke, I believed, of desertion. Or maybe early discharge; we would never be so close again, but even then I couldn't fathom his meaning.\n\nAfter his accident they tried to mend him at military hospitals in Verdun, Verona, Frankfurt and Valley Forge, and from one of these he wrote: \"Geoffers\u2014It has been too long. I have thought of what this time might have brought. And now years have passed. And more in these past few months. And yet I sit on the edge of a hospital bed with the approaching still distant. More certain and questionable though now there is known all that must be done. And this is not a mental hospital. I rise above all this but at times fall still behind these fences and guard houses. All that is without is within. And there has been great change through no change.\"\n\nThat's what it said. His calligraphy is exact, bold and all uppercase, but he had at best an uneasy relationship with syntax: too authoritarian, systematic. Andrew was answering the call of Eastern systems, the Wisdom of the Inscrutables, the _I Ching_ , yoga, Zen archery, macrobiotic principles of nourishment, the gibberish of paradox. Simultaneously, he yielded to the pull of those cosmic hucksters Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and Orage. Meantime, the Army botched its work on his leg; the pin in his thigh bent. He visited his father in Chicago, where he went (inadvertently?) AWOL. He seemed eager to break free of the gravitational pull of this world and float free to another.\n\nNot I; I welcomed gravity. In the chaos of Istanbul's goatish culture I had conceived a relish for order and had begun to walk, placing my feet deliberately and heavily, on carefully picked ground. I had applied for a Fulbright to study at Cambridge, and when a notice instructed me to report for an interview at the United States consulate, I considered five minutes before shaving off the beard I had so laboriously grown and come to define myself by. I wanted that Fulbright, and got it, despite the circumstance that my interviewer wore buckskins, muttonchops and a droopy Yosemite Sam mustache.\n\nMy Cambridge was a lively place, its politics expressed mostly by factional strife among faculty members, but also by earnest ideological disputation. I wrote for the radical magazine _Cambridge Forward_ about the sins of white folks, the infamy of _Time_ , the treachery of Jack Kennedy and the CIA. Perhaps because I celebrated the virtues of America's enemies, perhaps because I had known James Baldwin well in Istanbul, I was described by a _Cambridge Forward_ editor as a \"disciple of Jimmy Baldwin.\" This irritated me: I surely didn't object to identification with a black man or with a homosexual\u2014the first would distinguish me at Cambridge, the latter put me one with the mob\u2014but I wished to cast off the burden of being anyone's \"disciple.\"\n\nI hung out with King's College Communists, great gentlemen every one, Etonians and Harrovians who wore blue jeans under their gowns and bespoke dinner jackets to club dances. They were quick, those boys, and when we weren't joking, I liked to muse with them about the coming revolution, even as their porters made their beds, drew their baths, laid their fires, shined their shoes. If I _was_ anyone's disciple those days, I was T. S. Eliot's, and I believed I had learned from his example that a writer required fuel beyond language; I was hunting for a credo, and because I had no more use for God than God had for me, Marxism, for a minute, seemed a way to vault beyond myself and pick up free a reservoir of ritual and legend, of hagiography and historical reference.\n\nDuring the period of my revolutionary fervor, or appropriation\u2014to be measured in weeks rather than months\u2014Andrew came to Cambridge for a visit, and I attached my theatrical account of my conversion to a motor trip I had taken the previous winter through Eastern Europe. With a couple of friends, I had crossed the border into Czechoslovakia during the worst storm of the worst European winter of the century. As we made our way behind snowplows to Prague, we listened while the Voice of America broadcast news of the storm's terrible disruptions behind the Iron Curtain. We heard of fuel shortages, blocked roads, riots by angry workers and housewives. (In fact our VW, bearing West German plates, was attacked by men coming off shift at a brewery in Pilsen. We cried out that we were Americans and devoted beer drinkers, but snowballs were thrown at us, and our windshield was spat upon by nationalists who did not approve of German automobiles, German anythings.) Nothing of what we heard on the radio was true, and when we crested a hill and saw below us Prague, putatively without electricity or joy, in fact alit and on the move and the most gorgeous sight in Europe, we began to wonder about our countrymen as not even their double-dare with Khrushchev over Cuba had made us wonder.\n\nMore precisely, I had lost my patriotic cherry: my countrymen lied. As the sons of preachers often turn libertine, so do the sons of libertines turn prig, and the prig in me despised propaganda, just as the would-be scholar in me despised inexactitude. And when the _oddest_ thing happened in Prague\u2014strangers washed our car while we slept; is that a miracle or what?\u2014I improbably concluded that I hated America. This I told Andrew during his visit to Cambridge, but not without adding that I also hated Communist tyranny: \"Killing one generation to save the next just won't do.\" Oh my word: _won't do!_ What snaky twists I showed my friend. What was he to think? His accident had turned him solemn, and time had turned me to patchwork. Even as I delivered pronouncements about the masses, so had my taste in literature become increasingly mandarin. (Pope was a favorite, Congreve!) Andrew was beginning to remark aloud my unresolved paradoxes; he'd cock his head when he looked at me. For my part, something about his judgments raised a bloodlust in me; I delighted in mystifying him.\n\nA couple of weeks after Andrew left Cambridge for America, President Kennedy was shot. The news came at dinner, and that night I listened to America's theater of cruelty play out by shortwave at my tutor's house; George Steiner had invited fellow Americans to hear how it was at home, and how it was was distressingly distant. Later that night I took a young Louisville woman motorcycle riding, and managed to plow into the rear of a truck parked on the blind side of humpbacked Magdalene Bridge. The bike hit going seventy; she was not hurt, but I crushed the bones in my right hand, cut my head, had a concussion. I lay in the hospital watching the rain, listening to news of Oswald and then Ruby, to the funeral, to my country's trouble. I was ashamed of myself.\n\nMaybe the rain, maybe Kennedy's death, maybe an ambition to get on with it drove me home from Cambridge at the end of the first year of a two-year fellowship. The instant I stepped off the plane in New York, where I had gone to spend the summer of '64, I knew\u2014to my surprise\u2014I wouldn't go back. I had fallen in love with an American. Andrew thought this was a waste of time; he had watched me fall in love times aplenty. Falling in love was my hobby. I loved to fall in love. It was difficult to go AWOL from Cambridge; I disappointed people who had been good to me there, who had trusted me to come to something\u2014by their lights\u2014 _useful_ , a critic and academic, by my lights a careerist. Andrew urged me to return to England. He wanted me to locate my mission, and to him marriage was no mission, but simply an indulgence.\n\nI didn't listen to him. I took a job at _The Washington Post_ , writing obits and night-police scare stories, and after a year, the week I was married, the paper traded me up to book editor. I was able to pay my way in the world, and this made me proud. Andrew, who had always been able to pay his way by the fruit of his ancestors' labor and wit, was puzzled by my pride. But he was my friend\u2014wasn't he?\u2014and he and my brother gave me away (what a gift!) in the wedding on the Rhode Island shore, at Priscilla's grandmother's, a tumble-down old house whose loss of glory was memorialized by its name, The Ruins.\n\nThe marriage had come hard for us. Priscilla's parents disapproved; they over-our-dead-bodies disapproved, as Andrew knew, and he was cast down that I had so little self-respect as to marry someone whose parents were not enraptured to have me as a son-in-law. Andrew did a worse job than he imagined of keeping his reservations to himself, and I was irritated that he didn't seem to share our happiness. I was in love, respected my work, was fond of my colleagues, happy to have fled Cambridge. Perhaps I seemed smug. Perhaps I was smug.\n\nAndrew took the wedding photographs. I sit now looking at them and recognize how gorgeously cruel they are. Beautiful: Andrew cannot make anything graceless or pedestrian. But these images! He glued them by twos to opposite sides of mounting boards, so that, flipped back and forth, they tell a story\u2014before and after\u2014and point a moral. The before is a portrait of me near Chartres, mounted on my black A.J.S. motorcycle, lean and scruffy, grinning, a freebooter. Flip: I'm fat and anxious, got up in wedding rig, striped trousers and rented ascot, an involuntary rictus easily mistaken for a smirk disfiguring my mug. Here is my history with my friend, in two dozen images, sent me in a case Andrew scrupulously made from rosewood, a thing better fit for dueling pistols.\n\nAndrew went among the wedding guests like a scourge, bringing into extreme focus with his sharpest lens this lady's wrecked, eighty-year-old face and neck, that patrician patriarch's alcoholic blear. Andrew must have hated them, maybe hated us that day. For what? I could guess: he thought them unworthy of my company, and me of his. There was a nasty scene: his outlaw dog tried, with amiable gusto, to screw an in-law's pooch, and failing, discovering it to be no bitch after all, took about half a pound out of the tame creature. Shame and scandal.\n\nSome time later Priscilla and I visited Andrew in Putney, Vermont, where he had bought a farm. Andrew had become a despotic nutritionist, and we got lectured about organic processes, the yin of things and their yang, getting in touch with our cells. Maybe I was cynical. Certainly, as days passed, I got hungry. One night Priscilla and I, starved for junk food, crept down the farmhouse stairs after lights-out to sneak over to Brattleboro for tube steak with fries. Andrew caught us, and we all fell to laughing. Matters between us had not gone utterly to ruin.\n\nOn the contrary, he showed us the movies he was making, inventive and playful, Bergman parodies, cops-and-robbers parodies, fresh visions of common scenes. Andrew and I played Priscilla records of the jazz\u2014Monk, Coltrane, Miles\u2014we had heard together at the Five Spot; we were already, only seven years into our friendship, nostalgic for its past.\n\nWe decided to carry our party to Washington, where Priscilla and I lived near Dupont Circle in a perfectly precious little triplex row house, the kind of place nice mummies and daddies shared when their means were limited but their tastes refined. We had equipped it with coarse replicas of her parents' and grandparents' furniture, bought on the installment plan. Wedding-present-traditional, complete with hunting prints and ubiquitous bathroom art, cartoons of dogs queued up waiting for the hydrant. We burned pretty little birch logs\u2014more costly by the cord than dollar bills\u2014in our pretty little fireplace with its pretty little black marble mantel. It was Christmastime, and Andrew and his teenaged lady of the moment watched me lavish goods on Priscilla, a crazy surplus: two Pucci jackets, identical except for their dominant colors, a gold watch, I don't know what all. I wore a necktie in my own house! We ate roast beef, roast turkey, roast ham, too much of everything; during dinner we drank toasts to our well-dressed friends, appropriate wine in apropos glasses.\n\nAndrew sneered at our furniture and clothes and friends. He was as indirect in his disapproval as in everything, but he managed\u2014difficult trick\u2014to offend Priscilla; he insisted on cooking for himself, untreated rice in a pressure cooker, and when he consented to eat our food, he ate it savagely with his hands, to tell us something about himself and about us. There were ugly words, and when Andrew left Washington, something had been played out for good between us. It hadn't snapped, merely stretched and lost elasticity, like the back of someone who has lifted not too great a weight but a slight weight carelessly. The flowers of friendship were fading, but I continued to think of him as my best friend. As I do now, insanely.\n\nWe saw little of each other for the next few years. One time Andrew came to visit and listened to me expatiate on the stratagems of the CIA. By the kind of coincidence that has now stung me with its tail, the fathers of three of my closest Washington friends were personages in the Agency. One father had engineered assassinations and coups, another had lied to Adlai Stevenson during the Bay of Pigs harlequinade, another was neck-deep in Indochina.\n\nWith one of these I had had some glancing professional association. During the spring of 1965, a mere boy, an inchling low in my employer's esteem, I resolved to show the newspaper my stuff with a book review and pestered the book critic till she gave me something to judge: Morris West's novel about Vietnam, _The Ambassadors_. It was thin stuff, a black hats versus white hats simplification of the overthrow and murder of Diem. The villain was the CIA's chief of station in Saigon.\n\nA couple of hours after I had received this book, a few _minutes_ after I had read it, I was telephoned by one of my CIA fathers, recently retired. He wished to see me at his Georgetown house first thing in the morning, before breakfast. This was a command rather than an invitation, and I agreed, flattered and intimidated. I spent that night tangled in risible dreams of Istanbul and the Hilton bar and, on waking, wondered whether I should tell the man I would soon see, an OSS legend, about the pratfalls made in his institution's name.\n\nSeeing him at his door, dressed in his robe, exceedingly agitated, I knew I would tell that man nothing. He was not used to being told but to telling, and even then I reflected that such overbearing impatience was not the model temperamental equipment for a collector of intelligence. This man, mighty and consequential, revered by others mighty and consequential, astonished me by saying with immoderate anger that the book I had under review was a masterpiece of falsehood and treachery, that it posed a fundamental threat to the welfare of the United States and its allies, and that it _must_ be denounced, that I must do \"the right thing.\" He then took inventory of the book's few factual errors, none momentous, and sent me away. He seemed satisfied that I would do the right thing, when in fact he had enhanced West's stature in my eyes.\n\nHow had he learned that I was _The Ambassador_ 's reviewer? Why had he bothered\u2014at what risk of my gossip?\u2014trying to manipulate the critical judgment of a cub reporter? I shared these questions with Andrew, who took the episode (I now know) as evidence that I was myself an agent, a secret-sharer in a plot against truth and fair play, taking instruction from my superiors.\n\nSoon thereafter I wrote an expos\u00e9 of the USIA and the CIA, both of which were subsidizing and commissioning works of propaganda put forth by trade publishers, without reference to their origins, as disinterested works of scholarship. I knew I had caught the USIA with its britches down (its scheme was memorialized by the _Congressional Record_ ), but I had no documentary evidence of the CIA's witchwork. So one night at a Georgetown dinner party, in violation of decorum and common sense, I asked my host, an Agency personage, whether the CIA paid for books and bought writers.\n\n\"Sure,\" my friend's dad said. \"Many publishers are our pals. Don't say I told you or I'll be _very_ cross.\"\n\nI was stunned. He was so courtly, so sympathetic to my piece and to my career, so amused, so indifferent to having poisoned wells. With his help I went forward with the story, which exposed a practice I now guess he found distasteful (and costly). The report attracted publicity and did me no harm.\n\nAndrew read it: \"How did you nail down those CIA details?\"\n\nI smiled a deep smile, the smile of an insider protecting a secret. I said nothing. Andrew cocked his head, squinted, tried to read me. Now I know that he believed my information came from the best place of all, from within my own company.\n\nI saw Andrew only once again before he broke in on us in Vermont years later, on his mission of acquittal and repair. He passed through Washington after filming black Mississippi farm workers who had struck rather than starve on wretched wages. They had built a commune, Strike City, where they gathered in tents to decide what to do. They proposed to organize a brickmaking factory, but there were squabbles, and too little money, and it rained and it rained and it rained, and Andrew's documentary had no happy ending.\n\nHe was driving home to Putney when he decided to show us the rough cut, and also there that night were my brother Toby and the I. F. Stones. Toby was about to leave for Vietnam as an officer in the Special Forces, and he was more mindful than I what a mixed audience we made. My brother was for me my brother, no imperial running dog, no kid-murderer. Izzy Stone didn't make him feel on top of the world about his forthcoming trip, but by the standards of the day Stone was gentle that night, more eager to teach than to hector. He was grimmer in response to Andrew's movie, finding it beautiful, lovely, exquisite, delicate\u2014but somehow beside some important point. I was disappointed that he and Andrew didn't warm to each other. Andrew was making radical noises, but he and Stone didn't seem to recognize each other as allies. Maybe Stone had already seen a beautiful documentary or two about the oppressed.\n\nIt was difficult those days to sort friendships and beliefs. What a mess, the late sixties.\n\nFollowing a fancy dinner party one night, Nick von Hoffman and I pledged to quit our jobs at the _Post_ the next morning if the paper didn't immediately and publicly repudiate its editorial support of the Vietnam War. We were to meet at ten sharp in the office of J. R. Wiggins, to force on him our ultimatum. But when the telephone woke me at ten I was a sick and wretched fellow. \"Well?\" von Hoffman said. \"Maybe tomorrow,\" I said. \"Jesus, it's a big move. Let's discuss it.\" Von Hoffman laughed an odd laugh, and I crawled back into bed, and a couple of years later he confessed he'd phoned me from his own rack.\n\nAll good people hated the war, of course, but there were elegant and clumsy variations on this rancor. I remember another dinner, at our place, with several _Post_ reporters and an editor. It was an easy, bright occasion, what we'd come to expect with journalists, quick laughers and late-nighters. One of the reporters had brought along a knockout date, eighteen, maybe younger. She was sullen and mute, picking at her food; thinking to draw her out, I remarked on her ornate ring, and paid it a compliment. \"This is a poison ring,\" she told the table, with no smile, \"and unless that bastard McNamara has stopped bombing by Tuesday, I will poison myself with it.\" (I checked: on Tuesday, and two weeks from Tuesday, McNamara had not ceased bombing. I forgot to ask my reporter friend where they buried his date.)\n\nSometimes, after too much drink on such a night, after the guests left, I'd turn morose, decide I'd lost my chance at something. Then, near dawn, I'd phone Andrew and wake him from his sleep in Putney to bang his ears with my beefs, or to orate against the war, or to knit a tangled narrative of the CIA's real and imagined intrigues. I'd ask Andrew what did he make of the Company, that snake ranch of knotted motives and interlocking plots? I couldn't understand his response\u2014surprise, surprise\u2014because he was too drowsy to speak other than gibberish, or I was too crocked to interpret him. So then I'd ask the commonplace questions. Where have you been? What have you been up to?\n\nHe'd tell me, with some reluctance (as I now recall), that he'd organized a filmmakers' cooperative called News-reel, and someone else told me that its short movies, shown at communes and on campuses, were introduced by a logo spelled out with machine-gun bullets. I heard that Andrew had been in North Vietnam and had made a movie there and that some of his undeveloped footage, shot on Chinese stock, had been seized by customs officers, opened and destroyed. And that the rest had been saved because Andrew had had the cunning to suggest that the customs officer telephone the CIA, and tell the Agency what they were destroying.\n\nLater, he would blame me for having informed on him, and would remember a question I had asked\u2014\"What's coming up next?\"\u2014and his reply: \"A trip to Hanoi.\"\n\nI heard that he was teargassed at the 1968 Democratic Convention and that he returned to Chicago to film the Days of Rage. The year before that, he had broken with me. The occasion was the levitation of the Pentagon by the Fugs, attended by many a thousand but principally by Norman Mailer. I heard Mailer do his Southern-sheriff number at an abandoned movie theater; there was a light show, and Robert Lowell did a drunk act, and the following day kids burned their draft cards and driver's licenses and stuffed flowers into the rifles of perplexed soldiers.\n\nWhile this theater was in progress, I was in my study at home, winding up an essay for _The New Leader_ about Ezra Pound, trying to explain why a writer, by design subversive of the common interest, must nevertheless function as a social animal. Two-thirds through this piece I got a demonstration of its conundrum: Andrew phoned to announce that he required the use of my house the following few days, beginning _tout de suite_. He was in Washington with forty or so protesters; they would need a place to crash and food within the hour. I told my best friend that he would not be welcome with his mob, that my baby boy was teething and wailing, that there were other complicated reasons, that I was busy, that I had no choice.\n\nI didn't see or hear from Andrew again for eight years.\n\nAndrew's Putney farm became a commune, and its communards were often rousted by the state police or the FBI during dragnets and manhunts for Weatherpeople or for Angela Davis or for lesser, more local public enemies. I heard tales of a lack of comity on the farm, that while Andrew assailed the values of the middle class, so did his collective brothers and sisters assail his own. One friendly neighbor\u2014there were unfriendly neighbors in abundance\u2014believed Andrew was a patsy, but that he knew he was being used. The tribal women struck and accused the men of treating them like chattels. Then communards of both sexes faced Andrew down and demanded that he share his fortune with them, all of it. They wanted clear title to his farm, and he refused to yield it. Hearing this, I recollected a hoary political fable: a man of high ideals applies for membership in the Communist Party, and during an admission interview he is asked questions. If he had two houses, would he give one to the Party? \"Of course,\" he responds. And two cars, would one go to the Party? \"Naturally,\" he says. How about two shirts, what if he had two shirts? \"No way,\" he says. Why? \"Because I got two shirts.\" Assuredly, the brave new world bristled with paradox.\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\nAndrew never told me how he had found us in Vermont, or why he wanted to. At dinner he spoke of his new movie, described by its blurb as a \"vast, sprawling fresco whose subject is birth and rebirth in these United States in the mid-1970s.\" Andrew said it was about the Movement and its \"survivors,\" about loose ends, truces, navigational checks, interregnum, pardon. It had, he said, \"done well at Cannes.\" I was surprised by the show-biz locution, as later I would be by his familiarity with the ins and outs of hype, his accurate sense of \"key\" reviews and promotional timing; the film was about to open at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. Andrew was warm to us, sweet and condescending. I suspected that for Andrew I was a loose end, to be forgiven, a figure for the New Peace. I began to think, as I drank my wine, that mine was a role I did wish to play, and I asked Andrew why he had abandoned our friendship.\n\nThe question made him squirm, as though it were a social climber's gaffe at a formal dinner. His friend cleared her throat, and Priscilla cleared the table. No one spoke.\n\n\"What happened, Andrew? Where did you _go?_ \"\n\n\"That's done, Geoffers. Forget it.\"\n\n\"No, I don't want to. Why did you give up on us?\"\n\n\"Well, on you. I gave up on the side you chose.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"During my friends' march on the Pentagon, you said you didn't want to see Washington burn.\"\n\n\"I didn't.\"\n\n\"I did.\"\n\n\"You were wrong.\"\n\n\"You were wrong.\"\n\nThen he explained that he couldn't afford to trust me. He told me of the Movement's betrayals, of drugs planted by brothers on brothers to rig charges. He told of COINTELPRO, informers, seditions. I was sympathetic, asked what all this had to do with our friendship.\n\n\"Look,\" he said, \"I know what you were and what you still are, I guess.\"\n\n\"And what is that?\"\n\nAnd he told me: I was a spook, a mole, a Company Man. I had been recruited at Princeton, perhaps even before I met him. I had been an agent in Istanbul and in Paris. My Fulbright had been arranged by the Agency so I could infiltrate the radical movement at Cambridge. _The Washington Post_ was notoriously a collaborator of the Company and so was _Newsweek_ , where I'd worked. Andrew's friend nodded vigorous agreement with these judgments.\n\n\"How about Princeton? I taught there. Is Princeton wired in?\"\n\n\"Are you kidding? Of course. My _father_ went to Princeton.\"\n\n\"And my Guggenheim?\"\n\n\"Howard Hunt had one.\"\n\n\"And now. Here? Perched on the edge of a meadow beyond the back of the goddamned beyond? What am I doing here?\"\n\nAndrew shrugged. \"I don't know. Hey, Geoffers, I don't care! Deep cover, who knows how you guys work? This isn't why I came, to dredge up these things.\"\n\n\"And my books. My life?\"\n\nAndrew shrugged again, made a wig-wag gesture of dismissal, shooing flies. Two of my novels had minor characters in the CIA. Had I been trying to warn him? Anyway, the books were a side issue, not important, of a piece with my strategy of cover and deception. He told me this cheerfully, and I tried to remember that I had loved this man.\n\nHis companion spoke, from some deep well of contemplation: \"Hey, Andrew? Guys like this [and here she made her own sweeping hand gesture, taking in pets, bric-a-brac, my wife, my sons, my furniture\u2014I mean the furnishings of my life, our tangibles\u2014as well as my countenance] weren't the kinda guys who ratted us out. The pricks who sold us out didn't wear neckties.\"\n\n\"I'm not wearing a necktie,\" I said.\n\n\"Yeah,\" she said, \"but you look like a guy in a necktie. The worst finks were the coolest dudes.\"\n\nDoubt creased Andrew's brow. Could she be right? And then an odd feeling swept me. I didn't want to be a fellow in a necktie, some square who was no other thing, neither less nor more, than he seemed. I welcomed Andrew's faith that I was deep, a mole-like creature of secretly held codes, a masked man, underground man, slant deceiver. So when my friend, suddenly again a hanging judge, inquired how I had managed to afford my house, to quit _Newsweek_ and Princeton, I could have told him. Instead I shrugged: \"That's my business, Andrew.\"\n\nHe recapitulated his doubts about me, my preoccupation with spies and their plots, my friends in the Agency, my freedom from conventional responsibilities (in contrast, say, to his bondage?), my questions about his own wartime comings and goings.\n\n\"I was your friend, Andrew. Friends ask friends questions.\"\n\nHe shook his head from side to side. Studied his fingers. \"I don't know.\"\n\nAnd then I was furious. The error was gross: he thought of me as the lowest of things, capable of betraying him and doing him hurt. In my anger I defended myself on the narrowest grounds. Had I not excoriated the CIA in print? (Andrew smirked: what better way to burrow deeper? Anyway, who cared? He was right: who cared?) Had I not... had I not... had I not _what?_ Well, hadn't I many times taken the hide right off America in my essays and reviews?\n\nAndrew said: \"What did that cost you? Just words. Did you help? Name someone you helped. By name. What did you change? What did it _cost_ you?\"\n\nAndrew had no right to this. I owed him nothing now. Once, but not now. Now my debts were to others\u2014Priscilla, my boys. I would justify myself no more to this old friend. I wanted to go to bed. Andrew and I grabbed each other's arms from reflex or learned habit\u2014\"Good to see you again, pal,\" I said; \"Good to see you again, my friend,\" he said\u2014and we parted, he downstairs to bed and I upstairs, where I would lie till sunup staring at my ceiling.\n\nA few days later I wrote Andrew a letter, told him he was crazy: \"I know not without reason. I know that you have had reason to suspect people, many people of many things. I can't worry about that: you chose a risky life, and I respect you for that. But I have never done anything, ever, not once, to betray you, hurt you. Imagine if you will, try to imagine, what it means if you have been utterly wrong about me all these years. Imagine that I am _not_ an agent of the CIA, FBI, Amerika, of anything except myself and what I believe in. That what I have said to you over the years has had no subtext. Jaysus, I'm stunned, just bowled over. I feel as though I've been McCarthyed, Stalined, Pintered. But I think you know all this. And that you weary of judging people so harshly. But we won't get anywhere until you know that you have been wrong, wrong, wrong about me, who and what I have been, and why I have done what I have done. What I seem is what I am. [!] I hope that's enough for you.\"\n\nI received a reply, friendly enough, ignoring what was between us. A postcard showing a war scene busy with soldiers, dive-bombers, trenches, red flags. The painting is hung in the Imperial War Museum and shows Lenin and Stalin looking down, as though\u2014improbably\u2014from heaven. It is captioned: \"Under the banner of Lenin and Stalin onward to the west!\"\n\nI went to New York to see Andrew's movie. Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center was filled, and before the lights went down Andrew came onstage to read a plea that we cease murdering our brothers and sisters in Indochina. He read without evident passion, mumbling; the audience was bewildered by his purpose, for America had at last left the field to its enemies. There were a couple of intermissions, and at the first more than half the house took off for good. By the end only a few remained.\n\n_The New York Times_ liked the movie, and I wanted to, but it was a mess. It had radiant sea- and landscapes, shots of sunsets and snowfalls, mountains and coastlines. It got the grubby look of American cities; the photography was professionally\u2014let's say, slickly\u2014executed. But the movie ran past three hours, of which forty minutes showed a natural childbirth that will go far to rouse sexual partners to the banner of contraception. Andrew was co-director, co-screenwriter, co-photographer and co-editor. He also played a blind homosexual potter and saxophonist, the best acting in the movie. There was my old friend: he had somehow learned, during moments stolen from the Revolution, to play tenor sax, and he was good, doing a fair imitation of Coltrane's sheets of sound. What gifts! He still relished playacting, showing off, clowning. _There_ was his curiosity: what's it like to be blind? Let's pretend, stumble here and there, roll back the eyes, sniff the air for clues, cock an ear to whispers. What a ham! How proud I was of my old friend, those few minutes he was on screen.\n\nThe rest was cant and jargon, mindless, humorless crap: \"You kids have a better relationship to your feelings than I did,\" a character characteristically verbalizes. The movie was a prolonged complaint by \"society's victims\" against the crummy cards they had been dealt. What a parade: nudists, acupuncturists, Maoists, Trotskyites, dopers, middle-class hoboes on the lam from the burbs, gorp eaters, crybabies.\n\nI wanted the movie to fail; I didn't want it to fail. And then, as I saw Andrew's face\u2014still boyish, no meanness in it\u2014looking over the almost empty auditorium when the lights at last came up, I thought I understood him. For a moment he had come aboveground. He was himself a mole, but for the moment he was a movie hustler up from underground to walk among us, looking to put his finger on our systems, wishing for his movie success and a long run. Had he powwowed with his comrades about a \"media blitz\" even as they discussed how to raze our corrupt society and its office buildings? Did they speak communally of \"points\" and \"net of net\" and \"turn-around\"? Had they \"shopped\" their \"property\" at the studios? They had.\n\nWell: there would be none of that, as the empty theater foretold, and Andrew looked relieved, a slave emancipated from success and his secret vice, a longing to be well loved and loved by many. There are worse vices; there are few better.\n\nI saw Andrew the next afternoon. I was staying at the apartment of a friend who was in Europe. I telephoned Andrew at his Greene Street loft and was answered by a PhoneMate. Think of it: taps on tape! What revolutionaries these were! I left a number, name and title: \"Wolff, from the Company.\" Andrew returned my call, and we agreed to meet where I was staying, not at all Andrew's turf; I gave him an address on Central Park South.\n\n\"Whose apartment?\"\n\n\"Ask for Joe Fox,\" I told him.\n\nI heard him sigh, a kind of whistle of admiration. Joe (Geoffers) Fox (Wolff): the network spread wide. Double blinds, safe houses.\n\nWhen he came over, I talked of his movie, and I was more cruel than candor licensed. (There's repayment for your indifference to _my_ work. Shame on me.) Andrew was itchy to leave, looked this way and that at Fox's estimable antiques and paintings, things such as Andrew's father cherished.\n\n\"I like pretty things,\" I said. Perhaps Andrew thought the sideboard had been liberated from Allende's drawing room by some of the boys in my command.\n\nWhat had undone us? Bad times, the cruel, silly melodramas of the 1960s. Marriage unbinds friends, surely, but I don't believe mine had. It would be easy enough to conclude that we had never approved of each other; Samuel Johnson described the pathetic circumstance whereby \"dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint and too numerous for removal.\" That wasn't us: I remember how it felt to laugh together, and to share\u2014what wasn't too costly to share. Perhaps we never understood each other's interiors; surely we were preoccupied, as the young are, with surfaces, style, affects, manners and short-term consequences. For me art was play\u2014and singular. For Andrew art showed itself as play, but its purpose was to disrupt the conventions he had received; it was political, always had been for him. Because no resistance was raised against either of us, we were not revealed to each other by tests. I would hate to believe that we merely drifted away from what we had loved in each other without even noticing. Such ignorance would be indifference, bad character. I would prefer to believe that we were casualties of that damned war, but I know better. Time, simple time, did us in.\n\nI glanced at my watch, and Andrew asked me for the time. We spoke listlessly of another meeting later in the year. There came a knock on the door, someone to see me on business. He wore sturdy brogans and a black raincoat. We were not friends, merely professional associates. I introduced him to Andrew, who shook his head sadly. My associate was anxious\u2014perhaps he had interrupted... perhaps he should return later? No: Andrew said he was late, had to dummy up an ad for the _Times_.\n\nThe movie had a short run in the Village. I have not seen my friend again. But I think about him. Not so much anymore of the wrongs we did each other. I think that whatever friends may be, that's what we were for a while. I think that he taught me, and I taught him. I think, given the odds, that we were lucky to have had as much as we had. And I miss him. Not enough to try to win him again, or to try to be what he would have me be. But enough to have written this.\n\n# Drinking\n\nI'm looking at a bookshelf lined with spiral notebooks, my journals. Writers keep journals; I was an apprentice writer so I kept journals, daybooks, night books. I kept them current obsessively, you might say addictively. If I read it, saw it, thought it, ate it, overheard it\u2014in it went. If I drank it, into the record. I began this solipsistic account when I graduated from college, on the theory that my life had just begun; what I did and was done to me thereafter counted. Thereafter was _material;_ as writers sometimes say, it's all material.\n\nThe thing of it was, inventories were a drag: one meal got to sound much like the couple of dozen that came before in my journal. My sustained narratives were protracted whines: the torts varied in their particulars, but pared to essentials my journal entries tell of lackwits who failed to appreciate my virtue, warmth, tact, candor, generosity. Bad actors who made me mad or sad. I could have written \"October 3, 1961\u2014Istanbul: Screwed again\" and saved time and ink. Woe was me. My journalistic tic was pathos\u2014pathetic!\u2014and seeing this when I read what I had written made me unhappy with myself. But I reasoned that we're stuck with ourselves; we're our prisoners, no? Back then I was a _que ser\u00e1 ser\u00e1_ kind of guy; if my privately revealed posture was put-upon, so be it\u2014character was destiny.\n\nAs time passed, my journals relentlessly multiplied one pastime or hobby or pursuit, or what should I call it? My journals came to read like cocktail menus and wine lists written with a hungover shaky hand. They told so persistently and similarly of excess, loss of control and morning miseries that their accumulated burden cast me down, finally spooked me so alarmingly that I quit. Keeping a journal.\n\nI wonder, if I can articulate how I got to be a drinker, might I understand why I wanted to be a writer? At seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, I haunted New York jazz clubs, Jimmy Ryan's on West Fifty-second and especially Eddie Condon's down in the Village. Cranked by music and an atmosphere of the illicit (the places where my school pals and I liked to drink were said to have been speakeasies: this seemed interesting), I drank rye-and-ginger by the yard. I was charmed by the ruined faces of Condon's house band: the awful pallor and florid noses (\"grog blossoms,\" we called them) on Cutty Cutshall and Pee Wee Russell and Wild Bill Davison and Eddie Condon himself, virtuoso and entrepreneur of ill-spent nights. Believe an adolescent envying a bad complexion and you might credit the high times we enjoyed later at college, making an institution of dissipation. Our campus well was a garbage can filled with fruit juice, a fifty-pound block of ice and gallons of vodka; we drank from it, dipped our heads in it, were known to puke in it. This was fun. Heavy drinking in the 1950s was what we did; not to drink heavily was provocative, off the reservation.\n\nMy Silent Generation prized moderation in schoolwork and career ambitions but practiced passionate excess at the Nassau Tavern and Spring Houseparties blowouts. Our syllabus sang of Achilles' armor but our own epics were tales told of horror shows, blackouts, cars wrinkled or misplaced. Monday's sagas were of dates ditched and dates who ditched. We behaved as though we were monarchs, beyond the laws of physics and physiology; we behaved as though we were monarchs' jesters, with a sacred duty to distort the tame proportions and decorums of the Eisenhower years. We saw ourselves, upside down and bottoms up, as mockers and mocked, as childish fools sent to liberate our postadolescent old selves too wise for our own good.\n\nI'm not here to tug my forelock, scuff my toe, put on a long face and tut-tut-tut who I was and what I did. If I can't remember why it was a ball to stumble headfirst into a garbage can brimming with grape 'n' grain, I remember very well why it was agreeable to hang around men who had known the mighty Bix, horn players in worn double-breasted worsted suits who slept till sundown and smoked Camels or Luckys and drank and jammed till sunup. Oh, I miss those nights! I'd sit again at a small table below the bandstand, eye-level with Ralph Sutton's feet pumping the piano pedals, squeezed next to a honey whose complexion wasn't in the least pallid, whose silk stockings rubbed against my flannels, who smelled of perfume and tobacco, who knew better than to tap her swizzle stick against her highball glass, who drew a nod of appreciation from Peanuts Hucko while he noodled \"Someday You'll Be Sorry.\" How can I be sorry, how can I pull my beard and say I wish I'd spent my nights more profitably, in better company? I want to shut down this recollection now, and crank up the turntable and listen to \"Just Friends\" and \"Yellow Dog Blues\" and \"Davenport Blues\" and \"What-cha-Call-'Em Blues\" and \"Indiana\" and \"Minor Drag\" and \"That's A-Plenty\" and \"Someday You'll Be Sorry.\"\n\nI'm back, and I'm sorry. I couldn't play the cornet like Wild Bill or the clarinet like Peanuts or even the four-string guitar like Eddie, but I could stay up all night making a kind of music, and I think staying up all night and sleeping all day was half why I came to write; the other half, I hope, was the music. The drinking was incidental.\n\nMany writers drink. Maybe it's the irregular habits, the off-the-clock hours\u2014many writers are drunks. Maybe some ultrahigh frequency in writing's music screws up the liver's works, queers the kidneys, but many writers are alcoholics. Correction: many American writers are alcoholics. How many? Too many. The dead cannot sue, so I'll name the dead: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack London, Hart Crane, Conrad Aiken, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Thomas Wolfe, Dashiell Hammett, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, Ring Lardner, Dorothy Parker, John O'Hara, James Agee, Robert Lowell, John Cheever, Raymond Carver. I think I neglected to mention Jack Kerouac, Edgar Allan Poe, Edward Arlington Robinson, Ambrose Bierce, J. P. Marquand, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Theodore Roethke. Oh, and five of seven Americans who won the Nobel Prize: Eugene O'Neill, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis, who once in conversation asked, \"Can you name five American writers since Poe who did _not_ die of alcoholism?\"\n\nThe vocation sounds as perilous as stripping asbestos, mining coal. So who'd wish to be an American writer? Incredible question. A credible question: who wouldn't wish to be an American writer? But why? For the art of it? (Eventually, if the aspirant hangs in there, for the art of it, maybe.) For the fame of it? (Seven and a half minutes of experience added to seven and a half of reflection will teach the densest careerist that Warhol was wrong; everyone doesn't get fifteen minutes of street recognition.) For the money? (Get serious.) For what, then? Why did I want to write?\n\nFor the romance. At eighteen I traveled back and forth across Spain for the spring season of _corridas_ , carrying _Death in the Afternoon_. Central to this experience\u2014you might say its ruling purpose\u2014was squirting wine from a _bota_ approximately into my mouth. I can taste it now on my tongue, a coppery bitterness, the nasty rotgut _roja_ in no way improved by having been decanted into an unseasoned goatskin sack. This was glamorous. Lady Brett was glamorous. Jake Barnes was glamorous, although, in fairness to my generation's general good sense, I'll concede that no one I knew got himself emasculated in order to be glamorous in just the way Jake was glamorous.\n\nDoes this sound mannered? Farfetched? After the stock market crash, after Zelda's crash, after the crash of his reputation, F. Scott Fitzgerald took account of his wrecked health and cracked-plate spirit and wrote in his notebook: \"Then I was drunk for many years and then I died.\" Trying without much luck to dry out, jittery and bone-tired, he was roused from shaky sleep in the Great Depression gloom of 3 a.m. by a mighty banging on his door. There he found a stranger, a young college boy, drunk: \" 'Here I am at last,' the young scholar said, teetering triumphantly. 'I had to see you. I feel I owe you more than I can say. I feel that you formed my life.' \"\n\nThat's an old story about Fitzgerald. I read it in _The Crack-Up_ when I was a schoolboy. I thought it was a funny story then. I saw the brash kid, understood his quixotic mission. I knew what he meant, too: I already had a hunch I wanted my idea of Fitzgerald to form my life. I wanted to ride up a great New York avenue on the roof of a taxi, maybe even steal a dip in the Plaza's fountain. Was that inspired or what?\n\nNow of course I see another scene on Fitzgerald's stoop, 3 a.m. Now I see a man with the shakes, in a seedy bathrobe, his hairless paper-white stick-legs scuffling a pair of slippers to the door. Now I see Fitzgerald in the pre-dawn sick and scared and bewildered by the ruckus. But if I had seen then what I see now, would I have ever begun? Writing, I mean. (Drinking I would have begun.) Sure, because it was all wonderland back then. Dissolution was romantic. Death by consumption was Keatsian, fervidly true and beautiful. Self-destruction was visionary. Baudelaire had written: \"Always be drunk. That is all: it is _the_ question... How? Use wine, poetry, or virtue, use your imagination. Just get drunk.\" No religion could have been as unyielding in its commandment: Go Too Far. Appetite and carelessness seemed to me in the fifties and sixties to be indispensable properties of literary writing. Getting drunk did. How? We used wine, tequila, Pernod, Hudson Bay rum, dimies, whatever.\n\nWhy did self-ruin seem such a fine idea? You might say self-sacrifice was at the root of it, the notion of the writer so feverishly called to his art that he burned himself on the altar of its exactions. You might say this if you're full of crap. You might say the writer is fundamentally an outsider, outlaw, outcast, outlandish, out of bounds, out of phase, out-and-out outrageously out of his mind. This gives excess an audacious air of derring-do, a refusal to be bound. This would be a glamorous explanation of drunkenness, were it not for the reality of William Faulkner passing out on his toilet in the Algonquin, falling back against a steam pipe, so drunk the pain didn't stir him, cooking the flesh from his back, suffering a profound third-degree burn, getting skin grafts, feeling the pain for the rest of his life, telling a friend who asked why Faulkner did it, why he drank himself insensible, \"Because I like to!\"\n\nA place to divide here is on the question of whether you find Faulkner's reply heroic or flip. I can hear a previous incarnation of myself reading \"Because I like to,\" nodding approval concurrent with feeling an uncomfortable frisson of recognition. My father liked to.\n\nMy father was not a glamorous drunk. Sober he could enchant, charm, bewitch, con; Duke was a stutterer with a gift of gab. Drunk he was a stumblebum. Late at night as a kid, I'd hear the front door open, listen for the step. If his step was deliberate, we were in for it. After my mother had enough, and then my stepmother, I was in for it. We lived many places low and some high, but when he was high, high was worse. The stairs: he'd pull himself up a step at a time, muttering. There'd be a failure midway: he'd knock a picture off the wall, or lean too hard against the rail and break a baluster, or trip. Then he'd be on my bed reminding me what a miserable pismire I was, how I'd failed him, betrayed him, held him back, kicked him in the ass: _OldLyme... Sarasota... Seattle... New York... Wilton... La Jolla: Screwed again_. Then he'd be on his knees, driving the porcelain bus, heaving up his Dutch courage; then, next morning, he'd be on his knees, begging forgiveness for words he claimed he couldn't recall, words he maybe couldn't recall. I could recall them pitch-perfect, and what I wondered then: Is _veritas_ in _vino?_ If so, the truth had been said last night: I was a miserable pismire; he'd been sapped by me. Come morning, my dad wasn't interested in my metaphysical inquiry, but in his: \"Why do I do it?\" he'd ask me.\n\nMaybe he liked it. Maybe he had a disease. Who cares? I'm sorry: _now_ who cares? What I care to ask is why\u2014knowing what I knew\u2014did I do it? I could say genetics. I could read my journals and hear his melodramatic keening and explain: DNA dunnit. Raising a glass black with Wild Turkey, I'd cry cheers, to your health, bottoms up... just like Dad. Like him, I'd drink myself sick and call it a toot. I'd be _overtaken_ , or say, like Duke, \"It got drunk out last night and a little fell on me.\"\n\nBut I know\u2014I mean I _know_ \u2014genes didn't dunnit. I'll forever be the prisoner of my memory of him, and sometimes that memory is as sweet as sometimes it is foul. But I'm not him. He drank from leaden despair, and I drank revved from excitement, elation. He got potted (again) the night he got canned (again); I got lit on Publication Day. He'd scowl; I'd sing. He'd insult his best friend among a rapidly diminishing store of friends; any stranger on any stool beside me was my best friend.\n\nAs an apprentice writer, I had a drinking buddy, an apprentice writer. Now we're friends the way people are friends, but then we got together to drink together. We'd meet in the city at dinner parties and together drink up the hosts' spirits and patience, and then we'd go back to his place and keep his wife awake all night, or my place and keep my wife awake all night. We'd put jazz on the turntable and talk above Billie Holiday or Ben Webster or Fats Navarro. We'd talk about the things closest to our hearts; no one else could understand. We'd talk about art, vision, restlessness, recklessness, sacrifice, a sacred calling. Scotch for him, for me bourbon. One would confess his highest hopes, deepest fears; the other would listen, nodding. Unless of course the confessor's or the confessee's drink went dry mid-confession, in which case so much for highest hope and deepest fear: to the kitchen mid-sentence, to the ice bucket, to the bottle.\n\nBoozing was ever a matter of timing. Time came when cities were too ruinous for me, when I took to the hills and did my serious drinking solo. I'd put the jazz on the turntable, gather my mixings close to hand. Earphones were available; my wife could pretend to sleep after midnight, two, four... you know. What was the harm? I was never never never never never mean. I was sweet as pie: fat, dumb and happy. I'd fill my glass at two in the a.m., and play Side A, Track 1, John Coltrane's \"Cattin'.\" By the time the needle got to the end of Side A, I'd still have an inch in my glass. I needed music to wash down the drink, so I'd flip to Side B, \"Anatomy.\" Before the needle reached Track 2, \"Vodka,\" I'd run out of bourbon. I needed bourbon to appreciate Coltrane's \"Vodka,\" so I'd reload. The timing was a bitch. At four I'd laboriously dial my brother in San Francisco\u2014shank of the evening out there\u2014and get the wrong number, and dial again, all thumbs, till I got him awake, and bring him the Good News, he was about to hear John Coltrane play \"Lush Life,\" long distance, just for him, this was going out to my brother in California, \"Lush Life,\" a long, long track. This was before fiber optics, before you could hear a pin drop over the phone line. It was difficult to get high fidelity out of the earphones into the telephone mouthpiece, so my loudspeakers were rumbling \"Lush Life,\" and my wife wasn't pretending to sleep anymore, and she thought it was time to end the last set. That was always a tricky moment, the Jiggs & Maggie confrontation. \"That's enough, now. Come to bed.\"\n\nStanding on my dignity, I'd weave; I'd squint, maybe think, Who's she to talk to _me_ that way? But I'd obey. And next morning, wrung out and sick and of no use, I'd apologize for stealing sleep from my family, but for sure I wasn't my father. Of course once upon a time my father wasn't my father. Once upon a time he drank to loosen up, giggle, tap a toe to a tune, tell a tale. Once upon a time he didn't brood out loud.\n\nThe day came when I felt ready to brood out loud. It came over me like a low-grade fever. Well into a fifth of Mount Gay, I'd been laughing with my wife; abruptly, the effect of no knowable cause, I felt aggrieved, began to simmer. I was on the edge of giving words to my grievance, looking for just those words that might most forcefully deplore the bad cards I'd been dealt, been dealt _by her, by God!_ And on the edge of finding those words (in _vino_ is for sure not _veritas_ ) I put a sock in it, corked the bottle, shut up, turned in.\n\nThat was years ago. The plural makes for a nicely vague personal history, suggesting a then too far gone to locate now. Fact is, that was several years ago. I drink a little; I don't get drunk. Whether I am or ain't is not a question I want anymore to ask, not a question I can answer. I met a few times with a counselor expert in these matters and I was eager to attest to the malady, but he kept raising the stakes on me. Our meetings declined into disputes about semasiology, diagnosis, inference, exegetics, veiled subplots, the meanings of meanings. There were the Ten Danger Signs (I scored a mere nine, never having had a yen on waking for what put me to sleep) and AA's Twelve Steps. I quit for a summer, drank nonalcoholic beer unfortunately called Moussey, pronounced not like Mighty's surname but like the diminutive of a great antlered creature, but still. My counselor was alarmed about the nonalcoholic beer, said it was confirming evidence of my addictive personality, that if I didn't stop drinking near beer I'd soon be a slave to cocaine. Really and truly. He was most anxious about my future with cocaine. I was eager to give him confessions as lurid as those I had heard at my AA meeting (one meeting only: its narratives were so extravagantly squalid\u2014and so polished from repeated tellings by out-of-town ringers imported to the basement of a pretty little church in our pretty little village\u2014that they humbled me, held me at arm's length, made me ashamed to pretend to belong in the same room with maestros of misery), but cocaine was beneath my interest and beyond my means. _Just wait_ , the counselor warned. If I continued to drink nonalcoholic beer, _just wait and see_. He had a point. I was going through twelve and fifteen bottles a day, and this bewildered me until I studied the label and discovered that Moussey was _almost_ nonalcoholic. After all, Beck's was a simpler solution. For me.\n\nStill, whatever I was, I'm not it now. This wasn't jogging or throttling back on spareribs or eating oatcakes; this was a turnabout. But I wonder still why so many writers drink? I think some drinkers, from solid self-knowledge, knowing what will come of them working nine-to-five in the company of others, choose to write, to keep their own counsel, hours, company. But it can be a drag, keeping your own company. Samuel Johnson, asked by his friend Spottis-woode why he chose wine for his companion, answered for me: \"To get rid of myself, to send myself away.\" Writing is hard. I don't mean it's harder than everything, because it's not; I mean only that it's uphill work to write. And what's toughest is the din that echoes in a writer's ears after day's work is done. A writer can't shut down the damned noise, his characters' voices, their competing complications. You walk from the desk rubber-legged and sit picking at dinner like a zombie, coming awake to scribble a note on a napkin or on the palm of your little boy's hand. Day's work's done, but you can't keep your fiddling hands off the pages; the book's machinery diesels on long after you've turned the key to shut it down. It won't shut down, won't shut up.\n\nAnd this is why I write? To hear those insistent, nattering voices? To lie on my back, staring at the dark ceiling, imagining disasters for make-believe characters? To turn on the reading light, scribble a note at 3 a.m., edit it at four-thirty? To race the mind into sleeplessness? To see a dim unfocused light and then to focus it on the back of your mind and turn it up so bright it stabs your eyes and clamps a vice on your head? Malcolm Lowry, who wrote himself to glory and drank himself to miserable death, said he felt as though he had been born without a skin. Indeed. I write to take off my skin, lay my nerves bare. I write to hear unwelcome voices. Booze will send me to never-never land, dress me in thick wool, earmuff me against the voices, blink off the light, give rest and sleep and peace. Just what I must have wanted. Just what I don't want.\n\n# At the Fair: Dairyness and Human Sacrifice\n\nFrom the Ferris wheel it's possible to experience the fair's schitzy character, bucolic and menacing. The seat's slats have been cracked and many times painted over, bright blue, bright red, bright green\u2014what's the use?\u2014bright blue again. Grease has congealed at the joints where the seat swings on its groaning axle, and light rain leaks from a dismal sky that presses like an iron lid on the rusty mud below. The air is cold today, Saturday, nearly two weeks past Labor Day. The wheel has stopped, and from this prominence the Vermont hills cupping the fairground at Tunbridge seem almost companionable. To the west, the sun\u2014were there a sun to see\u2014would be setting, and the trotting races have just ended, and the sheep and swine and oxen have been returned to their stalls from the judging runs.\n\nA few children ride the Ferris wheel, and their earth-bound parents are anxious to scoot them home; night brings mischance to the \"World's Fair\" (people have come from the known world's far corners, from Canada and Connecticut even) here in Orange County. The wheel has not moved, and the rawboned operator wearing a greasy duck-ass hairdo is busy scouting the mud with a metal detector\u2014hoping, I guess, it will buzz with the discovery of coins fallen from the riders' pockets. The contraption's mute, and the young operator returns to his levers and spins the shaky wheel a half-turn. I've been riding long enough and I'd like to dismount, but the kid's mind is elsewhere, not on my wishes. Others have been revolving longer than I, and some are visibly uneasy. There's no government here, and I'm spinning on a huge and complicated contrivance casually knocked down and reassembled by people indifferent to me. The young man cocking his eye for windfall from our pockets is no airline pilot. Now he lets the shuddering wheel rotate untended, leaving his controls to bullshit with a buddy who pulls on a smoke from the pack he's unrolled from his T-shirt sleeve. Our operator drinks from a half-pint of something. Aren't there rules outlawing this kind of thing? No one shouts at him to stop the damned wheel. I feel, grinding round and round, like an organ-grinder tethered to a monkey.\n\nLights have been winking on along the midway, and the noise is reaching higher. Motorcycle engines, barkers, customers working their damnedest to fill the night with laughter. I hear the sad falling note of bells rung in the heavy air. To the left down there, strong farmers from hereabouts and workers from the marble quarries up in Barre are trying to ring the bell. They pay four bits for three swipes with a sledge, driving a weight up a column; the weight may or may not strike a bell; if the bell rings, a guy who never looks at anything except the cash\u2014in his fist\u2014hands over a nickel stogie. The challenge is to ring the bell with one arm, and then with the other, weaker arm. But these strong men are too drunk on beer to drive the weight high, and when the bell doesn't ring, they shrug, pretending not to care. They care.\n\nThe wheel on its rounds passes the loading platform, and I let the operator know I've had enough. What does he care? I spin away from him, feeling as silly as a tot in a swing-set, go through an almost full revolution, slow, fumble with my safety catch; he grins and pushes the lever to full throttle and up I go again, _knowing_ it's dumb to give this jerk the finger, giving him the finger. This wheel and my vantage are creaky fabrications: I'm riding it to establish a point of view _du haut en bas_. I don't so much want to grasp what I'm about to tell as poke at it with a long stick, which I'd like to hold in a gloved hand. Now I'm on high again, looking down at a concession called GIRLS that has brought me to this place. The year before, I was on this wheel with my kids, one on each side, looking down at three or four near-naked women taking a full shot of noon sun on the Lord's Day. One of my boys was looking at farm animals, or daredevil drivers, and the other was looking with me, at GIRLS, listening to the barker's cry.\n\n_Calling all the men\u2014girlie-girlie show time for the men! Red-hot and ginger, spice is nice. Hootchy-kootchy, carnival-style, get your tickets, we're starting right now, get right down there in front, right down there in the baldheaded row. Right down there in the finger-lickin' good row where you can look up and see the hole, I mean the_ _WHOLE_ _damned show. Show time for the men, no ladies and no babies, people as wears pants and looks like men, calling all the men..._\n\nThe year before, like now, there had been two girlie shows. One had big girls, the other had young girls, and the \"bally call\"\u2014the name carnies give their pitch\u2014was for one much as for the other, same phrases, with kindred internal rhymes and singsong rolling cadences. Last year I had left my kids with my wife and bought a ticket to the show featuring big girls. I entered the tent with a couple of pals, smirking, recollecting burly-que I had seen as a teenager in Florida and Tennessee, all come-on behind feathers and fans, as innocent as the unveiling of Little Egypt. Inside the tent were cops, sheriff's deputies armed with maximum flashlights and billies but no revolvers, and my friends and I smiled at the police like accomplices; we meant to have the law understand we were here to look at the lookers rather than the girls. We kept our hands out of our pockets and stood near the deputies, who didn't smile back, who moved from us as though plague bells hung from our necks.\n\nBeneath the canvas, men pressed as close as they could, chest-level to a makeshift stage. These men, mostly past middle years, made up the baldheaded row, and behind them, far enough apart to announce themselves as a different class of being altogether, lounged younger men, lady-killers. And behind these I stood with my friends. And behind us the cops. There were no women in the tent except the three whose business it was to show us whatever we had come to look at. For a wonder there were no teenagers, with their hands in their pockets, clamping down on their boners while the performers' gauze and boas swirled. The show lasted less than ten minutes, and before it ended it wiped the smirk off my face. My friends and I didn't look at one another when we left, stooping to exit under a flap at the rear of the tent into bright sun. Our wives asked for a rundown, teasing us, mock-scolding with playful libby jargon about chauvinist boys and their sex objects. My friends and I didn't want to talk about what we'd seen, less to laugh about it. An old guy, drunk and witless, without teeth, had tried to pull himself up on the stage and the cops had chucked him out like a spadeful of manure, tenderly lifting the tent flap so he wouldn't soil it. He was wearing a red sombrero with cotton tassels, a prize from the dart-throwing booth, and I told Priscilla much about the sombrero. She must have wondered what about the sombrero so amused and interested me. I couldn't say to my wife _I don't want to talk about it_ , as though I'd been traumatized in war, but I _really_ didn't want to talk about it.\n\nFor months I thought about what happened under that tent, and then began to talk about it, and then talked too much about it. So I came back alone to look again, and try to make sense of this pipsqueak World's Fair. So here I am, orbiting back to earth on this Ferris wheel, whose operator sets me free. I stare at him; this is meant to be a baleful look, a terrifying squint. He looks right through me; if I didn't know better, I'd swear I haven't terrified him. I loiter with the crowd in mud while the rain falls, looking up at two women moving more or less in time to distorted rhythm and blues amplified way past the capacity of an overloaded loudspeaker. A third woman, half her body backstage, licks her lips and humps a curtain, conventional striptease moves, garden variety. Meantime a barker with patient eyes paces leisurely back and forth giving the bally call.\n\n_Don't hesitate and don't be late, they're gonna shimmer, shake and vi-bo-rate. The big one the bad one the long one the strong one the red-hot one. Red-hot ramble, shake it up, shake it down, shake it all the way to town. Charge your battery, wind your clock, they're gonna put pepper in your pepper pot. You know what you wanna see, they know what you wanna see, that's what you're gonna see. That's exactly what you're gonna see. Shake it loose like a bucket of juice\u2014they're gonna do it. Have no fear, these girls are here. Racy, spicy, horny and red-hot. Hootchy-kootch, a red-hot ramble waiting for you. They're gonna shake it to the east, they're gonna shake it to the west, they're gonna shake it down the middle where you boys like it best. Come on, boys, when the line breaks, the show will start. When you walk out of this one, boys, your hands are way down deep in your pockets, you have a smile on your face and a brand-new grip on your life. It's raining, boys, come in out of the rain..._\n\nCarnival is fundamentally case-hardened conservative, a process of repetitions lockstepped into the condition of ritual. Surprises: rain, a police bust, gear breaking down, a dancer angry or in tears\u2014these are not welcome. Actions slip into grooves and polish themselves slippery with use. Thus bally calls vary only subtly from barker to barker and are said by carny legend to have evolved from a black man, the Urballyhooer, a genius of insinuation. Carny legend tells too of the first girl\u2014Georgette\u2014who decided in the middle of striptease to hell with the tease part; they say she was nothing to look at, pop-eyed and skinny, the daughter of a girl-show impresario; they say that one night in the way-back time she quit dancing, stripped, and shoved her crotch into a man's face and said, \"Here it is, jerks, this is what you want, this is what you got.\" The better mousetrap.\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\nSo now a huge woman, her pale flesh lapping like seas, removes a patron's eyeglasses, hearing aid attached, and wipes them between her legs. There is music, but she pays its beat no mind. She straddles another consumer's face and coos, \"Ooooh, baby, don't bite.\" Another customer fingers her; she doesn't seem to notice; the man feeling her wears an abstracted expression, as though he's wondering whether his left front tire might be losing air. Men throw their hats on the stage, and their pocket watches, to have them touched to the magic place. The performer is good-natured. The next dancer is not. She of the erstwhile come-hither look, so recently doing it outside with a beaded curtain, is not pleased to be here. She concentrates on the music, counterfeits something like a dance, scowls when the clients shout at her to be friendly, be nice, come close. Even the women who'll be touched don't like to be held. The story goes that not so long ago a performer removed the eye of a customer with her spiked heel when the sorry joker grabbed her ankle and wouldn't turn loose. The sullen dancer splits and the third hootchy-kootchy comes on stage, and about a dozen men, who seem to know her, call her a pig, and then eat her out. She seems not to take their abuse seriously. Boys will be boys, nothing personal. She grins. Hey, it's a hard dollar, but who said a job was all strawberries and cream?\n\nWhat am I doing here? Well, at this time I live in Vermont, near the Mad River, a couple of valleys over; I might say I have come the better to understand my neighbors. Nah. I've come to reckon some puzzles about myself. Even before I was a Boy Scout, I'd thought of sex as black comedy, the carnal as carnival. Throughout my adolescence, and the prolonged adolescence of college and bachelor years, I'd regarded women as angels or whores, as tricks to be mastered. To \"get in,\" to get \"it,\" to \"grab\" it, to \"bang\" it had been my boss preoccupation. During a lecture on _The Faerie Queene_ , I'd make a list of girls I had known, ranking them on which base I'd been allowed to reach. According to this calculus, I'd regarded progress as manifest destiny, base to base, a kiss today followed by two tomorrow, covered tit by bare. This was a campaign, but fundamentally farcical: the would-be loverboy prayed in the back seat for three hands and composed himself with the lexicon of \"lover's nuts\" and \"huge huggers\" and \"hand jobs\" and \"rubbers\" and \"boners\"; on the battlefield we suffered geographical confusion (here? there? is it in?). As in any combat, we soldiers armed ourselves with bluster: to the besieged's archetypal question\u2014\"How can it be fun if you know I don't want it?\"\u2014came the besieger's archetypal response\u2014\"You supply the pussy, I'll supply the fun.\"\n\nNow I'm here at the fair investigating my complicity in a grotesque, Bosch-like model of men and women together. Am I, after all, like these troglodytes, merely less drunk and more discreet? I plan to explore as though I am a disinterested reporter this straw man of a question, this scarecrow I have fabricated. I show a press card: I interview the performers.\n\nThe girls don't class themselves with hookers or even bar girls. This is show biz, they're dancers. One lucky break and next week it's \"Tony Orlando and Dawn.\" Hoofers. \"It's freaky,\" one said. \"The men are better performers than the women, honest to God, the men are the performers, the women are the audience. It's not like I'm doing it, it's their show that I'm going to see, it's not mine. The guys are getting into it, the guys are pulling each other's pants off.\"\n\nWith an occasional time-out for war or hurricane, the Tunbridge Fair has been held since 1847. Its purpose is to give folks an occasion to let themselves go after a summer of hard work, after the crops have been brought in, before winter screws down on them. Tunbridge is a handsome little town in central Vermont with a couple of Federal brick houses\u2014sure sign of bygone wealth thereabouts\u2014and a covered bridge contiguous to the fairground. Shirley Jackson could have set \"The Lottery\" in Tunbridge. Ask a local woman about the fair in her town and she'll tell how it brings a nice wage to the locals to provide services. Ask her when's the best time to bring children and she says, \"Almost any day, never at night, never on Saturday at any time.\" Ask her what goes on at night, on Saturday at any time, and she shrugs, and tries to grin. \"You know.\"\n\nNo one can know\u2014can guess\u2014without seeing. What happens inside the tents of the girlie shows has no bearing on sex and everything to do with violence, with ritual sacrifice. \"It's really scary,\" a dancer said. \"You don't know whether they're going to laugh at you... you're afraid they're going to laugh at you, or else the men're going to leave, or else they're going to demand their money back, or else they're just going to stare and look at you, or else they're going to\u2014I don't know what all.\"\n\nInside Whitey's girlie show the tent is cold and damp. Two black performers and a white, basic routine. Young men stick out their tongues at the stage, give war whoops and laugh, \"Come here goddammit, let's see them tits, my hands are cold, bring on them muffs!\"\n\nIt costs three dollars this year. The young bravos shoulder aside the old coots who come down once a year from the hills for a peek and a taste. Two days ago the girls got off easy; Friday was raw and Saturday\u2014today\u2014is unspeakable. The men are pinching the women, biting them, pulling their pussy hair. Sometimes it seems they'll eat them alive, truly eat them. Dionysian rites called for such orgiastic feasting, the tearing apart and consumption of sacrificial animals. This bacchanal connects with some such primitive free-for-all. License is the purpose. Chaos makes these men feel great. What's happening here in this pretty New England town is fundamental, ancient, base. The law watches disgusted\u2014that much is clear\u2014and stands motionless, fingering his billy. The performers look confused, unsure what is expected of them. Nothing can satisfy these men. The more forthcoming the women, the more savage the men, snapping at them. I mean it: wanting to bite. The men are farmers, druggists, salesmen, motorcycle hoods, construction workers, accountants... I see a farmer from my valley, one of my town's selectmen; when he wears a jacket and tie to Town Meeting, he looks like an ambassador to the Court of St. James. Now he's not wearing a jacket and tie, and he's here in the tent. Together with a policeman. And by the way: me. No, whatever else I may have been, I am not and never was these men's accomplice. These men scream: \"One, two, three, four, we don't want your fuckin' whores!\" What _is_ this?\n\nRemember \"The Lottery\"? In just such a pretty town, the narrator tells in a rational voice, a citizen is selected by lot, in an annual ritual, to be stoned to death. It's possible, I guess, to press this too far: cannibalism, rites of expiation and sublimation, Bacchic festivals, low-down barbarism. It's possible to argue that this is no more than a gamey county fair, the boys a little too far gone on beer. Old-timers refer to the Tunbridge Fair as the \"drunkards' reunion\" and tell apocryphal yarns of years past when any man found sober after 3 p.m. was ejected from the grounds. A newspaper from 1901 reports that \"there was liquor on the grounds and several arrests were made late in the afternoon of both the hilarious and the stupid.\"\n\nThe men come to booze and fight. There's a beer hall beneath the grandstand of the stadium where Chipwood Brothers Daredevil and Hell Riders do their thing. It's brightly lit, with a cement slab floor and long tables covered with oilskin. There's an entrance and an exit, where the police cluster, ready. The windows are protected by wire mesh, and from the outside looking in you have a vision of bedlam, of the bear pit. Ditto from the inside looking out, at the midway. Sots sit jammed together on benches, puking and pissing in place from time to time, swilling beer as fast as they can grab it. Mostly they have come to fight, with one another or with the cops. The game is to try to enter through the exit or exit through the entrance, provoking hard words and a billy upside the head. An arrest. Loud cheers. Victory sign. Blood.\n\nA Vermont bard, Mark Whalon, wrote some lines titled \"The Saddest Sound at the Fair.\" (He had in mind \"the last toot of the merry-go-round.\") His second stanza catches an idealized vision of such a festival as the Tunbridge Fair:\n\n_The youngsters are tired and whine and fret_\n\n_With the stomach-ache from all they've et_.\n\n_Your woman starts in a-jawin' you_\n\n_Because you took a \"swaller\" or two_.\n\n_She's mad clear through because you went_\n\n_Into that Hawaiian hula tent_.\n\n_What makes her maddest is just because_\n\n_You didn't come out when you seen what it was_.\n\nThe fair is sweet, too. Sheep and poultry are shown, usually by kids. The best plate of eight plums, any variety, wins a premium of a silver dollar. Exhibitors show their rutabagas and kohlrabi and Swiss chard. The biggest sunflower, grandest pumpkin and most distinguished display of gourds do not go unremarked or unrewarded. In Floral Hall one will admire embroidery and needlework, handmade dolls, doilies, crewelwork. In these exhibit halls people are easy with one another, admiring, chipper. Little kids wander here and there, munching cotton candy and fried dough. Chelsea High School sponsors a monster barbecue, and the students work hard to make it nice. Out behind the barbecue tent animals are being judged; this is serious business, the improvement of the breed, class tells. Four teens, two girls and two boys, lead fawn-colored Guernsey cows before the judge. He studies them, hefts their full sacs, praises one especially for her \"dairyness,\" for her \"useful kind of udder,\" for her \"impressive teats.\"\n\n\"Swing those tits, you fucking sow! Give me a feel, goddammit.\"\n\nA baldheaded man in the girlie tent yells at his friend: \"Luther, looky that nooky. Ain't them titties too much?\"\n\n\"No such of a thing as too much, Curly.\" Luther's motorcycle jacket commends him as a member of the Happy Swallows. He and Curly each fastens himself to a tit, Romulus and Remus. Curly's tattoo says \"Born to Lose,\" of course. Another man, like Luther and Curly middle-aged, watches the performers with a critical eye, periodically muttering _sheee-it_. His jacket displays a dragon, for some reason upside down, above the legend \"Born at Sea, Baptized in Blood, Crowned in Glory.\"\n\nMany of the bumper stickers read \"I'm Proud To Be A Farmer.\" This pride is palpable. The migrations from the farms of Vermont have been devastating, but those who have stayed and held the line are as tough and serious as the people who improbably settled this state, removing tons of rocks for every acre of mean clay they managed to put into cultivation, settling here when land was open to the west, facing this damned climate\u2014\"eleven months of winter and a month of hard sledding,\" as the playful saying goes. Future Farmers of America, teenagers who present their beasts for judgment, are expected to wear khaki or white clothes, and they'd better be clean. They are judged not only by their animals but by mimeographed standards nailed to every barn door at the Tunbridge Fair. These include \"proper manure disposal; pails and tools\u2014neat, adequate, practical; cooperation; willingness to cooperate with rules and regulations; assist with other exhibitors and have a good attitude toward management.\"\n\nEd Larkin's Old Time Contra-Dancers draw a decent crowd. Local people from Tunbridge and Chelsea get themselves up in antique costumes\u2014beaver toppers, swallowtail coats, bonnets and shawls\u2014and dance to a fiddle and piano. The calls are as intricate as the steps. The dancers dance up near the old schoolhouse on the Green. Preservation is the purpose, instruction, community. They dance to \"The Moon Is Shining Bright on Pretty Redwing\" while urban runaways and communards\u2014of whom there are a surplus in these parts\u2014clap their hands gravely, or photograph them. Farther up the Green, antique buggies are aligned, and antique farm machinery, and antique steam engines puff, lovingly preserved. There's a museum of antique crafts. A blacksmith shows how to beat horseshoes into shape, and Vermont's recent pilgrims from the big and bad cities sigh in wonder. Blacksmithing\u2014what a folkway! Someone is blowing glass, another hammering silver, another weaving cloth. The weaver and the blacksmith wear costumes maintained with unimaginable care and handed down through generations of Green Mountain Boys and Green Mountain Girls. The people from the cities look at these exhibits as though they were pressed between the leaves of an anthropology textbook, or behind glass, or displayed on a stage.\n\nBack in 1958 a local minister harangued and scolded, and managed to get the girlie shows shut down. Next year the shows were back, as raw as ever, and the preacher had been run out of town. (After a decent interval of eight years, a special service of worship was instituted at the fair; it is well attended.) This year the Orange County state's attorney shut down the gambling concessions\u2014a minority of them, fifteen. Most games of chance are dice games that pay two-to-one against three-to-one odds. There are also variations on roulette, played for a quarter or dollar a spin, the money flying from the pockets of shrewd, squint-eyed farmers and horse traders to the pockets of edgy, baffled-eyed carnies, the money moving in huge amounts. The losers know they're being jobbed and don't give a damn. The Tunbridge Fair comes once a year.\n\nThe state's attorney shut down some gambling concessions because he had had complaints of flimflam, would you believe it? Not about the dice and roulette games but about the pick-a-duck, knock-over-the-milk-bottles, pop-a-balloon cons. They're nominally played for small coins, for fun, to win a stuffed animal or a plastic statuette of Jack Kennedy. Someone lost more than a hundred dollars. He picked a duck, won a prize. Picked another, won another. Again. The operator said, \"Okay, let's cut the crap. You've got me boiling. I'll play you for a sawbuck.\" The operator lost to the player. Again. Up went the ante. There went a hundred dollars. Great was the hubbub when the state's attorney shut down these enterprises. The carnies cried foul, the lawman was playing politics with a way of life, with their livelihoods. Not even political ambition would mislead him to interfere with the girlie shows. The girlie shows \"disgust me,\" he says. He gets \"occasional complaints,\" he says\u2014say, from a mom who feels bad to have had her little girl have to watch a stripper hump a beaded curtain on the way from the parking lot to the Contra-Dancers. But what happens inside the tent: that's First Amendment stuff, sacred.\n\nThe menfolk of Vermont will not abide dictation. An acquaintance from my valley, a veteran of a quarter-century of Tunbridge Fairs, says it's not like it was. \"Cops here, cops there. What the hell's going on these days? I come to do what I want, drink as much as I want to drink, have fun. Now someone tells me I can't sit here, can't piss away my money on a bet. Why?\" He weighs maybe three hundred pounds, and has the touch of a pianist with his backhoe and bulldozer, and when I saw him at the fair his face was badly cut. I asked him what had happened. \"A little scrap with my wife,\" he said, and winked. \"What do you think of the girlie shows?\" I asked him. He was stunned by the question, visibly insulted. \"Do you think I'd watch that crap?\"\n\nHe comes mostly to watch the oxen- and horse-pulling. A yoke of oxen must pull its load\u2014up to eleven thousand pounds\u2014six feet forward, on a sled called a \"boat.\" The concrete weights are added in slabs weighing half a ton each until all the teams except one have been eliminated, and the winner takes home seventy-five dollars, not enough to pay for feed and transportation. The men driving these teams spend maybe a thousand dollars, sometimes three thousand, for one animal, and they beat them with their fists to encourage them to pull. The teams used to skid logs through the woods, or pull plows, but now they pull metaphorical loads for their owners' diversion and metaphorical pride. This is a brutal attempt to hold to old ways, and what impresses a spectator is the near-hysteria, the killing rage of the drivers. Beating those animals to pull those weights has no comprehensible end except noise and violence. It is a rite played out within earshot of Ed Larkin and the Old Time Dancers, within sight of the schoolhouse preserved with its antique map, globe, potbellied stove, _McGuffey's Reader_. But my God what a distance is one rite from another; you can't avoid the connection\u2014the performing girls and their consumers, the ox drivers, the pointless beatings, the queer humanish look of inhumanity.\n\nAcross a footbridge from the main fairground, guarded by a couple of police now armed with shotguns, is a huge parking lot. Bonfires smoke and smolder in the drizzle. The license plates on the campers and motorcycles are mostly from Massachusetts and New York. Here are the hard guys, Billy Bad-Ass and his gang, pissing on someone's fire, showing the ladies his pecker, offering to whip anyone's ass. These boys fight, of course, mostly with their friends; they listen to Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash. It isn't fair: the music's too good for assholes. Their bellies are acts of aggression. They swallow beer in a gulp and crush the cans, naturally, worth a nickel in Vermont. They make noises: roosters, bulls, wolves, swine. One of them gives me the finger as I walk past looking straight ahead, and his friend throws him on the fire. This interests me, which is my mistake; I look at the drunk man lying on the fire, and he says to his friend, \"Be nice, Jesus, be nice.\" His friend stares at me: \"What the fuck are you looking at, fuck?\" I say, \"Nothing, nothing.\" I thought I'd been in bad parking lots before, tailgating at the Yale-Princeton game, the Maryland Hunt Cup. I'd never been in a bad parking lot before.\n\nThe girls are outside now, Larry and Whitey have brought their girls outside. Something weird is happening. The rain is driving hard now. Guys search in the mud for money they think they just dropped, money they lost hours earlier, maybe when the gambling joints mysteriously reopened. There are women among these men standing in mud, being rained on. Regular women, amateurs, hooting at the performers: \"ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, WE DON'T WANT NO FUCKIN' WHORES!\" The chant grows louder, even meaner. Whitey looks at Larry. Larry shrugs. Whitey shrugs. One of the performers makes to a young buck a plea I just heard elsewhere: \"Be nice.\" No dice. This is a mob, near midnight, ready to tear the place apart. \"What do you guys want, anyway? What are you guys after?\" But no one answers the stripper, and Larry and Whitey shut down their shows and the mob melts away.\n\nNext day the sun struggles back. It's Sunday, family day, cold and clear. The carnival is being torn down, but Whitey's still hawking his show. His call is fundamental. He sounds like a plumbing contractor quoting an estimate for a job he knows he won't win: \"Buy your tickets. It's a good show. It's a girl show. It's a sex show.\" This he follows with a sentence oddly beside the point of a sex show, precisely to the point of some other existential axiom: \"The strong walk over the weak, they've always done it, that's how it is.\" Inside the tent, one of the girls has connected with a customer who is, as she says, \"oh so sweet!\" He tucks his head between her legs for five minutes, climbs right up on stage with her, you might even say performs for her. That seems fine by her; she says, \"Bring on another girl, I'm done now, I'm not moving from here,\" and her newfound friend keeps at her. Partnership, a grace note to close with, a gentle valediction.\n\n# A Day at the Beach\n\nI'd be the last one to brag up my vacation, show slides of Mustique's Cotton Club, Curtain Bluff you, Bitter End you, call Petit St. Vincent by its initials (PSV). As for chitchatting my physiological bona fides, my regime, pulse rate at rest, systolic upper (let's talk through the roof), and diastolic lower (shoot the moon), my SGOT abnormalities, the uric acid settled in gouty crystals at my extremities\u2014would I impose the particulars?\n\nBut to reveal both beach and body: here reticence yields to candor. All too soon you'll know of Sint Maarten and cardiac catheterization, of La Samana and acute aortic valvular stenosis, of the Wolff Family Christmas, of surgical procedures, of the very heart of me.\n\nNot long ago I flew with my family from New York to Antigua. The jumbo jet was full, and occupied principally (my two teenage sons noticed) by people old enough to drive but young enough not to know what is an IRA. These travelers smiled and had good teeth. I was old enough (then) to have all the friends I wanted, but my sons had another perspective, and they smiled back. Until we descended to Sint Maarten, our stopover, ten flying minutes from Antigua. The airplane unloaded every person with perfect white teeth, leaving us to fellow passengers plenty old enough to know their 401(k) retirement strategies. Golfers, hatched from madras eggs.\n\nOh, my poor boys! They pressed their noses to the Boeing's windows and watched the smiling young people skip toward Sint Maarten's terminal.\n\n\"We'll visit Sint Maarten someday,\" their mummy promised, calling it \"Saynt Martin.\"\n\nNot so fast! By June, all seats had been booked to that island for that Christmas vacation. I tried to pull strings, making my way up a chain of command to an executive of one of our most venerable international airlines. He wished to serve, but I heard in his voice a quality I couldn't then put a name to; I think I could now, if only I knew the exact antonym for \"ballyhoo\": would it be \"demotion\"? Perhaps \"derision\"? He suggested Jamaica. How about Barbados? Why not try Trinidad? He boosted other islands, to which his airline did not fly. For a fellow with almost as much experience living well as I had of living, I wasn't hearing the music.\n\nWe would go to Sint Maarten, by God, and so, with a sigh, the airline executive accommodated us.\n\nAn alarm bell rang a few days before takeoff during a phone talk with my mother, who had on some dreamy caprice visited during a single journey every Caribbean island with an airport, and some without, returning thereafter to none.\n\n\"Saint Martin?\" my mother said, \"or Sint Maarten?\"\n\n\"What's the difference?\"\n\n\"Sint Maarten is the Dutch part. Saint Martin is French. The French have fun, and eat good food.\"\n\n\"Our destination is Sint Maarten,\" I said.\n\n\"Oh,\" my mother said. \"Huh.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, 'huh,' \" I asked.\n\n\"Well,\" my mother said.\n\n\"Did you not care for the island?\" I asked.\n\n\"Well,\" my mother said, \"it has beaches. The French part. Or it did when I was there.\"\n\n\"Why would the beaches not be there now?\"\n\n\"Oh, the construction. There were buildings going up all along the beaches.\"\n\n\"Pretty buildings?\"\n\n\"I think I liked San Juan a little more than Saint Martin,\" my mother said.\n\n\"Did you like San Juan?\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" my mother said. \"It was tacky.\"\n\nI concluded that Sint Maarten might be just the place for my sons, and I felt virtuous thinking this, the way St. Sebastian must have felt when the arrows came.\n\nTravelogues and medical logs first intersect at Theodore Francis Green Airport, Providence, Rhode Island, 6:15 a.m., Saturday, mid-December. I am famously efficient, dependable. I use the old noodle, pack early, remember to bring tickets, passports, extra eyeglasses, maps to be studied en route, the novel by Dostoyevski I have still not read, medication\u2014 _all_ the necessaries. These I arrange in a canvas briefcase, and leave it in our driveway. Priscilla, for a wonder, had taken upon herself responsibility for the tickets and passports, so we were not grounded. But I was destined to fly away without my drugs. This was the conventional pharmacopoeia of a fellow of late-middle years: Benemid and colchicine (gout), Vasotec (hypertension), Inderal (heart rate). I didn't like flying to an island, at the beginning of a weekend, without these medicines: a general practitioner in our little town had a few days before, during my first visit with him, expressed quiet alarm at my blood pressure. I had visited him because, seized by a fitness fit, I had labored several months to row nowhere fast, and the more often I pulled on the handle of that Concept II Ergometer, the very machine favored by Olympic oarsmen, the less my stamina. My older son, Nicholas, can row the unmoved contraption more than twenty miles, and take a telephone call, and talk. I'd row three and double over. This didn't seem fair; it wasn't fair, my new doctor agreed, asking by the way did I know I had a heart murmur. I told him I had been told this since childhood, but it was nothing, it had been checked out.\n\n\"Checked out how?\"\n\nI explained, perhaps condescendingly, that in the metropolis of Providence I had not three years before been tested hi-tech with an echocardiogram, and the results had shown I had the heart of a baby. Those were my city doctor's very words, I explained, \"heart of a baby.\" My new doctor said very well, but my blood pressure must be diminished medically and, by the way, might he send away for those echocardiogram test results, just to see them, satisfy his curiosity about the clamorous mutter he had heard listening to my heart?\n\nJust before and after this physical examination I had been preoccupied with photographs, arranging the slides and prints of twenty-one years of marriage and nineteen years of daddydom in albums, to give as Christmas gifts to my kin. I am obsessive, but in the process of finding and sorting these pictures of a life, likenesses of my father and mother, their fathers and mothers, this innocent labor radiated out and became even by my tolerant lights weird, alarming. I dropped business and pleasure to sort, hunting through trunks and cartons in the attic several nights till dawn. Priscilla, whom I had meant to surprise pleasantly with photographs of herself, asked what I thought I was doing. Meaning to answer truthfully, I said I didn't really know.\n\n\"I'm arranging things,\" I said. \"It's as though I think I'm about to die,\" I said.\n\n\"I don't find that amusing,\" she said.\n\n\"I don't either,\" I said.\n\nIn truth, I think I thought no such thing. I didn't imagine dying, or didn't imagine dying any more often than I usually do, which isn't that often. But I'd felt _something_ , and it had sent me to trunks in my attic and to a doctor, who urged me to take my medicine.\n\nFlying to Sint Maarten I considered Vasotec. Landing at Sint Maarten, Saturday afternoon, I brooded on Benemid. I am not famously even-tempered; our bags, minus the carry-on of essentials snowed under in our driveway, were delayed. It seemed to me, elbowing through throngs to the baggage carousel, that I was being elbowed back. Irritable, I felt a bellicose rush of blood to my face; I was showing my fighting colors.\n\nOur taxi was no jitney daubed pastel but a businessman's sedan; the driver was all business, no _Welcome to de Islands, mon_ , but \"Where to?\"\n\nWe told him where. He seemed amused. Leaving the airport, he turned left and drove beside a chain-link fence bordering the runway. Left again, beside a fence bordering the end of the runway. Left again, along a rutted mud road, deeply puddled, with mosquitoes skimming the puddles, beside a fence bordering the runway. The fifteen-minute ride had brought us thirty yards from the place our jet's wheels had touched down.\n\nMore to the point, as we soon learned, it had brought us thirty yards from the place wheels would lift off at that moment when the pilot shouts \"Rotate!\" above the din, and mighty engines go to full power.\n\n(We had noticed during this journey a large hotel set near our own lodgings, behind a stucco wall, the \"Caravanserai,\" let's call it. A friend who had stayed there during a business convention later told me of his terror his first afternoon, having shed his New York clothes down to his boxers, standing in those thunderbags looking seaward from his ninth-floor picture window, seeing fly, right toward his window, a widebody, sliding into its landing path. On approach, aviators say, \"Pan Am heavy.\" No amount of time, my friend said, would delete from his mind's eye his first sight of a jumbo at eye-level, coming at the conversation pit of his suite, at _him_. Not that there weren't other experiences to share with me later, like his first dip in the pool, an announcement coming over the hotel's public-address system: \"Please, peoples. We have many complaints about pee-pee and doo-doo in swimming pool. Please don't forget to sign up for tonight's barbecue and salad bar on the beach.\") But I'm making Sint Maarten sound like Iwo Jima, Bataan. I'm not writing _Guadalcanal Diary;_ mine is a story of a heart murmur during a tropical vacation.\n\nThat first late afternoon we had a few unpleasant surprises in our seaside condominium, nothing acute: low water pressure from the taps and high voltage from the refrigerator door (we learned to pry it open using a mop handle). Otherwise, subtracting huge, lurid oil paintings of black-and-Day-Glo swans, the lodgings were dandy: slide the front door and there, fifteen yards dead ahead, was the sea.\n\nOur view across the bay was dominated by a rusted dredger moored offshore from a monumental and immoderate time-sharing project, a mausoleum of doomed real-estate speculation, the Pyramids of our time and that place. The half-baked and half-finished concrete resort and casino had been erected on land called Billy Folly, and was named Pelican Resort. Pelican because pelicans fished our common water, flying in threes, throttling back to stall speed, diving in a wings-back free fall, gobbling the catch. We learned to watch this process hours at a whack. That's what a Caribbean vacation is for, in my book, to zone out, narrow the concentration to what is least my own business. To buy a breather.\n\nThe pelicans' swooning fall and frantic takeoff reminded us of the enterprise at our backs, as though we could possibly have forgotten. The din began before breakfast, and quit during dinner. It was a stunning racket. What you hear at an airport isn't a patch on that uproar, because at an airport you don't pass your time in the open air a few feet from the runway. The blast shook the condo, shook us. It was not a Caribbean noise.\n\nThere was also a suspicion, vaguely perceived as a slickness to the epidermis, of oil finely sprayed at each takeoff. This was not Coppertone. Afterburners would cut in at full power, and those three or four great GEs or Pratt & Whitneys would go pedal to the metal, and we would cover our ears, and a fine mist of jet fuel would settle in the planes' wake, skim-coating my expensively vacationing family. Call it a \"vapor trail\" if you prefer; I call it kerosene.\n\nThe folks next door were untroubled by this phenomenon. They hailed from Queens, within easy earshot of JFK, and the takeoffs and landings made them feel at home. Our condominiums appeared to my untrained judgment identical, two-bedroom \"units,\" but there seemed no end to this neighboring family. Each morning, as with passengers piling from a circus car, the cry was still \" _they come!_ \" As many as they were, so were they similar, one big happy family.\n\nBig! Here in Rhode Island there was a restaurant of legend, Custy's, all-you-can-eat. A few years ago it changed management, and on his first Sunday the new owner saw an out-of-state charter bus swing into his parking lot. As the bus unloaded its freight, anxiety turned to horror: a banner stuck to the bus's side proclaimed its origin and mission: THE BUFFET BUSTERS OF NEW JERSEY! (Custy's is out of business.)\n\nOur neighbors were buffet busters, and we were at first standoffish when they approached us to share Sint Maarten dining lore. They had in their generous company a dog; his collar named him Butch, and he wouldn't be stood off. He would come to the _terraza_ of our unit to scratch his ass against a chaise longue while we watched the rusty dredger and listened to planes take off. Butch would curl up, a hint of a smile baring his canines, and languidly masturbate, until we left him to his self-absorption and took our pi\u00f1a coladas indoors, where the swans hung motelly.\n\nIt didn't take long to notice that our Buffet Busters were having better fun than we. They laughed, and when they weren't laughing they smiled, like Butch. They seemed to love one another (but less ardently than Butch loved himself). Every morning they took a group picture, one member of the dozen or so grams and moms and in-laws darting out of the great assembly to memorialize the rest. Even their sunburns seemed to amuse them, and these were _sunburns_ , the kind to be got only by spending hours without moving, floating belly-down staring at sand through a fogged face mask, or lying belly-up staring at the sky.\n\nWhile these good and happy people took their ease, I was about my business. To protect myself against the consequences of hypertension, I boiled my blood driving crowded potholed roads searching for a doctor to give me a prescription. Failing, I wandered from town to town to town (there are three: two French, one Dutch) to entreat pharmacists for drugs, and to be insulted by them. At length, sweating and shaking like an addict from my frustrated mission, I found a worldly French druggist, all shrugs and tropical sophistication, dressed like Bogey in _Casablanca_ , a coffin nail dangling from his lower lip. He was willing to sell me anything that wasn't what I had been instructed to use. I settled on reserpine, from _Rauwolfia serpentina_ , Indian snakeroot. Potent.\n\nAfter looking for The Man, finally making my connection, shopping in a supermarket whose linoleum floor, slick with spilled daiquiri mix, gave me a tumble amusing to other shoppers, I paused at one of the island's thousand or so casinos to lose my folding money to the wheel and my coins to the slots. At \"home,\" going for a Heineken to wash down my drugs, I forgot what I had urged those in my care to remember, and got a hundred-plus volts, and this caused me, more in anger than in sorrow, to sweep my prescription Vuarnets violently from my brow to the floor, where a lens broke. That was my second full day in Sint Maarten.\n\nThe following days we fended off the friendly approaches of the Buffet Busters and the amorous urgencies of Butch. We swam. Mostly we spent money. We spent at casinos, with workaday stupidity. We could as easily have blown a wad at Nice, or Baden-Baden, or in Venice; I'm not even saying the company would have been classier in Europe. But the Sint Maarten casino crowd was very Atlantic City, _muy_ San Juan.\n\nWe spent money eating. I mean _money_. We hadn't flown to the Islands to eat. We'd eaten in the Islands. We knew about Island cuisine. We'd tried veal birds at Bequia, \"rack of jambon au mustard\" in Antigua. We wished to eat and run, snack, go the simple route. So it was pizza for four at a fast-food place in Philipsburg, $83. American dollars. Dinner in Marigot, the French port, $200, plus tip ( _sans vin_ ), not an unwholesome piece of local fish, _tr\u00e8s nouvelle_ , teensy.\n\nThe most pleasing restaurant in town we were told but did not, alas, believe, is _at_ the airport, soundproofed against the din. Instead we chose a place set at the far end of the runway, very _intime_ , popular with return visitors (who could they be, and what could they be thinking?), called Mary's Boon. It has evident charms: old wicker, a macaw in a cage (or maybe it was a fish in a bowl), guests got up in natural fibers, a single menu served take-it-or-leave-it at long, communal tables, an \"honor bar,\" which means guests pour their own drinks, whose number they are honorbound to report, and for which they are charged several dollars apiece, which imposed, to be honest, a heavy burden on my sense of honor.\n\nWe ate at Mary's Boon with friends who knew the owners. Let's say the bill was $300. (We ate some shrimp was why.) When it came time to pay, we asked\u2014discreetly I thought, so the other guests didn't have to see the ugly transaction\u2014if we might pay $150 a couple. It was a matter of American Express traveler's checks, you see, because credit cards\u2014nasty plastic things\u2014were not... honored.\n\n\"I don't want to get into this,\" said the owner. \"One bill, one person pays.\"\n\n\"Well, it's quite simple,\" I said. \"We aren't asking for a mathematical computation, just that you take half in checks from me, half in checks from my friend.\"\n\n\"Must I speak more slowly?\" the owner said. \"What you do to each other with your 'traveler's checks' is quite your own business. I wish to have three hundred dollars, and I wish it from _one_ of you.\"\n\nCross my heart.\n\nTwo days later, Christmas, my wife and I stopped for a couple of drinks at La Samana (\"untypical,\" the brochure says, \"uncompromised\") where movie stars stay, but weren't staying that day. Our check was $16. I offered a $50 traveler's check.\n\n\"Haven't you got something smaller?\" asked the waitress at the least compromised al fresco resort in the Caribbean, $520 a night double, no meals, plus service.\n\nBut I run before my story. Back to Mary's Boon, or the hours following our honestly drunk drinks and $6-per-shrimp seafood at the runway's end, so complexly paid for. Sometime that night someone broke into our unit, patrolled our bedroom while we slept, and stole what was worth stealing, and much that was not. Now we were deep in it: no keys, identification, credit cards, cash, or traveler's checks.\n\nThe Buffet Busters, worldly old hands, were resigned to our bad luck.\n\n\"See the plywood screwed over our slider?\" (Indeed, we had remarked to ourselves the oddness of this use of a sliding-glass door fronting the ocean.) \"Only thing to keep the fuckers out. And I keep a loaded hogleg on the night table.\"\n\nBut of course! How silly of us not to have thought of it.\n\n\"They come in boats. Swim ashore, grab the loot, they're gone. Did they get your medication?\" (My medical adventures were not unknown to our immediate community: the single phone nearby worked according to the volume put into it, like a tin can connected to a tin can by string.) \"They love drugs. One drug looks like another to those fellows.\"\n\nWe were told how lucky we were: it was Christmas Eve morn; another day, and the Island would be shut tight till after New Year's. Many a red-letter day in the Lesser Antilles.\n\nKarl Malden was on the money. We had the providence of having had stolen from us not just any traveler's checks but the right kind, and sure enough, American Express has a Philipsburg office, and I found my way to it. I stood in line to tell my grim tale, behind half a dozen or so other desolates, similarly deprived at poolside, on the beach, asleep in their hotels. I asked an agency employee if it was always like this, and was told, runically, that where there are casinos, tourists lose money.\n\nPerhaps experience had educated the traveler's-check-refund people in their brisk manner, their refusal to say, as I might have liked to have heard: _This is tragic. Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the theft of cash_.\n\nOr, at least: _Gee, downer, you must be bummed_.\n\nLet _me_ say it: I felt awful. Angry, hot, panicked. (I saw for the first time the glimmer of an improbable possibility: that a fellow might come to this island, get picked clean and never leave; such a fellow would wind down drinking Jamaican Red Cap beer, wearing white clothes that weren't white anymore and not caring that they weren't.)\n\nI was also short of breath, as though a barber were wrapping a steaming towel around my face. I had felt this several times the past few days, and mentioned it to Priscilla, who took it more seriously than I took it. I wrote it off to heat, and stress, all those double sawbucks flying pell-mell from my pockets into the pockets of strangers.\n\nWhen I at last got to the head of the line of wronged ones, I learned that American Express would have no business with me until I filed a police report, which a policeman must sign. The American Express agent looked meaningfully at her watch, and explained that I had wasted much time in line, and the office closed, for Christmas and other holidays, in two hours, and I had better move with dispatch to the office of detectives, at the other end of Philipsburg's main drag.\n\nOh my! A speedy walk past the duty-free boom boxes and porcelain kitty-cats to another long line. As this crept, winding indoors from the hot alley where we miserables stood gnawing our lower lips, it dawned on me that to get a signature on a piece of paper was not so casually done as demanded.\n\n\"We hab no crime on dis island,\" I heard a detective explain. \"Mainland peoples bring de trouble. And Dominicans.\" (As Turks are to Swiss, and Koreans to Japanese, the people of Dominica, who labor with their hands, are to the entrepreneurs of Sint Maarten. It is a time-worn story.)\n\nLacking criminals, the detectives made do with victims. The victim immediately ahead of me was an Islander. His story was sadder and more complicated than mine. It seems that the night before, a person or persons unknown had invaded his property, taking advantage of the peculiarity that it was without a cyclone fence ringed with razor wire, and made away with the man's dog. The detective stopped writing, and looked up. The dog could be identified, the victim explained, and began to give an account of an animal I could have sworn was our neighbor Butch, until I heard a final detail: \"My dog got three legs.\" (Butch had five, always.)\n\nMy interview was not successful. The detective, studying my lack of composure, the red-faced urgency of my manner, concluded that I was a confidence man, and he was no stranger to \"devices,\" as he assured me. We were soon on the subject of signatures. I wanted his, in any form, on anything. I had an easier time getting the Splendid Splinter's when I was a boy. I believed I might weep. The detective saw something in me that made him wish I would go away, as the former master of a three-legged dog had gone away, and I explained that I _would_ go away, but only with a detective's signature. And that is how I got a name written on my airline ticket, which the cat burglar(s) had neglected to steal. This signature I rushed to the outskirts of Philipsburg, a town composed of outskirts, to a Dutch bank. Here, American Express had sort of suggested, the detective's signature would be exchanged for traveler's checks. Waiting in line, I was offered a fruit punch\u2014rum-and-cherry Slurpee, with a custard garnish. These were served by a Dutch bank officer who was busy drinking most of those portions of the concoction she was pouring for her puzzled customers; I thought I saw a pathway to her sympathy if not her heart, and invited her to enjoy the cup she extended toward me. In turn she invited me to sit at her desk. Her fingernails were too long to make it possible for her to open ledgers, but she invited me to her cabin after the close of business to \"happify Yuletime.\" I promised that that cabin was the only place I longed to be, and got new traveler's checks, and the residue of her lurid lipstick on my nose. (She had removed her bifocals to cuddle me.)\n\nThe rest of our holiday was less fun.\n\nWell, let me be fair. Putting aside an episode with our rented automobile in Marigot\u2014where it was sideswiped while parked and while we ate a hundred dollars' worth of sandwiches on Christmas night, a mischance that would cost me two (maybe three) hundred, and resulted in a fight so terrible between Priscilla (who parked the car) and her husband (who signed the rental contract that left us nakedly exposed to the driving skills and honor of other people) that my children preferred to hike to their runway-side villa, from France to Holland, by shank's mare so they wouldn't be obliged to listen to a Mr. & Mrs. that ended only because I ran out of breath to prolong it\u2014Christmas was mezzo-mezzo.\n\nDuring our holiday disagreement, I asked speculatively: \"Will we ever get off this miserable island?\"\n\nThe next day I found a way.\n\nFor a consideration a catamaran, the _Bluebeard_ , chartered on a head-boat basis (charging per passenger to all comers), would sail us from Marigot to Sandy Island, a reef-girt sandspit two hundred by fifty yards, a couple of miles northwest of Anguilla. Anguilla, under British colonial rule, is the place to which people flee when the pressure of Sint Maarten screws too tight on them; Sandy Island is where they go when the bustle of Anguilla mills them down.\n\nThe arrangements were businesslike. In the shadow of a casino I bought three tickets (Priscilla was left to guard the few remaining dollars and, especially, the plane tickets), and we were to surrender these dockside next day to the crew of _Bluebeard_. We were up early; I felt hinky, wanted to leave time aplenty for the untoward to waylay us before boarding. I believed two hours would be adequate for the seven-mile journey to Marigot by sideswiped car, time enough surely to find a bulletproof parking place. I wanted this to go smoothly.\n\nIt did not; we were rained out.\n\nWe took it well. Yachtsmen we were, sports. There was always tomorrow, our last full day. And tomorrow, in fact, came without intervening tragedy. We never left home, and remembered to open the refrigerator with a long wooden stick, and took baths instead of showers, so we wouldn't fall down and injure ourselves, and kept our doors and windows shut and locked, all day, even after the rain stopped, so our tickets and passports would not be stolen by foreigners who come from the sea. No pelicans fell on us while we swam.\n\nCome next morning, I got Nicholas and Justin up with the sun, and packed, and found we were just that little bit short of suntan lotion. We stopped at a convenience store along the imperfectly executed \"road\" to Marigot, and bought Sea & Ski, for only fifteen dollars. I rummaged for the money at the bottom of a canvas bag holding our _Bluebeard_ tickets. I had examined these tickets several times that morning, had held them in my hands, had stared at them and read their promises: the bracing sail, the \"dazzling white beach, the coral reefs that teem with bright, colorful tropical fish set in incredibly blue waters.\" I had not failed to note that after \"complimentary beverages\" the \"magical sound of a conch horn announces the readiness of a plentiful barbecue\" on the beach.\n\nSo: we parked the sideswiped vehicle in Marigot and walked briskly toward the yacht basin, and then\u2014half an hour before we were to sail\u2014I felt an inkling that we and our tickets were no longer together. A cursory look in my canvas bag revealed this horribly to be so. Throwing the bag to a son, yelling over my shoulder \"Beg them to wait,\" I ran to the car, and drove it, in violation of sense and law, careening around curves, ignoring a red light at a drawbridge, _fast_ , to the \"convenience\" store. Breathless, I broke in ahead of other customers.\n\n\"I left my tickets.\"\n\n\"What you talking about?\"\n\n\"Hey, we were in line.\"\n\n\"Tickets. Suntan lotion. Counter.\"\n\nAnd then it dawned on me. To black people, white people look alike. I am bald, and wear a white beard, and stutter, but the woman who twenty minutes earlier had instructed me to have a nice day did not know me. I tell you: it hurt.\n\n\"Could my tickets be in your wastebasket?\"\n\nAnd then I was behind the counter, rummaging through trash, while her husband or co-worker or brother or son or father came toward me with a look that would have frightened me had I had the composure to feel fear.\n\n\"You stole our tickets,\" I reasoned. \"I will never shop here again,\" I promised. \"Fifteen dollars for Sea & Ski is not right. I will tell about this. I am,\" I explained, \"a _writer!_ \"\n\nAnd then I drove back to Marigot, weeping. There would be for us no \"magical sound of a conch horn,\" no \"plentiful barbecue.\" I may weep again, maybe ten minutes from now. But I had not wept for many years until then, and have not wept since, and while I wept, I drove as recklessly as a teenager, with the difference that by then I knew as I had not known when I was sixteen that I could die, or kill, driving like that.\n\nParked and ran, and again found it difficult to breathe, but now there was an iron band under my arms, cinching my chest.\n\nThe boat was preparing to sail.\n\n\"She stole the tickets.\"\n\n\"Chill out,\" Nicholas said.\n\n\"Take it easy,\" a crew member suggested. \"Have you looked in your pockets? Checked that ice bag?\"\n\n\"Of course I have!\" Now I was yelling, while Justin dug his hands deep into the bag and found, where I had put them for safekeeping, the tickets.\n\nIt was as promised. Free drinks, sunshine, cool breezes, grilled fish. I apologized to everyone, blushing, my heart pounding with shame, I thought. The passengers were not boors. The crew were not cynical beach bums. They forgave me. I put aside a twenty-dollar bill to tip them generously for the trouble I had put them to. I wanted them to know I was not as I seemed. I began to relax. I could be a good guy. Tomorrow we'd be gone. My tip would go far to set things right. As we approached Marigot at day's end, I lay on deck, rolled to my left, and watched a twenty-dollar bill, the only money any Wolff had aboard, blow from my pocket, and bob in our wake. Justin saw it all, and looked away:\n\n\"Wow,\" he said.\n\nOur flight was to leave at four. We had been forewarned of chaos at the airport, long lines at the ticket counter, passport control, customs. We agreed to arrive at two. We packed. At noon my wife prepared to take a shower. My sons and I decided on a final swim. In the sea, for a reason I cannot fathom, I decided I wanted a water fight; I wanted the kind of water fight _they_ fight once a year, the real McCoy, not just splashing, but dunking, wrestling, slick violence. Me versus them. They played horse, and wrestled me down, and I remember my head going under, and coming up trying to catch a breath, and not getting a full load in my lungs, and then running toward them in deeper water, my legs heavy against the surge, feeling not right, turning toward shore, walking deliberately toward a beach chair set at the sea's edge, understanding that to reach that chair not thirty feet away would be to get somewhere I _had_ to reach, not as though my life depended on reaching that aluminum-and-plastic chaise longue, but as though it were an important goal, in the sense that one might run to board a slow-moving train that was not the last train ever to roll to one's destination, but what the hell, one had not come so far to miss trains.\n\nI got there, sort of. I was trying hard to breathe. I managed to say to my older son, \"I can't breathe.\"\n\nBut I couldn't find the posture to inhale what I wanted so badly. Upright, dignified: not enough air, something pinched off. Slump-shouldered, sagging: the diaphragm wouldn't deliver.\n\nI tried to lie down.\n\n\"Lower this chair for me, Nick.\"\n\nWhat happened then, I didn't witness. As far as I know, I asked my son a favor, and the next thing, just a blink out of my life, there were people standing above me, and I heard a little girl crying, and asking, \"Is he dead?\"\n\nWhat bad manners, I remember thinking. Much later I was told that was no little girl, but my wife. I had no trouble recognizing the voices of my sons, who were saying, not in unison but at the same time, two incantations, a fugue: \"Be all right. Don't give up. Come back.\" And much else.\n\nIt was embarrassing, all those strangers.\n\nA Buffet Buster was holding my wrist. \"He's got a pulse again.\"\n\nShe knew her apples.\n\nI tried to reassure them. I wanted to walk away from all this, and even then I knew it was important to escape that island. I didn't try to stand, but when I spoke I made my voice purposeful: \"I'm okay.\"\n\nNo one seemed interested in my opinion of myself, because they had seen what I hadn't: gray skin, eyes rolled back under my lids, convulsions\u2014to the untrained eyes of my wife and sons, death.\n\nNow\u2014soon\u2014came a doctor, Dutch, running. I mistook him for a jogger.\n\nThen the ambulance, a wild ride to Philipsburg, just wild; what a trip, lying on my back below the scream of the siren and seeing, blurred beyond the distracted nurse, palm trees shoot by.\n\n\"Where are my glasses?\"\n\n\"Just calm down, Dad. We'll be there. Please be quiet. Don't worry.\"\n\nBut, my God, Nicholas was edgy, the laid-back one, a grace-under-pressure boy. What was going on? I was, as they say, beside myself, trying without success to share a secret: _I was okay_.\n\nThe Dutch physician from the beach was met at the emergency room by a Dutch cardiologist, and they laid me down and hooked me up and asked questions. Was I in pain? (No.) Where had the pain come? Shoulders? Arms?\n\nNow this called for a more complicated reply than seems invited by such simple questions. My situation with the doctors was a bit like the situation of someone guessing which hand holds a coin. If the tempting obvious guess is _right hand_ , a simpleminded guesser will say _left_ , a more subtle mind _right_ , subtler still _left..._ I knew what story was told by pain radiating from the shoulders, and the doctors guessed I knew this and would deny it, and I denied it because I had not felt it, but the doctors had to decide whether I denied it because I had not felt it or because I didn't want to have had a heart attack.\n\nThe vocabulary of pain is discriminating. I aimed to illuminate rather than disguise my difficulty, but the emergency room of a Caribbean hospital is not precisely the site of choice for precise lexical delicacy. A patient's diction can express, and it can delude. Words, we do not tire of reminding ourselves, count. There is \"sharp,\" \"dull,\" \"throbbing,\" \"hot,\" \"unbearable,\" \"steady.\" I had experienced none of these sensations; instead, hurried, I chose an approximate locution, inaccurate in fact, but in the spirit of my experience: \"It felt like a heavy person kneeling on my chest.\"\n\nOh, how vigorously I would later try to retract those words, to delete them from my transcript, to change my grade. But they were my words, and I said them close to the moment, and they went from English to Dutch back out to English, and they added up to the single conclusion I least believed or wanted to believe: _heart attack_.\n\nNow the EKG. I lay in the emergency room, watching the terror on Priscilla's face and Justin's; I couldn't imagine what they were thinking. My attention was in the present tense; now a nurse was exclaiming impatiently that the monitor cups wouldn't adhere to my white-haired chest; now she was shaving my chest; now I felt the cold shock of jelly rubbed on me to hold the cups. I listened to doctors discuss, in a language I could not have understood had it been English, what it was with me. I knew I was just fine, that once this rigmarole was finished, I'd fly home and put paid to this fiasco of a holiday.\n\nThe diagnosis was heart disease. Syncopes here and abnormal repolarizations there. I tried to argue them out of it, explaining that I had been using reserpine, a drug new to me. That must have keeled me over, the reserpine. My instinctive distrust of that drug was not, I later learned, as desperately farfetched as you might believe. Reserpine is potent, can provoke suicidal depressions that hang on for months. More to my point, it so slows the heartbeat as sometimes to cause fainting, not to mention rashes, weight increase, lethargy, troubled dreams, blurred vision, nosebleeds, premature ejaculation: let's conclude that depression is a side effect of these side effects.\n\nI explained about my medications: they were in my driveway, all could be traced to that ill beginning. The Dutch doctors were curious as to how I managed to prescribe for myself a drug so potent as reserpine, and I mentioned Marigot, a pharmacy there, and they looked at each other, illuminated.\n\n\"Ah, the French.\" The doctors shrugged, so predictably that I laughed, but I found myself laughing alone.\n\nIt was decided, without interest in my opinion, that I would be checked into the hospital and observed until more was known. The stethoscope, the charts, did not suggest the side effects of reserpine.\n\nI gave in. Tame as a puppy. Fact was, I wanted to be in a room alone, with the door shut. I was done now searching for better words, wondering _what next_ , reckoning how we would escape that botched island. I wanted to nap.\n\nI was wheeled into an air-conditioned room, with a window fronting the harbor. I was getting my hand held by one and then another of my family, and that was nice, but\u2014I thought\u2014theatrical, uncustomary. More familiar was the nature of Priscilla's question to my sons after I was hooked up to a monitor by wires leading from my breasts, ankles; the monitor, just like the television monitors you've seen (I mean the ones _on_ television, \"St. Elsewhere,\" say), clicked busily but irregularly, sketched peaks and valleys, jagged yellow lines.\n\nMy wife asked my boys, the cardiologists: \"Does that look right to you? It doesn't look right to me.\"\n\nAnd then they left me to rest.\n\nImmediately came a nutritionist, asking was I hungry; I said no, not a bit hungry. So she produced for me to eat\u2014half an hour after the emergency room, an hour beyond the ambulance, an hour and fifteen minutes after the water fight\u2014chicken creole. There were French fries, and butterscotch pudding, and a huge breast of chicken with tomato sauce and okra. There were thick slabs of white bread. A bottle of Orange Crush. If I had asked for a St. Pauli Girl, I could have had it, and a squash racquet too. When the food was removed, I thought I might rest.\n\nI remembered a story a friend told me about his adventure in Jamaica thirty years ago during spring vacation from boarding school. Shy around girls, he was quite a diver, so he had put in hour upon hour diving from cliffs to amaze them but was then unable to hear their amazement. Water had collected in his ears, and he did what we do: shook his head violently, jumped on the left foot, jumped on the right, whacked the sides of his head with his palms. He bought Jamaican Q-tips, cotton swabs just the wrong size, and they seemed to drive the water deeper in his ears and to cause some small pain.\n\nHis roommate knew a remedy, was surprised it was not a remedy familiar to all divers: \"Pour bourbon in your ears. Melts the wax, and flushes out the saltwater.\"\n\nIn Jamaica, thirty years ago, bourbon was scarce, but there was 151-proof rum, and my friend poured this in one ear and then, despite the sensation you may guess at, poured some in the other ear. He spent time in a Caribbean hospital. The hospital stay made an impression on him\u2014changed him even.\n\n\"Do you believe in Our Lord Jesus _Christ!_ \"\n\nShe was immense, a figure only Flannery O'Connor could have imagined, breasts like shoats squirming to escape from a croaker sack. Black she wore, and a florid hat, and plum lipstick. Rouged, bearing a Bible.\n\n\"I say, do you _believe_ in Him!\"\n\nFor a moment, I almost thought of thinking whether I believed in anything the way she needed to know whether I believed in Him. Instead I thought, I don't need this.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"I say, will you _declare_ your belief in the Son of God!\"\n\n\"Please go away.\"\n\nShe was astounded. She was rattling off a rap from memory, let's call it a litany. This was not in the script, getting shown the door, on _Sunday_.\n\n\"I do this by the commandment of the Lord Jesus Christ! This is my day off work.\"\n\n\"Take a load off,\" I said. \"Enjoy a day of rest. I'm a bad customer.\"\n\n\"I'll tell you, mister, you are sick! They told me.\"\n\n\"Go away.\"\n\nThe apostle dropped to her knees. Her hat was ornate, almost interesting.\n\n\"There ain't no hospital beds in Hell, mister. Pray with me!\"\n\nI rolled over, away from the missionary's hat, and looked out at the harbor. A cruise ship was coming in. My eyes without my glasses saw it all blurred. I was infirm, unwell. But I could hear the clanking anchor chain and a bustle below my window on the beach, the excitement of people near a place where money will soon be redistributed. I never heard the proselyte leave, but I knew she was gone, and with her the Good News.\n\nLater that night, Priscilla came back with the boys. Justin thought it might be interesting to touch together the two electric paddles, those things you see in television emergency rooms, when the intern yells \"clear!\" and gives some luckless sod the juice, and the patient's chest heaves, and his legs buck like a bronc's, and his monitor line goes wavy (\"We've got a pulse; his blood pressure's coming back!\") and everyone smiles, or it goes flat (\"I need a drink. Sometimes I hate this job! Anyone coming?\"). Anyway, Justin was bringing the resurrection paddles together, Priscilla yelled at him, I jerked, my own life-sign line went kind of jagged, and Priscilla and I argued. Was what I might have had on the beach properly called a \"myocardial infarction\" (my choice), or \"myocardial infraction\" (Priscilla's and, once they heard the two side by side, the boys' choice). I was right, but let's concede \"infraction\" makes a world more sense.\n\nThen Priscilla, just before they left me for the night, said, \"I'll never be mean to you again.\"\n\nShe meant it, too. It made me laugh.\n\n\"Don't say such a thing. It makes me sad to hear it. I can't do without.\"\n\n\"I mean it. I'll never be mean to you again.\"\n\nWell.\n\nNear midnight, finished with a junk novel I was reading to keep my mind off my worries, which were worrying me less than they should, I got to my window, stretching to their farthest reach the wires connecting me to the heart monitor. I was drawn by lights in the harbor, and friendly shouts from the beach. I leaned my nose against the pane and tried to focus. Below on the beach I could see what looked like fireflies, wavy flickers seeming to signal to the sparkling cruise ship offshore, dressed with lights; to my blear vision the vessel seemed afire. My attention was drawn to a noise below, and I realized what I must seem to anyone looking in my window, an old geezer with cups stuck to his tits, wires leading out. The fireflies came closer, and I thought someone was waving sparklers at me in a friendly way, and then I saw the orange trail of a comet arc toward me, and then felt an awful concussion, full explosion, and I heard glass break, and by the time the nurses were there, in response to that monitor honking like a French flic's car, I realized someone had lobbed a cherry bomb at me, and the outer of the two windows had been shattered by it.\n\nSo I lay awake waiting for the blood test whose results would tell me whether I had had a myocardial in _farc_ tion, killing a region of my heart, or whether something else had made me eat sand. I lay tense, looking toward the open door where the evangelist in black might appear again with her Holy Book and Glad Tidings, and then toward the window, waiting for another bang. Staring out the window, I saw the nimbus of the sun rise, and had blood drawn, and heard a doctor tell me the blood test revealed none of those enzymes that accompany a death of heart muscle; I had probably not had the experience called heart attack.\n\n\"How soon can I get off this dangerous island?\"\n\n\"Next week, five or six days, after we observe you.\"\n\n\"Today,\" I said.\n\nI was warned not on any account to show signs of malaise at the airport, or the airlines would never carry me off that unspeakable place for fear I'd make trouble for them: die, say, or\u2014worse\u2014litigate them. It was an odd sensation, but not at all unpleasant, to be coddled by my family, to have my bags toted by Justin while Nicholas checked us in, to have Priscilla deal with the wrecked rent-a-car, and gesticulate, and argue, and by sweet advocacy save a buck or two. (I would have fought to win a moral judgment, which is one reason, I guess, I have high blood pressure. Priscilla just wanted to get the damage payment down a little, bless her.)\n\nIn fact, I felt fine, okay, not so bad. Tired, distracted, but I managed to watch the sappy holiday movie, a colorized _It's a Wonderful Life_. I began to notice, as Jimmy Stewart finally noticed, the decencies manifest around me. Flying north, into the teeth of a winter whose forthright sharpness I welcomed, I thought how kind the Buffet Busters had been, how quick to help, how competent. Even Butch, watching me heave back to life on my beach chaise, cocked his head, concerned more about me, it seemed, than about his pecker. I didn't like the news the Dutch doctors gave me, but they gave it, on a Sunday. The appraiser at the car rental\u2014LUCKY (!) CAR RENTALS\u2014had been just. As our stay at the condo was necessarily lengthened, instead of bills we got checks, refunds to atone for the nastiness of the refrigerator; the extra night was on them, they insisted cheerfully.\n\nI was learning lessons. Not the kind that is taught with a club that knocks you down: that kind of lesson I had always expected to have forced on me, and in fact it taught me nothing, except to remind me, around my family, of something Priscilla had read, that the one thing nobody says on his deathbed is \"I wish I'd worked harder.\"\n\nI was looking ahead to complicated news, though on New Year's Day I didn't guess how complicated. The messages coming in were about ratio, proportion; everywhere I turned people tried to smooth things for me. Near-strangers would write. Friends with whom I had nursed antique grievances\u2014feuds blossoming black from disputes over how many portholes in a 1951 Buick Special, or why didn't you like my book better, or pick up that dinner check, or phone earlier when you knew you couldn't come for the weekend, or help with the dishes when you came? These people were kind, wise, on call.\n\nSnow fell with us on Kennedy. In the customs shed the boys fought for luggage, and Priscilla tried to learn whether Providence was snowed in, whether flights would leave for that place, whether the parking lot there had been plowed. I telephoned doctors. I telephoned my father-in-law, a surgeon. For many years he had wisely dismissed as beneath serious discussion his family's anxious questions about sore throats and aching feet. To this story he listened. His interest did not reassure me. Neither did the product of a late-night conversation with my new doctor. He wanted me in his office tomorrow, no kidding.\n\nI got a crash course in cardiology. While I was keeling over in Sint Maarten, my doctor at home had been studying pictures and numbers from that echocardiogram administered three years earlier; these had not shown him \"the heart of a baby\"; these had sufficiently alarmed him that he was telephoning our house while I was snorkeling off the _Bluebeard_ , losing money at roulette, all the rest. He was not surprised, alas, by what I told him, and brought forth cutaway pictures of the heart, and especially of the heart's valves, and especially of the aortic region.\n\nPriscilla and Nicholas sat through his patient explanation. I had found books about prescription drugs, and had photocopied\u2014let's say obsessively\u2014the dire, possible (improbable) side effects of reserpine. Surely this explained everything. A reflex had evolved: at the end of every test I expected to hear: _Go home, you silly goose! There's nothing wrong with you. Reserpine tossed you a curveball, is all_.\n\nThe doctor listened. The doctor said, \"Anything's possible.\" The doctor got me an emergency appointment with a cardiologist.\n\nThe cardiologist was laconic, self-assured. He resembled Hal Holbrook, and gave off that same aura of prematurely gray-haired competence. This was not the man on whom I wished to exercise my reserpine theory of fainting. The cardiologist didn't at first seem to have, as Priscilla put it, \"a heart as big as all outdoors.\" (We were compiling an omniumgatherum of clich\u00e9s; I didn't resist the temptation to call friends on their expressions: \"You'd die to see her,\" \"My heart's with you,\" \"I feel heartsick for you\"; my favorite, after a chest X-ray revealed my abnormally enlarged pump\u2014\"You're all heart.\")\n\nThe cardiologist listened, and listened harder where other doctors had listened hard, and listened there some more. He was brisk; his hands were delicate; as he finished with me, he patted me on the head. I could have wept with gratitude for that gentle touch; Priscilla, watching, said it was like a man patting a dog. She was right; I was right. The pat was perhaps condescending, but if ever I wanted to be touched from above, from Olympus by a god, it was that day. I didn't want a cardiologist who was my equal; I knew what I was and was not. I knew how inaccurately I could parse a paragraph, or misdiagnose a meaning. I wanted to be in the hands of a master.\n\nThis master didn't like to answer questions. He especially winced at _what-if_ questions; they made him less terse than silent as a tomb. He knew what he knew, would tell when it came time to tell. He knew what he _thought_. He thought I had acute aortic valvular stenosis, which meant my aortic valve was defective, narrow, failing properly to open, which meant I was not pumping sufficient oxygen-rich blood up my ascending aorta, the great artery, to my body\u2014to my brain, for example. (Thus one faints, falls down, and the head\u2014if all goes according to the inventor's plan\u2014lies below the heart, and is fed by gravity.) But I learned what aortic valvular stenosis meant from _The Book of Knowledge_ , later. In that office then, I learned only that the cardiologist wanted me to get a chest X-ray and have another echocardiogram, immediately. I had been warned that I might have to undergo a procedure called \"cardiac catheterization,\" which I loosely understood to be the threading of a long tube up an artery and into the heart, where pressures could be read, and dye injected and photographed as it snaked through tributaries.\n\nAn echocardiogram, by high contrast, is performed in Rhode Island Hospital's cardiac \"non-invasive\" wing. Oh, I liked \"non-invasive.\" Give me \"non-invasive\" any day. It uses Doppler, a radar that can translate sound waves into pictures and numbers. The snowy Saturday morning Nicholas drove me to the hospital to have my heart televised, we found in the waiting room an aged couple. It was no trick to know which of them was there to be tested: her face was gray, and she trembled from stone terror. Later, I would think that to have seen her was to look into a mirror, but now it seemed I was on one side of a high fence, and she on the other.\n\nNicholas talked to her. The weather. The Patriots. How 'bout those Celtics! His college courses and summer jobs. Smart boy: she was forgetting here and now; forgetting herself, almost. This was life, talking this way.\n\n\"Does it hurt?\" her husband asked me.\n\nI wondered whether he thought I was a doctor. I wondered what they had been told, whether they too had thumbed an encyclopedia. I thought how needless _this_ terror was.\n\n\"Not a bit.\"\n\nIn fact it did hurt, a bit. Not me, as it turned out, but the nurse who made her way by microphones up and down and across me. The examining room, all electronics and monitors, was dark, so only the green light of the monitor lit us dimly, as murky pale as the floor of a shoal sea.\n\nI heard the murmur, a surfy snuffle, a wet whisper, like this: _be at peace, be at peace, be at peace_. Say it fast, honest. That's what my heart, amplified and sounded, said.\n\nThe nurse working me over was teaching the procedure to a nurse from another hospital. The student was bored and distracted; she chewed gum loudly enough to have the noise picked up by the echocardiogram mike, and was asked to give her jaws a rest.\n\n\"Where do you get these handiwipes?\" she asked her teacher. \"I love these; they're pre-moistened. I wish I had some at home,\" she said. \"They sure are handy.\"\n\nMy nurse was annoyed. She wasn't seeing the pictures she was told to shoot.\n\n\"Aortic stenosis has terrible mike angles. It kills, really hurts my hand to have to hold the mike this way. What a hassle!\"\n\n\"For me, too,\" I said.\n\n\"Quiet,\" she said, but the gum-chewer didn't obey.\n\n\"One thing for sure,\" I had told Priscilla that morning. \"No one, _no way_ , is threading anything up my arteries into my heart. Go to the bank on it.\"\n\nIn fact, walking a short distance from a Newport parking lot to my bank, less than two blocks, I had felt a catch in my lungs, a want of something. Breathe as I would, I couldn't get a full shot. (I popped a nitroglycerine tablet under my tongue, the time-honored remedy for victims of angina, but because angina wasn't my problem, the \"nitro\"\u2014as it's known to its friends\u2014was no remedy.) Two days later, two weeks after my felling in the Islands, I tried to drag a garbage can fifteen yards up my driveway, and I couldn't. I stood in the cold that day, alone in the small town where we live, and put a hand under my jacket and under my shirt, and tried to feel my heart, as though it were willing to tell me what it wanted, what I had done to it.\n\nAs soon as the chest X-ray was in the cardiologist's hands (confirming that my heart was abnormally enlarged, from laboring to pump blood through a bum valve), together with the echocardiogram, I was told the next step was to thread a wire up my arteries into my heart.\n\n\"How soon?\" I asked.\n\n\"Beginning of next week,\" he said.\n\nMy cardiologist would not discuss what lay beyond cardiac catheterization, which would confirm his suspicions, or\u2014lots of luck\u2014confound them. I knew. The encyclopedia explained it all under _Cardiac Abnormalities_. Next they \"crack your chest,\" and the knife goes to work.\n\nBut, for now, we weren't to discuss sharp knives. Our topic was catheterization. This we discussed in the cardiologist's office, examining a model of a heart, organs cleverly fit within organs, a contraption of hinges and lurid colors. I watched him manipulate it, and pretended to understand what I was being told, much of it in Latin.\n\nBut about the procedure he couldn't have been clearer. He told me everything, because this was not speculative; this would happen. He explained hospital admission, and what and when I would eat, and when I would begin my fast, and when and where they would wheel me down to the catheterization (\"Cardiac Invasive Unit,\" presumably) room, and what would run through my IV, tranquilizing me, and who would do what, and for how long, and what I would feel.\n\n\"It will hurt when you get the local anesthesia. We'll give you a shot right next to the groin. Then the pain will dull. We'll insinuate a tube up your femoral artery; it is about the diameter of linguini; no nerves there, so it won't hurt. Then we'll thread another into your coronary arteries, to look into heart disease.\" (Blocked coronary arteries; insufficient blood _to_ the heart; bypass country.)\n\nBefore I could ask, he told me: \"We have problems a few times for a hundred procedures. These can vary: heart attack, stroke. It is possible to puncture a vital artery.\"\n\nMy cardiologist is known both vulgarly and respectfully as a \"cath jockey.\" If there was anyone in the neighborhood I was prepared to trust with wires the size of pasta, and with my vital stuff, there he sat. He smiled; I melted with gratitude.\n\nWhat he said would happen, happened. It was an operating room, with a jungle of wires and screens. Many technicians, two cardiologists. The IVs had been run into me, thinning my blood, or thickening it, tranquilizing me. I got the shot, and never felt the deep incision about two inches from the jewel box ( _my_ jewel box), where they cut into the artery. I felt pressure. I was awake, and was to remain awake, eyes wide open, so I could issue reports, and \"cooperate,\" holding my breath, exhaling.\n\nMeantime, the team talked. They were all business, looking, judging what they saw. A time came when I knew the wire was at my aortic valve (such as it was), because they told me, and because I felt something I didn't like, a crazy quickening of the beat. This called for a shot, right into an open vein, and mechanisms calmed again, and I heard the subtlest change of pitch and attention in the cardiologist's running commentary into a tape recorder. I had been all smiles, believed I was getting a good report card. Then someone whistled and said, \" _That's_ tight!\"\n\n_That_ was the valve.\n\nThen they warned me they were about to inject dye, to get pictures, an angiogram, to see whether my coronary arteries were silted with fat, whether maybe they needed to be bypassed with a length of vein from my leg, _my_ leg.\n\nI had been warned the dye (\"contrast medium\") would give discomfort, a few-second hot shot through my body. Precisely as foretold: discomfort rather than pain, and great heat, which soon passed.\n\n\"Let's get the stuff out now.\"\n\nAnd bingo, after an hour's work, about noon, they were done with looking.\n\nIn the hall outside, while they did another customer inside (we were parked like cars on a full lot), an intern leaned for twenty minutes with his full weight on my groin's bleeding artery. He explained I'd have a sandbag on it the following twenty-four hours, and if there were no complications, I could go home tomorrow.\n\nMy cardiologist told me I'd be thirsty when it was over. I'd fasted twelve hours\u2014neither food nor water\u2014so the dye could do its thing without making me puke, and the dry surgical theater... I was thirsty. And just as my cardiologist had promised in his office last week, he appeared with a root-beer popsicle. I hadn't eaten a root-beer twin-stick popsicle since I was a kid. Had they been out there all this time? Oh boy! It was sweet, and on the instant I was hooked.\n\n\"Where do you get these?\" I asked.\n\nThe cardiologist looked at me as though he had something else on his mind. Why so closemouthed? Why not share his connection? Who needed him: if Chasen's flew chili to Rome during the filming of _Cleopatra_ , I could get root-beer popsicles sent to Rhode Island.\n\nNot twenty-four hours earlier I had told Priscilla: \"One thing for _damned sure_. No way, Jos\u00e9, are they 'cracking' this chest.\" I had banged my breast for emphasis. \"I'll go to the dye and linguini, but beyond the pasta, count me out.\" I knew a thing or two myself: how a local cardiologist, Dr. Belasco, had got himself in the steel ch\u00e2teau the year before for putting pacemakers in people whose hearts needed no pacing. I had just seen a report on _20/20_ about the failure of mechanical mitral valves, with consequences you don't want even to imagine, and you haven't got one in you. And I had read a letter to _The New York Times_ on the subject of heroic rescue of heart-diseased patients, from a Florida woman who wanted next time her heart played tricks on her to wake up dead. Called \"Don't Save Me Again,\" the letter said, in part:\n\nI had open-heart surgery after two years in bed with congestive heart failure. I was a pioneer in valve replacement. This was followed by hepatitis (bad blood transfusion), coronary (valvular clot), hysterectomy (bleeding from anticoagulants), loss of vision (cerebrovascular accident), loss of ability to read (stroke), open-heart surgery (replacement of first mitral valve), more open-heart surgery (bleeding in chest cavity), cranial and internal bleeding (anticoagulants).\n\nCall me a stubborn fool, but I thought I'd take a pass on the chest cracking.\n\nThe cardiologist spoke: \"Your aortic valve is badly stenosed.\"\n\n\"A mess?\"\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"How soon can we get someone to cut it out?\"\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\n_It_ was a genetic botch. It would be tidy to believe that the defect was a patrimony, given my persistent labors to memorialize in written and oral history my father's peculiar legacy to his sons. I had thought that his estate\u2014twenty-five dollars\u2014shared equally with my brother, was the last of him.\n\nSave for memories, it was. If my poor excuse for an aortic valve can be blamed on either parent's genes, I'd have to choose my mother's; her own unlucky mother died at forty-one of mitral stenosis and regurgitation, the failure of the other principal heart valve. In fact, even that sad end probably had nothing to do with my state, inasmuch as my grandmother was known to have had rheumatic fever, a common cause of heart-valve disorders.\n\nNo, this was no one's fault. Not my father's, not my mother's, not even mine. The \" _why me?_ \" mechanism never kicked in. It made all the sense in the world that my aortic valve was stupid. It was just a thing that happens sometimes to some people. The night before my operation, the surgeon was very clear about things. To have my chest sawed and cut open, to be put on a heart-lung machine, to cut into the aorta to remove something, and replace it with something else\u2014man-made\u2014this was not without risks.\n\nMaybe five of a hundred patients don't come out of the operating room alive. Improving these pretty good odds were my otherwise good health, his celebrated skill, his faith in the valve he meant to sew in me. He was serene, a late-night reader, _very_ late-night, after a day of scheduled heart surgery, followed by the unforeseen: shotgunned chests, ice-picked pumps. He was too busy for a bedside manner, but he admired good writing. I hoped he liked my prose. I thought if maybe he admired my writing, maybe I'd have an edge, maybe even get what a friend in a similar fix got from his heart surgeon, a written guarantee that my friend would _never_ die. That kind of edge. On the other hand, maybe I'd do without the edge, and the cutting. What then, I asked the man who was next morning to hold my heart in his hands.\n\nOh, for sure, without a valve replacement, I could expect to live maybe another year, probably less than half that.\n\nWhat was to decide?\n\nThe morning Nicholas drove me to the hospital, I sat at my desk in what an in-law had called our \"Terminal House\" (because it is commodious enough to store a lifetime collection of junk), paying bills, working on\u2014can you believe it?\u2014taxes. Deposited (I know, I wouldn't believe it either) a \"kill-fee\" for a failed commissioned essay that was\u2014as editors sometimes say\u2014lifeless.\n\nThe night before the dawn cutting-in, considerate nurses and counselors said what they needed to say, clarified, explained, explained again. While they were \"in,\" as they said, \"there,\" they might do that bypass, but probably would not. Time, I was told, is precious on a heart-lung machine. I feigned comprehension.\n\nPriscilla and Justin and Nicholas had come and gone and come and gone. They were great. Justin saved the occasion from sobersidedness. I mentioned that I needed bifocals.\n\n\"Dad,\" he said, \"did it occur to you that you were twenty-what\u2014thirty, maybe\u2014when Nick was born...\"\n\n\"Twenty-nine...\"\n\n\"Twenty-nine. _Old_. Too late to have kids. Irresponsible. You can't even throw a ball to your tykes. Now from four-eyes to six-eyes. Lousy foresight.\"\n\nTo them, I had something that was bust, and could merely be fixed. I took peace from them. They wanted to see me as soon as it was over, in the intensive care unit, seemed to look forward to it, as to a happy ceremony. The surgeon had not exactly discouraged them, but I could tell, and Priscilla could tell, he'd sooner they waited. He suggested that I would make an alarming sight to people unused to seeing a person fresh from open-heart surgery. (Later, when I was thought well enough to be told such stories, I heard about a woman who came to see her husband\u2014immediately post-op, as they say\u2014minutes after a valve replacement. The shocking sight of him\u2014his color, facial slackness, less man than junction box for wires and tubes\u2014blew her heart, killed her dead.)\n\nAlone, I willed myself to think _de profundis_ about what was about to be done to me, to happen after. It has been a point of dispute between me and people I love that I suffer from a failure of gravity. I excuse myself by believing it wrong to confuse seriousness with solemnity, to pull a long face when I believe, believe right in my heart, that most things are funny. I do not exclude death, entirely. I know (but have had little experience) of deaths that were not approximately funny, but I won't dishonor them with easy pieties.\n\nMy own imagination, for worse or better, inclines toward absurd ends. I was once in a near-collision at sea, aboard a famous Mediterranean steamship, flagship of the fleet, in the Straits of Gibraltar on a clear and moonlit night, when she altered course to draw close and salute her sister ship. It was a very close escape, and I knew in that moment that had it happened, my friends would learn of it and feel awful, but that part of the story, an important part, would be difficult to resist as comic narrative.\n\nOr difficult for me. I'm sorry.\n\nNow, though, I wasn't laughing. On the other hand, I wasn't frightened. (I put this down to consoling ignorance, but I also put it down to a temperamental abhorrence of theatricality.) What _would_ have frightened me was root canal. I don't have any notion what root canal is, and I don't want to know.\n\nLying alone that night, I thought ruefully that I might miss by more than a little my ambition to check out debt-free and penniless. Let me just say that as difficult as it would have been for pals and kin to walk this planet without me, it would have been catastrophic for Visa and Diners' Club. Sears, had it known my situation, would have sent specialists from Mass General. American Express would have demanded a second opinion.\n\nOn the telephone, my mother reminded me, perversely, how frightened I had been of the needle. Not just as a baby, but in sixth and seventh grade, when I needed a tetanus booster, how I'd had to be dragged from beneath the examining table. My sons\u2014stitched up, down and sideways from bike accidents, rock fights, skiing accidents, falls from heights\u2014had put some steel in me. Time had.\n\nAnd, finally, with sleep coming down fast, near midnight, I made myself think _what-if_. And I told myself, without tricking myself (I think), that I was ready for whatever, truly. It came down to a simple question. Did the people I love know I loved them, and were they apt to remember who had loved them? I thought so. If Justin were nine instead of seventeen, oh how I would have bawled that night! I would have known that he'd try and try to recall me, that my likeness would dim, and this would make him feel as though he'd betrayed me, or I'd betrayed him. And then I'd be merely an idea to him.\n\nBut Justin knew me, Nicholas did, Priscilla in and out. They'd float without me, and if I died they wouldn't have to live with the strangest story ever told, but with a story that could be told, and explained, and accommodated in a sane scheme. The terrifying part, seeing a standing man tip over, seeing their father fall, and quiver, and drool: they'd seen it, and come through it. That night I was kind of the same, but they were not. Whatever happened next would be better than that day at the beach.\n\nAfter all, here I am, down the road from my valve job. I don't remember the morning hours before they did what they did. Such amnesia, induced chemically or physiologically, is commonplace. I remember waking, and that my wife and boys were there, and that I couldn't talk past the tubes down my throat, and that I wanted to talk. I remember a nurse in intensive care who fed me chips of ice through a whole night, a chip at a time, like a kid feeding an abandoned bird.\n\nThey sent my miserable excuse for a valve to pathology. Rhode Island is a teaching hospital, so they will show off what was meant to be paper-thin fluttering valves and was in fact a chunk of calcium with a pinhole. _What do you think_ this _is?_ Students will scratch their heads. _Knuckle? Pig's foot?_ This way students will learn just how bad it can get before it can get no worse.\n\nI got an easy ride. It was not more fun than a day at the beach\u2014let me be frank\u2014but it was supportable. No nurse addressed me in the first person plural. Morphine rubbed the edge off for a couple of days, and then I went for a week to industrial-strength Tylenol, and then household strength, and within a few weeks nothing. For quite some time Priscilla leapt to my croaking pleas for ice water, crossword-puzzle assistance, a little help changing channels, or plumping my pillows. Pretty soon it was \"Get it yourself.\"\n\nOf the get-well cards, I liked best the generic: elephants in doctors' offices, and puppies in baskets. Trust Hallmark.\n\nMy breastbone is wired and stapled like a packing crate, and they say I'll set off metal detectors in airports. My scar is a beaut. Purple, visible at a good distance. It's not like that show-off LBJ's gall-bladder scar, a twisty chaos, map of Southeast Asia; mine is reasonable, straight as Park Avenue, the cross streets running at right angles\u2014to Madison one way, Lex the other. When I remove my \"Life's a Beach\" T-shirt, the scar should make an electric impression on suntanners with a few days off from mortality, dreaming of wieners and fried onion rings. Me? I've got a _bad_ root-beer twin-stick jones.\n\nI wear a Medic Alert bracelet, engraved with dire warnings. It jangles cheaply, and I can hear my valve tripping seventy-to-the-minute, ticking over like a Baby Ben, or a tuned '56 Chevy, idling. My aorta is carbon and Dacron, simplicity itself, and it's called a St. Jude, after the saint of the impossible, patron of hopeless cases. When I asked my cardiologist how valve manufacturers handle recalls, he said (was that with a smile?) he hadn't really given the matter much thought. (\"I'll tell you this,\" he told me; \"I worship at St. Jude's in Pawtucket, and I haven't noticed any dead people manning a picket line in front of the church.\") The valve was made not in Korea (or knocked off in Southern Italy, where craftsmen would have mis-stamped it \"arctic value\"), or worse luck by the Heart Valve Division of General Motors (I'd want to shun models built on Mondays and Fridays). It was fabricated in St. Paul, Minnesota, where they haven't even heard rumors of recreational drugs, and people wash their hands after using the lavatory, and quality control ( _I don't like the look of that weld, Sven_ ) is top-of-the-line. It comes with a lifetime warranty, I'm quite sure.\n\nI think of what happened on the beach and after as training for the future. But some questions I didn't ask. While I was in the land of Nod (they use curare, the stuff little people put on their blow darts), my heart was chilled (frozen?). Okay, where _was_ it? What's your hunch? Was it in me, or was it _on another table?_ Would that not be a prudent way to work on a pump, as a mechanic might repair a carburetor, on a bench, handy to the tools? What's your best line on this? I could straight-out ask, but I won't. I could ask how much time I bought, but I won't.\n\n# Matterhorn\n\nThere came a moment when I needed to climb a mountain. Not just a mountain, a _mountain_. My notion incited some friends to unbecomingly undisguised incredulity. This I expected. I did not expect the response of other friends, and some kin: my ambition seemed to insult them. They either disbelieved or mocked me, sometimes to my face. Others close to me, wishing to seem gentler, fretted in that avuncular way that can end friendships: _What's up with Geoffrey? I wonder, Does he know it's difficult to climb a mountain? Who does he think he is?_ They \"worried\" that I didn't remember I had passed fifty, and they \"worried\" that I had forgotten my open-heart surgery the year before, a new aortic valve, the contingencies.\n\nWell, exactly: downslope of middle age, bionic heart, narrow escape\u2014what better provocation to stir things up? I'd never climbed before or dreamed of climbing; I was quite sure I would not climb again after this once (just as young Nick Adams, of Hemingway's \"Indian Camp,\" having witnessed a suicide, was \"quite sure\" he would never die).\n\nBut what about duty, responsibility to others, to my wife and little ones? Well, the little ones are growing older than their old man (or, at least, less childish). They thought to climb was a high idea, and if they hadn't thought this, so what? Priscilla knew I wanted to do this, and she understood why mine was a solitary rather than a family ambition, and while laissez-faire would not customarily describe her policy, she had no wish to stand between me and the uphill path to the summit of a high mountain. Well, not just any high mountain, the best high mountain, the Matterhorn.\n\nSome very few sights are self-evidently what they are: New York's skyline and the Eiffel Tower require no elaboration. The Matterhorn is of this tight family of marvels, recognized in the blink of an eye. It's not the highest mountain in the world, or in the Alps, or in Switzerland, or in the Valaisian canton, or within view of Zermatt. So why is the Amai Dablang, higher by six thousand feet, called the \"Matterhorn of the Himalayas\"? And why do likenesses of the Matterhorn dress up wrappers of chocolate bars and Jamaican cigarettes? Why did Walt Disney erect a 360-foot model of the Matterhorn in Anaheim for Disneyland's roller coaster? Why would Baskin-Robbins name its grandest ice-cream sundae a Matterhorn? Why is it the logo for Paramount's motion pictures? Because the Matterhorn _is_ paramount is why.\n\nTo think mountain is to see Matterhorn. Unshouldered by nearby mountains, it diminishes higher peaks. I mean it stands _alone_. The Matterhorn has been likened to a ruined tower, a sphinx upon a pedestal of ice, the bust of a giant, an obelisk, a rearing horse, a masterpiece of Art rather than a blind accident of nature.\n\nGuido Rey, Italian mountaineer, author of _The Matterhorn_ (1907), understood the limits of language in the face of that formidable thing: \"Every time the Matterhorn appears upon the landscape it is wise for the writer to cease his description, and to refer the reader to\u2014the Matterhorn.\"\n\nWell, I could tell you that the Matterhorn is 14,691 feet high. A great rock pyramid with sheer faces, razor-ridged, saved from an illusion of artificiality by a hunched, off-true peak. In clear light, with feathery billows pluming like vapor trail from its bent crest, the Matterhorn appears unearthly. In hard weather\u2014the summit disappearing in furious black clouds, then, stabbed by lightning, abruptly materializing\u2014the Matterhorn seems ungodly, and to climb it unimaginable.\n\nWhat the spicy Indies were to Columbus and the North Pole to Peary, the Matterhorn was to mountain climbers of the nineteenth century. A local Italian guide, Jean-Antoine Carrel, attacked the heap of stone as if by ambush, shrewdly advancing, year after year, always higher. Otherwise the assaults were mostly by the British, who elevated the climbing of mountains from the arduous necessity of high-altitude travel (in the service of religious missions, warfare, smuggling, scientific curiosity) into an immoderate passion.\n\nAl Alvarez, a poet and mountaineer, uses Jeremy Bentham's phrase \"deep play\" to describe the enterprise of climbing. Bentham, celebrator of utility, despised deep play, in which \"the stakes are so high that... it is irrational for anyone to engage in it at all, since the marginal utility of what you stand to win is grossly outweighed by the disutility of what you stand to lose.\"\n\nDuring Victoria's toplofty decades of Empire, improbable conquest was useful and quotidian. Young British athletes, who regarded discomfort as a virtue almost as fine as understatement, challenged summit upon summit, cutting notches on alpenstocks at higher and higher altitudes, climbing from rough, isolated valleys where travelers seemed to have no reasonable business, where hospitality\u2014let alone the concept of Swiss innkeeping\u2014was uninvented.\n\nLondon's Alpine Club, founded in 1857 with members drawn from the professions and peerage, from universities and the clergy, was joined by a wood-engraving son of a wood engraver, Edward Whymper; Whymper was commissioned by a London publisher to prepare illustrations for a record of Alpine explorations. The issue of this enterprise is Whymper's _Scrambles Amongst the Alps_ , perhaps the best account of mountain climbing ever written.\n\nWhymper has been called a \"hard goer in an age of hard goers.\" Indeed. During eighteen days early in the summer of 1865, he ascended almost 100,000 feet. Fifty-five hundred feet of vertical a day\u2014 _up_ \u2014every day! And then down; some say down is harder. Whymper was known to have walked eighty-six miles in twenty-four hours.\n\nPrecise, imaginative, he had ingenuity, knew languages, invented many climbing devices. But above all, above even his stamina, Whymper had will. Oh, did he have will. Beginning in 1861, Whymper made seven assaults on the Matterhorn's Italian side; four years later it remained the last major Alpine mountain still unclimbed. Whymper was adding to his reputation for courage a quality more dangerous than courage: reckless compulsion. In 1862, during his fourth of five attempts that summer, he fell two hundred feet in seven or eight mighty, destructive bounces and still he flung himself at the thing's implacable stone face.\n\nAs Whymper well imagined, there was hubris in any contest with the Matterhorn. He wrote that \"there seemed to be a _cordon_ drawn around it, up to which one might go, but no farther. Within that invisible line djinns and efreets were supposed to out of sight exist.... The superstitious natives... spoke of a ruined city on its summit wherein the spirits dwelt; and if you laughed, they gravely shook their heads.\" (And hurled down rocks.)\n\nMid-July of 1865, Whymper's urgency was fueled by envy. He learned that an Italian party was readying an attack from their side of what they know as Monte Cervino, with a high probability of success. He made pell-mell for Zermatt and checked into the Monte Rosa, where he happened on two other British climbers: Lord Francis Douglas and the Reverend Charles Hudson, the latter accompanied by a nineteen-year-old friend, Douglas Hadow. Whymper's favorite guide, the Frenchman Michel Croz, was in the service of Hudson, and Lord Douglas had arranged to be assisted in his try at the Matterhorn by a couple of Zermatt guides, the now infamous Peter Taugwalders, father and son.\n\nWhymper liked to climb alone, or with a single guide, but the pressure of the Italian venture tempted him to join forces with his countrymen. So after dinner at the Monte Rosa an _ad hoc_ and ill-considered alliance was struck, casually, as British gentlemen liked to agree to grave matters. Nevertheless, Whymper was uncomfortable with the inclusion of young Hadow, who was inexperienced in high-risk climbs. He took Hudson aside after dinner to inquire about the boy. An artisan, Whymper wasn't the Reverend Mr. Hudson's and Lord Douglas's social peer, so it may be imagined with what deference his questions were asked, and how they were answered: by arched eyebrows, with nods and grunts between pulls on the cigar, sips of the Madeira, \"Fine chap,\" Hudson would have assured; \"game, a gentleman.\" \"Oh quite,\" Whymper would agree; \" _rather!_ \" And thus was born a catastrophe.\n\nThe ungainly party set out on July 13 from the Monte Rosa in perfect weather to attack the Swiss (H\u00f6rnli) Ridge. Conventional wisdom had held this route to be unassailable: viewed head-on from Zermatt the ridge seems knife-blade-sharp, and sheer. Whymper, as an illustrator so well trained in observation, came to see this as an optical illusion caused by foreshortening. The climb began with gorgeous ease, as though to mock the trials of Whymper's earlier attempts: the lightning storms that had pinned him, battered and exhausted, to some toehold crevice; the cannonades of rocks and boulders falling randomly as the mountain, freezing and thawing, came relentlessly apart.\n\nThe group bivouacked at eleven thousand feet, and the next morning, Bastille Day, as though climbing a natural staircase, they gained the summit\u2014piece of cake!\u2014and, spying the rival Italians twelve hundred feet below, Whymper heaved \"a torrent of stones\" down toward them. This uncharacteristic meanness of spirit, a belligerent mix of war-rush and spite, marked the beginning of Whymper's awful descent.\n\nA month later, writing to a stranger, Whymper told his sad progress after conquering the world's most spellbinding mountain: \"For five years I have dreamt of the Matterhorn; I have spent much labour and time upon it and I have done it. And now the very name of it is hateful to me. Congratulations on its achievement are bitterness and ashes and that which I hoped would yield pleasure produces alone the severest pain.\"\n\nThe plunge was morbidly portrayed at the time by a Gustave Dor\u00e9 drawing showing four men tumbling toward space at the onset of a half-mile free fall. What went wrong is in dispute, but Hudson, Douglas, Hadow and the revered guide Michel Croz fell, and died. A postmortem and any number of amateur investigations agree that the proximate cause of the accident was the inexperienced Hadow, who was so unsure of his feet that Croz was obliged to place them properly with his hands. Still near the summit, Hadow, roped together with the other three, stumbled at an easy place, for no evident reason, and took his fellows with him. Old Peter Taugwalder, tied to the luckless four, took the weight of the fall, and the rope parted. (The rope that broke is on display in Zermatt's Alpine Museum; it's fit to tie a package, but not to hold the weight of a climber, let alone two, three, _four_.)\n\nTaugwalder fled Zermatt in infamy; many Zermatters suspected him, forever after, of having cut his fellows loose. Whymper, who judged both Taugwalders to be swinish cowards, denied that any such crime was possible. The tragedy put Zermatt on the map, and confirmed the Matterhorn's sinister magic.\n\nMy corner room at the Monte Rosa looked to the south at the Matterhorn's H\u00f6rnli Ridge and cast across the main drag, the Bahnhofstrasse, to the boneyard. No sooner unpacked than I was down there, walking the rows of graves where more than eighty climbers were buried, marked by headstones embellished with bronze coils of climbing rope, or ice axes. Some of the stones were mountain-shaped, Matterhorn-shaped.\n\nJonathan Henry Convelle, 27: \"... fell from the North Face of the Matterhorn on 29th December, 1979.\"\n\nDonald Stephen Williams, 17: \"I chose to climb.\" (Breit horn, 1975)\n\nFrench: four young men on the Breithorn, \" _morts accidentellement dans l'ascension..._ \"\n\nA couple of Spaniards: \" _desaparecidos en el Monte Cervino..._ \"\n\nA young man from Stuttgart: _\"Gefallen am Matterhorn.\"_\n\nBut mostly the dead there (and in the graveyard of the English Chapel, a little glacier garden of granite set on a hill behind the Alpine Museum) were Whymper's countrymen, Oxford and Cambridge boys and their chums memorialized in Latin ( _Per Ardua Ad Alta_ ) or plain English, telling of this one \"killed in a crevasse\" in 1925, or by \"falling stones\" in 1895, or \"during a terrible snowstorm 18 August, 1886.\"\n\nI meant, I have said, to climb the Matterhorn. Why? Let's say because _I_ was there. No: I'm being flip. I meant to climb the Matterhorn because to climb it was for me so improbable. For too many years now I had failed to surprise myself, to reach beyond my grasp.\n\nNot that the Matterhorn was Everest, or the Eiger. No less an authority than the Alpine Club of London's official guidebook, the _Pennine Alps Central_ , calling the Matterhorn \"the most sought-after [mountain] among climbers in the world,\" told that it has been climbed by \"cats, dogs, monkeys and a bear, and by children (one of seven reached the top in two hours).\" Of the H\u00f6rnli Ridge, which turned the honey to ash in Whymper's mouth, the Alpine Club remarks casually that it is \"monotonous, especially in descent.\" After a summary of stunts on the Matterhorn\u2014speed climbs, successful attempts to girdle the summit, winter climbs, the ascent of all four ridges in a single day\u2014the guidebook concludes its patronizing theme by quoting a remark of Guido Rey: \"Its slopes are still considered unsuitable for skiing.\" (Not so: the Japanese fellow who skied down Everest has also skied from the summit to the base of the Matterhorn, incidentally causing the escapade to be filmed.)\n\nGuido Rey had also written that despite the commonplace conquests of the mountain, \"the Matterhorn will never be a vulgar mountain.\" My first afternoon in Zermatt I was given cause to wonder about that. Put aside the Disneyish knickknacks, disregard the Japanese wonders-of-the-world collectors photographing the knickknacks; regard Zermatt's goats, bells jangling cutely at their necks as they are driven along the Bahnhofstrasse by a bucolically tricked-out goatherd. The goats work on commission\u2014farmers are _paid_ to drive their bewildered beasts through town, a round-trip promenade without destination, with no end other than quaint photographability. And the goaty mess they drop? Not to worry: the streets of Zermatt are cleaned\u2014I mean _cleaned_ \u2014every six minutes or so.\n\nDuring a visit to the town tourist office to learn the telephone number of my guide, I found a young Swiss woman being assailed from across the counter by a countryman of mine, a primitive with a smoker's rasp and a blended-whisky-drinker's nose. This fellow held in his left hand a tourist brochure, which he smacked emphatically with his right fingers.\n\n\"Look here, missy! It says, 'See the Matterhorn up close, from the comfort of your air-conditioned bus.' Now where does the bus _leave_ from?\"\n\n\"As you see, sir, we have no cars or buses on our streets...\"\n\n\"I want to ride in a _bus_ to the _top_ of your darned Matterhorn!\"\n\nHe was invited to dart out on the Bahnhofstrasse to examine the elevation at issue, and judge for himself whether it seemed suitable for assault by (air-conditioned) bus. He waved his brochure. The patient lady explained that while it was possible to rise by cable car to the flanks of the mountain's steep summit, the only way to the top was to climb the thing, one circumspect step after another.\n\n\"No way! Iris will never sit still for that!\"\n\nIris, wise lady, nodded her vigorous assent.\n\nSo the Matterhorn's ubiquity may breed a kind of offhand contempt, and the would-be climber is torn between the scorn of well-wishers who deride an old hubby/daddy's audacity and mountaineers' derision for a well-worn path, overtramped by amateurs clinging to fixed ropes.\n\nJosie Furrer, my guide, put the matter in fit perspective. The Furrers have farmed the valley since the Middle Ages; the past century or so they have climbed, and some Furrers have died climbing, and two Furrer guides have died on the Matterhorn. The Alpine Club's dismissal of the mountain as \"monotonous\" was not my guide's view.\n\nJosie is tall and ropy thin, with a cowpoke's easy lope. He once made a long visit in the States, coming like many Swiss mountain men to ski-instruct; some deeper instinct drew him to a Durango, Colorado, ranch to herd cattle. As a kid, he was a shepherd (the kind who later goes to college), tending sheep and goats in the mountain pastures above Zermatt and Winkelmatten. To ease the boredom, he and his young pals\u2014on dares and double-dares\u2014would climb whatever was handy, and up there above the tree line, rocks were handy.\n\nLike many Swiss and most mountain men, Josie is taciturn, his energy and irony radiating from his eyes rather than his words. Taciturnity is a luxury, the fruit of Zermatt's prosperity. In older times, during the pioneer days of climbing, Zermatt's guides (many of them smugglers and mule drivers) gathered along a wall facing the Monte Rosa, touting their strength and valor, showing off books of testimonials from previous climbers. In not-so-old days, most of a Zermatter's family income came from guiding, and every able-bodied young man and boy set up outside the Monte Rosa with his book. (Josie has his, a keepsake rather than an advertising medium.) For decades Swiss guides have been stringently examined and licensed; a dozen people, more or less, die every year on the Matterhorn, but none in the company of a guide these past thirty years.\n\nIn the bar of the Monte Rosa, Josie inquired, delicately but directly, into my fitness. I made no vainglorious claims: I do what the doctors order, and a little more; I walk, row, ride a bicycle, play squash. He knew my mountain-climbing biography: _tabula rasa_. We did not discuss a certain medication I must take to thin my blood, a remedy for clots on an artificial aortic valve at the heart of me. Coumadin makes me an abundant bleeder, an easy bruiser. Some informed medical opinion holds that Coumadin users should avoid hammers and screwdrivers, let alone ice axes, crampons and sharp stones.\n\n\"I'd like to climb the Matterhorn,\" I said.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said. \"So you said.\"\n\n\"What do you think?\"\n\n\"There's ice on the rocks. The guides aren't climbing it.\"\n\n\"But if there weren't ice, what do you think?\"\n\n\"Tomorrow morning we'll climb some rocks, try the Riffelhorn. We'll see.\"\n\nWe caught the earliest morning cog train to Gornergrat, as far as Rotboden. (At the end of the nineteenth century porters carted well-fed tourists up here and higher in sedan chairs. Four francs! I know, a franc then was a franc, but this is a forty-five-minute train ride.) Along the gorgeous way, through forests of ancient larch, past waterfalls and sheer drops, Josie seemed stimulated by the scenery as though he'd never seen it before; he pointed out glaciers and peaks, but always our eyes returned to the Matterhorn. (It's odd, the relentless pull of that mountain. First thing every morning, last every evening, I glanced out my window to verify it was still there.)\n\nWe swung down at a little station and walked a path to the base of a rock cliff, and at the base Josie helped me fix a harness to my chest, and to this he connected one end of a long coil of rope; then he began to climb, and told me to follow, and that was that. (Oh, he also exhorted me to \"trust my boots.\")\n\nThe Riffelhorn is a serious hunk of rock, used by Zermatt guides to judge their clients' upper-body strength, dexterity and, above all, their tolerance for \"exposure,\" that great emptiness below and to the sides through which one would fall should one fall. Climbing the Matterhorn's H\u00f6rnli Ridge, one looks a foot or so to the right to a half-mile drop, and to the left a ditto to a ditto. Some people don't enjoy this. Some, climbing the Riffelhorn, looking beneath their toes jammed in smooth and minuscule dimples in the rock, looking down a couple of hundred feet and more, know they won't enjoy what they see on the H\u00f6rnli Ridge, and there's an end to that: home we go.\n\nThe exposure didn't trouble me; my eyes were fixed near, on the handholds and toeholds inches away; concentration effaced imagination. Not that I wasn't frightened by the here and now: to climb that face seemed at first out of the question. I found myself spread-eagled, a fly on the wall, always fixed (as Josie insisted) at three points. I would have preferred four, but such a system makes progress difficult.\n\n\"A few inches to the left and up, there's a _nice_ grip.\"\n\nHow, above me, looking up, did he know? He beheld the way as intimately as a person comes to know the route from bedroom to bathroom. His voice was patient, serene.\n\nWe began to climb faster; the progress seemed easier\u2014but Josie said later the line became more difficult, modeling the Matterhorn's demands. I felt exhilarated, and then we were up there, the summit. Josie shook my hand, and I felt like a million Swiss francs. Looking toward the Matterhorn, Josie said, \"I have to tell you, you didn't do badly.\"\n\nI slipped out of my harness. \"Can I climb the Matterhorn?\"\n\n\"First we'll climb the Breithorn, and then we'll see.\"\n\n\"Are the guides climbing the Matterhorn yet?\" The weather had been clear and warm the previous five days, and it was difficult to imagine the Matterhorn's upper rocks varnished with ice.\n\n\"No. Others have tried. Two Belgians fell yesterday.\"\n\n\"Hurt?\"\n\n\"Dead. Coming down, it is thought. The trouble usually comes on the descent. They set out too late, become tired, light-headed. Now, we must descend.\"\n\nComing down you face out, like having a ladder's rungs at your back, and it is impossible not to regard your miserable possibilities; you are _meant_ to look down. Josie was above me, and noticed I had failed to put my harness in place, and I paused to secure it, then began to lead down fast, showing off. Just as he suggested I slow the pace, my rucksack jammed between my back and the cliff face; using my heels as a fulcrum, I felt the rucksack wedge me forward, and I was already beyond the point of recovery when I observed (if that isn't too incredible an understatement), \"I'm falling,\" and Josie snugged down the rope. I was trapped (his rope pulled what the rucksack tried to push), and Josie had to pay out line till I was facing down, secured by the rope and my heels, better educated than a few minutes before in the physics of this pastime. Then my rucksack fell back where it belonged, and I knew why Josie's was secured at his waist.\n\nAt the depot we made an appointment for the Breithorn climb two days later. Josie said he would like to observe my stamina.\n\nClimbing the Riffelhorn, I had not felt spent; rock-climbing is deliberate, requiring many pauses to calculate the route, enforcing rest. The Breithorn is a snow-and-ice climb to almost the same altitude as the Matterhorn.\n\nDawn was midsummer temperate in Zermatt, and I felt preposterous in my long johns, wool socks and knickers, with mittens and cap in my rucksack, to which were strapped crampons and an ice ax. (I also carried glacier cream, glacier glasses to prevent snow blindness, a chocolate bar, water, medicine for altitude sickness.) Thus burdened, I clomped in heavy leather climbing boots to the cable car that would lift me by stages a half hour from Winkelmatten to the base of the Breithorn.\n\nBy its simplest route, in good conditions, the Breithorn is said to be the easiest four-thousander (4,000 meters plus) in the Alps. I met Josie at the staging area for our ascent and without small talk or delay\u2014to assure that this would be a climb in good conditions (the snow's crust too hard to break through)\u2014he roped us together, walked ahead ten or fifteen yards and commanded me to follow.\n\nThe first hour or so\u2014descending gradually to a valley between two peaks, leveling off, walking on firm snow\u2014was effortless. (In warm, soft snow a Breithorn climber can sink with every step to his crotch, and that can very quickly get to be a very old story.) The view was stunning: the Breithorn has a rounded vanilla crown, massive, toward which I moved freshly, feeling frisky on my leash, wondering why Josie walked with such slow, considered steps. The rope, I knew, was to save me from the consequence of crevasses, which were, with whiteouts (and lost routes), the mountain's principal peril.\n\nAfter an hour, at the foot of an ascent, Josie directed me to strap crampons to my boots, and the following hour offered a full curriculum of my middle-aged limits. By now the wind had come up, and at our altitude it was cold in the bright sun, and still I was sweating from the labor of a steep climb up a narrow ice path. The crampons' teeth, extending forward from the toes as well as down, made for clumsy going, and occasionally my right boot tangled in my left, and then Josie, climbing relentlessly above me, would unintentionally tug my leash, bringing to mind a conceit altogether different from master and pup; now I was on a chain gang, and I began to wonder, for the first time since I had hatched this plan a year ago, what in the world was I doing in that place, tied to that young man, being towed uphill?\n\nSwiss guides climb taking dainty steps; the rule has it that however strenuous the ascent, a climber should be able to talk in a normal voice, and continue up without pause, and in that way those wee steps cover great distances. We went up mutely, saving our breath; what we were doing was difficult. I was determined not to complain, to be a stand-up guy at 13,666 feet, but soon I was pausing every thirty seconds or so. My calf muscles burned, and the air was thin, thin, thin. I watched climbers strung out below, gaining a little on us. Gray clouds were sweeping up from Italy, and the light had gone flat.\n\nJosie looked unhappily at the sky. I thought he might suggest we go back down. He blew warm air into his mittens, and said, \"We should move on. We can't stay long at the summit.\"\n\nLooking where he pointed, I saw we were there, almost. And seeing this I breathed easy, and felt a rush of unwarranted pride. And just short of the summit I heard footfalls behind me. Let me say these were rapid footfalls, and someone, not at all short of breath, said in several languages \"Excuse me,\" and a young man passed us as though he were walking a city street, late for a romantic appointment, grinning, all bounce and cheer. He was carrying _skis_ on his shoulder, and through his eyes I saw myself\u2014an antique person.\n\nBut I got my handshake, and ate my chocolate bar; the sun punched a hole in Italy's smoggy clouds, and there was the Matterhorn.\n\n\"Do you think I'm fit to climb it?\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Josie said. \"But not yet. It's still iced. Crampons go badly on rocks.\"\n\nIndeed. That afternoon a young American died on the Matterhorn.\n\nTwo weeks in Zermatt, two weeks of perfect weather, and up there on the mountain that mattered the snow clung to sheer faces and ice glazed the rocks. After the American died, I asked Josie why they didn't close the mountain, and he looked at me with wonder, as though he had just then learned more about me than he wanted to know, that I was a sea-level flatlander through and through. _Close the mountain?_ What could I mean? To climb was to risk, a personal choice, deep play.\n\nMy final day, I wearied of looking at the Matterhorn from a middle distance, preparing for it, reading about it, studying the tombstones it had sowed. From its base at Schwarzsee I hiked two thousand feet to the H\u00f6rnli Hut, where climbers spend the night before taking the thing on in the cold dark hours before dawn, setting off with headlamps to get up there early enough to get down again alive.\n\nIt was a hard walk up to the hut, but the way was well traveled, and I was not alone. Below the sheer cliffs I saw the glacier gardens fan out; great crows climbed and fell on the thermals, and then I made my studied, solitary way along iced patches, and through new-fallen snow. The Matterhorn makes its own weather, and last night it had made bad weather.\n\nAt the hut the sun drilled down, and young climbers fiddled with their equipment, preparing for the morning. Some were jittery, laughing too often and loud; others were grave, like bullfighters waiting for it to begin. I sat on the terrace of the simple hut, trying to strike up talk, but I didn't belong there, and so I moved along, climbing, till the hut had disappeared. I was looking for a hand-lettered sign Josie had told me about. It had been erected a year or two ago\u2014maybe three, Josie said\u2014by the mother of a young American who had died on the Matterhorn. The sign was a warning to take the mountain seriously. I never found the warning. Maybe it was set higher than I wished to climb, or maybe someone had removed it, spooked by the bad vibes it gave off, or maybe time wore it down, as it wears down mountains, and us.\n\nI cranked my head back and back, looked up. No. This was not to be. I turned my back on the summit, and moved out, down. My feelings were complex: I had dragged myself to the bottom of that wonderful mountain, just this once. I drew cards, once. I was dealt a low hand, and now I'll stand pat with it, at sea level.\n\n# Waterway\n\n### The Deal\n\nOne May afternoon, end of Nicholas Wolff's junior year at college, drinking beer so cold we needed mittens to hold the cans, aboard our boat reaching rail-down into the sun and toward the beach at Mackerel Cove on the island where we live, himself at the helm giving orders (ease that sheet a tad, you might want to tighten the luff line on the main), we struck a deal. Or I dictated a deal, simplicity itself: on graduating from Bowdoin he would take this boat, the _Blackwing_ , to the Bahamas, with one or two chums. There was nothing to it\u2014other than taking full responsibility for our boat, which _I_ pay for, and teaching his friends to sail, navigate, cook on a galley stove without blowing up the unfortunate boat; other than maintaining the sails and gear and engine and electronics, and troubling that the dinghy wasn't stolen, and earning enough money before he sailed from home to keep himself afloat without work for six months, and making certain the anchor didn't drag when autumn and winter gales blasted him, and learning first aid, and keeping his friends out of the ocean and clear of the boom... why, there was nothing to the venture but a nod, a wink, another beer and a faraway look on Nicholas's face that I took to be gratitude for my trust, but was in truth cogitation. During the following year, when friends would remark what a generous fellow I was and how trusting (how could I bank on a mere boy with so much boat? wasn't he grateful?), that circumspect countenance would steal on Nicholas's face, and he'd catch my eye, and I'd shrug. In fact, I had every reason to trust him: he was handy; he didn't get seasick; he knew (as I didn't and don't) celestial navigation; he'd been trained to strip down and repair a diesel engine; he'd sailed offshore weeks at a time on a tall ship; he'd been aloft in great seas and screaming winds; his instincts on the water seemed flawless. We'd been together on the water since he was ten, and in trouble he had never failed to come through.\n\nBesides, _Blackwing_ would either winter over in my backyard (while I paid the bank and watched her cradled in blocks, swathed in tarps and crusted with snow a few yards from a blue spruce) or in the Bahamas. Which would she prefer?\n\nAlso besides, any trouble Nicholas could get into was the same trouble his father could get into. That the 30-foot cutter would suffer battle scars I had no doubt. There was no end of things to go wrong. So what? An anchor could hook an obstruction and be twisted or lost, a winch could freeze up, a mainsail rip; Nicholas and his friends would fix or replace what ingenuity and their thin wallets could make right. While Nicholas seemed to consider it was not his boat to be philosophic about, I was philosophic. _Que ser\u00e1_ and all that.\n\nAnd besides, I had an interest: if my son got _Blackwing_ to the Bahamas, my wife and I would have a boat in the Bahamas.\n\nHe got her there. He and two college buddies provisioned her and prepared her for sea in September, while hurricane Hugo made its way up the East Coast from the Caribbean. When it passed, Nicholas gave them a crash course in the rudiments of sailing, and slipped our Jamestown, Rhode Island, mooring the first day of October. Block Island, Fishers Island, The Thimbles, Long Island, City Island, the East River, Sandy Hook, Mannasquan, Atlantic City, Cape May, Chesapeake City, Sassafras River, Annapolis, Smith Island, Norfolk, the Dismal Swamp, Elizabeth City, the Alligator River, Okrakoke, Oriental, Beaufort, Wrightsville Beach, Waccamaw River, Charleston, another Beaufort, New Teakettle Creek, St. Simon's Island, St. Augustine, Daytona, Cocoa Beach, Vero Beach, Fort Pierce, Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Key Biscayne, the Gulf Stream, Gun Cay, the Bahama Banks, Chub Cay, Nassau, Allan's Cay, Hawksbill Cay, Sampson Cay, Pipe Creek, Staniel Cay, George Town, Eleuthera, Governor's Harbour, The End of the Road.\n\nThat road was six months unwinding, bristling with pitfalls and drug dealers and drug agents and anxiety and shoals and snags and reefs and the worst gear-busting winter winds ever recorded in the southern Bahamas. Priscilla and I had agreed to meet Nicholas and _Blackwing_ at Governor's Harbour on the 100-mile-long island of Eleuthera on March 20. Such time-tabled rendezvous are laughably chimerical. On our end we had flu to avoid, blizzards to pray against, semi-tropical airlines with semi-tropical attitudes toward confirmed reservations and clockwork schedules. On Nicholas's end was a complex of nautical machinery, his body's machinery, weather systems, kismet. On March 20, we landed with Nicholas's brother, Justin, at Eleuthera's little airport, and took a taxi to the harbor. In the harbor, swinging from a mooring thousands of miles from home, our boat and our son. The boat was impeccable, the sun shining, the son tan and grinning, the family Wolff fused, trust repaid, the outcome agreeable. It was difficult not to feel smug: I'd told them so, and it was so.\n\nWith what mixed feelings Nicholas surrendered command of _Blackwing_ might be imagined. With what mixed feelings I took responsibility for safely returning Priscilla, the boat and me to Rhode Island might be imagined. The idea was to take it easy, to laze three hundred miles through the islands of the northern Bahamas and back across the Gulf Stream; then to push more than a thousand miles up the Waterway to Norfolk; then to bring her the final six hundred miles home, reading the seabagful of paperbacks we'd brought, catching some good rays, watching the handsome world float by at five miles per hour\u2014less, if we wanted to hang out. I had finished and revised a book; Priscilla was on leave from teaching. We felt we deserved this, and we knew we needed a jolt to our routine. Back home we were owned by a house, and trees, and gardens, and processes of maintenance that had become habitual, were becoming reflexive, feckless. We'd begun to sleepwalk through the seasons, constricting with work and relaxing with our eyes closed. I was beginning to look forward to figuring our income taxes: the novelty of the year was a story narrated by spreadsheet; had we done better or worse this year than last year? We had begun to worry ourselves. It wasn't a \"rat race\" we had entered. \"Rat race\" is too vigorous for how it felt; \"Getting and spending we lay waste our powers\" was too verby for how it felt. Pulling the covers over our heads was how it felt. We were past due for a sea change. I sensed a danger in the serene regularity our life together had become: what I happened to know at my age could too easily become all I thought I needed or wanted to know. I needed a good shaking up, wanted to see anew, with sharp eyes, beyond my accustomed range and field of vision. Not that I welcomed obstacles or difficulty, the friction that makes for good narrative and bad marriage. Let it not be assumed that my appetite for refreshment was mere midlife crisis. No: I was well beyond the hammy clutch of crisis. I needed to sharpen my edge, and I thought I understood that a sea passage\u2014scary, chancy, variable\u2014was a sovereign honer. I would\u2014by Neptune!\u2014relax with a vengeance.\n\n### The Islands\n\nDuring the transition week, we stayed in Eleuthera at a friend's beach house, and swam and played Ping-Pong and read and played Ping-Pong and walked on the beach and argued about politics and played Ping-Pong and played Ping-Pong. I guess I mean to say we had fun. Most mornings that week, Nicholas instructed me an inch at a time in the foibles of the boat I had taught him to sail. This felt less like usurpation than succession; call it evolution. When Nicholas took _Blackwing_ , he had understood that to have the engine break down\u2014and carelessness of many kinds could cause it to break\u2014would be a tragedy of uninsured Force 10 magnitude, a five-thousand-dollar mischance. So, I had reckoned, Nicholas would not be careless with our engine, with what he seemed to regard as _my_ engine. He was not careless, but his pinched means and pinch-fist ways had motivated him to learn certain ugly chores I had paid others to do. So now he taught me the perversities of the fuel filters, and how to change the engine oil without having to steam-clean myself and burn my clothes when I was finished. He showed me how to tighten the stuffing box, a duty so ghastly I don't even want to tell you what it is or how it's done or why. A job I did once after Nicholas took me through it a step at a time. A job I again pay others to do.\n\nI felt like a stranger on our boat: not only because I was being taught her ways as though I were chartering her, but because _Blackwing_ looked different. The boat looked better. It had always looked good, I think, but Nicholas had made it look better. He had finished the cherry interior bright, laying up coat after coat of varnish. (And where did three six-footers sleep while the varnish was drying?) Above decks he had taken all the brightworked teak down to bare wood, and brushed on eight coats. Below, the bilge was dry, smelled sweet. The sails had been cleaned and spot-mended. You would not guess looking into my son's bedroom at home that _Blackwing_ 's icebox would have been scrubbed, but it had been scrubbed. (The ice chest was also empty. Dry. Hot. They had sailed more than two months in the Bahamas without ice. Ice cost money. Those boys had been strapped for cash; cleaning out detritus from _Blackwing_ 's forward shelf, I'd found a want ad torn from a Florida newspaper: \"Fair recompense paid to subjects offering services for scientific study of Jock Itch.\" Six weeks ago Nicholas had phoned me from the Exumas. Overcoming my terror of the cold and uninflected voice I heard when he guessed I was meddling, I had asked him how his money was holding up. \"Great. No sweat. I've got almost a hundred dollars!\" He's not a hedonist.)\n\nHe had made our boat sound and clean, and made us happy. There was nothing more that he could do, except sail with us and Justin twenty miles north up the west coast of Eleuthera to Hatchet Bay, and say good-bye.\n\nThe day, like all Eleutheran days so far, was clear; the wind was fair; _Blackwing_ moved fast through twenty-five feet of water. We could see the bottom\u2014could we ever see the bottom! We could identify a thin dime on the bottom, but we weren't looking at the bottom, pretty as it was; in the way of victims of vertigo, we disciplined ourselves not to look down. We instead stared ahead, trying to make out distinguishing features along what seemed to be an undifferentiated coast. But in less than the time it takes to tell, we were sailing through a hole in the wall, and making our way to a mooring of the Hatchet Bay Yacht Club. A few feet from the mooring pickup Nicholas said the water looked to him \"thin,\" and I was on the point of requiring him to define his terms when I ran us aground in soft mud. I don't run aground. Ask anyone. Maybe I _used to_ run aground, in Chesapeake Bay, but I DO NOT RUN AGROUND.\n\n\"Dad, we're high and dry. Tide'll ease you off in a couple of hours. Mix a Mount Gay and juice. Be mellow in the Islands, mon. Gotta blaze, Ma. Justin and I have a plane to catch.\"\n\nThis was what a father does when he throws his son off the deep end (I guess here the conceit would call for shallow end), and yells _Swim!_ There was water enough to float the dinghy, and I rowed my sons ashore, and asked Nicholas how often this had happened to him.\n\n\"Well, that's a weird thing. Never, actually.\"\n\n(Well, actually: would _you_ believe him?)\n\nAfter Nicholas rescued his brother and said good-bye\u2014jumped ship, took French leave, abandoned his mummy and daddy\u2014Priscilla and I had a long, hard look at our hole cards. Neither told the other then, but both wondered what did we think we were doing? We had loran, a pinpoint navigational device. I punched in Jamestown, Rhode Island, to see our range and bearing, how far and on what course was home from Hatchet Bay. The loran scratched its head, added sums on its fingers and said go north about eleventy zillion miles. Uh-huh.\n\nAfter Priscilla reminded me of our agreement, that she could jump ship whenever she was fed up with _Blackwing_ or its crew, we decided to put a Zoot Sims tape on the deck, were pleased to have verifiable corroboration that a rising tide floats all ships, ate a fine meal. The harbor was snug and pretty, bordered by the little settlement of Alice Town. This Saturday night a volleyball game was being played under arc lights against a neighbor from the archipelago called the Family Islands. It was a sweet occasion: we could hear bellows of enthusiasm, and Priscilla and I smiled a private smile, happy to share (at a little distance) the Bahamians' pleasures, to hear their boisterous huzzahs.\n\nWe were moored beside a spanky new ocean racer of about fifty feet; she was named _Tranquility_ , which is probably\u2014after _At Last_ and _Finally_ \u2014the John Smith of boat names. All was tranquil on _Tranquility_ , just as you'd hope at bedtime.\n\nThe next morning we were wakened before sunrise. The anchor was being raised on the ocean racer. The anchor rode was chain, and to run chain through a windlass and into a chain locker is to make a satanic clamor, skeletons slam-dancing in Hell. But that heavy clanking was as nothing against the nasal, boyish whine, speaking Southernese, in response to the captain's invitation that his deckhand \"get that fucking anchor off the bottom!\"\n\n\"You fucking get the fucker up, Dad! The fucker's muddy!\"\n\n\"Haul that fucker up now or you'll spend the rest of this fucking cruise down there with it, on the fucking muddy bottom!\"\n\nI poked my head up from below in time to see the deckhand's mom smile a joyless smile at the people of Hatchet Bay, and make a shruggy gesture of surrender ( _Y'all know how it is, boys on boats_ ), and thus _Tranquility_ slipped away before sunup.\n\nIn transit to Royal Island, trying with what would become comic inefficiency to get a weather forecast, we heard a news report. Dozens of people injured last night during a fracas at halftime of a volleyball match in Alice Town. A melee. Bottles had been thrown, police and ambulances sent for. The attention of the government in Nassau had been drawn, and by today's executive fiat there would be no more volleyballs spiked in Alice Town; the arc lights had been snuffed at Hatchet Bay. How the world seems is not how the world is.\n\nRoyal Island was the jumping-off harbor for a tricky passage across Northeast Providence Channel to Little Harbour in the Abacos, the northernmost Bahamian chain. We anchored in a palm-fringed lagoon that resembled a movie set of Eden. Water as clear as crystal, abandoned plantation, coconut palms backlit by a Tintoretto sunset. Sixteen boats were anchored in the large, nearly landlocked harbor. The moon rose, showing its sharp-edged silver face like a cheerful, goofy neighbor peering over a fence: _Hey, guys, what's cooking?_ The nautical almanac had said the moon would rise and it was so, the spheres in their regulated cycles, time and tide right with the world, natural law beside me in the cockpit. The night lavished softness, the moon spilling such unpolluted light that we could see by its beams our anchor dug into the chalky-white sand below our keel; as the breeze piped up, we heard the voices of wine and beer and rum drinkers float across the water, singing the songs sung in the backs of school buses (\"Roll Me Over\") and around campfires (\"Row, Row, Row Your Boat\"), and by God we joined in. Was this okay or what? We were gathered into the anything-goes euphoria of strangers sharing a discovery. Then it got rowdy, as though the whole harbor were drunk on liberty. Someone shot off a parachute flare, and we heard chivvying gasps. Bad Form. This Is Not Done. Flares were reserved for Mayday emergencies, to signal grave distress. To set off a flare back where we thought of as _back home_ would bring the Coast Guard down on a mariner. Back home playing with flares was much deplored; horsing around with flares was a rum job, a hanging offense back home. But we weren't back home. For sure. So another boat lofted a parachute flare, and another, and soon the lagoon was bathed in moonlight, starlight, phosphorus. Phosphorus in the velvet water, phosphorus aloft. The harbor was lit, and so were we.\n\nI went below, and spread out the charts. Again. I'd been studying the ungiving things since the night we met Nicholas in Governor's Harbour and, to my disenchantment, they weren't more inviting tonight than a week before. The dilemma was simple: we had to navigate the fifty-three miles in ten hours, from dawn till sundown. _Blackwing_ could do 5\u00bd knots under power in calm seas and neutral (or offsetting) current. We had to hit Little Harbour Bar on the button, and I spent the next several hours calculating courses and tidal sets. There were no buoys out there, and we'd spend most of tomorrow out of sight of land. At home I'd use tidal tables and current charts to calculate the effect of tides on our course. Here, now, I sought instruction from the _Yachtsman's Guide to the Bahamas_ and was casually informed of an unpredictable phenomenon (cause unknown) of a powerful tidal set \"at times,\" _either_ northwest (onshore) _or_ southeast (on our nose). It made a difference which. This tidal set had a reported velocity of up to three knots. Whether we could expect three knots or two or none of help, or three of hurt, this also made a difference.\n\nIf the wind (or tidal current) was on _Blackwing_ 's nose, we wouldn't make it. On the other hand, if the wind was behind us, or abeam of us, we probably would, unless something went wrong. Moreover, if we _almost_ made it, there was no escape hatch, no harbor of refuge. (A sort of anchorage, called Hole in the Wall, at the southernmost end of Great Abaco, was notorious for wretched protection from the prevailing wind and for an anchorproof bottom.)\n\nThe rum was beginning to wear off. I had shut down Jimmy Buffet for the night, and was playing a tape of Pablo Casals doing Bach solos. He was working his way through a threnodic patch, and I explained to Priscilla that I was \"apprehensive.\" She cocked her head at me. I said I was \"anxious.\" She asked me what I was talking about. I said it was going to be a \"chancy\" passage. Not \"tranquil.\" In fact, I was looking at alternate routes back to the coast of Florida. An easy passage would take us home by way of Nassau and Freeport, shitholes. Priscilla said she'd hang her head in shame. When it came down to it, Priscilla seemed always to be the one of us who put the thing in gear and stepped on the gas. She likes to know the pros and cons, but I'm not sure why; it takes a lot of cons to turn her off course.\n\nSo next morning we got our hangovers out of our berth an hour before dawn. While Priscilla made peanut-butter sandwiches with Ritz crackers, and packed them in zip-locked bags, I tried to tune in Charley's Locker on the transistor radio. In the Bahamas, on weekdays, at 6:45 a.m., maybe, if reception was good, it was possible to tune in Charley's Locker from Coral Gables, Florida, to get a rough prophecy of weather in the Caribbean. This followed a roundup of sports news from Trinidad and Jamaica, and was preceded by a maddening hornpipe chantey, \"Barnacle Bill the Sailor\" or the like. It was possible\u2014if the boat was pointed in just the right direction, and if the seas were quiet, and wind wasn't shrieking in the rigging, and no casuarinas blocked reception, and Priscilla remembered not to talk while I listened, and I kept alert despite a numbing chatter of cricket scores\u2014to hear every third or fourth word. The velocity of Charley's weather report was remarkable; someone was paying by the second. He sort of seemed to bring passably okay news. Windsouthwest-somethingknots-somethingelse-by-afternoon. Then, slow and sure, every syllable enunciated: \"Sat-is-fy alllll your boat-ing needs at Char-ley's Lock-er.\"\n\n\"Let's go,\" I said.\n\nSo we went.\n\nIt was a hairy passage. We jumped off at the first hint of light, got up in oilskins and wool caps and gloves. The wind was up and at 'em, twenty knots at first, gusting to twenty-five. The day was gray and ominous, with low clouds scudding in from the west-southwest. The rusted wreck of a fertilizer freighter at Egg Island cut was the last vessel we saw that day. We were headed due north, shoved by great cresting rollers; _Blackwing_ is a notably dry boat, but as the wind increased, spindrift blew off the tops of the surge, spraying us with warm water. When a gust hit, it came from the west. The wind was beginning to clock around, and I was tense, racing the sun to cross Little Harbour Bar before dark, and safely.\n\nPriscilla noted nautical miles accumulated on the log, an odometer that gives a roughly accurate account of speed through the water, which is (because of the effect of tidal and wind currents) less interesting than speed over the bottom. We seemed to be making six knots, and that was good. _Blackwing_ is cutter rigged with a large mainsail and two jibs; we were sailing with a double-reefed (radically reduced) mainsail and the roller-furled jib, called a Yankee, and we were flying.\n\nPriscilla kept me equipped with hot tea and peanut-butter crackers. I hadn't eaten peanut-buttered crackers since I was a kid, and neither had Priscilla; she reinvented them for this voyage, and this is why she's so smart: she knew that a quantity of those crackers, dry in zip-locked bags, would give our wind-swept, water-soaked cockpit a milk-and-crackers-at-recess comfiness. This passage was a trial for her. All these years she'd fought seasickness, and now we were trying a timed-release drug taken by way of a patch worn behind her ear, and either it was working or she was too busy hanging on and helping out to be sick. That was the good news. The bad news: I was working hard to keep _Blackwing_ on course in those willful seas, with the wind building and coming more and more off her beam. Plus: beginning just after noon, past the line of no return, we could see lightning on the horizon, and hear thunder. Plus: the steering felt sloppy, and I heard the rudder creak when I adjusted it to counter the violent push of a roller on our port stern quarter.\n\nOther than being stove in, or catching fire, there is no worse destiny in heavy seas than to lose a rudder. _Blackwing_ is steered by a wheel that moves the rudder by stainless-steel cables rove through sheaves to a rudder quadrant, and I knew that our trouble was more likely the connection between wheel and rudder than the rudder itself. Nicholas had had a steering cable break a few weeks ago in the Exumas, navigating a tricky reef. I had an emergency tiller, but it would take all my strength to keep _Blackwing_ on course with it, and I was cold and tired. I felt shorthanded; I _was_ shorthanded, and I elected to keep my anxieties about our steering system to myself.\n\nA simple truth we couldn't ignore: Priscilla\u2014smart, brave and calm\u2014is not strong. She has an unerring sense of place, so that she could thread us through a reef. She would cheerfully go below and make food in wild seas. But to ask her to douse and furl a sail in huge seas, or to trim a sheet, or to wrestle the wheel out here where all was too big for our britches\u2014this was to ask too much. Unspoken between us was an agreement: I sail, she thinks. Her will wasn't in question, or her nerve; she was overpowered, and I wasn't, quite. But there was only one of me (alas, alas!), and that one was now wearing out.\n\nThunder and lightning exploded at four in the afternoon, just after we'd caught sight of a landfall on Great Abaco. When the wind-driven rain hit us in horizontal sheets, we could see nothing but gray wet, and evil electric bolts, and the concussive thunder scared us silly. I wondered what it would be like, if I couldn't find Little Harbour Bar, to ride this out at sea, through the night, waiting for dawn, hoping to find my way across. Wondering this, I heard Priscilla say, \"That's it.\" The \"it\" she referred to was a reef, forbiddingly named The Boilers, a mile or so south of the bar. If \"it\" wasn't \"it,\" all bets were off, and we'd rolled snake eyes, crapped out. Time was short now. \"It\" _was_ \"it,\" and now all that remained was to follow the _Yachtsman's Guide_ , which Priscilla read to me above the scream of the wind and the thunder and the smash of the sea:\n\nLittle Harbour Bar should be negotiated with care, according to the following directions. Approaching Little Harbour Bar from the south, stand off the coast not less than one mile until Little Harbour Point and Tom Curry's Point are in transit. (See sketch chart of Little Harbour.) They will then be bearing roughly 305\u00b0. Alter course to port to keep them on this bearing until in mid-channel between the point and the line of breakers on the reef that extends south from Lynyard Cay. Then alter course to north, running parallel to the land for about 400 yards, in order to clear the reef that extends for about 300 yards north from Little Harbour Point. You will then be in 18\u201324 feet. As you alter course, rounding the reef, to the port a cove behind the lighthouse will open up. This will be easily recognized by the white sand beach and a group of coconut palms in the eastern corner. This is not a good anchorage.\n\nSee what I mean? Clear as mud? If you don't see what I mean, if you see instead what the _Yachtsman's Guide to the Bahamas_ shows, if you see it with utmost clarity so that you could put a hand on _Blackwing_ 's wheel and guide her over the reef, then you're of Priscilla's tribe. We made it. The storm was passing, Priscilla grinning.\n\n\"Look,\" she said. \"Look there!\"\n\nI looked, terrified what I might see. It was a pretty beach, our anchorage, a very good anchorage, pink sand beach. And over it, arched from way out at sea\u2014near the ungodly depths called The Tongue of the Ocean, to the spot off Lynyard Cay where we dropped anchor\u2014a rainbow.\n\nI thought of it as her rainbow, and do. When I met Priscilla in 1963, she was temperamentally unlike anyone I'd known; I fell in love with her for the inexpressible reasons people fall in love but also for a character I can try to articulate, her unimpeded clarity of vision and expression. Of course Priscilla had understood the _Yachtsman's Guide_ , and of course she had translated its dense instructions into a rational course of action, and of course she had seen how this coconut palm related to that coral head. If I couldn't have counted on Priscilla to continue to see and say unambiguously, we wouldn't have come to this place in this way. Imagine someone who sees things and systems whole, and who articulates precisely what she sees. Such a person can neither be fooled nor fool, and to live with her is to live with the recurring surprise of hearing a sane consciousness expressed with insanely serene candor. It is frightening to be wholly understood; it is bracing; it is fun; it keeps me off reefs. Because Priscilla's relentless good sense has no interest in prudence, only in knowing the odds so the odds may be disregarded; because her comprehension is a renewable resource driven by curiosity; because to see the world through her eyes is to see a misbegotten human comedy rather than a blighted human tragedy; because she said something crossing Little Harbour Bar that made me laugh; because I associate her with light, with warmth and buoyancy and illumination\u2014that was her rainbow, and is.\n\nIt is worth feeling wet and cold to feel dry and warm. It is worth being scared to be secure. It is worth leaving sight of land to make a landfall. More than a few times, _Blackwing_ had been an instrument of instruction in these lessons, but to be safe aboard her, with Priscilla, in the lee of those very reefs that caused such dread, was to feel the kind of gratitude that it is irrational to feel for inanimate objects. Perhaps this was why Priscilla\u2014bringing a tray of rum drinks and cheese to the cockpit\u2014found me below in the engine compartment, tightening the steering cable. It had been well secured and abundantly greased by Nicholas, but it had stretched, as new cable will, under the strain put on it today.\n\n\"Come on out of there,\" Priscilla said. \"The sun's setting.\"\n\n\"I know,\" I said. \"I need the last of the light to adjust her steering.\"\n\nI saw Priscilla make that ancient sign of schoolyard and marriage, eyes rolled upward while forefinger circles ear clockwise.\n\n\"What's the matter with you?\" she said. \"What's wrong with tomorrow?\"\n\nThe question was sensible, as far as it went. It failed merely to accommodate how I'd feel tonight leaving undone what ought to be done to thank our boat for bringing us safely to this place, whose rainbowed and sun-downed glow I was missing to thank our boat for bringing us to this place. Well, it confused me, too.\n\nWe'd seen through our open hatch stars clear and sharp in the flawless atmosphere\u2014Arcturus, Spica, Regulus, the Southern Cross\u2014and the next morning came in clean and bracing. I had fallen asleep in my clothes, and by now was too funky even for me. Bathing on _Blackwing_ was a trial: one squatted in the slippery gloom of our tiny head compartment, dribbling cold (and precious) freshwater from a comically forceless telephone shower. Conventional New England wisdom had it that soap and shampoo wouldn't clean in saltwater. Nicholas had commended a Lemon Joy saltwater bath and shampoo (dip bucket in ocean, stand in cockpit, invert bucket over hair and torso), a plunge in the soft warm sea for a rinse. It worked; I was his student again.\n\nStudying the charts, planning our next complicated passage, I noticed over the tops of my sunglasses an inflatable dinghy, pushed by an outboard, grinding toward us. The irritating noise (irritating when someone else was making it but not when I was making it) reminded me how quiet the world was here in these Out Islands. We were anchored off a pretty beach; when we were anchored, it was always off a pretty beach, so I'll describe the generic pretty beach now, and next time when I write \"beach,\" you'll read, \"talcy sand fifty yards off our bow, a deserted island, palm trees, great seas crashing against the barrier reef of pink and purple coral\"... Not a boat or person in sight, except this one, nearing from Little Harbour. It was churlish to resent company; call me churlish.\n\nHere he came: \"Ahoy, _Blackwing!_ Where's the cap?\"\n\n\"I'm the captain. And owner.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" The fellow bobbing alongside, a little more or less my age, was disappointed. \"Where's Nick?\"\n\nThis question would be repeated all the way home: _Where's Nick?_ To meet returning north the people he had met migrating south was an odd sensation. He'd made many friends, and these were not the friends I predicted he'd meet. The Inland Waterway is sometimes called the Blue Flag Expressway, for the blue flags flown from boats whose owners are not aboard. I had predicted that Nicholas and his friends would meet the paid hands of boats much bigger than _Blackwing_ , crews of young men and women not much older than Nicholas. In fact, the boys of _Blackwing_ preferred the company of people like us, oldsters looking for an adventure, middle-class couples (with an occasional remittance man or woman thrown in to raise the tone of the venture) who had cashed in their chips, sold the pencil factory or software patent or house in Shaker Heights, to quit the world and wander.\n\nIt was an oddity of many of these people that they brought with them vestigial Polonius- or headmaster-inspired wisdoms, so that many felt compelled, especially after a dinner served on their boat, to clear their throats over a glass of brandy and ask Nicholas and his friends when they were going to settle down, get with the program, start on their careers. They evidently detected no irony here. They may have been provoked to counsel by Nicholas's vague version of his recent history and his plans. He was less than forthcoming with newly met friends about the title to _Blackwing;_ when asked who owned her, he knew he couldn't say he did, or he'd be mistaken for a drug dealer or\u2014worse!\u2014a rich kid. He also wouldn't for sure confess the plain fact, \"My daddy let me have the keys.\" So he'd take on a cryptic mien, shrug, look at the night sky, say, \"Some guy in Jamestown asked us to bring her south.\"\n\nWe met dozens, scores, of people along our way who told of kindnesses done them by our son and his friends (without telling us of the kindnesses they returned). We heard stories of Nicholas's ingenuity with tools, his eagerness to lend a hand, his seamanship, his curiosity, his friendliness. We heard about get-togethers, and especially a huge Valentine's Night potluck blowout in the Exumas for hundreds of live-aboards who'd convened at Staniel Cay, just up the beach from the Happy People Marina. These happy people had shared their food and experience and stories with Nicholas and his friends, and what other situation could have given our son a window\u2014through which he wished to look\u2014into the cluttered interior of American middle age? If the sailors hailing _Blackwing_ displayed undisguised dismay to find us rather than our son, we could endure paling by comparison. If envy is the wasting sickness of the middle class, nature offered a remedy in children, teaching how good it can feel to wish for another better luck than one's own luck.\n\nThe fellow in the dinghy, a long way from his home in Tulsa, declined our invitation to come aboard. He said to tell Nick he'd really done it this time.\n\n\"This one's worse than Wax Cay Cut; he'll know what I'm talking about. We screwed the pooch this time.\"\n\nWhat happened: the sailor and his wife had bounced across the bar of Little Harbour lagoon at high tide of a full moon. Now they'd have to wait for the next full moon to bounce back out. We drew five feet, and it was too close a shave for us to try Little Harbour lagoon, so pretty it constitutes an attractive nuisance. Nicholas's friend's boat drew more than six feet, and he'd been using its keel to dig trenches in the sand during every daylight high tide of the waning and waxing moon. He left us to try again. We saw him later, motionless in the water, his mast at that telltale ten-degree angle we would soon have reason to recognize up close and personal.\n\nThe Siren who entices sailors across reefs has no seductive power over me. I plot a course for deep water, steer clear. Solo voyagers and racers court extremes; some cruisers enjoy the chest-cramping test of a shoal bar at high tide, or shave this side of a buoy meant to be taken on that side. The dare might save fifteen minutes, which isn't the point; the point is the frisson when the keel taps. For me the point is serenity, a limit to surprise. I shun ambush. _Have a nice day?_ You bet, a nice day's just the day for me.\n\nI trust nothing and nobody, including myself. I know a bit about myself, including what I don't know, so I ration trust miserly. I have my compass swung, update charts, tighten what's loose, reef too soon. A thirty-percent chance of thunderstorms is one hundred percent to this meteorologist. The only surprise I welcome at sea is a wind shift in my favor. _Uneventful_ is my favorite notation in the log. I do not sail boats to pump adrenaline or to grow an ulcer. My desideratum at sea is elementary: to cause no harm. To cause no harm is no passive ambition. It requires an imagination for disaster; it demands that the master of a vessel not put his vessel (or his family, say) in harm's way, needlessly, improvidently. I expect to be surprised at sea\u2014I am not a fool (I think)\u2014but I want surprise to come of natural law rather than my carelessness. Wanting to do no harm, I discovered I had translated myself from the quondam Hotspur Priscilla had married into a very clerk of a sailor, fussy, a look-before-you-leaper. This fever of caution had alarmingly spread inland to other enterprises: I now balanced my checkbook, \"maintained\" my shoes, did a fall lay-up on my body, would have put a spring coat of varnish on the lawn mower if I could get the Z-Spar to adhere to grease. Sometimes I came to believe I was no yachtsman; I was a grunt laborer. I sailed a mop. Was this Commodore Wolff? White-flanneled skipper of a sailing yacht? On my knees in the head, scrubbing piss and puke from the moving parts of a plastic toilet? I had become a prig. I took cleaning and fiddling over the top. I became a master of the domestic arts: scrubbing, scouring, sanding, painting, varnishing, greasing, adjusting, worrying. If my car failed, I'd stick out my thumb. Boat: I'd inflate the raft, shoot off a flare. So I learned to test this and check that, looking for the bite-sized surprise now, at anchor, so there would be no great ugly surprise later, out there.\n\nIt seemed a possible dream, to comprehend the universe of a 30-foot boat, my 30-foot boat, possible even to control _Blackwing_ 's destiny, in a modest way. A 30-foot boat is not after all a five-ton timepiece. It could be got into, wrestled with, maintained, fixed. If, hanging upside down in the engine room to adjust something, I heard a little noise, the terrible plop of my Ray-Bans falling into the greasy and carnivorous bilge, I had a handy-dandy magnet with which to fish them out, at the expense of only a few hours. Of course the magnet raised hell with the compass, which then needed reswinging. To keep _Blackwing_ fit, I'd merely pretend I was Sisyphus and put my shoulder to the rock, or let Nicholas take _Blackwing_ on a long voyage so he could put his shoulder to it.\n\nSailing the southern Abacos was a strained pleasure, more pleasure than strain, but a trial of attention. To sail is to attend: in New England the eye squints to pick out a buoy or the loom of a light. Here, as there, we watched the sea's surface for the telltale ripples of a shifting wind, and studied the sky for its lessons and warnings. But now we looked down as well as up; it is said of the Bahamas' shoals that the most valuable skill a navigator can bring to their successful circumvention is an aptitude to \"read\" the water. By this is meant an ability to distinguish between the dark blue of deeps, the turquoise and aquamarine of adequate depth, the green of a grassy bottom often safely deep, the milky pale yellow of sandy shoals, the white of a sandbar dry at low tide, the dark patch that looks like coral but is only a shadow cast by a cloud, the brown of coral that can tear a hole in a boat's bottom (not to be confused with the harmless brown of \"fish muds,\" caused by bottom-feeders eating dinner, stirring up the marl). Nicholas, who is colorblind, nevertheless learned to read the water from _Blackwing_ 's bowsprit or, in especially perilous waters, from up her mast. (The downside of that upside, he told us, was a clear view of sharks working the bottoms.)\n\nLearning to read thin water is an incremental adequacy; the apt scholar of shoals depends not only on memory and common sense, but on sunlight from above and behind. Sailing into the sun, it is impossible to distinguish between the consequential shades along the sea's spectrum. So we had to plan our passages, which demanded snaky course changes through erratic channels, according to the sun's declination, which often warred with felicitous tides. (The tidal range in the Abacos was as great as four feet.)\n\nIf we came to distinguish between water that would float us and water that would not, I never accustomed myself to sailing fast, hour after hour, with three feet and less beneath our keel. Is it reliable that what we don't know won't hurt us, that ignorance is bliss? Or is it incontestable that seeing is believing? I don't know why we found it less settling to see the bottom beneath our keel than to sail by faith in charts, as we do in New England's murky brine; to see the bottom near Rhode Island is to be on the bottom. In the Bahamas, sailing at a hull speed of six knots, the unnatural clarity of the water gave us the willies, an illusion of boiling forward into decreasing depths, as though the bottom were rushing up at us. We trained ourselves to disregard our terror, to pretend to know better, to smile as we sailed into what seemed to be five feet, four, two. But I'd reach the end of an Abacos passage, strike the sails, line up a casuarina with a church steeple, triangulate that line with a line bearing 287\u00b0 to the butt of a dirt road, dodge a sandbar, home in on a water tower (looking sharp for the submerged pilings of a wrecked pier), drop the anchor and uncramp my white-knuckled hand from the wheel and a dumb unfelt grin from my face.\n\nWhat we have here is a point-of-view problem. Up close, through my eyes, the seascape looked one way. Passages were treacherous, and their timing required exacting precision. Our clock was still on northern time; I had crossed from Royal Island as though I were running to catch the 7:06 from Pleasantville. So what if the worst had happened, if we'd been holed up for a week or two in one Eden in place of another? Or the other worst: we had had to spend a night at sea, floating two and a half miles above the bottom of Northeast Providence Channel? After all, I wasn't a single-handed Joshua Slocum dodging growlers, icebergs and pirates in the Roaring Forties. I wasn't commanding a convoy escort on the Murmansk run. Seen from above, we must have made an enviable picture, sailing like gangbusters through pristine water under a warming sun. This was the Bahamas, as in the Sunday newspaper supplement ads. And if my keel hit sand? _Blackwing_ would float off on a rising tide. And if she didn't? We'd wade ashore and phone Allstate.\n\nAs these verities sank in, we settled into what became (for a time) a tranquil routine. The sun would wake us; we'd drink coffee and orange juice; we'd laze in the cockpit waiting for the tide to do the right thing. We'd make a shopping list: this required much consideration. Not since we'd lived in Brittany twenty years before had we invested such prodigal gobs of time in the contemplation of what exactly we'd put in our mouths during the coming twenty-four hours. It wasn't as though a Brittany-like horn of plenty awaited us ashore: we were deliberating what we'd have with the tuna salad, whether taters or rice would go best with fried chicken. (It's an oddity of life aboard a small boat with a two-burner camp stove that it requires discipline to exorcise the temptation to prepare a meal of four or five courses, nuts to soup, fish to cookies. Priscilla and I were old enough to know better: we'd learned to eat lean.) Our lists made, we'd take the dinghy ashore to search for ice and bread and beer and fruit and cheese; we'd find what we came for. We'd take the dinghy back to _Blackwing_ and laze in the cockpit; we'd observe that it sure was a nice day; we'd think aloud that it was almost warm enough to swim; we'd say we were thinking about taking a swim; we'd swim; we'd sit in the cockpit letting the warm air dry us; we'd notice it was coming on toward the lunch hour; we'd discuss lunch; we'd make lunch; we'd eat lunch; we'd say we were considering a little nap; we'd take a little nap; we'd pull up anchor and sail a few hours to the next pretty beach (see above); we'd drop anchor; we'd make rum drinks; we'd take the dinghy ashore for a dinner of fried or saut\u00e9ed or grilled grouper or flounder; we'd bring the dinghy back to _Blackwing;_ we'd put a tape in the deck, maybe Dave McKenna, maybe Thelonious Monk; we'd sit in the cockpit, looking at the night sky; we'd go below to our berth; we'd lie on our backs talking, looking at the night sky. We'd sleep.\n\nIf one island in the Abacos looked like another, the islands were culturally distinct: a vacation paradise, where it's safe to let Muffy and Biff roam with pail and shovel, can be one island over from a drug terminus upon which it would be worth your skin to stumble. Along the west coast of Great Abaco (whose east coast is as tame as a tourist) is the Bight of Abaco, whose mainland and island settlements, menacingly called The Marls, are so hazardous to outsiders that charts of the area carry notices that passages through the wilderness islands are \"specifically NOT recommended.\" (Emphasis NOT added.) We met a sailor who had stumbled into the Bight of Abaco in search of solitude, who found greater solitude than he sought, and less. He was set upon by a clan of natives with whom he left his wristwatch, dinghy, outboard, transistor radio and blue jeans; these people titled themselves \"the meanest people in the world\" and shared a single Scottish surname, a name I'll refrain from printing not from vigilance against litigation but from dread that they'll bring their outboard-powered skiffs over the ocean to Little Rhody and find me tucked under a down comforter and murder me in my sleep.\n\nThese McKillers dwelt ten miles away as the buzzard flies, but at the antipodes from our destination, sweet Green Turtle Cay. We darted outside the protection of reefs to make our way north to Green Turtle Cay from Don't Rock Passage to Whale Cay Passage. Unsettled weather could have made this moment a trial: the unholy phenomenon of onshore winds piling huge seas onto shoal bars from the off-soundings ocean deeps (almost three _miles_ deep!) is called a \"rage.\" But today was fine, the wind light, and Priscilla read aloud to me from the _Yachtsman's Guide:_ \"Caution: Never pass close to the west of Whale Cay, where there are dangerous swells even in settled weather. Never underestimate this passage, as several boats and lives have been lost here in recent years.\" Talk about your wet blankets.\n\nWe gave the west of Whale Cay what I'd call a _wide_ berth, and snuck into Green Turtle Cay's White Sound on a rising tide, and anchored. Now this was a pretty island. I'd describe it as having a pinkish-white sand beach beyond which casuarinas grew, and palm trees. But wait, Green Turtle Cay was different from the rest. Along its west coast were bluffs; these soared from the sea to a great height. We got the dinghy ashore; to achieve that summit was worth the risk of nosebleed, and so\u2014without guides or bearers\u2014we climbed past oleanders and hibiscus to the Bluff House and finally, on the roof of our immediate world, at eighty feet, we stood, Goombay Smash in hand, looking down our snoots at reefs and bars and sand bores and the sun, sinking. After trading a grand view for a bad dinner, we surveyed the memorabilia framed on the inn's walls, and the first to catch our eyes was a recent article from _Cruising World_ retailing the loss of a sailboat out in Whale Cay Passage, within sight of where we stood:\n\nThe breaker arrived completely unexpectedly. On this beautiful sunny November day in the Bahamas, with winds not more than 15 knots from the north, I could not have imagined that a huge wave could break right on top of us, throwing me against the steering wheel... bending the wheel, breaking my right upper arm in four places, and leaving me with a cracked rib, a black left eye and both hands severely bruised.... We learned later that a 30-footer had been lost the day before our misadventure.\n\nIn retrospect, I blame our coming misadventure on that cautionary narrative. Descending from the heights after taking aboard a quantity of rum and table wine, climbing with exemplary grace into the dinghy, I said offhandedly, \"Let's have a drink over at the Green Turtle Club.\"\n\n\"We had a drink at the Bluff House.\"\n\n\"Well, I was thinking we ought to have a drink at the Green Turtle Club.\"\n\n\"Well, we had a drink at the Bluff House.\"\n\n\"I was thinking of prolonging the pleasure with a digestif.\"\n\n\"Oh boy,\" said Priscilla. \"I was thinking of hitting the hay.\"\n\n\"We'll have our whole lives to sleep when we're dead. Come with me, we'll have a fine time.\"\n\nPriscilla said, \" _We'll have a fine time?_ You sound like the jerk in 'Hills Like White Elephants.' \" Priscilla teaches literature; she knows her modern American short story backward and forward.\n\n\"I think I need a drink to relax me.\"\n\n\"From what?\"\n\n\"You've got a short memory,\" I said. \"I just brought us through Whale Cay Passage.\"\n\n\"But it was as calm as a bathtub.\"\n\n\"So it seemed,\" I said. \"To you,\" I said.\n\nBy Priscilla's silence I knew that she had come\u2014most reasonably\u2014to see the wisdom of my proposition. To motor us across the harbor to the Green Turtle Club, I got the Seagull outboard started (with ignobling difficulty), and we were necessarily silent in the din of its single piston banging like the hammers of Hell against its single cylinder. I began to brood: I had _never_ liked the goddamned outboard; it had _always_ been false, treacherous... selfish! I wasn't going to take it anymore. I would _... replace_ it. My revenge fantasy was cut short by our arrival at the Green Turtle Club's docks, lit by twinkling oil lamps. Here was the place!\n\nPriscilla had her back to me, where it had been since we agreed to have a fine time at the Green Turtle Club. She was climbing out of the little rubber boat. She was\u2014oh-oh. This was an old story, and none sadder. She was pushing out rather than up with her legs. Her hands were fixed on the dock, her feet to the bow of the little rubber boat, which was moving away from the dock. When the little rubber boat was about as far from the dock as Priscilla is tall, Priscilla was very wet. I helped her back into the dinghy, ferried her back to _Blackwing_ , helped her aboard, and left her. I had not spoken. I had a hunch Priscilla did not prefer that I speak (\"Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?\" says the woman in \"Hills Like White Elephants.\" Ray Carver called his turn on _please_ \"Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?\"). I was bound for the Green Turtle Club. It was what Priscilla would have wanted, if she'd thought about it.\n\nIn the open-air bar of the Green Turtle Club I found myself alone with a party of two badly sunburned men my age with two women less than half my age. I sat two tables away, positioned so I could see but pretend not to look. The men were drunk, I noted with disapproval as I took a long pull on my Beck's. I was in a tetchy humor. Any drinker or ex-drinker will recognize the symptoms: an exaggerated sense of what's now called \"entitlement\"\u2014I Deserve a Better Time Than I'm Having sort of thing.\n\nI eavesdropped. The young lady facing me was theatrically beautiful. Literally: she made references to her work on stage and screen. She was British. The men, and a woman hidden in shadows, were asking the starlet her analysis of contemporary films. The starlet's critical judgment was ever the same: \"Boring.\" _Rain Man_ was \"boring\" and _Robocop_ was \"boring\" and _Predator_ was \"boring.\" The starlet would brush back her gorgeous black hair, as though she were hot. (She was hot, I'll admit, but the temperature hung in the 60s, and there was a whispery breeze.) By brushing back her hair she could arch her pale throat, and show off her arms and shoulders, and pucker her lips and blow strands of hair away from her mouth and eyes. She couldn't have been prettier.\n\n\"Oh, I walked _out;_ it was so boring.\"\n\nA gent asked her verdict on _My Left Foot_.\n\n\"Yuch! Talk about boring! Who wants to have your date buy you tickets to watch sick people gross you out?\"\n\nThis made the party laugh. I recollected those snapshots of our erstwhile Presidential candidate and his friends on Bimini, dancing the limbo, wearing parrot shirts and those awful sunburns. What reminded me, _Monkey Business_ had passed us a few days before, heading north. I wouldn't mention it, except the captain didn't slow down, and his wake near swamped us. On the stern, _Monkey Business_ had been painted over, but you could make out the old name underneath\u2014what Lillian Hellman calls \"pentimento,\" a rethinking, a repentance of a still visible first instinct. Anyway, the tender still wore its name on its backside; _Monkey Shines_ , I think it was.\n\n\" _My Life as a Dog_ is extremely boring.\"\n\nIn the old days I would have ordered another Beck's; I would have dug in, leering, glowering, leering, glowering. Thanks for small favors, the old days aren't the new days.\n\nWhen I came aboard, Priscilla said, \"We're a couple of bozos.\"\n\nSo it would be okay.\n\nAnd next morning it was okay; it was okay right up till we dinghied to the dock of the Green Turtle Club where we thought we'd eat breakfast. Priscilla's hands were fixed on the dock, her feet to the bow of the little rubber boat, which was moving away from the dock... There's nothing easier to break than a good mood or harder than a bad habit.\n\nIt was time to get out of the Abacos and across the Gulf Stream to Florida. North of Green Turtle Cay, casual yacht traffic thins almost to vanishing, except for live-aboards transiting from north of Palm Beach into the Bahamas in the late fall and early winter, and back home in the spring. The northern Abacos are mostly uninhabited, with a desolate end-of-the-world atmosphere, especially on a cloudy day during a blustery northwest passage of twenty-five miles, driven by a northeast wind of twenty knots to Allans-Pensacola. This was an abandoned Air Force missile-tracking station, populated by moray eels in its reefs and barracuda in the mangrove flats. Oh, and sharks. Did I forget to mention sand fleas? Sand fleas weren't a worry when the wind gusted to thirty knots, but anchoring was.\n\nI use a heavy anchor called a plow, made in England by CQR ( _secure:_ get it?). I swear by it; I swear by anything weighing twenty-five pounds that can arrest the drift of another something weighing ten thousand pounds when another something is being hammered by a north wind. The holding power of an anchor is a function of physical properties that can be mathematically calculated, once that anchor is set. To set an anchor is an art I believed I had mastered. Priscilla would bring _Blackwing_ into the wind under power, and slow her till she was dead in the water, and I would nonchalantly, imperturbably lower the anchor to the bottom (no undignified heaving, no tangling myself in chain); I would then aloofly pay out anchor rode while _Blackwing_ drifted astern. When five times the water depth had been unflappably payed out in rode (I had marked it in twenty-foot increments), I would snub the rode to a cleat, and observe diffidently how, as usual, the anchor had CQRly bit into the bottom. I would then nod to Priscilla an almost imperceptible nod (no wild oaths, please, no despotic commands) to shut the engine down and start chipping ice for the rum drinks. I would sit quietly in the bow, triangulating lines of sight on various objects ashore\u2014casuarinas, say, or maybe palm trees. Meantime I would casually pay out more rode as _Blackwing_ drifted astern, till I had achieved the desired ratio of 7:1, rode to depth.\n\nExcept at Allans-Pensacola. We were dressed in oilskins, weary, lonely, wet and cold from the front's spill of rain. It was late in the day, and the sun was too low to light the reefs that ringed both shores of the harbor, the only harbor within reach, a harbor said to be marginal (\"a hard chance,\" in the idiom of cruising guides) in a northerly. Two boats were anchored close to each other, farther up the harbor, where we would like to have been. Priscilla brought _Blackwing_ into the nor'east wind; I lowered the anchor; _Blackwing_ drifted fast astern; the anchor bounced uselessly along the hardpan sand bottom. I could see it bouncing. It made me angry to see this, and to haul in rode and chain and twenty-five-pound plow also made me angry, and made me reflect on how lucky Priscilla was to have in her hands a varnished teak steering wheel instead of a muddy length of chain. This process was repeated for the next hour or so: the helmsperson, following the anchorperson's despotic commands, maneuvered _Blackwing_ into the wind; the anchorperson lowered the anchor, which skipped along the hardpan bottom, provoking from the anchorperson wild oaths.\n\nThis routine did not proceed in solitude, unobserved. To watch a couple anchor a boat is one of the sea's great entertainments, way more satisfying than a world-class sunset or moonbeams filtered through casuarinas. It is proof of one's superiority to observe\u2014from the CQRity of one's own steady state, with one's own vessel tugging fruitlessly at what holds it, with a beverage cooling one's hand and perhaps a dish of beernuts nearby on one's cockpit table\u2014a couple less evolved hurling oath, command and anchor. The world at such a moment is starkly binary, split between the anchored and the would-be anchored. Up at the head of the harbor, one of the two anchored was pretending not very successfully to be not watching us. He was smoking a pipe! This pipe-smoking shook me to my rubber Wellingtons. It was not right. And then, as though that were not enough, the pipe-smoker turned toward _Blackwing_ , languidly, and motioned _my_ helmsperson, to whom _I_ gave despotic orders, to approach. And then, as though that weren't enough, she did his bidding.\n\n\"Holding's bad down there,\" said the skipper of _Enshallah_ , a heathen corruption of _que ser\u00e1, ser\u00e1_. \"Anchor here, between us.\"\n\nPriscilla commanded me, tyrannically, to lower the anchor, and I did, and it held. There was marginally room enough for our three boats to swing, if they swung together, without hitting. The skipper of _Enshallah_ had violated a first principle of the Law of First Anchored: he had welcomed us to his sanctuary. This generosity was a breach of all anchoring protocols. I didn't know what to say, so I sulked. Priscilla said, \"Thank you.\"\n\nThe skipper pulled on his pipe, which he smoked upside down. \"I'd dive on that anchor,\" he said. \"To make sure it's set.\"\n\nTo examine an anchor in the Bahamas was always advised, because in the clear shoals it was an easy chore, sometimes even fun. (No one dives into Block Island's New Harbor to counterfeit study of his anchor dug into mud and beer cans and shit.) I eyed the mangroves seventy yards from my bow, and mused on the barracuda feeding there, in competition with sharks. I wondered whether the little food fish that lived among mangroves ever toured seventy yards to sightsee a plow anchor, and whether the bigger diners followed them on such a safari.\n\n\"You think it's a good idea to dive on that anchor?\" I said.\n\n\"Well, I do think it's a good idea,\" said the master of _Enshallah_.\n\n\"I think it's a good idea,\" Priscilla said.\n\n\"You want to dive on that anchor?\" I asked Priscilla.\n\nPriscilla looked at me; she cocked her head; she shook her head slowly. I had a hunch she was thinking about where she was spending her sabbatical and with whom.\n\n\"What I think I'm going to do,\" I said to Priscilla and to her pipe-smoking friend on _Enshallah_ , \"I think I'm going to slip down there in the water and have a look at that anchor.\"\n\nThe water was warmer than the air, and the wind was blissfully uninteresting below the troubled surface. I stayed down, looking sharp for predators, glancing behind toward the reefs and eels. A dozen feet down, the anchor rested on, rather than in, the bottom; its flukes were tangled in a furze of eelgrass, and each time the wind blew _Blackwing_ astern, the rode went taut, and the flukes strained at the grass, and held. I dived, and labored to dig the flukes in the bottom, and it was like trying to dig them into the surface of a parking lot. So I tangled them thoroughly in the grass, and broke the surface gasping, and told Priscilla and her best friend that I wasn't all that impressed by what I'd seen. I didn't want to lean too hard on this, because night was coming on, and I couldn't imagine anything I less desired than to raise anchor, go elsewhere and try again. This was weak of me, and imprudent, and in violation of all maritime usage and decorum, but I was of a mind to say _what the hell_ , to say, as it were, _enshallah_.\n\nOur neighbor pulled at his pipe and remarked that he had been in this very spot four days, diving among fish, and he sure hadn't dragged. \"I'm dug in so deep I'll have to blast my way out.\"\n\nI would have responded with appropriate awe, but his other neighbor, his friend, had just arrived at _Enshallah_ for cocktails, having rowed a little dink into what was now a thirty-knot gale.\n\nThat night, all night, while the wind gave _Blackwing_ a battering, shaking her mast, rattling her rigging, bringing her to the end of her anchor rode with a jarring shudder, I stood anchor watch. I didn't have fun. I wished I'd never examined the anchor on the bottom; faith thrives on blindness. I had lit an anchor light, in deference to doctrine, so we wouldn't be run down by anyone coming on Allans-Pensacola by night, which of course nobody would. Our nearby neighbors also showed anchor lights, and a few hours after midnight I saw _Enshallah_ move to leeward, farther and farther astern. I watched, and wondered what to do. The pipe-smoking, among-man-eating-fish-diving, anchor-dug-in skipper surely knew what he was doing; he was no doubt paying out more anchor rode. He was not; he was dragging down on the reef, and as soon as I realized this, his neighbor began to shout and to blow a foghorn at his friend. The skipper of _Enshallah_ was standing at his bow. No, that was the skipper's wife; the skipper was rowing his anchor and chain back upwind. It was an extraordinary feat, and he got it done, and got his anchor down in time, and did not lose his boat on the reef. No thanks to me. I made a mental note: next time you see an anchor light move, holler, the way Nicholas would. I made another mental note: no man is an island. And another: be nice.\n\nThe next afternoon, at three-thirty, within easy sight and less than a mile from our next anchorage at Great Sale Cay, two hours past low tide, we ran hard aground. Our loran had guided us flawlessly through the reefs and sand bores of the Little Bahama Bank. We were tired, as usual, and relieved to see a dozen masts at the anchorage just across a sandspit to port. We felt smug, probably, but we weren't so stupid that we didn't follow the guidebook's instructions to stay well offshore of a sunken blue sedan (search me!), and to sail a couple of miles southwest of the entrance to the harbor before we turned northeast. This was to avoid a sandbar. The day was overcast, and I couldn't see the bar; I guessed I had sailed two miles; I had instead sailed _almost_ two miles; the depth meter read eight feet, six, five, four; we hit.\n\nThis was not good: we were in open ocean, exposed to a high wind, bang up on what was said to be sand but felt like asphalt. I tried everything I knew: I lowered sails, of course, and attached our anchor to a halyard that ran through the masthead, and took the anchor to seaward in our dinghy. I brought the dinghy back, and cranked on the halyard run through a sheet winch. By this stratagem I hoped to heel _Blackwing_ sufficiently to float her off. Might have, too, if the anchor wasn't skipping uselessly along the bottom. No dice. I sat in the cockpit and wondered if it would feel good to weep.\n\nMeanwhile, Priscilla worked the radio, talking to sailors a couple of miles\u2014alas, not quite a couple\u2014distant in Great Sale's Northwest Harbour. Conversations on VHF radio are not private conversations; in fact, they give pleasure to strangers in just the way that listening in on a party line to parties discussing divorce or bankruptcy might give pleasure, and for the same _Schadenfreudesque_ reason, with the added stimulus of legitimacy: maritime code rules that one is obliged to monitor, eavesdrop on, a sailor's broadcast misfortune. Priscilla's audience counseled patience; the tide was rising. Priscilla got advice from _Enshallah_ and from others: _Soleil:_ we recall you! _Leisure Gal:_ what's ours is yours! Time crept; the wind built; the seas slapped; the sun fell. With an hour of rising tide left, Priscilla and I decided to ask _Leisure Gal_ to relay a call from her powerful radio to BASRA, Bahamas Air-Sea Rescue Association, to ask for a tow off the bar. This was complicated, because the nearest towboat was at Walker's Cay, fifty miles away. The colloquy was between Priscilla and her relay, her relay and BASRA, BASRA and a towboat with a piquant name. The discourse went like this.\n\n_\"Leisure Gal, Leisure Gal!_ This is _Blackwing, Leisure Gal_. Get us _Love Bone.\"_\n\n\"BASRA, BASRA! This is _Leisure Gal. Blackwing_ wants _Love Bone_.\"\n\n_Love Bone_ wanted five hundred dollars cash, \"win or lose.\" We pondered this arrangement. _Blackwing_ was beginning to pound against the bottom, and in my exhaustion I misread the meaning of that evil banging. I told BASRA to bring on _Love Bone_ , and no sooner had this been arranged, night now, than I sensed I could power _Blackwing_ off the bar, with a few lucky bounces. And I did, and _Leisure Gal_ instructed BASRA to take its payday another day from another sailor. And so we crept sheepishly and most cautiously up Northwest Harbour, lit by searchlights and mast spreader lights and foghorns and good cheer on the radio. The crew of _Soleil_ sent over a casserole, and after dinner Priscilla said gently, \"I think we better have a chat.\"\n\nI guessed what chat was coming. Seven years before, we'd had a chat aboard _Blackwing_ at the west end of the Cape Cod Canal the night before we were to go east through the canal, and thence a hundred and forty miles down east to Maine, a beeline to Monhegan, in the Gulf of Maine as much as eighty miles offshore. That chat was about navigational skills and our young crew\u2014Nicholas was thirteen, Justin ten. Priscilla took one position on that adventure, I took another, I prevailed, we went. I sailed us beyond the Dry Salvages, beyond a pod of cavorting sunlit humpback whales and into the pure terror of a fog thick as buttermilk. What I recollect better than our dread lost in the Portland shipping lanes waiting for some tanker to crawl into our cockpit\u2014and lost off Monhegan, and lost on the Green Ledges, and lost somewhere west of Portugal\u2014was my shame, the awareness as sudden as stroke that none of it was necessary.\n\nNow, before Priscilla had begun to make her gentle case, as soon as she began to wrap my pride (such as it was) in gauze, I cut her off: \"I'll do whatever you think best. We don't have to do this. None of this is necessary.\"\n\nSaying so, I knew that it was not, at a fundamental level, true. _Some_ of this was necessary: it was necessary to get from this uninhabited cay to the next place. But the thrust of Priscilla's profound (as in _deep_ , as in five feet of water below a boat that draws four feet eleven) reservations about our situation was irresistible. This was supposed to be fun. Our imagination for discomfort and disaster, a prophetic inclination toward doom and gloom that had turned us into stay-at-homes, was supposed to be asleep now. Now our senses were meant to be awake, and gleaning good vibes. We were to have been sun-warmed and sea-bathed and easygoing. _Who needed this?_ It was a question any sailor will recognize. It is a question impossible not to ask when the wind hauls around the wrong way, when that same wind goes past the limit of \"bracing\" into the Force 7 territory of \"gale.\" When seas begin to break. When a line squall appears on the horizon. Maybe, depending on a sailor's limit, when the sun goes behind a cloud. When a sailor grips the lee rail and pukes into the scuppers. When the main halyard jams in a masthead sheave. When a sailor is lost in fog somewhere near the toothy coast of Maine. When a sailor spends an afternoon aground on a sandbar.\n\nPriscilla said, \"I think we should get Nick down here.\"\n\nI didn't have to say how it would be for me to make that phone call. And how would that phone call be made? It would be broadcast by radio, patched into Freeport by _Leisure Gal, Soleil, Enshallah_ , whomever. The relay would tell an operator to tell my son that he'd have to leave the job he had just started in order to fly to Florida, and from there to Grand Bahama Island, in order to help us bring _Blackwing_ across sixty miles of Gulf Stream, because we were scared, in water way over our heads (figuratively speaking, of course), not sufficient to the tame adventure we had set ourselves.\n\nI said, \"Whatever you think.\" And I meant it.\n\nKnowing I meant it, Priscilla said, \"Let's sleep on it.\" I knew, and she knew I knew, that because I had meant \"whatever you think,\" what she now thought was _I think we shouldn't get Nick down here_.\n\nThe next morning, warm and dry and sunny, we rested. Great Sale Cay abounded with sand sharks along the edge of its mangrove banks; here were rays and snapper and bonefish and barracuda. And here, seeing the benign world lit by benign sunbeams, doubt bleached invisible by the sun, I spent a couple of hours in the fishy world, cleaning _Blackwing_ 's bottom; it was the last chance I'd have to see it in clear water before we crossed to Florida. Besides, it made me feel valiant.\n\nAfter lunch we stowed deep in the bilge the library of paperbacks we had lugged to Eleuthera. We had now been aboard _Blackwing_ almost two weeks and neither had read an opening sentence. Nor would we: keeping the boat afloat, plotting courses, casing hazards, shopping, cooking, cleaning, maintaining, staring at the bottom, squinting into the sun, napping, waking to check the anchor, studying cruising guides, studying charts, reckoning distance made good from Hatchet Bay and distance to go to Narragansett Bay, forecasting the weather, talking, remembering aloud, missing our boys, shutting up, listening to Pablo Casals or John Lee Hooker, laughing, fretting, beachcombing, sometimes sleeping\u2014set against all this, reading cried uncle.\n\nOur passage to West End across the Little Bahama Bank, in ten or twelve feet of water, had two jeopardies, one of which especially distressed me: reading about the jumping-off port for Florida in the _Yachtsman's Guide_ , I had charted my way almost to our destination when I reached an italic passage regarding Indian Cay Rock: _\"Important: Please see caution below regarding this channel before proceeding.\"_ Set off in a box, using boldface caps and italics, as typographically alarming as cautions get in the _Yachtsman's Guide_ , was this **_\"Caution Regarding Indian Cay Rock/Barracuda Shoal Channel:_** _At this writing all navigational aids for the Indian Cay Rock/Barracuda Shoal Channel are missing. We have no word as to when or by whom they might be replaced.\"_\n\nI mentioned a second jeopardy: mysterious tidal sets had been observed in the vicinity of Barracuda Shoal Channel. Yeah, yeah: I'd been warned before about tidal sets. Hadn't been bothered yet by a tidal set. _Blackwing_ was tidal-set-proof.\n\nWe set out at first light on a perfect day, the last day before a front was due in from the west; we were headed west; if we didn't plunge now, we could be pinned down for a week by foul weather at desolate Great Sale Cay. We were out of ice and fresh food. We were low on water and, worse, Mount Gay. Now we had the sun at our back, where we wanted it. I hit my loran (an electronic navigation device) destination on the button north of Mangrove Cay; we were halfway to West End; in twenty-three miles, four hours, we'd be sitting pretty at Jack Tar Marina before the cocktail flag flew.\n\n\"Damned loran's on the blink.\"\n\nPriscilla had heard me fret about the loran's waywardness many a time before; today she couldn't care less. We were navigating by what's called dead reckoning, observed landmarks (Mangrove Cay) checked against compass course and distance sailed. Two hours later the loran seemed to go crazy, telling me that I was far to the south of the rhumb line to Barracuda Shoal Channel. Occam's razor is a principle in rudimentary philosophy and science that holds that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon is the favored explanation. That is: if the loran has functioned with unerring accuracy, and it now warns that _Blackwing_ is off course to the south, then the simplest explanation of this message, since the navigator wishes _Blackwing_ to be right on course, is \"Damned loran's on the blink.\"\n\nWithin view of West End, a couple of miles off course to the south of Barracuda Shoal Channel where I'd been set by the tide, in seven feet of water, surrounded by sandbanks drying out in the ebbing tide, I dropped anchor. We were afloat in a maze of sand bores, rocky shoals, coral heads.\n\nWe worked the radio, calling Jack Tar Marina, groveling for advice. We were advised to await high tide, and eyeball our way in, reading the water. I wondered aloud how that would work, since high tide would arrive a couple of hours after nightfall.\n\n\"Well, mon, you could get a pilot.\"\n\nI had trouble understanding my interlocutor's Bahamian accent. I'm not being snotty here; they were his Bahamas long before they were mine, and how he chose to talk was his business. I mention my difficulty only to underscore the situation of a couple of folks with one boat between them, a single _Blackwing_ to their name, floating in a little pool of water, their anchor dug into bone-dry sand. Such a couple longs to interpret, is avid to fathom, its choices.\n\n\"Please send us a pilot,\" I said.\n\nI knew about pilots. In Julius M. Wilensky's _Cruising Guide to the Abacos and Northern Bahamas_ (1980), a pilot is discussed in reference to a grounding at Fox Town on Little Abaco Island. This pilot had come with friends in an outboard to lead Wilensky and his crew to safe water. He had spent several hours at his work, and Wilensky notes that \"he never mentioned how much he wanted. You should ask first, before you engage a pilot. The $5 we paid him might seem too much...\" Well, not _that_ much too much, considering the alternative. Making allowance for ten years' inflationary pressure, call it $10 or\u2014let's shoot the moon\u2014$25, I asked Jack Tar Marina how much a pilot would charge to guide us in. There was quite a long silence, and Jack Tar said we would have to negotiate directly. By hand-bearing compass I triangulated my position, got the pilot on the radio, gave my position, asked for help, and\u2014almost an afterthought\u2014asked how much he'd like from me. He said something that sounded like \"fifty,\" and I laughed. I asked was that fifty _dollars_ he wanted, to come a couple of miles to show me the way in? He said \"two fifty,\" and I thought that inflation was slow to impact West End if he wanted half what Wilensky had paid ten years ago. But you've guessed: that would have been \"two fifty\" as in two hundred and fifty dollars for half an hour's work. Not in a million years.\n\n\"Done,\" I said. \"Come,\" I said. \"Chop-chop,\" I said.\n\nThese negotiations were less simply sealed than reported. The more we talked to the pilot, the less we conveyed. He had asked our position, and he was meant to be approaching us even as his voice faded. He confessed, in a diminishing whisper of static, he couldn't find us. It seemed he couldn't understand my accent, and he was looking for us in another ocean, down the Atlantic coast toward the casinos and duty-free shops of Freeport. As an egalitarian enemy of hierarchy, I had trained myself to repudiate the commandment _know thy place_ , unless the place I didn't know was near the coast of Maine, or on the Little Bahama Bank south of Barracuda Shoal Channel. My radio voice transmitted a high reedy panic until an intermediary with a familiar articulation and idiom contacted the pilot, and translated my urgencies into useful loran coordinates.\n\nThe pilot found us. He didn't lead us in. He towed us. He towed us with his brand-new twin 250-horsepower Mercury outboards mounted on the transom of a brand-new Boston Whaler Outrage fishing boat; he pulled us over sandbars, and through sandbars. He dragged us into the Jack Tar Marina basin, and didn't cast us off till I'd signed thirteen twenty-dollar traveler's checks. He didn't have ten dollars change on him (or a peg leg, or an eye patch or a parrot on his shoulder), but he did have a gold front tooth, and a great smile. Tied to slips in Jack Tar Marina, ringing us like pitlings around an arena stage, was an audience of sailors. It was the cocktail hour, and they were relaxed in their cockpits, listening to their ship-to-ship radios, regarding us. We recognized them: _Leisure Gal, Soleil, Enshallah_. Oh, and more, many more.\n\nThe skipper of _Enshallah_ , lighting his pipe, said: \"Now _that's_ the way to travel. No wear and tear on the sails, no wear and tear on the engine, no wear and tear on the crew.\"\n\nJack Tar Marina, sixty or so miles from Lake Worth Inlet in Palm Beach, is a tight artificial harbor dug out to serve cruisers crossing the Gulf Stream. The hotel that owned it had gone bankrupt a week or two before we arrived; now high chain-link fences topped with razor wire bordered the marina; our only exit out of Jack Tar Marina was through a padlocked gate beside a security shed manned by guards bearing sidearms and shotguns. It seemed the hotel had abruptly shut its doors and laid off the huge staff that had been brought there and housed nearby in migrant camps. The staff, understandably desperate, had looted the larders. When security guards caught and punished them, the hotel was vandalized. The neighborhood was on edge. A couple of days earlier a huge chain had been laid in the water across the entrance to Jack Tar Marina; the chain had been removed this morning, but think of being towed into it by the pirate-pilot with 500 horsepower of Mercurys and a Boston Whaler Outrage.\n\nAt Jack Tar we waited out a front. Every afternoon we'd meet in shifting cliques at Baby Grant's, a little restaurant in the settlement strung along the westernmost end of Grand Bahama Island. Snugged into Baby Grant's, we'd drink beer and eat fried grouper or pork chops at long communal tables, and the crews stuck with us in West End would strike up deals, form flotillas to voyage in concert to Fort Pierce or to Cape Canaveral or to St. Augustine or to Lake Worth Inlet, where we were bound. These cohesions followed a good deal of throat-clearing and sniffing around; sailors wanted to be helpful, but no one wanted to be hindered by a sluggard or a fool during a Gulf Stream crossing. The Stream is a great river within the Atlantic, and between the Bahamas and southern Florida its axis moves north at six knots. A wind from the north, countering that swift current, builds seas of ferocious steepness and short periodicity. Put simply: a Gulf Stream norther breaks boats and sailors, and no one at Jack Tar considered crossing to Florida till the wind came around to south of west. We were smaller by ten or twenty feet, and slower by a knot or two, than any but one of the boats waiting to cross. And I had not forgotten how _Blackwing_ had arrived at Jack Tar Marina, so I had no stomach to thrust us on anyone, and I have to confess that our new friends didn't work to convert us from standoffishness.\n\nNonetheless, we became friendly with the crowd piling in from the northern Bahamas to wait out the contrary wind. We ate potluck dinners at the picnic tables near our slips and heard great fish stories told with the eternal gestures of hands spread and spreading away. People used first names, and didn't mention the real world across the Stream. After a few days the crews began to rib us about our grounding at Great Sale Cay, so I told about the poor soul trapped in Little Harbour lagoon when we came over from Eleuthera, and someone said she knew that guy: \"It had to happen, he never goes anywhere without bringing trouble with him, can't trust any place to have enough trouble to suit him.\"\n\nAnd then the stories rained down of bona fide trouble out there in the Gulf Stream, and after a couple of days of those lurid tales of lost rudders, swamped dinghies, engines torn off their mountings by the pounding of Promethean rollers, fingers smashed by gear busting loose, drownings.... The captain and crew of _Blackwing_ waited to cross with opposing emotions of impatience and dread: I felt like a kid who, with his first electric train assembled and plugged in, throws the switch only to learn the electricity has failed. I also felt like a death-row prisoner strapped in the hot seat who realizes, just as they throw the switch, the electricity has failed. We began to wonder if we sold our house and cashed in our retirement funds, could we hire that gold-toothed pirate to tow us home to Rhode Island, or tow _Blackwing_ home while we supervised from above, from window seats on American Airlines?\n\nOn the fifth afternoon of our layover at Jack Tar, the weather gave signs of breaking, and the group split up and each crew went about its private business on the eve of battle, putting affairs in order, double-securing secure gear, checking the rigging for hairline cracks and the sails for unraveled seams, cleaning and oiling weapons to combat the cruel sea. The atmosphere brought to mind the anxious, quiet preparations in the mountain hut on the Matterhorn, when climbers fiddled with their axes and crampons and ropes while they looked at the sky, wondering would they go up tomorrow?\n\nTomorrow dawned. We crossed a Gulf Stream as untroubled as a goldfish pond. There was no confusion about the boundary of the Stream, from the bright green of the Little Bahama Bank into the deepest blue in nature, a saturated azure of stunning clarity. The Stream is a warm river rushing north from the Yucat\u00e1n Channel, gathering speed from the Coriolis force and from prevailing winds, bottlenecked between Florida and Bimini, crowded with sea creatures. I remembered the observation of a _National Geographic_ photographer whose dives had been frustrated by sharks: \"When man enters the Gulf Stream, he enters the food chain. And he doesn't enter at the top.\"\n\nOur worry\u2014and we had to have a worry or it wouldn't have been a day on the water\u2014was being pushed so far north by the Gulf Stream that we couldn't make (or _lay_ , as navigators say) Palm Beach. To take the influence of the current into effect, I had charted a vector course, pointing our nose way south of Palm Beach in order to be crabbed north and hit Lake Worth Inlet on the money, which is the only thing you can hit if you hit Palm Beach. The accuracy of this vector course depended entirely on a constant speed forward through the water. If something slowed or stopped us, we'd miss our landfall.\n\nI was the alpha wolf in a pack of three fools; the other two boats depended on the accuracy of my loran readouts, and on my navigational shrewdness. One skipper decided he didn't believe we had to point so far south, and so he veered off my course, heading closer to the rhumb line (straight line, loxodrome, least distance between two points); he drifted north of Palm Beach and was last seen bobbing toward Labrador. (We were in radio contact until he declared he was resigned to his destiny; _enshallah_.)\n\nThere was lightning on the western horizon, but I didn't care about lightning. I cared about the United States Coast Guard. Let me tell you, sailing in the Gulf Stream is like sailing into a war zone. Coast Guard vessels were evident at all points of the compass. I mean big ships, ghostly white, with anti-aircraft batteries, and machine guns and cannons. My dread was to be approached, stopped, boarded and searched. Not that I was running cocaine or weed or guns or\u2014bank on it\u2014money: if we were boarded near the axis of the Gulf Stream, we'd be driven north at six nautical miles per hour, and that would make us sad. I intended to make us inconspicuous, nonchalant; I did this by looking casually in the direction of the Coast Guard vessels\u2014on the theory that they'd be suspicious if we pretended not to notice them\u2014and by talking to Priscilla about poetry. I assumed they could hear us through their directional microphones, and I'd never heard drug dealers discuss poetry with Sonny and Rico on _Miami Vice_. Live-aboard sailors had ascribed to the Coast Guard and DEA uncanny deductive powers, and I hoped that the Coast Guard had deduced that drug runners would on no account discuss poetry running drugs across the axis of the Gulf Stream.\n\nNicholas had been boarded by plainclothesmen in Key Biscayne's No Name Harbor. This didn't surprise us. He and his friends and _Blackwing_ fit a provocative profile: they were too young to own the boat except with ill-gotten gains, and _Blackwing_ was too small to be a professionally crewed yacht. Nicholas had taken the dinghy ashore and was walking the beach at Key Biscayne with a bad case of cabin fever. He noticed an overdesigned and overpowered and undermuffled speedboat bearing down on _Blackwing_ at anchor; he watched a couple of slick customers come aboard wearing fancy sunglasses and carrying fancy automatic weapons. He saw his friends point ashore, at him; he watched the speedboat come toward him, and he told us he was pulled in quite a few different directions, and one of them was not toward the bow of the speedboat. Before he could run like crazy, they were on him; he was ordered to return to the boat of which he was the putative captain; there he watched while _Blackwing_ was searched, though what she might have been smuggling _to_ the Bahamas (except beer, which sells in the Islands for thirty dollars a case) was a mystery. The boys were lucky: the DEA chose not to tear her interior apart. So when the _federales_ hopped in their speedboat and roared off in a tidal wave of wake, all hands felt relief. Until Nicholas remembered the dinghy.\n\n\"Who's swimming ashore to get it?\" ordered Cap'n Nick.\n\n\"I guess you,\" volunteered one of his crew.\n\n\"That would be my guess,\" volunteered the other.\n\n\"How do you figure?\" commanded the captain.\n\n\"Well, it's your dad's dinghy,\" conceded the first mate.\n\n\"And you took it ashore,\" offered the second mate.\n\nLeaving Governor's Harbour, we'd been boarded and delved by the Royal Bahamas Defence Force. Half a dozen uniformed men bearing automatic weapons had materialized in a fast inflatable runabout. They'd made a thorough search, opened a few tins of food, studied the bilges, looked through our duffel bags. This had been courteous: the enlisted men had teased Nicholas about the Boston Celtics; when they left, the officer in charge had wished us _bon voyage_. Courtly, but with locked and loaded firepower at port arms.\n\nWe knew we were being watched. Unmarked planes flew frequently and low over our anchorages; it was conventional wisdom that the blimps we saw every day were equipped with high-resolution cameras of the kind used in satellites, and that if we were questioned by the Coast Guard where we had cruised, it was best to remember exactly, since the feds had our itinerary thumbtacked to their bulletin board. It got to be a drag, drug stories shouldering aside a more human-scale Island mythology. We wanted to hear sweet stories, funny stories, stories out of the repertory of human comedy. Instead we were warned about yachties being shot or burned to the waterline for poking a bow into the wrong cove, and we were told of hijackings and unsolved murders and beatings.\n\nWe would stand foursquare against the drug scourge, but please not along the axis of the Gulf Stream. In the event, we were left in peace until we were coming through Lake Worth Inlet in a thunderstorm, zero visibility, and a Coast Guard patrol boat radioed us and the other boat in our mini-convoy (the third having been set a little north of Greenland by now). We were naughty: we had entered the territorial waters of the United States of America without flying a quarantine flag, which is a little yellow triangle beseeching the Coast Guard to come aboard and rummage for contraband. Nicholas had warned us to fly that flag, and now the Coast Guard was cross with us even before we'd touched home plate.\n\nLife is a crapshoot: the Coast Guard decided to search one rather than both of us. In the rain. And the wind. Under thunder. And lightning. Half an hour before night. The pointer pointed to our companion. _Adi\u00f3s, amigos!_ We were out of there. Home. Home?\n\n### The Ditch\n\nCome what came, we were safe. Snugged down below, drinking tea, we felt as smug as Magellans. We'd mounted a snapshot of Nicholas and his friends just above the loran readout, and I was studying it. Priscilla was reading Nicholas's log of his passage down the Intercoastal Waterway, an eleven-hundred-mile-sequence of rivers, lakes, bays and land cuts vulgarly titled The Ditch, an inland waterway (protected from the Atlantic mostly by barrier islands) from Norfolk, Virginia, to Miami. We were eighty-three statute miles north of Miami, at Mile 1017. Powering at five knots (the Waterway is too narrow and tortuous most places to sail), we had two hundred hours of travel ahead of us. And that was just to Virginia. Beyond Virginia lay Chesapeake Bay, Delaware Bay, the New Jersey Coast, the East River, Long Island Sound, Fishers Island Sound, Block Island Sound.\n\nIt was raining hard now, and I'd lit the kerosene lamp to give us some light and warmth. _Blackwing_ has a wood-burning stove that extends the cruising season in New England, but here in Florida a candle cut the damp cold. I liked being below. I thought we'd feathered our nest quite well. Our house is a rambling Victorian, too big for us, with spare rooms and redundant outbuildings. The place is stuffed with stuff: book cartons that haven't been opened since the mid-1960s, tools and machines to maintain the yard, ancient tennis rackets, closets of clothes held like Confederate war bonds in a profitless speculation that they might make a comeback (bell-bottoms, wide ties, white flannels); I've stored variant versions of manuscripts, students' short stories and essays and grades; I've stored empty shoe boxes in case they might be useful for storing something smaller than empty shoe boxes. You know; who doesn't know? But down here, below on _Blackwing_ , the concept _necessary_ was subject to ruthless revision. What I brought aboard, Priscilla would trip over; things stood trial for their lives. It was comfortable, and comforting, to strip down, to experience what could be lost in a burglary or foreclosure without diminishing us. As the weeks had passed, we had cleaned up our act, and we had learned the acrobatic tricks that made it possible to move with a show of practiced grace from the forward vee-berth (as big and as comfy as a queen-sized bed), through the main cabin (with opposing settees, a drop-leaf table between them, a small galley aft on the port side), to the head (tucked tight behind the companionway steps, and under the cockpit's bridge deck). The main cabin was white and clean, with varnished cherry doors and trim, a varnished teak and holly cabin sole, plenty of light. We knew the inches and dark corners of the place where we lived, and cleaned what was dirty, fixed what was broken, polished what was dull. Our boat was simple, and within the tiny universe we inhabited on _Blackwing_ we had the experience rather than the dream of control and competence and\u2014sometimes, now, protected from the driving rain\u2014perfection.\n\nWe'd expected, living days and weeks in close quarters, that we'd get on each other's nerves. Nicholas had confessed to feeling cramped, and so had his crew. Three had made a good number of friends to share confinement; one could always break off from two to brood, or sulk, or silently scream at the (a) inconsideration, (b) incompetence, (c) imperfect hygiene of the other two, who would not notice, or could pretend not to notice. Pretty soon the surly tired one, the furious one, would pop a cold beer or tell a joke or see a funny sight, and the little storm passed. Now, silent below, watching Priscilla read, no place to go other than the place we had chosen as our prison cell, I wondered how we'd do.\n\n\"We'll go right where he went,\" Priscilla said. \"It's all here in the log; he'll tell us what to do. It'll be perfect. If we follow where Nick leads, we'll do just fine.\"\n\nIt was so. Nick had been where we were going. Talk about displacement, reversal of customary order. A father says, \"Here are the keys. Drive carefully.\" Nicholas, in Governor's Harbour, had said, \"Here are the keys, be careful with the boat.\" In fact, Nicholas's log was more explicitly cautionary than most fathers would dare. A father might say, \"Watch out for speed traps in Connecticut.\" Nicholas's log said: \"The chart shows that Green #45 should be left to port northbound; the chart is _wrong;_ beware a shoal spot fifty feet northeast of #45.\" If we didn't beware, we'd hit it, and that was a fact. There were encouragements, too: \"Went to old hotel near Cocoa Beach Bridge and had a few. Funky joint, like hotel in _The Shining_. Check it out, but don't try to write a book there.\" It was pure pleasure, taking Nicholas as our guide; it was relaxing to let the son become the father, not to resist this inversion. He had been where I had not been, and he knew what I did not know: where to anchor, what bridge tender would open the draw on request, who grills a good hamburger, where to keep an eye open for otters, or laughs, or beauty. From this place forward, Palm Beach to Jamestown, we were in his hands. How did we feel to follow rather than lead? We felt swell.\n\nWe spent a day tied to a pier at Sailfish Marina on Lake Worth. We'd thrown in our lot with sportfishermen; marina life had its busy charm: we gaped at heavy-metal sportfishing boats, 60-foot Bertram killing machines as sleek as F-18s, gleaming white fiberglass and gleaming stainless steel and gleaming varnished hardwood. These showed off Brobdingnagian rods and reels set near audaciously complicated fighting chairs; aloft rose monster tuna towers, up and up, as high as follies. The boats rumbled with twin-engined Caterpillar diesel throatiness through Lake Worth Inlet from the Gulf Stream; approaching Sailfish Marina, they'd gurgle at low rpm to the weighing dock, and dump bravura loads of swordfish, tuna, marlin, sailfish and shark. While paid hands performed a three-hour wash-down of salt and scales and blood and gore from the sportfishermen, Priscilla and I, like kids, like a couple of retired geezers, would gawk at a deckhand slitting open the belly of a shark, and we'd take pictures of each other gawking, and, in unison with everyone else gawking, cry out _jeez!_\n\nPriscilla said, \"Let's phone Justin and tell him a college sophomore slid out of that tiger shark's belly.\"\n\nJustin had a special relationship with sharks, since seeing _Jaws_ as a little boy, against our better judgment. So we phoned Justin at Bowdoin and told him we had watched a college sophomore slip out of a tiger shark's belly. He laughed politely. It was a worn-out joke. He'd heard us report sharks in whose guts were found college frosh and high-school juniors and seventh-graders. He asked, sounding anxious, \"You guys showing each other a good time?\"\n\nWhat Justin meant: What do you find to talk about when you don't talk about us? What Justin meant: Take a vacation from your boys, The Boys, our boys. Justin, we heard you loud and clear. We suffered the (maybe) benign disorder of nonstop recollection. Priscilla and I put too many hours into riffling the pages of memory's scrapbook, and the pictures were forever the same: The Boys. For them it must have become an oppression; for us our fixation with recall was ceremonial. Like most ceremonies, it gave pleasure. Like most habits, it limited what we did because we did it instead of something else. We were never-endingly doing our sons' biographies: remembering them, analyzing them, telling their fortunes. This was a way to escape the self, to look elsewhere than at the here and now.\n\nBut the here and now was the purpose of this voyage. We were here to respond to now. Moving through the water, finding the channel, looking immediately ahead, responding to what we saw... This was not a prophetic enterprise, nor retrospective. The Waterway, in its slow unwinding, had no narrative thread evident to me then. Winding north, I forgot how to write, literally: my minimalist log of our progress is barely decipherable. I memorialized our voyage by notes on wind direction, tides, weather (put down \"sunny,\" and add \"ibid.\" to each change of date), bridges and mile markers. The miles were marked on stakes laid out at frequent intervals, port and starboard, marking our course, our biography.\n\nLeaving Palm Beach, floating past people's front yards, peering into their kitchens and bedrooms from a distance of yards\u2014this was a hoot. Americans\u2014even the marginal fortunates living waterside\u2014make a motley cohort. North of Palm Beach along the Gold Coast, fool's-gold coast, we saw expressions of preening grandiosity that refreshed the concept of kitsch. In this Xanadu\u2014where gators dwell in the water traps of golf courses and catfish stroll the boulevards\u2014were decreed by arbitragers and Subaru distributors pleasure domes, monumental humps of pink stucco; into the extravagantly watered lawns edged by flamboyant (I'll say!) trees were cut little canals, to float motor yachts as grand as the caretaker's house. We couldn't escape the privileged sense that this silliness was arranged for our entertainment, that we would be discourteous and ungenerous not to stare frankly at what had been set port and starboard to refresh our senses.\n\nPalm Beach's swank displays were merely predictable, as old-money Hobe Sound's affectedly unaffected Attic restraint was predictable. We were on the lookout for the capricious, and we found it everywhere. In Eau Gallie, on the tip of Merritt Island along the Banana River, we came upon an immense green concrete dragon guarding the homeowner's front lawn. The day we passed, the dragon's mouth was belching smoke and sparks and flame, the outcome of a barbecue cooking in the beast's torso. Did you ever?\n\nThe Intercoastal Waterway, ICW, completed an uninterrupted hookup from Norfolk to Miami in 1935, though portions had been undertaken as long ago as Colonial times. It was dug to excite commerce, but meanwhile barging along The Ditch was overtaken by trucking along the interstates. Now it was used by pleasure boats as an alternative to offshore passages along the mid-Atlantic coast, especially to escape killer shores between Cape Hatteras and Cape Fear. Seven thousand boats a year transit north and south along the ICW; seven thousand are too few for a crowd, just enough for company; most are powerboats.\n\nPowerboats and sailboaters are trapped in a Tom versus Jerry cartoon of reflexive mutual antipathy; to powerboaters, sailors are snobs and eccentrics, inconsiderate slowpokes absurdly insistent on exercising their right-of-way in accordance with the finest of fine print in seagoing Rules of the Road. To sailors, stinkpotters are boorish speedhounds indifferent to the huge wake they churn roaring clamorously through narrow channels, swamping sailboats and eroding the fragile shoreline and chewing up defenseless manatees. In fact, the powerboaters we passed bow-to-bow, who passed us from astern, were almost invariably considerate and friendly; it is unsettling to surrender a prejudice to experience, but if we'd brought anything to the party, it was a willingness to be surprised.\n\nWe were surprised most by the navigational exactions of traveling up The Ditch. When we'd planned the trip, we'd noticed a fallacy of logic in our dream to upset the uniformity of our home routines. What could be more sleep-inducingly uniform than to rise at dawn and plow north till dusk, along a narrow waterway, the diesel turning a steady 2700 rpm, following the magenta line on the chart, measuring progress by counting off regularly spaced channel marks, even numbered reds to port, green odds to starboard? Looked at narrowly, our would-be experiment in ultimate cohesion and attention had merely exchanged a regularity of days ashore (from which we fled) for an extreme regularity of days afloat (to which we fled); in this model a monotony of gardening and writing became a monotony of f\u00efve-point-f\u00efve-knot long-haul trucking. But it wasn't like that. Our senses were engaged: if negotiating the Bahamas without navigational aids was by inference and eyeballed best guess, navigating The Ditch meant understanding not only where we were going (to a spot between green stake #3 and red stake #4), but whether we had been set by current out of the narrow line connecting where we were going with where we had been (a spot midway between green stake #1 and red stake #2).\n\nPriscilla had a swell feel for our situation, studying it on the abstract environment of a chart; I had a feel for _Blackwing_ 's tangents and drifts. Priscilla knew where was center channel; I knew how to steer us there, and feel our way through deep water. Together we worked our way ahead, and I mean _worked_. Happy work, though, and Priscilla knew how to feather our nest: she had bought us a yellow beach umbrella rigged by a patented contraption to the steering station. She was expert in fetching and raising this at the first blush of discomforting sun. Iced tea materialized one beat before iced tea was desired. If I had been silently calculating our day's run to Fort Pierce, Priscilla had made an itinerary, subject to her daily revisions, home to Jamestown. Some micro for me, macro for her; some vice versa for vice versa. So we were team players, but we were also characters in what Hemingway believed was our first and last novel, Americans on a raft. We were a precious and privileged distance off the everyday verities of our crazy quilt of a gorgeous and tacky country; we believed we could see our country fresh from that little distance offshore, and so we looked sharp, and looking sharp we did not sleepwalk; we felt alive to that narrow band of our country, and to ourselves, and to each other.\n\nOur routine aboard became regular\u2014a hum of conversation, shared responses to the passing circus (or from the passing circus, depending again on point of view), shared silences that we didn't mistake for brooding or discomfort; ashore we were often surprised, when I had the sense to look beyond what I believed was inexorable. It's an ironist's vice, it's this ironist's vice, to look for discord, error, the good idea gone bad: looking along the Waterway, I found confirming evidence of botched design, of will opposed and impeded by circumstance. So now I read in my notebook a notation regarding Fort Pierce's grim and seedy downtown, where competing office-supply stores, facing each other on the main drag, were boarded up, had evidently driven each other out of business. I must have found in this joyless sight some confirmation of barbarous human nature: then I thought it would be of use in a piece of writing; now I think it's of no use.\n\nOur best moments were unanticipated. We had docked in Vero Beach on a hunt for supplies. Back when, waiting on the shoals short of West End for the pirate-pilot to lead us toward the Gulf Stream, I had noticed a dreamy look in Priscilla's eyes. Later she told me it wasn't that distant a dream; it was a sixty-or-so-mile westward conjury of the US of A, home waters, asphalted terra firma. She was thinking safe dry land, but she was also thinking supplies. It had been satisfyingly simple to find the thin rations we sought in the Bahamas, because Bahamian bakeries and icehouses and liquor stores were clumped in harbor settlements (and if they weren't, who minded the walk?), or perhaps because we expected to find so little. Stateside, by contrast, industrial-strength foodstuffs were out along the highway at the Publix and Winn-Dixie, and we had to settle for convenience stores, and so our quality of life had been much depressed by the change of waters to bountiful America, even though we were well trained to eat lean aboard _Blackwing_. This afternoon we had walked from the Vero Beach municipal marina to buy beer. Along the way we'd passed a codger walking his foppish little dog. _Walking_ isn't exact: the old man was mounted on an electric tricycle equipped with a high whippy mast topped by a bright orange flag. He controlled his yippy wee pooch by the agency of a kite string. The animal, no doubt practiced in the synergistic arrangement, was nevertheless unresigned to it, and strained vainly against the half-pound-test line.\n\n\"That's quite a system you have there,\" Priscilla said.\n\nThe old man said, \"You must be tourists.\"\n\nPriscilla said, \"How can you tell?\"\n\nHe said, \"You're kidding!\"\n\nHe asked where we hailed from, and when we told him, he said that was one hell of a coincidence, his son lived there too, \"in Delaware.\" Easy to believe he required remedial tutelage in geography, but I came to adjust my view to his, and to understand that a neighborhood of weensiness was as good an association as a proximity of latitude and longitude; whatever brought us together was jake by me.\n\nThe old man had directed us to a fish and bait shop on Bethel Creek, where we would find \"good, cold beer.\" Priscilla asked the rough-looking tattooed counterman lurking in the dark cave of his fishing shack where we might buy milk and orange juice. He stared at her, and threw something toward her.\n\n\"Here's the keys. It's the Dodge in the lot.\"\n\nHe told us where to shop, and what sights to see along the way, and I believe if we'd let him he would have come with us to pay for our groceries and bag them and carry them to _Blackwing_.\n\nWe learned to assume that people would be other than we assumed. It is a term of opprobrium among live-aboards that a novice boater is so poor a mechanic he can't screw the cap on a bottle of Mount Gay without crossing the threads; he \"can't even adjust his stuffing box.\" In a Florida marina I hired a mechanic to adjust my stuffing box. He was a rougher-looking customer than the fellow who gave his Dodge to strangers off the street: similar tattoos, a Harley T-shirt with its sleeves torn off, a patina of grease on his exposed skin, a fine full belly of the sort termed \"Milwaukee goiter,\" a plumber's wrench in his back pocket. As soon as he came aboard, he demanded a beer, and when he finished the beer he crunched the can one-handed, and if you don't believe me, if the crunched can's too perfect for words, I'll understand. Then he fixed things. He dived back into the tight engine compartment, and while he called every part of _Blackwing_ a bad name, and hammered those parts with his wrench, he fiddled and adjusted and tuned and advised. I asked him a couple of times how much all this was adding up to, and he said, \"Gimme another beer.\" When he was finished, he said, \"Nice boat. Very pretty boat.\" When he said \"pretty,\" the word sounded pretty. And then he began to reminisce about our home port. He asked us if we drank in the Narragansett Caf\u00e9; he asked if we knew Nick, who owned Central Garage. Sure we knew Nick; he worked on our cars, worked also on the conveyance I now drove instead of sports cars and Norton motorcycles, a Wheel Horse riding mower.\n\n\"Tell Nick Nigger says hello,\" said our new friend.\n\nPriscilla said, \"What a world.\"\n\nOur new friend looked hurt: \"That's what they call me. That's my nickname.\"\n\nRestaurants were museums of human unpredictability. In a Daytona waterfront restaurant with ambitions of refinement, we stumbled on pre-dance senior-prom-goers from New Smyrna High. They gave good value. Watching them was like doing an exegesis of the _National Lampoon Yearbook_. The prom queen wore a ball gown and a rhinestone tiara and smiled every second; we heard her say to a fat boy in a white dinner jacket a lot too tight on him, \"You look great! You look _so_ cute!\" (To put her prevarication in context, a girl about her age said of my Reef Runners, silly rubber shoes meant to protect the tootsies against nasty coral, pebbles and hot sand at the beach: \"Those are the _cutest_ shoes! I got to _get_ me some!\") The seniors had found their places: at the jock's table were crew-cut boys and clear-skinned girls with a lot of bouffant to their dos. At the literary magazine's table were unclear-skinned, pallid, angry, cigarillo-smoking boys and girls who wore no evening gowns or dinner jackets: black turtlenecks for her, black leather for him, sour misery vibes coming off the poached bass. The rich kids looked bored, jaded with the Chart House and its Polynesian drinks with umbrellas sticking out of them; the rich kids ordered Wild Turkey, \"straight up, and, honey, ask the bartender to give me a twist.\" How did they get so young? How did we get so old?\n\nMaybe not so old. Daytona gave me an odd baseline reference for \"old.\" I got carded in a convenience store that catered to golden-agers. I was essaying to buy a six-pack of beer, and the young lady behind the counter asked me for ID. I said, \"Look at me. You can't be serious.\" She was serious; she showed me a notice that said she'd be checking the age of anyone who purchased beer; she'd have proof that I was twenty-one-plus, or I'd put the beer back in the cooler. \"But I don't have ID with me.\" She said that was too bad for me. I said, \"Look at my white beard. My bald head.\" She looked. She saw a guy nineteen, maximum twenty. Either she'd seen many a guy older than I, or she'd seen some twenty-year-old carrying around a monster load of worry and bad luck.\n\nIn Titusville, along the Space Coast, we tied up with a mess of boats that had come north and south to watch the first shuttle launch after _Challenger_ went down. The boaters' kids clustered around a couple of manatees that floated around the gas dock, drinking water from a hose. The animals' backs were scarred from propeller cuts, and you could see their lassitude was ill-adapted to powerboaters in a hurry to get from one Chart House to another; the manatees had cute whiskers going for them, and the boaters' kids photographed them, and exclaimed over them. The scene was busy for our taste, so when we saw an ad for the town's \"finest Italian restaurant,\" Lorenzo's, to which we would be carried by courtesy car, I got on the telephone. Lorenzo said to get myself and my wife out in front, \"the limo's on its way.\"\n\nIn Southern California I'd come to associate conveyance in limousines with dashed book-into-movie dreams, with the snapping shut of checkbooks and the awful putting away of billfolds. I associated limousines with broken promises, and when I saw this stretch limo, white and waxed, I felt a little premonitory hitch. Along the way to Lorenzo's the driver complained bitterly about the _Challenger_ \"trouble.\" The \"media\" had \"blown it out of all...\" Out of all _what_ would you guess? You're right, out of all \"proportion.\" Spin again: the Shuttle \"trouble\" had been \"a bummer\" for... Right you are, for \"business.\" Lorenzo's was in a shopping center next door to Chicken Delight. It was not a stretch-limo kind of exterior presentation; inside was in keeping with outside. This was a shoppingcenter Italian restaurant, with cannelloni from Weight Watchers and garlic bread from the microwave.\n\nDriving us home, our uniformed and becapped driver said, \"I've got one question. How do you figure the mayor and our fair city council?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I said.\n\n\"I don't want to butt in,\" the driver said. \"Your opinion is your business, but me\u2014I got to believe someone's on the take.\"\n\n\"We don't know what you're talking about,\" Priscilla said. \"We don't live where you live.\"\n\n\"I read you loud and clear,\" the driver said. \"You're entitled to your private opinion. And if you're not into politics, that's also your right as a citizen. In my opinion.\"\n\n\"In my opinion,\" I said, \"they're both on the take.\"\n\n\"I catch your drift, Cap.\"\n\nWe had a fight at a Greek pizzeria near the St. John's River. The dinner began well, with a carafe of retsina; the only warning bell to ring was Priscilla's uncharacteristically pugnacious insistence on ordering for us not only a large Greek pizza, but two large Greek salads. She's a light eater, and I'm not. I amended the dinner order, instructed the waiter to bring me a small rather than large salad; I said my wife, despite her initial order, would also prefer a small salad. My wife said, \"Mind your own business.\" She told the waiter to bring her a large salad.\n\nWe'd had a good day, had put many miles under our keel. I congratulated us for owning such a swell boat. In fact, having ordered a second bottle of retsina, I toasted us for having ten years ago had the perspicacity to purchase such a commendable vessel.\n\nPriscilla's face abruptly clouded: \"It was outrageous the way you bought the boat. Unpardonable.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"You didn't even ask me my opinion.\"\n\n\"Of course I did!\"\n\n\"You did _not!_ You didn't receive my permission. You just said, 'I am _going_ to _buy_ that _boat_ , and that is _all_ I have to _say.'_ Like some macho jerk.\"\n\n\"Priscilla!\"\n\nIf retsina was talking on her behalf, she was also fed up with the delicate courtesies required of our relentless proximity. She was fed up with me. Later, walking home, Priscilla let me have it again, for allowing her to order about twelve pounds of Greek salad as a side dish to twelve pounds of pizza.\n\n\"You're such a wimp!\" she said. \"A mouse!\"\n\n\"I thought I was a macho jerk.\"\n\nA block later I caught her smiling, then laughing. \"Think of it,\" she said. \"This is the best fight we can come up with. A grievance ten years old.\"\n\nIn fact, there was a strain between us. During the several years before we treated ourselves to this escape, I had finished a novel, had accustomed myself to writing rather than to publishing, to baking bread rather than to casting it upon the waters. It had always been my professed desire to toss a book like a bomb over my agent's and editor's garden wall, and run for my life, and this time I had done just that. Whether my work gave good vibrations, or bad, or none\u2014I was beyond vibrations' range. No small part of Priscilla's willingness to undertake this journey was my implied promise that while New York cast its various verdicts on my value, I'd shun telephones. If I was a mendicant (and I was, despite cloudy title to a pocket yacht), I might as well be a tramp.\n\nBut recently I'd begun to hang on telephones at the dockmaster's shed and outside supermarkets called Piggly Wiggly. Would X buy the French rights? Did Y just love it to death? What I heard over the wires gave no joy, and too soon I was traveling the Waterway with my upper lip curled down and my lower lip stuck out. This made Priscilla angry. To check the temperature of work over which I had surrendered control was to her self-indulgent, and perverse, and profitless. It was one thing to do something irrational (write); it was a different and truncated thing to expect strangers to do something irrational (buy it, love me). When I feel sorry for myself, Priscilla takes it as her mission to give me even better cause to feel sorry for myself, so that in time I might learn that it is happier not to feel sorry for myself. At the most improbable moment\u2014watching a baby porpoise learn to dive by swimming loopy \"S\"s so close to its mama they touched, hearing them catch their breaths with a unison theatrical chuff like health enthusiasts swimming laps\u2014I'd let my thoughts drift to the advertising budget, first print run, advance reviews. Priscilla said this was a sickness; she was right.\n\nThey call the Georgia portion The Big Wiggle, because the Waterway snakes through wetland creeks in byzantine loops and oxbows, so that _Blackwing_ 's stem might move in an hour through all points of the compass. So twisted is the route that a great distance over the water might represent a tiny distance over land; we might see the mast of another boat less than a straight-line mile distant, and eight miles by water, as though the water route we traveled were the stretched rubber twine wrapped around a baseball's core. Navigation through those marshes was taxing: creeks and bayous and sloughs and cul-de-sacs branched off the narrow main channel. The tidal range was great, nine feet in places, and to go aground at high tide would make a monument to high-and-dryness.\n\nThe Florida Waterway had been crowded with local boaters and with snowbirds migrating north. Now the crowds thinned out. We journeyed entire mornings without passing another boat or seeing a human being or habitation. The grass was pale green and yellow, and unfolded to the horizon, and the spring dawnlight was filtered through patchy fog. We saw otters swimming on their backs, cracking open mussels, being cute; when a water moccasin, convoluting alongside _Blackwing_ (and to my inflationary eye near half her length) put itself on a course intercepting the otters, we called out a warning. Our alarm sounded intrusive and silly hollered into that wilderness silence; the snake and otters went about their business. Meantime egrets and blue herons waded on the marsh banks, and ospreys, nested atop channel stakes, brought fish to their fledglings. We saw wild horses running the beach at Cumberland Island, and at low water birds lined the water's edge waiting for the tide to drive small-fry fish to them, while smaller birds stood behind, waiting for the bigger birds to finish their lunch: the Chain of Being. One afternoon, just as we anchored in the bend of New Teakettle Creek, a golden eagle glided to the water surface right in front of our bow, and got what it had come for.\n\nBut Priscilla's eye was elsewhere: \"It's one of them. Look! Look there on the bank!\"\n\nPriscilla's manner is laconic, unless she's laughing. She wasn't laughing, and her manner was not laconic. She had spotted, napping on the mud bank of the narrow creek, a very adult alligator. Alligators down here were, if not a dime a dozen, no more than a dollar the half dozen, but not to Priscilla. I'd like to avoid superlatives, but I've never seen Priscilla so excited by anything. She wanted to watch that alligator do something. I'll be plain: she wanted to watch that alligator eat something\u2014a ship's cat, or a skipper, whatever alligators like to eat.\n\nThe alligator wearied of Priscilla's attentions, slid off its bank, swam under our stern and took up a position on the opposing mud bank, slightly more distant from my wife. All through that night, whenever we heard the wild sounds of a wild place\u2014an owl screech, a heron cluck, a rabbit shriek\u2014Priscilla would nudge me.\n\n\"There it is. It got something!\" she'd say. And I did not think about the advertising budget, or first printing, or advance reviews.\n\nDuring a tornado watch, we waited at Lanier Island for the front to pass through. It was Saturday; the marina bar's parking lot was filling with muscle cars and black Jeeps with roll bars and dark blue Volvo wagons bearing family initials on nautical semaphore badges and carrying golfers from Sea Island, two islands to seaward. This was a mixed gang of weight lifters, fighter pilots, nabobs; old salts danced with chipper youngsters to a local rock band's fave raves. I don't care if southern ease is faked; I'll take it. Way off to the west, even as the moon lit us from above, I saw electrical storms. The horizon crackled like cluster bombs, and set the world's edge ablaze with menace, and while the dancers danced looking at one another or down at their feet or above at the moon or east or south or wherever, I stared off to the west and wished I were jollier, easier, better fun.\n\nI heard a woman behind me, with a honey Georgia accent: \"Are you a Christian?\"\n\nI turned east. She was pretty. \"I beg your pardon.\"\n\n\"Are you prepared for the hereafter?\" No menace: a sweet patient smile. I had been asked that same question three years before, so at that rate I guessed I'll be asked it seven times again. It was time to have an answer, and I explained that I cared too much for the _here_ to fret about the _after_. She nodded sadly, serene in her disappointment; where was Priscilla's gator now that I needed him?\n\n\"Take care now,\" she said. I promised to try.\n\nBeyond Moon River (as in \"Muuuuune _Riiiver_ , dah dah dah dee dah, dah _dah_ dee dah dah dah, dah _duh_...\") we tied up at Thunderbolt, and got a taxi to Savannah. The fare was seven-fifty; I gave the cabby a twenty-dollar bill, and asked him to keep nine.\n\n\"I can't make change, pardner.\"\n\n\"You have no change?\"\n\n\"Just a ten and three ones.\"\n\n\"Tell you what: take my twenty, and why not give me a ten and a one.\"\n\n\"Well, how do I come out there?\"\n\n\"Well, I give you the twenty to keep, and you give me a ten and a one to keep.\"\n\n\"All right! That's mighty generous of you, pardner.\"\n\nSet beside the wide Savannah River, Savannah had been overwhelmed by a seven-story Mussolini Modern convention Hyatt, and inland had a desperate bombed-out character: an impeccable antebellum townhouse sat next door to a Western Auto. Hustlers panhandled the unkempt public parks, store windows were protected by metal mesh and doors by a locksmith's inventory of dead bolts and chains and padlocks with hasps as thick as my wrist. We were reminded: the Waterway is not the real world's way. Despite its riverside situation, this city was inland, with interior preoccupations.\n\nBack along the riverbank we were on the point of dining at the Shrimp Factory when a drummer spotted us looking at the menu and reached for my elbow.\n\n\"Come on in. Come on, now! You won't regret it! We got the best food in Savannah and we got the food in our kitchen to prove it!\"\n\n\"Isn't that a non sequitur?\"\n\n_\"Argumentum a fortiori,\"_ said Priscilla. \"Let's go home to _Blackwing_.\"\n\nNicholas had warned us; the log said of Savannah, \"Savannah: wait for Charleston.\"\n\nSoutheast of Charleston, we hit Elliott Cut on the last of a flooding (favorable) tide. The _Waterway Guide_ warned us: \"If you're in a sailboat with only auxiliary power, don't try to buck these currents; it could put you out of control.\" At three-fifteen we were shooting for a restricted bridge that would be closed from 4 p.m. until evening, when I did not want to navigate Charleston Harbor. As usual, we were tired. A Coast Guard runabout with five crew members aboard passed us, and I waved a distracted greeting, calculating whether we'd make the last bridge opening. The runabout did a U-turn and came alongside; four young men climbed aboard _Blackwing_ wearing brogans and the damnedest life jackets: the life vests made Mae Wests look like Audrey Hepburns. An officer asked questions while three enlisted men searched below; as I tried to answer questions, the current slacked and turned immediately against us. (\"... it could put you out of control.\")\n\nI laid it out: \"I'm not running drugs. I've got no weapons aboard. If I'm lying, you can throw my wife in prison.\"\n\n\"Sir, we've got a problem down here.\"\n\nThe young officer stared at me, smiled and went below. He soon poked his head up as I bucked the current whipsawing _Blackwing_ 's bow; we crept toward the bridge soon to close, trapping us in the narrow cut, without an anchorage.\n\n\"Captain,\" asked the teenaged officer, \"where is your Pollution Control Placard?\" \"My what?\"\n\nHe explained: I was meant to have posted a placard \"in the vicinity of any overboard discharge mechanism\"; the proclamation on this placard was to condemn in the strongest (and Coast Guard\u2013approved) idiom the jettisoning of oil\u2014what tankers do when they blow their tanks. \"You're in violation here, Captain.\"\n\nScolded by authorities, I'm tame. But this was a pissant offense, and I was climbing on my high horse when I heard an enlisted man whistle from the engine compartment.\n\nThe pre-adolescent officer, a cub of a boy, a rosy-cheeked Sea Scout of a law-enforcement person, said, \"I'm afraid we have an explosive situation down here, Captain.\"\n\nThere was a slight skim of diesel fuel on the bilge water. This was no big deal: diesel fumes do not explode, which is why we have a diesel auxiliary. I had found and plugged the fuel filter leak. But the Coast Guardsmen, finding no cocaine in our eggs, no hashish in our beer cans, decided to save our lives. They climbed back into the cockpit, where we were now half a dozen, plus four engorged life jackets.\n\n\"Your vessel could explode at any moment, Captain. We're going to accompany you to your destination at Ashley Marina.\"\n\n\"Why, if we could explode at any moment, are you all so calm and friendly?\"\n\n\"It's our job, Captain.\"\n\nThe bridge closed. I said, \"Shit.\" No: I said, \" _Shit!_ \" The Coast Guardsmen looked at one another, and at Priscilla; that kind of cursing in the company of a lady was deplorable. They were darned disappointed with me. I said, \"The bridge just closed. We're stuck here. The current's running so hard against me I can't keep a good course. The odds of an explosion must be gaining on us.\"\n\nThe enlisted men turned to the baby officer, and he seemed to be turning the enigma forming in his mind this way, and then that way. \"We've got an emergency here,\" he said. \"I'd better get that drawbridge opened.\"\n\nAnd he did. We entered Ashley Marina horsed violently by a sideswiping current; Coast Guard regulations forbid boat-handling, I guess, because they didn't help us maneuver alongside our neighbor at the pier. This was a powerboat named _Black Knight_ , which is the committee boat for the New York Yacht Club during America's Cup racing in Newport, two miles from our home mooring. _Black Knight_ is the handsomest powerboat in the world, and its crew is not the boat's crew to whom one most would wish to present a forceful impression of having been confiscated by the Coast Guard under Zero Tolerance provisions of controlled-substance statutes. The crew aboard _Black Knight_ made a show of looking elsewhere, as though to spy on our infamy were shameful.\n\n\"I don't know that we can handle this kind of thing here,\" said the dock boy.\n\nPriscilla explained our situation while the infant officer worked up my ticket for reckless driving. The explosion potential seemed to have been forgotten.\n\n\"Eyes?\" asked the toddler officer.\n\n\"Brown.\"\n\n\"Weight?\" asked the suckling officer.\n\nI told him. He looked at me, at my sunburned and very high forehead. He smiled. \"And what should I put down for hair?\" asked the fetus.\n\nAs the gang clomped across my deck and dropped to the pier, I said, \"This was a Mickey Mouse bust. You could put a fire out with diesel, if I had enough diesel in my bilge to get a fire wet.\"\n\n\"Happy trails,\" the embryonic officer promised.\n\nThe dock boy at Ashley Marina said, \"You people don't look like drug dealers, but smart drug dealers wouldn't look like drug dealers. Would they?\"\n\nWe passed awful hurricane damage north of Charleston; along Isle of Palms the cabbage palmettos had been swept clean, and at McClellanville remnants of the shrimp fleet were aground, and passing this devastation made me protective of our boat, aware how lucky we were to have come so far unscathed. I was considering our good fortune as we approached Georgetown Landing on the Pee Dee River when suddenly, coming up fast from astern in a runabout, the United States Coast Guard, five men and an officer, life-jacketed and sturdily shod. When they drew near, I shouted at them to bug off. Priscilla was alarmed, and the Coast Guardsmen seemed dumbfounded.\n\n\"I've _been_ boarded! I'm a good guy! I'm not a drug smuggler! I'm a citizen! Get off my case! I'm middle-class! I'm a prudent mariner! I'm...\"\n\n\"Probably fucked,\" said Priscilla, under her breath.\n\nThey were alongside. I said, \"Look at me. Do I look like a drug smuggler?\" I explained to The Law that I'd just been put through the wringer in Elliott Cut, and the officer, a mature and reasonable man, asked to see the citation I'd been given, and when Priscilla produced it, the officer asked whether I had installed an anti-pollution placard, and when Priscilla said that was definitely an affirmative, Sir, because it was, because she had insisted we track down and install the stupid thing, the officer saluted her:\n\n\"I'll take your word for it, ma'am. Have a real nice day, Captain. At least you know we're out here.\"\n\nBut the day's bad luck hadn't begun. While Priscilla and I were food-shopping, the wind came up. We realized we'd tied _Blackwing_ hastily to a badly protected pier, and by the time we ran back to move her the hurt had been done. Waves and wind had worn her hull against an exposed nailhead in the pier, cutting deep ugly gouges in her topsides. It had been dead calm when we'd tied alongside, and we'd been in a hurry to tie up, shop, get on our way; we'd let our guard down just for a moment, just once. Here, charged against my account, was the only damage done to that boat since she'd sailed from Jamestown more than seven months ago.\n\n\"What can we tell Nicholas?\" Priscilla said.\n\n\"How can we tell Nicholas?\" I said.\n\nWe sailed downwind and up the Waccamaw River to Prince Creek, and if there was a lovelier patch of Waterway, we didn't see it. The river was wide and deep, the color of hot chocolate; along its banks canals had been cut into abandoned antebellum rice fields. First-growth forests of live oaks were bearded by Spanish moss. The river was quiet and unthreatening, and I couldn't stop thinking about what I had let happen to _Blackwing_ , and every ten minutes or so I'd lean over the rail and look at the hideous scars, and rub them, as though I could make them go away. Priscilla doesn't like to brood on what's amiss, but she wasn't immune.\n\n\"Do you think we can fix it?\"\n\nI said I guessed it could be fixed.\n\nPriscilla said it would be nice to make the injury right before Nicholas saw it.\n\nShortly before dusk we anchored in a deep narrow creek, under cypress trees. The sky was clear; the wind had died and we could hear every creature on the riverbank. The low sun was casting pastels on the glassy water. Or so I was told; I was upside down in the cockpit locker trying to reach a broken electrical switch. The switch controlled our running lights, needed only when we moved at night, and we planned no night sailing south of Chesapeake Bay, so there was no need to repair that switch today.\n\n\"Why are you doing this?\"\n\nIt was a question Priscilla had asked back at Lynyard Cay, after we crossed Northeast Providence Channel. \"I have to fix it while I've got sunlight.\"\n\n\"What's wrong with you?\"\n\nI explained that I wanted to make a little right what I had made a lot wrong; I explained that if I had broken something, I could at least fix something.\n\n\"You're hopeless,\" Priscilla said, eating in the near dark. \"You don't know how to take pleasure from anything. You've spoiled Prince Creek, and I'm not waiting for you to finish your dumb project; you've let our bucket of fried chicken get cold.\"\n\n\"But we bought it four hours ago.\"\n\n\"Don't be a small-print artist.\"\n\nThe next day we negotiated the ugliest and most treacherous stretch of the Waterway, Pine Island Cut, called by its many enemies The Rock Pile. The narrow land cut had been imperfectly blasted by the Corps of Engineers, which left rock ledges below and just above the water. The channel bristled with snags and deadheads and submerged logs. So narrow and dangerous was this stretch that to meet a tug towing a barge through it would be to kiss _Blackwing_ good-bye. There was no room to spin around and turn back or to pass: southbound train and northbound train on one track. Edging The Rock Pile were shacks with wood or plaster statues in their yards\u2014life- or bigger-than-life-sized grizzly bears and zebras and giraffes and dinosaurs; the displays had been put there to give passing boaters pleasure, to astound, to up the ante on the neighbors' bestiaries. There were other likenesses: seated cast-iron statues of lazybones black boys equipped with makeshift fishing poles, angling from the ends of The Rock Pile's docks; these astounded, too, and gave no pleasure.\n\n\"How far to Wrightsville Beach?\" asked Priscilla.\n\nWhen Priscilla was ashore, she'd stop in front of every garden she met, and stoop to study and smell, and take on a faraway look. Measurably far away: two hundred and eighty-three miles of Waterway, plus the distance to Rhode Island, Jamestown, Narragansett Avenue, her flower beds. Since he left us in Eleuthera, Nicholas had been living at home, and when he and his mother talked while I waited a discreet distance from the phone booth, I overheard mulch and weeds and diagnostic consultations and corrective remedies. We had put in bulbs the autumn before we left, and I knew Priscilla was unhappy to be far from home when the daffodils and snowdrops and tulips\u2014some of them annuals\u2014poked through. As long ago as his second-grade year in Vermont, Nicholas had planted gardens with his mother, and he understood her aggravated feeling that to be elsewhere when her plants bloomed was to have slipped a cycle; he had been making time-lapse stills and videos of Priscilla's flowers.\n\nNow, in Wrightsville Beach, they switched places. This was no mutiny or MAYDAY; it was not unforeseen. We had planned as far back as the Florida\u2013Georgia border to make what is bloodlessly termed a crew change in the middle of May. It made sense. Priscilla knew, or believed, she wasn't physically equal to the marathon Waterway runs and nonstop offshore passages that lay ahead to put _Blackwing_ within striking distance of home. Because she sensed she was approaching the end of her leash, and because she trusts what she senses, and because her flowers were newborn, and because (so far) what one wants both want, this part of our voyage was done now. We wanted to quit the game winners, take chips from the table. I had always believed that interesting stories were necessarily about failure; this story was not about failure, but it interested me. I had no illusions about the obstacles we had mastered: shallow water, reefs, treacherous anchorages, storms, the thin skin of fiberglass between us and the bottom of the sea\u2014these were what Herbert Gold has named happy problems for happy people. On the other hand, we had overcome difficulties more interesting than trouble at sea; we'd behaved well to each other; we had hung in together day-to-day; we had hung, as they say, _tight_. This had required attention, not exactly the kind of attention required to maintain and navigate a boat, but akin to that kind of care.\n\nNicholas flew to Wrightsville Beach the day before Priscilla flew home. While she was packing, I busied myself paying the bills Nicholas had delivered. Maybe that was all there was to it, the dumb facts in dollars and cents of our intractable responsibility to a life of first-of-the-month obligations, or maybe it was the logistical exaction of manipulating checkbook and calculator on the little table better used for navigational reckonings, or maybe it was the concrete metaphor of watching Priscilla's locker empty, and become Nicholas's, but whatever provoked me, I felt more solitary in the company of Nicholas and Priscilla together than I felt with either alone.\n\nMy first boat was an eight-foot Penn Yan dinghy with white canvas topsides and varnished mahogany strakes and seats. To be free of land and landsmen has always figured in my fever for boats. At ten, living on the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound, I'd row as far off Point o' Woods beach as my parents would allow, to an imaginary line connecting one headland of the little bay with the other; I'd rest on my oars and wonder what it was like beyond the line, one bay over. When I was not languishing over my oars, I'd row as though in flight from danger, backwater abruptly, spin in circles\u2014the demented ballet of a kid in a rowboat. I was a would-be passage-maker, and a single-hander. I singlehand _Blackwing_ , and it's bracing to manage alone, to show off in the anchorage at Block Island or Cuttyhunk, getting down the sails, setting the anchor by my lonesome. But the point of it isn't to get away from home; the point is to get home away from land. To behave well in front of witnesses: Justin, Nicholas, Priscilla. To have them aboard is to feel in my bones the imperative of care, the good fun of good will; the point is to take pleasure from taking pains.\n\nPriscilla said good-bye at dawn from the marina dock, waving us up the Waterway. She looked envious; she looked relieved. Without her I felt incomplete, as though a sail had bust out along a seam. But I felt, if I couldn't then articulate, consolations. We'd just written much personal history together. I was sure of us. Now I was ahead of where I'd begun when I pushed the Penn Yan off from Point 'o Woods alone: I had company; we could go to sea, and float.\n\nThe night before Priscilla left we had had a snug night aboard; Nicholas is tall, the boat is tight; Nicholas was proprietary, and self-consciously considerate. Priscilla was proprietary, and self-consciously considerate. _After you; no, I insist, after_ YOU! In no setting other than prison can the concept _my space_ have such manifest substance. I was surprised to catch myself resenting Nicholas. It hadn't been his choice to displace his mother; he'd seen the Waterway; he had business elsewhere. I knew all this, but during our first day and night together I heard myself saying, \"Priscilla doesn't stow the cushion there\" or \"Priscilla likes to lash the boom more to port\" or \"Priscilla says the beer's coldest on the other side of the ice chest.\" Nicholas held his tongue, managed not to remark the obvious: then was then, now is now; she's there, I'm here. Our first day together I was too solicitous of Nicholas's judgment; I'd ask him if he agreed with actions and courses that were unambiguous. Nicholas wisely kept his distance.\n\nAt the end of May he was to fly to Alaska to work as a wilderness ranger in Wood-Tikchik Park; he could give me eight days, and wherever we'd got to then, he'd trade off with Justin. If _Blackwing_ was to be brought within reach of home by June 1, we had long legs to make, dawn-to-dark long legs. Priscilla and I had thought we were doing well to put forty miles under us, but I hadn't cruised the turnpike till Nicholas came aboard. He had the preposterous notion that I could deliver _Blackwing_ from the south coast of North Carolina to Rhode Island in two weeks. I knew I couldn't.\n\nWe did seventy miles to Beaufort. Sail hard, shop hard: we tied _Blackwing_ to the town dock and went in search of a handheld urinal. This was of value beyond calculation to a helmsman taking long watches at the wheel, especially offshore night passages north of Delaware. (A large fraction of the sailors lost at sea go overboard pissing over the stern rail; you can look it up.) We'd had a urinal aboard since I came home from heart surgery a few years before (waste not, want not), and Nicholas was disconsolate to learn it had been blown overboard in Northeast Providence Channel. He was determined to replace it, and along the waterfront we found a pharmacy where my son invited me to ask for, fetch and pay for the thing we desired. I put the mission in his capable hands, because I stuttered, because my stutter made it difficult to express some classes of desire, because I was his father and because I had money and he didn't. Nicholas looked, Nicholas found, Nicholas slid to the cash register. He wanted this to go smoothly, quickly, quietly, but, like a boy buying his first rubber, he faced a venerable checkout clerk. She began a colloquy with the pharmacist: \"The urinal doesn't have a price on it, Roy. How much for the urinal?\" Roy said, \"That urinal is four-ninety-five.\" She said, \"I'm charging you boys four-ninety-five for this urinal. You want me to wrap this urinal for you boys?\" Nicholas said that would be nice. \"Well, son, the thing of it is I don't have a sack the right size for this urinal.\" So Nicholas had to tote it, its hinged lid poking out of the sack. We visited a bar. Shop hard, play hard. Between racks of 8-Ball, we sat at the bar of the Royal James Tavern eating ninety-nine-cent chili burgers, and drinking frosted mugs of Bud. The bartender tried to break my son's heart: \"Hey, who belongs to this plastic pisspot in the paper sack?\"\n\nNicholas said, \"It's mine; I hate to leave the stool when I trade liquids.\"\n\nThe next day we motorsailed sixty-six miles to make the final seating of the legendary buffet at Belhaven's River Forest Inn. The morning after, we woke to dense fog, and at five-thirty pushed out into it, with a lift from the tide and the wind. By afternoon we reached Albemarle Sound; it had an ugly reputation for steep seas, but wind and tide had shifted, again to our favor, and we were piling up miles. In the Alligator River, Great Santinis flying Marine Corps Harrier jets, simulating bombing and strafing runs, came in low over the water and wingwagged us. We tied up to the last free berth in Elizabeth City half an hour past nightfall: we'd logged eighty-five miles in fourteen hours. Whatever you called what we'd done, you wouldn't call it cruising; call it people-moving; call it hauling ass.\n\nWe'd missed the evening cocktail party. Elizabeth City is the layover town for boaters entering or leaving the Dismal Swamp Canal; George Washington designed and underwrote the twenty-two-mile canal to open trade (rice, white-cedar shakes) from the Carolinas. Perhaps to endear the town to visitors, perhaps just another of the irregular courtesies offered all along the Waterway, the Elizabeth City Chamber of Commerce began long ago the custom of a nightly wine-and-cheese party hosted by the mayor in honor of transient boaters at the docks; this had been Nicholas's first taste of Waterway life when he came south, and he missed chatting up the town's personages. An Australian family on the motorsailor beside us, returning their boat from South Carolina to a Maine harbor a couple of miles from Bowdoin, urged ale on us; we sat in their pilothouse telling adventure stories. Or I did; Nicholas preferred hearing to talking.\n\nNicholas woke me before dawn. Maybe it was the ale, maybe it was my pollen and sap allergy, maybe it was too much distance covered too fast, a kind of five-knot jet lag\u2014whatever it was, I felt rocky when we backed out of the slip to make the first opening of the Dismal Swamp Canal's locks. The system of locking through was complicated, and if we missed the early opening at eight-thirty, there was little chance we'd make it today to Norfolk, Mile One. I was fuzz-headed, so I gave the helm to Nicholas. He asked some small favors\u2014to get him coffee, to switch the battery banks, to put sun lotion on his nose\u2014and I didn't execute them well.\n\nWe missed the opening by five minutes: the lock tender at South Mills saw us coming and shut the lock at 8:28 a.m., and we had to throw the engine into reverse to avoid hitting the lock bulkhead. The next opening would be in two and a half hours; we were in a narrow throat of the Pasquotank River. We knew that boats would come up behind us, jamming the river with traffic. Sailboats do not maneuver predictably in reverse. The morning was humid and hot, with a strong breeze blowing across our beam, setting us toward the riverbank; Nicholas needed my help, and I couldn't keep my eyes open. He was perplexed and irritated with me, and I was irritated with me. We weren't supposed to let each other down. I felt light-headed _and_ heavy-headed, and my muscles ached. I was too tired to drink water. I told Nicholas I guessed I had spring fever; Nicholas said that was a great pity, he was spending the least enjoyable morning he had ever spent on _Blackwing_ , so he might as well make it sepulchral and adjust the stuffing box. He anchored; I asked if he thought we could retrieve the anchor from the river bottom dense with snags; when I said \"we,\" he gave me a look, and shrugged. He stained himself with grease in the oven of the engine compartment, cut his hand banging and adjusting. Boats were stacking in around us, and the sun was hot, and I didn't care about anything. When Nicholas came up to the cockpit, the wind died, which was nice; when the wind died there was a fly hatch, which wasn't nice. The flies had materialized from nowhere, sticking to every exposed surface of sail and hull. They were in my ears and nose, and I saw them annealed to Nicholas's lips. He didn't bother shooing them away.\n\nWhen the canal opened, we had to be lifted eight feet by water flooding into the lock, and to avoid damage to the hull, the boat's lines had to be expertly tended. Nicholas was trying to do this alone, running from bow to stern and back; when I stood to handle a line, I went dizzy, and had to sit. The lock tender wouldn't help, and Nicholas found himself single-handing _Blackwing_ , and shouting (he _never_ shouts) at me and at the lock tender. We got through, and into the canal. We heard thunder, and I knew Nicholas was speculating on the physics of a fifty-knot gust taken broadside in a canal forty feet across. I guessed Nicholas wished he were in better company. I tried not to take this personally.\n\nWe squeezed through the lock chamber at the other end, and fifty miles after Elizabeth City, Nicholas was piloting us through Norfolk Harbor, coping alone with charts, drawbridges, barge traffic, Navy traffic, a marina reservation. He had his eye on an oxford-gray anvil of thunder-head, and when it burst he piloted us through the squall and asked me a final favor: to tie him a bowline at the end of a dockline he'd have to use tying up. I can tie a bowline in the dark, but not that day. I held the stupid line in my hands, and studied it, and said, \"Sorry. Can't.\" So Nicholas did that too, and, at the marina, the dockmaster made the mistake of suggesting that Nicholas turn the helm over to \"the captain there.\" I said this was not a good idea. As soon as we were alongside, Nicholas jumped ashore. He said he wanted to take a walk, alone. I said get us a hotel room. He said, \"Cool.\" I said buy a thermometer. He said, flushed with anger, \"Cool.\"\n\nA couple of hours later Nicholas wanted to call an ambulance. My temperature was above 104\u00b0; he was scared. We got a cab from the Holiday Inn to the city hospital; the taxi driver played a rap tape and smoked a stogie. Nicholas asked if he'd snuff the cigar, and the driver said, \"Walk.\"\n\nNicholas said, \"Please. Just get us there.\"\n\nThe driver cranked the volume, rolled up his window and took a huge hit off his Dutch Master. We'd come north, the way I saw it. The climate had changed. The idiom had gone from _what cute shoes to walk; fuck yourself_.\n\nIt was a weekend night; the emergency room was crowded with people having a hard time of it, but the reception nurse took a look at me and said, \"This guy's in shock.\"\n\nNicholas explained my St. Jude heart valve, certain medications. The nurse was a comedian; taking my temperature, seeing it spike 105\u00b0, he told Nicholas that Jim Henson, the man who brought \"you kids\" Miss Piggy, had died of something like this just the other day.\n\n\"Wait a minute,\" Nicholas said. \"Knock it off now.\"\n\nThe nurse was leading me back to the doctors, and Nicholas was trying to hold my hand, and the nurse said, \"You stay, Junior.\"\n\n\"Not in your lifetime,\" Nicholas said.\n\nThey ran IV fluids into me, cooled me with alcohol. I was out of it. Nicholas told me later some things he'd heard waiting. A bloody patient was on the gurney beside me; he'd been shot in the foot and ankle with a shotgun, and a nurse and police officer kept asking, \"Who did this to you?\" The victim kept answering, \"How the fuck would I know? I'm drunk, in case you didn't notice.\"\n\nNicholas heard a mother deny kinship with her son dying of knife wounds. She wanted to know: suppose the bleeding kid _was_ her bleeding kid, and he was underage, what was her financial exposure in such a situation?\n\nWhile that boy waited for surgery, Nicholas overheard a surgeon on the telephone, shouting above the mayhem to his contractor: \"I want a _real_ doghouse. Not some bitty peewee shack, but something I can _stand_ in when I visit my animal. Don't let me down, now\u2014I've got a temper.\"\n\nNicholas realized after midnight that they'd lost a heart-attack patient. Not _lost him_ euphemistically, _lost him_ lost him. It was the principal conversation back there among the trauma unit. The Desaparecido's wife had sent him by ambulance at teatime; now it was coming on morning and they had his paperwork but no one could find him. \"Try the morgue,\" an orderly suggested.\n\nThey let me go after seven hours. It was a viral infection, good news. It wasn't a big deal; I was merely sick and in debt five hundred dollars to the hospital.\n\nAfter a couple of days in bed I was returned to myself, weak, chastened and cast down. We studied the charts of Chesapeake Bay. We looked to the right of the chart, to the east, and had the same idea at the same time: \"Let's go outside,\" Nicholas said.\n\nAnd so it was decided. We'd scratch Chesapeake Bay from our itinerary, sail along the Atlantic coast the hundred and sixty miles from Norfolk to Cape May, New Jersey. That was a lonely ocean out there; we were shorthanded and could expect to be exhausted; if anything went wrong, there were no deep-water harbors or safe inlets along the Maryland\u2013Delaware shore. But we would cut many miles off our trip, and we could sail through the night.\n\nAfter breakfast, at the fuel dock, just before casting off, Nicholas said, \"I've got bad vibes about this passage, a creepy feeling.\" I tried to pin him down; he wouldn't amplify. I felt stretched, as though I couldn't calculate either my reach or my grasp. I took a deep breath and listened to the weather radio. We seemed to be promised twenty-four hours of unsettled but manageable weather.\n\n\"Let's go.\"\n\n### Coasting Home\n\nIt's an experience familiar to anyone who's dived off the high platform, who's put an arm around a first date at the movies, who's dropped an angry letter in the mailbox, who's told the boss \"I quit.\" Once begun it's okay. Sailing into the Atlantic that afternoon, settling into the mostly wordless groove of competence that keeps a boat on course and out of harm's way, we were happy. It wasn't until dusk, off the Maryland coast, that Nicholas called up to the cockpit from below: \"Dad, bad news; I've got a fever. It's only a hundred, but I don't feel great.\"\n\nOf course. It made sense; we'd talked about what we'd do if it happened. So Nicholas took the helm while I slept in the cockpit; he'd stand watch for four hours or until he felt too sick and wasted to steer, whichever came first. As the sun set over Virginia, we scanned three hundred and sixty degrees to note the range and bearing of shipping we'd have to beware. We didn't have radar, but we hoped they did, and that our radar reflector lit it up bright and clear. I saw nothing; Nicholas said he could make out a fishing boat on the horizon, way astern.\n\nI slept uneasily, worried about where I'd brought my son. I questioned my own judgment; we were out here tonight because six months ago I'd promised a stranger I'd show up in San Francisco on a certain day to expatiate to other strangers on a topic titled by strangers \"World Literature,\" a notional genre without existence or reason to exist. What would I say in San Francisco...?\n\n\"Dad, you're on watch.\" Nicholas was shaking me gently. \"You were snoring.\"\n\n\"I was dreaming about a literary conference.\" He offered a mug of coffee. I saw that the sky was clouded, the wind light from the southwest. We were gently lifted and gently dropped by greasy groundswells. We were motor-sailing. \"How do you feel?\"\n\n\"So-so,\" Nicholas said, helping me into the safety harness that we attached by carabiner to a cleat when we sailed offshore, or at night, or alone. \"If anything, my temp's a little lower.\"\n\nI didn't believe him. I asked him to take his temperature and to show me the thermometer.\n\n\"Don't treat me like a kid, Dad. Okay?\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\nShortly before midnight I heard Nicholas ask from below, \"Is that boat still following us?\"\n\nI had noticed running lights astern, but they seemed far away, and we were running along a kind of loran highway, following the rhumb line between sea buoys; it didn't alarm me that other boats followed this obvious route. Truth was, I wasn't practiced enough at night sailing to distinguish between running lights on a huge ship far off and running lights on a small boat close by. Nicholas came on deck. I pointed astern.\n\nNicholas said, \"He's following us.\"\n\nI doubted this, and said so. Nicholas suggested I change course to the east and see if the boat changed course. I did; it did. Nicholas said he was going to call the Coast Guard.\n\n\"Oh no! Not them! It probably _is_ the Coast Guard. Call the boat astern of us; ask its course; say we want to keep clear.\"\n\nNicholas went below and got on the radio to the Coast Guard. I could hear his voice low and steady. A pearly light mist was coming off the water, nothing that deserved the name fog, but it was eerie, like the steam-machine atmospherics used as props in horror movies. The rigging dripped. My eyeglasses clouded; they were greased with wet, and the gray seas seemed oiled. It was chilly now, and I shivered; not for the first time, I wondered who I thought I was.\n\nNicholas was in the companionway, looking astern through binoculars. \"Bring us into the wind and cut the engine,\" he said. I did as he said. We were dead in the water, locked in silence except for the gently shaking mainsail and staysail. We looked astern, saw above the low mist a red light, green light, white light; the lights didn't move. \"I think we're in trouble,\" Nicholas said; he went below to get the flare gun. I took it from him, and wondered aloud if we were being shadowed by the DEA. Nicholas said they wouldn't dick around with us; they'd approach and board us. But he got on the radio again to the Coast Guard, and I could hear him ask if the mystery boat might be the DEA.\n\nNow I heard alert care from the Coast Guard's end; they assured Nicholas they had no knowledge of any official vessel in our area. They asked our position, and when Nicholas gave it, they said they'd send a patrol out to us, and as soon as they said it, the lights astern winked off. Whoever was back there had either moved or shut off their lights.\n\nWho was it? Maybe a fishing boat, thinking it was following another fishing boat to a good haul? (Nicholas said they'd know by our masthead light we were a sailboat.) Okay, someone playing a game with us, for fun? (Nicholas said, \"Does that make sense to you?\") Maybe the DEA, after all? (Nicholas shrugged; why would they flee?) Then who? The Coast Guard never came. We moved on in anxious peace.\n\nJustin arrived in Cape May to take over from Nicholas. He'd just finished final exams at Bowdoin and was dead beat after the long drive from Maine. A cold rain was sweeping us. Who cared? It was a supercharged occasion; the brothers are distinct but tight. It's what anyone would wish for sons, an uncanny intimacy between them, together with a capacity for surprise. They had each other's number; they perplexed each other. Except for our short stay in Eleuthera, Nicholas and Justin had not seen each other for almost a year, and I could see them measuring each other, marking growth the way fond parents record kids' height on a storeroom wall. I took satisfaction from this reunion: because I'd made us all sail boats, and had engineered this adventure, I had given myself the power to command us to join together. We'd been having a high old time, chatting up barflies and shooting pool with fishermen. Thinking my smug thoughts about my wizard synthetic powers, I had a hunch I was thinking through my hat, that my reasoning was circular. That we were happy tonight owed nothing to my calculation; what we had tonight was as fleeting as a fair wind with a fair tide on a fair day, and all we could do with it was run with it. We had blundered on a wake for a Cape May fisherman lost that week at sea, and the fisherman's comrades bought drinks for the house, and challenged my sons to a game of pool. It was time for me to go home to _Blackwing_ , chart our course for the next day's sail alone with Justin. Tomorrow morning Nicholas would drive home, and fly away to Alaska. Much later that night, half asleep in my berth, I heard my sons walking down the dock, talking. Often they communicate in a slurred, breakneck idiom as inaccessible as code to outsiders and parents, but now they must have believed I was asleep.\n\n\"You'll have a swell time with him,\" Nicholas said.\n\n\"Of course,\" Justin said.\n\n\"Just be patient,\" Nicholas said.\n\n\"I know Dad,\" Justin said.\n\n\"Of course,\" Nicholas said.\n\nJustin and I beat into a cold easterly, forty-four miles up the coast to Atlantic City. Like his mother, Justin was resigned to being made miserable aboard _Blackwing_ by seasickness, but now the prescription ear patch rescued him too, and he was in a jolly mood as we thundered past the breakwaters and up to the marina that serves Harrah's. Justin was a gambler. The look in a gambler's eyes is a gorgon look: get out of my way; don't think of standing between me and that jackpot.\n\nSo how was it that a few hours later we glanced at each other and shook our heads? We'd done hard time at the slots: it was like making five knots through the water against a five-knot current; at the end of several hours our little plastic buckets held about as many quarters as they had held when we began, and our arms ached. So we tried the wheel, but it was crowded; we had to hurl chips in the general direction of our birthdate numbers. After four hours we were eight dollars down, maybe up. And if up, how long at such rates to become high rollers? We looked at each other, nodded and made our way, dodging wheelchairs, into the mob of golden-aged sports.\n\n\"Let's bag it, Pa. It would take forever to make a couple thousand. Easier to write about it, don't you think?\"\n\nIt was cold out in the shipping lanes converging on Sandy Hook. We kept warm with mittens, ski caps, sweaters, parkas, tea and jokes. We saw the Jersey shore lit up, but we were well off it, avoiding fish traps that could catch our rudder and foul our propeller. Justin had sailed aboard _Blackwing_ since he was nine, and he knew his way around her. But till now I'd felt his enthusiasm for sailing had often been dutiful; seasickness explained more than I could know, of course, but he'd been willing, not always eager. He'd deferred to his older brother's sometimes fraternal authority, had distanced himself from the underlying system of sailing, had come along for the ride, doing what he could to make the ride safe and pleasurable. But now, out there in the shipping lanes, he was different. Now he was soaking it up, asking questions, laying courses, entering data into the loran, trimming sheets. He showed the exhilaration of someone who\u2014long after comprehending gyroscopic theory\u2014suddenly realizes for the first time he's riding a bike without training wheels.\n\nAt dawn, a hundred and twenty miles later, _Blackwing_ swept us into New York Harbor, past the Battery, up the East River to Hell Gate and beyond, dodging tugs and ferries. We cruised up the East Side at rush hour, pushed by a fair tide. Helicopters buzzed around the UN Building. Justin had the helm.\n\nTwenty-four hours after leaving Harrah's, we were in Huntington, north of Cold Spring Harbor. As soon as we were snugged down, the sky opened, the wind howled, we lit a fire in the Tiny Tot fireplace, changed into clean clothes, cooked a pot of soup, put Lightnin' Hopkins in the tape deck, broke open a fresh deck of cards, played.\n\nNicholas had commended an anchorage on the Connecticut side of Long Island Sound, near New Haven, west of Sachem Head, a collection of Maine-like rocky islands called The Thimbles. Justin and I anchored midafternoon in deep water tucked in the alley between two islands. We were alone in our anchorage, except for teenagers water-skiing and showing off for each other. Justin said to watch them made him feel like an old-timer. It was a wonderful day. The pressure was off; we'd get _Blackwing_ home before June. We lazed in the cockpit, reading. Justin was reading a novel; I was reading _A Cruising Guide to the New England Coast_ , and he suggested I put the cruising guides away for a while. It wasn't like Justin to tell another what was best, but I took his suggestion as a thrust with purpose, took seriously what he might have noticed about my narrowed field of vision.\n\nLater, we grilled burgers and dogs on a hibachi that hung off the transom, and watched a perfect sunset. The moon came up, and we lay in the cockpit looking at it. We played music, trading tapes back and forth, listening to his Van Morrison then my Billie Holiday then his Eric Clapton then my Bucky Pizzarelli. In the silvery wash of moonlight he told me things I'd never guessed before, and I told him things. We were in a free zone together, out of range of our entrenched lines of authority and privacy, not facing off but facing the same sky, same moon. Such concurrence is rare; I'd experienced perfect concord with my sons far from home, or driving at night lit by the sea green of dashboard lights. Kin can wait a lifetime for whole intimacy, and to have it once is to keep it. Credo.\n\nWe sailed in freezing rain to Saybrook Breakwater, up the Connecticut River to Essex. We played gin rummy in the rain, swinging from a rented mooring. In the rain we went ashore, and ate at the Griswold Inn, shad with roe. We shopped in the rain for groceries and the bag tore and emptied itself into a gutter before we got to the dinghy. We played gin rummy. We tried to nap; the rain beat us awake. The boat below smelled of wet wool and of us. The rain fell. We drank beer and played gin rummy. We took the dinghy ashore and ate at the Griswold Inn, shad with roe. We got a good soaking going back after dinner in the dinghy. We drank beer and played gin rummy. (Later I found our gin-rummy scores penciled into a wet notebook; I owed Justin a couple of thousand dollars, or a couple of million, depending on where to put the decimal. There's an observation below an interim score: \"This man can't be for real; is he hustling me?\") Justin put Van Morrison on the tape deck. I'd heard Justin's Van Morrison tape. I put Billie Holiday on the tape deck. Justin had heard my Billie Holiday tape. We went to bed and listened to it rain. When we woke up, it was raining. The wind was howling from the northwest.\n\n\"Let's eat a fish lunch at the Gris,\" I said.\n\nWe were less than an hour from home by car. \"Let's get out of here,\" Justin said.\n\nIt wasn't prudent to leave our mooring in such conditions. \"In my considered opinion,\" I said, \"weighing probability against experience, let's get out of here.\"\n\nIt was foul out there. We banged into the biggest seas I'd faced since we left Eleuthera. We were bucking a tidal current, making good 2\u00bd knots, but way off in the distance was a ribbon of clear sky, and if the current was against us now, it would be with us later. And then it turned with us: we screamed up Fishers Island Sound to Stonington, dropped anchor at dark, rose at dawn, sailed past the Texas Tower into Narragansett Bay at the lunch hour and turned the corner at The Dumplings and tied up to Conanicut Marina at the foot of Narragansett Avenue, the street where we live. Justin ran home to get Priscilla, and by the time she raced down to the dock to greet _Blackwing_ , I was cleaning our boat. We ate a picnic in the cockpit, and traded sea stories, tales of legendary groundings and gear-busting gales in a far-off chain of islands where the moon was full thirty days a month. Soon I returned to scrubbing, and Priscilla said to our son, \"Let's leave him to it.\" She said this patiently. I scoured and fussed and oiled and adjusted and mended and prettied _Blackwing_. She had been good to us, and we had been good to us.\n\nAt the end of the day I took _Blackwing_ to her mooring; she swung into the wind, facing south. I covered the sails, tied off the running rigging, locked the helm amidships, closed the hatches, shut her up tight. If, as she tugged on her mooring, the sense of an ending was a romantic illusion, it was a benign illusion. So too the illusion of having done something valuable by taking a boat to sea, and bringing her home to port. Maybe I had felt no more, no less, than any layabout in a beach chair? Was it a trick I played on myself to regard this draining of my mind as healthy? Of course what I felt wasn't the whole point, was it? I hadn't been alone out there. Sailing up Narragansett Bay, Justin had said, so quietly I could just make it out, \"I think I'd like to take our boat on a voyage.\"\n"], ["\n\nPublished in 2010 by Stewart, Tabori & Chang  \nAn imprint of ABRAMS\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2010 by Tom Fitzmorris\n\nAll rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.\n\nThe Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition as follows:\n\nFitzmorris, Tom, 1951-\n\nTom Fitzmorris's _[sic]_ New Orleans food : more than 225 of the city's best recipes to cook at home / by Tom Fitzmorris.\n\np. cm.\n\nIncludes bibliographical references and index.\n\nISBN 1-58479-524-7\n\n1. Cookery, American\u2014Louisiana style. 2. Cookery\u2014Louisiana\u2014New Orleans. I. Title: New Orleans food. II. Title: Tom Fitzmorris's New Orleans food. III. Title: Tom Fitzmorris' New Orleans food. IV. Title.\n\nTX715.2.L68F584 2006  \n641.59763\u2014dc22\n\n2005030811\n\nISBN for this edition: 978-1-58479-876-7\n\nProduced for Stewart, Tabori & Chang by  \ngonzalez defino  \nNew York, New York  \nwww.gonzalezdefino.com  \nEDITORIAL DIRECTOR Joseph Gonzalez  \nART DIRECTOR Perri DeFino  \nEDITOR Julia Lee  \nCOPYEDITOR Marilyn Knowlton\n\nPRODUCTION MANAGER Jane Searle\n\nStewart, Tabori & Chang books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact specialsales@abramsbooks.com or the address below.\n\n115 West 18th Street  \nNew York, NY 10011  \nwww.abramsbooks.com\n\n_Contents_\n\nAuthor's Note\n\nForeword by Emeril Lagasse\n\nIntroduction\n\nAmuse-Bouche\n\nAppetizers\n\nGumbos, Bisques, and Other Soups\n\nShellfish Entr\u00e9es\n\nFinfish Entr\u00e9es\n\nMeat\n\nChicken, Duck, and Other Birds\n\nOutdoor Grill\n\nRed Beans, Rice, Vegetables, and Pasta\n\nSalads\n\nCasual Food\n\nBreakfast\n\nDesserts and Baked Goods\n\nDrinks\n\nRoux, Seasonings, Sauces, and Other Building Blocks\n\nIngredients Notes\n\nFood Sources\n\nConversion Chart\n\nIndex of Searchable Terms\nAuthor's Note\n\nOn Monday, August 29, 2005, one of the most vital and important capitals of the culinary world came to a complete and abrupt halt. Hurricane Katrina, the most destructive storm in the history of the United States, shut down all of the restaurants in New Orleans and those within a hundred miles in every direction. The population of the entire metropolitan area\u2014about a million and a half people\u2014was told to evacuate.\n\nThe storm did unimaginable damage to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, destroying man-made structures right down to roads and slabs. In New Orleans, the damage from the storm's winds was less severe. But the storm came in at the perfect angle to blow a deluge of water from Lake Pontchartrain through breaks in the levees into the city. The levees had always protected the city before, but they'd never faced a storm like this one. Eighty percent of the city was flooded, in some places more than 10 feet deep. Hundreds of people died, and many were displaced.\n\nI'm writing this note three weeks after the storm. About half of the city is still flooded as the world's largest drainage pumping station labors to send the water back to where it came from. Most of the area is still evacuated. No restaurants have reopened, although many of them are making plans, usually for weeks to months from now.\n\nI am still in evacuation myself. I know that my home is okay and that my family is safe. So I'm better off than a substantial percentage of my fellow Orleanians, many of whom are in temporary shelters in cities across America. My worst problem is that my occupation since college\u2014writing and broadcasting about New Orleans restaurants and food\u2014is, at best, compromised.\n\nI can't stand to do nothing. So while waiting to return, I put the finishing touches on this collection of what I think are the best recipes from my three decades of reporting on Creole and Cajun cuisines. Until our city is healthy again, I will donate half (or more, if we really sell a lot of books) of my profits from this edition to the recovery effort. Thank you for helping with that.\n\nI dedicate this book to all the people who love great New Orleans food.\n\nTastefully yours,\n\nSeptember 19, 2005\nForeword\n\nOn the day before we officially opened Emeril's in New Orleans\u2014my first restaurant\u2014we served dinner to a full house of friends. It was our dress rehearsal for the real thing. Tom Fitzmorris was there, with his wife and their one-year-old baby boy.\n\nI first met Tom eight years before that. I was the new chef at Commander's Palace. He was the person you thought of when somebody said \"restaurant critic\" in New Orleans. Dick and Ella Brennan ran Commander's then and invited him to anything special we had going on. Eventually Dick started having dinners once a month with Tom and our mutual friend Marcelle Bienvenu.\n\nWe had a lot of fun with those dinners because nothing we could throw at that table would be considered too far out. Tom especially was game to try anything, and then he would want to know where the idea came from, how we cooked it, and even how much it cost to put the dish together.\n\nI noticed something else about Tom's interest in food. The more something tasted like a New Orleans dish, the better he liked it. I feel that way, too. I say that if we're going to be in New Orleans, we're going to cook with fresh Louisiana ingredients with a Creole and Cajun flavor. We kick it up a notch with the flavors of the world, but if you asked me what kind of food we serve in New Orleans, I'd say we serve New Orleans food.\n\nIt didn't surprise me when, in addition to his restaurant reviews, Tom started writing about cooking. Every person who likes to eat sooner or later heads for the kitchen and starts playing around. Now here he is with a cookbook. I love the title. _New Orleans Food_ is what he's all about, and he knows it as well as anybody.\n\nEspecially in this tender, bruised time in the history of that marvelous city, we need to celebrate the uniqueness of New Orleans cuisine. It makes me smile to know that the first things everybody wanted after the hurricane were red beans and rice, poor boys, and gumbo. It told me that New Orleans is still New Orleans. I'm happy to be there, and I'm happy to see its best reporter on the subject of eating is still at it.\n\nIntroduction\n\nThis is a collection of the best dishes that I accumulated during my ridiculously long tenure as a New Orleans restaurant critic. Researching a weekly column for 33 years and a daily three-hour radio food show for 17 years, I've tried, loved, endured, and remembered thousands of dishes. I've learned how to cook the ones I liked best\u2014and here they are.\n\nThe cooking part of my career came well after the eating part. Although that was an accident, I would recommend that progression to anyone enthusiastic about food. First, learn how to eat well. That done, learn how to cook. If that moves you, develop the skill to anticipate what might taste good if you experiment a little.\n\nIt's certainly been a lot of fun for me.\n\nMany of the dishes herein come from my persistent infatuation with New Orleans restaurants. But these are not restaurant recipes. All of them have passed through my kitchen, usually more than once, before they made it into print. I'm not saying that I know better than the chefs do. Just that restaurant recipes rarely translate well into the home kitchen. So, in every case, I took liberties with the original recipes in order to make the dish taste the way I think it should.\n\nThat process is what started me cooking in the first place. I wanted to eat things that restaurants wouldn't or couldn't serve me. I had no formal training, and my equipment was poor. But I did possess what I think is the most important ability a cook can have: I knew how the final product should look and taste. With that, it was only a matter of experimenting until I got it right.\n\nThis is the great advantage of being able to cook. It gives you the ability to create dishes exactly to your own taste. I encourage you to do that by using these recipes as a starting point and adjusting them to your own pleasure.\n\nTHE HERITAGE STYLE\n\nMy favorite cuisines are those I grew up with: Creole and Cajun. New Orleans food. I admit also to a preference for dishes whose tastes ring familiar notes. Although innovative dishes are fun to write about, few of them persist into the next season. That's because they appeal more to the mind than to the palate. And one of the hallmarks of the New Orleans palate is that it is not easily fooled by public relations.\n\nOn the other hand, the young, adventuresome chefs that inspired our restaurants during the last 20 years have added much to our pleasure. We now have a far greater variety and quality of foodstuffs to cook with than we did a decade or more ago. Not only can you buy fresh foie gras and fresh chanterelle mushrooms now, but almost every avid diner knows what they taste like.\n\nThis is also true of current cooking methods. While deep-frying is still the default technique in most New Orleans restaurants, chefs and diners have found that many dishes formerly fried are much better grilled, seared, or broiled.\n\nI tell you all this to answer a question so obvious that I've asked it myself: \"Do we really need another new version of gumbo, bread pudding, or oysters Rockefeller with all the hundreds of recipes for those dishes already out there?\"\n\nYes, we do. Creole cooking evolves. Gumbo is much thicker and spicier than it was 20 years ago. We cook with ingredients unavailable back when. That's one of the ways in which I've adapted the recipes here. They're written with the latter-day food cornucopia in mind.\n\nAnd tastes have changed. When I started writing about food, dishes like veal Oscar were everywhere. Now the idea of covering veal (or fish or chicken or softshell crabs) with gloppy sauces riddled with crabmeat and crawfish seems excessive.\n\nWHAT IS NEW ORLEANS FOOD?\n\nEarly in my career, I wrote for a now extinct weekly newspaper called _Figaro._ On our masthead was a quotation whose source I don't remember, but I think it rings true: \"Localism alone leads to culture.\"\n\nNew Orleans food is, above all other things, distinctly local. It's comparable in that respect to the regional and local cooking styles you find in France and Italy, where if you drive 100 kilometers, you discover that the food has changed noticeably.\n\nNew Orleans Creole is the oldest comprehensive regional cuisine in America. It was recognized as a thing apart in the late 1800s, when the earliest Creole cookbooks appeared. It had a French face, a Spanish soul, and African hands. Soon it would get an Italian heart and a Cajun smile. Like other great regional cuisines, it doesn't travel well. I've never had a gumbo outside New Orleans that I thought tasted like gumbo, even though the attempt may have been tasty enough.\n\nNot even a lifelong Orleanian who thinks about food all the time (like me, for instance) can explain exactly what's missing. We just know gumbo when we taste it, and we know when we're not tasting it.\n\nSo what does gumbo\u2014or any other Creole or Cajun dish\u2014taste like? The only way I can really explain it is to give you the recipes that I know create what I think of as real Creole or Cajun flavor.\n\nTry to generalize, however, and you don't come up with much. Obviously, we love seafood in South Louisiana. With very good reason: We have plenty of it, and its quality is world-class. We also like big flavors. The kind that you can't miss, as opposed to those you have to sit and think about to know whether or not you're tasting them. Creole cooking's main appeal is not to the mind, but to the flesh. If a lengthy explanation of what it is we should be tasting is needed, there's a good chance the food isn't really Creole or Cajun.\n\nThere is a downside to this. Certain New Orleans dishes would not make a healthy steady diet. We cook with oceans of heavy cream, boulders of butter, and herds of smoked pork, among other foods from the \"Use Sparingly\" part of the food pyramid. That's okay. Just don't eat the richer dishes all the time. Unless you are really ill, you can eat anything once in a while.\n\nSeasoning rarely needs to be added at the table to New Orleans food. It's saltier than the food of most other regions. French chefs who move here tell me that when they return to France for a visit, dishes that they once loved taste bland to them.\n\nThat said, the salt levels in most New Orleans dishes have declined in recent memory. Recipes I published 20 years ago often had two or three times as much salt as the amount I think tastes right now. I've lowered the salt content in most of my recipes. You can always add more salt, but once it's in there, you can't get it out.\n\nOn the other hand, pepper levels continue to rise. They were always above average, but starting with the baby-boom generation, the appreciation for hot, spicy food has done nothing but grow. All kinds of peppers are used in Creole dishes, often in combination. And pepper sauce, that great South Louisiana invention of which Tabasco is the original, is essential. Those little bottles are on every table and in every kitchen. It not only tastes good, but I'm persuaded that capsaicin\u2014the active ingredient in hot chile pepper\u2014is good for you.\n\nOkay. Let's start illustrating all of these points by adjourning to the kitchen to do some cooking. I hope you have a great New Orleans meal today!\n\nAmuse-Bouche\n\nShrimp R\u00e9moulade with Two Sauces\n\nSaut\u00e9ed Crab Claws\n\nGnocchi with Crabmeat and Prosciutto\n\nOysters with Pepper Butter\n\nCrawfish and Corn Beignets\n\nCaviar on Savory Lost Bread\n\nMushrooms and Foie Gras Under Glass\n\nFrench-fried Parsley\n\nCreole-Italian Pot Stickers\n\nBroiled Mushrooms with Italian Sausage\n\nBoudin Blanc\n\nNew Orleans Shrimp Spring Rolls\n\nSavory Waffles\n\nA\n\nSmall, delicious nibbles before the dinner really begins set the tone for the entire repast. This is why so many restaurants\u2014especially at the upper levels\u2014send out a pre-appetizer course. The French expression _amuse-bouche_ \u2014\"entertain the mouth\"\u2014is well enough known now that it's been shortened to just \"the amuse.\"\n\nThis new first course gives the opportunity to use very expensive ingredients. Almost by definition, an _amuse-bouche_ is just a bite or two. So you don't have to use very much of the precious foodstuff.\n\nNot that pre-appetizers must be expensive. As you will see in the recipes that follow, the only requirement is that a bite fill the mouth with a good, savory flavor. My own preference is that pre-appetizers be a little salty and a little rich. Smoked, cured, and acidic flavors are also good.\n\nI'm wary of using sweet or peppery flavors in an _amuse-bouche._ Those tastes are delicious, but they need to be kept subtle. The point is to sharpen your palate, not dull it.\n\nOne other food seems inappropriate for a small first course. Cheese is for the end of the meal, not the beginning. I love cheese, but it can be an appetite killer.\n\nMany familiar New Orleans delicacies work well as pre-appetizers. Notable among them are shrimp, oysters (especially when baked on the half shell), crabmeat, and all our Cajun and Creole sausages. Add to that, international classics like smoked salmon, caviar, olives, p\u00e2t\u00e9s, and charcuterie meats, plus refreshing fruits and crisp vegetables, and the variety of flavors stretches endlessly in all directions.\n\nThe best pre-appetizer course includes several small dishes, each offering a flavor and color contrast with the others. For example, a great trio would be smoked boudin slices, asparagus with aioli, and shrimp with Creole r\u00e9moulade.\n\nAll this could be served with cocktails or Champagne or a light white wine. We like to offer our pre-appetizers at the counter in the kitchen because everybody's going to be in there anyway. Then it's an easy matter to start pulling the oysters Bienville out of the oven and shouting, \"Okay, here comes the first course! Everybody sit down!\"\n\nShrimp R\u00e9moulade with Two Sauces\n\n_There are two kinds of r\u00e9moulade sauce served around New Orleans, and everybody has a favorite. My preference is the orange-red kind that's utterly unique to our area. White r\u00e9moulade sauce, made with mayonnaise, is actually closer to the classic French recipe. It's so good that in recent years I've taken to making both sauces and letting people take their pick. What the sauces have in common is the main active ingredient: Creole mustard\u2014a rough, brown, country-style mustard mixed with a bit of horseradish._\n\n_The shrimp for shrimp r\u00e9moulade should be medium size, about 25\u201330 count to the pound. If you're making only the red style of r\u00e9moulade, a good trick is to underboil the shrimp slightly, then marinate them in the rather acidic sauce. The shrimp will finish cooking in the sauce in much the same way they do in a ceviche marinade._\n\n_The word \"r\u00e9moulade,\" by the way, is an old French dialect word that refers to a kind of radish that hasn't been part of the recipe for centuries._\n\nSHRIMP\n\nLeafy tops from a bunch of celery\n\n5 bay leaves\n\n3 whole cloves\n\n2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed\n\n1 large lemon, sliced\n\n\u00bd cup salt\n\n3 lb. medium shrimp (25\u201330 count)\n\nRED REMOULADE SAUCE\n\n\u00bd cup chili sauce (bottled) or ketchup, plus more to taste\n\n\u00bd cup Creole mustard, plus more to taste\n\n1 Tbsp. paprika\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n2 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n\u00bc tsp. Tabasco\n\n\u00bd tsp. minced garlic\n\n1 cup olive oil\n\n3 green onions, green part only, finely chopped\n\nWHITE REMOULADE SAUCE\n\n1 cup mayonnaise\n\n\u00bd cup Creole mustard\n\n2 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n\u00bd tsp. Tabasco Garlic Pepper Sauce\n\n1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n3 green onions, green part only, finely chopped\n\n1. Bring about a gallon of water to a boil in a large pot and add all of the shrimp ingredients except the shrimp. Boil the water for 15 minutes, then add the shrimp. Remove the pot from the heat immediately and allow the shrimp to steep for 4 minutes, or until the shell separates easily from the meat.\n\n2. Drain the shrimp in a colander and set aside until cool enough to handle. Peel and devein the shrimp.\n\n3. To make the red r\u00e9moulade sauce: Combine all the ingredients except the olive oil and green onions in a bowl. Add the oil a little at a time, stirring constantly, until all oil is absorbed. Taste the sauce and add more chili sauce or Creole mustard if needed. Stir in the green onions.\n\n4. To make the white r\u00e9moulade sauce: Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and stir to blend.\n\n5. Place the shrimp on a leaf of lettuce, sliced avocados, sliced tomatoes, or Belgian endive leaves. Drizzle half the shrimp with one sauce, half with the other. The sauces can also be served in pools for dipping. MAKES EIGHT APPETIZER PORTIONS OR SIX ENTREE SALADS.\n\nSaut\u00e9ed Crab Claws\n\n_Crab fingers\u2014the claw with the bottom jaw removed and the shell peeled from the meat\u2014are the most economical form of blue crab meat. They make a wonderful appetizer that can be prepared in a number of ways. This is probably the version that packs the greatest number of calories, but so what? Eat a few as an appetizer and then move on to the tofu if you think the crab will kill you._\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter\n\n1 small head garlic, cloves separated, peeled and chopped\n\n1 lb. blue crab fingers\n\n1 tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc cup dry white wine\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n2 green onions, finely chopped\n\nToasted French bread crescents, for dipping\n\n1. Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the garlic and saut\u00e9 until fragrant.\n\n2. Add the crab fingers and sprinkle with the Creole seasoning and salt. Shake the skillet to cook the crab fingers evenly.\n\n3. After 2 minutes, mix the wine and lemon juice together, and pour into the skillet. Add the green onions. Shake the skillet to combine the ingredients and simmer for 2 minutes more. The sauce should have a somewhat creamy appearance.\n\n4. Transfer the crab claws and all the sauce to a bowl and serve with toasted French bread crescents for dipping. SERVES FOUR.\n\nGnocchi with Crabmeat and Prosciutto\n\n_This rather rich dish brings crabmeat and dry-cured ham together in a cream sauce with gnocchi, the little potato-and-flour pasta dumplings. You can make your own gnocchi if you like (quite an undertaking), but you can buy relatively decent fresh gnocchi in the refrigerator case at the store._\n\nSalt, to taste\n\n8 oz. potato gnocchi\n\n1 Tbsp. butter\n\n1\u00bd Tbsp. chopped fresh shallots\n\n4 oz. prosciutto, sliced into thin slivers\n\n8 oz. whipping cream\n\nFreshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n8 oz. lump crabmeat\n\nCayenne, to taste\n\n1. Bring a pot of salted water to a boil and cook the gnocchi until they're set but not mushy\u2014about 4 minutes. Drain.\n\n2. In a saucepan over medium heat, heat the butter till it bubbles, then add the shallots. Saut\u00e9 until they just begin to brown, then add the prosciutto and cook another minute.\n\n3. Add the cream and bring to a low boil. Lower the heat and reduce the cream for about 5 minutes. Add pepper to taste.\n\n4. Add the crabmeat to the cream and agitate the pan to blend. Cook until the cream starts bubbling again. Add cayenne and salt to taste.\n\n5. Add the gnocchi to the pan and toss with the sauce to distribute the ingredients. Serve hot on small plates as an appetizer or amuse-bouche. SERVES FOUR.\n\nOysters with Pepper Butter\n\n_This is the oyster version of Buffalo chicken wings\u2014a tremendous improvement on the latter. The idea first hatched at Mr. B's, Ralph and Cindy Brennan's terrific French Quarter bistro. When Ralph opened the casual Red Fish Grill a block away, he took this with him and turned it into that restaurant's signature dish._\n\n_Use a less-hot hot sauce (in other words, not Tabasco) to make the sauce. When reducing it, make sure the ventilation is good because steaming hot sauce can burn your eyes._\n\nSAUCE\n\n2 oz. Louisiana hot sauce, such as Crystal Hot Sauce\n\n1 tsp. lemon juice\n\n2 Tbsp. dry white wine\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter, softened\n\nOYSTERS\n\nVegetable oil, for frying\n\n1\u00bd cups flour\n\n2 Tbsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n2 Tbsp. salt\n\n36 fresh, shucked oysters\n\nTOAST AND GARNISH\n\nThirty-six \u00bd-inch-thick slices French bread, toasted and buttered\n\nCrumbled crisp bacon, for garnish\n\n\u00bd cup blue cheese dressing, for dipping (see recipe, this page)\n\n1. To make the sauce: Bring the liquid ingredients to a light boil in a small saucepan. Reduce by about a third.\n\n2. Remove the pan from the heat. Whisk in the butter, a tablespoon or so at a time, until you have a creamy-looking orange sauce. Keep warm, but don't keep the pan on a continuous burner or the sauce may separate.\n\n3. To make the oysters: Pour the oil into a Dutch oven to a depth of 2 inches. Heat over medium-high heat until the oil reaches 375 degrees F.\n\n4. Combine the flour, Creole seasoning, and salt in a bowl, and mix with a fork. Toss the oysters in the mixture to coat, and shake off the excess flour.\n\n5. Fry the oysters, in batches, until plump and light brown. Drain on paper towels.\n\n6. Put an oyster on each piece of toast, drizzle on the sauce, and garnish with the bacon. Serve the dressing on the side for dipping. MAKES THIRTY-SIX PIECES.\n\nCrawfish and Corn Beignets\n\n_In classic French cookery, a beignet is the same thing as a fritter. The starting point for this is choux pastry\u2014the same soft dough used to make cream puffs or profiteroles, but without sugar._\n\n\u00bd cup milk\n\n\u00bd cup water\n\n5 Tbsp. salted butter\n\n1\u00bc cups all-purpose flour\n\n4 eggs\n\nVegetable oil, for frying\n\n1 cup boiled crawfish tails, chopped coarsely\n\n1 green onion, tender green parts only, very finely sliced\n\n\u00bd cup fresh corn kernels\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\nWhite r\u00e9moulade sauce (see Shrimp R\u00e9moulade with Two Sauces, this page)\n\n1. In a saucepan over medium-low heat, blend the milk with the water. Cut the butter into chunks and add it to the water. When the water comes to a boil, remove it from the heat.\n\n2. Add the flour and stir it into the liquid with a wooden spoon until well blended. Return to low heat and continue to stir until the mixture pulls away from the sides of the pan.\n\n3. Remove the pan from the heat and add 2 of the eggs, stirring quickly to blend into the batter. Stir in the other eggs, one at a time, and keep stirring until smooth and completely blended. Turn the batter out into a metal bowl to cool.\n\n4. Heat the oil in a deep saucepan to 350 degrees F.\n\n5. Combine the crawfish tail pieces, green onion, and corn in a bowl. Add pinches of salt and pepper and toss to distribute the ingredients equally.\n\n6. When the batter is cool enough to handle, scoop up a heaping tablespoon and form it into a ball. Push your finger into its center to form a well. Put a scant teaspoon of the crawfish mixture into the well and close the ball up, working it with your fingers a little until some of the contents start poking out a little.\n\n7. When you have 8 or 10 beignets made, start frying them. If they're close to round, you won't need to turn them. They take 6 to 8 minutes to fry to a medium brown. Serve as an appetizer with the white r\u00e9moulade sauce. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nCaviar on Savory Lost Bread\n\n_The most challenging dinners I cook all year are the ones I serve in the homes of people who buy my services at charity auctions. I'm never quite sure that what I cook will be worth what the people paid for it. For years, until Beluga caviar became endangered, I started these dinners with an appetizer of that rare roe served over a traditional New Orleans lost bread, but any good caviar will do. Lost bread, or_ pain perdu, _is New Orleans\u2013style French toast (see recipe,this page). This version is made without the sweet elements (sugar and vanilla) and with a little onion in the custard._\n\n2 eggs\n\n1 cup milk\n\nPinch of nutmeg\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\nPinch of ground white pepper\n\n2 Tbsp. pureed white onion\n\nSmall French baguette, cut into \u00be-inch-thick slices\n\nVegetable oil, for frying\n\n\u00bc cup sour cream\n\n2 Tbsp. finely chopped chives\n\n4 oz. caviar\n\n1. Blend the eggs, milk, nutmeg, salt, pepper, and pureed onion in a wide bowl. Soak the bread rounds until they're wet with the custard mixture all the way through but not falling apart.\n\n2. In a large skillet, heat about \u00bc inch of the oil until it shimmers at the surface. Fry the bread, in batches, until they are well browned on both sides, turning once. Drain on paper towels and keep warm.\n\n3. Spread a little sour cream on each bread round. Sprinkle with chives and top with a generous spoonful of caviar. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nMushrooms and Foie Gras Under Glass\n\n_This is an old and wonderful appetizer from Antoine's, which has, unfortunately, fallen from the menu. The reason for its demise was that the glass bells under which it was served were expensive and seemed to last through only one or two servings. My version of this incredibly rich and aromatic dish moves it from the era of Antoine's to our own, with its much better and more varied selection of mushrooms and fresh foie gras._\n\n4 oz. fresh foie gras, sliced into eight \u00bc-inch-thick pieces\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper\n\n1\u00bd sticks (12 Tbsp.) butter\n\n2 cups mushrooms, the more exotic the better, sliced about \u00bc inch thick\n\n2\u00bd cups whole milk\n\n\u00bc cup flour\n\n\u2153 cup dry sherry\n\nEight \u00bd-inch-thick slices French bread, toasted\n\n1. Sprinkle the foie gras slices with a little salt and pepper. Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat and sear the foie gras until lightly browned on both sides. Transfer to a plate and keep warm.\n\n2. Return the skillet to medium-high heat, add 1 stick (8 Tbsp.) of the butter, and bring to a bubble. Add the mushrooms and cook until tender.\n\n3. Meanwhile, make a thin b\u00e9chamel. Heat the milk until warm but not steaming. In a saucepan, melt the remaining \u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) of butter. Sprinkle in the flour and stir the mixture until it turns into a roux, about 2 minutes. Don't let it brown. Lower the heat and gradually whisk in the warm milk, stirring constantly until the sauce thickens.\n\n4. Add the sherry to the mushrooms and bring to a boil until the alcohol has evaporated, about 2 minutes. Lower the heat to a simmer and stir in the b\u00e9chamel. Add salt and pepper to taste and cook over very low heat, stirring lightly, until the sauce penetrates the mushrooms.\n\n5. Place 2 slices of toast on each of 4 salad plates. Top each toast with a foie gras slice and pour about \u00bd cup of the mushroom mixture over each serving. SERVES FOUR.\n\nFrench-fried Parsley\n\n_The Bitoun brothers\u2014Jacques, Maurice, Andr\u00e9, and Simon\u2014ran a number of restaurants in the New Orleans area for many years, separately and together. Their best remembered dish was a complimentary appetizer: a simple basket of fried parsley. Maurice called it French popcorn. It's much better than you can imagine, and it intrigues everyone who eats it._\n\n_There are two tricks to this recipe. First, it works better when the oil has been used previously, especially for fried chicken. Second, use curly-leaf parsley, because it holds the batter much better than the flat-leaf variety._\n\nVegetable oil, for frying (preferably used before, but clean)\n\n2 bunches of curly-leaf parsley\n\n1\u00bd cups flour\n\n2 Tbsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n1 Tbsp. salt\n\n1 egg\n\n1 cup milk\n\n1. Pour the oil into a Dutch oven to a depth of 2 inches. Heat over medium-high heat until the temperature reaches 350 degrees F.\n\n2. Wash the parsley well and shake dry. Trim off the bottom parts of the stems.\n\n3. Combine the flour, Creole seasoning, and salt in a bowl, blending it with a fork. Whisk the egg and the milk together in a second, much larger bowl. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and whisk to make a thin batter. Add a little water, if necessary, to make the batter runny.\n\n4. Toss the parsley in the batter to coat evenly. Shake off any excess batter.\n\n5. Working in batches, carefully drop the parsley into the hot oil and fry until it just begins to brown, about a minute. Drain on paper towels and serve immediately. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nCreole-Italian Pot Stickers\n\n_My son, Jude, developed an intense love for Chinese pot stickers at a time in his life when his list of acceptable foods was so short that he was hard to feed. At Trey Yuen, one of our favorite Chinese places, he typically ate three full orders of the things. His record is 32 pot stickers._\n\n_This passion is easy to understand. Good pot stickers are very good indeed. They're Chinese ravioli, balls of meat with seasonings and vegetables wrapped in a noodle disk. First you steam them (after which they're already pretty good) and then you fry them in a hot pan with a little oil. They're easy to make, though time-consuming; we usually sit around the kitchen counter as a family and make several dozen at a time. Once they're wrapped, you can freeze them to steam and fry later. We give our pot stickers a local wrinkle by using spicy Italian sausage in place of the usual ground pork. Just be sure the sausage is on the lean side._\n\nDUMPLINGS\n\n1 lb. spicy Italian sausage, removed from casings, or ground pork\n\n3 green onions, finely chopped\n\n1 small can of water chestnuts, drained and chopped\n\n2 Tbsp. soy sauce\n\n1 tsp. Asian fish sauce\n\n2 Tbsp. Chinese rice wine or dry white wine\n\n1 cup fresh spinach, washed, cooked, and coarsely chopped\n\n1 Tbsp. cornstarch mixed with 1 Tbsp. water.\n\n2 eggs, beaten\n\n1 package of round won-ton wrappers (about 40)\n\nVegetable oil, for frying\n\nSAUCE\n\n\u00bc cup soy sauce\n\n2 Tbsp. Chinese red pepper oil\n\n2 Tbsp. rice wine vinegar\n\n2 large cloves garlic, minced\n\n1 green onion, finely chopped\n\n1. In a skillet, combine all the dumpling ingredients up to and including the wine. Saut\u00e9 over medium heat, breaking up the sausage or ground pork as it cooks to prevent clumping. Cook until no longer pink. Pour off any excess fat.\n\n2. Stir in the spinach, then the cornstarch-water mixture, and then, gradually, about two-thirds of the beaten egg. Remove the skillet from the heat, transfer the mixture to a bowl, and set aside to let the filling cool.\n\n3. Separate a few won-ton wrappers and place them on a cutting board. Brush the remaining egg along the top margin of each wrapper. Spoon a scant teaspoon of the filling into the center, carefully fold the wrappers over the filling to create a half-circle, and then press the edges together to seal. Place the finished dumplings on a platter and cover them with a damp cloth to keep them from drying out while you assemble the rest.\n\n4. You can boil the dumplings in about an inch of simmering water, but steaming them over a simmering pot works better. In either case, cook only until the wrappers become translucent, about 2\u20133 minutes. At that point, the dumplings are ready to be eaten, but you can add further excitement with the \"pot-sticking\" trick.\n\n5. Heat 1\u00bd tablespoons of vegetable oil in a nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Space out as many dumplings as the pan will hold and cook until they're crispy brown on one side. (This is when they'd start to stick to a regular pot.) Turn them to crisp the other side, then remove and keep warm. Add a little more oil between each batch and continue cooking until all are done.\n\n6. Mix the sauce ingredients in a bowl. Serve the sauce on the side. MAKES FORTY DUMPLINGS.\n\nBroiled Mushrooms with Italian Sausage\n\n_This was a clean-out-the-refrigerator dish we threw together one night when friends suddenly came over. Like us, they'd recently been to Italy, so this naturally came to mind. It's delicious and simple to prepare on short notice._\n\n4 links hot or sweet Italian sausage\n\n\u00bc tsp. crushed red pepper\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried oregano\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n10 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, leaves only, chopped\n\n\u2154 cup bread crumbs\n\n1 lb. medium whole white mushrooms, stemmed\n\n\u2153 cup shredded Fontina or mozzarella cheese\n\n1. Preheat the broiler. Remove the sausage from the casings. Place the sausage meat in a large skillet over medium heat and cook, breaking up the sausage with a kitchen fork until it begins to brown. Pour off any excess fat.\n\n2. Add the crushed red pepper, oregano, salt, and \u00bd cup of water, and continue to cook until the sausage meat is no longer pink. Add the parsley and bread crumbs, and mix in well. Add a little more water, if needed, to keep the mixture from being very dry. (It should not be very wet, either.) Remove from the heat.\n\n3. Slice off a sliver the size of a dime from the top of the mushroom cap to make a flat area. Stuff a heaping teaspoon of the sausage mixture into the cavity of each mushroom. Place the mushrooms, stuffing side up, on a baking pan. Place a generous pinch of the shredded cheese (as much as you can get to stay put) on top of the stuffing. Broil until the cheese melts and begins to brown. SERVES EIGHT TO TWELVE.\n\nBoudin Blanc\n\n_White boudin is a rice-and-pork sausage found everywhere food is sold in Cajun country, from gas stations to fancy restaurants. Spicy with red pepper and enriched with a little bit of pork liver, this is the more familiar form of boudin (as opposed to the hard-to-find boudin noir, a blood sausage)._\n\n_This is not a hard recipe to make, but some of the ingredients and equipment you'll need may not be easy to come by. Finding sausage casing can be a challenge unless you want a mile of it. I beg a supermarket that makes its own sausages (as most of the big ones do) to give me 10 or 20 feet of it. Then there's the pork liver, which is a special-order item in most markets. You'll need a meat grinder, although a food processor will do a passable job. Finally, if you want to stuff the sausage in the casings, you need the gizmo for doing that. An easier alternative is to forgo the casings and make boudin balls instead._\n\n_My contribution to this traditional recipe is the concentrated chicken-and-pork stock that makes the rice part of the filling taste especially good. Use short-grain rice, which has the slightly sticky texture you need._\n\n3\u20134 yards of medium sausage casing\n\nSTOCK\n\n4 chicken-leg quarters\n\n1 small pork shoulder (Boston butt), about 3\u20134 lb.\n\n1 large onion, cut into eighths\n\n2 bay leaves\n\n2 ribs celery, chopped Stems from\n\n1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley\n\n\u00bd tsp. thyme\n\n\u00bd tsp. marjoram\n\n1 tsp. black peppercorns\n\nFILLING\n\n4 slices bacon\n\n1 lb. pork liver, cut into \u00bd-inch-thick slices\n\n1 medium onion, coarsely chopped\n\n\u00bd bell pepper, coarsely chopped\n\n1 rib celery, coarsely chopped\n\n1\u00bd tsp. cayenne, plus more to taste\n\n4\u00bd tsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\n3 cups uncooked short-grain rice (not parboiled or converted)\n\n1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley, leaves only, finely chopped\n\n2 bunches of green onions, green parts only, finely chopped\n\n1 tsp. freshly ground black pepper\n\n1. Unroll the sausage casing and soak it in cold water for an hour or so. Pull it open and run water through the casing for a few seconds. Keep moist.\n\n2. Put all the stock ingredients into a large pot and add enough water to cover\u2014at least a gallon (16 cups) of water. Bring to a light boil and cook, uncovered, for 2 hours. Skim the fat and foam off the surface as the stock cooks.\n\n3. To make the filling: Fry the bacon in a large skillet until crisp. Remove the bacon and reserve for another use. Add the pork liver and all the other filling ingredients up to (but not including) the rice to the drippings, and saut\u00e9 over medium heat until the liver is tender. Add \u00bd cup of the simmering stock and cook 10 minutes more. Transfer to a bowl, let cool, and then refrigerate.\n\n4. Remove the chicken and pork from the stockpot and set aside. Strain the stock and discard the solids. Return the stock to a light boil and reduce to 2 quarts.\n\n5. Reserve two of the chicken-leg quarters for another purpose. Skin and bone the other two and dice the meat. Dice the pork shoulder, cutting across the grain of the meat. Refrigerate all this when finished.\n\n6. When the stock is reduced, pour 5 cups into a large saucepan. Add the rice, bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer, covered, about 25 minutes, or until the rice is very tender and borderline gummy. Fluff and set aside.\n\n7. If you have a meat grinder, fit it with the coarse blade or \u00bc-inch die. Combine the diced chicken, pork, and liver, and run the mixture through the grinder once. If you don't have a grinder, use a food processor, but stop short of mincing the ingredients.\n\n8. Combine the ground meat mixture with the rice, chopped parsley, green onions, and black pepper. Add 1\u20132 cups of the stock, a little at a time, and mix well. You've added enough stock when you can easily form the mixture into a ball that doesn't stick to your fingers. Add more cayenne and salt to taste.\n\n9. At this point, you can either stuff the boudin into the casing, or you can make boudin balls without casing. Either way, microwave until quite warm inside before serving. MAKES ABOUT TWENTY-FOUR 4-INCH LINKS.\n\nNew Orleans Shrimp Spring Rolls\n\n_It may seem strange, but r\u00e9moulade sauce and pasta (and shrimp, of course) go well together. This is especially true of the rice noodles used in Southeast Asian cooking._\n\nSHRIMP\n\nLeafy tops from a bunch of celery\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n1 Tbsp. Tabasco\n\n\u00bd lemon, sliced 2 Tbsp. salt\n\n1 lb. medium shrimp (25\u201330 count)\n\nROLLS\n\n8 oz. rice stick noodles, soaked in cold water for about 45 minutes\n\n12 round rice-paper wrappers\n\n\u00bd cup red r\u00e9moulade sauce (see Shrimp R\u00e9moulade with Two Sauces, this page)\n\nGARNISH\n\nAsian-style chili-garlic sauce\n\n2 green onions, finely chopped\n\n1. To prepare the shrimp: Bring \u00bd gallon (8 cups) of water to a boil in a pot. Add all the ingredients up to (but not including) the shrimp. Boil the water for 5 minutes, then add the shrimp. Remove the pot from the heat immediately and allow the shrimp to steep for 4 minutes, or until the shell separates from the meat easily.\n\n2. Drain shrimp in a colander and set aside until cool enough to handle. Peel and devein the shrimp.\n\n3. Bring a small pot of water to a boil. After the noodles have soaked for about 45 mintues, drain them, then plunge them in the boiling water for about a minute. Drain again and let cool.\n\n4. Brush the rice-paper wrappers with water and let them soften. When the rice paper is stretchy, lay about 3 tablespoons of the noodles in a line about two-thirds of the way down the rice paper. Drizzle about a tablespoon of the r\u00e9moulade sauce across the noodles. Place 4\u20136 shrimp on top of the noodles, then roll up the rice paper. When the noodles and shrimp are covered, tuck in the loose ends of the rice paper and finish rolling.\n\n5. Garnish rolls with squirts of the chili-garlic sauce and chopped green onions. MAKES TWELVE ROLLS.\n\nSavory Waffles\n\n_This started as another way to serve caviar at my big charity dinners (see Caviar on Savory Lost Bread,this page). I'd make a little waffle with just one big depression in the center, and that was where the sour cream and caviar would go. Then I started snacking on the extra waffles and realized that they could be served with all sorts of other dishes, from seafood to eggs. They're not bad all by themselves, either, as an alternative to bread. Where this recipe deviates from the standard waffle is in substituting savory flavors for sweet._\n\n1 cup self-rising flour\n\n\u00bd tsp. granulated onion\n\n\u00bc tsp. dry dill\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt 3 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil or melted butter\n\n1 egg, beaten\n\n1 cup half-and-half\n\n1. Preheat a waffle iron.\n\n2. In a small bowl, mix all the dry ingredients.\n\n3. In a larger bowl, whisk together all the wet ingredients.\n\n4. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and whisk slowly until all the flour is wet. Don't eliminate all the lumps.\n\n5. Pour about 3 tablespoons of the batter into the center of each half of the waffle iron, covering only one square completely and allowing the batter to flow into the surrounding squares. Close the cover and cook according to the manufacturer's instructions. The top of the waffle need not brown entirely.\n\n6. Flip the waffle over, browned side up, and fill the center square with sour cream, soft-scrambled eggs, crabmeat with hollandaise, or whatever else you might think of. MAKES ABOUT A DOZEN WAFFLES.\n\n_Appetizers_\n\nCrabmeat St. Francis\n\nCrabmeat Ravigote\n\nCrabmeat West Indies\n\nCrabmeat Cannelloni\n\nDeviled Crab\n\nOysters Rockefeller\n\nOysters Rockefeller Flan\n\nOysters Bienville\n\nCreole-Italian Oysters\n\nOysters Dunbar\n\nOysters Jaubert\n\nOysters Polo\n\nOysters Roland\n\nOysters au Poivre\n\nOysters en Brochette\n\nShrimp Limone\n\nShrimp with Fennel and Herbs\n\nSpicy Garlic Shrimp\n\nTasso Shrimp\n\nCrawfish Boulettes\n\nCrawfish with Morel Mushrooms\n\nGratin of Crawfish Tails\n\nAsparagus and Crawfish with Glazed Hollandaise\n\nSeared Scallops with Artichokes\n\nChicken Livers with Bacon and Pepper Jelly\n\nNatchitoches Spicy Meat Pies\n\nFrog's Legs Persill\u00e9s\n\nAbita Springs Stuffed Quail\n\nMirliton and Root Vegetable Gratin\n\nA\n\nIn too many restaurants, the appetizers are dramatically better than the much more expensive entr\u00e9es. Here's why I think this is: most chefs make up their menus from the top down. By the time they get to the main courses, they often have used up all their inspirations on the first courses. And they revert to mere trend-following when they get to the steaks, chicken, and fish. The best chefs have enough in their heads to devise menus full of interesting food. But the less-than-best chefs are also out there, working.\n\nAlso, chefs like to play around with very expensive ingredients. You can make a legitimate dish of mostly jumbo lump crabmeat if the serving is appetizer size. It's quite another matter when you need to put a half-pound of crabmeat on the plate.\n\nFinally, appetizers must be brilliant. A meal that starts with a hit has a man on base, and you can figure out the rest of this metaphor. A spectacular first course often casts a glow on an underperforming entr\u00e9e that might disguise its shortcomings. At least in the mind of the beholder.\n\nNo course lends itself more readily to invention and rule breaking than the appetizer. You can go hot or cold or in between. Use any method of cooking any ingredient in any presentation. Your guests may well be turned on by some fantastic creation. But even if they aren't, the risk to their appetites is small. You have the entire remainder of the meal to make up for it with safer dishes. So go nuts on the first course.\n\nBeyond Shellfish\n\nThe most pervasive appetizer tradition is to center it on seafood. There is a logic to this: Seafood is light, much of it can be served cold, and you can use intense, palate-perking sauces.\n\nLouisiana seafood is a great resource for creating appetizers. The number of oyster dishes alone is dizzying (as I will prove shortly). The local crabmeat is almost absurdly delectable, even when eaten straight out of the container. The three major varieties of shrimp are all the equals of any other in the world.\n\nWhen seafood will be the entr\u00e9e, the meal is more interesting when it starts with something else. So we welcome duck breasts, sausages, sweetbreads, meat-filled dumplings, and other light meat dishes into the appetizer universe.\n\nHot and Cold, Soft and Crunchy, Mild and Spicy\n\nA chef I know uses a predictable pattern in all his wine-dinner menus. He starts with something cold, then serves a hot dish, then another cold item, followed by another hot item. If he could get away with it, he'd keep the pattern going all the way through the dessert.\n\nMy suspicion is that he does this mainly for logistical reasons. A cold dish can be prepared in advance, shoved into the refrigerator, and pulled out when it's time to send it out. This gives him more time to get the hot dishes ready. But there's a good taste reason for the strategy: contrast. Creating contrasts among flavors, spice levels, textures, colors, temperatures, and ingredients is a fine art. It's one of the things that separates the great chefs from the ordinary ones.\n\nSince you have much more latitude in the appetizer course than in any other, think about what will follow it and create an appetizer that will force a gustatory shift when you and your guests move on.\n\nCrabmeat St. Francis\n\n_Crabmeat St. Francis was created by the legendary New Orleans chef Warren Leruth, whose restaurant in Gretna was the premier haute-Creole place to eat in the 1960s and 1970s. Warren once told me that the biggest thing he missed about not having the restaurant anymore was that he couldn't eat crabmeat St. Francis whenever he wanted to. It was one of the most celebrated of his dishes\u2014fantastic appetizer._\n\n4 cups heavy whipping cream\n\n2 cups crab stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n\u00bc cup dry white wine\n\n4 bay leaves\n\n1\u00bd sticks (12 Tbsp.) butter\n\n1 large green onion, finely chopped\n\n2 large cloves garlic, chopped\n\n\u00bc cup chopped white onion\n\n\u00be cup hearts of celery, chopped\n\n\u00bd tsp. thyme\n\nGenerous pinch of celery seed\n\n1\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. cayenne\n\n\u00bc tsp. ground white pepper\n\n\u00bd cup flour\n\n1 Tbsp. chopped flat-leaf parsley leaves\n\n4 egg yolks\n\n2 lb. fresh jumbo lump crabmeat\n\n\u00bd cup bread crumbs\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. In a saucepan, bring the cream, crab stock, wine, and bay leaves to a simmer and hold there.\n\n2. Melt the butter in a medium skillet over medium heat. Add the remaining ingredients up to (but not including) the flour and saut\u00e9 until the vegetables are translucent.\n\n3. Make a blond roux by adding the flour to the vegetables and cook, stirring often, for about 5 minutes, or until the flour is no longer raw and just starting to brown.\n\n4. Whisk in the cream-and-stock mixture. Lower the heat, add the parsley, and gently simmer for about 15 minutes. Remove and discard the bay leaves.\n\n5. Remove the skillet from the heat and whisk in the egg yolks, one at a time.\n\n6. Place 2 oz. of the lump crabmeat in each of 16 ramekins or baking shells. Top each with a \u00bd cup of the sauce, sprinkle lightly with the bread crumbs, and bake until the top is browned and bubbly, 10\u201312 minutes. SERVES SIXTEEN.\n\nCrabmeat Ravigote\n\n_This and shrimp r\u00e9moulade (see Shrimp R\u00e9moulade with Two Sauces,this page) are the most popular cold appetizers in traditional New Orleans restaurants. The word_ \"ravigote\" _means \"revived,\" the original idea being that you could add this tangy sauce to some crabmeat or fish that was on the edge of freshness and resurrect it. Of course, it was quickly noticed that it also tasted great with vividly fresh crabmeat._\n\n\u00bd cup mayonnaise\n\n2 Tbsp. cider vinegar\n\n1 Tbsp. Creole mustard\n\n\u00bc cup heavy whipping cream\n\n1 green onion, green parts only, finely chopped\n\n3 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, leaves only, chopped\n\n2 Tbsp. small capers, drained\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried dill\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried tarragon\n\n\u215b tsp. salt\n\nPinch of ground white pepper\n\nDash of Tabasco\n\n1 lb. fresh jumbo lump crabmeat\n\n1. Whisk all of the ingredients except the crabmeat together in a bowl.\n\n2. Gently stir the crabmeat into the sauce. It's best if you let the mixture sit for an hour or two, refrigerated, before serving. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nCrabmeat West Indies\n\n_One of my radio listeners once told me that in his opinion the ultimate way to eat jumbo lump crabmeat was to open the box, reach in, and just start eating. I really cannot argue with that, but it doesn't make for much of a recipe. Here, however, is a popular dish all along the Gulf Coast that is about as close to naked as a lump of crabmeat can get._\n\n1 lb. fresh jumbo lump crabmeat\n\n1 small white onion, chopped\n\n\u00bd cup olive oil\n\n6 Tbsp. cider vinegar\n\n1 Tbsp. small capers, drained\n\n\u00bc cup water\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n4 dashes of Tabasco\n\n2 ripe tomatoes, thickly sliced\n\nGently blend together all of the ingredients except the tomatoes in a non-metallic bowl. Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or overnight. Serve cold over slices of ripe tomato. SERVES FOUR TO SIX.\n\nCrabmeat Cannelloni\n\n_Here's a rich crabmeat-and-pasta dish that makes a good appetizer or entr\u00e9e. Resist the temptation to roll these things up so tight that the crabmeat can't escape; you want to see some of it wandering around on the plate. Do you know how you can tell that this is a New Orleans recipe and not one from Italy? The cheese. Italians would never put this much cheese (if any) in a seafood dish. In New Orleans, not adding the cheese would be unthinkable._\n\nFifteen 4-inch pasta squares, preferably fresh, or 15 big pasta tubes, such as cannelloni or manicotti (include a few extra squares or tubes, since some will inevitably break as you roll or stuff them)\n\n3 cups heavy whipping cream\n\n\u00bd cup grated Parmesan cheese\n\n\u215b tsp. ground white pepper\n\n\u00bd tsp. chopped garlic\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. crushed red pepper\n\n1 lb. fresh jumbo lump crabmeat\n\n1 Tbsp. fresh chopped basil\n\n\u00bc cup shredded mozzarella\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Cook the pasta in salted boiling water until al dente. Drain and set aside.\n\n2. Boil the cream in a large saucepan and reduce by half. (Don't let it foam over.) Pour about two-thirds of the reduced cream into a skillet. To the cream remaining in the saucepan, whisk in the Parmesan cheese and white pepper to finish the sauce. Keep warm on the side.\n\n3. Add the garlic, salt, crushed red pepper, and crabmeat to the cream in the skillet. Simmer over low heat, stirring until the crab is well incorporated. Add the basil and mozzarella, and stir very lightly until the cheese begins to melt. Remove from the heat.\n\n4. Spoon about 3 tablespoons of the crab mixture onto the lower third of each pasta sheet. Roll them into tubes about an inch in diameter and place seam side down in a large baking dish. If using pasta tubes, spoon about 3 tablespoons of the crab mixture into the tubes. Spoon about 2 tablespoons of sauce over each cannelloni.\n\n5. Bake the cannelloni until the sauce starts to bubble and the pasta edges brown lightly, 3\u20135 minutes. SERVES TWELVE AS AN APPETIZER OR SIX AS AN ENTREE.\n\nDeviled Crab\n\n_Although the crab cake (an import from Maryland, rarely seen in New Orleans before about 1990) has largely overshadowed similar local dishes, these are not half bad when made with the kind of good crabmeat we have around here. A case in point is this recipe, which I like to serve as a side dish to pasta, entr\u00e9e salads, or fried seafood. It is also one of the relatively few dishes in this collection that begin with what is known around New Orleans as the holy trinity: yellow onion, bell pepper, and celery._\n\n1\u00bd sticks (12 Tbsp.) butter\n\n\u00bc cup chopped yellow onion\n\n\u00bc cup chopped red bell pepper\n\n\u00bc cup chopped celery\n\n\u00bc cup dry white wine\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n1 tsp. yellow mustard\n\n\u00bc tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n\u00bc tsp. curry powder\n\n1 lb. fresh jumbo lump crabmeat\n\n3 Tbsp. chopped green onion\n\n2 tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n1\u00bd cups bread crumbs\n\n2 lemons, cut into wedges\n\nWhite r\u00e9moulade sauce (see Shrimp R\u00e9moulade with Two Sauces, this page) or tartar sauce\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Melt 1 stick (8 tablespoons) of the butter in a skillet until it bubbles. Add the onion, bell pepper, and celery, and saut\u00e9 until soft.\n\n2. Add the wine, lemon juice, yellow mustard, Worcestershire sauce, and curry powder, and bring to a boil, stirring to blend. When the liquid is reduced by half, add the crab, green onion, Creole seasoning, and salt. Stir gently, trying not to break up the lumps of crabmeat too much. Remove the skillet from the heat. Add the bread crumbs and gently stir until just mixed.\n\n3. Although you can make the resulting mixture into cakes or balls (which you then bake on a pan in the oven, or even deep fry), I find it comes out better if you bake it inside clean crab shells or gratin dishes. Top each piece with about \u00bd a teaspoon of the remaining butter. Bake until the tops bubble and brown, 10\u201312 minutes\n\n4. Serve with lemon wedges and white r\u00e9moulade sauce or tartar sauce. SERVES SIX TO EIGHT.\n\nOysters Rockefeller\n\n_Perhaps the strangest request for a recipe I've ever received came from Bernard Guste, the fifth-generation proprietor of Antoine's. He wanted my recipe for oysters Rockefeller. His reason was that since Antoine's own recipe (remember, they invented the dish) is a secret, they needed something to give the many people who ask for it. He told me that my recipe is embarrassingly close to the real thing. I'm flattered. And if I say so myself, he's right. It took me about 50 tries to create a match for the flavor of Antoine's great specialty._\n\n_Oysters Rockefeller never did include either spinach or Mornay (white cheese) sauce, which most recipes call for. It does include green food coloring\u2014an atrocity now but common a century ago, when this dish was created. The Peychaud's bitters, a New Orleans specialty, can be ordered from the Sazerac Company (https://thesazeracgiftshop.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=2)._\n\n_Oysters Rockefeller has always been among my favorite Creole-French dishes and one that creates its own special occasion whenever you make it._\n\n4 dozen fresh, shucked oysters, with their liquor\n\n2 cups chopped celery\n\n2 cups chopped flat-leaf parsley leaves\n\n1\u00bd cups chopped green onion, green parts only\n\n1 cup chopped fresh fennel\n\n1 cup chopped watercress\n\n\u00bd tsp. chopped fresh garlic\n\n3 anchovy fillets\n\n\u00bc cup ketchup\n\n1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 tsp. sugar\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n1 tsp. ground white pepper\n\n\u00bd tsp. cayenne\n\n2 dashes of Peychaud's bitters (optional; see headnote)\n\n2 drops of green food coloring (optional, but authentic)\n\n2 sticks (16 Tbsp.) butter\n\n1 cup flour\n\n1\u00bd cups very fine, fresh bread crumbs\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Drain the oysters, reserving the liquor. Pour the oyster liquor into a 2-cup measuring cup, add enough cold water to make 2 cups, and set aside.\n\n2. Working in small batches, process the vegetables and anchovies together in a food processor to a near-puree, using the oyster water to help things along.\n\n3. Combine the vegetable puree and any remaining oyster water in a saucepan and cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, until the excess water has evaporated but the greens remain very moist. Stir in the ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, sugar, salt, pepper, cayenne, bitters, and food coloring.\n\n4. Make a blond roux by heating the butter in a medium saucepan over mediumlow heat. Add the flour and cook, stirring often, until the mixture just begins to brown. Add the roux to the greens and stir until the sauce takes on a different, lighter texture. Then mix in the bread crumbs.\n\n5. Place the oysters on individual half shells or in small ovenproof ramekins or gratin dishes. Top each oyster with a generous tablespoon (or more) of the sauce. Bake until the sauce just begins to brown, about 15 minutes. Serve immediately.\n\nIf you are using oyster shells, serve on a bed of rock salt or on a napkin to keep the shells from rocking. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nOysters Rockefeller Flan\n\n_Every food writer of my generation has a Julia Child story. Mine involves this dish. Chef Andr\u00e9 Poirot at Begue's at the Royal Sonesta Hotel cooked it for a small dinner party for Julia in the mid-1980s. I sat across the table from her and heard her declare, in her distinctive voice, \"Divine! Very creative!\" (We were not to hear any more such praise during the remainder of that meal.)_\n\n_A savory custard holds together the traditional ingredients for oysters Rockefeller._\n\nOYSTERS\n\n1 lb. fresh spinach, well washed, stems removed\n\n1\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n2 Tbsp. dry white wine\n\n2 dozen fresh, shucked oysters, with their liquor\n\n1 Tbsp. butter, softened\n\n5 eggs\n\n3 cups heavy whipping cream\n\n2 Tbsp. Pernod\n\nPinch of nutmeg Pinch of ground white pepper\n\nSAUCE\n\n6 Tbsp. dry white wine\n\n2 Tbsp. chopped shallots\n\n1 cup heavy whipping cream\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter, melted\n\nJuice of 1 lemon\n\nSalt and ground white pepper to taste\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Blanch the spinach for 1 minute in 2 quarts of boiling water seasoned with 1 teaspoon of the salt. Drain and douse the spinach with cold water. Drain again and set aside.\n\n2. Bring the white wine and oyster liquor to a light boil in a medium skillet and poach the oysters in it for about 2 minutes. Remove from the heat, let the oysters cool a bit, and chop coarsely. Strain the poaching liquid and reserve.\n\n3. Lightly grease the insides of six 6-ounce ramekins with the butter. Line the insides of these with leaves of cooked spinach, draping the ends of the leaves over the sides. Divide the chopped oysters among all the cups.\n\n4. Whisk the poaching liquid, eggs, cream, Pernod, nutmeg, pepper, and remaining \u00bc teaspoon of salt together in a bowl. Pour the mixture over the oysters in the cups. Fold the spinach leaves over the custard.\n\n5. Arrange the ramekins in a large baking dish. Pour in enough hot water to come halfway up sides of ramekins. Bake until the custard is just set, about 40 minutes.\n\n6. While the flans are baking, make the sauce. Boil the wine and shallots together in a saucepan until the wine is reduced to 1 tablespoon. Add the heavy whipping cream and reduce until sauce is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Whisk in the butter, lemon juice, and season to taste with salt and white pepper. Strain the sauce, discarding solids, and keep warm.\n\n7. Allow the ramekins to cool for a few minutes after baking, then unmold onto serving plates. Spoon the sauce over the flans. SERVES SIX.\n\nOysters Bienville\n\n_Not enough restaurants make oysters Bienville anymore, which is a shame. This classic baked-on-the-shell dish, named for the founder of New Orleans, is seriously delicious. However, there's no gold standard for the dish. Nobody is sure who invented it, in fact. Arnaud's, Antoine's, and Commander's all make claims. Pascal's Manale and Delmonico are also famous for their versions._\n\n_I'm persuaded that the ingredient list must contain bacon, shrimp, mushrooms, bell peppers, sherry, a light roux, Parmesan cheese, a milder cheese, and bread crumbs. Other ingredients lurk in the background. You can bake oysters Bienville classically on the shells, but I find they're just as good made in a small casserole or gratin dish. I serve them that way at Thanksgiving instead of oyster dressing._\n\n_When cooking, oysters release a lot of water, resulting in a watery sauce. The solution is to use more bread crumbs than looks or feels right. And to have the sauce fully cooked and hot before it goes into the oven, so that the dish is cooked mostly by heat from above._\n\n4 dozen fresh, shucked large oysters, with their liquor\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter\n\n1 lb. small shrimp (50 count), peeled, rinsed, and coarsely chopped\n\n1 rib celery, coarsely chopped\n\n1 large red bell pepper, seeded and coarsely chopped\n\n\u00bd lb. small white mushrooms, coarsely chopped\n\n\u00bc cup dry sherry\n\n4 strips lean bacon, fried crisp and crumbled\n\n2 green onions, finely chopped\n\n\u00bd cup flour\n\n\u2154 cup milk, hot\n\n2 egg yolks\n\n\u2154 cup finely shredded mozzarella cheese\n\n1 cup bread crumbs\n\n\u00bc cup grated Parmesan cheese\n\n1 tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Drain the oysters, reserving the liquor. Put the oyster liquor into a 1-cup measuring cup and add enough water, if necessary, to make 1 cup liquid.\n\n2. Heat 1 teaspoon of the butter in a medium skillet until it bubbles. Saut\u00e9 the chopped shrimp until it just turns pink. Remove and set aside. Add 2 tablespoons of the butter to the skillet and heat until it bubbles. Add the celery, bell pepper, and mushrooms. Saut\u00e9 until they get tender. Add the sherry and bring to a boil for about a minute.\n\n3. Add the bacon, green onions, and reserved shrimp. Cook for another minute, then add the reserved oyster liquor. Bring the mixture to a boil and cook for about 2 minutes more. The sauce should be wet but not sloshy. Remove from heat.\n\n4. Heat the remaining butter in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat. Add the flour and cook, stirring constantly, to make a blond roux. When you see the first hints of browning, remove from the heat and whisk in the milk to form a b\u00e9chamel. (It will have the texture of mashed potatoes.) Add the egg yolks to the b\u00e9chamel, stirring quickly to combine it before the eggs have a chance to set. Add the mozzarella slowly to the b\u00e9chamel, stirring until the cheese melts.\n\n5. Add the b\u00e9chamel to the shrimp mixture in the skillet and stir to combine.\n\n6. Mix the bread crumbs, Parmesan, Creole seasoning, and salt together in a bowl. Stir two-thirds of this mixture into the sauced shrimp. Set the remaining bread-crumb mixture aside.\n\n7. Cover the bottom of a shallow baking dish with oysters, leaving just a little space between them. Top with the Bienville sauce. Sprinkle the top with the remaining bread-crumb mixture. Bake until the sauce is bubbling and the top is browned, 15\u201320 minutes (depending on the size of the baking dish). SERVES EIGHT TO TWELVE.\n\nCreole-Italian Oysters\n\n_After Bienville and Rockefeller, this garlic-and-bread-crumby concoction is the most popular in the pantheon of local oyster dishes. The most famous version of the dish is Oysters Mosca, named for the restaurant that made it popular, but every restaurant that's even slightly Italianate makes a version of it, plus plenty of others. My version is a little spicier than most, inspired by the recipe used at La Cuisine. The ideal side dish with this is Pasta Bordelaise (see recipe,this page)._\n\n\u2153 cup extra-virgin olive oil\n\n24 fresh, shucked large oysters, partially drained\n\n2 Tbsp. finely chopped garlic\n\n2 Tbsp. chopped flat-leaf parsley leaves\n\n1 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice\n\n\u00bd tsp. crushed red pepper\n\n2 cups bread crumbs\n\n\u2154 cup grated Parmesan cheese\n\n1 Tbsp. Italian seasoning\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Pour a little of the olive oil into the bottom of a baking dish of almost any size, from a small gratin dish to a pie plate. Arrange the oysters in the dish, leaving about \u00bd inch of space between them.\n\n2. Sprinkle the oysters with the garlic, parsley, lemon juice, and crushed red pepper. Combine the bread crumbs, Parmesan, and Italian seasoning in a bowl and sprinkle evenly over the oysters.\n\n3. Bake until the sauce is bubbling and the bread crumbs on top brown, about 10\u201315 minutes (depending on the size of the baking dish). SERVES SIX.\n\nOysters Dunbar\n\n_Next to the Holy Grail, the most difficult thing in the world to find is a recipe from a restaurant that is no longer in business. I'm asked for them at the rate of about one a week. I think I have been asked for this one at least a hundred times._\n\n_Corinne Dunbar's was a unique restaurant on St. Charles Avenue that operated more like a private home. It had a fixed menu each day, and you never knew what you'd be served. But you hoped it would be oysters Dunbar, the restaurant's most famous dish. It was an oyster-and-artichoke casserole, and although I have never been able to obtain an authentic recipe from original sources, I've managed to piece together enough facts about it to come up with this one. At the very least, it seems close to what I remember from the one time I went to Dunbar's in the early 1970s._\n\n2 dozen fresh, shucked oysters, with their liquor\n\n2 Tbsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\nJuice of 1 lemon\n\n4 large artichokes\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) plus 2 Tbsp. butter\n\n2 Tbsp. flour\n\n\u00bc cup finely chopped green onion\n\n1 cup sliced fresh mushrooms\n\n\u00bc tsp. Tabasco\n\nFreshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n\u00bd cup bread crumbs\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Drain the oysters, reserving the liquor. Put the oyster liquor into a 1-cup measuring cup and add enough water, if necessary, to make 1 cup liquid.\n\n2. Bring a large pot of water to a boil with the 2 tablespoons of salt and half the lemon juice. Cook the artichokes until tender, then remove from the water and set aside to cool.\n\n3. Using a spoon, scrape the meat from the tough outer artichoke leaves into a bowl and discard the leaves. Pull off the tender inner leaves and reserve them whole. Remove the fuzzy \"choke\" from the artichoke bottom, chop the bottom into medium dice, and reserve.\n\n4. In a skillet, melt the stick of butter until it bubbles. Add the flour and cook, stirring often, to form a loose blond roux. Add the green onion and cook until tender.\n\n5. Add the reserved oyster liquor and mushrooms. Bring to a light boil, reduce heat to a simmer, and cook until the mushrooms are tender and the liquid is very thick. Add the oysters and cook for 2 minutes more. Season to taste with Tabasco, salt, and pepper.\n\n6. Scatter the reserved artichoke leaves and meat evenly in a baking dish. Pour the sauced oyster mixture over the artichokes and top with bread crumbs. Dot the top with the remaining butter and bake until the bread crumbs are browned and the rapid bubbling of the liquid contents has begun to slow, 12\u201315 minutes. Allow to cool for about 5 minutes. SERVES FOUR TO SIX.\n\nOysters Jaubert\n\n_Among the most distinctive of New Orleans dishes are oysters served with various kinds of brown sauces. There must be a dozen such dishes, and I've never met one I didn't like. This one is my attempt to recapture a dish served at a long-gone Central Business District caf\u00e9 called Guertin's._\n\n1 quart fresh, shucked oysters, with their liquor\n\n1\u00bd sticks (12 Tbsp.) butter\n\n1 medium onion, chopped\n\n2 green onions, green parts only, finely chopped\n\n\u00bd very ripe green bell pepper, chopped\n\n\u00bd stalk celery, chopped\n\n3 cloves garlic, chopped\n\n2 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 Tbsp. Louisiana hot sauce, such as Crystal Hot Sauce\n\n1 tsp. fresh lemon juice\n\n1 Tbsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc cup flour\n\n1 cup chicken stock, warm (see recipe, this page)\n\n1. Drain the oysters, reserving the liquor. Put the oyster liquor into a 1-cup measuring cup and add enough water, if necessary, to make 1 cup liquid.\n\n2. Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat until it bubbles. Saut\u00e9 the vegetables until they turn tender, then add the oysters. Cook until the edges begin to curl, 3\u20134 minutes.\n\n3. Add the Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, lemon juice, Creole seasoning, and salt, bring to a boil, and hold there for about a minute.\n\n4. Sprinkle the flour into the skillet and gently stir until the flour is fully incorporated into the sauce. This should make for a very thick mixture.\n\n5. Warm the reserved oyster liquor in a small saucepan and gradually add it to the skillet. Add just enough warm chicken stock, again gradually, until the mixture has a stewlike consistency. Adjust seasonings and serve immediately over toast or pasta. SERVES EIGHT AS AN APPETIZER OR FOUR AS AN ENTREE.\n\nOysters Polo\n\n_The Windsor Court Grill Room invented this very unusual baked oyster dish some years ago. After a few changes of chefs, managers, and owners, the memory of the dish has departed from their kitchen. Thank goodness we did this one on one of my television features. It's one of the most unusual of the many baked oyster dishes in New Orleans. The sauce is rich with cheese, sharp with horseradish, and crusty with bread crumbs. Although the classic restaurant way to serve this is on the shells, it comes out just fine in gratin dishes._\n\n2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, melted\n\n1 cup fresh bread crumbs\n\n\u00be cup grated Parmesan cheese, divided\n\n1 Tbsp. herbes de Provence\n\nSalt and freshly ground white pepper to taste\n\n1 small onion, peeled\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n1 whole clove\n\n2 cups milk\n\nFew drops Tabasco (optional)\n\n\u00be stick (6 Tbsp.) unsalted butter\n\n6 Tbsp. all-purpose flour\n\n4 Tbsp. prepared horseradish, drained\n\nPinch grated nutmeg\n\n24 fresh, shucked oysters, with their shells\n\n1. In a bowl, combine the butter, bread crumbs, \u00bd cup of the Parmesan cheese, herbes de Provence, and a pinch of salt and pepper. Set aside.\n\n2. Place the onion, bay leaf, clove, milk, and Tabasco in a small heavy saucepan over medium heat. When the mixture comes to a boil, remove the pan from the heat and strain. Reserve the liquid and keep warm.\n\n3. Melt \u00bd stick butter in a medium saut\u00e9 pan over low heat. When the butter is foamy, add the flour and make a blond roux. Remove from the heat when the first signs of browning appear. Whisk in the strained milk until the the sauce is fluffy and dry. Add the remaining \u00bc cup of Parmesan cheese, horseradish, and nutmeg. Season with salt, pepper, and a few drops Tabasco sauce, to taste.\n\n4. Fill a medium saucepan with water and bring to a boil. Fill a bowl with cold water and ice cubes. Poach the oysters in the boiling water until their edges curl. Remove with a slotted spoon and plunge immediately into the ice water to stop the cooking. Drain and set aside.\n\n5. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Place a layer of rock salt about \u00bd inch deep in 2 metal baking pans. Press half of the shells onto the salt. Spoon 1 tablespoon of sauce into each shell, then top with an oyster. Cover with 1 tablespoon more of sauce, then sprinkle the bread crumb mixture from step 1 on top. Bake for 10 minutes, or until a golden crust forms. SERVES FOUR TO SIX.\n\nOysters Roland\n\n_Roland Huet was one of the most skillful French chefs ever to work in New Orleans. Born and trained in the Loire Valley of France, he fetched up in the 1960s at Galatoire's in the French Quarter. Chris Ansel\u2014one of the family managers of Galatoire's\u2014left in the 1970s to open his own restaurant, Christian's. Roland created the menu that would make Christian's an essential restaurant. On the menu was this baked oyster appetizer. It remained until the restaurant came to an end with Hurricane Katrina._\n\n\u00bd cup water\n\n48 fresh, shucked medium oysters, with their shells\n\n1 bunch curly-leaf parsley, bottom stems removed\n\n3 cloves garlic\n\n8 oz. small mushrooms, well washed\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n1 tsp. freshly ground black pepper\n\nGenerous pinch nutmeg\n\n1 lb. softened butter\n\n1 cup French bread crumbs\n\nFrench bread\n\n1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.\n\n2. Bring the water to a light boil in a small skillet. Add the oysters and poach for 2 minutes. Strain the pan contents, reserving oysters and liquid. Return the liquid to a light boil and reduce by about a third.\n\n3. Put the parsley, garlic, mushrooms, salt, pepper, and nutmeg into a food processor, and process into a very fine mixture. Add the butter and process into a coarse, gritty puree.\n\n4. Add the bread crumbs and the reserved stock from the oysters and process only long enough to mix everything thoroughly.\n\n5. Place 6 oysters in the bottom of each of 8 small gratin dishes. With a spatula, lightly pack down enough sauce to cover the oysters completely, filling the dishes nearly to the top. (You can prepare the dish to this point and hold in the refrigerator. Take them out of the refrigerator a half-hour before the final baking.)\n\n6. Bake the gratins of oysters until the tops are distinctly browned and crusty and the sauce is heaving and steaming. Serve immediately with hot French bread for getting up the extra sauce. MAKES EIGHT APPETIZERS.\n\nOysters au Poivre\n\n_In 1997, my wife ordered me to enter the National Oyster Cooking Competition with this dish. The event takes place in St. Mary's County, Maryland, where the Chesapeake Bay oysters are almost identical to the ones we have in Louisiana. I came in second. But I think you'll enjoy this, one of my favorite fancy ways to eat oysters. The sauce is the best part, so make sure you provide lots of fresh, hot French bread to sop it up._\n\n2 dozen fresh oysters, the larger the better, preferably freshly shucked, with their liquor\n\n2 cups heavy whipping cream\n\n2 tsp. mixed dried peppercorns (black, white, green, pink)\n\n8 sprigs fresh thyme\n\nPinch of saffron threads\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n1. Drain the oysters, reserving the liquor. Pour the oyster liquor into a 1-cup measuring cup and add enough water, if necessary, to make 1 cup liquid. Set oysters aside.\n\n2. Combine the cream, peppercorns, 2 sprigs of the thyme, and the saffron in a stainless steel or porcelain 2-quart saucepan. Bring to a gentle simmer. (Watch to make sure the pan doesn't boil over, which cream likes to do.) Add the reserved oyster liquor and return to a simmer. Cook until the liquid is reduced to about 1 cup, about 30 minutes.\n\n3. Add 6 oysters to the reduced sauce and let them cook until the sauce resumes bubbling, about 2\u20133 minutes. Using a slotted spoon or a skimmer, remove the oysters from the pan and keep warm while you cook the remaining oysters in batches of 6.\n\n4. When all the oysters are cooked, plunge them back into the sauce for a few seconds to warm them back up. Arrange 3\u20136 oysters (depending on size) on plates. Spoon a little extra sauce over the oysters, stirring the pan to distribute the peppercorns and herbs. Garnish each plate with the remaining thyme sprigs. SERVES FOUR TO EIGHT.\n\nOysters en Brochette\n\n_This is the first dish I ever impressed anybody with. Even if you feel yourself very maladroit in the kitchen, you can get the same effect. This is a very easy dish to prepare. All you need is fat, fresh oysters and thick-sliced, smoky bacon._\n\n2 sticks (16 Tbsp.) butter\n\nVegetable oil, for frying\n\n1 cup flour\n\n1 Tbsp. salt\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n4 dozen fresh, shucked large oysters, drained\n\n12 slices bacon, each cut crosswise into quarters\n\nJuice of \u00bd lemon\n\n1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n1. Melt the butter in a small saucepan over very low heat. Once the bubbles subside, skim the foam off the top. Keep the butter over the lowest possible heat on your stovetop.\n\n2. Pour the oil into a deep, wide pan to a depth of about an inch. Heat over medium-high heat until temperature reaches 375 degrees F.\n\n3. Meanwhile, combine the flour, salt, and Creole seasoning in a wide bowl.\n\n4. Skewer the oysters and bacon on 8-inch-long metal or bamboo skewers, alternating each oyster with a square of bacon. Arrange them so they're barely touching. Coat the brochettes with the seasoned flour and shake off the excess.\n\n5. Fry the brochettes, turning once, until the oysters are golden brown, about 2 minutes per side. Keep them warm while you cook the remaining brochettes.\n\n6. Carefully add the lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce to the warm butter in the skillet. Careful! This may make the butter foam up again and perhaps splatter.\n\n7. Use a fork to unskewer the brochettes onto serving plates. Stir the butter sauce to get some of the browned solids at the bottom and spoon about 2 tablespoons of the sauce over each brochette. MAKES EIGHT APPETIZERS.\n\nShrimp Limone\n\n_This is a dazzling dish for shrimp lovers. The lemon really stands out, and the bit of smoky richness from the ham and the touch of red pepper at the end bring it to the culinary border of Italy and Louisiana._\n\n\u00bd cup extra-virgin olive oil\n\n2 cloves garlic, crushed\n\n24 large shrimp (16\u201320 count), peeled and deveined\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter\n\n\u00bc cup chopped shallots\n\n10 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, leaves only, chopped\n\n2 oz. lean, smoky ham, thinly sliced and cut into ribbons\n\n\u00bd cup dry white wine\n\n\u00bc cup lemon juice\n\n2 dashes of Tabasco\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n8 thin slices French bread, toasted\n\n8 thin slices lemon, for garnish\n\n1. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat until it shimmers. Add the garlic cloves and saut\u00e9 until the garlic begins to brown. Remove and discard garlic.\n\n2. Add the shrimp to the oil and saut\u00e9 over medium-high heat until they just begin to turn pink. Add the butter, shallots, parsley, and ham, and cook until the shallots are soft.\n\n3. Add the wine and lemon juice, season with the Tabasco and salt, and bring to a boil. Reduce the liquid by about two-thirds.\n\n4. Place the French bread on individual plates. Place 3 shrimp on each slice and spoon the sauce over all. Garnish each serving with a lemon slice. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nShrimp with Fennel and Herbs\n\n_The flavors of shrimp and fennel have always worked well together for my palate. This is a great light appetizer with a big and slightly offbeat flavor._\n\n3 Tbsp. olive oil\n\n1 lb. large shrimp (16\u201320 count), peeled and deveined\n\n1 fennel bulb, finely sliced\n\n2 cloves garlic, chopped\n\n2 shallots, finely chopped\n\n\u00bd cup dry white wine\n\n2 Tbsp. Herbsaint or Pernod\n\n1 tsp. dried thyme\n\n1 tsp. dried chervil\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. freshly ground black pepper\n\n4 dashes of Tabasco\n\n1 tsp. lemon juice\n\nChopped flat-leaf parsley, for garnish\n\n1. Heat the oil in a skillet until it shimmers. Saut\u00e9 the shrimp and fennel until the shrimp just begin to turn pink. Add the garlic, shallots, white wine, and Herbsaint or Pernod. Boil for about a minute.\n\n2. Lower the heat to maintain a simmer. Add the thyme, chervil, salt, pepper, Tabasco, and lemon juice. Cook until the sauce thickens. Garnish with the parsley. SERVES SIX.\n\nSpicy Garlic Shrimp\n\n_Every summer the Upperline Restaurant has a Garlic Festival\u2014a terrific menu of original dishes using garlic in all its delightful gustatory guises. This one is from the event's early days, compliments of the deft hand of the late chef Tom Cowman._\n\nGARLIC MAYONNAISE\n\n\u00bd cup mayonnaise\n\n2 Tbsp. Dijon or Creole mustard\n\n1 Tbsp. red wine vinegar\n\n2 Tbsp. chopped garlic\n\nSHRIMP\n\n\u00bc cup vegetable oil\n\n1 Tbsp. chili powder\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. cayenne\n\n1 tsp. chopped garlic\n\n\u00bd lb. small-to-medium shrimp, peeled and deveined\n\n\u00bd medium onion, sliced thinly\n\nFour 2-inch squares Jalape\u00f1o-Cheese Cornbread (see recipe, this page)\n\n1. To make the garlic mayonnaise: Whisk all of the ingredients together in a bowl. It's better to make this a day ahead of time and refrigerate to let the flavors blend.\n\n2. To prepare the shrimp: Mix the oil, spices, and garlic together in a bowl. Add the shrimp and toss to coat. Cover and let marinate in the refrigerator for 1\u20132 hours.\n\n3. Heat a medium skillet over medium-high heat. Add the shrimp, the marinade, and the onion, and cook until the shrimp are pink and firm, 4\u20135 minutes, depending on the size of the shrimp.\n\n4. Split the cornbread squares and spread both halves with \u00bc cup of the garlic mayonnaise. Put 2 cornbread halves on each of 4 plates and spoon the shrimp over the bread. SERVES FOUR.\n\nTasso Shrimp\n\n_The late chef Jamie Shannon's too short career brought many good dishes to the menu at Commander's Palace. This is one of his best. It looks simple, but it explodes with flavor. Tasso is a Cajun-style ham that is cured to be very spicy, smoky, and salty. It's used more as a seasoning than as a meat. I'd recommend chef Paul Prudhomme's brand, which is available in specialty food stores and by mail order (see Food Sources,this page)._\n\n6 Tbsp. butter, softened\n\nPinch of chopped garlic\n\nPinch of chopped shallots (or onion)\n\n1 Tbsp. Louisiana hot sauce, such as Crystal Hot Sauce\n\n1 tsp. heavy whipping cream\n\n24 jumbo shrimp (20\u201325 count), peeled and deveined\n\n4 oz. tasso, cut into matchstick-size pieces\n\nVegetable oil, for frying\n\n1 cup flour\n\n1 Tbsp. salt\n\n\u00bc cup pepper jelly\n\nPickled okra or pickled green beans, for garnish\n\n1. Melt 2 tablespoons of the butter in a medium skillet over medium-low heat. Saut\u00e9 the garlic and shallots for a minute. Add the hot sauce and bring to a boil. Cook until very little liquid is left. Add the cream and cook about 1 minute more.\n\n2. Remove from heat and gradually whisk in the remaining butter until it takes on a creamy consistency. (This is a New Orleans version of beurre blanc.) Keep warm.\n\n3. Cut a slit down the back of each shrimp and insert a strip of tasso. Close the slit with a toothpick.\n\n4. Pour the oil to a depth of \u00bd inch into a large, deep skillet and heat to about 375 degrees F. Meanwhile, mix the flour and salt together in a wide bowl. Dust the skewered shrimp with the seasoned flour. Fry the shrimp, in batches, until golden brown. Drain on paper towels.\n\n5. Transfer the cooked shrimp to a bowl, add the sauce, and toss to coat.\n\n6. Spread a thin film of pepper jelly on the bottom of each of 8 small dishes and arrange 3 shrimp on each plate. Garnish with pickled okra or pickled green beans. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nCrawfish Boulettes\n\n_Crawfish bisque is traditionally served with stuffed crawfish heads, but I find both the stuffing (while making) and the unstuffing (while eating) of the heads to be inconvenient and messy. Instead, I make small boulettes, or balls, with all the same ingredients except the head shells. These also make great appetizers when served with hollandaise, white r\u00e9moulade (see Shrimp R\u00e9moulade with Two Sauces,this page), or tartar sauce._\n\n1 cup cooked crawfish tails, peeled\n\n1 egg yolk\n\n1 Tbsp. olive oil\n\n1 tsp. chopped celery\n\n1 tsp. chopped flat-leaf parsley leaves\n\n1 tsp. chopped red bell pepper\n\n1 tsp. chopped green onion tops\n\n1 cup bread crumbs\n\n1 cup flour\n\n1 Tbsp. salt\n\n1 Tbsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\nVegetable oil, for frying\n\n1. Chop the crawfish tails very fine in a food processor. Add the egg yolk and process to blend.\n\n2. Heat the olive oil in a medium skillet over medium heat. Add the celery, parsley, bell pepper, and green onion, and saut\u00e9 until tender. Add the crawfish-egg mixture and warm through.\n\n3. Add the bread crumbs a little at a time to stiffen the mixture. (You may not need all the bread crumbs.) Transfer the crawfish mixture to a bowl and set aside.\n\n4. Mix the flour, salt, and Creole seasoning together in a wide bowl.\n\n5. Pour the oil into a large, deep skillet to a depth of \u00bd inch and heat over medium-high heat until the temperature reaches 375 degrees F. Divide the crawfish mixture into 16 equal portions and shape them into balls. Roll them in the seasoned flour and shake off the excess. Fry until golden brown. Drain on paper towels.\n\nIf you're serving this in Crawfish Bisque (see recipe, this page), drop 1\u20132 boulettes into each serving of bisque at the table or serve the boulettes on the side. MAKES ABOUT SIXTEEN BOULETTES.\n\nCrawfish with Morel Mushrooms\n\n_Chef Raymond Toups\u2014then the executive chef of the Rib Room at the Omni Royal Orleans hotel\u2014prepared this recipe once on my old television show. Afterward, so many people came in to order it that the kitchen nicknamed it the \"TV Special.\" It's a terrific combination of flavors. I wouldn't bother making it except at the height of crawfish season, March through June. It's best served with rice, but it's also good with pasta._\n\n1 oz. dried morel mushrooms (or 4 oz. fresh, if you're lucky enough to have them)\n\n2 Tbsp. butter\n\n1\u00bd lb. fresh crawfish tails\n\n1 Tbsp. chopped shallots\n\n1 tsp. chopped fresh tarragon\n\n1 tsp. chopped fresh chives\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\nPinch of cayenne\n\n1\u00bd cups cooked long-grain rice\n\n1. Soak the morels in water to reconstitute them. Change the water several times to remove any sand.\n\n2. Melt the butter in a large skillet. Add the crawfish meat and morels, and cook until they're hot all the way through\u2014about 2 minutes. Add the shallots, tarragon, chives, salt, and cayenne, and cook for about 1 minute more.\n\n3. Divide the rice among 8 plates and spoon the crawfish mixture over it. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nGratin of Crawfish Tails\n\n_This is what I came up with when I tried to build my favorite aspects of some of my favorite crawfish appetizers into a single dish. Don't attempt this when crawfish are out of season. Freshness is essential. Best: crawfish you boil (without crab boil) and peel yourself. Worst: imported thawed, frozen, cooked crawfish._\n\nMARINADE\n\n\u00bc cup dry white wine\n\nJuice of \u00bd lemon\n\n2 dashes of Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 tsp. yellow mustard\n\n1 tsp. Tabasco Garlic Pepper Sauce\n\nCRAWFISH\n\n1\u00bd cups cooked crawfish tails, peeled\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter\n\n3 Tbsp. flour\n\n1 tsp. minced garlic\n\n2 Tbsp. brandy\n\n1 cup half-and-half, warmed\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried tarragon\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried chervil\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried dill\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. ground white pepper\n\n18 slices French bread, toasted\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Whisk all of the marinade ingredients together in a bowl. Add the crawfish meat and toss to coat. Marinate for about 5 minutes.\n\n2. Heat the butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat until it bubbles, then stir in the flour and cook, stirring constantly, to make a light roux. Cook until the texture changes, about 5 minutes, but don't allow the roux to brown.\n\n3. Add the garlic and stir for about 30 seconds. Lower the heat to the lowest setting, stir in the brandy, and cook for about a minute. Add the half-and-half and whisk until the sauce thickens. Add all of the remaining ingredients except the French bread and simmer, stirring once or twice, for about 2 minutes.\n\n4. Stir in the crawfish gently. Continue to simmer until the crawfish is heated through.\n\n5. Divide the crawfish mixture among 4\u20136 ramekins or gratin dishes. Bake until the sauce begins to bubble and brown around the edges, 3\u20135 minutes. Serve immediately with the French bread. SERVES FOUR TO SIX.\n\nAsparagus and Crawfish with Glazed Hollandaise\n\n_The best time to make this dish is April and early May, when both crawfish and asparagus are excellent and inexpensive. The flavor blend, enriched by the hollandaise, is remarkable._\n\n1 lb. asparagus, the tough bottom inch or two cut off\n\n\u00bd cup cooked crawfish tails, peeled\n\n2 Tbsp. finely shredded Parmesan cheese\n\n1 cup Hollandaise (see recipe, this page)\n\nCayenne\n\n1. The best way to cook the asparagus is in a steamer, but it can also be done in a large skillet. If you're using a skillet, bring \u00bd inch of water to a slow boil and drop in the asparagus. Let the asparagus cook about 2 minutes, until crisptender, then remove, being careful not to break them. Run cold water over the asparagus to stop the cooking, then drain.\n\n2. Preheat the broiler. Arrange the asparagus in a single layer, all parallel to one another, on a broiler pan. Sprinkle the crawfish and the Parmesan across the centers of the asparagus spears. Pour the hollandaise over the centers of the spears, leaving the tips clean.\n\n3. Broil the asparagus until the hollandaise begins to turn light brown on top, about 3 minutes. Remove from the oven. Use a long metal spatula to transfer 6\u201310 spears at a time to a serving dish, making sure the topping stays intact. Sprinkle lightly with cayenne. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nSeared Scallops with Artichokes\n\n_This is a signature dish at the Pelican Club, where chef Richard Hughes calls it by the misleading name scallop-stuffed artichokes. (The recipe uses only the artichoke bottoms and some of the leaves; the rest of the artichoke can be used for other recipes.) Sophisticated in both flavor and appearance, this dish is best made with dry-pack (also known as day-boat) scallops, which have not been processed for a long shelf life. Be careful not to overcook the scallops. Use high heat and get them out of the pan while they're still bulging._\n\n4 small whole artichokes\n\nGARLIC BEURRE BLANC\n\n\u00bd cup dry white wine\n\n1 Tbsp. white vinegar\n\n1 Tbsp. heavy whipping cream\n\n1 head garlic, roasted until semisoft\n\n1\u00bd sticks (12 Tbsp.) butter, softened\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\nSCALLOPS\n\n\u00bc cup clarified butter (see recipe, this page)\n\n1 lb. day-boat sea scallops, medium-large\n\nVINAIGRETTE\n\n1 Tbsp. balsamic vinegar\n\n1 tsp. chopped fresh tarragon\n\n1 Tbsp. chopped flat-leaf parsley leaves\n\n1 tsp. grated Parmesan cheese\n\n\u00bc cup extra-virgin olive oil\n\nGARNISH\n\n1 tomato, finely diced\n\n1. Wash and then steam the artichokes until tender, 20\u201330 minutes. Pull off and save 24 perfect leaves. Clean and remove the artichoke bottoms and set aside.\n\n2. To make the garlic beurre blanc: Bring the wine and vinegar to a boil in a medium skillet. Lower the heat to a low simmer and add the cream. Puree the roasted garlic with the side of a kitchen knife and add to the skillet. Whisk in the softened butter, a little at a time, until the mixture takes on a creamy consistency. Add salt and pepper to taste. Remove from heat and reserve.\n\n3. Heat 2 tablespoons of the clarified butter in a medium skillet over high heat. Add the sea scallops, in batches, and saut\u00e9 until they are lightly browned but still bulging, about 1\u00bd minutes per side. Add more butter to the skillet, as needed, to complete the cooking.\n\n4. Combine all the vinaigrette ingredients except for the olive oil in a bowl. Gradually whisk in the oil.\n\n5. Place an artichoke bottom on each of 4 plates. Surround each bottom with 8 artichoke leaves. Drizzle some of the vinaigrette over the artichokes. Divide the scallops among the 4 plates and spoon 2 tablespoons of the garlic beurre blanc over each. Garnish with the diced tomato. SERVES FOUR.\n\nChicken Livers with Bacon and Pepper Jelly\n\n_It's time for chicken livers to return to the menus of New Orleans restaurants. We used to get them all the time in all sorts of dishes but rarely anymore. A particular favorite of mine was the chicken liver omelet at the Coffee Pot. The Praline Connection made a hit with pepper jelly\u2013coated fried chicken livers. I borrowed that idea as well as the old rumaki concept from Chinese restaurants to give you this dish. It's absolutely spectacular served over a plate of red beans and rice._\n\n24 chicken livers\n\n12 slices bacon\n\n\u00bc cup pepper jelly\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n1 green onion, finely chopped\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n1. Preheat the broiler. Bring a pot of water to a rolling boil.\n\n2. Rinse the chicken livers. Cut the bacon strips, crosswise, in half. Cook the livers and bacon in the pot of boiling water for about 2 minutes. Remove, drain, and cool for a few minutes on paper towels. Roll the chicken livers and bacon on the paper towels to dry them.\n\n3. Whisk the pepper jelly, lemon juice, green onion, and salt together in a small bowl. Roll the chicken livers in the pepper-jelly mixture to coat well. Place each liver atop a half-slice of bacon and roll it up. Skewer 4\u20136 bacon-wrapped livers together on metal or bamboo skewers, leaving about \u00bd inch between each liver.\n\n4. Place the skewers on the broiler rack and broil until the bacon is crispy on one side, about 4 minutes. Turn and broil for another 3\u20134 minutes, or until the second side turns crispy.\n\n5. Remove livers from skewers and serve, as is, as an appetizer. Or unload the skewers on top of red beans and rice for a unique alternative to sausage. SERVES FOUR TO SIX.\n\nNatchitoches Spicy Meat Pies\n\n_Spicy meat pies\u2014big as your hand, shaped like a half-moon\u2014are a major specialty in the central Louisiana town of Natchitoches (pronounced \"NAK-uh-tish\"). That French colonial city boasts being even older than New Orleans. We get our share of meat pies at the Jazz Festival and the like, but the temptation to make them at home is strong. I must warn you that this is not easy. The filling is straightforward, but the dough is a little work (as is all pie dough). And then you have to deep-fry, never any fun. (They can also be baked, but they're not quite the same that way.) Still, these things are so good that your guests will think they're worth the work, even if you decide otherwise._\n\n_You can make the pies up ahead of time and freeze them, and fry them when ready to serve. They will taste better if you make the meat mixture the day before and refrigerate it._\n\nFILLING\n\n3 Tbsp. vegetable oil\n\n2 Tbsp. flour\n\n1 large onion, chopped\n\n\u00bd green bell pepper, chopped\n\n1 lb. lean ground pork\n\n1 lb. ground beef round\n\n1 Tbsp. salt-free Creole seasoning (best: Bayou Bang)\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n\u215b tsp. cayenne pepper\n\n2 ribs celery, chopped\n\n12 sprigs parsley, leaves only, chopped\n\n1 clove garlic, chopped\n\n1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\nCRUST\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n4 cups self-rising flour\n\n6 Tbsp. Crisco\n\n2 egg yolks\n\n1\u00bd cups milk\n\n2 quarts vegetable oil\n\n1. Heat the oil and the flour together in a heavy, large skillet. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, to make a medium-brown roux. Add the onion when the color is right and saut\u00e9 until the onion begins to brown slightly. Add the bell pepper. Cook for another minute.\n\n2. Add the pork, beef, Creole seasoning, salt, and cayenne. Saut\u00e9, breaking it up as you go, until well browned. Pour off any rendered fat.\n\n3. Lower the heat and add the celery, parsley, garlic, and Worcestershire sauce. Continue to cook for another 5 or 6 minutes, stirring now and then to keep anything from forming clumps.\n\n4. Remove the meat mixture to a big metal pan to cool for a few minutes. Cover and refrigerate.\n\n5. Crust: In a bowl, blend the salt into the flour, then cut in the Crisco and blend with a whisk till it disappears and makes the flour slightly crumbly.\n\n6. Blend the egg yolks into the milk and add the milk mixture to the flour. Stir with a kitchen fork till mixed in, then with a rubber spatula to eliminate most of the dry flour. Stir as little as possible.\n\n7. Dump the dough onto a clean, floured work surface and roll out about \u00bc inch thick. Fold the dough into thirds, to make three layers. Roll out again, this time to the thickness of two stacked quarters. (This will make it pretty wide; you might want to cut it in half.) Cut out circles about 6 inches in diameter. Handling the dough as little as possible, roll out the leftover dough to cut another batch of circles.\n\n8. Spoon about 3 tablespoons of the meat mixture onto one half of a dough circle. Moisten the edge of the circle with a little water. Fold the circle over into a half-moon and press down the edges with a fork to seal.\n\n9. Heat the vegetable oil in a heavy, deep kettle to 350 degrees F. Fry no more than 2 pies at a time until golden brown. Let the heat of the oil recover between batches. MAKES EIGHTEEN TO TWENTY-FOUR PIES.\n\nFrogs' Legs Persill\u00e9s\n\n_Frog's legs are delicious, mild, and easy to love, even on a first try. The smaller they are, the better. I like to marinate them in buttermilk, like fried chicken, before cooking._\n\nFROG'S LEGS\n\n8 pairs of small fresh frogs' legs\n\n1\u00bd cups buttermilk\n\n1 tsp. Tabasco Green Pepper Sauce\n\n1 cup flour\n\n1 Tbsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. ground white pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried thyme\n\n\u00bd cup clarified butter (see recipe, this page)\n\n1 clove garlic, crushed\n\n1 tsp. red wine vinegar\n\n2 lemons, halved, for garnish\n\nPERSILLADE SAUCE\n\n2 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil\n\n6 cloves garlic, chopped\n\nLeaves from 15 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, chopped\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n1. Rinse the frogs' legs, then place them in a food storage bag with the buttermilk and green pepper sauce, and let marinate in the refrigerator for 2 hours.\n\n2. To make the persillade sauce: Heat the oil in a small saucepan over medium-low heat. Add the chopped garlic and parsley, and cook until the parsley is wilted and the garlic is fragrant. Remove from heat. Transfer the parsley mixture to a small food processor or blender. Add the \u00bc teaspoon salt and puree. Transfer the mixture into one corner of a small plastic sandwich bag.\n\n3. Combine the flour, 1 tablespoon salt, pepper, and thyme in a wide bowl. Shake the excess buttermilk off the frogs' legs and coat them lightly with the flour mixture.\n\n4. Heat the clarified butter in a medium skillet over medium-high heat. Add the crushed garlic. When the butter is bubbling, add the frogs' legs and saut\u00e9 until golden, turning once. Transfer the frogs' legs to paper towels to drain. Carefully add the vinegar to the skillet and whisk to make a sauce.\n\n5. Arrange 2 frogs' legs on each of 4 plates. Spoon some of the butter sauce over the legs, trying to avoid picking up the solids on the bottom of the pan. With scissors, snip off the corner of the plastic bag with the parsley sauce. Squeeze out lines of the persillade across the frogs' legs. Garnish with lemon halves. SERVES FOUR.\n\nAbita Springs Stuffed Quail\n\n_Seafood and birds rarely taste especially good together. We get around that here by having smoky andouille sausage make the introductions. As quails never seem substantial enough for a dinner entr\u00e9e, I say serve this as an appetizer, especially if the main course is fish._\n\nSTUFFED QUAILS\n\n\u00bc lb. andouille (see this page) or other smoked sausage\n\n4 green onions, finely chopped\n\n\u00bd red bell pepper, diced\n\n1 tsp. dried basil\n\n1 cup jumbo lump crabmeat\n\n1 cup shrimp, crab, or chicken stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n2 cups bread crumbs\n\n2 eggs, beaten separately\n\n8 baby quails, rib and backbones removed\n\n4 tsp. butter, softened\n\nEGGPLANT\n\n1 eggplant, at least 2\u00bd inches in diameter, peeled and cut into \u00bc-inch-thick rounds\n\n1 cup flour\n\n1 Tbsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n1 Tbsp. salt\n\n\u00bc cup milk\n\n\u00bc cup extra-virgin olive oil\n\nSAUCE\n\n2 green onions, chopped\n\n\u00bd cup dry white wine\n\n2 cups chicken stock\n\n1 Tbsp. tomato paste\n\nPinch of dried sage\n\nPinch of dried thyme\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Cook the andouille, green onions, bell pepper, and basil in a large skillet over medium heat until the sausage is lightly browned. Pour off any excess fat.\n\n2. Add the crabmeat and stock and bring to a boil. Gently stir to combine everything without breaking up the crab lumps. Over medium-high heat, reduce the liquid by about one-third.\n\n3. Remove the skillet from the heat and stir in the bread crumbs to make a thick stuffing. Cool the stuffing in the refrigerator for 20 minutes. Then mix one of the eggs into the stuffing.\n\n4. Fill each of the quails with some of the stuffing and arrange them in a roasting pan, breast side up. Dot each quail with \u00bd teaspoon of the butter. Roast until golden brown, 12\u201315 minutes. (If you have a convection oven, set it to convect.)\n\n5. Meanwhile, cut each slice of eggplant into perfect circles with a 2-inch cookie or biscuit cutter and set aside. Combine the flour, Creole seasoning, and salt in a wide bowl. Whisk the milk and remaining egg together in another bowl. Dip eggplant rounds into the egg mixture, then into the flour mixture.\n\n6. Heat the olive oil in a medium skillet over high heat and saut\u00e9 the eggplant until golden brown on both sides. Drain the eggplant on paper towels and keep warm.\n\n7. Transfer the roasted quail to a platter and keep warm. To make the sauce: Place the roasting pan over a burner on medium-high heat. Add the green onions and cook until they begin to brown. Add the wine and bring it to a boil, whisking to dissolve the crusty bits stuck to the bottom of the pan. Add the chicken stock, tomato paste, and herbs, and return to a boil. Reduce to about 1 cup. Season to taste with salt and pepper and strain the sauce through a fine sieve.\n\n8. Spoon some of the sauce over each of 8 warmed dinner plates. Arrange a few eggplant rounds on the sauce and top with a stuffed quail. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nMirliton and Root Vegetable Gratin\n\n_This dish is a variation on the French classic gratin Savoyard and uses mirlitons, a favorite vegetable around New Orleans, which are called chayote elsewhere._\n\n2 slices lemon\n\n2 whole cloves\n\n1 tsp. black peppercorns\n\n1 rutabaga, peeled and sliced into \u00bc-inch-thick slices\n\n2 lb. carrots, peeled and cut on the bias into \u00bc-inch-thick coins\n\n2 lb. parsnips, prepared the same way as the carrots (substitute turnips)\n\n4 mirlitons, halved, seed removed, sliced \u00bc inch thick\n\n3 cloves garlic\n\n1\u00bd cups grated Gruyere cheese\n\n1\u00bd cups finely grated Parmesan cheese\n\n1 tsp white pepper\n\nPinch nutmeg\n\n1 pint whipping cream\n\n2 egg yolks, beaten\n\n1 cup bread crumbs\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.\n\n2. Bring a large saucepan of water to a rolling boil with the lemon, cloves, and peppercorns. Add the rutabaga slices (it helps to do this in a large sieve or a chinoise), boil for about 2 minutes, then remove and drain. Repeat with the carrots, parsnips, and mirlitons. (The mirlitons will only require about 1 minute.)\n\n3. Crush the garlic cloves and use them to wipe the inside of a 2-inch-deep, 12 by 9-inch glass baking dish. Discard what's left of the garlic.\n\n4. Layer the vegetables in the baking dish in the order listed, sprinkling a mixture of the cheeses between the layers. Season with white pepper and (sparingly) nutmeg. The cheeses will provide all the salt this needs.\n\n5. Combine the whipping cream and the egg yolks thoroughly. Pour the mixture over the vegetables. Cover with aluminum foil and bake for 1 hour.\n\n6. Remove the foil, sprinkle bread crumbs in a thin layer over the top, and return to the oven. Continue baking, uncovered, until the crust browns.\n\n7. Remove from the oven and allow to rest and cool for at least 10 minutes before serving. This is better warm than hot. MAKES ABOUT TWELVE SIDE PORTIONS.\n\n_Gumbos, Bisques, and Other Soups_\n\nSeafood Gumbo\n\nChicken-Andouille Gumbo\n\nNouvelle Gumbo z'Herbes\n\nCrawfish Bisque\n\nCrabmeat and Corn Bisque\n\nCrab and Brie Soup\n\nOyster and Artichoke Soup\n\nOld-Style Oyster Stew\n\nMirliton and Shrimp Soup\n\nShrimp Bisque\n\nLobster Bisque\n\nTurtle Soup\n\nRed Bean Soup\n\nWhite Bean Soup with Ham\n\nSplit-Pea Soup\n\nEggplant and Tomato Soup\n\nPumpkin Soup with Tasso\n\nSoup of Seven Onions and Seven Peppers\n\nCream of Garlic Soup\n\nGuacamole Soup\n\nRed Pepper Vichyssoise\n\nBrisket and Vegetable Soup\n\nPetite Marmite\n\nA\n\nThe most famous soup in Louisiana is gumbo, in its endless isotopes. But there's plenty more where that came from. You would think that in a place with as much heat and humidity as New Orleans sweats through, the soups would be light, maybe even cold. In fact, they're among the heaviest in the soup world. Gumbo\u2014especially the way it's made these days\u2014is so substantial that a bowl of it needs only a length of French bread on the side to be a meal unto itself. That is also true of crawfish bisque, which is more often served as an entr\u00e9e than as a preliminary.\n\nHowever, if you turn back the hands of time about 30 years, you find that soups weren't nearly as thick or rich as they are today. The gumbos I grew up with in the 1960s had every bit as much flavor as those today, but the broth was much lighter. The original oyster artichoke soup that Chef Warren Leruth pioneered back then was not the thick, creamy potage we get under the same name today. But nobody ever pushed it off the table.\n\nSeafood is a main ingredient of many Creole soups. A common starting point for many of them is stock made from shrimp, crab or crawfish shells, or fish bones. Stocks are not essential, but they're so easy to make and they add so much flavor that I highly recommend them. Just remember to keep the boil very low.\n\nThe element that makes the difference in many a New Orleans soup is oyster liquor. With a little advance notice, you can get oyster liquor in the quantities you need from your oyster dealer.\n\nCold soups, which seem so appealing in the summer, are rarely found in New Orleans restaurants. I like them, though, and so I've included a couple you probably haven't had before.\n\nSeafood Gumbo\n\n_When I was growing up, my mother made gumbo every week, usually twice\u2014chicken-fil\u00e9 gumbo on Wednesdays and seafood-okra gumbo on Fridays. Her special touch was saut\u00e9eing the okra before adding it to the pot, thereby avoiding the texture problems some people have._\n\n_The great truth about gumbo is that no two chefs make it alike. Anybody who tells you that there's only one right way to make gumbo is nuts. A few points about my version: not all recipes for seafood gumbo call for making a stock, but I always do. Usually I buy a package of \"gumbo crabs,\" little crabs picked of their big lumps but with enough meat to make a good stock. (These are available in every supermarket's freezer in Louisiana but maybe not elsewhere.) The remnants of big boiled crabs also work, as do shrimp shells or crawfish shells. Or oyster liquor. Use what's available to make some kind of shellfish stock._\n\n_Also, following the technique of many restaurant chefs, I make the roux separately and add it to the broth well into the process, rather than at the start. My mother (and many other mothers) literally think this is crazy. But that's how chefs almost always do it._\n\nSTOCK\n\n6 gumbo crabs, and/or 4 cups shrimp or crawfish shells, and/or \u00bd gallon (8 cups) oyster liquor, strained\n\n1 small onion, cut up into chunks\n\n2 ribs celery, cut up into chunks\n\n1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley, stems only\n\n1 Tbsp. black peppercorns\n\n2 bay leaves\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried thyme\n\nGUMBO\n\n3 Tbsp. vegetable oil\n\n2 lb. fresh okra\n\n2 medium yellow onions, chopped\n\n1 very ripe (turning red) green bell pepper, seeded and chopped\n\n2 ribs celery, chopped\n\n8 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, chopped\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried oregano\n\n1 Tbsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\nLouisiana hot sauce, such as Crystal Pick 2 (or more, using less of each):\n\n2 lb. peeled, boiled, large shrimp\n\n1 lb. claw crabmeat\n\n2 cups cooked crawfish tail meat\n\n3\u20134 dozen fresh, shucked oysters\n\nROUX\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter\n\n\u2154 cup flour\n\n\u00bc cup sliced green onion\n\n1. To make the stock: Bring about a gallon (16 cups) of water and oyster liquor, if available, to a light boil in a large pot. Add all of the remaining stock ingredients. Return to a bare simmer and cook for about 30 minutes. Strain the stock into another large pot and discard the solids.\n\n2. To make the gumbo: Heat the oil in a large skillet until the oil shimmers. Add the okra and cook, stirring, for about 3 minutes. Remove the okra and set aside. Add the onions, bell pepper, celery, parsley, and oregano, and saut\u00e9 until the vegetables are soft. Add the vegetables, including the okra, to the stock and bring to a simmer. Add the Creole seasoning.\n\n3. Meanwhile, make the roux by melting the butter in a small saucepan over medium heat until it sizzles. Add the flour and whisk until it changes texture. Shift to a spoon and stir frequently until the roux reaches the desired color. For me, that would be the color of a pecan shell. Remove from the heat and stir in the sliced green onion. Keep stirring because the heat of the roux can still result in burning.\n\n4. Whisk half of the roux into the gumbo. It will rise to the surface and appear not to blend in, but if you keep whisking, it will. Add some of the remaining roux until the color and consistency of the gumbo are the way you want.\n\n5. Simmer the gumbo for about an hour. Season to taste with salt, pepper, and hot sauce. Just before serving, add the shrimp, crabmeat, crawfish tails, and/or oysters. Simmer 2\u20133 minutes, until the seafood is heated through. Serve with cooked long-grain rice. SERVES EIGHT TO TWELVE.\n\nChicken-Andouille Gumbo\n\n_This is my favorite style of gumbo. I've enjoyed it literally all my life, as it is basically my mother's recipe, a regular part of her weekly cooking regimen. This gumbo is made in the old style, which is to say that the broth is not as thick as has come to be the vogue in most restaurants these days. We called it fil\u00e9 gumbo because Mama put fil\u00e9 (powdered sassafras leaves) only in chicken gumbo and okra only in seafood gumbo. The fil\u00e9 goes in at the table, and then just a pinch for aroma._\n\n_This is one of those soups that gets better after it sits in the refrigerator for a day. This recipe also reduces the amount of time needed on the stove by about a third._\n\nOne 6-lb. stewing chicken\n\n\u00bd cup vegetable oil\n\n\u00bd cup flour\n\n1 large onion, chopped\n\n1 red bell pepper, chopped\n\n2 cloves garlic, chopped\n\n3 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, chopped\n\n12 cups chicken stock (see recipe, this page) or water\n\n1 Tbsp. salt\n\n1 tsp. freshly ground black pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp. Tabasco\n\n2 bay leaves\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried thyme\n\n1 lb. andouille (see this page) or other smoked sausage\n\n2 green onions, chopped\n\n2\u20133 cups cooked long-grain rice\n\nFil\u00e9 powder (see this page)\n\n1. Cut the chicken into 12 pieces. Sear them in 2 tablespoons of the oil in a large kettle or Dutch oven over fairly high heat. Keep turning the chicken pieces until they brown on the outside; they should not cook through.\n\n2. Remove the chicken and reserve. Add the flour and remaining oil to the pot and make as dark a roux as you can. The key to making a roux is to avoid burning it. This is accomplished by constant stirring and watching the heat.\n\n3. When the roux is medium-dark, reduce the heat and add the onion, bell pepper, garlic, and parsley, and saut\u00e9 until the onions are translucent and have begun to brown.\n\n4. Return the chicken to the pot, along with the chicken stock or water, salt, pepper, Tabasco, bay leaves, and thyme. Bring to a simmer and cook for about an hour.\n\n5. Slice the andouille into 1-inch-thick disks. Wrap them in paper towels and microwave them on medium power for about 3 minutes to remove excess fat. Add the sausage to the gumbo pot.\n\n6. Cook the gumbo, stirring occasionally, until the chicken is tender, for 1\u20132 hours. If you plan to serve the gumbo the next day, cook it for just 30 minutes, let it cool to warm, cover, and refrigerate. You might want to strip the chicken meat (see next step) while waiting for the gumbo to cool.\n\n7. When ready to serve, remove the chicken and strip the meat off if you haven't done so already. Slice the chicken into bite-size pieces and return to the pot. (You can also just leave the pieces as is if you're among family.) If you made it in advance, bring it up to simmer for about 30 minutes. Add the green onions and simmer for another 3\u20134 minutes.\n\n8. Serve over rice with a pinch or two of fil\u00e9 at the table. SERVES SIX TO TEN.\n\nNouvelle Gumbo z'Herbes\n\n_The past few years have seen a revival of this great old tradition\u2014the green gumbo of Lent. It was almost dead, but now quite a few restaurants offer it._\n\n_The traditional gumbo z'herbes includes a large number (but always an odd number) of greens, cooked down in a broth that, in its most stringent form, is nothing more than the water in which the greens and some savory vegetables were cooked. Most cooks, however, use a stock made with seafood or even seasoning meats. (The most famous local version, at Dooky Chase, uses both beef brisket and sausage.)_\n\n_My thinking with this recipe is that there's no reason why we have to limit ourselves to ancient traditions. So I've added a few vegetables I've never seen in a gumbo z'herbes recipe before. The recipe also turns out a more elegant soup than usually goes under this name. My wife suggested I take it a step further and add heavy cream, but I can't bring myself to do that during Lent._\n\nSTOCK\n\n6 medium gumbo crabs, crushed\n\n1 small onion, cut up\n\n1 tsp. black peppercorns\n\n2 bay leaves\n\nGREENS\n\n1 bunch of collard greens\n\n1 bunch of mustard greens\n\n12 Brussels sprouts\n\n1 bunch of spinach\n\n1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley, stems trimmed\n\nTop 5 inches of a bunch of celery, cut into thin sticks, with leaves\n\nGUMBO\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter\n\n1 cup flour\n\n5 green onions, finely chopped\n\n2 cloves garlic, chopped\n\n\u00bd green bell pepper, finely diced\n\n1 cup dry white wine (preferably Chenin Blanc)\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n1 head broccoli, broken up, stems removed\n\n1 lb. fresh asparagus, bottom 2 inches cut off\n\n1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 Tbsp. Tabasco Green Pepper Sauce\n\n\u00bc tsp. fil\u00e9 powder (see this page)\n\nSalt to taste\n\n1. Put the stock ingredients into a large saucepan. Bring it to a boil, lower the heat, and simmer for 45 minutes. Strain the broth, discarding the solids, and set aside.\n\n2. Pick through all of the greens to eliminate yellow or bruised parts and thick stems. Wash very well in several changes of water until there's no grit left.\n\n3. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add the collard greens, mustard greens, and Brussels sprouts, and cook until they are completely soft, about 20 minutes. Add the spinach, parsley, and celery, and cook another 3 minutes at most. Drain the greens, reserving the cooking water. Once cool enough to handle, chop all of the greens and set aside.\n\n4. Melt the butter in a clean, large pot over medium-high heat. Add the flour and cook, stirring constantly, until the roux turns a pale brown. Add the green onions, garlic, and bell pepper, and saut\u00e9 until tender. Add the wine and lemon juice and bring to a boil while whisking to dissolve the roux into the wine. Reduce the heat and whisk until what's left begins to resemble very runny mashed potatoes. Then whisk in the crab stock and bring to a simmer.\n\n5. Cut the broccoli and the asparagus into small pieces and add to the soup. Add the chopped greens and the Worcestershire and green pepper sauces. Bring the mixture to a light boil and cook until the broccoli and asparagus are just tender, 5\u20137 minutes. If the soup is too thick, add some of the reserved greens cooking water.\n\n6. Add the fil\u00e9 and salt to taste. Serve as is or over boiled long-grain rice. SERVES EIGHT TO TWELVE.\n\nCrawfish Bisque\n\n_Crawfish bisque\u2014one of the greatest dishes in all of Cajun cooking\u2014is not like any other bisque. It's not creamy or thickened with rice, as in the classic French style, but it is made with a dark roux. Most of the ingredients, even the crawfish, are combined to form a rough puree, which further thickens the soup. This may seem like a long, involved recipe, but there are no great challenges in it. What comes out is something unforgettable, especially when served with Crawfish Boulettes (see recipe,this page)._\n\n5 lb. boiled crawfish \u00bd medium onion, chopped\n\n2 cloves garlic, crushed\n\n1 rib celery, chopped\n\n\u00bd red bell pepper, chopped\n\n\u00bd cup dry white wine\n\n\u00bd cup brandy\n\n1 small lemon, sliced\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter\n\n\u2154 cup flour\n\n5 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, leaves chopped\n\n2 green onions, finely chopped\n\nSalt to taste\n\nTabasco to taste\n\n12 Crawfish Boulettes (optional; see recipe, this page)\n\n1. Rinse the boiled crawfish with lukewarm water to remove some of the salt, which will otherwise get concentrated later. Peel all of the crawfish and reserve the tail meat and the shells separately. Try to enlist a helper to pull off all the claws from the shells. Put the claws into a heavy plastic bag and bash with a meat mallet to break most of them.\n\n2. Place the onion, garlic, celery, and bell pepper into an 8-quart (or larger) saucepan and sweat over medium heat until the vegetables begin to brown a little around the edges.\n\n3. Add the crawfish claws, shells, and wine, and bring to a boil. When most of the liquid has evaporated, pour the brandy over the shells. If you are comfortable with flaming dishes and have a fire extinguisher nearby, carefully touch a flame to the brandy. Let the flames die out. Otherwise, just let the brandy boil away.\n\n4. Add the lemon and enough water to cover all the shells. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer for 30 minutes, spooning off the foam that rises to the top every now and then.\n\n5. Strain the stock into another saucepan and discard the solids. Simmer the stock until reduced to about 12 cups. Strain through a fine sieve. (At this point, the stock can be refrigerated for up to 3 days or frozen for later use.)\n\n6. Make a dark roux by melting the butter in a medium saucepan over mediumlow heat. Add the flour and cook, stirring constantly to avoid burning, until the roux turns the color of chocolate. Whisk the roux into the crawfish stock and continue whisking until completely blended.\n\n7. Add the parsley and green onions. Reserve 6 large crawfish tails per person for garnish. In a food processor, chop the rest of the crawfish tail meat to a near-puree. Add this to the soup and simmer for 5 minutes. Season to taste with salt and Tabasco.\n\n8. Place a crawfish tail in each of 6 soup plates and ladle in the bisque. If desired, add crawfish boulettes to the bisque at the table. SERVES SIX.\n\nCrabmeat and Corn Bisque\n\n_Crabmeat and corn bisque is a big hit anywhere it's served. This is my own version, distilled from recipes learned at Commander's Palace, Vincent's, Dakota, and a few other places._\n\n_The recipe begins with instructions for making crab stock. If you already have it (or shrimp or crawfish or lobster stock), just plunge ahead. When crawfish are in season, try substituting a similar amount of crawfish tails for the lump crabmeat. You can also make this bisque in greater quantities and freeze it for use in other recipes._\n\n6\u20138 gumbo crabs or picked crab shells\n\n1 jigger (1\u00bd oz.) brandy\n\n1 medium yellow onion, coarsely chopped\n\n2 ribs celery, coarsely chopped\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried thyme\n\n\u00bd tsp. black peppercorns\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter\n\n4 Tbsp. flour\n\n2 cloves garlic, chopped\n\n\u2153 cup dry vermouth\n\n2 ears fresh corn, kernels shaved off the cobs\n\n2 cups heavy whipping cream\n\n1 cup chopped green onion, green parts only\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. Tabasco\n\n\u00bd lb. lump crabmeat, carefully picked through\n\n1. Make the stock by putting the crabs or the shells into a large, heavy saucepan over high heat and cooking them until the edges of the shells brown a little.\n\n2. Lower the heat and add the brandy. If you're comfortable with flaming dishes and have a fire extinguisher nearby, carefully ignite the brandy. Otherwise, just let it cook and boil the alcohol away. Add the onion, celery, bay leaf, thyme, peppercorns, and 8 cups of water, and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 30 minutes.\n\n3. Strain the stock and discard the solids. Return the stock to a boil and reduce to about 2 cups. You can make this ahead and freeze it.\n\n4. Make a blond roux by melting the butter in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the flour and cook, stirring constantly until roux just begins to turn light brown. Add the garlic and saut\u00e9 until fragrant, about a minute.\n\n5. Whisk in the vermouth and bring to a boil. Add the crab stock and simmer, stirring occasionally, for about 15 minutes. Add the corn and simmer 5 minutes more. Add the cream, green onion, salt, and Tabasco. Stir until smooth and bring back up to a simmer.\n\n6. Add the crabmeat and blend it in gently, so as not to break the lumps. Adjust the seasoning and serve hot. SERVES FOUR TO SIX.\n\nCrab and Brie Soup\n\n_This is the signature soup of Dakota Restaurant in Covington, but calling it a soup is a stretch. It's so thick that you could turn a spoonful upside down and it might not come out. I'd recommend serving it only when you can afford to put a lot of lump crabmeat in it._\n\n1\u00bd sticks (12 Tbsp.) butter\n\n8 gumbo crabs (small hard-shell crabs)\n\n1 medium onion, chopped\n\n1 medium carrot, chopped\n\n3 ribs celery, chopped\n\n1 clove garlic, crushed\n\n2 bay leaves\n\n\u00bc cup brandy\n\n1 cup dry white wine\n\n4 cups heavy whipping cream\n\n\u00be cup flour\n\n8 oz. Brie cheese, rind removed\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n\u215b tsp. ground white pepper\n\n\u00bd lb. jumbo lump crabmeat\n\nPinch of cayenne\n\n1. Melt 1 stick of the butter in a heavy kettle over medium heat. Crack the crabs with a meat mallet, add them to the butter, and saut\u00e9 for 5 minutes. Add the onion, carrot, celery, garlic, and bay leaves, and cook until the vegetables soften.\n\n2. Add the brandy, bring it to a boil, then carefully touch a flame to it. After the flames die down, add the wine and boil for 2 minutes. Add 8 cups of water and simmer for about 30 minutes.\n\n3. Strain the stock and discard the solids. Return the stock to a cleaned pot, add the cream, and bring the soup base back to a simmer.\n\n4. Make a blond roux by melting the remaining butter in a saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the flour and cook, stirring constantly, until the roux just barely starts to brown. Whisk into the soup base.\n\n5. Slice the Brie into small pieces and add it to the pot. Stir until the cheese melts in completely. Add the salt and pepper.\n\n6. Right before serving, divide the lump crabmeat among 6\u20138 bowls and ladle in the hot soup. Sprinkle on a little cayenne and serve. SERVES SIX TO EIGHT.\n\nOyster and Artichoke Soup\n\n_The idea of making a soup from oysters and artichokes belongs to chef Warren Leruth, who may not have discovered how well the two things go together, but who surely made the most of it. Leruth's original potage had no cream, and neither does this one._\n\n4 fresh artichokes\n\n1 pint fresh, shucked oysters\n\n1 quart oyster liquor (if available)\n\n1 lemon, quartered\n\n1 small onion, sliced\n\n2 sprigs fresh thyme\n\n2 bay leaves\n\n1 tsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\n\u00bc tsp. freshly ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter\n\n2 Tbsp. flour\n\n\u00bd tsp. Tabasco\n\n1. Trim off the thorny tips from the artichoke leaves. Remove all of the bruised leaves. Cut the artichokes in half and wash well. Drain the oysters over a bowl to catch the oyster liquor. Rinse the oysters and set aside. Measure the oyster liquor and pour into a saucepan. Add enough water or additional oyster liquor, if available, to make a total of 6 cups liquid. Add the artichokes, lemon, onion, thyme, bay leaves, salt, and pepper. Simmer until the artichokes are tender, about 40 minutes.\n\n2. Lift the artichokes from the pot and set aside to cool. Strain the cooking liquid into a clean, small saucepan, discarding solids, and bring to a simmer. Meanwhile, separate all of the leaves from the artichokes. Using a spoon, scrape the meat from the leaves, transfer to a food processor or blender (discard leaves), puree until smooth, and set aside. Remove the choke and dice the hearts; set aside separately.\n\n3. Make a blond roux by melting the butter in a saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the flour and cook, stirring constantly, until the roux just barely begins to brown. Whisk the roux into the simmering liquid and return to a boil. Add the pureed artichokes and boil for 10 minutes.\n\n4. Set aside 12 of the biggest, best-looking oysters. Chop the remaining oysters.\n\n5. Strain the soup through a fine sieve into a clean pot. Add the chopped oysters, the diced artichoke hearts, salt to taste, and Tabasco. Heat to a simmer, then add the whole oysters. Simmer 2 minutes more. Put 2 oysters into each of 6 soup bowls and ladle in the broth. SERVES SIX.\n\nOld-Style Oyster Stew\n\n_This is the oyster stew that was once common in the casual seafood restaurants of New Orleans, especially around West End. Like West End itself\u2014which was totally destroyed by Hurricane Katrina\u2014this dish is little more than a memory. But it's a very good memory, and one that's easily revived in a home kitchen._\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter\n\n1 small yellow onion, chopped\n\n2 Tbsp. chopped celery\n\n4 cups oyster liquor, strained well\n\n2 cups half-and-half\n\n\u00bc tsp. black peppercorns\n\n1 sprig fresh thyme (or \u00bc tsp. dried)\n\n3 dozen fresh, shucked oysters\n\n4 green onions, chopped\n\nSalt to taste\n\n1. Melt the butter in a large saucepan. Add the onion and celery, and saut\u00e9 until tender.\n\n2. Add the oyster liquor, half-and-half, peppercorns, and thyme. Bring to a very light simmer and cook slowly for 15 minutes.\n\n3. Add the oysters and green onions, and cook until the oysters are plumped up and the edges are curly, 3\u20135 minutes. Add salt to taste. (You may not need any salt, depending on the saltiness of the oysters and oyster liquor.) SERVES FOUR.\n\nMirliton and Shrimp Soup\n\n_Mirliton (pronounced in New Orleans with a slight French accent,_ MILL-ee-tahn) _is the local name for the vegetable also known as a chayote or vegetable pear. They are much liked around town and used in many different ways. This is one of the most interesting: a great light soup that Le Parvenu's chef Dennis Hutley\u2014who dreamed it up\u2014describes as \"cappuccino style.\" By that he means a thin layer of nonsweet whipped cream floats on top._\n\n2 medium mirlitons (chayotes)\n\n1 lb. medium shrimp, with heads\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n\u00bc cup (2 Tbsp.) butter\n\n\u00bc cup flour\n\n\u00bc cup diced carrots\n\n\u00bc cup thinly sliced leeks\n\n2 Tbsp. diced celery\n\n2 Tbsp. diced yellow onion\n\n4\u00bd tsp. chopped garlic\n\n\u00bd cup sweet white wine (German Riesling, sweet Chenin Blanc)\n\n\u00bd tsp. liquid crab boil\n\n1 cup heavy whipping cream, warm\n\n\u00be tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. ground white pepper\n\n1. Peel the mirlitons and the shrimp. Put the mirliton trimmings, shrimp shells and heads, and bay leaf into a small saucepan with 2 cups of water. Bring the mixture to a light boil, reduce the heat, and simmer the stock for 20\u201330 minutes, during which time you can do the next step.\n\n2. Dice the mirlitons and set aside. Melt the butter in a large saucepan, add the flour, and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture begins to just turn a light brown. Add all the vegetables except the mirlitons and cook over low heat until the vegetables are soft, about 5 minutes.\n\n3. Stir the shrimp and mirlitons into the vegetables. Add the wine and bring to a boil for 2 minutes. Strain the stock from the shrimp shells into the saucepan with the shrimp and vegetables and discard the stock solids. Add the crab boil and heavy cream and simmer 30 minutes more. Season with the salt and pepper and serve. SERVES FOUR.\n\nShrimp Bisque\n\n_I used to think of shrimp bisque as a substitute while crawfish bisque was out of season. Then I found myself with a bunch of little shrimp and thought I'd give it another look. Well, I was wrong about this thick soup. It just needed a different recipe. A roux-based stock is perfect for crawfish bisque, but shrimp bisque needs more delicacy\u2014and cream. Shrimp also blends well with herbs, particularly those in the dill-basil-tarragon part of the flavor spectrum. This recipe uses more shrimp shells than actual shrimp. It will leave you about a pound of shrimp that you can use for salads, shrimp r\u00e9moulade, or just snacking on while you cook._\n\nSTOCK\n\n3 lb. medium head-on shrimp\n\n2 Tbsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\nLeaves and tops from a bunch of celery\n\n\u00bd small onion, cut up\n\n1 bay leaf\n\nBISQUE\n\n1 red bell pepper\n\n\u00bc cup brandy\n\n1 tsp. lemon juice\n\n1 tsp. tarragon\n\n\u00bd tsp. chervil\n\n\u00bd tsp. dill\n\n1\u00bd cups heavy whipping cream\n\n1 tsp. Louisiana hot pepper sauce\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\nChopped parsley, for garnish\n\n1. To make the stock, put the shrimp, Creole seasoning, and salt into a saucepan with 12 cups water. Bring it to a light boil, then lower to a bare simmer.\n\n2. After 6 minutes, remove the shrimp and set aside to cool. Add the other stock ingredients and return to a simmer. Peel the shrimp. Reserve the meat but return the shells to the stock. Continue to simmer the stock, uncovered, for 25 minutes more. Strain the stock and discard the solids.\n\n3. While the stock is simmering, put the bell pepper under a hot broiler until the skin is blackened here and there. Allow to cool, then peel the skin off and roughly chop.\n\n4. Put the pepper pieces and about half the shrimp meat into a food processor with about \u00bc cup of the stock. Process into a rough puree.\n\n5. Transfer the shrimp-pepper mixture to a saucepan over medium heat. Add the brandy and lemon juice and bring to a boil. Boil for 1 minute, stirring a little. Lower the heat and add the tarragon, chervil, and dill, plus the strained shrimp stock. Return to a simmer.\n\n6. After 5 minutes, stir in the cream and hot sauce. Adjust seasonings to taste. Serve topped with a sprinkling of chopped parsley and 2 or 3 whole shrimp tails. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nLobster Bisque\n\n_I offer this more-or-less classic recipe for lobster bisque for two reasons. First, because I like it. Second, to offer a contrast with crawfish bisque, which could not be more different, even though for all the world, crawfish look like small lobsters._\n\n_Lobster bisque is essentially a dish made from leftover lobsters. Use the tail meat for an appetizer or entr\u00e9e and save everything else for this. The amount of flavor you can get from those shells is astonishing._\n\n\u00bd cup vegetable oil\n\nShells and claws from four 1\u20132-lb. lobsters\n\n\u2153 cup brandy\n\n2 large tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and finely chopped\n\n2 large carrots, coarsely chopped\n\n2 ribs celery, coarsely chopped\n\n1 medium onion, coarsely chopped\n\n1 Tbsp. chopped garlic\n\n1 tsp. crushed red pepper\n\n2 cups dry white wine\n\n3 bay leaves\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried tarragon\n\n1 Tbsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\n\u00bc tsp. ground white pepper, plus more to taste\n\n\u00bd cup cooked long-grain rice\n\n\u00bc tsp. cayenne\n\n2 cups heavy whipping cream\n\n1. Heat the oil in a large saucepan over high heat. Remove the meat from the claws and reserve. Add the shells to the hot oil and saut\u00e9 until the edges begin to turn dark brown. Pour off the excess oil.\n\n2. Remove the pot from the heat and very carefully add the brandy. (You can flame it if you like, but be careful.) Return the pot to the heat and cook, tossing around, until the alcohol in the brandy evaporates.\n\n3. Add the tomatoes, carrots, celery, onion, and garlic, and continue to cook over high heat, stirring often, until the vegetables are tender. Add the crushed red pepper and white wine, and bring to a boil.\n\n4. Add the bay leaves, tarragon, salt, pepper, and 8 cups of cold water. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low, and simmer for 1 hour.\n\n5. Put the rice into a food processor or blender, add \u00bd cup of the lobster stock, and puree until smooth. Add the puree to the stock and continue to simmer for 30 minutes more.\n\n6. Strain the soup base through a colander. Puree the solids in a food processor with a little stock and strain this once again through a coarse sieve into the soup base.\n\n7. Add the cream to the soup base and return to a simmer. Adjust seasonings with salt, pepper, and the cayenne. I think this soup's flavor should have a noticeable pepper glow.\n\n8. Divide the reserved claw meat among 4\u20136 soup plates. Ladle the soup over the claw meat. SERVES FOUR TO SIX.\n\nTurtle Soup\n\n_New Orleans\u2013style turtle soup is as unique to our cuisine as gumbo. Unlike the clear turtle soup eaten in most other places, Creole turtle soup is thick and almost a stew. The most widely served style of turtle soup in the area is descended from the one served at Commander's Palace, which is distinctive in that it uses as much veal shoulder as turtle and includes spinach as an ingredient._\n\n_My recipe is influenced by that old style, as well as by the incomparable (and quite different) version at Brennan's. The hardest part of any turtle soup recipe is finding turtle meat; if you can't, using veal shoulder turns out a very credible mock-turtle soup._\n\n_It is traditional to serve turtle soup with sherry at the table, but I've never liked the resulting alcoholic taste and aroma. I add the sherry into the recipe early to get the flavor but not the bitter alcohol._\n\n3 lb. turtle meat or veal shoulder or a combination of the two, including any bones available\n\n3 bay leaves\n\n3 whole cloves\n\nPeel of 1 lemon, sliced\n\n1 Tbsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\n\u00bd tsp. black peppercorns\n\n2 sticks (16 Tbsp.) butter\n\n\u2154 cup flour\n\n2 ribs celery, chopped\n\n2 medium yellow onions, chopped\n\n1 small green bell pepper, chopped\n\n2 cloves garlic, finely chopped\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried thyme\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried marjoram\n\n1 cup tomato puree\n\n1 cup dry sherry\n\n2 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 Tbsp. Louisiana hot sauce, such as Crystal\n\n1 tsp. freshly ground black pepper, plus more to taste\n\n2 hard-boiled eggs, chopped\n\n1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley, leaves only, chopped\n\nHalf a 10-oz. bag of spinach, well washed and chopped\n\n1. Put the turtle meat and/or veal with bones into a large pot. Add the bay leaves, cloves, lemon peel, salt, peppercorns, and 1 gallon (16 cups) water. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer very slowly for about 2 hours.\n\n2. Strain the stock, reserving the liquid and the meat. If you don't have at least 3 quarts of stock, add water or veal stock to get up to that quantity. Chop the meat into small pieces and set aside.\n\n3. Make a medium-dark roux by melting the butter in a large saucepan. Add the flour and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture turns the color of a well-used penny. When the roux is the right color, add the celery, onions, bell pepper, and garlic, and cook until the vegetables are soft. Add the thyme, marjoram, tomato puree, sherry, and Worcestershire sauce, and bring to a boil.\n\n4. Add the hot sauce, pepper, and diced meat, and simmer for 30 minutes. Add the eggs, parsley, and spinach, and simmer 10 minutes more. Adjust the seasonings with salt and pepper and serve. SERVES SIX TO EIGHT.\n\nRed Bean Soup\n\n_I've been predicting for years that our allegiance to red beans would result in its being served widely as a soup instead of a main course. This has not come to pass. But I love a good red bean soup. I always order it when it's on the menu. And when it isn't, I make it myself._\n\n2 Tbsp. olive oil\n\n1 cup thinly sliced carrots\n\n1 cup finely chopped celery\n\n\u00bd cup chopped yellow onion\n\n1 tsp. dried summer savory\n\n\u00bd cup brandy\n\n4 cups beef broth (see recipe, this page)\n\n6 cups cooked red beans (or 3 cans Blue Runner red beans if you're rushed)\n\n\u00be lb. andouille (see this page) or other smoked sausage, very thinly sliced\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\nFreshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n1 Tbsp. Louisiana hot sauce, such as Crystal\n\n2 green onions, chopped, for garnish\n\n1. Heat the oil in a large saucepan over medium heat until it ripples. Add the carrots, celery, onion, and savory, and cook until the vegetables are tender. Add the brandy and bring it to a boil for about a minute. Add the beef broth and bring to a simmer.\n\n2. Meanwhile, puree the red beans in a food processor. Stir the puree into the pan with the vegetables and return to a simmer.\n\n3. Microwave the andouille on paper towels for 1 minute on high to remove the excess fat. Add the andouille to the soup and cook for at least 10 minutes more.\n\n4. Season with the salt, pepper, and hot sauce. Serve the soup garnished with the green onions. SERVES SIX TO EIGHT.\n\nWhite Bean Soup with Ham\n\n_My wife and I are both nuts for white beans in any form, but I'm especially partial to a light, peppery soup made with them and an inexpensive shank or bottom part of a smoked ham._\n\nSTOCK\n\n3\u20134-lb. ham shank or smoked pork shoulder\n\n1 medium onion, coarsely chopped\n\nStems from 1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n8 black peppercorns\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried thyme\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried marjoram\n\nSOUP\n\n2 Tbsp. olive oil\n\n2 ribs celery, chopped\n\n1 medium onion, chopped\n\n2 cloves garlic, chopped\n\n1 lb. white beans (navy beans), sorted and soaked overnight\n\n\u00bd tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n\u00bd tsp. Tabasco Green Pepper Sauce\n\n2 green onions, thinly sliced, for garnish\n\n1. Put all the stock ingredients into a stockpot with 20 cups of water. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer, uncovered, for 2\u20133 hours, or until the ham comes easily off the bone.\n\n2. Remove the ham from the pot. Strain the stock and discard the solids. Pick the ham from the bone and set aside.\n\n3. Rinse the stockpot and wipe dry. Return the pot to medium-high heat and add the oil. Add the celery, onion, and garlic, and saut\u00e9 until the onion browns slightly. Drain the beans and add to the pot, along with the Worcestershire sauce, salt, green pepper sauce, and a little less than 8 cups of the strained stock. Simmer, covered, until the beans are tender, about 2 hours.\n\n4. Strain the soup. Puree the solids in a food processor, then add it back to the broth. Shred as much ham as you'd like in your soup and add it. Adjust seasonings. Garnish with green onions.\n\n5. Reserve the rest of the ham and stock (you can reduce the stock to make it easier to store) for other purposes (jambalaya or pasta dishes, for example). SERVES EIGHT.\n\nSplit-Pea Soup\n\n_I loved my mother's split-pea soup as I was growing up, but when I tried to cook it, I couldn't get it right. Then I parted with tradition by leaving out the ham that's in every recipe and using a vegetable stock. This meatless, fatless soup turned out to be just what I remembered. (No surprise that my frugal mom made hers without meat.) The cilantro gives it a great fresh flavor, but if you don't like cilantro, use parsley. This soup is better the second day._\n\nSTOCK\n\n3\u20134 carrots, coarsely chopped\n\n2 ribs celery, coarsely chopped\n\n1 large onion or 1 large leek, coarsely chopped (if using the leek, wash it very well after pulling it apart)\n\nStems from a bunch of cilantro or flat-leaf parsley\n\n3 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed\n\n2 bay leaves\n\n1 Tbsp. mixed peppercorns (black, red, white, and green)\n\n1 tsp. dried thyme\n\n1 tsp. dried marjoram\n\nSOUP\n\n1 lb. split peas, sorted through and soaked at least 4 hours or overnight\n\n20 sprigs cilantro or flat-leaf parsley, leaves only, chopped\n\n1 rib celery, sliced into narrow, short sticks\n\n1 green onion, finely chopped\n\n\u00bd tsp. turmeric\n\nDash of Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 Tbsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\n\u00bd tsp. freshly ground black pepper, plus more to taste\n\n1 Tbsp. Tabasco Green Pepper Sauce, plus more to taste\n\n1. Put all of the stock ingredients and 12 cups of water into a large stockpot. Bring to a boil, lower the heat, and simmer for about an hour. Strain the stock into a clean pot and discard the stock vegetables.\n\n2. Drain the peas and add to the vegetable stock. Add all of the remaining soup ingredients. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer, uncovered, for 2 hours.\n\n3. Pass the soup through a food mill or push through a coarse sieve. You can also strain the soup and process the solid parts with a food processor, stopping short of a puree. Add the near-pureed peas to the soup. Adjust seasoning with salt, pepper, and green pepper sauce to taste. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nEggplant and Tomato Soup\n\n_Now and then and here and there, a soup of eggplant and tomato is the soup of the day. It's always so good\u2014no matter who cooked it\u2014that it must be one of those ideal flavor combinations. Here's my take on it._\n\n\u2153 cup extra-virgin olive oil\n\n3 cloves garlic, crushed\n\n\u00bc tsp. crushed red pepper\n\n1 large eggplant, peeled and cut into large dice\n\n2 sprigs fresh thyme, leaves chopped\n\n4 leaves fresh rosemary (only 4 leaves!)\n\nThree 28-oz. cans whole plum tomatoes, crushed by hand, juice reserved\n\n1 tsp. lemon juice\n\n1\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n1. Heat the oil in a large saucepan over high heat. When the oil shimmers, add the garlic and crushed red pepper, and cook until the garlic is browned at the edges. Remove and discard the garlic. Add the eggplant, cooking until it's browned on the edges.\n\n2. Reduce the heat to medium-low and add the thyme, rosemary, tomatoes, and 1\u00bd cups of the reserved tomato juice. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer, uncovered and stirring occasionally, for 45 minutes.\n\n3. Roughly puree the soup in a food processor, leaving small chunks of eggplant. Return to the saucepan. Add the lemon juice and salt, and bring to just a boil. Add a little water or chicken stock, if necessary, to lighten the texture. SERVES SIX TO EIGHT.\n\nPumpkin Soup with Tasso\n\n_Every October people begin asking me what they can cook with all those beautiful and inexpensive pumpkins out there. Jack-o'-lantern pumpkins are wrong for pie, but they do make interesting savory dishes. This rich soup gets a bit of spice and smokiness from the tasso\u2014Cajun-style cured ham. (Buy the very dry, crusty, peppery kind.)_\n\n1 medium\u2013large pumpkin, 5\u20137 lb.\n\n2 Tbsp. butter\n\n2 medium yellow onions, chopped\n\n3 Tbsp. bourbon\n\n1 tsp. dried marjoram\n\n\u00bd tsp. Tabasco Garlic Pepper Sauce, plus more to taste\n\n4 cups chicken or vegetable stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n4 oz. tasso (see this page) or other smoked ham, finely chopped\n\n2 cups heavy whipping cream\n\nSalt to taste\n\n1 green onion, green part only, chopped, for garnish\n\n1. Cut a round hole about 5 inches in diameter in the top of the pumpkin. Scrape out the seeds and juicy membranes and discard. Then scrape out the flesh of the pumpkin, leaving about a 1-inch-thick shell if you plan to use it as a soup tureen.\n\n2. Chop the pumpkin flesh roughly in a food processor. Measure out 4\u20135 cups' worth, saving the rest for another use.\n\n3. Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the onions and saut\u00e9 until soft. Add the bourbon and bring to a boil. (Careful\u2014it might catch fire if a flame touches it. This is not undesirable, but use caution.) Add the pumpkin, marjoram, garlic pepper sauce, and stock. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer until the pumpkin is very tender, about 30 minutes.\n\n4. Puree the saucepan contents in a food processor (in batches, of course). Strain through a coarse-mesh strainer back into the rinsed saucepan. Add the tasso and cream, stir, and return to just below a simmer. Cook for about 10 minutes more, then add the salt and more garlic pepper sauce to taste, and a little water to thin out the soup if necessary. (Note: Tasso is salty and peppery, so taste before seasoning.)\n\n5. Serve the soup out of the pumpkin shell if you like. Garnish with green onion. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nSoup of Seven Onions and Seven Peppers\n\n_This is a classic French onion soup, with a spicy twist. Try really hard to find the oxtails to make it. They're not essential, but they give the soup an ideal mouthfeel and flavor. Include a mix of hot peppers (e.g., Serrano, jalape\u00f1o, cayenne, cascabel) and mild (red and green bell, wax, poblano). And make sure you remember which seven onions and seven peppers you use, because someone will want to know._\n\n3 lb. oxtails or meaty beef soup bones\n\n3 bay leaves\n\n1 tsp. dried marjoram\n\n\u00bc cup olive oil\n\n1 each large yellow, red, and white onion, thinly sliced\n\n1 bunch of green onions, finely chopped\n\n1 leek, cut open, well cleaned, and thinly sliced\n\nEnough of 7 varieties of peppers to yield 1\u00bd cups when seeded and thinly sliced\n\n4 cloves garlic, chopped\n\n\u00bd cup tawny port or sherry\n\nSalt to taste\n\n4 Tbsp. chopped chives, for garnish\n\n2 cups shredded Gruy\u00e8re cheese, for garnish\n\n1. Heat a large soup pot over high heat. Add the oxtails or beef bones and brown until rather dark. Add the bay leaves, marjoram, and 1 gallon (16 cups) of water. Bring to a boil, lower the heat, and simmer for 2 hours (or longer if possible). Strain the stock and set aside, discarding the solids. (You can do this a day or two ahead and refrigerate the stock, which will congeal.)\n\n2. Heat the oil in a large, heavy pot over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Add all the yellow, red, and white onions, green onions, and sliced leek, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onions have browned rather darkly. This will take as long as 30 minutes but is essential to getting the sweetness of the onions. Then add the peppers and garlic.\n\n3. Add the port or sherry and cook until most of the liquid is gone. Add the reserved beef stock and boil for about 30 minutes. Season to taste with salt. Serve the soup garnished with snipped chives and shredded cheese. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nCream of Garlic Soup\n\n_Susan Spicer, the chef-owner of Bayona, has been a friend since before she became a chef. She has one of the surest senses of taste I've ever encountered. This soup has been on all her menus since her earliest restaurant days and with good reason: It's irresistible and not all that hard to make. For a great garnish, fry a few morsels of garlic in butter and float them on the soup._\n\n2 Tbsp. butter\n\n2 Tbsp. olive oil\n\n2 lb. onions, peeled and roughly chopped (about 4 cups)\n\n2 cups garlic cloves, peeled and chopped\n\n6 cups chicken stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n1 bouquet garni (parsley stems, thyme sprigs, and bay leaf tied together with kitchen twine)\n\n2 cups stale French bread, cut into \u00bd-inch cubes\n\n1 cup half-and-half\n\nSalt and ground white pepper to taste\n\n1. Heat the butter and oil together in a 1-gallon, heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat. Add the onions and garlic, and cook, stirring frequently, until they turn a deep golden brown, about 30 minutes.\n\n2. Add the chicken stock and bouquet garni and bring to a boil. Stir in bread cubes and simmer 10 minutes, until the bread is soft.\n\n3. Remove the bouquet garni and puree the soup in a blender, carefully. Strain it back into the saucepan. Add the half-and-half and season to taste with salt and pepper. Add a little water or chicken stock if soup is too thick. Bring to just a boil and serve. SERVES SIX TO EIGHT.\n\nGuacamole Soup\n\n_I came up with this one for a midsummer dinner party in very warm weather. I was thinking about a cold gazpacho, but while shopping, I saw some nice avocados and thought, Why not? This is more than just watery guacamole. You need to puree the avocado, which you shouldn't for guacamole. Also, although you want to serve the soup cold, chilling avocados for any length of time causes them to turn very dark. So you must make the soup right before serving. And while I won't even try to make guacamole without Hass avocados, this soup works well with even the big, shiny Florida avocados\u2014as long as they're completely ripe._\n\n3 tomatillos, husks removed\n\n1 medium sweet onion, chopped\n\n10 sprigs cilantro, leaves chopped\n\n\u00bc cup lime juice\n\n2 Tbsp. olive oil\n\n2 small cloves garlic\n\n3 large ripe tomatoes, skinned and seeded (depending on size)\n\n1 tsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\n2 Tbsp. Tabasco Green Pepper Sauce, plus more to taste\n\n5 medium Hass avocados (or 3 Florida avocados), fully ripe\n\n2 cups light chicken stock (see recipe, this page) or water\n\nGARNISH\n\nSour cream\n\nChopped red onion\n\nChopped cilantro leaves\n\nChopped fresh tomato\n\n1. Microwave the tomatillos on 70 percent power for 4 minutes. Let them cool, then peel them and cut into quarters. Remove the seeds and chop.\n\n2. In a non-metallic bowl, combine the tomatillos with all the other ingredients except the avocados and chicken stock. Then scoop the meat out of the avocados and add it to the mix. Stir.\n\n3. Working in batches, process the mix in a food processor to a rough puree.\n\n4. Whisk in the chicken stock or water. Adjust the seasonings with salt and green pepper sauce.\n\n5. Place a piece of plastic wrap over the surface of the soup and refrigerate for no more than an hour. Serve in chilled bowls. Garnish with sour cream, red onion, cilantro, and tomato. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nRed Pepper Vichyssoise\n\n_Despite the French name, vichyssoise was invented in America at a New York French restaurant. Another surprise (to me, anyway): All the versions of vichyssoise I've ever loved had ham in the recipe, although not visibly in the soup._\n\n_Classic vichyssoise is a cold leek-and-potato soup. But we don't always have to do the classics. The late chef Tom Cowman used to do variations with watercress, bell peppers, and other colorful infusions when he was at Restaurant Jonathan and, later, the Upperline. That is the inspiration for this recipe._\n\n2 lb. white potatoes, peeled and cubed\n\n\u00bd red bell pepper, stemmed, seeded, and chopped\n\n1 leek, white part only, washed well and chopped\n\n4 cups vegetable stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n\u2153 cup finely chopped ham\n\n2 cups half-and-half, hot\n\n\u00bc cup sour cream\n\nSnipped chives, for garnish\n\n1. Prepare the vegetables carefully. Leave no peel or spots on the potatoes, seeds or membranes in the pepper, or dirt in the leeks.\n\n2. In a large stockpot, bring the stock to a light boil. Add the vegetables and the ham, and cook until the potatoes are soft, about 25 minutes.\n\n3. Puree the stock and vegetables in a food processor. Strain the mixture through a sieve or food mill and return to the pot. Add the hot half-and-half and the sour cream, and stir until well mixed. Refrigerate until cold. Serve chilled, garnished with chives. SERVES FOUR TO SIX.\n\nBrisket and Vegetable Soup\n\n_I love homemade vegetable soup. My mother used to make this from time to time, and it was never often enough. I rediscovered this style of vegetable soup when I started going to old places like Tujague's, Galatoire's, and Maylie's, where they used the stock from boiling briskets to make the soup._\n\n_What gives this soup a great edge is boiling all the vegetables except the carrots (which lend a nice color to the soup) separately, not in the soup itself. That way, when you add them right before serving, they're all vivid and firm and full of flavor._\n\n1\u00bd gallons brisket stock (see Boiled Brisket of Beef, this page)\n\nOne 28-oz. can whole tomatoes, crushed by hand, with juice\n\n1\u20132-lb. boiled brisket (optional)\n\n1 small cabbage, cored and coarsely chopped\n\n1 large yellow onion, coarsely chopped\n\n1 turnip, peeled and cut into \u00bd-inch cubes\n\n2 lb. carrots, cut into \u00bd-inch-thick slices\n\n2 lb. red potatoes, peeled and cut into \u00bd-inch cubes\n\n1 lb. fresh green beans, trimmed and cut into 1-inch pieces\n\n4 ribs celery, cut into 3-inch-long, narrow sticks\n\n2 ears corn, kernels shaved off the cobs\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried basil\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried thyme\n\n2 Tbsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\nFreshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n\u00bd tsp. Tabasco, plus more to taste\n\n1. Put the brisket stock, crushed tomatoes, and juice into a kettle or stockpot. Bring to a boil. Meanwhile, cut the brisket (if using) into large cubes, removing any interior fat. Add the meat to the stock. Reduce the heat and simmer.\n\n2. Bring a separate stockpot three-quarters full of water to a light boil. As you cut the vegetables in the order given in the ingredients list, add them to the pot. (Some vegetables take longer to cook than others.)\n\n3. When the carrots and potatoes have lost all crispness, drain the vegetables and add them to the brisket stock, along with the basil and thyme. Lower the heat to a simmer and cook for at least 30 minutes. Adjust seasonings with salt, pepper, and Tabasco. SERVES ABOUT EIGHT, WITH LOTS OF LEFTOVER SOUP FOR THE NEXT DAY.\n\nPetite Marmite\n\n_A marmite is a covered crock, usually made of earthenware, designed to hold a soup or a stew that will be baked. Petite marmite has come to mean an intense, clear soup based on a consomme, with beef and vegetables. The best of these has an amazing flavor, especially when infused with a good shot of black pepper. I love this version. It's no small project to make it. (In fact, cooking schools give this to chefs as a test of their skills.) But the results are wonderful, and you will have really accomplished something elegant and special._\n\nSTOCK\n\n6 lb. oxtails\n\n1 large onion, coarsely chopped\n\n2 ribs celery, coarsely chopped\n\n1 carrot, coarsely chopped\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried thyme\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried marjoram\n\n1 tsp. black peppercorns\n\nCONSOMME\n\n1 lb. ground round, chilled\n\n1 medium carrot, chopped\n\n1 rib celery, chopped\n\n1 small onion, chopped\n\n2 egg whites\n\n4 eggshells, well crushed\n\n1\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. Tabasco\n\nSOUP\n\nGreen onions or chives to tie beef bundles\n\n4 small carrots, cut into thin sticks\n\n4 small potatoes, cut into \u00bd-inch dice\n\n2 ribs celery, cut into thin sticks\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n1. To make the stock: Brown the oxtails in a large kettle over high heat until rather dark. Add the remaining stock ingredients, along with 1 gallon (16 cups) of water, if necessary, to cover. Bring the pot to a low boil. Cook for 2 hours (or longer, if possible). Skim the fat and foam that rises to the surface as the stock cooks.\n\n2. Strain the stock. Remove the oxtails and reserve. Discard the vegetables. Set the strained stock aside to cool. (You can do this a day or two ahead and refrigerate the stock. It should congeal into a jelly, so any remaining fat can be easily removed from the surface.)\n\n3. To make the consomme: Return the strained stock to a clean pot and heat over medium heat. Meanwhile, combine the ground round, carrot, celery, and onion in a bowl. Flatten the mixture out into a sort of gigantic hamburger patty. Float this on top of the stock\u2014this is called a raft, and its purpose is to clarify the stock. (It might sink, but the boiling will make it rise.) Pour the egg whites over this raft and break the eggshells on top of that.\n\n4. When the pot comes barely to a boil, punch a few holes in the raft so that the stock bubbles up and over the raft. Keep the stock at a very light boil for about 2 hours, gently submerging the raft every now and then. Add the salt and Tabasco.\n\n5. Meanwhile, pick the lean meat from the oxtails and make small bundles of it, tying them with a thin green onion or a chive. Set aside.\n\n6. Remove the raft and anything else floating in the stock, which should now be clear or close to it. Carefully skim the fat from the top of the pot. Strain the soup through a very fine sieve or (better) double cheesecloth.\n\n7. About 30 minutes before serving, bring the consomme to a simmer. Add the carrots and potatoes, and cook until tender. Ten minutes after adding the carrots and potatoes, add the celery. Season to taste with salt and pepper.\n\n8. Place a bundle or two of the oxtail meat on a soup plate and ladle in the broth with its vegetables around it. SERVES EIGHT TO TWELVE.\n\n_Shellfish Entr\u00e9es_\n\nBarbecue Shrimp\n\nShrimp Clemenceau\n\nVol-au-Vent of Louisiana Seafood\n\nSoft-Shell Crab with Crabmeat Meuni\u00e8re\n\nSoft-Shell Crabs with Chinese Hot Garlic and Black Bean Sauce\n\nSoft-Shell Crab with Pecans\n\nCrab Cakes\n\nCrabmeat Imperial\n\nCrabmeat au Gratin\n\nCrabmeat and Tasso Sliders\n\nFettuccine Pontchartrain\n\nPasta with Cajun Crawfish Cream Sauce\n\nAline's Crawfish Etouff\u00e9e\n\nOysters Ambrosia\n\nOysters and Pasta Creole Bordelaise\n\nMussels in Ghent-Style Wine Sauce\n\nBouillabaisse, New Orleans Style\n\nCajun Seared Scallops with Near-Guacamole\n\nLouisiana Seafood Pasta\n\nA\n\nAlthough the Gulf and lake waters are full of first-class finfish, when someone from South Louisiana thinks of seafood, he's probably thinking of a crustacean or a mollusk. The crawfish really should be on the official seal of the state of Louisiana.\n\nIt's hard to imagine Creole cooking without crabs, shrimp, oysters, and crawfish. They're all used in both starring and supporting roles in all kinds of dishes. Featured in this chapter are recipes in which our best local shellfish (along with a few exotic ones) are the centerpieces.\n\nBut first get to know these delicacies a little better.\n\nShrimp\n\nFew foods inspire more culinary creativity than shrimp. You can cook shrimp just about any way you can think of, and thousands of ways have yet to be invented.\n\nLouisiana shrimp are the standard of the world. They are caught in tremendous numbers from several species, with seasons so complicated that only fishermen seem to know exactly when they come and go. Anyway, shrimp stand up to freezing better than any other seafood, so they're available almost all the time. (If you buy them frozen, thaw them in the refrigerator as slowly as possible.)\n\nThe two most common varieties are the brown shrimp and the white shrimp. The argument as to which is the better has been going on for a long time. I say they're both spectacular and just leave it at that.\n\nShrimp come in sizes from tiny (60 or more to the pound) to real monsters (3\u20134 to the pound). The size is usually specified by the \"count\": 16\u201320 count means 16 to 20 to the pound. I always buy shrimp whole, with the heads on; the flavor is much better, and it gives you shrimp shells for making stock for gumbo and all sorts of other dishes.\n\nShrimp cook very rapidly. When they overcook, the shrimp can stick to the shells or get mushy. Another problem that occasionally turns up with shrimp is a strong flavor of iodine. This is usually blamed on a lack of freshness, but in fact, it's due to the shrimp's diet. When acorn worm\u2014which concentrates iodine in its tissues\u2014is around in large numbers, the shrimp that eat them pick up the iodine flavor. It's objectionable but harmless.\n\nCrabs\n\nAdding a sprinkling of lump crabmeat to a dish that needs just a little something is a favorite trick of New Orleans chefs. But that's a clich\u00e9 and a waste of good crabmeat. The best crabmeat dishes employ the biggest lumps with the lightest of sauces. The flavor of the local blue crab is so distinguished that it needs no help. And it's so subtle that it's easy for a sauce to get in the way.\n\nLouisiana crabs are the same species found throughout the Gulf and up the Atlantic seaboard. All forms of blue crabs are best and least expensive in the warm months. Crabmeat is always available, but its price skyrockets in the winter.\n\nPicked crabmeat comes already cooked in containers of a half-pound to a pound. Pasteurized crabmeat has largely supplanted the superior fresh crabmeat, and crabmeat from Southeast Asia has become common. Read labels carefully before buying.\n\nWhen you add picked crabmeat to a dish, you only need to warm it through. So add it last to the pan. Here are the most common forms of Louisiana crabmeat:\n\nJUMBO LUMP (ALSO KNOWN AS BACKFIN). This is the big lump of meat from just below the point where the claws are attached. There's a little sliver of thin shell in there that's almost impossible to remove without breaking the lump. Restaurants buy almost all the jumbo lump in the market, at the highest prices. But it can usually be found in season in the better grocery stores and markets.\n\nLUMP. This is from the same part of the crab as the jumbo lump but from smaller crabs or perhaps broken jumbo lumps.\n\nWHITE. The white meat from inside the crab, but in large flakes and shreds instead of lumps. The flavor is not bad, but the look isn't as good, and the quality is inconsistent. It's best for soups and sauces.\n\nCLAW. The big lump of meat from inside the claws actually has the most pronounced flavor in the crab. It doesn't look as good\u2014the meat is darker and stringy. It's the cheapest variety of crabmeat but perfectly fine for stuffings.\n\nWHOLE BOILED HARD CRABS. This form may be the ultimate way to eat crabmeat because all of the above is packed securely within that shell. At the peak of the season, they can't be beat\u2014even though the work expended in opening and picking the crabs is not replaced by the calories in the crabmeat.\n\nAnd then there's the miracle of . . .\n\nSoft-Shell Crabs\n\nSoft-shells are almost absurdly delectable. During the warm months, particularly in late spring, the blue crabs that live around New Orleans shed their old hard shells. For a brief time afterward, they can be eaten almost whole. The process is closely monitored by crab farmers, who know when the crabs are about to molt. They remove the crabs from the water as soon as that happens, before the new shell stiffens.\n\nA crab grows so much in the minutes after it sheds that it seems impossible that it ever could have fit in the old shell. If the crab is taken before it sheds and pumps up, and the shell is removed by hand, the meat is richer and more intense. That's what is done to \"buster\" crabs, which usually lose their legs and claws in the process.\n\nCrabs get better as they get bigger. A gigantic soft-shell crab (known as a \"whale\" in the trade) contains massive jumbo lumps. I'd prefer one whale to two smaller crabs, even if the two weighed more.\n\nWithout a doubt, the best way to cook soft-shell crabs is to fry them. You might marinate or smoke a crab before and sauce it after, but if you do anything but fry it in between, you'll wish you hadn't. You can make the crab look really good by just dipping its legs in the hot oil for a few seconds before putting the rest of the crab in.\n\nOysters\n\nOysters are, to my palate, the finest of local seafood. Gulf oysters are among the best in the world, available in tremendous quantity at very low prices throughout most of the year. Creole cooks have dreamed up hundreds of ways to prepare them.\n\nFor all that culinary exploration, connoisseurs agree that oysters are at their best cold and raw on the half shell. The health risk you're constantly told about actually affects only a small number of people. Even for those who are advised to stay away from raw seafood, properly cooked oysters are quite safe to eat.\n\nOysters are somewhat seasonal. Although refrigeration has largely eliminated the risk of eating oysters in months without an \"R,\" there is a grain of truth to the old myth. In early summer, oysters change sex (!) and spawn, resulting in a harmless but off-putting milky liquid in the shell. In early fall, oysters are lean and can shrink a lot when cooked.\n\nIn New Orleans, wholesale and retail oyster houses shuck and package fresh oysters in pints, quarts, and gallons on a daily basis. The freshest and best oysters are those you shuck yourself, since the oyster is still alive until you open it. But shucking oysters is hard and borderline dangerous work. I have a short list of friends who have the knack; I invite them to all our oyster dinners and keep them well supplied with beer or wine as they perform their unenviable task (which they seem to like, for some reason).\n\nOne rule applies to all oyster dishes: Don't overcook them! When the edges get curly and the oyster plumps up, it's cooked. Get it out of the pot or pan!\n\nOne other thing. Never, ever just throw away the liquor in which oysters are packed. Strain it and add it to whatever you're cooking for another burst of flavor.\n\nCrawfish\n\nPeople who don't eat crawfish call them \"crayfish\" or \"crawdads,\" two other names for these small, lobsterlike crustaceans. The crawfish season begins around Thanksgiving in a good year, reaches a peak in April and May, and tapers off around the Fourth of July. Crawfish tail meat is available most of the year, but outside the season, it's usually the much inferior imported product. I recommend eating crawfish only in season\n\nIn recent years, the popularity of Cajun cooking has brought about a large increase in the annual consumption of crawfish in America. Crawfish tail meat is usually available in one-pound frozen packages. In gourmet stores, you can sometimes even find live or boiled whole crawfish, much of which comes from China. I would strongly recommend looking for the Louisiana crawfish, which has more fat.\n\nThe peak revelry involving crawfish is a crawfish boil. It happens only when crawfish are at peak. Mounds of the red mudbugs are piled on newspapers, and the eaters go through fantastic numbers of them with potatoes, corn, and beer.\n\nCrawfish are the official food of Cajun country, where hundreds of dishes utilize them. The important issue is that crawfish have a rather mild taste and require a lot of help from the seasonings and sauces. That done, they're delicious.\n\nBarbecue Shrimp\n\n_Barbecue shrimp, one of the four or five best dishes in all of New Orleans cooking, is completely misnamed. They're neither grilled nor smoked, and there's no barbecue sauce. It was created in the mid-1950s at Pascal's Manale Restaurant. A regular customer came in and reported that he'd enjoyed a dish in a Chicago restaurant that he thought was made with shrimp, butter, and pepper. He asked Pascal Radosta to make it. Radosta took a flyer at it. The customer said that the taste was not the same but he liked the new dish even better. So was born the signature dish at Manale's._\n\n_I know that the amount of butter and pepper in this recipe seems fantastic. Be bold. This is not a dish you will eat often\u2014although you will want to._\n\n3 lb. fresh Gulf shrimp (16\u201320 count), with heads on\n\n\u00bc cup dry white wine\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n2 tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n2 cloves garlic, chopped\n\n4 Tbsp. fresh ground black pepper (or more!)\n\n2 tsp. paprika\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n3 sticks (1\u00bd cups) butter, softened\n\n1 loaf French Bread\n\n1. Rinse the shrimp and shake the excess water from them. Put them in a large skillet (or two) over medium heat, and pour the wine, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, and garlic over it. Bring the liquids in the pan to a light boil and cook, turning the shrimp over with a spoon every 2 minutes or so, until all the brown-gray color in the shrimp is gone. Don't overcook! At the first moment when you think the shrimp might be done, they will be. Lower the heat to the minimum.\n\n2. Cover the shrimp with a thin but complete layer of black pepper. You must be bold with this. When you think you have enough pepper in there, you still need a little more. Add the paprika and salt.\n\n3. Cut the butter into tablespoon-size pieces and distribute over the shrimp. With a big spoon, turn the shrimp over. Agitate the pan as the butter melts over the shrimp and emulsifies into the liquid at the bottom of the pan. When no more solid butter is visible, remove the pan from the burner.\n\n4. Serve the shrimp with lots of the sauce in bowls, with hot French bread for dipping. Don't forget plenty of napkins and perhaps bibs. SERVES FOUR TO SIX.\n\nShrimp Clemenceau\n\n_Clemenceau is the name of a classic Creole chicken dish. But if you take the same ingredients and substitute big shrimp for the chicken, you get a delicious dish that's very different from most other shrimp concoctions, with a great blending of flavors. It comes out best if you buy whole shrimp, peel them, and make a shrimp stock from the shells._\n\nVegetable oil, for frying\n\n2 large potatoes, peeled and cut into \u00bd-inch dice\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter\n\n32 medium shrimp (21\u201325 count), peeled\n\n\u00bd tsp. crushed red pepper\n\n\u00bc cup dry white wine\n\n1 cup sliced fresh mushrooms\n\n4 artichoke hearts, poached and cut into quarters (or use canned or jarred artichoke hearts, drained)\n\n2 cloves garlic, chopped\n\n1 cup shrimp stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n2 green onions, chopped\n\n\u00bd cup frozen petit pois peas\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. freshly ground black pepper\n\n1. Pour the oil into a deep skillet to a depth of 1 inch. Heat until the temperature reaches 375 degrees F. Fry the potatoes, in batches, until golden brown. Don't eat too many of them as you do.\n\n2. Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the shrimp and crushed red pepper, and cook until the shrimp just turn pink. Remove the shrimp from the pan and set aside.\n\n3. Add the wine and bring it to a boil. Add the mushrooms, artichoke hearts, garlic, and shrimp stock, and cook over medium-low heat, shaking the skillet to mix the ingredients. Reduce until the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.\n\n4. Add the green onions, peas, fried potatoes, salt, and pepper, and cook until everything is heated through. Adjust the seasonings and serve with hot French bread on the side. SERVES FOUR.\n\nVol-au-Vent of Louisiana Seafood\n\n_This is a delectable combination of fresh local shellfish in a rich, slightly spicy sauce. The vol-au-vent (a large version of what Orleanians call a patty shell) can be bought fresh from a French baker or frozen at supermarkets._\n\n2 Tbsp. olive oil\n\n\u00bd cup chopped green onion\n\n1 Tbsp. chopped shallots\n\n\u00bc cup dry white wine\n\n2 cups heavy whipping cream\n\nPinch of saffron threads\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. ground white pepper\n\nPinch of cayenne\n\nPinch of ground ginger\n\n1 lb. sea scallops\n\n1 lb. large shrimp (16\u201320 count), peeled and deveined\n\n2 dozen fresh, shucked oysters\n\n1\u00bd tsp. fresh tarragon, chopped (or \u00bd tsp. dried)\n\n6 large vol-au-vents (puff pastry shells)\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F. Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the green onion and shallots, and saut\u00e9 until they're limp. Add the wine and bring it to a boil. Reduce until most of the liquid is gone. Add the cream, saffron, salt, pepper, cayenne, and ginger, and bring to a light boil. (Also add tarragon at this point if using dried.)\n\n2. Add the scallops and shrimp, and cook for 4 minutes, then add the oysters and, if using, fresh tarragon. Cook until the edges of the oysters are curly, 3\u20135 minutes. Throughout the process, shake the pan to slosh the sauce over the seafood.\n\n3. Bake the vol-au-vents until warmed through, about 2 minutes. Place the shells on individual plates and overfill each shell with seafood and sauce so that the mixture runs over the top and onto the plate. SERVES SIX.\n\nSoft-Shell Crab with Crabmeat Meuni\u00e8re\n\n_Few dishes inspire the eye-popping anticipation that a large, golden brown soft-shell crab does. It's so intrinsically good that any fancy preparation diminishes it. The standard (and best) preparation is to dust the crab with seasoned flour and fry it. All it really needs in the way of a sauce is a little brown butter, and perhaps a topping of extra-jumbo lump crabmeat._\n\n4 large soft-shell crabs\n\nVegetable oil, for frying\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n1 tsp. ground white pepper\n\n2 cups flour\n\n1 cup milk\n\n1 whole egg\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice, freshly squeezed\n\n\u00bd tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n\u00bd lb. jumbo lump crabmeat\n\n1. Rinse the crabs and shake off excess water. Using scissors, cut out the gills (the dead man's fingers) from under the shell and then cut off the eyes and mouthparts.\n\n2. Pour the oil into a large, heavy kettle to a depth of \u00bd inch and heat to 375 degrees F. Meanwhile, blend the salt and pepper into the flour in a wide bowl. Whisk the milk and eggs together in another bowl.\n\n3. Lightly dredge the crabs in the flour mixture, then dip them into the egg mixture. Coat crabs again with the seasoned flour.\n\n4. Place a crab, top shell side down, on the end of a long-handled cooking fork. (Do not skewer it.) Let the legs and claws dangle. Lower all but the body into the hot oil. Hold that position for about 15 seconds and then carefully flip the crab backward into the oil. Fry two at a time until golden brown and drain. (Let the heat of the oil recover before frying the next batch.)\n\n5. Melt the butter in a small saucepan over low heat until it stops bubbling and the milk solids at the bottom just begin to brown. Carefully add the lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce\u2014this will cause the butter to foam!\u2014and cook until the foaming subsides. Add the crabmeat and saut\u00e9 30 seconds. Spoon the butter and crabmeat over the hot fried crabs. SERVES FOUR.\n\nSoft-Shell Crabs with Chinese Hot Garlic and Black Bean Sauce\n\n_It surprises some Orleanians (who tend to think that all our favorite dishes originally came from our city) that crabs are also much enjoyed in Southeast Asian coastal cuisines, from Thailand to China, and throughout the Indonesian archipelago. And Southeast Asian cooks know what we know: that the crabs must be fried somewhere along the line. This is a spicy Chinese approach to the delectable beasts, with a sauce that doesn't overwhelm._\n\n4 large soft-shell crabs\n\n1 egg, lightly beaten\n\n2 Tbsp. cornstarch\n\n1 tsp. chopped green onion\n\nPinch of freshly ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd cup vegetable oil\n\n\u00bc cup soy sauce\n\n1 Tbsp. rice wine vinegar\n\n\u00bc cup dry white wine\n\n1 Tbsp. sesame oil\n\n4\u00bd tsp. sugar\n\n1 tsp. chopped garlic\n\n\u00bc tsp. finely chopped fresh ginger\n\n\u00bd tsp. hot bean sauce (available at Asian markets)\n\n\u00bc tsp. crushed red pepper flakes\n\n1. Rinse the crabs and shake off excess water. Using a pair of scissors, cut off the eyes and mouthparts. Turn each crab on its back. Remove and discard the \"apron\"\u2014the part of the shell in the rear. Carefully lift up the pointed ends of the bottom shell and remove the gills (the dead man's fingers) and the sand sac at the front. Push the shell back in place. Cut each crab in half, front to back.\n\n2. Mix the egg, cornstarch, chopped green onion, and black pepper together in a wide bowl. Dip the crabs into the mixture to coat.\n\n3. Heat the vegetable oil to almost smoking in a heavy skillet or wok over high heat. Fry the crab halves, two at a time, until crisp on the outside but still soft and moist inside. Remove from the pan, drain, and keep warm.\n\n4. Pour out the oil from the pan but don't wipe. Add all the remaining ingredients and boil, stirring, for about 1 minute.\n\n5. Place 2 crab halves on each of 4 plates and spoon on the sauce. Serve immediately. SERVES FOUR.\n\nSoft-Shell Crab with Pecans\n\n_Pecans add a fascinating flavor dimension to any fried seafood. They're used most commonly with fish, but I think they're great with soft-shell crabs._\n\nSAUCE\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc cup flour\n\n1\u00bc sticks butter\n\n1 cup veal or chicken stock\n\n2 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 tsp. red wine vinegar\n\n1 cup finely chopped pecans\n\nCRABS\n\n4 large soft-shell crabs\n\nVegetable oil, for frying\n\n2 tsp. salt\n\nFreshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n2 tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n2 cups flour\n\n1. With a fork, stir the Creole seasoning and salt into the flour.\n\n2. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat. When it begins to bubble, stir in the seasoned flour and make a roux, stirring constantly, until it's medium brown. (Be careful not the let the roux burn; throw it away and start over if it does.)\n\n3. When the right color is reached, add the stock and whisk until the roux is dissolved. Add the lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, and vinegar and bring to a light boil. Cook until thick enough to coat a spoon (5 minutes or so), then remove the pan from the heat. Keep the sauce warm while you prepare the crabs.\n\n4. Wash the crabs and remove the gills (the dead man's fingers) from underneath the shell and cut off the eyes and mouthparts.\n\n5. Heat the vegetable oil in a large heavy kettle to 375 degrees F.\n\n6. Blend salt, pepper, and Creole seasoning into flour and coat each crab lightly with flour.\n\n7. Place a crab top side down on the end of a long-handled kitchen fork (do not skewer it), with the legs and claws hanging down.\n\n8. Carefully lower all but the body into the hot oil. Hold that position for about 15 seconds, then carefully flip the crab backward into the oil. Fry 2 at a time until golden brown, then drain. (Let the heat of the oil recover before frying the second batch.) Keep warm.\n\n9. Reheat the sauce. Stir the pecans in and cook for about 2 minutes, then serve over the crabs. SERVES FOUR.\n\nCrab Cakes\n\n_Crab cakes are not native to New Orleans, but you would never know that to look at menus or recent local cookbooks. They moved in from Maryland in the early 1990s, replacing the good old stuffed crab and igniting the issue that rages wherever crab cakes are found: Which restaurant makes the best? Interestingly, every place claims its are self-evidently superior._\n\n_Most people will say that a great crab cake will contain as much jumbo lump crabmeat as possible while still sticking together as a cake. But clearly there should be other things in there, too. I like green onions, parsley, garlic, and red bell pepper. I use b\u00e9chamel to hold the crabmeat together and a light dusting of bread crumbs so the things can be browned. Crab cakes should fall apart at the touch of a fork, not hold together like a hamburger._\n\nWHITE REMOULADE SAUCE\n\n\u00bc cup mayonnaise\n\n2 Tbsp. Creole mustard\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\nDash of Tabasco\n\n\u00bc tsp. granulated garlic\n\nCRAB CAKES\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter\n\n\u00bd cup flour\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. ground white pepper\n\n1 cup warm milk\n\n2 lb. lump crabmeat\n\n\u2153 cup finely chopped red bell pepper\n\n2 green onions, thinly sliced\n\n1 tsp. chopped fresh tarragon (or \u00bd tsp. dried)\n\n\u00bd cup plain bread crumbs\n\n2 tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n\u00bc cup clarified butter (see recipe, this page)\n\n1. To make the sauce: Mix all of the r\u00e9moulade ingredients in a bowl and set aside.\n\n2. To make the crab cakes: Make a blond roux by melting the butter in a heavy saucepan over low heat. Add the flour, salt, and white pepper, and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture just barely starts browning. Whisk in the warm milk until the blend has the texture of runny mashed potatoes. Cool to room temperature. (You've just made a b\u00e9chamel.)\n\n3. Remove any shells from the crabmeat, trying to keep the lumps as whole as possible. In a large bowl, combine the crabmeat with the bell pepper, green onions, and tarragon. Add \u00be cup of the cooled b\u00e9chamel and mix with your fingers, being careful not to break up the crabmeat.\n\n4. Season the bread crumbs with Creole seasoning and spread the seasoned crumbs out on a plate. Use an ice-cream scoop to measure 12 balls of the crabmeat mixture. Gently form each into cakes about \u00be inch thick. Press them gently onto the bread crumbs on each side and shake off the excess.\n\n5. Heat the clarified butter in a medium skillet. Saut\u00e9 the crab cakes until they are golden brown on the outside and heated all the way through. (The way to test this is to push the tines of a kitchen fork into the center of the cake, then touch the fork to your lips. That will tell you whether the heat has penetrated all the way through.) Serve crab cakes with the r\u00e9moulade on the side. MAKES TWELVE LARGE CRAB CAKES.\n\nCrabmeat Imperial\n\n_Crabmeat Imperial is an old local favorite that has fallen on hard times. It's as good as ever\u2014about the only way one could dislike it would be to dislike crabmeat\u2014but few restaurants serve it. I like the very simple way it's prepared at the Bon Ton Caf\u00e9, the city's oldest Cajun restaurant. The crabby flavor fairly explodes in your mouth. This is my variation on Bon Ton's recipe._\n\n6 Tbsp. butter\n\n\u00bd cup chopped green onion\n\n\u00bc cup sliced mushrooms\n\n1 lb. jumbo lump crabmeat\n\n\u00bc of a roasted red bell pepper (pimiento), chopped\n\n\u00bc cup dry sherry\n\n4 slices toasted French bread\n\n\u00bc cup chopped flat-leaf parsley, for garnish\n\nPinch of cayenne, for garnish\n\n1. Preheat the broiler. Melt 3 tablespoons of the butter in a large skillet over mediumlow heat. Add the green onion and mushrooms, and saut\u00e9 until the green onion becomes limp but not brown.\n\n2. Add the crabmeat, red bell pepper, and sherry, and turn the heat up a bit. Cook, shaking the skillet (don't stir), until the sherry is boiled away.\n\n3. Melt the remaining 3 tablespoons of butter into the crabmeat mixture and pile it onto rounds of toasted French bread on ovenproof dishes. Run the plates under the broiler, about 5 inches from the heat, for 2\u20133 minutes, or until the crabmeat sizzles. Garnish with the parsley and cayenne. SERVES TWO TO FOUR.\n\nCrabmeat au Gratin\n\n_As widely as this is thought to be true,_ au gratin _does not mean covered with a thick layer of Day-Glo melted cheese. All it means is that there's some kind of crust on top. In this recipe, the crust is mostly bread crumbs, although there's some Parmesan cheese both in the crust and in the sauce. You will thank me for not ruining the taste of the crabmeat with melted Cheddar or the like._\n\n1 cup heavy whipping cream\n\n\u00bd medium yellow onion, chopped\n\n4 large mushrooms, sliced\n\n2 Tbsp. green onion tops, chopped\n\n1 Tbsp. chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley\n\n1 tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n1 tsp. lemon juice\n\n5 Tbsp. grated Parmesan cheese\n\n1 lb. jumbo lump crabmeat\n\n2 Tbsp. plain bread crumbs\n\n1. Preheat the broiler. Heat the cream in a small saucepan and reduce by about a third. Add all of the vegetables and return to a boil. Stir in the Creole seasoning, lemon juice, and 3 tablespoons of the Parmesan. Add the crabmeat and toss in the pan to combine with the sauce. Be careful not to break up the lumps.\n\n2. Divide the mixture into 4 ovenproof dishes for appetizers, 2 dishes for entr\u00e9es. Combine the bread crumbs and remaining cheese together and sprinkle over the top of each dish. Broil until the sauce begins to bubble, 3\u20135 minutes. Serve immediately. SERVES FOUR AS AN APPETIZER OR TWO AS AN ENTREE.\n\nCrabmeat and Tasso Sliders\n\n_The less-expensive varieties of crabmeat like \"special white\" (that's the flaky, non-lump white meat) and claw meat are very affordable. If you use them with a few other ingredients to make burger-like patties, you can pan-fry or broil them, then make tremendously delicious slider-style sandwiches. They're especially good with white r\u00e9moulade._\n\n1 stick butter\n\n\u2153 cup flour\n\n\u2153 cup milk\n\n1 lb. white or claw crabmeat\n\n2 oz. tasso ham, chopped fine\n\n\u00bc red bell pepper, chopped\n\n2 green onions, tender green parts only, thinly sliced\n\n1 cup bread crumbs\n\n8 small French bread rolls or kaiser rolls\n\n\u00bc cup white r\u00e9moulade, warm (see Shrimp R\u00e9moulade with Two Sauces, this page)\n\nBaby lettuce, if desired\n\n1. Melt 6 Tbsp. of the butter in a saucepan. Add the flour and cook over mediumlow heat, as if making a roux, stirring constantly, until the texture changes. Do not allow it to brown.\n\n2. Add the milk and whisk until well blended into what looks like thin mashed potatoes. This is a b\u00e9chamel sauce. Remove from heat.\n\n3. Add the crabmeat, tasso, bell pepper, and green onions to the b\u00e9chamel and stir gently with a wooden spoon.\n\n4. Turn the mixture out onto a cutting board. Form round, flat cakes the size of thick hamburgers.\n\n5. Put the bread crumbs onto a plate and gently press the crab patties into the crumbs to coat.\n\n6. Heat the remaining butter to bubbling in a skillet over medium-high heat. Cook the crab cakes on both sides until crusty brown.\n\n7. Warm the bread rolls in the oven. Spread with the r\u00e9moulade and place a crab cake in each. Baby lettuce makes a nice finishing touch, if you like. MAKES EIGHT SANDWICHES.\n\nFettuccine Pontchartrain\n\n_I'm not sure who thought of it first, but the combination of Louisiana crabmeat lumps with fettuccine and an Alfredo-style sauce is inspired and irresistible. This recipe takes it a step further, with a soft-shell crab (or even better, a buster crab) on top._\n\n6 small soft-shell crabs\n\nVegetable oil, for frying\n\n1 cup flour\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. ground white pepper\n\n2 Tbsp. butter\n\n\u2153 cup chopped yellow onion\n\n1 clove garlic, chopped\n\n1 cup heavy whipping cream\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n\u215b tsp. cayenne\n\n\u2154 cup shredded Romano cheese\n\n1 lb. white crabmeat\n\n1 lb. (precooked weight) fettuccine, cooked al dente\n\n1. Rinse the crabs and shake off any excess water. Using scissors, cut off the eyes and mouthparts. Turn each crab on its back. Remove and discard the \"apron\"\u2014the part of the shell in the rear. Carefully lift up the pointed ends of the bottom shell and remove the gills (the dead man's fingers) and the sand sac at the front. Push the shell back in place.\n\n2. Dry the crabs very well with paper towels. Heat about 1 inch of the oil in a deep skillet or saucepan to 375 degrees F. Season the flour with salt and pepper in a wide bowl. Dredge the crabs in the seasoned flour. Drop the crabs in the oil two at a time and fry until golden brown. Drain on paper towels and keep warm until serving.\n\n3. Melt the butter in large skillet and saut\u00e9 the onion for 1 minute, then add the garlic and saut\u00e9 until fragrant. Add the cream, salt, and cayenne, and reduce for 1\u20132 minutes. Add the Romano cheese, stirring until it melts into the cream. Add the crabmeat and cook for another minute, shaking the skillet to mix the ingredients. Remove the sauce from the heat.\n\n4. Add the cooked, drained fettuccine and toss with the sauce. Divide among 6 plates and top each with a fried soft-shell crab. SERVES SIX.\n\nPasta with Cajun Crawfish Cream Sauce\n\n_This is the most famous and the best of the many Louisiana pasta-and-seafood dishes, with suaveness and rambunctiousness playing off each other. It gets its distinctive pink-orange color from Creole seasoning. I add a little Cognac at the beginning and a little tarragon at the end. If I have crawfish stock around, I add some of that, too._\n\n2 Tbsp. butter\n\n\u00bd cup finely chopped green onion, plus more for garnish\n\n1 clove garlic, finely chopped\n\n2 Tbsp. Cognac or brandy\n\n\u00bd cup crawfish stock (optional; see recipe, this page)\n\n2 cups heavy whipping cream\n\n4\u00bd tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n\u00be tsp. fresh tarragon, chopped (or \u00bc tsp. dried)\n\n2 lb. crawfish tail meat\n\n1 lb. bowtie or other pasta, cooked al dente and drained\n\n1. Melt the butter in a large stainless steel skillet until it bubbles. Add the green onion and garlic and cook until the garlic is fragrant. Add the Cognac. Warm it and either boil it off or flame it (very carefully). If you have crawfish stock, add it and bring the mixture to a boil. Reduce it by half.\n\n2. Add the cream, Creole seasoning, salt, and tarragon, and bring to a boil while shaking the skillet carefully to blend its contents. Reduce the cream by about a third (approximately 3 minutes over medium-high heat). Then add the crawfish tails and cook until heated through.\n\n3. Add the pasta and toss with the sauce to distribute all the ingredients and sauce uniformly. Serve immediately, garnished with finely chopped green onion. (Resist the temptation to add Parmesan or Romano cheese.) SERVES FOUR.\n\nAline's Crawfish Etouff\u00e9e\n\nEtouff\u00e9e _means \"smothered,\" and that's the idea. It's not a long-cooked stew. My mother's version of this Cajun classic is important to me not only because it's very good, but also because of a poignant memory it always triggers. One afternoon in 1984, I brought Mama a big bag of boiled crawfish, and she made a pot of this \u00e9touff\u00e9e. My father, 75 and ailing, ate a big plate of it. He remarked how good he thought it was, then went off for a nap. He never woke up. It is my fondest wish that I shuffle off this mortal coil the same way._\n\n_It's best to make this from whole boiled crawfish, so when you peel them, you can extract the fat from inside the head. (Your finger will do the trick.) That adds lots of flavor to the \u00e9touff\u00e9e. One more thing: Crawfish tails are addictive, so bring home lots of them._\n\n\u00bd cup vegetable oil\n\n\u00bd cup flour\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter\n\n1 small yellow onion, chopped\n\n2 green onions, greens only, chopped\n\n\u00bd red bell pepper, chopped\n\n2 cloves garlic, chopped\n\n1 ripe tomato, coarsely chopped\n\n2 Tbsp. chopped celery\n\n4 sprigs flat-leaf parsley\n\n1 basil leaf\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n3 cups crawfish tail meat from boiled crawfish\n\nFat from crawfish heads\n\n3\u20134 dashes of Tabasco\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper\n\n2 cups cooked long-grain rice\n\n\u00bc cup very finely chopped green onion, for garnish\n\n1. Make a roux by heating the oil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the flour and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture turns medium brown. Add the butter, allowing it time to melt and mix in.\n\n2. Add the yellow onion and saut\u00e9 until it's barely brown around the edges. Add the green onions, bell pepper, and garlic, and cook until tender. Add the tomato and 2 cups of water. Bring to a boil, then add the celery, parsley, basil leaf, and bay leaf. Simmer for 10 minutes.\n\n3. Add the crawfish tails, crawfish fat, Tabasco, and salt and pepper to taste, and simmer for 10\u201312 minutes more. Remember as you add the salt and pepper that the boiled crawfish already have a good bit of both. Serve over rice, topped with finely chopped green onion for garnish. SERVES FOUR TO SIX.\n\nOysters Ambrosia\n\n_This was created at Commander's Palace by Sebastian \"Chef Buster\" Ambrosia, who might have the best name I've ever heard for a chef. For many years, Chef Buster hosted a cooking show on WWL Radio, where I work. He has served oysters Ambrosia in every restaurant he's headed, and it was always the best dish in that restaurant at the time. It's as Creole as something can be: seafood with a brown sauce. \"It's good, hearts!\" as Chef Buster would say._\n\n4 dozen fresh, shucked large oysters, with their liquor\n\n2 Tbsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n2 sticks (16 Tbsp.) butter\n\n3 cups flour\n\n2 cups red wine\n\n4 cups rich beef stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n6 bay leaves\n\n1 Tbsp. chopped garlic\n\n\u00bc cup Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 tsp. Louisiana hot sauce, such as Crystal\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\nVegetable oil, for frying\n\n1 Tbsp. salt\n\n2 green onions, chopped, for garnish\n\n8 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, chopped, for garnish\n\n1. Drain the oysters, reserving the liquor. Sprinkle the oysters with the Creole seasoning and toss around to coat. Put them in the refrigerator while making the sauce.\n\n2. Make a medium-dark roux by melting the butter in a medium saucepan. Add 1 cup of the flour and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture turns the color of an old penny. When the roux has reached the right color, add the wine and bring it to a boil, stirring for about 1 minute.\n\n3. Add the beef stock, strained oyster liquor, bay leaves, and garlic, whisking to dissolve the bits of roux that will be floating around. Bring the sauce up to a simmer and let it cook and thicken for about 45 minutes.\n\n4. Add the Worcestershire sauce and hot sauce, and season to taste with salt and pepper. Simmer another 10 minutes, at most, while you prepare the oysters.\n\n5. Pour the oil into a kettle to a depth of 1 inch and heat until the temperature reaches 375 degrees F. Place the remaining 2 cups of flour in a large bowl and season with the tablespoon of salt. Dredge the oysters in the seasoned flour. Fry the oysters, in batches, until golden brown, about 2 minutes. Don't add so many oysters that the oil temperature drops radically. Drain after frying.\n\n6. Spoon some of the sauce into a bowl and toss the oysters in the sauce to coat them well. Place 6 oysters (for an appetizer) or 12 oysters (for an entr\u00e9e) on a plate and top with some green onions and parsley. (Note: For an opulent option, add some lump crabmeat to the bowl when tossing the oysters in the sauce and serve them both together.) MAKES EIGHT APPETIZERS OR FOUR ENTREES.\n\nOysters and Pasta Creole Bordelaise\n\n_A delicious and very simple combination: spaghetti aglio olio (or bordelaise, as we call it in New Orleans) with fresh Louisiana oysters._\n\n\u00bc cup extra-virgin olive oil\n\n24 fresh large oysters\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter\n\n2 Tbsp. finely chopped garlic\n\n4 Tbsp. finely chopped green onion tops\n\n\u00bd tsp. crushed red pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n1 lb. vermicelli, cooked al dente\n\n8 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, chopped, for garnish\n\n1. Heat the oil in a small skillet over medium-low heat. Add the oysters, cooking them by shaking the pan and making them roll around until they plump up and the edges curl up.\n\n2. Add the butter, garlic, green onion tops, crushed red pepper, and salt, and cook, shaking the pan all the while, until the green onions have wilted. Don't cook more than a minute, or the garlic and green onions will lose their flavor.\n\n3. Remove from the heat and add the cooked, drained pasta to the pan. Toss the pasta until well coated with the sauce. Garnish with the parsley. SERVES FOUR.\n\nMussels in Ghent-Style Wine Sauce\n\n_The best mussels I ever ate were in a big restaurant called Auberge de Fonteyne in the center of Ghent in Belgium on the third day of our honeymoon. The mussels were awash in what they called a wine sauce, although it seemed more like a cream sauce to me. It's a Belgian classic, and no place in the world is more enthusiastic about mussels than Belgium._\n\n_Mussels are very inexpensive, so buy plenty of them. The best are the black-shell mussels from Prince Edward Island in Canada. (I do not recommend the green-lipped mussels from New Zealand.) Mussels should be tightly closed; if the shell gapes a little, tap it. If it doesn't close, pitch it. Although most of the mussels I'm finding in stores these days are pre-washed, scrubbing them and removing the byssus (beard) is still essential. After the mussels pop open in the pan, check them to see whether they need to be washed inside even a little more because sometimes they do. Mussels cook very quickly, and they shrivel up if you cook them too long. So get them out of the pan as soon as they open and are heated through._\n\nMUSSELS\n\n8 dozen mussels, scrubbed\n\n1 yellow onion, coarsely chopped\n\n1 Tbsp. coarsely cracked black pepper\n\n1 tsp. dried thyme\n\nStems from 1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley\n\n2 cups dry white wine\n\nSAUCE\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter\n\n1 heaping Tbsp. flour\n\n1 small yellow onion, minced\n\n2 cloves garlic, minced\n\n\u00bc tsp. crushed red pepper flakes\n\n1 cup heavy whipping cream\n\n\u00bd tsp. saffron\n\n4 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, chopped\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n2 green onions, chopped, for garnish\n\n1. Put the mussels into a very large, heavy pot with all the other non-sauce ingredients, plus \u00bc cup of water. Bring to a boil over high heat. After a couple of minutes, vigorously shake the pot to allow the unopened mussels to work their way to the bottom and open. Steam for about 4 minutes, or until all the mussels have opened.\n\n2. Remove the mussels to a strainer set over a bowl to catch all the juices. After they cool for 3\u20134 minutes, rinse the inside of the shells in a bowl of water and remove any beards that may remain. Strain the mussel juices back into the pot through a fine sieve or cheesecloth.\n\n3. Make a blond roux by melting the butter in a large saucepan until it bubbles. Add the flour and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture just barely begins to brown. Add the onion, garlic, and crushed red pepper, and cook until the garlic is fragrant, about 2 minutes.\n\n4. Add the strained mussel juices and gently simmer for about 8 minutes. Add the cream, saffron, and parsley, and simmer 3\u20134 minutes more. Season the sauce with salt and pepper to taste.\n\n5. Place a dozen mussels in a large, broad-rimmed soup bowl and ladle the sauce over them. Garnish with the green onions. Provide hot loaves of French bread, damp towels, and a bowl for the shells. SERVES ONE MUSSEL FANATIC OR FOUR NORMAL PEOPLE.\n\nBouillabaisse, New Orleans Style\n\n_Save this recipe for the day when you find yourself with a surplus of whole fresh fish. If you never have such a day, make crab or shrimp stock (see recipe,this page) instead of the fish stock. The best fish to use, both for the stock and the big pieces that will make their way into the soup, are firm-fleshed white fish, such as redfish, red snapper, drum, grouper, and lemonfish. For something outrageously good, use pompano. For various reasons (texture and color, mostly), I would avoid catfish, escolar, salmon, or tuna._\n\nSTOCK\n\nBones, heads, and scraps from 5\u20138 lb. white fish (see headnote), livers and gills removed\n\nTop 4 inches of a bunch of celery, chopped\n\nStems from 1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley\n\n1 yellow onion, chopped\n\n1 Tbsp. black peppercorns\n\n1 tsp. dried thyme\n\nBOUILLABAISSE\n\n\u00bd cup extra-virgin olive oil\n\n1 large yellow onion, coarsely chopped\n\n1 fennel bulb, coarsely chopped\n\n6 large cloves garlic, crushed\n\n\u00bd tsp. crushed red pepper\n\n2 medium fresh tomatoes, skin, seeds, and pulp removed, coarsely chopped\n\n2 canned whole Italian plum tomatoes, chopped\n\n\u00bd cup juice from canned tomatoes\n\n\u2154 cup dry white wine, such as Sauvignon Blanc\n\n1 large bay leaf\n\n2 lb. white fish (see headnote), cut into large pieces\n\n\u00bd pound squid, cleaned and bodies sliced into rings (optional)\n\n4 dozen mussels, scrubbed and debearded Pinch of saffron threads\n\n16 large (16\u201320 count) shrimp, peeled except for tails (or take them off, too)\n\n\u00bd lb. lump crabmeat (optional)\n\n2 green onions, finely chopped\n\n8 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, leaves only, chopped\n\nSalt to taste\n\nCayenne to taste\n\nParsley, for garnish\n\nToasted French bread rounds\n\n\u00bd cup Spicy Garlic Mayonnaise (see recipe, this page)\n\n1. To make the stock: Put all of the fish bones, heads, skins, and scraps into a stockpot and cover with cold water. Bring it to a boil, then dump the water, saving all the fish parts. Refill the pot with just enough water to barely cover the fish parts. Add all of the remaining stock ingredients and bring to just a simmer. Reduce the heat to low and very gently simmer for 30 minutes more, skimming the foam that rises to the top.\n\n2. Strain the stock and discard the solids. Return the stock to the pot and simmer while you continue with the rest of the recipe.\n\n3. To make the bouillabaisse: Heat the oil in another large kettle over medium-high heat. Add the onion, fennel, garlic, and crushed red pepper, and saut\u00e9 until the onion turns translucent. Add the fresh and canned tomatoes and juice, and cook 1 minute more. Add the wine and bay leaf, and boil for 3 minutes.\n\n4. Ladle \u00be cup of the fish stock into a skillet and set aside. Add the fish and squid and remaining vegetables to the kettle and return to a simmer.\n\n5. Meanwhile, add the mussels to the skillet with the stock and cook for about a minute, by which time all of them should open. (Discard any that do not.) Turn the heat off and allow to cool while shaking the pan so that the stock sloshes inside the mussels. Remove the mussels to a bowl. If any of the mussels appear to have grit or beard inside, clean them. Strain the liquid from the pan and the bowl through a fine sieve into the kettle with the fish.\n\n6. Add the saffron and shrimp to the kettle and cook for about a minute. Add the crabmeat, mussels, and green onions, and cook for another minute, gently stirring to distribute the ingredients. Season to taste with salt and cayenne.\n\n7. Divide the seafood equally among 4\u20136 bowls and ladle the broth and vegetables over everything. Garnish with parsley. Serve with toasted French bread slices spread with spicy garlic mayonnaise. SERVES FOUR TO SIX.\n\nCajun Seared Scallops with Near-Guacamole\n\n_Save this recipe for occasions when you find those sea scallops that are almost the size of filets mignons. Sea scallops that size are delicious and lend themselves particularly to pan-searing. In our part of the world, this verges on blackening and that's just fine, assuming the pan is really hot and you don't let the scallops sit there too long. The salsa is essentially my recipe for guacamole but with the avocados sliced on top instead of blended in._\n\nSCALLOPS\n\n1 lb. sea scallops, the bigger the better\n\nSalt-free Creole seasoning\n\nSalt to taste\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter, melted\n\nSALSA\n\n2 tomatillos, peeled and coarsely chopped\n\n1 medium sweet onion, coarsely chopped\n\nJuice of 1 lime\n\n1 Tbsp. red wine vinegar\n\n1 Tbsp. olive oil\n\n2 tsp. Tabasco Green Pepper Sauce\n\n2 large tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and chopped\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. coarsely ground black pepper\n\n2 tsp. Vietnamese fish sauce\n\n2 Hass avocados, ripe but not soft, each cut into 8\u201312 slices\n\n8 sprigs cilantro, leaves only, chopped, for garnish\n\n1 green onion, tender green part only, sliced, for garnish\n\n1. Heat a black iron skillet over high heat. Check the sea scallops to make sure they've been well trimmed. (Sometimes you'll find some fibrous stuff at the edge; remove and discard this.) Coat the sea scallops generously with the Creole seasoning and a little salt. Add the butter to the skillet, then add the scallops and sear them for about 2 minutes on each side.\n\n2. Blend all the salsa ingredients up to (but not including) the avocados in a food processor.\n\n3. Spoon about \u00bc cup of the salsa onto each of 4 plates. Place 4\u20136 scallops on the salsa (depending on size). Put 2\u20133 avocado slices between the scallops. Garnish with the cilantro and green onion. SERVES FOUR.\n\nLouisiana Seafood Pasta\n\n_Here's my take on the very rich Creole-seasoned, chock-full-of-seafood pasta dish that became popular in the early 1980s and remains so today. When crawfish are in season, use them instead of the scallops._\n\n2 Tbsp. butter\n\n\u00bd cup chopped green onion\n\n1 Tbsp. chopped shallots\n\n\u00bc cup dry white wine\n\n2 cups heavy whipping cream Pinch of saffron threads\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\n\u00bc tsp. ground white pepper\n\nPinch of cayenne\n\nPinch of ground ginger\n\n1 lb. sea scallops, halved crosswise\n\n1 lb. medium shrimp (20 \u201325 count), peeled and deveined\n\n2 dozen fresh, shucked oysters\n\n\u00bd tsp. fresh tarragon (or \u00bc tsp. dried)\n\n1 lb. lump crabmeat\n\nDash of Tabasco or pinch of crushed red pepper (optional)\n\n2 lb. farfalle pasta, cooked al dente\n\n1. Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the green onion and shallots, and cook until they're limp. Add the wine and reduce until most of the liquid is gone. Add the cream, saffron, salt, pepper, cayenne, and ginger, and bring to a light boil. (Also add tarragon at this point if using dried.)\n\n2. Add the scallops and shrimp, and cook for 4 minutes. Add the oysters and fresh tarragon, if using. Cook until the edges of the oysters are curly, then add the crabmeat. Throughout the process, shake the skillet to slosh the sauce over the seafood.\n\n3. Taste the sauce and add salt if necessary. You can also spice it up with a bit of Tabasco or crushed red pepper. Remove from the heat. Add the cooked and drained pasta, and toss until well combined. SERVES EIGHT.\n\n_Finfish Entr\u00e9es_\n\nFried Catfish\n\nTrout Meuni\u00e8re Old Style\n\nTrout with Pecans\n\nTrout Marigny\n\nTrout en Croute with Shrimp Mousse\n\nRedfish with Artichokes and Mushrooms\n\nRedfish with Sizzling Crabmeat and Herbs\n\nRedfish Herbsaint\n\nRedfish Courtbouillon\n\nNouvelle Pompano en Papillote\n\nPasta Milanese with Pompano\n\nCaribbean Creole Red Snapper and Shrimp\n\nPoached Fish with Cranberry Hollandaise\n\nBroiled Fish with Beurre Orange\n\nFish in a Salt Dome\n\nSea Bream in an Envelope\n\nSea Bream Nouvelle Creole\n\nWhole Flounder Stuffed with Crabmeat\n\nBlackened Tuna\n\nGrilled Tuna with Orange-Soy Sauce\n\nTuna Puttanesca\n\nSeared Tuna with Tomato-Lemon Vinaigrette\n\nHorseradish-Crusted Grouper with Oysters and Saffron\n\nSalmon Florentine\n\nA\n\nThe most fundamental change on New Orleans menus during my years of covering restaurants was in the fish department. Until the mid-1980s, speckled trout was the default fish everywhere. Also commonly available were pompano, redfish, flounder, and catfish. And that was really about it.\n\nThen the market changed. The blackened redfish craze decimated that species. Trout became scarce, too. Restaurants began resorting to fish only fishermen know about. This meant not only introducing customers to new flavors and textures but coming up with new recipes designed for unfamiliar species. The silver lining here is that we are now cooking and eating a far greater variety of fish than ever before.\n\nMost of the finfish used in New Orleans cooking are saltwater fish. Among the popular local wild fish, only catfish is a freshwater species.\n\nHere's a quick guide to the most popular Louisiana fish. Notes on some other species are found with the recipes for them.\n\nPompano\n\nFull-flavored and on the high end of the fat scale, pompano is not for everyone. But to my palate, this is the most delicious fish there is. It's also a beauty. Perhaps the best way to prepare it is to clean it and grill it whole. Even if you fillet a pompano, leave the skin on; that's where the rich, flavorful fat is. The silvery flesh has an unusual texture that neither flakes nor shreds. Pompano is seasonal, and the seasons are peculiar. When you find it, get it. And keep it simple. There's no close substitute.\n\nSpeckled Trout\n\nThe favorite fish in New Orleans white-tablecloth restaurants for decades, speckled trout suddenly became rare and we started appreciating it even more. The \"spotted sea trout\" (as ichthyologists call it) is a drum, not at all related to freshwater trout. The best speckled trout are the smallish ones, up to two pounds. Really small ones are excellent cooked whole\u2014either fried or broiled. The fish lends itself to pansaut\u00e9eing and deep-frying with a light dusting of seasoned flour. Speckled trout is the definitive fish for New Orleans\u2013style meuni\u00e8re and amandine dishes. If speckled trout isn't available, substitute redfish, red snapper, drum, or striped bass.\n\nTuna\n\nAlthough a tremendous amount of tuna\u2014both yellowfin (ahi) and the rarer bluefin\u2014is caught in the Gulf of Mexico, fresh tuna is relatively new to New Orleans cookery. Tuna is unlike most of the other fish we consume. (And it's not much like the tuna we all know from cans, either.) It's an enormous fish, some weighing in the hundreds of pounds. Its flesh is red, not white, has the texture of meat, and is usually cut into steaks.\n\nTuna is best cooked using the same methods and sauces you would for beef. Never cook it all the way through; leave it red in the center. (Of course, a lot of tuna is eaten completely raw in sushi bars.) I recommend having tuna cut very thick\u2014as much as three inches. Then hit it with very high heat. (Tuna lends itself exceptionally well to blackening.)\n\nRed Snapper\n\nRed snapper is a favorite not only around New Orleans but all across America. That makes it a bit more expensive and spotty in its availability, even though fishermen catch a lot of it in nearby waters.\n\nRed snapper has a tender texture that holds together well even though it's a flaky fish. Despite its relatively low oil content, red snapper has a delectable flavor. Some people like their snapper grilled, but I prefer it pan-saut\u00e9ed or broiled. Red snapper also lends itself to being cooked whole, particularly if it's a smaller specimen. Substitutes include redfish, trout, and striped bass.\n\nFlounder\n\nFlounder is a flatfish, like turbot, halibut, and sole. The few restaurants that specialize in this underappreciated fish sell lots of it because its fans know where to go.\n\nFlounder is among the best fish to cook whole, either broiled or fried. Even for the uninitiated, it's easy to cook and eat that way, as long as you avoid the free-floating bones around the perimeter. Flounder is good with any butter sauce, particularly those involving lemon.\n\nBlack Drum\n\nI always order drumfish when it's the fish of the day unless there's something obviously better. Funny: The fish was once despised. But after its cousin, the redfish, was banned from commercial fishing, black drum took its place in restaurants and markets. And suddenly we found that drum wasn't so bad after all. Delicious, in fact.\n\nDrum and redfish are similar in many ways. The right-sized drum is a two-to-four-pounder called a \"puppy drum,\" and it's a nice fish indeed. It has the same white-with-a-tinge-of-gray color and flakes of about the same size and texture as speckled trout (another relative) and, in most cases, makes a good substitute for it.\n\nSheepshead (Sea Bream)\n\nWere it not for its unappealing name, sheepshead would be one of the best-liked fish in Louisiana. To that end, the authorities have applied the name \"sea bream\" to sheepshead, which helped a little. It's not a new fish to our tables: I've found it on menus from 100 years ago. Assuming you don't see its funny head or have to clean it (quite a job), it's a beautiful fish\u2014white, firm, and flavorful without being oily. The larger ones are very good on the grill or blackened. Smaller ones can be pan-saut\u00e9ed or broiled to resemble redfish or drum. Never hesitate to use sheepshead for any recipe that calls for a good white fillet.\n\nFried Catfish\n\n_It's gospel, as far as I'm concerned: No catfish you ever make will ever be as good as catfish rolled in cornmeal and deep-fried. If you want to give it some extra moxie, marinate it in something good, as I do in this recipe. The other article of faith is the great superiority of small, wild catfish to big, farm-raised ones. Unfortunately, the catfish you find in the store is almost certainly farm-raised, which not only has an off-taste to me but also is too big._\n\n_The essential trick in frying fish is to keep the oil at 375 degrees F. Use a fat thermometer to monitor this. Whatever utensil you have that will keep the heat up is fine. I've had good luck with a black iron skillet with an inch of oil, a deep Dutch oven with a couple of quarts of oil, and a good electric fryer._\n\n2 lb. small catfish fillets\n\n3 Tbsp. yellow mustard\n\n2 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n1 Tbsp. juice from a jar of dill pickles\n\n2 tsp. milder Louisiana hot sauce, such as Crystal\n\n1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 cup corn flour (Fish-Fri)\n\n1 cup cornmeal\n\n1 Tbsp. salt\n\n\u00bd tsp. granulated garlic\n\nPeanut oil, for frying\n\n1. Wash the catfish and remove the skin and any remaining bones. Unless the fillets are very small, cut them on the bias into strips about 1\u00bd inches wide.\n\n2. Blend the mustard, lemon juice, pickle juice, hot sauce, and Worcestershire sauce in a bowl. Put the catfish fillets into the bowl and toss to coat with the marinade. Let marinate for about 30 minutes, refrigerated.\n\n3. Combine the corn flour, cornmeal, salt, and garlic with a fork in a large bowl. Put 4\u20136 pieces of catfish into the corn-flour mixture and toss around to coat the catfish. Repeat with the remaining fish.\n\n4. Pour the oil into a cast-iron skillet or a Dutch oven to a depth of 1 inch and place over medium-high heat until the temperature reaches 375 degrees F. Working in batches, fry the catfish until they turn golden brown. Remove with a skimmer (or, better, the spider utensil used by Asian cooks). Drain on paper towels.\n\n5. Serve with tartar sauce and pickles and hot sauce. And don't forget the Hush Puppies (see recipe, this page). SERVES TWO TO FOUR.\n\nTrout Meuni\u00e8re Old Style\n\n_The word \"meuni\u00e8re\" is a reference to the miller of wheat, whose wife (according to French lore) cooked everything coated with flour. The original French style of trout meuni\u00e8re was coated with seasoned flour, saut\u00e9ed in butter, and then topped with the browned butter from the pan. This is still more or less how the dish is done in some restaurants\u2014notably Galatoire's._\n\n_But there's a Creole version and I like it better than the French classic. It was invented by Count Arnaud, who added a bit of stock and roux to the butter and lemon. At its best, this sauce is incredibly good and works not just on trout but also on other fried seafoods, notably oysters._\n\n1 cup flour\n\n1 Tbsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\nSix 6\u20138-oz. speckled trout fillets\n\n1\u00bc sticks (10 Tbsp.) butter\n\n1 cup veal stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n2 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 tsp. red wine vinegar\n\nPeanut oil, for frying (optional but recommended)\n\nLemon wedges\n\n1. Combine the flour, Creole seasoning, and salt in a wide, flat-bottomed bowl (a soup bowl is perfect).\n\n2. Rinse the trout fillets and pat dry. Dredge the fish through the seasoned flour and knock off the excess. Place the fish in a pan on waxed paper and set aside.\n\n3. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat. When it begins to bubble, stir in \u00bc cup of the leftover seasoned flour and make a roux, stirring constantly, until it's medium brown.\n\n4. When the right color is reached, add the veal stock and whisk until the roux is dissolved into the stock. Add the lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, and vinegar and bring to a simmer. Whisk now and then while cooking, until the sauce is thick enough to flow but not slosh. Reduce the heat to the lowest setting to keep the sauce warm while you prepare the fish.\n\n5. You can pan-fry the fish in butter if you like, but it's more common in New Orleans to fry it in about an inch of 375-degree-F oil. Either way, cook till golden brown (about 2 minutes per side).\n\n6. Nap with the sauce and serve with lemon wedges. SERVES SIX.\n\nTrout with Pecans\n\n_In the early 1980s, when trout amandine ruled the earth, Ella Brennan asked her chefs at Commander's Palace, \"Why are we cooking trout with almonds like every other place in the world? Almonds don't grow around here. Why not use pecans?\" The chefs got to work, and trout with pecans was born. This preparation also works very well with fried soft-shell crabs._\n\nPECAN BUTTER\n\n3 Tbsp. butter\n\n2 Tbsp. toasted pecans\n\n3 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n1\u00bd tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\nSAUCE\n\n2 Tbsp. flour\n\n\u00bd cup shrimp or fish stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n\u00bd cup Worcestershire sauce\n\n3 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n2 sticks (16 Tbsp.) butter, softened\n\nTROUT\n\n2 cups flour\n\n3 Tbsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n2 Tbsp. salt\n\n2 eggs\n\n\u00bd cup milk\n\nSix 6\u20138-oz. trout fillets\n\n1 cup clarified butter (see recipe, this page)\n\n8 oz. toasted pecan halves\n\n1. To make the pecan butter: Place all of the pecan butter ingredients into the container of a food processor or blender. Process to a smooth puree and set aside.\n\n2. To make the sauce: Stir the flour and 2 tablespoons of water together in a heatproof bowl to a smooth paste. Bring the stock, Worcestershire sauce, and lemon juice to a light boil in a small saucepan. Whisk about \u2153 cup of the hot stock mixture into the flour paste. Then gradually pour the flour mixture back into the saucepan and bring to a boil, stirring constantly with the whisk. Whisk in the softened butter, a tablespoon at a time. Keep the sauce warm.\n\n3. Combine the flour, Creole seasoning, and salt in a wide bowl. Beat the eggs with the milk in another wide bowl. Dust the trout lightly with the seasoned flour. Pass it through the egg wash and then dredge it once more in the seasoned flour.\n\n4. Heat half of the clarified butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat until a sprinkling of flour sizzles in it. Add half of the fillets and saut\u00e9, turning once, until golden brown, 3\u20134 minutes. Transfer the fillets to a warm serving platter and keep warm. Repeat the process with the remaining clarified butter and trout.\n\n5. Spread the pecan butter over the trout, sprinkle with roasted pecans, and top with the sauce. SERVES SIX.\n\nTrout Marigny\n\n_This is a variation on the local classic trout Marguery, with a lighter and easier-to-make sauce. For once, this is a dish that's designed to be made with true trout, rather than the good fish we called speckled trout around here. (You could use specks, but I think rainbow or rubyred trout or even salmon would be better.) Asparagus makes a great side vegetable for this._\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) plus 1 Tbsp. butter\n\nFour 6\u20138-oz. freshwater trout or salmon fillets\n\n\u00bd tsp. black peppercorns\n\n2 slices lemon\n\n1 cup Chardonnay\n\n\u00be cup sliced fresh mushrooms\n\n2 Tbsp. shallots, chopped\n\n\u00bc cup flour\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\nGenerous pinch of cayenne\n\nParsley, for garnish\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease the bottom of a glass or ceramic baking dish with 1 tablespoon of the butter. Arrange the fish side by side, but not touching, in the dish. Sprinkle the peppercorns over the fillets. Add the lemon and pour the wine over all. Bake for 20\u201325 minutes, depending on the thickness of the fish.\n\n2. With a slotted turner, transfer the fish to a warm platter. Reserve the juices in the baking dish.\n\n3. Melt the remaining butter in a saucepan over medium-low heat until it bubbles. Add the mushrooms and shallots and cook until the mushrooms are soft, about 2 minutes.\n\n4. Reduce the heat to low. Sprinkle in the flour and whisk until smooth. Add 1 cup of the fish-poaching juices, a little at a time, stirring lightly. Add the salt and cayenne, and continue to cook, stirring lightly, until the sauce blends and thickens.\n\n5. Place a trout fillet on each of 4 plates and top with the sauce. Garnish with parsley. SERVES FOUR.\n\nTrout en Croute with Shrimp Mousse\n\n_This dish looks and sounds much more difficult than it really is, but it is very impressive when served. The puff pastry can be found (probably frozen) at better food stores._\n\nFour 13 x 11-inch sheets puff pastry\n\n5 eggs\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n\u00bd tsp. ground white pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp. dry mustard\n\n2 cloves garlic\n\n\u00bd lb. medium shrimp (20\u201325 count), peeled and deveined\n\n\u00bd cup heavy whipping cream\n\n4 slices lemon\n\n\u00bd cup dry white wine\n\nStems of 1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley\n\n\u00bd tsp. black peppercorns\n\nFour 6\u20138-oz. speckled trout fillets (drum, redfish, sheepshead, rainbow trout, or salmon also work well for this dish)\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Unfold each sheet of puff pastry onto a lightly floured surface and trim to an approximately 10 x 10-inch square. Transfer the 4 pastry squares to a baking sheet and refrigerate until ready to use.\n\n2. Put 4 of the eggs, the salt, pepper, dry mustard, and garlic into a food processor. Pulse the machine until the ingredients are well blended. Add the shrimp and, with the machine running, add the cream. Add a little water if the mixture seems to be very dry. Don't overdo it; it's okay for there to be small lumps.\n\n3. Bring a wide, shallow pan of water to a simmer with the lemon slices, white wine, parsley stems, and peppercorns. Add the trout and poach for 6 minutes. Transfer the trout to a plate and discard the poaching liquid.\n\n4. With a very sharp knife, butterfly the trout fillets into 2 thin halves. Put 1 trout half on each pastry square, moving the fish toward the bottom half of the pastry and leaving a \u00bd-inch border of pastry around the perimeter. Spoon about 2 tablespoons of shrimp mousse over the trout. Top with the other half of the fish.\n\n5. Beat the remaining egg and brush the edges of the pastry with it. Fold the pastry up and over the stuffed fish, pressing on the edges to seal. If you really want to get fancy, cut the pastry envelope in the shape of a fish. You can stick the parts of the dough you cut off back onto the fish to create fins. Make scalelike indentations on the side with the tip of a spoon.\n\n6. Arrange the stuffed-pastry envelopes, at least 1 inch apart, on a lightly oiled baking sheet. Bake until the pastry has puffed and has just turned brown, 6\u20138 minutes. Serve immediately. This is good as is, but if you want a sauce, reduced cream with fennel or fresh thyme is delicious. SERVES FOUR.\n\nRedfish with Artichokes and Mushrooms\n\n_This superb dish appears on the menus of quite a few New Orleans restaurants. Flounder, trout, lemonfish, sheepshead, or striped bass also work for this recipe. So do really big oysters._\n\nFISH FILLETS\n\nJuice of \u00bd lemon, strained\n\nFour 6\u20138-oz. redfish (or flounder, trout, lemonfish, etc.) fillets\n\n1 cup flour\n\n1 Tbsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. ground white pepper\n\n3 eggs, beaten\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter\n\nSAUCE\n\n\u2153 cup dry white wine\n\n4 fresh artichoke bottoms, poached and cut into eighths (or use canned artichoke bottoms)\n\n2 cups sliced white mushrooms\n\n2 Tbsp. chopped green onion\n\n\u00bc tsp. chopped garlic\n\n\u00bd tsp. chopped shallots\n\n3 Tbsp. small capers\n\n\u2153 cup lemon juice\n\n1\u00bd sticks (12 Tbsp.) butter\n\n1. Sprinkle the lemon juice over the fillets. Combine the flour, salt, and pepper in a large bowl. Dredge the fillets in the seasoned flour, shaking off excess. Dip the fillets in the eggs and then dredge once more in the seasoned flour, shaking off any excess.\n\n2. Melt the 4 tablespoons of butter over medium-high heat in a large, heavy skillet. Saut\u00e9 the fish fillets until cooked through, about 3 minutes per side. Remove and keep warm.\n\n3. To make the sauce: Add the white wine to the pan in which you saut\u00e9ed the fish and whisk to dissolve the pan juices. Bring to a boil until the wine is reduced by two-thirds. Lower the heat to medium and add all of the remaining sauce ingredients except the butter. Cook until the mushrooms are soft.\n\n4. Reduce the heat to low and add the 12 tablespoons of butter, a tablespoon at a time, shaking the skillet until the butter has blended in completely.\n\n5. Place a fillet on each of 4 warm serving plates and top with sauce. SERVES FOUR.\n\nRedfish with Sizzling Crabmeat and Herbs\n\n_The surprise in this dish is based on the fact that you can get clarified butter extremely hot without burning it. Hot enough to sizzle anything it's poured over. The butter looks very harmless when I bring it to the table, but when I spoon it onto the fish and its topping . . . drama! Along with a wonderful aroma._\n\n\u2153 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley (about half a bunch)\n\n1 Tbsp. capers, chopped\n\n2 tsp. chopped garlic\n\n4 oz. white crabmeat\n\nDash of Worcestershire sauce\n\nJuice of \u00bc lemon\n\nFour 8-oz. fillets redfish (or trout, drum, sheepshead, or other white fish)\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n\u00bd cup clarified butter (see recipe, this page)\n\n1. Preheat the broiler and broiler pan. Combine the parsley, capers, garlic, and crabmeat in a small bowl. Sprinkle in the Worcestershire sauce and lemon juice, and toss to combine.\n\n2. Season the fish with salt and pepper. Broil about 4 inches from the flame for about 6 minutes, or until the slightest hint of browning is seen around the edges. Check the fish to see if it's cooked in the center of the thickest part. If not, broil just a minute longer or less.\n\n3. Place the fish on a warm, heatproof serving platter. Top with a small pile (not a scattering) of the crabmeat-and-herb mixture.\n\n4. In the smallest saucepan you have, heat the clarified butter until a flake of parsley immediately sizzles in it. Carefully spoon the very hot butter over the fish and its topping, which will sizzle when the butter hits it. It's most dramatic to do this at the table, but be very careful: The heat of the butter presents a burning hazard if splashed. SERVES FOUR.\n\nRedfish Herbsaint\n\n_After an absence of several years from markets (though not from sports fishermen's ice chests), redfish is starting to reappear. This elegant, light dish shows off the quality of redfish very well. You can substitute trout, black drum, or sheepshead for the redfish._\n\n_Herbsaint, an anise-flavored liqueur made in New Orleans, is responsible for the dish's delightful aroma. The original inspiration for the recipe came from chef Gunter Preuss, who made something much like this at the now gone Versailles. (Gunter is now in the kitchen at his French Quarter restaurant, Broussard's.)_\n\n1\u00bd cups dry white wine\n\nJuice of 1 lemon\n\nFour 6-oz. redfish fillets\n\n1 medium carrot, peeled and cut into matchsticks (about \u00bd cup)\n\n1 rib celery, strings removed and cut into matchsticks (about \u00bd cup)\n\n6 black peppercorns\n\n2 leeks, white part only, well washed and sliced into matchsticks (2 cups)\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter\n\n1 cup heavy whipping cream 4\u00bd tsp. Herbsaint (or Pernod)\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n\u00bd tsp. ground white pepper\n\n\u00bd cup lump crabmeat\n\n1. Put 1 cup of the wine and all of the lemon juice in a stainless steel skillet and bring to just barely a simmer over low heat. Add the fish, carrot, celery, and peppercorns, and poach for 8\u201310 minutes. Check the fish after 5 minutes to make sure that it doesn't overcook. (The fish should not fall apart into flakes when done.)\n\n2. While the fish is poaching, saut\u00e9 the leeks in 1 tablespoon of the butter until soft, about 3 minutes. Add the remaining \u00bd cup of white wine and bring to a boil. Cook for another minute, then turn off the heat.\n\n3. Remove the fish when done to a warm plate. To the fish-poaching liquid in the skillet, add the remaining 3 tablespoons of butter, the cream, Herbsaint, salt, and pepper. Reduce over medium heat until the sauce thickens, about 5 minutes.\n\n4. Add the crabmeat and cook, gently shaking the skillet, until the crabmeat is heated through.\n\n5. Divide the leeks among 4 warm serving plates. Place the fish, celery, and carrot over the leeks and top with the sauce. SERVES FOUR.\n\nRedfish Courtbouillon\n\n_Here is a great, light, big-flavored, very traditional Creole dish that is served almost nowhere anymore. It's one of the few dishes that pair tomatoes with seafood that I actually think is good. In this case, very, very good._\n\n_Courtbouillon means brief boil, which describes the final step. However, I find I get much better results by finishing the dish in the oven instead of on top of the stove, and the process from there takes about an hour\u2014which is not what I would call brief. My version veers further from the standard by lightening up on roux and adding a few flavors from the Italian spectrum. These add a taste dimension without deeply altering the dish._\n\n_You need to make fish stock (see recipe,this page) for this, so wait until you have a whole fish to work with. You can make a courtbouillon of almost any white fish that poaches well\u2014drum, sheepshead, lemonfish, and striped bass all work well\u2014but for some reason, in these parts, you can't say courtbouillon without prefacing it with redfish._\n\nSTOCK\n\n1 whole 2\u00bd-lb. redfish fillet\n\n1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley, stems only\n\nTops from a bunch of celery\n\n\u00bd yellow onion, coarsely chopped\n\n\u00bd tsp. black peppercorns\n\nSAUCE\n\n\u00bd cup extra-virgin olive oil\n\n\u00bc cup flour\n\n2 medium yellow onions, coarsely chopped (about 1\u00bd cups)\n\n2 ribs celery, chopped\n\n\u00bd fennel bulb, chopped\n\n1 small red bell pepper, seeds and membranes removed, coarsely chopped\n\n2 cloves garlic, chopped\n\n4 canned whole plum tomatoes, chopped\n\n2 medium fresh, ripe tomatoes, seeded and chopped\n\n\u00bd cup juice from canned tomatoes\n\n\u00bd cup dry white wine, preferably Sauvignon Blanc\n\n3 bay leaves\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried thyme\n\n\u00bc tsp. allspice\n\n1 tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\nJuice of 1 small lemon, strained\n\n6 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, leaves only, chopped\n\n1 Tbsp. Louisiana hot sauce, such as Crystal\n\n1\u00bd tsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\nFreshly ground black pepper\n\n2 green onions, green parts only, finely chopped, for garnish\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.\n\n2. To make the fish stock: Fillet the fish and remove the skin from the fillets. Put the skinless fillets onto a plate and refrigerate until ready to use. Put all the fish bones, heads, skins, and scraps into a stockpot and cover with cold water. Bring it to a boil, then dump the water, saving all the fish parts. Refill the pot with just enough water to barely cover the fish parts. Add all of the remaining stock ingredients and bring just to a simmer. Reduce the heat to low and very gently simmer for 30 minutes, skimming foam that rises to the top.\n\n3. To make the sauce: Make a blond roux by putting the oil in a large, stainless steel or enamel skillet (for which you have a cover, though you don't need it just now) and heating it over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Add the flour and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture barely begins to turn brown. Add the onions, celery, fennel, bell pepper, and garlic, reduce heat to medium, and cook, stirring now and then, until the vegetables are soft.\n\n4. Add the canned and the fresh tomatoes, tomato juice, and wine. Bring to a boil and cook, stirring occasionally, for about 2 minutes. Add all of the remaining ingredients except the green onions. Add 4 cups of fish stock, bring the sauce to a very light boil, and simmer for about 15 minutes.\n\n5. Cut the redfish fillets into pieces about the width and length of 2 fingers. Place the fish pieces atop the sauce and season to taste with salt and pepper. Cover the skillet and bake for 20\u201325 minutes. The fish should be tender but not falling apart.\n\n6. Adjust seasonings to taste. Serve with plenty of the sauce in wide bowls. Garnish with green onions. Garlic bread is great with this. SERVES SIX TO EIGHT.\n\nNouvelle Pompano en Papillote\n\n_There are few worse travesties than the pompano_ en papillote _found in traditional New Orleans restaurants. It starts with the best fish there is\u2014one I find so good that sauces tend to detract from, not add to, the flavor. Then this great fish goes into a parchment bag with the gloppiest kind of \"light roux, white wine, three or four seafood\" sauce._\n\n_I will admit, however, that the idea of the papillote\u2014to keep the fish moist by cooking it essentially in its own steam in a parchment pouch\u2014is a fine idea. Looks nice, too. So here's my take. It starts with flounder, a milder fish that steams well. Small salmon and freshwater trout also work well. Of course, you could use actual pompano._\n\n_The parchment paper you need for this is more easily available than it once was; you can always get it at kitchen-supply stores._\n\nFour 6-oz. flounder fillets (or pompano, trout, or salmon)\n\n2 Tbsp. butter, softened\n\n\u00bd cup green onion, green parts only, finely chopped\n\n\u00bd stalk celery, cut into matchsticks\n\n4 tsp. chopped fresh dill\n\n1 tsp. chopped fresh tarragon\n\n2 Tbsp. dry white wine\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n\u00bc tsp. Tabasco Green Pepper Sauce\n\nSalt to taste\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Cut 4 sheets of parchment paper large enough to enclose the fish completely, with enough overlap to fold over to make a tight seal.\n\n2. After washing the fish fillets and checking for bones, generously butter each fillet. Place them on the parchment paper. Top each fillet with the green onion, celery, dill, and tarragon. Combine the wine, lemon juice, and green pepper sauce in a small bowl. Spoon the wine mixture over each fillet and season to taste with salt.\n\n3. Fold the paper up and over the fish and fold the edges down hard, then fold down again to seal the pouch as securely as possible. Place the papillotes on a baking sheet and place them in the center of the oven. Bake for 15\u201318 minutes (longer if the fish is thick).\n\n4. Remove the papillotes from the oven and place on serving plates. Serve immediately, along with a sharp steak knife for opening the bags. The fish should be eaten right out of the bag (set on a plate, of course). SERVES FOUR.\n\nPasta Milanese with Pompano\n\n_Get two older New Orleans\u2013Italian ladies together, and you'll have argument about which is the right way to make Milanese, the name for one of the main dishes traditionally served in New Orleans Italian homes on St. Joseph's Day (March 19). Both ladies will hate this recipe\u2014unless it's served on a day other than St. Joseph's and you don't call it Milanese. Then they'll love it, and they'll say it reminds them of Milanese._\n\n_The traditional fish used for Milanese is the strongly flavored Mediterranean sardine. It's good but hard to find. I substitute pompano, which has the flavor to carry the dish while adding a touch of class to it. The traditional pasta shape is bucatini: the thickest of the strand pastas. The topping is bread crumbs, a reminder of the sawdust of St. Joseph, the carpenter._\n\n1 bulb fennel\n\n5 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil\n\n5 green onions, trimmed and chopped\n\n4 flat anchovy fillets, crushed\n\nOne 28-oz. can Italian plum tomato puree\n\n1 Tbsp. chopped fresh oregano\n\n2 small whole pompano, cleaned\n\n2 cloves garlic, crushed\n\n\u00bc cup dry white wine\n\n\u00bc cup pine nuts\n\n\u00bc cup dried currants\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n1 lb. bucatini pasta\n\n1 cup bread crumbs\n\n1 tsp. Italian seasoning\n\n1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil for the pasta. Cut the fennel bulb in half from top to bottom. Cut out the core and trim off the tough top parts, leaving about 3 inches of the stems intact. Coarsely chop and set aside.\n\n2. Heat 3 tablespoons of the olive oil in a large saucepan. Add the the fennel and green onions and saut\u00e9 until they soften. Add the crushed anchovies and cook another minute. Add the tomato puree and the oregano, and bring to a simmer. Cook, uncovered, for about 20 minutes.\n\n3. Meanwhile, cut the tails and (if you like) the heads off the pompano. Heat the remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large skillet over high heat. Brown the crushed garlic, then add the pompano. Brown the pompano on both sides, cooking about 2 minutes on each side. Remove the garlic and discard.\n\n4. Add the white wine and bring to a boil. Lower the heat to medium-low and add a cup of the tomato sauce from the other pot. Bring the sauce to a boil, then lower to a simmer. Shake the skillet to slosh the sauce inside the fish. Cover the pan and cook for 4\u20136 minutes. Remove the fish from the pan. Cut out the fillets, but leave the skin intact. Keep warm.\n\n5. Pour the remaining fennel-tomato sauce into the skillet you just cooked the fish in. Add the pine nuts, currants, and salt and pepper to taste. Gently simmer the sauce while you cook the pasta.\n\n6. Add a tablespoon of salt to the boiling water. Cook the pasta for 6 minutes, then drain. Add the pasta to the sauce and toss to coat. Serve alongside a pompano fillet. Sprinkle bread crumbs mixed with the Italian seasoning over everything. SERVES FOUR.\n\nCaribbean Creole Red Snapper and Shrimp\n\n_I had a dish something like this in Jamaica in the 1970s. I was surprised by how much the cuisine has in common with New Orleans Creole, but with different spices in the seasoning mix. This dish also works well with redfish, black drum, lemonfish, or any other white fish._\n\n\u00bd poblano pepper, seeds and membrane removed\n\n\u00bd red bell pepper, seeds and membrane removed\n\n\u00bd yellow bell pepper, seeds and membrane removed\n\n1 small white onion\n\n\u00bd Tbsp. chopped fresh ginger\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n1 cup tomato juice\n\n6 black peppercorns\n\n\u00bc tsp. ground mace\n\n\u00bc tsp. ground allspice\n\n2 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n2 Tbsp. white vinegar\n\n2 Tbsp. olive oil\n\nFour 6\u20138 oz. red snapper fillets\n\n1 dozen large shrimp, peeled\n\nCreole seasoning\n\n1. Slice the peppers and the onion into narrow strips (julienne). Combine these in a saucepan with the ginger, bay leaf, tomato juice, peppercorns, mace, allspice, and Worcestershire sauce. Cover the saucepan and bring to a light simmer. Cook until peppers are completely tender and sweet\u2014about 30 minutes.\n\n2. Add vinegar and olive oil and simmer another 3 minutes. Remove bay leaf and peppercorns from the sauce.\n\n3. Wash the red snapper and shrimp well and season to your taste with Creole seasoning. Heat a charcoal grill or cast iron skillet very hot. If using the grill, run the shrimp up sets of 2 skewers, to make them easier to turn. Sear the fish until opaque and just warm on the inside, 2 or 3 minutes per side. The shrimp take less time, and they are ready when they're pink all over and black around the fine edges. Turn both the fish and shrimp only once.\n\n4. Spoon some of the sauce on a plate and place a fish fillet and 3 shrimp onto it. SERVES FOUR.\n\nPoached Fish with Cranberry Hollandaise\n\n_I served this dish at one of my annual charity Christmas dinners. Its great hollandaise sauce takes advantage of the tartness and very light sweetness of cranberries. The best fish to use include redfish, drum, flounder, or salmon._\n\n\u00bc cup dry white wine\n\n\u00bd lemon, sliced\n\n6 black peppercorns\n\n4 sprigs flat-leaf parsley\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\nFour 6\u20138-oz. redfish, drum, flounder, or salmon fillets\n\nSAUCE\n\n2 egg yolks\n\n2 sticks (16 Tbsp.) butter, softened\n\n1 cup cranberry juice, boiled down to \u00bc cup\n\nGenerous pinch of cayenne\n\n1. Pour water to a depth of about \u00bd inch into a large stainless steel or enameled saucepan and bring to a simmer. Add the wine, lemon slices, peppercorns, parsley, and salt, and simmer for 5 minutes. Reduce the heat to maintain a gentle simmer while you make the sauce.\n\n2. To make the sauce: Set a metal bowl over a saucepan of barely simmering water and vigorously whisk the egg yolks until they become thick and pale yellow. Whisk in the softened butter, a tablespoon at a time. (If the sauce shows any sign of curdling, remove the bowl from the saucepan and keep whisking until it cools.) Keep whisking in butter until half of it is incorporated, then add the reduced cranberry juice and a tablespoon of water from the fish pan. Whisk in the rest of the butter slowly until fluffy. Whisk in the cayenne. Set the sauce aside.\n\n3. Add 2 fish fillets at a time to the gently simmering wine-and-lemon mixture and cook for 6\u201310 minutes, depending on the thickness of the fish. Remove the fish with a slotted turner and allow excess water to drain. Place a fillet on each of 4 plates and top with the cranberry hollandaise. SERVES FOUR.\n\nBroiled Fish with Beurre Orange\n\n_Many different types of fish work for this recipe, among them redfish, flounder, trout, sheepshead, drum, or lemonfish. But the one I think looks and tastes best is salmon._\n\n\u00bd cup freshly squeezed orange juice, strained through a fine sieve\n\n1 tsp. lemon juice, strained through a fine sieve\n\n1 Tbsp. red wine vinegar\n\n1 small shallot, finely chopped\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) plus 1 Tbsp. butter, softened\n\nSalt and ground white pepper to taste\n\nSix 6-oz. skinless salmon fillets or other skinless fish (see headnote)\n\n1 Tbsp. orange zest, for garnish\n\n1. Preheat the broiler. Lightly grease a baking sheet and set aside.\n\n2. Combine the orange and lemon juices, vinegar, and shallot in a small saucepan. Bring to a light boil over medium heat and reduce by about two-thirds.\n\n3. Remove the saucepan from the heat and whisk in the stick of butter, a tablespoon at a time. Return the pan to very low heat for a few seconds, if necessary, to fully melt the last pieces of butter. Add the salt and pepper to taste, and strain the sauce through a fine sieve into a clean saucepan. Keep warm while cooking the fish.\n\n4. Season the fish lightly with salt and pepper, and place on the prepared baking sheet. Dot each piece of fish with some of the remaining butter. Broil about 3 inches from the heat, for about 3 minutes.\n\n5. Arrange a piece of fish on each of 6 plates and spoon on the sauce. Garnish each with a sprinkling of the orange zest. SERVES SIX.\n\nFish in a Salt Dome\n\n_The late chef Jamie Shannon prepared this dish for a dinner I had at the chef's table in the kitchen of Commander's Palace in 1992. It was as delicious as it was dramatic. The whole fish was presented on a pan covered with the mound of salt in which it had been baked. The salt formed a shell that had to be broken. Amazingly, the fish was not salty at all\u2014just full of elemental fish flavor. For this recipe, I'd recommend pompano, red snapper, Spanish mackerel, or other nice fatty fish._\n\nOne 2\u20134-lb. whole fatty fish (see headnote), gutted\n\n2 boxes kosher salt\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. The ideal pan for this is a heatproof 18 x 12-inch oval, about 3 inches deep. Cover the bottom with about \u00bd inch of salt and place the fish on top of it. Cover the fish with salt so that it forms a mound about \u00bd inch thick at its thinnest part.\n\n2. Using a clean spray bottle, spray water all over the salt until it glistens with dampness. Bake for 40 minutes (for a 2-pounder) up to an hour (for a 4-pounder). You can test for doneness by inserting a meat thermometer through the salt into the fish when you think it's nearly done. Look for an internal temperature of 125\u2013130 degrees F.\n\n3. Remove the fish from the oven and allow it to stand for 10\u201315 minutes. Break the salt shell, brush off the excess salt, and as you carve the fish, remove the skin. This fish will be so juicy and delicious that no sauce is needed. SERVES TWO TO SIX, DEPENDING ON THE SIZE OF THE FISH. (FIGURE ABOUT TEN OUNCES OF WHOLE FISH PER PERSON.)\n\nSea Bream in an Envelope\n\n_This recipe is very light\u2014nothing like the oversauced_ en papillote _dishes we often do around here. And instead of using parchment, you bake the fish in a tight envelope of foil._\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter, softened\n\n4 sprigs flat-leaf parsley\n\n\u00bd rib celery, cut into matchsticks\n\nEight 4-oz. sea bream (sheepshead) fillets (trout or flounder would also work)\n\n\u2153 cup tomato puree\n\n12 large white grapes, peeled and thinly sliced\n\n\u00bc cup dry white wine\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Tear off four 12 x 18-inch sheets of aluminum foil. Rub the softened butter in the center half of each sheet.\n\n2. Place a sprig of parsley and a fourth of the celery on the buttered side of each foil sheet. Place 2 fish fillets, head ends together, on top of the parsley and celery. Spoon the tomato puree lightly over the fish and top with the grape coins. Sprinkle a little white wine over the fish and season to taste with salt and pepper.\n\n3. Fold the foil up and over the fish. Fold the edges and crimp to make a tightly sealed envelope. Repeat the process for the remaining fish. Place the envelopes on a baking sheet and bake for about 12 minutes. The envelopes should puff up somewhat. Serve the fish in their envelopes on plates so that when they're opened, the aroma will waft up right into the nostrils of the eater. SERVES FOUR.\n\nSea Bream Nouvelle Creole\n\n_I am usually not a fan of seafood dishes with tomato sauce. Sometimes, though, they can be spectacular. In this one, the combination of hollandaise with the tomato sauce is what makes the magic. You can prepare this recipe with many species of white fish. I recommend the inexpensive and excellent sea bream (the polite name for sheepshead), but redfish, trout, red snapper, and lemonfish would also be good._\n\n_This recipe begins with Creole sauce, which is actually seldom used in Creole cooking._\n\nCREOLE SAUCE\n\n2 Tbsp. olive oil\n\n1 large yellow onion, minced\n\n1 green bell pepper, seeded and minced\n\n2 ribs celery, chopped\n\n2 tomatoes, diced\n\n\u00bd bunch of green onions, chopped\n\n\u00bd tsp. chopped garlic\n\n2 bay leaves\n\n1 sprig fresh thyme\n\n\u00bd tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n2 leaves fresh basil, chopped\n\n\u00bd cup tomato puree\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper\n\nFISH\n\n1 cup flour\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. freshly ground black pepper\n\n1 egg\n\n\u00bd cup milk\n\n2 Tbsp. butter\n\n2 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil\n\nEight 4\u20136-oz. sea bream (sheepshead) fillets\n\nTOPPING\n\n4 large mushrooms, quartered\n\n1 lb. white crabmeat\n\n1 Tbsp. dry white wine\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n\u00bd bunch of green onions, chopped\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. Tabasco Green Pepper Sauce\n\n1 cup Hollandaise (see recipe, this page)\n\nPinch of cayenne\n\n1. To make the Creole sauce: Heat the olive oil in a heavy saucepan. Add the onion, bell pepper, celery, tomatoes, green onions, and garlic, and cook until the onions are translucent. Add all of the remaining sauce ingredients except the basil, the tomato puree, and salt and pepper, and cook over medium-low heat until thickened, about 7 minutes. Add the basil, remove the bay leaves, and cook another 3 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper, remove from heat, and keep warm.\n\n2. To prepare the fish: Combine the flour, salt, and pepper in a wide bowl. Whisk the egg and milk in a small bowl to make an egg wash. Dust the fish with a little of the seasoned flour. Dip into the egg wash, then dredge once more in the seasoned flour, shaking off the excess.\n\n3. Heat the butter and oil together in a skillet over high heat. Add half of the fish and cook 2\u20133 minutes on each side, until golden. Remove the fish to a warm platter and keep warm. Repeat the process with the remaining fish, adding more butter and oil if necessary.\n\n4. To make the topping: Pour off all but about 1 tablespoon of the butter and oil. Return the skillet to medium heat. Add the mushrooms and saut\u00e9 until they soften. Add the remaining topping ingredients and saut\u00e9 about 2 minutes, until warmed through.\n\n5. Ladle some of the Creole sauce onto 4 plates. Place 2 fish fillets atop each. Add a heaping tablespoon of the topping over each fillet, then a stripe of hollandaise. Finish with a pinch of cayenne. SERVES FOUR.\n\nWhole Flounder Stuffed with Crabmeat\n\n_Bruning's opened at West End Park in 1859 and remained popular and excellent, run by the same family, until it and everything else at West End were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Bruning's great specialty was stuffed whole flounder. The restaurant may be gone (although maybe not forever), but the dish lives on. Use the biggest flounder you can find. (Fishermen refer to those as doormats.) I use claw crabmeat for the stuffing because it has a more pronounced taste._\n\nSTUFFING\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter\n\n\u00bc cup flour\n\n3 green onions, chopped\n\n3 cups shrimp stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 lb. claw crabmeat (or crawfish in season)\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\nPinch of cayenne\n\nFISH\n\n4 large whole flounder\n\n1 cup flour\n\n1 Tbsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n2 eggs\n\n1 cup milk\n\n\u00bd cup clarified butter (see recipe, this page)\n\n1 lemon, sliced, for garnish\n\nChopped flat-leaf parsley, for garnish\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.\n\n2. To make the stuffing: Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the flour and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture just begins to brown. Stir in the green onions and cook until limp. Whisk in the shrimp stock and Worcestershire sauce and bring to a boil, then add the crabmeat, salt, and cayenne. Gently toss the crabmeat in the sauce to avoid breaking the lumps. Remove the pan from the heat and set aside.\n\n3. Wash the flounder and pat dry. Combine the flour, Creole seasoning, and salt in a wide bowl. Whisk the eggs and milk together in another wide bowl. Coat the outside of the flounder with the seasoned flour. Dip the flounder into the egg mixture, then dredge once more into the seasoned flour.\n\n4. Heat the clarified butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the fish, one at a time, and saut\u00e9 about 4 minutes on each side. Remove and keep warm.\n\n5. Cut a slit from head to tail across the top of each flounder. Divide the stuffing among the fish, spooning it inside the slit and piling it on top. Place the flounder on a baking sheet and bake for 6 minutes, or until the stuffing is heated through.\n\n6. Place the flounder on hot plates. Garnish with lemon slices and fresh chopped parsley. SERVES FOUR TO EIGHT.\n\nBlackened Tuna\n\n_There's no better fish for blackening than tuna. By wonderful coincidence, no method of cooking tuna is better than blackening. The essential thing to know is that blackening fish creates a terrific amount of smoke and perhaps flames. It's best done outdoors over a very hot fire. And don't be shy about getting the heat up there\u2014it can't possibly be too hot._\n\nFour 10-oz. tuna steaks, each about 1 inch thick (the thicker the better)\n\n\u00bd cup dry white wine\n\n2 Tbsp. lemon juice, strained\n\n1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n2 cloves garlic, finely chopped\n\n\u00bc cup salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n1 Tbsp. salt\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter, melted\n\n6 Tbsp. butter, softened\n\n1. Trim away any dark parts of the tuna and discard.\n\n2. Blend the wine, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, and garlic together in a broad bowl. Place the tuna steaks in this mixture for about 30 seconds on each side. Shake off any excess marinade and set the tuna aside.\n\n3. Strain the excess marinade into a small saucepan, discarding solids, and bring to a light boil. Reduce by half.\n\n4. Place a large cast-iron skillet over the hottest heat source you have. The pan is ready when the oils that have soaked into the metal have burned off and the surface is smoking.\n\n5. Combine the Creole seasoning and salt together in a bowl. Generously season both sides of the fish with the seasoning mixture. Spoon melted butter over both sides, enough for it to drip a bit. Place the fish into the hot skillet. WARNING! There is a very good chance that this will flame up briefly and a certainty that there will be much smoke. The fish will first stick to the skillet, but after about a minute or so, it will break free. Turn it and cook the other side for another minute or so. It should be red in the center.\n\n6. Make a lemon-butter sauce for the tuna by heating the reduced marinade over medium-low heat. Add the softened butter, a tablespoon at a time, to make a creamy-looking sauce. SERVES FOUR.\n\nGrilled Tuna with Orange-Soy Sauce\n\n_Fresh tuna is a natural for Asian-style sauces like this one. Use high heat and avoid overcooking\u2014the tuna steaks should be a little red at the center. This recipe pairs the natural juiciness of tuna with some crisp vegetables and a sharp, low-calorie sauce._\n\nMARINADE\n\n\u00bc cup red wine vinegar\n\n\u00bc cup orange juice\n\n3 Tbsp. sugar\n\n3 Tbsp. soy sauce\n\n1 tsp. ground ginger\n\n\u00bc tsp. crushed red pepper flakes\n\nFISH\n\nFour 8\u201310-oz. yellowfin tuna steaks, each at least 1 inch thick\n\n3 Tbsp. butter\n\n3 cups shredded cabbage\n\n3 green onions, finely chopped\n\n1 medium carrot, peeled and sliced into matchsticks\n\n1 tsp. soy sauce\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper\n\n1. Combine all of the marinade ingredients in a broad bowl. Pass the tuna steaks through the marinade, wrap them (still dripping) with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least an hour. Save the remaining marinade.\n\n2. Melt the butter in a skillet over medium-high heat. Add the cabbage, green onions, and carrot, along with the soy sauce, and stir-fry until the vegetables wilt. Remove from the heat.\n\n3. Heat a cast-iron skillet until smoking. (You may also grill this over a very hot fire.) Season the tuna with salt and pepper. Cook the tuna for about 1\u00bd minutes on each side. (Note: This will produce a great deal of smoke, so keep the exhaust fan on or cook the tuna outside.) Remove the tuna and keep warm.\n\n4. Reduce the heat to medium. Add the reserved marinade to the skillet and bring to a boil. Slightly reduce it.\n\n5. Divide the vegetables among 4 plates. Top each with a piece of tuna and spoon on the reduced sauce. SERVES FOUR.\n\nTuna Puttanesca\n\n_Puttanesca, you've probably heard, means in the style of prostitutes. See, the sauce is made with a bunch of powerfully flavored, salty ingredients, and . . . well . . . I get the implication, but . . . uh . . . it's very satisfying. I recommend getting the tuna cut as thick as possible, perhaps even in cubes or blocks three inches on a side._\n\nFour 8\u201310-oz. tuna steaks, each at least 1\u00bd inches thick\n\n3 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\nOne 10-oz. bag of fresh spinach, well washed and picked\n\n12 black olives, pitted and coarsely chopped\n\n12 green olives, pitted and coarsely chopped\n\n1 tsp. chopped garlic\n\n1 tsp. chopped anchovy fillet\n\n1 tsp. chopped fresh oregano\n\n\u00bc tsp. crushed red pepper\n\n1 cup Fresh Marinara Sauce (see recipe, this page)\n\n1. Brush the tuna with some of the oil and season with salt and pepper. In a hot cast-iron skillet or over a hot grill, cook the tuna for 1\u20132 minutes on each side. Remove and keep warm.\n\n2. Heat 1 teaspoon of the oil in a saucepan. Add the wet-from-washing spinach with a little salt and pepper until it just begins to wilt. Remove and set aside.\n\n3. Heat the remaining oil in another saucepan over medium heat. Add the black and green olives, garlic, anchovy, oregano, and crushed red pepper, and cook until just heated through. Add the marinara sauce and bring to a boil. Lower heat to a simmer.\n\n4. Divide the spinach among 4 serving plates. Top each with a piece of tuna, then spoon on the sauce. SERVES FOUR.\n\nSeared Tuna with Tomato-Lemon Vinaigrette\n\n_Although the menu at Gautreau's is constantly changing, there always seems to be a great tuna dish on it. This is one I recall from the early 1990s. It involves tuna cut into thick blocks and finished almost in the style of a salad. I've been cooking this ever since, whenever I can find thick tuna._\n\nVINAIGRETTE\n\n2 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n1 Tbsp. white wine vinegar\n\n1 tsp. Dijon mustard\n\n6 Tbsp. olive oil\n\n2 Tbsp. vegetable oil\n\nSalt and ground white pepper\n\n2 large ripe tomatoes\n\n1 clove garlic, chopped\n\nLeaves of 1 sprig fresh thyme\n\nTUNA\n\n2 lb. thick tuna steaks, cut into 16 cubes\n\n3 Tbsp. olive oil\n\n6 oz. arugula or spring mix salad\n\n1. To make the vinaigrette: Whisk the lemon juice, vinegar, and mustard together in a bowl. Add the oils in a slow stream, whisking vigorously, to form a light emulsion. Season to taste with salt and pepper and set aside.\n\n2. Bring a pot of water to a rolling boil. Cut the stem core out of the top of the tomatoes and cut an X in the bottom. Plunge the tomatoes into the boiling water for 15\u201320 seconds, then rinse under cold water. The peel can now be removed easily. Slice the tomatoes in half crosswise and remove the seeds and pulp.\n\n3. Put the tomatoes, garlic, thyme, salt and pepper to taste, and the vinaigrette into a food processor or blender and process until well blended. Thin with a little vinegar if necessary.\n\n4. Allow the tuna steaks to stand at room temperature for 15 minutes. Season all sides with salt and pepper.\n\n5. Heat the 3 tablespoons of olive oil in a large, heavy skillet until almost smoking. Place 4 tuna blocks at a time in the pan and cook over high heat for about 20 seconds per side, until all sides are lightly browned. Repeat until all of the tuna is cooked, adding more olive oil if necessary.\n\n6. Toss the arugula or spring mix with enough vinaigrette to coat and arrange in the center of the plate. Place tuna around the salad and drizzle with more of the vinaigrette. SERVES FOUR.\n\nHorseradish-Crusted Grouper with Oysters and Saffron\n\n_This is another creation of Commander's chef Jamie Shannon, who died tragically young but left behind many warm memories. The sauce is made with the most expensive ingredient in the world, saffron (don't worry\u2014a little bit goes a long way) and fresh oysters._\n\nCRUST\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter\n\n3 cups bread crumbs\n\n3 Tbsp. finely grated fresh horseradish\n\n1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley, leaves chopped\n\n2 Tbsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n2 tsp. salt\n\nFour 8\u201310-oz. grouper fillets\n\nSAUCE\n\n2 cups heavy whipping cream\n\n1 Tbsp. butter\n\n1 Tbsp. chopped yellow onion\n\n1 Tbsp. chopped shallot\n\n\u00bc tsp. chopped garlic\n\n\u00bc tsp. saffron (about 10 threads)\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n\u00bd tsp. ground white pepper\n\n1 dozen fresh, shucked large oysters\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Lightly oil a large baking pan and set aside.\n\n2. To make the crust: Melt the butter and blend it with the remaining crust ingredients to form a pasty mixture. Divide this into 4 portions and cover the top of each fillet with a layer of the crust. With the back of a knife, make a crisscross pattern in the crust for eye appeal.\n\n3. Place the encrusted fish in the prepared pan. Bake the fish until the crust is golden, 10\u201314 minutes.\n\n4. To make the sauce: Place the cream in a saucepan over medium-high heat and reduce by a third. Melt the butter in a skillet over medium heat. Add the onion, shallot, and garlic, and cook until translucent. Add the reduced cream to the skillet and bring to a boil. Strain the cream back into the saucepan. Add the saffron, salt, pepper, and oysters, and gently simmer until edges of the oysters begin to curl.\n\n5. Place the fish on serving plates and surround with 3 oysters per person. Pour the sauce onto the plate, around (but not over) the fish. SERVES FOUR.\n\nSalmon Florentine\n\n_For this dish, buy the thickest salmon fillets you can, remove all the skin (not as hard as it looks\u2014just have a sharp knife handy), and broil it just until it's warm all the way though._\n\nSALMON\n\nTwo 10-oz. bags of fresh spinach\n\nFour 8-oz. salmon fillets\n\n6 Tbsp. butter\n\n\u00bc cup heavy whipping cream\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried dill\n\nJuice of \u00bd lemon\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\nPinch of ground white pepper\n\nPinch of nutmeg\n\nMARINADE\n\n\u00bc cup extra-virgin olive oil\n\n\u00bc cup dry white wine\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n\u00bd tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 tsp. soy sauce\n\n2 dashes of Tabasco\n\n1. Preheat the broiler. Lightly grease a baking sheet and set aside.\n\n2. Pick stems from the spinach; discard bad leaves. Wash the spinach in several changes of water. Place the wet spinach in a large saucepan and cook, uncovered, over medium-low heat until wilted. Drain the spinach and set aside until cool enough to handle. Squeeze out excess water, coarsely chop, and return to pan. Set the spinach aside.\n\n3. Combine the marinade ingredients in a wide bowl. Add the salmon fillets and marinate for a minute on each side. Lift the salmon from the marinade and place on the prepared baking sheet. Broil 3 inches from the heat for 3 minutes. Flip the fish, dot each with \u00bc teaspoon of the butter, and continue to broil for another 2\u20133 minutes. Loosely cover with foil to keep warm.\n\n4. To the spinach, add the cream and cook over medium-low heat, stirring, until the spinach is heated through. Meanwhile, melt the remaining butter in a saucepan over low heat. Add the dill, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and nutmeg, and whisk constantly until a creamy sauce forms.\n\n5. Divide the spinach among 4 serving plates. Arrange a salmon fillet on top of the spinach on each plate and spoon sauce over all. SERVES FOUR.\n\n_Meat_\n\nStrip Sirloin Steak Bordelaise\n\nFilet Mignon au Poivre\n\nCarpetbagger Steak\n\nRoast Tenderloin of Beef with Merlot Sauce\n\nHot Garlic Filet Mignon\n\nBoiled Brisket of Beef\n\nVeal Pann\u00e9e\n\nVeal with Oyster Stuffing\n\nVeal with White Wine and Vanilla Butter\n\nLiver \u00e0 l'Orange\n\nPann\u00e9ed Pork Chops with Fennel Creole Sauce\n\nPepper-Crusted Pork Loin with Sweet Heat Sauce\n\nPork Tenderloin Diane\n\nPork Tenderloin with Mushrooms and Brandy Cream Sauce\n\nOpen-Mouth Pork Chop\n\nNoisettes d'Agneau Maison d'Or\n\nCreole Lamb Shanks\n\nRoasted Venison Backstrap with Cherry-Peppercorn Sauce\n\nWild Mushroom and Rabbit Ragout\n\nRabbit with Apricots and Creole Seasoning\n\nSweetbreads Normande\n\nAlligator Creole\n\nRoot Beer\u2013Glazed Ham\n\nCorned Beef and Cabbage\n\nA\n\nNew Orleans is so famous for seafood that one might assume it's not the place to eat meat. This is not the case. New Orleans is a steak town on a par with New York and Chicago, with a long tradition of using top grades of aged beef. Beyond that, the city has a distinctive style of serving a steak: in a sizzling pool of butter on a hot plate. Ruth's Chris Steak House, one of the major players in the deluxe steak category, started in New Orleans\u2014and it wasn't the first great steak place in town.\n\nBeyond beef, Creole chefs cook everything else from the butcher shop. The local cuisine includes many unique sausages and dishes made from them. There's even a meaty, traditional breakfast dish. All of this, of course, is done with a free hand with the seasonings and big, flavorful sauces.\n\nStrip Sirloin Steak Bordelaise\n\n_My favorite cut of beef is a thick, 24-ounce bone-in strip sirloin. The best way to cook steak like this is on a very hot outdoor grill or in an equally hot cast-iron skillet. In either case, it will throw off a lot of smoke and perhaps even flames, so this is best done outside. You could also broil or pan-broil the steaks, but in either case, use the highest heat you can._\n\n_Bordelaise sauce in New Orleans usually means a garlic-and-parsley butter. This version is closer to the wine-based French original. Lyonnaise Potatoes (see recipe,this page) make an excellent accompaniment for this steak._\n\nSAUCE\n\n1 bottle red Bordeaux wine or Cabernet Sauvignon\n\n1 sprig fresh thyme\n\n10 black peppercorns\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter\n\n4 cloves garlic, finely chopped\n\n1 cup rich beef or veal stock (see recipe, this page)\n\nSalt to taste\n\nSTEAKS\n\nFour 24-oz. bone-in strip sirloin steaks\n\nSalt-free Creole seasoning\n\nSalt to taste\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter, melted\n\n1. Make the sauce first, since it will take about an hour. Bring the wine, thyme, and peppercorns to a boil in a saucepan. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until the wine is reduced to \u00bd cup. Meanwhile, melt \u00bd teaspoon of the butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the garlic and saut\u00e9 until it smells good. Strain the reduced wine into the skillet, add the stock, and bring to a boil. Reduce by half. Reduce heat to low and add the remaining butter, a tablespoon at a time, whisking constantly until a creamy sauce forms. Season to taste with salt. Keep warm.\n\n2. Preheat the grill, cast-iron skillet, or broiler to as hot as you can get it. Dust the steaks generously with the Creole seasoning and salt. Brush the melted butter generously on both sides of the steaks and put them onto the grill or into the pan.\n\n3. Turn the steaks only once, with tongs. For medium-rare, look for a meat thermometer reading of 130\u2013135 degrees F. As the steak will cook a little more in its own heat, pull it off a little early. Spoon the sauce over the steaks and serve with Lyonnaise Potatoes. SERVES FOUR TO EIGHT.\n\nFilet Mignon au Poivre\n\n_My favorite fancy steak dish is steak au poivre (\"with pepper\"). Here's a simple version of that restaurant classic._\n\n_The method of cooking steaks in a skillet with butter is the one that most restaurants use. I find that it's the easiest way to cook a steak. But I also like the appearance and the flavor it gives and the uniform brown crust it produces. This technique works better for a filet than for other cuts._\n\nFour 8\u201310-oz. filets mignons\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper\n\n1 Tbsp. butter\n\n2 tsp. chopped shallots\n\n\u00bc cup brandy\n\n1 cup heavy whipping cream\n\n1 Tbsp. black peppercorns, cracked\n\n2 tsp. demi-glace (optional)\n\n1. Trim the filets if necessary, removing all but the central true filet part, as well as the tough silverskin. Season lightly with salt and pepper.\n\n2. Heat a heavy skillet over medium heat. Add the butter and turn the pan to distribute and melt it quickly. Put the steaks into the skillet. Scatter the shallots around the steaks. Cook the steaks for 3\u20135 minutes per side. The steaks are ready to be turned when they come unstuck from the pan. (That doesn't always happen, but if the steak is really stuck down there, it's probably not ready to be turned yet.) If the steaks are thick, cook them on their sides as well as on their faces. About 6\u20138 minutes of total cooking time will make for medium rare. (For perfect results, use a meat thermometer and look for a reading of 130\u2013135 degrees F for medium rare.) Remove the steaks to a warm platter and keep warm.\n\n3. Add the brandy to the pan and bring to a boil. (Be careful. It may catch fire, which is all right for flavor but potentially dangerous.) With a whisk, dissolve the browned bits of meat in the brandy as it boils. When the brandy is almost boiled away, add the cream and cracked peppercorns (and the demi-glace, if you have it). Bring to a simmer and cook 3\u20135 minutes, shaking the skillet, until the sauce is reduced by about a third.\n\n4. Place a steak on each of 4 warm plates and spoon on the sauce. SERVES FOUR.\n\nCarpetbagger Steak\n\n_It's an odd-sounding idea: a steak stuffed with an oyster and served with a sauce of beef essence and more oysters. But the flavors of the two ingredients are most agreeably complementary. The hard part of making this dish is making the demi-glace, the ultimate reduction of an intense stock made from roasted veal bones. Every good cook should try this at least once; if you do it right, it takes two days. If you don't want to go to the trouble, you can buy demi-glace at gourmet food stores or on the Internet. If you're friends with a chef, he might sell or give you some._\n\nFour 8-oz. filets mignons\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper\n\n20 medium-large fresh, shucked oysters\n\n1 cup Pinot Noir or other dry red wine\n\n\u00bd cup demi-glace\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) unsalted butter\n\n1 Tbsp. clarified butter (see recipe, this page)\n\n1. Season the steaks with salt and pepper. With a sharp paring knife, cut a slit in the side of each of the steaks. Stuff an oyster into each steak.\n\n2. Place the remaining oysters into a stainless steel or enamel saucepan or skillet. Pour in the wine and bring to a boil. Cook until the oysters begin to curl. Remove the oysters with a slotted spoon to a bowl and continue to simmer the wine until it's reduced to about \u2153 cup.\n\n3. Stir in the demi-glace and return to a simmer. Reduce the heat to low and add the unsalted butter, a tablespoon at a time and whisking constantly, until the sauce is thick and creamy. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Keep the sauce warm.\n\n4. Cook the steaks in a hot skillet with a little clarified butter, adding more, as necessary, to sear the outside of the steaks. Cook to the desired degree of doneness. Place a steak on each of 4 warm plates. Surround each steak with 4 oysters and spoon the sauce over all. SERVES FOUR.\n\nRoast Tenderloin of Beef with Merlot Sauce\n\n_A few times a year I cook big, festive dinners for people who buy my services at auction for one charity or another. This dish is one I often include in those dinners. My guests seem to be impressed that I turn a whole bottle of wine into about a quarter cup of sauce. That's an easy trick, though._\n\n1 whole beef tenderloin, trimmed of silverskin and fat\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper\n\n2 tsp. butter, softened\n\n2 Tbsp. chopped shallots\n\n1 bottle Merlot (or other full-bodied red wine)\n\n2 cups rich beef stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n1 tsp. dried tarragon\n\n1 tsp. black peppercorns\n\n1 Tbsp. currant jelly\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter, softened\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly season the tenderloin with salt and pepper. Coat a skillet, large enough to hold the tenderloin, with the butter and heat it over high heat. Add the tenderloin and cook until well browned all over. Transfer the tenderloin to a roasting pan and put it into the center of the oven. Roast until a meat thermometer inserted into the thickest part reads 130\u2013135 degrees F (medium rare).\n\n2. While the beef is roasting, add the shallots to the skillet in which you seared the beef. Saut\u00e9 for about a minute, then add the entire bottle of wine\u2014saving a glassful for yourself to drink. Bring to a boil and hold it there for about a minute. Lower the heat to a fast simmer. Add the beef stock, tarragon, and peppercorns, and reduce to 1 cup of liquid. Strain, then stir in the currant jelly. Remove the sauce from the heat and add the butter, a tablespoon at a time, whisking constantly.\n\n3. When the beef reaches the desired temperature, remove it from the oven and let it rest for 10 minutes. Slice the beef tenderloin into \u00be-inch-thick steaks. Spoon the sauce onto the plates and top with the tenderloin. SERVES EIGHT, WITH LOTS OF LEFTOVER STEAK.\n\nHot Garlic Filet Mignon\n\n_Really, really spicy, this is a unique dish for times when you want a steak, but not plain old._\n\n2 heads garlic\n\n1 Tbsp. olive oil\n\n2 jalape\u00f1o peppers\n\n2 Anaheim chile peppers\n\n6 medium leaves fresh basil\n\n3 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, leaves only\n\nSalt to taste\n\n4 filets mignons from the big end of the loin, about 1\u00bd inches thick\n\n2 Tbsp. butter\n\n3 Tbsp. tequila (or brandy)\n\n\u00bd cup heavy whipping cream\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F. Cut off the tops of the garlic heads, taking off enough to cut off the ends of most of the cloves. Pour the oil into a puddle in a small baking pan and set the garlic heads, cut side down, on top of the oil. Bake for 1 hour, or until the cloves are quite soft and browned.\n\n2. Roast the peppers under the broiler (I use my toaster oven for this), turning them until the outside is charred and blistered. Let the peppers cool, then peel away the skin. Open them up and remove the seeds and the membrane inside. Rinse them in hot water and cut into thin strips about an inch long.\n\n3. When the garlic is roasted, remove and peel the cloves. (You can squeeze them out, usually.) Put them into a food processor with the basil, parsley, a pinch of salt, and about 1 tablespoon of the pepper strips. Process into a rough paste. Cut a slit in the side of each filet, making a pocket about 1 inch deep. Using a spoon, stuff with about a tablespoon of the garlic-chile mixture. Season filets on the outside with salt.\n\n4. Melt the butter in a large, heavy skillet over high heat. Add the steaks and panbroil. They will first stick to the pan, then almost break away; that's the time to turn them (once). Cook to the desired degree of doneness (130\u2013135 degrees F for medium rare). Transfer the steaks to a warm platter to let rest.\n\n5. Add the tequila to the skillet in which you cooked the steaks and bring to a boil, whisking to dissolve the browned bits stuck to the bottom of the pan. When the liquid has reduced by two-thirds, add the cream, the remaining strips of jalape\u00f1o and Anaheim chile peppers, and salt to taste. Bring to a boil and reduce by one-third, then pour over the steaks on their serving plates. SERVES FOUR.\n\nBoiled Brisket of Beef\n\n_In New Orleans, the favorite method of cooking brisket is to simmer it for hours. The flavorful meat is served with boiled cabbage, carrots, and potatoes as a classic lunch special in the older restaurants. One of the byproducts of making boiled beef is the ultimate stock for making Brisket and Vegetable Soup (see recipe,this page)._\n\n8-lb. choice brisket, flat end preferably\n\n2 medium yellow onions, each cut into 8 pieces\n\nLeafy tops from 1 bunch of celery\n\nStems from 1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley\n\n4 cloves garlic, crushed\n\n1 tsp. black peppercorns\n\n1 tsp. dried thyme\n\n1 tsp. dried marjoram\n\n\u00bd tsp. mustard seed\n\n2 bay leaves, broken in half\n\n2 cloves (optional)\n\n2 Tbsp. salt\n\nSAUCE\n\n\u00bd cup Creole mustard\n\n\u00bd cup chili sauce (or ketchup)\n\n\u00bd cup prepared horseradish\n\n1. Bring 2 gallons (32 cups) of water to a boil in a large stockpot.\n\n2. Meanwhile, trim any excess fat from the brisket. Cut it in 3 pieces and put it into the water. (No need to wait for it to boil.) Add all of the other ingredients except for the sauce ingredients. Cover the pot and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to as low a temperature as possible with bubbles still breaking. (The lowest heat setting will usually do the job.) Simmer for 4\u20135 hours, skimming any foam that rises to the surface.\n\n3. Remove the brisket and set aside. Strain out the vegetables and discard, but save the beef stock for other uses. The stock can be kept in the refrigerator for about a week, or it can be frozen.\n\n4. To make the sauce: Blend the 3 sauce ingredients together in a bowl. Chill in the refrigerator until ready to use.\n\n5. Slice the brisket or serve it in large cubes, but cut against the grain with a sharp, nonserrated knife. The meat will be falling apart and easy to eat. Serve with boiled cabbage, potatoes, carrots, and the chilled sauce. SERVES EIGHT, WITH LEFTOVERS FOR SANDWICHES OR TO ADD TO VEGETABLE SOUP.\n\nVeal Pann\u00e9e\n\n_It may be safe to say that there is no known food that tastes bad pann\u00e9ed, or coated with bread crumbs, New Orleans style. Pann\u00e9ed veal, which everyone in New Orleans grew up eating, is so easy to prepare that it must have brightened the hearts of chefs and restaurateurs when it became popular in restaurants in the late 1970s. (Before that, strangely, it was almost never seen on a menu.) I personally prefer pann\u00e9ed pork, but the technique is the same for both types of meat._\n\n8 large slices veal leg, cut across the grain\n\n\u00bd cup flour\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n2 eggs, beaten\n\n1\u00bd cups fresh bread crumbs\n\nCanola or olive oil, for frying\n\nChopped flat-leaf parsley, for garnish\n\n1. Pound the veal with a meat pounder between 2 pieces of wax paper until each piece is about twice its original size.\n\n2. Mix the flour, salt, and Creole seasoning together, and lightly dust (don't dredge!) the veal. Pass the veal through the beaten egg. Shake off the excess. Then dredge through the bread crumbs.\n\n3. Heat about \u00bd inch of oil in a heavy skillet (cast-iron is perfect) over medium-high heat until a pinch of bread crumbs fries vigorously. Cook the veal, as many pieces as will fit without overlapping, for about 1\u00bd minutes per side, or until the exterior is golden brown. Remove and drain on paper towels. Garnish with the parsley and serve alongside pasta Alfredo or Pasta Bordelaise (see recipe, this page). SERVES FOUR.\n\nVeal with Oyster Stuffing\n\n_This is a Creole-Italian dish if ever there was one. It is reminiscent of what Italians call_ \"involtini di vitello.\" _(For some reason, New Orleans Italians call the same thing_ \"spiedini,\" _even though it's not skewered with anything more than a toothpick.) But the flavor is distinctly Creole._\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) plus 2 Tbsp. butter\n\n1 large yellow onion, chopped\n\n1 rib celery, chopped\n\n2 dozen fresh, shucked oysters, drained and oyster liquor reserved\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\nOne 8-inch-long piece of stale French bread, cut into cubes\n\nEight 2-oz. veal-leg medallions, cut across the grain\n\n\u00bd cup flour\n\n1 tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n\u00bd cup dry white wine\n\n2 Tbsp. small capers\n\n1. Melt the stick of butter in a skillet. Add the onion and celery, and saut\u00e9 until soft. Add the oysters and lemon juice, and cook until the oysters just begin to curl.\n\n2. Pour the oyster liquor into a 1-cup measuring cup and add enough cold water, if necessary, to make 1 cup. Soak the bread cubes in the oyster liquor and add to the skillet. Cook until everything is heated through. Remove from the heat.\n\n3. Pound the veal with a meat pounder between 2 pieces of wax paper until each piece is about twice its original size. Mix the flour, Creole seasoning, and salt together, and lightly dust (don't dredge!) the veal.\n\n4. Spoon one-quarter of the oyster dressing in a line down the center of each piece of veal. Roll the veal around the stuffing and secure with toothpicks.\n\n5. Melt 1 tablespoon of the butter in a large skillet and brown the veal rolls well on all sides. Remove and keep warm in a 200-degree-F oven.\n\n6. Add the wine to the skillet and bring to a boil, whisking to dissolve the veal juices in the pan. Reduce the wine by about half, then remove from the heat and whisk in the remaining tablespoon of butter. Add the capers and stir to combine. Divide the rolls among 4 plates and spoon sauce over all. SERVES FOUR.\n\nVeal with White Wine and Vanilla Butter\n\n_Vanilla works with only a narrow range of savory ingredients, but this combination is a winner. I was trying to come up with a new take on veal Marsala, whose sauce is made with an aromatic, slightly sweet red wine. Without Marsala in the kitchen, I remembered how much I liked a veal piccata I'd made using an intensely oaky (and therefore vanilla-scented) Chardonnay. So I took it up to the next level._\n\n_When you buy veal for this dish, make sure it has been sliced across the grain. I find butchers have an annoying habit of slicing it with the grain, which will make the finished dish tough. As for the vanilla, if you're in New Orleans, look for Ronald Reginald's Melipone vanilla, which has an especially beguiling aroma._\n\n1 lb. white veal round scallops\n\n1 cup flour\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. ground white pepper\n\n\u00bd tsp. paprika\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter\n\n1 Tbsp. olive oil\n\n\u00bd cup oak-aged Chardonnay\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice, strained\n\n\u00bc tsp. vanilla extract\n\n1. Pound the veal with a meat pounder between 2 pieces of wax paper until each piece is about twice its original size.\n\n2. Combine the flour, salt, pepper, and paprika in a wide bowl. Dust the veal slices with the seasoned flour to very lightly coat.\n\n3. Heat 2 tablespoons of the butter and all of the olive oil in a skillet over medium heat until it bubbles. Add the veal, without overlapping any of it, and cook it just under 30 seconds on each side. Remove the veal to a plate and place in a warm 200-degree-F oven until ready to serve.\n\n4. Add the Chardonnay and lemon juice to the pan and simmer for about 2 minutes, scraping the bottom of the skillet to dissolve the browned bits. Reduce the heat to low, stir in the vanilla, then whisk in the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter.\n\n5. Divide the veal among 4 warm plates and spoon on the sauce. SERVES FOUR.\n\nLiver \u00e0 l'Orange\n\n_This is my version of a creation of chef Tom Cowman, who came to town to open the kitchen at the fabled Restaurant Jonathan and who later became everybody's favorite chef at the Upperline. The sauce is similar to the one in duck \u00e0 l'orange, but it goes perfectly with liver. This is a dish for you if you never liked liver before. It may turn you around._\n\n1 cup flour\n\n1 Tbsp. salt\n\n1 tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n1\u00bd lb. (approximately) veal liver\n\nJuice of 1 large orange, strained\n\n\u00bc cup Cointreau or Grand Marnier\n\n\u00bc cup dry white wine\n\n3 Tbsp. orange marmalade\n\n\u00bc cup chopped sweet onion\n\n\u215b tsp. dried marjoram\n\n8 slices bacon\n\n2 Tbsp. butter\n\n8 half-moon slices of orange, about \u00bc inch thick\n\n1. Preheat the broiler. Combine the flour, salt, and Creole seasoning in a wide bowl and set aside. Slice the liver in 8 wide slices, about \u00bc inch thick, and set aside.\n\n2. Combine the orange juice, Cointreau, wine, marmalade, onion, and marjoram in a small saucepan and cook, stirring, over medium heat until thick enough to coat a spoon. Keep warm on the lowest heat.\n\n3. Fry the bacon in a skillet until crisp. Allow to cool, then break into small pieces (but not quite crumbled). Pour off the excess bacon fat, but don't wipe the pan. Add the butter and heat over medium-high heat. Pass the liver through the seasoned flour, shaking off the excess. Add the liver to the skillet and saut\u00e9 for about 2 minutes on each side, leaving some pink in the center.\n\n4. Transfer the liver to a baking sheet, with the slices slightly overlapping. Tuck an orange slice between each slice of liver and spoon some of the sauce over each slice. Broil until the sauce starts bubbling, about a minute.\n\n5. Arrange 2 liver slices and 2 orange slices on each of 4 warm plates and spoon a little sauce around the side. SERVES FOUR.\n\nPann\u00e9ed Pork Chops with Fennel Creole Sauce\n\n_Some years ago, the annual March of Dimes Gourmet Gala took the form of a celebrity cooking competition, to which I was invited. My dish was pann\u00e9ed sweetbreads prepared with the sauce below. I won!_\n\n_As much as I like sweetbreads, I give you this recipe with pork chops because sweetbreads are hard to find and fool with and a lot of people don't like them._\n\nSAUCE\n\n3 Tbsp. butter\n\n1 medium yellow onion, chopped\n\n1 medium green bell pepper, chopped\n\n1 bulb fresh fennel\n\n1 rib celery, chopped\n\n\u00bd tsp. chopped garlic\n\nOne 28-oz. can whole tomatoes\n\n2 large ripe tomatoes, seeds and diced\n\n2 cups chicken stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n\u00bd bunch of green onions, chopped\n\n2 bay leaves\n\n1 sprig fresh thyme\n\n1 tsp. Louisana hot sauce, such as Crystal\n\n1 tsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\n\u00bd tsp. ground white pepper, plus more to taste\n\n\u00bd tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\nPORK CHOPS\n\n8 center-cut pork chops, trimmed\n\n\u00bd cup flour\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n2 eggs, beaten\n\n1\u00bd cups fresh bread crumbs\n\nCanola or olive oil\n\nFresh chervil (or parsley), for garnish\n\n1. To make the sauce: Melt the butter in a heavy saucepan. Add the onion, bell pepper, fennel, celery, and garlic, and saut\u00e9 until just tender but not browned, about 5 minutes.\n\n2. With your fingers or a food processor, crush the canned tomatoes. Add them, all the juice from the can, and the fresh tomatoes to the pan, along with the chicken stock, and bring to a simmer. Add all of the remaining sauce ingredients and cook over medium heat for 5 minutes.\n\n3. Reduce the heat to a simmer and cook until the sauce has reached a non-runny consistency. Adjust the seasonings with salt and pepper, and keep warm until time to serve. (Makes about 4 cups of sauce. This is a bit more than you'll need, but you'll find that some people can't get enough of the sauce. Refrigerate the rest and keep it on hand for omelets, grilled chicken, or grilled shrimp. It will keep for about a week.)\n\n4. Pound the pork chops with a meat pounder between 2 pieces of wax paper until they're about twice their original size. Mix the flour, salt, and Creole seasoning together, and lightly dust (don't dredge!) the pork chops with the seasoned flour. Pass the pork chops through the beaten eggs, shaking of the excess. Then dredge through the bread crumbs.\n\n5. Heat about \u00bd inch of oil in a heavy skillet (cast-iron is perfect) over medium-high heat, until a pinch of bread crumbs fries vigorously. Cook the pork chops, one at a time, until golden brown, about 1\u00bd minutes per side. Remove and drain on paper towels.\n\n6. Spoon about \u00bc cup of sauce around each chop and serve garnished with chervil or parsley. SERVES FOUR.\n\nPepper-Crusted Pork Loin with Sweet Heat Sauce\n\n_As the Chinese have known for ages, sweet heat is a wonderful flavor effect. The sweetness in the sauce balances an otherwise over-the-top degree of pepper heat in the dish, resulting in greatly heightened flavor. You can use either pork tenderloin or pork rib loin for this dish. The latter is better if you're cooking on the outdoor grill._\n\n_I will always associate this dish with Hurricane Katrina. I made it up the weekend before the storm hit. Then, after my family and I were evacuated to the home of our niece Jennifer Donner in Atlanta, I cooked (and perfected) it there._\n\nPORK LOIN\n\n1 pork rib loin, 10\u201312 inches long, trimmed of fat and silverskin, or 2 pork tenderloins\n\n\u00bc cup soy sauce\n\n\u00bc cup coarsely ground black pepper\n\nSalt\n\nSAUCE\n\n\u00bc cup fig preserves\n\n\u00bc cup orange marmalade (or other kinds of preserves)\n\n\u00bd cup apple juice\n\n2 Tbsp. steak sauce\n\n1 Tbsp. soy sauce\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n1. If cooking outside, build a fire with some wood chips or other smoking fuel in the pit. If cooking indoors, preheat the broiler and pan, positioning the pan 6 inches from the heat.\n\n2. If using the rib loin, cut it from end to end into 2 pieces of the same size. (The pork tenderloin is already the perfect size.) Pour the soy sauce over the loins and coat them all over. Sprinkle on the coarse pepper and a bit of salt. The pepper should create a distinct crust.\n\n3. Place the pork loins right over the fire in the grill and cook, turning every few minutes, until the internal temperature reaches 160 degrees F on a meat thermometer. There may still be a blush of pink in the center, but that is well past the safety point for pork. If using the oven, place the loins under the broiler and broil, turning once, for 10 minutes, until the exterior is well browned. Lower the heat to 275 degrees F and continue to cook until the interior temperature reaches 160 degrees F.\n\n4. Slice the pork loins into \u00bd-inch-thick medallions. If using tenderloin, slice it on the bias.\n\n5. Combine all of the sauce ingredients in a saucepan and heat through. Reduce the sauce a little if you think it's too thin. SERVES EIGHT TO TEN.\n\nPork Tenderloin Diane\n\n_Steak Diane is a famous dish from the really old days and persists in only the few restaurants that still perform a lot of tableside preparation. (Brennan's is one.) I thought pork tenderloin might work with the recipe, so I played around with it until I came up with this._\n\n2 whole pork tenderloins, cut into 1-inch-thick medallions\n\n2 Tbsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n2 Tbsp. butter\n\n2 Tbsp. bourbon\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice, strained\n\n3 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n2 Tbsp. Tabasco Caribbean Style Steak Sauce or Pickapeppa\n\n1 tsp. Dijon mustard\n\n\u2153 cup heavy whipping cream\n\n1 Tbsp. shallots, very finely chopped, for garnish\n\n\u00bd tsp. coarsely cracked black pepper, for garnish\n\n1. Season the pork with the Creole seasoning and salt.\n\n2. Heat the butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the pork and cook until browned on each side. Remove and keep warm.\n\n3. Add the bourbon to the skillet and bring to a boil, whisking to dissolve the browned bits. Add the lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, steak sauce, and mustard, and cook for a minute. Add the cream and reduce heat to a simmer.\n\n4. Return the pork to the pan and heat through while spooning sauce over the medallions.\n\n5. Divide the pork among 6 warm plates. Spoon on the sauce and garnish with a light sprinkle of the shallots and pepper. SERVES SIX.\n\nPork Tenderloin with Mushrooms and Brandy Cream Sauce\n\n_Pork tenderloins are lately much appreciated by cooks and eaters not only because of their great texture (it is to pork what a filet mignon is to beef), but also for their low fat content (less than even skinless chicken). This dish \"fixes\" that fat issue by adding a very rich but supremely delicious cream sauce. Oh, well._\n\n_Note that the two pork tenderloins called for are almost always packed together in a single vacuum package in the meat counter._\n\n1 cup whipping cream\n\n2 Tbsp. olive oil\n\n2 whole pork tenderloins\n\n1 Tbsp. Creole seasoning\n\n3 Tbsp. brandy\n\n1 Tbsp. chopped onion\n\n1 cup coarsely chopped Portobello or shiitake mushrooms\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.\n\n2. Bring the cream to a light boil in a small saucepan and reduce it by half while preparing the rest of the recipe.\n\n3. Heat the oil in a large ovenproof skillet over medium-high heat. Season the tenderloins with Creole seasoning. Sear the tenderloins until crusty brown all over. Remove the pan from the heat and reserve the pan. Transfer the tenderloins to a roasting pan in the center of the preheated oven, and roast for about 15 minutes, or until an internal temperature of about 155 degrees F is reached on a meat thermometer pushed into the center of the larger tenderloin. Remove the meat from the oven and let it rest for about 5 minutes while you prepare the sauce.\n\n4. Return the skillet you used to brown the tenderloins to medium heat. Add the brandy and bring it to a boil while whisking to dissolve the browned juices and bits in the pan, about 1 minute.\n\n5. Lower the heat to medium-low and add the onion and the mushrooms. Cook until they soften completely. Add the reduced cream and salt, and stir lightly to blend all the ingredients. Lower the heat as low as it will go and allow to simmer, stirring every minute or so.\n\n6. Slice the tenderloins into disks about \u00bd inch thick and put them on warm plates. Spoon some of the sauce over or around the pork and serve. SERVES FOUR.\n\nOpen-Mouth Pork Chop\n\n_This variation on stuffed pork chops is so off-center that I had to call it something else. Do not be distressed that the stuffing wants to fall out; there's no avoiding this other than by using toothpicks to hold the chop together during the cooking._\n\n2 oz. block Parmesan cheese\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter\n\n4 cloves garlic, chopped\n\n\u00bc tsp. crushed red pepper\n\n3 crimini mushrooms or 1 small portobello, sliced\n\n3 firm Italian plum tomatoes, seeded and sliced\n\n6 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, leaves only, chopped\n\n\u00bc cup bread crumbs\n\nFour 16\u201320-oz. double pork chops\n\nSalt to taste\n\nSalt-free Creole seasoning\n\n1. Preheat the broiler. Using a vegetable peeler, slice off thin but wide shavings of the Parmesan cheese and set aside.\n\n2. Melt the butter in a medium skillet over medium-low heat until it bubbles. Add the garlic and crushed red pepper, and saut\u00e9 until the garlic is fragrant. Add the mushrooms and cook until the mushrooms just begin to soften. Add the tomatoes and parsley, and toss to combine. The tomatoes should not get hot. Remove from the heat and sprinkle the bread crumbs evenly over the top.\n\n3. Using a sharp knife, cut a slit in the pork chops all the way to the bones. Open the chops and spoon in some of the mushroom-tomato mixture. Tuck some of the cheese shavings into the pocket and pin the edges of the pork chop (you won't be able to close it) with toothpicks.\n\n4. Season the chops with salt and Creole seasoning. Broil about 4 inches from the heat for about 5 minutes and turn. Broil on the other side until done. Remove the toothpicks and serve. SERVES FOUR.\n\nNoisettes d'Agneau Maison d'Or\n\n_\"Nuggets of lamb in the style of the House of Gold\" was for many years the premier lamb dish at Antoine's. It was revised in the late 1970s\u2014a good idea, since the sauce was an impossibly old-fashioned concoction riddled with sweetbreads, turkey chunks, and mushrooms. My recipe is really different from Antoine's dish, but I wanted to keep the name alive because my first golden retriever, Noisette\u2014a wonderful dog\u2014was named after it._\n\n1 rack of American lamb\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper\n\n2 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil\n\n2 cloves garlic, crushed\n\nSAUCE\n\n2 Tbsp. red wine\n\n1 Tbsp. fresh orange juice, strained\n\n1 tsp. tarragon vinegar\n\n1 tsp. dried chives\n\n\u00bd cup thinly sliced crimini mushrooms\n\n\u00bd tsp. Tabasco Green Pepper Sauce\n\n2 egg yolks\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter, softened\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Trim the lean central part of the rack away from the bones and fat. Season it with salt and pepper. Heat the oil in a large ovenproof skillet over medium-high heat. Add the garlic and cook until the garlic browns a little. Add the lamb and brown it all over. Transfer the skillet to the oven and bake the lamb until it is done to your liking. (For medium-rare, look for a meat-thermometer reading of 130\u2013135 degrees F. This should take about 25 minutes.)\n\n2. While the lamb is roasting, make the sauce. Combine all of the sauce ingredients except the egg yolks and butter in a small saucepan. Cook over low heat until almost all the liquid has been absorbed or evaporated. Set aside.\n\n3. Put the egg yolks into a metal bowl and set over a saucepan of gently boiling water. Whisk constantly until the yolks turn a pale yellow color. Add the butter, a little at a time, whisking constantly. When the sauce is fluffy, add the mushroom mixture. Keep warm.\n\n4. Remove the lamb from the oven and let it rest for 10 minutes before carving. Slice the lamb into \u00be-inch-thick medallions. Serve 2 medallions per person with the sauce spooned generously over the top. SERVES FOUR.\n\nCreole Lamb Shanks\n\n_This is one of the most popular daily specials in all the restaurants that serve it. It's not hard to make at home, although it needs to cook for a long time to get the flavors to emerge and for the meat to gain its lip-smacking tenderness. One other benefit is that lamb shanks are relatively inexpensive._\n\n4 lamb shanks, about 1 lb. each\n\n2 Tbsp. olive oil\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n1 tsp. coarsely ground black pepper\n\n2 onions, cut into chunks\n\n2 large carrots, cut into thick coins\n\n3 stalks celery, cut into 1-inch pieces\n\n8 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed\n\n2 bay leaves\n\n1 tsp. marjoram\n\n2 sprigs fresh rosemary\n\n1 whole orange, cut into eighths\n\n1\u00bd cups white wine (best: Gew\u00fcrztraminer)\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.\n\n2. Trim as much fat as you conveniently can off the lamb shanks. Don't get too zealous about this; there should be a little fat still there.\n\n3. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat until the oil shimmers. Season the shanks with salt and pepper. Brown the shanks on all sides in the skillet. Remove the pan from the heat and reserve the pan.\n\n4. Place the shanks into a roasting pan or large skillet with a cover that is big enough to fit all the shanks without overlapping, but without a tremendous amount of space between them, either. Add all the other ingredients around the shanks except for the wine.\n\n5. Put the skillet used to brown the shanks back onto the burner over medium heat. Add the wine. Bring to a boil while whisking to dissolve the pan juices and browned bits. Hold at a light boil for about 2 minutes, then pour over the shanks.\n\n6. Add enough water to bring the liquid about one-third of the way up the sides of the shanks. Cover the roasting pan and put it into the oven for 90 minutes. Every 30 minutes, turn the shanks.\n\n7. After 90 minutes, remove the cover but leave the pan in the oven. Turn the shanks and roast for another 30 minutes. By this time, the meat should be falling from the bones with just a touch of a fork. If not, add more water (if necessary) and continue to cook uncovered until done. Remove the shanks and keep warm.\n\n8. Strain the pan juices into a tall glass or cup. Discard the vegetables. Let the pan juices settle, and skim off all the fat. If you have more than about a cup, put the liquid into a small saucepan and reduce to 1 cup. Adjust seasonings with salt and pepper.\n\n9. Serve the shanks with rice, pasta, or vegetables, well-moistened with the pan sauce. SERVES FOUR.\n\nRoasted Venison Backstrap with Cherry-Peppercorn Sauce\n\n_I have about a dozen friends who hunt. All of them must be pretty good at it because they seem always to have freezers full of venison that they're eager to give away. I'm pleased to accept it so I can make up dishes like this one. By the way, this is the kind of dish that will turn around those who say they don't like game. Even my kids liked this, and that's saying something._\n\n4 venison backstraps (loins), about 4\u20136 lb. total\n\nMARINADE\n\n1 cup Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot\n\n\u00bd cup orange juice\n\n1 Tbsp. black peppercorns\n\n2 bay leaves\n\n1 tsp. dried marjoram\n\n1 tsp. dried thyme\n\nSAUCE\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper, plus more to taste\n\n3 Tbsp. butter\n\n1 Tbsp. chopped shallots\n\n3 Tbsp. black cherry or currant jam\n\n1 Tbsp. Tabasco Steak Sauce\n\n1. A day before cooking, put the venison into food-storage bags with all of the marinade ingredients. Refrigerate until cooking time.\n\n2. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Remove the venison from the marinating bag and shake off the excess. Season the loins with salt and pepper. Strain the marinade into a bowl and set aside.\n\n3. Heat 2 tablespoons of the butter in a large, heavy skillet over medium-high heat until it bubbles. Add the venison and brown it all over. Transfer the venison to a roasting rack and bake until the temperature registers 135 degrees F on a meat thermometer for medium-rare. Let the venison rest for 15 minutes before carving.\n\n4. Meanwhile, add the shallots to the skillet in which you cooked the venison and saut\u00e9 for a few seconds. Add the strained marinade to the pan and bring to a boil, whisking it to dislodge the browned meat juices and bits on the pan. Reduce the marinade to about \u2154 cup. Stir in the jam and steak sauce. Continue cooking until the jam is dissolved.\n\n5. Strain the sauce once more into a clean, small saucepan and return to a simmer. Season to taste with salt and pepper. You can also reduce the sauce some more to get a thicker sauce. Remove from the heat and whisk in the remaining tablespoon of butter.\n\n6. Slice the venison into \u00bd-inch-thick medallions and spoon on the sauce. SERVES SIX TO EIGHT.\n\nWild Mushroom and Rabbit Ragout\n\n_Created by chef Gerard Maras when he was at Mr. B's, this has a bigger flavor than we get out of most rabbit dishes, yet it doesn't lose the character of that tender meat. The main ingredient is rabbit \"tenderloins.\" (These are actually backstraps; the real tenderloin is only as big as a child's little finger.) Sear them fast at first, then let them cook slowly to develop the flavor._\n\n3 Tbsp. butter\n\n3 Tbsp. flour\n\n3 cups rich veal or chicken stock, hot (see recipe, this page)\n\n3 whole rabbit tenderloins, cubed\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper\n\n2 Tbsp. vegetable oil\n\n\u00bc cup chopped yellow onion\n\n3 ripe plum tomatoes, chopped\n\n2 sprigs fresh thyme, leaves only (or 1 tsp. dried)\n\n3 cups whole wild mushrooms, or sliced shiitakes or criminis\n\n1. Make a blond roux by melting the butter in a saucepan. Add the flour and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture barely begins to brown. Whisk in the stock and keep warm on low heat.\n\n2. Season the rabbit with salt and pepper. Heat the oil in a skillet over high heat. Add the rabbit and brown all over. Lower the heat to medium and add the onion, tomatoes, and thyme, and cook until soft. Add the roux-stock mixture and bring to a boil. Lower to a simmer and cook for 20\u201325 minutes, or until the sauce coats a spoon and the rabbit pieces are tender but not falling apart.\n\n3. Add the mushrooms and cook until they just begin to soften\u2014about 2 minutes. Serve hot by itself or over pasta or rice. SERVES FOUR.\n\nRabbit with Apricots and Creole Seasoning\n\n_This savory dish with sweet highlights blends the cooking approaches of Creole and Eastern European cuisines. Use a late-harvest sweet wine, which brings out the flavors of the fruit without making the dish too sweet. When I first made this, I used Chappellet Late-Harvest Chenin Blanc._\n\n1 rabbit, about 4 lb., cut up into 8\u201310 pieces\n\n2 Tbsp. flour\n\n2 Tbsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n1 tsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter\n\n\u00bc cup brandy\n\n2 cloves\n\n8 ripe apricots or 3 ripe peaches, peeled and pitted\n\n\u00bd cup late-harvest white wine\n\n\u00bd tsp. Tabasco\n\nFreshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n1\u00bd cups cooked rice\n\n1. Rinse and dry the rabbit pieces. Combine the flour, Creole seasoning, and salt in a bowl. Add the rabbit pieces and toss to coat in the mixture.\n\n2. Melt the butter in a large, heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Add the rabbit and brown the pieces all over. Remove from the skillet and set aside.\n\n3. Add the brandy to the skillet in which you cooked the rabbit and bring to a boil while whisking the pan to dissolve the browned bits at the bottom. Careful! The brandy can catch fire, which is okay for flavor but potentially dangerous.\n\n4. When most of the brandy has evaporated, add \u00bd cup of water to the pan, along with the cloves, apricots or peaches, and the browned rabbit pieces. Lower the heat and simmer, covered, until the rabbit legs are tender, 35\u201340 minutes.\n\n5. Remove the rabbit pieces and keep warm. Add the wine and Tabasco to the skillet and bring to a boil. Reduce for 5 minutes, then pour the pan contents into a food processor. Puree, then strain into a clean skillet. Return the rabbit to the strained sauce and simmer until everything is hot and combined. Add a little water if the sauce is too thick and season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve with rice. SERVES FOUR.\n\nSweetbreads Normande\n\n_Veal sweetbreads are the thymus glands of a veal calf. They have the flavor of veal but with an incomparable richness and tenderness. This dish gets added richness from the cream sauce. The most time-consuming part of the recipe is getting the sweetbreads ready for the saut\u00e9 pan. The fresh product seems almost liquid but firms up when you poach it._\n\n2 lb. sweetbreads\n\n1 cup flour\n\n1 Tbsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\n1 tsp. ground white pepper, plus more to taste\n\n5 Tbsp. butter\n\n\u00bd cup Calvados\n\n\u00bc cup apple juice\n\n1 Tbsp. Dijon mustard\n\n3 cups sliced mushrooms, preferably shiitakes or chanterelles\n\n1\u00bd cups heavy whipping cream\n\n8 oz. orzo pasta, cooked al dente\n\n1. Bring a pot of water to a boil and blanch the sweetbreads for about 5 minutes. Drain and plunge into a bowl of ice water. Peel the membrane from the outside of the sweetbreads. You may have to pull apart the lobes to get the little shreds of membrane out, but don't break the sweetbreads up too much. Drain excess water.\n\n2. Combine the flour, salt, and pepper in a wide bowl. Dust the sweetbreads with the mixture.\n\n3. Melt the butter in a skillet over medium heat until it bubbles. Add the sweetbreads and saut\u00e9 until lightly browned all over. Remove the sweetbreads from the pan and keep warm.\n\n4. Pour off the excess butter, but don't wipe the pan. Lower the heat to mediumlow and add the Calvados. Bring to a boil, whisking the bottom of the pan to dissolve the juices. Be careful; Calvados is highly alcoholic and its fumes may flame.\n\n5. When the Calvados is almost all gone, add the apple juice, mustard, and mushrooms, and cook until the mushrooms are soft, about 3 minutes. Add the cream and bring to a boil, stirring to blend the ingredients. Don't let the cream foam over.\n\n6. Season the sauce to taste with salt and pepper. Return the sweetbreads to the pan and cook until heated through. Serve with orzo pasta. SERVES FOUR.\n\nAlligator Creole\n\n_This dish takes advantage of the resemblance alligator tail meat has\u2014in texture, color, and weight\u2014to baby white veal. The hardest part of the recipe is finding the alligator meat. (One online source iswww.cajuncrawfish.com; see Food Sources, this page.) If alligator meat is unavailable, you can use veal, pork loin, or even chicken instead. The best side dish for this is buttered stone-ground grits._\n\n1 lb. alligator tail meat, sliced against the grain into \u00bc-inch-thick cutlets\n\nFlour\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\n\u00bc tsp. ground white pepper, plus more to taste \u00bc cup olive oil\n\n1 red bell pepper, chopped\n\n1 rib celery, chopped\n\n\u00bd medium yellow onion, chopped\n\n\u00bd bulb fennel, chopped\n\nOne 28-oz. can Italian plum tomatoes, with \u00bd cup of the juice\n\n\u00bc cup dry white wine\n\n2 tsp. lemon juice\n\n4 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, chopped\n\n\u215b tsp. cayenne\n\n1. Dust the alligator lightly with the flour and season with the salt and pepper. Heat the oil in a large skillet until it begins to shimmer. Add the alligator and saut\u00e9 about a minute on each side. Remove from the skillet and keep warm.\n\n2. Add the bell pepper, celery, onion, and fennel to the skillet in which you just cooked the alligator and saut\u00e9 until tender. Chop the tomatoes and add them to the skillet, along with the tomato juice, wine, lemon juice, parsley, and cayenne. Bring to a simmer.\n\n3. Return the alligator cutlets to the pan and cook them in the sauce for 2\u20133 minutes. Adjust the seasonings with salt and pepper. Serve with lots of sauce and hot buttered grits on the side. SERVES FOUR.\n\nRoot Beer\u2013Glazed Ham\n\n_This is without a doubt the most-asked-for recipe in the 17-year history of my radio show. Demand for it rises during the holidays but never goes away completely._\n\n_The root beer\u2013glazed ham is a fixture on my table on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. It's in the oven all morning (good thing my turkey is usually out on the grill!), and it makes the whole house smell good. You'll find that lots of your guests will fight over the black crusty parts of the ham (and all the rest of it, too)._\n\n_If you live in New Orleans, I strongly urge you to buy the superb locally produced Chisesi ham for this. It's widely available at supermarkets, usually in the deli department. Otherwise, a top-quality, lean, naturally smoked boneless ham is what you want._\n\n_I usually make the glaze the night before so I can get the ham right into the oven in the morning. You'll also want to use a disposable pan to bake the ham. The drippings get so crusty that they are very hard to dislodge._\n\nGLAZE\n\n24 oz. (2 cans) Barq's root beer\n\n4\u00bd tsp. pepper jelly\n\n4\u00bd tsp. Tabasco Caribbean Style Steak Sauce or Pickapeppa\n\n6 cloves\n\n1 stick cinnamon\n\n1 bay leaf\n\nPeel and juice of \u00bd orange\n\nPeel of \u00bd lemon\n\nHAM\n\nOne 10\u201314-lb. cured, smoked ham\n\n\u00be cup dark brown sugar\n\n\u00bd tsp. dry mustard\n\n1. Combine all of the glaze ingredients in a large saucepan. Bring the mixture to a boil, then lower to a simmer and cook for about 30 minutes. Strain the pan contents and discard the solids. Reduce the liquid to about \u00bd cup. Refrigerate if you do this in advance.\n\n2. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.\n\n3. Place the ham on a rack in a disposable aluminum pan. Cut shallow gashes in a crisscross pattern across the top half of the ham. Spoon just enough of the glaze over the ham to completely wet the surface. Combine the brown sugar and mustard together and pat it all over the ham. Pour \u00bd cup of water into the pan.\n\n4. Bake the ham, spooning some of the remaining glaze over it every 15 minutes until the glaze is all used up. Try to get some glaze on all parts of the ham. Add more water to the pan when it dries up. Continue baking for a total of 3\u00bd\u20134 hours, or until the ham reaches an internal temperature of 160 degrees F on a meat thermometer. Remove from the oven and allow to rest for 30 minutes before carving. SERVES TWENTY-FIVE TO THIRTY.\n\nCorned Beef and Cabbage\n\n_Corned beef is brisket that's been corned with seasonings and then brined for several weeks. Trust me: It is not worth attempting to corn beef yourself. Buy a nice one at the store and just boil it. I do have a trick for you, however: Add crab boil to the mixture. It will not taste like crab or be noticeably spicy\u2014just good._\n\n_The cabbage component will be better if it's boiled all by itself. Also, you need some salt in the water for the cabbage, but the corned beef will get tough if you cook it with salt._\n\n_Now, my favorite corned beef story. When the late chef Jamie Shannon was chosen to succeed Emeril Lagasse as executive chef at Commander's Palace, Dick Brennan, Sr.\u2014one of the owners of the restaurant\u2014told him, \"Just make sure the corned beef is tender on St. Patrick's Day.\" Corned beef was served only on that day at Commander's, whose culinary ambitions were quite a bit higher. Jamie shrugged that off as a joke. Later in the day, he encountered Dick's brother, John Brennan. John congratulated Jamie, then added only this advice: \"Okay, young fella. Make sure the corned beef is tender on St. Patrick's Day.\" The Brennans have never been ashamed of being Irish._\n\nBRISKET\n\n1 corned beef brisket, about 4 lb.\n\n1 medium yellow onion, quartered\n\n2 Tbsp. liquid crab boil\n\n1 Tbsp. black peppercorns\n\n1 tsp. dried marjoram\n\n\u00bd tsp. mustard seeds\n\nCABBAGE\n\n1 head green cabbage, quartered\n\n2 Tbsp. salt\n\nCreole mustard\n\n1. Wash the seasonings that were in the vacuum-packed bag off the corned beef. Put it in a large pot and cover with cold water. Add the onion, crab boil, peppercorns, marjoram, and mustard seeds, and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer, covered, for 3\u00bd hours.\n\n2. Boil the cabbage separately in about 2 gallons (32 cups) of salted water.\n\n3. When the corned beef is cooked, drain it from the water and let it stand for about 20 minutes. Slice it against the grain, noting that the grain in brisket has a way of changing directions as you slice it. The thinner you slice it, the better. Serve with the boiled cabbage and Creole mustard on the side. SERVES FOUR TO SIX.\n\n_Chicken, Duck, and Other Birds_\n\nRoasted Chicken Aline\n\nChicken Bonne Femme\n\nStewed Chicken with Brown Gravy\n\nFried Chicken\n\nChicken with Artichoke Sauce and Pasta\n\nChicken Grandee\n\nGrilled Marinated Chicken with Hot and Sweet Peppers\n\nCornish Hens with Peppercorn Red Wine Sauce\n\nGame Birds Paradis\n\nCajun Smothered Duck\n\nDuck Confit\n\nPat Gallagher's Smothered Quail\n\nA\n\nSince chicken is perceived as ordinary and inexpensive by many people, chefs give disproportionate attention to their chicken dishes in particular and their poultry dishes in general. The chicken dish in a first-class restaurant is usually one of the best eats in the house.\n\nBut I'd trade it any time for a well-made stewed chicken, falling off the bone into a plate of brown gravy with dirty rice. Hardly a restaurant cooks that anymore. So we have to make it at home. And let's not even talk about how the fast-food industry has destroyed the reputation of fried chicken.\n\nI'm also put off by the trend in recent years to replace the roasted half-duck with a fanned-out, grilled, undercooked duck breast. It's only occasionally that I find such dishes turn me on. Again, the heart begs for the Cajun smothered duck, tender and awash in a sauce of its own juices.\n\nI give you those dishes and a few others. I love chicken, don't you?\n\nRoasted Chicken Aline\n\n_If I had to live on just one entr\u00e9e the rest of my life, this would be it. I love a good roasted chicken, like the one my mother (Aline) used to make every Sunday when I was a kid. After this chicken comes out of the oven, you can add almost any sauce or garnish to it you like, but it's very good as is. Buy a free-range chicken or the smallest chicken you can find at the store._\n\n_Feel free to vary the array of fruits, vegetables, and herbs that I like to stuff inside the cavity before putting the chicken into the oven._\n\nOne 3\u20133\u00bd-lb. whole chicken,\n\nStems of 1 bunch of fennel, chopped, or tops from 1 bunch of celery\n\nStems of 1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley\n\n\u00bd orange, sliced\n\n1 good-sized branch rosemary\n\n10 cloves garlic, crushed\n\nSalt to taste\n\nSalt-free Creole seasoning or freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried tarragon\n\n1 Tbsp. butter\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees F. If you have a convection oven, set it to convect.\n\n2. Rinse the chicken and remove the giblets. Stuff the cavity with as much of the fennel or celery, parsley, orange, rosemary, and garlic as will fit inside it. Season the outside of the chicken with salt and Creole seasoning or pepper.\n\n3. Put the chicken, breast side down, on a broiler pan with a rack and set it in the center of the oven. Reduce the oven to 350 degrees F. Roast for 1 hour and check the temperature of the chicken with a meat thermometer. When it reaches about 170 degrees F, turn the oven up to 450 degrees F and dot the outside of the chicken with small slivers of butter.\n\n4. Roast the chicken another 5\u201310 minutes. Check to make sure the juices run clear from the thigh. Remove from the oven and let stand for 15 minutes before serving. SERVES TWO TO FOUR.\n\nChicken Bonne Femme\n\n_\"Good woman's chicken\" and its variations (chicken Clemenceau and chicken Pontalba) are among the best dishes in the Creole cookbook. Although there is little agreement on how chicken bonne femme is prepared, potatoes and garlic are always part of the recipe. This one evolved in my kitchen from the very good version prepared at Antoine's, with inspiration from the super-garlicky, great bonne femme at Tujague's._\n\n4 slices bacon, cut into 1-inch squares\n\nTwo 3\u00bd-lb. whole chickens, quartered\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n2 Tbsp. flour\n\n\u00bd cup ham, cut into tiny dice\n\n1 cup chopped green onion tops\n\n1 cup chopped yellow onion\n\n2 cups sliced fresh mushrooms\n\n1 cup dry white wine\n\n1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n\u00bc tsp. Tabasco\n\nVegetable oil, for frying\n\n2 lb. white potatoes, peeled and cut into \u00be-inch dice\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter\n\n8 cloves garlic, chopped\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Fry the bacon in a large skillet until crisp, then remove with a slotted spoon and reserve, leaving the fat in the skillet. Meanwhile, season the chicken with salt and pepper, then dust lightly with the flour. Cook the chicken in the rendered bacon fat over high heat until browned on all sides. Remove the chicken pieces to an ovenproof platter and keep warm.\n\n2. Add the ham, green onion, and yellow onion to the skillet in which you cooked the chicken and saut\u00e9 until the onions turn translucent. Add the mushrooms, wine, Worcestershire sauce, and Tabasco, and bring to a boil. After a minute, reduce the heat to maintain a simmer.\n\n3. Pour the oil into a deep skillet to a depth of 1 inch and heat to 375 degrees F. Add the potatoes and fry until very lightly browned. Drain them well and add to the skillet with the ham and onions. This is bonne femme garnish.\n\n4. Continue simmering the garnish until all of the liquid is absorbed; lightly stir to distribute the ingredients. Remove from heat.\n\n5. Heat the butter in a small saucepan until it starts bubbling. Lower the heat, skim the foam off, and add the garlic. Cook the garlic in the hot butter for about a minute.\n\n6. Spoon the bonne femme garnish over and between the chicken pieces. Spoon the garlic butter over the garnish and season to taste with salt and pepper. Crumble the reserved bacon over the top.\n\n7. Bake for 7\u201312 minutes. Turn the chicken pieces, redistribute the garnish, and bake for another 5\u20137 minutes. If the white meat is cooked, remove it from the pan and keep warm. Continue cooking the leg quarters until the juices run clear when the thigh is pierced. Return the breasts to the mixture and serve with lots of the garnish. SERVES FOUR.\n\nStewed Chicken with Brown Gravy\n\n_This is one of New Orleans's favorite lunch specials\u2014one which, unfortunately, is slipping away from us. The old Delmonico used to make the definitive version of this dish. Now Mandina's version is probably best. It's always served with brown gravy over the chicken and rice. The vegetable of choice is peas, preferably with mushrooms in a roux._\n\n_Stewed chicken is made sort of like chicken gumbo but with bigger pieces of chicken and less broth._\n\n\u00bd cup vegetable oil\n\n\u00bd cup flour\n\n1 rib celery, chopped\n\n\u00bd yellow onion, chopped\n\n\u00bd green bell pepper, chopped\n\n\u215b tsp. dried thyme leaves\n\nTwo 3-lb. whole free-range chickens, cut into 8 pieces\n\n\u00bc cup red wine\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. freshly ground black pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp. Tabasco\n\nCooked long-grain rice\n\n1. Make a dark roux by heating the oil in a saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the flour and cook, stirring often, until the mixture turns the color of dark chocolate. After the roux has reached the right color, remove from the heat and add the celery, onion, bell pepper, and thyme. Continue to stir for a minute or so until the vegetables get soft and the roux cools.\n\n2. In a large saucepan or Dutch oven, sear the pieces of chicken until browned all over. Remove the chicken. Add the wine and bring it to a boil, scraping the bottom of the pan to dissolve the browned bits in the wine.\n\n3. Add 3 cups of water to the pan and bring to a simmer. Add the roux and whisk until smooth. Return the chicken to the pot.\n\n4. Cover and simmer on very low heat for about 30 minutes. Remove the breasts and wings, and continue to cook 20\u201330 minutes longer, or until the meat on the chicken legs begins to fall away from the bones. Remove the chicken from the pot and keep warm. Add the salt, pepper, and Tabasco to the gravy pot and cook until the sauce thickens. You can strain it or not, according to your taste. Serve the chicken with rice and spoon the gravy over both. SERVES FOUR.\n\nFried Chicken\n\n_Confession: I never make fried chicken the same way twice. It's still a work in progress. The problem with any method of cooking chicken is that the various pieces cook at different rates. This is why, I suspect, the Colonel didn't use the standard breast-wing-thigh-drumstick configuration. The trick is to pull the breastbone and the cartilage in the center of the full breast away from the rib sections, leaving the two tenders still attached to the cartilage._\n\n_The problem is not entirely solved. Breast meat cooks faster than leg meat of the same size. So consider that as you cook. One more thing: There is no question that the flavor of the chicken gets better after you've fried about six pieces and that it starts deteriorating after you've fried about 16 pieces. So refresh the oil\u2014strain it and add fresh\u2014along the way._\n\nMARINADE\n\n4 cups buttermilk\n\n\u00bc cup yellow mustard\n\n2 Tbsp. salt\n\n1 Tbsp. dried tarragon\n\n1 Tbsp. dried dill\n\n1 Tbsp. Tabasco Garlic Pepper Sauce\n\n2 whole chickens, each cut up into breast tenderloin, 2 breasts, 2 thighs, 2 drumsticks, and 2 wings\n\nCOATING\n\n4 cups self-rising (yes!) flour\n\n2 Tbsp. freshly ground black pepper\n\n1 Tbsp. granulated onion\n\n1\u00bd tsp. turmeric\n\n1 tsp. dried marjoram\n\n1 tsp. dried thyme\n\n\u00bd tsp. ground white pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp. cayenne\n\n2 cups Crisco (preferred) or vegetable oil, plus more for refreshing the oil\n\n1. Combine the marinade ingredients in a bowl, mixing until the salt is dissolved. Divide the chicken equally among gallon food-storage bags. Add enough marinade to completely soak the chicken. Place the bags in the refrigerator for at least 8 hours or overnight.\n\n2. Remove the chicken from the marinade and shake off any excess. Place the chicken pieces on a rack over a pan. (The racks you use to cool cakes are perfect.) Place the chicken out of the way but in the open air and allow it to warm up for about 30 minutes.\n\n3. When ready to begin cooking, combine the coating ingredients in a bowl. Pour into a large, clean paper bag.\n\n4. Heat the Crisco or vegetable oil in a deep, heavy pot over medium-high heat until its temperature reaches 375 degrees F. Put 3\u20134 pieces of chicken into the bag with the seasonings. Shake to coat uniformly. (The bag method will also shake off excess coating.)\n\n5. Using tongs, put 4\u20135 pieces of chicken into the hot shortening and fry, without turning, for 8\u201310 minutes. Turn the chicken pieces over and fry on the other side, again for 8\u201310 minutes. The color you're looking for is a bit darker than the usual golden brown.\n\n6. As you remove the pieces of chicken from the pot, drain them on paper towels. If nobody grabs it immediately\u2014the recommended way of eating fried chicken\u2014keep it warm in a 150-degree-F oven until serving. SERVES FOUR TO EIGHT.\n\nChicken with Artichoke Sauce and Pasta\n\n_The Red Onion was a great Metairie restaurant that closed in the early 1980s. On its menu was a terrific chicken dish that involved artichokes somehow. It's almost impossible to get recipes from closed restaurants, but I remembered the taste, so I took a shot at recapturing it. I doubt this is how they did it, but it's close enough for me._\n\n4 chicken breasts, deboned and each cut into 3 pieces\n\n\u00bd cup flour\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n1 tsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\n\u2153 cup olive oil\n\n2 cloves garlic, crushed\n\n6 artichoke hearts, poached and cut into quarters (or use canned or jarred artichoke hearts)\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n2 green onions, finely chopped\n\nTabasco to taste\n\n\u00bd lb. fettuccine, cooked al dente\n\n1. Pound out the chicken pieces with a meat pounder between 2 pieces of wax paper to about double their original size. Blend the flour, Creole seasoning, and salt, and dust the chicken pieces lightly.\n\n2. Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a heavy skillet over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Add the garlic and saut\u00e9 for a minute. Add the chicken and saut\u00e9 until browned all over. Remove the pan from the heat. Remove the chicken and keep warm. Discard the garlic cloves.\n\n3. If using canned or jarred artichoke hearts, pour off the water or oil. Chop the artichokes roughly.\n\n4. Return the pan to medium heat. Add the remaining oil, artichokes, lemon juice, and green onions. Cook until the onions wilt, then add 1 cup of water. Whisk to dissolve the pan juices and lower the heat to a simmer. Reduce the pan contents until they thicken a bit. Season to taste with salt and Tabasco.\n\n5. Return the chicken to the pan and heat through, cooking until the sauce soaks into the chicken a bit. Add the pasta to the pan and toss to coat. Adjust seasonings with salt and Tabasco, and divide among 4 warm plates. SERVES FOUR.\n\nChicken Grandee\n\n_This dish was made famous at Mosca's, but it spread to many other restaurants around New Orleans. Each of them cooks it a little differently. (Mosca's doesn't use sausage or bell pepper in theirs, for example.) Feel free to add a few items of your own to the broiling pan._\n\n1 whole chicken, about 3 lb., or 3 chicken breasts\n\nSalt to taste\n\n1\u20132 Tbsp. Italian seasoning\n\n2 lb. small white potatoes\n\n1 lb. Italian sausage links\n\n\u2153 cup olive oil\n\n1 red or yellow bell pepper, seeds removed, cut into \u00bd-inch dice\n\n6\u20138 large garlic cloves, peeled and crushed\n\n2 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n1 Tbsp. rosemary\n\n2 tsp. oregano\n\n2 tsp. salt\n\n2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper\n\nChopped parsley\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. With a cleaver, cut the whole chicken breast (both sides) into four pieces, and each of the thighs into two pieces. Leave the drumsticks whole. Cut the tips off the wings. Remove small bones\u2014big ones are okay. Season the pieces with salt and Italian seasoning.\n\n2. Bring about a quart of water to a light boil. Peel the potatoes and cut them into half-moon-shaped slices about a quarter of an inch thick. Drop them into the boiling water for about 2 minutes. Drain and set aside.\n\n3. Prick the skins of the sausages a few times with a kitchen fork. In a large, heavy skillet over medium-high heat, cook the sausages until browned and firm. (They don't need to be cooked all the way through, but nearly so.) Remove the sausages and pour off excess fat from the skillet. When the sausages have cooled enough to handle, slice into coins about a quarter-inch thick.\n\n4. Add 2 tablespoons of the olive oil to the skillet. Raise the heat to high and heat until the surface begins to ripple. Add the bell pepper and garlic and cook until brown around the edges. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside.\n\n5. Add the chicken pieces to the skillet and brown on all sides. They don't need to be fully cooked. Sprinkle the lemon juice over the chicken and set aside.\n\n6. Add the remaining olive oil to the skillet and brown the potatoes lightly over high heat, turning once.\n\n7. Put the sliced sausage, pepper, garlic, chicken, and potatoes into a roasting pan, sprinkling in the rosemary, oregano, salt, and pepper as you go and distributing all the ingredients evenly.\n\n8. Put the roasting pan into the preheated 400-degree F oven and roast for 15\u201320 minutes, uncovered. When the biggest pieces of chicken are cooked all the way through, it's ready. Garnish with fresh chopped parsley. SERVES FOUR.\n\nGrilled Marinated Chicken with Hot and Sweet Peppers\n\n_This was a standard dish for years at Brigtsen's, and it's a good example of the robust, painstaking, but essentially simple dishes from that great little Creole bistro. Frank Brigtsen says it was the sort of thing he did a lot when he worked for chef Paul Prudhomme._\n\nMARINADE\n\n1\u00bc cups balsamic vinegar\n\n\u00bc tsp. chopped garlic\n\nLeaves of 1 sprig fresh oregano, chopped\n\n2\u20133 fresh basil leaves, chopped\n\n\u2154 cup extra-virgin olive oil\n\nCHICKEN\n\n4 boneless chicken legs and thighs\n\n4 boneless chicken breasts, skinned\n\n\u00bc cup clarified butter (see recipe, this page)\n\n1 tsp. Chef Paul Prudhomme's Poultry Magic Seasoning (see Food Sources, this page)\n\nSAUCE\n\n2 Tbsp. butter, softened\n\n\u00bd cup diced sweet bell pepper\u2014red, yellow, green, or some of each\n\n\u00bd tsp. chopped fresh jalape\u00f1o pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp. chopped garlic\n\n\u00bd cup rich chicken stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n\u00bd tsp. honey\n\n\u00bc tsp. lemon juice\n\n1. Combine all of the marinade ingredients except the oil in a mixing bowl. While whisking, add the oil in a thin stream until fully incorporated. Place the chicken pieces and marinade in food-storage bags and marinate in the refrigerator for 6\u20138 hours.\n\n2. Remove the chicken from the marinade, shaking off the excess. Lightly brush the chicken with some of the clarified butter and season lightly with the Magic Seasoning. Place the chicken on a very hot grill or in a cast-iron skillet and cook for 3\u20135 minutes on each side, until done. Cook the legs and thighs, skin side down, first. If using an outdoor barbecue grill, you might want to baste the chicken with the leftover marinade.\n\n3. To make the sauce: Melt 1 tablespoon of the butter in a heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Add the bell pepper, jalape\u00f1o, and garlic. Cook for about a minute, stirring constantly. Add the stock and bring to a boil. Add the honey, lemon juice, and remaining tablespoon of butter and cook, stirring, until the butter is melted and fully incorporated. Spoon over the grilled chicken and serve immediately. SERVES FOUR.\n\nCornish Hens with Peppercorn Red Wine Sauce\n\n_I found this recipe in a folder deep in my file cabinet. It was written in my hand on radio station stationery and dated 1988. I remembered it only vaguely. So I cooked it and liked it enough to know that it's not an original recipe of mine, but I wish I had thought of it._\n\n_It's very French in style and turns the chickenlike Cornish hen (which I rather like anyway) into something wonderful. It's worth trying to find the demi-glace this recipe calls for. You can now buy demi-glace in gourmet food stores and gourmet-to-go places. And if you have a good relationship with a fine restaurant, you may be able to buy it there, too._\n\n2 Tbsp. butter\n\n\u00bd small yellow onion, cut in half and pulled apart\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried marjoram\n\n2 Cornish hens\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n12 oz. duck p\u00e2t\u00e9 de campagne\n\n6 thick slices smoky bacon\n\n1 tsp. chopped shallots\n\n1 tsp. chopped garlic\n\n\u00bd cup brandy\n\n2 Tbsp. green peppercorns (the marinated kind, not dried)\n\n1 cup Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot\n\n\u00bd cup demi-glace\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Melt the butter in a large, ovenproof skillet over medium-low heat. Add the onion pieces and marjoram, and saut\u00e9 until the onions become soft. Turn off the heat and with a slotted spoon, remove the onions and allow to cool.\n\n2. Season the hens with salt and pepper. When the onions are cool enough to handle, line the inside of the Cornish hens' cavities with them. Divide the p\u00e2t\u00e9 in half and stuff the hens' cavities with it. Tie the legs closed with kitchen twine. Wrap each hen with 3 slices of the bacon, holding them in place with toothpicks.\n\n3. Return the skillet to medium heat. Place the hens in the skillet and sear them until the bacon starts to crisp. Put the skillet into the preheated oven and roast the hens for 35 minutes.\n\n4. Remove the pan from the oven and the Cornish hens from the pan. Leave the oven on. Pour off excess fat from the pan, but don't wipe. Place the shallots and garlic in the skillet and saut\u00e9 over medium heat for about a minute. Add the brandy and peppercorns. (Be careful\u2014the brandy might flame briefly.) Bring the brandy to a boil for about 30 seconds, then add the wine and demi-glace. Bring to a light boil and reduce until the sauce thickens enough to coat a spoon, 5\u20136 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper.\n\n5. Remove toothpicks and strings from the hens. Cut each hen in half from front to back and place each half on a plate. Pour the sauce around the hens and put the plates into the oven for 2\u20133 minutes to warm everything back up. Serve with wild rice. SERVES FOUR.\n\nGame Birds Paradis\n\n_This is not named for the little town down on US 90, but for Paradise, to which the sauce is alleged to raise you. That's what they told me at Antoine's, where this was the treatment for squab when I first began dining there in the early 1970s. Squab was out of vogue then, though, and the sauce soon moved to chicken. Now that squab is available and liked by lots of people, it would be nice for the old dish to return._\n\n_I like the sauce with almost any bird. I suggest Cornish game hens, or pheasant if you can get it. The recipe calls for pepper jelly, but taste it first: It shouldn't be lip-blistering hot. If very hot is all you have, substitute something like apple jelly._\n\nGAME BIRDS\n\n4 Cornish game hens\n\n1 whole apple, cut into eighths\n\n1 whole orange, cut into eighths\n\nCreole seasoning\n\nSalt\n\nSAUCE\n\n4 Tbsp. butter\n\n\u00bc cup finely chopped sweet onion\n\n\u00bc cup flour\n\n1 cup tawny port\n\n2 cups strong duck, turkey, or chicken stock\n\n1 Tbsp. pepper jelly (not too spicy!)\n\nAbout 20 red seedless grapes, cut in half\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\nFreshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.\n\n2. Stuff the cavities of the Cornish hens with the apple and orange sections. Season with Creole seasoning and salt. Place on a roasting pan, breast side down, and put in the oven. Immediately lower the oven temperature to 350 degrees F. Roast for 45 minutes, then turn up the heat to 425 degrees F for a final 5 minutes. The internal temperature should be about 175 degrees F on a meat thermometer inserted in the thigh.\n\n3. While the birds are in the oven, make the sauce. In a saucepan over medium-low heat, melt 1 Tbsp. butter and cook the onion until light brown.\n\n4. Add the remaining butter and flour, and whisk to make a blond roux.\n\n5. Whisk in the tawny port. Bring to a boil and hold it there, whisking often, until the liquid is reduced by half.\n\n6. Add the stock and bring to a boil. Dissolve the pepper jelly into the sauce, then strain.\n\n7. Return the sauce to a very light simmer, and add the grapes. Check seasonings and add salt and pepper as needed.\n\n8. Place a whole roasted Cornish hen on each dinner plate, and serve the sauce around it. SERVES FOUR.\n\nCajun Smothered Duck\n\n_This old-fashioned Cajun way of preparing wild fowl\u2014another of my mother's recipes, although she would never call it (or herself) Cajun\u2014is so full of flavor as to be almost rich, but the spice level is moderate. It's great with Dirty Rice (see recipe,this page) and yams._\n\n2 farm-raised ducklings or 4 wild ducks, cleaned\n\n2 Tbsp. salt-free Creole seasoning, plus more to taste\n\n1 cup flour\n\n\u00bd cup vegetable oil\n\n2 yellow onions, chopped\n\n2 large green bell peppers, chopped\n\n1 celery rib, chopped\n\n1 cup water or chicken stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n1 cup chopped green onion\n\n\u00bd cup chopped flat-leaf parsley\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F. Wash the ducks and pat dry. Season inside and out with the Creole seasoning, then dust the outside lightly with the flour.\n\n2. Heat the oil in a roasting pan or large, heavy pot over medium-high heat. Brown the ducks in the oil, turning frequently, until the skin begins to crisp on all sides. Remove and keep warm. Pour off all but about 1 tablespoon of the oil from the pan. Add the yellow onions, bell peppers, and celery, and cook over medium-low heat until soft, about 2 minutes.\n\n3. Return the ducks to the roasting pan. Add the water or chicken stock and bay leaf. Cover the pan, place it in the preheated oven, and bake for about 2 hours. Every half-hour turn the ducks over. Add a little water if the pan juices begin to dry out. The ducks are cooked when the meat begins to fall from the leg bones.\n\n4. Remove the ducks from the pan and keep warm. Let the pan contents stand for a few minutes; the fat will rise to the top. Skim and discard the fat. Bring the remaining pan contents to a very light simmer and reduce until it thickens to a gravy consistency. Add the green onion, parsley, and more Creole seasoning or salt and pepper to taste.\n\n5. With a large knife, cut the ducks in half from end to end. Remove and discard the backbone and rib cage and serve the rest with the sauce. SERVES FOUR TO SIX.\n\nDuck Confit\n\n_There's really only one challenge in making duck confit: getting enough duck fat. Restaurants have no problem with this. They break down the ducks for duck breast dishes, which gives them lots of skin and fat for making a confit of the legs. So, in other words, if you're going to try this, be prepared to eat other duck dishes. One other piece of bad news: You need to start this recipe days ahead. Good news: It can be a week or two ahead._\n\n2 whole ducks\n\nSalt\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 250 degrees F. Thaw the ducks if necessary. Cut them into quarters. Reserve the breasts for another dish, but remove all of the skin except the part right over the breast and on the leg quarters.\n\n2. Render the fat from all of the duck skin in a skillet over medium-low heat. Coat the leg quarters generously with salt and transfer to the rendered fat in the skillet. Place the skillet in the oven and roast slowly for 2 hours, or until the meat begins to fall away from the bones.\n\n3. After 2 hours, transfer the duck legs to a deep dish and pour the fat over it. You may need additional fat to completely cover the duck legs. Cover the dish and refrigerate for at least 3 days. It will hold for days or even weeks in the refrigerator.\n\n4. When ready to serve, preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Arrange the duck legs on a broiling pan and top them with all the fat you can. Bake until the skin sizzles audibly. Serve immediately, with a small salad of something sharp (like arugula with raspberry vinaigrette). SERVES FOUR.\n\nPat Gallagher's Smothered Quail\n\n_I'm not nuts about quail. As cute as the little birds are, I find their flavor not sufficiently interesting to justify the amount of work involved in eating them. So it's saying something when I tell you that I would never turn away from any quail dish prepared by Pat Gallagher. Gallagher had a number of restaurants over the years on the North Shore, and quail was always a great specialty. None were pretentious dishes. Just fresh, prepared simply and very, very well. Now that quails are relatively easy to buy fresh, consider trying this one night._\n\n_It's better to buy the quails with the bones in\u2014the quality is better than boned quail. The only bones you need to remove for cooking are the backbone and rib cages. Use kitchen shears to cut down the backbone. Spread the quail open and pull out the backbone and the ribs. This takes a little patience, but you'll get the hang of it quickly._\n\n_An excellent accompaniment for this dish is Dirty Rice (see recipe,this page). Not-so-dirty rice would work, too._\n\n8 quails, partially deboned and split\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper or Creole seasoning to taste\n\n2 sticks (16 Tbsp.) butter\n\n1 medium yellow onion, sliced\n\n4 cloves garlic, chopped\n\n8 large mushrooms, sliced\n\n\u00bc cup brandy\n\n2 cups chicken stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n\u00bd cup dry red wine\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried thyme\n\n1. Season the quails front and back with salt and pepper or Creole seasoning.\n\n2. Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat and bring it to bubbling. Add the quails and saut\u00e9 for about 2 minutes. Add the onion, garlic, and mushrooms, and cook until the onion turns translucent. Carefully pour on the brandy and touch a flame to it. (Skip this if you have even a shred of doubt about safety, and just let the brandy simmer for a few minutes to let the alcohol cook off.)\n\n3. When the flames die out, add the stock, wine, and thyme, and bring to a boil. Cover the pan and cook over medium-low heat until the quails are tender, 7\u201310 minutes.\n\n4. Serve 2 quails per person with plenty of the sauce. SERVES FOUR.\n\n_Outdoor Grill_\n\nDrago's Char-Broiled Oysters\n\nFish on the Half Shell\n\nGrilled Lemonfish\n\nCold-Smoked Pompano or Amberjack\n\nCane-Smoked Turkey\n\nSmoked Duck Breast with Jalape\u00f1o Glaze\n\nPulled Barbecued Pork Shoulder\n\nBarbecue Brisket\n\nA\n\nThere is no outdoor-grilling season in New Orleans. Outdoor grilling goes on all year round. My charcoal grill is as likely to be fired up on Mardi Gras as on the Fourth of July. I can assure you it will contain a fire on Thanksgiving, along with a couple of turkeys.\n\nOutdoor grills, especially those fired with wood or charcoal, offer a pair of advantages beyond the special flavors they give. The first is that you can achieve much higher temperatures than you can indoors, making possible styles of cooking that would be impossible or quite dangerous in the home kitchen. Second, you can use techniques that create a great deal of smoke without polluting the air in your living space.\n\nIn addition to the grillwork you find in this chapter, two other outdoor-cooking routines are popular in South Louisiana. You'll find the recipe for one of them\u2014boiled crawfish\u2014in the Casual Food section. The other is fried turkey, the omission of which was entirely intentional.\n\nDrago's Char-Broiled Oysters\n\n_Drago Cvitanovich has been the oyster king of New Orleans for four decades\u2014and that's saying something. Like most other people in the oyster business, he's a Croatian immigrant. When he opened his restaurant in the 1970s, he kept his ties with his countrymen down the river and, as a result, always had the best oysters available._\n\n_Drago's son Tommy, who now runs the restaurant, created this dish in the early 1990s. It became wildly popular, and restaurants all over town now copy it. The dish is simple enough to prepare. The only tough part is obtaining oysters of Drago's quality and then opening them. Don't attempt this recipe without freshly shucked oysters and an outdoor grill._\n\n_This is the perfect dish for those who want to enjoy oysters in their unadorned form but can't, or won't, eat them raw. Once you start eating these, you won't be able to stop. My personal best is four and a half dozen._\n\n8 sticks (2 lb.) butter, softened\n\n\u00bd cup finely chopped garlic\n\n1 Tbsp. freshly ground black pepper\n\n1 tsp. dried oregano\n\n6 dozen oysters on the half shell\n\n1 cup grated Parmesan and Romano cheeses, mixed\n\n3 Tbsp. chopped flat-leaf parsley\n\n1. Mix the butter, garlic, pepper, and oregano together in a bowl.\n\n2. Heat a gas or charcoal grill and put oysters on the half shell right over the hottest part. Spoon enough of the seasoned butter over the oysters so that some of it will overflow into the fire and flame up a bit.\n\n3. The oysters are ready when they puff up and get curly on the edges. Sprinkle the grated Parmesan-and-Romano mixture and parsley on top. Serve on the shells immediately with hot French bread. SERVES EIGHT TO TWELVE NORMAL PEOPLE, OR TWO SERIOUS OYSTER FANATICS.\n\nFish on the Half Shell\n\n_If you cut big fillets from a redfish or drum and leave the skin and scales on, you can grill it over a hot fire without having to turn it. The skin and scales get black, but the fish stays moist because it's steaming in its own juices. You absolutely must do this outdoors because the smell of the burning scales in the beginning is not the nicest thing you will ever sniff. (Don't worry\u2014it won't affect the flavor of the fish.)_\n\n\u00bc cup dry white wine\n\n\u00bc cup olive oil\n\n1 Tbsp. soy sauce\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n4 large fillets of drum, redfish, or sea bream (sheepshead), skin and scales on\n\n2 Tbsp. finely chopped garlic\n\n2 Tbsp. chopped fresh oregano\n\n4 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, leaves only, chopped\n\nSalt and cracked black pepper to taste\n\n6 Tbsp. butter\n\n1 lemon, cut into wedges\n\n1. Mix the wine, oil, soy sauce, and lemon juice together in a wide bowl big enough to fit the fish. Marinate the fish for about a minute, skin side up.\n\n2. Place the fish, skin side down, on a very hot grill. Mix the garlic, oregano, parsley, salt and pepper into the butter and spread it on top of the fish.\n\n3. Grill the fish without turning, until the very top of the fish is distinctly warm to the touch. It's best when some of the butter falls into the flames and smokes up over the fish. The scales will char.\n\n4. Serve with lemon wedges. Tell your guests to beware of bones as they cut into the fillets. SERVES FOUR.\n\nGrilled Lemonfish\n\n_Lemonfish is a large, much admired Gulf fish that also goes by the names cobia and ling. It is as good a grilling fish as I've ever encountered. During a campout when my son was a Boy Scout, we grilled a 10-pound slab of lemonfish over an open fire. Coated only with Creole seasoning, the fish was unforgettable\u2014tender, flavorful, and moist. For an elegant touch, serve grilled lemonfish with a beurre blanc sauce (see Seared Scallops with Artichokes,this page, but omit the garlic and substitute lemon juice for the vinegar in that recipe's garlic beurre blanc)._\n\n1 large lemonfish fillet, up to about 10 lb.\n\n2 lemons, quartered\n\nSalt-free Creole Seafood Seasoning (see recipe, this page)\n\nSalt\n\n1. Wash the fish fillet and make sure all the bones are out. Rub the fish all over with the cut lemons.\n\n2. Cover the fish with a liberal coating of 2 parts Creole seasoning to 1 part salt. Put on as much as will stick to the fish. Let the fish sit with the seasoning in place while you prepare the grill.\n\n3. Heat a charcoal or wood grill (or gas, if you must) until very hot, with the heat source about 5 inches from the grill surface.\n\n4. Place the fish on the grill and cook for about 4 minutes. Turn and continue to grill, turning every 4 minutes or so. The exterior will get very dark, but it will not burn. The fish is done when you poke a kitchen fork into the center and it comes out warm to the touch of your lips. This will take 20\u201330 minutes, depending on the size of the fish.\n\n5. After removing the fish from the grill, let it sit on the cutting board for about 3 minutes before cutting serving-size portions across the fillet. SERVES TWO TO THREE PEOPLE PER POUND OF FISH.\n\nCold-Smoked Pompano or Amberjack\n\n_All the fish in the jack family (the most familiar around here are pompano and amberjack) have a higher-than-average oil content and so are perfect for smoking. Cold smoking also works well for salmon, mackerel, or tuna. The fish picks up a terrific smoke flavor throughout, without getting a barbecued taste._\n\n_I learned how to make this from chef Roland Huet, the original chef at Christian's, who developed the method for that restaurant's excellent house-smoked salmon. He went through four different smokers before finding that the barrel-shaped kind with the water pan in the center works best. I ignored that discovery and use a standard rectangular barbecue pit. I put the fish on a rack over a pan on one side of the grill. The fire requires a minimum amount of wood on the other side, with a pan of water over it. At best, the fish never gets warm to the touch. The technique works best in the winter._\n\n3 large pompano or 2 small (2-lb.) amberjacks\n\n1 lb. salt\n\n\u2153 cup brown sugar\n\n1 tsp. dried basil\n\n\u00bd tsp. freshly ground black pepper\n\nExtra-virgin olive oil\n\nFresh dill\n\nCracked black peppercorns\n\n1. Fillet and skin the fish. If using amberjack, remove the big blood line that runs through the center.\n\n2. Dissolve all the other ingredients in 1 gallon (16 cups) of cold water. Marinate the fish in the brine for 12 hours, refrigerated.\n\n3. Using a fruit wood (cherry, apple, or grapevine), cold-smoke the fish at 75\u201390 degrees F for 2 hours.\n\n4. Slice the fish at a very narrow bias into slices as thick as a coin. Serve dressed with extra-virgin olive oil, dill, and cracked black peppercorns. SERVES TWELVE AS AN APPETIZER.\n\nCane-Smoked Turkey\n\n_I cook my turkey in a big barbecue pit. It gets hotter than a smoker, but because I keep the turkey away from direct heat, it cooks slowly and absorbs a lot of smoky flavor. The skin comes out crisp, with a beautiful orange-bronze color, and the meat retains more moisture than it would if cooked any other way. The sugarcane that I use with the charcoal comes from a friend's plantation. It's worth the trip upriver to St. James Parish to get it. If you can't get sugarcane, standard smoking woods like pecan, oak, hickory, or mesquite will do the job._\n\nOne 12\u201315-lb. turkey\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper\n\n2 ribs celery, chopped\n\n1 yellow onion, chopped\n\n1 orange, cut into eighths\n\n1 lemon, cut into quarters\n\n1 shake of dried tarragon\n\n1 stem of fresh rosemary\n\n1. Thaw the turkey if frozen. This takes at least 4 days and should be done in the refrigerator. Put the turkey into the pan you'll roast it in to catch any leaks. After it thaws, remove the metal or plastic tie holding the legs together. (A pair of pliers is essential, I find.) Remove the giblets and neck from the cavity and clip off the wing tips. (You can use these parts for making stock for the gravy.)\n\n2. The day before, marinate the turkey in a brine. The standard proportion is 1 cup of salt to 1 gallon (16 cups) of water. Make enough of this to completely cover the turkey in an ice chest with an unopened (so as not to dilute the brine) bag of ice to keep everything cold. The brining process takes 12\u201318 hours for a 15-pound turkey. Another method is to put the turkey and the brine solution inside a leak-proof plastic bag and put it into the refrigerator.\n\n3. The morning of the day you want to serve the turkey, dump the brine and rinse the bird very well inside and out with cold water. Season it with salt (yes!) and pepper. Stuff the cavity with all the other ingredients and tie the legs just tightly enough to keep everything inside.\n\n4. Fire up the grill with charcoal. Add pieces of smoking wood, soaked in water and then shaken dry. Stack 6 or so foot-long pieces of sugarcane on the grill directly over the fire. Put the turkey into an aluminum pan with a loose tent of foil over the top. Place the turkey as far from the fire as possible and hang a curtain of foil down to ward off direct heat. Any heat that gets to the turkey should arrive in smoke.\n\n5. Close the cover. Add coals and cane at intervals to maintain a temperature of 200\u2013250 degrees F inside the pit. It takes 6\u20137 hours for the internal temperature of the turkey to reach about 180 degrees F. Use a meat thermometer to check; the useless pop-up plastic indicator will pop only when the turkey is overcooked.\n\n6. Take the turkey out and put it on the table to rest and cool before carving. Although it may be tempting, don't use the drippings for the gravy. They reduce so much during the long cooking time that they become impossibly salty. SERVES EIGHT TO TWELVE.\n\nSmoked Duck Breast with Jalape\u00f1o Glaze\n\n_Although you can use an outdoor smoker, the first time I prepared this recipe I used a stovetop smoker\u2014essentially a big pan with a rack inside and a cover. You put very fine wood chips (almost sawdust) in the bottom of the pan, put the duck (or whatever) on the rack, cover, and place the whole shooting match atop a burner. Amazingly, it does the job in just about 10 minutes. (This is essentially the technique Chinese cooks use to smoke duck in tea leaves.)_\n\n_This makes a good appetizer for meals with seafood as the main course._\n\n1 cup salt\n\n1 cup sugar\n\n4 duck breasts, skin on\n\n2 Tbsp. orange marmalade\n\n\u00bd cup highly reduced chicken or duck stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n1 Tbsp. Tabasco Green Pepper Sauce\n\n\u00bc cup Cointreau, Grand Marnier, or triple sec liqueur\n\n\u00bd cup orange juice, strained\n\n\u215b tsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\nFreshly ground black pepper, plus more to taste\n\n1. Dissolve the salt and sugar in 1 gallon (16 cups) of water in a large bowl. Add the duck and brine it in the refrigerator for 4\u20138 hours.\n\n2. Using an outdoor cold smoker at about 80 degrees F, smoke the duck breasts for 30\u201345 minutes. Or use a stovetop smoker as outlined in the headnote. In either case, fruitwoods (apple, cherry, or peach) are recommended.\n\n3. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Meanwhile, combine all of the remaining ingredients except the duck breast in a small saucepan over medium-low heat. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer until the sauce is thick enough to coat an upside-down spoon for a second or two.\n\n4. Brush the duck breast lightly with the sauce. Season with a little salt and pepper. Roast in the oven for 15\u201320 minutes until just a blush of pink remains at the center.\n\n5. Spoon some of the sauce on the plate. When the duck breast is ready, carve it on the bias into \u00bc-inch-thick slices. Fan out the slices on the sauce. SERVES FOUR AS AN APPETIZER.\n\nPulled Barbecued Pork Shoulder\n\n_The cut you want for this is pork shoulder\u2014also known as Boston butt\u2014preferably bone-in. Pork shoulder tastes terrible if you try to cook it quickly but responds with a wonderful texture and flavor if it's smoked slowly. The expression \"pulled\" means that the meat is not sliced but torn from the bone. In the case of pork shoulder, it comes off in lovely long morsels, perfect for sandwiches, but not at all bad for a platter either. Tongs are the usual tool for pulling the meat from the bone, but you can sometimes do it with a fork. On the other hand, even in Memphis\u2014where this is the primary barbecue meat\u2014there are lots of famous places that chop it._\n\n1 whole pork shoulder\n\nMARINADE\n\n2 cloves garlic, pureed\n\n\u00bc cup Worcestershire sauce\n\n2 Tbsp. honey\n\n\u00bd tsp. Tabasco Chipotle Pepper Sauce\n\n\u2153 cup Barbecue Dry Rub, brown sugar version (see recipe, this page)\n\n2 cups Cool Water Ranch Barbecue Sauce (see recipe, this page) or bottled barbecue sauce\n\n1. A few hours before you start cooking (or the night before), cut the skin (if any) off the pork shoulder. Don't trim any more fat than what comes off with the skin. Combine the marinade ingredients. Brush the outside of the pork with the marinade.\n\n2. Start a charcoal fire in your pit, with all the charcoal on one side of the grate. If you're using wood chips (which you'll have to if using gas), wrap them in heavy aluminum foil and punch a few holes in the resulting packet. (There's no need to soak the chips.)\n\n3. Brush the shoulder with the marinade once more, then cover with a thick coating of dry rub. If using a grill, place the pork as far away from the fire as you can and drape a sheet of aluminum foil down to prevent direct heat from hitting the meat. Top the fire with the smoking wood and close the cover.\n\n4. Maintain a temperature of about 175\u2013200 degrees F, adding fuel and wood as needed. After 4 hours, check the internal temperature by inserting a meat thermometer (without touching bone). You eventually want to see a reading of 170 degrees F, but it probably won't be there yet. This is good: The longer the meat is in there, the better. Smoking time is usually about 8 hours, but it can go even longer than that.\n\n5. When the pork reaches the desired temperature, allow it to cool for about 15 minutes, then pull the meat from the bone with tongs. Or cut away and chop. Serve with barbecue sauce on the side. SERVES FOUR TO EIGHT.\n\nBarbecue Brisket\n\n_The meat most closely identified with the Texas style of barbecue is brisket, which is more commonly found around New Orleans in its boiled form. Brisket needs to be cooked very slowly for its goodness to emerge, and that's why it's such a natural for barbecue._\n\n_I've always done my briskets on a large barbecue pit instead of a smoker. I got this idea from my Texas-born buddy Oliver Kluna. Astonishingly, he uses no wood: just charcoal smoke. I usually add oak wood picked up in the woods around my home, the Cool Water Ranch._\n\nOne 4\u20138-lb. beef brisket, preferably flat end\n\nSalt-free Creole seasoning\n\nSalt\n\n1. Start a natural-wood charcoal fire in your pit, with all the charcoal on one side of the grate. If you're using wood chips (which you'll have to if using gas), wrap them in heavy aluminum foil and punch a few holes in the resulting packet. (No need to soak them.)\n\n2. Trim off the brisket's really thick slabs of fat, but don't be too aggressive\u2014you should never cut into the lean. Don't worry about the fat in the middle, if any.\n\n3. Mix 2 parts Creole seasoning with 1 part salt. (For a big brisket, mix \u00bc cup seasoning with 2 tablespoons salt.) Coat the brisket liberally with the seasoning.\n\n4. Place the meat on the grill, fatty side up, with the thicker end facing the fire, as far away from the heat source as possible. To keep direct heat from the fire from hitting the meat, hang a curtain of aluminum foil between the two. Close the lid and maintain a temperature of 225\u2013250 degrees F inside, adding coals and wood now and then. There is no need to turn the brisket, but you might move it around on the grill so the bottom is more evenly smoked.\n\n5. The brisket is done when the internal temperature, measured with a meat thermometer, hits 165 degrees F. This takes 3\u20135 hours, depending on the size of the brisket and the heat in your grill. Let the brisket rest for about 20 minutes. Remove any remaining fat before slicing. Slice against the grain for easy, tender eating. Note that the direction of the grain changes as you cut; change with it. Serve with warm barbecue sauce and cole slaw. SERVES TWO PEOPLE PER POUND.\n\n_Red Beans, Rice, Vegetables, and Pasta_\n\nRed Beans and Rice\n\nField Peas\n\nPeas in a Roux\n\nBaked Black-eyed Peas\n\nDirty Rice\n\nLyonnaise Potatoes\n\nGratin Dauphinois\n\nMashed Potatoes\n\nMary Ann's Hash Brown Potatoes\n\nBrabant Potatoes\n\nFrench Fries Souffl\u00e9es\n\nCreole Eggplant Gratin Delmonico\n\nSavory Bread Pudding with Mushrooms\n\nBroiled Asparagus Parmigiano\n\nSpinach \u00e0 la Wohl\n\nGratin of Pumpkin\n\nStuffed Onions Florentine\n\nStuffed Artichokes\n\nPasta Bordelaise\n\nOyster and Pecan Stuffing\n\nHush Puppies\n\nZea's Roasted Corn Grits\n\nCorn Macquechoux\n\nRagout of Mushrooms with Grits\n\nA\n\nIt's lucky that we have the tradition of eating red beans every Monday in New Orleans. Loaded with soluble fiber, red beans are thought to counter the effects of the fats we have a habit of overusing in our local diet. (The sausage that traditionally comes with the beans, for example.) Beans of all colors are a big deal in New Orleans, especially at lunch, and they are the center of the meal, not just a side dish.\n\nRice is important, too. New Orleanians eat more rice than any other Americans except those of Asian descent. Most of us prefer it to potatoes. Even dishes like beef stew are served over rice here, and every family has two or three unique side dishes made with rice.\n\nWhen I began writing about restaurants, side dishes were the weakest part of menus everywhere in New Orleans. Even in the best restaurants, vegetables were an afterthought. That changed in the 1980s. A generation of young chefs demanded and got better-quality vegetables from the markets. Still, a love for the old long-cooked dishes lives on. Here's a bit of all of that, both old and new.\n\nRed Beans and Rice\n\n_Red beans and rice is the official Monday dish in New Orleans, on special menus in all kinds of restaurants all over town. Although most people agree on the recipe, the trend in recent years\u2014especially in restaurants\u2014has been to make the sauce matrix much thicker than what I remember from my youth. This version is the old (and, I think, better) style, with a looser sauce. The way my mother made it for us every Monday throughout my childhood._\n\n_I have, however, added two wrinkles. One came from a radio listener, who advised that beans improve greatly when you add much more celery than the standard recipe calls for. The other is adding the herb summer savory. Both provide pleasant flavor complements._\n\n_Red beans are classically served with smoked sausage, but they're also great with Fried Chicken (see recipe,this page), Oysters en Brochette (see recipe, this page), or grilled ham. But the ultimate is chaurice\u2014Creole hot sausage\u2014grilled to order and placed, along with all the dripping fat, atop the beans._\n\n1 lb. dried red beans\n\n\u00bd lb. bacon or fat from a fresh or smoked ham, salt pork, or pork belly\n\n4 cloves garlic, minced\n\n3 ribs celery, chopped\n\n1 green bell pepper, chopped\n\n1 small yellow onion, chopped\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n1 tsp. dried summer savory\n\n\u00bd tsp. freshly ground black pepper\n\n1 tsp. Tabasco, plus more to taste\n\nSalt\n\n6 cups cooked long-grain rice\n\n1 Tbsp. chopped green onion tops, for garnish\n\n2 Tbsp. chopped flat-leaf parsley, for garnish\n\n1. Sort through the beans and pick out any bad or misshapen ones. Soak the beans in cold water overnight. When ready to cook, pour off the soaking water.\n\n2. Fry the bacon or ham fat in a large, heavy pot or Dutch oven until crisp. Remove the bacon or ham fat and set aside for garnish (or a snack while you cook).\n\n3. In the hot fat, saut\u00e9 the garlic, celery, bell pepper, and onion until the vegetables just begin to brown. Add the beans and 1 gallon (16 cups) of water. Bring to a light boil, then lower to a simmer. Add the bay leaf, savory, black pepper, and Tabasco.\n\n4. Simmer the beans for about 2 hours, stirring occasionally. After about 1\u00bd hours, fish out about \u00bd cup of beans and mash them. Return the mashed beans to the pot. Smash more of them if you like your beans extra creamy. Add a little water if the sauce gets too thick. Add salt and more Tabasco to taste. Serve the beans over rice cooked firm. Garnish with chopped green onion and parsley. SERVES SIX TO EIGHT.\n\nTHE ULTIMATE: Fry skinless hot sausage and deposit it, along with as much of the fat as you can permit yourself, atop the beans. Red beans seem to have a limitless tolerance for added fat.\n\nHEALTHY ALTERNATIVE: Leave the pork and ham out of the recipe completely and begin by saut\u00e9ing all of the vegetables other than the beans in \u00bc cup olive oil. At the table, pour extra-virgin olive oil over the beans. This may sound and look a bit odd, but the taste is terrific and everything on the plate\u2014beans, rice, and olive oil\u2014is a proven cholesterol-lowerer.\n\nField Peas\n\n_When the wonderful old West Bank caf\u00e9 Berdou's was still around, one of its lunch specials was field peas and rice. Mr. Berdou told me he didn't sell many orders of it. \"But I like them, so we cook them almost every week,\" he said. I'd never given field peas a second thought before, but they were so good that I added them to my regular bean rotation at home._\n\n_Field peas are a lot like crowder peas but smaller. They're a light brown, bigger than lentils, but shaped like red beans. They have a unique savory flavor that I find makes a great side dish. This version steers away from the bacon-fat, salt-pork kind of thing we do for red beans. If anything, it's inspired by the way they cook beans in Italy. So I suggest serving them with orzo pasta instead of rice._\n\n\u2153 cup extra-virgin olive oil\n\n1 medium yellow onion, chopped\n\n1 medium bulb fennel, chopped\n\n1 lb. field peas, sorted, rinsed, and soaked for a few hours or overnight\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n1 tsp. dried summer savory\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried thyme\n\nPinch of nutmeg\n\n4\u00bd tsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\n1 Tbsp. Louisana-style hot sauce, such as Crystal\n\n8 oz. orzo pasta, cooked and drained\n\n6 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, leaves only, chopped, for garnish\n\n1. Heat the olive oil in a large pot over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Add the onion and fennel, and cook until soft.\n\n2. Drain the field peas and add them to the pot. Add 6 cups of fresh cold water, the bay leaf, savory, thyme, nutmeg, salt, and hot sauce. Bring to a boil, then lower to a simmer. Cover and cook for 1 hour. Check after an hour to see that the peas have not absorbed all the water. If they have, add more. The peas should still have a soupy texture.\n\n3. Continue to cook until the peas are completely soft but not falling apart, another 30\u201345 minutes. Remove the bay leaf. Taste for seasoning and adjust. There should still be enough liquid that the beans have a stewlike texture.\n\n4. Add the orzo to the pot and gently stir into the beans. Serve garnished with chopped parsley. SERVES ABOUT SIX.\n\nPeas in a Roux\n\n_This is an old, nearly extinct local dish that intrigues me, especially after Arnaud's revived it for a while. After failing a couple of times to get it right, I came up with this, which I now serve at Thanksgiving in place of plain old peas._\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter\n\n\u00bd cup flour\n\n\u00bd cup sliced mushrooms\n\n1 green onion, sliced\n\n1\u00bd cups chicken stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n\u00bd tsp. Tabasco Garlic Pepper Sauce\n\n3 cups large peas, frozen\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n1. Make a blond roux by melting the butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture just barely begins to brown. Lower the heat to almost nothing. Add the mushrooms and green onion, and stir lightly to blend into the roux. The heat of the roux will cook the mushrooms and onion, and the vegetables will bring down the heat of the roux so it won't brown any further.\n\n2. Add the stock, Worcestershire sauce, and Tabasco, and whisk to blend into a smooth sauce. Add the peas and raise the heat a little. Cook until the peas are heated through, stirring while they're still frozen to blend them into the sauce. The sauce should have the texture of gumbo. If it's too thick, add a little more stock or water. Season to taste with salt and pepper. SERVES EIGHT TO TWELVE.\n\nBaked Black-eyed Peas\n\n_Black-eyed peas have a much more assertive taste than most beans. For this reason, I really think that you have to cook them differently from the way you cook red beans. This method heads off in the direction of barbecue beans, without the sauce. It helps to boil the beans the night before, then bake them all morning long. This is actually my wife's recipe, and we serve it at most of our casual barbecues._\n\n1 lb. dried black-eyed peas\n\n\u00bc lb. lean bacon, cut into squares\n\n\u00bd cup chopped yellow onion\n\n\u2154 cup Steen's cane syrup\n\n\u00bd cup dark brown sugar\n\n2 Tbsp. Pickapeppa or Tabasco New Orleans Steak Sauce\n\n2 Tbsp. Creole mustard\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried summer savory\n\n1. Sort through the beans to remove bad ones and dirt, then rinse well. Put them into a pot with 3 quarts of water and bring to a light boil. Boil for 1 hour.\n\n2. Preheat the oven to 275 degrees F. Bring 4 cups of water to a boil. Meanwhile, drain the parboiled beans well and transfer to a baking dish. Add all of the remaining ingredients and mix well.\n\n3. Top the beans with just enough boiling water to just barely cover them. Bake for 5 hours. Check it every hour, stirring the pot and adding a little more water if the beans seem to be getting dry. MAKES EIGHT TO TWELVE SIDE PORTIONS.\n\nDirty Rice\n\n_Dirty rice is jambalaya's less complex brother, yet in its way, it's every bit as delicious. Unlike jambalaya, which can be served as a main course, dirty rice is a side dish. It's also a way to use all the stuff you pull out of the cavity of a whole chicken. While you can use the heart, I usually leave it out because it's tough, even chopped up. If the liver component of the giblets is about 50 percent, that's perfect._\n\n\u00bd lb. chicken giblets (heart removed)\n\n1 large yellow onion, quartered\n\n1 green bell pepper, stemmed and seeded\n\n1 rib celery, halved\n\n\u00bd lb. ground pork (or better yet, substitute \u2153 of this with pork liver)\n\n2 Tbsp. butter\n\n2 tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n2 tsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\n1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n\u00bd tsp. crushed red pepper\n\n\u00bd tsp. marjoram\n\n2\u00bd cups chicken stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n1\u00bd cups Uncle Ben's or other parboiled rice\n\nFreshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F. Working in 2\u20133 batches, finely chop the giblets, onion, bell pepper, and celery in a food processor. Set aside. Saut\u00e9 the ground pork in a skillet until all the pink is gone. Drain the excess fat and set aside.\n\n2. Melt the butter in a large, heavy saucepan. Add the giblet-vegetable mixture and saut\u00e9 until the onion is clear. Add the Creole seasoning, the 2 teaspoons of salt, Worcestershire sauce, crushed red pepper, and marjoram, and stir to combine. Cover the pot, lower the heat, and let simmer while you prepare the rice.\n\n3. Put the stock, rice, and salt to taste into another saucepan. Bring the stock to a boil, lower to a simmer, cover, and cook 25 minutes, or until all the liquid has been absorbed.\n\n4. When the rice is cooked, fluff it with a kitchen fork and add it to the pan with the chicken-vegetable mixture. Add the ground pork and stir to distribute all the ingredients. Season to taste with salt and pepper.\n\n5. Place the rice loosely in a casserole dish and bake for 5 minutes, or longer if the rice is very damp. It should be a little dry but not hard. MAKES EIGHT SIDE PORTIONS.\n\nLyonnaise Potatoes\n\n_The classic potato side dish in New Orleans\u2013style steak houses, this is a simple combination of potatoes and onions._\n\n3 lb. white potatoes, peeled\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter\n\n1 large yellow onion, coarsely chopped\n\n1 green onion, finely chopped Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n1. Boil the potatoes for about 10 minutes, or until a kitchen fork jabbed into the biggest potato slips out when you lift the potato out of the water. Rinse the potatoes in cool water to stop further cooking. Slice the potatoes first from end to end, then into half-disks about \u00bd inch thick.\n\n2. Melt 4 tablespoons of the butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat until it bubbles. Add the yellow onion and saut\u00e9 until it just begins to brown at the edges. Add the potatoes, green onion, and the remaining 4 tablespoons of butter to the pan and cook, without stirring, until the potatoes have browned on the bottom. Turn the potatoes over and brown the other side. Season to taste with salt and pepper. SERVES SIX.\n\nGratin Dauphinois\n\n_This is potatoes au gratin with class. I am no fan of the melted-Cheddar-topped potato gratins that steak houses serve, popular though they may be. This French classic gets all the same things accomplished with much better flavor._\n\n4 large white potatoes (about 3 lb.), peeled and sliced \u00bc inch thick\n\n3 cloves garlic, crushed\n\nSalt and ground white pepper\n\n8 oz. Gruy\u00e8re cheese, shredded\n\n1\u00be cups grated Parmesan cheese\n\n2 cups heavy whipping cream\n\n2 egg yolks, beaten\n\n\u00bd cup bread crumbs\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Bring a pot of water to a boil. Add the potatoes and cook for 5 minutes. Drain and cool.\n\n2. Rub the inside of a 12 x 8-inch glass baking dish with the garlic. Discard what's left of the garlic. Layer the potato slices all the way across the bottom of the dish, seasoning each layer with salt and pepper and a sprinkling of Gruy\u00e8re and Parmesan. (Reserve \u00bc cup of the Parmesan for the topping.)\n\n3. Whisk the cream and egg yolks together and pour over the potatoes. It should come up about two-thirds of the way to the top. Cover with aluminum foil and bake in the oven for an hour.\n\n4. Remove the foil. Combine the bread crumbs and the reserved \u00bc cup of Parmesan cheese, and sprinkle in a thin layer over the top of the potatoes. Return, uncovered, to the oven and continue baking until the crust browns. (If you have a convection oven, set it to convect.)\n\n5. Remove from the oven and allow to rest and cool for at least 15 minutes before serving. MAKES ABOUT TWELVE SIDE PORTIONS.\n\nMashed Potatoes\n\n_My daughter, Mary Leigh, loves my mashed potatoes and won't allow my wife to make them. I'm pleased to have such a hold on her affection. I, too, like creamy, lumpy, buttery, peppery mashed potatoes, without the other flavorings that have become the vogue in recent times._\n\n_The variety of potato matters. When the red creamers look good, I get those. Yukon Golds are excellent, too. But white russet potatoes with no trace of green in the skin also come out nice. I boil the potatoes with the skins on and peel them later. That does burn the fingers a little, but if you do it in the sink under a thin stream of cold water, it's not too bad and you get a better flavor._\n\n4 lb. potatoes\n\n1\u00bd sticks (12 Tbsp.) butter, cut into pats\n\n1 cup whole milk\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. freshly ground black pepper\n\n1. Boil the potatoes until a kitchen fork jabbed into the biggest one slips out when you lift the potato out of the water. Drain and peel the potatoes as soon as they're barely cool enough to handle. (I usually do this under a little running water.)\n\n2. Put the potatoes in a large non-metallic bowl. (Metal promotes cooling, and you want the potatoes to stay hot.) Add the butter, and using a large, heavy wire whisk or a potato masher, mash the potatoes into pieces about the size of your little finger.\n\n3. Heat the milk in the microwave until steaming. Add it and the salt to the potatoes and continue mashing. They will seem very wet at first, but as you continue to mash, they will become creamy. Add a little more milk, if necessary, to achieve a lighter texture.\n\n4. Add the pepper and mix well. Ignore the small lumps that will inevitably be in there. They lend authenticity. These obviously did not come from a box! SERVES FOUR TO EIGHT.\n\nMary Ann's Hash Brown Potatoes\n\n_My wife, Mary Ann, has a unique style of cooking. She recognizes only two settings on a stove burner: Off and High. Her default cooking gambit is to put the pan of food on a burner on High, leave the room to do something else, and check back when she smells something burning._\n\n_That approach (which I do not recommend) happens to be the perfect technique for cooking hash brown potatoes. Hers are the best hash browns I have tasted, and she wows everybody else with them, too. I can't duplicate them myself, because my instincts will not allow me to do so. But here's how it goes._\n\n_It's best to bake the potatoes a day or more in advance (perhaps while you're baking something else) and refrigerate them. They shred better that way._\n\n5 lb. medium white potatoes\n\n1 stick butter\n\n3 green onions, tender green tops only, finely sliced\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.\n\n2. Bake the potatoes, skins on, in the center of the oven for 40 minutes. This will be a bit less than the time needed for edible baked potatoes. Cool the potatoes, then refrigerate.\n\n3. When you're ready to cook, remove the potatoes from the refrigerator and cut in half, but leave the skins on.\n\n4. In a skillet over the highest heat, melt 2 tablespoons of the butter until it sizzles. Using the big holes on a hand grater, grate the potatoes right into the pan, sprinkling some green onions as you go, until the pan is nearly full. Cook without turning until the bottom appears to be on the verge of burning. Turn (either the whole thing or as much as you can at a time) and cook the same way on the other side.\n\n5. Dump the pan of hash browns into a serving dish and keep it warm in the oven while you repeat the process for the rest of the potatoes. Or you can stop right there if that's enough for the meal involved. The rest of the potatoes can be made into hash browns on another occasion. SERVES EIGHT TO TWELVE.\n\nBrabant Potatoes\n\n_In most restaurants, these are nothing more than cube-shaped french fries. But there is much more to the dish than that. Brabant potatoes can be a surprisingly delicious side dish if you use this two-step preparation._\n\n2 large white potatoes, very starchy (no green)\n\n2\u20133 cups vegetable oil (preferably canola or peanut oil)\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter\n\n1 Tbsp. olive oil\n\n1 clove garlic, minced\n\n1 sprig flat-leaf parsley, minced\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Scrub the outsides of the potatoes under cold running water, or peel if you don't like potato skins. Cut into \u00bd-inch dice, wash again to remove excess starch, and drain well. Allow 5-10 minutes for the potatoes to dry.\n\n2. Meanwhile, in a large saucepan or deep skillet, heat the vegetable oil to 375 degrees F. Put the potatoes in and fry until they are very lightly browned. Remove them from the oil with a skimmer and drain on paper towels. Once drained, arrange the potatoes in a single layer on a baking sheet or dish and set aside.\n\n3. Heat the butter and olive oil in a skillet over medium-low heat. Add the garlic and parsley and cook just until the garlic is fragrant. Spoon some of the garlic-parsley mixture over the potatoes and bake until their edges become crisp and medium-dark brown, 7\u201310 minutes. Serve with a little extra garlic butter if you have any left. SERVES FOUR.\n\nFrench Fries Souffl\u00e9es\n\n_Almost all french fries in restaurants are terrible, made with frozen potatoes and rarely to order. We put up with that because fries made with fresh potatoes at home are such a pain in the neck to prepare. Our kids love them so much, however, that we're constantly finding ourselves going through the ordeal\u2014and then enjoying the results very much._\n\n_Start with large, starchy potatoes (such as russets). Blanch them briefly in boiling water. Then fry them twice. The second frying is not essential, as the people who crowd in grabbing fries after the first frying will prove. But it adds a magical crunch to the fries._\n\n_If you want to go to the outer limits of excellence in french fries, use rendered beef fat to fry them in. But few of us have the heart to do that._\n\n5 lb. starchy potatoes\n\nCanola oil for frying\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil while you're peeling the potatoes (if you want them peeled). After peeling, slice the potatoes as thick as you like in whatever shape you like, but put them into a bowl of cold water while they're waiting for the next step.\n\n2. Boil the sliced potatoes for about a minute. This will not only begin their cooking but will also prevent the sugars from oxidizing and turning the raw potatoes brown. Drain and collect them in a colander.\n\n3. Bring at least 2 quarts (8 cups) of oil to a temperature of 375 degrees F in another large pot. Use a fat thermometer to monitor this. The oil should not fill more than half the pot.\n\n4. It's safest to use a fry basket. Put a handful of the cut, blanched fries into the basket and lower it into the hot oil. Be prepared to lift the basket should the oil foam up to near the top. Fry the potatoes until they're just light brown. Remove and drain. Let the temperature of the oil return to 375 degrees F before lowering the next batch.\n\n5. If you can keep from eating them at this point, let the french fries cool a bit. When ready to serve, heat the oil back up to about 400 degrees F. I warn you that we are in grease-fire territory here\u2014be very careful and have a dry-chemical fire extinguisher handy. Place a handful of the once-fried fries back into the basket and lower it into the hot oil. Fry for about 15 seconds; they will brown very quickly and may even puff up. Drain, season with salt and pepper, and serve immediately. For a distinctly New Orleans way of eating fries (the Belgians also like this), serve with a dish of Spicy Garlic Mayonnaise (see recipe, this page). SERVES EIGHT.\n\nCreole Eggplant Gratin Delmonico\n\n_Here's another extinct restaurant dish. It was the favorite side dish at the old Delmonico, before chef Emeril bought and modernized it. Especially right after it comes out of the oven, it's delicious\u2014even if you don't like eggplant._\n\n_I had this dish for the last time at Delmonico two days before the old regime closed down. It was the night of the Babylon parade, which passed right in front of the restaurant on St. Charles Avenue. We had most of our dinner, went out to watch the parade, and came back in for dessert with Angie Brown and Rose Dietrich, the sisters who owned Delmonico. The combination of that Mardi Gras experience with one of the best meals I ever had there (the old place was good to the last) is forever engraved in my memory._\n\n2 eggplants, peeled and cut into large dice\n\n2 Tbsp. butter\n\n1 medium yellow onion, chopped\n\n2 ribs celery, chopped\n\n1 cup small shrimp (25\u201330 count), peeled\n\n\u00bd lb. claw crabmeat\n\n1 fresh ripe tomato, chopped\n\n\u00bc tsp. Tabasco\n\n\u00bc tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried marjoram\n\n3 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, leaves chopped\n\n\u00bd tsp. lemon juice\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc cup bread crumbs\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil and drop the eggplant in for about 2 minutes. Drain and set aside.\n\n2. Melt the butter in a large skillet. Add the onion, celery, and shrimp, and cook until the shrimp turn pink. Add all of the remaining ingredients except the bread crumbs and cook, stirring very lightly, until everything is heated through.\n\n3. Load the mixture into a baking dish and top with the bread crumbs. Bake until the bread crumbs are toasty, about 15 minutes. SERVES FOUR TO EIGHT.\n\nSavory Bread Pudding with Mushrooms\n\n_In New Orleans, bread pudding is usually a dessert. But not this one. Out come the sweet ingredients, replaced by mushrooms, onions, and cheese. It's my wife Mary Ann's idea, and we often use it as side dish, especially for Thanksgiving. The dish is at its best with meaty, wild-tasting mushrooms: portobellos, criminis, shiitakes, chanterelles, porcinis, etc. The best cheeses are the ones that melt well and have an interesting tang: Gruy\u00e8re, fontina, Swiss, provolone, mozzarella. (If you use the last two, add a little Parmesan, as well.)_\n\n3 cups half-and-half\n\n4 eggs, beaten\n\n1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n\u00bc tsp. Tabasco\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n1 Tbsp. butter\n\n18 inches of a loaf of stale poor boy bread or French bread, cut into \u00bc-inch-thick slices\n\n1\u00bd cups shredded Gruy\u00e8re, fontina, or other easy-melting white cheese\n\n1\u00bd cups sliced meaty mushrooms, such as portobellos, shiitakes, criminis\n\n\u00be cup finely chopped green onion\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F. Whisk the half-and-half, eggs, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, and salt together in a bowl and set aside.\n\n2. Grease a 9 x 5 x 4-inch baking dish or casserole with the butter. Place a layer of bread along the bottom of the dish. Sprinkle a third each of the cheese, mushrooms, and green onion over the bread. Pour about a quarter of the milk-egg mixture over this, enough to soak it well. Push down gently until the bread is soaked. Repeat the layers in the same order as above, topping each tier with a dousing of liquid. Finish with a layer of bread and the last of the liquid.\n\n3. Set the baking dish into a second larger baking pan and pour in enough hot water to come halfway up the side of the baking dish. Bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes. Let it cool for at least 30 minutes before serving. The bread pudding can be sliced, but it's perfectly fine to spoon it right out of the dish at the table. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nBroiled Asparagus Parmigiano\n\n_This is my favorite recipe for asparagus as a side dish. It takes a few minutes longer than just boiling them, but the result is superb._\n\n2 lb. fresh medium asparagus\n\n2 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil\n\n\u00bc tsp. crushed red pepper\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n\u00bd cup finely grated Parmesan cheese\n\n1. Preheat the broiler. Place water in a wide skillet and bring to a rolling boil. Meanwhile, trim the tough bottom inch or so off the asparagus spears. Blanch the asparagus for 2 minutes (or steam them for 90 seconds), then remove. Rinse with cold water until they're no longer hot.\n\n2. Arrange the asparagus on a baking sheet, parallel to one another and almost touching. Pour a ribbon of olive oil back and forth across the asparagus, but not so much that it collects on the baking sheet. Sprinkle lightly with the crushed red pepper and lemon juice. Then top with enough of the Parmesan cheese to form a lacy layer.\n\n3. Put the pan under the broiler, about 4 inches from the heat, cooking until the cheese melts and just begins to brown. Remove from the oven and allow to cool enough for the cheese to set. Then, using a metal spatula, transfer 4\u20136 asparagus spears per portion, still held together by the cheese, to individual plates. SERVES SIX TO EIGHT.\n\nSpinach \u00e0 la Wohl\n\n_In my bachelor days, I was a regular guest at the large Thanksgiving gatherings hosted by my good friends Kit and Billy Wohl. (Kit is the author of_ Arnaud's Cookbook. _) We'd divide the kitchen down the middle: cooks and burners on one side, talkers and wine drinkers on the other. I was usually recruited to wash and chop spinach (on the talker side\u2014we usually had actual chefs in attendance) for an ever evolving creamed spinach recipe that was always part of the dinner, although it never tasted the same twice. Here's a recipe based on a particularly good batch._\n\nFour 10-oz. bags of fresh spinach, picked of stems and washed well\n\n\u00bd cup half-and-half, heavy whipping cream, or milk\n\n\u00bd cup grated Cheddar cheese\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter or margarine, melted\n\nOne 5.2-oz. package Boursin Garlic & Fine Herbs Gournay Cheese\n\nOne 8-oz. package cream cheese\n\n2 Tbsp. grated Parmesan cheese\n\nPinch of nutmeg\n\n\u00bd cup sour cream\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n1. Place the spinach in a large saucepan over low heat with just the water that clings to it after washing and cook until completely wilted. Squeeze out any excess water.\n\n2. Put the spinach in a food processor and process for 10 seconds. Add all of the remaining ingredients, except the sour cream, salt, and pepper, and puree. Add a little more half-and-half (or cream or milk) if a looser texture is desired.\n\n3. Transfer the spinach mixture to a butter-coated saucepan and cook over mediumlow heat until just heated through. Remove from the heat and fold in the sour cream until it is evenly blended. Season to taste with salt and pepper. If you want to be fancy and have the oven space, reheat the dish in the oven with a grated Cheddar cheese topping. MAKES ABOUT TWELVE SIDE PORTIONS.\n\nGratin of Pumpkin\n\n_This dish is a variation on the French classic Gratin Dauphinois (see recipe,this page). I originally served it at one of my Thanksgiving dinners, in another effort to use the meat of the jack-o'-lantern\u2013style pumpkins that are so plentiful and cheap that time of year. I've made it often since._\n\n1 medium jack-o'-lantern\u2013type pumpkin, 4\u20136 lb.\n\n5 cloves garlic, 2 of them chopped\n\n2 lb. carrots, peeled and cut on the bias into \u00bc-inch-thick coins\n\n1 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese\n\n1 cup grated Gruy\u00e8re cheese\n\nGround white pepper to taste\n\n2 cups half-and-half\n\n2 egg yolks\n\nPinch of nutmeg\n\n1 cup bread crumbs\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. If you have a convection oven, set it on convect.\n\n2. Cut open the pumpkin from top to bottom. Scrape out all the seeds and fibers. Cut the pumpkin into eighths. Carve the meat out in pieces as large as you can, leaving \u00bd-inch-thick shells. Cut the meat into \u215b-inch-thick slices.\n\n3. Crush the 3 whole garlic cloves and use them to wipe the inside of a 12 x 8-inch glass baking dish. Discard what's left of the crushed cloves. Shingle half of the pumpkin and half of the carrots along the bottom of the dish. Sprinkle on half of the chopped garlic, one-third of each of the cheeses, and white pepper to taste. Repeat the process with the remaining ingredients, finishing with a generous layer of the cheeses.\n\n4. Beat the half-and-half, egg yolks, and nutmeg together, then pour over the casserole. Wrap a relatively tight seal of aluminum foil over the top of the dish. Bake for 1 hour and 10 minutes.\n\n5. Raise the oven temperature to 400 degrees F. Remove the foil, sprinkle bread crumbs in a thin layer over the top, and return to the oven. Continue baking, uncovered, until the crust browns.\n\n6. Remove from the oven and allow to rest and cool for at least 15 minutes before serving. MAKES ABOUT TWELVE SIDE PORTIONS.\n\nStuffed Onions Florentine\n\n_This dish was in my very first cookbook, a little tome published in 1982, now out of print. One day not long ago, someone called me on the radio and said she'd made it and loved it. I cooked it again and found out why._\n\nONIONS\n\n6 medium yellow onions, peeled\n\n6 slices bacon\n\nTwo 10-oz. bags of fresh spinach, cooked and chopped\n\n2 crimini mushrooms, chopped\n\n\u00bd cup chicken stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n1 Tbsp. red wine vinegar\n\n1 tsp. brown sugar\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n1 tsp. Herbsaint or Pernod (optional)\n\nDash of Worcestershire sauce\n\nTOPPING\n\n\u00bc cup bread crumbs\n\n2 Tbsp. Parmesan cheese\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. If you have a convection oven, set it on convect. Cut off the root ends of each onion, about one-fourth the way down. Scoop out the centers of the onions, leaving \u00bc-inch-thick onion shells. Chop the onion centers.\n\n2. Cook the bacon in a skillet until crisp. Remove and crumble the bacon and set aside. Pour off the fat, but don't wipe the pan. Cook the chopped onion in the remaining fat until tender.\n\n3. Lower the heat to medium-low and stir in all of the remaining ingredients, along with the bacon. Cook until all of the moisture has been absorbed and the mixture begins to dry out.\n\n4. Fill the onion shells loosely with the spinach mixture. Blend the topping ingredients together and sprinkle generously on top of the onions. Arrange the stuffed onions in a shallow baking dish, cover with foil, and bake for 20 minutes, then remove the foil and bake until the topping browns. SERVES SIX.\n\nStuffed Artichokes\n\n_Stuffed artichokes, Italian style, are an old New Orleans favorite. They're at their best in springtime, when the new crop of artichokes appears. The stuffing is mostly bread crumbs and garlic. Not everybody likes (or understands) stuffed artichokes. My wife does; I don't. This recipe came from the old Toney's on Bourbon Street, which sold them by the hundreds._\n\n4 fresh medium artichokes\n\n2 tsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\n\u00bc cup olive oil\n\n3 Tbsp. chopped garlic\n\n4 anchovy fillets, chopped\n\n2 cups bread crumbs\n\n\u00bc cup grated Romano cheese\n\n3 Tbsp. chopped flat-leaf parsley\n\n1 tsp. dried oregano\n\n\u215b tsp. sugar\n\n\u215b tsp. freshly ground black pepper\n\n1 large lemon\n\n1. Thoroughly wash the artichokes. Carefully trim the top inch or so off each. Trim the stem so that the artichokes will sit straight up. With scissors, trim off points of leaves. Soak artichokes 30 minutes in \u00bd gallon (8 cups) of water with 2 teaspoons of salt dissolved.\n\n2. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a large skillet. Add the garlic and saut\u00e9 until fragrant. Add all of the remaining ingredients except the lemon and continue cooking, stirring frequently, over low heat until everything is well blended.\n\n3. To stuff the artichokes, spread the outer leaves and spoon in the stuffing, starting from the top and going around to the bottom. Form foil cups around the bottom half of each artichoke.\n\n4. Arrange the stuffed artichokes in a large kettle or Dutch oven with an inch of water in the bottom. Squeeze lemon juice liberally over all. Cook, covered, over medium heat for 30\u201340 minutes. Do not boil dry. Artichokes are done when the inner leaves can be pulled out easily. If you can lift the artichoke by its inner leaves, it's not done.\n\n5. Allow the artichokes to cool until you can touch them, then dig in. Also good cold as a late-night snack\u2014in moderation, and only if your mate eats them with you. SERVES FOUR.\n\nPasta Bordelaise\n\n_The Italians call this pasta aglio olio. In New Orleans, it's pasta bordelaise, even though there's not a drop of red Bordeaux in it. We eat it as a side dish to all sorts of things, from Deviled Crab (see recipe,this page) to Veal Pann\u00e9e (see recipe, this page)._\n\n1 Tbsp. salt\n\n1 lb. angel hair pasta\n\n\u2153 cup extra-virgin olive oil\n\n4\u20138 cloves garlic, chopped\n\n6 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, leaves only, chopped\n\n\u00bc tsp. crushed red pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried oregano\n\nParmesan cheese\n\n1. Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil with a tablespoon of salt dissolved in it. Cook the pasta for about 4 minutes, leaving it al dente\u2014firm to the tooth. Drain the pasta, but save about \u00bc cup of the pasta cooking water.\n\n2. In a large skillet, heat the olive oil until it shimmers. Add all of the remaining ingredients except the pasta and cook until the garlic smells good. Add 3 tablespoons of the reserved pasta cooking water and whisk to blend.\n\n3. Turn the heat off and add the pasta, tossing it with a fork to coat with the sauce. Divide among the plates and serve with grated Parmigiano Reggiano or Grana Padano cheese. SERVES FOUR AS A MAIN COURSE OR EIGHT AS A SIDE DISH.\n\nOyster and Pecan Stuffing\n\n_Here is a different approach to oyster dressing for the holidays. This recipe should be made a day ahead of time so that the flavors of the ingredients will merge together. (If you do, refrigerate it and take it out of the refrigerator an hour before baking it.) Although you might want to stuff this into a bird, it's probably better baked separately._\n\n\u00bc cup dry vermouth\n\n24 fresh, shucked oysters, with their liquor\n\n3 cups stale French bread, cut into cubes\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter\n\n1 medium yellow onion, chopped\n\n3 green onions, chopped\n\n2 cloves garlic, chopped\n\nPinch of dried thyme\n\nPinch of cayenne\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n\u00bd cup chopped flat-leaf parsley leaves\n\n1 cup chopped pecans\n\n\u00bd cup bread crumbs\n\n1. Warm the vermouth in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the oysters and gently poach until the oysters curl at the edges, about 8 minutes. Turn off the heat. Chop the oysters coarsely and set aside. Add the bread cubes to the poaching liquid and mash them a bit with a wire whisk. Set aside.\n\n2. Melt the butter in a skillet over medium heat. Add the yellow and green onions, garlic, thyme, cayenne, and bay leaf, and saut\u00e9 until the onions turn translucent. Add the poached oysters, oyster liquor, and parsley, and simmer for 3\u20135 minutes. Remove from heat and discard the bay leaf. Stir pan contents into bread mixture.\n\n3. Add the chopped pecans. Toss to evenly distribute them in the mixture, which should be fairly loose and wet. Stir in the bread crumbs to stiffen the mixture and transfer it to a baking dish. Refrigerate, covered, overnight if you like. Take the baking dish out of the refrigerator about an hour before baking.\n\n4. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Bake the stuffing, covered, until warmed all the way through. Then bake another few minutes, uncovered, to get a bit of a crust on top. SERVES SIX TO EIGHT.\n\nHush Puppies\n\n_Hush puppies are essential to Fried Catfish (see recipe,this page), and they're good with any other seafood platter, too. You make them especially good by keeping the texture light and including flavors other than that of the cornmeal. Fry them in the same oil that you used to fry fish or (even better) chicken._\n\n_Although the original idea for hush puppies is to use the same stuff you used to coat the fish, better results come from making a batter specifically for hush puppies. I like white self-rising cornmeal._\n\nVegetable oil, for frying, preferably oil previously used for frying fish or chicken\n\n1\u00bd cups white self-rising cornmeal\n\n1\u00bd cups self-rising flour\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n\u00bd tsp. sugar\n\n1 cup canned corn, drained\n\n2 green onions, finely chopped\n\n1 small jalape\u00f1o pepper, seeded and membrane removed, chopped\n\n2 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, chopped\n\n1\u00be cups milk\n\n1 egg, beaten\n\n1. Pour the oil into a heavy saucepan to a depth of 1 inch. Heat over medium-high heat until the temperature reaches 350 degrees F.\n\n2. Whisk the cornmeal, flour, salt, Creole seasoning, and sugar together in a small bowl. Add the corn, green onions, jalape\u00f1o, and parsley, and stir to blend well.\n\n3. In a second, larger bowl, beat the milk, egg, and \u00bc cup of water together. Add the cornmeal\u2013green onion mixture to the wet ingredients and mix with a whisk until no dry flour is visible. (Add a little more milk to the mixture if necessary. The mixture should be sticky but not runny or grainy.)\n\n4. With a tablespoon, make balls of batter. Fry 4\u20136 at a time until they're medium brown; they should float on the oil when they're ready. Remove and drain, and allow the oil temperature to recover before adding more hush puppies.\n\n5. Serve as an appetizer with a mixture of equal parts mayonnaise, horseradish, and sour cream, or tartar sauce. Or alongside fried seafood or chicken. MAKES ABOUT EIGHTEEN HUSH PUPPIES.\n\nZea's Roasted Corn Grits\n\n_Even people who like grits didn't get excited about them until chefs starting playing around with them. One of the best versions of grits I ever had is the corn-studded yellow grits they serve as a side dish at Zea. That's a small chain of specialty restaurants run by New Orleans chefs Gary Darling, Greg Reggio, and Hans Limberg. Their grits are so good that they outsell French fries at Zea\u2014probably the only non-breakfast restaurant in the world where this is true. Use the best quality grits you can find, preferably stone-ground._\n\n2 ears fresh corn\n\n1 Tbsp. butter\n\n1 cup chicken broth\n\n1 cup heavy whipping cream\n\n1 cup yellow grits\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\nFreshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n1. Shuck off the husks and butter the ears of corn. Grill over an open fire (preferably charcoal) until the kernels are dark brown here and there.\n\n2. Let the corn cool. Slice the kernels off the cob, holding the stem end down on a cutting board and slicing downward.\n\n3. Bring the chicken broth to a light boil. Add the cream and return to a boil.\n\n4. Slowly whisk in the grits and the corn. Reduce the heat to a simmer and cook 5 to 6 minutes.\n\n5. Add salt and pepper to taste. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nCorn Macquechoux\n\n_\"Macquechoux\" is the Cajun French rendition of a word used by the Native Americans who lived in what is now Louisiana. It meant \"cooked corn,\" so \"corn macquechoux\" is redundant. But never mind. It's a delicious and common side dish in Cajun country, good enough that it's made its way into New Orleans Creole cooking. The corn is cooked down with all the ingredients of a Creole sauce and a lot of butter. It becomes soft and almost a stew, but the kernels don't disintegrate. In some families, enough sugar is added to the concoction to make it unambiguously sweet._\n\n_Macquechoux can be turned into an entr\u00e9e by adding crawfish tails, small shrimp, or diced andouille sausage to the mix. Those variations are typically made with more pepper than for a side dish._\n\n5 ears fresh yellow corn\n\n1 stick butter\n\n\u00bd cup chopped onion\n\n1 small red bell pepper, chopped\n\n1 rib celery, chopped\n\n2 small, ripe but firm tomatoes, seeds and pulp removed, chopped\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n\u00bd tsp. freshly ground black pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp. cayenne\n\nHalf-and-half (if necessary)\n\nTabasco jalapeno sauce to taste\n\nFOR AN ENTR\u00c9E\n\n2 lb. fresh Louisiana crawfish tails or medium shrimp or andouille sausage (the latter diced)\n\n1. Shuck the corn and rinse with cold water. Hold the corn upright with the tip of the ear on a shallow plate. With a sharp knife, cut the kernels off the ear. When finished, use the knife to scrape the ears to extract as much of the corn \"milk\" as possible. Do this for all the ears.\n\n2. In a medium saucepan over medium heat, heat the butter until it bubbles, and add the onion, bell pepper, and celery. Cook until softened.\n\n3. Lower the heat. Add the corn and the corn milk and all the other ingredients up to and including the cayenne. Cover and cook, stirring every few minutes, for 20\u201325 minutes. If the mixture becomes so dry that it's hard to stir, add a little halfand-half to loosen it up.\n\n4. Adjust the seasonings with salt and Tabasco jalapeno sauce. Serve as a side dish with almost anything.\n\nFOR AN ENTR\u00c9E:\n\nIf using crawfish tails, add them to the corn when it has about 10 minutes left to cook. Use extra Tabasco.\n\nIf using shrimp, add them to the butter in step 1 before the vegetables, and cook until they turn pink. Remove and reserve. Add the shrimp back to the pot, with all their juices, when the corn has about 5 more minutes to cook.\n\nIf using andouille sausage, cook the diced sausage in a pan to extract some of the fat. (This can also be done by wrapping the andouille in a paper towel and microwaving it for 2 minutes or so.) Add the andouille to the corn when it has about 10 minutes left to cook. MAKES EIGHT SIDE DISHES OR FOUR ENTR\u00c9ES.\n\nRagout of Mushrooms with Grits\n\n_This is a spectacular side dish for almost any meat, but it's especially fine with beef. The ragout of mushrooms is much more intensely flavored than the same mushrooms saut\u00e9ed in butter would be. And now that we can find coarse-ground grits that stand up to cooking, we're getting used to using it as a side dish at dinner. This comes out fine with standard white mushrooms, but it's better to mix in some exotic or even wild species if you can find them. Serve it with steak, roast beef, roast pork, or lamb leg._\n\nGRITS\n\n2 cups half-and-half\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n\u00be cup grits, preferably Anson Mills stone-ground white grits\n\n2 Tbsp. butter\n\nRAGOUT\n\n1 stick butter\n\n6 Tbsp. flour\n\n2 Tbsp. chopped onion\n\n\u00bd square (\u00bd oz.) Baker's dark chocolate\n\n\u00be cup half-and-half\n\n\u00bd cup warm, strong beef stock or broth\n\n\u00bd cup port, Madeira, or Marsala wine\n\n16 oz. assorted mushrooms, cleaned and sliced into pieces the size of the tip of your little finger\n\n\u00bc tsp. marjoram\n\n1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n3 dashes Tabasco chipotle pepper sauce\n\nFreshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n1. Make the grits first by bringing the half-and-half and the salt to a light boil. Stir in the grits and lower the heat to the lowest temperature. Cook, stirring now and then, until a furrow you make with a spoon drawn across the top surface remains for a few seconds. Remove from the heat. Let the butter melt on top of the hot grits, and tilt the pan around to coat the top surface with butter (don't stir it in). Keep the grits warm, covered, in an oven at the lowest heat setting.\n\n2. For the ragout, melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat, then add the flour. Make a light brown roux, stirring constantly. When the mixture reaches the color of a brown paper bag, add the onion and the chocolate, and remove from the heat. Continue to stir until the chocolate disappears.\n\n3. Whisk in the half-and-half until the mixture takes on the texture of mashed potatoes. Whisk in the beef stock and the wine until well blended. Add the remaining ingredients and lower the heat to the lowest temperature. Cover and cook for about 15 minutes, stirring every now and then, until the mixture is very thick and the mushrooms are very soft. Adjust seasonings with salt and pepper to taste.\n\n4. Stir the grits and spoon onto plates. Surround or top the grits (at your discretion) with the mushroom ragout. SERVES SIX TO EIGHT.\n\n_Salads_\n\nChicken Tenders with Pepper Jelly and Spinach Salad\n\nAndouille-Cucumber Salad\n\nCobb Salad, New Orleans Style\n\nBlackened Catfish Salad\n\nWatercress and Spinach Salad with Pecans\n\nPasta Salad Allegro\n\nSquid with Spicy Creole Vinaigrette\n\nGuacamole\n\nCole Slaw\n\nDeviled Eggs R\u00e9moulade\n\nCreole French Vinaigrette\n\nLemon Vinaigrette\n\nCreole Mustard Vinaigrette\n\nRoasted Onion (or Garlic) Vinaigrette\n\nAvocado Ranch Salad Dressing\n\nBlue Cheese Dressing\n\nA\n\nSometime in late May or early June in New Orleans, a day will begin hot and will just keep getting hotter. It's the first of many such days, and by September, it seems as if they will never end. This has a definite effect on our dining habits. Suddenly the idea of replacing a plate of red beans and rice or a bowl of gumbo with a refreshing salad sounds very good, indeed.\n\nEven at those times, Orleanians remain suspicious of salads. It wasn't until recent memory that local greens were good enough to hold up their end of the flavor bargain. Even expensive restaurants kept throwing jejune stacks of iceberg lettuce at us until the 1990s. Fortunately, we've managed to move past that, and both stores and restaurants provide Orleanians with interesting greens and vegetables for the salad bowl.\n\nThe most popular big salads in New Orleans are those made by tossing some of those leaves with our big boiled shrimp, lump crabmeat, or both. Fried oysters or crawfish tails also become salad garnishes, functioning like the most interesting croutons you can imagine. Such salads are easy enough to figure out. Here are a few more complicated salads for the end of summer, when you've worn out all of the obvious ideas. Many of them can do duty not just as salads, but as cold appetizers or even light, fresh summer entr\u00e9es.\n\nChicken Tenders with Pepper Jelly and Spinach Salad\n\n_This dish will help you get rid of some of that pepper jelly you're always getting as gifts (or the pepper jelly you made yourself that you can't seem to unload). Maybe the stuff would be in greater demand if it came with a recipe like this one._\n\n1 cup pepper jelly\n\n2 Tbsp. orange juice\n\n2 cups flour\n\n1 Tbsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n2 Tbsp. salt\n\n2 lb. chicken tenders, or chicken breasts cut into thirds\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter\n\n8 oz. crumbled blue cheese\n\nTwo 10-oz. bags of fresh spinach leaves, well washed and dried\n\n1 cup Creole Mustard Vinaigrette (see recipe, this page)\n\n1. Preheat the broiler with the broiler pan about 4 inches from the heat.\n\n2. Whisk the pepper jelly and orange juice together and set aside. Combine the flour, Creole seasoning, and salt in a wide bowl. Dust (don't dredge!) the chicken tenders with the seasoned flour.\n\n3. Melt 2 tablespoons of the butter in a large (preferably stainless steel) skillet over medium heat. Working in batches, cook the chicken, turning occasionally, until lightly browned, about 5 minutes. (They will not be cooked all the way through at this point.) Add more butter, as necessary, to cook all the chicken.\n\n4. Generously coat the chicken with the pepper-jelly mixture and place the pieces on the preheated broiler pan. Broil the chicken pieces until they are fully cooked and browned on top. Allow them to cool for 5 minutes, then cut them on the bias into \u00be-inch-thick slices.\n\n5. Toss the chicken slices, blue cheese, and spinach with the Creole mustard vinaigrette and serve. MAKES EIGHT ENTR\u00c9E SALADS.\n\nAndouille-Cucumber Salad\n\n_This salad came from Chef Gary Darling when he was one of the corporate chefs for Copeland's\u2014although I don't remember that it was ever on the menu there. It's a good change of pace from salads made mostly of green leaves. It's refreshing and light, but the andouille makes you feel as if you've actually eaten something. It also comes out well with firm, well-seasoned grilled fish or chicken in place of the andouille._\n\n1 Tbsp. sugar\n\n\u00bc cup rice vinegar\n\n1 Tbsp. Creole mustard\n\n\u00bd tsp. garlic, finely chopped\n\n1 Tbsp. cilantro, finely chopped\n\n2 Tbsp. green onion, finely chopped\n\n2 tsp. fresh, seeded jalape\u00f1o, finely chopped\n\n\u00bc cup sesame oil\n\n4 peeled, seeded cucumbers\n\n\u00bd lb. grilled andouille sausage, diced\n\n1. In a mixing bowl, dissolve the sugar in the vinegar.\n\n2. Add the mustard, garlic, cilantro, green onion, and jalape\u00f1o to the sugar mixture and mix well. Add the sesame oil and mix well.\n\n3. Quarter the cucumber lengthwise, then slice into thin disks. Marinate for 30 minutes in the sauce.\n\n4. Drain the cucumber from the marinade and reserve the marinade for the next batch. Toss the andouille with the cucumber. SERVES FOUR.\n\nCobb Salad, New Orleans Style\n\n_What makes this Cobb salad different is that the chicken is seasoned with Creole seasoning and grilled. The dressing also includes a few local favorites among its ingredients. The result is a classic Cobb with a bit more bite. The choice of greens is critical. Use at least two varieties: one mild (such as Boston, iceberg, or romaine), the other sharper (such as escarole, fris\u00e9e, or arugula). Ratio: about two parts mild to one part sharp._\n\nCHICKEN\n\n2 chicken breasts\n\nBlackening Seasoning (see recipe, this page)\n\n3 Tbsp. butter, melted\n\nDRESSING\n\n1 Tbsp. Creole mustard\n\n3 dashes of Worcestershire sauce\n\n3 Tbsp. tarragon vinegar\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n5 dashes of Tabasco Garlic Pepper Sauce\n\n1 Tbsp. paprika\n\n\u00bd cup olive oil\n\nSALAD\n\nEnough mixed greens to make 4 salads (about 2 standard bags)\n\n1 green onion, tender parts only, thinly sliced\n\n1 hard-boiled egg, finely diced or crumbled\n\n2 ripe but not soft avocados, cut into medium dice\n\n2 ripe tomatoes, cut into medium dice\n\n1 red radish, chopped\n\n6 slices thick bacon, fried crisp\n\n\u00bd cup crumbled blue cheese\n\n1. Generously season the chicken with the blackening seasoning. Brush with the butter and either grill or broil until cooked through and crusty. Let cool, then chop into medium dice.\n\n2. To make the dressing: Combine all the ingredients except the oil in a bowl. Add 1 tablespoon of water. Add the oil a little at a time, whisking constantly, until emulsified.\n\n3. The greens are best torn into small pieces, not chopped. Either way, prepare them right before serving. In a bowl, combine the chicken and all the remaining salad ingredients, except the greens, and toss with three-quarters of the dressing. Add the greens and toss gently until all the leaves are coated. Add more dressing if necessary. SERVES FOUR.\n\nBlackened Catfish Salad\n\n_Although frying is by far the best way to prepare catfish, the fish is so inexpensive and available that it's hard to resist using it in other styles. I find that blackened catfish can be cooled off and then added to a salad with good effect. Blackening works best with larger fillets, which are less good for frying._\n\n_To blacken fish properly requires a very hot skillet, which will throw off a lot of smoke and perhaps even a few flames when the butter-coated fish hits the pan. Be sure to have a good exhaust fan going. Or take the whole shooting match outside and do it on an outdoor grill._\n\nFour 8-oz. catfish fillets\n\n1 stick butter, melted\n\n\u00bd cup Blackening Seasoning (see recipe, this page)\n\n4 oz. crumbled feta cheese\n\n8 oz. Creole Mustard Vinaigrette (see recipe, this page)\n\n2 bags spring mix salad\n\n8\u201312 spears fresh asparagus, poached\n\n8 wedges tomato\n\n4 lemon wedges\n\n1. Heat a black iron skillet over high heat until smoking. Turn the exhaust fan on.\n\n2. While the skillet is heating, pass the fillets through the melted butter and shake off the excess. Then generously sprinkle the blackened seasoning on both sides of each fillet (you can even dredge it through the seasoning if you like).\n\n3. Place the fish in the skillet and sear it for 1\u20132 minutes per side, depending on thickness. (Check to make sure the fish is done by piercing the thickest part with a kitchen fork. Hold it in the center for a few seconds, then carefully touch the fork to your lips. If the fork seems even a little warm, the fish is done.)\n\n4. Let the fish cool for a few minutes, then cut into strips or large chunks.\n\n5. Mix the feta cheese into the dressing. Toss the greens with the dressing, then place on a salad plate. Top with the asparagus, tomatoes, and catfish. Drizzle a little more dressing and lemon juice over all. MAKES FOUR ENTR\u00c9E SALADS.\n\nWatercress and Spinach Salad with Pecans\n\n_This is one of my favorite salads. I love the way the softness and pepperiness of the watercress plays against the crisp nuttiness of the pecans. And it doesn't have ambitions to become an entr\u00e9e. Don't even try it unless the watercress is very fresh. Any yellow at all is bad news._\n\nSALAD\n\n1 bag of spinach, picked and washed\n\n1 bunch of watercress, trimmed and washed\n\n1\u00bd cups sliced white mushrooms\n\nDRESSING\n\n\u00bc cup chopped toasted pecans\n\n\u00bd cup walnut oil\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n2 Tbsp. red wine vinegar\n\n2 grinds fresh black pepper\n\nGenerous pinch of salt\n\n\u00bd tsp. fresh dill, finely chopped\n\n2 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped\n\n1. Tear the larger spinach leaves into pieces. Toss the spinach with the watercress and mushrooms in a salad bowl.\n\n2. Put the dressing ingredients into a food processor or blender and process until emulsified. Add the dressing to the greens and toss until the leaves are well coated. SERVES FOUR.\n\nPasta Salad Allegro\n\n_This pasta salad has a distinctly Creole flavor, along with a clear Italian accent. It was created by chef Ron Wilemon, who's turned up in a number of great restaurants over the years, including one of his own\u2014the Allegro Bistro._\n\n2 lb. cheese tortellini, preferably tri-color\n\n2 Tbsp. Creole mustard\n\n\u00bd cup red wine vinegar\n\n1 cup olive oil\n\n1 lb. andouille (see this page) or other smoked sausage, cut into small slivers\n\n2 large, ripe tomatoes, cubed\n\n16 sun-dried tomatoes, soaked a few minutes in warm water, sliced into julienne strips\n\n3 cans artichoke hearts packed in water, drained, rinsed, and quartered\n\n20\u201330 leaves fresh basil, chopped\n\n1 each red, yellow, and green bell peppers, thinly sliced\n\n1 green onion, thinly sliced\n\n\u00bd cup finely shredded Parmesan cheese\n\n2 tsp. dried oregano\n\n1. Cook the tortellini in rapidly boiling water until still firm to the bite. Drain and refrigerate.\n\n2. Whisk the mustard and the vinegar together in a large bowl. Add about a third of the oil, whisking until smooth. Add 2 tablespoons of cold water, then gradually add the rest of the oil while whisking constantly.\n\n3. Add the remaining ingredients, along with the tortellini, and toss carefully (avoid breaking the pasta) to distribute the ingredients evenly. Let it sit for about 15 minutes before serving. SERVES EIGHT TO TWELVE.\n\nSquid with Spicy Creole Vinaigrette\n\n_One of the best ways to serve squid is as a salad. This is sort of that, although it's really more akin to Shrimp R\u00e9moulade with Two Sauces (see recipe,this page) and Crabmeat Ravigote (see recipe, this page). The best squid to use are the small ones, about three to four inches long._\n\n2 lb. small squid\n\n\u00bc cup red wine vinegar\n\n\u00bc cup dry white wine\n\n\u00bc tsp. crushed red pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp. cracked black peppercorns\n\n1 sprig fresh thyme\n\n\u2153 cup extra-virgin olive oil\n\n4\u00bd tsp. Creole mustard\n\n4\u00bd tsp. lemon juice\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n\u00bd cup thinly sliced white onion\n\n\u00bd cup chopped flat-leaf parsley, leaves and stems\n\n1 rib celery, chopped\n\n\u00bd tsp. chopped garlic\n\n1 tsp. chopped fresh oregano\n\n1. The only difficulty with squid is cleaning it, and even that task is easy if you remember that the undesirable parts are where the tentacles meet the body. Cut out the \u00bc-inch section that includes the beak and the eyes. Then carefully remove the ink sac and the cartilage pen from the body and rub off the dark, thin skin. On the tentacle part, make sure there is a clear ring you can see through and remove any thin skin that may be there. Then slice the body into rings about \u00bd inch thick.\n\n2. Put 2 tablespoons of the vinegar, 2 tablespoons of the wine, the crushed red pepper, black peppercorns, thyme, and \u2153 cup water into a saucepan. Add the cleaned squid and bring to a simmer. Cook for about 3 minutes, then remove from the heat and allow to cool for about 2 minutes more. Drain.\n\n3. Meanwhile, whisk the olive oil, mustard, lemon juice, salt, remaining vinegar, and 2 tablespoons of water together in a large bowl. Add the squid and all the other ingredients, and toss to combine.\n\n4. Let the squid marinate, refrigerated, for about 4 hours. Remove from the refrigerator and bring to room temperature before serving. SERVES FOUR.\n\nGuacamole\n\n_This is a little more complicated than most guacamole recipes and probably not authentic, but it sure tastes good. If you have fresh chile peppers available, chop about two tablespoons' worth and substitute it for some or all of the Tabasco Green Pepper Sauce. To keep the avocados from browning, don't cut them until everything else is chopped and combined. At this point, I'd like to apologize for the green ketchup. But blind tasting doesn't lie: The ketchup adds a nice little something, and the green makes it greener._\n\n1 medium white onion\n\n10 sprigs cilantro, leaves only\n\nJuice of 1 small lime\n\n1 Tbsp. olive oil\n\n1 large clove garlic\n\n3 Tbsp. Tabasco Green Pepper Sauce, plus more to taste\n\n3 large, very ripe tomatoes, seeds and pulp removed\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\n1 Tbsp. ketchup (preferably green ketchup)\n\n4\u20136 ripe Hass avocados (depending on size)\n\n1. Put the onion, cilantro, lime juice, olive oil, garlic, and green pepper sauce into a food processor and chop finely, but don't let it become a slush. Transfer to a bowl.\n\n2. Chop the tomatoes coarsely and add to the bowl. Add the salt and ketchup.\n\n3. Cut the avocados in half. Remove the pits. With a spoon, scoop out the flesh into the bowl, avoiding any discolored or stringy parts. Using a large wire whisk, mash and mix everything together. The guacamole should be on the chunky side, not a puree. Add more green pepper sauce and salt to taste. Serve with tortilla chips. SERVES TEN TO FIFTEEN.\n\nCole Slaw\n\n_Cole slaw is an essential part of my barbecue menu. My wife, who is not given to spewing unwarranted praise and who is a cole slaw fan, says this is the ultimate. And you know she's never wrong. This makes quite a bit\u2014enough for 20 or 30 portions._\n\nVEGETABLES\n\n1 head green cabbage, finely shredded or finely chopped\n\n1 head red cabbage, finely shredded or finely chopped\n\n2 bunches of green onions, finely chopped\n\n1 lb. carrots, peeled and finely shredded\n\nDRESSING\n\n1 quart mayonnaise\n\n1\u00bc cups cider vinegar\n\n2 Tbsp. yellow mustard\n\n\u00bc cup sugar\n\n2 Tbsp. celery seed\n\n1\u00bd tsp. dried dill\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried tarragon\n\n\u00bc tsp. ground white pepper\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. Tabasco Green Pepper Sauce\n\n1 cup buttermilk\n\n1. Toss all of the vegetables together in a large bowl and set aside\n\n2. Whisk all of the dressing ingredients together in a bowl. Pour about half the dressing over the vegetables and toss until well coated. Add more dressing to coat but not to make a puddle of dressing in the bottom of the bowl. SERVES TWENTY TO THIRTY.\n\nDeviled Eggs R\u00e9moulade\n\n_Deviled eggs are not thought of as a particularly brilliant appetizer, but I say that's because most people have never eaten them with New Orleans\u2013style red r\u00e9moulade sauce. That combination was a specialty at the historic, lost Creole cafe called Maylie's. Arnaud's revived the idea some years ago with its superb r\u00e9moulade sauce, and it still holds up. Add some sliced ripe avocado, lettuce, and tomatoes to the plate, and you have a fine little salad. For an extra touch, garnish each serving with a couple of boiled, peeled shrimp._\n\n8 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and halved\n\n1 Tbsp. chopped yellow onion\n\n1 Tbsp. chopped celery\n\n\u00bd tsp. small capers\n\n\u00bc cup mayonnaise\n\n2 Tbsp. yellow mustard\n\n\u215b tsp. salt\n\n4 dashes of Tabasco\n\n4 small ripe but not soft Hass avocados, halved, pitted, and peeled\n\n2 large ripe tomatoes (Creoles or beefsteak), cut crosswise into \u00bc-inch-thick slices, then into half-moons\n\nOne 8\u201310-oz. bag of baby lettuces or spring mix\n\n\u00bd cup red r\u00e9moulade sauce (see Shrimp R\u00e9moulade with Two Sauces, this page)\n\n1. Scoop the yolks out into a bowl. Reserve the egg-white halves.\n\n2. Add the onion, celery, capers, mayonnaise, mustard, salt, and Tabasco to the yolks and mix well with a whisk. (You can even beat it to fluffiness.)\n\n3. Load the mixture into a pastry bag and pipe it into the centers of the egg-white halves.\n\n4. Cut the avocado halves into \u00bc-inch-thick slices. Fan out each sliced avocado half on one side of an individual plate, with the slices overlapping. Place an egg half in the avocado's pit indentation. Put 2 tomato half-moons and another egg half on the other side of the plate. Surround all with lettuce leaves. Drizzle the r\u00e9moulade sauce generously over each salad and serve chilled. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nCreole French Vinaigrette\n\n_Have you ever wondered why French dressing is orange in America but nowhere else? No? Well, the orange element is paprika, and originally the dressing included enough paprika to make it spicy. The French eventually cut back on the paprika, but in America\u2014where the paprika rarely had much spice\u2014it was left in. I have gone back to using the spicy paprika, and I enjoy the effect it has on an otherwise straightforward vinaigrette._\n\n1 Tbsp. Dijon mustard\n\n\u00bc cup red wine vinegar\n\n1 cup olive oil\n\n2 Tbsp. Hungarian spicy paprika\n\n3 Tbsp. finely grated Parmesan cheese\n\n\u215b tsp. salt\n\nPinch of ground white pepper\n\n1. Whisk the mustard, vinegar, and 2 tablespoons of water together in a bowl. Add the olive oil in a slow stream, whisking constantly, until the dressing takes on a smooth, almost opaque quality.\n\n2. Whisk in the paprika, cheese, salt, and pepper. Store in a tightly closed bottle in the refrigerator until ready to use. This dressing can be stored, refrigerated and covered, for 2 weeks. MAKES ABOUT A CUP AND A HALF OF DRESSING.\n\nLemon Vinaigrette\n\n_Here's a tart, refreshing salad dressing that's especially good on bitter greens like arugula, radicchio, endive, or fris\u00e9e._\n\n1 tsp. Dijon mustard\n\n2 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n1 Tbsp. balsamic vinegar\n\n\u2153 cup olive oil\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n\u215b tsp. ground white pepper\n\nCombine the mustard, lemon juice, vinegar, and 2 tablespoons of cold water together in a bowl with a wire whisk. Add the oil in a slow stream, whisking constantly, until incorporated fully. Add the salt and pepper, and toss with salad greens. This dressing can be stored, refrigerated and covered, for 2 weeks. MAKES ABOUT A HALF CUP.\n\nCreole Mustard Vinaigrette\n\n_Whoever came up with idea of making a vinaigrette with our pungent Creole mustard instead of the standard Dijon mustard was really onto something. It's the dressing I most often make at home, and it's good on all sorts of salads, from simple greens to seafood salad to even pasta salads._\n\n2 Tbsp. Creole mustard\n\n\u00bc cup red wine vinegar\n\n1 cup olive oil\n\n\u215b tsp. ground white pepper\n\n1. Whisk the mustard, vinegar, 1 tablespoon of cold water, and a third of the oil together in a bowl. Add the remaining oil in a slow stream, whisking constantly, until emulsified.\n\n2. Add the white pepper and whisk. You can also do this in a shaker bottle, but whisking gives a much better, creamier consistency. This dressing can be stored, refrigerated and covered, for 2 weeks. MAKES ABOUT A CUP AND A HALF OF DRESSING.\n\nRoasted Onion (or Garlic) Vinaigrette\n\n_Onions give this great dressing a touch of sweetness. You can also get more or less the same result with a head of garlic._\n\n\u00bd medium yellow onion, diced, or 1 head garlic, peeled and chopped\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n\u00be cup olive oil\n\n\u00bc cup red wine vinegar\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper\n\n1. Preheat oven to 225 degrees F. Combine the onion (or garlic, if using), Creole seasoning, and 2 tablespoons of the oil in an ovenproof pan with a lid. Cover and bake in the oven for 2 hours. Cool to room temperature.\n\n2. Whisk in the vinegar, remaining oil, and salt and pepper to taste. This dressing can be stored, refrigerated and covered, for 2 weeks. MAKES ABOUT A CUP OF DRESSING.\n\nAvocado Ranch Salad Dressing\n\n_Every time I look at this recipe, the image of an avocado ranch comes to mind. Rounding them up . . . branding them . . . Okay, enough. As is the case with any dish using avocados, the challenge here is to make it during the half-hour or so when the avocados you have on hand are perfectly ripe. Also, make only enough of this dressing for one use, as it does not hold up well, even refrigerated._\n\n\u00bd cup mayonnaise\n\n\u00bc cup buttermilk\n\n\u00bc cup cider vinegar\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried tarragon\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried dill\n\n1 tsp. celery seed\n\n2 Tbsp. Tabasco Green Pepper Sauce\n\nDash of Worcestershire sauce\n\n2 medium ripe Hass avocados, halved and pitted\n\n1. Whisk all of the ingredients, except the avocados, together in a bowl. Let this sit for about an hour before moving on.\n\n2. Scoop the avocados out of their skin with a spoon. Avoid any stringy parts at the stem end. Add the avocados to the other ingredients and mash with a whisk. Add \u00bc cup of cold water and whisk until smooth. Add a little more water to thin the texture, as desired.\n\n3. Right before serving, toss the greens (red and green leaf, romaine, or Boston lettuces recommended; watercress makes a nice accent) with the dressing. Garnish individual salads with thin slices of avocado and tomato. MAKES ABOUT A CUP AND A HALF OF DRESSING.\n\nBlue Cheese Dressing\n\n_For a long time, this meant that thick, gluey stuff made with mayonnaise and so heavy it's a wonder any salad survived it. Lately many of us are going back to the original blue cheese salad, which was essentially a green salad dressed with vinaigrette and sprinkled with blue cheese. This recipe puts the cheese in the dressing, but it's still pretty light. It also works very well with feta cheese._\n\n\u00bc cup red wine vinegar\n\n1 Tbsp. Dijon mustard\n\n1 cup olive oil\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried dill\n\n\u00bc tsp. Tabasco\n\n4 oz. blue cheese (Roquefort, Stilton, Gorgonzola, or domestic) or feta\n\n1. Whisk the vinegar, mustard, and 2 tablespoons of water together in a bowl. Add the olive oil in a slow stream, whisking constantly, until the dressing takes on a smooth, almost opaque quality.\n\n2. Add the dill and Tabasco, and crumble the cheese into the dressing. Stir well with a fork. This dressing can be stored, refrigerated and covered, for up to 1 week. MAKES ABOUT A CUP AND A QUARTER OF DRESSING.\n\n_Casual Food_\n\nBoiled Crawfish\n\nCreole-Cajun Jambalaya\n\nOyster Boat\n\nRoast Beef Poor Boys\n\nMuffuletta\n\nGrilled Pizza\n\nHot Bacon Shrimp\n\nMary Ann's Spinach and Mushroom Dip\n\nTom's Hamburger Sauce\n\nA\n\nMany of the essentials in a well-rounded New Orleans eating regimen are the most informal of dishes. The best demonstration of this is provided at the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, where vendors sell more than 100 different dishes that are best eaten without tables, and sometimes even without plates or utensils.\n\nThe most celebrated of these dishes is boiled seafood, particularly boiled crawfish. The advent of live crawfish by the sack in the spring triggers a wave of crawfish boils all across South Louisiana. Everybody who boils crawfish has his own special way of doing it. I offer my version for first-timers.\n\nThe poor boy sandwich was invented in the mid-1920s during a streetcar strike. Bennie and Clovis Martin, owners of a busy restaurant in the Faubourg Marigny, served the poor boys on the picket lines a sandwich of roast beef gravy with just bits of beef on French bread for a nickel. After the strike, they added sliced beef to the gravy, and their baker, John Gendusa, devised an extra-long French loaf to put it on. The poor-boy sandwich soon became the official sandwich of New Orleans, filled with anything the maker thought might work (which is just about anything).\n\nRivaling the poor boy in local popularity is the muffuletta. The word is obsolete Sicilian dialect for the round bread loaf it's made with. The muffuletta made its first appearance in New Orleans shortly after the first wave of Italian immigrants arrived in the city in the late 1800s.\n\nJambalaya is a distant descendant of Spanish paella but much more rustic. The best versions are made in giant pots outside, stirred with boat oars. Jambalaya is served in gigantic piles, almost always on a paper plate.\n\nHere's my pick of the best of these casual New Orleans favorites.\n\nBoiled Crawfish\n\n_A crawfish boil is_ the _great casual party food in South Louisiana, especially in Cajun country. It's also a celebration of springtime, when the crawfish are available in abundance._\n\n_The peeling process goes like this: You break the crawfish where the thorax meets the tail. After removing a segment or two of the tail's carapace, you can squeeze the meat out by applying pressure just above the tail fin. There is also some good crawfish fat inside the head, which you need to suck out\u2014but that is not for beginners._\n\n_It's traditional to boil potatoes, corn, heads of garlic, and other things in the pot with the crawfish and eat them as side dishes. It sounds better than it is, as everything winds up tasting the same. I say\u2014knowing this is heresy\u2014cook at least the corn separately._\n\n2 cups salt\n\n20 lb. live crawfish\n\n8 large lemons, quartered\n\n6 yellow onions, quartered\n\n1 bunch of celery, with leaves, cut into eighths\n\n1 bunch of green onions, chopped\n\n1 bulb of garlic, halved\n\n1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley\n\nFour 3-oz. bags of crab boil (see Food Sources, this page)\n\n4 \u20136 bay leaves\n\n1 Tbsp. cayenne\n\n3 lb. whole new potatoes\n\n1. Fill a bucket or your kitchen sink with 2\u20133 gallons of cold water. Add about \u00bd cup of the salt and the crawfish; the salted water will purge the crawfish. Repeat the process with new, unsalted water 2\u20133 times until the water is only slightly dirty.\n\n2. In a large stockpot, bring 5 gallons of water to a boil. Add the remaining 1\u00bd cups of salt and all the ingredients except the crawfish and potatoes, and return to a boil. Let cook for 10 minutes.\n\n3. Add the crawfish and potatoes, return to a boil, and continue boiling for 15 minutes. Make sure there's enough water to completely cover the crawfish. Remove a crawfish after 15 minutes and see if it's cooked through. If it is, turn off the heat and let the crawfish steep until the potatoes are tender.\n\n4. Now the peeling and eating process begins. Serve the potatoes on the side. SERVES EIGHT NORMAL EATERS OR TWO SERIOUS CRAWFISH FANATICS.\n\nCreole-Cajun Jambalaya\n\n_As with many Louisiana dishes, jambalaya has distinctive Creole and Cajun versions. Creole jambalaya is reddish, a color it gets from tomatoes. Cajun jambalaya never includes tomatoes and is brown. Creole jambalaya almost always contains shrimp. Cajun jambalaya always has smoked sausage or tasso. Instead of stepping into the endless \"which jambalaya is better\" debate, I present here my favorite version. It has elements of both styles, with oysters providing a unique flavor. I don't include tomatoes\u2014but if you add a 16-ounce can of crushed tomatoes with the vegetables, that would be perfectly okay and quite authentic._\n\n\u00bc cup vegetable oil\n\n4 lb. chicken-leg quarters, each cut into 4 pieces, bone in\n\n2 lb. andouille (see this page) or other smoked sausage, cut into \u00bc-inch-thick slices\n\n2 large yellow onions, coarsely chopped\n\n2 green bell peppers, coarsely chopped\n\n2 ribs celery, coarsely chopped\n\n2 cloves garlic, chopped\n\n2 cups oyster liquor or chicken stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n2 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 Tbsp. Tabasco\n\n1 Tbsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n1 Tbsp. salt\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n1 tsp. dried thyme\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried marjoram\n\n4 cups (uncooked) Uncle Ben's rice, or similar parboiled rice\n\n2 green onions, chopped\n\n3 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, chopped\n\n4 dozen large fresh, shucked oysters\n\n1. Heat the oil in a heavy kettle or Dutch oven. Add the chicken and sausage, and brown the chicken all over. Add the onions, peppers, celery, and garlic, and saut\u00e9 until they wilt. Add the oyster liquor or stock and 5 cups of water. Bring to a simmer, stirring to dissolve the browned bits in the pot.\n\n2. Add the Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, Creole seasoning, salt, bay leaf, thyme, and marjoram. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer for 30 minutes. Remove the chicken and set aside. Stir the rice into the pot. Cover and simmer for 30 minutes.\n\n3. Meanwhile, remove the chicken meat from the bones and set aside. When the rice is cooked, stir in the chicken meat, green onions, parsley, and oysters. Continue to cook, uncovered, gently stirring occasionally, until the rice just starts to dry out. Adjust the seasonings as needed. SERVES TWELVE TO EIGHTEEN.\n\nOyster Boat\n\n_Lakeview Seafood was a joint on the road to the old lakefront fishing-camp community of Little Woods. Its owner, a former Marine Corps baker, had an interesting idea. Instead of serving the traditional oyster loaf on French bread, he baked a standard loaf of white bread, cut off the top, hollowed it out, buttered the inside, and filled it with fried seafood. He called these \"boats,\" and they were a big hit. Oysters are a natural for this great oversized sandwich, but you can also use fried shrimp, catfish, or even small soft-shell crabs. Serve with lemon wedges, hot sauce, and french fries on the side._\n\n1 loaf unsliced white bread (sold at supermarkets with in-house bakeries)\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter, softened\n\n2 Tbsp. chopped garlic\n\n1 Tbsp. chopped flat-leaf parsley\n\n\u00bd tsp. lemon juice\n\nPeanut oil, for frying\n\n3 dozen medium fresh, shucked oysters\n\n\u00bd cup corn flour (Fish-Fri)\n\n\u00bd cup yellow cornmeal\n\n1 Tbsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n1 Tbsp. salt\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F. Cut the loaf horizontally into 2 halves; set the top half aside. Make a vertical cut about 2 inches deep all around the top of the lower half of the loaf, about \u00bd inch from the sides. Push down the bread within the cut perimeter to form a pocket in the center of the loaf.\n\n2. Melt 1 tablespoon of the butter in a saucepan. Add the garlic and parsley, and cook until fragrant, then add the lemon juice and remove from the heat. Put the remaining butter in a bowl and stir in the garlic-parsley-butter mixture. Coat the inside of both halves of the loaf with the garlic butter. Toast the bread in the preheated oven until the inside surfaces of both halves just start to brown.\n\n3. Pour the oil into a cast-iron pot or deep skillet to a depth of 1 inch. Heat the oil over medium-high heat until the temperature reaches 375 degrees F.\n\n4. Meanwhile, combine the corn flour, cornmeal, Creole seasoning, and salt in a large bowl. Toss the still-wet oysters, 6 at a time, in the corn flour mix. Fry the oysters in batches until golden brown and crisp, then load them into the pocket half of the loaf. Place the top of the loaf over the oysters and serve with lemon wedges, hot sauce, and french fries. MAKES ONE OYSTER BOAT\u2014ENOUGH FOR TWO PEOPLE.\n\nRoast Beef Poor Boys\n\n_The poor-boy sandwich is one of the essential flavors of New Orleans, and roast beef is king of the poor boys. (For a bit of poor boy history, seethis page.) Making roast beef for poor boys is more about making gravy than roasting beef. Inside round seems to taste best, but some cooks like eye of round or even rib-eyes. It's best to cook the beef the day before because it will throw off lots of good juices for the gravy and the cold beef will be easier to slice. You can keep the gravy in a well-sealed container in the refrigerator for a few weeks or freeze it for even longer storage._\n\n_The most critical step in making a roast beef poor boy is to put the whole, assembled sandwich into a hot oven for two or three minutes before serving it. The flavor and aroma of the toasted French bread double the goodness._\n\nROAST BEEF AND GRAVY\n\n4\u20136-lb. inside round of beef, trimmed\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper\n\n4 ribs celery, coarsely chopped\n\n2 medium carrots, coarsely chopped\n\n1 large yellow onion, quartered\n\n1 whole garlic bulb, outer papery skin removed and bulb cut in half\n\n2 bay leaves\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried thyme\n\n\u00bd tsp. dried marjoram\n\n\u00bc tsp. black peppercorns\n\n1\u20133 Tbsp. flour\n\n1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\nSANDWICH\n\n3 loaves poor-boy bread or 6 French baguettes, cut lengthwise and into sections 6\u20138 inches long\n\nGARNISH\n\n1 head lettuce, shredded coarsely\n\n8 tomatoes, thinly sliced\n\nMayonnaise\n\nDill pickle slices\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Season the beef with salt and pepper. Put it in a Dutch oven or kettle filled about a third of the way up with water. Add the celery, carrots, onion, garlic, bay leaves, thyme, marjoram, and black peppercorns. Roast, uncovered, for 4\u20136 hours, turning the roast and adding water every hour or so. The water level should slowly drop, but don't let it get less than about 2 inches deep. The beef is ready when a meat thermometer inserted into the center reads 160 degrees F.\n\n2. Remove the roast from the pot and place in a pan that will catch all the juices that come out as it cools. If you're cooking a day ahead (recommended), wrap the beef and refrigerate it as soon as it's cooled to room temperature. If making it the same day, wait at least an hour before slicing.\n\n3. Skim off fat from the stock in the pot. Use a coarse sieve to strain the stock into a bowl, then return the stock to the pot. Add any juices that come out of the roast as it rests. Bring the stock to a simmer. Skim off any fat that rises to the surface. Cook to a thin gravy consistency. (This also benefits from being made a day ahead and cooling in the refrigerator.)\n\n4. When you're ready to make sandwiches, preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Bring the gravy to a simmer and whisk in the flour (but only if the gravy appears to need thickening). Add the Worcestershire sauce and season to taste with salt and pepper. (It's a common practice in New Orleans to add Kitchen Bouquet to darken the sauce, but I never do.)\n\n5. Slice the roast beef as thin as possible. Collect all the crumbs and slivers that fall off as you do this (the debris) and add them to the gravy. Stack as much sliced roast beef as you want on a length of French bread. Garnish with lettuce, tomatoes, mayonnaise, and dill pickles. Spoon on as much gravy as the sandwich can hold. Bake the assembled sandwich for about a minute to toast the bread. MAKES TWELVE TO EIGHTEEN POOR BOYS.\n\nMuffuletta\n\n_Muffulettas are right up there with poor boys in popularity and goodness among local sandwiches. What makes them special is the dressing. It's called olive salad, and it's something like antipasto, made by marinating not only olives but also a host of other vegetables in olive oil, a little vinegar, and a lot of garlic and herbs. This recipe starts from scratch, but you can use prepared Italian giardiniera in place of the non-olive vegetables._\n\n_The muffuletta is filled with as many as three meats and three cheeses, all sliced very thin. Ham and Genoa salami are essential; mortadella is optional but desirable. Mozzarella, provolone, and Swiss cheese can be used in any combination. The best bread to use is the muffuletta loaf made by the United Bakery, an old, small company whose limited output never satisfies the demand. Any crusty round loaf with a medium-light texture will do._\n\n_The great controversy concerning muffulettas is whether they should be heated or not. The current vogue is to do so until the cheeses melt. My take is that this throws off the flavors and textures of everything and that a room-temperature muffuletta is superior._\n\nOLIVE SALAD\n\n2 medium carrots, sliced into \u00bc-inch-thick rounds\n\n1 cup cauliflower florets\n\n1 small red bell pepper\n\n16 large green olives, pitted\n\n2 cups medium green olives, pitted\n\n1 cup brine-cured black olives, pitted\n\n1\u00bd cups extra-virgin olive oil\n\n\u00bc cup red wine vinegar\n\n\u00bc cup brining juice from the olive jar\n\n6 large cloves garlic, chopped\n\n4 ribs celery, chopped\n\n\u00bc cup (a small jar) capers\n\n10 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, chopped\n\n2 tsp. dried oregano\n\n1 tsp. dried basil\n\n\u00bd tsp. crushed red pepper flakes\n\nSANDWICH\n\n3 loaves muffuletta bread, or other medium-texture loaf, 8 inches in diameter\n\n1 lb. lean, smoked ham (I recommend the local Chisesi ham), thinly sliced\n\n1 lb. Genoa salami, thinly sliced\n\n\u00bd lb. mortadella (optional), thinly sliced\n\n2 lb. total of at least 2 of these cheeses: mozzarella, provolone, or Swiss, thinly sliced\n\n1. Bring a small pot of water to a boil. Boil the carrots and cauliflower until crisptender, about 5 minutes. Rinse with cold water, drain, and set aside.\n\n2. Roast the bell pepper under a broiler until the skin turns black and blistered in spots. Keep turning until the entire exterior is that way. Remove, cool, peel, and remove stem and seeds. Cut into \u00bd x 1-inch pieces and set aside.\n\n3. With a knife (not a food processor), coarsely chop the olives. It's okay if some of the olives are cut into just 2 pieces or not at all. Transfer the olives to a large non-metallic bowl. Add all of the remaining olive salad ingredients and mix well. Cover and refrigerate for at least a day; a week is better (stored in jars).\n\n4. To make the sandwich: Cut each loaf in half crosswise and spoon olive salad with a lot of the marinating oil onto both halves. Put 3\u20134 slices (or more) of each of the meats and cheeses onto the bottom half. Cover with the top half of the loaf and cut each sandwich into quarters. Figure 1\u20132 quarters per person, but know that it is hard to stop eating muffulettas, even if you're full. SERVES SIX TO TEN.\n\nGrilled Pizza\n\n_When we have a pizza party, we often make it an outdoor event and bake the pizzas on the grill. This works better than you can possibly imagine. You don't even have to put the top down on the grill, unless it's a windy, cold day. Any pizza topping works, except one: pepperoni, which needs heat from above, just sits there getting flaccid and unpleasant. Spinach and other vegetable pizzas are particularly good done on the grill._\n\n_The best way to make pizza dough is in a big, strong mixer (like a KitchenAid) with the dough-hook attachment. You can also do it, in batches, in a large food processor, or you can make the dough manually. I have instructions for both mixer and manual methods._\n\n_This pizza crust can also be baked in the oven. It's especially good using a thick pizza stone, heated for a half-hour in the oven before the first pizza goes on._\n\n1 package active dry yeast\n\n1 tsp. sugar\n\n3\u00bd cups bread flour\n\n1 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n1\u00bd cups Fresh Pizza Sauce (see recipe, this page)\n\n2 lb. mozzarella cheese, grated\n\nYour choice of pizza toppings\n\n1. In a small bowl, stir the yeast and sugar into 1 cup of warm water. Allow the yeast to come alive for 5 minutes.\n\n2. Mixer method: Combine the flour, oil, and salt in the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the dough-hook attachment. Add the yeast-water mixture and mix on low speed until the dough pulls away from the sides of the mixer bowl. If necessary, add more water, a little at a time, to get a smooth, but not sticky, dough.\n\nHand method: Pile the flour on a clean work surface. Make a depression in the center and add the oil and salt. Add the yeast-water mixture, a little at a time, and mix to form a dough. Knead the dough on a lightly floured surface until dough is smooth but not sticky, about 15 minutes. Roll dough ball away from you while, with the same motion, tearing it in half. Put it back together and repeat a few times.\n\n3. Place the dough on an oiled baking sheet or pizza pan, cover it with a damp, clean towel, and let it rise for 1\u00bd hours in a warm, moist place. (The inside of an oven, turned on for 1 minute, then turned off, works well.) When the dough is double its original size, punch it down and divide it into 6 balls. Flatten each slightly, sprinkle with some flour, and return to the oiled pan, well apart. Let them rise again, covered, for about 30 minutes.\n\n4. Fire up the grill to get a medium-high heat. Roll each piece of dough out to a 12-inch round. Place the dough on the grill and let it bake for 1\u20132 minutes, or until lightly browned on the bottom. (It may balloon; this is okay.) Turn the crust over and top with some of the sauce, cheese, and other toppings of your choice. Continue to grill the pizza for 3\u20135 minutes until the cheese melts. You do not need to close the top of the grill. Slice and serve immediately. MAKES SIX 12-INCH PIZZAS.\n\nHot Bacon Shrimp\n\n_Near as I can tell, this dish infiltrated New Orleans from the West Coast and caught on in a wide variety of restaurants. It's a great party dish: big shrimp butterflied and stuffed with a mixture of mozzarella cheese and jalape\u00f1o, wrapped in bacon, and broiled until crispy. Its goodness owes much to the quality of the shrimp we have in New Orleans. Make a million of these: Once people start eating them, they won't be able to stop._\n\n24 large (16\u201320 count) shrimp, peeled, with tail shell intact, and deveined\n\n8 oz. mozzarella cheese\n\n12 slices bacon, cooked until lightly browned but not crisp\n\n2 Tbsp. chopped jalape\u00f1o pepper\n\n1. Preheat the broiler. Wash the shrimp and pat dry. Butterfly the shrimp. Cut the cheese into pieces a little smaller than the shrimp. Cut each piece of bacon in half.\n\n2. Fill the center of each shrimp with about \u00bc teaspoon chopped jalape\u00f1o, top each with a piece of cheese, and wrap a piece of bacon around all. Secure the bacon with a toothpick.\n\n3. Place the shrimp on a baking sheet and broil until they turn pink. Turn the shrimp and return to the broiler until the cheese begins to melt. Serve immediately. MAKES TWENTY-FOUR.\n\nMary Ann's Spinach and Mushroom Dip\n\n_My wife, Mary Ann, loves to improvise dips. This is the best one she's ever made._\n\n3 Tbsp. butter\n\n1 bunch of green onions, chopped\n\n8 oz. small button mushrooms, sliced\n\nOne 10-oz. bag of fresh spinach, picked and washed\n\n\u2153 cup heavy whipping cream\n\n12 oz. cream cheese, at room temperature\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\nDash of Tabasco Green Pepper Sauce\n\n1. Melt the butter in a skillet over medium-high heat. Add the green onions and saut\u00e9 until soft. Add the mushrooms, spinach, and \u00bc cup of water, and cook until the liquid is evaporated. Transfer the mixture to a cutting board and chop.\n\n2. Return the mushroom-spinach mixture to the skillet. Add the cream and simmer over medium heat, stirring occasionally, for about 3 minutes. Turn off the heat.\n\n3. Cut the cream cheese into pieces and stir into the pan contents. Season to taste with salt, pepper, and Tabasco. Serve with croutons, pita crisps, or other dippable food. MAKES THREE CUPS.\n\nTom's Hamburger Sauce\n\n_This is what I slather all over the hamburgers I make at home. Aficionados of Bud's Broiler, an old local chain of charcoal-broiled hamburger joints around New Orleans, may note that this is a bit similar to the sauce on Bud's Number One._\n\n\u00bd cup mayonnaise\n\n3 Tbsp. dill relish, well drained\n\n2 Tbsp. smoke-flavored barbecue sauce\n\n1 tsp. Tabasco Chipotle Pepper Sauce\n\nMix all of the ingredients together in a bowl. Refrigerate what you don't use immediately. MAKES ABOUT A HALF CUP.\n\n_Breakfast_\n\nBeignets\n\nCalas\n\nGrillades and Grits\n\nAline's Grits and Eggs\n\nLost Bread\n\nMary Leigh's Buttermilk Biscuits\n\nCreole Cream Cheese\n\nBelgian Waffles\n\nShirred Eggs with Crabmeat Remick\n\nA\n\nWhen Brennan's invented its grand all-morning breakfast, it started an entirely new tradition of eating in New Orleans and elsewhere. Any chef attempting to make his breakfast or brunch menu distinctive felt compelled to invent his share of poached egg dishes with something interesting underneath them and a convincing (usually rich) sauce overhead. There must be hundreds of them now.\n\nBefore that vogue came along, however, New Orleans already had its fair share of unique breakfast dishes. Calas, Creole cream cheese, and grillades and grits go back a long way. They were on the road to extinction when chefs, looking for bits of authentic heritage to incorporate into their menus, revived them. These traditional breakfast dishes struck a chord with those of us who remember our parents eating them but never took up the Creole cream cheese or grillades habit ourselves. It was eye-opening to discover why our forebears liked those Creole breakfast items so much: they're simply delicious.\n\nAnd you can't talk about breakfast in New Orleans without beignets, the partner to our caf\u00e9 au lait for a century and a half now. When the Morning Call and the Caf\u00e9 du Monde began making beignets again a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina, it made news nationwide. Some things are indispensable.\n\nBeignets\n\n_Beignets are a distinctive part of the New Orleans breakfast, although they're enjoyed even more as a late-night snack. Our beignet is a square of straightforward dough, fried until it puffs up and becomes golden brown. It's covered with confectioners' sugar, placed on a plate with two more of its kind, and sent to the table or counter, where the person who ordered it is already sipping caf\u00e9 au lait._\n\n_The best beignets have two qualities that rarely come together: They're doughy enough that there's more than just air inside, but they're not so heavy that they sink to the bottom of the fryer. The beignets in the French Market are made with a yeast dough, which is fine for a large operation but too involved for home use. I prefer something similar to a biscuit dough._\n\n2 cups self-rising flour\n\n3 Tbsp. Crisco\n\n1 Tbsp. sugar\n\nVegetable oil, for frying\n\n1 cup confectioners' sugar, sifted\n\n1. Combine the flour and Crisco in a bowl with a wire whisk until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal, with perhaps a few lumps here and there.\n\n2. Warm \u00be cup of water in the microwave oven until barely warm to the touch. Pour the water into a large bowl, add the sugar, and stir until dissolved. Add the flour mixture and blend it with a kitchen fork. Work the dough as little as possible.\n\n3. Turn the dough out on a clean counter and dust with a little flour. Roll it out to a uniform thickness of about \u00bc inch. Cut into rectangles about 2 x 4 inches. Let sit for a couple of minutes while you heat the oil.\n\n4. Pour oil to a depth of 1 inch in a large, deep skillet and heat to about 325 degrees F. When the beignet dough squares have softened and puffed up a little, drop 4\u20136 at a time into the hot oil and fry until light brown. Turn once and fry the other side. Drain on paper towels. It's all right to fry the misshapen dough pieces from the edge of the dough sheet.\n\n5. Dust with confectioners' sugar and serve hot. MAKES TWELVE TO FIFTEEN BEIGNETS.\n\nCalas\n\n_In a time prior to the emergence of my consciousness, horse-drawn carts plying the streets of New Orleans sold these wonderful, aromatic rice cakes. They were so popular in the early part of the last century that one of my oldest aunts was nicknamed Cala. They have never been widely available in restaurants; the Old Coffee Pot on St. Peter Street has kept their memory alive almost single-handedly. Calas make a great breakfast or snack. Here's a recipe derived from one that a radio listener, who thinks it came from his grandmother, sent me._\n\n1 package active dry yeast\n\n1\u00bd cups cooked, cooled rice, preferably short-grain\n\n3 eggs, beaten\n\n1\u00bc cups rice flour\n\n\u00bd cup light brown sugar\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n1 tsp. cinnamon\n\n\u215b tsp. nutmeg\n\nVegetable oil, for frying\n\nConfectioners' sugar, or maple or cane syrup\n\n1. The night before you plan to make these, dissolve the yeast into \u00bc cup of warm water. Mix with the rice in a bowl. Cover and let stand in a warm place overnight.\n\n2. The next morning, blend the eggs, rice flour, brown sugar, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg into the rice-yeast mixture. Add just enough water, a little at a time, to incorporate all of the dry ingredients. (You may not need any.)\n\n3. Pour oil to a depth of 1 inch in a large, deep skillet and heat the oil to 375 degrees F. Working in batches, use a spoon to scoop the rice mixture into Ping-Pong\u2013size balls. Drop them into the hot oil and fry until darkish brown, about 3 minutes. Drain on paper towels.\n\n4. Serve hot, sprinkled with confectioners' sugar. You can also serve calas with syrup. MAKES TWO OR THREE DOZEN.\n\nGrillades and Grits\n\n_This is the most distinctive of Creole breakfast dishes. Despite its name, the meat in this dish is almost never grilled. Restaurants tend to simplify and sanitize grillades and grits. What I'm giving you here is the old, bothersome, incomparably delicious version, simmered to tenderness for a long time. You don't even need to use veal\u2014calf or baby beef is fine._\n\n2 lb. veal or calf round\n\n\u00bd cup flour\n\n1\u00bd tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\n\u00bc cup vegetable oil\n\n1 large yellow onion, chopped\n\n1 very ripe green bell pepper, seeded and coarsely chopped\n\n2 ribs celery, coarsely chopped\n\n2 cloves garlic, chopped\n\nOne 28-oz. can whole tomatoes, juice reserved\n\n1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n2 cups veal stock (see recipe, this page)\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried thyme\n\nFreshly ground black pepper to taste\n\n\u00be cup (uncooked) stone-ground grits\n\n2 Tbsp. butter\n\n1. Cut the meat into 1 x 2-inch rectangles, each about \u00bd inch thick. Combine the flour, Creole seasoning, and the \u00bd teaspoon of salt in a bowl. Dust the veal cubes with the seasoned flour. Reserve the remainder of the flour. Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a large, heavy pot over high heat. Add the veal and sear until well browned. Remove the veal and reserve.\n\n2. Make a medium-dark roux by adding the remaining oil to the pot. Add the reserved seasoned flour and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture turns the color of an old penny. Reduce the heat to low and quickly add the onion, bell pepper, celery, and garlic, and cook, stirring constantly, until the onion turns translucent.\n\n3. Crush the tomatoes with your fingers. Add them to the pot, along with \u00bd cup of juice from the can and the Worcestershire sauce. Bring to a light boil. Return the veal to the pot, add the stock and thyme, and simmer slowly until the sauce is thick enough to coat a spoon. Taste the sauce and add salt and pepper, as necessary.\n\n4. Cook the grits according to package directions. Add the butter when the grits are near desired thickness. Serve grillades with lots of sauce and grits on the side. SERVES FOUR.\n\nAline's Grits and Eggs\n\n_When I was a kid, I didn't like eggs. My mother thought this was such a deficiency in my diet that she created a version of grits in which eggs are cleverly\u2014and deliciously\u2014hidden. I liked grits, so I downed this with delight. She topped the concoction with applesauce. I had a glass of chocolate milk on the side to cool my throat if I ate the lava-like grits too fast. I still love this entire ensemble, including the chocolate milk. The eggs not only enrich the flavor of the grits, but give them a lighter texture._\n\n\u00be cup (uncooked) stone-ground white grits\n\n2 Tbsp. butter\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n3 egg yolks, beaten\n\n\u00bd cup applesauce\n\n1. Bring 3\u00bd cups water to a boil in a saucepan. Stir in the grits, butter, and salt. Lower the heat to the lowest setting. Cook the grits, stirring every now and then, for about 15 minutes, until they thicken. Add a little more water if the grits are so thick that a furrow formed by a spoon doesn't fill back in almost entirely in a few seconds.\n\n2. When the grits are cooked, remove them from the heat and rapidly stir in the egg yolks, until the grits are uniformly yellow. The heat of the grits will cook the eggs instantly.\n\n3. Serve the grits in a bowl and top with 2 tablespoons of applesauce. Add more applesauce as you eat. MAKES TWO MAIN BREAKFAST DISHES OR FOUR SIDE DISHES.\n\nLost Bread\n\nPain perdu, _as the Old Creoles like my mother called it, got its name from the day-old stale French bread used to make it. Lost for most purposes to which French bread is usually put, these crusts are soaked in eggs and milk, fried or grilled, and served for breakfast. It is, you've noticed, quite like French toast but a good deal richer._\n\n_This is another one of those dishes for which my mother's version remains definitive for me. She soaked the bread in the custard until it was almost falling apart and then (hold your breath) deep-fried it. The most outstanding characteristic of this stuff is its oozy richness. It is not oily in any way._\n\n4 eggs\n\n\u00bd cup half-and-half\n\n2 Tbsp. sugar\n\n1 Tbsp. vanilla extract\n\n1 tsp. cinnamon\n\n2 dashes of nutmeg\n\n18 slices stale French bread, about \u00be inch thick\n\n1 cup vegetable oil\n\nConfectioners' sugar\n\n1. Whisk the eggs, half-and-half, sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg together in a wide bowl. Add the bread and soak the slices while you heat the oil.\n\n2. Heat the oil in a large cast-iron skillet to about 350 degrees F.\n\n3. Lower 2 pieces of bread at a time into the oil and fry about 2 minutes on each side. Let the bread cook to a darker brown than your instincts might tell you.\n\n4. Remove the lost bread as it's cooked and drain it on paper towels. Use another towel to blot the excess oil from the top. Keep the bread pieces warm in a 200-degree-F oven. Continue cooking the rest of the bread in small batches, allowing the temperature of the oil to recover between batches.\n\n5. Serve immediately with confectioners' sugar. Warn your guests about the lavalike heat on the inside! SERVES SIX TO EIGHT.\n\nMary Leigh's Buttermilk Biscuits\n\n_Homemade buttermilk biscuits are our favorite breakfast at the Cool Water Ranch. For years we've made them almost every weekend. When my daughter, Mary Leigh, was still very small, she started helping me. Now she's completely taken over the job. The recipe is not revolutionary. There are only three ingredients: self-rising flour (White Lily is by far the best), buttermilk, and butter. (We used to use Crisco, but what we now know about trans fats made me convert to butter as the shortening.)_\n\n6 Tbsp. unsalted butter, softened\n\n3 cups self-rising flour\n\n1\u00bd cups buttermilk\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 475 degrees F. Cut the butter into the flour with a wire whisk until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal. A few small lumps are okay.\n\n2. Blend in the buttermilk with light strokes of a kitchen fork. Continue lightly blending until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Add a little more milk, if necessary, to work all the dry flour at the bottom into a sticky, thoroughly damp dough.\n\n3. Lightly grease a baking sheet or pizza pan with butter or shortening. Spoon out the dough with a large spoon into lumps about 3 inches high and 3\u20134 inches in diameter and drop them about 1 inch apart on the prepared baking sheet or pizza pan. Dip your fingers in water and mound the dough up a bit if necessary.\n\n4. Bake until the little peaks on the biscuits start to brown, 10\u201314 minutes. Don't aim for a dark overall brown; that indicates overbaking. MAKES SIX TO TEN BISCUITS.\n\nCreole Cream Cheese\n\n_Creole cream cheese was once a widely eaten favorite, served most often for breakfast with half-and-half and sugar or fancied up with fresh fruit\u2014strawberries being the classic. It was available in every store, sometimes from several sources. Then it came close to disappearing completely. In the last few years, some small dairies on the North Shore\u2014Mauthe's and Smith's\u2014have begun making it again._\n\n_Creole cream cheese is clabber\u2014the solid part of milk that has turned and separated. That's it! All you have to do is control the separation, and you're there. Here's how to do it\u2014but I will add that you're probably better off buying the ready-made Creole cream cheese if you can find it._\n\n1 gallon low-fat milk\n\n1 cup buttermilk\n\n\u00bc tablet or 6\u20138 drops rennet (available at natural foods stores)\n\n1. Combine the milk and buttermilk in a large bowl and add the rennet. (If using rennet tablet, dissolve it in about a tablespoon of warm water before adding it to the milk.) Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and allow to stand at cool room temperature for 24 hours.\n\n2. The next day, the milk should have separated. Place a large sieve over a wide bowl. The bottom of the sieve should be at least 2 inches above the bottom of the bowl. Pour the clabbered milk into the sieve. Wrap the whole thing with plastic wrap and let it drain for another day.\n\n3. On the third day, pour off the liquid from the bowl and set the sieve and its contents on a clean bowl or pan. (There won't be as much liquid now, so the bowl doesn't have to be as large as the first one.) Cover again and store in the refrigerator for one more day.\n\n4. On the fourth day, the Creole cream cheese is ready to be eaten or packaged in plastic containers. It can also be frozen. The classic way to eat it is doused with half-and-half and sugar to taste. MAKES ABOUT A QUART.\n\nBelgian Waffles\n\n_The distinguishing feature of a Belgian waffle is that its batter is lightened with foamed egg whites. This gives it a wonderful, airy quality that's best appreciated when the waffle iron has big squares. To make a waffle come out crisp, put a substantial amount of butter into the batter. That increases the temperature at the point where the batter meets the iron._\n\n1 cup self-rising flour\n\n3 Tbsp. sugar\n\nGenerous pinch of cinnamon\n\n2 eggs, separated\n\n1 cup milk, lukewarm\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter, melted\n\n1 tsp. vanilla extract\n\nPinch of cream of tartar\n\nPure maple syrup\n\n1. Heat a waffle iron and let it get very hot.\n\n2. Use a fork to mix the flour, sugar, and cinnamon together in a medium bowl.\n\n3. In a second, larger bowl, beat the egg yolks. Add the milk, whisk in the melted butter, then add the vanilla.\n\n4. Pour the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and whisk until the batter is almost blended but still has some lumps. The batter should be very thick, but if it's so thick that it won't pour at all, add a little water.\n\n5. In a clean bowl and using a clean whisk or beater, whip the egg whites with the cream of tartar until soft peaks form. Spoon the egg whites into the batter and, with a wooden spoon, fold them in carefully, without overblending.\n\n6. Pour some of the batter into the waffle iron and cook until crisp. Serve with pure maple syrup. MAKES FOUR TO SIX WAFFLES.\n\nShirred Eggs with Crabmeat Remick\n\n_The biggest hit we've ever had at our Sunday brunches is this recipe, which turns a classic crabmeat appetizer into a terrific egg dish. You don't see shirred eggs very often, even in restaurants, but I love the style. The technique is to cook the eggs with powerful heat from above after setting them on something savory._\n\nSAUCE\n\n\u00bd cup mayonnaise\n\n\u00bc cup bottled chili sauce\n\n1 Tbsp. Creole mustard\n\n1 Tbsp. tarragon vinegar\n\n\u00bd tsp. Tabasco\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\nCRABMEAT AND EGGS\n\n6 thick slices smoky bacon\n\n1 lb. jumbo lump crabmeat\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n12 eggs\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Whisk together the sauce ingredients in a bowl and set aside.\n\n2. Cut the bacon into squares and fry until crisp. Drain very well and set aside.\n\n3. Divide the crabmeat among 6 small, shallow gratin dishes. Sprinkle with the lemon juice and bake until heated through, about 5 minutes.\n\n4. Top each baking dish with an equal portion of crumbled bacon. Spoon in enough of the sauce to cover the bacon and the crab. Then carefully break 2 eggs onto each dish, keeping the yolks whole.\n\n5. Turn the oven up to broil. Put the baking dishes in the broiler and cook until the eggs have set. Serve immediately with a warning that the dish is mouth-searingly hot. SERVES SIX.\n\n_Desserts and Baked Goods_\n\nBread Pudding Alaska\n\nBourbon Whiskey Sauce for Bread Pudding\n\nPumpkin and Pecan Bread Pudding\n\nCr\u00e8me Anglaise\n\nCr\u00e8me Caramel\n\nCr\u00e8me Br\u00fbl\u00e9e\n\nOrange Cheesecake\n\nPear Clafoutis\n\nOrange Icebox Pie\n\nPecan Pie\n\nStrawberry Shortcakes\n\nBananas Foster\n\nRiz au Lait\n\nSatsuma (Mandarin) Granita\n\nChocolate and Caf\u00e9 au Lait Mousse\n\nHeavenly Hash, New Orleans Style\n\nOat Bran and Apple Muffins\n\nBanana\u2013Peanut Butter Bread\n\nHam and Goat Cheese Bread\n\nJalape\u00f1o-Cheese Cornbread\n\nA\n\nOne of the few things the New Orleans palate has in common with that of the rest of the South is a too-well-developed taste for sweets. We tend to use sugar as liberally in our desserts as we use salt and pepper in our savory dishes.\n\nWe also have a taste for variations on custards. Without doubt, the most popular of all New Orleans desserts is bread pudding. It's found on almost every restaurant's dessert menu, from the grubbiest neighborhood hangout to the grandest gourmet establishment. (It's interesting that the best versions are distributed uniformly throughout that whole spectrum.) Unlike the spartan bread puddings served elsewhere, the New Orleans version is rich and glorious.\n\nIn a time when flaming desserts are outmoded in most places, the enduring popularity of one great local original\u2014bananas Foster\u2014assures us that the fires will be burning at meal's end for many more years to come.\n\nPralines have been much loved in New Orleans for as long as sugar has been grown in the area (centuries). The many makers of pralines around town sell a much better product than you would be able to make at home. The same is true of king cake, a sweet yeast bread decorated with purple, green, and gold sugar. It's a lot of work to make yourself, but it's widely and cheaply available during the Carnival season as sliced bread.\n\nI omit yet another difficult recipe: New Orleans\u2013style French bread, a uniquely light loaf made with unusual yeasts and specialty ovens. It's almost impossible to reproduce at home. But I did include a few breads and muffins that my readers and radio listeners have liked a lot over the years.\n\nBread Pudding Alaska\n\n_Bread pudding is generally thought of as a poor person's dessert. But the rich New Orleans version is a thing apart, served in even the most expensive restaurants in town. This is an adaptation of my mother's bread pudding. She topped hers with meringue. I surround mine with it, like a baked Alaska. I also like making individual puddings in muffin tins. I unmold them onto baking dishes before adding the meringue and toasting it until browned._\n\nBREAD PUDDING\n\n5 Tbsp. butter, softened\n\n\u00be cup sugar\n\n4 cups half-and-half, warmed\n\n4 Tbsp. vanilla extract\n\n2 Tbsp. cinnamon\n\n5 eggs, separated\n\n1 loaf French bread, torn into chunks\n\n\u00bd cup white raisins\n\nMERINGUE\n\n5 egg whites (reserved from first step)\n\n\u00bc tsp. cream of tartar\n\n\u2153 cup sugar\n\n1 Tbsp. vanilla extract\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F. Beat 4 tablespoons of the butter and the sugar together until well creamed. Add the half-and-half, vanilla, cinnamon, and egg yolks (reserve the whites for the meringue), and mix until the custard is well combined. Add just enough bread so that the mixture remains very juicy. Stir in the raisins.\n\n2. Grease 12 pockets in a muffin tin with the remaining butter. Spoon the pudding mixture into the greased pockets, filling each just barely to the top. Set the muffin tin in a baking pan and add enough warm water to come halfway up the sides of the tin. Bake for 45 minutes. Remove and cool.\n\n3. In a clean, grease-free bowl, beat the egg whites and cream of tartar at high speed until peaks begin to form. Slowly add the sugar, then the vanilla, until well blended.\n\n4. After the bread pudding has cooled for 15 minutes, raise the oven temperature to 350 degrees F. Carefully lift each pudding out of the tin and place one on each of 12 individual baking dishes. Using a rubber spatula, cover the puddings with a thick layer of meringue. Little swirls and peaks are desirable. Bake until the meringue is browned, about 5 minutes. Serve immediately. SERVES TWELVE.\n\nBourbon Whiskey Sauce for Bread Pudding\n\n_The best sauces for bread pudding are those that are in essence a combination of afterdinner drink and dessert. This sauce is the kind you'd find in restaurants, but it's not often made at home. You can substitute rum or brandy for the whiskey if you like, or perhaps even vanilla if you'd prefer it to be nonalcoholic (although most vanilla does contain alcohol)._\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) unsalted butter\n\n1 cup sugar\n\n1 Tbsp. orange juice, strained\n\n1 egg\n\n\u00bc cup (or more to taste) bourbon, or 1 tsp. vanilla extract\n\n1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium-low heat. Add the sugar, orange juice, and \u00bc cup of water, and cook until the sugar is completely dissolved. Remove from heat.\n\n2. Beat the egg well in a bowl. Add the butter-sugar mixture, about a tablespoon at a time, whisking constantly. (You can pick up the pace after half of the buttersugar is added.) Add the bourbon or vanilla and whisk until smooth. MAKES ABOUT ONE AND HALF CUPS.\n\nPumpkin and Pecan Bread Pudding\n\n_Even by New Orleans standards, this is no ordinary bread pudding. Rich with the fall flavors of pumpkin and pecan, this version of bread pudding is best served not scooped into bowls, but sliced like a cake and elegantly presented on plates._\n\n\u00be cup sugar\n\n3 whole eggs\n\n3 egg yolks\n\n4 cups half-and-half\n\n2 cups heavy whipping cream\n\n2 Tbsp. vanilla extract\n\nOne 16-oz. can solid-pack canned pumpkin (the fresh jack-o'-lantern pumpkins won't work)\n\n2 Tbsp. cinnamon\n\n\u00bc tsp. nutmeg\n\n2 Tbsp. butter\n\n1 loaf stale French bread, cut into \u00bd-inch-thick slices\n\n1 cup pecan pieces\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 250 degrees F. Whisk the sugar, whole eggs and yolks, halfand-half, cream, and vanilla in a large bowl to make a smooth custard. Combine the pumpkin, cinnamon, nutmeg, and \u00bd cup of the custard mixture in another bowl.\n\n2. Generously grease the insides of two 10-inch cake pans with the butter. Line the perimeters of each pan with the smallest slices of bread, then cover the bottom of each with an overlapping bread layer. Pour one-sixth of the custard mixture over the bread to soak it. Spread one-fourth of the pumpkin over the bread in each pan, then sprinkle about one-fourth of the pecans over the pumpkin. Repeat the process in the same order, ending with a layer of bread, pecans, and a final soaking with the custard.\n\n3. Bake for about 1\u00bd hours. The pudding will rise a great deal, but it will fall again when you take it out of the oven. Remove and cool. Cut into pie-style slices and serve either warm or cold. SERVES TWELVE.\n\nCr\u00e8me Anglaise\n\n_Cr\u00e8me Anglaise, or custard sauce, is served with many kinds of desserts, but I like it best with bread pudding and intense chocolate tortes\u2014particularly those with raspberries. You can add a little rum or brandy to this at the end to spike it up a little. But do this strictly to taste\u2014don't guess._\n\n1 cup heavy whipping cream\n\n3 Tbsp. sugar\n\n4 egg yolks\n\n\u00bc tsp. vanilla extract\n\n1. Combine the cream and 1 tablespoon of the sugar in a saucepan and bring to a simmer, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Keep warm on low heat.\n\n2. Use an electric mixer to beat the egg yolks with the remaining sugar until thick and pale yellow. Whisk about half of the hot cream into the eggs and continue whisking until smooth.\n\n3. Return the egg mixture to the saucepan. Add the vanilla and cook over mediumlow heat, whisking frequently, until the sauce has a medium-thick consistency. MAKES ABOUT A CUP AND A HALF OF SAUCE.\n\nCr\u00e8me Caramel\n\n_In this clasic caramel custard, the custard part is easy. The caramel sauce is only a little harder. The most important matter of all is to bake the custards gently, in a water bath, so as not to overbake them._\n\nCARAMEL\n\n1 cup sugar\n\n3 Tbsp. water\n\nCUSTARD\n\n8 whole eggs\n\n4 egg yolks\n\n4 cups whole milk\n\n1\u00bc cups sugar\n\n2 Tbsp. vanilla extract\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.\n\n2. To make the caramel: Cook the sugar and water together in a _white_ enamel saucepan over medium-high heat until you see the first bit of browning. Brush any sugar crystals off the sides of the pan with a wet brush to prevent regranulation. The sugar is now extremely hot\u2014about 350 degrees F\u2014so be careful. It can burn very quickly. Reduce the heat to medium and continue to cook, carefully swirling it around until the center of the pan is light brown. Remove it from the heat immediately. The caramel will continue to cook a bit from its own heat. Divide the caramel among eight 6-ounce custard cups and swirl the cups around to coat the sides.\n\n3. To make the custard: Whisk all of the custard ingredients together in a bowl until smooth. Strain the mixture into a clean saucepan. Cook the custard over mediumlow heat, stirring constantly, until it feels barely warm to the touch. Pour the custard into the custard cups over the caramel sauce. Arrange the custard cups 1 inch apart in a baking pan and add enough hot water to come halfway up the sides of the cups. Bake until the custard has just set and the tops are lightly browned, about 30 minutes.\n\n4. Remove the cups from the water bath and allow to cool at room temperature for about 15 minutes, then refrigerate until well chilled. Unmold onto dessert plates, along with all of the caramel sauce. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nCr\u00e8me Br\u00fbl\u00e9e\n\n_Cr\u00e8me br\u00fbl\u00e9e appeared in New Orleans in the early 1980s (Arnaud's served the first one), and over the years, it supplanted the once universal caramel custard. It's now on almost every non-Asian menu in the city. The difference between cr\u00e8me br\u00fbl\u00e9e and cr\u00e8me caramel is that the former is made with cream and has the sugar crusted on top; the latter is made with milk and has sugar caramelized into a syrup at the bottom of the baking cup._\n\n_Cr\u00e8me br\u00fbl\u00e9e must be baked very carefully and slowly, or it will not reach its proper semiflowing state. You can't do it in standard custard cups; much better are shallow (an inch or so deep) glass or ceramic ramekins or gratin dishes._\n\n_It is also essential to insulate the bottoms of the dishes from the pan they're sitting on. Those air-insulated baking pans work well. If you don't have one, you can get the same effect by setting a wet dish towel in the bottom._\n\n\u00bd cup light brown sugar\n\n4 cups heavy whipping cream\n\n9 egg yolks\n\n\u2154 cup sugar\n\n4\u00bd tsp. vanilla extract\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.\n\n2. The first step is not essential but does give an extra measure of elegance. Spread the brown sugar out, breaking all the lumps, on a big plate. Put it into the microwave for 10 minutes at 10 percent power, then let it cool for 30 minutes. This will remove the excess moisture from the brown sugar and keep it from turning to syrup when you blast it later.\n\n3. Combine \u00bc cup of the cream and the egg yolks in a metal bowl and whisk to blend well. Stir in the sugar until nearly dissolved and set aside.\n\n4. Put the remaining cream into a small saucepan and heat it over medium heat until wisps of steam start appearing. (Don't boil even a little.) Stir in the vanilla. Slowly add the warm cream to the bowl with the egg-cream mixture, whisking constantly to prevent curdling. Strain the custard through a fine sieve into a large measuring cup. Pour the custard into the 8 baking dishes. Place the dishes in an air-insulated baking pan or on a wet towel set inside the pan.\n\n5. Pour in enough hot water to come halfway up the sides of the baking dishes. Bake for 30 minutes. Depending on the type of dishes you're using, the custards may have to continue baking for as long as 15 minutes more. The custard should not flow when you tip the baking cup, but it should not be solid, either. Remove the dishes from the pan and set out to cool for 30 minutes, then refrigerate for at least 3 hours, or as long as a day.\n\n6. When ready to serve, preheat the broiler. (Or the broil feature of your toaster oven, which works better for this than you might imagine.) Sprinkle enough brown sugar on top of each custard to completely cover, and run them under the broiler until the sugar melts and caramelizes, about 30 seconds. You might want to turn the dishes so that this happens uniformly. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nOrange Cheesecake\n\n_I learned the basic recipe for this great cheesecake\u2014one that I am forced to make and bring to every family function\u2014from the late Lonnie Knisley. One of the best pastry chefs who ever worked in New Orleans, Lonnie made all the desserts at Andrea's for years. The orange aspect is my wrinkle on it; I have a personal passion for that flavor, and I think it's especially good in this._\n\n_The most time-consuming part of making a cheesecake is cooling it. This must be done slowly and gently, or you'll have cracks in the top._\n\nCRUST\n\n2 packages (out of the 3 in a standard box) cinnamon graham crackers\n\n\u00bc cup sugar\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter, melted\n\nFILLING\n\nFour 8-oz. packages cream cheese, at room temperature\n\n1 cup sugar\n\n1 cup sour cream\n\n4 eggs\n\n1 cup heavy whipping cream\n\n1 Tbsp. vanilla extract\n\n\u00bc cup orange juice\n\n1 tsp. lemon juice\n\nZest of 1 orange\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 275 degrees F. Line the bottom of a 10-inch springform pan with parchment paper.\n\n2. To make the crust: Grind the graham crackers into small crumbs in a food processor. Add the sugar and the butter, and process until the butter has soaked into the crumbs. Dump the crust mixture into the prepared pan and press the crust into the bottom and up the sides of the pan. It is not necessary for the crust to come all the way to the top of the pan. Set aside.\n\n3. To make the filling: Put the cream cheese and sugar into the bowl of a mixer and blend on medium-slow speed until completely blended and fluffy, about 10 minutes. Add the sour cream and mix, scraping down the sides of the bowl until combined. Add the eggs, one at a time, allowing them to blend in completely before adding the next one. (Break each egg into a cup first to make sure it's okay before you add it.) Add the heavy cream, vanilla, the juices, and zest, and mix for another 5 minutes or so, occasionally scraping down the sides of the bowl.\n\n4. Pour the filling into the crust. Set the springform pan into a larger pan (I usually use a pizza pan) and place it in the center of the oven. Pour warm water into the bottom pan. You don't need much\u2014\u00bc inch deep is fine. Bake until you see the cheesecake has just a hint of brown on top, about 90 minutes.\n\n5. Turn the oven off, but leave the cheesecake inside. After an hour, open the door a crack and let the cheesecake cool in the oven another 30 minutes. Remove the cheesecake and let it finish cooling on a counter. After another hour, remove the sides of the springform pan and put the cheesecake into the refrigerator. Chill at least 3 hours before serving. SERVES TWELVE TO SIXTEEN.\n\nPear Clafoutis\n\n_A clafoutis uses a runny version of Belgian waffle batter as a matrix for fruit\u2014classically, cherries\u2014but you can make it with anything sweet. Few fruits would be more appealing in this than ripe pears. When making this recipe, use more pear than you think you'll need. And while the pan will seem to contain too much batter, go with it\u2014it won't run over._\n\n1 Tbsp. butter, softened\n\n4 eggs, separated\n\n\u2154 cup sugar\n\n1 cup buttermilk\n\n1 Tbsp. vanilla extract\n\n1 tsp. almond extract\n\n\u00bc tsp. cinnamon\n\n\u00be cup self-rising flour\n\nPinch of cream of tartar\n\n3\u20134 ripe pears, peeled, cored, and cut into small chunks\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Generously butter a 10-inch cake pan and set aside.\n\n2. Use an electric mixer to beat the egg yolks and sugar together until thick and pale yellow. Add the buttermilk, vanilla and almond extracts, and cinnamon, and beat until well mixed.\n\n3. Add the flour and stir with a kitchen fork, leaving small lumps in the batter.\n\n4. In a clean bowl with clean beaters, beat the egg whites and the cream of tartar until soft peaks form. Fold the beaten whites into the batter. Do not overmix\u2014streaks are okay.\n\n5. Scatter the pears into the prepared pan and pour in the batter. Bake for 8 minutes, then lower the oven to 325 degrees F and continue baking for another 20 minutes. The clafoutis is ready when barely browned on the top. (It can also be refrigerated for a great breakfast.) SERVES EIGHT.\n\nOrange Icebox Pie\n\n_Lemon is the standard flavor for this type of pie, and it's quite wonderful, but I like to surprise people with this variation. Oranges, however, lack the necessary tartness to make it on their own. The solution is to add lemon juice and cut back on the sugar. I make this when I get a batch of oranges that seem unusually sour._\n\n_I include a recipe here for making your own pie shell, but you can buy a prebaked one if you prefer._\n\nCRUST\n\n\u00be cup flour\n\n\u00bc cup sugar 5 Tbsp. butter, softened\n\n1 egg, beaten\n\n1 tsp. vanilla extract\n\n\u215b tsp. salt\n\nFILLING\n\n\u00bd cup sweetened condensed milk\n\n\u00bd cup heavy whipping cream\n\n5 eggs, separated\n\n\u00bd cup freshly squeezed orange juice, strained\n\n\u00bc cup lemon juice, strained\n\nZest of 3 oranges\n\nZest of 1 lemon\n\n\u00bc tsp. cream of tartar\n\n7\u00bd tsp. sugar\n\n\u00bd tsp. orange flower water, or \u00bc tsp. orange extract (optional)\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.\n\n2. To make the crust: Combine the flour and sugar in a bowl. Cut the butter into the dry ingredients with a wire whisk until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal. A few small lumps are okay. Whisk the egg, vanilla, and salt together, and add to the dry ingredients. Gently knead the mixture in the bowl until a dough comes together. Roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface to a 12-inch circle and carefully tuck the crust into a 10-inch pie pan.\n\n3. Line the crust dough with aluminum foil and fill it with dry beans. Blind-bake the crust for 10 minutes. (This step keeps the sides from caving in and the bottom from bubbling up.) Remove the foil and beans, and bake, uncovered, for another 5 minutes. Remove and cool the crust. Reduce the oven heat to 325 degrees F.\n\n4. To make the filling: With an electric mixer, beat the condensed milk, heavy cream, and 5 egg yolks together. Add the orange and lemon juices and half of the orange and lemon zest. Pour this mixture into the pie shell and bake for 20 minutes. Remove and cool. Increase the oven heat to 350 degrees F.\n\n5. When the pie has cooled to room temperature, beat the 5 egg whites in a greasefree bowl with the cream of tartar until peaks begin to form. Add the sugar, a little at a time, until completely blended. Add the orange flower water or orange extract and continue to beat until stiff but not dry peaks form. Fold in the remaining zest with a rubber spatula to distribute evenly. Spread the meringue on top of the cooled pie.\n\n6. Bake the pie at 350 degrees F until the top is lightly browned, about 5 minutes. Chill for several hours before serving. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nPecan Pie\n\n_Here is my current recipe for pecan pie, arrived at after dozens of changes I've made over the years to an old restaurant recipe. As time has gone on, I've reduced the amount of sugar, lowered the baking temperature, and toasted the pecans. One more thing you need to know: If you decide to warm a piece of this in the microwave, do so for only about 15 seconds. For some reason, the pie superheats and splatters after about 45 seconds._\n\n2 cups coarsely broken pecans\n\n\u00bd cup light Karo syrup\n\n\u00bc cup dark Karo syrup\n\n1 cup light brown sugar\n\n2 whole eggs plus\n\n1 egg yolk\n\n1 egg white\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n1 Tbsp. vanilla extract\n\n1 tsp. flour\n\nPinch of salt\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter, melted\n\nOne 10-inch pie shell, unbaked (see Orange Icebox Pie, this page)\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Spread the pecans out on a baking sheet and bake on the top shelf of the oven until they just begin to brown. Set the pecans aside.\n\n2. In a microwave-safe bowl, combine the syrups, sugar, eggs (minus 1 egg white), lemon juice, vanilla, flour, and salt. Add the butter and microwave the bowl at 20 percent power for about 15 seconds. Stir again and repeat this process until the mixture feels slightly warm to the touch and begins to get thick.\n\n3. Brush the unbaked pie-shell bottom with the reserved egg white. This keeps the crust from getting soggy. Pour the filling into the pie shell. Top with the pecans, pushing them down with a spoon, if necessary, so that all the pecans are at least touching the filling. Bake for 10 minutes, then lower the temperature to 275 degrees F and continue to bake for 30\u201340 minutes more. Cool to room temperature. SERVES EIGHT TO TWELVE.\n\nStrawberry Shortcakes\n\n_A true shortcake is not the sponge cake that's typically used for this famous old dessert, but something a lot like a drop biscuit. We make these all the time, and it's an essential for our Easter parties._\n\nSHORTCAKES\n\n4 cups self-rising flour\n\n\u00be cup sugar\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter, softened\n\n1\u00be cups half-and-half\n\nFILLING\n\n2 cups heavy whipping cream\n\n\u2153 cup sugar\n\n2 pints fresh strawberries, hulled and thinly sliced\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 475 degrees F. Grease a cookie sheet and set aside.\n\n2. To make the shortcakes: Whisk the flour and sugar together in a large bowl. Cut butter into the flour mixture with a wire whisk until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal. A few small lumps are okay.\n\n3. Add the half-and-half with light strokes of a kitchen fork. Continue lightly blending until the dough leaves the sides of the bowl. Add a little more milk, if necessary, to work all of the dry ingredients into a sticky, thoroughly damp dough.\n\n4. Spoon out the dough with a large spoon into lumps about 4 inches in diameter and 2 inches high and drop them about 1 inch apart on the prepared cookie sheet. Bake for 10\u201314 minutes, or until light brown on top. Don't look for a dark brown; that indicates overbaking.\n\n5. To make the filling: Whip the cream in a chilled metal bowl until soft peaks form. Add the sugar and continue whipping until no grittiness remains.\n\n6. Slice the shortcakes in half. Spoon some whipped cream on the bottom half. Add sliced strawberries until they fall off the sides and a little more whipped cream. SERVES TWELVE.\n\nBananas Foster\n\n_This creation of Brennan's is not only widely served around New Orleans\u2014I've seen it almost everywhere in the world I've traveled. It was developed because the Brennans had close friends in the banana business. They asked the restaurant's first chef, Paul Blang\u00e9, to come up with something. Boy, did he ever! Although the dessert is classically prepared and flamed at the table, there's no reason it can't be done without the show._\n\n1 cup light brown sugar\n\n\u00bd stick (4 Tbsp.) butter\n\n4 ripe bananas\n\n2 Tbsp. banana liqueur (optional)\n\n1 tsp. cinnamon\n\n\u00bd cup dark rum (80 proof maximum)\n\n4 large scoops vanilla ice cream\n\n1. Melt the sugar and butter together in a large, flat skillet over medium heat, stirring frequently.\n\n2. Peel the bananas and slice them in quarters\u2014first lengthwise, then across. When the sugar and butter have melted together and begun to bubble, add the bananas and saut\u00e9 until tender. Add banana liqueur, if using, and sprinkle with cinnamon.\n\n3. Add the rum and ignite in the pan (if you like, and if you're prepared for the possibility of a flare-up). Carefully spoon the sauce over the bananas until the flame burns out. Serve immediately over ice cream with lots of sauce. SERVES FOUR.\n\nRiz au Lait\n\n_Rice pudding is a popular dessert throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as in New Orleans (where it's known by the French name_ riz au lait _). It's always better than you think it's going to be. I recommend using short-grain rice, which will absorb more of the sweet liquid and attain a more puddinglike texture. This stuff is pretty good for breakfast, too, especially with some berries on top._\n\n\u00be cup short-grain rice\n\n4 cups whole milk (or half-and-half for a very rich pudding)\n\n\u2154 cup sugar\n\n\u2153 cup golden raisins\n\n2 Tbsp. honey\n\n1 tsp. vanilla extract\n\n\u215b tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. cinnamon\n\nPinch of nutmeg\n\n1. Rinse the rice well, then put it in a heavy saucepan with the milk, sugar, raisins, honey, vanilla, salt, and cinnamon. Bring the mixture to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 25\u201330 minutes, stirring often, until thickened into a pudding consistency.\n\n2. Allow to cool at room temperature or even refrigerate. Sprinkle with a little nutmeg before serving. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nSatsuma (Mandarin) Granita\n\n_During the thirty years that LeRuth's restaurant in Gretna was a glowing house of flavor, it served a pair of fruit ices that tasted more like the fruits involved than the fruits themselves. One of those was what Chef Warren LeRuth called mandarin ice. During the satsuma season (early fall), this is best made with those sweet citrus darlings from Plaquemines Parish._\n\n_You can make this in a pan, freeze it, and scrape it. Or, if you have an ice-cream maker, you can make it as a sorbet in the machine._\n\n1 cup water\n\n\u00bd cup sugar\n\n\u00bc tsp. vanilla extract\n\n\u00bc cup freshly squeezed lemon juice, strained\n\n3 cups freshly squeezed satsuma or mandarin juice, strained\n\n1. Combine the water and sugar in a clean saucepan over medium heat. Stir until the sugar is completely dissolved. (The water doesn't have to come all the way to a boil, but it's okay if it does.) Allow this simple syrup to cool.\n\n2. Add the other ingredients and stir completely. Pour into a 9 by 13-inch metal pan, and put into the freezer. After 20\u201330 minutes, stir the mixture with a fork. Repeat every 20 minutes or so, increasing the frequency a little when the mixture becomes a slush. When the stirring results in dry crystals, you're finished. Cover the pan with plastic wrap and hold in the freezer until serving time. SERVES EIGHT.\n\nChocolate and Caf\u00e9 au Lait Mousse\n\n_I've long been fascinated by the cocoalike flavors in my morning cup of coffee and chicory. It occurred to me that it would be interesting to make chocolate mousse flavored with a jolt of intense New Orleans\u2013style coffee, and indeed it was. Chocolate mousse is best right after being made because the frothy texture disappears after it's refrigerated._\n\n1 lb. Baker's semisweet chocolate\n\n6 eggs, separated\n\n\u2153 cup warm, brewed very dark coffee, preferably coffee and chicory blend\n\n\u00bc cup warm milk \u00bd cup sugar\n\n2 tsp. vanilla extract\n\n1\u00bd cups heavy whipping cream\n\n1. Melt the chocolate in a bowl in a microwave oven in 30-second bursts, stirring between each burst until the chocolate is completely melted and smooth. (This can also be done in a bowl over a pan of boiling water.)\n\n2. In another bowl, whip the egg yolks until they become distinctly lighter in color. Combine the coffee and milk, and add it slowly to the yolks, whisking as you go. Add the chocolate slowly to the egg-and-coffee mixture and whisk well until the mixture is just barely warm and well blended.\n\n3. Beat the egg whites until soft peaks form, then add the sugar and vanilla. Continue beating until stiff. With a rubber spatula, fold the egg whites into the chocolate mixture. Do this gently; don't worry about achieving an absolutely uniform mixture.\n\n4. Whip the heavy cream in a metal bowl. Remember that cream whips best when cold and that if you overwhip, it will break up into butter and buttermilk.\n\n5. If the chocolate mixture is still warm, let it continue to cool to room temperature. Then fold in the whipped cream with the rubber spatula or wooden spoon. Do this gently and keep at it until you have a uniform texture.\n\n6. Spoon the mousse into serving dishes or pipe it in with a pastry bag for a more elegant presentation. If you like, top it with shaved chocolate or a strawberry. SERVES SIX TO EIGHT.\n\nHeavenly Hash, New Orleans Style\n\n_The words \"heavenly hash\" mean only one thing in New Orleans: a chocolate-and-marshmallow candy, studded with almonds, sold in big chunks in the old department stores. (And still, in a more mainstream form, by the local Elmer's Candy Company.) There's really not much to it, as you'll see here._\n\n24 oz. semisweet chocolate\n\n1 cup whole pecans, almonds, or walnuts, or a combination\n\n1 overflowing cup miniature marshmallows\n\n1. Melt the chocolate in a bowl in a microwave oven in 30-second bursts, stirring between each burst until the chocolate is completely melted and smooth. (This can also be done in a bowl over a pan of boiling water.)\n\n2. Pour about half of the chocolate into a pan or baking dish lined with wax paper. Sprinkle the nuts and marshmallows over the chocolate. Cover it all with the rest of the chocolate. Let it cool and harden. To serve, just break into pieces. MAKES ENOUGH TO FILL A LARGE CANDY BOWL.\n\nOat Bran and Apple Muffins\n\n_Remember oat bran muffins? Remember how they were supposed to bring your cholesterol down, so everybody was eating them? Remember the cartoon about the man who stood in front of the three-story oat bran muffin he had to eat to make up for everything he'd eaten before? Well, I fell for that stuff, too, and for a couple of years, I made a batch of oat bran muffins every two or three weeks and ate one every day. It was not unpleasant, actually. These are great with a cup of coffee and chicory with hot milk._\n\nDRY INGREDIENTS\n\n2\u00bd cups oat bran\n\n1 cup self-rising flour\n\n1 tsp. cinnamon\n\nDash of nutmeg\n\n\u00bd cup grated carrots\n\n\u00bd cup pecan pieces\n\n2 medium apples or pears, peeled, cored, and chopped\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\nWET INGREDIENTS\n\n1\u00bc cups buttermilk\n\n6 Tbsp. canola oil\n\n\u00bd cup Steen's cane syrup or molasses\n\n1 Tbsp. honey\n\n1 Tbsp. vanilla extract\n\n2 egg whites\n\n1 egg yolk\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Grease 15\u201318 pockets in muffin tins with nonstick cooking spray.\n\n2. Combine the oat bran, flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg in a bowl and mix well. Add all of the remaining dry ingredients and stir until well mixed.\n\n3. Mix all the wet ingredients in a larger bowl. (Measure the syrup after the oil, so that the syrup doesn't stick to the measuring cup.)\n\n4. Pour the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and, with a minimum of stirring, combine them, making sure the dry ingredients at the bottom get saturated. The batter should be quite wet.\n\n5. Spoon the batter into the prepared tins, filling each pocket three-quarters full. Bang the muffin tins down on a countertop to settle and even out the batter. Bake for 25\u201330 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool. Freeze the muffins you don't plan on eating right away. MAKES FIFTEEN TO EIGHTEEN MUFFINS.\n\nBanana\u2013Peanut Butter Bread\n\n_This was the first hit recipe on my radio show, back in 1988. I remember sending out dozens of copies of it every week for a while. Then the interest faded, just the way it does for hit records on a music station. That didn't make it any less good. It's a terrific loaf of bread that can be eaten during a meal, as dessert, for breakfast, or for a snack._\n\n4 medium, extra-ripe bananas, peeled\n\n\u2153 cup chunky peanut butter\n\n\u00bd stick (\u00bc cup) softened butter\n\n2 eggs\n\n1 tsp. vanilla extract\n\n2 cups flour\n\n\u00bd cup sugar\n\n1 tsp. baking soda\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\n1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Slice the bananas into a blender. Puree until smooth.\n\n2. In a bowl with an electric mixer, beat the peanut butter and butter together until smooth. Beat in eggs until completely blended. Then beat in the pureed bananas and the vanilla.\n\n3. Combine all the dry ingredients. Add to the banana mixture a little at a time, beating until completely blended.\n\n4. Pour batter into a 9 by 5-inch loaf pan. Bake 50 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the center comes out clean.\n\n5. Cool 10 minutes in pan, then turn onto a wire rack to complete cooling. MAKES ONE LOAF.\n\nHam and Goat Cheese Bread\n\n_This is good not only in a basket of breads for the dinner table but also as a tangy breakfast item. You can bake the entire amount of dough in a loaf pan and make one big bread, but I prefer the small muffin-size version. If you can get it, use the New Orleans\u2013made Chisesi ham, which has the perfect taste and texture for this._\n\n1 Tbsp. butter, softened\n\n8 oz. fresh (not aged or feta) goat cheese\n\n4 oz. cream cheese\n\n3 eggs\n\n1\u00bc cups buttermilk\n\n1 tsp. Creole mustard\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\nGenerous pinch of cayenne\n\n\u00bd lb. smoked ham, finely chopped\n\n3 cups unsifted self-rising flour\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Grease 12 muffin-tin pockets or a 9 x 5 x 3-inch loaf pan with the butter.\n\n2. Combine the goat cheese and cream cheese in the bowl of a mixer and mix until fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, while the mixer is running. Wait until the mixture is smooth before adding the next egg. Scrape down the sides of the bowl as you go. Gradually add the buttermilk, mustard, salt, and cayenne, and mix until completely blended.\n\n3. Remove the bowl from the mixer. Fold in the ham, and then stir in the flour using a wooden spoon. The batter will be very wet. Spoon it into the prepared muffin tins, filling each pocket to just below the top, or into the prepared loaf pan.\n\n4. Bake the muffins for 30 minutes, or until puffed and brown. If making a loaf, lower the heat to 350 degrees F and bake for 1 hour. Let the loaf cool completely before attempting to slice. Refrigerate or freeze any unused part of the loaf. MAKES TWELVE MUFFINS OR ONE LOAF.\n\nJalape\u00f1o-Cheese Cornbread\n\n_Chef Paul Prudhomme made this cornbread popular in the early 1980s, although it probably originated in Texas long before then. You can leave out the cheese and the jalape\u00f1os and substitute other things, like corn kernels, bacon, or green onion. Or add_ \u2153 _cup of sugar to make it sweet._\n\n_I prefer self-rising flour for this recipe. I find it to be more convenient, and it gives a superior result, especially with the acidity in the buttermilk to kick it off._\n\n2 cups self-rising yellow cornmeal\n\n1 cup self-rising flour\n\n1 tsp. salt\n\n4 eggs, beaten\n\n1\u00bd cups buttermilk\n\n1\u00bd cups roughly grated sharp Cheddar cheese\n\n2\u20133 fresh jalape\u00f1os, seeded, membranes removed, and chopped\n\n2 Tbsp. vegetable oil\n\n1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. If you have a convection oven, set it on convect.\n\n2. Blend the cornmeal, flour, and salt in a bowl. Combine all of the remaining ingredients, except the oil, in a second bowl. Dump the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and mix completely. If it looks a little stiff, add a little water.\n\n3. Heat the oil in a large cast-iron skillet, tilting the skillet around to coat the entire inner surface. Add the batter to the pan and bang it down on a towel on the countertop. (This evens out the top of the batter.) Place the pan in the oven and bake for about 30 minutes. Check its progress at that point and continue baking until the top is light brown.\n\n4. Allow the cornbread to cool for 5 minutes, then cut into squares. This recipe can also be made as muffins or in those cute little molds that look like ears of corn. SERVES EIGHT TO TEN.\n\n_Drinks_\n\nCaf\u00e9 au Lait\n\nCaf\u00e9 Brulot\n\nMint Julep\n\nOld-Fashioned Cocktail\n\nSimple Syrup\n\nEgg Nog\n\nPing Pong\n\nA\n\nRichard Collin, the city's first restaurant critic and a former history professor of mine, said, \"If someone dies in New Orleans of cirrhosis of the liver, it's considered natural causes.\" That certainly has a ring of truth. Consider this: The only business in New Orleans that never closed during or after Hurricane Katrina was a bar.\n\nNew Orleans has a wide array of distinctive beverages, alcoholic and not. We begin with coffee. Long before gourmet coffee swept across America, New Orleans coffee was in a class by itself. It still is. The classic version is a blend of very dark roast coffee and chicory, brewed so intense that when you swirl it, the sides of the cup stay brown for a few seconds. It's cut with an equal amount of hot milk for caf\u00e9 au lait. Chicory is the root of a variety of endive, roasted and ground. It doesn't really taste like coffee, but the flavor it adds is complementary. The use of chicory in coffee dates back to a coffee shortage in France during the Napoleonic era. The practice spread to New Orleans, where it remained in vogue long after it died out in France.\n\nNew Orleans is also the birthplace of the cocktail. Its inventor, a druggist named Antoine Peychaud, formulated the original bitters (still made under his name and much liked around New Orleans) and added it to Cognac from Sazerac, France, along with a little sugar and absinthe. At his drugstore on Royal Street, Peychaud served up this concoction (for alleged health benefits) in a _coquetier_ \u2014a French name for an egg cup, whose mispronunciation resulted in the word cocktail. Peychaud's original drink, now called a Sazerac, is made with rye whiskey these days and is still quite popular. A recipe for one of its offshoots, the old-fashioned, is included here.\n\nCaf\u00e9 au Lait\n\n_The two cups of caf\u00e9 au lait I have every morning are a wonderful addiction. I make them with Union coffee and chicory, brewed so dark that it leaves the side of the cup deep brown for a moment when I swirl it. I mix that with an equal amount of milk, and the pleasure begins._\n\n_Serious purists insist that great coffee and chicory can only be brewed in an enamel coffee biggin (an old-fashioned pot that requires one to slowly drip small amounts of water through the grounds manually). However, I find that a good drip coffeemaker\u2014especially the kind with cone-shaped filters\u2014does just as fine a job as long as you use enough coffee. Err on the side of too much ground coffee and step it back if it's too strong._\n\n_Union coffee and chicory, in its distinctive soft green bag, can be hard to find even in New Orleans. Other good brands include CDM, French Market, and the widely distributed but relatively light Community New Orleans Blend._\n\n\u00bd cup ground coffee and chicory blend\n\n8 cups water\n\n6 cups milk\n\nSugar\n\nBrew the coffee with the water normally in a drip coffeemaker. Fill mugs half-full with milk and heat in a microwave until steaming. Add sugar to your taste and stir. Pour the coffee in and observe the pleasant light foam of the milk on the coffee. MAKES EIGHT CUPS.\n\nCaf\u00e9 Brulot\n\n_Caf\u00e9 brulot is the grandest ending to a major New Orleans dinner\u2014especially if it's made and served in the traditional caf\u00e9 brulot bowl and cups. The show at the table is spectacular, and the aroma is wonderful. If you make it at home, look for oranges with a thick, flawless skin. (California oranges are best.)_\n\n_This is a flamed dish. So make sure you have nothing above the burning bowl that could catch fire. Do not use any spirit higher than 80 proof. If you feel ill at ease about flaming dishes, skip the flaming part._\n\n1 lemon\n\n1 orange\n\n12\u201315 cloves\n\n5 Tbsp. brandy\n\n5 Tbsp. Cointreau, triple sec, or Grand Marnier\n\n2 cinnamon sticks, broken in half\n\n\u00bd tsp. vanilla extract\n\n1 Tbsp. sugar\n\n3 cups freshly brewed very dark coffee, preferably coffee-and-chicory blend\n\n1. Wash the lemon and the orange. Peel the lemon and cut the peel into strips about 1 inch long and \u00bd inch wide. Stud the skin of the orange with the cloves, inserting the cloves in a spiral pattern from top to bottom. Then cut the peel from the orange in one continuous spiral with the cloves in the center of the strip.\n\n2. In a metal bowl set over a small burner, combine the brandy and the Cointreau with the lemon peel, studded orange peel, and cinnamon sticks. Bring to a light boil and hold it there for a minute. Carefully touch a flame to the mixture and flame it, stirring it around.\n\n3. With a long fork, spear the orange peel and hold it up above the bowl. Pour some of the flaming liquid over the orange and let it flow down the spiral of the skin.\n\n4. Add the vanilla, sugar, and coffee, and swirl it all around until the flames die out. Pour the caf\u00e9 brulot into demitasse cups and serve hot. It's okay for pieces of lemon or orange peel to go into the cup. SERVES SIX TO EIGHT.\n\nMint Julep\n\n_The mint julep is considered a clich\u00e9 Old South drink by some. But a good one is about as refreshing a cocktail as ever slaked a midsummer night's thirst. It is best served in the classic metal cups, which get frosty on the outside if you make it right. I use those great small-batch bourbons in my mint juleps; Knob Creek or Blanton's are particularly good._\n\nAbout 20 fresh mint leaves, plus more sprigs for garnish\n\n8 oz. Simple Syrup (see recipe, this page)\n\n8 oz. bourbon\n\nCrushed ice\n\n1. Combine the mint leaves and the simple syrup in a cocktail shaker. Crush the leaves with a muddler or a blunt-end wooden stick. (The back end of a honey server works perfectly.)\n\n2. Add the bourbon and fill the shaker with crushed ice. Put the top on the shaker and shake vigorously until the outside is frosty.\n\n3. Strain the mint juleps into 4 old-fashioned glasses (or silver julep cups) filled about three-quarters full with crushed ice. Garnish each with a sprig of mint. SERVES FOUR.\n\nOld-Fashioned Cocktail\n\n_The old-fashioned has indeed been around a long time. It dates almost to the dawn of the cocktail, which occurred in New Orleans. An old-fashioned is similar in many ways to a Sazerac, which lays claim to being the very first cocktail of them all. You can obtain Peychaud's bitters from the Sazerac Company (www.sazerac.com/bitters.html)._\n\n6 oz. Simple Syrup (see recipe below)\n\n1 tsp. Angostura bitters\n\n1 tsp. Peychaud's bitters\n\n8 oz. bourbon\n\nCrushed ice\n\nClub soda\n\n1 orange, cut into 8 half-moon slices\n\n8 stemmed maraschino cherries\n\n1. Combine the syrup, both bitters, and bourbon in a shaker filled with crushed ice.\n\n2. Strain the mixture into old-fashioned glasses filled about two-thirds full with crushed ice. Top with club soda and stir 2\u20133 strokes. Garnish each glass with an orange slice and 2 cherries. SERVES FOUR.\n\nSimple Syrup\n\n_Simple syrup is essential for making mint juleps, old-fashioneds, and other great cocktails. It's also nice to have on hand to sweeten iced tea without the endless, clanky stirring._\n\n2 cups sugar\n\n1 cup water\n\nCombine the sugar and water in a very clean saucepan and bring to a light boil for 5 minutes. Brush any granules of sugar that may stick to the sides of the pan down into the syrup, or the syrup may regranulate. Refrigerate. MAKES ABOUT ONE CUP.\n\nEgg Nog\n\n_The best egg nog, frankly, is uncooked. But so many people are concerned about the health risks of eating raw eggs that I've come up with an egg nog recipe cooked just long enough to eliminate most possible problems. It does produce a difficulty, though: You have to be very careful to keep the mixture from setting as you cook it._\n\n1 dozen egg yolks\n\n1\u00bd cups sugar\n\n2 Tbsp. vanilla extract\n\n\u00bd tsp. nutmeg, plus more to taste\n\n2 cups heavy whipping cream\n\n4 cups half-and-half\n\n1. Whisk the egg yolks with the sugar, vanilla, and nutmeg together in a saucepan until creamy-looking. Add the cream and 2 cups of the half-and-half, and whisk until blended.\n\n2. Cook over very low heat while stirring. Look for a temperature reading of 175 degrees F on a meat thermometer. Don't overheat or cook longer than needed to reach this temperature.\n\n3. Remove from the heat. Strain the egg nog into the container you will store it in and add the remaining half-and-half. Refrigerate.\n\n4. If you'd like to add something interesting (i.e., brandy, bourbon, or dark rum), a cup of the stuff should be about right. Serve with some more nutmeg (freshly grated, if possible) over the top. SERVES TWELVE TO SIXTEEN.\n\nPing Pong\n\n_The origin of the name ping pong is unknown, but in the riverlands between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, many people know what it is: a pink, frozen drink that has the flavor of nectar. Nectar, in turn, is universally recognized among Orleanians as a distinctive flavor, a blend of almond and vanilla. Nectar was one of the most popular flavors for ice-cream sodas in the days when drugstores still made such things. Now nectar is an essential flavor in the vast array of syrups poured over finely shaved ice for sno-balls._\n\n_I learned about ping pong from Mark Hymel, whose family has raised sugarcane and run a fine seafood restaurant in St. James Parish for generations. He handed it to me at a party at his home and challenged me to guess what it was. I recognized the nectar flavor instantly but was astonished to learn how it was derived. I mentioned it on the radio the next day, and from that time until the day Hurricane Katrina shut us down, I've repeated the unlikely recipe hundreds of times on the air and on the Internet._\n\n_The original recipe is so sweet that you can't drink much of it (although you'll very much like those few sips). Lately I've lightened up the sugar content by replacing the sweetened condensed milk with half-and-half._\n\nORIGINAL RECIPE\n\n1 can sweetened condensed milk\n\n1 liter Barq's Red Creme Soda\n\nNOT-SO-SWEET VERSION\n\n1 cup half-and-half\n\n1 liter Barq's Red Creme Soda\n\n1. For either formula, mix the 2 ingredients in an ice-cream maker and freeze. It will probably not get hard, but it will have the texture of a frozen daiquiri. You can solidify it by freezing it further, but it's better as a drink, really. In fact, you can add a shot of vodka to it for something a bit more potent.\n\n2. If you don't have an ice-cream maker, mix the ingredients in a gallon-size plastic food-storage bag and freeze that until it starts to set. Squinch the bag every now and then, until it has a slushy consistency. SERVES TWELVE TO SIXTEEN.\n\n_Roux, Seasonings, Sauces, and Other Building Blocks_\n\nRoux\n\nSalt-free Creole Seasoning\n\nSalt-free Creole Seafood Seasoning\n\nBarbecue Dry Rub\n\nBlackening Seasoning\n\nStocks\n\nClarified Butter\n\nHollandaise\n\nB\u00e9arnaise\n\nSpicy Garlic Mayonnaise\n\nSauce Nantua\n\nMarchand de Vin Sauce\n\nFresh Marinara Sauce\n\nFresh Pizza Sauce\n\nFresh Salsa\n\nSoutheast Asian\u2013Creole Dipping Sauce\n\nMignonette Sauce\n\nCool Water Ranch Barbecue Sauce\n\nCreole Sauce\n\nNew Orleans Bordelaise Sauce\n\nChef Andrea's Fish Marinade\n\nA\n\nThe most contentious issue in all of Creole and Cajun cookery is how to make and use roux. Talking about roux in South Louisiana is like talking about ragu in Sicily. Everybody who makes it believes that his or her version is the only right way. So many Creole recipes begin with the words \"First make a roux\" that it's become a clich\u00e9 even to point this out. But its importance can't be overstated.\n\nRoux is flour mixed with some kind of fat (oil, butter, margarine, lard, rendered bacon fat, duck fat\u2014almost any fat you can imagine has been used by somebody) and browned, usually on top of the stove. The degree of browning\u2014from the palest tan (a blond roux) to nearly black\u2014depends on the recipe. You'll find many variations throughout this book, but the recipe in this section is a good basic technique.\n\nAnother essential element of modern Creole and Cajun cookery is Creole seasoning. Although everybody in Louisiana with even a tenuous connection to food seems to market a line of Creole seasonings, if you find yourself using a lot of it, you might want to try your hand at making your own. I include three variations in this chapter (see this page, this page, and this page).\n\nFinally, a dish made with a stock has dimensions of flavor missing from the same dish made with just water. Here are some simple stock recipes that you'll find well worth the trouble of making.\n\nRoux\n\n_Roux is a blend of flour and some kind of fat, cooked a little or a lot, used as a base for sauces and soups. It's a classic French technique, but it's likely that more roux is used in Creole and Cajun cooking than in all other cuisines combined. Not all Creole and Cajun recipes call for roux, but those that do\u2014notably gumbos\u2014rely heavily on it for their unique flavors._\n\n_I deviate from the tradition of my forebears by usually making the roux separately, then adding it to the recipe later, after the liquid component is in the pot. That way I can control the amount of roux in the dish._\n\n_The essence of making a good roux is constant stirring to keep it from burning. There's no saving a dish that tastes of burned roux. If you smell the unmistakable burned odor or see a hard black crust forming in the bottom of the pot, stop. Dump it, clean the pot, and start over. The best tool for making a roux is a roux stick, a wooden spoon with a flat outer edge. This allows you to scrape a wide swath on the bottom of the pan, thereby keeping the roux from sitting in one place too long._\n\n_It's a good idea to cook roux slowly if you're learning. Cooks who make roux all the time get bold, heating the fat very hot to cook the roux faster. They also know that roux gets incredibly hot and are careful not to splash it. Splattered roux on the skin feels as if it will burn all the way through to the bone._\n\n\u00bd cup oil, butter, or other fat\n\n1 cup flour\n\n1. In a heavy saucepan or skillet over medium heat, heat the oil until it shimmers or the butter until it bubbles. Sprinkle in the flour and begin stirring with a wooden spoon or roux stick. Stir constantly, leaving no part of the bottom of the pan unstirred for long.\n\n2. After a minute or so, the texture of the mixture will change from a blend of oil and flour into something thicker and lighter. You now have a blond roux. It will begin to brown, getting darker at an accelerating rate. It goes from looking like peanut butter to taking on a reddish hue, like that of an old penny. Then it becomes chocolate-colored. But beware: The darker it gets, the faster it gets darker still. You can stop the darkening process at any time by cooling it down. In some cases, this is done by removing the pan from the heat and stirring in onions, celery, and other vegetables from the recipe you're making. If the recipe doesn't include that step, you must turn the heat off before the desired color is reached and keep stirring because the held heat of the roux will keep cooking it. (It will even burn if you don't keep stirring.) MAKES ABOUT ONE AND A HALF CUPS.\n\nSalt-free Creole Seasoning\n\n_Seasoned salts have been around for a long time. Almost every restaurant makes its own variation. During the past few years, many companies have come out with Creole or Cajun seasoning blends, usually at prices far beyond what the ingredients cost. I make mine to my own taste and without salt. I prefer to control the salt component of the dish separately. Here is an all-purpose salt-free Creole seasoning._\n\n2 Tbsp. granulated onion\n\n2 Tbsp. freshly ground black pepper\n\n1 Tbsp. paprika\n\n1 tsp. granulated garlic\n\n\u00bd tsp. ground white pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried thyme\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried marjoram\n\n\u215b tsp. cayenne\n\nPinch of dry mustard\n\nMix all of the ingredients well in a jar with a tight-fitting lid. This will keep for about a year, tightly sealed, in a cool place. MAKES HALF A CUP.\n\nSalt-free Creole Seafood Seasoning\n\n_This subtler version of my salt-free Creole seasoning is made specifically for seafood._\n\n2 Tbsp. granulated onion\n\n1 Tbsp. freshly ground black pepper\n\n1 Tbsp. paprika\n\n1 tsp. granulated garlic\n\n\u00bd tsp. ground white pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp. cayenne\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried basil\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried oregano\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried thyme\n\nPinch of dry mustard\n\nMix all of the ingredients well in a jar with a tight-fitting lid. This will keep for about a year, tightly sealed, in a cool place. MAKES HALF A CUP.\n\nBarbecue Dry Rub\n\n_This is the stuff I use to coat (liberally) every meat I smoke or barbecue. There's only one variation: For pork shoulders and ribs, I add brown sugar to the mix, but I leave it out for briskets._\n\n2\u00bd cups salt\n\n1 cup granulated onion\n\n\u00bd cup freshly ground black pepper\n\n\u00bc cup chili powder\n\n\u00bc cup granulated garlic\n\n\u00bc cup paprika\n\n3 Tbsp. cayenne\n\n2 Tbsp. ground white pepper\n\n2 Tbsp. dried marjoram\n\n1 Tbsp. dried thyme\n\n1 Tbsp. dry mustard\n\n1 Tbsp. cinnamon\n\n1 Tbsp. turmeric\n\n1 cup dark brown sugar (for pork only)\n\nBlend all of the ingredients well in a big jar with a tight-fitting lid. This will keep for about a year, tightly sealed, in a cool place. MAKES ABOUT FIVE CUPS (SIX, IF YOU INCLUDE THE BROWN SUGAR).\n\nBlackening Seasoning\n\n_The essence of a good blackened dish is the seasoning blend with which it is encrusted. During the past several years, many companies have come out with blackened seasonings, usually at prices far beyond what the ingredients cost. I always make my own, which allows me to make it to my taste. This one is appropriately spicy without being insane._\n\n3 Tbsp. paprika\n\n2 Tbsp. salt\n\n1 Tbsp. garlic powder\n\n4\u00bd tsp. freshly ground black pepper\n\n2 tsp. ground white pepper\n\n1 tsp. cayenne\n\n1 tsp. dried thyme\n\n1 tsp. dried oregano\n\nMix all of the ingredients well in a jar with a tight-fitting lid. This will keep for about a year, tightly sealed, in a cool place. MAKES HALF A CUP.\n\nStocks\n\n_Using stocks in place of water in a recipe gives an added dimension of flavor, so they're well worth making and using if you can. Many of the stocks in this book are described within the recipes, but here is a general method of making a variety of stocks._\n\n_The key to making good stock is to simmer it very slowly for a long time, with only a few bubbles breaking on top of the pot. Slow-cooked stocks come out clear and full of flavor. The longer you cook a stock, the more intense it gets and the less of it you need in a recipe._\n\n_Stocks hold up for a few days in the refrigerator or for a long time if well sealed in the freezer. Many cooks freeze stock in ice-cube trays, so they can slip out a few cubes and add it to recipes conveniently._\n\n_Canned chicken stock can be used if you don't have your own. It's not as good, but it's acceptable. Canned beef stock is not very good, and I wouldn't recommend using it._\n\nFOR BEEF STOCK\n\n3 lb. meaty beef bones, fat trimmed (soup bones or oxtails are the most desirable)\n\n2 carrots, coarsely chopped\n\nFOR VEAL, LAMB, OR PORK STOCK\n\n3 lb. meaty veal, lamb, or pork bones, depending on which you are making, fat trimmed\n\nFOR CHICKEN STOCK\n\n3\u20134 lb. chicken pieces, no liver, or a whole chicken\n\nFOR CRAB, SHRIMP, OR CRAWFISH STOCK\n\n2 cups (at least; the more the better) picked or peeled shells of crab, shrimp, or crawfish, depending on which you are making\n\nPeel of \u00bd lemon\n\nFOR FISH STOCK\n\n1 lb. or more of bones, heads, and scraps from edible fish, gills and livers removed\n\n1 tsp. dried oregano\n\nSTOCK SEASONINGS\n\n1 large onion, coarsely chopped\n\nTop 4 inches from a bunch of celery, coarsely chopped\n\nStems from a bunch of parsley\n\n2 bay leaves\n\n1 tsp. black peppercorns\n\n1 tsp. dried thyme\n\nFOR THE BEEF, VEAL, LAMB, OR PORK STOCK: Heat a heavy kettle or stockpot over medium heat. Add the meat and bones of whichever meat you are using and cook until well browned all over, turning them now and then. (For the beef stock, add the carrots after the meat begins to brown.) Then add 2 gallons of water to the pot, plus all of the stock seasonings. Bring to a light boil, then lower to a bare simmer. Cook for 2\u20133 hours. Read on at Finish, below.\n\nFOR THE CHICKEN STOCK: Pour 2 gallons of water into a heavy kettle or stockpot. Add the chicken and the stock seasonings. Bring to a light boil, then lower to a bare simmer. Cook for 2 hours. Read on at Finish, below.\n\nFOR THE CRAB, SHRIMP, OR CRAWFISH STOCK: Crush the crab claws and/or crawfish shells with a pounder to break open. Combine claws and/or shells in a heavy kettle or stockpot with the stock seasonings and enough water to cover. Bring to a light boil, lower to a bare simmer, and cook for 30 minutes. Read on at Finish, below.\n\nFOR THE FISH STOCK: Put fish bones and scraps into a pot and nearly cover with cold water. Heat until water begins to steam, then pour off water. Refill pot with enough water to cover and add the oregano and stock seasonings. Bring to a light boil, then lower to a bare simmer. Cook for 45 minutes. Read on at Finish, below.\n\nFOR A VEGETABLE STOCK: Combine stock seasonings with 1 gallon of water. Bring to a boil then lower to a bare simmer. Cook for 30 minutes. Read on at Finish, below.\n\nFINISH FOR ALL STOCKS:\n\n1. As the pot boils, skim any foam that rises to the top. For meat and chicken stocks, also skim off any fat. Cook for the noted time, then strain stock through the finest sieve or cheesecloth. Dispose of solids (except for the chicken or meats, which can be picked from the bones for use in other recipes). Stocks can be further reduced and intensified by continuing to simmer after the solids have been removed.\n\n2. Let stock cool to lukewarm, then refrigerate if not using right away. For beef and chicken stocks, the fat will rise and solidify upon chilling and can be easily removed. All except vegetable stocks may become gelatinous in the refrigerator; this is not a problem. MEAT AND CHICKEN STOCK RECIPES MAKE ABOUT THREE QUARTS; SHELLFISH, FISH, AND VEGETABLE STOCK RECIPES MAKE ABOUT TWO QUARTS.\n\nClarified Butter\n\n_The process of clarifying butter does two things: It boils out the water (of which there is a great deal in butter), and it causes the milk solids to fall out of suspension. Some of the solids will rise to the top as foam, but most will fall to the bottom. During clarification, you will lose a third to a half of the quantity of butter you started with. So if you start with two sticks of butter, you'll end up with a quarter to a third of a cup of clarified butter._\n\n_The amazing thing about clarified butter is that it will hold up for a long time, even unrefrigerated (although I recommend keeping it chilled). It can also be heated to a much higher temperature than most fats without burning. (The threat of fire, however, is always there, so be careful.)_\n\n2\u20134 sticks butter (unsalted preferred)\n\nHeat the butter in a small saucepan over the lowest heat for about 20 minutes, or until the bubbling has stopped almost completely. Spoon the foam off the top, then pour the clarified butter carefully away from the milky solids on the bottom. If you want to be thorough, you can strain the butter through cheesecloth. MAKES A QUARTER TO TWO-THIRDS OF A CUP, DEPENDING ON THE AMOUNT OF BUTTER USED.\n\nHollandaise\n\n_Hollandaise is one of the mother sauces of classic French cooking and widely used around New Orleans, where it usually contains an extra pinch of cayenne. It's not hard to make if you can keep it from breaking, which will happen if the sauce gets too hot once the butter goes in. I avoid this by whisking butter that's at room temperature, not melted._\n\n_Hollandaise should be made right before it's needed. If you try to keep it warm, it might break. If that happens, you can sometimes bring it back by adding a little warm water. If that doesn't work, whisk another egg yolk in a clean bowl and slowly whisk the broken sauce into the beaten yolk._\n\n2 egg yolks\n\n1 Tbsp. red wine vinegar\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter, softened\n\n1 tsp. lemon juice\n\nPinch of cayenne\n\n1. Whisk the egg yolks and the vinegar briskly in a metal bowl set over a saucepan filled with about an inch of barely simmering water. If you see even a hint of curdling in the eggs, take the bowl off the heat, but keep whisking. Keep going back and forth from the heat until the mixture turns thick and pale yellow. Whisk in a tablespoon of warm water.\n\n2. Add the butter, a pat at a time, whisking constantly. When you begin to see a change in the texture of the sauce, you can step up the addition of the butter a bit. Keep whisking constantly until all of the butter is incorporated. Whisk in the lemon juice and cayenne and serve right away. MAKES ABOUT THREE-QUARTERS OF A CUP.\n\nB\u00e9arnaise\n\n_B\u00e9arnaise is my favorite sauce. It's good on almost everything: steaks, fish, fried potatoes, eggs, chicken . . . I could go on. Its finest employment in the Creole arena is in a dish called chicken Pontalba. If you find fresh tarragon or chervil, use twice as much as called for here._\n\n\u00bc cup tarragon vinegar\n\n\u00bc cup Sauvignon Blanc or other dry white wine\n\n1 Tbsp. very finely chopped green onion, tender part only\n\n2 tsp. dried tarragon\n\n1\u00bd tsp. dried chervil\n\nPinch of ground white pepper\n\n\u2154 cup Hollandaise (see recipe, this page)\n\n1. Combine the vinegar, wine, green onion, tarragon, chervil, and white pepper in a small saucepan. Bring it to a light boil and reduce until the herbs are just soggy.\n\n2. Stir this mixture into the hollandaise. It will keep for 30 minutes or so at warm room temperature. MAKES ABOUT TWO-THIRDS OF A CUP.\n\nSpicy Garlic Mayonnaise\n\n_Somewhere in Provence there is a newspaper whose name is_ L'Aioli. _That lucky town gets to wake up every day to_ The Garlic Mayonnaise. _Sounds like a good place to live. Closer to home, chefs have extended the aioli concept to include all sorts of other flavors. Here's my contribution to the overload. This is not only tasty as a dip, a squirtable condiment, or even a sandwich spread, but it's also a very pretty color. Thinned with a little water, it makes a wine-friendly salad dressing (no vinegar)._\n\n2 egg yolks\n\n1 tsp. Dijon mustard\n\n2 cloves garlic\n\n2 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n1 cup extra-virgin olive oil\n\n\u215b tsp. salt\n\n5 dashes of Tabasco\n\n1. Put the egg yolks, mustard, garlic, and 1 tablespoon of the lemon juice in a blender or food processor. Blend at medium speed for about 45 seconds.\n\n2. With the blender or food processor still running, add the oil a few drops at a time until the contents of the container noticeably begin to change texture. Then add the remaining oil in a thin stream while the blender or food processor continues to run. When all the oil is incorporated, add the salt, Tabasco, and remaining lemon juice. Refrigerate to thicken. MAKES ABOUT ONE AND THREE-QUARTERS CUPS.\n\nSauce Nantua\n\n_This is a creamy, Cognac-scented crawfish sauce, which, although it sounds like something from Louisiana, is actually a classic French sauce. I first ran into it with quenelles of fish at Christian's. Lately it has been appearing on more menus._\n\n2 lb. whole boiled crawfish\n\n4 cloves garlic, crushed\n\n1 tsp. dried thyme\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n\u00bc cup olive oil\n\n\u00bd cup chopped yellow onion\n\n1 medium carrot, chopped\n\n2 Tbsp. chopped flat-leaf parsley\n\n\u00bd cup tomato puree\n\n1 cup dry white wine\n\n\u00bd cup brandy\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter\n\n\u00bd cup flour\n\n1 cup heavy whipping cream\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n\u215b tsp. cayenne\n\n1. Rinse the crawfish in cold water. Peel them, reserving all of the shells. Set aside about \u00bd cup of tail meat and finely chop the the rest in a food processor.\n\n2. Crush the crawfish shells with a meat pounder. Put the shells, garlic, thyme, bay leaf, and 1 quart of cold water into a saucepan and simmer for 30 minutes. Strain stock into a clean saucepan and reduce the stock down to about 1 cup.\n\n3. Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the onion, carrot, and parsley, and saut\u00e9 until soft. Add the tomato puree and cook another minute or so. Add the wine, bring to a boil, and reduce until most of the liquid is gone. Add the chopped crawfish tails to the pan. Add the brandy, bring to a boil, and carefully flame it (if you like). Add 1 cup of the crawfish stock to the pan and bring to a light boil. Reduce the heat to low and keep the sauce warm.\n\n4. Make a blond roux by melting the butter in a saucepan. Add the flour and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture barely begins to brown. Whisk the roux into the sauce until completely blended. Add the cream, salt, and cayenne, adjusting the latter two to taste. Bring to a simmer, then serve. Garnish with the reserved whole tails. MAKES ABOUT A CUP AND A HALF.\n\nMarchand de Vin Sauce\n\n_This is the great sauce for steaks in the old-line Creole restaurants. As is often the case, the New Orleans version of this is much different from the classic French sauce of the same name. When serving, place the sauce right on top of the steak (or whatever\u2014this is also good with many other dishes, from eggs to pork chops), not underneath._\n\n_My reading of old cookbooks tells me that this sauce originally contained chips of marrow. I love that flavor and have included marrow as an optional ingredient in this recipe._\n\n1 stick (8 Tbsp.) butter\n\n\u2153 cup flour\n\n2 slices smoked, cured ham, finely chopped\n\n4 cloves garlic, chopped\n\n1 green onion, chopped\n\n2 Tbsp. chopped shallots\n\n1 cup dry red wine\n\n2 cups beef stock (see recipe, this page)\n\nUp to \u00bc cup beef marrow, chopped (optional)\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n\u215b tsp. thyme\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\n\u00bc tsp. Tabasco\n\n1. To make a roux: Melt the butter in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat until it bubbles. Add the flour and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture turns light brown.\n\n2. Add the ham, garlic, green onion, and shallots to the roux and saut\u00e9 until the vegetables are soft. Add the wine and bring to a boil, whisking to dissolve the roux into the wine. Reduce the wine by about half.\n\n3. Add the stock, marrow, bay leaf, Worcestershire sauce, and thyme, and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook for 30\u201345 minutes, stirring now and then, until thickened to a sauce consistency. Don't overthicken. Add the salt and Tabasco. Remove the bay leaf before serving. MAKES ABOUT TWO CUPS.\n\nFresh Marinara Sauce\n\n_This is the kind of red sauce we make most often at home. It's cooked only a few minutes, so the freshness of the tomatoes doesn't turn into sweetness. The flavor of fresh basil\u2014which we have growing outside in all the nonfreezing months\u2014is a top note._\n\nTwo 28-oz. cans whole plum tomatoes with basil\n\n\u00bc cup extra-virgin olive oil\n\n1 Tbsp. chopped garlic\n\n\u00bc tsp. crushed red pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried oregano\n\n4 fresh, ripe plum tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and finely chopped\n\n\u00bd tsp. salt\n\nLeaves of 6 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, chopped\n\n15 leaves fresh basil, chopped\n\n1. Drain and reserve the juice from the canned tomatoes. Put the canned tomatoes in a food processor and process almost to a puree. (You can also do this by squeezing the tomatoes with your fingers in a bowl.) Set aside.\n\n2. Heat the oil in a large saucepan over high heat until it shimmers. Add the garlic, crushed red pepper, and oregano, and cook for 1 minute. Add canned and fresh tomatoes and stir, maintaining the heat until you have a pretty good boil. Lower the heat, add 1 cup of the reserved canning juice, and return to a low boil.\n\n3. Add the salt, parsley, and basil, and cook, stirring occasionally, for about 10 minutes. You can cook it longer for a sweeter sauce, but I think it tastes best right at this point. MAKES ABOUT SIX CUPS.\n\nFresh Pizza Sauce\n\n_One of the best ideas I got from chef Andrea Apuzzo when I was working on his cookbook was that pizza sauce does not have to be cooked. This, at last, revealed the problem with all pizza sauce! The following concoction may seem a little too runny, but trust me\u2014it works and has a marvelous fresh flavor._\n\nOne 28-oz. can whole peeled Italian tomatoes, juice reserved\n\n2 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil\n\n2 tsp. chopped garlic (or more, if you love garlic)\n\n6\u201310 leaves fresh basil\n\n6 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, chopped\n\n\u00bc tsp. crushed red pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp. dried oregano\n\n\u00bc tsp. salt\n\nPut all of the ingredients into a food processor and process for about 20 seconds. That's it! Do not cook; just ladle it right onto the pizza crust and top with cheese and whatever else you like. MAKES ENOUGH FOR ABOUT FOUR 12-INCH PIZZAS.\n\nFresh Salsa\n\n_This is the enhanced first stage of making guacamole. My wife once asked me why I don't make it into a salsa. So here it is._\n\n3 cups peeled, seeded, and chopped fresh ripe tomatoes\n\n1 cup chopped white onion\n\n\u00bc cup chopped cilantro leaves\n\n2 Tbsp. Tabasco Green Pepper Sauce\n\n1 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil\n\n1 Tbsp. lime juice\n\n\u2153 tsp. salt\n\nMix everything together in a bowl and allow the flavors to blend for an hour or so in the refrigerator. MAKES ABOUT FOUR CUPS.\n\nSoutheast Asian\u2013Creole Dipping Sauce\n\n_This may be a long stretch to keep the local theme, but it's great as a dip for vegetables or seafood (especially big grilled shrimp), or even as a salad dressing. It also works well as a basting sauce for grilled fish or chicken. All of the exotic ingredients are available in the ethnic section of any large supermarket._\n\n5 sprigs cilantro, leaves only\n\n3 cloves garlic\n\n4\u00bd tsp. Tabasco Green Pepper Sauce\n\n2 tsp. sesame oil\n\n1 cup smooth peanut butter\n\n\u00bc cup coconut milk\n\n2 Tbsp. nuoc mam (Vietnamese fish sauce)\n\n2 Tbsp. hoisin sauce\n\n2 Tbsp. rice wine vinegar\n\n1 Tbsp. soy sauce\n\nIn a food processor, puree the first 4 ingredients, then add everything else and puree again. Add water, as necessary, to achieve the consistency appropriate to your needs. MAKES ABOUT TWO CUPS.\n\nMignonette Sauce\n\n_This cold sauce\u2014it's more like a relish, really\u2014takes you just a short step away from eating raw oysters with nothing at all on them. The flavors of the sauce don't get in the way of the oyster, and the contrast between the metallic brininess and softness of the oyster and the acidity and crunch of the sauce is very pleasant. Don't chop the shallots in a food processor; dice them with a sharp knife._\n\n\u00bc cup finely diced shallots\n\n2 Tbsp. red wine vinegar\n\n2 Tbsp. dry white wine (best: Muscadet)\n\n1 tsp. Dijon mustard\n\n\u00bd tsp. lemon juice\n\n4 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, leaves only, chopped\n\n\u2154 cup extra-virgin olive oil\n\nSalt and freshly ground black pepper to taste\n\nCombine everything up to the olive oil in a small bowl. Whisk in the oil in a thin stream until blended. Season to taste with salt and pepper. MAKES ENOUGH FOR ABOUT FOUR DOZEN OYSTERS, A TEASPOON OF MIGNONETTE SAUCE PER OYSTER.\n\nCool Water Ranch Barbecue Sauce\n\n_I started making my own barbecue sauce when I volunteered to run a barbecue booth at the festivals at my children's schools. I used two bits of knowledge gleaned from my barbecueeating activities. The first came from Harold Veazey, founder of the ancient Harold's Texas Barbecue in Metairie. He told me that the secret to his sauce is that he \"kills it\"\u2014cooks the tomatoes so long that they take on an entirely different, sweet flavor. The second datum was my noticing the cinnamon taste in Corky's barbecue sauce, the best bottled sauce I've found._\n\n_It may seem like cheating to add bottled barbecue sauce to the mix. What I'm after there is the stuff in commercial barbecue sauce that keeps it from separating._\n\n2 liters Dr Pepper\n\n\u00bc cup canola oil\n\n2 medium yellow onions, pureed\n\n1 medium head garlic, cloves pureed\n\n2 Tbsp. grated gingerroot\n\n4 gallons tomato sauce\n\n\u00bd cup yellow mustard\n\n\u00bd bottle Tabasco Caribbean Style Steak Sauce\n\n\u00bc cup cinnamon\n\n\u00bc cup freshly ground black pepper\n\n5 bay leaves\n\n3 Tbsp. dried basil\n\n2 Tbsp. dried marjoram\n\n2 Tbsp. rubbed sage\n\n2 Tbsp. allspice\n\n2 Tbsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\n2 tsp. chili powder\n\n4 cups cider vinegar, plus more to taste\n\nSix 12-oz. jars molasses\n\n2 quarts (8 cups) prepared barbecue sauce\n\n1. Pour the Dr Pepper into a large saucepan and reduce it slowly to about 1 cup of liquid. (If you can get Dr Pepper syrup, use a cup of that instead.)\n\n2. Meanwhile, heat the oil in the biggest stockpot you have over medium heat. Add the onions, garlic, and ginger, and saut\u00e9 for about 15 minutes, stirring every minute or two. Add the remaining ingredients, except for the vinegar, molasses, and prepared barbecue sauce, and bring to a light simmer. Reduce heat to low and simmer, covered, stirring occasionally, for about 8 hours.\n\n3. Add the vinegar, molasses, and barbecue sauce, and cook another 1\u20132 hours. Taste the sauce and add salt, hot sauce, or vinegar, if needed, to balance it. Pack what you will not use right away into sterilized canning jars while the sauce is still hot. MAKES FIVE GALLONS.\n\nCreole Sauce\n\n_Classic Creole sauce seems to be making a comeback. It's a tomato-based concoction with the holy trinity (bell pepper, celery, and onions). I find myself using it with all sorts of meats and poultry. It's even good with eggs. My Creole sauce is made with a good bit of black pepper, which I think makes the difference. So does a short cooking time, which keeps it from becoming spaghetti sauce. This recipe makes a lot, but it freezes well, so you can later use it to jazz up whatever food for which you're at a loss for ideas._\n\n1 Tbsp. olive oil\n\n1 medium bell pepper, finely chopped\n\n1 medium white onion, finely chopped\n\n2 ribs celery, finely chopped\n\n\u00bd bunch green onions, finely chopped\n\n2 cloves garlic, finely chopped\n\n1 tsp. basil\n\n1 tsp. thyme\n\n2 oz. jalape\u00f1o pepper sauce\n\n1 Tbsp. brown sugar\n\n2 28-oz. cans whole plum tomatoes, crushed by hand\n\n1 cup cherry or grape tomatoes, roughly chopped\n\n2 bay leaves\n\n2 oz. Worcestershire sauce\n\n\u215b tsp. cayenne\n\n1 tsp. salt, plus more to taste\n\n1 Tbsp. coarsely ground black pepper\n\n1 cup chicken stock\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n1. Heat the oil in a saucepan over medium-low heat until it shimmers. Add the bell pepper, white onion, celery, green onions, and garlic, and cook, stirring with a wooden spoon, for about 5 minutes.\n\n2. Add all the other ingredients. Cook for about 1 hour, stirring every few minutes. Remove the bay leaves. Add more salt to taste. MAKES ABOUT TWO QUARTS.\n\nNew Orleans Bordelaise Sauce\n\n_The people in Bordeaux would be mystified, but in New Orleans bordelaise sauce is likely to be nothing much more than a garlic and parsley butter. We use it on pasta, steaks, chicken, oysters, and snails (for which use its name changes to bourguignonne, for some reason). We never said we were good at nomenclature._\n\n2 sticks butter\n\n1 large head fresh garlic, chopped\n\n12 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, leaves only, chopped\n\nGenerous pinch crushed red pepper\n\n1 tsp. lemon juice or white wine\n\n1. Put the butter into a small saucepan over the lowest heat. Cook until the bubbling stops. Skim the foam from the top and pour away the clear butter from the solids at the bottom of the pan, reserving the clear butter. You now have clarified butter.\n\n2. Wipe out the saucepan to get rid of the milk solids and return the clarified butter to the pan. Heat it over medium heat for about 1 minute, then add the garlic, parsley, and crushed red pepper. Cook until the garlic is fragrant\u2014which may be less than 1 minute. Turn off the heat and let the sauce sit for 1 minute. Then add the lemon juice or white wine (careful, it may splatter!). Whisk a bit to emulsify the liquid into the butter. MAKES ENOUGH FOR FOUR STEAKS, A POUND OF PASTA, OR TWO DOZEN BROILED OYSTERS.\n\nChef Andrea's Fish Marinade\n\n_Chef Andrea Apuzzo at Andrea's Restaurant in Metairie uses this concoction briefly (a minute on each side) to marinate his fish fillets before putting them into the pan. Almost no matter what fish you're using or which preparation (with the exception of fried), this both enhances and balances the flavor of the fish without distorting it. If you cook the fish in a pan, you can add the marinade at the end of the cooking (after removing the fish) to reduce to a sauce._\n\n\u00bc cup white wine\n\n\u00bc cup extra-virgin olive oil\n\n1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 tsp. soy sauce\n\n1 Tbsp. lemon juice\n\n\u00bc tsp. Tabasco\n\nMix all the ingredients in a shallow bowl. (It will not blend completely, but that's not important.) Set fish fillets in the marinade for about 1 minute, turn, and marinate the other side. Allow the marinade to drip off before seasoning the fish and moving on to the rest of the cooking process\n\n_Ingredients Notes,_\n\n_Food Sources,_\n\n_Conversion Chart,_\n\n_and Index_\n\nIngredients Notes\n\n_Most of the ingredients called for in this book are either well known or are explained in the recipes or chapter introductions. You'll find instructions for making many often-used recipe elements in the Roux, Seasonings, Sauces, and Other Building Blocks chapter (this page). Here are a few ingredients that may require further explanation._\n\nANDOUILLE. A chunky, smoky, thick-skinned smoked pork sausage, both French and German in character. Andouille is used in gumbo, jambalaya, and quite a few other New Orelans dishes as both a meat and a flavoring. You can substitute a generic smoked pork or beef sausage if you can't get the real thing.\n\nBUTTER. Unless otherwise noted, the recipes in this book call for regular salted butter. You may use low-salt or unsalted butter if you like.\n\nCREOLE SEASONING. A blend of herbs and spices that almost everybody in New Orleans has as handy as salt and pepper. There the most famous of the commercial brands are Tony Chachere's and Chef Paul Prudhomme's Magic Seasonings. My favorite is the hard-to-find, salt-free Bayou Bang. I prefer a salt-free Creole seasoning because it allows me to control the amount of salt separately. You'll find recipes for two versions of Creole seasoning on this page.\n\nFIL\u00c9. A distinctive ingredient in gumbo, especially chicken gumbo, fil\u00e9 is powdered sassafras leaves. It is in the spice rack of any New Orleans food store but may be harder to find elsewhere (see opposite for online and phone-order sources).\n\nFLOUR. Unless otherwise noted in a recipe, the flour called for in this book is all-purpose flour.\n\nGUMBO CRABS. Small crabs that have been picked of their lump meat. You use them to make crab stock. They're often found in packages of six or eight, frozen.\n\nHEAVY WHIPPING CREAM. Also called heavy cream, this is is cream with a butterfat content of 36\u201340 percent. We use a lot of it in our cooking in New Orleans.\n\nTASSO. A ham used for seasoning, tasso is heavily cured, then smoked with a tremendous amount of seasoning. It comes out a bit dry and very salty, peppery, and smoky. A little of it usually goes a long way.\n\nFood Sources\n\n_All of the ingredients in this book are widely available in supermarkets along the Gulf Coast, from Houston to Mobile and beyond. If you live elsewhere, you'll find the New Orleans products you'll need from these mail-order sources._\n\nCHEF PAUL PRUDHOMME'S MAGIC SEASONING BLENDS. Chef Paul was the first chef to roll out a comprehensive line of seasonings, and the quality is first-class. He also has great tasso and andouille.\n\nWEB SITE: shop.chefpaul.com. PHONE: 800-457-2857.\n\nCAJUN CRAWFISH ships its namesake item overnight in all its forms. The company also sells shrimp, meats, turducken (a Cornish hen inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey; it's more interesting than good), seasonings, and all the rest of it.\n\nWEB SITE: www.cajuncrawfish.com. PHONE: 888-254-8626.\n\nCAJUN GROCER offers a comprehensive line of New Orleans and Cajun foodstuffs, including seasonings, crab boil, bottled sauces and marinades, beans, rice, Creole mustard, sausages, tasso, and turduckens.\n\nONLINE ORDERS ONLY: www.cajungrocer.com.\n\nTABASCO makes a much wider array of products than one usually finds in stores, many of which are utterly unique and delicious (such as the Caribbean-style steak sauce and pepper jelly, to name two personal favorites).\n\nWEB SITE: countrystore.tabasco.com. PHONE: 888-222-7261.\n\nTONY CHACHERE'S CREOLE SEASONING is so widely used in New Orleans that \"add a little Tony's\" is instantly understood. Tony Chachere's makes many kinds of seasonings, as well as boxed jambalaya, gumbo mixes, and a million other things.\n\nWEB SITE: www.tonychachere.com. PHONE: 800-551-9066.\n\nASK TOM. If you have any questions about the recipes in this book or about New Orleans cooking or dining, I would be pleased to answer them. Visit my web site, www.nomenu.com, where you'll find a daily newsletter, a message board, and other resources. Or call me during my radio show and get your questions answered on the spot. _The Food Show_ is broadcast every weekday, 4\u20137 P.M. central time, on WSMB 1350 AM; the show's toll-free number is 866-644-9762.\n\nConversion Chart\n\nWEIGHT EQUIVALENTS. _The metric weights given in this chart are not exact equivalents, but have been rounded up or down slightly to make measuring easier._\n\nAVOIRDUPOIS | METRIC\n\n---|---\n\n\u00bc oz. | 7 g\n\n\u00bd oz. | 15 g\n\n1 oz. | 30 g\n\n2 oz. | 60 g\n\n3 oz. | 90 g\n\n4 oz. | 115 g\n\n5 oz. | 150 g\n\n6 oz. | 175 g\n\nAVOIRDUPOIS | METRIC\n\n---|---\n\n7 oz. | 200 g\n\n8 oz. (\u00bd lb.) | 225 g\n\n9 oz. | 250 g\n\n10 oz. | 300 g\n\n11 oz. | 325 g\n\n12 oz. | 350 g\n\n13 oz. | 375 g\n\n14 oz. | 400 g\n\nAVOIRDUPOIS | METRIC\n\n---|---\n\n15 oz. | 425 g\n\n16 oz. (1 lb.) | 450 g\n\n1\u00bd lb. | 750 g\n\n2 lb. | 900 g\n\n2\u00bc lb. | 1 kg\n\n3 lb. | 1.4 kg\n\n4 lb. | 1.8 kg\n\nVOLUME EQUIVALENTS. _These are not exact equivalents for American cups and spoons, but have been rounded up or down slightly to make measuring easier._\n\nAMERICAN | METRIC | IMPERIAL\n\n---|---|---\n\n\u00bc tsp. | 1.2 ml\n\n|\n\n\u00bd tsp. | 2.5 ml\n\n|\n\n1 tsp. | 5.0 ml\n\n|\n\n\u00bd Tbsp. (1\u00bd tsp.) | 7.5 ml\n\n|\n\n1 Tbsp. (3 tsp.) | 15 ml\n\n|\n\n\u00bc cup (4 Tbsp.) | 60 ml | 2 fl. oz.\n\n\u00e3 cup (5 Tbsp.) | 75 ml | 2\u00bd fl. oz.\n\n\u00bd cup (8 Tbsp.) | 125 ml | 4 fl. oz.\n\n\u2154 cup (10 Tbsp.) | 150 ml | 5 fl. oz.\n\nAMERICAN | METRIC | IMPERIAL\n\n---|---|---\n\n\u00be cup (12 Tbsp.) | 175 ml | 6 fl. oz.\n\n1 cup (16 Tbsp.) | 250 ml | 8 fl. oz.\n\n1\u00bc cups | 300 ml | 10 fl. oz.\n\n|  | (\u00bd pint)\n\n1\u00bd cups | 350 ml | 12 fl. oz.\n\n2 cups (1 pint) | 500 ml | 16 fl. oz.\n\n2\u00bd cups | 625 ml | 20 fl. oz.\n\n|  | (1 pint)\n\n1 quart | 1 liter | 32 fl. oz.\n\nOVEN TEMPERATURE EQUIVALENTS.\n\nOVEN MARK | F | C | GAS\n\n---|---|---|---\n\nVery cool | 250-275 | 130-140 | \u00bd-1\n\nCool | 300 | 150 | 2\n\nWarm | 325 | 170 | 3\n\nModerate | 350 | 180 | 4\n\nModerately hot | 375 | 190 | 5\n\n|\n\n400 | 200 | 6\n\nOVEN MARK | F | C | GAS\n\n---|---|---|---\n\nHot | 425 | 220 | 7\n\n|\n\n450 | 230 | 8\n\nVery hot | 475 | 250 | 9\nIndex of Searchable Terms\n\nA\n\nAbita Springs Stuffed Quail\n\nAline's Crawfish Etouff\u00e9e\n\nAline's Grits and Eggs\n\nAlligator Creole\n\nAmberjack, Cold-Smoked Pompano or\n\nAmuse-Bouche\n\nAndouille. _See_ Sausage\n\nAppetizers\n\nApple Muffins, Oat Bran and\n\nApricots and Creole Seasoning, Rabbit with\n\nArtichokes\n\nChicken with Artichoke Sauce and Pasta\n\nOyster and Artichoke Soup\n\nOysters Dunbar\n\nPasta Salad Allegro\n\nRedfish with Artichokes and Mushrooms\n\nSeared Scallops with Artichokes\n\nShrimp Clemenceau\n\nStuffed Artichokes\n\nAsparagus\n\nAsparagus and Crawfish with Glazed Hollandaise\n\nBroiled Asparagus Parmigiano\n\nNouvelle Gumbo z'Herbes\n\nAvocados\n\nAvocado Ranch Salad Dressing\n\nCajun Seared Scallops with Near-Guacamole\n\nDeviled Eggs R\u00e9moulade\n\nGuacamole\n\nGuacamole Soup\n\nB\n\nBacon\n\nChicken Livers with Bacon and Pepper Jelly\n\nHot Bacon Shrimp\n\nOysters en Brochette\n\nBaked Black-eyed Peas\n\nBananas\n\nBanana\u2013Peanut Butter Bread\n\nBananas Foster\n\nBarbecue Brisket\n\nBarbecue Dry Rub\n\nBarbecue Shrimp\n\nBeans. _See specific kinds_\n\nB\u00e9arnaise\n\nBeef\n\nBarbecue Brisket\n\nBeef Stock\n\nBoiled Brisket of Beef\n\nBrisket and Vegetable Soup\n\nCarpetbagger Steak\n\nCorned Beef and Cabbage\n\nFilet Mignon au Poivre\n\nHot Garlic Filet Mignon\n\nPetite Marmite\n\nRoast Beef Poor Boys\n\nRoast Tenderloin of Beef with Merlot Sauce\n\nStrip Sirloin Steak Bordelaise\n\nBeignets\n\nBelgian Waffles\n\nBell peppers. _See_ Peppers\n\nBiscuits, Mary Leigh's Buttermilk\n\nBisques. _See_ Soups Black drum\n\nBlack-eyed Peas, Baked\n\nBlackened Catfish Salad\n\nBlue Cheese Dressing\n\nBoiled Brisket of Beef\n\nBoiled Crawfish\n\nBoudin Blanc\n\nBouillabaisse, New Orleans Style\n\nBourbon\n\nBourbon Whiskey Sauce for Bread Pudding\n\nMint Julep\n\nOld-Fashioned Cocktail\n\nBrabant Potatoes\n\nBrandy\n\nCaf\u00e9 Brulot\n\nPork Tenderloin with Mushrooms and Brandy Cream Sauce\n\nSauce Nantua\n\nBread\n\nBanana\u2013Peanut Butter Bread\n\nHam and Goat Cheese Bread\n\nJalape\u00f1o-Cheese Cornbread\n\nrecipes using\n\nBread Pudding Alaska\n\nCaviar on Savory Lost Bread\n\nCrabmeat Imperial\n\nLost Bread\n\nMuffuletta\n\nMushrooms and Foie Gras Under Glass\n\nOyster Boat\n\nOyster and Pecan Stuffing\n\nOysters with Pepper Butter\n\nPumpkin and Pecan Bread Pudding\n\nRoast Beef Poor Boys\n\nSavory Bread Pudding with Mushrooms\n\nShrimp Limone\n\nSpicy Garlic Shrimp\n\nVeal with Oyster Stuffing\n\nBreakfast\n\nBrisket and Vegetable Soup\n\nBroccoli\n\nNouvelle Gumbo z'Herbes\n\nBroiled Asparagus Parmigiano\n\nBroiled Fish with Beurre Orange\n\nBroiled Mushrooms with Italian Sausage\n\nBrussels sprouts\n\nNouvelle Gumbo z'Herbes\n\nButter\n\nBarbecue Shrimp\n\nBroiled Fish with Beurre Orange\n\nClarified Butter\n\nDrago's Char-Broiled Oysters\n\nHollandaise\n\nOysters with Pepper Butter\n\nSoft-Shell Crab with Crabmeat Meuni\u00e8re\n\nTrout Meuni\u00e8re Old Style\n\nVeal with White Wine and Vanilla Butter\n\nButtermilk\n\nAvocado Ranch Salad Dressing\n\nCreole Cream Cheese\n\nFried Chicken\n\nMary Leigh's Buttermilk Biscuits\n\nC\n\nCabbage\n\nCole Slaw\n\nCorned Beef and Cabbage\n\nGrilled Tuna with Orange\u2013Soy Sauce\n\nCaf\u00e9 au Lait\n\nCaf\u00e9 Brulot\n\nCajun-Seared Scallops with Near-Guacamole\n\nCajun Smothered Duck\n\nCake\n\nOrange Cheesecake\n\nCalas\n\nCalvados\n\nSweetbreads Normande\n\nCandy\n\nHeavenly Hash, New Orleans Style\n\nCane-Smoked Turkey\n\nCaramel, Cr\u00e8me\n\nCaribbean Creole Red Snapper and Shrimp\n\nCarpetbagger Steak\n\nCarrots\n\nCole Slaw\n\nGratin of Pumpkin\n\nGrilled Tuna with Orange\u2013Soy Sauce\n\nPetite Marmite\n\nCasual food\n\nCatfish\n\nBlackened Catfish Sald\n\nFried\n\nCaviar on Savory Lost\n\nBread\n\nCelery\n\nBoiled Crawfish\n\nPetite Marmite\n\nChayote. _See_ Mirliton and Shrimp Soup\n\nCheese\n\nBlue Cheese Dressing\n\nBroiled Asparagus Parmigiano\n\nChicken Tenders with Pepper Jelly and Spinach Salad\n\nCrab and Brie Soup\n\nCrabmeat au Gratin\n\nCrabmeat Cannelloni\n\nGratin Dauphinois\n\nGratin of Pumpkin\n\nGrilled Pizza\n\nHam and Goat Cheese Bread\n\nHot Bacon Shrimp\n\nJalape\u00f1o-Cheese Cornbread\n\nMuffuletta\n\nOysters Bienville\n\nSavory Bread Pudding with Mushrooms\n\nSpinach \u00bc la Wohl\n\nChef Andrea's Fish Marinade\n\nCherry-Peppercorn Sauce, Roasted Venison Backstrap with\n\nChicken\n\nChicken-Andouille Gumbo\n\nChicken with Artichoke Sauce and Pasta\n\nChicken Bonne Femme\n\nChicken Grandee\n\nChicken Livers with Bacon and Pepper Jelly\n\nChicken Stock\n\nChicken Tenders with Pepper Jelly and Spinach Salad\n\nCobb Salad, New Orleans Style\n\nCreole-Cajun Jambalaya\n\nDirty Rice\n\nFried Chicken\n\nGrilled Marinated Chicken with Hot and Sweet Peppers\n\nRoasted Chicken Aline\n\nStewed Chicken with Brown Gravy\n\nChiles. _See_ Peppers, hot\n\nChocolate\n\nChocolate and Caf\u00e9 au Lait Mousse\n\nHeavenly Hash, New Orleans Style\n\nClarified Butter\n\nCobb Salad, New Orleans Style\n\nCoffee\n\nCaf\u00e9 au Lait\n\nCaf\u00e9 Brulot\n\nChocolate and Caf\u00e9 au Lait Mousse\n\nCole Slaw\n\nCool Water Ranch Barbecue Sauce\n\nCorn\n\nCorn Beignets and Crawfish\n\nCorn Macquechoux\n\nCrabmeat and Corn Bisque\n\nHush Puppies\n\nZea's Roasted Corn Grits\n\nCorned Beef and Cabbage\n\nCornish Hens with Peppercorn Red Wine Sauce\n\nCornmeal\n\nHush Puppies\n\nJalape\u00f1o-Cheese Cornbread\n\nZea's Roasted Corn Grits\n\nCrab\n\nBouillabaisse, New Orleans Style\n\nCrab and Brie Soup\n\nCrab Cakes\n\nCrabmeat au Gratin\n\nCrabmeat Cannelloni\n\nCrabmeat and Corn Bisque\n\nCrabmeat Imperial\n\nCrabmeat and Prosciutto, with Gnocchi\n\nCrabmeat Ravigote\n\nCrabmeat St. Francis\n\nCrabmeat and Tasso Sliders\n\nCrabmeat West Indies\n\nCrab Stock\n\nCreole Eggplant Gratin Delmonico\n\nDeviled Crab\n\nFettuccine Pontchartrain\n\nLouisiana Seafood Pasta\n\nRedfish Herbsaint\n\nRedfish with Sizzling Crabmeat and Herbs\n\nSaut\u00e9ed Crab Claws\n\nSea Bream Nouvelle Creole\n\nSeafood Gumbo\n\nShirred Eggs with Crabmeat Remick\n\nSoft-Shell Crab with Crabmeat Meuni\u00e8re\n\nSoft-Shell Crab with Pecans\n\nWhole Flounder Stuffed with Crabmeat\n\nCranberry Hollandaise, Poached Fish with\n\nCrawfish\n\nAline's Crawfish Etouff\u00e9e\n\nAsparagus and Crawfish with Glazed Hollandaise\n\nBoiled Crawfish\n\nCrawfish Bisque\n\nCrawfish Boulettes\n\nCrawfish and Corn Beignets\n\nCrawfish with Morel Mushrooms\n\nCrawfish Stock\n\nGratin of Crawfish Tails\n\nPasta with Cajun Crawfish Cream Sauce\n\nSauce Nantua\n\nSeafood Gumbo\n\nCream\n\nCream Cheese, Creole\n\nCream of Garlic Soup\n\nCr\u00e8me Anglaise\n\nCr\u00e8me Br\u00fbl\u00e9e\n\nCr\u00e8me Caramel\n\nCreole-Cajun Jambalaya\n\nCreole Cream Cheese\n\nCreole Eggplant Gratin Delmonico\n\nCreole French Vinaigrette\n\nCreole-Italian Oysters\n\nCreole-Italian Pot Stickers\n\nCreole Mustard Vinaigrette\n\nCreole Lamb Shanks\n\nCreole Sauce\n\nCucumber, Andouille-Salad\n\nD\n\nDesserts. _See also_ Cakes; Pastries; Pies\n\nBananas Foster\n\nBourbon Whiskey Sauce for Bread Pudding\n\nBread Pudding Alaska\n\nChocolate and Caf\u00e9 au Lait Mousse\n\nCr\u00e8me Anglaise\n\nCr\u00e8me Br\u00fbl\u00e9e\n\nCr\u00e8me Caramel\n\nHeavenly Hash, New Orleans Style\n\nPear Clafoutis\n\nPumpkin and Pecan Bread Pudding\n\nRiz au Lait\n\nSatsuma (Mandarin) Granita\n\nStrawberry Shortcakes\n\nDeviled Crab\n\nDeviled Eggs R\u00e9moulade\n\nDips\n\nMary Ann's Spinach and Mushroom Dip\n\nSoutheast Asian\u2013Creole Dipping Sauce\n\nSpicy Garlic Mayonnaise\n\nDirty Rice\n\nDrago's Char-Broiled Oysters\n\nDrinks. _See also_ Coffee\n\nEgg Nog\n\nMint Julep\n\nOld-Fashioned Cocktail\n\nPing Pong\n\nSimple Syrup\n\nDrum. _See_ Black drum Duck Cajun Smothered Duck\n\nDuck\n\nCajun Smothered Duck\n\nDuck Confit\n\np\u00e2t\u00e9\n\nCornish Hens with Peppercorn Red Wine Sauce\n\nSmoked Duck Breast with Jalape\u00f1o Glaze\n\nDumplings\n\nCreole-Italian Pot Stickers\n\nE\n\nEgg Nog\n\nEggplant\n\nAbita Springs Stuffed\n\nQuail\n\nCreole Eggplant Gratin Delmonico\n\nEggplant and Tomato Soup\n\nEggs\n\nAline's Grits and Eggs\n\nDeviled Eggs R\u00e9moulade\n\nEgg Nog\n\nLost Bread\n\nShirred Eggs with Crabmeat Remick\n\nF\n\nFennel\n\nPann\u00e9ed Pork Chops with Fennel Creole Sauce\n\nShrimp with Fennel and Herbs\n\nFettuccine Pontchartrain\n\nField Peas\n\nFil\u00e9\n\nFilet Mignon au Poivre\n\nFinfish entr\u00e9es\n\nFish. _See also specific kinds_\n\nBouillabaisse, New Orleans Style\n\nBroiled Fish with Beurre Orange\n\nFish on the Half Shell\n\nFish in a Salt Dome\n\nFish Stock\n\nPoached Fish with Cranberry Hollandaise\n\nFlan, Oysters Rockefeller\n\nFlounder\n\nNouvelle Pompano en Papillote\n\nWhole Flounder Stuffed with Crabmeat\n\nFoie Gras Under Glass, Mushrooms and\n\nFrench-fried Parsley\n\nFrench Fries Souffl\u00e9es\n\nFresh Marinara Sauce\n\nFresh Pizza Sauce\n\nFresh Salsa\n\nFried Catfish\n\nFried Chicken\n\nFrog's Legs Persill\u00e9s\n\nG\n\nGame Birds Paradis\n\nGarlic\n\nCream of Garlic Soup\n\nCreole-Italian Oysters\n\nHot Garlic Filet Mignon\n\nOysters and Pasta Creole Bordelaise\n\nRoasted Onion (or Garlic) Vinaigrette\n\nSaut\u00e9ed Crab Claws\n\nSeared Scallops with Artichokes\n\nSoft-Shell Crabs with Chinese Hot Garlic and Black Bean Sauce\n\nSpicy Garlic Mayonnaise\n\nSpicy Garlic Shrimp\n\nGnocchi with Crabmeat and Prosciutto\n\nGoat Cheese Bread, Ham and\n\nGratin of Crawfish Tails\n\nGratin Dauphinois\n\nGratin of Pumpkin\n\nGratin, Root Vegetable and Mirliton\n\nGreens\n\nNouvelle Gumbo z'Herbes\n\nsalad\n\nCobb Salad, New Orleans Style\n\nGrillades and Grits\n\nGrilled Lemonfish\n\nGrilled Marinated Chicken with Hot and Sweet Peppers\n\nGrilled Pizza\n\nGrilled Tuna with Orange\u2013 Soy Sauce\n\nGrilling\n\nGrits, Aline's and Eggs\n\nGrits, Grillades and\n\nGrits, with Ragout of Mushrooms\n\nGrouper, HorseradishCrusted, with Oysters and Saffron\n\nGuacamole\n\nGuacamole Soup\n\nGumbo\n\nChicken-Andouille Gumbo\n\nNouvelle Gumbo z'Herbes\n\nSeafood Gumbo\n\nGumbo crabs\n\nH\n\nHam, 366. _See also_ Tasso\n\nHam and Goat Cheese Bread\n\nMuffuletta\n\nRoot Beer\u2013Glazed Ham\n\nWhite Bean Soup with Ham\n\nHeavenly Hash, New Orleans Style\n\nHerbsaint, Redfish\n\nHollandaise\n\nHorseradish-Crusted\n\nGrouper\n\nwith Oysters and Saffron\n\nHot Bacon Shrimp\n\nHot Garlic Filet Mignon\n\nHush Puppies\n\nJ\n\nJalape\u00f1o-Cheese Cornbread\n\nL\n\nLamb\n\nCreole Lamb Shanks\n\nLamb Stock\n\nNoisettes d'Agneau Maison D'Or\n\nLemonfish, Grilled\n\nLemons & lemon juice\n\nLemon Vinaigrette\n\nSeared Tuna with TomatoLemon Vinaigrette\n\nShrimp Limone\n\nLiver\n\nBoudin Blanc\n\nChicken Livers with Bacon and Pepper Jelly\n\nLiver \u00bc l'Orange\n\nMushrooms and Foie Gras Under Glass\n\nLobster Bisque\n\nLost Bread\n\nLouisiana Seafood Pasta\n\nLyonnaise Potatoes\n\nM\n\nMarchand de Vin Sauce\n\nMarinara sauce\n\nFresh Marinara Sauce\n\nTuna Puttanesca\n\nMarshmallows\n\nHeavenly Hash, New Orleans Style\n\nMary Ann's Hash Brown Potatoes\n\nMary Ann's Spinach and Mushroom Dip\n\nMary Leigh's Buttermilk Biscuits\n\nMashed Potatoes\n\nMayonnaise, Spicy Garlic\n\nMeats. _See also specific kinds_\n\nMignonette Sauce\n\nMint Julep\n\nMirliton and Shrimp Soup\n\nMirliton and Root Vegetable Gratin\n\nMuffins, Oat Bran and Apple\n\nMuffuletta\n\nMushrooms\n\nBroiled Mushrooms with Italian Sausage\n\nCrawfish with Morel Mushrooms\n\nMary Ann's Spinach and Mushroom Dip\n\nMushrooms and Foie Gras Under Glass\n\nOysters Bienville\n\nPeas in a Roux\n\nPork Tenderloin with Mushrooms and Brandy Cream Sauce\n\nRedfish with Artichokes and Mushrooms\n\nRagout of Mushrooms with Grits\n\nSavory Bread Pudding with Mushrooms\n\nSweetbreads Normande\n\nWatercress and Spinach Salad with Pecans\n\nWild Mushroom and Rabbit Ragout\n\nMussels\n\nBouillabaisse, New Orleans Style\n\nMussels in Ghent-Style Wine Sauce\n\nMustard, Creole, Vinaigrette\n\nN\n\nNatchitoches Spicy Meat Pies\n\nNew Orleans Bordelaise Sauce\n\nNew Orleans Shrimp Spring Rolls\n\nNoisettes d'Agneau Maison D'Or\n\nNouvelle Gumbo z'Herbes\n\nNouvelle Pompano en Papillote\n\nNuts. _See also_ Pecans Heavenly Hash, New Orleans Style\n\nO\n\nOat Bran and Apple Muffins\n\nOkra\n\nSeafood Gumbo\n\nOld-Fashioned Cocktail\n\nOld-Style Oyster Stew\n\nOlives\n\nMuffuletta\n\nTuna Puttanesca\n\nOnions\n\nBoiled Crawfish\n\nCream of Garlic Soup\n\nRoasted Onion (or Garlic) Vinaigrette\n\nSoup of Seven Onions and Seven Peppers\n\nStuffed Onions Florentine\n\nOpen-Mouth Pork Chop\n\nOranges, orange juice, & orange liqueur\n\nBroiled Fish with Beurre Orange\n\nCaf\u00e9 Brulot\n\nGrilled Tuna with Orange\u2013Soy Sauce\n\nOrange Cheesecake\n\nOrange Icebox Pie\n\nSmoked Duck Breast with Jalape\u00f1o Glaze\n\nOxtails\n\nPetite Marmite\n\nOysters\n\nCarpetbagger Steak\n\nCreole-Cajun Jambalaya\n\nCreole-Italian Oysters\n\nDrago's Char-Broiled Oysters\n\nHorseradish-Crusted Grouper with Oysters and Saffron\n\nLouisiana Seafood Pasta\n\nOld-Style Oyster Stew\n\nOyster and Artichoke Soup\n\nOyster Boat\n\nOyster and Pecan Stuffing\n\nOysters Ambrosia\n\nOysters au Poivre\n\nOysters Bienville\n\nOysters Dunbar\n\nOysters en Brochette\n\nOysters Jaubert\n\nOysters and Pasta Creole Bordelaise\n\nOysters with Pepper Butter\n\nOysters Polo\n\nOysters Rockefeller\n\nOysters Rockefeller Flan\n\nOysters Roland\n\nSeafood Gumbo\n\nVeal with Oyster Stuffing\n\nVol-au-Vent of Louisiana Seafood\n\nP\n\nPann\u00e9ed Pork Chops with Fennel Creole Sauce\n\nParsley\n\nFrench-fried Parsley\n\nFrog's Legs Persill\u00e9s\n\nNouvelle Gumbo z'Herbes\n\nOysters Rockefeller\n\nPasta\n\nChicken with Artichoke Sauce and Pasta\n\nCrabmeat Cannelloni\n\nFettuccine Pontchartrain\n\nField Peas\n\nLouisiana Seafood Pasta\n\nOysters and Pasta Creole Bordelaise\n\nPasta Bordelaise\n\nPasta with Cajun Crawfish Cream Sauce\n\nPasta Milanese with Pompano\n\nPasta Salad Allegro\n\nSweetbreads Normande\n\nPastries\n\nBeignets\n\nCalas\n\nPat Gallagher's Smothered Quail\n\nPeanut butter\n\nBanana\u2013Peanut Butter Bread\n\nSoutheast Asian\u2013Creole Dipping Sauce\n\nPear Clafoutis\n\nPeas in a Roux\n\nPecans. _See also_ Nuts Oyster and Pecan Stuffing\n\nPecan Pie\n\nPumpkin and Pecan Bread Pudding\n\nSoft-Shell Crab with Pecans\n\nTrout with Pecans\n\nWatercress and Spinach Salad with Pecans\n\nPepper, black & green\n\nCornish Hens with Peppercorn Red Wine Sauce\n\nFilet Mignon au Poivre\n\nPepper-Crusted Pork Loin with Sweet Heat Sauce\n\nRoasted Venison Backstrap with Cherry Peppercorn Sauce\n\nPepper jelly\n\nChicken Livers with Bacon and Pepper Jelly\n\nChicken Tenders with Pepper Jelly and Spinach Salad\n\nPeppers, bell & hot\n\nCajun Smothered Duck\n\nCreole-Cajun Jambalaya\n\nGrilled Marinated Chicken with Hot and Sweet Peppers\n\nHot Bacon Shrimp\n\nHot Garlic Filet Mignon\n\nJalape\u00f1o-Cheese Cornbread\n\nRed Pepper Vichyssoise\n\nSoup of Seven Onions and Seven Peppers\n\nPetite Marmite\n\nPies\n\nNatchitoches Spicy Meat Pies\n\nOrange Icebox Pie\n\nPecan Pie\n\nPing Pong\n\nPizza\n\nFresh Pizza Sauce\n\nGrilled Pizza\n\nPoached Fish with Cranberry Hollandaise\n\nPompano\n\nCold-Smoked Pompano or Amberjack\n\nPasta Milanese with Pompano\n\nPork\n\nBoudin Blanc\n\nDirty Rice\n\nOpen-Mouth Pork Chop\n\nPann\u00e9ed Pork Chops with Fennel Creole Sauce\n\nPepper-Crusted Pork Loin with Sweet Heat Sauce\n\nPork Stock\n\nPork Tenderloin Diane\n\nPork Tenderloin with Mushrooms and Brandy Cream Sauce\n\nPulled Barbecued Pork Shoulder\n\nPot Stickers, Creole-Italian\n\nPotatoes\n\nBoiled Crawfish\n\nBrabant Potatoes\n\nChicken Bonne Femme\n\nFrench Fries Souffl\u00e9es\n\nGratin Dauphinois\n\nLyonnaise Potatoes\n\nMary Ann's Hash Brown Potatoes\n\nMashed Potatoes\n\nPetite Marmite\n\nRed Pepper Vichyssoise\n\nShrimp Clemenceau\n\nPoultry\n\nProsciutto and Crabmeat, with Gnocchi\n\nPuff pastry\n\nTrout en Croute with Shrimp Mousse\n\nVol-au-Vent of Louisiana Seafood\n\nPulled Barbecued Pork Shoulder\n\nPumpkin\n\nGratin of Pumpkin\n\nPumpkin and Pecan Bread Pudding\n\nPumpkin Soup with Tasso\n\nQ\n\nQuail\n\nAbita Springs Stuffed\n\nQuail\n\nPat Gallagher's Smothered Quail\n\nR\n\nRabbit\n\nRabbit with Apricots and Creole Seasoning\n\nWild Mushroom and Rabbit Ragout\n\nRagout of Mushrooms with Grits\n\nRed beans\n\nRed Bean Soup\n\nRed Beans and Rice\n\nRed Pepper Vichyssoise\n\nRed snapper\n\nRed Snapper, Caribbean Creole and Shrimp\n\nRedfish\n\nRedfish with Artichokes and Mushrooms\n\nRedfish Courtbouillon\n\nRedfish Herbsaint\n\nRedfish with Sizzling Crabmeat and Herbs\n\nRice\n\nBoudin Blanc\n\nCalas\n\nCreole-Cajun Jambalaya\n\nDirty Rice\n\nRed Beans and Rice\n\nRiz au Lait\n\nRiz au Lait\n\nRoast Beef Poor Boys\n\nRoasted Chicken Aline\n\nRoasted Onion (or Garlic) Vinaigrette\n\nRoasted Venison Backstrap with CherryPeppercorn Sauce\n\nRoast Tenderloin of Beef with Merlot Sauce\n\nRoot Beer\u2013Glazed Ham\n\nRoux\n\nRubs\n\nBarbecue Dry Rub\n\nBlackening Seasoning\n\nRum\n\nBananas Foster\n\nS\n\nSalad dressings\n\nAvocado Ranch Salad Dressing\n\nBlue Cheese Dressing\n\nCreole French Vinaigrette\n\nCreole Mustard Vinaigrette\n\nLemon Vinaigrette Dressing\n\nRoasted Onion (or Garlic) Vinaigrette\n\nSoutheast Asian\u2013Creole Dipping Sauce\n\nSpicy Garlic Mayonnaise\n\nSalads\n\nBlackened Catfish Salad\n\nChicken Tenders with Pepper Jelly and Spinach Salad\n\nCobb Salad, New Orleans Style\n\nCole Slaw\n\nDeviled Eggs R\u00e9moulade\n\nGuacamole\n\nPasta Salad Allegro\n\nShrimp R\u00e9moulade with Two Sauces\n\nSquid with Spicy Creole Vinaigrette\n\nWatercress and Spinach Salad with Pecans\n\nSalami\n\nMuffuletta\n\nSalmon\n\nBroiled Fish with Beurre Orange\n\nSalmon Florentine\n\nSalt Dome, Fish in a\n\nSalt-free Creole Seafood Seasoning\n\nSalt-free Creole Seasoning\n\nSandwiches\n\nMuffuletta\n\nOyster Boat\n\nRoast Beef Poor Boys\n\nSatsuma (Mandarin) Granita\n\nSauce Nantua\n\nSauces\n\nB\u00e9arnaise\n\nBourbon Whiskey Sauce for Bread Pudding\n\nChef Andrea's Fish Marinade\n\nCool Water Ranch Barbecue Sauce\n\nCr\u00e8me Anglaise\n\nCreole Sauce\n\nFresh Marinara Sauce\n\nFresh Pizza Sauce\n\nFresh Salsa\n\nHollandaise\n\nMarchand de Vin Sauce\n\nNew Orleans Bordelaise Sauce\n\nMignonette Sauce\n\nSauce Nantua\n\nSoutheast Asian\u2013Creole Dipping Sauce\n\nSpicy Garlic Mayonnaise\n\nTom's Hamburger Sauce\n\nSausage\n\nAbita Springs Stuffed Quail\n\nAndouille-Cucumber Salad\n\nBoudin Blanc\n\nBroiled Mushrooms with Italian Sausage\n\nChicken-Andouille Gumbo\n\nCreole-Cajun Jambalaya\n\nCreole-Italian Pot Stickers\n\nPasta Salad Allegro\n\nRed Bean Soup\n\nSaut\u00e9ed Crab Claws\n\nSavory Bread Pudding with Mushrooms\n\nSavory Waffles\n\nScallops\n\nCajun-Seared Scallops with Near-Guacamole\n\nLouisiana Seafood Pasta\n\nSeared Scallops with Artichokes\n\nVol-au-Vent of Louisiana Seafood\n\nSea bream\n\nSea Bream in an Envelope\n\nSea Bream Nouvelle Creole\n\nSeafood Gumbo\n\nSeared Scallops with Artichokes\n\nSeared Tuna with TomatoLemon Vinaigrette\n\nSeasonings\n\nBarbecue Dry Rub\n\nBlackening Seasoning\n\nRoux\n\nSalt-free Creole Seafood Seasoning\n\nSalt-free Creole Seasoning\n\nSheepshead. _See_ Sea bream Shellfish entr\u00e9es\n\nShirred Eggs with\n\nCrabmeat\n\nRemick\n\nShrimp\n\nBarbecue Shrimp\n\nBouillabaisse, New Orleans Style\n\nCaribbean Creole Red Snapper and Shrimp\n\nCreole Eggplant Gratin Delmonico\n\nHot Bacon Shrimp\n\nLouisiana Seafood Pasta\n\nMirliton and Shrimp Soup\n\nNew Orleans Shrimp Spring Rolls\n\nOysters Bienville\n\nSeafood Gumbo\n\nShrimp Bisque\n\nShrimp Clemenceau\n\nShrimp with Fennel and Herbs\n\nShrimp Limone\n\nShrimp R\u00e9moulade with Two Sauces\n\nShrimp Stock\n\nSpicy Garlic Shrimp\n\nTasso Shrimp\n\nTrout en Croute with Shrimp Mousse\n\nVol-au-Vent of Louisiana Seafood\n\nSimple Syrup\n\nSmoked Duck Breast with Jalape\u00f1o Glaze\n\nSnapper. _See_ Red snapper\n\nSoft-shell crabs\n\nFettuccine Pontchartrain\n\nSoft-Shell Crab with Crabmeat Meuni\u00e8re\n\nSoft-Shell Crabs with Chinese Hot Garlic and Black Bean Sauce\n\nSoft-Shell Crabs with Pecans\n\nSoups\n\nBrisket and Vegetable Soup\n\nChicken-Andouille Gumbo\n\nCrab and Brie Soup\n\nCrabmeat and Corn Bisque\n\nCrawfish Bisque\n\nCream of Garlic Soup\n\nEggplant and Tomato Soup\n\nGuacamole Soup\n\nLobster Bisque\n\nMirliton and Shrimp Soup\n\nNouvelle Gumbo z'Herbes\n\nOld-Style Oyster Stew\n\nOyster and Artichoke Soup\n\nPetite Marmite\n\nPumpkin Soup with Tasso\n\nRed Bean Soup\n\nRed Pepper Vichyssoise\n\nSeafood Gumbo\n\nShrimp Bisque\n\nSoup of Seven Onions and Seven Peppers\n\nSplit-Pea Soup\n\nStocks\n\nTurtle Soup\n\nWhite Bean Soup with Ham\n\nSoutheast Asian\u2013Creole Dipping Sauce\n\nSoy Sauce, Orange\u2013, Grilled Tuna with\n\nSpeckled trout\n\nTrout en Croute with Shrimp Mousse\n\nTrout Meuni\u00e8re Old Style\n\nSpices\n\nBarbecue Dry Rub\n\nBlackening Seasoning\n\nSalt-free Creole Seafood Seasoning\n\nSalt-free Creole Seasoning\n\nSpicy Garlic Mayonnaise\n\nSpicy Garlic Shrimp\n\nSpinach\n\nChicken Tenders with Pepper Jelly and Spinach Salad\n\nMary Ann's Spinach and Mushroom Dip\n\nNouvelle Gumbo z'Herbes\n\nOysters Rockefeller Flan\n\nSalmon Florentine\n\nSpinach \u00bc la Wohl\n\nStuffed Onions Florentine\n\nTuna Puttanesca\n\nWatercress and Spinach Salad with Pecans\n\nSplit-Pea Soup\n\nSpring Rolls, New Orleans Shrimp\n\nSquid\n\nBouillabaisse, New Orleans Style\n\nSquid with Spicy Creole Vinaigrette\n\nStewed Chicken with Brown Gravy\n\nStews\n\nAline's Crawfish Etouff\u00e9e\n\nOld-Style Oyster Stew\n\nStocks\n\nStrawberry Shortcakes\n\nStrip Sirloin Steak Bordelaise\n\nStuffed Artichokes\n\nStuffed Onions Florentine\n\nStuffing, Oyster and Pecan\n\nSugar\n\nSimple Syrup\n\nSweetbreads Normande\n\nT\n\nTasso\n\nCrabmeat and Tasso Sliders\n\nPumpkin Soup with Tasso\n\nTasso Shrimp\n\nTomatoes\n\nAlligator Creole\n\nBouillabaisse, New Orleans Style\n\nCool Water Ranch Barbecue Sauce\n\nEggplant and Tomato Soup\n\nFresh Marinara Sauce\n\nFresh Pizza Sauce\n\nFresh Salsa\n\nGrillades and Grits\n\nPann\u00e9ed Pork Chops with Fennel Creole Sauce\n\nPasta Milanese with Pompano\n\nSauce Nantua\n\nSea Bream Nouvelle Creole\n\nSeared Tuna with TomatoLemon Vinaigrette\n\nTom's Hamburger Sauce\n\nTrout, freshwater. _See also_ Speckled trout\n\nTrout en Croute with Shrimp Mousse\n\nTrout Marigny\n\nTrout Meuni\u00e8re Old Style\n\nTrout with Pecans\n\nTuna\n\nBlackened Tuna\n\nGrilled Tuna with Orange\u2013\n\nSoy Sauce\n\nSeared Tuna with TomatoLemon Vinaigrette\n\nTuna Puttanesca\n\nTurkey, Cane-Smoked\n\nTurtle Soup\n\nV\n\nVeal\n\nGrillades and Grits\n\nLiver \u00bc l'Orange\n\nTurtle Soup\n\nVeal with Oyster Stuffing\n\nVeal Pann\u00e9e\n\nVeal Stock\n\nVeal with White Wine and Vanilla Butter\n\nVegetables. _See also specific kinds_\n\nBrisket and Vegetable Soup\n\nNouvelle Gumbo z'Herbes\n\nPetite Marmite\n\nVegetable Stock\n\nVenison Backstrap, Roasted, with CherryPeppercorn Sauce\n\nVol-au-Vent of Louisiana Seafood\n\nW\n\nWaffles\n\nBelgian Waffles\n\nSavory Waffles\n\nWatercress\n\nOysters Rockefeller\n\nWatercress and Spinach Salad with Pecans\n\nWhite Bean Soup with Ham\n\nWhole Flounder Stuffed with Crabmeat\n\nWild Mushroom and Rabbit Ragout\n\nWine\n\nCarpetbagger Steak\n\nCornish Hens with Peppercorn Red Wine Sauce\n\nMarchand de Vin Sauce\n\nMussels in Ghent-Style Wine Sauce\n\nRedfish Herbsaint\n\nRoast Tenderloin of Beef with Merlot Sauce\n\nRoasted Venison Backstrap with CherryPeppercorn Sauce\n\nStrip Sirloin Steak Bordelaise\n\nTrout Marigny\n\nVeal with White Wine and Vanilla Butter\n\nZ\n\nZea's Roasted Corn Grits\n\n"], ["\n\n_Pyramid_ is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.\n\nA Dell eBook Edition\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2015 by David John Lawrance Gibbins\n\nMap copyright \u00a9 2015 by Tim Peters\n\nAll rights reserved.\n\nPublished in the United States by Dell, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.\n\nDELL and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.\n\nISBN 9780345534729\n\neBook ISBN 9780345534736\n\nCover design: Carlos Beltr\u00e1n\n\nCover illustration: Mike Bryan\n\nwww.bantamdell.com\n\nv4.1_r1\n\na\n\n# Contents\n\n_Cover_\n\n_Title Page_\n\n_Copyright_\n\n_Epigraph_\n\n_Map_\n\nPrologue\n\nPart 1\n\nChapter 1\n\nChapter 2\n\nChapter 3\n\nChapter 4\n\nChapter 5\n\nPart 2\n\nChapter 6\n\nChapter 7\n\nChapter 8\n\nChapter 9\n\nChapter 10\n\nChapter 11\n\nPart 3\n\nChapter 12\n\nChapter 13\n\nChapter 14\n\nChapter 15\n\nChapter 16\n\nChapter 17\n\nPart 4\n\nChapter 18\n\nChapter 19\n\nChapter 20\n\nChapter 21\n\nChapter 22\n\nChapter 23\n\nChapter 24\n\nChapter 25\n\nEpilogue\n\n_Acknowledgments_\n\n_Author's Note_\n\n_By David Gibbins_\n\n_About the Author_\nPharaoh...made ready his chariot, and took his people with him; and he took six hundred chosen chariots, and all the chariots of Egypt, and captains over every one of them. And the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh King of Egypt, and he pursued after the children of Israel...and overtook them encamping by the sea, beside Piha-hirth, before Ball-zephon...And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the sea to go back...And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground: and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left. And the Egyptians pursued, and were in after them to the midst of the sea, even all Pharaoh's horsemen, his chariots and his horsemen...and the Lord overthrew the Egyptians in the midst of the sea...And the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host that came into the sea after them; there remained not so much as one of them...\n\n_\u2014Old Testament_ , Book of Exodus 14:6\u201328\n\n(King James Version)\n\nMoses threw down his staff and thereupon it changed to a veritable serpent...Pharaoh sent forth heralds to all the cities. \"These,\" they said, \"are but a puny band, who have provoked us much. But we are a numerous army, well-prepared.\"...At sunrise the Egyptians followed them. And when the two multitudes came within sight of each other, Moses' companions said: \"We are surely undone!\" \"No,\" Moses replied, \"my Lord is with me, and He will guide me.\" We bade Moses strike the sea with his staff, and the sea was cleft asunder, each part as high as a massive mountain. In between We made the others follow. We delivered Moses and all who were with him, and drowned the rest...\n\n\u2014 _Qur'\u0101n_ , Al-Shu'Ar\u0101' (The Poets), 26: 32\u201366\n\n(trans. N. J. Dawood)\n\n_Omens of fire in the chariots' wind_ ,\n\n_Pillars of fire in thunder and storm_\n\n\u2014Yannai, possibly _c_. seventh century AD\n\n(a Hebrew poem in the Cairo Geniza, about the Book of Exodus)\n\n# PROLOGUE\n\n**I N THE EASTERN DESERT OF EGYPT, IN THE EIGHTH YEAR OF THE REIGN OF THE PHARAOH AKHENATEN, IN THE 18TH DYNASTY OF THE NEW KINGDOM, 1343 BC**\n\nThe chariot swept around in a wide arc in front of the pharaoh, the horses kicking up a cloud of dust and coming to a halt stamping and snorting, their eyes bloodshot and their mouths flecked with foam. The charioteer held the reins while a portly official stepped off the back, and then he flicked his whip and drove off to join the others waiting in the wings on either side of the pharaoh. The official waddled up, his bare belly juddering, trying to fan the beads of sweat that were forming on his shaven head and jowls. He came to a halt, catching his breath, blinking the sweat out of his eyes as he knelt down and prostrated himself.\n\n\"Well, vizier, what news from the east?\"\n\n\"May the light of the Aten shine on you, Neferkheperure-Waenre Akhenaten, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Lord of the East and the West, Lord of the Worlds, Lord of the Heavens and the Earth and all that lies between them.\" The man wheezed, kneeling like a dog in front of the pharaoh and slowly lowering his belly into the dust.\n\n\"Yes, yes, you fool, get up. What news, I say?\"\n\nThe vizier struggled to his feet, his knees and the front of his belly smudged with dust, and then shut his eyes as he declaimed, \"Their kings prostrate themselves and beg for peace. Canaan is devastated, Ashkelon is vanquished, Gezer is taken, Yenoam is annihilated, the land of the Shasu is laid waste, its seed existing no more; Syria is made a widow for Egypt, and all the lands have been pacified.\"\n\nAkhenaten tapped his fingers impatiently. It was the same tired old formula, platitudes he had heard reeled out to his father, Amenhotep, and his grandfather, Thutmose, before that. He leaned forward in his palanquin chair, the slaves holding it on either side quickly adjusting their positions to keep it upright. \"Yes, vizier, but what about M\u00e2t Urusalim, the Land of Jerusalem? That is what I sent you to resolve.\"\n\nThe man reached into a leather pouch on his belt and pulled out a clay tablet. It was covered with the punched writing that Akhenaten recognized from the tiresome cascade of tablets he received in his royal capital of Amarna from the sea traders of Canaan, all of them wanting to do trade with him. The vizier gave a little cough and attempted to puff out his chest. \"It is from the King of Jerusalem. It says: 'To the pharaoh, my lord. Thus Abdu-Heba, your servant. At the two feet of my lord, the pharaoh, seven times and seven times again I fall. Behold, the pharaoh has set his name in the Land of Jerusalem forever, so he cannot abandon the lands of Jerusalem! Those who come from Egypt with the golden seal of the pharaoh will be welcome, and may stay.' \"\n\nAwash with relief, Akhenaten sat back under the shade of the parasol. _Everything was as planned_. He waved dismissively, but the vizier remained stock-still, uncertain what to do, expecting further instructions. He waved again and the man suddenly took the cue, awkwardly attempting a bow and then shuffling backward and scurrying out of sight. The chariot corps commander, who had been standing next to the chair, turned to him. \"With the lands of Canaan vanquished and the King of Jerusalem your vassal, all we have to do now is destroy the renegades in front of us, and your conquest of the peoples of the east will be complete. No longer will the kings of Ashkelon or Canaan or Syria side with the Hittites against us. Today the weight of history is in your favor.\"\n\nAkhenaten looked toward the red glow of dawn in the east, above the place a mile from them where the level plain of the desert dropped in a cliff to the great gulf of the sea. \"Indeed it is, Mehmnet-Ptah. Are your divisions ready?\"\n\n\"The divisions of Ra and Seth are formed up, Pharaoh. All we await now is the division of Mina.\"\n\n\"When the divisions are ready, when the sun glints above the horizon, you will lead the charge in my golden chariot, Mehmnet-Ptah. You will inspire your men, and strike fear into the hearts of the enemy.\"\n\n\"It should be you who drives the golden chariot, Pharaoh.\"\n\n\"The Aten has blinded me to everything but his brilliance, Mehmnet-Ptah. I can no longer see to drive an earthly chariot, but the rays of the Aten will reflect from my eyes and light your way. You will charge on my command.\"\n\n\"It will be so, Pharaoh.\" The general strode off, followed by his retinue of staff officers. On either side, the chariots of the two divisions stood in long lines as far as the eye could see, the horses drinking from buckets carried up and down the line by slaves, the charioteers and bowmen sitting in the sand behind, resting and checking the torsion of their bows. Their chariots were of a new design, lithe, well sprung, copied from the chariots of the Mitanni that Mehmnet-Ptah had so admired when he had campaigned in the ancient land of the two rivers when he was a youth. It had been Moses the Israelite who had given them the design, who had brought before Mehmnet-Ptah an Assyrian chariot-maker from among the slaves who was willing to trade the secrets for his freedom\u2014Moses who with his people was now concealed behind that distant ridge overlooking the sea, waiting for the trumpets to blare and the chariots to come thundering toward them across the desert.\n\nAkhenaten stared again at the horizon and shifted his head slightly from side to side. His eyesight was not as bad as he had made out, but the image of the sun was seared into his eyes from the time he had spent staring up at it in the desert, soaking in the rays of the Aten. He contented himself with imagining the shimmer of the great gulf of the sea beyond, and on the cliff top above it the encampment of the Israelites. He had told Moses to camp there, brazenly so, on the very edge of the cliff, their campfires burning through the night so that when the Egyptian scouts saw them there should be no uncertainty, and the massed army that followed would know where to aim their chariots with the coming of dawn in order to destroy the Israelites once and forever.\n\nHe thought of that word: _Israelite_. It was Akhenaten who had given it to them, plucked from among the multitude of their origins because it was the name of Moses' own tribe, and he who had first written it down for them in a hieroglyphic cartouche. Yet those few hundred encamped by the sea were of many origins\u2014Syrian, Canaanite, Elamite, Hurrian\u2014from all the tribes and kingdoms between Egypt and the Hittites and the empire of the Assyrians, prisoners of war and their descendants from the many campaigns waged by Egypt in those lands. To be called Israelite, to accept it, did not give the slaves the illusion of one origin, but the dream of one destiny. It had been the dream of Moses, the one who had been his slave and had become his brother, who had travelled with him to the desert of Nubia and shared the revelation of the Aten, the god whom Moses in his language called _Jehovah_ , the one and only god.\n\nAfter today both men would be able to fulfil the dream they had shared in the desert. Akhenaten would return to his capital stronger than before, a vanquisher of enemies, a warrior-pharaoh like his father and grandfather, unhindered by those of the old religion who would seek to undermine him; Moses and his people could celebrate their miraculous deliverance from the army of the pharaoh and go to the haven that Akhenaten had found for them, far away on the rocky mount of Jerusalem. Together they would build not one City of Light but two, shining beacons of the one god that would unify all the peoples of the world and make wisdom and knowledge the new religion.\n\nAkhenaten felt a presence to his right and turned, seeing past the slaves holding up his chair to a chariot that had drawn up alongside. Through his blurred vision and the dust, the chariot seemed monochrome, a coppery red, as if it had somehow driven up from the underworld, and for a second he remembered the cold fear he had felt as a boy when he was still in the grips of the old religion and its superstitions. He then heard the voice of a woman, hoarse and sharp edged. _\"Akhenaten,\"_ she said contemptuously, looking down from the chariot on him. \"Who is this _Akhenaten_? I know only Amenhotep, the weakling child who always had his head in papyrus scrolls.\" She spoke in a language incomprehensible to those around them, the language of their great-great-grandmother Ahhotep, first Mistress of the Shores, wife of the pharaoh Ahmose, a language learned in secret by all in the royal line who descended from her.\n\n\"A lot has happened since you were last here, Mina,\" he replied, speaking in her tongue. \"I am now pharaoh, and you are Mistress of the Shores.\"\n\n\"Pah.\" She spat the words out. \" _Mistress of the Shores_. I am more than that. We hold the men of Mycenae in our thrall. They think they control our island that you Egyptians call Hau-nebut because when they came after the gods inundated our palaces with the great wave, we retreated to the mountains and the southern shore. But we seduce their warriors and breed with them and take our female offspring as our own, training them in all the skills that Ahhotep passed down to us. I am no longer merely Mistress of the Shores. Now, I am Mistress of _War_.\"\n\nAkhenaten smiled to himself. Mina had come from her island fastness to the north at his beckoning; she had been promised gold but was lured more by the prospect of war. Her warriors had sailed across the sea in sleek ships, so unlike anything Egyptian, vessels that Akhenaten would one day use for his own final voyage. Mina had always been one for posturing, but unlike many male warriors who boasted, her posturing was backed up by a bloodcurdling ability on the battlefield, with what she called _kharme_ , battle lust. Mina's female warriors had been the mercenaries of choice for his father and grandfather, preferred over the Nubians, who had now become too integrated into Egypt and her intrigues. Mina was perfect for Akhenaten's task. He needed mercenaries who would do exactly as they were bidden, who would leave with their gold and never tell the truth of what had happened on this day.\n\nAkhenaten looked sideways at the chariot again, suddenly seeing her. She was standing on the platform, one hand on her hip, holding the reins. Her thick black hair was wound around her head and fell in tresses down her back, hanging over her bow. She wore a skirt and corset, which pushed up and exposed her ample breasts. Two big snakes curled over them and around her neck, and with her free hand she slowly caressed them. Behind her Akhenaten could see more chariots drawn up, a division that he knew amounted to no more than two hundred warriors but would be easily enough for his purpose.\n\nMina gestured toward the cliff edge to the east. \"It will be suicidal for your chariots. Is this your intention?\"\n\nHe refused to answer directly. \"When I give the signal, you and your warriors will charge ahead of the two Egyptian divisions. They will already be stoked up, and seeing your women take the lead, bravado and lust will drive them farther. But only you will know that the Israelite encampment is right on the cliff edge, leaving the Egyptians no room to wheel once they have driven through it. At the last moment before reaching the camp, you will wheel to the right and left and leave the two Egyptian divisions to charge straight through.\"\n\n\"Over the cliff into the sea.\"\n\n\"Are your chariots up to the task?\"\n\nShe snorted. \"It is not the chariot that matters, but the charioteer. We all drive the same chariots, your divisions and mine. They all have wheels at the back, six spoked, and the leather harnesses that yoke the horses. They can be driven as fast as the sound of their coming, but drive them that fast and you will never be able to turn them. Your charioteers are inexperienced, and train too little. You have been lazy in war, Akhenaten, unlike your father and grandfather. You have been spending too much time staring at the sun. But today the inexperience of your charioteers will work to your advantage. They think that the ease with which they can gather speed makes them nimble and warlike, when it will just hurtle them to their deaths. My charioteers know how to fly toward an enemy and then wheel at the last minute to loose their arrows at close range. We will do the same maneuver today.\"\n\n\"Prepare your division.\"\n\nMina pulled on the reins and turned her chariot back toward the others. Akhenaten remembered the last time she had been in Egypt, when he had called on her to protect the border to the south against nomadic raiding. She had visited him and Nefertiti in Amarna and held their child Tutankh-aten, a sickly boy whom nobody expected to live long enough to succeed his father. Mina had suggested that they expose him to the elements, as they did unwanted infants in the mountains of her island. She had said that if he did survive, he would be too weak to resist a resurgence of the old religion, plunging Egypt back into an obsession with the afterlife, and the priests would once again be in control. Akhenaten had known that she was right, but he could not bring himself to kill his own son. It was then he knew that his legacy would have to be a secret one, not open for all to see as the new Jerusalem would be, but something hidden, secreted away in the most venerated place in Egypt, where its presence could be safeguarded for the future by a new priesthood sworn to serve only the Aten.\n\nThe line of trumpeters to his left had been gaping at Mina and her bare-breasted warriors, and now looked at him expectantly. To the east the glow of dawn had become stronger, and a crack of sunlight appeared between land and sky. Akhenaten extended his left hand, and the trumpeters instantly raised their instruments and blew, a ragged noise at first that levelled out and became a deafening blare across the desert. It was the signal to mount up. The men turned from leering at the women and leapt on their chariots, the drivers unleashing the reins and standing with their whips at the ready, the archers pulling arrows out of their quivers and stringing them loosely in their bows. Out of the dust to his right, Mehmnet-Ptah appeared in his royal chariot, glinting now in the sunlight, his great curved sword upraised, and pulled to a halt just ahead of the start line. Stamped into the gold and electrum shield at the front of the chariot were the wings of Horus, the falcon god, and above it Akhenaten could see the rays of the Aten and the cartouche containing his own name. Behind him Mina drew up with a section of her chariots, and he saw others of her division stream off to the left and right to take up positions on either flank of the Egyptian charioteers, ready to funnel them toward the encampment below the rising sun.\n\nAkhenaten's own chariot drew up alongside. He got up, waved the charioteer aside, and took his place at the reins. He would drive the chariot himself, spurring his army on like the warrior pharaohs of old, but he would fall back behind the main body before they converged on the cliff encampment. He stared to the east, narrowing his eyes. The light was stronger now, searing his vision on either side of his blind spot. If he did not give the signal soon, the horses might shy away from it and refuse to gallop, but he wanted to wait long enough that the sun would blind the drivers as they hurtled closer to the edge. The blare of the trumpets had also been the last warning to any of the Israelites who might remain in the camp. Moses should by now have spirited them away along the perilous path just beneath the lip of the cliff, and they should be far away to the north. If all went according to plan, after this morning there would no longer be an Egyptian chariot army to pursue the Israelites; they should be able to make their way across the northern isthmus of the gulf beyond the border of Egypt and to safety.\n\nMehmnet-Ptah looked back to him. Akhenaten raised his arm again, and then dropped it. With a huge battle cry, the general whipped his horses forward, his sword flashing. On either side the ground rumbled, and, like a great wave breaking on a beach, the line of chariots surged forward in a cacophony of yelling and neighing and screeching of wheels. Then Mina and her chariots followed, hurtling ahead like a spear thrust through the center of the line. For an instant Akhenaten saw her as he whipped his horses forward, saw the snakes held high above her head like batons, writhing and turning, heard her warriors shrieking and ululating as they shot past. Soon they had overtaken Mehmnet-Ptah and disappeared in the cloud of dust that had risen above the plain. Far out on either side he could see the two flanking lines sweeping ahead and closing in to constrict the main force, driving it toward the cliff-top encampment. As the dust enveloped the last of the charioteers, all he could hear was an extraordinary din, like the sound of a rushing sandstorm heading out from the desert and dropping into the canyon of the sea.\n\nHe veered right, reached the cliff edge, and turned to look back at the Israelite encampment. The dust cloud had rolled ahead of the chariots and erupted like a huge exhalation from the desert, billowing and swirling out over the sea. An astonishing sight met his eyes, almost impossible to register. In the final seconds as the first rank of charioteers had realized their mistake in driving too fast at the cliff edge, they had tried to rein in their horses, slowing them enough that the following ranks had crashed into them, each successive rank doing the same. The combined momentum of horses and chariots and men had pushed the entire army in one impacted mass over the cliff, the leading edge appearing out of the dust cloud hundreds of feet above the sea. For a moment the mass seemed suspended in space, like a great frieze of battle carved into the wall of a temple, and then with a cacophony of shrieking and whinnying and bellowing it plummeted to the sea, a thrashing, seething mass of limbs and wheels and spars that fell like some monstrous apparition from the heavens, hitting the water with a mighty crash. Giant waves erupted around the edges, throwing dismembered parts of horses and men far into the air to rain down on either side. Within the tumult it was as if the seas themselves had parted, exposing a sloping sandy seabed littered with chariots that still seemed to be driving forward into the depths, their horses and charioteers gone.\n\nChurning waters enveloped the scene, with shattered and burst bodies and slicks of blood lying thick on the surface. Akhenaten peered along the cliff face to the north, imagining the Israelites who he knew would have been left behind to watch before catching up with the main exodus. He knew that what they had seen today, the destruction of an army, the parting of the seas, would become a legend of their people as they fled along the great canyon of the gulf to the north. It truly had been the work of the Aten, the chariot army having been blinded by the rays of the sun, but only he and Moses would know that it was a deliverance planned not by divine wisdom but by two men intent on saving those whom they had chosen to be the people to carry forth the worship of the one god.\n\nThen on the cliff edge out of the dust on either side he saw a distant line of chariots streaming off to the north and south, looping around to their rendezvous point somewhere behind him; it was Mina's division, their job done. But from the center of the dust storm there was nothing, no longer any sound, no chariots returning. He had achieved what no enemy of Egypt had achieved in a thousand years. He had driven a pharaoh's army, his own army, to utter destruction, over a cliff into the sea, leaving no survivors and no trace of their passing.\n\nHe reined around and turned his back on the scene, looking to the left and then right, and seeing the emptiness where the army had once been, the dust still settling on the scuffed hoof prints and the shallow depressions where the soldiers had been resting mere minutes before. He felt the warmth of the sun on his neck, and looking to the west he saw only the burning white disk in his vision that blotted out all but the shimmering sands of the desert. It was with him all the time now, the light of the Aten shining through all his thoughts and his deeds.\n\n_Now was the time for his own destiny_.\n\n# PART 1\n\n# CHAPTER 1\n\n# **T HE GULF OF SUEZ, EGYPT, PRESENT DAY**\n\nJack Howard sank slowly into the depths of the Red Sea, injecting a blast of air into his stabilizer jacket and reaching neutral buoyancy only inches above the seabed. Ahead of him the sand shimmered with the sunlight that streamed down from the surface some thirty meters overhead, blocked only by the shadow of the dive boat at the edge of his field of vision. For a few moments he hung there, barely breathing, perfectly at one with the sea.\n\nWhen Jack dived he was always seeking the past, in shipwrecks, in sunken ruins, in humble scraps of evidence or fabulous treasures, some of them dating back to the dawn of recorded history. And yet for him the experience of diving was all about the present, about the heightened awareness and rush of adrenaline that came when every breath was precious and your life depended on it. In more than thirty years of diving, he had never lost that feeling, from his first dives as a boy through his academic training as an archaeologist and his time as a navy diver to his years with the International Maritime University on expeditions that spanned the globe. It was the same allure that had drawn men to the sea for millennia, men whose past receded with the shoreline, their future hemmed in by the vagaries of storm and wreck, whose survival could be measured only as far as they could see ahead. For Jack it was intoxicating, his lifeblood. He knew that even if he found nothing this time, the dive would revitalize him, would push him forward to try again, never to give up as long as the past beckoned him to explore its deepest secrets.\n\nHe stared around him. To his left a cliff rose steeply up the western shore of the gulf, the rock furrowed and worn. To his right the seabed dropped off to the abyss at the center of the gulf; the slope was punctuated by the heads of coral that rose out of the sand like giant mushrooms. He strained his eyes, scanning the seabed: still nothing. And yet his gut feeling told him to carry on, an instinct borne of more than thirty years of underwater exploration in which he had rarely made a bad call and had never given up while the window was still open. For three days now, he and Costas had dived repeatedly along this coast, covering more than a kilometer of seabed, and Jack was determined to use every last second of dive time available to them. The prize that he knew lay somewhere out there was big enough to justify the risk they had taken coming here, and they might never again have a chance like this.\n\nA voice crackled in his earphones, the familiar New York accent clear even through the intercom. \"Jack. It's my worst nightmare.\"\n\nJack turned, seeing the sparkling veil of exhaust bubbles at the edge of his visibility some thirty meters upslope, exhaled by the diver kneeling on the seabed beneath. Costas Kazantzakis had been Jack's constant dive companion for almost twenty years now, ever since they had first met and come up with the idea of an institute for exploration and research. Costas had learned virtually everything he knew about archaeology from Jack, who in turn had come to rely on his friend for engineering expertise and general practical know-how. Jack remembered the last time he and Costas had dived together in the Red Sea, almost five years before. Then, they had been seeking a fortune in gold lost in a Roman ship trading out to India. They were following clues in fragments of an ancient merchant's guide found by their colleague Maurice Hiebermeyer in a desert excavation. Now, five years later, they were again following clues in ancient writing, but instead of a newly discovered text, it was one of the greatest works of literature ever known, its words and verses pored over and memorized by millions. And what was at stake was not just a treasure in artifacts but the truth behind one of the oldest adventure stories ever told, a foundation myth in one of the world's great religious traditions, yet a tradition that may have been torn apart by an event of unimaginable destruction at this very spot over three thousand years ago.\n\nJack tapped his intercom. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Two sea snakes. Right in front of me, Jack, swaying, working out which bit of my neck to lick. Just like those snake batons from the tomb of Tutankhamun that gave me the jitters in the Cairo Museum. It's the undead, come back to haunt me for violating the temple we found under the Nile.\"\n\n\"Those weren't snakes, Costas. They were _crocodiles_. A temple to the crocodile god, Sobek.\"\n\n\"They're all friends, right? Crocodile gods, snake gods. Violate one, you violate all of them. Right now I wish I'd never gotten involved with archaeologists.\"\n\n\"Remember our cover, Costas. We're here to photograph the wildlife. Our dive boat captain's probably watching us through his glass-bottomed bucket right now. You need to look the part, but just keep your distance.\"\n\n\"Don't worry. Every great explorer has their phobia, Jack. Mine's just become sea snakes.\"\n\n\"Yeah, along with, at the last count, rats, skeletons, and anything decayed. Especially mummies.\"\n\n\"Don't mention mummies, Jack. Just don't go there.\"\n\n\"That's why I brought you here, remember? To get away from all that. You're always at me about wanting more down time, and now you've got it. A holiday on the Red Sea, and still you complain.\"\n\n\"Jack, holiday means sun lounger under a parasol, gin and tonics, the occasional splash in the sea, delightful _female_ company. It doesn't mean another Jack and Costas against-the-clock hunt for some lost archaeological treasure. It doesn't mean the entire Egyptian security service on our tails, our lives dependent on some dodgy dive boat captain who probably moonlights as a pirate. And just to cap it off, a major war about to start overhead.\"\n\n\"You love it, Costas. Admit it.\"\n\n\"Yeah, right. Like I love being licked by sea snakes.\"\n\n\"How's your air?\"\n\n\"A hundred bar and counting. Enough for half an hour at my depth, twenty minutes where you are.\"\n\n\"Okay. You see that triple coral head about twenty meters in front of me? At my four o'clock from that, about twenty meters down the slope, there's a cluster of smaller coral heads I want to look at. There's something strange about them. That's as far as we're going to get on this dive.\"\n\n\"Roger that, Jack. Wait there while I take a picture.\"\n\nJack stared, riveted by the scene. For a long time it had been thought that the Red Sea was fatal for sea snakes, it being too saline for them to be able to filter out enough of the salt to make the water drinkable. But reports of sea snakes in the Red Sea had circulated among divers for several months now, and fishermen had brought in several specimens. The captain of the dive boat had spoken of it to Jack the night before, telling him of turbulence he had seen on the surface of the sea at night, patches of disturbed water and phosphorescence that looked like feeding schools of fish but he thought were actually writhing schools of snakes. In the Indian Ocean they were known to rise to the surface to drink freshwater after a rainstorm, and he thought that they had reached the northern limit of their tolerance at the entrance to the Gulf of Suez, where the sea becomes even more saline, and were congregating there in a desperate attempt to find drinkable water. They seemed to be drawn in large numbers to a few places where the water was fresher. Jack had pointed to a desert spring that trickled down the cliff face to the beach at this spot, and he had thought there might be other freshwater up-wellings below the seabed near the shoreline.\n\nJack watched Costas reach out and turn the camera on himself and the snakes, and then he pressed his intercom. \"You might not want to alarm them. I'd keep the flash off if I were you.\"\n\n\"You know how I feel about snakes, Jack. I'm trying not to shake all over. I just need one selfie to show that I've overcome my fear.\"\n\n\"Did you hear what our captain said about the snakes last night?\"\n\n\"I heard the word _snake_ , and then I put on my headphones. I didn't want any bad dreams on our final night here.\"\n\n\"He said the ones he's seen are _Pelamis platurus_ , the yellow-bellied sea snake.\"\n\n\"Got it. Black body, yellow belly. They look kind of Egyptian, the sort of thing you'd see swirling around Tutankhamun in his tomb.\"\n\n\"Just don't get bitten.\"\n\n\"Don't say that, Jack. I thought sea snakes were pretty passive.\"\n\n\"Not when they're thirsty. And these snakes might be a little deranged. They shouldn't really be in the Red Sea, and they've swum in the wrong direction if they want to find water that's less saline. The Gulf of Suez would be a death zone for them.\"\n\n\"Okay, Jack.\" Costas slowly withdrew the camera. \"Give me the lowdown. You should have warned me earlier.\"\n\n\"I didn't want to break the spell.\"\n\n\"That's done.\"\n\n\"Progressive flaccid paralysis, leading to muscle breakdown, renal failure, and death. Get bitten out here, and you're a goner.\"\n\n\"Great.\" Costas sounded distant, and he had gone still in the water. \"Any suggestions?\"\n\n\"You remember that spring we saw above the cliff face? The outflow should be coming into the sea just opposite you. If you slowly ascend and the snakes stay with you, they might sense the freshwater and swim toward it, away from you.\"\n\n\"Got it.\" Costas slowly reached toward the valve that bled air into his buoyancy compensator. One of the snakes slid under his jacket, came out through the neck opening, and coiled itself around Costas' hand, hovering over his fingers, its mouth open. Costas had stopped exhaling, and for a moment there was no movement. Jack felt his own breathing lessen, as if he too were worried that the snake might be disrupted by his exhaust bubbles. He watched, his heart pounding, barely believing what might be about to happen. After all they had been through, it seemed absurd that a chance encounter with sea life could put an end to everything, but it was an occupational hazard as dangerous as anything else. He held his breath, staring. A few seconds later the snake slid over Costas' mask and then uncoiled above him, looking toward the surface, its mouth opening and closing. Costas pressed the valve and slowly began to ascend, his legs motionless, letting the buoyancy do all the work. After about five meters both the snakes uncoiled and swam up toward the surface, rising on the mass of bubbles from Costas' exhaust. He watched them swim toward shore on the surface, sinuous black shapes silhouetted by the sunlight, and then he bled air from his jacket and swam toward Jack.\n\nJack turned to face ahead, regulating his breathing until he was hanging almost motionless in the water. He thought about what Costas had just said. _A war about to start_. He stared north along the slope to a rocky promontory that marked the limit of their survey area. Earlier that day an Egyptian navy patrol boat had told the dive boat captain in no uncertain terms that he must not stray into the military zone that lay beyond the promontory. Tensions between Egypt and Israel were higher than they had been for decades, with the Middle East closer to a meltdown than it had been since the Yom Kippur war of 1973. The extremist hold on Iraq had been tightening again; only Iran remained a beacon of stability, ironically courted by the West after years of standoff. To the north of Israel, the true intentions of the extremists who had flocked into Syria during the civil war had become clear, with their attention turning from fighting the regime to sending rockets and suicide bombers across the Israeli border. To the south, the Israelis had watched the political turmoil in Egypt with dismay, as the newly installed Islamist regime was now itself threatened by extremists, a faction whose sympathies lay more with the extremists in Syria and Iraq than with the interests of the Egyptian people. Most worrying, it had become clear that the Egyptian army, in the past a force for moderation, had been infiltrated to the highest level by officers in the extremist camp, a process that had been going on in secret for years.\n\nA military coup now would not bring stability as it had done in the past, but it would provide clout for an extremist takeover. And everyone knew that if that happened, the Israelis would have no choice but to act. A war now would not be a lightning conflict as in 1973, brought to heel by superpower intervention, but a prolonged conflict, escalating into surrounding countries, into Libya, Somalia, and Iraq, drawing in Iran and Turkey. Outside powers would lack the strength to mediate a peace, their credibility undermined by the failed interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. The war would start on the eastern frontiers of Egypt, in the skies above them now, and could turn into the cataclysm that everyone watching the Middle East had feared since the end of the cold war: a new kind of world war, one marked not only by a wildfire of conventional conflicts but also by unfettered terrorism, paralyzing the world and bringing fear to people in a way that had not been seen since the threat of a nuclear holocaust two generations before.\n\nAs if to underline his thoughts, the deep rumble of a low-flying jet coursed through Jack. It was one in a succession of warplanes that had been flying toward the Egyptian border over the past few hours. The captain of the dive boat had been jittery enough without the ultimatum from the patrol vessel, and he was now standing off from their anchorage point with his engine already fired up. Jack and Costas were here anonymously, posing as recreational divers, having chartered the boat with the cover of being photographers. The only way now that Jack could extend their time on-site would be for him to blow their cover and tell the authorities that they were on the cusp of a breakthrough discovery, but to do so would be to court disaster. The new antiquities director in Cairo was a political stooge and had been shutting down foreign excavations in Egypt on a daily basis. A month ago he had been enraged to discover that Jack and Costas had been exploring beneath the pyramids at Giza, had refused their request to clear the underground passage they had found, and had rescinded their permit.\n\nAnything Jack tried now would almost certainly result in the International Maritime University being blacklisted in Egypt, his deportation, and the closure of all the remaining IMU projects in the country, as well as threatening Hiebermeyer's Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria, an affiliate of IMU. At this moment Maurice was working desperately to complete his excavation of the mummy necropolis in the Faiyum oasis, the culmination of a lifelong passion for Egyptology that might still produce astonishing finds. For him, every moment now counted just as it did for Jack, but Hiebermeyer's entire soul and career were wrapped up in ancient Egypt, and Jack was not willing to risk his friend's chance of bringing his excavation to some kind of completion. There was no leeway: This dive would be their last one on-site, with the chances of them ever returning overshadowed by the cloud that now hung over the entire Middle East, not just Egypt.\n\nJack closed his eyes for a moment, breathing in slowly and deeply, knowing that each draw on his tank now represented a final countdown to the end of the dive. Over the past few months in Sudan and Egypt, he had pushed the envelope further than he ever had done before, and he had raised more than a few eyebrows among the IMU board of directors. Officially Jack was IMU's archaeological director and Costas its submersibles expert. When Jack had set up IMU fifteen years before, he had relinquished control to an independent board because he had seen too many institutes wobble under the control of a founding director who had put too many eggs in one basket. IMU projects were now spread around the globe, encompassing oceanography and geology as well as archaeology, and IMU acted as an umbrella for affiliated institutes, including Hiebermeyer's beside the ancient harbor of Alexandria, on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt. One of the board's remits was to rein in any project that had become a political flash point, potentially threatening IMU's reputation and wider activities in the region. Through no fault of his own, Jack had endured the Sudanese authorities terminating his diving in the Upper Nile and had then experienced the barely contained furor over their pyramid exploration, setting him up against the same extremist element that had infiltrated the regimes in both countries. For some days now, Jack had wondered whether it would be the new Egyptian antiquity authorities or the IMU board of directors that would cause his final departure from Egypt. Either way, he knew his time was running perilously short.\n\nJack glanced at his wrist computer. There were still fifteen minutes of dive time left, precious moments in which he could push aside the modern world and focus all his being on the diving. For Jack, no amount of equipment preparation, of preparation of body and mind, of bringing a lifetime of experience to bear could guarantee his ability to see beyond the perimeter of his vision to what might lie ahead. Living for the moment was more than just an intoxication for him; it had become a tool of his trade, sharpening his senses and his acuity of observation, clearing his mind and allowing him to see more in a few moments on the seabed than he could do in hours on land. He stared down the slope and saw the seconds slipping away on his dive computer. He knew he was going to have to bring all that acuity to bear if they were to stand any chance of finding what all his instincts told him lay out there: a revelation that just might shake the foundations of history.\n\n# CHAPTER 2\n\nJack stared up at the hull of the dive boat some thirty meters overhead, watching as the captain gunned the engine to keep clear of the shore. Something nudged him.\n\n\"Jack.\" He heard the suck of another regulator, and turned to see Costas hovering behind him. It was still a double-take to see him in rented scuba gear rather than the usual E-suit, an all-environment dry suit with Kevlar exoskeleton and an integrated re-breather that Costas had developed more than ten years before at the International Maritime University engineering lab in Cornwall. He had been constantly refining it since then. Out here anything with an IMU logo was going to attract unwanted attention. Even the full-face masks with intercom were a lucky find in the backroom of the dive operator they had decided to hire. All they had brought of their own was Costas' photo rig and the GoPro camera he had strapped to his forehead. Yet Jack relished going back to basics, to the kind of equipment he had pored over in dive magazines as a boy. Sucking on a battered rental regulator gave him the same thrill he had felt when he did it on his first open-water dive all those years ago.\n\nHe steadied himself, injecting a small blast of air into his stabilizer jacket. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Found something.\"\n\nJack shook his head, staring back down the slope. The coral heads were shimmering with schools of fish, and in the distance he saw the flash of a whitetip reef shark. \"Not yet. But I want to look at those outcrops down there. It means going a bit deeper, and I know we can't risk extending our no-stop time with the boat having no recompression chamber. But even if we only have five minutes, that might be enough.\"\n\n\"No. I mean _I_ found something.\"\n\nJack turned to him and caught his breath. Costas was kneeling on the sand holding an object in front of his camera. It was a rusty old rifle, the stock riddled with shipworms and the metal receiver caked with marine growth. Jack lifted it from him, staring at the distinctive magazine and bolt. \"Lee-Enfield Mark III,\" he said, turning it over, seeing the magazine cutoff and long-range volley sights. \"First World War issue, early on, before 1916.\"\n\nCostas held up a rusted charger clip containing five staggered cartridges with rimmed bases. \"There's more where this comes from, Jack. Strewn down the slope behind me. It looks like the remains of several crates.\"\n\n\"You sure?\"\n\n\"All the same. Lee-Enfield rifles and .303 ammunition.\"\n\nJack's heart began to pound. Maurice Hiebermeyer's Egyptian wife, Aysha, had been researching old archaeological reports in the Cairo Museum and had come across a diary written by an archaeologist friend of T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, a man who had served alongside him as an intelligence officer during the First World War and had assisted with the Arab Revolt. Aysha had nearly put the diary aside when her eye was caught by a remarkable sketch, and she had read the accompanying entry. While loading arms from shore at a clandestine transit point in the Gulf of Suez, the dhow carrying the arms had capsized, and in the scrabble to recover what they could, the officer had pulled up something else from the shallows, something much older.\n\nJack had been at the institute in Alexandria when Aysha had shown Hiebermeyer the sketch, and had seen his jaw drop. With its curved shape, the object could have been medieval, perhaps Saracen, but there was one particular feature that had convinced Hiebermeyer that it was ancient Egyptian, dating no later than the end of the New Kingdom in the late second millennium BC; if so, it was a prestige object owned by someone of wealth and high rank. Jack had pinpointed the stretch of coast to within a few kilometers and was pondering how such an object could have been lost there, so far from the heartland of Egypt, when Costas had looked up from the submersibles manual he had been studying in a corner of the room and had recited a passage from the Old Testament Book of Exodus. The atmosphere in the room had suddenly gone electric. For a few moments all Jack's frustration at their unresolved pyramid quest had gone out the window. Any lingering sense that this new quest was deflecting his attention from the bigger prize, from what lay beneath the pyramid, was overcome as soon as he dropped off the boat for the first dive. Over the past three days, since discovering the site where the officer had reported the artifact, and then finding more evidence of that astonishing biblical event, the possibility of what lay buried in the seabed below them had eclipsed all other thoughts.\n\nJack stared ahead. The words that had been running through his head all through the dive surfaced again, and he spoke them slowly. \" 'We bade Moses strike the sea with his staff, and the sea was cleft asunder, each part as high as a massive mountain. In between we made the others follow. We delivered Moses and all who were with him, and drowned the rest.' \"\n\nCostas swam alongside him. \"Come again, Jack?\"\n\n\"Do you remember in Alexandria quoting the Book of Exodus on pharaoh and the Egyptian chariots chasing the Israelites?\"\n\n\"Advantage of a strict Greek Orthodox upbringing. I know a lot about submersibles, and a lot about the Bible.\"\n\n\"Well, my quote was from the Qur'\u0101n, Al-Shu'Ar\u0101,' The Poets.\"\n\n\"Huh,\" Costas replied. \"Same prophet, same God.\"\n\n\"And same pharaoh,\" Jack replied. \"That's who 'the others' means in the quote. 'Lord of the East and West, and all between.' I don't know about the parting of the sea, but we're about to find out if the nub of the story is historical reality.\"\n\n\"You think that pharaoh's our guy? The one we were chasing in the desert? Akhenaten?\"\n\nJack checked his contents gauge. He had only ten minutes of air left. He pointed ahead to the cluster of coral heads. \"There's only one way to find out. Let's move.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nJack powered ahead of Costas, finning hard as he dropped down to thirty-five meters depth, then forty. It was deeper than he had thought it would be, and they were going to have less time. The diffused light at this depth meant that the brilliant colors of the coral heads closer to shore had now been reduced to dark shades of blue, making it more difficult to distinguish any unusual features. With only a few minutes remaining, Jack's thinking automatically switched to free-diving mode, as if he had taken a single breath of air on the surface and had to maximize every moment on the seabed. He reached a central point above the coral heads and sank to the sand. There was no question that the heads were unusual, almost as if they were lined in ranks extending down the slope, more densely concentrated than on the surrounding seabed. He began to look between them, finning quickly over the gaps, scrutinizing the sand for artifacts. _Nothing_.\n\nHe glanced back at Costas, who was a few meters upslope and shining the torch on his strobe array at one of the coral heads as he floated slowly around it. \"I've drawn a blank,\" Jack said. \"There could be material under the sand, but it could be meters deep. I'm going to ascend slowly just in case a wider view gets anything, and then we've got to go.\"\n\n\"Wrong, Jack.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, 'wrong'?\"\n\n\"I mean, _wrong_. It's not buried. It was _once_ buried, but now it's all around us. Get over here.\"\n\nCostas began taking photos, the strobes flashing as fast as they could recharge. Jack glanced at the warning light on his dive computer, and then finned over toward him. \"I see coral,\" he said. \"An unusual amount at this depth, but that's it.\"\n\nCostas switched off the torch on his strobe array, and the brilliant colors that had been lit up in the artificial light were reduced to blue. He pointed to a complex growth of coral at the base of the head. \"Now look.\"\n\nJack stared hard, dropping down in front of a jumble of coral that extended out in front of the head. It reminded him of marine growth on the decayed iron structure of modern wrecks, preserving shapes that would otherwise have disintegrated. He remembered the clandestine First World War shipment at this spot; they might be looking at other material that had fallen off the dhow and become encased in coral after a century underwater.\n\nHe shifted slightly sideways, and then he saw it. \"A wheel,\" he exclaimed. \"I can see the spokes of a wheel, and the curved line of the rim.\"\n\n\"Not just one wheel, Jack. There's another one on the opposite side. And there's a curved surface in between them, and a shape like a coral-encrusted pole sticking out front.\"\n\nCostas dropped behind Jack, taking pictures of him in front of the head. Jack stared in astonishment. \"My God.\"\n\n_There was no doubt about it_. He was looking at the preserved form of a chariot encased in coral. \"The wheel,\" he said hoarsely. \"The spacing of the spokes suggests a six-spoke wheel, typical of the New Kingdom. I think we just hit pay dirt.\"\n\n\"Bingo,\" Costas said. \"Congratulations, Jack.\"\n\n\"You spotted it.\" Jack twisted around, staring. There were dozens of them, hundreds, a cascade of chariots down the slope. He turned back to the one in front of him. The flash of the strobe revealed an unusual color, a shimmer of pale gold emerging from the sand at the base of the head. \"Good God,\" he exclaimed.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"Get close up and photograph it. There's about a ten-centimeter-square section of gold there, maybe electrum.\"\n\n\"I can see a wing,\" Costas muttered, the strobe flashing. \"The end of a wing.\"\n\n\"It's the falcon-god Horus,\" Jack exclaimed. \"Wait till Maurice sees that. The symbol of a pharaoh.\"\n\n\"It can't get much better than this, Jack.\"\n\nJack pushed off, rose above the coral head, and scanned the others. \"I'm trying to understand how this happened. How these chariots were preserved like this.\"\n\n\"I've got it. Think bodies at Pompeii, Jack. Bodies preserved as hollow casts in the volcanic ash as it solidified over them. Check out the base of that coral head: You can still see traces of the mud that once encased the chariots, now rock-hard. You remember this morning we were scanning the cliff from the dive boat, thinking how unstable it looked? I think those chariots came hurtling over the cliff and caused a massive landslide, enveloping them in earth and debris as they fell to the seafloor. The material in that cliff may contain a volcanic dust like the pozzolana of the Vesuvius area, something that caused the mud to solidify underwater.\"\n\n\"Got you,\" Jack said. \"Like hydraulic concrete.\"\n\n\"Exactly. The hardened masses were buried in sand, but as that shifted with the current over the centuries the masses were exposed, some of them resisting erosion long enough for coral to form and preserve them in the way we see them today. That one with the gold fronting happened to be eroded in such a way that the coral formed over those features just as the mud casing was about to wash away completely, so the features of the wheels and pole are preserved in the shape of the coral. The other masses we can see are probably shapeless lumps now, but raise them to the surface, fill them with plaster, break them open, and hey, presto, you've got a pharaoh's chariot army reborn.\"\n\nJack remembered the lines of the Book of Exodus that Costas had quoted a few days before: _and the Egyptians pursued, and were in after them to the midst of the sea, even all Pharaoh's horsemen, his chariots and his horsemen...and the Lord overthrew the Egyptians in the midst of the sea...And the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host that came into the sea after them; there remained not so much as one of them_. He felt a huge rush of excitement, and punched the water. His dive computer began beeping, indicating that he was now at his no-stop limit. \"Time to go. We've done all we can here. A fantastic result.\"\n\n\"A few more pictures, Jack. Be with you in a moment.\"\n\nJack glanced at his contents gauge. He was well into the red, with only twenty bar remaining. He knew that if he breathed hard now, he would soon feel the resistance of an emptying tank. He needed to relax, to moderate his breathing but keep it at a normal rate in order to expel as much nitrogen as possible as he ascended. He finned off the seabed, his hand ready on the vent on his stabilizer jacket in order to expel air as it expanded, to keep his rate of ascent no faster than the speed of his exhaust bubbles. The one thing they could not afford was a decompression incident, with the nearest chamber hours away. He looked up, aiming at the metal bar suspended ten meters below the boat as a decompression safety stop. He saw the two hanging regulators from cylinders of pure oxygen on the boat that would help to flush the nitrogen further. With Costas now having exceeded the no-stop time for his depth, they had all the more need of the oxygen now.\n\nJack looked down as he rose and saw the repeated flash from Costas' strobes as he took as many photographs as he could, finning quickly between the outcrops and dropping deeper to get the best angles. Along with the video from the GoPro camera on his forehead, the images should give them all they needed for a press release that would astonish the world. Jack was already running through the timing; the release could be only after Maurice had wound up his Faiyum excavation, as even with the euphoria of discovery and Egyptian archaeology once again at center stage, the new antiquities director would be bound to pick at the fact that he and Costas appeared to have carried out an archaeological project without his authorization. The fact that they left the site undisturbed and had been within their legal rights as recreational divers, with even the dive boat under surveillance from the Egyptian navy, would carry little weight. Jack knew that he would have to ensure that all IMU assets were out of Egypt before the storm broke.\n\nBy then Hiebermeyer's institute would probably have been forcibly closed anyway, and a fresh outburst from the antiquities director would have no effect on the prognosis for future excavation permits, which were already as bleak as they could be. Better by far that Jack give the board of directors what they needed to ensure that IMU's departure from Egypt was accompanied by a major archaeological revelation, and not overshadowed by a political firestorm. It would be better still if Maurice was able to add to it with a last-minute discovery of his own from the mummy necropolis, something that Jack now hoped for fervently as he looked ahead to the next hours and days.\n\nJack's mind returned to the past, to the trail of discovery that he had come out here to follow. He thought of the pioneers of archaeology\u2014amateurs, surveyors, soldiers, those who had traveled to the Holy Land in the nineteenth century seeking what he and Costas had just found, proof beyond reasonable doubt of the reality behind the Bible. Yet he had begun to feel that history had judged those men wrongly, had focused too much on their Christian zeal and their role as imperialists rather than their wider humanity. He thought of the group of officers he had been shadowing as he followed the trail of Akhenaten through the desert of Sudan to the pyramids at Giza, and he remembered what Costas had said: _one prophet, one god_. Perhaps for those men, the story of Akhenaten, of his conversion to the worship of the one god, the story of Moses and the Israelites, was about more than just biblical reality. These were men who in the war against the Mahdi in Sudan had come up against the terrifying rise of jihad, and who also knew the extremism that could be preached by followers of their own religion, not least among the zealots and missionaries they had seen in Africa. Perhaps their true zeal had been to reveal the single unifying truth behind both traditions. Perhaps their quest had been fuelled by the burning desire for discovery that drove Jack, but also by an extraordinary idealism. Then, as now, anything that could throw the spotlight on the similarities, on the common tradition, might push the world back to reason, might strengthen the common ground and force the extremists to the margins. Jack stared back down at the receding forms of the chariots on the seabed, and he felt another surge of adrenaline. He was back on track again, taking up where those men had left off. Archaeology had more to offer than just the thrill of discovery, far more, and the dark cloud over Egypt and the Middle East made it all the more imperative that he do everything in his power to see this one through. _He would not let it go_.\n\nCostas' voice crackled through the intercom. \"A wing and a prayer, Jack.\" He came up alongside, showing where his contents gauge was nearly at the bottom of the red. \"Are we done here now? I mean in Egypt? We can't do better than this.\"\n\nJack said nothing, but seemed to stare through Costas as they came up level, their masks almost touching. \"Uh-oh,\" Costas said. \"I've seen that look before.\"\n\nJack snapped out of his trance, looked up at the boat and then back at Costas, his eyes burning. \"As soon as we've off-gassed and can fly, I'm going back to the institute in Alexandria.\"\n\nCostas peered at him. \"You want to get under the pyramid again, don't you?\"\n\nJack stared at him. \"Damn right I do.\"\n\n\"What's changed here?\"\n\n\"It's not because I think what we've found here will give us a glimmer of hope with the Egyptian authorities. If anything, the opposite. That's why we're keeping this discovery to ourselves until the time is right.\"\n\n\"It's crazy,\" Costas said. \"Apart from anything else, the press attention this would get around the world might just remind them of the huge tourist revenue they're in the process of losing by shutting down archaeology in the country.\"\n\n\"We're talking about a regime whose ideologues might be about to wind the clock back to year zero. I think they couldn't care less about tourist dollars.\"\n\n\"That thug in the Antiquities Department might finally blow a fuse and deport us. It's only the more moderate elements in government that might stop him from doing that. Anyway, events could be moving too fast for us. We might be flying back into an extremist coup, in which case we may as well just keep on flying.\"\n\n\"That's why time is of the essence. If we do still have time in Egypt, it might only be for days or even hours. Are you with me?\"\n\nCostas took a final few photos of the scene below, the outcrops now just dark smudges in the shimmer of sand. Jack looked up at the decompression stop, less than ten meters above, and saw the bar vibrate as another fast jet roared overhead. Costas peered again at him. \"I know what's happened. Maurice predicted it. He said that any hope that a discovery out here might allow you to leave Egypt satisfied was misplaced. He said it would just rekindle your desire to get to the bottom of our original quest.\"\n\n\"Damn right it has,\" Jack said.\n\n\"And make you take risks. Really big risks that could jeopardize your future and even your life.\"\n\n\"Been there before.\"\n\n\"Not like this,\" Costas replied. \"Maurice's own words. He knows these people. This time we're not just dealing with some maverick warlord. The antiquities director may be our bad guy of the moment, but when that coup happens he'll be ousted by someone who'll make the Taliban thought police look tame. Cut off his head, and another one will appear. This time we're up against an ideology, an extremist movement that the world has been fighting since the days of the Mahdi in Sudan, and so far it's been a losing battle.\"\n\n\"All the more reason not to give up. You win the fight against ideology with ideas, not with hardware. That's the lesson of history. If I can find a revelation from the past that adds ammunition to that battle, then it will be worth it.\"\n\n\"That's a tall order, Jack. This could just be the highest mountain you'll climb.\"\n\n\"You can walk away. I won't hold it against you. I can go it alone.\"\n\n\"As if.\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"What's in it for me?\"\n\n\"I've been thinking about that,\" Jack said. \"Submersibles. We'll definitely need submersibles.\"\n\n\"You making that up?\"\n\n\"How else do we get into passages under pyramids too small to dive through?\"\n\nCostas narrowed his eyes. \"Remote operated vehicles, autonomous android excavators?\"\n\n\"You name it. Any gismo on the books. You just name it.\"\n\n\"Little Joey Three, my latest submersible micro-robot? I haven't told you about him yet. Lanowski and I were perfecting him in the IMU engineering lab just before I came out here. Amazing bionics.\"\n\n\"Anything. It's all yours.\"\n\nCostas shook his head. \"So much for the beach holiday.\"\n\nJack concentrated on his ascent. Costas had been right: _a wing and a prayer_. They had come here following a report of a find that had suddenly opened up another extraordinary possibility, another part of the trail they had been on for months now, from the ancient crocodile temple they had discovered on the Nile to the pyramids. It was a trail that shadowed one made over a hundred years before at the time of another conflict, the war against the Mahdist uprising in the Sudan, a war that itself foreshadowed what was on the verge of happening in the Middle East today. Yet somehow Jack knew that the story of what had gone on in the nineteenth century had not yet been fully told, that somewhere in it there was another key to the quest ahead that needed to be found before they could take a new plunge into the unknown.\n\nJack looked down and saw that a thin black shape had emerged from the encased chariot wheel in the coral head they had examined. It was wavering like a stalk of sea grass in a current. Other dark shapes appeared from the surrounding heads, and one detached itself and began to move sinuously toward shore. They were sea snakes, ones that had clearly been dormant within the heads but had been disturbed by the divers' exhaust bubbles and movement. Jack remembered the captain's story of a swarm of snakes thrashing on the surface, and he began to see more of them now, rising from the coral heads farther down the slope and following the first one toward the place where the other two had apparently sensed the inflow of freshwater from the shore. He felt uneasy, as if by coming to this place they had disturbed something that should have been left alone, a secret that should have died with a pharaoh and his Israelite slave more than three thousand years ago. He saw Costas concentrating on the boat above them as he ascended, and decided not to tell him. There had been enough snakes for one dive, and they needed to look ahead.\n\nTogether they reached the metal bar of the decompression stop. Costas turned to him, hanging with one hand on the bar, putting his other hand on Jack's shoulder. \"Before we deactivate the intercom, there's something I want to pass on. Maurice mentioned it to me just before we left, but we decided not to tell you straightaway, as we thought it would just fuel your frustration about not being able to get back under the pyramid. Apparently, when Aysha was rummaging in the museum, she also found a news clipping from before the First World War about some mad old mystic in Cairo who appeared from nowhere, claiming he was a former British soldier who had been sucked from the Nile into an underworld of mummies and the living dead. Something like that, anyway. Maurice thinks it's a typical story made up at the time for credulous tourists, but Aysha thinks it's so far out that there must be something to it. I think it's that husband-wife rivalry thing again, and as you know, Aysha usually wins. Anyway, she's following it up. There may be another entrance into our pyramid underworld, that's all.\"\n\nJack stared at him, his eyes gleaming with excitement. He took one of the regulators hanging down from the dive boat, pressed the purge valve to see that the oxygen was on, and then took a final breath from his own regulator, sucking on empty. He pulled off the full-face mask, put the oxygen regulator in his mouth, and reached down to the front of his stabilizer jacket for his backup mask. He put it on and cleared it, and then watched Costas do the same. He breathed in deeply, feeling his entire body tingling, relishing the sudden lift that pure oxygen always gave him, as if it were cleansing his soul. He set the timer on his computer, beginning his countdown to surfacing and getting back on the trail they had left off under the pyramid.\n\nHe could hardly wait.\n\n# CHAPTER 3\n\n# **O N THE NILE SOUTH OF CAIRO, EGYPT, 1893**\n\nThe man in the dark cape struck a match and raised it to his cigar, cupping his hand to prevent the flame from being seen by anyone who might be passing along the riverbank. Around him the waters of the river were barely discernible, a swirling miasma veiled by a thin mist; the abandoned fort on the embankment was still invisible despite the captain of the boat jabbing his finger into the darkness and assuring them that it was a mere stone's throw away. They had deliberately chosen a moonless night for their venture, and without a navigating lantern their voyage upriver had seemed a blind man's gamble at best. But the captain had raised the huge triangular sail of the felucca and brought them unerringly past the city, using the northerly breeze to sail against the current and bring them to the narrow strip of cultivated floodplain beyond the southern outskirts that fronted the desert. They had left the putrid odor of the Cairo waterfront behind, and now the river smelled musty, like an old camel. The captain had bent the tiller while his boy ran along the spar and furled the sail. For what seemed an age now, they had drifted silently, letting the eddies push them slowly into the river shore.\n\nThe man strained his eyes into the darkness, still seeing nothing, having no recourse other than to trust the skill and knowledge of the captain. He took a deep draw on his cigar, clenching it in his teeth while he exhaled the sweet smoke into the darkness, trying to calm his excitement. In daylight, if they were in the correct position, he would be able to see the pyramids of Giza just above the horizon to the west, and in front of him the ruined river fort that they had visited on foot the day before. Somewhere below, somewhere under the riverbank, lay the key to the greatest undiscovered prize in Egyptology, greater even than the lost city of Amarna or the tombs of the Valley of the Kings; something that would cap his years of adventure in Africa and allow him to return home in triumph across the Atlantic to the destiny that had seemed marked out for him, the highest offices in the land now surely within his grasp.\n\nSomething bumped the boat, knocking him momentarily off balance. He peered over the bow, seeing a small swell on the surface of the river, doubtless marking some fetid unpleasantness beneath. With the annual Nile flood only now abating, they had encountered all manner of flotsam on their trip upstream, from the washed-away wooden structures of riverside _shaduf_ irrigation pumps to the bloated carcasses of cows. Most remarkable had been a rotting fishing net tangled up with empty wooden cartridge boxes marked \"Gordon Relief Expedition,\" the detritus of a botched conflict eight years before that had taken all this time to wash its way down from the former war zone in the Sudan. The boxes had seemed archaeological, artifacts from another era, and yet Egypt, the world even, was still gripped in the aftershock of General Gordon's death at the hands of the Mahdi army in Khartoum, and the ignominious British failure to retain Sudan. In Egypt the British were bent on revenge, and in Sudan, the Mahdi army on jihad, which threatened to sweep across North Africa and the Middle East as it had done more than a thousand years before, drawing the West into a conflict that would make the wars of the Crusades seem like child's play.\n\nSeeing those cartridge cases had made him ponder his own role in the affair. He had been one of a group of American officers restless after the Civil War who had crossed the Atlantic seeking excitement in Africa, and had been employed by the Khedive of Egypt. From being a captain in the 11th Maryland Regiment of the Union army, a veteran of Gettysburg, and a personal acquaintance of General Grant, now _President_ Grant, he had become a lieutenant colonel in the Khedive's service, and then chief of staff to Gordon after the British general had been appointed governor of equatorial Sudan. With his exotic surname, Chaill\u00e9-Long, a legacy of his Huguenot French ancestry, and the manners of a southern gentleman, he had seemed a cut above the other American officers and had quickly found favor as a kind of honorary European. He had at first struck up a cordial relationship with Gordon; despite being born on a Maryland plantation, he had joined the Union army opposed to slavery, and had been more than willing to assist Gordon in his effort to eradicate the slave trade in the Sudan. Their relations became strained only when Chaill\u00e9-Long realized the futility of that enterprise and the impossibility of working under such a man as Gordon. They were broken entirely after the Khedive appointed Chaill\u00e9-Long to travel deep into Africa to conduct a treaty with the king of the Ugandans, on the way becoming a celebrated explorer whose name now stood alongside those of Speke and Burton, Livingstone and Stanley.\n\nIn 1877 he had returned to America in high esteem, newly decorated by the Khedive with the Order of the Medjidieh, acclaimed as the first American to stand on the shores of Lake Victoria. With Gordon still in charge, the Sudan had been closed to him, but he had seen the future in international law, and after a degree at Columbia had set up a practice in Alexandria in Egypt. In 1882 he had earned the approbation of the State Department by taking over the U.S. Consulate during the British naval bombardment of the city that preceded their military conquest of Egypt, the circumstance that led to direct British involvement in the Sudan and the debacle of the relief expedition in 1885.\n\nAfter that, Egypt too had seemed closed to him. And yet here he was again, drawn back not by the promise of military glory or exploration but by something else, by unfinished business from his time under Gordon in the 1870s. A few of them had become party to another enterprise, one that had begun with a small circle of British officers around Gordon obsessed with uncovering the truth of the Old Testament. Their quest to find out more had led them on a trail of discovery that had brought him to this place now on the eve of his final planned departure from Egypt. He was hoping to show something to the world arising from those years that was not tainted by the guilt and dishonor that pervaded the failure to rescue Gordon.\n\nThe boat bumped again, more jarringly this time. There was a commotion from the hold opening in the center of the deck, and a voice with an English accent cursing. \"God damn you. _God damn your eyes_.\" Another man spoke, higher pitched, in French, remonstrating angrily, followed again by the first voice. \"I didn't mean you, Guerin. I meant the spanner, God damn it. The one I just dropped.\"\n\nChaill\u00e9-Long took out his cigar and peered into the hold. \"Keep your voice down, Jones. We're close enough to shore that we might be overheard.\"\n\nJones' head and shoulders appeared out of the opening, and he spoke in Arabic to the captain. After listening to the reply, he turned around, his bearded face scarcely visible in the darkness. \"Don't worry yourself, Colonel. The captain says there's nobody along the shoreline. The fishermen don't bother to come this far along the bank when it's pitch dark, when there's no moon. They're terrified of slipping into the whirlpools that appear during the flood and being sucked down by the monsters they think lie beneath. Nile perch, no doubt, some of them of prodigious size, though who knows what else swims in this river. Even the captain and his boy are afraid. It's only your gold that's brought them here, and you'll probably have to cough up more of it to make them stay. So I can curse and swear as much as I like.\"\n\n\"In my experience of English soldiery, Corporal Jones,\" Chaill\u00e9-Long drawled, \"that could keep us occupied to dawn and beyond.\"\n\n\"The valve of the diving cylinder is jammed,\" Jones said, and he ducked down again. There was a sound of scrabbling in the bilges, and then he reappeared. \"I've found the spanner, Allah be praised. But I'm going to have to strike the valve to open it, and that sound would wake up all Cairo. I'll need to muffle it.\" He paused, looking up. \"Toss me your scarf, would you, old boy?\"\n\nChaill\u00e9-Long drew himself up and snorted. \"I will _not_ give you my scarf. It is the purest cashmere, direct from my _fournisseur_ in Paris.\"\n\n\"I don't care if it's rat skin. I never took you for a dandy, Chaill\u00e9-Long, but now I'm wondering. How did an American get a name like that anyway?\"\n\n\"Not all Yankees are Irish, despite the prejudicial views of you English. My great-grandfather was French, from a landed family under the old regime. And before you call me a dandy, I will have you remember that I was a captain in the army of the North at the Battle of Gettysburg, and after that a colonel in the Khedive's Sudanese army, chosen for the task by your revered General Gordon, no less.\"\n\nJones narrowed his eyes and stared at him. \"Well, if you were good enough for old Charlie Gordon, God rest his soul, I suppose you're good enough for me. But I still need your scarf.\"\n\nChaill\u00e9-Long snorted again, paused, then unlooped the scarf from his neck and dropped it into the opening. A few moments later there was a sound of dull thumping, of metal against metal, and then a sharp hissing noise that stopped as abruptly as it had started. \"Done,\" Jones called up. \"That's the breathing device prepared. As soon as the captain gives the word, Monsieur Guerin will be ready to go. We will help him to kit up.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nFifteen minutes later Jones lit the small gas lamp inside the hold and then turned it down so that the glow would be invisible beyond the boat. He had known Guerin for only a few hours, since the man had joined them from the Cairo dock with his secret crate of equipment, and until now it had been a matter of fumbling around in the dark as he had helped to unbox and assemble the contraption.\n\nGuerin had come straight from the harbor of Alexandria, where he had intended to dive on the ruins of the Pharos, the great lighthouse from antiquity, but Chaill\u00e9-Long had seen him there and diverted him to their present purpose. Now for the first time with some semblance of light, Jones was able to see it: a bulbous cylinder containing compressed air, above that a complex attachment of pipes and hoses to regulate the supply of air to the diver, and attached to that a face mask with a glass plate and beneath it the mouthpiece. Jones remembered the course in submarine mine-laying and demolition that he had been obliged to take as a recruit at the Royal Engineers depot at Chatham. His greatest fear had been confined spaces, followed closely by being underwater, and he had been petrified that the instructor would select him to demonstrate the bulky hard-hat diving gear in the murky depths of the River Medway. Earlier, in the barracks, the corporal in charge had regaled them with lurid tales of divers being sucked up into their helmets when their tenders on the surface had forgotten to keep the pump going. As it was, the luckless recruit who was selected on the river that day had come up unconscious and blue, temporarily overcome by carbon dioxide.\n\nJones squatted in the scuppers of the boat and peered more closely. The gear they had on the Medway had been helmet-diving equipment, in use for more than half a century; Guerin's contraption was very different. He pointed at the regulating valve. \"Does the diver introduce air manually by opening and shutting the valve with each breath, or is it automatic?\"\n\nThe Frenchman thrust his head through the neck hole in the suit and shot him a sharp glance. \"You know something of diving technology, _mon ami_?\"\n\nJones started to speak, and then checked himself. Only Chaill\u00e9-Long knew anything of his army background, and it was best it stayed that way. \"From watching salvage divers on the docks at Portsmouth, when I was a boy growing up there,\" he replied. That much was true; he had seen divers raising guns from the wreck of the _Mary Rose_ , Henry VIII's sunken warship, which had been deemed a hazard to the ever-larger naval ships that plied the Solent. \"But of course they were only using Mr. Siebe's hard-hat equipment.\"\n\n\"Then, _mon ami_ , you will have seen how _impossible_ it is,\" Guerin exclaimed, straining as he tried to poke his fingers though the hand holes, his arms outstretched and his fingers working vigorously against the rubber. Finally his left hand broke through, and he used it quickly to pull through the other hand. \" _Premi\u00e8rement_ , it is too heavy for the diver even to stand upright out of the water, firstly because the helmet must be strong enough to withstand the external pressure at depth, and therefore be a great weight of bronze, and secondly because the diver must wear yet more weight underwater to keep the helmet down because, despite its weight out of the water, it becomes almost buoyant underwater when filled with air.\" His face reddened and his veins bulged where the rubber seal constricted his neck. \" _Deuxi\u00e8mement,_ \" he continued more hoarsely, \"the diver must remain upright on the bottom to prevent the helmet from flooding and himself from drowning, and thus limiting his usefulness for jobs requiring any, how can I put it, finesse. _Troisi\u00e8mement_ , he is tethered to the surface by the air hose, so he has even less freedom of movement underwater, and he is entirely dependent for his survival on the man pumping the air down to him.\"\n\n\"And fourthly,\" Jones said, remembering the recruit on the Medway, \"he risks blackout from carbon dioxide poisoning if he fails to manually open the valve and expel the exhaled air from his helmet.\"\n\n\"Precisely. _Pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment_. You have it.\" Guerin got up, climbed out of the hold, and lurched and fell backward. He was caught just in time by Chaill\u00e9-Long, who steered him to a plank that served as a bench. The Frenchman thrust his fingers into the neck seal to pull it open, gasping as he relieved the pressure. \"I assure you, _mes amis_ ,\" he said even more hoarsely, his face running with sweat, \"this constriction is relieved underwater, but it is necessary to keep the suit watertight.\"\n\n\"Well, I for one am mighty relieved to hear it,\" said Chaill\u00e9-Long, looking at the man dubiously and then at the river. \"We shall need to secure that contraption on your back and get you in the water once our captain has steered this benighted craft to shore.\"\n\nGuerin nodded, his face now looking drained. \" _Un moment_ , monsieur, while I recover my composure.\" He gestured at the equipment and then looked at Jones. He was suddenly beaming. \"It is, as I believe you have correctly surmised, an automatic valve, the first-ever demand valve. When the diver breathes in, the cylinder releases a lungful of air, regulated through the device on the valve.\"\n\n\"Tried and tested, I presume?\" said Chaill\u00e9-Long, taking the butt of his cigar from his mouth and tossing it into the river.\n\n\"Monsieur Denayrouze has been developing a similar device, and Monsieur Rouquayrol has been making cylinders strong enough to hold more air,\" he replied, his eyes narrowing. \"But their _r\u00e9gulateur_ is inferior to mine, requiring the diver to open the valve manually each time he needs air.\"\n\nChaill\u00e9-Long looked at him shrewdly. \"Are you in competition with these other gentlemen?\"\n\n\"It is why I have had to be so secretive. And there is something else, _mon ami_. This device would revolutionize underwater warfare. Divers could swim freely to attach mines beneath enemy ships' hulls, wreaking havoc. One day wars will be fought underwater, you know. The world's navies would clamor for it.\"\n\n\"It is a good thing, then, that when I needed a diver for our enterprise, I was not obliged to employ these other gentlemen, and you were at hand.\"\n\n\"A matter of good fortune that I had travelled to Alexandria intending to test my prototype, first in the ancient remains of the harbor and then on the wreck of the _Oceanus_ in Aboukir Bay, where it blew up in 1798 during the Battle of the Nile. In these days of the British Empire, people have forgotten the role of Napoleon in opening up ancient Egypt to the world, and my discovery of the wreck would have been _pour la France_.\"\n\n\"You mean it would have brought you the fortune in gold coin that is said to lie in her hold?\"\n\nGuerin shrugged theatrically. \"An _inventeur_ needs his income, monsieur. How else does he buy his _mat\u00e9riel_?\"\n\n\"So, you do not selflessly give your endeavors to _la France_ , then?\"\n\nGuerin eyed Chaill\u00e9-Long. \"Do you work for the United States of America, monsieur, or for yourself?\"\n\nThe ghost of a smile passed Chaill\u00e9-Long's lips. \"It sounds as if you are embarked upon a profitable enterprise.\"\n\n\"Now you understand how it is that I have not been able to test my equipment like this before. I could not risk prying eyes seeing it.\"\n\nChaill\u00e9-Long gave the man a wry look. \"I am grateful to you for answering my question in so _direct_ a fashion.\" He put his hands on his hips, surveying the shore that was just coming into view, a dark bank several boat lengths away. \"Now, are we ready?\"\n\nJones eyed Guerin. \"Do you have your lamp?\"\n\n_\"Mais oui,\"_ the Frenchman replied exuberantly, lifting an open-fronted metallic box the size of a kerosene lamp but containing an opaque glass ball. \"Another one of my inventions. It contains a battery and an electrical filament. The opaque glass keeps the light from shining too strongly, as the glare off the suspended particles in the water would obscure my view. I have tested it myself to a depth of ten meters off the Marseilles docks.\"\n\n\"You are indeed an entrepreneur,\" Chaille-Long murmured. \"If _libert\u00e9, fraternit\u00e9 et \u00e9galit\u00e9_ are in truth not your master, then you and I could do business.\"\n\nGuerin looked at Jones, his eyes glinting. \"And you, monsieur, for your part, you have _les explosifs_?\"\n\nJones carefully lifted up an oiled tarpaulin beside the hatch and revealed a small wooden box attached by a coiled cable to a plunger. \"Borrowed from the Royal Engineers depot in Cairo,\" he said. \"Security there is not what it used to be. The box contains eight one-pound sticks of dynamite, packed in petroleum jelly for waterproofing. The cable is two hundred feet long, and the charge should be waterproof down to a depth of thirty feet. If the captain can hold us at that distance from the riverbank, the boat should survive the detonation unscathed.\"\n\nGuerin stared hesitantly at the box. \"That is, if I find what you are after, and have occasion to lay the charge.\"\n\n\"I have spent weeks triangulating this exact position from the pyramids, transposing the ancient plan on the most up-to-date topographical maps prepared by the Ordnance Survey.\"\n\nThe Frenchman tweaked his mustache. \"More _\u00e9quipage_ liberated from the Royal Engineers, I surmise? And you found a theodolite too? You are a man of many skills.\"\n\nJones coughed. \"Let's just say I've had some training.\"\n\nGuerin's eyes twinkled. \"Do you mean in larceny, _mon ami_ , or in the military sciences?\"\n\nJones pointed at the riverbank looming out of the darkness. It was held off by the captain's boy with a pole. A cascade of bricks and mortar lay embedded in the bank, and above it they could make out the ruined walls and gun embrasure of the fort. \"There it is,\" Jones exclaimed, his voice hushed. \"This was the feature that coincided precisely with my measurement, the place I told the captain to find. When I came here in daylight, I also measured the movement of water along the shore. It's outside the main river current, but there are strong eddies, enough to keep river silt from accumulating or mud from building up too deeply. Monsieur Guerin, I believe you will be in with a very good chance.\" He looked up at Chaill\u00e9-Long. \"Are you up to getting your hands wet, Colonel?\"\n\nChaill\u00e9-Long bristled. \"I will have you know that I have survived pitiless rain, mud, misery, malaria, and the other dread fevers of the jungle in my years as an explorer of deepest Africa.\" He pointed to a faint scar on his cheek. \"This wound, as you will doubtless have wondered, I acquired fighting off the Bunyan warriors of Uganda, alone with my Reilly elephant gun, assisted only by two of my bearers with Snider rifles, together accounting for dozens of 'em.\" He took off his silk gloves with a theatrical flourish. \"I do believe, sir, that I am capable of dipping my hand in this river, however fetid and pestilential its waters may be.\"\n\nJones glanced at Chaill\u00e9-Long as he squatted down beside him. He noted the silk top hat, the black cape with its crimson lining, the patent leather shoes. The war in Sudan had attracted all manner of mavericks, some of them genuinely capable, others charlatans, and had refracted their skills in the intensity of the struggle, sometimes brilliantly so. And then it had thrown them out at the other end, propelling some on to greater things and others back to the obscurity from which they had emerged. The American officers hired as mercenaries in the Khedive's service had made the Egyptian army a force to be reckoned with, but it had included their share of tale spinners and egotists. Jones remembered one night by the Nile sitting with his officer, Major Mayne, and a group of other Royal Engineers officers and listening to them talk about Chaill\u00e9-Long and his exploits in equatorial Africa. He had been derided at the Royal Geographical Society for suggesting that Lake Victoria was only twelve miles across, having misidentified some islands as the opposite shore, and for trying to bribe a cartographer to make Lake Kyogo, on the Upper Nile, appear larger than it was, a blatant act of self-aggrandizement. It was also common knowledge that the wound on his face had not been caused by enemy fire but by his Sudanese cook, who had saved his life by shooting an attacking warrior with a revolver but in the process grazing Chaill\u00e9-Long on the face with the bullet.\n\nYet all the posturing and exaggeration was unnecessary. Chaill\u00e9-Long had indisputably gone farther south than any other foreigner in the Khedive's service, showing the grit and determination so admired by the British and earning a letter of approbation from Gordon himself, published in the _New York Herald_. And he had no need to embellish his experience of fighting: Jones had respect for anyone who had been through the bloodbath of the American Civil War, and he knew that Chaill\u00e9-Long had been in at the sharp end. Beneath the foppery and affectation, he had seen the look in his eyes that he knew well from men who had faced death on the battlefield, and he had also seen the pearl-handled Colt revolver beneath the cape. Of one thing he was certain: Chaill\u00e9-Long was not a man to be trifled with, and Jones knew that, having made the decision to approach him in the first place, he was now committed to seeing this through with that man in the cape and top hat looming over him, whatever the outcome.\n\nThe captain of the boat whistled gently and pointed to the shore. Chaill\u00e9-Long waved back and drew himself up. \"Now, Monsieur Guerin, if you will be so kind as to instruct us, Jones and I will assist you in donning your contraption. We have less than four hours until dawn, when we shall suddenly be conspicuous. We have no time to lose.\"\n\n# CHAPTER 4\n\nHalf an hour later, Jones and Chaill\u00e9-Long watched as Guerin floated on the surface of the Nile, his underwater lamp lighting up a brown smudge of silt in the water around him. With some considerable effort they had heaved him off the side of the boat. Meanwhile the captain and his boy offset the balance on the other side by swinging the boom around and hanging out as far as they could from it without falling in. After they had slid Guerin into the water, trying to keep their splashing to a minimum, Jones had double-checked the regulator valve above the bulbous air tank on his back while Guerin had inspected his face mask for leaks.\n\nThere were thirty atmospheres in the tank, pumped into it by a steam compressor in some backstreet mechanical shop that Guerin had found in Alexandria, and Jones could only hope that there was more air than fumes in the mix. If all went well, he should have some thirty minutes at the depth that Jones had estimated for their target, about twenty-five feet below. Guerin had shown him the small safety shutoff he had devised for when the pressure reached ten atmospheres, indicating that it was time to surface but allowing him to open the flow again to breathe the final lungfuls of air from the cylinder before it emptied.\n\nThe regulator was hissing now, a froth of bubbles coming out with each exhalation. They watched as he vented the air bladder under his arms that had kept him afloat. As his head began to sink, Jones reached out and tapped it. \" _Bonne chance_ , my friend. Remember to drop your lead weights when you intend to ascend, or else you will never make it back up.\" Guerin nodded, raised a hand in farewell, and dropped below the surface, the smudge of light quickly disappearing. After a few moments, only the bubbles from his exhaust betrayed his presence, along with the detonator cord that Jones fed out as Guerin descended. The cord was attached to the dynamite in a box on the front of his suit. \"Damn it to hell,\" Jones murmured. \"I forgot to remind him to breathe out as he ascends.\"\n\nChaill\u00e9-Long dabbed his wet forearms with his handkerchief and rolled his sleeves back down. \"Breathe out? Why should he need reminding of that, might I enquire?\"\n\n\"Because the instinct underwater is to hold your breath,\" said Jones. \"We were taught that in diving class at the Royal Engineers School at Chatham. If you hold your breath while ascending, you get something called an embolism.\"\n\nChaill\u00e9-Long snapped shut his cuff links. \"And what might that be?\"\n\n\"Your lungs rupture like an overfilled balloon.\"\n\n\"Surely Monsieur Guerin would know of such things.\"\n\n\"Monsieur Guerin is more an engineer than a diver, more a theoretician than a practitioner.\"\n\n\"Elegantly put, Jones. You _are_ an educated man, I find, more so than I might expect from the ruffians I have seen in the rank and file of your army.\"\n\n\"Educated, but not a gentleman. A benefactor who visited my orphanage paid for me to go to the Bluecoat School in Bristol. But I was too rebellious and knew I'd never be polished enough to be admitted to the Royal Military Academy, so at sixteen I ran away from the school and joined my father's old regiment, the sappers and miners. They gave me some skills, but the rest is self-taught. I've always enjoyed reading. Done a lot of that over the past eight years, since the war.\"\n\nChaill\u00e9-Long tucked his cloak under him and sat down on the bench on the foredeck. He adjusted his top hat, produced two cheroots from his waistcoat pocket, offered one to Jones, who declined it, and then lit the other one with a silver lighter, drawing deeply on it and crossing his legs. \"I've wanted to ask you about that, Jones, now that we have some time on our hands. About the last eight years. About the officer who pointed you in my direction, Major Mayne.\"\n\nJones was looking at Guerin's bubbles, straining to follow them in the darkness as they advanced toward the shoreline and then seemed to veer a dozen or so yards to the north. The bubbles would be pulled farther along by the current as they rose, giving a misleading impression of the position of the diver, but even so Guerin would soon be reaching the limit of the detonator cable. Jones watched anxiously, checking that the plunger box was still secure where he had nailed it to the deck, but then saw with relief that the bubbles were returning along the shore in the direction of the boat. They were no more than fifty feet away now. He perched on the gunwale, still keeping an eye on them, and glanced at Chaill\u00e9-Long.\n\n\"Major Mayne. Finest officer I ever knew. Without him, I wouldn't be here. He was the one who mentioned your name as one of Gordon's confidants, and when I came to need a partner for this enterprise, you were the only one I could find of those officers still in Egypt. I took a risk in revealing what I did to you, but I knew you had money, and without gold to pay for a boat and a diver I was going nowhere.\"\n\n\"What were you doing with Mayne in the desert?\"\n\nJones paused, looking at him shrewdly. \"He was a reconnaissance officer, and we carried out forays behind enemy lines. I was his servant, his batman.\"\n\n\"You mean he was an intelligence officer. A spy.\"\n\nJones paused again. \"Not exactly. I cleaned his rifle once. It was a Sharps 1873, 45-70 caliber, with a telescope sight and heavy octagonal barrel. One of your American sharpshooter rifles.\"\n\n\"Sharps 45-70?\" Chaill\u00e9-Long exhaled a lungful of smoke. \"Saw a man take out a buffalo with one at a thousand yards.\"\n\n\"Well, I saw Mayne shoot a dervish across the Nile at over five hundred yards, and that was with a service Martini-Henry rifle,\" Jones replied. \"It was the finest shot I've ever seen, so who knows what he was capable of with the Sharps.\"\n\nChaill\u00e9-Long knit his brows. \"So, Mayne goes with this rifle on a mission to Khartoum, and a few weeks later Gordon is dead and, apparently, Mayne too, having disappeared and never been seen since?\"\n\n\"That's what I told you when we first met.\"\n\nChaill\u00e9-Long cocked an eye at him. \"All the most reliable accounts of Gordon's last moments have him on the balcony of the Governor's Palace, surrounded by dervishes, in full view, as it happens, from the other bank of the Nile\u2014let's say five hundred, six hundred yards distant, beyond the dervish encampment and where a sharpshooter might creep up and lie undetected, awaiting the right moment.\"\n\n\"I know for a fact that Mayne met Gordon in Khartoum the morning of his death.\"\n\n\"You know this for a fact? How so?\"\n\nJones checked himself; he had revealed enough. \"I've spent a lot of time amongst Arabs since then, and heard firsthand from men who were in Khartoum that day.\"\n\n\"Was Mayne alone in his enterprise?\"\n\nJones paused. \"I did not see him depart for Khartoum from Wadi Halfa, where he went to be told of his mission by Lord Wolseley. I last saw him the day before on the Nile, where he left me with his belongings. That's when he gave me the inscribed stone that he and his fellow officers had found in the crocodile temple beside the pool, with the radiating sun symbol of the pharaoh Akhenaten that he had recognized as the plan of something underground, with the three temples at Giza clearly shown.\"\n\n\"The artifact that brought us here,\" Chaill\u00e9-Long exclaimed, taking another draw. \"The ancient map to something hidden beneath the very feet of all those many who have tramped the plateau of Giza seeking treasures, little knowing what might lie below.\"\n\nHe clamped his cheroot hard, and then removed it and picked out a piece of tobacco from between his teeth. He looked to the deck, and then at Jones again. \"Did the thought ever occur to you,\" he said quietly, \"that Gordon alive in the hands of the Mahdi would have been a grave embarrassment to the British, a death knell for the Gladstone government, a fatal dent in the prestige of the empire? Gordon alive, a Christian martyr abandoned to the forces of jihad, or Gordon alive, a willing partner of the Mahdi, a man so disgusted by the failure of his compatriots to rescue the people of the Sudan that he would cast his lot with the enemy? Would not such a man have been a prime target for assassination?\"\n\nJones kept his eyes glued on the waters below the riverbank. \"Thoughts are for officers, Colonel. I'm just a lowly sapper.\"\n\nChaill\u00e9-Long thought for a moment, shook his head, then flicked his butt into the river. He leaned back and smiled. \"But not any longer, it seems. You say you've been associating with Arabs. Tell me, Jones, are you a deserter?\"\n\nJones coughed. \"Before Major Mayne left on his mission to Khartoum, he arranged for me to return to the railway construction unit that I'd been working with when I first arrived in Egypt after service in India. He thought railway construction would be safer and would see me through the campaign. He was probably right, but as far as I could see, neither the railway nor the river expedition were ever going to reach General Gordon in time, so I tossed a coin and stayed on the river. Everything was going swimmingly until the Mahdi's boys finally caught up with us at a place called Kirkeban and there was a terrible twenty-minute battle. One moment I was bayoneting and bludgeoning dervishes, and the next thing I knew I was floating down the river all alone, with only the corpses of my mates for company. I fetched up at the same pool where the major had found the crocodile temple and the clue in the inscription that he gave me for safekeeping. I stayed there for days, weeks, living off abandoned supplies. I'd been knocked on the head and was half-crazed. We'd heard rumors of a giant crocodile in the pool, and I became obsessed with the idea of catching it, conceiving all manner of devices to do so. The Leviathan, we'd called it, after the biblical monster. Then Kitchener and his camel troops arrived, and seeing them put some sense into me. You know Kitchener?\"\n\nChaill\u00e9-Long nodded. \"Rising star of the Egyptian army. The man who has sworn to avenge Gordon.\"\n\n\"I heard him say it. That he'd kill a dervish for every hair on Gordon's head. But I knew that could only be a long time in the future. It was Kitchener himself who told me that Gordon had been killed and that the British force was retreating back to Egypt and abandoning the Sudan to the Mahdi. It was then that I knew that Major Mayne wouldn't be coming back, that it was a forlorn hope for me to wait for him. Then just before we reached the British camp at Abu Halfa, on the Egyptian border, I gave Kitchener the slip. I remembered what had happened after the battle of Kirkeban, and how it would look with me having disappeared. An army recovering after defeat is always looking for scapegoats and is never generous to soldiers they think have done a runner. I'd been cashiered before, out in India, even made sergeant once before being reduced. I was too cocky for my own good, mostly, with too many opinions for certain officers to stomach. But this time it was more serious. I didn't fancy having survived the dervishes at Kirkeban only to face a firing squad of my own mates at Abu Haifa.\"\n\n\"That was more than eight years ago,\" Chaill\u00e9-Long said. \"What have you done since then?\"\n\nJones peered at him and stroked his stubble. \"Master of disguise, I am. That's what Major Mayne used to call me. Within days of our reconnaissance missions behind dervish lines, I'd look the part, with a beard and a turban. My mother was Anglo-Indian, the daughter of a British soldier and a Madrassi woman, so I'm naturally dark skinned. I knew enough Madrassi to pass myself off as an Indian, and enough Arabic from Major Mayne and our time in the desert to get by. I learned to live like an Arab, to blend into the folds of the desert and the crowded souks of Cairo, to live without being noticed.\"\n\n\"And you read books. You learned about the ancient Egyptians.\"\n\n\"I joined with the fellahin, who are used as laborers on digs, and found work at Giza, clearing out the pyramids. I went to Amarna and became foreman of a French excavation there. No questions were ever asked; I looked the part of an Arab, and with my engineering skills I could do the job well. I spent days in the Cairo Museum, working from cabinet to cabinet, memorizing everything I saw. I learned to read hieroglyphics.\" Jones lowered his voice. \"I learned everything I could about _him_.\"\n\n\"Him?\"\n\nJones leaned forward, almost whispering. \"Long-face. That's what the Canadian Indians called him. We had them with us on the Nile expedition, you know, voyageurs, brought over from Canada by Lord Wolseley to navigate the boats. On the way up they'd stopped at Amarna and seen the crumbled statues of the pharaoh who had built the city, that strange face with the big lips. In the Mohawk language they called him Menakouhare, long-face. The name stuck with me.\"\n\n\"You mean Akhenaten.\"\n\n\"The Sun Pharaoh,\" Jones said, his voice a hoarse whisper. \"Father of Tutankhamun, the boy pharaoh. The one who went south to the desert as Amenhotep the fourth, high priest of the old religion, and came back as Akhenaten\u2014 _He through whom the Light shone from the Aten, the Sun God_. He went south with his wife, Nefertiti, and his companion Moses, the former slave who had the same revelation and took away his vision of the one god to his people. They were in the crocodile temple, the one Mayne found beside the pool on the Nile. I saw it myself, steeled myself to go inside in the weeks I spent there alone after the battle, when my mind was unbalanced. I saw the wall carving, with Menakouhare at the head of the procession, the Aten symbol before him. I saw the gap where Mayne had taken the plaque that I showed you. Akhenaten had his vision in the desert, but his City of Light was not to be there. It was to be here, out of sight and hidden in the heartland of ancient Egypt. And we will be the first in three thousand years to see it.\"\n\nChaill\u00e9-Long put his hand on his hip and eyed Jones keenly. \"When we have made our great discovery, you and I will be much in demand. We will be on the front page of the _New York Herald_ and the _Illustrated London News_ , and around the world. People still reeling from the death of General Gordon, from his _neglect_ , I say _neglect_ , will see our triumph as his apotheosis, as proof that he was in Khartoum for a higher purpose, not only to succor the people of Sudan but also to safeguard the clues to a discovery that will be for the enlightenment of mankind. I have little doubt that on my return I will be called to the House of Representatives, even the Senate. You should come with me, Jones. America is a place for a man like you. There are railways to be built, rivers to be dammed. With my connections and good word, I can propel you on a path to riches and fame, unfettered by the barriers of class and etiquette of your own country that keep men like you in the gutter.\"\n\nJones turned to watch Guerin's bubbles, the detonator cord still slack in his hands. The lofty intentions, the talk of taking the world by storm, of business collaborations with Guerin, could all be a smoke screen, a play by a man who when the time was right, when the discovery was certain, could as easily sweep others aside and take all the glory for himself. Jones did not know whether the style of the man in front of him was that of a true gentleman or merely a veneer of decency. He had seen what war did to men, and civil war was the worst, war that pitted brother against brother, men who after that could plumb no greater depths. The America that Chaill\u00e9-Long spoke of was a place where ambition might know no bounds, but only in the shattered morality that was the aftershock of the Civil War. He had heard stories of latter-day robber barons carving out fiefdoms for themselves in the West with the Colt and the Winchester. It would be an easy matter on a night like this when the time was right for a man like Chaill\u00e9-Long to use that revolver beneath his cloak to dispose of them all\u2014a British army deserter long thought dead, an obscure French inventor who seemed intent on keeping his very existence secret, a Nile riverboat captain and his boy\u2014adding a few more to the cargo of unidentifiable corpses swept down annually by the Nile into the swamplands of the delta.\n\nJones too had been hardened by killing, but not at the expense of his own soldierly brand of morality. As a soldier he had been a maverick, constantly pressing against authority, an enlisted man with the wayward thinking allowed only to officers. Yet not for the first time he found himself missing the army, the moral certainty of those who worked and fought for one another. Out here, in the world beyond the army, he had discovered that the only person you could rely on was yourself, but in so doing all your flaws and weaknesses became sharply defined, and the personal demons kept at bay in the army rose up to do battle for your soul and mind when there were no others to discipline and protect you.\n\nBut he had laid a smoke screen of his own, and had not told Chaill\u00e9-Long everything. In the last eight years he had learned to move in the shadow lands, to bend the truth to his purposes. He knew what had happened to Mayne; he had guessed who had ordered it. Chaill\u00e9-Long was right: Gordon had become a liability, but so too would be the one ordered to carry out the deed, a deed so shocking to public sentiment that word of it must never be allowed to leak out. And Mayne had not gone to Khartoum alone, but with his friend, his blood brother from their service together years earlier on the Red River expedition in Canada, a voyageur named Charri\u00e8re. After Jones had left the crocodile pool with Kitchener, they had ridden out into the desert to join the route back from Khartoum to the Egyptian border, and Jones had been astonished one night to see a form he recognized as Charri\u00e8re slip by, heading north. Jones followed him to Wadi Halfa, where he had seen Charri\u00e8re go alone into Lord Wolseley's tent. It was then that he knew what Charri\u00e8re had done. Wolseley had been a patron and benefactor to the Mohawk Indians since he had first employed their services in Canada; Charri\u00e8re would be beholden to him, and was someone who would disappear back to the forests of Canada as silently as he had crossed the desert from Khartoum, trusted never to tell anyone what he had done.\n\nAnd there was something else that Jones had not told Chaill\u00e9-Long. It was not only the plaque from the crocodile temple that had given him the clue to this place. That night at Wadi Halfa he had risked all and crept into Charri\u00e8re's tent while he was with Wolseley. In Charri\u00e8re's bag he had found Gordon's journal of his final days in Khartoum, something that he must have entrusted to Mayne, that Charri\u00e8re must then have taken from him but clearly decided not to show to Wolseley. In the frantic few seconds in the tent, he had seen an incredible drawing inside the back cover of the journal, something that had etched itself on his mind. It was another clue to Akhenaten that Gordon himself had uncovered, a more detailed version of the plan on the plaque. It too showed the Aten sun symbol, the lines radiating off from the center with the cluster of three squares showing the Giza pyramids at one corner. Jones had hastily copied down a series of hieroglyphic cartouches that Gordon had inscribed at the bottom of the page, and then packed the diary away in the bag and fled into the night.\n\nIt was Gordon's sketch that had been his biggest revelation and had allowed him to understand the plaque. One day several years later while working with the fellahin at Giza, he realized that the three small squares exactly mapped the relationship of the pyramids on the plateau. He was then able to use the sketch and the plaque to triangulate their position at the river from the pyramids by following one of the radiating lines from the sun symbol that he believed represented underground passageways. Finding what lay beneath became an obsession for him, not because he was drawn by a promise of ancient riches but because it was about discovering a truth that seemed to give a nobility of purpose to their enterprise in the desert, something that could exonerate Mayne, even Gordon, that would stand in stark contrast to the grim reality of failure and dishonor in their avowed reason for being there. In his fevered imagination, gripped once again by the same mania that had enveloped him at the crocodile pool, he had even felt himself on the same elevated mission as Gordon in Khartoum, as someone who had thrown away all the shackles to the outside world and his past life in order to devote himself to a higher purpose.\n\nHe was barely out of this state, in the grips of the deep melancholia that followed, when he had been begging near Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo and had overheard guests mentioning Chaill\u00e9-Long and his law practice in Alexandria. Jones had already realized that he was going to have to enlist the help of others with money if he were ever going to get to the bottom of the mystery. Then, less than a month ago, he had experienced another astonishing revelation. He had learned hieroglyphics specifically to translate the cartouches that he had copied from Gordon's journal. He had learned to recognize the royal cartouche of Akhenaten, one of the three in the journal, but the other two had defeated him. And then he had a blinding revelation. The symbols for the Aten, for sun and light, did not mean sunlight after all but something more down to earth and far more astonishing. This place he was searching for was not just a holy sanctum of a new religion; it was a treasure-house, yet a treasure that few Egyptologists would ever have imagined possible even in their wildest dreams.\n\nJones had not yet told Chaill\u00e9-Long because he could not calculate the effect that such a revelation might have on the man\u2014and the actions he might take as a consequence. He was fearful also of word leaking out. Cairo eight years after the war was seething with men of loose purpose drawn by tales of ancient riches to be discovered; they had subverted their passion for war by an obsession with tombs and pharaohs. Until Guerin returned from his dive with word that they were in the right place, his revelation would remain a secret known to him alone, preserved only on a crumpled piece of paper concealed in his belt and in a journal that he presumed by now had disappeared with Charri\u00e8re beyond knowledge, somewhere on the far side of the world.\n\nChaill\u00e9-Long stood up and consulted his fob watch. \"He's been down half an hour now,\" he said. \"He must be up soon.\" Jones stood up as well and scanned the water. He realized that he was now able to see more clearly. Looking over the riverbank, he could just make out the distant triangles of the pyramids at Giza caught in the first red glow of dawn.\n\nHis heart began to pound. _This was it_.\n\n# CHAPTER 5\n\nThe boat lurched and then trembled again, as if something were bumping along the side. \"What's that infernal knocking?\" Chaill\u00e9-Long said. The boy ran over to look, and Jones followed his gaze. Something big was floating just under the surface, heaving upward and bobbing in the current, its form indiscernible beneath the muddy water. Whatever it was had caught the boat and was pulling it out into the current, forcing the captain to push bodily against the tiller to keep the vessel beam-on to the shore. Jones felt the detonator line tighten, but there was still no sign of Guerin's light coming up in the water. The captain shouted at the boy in high-pitched Arabic, gesturing frantically with one free hand at the long wooden pole lying just inside the gunwale. The boy picked it up and lowered the end with the iron hook over the side, holding it upright and walking it along to find the obstruction. The boat veered farther into the current, its deck angled down amidships on the port side; the captain was fighting a losing battle with the tiller. He waved wildly with his free hand for Chaill\u00e9-Long and Jones to remain where they were on the starboard side to keep the port rail from going under.\n\nThe boy stopped, and then heaved the pole with all his might. Suddenly the boat lurched upright, its deck now level, and the pole angled back to horizontal. The hook had caught in a tendril that had pulled up from the main mass of the object, which was now detached from the boat and floating free. The boy stumbled forward and fell to his knees as he tried to free the pole. The captain shouted again in Arabic, and Jones saw the danger of the boy being pulled overboard. He leapt on him, still holding the detonator cord, pinned the boy's legs against the deck, and grasped the pole. He tried to yank it backward and forward to release the hook, but to no avail. As he made one last desperate attempt, the object reared up and became visible in an eddy. It was pitching and rolling as the water swirled around it.\n\nJones stared in horror, transfixed. The boy had gone white, and the captain had dropped to his knees wild eyed, sobbing, and beseeching Allah. A smell, suppressed by the river while it was underwater, now rose from the object as it rolled on the surface. The smell was of colossal, all-encompassing decay. Jones felt sick to his stomach; it was his worst nightmare come true. _It was a crocodile_. Or rather, it was the putrefied, long-dead carcass of a crocodile, its giant skeleton flecked with tendrils of white and gray, just enough organic matter to have kept it afloat on its final voyage from whatever pool it had inhabited somewhere far upriver.\n\n_\"God protect me.\"_ Jones' breathing quickened, and he grasped his hands around the detonator cord, trying to stop them from shaking. _Chaill\u00e9-Long must not see_. He flashed back to his state of mind beside the crocodile temple eight years ago. He must not sink into that madness again. He had convinced himself that his obsession with the Leviathan had been delirium brought on by his head wound, something he had snapped out of with the arrival of Kitchener and his camel troops. But suddenly that rationality disappeared, and he felt as if he were being drawn back there again. With all the fiendish contraptions he had devised, all that his engineering knowledge could spirit up, the dynamite, the trip-wire guns, had he truly killed the sacred crocodile of the pool, a crocodile whose long-dead carcass had now caught up with him? A fear began to grip him, a fear that he knew could become panic, spreading to all his other dark places, to the fear of confined spaces, of being trapped underground, a fear that he had last felt in the gloomy basement rooms of the Cairo Museum among the rows of decaying mummies. It was as if the demons of his own underworld were released again, clawing at him and beckoning him down into the portal that lay somewhere beneath them now, the entrance to a world of the dead that lay just below the riverbank.\n\nThe detonator cord suddenly yanked him back to his senses. Chaill\u00e9-Long was lifting up the underwater lamp, its power virtually expended. Guerin had surfaced on the side of the boat opposite the carcass, his mask and hood stripped off. He was panting and wheezing. _\"Pr\u00e9parez le plongeur,\"_ he gasped. \"The charge is laid.\" Jones lurched over and gripped the handle of the plunger, winding it hard to generate enough electricity to set off the charge. Something inside him, a voice from his army training long ago, told him that this was wrong, that he should prepare the plunger only an instant before setting it off. They still had to hear from Guerin about what he had found. But the winding focused him, and gave a reason for his shallow breathing. He left the plunger ready and crawled over to the side of the boat. Guerin was fumbling with something in his suit, but he looked up at the other two, his eyes feverish and bloodshot. \"I found it. Half an hour of digging, and I exposed the lintel. It bears this inscription.\" He heaved up a wooden slate with a hieroglyphic cartouche scratched on it. Jones took it, his hands shaking now with excitement. \"My God,\" he said hoarsely. \"Look, Colonel. I was right. It's the royal cartouche of Akhenaten.\"\n\nChaill\u00e9-Long raised himself up and stood above the two men, one thumb hitched in his fob pocket, the ivory grip of his pistol clear to see. \"I do believe, gentlemen, we have come up trumps.\"\n\n\"There's a stone door below the lintel, and it's closed,\" Guerin gasped, grimacing in evident pain. \"And the charge is laid against it. But, _mes amis_ , I should warn you...\" He coughed violently, swallowed, and coughed again. \"I should warn you,\" he said, wheezing, \"if the tunnel beyond is not flooded, there will be _un vortex_ , and if we blow open the door, there may be something of, how do you say, a whirlpool.\"\n\nChaill\u00e9-Long looked disdainfully at the captain, who was sitting huddled with the boy beside the tiller, apparently still praying. \"Well, I understand that people are used to whirlpools along this part of the river. A little disturbance might knock some sense into those two. And at any rate,\" he said, picking up a distended pig's bladder, which was normally used as a fishing float, \"I for one am prepared for a swim if it comes to that.\"\n\nThe boat lurched again. Jones could not bring himself to look back over the other side. Guerin reached up with one hand and held the gunwale. \"What was that?\"\n\nChaill\u00e9-Long shrugged. \"Some more floating debris in the water, no doubt. Nothing to concern yourself about, my friend.\"\n\nJones knelt over the plunger, protecting the handle from any knocks, and looked at him. \"There's something more I should tell you. About what's down there. I mean what's _really_ down there. What Akhenaten built under the pyramids.\"\n\n\"I know enough,\" Chaill\u00e9-Long said imperiously, glancing again at his watch. \"We have found what we came for.\" The boat seemed to rise slightly and then slide out into the river current, tightening the detonator cord. \"You must detonate that charge now, Jones.\"\n\nGuerin looked up. \"Do it, _mon ami_. I'm far enough away to be safe.\"\n\nJones shook his head. \"You know nothing about explosives, Guerin. About underwater shock waves.\"\n\nGuerin coughed. A great gob of blood came up, and he retched. He gasped over and over again, bringing up a bubbling red froth each time. \"He's had an embolism,\" Jones exclaimed, peering up at Chaill\u00e9-Long. \"The shock wave would surely kill him now. We need to get him on board.\"\n\n\"Depress the plunger, Jones. The boat is pulling the detonator cord and the charge away from the riverbank, and this is our last chance. _Your_ last chance.\" Chaill\u00e9-Long was behind him, his voice cold. Suddenly a huge lurch rocked the boat, and he was thrown sideways. As he spun around, he saw Chaill\u00e9-Long lose his balance, stagger backward and then fall forward, landing heavily on the plunger. The boat swung into the current, pulling the detonator cord and plunger into the water, leaving Guerin floating in a bloody froth toward the shore. Suddenly the river in front of him erupted in a boiling mushroom of water, sending ripples of shock through the boat and across the river. Seconds later it was followed by a dull boom, and then an extraordinary sound, quite unlike any underwater explosion Jones had ever heard, seemingly coming from far off under the riverbank. He remembered Guerin's warning, and suddenly realized what it was: an echo coming from a hollow chamber, a dry passage running deep under the desert. Whatever lay beyond that portal was no simple chamber but a long passage, large enough to consume a giant torrent of water if the charge had succeeded in blowing open the stone entrance.\n\nFor a moment all was calm. Guerin was floating in the water, unconscious or dead. Chaill\u00e9-Long lay sprawled on the deck, groaning and clutching his makeshift pig-bladder float. The captain and his boy were nowhere to be seen. And then, slowly at first but with increased violence, the water in front of him started to swirl around like a giant sinkhole, taking the boat with it. Jones could do nothing but kneel in horror at the gunwale, watching the center of the swirl as it plummeted deeper and deeper into the vortex, seeing the boat drop below the surface of the river. He saw Guerin's body swirled out of sight, sucked down. And then for a fleeting moment he saw what Guerin had seen, a stone portal, a flashing image of pillars and a hieroglyphic inscription, and a dark passage beyond. Then he felt the boat splinter around him, and he himself was hurtling forward on a torrent of water, unable to breathe or hear, seeing only blackness beyond.\n\n# PART 2\n\n# CHAPTER 6\n\n# **A LEXANDRIA, EGYPT, PRESENT DAY**\n\nJack Howard walked along the old quayside of Alexandria harbor toward Qaitbey, the fifteenth-century fort built on the foundations of the ancient lighthouse that now served as headquarters for Maurice Hiebermeyer's Institute of Archaeology. The sun was beating on the rocks, the light shimmering off the waters of the harbor, and for a few moments Jack allowed himself to relish the summer air of the Mediterranean and forget that he was in a country on the brink of war. He cast his mind back ten years to the discovery of a scrap of papyrus in the mummy necropolis in the Faiyum that had led them to the truth behind the Atlantis legend. The Egyptian student who had made the discovery was now Hiebermeyer's wife, and together they had created one of the premier centers in Egypt for the study of archaeology.\n\nJack had a strong sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu as he made his way across the worn stones toward the fort. He was going to hear the latest from the mummy necropolis, still an ongoing excavation producing extraordinary finds, and he in turn was going to match Maurice with an account of their latest underwater discoveries, hoping for that sparking of ideas and rush of excitement as things fell into place that had marked their collaboration over the years.\n\nBut there was a dark side to this day. All Jack's projects since Atlantis had been threaded together, interlinked by discoveries that had sent him around the world, from Egypt to Greece and Turkey, from India and Central Asia to ancient Herculaneum and across the Atlantic to the frigid waters of Greenland and the jungles of the Yucatan. The loose ends of one project had become the beginnings of another. Yet for the first time today, he had felt a looming sense of finality, that what had begun here a decade ago was about to offer up its last, that the extraordinary wellspring of ancient Egypt was about to close down forever. He felt edgy and nervous, and that heightened sense of awareness he experienced while diving was now with him all the time. If there were to be any more discoveries in Egypt, they were going to have to happen in the next days, even the next hours, in a window that was rapidly closing down on all of them.\n\nHe stared over the bobbing boats in the harbor at the extraordinary form of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the new library of Alexandria. Just like its predecessor, the famous _mouseion_ founded by the Macedonian king Ptolemy in 283 BC, the library seemed fated to suffer from religious extremism. Back then it had been Christianity, culminating in the antipagan purge by the Roman emperor Theodosius in AD 391, that led to the library's destruction, whereas now it was extremism and the threat of regional war. The reconstructed library had been a noble enterprise at a time when many believed that the Internet and electronic publishing had eclipsed the need for physical repositories of knowledge. And yet the threat of destruction and of Internet sabotage meant that electronic means of data storage were just as vulnerable as the libraries of old. Each epoch seemed destined to build up a critical mass of knowledge, only for it to be largely destroyed and a few precious fragments to survive, buried by chance like the library that Jack had excavated at the Roman site of Herculaneum, or the shreds of papyrus reused as mummy wrappings that Hiebermeyer and his team had unearthed in the desert necropolis.\n\nJack shaded his eyes against the sun as he thought about the Atlantis papyrus. The story of Atlantis had come down from the sixth-century-BC Athenian traveler Solon, who had visited the Egyptian temple of Sais, heard it from the High Priest, and had then written it down, only for his original papyrus to have been lost and then reused as mummy wrapping. The knowledge memorized by the High Priest had been passed down through generations from earliest times, an oral tradition whose days were numbered with the arrival in Egypt of the Greeks and their new religion. But what if at the height of ancient Egypt, during the New Kingdom of the later second millennium BC, a visionary pharaoh had decided to collate and transcribe all that ancient knowledge? What if there had been an _earlier_ library somewhere in the heartland of ancient Egypt? Jack stared at the extraordinary discoid shape of the modern Bibliotheca, deliberately designed to look like a sun disk rising out of the horizon to the east. Who would that visionary pharaoh have been? Would it have been Akhenaten, the one who rejected the old religions, the pharaoh who worshipped the sun god, the Aten?\n\nJack reached into his pocket and took out a military campaign medal from the Victorian period that he had bought from a market stall near the docks where the taxi had dropped him off. It was a Khedive's Star, worn and battered, awarded to an Egyptian soldier who had fought under British command in the 1880s war against the Mahdi in Sudan. Jack thought again of those British officers in the desert, who were there not only for war, but whose exploration for ancient sites had so fascinated him. Had they been hunting not just for confirmation of Old Testament history but for something even greater than that, for a lost repository containing the greatest treasure that a civilization could offer, the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of the ancient Egyptians?\n\nHe grasped the medal until the points of the star hurt his hand, and then thrust it back into his pocket. These thoughts had run through his mind endlessly since he and Costas and Hiebermeyer had been forced to leave Sudan almost two months previously, bringing with them enough evidence from the ancient temple carvings beside the Nile to suggest that Akhenaten's City of Light lay somewhere near modern Cairo and that the pyramids were the key to its entry. He and Costas had been there, on the cusp of an incredible discovery, suspended beneath the Pyramid of Menkaure and seeing where the reflected sunlight shone against something far ahead, beyond a tunnel almost completely blocked by rockfall. Ever since they had been forced to leave the site, he had tried not to think of it, knowing that there was no chance of them returning with the tools they would need to break their way through. He had gone to the Gulf of Suez intent on moving on, and yet as long as he was in Egypt, as long as there was a glimmer of hope, the image of Akhenaten kept returning to him. Perhaps there was another entrance to the underground complex, closer to the Nile. He needed to look again at the plan that he believed was preserved in the radiating arms of the Aten sun symbol on the plaque from the wreck of the _Beatrice_ , and at the known layout of the early dynastic canal system that linked the pyramids with the Nile. As long as there were still IMU feet on the ground in Egypt, he would pursue it. _He would not give up_.\n\n\u2014\n\nTen minutes later he mounted the worn stone steps at the entrance to Qaitbey Fort. He passed the red granite blocks from the toppled ancient lighthouse that had been incorporated into the fort when it was built in 1480. Inside, Hiebermeyer's institute occupied a modern single-story stone structure set against one wall of the courtyard, with a library, a conservation lab, and research facilities for the Egyptian graduate students who were the mainstay of Hiebermeyer's team. The institute was funded by a fellowship scheme managed by his wife, Aysha. On the opposite side of the courtyard were the foundations of the new museum, being funded by IMU's main benefactor, Efram Jacobovich, to complement their existing museum in the ancient harbor at Carthage, in Tunisia. The Alexandrian museum would showcase shipwreck finds made by IMU teams off the north coast of Egypt and in the Nile. Like everything else here, like the fellowship scheme, the future of the museum project now hung by a thread, something that Jack knew he was going to have to discuss with Hiebermeyer once they had shared the excitement of their latest discoveries.\n\nCostas came hurrying up the steps behind him holding out a VHF radio. \"Jack, there's a message from Captain Macalister on _Seaquest_. He wants to talk to you as soon as possible.\"\n\nJack shook his head. \"Not now. I've got to devote all my attention to Maurice. It's going to be pretty intense in there. Every time I checked the news in the taxi from the airport, the situation in Cairo seemed to be deteriorating. This could be Maurice's swan song at the institute. Tell Macalister I'll contact him in an hour.\"\n\n\"Okay. I'll deal with anything urgent.\" Costas stopped to make the call, and Jack turned in to the courtyard. On the wall to the left was an IMU poster showing _Seaquest_ , the research vessel that was his pride and joy. The image was now as iconic from her many expeditions around the world as Captain Cousteau's _Calypso_ had been in his youth. For much of the summer the _Seaquest_ had been in the West Mediterranean off Spain with an IMU team excavating the wreck of the _Beatrice_ , the ship that had been taking the sarcophagus of the pharaoh Menkaure to the British Museum when she had foundered in 1824. It was the discovery of an extraordinary plaque within the sarcophagus, not of Menkaure but of Akhenaten, that had propelled Jack on his current quest. But right now he was more concerned with the whereabouts of _Seaquest_ 's sister ship, _Sea Venture_ , which had been carrying out geological research off the volcanic island of Santorini, north of Crete. Like _Seaquest_ , she carried a Lynx helicopter, and she had been diverted south toward Egypt ready for an evacuation. Jack had been relieved to see the line of crates on the helipad beside the fort, but it had also made him unexpectedly well up with emotion. If that image brought home the reality of the situation to him, he could hardly imagine how it made Maurice feel. Not for the first time he was thankful for the presence of Aysha, a rock who had kept Maurice anchored through storms in the past and was going to be needed more than ever now.\n\nCostas came up behind him, and together they walked through an open doorway into Hiebermeyer's main operations room. It was a familiar clutter of computer workstations, filing cabinets, books and papers, though the wall by the door was lined with plastic boxes where material had been packed for departure. Hiebermeyer himself was seated with his back to them behind an outsized monitor in the center of the room. Jack smiled as he saw the tattered khaki shorts and an Afrika Korps relic from the Second World War that he had given him years before at the outset of their careers. He was still wearing his leather work boots and was caked from head to foot in dust, having driven in from the desert that morning.\n\nThe day before, Jack had used the secure IMU channel on the VHF radio to fill him in on their discovery while they had been waiting by the Red Sea for their nitrogen levels to reduce enough to allow them to fly, and there was more to tell him now. But he was determined that Hiebermeyer should have first say; there must have been something exciting for him to have taken a break from the mummy excavation and come all the way here to meet them.\n\nHiebermeyer turned as they entered. \"Jack. Costas. Good to see you.\"\n\n\"You too, Maurice.\" Hiebermeyer looked exhausted, even more weather-beaten than usual, and Jack noticed that he had lost weight since they had last met. \"What have you got?\"\n\nHiebermeyer gestured at a paused image from Al-Jazeera news on the TV screen above him. It showed a reporter in front of the dark shapes of the pyramids on the Giza plateau. \"What we've mainly got is that cleric raving again about blowing up the pyramids. He was the one who hit the headlines a few years ago when he first threatened to do it. Then, it seemed like a sick joke. Now it looks like reality.\"\n\n\"Let's forget that for a moment. I want to see what _you've_ got.\"\n\nHiebermeyer stared at him, his eyes suddenly gleaming. \"All right, Jack. Prepare to be amazed.\"\n\n\"Go on.\"\n\nMaurice pointed to his computer screen. \"Take a look at this.\" He clicked the mouse, and an image of an ancient underground chamber appeared. It had plastered walls, an array of artifacts in the corners, and a mummy casing in the center, its painted eyes just visible.\n\nJack peered closely. \"Well, I'll be damned,\" he murmured. \"Undisturbed?\"\n\n\"Completely intact,\" Hiebermeyer enthused. \"It's an incredible rarity; there's no evidence of tomb robbing at all. Last night I was the first person in that chamber for more than three thousand years. It's eighteenth dynasty, Jack. I'm sure of it.\"\n\n\"Eighteenth dynasty,\" Costas said. \"Late second millennium BC? I know that most of the necropolis is later than that, from the first millennium BC, like the mummy that produced the Atlantis papyrus.\"\n\nHiebermeyer peered at him. \" _Mein Gott_. Costas, we'll make an archaeologist of you yet.\"\n\n\"No chance of that, my friend. Not as long as you guys have robotic equipment you don't know how to fix. So is this a royal burial?\"\n\nHiebermeyer shook his head. \"Not in the Faiyum oasis. They're mostly officials, though some of them are pretty high ranking. This one's an army officer, a previously unknown chariot general by the name of Mehmnet-Ptah. Actually, it wasn't the mummy casing that got me so excited, but the wall painting. That's really what I wanted you to see.\" He clicked the mouse again, changing the image to a close-up of one of the walls showing flaking colored plaster. \"What do you make of that?\"\n\nCostas leaned over his shoulder and peered closely, and then straightened up. \"Men in skirts. The usual Egyptian thing.\"\n\nHiebermeyer snorted impatiently. \"You mean Egyptian infantry, marching to the right and carrying spears. Now, if I scroll the image along, you can see chariots, just like the ones you've found in the Gulf of Suez, with the charioteers holding bows. And now here's another group of charioteers, larger than the first and more elaborately attired.\" He paused, looking up. \"Any thoughts?\"\n\nJack stared. The charioteers were also skirted but wearing sandals, some form of cuirass, and distinctive segmented helmets, and they were carrying short thrusting swords with bows slung over their shoulders. Above them were a faded hieroglyphic cartouche and the symbol of a bull's horns. Jack felt a rush of excitement. \"Mercenaries,\" he exclaimed. \"But not any old mercenaries. These are _Aegean_ mercenaries. Those are bone and tusk helmets like the ones found at Mycenae, and the swords are the same type we found on the Minoan shipwreck we were excavating when you and Aysha discovered the Atlantis papyrus.\"\n\n\"Perfect,\" Hiebermeyer said. \"And they're completely consistent with an eighteenth-dynasty date. Before then we'd expect to see Nubian mercenaries, large dark-skinned men from the desert. But by the eighteenth dynasty they'd become too integrated within Egyptian society. Mercenaries have to be outsiders with no vested interest in the politics, in it only for the loot and the battle. Think of the Varangian bodyguard of the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. They were Vikings from Scandinavia who guarded the emperors over a period of several centuries, but they weren't born and bred in Constantinople. New recruits returned to Scandinavia once they'd finished their service and made their fortunes. I believe that the same happened in Egypt during the eighteenth dynasty with the sea peoples from the north.\"\n\n\"Mycenaeans?\" Costas offered.\n\n\"That's what you might think. We know that by the fourteenth century BC the Mycenaeans from mainland Greece had taken over the island of Crete. We think of the Mycenaeans as a warrior society, so you might assume that Aegean mercenaries of this date would be Mycenaean. But the truth is more interesting. _Far_ more interesting. In fact, it revolutionizes our picture of this period. For a start, the word in that hieroglyphic cartouche, Hau-nebut, doesn't specifically denote Mycenaeans, but it's an old Egyptian term for Aegean peoples used from the time when the Minoan civilization of Crete dominated the Aegean. Why would that term, with its strong Minoan connotations, be used for these warriors if they were Mycenaeans, who were quite distinct? And the bull's horn symbol specifically denotes Crete, where the symbol is prominent on the palaces of the Minoans.\"\n\nJack took out his phone and showed Hiebermeyer the screen saver, part of a fragmentary painting showing ducks flying out of a papyrus thicket, impressionistic in shades of blue. \"I've still got this from when we last debated it, Maurice.\" He glanced at Costas. \"It's a wall painting from Akhenaten's new city of Amarna. It's a typically Egyptian scene but very reminiscent in style of the Minoan wall paintings from Crete. Amarna also famously produced a cache of clay tablets that shows the extent of trade with the Aegean during this period. I argued that the link with Crete wasn't just about trade, but that there were cultural influences as well. Akhenaten had turned the old Egyptian religion on its head and was clearly receptive to outside ideas. Now that I see what Maurice has found, it figures that he might have had Aegean mercenaries too. Akhenaten may have been something of a dreamer, but he was practical enough to survive as pharaoh for more than twenty years, so having a strong force of mercenaries who would not be swayed by the factions against him would have made a lot of sense.\"\n\nHiebermeyer swivelled his chair and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender to Jack, and then cracked a grin. \"You and I have debated it for years, and finally I'm forced to concede. It was a two-way process. Egypt influenced Greece, and now we know it also happened in reverse. And there's even more. In the sixteenth century BC, the first pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty, Ahmose I, made an astonishing dynastic marriage. A stone stele in the temple of Amun at Thebes describes his wife, Ahhotep, as Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut. That's the first known use of the word _Hau-nebut_ , the term for the Aegean lands, for Crete, that you see in the cartouche here. It goes on to say the following: 'Her reputation is high over every foreign land.' This leads me to the most astonishing revelation in our necropolis find.\"\n\nCostas had been peering again at the image of the tomb painting on Hiebermeyer's screen. He coughed, pointing. \"About those cuirasses. Those breastplates. I mean, _breast_ -plates.\"\n\nHiebermeyer swivelled back to the screen and grinned again. \"I was wondering when you'd notice.\"\n\n\"Not men in skirts.\"\n\n\"Not men in skirts.\"\n\n\"No,\" Costas said, shaking his head. \"These are _girl_ mercenaries.\"\n\n\"Good God,\" Jack exclaimed, peering. \"You're right.\"\n\n\"Feast your eyes on this, then.\" Hiebermeyer swept the mouse, and the next charioteer in the army came into view, an astonishing sight. It was unambiguously a woman, her breasts bare above her cuirass, her head towering above the others. Her long hair was braided down her back, and she held swirling snakes above her head. Jack gasped. \"It's the Minoan mother goddess, the Mistress of the Animals.\"\n\n\"Not quite, Jack. Look at that cartouche above her head. It's exactly the same as the one for Ahhotep a century and a half earlier. 'Not Mistress of the Animals, but Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut.' \"\n\nJack's mind raced. \"What are you thinking, Maurice?\"\n\n\"I'm thinking, forget all that romantic guff about the Minoans being peace-loving idealists. You just didn't survive in the Bronze Age that way. The term Mistress of the Animals was made up by Sir Arthur Evans when he excavated Knossos and wanted it to be some kind of paradise, an idealized antidote to the ugly modern world of a hundred years ago. You English can be sentimentalists, Jack. Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut is undoubtedly a military term, like Count of the Saxon Shore for the late Roman defender of Britain. Crete was an island too, and that's where her defenses lay. Your Minoan mother goddess was in truth a Boudica or a Valkyrie, a warrior queen.\"\n\nJack's mind raced. \"Here's a scenario. The volcano on Thera erupts in the fifteenth century BC, right? Minoan civilization is devastated, leaving Crete vulnerable to Mycenaean takeover. Shortly before that a Minoan queen, Ahhotep, marries an Egyptian pharaoh, Ahmose I. The bloodline of the Minoan rulers passes down not in Crete but through the eighteenth dynasty in Egypt. Maybe that fuels the brilliant mix of genius, military leadership, and iconoclasm that makes the New Kingdom stand out so much, peaking with Akhenaten and his wife, Nefertiti. Meanwhile, the warrior tradition of Minoan Crete, the _female_ warrior tradition, survives the Mycenaean takeover, perhaps in the remote mountain fastnesses of the south. For generations those warriors sell themselves to the highest bidder, led by a woman the Egyptians knew by the old title of their first Minoan queen, Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut. How does that sound?\"\n\nHiebermeyer opened his arms. \"That's one small corner of Egyptology conceded. One _small_ corner.\"\n\nJack was thinking the unthinkable. _And King Minos was a woman_. He put his hand on Hiebermeyer's shoulder. \"Congratulations, Maurice. Really brilliant. This might just lead to that joint book we've often talked about. Rewriting contact between Egypt and Crete in the late Bronze Age.\"\n\n\"And putting women on the map,\" Costas said, still staring at the charioteer. \"Big-time.\"\n\nHiebermeyer turned back to the computer, clicked the mouse, and called up the first image, showing the tomb with its contents. \"There's more to be found in there, Jack. A lot more. We've been working against the clock, and I've had to make just about the hardest decision of my life, to shut down the tomb and seal it. There are already too many other parts of the excavation ongoing that need to be finished up. I can't even report the tomb discovery, as that would see the looters descend like vultures as soon as we leave the place. I'm not even sure about the book idea, Jack. What we've just discussed is going to have to remain our own speculation, as it's too controversial to publish without the full excavation and appraisal of that tomb. We all know what happens when a theory like that gets put out prematurely and is ridiculed. It then takes ten times more evidence than is needed to make it stick.\"\n\nHiebermeyer slumped forward, his head in his hands, looking defeated. For a moment Jack felt paralyzed, unable to think of anything to say that might help. He had a sudden flashback to their boyhood together at boarding school in England, swapping dreams about the great discoveries they would one day make as archaeologists. Those discoveries had come to pass, more than they could ever have imagined, and yet there still seemed as much to uncover as there ever had been. No single treasure was the culmination of the dream, and every extraordinary revelation spurred them on toward another. It seemed impossible that the perversity of extremism, of human self-destruction, should overtake that dream. Jack knew that if their friendship meant anything, he should do all he could to push Maurice through and see that their shared passion was never extinguished.\n\nCostas put a hand on Hiebermeyer's shoulder. \"Don't kill yourself over it, man. You're doing the best you can. There's light at the end of the tunnel.\"\n\nHiebermeyer grasped his hand for a moment. \"Thanks, Costas. You and Jack have seen it, haven't you? That light underneath the pyramid. As long as we know it's there, maybe there's hope for us yet.\"\n\nJack took out a memory stick and inserted it into Hiebermeyer's computer. \"I know you have to return to the necropolis as soon as you can, but I want to show you an image from our dive that you haven't seen yet. I'd like Aysha in on this. Is she around?\"\n\nHiebermeyer gestured at the door. \"Outside on the quay, talking to our son on the phone. We sent him away to stay with my mother in Germany. This place has become too dangerous for a five-year-old. She said she'd come back in here when she finishes.\"\n\n\"I sent him a picture from our dive,\" Costas said. \"A selfie of Uncle Costas with a sea snake wrapped around his helmet, and a goofy face.\"\n\n\"That's good of you, Costas. I really appreciate it. He probably doesn't get too much humor from his dad right now.\" He straightened up and took a deep breath. \"Okay, Jack, what have _you_ got?\"\n\n# CHAPTER 7\n\nJack felt a huge surge of excitement as he saw the photograph on the screen that Costas had taken two days before in the depths of the Red Sea. It was the unmistakable form of a chariot wheel visible in the mass of coral. Hiebermeyer moved the mouse over different points on the image and then zoomed in on the gilded wing of the falcon at the front of the chariot that was partly exposed beneath the coral. \"There should be a cartouche above that, a royal cartouche,\" he murmured. \"An inscription on the temple of Karnak at Luxor mentions a chariot of Thutmose III made from electrum, and this one must have been from the same stable. With this gilding it can only have been a royal chariot, perhaps lent by the pharaoh to a favored general.\"\n\n\"It was our final dive, and we were in the same quandary as you were in the tomb in the mummy necropolis,\" Jack said. \"No time to try removing any of that coral.\"\n\nHiebermeyer zoomed out to the original view and sat back in his chair, shaking his head. \"Still, it's an incredible find. You know it was Howard Carter who first reconstructed their appearance, based on the disassembled chariots he found in 1922 when he opened the tomb of Tutankhamun?\"\n\n\"I know that they first appear in Egypt about the beginning of the New Kingdom, copied from the chariots of the Near East.\"\n\n\"It was our friend Ahmose I and his Minoan wife, Ahhotep, fighting off the Hyksos in the northern marshlands of the Nile Delta, capturing and then copying the weapons of their enemy,\" Hiebermeyer replied. \"Judging by the wall painting in the tomb, it may have been Queen Ahhotep's Minoan warriors who took to the chariots most readily. Not what you might expect for a people from a mountainous island.\"\n\nJack shook his head. \"The Minoans were renowned for their naval might, remember? They probably used small vessels like the Liburnians of classical antiquity, designed to dart into range of an enemy flotilla and attack with the bow and the slingshot. The transition to desert warfare was maybe not that much of a leap from a tactical viewpoint. Ships at sea became chariots on land.\"\n\nHiebermeyer put his hands behind his head and stared at the screen. \"Two centuries later, at the time of Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, the chariot was at the pinnacle of its technology. They were like modern fly-by-wire jet fighters, capable of astonishing speed and agility but inherently unstable. Drive them too fast and the traditional wheeling maneuver you just described became impossible, leaving them no choice other than to hurtle directly into an enemy and take their chances.\"\n\nJack looked thoughtfully at the screen. \"Technology so advanced that it backfired on them: sheer speed and nimbleness was perhaps their undoing.\"\n\nCostas came over from the computer workstation, where he had been backing up their Red Sea images. \"Or maybe someone who knew the risks of the technology played with it. The best systems, the best technologies, often have an inherent instability; it's that instability that often makes them capable of great things, like those fly-by-wire planes, but also leaves them vulnerable to manipulation and sabotage.\"\n\n\"Go on,\" Hiebermeyer said.\n\n\"It's something that Costas and I discussed on the flight here,\" Jack interjected. \"Thinking laterally, that is. What if the pharaoh, Akhenaten\u2014if that's who it was\u2014engineered the whole thing? Think about the backdrop. There's all the modern speculation that he and Moses were more than just master and slave. Sigmund Freud even thought they were two sides of the same coin. Let's imagine they share the revelation of the one god in the desert, and Akhenaten determines to let Moses take his people and establish his own City of Light. For Akhenaten, it might provide assurance that the new religion, the new monotheism, would have a chance of surviving outside Egypt, where he must have guessed that his focus on the Aten might not survive his own lifetime. If Moses was his big hope for the future, for spreading the word, then the pharaoh is hardly going to want to destroy him as he leads his people to Israel, is he? But it might be politically expedient for him to _appear_ to do so. Akhenaten knows there's a strong faction against him among the old priesthood, but he also knows he lacks the military credentials of his forebears. Chasing and destroying the Israelites would raise his kudos and hark back to the great victories of earlier pharaohs against the Hyksos and the other peoples of the Middle East. The strength this gave Akhenaten might buy him the time he needed to establish his new religion more firmly, building temples and converting as many people as possible to his beliefs.\"\n\n\"So you're suggesting he _faked_ it,\" Hiebermeyer said, staring at him.\n\nJack leaned forward, nodding. \"Faked the destruction of the Israelites, but not of his own Egyptian army. He would have known that a victory could be made even more glorious by sacrifice. Imagine Akhenaten returning to Amarna with only a few survivors, telling of a great victory but one where divine intervention caused victor and vanquished alike to plunge into the sea. That's the basis of the story in the Book of Exodus. Akhenaten's status is enhanced not only by his claim of victory but also by his miraculous survival. Maybe he even lets a favored general use his golden chariot, the one we found, so that Akhenaten would return without it, something the people would take as evidence of his own role in the battle. Pharaohs in the past would never let others take their place. With the Egyptian army gone, the Israelites could escape from Egypt unhindered. There's no reason why Moses and his people should ever be heard of again in Akhenaten's lifetime as they develop their settlement in a new place of worship that Akhenaten has secured for them in the land of Israel.\"\n\n\"You're suggesting that Akhenaten was party to the entire exodus?\"\n\n\"More than that. I'm saying that he _engineered_ it. I'm saying that the death ride of the charioteers was a setup. I'm saying that he and Moses chose the place in advance, that the Israelite encampment was placed dangerously close to an unstable cliff, but that Moses and his people had left it secretly before the attack. To pull it off, Akhenaten would have needed some way of egging his men on, of convincing them that they could wheel to safety after trampling over and destroying the encampment and its occupants.\"\n\n\"Mercenaries,\" Hiebermeyer said. \"Those who would do a pharaoh's word without question.\"\n\n\" _Female_ mercenaries,\" Jack said. \" _Bare-breasted_ female mercenaries. What better way to get an army on the move.\"\n\n\"Like running a rabbit before a pack of racing dogs,\" Costas said, sitting down on a chair. \"I love it.\"\n\nHiebermeyer shook his head. \"I'm going to miss these brainstorming sessions, Jack.\"\n\n\"One thing I wanted to ask,\" Costas said. \"About your tomb in the mummy necropolis.\"\n\nHiebermeyer swivelled his chair. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"The chariot general. Did you get a look at him? I mean, did you see inside his sarcophagus?\"\n\nHiebermeyer pursed his lips, nodding. \"I didn't mention that earlier because I felt like a tomb robber. Thank God none of my team saw me. Just before leaving and sealing up the tomb, I took a crowbar and jacked off the coffin lid. As I suspected, it was empty.\"\n\n\"Huh? I thought the tomb was undisturbed.\"\n\n\"It was. The empty sarcophagus means that Mehmet-Re died in action and his body was never recovered. The best his family could do was to go through the motions and hope that the gods would still accept him into the afterlife.\"\n\n\"The action in the wall painting,\" Costas said. \"Could that be the actual battle?\"\n\nHiebermeyer sat back, tapping a pencil on the table. \"I'd assumed it was a generic scene. If a body wasn't recovered, that usually meant a catastrophic defeat, one leaving few survivors or eyewitnesses.\"\n\n\"Sounds like our chariot charge into the Red Sea.\"\n\nHiebermeyer stopped tapping and stared at the screen. \"It's possible. We know that Mehmet-Re was a general and died in battle during Akhenaten's reign. We don't know of any other catastrophic defeat incurred by Akhenaten, certainly none in which such a high-ranking officer died. Assuming that Akhenaten _was_ the pharaoh of the Old Testament story of Moses, that chariot charge would fit the bill.\"\n\n\"And no surprise that there's silence about it in the other sources,\" Jack added.\n\nHiebermeyer nodded again. \"You're going to find evidence buried away like this only in tombs. You don't celebrate a catastrophic defeat with inscriptions and relief carvings in the great temples, especially the apparent destruction of the most powerful chariot army in the world by a band of unarmed slaves. If you're going to talk about it at all, it's more likely you give a supernatural explanation. The desert was a feared place, and this wouldn't have been the first time an Egyptian army had disappeared into the dust, never to be seen again. The Israelites might not be the only ones who invoked the powers of a deity in their explanation of what happened that day beside the Red Sea.\"\n\n\"Is there anything else in the tomb that could pin it down?\"\n\nHiebermeyer slumped forward. \"I had only a matter of minutes in there before I had to call in the bulldozer to bury that part of the site. I had my camera with me and photographed everything I could see, and it's just possible that something else will show up in the images of the walls\u2014a hieroglyphic cartouche perhaps. The problem is that much of the wall was heavily mildewed and the painting was obscured. The other problem is that apart from Aysha, you two are the only people to know about the tomb, and I can't risk giving the images to anyone else in my team to analyze in case word slips out. I might be able to snatch a few moments to glance at them myself over the next few days, but I can't promise it. The priority for me now is getting back to finish off the parts of the necropolis that are still under excavation.\"\n\n\"We hear you,\" Jack said.\n\nAnother figure walked into the room, a short, compact woman also wearing dusty khaki, her dark hair tied back in a bun. She handed Costas a thick sandwich and offered another one to Jack, who shook his head. Jack knew from glancing at her that now was not the time for niceties, and she walked over and put a hand on Hiebermeyer's shoulder, her expression serious. \"I've seen the pictures you sent from the Red Sea, Jack. What else have you got?\"\n\n\"I wanted you to see this, Aysha, because you were the one who came across that First World War diary entry that led us to the site, and it specifically mentioned what you're about to see.\" Jack put a memory stick into the computer and opened up the file containing the images that Costas had taken of him in the final moments of the dive. He found what he wanted, and clicked it open. Hiebermeyer stared at the screen, and then clapped his hands. \"I knew it,\" he cried. \"I _knew_ when I saw the sketch in that officer's notebook that it was one of those.\"\n\n\"You can identify that for certain?\" Costas asked, his mouth full.\n\n\"It's a khopesh sword,\" Hiebermeyer exclaimed. \"Look at that poster on my wall, from the Tutankhamun exhibition that travelled the world a few years ago. You can see one there, almost identical.\"\n\n\"It's not the most practical-looking weapon, is it?\" Costas said, munching on his sandwich and peering at the poster. \"I mean, from a military point of view. That sickle-shaped blade would have been difficult to balance and unwieldy in battle. It's more like an executioner's sword.\"\n\nHiebermeyer nodded. \"Howard Carter thought they were more suited to crushing rather than cutting, but with a razor-sharp edge and the weight of the blade it would have worked well for decapitation. They seem to be Asiatic in origin and arrive in Egypt about the beginning of the New Kingdom, about the same time as chariots, and disappear by the end of the Bronze Age. There's no doubt that these were high-status weapons carried by officers, by army or divisional commanders. It shows that those charioteers were being led by their officers when they rode off that cliff into the sea, and the men were not being forced on some kind of suicide charge by officers who remained behind.\"\n\n\"Can you date it more closely?\" Jack asked.\n\nHiebermeyer rocked back on his chair, staring at the photograph. \"The closest date we've got for one is the example from Tutankhamun's tomb, about 1320 BC.\"\n\n\"The son of Akhenaten and Nefertiti?\" Costas said.\n\n\"Not all would agree, but I believe so,\" Hiebermeyer said. \"Whatever their true relationship, they were certainly only a generation apart.\"\n\n\"Good enough for me,\" Costas said. \"And Akhenaten's our man? I mean, are we _sure_ he's the pharaoh of the Old Testament, the one who chased the Israelites across the sea?\"\n\nHiebermeyer looked at Jack, who nodded. \"We're not sure, but that's the consensus.\"\n\n\"Well, looking at those two photos, I'd say those two swords were cast in the same foundry.\"\n\n\"You may well be right,\" Hiebermeyer said. \"But it's not enough evidence to confirm the identification of the pharaoh at the time of the chariot disaster. Egyptologists are used to dealing with very precise data, and our theory won't wash unless we can find archaeological evidence to pin this with absolute certainty to Akhenaten. Did you have time to look closely at the blade of that sword, Jack? Any indication of hieroglyphs?\"\n\n\"Nothing that I could see.\"\n\n\"Any other artifacts at the site? Any at all?\"\n\nCostas suddenly shot bolt upright. \"Ah.\" He turned to Jack, a guilty look on his face.\n\n\"I know that look,\" Jack said, narrowing his eyes. \"It means Costas has seen something archaeological but forgotten to tell me, usually because whatever technical thing he was doing at the time was more important. Am I right?\"\n\nCostas coughed, spilling crumbs down his shirt, and reached into his shorts pocket. \"Well, not _seen_ something, exactly. I _found_ something. I'd clean forgotten about it until this moment. Had it in these shorts all the way from the dive boat.\"\n\nJack stared at him. \"You mean you went through security at the airport with some looted antiquity in your pocket, just when we were trying to remain incognito and avoid any confrontation with the Egyptian authorities?\"\n\n\"Sorry, okay?\" Costas took another bite from his sandwich. \"Anyway, I'd also forgotten that my notebook had the full specs for the latest IMU deep-submergence Aquapod on it. That's far worse. I must have had too much nitrogen still circulating in my head. Now it _would_ have been a disaster if they'd found that.\"\n\nHiebermeyer stared at him. \"If you hadn't been my son's godfather...\"\n\n\"And an all-round good guy,\" Costas said, munching away and handing him the object he had fished out of his pocket. \"You were going to say?\"\n\n_\"Mein Gott,\"_ Hiebermeyer whispered, staring at the artifact in his hands, turning it over and letting Jack look. \"It's a fragment of gilding from a wooden panel that's thick enough to be gold plate. It must be part of the openwork decoration on that chariot facing. Look at that poster again and you can see a shield decorated that way from the tomb of Tutankhamun that shows the pharaoh smiting a lion, and a small panel on the side containing his two first names.\"\n\n\"Can you see any detail?\" Jack asked,\n\n\"Just a moment,\" Hiebermeyer murmured, carefully prizing away a layer of marine accretion from the gold and revealing the lower end of a cartouche with symbols inside. \"We're in luck!\" he exclaimed, his voice hoarse with excitement. _\"Hieroglyphs.\"_ He turned to Costas, his face flushed. \"As the discoverer and guardian of this priceless artifact, the honor of translating it should be yours.\"\n\n\"What do you mean? You're the Egyptologist.\"\n\n\"Have you seen those symbols before? In the crocodile temple on the Nile, for example? On the panel inside the sarcophagus of Menkaure in the shipwreck? At Tell-el Amarna?\"\n\nCostas stared. \"A reed. That bird. A ball of string. That half-sun symbol.\" He looked up. \"Is this our man?\"\n\n\"Neferkheperure-Waenre Akhenaten, to give him his full name,\" Hiebermeyer said triumphantly. \"This cartouche could have been put on a chariot only during his reign. That clinches it. We've not only got the lost chariots from the biblical Exodus, but we've pinned down the pharaoh.\"\n\n\"Bingo,\" Costas said, beaming at Jack.\n\n\"What do you mean, bingo?\"\n\n\"I mean, Costas saves the day again. What would you do without me?\" He reached across for the fragment of gilding, and Hiebermeyer gently but firmly pushed his arm away. Then he placed the artifact on a foam pad beside his computer. \"I think you've taken care of that long enough. I need to get it cleaned up and photographed. When the time's right, we've got what we need for the biggest archaeological press release from Egypt since the time of Howard Carter.\"\n\n\"When will you do it?\" Jack asked.\n\n\"It'll have to be just after we've packed our bags and left. Otherwise I'll have to explain how we raised an artifact from Egyptian waters without a permit, and there will be hell to pay. I'd rather close up shop here before the thugs arrive to do it for me, and then we can leave on a high note.\"\n\n\"Unless you get some last-minute find from the mummy necropolis.\"\n\n\"Unless you find a way into Ahkenaten's underground City of Light.\"\n\nAysha put a hand on both men's shoulders. \"Now _that's_ what I like to hear. The Jack and Maurice of old. If we're finished here, Jack, I've got something I want to show you.\"\n\nJack looked at her. \"You've done great stuff already for us, Aysha. You should get back to the necropolis with Maurice. This is your country, and you need to do whatever's necessary to leave it in your own terms, with your own projects resolved.\"\n\nShe took a deep, faltering breath. \"I don't feel that Egypt is my country anymore. I feel we're on the verge of an exodus just like the one that Moses and the Israelites set out on more than three thousand years ago. We'll be like so many others who have fallen back before this modern-day darkness, like the Somalis, the Afghans, the Syrians, living in exile, a modern-day diaspora. We can't delude ourselves. Egypt will fall, and we have only a few weeks left at most, probably only days. The hours ahead are going to be the most intense of my life. Part of that is doing what I have to do for you.\"\n\nJack stared back at her. \"Okay, Aysha. Let's hear what you've got to say.\"\n\n# CHAPTER 8\n\nAt that moment Jack's phone hummed, and he glanced at it. \"It's a text from Rebecca. She's arrived at Tel Aviv airport. Israeli security interrogated her for more than three hours.\"\n\nAysha looked at him. \"You worried, Jack?\"\n\n\"About my nineteen-year-old daughter flying into a war zone? Of course not.\"\n\nCostas coughed. \"What were you doing at that age, Jack? I seem to remember you telling me about Royal Navy diver training, and then a stint with the Royal Marines on some special forces ops in the Arabian Gulf.\"\n\n\"The Special Boat Section,\" Jack said. \"Anyway, I wasn't really with them, I was just trying it out. I'd already decided to go to university instead, which is more than can be said for Rebecca.\"\n\n\"Given all the experience we've provided her with on IMU projects during her school vacations,\" Aysha said, \"you can hardly blame her for wanting to bypass that. Anyway, I think she'll do it. I spotted her looking at the prospectus for Cambridge.\"\n\n\"What's she doing in Israel, anyway?\" Costas asked.\n\n\"She's been wanting to go there ever since I told her about our hunt six years ago for the tomb beneath the Holy Sepulchre,\" Jack said. \"She found out about the big project at the City of David site to sort and wash ancient debris swept off the Al-Aqsa mosque platform when it was built. There are millions of sherds dating back to prehistory, and volunteers are always needed.\"\n\nAysha furrowed her brow, looking skeptical. \"Mmm. I remember Rebecca at Troy three years ago volunteering to help us clean potsherds. As I recall, it lasted about a day. Cleaning potsherds isn't really a Howard thing, is it? Not when there's real excitement around.\"\n\n\"It did strike me as a bit odd,\" Jack said. \"I thought there might have been a boyfriend involved. I think Jeremy was there. I didn't ask because I didn't want to interfere. It's tricky being a dad sometimes.\"\n\nAysha gave him a questioning look. \"Would you ever put a girlfriend above archaeology? And remember, I'm good friends with both Katya and Maria. I know _everything_.\"\n\nJack fidgeted slightly, tapping a pencil on his hand. Katya and Maria were two of his closest colleagues, instrumental in several of his greatest discoveries. Jeremy had been Maria's graduate student in Oxford. He was an American who was now assistant director of her palaeography institute. \"Katya's always impossible to get hold of, always in the middle of nowhere looking for ancient petroglyphs in Kyrgyzstan, and Maria's always up to her neck in some medieval manuscript in Oxford.\"\n\nAysha peered at him. \"When did Rebecca make the decision to visit Israel?\"\n\n\"We'd been talking about General Gordon in Khartoum, about how he and the other Royal Engineers survey officers had a fascination with the Holy Land and its archaeology. I'd been telling her my theory that their quest for Akhenaten in the desert of Sudan had been spurred by something they'd found in Israel, in Jerusalem itself, something that had drawn them there repeatedly over the years right up to the time of Gordon's final appointment as governor general in Khartoum.\"\n\n\"And Israel is the one place you haven't visited on your quest.\"\n\n\"I'd been planning to go there if things in Egypt go belly-up.\"\n\nHiebermeyer looked at him. \"Did you put Rebecca in touch with IMU's Israel representative, Solomon Ben Ezra? Sol and I have been planning a joint Israeli-Egyptian project to evaluate coastal sites at the border, something that seems inconceivable now.\"\n\n\"I tried that. She wanted to go it alone. But I let him know anyway, so he can keep a discreet eye on her.\"\n\n\"It had better be pretty discreet,\" Costas muttered. \"Otherwise you won't hear the end of it.\"\n\n\"That's it then,\" Aysha said. \"Rebecca hasn't gone to Israel to clean potsherds. She's gone there as part of this project, to make her mark. And she's not the only one working behind the scenes this time. You'd be surprised who else is involved, Jack, right here in Egypt. That's what I want to talk about now. What do you know of the early caliphs of Cairo?\"\n\nCostas raised his hand. \"I know about Malek Abd al-Aziz Othan ben Yusuf, son of Saladin in the twelfth century. He was the one who tried to destroy the pyramid of Menkaure, who's responsible for all that missing masonry on the southern face above the entrance where Jack and I went in.\"\n\n\"My worst nightmare,\" Hiebermeyer murmured. \"And he didn't even have explosives.\"\n\n\"Any more takers?\" Aysha asked.\n\n\"Well, there's Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah,\" Jack said. \"The one whom the Druze Christians regard almost as a god. He springs to mind because Rebecca and I talked about how he ordered the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in the tenth century.\"\n\n\"Okay. He's the one I want. Anything more about him?\"\n\nJack thought for a moment. \"Odd behavior. Took to wandering alone at night in the desert, disappearing for days on end. Murdered, I think.\"\n\n\"And what do you know about the Cairo Geniza?\"\n\nJack stared at her. \"Arguably the greatest treasure ever found in Egypt, greater even than Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb.\"\n\nHiebermeyer shot bolt upright. \"You're treading on thin ice there, Jack. _Very_ thin ice.\"\n\nJack grinned at him. \"I thought that would get you going. _Intellectually_ , I meant. Tut's tomb may have contained the greatest physical treasure, but the Geniza has drawn us into the detail of the past like no other archaeological find except perhaps Pompeii and Herculaneum. And studying it hasn't been just a matter of cataloguing and conservation, but immediately involved some of the greatest scholars of recent times, not just of Jewish religion and literature but also of medieval history and historiography, of the very meaning of history and why we study it.\"\n\nCostas peered at Jack. \"You'd better fill me in, Jack.\"\n\n\"Genizot were the storerooms in synagogues where worn-out sacred writings were deposited. In Jewish tradition any sacred or liturgical writing in Hebrew was considered the word of God and therefore couldn't be thrown away, but the Cairo Geniza was unusual in containing a huge amount of other material related to the medieval Jewish community in Egypt as well. It was found in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, the Old City of Cairo, the synagogue of the Palestinian Jews. When the Ben Ezra Geniza was opened up in the late nineteenth century, the bulk of it\u2014over two hundred thousand fragments\u2014was shipped to Cambridge under the care of Solomon Schechter, reader in rabbinical studies at the university. I was fortunate to be able to study the archive firsthand when I was researching for my doctorate. I was looking at Jewish involvement in maritime trade in the Indian Ocean.\"\n\nAysha peered at him. \"So you'll know that it also contains a huge amount of incidental detail on early medieval Cairo, and not just on Jewish life.\"\n\n\" 'The unconsidered trifles that make up history,' as one Geniza scholar put it,\" Jack said.\n\n\"Including references to the caliphs, and to ancient parts of Cairo that have since been demolished or lie buried beneath the modern city.\"\n\n\"Where are you heading with this, Aysha? Fustat was the main settlement of Cairo when the Fatimids arrived from Tunisia to take over control of Egypt, and much of the Geniza dates to about the time of Al-Hakim and the two centuries or so that followed. Is that the connection?\"\n\n\"I don't want to tell you more now because what we've found is being translated as we speak. You need to see it for yourself at the actual place where it was discovered. Today may well be our last chance. Cairo is still open to us, but a midnight curfew has already been imposed, and the city will very likely be a no-go zone within days. I've arranged for transport to get us there this evening.\"\n\nJack thought for a moment. \"All right. If you think it'll be a good use of my time here. The clock's ticking.\"\n\n\"Believe me, it will.\"\n\nHiebermeyer gestured down the corridor. \"Before you go, there's another friend here who wants to see you. A genius-level physicist with a penchant for computer simulation and Egyptology.\"\n\n\"Uh-oh,\" Costas said, raising his eyes theatrically. \"Here we go.\"\n\n\"What on earth is Lanowski doing here?\" Jack asked.\n\n\"He flew in from _Seaquest_ late last night. You know that _Seaquest_ is still over the wreck of the _Beatrice_ off Spain? They were making the final preparations for raising the sarcophagus of Menkaure, but there's been some kind of hitch. He's come to consult Costas.\"\n\nJack nodded. \"I know Captain Macalister's been trying to get in touch with me. Costas took the call before we came in.\"\n\nCostas grinned. \"Lanowski comes all the way across the Mediterranean to consult with me? We must _really_ be friends.\"\n\n\"You and me both,\" Hiebermeyer said. \"His brain is like an analog of ancient Egypt. Every measurement, angle, and coordinate is in there. I can't keep up with him.\"\n\nJack pursed his lips. \"They weren't supposed to raise the sarcophagus without me being there. I don't like being out of the loop.\"\n\nHiebermeyer peered up at him. \"Well, Jack, you _have_ been out of the loop. You've been incognito in the Gulf of Suez for the last four days, with instructions that nobody from IMU should try to make contact. The board of directors decided to bypass you and authorize the _Seaquest_ team to raise the sarcophagus in your absence. It was a way of deflecting attention from everything that's going on in Egypt, from the possibility that the antiquities people here might rumble your diving escapade and create a huge stink. Better to get the sarcophagus in the public eye before anything like that happened, and to make a huge splash in the media: Taken from the pyramids at Giza in the 1830s, lost in a shipwreck on the way to the British Museum, recovered by IMU. The board went public about the discovery yesterday, and there are now a dozen reporters and film crews on board waiting for the recovery. The press release has even included your promise that if the protection of the sarcophagus can be guaranteed by the Egyptian authorities and overseen by a UNESCO monitoring team, then it goes back to the pyramid. That's what we all agreed upon from the get-go.\"\n\nCostas snorted. \"From the look of what's going on here, it's more likely to be hacked to pieces by the extremists.\"\n\n\"The new antiquities director is aware of that,\" Hiebermeyer said. \"He may be a political stooge who cares nothing for archaeology for its own sake, but he's also a pompous egotist who would like nothing better than to be associated with the return of the sarcophagus. He's been in the job for only six months, but he's shutting down foreign excavations across Egypt to keep his xenophobic masters in the new regime happy. But at the same time he's resisting the extremists, who want a repeat of the Taliban nightmare in Afghanistan, the desecration of anything they perceive to be non-Islamic. If the extremists get their way, he knows he'll be out of a job and just as dispensable as the monuments that are supposedly in his care.\"\n\n\"It sounds like a losing battle,\" Costas said.\n\nHiebermeyer looked at them grimly. \"With the press release the board of directors has been buying us time, dangling a carrot in front of the antiquities director, which results in our own projects in Egypt remaining off the hit list for the time being. We have to pray that the current director remains in power long enough for us to complete our main excavation at the mummy necropolis.\"\n\n\"And that scenario could crumble to dust at any time,\" Costas muttered. \"Someone from the extremist faction holds a knife to his throat, or the expected coup takes place and the extremists oust the moderates. Then Egypt winds back to year zero and archaeology goes to hell in a handbasket.\"\n\n\"I couldn't have put it better myself,\" Hiebermeyer said.\n\n\"Were you in on the decision-making about the sarcophagus?\" Jack asked him. \"Did the board consult you?\"\n\n\"From the very outset,\" Hiebermeyer said. \"They weren't going to go public without my approval.\"\n\nJack took a deep breath. \"Okay. You did the right thing. You'd think by now I'd have learned to let IMU sail on without my hand always at the helm, but sometimes it throws me. Now, where's Lanowski? If the _Seaquest_ team is on hold with the sarcophagus and I can hitch a lift back with him after visiting Cairo, I might even get a look-see at the raising after all.\"\n\nHiebermeyer gestured with his thumb. \"Down the corridor. He's set up his simulation computer in my office.\"\n\n\"What on earth is he doing with that?\" Jack said.\n\nHiebermeyer gave a tired smile. \"You know Lanowski. He says that when his feet hit Egyptian soil, he gets so wired that he can fly through the past and see every detail as if it's laid out in front of him. I told him what you and Costas have been up to in the Gulf of Suez. I've never seen anyone so hyped. He's simulating the Bible.\"\n\nCostas coughed. \"Say again?\"\n\n\"Simulating the Bible.\"\n\n_\"Simulating the Bible,\"_ Costas repeated, shaking his head. \"Isn't that flying a little close to the sun? You know, the big guy in the sky?\"\n\n\"That's Lanowski for you,\" Hiebermeyer said. \"Boundaries are there to be crossed.\"\n\n\"God help us,\" Costas muttered.\n\nAysha stood up, glancing at her watch. \"No more than an hour. Maria's expecting you in the Old City of Cairo at 1900 hours.\"\n\n_\"Maria,\"_ Jack exclaimed. \"So that's who you mean about people working behind the scenes. What's she doing here?\"\n\n\"I was going to mention it before we left, of course,\" Aysha said. \"Remember, she's director of the Institute of Paleography at Oxford. Who better to study a new document from the Cairo Geniza?\"\n\n\"And Jeremy too?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"He's just been appointed assistant director, so he holds the fort while she's gone. Anyway, he's in London at the British Museum doing some other research for this project that you don't yet know about.\"\n\nJack put up his hands. \"I surrender. It sounds as if my world really has spun out of my control.\"\n\nCostas slapped him on the shoulder. \"It's what friends are all about, Jack. Sometimes you just can't manage it all on your own.\"\n\nJack stood up and put his hands on his hips. \"All right. Lanowski first, then Cairo. And then we'll see what happens. We could be back to _Seaquest_ for another dive to a thousand meters in a submersible.\"\n\n\"I'm good with that,\" Costas enthused. \" _Very_ good.\"\n\nAysha checked her phone. \"I'm going ahead to Cairo. Before you think of planning ahead, wait until you see what Maria and I have to show you. Your quest for Akhenaten's City of Light might not be over just yet, inshallah.\"\n\nJack glanced at Costas. \"Let's move.\"\n\n\"Roger that.\"\n\n# CHAPTER 9\n\nJack and Costas made their way along the lower floor of the institute to the director's office, its door slightly ajar. Hiebermeyer preferred the workroom where they had met him, so he usually lent his office to a visiting scholar, and there was one in there now. Costas had wanted to capture an image of Lanowski hard at work for the IMU Facebook page, and had his phone at the ready as he gently pushed the door open.\n\nLanowski was occupying Hiebermeyer's desk. More accurately, he was perched on it, legs crossed, arms resting on his knees in the lotus position, eyes tightly shut, humming to himself and occasionally uttering a surprised chortle, as if in a state of constant revelation.\n\nCostas took a picture. \"Look, Jack,\" he whispered. \"He's gone archaeologist.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Ever since we let him take these little sabbaticals out of the lab, he's tried to become one of us. Check out the boots and shorts. He's copying Maurice. Sweet, isn't it?\"\n\nJack scratched his chin, trying to keep a straight face. \"Doesn't really work, does it?\" He stared at Lanowski, at the long, lank hair hanging over the little round glasses, the mouth in a half smile of apparently joyous discovery, seemingly oblivious to them. Lanowski had looked exactly the same since they had poached him twelve years earlier from MIT to help Costas develop strengthened polymer materials for submersibles casings. Since then he had become IMU's all-round genius, with a particular knack for computer-generated imagery, or CGI. He was here because a childhood fascination with the mathematics and geometry of ancient Egypt had led him to work closely with Hiebermeyer, a relationship that Jack had been happy to foster and that seemed all the more precious now that the institute was threatened with imminent closure.\n\nCostas coughed, and tapped the door. \"Jacob, what are you doing?\" There was no response, so he tried again, louder this time. \"Ground control to Dr. Lanowski. Come in.\"\n\n\"I'm conducting a thought experiment,\" Lanowski replied quietly, his eyes still shut. \"Come, take a voyage in my mind.\"\n\n\"You must be joking,\" Costas exclaimed. \"Real life with IMU is enough of a trip as it is.\"\n\n\"A _thought experiment_ ,\" Jack said.\n\n\"Like Einstein,\" Lanowski replied. \"He used to spend hours imagining he was sitting on a particle of light flying through the universe.\"\n\n\"The theory of relativity?\" Costas said. \"Are you developing a better one?\"\n\nLanowski suddenly opened his eyes, stared at them, and threw himself off the desk, stumbling toward the computer workstation on the far side of the room. He pulled up the chair and began working the keyboard with one hand, the other hand clicking the mouse. \"I wasn't riding a particle of light,\" he said, his eyes darting over the CGI image he was creating. \"I was riding a chariot. To be precise, an ancient Egyptian chariot, at thirty miles an hour on the desert beside the Gulf of Suez, on the twenty-second of March 1343 BC at 0645 hours. The year is a best-fit during Akhenaten's reign; the month seems plausible, before the hot season, and the time of day just after dawn is right for an attack.\" He glanced at Costas, who had come up alongside and was staring at the screen. \"The only part that's complete guesswork is the day of the month, and to conduct a thought experiment in the past you need a precise day and time.\"\n\nCostas nodded thoughtfully. \"I get that.\"\n\nJack came up on the other side. \"I gather Maurice has told you about our discovery.\"\n\nLanowski stopped typing and punched the air. \"I've got it.\"\n\n\"Got what?\" Costas asked.\n\n\"Solved the Bible.\"\n\n_\"Solved the Bible?\"_\n\n\"Book of Exodus, chapter fourteen. 'And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground: and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left.' That's the King James Version, right? Well, I've checked the original Greek with your old mentor at Cambridge, Professor Dillen, and he thinks it allows for some latitude in translation. I know Aysha's been talking to you about the Cairo Geniza, Jack, because she told me what she has in store for you. Dillen also brought up the Geniza when we talked about the problems of translation. One of the greatest discoveries in the Geniza has been original Hebrew pages of the Ben Sira, the Book of Wisdom from the second century BC previously known only from its Greek translation. He said that seeing those original pages and then comparing the Greek, the Latin, and the English versions has made him think again about the huge problem of conveying exact meaning through languages that simply don't have the appropriate words or expressions, resulting in translations that are either inaccurate or too obscure to understand without a mediator. He thinks the original Hebrew of the scriptures was meant to be clear and precise and to not require a priestly interpreter, and that the development of a priestly class was actually a consequence of the written word becoming too baffling in its transmission for people to understand.\"\n\nJack nodded. \"He's been developing that idea since looking at the foundation of organized religion in the early Neolithic, when religion became a tool of control for the first priest-kings. Go on.\"\n\n\"Your discovery in the Gulf of Suez makes it absolutely certain that this event took place where the sea could have been parted only by a supernatural occurrence rather than, say, a marsh or a lake where the Israelites could have crossed some kind of shallow causeway that was then flooded.\"\n\n\"That would be fine with most believers,\" Costas said. \"God through Moses caused the sea to be parted.\"\n\n\"Sure. But let's look at the hard evidence. That says to me that those chariots weren't there because Moses parted the sea and they were swallowed up. They were there because someone ordered the charioteers to ride at full speed toward the cliff top, which then collapsed as they flew over it, causing them to be submerged in the sea and also to be buried in the resulting landslide.\"\n\n\"That was our theory too,\" Jack said. \"We think the Israelite encampment was right on the edge of the cliff. Go on.\"\n\n\"It's about thinking laterally, Jack. Or I should say at right angles. If we assume that the Israelites could never have walked across the seafloor, then they must have gone along the edge. So instead of going east across the sea, they went north up the western shore. The biblical reference to the 'wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left' therefore means not walls of water within the sea, but the walls of the sea itself\u2014that is, the western and eastern shores of the Gulf of Suez. Professor Dillen thinks the Greek allows for that. Now take a look at my CGI. I've exaggerated the height of the cliffs for effect, but you can see what I mean. And to cap it all, look at this.\"\n\nA close-up satellite image of a beach appeared on the screen. Costas peered at it. \"I recognize those rocks. That's where I had my lunch two days ago between dives.\"\n\n\"Look closer. With the wide-brimmed hat, sitting with his feet dangling in the water. Almost as if he's on holiday.\"\n\nCostas peered again. \"You've got to be kidding me.\"\n\n\"Yep,\" Lanowski beamed. \"I can follow your every move. If you won't let me join in the fun, at least I can watch it and imagine myself there.\"\n\n\"I thought the Egyptians had cut off Maurice's access to their live-stream satellite imagery, as well as to every other foreign project in the country.\"\n\n\"This isn't through the institute. It's Landsat, U.S. military. I've got a friend in the CIA who owes me a favor after I did the math in his PhD for him.\"\n\n\"You're a useful man to have around, Jacob,\" Jack said.\n\n\"Glad you noticed.\"\n\n\"The new translation makes sense. A _lot_ of sense. Anything else?\"\n\n\"Of course.\" He dragged the mouse, and the image zoomed out. \"Aysha told me about her discovery of the First World War diary that led you to that spot, the account of the crates of arms lost overboard, and that officer finding the ancient Egyptian sword. Well, she and I read through several previous entries in the diary last night. They showed that the British had developed a ruse in case they were spied on in the desert. Instead of driving the camels with the crates to a point on the cliff directly above the rendezvous point with the dhow, they off-loaded them several miles to the south and used a hidden track just below the cliff top known to local tribesmen to carry the crates out of view of the desert above. Captain Edmondson, the diarist, was also an archaeologist, and he mentioned how he thought the trackway was probably millennia old based on the number of rock slides and mud falls they had to negotiate on the way.\"\n\n\"And then they came down to that beach where I had lunch,\" Costas said. \"Just above the spot where we found the rifles and ammunition underwater, and then the chariots.\"\n\n\"Right. And just _above_ that, the Landsat image shows a concavity in the line of the cliff where there's a break in the path. I'm convinced that the concavity is evidence of the ancient cliff fall caused by the massed chariot charge, and I'm also convinced that Moses used that path to lead away the Israelites right under the noses of the Egyptians, leaving an empty encampment. The path continues for miles up the coast, so it would have been a viable escape route. What do you think, Jack? Bingo. Case closed.\"\n\n\"Well, I'll be damned,\" Jack said, staring in fascination at the image. \"I think you might just have earned your pay, Jacob.\"\n\n\"I'm not the first one to have these ideas. You ever heard of Hiwi al-Bakhi?\"\n\nJack was glued to the screen, but nodded. \"His name means the Bactrian Heretic, a medieval Jewish dissenter from ancient Bactria, modern Afghanistan. He openly criticized the Hebrew Bible for lack of clarity and contradictions, and for representing God as inconsistent and capricious. His writing was another great discovery in the Cairo Geniza.\"\n\n\"Well, he also tried to debunk the supernatural. For him, the parting of the Red Sea was a matter of the water ebbing and flowing, something he's probably seen in the huge tidal flows on the shores of the Indian Ocean. He wasn't to know that the Gulf of Suez doesn't have much tide, nor does it have tidal flats like those he might have seen off India, but I like his way of thinking.\"\n\n\"A rationalist like you, Jacob.\"\n\n\"There's something else that's very interesting about Hiwi, Jack. Dillen and I talked about it too. His sect was so intent on cleansing Jewish religion and starting afresh that they wanted to change the Sabbath from Sunday to Wednesday, the day in Genesis when the sun was created. The _sun_ , Jack. Does that ring any bells? We thought of Akhenaten and Moses together in the desert, and the revelation of the one god, the Aten. Akhenaten too was seeking a cleansing of the old religions, a return to a purer notion of deity, a rejection of gods who had become too anthropomorphic and displayed the human traits that Hiwi lamented in the God of the Bible. Maybe we should expect these periodic attempts at cleansing in the history of religion, but maybe too we should be looking for continuity, for a memory preserved even in Hiwi's time of that foundation event in the desert almost two thousand years before. Egypt has had its takeovers\u2014the Greeks, the Romans, the Muslims\u2014and cultural destruction like the loss of the Alexandria library, but it never suffered the utter devastation of so many other regions, the sweeping away of its culture and people. And for the Jewish people, their history is all about maintenance of the tradition, isn't it? That's the biggest lesson of the Cairo Geniza, that it's about continuity, not change.\"\n\nJack nodded. \"Even dissent like Hiwi's became part of the Jewish intellectual tradition, one of debate rather than persecution, ensuring that inquiring minds were not stifled in the way they have been in so many other religions.\"\n\nCostas looked at Lanoswki. \"I'd no idea you were also something of a rabbi, Jacob. A real multitasker.\"\n\n\" 'Happy is the man who meditates on wisdom and occupies himself with understanding.' That's from Ben Ezra. My parents were Ukrainian Jews who were smuggled out of Europe just before the Second World War. All the rest of my family\u2014my grandparents, my uncles and aunts\u2014died in the Holocaust. Both my grandfathers had been rabbinical scholars, and my parents hoped that I'd follow the same route.\"\n\n\"Is that how you got interested in Egyptology?\" Jack asked.\n\nLanowski nodded. \"I always wanted to know the specific identity of Pharaoh in the Bible. It annoyed me that he was unnamed, as if he's the one and only pharaoh, but then I realized there was something special about him. Being part of your team in the quest for Akhenaten is fulfilling a childhood dream, Jack. I'm grateful to you.\"\n\n\"We've got a good way to go yet.\"\n\nLanowski turned to Costas. \"And now about the theory of relativity. Funny you should mention that. As it happens, I do have a niggle with the space-time continuum model. It's...well,\" he chuckled, \"wrong.\" He suddenly looked deadly serious. \"I mean, _wrong_.\" He whipped his portable blackboard from beside the desk, picked up a piece of chalk, and scribbled a formula. \"It's like this.\"\n\nCostas immediately took Lanowski's hand and steered the board back down to the floor. \"Not now, Jacob. That's too big even for IMU. Save it for the Nobel Prize committee. Jack has got to go. He's meeting Aysha and Maria in Cairo this evening. And I need to get back on the phone to Macalister on _Seaquest_.\"\n\nLanowski looked crestfallen, but then brightened up. \"Anything comes up out there, you let me know.\"\n\n\"Come again?\"\n\n\"Boots on the ground. Jack and Costas stuff.\" He pointed meaningfully at his gear. \"You need help, I'm good to go.\"\n\nCostas nodded slowly. \"I can see that. Good to go.\"\n\nJack stared at him. \"Thanks for the offer, Jacob. We'll let you know. Meanwhile, get this written up so I can send it to the board along with Costas' photos of the chariots for the press release. It'll make a fantastic mix of hard data and speculation.\"\n\nLanowski looked dumbfounded. \"Where's the speculation, Jack? From where I see it, there's only hard data.\"\n\nJack grinned, and slapped him on the shoulder. \"Of course. Only hard data. Brilliant work, Jacob.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nJust over four hours later, Jack jumped out of the institute's Land Rover and hurried after Aysha under the medieval wall into the ancient compound of Fustat. He was thankful to be in the old part of Cairo, away from the din and congestion of the modern city. The drive from Alexandria had been hampered by a seemingly endless succession of police roadblocks and checkpoints. It was already almost nine in the evening, just over three hours to curfew. The Institute of Archaeology logo in Arabic on the Land Rover had eased them through a few sticky checkpoints, but they knew that once the police had been ousted by the extremists, then any Western affiliation, in Arabic or otherwise, would become a liability. Earlier, while they had been in Alexandria, Aysha had not wanted to depress Hiebermeyer any further by dwelling on the political situation, but in the Land Rover she had told Jack that she believed a coup in Cairo was now a near certainty. The moderate Islamist regime that had replaced the pro-Western government a few months ago was never going to work, with policies that satisfied nobody. The decision of the new minister of culture and his antiquities director to shut down foreign excavations had not been enough for the extremists, but they had been too much for Western governments, which had begun to withdraw financial aid in protest. Increasingly the new regime was being seen as a prop that had been engineered all along by the extremists, a stepping-stone to their own imminent takeover. The regime was filled with petty tyrants such as the new antiquities director, who had jumped eagerly on the bandwagon without realizing that the extremists who had opened the door for them would also be their nemesis in the aftermath of a coup.\n\nAs they drove into the city, Aysha had been concerned by the absence of gunfire or signs of demonstrations, routine features of Cairo life for months now. The extremist thugs who had battled the pro-democracy demonstrators had seemingly disappeared into the night, leaving the squares festooned with banners but strangely empty of protesters. It had seemed ominous, like a lull before a storm. Reports had come through on the radio of convoys of \"specials,\" pickup trucks with mounted machine guns, breaking through the border from Sudan virtually unopposed by the Egyptian police or army. The presence of extremist training camps to the south had been an open secret for some time, and now they were seen for what they were: staging posts for a terrorist invasion of Egypt, taking up where their forebears had been forced to leave off after Kitchener's defeat of the Mahdi army at Omdurman in 1898. Those events of more than a century ago had come back to haunt the world. The slaughter at Omdurman, and Kitchener's desecration of the Mahdi's tomb in revenge for the death of General Gordon, had been barely remembered in the West, eclipsed by the horrors of the twentieth century. Yet for the extremists they were still as fresh as if they had happened yesterday. The smell of the blood of Omdurman and the sight of the Mahdi's paraded remains were embedded in their collective memory and were stoking the fires of hate. Jack and Costas had been on the edge of that tidal wave of extremism in Sudan a few months ago, and now Jack knew they had been lucky to get out when they did. If Aysha was right, that wave was coming at them again, a matter of days at most before Cairo was overrun, with the Egyptian army officer corps infiltrated by sympathizers and the extremist leaders calling for the mass desertion of conscript soldiers. She was convinced that this evening would be their last chance in Cairo, and they needed to make the most of the few hours that lay ahead of them now.\n\nJack followed Aysha into a maze of narrow cobbled alleys and high stone walls, of men in fez caps and galabiya robes, reminiscent of the Old City of Jerusalem. He remembered that it was to Egypt as well as Spain that many of the Jews who escaped the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 had fled, and there had been other Jews in Alexandria involved in trade with India even before that.\n\nA bearded beggar sat at the entrance to the synagogue precinct, and Jack tossed him a few coins. Then he followed Aysha into the building itself, through the doorway and onto the gray marble floor of the main open space, which was mottled in pools of white where it was lit up by hanging lamps. Above him, on either side, upper-floor balconies ran the length of the building. They were faced with pillared colonnades of little arches painted in alternating white and red that would not have looked out of place in the courtyard of a Cairo mosque. Not for the first time, Jack reflected on the intermeshing of Judaeo-Christian and Muslim culture in the Near East, so at odds with the polarization created by politics and extremism.\n\nAysha motioned for him to stay while she quickly ran up the stairs to the left-hand gallery. She disappeared behind a section at the far end that had been cordoned off with hanging shrouds lit up from within. He could hear low voices, hers and another he recognized as Maria's, but he blocked them out for a moment and breathed in deeply, enjoying the smell of old stone and wood after the smog outside. He was relishing the tranquillity he always found in old churches and mosques and synagogues in the middle of bustling cities, a precious respite from the cloud of uncertainty that hung over Cairo.\n\nHe was fascinated to be in the Ben Ezra synagogue at last, the source of the Cairo Geniza, the greatest collection of medieval documents to be discovered anywhere in recent times. In most synagogues the geniza chambers were cleared out periodically and their contents buried in cemeteries, whereas the geniza in the Ben Ezra synagogue appeared to contain everything that had been put into it from its inception in the ninth century. When the geniza was first studied, it proved to contain not only thousands of pages of sacred writings\u2014biblical, Talmudic, rabbinical, even fragments of the Qur'\u0101n\u2014but also a trove of secular material, documents in Aramaic and Arabic as well as Hebrew that preserved an extraordinary picture of Jewish life in Egypt in the medieval period. When Jack had first pored over those documents as a student at Cambridge, he had seen the collection with an archaeologist's eye, much as if he were looking at the evidence of an excavation. The geniza fragments seemed all the more valuable because, like Hiebermeyer's papyrus mummy wrappings, they were writings that had not been selected by scholars or religious authorities for preservation, and they revealed details of day-to-day life that so rarely survived in written records before modern times.\n\nThe hanging shroud on the upper floor parted, and Aysha stood at the balustrade of the balcony. \"Okay, Jack. Maria's nearly ready. What are you thinking?\"\n\n\"I'm thinking how pleased I am that Solomon Schechter over a century ago arranged for the bulk of the archive to go to Cambridge University. I hate to think what the extremists would do to this place.\"\n\n\"If they were true Muslims, they'd leave it alone. Moses was one of our prophets too, and to Muslims the Jews are People of the Book, those to whom scripture has been divinely revealed. Did you know that the baby Moses was supposedly found at this spot, in the reeds in a tributary of the Nile that ran just behind this place?\"\n\nJack walked toward the stairs. \"Nice story, but it was two thousand\u2013odd years between the Exodus and the reemergence of the Jewish community in medieval Cairo. It's hard to believe that anyone would have remembered the exact spot. Also there's a lot of uncertainty about what was going on in the New Kingdom period where Fustat now lies, and whether there was a settlement or perhaps some kind of temple establishment. The site for the story is more likely somewhere north in the marshlands of the Nile Delta, good papyrus country.\"\n\nAysha stood with her hands on her hips. \"What about that famous Jack Howard leap of faith? Maurice says that's your biggest asset.\"\n\n\"Faith in my instinct, not in every old legend,\" Jack said, mounting the stairs and grinning at her. \"Anyway, I'm being Lanowski. Where's the hard data?\"\n\n\"Well, here's something fascinating for you. You remember the diary of Captain Edmondson, the archaeologist-turned\u2013intelligence officer whose notes led you to the Gulf of Suez? A year before that botched arms shipment, he was a newly commissioned second lieutenant in Cairo, working in the same cipher office as his friend T. E. Lawrence, both of them bored out of their minds. Things perked up one day when high command detailed him to act as a discreet escort for a very important visitor who wanted to come incognito to visit the synagogue. Well, the VIP rumbled that Edmondson was following him, and when he reached the synagogue he let him catch up and invited him inside. The VIP was none other than Lord Kitchener, newly appointed secretary of state for war, visiting Egypt only months before he went down with the cruiser _Hampshire_ in the North Sea. It turns out that there were half a dozen other men waiting in the synagogue, all of them getting on a bit in years. Kitchener told Edmondson that they were all in some way associated with General Gordon of Khartoum and came together every few years in the synagogue to celebrate his memory. One of the other men present was an American, Colonel Chaill\u00e9-Long.\"\n\nJack stopped on the stairs. \"How extraordinary. Gordon's former chief of staff, the explorer of Lake Victoria?\"\n\n\"By now an elderly man, and a famous author.\"\n\n\"Of lavishly embellished tales, as I recall. Something of a dandy.\"\n\n\"And Edmondson mentioned someone else. I've been itching to tell you, Jack, but I wanted to wait until we were here. It was a Royal Engineers colonel well known to you: John Howard.\"\n\nJack stopped in his tracks, staring at her. \"My great-great-grandfather? Incredible.\" He looked down, thinking hard. \"He'd retired by then, but he traveled several times to the Holy Land. He was a friend of Kitchener's and had known Gordon. They were all Royal Engineers together. It makes sense.\" He stared back at the floor of the synagogue, suddenly seeing those men standing there in his mind's eye. \"Amazing.\"\n\n\"They came here to the synagogue because _they_ believed in the Moses story. But, being engineers and practical men, they decided to find proof. Apparently, one night almost a quarter of a century earlier, in 1890, they had gathered together here for the first time, intent on excavating beneath the synagogue: Chaill\u00e9-Long, the then Colonel Kitchener, Captain Howard, and a Colonel Wilson, who had died since.\"\n\n\"That would be Colonel Sir Charles Wilson,\" Jack murmured. \"Intelligence chief on the Gordon relief expedition, but before that a surveyor in Palestine who had discovered ancient structures beneath medieval Jerusalem. I prepped Rebecca on him before she went out there, as well as on Gordon and Kitchener. All of them were linked by their archaeological work in Palestine. In 1883 Gordon took a kind of sabbatical there, dispirited by his lack of progress in the Sudan and more interested in seeking proof of the Bible in the archaeology of Jerusalem.\"\n\nAysha nodded enthusiastically. \"They brought surveying equipment and digging tools and went out into the synagogue precinct. They'd been led to the spot by another of the colorful characters in Egypt at the period, Riamo d'Hulst, a self-styled count and subject of Luxembourg who was probably a German deserter from the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and something of a shape-shifter. In 1890 while the synagogue was being restored and refurbished, he took advantage of the construction work to dig around the precinct. Following his lead, the British officers discovered indisputable evidence of a silted-up river channel. That doesn't prove the Moses story, of course, but they did also find the plinth of an ancient structure. According to Edmondson, it contained the worn remains of a hieroglyphic cartouche. Finding something of a Pharaonic date was enough to convince them that they were at the right spot. Edmondson himself might have been able to decipher the hieroglyphs with his archaeological background, but he wasn't able to see the inscription because the stone block had been removed in secret to England for safekeeping by Lieutenant Howard.\"\n\n\"By Howard?\" Jack exclaimed. \"By my great-great-grandfather?\"\n\n\"Do you remember any Egyptian antiquities on the Howard estate?\"\n\nJack was stunned. _Of course_. \"Yes, I do. On the edge of the fireplace in the drawing room. My father found it in a storeroom and didn't know what to do with it. Egyptian red granite?\"\n\n\"That's what Edmondson said.\"\n\n\"Does Maurice know about this?\"\n\n\"Not yet. He has enough on his plate for the time being.\"\n\n\"Well, it might just cheer him up. When I first brought him home for holiday from boarding school, he became obsessed with that thing. He used to spend hours with it, staring at it, sketching it. It was what really spurred him into Egyptology. We thought it was a relic of someone's grand tour of the nineteenth century with no known provenance, the kind of thing that wealthy Europeans brought back to adorn their stately homes. But Maurice constructed all kinds of theories for where it might have come from in Egypt. And of course he translated it.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"It was Akhenaten. The royal cartouche of Akhenaten. The pharaoh of the Old Testament. The pharaoh of the time of Moses.\"\n\nThe shroud parted, and a slim, dark-haired woman of about forty stepped out, reading glasses dangling from her neck and a pair of conservator's gloves in her hands. \"Evening, Jack. You look a little flushed. Excited to see me?\"\n\nJack stepped forward and kissed her on the cheek. \"I've just had a revelation, Maria. In fact, a really big revelation. Out of the blue.\"\n\n\"Sounds like Jack Howard,\" she said, her Spanish accent giving the words added emphasis. \"You can tell me once we've finished in here.\"\n\nJack nodded toward the shroud. \"This brings it back, doesn't it?\" He turned to Aysha. \"Maria and I first met in the coffee room of Cambridge University Library after discovering that we were both there to study the Geniza documents. We haven't looked back, have we, Maria?\"\n\n\"Or forward,\" Aysha added, eyeing him.\n\nMaria put her hand on Jack's shoulder. \"Well, Jack Howard just wouldn't be the man I know and love if he wasn't always disappearing on adventures, would he? But before you disappear yet again, you need to come in here and see what I've got.\"\n\nJack was already staring past her into the gap beyond the shroud, seeing the ladder and hole at the top of the wall that he knew led to the geniza chamber. \"You lead, Maria. I can't wait.\"\n\n# CHAPTER 10\n\nJack parted the hanging shroud and followed Maria and Aysha into the enclosed section they had created at the end of the gallery. Within the shroud the air was noticeably warmer, the heat emanating from two portable angle-poise lamps bent low over a wooden table set up in the center of the space. Two briefcases were open on the floor, and the table was covered with Maria's tools of the trade as a paleographer: protective plastic sheeting for manuscript fragments, tweezers, a magnifying glass, gloves, and a laptop. Its screen showed a blown-up section of text that Jack recognized as Hebrew by the serifs on top of the letters. Beyond the table the stepladder that he had seen from outside rose to a rectangular opening in the wall some three meters above them just below the ceiling. An electrical extension cable snaked over the rim into the darkness beyond.\n\nJack leaned over and stared at a black-and-white photograph propped up on the table. \"That's Solomon Schechter,\" he said, pointing at the bearded man in a black suit hunched over what looked like a pile of old rags. \"I know the famous picture of him surrounded by the boxes and piles of Geniza fragments in Cambridge University Library, but I haven't seen this one before.\"\n\n\"That's because Jeremy's just unearthed it,\" Maria said. \"He's become quite a sleuth, you know. For a long time it was thought that no photos survived of Schechter's time here in the synagogue in 1896, when the full contents of the Geniza were pulled out of that hole above us and laid in piles all over the floor for him to inspect. In fact, the Scottish twin sisters who had led him here, the widows Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, had brought a box camera with them and took some snaps. Jeremy trawled through all the surviving family he could find in the search for old photo albums and eventually came up trumps. Geniza scholarship has for so long been a man's world, but this photo really reinforces the role of those two women in setting the whole thing in train. It was their search in Egypt for old manuscripts that led them to show fragments from the Geniza to their friend Schechter in Cambridge.\"\n\nJack glanced at her and at Aysha. \"With you two here, it looks as if that role of women in Geniza scholarship has come full circle.\"\n\n\"There at the beginning, and there at the end,\" Maria said. \"I feel as if we're closing one of the most incredible chapters of historical discovery ever.\"\n\nJack peered at the figure in the photo. \"He looks a little overwhelmed.\"\n\n\"You'd be too, faced with almost two hundred thousand fragments of manuscript. Overwhelmed, but overjoyed. It became his life's work at Cambridge, where as you know the Geniza archive is one of the university's prized collections, studied by scholars of Jewish history from around the world.\"\n\nJack looked at her shrewdly. \"I thought the Geniza chamber had been completely emptied. What exactly are you doing here, Maria?\"\n\nShe glanced at Aysha. \"Put it this way. One thing I learned years ago from your husband, Aysha, before you'd even met him. When I was a student I worked on one of Maurice's projects in the Valley of the Kings. I was collecting papyrus debris still lying in a storage chamber that had not only been robbed in antiquity but also cleared out by Howard Carter's team in the lead-up to the discovery of Tut's tomb. That is, never assume that earlier archaeologists have picked up everything.\"\n\n\"Go on,\" Jack said.\n\n\"Do you remember our project in England a few years ago at Hereford Cathedral, where Jeremy and I found the Vinland map showing Viking exploration in the Americas? Everyone thought the famous chained library contained all there was to be found in the cathedral, but then we discovered that sealed-up stairwell with its trove of manuscripts.\" She reached over and tapped the wall beside the desk below the opening, producing a hollow sound that evidently came from the Geniza chamber beyond. \"It's what Jeremy and I always tell our new students at the institute. Never forget to tap the walls. Sahirah al-Hadeen, one of Aysha's friends who's studying the architecture of the synagogue, a graduate student who spent a term with us in Oxford, got into the chamber and did what I just did, on the opposite wall that forms the exterior of the synagogue. As soon as she realized that there was some kind of space beyond, she contacted Aysha and then me.\"\n\n\"Is she with us now?\"\n\nAysha gave Jack a grim look. \"Earlier this afternoon she was arrested and imprisoned. One of my contacts still employed in the antiquities service got a message through to Maria just before we arrived. That's what we were talking about while you were waiting below in the synagogue. She's in the Ministry of Culture, which now has a security wing with cells and interrogation rooms where there used to be conservation labs. She was arrested on a trumped-up charge of dealing in antiquities without a license, because when she was detained they found a fragment of manuscript in her briefcase that she was in fact taking to Alexandria for conservation in the institute, there no longer being any facility in Cairo. But the reality is far worse. Sahirah is from one of the oldest Cairo Jewish families, and the truth is that she's a victim of anti-Semitism. Have you seen the extremists with the black headbands, Jack? They're terrifying. We watched them beat up a man outside the synagogue last night just after I arrived, and it was like those images of SS thugs laying into Jews on the streets of Germany in the 1930s. Did you see the posters plastered all over the precinct wall? Some of them came and did that last night. They're calling for all Jews to leave Egypt or face being asset-stripped and imprisoned. Even the worst of the caliphs didn't go that far.\"\n\n\"We should be getting her out,\" Jack said. \"Not digging around in here.\"\n\nMaria put her hand on his arm. \"The best possible thing we can do for her is to finish up here. The manuscript she was carrying when she was arrested was a scrap she managed to reach in the hole she made in the wall of the chamber where she heard the hollow sound. If they torture her and threaten to arrest her family, she might reveal where she found it, and the last thing she'd want would be to provide the thugs with an excuse to descend on this place. She'd want us to be here now, getting out everything we can before that happens. It's become personal for me too, Jack. When I lock up here later tonight, this synagogue will be empty and perhaps doomed to destruction, but we don't want it to be as if a thousand years of history were closing down. Removing these last shreds of the Geniza is not an ending, but a thread of continuity. The history represented here has survived darkness before, and we must not let these people get their way. That's why, when Sahirah contacted me, I wanted to come out here to help in any way I could, in the eye of yet another storm of ignorance and destruction.\"\n\nJack paused thinking hard. \"We didn't bring a satellite phone from Alexandria in case we were searched at a checkpoint and had it confiscated, potentially compromising the IMU secure line.\" He took out his cell phone and looked at the network indicator. \"What's mobile reception like?\"\n\nAysha shook her head. \"Pretty well nonexistent outside Cairo. I can't raise the institute or Maurice, who's in his Land Rover heading toward the Faiyum excavation as we speak. The extremists have been sabotaging the transmitters across the country.\"\n\nJack pocketed his phone. \"Okay. This is what I'm going to do. First thing tomorrow when I'm back on _Seaquest_ , I'll get the IMU board of directors to rescind our offer to return the sarcophagus of Menkaure to Egypt unless they release Sahirah, immediately. That should put some fire under the antiquities director while he still has any power. The return of the sarcophagus was going to be the big event of his probably very short career. We just have to hope that we can still play him before the extremists take over.\"\n\nAysha nodded. \"That might just work, Jack. It's about the only leverage we've got.\"\n\nJack thought hard for a moment longer. There was nothing else they could do, bar storming the ministry and demanding her release, something that would almost certainly get them arrested or worse. \"All right. Let's see what you've got.\"\n\nMaria looked at him. \"We enlarged the hole that Sahirah created as much as we could, but it's still barely big enough to get your arm into. It's a crack in the fabric of the wall that seems to have been overlooked when the synagogue was restored in 1890 and then again a few years ago, probably because the opening that had once existed had become bunged up centuries ago with congealed vellum and other organic matter. Countless generations of mice dragged bits of manuscript into the hole and shredded it to make their nests, so nothing of paper or papyrus has survived beyond a few tiny shreds. But what we do have is some larger pieces of vellum. It seems the mice didn't like something about the vellum, perhaps the gum used to stabilize and dry the gall ink. In time those fragments became glued with mouse droppings to the interior of the hole, actually helping to insulate the nest. When Sahirah showed us the few postage-stamp-sized fragments that she managed to prize out, we got really excited because vellum generally was used for religious texts, so there was a chance of it being something really important. After I saw her photos in the email, I booked the first flight here.\"\n\nJack pointed at a matte of tissue covering something on the table. \"Have you got a fragment here?\"\n\nMaria sat down on the chair and raised the tissue. Beneath it was a piece of vellum about half the size of a standard book page. It was torn along one edge and filthy. \"Partly the dirt is centuries of mouse droppings and body decay, a kind of congealed stickiness,\" she said. \"And partly it's the spread of ambient ink from the lettering, as well as moisture stains that look almost like burning. After I've cleaned this back in the lab and put it under the electron microscope to check the gall ink stability, I'll put it in a humidification chamber to give the leather back its suppleness, and then strengthen it with methycellulose and starch paper. But even without cleaning, you can still make out the words.\"\n\nJack leaned closer, but then recoiled. \"That's a serious stench,\" he said, crinkling his nose. \"I think I need a gas mask.\"\n\nMaria gave him a rueful look. \"Nice, isn't it? Nine hundred years of mouse. Solomon Schechter was never the same after the months he spent in here. His health was broken. He took to wearing a mask when he studied the manuscripts in Cambridge, but it was probably too late, and ultimately that fetid exposure was what killed him.\"\n\n\"Nine hundred years,\" Jack murmured, staring again. \"That makes it early- to mid-twelfth century. Have you managed to transcribe it?\"\n\n\"Take a close look first. What do you see?\"\n\nJack held his breath, stared closely, and then backed off again. \"Hebrew letters, about seventeen lines, broken off at the bottom as if the lower part of the page is missing.\" He held his breath again, and peered closely. \"My God. I thought so. It's a palimpsest. I can see older letters floating under the upper text, upside down. I can't make out the words, but the letters have Hebrew-style serifs as well.\"\n\nMaria nodded. \"At the moment I can't translate the lower text. That's a prize that awaits us back in the lab. I'm hoping against hope for more lines of the Ben Sira, the Book of Wisdom, which is probably the greatest single treasure to come out of the Geniza.\"\n\n\"Lanowski talked about that this afternoon. About the problem of translation and transmission in sacred texts, and the importance of finding the Hebrew originals.\"\n\n\"I talked it through with him as well on the phone. He's had some startling ideas. He follows many scholars in thinking that Joshua Ben Sira in the second century BC composed the book in Alexandria. But he's taken it one step further and suggested that the great library of Alexandria, newly established at that time, would have allowed Ben Sira ready access to many of the surviving books of wisdom from Pharaonic Egypt, texts that mostly didn't make it through the destruction of the library in late antiquity and are therefore unknown to us. Both he and Professor Dillen think there's enough in what we know of the Ben Sira to suggest a Pharaonic link, though they need more original text to make a case for it. Maybe we've got it here; it's tantalizing, but a brick wall at the moment. What I'm really interested in now, what I've got you here for, Jack, is the upper text. Has Aysha prepped you on this?\"\n\n\"Only that it's something to do with Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, the eleventh-century caliph of Egypt.\"\n\n\"Okay. Al-Hakim ruled from 996 to 1021. This is a letter written about a hundred and twenty years after his death, by Yehuda Halevi.\"\n\n\"The Jewish poet?\" Jack exclaimed. \"I know that the Geniza contained one of the richest archives of letters from him.\"\n\nMaria nodded. \"More than fifty of them. He's one of the most celebrated poets of medieval Judaism. He was Sephardic, from Spain, and had a wide circle of friends there and among the Jewish diaspora around the Mediterranean. He came on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1140, in the last year of his life, arriving in Alexandria in September of that year, probably alighting near the site of the ancient lighthouse at the very spot where you left the institute this afternoon. After several months in Cairo, he finally left on the eleventh of May 1141 for Jerusalem, where his trail is lost to history. Under the Crusaders, neither Jews nor Muslims were allowed into the city, but pilgrims like Halevi were allowed to pray at the Mount of Olives. Perhaps he died there after fulfilling his dream. He's another shade from the past you can imagine standing on the floor of the synagogue, Jack. In fact he had quite a lot in common with General Gordon and his circle. Like them, Halevi had become convinced that religious fulfillment could be found only in the Holy Land. He lived at the time of the First Crusade, when Baldwin the Third was King of Jerusalem, and also when the Jewish community in Spain was caught between Christianity and Islam.\"\n\n\"Your own ancestors, I remember.\"\n\nMaria nodded. \"They were forced to convert to Christianity and adopt Christian names to avoid the Inquisition, eventually losing their Jewish identity. But I have a huge diaspora of distant cousins who chose to flee, to England, to Holland, to Constantinople, to the New World, even here to Cairo, readopting names like Sarah and Rebecca and Moses and Abraham. Handling this document from the twelfth century gives me a strange feeling, as if that Jewish identity had been lying dormant in my family for all those generations since the conversion, and not been extinguished after all.\"\n\n\"They say you can never lose it,\" Aysha murmured.\n\n\"And there's something else. Like those soldiers in the late nineteenth century, Halevi also turns out to have had a fascination with what we would now term archaeology.\"\n\n\"That's what's in this letter?\"\n\nMaria nodded. \"It's a fantastic addition to the archive. His feathery hand is instantly recognizable, and it's incredibly exciting for me to be holding this. It's actually Arabic, but written in Hebrew letters. The Geniza represents a rich fusion of Arabic and Jewish traditions, evidence of a cosmopolitan world far removed from the version of history peddled by the preachers of hate who indoctrinate the extremists. Halevi had been influenced in Spain by Islam just as the Jews had been in Cairo, and had come to believe that Arabic forms of expression could mediate Jewish thought, in poetry and in prose.\"\n\n\"And he had an eye for the history he saw around him.\"\n\n\"Correct. And now we're getting to the nub of it. While he was in Cairo for those months in 1140 to 1141, he became good friends with the _nagid_ , the Jewish community leader\u2014a man named Samuel ben Hananiah\u2014and with a wealthy merchant named Halfon ben Netanel. He also corresponded regularly with his intellectual friends back in Spain. He loved Egypt: 'This is a wondrous land to see, and I would stay, but my locks are grey,' he wrote. He was anxious to get to Jerusalem, but he wanted to lap up everything he could about Egypt while he was here. The caliph Al-Hakim comes into the story because the Jews in Spain had a particular fascination with the behavior of the Muslim potentates of the Near East at a time when Spanish Jews were looking anxiously over their own shoulders at their own Islamic overlords and wondering what the future might hold. Al-Hakim wasn't exactly the flavor of the month. He was reviled among Jews and Christians alike for ordering the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 1021 and, for good measure, the Ben Ezra synagogue here in Cairo as well. But they also saw him as a complex and intriguing man who might be the basis for a lesson in morality. Halevi loved a mystery, and he was especially interested in the questions over Al-Hakim's death. This letter seems to be a draft of something he may never have actually sent off, written to his son-in-law, the scholar and historian Abraham Ibn Ezra in Toledo.\"\n\n\"Can you translate it?\"\n\nShe clicked the screen, calling up an enhanced photographic image of the text with English words overlaid. Jack leaned over her shoulder and followed as she read:\n\n> _To my son-in-law Abraham Ibn Ezra and my daughter Ribca, my heart belongs to you, you noble souls, who draw me to you with bonds of love. In my last letter I wrote to you of the Caliph Al-Hakim, and of how my friends the nagid and the merchant Halfon have revealed much that is new to me about his disappearance in the desert, a mystery above all others in this mysterious and beguiling land. I ask you to pass on this letter to my friends the astronomer Ibn Yunus and the mathematician Ibn al-Haytham, as they may be able to sit down with the maps I sent and their measuring instruments and make sense of the story I have been told. Al-Hakim had taken to wandering into the desert alone on his donkey south of Cairo every night, having ordered his retainers and guards to stay at the city gate. Some say he was, in truth, a god; his disappearance was a reversion to his nonhuman form. Some also say that by persecuting Jews and Christians he was going against Islamic law; yet as caliph, he was not accountable to any law, but the law to him. That is surely enough to drive any man to insanity, or to the desert! Perhaps like the pharaoh who sought the Aten in the desert, who made his temple at Fustat, aligned towards the pyramids, he was shedding that impossible burden, and seeking simplicity. When he went to the desert he went not as caliph, but as a man_.\n\nMaria looked up. \"The literal translation of the epithet he uses for Al-Hakim is 'sand-traveller,' which itself is the literal translation of an ancient Egyptian term known only from hieroglyphs. It's almost as if they were speaking the same language.\"\n\nJack shook his head in amazement. \"Fascinating,\" he exclaimed. \"That meshes with my own revelation just now in the synagogue when I realized that I knew that a stone excavated in 1890 from the synagogue precinct contained the hieroglyphic cartouche of none other than Akhenaten. It begins to fit with a wider picture, that the site of medieval Fustat was once connected with the ancient complex of Heliopolis, where northeastern Cairo now stands. Heliopolis was the center for the worship of the sun god Ra, and a logical place for Akhenaten to build a great temple to the Aten. Maurice told me that blocks from that temple have been identified in the medieval walls of Cairo. That was my first thought when Aysha told me about the British officers discovering the stone with the cartouche here in 1890. But the account in that officer's diary makes it sound as if it came from an in situ ancient structure, not a medieval one, so it fits with what Halevi suggests about a separate Pharaonic religious complex here, one aligned to the pyramids rather than to the old cult center at Heliopolis. Is there more, Maria?\"\n\n\"A few sentences, before the tear.\" She carried on reading:\n\n> _Now ben Netanel tells me this. His great-grandfather as a boy secretly followed Al-Hakim out into the desert that final night, a dare among the boys of Fustat to see where the caliph was really going. He watched from behind a dune as Al-Hakim hobbled his donkey with a knife, stripped off his clothes and slashed them with the bloody blade, and then stood there naked, raising his arms to the sky. His murder was a ruse. He wanted the world to think that he had died. He had indeed undergone a transmogrification, not from caliph to god, but from caliph to man. He did not die, but he disappeared down a hole in the ground into the underworld, never to be seen again. This is no fable; this is truth_.\n\nJack waited in silence for a moment, coursing with excitement. \" _The underworld_. Go on,\" he urged.\n\nMaria sat back. \"That's it.\"\n\nJack closed his eyes. _That's it?_ \"Are you sure?\"\n\nMaria glanced at Aysha. \"Well, there _might_ be more. Yesterday evening after I got set up here, Aysha and I climbed into the chamber and managed to see through the hole with our torches. We were able to prize free this fragment, but we saw another sheet compacted against the stone beyond it that could be the torn lower half of the page. We don't have any extraction tools that wouldn't damage it, and would probably tear it into shreds. Everything has to be done here the old-fashioned way, with bare hands. And Aysha and I are, well, both a little short on length.\"\n\nJack stared at her. \"You're telling me you got me all the way here because I've got long arms?\"\n\n\"The longest in Cairo. Probably the longest in Egypt. And fingers used to feeling around in the murk. Diving down holes is your specialty, isn't it?\"\n\nJack shook his head. \"What you need is Little Joey. Costas' miniature robot. His buddy. That's the real reason he's pining to get back to his engineering lab on _Seaquest_ , not the problems of raising the sarcophagus of Menkaure.\"\n\n\"We thought of asking him along too, but we didn't think that mouse droppings were really his thing.\"\n\n\"That's probably wise. Underwater is fine, but holes in the ground full of decayed matter are not what he signed up for.\"\n\n\"Of course, there's the inevitable curse, as well,\" Aysha said. \"The Geniza was said to be guarded by a serpent who bedded down in the manuscripts like a dragon with its treasure. Anyone who went in was doomed. Look what happened to Solomon Schechter.\"\n\n\"Snakes,\" Jack muttered. \"Definitely not Costas' scene.\"\n\n\"Then you'll have to go it alone,\" Maria said.\n\nJack stared at the filth on the fragment of vellum. \"I'll need protective clothing. Some kind of respirator.\"\n\nAysha nodded at a large plastic crate beside the ladder. \"We're one step ahead of you. Full biological, chemical, and nuclear protection suits liberated from an army depot by a friend of mine.\"\n\nMaria glanced at him. \"You good to go?\"\n\nJack looked at his watch, and then up at the hole into the Geniza chamber above him, black and slightly forbidding. \"Okay. There's no time for dithering or, the gods protect me, for curses. Let's do it.\"\n\n# CHAPTER 11\n\nAlight came on, harsh, blinding, and the young woman in the center of the room turned her head away from it, shutting her eyes tight against the glare. She strained against the bindings that held her hands to the back of the chair, no longer feeling the pain where the rope had cut into her wrists. Even the slight movement of her head had brought back the sickening stench of the room, full of people bound like her who had lain in their own filth for days, and in the filth of others before them who had died or been dragged away for execution. She had been in here for only a few hours, but with their watches removed and no clock, she was already beginning to lose track of time. The only break in the sepulchral gloom was when the light cut in, when those who still had the energy moaned and whimpered with fear, when their captors came for another victim.\n\nThe first few times it had happened after she had recovered consciousness, she had managed to look around, above the terrified faces and twisted bodies, and had seen the cupboards filled with chemicals and the half-torn posters on the walls advertising forthcoming exhibitions in the museum. She had been here before. She knew she was in the archaeological conservation labs of the ministry, now used as detention cells by the extremists who had been the driving force behind the new regime. She was only a short walk away from the Old City and the synagogue where they had snatched her, only a stone's throw from family and friends. Yet she knew she may as well be a world away, beyond rescue. Only a few weeks before, these labs had been a hive of activity, filled with colleagues of hers in the archaeological service. The people around her now had been smartly dressed politicians and civil servants. Those torn posters and soiled clothes might just as well be archaeological relics themselves of a time before Egypt had begun to fall before the forces of darkness and the people began to stare into the void.\n\nThe light shone hot against her face, and she knew it was her turn. A hand pulled her head and jerked it upright, the fingers smelling of khat. A man spoke harshly in English. \"Open your eyes.\"\n\n\"Turn away the light,\" she said hoarsely. \"And speak to me in Arabic.\"\n\n\"You are a Jew. We will not speak to you in the language of the Prophet.\"\n\n\"My family has lived in Cairo for two thousand years. Arabic is the language we speak.\"\n\nShe heard the man talk to another in the distinctive dialect of Sudanese Arabic, and the light moved away. She opened her eyes cautiously and saw two bearded men in front of her wearing black headbands, both with handguns and one carrying a powerful torch. The closest man waved a tattered piece of paper in front of her face. \"What is this?\" he said, still speaking in English.\n\nShe squinted at it. \"It's a twelfth-century document from the archive in the synagogue,\" she said. \"I was taking it away for study when I was brought here.\"\n\nThe man leaned forward and spat a stream of khat juice into the face of a woman on the floor, and then turned back. \"You're a liar. Our informant told us you were stealing holy documents of Islam, and he was right. This is written in Arabic. Even the stupidest of my men can see that. This is a page of the holy Qur'\u0101n.\"\n\nShe looked at him defiantly. \"It's true that there are pages of the Qur'\u0101n in the archive. They're one of its greatest treasures. But there are also thousands of other documents in Arabic. If you and your fighters are as holy as you'd like to think you are, then you'd have memorized the Qur'\u0101n and you'd see that this is not a holy page. In fact, it's a letter from a wealthy Jewish matriarch to one of her three lovers, encouraging him to keep his Muslim faith because she knows that for him it is the true route to God.\"\n\nThe man spat again, dropped the fragment of paper, and held her by the chin, coming close to her face. \"We know who you work for. You are a spy for the Zionists. We have seen you go into the synagogue with that woman from the Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria.\"\n\nShe said nothing. The man raised his pistol and cocked it beside her ear. \"Answer one question, and I will make this easy for you. There is a man we want, a so-called archaeologist who spied in my country when he was supposedly hunting for relics, and who is now on the trail of something we want in Egypt.\" He let go of her chin, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a crumpled page from a magazine. He straightened it and then held it in front of her. It showed a picture of two men in diving gear on the side of a boat, one of them tall with graying dark hair and the other shorter and stouter. He pointed with the butt of his pistol at the taller one. \"Where is this man?\" he demanded.\n\nShe pursed her lips defiantly, saying nothing. He rolled up the page, tossed it aside, and then aimed his pistol at the woman he had spat on. There was a deafening crack and her head exploded, brains and blood spraying their legs. He turned back to her, held her chin again, and brought the pistol close enough that she could smell the smoke. \"I will ask only one more time,\" he snarled. \"Where is Jack Howard?\"\n\nShe continued to say nothing, sitting as upright as she could and staring defiantly ahead. The man waited for a moment longer, raised his pistol, and then swung the butt at her head, hitting her and throwing her violently sideways. For a brief moment she saw the fragment of ancient text lying on the floor beside the dead woman, and then she saw a terrifying rushing blackness.\n\nAnd then nothing.\n\n\u2014\n\nTwenty minutes after leaving Maria, Jack was crouched at the bottom of the Geniza chamber looking up at the aperture in the wall leading back into the synagogue. The space was cramped, an arm's breadth across each way and some six meters high; it was like being inside a large chimney well in a medieval castle. He watched Maria follow him carefully down the rope ladder they had dropped from the aperture, her white protective suit shimmering in the light from the single bulb they had suspended from the top of the chamber. Jack's own suit felt strangely insubstantial after the countless hours he had spent underwater in a Kevlar-reinforced E-suit, and he had to move and hear the crinkle of the plastic to convince himself that he was wearing anything above his own clothes. He shifted the respirator and clear plastic visor to get a more comfortable view, and then looked at his exposed right hand, already smeared with dirt, where he had cut off the glove and sealed the wrist with a rubber band. They had brought mini Maglites with them, but what he was about to do was going to be a matter of touch and feel, with bare fingers essential for the sensitivity needed to prize out what might remain of the ancient vellum letter in the hole in the wall.\n\nMaria landed beside him and looked at the smear on his hand. \"Solomon Schechter called it Genizaschmutz,\" she said, her voice slightly muffled by her respirator. \"Dust, insects, decayed manuscripts, flecks of whitewash from the ceiling, desert sand, the residue of all those human hands sweating and smudging as they wrote, and of course mouse goo, stuck together with a gummy ooze from the vellum. It's like pine resin when you get it on your hands. Almost impossible to get off.\"\n\nJack looked up at the aperture, lit by the single stark bulb, their route out. \"So this was filled up to the brim with manuscripts?\"\n\n\"Virtually overflowing. They say the opening is up there so that the holy words in Hebrew go directly to heaven, like the soul. In reality it was the only practical place they could put the opening, like a giant rubbish bin. Even though the manuscripts were removed over a century ago, I still feel as if I'm diving into a well of history when I come inside here. Aysha is only a few meters away on the other side of this wall, but it's as if we're halfway back to the world of the Geniza, in a kind of shadowy netherland with all those faces and voices about to spring to life. I've never felt quite like this before in a medieval manuscript repository. In most cases, like the Hereford Library, the manuscripts were part of a scholarly library, so in your mind's eye you walk back into a candlelit scriptorium or a monk's study. Here, you walk back into a bustling Cairo street scene of the eleventh or twelfth century, filled with all the color and vibrancy that life can offer.\"\n\nJack spied a fleck of lighter colored material sticking to the wall beside his face and put his forefinger on it, peeling it away with his thumb. It was a tiny piece of paper with a letter on it, a serif just visible. Maria opened up a small plastic box that she had taken from a pouch on her belt and Jack gently flicked the fragment into it. She closed the box and replaced it carefully in her pocket. \"This is real archaeology, Jack. Creating a huge mosaic from the tiniest of tiny details. That single letter may float through history by itself forever, or it might just form the crucial piece in a jigsaw puzzle. With the Geniza, you never know.\"\n\n\"Let's get the job done,\" Jack said.\n\nMaria pointed to a hole just above the floor of the chamber on the side opposite the synagogue balcony. It led into the outer wall of the building. It was even smaller than Jack had imagined, barely wide enough to fit his bicep. He eased himself down until he was lying on his right side, his hand poised to reach inside. He paused for a moment, eyeing Maria. \"About that snake,\" he said. \"The venomous guardian of the Geniza. If there were mice living in there, then this hole isn't going to have been his lair, is it?\"\n\nMaria looked thoughtful. \"The last mouse died in there about five hundred years ago, trapped behind a congealed plug of resinous vellum. The snake could have burrowed its way in there after that. It could be waiting in there for you, Jack.\"\n\n\"I'm so glad Costas isn't here,\" Jack muttered, flexing his fingers.\n\n\"There's a great line from Ben Sira, words on a piece of parchment that was floating in that mass of manuscripts where we're sitting now. It goes: 'Concealed wisdom and hidden treasure, what's the use of either?' Whatever's in there needs to come out, Jack. I don't think the snake will bite.\"\n\n\"Okay. I'll trust you.\"\n\n\"There's something else I wanted to say to you, Jack, while we're here together. Whatever we find in that hole, you're going to want to leave here as soon as possible afterward and the opportunity will be lost.\"\n\nJack rolled back and looked at her. \"Maybe not the best time, Maria.\"\n\nShe shook her head impatiently. \"It's not that. It's about scholarship. It's about the exhilaration of discovery. It's about what drives people like Solomon Schechter, like Howard Carter, like you, Jack. At the time when the Geniza was discovered, there were many who felt that Jewish scholarship had turned in on itself, like the sophists of late antiquity or medieval Christianity, with too much intellect being wasted on trivia and obscurity, with piety becoming burdensome and negative. The Geniza gave a huge burst of vitality to all that, almost a cleansing. It allowed people to see afresh not just the fundaments of their religion but also the sheer vitality of the people who had lived by it. It was as if what had gone before was foam on the sea of scholarship. But the uncovering of the Geniza created a tidal wave in the sea itself, one that survived even the darkest days of the Holocaust. It drove some of them to a vision of the world that was not partisan, was not divided into separate communities, but was as cosmopolitan as the world they found in the Geniza, a world where peaceful coexistence across all the world's great religions might be possible. It was idealism, but idealism based on an astonishing historical revelation. That's what I wanted to say to you, Jack. Every time you make a great discovery, it gives that burst of vitality to the world, a rekindling of wonder and excitement. With another dark cloud hanging over us now, we need that more than ever. Don't ever give up on the quest.\"\n\nJack stared up at that aperture near the ceiling. He was utterly still for a moment, feeling his heartbeat slow, as it did when he was underwater. \"It's no longer just Jack Howard,\" he replied quietly. \"The quest is driven by all of us, by the team.\" He rolled back, took a deep breath, and thought again. \"But I know what you're saying. It's the bigger picture, isn't it? Discovery isn't just about the adrenaline rush, the thrill of the chase, the problem-solving. It's about consequences, about what you find and how you present it to the world, about enrichment and uplifting, and sometimes, just _sometimes_ , about improving the human condition. I'm with you on that, up to the hilt. And I'm humbled that you can think of me alongside scholars like Schechter and Carter. I'd say the same about you, as I would about Aysha and Maurice. And I'm not always the star. Sometimes,\" he said, flashing her a smile and raising his right hand, \"I'm just a long arm, aren't I?\"\n\nMaria smiled back. \"Time you put it into action.\"\n\nJack bunched his fingers and pushed his hand into the hole, continuing until he was elbow deep. At first he felt only a void, but then his fingers brushed against the edges, against slippery stone and a sticky mass. He tried not to think about what he was touching and pressed in farther, reaching the middle of his bicep and already feeling the edges of the hole constricting his arm. \"Still nothing,\" he exclaimed, pushing in farther. \"I can't feel the end.\"\n\n\"Another hand's length, no more,\" Maria said. \"You can do it.\"\n\nHe gave another shove, flinching in pain as his shoulder wedged into the hole. \"Okay. I've got to the far end,\" he said, his face pressed hard against the chamber wall above the hole. He closed his eyes, imagining what he was feeling\u2014a smooth but undulating surface with edges that curled back from the underlying stone. \"I think I've got the piece of vellum,\" he said. \"About twice the size of my hand? I'm prizing it away now.\" He pulled gently at the edges, carefully forcing his fingers behind, working his way around until only the central part of the vellum remained attached to the masonry. Slowly, with infinite care, he pushed his fingers farther behind the flap, feeling it come away millimeter by millimeter until finally it broke free. \"Okay. Got it.\" He edged backward from the wall as he withdrew his hand, pulling out a blackened object that looked like a piece of leather caught in a fire. He handed it to Maria, who peered at it closely and put it in another lidded plastic box. Jack sat upright, his hand blackened with filth. \"Could you see anything?\"\n\n\"I could, Jack.\" Her voice was taut with excitement. \"Maybe twenty lines, and it's in Halevi's hand. The upper tear is exactly consistent with the tear we've got in the other piece. Let's get out of here and see if I can read it.\"\n\nFive minutes later they were both outside on the balcony floor stripping off their suits, Jack quickly rubbing off the worst of the dirt from his hand with a pile of wet wipes. Aysha had already taken the box and opened it on the table, and Maria immediately went over and sat in front of it, pulling down one of the angle-poise lamps, and putting on a pair of conservator's gloves. She carefully removed the vellum, placing it on a plastic sheet on the table, and picked up her magnifying glass and notebook, jotting down words in translation as she peered at the lines. Jack gave up trying to clean his hand and walked over. \"Can you see more palimpsest?\"\n\n\"Definitely. It's even clearer than the other piece, but I'm just concentrating on the upper text.\" She continued jotting down words, and after about another ten minutes stopped and sat back. She was silent for a moment, and then stripped off her gloves and put the notebook on the table. \"You're going to love this, Jack.\"\n\n\"Go on.\"\n\n\"You remember we left off where the boy had been following Al-Hakim into the desert, and had secretly watched him faking evidence of his own death?\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"Well, this tells what the boy saw next.\" She read out from her notebook:\n\n> _Now, according to my friend ben Netanel, his great-grandfather followed the caliph to a place where he disappeared beneath a sand dune, and where the boy hidden above saw a long tunnel leading to brilliant light. He tried to follow, but as he began to enter a stone door came crashing down, quickly to be swallowed by the desert. Before it vanished he saw on the door an ancient inscription of the disk with radiating arms that I have also seen in Fustat, at the place beside the synagogue where Moses was found in the reeds by Pharaoh. They say that the place where Al-Hakim left his donkey and his clothes was near the monastery of Qusayr, and the town of Hulwan, but if the boy indeed saw the pyramids, then the place where Al-Hakim disappeared must have been farther north, not far south of Fustat, where I write to you now from the precinct of the synagogue of Ben Ezra, surrounded by all the delights of fruit and wine and beautiful women that this wondrous country has to offer. If you pass this on to my friends the astronomer Ibn Yunus and the mathematician Ibn al-Haytham, they may calculate the area within sight of the pyramids close to the Nile where this event took place. I myself would seek out the place in the desert, but I must travel while the sailing season is on us to the shores of the Holy Land and to Jerusalem, God protect it. God knows that I have love for both of you, my son Abraham and my daughter Ribca, and for my beautiful nieces and nephews, and I will pray for all of you in sight of the Temple Wall on the Mount of Olives, inshallah_.\n\nJack looked at the vellum, his mind reeling. \"Amazing,\" he exclaimed. \"That's exactly what Costas and I saw from under the Pyramid of Menkaure, only this seems to be from another entrance in another direction, looking west _toward_ the pyramids. What he's describing is the sun symbol of Akhenaten, and the one he mentions in Fustat may well have been associated with the Akhenaten cartouche excavated by those British officers and taken back to England by my great-great-grandfather.\" He took a deep breath, shaking his head. \"It's amazing, though it doesn't necessarily bring us closer to another entrance that we might get into. The one he's describing sounds as if it would require a major mechanical excavation to open up, and could be anywhere within a radius of several dozen square kilometers, probably beneath the southern suburbs of Cairo.\"\n\n\"I'll get one of my Hebrew experts back in Oxford to take a look at the translation,\" Maria said. \"Maybe there's an alternative nuance to some of those words that might give a better clue.\" She glanced at her watch. \"Meanwhile, I've got to get on here. There's a cluster of smaller fragments of other manuscripts from the hole that need to be dealt with. The clock's ticking.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Aysha said, pulling out her phone. \"I'm calling our driver in the Land Rover. He should be outside the main entrance to Fustat within fifteen minutes.\"\n\nJack turned to Maria. \"How did you guess there might be something like this in the second part of the letter? The first half left Al-Hakim's fate wide open.\"\n\n\"Call it instinct. A Jack Howard moment.\"\n\n\"You have those?\"\n\n\" _Very_ occasionally.\" She smiled at him. \"Actually, it was something Jeremy found in his research into the Howard Carter papers. He gave me only the barest details in a text message after I'd boarded the plane yesterday for Cairo, but it seems as if Al-Hakim wasn't the only one to disappear under the desert. And it seems as if there might be a connection with your Royal Engineers officers in the late nineteenth century. Jeremy was expecting his research to be finished by tomorrow and will contact you then.\"\n\nJack glanced at his watch. There was something else he had wanted to do in Cairo, something he had planned since he and Costas had first laid eyes on the relief sculpture of the pharaoh and the Israelites inside the crocodile temple beside the Nile. There, he had seen the pharaoh in two dimensions; now he wanted to see him in three. He turned to Aysha. \"Do we have time to go to the museum? I'd like to see the colossal statue of Akhenaten from Amarna that went with the travelling exhibition around the world a few years ago.\"\n\nAysha looked uncertain. \"It's shut to the public, but I still have a pass. Our driver knows the back routes and could get us to the rear entrance. I'm supposed to return you to Alexandria and then I'm straight off to the Faiyum to join Maurice at the mummy necropolis. But we could squeeze in the extra hour if you really want it.\"\n\n\"Who knows when I'll be in Egypt again.\"\n\nMaria eyed him. \"You'll be back. I've never known Jack Howard to walk away from something like this.\"\n\n\"I'm thinking of visiting Jerusalem next.\"\n\n\"That's going from the frying pan into the fire, isn't it? There have already been rockets from Syria falling on Haifa.\"\n\nJack shrugged. \"I was there doing research for my doctorate in the week before the first Gulf War, remember? There were no tourists, and I had the Holy Sepulchre all to myself. I told Rebecca she should seize the opportunity to explore as much as possible while she's there now, when the place isn't swamped with tour buses.\"\n\nMaria looked at him shrewdly. \"If the real reason you're going to Jerusalem is to look out for Rebecca, forget it. She'd never forgive you. You've got to let her plough her own furrow, and then ask you out there herself.\"\n\nJack pulled out his phone and showed her an image. \"That's the tunnel she's about to go down under the City of David. She sent this just after we left Alexandria. She wanted Costas to go too, but I texted her about Lanowski's visit and said Costas might be tied up for a while with some engineering problem on _Seaquest_.\"\n\n\"When you reply, tell her the trip she and I have planned to Greece is definitely in the cards. I've just had permission for us to visit the monasteries on Mount Athos to look at the manuscript libraries. At last they've agreed to let women in, and she and I are going to be the first.\"\n\nJack raised his eyes. \"Fascinating. I've always wanted to have a look in there. Maybe I'll join you.\"\n\n\"As if, Jack, as Rebecca would put it. This is a strictly girls-only trip to a once-strictly-male preserve. It'd look as if we had a chaperone.\"\n\nJack put away his phone, and paused. \"I'll call you in Oxford. We should spend some time together.\"\n\nMaria turned back to the vellum. \"How's Katya?\"\n\nJack shrugged. \"Haven't seen her for months.\"\n\nShe turned to him. \"What's going on there, Jack? She's perfect for you. A paleolinguistics PhD who can hold her own in a gun battle and runs her own project on the Silk Road in Kyrgyzstan. What is it now, ten years since you first met? She helped you find Atlantis.\"\n\nJack shrugged. \"You helped me find the last Gospel of Christ.\"\n\n\"What are you doing, Jack? You need to make up your mind.\"\n\n\"She's with that Kyrgyz guy, Almaty, at the petroglyph site.\"\n\n\"Well, I guess at least he's on the same continent as she is. I know how she feels.\"\n\nJack glanced at Aysha, who gave him a rueful look. \"Time to go, Jack. There's a curfew at midnight, and we definitely can't push that.\"\n\nMaria looked at them. \"I'm doing an all-nighter here and then I'm on the early morning flight back to Heathrow. I want to get my Hebrew expert at the institute to look at this and then I'll email you the final translation. And watch out for something from Jeremy. He's working flat out in the British Museum stores looking for more Howard Carter manuscripts, for anything further on the old soldier and his story of lost treasure under the pyramids. Jeremy usually comes up trumps, if you give him time.\"\n\n\"We may not have a lot of that,\" Jack said.\n\n\"He was on to the last box of correspondence when I left. With the pyramid a no-go zone, his findings may be the last hope you have of discovering another way underground. Who knows what that guy told Carter.\"\n\n\"I'll text him when I get back to Alexandria, right after I contact the IMU board and do all I can to get your friend Sahirah released. Any plans to return the sarcophagus to Egypt are on hold until she walks free. If we are indeed able to raise it tomorrow, that would bring maximum public humiliation to the antiquities director. Releasing Sahirah should be a price he is willing to pay to keep face.\"\n\n\"Tomorrow might be your last chance,\" Aysha said. \"The antiquities director might not last much longer than that, and whoever takes his place from the extremist junta won't care less about the sarcophagus returning to Egypt. That is, if there's even a Ministry of Culture left. It's already halfway to being an interrogation block.\"\n\nJack gave her a steely look. \"I'm going to insist on her release by midday tomorrow Egyptian time. If there's no response, I'll be meeting with the IMU security director and assessing all options.\"\n\nMaria stood, arms folded, and looked up at Jack. \"Congratulations on your chariots discovery in the Red Sea, Jack. But it makes me think of lines from Yannai, another poet in the Geniza, on the burning bush in the Book of Exodus. 'Omens of fire in the chariot's wind, Pillars of fire in thunder and storm.' Take care of yourself, Jack. Don't stretch that envelope too far; otherwise, it'll be Rebecca coming to find you, not the other way around.\"\n\nJack looked at her with concern. \"Will you be all right here alone?\"\n\nAysha turned to him. \"That beggar you gave money to at the entrance to the synagogue precinct? He's ex-Egyptian special forces, a cousin of mine, Ahmed. He has a Glock 17 concealed in those rags. He won't let Maria out of his sight until she's sitting on the plane for Heathrow tomorrow morning.\"\n\n\"Good. I wouldn't want to be coming back here to rescue Maria.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't need to. I'd be here first.\"\n\nMaria paused, and then quickly kissed him on the cheek. \"See you in Oxford when this is over.\"\n\nAysha gave them both a wry smile. \"Inshallah.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nHalf an hour later Jack ducked out of the Land Rover into a back street and followed Aysha quickly down a passageway behind the museum. While they had been in the synagogue, Cairo had erupted again, the low cloud over the city reflecting the orange glow of fires and the roar of the traffic punctuated by the wail of sirens and bursts of gunfire. Aysha spoke to the two armed guards at the entrance, showed her pass, and waited as one of them unlocked the door. Moments later they were in a long, ill-lit corridor and then ascending a staircase that came out at the rear of the ground-floor exhibits hall. The entire museum seemed sepulchral, with many of the cases shrouded with sheets.\n\n\"The last antiquities director ordered this, the last _archaeologist_ , that is, before he was ousted by the new regime,\" Aysha said as they hurried on. \"Everyone here was fearful of a repeat of what had happened to the museums in Iraq and Afghanistan, and covering the exhibits at least buys some time, keeping them out of the eye of the extremists, who see virtually everything in here as un-Islamic. Here we are, Room Three, the Amarna Room. The sculpture you want is in the far left corner under the shroud. I'll wait here in case a guard comes by and I have to explain what we're doing. You've got ten minutes, maximum.\"\n\nShe switched on the light, and Jack left her pacing the entrance to the room. The air smelled musty, tomblike, and Jack had the chilling sensation of being at the end of an era, with the mummies and sculptures and other priceless artifacts celebrated the world over about to be entombed again, swallowed into the ground or smashed to pieces within the ruins of this place. He passed the famous unfinished sculpture of Nefertiti, her beautiful face looming out of the darkness, and then he saw her again in a relief sculpture, no longer so beautiful, with the same elongated profile and same bulbous features as her husband. He stopped at the far corner in front of a shrouded form that towered over the rest of the room, and he carefully pulled off the sheet. The sculpture rose above him just as he had remembered it in the travelling exhibition in London, only here the features were even more deeply accentuated by the shadows. It was a representation utterly unlike that of any other pharaoh from ancient Egypt, with the extended chin, the thick, half-smiling lips, and the bulbous eyes, as if it were from another place and another time altogether.\n\nHe had not known for certain why he wanted to see this statue again, but now he realized why. Before she had left for Jerusalem, Rebecca had talked to him about Baldwin the Fourth, the Crusader king who had ruled the city with his Frankish barons in the twelfth century, soon after the Geniza poet Halevi had met his end there. Together they had watched the Ridley Scott film _Kingdom of Heaven_, in which Baldwin is portrayed in a golden mask, concealing the leprosy that had ravaged his face and would eventually kill him. Jack had remembered the wooden Burundi face masks with their hooded eyes that he had seen in Sudan, ceremonial masks with a history that may have extended back thousands of years to the time when the pharaohs had tried to conquer the desert. It was there that Akhenaten had experienced his revelation of the Aten, had cast off his priestly role and pushed aside the old religion. Had the tribesmen seen his extraordinary features and created their masks in his image? Or had he seen _their_ masks, the masks of those who lived under the radiance of the Aten, and then had he and Nefertiti adopted them for their own, symbols of their own allegiance to the new religion? How else to explain the transformation of Nefertiti in the sculptures? Instead of signs of illness, as many had suspected, was Akhenaten instead portraying himself like the Burundi, seeking the anonymity that a mask gave him in the light of God?\n\nJack looked up one last time at the sculpture. He did not know whether he had just experienced a blinding revelation, or whether the idea of the mask just pushed Akhenaten further back into mystery. It was as if the pharaoh himself were playing games with him, tempting him to take one step further into the unknown, then showing him that the trail was an illusion. It seemed to reflect everything that had happened over the last few months, of tottering on a knife-edge between success and failure, between unlocking a mystery that Jack knew lay somewhere beneath their feet and having to walk away with that ambiguity in Akhenaten's face, that mask over reality, seared into his mind.\n\nHis phone hummed. It was a text from Costas. He quickly read it, and suddenly coursed with excitement. The dive from _Seaquest_ to raise the sarcophagus was on for tomorrow afternoon. The IMU Embraer jet was due at Alexandria at dawn tomorrow, and the Lynx helicopter was already waiting at Seville airport in Spain to transfer them to the ship. Rebecca would understand his trip to Jerusalem being postponed, and Maria had been right; it would have been wrong for him to jump on the first plane to Tel Aviv after receiving Rebecca's text, as if he had been waiting on tenterhooks for a chance to watch out for her. And she was used to the last-minute change in priorities that often took place when Jack was following too many leads at once.\n\nAs he put away his phone, he smelled the Geniza on his hand. He remembered Maria at the bottom of the chamber, eyes ablaze, voicing her passion for the project, for Jack to hold on to his vision of what might lie ahead. He felt a sudden upwelling of emotion, and swallowed hard. After reading the letter of Yehuda Halevi, he had begun to understand what it was that had overwhelmed Solomon Schechter and the other Geniza scholars, not so much the sheer quantity of material but the humanity it represented, preserved with breathtaking immediacy. It had been as if Halevi had been writing the letter to him, brimming with curiosity and a fascination with the world around him that struck right to the core of Jack's being. He felt revitalized, more determined than ever to pursue his own quest. He remembered those last lines of Halevi, the extraordinary account of the tunnel, and he felt a burning excitement. But meanwhile he had another priority, to do all he could to secure the release of the Egyptian student who had been the first to make the discovery. The sarcophagus might give him only a small amount of leverage, but he would use it to his utmost. He needed to make contact with the outside world as soon as possible.\n\nHe turned and walked quickly back to the entrance to the room. Aysha already had her finger on the light switch. \"Seen what you wanted to see?\"\n\n\"I've seen it.\"\n\n\"Right. Twenty minutes to midnight curfew. We need to get out of here.\"\n\n# PART 3\n\n# CHAPTER 12\n\n# **O FF SPAIN, IN THE WEST MEDITERRANEAN**\n\nJack sat back in the passenger seat of the Lynx helicopter, glanced at the helmeted figure of Costas asleep in the seat opposite, and stared out at the shimmering blue of the sea below. At Valencia airport he had turned down the pilot's offer to take over the controls, relishing instead the half hour of downtime before they hit the bustle of _Seaquest_ and all the demands of the day ahead. Jack knew that he would be walking off the helipad into a teleconference to discuss the imprisoned Egyptian girl, and Costas would be straight down into the engineering lab to make sure that all the equipment was as ready as it could be for the dive that afternoon.\n\nThe sound of snoring came through his headphones, and Jack turned just in time to see the grizzled face loll forward in his shoulder straps. He leaned over and pushed him gently upright, and Costas opened his eyes and looked blearily about. \"We there yet?\"\n\n\"Not yet, but you were taking a slow nosedive for the floor.\"\n\n\"Dive,\" Costas mumbled. \"Need to adjust the dynamo in the ADSA submersible stabilizer system. I knew I'd forgotten something on my checklist. Always think better when I'm asleep. Can't believe I won't have Lanowski to help me.\"\n\n\"His talents were needed in Alexandria stripping Hiebermeyer's computers and making sure his database was secure. You'll just have to wing it.\"\n\nCostas crinkled his nose where Jack's hand had been and leaned toward him, sniffing like a dog. \"What's that smell? That _terrible_ smell?\"\n\nJack looked at the fingers of his right hand and saw the dark stains from the resin. He remembered the Geniza chamber. \"Ah, yes. Couldn't scrub it off.\" He sniffed the tips of his fingers. \"That, my friend, is a thousand years of mouse.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"An ancient archive. A hole in the wall. With Maria.\"\n\n\"That sounds just like a date with Jack. Really romantic. You're talking about the synagogue in Cairo?\"\n\n\"I'll fill you in when I can show you my pictures. It was a fantastic discovery, a clue that pushes us one step closer to getting under the desert again. You'd have loved it. There was a sacred snake guarding the archive.\"\n\n\"No way.\"\n\n\"Only kidding. Well, nearly only kidding. Anyway, Maria thinks the curse was lifted long ago.\"\n\nCostas looked aghast. \"What curse? What snake?\" He looked back into the cargo compartment at their bags. \"You haven't brought anything with you, have you?\"\n\nJack grinned. \"Just something for you to dream about. I'll wake you when we're there.\"\n\n\"Huh? Oh, yeah. Okay.\" Costas slumped against the window, and seconds later Jack heard the low rumble again. He glanced at the text message he had received from Maria when he and Costas had landed in the Embraer from Egypt an hour and a half before. All it said was _Thanks for last night_. He smiled at the irony of it. \"Last night\" meant a dusty chamber in an old synagogue poring over a medieval manuscript, with barely a farewell embrace.\n\nHe stared out at the shimmering expanse of the sea, his lifeblood since he had first donned a wetsuit more than thirty years before. He thought back to Rebecca's mother, Elizabeth, to a relationship that had ended even before Rebecca was born, when they had both been graduate students. She too had been an archaeologist but had been forced by threats and intimidation back into the world of her Camorra background in Naples, to give archaeological legitimacy to their tomb robbing and antiquities dealing. When she found out she was pregnant, she decided not to tell Jack, not to allow her family to get their tentacles around him as well and destroy his dream, and she had struggled to bring Rebecca up alone and carve out a legitimate position for herself in the antiquities service. When Rebecca herself was threatened, used as a pawn to try to get Elizabeth back into the criminal fold, she sent her secretly to close friends in New York State to be brought up and educated, while she remained in Naples to do enough of what was asked of her to keep them from acting on their threats to hunt down Rebecca and bring her back into the family.\n\nJack had seen Elizabeth only once more when he had gone to Naples to explore the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, and in their brief conversation she had broken down and told him everything, revealing the existence of their daughter and her wish that he take care of Rebecca if anything should happen. Elizabeth had witnessed one drug deal too many, had made some distant cousin jittery that she would go to the police, and a few days later her body was found by the seashore with a bullet through the back of her head. That had been more than five years ago, and Jack still felt the numbness, a heartache that he knew would always be behind everything that he and Rebecca did together, behind her own drive to make a mark on the world and show the same strength that her mother had in bringing her up against the odds.\n\nJack knew that his seeming ambivalence toward Maria and Katya was not a consequence of juggling between the two, or of a greater love in the past that he had been unable to shake off, or of the sense of responsibility that had channelled so much of his emotional reserve toward Rebecca after her mother's death. Rebecca had told him that he was like the great sea captains of old, brilliant at sea but directionless on land, most at home navigating his life with the prize always just beyond the horizon and the voyage toward it at the mercy of the elements and chance. Perhaps his relationships with women had become an analog of that. Yet he knew it did not have to be so. He had seen it work with Hiebermeyer and Aysha. He remembered Maria's parting words in Cairo, and resolved that this time, when it was all over, he would take that step that he so often balked at, and actually give her a call.\n\nA rocky headland came into view, the limestone reduced to the jagged, sun-bleached form characteristic of the northern Mediterranean shore, and his heart leapt as he saw _Seaquest_ in the bay beyond. He knew that the Lynx pilot would need to hold off before getting permission for landing, and he had been relishing the chance to inspect _Seaquest_ properly from the air for the first time since her refit in Falmouth earlier that year. On the stern she was flying the Spanish flag, a courtesy to the country that had agreed to allow the search within their territorial waters, and below that the IMU flag bearing the anchor on a unicorn, the crest of Jack's seafaring ancestors and a recognition of the donated land from the Howard estate that formed the main IMU base beside the Fal Estuary in Cornwall. She was the second IMU vessel to bear the name, the first having been lost almost ten years before to a battle with a warlord in the eastern Black Sea during their search for Atlantis. The second _Seaquest_ and her sister ship, _Sea Venture_ , were multirole scientific research vessels, in keeping with IMU's expanded brief over the last decade not only to be at the forefront of archaeological exploration but also to spearhead other aspects of oceanographic research. Like the Royal Navy's latest Echo-class vessels, she was equipped for full hydrographic survey, including multibeam echo sounders, a side-scan sonar, and a sub-bottom profiler, as well as an integrated navigation system of bow and azimuth thrusters and propellers within a swivelling pod that allowed her to hold a precise position over the seabed in all but the worst weather conditions. Her defensive capability was also closely based on the Echo-class vessels, with a retractable twin 20 mm Oerlikon pod set below her foredeck and two 7:62 mm general-purpose machine guns, an essential provision given the fate of her predecessor and namesake and the threat of piracy when she was conducting operations in unpoliced international waters.\n\nIn other respects _Seaquest_ and _Sea Venture_ formed a unique class with many features designed from the bottom up by Jack and his team. At a little over 6,000 tons and 120 meters in length, they were larger than her naval counterparts, with a top speed of 25 knots and a range of up to 12,000 nautical miles, which made them capable of extended deep-ocean voyages. Behind the bridge lay an extended accommodation block for up to thirty researchers and technicians, including state-of-the-art labs for the conservation and analysis of finds and below that an engineering facility custom-designed by Costas for the maintenance of the ship's remote- and autonomous-operated vehicles and manned submersibles. The submersibles hangar opened out on to a unique internal docking facility on either side of the propeller shaft toward the stern, allowing divers and vehicles to enter and exit safely even in extreme weather conditions.\n\nThe Lynx banked low, its rotor kicking up a halo of spray as it held position some five hundred meters off the ship's port side, allowing Jack to see her more closely. Behind the accommodation block lay the helipad and the aft operations deck, the focus of most activity when they were working on a site. Jack cast a critical eye over the equipment visible in the stern. The main purpose of the refit had been to install an upgraded derrick for raising and lowering Zodiacs and submersibles, and he could see it extended over the starboard side, the cradle they had made for the sarcophagus sitting on the deck beside it. The derrick had passed its sea trials off Cornwall with flying colors, but it was having its first proper outing here. Jack remembered years before watching the Tudor warship _Mary Rose_ being raised from the Solent, and the terrifying moment as the hull surfaced and the cradle slipped. That had also been in the glare of the world's media, and he knew that Captain Macalister would be putting the derrick through every possible safety check to try to ensure that there was no brush with disaster this time around.\n\nJack watched a group of technicians in IMU overalls and safety helmets begin to release the derrick from its deck restraints and roll out the winch. IMU's greatest assets were not equipment but personnel, and he knew he had the best. Over the years he had assembled a crack team, a mix of old friends and fresh talent, many of them bridging the divide between commercial and military experience and the strong focus on scholarship and research that drove all Jack's projects forward. Unlike those of treasure hunters, their jobs were not on the line every time they embarked on a new quest, counting the cost hour by hour, holding out for prize money that rarely came. IMU operations were financed entirely from an endowment that released Jack from ever having to raise funds or satisfy investors. It had been a dream of his from the time when he ran student expeditions from a battered old van and an ex-navy inflatable, a dream realized when one of his most stalwart expedition divers, Efram Jacobovich, had ridden the wave of the software boom that was making huge fortunes when they had been students. Fifteen years later he backed Jack's budding institute with an operating budget far larger than that of any other oceanographic institute in the world. Jack still had to answer to a board of directors. But with their criteria being scientific merit and feasibility rather than financial profit, he was in a unique position among undersea explorers able to mount multimillion-dollar projects. Above all, he was freed from ever having to consider selling artifacts; all their finds went on museum display or were part of the cycle of travelling exhibits that had brought their discoveries to audiences around the world. It was one commitment that Jack shared with Colonel Vyse, the British officer who had extracted the sarcophagus from the pyramid and dispatched it on its ill-fated voyage to the British Museum in 1838. Jack was determined that it should go to the best possible place for display as well as for its own security, and if that meant reneging on their offer to return it to Egypt, then so be it.\n\nBeyond the rotor downdraft, the sea was millpond calm, and it took an effort to imagine the storm winds on that December day in 1838 and the abyss that lay beneath. Since their find of the chariots in the Red Sea, and touching the manuscript fragments from the Geniza in Cairo, biblical phrases had been running through Jack's mind, snatches of verse he had remembered from chapel at boarding school. _And darkness lay on the face of the deep_. Far below them, unimaginably deep, in the place that creation had forgotten, lay the wreck of _Beatrice_ , the ancient sarcophagus in its hull standing stark above the silt like the tomb of a long-forgotten sea god. That was temptation enough for any archaeologist, but it was not just the sarcophagus itself that had brought Jack back here. It was what Colonel Vyse had packed inside, a surprise for the museum, perhaps a sweetener to persuade the trustees to continue to sponsor his excavations. It was something that he himself had not recorded and was lost to history until that dive when Jack and Costas had brought it back to light.\n\nWhen Jack had swept the silt from the plaque, he had been astonished to see the sun symbol of Akhenaten, a pharaoh who had lived over a thousand years after the mummy of Menkaure had been sealed within the sarcophagus. It was only after they had found a second Akhenaten plaque in the desert, one with a depiction showing the pyramids, that Jack had made sense of it, realizing that Akhenaten had taken over the pyramid as a portal into the underground complex beneath the Giza plateau that he and Costas had glimpsed for a few precious moments three months ago far below the burial chamber. Inside that chamber, perhaps mounted above the portal, Colonel Vyse had unwittingly found a clue to what might have been the most extraordinary discovery ever made in Egyptology. His decision not to mention the plaque and its loss in the wreck\u2014perhaps to avoid criticism for not having recorded it\u2014was to keep the world in ignorance until now. Jack had been clutching at straws since them, desperately hoping for clues to another entrance into the complex, a discovery he might make before Egypt shut down on him entirely. Coming back to the wreck was part of that trail. The plaque had been missing a section from one side, and he was hoping against hope that the lost fragment would be buried in the silt nearby.\n\nThe pilot's voice came through his headphones. \"Jack, we're holding off for another fifteen minutes or so while a helo ahead of us delivers a film crew. As soon as they've cleared the helipad, we're good to go.\"\n\n\"Roger that, Charlie,\" Jack replied. \"I'll use the time to get up to speed on the site. I don't think I'm going to get much chance for that once I'm on board. And our colleague could always use a little more beauty sleep.\"\n\n\"Roger that,\" the pilot said. \"I'll advise you.\"\n\nA noise like a snorting water buffalo came through the intercom, and Jack pushed Costas up again and wedged him beside the window. He took out his iPad, attached the keyboard, propped it on his knees, and opened a ghostly image of the sarcophagus as he and Costas had first seen it from the submersible three months before. There was no indication that any other antiquities had been on board the ship, and the decision had been made not to excavate the site any further than was required to clear a large enough space to feed the cushioned winch cables beneath the sarcophagus preparatory to lifting it. He touched the screen and opened up the image that had brought them to this spot in the first place, a previously unknown watercolor that had appeared in an auction a few months earlier showing _Beatrice_ in the harbor of Smyrna in Turkey. On the back had been a pencilled note made years later by the captain of the ship\u2014George Wichelo, a man thought to have died in the wreck\u2014giving its location in this bay a few nautical miles north of Valencia, resolving a mystery that had led undersea explorers on numerous false trails over the years in the hunt for the fabled lost sarcophagus.\n\nThe artist had accurately shown _Beatrice_ as a brig, with foremast and mainmast and the boom for a spanker over the stern. Despite being on the cusp of the Victorian era, only a generation away from the transformation to steam power, _Beatrice_ was indistinguishable in appearance from her forbears of the Napoleonic Wars period. She still bore the checkerboard \"Nelson pattern\" of gunports that merchantmen in the Mediterranean retained against Barbary pirates from North Africa, still a threat in the early 1830s when the painting had been made. He tapped the screen again and brought up a three-dimensional visualization of the wreck that Lanowski had completed a few days before, based on weeks of survey using a high-precision multibeam sonar array mounted on a remote-operated vehicle flown a few meters above the seabed.\n\nThe program allowed a virtual fly-around of the site, and Jack swept his fingers across the screen to get as many angles as possible. The wreckage had been rendered in metallic gray to distinguish it from the sediment in which it had been partly buried. He could clearly see the lines of protruding frames and the regular mounds that were all that was left of her iron deck knees, the results of a refit that provided the only concession to modernity in a hull otherwise built in time-honored fashion using timbers and copper nails. The sarcophagus and the ship's sixteen guns had been rendered in white, highlighting the elements with the greatest inert weight that might have affected the ship's freeboard and stability. In a way that Jack had not appreciated on the seabed, the visualization showed how all the starboard guns had shifted to the port side and how the sarcophagus was also off center, as if straining on the cordage that must once have held it in place.\n\nThere was little doubt in Jack's mind what had caused the wreck. Lanoswki's simulation had shown that even with extra compensating ballast, she would have been dangerously unstable with the sarcophagus on deck, three tons of granite that would have unbalanced a ship of little more than 200 tons deadweight. He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to imagine the sea as it must have looked on that winter's day when the ship had come to grief in the bay. Her last known ports of call had been Valetta in Malta and then Leghorn, modern Livorno, far up the Italian coast. At that time of year, Wichelo may have encountered strong northeasterlies all the way from Alexandria, and decided to claw his way up the western shore of Italy rather than attempting to sail due west from Malta with the risk of being blown into the North African shore and any awaiting corsairs. From Leghorn it would have been plain sailing with a northeasterly mistral behind him across the Gulf of Lyons, an exhilarating run when all went well, with the hope of rounding the southern coast of Spain into the Strait of Gibraltar. For some reason, perhaps because the wind became a gale, perhaps because the recent refit had given the vessel more leeway than the captain had been used to, perhaps because the lading of his cargo had made the ship less maneuverable\u2014probably a combination of all these factors\u2014his course and the coast of Spain converged just north of Valencia. Had they rounded the next headland, they might have made Valencia. As it was, the bay where they came to grief offered no shelter and only a jagged rocky shore dropping off to great depth, so there was little hope of grounding the ship or saving its cargo.\n\nThe sarcophagus had been lashed down and wedged with beams but would still have been vulnerable to a sudden roll. The captain would have done his best to avoid broaching to\u2014coming beam-on to the waves\u2014knowing that a roll could cause the sarcophagus to strain against its lashings and break free. Although the ship's guns were only lightweight six- and nine-pounders, they still weighed over half a ton apiece and must have been part of the problem in her final moments. The eight guns on her starboard side broke free of their carriages and crashed to port as the ship heeled over, adding to the displaced weight of the sarcophagus and making recovery impossible. But then as the port gunwale became submerged, she took on such a weight of water so quickly that she came upright again as she sank, keeping the sarcophagus from tumbling overboard and providing enough cushioning in the hull structure to protect it from damage when the ship hit the seafloor.\n\nThe sudden swamping had been fortunate for the preservation of the sarcophagus, but less so for the crew. As always Jack reflected on the human cost, on the terror of those final moments. It probably took only seconds for the ship to sink, taking with it anyone belowdecks and sucking down the others in the vortex. It was a minor miracle that anyone should have survived, and more so that it should have been Captain Wichelo himself, a man assumed to have gone down with the ship but whose pencilled note years later on the back of the watercolor had shown otherwise. Jack felt certain that his survival was an accident of fate; there would have been no time for anyone deliberately to abandon ship. He remembered the time he had spent in the crow's nest of a cadet training ship when he had learned to sail, and imagined that Wichelo might have scrambled up to the maintop in the search for a safe anchorage and then been thrown clear when the ship heeled over and the masts dipped into the waves.\n\nWichelo's disappearance after coming ashore was not difficult to fathom. He was an experienced captain who had taken _Beatrice_ many times across the Atlantic and through the Mediterranean, who must have looked death in the face before. He would have been bound by the immemorial custom of the sea that a captain is always the last to leave his ship. That custom was so deeply embedded in the seafarers' code that even a hint of suspicion among friends and colleagues that he had put his own life before others might have been too much for him to bear. He might also have been doing a favor to his beneficiaries, knowing that the insurance claim would stand a better chance of succeeding if he were not there to give evidence of unsafe lading that as an honest man he might have been unable to conceal. He would have known that he had taken a risk in accepting the cargo, and that the price of failure was absolute.\n\nJack imagined the scene with Colonel Vyse on the docks at Alexandria, a stone's throw from Qaitbey Fortress and the place where the Geniza poet Halevi had landed from Spain in the twelfth century. Wichelo would have been a good captain for Vyse to approach, one with an established reputation who perhaps had taken antiquities before for clients to England. Vyse might have been less concerned with the suitability of the ship itself for his particular cargo, his blunderings in the pyramid suggesting that he lacked a good eye for the logistics of transport. But he was a wealthy man who would have offered Wichelo a handsome remuneration, perhaps enough to secure a comfortable retirement capped by the small fame of being the man who had brought the centerpiece of the British Museum's collection safely from Egypt. If Wichelo had declined, there would have been others eager to accept. He would have known that his ship was not ideal and that the summer sailing season was coming to an end, but he was swayed by the rewards. It was always a precarious business being a ship's captain, with the lion's share of the glory if a venture succeeded but a quick fall to ignominy if things went wrong.\n\nJack touched the screen to bring up Lanowski's second CGI, an animation that he had not wanted to see until he had worked it through in his own mind. He smiled as he saw the ghostly image of the ship, exact in every particular of a brig's standing and running rigging. The attention to detail was just like Lanowski. He had shown Wichelo gambling on a full spread of canvas, with the rudder hard over to port in an attempt to steer parallel with the coast. As the bay loomed, the topsails were furled and the ship suddenly broached on to the waves, heeling over and swamping. As if in an X-ray through the hull, he could see the sarcophagus shift and the starboard guns break free and tumble to port, and then the ship submerging, coming upright again, and hitting the seabed almost a thousand meters below in a cloud of silt before sliding to a rest.\n\nJack stared at the screen. \"Bingo,\" he said quietly. He now felt fully prepped for what lay ahead. He took the iPad apart and slotted it into his backpack, and then brought his mind back to the present and to Captain Macalister on _Seaquest_. He was as embedded in nautical tradition as Wichelo had been. As captain he had final say on all operations carried out on board, not just navigation but also diving and exploration.\n\nSince finding the wreck three months previously, the work to map and evaluate the site had been in the hands of a highly experienced project director, and Jack had no intention of taking over. His role with Costas was to be on the seabed to secure the cradle and look for anything that might be revealed as the sarcophagus was lifted free. Jack knew the pressure that Macalister would now be under, with the countdown into its final phase and the focus on safety for the equipment operators as well as for the divers in the water.\n\nJack watched the other helicopter rise from the ship, swoop low over the bay, and then disappear beyond the rocky shoreline. He thought back to Egypt, to Hiebermeyer and his desperate race against time to complete the necropolis excavation before the forces of darkness descended. At least here they were working in full cooperation with the Spanish authorities, and the only political dimension was one created by IMU itself, to use the raising of the sarcophagus as leverage with the Egyptian authorities to allow Hiebermeyer to finish his work and to secure the release of the student in Cairo. With prime-time media across the world prepped for the event this afternoon, and with the return of the sarcophagus to Egypt hardwired into the story, the pressure on the antiquities director in Cairo would be considerable. That had been their gamble in letting in the film crews, but with the additional situation with the girl, it had seemed a gamble worth taking. He drummed his fingers against the side of the seat. _If_ the weather held. _If_ the new derrick cooperated. _If_ there was no other glitch. He shut his eyes, mouthing the words that had become his mantra: _Lucky Jack_.\n\nThe pilot came over the intercom. \"Jack, we're going in now.\"\n\n\"Roger that.\"\n\nCostas suddenly shot awake, blinking hard, his face beaming with excitement. \"I've got it, Jack. _I've got it_. I know how to fix Little Joey. And I'm starving. Take us home, Charlie.\"\n\n# CHAPTER 13\n\nTwenty minutes later Jack opened the door of the conference room on _Seaquest_ to a blaze of camera flashes and shouted greetings. He held up a hand, smiling, and scanned the room. He counted at least twenty-five journalists, some of them familiar faces who had followed his projects for years, others big-name foreign correspondents who had been attracted not only by the drama of the sarcophagus but also by the political dimension of its return to Egypt.\n\nThere was a large contingent of Spanish reporters, and as Jack made his way behind the table at the head of the room, he quickly shook hands with the two representatives of the Spanish Ministry of Culture who were sitting there. Beside them was James Macalister, a short, dapper man with a white beard, immaculate in his uniform with the braid of a captain on his shoulders. Space had been left for Jack between Costas and the project manager, and as he sat down Macalister leaned back and spoke to him. \"We've done the background on the _Beatrice_ and the sarcophagus, and run through the logistics. You're just here for a quick meet and greet.\" Jack nodded, and Macalister stood up, addressing the room.\n\n\"All of you will be familiar with Jack Howard, who has just arrived on board _Seaquest_ with Dr. Kazantzakis. They'll be on the seabed supervising the raising of the sarcophagus, and you'll be getting broadcast-quality live feed from them. There'll be plenty of opportunities after that for interviews. Right now this is just a chance to say hello.\"\n\nA woman in the front row raised her hand, waving it in the air. \"What were you doing in Egypt, Jack? You were spotted at the airport at Sharm el\u2013Sheikh.\"\n\nJack groaned inwardly but kept his cool. The journalist who had asked the question was one of his most ardent fans, but also a blunt instrument as far as the politics were concerned. She was one of the main reasons why he preferred to avoid any kind of press conference before a project was over, but he knew that to try to deny his presence would only stoke up her interest further. \"Just checking out the dive resorts. Dr. Kazantzakis tells me that with IMU it's all work, no play, so I was looking into doing something about it.\"\n\nThere was a titter of amusement from the others, but the woman persisted. \"We had a round-robin in the office guessing what mystery Jack Howard would be trying to solve in the Red Sea. The best we could come up with was the biblical Exodus, the story of Pharaoh's lost chariot army.\"\n\nJack look at her unblinkingly and smiled broadly. \"Now that _would_ be a find. If I ever make it, you'll be the first to know. Meanwhile, I'm delighted that you're all here for this afternoon's show. Captain Macalister and his team have been working around the clock to get everything ready. I'm looking forward to spending time with you later.\"\n\nMacalister held up his hand. \"That's it. There will be another briefing here with the project manager at 1430 hours, and then if all goes according to plan you will be allowed on the starboard bridge wing with your cameras to film the recovery. Meanwhile you are required to remain in this room or your quarters, with the deck strictly out-of-bounds for your own safety. Thank you for your attention.\"\n\nJack and Costas quickly got up and followed Macalister out of the room, past the two security men stationed there to enforce the captain's instructions. Macalister turned to Jack.\n\n\"That was close.\"\n\n\"Let's hope we can keep this operation on track to give them what they're expecting. I won't answer any more questions from journalists about Egypt until everything is resolved there.\"\n\nMacalister pushed open the door to his day cabin and ushered them in. The room was already occupied by IMU's security chief, Ben Kershaw, a former Royal Marine who had also worked for MI6, the British secret intelligence service. He was standing at the window with a satellite phone, but lowered it as the others entered. He quickly shook hands with Jack and Costas and then sat down with them at the conference table at one end of the room. Jack poured himself a glass of water and leaned forward, his eyes steely. \"Okay, Ben. Tell us what you've got.\"\n\n\"I followed our plan not to involve diplomatic channels except as a last resort. I used personal contacts from my intelligence days in Egypt. I now know exactly where she's being held, in the lower ground floor of the Ministry of Culture building in Cairo, where the conservation labs have been converted into interrogation chambers.\"\n\n\"Archaeology meets the modern world,\" Costas said grimly.\n\n\"Our plan was to go to the antiquities director to see if he could exert leverage to get the girl released. I couldn't get any response, and then Professor Dillen intervened. As chair of the IMU board of directors, he was in on this from the start.\"\n\nJack took a sip of coffee. \"I know why. About ten years ago, Ibn Afar tried to obtain an archaeological qualification in Britain, when he had his eye on the top job in the Egyptian ministry. He showed up in Cambridge thinking he could bribe his way into a master's degree by promising future excavation permits to anyone who helped him. Dillen was the only one who didn't dismiss him outright but sat down and explained how things work in the West and then arranged for him to start off as a volunteer at the British Museum. That didn't last long, predictably, but I know that once he was back in Egypt working his way up the greasy pole, he often contacted Dillen to ask for references and endorsement, seeing him as a kind of patron.\"\n\n\"They had a phone conversation this morning,\" Ben said. \"Dillen told him that the offer to return the sarcophagus to Egypt still stood, and that Ibn Afar would have all the limelight. But he also told him that there would be no movement until the girl was released. Dillen and I had already agreed that we should give him a two-day ultimatum. With the sarcophagus being raised today, Ibn Afr was told that the press would be clamoring to know its destination and that the Spanish authorities would reinstate their claim to ownership if it looked as if there was uncertainty. Of course, we all know that the Spanish government, UNESCO, and IMU will no longer condone the plan to return the sarcophagus to Egypt given the present political circumstances, but Ibn Hafr is in Cairo cocooned from reality and won't necessarily guess that. But he's wily enough to know a veiled threat when he sees one. If he fails to come up with the goods, three days from now he suffers international humiliation and opprobrium when it's revealed that the decision to return the sarcophagus has been revoked and his name is linked with the arrest of the girl.\"\n\n\"So what was his response?\" Jack said, finishing his drink.\n\nBen leaned forward, clasped his hands together, and stared at Jack. \"There's a trial due in two days' time. She'll be in the dock with a hundred or so others. The accusation is read out, and they are convicted and sentenced to death.\"\n\n\"A _death_ sentence?\" Jack exclaimed. \"That's outrageous. For being accused of stealing a scrap of medieval manuscript?\"\n\n\"Ibn Hafr says that he'll try his best to get her off. My intelligence source says that as things stand he will probably succeed. Antiquities theft was of more concern to the old regime than to the extremists, and they're more interested in cases of apostasy or adultery. If there are actually going to be executions, those will be the ones to go first. My source says that Ibn Hafr will make a big show of the difficulty and how he's putting himself on the line, and that we should go along with that; it's all part of the game. But we should hold him absolutely to the deadline, which stands at 1030 hours two days from now.\"\n\n\"To the second,\" Jack said coldly.\n\n\"There's one big _if_ in all this,\" Costas interjected. \" _If_ things stay as they are. If there's a meltdown and the extremists take over in two days' time, then we've lost her.\"\n\n\"She won't be the only one,\" Ben said. \"If there's a takeover, the hundreds awaiting execution now will be joined by thousands more. My source is expecting a complete purge of government ministries.\"\n\nCostas shook his head. \"Roll on the Dark Ages.\"\n\n\"We have to try to be optimistic,\" Jack said. \"Egypt isn't like Iraq or Afghanistan, brutalized by dictatorship or decades of war. We're talking about a civilized and decent people who will not allow themselves to be taken to the cage without a fight.\"\n\nMacalister looked grim. \"Not so easy when your oppressors are psychopaths who have been building up a head of steam for over a hundred years.\"\n\n\"There's always the military option,\" Ben said.\n\nJack stared at him. \"Are you suggesting that we invade like the British did in 1882, and again in 1956? With the right force you might push the extremists out of Cairo, but then you'd be likely creating an insurgent war like the one the coalition fought in Iraq, with the same cocktail of terrorism, suicide bombings, and an enemy who disappears and rematerializes as soon as you think you've scored a success. The civilian population would soon become too weakened and demoralized to resist. And any Western intervention in Egypt now would be seen by hard-liners elsewhere as tantamount to an alliance with Israel. Any radicalized regime not yet in open conflict with Israel would soon join in. We'd be stoking up World War Three.\"\n\nBen leaned over the table and looked at him intently. \"You know the other military option, Jack. You've been in special forces.\"\n\n\"You mean targeted assassinations?\" Jack pursed his lips. \"I was involved in two ops against leadership targets in the Middle East. I was just a ferryman, a temporary naval officer who happened to be good at driving Zodiacs. One op was a success, the other an abort. But if you want to hear about the tit-for-tat consequences of those ops, go no further than Engineer Lieutenant Commander Kazantzakis of the U.S. Navy Reserve, who won his Navy Cross rescuing seamen blown into the water from his ship in a copycat attack of the terrorist assault on USS _Cole_ , provoked by a similar U.S. special forces assassination attempt.\"\n\nCostas looked at Ben. \"I was at the debrief with the SEAL team who did the op. That was back before 9/11, and the conclusion even then with targeted assassinations was that you cut off one head, and another one grows in its place. Since then the bad guys have become very good at creating the infrastructure to absorb punishment. Kill one Taliban commander, and five others are there to take his place. The extremists in Egypt must have a tight command structure, but they've been very careful not to publicize their leadership. Assassination is useful only if the target is a known quantity and a big name.\"\n\nJack tapped his pencil on the table. \"Which brings us back to archaeology, and to the people of Egypt. Archaeology is the greatest weapon we have against extremism. Egypt more than any other country in the world has become dependent on archaeology for its livelihood. From the lowliest camel driver on the Giza plateau to the hotel owners and the tour guides, archaeology provides the lifeblood of the nation. That's what we've got to marshal in this battle. It could be the first time that archaeology\u2014the place of archaeology in the modern world and people's lives\u2014provides the critical groundswell for a popular uprising. Right now, that's what we're in this game for. We're talking about saving people's lives.\"\n\nBen nodded. \"Let's hope it happens in time for a frightened girl and her family in Cairo.\"\n\nJack stared bleakly around the table. He knew what Aysha would say: inshallah. He took a deep breath. \"Okay. We're done here. Thanks for everything, Ben. Keep me in the loop.\"\n\nCostas stood up. \"I can finally get to the engineering lab. No time for Little Joey, but I want to run some final diagnostics on the gimbal in the submersible. There's something I need to adjust. And I haven't had a go with the new derrick yet.\"\n\nMacalister glanced at his watch. \"Meet on deck at 1500 hours, dive at 1530. Let's try to keep to the schedule.\"\n\nJack pushed his chair back. \"Roger that. On deck one hour from now. Enough time for me to get some shuteye. See you then.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nTen minutes later Jack closed the door of his cabin and lay back on his bunk, suddenly realizing how tired he was. His cabin was just below the bridge, its portholes looking out over the foredeck and to starboard. He glanced around at his most treasured belongings\u2014the cases of old books, the battered old chest first taken to sea by an ancestor of his on an East Indiaman three hundred years before, the artifacts and photographs that covered the walls. More so than anywhere else, more than his rooms in the old Howard estate in Cornwall, his cabin on _Seaquest_ was where he felt most at home, anchored by familiarity. This was where he dreamed of new discoveries, and yet it was also where the reality when he wakened and felt the tremor of the ship's engines was more hard edged and exciting than anything he could imagine.\n\nHe stared at the wall opposite, at the hanging brass gauntlet from India in the shape of a tiger and above that a painting that Rebecca had done of the Jewish menorah from the temple in Jerusalem, the lost ancient treasure that had taken him on a quest halfway around the world when she was just a child. He was now only a flight away from seeing her, and yet when he closed his eyes it was not her he saw but the immediate task ahead of him, the inky darkness a thousand meters below and the extraordinary scene that he and Costas had seen three months before when they had discovered the wreck of the _Beatrice_ and the ancient sarcophagus. He tried to relax, thinking of nothing but the sensation of being underwater, but his mind kept returning to the nagging question that had driven him to return here. Was the missing fragment of the plaque of Akhenaten still inside the sarcophagus? Did it contain the clue that he so desperately wanted, the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle that would justify a return to Egypt and their unfinished quest beneath the pyramid?\n\n\"Dr. Howard. Time to go.\"\n\nJack opened his eyes, sat bolt upright, and stared at the chronometer beside his bed. He had been out for almost half an hour. He stood up and took a swig of water from a bottle on his desk, and then the coffee proffered by the crewman. He quickly drank half the cup. \"What's the state of play?\"\n\n\"Costas is already in the water.\"\n\n\"What? In the sub? He's supposed to wait for me.\"\n\n\"He wanted to get it submerged to check the gimbal, to make sure it'll keep the sub trim and level. He realized that the only way he could do it was to have it in the water for a shallow-water trial. All's going well. He should be finished and on the surface by the time you get on deck.\"\n\nJack drained the rest of the coffee and handed back the mug. \"Thanks. Two minutes to change into my overalls and I'm there.\" The crewman ducked away down the corridor, and Jack stripped off his outer clothes and pulled on the orange IMU overalls that had been hanging behind his door. They were more comfortable in the confined space of the bathysphere, and cooler if the heat ramped up. He had to steel himself to spending the next few hours cooped up inside a metal and Perspex ball barely big enough to fit the two of them crouched down, something that preyed on a lingering claustrophobia he had battled since a near-death experience diving in a mine shaft when he was a boy. He splashed some water on his face, wiped it on his sleeve, and stooped out the door into the passageway. He kept his own personal demon at bay by focusing his mind on the objective. This was not just about the plaque, about his burning personal quest. It was also about ensuring that the sarcophagus was successfully winched to the surface, a huge achievement in itself but also a carrot to dangle in front of the egomaniacal tyrant in charge of the Egyptian antiquities service who might thus be persuaded to save a young woman from an appalling fate.\n\nJack slid on his hands down the rails of the stairway to the main deck level, swung open the hatch, and stood in the full glare of the sunlight on the foredeck below the bridge, cursing himself for having forgotten his sunglasses. In front of him the new red derrick was swung off to starboard, its cable taut where the submersible was held over the side of the ship. Jack grabbed a hard hat from the bin beside the hatch and went over to the rail. Looking down he could see the submersible awash in the azure blue of the Mediterranean. Out of the water it was ungainly, its manipulator arms making it look like some giant insect, with racks of compressed air cylinders and piping on either side. In the water it was another story entirely. A streamlined yellow carapace covered the pressurized bathysphere and double-lock chamber, a crucial feature that allowed divers to enter and egress. The vectored-thrust propellers allowed an extraordinary precision of movement and position holding, perfect for archaeological work and the task ahead of them almost a thousand meters below on the seabed.\n\nMacalister came alongside him, and they both watched as the submersible rose higher and Costas came into view through the Perspex viewing dome. Jack glanced at his watch. The journalists would be having their second briefing now, and soon afterward be expecting to set up their cameras. Before that the submersible would have to be raised out of the water and placed on its cradle on the deck in order for Jack to get inside. Then it would be winched out again. If this was going to be in full view of the world's media, they needed everything to run as smoothly as possible and not allow filming until they were in the water again and certain that everything was good to go.\n\nMacalister pressed the earphone he was wearing and bent down to listen more clearly and then straightened up, gave a thumbs-up, and made a whirling motion with his hand, looking back at the derrick operator. He turned to Jack. \"That was Costas, and he's ready to come up. He said it was crucial to trial it, and the issue's resolved.\"\n\n\"You mean he got itchy feet, and just couldn't resist taking it for a joyride.\"\n\nMacalister grinned, and signalled again to the derrick operator.\n\nThe cable creaked, and the motor screeched. There was a sudden lurch, and the cable began paying out rapidly from the derrick, coiling in the sea around the submersible. Jack glanced back in alarm and saw the derrick operator frantically pulling the emergency hand brake. Jack looked at the submersible. At least it was buoyant, not dependent on the winch to keep it afloat. But as he watched, the top of the submersible dipped beneath the waves, and then was submerged. Jack's heart began to pound. _Something was wrong_.\n\n\"It's the cable,\" Macalister shouted. \"The coils have fallen on top of the submersible, weighing it down.\"\n\nJack stared at the cable. At least fifty meters had been paid out. If the weight of the cable forced the submersible down to a depth of ten meters, then the volume of air in its ballast tanks would be halved and it would sink of its own accord. It would come to a halt only when it reached the maximum extent of the cable. Jack tossed off his hard hat, grabbed another intercom headset from its stand, and put it on. \"Costas, do you read me?\"\n\n\"Loud and clear.\"\n\n\"Blow the ballast tanks. There's a malfunction in the derrick, and about fifty meters of coiled cable has dropped onto you.\"\n\n\"No can do, Jack. Something's jamming the valve.\"\n\nJack stared at the wavering form of the submersible just beneath the surface. He could just see where a coil of cable had caught around the manifold linking together the rack of compressed air cylinders on one side. The submersible suddenly sank deeper and the coil disengaged, swirling around with the rest of the cable in the water below the derrick. \"Okay,\" Jack said. \"A coil of cable was caught around it. Try now.\"\n\n\"Still no good. The drag from the cable must have somehow closed the external valve.\"\n\nJack turned back to the derrick operator. \"Can you hold it?\" he shouted.\n\nThe man gave a thumbs-up, his other hand still on the brake. \"I should be able to hold it once it reaches the maximum extent already paid out. That's fifty-seven meters from the top of the derrick. But I can't guarantee for how long. After that, it's a thousand-meter payout.\"\n\nJack turned back to the water. The submersible was nearly out of sight now, sinking more rapidly, the cable unwinding and straightening out above it. Two men with tool kits rushed up to the derrick, removed the panel over the electronic controls, and tried to isolate the problem.\n\nBeside Jack the two safety divers were quickly finishing kitting up. Jack cupped his hand over the mike so that Costas could hear against the noise. \"You're going to come to a halt at about fifty meters depth. The divers should be able to free the valve. Failing that, you can do an emergency egress through the double-lock chamber, and they'll escort you to the surface. You copy that?\"\n\n\"Copy, Jack. But there's another problem. It's also cut off my breathing air. The carbon dioxide levels in the bathysphere are already in the red. I've only got a few minutes before blackout.\"\n\nJack stared at the two safety divers, his mind racing through the options. They had just zipped up their E-suits and were donning air cylinders. The cable suddenly became taut, and the derrick jolted. \"Okay,\" he said into the mike. \"The divers are less than a minute away from entry. Do you copy?\"\n\nThere was a pause, and Costas' voice when it came through sounded distant. \"Copy that. I'm on the way out, Jack. My legs and arms are tingling.\"\n\nJack stared at the cable, watching the water shimmer off it. In the space of a few minutes, a routine equipment check had turned into a deadly crisis. He felt his breathing and heart rate slow, as if he were making time itself slow down to stretch out the seconds so that he could run through all the options. The divers had only the compressed air tanks they used for shallow-water safety checks and maintenance. It would take too long now to rig them up with mixed gas or rebreathers. With compressed air, they were limited to fifty meters, maybe twenty meters beyond that in an extreme emergency, but no more. If the cable ran free again and the submersible plummeted beyond that depth, there was only one option left for rescue, one that he would never allow another member of his team to take.\n\nAnd then it happened. The derrick screeched and the cable began to feed out again. Jack ripped off the headphones and glanced back to the derrick operator, seeing where the others had leapt forward to help him try to hold the brake, their tools cast aside. The cable was falling fast, dropping the submersible far beyond air-diving depth now. Jack turned, feeling as if he were in slow motion. His vision tunneled, his metabolism slowed as if he were already in dive response, his system anticipating what his brain was telling it and doing all it could to maximize his chances of survival. He blew on his nose to clear his ears, keeping his nose pinched, and with his other hand scooped up the weight belt of one of the divers, holding it tight and bounding to the edge of the deck beside the cable. He was barely conscious of those around him, of Macalister's shocked face, of the two divers too stunned to move, of voices behind yelling at him not to do it.\n\nHe stared into the abyss. All he thought of was the darkness, and Costas.\n\nHe breathed fast, gulping in the air, took a final deep lungful, and jumped.\n\n# CHAPTER 14\n\nJack had just enough time to cross his ankles and arms to present minimal resistance before he hit the water, his right hand pinching his nose ready to equalize the pressure in his ears and sinuses and his other hand wrapped around the diver's weight belt he had grabbed just before leaving the deck. He knew that the cable from the derrick to the submersible was only a few meters away, and with the dead weight of the belt he would plummet directly on target without having to angle sideways.\n\nIn the seconds it took him to leave the deck, his mind had flashed through the physiology of free diving: the possibility of middle ear and sinus rupture if he failed to equalize, and the inevitability of lung barotrauma and blood shift into the capillaries as his chest cavity was squeezed. Yet there was also the reflexive response of the body to being underwater, the reduction of metabolic rate that could allow him to remain conscious for the crucial few extra seconds he might need to reach the submersible and open the air-tank manifold to give Costas a chance of survival.\n\nBelow him lay almost a thousand meters of water to the wreck of the _Beatrice_. At that depth without a pressure suit, his organs would be crushed, but he would have been dead a long time before that. With every ten meters of depth from the surface, his lungs would halve in volume, so that at fifty meters the air that had filled his lungs would occupy only one-fifth of that volume, at a hundred meters one-tenth. By a hundred and fifty meters, lung barotrauma was a near certainty. The constricting volume of his chest cavity would cause the membranes to rupture, and he would begin to drown in his own blood. By then, perhaps two minutes or two and a half minutes into the dive, he would be reaching the limit of his breath-holding endurance. At that point he would either give way and breathe in water, or black out because the increased carbon dioxide level in his body would trigger unconsciousness. Either way meant death. All he knew for certain was that the maximum free-diving depth ever achieved had been a little over 250 meters, less than a quarter of the depth of the water below him now and representing almost superhuman physiological endurance. If the submersible had dropped any deeper than that before he reached it, there could be only one possible outcome, for him as well as for Costas.\n\nHe was instinctively prepared for a shock of cold, but as he sliced into the water he felt the warmth of the Mediterranean envelop him. He knew that the cold would come, a rapid, numbing cold as he passed through the thermocline, and that the oxygen saturation in his brain was inducing a mild sense of euphoria, something that would wear off quickly as the oxygen was depleted. As he felt himself plummet, he concentrated on equalizing his ears, his eyes shut tight. To open them in the pellucid water would be to reveal the enormity of the darkness beneath him, something that would make even the strongest diver balk. He would do so only once he had passed the point of no return, once he knew that bailout was impossible.\n\nLess than ten seconds after entering the water, he passed the first big thermocline, at this time of year at a depth of about thirty-five meters. Even if he dropped the weights, he knew that without fins he would stand no chance of returning to the surface now. The cold increased his sense of speed, his skin more sensitized to the water rushing past. Equalizing became easier as the pressure differential decreased, each halving of the air spaces in his body every ten meters now involving smaller and smaller volumes of gas. He was deeper than he had ever free-dived before\u2014eighty, perhaps ninety meters\u2014far beyond the safe depth for compressed-air diving, well into the death zone, where the chances of sudden unconsciousness increased dramatically with every meter of descent.\n\nHe felt a searing pain in his lungs, as if a clamp were compressing his chest from all sides, tightening with every second that passed. Even if there had been air to breathe, he felt that his chest could never bear the expansion. The cold was shocking now, as cold as the Arctic Ocean, further paralyzing him. He knew he had little time, maybe half a minute, no more. He opened his eyes. For a few seconds he was distracted from the agony in his body as he concentrated on trying to see. He looked down, blinking against the blur. Directly below him it was pitch dark, an absolute darkness like he had never seen before. He had the sense that he was sinking into it, that he had plummeted below the final gloom of natural light. He knew that meant he was at least 120 meters deep, probably closer to 150 meters. For an instant the pain seemed to leave him and he felt himself holding Rebecca tight, a memory of a moment when he had felt that his life had been most worthwhile, a moment of utter contentment. He forced himself out of it, back to reality. He needed to remain focused for his final seconds, even if it meant excruciating pain. _Costas_.\n\nAnd then he saw it. A few meters below him, a suffused glow appeared, the emergency lighting of the submersible. He hit the cable and slid down it, the metal cutting into his exposed forearm. He crashed into the carapace of the submersible like an astronaut out of control on a spacewalk. He let go of the weight belt, which spun a crazy dance into the depths, disappearing out of sight below. He saw the recumbent form of Costas watching him through the viewing port of the bathysphere, his face distorted by the thick Perspex. He pulled himself over to the manifold linking the air cylinders together and found the wheel that opened the valve, seeing where it had been bent over by the cable falling on it. He pulled it anticlockwise. _Nothing_. He tried again, using every fiber of his being, every ounce of energy he had left. Still nothing. He suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to breathe, and began gagging, each reflex sending a jolt of pain through his lungs. He caught sight again of the face in the porthole. _He could not give up now_. He heaved one last time, and suddenly it gave way, cracking open. He spun the wheel around several times and pulled himself frantically down to the wheel that opened the double-lock chamber, spinning that too, feeling the hatch open inward and pulling himself inside, pushing it shut and slamming his hand down on the handle that opened the valve to fill it with air.\n\nA deafening hiss filled his ears, and the water in the chamber became a raging maelstrom, lit up by the orange glow of the emergency lighting. Seconds later his head was above water, and he was gasping, taking in huge lungfuls of air, shuddering as the oxygen coursed through him. He coughed hard and saw a fine mist of red, evidence of some respiratory tissue damage but not enough to indicate major barotrauma. He saw blood drip from his nose, and he tipped his head up. He glanced at his watch; it had been a little over four minutes since he had last looked at it on the deck of the ship just before jumping. The depth gauge on the casing of the chamber showed 275 meters, and was increasing rapidly. In the course of tangling with the submersible, he had dropped through the threshold of possibility for free diving. Another ten meters and he would probably have been gone. He had been lucky.\n\nThe chamber emptied of water, the hissing stopped, and the hatch from the bathysphere clanged open. Costas' head appeared through it. \"Jack. Good of you to drop in.\"\n\nJack coughed again, his voice hoarse, distant sounding. \"Don't mention it.\"\n\n\"You okay?\"\n\nJack tipped forward, a finger pressed against his nose. \"Could use a tissue.\"\n\nCostas fumbled in the pocket of his overalls, leaned in, and passed over a scrunched ball of white. Jack took it, holding it cautiously. \"Pre-used?\"\n\n\"Tried and tested.\"\n\nJack wet it, tore off a chunk, shoved it up his nostril, and held it there. He cautiously tipped forward again and saw that the bleeding had been stemmed. His breathing had nearly returned to normal, and he edged forward, noticing for the first time the gash like a deep rope burn on his left forearm where he had slid down the cable. Costas handed him a towel, a fleece, and a pair of tracksuit bottoms. \"My spare clothes. A little short and a little wide, but who's looking. Once we get into the bathysphere, we'll dig out the first-aid kit for that arm.\"\n\n\"You okay?\"\n\n\"I was nearly gone, Jack. Seeing stars.\" He jerked his head at the emergency oxygen bottle attached to the casing beside him. \"Couldn't risk using that because the air cutoff meant there was a pressure buildup inside the bathysphere, enough to make pure oxygen toxic. But it's back to normal now.\"\n\nJack rubbed the towel on his hair, feeling the ache in his head from the cold. \"What's our status?\"\n\n\"We're going to the bottom, Jack. When you opened the valve, it filled the bathysphere. We've got enough air for at least six hours. But there's still a problem with the pipes to the ballast tanks. Right now I just have to concentrate on maintaining life support and keeping the sub stable and upright. Once we get within fifty meters of the seabed, I'll activate the vertical water thrusters to soften the landing. If the vectored thrusters work as well, they might give us enough power to hop around like a big bug on the seabed, but not to rise more than a few meters without draining the battery.\"\n\n\"How close will we be to the sarcophagus?\"\n\n\"We should be dead on target.\"\n\n\"Comms?\"\n\n\"Dead as a dodo. The fiber-optic cable was severed. We have no way of communicating with the surface.\"\n\n\"But they could still brake the cable before we hit the seabed.\"\n\nCostas shook his head. \"Too much of it has been paid out. The weight of that amount of cable as well as the dead weight of the submersible would be too much by now for them to be able to halt the fall. The only way of repairing the winch will be to let the cable uncoil completely after having secured the upper end with the old derrick, and then attempt to repair the fault in the winch machinery. I was never happy with that new derrick, Jack. Too many corners were cut to get this show ready in time for the media, who now look as if they might not get a show at all. But we've got the best people topside, including the engineer from the shipyard who installed it, and with any luck we'll be back on track soon. The biggest danger is the cable spooling off entirely and falling on us, two tons of metal dropping a thousand meters at about fifty meters a second, like a gigantic whip. If that happens, this submersible will become the second sarcophagus down there.\"\n\n\"Meanwhile they'll be sending down an ROV.\"\n\n\"It'll be on its way as we speak. My guys in the engineering lab will be onto it.\"\n\n\"Okay.\" Jack eased out of his wet clothes, realizing that he was shivering uncontrollably. He had hardly noticed it in the euphoria of survival, but now he felt the cold ache all over his skin, adding to the residual pain he felt in his chest. He towelled himself down as well as he could, pulled on Costas' clothes, and followed him through the hatch into the bathysphere, sliding down into the copilot's seat beside Costas. He leaned back, closing his eyes for a moment. \"I never thought I'd be happy to be in a confined space, but this is that time.\"\n\n\"Seat belts on, Jack. Brace yourself.\"\n\nJack strapped himself in and watched Costas activate the thrusters. The three portholes in front of them showed pitch black. The external lights were still off. The depth gauge showed 820 meters, then 840. The thrusters came to life, slowing down the submersible and forcing Jack up in the seat against his belt. Costas activated the multibeam sonar, and a high-definition image appeared on the screen in front of them as it swept the seabed some eighty meters below. It revealed undulating sediment and then the familiar outline of the shipwreck, the scatter of guns clearly visible and the sarcophagus standing stark in the center, where the pit had been dug around it preparatory to lifting.\n\nCostas flicked on the external strobe array, revealing a shimmer of reflected particles through the portholes, and then he took the joystick in his right hand while keeping his left on the water jet throttles. \"Easy does it,\" he muttered to himself. \"I need to pull us a fraction off the vertical of the cable to avoid landing right on top of the sarcophagus. The vectored thrusters aren't responding, but I should be able to do it by reducing the flow through the port-side vertical thrusters while keeping the starboard ones on full throttle.\"\n\nJack could feel the vibration of the water jets on one side of the submersible, and watched the altitude gauge, measuring their height above the seabed. At twenty-two meters he could see a hint of something through the forward viewing port, and suddenly he was seeing the shipwreck, the dull green of brass guns covered with verdigris poking out of the sediment. Above the breech of one of them, he could see the distinctive heart-shaped bale mark of the East India Company, a little detail he had not noticed before when he had studied photos of the wreck. It opened up a small unexplained byway in the history of the ship that sent a frisson of excitement through him. And then with a soft explosion of sediment they came to a halt, 934 meters beneath _Seaquest_ and the surface of the Mediterranean.\n\n\"The eagle has landed,\" Costas said, releasing the controls.\n\nThe veil of sediment dropped, and the white form of the sarcophagus came into view only a few meters in front of the strobe array. Jack could clearly make out the architectural style of the carving, a geometric pattern that made the sarcophagus one of the greatest exemplars of sculpture from the Egyptian Old Kingdom, at the time of the building of the pyramids. For almost two hundred years, the only image that the world had seen of the sarcophagus had been a woodcut in Colonel Vyse's account of his excavations. It showed the sarcophagus inside the burial chamber of the Pyramid of Menkaure. Now it was in front of them, looking almost as if it had been designed to be in this place, unaffected by the forces of nature that were steadily eroding and crumbling the wreck around it.\n\nCostas tried the controls again. \"They've gone dead. I can't move them. That coil must have caused more damage than I thought.\"\n\n\"So we're not going anywhere. No big bug hopping on the seabed.\"\n\nCostas shook his head and lay back, stretching. \"All we can do now is wait.\" He reached down into a paper bag on his side. \"Brought lunch with me. Didn't have time topside. Sandwich?\"\n\nJack felt as drained as he had ever felt, bone tired and aching all over, and he knew that when they surfaced, the medicos on _Seaquest_ would want to give him a thorough road check. But meanwhile he was famished, and the idea of a picnic with his best friend trapped inside a submersible almost a kilometer deep in the abyss did not seem such a bad plan at all. He took the sandwich, and they ate together, occasionally swigging from a water bottle that Costas had placed between them. As Jack sat there munching, staring at one of the greatest archaeological discoveries they had ever made, he knew there was nowhere at this moment that he would rather be.\n\n_It felt good to be alive_.\n\n\u2014\n\nTwenty minutes later Jack finished wrapping a bandage around his forearm and stared out the front viewing port at the sarcophagus. Inside it he knew lay the plaque they had discovered on their dive to the wreck three months previously, something that Colonel Vyse must have found inside the pyramid and included as an added extra for the British Museum when he consigned his cargo to the _Beatrice_ that day in 1837 in Alexandria harbor. It was not the plaque they had seen that had spurred Jack to come back here, as they had been able to record all the surviving carving three months earlier, but rather the hope that they might find the fragment a meter or so across that had been missing from one corner, the sharp edges suggesting that the break had been recent rather than ancient and might have taken place during the wrecking. The plaque had shown the Aten sun symbol superimposed on a plan of the pyramids at the Giza plateau, with the orb of the Aten in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure and the radiating lines extending eastward toward the site of modern-day Cairo and the Nile. There was a chance, just a chance, that the missing fragment might show the intersection of the thickest radiating line with the river at a point just south of modern Cairo, the clue that Jack needed to the location of another entrance into the underground complex that he and Costas had seen from beneath the pyramid.\n\nJack glanced across at Costas, who was absorbed in a mass of wiring that he had disengaged from the upper casing of the bathysphere. Jack tapped the viewing port. \"Come and look at this. Tell me I'm seeing things.\"\n\nCostas grunted, left a pair of miniature pliers dangling from a wire, and slid over beside Jack. \"What are you looking at?\"\n\n\"About two meters in front of us, at eleven o'clock, nearly abutting the sarcophagus. Just visible sticking out of the silt.\"\n\nCostas pressed his face against the middle of the glass. \"Doesn't look like ship structure or fittings. Looks like it might be stone.\"\n\n\"That's what I thought. It's off-white, like marble.\"\n\n\"The missing fragment of the plaque?\"\n\n\"Any chance of getting the manipulator arm to work?\"\n\nCostas jerked his head back toward the dangling mass of wires. \"Not a chance, Jack. We've got life support, that's all. Somehow when that coil hit the sub, it short-circuited the main electronics board. It's more than I can fix down here.\"\n\nJack stared at the few centimeters of white stone visible in the silt. _So near, yet so far_. It was close enough that he felt he could almost reach out and grab it, yet he may as well be trying to touch ice on Mars. He took a deep breath, feeling the ache in his lungs. He would have to wait and see where they stood with the excavation, whether the backup submersible or remote-operated vehicle could examine his find, something that would take precious time that he could ill afford if he were to return to Egypt before the country went into meltdown.\n\nA swirl of sediment filled his view, and in the distortion through the left side of the port he saw a commotion on the seafloor. Apart from a few diaphanous fish, he had seen little sign of life in the desolation outside, and he peered with some curiosity, expecting something larger. Suddenly an eye appeared only inches away, staring directly at him, luminous, blinking, the size of a baseball. He jumped back, startled, and then saw the flexible metallic neck. \"Costas, we've got a friend.\"\n\nCostas slid back alongside him. \"Joey!\" he exclaimed excitedly, putting his hand against the Perspex. \"I _knew_ he'd come. Good boy.\"\n\nThe eye retracted, looking down, and a manipulator arm came into view and pivoted at the elbow and wrist. It had five metallic digits just like a human hand. Behind it Jack could see the yellow carapace covering the batteries and electric motor that powered the water jets, and an array of tools that Costas and his team had built into it, all of it operated from the surface via a fiber-optic cable that was just visible trailing off above. The forefinger of the hand pointed down at a tablet-sized LCD screen on the front of the ROV just below the manipulator arm, and Jack could just make out letters appearing on it, distorted through the Perspex cone of the viewing port. Costas pressed his face against the center of the cone, where there was the least distortion, and after a minute or so he rolled over and turned back to Jack.\n\n\"Joey's inspected the manifold, and everything looks okay. They can't reconnect our communications cable, so it's going to have to be done the old-fashioned way, with written messages. The problem with the derrick was an electronic switch override, which the engineer has replaced. They're currently recoiling the cable on the spool and expect to be ready to retrieve us in about twenty minutes. The recompression chamber is prepped and the medical team is waiting. You're supposed to breathe pure oxygen.\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" Jack said. \"Tell them there's no evidence of barotrauma.\"\n\n\"You know what the medicos are like. And Joey's watching.\"\n\nJack grunted, pulled the oxygen mask from the emergency bottle beside his seat, cracked the valve, and pressed it against his mouth and nose. \"Okay?\" he said, his voice muffled.\n\nCostas turned back to read the screen. \"Meanwhile, Joey's going to carry on snaking the hawser under the sarcophagus, the job we were meant to be doing. Now that they know we're safe and sound, they're going to carry on with the plan. As soon as we're back on deck, the cable will be dropped again for Joey to attach to the hawser. Fortunately the media people haven't yet been allowed out, so they'll have no idea what's happened, other than a small delay. They'll be told that the decision was made to use the ROV rather than the manned submersible because Joey's manipulator arm was better up to the task than the arms on the submersible. Which happens to be true.\"\n\nJack stared out of the viewing port beside him at the white form of the sarcophagus. The fragment of stone protruding from the silt was only about a meter from Joey. He sidled over to the main port beside Costas, and pointed exaggeratedly at it. The eye looked at him and cocked sideways, and the hand twisted around with the palm up, as if questioning. Jack dropped the oxygen mask, picked up a pencil and notepad and quickly scribbled on it, and then pressed the pad up against the window. The eye slowly scanned the paper, and Jack turned to Costas. \"If we've got twenty minutes, that might be just enough time for Joey to see whether that slab is the missing fragment.\"\n\nThe screen on the ROV began scrolling out letters again, and Costas pressed his face against the Perspex to read it. \"The ROV operator is under strict orders from Captain Macalister to focus on the task at hand. Under no circumstances is he to let Dr. Howard divert Joey to dig a hole somewhere else.\"\n\n\"You try. Doesn't Joey have a mind of his own?\"\n\nCostas scribbled on the pad and pressed it against the window. Joey read it, flexed his hand, looked up and around as if to check that he was not being watched, and then backed off slowly. \"I think I got a result,\" Costas said. \"I told him he wouldn't get a treat unless he obeyed you.\"\n\n\"You mean the ROV operator, or Joey?\"\n\nCostas grinned, and they both stared out the port. As Joey turned toward the sarcophagus, they could see his entire form. Unlike the box shape of most ROVs, Joey had a tapering body and an extended tail that flexed as he swam, providing improved hydrodynamics and stability while he was working on the seabed. With his second manipulator arm now extended, he looked like an outsized prehistoric scorpion. He angled gracefully through the water and came to a halt just above the protruding stone. The eye extended ever farther on its mount, snaking around and down and peering at the slab from every angle.\n\n\"Okay,\" Jack murmured. \"That's the one. Go for it, Joey.\"\n\nThe left arm reached under the carapace, drew out a tube like a vacuum-cleaner hose, and placed the end of it near the slab. Seconds later a jet of silt blew out behind the tail, and the surface of the slab was revealed. The pump sucked away sediment until all four sides had been uncovered. Joey backed away, and Jack pressed his face against the cone, staring.\n\n\"That's it,\" he said excitedly. \"I can see the fracture line. This _must_ be the missing piece of the plaque.\"\n\n\"I can't see any carving,\" Costas said. \"It must be upside down.\"\n\n\"Can Joey shift it?\"\n\n\"If I tell him to.\" Joey had remained in position as the silt settled, and then looked back to them, his eye rolling sideways as if questioning. Costas pointed at the slab, made a turning motion with his hands, and then repeated it. Joey raised his finger upward and slowly shook his eye. Costas glared at him, jabbing his finger at the slab. \"Come on, Marcus,\" he muttered. \"I know it's him. He's my best ROV operator, usually. He always gives Joey a little bit more personality. Now he needs to make him into a free thinker.\"\n\nJoey looked back at the slab, then at the submersible, then back at the slab again. He suddenly jetted forward, settling again on the seabed just in front of the slab.\n\n\"Good boy,\" Costas murmured. \" _Good_ boy.\"\n\nStabilizing legs drove down from each corner of the carapace into the sediment. The second manipulator arm came into play, and Joey hooked both hands under the exposed edge of the slab. He heaved upward, shuddering, a fine sheen of sediment rising with each vibration. The slab slowly rose to vertical, and then Joey retracted one arm, pulled out the vacuum pipe, and sucked away the sediment from it. They saw the flash of a camera, and then Joey gently lowered the slab back to the seabed, released it in a puff of silt, and jetted back toward the submersible. He came to a halt, raised both hands as if in a gesture of uncertainty, and pointed with one of them at the screen below. It showed the surface of the slab, dazzling white with the flash, at first sight devoid of any features of interest.\n\nJack stared, his heart suddenly racing. \"That's it,\" he exclaimed, pointing. The ROV moved closer, and the image came more sharply into view. A line furrowed into the rock extended from the fracture to the center of the slab, where it joined another, wider line extending to either side roughly at right angles, creating something akin to a T shape. \"The first line is the extension of the radiate line from the Aten symbol. The second line is the River Nile. I believe the first line shows the course of a man-made tunnel, and this map reveals where it intersects with the Nile.\"\n\n\"You think that's a way in?\"\n\n\"I've got to get this to Lanowski. He can try to match it to modern coordinates. This is fantastic. It might be the best break we've had.\"\n\nJoey's screen flashed with another message, and Costas pressed his face again the viewing port to read it. He gave Joey a diver's okay sign and then turned to Jack. \"Everything's now fixed topside, and they're going to begin lifting us in about two minutes. The plan for raising the sarcophagus is still on schedule. Joey's going to rig up the sarcophagus for raising, and the media can get live-stream video from his camera. Once we're topside, they'll drop the cable and Joey can hook it on. Macalister says that our little glitch served a useful purpose in ironing out a problem with the derrick winch. Assuming our ascent is successful, the engineers now have complete confidence in using it to raise the sarcophagus.\"\n\n\"Glad to know our little jaunt has been of some use.\"\n\nCostas punched a finger at the viewing port. \" _That's_ where it's been of use. Getting Joey to perform exactly the kind of task I envisaged for him. He's the one who should have come down here to do this job in the first place.\"\n\nJack waved the piece of notepaper with a sketch he had made of the depiction on the plaque fragment. \"Nothing beats the Mark One human eyeball. Joey might never have found this without us to guide him.\"\n\nCostas was barely listening as he watched Joey uncoil the hawser strap from a basket beneath the ROV that he would feed beneath the sarcophagus. \"You think Joey's impressive, you should see _Little_ Joey. Almost thinks intuitively.\"\n\n\"I remember his predecessor. Got stuck inside a volcano.\"\n\nCostas looked suddenly crestfallen. \"Don't remind me. But all his technology has gone into the new one, and more. He's truly pocket-sized.\"\n\nThey strapped themselves back into the seats of the submersible, and Jack gazed one last time at the sarcophagus in situ, Joey alongside. \"That's how I want to remember it,\" he said. \"I'm glad I won't be here to see it being raised. Do you remember seeing the Egyptian sculptures raised from the harbor of Alexandria, where they'd fallen when the ancient lighthouse collapsed? They seem diminished on land, like rusty old cannon raised from shipwrecks. Some artifacts are just better left on the seabed, where they have much more power and meaning. If I had my way, the sarcophagus would go to the British Museum just as Colonel Vyse intended, only in a way he could never have envisaged, not as an actual artifact but as a virtual exhibit. The HD multi-beam sonar scan and terrain mapper could produce a CG model of the wreck in incredible detail, and we've got enough imagery to simulate a real-time submersible dive to the site. Leaving the actual sarcophagus here on the seabed would mean that you retain the power and mystique of an object in the darkness of the abyss, in a place where no human could survive. That's what would really fire up people's imaginations, not being able to inspect the finer points of Old Kingdom architectonic sculpture close-up.\"\n\n\"We're caught in a political game, Jack. Ownership is always going to be an issue with an artifact like this, and where there are conflicting claims of ownership, the winner is always going to want to trumpet their prize. And now there's the added factor of the leverage it might give us in Egypt with the antiquities people.\"\n\n\"That's the one plus for me. But I still feel uncomfortable playing the media game and seeing archaeology used as a pawn like this.\"\n\n\"Chances are you won't even see it being raised. The instant we're on deck, you'll be whisked off to the sick bay for a complete checkup, and then you'll probably have a spell in the recompression chamber. After that my guess is you'll be out of here as soon as the medicos allow you to fly, if not sooner. Heading toward the Holy Land.\"\n\nJack stared for a moment at the sarcophagus, his mind back on the Cairo Geniza and the Jewish poet Yehuda Halevi, on the extraordinary letter that he and Maria had read only the evening before in Cairo. _Heading toward the Holy Land_. Halevi too had travelled from Spain to the land of the Old Testament, certain that after a lifetime of searching, the answers to his questions lay there, that revelation for him could come only in the land of the Israelites. Jack had begun to feel the same too, now even more strongly with the discovery of the missing fragment of the plaque, that he was being driven back to the only place where he could find his own personal redemption, the resolution to a quest that had come close to costing him everything.\n\nCostas nudged him. \"By the way, thanks.\"\n\nJack stared at him, his mind already focused on Jerusalem, on seeing Rebecca again. \"Huh?\"\n\n\"For the rescue. Thanks.\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah. No problem. You would have done the same for me.\"\n\nCostas tapped the casing. \"Yeah. Probably. Wouldn't have been able to live with myself afterward. Would have hated to lose a good submersible like this.\"\n\nHe grinned at Jack, and then made a whirling motion at Joey and gave a thumbs-up. The eye peered closely at them and cocked sideways, and then the manipulator arm pivoted upward on its elbow and the hand extended palm outward toward them, as if blowing them a kiss.\n\n\"Now that _was_ weird,\" Jack said.\n\nThe submersible shuddered, and they both lay back and braced themselves. They felt it rise and swing sideways, free of the seabed. After a few seconds hanging motionless, Jack saw the depth readout slowly but surely begin to reduce, meter by meter. As they rose above the cloud of silt created by their departure, he looked out the viewing port beside him and saw Joey bustling around the sarcophagus, feeding the hawser beneath it and then jetting over to the other side to pull it through. A pool of light in the darkness became smaller and smaller until it was no more than a smudge of yellow, and then it was gone entirely. All Jack could see was blackness, the utter void of the abyss, as if the wreck of the _Beatrice_ and their extraordinary discovery had been no more than a phantasm of the night, as quickly dispelled as it had been conjured up.\n\nHe shut his eyes, and was instantly, dreamlessly asleep.\n\n# CHAPTER 15\n\n# **L ARNAKA, CYPRUS**\n\n\"Jeremy! Good to see you. We haven't got much time.\"\n\nJack stood up and extended a hand as the tall young man loped through the airport concourse toward him. He was wearing a T-shirt and khaki trousers and carrying a compact backpack. He shook Jack's hand, sat down at the coffee table, quickly opened the rear of his pack, and took out his computer. He glanced at the people milling around the terminal. \"Is there anywhere more private?\"\n\nJack shook his head. \"This is as good as it gets. Rule number one of travelling incognito is to be part of the crowd, not apart from it.\"\n\n\"You worried about being spotted?\"\n\n\"The last thing I want is for one of my journalist fans to tweet about how they've just seen me in Cyprus checking in to a flight to Israel only two days after the world saw me off Spain raising the sarcophagus. Reminding the extremists in Egypt that we also have a research presence in Israel might be the final card that brings everything crashing down around Maurice. We're walking on a knife-edge as it is, and I don't want to provoke the Egyptian regime any further.\"\n\n\"I heard that the medicos on _Seaquest_ wanted you to wait three days for observation before flying,\" Jeremy said.\n\n\"That was just precautionary. I didn't breathe any compressed gas at depth, so there was no problem with excess nitrogen. I had some soft-tissue rupture in my sinuses and air passages but no lung collapse. Even the twenty-four hours I agreed to stay was pushing it. The Israelis banned incoming private and commercial aircraft other than El-Al three hours ago, meaning that the Embraer had to put me off here in Cyprus. The latest threat of an all-out terrorist attack from the extremists in Syria means that they're probably on the cusp of halting incoming flights altogether, which would cut me off from seeing Rebecca. And then to cap it all, I've just had a text from Aysha saying that Maurice and the rest of his workers are on their way back to Alexandria from the Faiyum this afternoon. That can mean only one thing\u2014that they've been booted out. Events could be coming to a head very quickly.\"\n\n\"At least the delay gave me the chance to come out and see you,\" said Jeremy.\n\n\"We could have Skyped.\"\n\n\"Not when you see what I've got to show you. When I saw the image you sent us yesterday of the plaque, I knew you'd want everything I could fire at you.\" Jeremy glanced up at the departures board in front of them. \"We've got forty-five minutes to final boarding. That should be exactly enough time.\" He flipped open the computer and began typing.\n\nJack took a deep breath, trying to forget his frustration over the lost day, and watched Jeremy. He had grown a thick black beard but still looked as boyish as he had eight years before when he had joined Maria as a graduate student in her palaeography institute in Oxford. It was hard to believe that he now had a doctorate as well as a prestigious research fellowship from his Oxford college under his belt, and had just returned from a six-month sabbatical at Cornell University, his alma mater, where he had turned down a faculty position in order to remain as assistant director of Maria's institute. For IMU he had become an invaluable complement to Maria where ancient writing and textual analysis was concerned, and for Jack no small part of his role had been the friendship he had developed with Rebecca since she had joined her first IMU project while she was still in high school.\n\nJeremy stopped tapping and looked at Jack. \"You ready?\"\n\n\"Fire away. About Howard Carter.\"\n\n\"Right. After what Maria told me about the Halevi letter from the Geniza, you'll see how this fits. Carter was born in London in 1874, the son of a painter. He went out to Egypt at the age of seventeen as a draftsman. Within a year he was working under Sir Flinders Petrie at the excavation of El-Amarna, Akhenaten's capital, and by the age of twenty-seven he was inspector general of monuments for Upper Egypt. But then he resigned after a dispute, spent four years as a painter and antiquities dealer, and only gradually got back into archaeology proper. He eventually found patronage from Lord Carnaervon to begin his exploration of the Valley of the Kings. In 1924 he chanced on the tomb of a little-known boy pharaoh, and the rest is history.\"\n\n\"So somewhere along the way, he heard the story of the mad Sufi claiming to be an English soldier in the Old City of Cairo. Aysha told me about the article she'd found.\"\n\nJeremy nodded. \"It was in an issue of the Cairo _Weekly Gazette_ from 1904. The _Gazette_ was less a newspaper than a social and entertainment journal for the British community in Cairo, with a travel section mainly aimed at ladies disposed to explore Old Cairo while their husbands were away doing frightfully important things like drinking gin in their club. One of the columns was a whimsical offering by an anonymous lady who described how the Sufi had become something of a tourist attraction. He evidently played up to the ladies, who were fascinated by him. It was hot and steamy, and they were bored and frustrated. I think there might have been a bit of the Rasputin effect.\"\n\n\"But none of them believed his story.\"\n\n\"They might not have, but somebody else did. What Maurice remembered when Aysha found that article was Howard Carter's journal from his so-called lost years, between his resignation as inspector general in 1903 and the beginning of his exploration in the Valley of the Kings some ten years later. Because that period has less bearing on the lead-up to the discovery of Tut's tomb, it hasn't received as much attention from biographers, so some of his papers from that time haven't been thoroughly studied. But trust Maurice to have done so, while he was researching some of Carter's manuscripts held in the Bodleian Library in Oxford when he was a student.\"\n\n\"I remember him going there,\" Jack said. \"He was trying to trace the whereabouts of a sculpted head of Akhenaten that had been sold in Egypt before the First World War, and he remembered Carter's period as an antiquities dealer. Back then the distinction between archaeologist and antiquities dealer was less clearly defined, with some eminent scholars being both. Carter was forced into it as he had no private means and felt his career as an archaeologist was over.\"\n\n\"It took a lot of ferreting about, but eventually I found the diary that Maurice had seen for 1908,\" Jeremy said. \"It makes for fascinating reading, and is a spotlight on the period. It shows that Carter really had his nose to the ground, like any good dealer. Cairo was awash with antiquities at the time, with mummies falling off the back of camels brought in by hopeful Bedouin from the desert, and every street urchin hawking a pocketful of scarabs and little bronzes. Carter had his trusted network of informants, including former Egyptian employees of his in the antiquities service who had also fallen on hard times. They were unable to find legitimate work because Carter himself had been blacklisted. It was a world of patronage and corruption, with some senior officials up to their neck in it.\"\n\n_\"Plus \u00e7a change,\"_ Jack murmured. \"So he came across the Sufi, and his tall tales of treasure?\"\n\n\"Actually, he'd come across him a lot earlier than 1904,\" Jeremy enthused. \"And this is what makes the story that bit more plausible, because there is a consistency between the accounts. When Carter first arrived in Egypt as an impressionable teenager in 1891, he threw himself into Cairo, lapping up all the history and mystique he could find. It was then that he first saw the man, begging outside the Ben Ezra synagogue. He wasn't yet the mad mystic of the _Weekly Gazette_ seventeen years later, but simply one of innumerable filthy and emaciated beggars on the streets of Cairo. Carter tried practicing his beginner's Arabic on the man, who became frustrated and replied in English. He swore Carter to secrecy and showed him a battered Royal Engineers cap badge. It was only a few years after the failed Nile expedition, and the human detritus of war was also very visible in Cairo at the time. Destitute and maimed veterans of the Egyptian army as well as miscreant British soldiers were scraping a living however they could in the backstreets of the city. Some of them were mentally unbalanced by their experiences fighting the dervishes. But the Mahdist threat from Sudan was still very real, and Kitchener's promise to avenge the death of General Gordon rung in everyone's ears, so to be fingered as a deserter risked the harshest penalty.\n\n\"Howard seems to have kept to his word, though, and the man, a former sapper called Jones, began to tell him an incredible story of being trapped underground for months on end. But just as Carter was planning to return to hear more, he was whisked off to Amarna by Petrie, and it was only in 1904 with the downturn in his fortunes that he came back to look for the man.\"\n\n\"Who by then was the mad mystic,\" said Jack.\n\n\"Self-styled, with an appearance to match: bald with a skullcap, a huge gray beard, sun-blackened skin. He lived by selling gullible European ladies restorative balms that he claimed to have been given by Osiris himself during an underground journey to the afterlife. He was evidently quite a character, theatrical with a deep, booming voice, speaking a strangely accented English as well as Urdu and Arabic. Local children flocked to hear his tales. He'd become something of a celebrity.\"\n\n\"Urdu is plausible for an ex-soldier who might have served in India, and he could have accented the English to disguise his true origins,\" Jack said.\n\n\"Carter noted that the man he met in 1891 was lucid enough when he was in full flow, but he was physically weak and fearful of being caught,\" said Jeremy. \"He said he had been a corporal in the Royal Engineers and had been with the river expedition to relieve General Gordon in Khartoum in 1884. But after a particularly savage battle, he had been knocked unconscious and lost track of time and place. After a long period of wandering and a terrifying encounter with a crocodile, he found himself in Cairo, where his extraordinary underground adventure took place. He had clung to Carter in desperation as he told the story, clearly tottering on the edge of sanity, babbling about the crocodile and mummies. It was the Royal Engineers cap badge that convinced Carter that there might be some element of truth in the story.\"\n\n\"Royal Engineers,\" Jack muttered, thinking hard. \"How extraordinary. He must have gone up with the river expedition past the crocodile temple, the one that Costas and I discovered on the Nile. And the battle can only have been Kirkeban, the one major encounter with the Mahdi army for the river column. The expedition pretty well disintegrated after that, so it's plausible that a man left for dead on the battlefield or lost in the river might have ended up that way.\"\n\nJeremy positioned the computer screen so that Jack could see it. \"I know all this because Howard summarized it in his diary entry for the day in 1904 when he rediscovered Jones. He wrote an account of what Jones told him next. I've scanned it so you can read it in its entirety.\"\n\nJack stared at the screen. It showed a single notebook page of handwriting, neat and legible. He began to read:\n\n> _13 October 1904. Visited the souk outside the synagogue today to seek Jones, about whom I wrote in my entry yesterday. I feel that with the passage of years I can use his name without fear of compromising his safety, as surely by now his desertion from the army would be beyond retribution, if indeed his story were to be believed. Having searched all the usual places and nearly giving him up for dead, a reasonable conclusion after all these years, I spied the man I described yesterday, and, after observing him discreetly, watching him dispense who-knows-what concoction to a gaggle of credulous Belgians, I approached him; he immediately recognized me and we renewed our acquaintance. I reminded him of his unfinished story, and after some egging he took me in hand and led me to the back corner of the courtyard where the rabbi allows him to sleep and brings him food and water_.\n> \n> _Here is what he told me. One night some three years after the death of Gordon, he and an American, whom I surmised to be none other than the estimable Charles Chaill\u00e9-Long, former officer in Gordon's service and now distinguished author and lawyer (about whose subsequent career I did not apprise Jones, not wishing to divert him from his story, or render him too amazed), along with a Frenchman, an inventor of a submarine diving apparatus, went to a place on the Nile where Jones knew from an ancient carving found in the desert that there lay an underground entrance, below a ruined fort some few miles south of the present city boundary. In dynamiting it open, they were sucked in from their boat, and Jones yet again suffered a knock to the head. He woke up some indeterminable time later, without Chaill\u00e9-Long or the Frenchmen, both of whom he gave up for dead, but with the remains of the boat washed all around him, in a kind of darkness suffused by a distant brilliant light_.\n> \n> _At this point I had to hold Jones in my hands to keep him talking. His eyes widened and he spoke feverishly, in the grip of a barely suppressed terror. He talked of deep pools of water, and again of a blinding light. He said that he ate some kind of slimy fish, and, to my considerable consternation, the flesh of long-dead bodies, bodies that he described as if they were ancient mummies. After an inordinate amount of time and much hopeless terror, he came to a great chamber with many lidded jars on shelves, tall jars, hundreds of them, filled with papyrus. In that chamber he saw many great treasures, gold and amulets and crystal, and he then told me he had made a long-dead friend, who had pointed him the way out. I felt that Jones had strayed into fiction and delirium, and knew this must be the case when he showed me a ring he had taken from the hand of his supposed friend, clearly not Pharaonic or even ancient but a signet from the caliphate, a Fatimid ring of a type I have sold before (a particularly fine one, I have to say, of Al-Hakim I am certain, for which I considered offering him a generous price. But then I saw from the fervor in his eyes that this was not a ring he would be parted from, and indeed that this was a man beyond the draw of mammon). He told me that he had come up from this place under the west bank of Cairo, but that the tunnel had collapsed behind him and could never be found, as the spot had been filled in and floored over_.\n> \n> _I thanked Jones for his story, but will not, I think, return to press him for more. I considered writing to Mr. Chaill\u00e9-Long, but I cannot afford to be made a laughingstock if the story should prove false, so I decided against it. My cachet is low enough in Egypt as it is. Of submarine diving apparatus I know precious little, but I might surmise that Jones had come across such an inventor in his career as a sapper, and thus he found a place for him in his story. Jones did also mention an officer of engineers, a Main or Mayne. A check of the Army List in my club library indeed reveals a Major Mayne in 1884. It's a not uncommon surname, and perhaps, indeed, Mayne was a former officer of his, though the name had disappeared from the list by the following year. Perhaps he too was a victim of that benighted campaign, and, in any event, being in all likelihood long dead, is not a lead to pursue. Cairo to me sometimes seems a miasma of make-believe, of stories of tombs and treasures too numerous for all the ancient dynasties of Egypt many times over. And though I think there is something in Jones' story, some kernel of truth, it is not one to which I will be returning unless I am stripped of all other possibilities, unless the Valley of the Kings is to be shut to me forever. Oh for just a small pharaoh's tomb of my own..._\n\nJack stopped reading, his mind reeling. For Howard Carter, the Fatimid ring had pushed the story beyond credulity, yet it was precisely the detail that nailed it for Jack. He stared at Jeremy. \"It's the ring, isn't it? That's the clincher.\"\n\n\"Now you know why I was so excited when Maria showed me the Halevi letter. Carter nails it for us by identifying the caliph as Al-Hakim and the ring as a signet, worn only by the caliph and his immediate family. Corporal Jones must have stumbled across his body. What he meant by his new friend pointing the way out is a little mystifying, but Jones may not have been entirely grounded at that point. He'd been underground for weeks, probably months, and may have been hallucinating. Do you remember Wilson in the Tom Hanks film _Castaway_? People alone in desperate situations make friends out of the most unlikely objects, and a skeleton at least has a semblance of humanity.\"\n\nJack's eyes were ablaze. \"The other breakthrough is Carter's reference to the ruined fort on the banks of the Nile, giving us a modern way marker to another entrance to the underground complex. If those ruins can be pinpointed, then there's a chance, a _small_ chance, that we might be able to find the entrance under the river that swallowed up Jones and the French diver, and an even smaller chance that we might get in.\"\n\nJeremy grinned at him. \"A small chance is still a chance, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Damn right it is.\" Jack pulled the satellite phone out of his bag, pressed the key for the secure IMU line, and waited for the connection. He turned to Jeremy. \"Can you email that scan to Lanoswki, Costas, and Aysha?\"\n\nJeremy typed quickly and tapped a key. \"Done.\" He shut down the computer and slipped it into his bag. \"We've got to go. Our flight's boarding.\"\n\nJack peered at him. \"What do you mean, _our_ flight?\"\n\n\"You didn't think I'd come all the way out to Cyprus just to see you and then return, did you? I'm coming to see Rebecca too.\"\n\n\"Does she know?\"\n\n\"Remember, I didn't even know myself that I was coming until this morning. I sent her a text from Heathrow but haven't had a reply. The last I heard from her yesterday was that she was going underground.\"\n\n\"That would be Temple Mount,\" Jack said, pursing his lips. \"I hope she hasn't pushed the boundaries. That place is a tinderbox at the best of times. David Ben-Gurion is due to meet me at Tel-Aviv Airport and take me straight there.\"\n\n\"IMU's Israel representative?\"\n\nJack nodded. \"I'm glad you're coming with me, Jeremy. Rebecca's got something she really wants to show me, but it looks as if I'm going to be doing a quick turnaround. I may not have more than a few hours in Jerusalem.\"\n\nJeremy looked at him shrewdly. \"Back to Egypt?\" Jack nodded.\n\n\"David's a reserve captain in the Israeli navy. With any luck he'll be able to get a reconnaissance flight to divert out to _Sea Venture_ for a paradrop, and then it's a short flight by helicopter to Alexandria.\"\n\n\"Sounds like a return to special forces days, Jack.\"\n\n\"The real test is going to be Cairo. It was bad enough when we left, but by tomorrow it could be in the grips of an extremist coup. Somehow we've got to get through that if we're going to get to this ruined fort beside the Nile south of the city.\"\n\n\"By 'we,' do you mean you and Costas?\"\n\nJack looked nonplussed. \"Of course. If he's up to it.\"\n\n\"You need to access some satellite imagery to look for the site of that fort.\"\n\n\"Lanowski will be onto it the moment he reads that email.\"\n\nThe satellite phone flashed green to indicate a link, and Jack quickly tapped in a number and raised it. After a few moments, a familiar voice answered.\n\n\"Jack?\"\n\n\"Costas? How soon can you be in Alexandria?\"\n\n\"The Embraer is due to touch down on its return flight to Valencia in two hours, and it can be refueled for Herakleion in Crete immediately. From there I'll take the Lynx to _Sea Venture_ two hundred miles due south. Twenty hours from now, maybe a little more.\"\n\n\"Sounds like you've got it all mapped out.\"\n\n\"I've learned to be one step ahead of the game, Jack. I knew we were going back even before we left Egypt.\"\n\n\"Equipment?\"\n\n\"I'll get everything together on _Sea Venture_. E-suits, rebreathers, underwater scooters. I'll need to score some extra oxygen off the equipment storekeeper on _Sea Venture_. We're always somehow in short supply with them. But I'll manage. No worries, Jack. You just do what you have to do with your daughter.\"\n\n\"Bring my Beretta, Costas. You know where it is.\"\n\n\"Roger that. And I'll be visiting the armory on _Sea Venture_.\"\n\n\"Rendezvous Alexandria, twenty-four hours from now?\"\n\n\"You got it. Over and out.\"\n\nJack quickly replaced the phone in his bag and got up just as the announcement came on for final boarding. He strode alongside Jeremy to the departure gate, his mind filled with what he had read. _A great chamber with many lidded jars on shelves, tall jars, hundreds of them, filled with papyrus_. He was on a knife-edge still, but coursing with excitement. If all went well, a little over a day from now he would know whether the soldier's story was the key to one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made. He glanced at his watch, wishing the hours forward. He could hardly wait to tell Rebecca.\n\n# CHAPTER 16\n\n# **J ERUSALEM, ISRAEL**\n\nJack had arranged to meet Rebecca outside the Jaffa Gate into the Old City of Jerusalem. He saw her there now, in the shade of the ancient wall chatting to two Israeli soldiers who were guarding the entrance. In the last year since turning nineteen, she had grown into a self-confident young woman, her slender limbs and height coming from Jack but her dark hair and complexion reflecting her mother's Italian background. She was wearing khaki trousers, a T-shirt, and sturdy hiking boots and had on a small backpack. Jack knew that she had spotted him but had not wanted to attract attention, so she was waiting for him to come to her.\n\nHe quickly led Jeremy across the busy street and the pedestrian square and reached her, nodding at the soldiers and giving her a kiss on the cheek. She embraced Jeremy and turned back to Jack. \"Good trip?\"\n\n\"We were met at Tel Aviv Airport by a friend of mine who dropped us off just up the hill.\"\n\n\"I watched the live stream of the sarcophagus being raised on CNN on my iPhone. It seemed to go without a hitch.\"\n\nJack nodded. \"It was a relief to get it on deck. Now the politics begin.\"\n\nShe peered at him. \"Uncle Costas sent me a text just before you arrived at the airport. Said he'd thanked you but had forgotten to say he owes you. Usually, when he sends me a message like that to pass on to you, it means that something bad happened, but the unspoken hallowed code means you can't thank each other directly because if you do, then the next time it won't work out so well. Am I right? And what about that bandage on your arm?\"\n\nJack cleared his throat. \"Okay. There was a small hitch, but everything worked out fine in the end, and we're all in one piece. I'll tell you about it later. The crucial thing is that we found the missing fragment of the plaque that was inside the sarcophagus, and it seems to give us a location for getting into the underground complex from the Nile.\"\n\n\"So you're definitely going back to Egypt?\"\n\n\"The friend who dropped us here is going to pick me up again in the early evening and take me to the coast south of Tel Aviv, where I'm taking a ride on an Israeli naval reconnaissance plane out to _Sea Venture_.\"\n\n\"You doing a paradrop?\"\n\n\"Yep.\"\n\n\"You _promised_ me. Do you remember? Almost two years ago.\"\n\n\"I said I dropped out of planes only when it was absolutely necessary and not for the thrills. Anyway, you're your own boss now. You can arrange a paradrop with the IMU training director.\"\n\n_\"Yes,\"_ she exclaimed, putting an arm around Jeremy. \"We can do it together, Jeremy. Our first proper holiday, just the two of us.\"\n\nJeremy looked more studious than usual as he stroked his beard. \"Not really my scene. Diving, yes, maybe, but jumping out of planes? No. I was thinking we could spend a week back in Naples with your mother's family to give me a chance to get up to speed with the conservation work on the scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. Some amazing new texts are being revealed. You could help me piece them together.\"\n\nRebecca looked aghast and pushed him away. \"I'm talking _holiday_ , Jeremy, not work.\"\n\nJack cracked a grin. \"Remember what Maria has in store for you. She asked me to tell you that the trip to look at the monasteries on Mount Athos is all fixed.\"\n\n\"You been seeing Maria, Dad?\"\n\n\"In Cairo. She came out to look at some new manuscript finds in the Ben Ezra synagogue.\"\n\n\"I know about the Geniza. You mean you've been seeing her at the bottom of a hole in a wall.\"\n\n\"Something like that.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"You're the one who needs a holiday with Maria, Dad, not me.\"\n\nJack smiled at her. Ten years of schooling in New York had given Rebecca not only her distinctive accent but also a candor that he found refreshing, even if it sometimes presented him with awkward truths.\n\nHe glanced at the Jaffa Gate, at the medieval crenellations and stonework that seemed to rise unperturbed above the tides of humanity that swept beneath it, the countless pilgrims and warriors, merchants and prophets who had come to Jerusalem in its long history. The last time he had stood at this spot had been more than twenty years before, on the eve of the first Gulf War, when Jerusalem had been devoid of tourists and the air-raid sirens were sounding. Standing here then, with his khaki bag slung over his shoulder and his camera poised, he had felt like a diver about to plunge into the unknown, and he felt that same frisson now. The crisis that again loomed over Israel and the Near East lent the same sense of danger to the place. He turned to Rebecca. \"Okay. I've told you about my latest find. Now it's your turn to show us yours.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nTen minutes later Jack hurried with Jeremy through a maze of alleyways and narrow streets in the Coptic quarter of Jerusalem. They were trying to keep up with Rebecca as she led them deeper into the city. Apart from army and police patrols and local men who eyed them as they passed, there were few people to be seen, the usual bustle of activity reduced to the minimum as people stayed indoors with the threat of missile attack. Rebecca stopped at a poky hole-in-the-wall street vendor, greeted the woman behind the counter like an old friend, and waited while she squeezed her a fresh orange juice. She took a bread roll as well. \"Breakfast,\" Rebecca said apologetically. \"Didn't have time earlier.\"\n\nJack shook his head when she offered to buy him one. \"You came here to volunteer for the Temple Mount archaeological project. How's pot washing going?\"\n\nShe finished the roll and wiped her mouth. \"Yeah. Good.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"It was fun. For about ten minutes.\" She gave Jack a glum look. \"They've got twenty metric tons of the stuff, Dad. I did a quick calculation as I was sitting in front of my first tray. With each sherd averaging five centimeters across, that means fifty million sherds.\"\n\n\"Each one a precious link to history. And one day one of them might just provide a clue to something bigger.\"\n\n\"I know. I get that. It's kind of a privilege. And it is special to a lot of the volunteers who've never done archaeology before. But I've been spoiled, haven't I? I was digging at Troy at the age of fourteen, and hunting for Ghengis Khan's tomb in Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan the year after that. Anyway, I've been finding my own links to history.\"\n\n\"I'd guessed you might be.\"\n\nShe swerved into an alleyway lined with dingy metalworking shops, swerved again into a smaller alley with men squatting along the side, smoking and talking in low voices, and then came to a halt in front of a decaying wooden doorway in the shadows beneath a balcony. The man squatting in the alley beside the entrance nodded at her, peered suspiciously at Jack and Jeremy, and then unlocked the door and pushed it open.\n\n\"That's my friend Abdul,\" Rebecca said quietly, leading them into a gloomy passageway. \"He's the one who showed me the way to the tunnel entrance.\"\n\n\"What tunnel?\" Jack said.\n\n\"Patience, Dad. Here first.\"\n\nThey reached another door, and Rebecca knocked. A small boy opened it, grinning broadly when he saw Rebecca. He ushered them in, and then locked and bolted the door behind them. The room looked like a living room, with shoes lined up beside the door, a table covered with schoolbooks and papers, and the typical furnishings of a well-appointed Arab household. The boy went over to the far wall and pushed aside an ungainly looking wooden bureau, the base sliding easily on rollers. Behind it was another door, and the boy beckoned them through. The space beyond was dark, with only a crack of light visible at the far end. He flicked on a light switch, led them to a door with a lit space beyond, and ushered them in.\n\nJack had already guessed where they were going from the smell. It was the same smell he remembered from the storerooms of the Cairo Museum and the Geniza chamber: the smell of ancient artifacts and decay, of millennia-old dust and the organic matter that built up in long-sealed tombs. It was as if he were entering an Aladdin's Cave of antiquities, with artifacts of every description filling every available space: pottery vessels of all types and periods, oil lamps, metalwork, bronze armor, and weapons, much of it intact and in spectacular condition. It was as if all the top museums of the world had been shorn of their best exhibits of Near Eastern and biblical antiquities, and yet Jack knew that none of this material had ever seen the light of day in a museum, that it had all been spirited out of tombs and dark places unknown to archaeologists and destined for the international black market in antiquities.\n\nA small wizened man appeared, white bearded and wearing a robe and a tatty red fez. His bloodshot eyes lit up when he saw Rebecca, and he took her hands, clasped them between his own, and shook them. Then he let her go and clicked his fingers at the boy, who went off the way they had come. He turned to the other two, and his eyes alighted on Jack. \"So, you must be the famous _Jack Howard_ ,\" he said, rolling the words slowly, his English thickly accented. \"You think you know what happened to the temple menorah, eh? Well, I know where the rest of the treasure lies. Maybe you give a little, I give a little, and I will tell you.\" He laughed, a low cackle. \"You have a fine figure of a daughter, eh? She has the makings of a tomb raider. I think nobody messes with her.\"\n\nJack looked at him coldly. \"Nobody messes with her,\" he repeated.\n\nThe man peered at Jack, and then waved an arm in the air dismissively. \"Yes, yes, we know all about that. She has a bodyguard, yes, your man Ben-Gurion? We could have made him disappear, but we are all friends, yes? You are in the business of antiquities, Jack Howard, and I am a businessman too, and we can help each other. It has been this way in Jerusalem for more than a thousand years, ever since my ancestors began selling pieces of the holy cross to the Crusaders.\"\n\nRebecca turned and glared at Jack. \"You had me _followed_?\"\n\nJack continued to hold the man's gaze. \"Precisely for this reason.\"\n\nThe boy returned with a tray of little glasses of tea, which he offered around. Jack took one, dropped a sugar cube into it, and sipped the strong liquid. He replaced it on the tray. \"So, I take it you are an antiquities dealer?\"\n\nThe man opened his arms expansively. \"I am Abdullah al-Harasi. My shop is one of the best known along the Via Dolorosa. I am licensed by the antiquities authority, and everything I sell in my shop comes with an export permit. Every day I sell to tourists: coins, lamps, little pottery vessels, mementoes of antiquity that bring them closer to whichever prophet or messiah they hold dear, inshallah. I sell to them, that is, when there is not another war looming. Business has been difficult these last months.\"\n\n\"And this is your storeroom?\" Jack said.\n\nAbdullah opened his arms wider. \"This is where I keep my prize items, for select customers.\"\n\nJack knew that those words were a thinly veiled code for artifacts excavated illegally and sold to those who could get antiquities out of the country without a license. He hoped that Rebecca had not gotten herself in too deep. The uninitiated could easily be seduced into an agreement over a glass of tea. If some kind of deal had been struck, it might be difficult to extract themselves without things getting ugly. The antiquities black market was a murky underworld that only those experienced in its ways could negotiate without coming to serious grief. Even David's surveillance team could not prevent what might go on behind closed doors. For a moment Jack felt culpable, responsible. His decision to let Rebecca come to Jerusalem at this time might have been more fallout from his quest in Sudan and Egypt, preoccupying him when better judgement might have prevailed.\n\nRebecca finished her tea and replaced the cup. \"Abdullah brought me here after I'd visited the antiquities dealers asking if anyone had Egyptian antiquities that might have been found in Jerusalem.\"\n\nAbdullah reached under the table next to him and took out a square object about twice the width of his hand. \"By good fortune I had just what she wanted, eh?\" He held the object up so that Jack and Jeremy could see. It was like a miniature icon, an ancient frame of hardwood surrounding a plaque of beaten gold about ten centimeters across. Abdullah held it under the bare light-bulb that lit up the room. To his astonishment, Jack saw the Aten sun symbol in the upper right corner, the radiating arms with upturned hands extending from it.\n\n\"Akhenaten,\" he murmured, moving for a better view. \"It can only be Akhenaten.\"\n\n\"There's a hieroglyphic cartouche below,\" Rebecca said. \"And you can see partial clusters of hieroglyphs on the left-hand side that show that this plaque was actually cut out of a larger sheet of gold, a decorative cover for a curved surface.\"\n\nJack's mind was racing. He had seen something like this before, only a few days ago. And the hieroglyphs in the complete cartouche were identical to those that Hiebermeyer had found in the tomb of the general in the mummy necropolis, on the wall painting that recounted his achievements: a sheaf of corn, two half circles, two birds. \"That's the Egyptian word for the Israelites,\" he exclaimed. \"This is incredible.\"\n\n\"Turn it over, Abdullah,\" Rebecca said.\n\nHe did so, and on the back Jack saw an inscription in black ink, like a museum acquisition label. He immediately felt a cold shiver down his spine. If this was a stolen antiquity from a museum, then they were in even deeper waters. He peered at it and read it out. \"Jerusalem, 27 April 1864, CRW, RE.\"\n\n\"This was once a possession of General Gordon of Khartoum,\" Abdullah said.\n\nJack looked at him in disbelief. \" _Gordon of Khartoum?_ How do you know?\"\n\n\"Because my great-grandfather got it from him.\"\n\nJack stared at the letters again, racking his brain. _Of course_. \"CRW. That's Charles Richard Wilson, surely. RE means Royal Engineers. Wilson was employed by the Survey of Palestine in the 1860s. He surveyed extensively in Jerusalem and had an abiding interest in archaeology.\"\n\n\"Later General Sir Charles Wilson,\" Rebecca said. \"I worked that out too, and I looked him up. He was intelligence chief during the campaign to rescue Gordon from Khartoum in 1884, and a close personal friend of Gordon himself.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, yes,\" Abdullah said, holding up one hand and counting off the names. \"Wilson. Warren. Gordon. Kitchener. All of them British officers who came to Palestine to map the land for Queen Victoria, but who became obsessed with antiquities and the ancient past. Men little different from you and me, Jack Howard.\" He turned the artifact over in his hands as he eyed Jack. \"You wish to purchase this? For your museum? It did not come to my family cheap. But for you, a bargain price.\"\n\nJack raised his hands. \"Not this time.\"\n\nAbdullah considered it again, and then handed it to him. \"Accept this as my gift. In hopes of future business, inshallah. If you ever wish to sell the artifacts from your shipwreck finds, I offer myself as your agent. My clients include the richest Russian oligarchs, those of Jewish background who now have interests in Israel and can ship antiquities unseen back to the mother country. You could be a rich man, Jack Howard. You could reclaim the Howard family fortunes. Think of your daughter's education. Of her future.\"\n\nJack placed the object firmly back in the Abdullah's hands. \"I'm grateful for your offer and your hospitality. But you know my position.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes. Archaeology versus treasure hunting. Artifacts consigned out of sight from an excavation to a museum store, or artifacts made available for anyone to own and enjoy. But there is a bridge, my friend, and we can meet in the middle.\"\n\n\"You know I can't be associated with an unprovenanced artifact acquired from an antiquities dealer. All our museum exhibits are finds from our own excavations.\"\n\n\"We could photograph it,\" Jeremy said.\n\nAbdullah wagged a finger, suddenly looking less amiable. \"No photography.\"\n\nJack turned to Rebecca. \"Do you have anything more you want me to see?\"\n\nShe narrowed her eyes at him. \"Maybe. But you might not think it's safe for me. Without an escort.\"\n\nAbdullah cackled and twisted his hands in the air. \"Fathers, daughters, eh? I have four of them. Two are doctors, one is a police colonel, and one is in my business. One day the women will rule Jerusalem, eh? It is the men who have made such a mess of this place over the last two thousand years. Men of the Roman army, of the jihad, of the Crusades; the British, the Zionists, and the fundamentalists today. Look at the Al-Aqsa mosque. The authorities prevent Jews from worshipping at their holiest site, the platform of the temple. Jews must crowd against the edges, praying at the Western Wall, digging tunnels into the rock to get as close as they can, but no farther. If women were in charge, they would be more accommodating, eh? As accommodating as you and I could be in our business, Jack Howard. Think of my offer. You know how to contact me. Inshallah.\"\n\n\"Thank you for helping my daughter.\"\n\nAbdullah waved his hand dismissively. \"Go now. Follow your daughter. She has a good nose for treasure. My son will show you out.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nTen minutes later they were again hurrying through the labyrinth of the Old City, along streets and alleys that Jack recognized as leading toward the Western Wall and the site of the Temple Mount archaeological project. Rebecca slowed down and gave him a piercing look. \"I still can't believe you had me followed.\"\n\n\"David Ben-Gurion's team is the best there is. They're all ex\u2013Israeli special forces surveillance experts, several of them Palestinian Arabs who know how to blend in.\"\n\n\"Not very well if Abdullah knew about your guy.\"\n\n\"David would have wanted them to see him. Abdullah can puff himself up like a caliph, but he knows perfectly well that with any hint of trouble, David could shut down his entire business. He's allowed to carry on only because there's a delicate balance to be maintained. The authorities stand back from business activities that they know are shady but have been part of the culture of this place for hundreds of years. And what Abdullah didn't know is that three of the Arabs squatting in the street outside were David's men. David had guessed where you'd be taking me from his earlier surveillance and had provided me with a phone with an emergency beacon. If I'd activated it, the response would have been instantaneous.\"\n\nRebecca looked away. \"I just wish you'd told me.\"\n\n\"That would have defeated the purpose, wouldn't it? You would have tried to shake him. That's probably what I would have done at your age.\"\n\n\"The difference between us is that my mother was from one of the oldest Camorra families in Naples. I know how to handle myself with these kinds of people. Remember how my mother died? They thought she was about to shop them to the police, and she suddenly became one family member too many. I know about boundaries and what happens if you cross them.\"\n\nJeremy coughed. \"It's a pity we don't have photos of that artifact.\"\n\nRebecca sighed, dug in her trousers pocket, and pulled out her phone and held it up so they could see as she scrolled through a series of images that showed the golden sheet from numerous angles in close-up. \"You didn't think I was going to leave without that, did you? As Abdullah said, he's the father of four daughters, and I know how to tug on those strings. During my previous visit, I told him I felt faint and asked for a glass of water. His son wasn't at his beck and call because he was at school, so Abdullah left me alone in the storeroom for a few minutes.\"\n\nJeremy gave Jack a rueful glance. \"Nice one, Rebecca.\"\n\nShe held the phone up to Jack. \"Well? What do you really think?\"\n\nJack's mind had been in a tumult since they had left Abdullah's lair. \"The last time I saw anything like that was on the floor of the Red Sea with Costas five days ago.\"\n\n\"You're certain it's genuine?\" Jeremy asked.\n\nJack nodded. \"Absolutely. And more than that, I'm sure that Maurice would confirm that it comes from the golden facing of an Egyptian war chariot. After our find in the Red Sea, I spent enough time looking at the chariot fragments and depictions with Maurice to be certain of it.\"\n\n\"Any theories?\"\n\n\"About how a piece of a chariot of Akhenaten mentioning the Israelites ends up in Jerusalem?\" Jack ducked sideways under an awning to avoid a passing army patrol, and the other two stopped beside him. \"Well, it's most likely to have been contemporary, brought here at the time of Akhenaten's reign or soon afterward. Maurice told me that a pharaoh's cartouche and any other identifying features were often beaten out of armor and other military embellishments after his death, to be replaced by those of his successor. The one way you might expect an artifact like this to survive is on the battlefield, as a consequence of an Egyptian defeat where the spoils were picked up by the victor. Akhenaten wasn't a great campaigning pharaoh, and in fact we know of only one major set-piece encounter, though it is one that can be counted as a resounding defeat, perhaps the worst disaster an Egyptian army ever suffered.\"\n\n\"The loss of the chariot army in the Red Sea,\" Jeremy said.\n\n\"It's the only plausible scenario.\"\n\n\"But if the Israelites had already fled from their cliff-top encampment, how do you account for the recovery of this object?\"\n\n\"Somebody stayed behind to watch,\" Jack said. \"Moses would have wanted confirmation that the deed was done, that his people could continue their trek northeast toward the Holy Land without the risk of further Egyptian attack. We know there must have been Israelite eyewitnesses because of the account of the destruction of the chariot army in the Book of Exodus, something we now know is based closely on fact. Lanowski's study of the Landsat imagery suggests that there could have been an old path leading down to the beach that Costas and I explored between our dives, immediately below the point where the chariot army had careered off the cliff and brought down a landslide with it. Imagine a couple of Israelite spies making their way down among the carnage afterward and finding a decorated wrecked chariot in the shallows, maybe that of a general. They could have recognized a hieroglyphic reference to the Israelites and wrenched that off to take back to Moses as evidence, an artifact that might later have been treasured as one of the small number of objects brought from Egypt to the Holy Land.\"\n\n\"Where it remained secretly buried somewhere until Wilson got his hands on it,\" Jeremy said.\n\nJack turned to Rebecca. \"Did he tell you anything more about its source?\"\n\nRebecca shook her head. \"One of Mamma's uncles told me that in the antiquities black market, asking any kind of question about artifact origins is a big taboo and will see you ending up like she did with a bullet in the back of your head. But I believe Abdullah's story. I've studied Gordon's _Reflections in Palestine_. He spent the best part of a year here in 1883, carrying out some very exacting exploration in and around Jerusalem but also undergoing something of a religious epiphany. He'd resigned from his governorship in the Sudan in a state of dismay about the lack of government support for his initiatives to help the people there. He never suspected that he'd be invited back the following year or end up where history has immortalized him. He was a close friend of Wilson, of Warren, and of the young Kitchener and the other British engineer officers who had worked on the survey of Palestine. I believe that this artifact might have been one of a number that he collected from them to take back to Jerusalem as part of his attempt to unlock the mysteries of this place, a project he could immerse himself in after his perceived failure in Sudan. I believe that following his abrupt recall to Sudan, he may have entrusted them to someone here, and after his death with nobody to claim them they were dispersed and sold. This one ended up in the hands of Abdullah's great-grandfather, also an antiquities dealer.\"\n\n\"Then how come he still has it?\" Jeremy said. \"It's a long time for a dealer to sit on something that would have considerable value, even as gold bullion.\"\n\n\"That happens,\" Rebecca replied. \"In Naples, artifacts are sometimes cached away for years, even decades, waiting for the right time for a sale, for the right person or an upturn in the market.\"\n\n\"Abdullah may have been waiting for something more,\" Jack said pensively, looking at Rebecca. \"He may have been waiting to dangle it in front of someone who might be tempted to go where he was unable to go, to find the place where Wilson had actually discovered the artifact and to see what else might lie there.\"\n\nRebecca suddenly seemed distracted, and looked back down the alley. \"Are we still being followed?\"\n\nJack nodded. \"By David's men, and probably Abdullah's. Everyone's always watching everyone else here. It's a place you can't disappear into, unless you really know where you're going.\"\n\n\"Underground,\" Rebecca said. \"That's where you need to go. Everything's just under the surface here: war, the truth behind religion, the reality of history. Jerusalem's riddled with natural caves and man-made tunnels, a honeycomb beneath your feet almost everywhere you step. Some archaeologists I've spoken to say there's nothing more to be found here, that every last fissure has been scraped clean by treasure hunters over the centuries. Others believe that the ban by the mosque authorities on exploration beneath Temple Mount has concealed untold treasures, the sacred relics of the temple and much else besides.\"\n\n\"The stuff Abdullah really wants to get his hands on,\" Jeremy said.\n\n\"Abdullah was being disingenuous when he lamented the ban. For him, the possibility of undiscovered treasure boosts the mystique of the place and keeps his customers coming back for more. Buy a coin or an oil lamp from Jerusalem and you buy into that dream. And there may be a blanket ban on official exploration beneath the Temple Mount, but those who supply him with antiquities operate outside the law and will always be trying to find a way in. Once they've gotten there, it would be a free-for-all, but with Abdullah poised to stake the biggest claim.\"\n\nJack peered at Rebecca. \"And he's canny enough to know that someone like you might be able to go to places along the temple precinct that would be denied to his people, and that you might be able to unlock vaults that would make him richer than his wildest dreams. That's what those Russian oligarchs really want\u2014the real treasure, not pots and coins\u2014and they'd compete with one another to own it. Abdullah truly would become the new caliph of the Jerusalem underworld, and you would have been his unwitting pawn.\"\n\n\"But I've used him, not the other way around. Let's move. We've only got a few hours until you have to leave.\"\n\nThey came out in front of the Western Wall precinct, the midday sun after the gloom of the alleyways reflecting blindingly off the white surface of the rock and making Jack squint and shade his eyes. A pair of Israeli Air Force F-16s shrieked overhead, banking right in the direction of the southern border with Gaza and Egypt. The police and army presence was stronger than he had ever seen it before, and the worshippers were limited to a few groups of Hasidic Jewish men with black hats and long hair who were bobbing and praying in front of the wall. Jack found himself hoping that the twelfth-century poet Yehuda Halevi of the Geniza letter had gotten here, that he had broken the Crusader ban on Jews entering the city and had touched the wall before he died, and had found the spiritual revelation that had eluded him in his life in Spain. The wall itself seemed impermeable, as if the shaped masonry were a natural extension of the bedrock, and Jack had to remind himself that like the mosque above it the wall was an accretion on a rock that had a far older history of human occupation than either of the two religions that claimed it.\n\nRebecca veered to the left to head back toward the city and the conjunction between the Western Wall and the medieval structures that abutted it. Jack followed, and caught up with her. \"Isn't the Temple Mount excavation to the right, at the City of David site?\"\n\nRebecca waved her hand dismissively and flashed him a smile. \"Been there, done that. I've got a new project.\"\n\nJack stared at the wall ahead. He remembered what Rebecca had said: _underground_. He had an ominous feeling, but one tinged with excitement. He had guessed where she might be taking them. Any political storm that he might have provoked by transgressing on forbidden territory in Egypt and Sudan would be nothing compared to the one Rebecca might be risking now.\n\nThey came to a halt in front of a stone archway, and Jeremy walked up alongside. \"Any hints, Rebecca? Any special equipment needed?\"\n\nShe hitched up her rucksack, kicked back on the heel of one boot, and stared determinedly at a man-sized crack in the wall in front of them. \"All I can say is, you haven't seen anything yet. Follow me.\"\n\n# CHAPTER 17\n\nJack squeezed sideways through the crack in the masonry and came out on a boardwalk that ran the interior length of the wall, at least twenty meters in either direction. They were inside a cavernous enclosed space between the outer medieval wall they had just penetrated and a continuation of the Western Wall of the Temple Mount. Its huge blocks were visible some ten meters in front of Jack and disappeared to the left under accretions of later structure.\n\nOn the ground in front of the wall was the exposed rock that formed the edge of Temple Mount, an area previously covered over with paving slabs of Roman appearance that were now stacked around the edges. Pockets of the rocky ground were under excavation, with hard-hatted archaeologists visible where the dolomite had been cut in prehistory to form tombs and underground dwellings. Rebecca beckoned Jack and Jeremy forward along the walkway to a table covered with files and cameras. A bearded man with a skullcap was working at a laptop. He smiled when he saw Rebecca, and then sprang to his feet when he saw Jack following. Rebecca quickly kissed his cheeks and took his hand. \"Shalom, Danny. My friend, Dr. Jeremy Haverstock, and my father.\"\n\nDanny shook their hands, and spoke quietly to Jack. \"It's an honor to meet you. Let me know if I can help in any way.\" He watched them as they each took a hard hat and a torch from the table and Rebecca led them along the final length of the boardwalk. She turned to Jack. \"Danny's the assistant director, in charge for today. I told him I wanted some time alone with you in my excavation, and he agreed not to broadcast your presence. It's a good thing the director's not around as he'd have been all over you. The rest of the team would have been clamoring to meet you, and we'd never have gotten anywhere.\"\n\nThe boardwalk ended where the outer wall and Western Wall began to converge, and the area of exposed bedrock reduced in width to less than five meters. They were a good twenty meters from the nearest excavator and well beyond the temporary lighting that had been set up over the main area. Rebecca led them out of sight behind a rocky knoll and then down an ancient rock-cut staircase some fifteen steps into the gloom. They passed several burial niches, rectilinear recesses cut into the rock, and then turned a corner in the passageway and came to a halt in front of a hole in the lower side wall only a little wider than Jack's body. Rebecca sat down, poked her legs inside, and then switched on the headlamp on her helmet. \"Okay,\" she said. \"Here goes.\"\n\nShe disappeared down the hole, followed by Jeremy. Jack eased himself behind, holding the rim of the rock with his fingers and feeling for the floor with his feet. \"Another six inches, Dad,\" Rebecca called up, her voice resonating in the chamber. Jack let himself slide down, twisting sideways to prevent his spine from being scraped, and landed in a low crouch. He looked around, his headlamp beam joining the other two, and could see immediately that they were inside an ancient rock-cut tomb, the walls showing some erosion from rainwater percolation but overall in a good state of preservation. One wall was partly covered by a hanging sheet and still had large sections of its plaster facing intact. A foldable plastic chair lay in front, and an array of cleaning tools and brushes were set alongside as well as a bucket half-filled with debris. The opposite wall from the entrance tunnel, in the direction of the Western Wall, was not rock-cut but instead was made up of a precarious-looking jumble of rubble, more like a rockfall than a deliberate construction.\n\nJack looked at Rebecca. \"Okay. Fill us in.\"\n\nRebecca nodded, and knelt beside the rubble wall. \"When I saw those initials on that artifact in Abdullah's storeroom and identified them as Charles Wilson, I immediately thought of Wilson's Arch, the feature abutting the Western Wall that was above us when we came into this place. It's named after Wilson because he uncovered it in 1867. If he was working there then, this seemed a good place to begin my search for places underground where he might have found that artifact, places dating to the later second millennium BC. By good fortune the Israelis have been carrying out extensive excavations and clearance as far as they can along the length of the Temple precinct at this point, so my next step was to get myself on the excavation team.\"\n\nJack cleared his throat. \"Let me see, that would normally take a degree in archaeology, probably a master's, a track record of several years, and impeccable references, not to speak of several months coming up the hard way washing potsherds and pushing wheelbarrows.\"\n\n\"Not if you're Jack Howard's daughter. Not if you've been seen on our films excavating at Troy and at Herculaneum. Two days after being accepted on the team, I had my own special hole in the ground, one that I'd selected myself.\"\n\n\"And how did you manage that?\"\n\n\"I took a page out of Uncle Hiemy's book. Maurice once told me that the best way to get to grips with an excavation is to go there at night when nobody else is around. So I sweet-talked my friend Doron, the night watchman, into letting me stay here one evening, and I spent the entire night searching every cavern and tunnel I could find in this place. I was looking for somewhere near the arch that looked as if it might once have led deeper into the rock, actually beneath the Western Wall. I finally broke my way into this tomb. That far wall of rubble was plastered over, but the plaster looked to me to be relatively recent, within the last couple hundred years rather than ancient. It _might_ have been put there by an excavator in the nineteenth century to seal up a discovery. That was nearly good enough for me to have a go breaking through, but I wanted some more definitive indication that this might have been Wilson's hole. So I looked carefully around, and I found this.\"\n\nShe reached up to a ledge and took down an old smoke-blackened tobacco pipe. She passed it to Jack, who turned it over in his hands. \"Intriguing,\" he said. \"Probably Victorian, pretty high-quality ebony. The kind of thing that British officers smoked.\"\n\n\"Take a look at the initials on the bowl.\"\n\nJack turned the pipe over and wiped away the dust. \"Well, I'll be damned,\" he exclaimed. \"CRW. It's Charles Richard Wilson.\"\n\n\"That's what clinched it for me,\" Rebecca said, her voice taut with pent-up excitement. \"I can just see him sitting here after he'd plastered up that hole, contemplating his golden find and the explorations he'd just undertaken beneath the Temple Mount. Smoking a pipe would have been a very British thing to do. Later he realizes he's left it inside on that ledge, but by then he's sealed up the entrance to the tomb as well and decides not to bother trying to retrieve it. He was probably having to act covertly as well, wary of men like Abdullah's great-grandfather and the other tomb robbers and shady characters trying to dig under Temple Mount at that time. He'd found something he wanted to conceal, and he was successful in doing that. What I found in there hadn't been disturbed since he left it.\"\n\n\"So how did you make this tomb your own?\" Jeremy asked.\n\n\"I rediscovered it\u2014so to speak\u2014the next day, after I'd asked to explore this corner of the excavation site, an area that hadn't yet been cleared. The night before, I'd also discovered this.\" She leaned over and carefully lifted the hanging sheet, revealing the remains of an ancient plastered wall with fragments of red fresco adhering to it. \"This was once a painted tomb, probably late prehistoric. I played up the fact that wall paintings were my specialty. The excavation director had seen me on TV helping Professor Dillen uncover the painting of the lyre player at Troy. I insisted that if I were to take this on, I'd need to do it alone and without disturbance because of the fragility of the fresco, and he agreed. I even insisted that there should be no electrical extension here, as the light might damage the painting. As a result I was able to break through Wilson's plaster and rubble fill without being seen, to get beyond and then to rebuild the rubble after returning.\"\n\n\"And you're going to take us through there again?\" Jeremy asked.\n\nShe turned to the rubble face, put her hand on a protruding rock, and glanced at them. \"Stay back.\" They shifted to the rear of the tomb, and Rebecca gingerly pulled at the stone. Nothing happened, and she tried again, this time more forcibly. Suddenly the entire wall shimmered and collapsed in a grinding roar, narrowly missing Rebecca as she leapt back in a cloud of dust. They all put their shirts to their mouths until the dust settled, and then stared at the black hole left in the wall where the rubble had been. Rebecca looked apologetically at them, her face white with dust. \"Whoops.\"\n\nA voice called down. \"Rebecca. Are you all right?\"\n\n\"Fine, Danny,\" Rebecca shouted back. \"Just spilled my bucket.\" She turned to Jack, whispering. \"That wasn't supposed to happen. I thought I'd balanced the rocks so they'd fall inward.\" She scrambled over the rubble, coughing in the dust, and peered through the hole in the wall. \"Okay. Everything looks stable beyond here. Headlamps to maximum.\"\n\nJack replaced Wilson's pipe on the shelf and brought up the rear, crawling forward behind Jeremy and bending to avoid a jagged rock sticking down from above. Any of his old discomfort about enclosed spaces was eclipsed by his concern that Rebecca might be taking them on a reckless adventure, but he was committed now and there was little sense in trying to hold her back unless the way ahead was clearly too dangerous. He came out at the beginning of a tunnel where Rebecca and Jeremy were crouched. \"What about the entrance?\" he said to Rebecca. \"We could be followed.\"\n\n\"The site director is away until tomorrow, and none of the other excavation teams come down my hole without being invited. It would take too long and be too noisy to rebuild that barrier, and we'd only have to take it down again when we go out. But Danny will see to it that we're undisturbed. And we don't need to be in here for more than twenty minutes.\"\n\nJeremy aimed his torch high, revealing an immense block of masonry above their heads. \"Are we where I think we are?\"\n\nRebecca nodded, her eyes ablaze. \"Directly beneath the Western Wall of Temple Mount.\" She pointed back the way they had come. \"That way is present-day Jerusalem. This way, we're crawling into three-thousand-year-old history.\"\n\n\"That way, we're legal,\" Jack said. \"This way, we're transgressing the strictest religious laws on the planet.\"\n\nRebecca peered at him. \"I've never known laws of _any_ description to put off Jack Howard.\"\n\nHe paused for a moment, giving Rebecca a long appraising stare, and then nodded. \"Okay. Just this time. We'll talk about boundaries later. You lead.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nFive minutes later they came out of the tunnel into a cavern at least five meters across, their headlamp beams dancing across the walls. Jack had noticed that the tunnel was scored with the marks of picks, whereas the cavern walls were irregular in shape, with cracks and fissures that rose out of sight and showed no obvious signs of being hewn by human hands.\n\n\"It's a natural cave,\" Rebecca said, echoing his thoughts. \"The rock beneath Jerusalem is riddled with them, where water has eroded away layers of softer rock within the dolomite. I read everything I could about the geology and archaeology of underground Jerusalem in the weeks before I came out here. But this cave is unusually large and well proportioned, the kind of place that could have served as a refuge for several dozen people or as a storeroom. The first thing I noticed was how smooth that outcrop of dolomite is in the center, like the sacred omphalos you showed me inside the Diktaean Cave in Crete. You can see that many hands must have worn it smooth, and that it has enough of a flat surface for objects to be placed on it.\"\n\n\"It must be an altar,\" Jeremy said.\n\nRebecca nodded excitedly. \"That's what I thought. And if you look around you can see apertures and fissures in the walls that could have served as niches for displaying sacred objects. But what really made my heart leap was seeing a patch of the wall that had been plastered over, with plaster of exactly the same color and composition as the plaster that Wilson used to seal the rubble wall that he put in place in the tomb after he left this area for the last time.\"\n\n\"Can you be certain he was here?\" Jeremy asked.\n\nRebecca nodded vehemently. \"This is where he found that piece of golden chariot decoration. I'm absolutely sure of it. I think he dug around in here and that's all he found, perhaps concealed in one of those niches. But I've no doubt that three thousand years ago there were more\u2014many more\u2014artifacts of similar age and origin, all of them of sacred significance to the people who stored them here. This was their holy of holies.\"\n\n\"What about the plaster?\" Jack asked. \"What did that conceal?\"\n\nShe beckoned them over to the far side of the chamber as she lit up a polished section of wall about a meter wide and half a meter high. Jack could see that it was covered with several dozen lines of written inscription, the letters alphabetic but spidery and difficult to discern. \"Fantastic,\" he exclaimed. \"I've seen something similar to this before, in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, taken from Jerusalem when the Ottomans ruled Palestine. It was found in the Siloam Tunnel near the Gihon Spring.\"\n\n\"Look closer, Dad.\"\n\nJack made his way past the altar stone, and as he did so he saw something else on the stone, faint lines and symbols that appeared to underlie the inscription. He stared, hardly believing what he was seeing. \"My God, Rebecca. Now I get it.\"\n\n\"It's the Aten sun symbol, the radiating arms,\" Jeremy exclaimed, coming alongside.\n\n\"And the symbols at the bottom are hieroglyphic cartouches,\" Rebecca said. \"You can barely make them out, but I'm sure they're identical to the groupings of symbols that Aysha showed me, one for Akhenaten and the other for Israelites.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Jack murmured, looking around. _\"Of course.\"_\n\nJeremy peered closely at the words of the inscription. \"It's Palaeo-Hebrew,\" he said. \"That puts it before the Babylonian period, before Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the first temple in the early seventh century BC. I think I recognize some of the words, but I haven't done Old Hebrew since I was an undergraduate. I'd need some time and some reference material.\"\n\n\"Don't worry, Jeremy. I'm one step ahead of you.\" Rebecca turned to Jack. \"I brought Danny in on this. When I found the inscription, all I recognized for certain was that sun symbol and the hieroglyphs, and I knew I was going to need someone else to translate it. Danny's got a PhD from Chicago in Near Eastern archaeology, and he's also a reserve captain in the Israeli Army intelligence corps. He knows perfectly well the need to keep this discovery absolutely secret until the time is right. He's the reason I've felt confident that nobody else would follow us down here, and he'll see that the entry tunnel from the tomb is completely sealed up after we leave.\"\n\n\"Go on,\" Jack said.\n\nShe pulled out her phone and opened up a paragraph of text. \"First, the date. You've probably guessed it, but this inscription is much older than the Babylonian period. The Siloam Tunnel inscription is thought to date to the eighth century BC, but Danny thinks that ours might be even earlier, ninth or even tenth century BC, right at the beginning of the Iron Age and the inception of Hebrew script. The sun symbol and the hieroglyphs are part of an _earlier_ inscription. Danny studied the wear and patination on the inscribed lines and reckons it could be two to three centuries earlier than the Palaeo-Hebrew writing, putting it close to the time of Akhenaten and the Exodus.\"\n\n\"It's like a palimpsest,\" Jack said. \"Like Yehuda Halevi's letter that Maria and I found in the Geniza, written on a reused piece of vellum that preserved a shadow of the original text. Only here no attempt was made to erase the earlier inscription.\"\n\nRebecca nodded. \"The Siloam inscription was made to commemorate the joining up of two tunnels, part of a complex dug to improve access to the spring. As you'll see, this inscription served a similar purpose. The tunnel we came in through was a later cutting into this chamber, and it continues on ahead of us to the east where it joins a natural fissure that must have been the original entrance from the surface when this was a holy place. The foreman of the tunnel gang may have chosen this slab simply because there's no other suitable flat surface inside this chamber, so it was ready-made for a new inscription. The sun symbol and the hieroglyphs already there would probably have meant nothing to him, though as you'll see there was a memory of the earlier significance of this place.\"\n\nJeremy stared at the inscription. \"I can see it now. There are numbers, cubits. And I recognize the word for water.\"\n\n\"Here's Danny's translation.\" Rebecca read out from her screen:\n\n> _This is the way the tunnel was joined. As the men were wielding their pickaxes, each toward the other, and while there were yet three cubits to the breach, the foreman could see through an opening to the cavern ahead, and beyond it another tunnel. On the day of the breach, the men struck hard, pickax beside pickax, and broke through. Down below, the water flowed from the spring to the pool, a distance of one thousand cubits. In the cavern, one hundred and fifty cubits was the height of the rock above the men. I, Yeshua-hamin, foreman, made this with my team. In the days of the king Abdu-Heba, this was the place occupied by the prophet when he came from Egypt_.\n\nThere was a stunned silence. \"Incredible,\" Jack said. \"Are we really talking about Moses?\"\n\n\"That's what Danny thinks the word he translates as 'prophet' would have meant to people at the time.\"\n\n\"Abdu-Heba,\" Jeremy murmured. \"Wasn't he the king of Jerusalem at the time of the Amarna letters?\"\n\n_\"Precisely,\"_ Rebecca said, her eyes lit with fervor. \"The Amarna letters were cuneiform tablets found in Akhenaten's capital that included an archive of correspondence from foreign rulers swearing allegiance to the pharaoh, and at least six of them are from Jerusalem. Listen to this one.\" She read from her screen.\n\n> _To the Pharaoh, my Lord, say: thus Abdu-Heba, your servant. At the two feet of my Lord, the Pharaoh, seven times and seven times more I fall. Behold, the Pharaoh has set his name in m\u00e2t urusalim, the Land of Jerusalem, forever_.\n\nRebecca looked up. \"That's Amarna Letter number 287, lines 60 to 64. The others are in a similar vein, obsequious, almost fawning, as if the pharaoh had threatened him. But why should the pharaoh have done so, to the extent that Abdu-Heba felt the need to swear allegiance over and over again?\"\n\nJeremy looked at her. \"The land of Canaan was a battleground for the Egyptians and the Assyrians and the Hittites, with citadels like Jerusalem acting as pawns for one side or another. Alliances with the big powers were the name of the game for a king like Abdu-Heba.\"\n\n\"That may be true for the New Kingdom period in general,\" Rebecca replied pensively. \"But I've been listening to everything you guys have been saying about Akhenaten over the last couple of months. He bucks the trend. He's _not_ a bellicose pharaoh. He makes a halfhearted attempt to suppress a tribal rebellion in the southern desert, and he waves his hand in the direction of Assyria. His only fixed battle that we know of is his disastrous chariot charge against the Israelite encampment beside the Red Sea. Ramses the Great he definitely is not. So why pick on a relatively minor settlement in the Jordan Valley and insist that its ruler swear undying allegiance to him, over and over again?\"\n\n\"Because he was securing a safe haven for Moses and the Israelites,\" Jack said quietly.\n\n\"You've got it,\" Rebecca said, putting away her phone. \"And this is where they came, to a natural cave just outside the walls of Bronze Age Jerusalem, a place where they could establish their first primitive altar and store their sacred artifacts. A place that was rapidly superseded once their new religion swept through the population of Jerusalem and they built the first temple atop this site, all those cubits above us, the memory of the cave lasting long enough for the foreman of that excavation team a couple of hundred years later to know its significance, but was then sealed up and lost to history until a British officer broke his way into it more than twenty-five hundred years later.\"\n\nJack gazed around, breathing in the dust of ages, savoring the history. _Moses had been here_. He put his hand on Rebecca's shoulder. \"Congratulations. This is a phenomenal discovery. A game changer. And you've really put your heart and soul into this one.\"\n\nShe stared at him, her eyes passionate. \"This isn't about clues, Dad. You've already got what you need for the next stage of your quest. This is about the point of it all. After finding this, after sitting here beside that altar, I began to understand what drove men like Wilson and Gordon to keep coming back to Jerusalem and to seek Akhenaten in the desert. I thought back two years ago to your extraordinary discovery of the birthplace of the gods beside the Black Sea, of the first stone temples erected at the dawn of civilization. Then, the shamanism and superstitions of the hunter-gatherers were discarded, and people looked to a new spirituality. But in time that optimism was clouded by the power games of priests and priest-kings, and then one pharaoh had the courage to do away with it all and try to start afresh. I don't think the revelation of the one god came to Akhenaten out of the blue. I think he was yearning for it. It allowed him to be human again, to discard the sham of deified kings and priests. This place, the vision it represents, the presence of the prophet who would perpetuate their shared revelation, would have represented a sea change in his world. And now three thousand years later we are again at a turning point. That's why I wanted you to see this, Dad. Just like those Victorian soldiers fighting the Mahdi, you're about to go into a pit of darkness where religion has again been enlisted to justify bestiality and war. Bringing you here was to remind you that there can be hope, that another spiritual awakening is possible, another cleansing. That's what I believe Wilson and Gordon and the others caught up in their war felt too, and what they so desperately hoped to find.\"\n\nHer eyes were red rimmed, and she looked away and wiped them. Jack felt an unexpected upwelling of emotion. Hiebermeyer was not the only one whose guard had been eroded by the events of the past weeks and months, and Jack realized that he had been on edge for too long, that his body and mind craved the resolution that now lay ahead of him one way or another in the coming days. He thought of Rebecca's mother, of the passion of her convictions that had attracted so many to her, and for a split second he seemed to see Elizabeth standing in the shadows behind Rebecca, the same fervor in her eyes, egging her daughter on. He blinked, and the image was gone, and Jack felt a sudden yawning emptiness that he had not allowed himself to feel in the years since her death. He swallowed hard, and nearly said something to Rebecca, but chose not to. There would be a better time. He glanced at his watch and put his hand back on her shoulder. \"Time for me to go.\"\n\nJeremy aimed his headlamp beyond the inscription, toward the blocked-up entrance where the tunnel continued under Temple Mount. \"Any thoughts about what lies beyond there?\"\n\nRebecca wiped her eyes again and gazed along his beam. \"Danny and I think it's blocked up. I mean _seriously_ blocked up, not just rubble and plaster but actual shaped masonry, huge slabs of stone barring the way. To get through it would require pneumatic drills and explosives, and that would rock the foundations of the mosque. A very big no-no.\"\n\n\"Must be something pretty significant for it to have been blocked up like that.\"\n\n\"Danny's done some basic geometry and reckons is leads directly under the central part of the temple site.\"\n\n\"Where you might expect there to be a repository,\" Jack said.\n\n\"A treasure chamber,\" Jeremy added.\n\nJack looked at Rebecca. \"This one's all yours. For the future.\"\n\nRebecca gave him a wry look. \"I'm not really sure about being an archaeologist. Too much dust and dead old stuff.\"\n\nJack raised his eyes and grinned at Jeremy. \"Right.\"\n\nRebecca suddenly looked serious, and held Jack's arm. \"Aysha sent me a text yesterday about the Egyptian girl, Sahirah. Jeremy and I took her around when she came to England last year to study with Maria.\" She pulled out her phone and showed Jack a photo taken in front of the lions in Trafalgar Square, with Rebecca on the left and beside her an attractive, well-dressed girl with a computer bag slung over her shoulder. Jack had never met Sahirah, and this was the first time he had seen a picture of her. He stared at the dark eyes and Egyptian features, imprinting them in his memory. It was like looking at the exquisitely lifelike portraits that Hiebermeyer had found painted on mummy coffins from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, images that gave sudden humanity to the distant past. Sahirah's face was like a beacon of light in the darkness that was enveloping Egypt, a darkness that Jack knew would soon be streaked with fire and running with blood.\n\nRebecca put away the phone. \"You will get her out, won't you, Dad?\"\n\nJack looked at her, silent for a moment. He thought of Sahirah's parents, of her father, of the anguish they must be going through, seeing their daughter trapped in a tide of history that must seem to them unstoppable. He gave Rebecca a steely look. \"That's really why I'm going back to Egypt. And Aysha is doing everything she can.\"\n\nHe gave her a quick embrace and shook hands with Jeremy. \"My advice is that you photograph every square inch of this place and leave as soon as you can. If I don't see Danny on the way out, give him my warmest regards and an invitation to IMU to discuss the future of your find. He'll know that if word of this discovery under the mosque leaks out, the extremists of both sides will be at each other's throats. It sounds as if he'll be able to wrap things up for you here. David's men will be waiting outside the Western Wall to take you away to a safe house, and after that you'll be put on a flight out of Tel Aviv back to London. Under no circumstances should you make contact with Abdullah the antiquities dealer or his men, who will also be somewhere outside waiting to induce you back into his lair. As far as they know, we've just been visiting the Israeli excavation.\"\n\n\"Don't worry, Dad. I'm on it.\" Rebecca took out her DSLR camera, set the controls, and began photographing. Meanwhile Jeremy knelt down and began sketching the inscription. Jack started to make his way out through the tunnel, but then thought for a moment and turned back. \"And Rebecca.\"\n\nShe glanced back at him, camera poised over the altar. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Look after Jeremy.\" He flashed her a smile and turned back to the tunnel. A few minutes later he was out of the tomb and walking quickly past the Israeli excavators toward the shafts of sunlight he could see coming through the entrance from the Western Wall. He saw Danny on a photo gantry above the excavation and gave him a quick wave. His mind was already on the task ahead, on the trip from the coast of Israel to _Sea Venture_ and then to Alexandria. He would be going back to the brewing firestorm that he hoped against hope had not yet ignited, that would still allow him and Costas the time they needed to complete their quest.\n\nHe strode into the dazzling light of the afternoon, and immediately spotted David and two of his men waiting beside a car on the far side of the square.\n\n_This was it_.\n\n# PART 4\n\n# CHAPTER 18\n\n# **A LEXANDRIA, EGYPT**\n\nJack stepped out on to the helipad beside Qaitbey Fort a little over six hours after leaving Rebecca in Jerusalem. The paradrop from the Israeli Air Force Hercules had gone without a hitch, and minutes after being picked up from the Mediterranean by a Zodiac from _Sea Venture_ , he had been strapped into the Lynx helicopter for the eighty-mile flight due south to Alexandria.\n\nThe city was still under its elected administration but now close to anarchy, and they had decided to fly in at night under the radar screen in order to minimize the chances of interference from any Egyptian police or coastal surveillance units that might remain functional. As Jack ducked away from the rotor downdraft, he saw a small stack of crates beside the edge of the helipad. He knew from the pilot that they contained the final batch of material from the institute, and that the next scheduled flight of the helicopter out of here would be its last. It would carry Hiebermeyer and Aysha to safety with their last precious records from Egypt.\n\nAcross the harbor, the first glow of dawn silhouetted the disk shape of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and the streaks of pastel red lit up the water and the bobbing rows of fishing boats moored across the basin. It seemed a timeless scene, yet Jack knew it was an illusion. He walked through the fort entrance into the courtyard and saw Costas, who had preceded him from _Sea Venture_ by several hours and was crouched over several large kit bags. He gestured for Jack to come over.\n\n\"Everything's ready. Two E-suits, and two oxygen rebreather backpacks with double cylinders, giving us about five hours' endurance. We also have the first two prototypes of my new UPD-4 underwater propulsion device, able to go underwater or skim along the surface. It's the only way we're going to get three kilometers underground from the river edge to the pyramid plateau, assuming we can even get through the tunnel entrance.\"\n\n\"Has Lanowski gotten us some coordinates?\"\n\n\"He's inside waiting to tell us.\"\n\n\"And the kit bags?\"\n\nCostas jerked his head toward the harbor. \"Aysha's uncle Mohammed has a motorized felucca. He and his son are coming any time now to take the bags and stow them out of sight. He's going to take us up the Nile past Cairo to our insert point. We'll be travelling in daylight, but that means we'll be less conspicuous among the other daytime traffic on the river than we would be at night. It'll give us a chance to get some rest before the night ahead.\"\n\n\"What's our departure time?\"\n\n\"He wants to leave at 0800. That's two hours from now. The Lynx is scheduled to leave later in the morning to give Maurice and Aysha a chance to do a final shutdown on this place, but that might be ramped forward if things heat up.\"\n\n\"Is that likely?\"\n\n\"There've been shootings and explosions through the night. Mostly it's been gangs of local men taking on the extremists who have been embedded here and making their presence known over the past few days. But there are additional gunmen poised to take over in the event of a coup. I've just spoken to Ben on the satellite phone, and the latest intel is that there's a forward camp just inside the Libyan border comprising several hundred men with pickup trucks, almost certainly tasked to take Alexandria. They'll be joined by much larger groups heading up from Sudan toward Cairo. The Egyptian military has been so extensively infiltrated by extremist sympathizers that it's no longer an effective defensive force for the government. Once the gunmen arrive, all resistance will crumble and this place will go over to the dark side. It could happen at any time.\"\n\n\"Did Ben say anything about the situation with the girl in Cairo?\"\n\n\"He hasn't been able to raise the antiquities director or his intel contact in Cairo. The deadline for a response is 1230 this morning Egyptian time. It doesn't look promising, Jack, but we have to hold on until then. I know that Aysha's got another option.\"\n\nJack grunted. \"Okay. Let's hear what Lanowski has to say.\"\n\nCostas took a swaddled package from the top of one of the kit bags and handed it to Jack. \"Three extra magazines loaded personally by me, and the Beretta stripped and oiled. I've got a Glock and a few other goodies from _Sea Venture_. If we're caught out, we can't surrender to these people, Jack. By the time the coup's in full swing, they won't be taking any prisoners.\"\n\nJack strapped on the holster, took out the Beretta, ejected and then replaced the magazine, pulled the slide to the rear and released it to chamber a round, and then replaced it in the holster. \"Okay,\" he said. \"Let's move.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nFifteen minutes later they stood with Aysha and Hiebermeyer behind Lanowski, who was sitting in front of the last remaining computer console in the operations room. Everything else was bare, the books and files and posters gone. All that remained beside the computer on the desk was an open briefcase and a satellite phone. Jack leaned over and stared at the image of the radiating Aten symbol from the plaque that Lanowski had just opened up on the screen. It showed the additional fragment with the line running to a point where the depiction showed the River Nile. \"We've got a little over an hour before the felucca is ready,\" he said. \"I want everything you've got on those Nile coordinates, but before that I want a full operational briefing, everything we know about the archaeology under that plateau. This is the last chance we've got.\"\n\nHiebermeyer unrolled a map from the briefcase showing the Giza plateau, the Nile, and the southern Cairo suburbs in between. \"All right, Jack. During the 1980s an international company was hired to construct a new sewage system under the Giza suburb, to the south of old Cairo abutting the pyramid plateau. It was an unparalleled opportunity for archaeology, promising the kind of revelations we've seen in Athens with construction work in advance of the Olympics or in Istanbul with the new Bosporus tunnel terminus. But the need to get those sewers done was truly desperate, and corners were cut. We got a tantalizing glimpse of what might lie beneath, nothing more. I was a student at the time and managed to join the archaeological team monitoring the work.\"\n\n\"Unofficially, as I recall,\" Jack said. \"Your supervisor wanted you to finish your doctorate, but you wanted a finger in everything going on in Egypt. The antiquities director at the time point-blank refused you a permit. Had your best interests at heart.\"\n\n\"Not the way I saw it at the time,\" Hiebermeyer said, shaking his head in frustration. \"If I'd had another couple of hours out there, we might be a lot closer to our objective right now. I was appalled at how the investigation was shut down as soon as the construction work was finished and all the holes were backfilled. Today it's all completely buried beneath the suburb that now laps the Giza plateau itself. But the night guard at the most interesting site was a friend of mine, and he let me inside on the final night before it was filled in. What I found was fascinating, though of course I couldn't tell anyone about it as I was there illegally. At the time I had bigger fish to fry, or so I thought, and I set it aside in my mind. But it suddenly makes sense. This is _huge_ , Jacob.\"\n\nLanowski tapped a key, and an aerial photo of the Giza plateau appeared on the screen, showing the three pyramids and the Sphinx, the mass of lesser structures and excavated foundations in front of the Great Pyramid, and in the foreground the sprawling buildings of the modern suburb. Lanowski tapped again and the scene transformed into an isometric computer-generated image with a reconstructed overlay showing the plateau with the ancient structures intact. The modern suburb had disappeared, replaced by regular cultivated fields, and suddenly the jumble of ruins in front of the pyramids made sense, with rectilinear buildings, courtyards, and linked causeways. The most striking addition on the edge of the floodplain in front of the pyramids was a large man-made basin and a complex of canals, one of them leading to an irregular waterway about a kilometer east of the plateau that was clearly a branch of the Nile.\n\n\"Give us a rundown, Maurice,\" Costas said.\n\n\"Okay. You've got the three pyramids, Khufu, Khafre, Menkaure, largest to smallest, north to south. They're on the edge of a plateau called the Mokkatam Formation, a limestone ridge that rises at this point about fifty meters above the modern suburb. To the east of the plateau is the ancient floodplain of the Nile, to the west the open desert. The limestone is easily quarried and easily tunnelled. The plateau to the east of the Pyramid of Menkaure is completely free of ancient structures, leaving the raised plateau in front bare over almost a square kilometer until you drop down into the floodplain.\"\n\n\"You mean where we would have been looking when we were suspended beneath the pyramid, facing east?\" Costas asked. \"Where we were looking down the blocked-up tunnel?\"\n\nHieberemeyer nodded. \"First, let's look at what we can see aboveground. This image shows the plateau as it might have looked during the New Kingdom, about the time of Akhenaten, over a thousand years after the pyramids were built. Originally each pyramid would have been fronted by a mortuary temple, and then a further temple\u2014really a kind of entrance portico\u2014on the floodplain below. The two were joined by a causeway. But by the time of the New Kingdom, the mortuary complexes for the Pyramids of Menkaure and Khafre had been removed, and everything was focused on the structures associated with the Great Pyramid. By then, of course, the use of these structures as mortuary temples, to prepare the bodies of the pharaohs for the afterlife, was ancient history, and I mean _really_ ancient history. People tend to think of Pharaonic Egypt as a continuum where everything can be lumped together, whereas in fact we're dealing with a time span between the construction of the pyramids and the time of Akhenaten\u2014similar to that between, say, the end of the Roman period and the present day. In such a huge expanse of time, we should expect monuments to change in meaning and function.\"\n\nJack nodded. \"So what began as communities of priests perpetuating the memory of the three individual pharaohs\u2014Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure\u2014becomes a unified cult of the ancient pharaohs, centering on the one complex associated with the Great Pyramid. The other temples become redundant.\"\n\n\"And more than that,\" Hiebemeyer enthused, \"the entire _cult_ could have become redundant.\" He paused, standing back. \"What is it that fascinates us most about the pyramids? It's not so much the dead pharaohs, but the engineering marvel and the geometry of the alignments, the relationships in particular to the sun. Egyptians of the New Kingdom would have been as awestruck by these ancient monuments as we are today, and would have been well aware of the celestial alignments. They would have celebrated them. It's my belief that the cult of the pharaohs would have been largely subsumed by a cult of the Sun, of Ra and the other sun gods, a transition that could have taken place already by the beginning of the New Kingdom.\"\n\n\"And that brings us to Akhenaten,\" Costas murmured. \"And to how it was that plaques showing the Aten sun symbol could have been placed inside the burial chamber of Menkaure, something that would have been impossible while his cult was still alive.\"\n\nHiebermeyer nodded, and pointed at the screen. \"Let's look at these structures in front of the Great Pyramid first. This is what was revealed during the sewer construction. What was _officially_ revealed, that is. First, a mass of mud-brick buildings that was undoubtedly part of the town that sprang up to house the workers and then the priests who maintained the cult. Second, the remains of a huge mud-brick wall, the so-called palace. Third, the massive basalt revetment of the man-made harbor abutting the valley temple, joined to the Nile by canals wide enough to float barges with stone blocks up to the harbor and later for the ceremonial final boat journey of the dead pharaoh from the Nile to the mortuary temple.\"\n\nCostas pointed at a sinuous channel shown to the east of the harbor. \"You mean here?\"\n\n\"That's the Bar el-Libeini, the projected line of a channel of the Nile in Old Kingdom times. Since then it's silted up, and the main channel of the river has progressively migrated east, except in a few places where it has remained in more or less its ancient position. The man-made canals have also been lost, but they would have been huge engineering feats in their own right.\"\n\n\"What all this shows,\" Jack said thoughtfully, \"is that the construction of some kind of passage between the Nile and the Giza plateau, an underground passage, would have been perfectly feasible, and our idea that those radiating lines on the Aten symbol might map out its course is within the realm of possibility.\"\n\n\"More than that, Jack. It's a dead certainty.\"\n\n\"Go on.\"\n\nHiebermeyer took a deep breath, steadying his excitement. \"I've listed the _official_ discoveries. Well, now for the unofficial ones.\" He reached under the computer table, felt around for a moment, and then pulled out a book-sized slab of highly polished granite, the end of a hieroglyphic cartouche deeply cut in its surface. He placed it carefully on the table beside him and then swept his hand across the surface. \"This has been my guilty secret for all these years. I've been waiting for the right time to reveal it, and this is it. I've got nothing to lose.\"\n\nCostas peered at it. \"There's that bird, the Egyptian buzzard. And the mouth, the face, and the half sun. The rest I don't recognize.\"\n\nHiebemeyer's voice was taut with excitement, and his hand was trembling as he traced out the hieroglyphs. \"I found this that night in the trench beside the huge mud-brick wall. This is why I said the _so-called_ palace; it's because it wasn't a palace. There are three certain words here. One is _secrets_. Another is _writing_. Another is _storeroom_ , or _repository_. The only other person I've shown this to is Aysha, who happens to be my best hieroglyphics expert. She's certain it means _storeroom of written secrets_.\"\n\nThere was a stunned silence. \"My God,\" Jack whispered. \"A _library_.\"\n\nHiebermeyer stared at Jack, his face flushed. \"I always objected to the word _palace_. A closer approximation would be monastery, a place where priests lived and worked. And just like medieval monasteries, the priestly colleges of ancient Egypt would have been repositories of knowledge. Do you remember the Temple of Sais in the Nile Delta, where Solon the Greek heard the Atlantis story? By that stage, half a millennium after Akhenaten, the old knowledge had become fragmented, parcelled among many temples, jealously guarded by the priests and passed down only by word of mouth. The first Macedonian king of Egypt, Ptolemy I, tried to rectify that with his establishment of the great library at Alexandria, though by then much of the old knowledge had died after the closure of the last of the ancient temples. But I believe that he was inspired by a memory of a great centralized repository, a great library, that had existed far back in the glory days of the pharaohs, in the New Kingdom at the time of Akhenaten and his son, Tutankhamun.\"\n\n\"And where better than at Giza,\" Jack murmured. \"The great center for the worship of the sun god during the New Kingdom, and before that of the earliest pharaohs. A place of continuous occupation by a priestly caste for over two thousand years, priests who could safeguard a repository of knowledge through the centuries.\"\n\n\"And if this was a library, it could have been the earliest library on this scale anywhere,\" Hiebermeyer exclaimed. \"That mud-brick wall dates back to the Old Kingdom, to soon after the construction of the Great Pyramid, about 2500 BC. That's over a thousand years before the heyday of the New Kingdom, before Akhenaten. Imagine what such a repository might have contained: all the knowledge passed down from Egyptian prehistory, from the time of the first hieroglyphic texts of the previous millennium as well as the oldest writings of Mesopotamia. And we're not just talking about funerary texts, sacred mantras, Books of the Dead, and all the familiar religious tracts, but about material that predates and transcends all that: the earliest sagas and histories, accounts of exploration and discovery, lost medicinal knowledge. Ptolemy's library at Alexandria would have been only a pale shadow of that.\"\n\n\"But like Ptolemy's library, it could have acted as a magnet for other collections, an accumulator,\" Jack said, his mind racing. \"I'm thinking about something else, Maurice, about the Minoan queen of Egypt in the fifteenth century BC, about your theory of her legacy in the bloodline that led to Akhenaten and the other great New Kingdom pharaohs. Maybe the Minoan legacy in Egypt wasn't just about a dynasty and a mercenary army of amazons. Maybe it was far more profound than that, a legacy of preserved knowledge that passed to Egypt after the volcano of Thera destroyed Cretan civilization and the priests fled over the sea to the south from their ruined palaces.\"\n\nHiebermeyer nodded. \"Palaces, but not palaces. People have wondered about the function of the Minoan palaces ever since they were discovered, about the complexes of storerooms, about the labyrinth.\"\n\nJack closed his eyes for a moment. \"Imagine what that might contain.\"\n\n\"But then it was all lost,\" Costas said.\n\nHiebermeyer tapped the screen where the image showed the empty limestone plateau in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure. \"Maybe. Or maybe it's still there. Maybe it went _underground_.\"\n\nJack stared, his mind racing. _Of course_. \"Ahkenaten's City of Light,\" he exclaimed. \"It's exactly what Akhenaten would do. He's a pharaoh who's created a whole new religion, who has built himself a new capital at Amarna, who has dedicated massive new temples at Luxor and Heliopolis. Refounding the library at Giza, removing it to a more secure location from that old mud-brick complex, bringing it under the aegis of his new cult center to the Aten and putting it underground would be completely in keeping with his vision. Jacob, can we see your plan again?\"\n\nLanowski tapped a key, and the image transformed to the Aten symbol from the plaques with the pyramids behind, transposed on the actual topography of the plateau. \"It fits exactly,\" Jack said. \"The central sun symbol falls exactly on the plateau in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure, the place from which the rays emanate. That's got to be it.\" He glanced at Costas. \"That must be what we saw down in the tunnel under the pyramid.\"\n\nCostas nodded. \"Lit up by sunlight coming through those air shafts in the pyramid, reflected off polished basalt mirrors that magnified it somewhere deep beneath the plateau.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Jack said. \"Now for the egress point of that tunnel on the Nile.\"\n\nLanowski reeled off a twelve-figure set of coordinates. \"That pinpoints it to within twenty meters. I simply superimposed the image of the plaque on a modern map, maintaining the exact alignments of the pyramids.\"\n\nCostas peered at the map dubiously. \"You really think it can be that accurate?\"\n\nHiebermeyer and Lanowski both turned and stared at him. Jack put a hand on his shoulder, grinning. \"You want to watch what you say. We're outnumbered by Egyptologists here.\"\n\n\"I think,\" said Lanowski slowly, eyeing Costas, \"given that the ancient Egyptians were able to align a pyramid with geometrical precision, if they really intended this to be a map, then we can trust them.\"\n\nCostas raised his hands. \"I was only asking. Mea culpa.\"\n\nLanowski tapped a key, and a satellite image of Lower Egypt came into view. The Nile Delta and Cairo were clearly visible above the belt of green that marked the course of the river through the desert. He tapped repeatedly, coming closer and closer to a point on the Nile to the south of Cairo. \"Google Maps is still down for Egypt, but I kept open the link to Landsat that my friend at Langley sent me when I was researching the Red Sea chariots site. Take a look at this. My coordinates come out almost exactly on this ruined structure half fallen into the Nile. Aysha?\"\n\n\"My research shows that it's early nineteenth century, thought to have been built by Napoleon's forces when they took Egypt,\" she said. \"It would have been a ruin by the time Corporal Jones and Chaill\u00e9-Long and the French diver undertook their foray in 1892. There's nothing else like it on that stretch of the west bank of the Nile. There's no doubt that this is the fort they saw and that Howard Carter mentioned in his diary entry. The entrance to Akhenaten's tunnel should lie somewhere very close to that spot.\"\n\n\"Bingo,\" Lanowski said quietly.\n\nJack's excitement was mounting. \"Good work, Jacob. Now let's do some geomorphology on this. We need to be thinking about the water level.\"\n\n\"I'm already there,\" Lanowski replied, his eyes gleaming. \"Obviously, there's the issue of changes in the course of the Nile over three thousand years. But this is one of those places where the position of the bank has been almost static, as we can infer from the discovery of the tunnel entrance apparently below the modern bank of the river.\"\n\n\"It might not have been chance,\" Costas said thoughtfully. \"Akhenaten's engineers must have known their river intimately. If they were going to build a tunnel entrance, they'd have chosen somewhere stable.\" He glanced at Jacob. \"After all, these were the guys who built the pyramids. You said it.\"\n\nLanowski turned to Costas, his face suffused with pleasure. \" _Very_ good, Costas. You're learning.\"\n\n\"What about the river level?\" Jack asked.\n\n\"The latest sedimentological research suggests that the New Kingdom floodplain was lower than has generally been believed, though of course we have to factor in the annual flooding and lowering of the Nile that's now controlled by the Aswan Dam. My calculations suggest that a tunnel built into the bedrock at that point could have been dry for part of the year, and partly flooded for the remaining months when it might have been navigable.\"\n\n\"You mean an underground canal,\" Jack said. \"Something that would have allowed barges to be poled or wall-walked right up to the pyramid plateau.\"\n\n\"Exactly. We've already seen a precedent for it in the canals and artificial harbors dug for each of the pyramids when they were constructed, only they were aboveground.\"\n\n\"But our tunnel doesn't lead to a mortuary temple,\" Hiebermeyer added.\n\n\"What about the present water level?\" Jack asked.\n\n\"My model suggests that the tunnel will be completely submerged, though it may well rise once it reaches the plateau. It will connect with passageways and chambers that have always been above the water level and remain dry today. Ground-penetrating radar survey in the past has revealed nothing like this under the plateau in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure, but that may only reflect the limitations of the technology. It would be possible for the roof of the chambers to be many meters deep, beyond the range of the radar, but for the chambers still to be above the water table. And there's no doubt that they exist. You and Costas saw through to some kind of space when you were under the pyramid.\"\n\n\"I just hope you can break through from the Nile,\" Lanowski said. \"When that French diver blew his way in over a hundred years ago, he may have caused a rock slide.\"\n\n\"We can't know that until we get there,\" Jack said, squinting at Costas. \"And my colleague usually has a few bits and pieces up his sleeve.\"\n\n\"C5,\" Costas said. \"A diver's best friend. I used it to liberate a few slabs from _Sea Venture_ 's armaments store.\"\n\nHiebermeyer was still staring at the screen. \"Do you really think you can make it? I mean, more than three kilometers through that tunnel, completely underwater?\"\n\nCostas nodded. \"Physically, yes. As long as the tunnel is clear beyond the entrance, as long as our scooters work, and as long as our rebreathers hold out.\"\n\n\"But?\"\n\n\"I can't help thinking of those who have gone before us. The only ones we know about were the Caliph Al-Hakim and Corporal Jones. The first is apparently dead somewhere down there, and the other one was seriously unhinged by the experience. And our first foray under the pyramid was hardly auspicious. We saw the light once, but maybe that's all the pharaoh will allow us.\"\n\nLanowski glanced at him. \"You're in the wrong movie, Costas. This isn't the one with the curses, the flesh-eating scarabs, and the zombie mummies. Akhenaten ditched all the old religion, remember? He was above all that.\"\n\nCostas gave him a wry look. \"Yeah, and this is the one with the extremist fanatics, the public executions, and impending Armageddon. Given the choice, I think I'd take swarms of locusts and come-alive mummies over that.\"\n\nAysha's phone hummed, and she took it out of her pocket. \"We've got reception back. It won't last, so let me check on the latest.\" She tapped the screen, waited, stared at the image that came up, and then scrolled quickly down. \"You need to see this, all of you. It's on the news, now. Our time may be tighter than we thought.\"\n\n# CHAPTER 19\n\nAysha propped her phone on the computer so they could all see the screen, and Hiebermeyer sat forward. He gripped the armrests of his chair, his knuckles white with tension. \"It's from Al Jazeera, their Arabic service,\" Aysha said. \"It's live.\"\n\nJack leaned over and stared. Above the footer with breaking news was a scene that looked like the aftermath of a terrorist attack, the foreground filled with flashing lights and emergency vehicles in front of a high perimeter fence. The headline said \"Giza, live.\" The camera zoomed in beyond the fence to the looming forms of the three pyramids. Suddenly there was a white flash in front of the smaller of the pyramids, and then another. \"That looks like white phosphorus, probably grenades,\" he murmured. \"Phosphorus won't bring anything down, but if they use it on the pyramids, it'll blacken the stone and make them seem as if they're on fire.\"\n\n\"It's a portent of what's to come,\" Hiebermeyer muttered. \"Next time they'll pack the burial chambers with high explosive.\"\n\n\"Isn't that our pyramid?\" Costas said. \"The Pyramid of Menkaure?\"\n\nHiebermeyer nodded. \"The one that Saladin's son tried to dismantle in 1196, so they're taking up where he left off. Look what the new report says. They've been chanting 'Saladin, Saladin.' They may be threatening to do this to the smaller pyramid now, but next time it'll be the Great Pyramid.\"\n\nAysha switched on the speaker and listened intently to the report, in Arabic. \"Apparently it's the same militant cleric who's been threatening this ever since the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001,\" she said, switching the sound off again. \"It seems that his thugs managed to break their way through the perimeter fence about an hour ago in a convoy of pickup trucks, and now they're in an armed standoff with the police at the entrance to the plateau. The police have no interest in a firefight, and anyway their senior officers have been infiltrated by the extremists, just like the army. As for our beloved antiquities director, Al Jazeera has managed to track him down at home halfway through packing to leave. He was a political nobody before the current regime came into power, and I expect right now he's bitterly regretting having accepted the position. With the media spotlight on him, he's been forced to return to the ministry in Cairo, where I don't imagine he'll last long.\"\n\n\"I've read the Qur'\u0101n right through,\" Lanowski said, shaking his head. \"There's nothing in there about ordering the destruction of monuments or statues just because they predate Mohammed.\"\n\n\"The glory of Allah shines through everything from creation to the present day, including all the marvels of ancient Egypt,\" Aysha said quietly. \"To suggest that it does not do so for history before Mohammed is wrong. These people are the enemy of true Muslims.\"\n\nThe TV camera refocused to show the shady figures in front of the trucks that were parked in a line just inside the entrance to the Giza plateau. \"Take a look at the gunmen,\" Costas said. \"They're all wearing black headbands.\"\n\n\"They call themselves the new followers of the Mahdi,\" Aysha said. \"Al Jazeera says they've been training in secret camps in Sudan and Somalia for months now. Many are veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, with close ties to the extremists now operating in Syria against Israel. For the first time since the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, since Yemen and Somalia, we're looking at an extremist group about to stage a coup to take over a country. They've been planning this for over a century, ever since Lord Kitchener desecrated the Mahdi's tomb outside Khartoum after he'd defeated the dervish army at the Battle of Omdurman. Intelligence analysts at the time knew that Omdurman was a hollow victory, and now it's come back to haunt us.\"\n\n\"And archaeology is being used as the tinderbox,\" Jack said.\n\nHiebermeyer shook his head. \"Not just as a tinderbox. Look at what's happening. The West proved powerless to prevent the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and now we watch helplessly while the greatest antiquities of Egypt are threatened. The forces behind this are about to pull off an extraordinary publicity stunt. How better to show the weakness of the West? Archaeology, the West's fascination with ancient Egypt, is about to become a pawn in the hands of the extremists. What we are seeing is a gesture of contempt, not only to the West but also to the people of Egypt who have made archaeology their livelihood and the basis for their sense of national identity. A little over two centuries after Napoleon arrived with his team of cartographers and scholars, Egyptology is about to be extinguished.\"\n\nLanowski put a hand on Hiebermeyer's shoulder. \"Not for you it won't be. Not for any of us here, or for the millions around the world who follow your work. You've got a lifetime ahead of you putting together everything you've gotten out of Egypt. There will be books, films. The whole incredible story of Akhenaten, for a start, when we finally get to the bottom of it. _I'll_ be there with you.\"\n\nAysha put a finger to her lips and gestured toward Hiebermeyer, who had turned away from them. She leaned down and whispered to him, kissing his forehead and brushing his cheek. As she did so, the image on her phone changed from the pyramids to another view, the headline reading \"Cairo Museum under threat.\" The live streaming showed the museum behind a line of bonfires; in front of them men in black headbands were chanting and praying.\n\nHiebermeyer turned, took a deep breath, and stared at the image. _\"Mein Gott,\"_ he said. \"It truly begins.\" He got up and turned around, his face drained.\n\n\"Jacob was right,\" said Jack. \"You may have to hang up your trowel for a while, but now is the time for ideas. After all, a few days ago, after your find of that carving in the tomb in the mummy necropolis, you handed me the best proof I could want that the Egyptian New Kingdom came about as a result of influence from Minoan Crete.\"\n\nHiebermeyer suddenly bristled. \"I did _what_? I said nothing of the sort. A gaggle of bare-breasted Minoan amazons cavorting around in chariots in the desert does not amount to cultural influence.\"\n\n\"Prove it. And prove to me that the Egyptians travelled farther than the Greeks, in the Mediterranean, around Africa, even across the Atlantic. Go out and find the sites. That is, if they exist.\"\n\n\"Oh, they exist.\" Hiebermeyer was positively glaring at him now. \"You _know_ they exist. I'll prove it to you. Just wait.\"\n\nJack gripped his shoulder. \"That's the Maurice I know.\"\n\nLanowski scuffed the floor with his feet and raised his hand, coughing.\n\n\"What is it, Jacob?\" Costas asked cautiously.\n\n\"Permission to join the team,\" he said.\n\n\"You're already part of the team,\" Jack said. \"And a highly valued member. You've proved it yet again today.\"\n\n\"No, I mean the real team. The _expedition_. You and Costas.\"\n\n\"Come again?\"\n\n\"You're going to need someone else topside. Mohammed and his son will have their work cut out for them managing the felucca. I've already been out with them in the harbor and seen what it's like. You'll need someone else to manage GPS position finding and to help with equipment. And Mohammed's English isn't that great. I speak pretty reasonable Arabic.\"\n\n\"You speak Arabic?\" Costas murmured. \" _Of course_ you speak Arabic. I should have guessed.\"\n\nJack eyed him. \"There's a big risk factor. You know that.\"\n\nLanowski raised his arms in the air, looking exasperated. \"The last big risk I took was when I turned down a tenured professorship at MIT for what amounted to a technician's job at IMU. My friends thought I'd finally flipped. All hope of the Nobel Prize went out the window. What attracted me to IMU was the chance to combine my, well, genius with hands-on archaeology, something I'd dreamed about since first being fascinated by Egyptology as a kid. And I've been part of this project from the get-go. And show me a Jack Howard project that doesn't involve big risks. _Real_ risks.\"\n\nJack glanced at Costas, who cracked a smile. \"I guess we could use the odd genius.\"\n\nJack pursed his lips. \"You'd be our man on the felucca. Shore excursions are strictly off-limits. Okay?\"\n\nLanowski punched the air. \"Thank you, Jack. You won't regret it.\"\n\n\"One question,\" Costas said, putting up his hand. \"About _our_ shore excursion. Assuming we make it out alive, how do we get picked up?\"\n\nLanowski took a black object the size of small alarm clock out of his pocket. \"Obviously you'll be on your own underground, and the mobile network around Cairo will probably be completely dead by then. You'll have a satellite phone, but the most reliable device is going to be this little gizmo.\"\n\nCostas peered at it. \"A beacon?\"\n\n\"You got it. Switch this on anywhere, and your GPS coordinates will be transmitted instantly via satellite to _Sea Venture_.\"\n\nCostas looked uncertain. \"Our people won't risk flying in a helicopter to pick us up on land. One thing the extremists have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan is how easy it is to shoot down helicopters. You can see shoulder-launched SAMs among those trucks in the Al Jazeera report, some of them looking very like Stingers.\"\n\nAysha looked at him. \"Our plan is for you to get out the way you got in. Mohammed and his son, and now Jacob too, will be waiting on the Nile in the felucca. Wherever you egress, your plan should be to make your way to the nearest point on the riverbank and activate the beacon. _Sea Venture_ will pass on your GPS coordinates via satellite phone to Jacob. After they pick you up, the felucca will sail north of the Nile Delta far enough out to sea for the Lynx to extract you without danger of attack.\"\n\n\"We may well have to go through Cairo to get back to the river,\" Costas said.\n\n\"That's a risk you'll have to take,\" said Aysha. \"There are still going to be Westerners there: journalists, some diplomats, the usual vultures who show up during a coup thinking they'll be in pole position to score lucrative deals with a new regime. But the first target for the extremists is likely to be members of the existing government, many of them Muslims. They might even want Western journalists there to report on it. It's afterward when there are gangs of blood-crazed gunmen roaming the streets that you'd be in the most trouble. We'll just have to hope that they're still preoccupied with the purge when you arrive. You'll never succeed in being inconspicuous, so you need to look self-confident, assertive. I take it you'd strip off your E-suits to the clothes you've got on now. And I may be on the ground to help.\"\n\nJack stared at her. \"What do you mean, on the ground?\"\n\nAysha gave him a steely look. \"It's about Sahirah, the Egyptian girl. The deadline Ben set on _Seaquest_ for a response from the antiquities director is only a few hours away. We've just seen on the newscast that he's more concerned with saving his own skin right now. But something else has happened, Jack. One of the extremists who now effectively runs the judiciary saw that Sahirah had been arrested in connection with a visit to a synagogue. As a result he's had the charge against her changed from the lesser one of antiquities theft to the worst crime of all in their books, apostasy. She won't be given a chance to deny it. And even if the antiquities director were to intervene, there would almost certainly be no clemency.\"\n\nJack pursed his lips. \"I take it you have a contingency plan.\"\n\n\"Do you remember the beggar outside the synagogue when we went in to see Maria? I told you that he was in fact my cousin Ahmed, the former Egyptian special forces soldier. What you weren't to know is that he's also Sahirah's boyfriend. He and several of his former army friends think that in the confusion of the coup they'll be able to get into the ministry building and find her. I'm going to Cairo to meet up with them.\"\n\n\"You mean they're planning to shoot her out?\" Jack said.\n\n\"There may be no other choice.\"\n\n\"Good people are going to get killed.\"\n\n\"It's going to be a bloodbath anyway, Jack. All we can do is try to save a few lives.\"\n\n\"What's our rendezvous point in the city to meet up with you?\"\n\n\"The synagogue. If you have to come through Cairo and can't safely get to the river, make your way there and activate the beacon. I'll be in satellite phone contact with _Sea Venture_ as well. I can help to guide you.\"\n\nJack looked at Lanowski. \"Make sure you keep that beacon safe.\"\n\n\"I've got two of them. One for me, the other for you.\"\n\nCostas peered closely. \"Why didn't you tell me about this, Jacob? I tell you about everything I'm working on.\"\n\nLanowski looked hesitant. \"Well, it was going to be a birthday surprise for you. For today. Rebecca told me.\"\n\nJack looked at Costas. \"For today? Today is your birthday?\"\n\nThe building vibrated from an explosion somewhere near the harbor, the detonation followed by the ripping sound of machine-gun fire. Costas jerked his head toward the door, his face grim. \"I don't think today is one for any kind of celebration.\"\n\nJack pointed to the fragment of ancient masonry beside the computer, the find that Hiebermeyer had made years before in the sewage pipe excavation beside the pyramids. \"Don't forget that, Maurice,\" he said. \"If Costas and I get nowhere tonight, those hieroglyphs could be the only real proof we have for what lies under the plateau.\"\n\n\"Maurice and I have everything,\" Aysha said. \"The First World War diary I found in the museum archives, the Geniza letter of Halevi, all the images and data from the mummy necropolis, everything.\"\n\nJack reached out and shook Hiebermeyer's hand. \"Do you remember our old school motto? 'Quit ye like men, be strong.' We used to joke about it, but now is one of those times.\"\n\nHiebermeyer tapped his head. \"It's all up here, Jack. I'm taking Egypt with me. I won't let it go.\"\n\nThe phone hummed, and Aysha picked it up and read a text. \"That was my sister near Tantur, about eighty kilometers south of Alexandria. She says she's just seen a convoy of trucks with gunmen racing up the highway. If Cairo falls, Alexandria won't be far behind.\"\n\nJack looked at his watch. \"Okay. Time for us to go.\"\n\nAysha nodded. \"Mohammed has food and drink and sleeping bags on the felucca. All you need to do now is visit the washroom and say your prayers.\"\n\nJack looked around the room. \"Anything more we can do?\"\n\n\"Everything's on _Sea Venture_ except what you can see here and the crates on the helipad.\"\n\n\"Institute staff?\"\n\n\"Anyone who wanted to leave has been airlifted out, along with their families. They'll get refugee status in the UK.\"\n\nJack turned to Costas and made a twirling motion with one hand. \"We need to get the Lynx fired up.\"\n\nCostas unclipped the VHF radio from his belt and started walking to the door. \"I'm on it.\"\n\nJack turned to Hiebermeyer. \"We'll help you get this remaining stuff to the helipad. It's 0730 hours already, and Mohammed's probably loaded up and waiting. We can get going early and give him a little leeway.\" He turned to Lanowski, who had shouldered a small rucksack and had picked up a crate of books from the floor. \"Jacob? You still on for this?\"\n\nLanowski stared at him, his face pale but determined. \"Roger that, Jack. I'm good to go.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nForty minutes later Jack was crouched between the thwarts of the felucca, staring in horror at the scene that was unfolding around them. The explosion they had heard while they were in the operations room had been the first of a succession every few minutes along the harbor front, all of them car bombs. After the third one, Hiebermeyer had decided to bring forward his plans and evacuate the institute immediately. Aysha had left quickly with their driver for Cairo. She was shorn of anything associating her with a foreign institute and was dressed in a burkha with a face veil. A few minutes later Mohammed and his son had finished loading the felucca and poled it away from the quayside. Jack and Lanowski were sitting in the bow, and Costas was helping the boy to fire up the diesel engine. As it coughed to life, the noise was drowned out by the Lynx, which raised a dust storm around the fort as the pilot held the aircraft poised for departure. Jack had watched as Hiebermeyer ran out of the fort with his briefcase and rucksack, ducked down on the helipad while the crewman loaded the last of the crates, and then took the outstretched arms and jumped on board himself. He had turned for a last glimpse of Egypt as the helicopter rose, angled sharply, and then clattered off over the Mediterranean, soon leaving Alexandria and Egyptian airspace far behind and disappearing from view over the northern horizon.\n\nFor Jack it should have been a scene of almost unbearable poignancy, watching his friend in his trusty old shorts and boots, still streaked with dirt from his last excavation, leave his beloved Egypt perhaps for the last time. But any reflection was instantly cut short by a cacophony of gunfire and engine revving coming along the highway from the west, the first of the trucks screeching onto the quay mere minutes after the Lynx had taken off. One of them disgorged half a dozen gunmen, who raced up to the fort, firing their Kalashnikovs into the air, one of them waving the black flag of the extremists. Within minutes they had entered the fort and raised the flag on a pole above the ramparts. Qaitbay Fort suddenly looked as it had been intended, a stronghold of medieval Islam, all indication of its use over the past few years as an archaeological institute obliterated.\n\nTwo trucks raced up to the fort and this time let off a cluster of handcuffed prisoners, all of them Egyptian woman in Western dress, the gunmen rifle-butting them into the courtyard. Seconds later there was an earsplitting clatter of gunfire and the gunmen reappeared, leaving one man at the entrance, and piling back into the trucks. Jack turned away, feeling numb, glad only that Maurice and Aysha had not witnessed what had just happened. As the felucca chugged out into the basin toward the sea, he steeled himself for more to come, keeping his eyes glued on the gunmen at the fort. Suddenly the air was rent by another explosion, deeper and more resonant than the others, and then a rushing noise and the sound of shattering glass. \"My God,\" Costas exclaimed. \"They've torched the library.\"\n\nJack spun around, staring at the far side of the harbor. A gas truck had been driven into the foyer of the Bibliotheca and exploded, its wrecked form lying upside down on the road in front. The huge disk shape of the Bibliotheca was wreathed in flame, like a burning sun rising from the eastern horizon. Jack could barely breathe; his mind was reeling. It was as if he had been transported back fifteen hundred years to an event that seemed fossilized in history, too awful to comprehend. But this was real, and happening before his eyes. For the second time in two millennia, the great library of Alexandria had been destroyed by religious extremists, by those who believed that knowledge was offensive to their god. Jack could hear the screams of people streaming out of the building, and bursts of gunfire from the trucks that had ranged up beside the wreck of the tanker, their machine guns trained on the steps and raking them every time another person appeared. It was not just the books that were anathema to the extremists; it was those who had read them as well. In that instant the frailty of civilization seemed laid bare, the foundations of wisdom as fragile as those of morality, with those who espoused it as vulnerable as the women who a few minutes before had paid for their freedom of expression with their lives.\n\nAnother burst of automatic fire rang out from near the fort, and Jack spun around. A truck with a gunman on the roof was hurtling along the edge of the harbor to the point closest to the felucca, no more than a hundred yards distant. It screeched to a halt. The gunman vaulted out of the rear and began to taunt a fisherman who was gathering up his net on the quay. The gunman was prodding him with the barrel of his Kalashnikov. The fisherman backed away, his hands in the air, gesticulating toward his family in a small car beside them. The gunman raised his rifle and shot him in the head, watched his body jerk back and fall into the harbor, and then ran along the quay looking for others.\n\nMohammed gestured frantically at Jack and Costas to get down. They dropped into the scuppers and crawled forward to where Lanowski was already lying under the deck in the bow of the boat, absorbed in checking the battery in one of the beacons. Jack looked back and saw Mohammed unfurl and raise a black flag in the stern, and then slowly swing the tiller to take them farther out into the basin toward the entrance. With any luck there would be more interesting and easier targets for the gunmen than a felucca setting out to sea, especially one that appeared to be sporting the flag of the extremists.\n\nJack drew himself up farther into the crawl space in the bow of the felucca, wedged his feet beside one of their kit bags, and pushed a sleeping bag forward as a makeshift pillow. He felt the bulge of the Beretta in the holster on his chest, and shifted slightly to make sure the grip was accessible in case it was needed. He could make out Lanowski and Costas lying in the gloom beside him, their faces etched with the reality of what they were undertaking. They all knew there was no going back now. Even if they had decided to abort, Jack would never have risked calling back the Lynx to a place that was crawling with trigger-happy gunmen who almost certainly had SAMs in their trucks. The only way ahead was the one they had mapped out, from one burning cauldron to another, but with a plausible exit strategy. They would stick to their plan.\n\nJack shifted again, trying to find a more comfortable position, and shut his eyes. He tried to forget what he had just seen, and to think instead of those who had gone before him down the Nile in search of fabulous discoveries, of the sand travellers of the past, those who breathed in the dust of the desert and felt the brush of the wind that blew from the pyramids. He thought of what could lie beneath, of sealed chambers full of treasures, of rows of pottery jars brimming with papyri that might contain all the lost wisdom of the ancient world.\n\nThe chug of the engine increased to a throb, and he felt the bow rise. He opened his eyes and peered through a crack in the planking, seeing the end of the quay and hearing the slap of the waves as they passed into open water. The engine began to vibrate badly, seeming to jar every bone in his body, and each slap of the waves felt like a body blow. The movement of the boat had released a rancid smell of fish from the scuppers, and wafts of diesel smoke erupted every few seconds from a hole in the engine. The great triangular sail would remain furled until they had traversed the coast and veered south into the Nile, where a good following wind might allow them to ease off on the engine.\n\nHe rolled over again and looked at Costas. He was splayed out on top of the kit bags, his mouth open and emitting snores, oblivious to everything around him, rocking to and fro with every shudder of the boat.\n\nJack swallowed hard. He was beginning to regret devouring the food that Mohammed had offered him on the quayside. He stared at the planks above him, wishing he could be outside and focusing on the horizon, and glanced at his watch. They had ten hours to go until they passed Cairo.\n\nIt was going to be a long day.\n\n# CHAPTER 20\n\nIt was dark by the time the felucca passed through the northern suburbs of Cairo, the lingering heat of the day tempered by a torrential downpour that had left a mist over the banks of the river. Earlier they had used the boat's huge triangular lateen sail to make their way with the wind against the current, but with the city looming ahead Mohammed and his son had furled the sail and lowered the mast to make the boat less conspicuous and had fired up the old diesel engine again.\n\nAs they chugged past vessels heading north, Mohammed had exchanged a few words with their captains and learned that everyone who could was leaving Cairo by whatever means possible, by river or road or on foot, with groups of people even striking out across the desert with all they could carry to find a place to hide and wait out the worst of what was happening in the city.\n\nThere had been a tense half hour as they passed the center of the city and the walled enclosure of Fustat, Old Cairo, near the Ben Ezra synagogue, where Jack and Maria had explored the Geniza chamber only four days previously. Jack had tried to make out the medieval walls in the gloom and the mist, remembering that this was the place where he and Costas were due to rendezvous with Aysha before dawn and to find the felucca for their return journey up the Nile to the sea. Between now and then, they should finally have answered the question that had been eating at Jack for months now, ever since they had returned from their explorations in Sudan, since he and Costas had seen the shaft of light beneath the Pyramid of Menkaure. He glanced at Costas' recumbent form beneath the foredeck of the boat, next to the spot where Jack had just spent several of the most uncomfortable hours of his life hidden from sight during the long daylight passage down the Nile. At least one of them would have had a good rest.\n\nThey had begun to pass amorphous shapes floating in the river that Jack knew must be bodies, but until now the city had been ominously quiet, with only the odd gunshot and distant scream. Then just before they reached Fustat, there had been the call to prayer, the muezzins and recordings from the minarets joining in the familiar cadences that seemed to undulate over the city, reaching a crescendo and then stopping suddenly. It had been more than a call to prayer; it had been a signal for the extremists. Seconds later the city erupted in gunfire and a cacophony of shrieking and yelling rising from all directions and echoing across the river. A long burst of automatic fire came at them from the east bank, the muzzle flashing like a distant jet of flame in the night, the bullets zipping overhead and several of them slapping into the side of the boat. Mohammed kept his nerve, staying in the central channel of the river, and the gunman soon turned his attention elsewhere, firing shorts bursts into groups of people who were running and tripping along the embankment.\n\nJack knew that people were dying now, by the scores if not the hundreds, and that before the night was out the river would run with blood. As the glow of fires began to redden the night, he cast his mind back to the descriptions of Khartoum in Sudan a hundred and thirty years before. It had been the first city on the Nile to fall to the extremists. Those who were watching from the river then must have seen similar sights. Despite all the advances in technology, in weaponry and in communications, when it came to the razing of a city and the destruction of its inhabitants, little had changed through history. It was reduced to the same individual acts of savagery and horror that were little different from the time when the forces of jihad had first swept west across Africa almost fifteen hundred years before, or when the Crusaders had done the same in the name of their own faith.\n\nJack huddled down again out of sight beneath the thwarts, watching the river through a slit in the planks. Soon the glow of Cairo was enveloped in darkness, and the sounds of gunfire receded into the night. He knew they must be nearing their destination, the ruined Napoleonic fort on the west bank of the river that Lanowski had identified as the point where the tunnel from the pyramid entered the Nile. He could see the screen of Lanowki's computer now in the space in the bows opposite his own makeshift bed. A few moments later Lanowski emerged with his GPS receiver, his long lank hair coming out from under a woolen Jacques Cousteau hat and his face daubed black. Jack smiled to himself despite the grim scenes of the past hour. Lanowski had come into his own as IMU's newest field operative, and he was clearly relishing it. He made his way up to Mohammed, exchanged a few words in Arabic, and then came back to Jack, crouching down and showing him the GPS readout and its convergence with the programmed position for the fort. \"We're less than a kilometer away,\" he said quietly. \"Time to wake Costas?\"\n\nJack nodded. \"We've got to get our equipment ready. We can't afford to linger once we get there.\"\n\n\"Roger that. Mohammed's apprehensive about his return journey through the city. He thinks it's only a matter of time before the gunmen find the police river launches and begin joyriding. He wants to be at his rendezvous point north of Cairo before that happens.\"\n\nCostas blearily raised himself, banged his head on the deck above him, fell back, and then eased himself out of the space feet first. He turned around and pulled out the two gear bags that had made up his bed, and then cracked opened a water bottle and drained it. \"What's our ETA?\" he asked gruffly.\n\n\"About twenty minutes,\" Lanowski said. \"Time to saddle up.\"\n\n\"Saddle up?\" Costas rubbed his eyes. \"Since when are we cowboys?\"\n\n\"It's what you said in that film. In the TV special about Atlantis. I watched it a couple of times to get the lingo.\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah. Okay. We're cowboys.\" Costas swayed slightly. \"I need some coffee.\"\n\nAs if on cue, Mohammed's son appeared with a tray of glasses of strong tea, and they each took one. Costas pulled out a bag of fat sandwiches and offered them around, taking a huge bite from one himself.\n\n\"Always the sandwiches,\" Lanowski said keenly. \"Always New York deli. That's in the film too.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, life imitates art.\" He swallowed and peered at Lanowski. \"What's with the commando paint?\"\n\n\"You should see your faces. They'd stand out like beacons to anyone watching from the shore.\"\n\nCostas grunted, swallowed his last mouthful, wiped his hands, crouched down, and pulled his E-suit from his bag. \"You help Jack on with his, and then you can zip me up. I've got a few additional bits and pieces I need to clip on.\"\n\n\"A shame you lost your old boiler suit in that volcano.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Costas looked disconsolate for a moment. \"It melted. I've kept the shreds of it in my cabin on _Seaquest_. It was great to wear that over my E-suit. I haven't worked out how to carry tools properly since then.\"\n\nLanowski ducked down and pulled a package out of his own bag and handed it to Costas. \"I hope you don't mind. I took a look at that old one in your cabin to get the size.\" He tore open the plastic, and an immaculate blue boiler suit complete with outsized leg and arm pockets came tumbling out.\n\nCostas stared. \"Hey, Jacob. _You're the man_.\" He took the suit and held it out appreciatively. \"It's even the correct pattern, 1954 U.S. Navy submariner issue. Where the hell did you find this?\"\n\nLanowski shrugged. \"eBay, of course. You can find everything on eBay. I reckoned you were likely to ditch this one with your E-suit at the end of this mission, so I ordered two. There's another one hanging up behind the door in your cabin.\"\n\nCostas looked at Jack, jerking a thumb at Lanowski. \"This guy's good. _Really_ good. We should have him on all our dives.\"\n\nLanowski glanced at his GPS receiver. \"Time to saddle up. I mean it this time.\"\n\nCostas grinned and slapped him on the shoulder. \"Roger that.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nTwenty minutes later Jack was floating beside Costas on the starboard side of the felucca, the buoyancy in his E-suit holding him upright with his head and shoulders out of the water. Between them were the aquajets they planned to use to extend their exploration reach underwater. These compact propeller-driven units were capable of 2.5 horsepower with a battery life of up to three hours. The E-suit was an all-environment, Kevlar-reinforced protective shell developed at IMU and refined over the last ten years. It provided a dry interior with temperature control but gave the diver the agility of a wetsuit. Critical to its performance was the streamlined console on the back containing a breathing unit of choice, in this case a semi-closed-circuit oxygen rebreather ideal for maximizing bottom time in the shallow depths they were likely to encounter. The upper part of the console contained a computer that regulated oxygen output, monitored the diver's physiology, and contained a two-way communication unit, all of it feeding into the helmet with a pivoting visor that was clamped on top of the E-suit. In a refinement since the early days, the helmet was now a closer fit to the head with a flexible neck made of the same material as the E-suit, allowing the diver to move almost without restriction. Jack loved the E-suit for the freedom it gave him, and for the adaptability that allowed them to use it in every conceivable environment, from the Arctic to the superheated water above an underwater volcano to the dive they were about to carry out now, into the murky depths of the Nile, searching for an ancient tunnel under the desert and what might lie beyond.\n\nLanowski's head reappeared over the gunwale and he stared down at them. He had prepared a comprehensive equipment checklist on his computer, something that Jack and Costas usually winged, and had just finished running through it with them. Jack could feel the bulge under his E-suit where his Beretta was holstered, and the slight discomfort of the shirt and lightweight jacket, casual trousers, and leather shoes he was wearing under the suit. He was ready to walk out of his E-suit into the streets of Cairo. They had run carefully through every scenario, assessing the best plan of action. Everything depended on them finding the tunnel, being able to get into it, and then finding an egress point. If there was no tunnel below, they would abort the mission here and now. And if there was no egress point farther along the tunnel, they would hope to return to this point, stash their suits in the ruins of the fort, and make their way along the riverbank to the north. As Jack floated there beside the felucca, seeing nothing below, everything seemed to hang in the balance. The yawning uncertainty seemed to eclipse all the hours and days of speculation, the endless juggling of scenarios and possibilities that had filled his mind since finding this spot had become a reality.\n\nLanowski looked at Costas. \"Double-check the two radio beacons.\"\n\n\"Roger that. One to be activated when we exit, the other when we reach the Nile.\"\n\n\"And the marker buoy?\"\n\nCostas patted the front pocket of the boiler suit he had donned on top of his E-suit. \"Roger that. We release it here as soon as we know we can get inside the tunnel.\"\n\n\"Is your GPS activated?\"\n\n\"Roger. The in-helmet display will navigate to the precise fix you calculated for the tunnel.\"\n\n\"Mohammed wants to stand off as soon as possible in the center of the river. He's the world's most level guy, as you could see from how cool he was going through Cairo, but he's gotten twitchy. His son told me that this part of the river has a bad reputation among the felucca captains. They think it's spooked. Apparently there are whirlpools, and some of the captains think they're caused by river monsters. Probably nothing to worry about, just giant Nile carp inflated by rumor into monsters.\"\n\n\"That's bad enough,\" Costas grumbled. \"Those things have been known to pull fishermen under.\"\n\n\"Or it could be crocodiles.\"\n\n\"Or _what_?\"\n\n\"Crocodiles,\" Lanowski said distractedly, looking at his list again. \"Apparently, they sometimes get this far. Mostly only small ones these days, but some big carcasses still get washed down. Sometimes they're not carcasses. Sometimes they're alive and snapping.\" Costas groaned again. \"That's great. I thought we'd left all that behind at the crocodile temple in Sudan. Why didn't someone tell me?\"\n\n\"You'd still have volunteered,\" Jack said. \"You'd never have let me do this alone.\"\n\nMohammed appeared beside Lanowski, looking anxious. \"Okay, boys,\" Lanowski said. \"You've got to go. See you back on board in a few hours, inshallah.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Jacob. Look after yourself. No shore expeditions, remember?\" Jack turned to Costas. \"Good to go?\"\n\nCostas made a diver's okay signal. \"Good to go.\" They both shut their visors, and Jack felt the slight increase in pressure as the helmet sealed and the rebreather came online. A second later the in-helmet screen display activated to the left and right of his main viewport. It was a low-light readout that could show up to thirty variables, from carbon dioxide levels to pulse rate. He tapped the computer control inside the index finger of his left glove and reduced the display to the minimum, to show depth in meters, compass orientation, and external water temperature. He raised his right arm in an okay signal to Lanowki and Mohammed, then turned and did a thumbs-down signal to Costas. He descended two meters, bleeding off air manually from his suit and waiting for the automated buoyancy system to compensate. He pulled down the aquajet after him and waited while its computer altered the trim in the small ballast tanks on either side of the unit, an automated process that self-adjusted with depth to ensure that the scooter remained neutrally buoyant.\n\nHe switched on his helmet light but was dazzled by the reflection of particles in the water that reduced the visibility to almost zero. He switched it off and was again in blackness, the moonless night meaning that no light filtered down from the surface. As he stared out, he remembered the lines that Jeremy had read from Howard Carter's diary, the account that Carter had heard from Corporal Jones of what went on here that night in 1892 when Colonel Chaill\u00e9-Long and the French diver had accompanied Jones to this very spot. He could well imagine the trepidation of the diver as he went down with his homemade gear, yet also his excitement at seeing that the valve and cylinder worked and at what he might discover on the riverbed below.\n\nWhat had happened then was a mystery. All Jack knew for certain was that somewhere down there must lie the remains of that diver, and of the boat that had been sucked down by the same vortex that had taken Jones into an underworld that had sent him spiraling further on his own descent into madness.\n\nCostas tapped him on the shoulder, and Jack could just make out the glow of the readout inside his helmet a few inches away. \"Jack, testing intercom. Over.\"\n\n\"Reduce the squelch level about twenty percent.\"\n\n\"How's that?\"\n\n\"Good. Visibility's about as bad as I've ever seen. We're going to have to rely on the virtual terrain mapper.\"\n\n\"Mine's already on. It's a revelation, Jack.\"\n\nJack tapped his finger and a green isometric lattice appeared in front of his visor, gradually filling with detail as the multibeam sonar built into the top of his helmet mapped out the riverbed in front of them. The display provided a continuously adjusted virtual image with a time lapse of about half a second as new data streamed in. Jack was constantly amazed by the clarity of the images it produced, and this time was no exception. It was as if they were suspended in midair above a sharply angled scree slope some twenty meters from top to bottom. To the left the slope was covered with debris from the nineteenth-century fort, the building whose ruined form on the shore had been their way marker, the feature described by Corporal Jones to Howard Carter. To the right was a more regular shape about ten meters below the surface, an overhanging ledge about five meters across with another jumble of material below it, much of it larger, more regular blocks. The red tracking lines showing the GPS fix converged on his screen directly in front of the ledge. Jack's heart began to pound. _This could be it_.\n\nCostas dropped below, his aquajet held in front. \"I'm activating my helmet camera and the recording function on the terrain mapper. That means everything we see will be recorded on the memory chip.\"\n\n\"Check,\" Jack said. \"I've done the same.\"\n\nJack felt something bump his fins, and a spectral form seemed to undulate across his terrain mapper. It filled the entire lower half of the screen and swayed from side to side, caught like a series of stills in a time lapse. \"Did you see that?\" he exclaimed. \"I could swear something swam by. It seemed to be all tail.\"\n\n\"No, I did _not_ see it,\" Costas said, his voice quavering. \"I _definitely_ did not see it. What I saw was a glitch in the mapper. This is reality, not a nightmare.\"\n\n\"Whatever it was, it's gone now,\" Jack said. \"A serpent off to join the party, heading to the hell of Cairo.\"\n\n\"It never existed, Jack. You've just got a touch of Mohammed's river fever.\"\n\nJack held his aquajet by the handles on either side of the encased propeller housing, released the safety lock with his thumbs, and pulled the trigger. He felt the backflow of water course down his body. The jet had a deflector so that at full throttle it dropped just below the diver, keeping the flow of water from the propeller clear and unobstructed. Costas came alongside and they both gunned the jets forward. They quickly came to within a few meters of the GPS fix and then released the triggers.\n\nJack stared at the image on his terrain mapper, taking in the detail. It was astonishingly clear, as if he were looking at a wall of masonry on land with the naked eye. He remembered Lanowski's model showing how the scour effect of the Nile at this point could have kept the submerged bank free from loose sediment, a phenomenon also manifest in the whirlpools and eddies that made Mohammed and his fellow felucca captains so apprehensive. And there was no doubt about it now. The block in front of him that had looked like a ledge was fixed into the bank, part of a larger structure rather than fallen masonry. It was clearly a lintel, a huge block that must have weighed ten tons or more. Below it on either side he could just make out two massive upright blocks, and between them a jumble of stone that had fallen in from the sides.\n\nJack did a double take, not entirely believing what he was seeing, swinging from left to right and back again to re-create the image on his terrain mapper. Exactly the same features came into view. He was absolutely convinced of it now. It was an entranceway, an ancient portal beneath the Nile. Its depth put it exactly on Lanowski's prediction for the level of the Nile at low water in the second millennium BC, allowing a partly flooded channel to act as an underground canal beneath the desert, wide enough to take barges that could have been walked or poled along. He clicked on his headlamp, and as he came within inches of the lintel he began to make out the stone beyond the reflected haze of particles in the water, unmistakably the fine-grained red granite favored by the New Kingdom pharaohs as a prestige building material. He stared more closely. He realized that he was not just looking at a smoothed surface of granite. _He was looking at hieroglyphs_. He switched back to the terrain mapper, and suddenly there it was, the cartouche that had become etched in his mind over the last months, from the crocodile temple in Sudan, from the plaque they had found with the sarcophagus on the wreck, from Rebecca's underground find in Jerusalem. He put out his hand and traced his finger over the bird at the beginning and the sheaf of grain at the end. He stared for a moment longer, mouthing the word _Akhenaten_.\n\nCostas' voice came through the intercom. \"Jack, we've got a problem.\"\n\n\"I've just found the hieroglyphs. We're bang on target.\"\n\n\"I mean down below the lintel,\" Costas said. \"I think I can see what happened back in 1892.\"\n\nJack dropped a few meters below the overhanging block to where the terrain mapper showed Costas' form above the pile of blocks between the uprights of the portal. In front of him he could see where the blocks filled the entrance, with cracks leading to deeper spaces beyond. Costas' voice came on again. \"I think the diver blew open the stone doors that once sealed off this entrance, and in the process caused the rockfall that's blocked it up again for us. But there's one spot where I think we might get through, directly in front of me now, where my terrain mapper shows a block that could be dislodged. With a little assistance.\"\n\n\"Explosives?\"\n\n\"C5. Always be prepared.\"\n\n\"I was wondering about that bulge in the front of your boiler suit.\"\n\n\"It's our only option. We've got to try it.\"\n\n\"Remember what happened in 1892,\" Jack said. \"We don't want to create an explosive vortex and see our felucca sucked in.\"\n\n\"I think that happened because the stone door was watertight and there was an air space in the tunnel beyond, so that when the doors blew the water poured in and created a whirlpool that must have pulled down their boat. My guess is that our diver was using some kind of waterproofed dynamite and probably didn't really know what he was doing, using too much of it and creating a hole so large that the flow of water pushed those slabs open too quickly and created a lethal vortex. C5 is a far better explosive and much easier to position for maximum effectiveness with small quantities. I think I've got just about the right amount for the job.\"\n\n\"Risk factor?\"\n\n\"An underwater shock wave, but that should be mitigated by the pressure resistance of our E-suits.\"\n\n\"Okay. Let's do it.\"\n\nCostas drew a package out the bulge in the front of his boiler suit, swam forward, and pushed it into the crack. He worked it farther in for a few minutes and then pushed himself back out. \"Okay. I've separated it into three charges, with individual detonators. They're manual, and I've set the delay for two minutes. You good with that?\"\n\n\"Roger. Go ahead.\"\n\nCostas finned into the crack again, and then pushed himself out. \"Fire in the hole. Swim hard right.\" Jack followed him along the face of the riverbank and came to a halt behind a rock that protruded between them and the likely blast radius. \"Okay,\" Costas said. \"Now.\" Three nearly simultaneous detonations shook the water, causing the rock to shift slightly and a pressure wave to pass through Jack's body. Costas immediately swam back, and Jack followed. On his terrain mapper he could see the jerky image of rocks tumbling down to the base of the slope. Ahead of them a hole about a meter and a half across had opened up where the charges had been set. Costas poked his head through and then withdrew, detaching the marker buoy from the front of his suit and holding it out. \"It's clear. There's open water beyond, presumably the tunnel. You good to go?\"\n\nJack stared through, seeing only darkness. Releasing the buoy was the signal for Mohammed to leave, though it still left them the option of egressing this way if the tunnel beyond proved to be blocked. They should ideally do a recce before releasing the buoy, but he knew that by now Mohammed would be desperate to get back through Cairo before the river became a no-go zone. He turned to Costas. \"Do it.\"\n\nCostas released the buoy, and a few seconds later Jack heard the throb of the boat's diesel engine firing up. Mohammed must have been waiting with his hand poised over the starter. Costas immediately swam through the crack, and Jack followed, both pushing their aquajets in front of them. As they passed through the haze of silt created by the explosion, the external water temperature dropped by over ten degrees and the visibility opened up. The water was no longer clouded by river sediment. They panned their headlamps around and an extraordinary scene came into view. They had passed through a monumental entranceway, and ahead of them a tunnel with smoothed walls about five meters in diameter extended into the darkness as far as Jack could see. Below them the cascade of rock created by the explosion in 1892 lay over the hull of a wooden boat, so shattered that it was barely recognizable.\n\nJack remembered Corporal Jones' account of that night. Chaill\u00e9-Long had clearly survived the sinking, somehow avoiding being sucked under and making his way to the riverbank, but the boat's captain and any crew must have died almost instantly. Jones' survival was little short of a miracle. He had been sucked through and rode the wave far down the tunnel, something that must have contributed to the haunted state of the man whom Howard Carter had met months later dazed and begging on the streets of Old Cairo.\n\nJack adjusted his headlamp beam and saw something metallic pinned under one side of the wreckage. \"My God,\" he exclaimed, his heart pounding. _It was the diver_. With some trepidation he finned closer, and brushed the silt from the man's visor. The glass was corroded and opaque, but inside it he could see the amorphous fatty remains of a human face, the eye sockets filled with white matter. He realized that the rest of the man's body must be in the same condition, held in place by the canvas suit and the straps of his equipment. He gently pushed the head to one side to look at the valve arrangement of the breathing apparatus. He glanced back at Costas. \"You need to see this.\"\n\nCostas was preoccupied with his aquajet. \"What is it?\" he said.\n\n\"I've just met our French diver.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, just met him?\"\n\n\"He's fully intact. I mean his equipment. What's inside is pretty well preserved too. Adiposed.\"\n\n\"I don't want to see, Jack. I really don't. That's what we'll look like a hundred years from now if we don't get out of this place.\"\n\n\"Fascinating equipment. Looks like a fully developed demand valve, fifty years before the Cousteau-Gagnan device.\"\n\n\"1892,\" Costas replied, still preoccupied. \"France was the hotbed of diving invention, with Rouquayrol having developed compressed air cylinders and Denayrouze a reduction valve. It always amazes me that it took so long to mate them effectively and develop a proper automatic demand valve.\"\n\n\"Imagine the military applications in the arms race leading up to the First World War.\"\n\n\"That's probably why it never saw the light of day. It was probably his only working example and he'd kept it secret. It was a highly competitive world.\"\n\n\"You need to see it.\"\n\n\"I'll look at your pictures. After I've had several stiff drinks. Meanwhile we have a problem. My aquajet's gone dead.\"\n\nThe water suddenly shimmered, and out of instinct Jack powered forward into the tunnel. There was a dull rumble, and he was slammed by a violent surge in the water, tumbling him over on to his back. He quickly righted himself, checking his readout for any damage to his equipment, and looked back. He had guessed what had happened, and his fears were confirmed. The corpse had disappeared beneath a massive fall of rock and debris. Through the swirl of sediment that now filled the water, he could just make out their entry point, now completely blocked. He saw Costas recovering himself and finning back a few strokes, scanning the rockfall with his terrain mapper. \"Houston, we've got a problem,\" he announced. \"My aquajet is now the least of our worries.\"\n\nJack looked back to where he had been examining the diver. \"There is some more bad news. My aquajet's crushed under the rock. The propeller's sheared off.\"\n\n\"We can both use mine, though it will double the drain on the battery. That is, if it starts. I think the shock wave of our explosion knocked it off-line. I'm rebooting it now.\"\n\nJack closed his eyes for a moment and then looked back through the settling silt at the jumble of rock where the entrance had been. \"No more C5,\" Jack said.\n\n\"No more C5,\" Costas repeated. \"But you'd need a cruise missile to open up that entrance now.\"\n\n\"What's your predicted oxygen timeout?\"\n\n\"Two hours and fifty-five minutes at my current breathing rate.\"\n\nJack turned and stared down the tunnel. Two hours and fifty-five minutes, and at least five kilometers until the beginning of the Giza plateau, the point where the tunnel might rise above the waterline. There was no way they could make that distance, or even half of it, without the aquajet. The passage down the tunnel had been the biggest gamble of their plan, and the odds were now stacked dramatically against them. If Costas' aquajet failed to start, or if it ran out partway along the tunnel, they would be doomed to an inevitable agonizing countdown, able only to swim forward in desperation until exhaustion overtook them and their oxygen ran out. Jack stared into the constricting walls of the tunnel and the black hole ahead. For the first time he felt a tightness in his chest, a pinprick of fear. They might not get out of here alive.\n\nHe swam over and grasped the right handle of the aquajet, and watched as Costas' finger hovered over the trigger in front of the left handle. Everything now depended on what happened next. For a moment they hung there motionless, side by side, the aquajet held in front of them, aimed down a tunnel that right now seemed more forbidding than any they had ever dived down before. Their survival, even if they made it to the surface, was threatened by the apocalypse of biblical proportions that was now engulfing Egypt.\n\nCostas pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He pulled again. _Still nothing_. Jack stopped breathing. Costas held down the emergency start switch on top of the aquajet and pulled the trigger again. Suddenly it whirred to life, and Costas gunned it a few times. It moved them forward. He put it in neutral and held it firmly in front. \"You ready for this?\" he said. \"Prepare for the ride of your life.\"\n\nJack took a deep breath. \"Time to go.\"\n\n# CHAPTER 21\n\nForty minutes later Costas eased off on the throttle of the aquajet and they slowed down to swimming speed, allowing Jack to relax his grip on the handle and focus more on the tunnel around them. The most telling feature so far had been a line of foot-sized indents carved into the side walls at intervals of about a meter and running the entire length of the tunnel from the outset.\n\nJack had recognized the indents not from ancient parallels but from the Black Country in England, where he had once explored an underground canal from the time of the Industrial Revolution and seen where the bargemen had lain down and walked their vessels along the walls of the canal. The same had happened here, three thousand years earlier, only the Egyptians with their engineering exactitude had provided their bargemen with secure footing along the entire length of the canal. For Jack it was confirmation that this was indeed a passageway for boats to make their way between the Nile and the Giza plateau, with the Nile at low water lapping just below the level of the footings.\n\nThe tunnel could have accommodated vessels up to three meters in beam and one and a half meters in draft, large enough for the type of river barges that plied the surface canals to the pyramids during their construction. They had been hauled by teams of oxen and slaves plodding along the towpath just like those English canal boats of the nineteenth century that Jack had examined.\n\nCostas reduced the speed by a further setting and Jack felt the wake wash forward, his legs dropping with the reduced momentum. He could see nothing but the receding darkness of the tunnel ahead, and he felt a niggle of unease again. \"Do we have a problem?\"\n\n\"I'm trying to reduce the drain on the battery. We're not at critical yet, but it's showing the orange warning light.\"\n\n\"What do you make of our position?\"\n\n\"In the absence of GPS reception down here, we can only go by dead reckoning. The tunnel has maintained a straight course almost exactly due west, bearing toward the southern end of the Giza complex in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure, just as Lanowski mapped it. And the aquajet's computer calculates a lapsed distance of four point three kilometers. That puts us a kilometer or so from the point where Lanowski thought the tunnel could break above the water level.\"\n\n\"If the tunnel links to the complex we saw from beneath the pyramid, then it has to rise above the water level,\" Jack replied. \"The intensity of light we saw reflected through that shaft in the pyramid could only have come from mirrors set up in dry spaces, as refraction through water couldn't have produced anything so bright.\"\n\n\"We have to hope that the other radiating arms on that map represent tunnels that are above water too. Otherwise we're dependent on finding an exit from the main complex, and if that means the shaft we saw from beneath the pyramid, then we're going nowhere. The shaft had been filled with masonry so that the aperture for the light was a slit less than half a meter high. There's no way we're getting through that.\"\n\n\"While you were in never-never land today on the felucca, Lanowski and I worked up a best-fit CGI for what might lie ahead of us. The plaque from the shipwreck, the one that shows the Aten symbol superimposed on the Giza plateau and the desert, had a total of eight arms radiating southeast to northeast toward the Nile, all of them extending out from the sun symbol that we imagine represents the central complex below the plateau. Our tunnel is the second arm from the bottom, the one running nearest to due east. We guessed that two of the other arms might also represent actual tunnels or canals and not just be symbolic depictions. One of them must be the aboveground canal used during the months of the year when the Nile was in full spate, when the tunnel we're in would have been completely submerged and unusable. We think the above-water channel may well have been the canal already in existence from the time of the pyramid construction, adapted and perhaps strengthened by Akhenaten's engineers.\"\n\n\"You mean the canal from the Nile to the artificial harbor that was dug in front of the pyramid, beside the mortuary temple?\"\n\n\"Right,\" Jack replied. \"Each of the pyramids originally had one. All trace of the above-water canal from the Pyramid of Menkaure has been lost beneath the southern suburbs of Cairo, but we think it's likely to be the next radiating line of the Aten symbol to the north of us, at an arc of thirty degrees from our tunnel and reaching the Nile about two kilometers north of our entry point. But it's the line above that one that interests us most. When Lanowski superimposed the depiction from the plaque on the modern map, keeping to the exact alignment of the pyramids, not only did our line end up exactly at the Napoleonic fort, but the line two up from that, the one I'm talking about, abutted the river directly opposite Fustat, Old Cairo.\"\n\n\"Which didn't exist in antiquity,\" Costas said.\n\n\"Not as we see it now. But knowing about the masonry block with the Akhenaten cartouche found in 1892 by those Royal Engineers officers beside the synagogue confirms what Maurice has long suspected, that the other blocks of that date found in the medieval walls of Fustat were not all reused from Akhenaten's great temple at Heliopolis, to the northeast of Fustat, but included material from a structure whose remains lie beneath the boundaries of medieval Fustat itself. If you extend the Aten line across the river, it points almost exactly to the site of the synagogue.\"\n\n\"So you think all these features from Akhenaten's building program were interconnected\u2014the Heliopolis temple, the structure under the synagogue, and this complex in front of the pyramids.\"\n\n\"The Egyptians were really into alignments, right? It's the kind of thing you can do in the desert over long distances, by line of sight. Maurice thinks that this was intimately tied up with worship of the sun, and that the Aten symbol with its very precise radiating lines suggests a particular fascination for Akhenaten himself. Maybe the passion for geometry that shows in the planning of his capital at Amarna should lead us to look for the same kind of grandiose conception here. With polished stone surfaces you can make the rays of the sun link together distant places, something that we might see in microcosm in the mirrors that we know must direct the light beneath the plateau. But Lanowski and I concluded that the line leading to Fustat may well represent another real tunnel, one likely to be above the flood level of the Nile so that it could be used all year round. The tunnel we're in now and the above-water canal were used mainly for barging in building materials and other goods, at low water and high water, respectively. The tunnel from Fustat might have been some kind of processional way for priests and even the pharaoh himself.\"\n\n\"Whoa.\" Costas put the aquajet in neutral and pointed to the wall on his side. A flight of narrow rock-cut steps led upward to an aperture in the ceiling. \"That's exactly what I've been expecting,\" he said. \"While you had your head down earlier as we were going at full throttle, I saw several small dark openings in the ceiling that must once have been ventilation shafts, long ago blocked by sand and rockfall. This one looks more like a service entrance, something you'd expect partway along a tunnel of this length.\" He released the handle of the aquajet, rose to the ceiling, and poked his head into the hole. \"No good for us. It's completely filled with a jumble of rock.\"\n\n\"You sure?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't even want to try. Pulling out one of those rocks might create an instant rockfall and bury us.\"\n\nJack stared at the steps, his mind racing. \"I'm thinking of our eleventh-century caliph Al-Hakim. He disappears somewhere around this part of the desert, and then eight hundred years later Corporal Jones reappears after his own little adventure in this place wearing the ring that Howard Carter recognized as the signet of the caliph. Maybe Al-Hakim stumbled across this entrance and literally fell through it. I'm imagining him coming back here again and again, night after night, exploring ever farther into the tunnel, able to do so because the Nile was at low water when he was out here. And then one night he finds something inside, something so revelational that it makes him determined that his next visit will be his last one, that leads him to walk away from his day job once and for all. So he leaves his bloody clothes elsewhere in the desert to suggest that he's been robbed and murdered, exactly the fate that those around him would have expected for a not very popular caliph wandering alone in the desert at night, and then he comes down here and finds a way of sealing himself inside by triggering a rockfall.\"\n\n\"If he did that, he might have caused us another problem I've just spotted.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Take a look ahead.\"\n\nJack turned away from the steps and stared down the tunnel. He finned forward, and out of the darkness his beam began to reflect off irregular rock, quickly revealed as a fallen jumble that blocked the tunnel. It had been their unspoken fear from the outset. Costas powered ahead, leaving Jack with the aquajet, and came to a halt at the top of the pile, where there was a visible crack between the rocks. Costas reached in his arms and pulled, dislodging a block and sliding it out under him. \"Watch out,\" he exclaimed. The block slid down the pile to the floor, and was followed by several more as he dug his way deeper in. After a few minutes he pulled himself in entirely and disappeared, and then his headlamp beam reversed and shone back at Jack, momentarily dazzling him. \"Okay,\" Costas said. \"If I can get through, then you should have no problem. But I can't take out anything more. Everything in the jumble below those blocks that I shifted is way too big even to budge.\"\n\nJack swam up to the crack, leaving the aquajet to be pulled through afterward, and eased his way into the hole. Costas was considerably bulkier than Jack was but surprisingly agile, and with his greater length Jack found it difficult to angle himself through the final part of the gap that Costas had created. Finally he was through, and he immediately turned around to retrieve the aquajet, reinserting himself in the crack and reaching for it. He caught hold of one of the handles and pulled it as far as he could, but it quickly became jammed. He pushed himself out and turned to Costas, who was hovering alongside. \"I can't get the aquajet through. There's absolutely no way. It's the shield around the propeller.\"\n\nCostas pulled himself in the hole to have a look, and he grunted and cursed as he tried every angle. He pushed himself out, breathing noisily. \"It was nearly out of juice anyway. It was probably going to give us only another five hundred meters or so.\"\n\n\"We have another problem. I noticed it only when we slowed down.\"\n\n\"You mean my leak?\"\n\n\"It must have been caused by that rockfall that sealed us in at the entrance. There's a dent in your pack and a stream of bubbles from the manifold. I'd have to remove the cover to take a look.\"\n\n\"Don't even try. It might just make it worse. My helmet display told me about it when it happened, but there was nothing I could do about it, and I didn't see any point in mentioning it. With the aquajet online, I calculated that I should still be able to make the likely length of the tunnel with oxygen to spare.\"\n\n\"And now?\"\n\n\"Twenty-five minutes of oxygen left. Almost a kilometer of tunnel. We're going to be buddy-breathing.\"\n\nJack focused on their training. One of the safety features of the IMU rebreather was an inlet on the manifold that allowed a hose to be attached from another rebreather so that the oxygen supply could be shared. He stared at the manifold, looking for the outlet. He suddenly felt cold in the pit of his stomach. _It was gone_. He looked quickly around, but he knew he was not going to find it here. There was no way he could attach his hose into Costas' rebreather now, no way they could share gas. He dropped down alongside Costas and looked at him. \"We're not buddy-breathing. The inlet for the hose is gone. It must have been struck during the rockfall and popped off.\"\n\nCostas looked back at him, his face drawn. \"I've got my portable emergency bottle, and I can use yours. That's a further ten minutes each.\"\n\n\"That means having to take off your helmet. Tell me when your carbon dioxide level reaches critical. I won't be able to help you if you've blacked out.\"\n\n\"Roger that. Let's go.\"\n\nCostas powered ahead again, trailing bubbles behind him. Jack followed, watching his own oxygen consumption rise as he began to exert himself for the first time since entering the tunnel. He was finning hard to keep up. Suddenly everything they had talked about, the prospect of what might lie ahead, was blanked out of his mind, and all he could think about was the next few minutes. It felt horribly like the final countdown of a condemned man. He remembered four days earlier seeing Costas semiconscious in the submersible as he reached it on his free dive, and the huge relief when he had opened up the jammed air valve and seen his revived face at the door of the double-lock chamber. This time there could be no quick solution, no instant reprieve. Once the emergency air had run out, there would be nothing Jack could do except watch Costas drown. If that happened, life as he knew it would be over. Every second now counted.\n\nAfter fifteen minutes Costas slowed down, his breathing hard and fast. \"Okay, Jack. Ten minutes of oxygen left on my readout.\"\n\n\"Roger that. Less than five hundred meters to go now.\" As they swam forward, the tunnel ahead seemed to be surrounded by a golden glow, a ring of shining yellow that separated itself in the center of the tunnel as they came closer. It was a huge torque of gold shimmering in their headlamps, each arm ending at the top in a finial in the shape of a serpent's head. On either side of it, the tunnel opened out and split into two parallel channels separated by a row of rock-cut columns that extended from the golden ring as far as they could see. \"This is what we want,\" Jack said, desperately hoping he was right. \"This is the beginning of a dock complex that would have allowed barges to arrive on one side while others waited on the opposite side for departure, ready to head back toward the Nile. The wharf can't be far ahead.\"\n\n\"Snakes, Jack. I just can't get away from them. You remember the Red Sea?\"\n\n\"I remember the image of those sea snakes you sent Maurice's boy. That made his day.\"\n\n\"The sonar can see farther ahead than our eyes, and I don't see anything yet.\" Costas swam through the ring and Jack followed him, brushing against the gold. If it was solid, it was far larger than any golden object ever recovered in Egypt, an extraordinary testament to the wealth and vision of the pharaoh who had built this place.\n\nHe followed Costas into the left-hand passage, still seeing nothing ahead to suggest a surface to the water. A few minutes farther on, Costas stopped finning and sank slowly to the floor of the tunnel. \"I've reached critical, Jack. I'm beginning to feel like I did in the submersible. A little dizzy and out of breath. I need you to get my helmet off now.\"\n\nJack sank down beside him and saw Costas' bluetinged lips through the visor, his eyes dulled. He unclipped the emergency air unit from the thigh pocket on Costas' right leg. It was a miniature cylinder about fifteen centimeters long with a mouthpiece in the middle. He twisted it to crack open the valve, pressed the purge button to test it, and saw a blast of bubbles. He put it in Costas' hand and then placed his own hands on the locking levers on either side of his helmet. \"The water's twelve degrees. You ready?\"\n\nCostas' voice sounded distant. \"You know, Jack, I could really do with one of those sandwiches now. Promise me you'll have them if I go. I can't bear to think of them wasted.\"\n\n\"We'll have them together. A picnic on the beach. You ready?\"\n\n\"I meant to say, Jack. About everything. You know.\"\n\n\"I know. Me too. Keep focused.\"\n\n\"Camera. Keep my camera. And my headlamp.\"\n\nJack unlocked and snapped the unit off the top of Costas' helmet and wrapped the straps around his wrist. \"Done.\"\n\n\"Now, Jack. _Now_.\"\n\nJack quickly snapped open the locking clamps, twisted the helmet and lifted it off, and pushed it out of the way behind the backpack. Costas had shut his eyes tight against the shock of the water, but he immediately put in the mouthpiece and took a breath. He reached down and took his spare mask out of his other thigh pocket, pressed it to his face, pulled the strap over the back of his head, and cleared the mask, giving Jack the diver's okay signal as he did so. Jack remembered that they could no longer talk, that all he could do if the terrain mapper showed signs of the surface ahead would be to gesture. He unclipped the straps of Costas' backpack and pushed it off, freeing him of the helmet and all encumbrances, and then took out his own emergency air and cracked it open. He held it ready to hand to Costas when the first one ran out. He had no idea what he would do then, when there was nothing more, when Costas began to breathe in water and convulse. He had seen it enough times to know that drowning was not the easy death that people imagined, but tormenting, horrible, like a slow hanging, the victim conscious for a few moments of terrible pain and sometimes taking minutes to die. He forced himself ahead, powering after Costas. All he could do now was hope.\n\nA little over five minutes later, Costas put up his right hand, still finning hard, and Jack put his emergency air into it. Costas sucked the last of his own, spat it out, and put Jack's in. He took a deep breath and powered on ahead. At this rate of breathing, he had only six, maybe seven minutes left. Still there was nothing on the terrain mapper. Jack hardly dared glance at the timer on the readout inside his helmet. Five more minutes had gone. There could be less than two minutes left. His heart began to pound, his mouth was dry. _This was not happening_.\n\nAnd then he saw it. Fifty, maybe sixty meters ahead, the tunnel seemed to slope up. A few moments later he was absolutely sure of it. He finned as hard as he could, drawing parallel with Costas and turning to him, gesturing forward with a sloping motion with one hand and opening all five fingers of the other to show the distance. Then he realized that he was no longer seeing exhaust bubbles. Costas had taken his last breath. He spat out the mouthpiece, put his head down, and swam as fast as he could. They were so close now that Jack readied himself to pull Costas along if he became unconscious, knowing that there might be a glimmer of hope that he could be saved if he could pull him to the surface in time.\n\nThen, miraculously, he saw the unmistakeable glimmer of surface water in his beam, and seconds later they exploded through, Costas gasping and coughing, floating on his back and breathing heavily. Jack panned his beam around, seeing a slope leading up to some kind of entranceway, and beside them a wharf that surrounded the end of the channel, evidently the ancient dock. He glanced at the external sensor array to check the air quality, and then unlocked and wrenched off his helmet, relishing the cool air on his face and taking a few deep breaths. He turned to Costas. \"You okay?\"\n\nCostas was still floating on his back, his arms and legs outstretched. \"Okay,\" he said, his breathing becoming normal. \"But hungry. _Really_ hungry.\"\n\nJack sniffed the air tentatively. \"Extraordinary smell,\" he said.\n\nCostas heaved himself over and hauled himself partway up the slope. \"That, my friend, is the smell of ancient Egypt. And from where I am, it smells good. _Very_ good.\"\n\n\"Interesting,\" Jack said, peering back inside his helmet. \"My readout shows a slightly lower than normal oxygen content.\"\n\n\"We know of only one open ventilation point, the shaft under the pyramid where the light got through. And we don't know yet whether that links to this tunnel.\"\n\n\"I smell jasmine, thyme, acacia. Almost a hint of incense, and a definite odor of organic decay.\"\n\n\"Must be something recent,\" Costas said, struggling out of his fins. \"Rats, maybe. This is a good place for rats.\"\n\n\"Rats and little fish in the canal. That's what Jones survived on. When he wasn't eating mummies.\"\n\n\"No way. You don't know that.\"\n\n\"That's what Howard Carter's diary entry said. After weeks down here Jones was desperate, and opened up some coffins. It must have been like eating dessicated old wasp's nests. With eyes and teeth.\"\n\n\"Don't, Jack. Just as I was about to have lunch.\"\n\n\"It's midnight. And we didn't bring a picnic.\"\n\nCostas patted the bulge in the front of his boiler suit. \"Oh yes we did.\"\n\n\"You didn't _really_ bring sandwiches.\"\n\n\"What do you think I was doing while I was waiting for you to come from Jerusalem? Took over the entire galley on _Sea Venture_. Brought my own ingredients, air-freighted out from my favorite deli in Manhattan. The one I always tell you I'm going to take you to one day. Gino's, where you can get a haircut and a shave while you wait. You think you've gone to heaven.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Jack said, grinning and helping Costas to his feet. \"We'll have lunch. But let's find a way out of this place first, right? Otherwise we might be rationing your very special sandwiches over a very long time, and looking for alternative food sources?\"\n\nA little fish flapped out of the water where it lapped at the edge. Slimy looking and with bulging eyes, it was the only other living thing they had seen since leaving the Nile. Costas contemplated it with a distasteful look on his face, and then edged it back in with his foot. \"I don't like the sound of that at all,\" he said. \"Not _at all_.\"\n\n\"You need more rest?\"\n\nCostas shook his head, checking the waist strap on his boiler suit and easing the constriction of the E-suit on his neck. \"Let's get this show on the road.\"\n\nJack stared up the slope. \"Roger that.\"\n\n# CHAPTER 22\n\nJack removed the headlamp console from his rebreather backpack, handed Costas' back to him, and then eased off the backpack and laid it with his helmet on the sloping floor. There were still over two hours of breathing time left in his cylinder, but with Costas on empty and no way of buddy-breathing, he was not going to carry on alone if they came to another underwater passage. After what had just nearly happened to Costas, and Jack's reaction to it, they were either getting out of here together or not at all.\n\nThey both unwound the straps from the back of the lamp consoles and put them on their heads, first checking that the integrated miniature video cameras were still recording. With the backpack air-conditioning unit removed, the E-suits might become uncomfortably warm, but at the moment that was better than being chilled, and the Kevlar would afford protection against bumps and scrapes along the way. Whatever lay in store for them now, Jack knew it was unlikely to be an easy walk-through. And being in a breathable environment did not mean that an escape tunnel out toward Cairo somewhere ahead was still anything more than a shaky hypothesis.\n\nCostas detached the hose from the hydration pack on the left side of his E-suit and took a deep draw on it, patting his boiler suit as he did so to check that everything was there and still in place. He paused for a moment, delved deep into the front pocket, and removed a watertight bag. He unzipped it, grasped the sandwich inside, and took a huge bite. He munched noisily and swallowed as he replaced the bag. \"It was going to be my dying thought, and now it's my kiss of life. Thank you, Gino.\" He took another mouthful of water and stowed the tube. Then he panned his headlamp beam over the top of the ramp. \"You think that's the way to go?\"\n\n\"We don't have any choice,\" Jack replied. \"There's an identical ramp at the end of the channel parallel to us, just visible through the columns, but it joins up to the single passageway ahead. My guess is that it will lead first to some kind of boat stowage facility, probably linked to the artificial harbor that we know was associated with the Old Kingdom mortuary temple. The space we saw lit up from beneath the pyramid three months ago lies somewhere between the edge of the pyramid and the harbor site. We have to hope there will be some kind of entrance to it ahead.\"\n\nCostas nodded and then heaved himself upright. \"If it had been daytime, we might have seen reflected light coming through those shafts leading from the pyramid. I assume that's what allowed the caliph Al-Hakim and then Corporal Jones to see their way around this place. As it is, there isn't even a moon tonight.\"\n\nJack stared ahead, reciting. \" 'Omens of fire in the chariot's wind, pillars of fire in thunder and storm.' \"\n\n\"Come again?\"\n\n\"Something I remembered when I mentioned our chariot discovery in the Red Sea to you a few minutes ago. When I told Maria about our discovery, she quoted those lines to me from another of the medieval Geniza poets, Yannai. His imagery comes from the Book of Exodus.\"\n\n\"The burning bush, the mountain on fire,\" Costas replied. \"I had to learn all that stuff backward when I was a boy. I used to think ancient Egypt was a vision of hell.\"\n\n\"It's not just ancient Egypt now. You should have seen Cairo when we came through it this evening on the felucca.\"\n\n\"Are you thinking of the pyramids? That CNN footage we saw in Alexandria?\"\n\nJack nodded. \"You're right that we won't be seeing sunlight down here. But we may see another kind of light reflected in those mirrors. Akhenaten's City of Light won't be illuminated by the rays of the Aten, but it might be lit up by something he would have thought unimaginable, by fires that may as well be drawn straight from the biblical image of hell. The reflection from a burning pyramid is not a way marker that any archaeologist would wish to follow, but if it's there, it might be all we've got to go on.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nThe ramp sloped up at an angle of about thirty degrees until it reached a platform some five meters above the level of the water. From there it became a rectilinear tunnel about four meters across and three meters high, wide enough for the two of them to proceed side by side. Jack paused to adjust the angle of his camera while Costas carried on ahead, his beam reflecting off the polished veneer of granite that lined the lower part of the walls. About ten meters ahead Costas stopped and peered closely at the side of the tunnel, then he pressed his hands against it.\n\n\"Jack, this is interesting. It's been plastered over. It's\u2014\"\n\nThere was a sudden bellow and the sound of collapsing masonry, and Costas was gone. Jack stared aghast, and then quickly made his way forward. Where Costas had been standing was a jagged hole about the size of a small door. He approached it and leaned forward into the chamber that had been revealed. That air inside was dry and aromatic, and made his eyes smart. He blinked hard, coughed, and then saw Costas' headlamp beam coming from somewhere below, apparently stationary and at an odd angle. For an instant Jack had a yawning feeling of fear. They had basic medical kits inside their E-suits but nothing to treat major trauma other than blood coagulants and shell dressings. If Costas was seriously injured, there was little he could do for him and no way of calling in help.\n\nHe pulled himself carefully through the hole and peered below, his heart pounding. \"Costas, are you all right? Talk to me.\"\n\nThere was no response, and Jack held his breath. Then the beam from below shifted slightly, and he heard a grunt and a mumbled curse. \"Fascinating,\" Costas said. His voice sounded impossibly distant, as if coming from deep inside a chasm.\n\n\"What's fascinating? Are you all right?\"\n\n\"Never seen anything quite like it. Sewn joinery, each timber individually shaped. Amazing technology.\"\n\nJack stared out beyond Costas, and gasped as he realized what he was looking at. It was a huge rock-cut chamber at least ten meters across, the size of a giant water cistern. At the bottom was a mass of timber, disarticulated and carefully laid out. Costas' beam was coming from beneath a section of stacked planking close to the corner of the chamber beneath him. Jack watched as Costas began to extricate himself. He looked up, shading his eyes against Jack's beam, his face white with plaster dust. \"What do you make of it, Jack? A nautical archaeologist's dream, or what?\"\n\n\"It's fantastic,\" Jack enthused. \"The chamber must have been airtight before you broke through, preserving all those timbers like that. There's another of these boat pits still unopened in front of the Great Pyramid, known as a result of archaeologists pushing a fiber-optic camera down into it. Unless I'm mistaken, you've just fallen into the dismantled funerary barge of the Pharaoh Menkaure, the boat that took his body down the canal from the river to the harbor and the funerary temple. And you're right, the joinery is sewn planking. Actually an incredibly robust technique that could produce a hull well up to sea travel, though this is a ceremonial riverboat. You can make out the raking stem and stern timbers, the oars, the fine woodwork of the deckhouse. Amazing.\"\n\nAs Jack was talking, Costas clambered to his feet and then made his way across to the far side of the chamber, carefully avoiding causing more damage to the timbers. Jack could see that he was heading toward another aperture in the wall, and he watched him crouch down and crawl in until only his feet were visible. There was another sound of collapsing masonry, a small cloud of dust, and then silence, followed by violent coughing. A few moments later Costas' face reappeared, and he beckoned. \"Jack, you _really_ need to see this.\"\n\nJack stepped through the jagged hole and peered over the side. It was about three meters to the chamber floor, and he did not want to risk a broken limb. He stared across. \"Is it _that_ good?\"\n\n\"That good, Jack. You're not leaving without seeing this. Trust me.\"\n\n\"All right. I'm on my way.\" He found a lip of rock, jammed his fingers into it, and swung out over the edge. Then he lowered himself until he was hanging above the floor. He looked for a landing point and then let himself go, falling into the dust and narrowly missing the edge of the pile of planks. He got up, flexed his legs, and then stepped over the wood toward Costas, who had backed out of the hole to give Jack space to get through.\n\n\"It's another chamber,\" Costas said. \"At least twice as big as this one. Prepare to be amazed.\"\n\nJack ducked down and crawled in, trying not to scrape his back against the top of the hole. His headlamp beam caught timbers, the joinery visible; they were clearly more boat elements. He pulled himself out of the hole and moved aside to let Costas follow. Then he squatted on the floor of the chamber and aimed his beam upward for a better view.\n\nAn astonishing sight met his eyes. Instead of dismembered timbers, it was an intact vessel, the flush planks of its bow only inches from his face. He reached out and touched it, feeling a frisson of excitement. The timbers were covered with pitch, and as Jack eased forward he knocked a pot on the floor that contained a congealed black mass, presumably the source of the material. He shifted to the left and saw a pile of planks and a bronze adze beside a section of the hull that was evidently being repaired. The edges of the timbers showed where they had been sewn together with some form of cord as well as joined with wooden mortise and tenon. Jack stood up carefully, raising himself until his head was just above the gunwale, and panned his beam over the entire vessel.\n\n\"See what I mean?\" Costas said, standing beside him. \"Looks like old Menkaure took a whole fleet with him to the afterlife.\"\n\nJack shook his head. \"This isn't Menkaure. This vessel is characteristically Late Bronze Age, dating more than a thousand years later. And it's not a river barge. This is a full-blown seagoing ship.\"\n\n\"No kidding.\" Costas stood on a stone block beside Jack, allowing him to see in at Jack's level. \"My God. I see what you mean. Deckhouse at the back rather than the center, wide beam, deck planking. And that's a mast, stepped down, and stern steering oars. A cargo ship?\"\n\n\"Do you remember first seeing the timbers of our Minoan wreck off the north coast of Crete ten years ago, where we were excavating when Maurice found the Atlantis papyrus? It's taken most of the last decade to conserve and record the timbers, but I reviewed the final report just before coming out here. This boat is astonishingly similar in almost every detail. This isn't an Egyptian ship. It's a Minoan ship, or at least one built to Aegean specifications or by a Minoan shipwright.\"\n\n\"How do you know the date?\"\n\n\"See the row of empty jars in the hold?\"\n\nCostas peered over. \"Aha. Early amphoras. Like on our Minoan wreck.\"\n\n\"Canaanite jars,\" Jack said. \"Second half of the second millennium BC, fifteenth, maybe fourteenth century BC. And I can see a so-called pilgrim flask beside the deckhouse, a typical Aegean pottery oil container you see on Egyptian wall paintings depicting trade with Aegean merchants.\"\n\nCostas stepped off the block, eased his way around Jack, and came to the prow of the hull. \"Take a look at this. It's got an evil eye.\"\n\nJack dropped down and moved alongside Costas, then stepped back against the wall for a better view. \"Well, I'll be damned,\" he exclaimed. \"That clinches it. Fantastic.\"\n\n\"Talk to me, Jack.\"\n\n\"Look closely. That's not an evil eye. It's the Aten, the sun symbol. If you look really closely, you can see it's even got the radiating lines etched into the planks.\"\n\n\"Akhenaten?\"\n\n\"It could only be. It's the first certain evidence we've had of him since that hieroglyphic cartouche at the entrance to the tunnel on the Nile.\"\n\n\"What's the Aegean connection?\"\n\n\"You remember Maurice showing us the Aegean mercenaries he identified on the tomb painting from the mummy necropolis?\"\n\n\"Who could forget it. The bare-breasted amazons.\"\n\n\"Well, I think that dynastic marriage in the fifteenth century BC with a Minoan queen brought the Egyptians more than just a ready army of mercenaries. One of the few technologies the Egyptians lacked was seagoing ships, apart from vessels used on the Red Sea that look more like strengthened river craft.\"\n\n\"Was this a war harbor?\" Costas suggested. \"A secret naval base?\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Jack murmured. \"Not exactly. These aren't warships; they're not galleys. They're also not deep-bellied merchantmen. They're more like passenger transport vessels, definitely designed for deep-sea sailing with room for plenty of provisions.\"\n\n\"Ships of exploration?\" Costas suggested.\n\nJack stared, his mind racing. _It was possible_. \"This boat looks as if it was abandoned hastily in the middle of a refit, with tools still left lying around.\"\n\nCostas had moved out of sight beyond the prow. \"Take a look around the corner, Jack. There's an empty berth, and in front of it a ramp leading down to where we think the artificial harbor must have abutted this part of the plateau, the exit now completely sealed in.\" Jack followed him through and stared at the open space, at the wooden formers that looked as if they had been hastily cast aside. He shook his head, astonished. \"One pharaoh goes in dead, another one comes out alive.\"\n\n\"What are you saying?\"\n\n\"Just another hypothesis. A best-fit scenario. We know that Menkaure came here dead, probably already embalmed, ready for the rituals of the mortuary temple and then interment in his sarcophagus in the pyramid. What we don't know yet for sure is how this place figured in Akhenaten's journey over a thousand years later. Nobody has ever conclusively identified his tomb or his mummy. One possibility is that he may be buried here, and that was what this underground construction was really all about, but my instinct says no. I see this, whatever he built here under the plateau, his City of Light, as something that he saw through to completion and then sealed up before departing.\"\n\n\"Maybe he mocked it up for any suspicious observers as if he were constructing a funerary complex, a pretty normal thing for a pharaoh to do, when in reality he was planning to do a runner,\" Costas suggested. \"Maybe that was his final opt out. Come up here as if dead, in a funerary barge like the pharaohs of old, but instead of going to the afterlife he leaves very much alive on a vessel equipped for a long sea voyage.\"\n\n\"It's possible. The ship that's still here was abandoned in the middle of refitting, as if it too had been intended for departure but there was no time to make both vessels ready. Akhenaten must have known his life was in danger. A man like the caliph Al-Hakim, who had done beneficent things, had perhaps endowed some kind of library or seminary at this spot, but had made mortal enemies in the old priesthood for his desecration of their temples and banning of their rituals. Maybe departure was his only option once he had achieved his ambitions and seen the Israelites safely resettled in Canaan.\"\n\n\"Have you voiced this idea to Maurice?\"\n\n\"He says that for a man who founded a new religion, created a new capital city, and seems to have engineered the destruction of his entire chariot army to let the Israelites escape, anything is possible. Akhenaten was ancient Egypt's wild card.\"\n\n\"Just as long as he took Nefertiti with him too.\"\n\nJack looked at the ship again, making sure his camera took in as much as it could of the astonishing sights around him. It was as if they had walked into an ancient Egyptian shipyard while the workers were out on a lunch break. He turned back to Costas. \"Okay. _Definitely_ worth it. Where do we go from here?\"\n\nCostas nodded back the way they had come. \"The passageway from the wharf carried on beyond the point where I broke through into these chambers. There might once have been entrances from these sheds into a complex under the plateau, but if so they've been sealed up. We could spend hours sounding out the plaster on the walls and not find them. Every entrance seems to have been sealed up, as if this whole place had been mothballed. That might fit in with your theory.\"\n\nJack followed Costas back through the ship chambers and clambered up the jumble of fallen masonry where they had entered. He heaved Costas up on his shoulders and then strained as he took Costas' outstretched arm and hauled himself into the passageway. He suddenly felt exhausted and woozy, as if he had experienced a rapid loss of blood pressure, and he leaned against the wall of the passageway and took a drink from his hydration pack. He realized that he had not drunk anything since they had passed beyond Cairo, and he made a mental note to keep hydrated.\n\nHe pushed off and followed, his unsteadiness having passed. Ahead beyond the western limit of the boat chambers he could see Costas' beam waver, and then stop. As he neared he could see that the passageway had ended, carrying on only as an aperture at head level about half a meter high and a meter wide that extended into the darkness as far as their beams could penetrate. He remembered three months before, staring down a similar slit from under the pyramid, looking in exactly the opposite direction to their position now. Somewhere between the two was the space that had been lit up so brilliantly by the light that had come down through the pyramid.\n\nHe refused to think that that was the end of the road, that what they had seen was no more than a reflection from further tunnels and ventilation shafts. What they had found already had been extraordinary, but there had to be more, a central hub to the radiating passageways indicated on the plaque, something set farther back under the plateau directly ahead of them now.\n\n\"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?\" Costas said.\n\n\"I'm thinking that if there's another chamber ahead, it must have been accessible from this tunnel if it was used to bring in building materials and workers. But maybe once the work was completed, this tunnel was shut off except for this aperture, with the entrance to the chamber then becoming the hypothetical processional way that we think might be represented by that other arm of the Aten heading toward Fustat.\"\n\n\"You mean our hypothetical egress tunnel.\" Costas crouched down at the corner of the tunnel and peered closely at the gaps where the slabs of granite abutted one another. \"You're right, Jack. Under the veneer I can see the edges of blocks of masonry. The Egyptians were past masters at this, weren't they? Creating burial chambers and then devising ingenious ways of blocking them off to deter tomb robbers. Look at all those obstructions that Colonel Vyse had to blow his way through to reach the sarcophagus in the Pyramid of Menkaure. Somebody was doing the same kind of thing here.\"\n\n\"Only I don't think what lies beyond here was a burial chamber.\"\n\n\"Maybe not. But I have a horrible feeling that there's one right here.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Beside the floor, Jack. Look down to where I am. There's a really bad smell coming from it.\"\n\nJack followed Costas' gaze and knelt in front of an irregular hole that looked as if it had been punched through a plastered space between two slabs of granite. He saw something, reached in, gingerly pulled it out, and held it under his beam. It was a human hand, a very old human hand, mummified and nearly skeletal. He held it out to Costas. \"Ever wanted to shake hands with a mummy?\"\n\n\"I knew it. We weren't going to go underground in Egypt without finding mummies. No way.\"\n\n\"I think we might just have found Corporal Jones' larder.\" Jack carefully replaced the hand, took a deep breath, and poked his head partway into the hole. He panned his beam around and revealed a carved-out annex the size of a small bedroom. It was a charnel house, filled with a mass of disarticulated mummies and mummy parts, bedded down in a great mass of feathery material that looked like pieces of mummy wrapping and shredded human skin. He looked for anything diagnostic, and then saw a fragment of wooden coffin casing, its edges gnawed away but part of the painting and hieroglyphs on the surface just visible. He pulled his head out and sat back against the wall of the tunnel, gasping for breath, his eyes smarting from the dust.\n\n\"Well?\" Costas said. \"Is there a passageway?\"\n\nJack shook his head, and coughed. \"What we've got in there,\" he said, \"is a giant rat's nest.\"\n\n\"Not caused by Corporal Jones after all?\"\n\nJack nodded, coughing again. \"Him too. I'm sure of it. I think he took his cue from the rats. They must have gnawed out a small entrance from this passage, and Jones in his desperate hunt for food must have seen it and enlarged it. There's more damage in there than rats could cause, and more bits missing. Originally that chamber was stuffed full of intact mummies, but they're not from the time of Akhenaten. The one fragment of decorated coffin I saw was definitely Old Kingdom, almost certainly from the time of Menkaure. What I think we've got here is a secondary burial, mummies probably of viziers and minor officials involved in the construction of the pyramid, cleared out of their tombs by Akhenaten's workmen to make way for something bigger. It makes sense that the original tombs should have been under the plateau in front of the pyramid. If they were removed and maybe extended to make a larger chamber, then that's a promising sign.\"\n\n\"If we could get through.\" Costas eased himself up, looking back distastefully at the hole where the withered fingernails of the hand were poking out. Jack followed suit, and they both peered down the aperture at the end of the tunnel.\n\n\"It could be done,\" Jack said after a moment. \"Al-Hakim and Jones must have crawled down there, as we haven't seen any way ahead other than this.\"\n\n\"I know what would have drawn them on,\" Costas said. \"I think this was a light shaft, like the one under the pyramid. Even at night if there was a moon, they would have seen some light ahead, enough to tempt them to try their luck at getting through. After all, by this stage if they were trapped down here, they wouldn't have had anything to lose.\" He glanced back again at the hand. \"Other than Jones, leaving his mummy larder behind.\"\n\n\"Do we risk it, or double-check for entrances elsewhere?\"\n\n\"We could do a recce.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nA chirping sound came from the bulge in the front of Costas' boiler suit, and then it moved. Jack jumped back, startled, but then he relaxed slightly, shaking his head. \"You brought along a little friend, didn't you?\" Costas unzipped the top of his boiler suit and a little mechanical eye on a stalk peered out, followed by two miniature robotic hands that slowly reached up and grasped the edges of the suit. \"I couldn't leave Little Joey behind, could I?\" Costas said, gently stroking the neck behind the eye. \"Not after Big Joey had all the fun at the wreck site.\"\n\n\"I worry about you sometimes. Aysha thinks you'd be a great dad to living, sentient human beings.\"\n\nLittle Joey seemed to bristle, and cocked his eye at Jack. \"Careful what you say,\" Costas said. \"He's very sensitive.\" He reached in, took the robot out, and placed it on the ledge at the beginning of the aperture. Then he pulled out a radio control unit and strap-on virtual goggles. \"He's programmed to be reactive to his environment. Because of what we tend to do, I've made him fully sensitized to tunnels and the kind of archaeological features we've encountered in the past. He's like a robotic tomb raider. I'll send him down that tunnel now and he'll stop and report back anything unusual.\"\n\n\"How does he do that?\"\n\n\"He'll tell us. You'll see.\" Costas reached under the tail of the robot and activated a switch. Like its larger counterpart, Little Joey was shaped like a scorpion, with four legs on either side, the single eye on its stalk and two flexible arms, only it was no bigger than a large rat. Costas lifted it and aimed it down the tunnel. But it leapt up, assumed its original sideways position, and looked back at Costas. Then it leapt around again and aimed itself down the tunnel. \"He's very independent,\" Costas said, shaking his head. \"Doesn't like to be shown what to do. Always has to try it himself first.\"\n\n\"Just like children,\" Jack said thoughtfully. \"That's what you'd discover if you had them. Like a certain teenager we know.\"\n\nLittle Joey suddenly scurried off down the aperture, his lights showing as pinpricks in the darkness, and came to a halt perhaps ten meters ahead.\n\n\"Dead end?\" Jack asked.\n\nCostas hunched over the radio. \"It means he's seen something, but we won't know until I've booted the system up and he can react. Once that's done I'll be able to put on the goggles and see what he sees. It'll take a few minutes.\" Costas stood back, took a deep breath, and wiped the back of his hand over his face, blinking hard.\n\n\"You okay?\" Jack said.\n\n\"Beginning to feel the effect. Nothing serious, yet.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Some basic science, Jack. Those extremists at the pyramid were spraying it with some kind of fuel, right? We saw those tanker trucks on the CNN report. It must have been a pretty well-planned operation.\"\n\n\"They've been threatening it for years. Nothing about this coup is spur of the moment. They're taking up where the Mahdi left off in 1885.\"\n\n\"Well, spraying fuel and igniting it is how you get a stone building to look as if it's burning. The biblical burning bush is thought to have been based on something similar in appearance, where in some conditions the gas exuding from certain desert species could be ignited to give the appearance of a bush wreathed in flame but not actually burning. Some of that fuel is likely to have entered the pyramid through the shafts that were used to bring light to this underground complex. The fuel will be burnt out long before it reaches us, but that's not the problem. The problem is what I experienced firsthand during that terrorist strike on my destroyer in the Gulf, when I was trapped by fire belowdecks in the engine room before I managed to escape and help with the rescue.\"\n\n\"Fire consumes oxygen,\" Jack murmured. \"I think I see what you're getting at.\"\n\n\"You remember the low oxygen readout you noticed after we surfaced? Ever since then, when I've exerted myself I've felt a little lightheaded. I put it down to the residual effect of carbon dioxide buildup during my final minutes on the rebreather, but this is a better explanation.\"\n\nJack nodded. \"That's reassuring. I felt it a few minutes ago. I nearly blacked out.\"\n\n\"Reassuring, but not. They'll be jetting fuel continuously at the pyramid to maintain the spectacle, and that means more fuel getting down those shafts. With the outer surface of the pyramid wreathed in fire, the only way the burning fuel inside can feed its flames is by sucking up the oxygen from inside the pyramid, from the shaft, from the burial chamber, from the well we went down three months ago, and ultimately from every connected part of this underground complex. Slowly but surely, we're being starved of oxygen.\"\n\n\"How long, do you think?\"\n\n\"Two or three hours, probably. Maybe less.\"\n\n\"Well, we weren't planning on lingering. If we're in here much longer than that, we'll never make our rendezvous with the felucca before dawn.\"\n\n\"At least it means if we do get stuck down here, we won't be around long enough to have to eat mummies.\" Jack gave Costas a wan look. \"I for one do not intend to suffocate because of some deranged extremist.\"\n\n\"Amen to that. Let's just hope Little Joey can save the day.\"\n\nThey were interrupted by a chirping sound from down the aperture. Jack angled his headlamp beam and peered down. The robot was shaking and waving its arms as the eye looked back at them and then at the wall in front. \"Something seems to be wrong,\" he said. \"Looks like a malfunction.\"\n\nCostas stared incredulously at Jack. \"Malfunction? Little Joey? No way. He's just excited. It means he really has found something. It shows that the system is coming online.\" He picked up the mask, tried it on, and then removed it. \"About a minute more, and then I can actually _be_ Little Joey, real time. Lanowski calls it a mind-meld.\"\n\nJack continued staring at the chirping and chattering apparition that was caught in his beam. \"Is he really agitated? I mean, you must have programmed this.\"\n\n\"It's like a smoke alarm. He's programmed to respond if he finds what I've asked him to look for. But he really _has_ been acting like a wilful teenager recently. You think you've got problems with Rebecca. I left Lanowski alone with him in the engineering lab for half an hour a few weeks ago, and he hasn't been the same since.\"\n\n\"It's stopped,\" Jack said.\n\nCostas put on the mask. \"Eureka,\" he murmured, manipulating the controls. \"I'm looking through his eye, Jack. The shaft goes off to the right, and there it is, a very suffused red glow.\"\n\nJack's heart began to pound with excitement. \"Can you get up to it?\"\n\n\"I'm getting there now. About a meter to go. Okay. Looking out over a big room, circular, maybe twenty meters across. Recesses around the edge filled with jars. Holy cow. _Holy cow_.\"\n\nJack could barely contain himself. He wanted to be there, to be where Costas was. Jars like that were exactly what Jones had described to Howard Carter. \"What is it? What can you see?\"\n\nCostas seemed to be transfixed, his hand motionless on the control lever and his mouth wide open. He slowly let go of the control and took off the mask, his eyes staring into space, and then turned to Jack. \"You remember those first ever pictures of King Tut's tomb? You're not going to believe what I've just seen.\"\n\n# CHAPTER 23\n\nJack pushed ahead with his feet through the shaft, using his elbows and hands to pull himself along. He inched toward the halogen beam from Little Joey some five meters away where the shaft angled sharply to the right. The image he had seen from the robot's camera confirmed beyond a doubt what lay around the corner, yet Jack refused to register it until he saw it with his own eyes.\n\nHe could hear Costas grunting and cursing where he had climbed in behind from the tunnel, his frame barely fitting into the shaft. They knew that they must be following in the path of Corporal Jones, and almost certainly the caliph Al-Hakim before that, taking the only passage left open when the ship sheds and the entrance tunnel had been blocked up in antiquity. They were crawling along a shaft that was part of the extraordinary network cut through the rock to reflect sunlight into the underground complex.\n\nJack paused, his breathing fast and shallow, remembering that the oxygen level would by now be seriously depleted and that he was not in the first stages of a panic attack. The turn in the shaft was only a few meters ahead. He watched as Little Joey used a miniature air jet to blow dust from a black basalt slab angled at forty-five degrees in the corner of the shaft. The basalt was polished to a glassy sheen and was clearly intended as a mirror.\n\nJack shut his eyes until the dust settled and then he saw it, the same extraordinary image they had seen through Little Joey's eye a few minutes before, a glow of red as if he were looking through a slit into a furnace. His heart began to pound with excitement. He had dreamed of this for months, and now, incredibly, it was just within his reach, something that had seemed virtually impossible only a few days before.\n\nMoments later he was around the corner pulling himself to the edge of the aperture overlooking the chamber. Little Joey clattered ahead and perched on the rim, chirping and shaking. The shaft had widened enough to allow Costas to heave himself alongside, his E-suit smeared with grime. As they panned their lights ahead, an astonishing scene met their eyes. They were on the edge of a huge circular space, perhaps twenty meters across and eight meters high where it rose to an apex. On the floor below the apex was an elevated dais capped by a rectangular altar or sarcophagus, its top above their line of vision. From the dais radiating outward on the floor were raised ridges terminating in carved hands, the unmistakable sign of the Aten, the sun symbol of Akhenaten. One of the arms pointed directly to the shaft they had come through and another to a second shaft visible to the left, coming from the direction of the pyramid. Costas gestured at it, his voice hushed.\n\n\"That shaft must be the one we were looking through three months ago from beneath the pyramid. You can see the light from the fire shining through, and reflecting off basalt mirrors around the walls. In daylight the reflection back would be dazzling, exactly as we saw it.\"\n\n\"The light of the Aten, concentrated on this one spot,\" Jack said. \"It's an incredible feat of precision, ancient Egyptian engineering at its best. Maurice would love it.\"\n\nCostas pointed to the opposite wall of the chamber. \"That's what we want to see, Jack. One of the arms, the longest one, is pointing to an open tunnel. Another one's pointing to the wall just to the right of us that must lead to the ship sheds. You can see an area of plaster, clearly different from the polished rock veneer, and I bet that's where the entrance remains sealed up. The entrance to the open tunnel looks as if it was once plastered over as well, and was broken into relatively recently.\"\n\n\"Corporal Jones?\" Jack suggested.\n\n\"He was a sapper, right? He would have had an eye for constructional detail. He would have been looking for a way out, just as we are. That is, when he wasn't living in a twilight world of his own, crawling around here like the undead looking for tasty snacks. This place would have been pretty eerie at night with only moonlight reflecting through, enough to unhinge someone already halfway there and weak with hunger. It's spooky enough in this light.\"\n\n\"What's your take on the orientation of that open tunnel?\"\n\n\"It's heading toward Cairo. It almost certainly corresponds to that line on the plan leading to Fustat. And it's clearly above water level, a dry channel. It could be our ticket out.\"\n\n\"If it's not blocked by rockfalls.\"\n\n\"Only one way to find out.\"\n\n\"I need some time in here, Costas. We need to get as much as we can on video.\"\n\n\"Thirty minutes, maximum. I can actually feel the air being sucked up that shaft by the fires on the pyramid. If we stay longer than that, we won't have the energy to get far enough down that tunnel to get out, and then we end up in a terminal countdown.\"\n\nLittle Joey chirped and sighed, almost an electronic moan, and the eye peered dolefully at Costas. \"I know,\" he said, stroking its neck. \"Good boy. _Very_ good boy.\" He pressed something beneath the carapace, and Little Joey jumped slightly, and then settled down and purred. \"I can't give him a biscuit, but I can give him an electronic buzz. It means he'll go to sleep happy. He might be holding the fort here for some time.\"\n\nJack slithered around until his feet were hanging over the edge, and slowly lowered himself to the floor. \"Okay,\" he said. \"Thirty minutes. Keep your camera rolling.\"\n\n\"Roger that.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nAs Jack hit the floor he felt for his head camera, making sure it was at the right angle to catch everything he saw. He knew what he wanted to look at. It was what had set his pulse racing when he had heard Jeremy read Howard Carter's account of what Corporal Jones had seen, and then a few minutes ago when he had looked at the video image relayed from Little Joey. It was what had been sitting in Hiebermeyer's desk for all those years since he had found it in the excavation beside the plateau, the hieroglyphs that hinted at the truth behind Akhenaten's City of Light. Jack glanced around the chamber. Akhenaten's treasure was not to be another Tutankhamun's tomb, not another trove of gold and jewels and precious artifacts. It was the greatest treasure of all. _It was a treasure in words_.\n\nCostas dropped behind him and they slowly proceeded along the wall. At intervals of about five meters the rock had been carved into alcoves like the burial niches he had seen in Jerusalem with Rebecca, only here they were not designed for bodies. Each niche was filled with dozens of tall pottery jars, more than a meter high, almost all of them lidded and sealed with a mass of black resinous material. Those that were not lidded had been smashed open, their contents strewn over the floor, visible in front of three of the twelve alcoves that Jack had counted around the chamber. He squatted in front of the first and picked up a handful of material from among the pottery sherds, fragments of papyrus that crumbled to dust as he touched them. Costas thrust his hand deep into the base of one of the smashed jars still remaining in the alcove and came up with a handful of the same material. \"My best guess?\" he said, letting it drop between his fingers. \"Corporal Jones, looking for food. He gave up at the third alcove once he realized that the contents were inedible.\"\n\n\"What was inside,\" Jack murmured, staring at the shreds in his hands, \"was papyrus scrolls. This place is a library.\" He got up, and did some swift arithmetic. \"If there are twelve alcoves containing thirty jars each, and each jar contains four or five scrolls, that's the best part of two thousand scrolls. That's way more than you'd expect for a collection of religious tracts and Books of the Dead.\"\n\n\"Check out the pots,\" Costas said. \"They've all got symbols on them painted in black. The pots in each alcove have the same principal symbol, but then above that, each pot has a unique additional symbol. From my memory of Lanowski's attempt to teach me hieroglyphics, those upper symbols are numbers. So this must be some kind of cataloguing system.\"\n\nJack brushed the dust from the symbols on one pot and then moved to the next alcove and did the same. \"You're right. Each alcove has an individual hieroglyph: a sheaf of corn in the first, a seated bird in this one, a half-moon in the next one along. I think they're signifiers like our letters of the alphabet, part of the cataloguing system.\"\n\n\"Sheaf of corn means religion, squatting bird means science, half-moon means medicine?\" Costas said. \"Something like that?\"\n\nJack nodded, suddenly overwhelmed by the enormity of what they were confronting. \"Imagine what those could contain.\"\n\n\"You know we can't risk opening them, Jack. We have nowhere to take them, and they might just crumble to dust on contact with the air. Our job now is to see to it that this place remains secret until we can get back here with the biggest manuscript conservation team that Maria and Jeremy have ever assembled. Meanwhile our clock is ticking. I'm going to check out that dais in the center.\"\n\nJack turned back to the pots and put his hand on one of them, struggling to contain his emotions. Costas was right, of course. It would be grossly irresponsible to tamper with them now. If there were huge secrets of science and medicine, the cures to diseases, then they could be lost in an instant; far better to leave them here in the hope that a return would be possible. But it went against his grain as an archaeologist not to at least see some writing, to record it with their cameras. Not to do so, to leave empty-handed, would be to leave something unsatisfied in his soul, a need for something tangible to make all the effort seem worthwhile.\n\nCostas' voice came from the dais. \"It looks as if you might have been wrong about Akhenaten leaving here alive. Looks like we might just have solved the mystery of his burial place.\"\n\nJack turned and mounted the steps, gasping in astonishment at the sight in front of him. In the middle of the chamber with the ridges in the floor radiating from it stood a huge sarcophagus in gold, larger even than the outer sarcophagus that had surrounded the mummy of Tutankhamun. The head was that of a man with a slightly upturned nose and almond eyes, reminiscent of Tutankhamun, his braided beard and headdress decorated with strips of faience and his eyes surrounded with inlays of niello to represent the lines of kohl. It was a face unfamiliar and yet familiar, the father of the pharaoh who had accidentally become the most famous in history and yet whose achievements were puny by comparison, cut off by death before he had even reached manhood. Jack knew who it was even before he had gazed down over the figure's torso, over the crossed arms carrying the jewel-studded staff and ankh symbol, to the circular representation of the Aten with radiating arms that clinched the identity beyond any doubt. _Akhenaten_.\n\nCostas was peering closely at the edge of the sarcophagus near the feet. \"Fascinating,\" he said. \"The lid was originally sealed over with sheet gold, but then someone's been around and scored it, cutting through to the crack between the sarcophagus and the lid. It's been pushed slightly off center.\"\n\nJack knelt down beside him, staring. \"Corporal Jones again?\"\n\n\"Maybe when he got hungry,\" Costa suggested. \"Before he found those other mummies.\"\n\nJack heaved on the lid, suddenly feeling woozy as he did so, his heart pounding and his chest tight. He knew they were more than halfway through Costas' predicted countdown before the oxygen level became critical. He pushed again, creating a crack just large enough for him to aim his beam inside. He panned it around, and then looked again. \"I think Jones would have been disappointed. There's nothing inside.\"\n\n\"Ancient tomb robbers?\"\n\nJack shook his head. \"There's no evidence I can see for robbers ever having gotten inside this chamber. When it was sealed up, that was it for over two thousand years. Ancient robbers would always leave the worthless debris behind, the mummy wrapping and bones, and they'd never have left without hacking off those parts of the sarcophagus that look like solid gold\u2014the hand, the ears, the beard. No, this was empty from the outset.\"\n\n\"Well, if Akhenaten could pull the wool over the Egyptians' eyes about the real cause of the loss of an entire chariot army in the Red Sea, then I guess he could fake his own death.\"\n\nJack stared at the face on the sarcophagus. It was Akhenaten as nobody had seen him before: not the elongated, misshapen pharaoh with the masklike visage, exaggerating his otherness, but instead Akhenaten the man, a fitting consort to the Nefertiti whose face had transfixed Jack a week before in the Cairo Museum. This was Akhenaten not as the world would know him but as he wished to be seen in the place of his greatest legacy, presiding not as a pharaoh but as a man over a treasure far greater than any of the riches that filled the tombs of his ancestors.\n\n\"Jack, take a look at what I've just found. These definitely aren't ancient.\"\n\nCostas had followed one of the ridges to the edge of the chamber between the alcoves filled with jars, and was squatting down. Jack walked over and joined him. On a ledge in front of the wall were two tarnished medals, their ribbons faded and dirty but laid out as if they had been carefully arranged. Jack recognized them immediately as Victorian campaign medals. One was silver, showing the Sphinx with the word _Egypt_ above and the date 1882 below, its ribbon made up of three blue and two white stripes. The other was a five-pointed bronze star with the Sphinx and the three pyramids in the center, also inscribed _Egypt_ and 1882 but with the year in Arabic in the Muslim calendar at the foot and surmounted by a star and crescent. Jack carefully picked up the silver medal, wiped the rim, and inspected it closely. \"Well, I'll be damned,\" he said quietly. \"It's our friend 3453 Corporal R. Jones, Royal Engineers. We meet at last.\"\n\nCostas picked up the star. \"How did he get these if he'd basically deserted?\"\n\n\"Look at the date, 1882,\" Jack replied. \"After Jeremy found that account in Howard Carter's diary, he looked up Jones' service record in the National Archives. It lists him as missing in action after the Battle of Kirkeban in February 1885, presumed killed. But it also shows that he'd first arrived in Egypt from India in 1882 as part of the expeditionary force sent to support the Khedive against an army uprising, but that soon became embroiled in the war against the Mahdi. So Jones had already had these two medals, the Egypt Medal and the Khedive's Star.\"\n\nCostas examined the star, fingering the crescent on the clasp. \"Ironic that British soldiers for years to come would have worn the symbol of Islam and the caliphate on their chests, after having fought a war that many would have seen as a latter-day crusade against the jihad.\"\n\nJack put the Egypt Medal back, carefully laying the ribbon as he had found it. \"That's history for you. Never quite what it seems. Officially the British were fighting for the Khedive of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, the largest Islamic state the world has ever seen. And some among the officers, particularly those who had spent years in the Arab world, were sympathetic to aspects of Islam. Gordon and the Mahdi would have been an interesting meeting of minds, philosophically not that far apart.\"\n\n\"Well, it's pretty clear where Jones was coming from,\" Costas said, pointing to the wall just to the right of the shelf with the medals. \"Take a look at that.\"\n\nJack shifted around and stared. The lower part of the wall was covered in an inscription, written in the neat, precise hand taught to all Victorian schoolchildren, with the subject matter that was often their sole source of simile and metaphor. Jack slowly read it out loud: \" 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.' \"\n\n\" 'I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever,' \" Costas murmured. \"The Twenty-third Psalm. He must have been awestruck by the appearance of the pharaoh, by the crossed rod and staff on the sarcophagus. Those medals with their images of the sphinx and the pyramids must have seemed like offerings to him, meant for this place.\"\n\nJack took a few steps farther toward the open tunnel heading in the direction of Cairo, stepping over fragments of plaster that Jones must have dug out of the wall over the days it probably took him to open it up. Beneath the plaster he saw something else, a skeletal form. He stared at it and then gestured to Costas. \"I think we might just have solved another mystery.\"\n\nCostas came over and then stopped abruptly. \"I see bones. Don't tell me. Not Jones' final mummy feast.\"\n\nJack shook his head. \"This is the skeleton of someone who has lain down to die, or been placed in this position. Look at what he's holding. It's a little Arab dagger, beautifully engraved on the blade and embellished with gold. I think this is where Jones got his souvenir, that ring.\"\n\n\"Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah,\" Costas murmured. \"We knew he'd be in here somewhere. Do you think he was trying to escape too? Do you think Jones found his body, and then laid him out like this?\"\n\nJack stared at the skeleton. \"The medieval accounts suggest that he went alone at night into the desert on many occasions before disappearing for good, clearly faking his own death. I think after finding that entrance we passed in the tunnel, the partly collapsed ventilation shaft, and exploring this place, he eventually found the light shaft we came through and got into this chamber. Maybe seeing the sarcophagus did it for him, and he decided next time to come in here for good, never to go back.\"\n\nCostas sifted the dust on top of the bones. \"Maybe he had delusions of grandeur. He could have been the one who tried to open the sarcophagus, not Jones. Look at the way he's lying, with his arms crossed like that. Maybe he wanted to lie down inside the sarcophagus, to be Akhenaten.\"\n\n\"Being a caliph was not that much different from being a pharaoh,\" Jack murmured. \"And Akhenaten isn't the only ruler in history to want to get away from it all.\"\n\nCostas peered down where he had been sifting. \"Look at this, Jack. He's got something in his hands. It's a small wooden frame containing a piece of papyrus, with text in hieroglyphs.\"\n\nJack knelt down and peered at it, feeling a sudden rush of satisfaction. _He had found his piece of text_. \"I don't know what it is,\" he said. \"But it must have some special significance to have been framed like that. Let's make sure we both have detailed images.\"\n\nCostas followed after him, leaned over the hieroglyphs, and panned his camera slowly over the papyrus. \"Okay,\" he said. \"That's done.\"\n\nJack gestured at the open tunnel in front of them. \"Our time is nearly up.\"\n\nCostas nodded. \"There's one thing left to do. Little Joey.\"\n\n\"You can't take him with us.\"\n\n\"I know. I've been dreading this. But I _can_ switch him off. I can't have him going mad in here like Jones.\"\n\nHe made his way back to the shaft, and Jack turned to the nearest alcove and put his hand on one of the sealed jars. Costas came back and stood beside him. \"Think of yourself as a caretaker of knowledge, Jack, just like those priests of Akhenaten who sealed this place up after he'd left. They were protecting it against Akhenaten's enemies of the old religion who might have destroyed it, and now we're protecting it against the modern-day forces of darkness. Akhenaten must have ordered this place to be sealed up in the hope that it would be discovered and revealed some time in the distant future, when the time was right. He left clues in those plaques that have taken all our combined intelligence and even a little bit of genius to work out. It's almost as if he anticipated a time like ours when exploration like this would be possible, when people would be driven to seek the truth about the past. But the time's not yet right, Jack. Akhenaten would not have wanted his legacy to be consumed by the fires that are raging above. Maybe the time will come in our lifetimes, or maybe this will be our legacy to pass on to Rebecca and her generation. But right now we've got the present to deal with. There's a girl in Cairo who needs to be rescued, and a lot of people depending on us. It's time to go.\"\n\nJack pushed off from the jar, took one last look around, and put his hand on Costas' shoulder. \"Roger that. We move.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nAlmost half an hour later Costas stopped jogging and bent down, his hand on his knees, panting hard. \"We must be getting close to an exit, Jack,\" he said, his face streaming with sweat. \"It's getting warmer. And I can smell it.\"\n\nJack stopped beside him, wiping the sweat off his own forehead, and breathed deeply. He realized that he felt stronger, revitalized. Costas was right: They must be close to a source of fresh air. And the smell was unmistakable, a cloying tang of burning, a sharp reminder of what lay in store for them outside. They must be at least three kilometers beyond the Giza plateau by now, but the fire on the pyramids would send heat and the reek of burning fuel far over the desert, a smell that by now would be commingling with the reek and ash of fire from Cairo itself.\n\nThey began jogging again, and after a few minutes came to a rockfall that completely blocked the tunnel ahead. Costas crawled up the slope, pulling aside blocks of stone, working feverishly until he reached the top. A cascade of sand came down, and a new kind of light appeared, not the suffused red glow from the tunnel but a flickering darker red that bathed Costas' face in a luminous glow. He disappeared upward and then reappeared, sliding down the sand until he was back beside Jack.\n\n\"Okay. We ditch our E-suits here. Keep your hydration pack, and give me your camera microchip. We're in the desert maybe a kilometer away from the edge of the southern suburbs, and I can see a road to the west with abandoned vehicles. We might get lucky and find something still with gas.\"\n\nJack unzipped the front of his E-suit, ducked his head and shoulders through, and quickly pulled the rest off. He straightened his jacket and trousers and then removed his headstrap and dismembered the camera. He watched as Costas took out one of the satellite beacons, activated it, and then pointed up. \"We'll have to block this entrance.\"\n\n\"No problem. A shove of one rock up above and the whole thing will come tumbling down, followed by about ten tons of sand. Nobody walking by would ever guess.\"\n\n\"What does it look like topside?\"\n\nCostas kicked off the feet of his E-suit, took out the Glock from its holster, checked it, and gave Jack a grim look. \"You know those medieval images of hell? They always have it underground. Well, they got it wrong. Prepare yourself for just about the worst thing you've ever seen.\"\n\n# CHAPTER 24\n\nJack stared in horror at the western horizon. The Pyramid of Menkaure was engulfed in flames, lighting up the Giza plateau like a vision of hell. Those who had been threatening it had finally gotten their way, picking up where the son of Saladin had left off in the twelfth century, only with powers of destruction that no medieval caliph could ever have envisaged. Jack felt the anger well up inside him, a rage against those who had orchestrated this. They claimed to be acting in the name of the one god, but in truth they represented no god. He looked down at the form that had followed him out of the tunnel entrance. He and Costas had just carried out one of the most extraordinary dives of their lives, and had uncovered the greatest treasure that any civilization could offer. He glanced at the flames again, this time feeling only a cold determination. He would not let the forces of darkness destroy the truth of history. He turned back and helped Costas to his feet. \"This place is about to implode. If we don't get out of here, nobody will ever know what we've found. Let's move.\"\n\nA little over an hour later, they crouched behind a wall just outside Fustat, the Old City of Cairo, a stone's throw from the Ben Ezra synagogue. After leaving the tunnel they had jogged in the darkness along a dusty track toward the lights of the city, both of them soon drenched in sweat in the humid air of the night. The smell of burning had been all around them, an acrid, cloying smell that became worse as they entered the outer sprawl of the city, making them cough and slow down. Partway along they had found an abandoned car with the key still in the ignition and had sped along a highway toward the Nile. They left the car once they had found a motorboat, which they used to cross the river to the eastern shore beside Fustat. The journey had been an eerie one, with hardly any other cars on the roads and only a few people to be seen, the rest probably cowering in their houses or caught up in what was going on in the city center. As they had come closer, the noise had become louder\u2014chanting and wailing, shrieks and screams, long bursts of gunfire, and above it a constant call from the minarets around the city, their recordings sounding as through they had been put on a continuous loop by the extremist junta, who by now must have swept aside the last residues of legitimate government in Egypt.\n\nJack tried to ignore the noise as he stared along the alleyway ahead toward the entrance into Fustat, watching for gunmen and gauging the best time to enter. He took out his Beretta from the holster beneath his jacket, pulled back the slider partway to confirm that a round was chambered, and put the gun back in its holster. With the two extra magazines, he had forty-five rounds, hardly enough to put a pinprick in the side of the coup but giving him the option of self-defense if it came to it. He watched Costas check his Glock and then pull out the second transmitter beacon and place it behind the wall where it would be concealed from view but the satellite signal would be unimpeded. \"Okay,\" he said quietly. \"It's activated. That means _Sea Venture_ will know we're here.\"\n\n\"Mohammed won't be able to get his felucca this far south,\" Jack said. \"You can see that the river ahead of us is jammed with burning feluccas, and chances are the gunmen have gotten hold of the police patrol vessels and are raking any boat they see. We'll have to rely on Aysha to get us out through the city to a rendezvous point farther to the north.\"\n\n\"That could be like walking through the fires of hell,\" Costas said.\n\n\"We haven't got any choice.\" Jack checked his watch. \"It's three fifteen. There's about two hours of night left. We're going to be far better off trying to do this under cover of darkness than waiting for the day, and we need to get to the rendezvous point at the synagogue. Let's move.\"\n\nThey got up and walked quickly to the entrance through the medieval wall into Fustat, and then ducked inside and came within sight of the synagogue precinct. There were more people now in the streets, clustered fearfully in doorways and dark alleys, and the gunshots were close enough in the still air to sound like sharp hammer blows, but still there were no gunmen to be seen. Jack stared at the synagogue and pursed his lips. \"Aysha should have had our first beacon signal relayed to her by now, but I don't see her there. It was always going to be a gamble, and maybe we just ran out of luck. All I can see is that Sufi sitting in front of the wall.\"\n\nA truck filled with jeering gunmen suddenly lurched into view on the cobbled street, roared past them in low gear and disappeared down another dark alley. Jack had flattened himself against the wall, and he felt his heart pounding. They had been in full view of the gunmen but had been ignored. \"I think they've got other fish to fry,\" he said, standing forward again and looking around. \"Most of the noise is coming from the direction they were heading, where the alley opens out in front of a big mosque.\"\n\n\"My God,\" Costas whispered, his eyes glued on the synagogue. \"The Sufi. It's Lanowski. Only we would recognize him. I mean, _instantly_ recognize him. He's in double disguise, disguised as Corporal Jones disguised as a mystic. Genius, or mad.\"\n\n\"I told him to stay with the felucca,\" Jack muttered. \"Something must have happened.\" He turned to Costas, straightened his shirt and patted his hair. \"We're going to have to walk in the open now. We've got no choice, and we need to be confident about it. There are still going to be reporters and die-hards of the expat community here, and we need to look like them, as if we know what we're doing.\"\n\nJack felt himself beginning to sweat again in the tepid air. He took out the hydration pack that he had kept from his E-suit and offered it to Costas, who shook his head. \"Still got some in my own,\" he said. They both drank the remainder of the water pouches and discarded them. Jack peered at Costas. \"Still got the camera microchips?\"\n\n\"They're zipped into my side pocket.\"\n\nJack looked down, forcing himself to accept reality. \"If it comes to it, you have to promise me that you'll destroy them, right? If the bad guys get hold of those images and work out where we came from, then the world really will never know what we found. Maurice was right. There are going to be terrible scenes of destruction across Egypt, not only what we've already seen happening at Giza but also at Luxor, at the Valley of the Kings, scenes to make even the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas pale by comparison. The world had better get ready to weep.\"\n\nCostas straightened his jacket. \"Let's do it.\"\n\nThey stepped out into the street and walked toward the mystic, stopping close enough to be heard. \"Jacob,\" Costas said quietly. \"We see you.\"\n\n\"Walk toward the alley where that truck went,\" Lanowski replied, without moving or looking at them. \"It might attract attention for me to join you, a Sufi with two Westerners, so I'll be shadowing you. I had to come here to warn you that Aysha's been delayed, but she will find us if we head slowly west. You're conspicuous enough for her to see, Jack, because of your height.\"\n\n\"Be careful, Jacob,\" Jack said. \"We'll be going into a death zone.\"\n\n\"I've seen it, Jack. I had to walk through it when Mohammed let me off from the felucca. Prepare yourselves for the worst. Now get moving. With any luck we'll meet again at the felucca within the hour, and be out of here.\"\n\nJack glanced left and right, and then hurried ahead as Lanowski had instructed. He led Costas through a dark cobbled alley about two hundred meters long and out into another square. This one was packed full of people, large milling groups with black-hooded gunmen sauntering among them, occasionally raising their Kalashnikovs into the air and firing a deafening blast. Jack held Costas back, unsure what to do. Ahead of them a cluster of women dressed in burkhas stood on the pavement, swaying and ululating, their heads covered except for a slit for their eyes. One of the women was frantically stripping off her tights beneath her burkha, the others closing in around her protectively. A gunman spotted her and rushed in, pulled her out screaming and sobbing, and dragged her toward an open area where three other women in Western dress lay sprawled in the dust surrounded by men with Kalashnikovs. Beside them an acacia tree in the middle of a small garden had been hacked down to a man-sized stump, and a few yards in front of it boys with wheelbarrows were dumping building debris brought from a structure that Jack could hear being demolished somewhere beyond. One of the men slung his rifle, picked up a brick, and hurled it with huge force at the stump. Jack stared at the scene, feeling a cold dread. \"My God,\" he said hoarsely. \"It's a stoning ground. They're going to force those other women to stone those three to death.\"\n\nAnother woman in a burkha came alongside them. \"Don't do anything, for God's sake,\" she said in a low voice. \"If you try to intervene, you will be shot and I will be the next one to be put against that post.\"\n\nJack stared at her. _\"Aysha.\"_\n\nShe said nothing, but steered them around a corner into another dark alley, quickly looking around. \"Follow me,\" she said urgently. \"We haven't got much time.\"\n\n\"What's going on?\" Jack asked, hurrying after her.\n\n\"You've been incredibly lucky. About an hour ago the junta issued a fatwa against all Westerners except accredited journalists. Evidently the news hadn't quite reached the gunmen who've seen you so far. Apparently it still matters to the junta for the world to see what they're doing, though that won't last long. Here, take these.\" She steered them down the passageway and handed them each a ziplock bag. \"Passports, press documentation. Take out the cards and hang them around your necks. You're CNN journalists. The Cairo bureau chief is an old friend of mine, and he's issued bogus accreditation to help some friends get out. These are the last two cards he had.\"\n\n\"They'll rumble that soon enough if Cairo is suddenly swarming with CNN journalists.\"\n\n\"Hopefully we'll be out of here by then. When I came to Cairo two days ago, I had to ditch the institute's Land Rover in the northern suburbs, as it was too dangerous for me to be seen in it. The way to Alexandria is clogged with people fleeing the city. I'll be coming out with you by river from a rendezvous point I agreed upon with my uncle about half a mile north of here.\"\n\n\"Mobile phone networks? WiFi?\"\n\n\"Everything's down. The only contact with the outside world is by satellite phone, and I couldn't risk being caught with one. They're searching everyone. I was lucky to get here with those documents.\"\n\n\"What's the situation with Sahirah?\" Jack said.\n\nAysha looked grim. \"She's still being held in the Ministry of Culture. They cleared out all the remaining staff yesterday. There have been mass trials and convictions of government people through the night. A lot of good people are going to die, Jack, a lot of good friends. Once they've dealt with that, they'll turn their attention to Sahirah and any other prisoners still alive in the interrogation rooms.\"\n\n\"Your cousin Ahmed, the ex\u2013special forces man and his team?\"\n\nAysha nodded. \"It's out of our hands now, Jack. If they can spring her, they'll do it. If not, they'll die trying.\"\n\n\"What about Lanowski?\" Costas said, jerking his head to the shuffling mystic following them a discreet distance behind.\n\n\"He volunteered to be your point of contact at the synagogue after I'd heard about the impending crackdown and knew I was going to be delayed getting those documents. I could only get two CNN passes. But he's the least of my worries; he blends in just fine.\"\n\n\"You won't believe what we found,\" Costas said.\n\n\"Don't tell me. I don't what to hear anything, just in case I'm interrogated.\"\n\nThey came to the end of the alley and peered into another, much larger square with a columned structure in the center. The square seemed a maelstrom of activity, with eruptions of fire, the sound of falling masonry and bursts of automatic gunfire, and lines of black-clad men with Kalashnikovs encircling the perimeter.\n\n\"That's the mosque of Amr ibn al-As,\" Aysha said. \"It's the oldest mosque in Cairo, founded in AD 642. The extremists have taken it over as their spiritual focus. The original mosque where Abn al-As pitched his tent was made of palm trunks and leaves, and they're planning to re-create that. The present mosque is made of reused columns and blocks from ancient Egyptian sites that they regard as non-Islamic. And beyond that they've created an execution ground. The gunmen have already begun dragging people there from the government buildings, the Ministry of Culture first. They seem to have the greatest contempt for the Antiquities Service.\"\n\n\"It's a cold calculation,\" Jack said. \"They've used the moderate regime as a stepping-stone over the last months, sweet-talking men like our beloved antiquities director and promising him big rewards, but now that the coup has happened it's a different story. They want moderates to see that only a strict regime is possible and that any who fail to follow them will pay the price.\"\n\nAysha peered out at the square. \"You're going to see some terrible sights, but you must keep your cool. Do not, I repeat, _do not_ try to intervene.\"\n\n\"You mean we're going through _that_?\" Costas said, sounding horrified.\n\n\"You're reporters, right? Reporters don't slink around in back alleys. They go to where the action is. You're going to walk right past that crowd and then on toward Salah Salem Street beyond. I'll make my own way and rendezvous with you there.\"\n\n\"Won't you be safer sticking with us?\" Costas said.\n\nShe shook her head, replacing her head veil so that her face was concealed except the slit for her eyes. \"From now on any Egyptian seen helping reporters is going to be targeted, especially a woman. They'll assume I'm using you as a means of escape.\"\n\nAn ear-piercing shriek rent the air behind them, followed by the sound of wailing. There was another shriek, cut short by a burst of gunfire. Jack remembered the face of the young woman he had seen sprawled on the ground. That girl had a father and a mother somewhere; she could have been Rebecca, anyone. Aysha saw him staring, and touched his arm. \"I call on all Muslims in Egypt and all other faiths to defeat this evil and bring an end to it,\" she said. \"In Egypt the people will prevail.\"\n\n\"Amen to that,\" Costas said.\n\nA call to prayer suddenly filled the air, crackling out from loudspeakers mounted on a pickup truck that was slowly circling the square.\n\n\"Okay,\" Aysha whispered. \"Walk out now. Don't even look at me as I leave.\"\n\nShe was gone, and without thinking Jack did as she instructed, Costas following close behind. Lanowski was nowhere to be seen, but Jack could not afford to track him now. Everyone in the square was kneeling toward the east and praying, following the instructions of the recording from the vehicle. Two of the gunmen saw them and jumped upright, but backed off when Jack walked brazenly forward and thrust the press ID at them. About fifty yards farther on they passed the place where the fa\u00e7ade of the mosque was being hacked down and the boys had been picking up rubble to take to the stoning ground. Abruptly the prayer ended and the vehicle sped off, and everyone jumped to their feet. Jack kept pressing on, veering sideways to avoid a crowd of people and the gaze of more gunmen whose eyes were following them.\n\nHe reached the northwest corner of the perimeter wall around the mosque, about halfway to the street exit that Aysha had indicated. He took a deep breath as he and Costas rounded the corner into an open space about fifty yards across surrounded on three sides by dense throngs of men and on the other by the perimeter wall of the mosque. By skirting the wall they had walked straight into the gaze of the onlookers, but they were not the main focus of attention. In the center he caught sight of a line of kneeling men, and then saw the flash of a sword. He forced himself to look forward, to focus on getting through. He remembered the image of the burning pyramid; he had thought that was as bad as it could get, but now he realized that it was merely a grim portent. Already another line of men were being led out, kicked and rifle-butted by the gunmen as the swordsman walked back to his starting point, his blade dripping with blood.\n\nJack reached the onlookers and forced an opening, with Costas following close behind. From his height he could see above the throng to where a further group was being escorted from a street into the square, providing the executioner with a continuous line of victims, the women among them forcibly separated and led in a separate group toward the stoning ground. Many of the men were well dressed but already dishevelled and bloody, some of them pleading and praying as soon as they began to realize what was about to happen to them.\n\nJack suddenly remembered what Aysha had said: the Ministry of Culture. _That was who these people were_. Then his heart lurched. The Ministry of Culture included the Antiquities Department. He pressed through the throng, staring at them. He was sure that he recognized some of the faces, inspectors and dirt archaeologists who had been the mainstay of Egyptian archaeology for years, friends and colleagues who had worked alongside Hiebermeyer at the mummy necropolis, at their excavation of the Roman port on the Red Sea, at the crocodile temple site beside the Nile in Sudan. Jack was suddenly conscious of his own visibility, hoping that none of them would see him. He felt as if he were betraying them, but there was nothing he could do. To be recognized now for who he was would be the death knell for him and for Costas. He forced himself to think of what they were doing, taking away a last hope for Egyptology and the achievements of those people, something that might just give the world a legacy of Egypt other than the images of medieval horror they were witnessing now.\n\nThey were nearly through the area, but the swaying momentum of the crowd was forcing them close to the line of prisoners. Jack pressed against the crowd to push away from them, but to no avail. There was another eruption of yelling and chants from behind them, and the line of prisoners shuffled forward. He held his Press ID forward and tried to keep his head down, focusing his mind solely on the open street ahead, moving toward the line of gunmen who formed a cordon around the outer perimeter of the crowd.\n\nFor a fleeting moment he made eye contact with one of the prisoners. It was an overweight man, balding, dishevelled, his hands tied behind his back, with gunmen holding him on either side. Jack's mind froze. He had met the man only once, an imperious audience of a few minutes in the ministry after he and Hiebermeyer had been made to wait for hours. _It was the antiquities director_. Jack pushed past, holding his breath. There were only a few yards to go before they were out of the throng and on the street. There was still a chance he had not been recognized. He pressed on, pulling Costas close behind him.\n\nSuddenly there was a commotion in the line behind him and he heard a shrieking voice, the high-pitched voice he remembered from the audience in the ministry. Jack knew enough Arabic to understand what he was saying. \"It is Jack Howard, the archaeologist _Jack Howard_. He is a blasphemer, a destroyer of sacred works. Arrest him!\"\n\nJack glanced over his shoulder and saw the man struggling to point toward him, his eyes wide and panic-stricken. And then one of the gunmen slammed his rifle butt into the man's face, thrusting his lolling head back as he was carried forward in the line. Jack grabbed Costas, ducked down, and pushed through the cordon. \"Come on. Our cover's been blown. We've got to run.\"\n\nThey rushed forward past the clusters of people heading toward the square and then ducked down an alley to the left. Jack had no idea where they were going; this was pure survival. Seconds later he heard booted feet pounding down the alley behind him, and a crack of rifle fire. Two men holding Kalashnikovs appeared out of nowhere in front. He and Costas barrelled through them, sending both men sprawling. Jack stumbled, snatching up one of the rifles as he did so, and pushed Costas ahead. \"Run,\" he yelled. _\"Run.\"_ He turned, firing a burst into the air above their pursuers, his hands jarring with the clacking of the bolt. Chunks of brick and masonry fell from the upper story where the bullets had hit the wall, but still the men kept coming. One of them fired back, the bullets striking the walls of the alleyway ahead and filling the air with dust. Jack lowered the rifle, holding the wooden barrel guard to stop it from jumping, and fired a long burst into his attackers, seeing several of them jerking and falling. Another man lunged toward him only yards away. He pulled the trigger again, but the bolt was open; the magazine was empty. He threw it down, pulled out his Beretta, and turned to run, seeing Costas in the dust ahead. A rifle cracked deafeningly behind him, and the air was filled with shrieking and yelling.\n\nSuddenly he was knocked sideways and sent sprawling in the dust. Then he was raised onto his knees and pushed against the alley wall, his arms pulled savagely behind his back and his wrists tied. Someone pulled him up by his hair and dragged him along, slamming him against the wall. The pain from his hair was eye-watering, but he was too dazed to care. He saw Costas alongside him, spitting blood from his mouth, and was conscious of a circle of gunmen forming around them, Kalashnikovs raised.\n\nSomebody, a leader in the group, was talking, too fast for Jack to understand, but he guessed that their lives were in the balance. He stared at the intricate pattern in the granite of the wall in front of him, trying to focus on that, and breathed in deeply through his nose, smelling the dust and stone. He caught Costas' eye, but they both knew better than to talk. Each knew what the other was thinking. After more than their share of near-misses underwater, of danger they accepted as part of their calling, it seemed a perversity of fate that they should die like this, in a squalid execution in a back alley of Cairo. Jack felt numb; all emotion seemed to have drained from him in the square. The argument behind them stopped, and there was a silence. Suddenly there was a deafening rip of gunfire, and chips flew off the rock above his head. Jack was thrown forward against the wall, and felt a hammer-blow of pain in his right arm. His knees give way, and he fell, seeming to fall a long way as if he were going far beneath the ground, back to that place from which he and Costas had just emerged, into a well of blackness. Then nothing.\n\n# CHAPTER 25\n\nJack recovered consciousness moments later as he was being hauled to his feet. He was aware of Costas alongside him as the two of them were shoved ahead by the gunmen down the alley. Costas already had his hands zip-tied behind his back, and Jack felt his own arms being pulled roughly together, causing a jolt of pain to course through him from the bullet wound in his right shoulder. His arm was dripping with blood, and out of instinct he played it up, bending over and yelling with pain each time they tried to pull it back. Someone shouted in Arabic and they relented, tying his wrists in front of him instead. At the end of the alley they were hustled into the back of a pickup. They were made to lie facedown and had hoods pulled over their heads. Jack braced himself as the truck revved up and screeched down the road. He was trying to keep his head from banging where it had been bruised when he hit the wall in the alley and been knocked out momentarily.\n\nHe forced himself to assess the situation. His right arm was still functional, but he could feel the stickiness of the blood on his hand and the numbness where shock was still overriding the pain of the wound. He knew that they had been reprieved, that someone had stayed their execution; there was some small hope in that. It was not the way of the extremists to carry out mock executions, so someone among the gunmen must have seen something, perhaps their CNN press cards, and ordered his men to fire high. Where they were going now was anyone's guess, back to the killing ground of the square, perhaps, to face the judgment of someone higher up the chain of command, or to some hidden place to await an ignominious end, to join the many like the girl Sahirah who had already been arrested by extremist sympathizers before the coup, and would provide another wave of victims as the gunmen finished their first round of executions and swept through the city looking for more. Jack was thankful that Aysha and Lanowski had not been with them in the alley; he desperately hoped that they had not tried to follow but had made their own way to the felucca to make good their own escape.\n\nThe truck screeched to a halt and they were bundled out of the back, up a shallow flight of steps into a large space that echoed with shouts and commands in Arabic, and then up a flight of stairs, along a corridor, through some doors, and into a smaller space, where they were roughly forced to a halt. Jack's hood was pulled off, and he blinked hard, looking around. He was standing beside Costas in an office of a minor government functionary by the look of it, with a desk and filing cabinets and a glass screen to the corridor outside. Two gunmen with wispy beards and black headbands loitered outside the door, and another two were inside the room facing them. One of them let his rifle hang on its sling, pulled some leaves from a bag, and began chewing on them, and the other asked for some, in English with a broad Yorkshire accent. Jack stared at the man with contempt. He knew that the gunmen included radicalized Western sympathizers, just like the other extremist groups elsewhere. Jack glanced at the gunmen in the corridor, and then back at the two who were chewing khat; they would be the easiest to deal with if the opportunity arose.\n\nAnother man walked into the room; he was short and dapper with a thick beard, and wore a white robe beneath his ammunition vest. He was carrying Jack's Beretta with the spare magazines and Costas' Glock, and placed them on the desk. He clicked his fingers at the two men, who slung their weapons on their backs and came up behind and frisked Jack and Costas. Jack could smell the khat on their breath, and stale sweat. They found nothing, and Jack saw that the zip pocket where Costas had put the camera microchips was open and empty. He must have destroyed and ditched them back in the alley as the gunmen were closing in. Jack could barely think about that now; his arm was beginning to throb and he felt faint. The small man perched on the edge of the desk, picked up the Beretta, turned it over, put it down again, and then gestured at the press card still hanging around Jack's neck.\n\n\"We have been coming across quite a few of these.\" His English was accented but educated. \"If they are being carried by Egyptians, we shoot them on the spot. You are the first Western imposters.\"\n\n\"We're not imposters,\" Costas protested. \"We're journalists.\"\n\n\"If you carry these false cards, you must have something to hide. You are spies.\"\n\n\"We're journalists. Read the accreditation.\"\n\n\"You are spies.\" The man was becoming heated. \"Zionist spies.\"\n\nJack thought quickly. The truth might be the best option. \"Okay. A friend arranged the cards for us. We're archaeologists, making our way back to Alexandria.\"\n\n\"You are lying. You are Zionist pigs.\"\n\n\"I'm Jack Howard, and this is Costas Kazantzakis. The antiquities director shouted my name in the square. We're from the International Maritime University. Look us up online.\"\n\n\"We have no use for the Internet.\"\n\n\"Except to show videos of executions,\" Costas muttered. \"And burning pyramids.\"\n\nThe man stared venomously at Costas, and then turned to Jack. \"I will tell you why our forces are in Cairo.\" He pointed to a poster on the glass partition, one that Jack had seen gunmen plaster on walls as they had come through the city. It showed an old black-and-white photo of a whitewashed tomblike structure, the Islamic crescent above it, with words in Arabic lettering below. The man continued: \"A hundred and twenty years ago General Kitchener swore that he would avenge the death of General Gordon in Khartoum by killing an Arab for every hair on Gordon's head. He had his vengeance at the Battle of Omdurman, but then he went too far. He desecrated the Mahdi's tomb, tossing out the Sufi's relics and parading his head in front of his men. When that happened we swore our own vengeance, and now we are having it. History has come back to haunt you, to haunt all who stand in our way.\" He picked up the Glock and waved it at Costas. \"Kneel, infidel.\"\n\nCostas remained impassive, and the man gestured again. One of the gunmen chewing khat came behind Costas and kicked him below the knees. He fell heavily but then pushed himself back up off the floor and knelt.\n\nJack felt paralyzed. \"He's Greek,\" he said. \"He couldn't possibly be an Israeli spy.\"\n\n\"Show me his papers then. No passport? Then he is a spy. You will watch him die, and then it will be your turn.\"\n\nHe raised the Glock to Costas' forehead and pulled the trigger. In that split-second Jack remembered that the Glock was security imprinted, that it recognized only Costas' fingerprints. It was a manufacturer feature that Costas had wanted removed, but had not gotten around to doing. The man tried again, and again nothing. He threw it down in disgust. There was a sudden screaming in the corridor and a burst of gunfire, and the two gunmen who had been outside the door disappeared. Jack lunged forward, grabbed the Beretta off the desk, and fell backward, emptying all fifteen rounds into the three men in the room. The man on the desk crashed back against the glass partition with blood pumping from a hole in his throat, and the other two dropped instantly with multiple wounds to the chest and head. Jack scrambled up, ejected the magazine and loaded another from the two on the table, chambered a round, and shot the small man in the head. He put down the Beretta, picked up a knife from the slew of blood on the floor and quickly cut the tie between Costas' wrists, and then held out his arms while Costas did the same for him. They both grabbed their pistols and spare magazines, dropped down together beside the doorway, and huddled out of view. The two gunmen who had been outside were sprawled motionless in the corridor in a pool of blood, and a ferocious gun battle was raging in the direction of their entrance from the lower floor.\n\n\"I know where we are,\" Jack said, shouting above the noise. \"It's the Ministry of Culture. You can read it on the label on the desk. This is where they're holding the girl Sahirah, and where Aysha's cousin Ahmed was going to try to break her out. Chances are that's what all this gunfire is about. He's ex\u2013Egyptian special forces, trained with the SAS, and knows what he's doing. Now's the time I would have chosen for an assault if I were in his shoes, while most of the focus among the gunmen is on the executions in that square.\"\n\nThere was a sudden clatter of boots down the corridor and the sound of doors being kicked open, followed by bursts of gunfire. Seconds later two men in civilian clothes with Egyptian paratrooper M4 carbines rushed in, weapons levelled. Taking in the scene, they saw that Jack and Costas were still alive and aiming at them. Neither of the men was wearing the black headband of the gunmen, and both looked Egyptian. Jack dropped the Beretta and waved the press card at them. \"CNN,\" he shouted. \"Journalists.\"\n\nAnother man came in, glanced at them, and gestured to the others to lower their weapons. \"Dr. Howard,\" he said, crouching down. \"Remember me? Aysha's cousin Ahmed. We're in here to find Sahirah.\"\n\nJack raised himself as he picked up the Beretta. \"Where's Aysha?\"\n\n\"I sent her on to the felucca. She's gone with your friend the Sufi.\"\n\nJack closed his eyes. _Thank God for that_. He helped Costas up, and then turned to Ahmed. \"I can help you,\" said Jack. \"I've been in here before, when I came with Aysha's husband to see the antiquities director. He made us wait for hours, and I went down to the archaeological conservation labs. Aysha told me that's where they're holding prisoners. The previous regime turned the labs into interrogation chambers. I can lead you there.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" said Ahmed. \"We've cleared this corridor and the ground floor. There are probably still gunmen in the basement. But we don't have much time. Someone will have reported back to the commanders in the square, and they'll probably send a couple of truckloads of gunmen here. I came in with only five guys, and one's already down.\"\n\n\"What if there are other prisoners still alive?\" Costas asked. \"Sahirah was probably one of many.\"\n\nAhmed shook his head. \"We get her out first. Anyone else waits inside until we're sure we've cleared the building. If there are many of them and we try to get them out together, it will be chaos and a massacre.\"\n\nJack heaved Costas to his feet, grimacing from his wound, and then approached the door with the Beretta held ready. He glanced back at Ahmed. \"You good to go?\"\n\n\"On your six.\"\n\nJack nodded, turned, and stepped cautiously into the corridor, peering left and right, and then made his way quickly to the stairway and down to the entrance foyer. Bodies were strewn everywhere, and Jack saw Ahmed's other two men guarding the street entrance. He could orientate himself now and turned along a ground-floor corridor through a swinging door and down a flight of stairs to the basement level. The labs lay through two more doors ahead and were visible through the glass partition. He turned to the others, putting a finger up for quiet, and slowly opened each door in turn. He led them forward until they all stood silently in the corridor outside the labs. The walls were still covered with archaeological posters, one showing artifacts from the travelling Tutankhamun exhibition, the same poster that Hiebermeyer had in the institute in Alexandria. Another advertised a forthcoming conference on the Cairo Geniza, with a section of medieval manuscript text in Arabic prominently displayed beneath it.\n\nJack turned to the first of the labs and slowly raised himself until he could see through the glass partition that divided it from the corridor. The scene inside was like something from a horror film. The lights were off, but he could see a body strapped to a chair, with electrical wires attached to its hands. Another body was suspended from a hook that had once been used to raise heavy artifacts onto the lab bench. A terrible stench came through the cracks around the door as he passed it. Neither of the bodies had been a woman, and he turned back to Ahmed, who was crouched behind him, and shook his head. He moved forward to the next lab, crawled along to the door, and slowly raised himself up, holding out his hand for the others to wait. He was expecting the worst, but this one was different. The lights were on, bright florescent bulbs used for archaeological work, and he could see that the lab was filled with crouching people, perhaps twenty-five to thirty of them, their hands behind their heads and their faces down. Against the back wall were two gunmen with black headbands, chewing khat and fingering their Kalashnikovs, evidently left to guard these people while a decision was made about what to do with them.\n\nJack slowly dropped down and turned his back to the door. It was impossible to make out any faces, but if Sahirah were alive and in the labs, this was the only place where she could be; there were no other rooms. He looked at his Beretta, his hand stuck with his own congealing blood to the grip, and opened the slide to check that a round was chambered, letting it back silently against the spring. He ejected the magazine, checked it, and slid it back in again until it clicked in place. He looked back at Ahmed and Costas and the other two, putting his fingers to his eyes and pointing toward the door, holding up two fingers, and then raising his hand for them to stay where they were. If one of them tried to come up to him and dropped his weapon or made any other noise, it might provoke the gunmen to open up inside, causing carnage. Jack slowly turned toward the door and shuffled back a meter or so, keeping low so that he was invisible from inside, holding the Beretta out in front of him with both hands. He would have to ignore the pain in his shoulder when he struck the door. He closed his eyes and counted down. _Three. Two. One_.\n\nHe leapt up and crashed into the door, pushing it hard against the people squatting inside, turned to the left and fired twice in quick succession, hitting both gunmen in the head, the blood and gray matter splattering against the wall behind as they crumpled to the floor. The crack of the Beretta had deafened him, and for a moment he sensed only the smell of the smoke curling up from the muzzle. The people began to look up at him, their faces contorted with fear, the men with days of stubble and the men and women alike streaked with dirt and dried blood. A figure stood up and detached herself from the rest, a young woman, and lurched toward him, falling into his arms. He realized that he was shaking her by the shoulders, the pistol still in his left hand, trying to snap her out of her shock, shouting at her to pull herself together. He had never spoken to her before, had never even seen her except in Rebecca's photograph, but in that split second she was all that mattered to him. His hearing came back, a hiss and then a roar that became yells and screams and gunshots, and he heard himself shouting at her. \"We've come to get you out of here. Stay close behind me. Everyone else has to remain here until the building is clear. You tell them.\"\n\nSahirah turned and spoke quickly in Arabic, her voice shaky and hoarse, repeating herself more loudly as several men got up and tried to push themselves toward the door until others pulled them down. Jack turned back, holding her wrist with his right hand and the Beretta with his left. Two gunmen rushing down the corridor were cut down in a hail of fire from Ahmed and his men, the bullets smashing through the glass screens and pinging off the pipes overhead. Jack crouched down, the girl behind him, and poked his Beretta into the corridor. A voice yelled her name, and Ahmed showed himself at the end of the corridor, his M4 aimed. Jack pushed her ahead and turned back, emptying his Beretta down the other end of the corridor where more gunmen had been shooting at them. He dropped the magazine, inserting the last one and releasing the slide, and then followed Sahirah and Ahmed. He was conscious of Costas ahead of him, and Ahmed's men firing bursts behind them as they ran. Seconds later they were outside, running down an alley toward a street. As they turned the corner, a pair of pickup trucks hurtled by, the gunmen aboard oblivious to them, heading in the direction of the execution ground in Fustat.\n\nAhmed pulled Sahirah under an archway and the rest came after him, Jack following. One of the men spoke rapidly in Arabic to Ahmed, who bowed his head briefly and put a hand on the man's shoulder before turning to Jack. \"We're down to three men. We lost another in the foyer. But there are others like us around the city, pockets of fighters. Every able-bodied Egyptian man has done military service and knows how to use a rifle, and they'll start coming to us now. That bloodbath in Fustat is going to work against the extremists, a sign of weakness, not strength. While they're focused on executions, we're going back into the ministry to kill any others in there and collect their weapons and ammunition, and get those other people out. Now is the time to rally resistance, not later when the gunmen have come down off their high and begun to establish order.\"\n\n\"I take it you're not coming with us.\"\n\nAhmed gave him a bleak look. \"What would you do in my position? Even if there is Western intervention, it will be too late to save most of my family and friends. This is my country, and I haven't seen an Egyptian face among the gunmen. I will stay and fight.\"\n\nAhmed turned to Sahirah, embracing her. He released her and peered out into the street. \"It's about three hundred meters to the river. I'll hold this position until we see you safely on the felucca. Then I'm back inside to help my men get those people out. Walk quickly, but don't run.\"\n\nCostas turned to Ahmed and clasped his hand. \"God be with you.\"\n\nHe nodded, squeezed Costas' hand and released it, and glanced again at Jack. \"And with you too, my friends. Now go.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nDawn was just breaking as the felucca finally motored clear of the last dilapidated dwellings of northern Cairo, the way ahead of them now clear through the delta toward the sea. It had been a tense hour since they had scrambled on board, with gunmen in trucks careering along the banks and firing bursts into the air. But Ahmed had been right; all attention appeared to be focused on the feeding frenzy in the center of the city. Lanowski had been in satellite contact with _Sea Venture_ and the IMU security team, who had modified the extraction plan in the light of the events of the past twenty-four hours. With the Egyptian air force dysfunctional and the extremists having no air capability, the Israelis had total air superiority over northern Egypt and the Sinai. Ben had liased with their contacts in the Israeli Defense Force and arranged for air cover for a revised helicopter extraction deep within Egypt, only a few kilometers ahead of them now on the east bank of the Nile. Not for the first time Jack was grateful to David Ben-Gurion, whose reserve rank in the IDF had allowed him to pull off something that would never have been officially sanctioned. Israel would undoubtedly maintain her presence in the air over Egypt to secure a buffer zone, but her ground forces were needed to the north and east, where the threat of invasion was greatest by organized, well-equipped forces rather than ragtag gunmen in pickup trucks. Any hint of intervention by Israel in Egypt would only provoke the crisis further, leading to all-out war and extreme acts of terrorism not only against Israel but also against the Western powers, which were perceived to be her allies.\n\nMohammed slowed the engine and veered the felucca closer to shore, his son making ready the boarding plank. Jack shifted from where he had been lying and looked at his upper right arm. The bullet had glanced off the bone, leaving a gaping exit wound but no apparent damage to major blood vessels. Aysha had done her best to patch it up, cleaning it and applying a shell dressing, but there were no painkillers in the first-aid kit strong enough to have much effect, and there was nothing more to be done until they reached _Sea Venture_ and her bolstered medical team, already on standby to receive Sahirah and any others escaping Egypt who might need assistance.\n\nAysha clambered over the thwarts to him now, leaving Sahirah with a water bottle looking out over the Nile. \"How is she?\" Jack said quietly.\n\n\"Physically, it's nothing more than bruises, dehydration, and exhaustion. Mentally she's obviously traumatized, and desperately worried about Ahmed. She knows his chances are slim.\"\n\n\"She doesn't have to worry about her own future. We'll see to that.\"\n\n\"How's Costas?\"\n\nJack jerked his head toward the space under the bow where they had hidden away on the voyage toward Cairo the day before. \"The first thing he did was to burrow in his kit bag for some sandwiches he left there. A reserve supply, apparently. Ever since then he and Lanowski have been in there hunched over something technical on the computer. Costas is a rock. Guys like him don't get traumatized.\"\n\n\"That's why you love him, isn't it?\"\n\nJack paused, the pent-up emotions of the last twenty-four hours suddenly welling up. He swallowed hard, looking away. \"Not the word I'd use.\"\n\n\"No, of course not. Men like you don't. But you know what I mean.\"\n\nJack took a deep breath. \"We just look after each other, that's all.\"\n\nShe held his arm. \"And you, Jack? You've seen some terrible things. You've killed people. Don't tell me that will all wash over you.\"\n\n\"It won't. But I've been here before. I'll be fine.\"\n\nThe felucca came alongside the riverbank, and the plank was laid ashore and tied to the gunwales. Jack gestured at Mohammed. \"What will your uncle do?\"\n\n\"He'll go back to Alexandria. He's not like Sahirah, not like me, people who can carve out lives for themselves anywhere in the world. Mohammed is a Nile fisherman and a felucca captain, and his whole life is here. If people like Mohammed were to leave Egypt, then it truly would cease to exist. They are her past, and her future.\"\n\n\"If there is one.\"\n\n\"There will be. Inshallah.\"\n\n\"And you, Aysha?\"\n\nHer face hardened. \"If it hadn't been for my son and Maurice, I'd have been with Ahmed right now killing extremists. But I'll never turn my back. One day the flag will fly again over our institute in Alexandria. You'll see.\"\n\nThe boy jumped ashore, laying the plank and holding the bow by the painter. Aysha got up and led Sahirah across to the plank, and Jack followed, pausing to shake hands with Mohammed and his son. He was followed by Costas and Lanowski, who brought the two empty kit bags, Lanowski's laptop, and any other evidence of their presence with them. Jack crouched down on the riverbank, picked up a handful of dust from the ground, and let it fall through his fingers. \"So near, and yet so far.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Costas said.\n\nJack peered up at him. \"You and I know what we saw, but the rest of the world will only be able to take it on our word. It could be a lifetime before anyone gets the chance to explore where we went again.\"\n\nCostas went rigid, and put up a finger. \"Ah. I nearly forgot.\"\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\nHe dug in his pocket and pulled out a small package wrapped in tissue. \"Two microchips, from your camera and mine. All the video we took.\"\n\nJack stared, stunned. \"Where did you hide that?\"\n\n\"You don't want to know. It was in the alley just before we were captured. I don't know how I did it, but I did. Must have looked pretty odd to anyone watching. But there was no way I was going to ditch those chips after all we went through. No way.\"\n\nJack stood up, suddenly more elated than he could remember ever feeling. \"Costas, you know sometimes I really do... _appreciate_ you. Yes, that's the word. _Appreciate_. Brilliant. You just tied a big red bow around this whole project.\"\n\nCostas pushed the package back into his pocket and zipped it up. \"Glad to be of service.\" He pointed into the air. \"Looks like we've got company.\"\n\nTwo Israeli Air Force F16s streaked far overhead, and in the distance Jack could see the Lynx swooping in low from the north, the sound of its rotor reverberating off the waters of the Nile. He shook the rest of the dust from his hand and stood up. \"That was quite a night,\" he said.\n\n\"And now a new day dawns.\"\n\n\"Yes, it does.\" Jack turned and watched Aysha and Sahirah slowly make their way from the felucca to the landing site, followed by Lanowski. \"You know that feeling when you've been weighed down by a big project, a really important one, and it's gone on and on because you've wanted to get it right, and then finally you've nailed it and it feels as if the whole world has lifted off your shoulders?\"\n\n\"It makes everything ahead seem that bit more exciting. The little things. A holiday on the beach. Gin and tonics. Sandwiches.\"\n\n\"The big things. That Phoenician shipwreck off Cornwall. They really were the first Europeans to reach America. Whatever _did_ happen to Akhenaten?\"\n\n\"Some downtime with Maria? A little holiday with your daughter?\"\n\n\"That too.\"\n\nLanowski came over to them, his robe and artificial beard removed but his face still darkened with polish. \"Well, boys,\" he said, holding up one hand palm out. \"Did we do it, or what?\"\n\nCostas high-fived him, and Jack put a hand on his shoulder. \"You made the team, Jacob. Good work.\"\n\n\"I've been meaning to ask.\" Lanowski squinted into the dust, watching the helicopter begin its descent. \"Is it always like that? I mean, the bad stuff? The present day?\"\n\n\"Not always,\" Jack said, following his gaze. \"Sometimes, the adventure's all in the past.\"\n\n\"I think,\" Lanowski said, putting a finger to his lips and furrowing his brow, peering at Jack, \"don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, but I _think_ I'd prefer that.\"\n\nJack suddenly felt dead tired; he was feeling the pain in his arm continuously now. He nodded slowly. \"Wouldn't we all.\"\n\nThey crouched against the downdraft of the rotor, waiting until the Lynx had landed and powered down. Lanowski hurried off to help Sahirah and Aysha on board, and Costas got up, holding the rim of his hat against the dust. \"I had a brainstorm just now in the boat about Little Joey,\" he said, his voice raised against the noise. \"Well, it was Lanowski, actually. It was about the microprocessor for the robotics, and also a small problem with how he swims. If you want a state-of-the-art robot to explore that Phoenician wreck, look no further than our new creation, Little Joey Four.\"\n\nJack cracked a smile. \"The big things.\"\n\n\"You got it. Come on, Jack. Time to let Egypt go.\"\n\n# EPILOGUE\n\nFive days later Jack sat under an awning on the aft deck of _Seaquest_ , gently easing his arm out of its sling and attempting to raise a water bottle to his lips. It was still too painful, and he let it down, gasping as he slid the arm back into the sling and sat back again. With his other hand he picked up his phone and looked at the picture that Rebecca had just sent him from Greece, showing Maria far above climbing a rope ladder to one of the monasteries on Mount Athos.\n\nJack suddenly remembered a promise he had made to himself. _Maria_. He made a mental note to contact her when he was back in action again. He put on his sunglasses, pulled down the peak of his cap, and looked disconsolately at the Mediterranean, wishing above all things that he could be diving into those crystal-clear waters right now. The hatch clanged behind him and Costas came sauntering out wearing a spectacular Hawaiian shirt and knee-length shorts, his feet bare. He sat down heavily on the deck chair beside Jack, cracked open a can of drink from the selection on the table, and put on his sunglasses, pushing aside a map of the world that Jack had been perusing. \"How's the world's worst patient?\" he said.\n\n\"Don't ask,\" Jack grumbled. \"The doctors say three weeks until I can dive. _Three weeks_. I can make it one week, no more. It wasn't even a compound fracture.\"\n\n\"The small matter of a bullet hole.\"\n\nJack looked scornfully at the dressing on his arm. \"That's nothing. Hardly even hurts.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"Has Macalister said when we're leaving?\"\n\n\"He's finishing the formalities with the Spanish authorities now. We should be under way within half an hour, course set for home. He wants to do a complete shakedown on the derrick and winch apparatus before she goes to sea again. He never wants to see an escapade like ours again.\"\n\nCostas leaned over and slapped the base of the derrick, the arm now secured to the deck in preparation for the voyage into the Atlantic. \"It's hard to believe our dive in the submersible was only ten days ago, isn't it? I meant to say, Jack, I'm not sure if I said it properly, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't mention it,\" Jack replied, wincing as he shifted. \"Don't mention anything about diving at all. Now that really is painful.\"\n\n\"Well, some other friends of yours have arrived to cheer you up.\"\n\nThe hatch had opened again and Hiebermeyer, Aysha, and Lanowski came out, Hiebermeyer looking decidedly uncomfortable in a shirt and tie and Lanowski affecting an attempt at formality that looked like an ill-conceived safari suit. They all sat down around the table and Aysha opened her laptop, showing Jack a photo.\n\n\"That's Maurice cutting the ribbon, with the mayor of Valencia and the Spanish minister of culture officiating,\" she said. \"There were about a hundred TV cameras behind me when I took this.\"\n\nHiebermeyer loosened his tie, the sweat beading on his face. \"Not my favorite way of spending an afternoon, but it was a good outcome.\"\n\n\"Are they still planning to keep the sarcophagus on the waterfront?\"\n\n\"They're building a museum around it, with UNESCO and IMU providing the funding. They've taken up your idea of showing the sarcophagus within a virtual representation of the pyramid chamber as well as on the wreck, so the viewer can alternate from one to the other. The multibeam sonar data will allow a half-size model of the wreck, and there are plans for a permanent camera on the wreck site for live-stream imagery. That was an inspirational idea, Jack. To cap it all, _Seaquest_ is due back next season to raise two of the bronze guns for the museum, one of them the cannon you spotted with the East India company markings.\"\n\n\"I still hope that one day the sarcophagus can go back to Egypt,\" Jack said.\n\n\"We all do,\" Aysha said. \"But it's a pretty remote prospect now. Have you seen the news?\"\n\n\"I've just been watching Al Jazeera. It looks like the apocalypse.\"\n\n\"Our only hope now is military intervention. It can't destabilize the region any more than it is already. Israel has just carried out a massive preemptive airstrike against extremist positions in Syria. The U.S. 6th Fleet is now within easy bombing and cruise-missile range of Cairo, and the president is due to make an emergency address at the White House within the hour. We all just hope that if there is an intervention, it's on a big enough scale to destroy the extremists as a fighting force, and not result in a long-term insurgency war.\"\n\n\"Have you managed to make contact with Sahirah's parents?\"\n\n\"They know she's safe in England.\"\n\n\"I just wish we could have gotten them out too.\"\n\n\"I wish we could have gotten _everyone_ out. But you have to draw the line somewhere. They're hugely grateful to you and Costas and Jacob.\"\n\nJack had a flashback to the final desperate minutes of their escape from Cairo. His ears were still ringing from the gunfire, but he felt nothing about those he had killed, men whose humanity was already long extinguished, only a surge of satisfaction that they had managed to get the girl out and had escaped themselves without fatality. He gave Aysha a penetrating look. \"We arranged for her to go straight to Oxford, where she's got an open-ended position at the institute funded by IMU to work on our Geniza finds. Jeremy thinks that she stands a very good chance of getting a place as a graduate student and that there could be a doctorate in it for her.\"\n\n\"Ah. Speaking of Jeremy.\" Aysha tapped the laptop. \"While we were at the ceremony, he sent me an enhanced image from your film of the papyrus that Costas found on the dead caliph's skeleton. He and Sahirah have been working on it day and night since they got to Oxford. Maurice and I brainstormed the translation in the Zodiac on the way back here from Valencia this afternoon, and we think we've nailed it. We have no doubt from the appearance of the hieroglyphs that it dates from the New Kingdom period, to the time of Akhenaten.\"\n\nJack had forgotten his arm and stared at her. \"I can't wait.\"\n\nShe opened a text file and began to read:\n\n> _All wisdom comes from the Aten and is with him forever_.\n> \n> _Who can count the grains of sand in the sea, and the drops of rain, and the days of existence?_\n> \n> _Who can discover the dimensions of heaven, and the width of the earth, and the depths of the sea, and the entirety of wisdom?_\n> \n> _I come to you like a stream into a river, like a water-channel into a field_.\n> \n> _I said, I will water my orchard and drench my garden;_\n> \n> _And lo, my stream became a river, and my river became a sea_.\n> \n> _I will make wisdom shine like the dawn_ ,\n> \n> _And leave it for future generations_.\n\nThey were silent for a moment. \"It's Akhenaten's manifesto, his creed for the City of Light,\" Jack said. \"He's telling us that his library comes through the Aten, and that he bequeaths it to us. Those words could be inscribed above the entrance to any great library or university today, only here it was one built over three thousand years ago beneath the desert sands of the Giza plateau.\"\n\n\"It's even more incredible than that.\" Lanowski's voice was hoarse with emotion. \"I've heard those words before, many times in my yeshiva as a boy, growing up studying the Talmud and the holy scriptures. Substitute _Lord_ for _Aten_ and those words are almost exactly the words of the Ben Sira, the Book of Wisdom.\"\n\n\"Hang on,\" Costas said. \"You're telling me that a Jewish sacred book was originally an Egyptian text written in hieroglyphs?\"\n\nAysha stared at him. \"Some of the oldest fragments of the Ben Sira come from the Cairo Geniza, and it's thought to have been first set down in Hebrew in Egypt, in Cairo or Alexandria, during the Hellenistic period. But this shows that its composition dates almost a thousand years earlier than that. They were one and the same. The revelation of the one god came at the same time to Akhenaten and to Moses, and their sacred texts spring from the same wellhead.\"\n\n\"We've got another Geniza on our hands here,\" Jack said quietly, shaking his head. \"Thousands of papyrus scrolls. It's going to take an army of scholars a lifetime even to begin to tackle it.\"\n\n\"We're ready, Jack,\" Hiebermeyer said, eyeing him determinedly. \"Aysha and her team are the best hieroglyphics people anywhere, and they'll be training up more translators in preparation. The day that Egypt opens up again is the day that we'll be down there.\"\n\n\"And remember, there's a guardian,\" Costas said, his voice thick with emotion. \"Little Joey's in sleep mode, but he's triggered by motion sensors, and I've programmed him to put the fear of God into anyone who tries to get in there. He'll make the curse of King Tut's tomb seem lame.\"\n\n\"And meanwhile, mum's the word,\" Aysha said. \"Nobody outside our group knows anything about it.\"\n\nHiebermeyer nodded, looking serious. \"One slip of the tongue, one inadvertent lapse online, and word of a discovery like this will spread across the Internet like wildfire, and before we know it the extremists will find it and torch the entire place.\"\n\n\"One question,\" Costas said. \"Caliph Al-Hakim wouldn't have been able to read hieroglyphs, right? Of all the thousands of papyrus documents lying around in that chamber, how come he chose the one that's so significant?\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Aysha nodded to Hiebermeyer, who scrolled through a series of photos on the screen. \"The answer lies in the memory chip that you so carefully,\" she coughed, \"concealed on your person.\"\n\n\"Excellent. My treasure trove. I knew it would be useful.\"\n\n\"These pictures are the most incredible I've ever seen, outstripping even those famous first images that Howard Carter took of Tutankhamun's tomb,\" Hiebermeyer said. \"Without these pictures and that scrap of papyrus, we'd have nothing tangible to go on. I for one owe you a very large gin and tonic.\"\n\n\"There it is,\" Aysha said, pointing at the screen. The photo showed the huge golden sarcophagus, the lid slightly ajar where Jack had tried so hard to push it. Hiebermeyer zoomed in to the central part below the crossed arms holding the scepter and the ankh symbol. A curious black wood embellishment like a picture frame lay on the lid below, its interior edges jagged like the broken remains of a windowpane.\n\n\"I get it,\" Costas exclaimed. \"Al-Hakim found that papyrus inside that frame.\"\n\nAysha nodded. \"You can see where he tore it out. He couldn't read it, but he guessed that it must be some kind of holy text. He held it close to him as he died.\"\n\n\"There's something else we want to show you, Jack,\" Hiebermeyer said. \"Something else to close the story.\"\n\n\"Go on.\"\n\nHiebermeyer tapped the laptop and an image of a stone slab covered with hieroglyphs came into view. \"This is the so-called Israel Stele, set up in Thebes in the late thirteenth century BC to commemorate the conquests of the pharaoh Merenptah. It's famous as the only known reference to Israel in an ancient Egyptian inscription. But it now takes second place to Rebecca's find of the Israel cartouche under Temple Mount in Jerusalem dating at least a century earlier to the time of Akhenaten or shortly after. Here you can see the two cartouches side by side, showing how they contain identical hieroglyphs.\"\n\n\"Tell them Rebecca's theory,\" Aysha said.\n\nHiebermeyer sat back in his chair and looked pensively at the image. \"When Rebecca emailed me her photo of the Jerusalem find, she outlined a startling idea. The other conquered enemies listed in the Stele\u2014Canaan, Ashkelon, Gezer, Yenoam, and Syria\u2014were all city-states or confederations, whereas the determinative hieroglyph written in front of the word for Israel shows that Israel was regarded as a people, not a city. And yet at this date it seems hardly plausible that a nomadic people or a marauding band of warriors would have the strength to oppose an Egyptian army, to be considered opponents worthy enough to list in this fashion. Rebecca then pointed out one city that was missing from the list.\"\n\n\"M\u00e2t Urusalim,\" Jack said. \"Jerusalem.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Hiebermeyer continued. \"Jerusalem was a significant citadel, on a par with the coastal cities and a gateway for any Egyptian army intent on conquering farther north. Either the alliance revealed in the Amarna letters with Akhenaten still remained in force, or, more likely, M\u00e2t Urusalim actually is there in the list, only under a different name.\"\n\n\"Israel,\" Jack murmured.\n\nHiebermeyer nodded enthusiastically. \"Here's a scenario. In the century or so between their arrival as refugees from Egypt and the campaigns of Merenptah, the Israelites had taken over and transformed Jerusalem, strengthening it with their knowledge of Egyptian engineering and winning over the people to their new religion. Rebecca thinks the origins of the Jewish state lie then, not several centuries later with the arrival of King David, as the Old Testament would seem to suggest.\"\n\n\"So who exactly were the Israelites?\" Costas asked.\n\n\"I think they may originally have been a tough hill people of Canaan, a large enough component of the prisoners captured by the Egyptians in earlier wars of conquest for the name to have stuck. But the migration from Egypt recounted in Exodus probably included peoples of diverse origins. Imagine the composition of a Roman slave revolt, for comparison. At certain periods it would be dominated by prisoners from the current wars, Gaulish, Spanish, or Macedonian, for example, but there would always be others from different parts of the ancient world, some very exotic. In the same way, you can imagine the followers of Moses predominantly claiming Canaanite origins but including a diversity of others whom the Egyptians had enslaved, from captured sailors of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean to Nubians and Saharan nomads. This ethnic diversity may well have been one of the strengths of the early Jewish state and religion.\"\n\nLanowski pointed at the first hieroglyphs in the cartouche, the determinative of a throw stick, a sitting man and a woman. \"That's what does it for me. Israel was a people, not a land. A people is always restless, always wanting to be on the move, seeking a promised land that lies just out of reach. The refugees from Egypt may have settled in Jerusalem, but that yearning was always in their blood. You can see it in the history of the diaspora, in that tension between the lure of the Holy Land and the spiritual and creative strength that came from not quite getting there. You can see it in the life of a man like Yehuda Halevi. Would he have been such a great poet if he had reached the Holy Land as a younger man?\" Lanowski turned to Jack. \"Would you be such a great archaeologist, such a good storyteller, if your Holy Grail didn't lie most of the time just over the horizon, just beyond your reach?\"\n\n\"Speaking of horizons, I wonder what really did happen to Akhenaten,\" Aysha said.\n\n\"The sun rises in the east, and sets in the west,\" Costas murmured.\n\n\"What did you say?\" Jack said.\n\n\"Well, if you're going to worship the sun, you look east or you look west. It's too bright in the middle.\"\n\n\"Moses and the Israelites went east,\" Lanowski said.\n\n\"So which way did Akhenaten go?\" Jack tapped his pencil, staring at the image of the empty coffin, and then swivelled the map on the table so that his line of sight took him from Egypt across North Africa and beyond, due west.\n\n\"Uh-oh,\" Costas said, peering at him. \"It's that look again.\"\n\n\"You know all those theories about the origins of the pyramids in Mesomerica?\" Jack said. \"We need to look at every scrap of evidence, and I mean _every_ scrap, for Egyptian exploration to the west. If Akhenaten set off in search for his own promised land, it could be anywhere west of Libya.\"\n\n\"I'm on it,\" Lanowski said, sliding the laptop in front of him, brushing his hair aside, and pushing up his little round glasses. \"I'll start with the fringe stuff first. I'm pretty good at working out which of those theories are crackpot and which have a modicum of sanity behind them. Some of those guys are alarmingly like me.\"\n\n\"Maurice?\" Jack said.\n\nHiebermeyer stared at the map and slowly nodded. \"After finishing at the mummy necropolis, my new project was going to be an excavation near Mersa Matruh, a trading site on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt close to the Libyan border. Aysha and her team had already begun to evaluate all the known evidence for Egyptian trade farther west. One of the most intriguing reports comes from the early Phoenician outpost at Mogador, on the Atlantic coast of Mauretania, where surface finds have apparently included fragments of New Kingdom pottery.\"\n\n\"Fourteenth century BC?\" Jack said.\n\n\"It's possible.\"\n\n\"We have a standing invitation to excavate there,\" Aysha said.\n\nCostas slapped Hiebermeyer on the back. \"There you go. Just say yes. Egyptology lives on.\"\n\nJack turned to Costas and cracked a smile. \"And you, my friend, have free rein to go and tinker with submersibles. There's a possible Egyptian wreck off Sicily I've always been meaning to visit that might just need your expertise, and provide the stepping-stone we need to take this theory forward.\"\n\nCostas' eyes lit up. \"That's even better than a beach holiday, Jack. _Way_ better. With Maurice's gin and tonic, of course. And you'll be amazed at what my guys have come up with while we've been crawling down slimy tunnels under the desert. I can't wait to show you.\"\n\nThey began to disperse, and Jack sat back, exhausted but elated. The horizon had suddenly opened up for him again, and the possibilities seemed endless. He stared at the map, his eyes narrowing. He had that feeling again, the overwhelming instinct that he was onto something big, as big as any quest he had pursued before. He felt the ship's engines begin to throb, and he looked out to sea, already planning the next few days, his mind racing.\n\n_Game on_.\n\n# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\nI'm most grateful to my agent, Luigi Bonomi, and to my editors, Tracy Devine and Sarah Murphy in New York, and Marion Donaldson and Sherise Hobbs in London; to my previous editors Caitlin Alexander and Martin Fletcher; to Crystal Velasquez and Kay Gale for their copyediting; to the rest of the teams at Bantam Dell and Headline, including Jo Liddiard, Jane Morpeth, Tom Noble, and Ben Willis; to the Hachette representatives internationally, including Donna Nopper; to Alison Bonomi, Amanda Preston, and Ajda Vucicevic at Luigi Bonomi Associates; to Nicky Kennedy, Sam Edenborough, Mary Esdaile, Julia Mannfolk, Jenny Robson, and Katherine West at the Intercontinental Literary Agency; to Gaia Banks and Virginia Ascione at Sheil Land Associates; and to my many foreign publishers and their translators.\n\nI owe a continuing debt to Ann Verrinder Gibbins for her critical reading of all my writing, and for her support. The formative period of travel and fieldwork behind this novel was funded by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, the Palestine Exploration Fund, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. I'm grateful to the staff of Cambridge University Library for allowing me to examine original documents from the Cairo Geniza when I was a graduate student there, to the Royal Engineers Museum and Library in Chatham for help with research on the officers who appear in this novel, and to Peter Nield for introducing me to recent work on the life of the caliph Al-Hakim. Finally I owe a special thanks to my daughter for organizing a trip to the Black Country Museum in England, where I was able to \"wall-walk\" a barge in an underground canal just as I have imagined happening in Egypt more than three thousand years ago.\n\n# AUTHOR'S NOTE\n\n> Hidden wisdom and concealed treasure: what is the use of either?\n> \n> \u2014From _Ben Sira_ ( _Ecclesiasticus_ , the Book of Wisdom), _c_. third to second century BC, in the Cairo Geniza\n\nThe idea that the Giza plateau in Egypt might contain underground passageways and chambers has long fascinated archaeologists, particularly following the discovery in the 1950s of two pits beside the Pyramid of Khufu containing the pharaoh's funerary boats. The existence of mortuary temples, man-made harbors, and canals leading from the Nile has long been known, and was given further credence when digging for a new sewage system under the adjacent suburb of Cairo in the 1980s revealed tantalizing evidence for further structures\u2014one of them a huge mud-brick wall interpreted by some as part of a \"palace\" or priestly complex. The engineering feat in cutting these waterways is in many ways as extraordinary as the construction of the pyramids themselves. Despite being one of the most intensively studied sites in the world, there is much about the Giza plateau that remains open to speculation, including the possibility of subterranean complexes that have been inaccessible to exploration and lie beneath the range of ground-penetrating radar.\n\nA further possibility, that such a complex might contain an extraordinary revelation, a secret hidden away by a heretical pharaoh, is the basis for this novel. By the time of the New Kingdom, more than a thousand years after the pyramids had been completed, it seems likely that the cults of the three individual pharaohs of the Giza pyramids had coalesced into one, and that this unified cult had become associated with the worship of the sun god Ra. When Amenhotep IV\u2014the future Akhenaten\u2014discarded the old religion in favor of his new sun god, the Aten, and changed his name accordingly, he may have sought a new cult center away from the traditional focus of priestly power in Thebes, and chosen instead a place that remained the oldest and most powerful expression of kingly power in Egypt and already had a strong association with the worship of the sun. Akhenaten was one of the greatest builders of all the pharaohs, with new temples at Heliopolis, not far from Giza, and at Luxor, not to speak of his magnificent new capital at Amarna. The idea that he might have directed that energy to a new complex at Giza\u2014drawing on all the experience in rock cutting, canal building, and large-scale schemes evident in the Old Kingdom structures\u2014is a compelling one, and plausible in terms of the engineering and architectural ambitions that his builders were capable of realizing.\n\nSome of the inspiration for this idea of a later pharaoh \"reinventing\" the Giza site comes from the Pyramid of Menkaure itself, where the archaeological evidence suggests a complex picture of restoration and reuse and even the reburial of the pharaoh some two thousand years later in the 26th Dynasty, in a wooden coffin that you can see today in the British Museum. It is the only artifact collected by the British colonel Richard Vyse from the pyramid in the 1830s not to have disappeared with the sarcophagus in the wreck of the _Beatrice_ , the coffin fragments having been despatched in a separate shipment that made it safely to London.\n\nAs well as being a builder, Akhenaten was a thinker; for most of the other pharaohs we can say little about the life of the mind, constricted as they were by the kind of priestly ritual and control that the young Amenhotep IV clearly despised. The fact of his conversion makes him intellectually the most interesting of all the pharaohs. I have speculated that instead of mysticism his revelation may have stimulated a clarity of thought that led him to gather together all the ancient knowledge and wisdom as an expression of his cult, and that the same kind of incentive that we might identify in the foundation of the Great Library of Alexandria almost a thousand years later was rooted in a memory of this center of learning lost in the desert of the Giza Plateau after Akhenaten's death. Its very secrecy, buried out of sight and known only to a select priesthood, would have reflected Akhenaten's certainty that his new cult would not long outlast his death, ensuring that knowledge of the place was quickly lost and showing how such a complex might have survived intact without being looted through the ages to the present day.\n\n\u2014\n\nThe possible association of Akhenaten with the Old Testament prophet Moses has been another constant source of fascination. In his book _Moses and Monotheism_ , Sigmund Freud speculated that Moses was in fact an Egyptian of royal birth, and came close to conflating the two. It is certainly striking that the monotheism of Aten worship and the revelations said to have been experienced by Moses could have been contemporaneous, and that Moses and Pharaoh are presented in the biblical narrative in such close connection with each other. If there was indeed a revelation in the desert, shared perhaps by an Egyptian prince and an Israelite slave, then it was to be in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and later in Islam that the monotheism arising from that revelation survived, with Egyptian religion reverting back to its traditional polytheism after Akhenaten's death.\n\nI have imagined Akhenaten foreseeing this outcome, and engineering the escape of the Israelites to a place where their religion might flourish. He did so by finding a haven for them in the city of Jerusalem, a place whose allegiance to Akhenaten is revealed in the clay tablet archive from Amarna, as well as by bringing about the destruction of his own chariot army in the pursuit of the Israelites. This is the basis for the famous accounts in the Book of Exodus and the Qur'\u0101n quoted at the beginning of this novel as well as for the fictional Red Sea discovery made by Jack and Costas in the Prologue.\n\n\u2014\n\nIn Fustat, the Old City of Cairo, blocks of masonry thought to have come from Akhenaten's temple at nearby Heliopolis have been found reused in the medieval walls. This is the basis for the fictional discovery in this novel of a block beside the Ben Ezra synagogue containing a hieroglyphic cartouche of the pharaoh. If you visit the synagogue today, you may be told that the infant Moses was found in the reeds of a tributary of the Nile that ran up behind the precinct, a fascinating foundation myth by a people who had been forced out of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and the Romans and had returned to Egypt with their religion now strong enough to survive persecution and the vicissitudes of history.\n\nFor me one of the most powerful images of the demands of scholarship is a famous photo taken in 1912 of the Cambridge academic Solomon Schechter surrounded by boxes and table loads of fragments from the Cairo Geniza shortly after the collection had been removed from the Ben Ezra synagogue to Cambridge University Library. The image of a man bowed down before a project that he knew would occupy far more than his lifetime has added poignancy because the dust he inhaled when he first sorted through the scraps in the synagogue severely damaged his health and probably shortened his life. The story of the recovery and study of the Geniza documents is one of the greatest in the history of scholarship, and its discovery should rank alongside that of Tutankhamun's tomb in the annals of Egyptian research.\n\nIn a fictional addition to the hundreds of thousands of fragments recovered when the Geniza was cleared out in the late nineteenth century, I have imagined a new exploration of the empty chamber revealing a hole in the wall with a few additional fragments overlooked in the clearance and restorations of the synagogue. The scrap with superimposed texts found by Jack and Maria closely mirrors actual palimpsests from the collection in which an earlier text on vellum has been scraped away to allow the sheet to be reused, but where the original text is still visible beneath. Some of the oldest of these texts have been fragments of _Ben Sira (Ecclesiaticus)_ , the Book of Wisdom thought to have been first written down by Ben Sira in the third century BC. The overlying text, a fictional letter from the prolific Spanish poet Yehuda Halevi, draws inspiration from other texts in the archive related to Halevi, one of the most appealing of the individuals of the early medieval period who come alive again through the archive. The letter contains phrases from a number of actual letters and poems by him, examples of which can be seen on the Cambridge University Schechter-Taylor Project website and the many other websites from researchers around the world who continue to work on the Cairo Geniza.\n\n\u2014\n\nIn 1196, Malek Abd al-Aziz Othman ben Yusuf, son of the caliph Saladin, spent eight months removing stones from the north face of the Pyramid of Menkaure, causing a degree of damage not to be visited on the pyramid again until Colonel Vyse used explosives to blast his way into the burial chamber in the 1830s. For Malek the pyramid would have been a quarry for building stone, the cause of damage to many of the pyramids at this period, though some extremists in recent years have imagined a religious motivation and have threatened to complete what they regard as unfinished business, on much the same grounds that led to the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001.\n\nAnother caliph who figures in this novel is the erratic Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (996 to 1021), founder of a public library in Cairo and patron of the sciences. He was also a persecutor of Jews and Christians\u2014he ordered the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem as well as the Ben Ezra synagogue\u2014and his strange nocturnal behavior and disappearance in the desert added further to his mystique. Whether or not he was seeking some kind of spiritual redemption or simply relished the solitude is unclear; all that is known with reasonable certainty is that he took to wandering alone in the desert south of Cairo at night, and after his disappearance all that was found was his hobbled donkey and bloodstained clothes.\n\nI have imagined that the place he discovered was the same one entered from the Nile by my fictional Corporal Jones, who also appears in my novels _Pharaoh_ and _The Tiger Warrior_. Of the two men I have imagined accompanying Jones on that night in 1892, the French diver is fictional, though his gear is based closely on the compressed-air cylinder and reduction valve that had been developed recently by the Frenchmen Rouquayrol and Denayrouze. It is fascinating to think of the military and civil impact had a fully functional demand valve indeed been developed in secret by this date, as in my story, and not lost beneath the Nile. The second character, Charles Chaill\u00e9-Long, is historical, and one of the more colorful of the adventurers to make their way to Egypt at this period. An American of Huguenot French ancestry\u2014hence his surname\u2014he had fought in the U.S. Civil War, served under Gordon in Sudan, explored Lake Victoria, and worked as an international lawyer based in Alexandria, and later made a name for himself in America with his sometimes embellished tales of his adventures in deepest Africa. Chaill\u00e9-Long was one of some sixty veterans of the U.S. Civil War from both sides to accept commissions in the Khedive's army in Egypt, a little-known but fascinating episode that\u2014though unofficial\u2014marks the first major involvement of Americans in the affairs of the Middle East. They were in the employ of an Islamic regime but one that was ultimately to be reined up against the growing movement of the Mahdi in Sudan.\n\nFustat and the Ben Ezra synagogue would have been intimately familiar to another historical character of this period, Howard Carter, the future excavator of Tutankhamun's tomb, when he first arrived in Egypt as an impressionable teenager in 1891. Before being whisked off to work as a draftsman on the excavation of Akhenaten's capital at Amarna, he would have learned much about the characters and byways of Old Cairo, knowledge that would have stood him in good stead after he resigned from the Antiquities Service in 1905 and became an antiquities dealer. The diary entry from him in this novel is fictional, though it reflects a constant curiosity and quest for new finds that ultimately were to lead him back to the Valley of the Kings and fame. During his years in Cairo after his resignation, he would undoubtedly have come across men like the fictional Corporal Jones, former British soldiers who had stayed to try their hand in Egypt but had fallen on hard times, some of them Sudan war veterans disturbed by their experiences and with tall stories to tell of tombs and mummies that might nevertheless just contain a kernel of truth.\n\n\u2014\n\nThe tomb of the chariot general in the mummy necropolis in the Faiyum is fictional, though the necropolis itself is based on reality. The region has produced tombs of officials of New Kingdom date; it features as well in my novel _Atlantis_ , where a crucial papyrus is discovered as a mummy wrapping. Despite many claims and several hoaxes, archaeological evidence for the destruction of the chariot army described in the Book of Exodus and the Qur'\u0101n has never conclusively been identified. What is well substantiated, though, is the evidence for Minoan influence on New Kingdom Egypt, in particular Queen Ahhotep's epithet \"Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut,\" found on a stele set up by her husband Ahmose at Ipetsut in the Temple of Amun, and evidence for Minoan connections in her grave goods. If \"Hau-nebut\" does indeed refer to Crete, and if she was therefore Minoan, it is fascinating to imagine her bloodline influencing the character of the pharaohs in subsequent dynasties. Whether this lay behind Akhenaten's tastes or was simply his receptivity to external ideas, the wall paintings from his palace at Amarna are strikingly similar in naturalism and color to those seen in Minoan Crete.\n\n\u2014\n\nThe oldest known reference to Israel, and the only known reference to Israel in a second millennium BC Egyptian inscription, is on the so-called \"Israel Stele\" from Thebes; the two other occurrences of the hieroglyphic word in this novel are both fictional. The stele, in the Cairo Museum (JE31408), is a slab of gray granite over three meters high erected by the 19th Dynasty pharaoh Merenptah in his funerary temple in Thebes. It commemorates his conquests in the lands of Syria-Palestine toward the end of the thirteenth century BC: \"Their chiefs prostrate themselves and beg for peace: Canaan is devastated, Ashkelon is vanquished, Gezer is taken, Yenoam annihilated, Israel is laid waste, its seed exists no more, Syria is made a widow for Egypt, and all lands have been pacified.\" In the hieroglyphic word for Israel, the \"determinative\"\u2014the first hieroglyph in the group\u2014signifies a people rather than a place, a fascinating indication that the sense of identity as a people that was to become so much a part of Jewish history may have been evident well before the diaspora.\n\nThe development of Jerusalem in the second millennium BC remains scantily known, with many modern accounts using the Old Testament as a framework, and little being certain in the written evidence before the foundation of the \"City of David\" about the beginning of the first millennium BC. It seems clear, though, that Jerusalem was a substantial settlement by the time of the Egyptian New Kingdom in the late Bronze Age. Among the most fascinating of the \"Amarna letters\" from Akhenaten's capital in Egypt are several from the ruler of Jerusalem confirming the loyalty of _m\u00e2t urusalim_ \u2014the Land of Jerusalem\u2014to the pharaoh, presumably Akhenaten himself, and from the same period comes the oldest writing from Jerusalem itself in the form of a fragmentary cuneiform tablet.\n\nWhether or not any part of the Israelite Exodus from Egypt reached Jerusalem is a matter for speculation, but it is the type of question that taxed the many foreign archaeologists who descended on Ottoman Palestine in the nineteenth century, Bibles in hand. These included a remarkable group of British officers of the Royal Engineers who carried out the first detailed mapping of the city and its environs, working officially as well as on their own initiative. Among them are several officers who were to achieve fame in the war against the Mahdi in Sudan and feature extensively in my previous novel _Pharaoh_ , including Charles Wilson, intelligence chief in the 1884 Gordon Relief Expedition; Charles Gordon himself, doomed defender of Khartoum; and Horatio Herbert Kitchener, whose desecration of the Mahdi's tomb at Omdurman in 1898 satisfied his promise to avenge Gordon. But it set the stage for the resurgent extremist movement generations later that forms a present-day fictional backdrop to this novel.\n\nTwo of the books by these men, Gordon's _Reflections in Palestine, 1883_ (1884), and Charles Warren's _Underground Jerusalem: An Account of Some of the Principal Difficulties Encountered in Its Exploration and the Results Obtained_ (1876), provide accounts of exploration beneath Jerusalem, the latter detailing extensive investigations that resulted in the discovery of a vertical hole still known as \"Warren's Shaft.\" Much of the prehistoric rock cutting beneath Jerusalem is likely to have been associated with securing the water supply\u2014opening up vertical shafts to reach the level of springs and horizontal tunnels to channel the water to convenient points beneath the city. One of the most remarkable finds detailing this type of work, now in the Istanbul archaeological museum\u2014a legacy of Ottoman rule in Jerusalem\u2014is a stone block from the \"Siloam Tunnel\" with an inscription in Palaeo-Hebrew of the early first millennium BC, the inspiration for the fictional inscription that Rebecca discovers in Chapter 17 of this novel.\n\nWhether or not undiscovered man-made spaces exist beneath Temple Mount, perhaps including tombs and storage chambers, may become apparent only when the authorities allow further exploration, though one underground passage is known to exist to the east of \"Wilson's Arch\" beside the Western Wall leading toward the temple site. Meanwhile, in the area surrounding the temple precinct, several recent excavations have been carried out that closely parallel those presented fictionally in this novel. They suggest the revelations that may await those who one day may be able to resume the explorations of Warren and his colleagues and penetrate even farther into the spaces beneath Temple Mount where access is currently forbidden.\n\n\u2014\n\nYou can read about Jack and Costas' exciting discovery of the wreck of the _Beatrice_ in my previous novel _Pharaoh_. The actual wreck site from 1837 remains undiscovered, though southeast Spain and the scenario for her wrecking presented in this novel fit the available evidence, including the likely wind patterns at that time of year for her voyage from Alexandria via Malta and probably Livorno. Since carrying out my initial research, I have unearthed more details from _Lloyd's Register_ and other sources about her structural changes after a refit, including the addition of iron knees, and about her armaments. The idea that these might have included guns made initially for the East India Company was inspired by the discovery in 2014 of EIC guns on a merchantman wreck in the English Channel, and by the idea that EIC weapons requisitioned by the Crown during the Napoleonic Wars before being shipped to India may have included naval ordnance that was sold off afterward when neither the Crown nor the EIC had any use for it.\n\n\u2014\n\nThe hieroglyphs that appear as a heading through this novel are taken from the Israel Stele in the Cairo Museum, mentioned above, and show the ancient Egyptian word for Israel. Of the quoted material in this novel not already attributed, the wording of the fictional inscription found under Jerusalem in Chapter 17 is based closely on the Siloam Tunnel inscription, in the Archaeological Museum, Istanbul. The Amarna Letter quoted by Rebecca in the same chapter is no. 287: 60\u201364. The text of the fictional papyrus document shown by Aysha in the Epilogue is inspired by a translation of passages of the _Ben Sira_ ( _Ecclesiasticus_ , the Book of Wisdom) by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole in _Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza_ (2011, pp. 53\u201354), also the source of the pithy quote at the beginning of this note.\n\nSince completing _Pharaoh_ , I have discovered a fine contemporary watercolor depicting the _Beatrice_ a few years before her loss, and you can see that, a drawing by Colonel Vyse's draftsman Edward Andrews of the sarcophagus of Menkaure in the pyramid before he removed it, the photo of Solomon Schechter with the Geniza archive, Corporal Jones' medals, and many other images related to the novel and the facts behind the fiction at www.davidgibbins.com and Facebook.com/\u200bDavidGibbinsAuthor.\nBY DAVID GIBBINS\n\n_Atlantis_\n\n_Crusader Gold_\n\n_The Lost Tomb_\n\n_The Tiger Warrior_\n\n_The Mask of Troy_\n\n_Atlantis God_\n\n_Pharaoh_\n\n_Pyramid_\n\n# ABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\nDAVID GIBBINS has worked in underwater archaeology all his professional life. After earning a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, he taught archaeology in Britain and abroad, and is a world authority on ancient shipwrecks and sunken cities. He has led numerous expeditions to investigate underwater sites in the Mediterranean and around the world. He currently divides his time between fieldwork, England, and Canada, and is at work on a new novel about the further adventures of Jack Howard and his team in Egypt.\n\nwww.davidgibbins.com\n\n# _What's next on  \nyour reading list?_\n\n[Discover your next  \ngreat read!](http://links.penguinrandomhouse.com/type/prhebooklanding/isbn/9780345534736/display/1)\n\n* * *\n\nGet personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.\n\nSign up now.\n\n## Contents\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Title Page\n  3. Copyright\n  4. Contents\n  5. Epigraph\n  6. Map\n  7. Part 1\n    1. Chapter 1\n    2. Chapter 2\n    3. Chapter 3\n    4. Chapter 4\n    5. Chapter 5\n  8. Part 2\n    1. Chapter 6\n    2. Chapter 7\n    3. Chapter 8\n    4. Chapter 9\n    5. Chapter 10\n    6. Chapter 11\n  9. Part 3\n    1. Chapter 12\n    2. Chapter 13\n    3. Chapter 14\n    4. Chapter 15\n    5. Chapter 16\n    6. Chapter 17\n  10. Part 4\n    1. Chapter 18\n    2. Chapter 19\n    3. Chapter 20\n    4. Chapter 21\n    5. Chapter 22\n    6. Chapter 23\n    7. Chapter 24\n    8. Chapter 25\n  11. Epilogue\n  12. Acknowledgments\n  13. Author's Note\n  14. Other Titles\n  15. About the Author\n\n  1. iii\n  2. iv\n  3. v\n  4. vi\n  5. vii\n  6. \n  7. \n  8. \n  9. \n  10. \n  11. \n  12. \n  13. \n  14. \n  15. \n  16. \n  17. \n  18. \n  19. \n  20. \n  21. \n  22. \n  23. \n  24. \n  25. \n  26. \n  27. \n  28. \n  29. \n  30. \n  31. \n  32. \n  33. \n  34. \n  35. \n  36. \n  37. \n  38. \n  39. \n  40. \n  41. \n  42. \n  43. \n  44. \n  45. \n  46. \n  47. \n  48. \n  49. \n  50. \n  51. \n  52. \n  53. \n  54. \n  55. \n  56. \n  57. \n  58. \n  59. \n  60. \n  61. \n  62. \n  63. \n  64. \n  65. \n  66. \n  67. \n  68. \n  69. \n  70. \n  71. \n  72. \n  73. \n  74. \n  75. \n  76. \n  77. \n  78. \n  79. \n  80. \n  81. \n  82. \n  83. \n  84. \n  85. \n  86. \n  87. \n  88. \n  89. \n  90. \n  91. \n  92. \n  93. \n  94. \n  95. \n  96. \n  97. \n  98. \n  99. \n  100. \n  101. \n  102. \n  103. \n  104. \n  105. \n  106. \n  107. \n  108. \n  109. \n  110. \n  111. \n  112. \n  113. \n  114. \n  115. \n  116. \n  117. \n  118. \n  119. \n  120. \n  121. \n  122. \n  123. \n  124. \n  125. \n  126. \n  127. \n  128. \n  129. \n  130. \n  131. \n  132. \n  133. \n  134. \n  135. \n  136. \n  137. \n  138. \n  139. \n  140. \n  141. \n  142. \n  143. \n  144. \n  145. \n  146. \n  147. \n  148. \n  149. \n  150. \n  151. \n  152. \n  153. \n  154. \n  155. \n  156. \n  157. \n  158. \n  159. \n  160. \n  161. \n  162. \n  163. \n  164. \n  165. \n  166. \n  167. \n  168. \n  169. \n  170. \n  171. \n  172. \n  173. \n  174. \n  175. \n  176. \n  177. \n  178. \n  179. \n  180. \n  181. \n  182. \n  183. \n  184. \n  185. \n  186. \n  187. \n  188. \n  189. \n  190. \n  191. \n  192. \n  193. \n  194. \n  195. \n  196. \n  197. \n  198. \n  199. \n  200. \n  201. \n  202. \n  203. \n  204. \n  205. \n  206. \n  207. \n  208. \n  209. \n  210. \n  211. \n  212. \n  213. \n  214. \n  215. \n  216. \n  217. \n  218. \n  219. \n  220. \n  221. \n  222. \n  223. \n  224. \n  225. \n  226. \n  227. \n  228. \n  229. \n  230. \n  231. \n  232. \n  233. \n  234. \n  235. \n  236. \n  237. \n  238. \n  239. \n  240. \n  241. \n  242. \n  243. \n  244. \n  245. \n  246. \n  247. \n  248. \n  249. \n  250. \n  251. \n  252. \n  253. \n  254. \n  255. \n  256. \n  257. \n  258. \n  259. \n  260. \n  261. \n  262. \n  263. \n  264. \n  265. \n  266. \n  267. \n  268. \n  269. \n  270. \n  271. \n  272. \n  273. \n  274. \n  275. \n  276. \n  277. \n  278. \n  279. \n  280. \n  281. \n  282. \n  283. \n  284. \n  285. \n  286. \n  287. \n  288. \n  289. \n  290. \n  291. \n  292. \n  293. \n  294. \n  295. \n  296. \n  297. \n  298. \n  299. \n  300. \n  301. \n  302. \n  303. \n  304. \n  305. \n  306. \n  307. \n  308. \n  309. \n  310. \n  311. \n  312. \n  313. \n  314. \n  315. \n  316. \n  317. \n  318. \n  319. \n  320. \n  321. \n  322. \n  323. \n  324. \n  325. \n  326. \n  327. \n  328. \n  329. \n  330. \n  331. \n  332. \n  333. \n  334. \n  335. \n  336. \n  337. \n  338. \n  339. \n  340. \n  341. \n  342. \n  343. \n  344. \n  345. \n  346. \n  347. \n  348. \n  349. \n  350. \n  351. \n  352. \n  353. \n  354. \n  355. \n  356. \n  357. \n  358. \n  359. \n  360. \n  361. \n  362. \n  363. \n  364. \n  365. \n  366. \n  367. \n  368. \n  369. \n  370. \n  371. \n  372. \n  373. \n  374. \n  375. \n  376. \n  377. \n  378. \n  379.\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Cover\n  3. Title Page\n  4. Table of Contents\n  5. Start\n\n"], ["\n\nFor my mother and father with love\nTable of Contents\n\nTitle Page  \nPREFACE\n\nLEARNING TO COOK\n\nTHE DISCOVERY OF SLOWNESS\n\nKITCHEN DIARY: RASPBERRIES\n\nLEARNING TO EAT\n\nKITCHEN DIARY: VEGETABLE BRIEFS\n\nOUTLAW COOK\n\nKITCHEN DIARY: BLACK BEANS AND RICE\n\nPLOWMAN'S LUNCH\n\nKITCHEN DIARY: TWO AUTUMN SALADS\n\nFORTY CLOVES OF GARLIC\n\nKITCHEN DIARY: A WEDDING PUNCH\n\nTAKING STOCK\n\nKITCHEN DIARY: CHICKEN IN A CRUST\n\nON NOT BEING A GOOD COOK\n\nKITCHEN DIARY: SOME THOUGHTS ON OMELETS\n\nMADE TO TASTE\n\nMANGIAMACCHERONI\n\nCHEESE  \nHERBS  \nLEMONS  \nCANNED FISH  \nSTALE BREAD  \nEGGS  \nOLIVES  \nOLIVE OIL  \nA NOTE ON AGLIO E OLIO  \nTASTING NOTES: CALIFORNIA PASTA, OLIVE OIL, AND GRATING CHEESE\n\nMEATBALL METAPHYSICS  \nGARLIC SOUP\n\nKITCHEN DIARY: LEMON ICE CREAM\n\nFUL MEDAMES  \nRUSSIANS AND MUSHROOMS\n\nTASTING NOTES: DRIED WILD MUSHROOMS\n\nDANDAN NOODLES\n\nDANDAN NOODLES\n\nBOEUF AUX CAROTTES\n\nKITCHEN DIARY: GINGER PEAR CAKE\n\nPOTATO PANCAKE PRIMER\n\nTASTING NOTES: GREEK OLIVES\n\nSOUP WITHOUT STOCK\n\nA NOTE ON PEA SOUP  \nKITCHEN DIARY: SWEDISH PANCAKES\n\nBREAKFAST CLAFOUTIS  \nPERFECT PECAN PIE\n\nTHE BAKER'S APPRENTICE\n\nAN ARTISANAL LOAF\n\nNOTES ON BUILDING AND USING AN OUTDOOR WOOD-FIRED BREAD OVEN  \nBAKING NOTES: A READING LIST\n\nONE LOAF THREE WAYS\n\nBAKING NOTES: THE BREAD CLOCHE\n\nNATURAL LEAVENS: SORTING OUT SOURDOUGH\n\nBAKING NOTES: SOURDOUGHS INTERNATIONAL\n\nIRISH SODA BREAD\n\nTHE INGREDIENTS  \nTHE METHOD\n\nTHE CULINARY SCENE\n\nMARTHA STEWART  \nSTRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND\n\nMYTHOLOGY & MEATBALLS: A GREEK ISLAND DIARY/COOKBOOK\n\nTHE SPICE SELLERS  \nACETARIA\n\nTHE FRUIT, HERBS, & VEGETABLES OF ITALY\n\nMONET \u00c0 TABLE\n\nMONET'S TABLE: THE COOKING JOURNALS OF CLAUDE MONET\n\nCOUNTER REVOLUTION\n\nTHE TASTE OF CHINA\n\nRICHARD OLNEY, ENCORE UNE FOIS\n\nTHE FRENCH MENU COOKBOOK\n\nTHE TASTE OF THE PAST\n\nTHE ROMAN COOKERY OF APICIUS: A TREASURY OF GOURMET RECIPES AND HERBAL COOKERY, TRANSLATED FOR THE MODERN KITCHEN\n\nMY PAUL WOLFERT PROBLEM\n\nCOUSCOUS AND OTHER GOOD FOOD FROM MOROCCO MEDITERRANEAN COOKING THE COOKING OF SOUTH-WEST FRANCE PAULA WOLFERT'S WORLD OF FOOD\n\nMEDITERRANEAN ODYSSEY\n\nHONEY FROM A WEED: FASTING AND FEASTING IN TUSCANY, CATALONIA, THE CYCLADES, AND APULIA  \nPLATS DU JOUR - Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd, with illustrations by David Gentleman\n\nCUISINE M\u00c9CANIQUE\n\nLIST OF RECIPES\n\nA NOTE ON AUTHORSHIP  \nALSO BY JOHN THORNE  \nBIBLIOGRAPHY  \nINDEX  \nNotes  \nCopyright Page\n\nPREFACE\n\nAll I wanted to do was to go into the kitchen and cook.   \nWhy did that prove so very difficult?\n\nOutlaw Cook is an assembly of pieces that for the most part were first published in Simple Cooking, the food letter my wife, Matt, and I write and publish. It has now survived for over a decade, the first issue having been sent out sometime in the fall of 1980. Then it was a single, legal-sized sheet, printed at a local photocopy shop. I sent it out free to approximately fifty people, some of whom had already purchased A Treatise on Onion Soup or Aglio, Oglio, Basilico, two pamphlets I was then selling through small classified ads in (of all places) The New Republic and the National Review, and to correspondents to the letters pages of Gourmet, Bon App\u00e9tit, and Cuisine whose full addresses I had been able to find in the collection of telephone books at the Boston Public Library.\n\nThis was about as hopeless a method as there is for finding readers but, being completely ignorant of the publishing business, I hadn't yet found that out. In any case, what really mattered was that I had finally begun to sort out what had been happening to me for the six years previous\u2014since 1974, that is, when, after years of teaching at a small private school, I had moved to Boston and begun to cook.\n\nThe first gale-force waves from that decade's great storm of culinary discovery were just then beginning to roll into the Hub, and it wasn't long before they washed me away. Every week, it seemed, another exciting cookbook arrived in the bookstores\u2014reporting on the culinary revolution in France, presenting at long last the authentic details of the regional cuisines of Italy, China, Mexico, and India, explaining precisely the making of a genuine croissant, a pizza margherita, a cassoulet in the manner of Languedoc or Toulouse.\n\nKitchen equipment stores were springing up overnight, and the single shelf or two of specialty groceries were expanding into entire shops. Even in Boston, it was now possible to buy virgin olive oil, good wine vinegar, shallots, cr\u00e8me fra\u00eeche, pancetta, and, for a time, unpasteurized French cheeses. It was all so new and, to a freshly awakened palate, so good.\n\nNot coincidentally, this was also a time when a journalistic revolution was taking place, emblemized by the larger-than-life presences of Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson. Journalists were now propelling themselves directly into the story, as much participants as reporters. No surprise then that in the Boston alternative papers, where even the television listings were engag\u00e9, a writer named Mark Zanger\u2014under the culinary persona of \"Robert Nadeau\"\u2014began reviewing local restaurants and producing occasional food columns in the first person political.\n\nI was immediately drawn to Zanger/Nadeau as I had been to no other food writer. He was like me\u2014only he was more honest about it. He was teaching himself eating and drinking and simultaneously wondering out loud what he should be making of it, gnawing away at all pat assumptions.\n\nI had read other writers before him who had claimed neither to be good cooks nor to possess a perfect-pitch palate, but their writing tended to weave an unsteady course between humorous self-deprecation and a relentless flood of just-learned good advice. Zanger was always more than that. He taught me\u2014although I've taken my time in learning the lesson\u2014that honesty means nothing if there's no real risk to it, no genuine self-examination.\n\nI needed that kind of perspective right then, because things had already started to go wrong. The most visible symptom was my conviction that I couldn't have too many recipes. I subscribed to every food publication; I had rummaged every cookbook in the open stacks of the Boston Public Library; weekly, and sometimes daily, I scoured the remainder tables at Barnes & Noble. By 1978, I was amassing recipes at such a rate that at the end of the year I filled a whole trash barrel with those that, on sober reflection, I realized I didn't want or need. But of those that I thought I did need, I saw no end in sight.\n\nAlways, of course, there are answers within answers, but the simplest reason why I was collecting all those cookbooks, all those recipes, was the same one that explained why I kept bringing home grocery bags full of new, untried ingredients. Even being able to pare things down to the truly good (and this itself, I discovered, is no easy thing) did not necessarily free me from making some hard choices. I was like a child in a candy store, tempted by too many good things all at once.\n\nE. M. Forster once wrote that he didn't know what he thought until he said it, and it's the same with me. Mark Zanger had given me a model\u2014in the beginning I even tried to imitate his prose style\u2014but my own experiences not only were presenting me with my theme but were doing so with such urgency that, when I started to formulate Simple Cooking, my mind flooded over with words.\n\nI still have my original working notes, and, looking over them, I can see that, right from the start, what I was trying to do was to formulate an approach to cooking that would get me out of the mess I had gotten myself into... without surrendering the great pleasure I felt\u2014and still do feel\u2014when I just go into the kitchen and cook. My thought\u2014much elaborated, first in a set of nine culinary pamphlets and then over the years in Simple Cooking\u2014was to concentrate on dishes toward which I felt an immediate and intuitive affinity... building up a personal cuisine out of what best suited my own tastes, temperament, and cooking talent.\n\nI was much slower in addressing the conflict that came from my sometimes fighting off and sometimes surrendering to the enormous temptation to use cookbooks to inflate my sense of self as a cook\u2014even though I had begun to see how dependent this made me on recipes and how much it ultimately sapped my self-confidence in the kitchen.\n\nA child who is forced to learn self-control in a candy store is engaged in a very ambiguous project. The poignancy inherent in that ambiguity has always provided the octane on which the Simple Cooking engine runs. It explains why I excoriate recipes although I am obviously on intimate terms with countless numbers of them; why I denounce trendy ingredients while remaining willing to give the next one a try; and why I continually voice suspicion about the relevance of foreign cuisines to American cooks although much of my writing is devoted to nothing else.\n\nIn other words, from the very beginning, my writing was rife with symptoms of the disease I was struggling to cure myself of. It is all there in full cry in the mushroom-soup recipe that appears in the first issue. Though I say that I vary the recipe to suit \"what is in the larder or to whim,\" the actual details convey a dish whose emphasis, in typical recipe fashion, falls on the lip-smacking persuasion of a very familiar set of ingredients. These start with butter, bacon, and chicken stock. \"Then,\" I continue, \"stir in two cups of light cream and a scant teaspoon of cognac or good brandy (or even Madeira).\" I like the restraint of that \"scant teaspoon.\"\n\nStill, there were also signs that this same engine might at least take us all for an interesting ride. There were three pieces in the first issue: the one on mushroom soup; another that marveled at the simple ingenuity of boeuf \u00e0 la ficelle, which was later put into my first book, Simple Cooking; and, lastly, the feature essay, a rumination on salt. This, with some minor touchings-up, is reprinted below. It still works, I think\u2014despite an unintended but still slightly sourish whiff of male chauvinism\u2014and it examples what for me is the genuinely interesting question about the food we eat: not where it comes from or who grows it or even which of it tastes the best, but why it wants to kill its father and sleep with its mother... .\n\nIf it's cheering to discover that I was writing things ten years ago at the very beginning of my career that I can reprint today with pleasure, it is also salutary and somewhat sobering to realize that the problems I wrestled with in the eighties are very much the same ones that Matt and I find ourselves facing at the start of the nineties. This, I think, explains the deeper threads of intro- and retrospection that distinguish Outlaw Cook from its more youthful predecessor. If these meditations can be said to have a single theme, it appears\u2014with apologies to Hermann Hesse\u2014succinctly stated at the beginning of this preface. I pose it in the form of a question\u2014one that, in the end, may never be adequately answered. Even so, as we used to say in the seventies, la lutte continue... the struggle continues.\n\nON SALT\n\n(REPRINTED FROM SIMPLE COOKING #1)\n\nSalt is the masculine presence in the tabletop constellation, sugar the feminine one. Sugar is not only sweet itself but a flatterer in other foods, heightening and mellowing flavors without intruding any taste of its own. Like sugar, salt is a flavor without quality. Its bitterness has no character, only an effect\u2014it makes you salivate. But, unlike sugar, salt has no respect for other flavors; its savor dominates where it intrudes.\n\nThis assertiveness is partly why salt conjures up images of the masculine. But it is also because the body is and tastes salty. Blood and sweat, especially when unmediated by either artifice or soap, both have mostly masculine associations. Tears, of course, are a feminine prerogative, but kissing them away (and in the process enjoying their savor) is a masculine one. Thus, \"an old salt\" is a tag not usually attached to a woman. The phrase \"Oh, you salty dog!\" has a definite priapic ring to it, and a salty tongue implies male, not female, cussedness.\n\nSalt, then, has masculine connotations because of its aggressive physicality, whereas sugar is a medium of reverie. As children, we fantasized castles of gingerbread in a candy landscape where even the clouds were spun sugar; as adults, the image of sugar still brings with it a romancing of food... it heightens anticipation. But the mere thought of salt can cause the tongue to drool and the stomach to grumble\u2014thus rubbing us against our present hunger. So does the skeptic's pinch of salt also bring illusion to an end.\n\nSalt dehydrates meat tissue, forcing out moisture. This chemical action has its metaphorical ramifications, too. You'd expect to find a recipe for steak seared in salt on a red-hot skillet in James Beard, not Fannie Farmer\u2014and you'd be right. Beard approved the method because the salt crust sealed the steak, holding in the juices, which, in fact, it does not do.\n\nAt first glance, this bit of culinary folklore seems contrary even to common sense: after all, salt is used to wick moisture out of meats in the drying of salt cod and the curing of country ham. But extend by analogy the feeling of contraction that comes when the tongue is sprinkled with salt to a raw piece of meat and you can see why Beard might have come to believe it.\n\nYou can also see why he might have other reasons to be predisposed to do so. Even the idea of a well-salted steak makes the mouth salivate, priming it to put away larger quantities of meat than appetite would otherwise allow\u2014and also allowing it to wolf the meal down quickly. Both aspects are supposed traits of the masculine hunger that Beard, a hearty trencherman if ever there was one, conspicuously espoused.\n\nIn brief, then, sugar seduces\u2014the hand that reaches for the next chocolate does so because of the excess of pleasure from the last\u2014while salt, by compelling salivation, commands: \"Mouth, forward marrrch!\" In masculine parlance, to obey such an order is no sign of weakness. It is a battle cry, the signal for appetite to wade in and begin the fight.\n\nHowever, precisely because it is so aggressive, salt is also a food to measure and, ultimately, one to control. There's no end to the amount of sugar you can put into a cup of coffee (ask a Turk), but the limits of salt are much more closely defined. This helps explain the presence of salt in hospitality rites of aggressive (i.e., masculine) societies: \"There is salt between us,\" the Arabs say, and we cannot imagine the word \"salt\" replaced by, say, \"sugar\" or \"a pat of butter.\" This salt is an expression of generosity but also one that compels control and, hence, restraint, the acknowledgment of which is the first step to trust.\n\nDoubtless, salt is a necessity in the kitchen, especially for food cooked in water, which otherwise leaches out any salts already present. A broiled steak can be enjoyed without salt, but a piece of beef boiled in unsalted water emerges inert and dead, meat cooked but not transformed into food. Even so, salt's presence at the table is a cultural phenomenon related less to food than to dining. It allows us to regulate the speed with which we ingest our food \u2014so as to match the rate of our neighbors at the table and to get the job done within an allotted time. The longer one has to eat and the more attention one can pay to the food itself, the less salt is required as a table condiment.\n\nHowever, if you do put it there, take a close look at the ingredient list on its original container. If you find anything but salt itself, buy some other brand. Salt is a taste that precedes even a mother's milk, for it is the taste of life itself. No food is as good as it can be if the salt that is eaten with it is not clean and pure.\n\nPerhaps the best salt of all is bay salt, sun-dried from sea water. The crystals form into large and crumbly pyramidal flakes, as nice to touch as they are to taste. Their clean savor is so persuasive that a flake easily finds its way, now and then, straight into the mouth of the cook. A pinch of this salt is a reasonable measure, and it is expensive enough so that moderation is a financial as well as a moral pleasure. British Maldon sea salt is a bay salt widely available in this country, from, for example, Williams-Sonoma and\u2014in that firm's own proprietary packaging\u2014Crabtree and Evelyn.\nLEARNING TO COOK\nTHE DISCOVERY OF SLOWNESS\n\nMost of the time when I was a kid, we lived in Fort Bliss, Texas, an army post on the outskirts of El Paso. But as many summers as we could, the whole family (Mother and Dad, four children) would pile into the Buick Super and head for New England. After a four-day drive, with a stopover in Boston to visit my grandparents, we would arrive at the dock in Portland, Maine. There we caught the boat to Long Island, out in Casco Bay. My father would then leave us at the family cottage until the end of summer, when he'd return to spend what was left of his leave before bringing us all back to Texas.\n\nThe cottage existed, like all summer places, in a world of slow time. Perched on a cliff overlooking the bay, it was bounded on all sides not by paved roads or even a sidewalk but by a sea of grass. The drinking water came from a well, the washing water from rain barrels set under the eaves. The food was cooked over a tiny camp stove; perishables were kept in an icebox, cooled with an actual giant chunk of ice. At night, games were played and stories read aloud by kerosene lantern; the last trip to the outhouse was lit by a candle in a jar, because flashlight batteries were expensive and we kids ran them down, shining its light for company all the time we sat there.\n\nWe had no radio, no television, no telephone. Here was here; there was somewhere else. Things traversed the distance between the two over the water, by boat, slowly. Even when the Gurnet or the Aucocisco had been sighted steaming toward us up the bay, there was still plenty of time to push the wheelbarrow through the woods and across the beach to meet it. Boxes of groceries, blocks of ice, visitors' luggage were all wheeled home in it slowly... time taken to get used to something new.\n\nSmart, but timid and easily panicked, I was a child who needed this slowness. My mind raced quickly but only really grasped the things it was allowed to take in small bites. This may be why, although I was naturally interested in treats, I wasn't all that drawn to food. Eating was just something else that had to be done too quickly. Lingering at the table or playing with one's food was not allowed. To get dessert, what came before had to be eaten at a rate that was the same as everyone else's, which meant not so much tasting as performing the necessary motions.\n\nLearning to become a socially acceptable table partner is not at all the same thing as learning how to eat. Involvement with what went into the mouth was possible only for such things as cocoa or ice cream, food that was taken in small, contemplative mouthfuls and\u2014unlike the monotonous plasticity of chewing gum\u2014rewarded such patience by continuing to taste good.\n\nOn the island, however, ordinary rules of the table didn't hold. Eating, too, was incorporated into slowness. Blueberries and raspberries, for example, grew everywhere, and were to be picked, examined for bugs, and then eaten one by one. Or a whole leisurely morning could be spent picking them, until there were enough to be made into a pie or, even better, into preserves. Then one could watch their gradual transformation into an astonishingly clear and deep-colored liquid. This, dipped up in a spoon, could be turned by patient blowing into a quivering mass of fragile jelly, lustrous as a jewel.\n\nDigging for clams, I found that they were not slow but surprisingly quick\u2014just not quick enough once you learned to outsmart them. In any case, they could only move at all when burrowing through the sand. When fingers clutched them, they gave up like a victim at tag.\n\nThis was good, because crabs and lobsters were terrifying even in captivity, scurrying about so quickly, snapping their claws. I was upset by fishing, too, but for a different reason. I knew that the fish wouldn't hurt me, but its convulsive thrashing touched off an inner empathetic agitation. I felt too close to such spasms myself, as when cornered in math class by a word problem, on one side, that needed an hour to sort out and a teacher, on the other, insisting that I solve it that moment, at once, immediately.\n\nLobsters, at least, were made to be eaten slowly, each leg carefully searched for all hidden morsels before going on to the next. The big, juicy piece of tail meat, I learned, was to be saved for last, like the heart of an artichoke, to finally fill the mouth with as much as it could hold of the flavor that, until now, had been worried out in bits.\n\nClams were steamed in big pots full of clean seaweed, which gave them plenty of time to decide to open their shells. Those that refused escaped being eaten. Each of the others was taken from its shell, had its rubbery neck pulled off like a dirty undershirt, and was given a bath in hot broth. Then, finally, the soothing dip in melted butter... it was like getting them ready for bed.\n\nAlthough clams are often steamed right on the beach, I liked the fact that our family brought them home to eat. There, at the table, the beach that the clams lived and fed in could be held at a distance and considered with cautious pleasure. Contrarily, what I loved about eating on the beach was how it transformed what was, when we ate it at home, completely ordinary. Meals that would otherwise be made in a minute now took a whole afternoon. Food waited patiently in the big wicker basket while we edged into the icy water, taking our time to work up nerve for that first electric plunge. Then blankets would be spread, creating a room; rocks would be propped together carefully to make a fireplace, driftwood gathered, and a fire started. There could be no cooking done until the wood had burnt down into coals, and, since the fire wasn't started until everyone had come up from swimming, supper proceeded for once with exemplary slowness.\n\nThe sun slipped down behind the island. The breeze off the water blew no longer cool but chill. We sat around the burning logs, impatiently picking away the bark from our sharp-pronged cooking sticks, fashioning them to personal specification, until, finally, the last flame flickered away, leaving behind it a bed of glowing embers.\n\nEach of us then impaled a hot dog and got as near to the fire as we could, dodging the smoke, which made us blind with tears. By practicing slowness, we could make our hot dogs first sizzle and then burst, exposing their bright, juicy innards. All the while, the rolls were being carefully toasted on a rock propped at the edge of the fire. Success meant a hot dog that was burnt black only in spots but leaking all over with steamy juices, slipped into its grilled roll and dressed with Mr. Mustard and plenty of piccalilli.\n\nBy the time we roasted the last of them, the sun had gone. The beach was dark, and when the coals were prodded with our sticks, sparks scattered up like fireflies. Now my mother took out of the picnic basket the makings of her own favorite part of the meal: Campfire marshmallows, Hershey almond bars, and Nabisco graham crackers.\n\nEach of the marshmallows, of course, was to be speared and then rotated cautiously over the fire until its exterior was an even brown and its interior melted through. The trick was not only to have the patience to wait for this moment but also to recognize it when it arrived\u2014so that the marshmallow would collapse onto a graham cracker, not into the coals. The sandwich was then completed with a chunk of the Hershey bar and a second graham cracker pressed firmly on top of all. In our family these were called simply toasted marshmallow sandwiches, but, by whatever name they are known, this is the taste that calls up for countless American kids a certain kind of summer night\u2014of fire, feeding, and the ragged festivity that comes from genuine happiness.\n\nOf course, only as adults do we taste all this in the confection; as children, the thing itself was enough. Melted marshmallow pressed flat in its still-crisp crust, the softened chocolate, the salty, crunchy nuts, the dry, crumbly graham cracker... it's on such as this that kids are permitted to get drunk. Soon, marshmallows are set aflame and waved about to raucous laughter, mouths get burnt, and adult good humor starts to wane.\n\nFor my mother, the most evocative toasted marshmallow sandwich was the one made exactly right. By showing us, her children, how that could be managed, she might see herself through her own mother's eyes. Here was a moment when my mother understood slowness completely. As I watched her in the darkness, patiently turning one final marshmallow over the dying coals, I was at last able to feel that growing up did not entirely mean speeding up, that ahead of me might also lie the ability to become stronger even in slowness.\n\nWritten in memory of my uncle Walter Brooks Favorite (1924 1990), who, of all my mother's generation, loved this place the most.\n\nKITCHEN DIARY: RASPBERRIES\n\nThe British make a dessert with fresh strawberries, variously called Clare College Mush or Eton Mess, in which the berries are macerated in Cointreau and stirred into a mixture of whipped cream and crushed meringues. This is good, but I like it even better made instead with raspberries and a raspberry liqueur like Chambord, where the intense sourness of those berries makes a better contrast with the sweetness of the meringues.\n\nRASPBERRY CRUMBLE\n\n(SERVES 4)\n\n3 large egg whites, at room   \ntemperature   \n\u00bc teaspoon cream of tartar   \nPinch of salt   \n1/2 cup sugar   \nDash of vanilla   \n2 tablespoons raspberry eau-de-   \nvie or Chambord   \n1 pint fresh raspberries   \n1 cup heavy cream, chilled\n\nPreheat the oven to 250\u00b0F. Put the whites into a mixing bowl, making sure no speck of yolk gets in with them, and whip until frothy with a whisk or electric mixer. Then beat in first the cream of tartar and then the pinch of salt. Continue beating, and add 6 tablespoons of the sugar, one at a time, sprinkling each spoonful in slowly. Do not rush this. Finally, mix in the vanilla. Beating at high speed, whip the mixture until it is glossy and firm enough to hold its shape when the beaters are removed. Drop tablespoons of this mixture onto a lightly greased cookie sheet and bake in a low oven for one hour. Then turn the oven off but do not remove the meringues for another hour. (If not using them immediately, keep tightly sealed in a tin.)\n\nWhile the meringues are baking, pour the raspberry liqueur and 1 tablespoon of the remaining sugar over the raspberries, stirring gently but well. Leave this mixture to macerate for at least one hour. Before serving, whip the chilled heavy cream with the last tablespoon of sugar. Coarsely crumble the meringues and mix these and the macerated berries together in a large bowl. Fold in the whipped cream and turn equal portions of this mixture out into small chilled bowls. Serve at once.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: If a raspberry liqueur or eau-de-vie is unavailable, cr\u00e8me de cassis or ordinary black currant syrup can be substituted for the raspberry liqueur, giving the dessert a pleasantly mysterious note. Finally, if making meringues is something that you never seem to get around to, amaretti di Saronno can be substituted, using three for each serving.\n\nThis cake is extravagant in its use of fresh raspberries, but you'll realize how worth the expense it is when, during the last ten minutes of baking, the kitchen is flooded with that berry's fragrant aroma. And the cake itself lives up to this advance billing, with its deep, spicy raspberry flavor, marvelously set off by the buttery richness and the sweet-sour savor of the brown sugar.\n\nI found the recipe in Haydn S. Pearson's The Countryman's Cookbook, a very opinionated, very charming collection of New England recipes from the 1940s. The recipe as he gives it calls for canned raspberries and a flavoring mixture of clove, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Matt and I replaced the canned with fresh berries and two of the spices with fresh lemon zest, which we felt better brought out the slightly elusive raspberry flavor.\n\nFRESH RASPBERRY CAKE\n\n(MAKES ONE 9-INCH LOAF)\n\n\u00be cup (11/2 sticks) unsalted but-   \nter, softened   \n1 cup brown sugar, packed   \n2 eggs   \n2 tablespoons sour cream   \nGrated zest of 1 small lemon   \n2 cups all-purpose flour, sifted be-   \nfore and after measuring   \n1 teaspoon baking soda   \n1/8 teaspoon cinnamon   \n1 pint fresh raspberries   \nWhipped cream for topping\n\nPreheat the oven to 325\u00b0F. Lavishly butter a 9 x 5 x 3-inch loaf pan; set aside. In a large bowl, cream the butter well and beat in the sugar. Beat the eggs until frothy in a separate bowl and then beat them into the butter-sugar mixture. When this is light and creamy, beat in the sour cream and the grated lemon zest. Then sift the flour, baking soda, and cinnamon on top, and mix until smooth. Gently fold the raspberries into the batter with a spatula, mixing well but breaking up the berries as little as possible.\n\nTurn the batter into the buttered pan, smoothing it evenly on top. Bake for about 55 minutes or until a cake tester or straw comes out clean. Let the cake cool on a wire rack for about 15 minutes before inverting the pan gently, letting the cake slip out onto the same rack to cool completely. Cut in thick slices and serve with whipped cream.\nLEARNING TO EAT\n\nA man who is rich in his adolescence is almost doomed  \nto be a dilettante at table. This is not because all millionaires  \nare stupid but because they are not impelled to experiment.  \nIn learning to eat, as in psychoanalysis, the customer, in  \norder to profit, must be sensible of the cost.\n\n\u2014A. J. Liebling, Between Meals\n\nMy first piece of cooking equipment was an 8-inch cast-iron frying pan. I was in a junk shop on Manhattan's Lower East Side, rooting around for two used chairs to bring back to my new apartment at East Ninth Street. I had moved in the day before and discovered I had inherited three pieces of furniture: a mattress, a vintage-model air conditioner the size of a refrigerator, and a table. The first two of these were to be reclaimed that morning by the former tenant's boyfriend. He didn't take the table, however, perhaps because it stood up only when propped against a wall.\n\nI was sorry to see the mattress go because, wretched as it was, without it I was reduced to sleeping on the floor. But it was even more important to have a table. Using the floor as a bed is an inconvenience that most of us have suffered at least once, but using it as a table is to lose all touch with civilized life and, with it, all hope. The gift of a table, however, means the buying of a chair. I could afford that, and I hoped I could afford two of them. A second chair was a promise of company. I didn't know anyone in New York City right then, but I wanted to.\n\nSo I had come to this place where old chairs went to die. Eventually I found two whose demise had been misjudged by a year or so, and as the old proprietor was tying them together so that I could carry them back home, he asked me if I was moving into the neighborhood. I told him that I had just rented my first apartment and that these two chairs would be my first pieces of furniture. He nodded and, when he had finished with them, turned and rummaged through a huge pile of junk that was dumped across the table behind him. He emerged from it with the frying pan. It was a disgusting-looking object, crusted thickly all over\u2014inside and out\u2014with dust caked onto ancient grease. He held it out to me. \"With this,\" he said, \"you'll never starve. It's a whole kitchen by itself. Take it.\" As I hesitated, he thrust it forward and said, \"As a moving-in present. Yours for seventy-five cents.\"\n\nWhen I still stood there motionless, he set it down on the counter without rancor. \"Let me give you a little cooking lesson for free,\" he said. \"This pan is a gem. You don't know why because you've never cooked anything. So, I'll tell you.\" He leaned a little toward me over the counter and hissed, \"Because it's never been washed, that's why. And it never should be washed. When you're done using it, throw in some salt and scrub it out with a crumpled piece of newspaper, a paper bag. No soap, no water\u2014no stick.\" I paid him, balanced it on the two chairs, and brought it home. I didn't believe him about the pan, but I knew he was right about one thing: I didn't know how to cook. The truth was, I hadn't yet even found out how to eat.\n\nI lied when I told the junk dealer that this was my first apartment. I had already dropped out of college to share a place in New York City a year earlier, but that time was a lark. This time I had left college for good, committed to becoming a writer. I had arrived in Manhattan the day before at five in the morning, alone, with precious little money and too many expectations: in short, so far as this city was concerned, a rube.\n\nI threw my luggage into a locker at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, picked up a copy of The New York Times, and went to an all-night cafeteria on Forty-second Street for steak and eggs. I left my tray at a vacant table to go back for some packets of sugar, and when I returned I found a vagrant polishing off my breakfast. Shaken, I went through the line again and sat somewhere else, spending the next two hours marking off places I thought I could afford. By 9 A.M. I was working my way through the list from East Fourteenth Street down.\n\nThe day was gray and bitter cold. Snowflakes floated in the air. The apartments were universally grim. I rejected them, one after another, with growing despair. In some the ends of each hallway were pitch black; in others there was a common toilet shared by the whole floor. The rooms reeked of unwashed bodies and stale food. The one I finally chose, on East Ninth Street between First Avenue and Avenue A, was on the top floor of a five-floor walkup. But the stairwell was brightly lit, the toilet had a closet to itself off the single (windowless) bedroom, and the two windows looked out onto a neatly kept back yard where a large sycamore grew, its bare branches reaching almost as high as the sill.\n\nThirty years now and I can still remember that apartment almost as if I had just stepped out of it, from the feel of the lock knob to the location of the electric sockets to the shape of the tub, the size of the closet, the pane of glass with a crack shot through it that popped out of its frame during a February blizzard. I can call back up to the mind's eye that first long night spent carefully painting the living-room walls and ceiling a bone white, then scrubbing the floors and rubbing them with paste wax, to coax out of their scuffed wood a reluctant, soon-to-vanish sheen.\n\nThe smell of fresh paint barely overlaid a fainter, more pungent odor, the accumulated fear and loneliness and terrified excitement of those who had lived here before me. My immediate successor had simply vanished, leaving her possessions behind. Her boyfriend took what he wanted; the landlord told me to throw the rest out. She was young, or at least her clothing was; I packed it up in her battered fiberboard suitcase. But after a month of keeping it in the closet, I carried it down to the basement and abandoned it. It was too vivid a reminder of my own fear about what might happen to me.\n\nNew York is a brutal city, especially if you come there without friends, work, or money, and if your sense of self is buoyed by nothing but the flimsy dreams of youth. It isn't just the eruption of random, sudden violence\u2014the electric iron flung during a family fight out of a third-floor window, the gunshot on the roof overhead\u2014but the brutality of walls and moldings that have been painted over so many times that their outlines are swollen, shapeless... layer on layer of fresh hope that has eventually turned as grimy and black as those that lie beneath. The brutality of too much fragile experience crushed together.\n\nI blocked off my windows with long drapes cut from a bolt of burlap dyed royal blue. When I woke in the morning, wrapped up in my living-room rug, the sun streamed in through the loose weave in the coarse-grained color of an early Technicolor movie. Although the room was dark and starkly empty, it was filled with flecks of blue-tinged light, as if it were a closed eyeball and I myself an overstimulated optic nerve.\n\nI had come to New York to become a writer, but the story that was my life was washed out from under me by a violent torrent of sensation\u2014inner impulse and outer stimuli. At my age, that story was my single subject. I was entirely flushed of words. The typewriter took a long slow fade; it was only after someone broke in and stole it that it reappeared in my consciousness, now an ironic symbol. I was a refugee whose forged passport had been stolen and, with it, the fantasy of escaping into a false, safe self. All my dreams at the time were of elevated trains shooting over chromatic cityscapes on roller-coaster trestles. In waking life that ride often left me breathless, but I found that it didn't take my appetite away. In fact, I was very, very hungry.\n\nOutside my apartment\u2014that large, shut eye\u2014were Russians, Poles, Ukrainians. A Russian Orthodox church sat on a nearby corner and near it a genuine Russian bathhouse; the single display windows of assorted tiny import stores sported rugs with savage bears wandering in forests or pious religious motifs woven in Day-Glo hues on black backgrounds. Signs promised safe delivery of parcels to behind the Iron Curtain. In other windows had been propped cards that read \"Apartment to Let\u2014Polish People Only.\" This, a super explained, didn't mean me\u2014who could pass as a kind of Pole\u2014but blacks and also the Hispanics encroaching in from Avenues C and D.\n\nIt was, in fact, a neighborhood of old people. I did once see a crowd of fresh-faced, well-scrubbed Boy Scouts, a Polish-American troop (in ironed uniforms!) waiting for a bus to camp, but they probably accounted for every Slavic youth on the entire East Side. Mostly I encountered suspicious, wrinkled faces peering from behind chained doors, sagging bodies on withered legs shuffling up the steep flights of stairs in carpet slippers, dragging a shopping cart behind. Now and then I would pass an old woman, dressed entirely in black, down on her hands and knees, scrubbing the sidewalk with a brush and a pail of soapy water.\n\nOnce my presence became familiar to these people, I ceased to exist. Exciting no fear or interest, I was not worth seeing. I was the Invisible Man. I passed them on the sidewalk or in the hallway without remark; they barely glanced at me or answered a greeting when I edged past them on the stoop or waited next to them at a counter.\n\nThis intensified the dreamlike quality of my life. It also had another effect. Nothing among these puffy, dowdy women and crabby, withered men, these religious shops and churches, the cramped, furniture-stuffed, heavily curtained apartments, echoed back or reflected any part of the intense sexual excitement that my youth and this flood of sensation had sent rushing through my responsive but tightly reined-in flesh.\n\nAt the time, I didn't think of it as restrained. On the contrary, my brain reeled with sex. I read Jean Genet, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Wilhelm Reich. I absorbed Fellini's 81/2, Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising, the then budding oeuvre of Andy Warhol's film factory. Even so, all this was in my head\u2014the same head that had locked my body into what would prove to be a near-unbroachable shell. Looking back, I see I had already made a clear if unconscious choice by locating myself not in the permissive Village but on the Lower East Side, a repressed-seeming neighborhood where I would be kept safe from finding\u2014or myself becoming\u2014an object of desire.\n\nAt the age of twenty, however, desire is not that easy to avoid. With nothing else to do, I used up my free time walking the city. That first winter, every other Friday\u2014payday\u2014I would find myself walking west, into the Village, to browse the bookstores for a mystery or to see a movie, and end up discovering, once again, that I had somehow managed to brush up against it. My body charged with electric current, I would walk back home, stopping at the Night Owl Grocery on the corner of Tenth Street and First Avenue for a bag of potato chips. Back in my apartment, I would take these and my mystery and go straight to bed.\n\nAt the time about which I write, any pretensions I had regarding connoisseurship revolved around tobacco. My cooking, such as it was, came mostly out of cans. I was too intensely inhibited to directly focus on the pleasure of eating in the company of anyone, even myself. Now, lying under the covers, my mind absorbed in a book, I would eat through the bag of chips, producing\u2014like the solitary sex that often followed after\u2014a state of contented oblivion, a self-induced warmth that filled mind and body, wadding it as best as I could against the reality without.\n\nOnce let into my life, however, I found it hard to confine this kind of eating to the safety of my bed. As summer approached, I became more and more reluctant to return home. Nightfall came later, my rooms were hot and airless, and I began instead to head south, crossing Houston Street into Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Jewish neighborhoods by the Williamsburg Bridge. Here were places where I had already seen food being conspicuously enjoyed; here also were places where, if I had any change in my pocket, I could afford to eat.\n\nStill, if desire urged me forward, repression, shyness, continued to hold me back. I became, at least at first, a gastronomic voyeur. I stared into shop windows. If the shop was large and crowded, I might let myself go in and browse, peering into the display cases, watching, still clinging to my invisibility, the interplay between counterman and customer. I would hover about the Essex Street Market, a block-sized building the city had erected years ago to get the pushcarts off the street, letting myself be swept in at one end and out the other, safe and unseen in crowds of every ethnicity and human hue, who pushed their way through the alleyways between the stands. These, often no more than planks on sawhorses, displayed hog maws, plantains, live turtles, rabbits, violent-colored unwrapped confections, blocks of halvah, vats of olives, and tubs of brine-cured onions, cucumbers, and chile peppers.\n\nWhat little of this that I bought and ate had already been made eatable\u2014pickles, olives, cheese. Mostly I observed. A leg of beef was one thing, a plucked and eviscerated duck\u2014complete with head, bill, and feet\u2014another. I came from a place where appetite was diffident and picky and didn't want to know too much. It was a place where supermarkets trimmed meat into individual portions in the back and wrapped these in cellophane; where waiters brought out food only after it had already been chosen; where, that is, appetite was stimulated by packages, advertisements, menus\u2014by words and pictures, not by the food itself.\n\nHere, however, appetite was raw aggression, and those who meant to feed it did so on those terms. Not only were shop windows full of actual, unpackaged food, but on slow days shopmen stood in their doorways to urge your custom, street vendors saluted you as brazenly as beggars. So did their food. The air was full of appetizing smells: roasted chestnuts, hot peanuts, hot dogs. Good Humor men, with no scents to waft, jangled bells. Eateries, in competition, put on their own performances. Peppers, onions, and sausages fried in full view in a whole row of electric frying pans; huge gyros (which for years I believed to be legs from some Greek strain of super-sheep) rotated on vertical skewers, sweating grease; and, of course, solemn pizzaioli flipped and spun large, twirling disks of dough with two clenched fists, as watchers gawked and they themselves stared coolly at nothing at all.\n\nWorking as a mail boy for fifty dollars a week, I shared with this crowd its hunger; I was alone in my shame of it. I could not imagine eating hugely, openly; the prickling of appetite was exciting until I reached out my hand to take... then it fled. There were times when I could have afforded a whole Sicilian pizza\u2014the kind I coveted: rectangular, thickly crusted, heaped with cheese and sauce\u2014but I could never bring myself to order more than a slice or two.\n\nEven eating that made me self-conscious; I preferred to scoop it up and run. Eating while reading had been my introduction to gastronomic pleasure because the mind was too buried in words to notice what the mouth was up to. Walking and eating, I now discovered, nearly replicated that experience. Paradoxically, eating made me feel less, not more, conspicuous out on the street; like taking out the dog, it was a reason to be there. Those who had previously looked straight through me now looked at what I was doing... and responded with a smile. I was still unseen\u2014they looked at the eating, not at me\u2014but the warmth inside me drew up a warmth outside as well. Unnoticed, between two warmths, I had found a way into another safe and private place.\n\nNow on the prowl for such pleasure, I began to notice that this was the one form of sensuality my neighbors did explicitly encourage. Up and down First Avenue were food stores. The bakery windows were crammed with bread of every shape, flavor, and texture\u2014plump, round loaves of pumpernickel; elongated, sleek-crusted loaves of rye; rough, heavy, chunky loaves of Polish \"corn\" (made not with corn at all but coarse-ground rye); and glossy, brown-crusted, braided loaves of challah with a soft, yolk-yellow crumb. Pastry shops offered their own elaborate concoctions: split puffs oozing whipped cream, hazelnut tortes, Black Forest cakes, and fruit tarts sporting impossibly huge, glossy strawberries.\n\nPork butchers draped long links of sausage across their windows\u2014German bratwurst, mettwurst, blood sausage. With them hung lengths of Polish wiankowa and kielbasa; red-faced, fatty hams and whole smoked loins were tucked into the corners. Thick blocks of sweet butter, hefty as cornerstones, sat on the counter of the dairy store. One tiny shop, no more than a door, tucked around a corner on Seventh Street, sold \"Farm Fresh Eggs\u2014Thursdays Only.\" Produce shops burst out onto the sidewalk, their bins overflowing with cabbages, carrots, cauliflowers, leafy greens beyond my capacity to identify or, in some instances, even imagine eating.\n\nFurthermore, entering food stores to take food out, I learned I could linger and still retain that place within. A delicatessen on Houston Street sold potato knishes\u2014large, bright yellow, pillowy squares, deep-fried in chicken fat\u2014for a quarter each. I ate these, washed down with celery tonic, while leaning against the stand-up counter along the wall, watching countermen hand-slice paper-thin cuts of smoked salmon, while bakers, towels tied around their heads, brought out huge trays of bagels and bialys. All around me, I was starting to see, was food that 1 could also bring home.\n\nIn the Village, on the corner of MacDougal and Bleecker, a thickly mustachioed Chilean sold empanadas out of a booth built from a packing crate. These came two ways (I think his only English was \"meat\" and \"cheese\"), fried fresh to order: he would plunge the chosen pastry into boiling oil and prod it with tongs until it was golden and crisp. I had just left the late-night double feature at the Bleecker Street Cinema, and this hot pastry was my company on the long, dark walk home. I carried it gingerly until it was cool enough to eat. Even then, on a cold night, the first bite released a savory cloud of steam.\n\nI am not, and never have been, a gourmet. I possess no curiosity about world-class restaurants, and while I am more drawn to the idea of exemplary foods\u2014truffles, caviar, goose liver, rack of lamb\u2014the fact that I have never tasted any of these except in the most adulterated form must mean that, finally, they are not all that important to me. It is character, not the tongue, that determines one's gustatory destiny, and that empanada was the key to mine.\n\nI soon knew its physiognomy as well as I knew the contours of my own face. I was drawn to the immediate, enveloping comfort of fat: fried wontons or potatoes or onion rings or pieces of chicken or grilled sausage on a stick. More specifically, it was always something hot, salty, succulent, preferably compact enough to be eaten casually, quickly, standing up, on the go.\n\nThis, for better or worse, was to become my chosen form of gastronomic pleasure. Not for me the elegant, massive, public presence of a standing rib roast; I chose instead the single barbecued beef rib, which, with its rebarbative, greasy chunks of flesh, vein, and gristle, claims for its eater a kind of animal privacy. This is a form of enjoyment that, no matter the company, remains deeply solitary, totally absorbing, hurriedly done with, and, let it be said, at times edged with shame.\n\nIn New York City, where there was no sense of safety anywhere, I had now found two havens: reading and eating in bed, and walking and eating in the street. But supper remained a can of Campbell's cream of celery soup with a fistful of oyster crackers. Before I could learn to cook, I had to not only learn to eat, but learn to eat at home... and in some other place than bed.\n\nKITCHEN DIARY: VEGETABLE BRIEFS\n\nHow to Cook an Artichoke. Almost every cookbook instructs the cook to trim away its stem at the base of the globe. This is necessary if the artichoke is to be stuffed, because it has to be stood on end. But, otherwise, the heart is the choicest bit of the artichoke, and the heart is no more than the top of the stem. If your grocer sells them by the piece, rather than by the pound, try choosing ones with a good portion of the stem still attached. I think you'll find, as I do, that they cook as tender and tasty as the heart itself, and nearly double the size of that portion.\n\nHow to Eat an Avocado (you think you know how, but you don't). First of all, it must be a perfectly ripe Hass avocado (small, dark green, and with an alligator's crumply skin). Cut it in half and gently pop out the seed. Set each half, cut side up, in a shallow bowl. Now, in a separate dish, mix together (for every two halves) about a spoonful of olive oil, a good squeeze of fresh lime, a few drops of Tabasco, and a pinch of coarse salt. Mix this well and dribble a fair share into each avocado half. Now fall to, eating the avocado out of its skin with a teaspoon, catching a bit of the dressing with each bite. A little buttered bread is good with this; the oil and lime juice can be further enhanced, if you like, with a morsel of crushed garlic and, instead of the Tabasco, a sprinkle of powdered cayenne. God didn't make the avocado just for guacamole.\n\nBelgian Endive. I pull the head apart into its separate leaves, wash and dry these carefully, and then break them into bite-sized pieces. These are quickly dressed with the juices and a bit of the fat from a just-cooked piece of saut\u00e9ed chicken or steak. Eaten immediately, this produces a crisp and peppery and very good salad all by itself, without any intrusion of lettuce or onion. My only way to cook it is to wilt the separate leaves quickly in the same kind of meat juices or in a little melted, pepper-seasoned butter. Rich people can afford to slowly braise whole heads in butter or cream, which sounds terrific. But any recipe that calls for them to be steamed or boiled is a recipe up to no good.\n\nCavolini di Brusselle alla Milanese. The Brussels sprout and I might still be going our separate ways if I hadn't come across a recipe in Janet Ross's Leaves from Our Tuscan Kitchen for a dish that\u2014despite strong forebodings\u2014sounded just too good not to try. Essentially, the sprouts are boiled for about ten minutes in salted water, drained, and then saut\u00e9ed in a skillet in which equal portions of butter and fruity olive oil have been heated together. Ross directs that this cooking take place over \"a rather fierce heat\" until the sprouts begin to brown\u2014at which point they are tossed with a good handful of homemade bread crumbs and a generous sprinkle of freshly grated Parmesan, the cooking continuing just long enough for the cheese to melt and help the now crisped crumbs cling to the sides of the sprouts.\n\nAs I say, this sounded good\u2014and that the dish didn't live up to that first impression was for a reason at once obvious and yet somehow impervious to understanding. We've been conditioned to think of a single sprout, once pared of its ratty outer leaves, as being itself bite-sized, as perhaps it is for a consenting adult anxious to clean the plate of them. But not for any other reason, since a whole sprout seems to contain the concentrated taste of an entire cabbage... a taste that simply mocks the efforts of butter and Parmesan\u2014or whatever\u2014to salve the dish with their moderating presence.\n\nIt was by pure accident that I set this right: having purchased too many sprouts to finish the first time around, I set out to make the dish again. Remembering how hard it had been to get a round sprout to brown in the hot butter-oil mixture, I cut them in half, steaming them for about six minutes, or just enough for their color to soften and the leaves to wilt, then adding them to the hot oil.\n\nThis time the cut surface did acquire a tasty brown edging. This time the bread crumbs did find nooks and crannies in which to wedge themselves securely enough to not all stay behind in the pan. And best of all, this time the crunchy bread crumbs, the tart, rich taste of cheese, the luscious mixture of butter and oil had the chance they needed to mollify the harsh edge of each half-sprout without drowning out its essential sweetness. In short, not bad at all\u2014which is high praise for the vegetable that, all by itself, has damned by implication the whole of Belgian cuisine to near oblivion.\nOUTLAW COOK\n\nKlepp rolled over on one side and silently, with the assured  \nmovements of a somnambulist, attended to his cookery.  \nWhen the spaghetti was done, he drained off the water  \ninto a large empty can, then, without noticeably altering  \nthe position of his body, reached under the bed and pro-  \nduced a plate encrusted with grease and tomato paste.  \nAfter what seemed like a moment's hesitation, he reached  \nagain under the bed, fished out a wad of newspaper,  \nwiped the plate with it, and tossed the paper back under  \nthe bed... . After providing me with a fork and spoon  \nso greasy they stuck to my fingers, he piled an immense  \nportion of spaghetti on my plate; upon it, with another of  \nhis noble gestures, he squeezed a long worm of tomato  \npaste, to which, by deft movements of the tube, he suc-  \nceeded in lending an ornamental line; finally, he poured  \non a plentiful portion of oil from the can. He himself ate  \nout of the pot. He served himself oil and tomato paste,  \nsprinkled pepper on both helpings, mixed up his share,  \nand motioned to me to do likewise... . Strange to say, I  \nenjoyed that spaghetti. In fact, Klepp's spaghetti became  \nfor me a culinary ideal, by which from that day on I have  \nmeasured every menu that is set before me.\n\n\u2014G\u00fcnter Grass, The Tin Drum\n\nThe Tin Drum was the first novel I ever bought new, in hardcover, and so I still remember the expedition from the Lower East Side to the Doubleday Book Shop on Fifth Avenue. I produced my (expired) passport as identification (in lieu of a nonexistent driver's license) for my check, then anxiously bore my prize home. I was anxious partly that it wouldn't live up to the expenditure and partly that it would prove too much for me\u2014as, in fact, it did. Thirty years later, images from its pages still fitfully flicker in my memory, but only images from the earlier pages. I never finished The Tin Drum. It exhausted me \u2014as novels, especially long novels, tend to do\u2014before I exhausted it.\n\nEven so, I read far enough for G\u00fcnter Grass to present me with a disconcerting portrait of a deviate cook. It was that of the jazz musician Egon M\u00fcnzer, aka Klepp, keeper of a self-imposed exile, for weeks at a time, in his own bed. Indeed, his rented room contained no other furniture\u2014he kept at arm's reach all he needed: reading material, a case of beer, an alcohol stove, boxes of spaghetti, cans of olive oil, tubes of tomato paste, lumps of salt wrapped in newspaper, and a pot containing what, at the beginning of each internment, started out as cooking water but, as it was used over and over again, became a dark and murky paste.\n\nIt would be silly to write that this passage made me hungry, an easy enough accomplishment in any case. G\u00fcnter Grass pulled off something much more difficult. He made me aware, against the force of all my upbringing, of a denied appetite, of a repressed and forbidden hunger.\n\nA shy and diffident child, I was self-conscious at all public occasions, shrinking into myself and away from my appetite. I anticipated almost any formal eating occasion\u2014from the nightly family supper to holiday feasts\u2014with a mixture of desire and dread. The moment I sat down, I found myself wanting the meal to be over as soon as possible, so as to be excused from the table and the scrutiny of adults.\n\nMy appetite came to life only in privacy, secretly. Like other children, I stole cookies from the cookie jar, squirreled away Christmas treats to enjoy at my leisure, and spent my allowance on ice cream sundaes and Charleston Chew bars. But the secrecy I mean revolved around eating that was not so much extracurricular or even illegal as outside public knowledge and hence family law, a world in which I could be left completely alone.\n\nThus, on the nights when my parents gave dinner parties, after the company had finished eating and retired to the living room, I would sneak downstairs and into the kitchen to pick over the leavings of the meal for tidbits of food, leavings from the adult world that\u2014in their own eyes\u2014had now ceased to exist.\n\nPerhaps the single most powerful gastronomic memory of my childhood was the discovery, as I cleared away the remains of a baked ham, of the marrow in the ham bone. So rich and succulent, so entirely ignored. Ever after, I would happily, surreptitiously, dig it out with and then eat it from the handle of the narrowest, most delicate of my mother's silver teaspoons. An even earlier discovery (which perhaps eventually led me to the marrow) was the \"oysters\"\u2014two delicate-tasting, chicken liver-like morsels\u2014that I found could be gouged out of the inside of the chicken back, the least wanted portion of our Sunday-dinner fried chicken.\n\nBy the time I was a teenager, I had expanded this invisible gustatory universe to include trips to the gourmet store for cans of pate and little crocks of port-wine-flavored cheese. Late at night, alone in my bedroom, I would spread them on exotic crackers, to be eaten in my bed. These midnight feasts were the true beginnings of my culinary education. This was food I anticipated eating and could surrender myself to with excited pleasure. And preparing it remained a distinctly different enterprise from the formal cooking and eating of meals, a task I would find myself taking on in just a few years. Then, even though I lived alone, my ingrained eating patterns continued to make my actual suppers nervous, abstracted affairs, meals that were often over before I noticed they had begun.\n\nThis was why I was, at twenty, a person whose happiest home eating took place in bed\u2014usually with a book. Reading absorbed conscious attention; the pleasure that my hand brought to my mouth was all peripheral sensation, the purring of a cat. Most important, perhaps, was the closeness of the food and the mouth. What fiercer culinary taboo than the prohibition against lying on the table with the filled plate right beside the mouth? In bed, sheet and tablecloth become deliciously, even lasciviously, confused.\n\nAs we all know, the other face of this confusion is chaos, filth. The child who eats in bed fears being not only caught in the act but discovered afterward. Every escaped crumb that digs into his back, his neck, as he tries to sleep is a goad of guilt as much as of discomfort. Eating is mess making. We are taught to stop making that mess first on our tray, then on our plate, and finally on our face. Some poor souls are forced to pursue the lesson further, keeping even the contents of their stomachs neat and clean. For the rest of us, the lips are the demarcation line; what happens in the mouth is nobody's business but our own.\n\nBy the same tender age as everyone else, I learned that a sign of mess was a sign of trouble. But I also found myself unable to stop making them\u2014as I'm still unable to now. For me, they remain the signal that a place is private, my own. I did learn, of course, to be ashamed of them. The experience of eating became divided in two: the pleasurable mess; the aftermath of denial and shame. At the time I read The Tin Drum, I thought that the denial and shame part was immutable, that the trick was to stay as long as possible in the mess.\n\nMy relationship with this mess, however, was strictly that of a passive consumer. Klepp suggested another, much more radical possibility. By making his bed into a kitchen, he pointed the way for me to make my kitchen into a bed. Even today, as I write down this thought, a thrill runs through my body. It was as if G\u00fcnter Grass had reached deep down inside me, plucked out my most repressed, most volatile taboo, and cheerfully exploded it in my face. Given my preoccupations and fears, it was in Klepp that I found my image of the supreme renegade: not the junkie or the con man or the hired gun, but the outlaw cook.\n\nHe is going back to cook a solitary lunch, thought Jane, or perhaps it will just be beer and bread and cheese, a man's meal and the better for being eaten alone.\n\n\u2014Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence\n\nLiving on my own and without the funds to eat out every night, I had perforce begun to cook, but my kitchen activities were perfunctory, mechanical\u2014even the zest was mechanical. My efforts had a certain ambition to them\u2014I didn't simply eat out of cans\u2014but I still didn't think of cooking as having anything to do with me... the real me, that is, buried within the armor of my performing self. I made my meals the way I brushed my teeth, to show that I was a good boy, taking care of myself. And just as on certain nights I sometimes found myself too tired, too preoccupied, too drunk to brush them\u2014and, hence, was a bad boy\u2014on other nights (or those same ones) I ate no supper at all, subsisting instead on potato chips, pistachio nuts, a bag of pecan sandies.\n\nThe closest my formal eating came to taking on this sense of freedom was on payday, when I would bring home the only meal from this time which still moves me: a loaf of challah from the day-old-bread shop and a slab of sweet butter from the dairy store. I would climb the five flights to my walkup flat and make a meal of just the two, pulling off whole chunks of the golden-crusted, eggy loaf, folding them around thick slabs of the butter, and eating until the loaf was gone. I would then cut a final piece of butter and use it to pick up all the bits of flaky crust that had fallen to the table. The last mouthful\u2014a kind of improvised croissant, a crust-flake-and-butter pastry.\n\nThis, although it occurred at the end of the meal and not before it, was my first real culinary creation, my first\u2014completely unconscious\u2014step in learning to cook.\n\nThe next step was equally unpremeditated, although far more public. Although by day I was clinging to the bottom rung of respectability by working as a mail boy for W. R. Grace on Hanover Square, by night and weekend I was trying to defrost the ice of my deeply ingrained New England puritanism. To aid in this project, a friend arrived at my doorstep every Saturday to drag me through the Village bars.\n\nI've forgotten most of them, which is probably just as well \u2014of the two that I do remember, one was a place called something like Dirty Julie's, famous for having never been cleaned. The walls were black; dirt hung from the ceiling in greasy swags. The other place is still around\u2014McSorley's Old Ale House on East Seventh Street. At the time, it was notorious for refusing to allow women on the premises; half the fun of being there was to wait on Saturday night for the inevitable woman who would insist on coming in. A waiter would immediately block her way, ask her to leave, and, if she didn't go quietly, forcibly hustle her out the door to the jeers of the patrons. You can see why McSorley's might appeal to college boys: you didn't even have to hold your liquor to prove you were a man\u2014you had only to not be obviously female.\n\nMcSorley's other attraction, the one we had ostensibly come for, was the less controversial reputation of its ales\u2014one dark, one light\u2014supposedly brewed on the premises. Boldly\u2014since I had yet to come to terms even with our country's ordinary, light-bodied, uncomplicated beers\u2014I called for a pint of the dark. I found it to be a thick, mildly sweet-and-sour brew that at best summoned out of me a kind of ruminative sipping. My companion, whose image of pub life was one of hearty quaffing, quickly finished off his first mug and hailed the waiter for a second. As a subterfuge to hide my having already fallen from the race, I asked for a plate of crackers and cheese.\n\nI had seen one of these being delivered to a patron at a nearby table and my fingers had immediately begun to ache for one of my own. For a very modest price you got a heap of saltine crackers, paper-thin onion rings, a slice of sharp New York State Cheddar, and a dollop of mustard. You took up a cracker, dabbed it with a little mustard, laid a bit of cheese and onion on it, and ate it\u2014washing it down, of course, with a mouthful of ale.\n\nThis, I would learn years later, was their version of the pub meal that, just then in England, was being promoted as a plowman's lunch: ale, bread, pickled onion, and cheese. McSorley's version was a decent replica. The tang of the Cheddar, the bite of the mustard and onion, the salty crispness of the crackers not only rounded off the vegetative richness of the brew but also let me pace my sips, the slow assembly giving mind and hand productive work between the swallows. Until now my idea of great bar food was the free roasted peanuts handed out at yet another Village bar\u2014name forgotten\u2014its floor a compost heap of trodden shells. Here was something different. The mere idea of it lifted me to culinary heaven.\n\nThe line over which the eater steps to become a cook is a much finer one than is usually imagined: it is that point at which the eater\u2014and not someone else, not some cook\u2014takes control of making the dish. Here, at McSorley's, I took over the making of this one. It didn't matter that no actual cooking took place. It didn't matter that someone had already sliced the onion and cheese. If they had just brought me the knife, the Cheddar, and the onion, I would have known what had to be done, and I would have much preferred to do it all myself. The pleasure of knowing just what I wanted to do with these things is what made this the moment that, for the first time, I became consciously aware of myself as a cook.\n\nIn a piece that I believe originally appeared in an early issue of The Pleasures of Cooking, Sally Barnes described Gloria P\u00e9pin's first attempt to cook for her famous-chef husband. At one point, overcome with nervousness, she fled the kitchen, returning to find that Jacques\n\nhad taken a fork, punctured both yolks, mixed them together and put a piece of ham on top. She describes the result as a \"steamed mess. The bottoms of the eggs were crusty and brown, the top was wet and mushy and looked awful.\" He slid this onto a plate and ate it with gusto.\n\nThis isn't a dish that Jacques P\u00e9pin teaches his students, nor could he. No one can teach you how to cook like this if the dish isn't already in you; if it is, what you need is not the lesson but permission\u2014even if that permission comes only from the example. However you find it, the dish seems waiting inside you, like a fragmant of a former life, for you to recognize its face.\n\nThis is why, while I still need a lesson on how to poach an egg, no one has had to teach me how to fry one. When I first went to do it, my eating had already given me a complex grammar of possibility. The subject \"egg\" and the verb \"to fry\" I already knew well; they immediately called up an image of a hot skillet, of sputtering fat, of edges crisping and turning brown. The rest is just a matter of fleshing the dish out with whatever modifiers lie at hand in the refrigerator/thesaurus: butter, onion, garlic, sweet or hot pepper, parsley, the leftover lamb roast, the jar of chicken fat. The trick is getting the permission in the first place\u2014or, I should say, taking it.\n\nCooking, we think, is something done for others: even when that other is ourself. This at least is the way we first experience cooking and how we unthinkingly come to define it: Mother making meals for us. Mother's cooking can be wonderful but it comes with a price: socialization. Not only is the child stopped just at the moment his own form of cooking is getting interesting\u2014the boiled potato mashed into the peas, the pat of butter floated in the milk\u2014but all the sensory richness of such exploration is denied.\n\nWhen the grown child goes for the first time into the kitchen to prepare a meal, it isn't mother's cooking that awaits, but the role of being mother. To cook is to don a mental apron, a servile garment shed only when the meal is prepared and everyone sits down to eat. No matter how attentive, careful, and interested the cook is in what he or she is doing in the kitchen, he or she is still, first of all, performing a necessary chore. A distinction has been drawn between cook and eater, server and served, work and pleasure.\n\nHowever, cooking at its most primal is not consciously instructed labor but a flowing, attentive reverie. Spear a chunk of meat on a skewer and hold it over a bed of smoldering charcoal. It's not conscious thought but a continual tension between the fire's hunger and your own that directs the sharp-eyed turning, keeping sear from turning altogether into char as the fat bubbles and pops, the juices sizzle and crust, and the odors of smoke and meat swirl about your head. Flame is the most sensual of culinary catalysts; it releases aromas, awakens flavors, plasticizes shapes. And, by being dangerous, it heightens absorption; by its shameless show of hunger, it eggs us on. Our original, primal relationship with food is forcibly recalled when the frying pan is made to serve as the dinner plate.\n\nOr when the dinner plate becomes the frying pan. As small a first step toward culinary outlawry as it was, my McSorley's plate of crackers and cheese gave me permission to return to the wordless, sensual concentration that I had had to abandon to become civilized. And this feeling intensified and expanded as I began to incorporate fire into this play\u2014that being, of course, another childhood prohibition. Utterly absorbed in peeling, prodding, scraping, cutting, frying, basting\u2014even eating, to the point where the meal was half gone before, officially, it was supposed to begin\u2014I was doing what I had to do to taste food best. This outlaw cook was, at heart, still a six-year-old bandido, fighting off civility for the pleasure of making himself completely familiar with his dinner... before he put it into his mouth.\n\nThe kitchen as bed, cooking as sensual communion, a self-pleasing, attentive dream state\u2014any stream of instruction flowing through my head at such a moment would have been as welcome as Miss Manners scurrying over with a sponge to mop up the crumbs. The purpose of a recipe in my cooking was to plunge me into a reverie that could be acted out at the stove, not to interrupt it constantly with well-meaning advice. So what if it gave me a good meal, if it knocked me out of connection again with my inner needs and wants?\n\nThe problem was\u2014and remained\u2014that I could only enter this world alone. The same timidity that made me cling to a need for intimacy with my dinner also left me paralyzed by the specter of childhood notions of propriety. My time alone in New York was too short, too exceptional by reason of its dire poverty, to blossom into a full-fledged cuisine. Returning, first to college, then to a prep-school teaching career, and finally to a long-term relationship, I found myself dragged out of my kitchen bed and into public view. There I performed as a dutiful, occasionally inspired, recipe-following drudge, cooking for real only at the margin of things: when I was left in the house alone or when I escaped for an evening of barbecuing with a like-minded bachelor friend.\n\nIt took me twenty years of instinctively but slowly acquiring the protection of a repertoire of recipe-resistant dishes before I could actively cultivate the persona of the outlaw cook. Ironically, only as I did so did it begin to occur to me that all true cooks might be outside the law\u2014at least civility's law. It isn't by accident that Klepp is a jazz musician; jazz is a primal, earthy, assertive music\u2014a mess of sound improvised into shape in front of other people.\n\nJazz musicians describe this act, when they've got the motion just right, as \"cooking.\" Klepp wasn't interested merely in squeezing the tomato paste onto his sheets; his concept of pleasure was more focused, seeking a shape, an end, a final explosion of delight. Artists do something different to messes than clean them up. And that something subverts observers into accomplices: witness the transformation of Oskar, Gunter Grass's diminutive narrator, from revolted witness into delighted participant.\n\nThis brings us back to Jacques P\u00e9pin. \"A recipe tells you nothing,\" he once told Sarah Fritschner in an interview\u2014which is another way of saying that they get in his way. Chefs are the opposite of epicures: whether men or women, overtly or subvertly, a major component of their creativity is aggression. It may be mastery of technique that makes P\u00e9pin a culinary artist, but the force that drives him is his outlaw heart. The cacophony of the restaurant kitchen gets his adrenaline flowing; then he starts to cook.\n\nIn a suggestive piece written years ago for The Washington Post, Steven Raichlen described playing stagier to chef Fernand Chambrette. One of the last of the old school of French chefs, Chambrette had once been the owner of Paris's famed La Boule d'Or but was now an instructor at La Varenne\u2014a short, stocky, \"grouchy, grumbly old goat with a mean streak a mile wide,\" who wore an apron flaunting a week's worth of stains, shuffled around without socks in an shabby pair of backless slippers, swore like a sailor, rained blows on the bottoms of his assistants, and spat in the deep-fat fryer to gauge its temperature. \"Every morning before class,\" Raichlen wrote,\n\nChambrette went on a rampage, raiding all the refrigerators for wilted vegetables, meat scraps past their prime, chicken's feet, pork rind, minute saucersful of hollandaise, madeira, and velout\u00e9 sauce, and countless other goodies which he affectionately called his petits cacas. With these queer, mismatched piles of leftovers, he concocted divine culinary creations.\n\nWhile his students were infatuated with the products of their efforts, Chambrette was in love with the act of making itself... which is why he, like Jacques P\u00e9pin, dismissed the importance of recipes\u2014they can't teach you how to cook!\u2014and would sit down with a beaker of ice water to a simple meal of bread and cheese, while his students ate the dishes they had just produced in class. \"Then he'd trundle off in his civvies, the leftovers loaded into an old gym bag for his wife and cat.\"\n\nRaichlen leaves us to imagine what went on in the old chef's mind as he watched his students drinking their fine wines and devouring the terrines en gel\u00e9e, the coulibiacs, the souffl\u00e9s, and the \u00e9clairs. I suspect that he contemplated them with something like bemusement: they had before them only the remains of the real meal, the one that he had just taken his time enjoying right before their astonished, unbelieving eyes.\n\nKITCHEN DIARY: BLACK BEANS AND RICE\n\nKaryl Bannister, who also writes and publishes a food letter\u2014Cook & Tell\u2014out of Maine, often telephones her readers to find out what they're really making for supper. If she had called us on New Year's Day, 1989, she'd have discovered Matt making black beans and rice with curried egg sauce after a recipe Karyl herself had published, sent in by her subscriber Sally Monroe.\n\nWhen Matt first read the recipe, she liked the honest ingredients and straightforward preparation: the beans simmered with a ham hock, onion, garlic, and a dose of cumin and oregano. But it was the way Sally suggested serving the soup that drew Matt to think about actually making it.\n\nMost beans have a \"fat\" quality to their texture that needs only meat or olive oil to make them truly unctuous, but black beans have a meagerness that demands a more substantial richness. This is why a traditional garnish for black bean soup is sliced hard-cooked egg. Sally went that one better, serving the dish with rice and with deviled eggs baked in a curry sauce.\n\nThese enrichments had an immediate appeal. We had recently tracked down a nearby farm that would sell us fresh-laid eggs. Their distinctive flavor and golden yolks soon had us remembering the pleasures of such homey dishes as soft-cooked eggs in a nest of pulled buttered toast.\n\nBoth curry powder and white sauce are familiars in New England cooking; since childhood, Matt has loved dishes that incorporated them. It struck her that to simply mix the chopped hard-cooked eggs into a curry sauce would be less complicated than deviling and baking them.\n\nOn hand were some glossy new-crop beans from Walnut Acres and a pink, spectacularly meaty ham hock from Burgers' Smokehouse in California, Missouri. This was how her appetite put it together: these beans cooked with that hock, made into a dish of black beans and rice \u2014with a rich amalgam of curried eggs ladled alongside. Here, in narrative form, is the way we worked it all out.\n\nBLACK BEANS AND RICE WITH HAM HOCKS AND DEVILED EGGS BAKED IN CURRY SAUCE\n\nThe night before, a pound (2 cups) of the black beans were picked over, rinsed, and put to soak. The next afternoon, they were drained and set in a large pot with 10 cups of fresh water. This was brought to a boil and allowed to bubble for 10 minutes, with any scum skimmed away. Then the ham hock, a bay leaf, 2 celery stalks (cut in large pieces), and a knotted bunch of parsley were added, the heat was turned down, and the pot covered and left to simmer until the beans were tender (in this case, about an hour). Meanwhile, 4 eggs were hard-cooked and let cool. Two onions and 3 large cloves of garlic were minced and saut\u00e9ed in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, with about 2 teaspoons each of cumin and Greek oregano, and a pod of dried hot red pepper, seeded and minced.\n\nWhen the beans were tender, the pot was removed from the heat and the parsley and celery discarded. The ham hock was lifted out, and its meat and rind removed from the bone and cut small (the rind can also be left in a large, separate piece if there is only one who likes it). The meat, rind, denuded bones, and the fresh flavoring mixture were returned to the pot and cautiously salted to taste, a half teaspoon at a time. The soup was then put back to simmer another hour.\n\nAbout a half hour before supper, some rice was started and the white sauce made. Two tablespoons of butter were melted in a small saucepan. The same amount of flour and a teaspoon of curry powder were whisked in and the mixture was cooked briefly to rid it of its rawness. Then the pan was removed from the heat and a cup of scalded milk beaten in. This sauce was brought close to a boil and simmered until supper, while the eggs were peeled and chopped into big chunks and some parsley was minced.\n\nAt the last minute, the eggs were stirred into the curry sauce, the beans tasted again for salt (which they needed) and pepper. A bed of rice was laid into four hot bowls and beans ladled over two-thirds of it, with enough cooking liquid to come almost to the top of the rice. Minced parsley was sprinkled over the beans; the curried eggs were spooned over the remaining rice surface and dusted with paprika and a grating of pepper. Matt served this with a salad of romaine leaves dressed with a sharp vinaigrette\u2014all in all, a delicious and generous supper, with plenty of black beans left over for a soup the next day.\n\nA Note on Sources. Burgers' Smokehouse, Highway 87 South, California, MO 65018; (800) 624-5426. Walnut Acres Organic Farms, Penns Creek, PA 17862; (800) 433-3998. Both enterprises will send a free catalogue on request.\n\nPLOWMAN'S LUNCH\n\nThe cheese, the onion, and the bread I figured out for myself. They were a start, but only that. It's an American trait, I think, to consider the beverage that accompanies the meal an optional, almost disconnected item, the way that one good overcoat is worn to cover two different wool suits, or over the various mixes of sport jacket, shirt, tie, and slacks. I grew up like everyone else, drinking milk with my meals when I couldn't have a Coke or a ginger ale. At college, pitchers of milk sat on every table. There was no thought of matching meal to beverage; the one was there to wash the other down.\n\nFrom the vantage point of now, I can see how strange this is. Milk is more food than drink; it's a way of getting children to down more nutrients without knowing it. Beer does the same for adults (and once also did for children); for generations in beer-drinking countries it was a necessary aspect of the diet\u2014which is to say, a part of the meal. Tracts were written in England when tea began to edge out ale as the workingman's friend: ale was rich in nutrients, healthy, and home-brewed; tea was foreign, costly, affected stuff, and at bottom nothing more than flavored water\u2014and that flavor did nothing good to the taste of bread and cheese.\n\nThis was important, because bread (carbohydrate), cheese (fat and protein), and ale (more carbohydrates plus vitamins) were an important meal, sometimes made into a dish but more commonly eaten just as they were\u2014an easily portable feast for workers too far away to walk home for lunch. In England, where it is a popular pub snack, this combination, thanks to a national advertising campaign in the 1960s, has come to be known as a plowman's lunch. When the plowman actually ate such a meat\u2014which he simply called \"bait\"\u2014the piece of cheese would have been more equal in size to the bread, and both would have come from the farm whose fields were being plowed.\n\nThe beer would have been home-brewed, and the onion would have been both fresh and raw, eaten like an apple, not a vinegary pickle fished from a jar. In Gardener's Delight, John Seymour tells us how:\n\nAs for eating onions\u2014here is my recipe. Sit down under an oak tree and spread a white-spotted red handkerchief on your lap. Place on it a hunk of wholemeal bread, a hunk of cheese, and a raw onion. Pull out your pocketknife, cut off mouthfuls from each of these three articles of sustenance, and put them in your mouth. Wash them down with home-brewed beer.\n\nBread, cheese, onion, and a fermented brew (ale/beer/wine/ cider) make a well-married, even classic, combination in part because it feeds us well. The rest is due to centuries of honing; given the many kinds of bread, beer, and cheese, the number of possible combinations is almost infinite. Here, both cultural conditioning and individual physiology come into play. At about the same time I was discovering the plowman's of saltines and New York Cheddar at McSorley's, a friend who was working his way through college at a deli counter told me that the owner, an enormous individual with a beet-red face and a walrus mustache, would sometimes at closing, after locking the door and pulling the shade, draw him into the back room, produce a loaf of pumpernickel, a jar of Polish horseradish mustard, a creamy slab of Limburger, and a pile of onion rings salvaged from the chopped liver display. Two well-chilled bottles of Beck's appeared, dripping wet, from the pickle tub in the walk-in refrigerator, and they would both fall to.\n\nOne of the differences between the universe of cooking as portrayed in beginner's cookbooks and as we acquire it in real life is that in the former knowledge progresses in an orderly fashion, while in real life it arrives in unique chunks of experience... and those in no particular order. In this regard, it is more like doing a jigsaw puzzle: putting your hand on just the right piece can link several other unconnected-seeming pieces together into a coherent pattern.\n\nThis was how that glass of McSorley's ale worked for me: it vitalized bread, cheese, and onion. All of a sudden they seemed to emit a kind of magnetic attraction. This sense of mutual attraction is what made them an ideal introduction to the meditative cooking that is the sole province of the solitary eater-cook. When cook and eater are one, half the meal's pleasure is in letting hunger craft an appetizing whole by instinctively balancing what is really a kind of physiological equation. Consequently, our four ingredients should always be read as if each were enclosed in brackets\u2014[bread], [cheese], [onion], [brew]\u2014because each is as much a place holder in a constantly fluctuating force field as it is an item of food.\n\nThe classic plowman's lunch, for example, pits the oily, crumbly richness of a ripe Cheddar or Cheshire against the sharp-sour bite of onion and the bitter tang of ale, all mellowed together in the yeasty sweetness of good white bread. But if I pour myself a glass of milk or sweet apple cider instead of beer, the onion falls out of the combination. With milk, an apple might replace it; with cider, a slice of country ham. The exact choice isn't important; what I need to feel is the shift of appetite, righting the equilibrium, resolving the equation.\n\nIf I reach for a different cheese, the same counterbalancing is necessary, more challenging still if the cheese has an especially intimidating personality or a particularly subtle one. Confronted with a brassy Roquefort or a delicate Caerphilly, appetite must show a special agility\u2014matching the Roquefort with, say, a slice of well-buttered rye, a ripe pear, and a glass of brandy; or highlighting the sweet tang of the buttermilk in the Caerphilly with whole-wheat bread, thin slices of celery, and a dry fermented cider.\n\nSome frown on serving butter with cheese\u2014good cheese brings its own butter, bad cheese needs none, say the French\u2014but while its lusciousness can mask the personalities of some, it enhances that of others. Butter can mellow sourness, offset dryness, and balance excessive saltiness (as occurs in export Roquefort). It is an integral part of the combination with, say, Emmenthaler or Appenzeller served with sour rye bread and a glass of a flowery German Riesling.\n\nIf the ingredients aren't themselves fixed entities, neither is the flavor of the ingredient nor the role it plays in the combination. British ales have a bitter complexity generally shunned by other beer-drinking countries, where a crisper, less complex-tasting brew is preferred. The balance of flavor in a German version of the plowman's is maintained by matching a pungently sour Bierk\u00e4se with rye bread and pickled onion slices. Our brick and (obviously) beer cheese have a similar affinity to our milder American brews.\n\nHandk\u00e4se (hand cheese, as the Pennsylvania Dutch version is known) is another pungent cheese associated with lager. Germans cut it into little chunks, swirl these around in the beer until they melt, and drink the mixture down. This same playfulness is expanded into a dish that will leave the eater a little soberer:\n\nK\u00c4SE MIT MUSIK / CHEESE \"WITH MUSIC\"\n\n(SERVES 1)\n\nA rectangular wedge, 1/2 inch   \nthick, of Handk\u00e4se   \n2 tablespoons olive oil   \n1 tablespoon distilled vinegar   \n1/2 cup minced onion   \nA thick buttered slice of rye bread\n\nSet the slice of cheese in a shallow-sided dish. Mix the oil and vinegar together vigorously and pour over the cheese slice. Sprinkle on the minced onion. Let marinate an hour or two at room temperature, gently turning the cheese over midway through the process. Serve with bread and butter and cold imported beer.\n\nThe more genteel German beer parlors serve this as an actual dish\u2014the onions on the cheese, the cheese on the buttered bread\u2014to be eaten with a knife and fork. But it is best eaten directly out of the marinade. Scoop up some onion bits with the end of the knife and mash them into a bit of the cheese, spreading that on a piece of buttered rye.\n\nVARIATIONS: Other soft-textured, pungent cheeses such as beer, brick, or Tilsit can be substituted, but none of them melts into the same butter-soft consistency of the looser-formed hand cheese, and this is half the fun of the dish. (Hand cheese, by the way, has a powerful odor; the uninitiated should know that the bark is worse than the bite: the flavor is quite mild.)\n\nWhen I encountered cheese \"with music,\" I finally grasped how the raw (plowman's) crossed over to the cooked (toasted cheese): not only because this is really a method of melting cheese, even if no heat is used, but also because the ingredients have actually been changed into something else\u2014\"a dish.\" Since cheese by its very nature has already been cooked, whatever I do to it between slicing and eating is only for my pleasure\u2014thus firmly keeping it in the realm of intuitive, meditative cookery. When I grill, toast, or melt cheese, I mean to make it taste better, but better here often means more comforting, more personal, not more flavorful.\n\nConsider, for example, fried cheese\u2014not the delicate technique by which the Italians turn Scamorza or the Greeks Kasseri into little molten packages with golden crusts, but the brutal method I discovered early in my eater-cook career of frying cheese all by itself into a deliciously greasy crisp. A thick slice of cheese set onto a lightly greased, well-heated frying pan almost at once collapses into a batterlike consistency punctuated with a lacy pattern of air bubbles, like pancake batter. Amazingly, this batter also produces a kind of pancake, or at least its bottom turns golden and crunchy, and can eventually\u2014carefully\u2014be dislodged from the pan.\n\nOnce the cheese has been prodded and tugged free, it can be flipped over and browned on the other side or folded over itself like an omelet, leaving a soft center that can itself be enhanced by slipping another sliver of the same cheese inside it, leaving this just long enough for the contents to melt. However it is done, fried cheese has to be eaten at once; it soon loses its crunch and turns rubbery\u2014so quickly, in fact, that the eater has to balance fading crispness against the risk of burning the mouth.\n\nNo cheese\u2014with the possible exception of commercial mozzarella\u2014is improved by this treatment; most actually suffer. If the solitary eater-cook insists on treating it this way anyway\u2014as I have treated very good Cheddars\u2014it is because the loss of character in flavor is offset by the visual, aural, and tactile pleasures of making it, the comfort of the heat of the stove and the cheese's own greasy crispness, and the satisfaction of stamping public food with an implacably private brand.\n\nFrying cheese this way gave me an intuitive grasp of a simple dish that I had often read about but had not until then dared to try: toasted cheese. This is the fireplace version of the plowman's and surely as venerable, sharing the same ingredients and philosophy. Its rhythms of making and eating are necessarily personal ones, too, no matter how many eater-cooks share the toasting fork. In this instance, however, a good toasting cheese\u2014Cheddar or Cheshire\u2014offers a different, and at least as pleasing, side of its character through toasting, producing a soft, rich, succulent texture in perfect harmony with its buttery taste.\n\nTOASTED CHEESE\n\n(SERVES 1)\n\n\"Ten cookes in Wales,\" quothe he, \"one wedding sees.\"   \n\"True,\" quothe the other, \"each man toasts his cheese.\"\n\n\u2014Springes for Woodcockes (1613)\n\nTo toast cheese, you need a good knife, a long-handled fork (such as completes a barbecue set), and a fire in the fireplace that has burnt down to a nice set of coals. Sit yourself down before it with all necessary ingredients at hand: the cheese to be toasted, some paper-thin slices of onion, a pot of mustard or the butter dish, an unsliced loaf of bread, and a mug of beer. Cut a thick slice from the loaf, spear it through the crust with the fork, and toast it on both sides over the coals. Place it on a plate, spread it with a little mustard or butter, and set it on the hearth to keep warm.\n\nNow cut a block of cheese about the size of a toothpick box and spear it through one side with a fork, taking care not to let it crumble. Hold the cheese over the coals, not too close, watching carefully. Turn the fork regularly, slowly, so that the heat penetrates all sides at approximately the same rate. The surface will begin to sag as the cheese melts; twirl the fork to keep runny cheese from falling into the fire. The moment the whole piece begins to collapse, slip it onto the piece of toast, spreading it over the surface with the blade of the knife. Top with onion rings and eat when it has cooled a little, washing it down with the beer.\n\nThe cheese toaster needs elbow room and time to concentrate and is rewarded with the drama of expectation and risk\u2014the cheese can, and sometimes does, drop into the fire, especially until the skill is mastered. In Britain, when every lodger had a fireplace, toasting cheese was a convivial bachelor meal\u2014as readers of Great Expectations may remember. In more modern times, rented rooms have changed, and the dish has evolved with them into what we now call Welsh rabbit.\n\nWelsh rabbit is a joke name on the order of calling watermelon \"Georgia ham\"; in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), Hannah Glasse's recipe calls simply for toasted cheese to be set on toast spread with mustard (her recipe for \"Scotch rabbit\" sets it on buttered toast). The version we now know is the logical consequence of distancing the cook from the eater, and the eater from the fireplace.\n\nReally, though, it might be more accurately argued that the dish evolved into two distinct dishes, the first being \"Welsh rarebit\"\u2014that chafing dish specialty rechristened to assuage the snobbery of economy-minded hostesses. It is the \"rarebit\" that has gradually worked its way into the common vernacular as the dish of cheese-sauce-soaked toast points served up in some households the night before payday\u2014at least until Kraft macaroni dinners arrived upon the scene.\n\nThe other version, still called Welsh rabbit, lingers on in England in the rented rooms of retired military men on half pension who make it up on their hot plates and extract the necessary moiety of self-respect and satisfaction by whisking in a few drops of good whiskey or Worcestershire and by using a fine old Cheddar they keep in the wardrobe wrapped in a vinegar-dampened tea cloth... coaxing from the mixture some vestigial recollection of fireplace and toasting fork.\n\nWELSH RABBIT\n\n(SERVES 1)\n\n4 ounces Cheddar or Cheshire   \ncheese   \n1/2 small onion   \n1 to 2 tablespoons sweet butter   \n2 tablespoons ale (or port, whis-   \nkey, stout)   \nA thick slice of buttered toast (kept   \nwarm)   \nBlack pepper\n\nGrate the cheese and mince the onion. Melt the butter in a saucepan and saut\u00e9 the onion over medium-low heat until amber and soft, but not brown. Add the cheese and ale, turn the heat down to low, and stir gently until the cheese is melted and the mixture smooth and creamy. Set the thick slice of buttered toast in a shallow bowl, pour the cheese mixture over, grind some black pepper over the top, and eat at once, perhaps with a grilled tomato set at the side.\n\nVARIATIONS: \"Like every other cook, my own recipe for Welsh rarebit [sic] exceeds all others in quality,\" writes Sarah Tyson Rorer in Mrs. Rorer's New Cook Book (1902). \"There is not a dish in the whole list that has so many methods of making, all more or less alike, but the simple change of seasoning gives different results.\" And to prove her point, she goes on to name them: a pinch of cayenne, a dash of Worcestershire, a grating of horseradish or garlic to point up the flavors, or an egg beaten into the ale to make the mixture richer (or richer still with two egg yolks). If you try the yolk, be sure to beat it (or them) into the mixture with the pan off the heat, lest you cook the yolks rather than thicken with them.\n\nNow, if we had Gruy\u00e8re in the larder instead of Cheddar, and white wine instead of beer... A fondue, of course, is a dish of melted cheese into which the bread is dunked, so it is made more like a cheese soup. (In fact, the great French gourmet Brillat-Savarin, who was born on the Swiss border at Belley, wrote in 1795 that the elderly of the district still chuckled over the memory of the local bishop eating his fondue with a spoon.) In the same way, more ale can be added to a Welsh rabbit to give it, too, a fondue-like consistency. Here is a dish from Gloucestershire that does so, although the mixture is still poured onto toast, not scooped up with it.\n\nSOUSED CHEESE\n\n(SERVES 1)\n\n4 ounces Double Gloucester or   \nCotswold cheese   \n1 tablespoon coarse-textured, full-   \nflavored mustard   \n\u00bc cup ale   \nHot buttered toast\n\nCrumble the cheese into a buttered ovenproof pot. Beat the mustard into the ale and gently stir this mixture into the cheese. Bake in a preheated 350\u00b0F oven until the mixture is melted, hot, and bubbling\u2014about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, make the toast, butter it well, and cut it into bite-sized croutons. Spread these in a shallow bowl. Remove the soused cheese from the oven and use a buttered heatproof rubber spatula to scrape it over the toast. Eat at once, with some grilled slivered scallions on the side.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: The British market a Double Gloucester in the U.S.A. that is peppered with chives and called Cotswold. If neither can be found, a Cheddar, Cheshire, or other toasting cheese can be substituted.\n\nToasted cheese and toasted bread... you would think that the simplest method to combine them would be to put the one between two slices of the other and slap the result onto a well-greased grill. However, if you follow the evolution of toasted cheese as I have pursued it here, you can begin to understand why, familiar as it is to us, the grilled (or toasted) cheese sandwich is a relatively recent innovation. A search of my old cookbooks failed to unearth a single recipe for it before\u2014or even early into\u2014the twentieth century. For example, Mrs. Rorer, in the book already mentioned above, while she devotes four pages to cheese dishes in general and \"rarebits\" in particular, never mentions the grilled cheese sandwich. Nor is she alone.\n\nA common argument for this kind of omission is that cookbook writers in those days thought no one needed instructions for such easy dishes\u2014to see one is to know how to make it\u2014but Mrs. Rorer is nitpicky about the obvious elsewhere. I believe the grilled cheese sandwich is, at least as a common dish, a creation of our century. All the adaptations of toasted cheese that we've considered up to now are strategies that evolved from the fireplace, adapted to the stove. The grilled cheese sandwich has no suggestion of this at all; it is as modern as the truck-stop grill.\n\nFor me, coming to cooking from my mother's planned home meals, the grilled cheese sandwich was already there, a familiar Wednesday night supper eaten with (and surreptitiously dunked into) Campbell's tomato soup. But it would only be much later, after I had passed along this path, that I was able to take it into the domain of the solitary eater-cook, by deconstructing it into the two separate dishes that were joined together in order to create it: toasted cheese and \"bread and drip.\"\n\nGermans eat something they call a bread sandwich\u2014a slice of pumpernickel spread on both sides with bacon drippings or fresh lard, salted, and then clamped between two slices of sour rye. Most of us, however, eating grease with bread want heat applied somewhere in the equation. I wrote a whole chapter of my first book, Simple Cooking, on bruschetta, a slab of peasant bread toasted over a fire, rubbed with garlic, and drizzled with freshly pressed olive oil. The bread is also delicious rubbed with garlic and then fried\u2014this time in ordinary olive oil.\n\nThis is, in effect, a new culinary concept: buttering the bread before toasting it. It is a strategy that comes naturally to the eater-cook who, having just fried an egg or some chicken thighs or onions and peppers, can easily see the advantage of adding a square of bread to mop up the residue, and then to brown and crisp. Texas toast, for example, made by dusting a thick slice of bread on both sides with powdered chile and frying this in the remnants of the broiler pan, goes better with a steak than a serving of French fries. (For those who like a simple, savory breakfast, melt some butter, punch a hole in the center of the slice with a biscuit cutter, and fry an egg there while you fry the bread.)\n\nIn one of his mystery novels\u2014I forget which\u2014Douglas Clark has a policeman fondly reminisce as he watches schoolchildren hurrying home after school:\n\n\"Lord, how I used to like it. Scarpering home for tea. And if it wasn't ready I used to get a slice of bread and dripping. Pork dripping was best, with the brown bottoms and a scatter of salt. I don't suppose any of those kids has ever tasted anything half so good as a slice of bread and drip.\"\n\nThe British eat their dripping spread on bread, but that phrase \"brown bottoms and a scatter of salt\" inspired me to fry my bread in it instead, producing a crunchy slice dotted all over with bits of pan scrapings.\n\nDRIPPING-FRIED BREAD\n\n(SERVES 1)\n\nSome good meat broth   \n2 to 3 tablespoons meat fat, con-   \ngealed juices, pan scrapings   \n1 or 2 thick slices of stale bread   \nPepper and salt if needed\n\nPut the broth in a wide bowl. Heat the drip in a frying pan and spread it with a heatproof spatula so that the juices and browned bits are evenly distributed. When the fat is hot, take each piece of bread and dunk it in the broth. The bread should be wet but not soaked or it will fall apart. Set each slice in the hot fat, turning it over when the bottom is golden brown. The outside of the bread will fry to a greasy crispness, embedded with savory bits; the inside will turn into a broth-flavored custard. Since the drip will probably be salted and peppered already, season carefully.\n\nVARIATIONS : These pretty much depend on what happens to be around. I remember one feast when I had both chicken fat and chopped chicken liver in the refrigerator. I spread the bread with the latter after I turned over the first side. The British sometimes spread their bread and drip with Bovril or a similar meat concentrate; another, more localized, favorite is a \"chip butty\"\u2014fresh, crisp-fried potatoes sandwiched between two slices of drip-fried bread\u2014Cheshire's answer to the New Orleans fried-potato po' boy.\n\nOnce I began to perceive the grilled cheese sandwich as a marriage between fried bread and toasted cheese, I found it amenable to a much wider range of play than just dunking the finished product into a bowl of tomato soup. Most versions of a plowman's work well when grilled\u2014the one combining Caerphilly, whole-wheat bread, and celery is especially good\u2014and new versions become possible. My own favorite is to take a slab of roasted sweet red pepper and grill it with the Cheddar between two slices of good white bread. But best of all, perhaps, is to eat a plain grilled cheese sandwich with a bowl of homemade bread-and-butter pickles\u2014into which plenty of the sweet-sour-and-spicy pickling juices have been poured for dunking.\n\nInnovation can wander further afield than this. The best grilled cheese sandwich I ever made was concocted of Brie and paper-thin slices of Westphalian ham, put between slices of pumpernickel that were then spread with sweet butter and grilled. The bread can also be dipped into egg and milk that have been lightly beaten together and seasoned with paprika or cayenne (for Cheddar) or nutmeg (for Gruy\u00e8re). If ham is added to the cheese, you have what the French call a croque-monsieur. Ale can be substituted for the milk and toasted onion bits for the ham to make a grilled plowman's.\n\nThe grilled cheese sandwich introduces the third intuitive culinary technique that the solitary eater-cook requires no lessons to master: the art of dunking. Eating dunked or sopped bread is as old as cooking itself, and the notion of dunking and then cooking the bread follows as easily from the idea of dunking bread as frying bread dipped in grease follows from buttered toast. Hannah Glasse, again in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, does exactly this, giving an inverse twist to the recipe for soused cheese. Her recipe for an \"English rabbit\" calls for toast to be moistened with red wine or ale and covered with an ample amount of thinly sliced cheese. This dish is baked in a hot (350\u00b0F) oven until the cheese is melted and the toast crisp (about twenty minutes).\n\nBy combining dunked (or sopped) bread, fried bread, and Welsh rabbit, we could spread a thick blend of melted cheese and ale between two slices of bread dipped in beaten egg and milk and produce\u2014well\u2014a sandwich that lies at the far edge of the ordinary eater-cook's ambitions. It's too much of a production... almost a chore. Perhaps it is no accident that the fondue-like mixture of cheese and wine grilled between two slices of egg-and-milk-sopped bread is called a croque-madame. They must mean a croque-maman.\n\nSo far as the solitary eater-cook is concerned, we've come to the end of the line. Beyond this point there are only recipes. But let us notice that these are recipes built up out of our now-familiar kitchen play. To give a final example: of all the combinations through which we've put our four ingredients\u2014cheese, bread, beer, and onion\u2014the one thing we haven't done is to cook them up together in one big mess. This, essentially, is how you go about making a bread and cheese pudding:\n\nBREAD AND CHEESE PUDDING\n\n(SERVES 4)\n\n8 slices of good white bread   \n8 ounces Cheddar or its like   \n2 eggs   \n1 small onion, minced   \n1 bottle (12 ounces) ale or beer   \n1/2 teaspoon cayenne   \nSalt and pepper   \n4 tablespoons butter\n\nSlice the bread thick, toast it lightly, and set it to one side to cool. Grate the cheese in a large bowl, break in the eggs, and stir in the minced onion and the ale. Mix this together until the eggs are well combined with the other ingredients. Season with the cayenne and salt and pepper to taste. Tear the toast into small pieces, tossing them into the bowl. With the hands or a wooden spoon, mix all this together. Let the bowl sit so that the bread can absorb some of the liquid while the oven preheats to 375\u00b0F. Grease a 6-cup souffl\u00e9 dish with half the butter. Add the pudding mixture, compressing it a little if necessary to make it fit. Dot the top evenly with small pieces of the remaining butter. Bake for about 45 minutes or until the top is puffed and golden and a knife blade comes out clean.\n\nVARIATIONS : Use whole-wheat, rye, or pumpernickel bread, altering the cheese, liquid, and seasonings accordingly.\n\nHaving traversed this distance, we are better placed to define the transition point between the solitary and the public cook. The eater-cook doesn't necessarily cook without recipes; rather, he or she tends to be drawn to those that fall together\u2014as does the bread and cheese pudding recipe above\u2014into familiar chunks of tactile and sensory play.\n\nWhat more natural way than this kind of kitchen pleasure to absorb and develop culinary technique? Toasting and buttering bread, dunking it to sop up juices from our plate, melting cheese, eating bread and onion and cheese and ale\u2014all untaught activities, but as we begin to articulate them, we find how easy it is to shuffle and deal them into different culinary hands.\n\nFor example: dice up some onions and saute them in butter or drip until they are caramelized, add some ale or wine mixed with water to make a broth, toss in a handful of cheese, grated or cut into cubes, float toasted bread on top, and we have onion soup. Our four staples shift suddenly into a new sensory pattern, a starting point for another round of dishes, a whole new area of exploration... and another chapter of our imaginary book.\n\nMaybe what all this means is that we don't really start learning how to cook until we begin noticing what gives us pleasure in the kitchen. Cooking is about eating, of course, but it's also about doing, and recipes are as fairly judged by the quality of experiences that they offer to the cook as by those that they offer to the eater.\n\nFor the eater-cook, dishes made up out of familiar handwork are that much more owned. Each time we connect these sensory activities together in another way, we elaborate a little more the map of our own particular culinary place. Such dishes possess\u2014just as they do when made from vegetables picked from our own garden or from clams raked up out of the beach just down the road\u2014not only the tang of our labor but the specific flavor of our life.\n\nA personal cuisine built up out of such a repertoire does have its limitations. It develops slowly. Because it depends on one person's palate and personality, it is necessarily selective and may seem to others unnecessarily arbitrary, even unbalanced\u2014especially before time has been given a chance to round out harsh edges and mellow prejudice.\n\nBut this same narrowing of focus also brings with it greater depth of field. A love of bread, cheese, and onions has not only led me to the dishes mentioned here but also, to give a single instance, helped me understand that onion soup is not so much a dish as a method, used in the Mediterranean to make garlic and herb pottages and, in Tuscany, panzanella, an uncooked salad-soup of fresh basil, tomato, onion, and bread (to which, not surprisingly but unconventionally, I add some mozzarella).\n\nThe best response to such criticism, however, is that no one should have to spend a lifetime cooking alone. The commingling of two different personal cuisines in a single household brings an unimaginable sensual enhancement to the relationship and a freshening of experience that comes from sharing with another. This, however, is a very different kind of culinary adventure\u2014one that for me, at the age of forty-eight, has only just begun.\n\n\"Papa doesn't care what he has, if it's only ready. He would take bread-and-cheese, if cook would only send it in instead of dinner.\"\n\n\"Bread-and-cheese! Does Mr. Gibson eat cheese?\"\n\n\"Yes; he's very fond of it,\" said Molly innocently. \"I've known him eat toasted cheese when he has been too tired to fancy anything else.\"\n\n\"Oh! but, my dear, we must change all that. I shouldn't like to think of your father eating cheese; it's such a strong-smelling, coarse kind of thing. We must get him a cook who can toss him up an omelette, or something elegant. Cheese is only fit for the kitchen.\"\n\n\"Papa is very fond of it,\" persevered Molly.\n\n\"Oh! but we will cure him of that. I couldn't bear the smell of cheese; and I'm sure he would be sorry to annoy me.\"\n\n\u2014Mrs. Gaskell, Wives and Daughters\n\nKITCHEN DIARY: TWO AUTUMN SALADS\n\nAn End-of-Season Grill. Here in Maine, long after the weather turns too cold for cooking meat, we keep the barbecue grill out for roasting peppers, a very pleasant pastime on a nippy but sunny November afternoon. The seared flesh and sweet, meaty aroma of roasting red peppers are so suggestive of grilled steak that the only surprise is why a dish that combined the two hadn't composed itself sooner in my mind. As it turned out, the deep autumnal colors and simple but rich-tasting mix of taste and texture proved a persuasive reason to keep the grill out of the garage until the first snow arrived, a few weeks later.\n\nA SALAD OF STEAK, KALAMATA OLIVES, AND ROASTED PEPPERS\n\n(SERVES 4)\n\n4 large sweet red peppers   \n2 (12-ounce) sirloin shell steaks   \n1 small onion   \n10 to 12 Kalamata (or other brine-   \ncured black) olives   \n2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice   \n4 tablespoons virgin olive oil   \n1 clove garlic, minced   \n1 tablespoon capers, chopped   \nSalt and pepper to taste\n\nHeat charcoal in an outdoor charcoal grill until red hot and a white ash forms. Grill the peppers, turning with tongs as needed, until they are charred on all sides. Remove the peppers and place them in a large paper bag. Fold the bag over to loosely seal and let the peppers steam in their own heat for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, place the two shell steaks over the coals and grill to rare, about 5 minutes on the first side and 3 to 4 minutes on the second. Remove and set aside to cool.\n\nPeel the charred skin from the peppers. Then stem them carefully, removing all seeds. With a sharp knife, slice the peppers into narrow strips, each about as long as the steaks are wide. Put the slices, as cut, into a large bowl. When the steaks have cooled, cut them into thin (but not paper-thin) strips, slicing widthwise and discarding any scrim of fat.\n\nSet out a large platter and interleave the strips of pepper and steak, each resting on the one before, so that each piece is visible. (Don't discard the pepper juices.) Slice the onion as thin as possible into rings. Set it into a colander and pour a kettle of boiling water over it. Shake away excess water, turn the onion rings onto paper toweling, and pat dry. Spread these in a fine web over the slices of meat and pepper.\n\nPit the olives and, with your fingers, tear the olive meat into small bits and scatter these also over the platter. Pour the lemon juice and olive oil into the pepper juices that remain in the bowl that held the pepper slices. Stir in the garlic and capers. Mix this dressing well and spoon evenly over the collation. Finally, season it with plenty of freshly ground pepper and sprinkle with a pinch or two of salt.\n\nCover with plastic wrap and let sit for about half an hour before eating, to allow the flavors to mingle (but do not refrigerate\u2014it should be eaten at room temperature). Serve with good crusty bread and a simple lettuce salad.\n\nA Cajun Corn-and-Tomato Medley. The following recipe is actually for a macque choux: a Cajun cooked corn-and-tomato dish, here transformed into a (quite wonderful) salad by the simple expedient of not cooking the tomatoes.\n\nA SALAD OF TOMATOES AND CORN\n\n(SERVES 4)\n\n6 ears of fresh corn (or about 3   \ncups kernels)   \n2 teaspoons each butter and corn   \noil   \n1 small onion, cut into small   \npieces   \n1 small bell pepper, seeded and   \nchopped fine   \n1 clove garlic, minced   \n2 or 3 dashes Tabasco   \n4 red ripe tomatoes, coarsely   \nchopped   \n2 tablespoons heavy cream   \nSalt and pepper to taste\n\nCut the corn kernels from the cobs with a sharp knife, scraping each cob with the back of the knife afterward to rub away as much pulp as possible. Collect in a bowl. Heat the butter and oil together in a skillet and, when butter is melted, stir in the onion bits. Cook these until just translucent, stirring often.\n\nMix together the pepper pieces, garlic, and corn kernels and pulp; season with the Tabasco; and add all this to the onions. Cook for about 5 minutes, just until the kernels are soft and the pepper pieces tender (they should still have a little crunch). Remove from the stove and turn out into a large bowl. When the mixture has reached room temperature, add the tomatoes and stir in the cream. Taste for seasoning, adding salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Serve at room temperature.\nFORTY CLOVES OF GARLIC\n\nThe time: Thanksgiving Day, 1970. The place: the Massachusetts Berkshires. Snow had been falling all morning. It had stopped by the time I came out to shovel a path to my car, but storm clouds still hung darkly over the deserted campus of the private school where I was then a teacher. The students and most of the faculty had already left for the holiday, and the only building with any lights on was the school dining hall. There, Alice Brock\u2014just recently made famous by Arlo Guthrie's song \"Alice's Restaurant\"\u2014was cooking a Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings for the hip folk of the Lenox-Stockbridge area. Alice had once been a faculty member at the school (as Arlo had been a student), and in consequence, any teachers staying over the holiday, hip or no, were also invited.\n\nAs my friend Dave Bremer and I got into my little Triumph Herald, a tandem of Land Rovers came plowing up the drive: the first guests, already arriving. We went down their tracks and turned right onto the icy surface of Route 183, heading for town. I drove off not unconscious of a historic moment being missed\u2014and not without real pangs of regret at missing it. For while Alice didn't yet actually run a restaurant, she already was a legendary cook in the area, and there were rumors that she was about to ride her newfound notoriety to high places in the big-time culinary world.\n\nDave and I, however, were going to have supper with a young couple, Jim and Judy Mendel (not their real names), who had promised us something different for Thanksgiving\u2014something with lots of garlic and no turkey. And even the allure of a meal cooked by Alice Brock didn't overcome my lack of enthusiasm for that bird and all its tedious accompaniments.\n\nIn other words, there had been, there still was, a wrestling match going on within. Part of me wanted to go where it had already sniffed out a genuinely good feed; another part, bolstered by the excuse of icy roads and threat of storm, insisted on staying where it could rub shoulders with famous people and get to eat famous food. This time, my stomach won.\n\nAs it turned out, there was no reason to be sorry. Alice Brock wrote a not-very-memorable cookbook and has otherwise remained a celebrity relic of the sixties... but that night I ate a dish that had a powerfully subversive effect on my notions of fine cooking. I ate chicken cooked with forty cloves of garlic.\n\nI was twenty-seven at the time; Judy Mendel was the first serious cook I had encountered. I had thought, until I met her, that I was a serious cook. The truth was that neither of us had had any real culinary training, and it may be that I knew as many recipes and techniques as she did. The difference between us was that Judy was aggressively honest about what she wanted to eat, whereas my cooking suffered, without my realizing it, from an essential failure of nerve.\n\nEven with foods that I liked and was confident that I cooked well, there was something slyly passive in my claims to pleasure. I was unable, for example, to go to a good butcher, buy a two-inch-thick slab of prime porterhouse, coat it with olive oil, and grill it over chunks of real charcoal. Such extravagance of appetite seemed too terrifyingly conspicuous.\n\nSo instead I would go to Adams Market, buy a scant inch-thick sirloin of dubious grade, rub it with charcoal-seasoned salt, grill it under the broiler, and eat it topped with thick \"coins\" of maitre d' butter made with dried garlic bits, dehydrated parsley flakes, and minced frozen chives. I ignored the bogusness of all this because it allowed me to produce the dish's enrichments at the last possible moment\u2014as if otherwise, somehow, I risked being caught and exposed.\n\nJudy had no time for such \"gourmet\" touches. Her approach to extravagance was fearless and direct. Although she had lived in the Berkshires a year less than I, she had already persuaded a mushroom enthusiast to share the secret places where morels grew in early spring. She had convinced an old Italian couple with a large herb garden to supply her all summer with bunches of fresh basil. And she'd found a tiny grocery store in Pittsfield that sold real Parmesan, plump heads of garlic, pignoli, imported DeCecco pasta, and a rich-tasting, deep-colored Sicilian olive oil.\n\nThe dishes that she made from these ingredients agitated me by the openness of their pleasure. The morels were gently saut\u00e9ed in sweet butter. The basil was pulverized with the garlic, pignoli, olive oil, and Parmesan into pesto alla genovese, a dish I had never heard of before. Such astonishing stuff it was, too: a mouthful of aggressive flavors, each\u2014like the colors of an Expressionist painting\u2014retaining a coarse vibrancy while still somehow melding into a single, ravishing whole.\n\nWhat I didn't understand then was that these dishes also composed a portrait of Judy. If you are what you eat, you are even more what you cook. But what I found compelling in her cooking, I found pushy and coercive in her. I wanted those baskets of morels, those bunches of fresh basil, too, but I was incapable of the bullying and cajoling that would get me them. It was like putting down a buddy for the way he chatted up the girls but still wanting him to set me up with a date.\n\nNor is this simile at all inappropriate. Garlic is one of the most directly sexual of foods\u2014which is perhaps why, until Judy, I had desired it greatly but approached it very circumspectly. I still found it daring to mince a whole clove into a pasta sauce\u2014in fact, I kept returning to dehydrated garlic precisely because desiccation absolved it of its pervasive suggestiveness.\n\nRecipes for chicken with forty cloves of garlic often make much of the fact that the long cooking mutes that bulb's sometimes harsh-seeming pungency, as indeed it does. But nothing suppresses that throaty muskiness\u2014and in this dish it is present in breathtaking abandon. After all, at its purest, it consists of nothing but pieces of chicken and the unpeeled bulbs of four whole heads of garlic, thoroughly braised in olive oil. You pick up a clove, suck off the juices that cling to it, bite away the husk at one end, squeeze the succulent mash into the mouth, and then follow this with a bite of the rich, greasy, garlicky chicken.\n\nIf there is nothing sexually forward about this dish, then food and love have no common ground at all. I have come to think otherwise, and certainly this explains why, despite the fact that both pesto and poulet aux quarante gousses d'ail became flashing beacons for me in what was still a great darkness, my navigation toward them remained uncertain and slow. This was, I think, because for a very long time both of these dishes seemed to me as secret as sex.\n\nFood writers have for so long acted as if they knew about pesto forever that it is hard to remember in how very few cookbooks it appeared before 1970\u2014and how much it was ignored in those in which it did appear. The same was even truer of poulet aux quarante gousses d'ail. If it appears among the hundreds of chicken recipes in the 1961 edition of the Larousse Gastronomique, I can't find it, and that situation is no different with several other now-venerable French cookbooks, including Anne Willan's French Regional Cooking and, surprisingly, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.\n\nI didn't encounter it in a book myself until 1973, when I first read Ford Madox Ford's quirkily appealing meditation-cum-travelogue, Provence. There it figures in an oft-quoted tale about a French model in London who found it impossible to reconcile her trade and her passion for garlic. In despair, she decided to chuck the job and went home and made herself a poulet b\u00e9arnais, \"the main garniture of which is a kilo\u2014two Ibs.\u2014of garlic per chicken, you eating the stewed cloves as if they were haricots blancs.\" Instead of firing her when she returned to work, her employers found her suffused with a new and mysterious attractiveness.\n\nThis story is sometimes used as evidence of the harmlessness of cooked garlic. But Ford is, I think, saying something very different\u2014something you will now understand. I picked that up right away. What it took me longer to notice\u2014partly because Ford had become a kind of literary father figure for me and partly because, simply, this part of the story is told only when he picks up its thread again after an intervening two hundred pages\u2014was that Ford could not in fact bring himself to eat those garlic cloves \"as if they were haricots blancs\"... because, he said, he wasn't that much a hero.\n\nIt appeared that her kind Grace... had had a couple of capons cooked and had them stuffed each with twenty-five cloves... . She was under the impression that she would thus be giving me poulet b\u00e9arnais, but she was a little mistaken. The dish of Henri Quatre has the garlic stewed under the fowl.\n\n\u2014Ford Madox Ford, Provence\n\nIt's not her Grace who has got things wrong, but Ford, who confuses poulet aux quarante gousses d'ail with poulet b\u00e9arnais, also called poule au pot d'Henri IV. This is a dish in which a fat hen is stuffed and then stewed on a bed of pot vegetables. It is not, in any version I know, especially garlicky, although a modest amount is always present among the ingredients. Either Ford once knew a French cook who thought otherwise, or else the two dishes got somehow muddled in his memory.\n\nNo one doubts that poule au pot is a B\u00e9arnais specialty, but if that region also claims poulet aux quarante gousses d'ail, it's only one pretender in a rather long line. Jean-Noel Escudier includes it in The Wonderful Food of Provence, Paul-Louis Couchod appropriates it for the Dauphin\u00e9 in La France \u00e0 table, James Bentley has it in Life and Food in the Dordogne, and Andr\u00e9 Daguin sets it among Foie Gras, Magret, and Other Good Food from Gascony.\n\nProvence, B\u00e9arn, Gascony, the Dauphin\u00e9, Dordogne\u2014the more pins one pushes into the map, the more one comes to suspect that the dish originated in the culinary area that they surround and which has influenced much of their cooking: Catalonia. For while all the South of France loves garlic, it is simply impossible to imagine la cuina catalana without it.\n\nAllioli, a Catalan sauce made essentially of olive oil and garlic, might be called, Colman Andrews writes in Catalan Cuisine, \"the Catalan catsup.\" Another famous Catalan dish, called pistache de mouton, is a leg of mutton prepared with a garnish \u2014not of pistachio but\u2014of fifty cloves of garlic (called pistache maybe because the cloves look like fresh pistachio nuts). Made with a whole chicken, this dish would be very much like Ford's poulet b\u00e9arnais.\n\nWriting about a popular Catalan dish of lamb and garlic (a recipe for which is given below), Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz, in The Food of Spain and Portugal, describes it as \"the first cousin to the Proven\u00e7al Poulet aux Quatre Clous d'Ail.\" But this is as close as we can get, at least with the sources I have at hand \u2014so for the moment, this notion, however suggestive, must remain unproven.\n\nFortunately, however much dispersed, the dish everywhere has remained true to its peasant roots\u2014it is so simply made that the regional touches are modest indeed. If in the Dordogne they use goose fat instead of olive oil, or in Gascony duck fat\u2014well, these are choices easy enough for any cook to sort out for herself.\n\nAs for Matt and me, our boldest step was a substantial reduction in the amount of olive oil. For the quantity of chicken we used, recipes can be found that call for as much as three-quarters cup of oil. Why so much? One thought is that the stewing hens originally used were relatively lean; another is simply that the people who made the dish liked it that way. Times change, however, and we find that, given the fattiness of American poultry, the dish is quite rich and flavorful enough with a couple of spoonfuls.\n\nAnother major departure was to dispense with the traditional seal of flour-and-water paste the dish required. It was customarily made in an earthenware casserole with a poorly fitting lid and baked in a communal bread oven where the heat could not be controlled. At a steady, moderate cooking temperature, any covered casserole will produce tender, juicy chicken, well permeated with garlic essence.\n\nSome recipes call for cooking the chicken whole; others, for cutting it up into pieces. We favor the latter because the cloves are more evenly distributed. Besides, carving a braised chicken is a very different matter from carving a roasted one. Finally, we are of two minds about peeling the cloves. It is more work for the cook to do this and less fun for the eater. But they are such appealing little morsels, sans chemise... and how else can you get a whole forkful? Like already-shelled pistachio nuts, this may seem altogether too much of a good thing. But this is a matter of taste, even morals, rather than of technique.\n\nCHICKEN WITH FORTY CLOVES OF GARLIC\n\n(SERVES 4)\n\n31/2\\- to 4-pound chicken, cut into   \nserving pieces   \nSalt and freshly ground pepper   \n40 cloves of garlic (about 4 heads)   \n1 to 2 tablespoons fruity olive oil   \nSeveral sprigs of parsley and one   \nof thyme   \nThick slices of country bread, fried   \nin olive oil\n\nPreheat the oven to 325\u00b0F. Season the pieces of chicken with salt and pepper. Examine the cloves of garlic. If they are fresh and firm\u2014and if you care to\u2014use them unpeeled. Otherwise, peel them carefully, discarding any soft or moldy ones and cutting away any brown spots and assertive green sprouts. Choose a flameproof casserole with a tight-fitting lid, just large enough to hold the chicken pieces comfortably. Heat the olive oil in it over medium-high heat and, when it is hot, quickly brown the chicken pieces on all sides. Do this in batches, removing each piece to a platter as soon as it is done. When all the pieces have been browned, put the garlic cloves into the hot oil and saut\u00e9 these, stirring constantly, for 2 or 3 minutes, until they soften and begin to brown a little at the edges.\n\nRemove the casserole from the heat and return the chicken pieces, stirring so that they and the garlic cloves are well mixed. Tie the sprigs of parsley and the sprig of thyme together with string to make a bouquet garni. Work this down among the chicken pieces, cover the pot tightly with foil, and press on the lid. Bake for 11/2 hours. The chicken will be meltingly tender and suffused with the garlic. Serve with the fried crusts of bread, to be spread with the soft garlic.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: An attractive version of Ginette Mathiot's in A Table avec \u00c9douard de Pomiane replaces ten of the garlic cloves with shallots, which are peeled and chopped fine. The dish is prepared as directed above, with the addition of a generous half-cup of dry white wine. This is poured in just before the pot is covered and boiled off over high heat when the dish is done. The chicken and garlic are then served at the table from the pan.\n\nAfterword from our subscriber Michael Rosen (Oberlin, Ohio). \"Concerning chicken with 40 cloves of garlic (which my family just finished eating): I've always used the recipe from a Proven\u00e7al cookbook called Cuisine Proven\u00e7ale, by Michel Barberousse. There is no date in the book and it seems as though the author published it himself. French friends tell me it is rare and, at the same time, reputable. I prefer his version because he leaves the chicken whole. It fills up a rather high earthenware casserole I found at a rummage sale. I tuck a bouquet garni inside the feckless bird and cook it on its bed of garlic in the pot. A whole chicken makes for a more festive event as I carve (or rather divide) the final product at the table.\"\n\nHere, as Matt and I transposed it from the original, is:\n\nMICHEL BARBEROUSSE'S CHICKEN WITH FORTY CLOVES OF GARLIC\n\nTake a plump young chicken of, say, 21/2 pounds and clean it. Salt and pepper its cavity, put in a bouquet garni, and sear it all over. Choose an earthenware casserole into which the bird can be comfortably nestled. Into this put \u00be cup of olive oil and 40 unpeeled cloves of garlic. Add a large bouquet of rosemary, thyme, sage, bay, parsley, and celery. Place the prepared chicken on this bed of seasonings and turn it so that it is covered with the aromatic oil. Cover the pot and seal the lid shut with a strip of dough made of flour and water. Cook this in the oven for about 11/2 hours at 325\u00b0F (a smaller chicken will take less time). Remove the pot from the oven and break off the seal. Bring the pot to the table, removing its lid only at the moment of serving... . The air is filled with suggestive aroma, the chicken golden, tender, and deliciously scented. Serve with toasted French bread for the eaters to spread with pur\u00e9e squeezed from the garlic cloves.\n\nLAMB WITH FORTY CLOVES OF GARLIC\n\n(SERVES 4)\n\n40 cloves of garlic (about 4 heads)   \n2 pounds boneless lamb   \n2 tablespoons olive oil   \n1 medium onion, finely chopped   \n1 bay leaf   \n1 to 2 teaspoons paprika   \n1 to 2 tablespoons red-wine   \nvinegar   \nSalt and pepper to taste\n\nPreheat the oven to 325\u00b0F. Prepare the garlic as described in the recipe for chicken with forty cloves of garlic above. Cut the lamb into bite-sized pieces. Choose a flameproof casserole with a tightly fitting lid, just large enough to hold the lamb pieces comfortably. Heat the olive oil in it over medium-high heat and, when it is hot, quickly brown the pieces of lamb on all sides. Do this in batches, removing each one to a platter as soon as it is done. When all the pieces have been browned, put the garlic cloves and chopped onion into the hot oil and cook these, stirring constantly, for 2 or 3 minutes, until they soften and begin to brown a little at the edges.\n\nRemove the casserole from the heat and return the lamb, stirring until it and the garlic and onion are well mixed. Add the bay leaf, paprika, vinegar, and salt and pepper. Cover tightly with foil, top with the lid, and cook for about 2 hours. The cooking vegetables should weep sufficient liquid to keep the contents of the pot moist. Check after an hour to make sure this is so\u2014if the pot is dry, add \u00bc cup of water. Reseal the pot carefully and cook until the lamb is fork-tender and the garlic meltingly soft. Rice goes well with this meal, as does a lightly dressed salad of pungent greens.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: In a similar dish in Catalan Cuisine, Colman Andrews omits the vinegar and flavorings, substituting instead a cup of a Catalan fortified wine not unlike a dry sherry. Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz, in The Food of Spain and Portugal, suggests dropping the unpeeled garlic cloves into boiling water for half a minute to make them easier to peel.\n\n  For further exploration, see Patricia Wells's Bistro Cooking for a pan-saut\u00e9ed version of chicken with forty cloves of garlic; Geraldene Holt's French Country Kitchen for a turkey casserole with twenty; Andr\u00e9 Daguin's Foie Gras, Magret, and Other Good Food from Gascony for a version served with a garlic-clove confit; and Colman Andrews's Catalan Cuisine for a spectacular roast-lamb casserole with twelve heads of garlic, half of them left whole.\n\nKITCHEN DIARY: A WEDDING PUNCH\n\nWinging my way down to Florida. David Bremer, one of my closest friends, is getting married and I'm best man. I've managed to evade all attached duties except giving the wedding toast and concocting a champagne punch for the reception. Slight as it is, this responsibility has been weighing on my mind. A search through my cookbooks turned up nothing that immediately soothed my unease by perfect appropriateness\u2014champagne punches are pretty much cut from the same cloth, and those that strive for originality teeter instead toward disaster. Weeding out such impostors and weighing the merits of the rest have left me more or less decided on a version from the old Picayune's Creole Cook Book.\n\nCHAMPAGNE PUNCH \u00c0 LA CR\u00c9OLE. 1 lb. sugar; 1 pint fresh lemon juice; 1 quart champagne; 1 quart best white wine; \u00bc cup of Cura\u00e7ao; 2 quarts seltzer; 1 pineapple, half grated and half sliced small; a large piece of ice; and 3 dozen strawberries. Take a large punch bowl and dissolve in it one pound of sugar, one pint of lemon juice, one quart of White Wine, one quart bottle of Champagne, two quarts of Seltzer Water, one-quarter cup of Cura\u00e7ao, and one-half of a grated pineapple. Mix well. Put in a large piece of ice, decorate with strawberries and sliced pineapple, let it cool, and serve in small cup glasses. The above quantity will serve twenty-five people.\n\nBut the piece of paper on which I've copied the recipe is already scribbled with nervous queries: what purpose the white wine? what good is a champagne punch that's half seltzer? And\u2014what's really bothering me\u2014how could I hope to judge the merit of a recipe I've never tasted? Literally as well as figuratively (for the sun had long set by the time we arrived at Orlando International), I was flying blind.\n\nNo surprise that champagne punch was not the first thing on Dave and Sharran's list of worries, and Dave kindly but firmly let me know, after listening to some of this, that the thing was entirely in my hands. Then he informed me that Sharran's mother had brought a bottle of peach wine back from a visit to California many years ago and wanted to contribute it to the punch for good luck.\n\nThis bottle, on being produced, appeared to be not only decades old but open\u2014apparently it had been sampled on their return, been declared too good for casual drinking, and had thus been put away in the closet for the right special occasion. I gathered my courage and tasted: it had turned, not to vinegar, but into VSOP\u2014very stale old peach-water. Palatable, yes, if barely\u2014but palate is not the only judge. This was that moment the bottle had been patiently waiting for, and into the punch it would have to go.\n\nAn even more unnerving challenge was yet to come. The town's one big supermarket offered plenty of white cornmeal to stuff into my suitcase for the trip home, but a distressingly anemic produce section. The state being Florida, there was some good citrus, but there were no strawberries at all, and their few pineapples were suspiciously without aroma.\n\nWhat to do? I hovered over the small fruit selection in a panic of indecision. Morbid thoughts of frozen strawberries in syrup roiling in my brain, I began to pick over the peaches, having already decided to freshen the dusty frailty of that old peach wine with a generous portion of real fruit pulp.\n\nHere was a ripe one, there another. Suddenly the obvious began to dawn: give them the leading role. Peach was a presence that was as pleasing in champagne as any strawberry, and the peaches were here.\n\nWell, some were anyway\u2014after I had picked through them all, I found out there weren't really enough. However, my panic was fading, and a decisive shift had somehow happened, moving the punch's making from the Picayune's imagination to mine. If there weren't enough ripe peaches, I decided, I'd augment them with kiwi fruit.\n\nHaving railed against that fruit in Simple Cooking, I'm sure the California Kiwi Growers' Association would have loved a photograph of me stuffing handfuls into a paper bag. But floating in a punch bowl, their brilliant color would be only an asset, and with the peaches and pineapple, their indecisive flavor no handicap. A couple of lemons and limes went in after them, and I was through.\n\nAs it happened, we did find some strawberries a little later at a fruit stand, but the image of the peaches' luscious flesh had already given me confidence to work up my punch\u2014brightly flavored, swimming with fresh bits of glistening fruit, bubbling with lots and lots of champagne. A different beast indeed from the subtler-flavored, stately Creole concoction, this version had a livelier commingling of flavor and aroma... and quite a bit more kick.\n\nA lovely presentation it made set out in the huge, clear punchbowl (in many multiples of the original recipe to accommodate a half case of champagne). How did it taste? All I know is that I drank my share and more with complete unself-conscious pleasure. Once the celebrating began, the effort of preparation faded before the meaning of the event\u2014all I had done was mix the ingredients; the wedding made the punch.\nTAKING STOCK\n\nIt is said that stock is the foundation of great cuisine. It is essential to flavorful soups, rich sauces, and boiled or braised meats, not to mention risotto.\n\n\u2014Robert Nadeau\n\nStock is everything.\n\n\u2014Escoffier\n\nThe sensation of the 1898 Salon des Artistes Fran\u00e7ais was Joseph-Ferdinand Gueldry's painting \"The Blood Drinkers.\" It depicts the stark interior of a French slaughterhouse. A newly slain ox sprawls in the foreground. One of its slaughterers, his arm dripping with gore, lifts a glass of steaming blood, just filled from the stream still spurting from the animal's heart, to the first of a shambling queue of well-to-do invalids\u2014men, women, children\u2014each waiting a turn to drink.\n\nFrench doctors then believed such treatment strengthened the weak blood of their patients, and the public fascination with the painting sprang from the same macabre irony as today's organ transplant dramas, where the seriously ill wait for the death of a healthy body so that they might inherit its organs. Gueldry contrasts the vitality of the dead steer with the pallid frailty of the invalids\u2014and contrasts as well their palpable disgust at the drink they are forced to down with their equally palpable desire for the life they hope it promises.\n\nGueldry's painting still disturbs, but only vicariously, for it can no longer draw us into the scene it portrays. The blood drinkers merely revolt us; we cannot put ourselves in their places. And time has given the graphic depiction of the act of slaughter a patina of nostalgia that was not there when the artist painted it, a feeling, even, of intimacy.\n\nAlthough the room itself, large and floored with concrete, has a modern impersonality, the carcasses that hang from the overhead rails are not numerous and their slaughterers only two. The victim was led to its death by a rope. The sledgehammer that stunned it lies in full view\u2014a single, simple instrument.\n\nAnd then there is the beast itself. The eye is immediately drawn to it\u2014especially the modern eye, for it is this, not the invalids, that has become the real object of its curiosity. The mind\u2014except that of the very squeamish or the resolutely vegetarian\u2014does not balk at the sight of one dead ox.\n\nThe original viewers of this painting, especially, knew where meat comes from. They had seen whole carcasses suspended from their butcher's ceiling; they had heard the bellowing from the local abattoir. All that Gueldry removed from the equation was the cook, intermediary between the raw and the roast. For a moment, the curtain was pulled back and appetite suddenly saw itself in the nude.\n\nThis is the fulcrum by which Gueldry's painting works. If the idea of that mouthful of hot blood only revolts you, the theme becomes mere sentiment: poor ox, poor invalids, poor viewer. But if a flicker of desire also stirs within, then your reactions become more complex, your understanding more difficult, the painting\u2014for all its limitations as genre\u2014art.\n\nToday, our eyes see but do not comprehend. Our appetite does not know the way back to the ox, for it balks before the workings of the modern slaughtering plant. It cannot imagine a whole herd of bawling cattle, strung by their hind legs, swinging down the conveyor belts, one after another, to meet their death from the blow of a pneumatic jackhammer.\n\nWe cannot respond to such an image, not because it is so horrible, but because carnage at this scale is immediately anesthetizing. If anything, the slaughtering of a single animal with hammer and knife is more horrible because we can imagine it. But what cannot be imagined cannot be experienced. Our slaughterhouses no longer offer experience and so we learn nothing\u2014we are given nothing\u2014from the death of the animals we eat.\n\nThe essential premise of stock is a good one: letting nothing go to waste. This means, first, finding a way to eat animals that, while edible, have not been raised strictly to be eaten. Once, not so long ago, much of the meat served on all but the tables of the rich came from animals that had already led useful lives as beasts of burden or wool producers, or careerists who had sent eggs and milk to the table before arriving there themselves.\n\nFurthermore, in those days, because of the vexing problems of spoilage, animals were slaughtered locally, sometimes even at home, supplying ample trimmings and bones (not to mention offal). A cuisine based on stock begins with such butcher's leavings\u2014bones, especially, but also cuts of meat too tough to eat. Butchers then had whole carcasses to contend with, not cartons of selected parts. To keep the profitable cuts moving they had to shift all the rest, too, for such price as they could get.\n\nA cuisine based on stock also requires gardinage in plentiful supply: vegetables that come home with all their parts attached; herbs sold not dried in little expensive bottles but fresh in big fragrant penny bunches.\n\nFinally, a cuisine based on stock is a cuisine faced with the problem of kitchen waste. It is a part of the cooking of families that are large and rarely nuclear\u2014of maiden aunts and bachelor uncles, aged grandparents, nephews from the country looking for a job, all crowded round the supper table.\n\nStock speaks of a time when the good housekeeper served the tops she had cut off from the turnips and the poached beef out of which she had made her broth, and then she scraped the serving platters clean. She cut away the bits of meat that might make up a shepherd's pie and divided the rest between the stockpot and the dripping jar.\n\nOur kitchens do not see this kind of wastage. Today, the disposal of such garbage is not put into our hands. Except for fruit and the most durable vegetables, everything we now buy has already been trimmed of nature's generous lagniappe. The appeal of meat stock or broth has always been that it is a richness come from nowhere, made from scraps and bones that the careless throw away. Although its public face is frugality, its private one is glee: something good for nothing; meat for free.\n\nThis is no longer true. Decent meat is relatively cheap and we can get as much of it as we want. We are stock poor because we are so meat rich. No self-respecting butcher in America today would sell the meat you need to make a true bouillon, and, even if he would, he'd be hard pressed to find any. Genuine mutton, real stewing hens, tough old goat: none of this exists except for those who raise it. Many markets refuse even to carry the unfamiliar, tougher cuts\u2014tail, neck, feet, tongue\u2014of the tender animals we eat.\n\nI don't make stock. But when I was in my early twenties, I lived in a place where people did, a Russian-Ukrainian neighborhood on New York City's Lower East Side. The local meat shop still had sawdust strewn on the floor; a suckling pig was often displayed in the window. The butcher laughed and gossiped with his customers while he cut, trimmed, and packaged the cuts they requested\u2014small orders mostly, a couple of chops for one, a little ground meat for another, a brace of hocks for a third.\n\nStanding behind the others, waiting my turn, I watched with fascination the communal scrutiny every individual transaction received. When a special cut was required, the butcher would go into the meat locker and bring out the part of the carcass from which it would be taken.\n\nThe customer followed every motion as the butcher began to slice, a certain tension in her demeanor suggesting that if the job were done one whit less carefully, she was not above snatching the knife away and doing it herself. And once the piece had been cut and weighed, she would insist that all the trimmings be wrapped up with it in the butcher's paper.\n\nThe butcher bore such requests with equanimity. Often his red, beefy hands would dip into the large waste can by his side to pluck out a massive, meaty bone \"for the dog.\" It was only after I had lived in the neighborhood for some time that I realized that the dog for whom these frail old ladies were toting home bones was a fictive beast: they were feeding their soup pots instead.\n\nWhen the butcher showed me my piece of meat, I also inspected it\u2014but only to ensure it was what he said. I could distinguish one cut from another, but with no sense of the anatomy of the animal from which it came, I knew nothing about its relationship to the whole. That was the difference between the cooking of my neighbors and my own\u2014they possessed a culinary imagination that could still confront Gueldry's dead ox. Sharp as a blade, it could peel back the pelt to reveal appetite lurking in the darkness that lay beneath.\n\nA culture's appetite always springs from its poor, and these were poor whose fingers still knew their way into every crevice and cranny of the animals they ate. Stock is the foundation of so many dishes of \"grand\" cuisine because these were created at a time when boys became chefs for food, not fame. Born hungry, they wove dishes for the rich in which their own appetite ran wild. They stuffed meat with more meat, enriched their gravies with the sweetest of suets, sought to distill out of bone and gristle a concentrate that would imbue any dish with what most propelled their hunger.\n\nThis kind of intimate connection between eater and eaten has almost vanished from our cooking, despite the scattered remnants that remain behind to hold its memory. Today's young chefs may be trained in stocks and sauces, but as much as they draw on personal experience their culinary instincts flower most easily at the grill, with its focus on drawing flavor from a particular piece of meat. Theirs is no longer a cuisine of the carcass; it is a cuisine of the cut.\n\nRich and poor alike, none of us likes being reminded of the whole from which our meat is cut; even less do we wish to consider edible the framing that holds it all in place. The only carcass that we regularly encounter is that of the chicken, and even here most of us prefer to buy that bird already cut into parts\u2014though it would take only a few moments to cut it up ourselves so as to have the trimmings to do with as we please. If we don't bother, it is because our honest impulse is to throw all that away.\n\nIf we don't care enough about broth to make it a matter-of-fact part of our lives, why do we bother with it at all? What makes us cling to our Knorr-Swiss bouillon cubes, our cans of Swanson or College Inn? If such stuff is only a little worse than what we can make for ourselves, why don't we give up cooking with it at all? It isn't, I think, because we love its taste. It's because that bubbling stockpot has remained a compelling symbol, long after the cooking it emblemized has fled.\n\nAmerican cooking, tumbling as fast as it is toward a totally take-out cuisine, retains two potent images that can still revivify our appetite for good, homemade food: baked goods, which stand for the gift of pleasure, and meat-based broths, from which all the kitchen's healing goodness flows.\n\nNot too long ago, this image reflected a truth: a continuous river of broth spilled from the stockpot to inspirit soups, enhance pasta and rice, baste the roast, sauce the vegetables, and provide a sop for bread. And, most important of all, its aroma filled the house, cosseting all who inhaled it with deep well-being, as if the very air were filled with nurture. The chef may have transmogrified his meat waters into gold; the housewife transmuted them into a far more essential nutrient: love.\n\nTo understand the power of such broths over our collective unconscious, we must remember that until very recently they were thought to contain\u2014whether stock, broth, or bouillon\u2014an essential, life-enhancing goodness. It was not simply minerals, protein, vitamins that the home cook sought to extract from the stuff of the stockpot but the actual vigor and good health of the animal whose parts these were.\n\nWe don't seek to consume them, after all, in sickness or old age but, as much as possible, in their prime. We drink their health: and that glass of blood from Gueldry's ox, transmuted by the cook, becomes the cup of broth, of stock. As one is to living meat the other is to cooked\u2014the vital fluid, reduced and concentrated.\n\nHowever, it was the animal's body that oriented appetite, centering what it searched for and giving every part it found a role. By the time the brains were scrambled, the sweetbreads poached, the bones sucked dry of marrow\u2014the vitals of the animal devoured\u2014its vitality was totally absorbed. But as fewer and fewer of us have held the hot, soft body of a freshly slain hen or stunned a wildly flapping fish, our cuisine has recoiled that much further from any intimacy with the bodies we eat and their sacrifice has lost all its imaginative weight.\n\nIn response to our appetite's disorientation, our culture's metaphors of wellness are shifting. Although we continue to pay lip service to the healthfulness of liver and chicken stock, the truth is that the phrase \"health food\" now conjures up images that are becoming entirely anti-meat. Today, we seek our magic potions in oat bran and canola oil; the noxious concoctions we force ourselves to drink for the sake of health are made of torula yeast, of \"tiger's milk,\" not bull's blood.\n\nWhy then aren't we turning to wholesome vegetable broths? Although they exist, they remain an anomaly, a minority concern. Nourishing, yes, but there is no blood in them, no gift of life. If there were anything compelling to the imagination in the vegetable's sacrifice to provision us we would by now all be vegetarians. But there isn't\u2014and we're not.\n\nInstead, in the country of surfeit, the half measure is king. If we can't bear to push our meat plate entirely aside, we can't quite take pleasure in it either. We want beef that is at once fatless and tender; we want chicken that is all breast. And we have the pallid stews, the watery chicken soups, and the pot roasts flavored with onion-soup mix to prove it. We're clinging, as a culture, to a cooking that is no longer possible. As appetite has lost its hold on the necessary ingredients, those ingredients have changed... or gone away.\n\nA few years ago\u2014this time in Boston\u2014I was heading home from a visit to the local A&P when I saw a giant garbage truck pulling away from the rear loading dock, its maw stuffed with beef bones, blotchy red with gobbets of flesh. The head butcher told me, when I went back in to protest, that there was almost no demand for such bones and so no profit to be got in selling them; the few he still put out hardly paid for their space in the meat case.\n\nNor did he have time to bundle them up to give away\u2014and anyway, most people didn't want them like that, all meaty and gristly. They liked bones clean and white, so their dog wouldn't make a mess with them on the carpet. \"Soup bones,\" he said, \"are really pet bones\u2014except people don't like seeing the word 'pet' near anything they themselves are going to eat.\"\n\nIn the past few decades, a complete reversal of meaning has taken place. Before, \"something for the dog\" meant soup bones; now, \"soup bones\" means something for the dog. Why else, if good homemade stock is as central to our cooking as we still pretend it to be, isn't the stuff sold in bottles in the grocer's dairy case\u2014put up daily at the local free-range chicken farm, wholesome, tasty, sweetly fresh?\n\nInstead, we've become a nation of culinary hypocrites. \"When calling for chicken or beef broth,\" writes the author of a recently acclaimed cookbook, \"I specify 'excellent' quality. That means don't use powders or cubes as a base... . I rarely have time to make broths from scratch, but certainly homemade is ideal. I use canned 'ready-to-serve' (i.e., not condensed) which I find remarkably close to homemade. I hesitate to give brand names... .\"\n\nThe truth is that, made out of the flavorless chickens that flood our market, the best homemade broth still tastes flat and thin; made out of a rare and pricey free-range hen, the object of the exercise is lost. So we pour it out of a can. Its label reads \"chicken,\" but it might as well say \"golden broth.\" Indeed, it would do better to say that. Its contents may be made from a chicken\u2014or some of its unspecified parts\u2014but who of us would want to know that bird, let alone transmute its wretched life into our own? Drink its health? We wouldn't dare. For us broth is only flavored water. Now that the life has left it, the goodness has flown.\n\nKITCHEN DIARY: CHICKEN IN A CRUST\n\nIs there anything one can do to give our battery-raised chickens more flavor? Recently leafing through Nathalie Hambro's Particular Delights, I came across a method for baking a chicken wrapped in a salt-and-flour dough. This cleverly combines two disparate strategies that have long been used to cook a chicken so that it remains moist and tender. The Chinese bury it in a bed of salt, which lets steam escape but seals in the juices. Other cuisines wrap the bird in a sealed wrap of moist clay, which keeps in the steam but traps some of the juices between the clay and the skin. A wrapping of salt-and-flour dough promised to cauterize the juices before they escaped and to absorb those that did, leaving the bird with a crusty skin.\n\nBesides intensifying flavor, this technique interested me for two other reasons. The first is that I had become convinced that the best way to roast chicken is to roast it quickly over high heat (500\u00b0F\u2014following Barbara Kafka's lead in Food for Friends). I hoped the crust might allow me to do this to a chicken smaller than the usual roaster (5 to 7 pounds), without drying the bird out. (Since we are two, the smaller bird is more suitable for our table.) Secondly, I wondered if, so confined, the meat would taste more of any seasonings placed in the bird's cavity or rubbed into its skin.\n\nSo I chose a relatively small chicken, about 31/2 pounds, and rubbed it inside and out with a mixture of crushed fresh leaf of thyme and rosemary and a minced clove of garlic, all of which I had let marinate awhile in about 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Then I set it aside, turned on the oven to 500\u00b0F, and began to make the dough.\n\nThis was done by mixing together a pound and a half each of kosher salt and flour (or about 41/2 cups each). A generous cup of water was then kneaded in to make a firm but pliable dough. The first impression was one of far more dough than I would need, but it proved fragile and tore easily if stretched too thin. I rolled it out on a lightly floured board to what I guessed was a size large enough to cover the chicken. I then shifted it to the cooking pan before the first fitting session. This proved a wise choice, for I had to do a little patching at points where, despite my caution, parts of the bird broke through. The result was a solid but ungainly-looking parcel.\n\nAll this was actually accomplished in a very short time: the dough, not being edible, could be treated with scant courtesy, poked, pinched, and patched as occasion requires; the chicken was ready for the oven almost by the time the oven was ready for it. I put it in and set the timer for an hour.\n\nI was happy to note the absence of any cooking smell (other than a toastily delicious salt-and-flour aroma) until the last ten minutes or so, when the rich and concentrated smell of chicken suddenly filled the kitchen. At the hour point, the crust had turned a dark, crusty brown and had shrunk to fit the bird. It was impossible, of course, to wiggle a leg to test for doneness: I plunged a skewer in the breast, which released a copious flow of clear, sweet-smelling juices. I decided it was done.\n\nHambro suggests bringing the chicken to table en chemise, as it were, which I would not suggest unless you mean to give your guests a few laughs before feeding them. The dough is truculently hard and I had to rip it away, chunk by chunk, with a well-mitted hand. The bird inside was a lovely gold. The meat was moist and unsalty, the dark meat as succulent as a dream and the breast meat, for the first time in memory, full of juices and mouth-meltingly tender. The meat at the bone, however, was just done\u2014the next time I'll give it another good ten minutes.\n\nThe downside, such as it was: first, the skin was tasty but quite salty and not at all crisp, which may prove a boon to those who think they ought to avoid it. Also, despite being trapped in with the bird, the taste of the flavorings was not noticeably enhanced. Worst of all, however, was the effect of that inedible crust\u2014baked a rich biscuit-brown, dotted all over inside with bits of herbs and flecks of chicken skin, and sopped with drippings. For a fleeting moment, I cursed Nathalie Hambro for getting it all wrong. What was wanted was to wrap up the bird in a brioche dough, bake it until the bundle was a tender, golden brown\u2014and then throw away the bird and devour the crust.\nON NOT BEING A GOOD COOK\n\nI'm not a good cook. Not that I don't have my moments\u2014like anyone who has spent thirty years happily cooking, I have absorbed something along the way. And in its casual way, it pays off\u2014God knows I eat well enough. However, if our criterion for goodness is whether I possess anything like a genuinely well-rounded repertoire of dishes I consistently prepare well, then my credentials are nothing much to boast about. Quite honestly, this has never bothered me much at all.\n\nIt's my experience that truly good cooks are born. I was not born to be one, and I don't like being trained, especially if the result is going to be mere competency. I've generally found life a lot more interesting learning to use my limitations than struggling to overcome them.\n\nFor example, since I have little patience in getting things just right, I tend to avoid dishes that require a calculated perfection. I'm a compulsive fiddler, so I steer clear of foods that must be set up to run and then left to cook strictly on their own. And since I can't abide following someone else's directions, I rarely prepare anything that I can't get a good mental fix on before I start.\n\nGiven such strictures, there is still a lot of cooking I can do that doesn't involve opening cans and defrosting TV dinners \u2014only I've had to go out and find it for myself. I've acquired my cooking know-how on a very ad-hoc, need-to-know basis, which leaves my culinary knowledge full of gaping holes.\n\nFor instance, I have no idea of how to make a b\u00e9chamel sauce, and if I hadn't become a food writer, I probably still wouldn't even know what one was. I waffle on simple things like custards and crepe batters, food I don't much get around to making. (I once spent a good month at perfecting the one-handed flip-and-jerk that turns the perfect omelet over on itself, eating omelets for supper every night. By the time I acquired the knack I was so sick of them I didn't eat another for fifteen years. Now that I've started again, I'm back to folding them over with a spatula.)\n\nIn other words, I've learned to cook the way most people do\u2014or did before there were cooking schools\u2014by following my appetite and fulfilling my obligations, picking up what I needed to please myself and anyone else I was cooking for. My personal cuisine had obvious limits, but boundaries can challenge even as they restrict... and within the culinary range I had defined for myself, I found much to enthrall me.\n\nBut therein lies the rub. As I've come to earn my living writing about food, I regularly have to fend off the assumption that I'm a good cook. Often, I'm not even asked, it being somehow self-evident that if I write about a subject I'm an expert at it (or at least have convinced myself that I am). Implicit in this expectation is its opposite: if I'm not a good cook, then I'm a fraud\u2014or at least something of a capon (one of those armchair appetites who lovingly detail dishes they've conned their wives into confecting).\n\nProfessional food folk, especially, are confused and sometimes upset by my lack of interest in the sorts of competencies that most interest them. Why do I write about food at all if I'm not an expert in the art of good cooking, nor do I want my readers to be? Because I think you don't have to be a good cook, or even aspire to be one, to be an interested cook.\n\nThere's a distinction begging to made here, and to start in at it let's first note that the opposite of a good cook isn't necessarily a bad one. No more am I a good cook than am I a gifted talker, but I still manage to get my points across in an intelligent conversation\u2014not only keeping tabs on such minimal graces as getting my tenses straight and my nouns and verbs in agreement, but also, on occasion, even managing to utter a genuine (and genuinely unrehearsed) bon mot.\n\nEven so, just as I anguish over amounts and kinds of seasoning for dishes I've cooked countless times before, fall into confusion over roasting temperatures, and lapse into a blind reverie just as the broth I'm reducing turns into a black, burnt mass, so, too, do I speak with a nasal wheeze, enunciate poorly, mispronounce (and misuse) more words than I care to know, and have the maddening habit of leaping from subject to subject in the course of a single phrase.\n\nStill, I'm not aware that my friends\u2014or students, when I had them\u2014have ever felt I was in desperate need of a public-speaking course. Since I manage to operate within the range of generally accepted competency, such idiosyncrasies are seen as nuances of character, as flavors more than deficits\u2014as consider the general fondness for Truman Capote's truly bizarre vocal deportment: it rounded out the whole. And there, on a much more modest scale, go I.\n\nIt's also worth noting in this regard that as the years have gone by, my talk has not much improved from what it was when my \"style\" firmed up in my late teens and early twenties. All sorts of ambitious ideas have gone tumbling through my brain and out of my mouth between then and now, improving my intellect immensely. But none seems to have done much to improve the medium that actually expressed it. My talk is me: my verbal strategies, such as they are, reflect strengths and weaknesses in my character. They are part of my way of being in the world, and I tamper with them at the peril of owning a voice that is a stranger to my soul.\n\nAll this is just as true of my cooking. I don't consider myself a poor cook, even less a lazy and self-indulgent one. Very often, I spend days, even weeks, thinking out a dish before I make it and, if I'm unhappy with the results, resolutely go work it out all over again. If I do find myself chafing at some limitation in my knowledge, I'm happy to consult a cookbook\u2014or an expert\u2014for advice.\n\nOf course, just as with my talk, there have been moments when I've had to seize my cooking by the throat and make it perform at a level far beyond its ordinary limits, producing for a special occasion a meal I would serve unashamed to Fernand Point. But then, with a great and heartfelt sigh, I shrink away from the edge... back into the person that is me.\n\nFor what delights me about cooking is not getting things right but the simple pleasure of getting to know them in the first place. Today, on my daily visit to market, I came across a cabbage\u2014an ordinary plain green one\u2014but one so small and round and appetizingly demure that I had to immediately seize it up. Cradling its smooth, firm, compact form in my hand, I began to whisper in its ear the sweet nothings that would coax it into dinner.\n\nMy expectations were nothing complicated or demanding. I would simmer it in some rich broth with lots of sweet tender green peas, season it with flecks of freshly ground pepper and bits of tarragon, stir in a handful of rice to thicken it, maybe with a pat of butter to enrich it. A simple meal, but one to look forward to, even to mentally play with as the day went on, adding something more, removing something else.\n\nFor me, this is enough. To pick up some fresh piece of produce or meat and have a dish naturally cohere around it\u2014to lure my appetite into unfolding itself into a satisfactory scheme\u2014all this is what my cooking tries to be about.\n\nThe major difference that I see between myself and the good cook is not so much a matter of skill as of architecture. When it comes to food, I like structures that are simple, sturdy, and easily comprehensible, made of substances with direct sensual resonance, all fitted together with a forthright joinery\u2014honest shapes that I can conceive of in their entirety.\n\nGood cooks can entertain more complex culinary architectures in their minds than I, fitting together sophisticated dishes with instructive ease and grace. I admire that: occasionally, presented with some superbly structured dish, I can even grasp it in all its complexity, just as, during one memorable moment, I managed to hear each separate voice in a Bach fugue sounding out its cohering but resolutely contrapuntal song.\n\nFor myself, I'm most content when building a meal from a set of simple building blocks, in easily grasped shapes and appetizing primary colors, blocks that can suffer being occasionally knocked over, misplaced, or misused and still be happy to be played with next time around. I am too clumsy-fisted, too slow-witted at the stove to attempt much more, and lucky in an appetite that demands no less.\n\nAnd what's the connection with conversation? Only this: In my own experience, what makes conversation good, once basic expectations are met, has very little to do with skill and very much to do with one's sense\u2014and enjoyment\u2014of the person or persons being talked to. The more I like you and like talking to you, the less I find myself talking down\u2014or up\u2014to you. We simply connect. The best conversation, no matter the subject, lights up two selves at once.\n\nCooking should be like that, too: done not for someone but with them. For me, there is no happier moment than when I share a dish with a person who not only enjoys it but who also understands it\u2014grasps it just as they would a joke or a thought that I had been anxious to share. For this reason I like having company in the kitchen while I cook, someone with whom I can unfold\u2014and discuss\u2014the logic of my making. So are appetites entwined.\n\nThis isn't to say that I don't want to surprise and delight those I cook for, but that it is their understanding, not their praise, I truly want. When friends eat together, food should be as accessible as it is good, just like the conversation. A meal cooked brilliantly but in a style beyond those who share it sets up a table where each eater is isolated with his or her own pleasure\u2014an audience, not company.\n\nIn a restaurant, being part of an audience is expected and right, which is why we all order for ourselves: restaurants are to cooking as theaters are to talk. But among family and friends, being even a happy audience is not enough. Talking a meal is half the fun of eating it... and anyone who wants to should be able to join in.\n\nSo there we are. Some good friends are coming over for supper, the sort of friends who\u2014no matter how many\u2014can always manage to squeeze in around the kitchen table. The conversation starts even at the market as we pick out the shrimp and the hot peppers for the gumbo, and continues around the stove, beer in hand, as we take turns stirring the roux and gamble on how dark we really dare cook it before throwing in the onions and celery and chopped pepper.\n\nThe shrimp may not be as tender as they could be, but they will not be tough either\u2014for if we're not good cooks, we know enough to keep from being bad ones. The glass or two of beer will make us a little light-headed, and we will talk louder than we should and thus make more obvious the sudden pauses when we discover, to mild astonishment, that our subject has completely escaped us.\n\nBut our friends, who have come simply to partake and enjoy, will worry about none of these things. And, because this is a sharing and not a performance, neither will we. There's a lot more to cooking than being good at it.\n\nKITCHEN DIARY: SOME THOUGHTS ON OMELETS\n\nAs an Egg Pudding. It may come as good news to those who, like myself, lack the knack of flipping an omelet and must ignominiously fold it over with a fork, that there is an omelet heresy put forth by Colonel A. Kenney-Herbert in his Fifty Luncheons (circa 1895). He argues that an omelet should not be folded at all. \"Books that counsel you to turn an omelet, to fold it, to let it brown on one side, to let it fry for five minutes, etc., are not to be trusted. If you follow such advice you will produce, at best, a neat-looking egg pudding.\" I like this, for it is not merely an opinion that is being calmly flung into the face of received culinary wisdom. Given that omelets by nature are egg puddings of some sort, the Colonel's must have differed from the ordinary kind most obviously in their singular untidiness.\n\nAs Sent Straight to Hell. There's also a story attached to that short period in my life when I actually did manage by dint of fanatical practice to master an omelet-flipping wrist snap. My Lower East Side apartment, like many such, had the bathtub in the kitchen. One evening, making my nightly omelet supper (for, having no food to waste in idle practice, I made a meal of each of my efforts, night after night), I gave the flip a little too much wrist. The omelet flew out of the pan and soared across the room to the furthermost corner, where it landed with a soft plop on the rim of the tub. It hesitated there a second and then, with the barest discernible sigh, slid down the wall out of sight.\n\nI realized at once there was no way to retrieve it. No arm would fit down the crack between wall and tub. Its ungainly size and giant feet prohibited any omelet-fishing with broom handle from below. Suddenly, the pedestrian act of supper-making was transformed into a theological demonstration of the irreversible nature of a sinful act, where redemption was possible only through the intervention of divine grace. In this instance, however, no epiphany occurred. It stayed where it fell and for all I know is there still. And rather than repentance, after the astonishment and disbelief, I have to confess that I felt instead an unholy but truly delicious sense of glee. One omelet sent straight to hell.\n\nAs My Introduction to Julia Child. The source of inspiration for this bout of omelet-making was a gift from my grandmother of the just-published Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, and Julia Child\u2014which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary on October 16, 1991. (Knopf must have realized it was issuing a classic: I've never seen a book before or since with the exact day of publication printed on the copyright page.)\n\nMastering the Art of French Cooking was then (1961)\u2014and for some years afterward\u2014one of just four cookbooks that made up my entire culinary library. (For the record, the other three were Ann Rogers's Cookbook for Poor Poets (and Others), Joyce Chen's Chinese cookbook, and a battered paperback copy of the 11th edition of Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School Cook Book.)\n\nJulia Child. With all due respect to the other two authors, hers was the voice that spoke to me out of its pages and so it is by her name that I remember that book. Of course, her television persona helped with the task of name recognition, but even before that, there was no question that it was not so much the contents of the book that made me treasure it as the voice that spoke to me out of it.\n\nBefore her, as after, there were food writers who knew as much about French cooking as she did\u2014some, unquestionably, even more. But she was the first who was able to write about French cooking in resolutely American speech and with unabashed and unembarrassed American enthusiasm and appetite.\n\nShe not only broke through the snob barrier\u2014for without her, haute cuisine would have remained in the possession of such culinary mandarins as Roy Andries de Groot\u2014but she also showed the way for American sensibilities to play with the possibilities inherent in French cuisine without surrendering their own native tastes and voices. All good reasons to take this opportunity to say, again, thank you. No one else in the world could have got me, at nineteen, to add a tin-lined copper omelet pan to my neolithic batterie de cuisine, or to then pour into it a bag of navy beans and spend a whole weekend in my primitive kitchen using them as a means of practicing the flip.\nMADE TO TASTE\nMANGIAMACCHERONI\n\nBefore we started the CIT man straightened his tie, looked severely at us, and said: \"Please, as a favor, do not disgrace the pasta and use a spoon!\"... I am not certain, however, that the spoon in some cases isn't preferable to the manner in which many supposedly sophisticated Italians handle their pasta; somewhat like the Chinese with chopsticks, they push their faces close to the plate, sending in a continuous stream of pasta. A most unappetizing sight, even if it is done with gusto.\n\n\u2014Jack Denton Scott, The Complete Book of Pasta\n\nOne special word about the fine art of eating spaghetti.  \n... You will note that many Italians, at least in the less  \nelegant restaurants, do not cut these \"little strings.\" They  \ntake up a few strands on the fork, plant the tines of the  \nfork securely in the bowl of a large spoon and twist (clock-  \nwise) until the spaghetti is wound up into a little ball of  \nyarn, so to speak, then pop it in and start winding up the  \nnext mouthful. No, it is not dainty, and I am told by Italian  \nEmily Posts that nowadays \"the best people\" are not doing  \nit any more. Against this I must register my alien protest.  \nIt is impossible to be dainty eating spaghetti.\n\n\u2014Sydney Clark, All the Best in Italy\n\nRiffle through the pages of any illustrated pasta cookbook with even a modest historical perspective\u2014Vincenzo Buonassisi's Pasta, Massimo Alberini's introduction to Anna Martini's Pasta & Pizza, Anna Del Conte's Portrait of Pasta, and especially Julia della Croce's lovely Pasta Classica\u2014and concentrate entirely on the pictures. You'll see something to thrill and astonish the small child who still lingers deep within you: scene after scene of people eating pasta, alone and in groups, young and old, men, women, and children, at home and in the street... and each and every one of them eating it with their fingers.\n\nAlthough often good-humored, these drawings are not meant to be taken as merely humorous. Dating from as late as the beginning of this century, they are straightforward depictions of fact. Pasta was originally eaten, at least by the poor, in exactly the way we still naively intuit it should be: by plucking a generous pinch of sauce-soaked strands and raising them up high enough\u2014which is very high indeed\u2014so that the lips can grasp them and the mouth suck them down in a series of voluptuous gulps.\n\nSince Marco Polo did not, as we are insistently instructed in all these volumes, bring pasta back from China, he might have done his fellow Italians a good turn instead and brought them chopsticks\u2014those simple, useful, egalitarian eating tools, so perfect for catching up and conveying noodles to the mouth, as the customers of countless Chinese noodle stalls demonstrate every day. But if neatness and efficiency go to the Chinese, sheer fun belongs to the Italians\u2014looking at any of those old pictures, you can't help but smile.\n\nUnlike our other two familiar supper starches, rice and potatoes, pasta is an invention, created at a time when manners were less inhibited, the relationship to food more intimate and vital. We find the idea of eating pasta with our fingers vulgar, but vulgaris means \"common\"\u2014and for the longest time pasta was anything but. Its single ingredient, white flour, was affordable only by the privileged few. The Italian nobility found nothing wrong with eating pasta with their fingers\u2014after all, there was always the tablecloth to wipe them on.\n\nEventually, the upper classes did find this way of eating pasta a tad churlish, but only because the churls had begun eating pasta, too. Class distinctions had to be maintained. As flour became cheap and noodle vendors fought for street space in Italian cities, the educated classes took to eating their pasta with utensils, thus abandoning to the ignoranti the pleasurable task of preserving the original gusto\u2014and the original logic\u2014of this wonderful invention.\n\nOf course, in Italy it was not quite seen this way. My favorite picture in Pasta Classica shows a baffled monk, knife in one hand and fork in the other, who has hoisted up a mass of pasta between them and has no idea what to do next. Here is the classic mangiamaccheroni\u2014someone who doesn't know how to eat pasta except with his fingers. When, much more recently, the poor became able to afford eating utensils and were shamed into using them, the eleganzia one-upped them again and prohibited the use of spoons.\n\nChildren take great delight in eating spaghetti, grasping the squirmy strands and cramming them into their mouths, coating hands and faces with the sauce. Adults who have been table trained, however, can be unnerved by this experience. Italians claim that the fork was invented because noble visitors to the Bourbon court in Naples in the time of Ferdinand II were discomfited by the idea of eating pasta with their fingers\u2014but were they any less nonplussed when presented with a fork? Strands are always wriggling free from it, escaping back to the plate, and scattering as they do bits of sauce on napkin, shirt-front, tablecloth.\n\nShame, as we all know, has two faces: both hide themselves behind the hands\u2014but one of them peeps out between the fingers. The same impulse that has coerced you into twiddling those pasta strands around the fork tines can suddenly invert itself. Then you find yourself wrestling, not with the pasta, but with the temptation to rip off the tight collar, to shove away the delicate little pile of pasta on its elegant china plate, and to rush into the kitchen and plunge your hands right into the pot.\n\nThis tension\u2014as much a struggle between rich and poor as it is between appetite and restraint\u2014is the reason that almost every pasta book feels compelled to explain how pasta should be eaten... which is to say, how it should not be eaten. There are two essential rules. The first is: eat your pasta with a fork. (Don't use your fingers; don't use a spoon.) \"When it comes to eating utensils you only need a fork,\" says Fred Plotkin in a section called \"Some Thoughts on Eating Pasta\" in his Authentic Pasta Book. Then, afraid you might not have gotten the point, he repeats it in the next paragraph: \"The fork is the basic implement for eating pasta.\" Don't you, these books say over and over again, be a mangiamaccheroni.\n\nIn Italian art as much space has been given to the joys of pasta eating as Hogarth, Rowlandson, Gilray, and all their lesser imitators devoted to beer, gin, and wine. From Naples, in particular, came an almost endless stream of colored lithographs showing the Neapolitan lazzaroni\u2014who were literally born, lived, and died in the streets\u2014enjoying their daily portion of pasta. Many of these, although astonishingly vivid and controlled in their line and colour, are the work of anonymous artists... .\n\n\u2014Enrica and Vernon Jarratt, The Complete Book of Pasta\n\nThe second rule for eating pasta\u2014don't eat too much!\u2014likewise serves to drive home this all-encompassing, anti-mangiamaccheroni admonition. If, in Italian, a maccherone is a blockhead, a dolt, a numskull, a maccheronata is a beanfeast\u2014a big feed. Macaroni, the primal Italian food, has become their synonym for appetite, for hunger and its satiety. But like all of us, Italians are both drawn to and repelled by what inspires their own carnality, an ambivalence made all the stronger by macaroni's \u00e9lan vital.\n\nConsequently, at the same time that Italian mamas scold their children, and, for that matter, recalcitrant papas, to use their forks, and to not gorge themselves as if they were starving, they decorate their dining rooms with colorful lithographs showing lazzaroni\u2014street urchins\u2014enjoying themselves in just this prohibited way. Appetite is cute in the young, understandable in the poor: combine the two images and the result is irresistible: pure Italian kitsch.\n\nIn all these pictures, the scene is very much the same. The spaghetti vendor stands over a large shallow pan, resting on a brazier, in which a huge mound of pasta steams; sometimes, a reserve pile of cooked pasta waits in a bowl nearby, from which he can replenish the pan. Behind him, their necks inverted into a rack, are the small round flasks of wine he also sells. And, lastly, by his side, is another bowl\u2014this one full of grated cheese, occasionally decorated with a tastefully placed carnation.\n\nThe emphasis in all these illustrations is on the pasta. There is always plenty of it, and it is always dispensed with a generous hand. Although these vendors usually offered a simple tomato sauce for another penny, it is almost never shown. These pictures are all variations on a single theme, and that theme is having enough to eat\u2014enough pasta to eat.\n\nFurthermore, such pictures\u2014and their number is legion\u2014tell only half the story. Italy is traditionally a fuel-poor country, and our romantic image of that cuisine's rich, meaty, long-simmered pasta sauces ignores what, for the poor, was and is a very different reality. Helen Campbell writes in In Foreign Kitchens (1893):\n\nFuel is costly and the price of prepared food the merest trifle beyond its value uncooked; and thus many a family relies altogether upon cook-shops, from which ascends the smell of ever-boiling broth bubbling in huge caldrons. In the windows are mountains of smoking-hot, golden polenta; heaps of fried minnows, crisp and brown; mounds of rice; great dishes of stewed snails, dear to all Italians... . Here come the gondoliers to bargain for dinner with the cooks, whose huge ladles indicate what may be skimmed from those bubbling depths.\n\nThis was in Venice; in Naples and elsewhere, the starch was pasta, not corn or rice, and these same pasta stalls also served as cookshops for the poor and not-so-poor alike, many customers whisking their purchases home to dress them as they pleased.\n\nSuch saucing was inevitably quick and simple. The pasta dishes of the humble, whether wolfed down on the street or consumed at home, were a thing apart from the complexly dressed pastas made in kitchens that could afford not only such luxuries as cream and meat, but the stove and the fuel required to cook them.\n\nIndeed, it might be suggested\u2014adopting for a moment Lorenza de Medici's terminology in The Renaissance of Italian Cooking\u2014that, quite apart from the regional variations in pasta dishes, Italy has two essentially distinct pasta cuisines: that of the poor (pasta povera), heavy in pasta and light in sauce, and that of the rich (pasta alto-borghese), in which the sauce predominates, if not in quantity, at least in culinary importance.\n\nIn his book Sweetness and Power, Sidney Mintz quotes from a monograph on a Southern Bantu people called the Bemba, whose preferred starch, ubwali (thick balls of cooked millet), is, as he puts it in a luminous phrase, \"the nutritive anchor of an entire culture.\" Bemba cuisine is divided between food and relishes, with the food being the ubwali and the relish\u2014umunani\u2014being what is eaten with it to give it flavor: meat, caterpillars, locusts, ants, vegetables, mushrooms, etc. No matter how much umunani comes with the meal, it is the ubwali that is the food. Mintz describes some Bantu eating roasted grain off four or five corncobs, only to shout to their fellows later, \"We have not had a bite to eat all day... .\"\n\nThis distinction is one that appears again and again in human culture. It is as familiar to us as bread and butter\u2014which is one of the few foods that we still do eat with our fingers, even at formal dinners. A fresh-baked loaf of bread, still hot from the oven, is something that we can easily imagine eating in almost unlimited quantities, given enough butter to \"grease its way down.\"\n\nWhen poor people prosper, their first impulse is to have as much food as they can eat, and enough relish to dress it well. They then learn to redefine \"food\" to embrace a larger category of eatables, although the original, basic food retains an honored place at the meal. And always, with that food alone, the sense of the defining original balance remains. Just as we look askance at someone who puts too much butter on their bread, Italians abhor the idea of heaping sauce onto a dish of pasta. For them, rich or poor, it is still the spaghetti, not the sauce, that is the food.\n\nWhen we first went to Naples... Italy was poor, Naples  \nwas very poor, and some areas, including the San Lorenzo  \nQuarter where we worked in the medical school, were  \ntruly poverty stricken. But every day... we saw little  \nheaps of spaghetti and macaroni on the street curbs put  \nout by the local families for the neighborhood cats to  \ndemolish.\n\n\u2014Ancel and Margaret Keys, How to Eat Well and Stay Well the Mediterranean Way\n\nHow much pasta should we eat? Let Corby Kummer\u2014in his piece on that subject in the July 1986 Atlantic\u2014speak for all: \"The standard portion in Italy, and the size recommended on packages, is two ounces. This is fine for a first course to cut the appetite without killing it. I find three ounces an ideal portion for a main course, but hungry people might prefer four.\"\n\nSuch recommended portion sizes may be provided in the spirit of public information, but they have a subtext that serves equally as a threat. What if a hungry person prefers five ounces? Well, they had better keep their mouth shut. What else is Anna Del Conte saying when she writes in Pasta Perfect: \"I am often asked if my quantities [generally three ounces per person] are for first or main courses, but in fact I find it makes surprisingly little difference, and that people eat the same amount whether there is a main course of meat or fish, or just a salad, to follow\"?\n\nPeople, of course, eat what they are given. But who is it exactly who decided\u2014once and for all, it seems\u2014how much that amount should be? Or perhaps we should ask who set the standard portion in Italy, for it is upon this unnamed authority that all our own pasta writers seem to lean. Strangely, in the ten books whose sole subject is pasta\u2014and in the many others that treat it in some detail\u2014consulted in the preparation of this piece, not one attempts to answer this question, or whether this standard portion really is the amount of pasta that Italians really eat when they sit down at the table.\n\nThe notion of Italians, an anarchistic tribe of eaters if ever there was one, all carefully measuring out their little 125-gram portions is so ridiculous that perhaps it need only be mentioned to be dismissed. But it is good to know for sure about such things, and, as it happens, Ancel and Margaret Keys were interested in this question and, contrary to the usual practice, went out and asked around\u2014in homes, restaurants, and taxicabs\u2014all over central and southern Italy. They report their answer in How to Eat Well and Stay Well the Mediterranean Way (the earliest and still the best book on that topic):\n\nIn private homes in Italy the size of the pasta portion depends on the physical activity of the family and the make-up of the rest of the meal. For the farm laborer or stone mason the portion may be 200 grams (almost 7 ounces) or more. A farmer, his wife, and teenage child will use a half-kilogram package of pasta (roughly 18 ounces) for a meal\u2014even more during the planting or harvesting seasons.\n\nIn other words, Italians eat as much pasta as they want and need. Until recently, most Italian housewives bought their pasta loose. When they cooked it, they tossed in a handful for every eater, plus a handful for the pot. Papa might get a bigger handful than peckish Aunt Sophia, but the rule was always that there must be plenty for everybody, which is why those poor Neapolitans set out the remains of last night's supper for the kitties. No matter how poor a family was, it prided itself on having enough pasta for everyone to eat their fill\u2014which meant that there would always be a little left over that no one could be convinced to eat.\n\nWhat the Keyses also discovered was that after everyone, young and old, large and small, rich and poor, had had his fill, the average consumption of pasta was between four and five ounces per person per meal. Once pasta is put up in packages, however, that \"average\" portion is transformed into the \"recommended\" portion... a very different thing. A handful for everyone at the table and one more for the pot is no longer possible. This is the tyranny of prepackaged food: enforced portion control. Once a family is convinced to buy its pasta by the package, servings become divisible not by appetite but by the amount in the box.\n\nAll but the smallest-sized pasta is sold in Italy in 500-gram packages, a weight just a fraction over a pound. This means that standardized\u2014hence \"official\"\u2014Italian pasta recipes translate easily into American ones. We accept this assigned amount without question, partly because such portioning has long been part of our way of eating, partly because it has become tacitly understood that only the worst sort of glutton would break this social code and ask for more than his or her fair share.\n\n\"Fatso,\" \"slob,\" \"pig\"\u2014this is our translation of mangiamaccheroni, and it explains why food writers are so reluctant to reveal that many Italian families still do not let cookbooks, or any pasta package, dictate the amount of spaghetti that they are going to eat. Whatever else these writers picked up about pasta in Italy, they learned that to have too much of an appetite for it is to appear slovenly and gross; genteel people eat it delicately, in modest quantities\u2014the more modest, the more genteel... and that last word, in America, means, especially, the more thin.\n\nSuch snobbism, alas, is infinitely contagious. Waverley Root, a man not noted for his abstinence, wrote in The Cooking of Italy: \"In poorer homes, the main course is sometimes skipped and an abundant helping of pasta serves to blunt, if not to satisfy, the appetite... .\" If anyone knew that an abundant helping of pasta can itself be a main course, entirely satisfying to the appetite, it was he\u2014but to admit such a thing must have come too close to declaring himself a common glutton.\n\nAbout eight years ago, I noticed that the G. B. Ratto catalogue sold five-pound cartons of various kinds of pasta made by D. Merlino & Sons, an Oakland firm (for a tasting note on these, see below). I had only to see a picture of that bigger box of spaghetti for a sense of sweet illumination to spread through my consciousness. I took an empty tin, filled it with the contents of half a dozen linguine packages, and from then on just reached in and took out a fistful when the pasta pot was set to boil.\n\nBeing able to take as much as you want makes you notice what it is that you hold in your hand. Now, no longer squinting to see if I had taken exactly a quarter of the box, I was able to concentrate on the feel of the pasta, to notice its solidity, its accumulated heft. I learned that those dry, fragile, slightly nubbly strands are nice to hold. There's something pleasant in letting them slip through the fingers until you find that good weight. And if I took too much... well, in those days, I had a dog.\n\nPerhaps not uncoincidentally, this same period saw the growth in my interest in simple pasta sauces, if \"sauce\" is the right word for spaghetti tossed with some olive oil and a spoonful of olivada, or minced parsley, garlic, and anchovy bits. But whether it was sauced or merely seasoned with flavorful condiments, the result produced a filling, satisfying meal.\n\nAnd how much pasta did I eat? I honestly don't know. But I do know that I've eaten steaks\u2014not counting the garnish of fried onions or the baked potato\u2014that carried more calories than a whole pound of pasta. I found I could take all the spaghetti I wanted, cook it, dress it to taste, and have a filling supper that, with a glass of wine, was, as my suppers went, a relatively moderate one.\n\nEven so, even so... after about a year of this, without my really noticing it, the light was snuffed out. I found myself back to carefully eyeballing the contents of individual packages, measuring each portion to make sure I wasn't taking more than I ought. It's not easy to find permission to help yourself when every pasta box and every pasta book\u2014for that matter, every book that gives a pasta recipe\u2014tells you that your portion should never be larger than four ounces\u2014preferably less\u2014or you're nothing but a pig.\n\nPasta prudery. One price we pay for it is an overemphasis on sauce. Because we don't eat pasta like bread, we can't imagine it as being like bread\u2014something that might be good by itself, with just a little butter. How could we, when we depend on what is on the pasta to fill us up? It is as much this as anything that makes us skip through Italian pasta cookbooks for the richest sauces\u2014pesto, carbonara, bolognese, alfredo\u2014and why, to the consternation of Italians, we want to grate cheese on every pasta dish.\n\nWhat appear on the following pages are some ways of eating pasta that give permission to clearly experience the pasta, not the sauce, as the food that makes the meal\u2014and to discover that eating it to a pleasant surfeit on occasion will not necessarily make you fat. It may also tempt you to momentarily liberate yourself from a cultural conditioning even more strongly engrained than the one that forbids drinking soup from the bowl, and eat some with your fingers.\n\nIn An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, Elizabeth David describes how she used to meet that old rascal Norman Douglas for a meal of pasta at a small, seedy caf\u00e9 in Antibes. \"At the restaurant he would produce from his pocket a hunk of Parmesan cheese. 'Ask Pascal to be so good as to grate this at our table. Poor stuff, my dear, that Gruy\u00e8re they give you in France. Useless for macaroni.' And a bunch of fresh basil for the sauce. 'Tear the leaves, mind. Don't chop them. Spoils the flavour.'\"\n\nI suppose that when Elizabeth David writes \"for the sauce\" she means that these two ingredients were to be added to it, not that they would make it up. Even so, when I first read this passage, I saw a terrace flooded with Mediterranean light, two glasses of that astringent, thin, yet surprisingly potent Proven\u00e7al wine already set on the small, round table, and Pascal himself bringing out a heaping bowl of pasta, shimmering in a dressing of oil and cheese, flecked with bits of pepper and torn basil leaf. This misreading was immediate and convincing: it was exactly the meal I was just learning I would have wanted there myself.\n\nCHEESE\n\nThe original \"two-cents plain\" (al due) of the Neapolitan street vendors was a plate of pasta sprinkled with grated cheese. (According to Vincenzo Buonassisi, sauce\u2014made from tomatoes cooked down in their own juices and seasoned only with a little pepper and basil\u2014was strictly extra [al tre].) Any grating cheese may be used to dress pasta, but most versions calling for Parmesan add butter as well.\n\nSPAGHETTI WITH CHEESE AND PEPPER\n\n(ADAPTED FROM PASTA & PIZZA, BY ANNA MARTINI)\n\nSpaghetti   \nPecorino Romano  \nBlack pepper\n\nCook the pasta and drain it, but not too well. Dress at once with a handful of grated cheese per person and plenty of freshly grated black pepper, sprinkling over a tablespoon or so of the cooking water, if necessary, to transform the melted cheese into a \"lovely creamy sauce.\" Vernon Jarratt notes in The Complete Book of Pasta that \"in Lazio, whence this dish comes, the peppercorns are pounded in a mortar rather than ground, adding to the rustic simplicity of the dish.\"\n\nAfterword. Colman Andrews wrote when the above recipe originally appeared in Simple Cooking to offer the following amendment: \"Though the method you give seems to be more or less agreed upon, I got another opinion from a well-known Roman-born restaurateur in Los Angeles named Mauro Vincenti, who is something of an amateur historian/philosopher of food. Rather than letting some water remain to help form a creamy coating with the cheese, he says, the real Roman way of doing it is to drain the pasta very, very well, so that it is as dry as possible, and then bathe it in a bit of fat rendered from guanciale (cured, unsmoked pork jowl\u2014the favored pork accent for pasta in Lazio) or at least from pancetta to coat all the strands before tossing it with the cheese and pepper. The spaghetti should be cooked, Vincenti adds, filo de ferro or 'iron string,' which is firmer than al dente. That's the way the chef makes the spaghetti cacio e pepe at one of his restaurants here (both the iron string and the pancetta part), and it is indeed superb.\"\n\nHERBS\n\nOne of the simplest pasta sauces is made by tearing some fresh herb into small bits and tossing these with a good olive oil into a bowl of steaming pasta. A small quantity of almost any likely herb\u2014oregano, thyme, marjoram, chive\u2014used before the subtler notes of its aroma have had a chance to evaporate, is usually enough to give the dish the right amount of savor; only basil and parsley should be used in larger quantities than a sprig. Even an herb as potent as sage (again, only if fresh) can make a surprisingly delicious sauce when a leaf or two is minced and heated in melted butter with plenty of ground pepper. Here is another herbal sauce, made from parsley, which Sicilian coachmen once prepared for themselves at curbside while waiting for a fare.\n\nCOACHMAN'S SPAGHETTI (SICILY)\n\n(ADAPTED FROM THE ART OF SICILIAN COOKING, BY ANNA MUFFOLETTO)\n\nSeveral sprigs parsley   \nGarlic   \nPecorino Romano   \nPasta   \nOlive oil   \nFreshly ground black pepper\n\nUse a lot of parsley, mincing it together with the garlic. Grate some Romano. While the pasta cooks, heat a little olive oil in a frying pan. Sprinkle in the minced herb and remove the pan from the heat. Drain the pasta, return it to the pot, and turn into it the herb-garlic-oil mixture and the cheese. Mix this well, season generously with pepper, and serve. Since the Romano is salty, you may find no additional salt is necessary.\n\nVARIATION: In The Regional Italian Kitchen, Nika Hazelton gives a Tuscan green sauce which is made similarly, but with butter instead of olive oil and Parmesan instead of Romano (and using rather a bit more of both!). Here the pasta emerges from the pot bathed \"in a sort of creamy green sauce.\"\n\nLEMONS\n\nVERMICELLI WITH LEMON AND OLIVE OIL\n\n(ADAPTED FROM THE COMPLETE BOOK OF PASTA, BY ENRICA AND VERNON JARRATT)\n\nVermicelli   \nA few leaves of parsley   \nA large sprig of basil   \nFruity olive oil   \nFreshly squeezed lemon juice   \nSalt and white pepper\n\nWhile the pasta is cooking, tear the parsley and basil leaves into little bits. Drain the pasta, but not too well. Toss the pasta with the torn herbs. When this is well mixed, add olive oil, lemon juice, and salt and pepper, as if dressing a salad. This is one of the few pasta dishes Italians actually eat cold.\n\nVARIATIONS: Fred Plotkin adds a little minced garlic. Also a very ripe tomato, skinned, seeded, and sliced, might be tossed in.\n\nCANNED FISH\n\nThere are many Italian pasta recipes utilizing canned anchovies and tuna, but almost none that allows for the use of anything but fresh sardines. Why? Possibly because fresh sardines (in Italy a species different from our own) are quite delicate in flavor and texture; if the same dish were made with canned ones, the effect would become hopelessly oily and fishy. However, the olive oil alone from a sardine can\u2014plus lemon juice, minced garlic and parsley, and ground pepper\u2014makes a delicious pasta dressing by itself, and one of my very favorite impromptu pasta dishes came from the remains of a can of smoked oysters (using all of the liquid and mincing the last of the oysters), tossed into hot cooked pasta with lots of minced parsley.\n\nSPAGHETTI COUNTRY-STYLE (SARDINIA)\n\n(ADAPTED FROM ITALIAN REGIONAL COOKING, BY ADA BONI)\n\nFresh garlic   \nSprig of fresh oregano   \nSpaghetti   \nOlive oil   \nAnchovy fillets preserved in olive   \noil   \nPecorino Romano or Parmesan\n\nMince some garlic and the sprig of fresh oregano together. While the pasta cooks, heat some olive oil in a skillet. Drain the anchovy fillets. When the oil is hot, lower the heat and put in the fillets (one per serving), gradually working them into a paste with the tines of a fork. Then stir in the minced garlic and oregano and remove from the heat. Drain the cooked pasta, return to the pot, and toss with the oil, anchovy, garlic, and herb mixture. Let sit for 2 or 3 minutes before serving with the grated cheese.\n\nVARIATION: Marcella Hazan, in Marcella's Italian Kitchen, offers a version made as above but including as well black olives and toasted bread crumbs (about which see \"Stale Bread\" just below).\n\nSTALE BREAD\n\nSPAGHETTI WITH CROUTONS AND PROSCIUTTO\n\n(ADAPTED FROM PASTA, BY VINCENZO BUONASSISI)\n\nSpaghetti   \nButter   \nMinced salt pork or pork fat   \nProsciutto (or country ham), cut   \ninto strips   \nSmall croutons of good stale bread   \nBlack pepper\n\nWhile the pasta cooks, melt some butter in a skillet. When hot, fry the bits of salt pork until crisp, then add the prosciutto and croutons, turning them with a spatula so that the ham is wilted and the croutons lightly toasted. Toss with the cooked, drained pasta, grating in plenty of pepper.\n\nVARIATIONS: The simplest form of pasta made with stale bread involves tearing the bread into coarse crumbs, toasting these in a richly flavored olive oil until golden brown, and tossing this mixture, along with some minced parsley, into hot spaghetti. Season with salt and black pepper. Giuliano Bugialli, in his pasta book, offers a Tuscan version that also incorporates a crushed clove of fresh garlic.\n\nEGGS\n\nSPAGHETTI WITH FRIED EGGS\n\n(ADAPTED FROM PASTA, BY VINCENZO BUONASSISI)\n\nThin spaghetti   \nButter (olive oil)   \nEgg(s)   \nSalt   \nParmesan   \nBlack pepper\n\nWhile the pasta cooks, heat some butter (or a mixture of butter and olive oil) in a skillet. When it is hot, slip in one egg per person and fry until the white has set but not the yolk. Salt and remove from the heat. Drain the pasta when done and divide into portions. Place a fried egg and a share of the pan butter on each. Serve with the grated Parmesan. The egg should be broken up and stirred into the pasta with the cheese before it is eaten, and the dish seasoned with salt and pepper.\n\nVARIATION: Anna Del Conte gives a similar version in Pasta Perfect made with garlic, hot pepper flakes, olive oil, and Romano.\n\nOLIVES\n\nSPAGHETTI WITH CAPERS AND BLACK OLIVES (APULIA)\n\n(ADAPTED FROM THE MONDADORI REGIONAL ITALIAN COOKBOOK, BY ANNA MARTINI)\n\nSpaghetti   \nCapers   \nBlack Mediterranean-style olives   \nRed pepper flakes   \nOlive oil   \nTomato paste\n\nWhile the pasta is cooking, drain and chop the capers. Pit the olives, tear the flesh into pieces, and put these with the capers in a bowl with a pinch of red pepper flakes and some olive oil. Stir in just enough tomato paste to add some flavor\u2014in the same proportion as vinegar to oil in a vinaigrette. Drain the cooked pasta, return to the pot, and toss with the sauce. Let sit for a few minutes before serving.\n\nVARIATION: Instead of the olives, use a spoonful of olivada\n\n\u2014which condimento, of course, serves as a fine sauce by itself.\n\nOLIVE OIL\n\nOf course, the simplest way with pasta is to sauce it with some good olive oil and to eat it with a pepper mill and a bowl of coarse salt by your elbow. Pasta and olive oil... like bread and butter, you never know how good it is until you make a meal of it, all alone\u2014that is, all by itself and all by yourself. Both the olive oil and the pasta should be as good as you can get, if only because eating them like this is the best way to discover how good they can be\u2014to know, once again, the satisfaction of that most primordial of combinations, starch and fat. Of all the 653 pasta recipes in Vincenzo Buonassisi's superlative codex, Pasta, the humblest of them all is #35. It is called simply \"fried pasta\" and is described as an old Neapolitan dish. To say the name is to know the recipe: you take any kind of leftover pasta set aside for the cat, fry it in hot olive oil, salt it, and eat it.\n\nA plate of pan-fried pasta! It immediately calls up the image of a midnight meal, of doors locked, shutters fastened, of the hot stove, the moist steam of the pasta water, the rich smell of heating oil. Bread and butter, even toasted bread and butter, is one thing, fried bread is another... and the same is true here. Crisp, yielding, everywhere greasy, fried pasta is messy, vulgar, and almost feral in its need for privacy. All cuisines have a dish like this at their very heart, food that simply, fiercely, says: Eat.\n\n  For further exploration, try Fred Plotkin's Calabrese pasta sauce of sliced raw onion, olive oil, and hot pepper flakes in The Authentic Pasta Book; Mary Taylor Simeti's Sicilian pesto of basil, almonds, and raw tomatoes in Pomp and Sustenance; and, for the truly adventurous, the spaghetti with basil and whole cloves of uncooked garlic in Bugialli on Pasta.\n\nA NOTE ON AGLIO E OLIO\n\nThose who are particularly addicted to spaghetti and to garlic will find this dish excellent, others will probably abominate it.\n\n\u2014Elizabeth David, Italian Food\n\nGarlic mixed with olive oil is very possibly the most ancient and primitive of all the condiments of the poor. And, at least before olive oil became the relatively expensive commodity it now is in Italy, spaghetti con aglio e olio was one of the last resorts of the hungry\u2014and thus, in that special sense, it is in the minds of many Italians the very first sauce of all. As Giuliano Bugialli wrote in Bugialli on Pasta:\n\nAglio e olio is the simplest of vegetable or herb dressings for pasta, and it is still the most used, in many small variations, all over Italy. It seems reasonable to regard it as possibly the oldest of all dressings.\n\nBecause it is good, filling, and quick to make, all Italians, poor or not, turn to spaghetti con aglio e olio when they are simply ravenous, something that must have been communicated to Fred Plotkin, since this is the one dish where (in his Authentic Pasta Book) he admits to eating more than the standard pasta ration\u2014a third, rather than a quarter, of a pound. (\"This recipe is for a very copious serving, but people like to eat a great deal of this [italics mine]\"\u2014really a lot of noise for only one and a third more ounces of spaghetti.)\n\nThe simplest version of spaghetti con aglio e olio calls for the garlic to be minced or crushed and mixed with the oil into hot pasta, still damp from a strictly cursory draining. This is the method to follow for those who want the strongest contrast of flavors, and some seek to enhance the polarity further by using a fruity, sediment-rich oil and grating or crushing the garlic directly into the pasta.\n\nA mellower effect may be obtained by mincing the garlic and then warming (but not frying) it in the oil over a very low flame, to which mixture can be added, if one desires, some minced herb\u2014usually parsley, cilantro, or fresh basil\u2014with the amounts of all these ingredients to be judged by one's own appetite and taste.\n\nPossibly the most popular variation on this dish is spaghetti con aglio, olio, e peperoncino, in which a small (or not so small!) amount of fresh or dried hot pepper is added, enriching the flavor of the sauce and enhancing the sense of heat already provided by the garlic. This unabating, lubricious warmth, so soothing to the appetite, is surely one of the subliminal attractions of the mixture. This dish comes from the Abruzzi mountains, but it has been adopted by Italians everywhere, often prepared, note Enrica and Vernon Jarratt, \"by the husband for himself and a few surviving cronies when they get home at one in the morning after a serious night's drinking to find the lady of the house fast asleep.\"\n\nThe version in Carlo Middione's The Food of Southern Italy\u2014from Basilicata, the province that makes up the instep of the Italian boot\u2014pounds together whole dried chile peppers and cloves of garlic in a mortar to produce a sauce of compelling pungency (see adaptation below)... so much so that, Middione claims, compared to it, the hot dishes of the American South and Southwest are \"mere embers compared to roaring flames.\"\n\nThe more elegant versions of spaghetti con aglio, olio, e peperoncino direct that both the garlic and hot pepper be strained out of the oil before the pasta is dressed. But as Ada Boni comments in Italian Regional Cooking, \"this, curiously enough, does not happen when the dish is served in a trattoria... . On the contrary, there is a great willingness to provide both extra garlic and chili... ,\" showing that in Italy, as in this country, such dishes find in these establishments their last bastion against encroaching gentility.\n\nInstead, if elegance is desired, incorporate some fresh butter. In Honey from a Weed, Patience Gray describes the evolution of this version. The first, the Mantuan School, insists that the garlic be sliced and fried a moment in hot olive oil\u2014just until the slices turn color. Then, retrieved from the pan, these pieces are used with fresh butter to flavor al dente spaghetti, with or without chopped parsley and/or grated Parmesan. \"The other school of thought,\" she writes:\n\ncherishes the fragrance which emanates from sliced cloves of fresh garlic, particularly when... newly pulled in June, coming in contact with hot spaghetti in a heated white china bowl in which a tablespoon of olive oil is warming. In this case, butter is lavishly added, and chopped parsley or basil, with plenty of Parmesan mixed in.\n\nMACCHERONI DI FUOCO/FIERY MACARONI\n\n(ADAPTED FROM CARLO MIDDIONE'S THE FOOD OF SOUTHERN ITALY)\n\n\u00bc cup good fruity olive oil plus 1   \ntablespoon   \n3 or 4 cloves of garlic, peeled   \n4 to 6 dried small chile pods,   \nstemmed and (if wished) seeded   \nSalt   \n1 pound spaghetti\n\nHeat the quarter cup of oil in a small skillet over medium heat. Add the garlic and peppers. Stir until the garlic turns gold. Turn this into a mortar with a teaspoon of salt and pound into a paste. Thin this to a thick sauce with a spoonful or so of pasta water. Cook the pasta in salted water al dente. Drain not too well and toss with the remaining oil. Serve in warmed bowls with a portion of sauce spooned on top.\n\nTASTING NOTES: CALIFORNIA PASTA, OLIVE OIL, AND GRATING CHEESE\n\nThese days, even here in Maine, there are gourmet stores that offer fine imported Italian foods\u2014but at a price. It's hard to have a casual hand in dispensing ingredients that are always costly and sometimes difficult to come by, and we are always on the lookout for reliable domestic sources for good-quality, not-too-expensive pasta, olive oil, and grating cheese. Pasta might seem to be the least of our worries, our local supermarket now carrying at least three imported varieties. But the brand we like the best\u2014DeCecco\u2014is often in short supply and, at its cheapest, $1.49 the pound box.\n\nThis is why we were delighted to discover D. Merlino & Sons, in Oakland, New World pasta makers perpetuating Old World traditions, making eighty-seven varieties of pasta from 100 percent durum semolina. Their spaghetti is still available in continuous strands, bent over and over onto themselves in 13-inch folds. Their linguine has the fresh wheat taste and resilient texture we like, and the price, around $5 for 10 pounds (even with the additional shipping), was more than acceptable. Call or write for a price list and a photocopy of their pasta chart. D. Merlino & Sons, 1001 83rd Avenue, Oakland, CA 94621; (510) 568-2151.\n\nThere is a simple fascination in sampling the family of aged dry Monterey Jacks made by Ig Vella and experiencing a very decent, honest American cheese as it develops character, authority, and an exciting depth of flavor. We tasted three cheeses: the regular dry Jack, aged seven months; the special select, aged one year; and, finally, a piece of the \"California Gold.\" This last is aged at least two years (our wheel, bought in 1990, was dated July 1987!). Good Monterey Jack has a fresh sweetness, and drying it enrobes this quality with an increasingly nutty tang. By the time it is two years old, it has achieved a deep golden color, a wonderful granular texture, and a unique, intense flavor that still retains the sweet dairy freshness of the original cheese. We thought this final version as excellent for eating as it was for grating, very fairly priced at $7.25 per pound for an 8-pound wheel. At the time of writing, their gold medal-winning dry Jack was $6.25 per pound (with a 4-pound minimum). Vella Cheese Company, P.O. Box 191, Sonoma, CA 95476; (800) 848-0505. A descriptive brochure is available.\n\nMy experience with California virgin olive oils has been a hohum affair at best, and I approached the Sciabica family's collection of varietal extra-virgin olive oils with a little skepticism. However, after the first tasting, we decided to change our house oil to Sciabica's Mission variety natural olive oil, a sweet, clean, golden oil with a deliciously lingering olive flavor (there is a similar-tasting organic version). The care the Sciabicas take in producing all these first-pressing, extra-virgin oils is evident in their artisanal character; the mouth does not feel manipulated by clever blending but is allowed to encounter the character of the year's harvest of each particular variety.\n\nThe Sciabicas actually offer pressings from some of their varieties picked at different times of the year. Their \"fall harvest\" varietals are made from olives gathered early in the season, producing oils with a distinctive green tint and an earthier taste. This presence was a bit too raw for us in the Mission variety fall harvest, but the Manzanillo variety fall harvest had the full character of some Italian peasant-style oils, with a fruity flavor and a throaty burn. Finally, there is the Sevillano variety fall harvest oil: deep gold-green, fruity, very fragrant, with a surprisingly artichoke-like sweetness that sets it apart from any other olive oils we've ever tasted\u2014the perfect present for the olive oil connoisseur. At the time of writing, Sciabica oils run about $25 a gallon, with small sizes available. A tasting pack of six 6-ounce bottles can be ordered for $36. All prices are exclusive of shipping. Write to Nick Sciabica & Sons, P.O. Box 1246, Modesto, CA 95353; (800) 346-5483. Their catalogue and price list are free.\nMEATBALL METAPHYSICS\n\nThe meatball is a food with \"permanent culinary refugee status\" stamped on its passport. It is at ease in almost any cuisine but rarely made to feel at home there, for either too big a fuss is made over it or else it is snubbed entirely. I'll bet, for example, that no French meatball dish springs to mind. Italians do make meatballs but rarely boast of it: they claim spaghetti and meatballs is a slander against their cuisine. Likewise, the Swedes are mortified that their cooking is known to us almost entirely through an ersatz appetizer to which we have given the name of Swedish meatballs.\n\nPerhaps it's because meatballs aren't used to polite society. Stanley Kunitz helped me place them when I read in his essay \"Seedcorn and Windfall\" about a young student revolutionary, Konstantin Paustovsky, who, during the reign of Nicholas II, shot Minister Stolypin dead at the Kiev opera and was sentenced to be hanged. He accepted his fate with equanimity: \"What possible difference can it make to me if I eat two thousand fewer meatballs in my life?\"\n\nThis is where the meatball belongs, feeding students and revolutionaries. The imagination quickly sketches out the rest: the seedy, back-street bistro in some Middle European city, windows steamed over, air thick with the fumes of cigarette smoke, strong tea, and boiled cabbage, the atmosphere heady with political passion and melancholic irony. And a menu that features meatballs as its only meat dish.\n\nThat's the meatball on its own turf: mocking eyes under an unruly shock of hair, a worn cloth coat belted tightly around the waist, a sheaf of samizdat crushed deep in its one good pocket. Little wonder that around us, even after all the passing years, the meatball is still a stranger in a strange land. And we, in turn, go on thinking of it as still wearing its immigrant tag, the point of origin written in indelible ink: what American meatball dish have we allowed to forget its foreign provenance?\n\nBecause, familiar as they are, there's still something a little embarrassing about meatballs, something not quite comme il faut. They confuse us by being vulgar and delicate all at once, and a little defiant besides. Originally made mostly of sinew and gristle and the least bits of meat and fat, meatballs were willed into existence by determined eaters whom fate had denied any right to meat\u2014but who themselves determined otherwise.\n\nDon't confuse them, then, with the delicate rissoles and forcemeat dishes that amuse the mouths of the wealthy while they wait for the roast suckling pig to be brought to table; meatballs are a food eaten by people who believe they deserve more than they are given. Meatballs are a dish of the aspiring poor and the displaced genteel\u2014and especially, the food of artists, students, dreamers, and other malcontents who have taught themselves to wear their poverty with a flourish. In the meatball they find an insouciance that matches their own. What is a meatball, after all, if not a triumph of quick wit over brute reality?\n\nAll this is why we Americans\u2014for whom the lowest imaginable common denominator in meat is ground chuck\u2014have found it hard to take the meatball's measure, or it ours. Here, where its traditional makings are processed into dog food, it has had a hard struggle to find an identity. It beefed itself up into a meatloaf, only to discover it had become fat and stupid\u2014and no more understood than before. And it watched its children grow up to be hamburgers\u2014wholesome, juicy, and utterly bland.\n\nThat doesn't mean that the only good meatball is made out of the butcher's scrap pail, but to know them at their best, you do have to taste the crunch of that original gristle in the back of\u2014if not your mouth\u2014at least your mind. Otherwise, that hard-won tenderness becomes mere mildness and mush. This isn't sentimentality speaking, either, but the logic of their making. Because her hoard of meaty oddments were so tough and gristly, a cook had to run them through the grinder twice, and took advantage of that to use the first grinding to work in some extra fat (the meat being not only tough but lean) and the next to grind in some flavorings\u2014garlic, onion, lemon peel\u2014which not only lent flavor but helped tenderize. Hence, each batch of meatballs was unique, with its own textures and flavors.\n\nThese days, however, there are no recipes that encourage you to grind your own meatballs. Ground meat is so readily available that it seems an impossible undertaking to convince anyone that the result might be worth the effort. But most recipes\u2014including the ones that follow\u2014can easily be adapted so to make the meatballs from scratch. Simply put the meat through a grinder or process it in a food processor fitted with a steel blade. Not only will that give you the superior texture of a knife-cut grind, but it will allow you to combine, say, the trimmings of leftover veal breast with some pork shoulder, working in some shallots and a sprig of summer savory.\n\nNor should you hesitate to throw in a handful or two of bread crumbs. Their purpose, besides serving as a meat extender, is to give the meatballs lightness and grace. They soften the texture, retain the juices, and help each keep shape in the cooking pot. And a little beaten egg can provide both binding and an appetizing gloss. Neither should be overdone. The main ingredient in a meatball must be meat.\n\nA final caution. Chopped raw onion mixed into ground meat will weep moisture into the meatballs while cooking, giving them a sour taste and often causing them to fall apart. This is why the directions below call for sweating the onions in a hot skillet before adding them to the meatball mixture. But if you grind everything together yourself, you can omit this step. This is why traditional recipes allow the raw onion to be mixed with the meat: ground together, the onion mixture is evenly spread through the mixture and its vapors escape while cooking.\n\nKEFTEDES ON SKEWERS\n\n(SERVES 4 TO 6)\n\nOlive oil   \n1 medium onion, minced   \n11/2 pounds lean ground lamb   \n1 teaspoon fresh mint, rosemary,   \nor Greek oregano, minced   \n2 tablespoons parsley, minced   \n1 egg, beaten   \n1/2 cup pine nuts, minced   \nSalt and black pepper to taste\n\nSoak six 10-inch bamboo skewers in water. Heat a little olive oil in a small skillet and saut\u00e9 the minced onion until it is just translucent. Remove from the heat. Combine meat, herbs, egg, saut\u00e9ed onion, and pine nuts in a mixing bowl and, using your hands, mix them into a coarse paste, seasoning this with salt and pepper. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and set aside for about 30 minutes so the flavors will commingle.\n\nPreheat the broiler or heat charcoal in a grill. Divide the mixture roughly into two halves, and those into two halves again. With damp hands, mold the meat mixture around each skewer into fat finger-shaped sausages, roughly 2 inches in length, fitting four per skewer, with each of the four mounds of seasoned lamb making six keftedes (one and one-half skewers).\n\nGrill over the hot coals or in the broiler, turning often, for about 5 to 6 minutes (don't overcook them, or they'll be dry and tasteless). Serve on a bed of hot rice.\n\nSPANISH MEATBALL SOUP\n\n(SERVES 4 TO 6 AS A MEAL)\n\n3 to 4 scallions, minced   \n3 cloves garlic, minced   \nOlive oil   \n1 pound ground pork   \n1 cup fresh bread crumbs   \n2 eggs, beaten   \n\u00bc cup pine nuts, chopped   \n1/8 teaspoon cinnamon   \nSalt and black pepper to taste   \nFlour for coating   \n4 cups water   \n3 to 4 sprigs of fresh parsley,   \nminced   \nToasted bread squares brushed   \nwith olive oil\n\nSaute the minced scallion and garlic in a skillet in a little olive oil until the scallion is wilted and the garlic translucent. In a mixing bowl combine the pork, bread crumbs, eggs, saut\u00e9ed garlic and scallion, chopped pine nuts, cinnamon, and salt and pepper to taste. Beat with a wooden spoon until the mixture is light.\n\nWith moistened hands, shape the mixture into meatballs the size of walnuts, lightly coating each with flour as it is finished. Heat a few tablespoons of olive oil in a large cooking pot with a cover. When the oil is hot, saut\u00e9 the meatballs, gently turning them as necessary, until they are golden brown. Add the water and the parsley. Bring the water to a gentle simmer and cook\u2014never boiling\u2014for 15 minutes. Taste for seasoning, adding salt and pepper as necessary. Serve with the toasted bread squares as a garnish.\n\nMEATBALLS IN TOMATO SAUCE\n\n(ADAPTED FROM THE FINE ART OF ITALIAN COOKING BY GIULIANO BUGIALLI)\n\n(SERVES 4 WITH PASTA OR BOILED RICE)\n\n1 pound ground lean sirloin   \n\u00bc cup pine nuts, chopped fine   \n\u00bc cup freshly grated Parmesan   \n\u00bc cup plus 2 tablespoons olive oil   \nFlour for coating   \n1 or 2 fresh sage leaves   \n1 clove garlic, minced   \n1 cup imported canned tomatoes,   \ndrained and coarsely chopped,   \nwith the drained liquid reserved   \nSalt and black pepper\n\nIf possible, grind the beef yourself in a meat grinder or food processor fitted with a steel blade so that it retains a slightly coarse texture. Put the ground meat in a bowl with the pine nuts, Parmesan, and 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Beat with a wooden spoon until well mixed. Divide the mixture in half and then in half again, into four equal amounts. Divide each of these into four oval-shaped meatballs, coating each one lightly with flour as it is made.\n\nHeat the remaining \u00bc cup of olive oil in a large flat saucepan. When the oil is hot, add the sage, the minced garlic, and the meatballs and saut\u00e9 these over medium heat, turning them gently so they will brown on all sides. Then add the chopped tomatoes to the pan with the meatballs, cover, and simmer over low heat for about 10 minutes.\n\nTaste for seasoning, adding salt and pepper to taste. If the sauce seems too thick, thin it cautiously with a little of the reserved tomato liquid. Cover again and continue to simmer, checking occasionally for threat of scorching, until the sauce is almost completely absorbed, or for about another 15 minutes. Pick out the sage leaves before serving.\n\nRUSSIAN BITKI WITH DILL SAUCE\n\n(SERVES 4 WITH NOODLES OR RICE)\n\nFor the meatballs\n\n1 small onion, minced   \n2 tablespoons unsalted butter   \n1/2 cup fresh bread crumbs   \n\u00bc cup milk   \n1/2 pound lean ground beef   \n1/2 pound ground veal   \n1 egg, beaten   \nSalt and black pepper to taste   \nFlour for coating\n\nFor the dill sauce\n\nUp to 2 tablespoons butter   \n2 tablespoons flour   \n1 cup chicken stock   \n1 cup milk   \n2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice   \n2 tablespoons minced fresh dill   \n1 egg yolk   \nSalt and black pepper to taste\n\nTo make the meatballs: Saut\u00e9 the minced onion in a tiny bit of the butter until it is translucent. Remove from the heat. Soak the bread crumbs in the milk, squeeze out the excess, and then mix with the ground meats, onion, and beaten egg. Season to taste with salt and pepper and then beat with a wooden spoon until mixture is smooth and light. Hands damp, form the mixture into meatballs the size of walnuts, dusting each with flour as it is formed. In a large skillet, melt the remaining butter and fry the meatballs until brown and cooked, about 10 minutes. Remove meatballs and keep warm.\n\nTo make the dill sauce: Add enough butter to that already in the skillet to make 2 tablespoons (if the meat was fatty, you may prefer to pour out the accumulated grease and begin afresh). When this has melted, stir in the flour gradually until it is all absorbed. Pour in the stock and milk gradually, stirring all the while, until the flour cooks and the mixture thickens. Then mix in the lemon juice and dill. Remove the pot from the heat for a minute, and then whisk in the egg yolk. Finally, add the meatballs to the sauce and return to the heat\u2014the sauce must not boil\u2014for about 3 minutes, or until the taste is smooth and the sauce nicely thick. Add salt and pepper if needed. Serve over rice or buttered egg noodles.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: Russians like dill very much, and recipes call for twice the amount given above; feel free to adjust this to your taste. If need be, 2 teaspoons of dried dill leaf may be used instead of the fresh leaf.\n\nDANISH FRIKADELLER IN BEER\n\n(SERVES 6 TO 8 AS A MEAL WITH NOODLES)\n\n4 tablespoons butter   \n1 medium onion, minced   \nSalt and black pepper   \n1/8 teaspoon nutmeg   \n4 slices stale bread   \n1 pound ground beef   \n1 pound ground pork   \n1 egg, beaten   \nFlour for coating   \n1 bottle (12 ounces) Danish beer   \n2 teaspoons lemon juice\n\nMelt 2 tablespoons butter in a large saucepan. Add the onion and saute until translucent. Add the salt, pepper, and nutmeg, mix well, and remove from the heat. With determined fingers or a food processor fitted with the steel blade, crush the stale bread into fine crumbs. Put these and the meat into a mixing bowl and, with your hands or a wooden spoon, work into a soft paste. Mix in the seasoned onion bits and, lastly, the beaten egg. With damp hands, roll this mixture into meatballs about the size of a walnut, giving each, when formed, a light dusting of flour.\n\nMelt the remaining butter in the same saucepan. Add the meatballs and cook these over medium heat until nicely browned. Then add the beer and the lemon juice. Bring just to a boil, reduce the heat so that the liquid barely simmers, and cook for 20 to 25 minutes. Serve with buttered noodles sprinkled with toasted rye bread crumbs.\n\nMEATBALLS WITH SPINACH AND CHICKPEAS\n\n(ADAPTED FROM A BOOK OF MIDDLE EASTERN FOOD BY CLAUDIA RODEN)\n\n(SERVES 4 TO 6 WITH BOILED RICE)\n\n1 medium onion, minced   \n3 tablespoons olive oil   \n11/2 pounds ground lamb   \nSalt and black pepper   \n2 (10-ounce) packages fresh   \nspinach   \n1 can (20 ounces) chickpeas,   \ndrained   \n2 cloves garlic, crushed   \n1 teaspoon ground coriander\n\nSaute the minced onion in a little of the olive oil until it just turns translucent. Remove from the heat. When cool enough to handle, mix with the ground meat and season to taste with salt and black pepper. Form into meatballs the size of walnuts. Add the rest of the olive oil to the same pan used to cook the onions and saut\u00e9 the meatballs for a few minutes, or until they are browned.\n\nWash the spinach well to remove all grit, discarding stems and any damaged leaves. Remove leaves from water but do not drain. Put the spinach in a large saucepan. Cover, lower heat, and let it stew just until the leaves wilt and turn tender (the moisture clinging to the leaves should be sufficient cooking liquid). Put the spinach into a colander set over a bowl. Gently press to remove excess moisture and then turn the spinach onto a cutting board, reserving the liquid. Coarsely chop it with a knife.\n\nReturn the chopped spinach and liquid to the pot. Stir in the drained chickpeas and meatballs, along with any remaining olive oil, cover again, and simmer for a half hour, adding a little water if necessary. While this cooks, blend the crushed garlic with a pinch of coarse salt and fry this with the coriander in a few more drops of olive oil until the garlic softens and the coriander releases its aroma. Stir this final seasoning into the dish just as it goes to table. Serve over or with boiled rice.\nGARLIC SOUP\n\nAlong the Mediterranean, an a\u00efgo bou\u00efdo is considered to be very good indeed for the liver, blood circulation, general physical tone, and spiritual health. A head of garlic is not at all too much for two quarts of soup. For some addicts, it is not even enough.\n\n\u2014Beck, Bertholle, and Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Vol. I)\n\n\"And the bread, does it get dry?\"\n\n\"Hard as a stone to kill a dog. Too hard to eat without grinding teeth. But at night if there is no cooked food, one boils water with a little garlic and dips in the bread. That is good.\"\n\n\u2014Eliza Putnam Heaton, By-Paths in Sicily\n\nWhy is garlic soup, which is so similar to onion soup, being equally as tasty and possibly even more soul-satisfying, comparatively so little known? The answer, I think\u2014which is interesting not only in its own right but because it helps explain the power this soup still manages to exert over the imagination of those who are drawn to it\u2014lies in the powerful sexual overtones that garlic exudes, and more particularly still in the difference between the sexual overtones of garlic and onion.\n\nThese overtones are, of course, metaphoric and this comparison can only be drawn so far. But it is no less real for that. Like the sexual parts themselves, garlic bulbs have the ability to overpower our senses and pervade our body with sensation. Unlike other foods, whose capacity to stimulate is generally limited to the nose and the mouth, onion and\u2014especially\u2014garlic can pervade our entire sensual being with its presence, an experience, also like sexuality, that can be exhilarating but also disturbing, even profoundly distressing.\n\nThe onion, although it might superficially appear the more powerful, since it is the most awkward to handle\u2014its juices alone make us weep\u2014is actually the weaker of the two, being the one more amenable to control. With cooking it becomes sweet and tame, its aroma reduced to a mere husky-throated whisper.\n\nGarlic, on the other hand, has a power at once more intimate and more muscular, for it attracts us through an act of aggressive seduction. Cooking may smooth its roughest edges, but that it is thus tamed is nothing but an illusion, for once ingested it suffuses our body with its musky scent, announcing its presence to the world through all our bodily exhalations, both sweat and breath.\n\nIn other words, where the onion allows itself to be seduced and its charms to yield to the desire of the eater, garlic is the ravisher, dominating those who would eat it, and then crowing that subjugation to the world through the body's every pore. It allows only two possible responses, apart from shunning it entirely: we can rub it raw on our chest and shamelessly swagger our predilection or use it in pathetic homeopathic doses in hopes that we will not be caught out.\n\nAlthough I don't doubt that garlic possesses all the healthful qualities claimed for it, these would have been invented anyway if they did not already exist\u2014as they were invented for tobacco, and for the same reason. Exactly what disgusts us about garlic and tobacco (for both of these have earned the epithet \"filthy\") is also what draws us to them: they are at once so pervasive and so comforting. They drench us with their presence, satiate us beyond hunger, as if we consumed not only their substance but their spirit as well. It is only to others that we stink: we ourselves feel as if intoxicated in a heady perfume. It's not for nothing that a nineteenth-century commentator wrote of the effect of garlic that it \"works upon you like haschisch.\" And of all dishes in which garlic plays a part, this is most true of garlic soup.\n\nI'm no food historian, but I'd be willing to put a small wager to the effect that garlic soup\u2014at least in the form that I'm about to describe it\u2014originated in Catalonia, that former Spanish kingdom, now a region, that once included a goodly portion of Mediterranean France. The Catalans were and still are brilliant cooks, adept in dishes conjured from olive oil, garlic, and brightly fragrant herbs and spices, all of which are the very essence of this dish. And while it is, in one form or another, everywhere available in Spain and Portugal and has also percolated through southern France, it has not spread much farther. My casual researches located no Latin American version nor any around the Mediterranean, at least not beyond Italy; there are several Arabic and North African garlic soups, but they are of a quite different composition.\n\nIn any case, the common origins of the Spanish sopa de ajo and the Proven\u00e7al a\u00efgo bou\u00efdo (or a\u00efgo bolido, as some have it) are unmistakable, especially in their simplest and no doubt original form, built out of nothing more than a crust of dried bread, some boiling water, a handful of herbs, and the garlic itself. Indeed, a\u00efgo bou\u00efdo means simply \"boiled water.\" Boiled water... it doesn't sound very satisfying at all, and yet the Proven\u00e7als also say of it, \"L'a\u00efgo bou\u00efdo sauvo la vido,\" which roughly translates as \"a\u00efgo bou\u00efdo, saver of lives.\"\n\nHow can this be? Like onion soup, the origins of garlic soup are that it was used as a sop. Until recently, and especially in areas where wood was at a premium, the bread ovens in small communities were not fired every day\u2014often not every week. Consequently, you had either to learn to do without bread or to make do with stale. When it became too hard to chew (especially when one had only a few bad teeth), it was dipped into a hot liquid to soften it and make a meal.\n\nThe focus, then, is on the bread, the staff of life: the water, seasoned with garlic and herbs, was a means, not an end. The bread provided both the substance and some of the savor, for a good peasant bread would have the tang of sour and salt and the sweet taste of wheat. If a chunk of bread does have all these things, and if it is really and truly dried out, you'll be surprised both at how much flavor it can give to simple water... and at how much texture it has, even after the sopping.\n\nEven so, appetite is not sparked by the idea of dunking the bread into potato or carrot or cabbage water. The two things are not equal; the liquid insults the bread. On the other hand, meat broth is also not right. It is too rich; it condescends. If you can afford meat broth, you don't put stale bread in it.\n\nHerbs and garlic, however, like stale bread, are at once less and more than ordinary food. They work together to perform an act of magic. Here is the original, true stone soup of the folktale, the one that is made of nothing but the faith that we are not meant to starve. A dried crust, a few bits of grass and weed, a bulb of garlic, a little water, a pinch of salt: heat them together and they produce an aroma of such intensity that you inhale it through your pores as much as your nostrils, a flavor that ravishes your mouth and fills and soothes your stomach, a presence that pervades every atom of your body and intoxicates your mind. There is no meat soup, no other kind of soup at all, that works such miracles... let alone out of nothing much at all. L'a\u00efgo bou\u00efdo sauvo la vido.\n\nKnowing this much about garlic soup, you already see that a recipe is superfluous for making it. For each eater, take two or three cloves of garlic, peel and crush them, and then stir them into a cupful of boiling water. Set this to simmer and add a pinch of aromatic herb or two\u2014the Proven\u00e7als add fresh sage with wanton abandon and a goodly amount of thyme, while the Catalans add a generous pinch of paprika and maybe a coarsely chopped tomato. In either instance, float a splash of olive oil over the top. Let this simmer for a good half hour and then pour it over a hard slab of stale bread. Stir in a portion of freshly minced parsley and fall to.\n\nEven at this simple level there is much toying with the formula, and you should consider nothing in it fixed. Other herbs can be used, like bay leaf or oregano, such spices as nutmeg or clove, or an aromatic piece of lemon or orange peel. (I also feel that a few drops of good wine vinegar enhance the flavor of a bread broth.) If you prefer a less pungent herbal presence, consider some minced fresh fennel, both bulb and root. Either potatoes or vermicelli can be used instead of the bread. And many like to sprinkle over a handful of grated Parmesan at the same time as (or instead of) the parsley.\n\nI give this version in proportions to feed a single person because it's unlikely you'll want to serve it to anyone but yourself. It is too rude to be anything more than a solitary repast, a self-administered analeptic meant to get the blood stirring again after a hike through a blizzard or a drenching from a summer thunderburst. It is, as claimed, an amazing restorative and at the same time a great soother of nerves... just the thing to lull your aching soul and coax you back to bed when a bout of anxiety has tumbled you out of sleep.\n\nBut to serve it to others, the soup needs... not improvement exactly, but a little socialization\u2014and a little adaptation, not at all to obscure the dish's rustic origins but to compensate for aspects of it that we cannot easily hope to duplicate in our modern kitchens.\n\nFor example, while ordinary French bread is famous for its staling ability (what's bought for breakfast can be too much rusk for supper), it still lacks both the deep savor of the sourer rustic loaf and its density of texture. This robs the broth. So the bread is toasted to give it more flavor. Possibly, in this case, chicken or meat broth is used as well. (Another argument for meat broth is the quality of one's tap water, since the aftertaste of chlorine can muddy a mouthful of flavor that should be full of bright edges all around.) And since the soup is too emphatic to serve as a first course and so must do as a meal, it is enhanced with such additional nourishment as cheese and\u2014particularly\u2014eggs, for when the yolks are used to thicken this soup they give it a rich and velvety consistency, perfect foil to the garlic's urgent presence.\n\nThe following recipes pick up this theme, working garlic soup through some of its more attractive modern adaptations: hearty, savory, soul-satisfying, and yet still suitable for company. But in each of them lingers the old enchantment, if you dare let your tongue set it free.\n\nSOUPE \u00c0 L'AIL\n\n(ADAPTED FROM MONET'S TABLE BY CLAIRE JOYES)\n\n(SERVES 6)\n\n12 cloves of garlic   \n1/2 loaf stale French bread   \n6 tablespoons unsalted butter   \n6 eggs   \nSalt and black pepper   \nMinced parsley for garnish\n\nHeat 6 cups of water in a cooking pot. When it comes to a boil, reduce to a simmer and add the garlic cloves. Cook until these are tender, about 15 minutes. Remove the pot from the heat. Fish out the garlic with a strainer and, with a mortar and pestle, work it into a smooth paste. Stir this back into the cooking liquid.\n\nCut the bread into croutons, each about a half-inch square. Reserve 2 tablespoons of butter and melt the rest in a large skillet. Stir in the croutons and, over medium heat, turn them with a spatula until they are evenly browned on all sides. Distribute these evenly among six warmed soup bowls.\n\nBreak the eggs into a mixing bowl and whisk into this 1/2 cup of the soup liquid, adding it in a thin but steady stream. When it is well blended, whisk this mixture into the soup liquid that remains in the cooking pot. Add the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter and, over very low heat, stir until the butter has melted. Do not let the soup come to a boil or the eggs will curdle. Add salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Pour the hot soup into the soup bowls over the croutons and sprinkle generously with minced parsley. Serve at once.\n\nSOUPE \u00c0 L'AIL BONNE FEMME\n\n(SERVES 4 TO 6)\n\n2 leeks   \n2 or 3 fat, ripe tomatoes   \n2 large potatoes   \n\u00bc cup olive oil   \n4 large garlic cloves, peeled   \nA few strands of saffron   \nSalt and black pepper to taste   \n1/2 loaf stale French bread   \n1/2 cup grated Gruy\u00e8re cheese\n\nPreheat the oven to 425\u00b0F. Trim, wash, and chop the leeks. Peel, seed, and coarsely chop the tomatoes, reserving all juice. Peel the potatoes and cut them into small dice. Heat half the olive oil in a large saucepan, add the leeks, and saute them until they just turn translucent. Crush 3 of the garlic cloves and add, then stir in the tomatoes with their juice, the potatoes, the saffron, and 31/2 cups of water. Season to taste with salt and pepper, bring to a simmer, and let cook for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, crush the remaining clove of garlic into the remaining olive oil and mix well. Cut a thick slice of bread for each eater and rub each side with the garlic/olive oil mixture. Sprinkle one side of each with an equal portion of the cheese and bake these in the preheated oven for 10 minutes, or until a light golden brown. Set a slice in each soup bowl. When the soup is done, ladle it over the slices.\n\nA\u00cfGO BOU\u00cfDO\n\n(A MEDITERRANEAN FRENCH BROTH OF GARLIC AND HERBS)\n\n(SERVES 4)\n\n8 garlic cloves, peeled   \n1 small bay leaf   \n1 sprig fresh thyme (or 1/2 tea-   \nspoon dried)   \n2 fresh sage leaves   \n1- to 2-inch strip dried orange   \nrind   \n3 large eggs   \n4 thick slices peasant-style bread   \n2 tablespoons olive oil   \nSalt and black pepper to taste   \nMinced parsley\n\nPreheat the oven to 450\u00b0F. Bring 31/2 cups of water to a boil in a large pot. Add the whole garlic cloves, herbs, and orange rind and let simmer for 20 minutes. While this cooks, separate the eggs. Using a pastry brush, coat the slices of bread with some of the egg whites, discarding the rest. Set these on a wire rack placed on a cookie sheet and toast in the preheated oven. (This doesn't take long\u2014don't let them burn!) Remove from the oven and set aside.\n\nWhen the liquid has simmered its 20 minutes, pour it through a strainer. Pick out and discard the fresh herbs and orange peel, reserving the garlic (and, of course, the liquid!). When the garlic cloves are cool enough to handle, put them and the olive oil into a mortar or the bowl of a food processor set with the steel blade, and pound them to a pulp. Beat this mixture into the egg yolks.\n\nReturn the garlic stock to the pot. Stir in the egg yolk/oil/ garlic mixture until well blended and reheat over a gentle flame for a few moments, until the soup is hot (but not boiling) and thick. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Put a piece of toast in each of four soup bowls and ladle in the soup. Garnish with a little minced fresh parsley and serve at once.\n\nCOOK'S NOTES: The technique of beating the cooked mashed garlic cloves and olive oil into the egg yolks is Paula Wolfert's (from Mediterranean Cooking), a terrific improvement over discarding the garlic and just stirring the oil in. She and Robert Courtine (in Real French Cooking) both suggest brushing the bread with the egg whites: it makes good use of what might be otherwise wasted and gives the bread an attractive gloss. Another option, suggested by Suzanne McLucas (in A Proven\u00e7al Kitchen in America), is to poach the whites in the soup during the last few minutes of cooking. (Although how does one do this without making a terrible mess? Perhaps better to poach a whole egg for each eater in the broth, then thicken that with a simple amalgam of garlic and oil.) Also, a single crumbled leaf of dried sage can be substituted for the fresh amount, making sure it is not too medicinal-tasting. If so, it would be better just to do without.\n\nSOPA DE AJO\n\n(ONE VERSION OF SPAIN'S NATIONAL GARLIC SOUP)\n\n3 tablespoons olive oil   \n6 cloves garlic, peeled   \n1/2 loaf stale French bread   \n1 tablespoon mild paprika   \n4 cups good chicken broth   \nA few strands of saffron (optional)   \nSalt and black pepper to taste   \n4 eggs   \nMinced parsley for garnish\n\nPreheat the oven to 450\u00b0F. Heat the oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the cloves of garlic and saut\u00e9 them gently, turning often, until they are golden all over. Remove them and set aside. Pull the bread apart into walnut-sized bits, discarding the crust. Add these to the hot oil and saut\u00e9 these also until golden on all sides. Remove and reserve. Sprinkle the paprika into the small amount of oil remaining in the pan and stir it, heating it enough to remove its raw taste. Then add the chicken broth and the saffron and bring to a simmer. As the broth heats, finely mince the garlic cloves and stir into the soup along with all the bits of bread. Season with salt and pepper and let simmer for about 15 minutes until the bread is very soft but still holding together.\n\nSet four ovenproof soup bowls or individual-sized casserole dishes (such as small souffle molds) onto a cookie sheet and equally divide the soup into them, being as careful as possible not to break up the bread. Then quickly but carefully break the eggs and slip them, one apiece, into each of the bowls. Put these, still on their cookie sheet, into the preheated oven and bake just until the eggs are set, about 4 minutes. Serve at once, sprinkling each bowl with a pinch of minced parsley as garnish.\n\nCOOK'S NOTES: Often Spanish recipes call for the addition of 2 or 3 ripe tomatoes, seeded, peeled, and coarsely chopped, to be added at the same time as the paprika; the recipe is otherwise prepared exactly the same. Other versions omit the eggs entirely. A piece of lemon zest can be substituted for the saffron and discarded when the soup is divided among the individual bowls. Of course, the soup can be finished in a single large casserole\u2014or the pot, if so designed, can be put straight in the oven. The only problem is serving the soup without making a muddle of the eggs.\n\nGARLIC AND WALNUT SOUP WITH FRESH GOAT CHEESE\n\n(A COLD SUMMER SOUP)\n\n(SERVES 4)\n\n1/2 cup walnut meats   \n3 large cloves garlic, peeled   \n3 tablespoons olive oil   \n1/2 cup light cream   \n2 ounces fresh goat cheese   \n3 cups homemade chicken broth   \nSalt and black pepper to taste\n\nHeat the walnut meats in an ungreased skillet over medium heat, stirring constantly for a few minutes until they release a nutty smell. Turn them into the bowl of a food processor fitted with the steel blade. Crush the garlic and add it to the walnuts; pulse-process the mixture until it is well blended. Then, the machine running constantly, dribble in the olive oil drop by drop to make a thick emulsion. Into this process the cream and finally the goat cheese, producing one cup of a pungent but unctuously rich sauce. Taste\u2014you may decide to do something more interesting with it than making it into a soup.\n\nIf not, heat the broth in a small saucepan, whisking in the sauce bit by bit once it gets hot. Do not let it boil. When the sauce is well incorporated, let simmer for a few minutes. Taste for seasoning and then remove from the heat. Let cool and then place in the refrigerator. Serve well chilled, whisking it well first and garnishing it, if you wish, with a tiny amount of minced fresh herb like cilantro or watercress.\n\nCOOK'S NOTES: I concocted this soup out of a garlic and walnut sauce in Mireille Johnston's The Cuisine of the Sun. It's not quite as interesting served hot, although it helps if you toss into each bowl a slice of toasted bread on which some more of the goat cheese has been spread.\n\nAt the time I originally worked on this piece, I had just bought a food processor. That machine now languishes in a cardboard box in the storage room, and if I were making this soup today I would use the large Thai composite-stone mortar on the kitchen counter, switching from pestle to table fork when I mixed in the oil, the cream, and then the goat cheese.\n\nFinally, don't bother making this dish with canned chicken broth; it is simply too salty for this soup. In fact, you should undersalt it when seasoning it at the stove. However, it's quite amenable to plenty of freshly ground black pepper.\n\n  Those who would like to explore more elaborate versions of garlic soup should turn especially to the recipes for the dry soup of garlic and fresh coriander in Jean Anderson's The Food of Portugal; soupe \u00e0 l'ail et au vin in Madeleine Kamman's When French Women Cook; ajo blanco de M\u00e1laga (a garlic gazpacho) in Marimar Torres's The Spanish Table; and the evening garlic soup in the manner of Corr\u00e8ze in Paula Wolfert's The Cooking of South-West France. Several further variants are available in Barbara Batcheller's Lilies of the Kitchen.\n\nKITCHEN DIARY: LEMON ICE CREAM\n\nThis is perhaps the simplest possible ice cream\u2014sugar, cream, and fresh lemon stirred together and frozen. It has a soft, smooth texture and a delicious flavor, and the pleasure in eating it is only heightened by its being so surprisingly easy to make. It is the sort of thing where you think there must be a trick to it, but what is magical is that there are not any tricks at all.\n\nWe first saw the recipe in Maida Heatter's Book of Great Desserts, where it is called \"Jean Hewitt's Old-Fashioned Lemon Ice Cream.\" But we later found versions in several other places, including an earlier but nearly identical recipe in Clementine Paddleford's How America Eats (1960).\n\nThe Paddleford version (to serve six) calls for the juice and grated zest of a single medium lemon, a cup of sugar, two cups of light cream, and two drops of yellow food coloring. The lemon juice and zest are thoroughly mixed with the sugar. The cream and food coloring are carefully stirred in and this mixture is poured into an ice-cube tray and frozen for at least three hours (\"do not stir and it freezes smooth\"). The Heatter-Hewitt version ignores the food coloring, adds a pinch of salt, and stirs the mixture in the freezer just before it firms up. Otherwise it is the same.\n\nWe took everyone's advice\u2014so far as it simplified. We omitted the food coloring, the salt, and the stirring. What appealed to us most was that we could treat it so casually\u2014no whipping the cream or stirring the mixture once in the freezer\u2014and still have it emerge, not only a real ice cream, but \"smooth as a petal, a joy to eat.\"\n\nThe proportions of the ingredients can also be varied to suit different tastes or different purposes. Madeleine Kamman gives a recipe for lemon \"sherbet\" in an old issue of The Pleasures of Cooking (Vol. 4, No. 1) in which she calls for a cup each of heavy cream, sugar, and lemon juice (plus a pinch of salt). This is because she means the dish, served with little splashes of marc de Bourgogne and cr\u00e8me de cassis, not as a dessert but as an entremets\u2014to wake up the mouth between courses.\n\nWe ourselves were more interested in lulling it into a snoozy contented state, but we did want something that would delight and satisfy in smallish portions. Heightening the lemon presence made us pause at each bite and wait until the initial mouth-puckering taste was softly enrobed and sweetened by the cream.\n\nThese are our final proportions (to serve two): the juice and zest of 1 medium lemon, 1/3 cup of superfine sugar, and 2/3 cup of non-ultrapasteurized all-purpose cream. In other words, we've tripled the amount of lemon in the Paddleford/Hewitt/ Heatter recipe that was our starting point.\n\nWe followed the method as we explain it above except that we substituted superfine for regular sugar. This eliminates all hint of grittiness. We also discovered that stirring the cream during freezing really didn't improve it any, but that whipping it beforehand did give the ice cream a lighter texture. However, we decided we liked the compact smoothness of the un-whipped version better. The ice cream freezes best in a shallow container; we used a wide-bottomed stainless-steel bowl.\n\nFor some reason, all the recipes we've seen for this sort of simple ice cream have required lemon or some other citrus fruit. (When we made it with lime, however, the texture was right, but the cream and coldness muted and fragmented that fruit's delicate, flowery flavor.) Could a similarly smooth-textured version be made with a non-citrus flavoring like banana or coffee? We haven't yet been quite curious enough to try bananas, but we did make it a few times with an extract of ground coffee beans.\n\nCOFFEE ICE CREAM\n\nThis is best made with freshly ground, distinctive-tasting coffee beans; the more ordinary the coffee used, the more the result tastes like, well, coffee ice cream. A nice choice is a bean with chocolaty overtones like Mexican Maragogipe or a rich-flavored, aromatic coffee like Hawaiian Kona. We also liked it made with an espresso-roast bean.\n\nOur method, to serve four, requires 2 coffee scoops (or a single quarter cup) of roasted beans, ground finely and then infused in \u00be cup of boiling water. This was allowed to cool and then filtered through a coffee filter, yielding 2/3 cup of extract. This was blended in a large shallow bowl with 11/2 cups non-ultrapasteurized all-purpose cream, \u00be cup ultrafine sugar, and a pinch of salt. These were combined and frozen in the same manner as the lemon ice cream. While not as spectacular a concoction as the lemon version, our coffee ice cream was sophisticated-tasting and good\u2014another decidedly adult dessert.\n\nAnd this final note: If you make this ice cream our way, we think you'll find it best eaten in the company of one or two short, not-too-sweet cookies.\nFUL MEDAMES\n\nI well remember my childhood, when for a halfpenny I used to get a bowl of ful and a crust of bread at the \"ful shop\" near my school. Naturally one had to queue, sometimes up to fifteen minutes, then gobble the food and depart quickly... . If a host is to honour a guest he orders a bowl of el-ful from the nearest shop and to refuse to eat would be tantamount to insult.\n\n\u2014Arto der Haroutunian, Middle Eastern Cookery\n\nFul medames (or ful mesdames, fool midamess, foul midammis, etc.), which is no more than small brown fava beans simmered to melting softness, dressed simply with oil, lemon juice, and (usually) garlic, and served with a few choice additions, is Egypt's national dish. It is generally described as a breakfast food, since it is eaten then by rich and poor alike, and at its least adorned. But this is to misrepresent what is really a food for all hours. Many Egyptians\u2014and not only poor ones\u2014will have it again for lunch and possibly as a side (or even a featured) dish at dinner, not to mention a couple of plates of it in between.\n\nAlmost every street has its vendor selling ful medames. Some buyers scoop it up in fresh pita bread and eat it on the run. Children bring empty pots from home, sent by their mothers to purchase the family meal. And since this is only first among many passionately devoured legume dishes, it is hardly surprising that Egyptians are known among the Arabs as the children of el-ful (\"of the bean\").\n\nBut it isn't only el-ful that they are passionate about. Egyptians are renowned for the appreciative pleasure they bring to the table\u2014as well they should, for theirs is a cooking as varied and interesting as you might expect from a country with so old and complex a history, and a populace whose culture, at least in cosmopolitan areas, is a subtle intertwining of many presences: Mediterranean, Arabic, and African. The reason that ful medames can hold the continued interest of such eaters is that it combines simplicity of preparation with endless possibilities of variation\u2014a dish that all Egyptians can hold in common and yet each prepares to the dictates of a very individualized taste.\n\nYou can get some sense of the imaginative resources of the Egyptian cook when you compare ful medames with hummus-bitahini \u2014the familiar chickpea spread found throughout the Middle East. For while this latter is a tasty preparation and its flavorings many, it has none of the richness of association that belongs to ful medames. You can eat the latter for breakfast seasoned with cumin and mixed with chopped tomatoes; have it again for lunch sprinkled with parsley and mint and accompanied by olives, slices of green pepper, and hard-boiled eggs; and snack on it from a vendor that afternoon, strongly seasoned with spicy condiments\u2014and think of each version as something entirely different from the one before.\n\nIf it is analogous to anything in our own American cuisine, it is to peanut butter\u2014or at least would be if our use of peanut butter were half as imaginative as it should be. Like peanut butter, ful medames isn't simply a bulk food made palatable with seasoning. It has a flavor and an integrity entirely its own. Whatever is added, there is never a doubt as to the central attraction of the ful. Also like peanut butter, ful medames\u2014especially in combination with the foods eaten with it\u2014is very nutritious: mixed with yogurt it is used to sustain Egyptians from sunrise to sunset during the month of Ramadan, the yearly Islamic period of fast.\n\nDelicious, sustaining, inexpensive, and (apart from the actual cooking of the beans) quick to assemble, ful medames is especially right on a hot summer's day, a cool and leisurely repast whose fresh flavors soothe a palate dulled by sultry heat and whose bright and various colors delight the glare-dulled eye. All that is needed is plenty of pita bread and an icy, water-beaded pitcher full of sweetened, mint-scented iced tea.\n\nEgyptian cooks agree only about the basic preparation. Although any fava or broad bean can be used to make ful medames, the preferred one is ful hamam, a small, round, dark brown bean that turns a deep purple when cooked. Traditionally, these were soaked overnight and then lengthily simmered in a dammasa, a narrow-necked metal cooking pot that rested on a charcoal brazier (or electric element). The beans are cooked until tender but not to disintegration, a process that can take several hours. At this point, depending on the cook, they are either tossed or mashed in a mixture of oil (traditionally olive but more recently [edible] linseed, cottonseed, or corn oil), lemon juice, garlic, and salt, and then served with a variety of accompaniments.\n\nHolding this general notion in mind, consider the following recipe as no more than a guide. The proportions are meant only as a mean from which to vary as taste dictates or circumstances require.\n\nFUL MEDAMES\n\n(SERVES 4 AS A MEAL OR 6 TO 8 AS AN APPETIZER)\n\nTo prepare the beans\n\n2 cups uncooked small fava beans   \n(see sources), soaked   \novernight or for at least 6 hours   \n1/2 cup lentils (optional)   \n\u00bc cup olive (or other vegetable)   \noil   \nJuice of 1 lemon (scant \u00bc cup)   \nSalt and pepper to taste\n\nWash the fava beans well in cold water, picking them over carefully for any small pebbles. Cover them with water and let them soak overnight or for at least 6 hours. (Note: a larger amount of beans can be prepared and those not used in the recipe frozen.)\n\nWhen ready to prepare them, pour 2 quarts of water into a heavy, tight-lidded pot and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Add the beans and cover. Return to a boil and cook the beans for 10 minutes. Now reduce the heat, stir in the lentils (if using), and simmer about 2 hours or so, or until the beans are tender all through. (Do not add salt during this cooking process or it will make the beans tough. If the beans begin to cook dry, wet them with more boiling water.)\n\nWhen they are done, drain them well and let cool. Then combine the olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and pepper. (Note: The amounts given are only suggested: recipes using the same amount of beans call for as much as 2/3 cup of oil and the juice of 2 lemons\u2014almost 1/2 cup\u2014or as little as 3 tablespoons of oil and 1 tablespoon of lemon juice.) Either mix this in with the beans or mash them into it to make a smooth, spreadable paste.\n\nSuggested flavorings\n\nMix into the prepared beans any one or a selection of: 1 clove or 2 or 3 of finely minced garlic; some chopped scallion or onion; a coarsely chopped, fully ripe tomato; a tablespoon of minced fresh parsley, mint, and/or coriander (cilantro); and/or a generous pinch of dried cumin.\n\nSuggested accompaniments\n\nOne or several of: sliced green pepper; black Mediterranean olives; sliced red onion; hard-boiled eggs or hamine eggs (see below); feta cheese; lemon quarters (if lemon juice is not mixed into the ful); tahini sauce (see below); and plenty of pita bread.\n\nTo serve\n\nPlace the ful medames in a bowl, sprinkle with a bit more of the fresh chopped herb(s), and set out with the bread and accompaniments for each to choose to taste. Serve with mint-scented iced tea.\n\nHAMINE EGGS\n\nFresh eggs\n\nBrown skins from several onions\n\nPut the eggs and onion skins in a large pot and fill the pot with water. Bring this to a very gentle simmer\u2014it should barely quiver\u2014and cover. Cook for at least 6 hours (or overnight). This extended cooking produces boiled eggs with a soft, smooth texture, very delicious with ful medames. In Egypt, they are also eaten plain, as an appetizer, dipped in salt seasoned with cumin, coriander, and cinnamon.\n\nThe onion skins, by the way, are to provide color more than flavor. The method is very similar to that for making Chinese tea eggs.\n\nTAHINI SAUCE\n\n(MAKES 1/2 CUP)\n\n1/2 cup tahini (sesame paste)   \nJuice of 2 lemons (a scant 1/2 cup)   \n2 to 3 cloves of garlic, crushed   \n1/2 teaspoon cumin   \nA sprig of fresh parsley, minced\n\nBlend the first 4 ingredients into a creamy sauce, adding more lemon juice or water if necessary. Garnish with the minced parsley.\n\nA Note on Sources. The only cookbook I know devoted entirely to Egyptian cooking is Samia Abdennour's Egyptian Cooking: A Practical Guide. A 160-page spiral-bound volume published by the American University in Cairo, it is usable and authentic, and can be obtained from Kitchen Arts & Letters (1435 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10128) for $14.95 plus postage. Our source for the small brown Egyptian fava beans is Sultan's Delight, P.O. Box 140253, 25 Croton Avenue, Staten Island, NY 10314-0014; (718) 720-1557.\n\nRUSSIANS AND MUSHROOMS\n\n\"Yes, yes, yes! with onion, and you know with bay leaf and all kinds of spices. When you open the pot and the steamy mushroom smell rises, it sometimes even brings tears to your eyes... .\" \"Devil take it! Only thinking about eating,\" growled Milkin the philosopher contemptuously. \"Aren't there any more interesting things in life besides mushrooms... ?\"\n\n\u2014Anton Chekhov, \"The Siren\"\n\nAttempting, in a recent issue of Mushroom: The Journal of Wild Mushrooming, to explain his compatriots' obsession with gathering wild mushrooms, Alexander (\"Sasha\") Viazmensky tells how, during the peak of the season, Russians drive their cars right off the roads into the forests, in single-minded determination to cover as much ground as possible. This image has its downside\u2014from the perspective of both the ecologist and the foot-borne mushroom gatherer\u2014but from a distance it also has a certain perverse, surrealistic charm: black-beetle Soviet automobiles, like a swarm of 1948 DeSotos, their headlights glowing in the murk, weaving between the tree trunks of a forest that extends as far as the eye can see.\n\nThis image also captures something of what the landscape of western Russia is like: immense\u2014and immensely flat. Its forests dwarf the imagination without themselves being all that impressive, for the ground is often damp, the soil poor, and the trees aspen, pine, and birch. They provide the Russian wanderer not with dramatic vistas or a sense of savage charm, but with an intimate, protective privacy\u2014healingly cool and sweet-smelling. Boris Pasternak spoke for all native Russians when he wrote: \"Included in the saintly order of pines/We become immortal for a while.\"\n\nMushrooms, of course, grow in many places, but for Russians they have an immediate association with these woods; they might be considered, more even than the Russian black bear, their country's emblem. Mushroom hunting appears in Pasternak's poems, in Chekhov's short stories, in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. A recent Russian novel by Zinovy Zinik called The Mushroom-Picker tells of an expatriate who comes to define what a Russian is\u2014and what the rest of the world is not\u2014in terms of his nostalgia for the commingling of sensual and sensory pleasure that is the mushroom hunt.\n\nTo understand this relationship between Russians and mushrooms, you must first grasp that the latter are, before anything else, a gift. Like Easter eggs, they are something put there to be discovered, hidden for the pleasure of being found. Adults are not immune to the happiness that children take in finding things: the delight in the gift is enhanced by that contradictory feeling that simultaneously celebrates one's cleverness and good luck. The wild mushroom becomes a gift not only to the stomach but also to the spirit, all the more so because\u2014unlike wild fruit, which has its predictable season\u2014mushrooms appear magically, overnight, anywhere, following no discernible rhyme or reason. Thus in Russia the approach of the mushroom season is not unlike\u2014to vary the metaphor a little\u2014going to look under the Christmas tree every morning from Advent on to see if any presents are yet hidden beneath its boughs.\n\nHowever, the moment for hodit' po griby\u2014finding the mushroom\u2014arrives neither at Christmas nor at Easter, but sometime in the middle of July. Morels are not much hunted, nor any spring mushroom, the forests being then infested with an encephalitis-spreading tick. You hardly encounter a hiker there until the rumor spreads that someone has found the year's first clump of boletes\u2014whether tawny edulis, brown scaber, or red aurantiacus\u2014and mushroomers start heading for the woods. When these mushrooms actually appear in the farmers' markets, the real rush is on. Morning trains are jammed with hunters clutching baskets, knapsacks, satchels, pails; some foragers\u2014the most devoted\u2014leave the night before. Groups organize expeditions, rent buses through their factories, and spend Friday night getting what sleep they can on the road; individuals catch the last train of the evening and doze fitfully beside a campfire, to get that much of a head start.\n\nAll agree that the best time to find mushrooms is at dawn's first light. Mushrooms are the freshest then and competitors the fewest. \"You get into the forest and you know instinctively if the conditions are right for them,\" a young hitchhiker told Colin Thubron in Where Nights Are Longest. \"You can sense it. It gives you a strange thrill. Perhaps the grass is growing at the right thickness, or there's the right amount of sun. You can even smell them. So you go forwards into the shadows... .\" Vladimir Nabokov captures, in Speak, Memory, the many nuances of that evocative scent. In rainy weather, the shady recesses under the old firs, birches, and aspens in the family park would \"harbor that special boletic reek which makes a Russian's nostrils dilate\u2014a dark, dank, satisfying blend of damp moss, rich earth, rotting leaves.\"\n\nBy August, when slow, warm rains start soaking the vast Russian forests, everyone takes part in the feast. A huge billboard identifying the more common varieties of mushrooms is erected in Moscow's central market to help shoppers identify their purchases, and the state sets up multiple \"mushroom points,\" or collection areas, where mushroom hunters can sell their catch and others can take a working holiday to help clean and dry them. Most hunters, however, bring their finds home, some vaunting their success and others keeping it hidden. \"A totally open basket with beautiful mushrooms draws everybody's jealous glances,\" remarks Sasha Viazmensky, \"but it looks shockingly immodest.\" Better to pick a few of your prize finds and lay them on top, and at least partially cover the rest with pretty branches.\n\nVladimir Nabokov's mother took the opposite ploy. As she emerged from under the dripping trees, \"her face would show an odd, cheerless expression, which might have spelled poor luck, but which I knew was the jealously contained beatitude of the successful hunter. Just before reaching me, with an abrupt, drooping movement of the arm and shoulder and a 'Pouf!' of magnified exhaustion, she would let her basket sag, in order to stress its weight, its fabulous fullness.\"\n\nAnd what was that basket full of? Volodya, Thubron's young informant, waxes lyrical about the possibilities: \"delicate white mushrooms with umbrellaed hats... in the pine forests; red, strong-tasting birch mushrooms with whitish stems and feverish black specks; the yellow 'little foxes'; and the sticky, dark-tipped mushroom called 'butter-covered,' delicate and sweet. Then there was the apyata which multiplied on shrubs... and at last, in late autumn... a beautiful green cap which it was a sacrilege to fry.\" Lesley Chamberlain, in The Food and Cooking of Russia, conveys something of how the names and lore of such mushrooms can bring a Russian forest to enchanted life:\n\nThese strange and wonderful growths have names that locate them in a fungous elfin kingdom of old men with ear trumpets, little women with long-stemmed umbrellas, men wearing hoods in the rain, Caesar's favorites, little foxes, little pigs, little hawks and cows and goats with beards, those that live under the birch tree and those that prefer the pine. Always lurking under some tree or other is the devil.\n\nRussians claim that their cuisine makes the greatest and most varied use of mushrooms: they dress them with herbs and eat them raw; they fry them up with butter and serve them mixed with sour cream; they simmer them in soups and bake them in pastry. They pickle them or salt them and wash the result down with vodka. And, after all else, they thread them into long chains and dry them, and cook with these the whole winter through. Still, there is something all of a piece about native Russian cooking (as opposed to the several cuisines of the new Russian federation); it is really a collection of variations on a relatively small number of simple themes. Although there are many dishes that utilize them, at bottom there seems to be a single Russian mushroom dish\u2014or, at least, one basic way of preparing them. Fortunately, it is also the best way, as the following version and some of its simpler permutations may suggest.\n\nMushrooms are eaten fried, boiled or pickled, while their season endures, by all classes... . They are fried on hot ashes, or in a frying-pan; they are boiled alone; they are boiled with shchi or cabbage soup; they are roasted with butter alone, or oftener with butter and smetana or sour cream. They also enter into the composition of some puddings and pies. The latter are generally eaten with soup or with shchi. Mushrooms are often served up with beef-steak, or roast beef sliced, either alone or mixed with potatoes, carrots, turnips, cabbage, asparagus &c., and sauce. They are excellent when prepared with cutlets and rich sauce, duly seasoned.\n\n\u2014Robert Lyall, The Character of the Russians (1823)\n\nMAKING DO WITH AGARICUS BISPORUS\n\nMushroom fanciers scorn the familiar commercial mushroom and often make the point that it isn't even a true champignon (Agaricus campestris)\u2014a tastier but harder-to-grow cousin. The store or \"button\" mushroom (Agaricus bisporus) was easy to domesticate because it thrives in domestic circumstances. It particularly loves horse manure, for which reason Russian peasants shunned it, thinking it unclean. Russians in general shun it for its lack of flavor. As Zinovy Zinik has the narrator exclaim in The Mushroom-Picker:\n\nNobody in Moscow even bothers to eat them; they grow in Gorky Street between the cracks in the pavement and the people tread them underfoot. Because they don't taste like mushrooms\u2014they taste like rubber galoshes!\n\nWell, chacun \u00e0 son go\u00fbt. The button mushroom is always available, still reasonably cheap, and, if you know how to cook it, does have some mushroom taste. The trick, as Edna Lewis explains in The Edna Lewis Cookbook, is to cook them \"over high heat, as this seems to seal in their moisture and keep them plump and firm. If the heat is too low, they will stew and become wrinkled and rubbery...\" and taste like galoshes. It need only be added that to keep them moist, plump, and firm, slice them thick; to make them crisp and buttery, slice them thin. Either way, they should then be saut\u00e9ed in quite hot butter and/or oil until their edges are brown.\n\nAs a final enhancement, we finish these mushrooms in a flavor concentrate prepared in advance by pouring a cup of boiling water over a half ounce or so of dried boletes or inexpensive Chilean mushrooms (for sources, see the taster's guide), and letting this mixture steep for a half hour. The liquid is strained off and reduced in a small pot over high heat to about a quarter cup. (The dried mushrooms, having surrendered their flavor, are discarded.) This reduction is stirred into the mushrooms during their last few minutes of cooking until completely absorbed.\n\nNote: Commercial mushrooms are enclosed in airtight plastic containers to ensure that no moisture (and hence weight) is lost. This means that even though you pay more, you get more buying them loose. Mushrooms keep longest when stored in the refrigerator in a closed paper bag: in plastic, they rot; in paper, they dehydrate instead.\n\nFried in butter and thickened with sour cream, her delicious finds appeared regularly on the dinner table.\n\n\u2014Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory\n\nMUSHROOMS SAUTEED IN THE OLD STYLE\n\n(ADAPTED FROM A RECIPE BY BORIS ZABOROV IN NADINE HAIM'S THE ARTIST'S PALATE)\n\n1 pound fresh boletes (porcini,   \nc\u00e8pes, etc.) (see note below)   \n4 tablespoons butter   \n1 medium onion, diced small   \n2 tablespoons sour cream   \nSalt and pepper to taste\n\nClean the mushrooms carefully with a soft-bristled brush. If they are small, leave them whole, otherwise slice them thick. Melt 1 tablespoon of the butter in a skillet over medium heat and add the onion pieces. Cook these until edged with brown, then remove and reserve. Wipe the skillet with a paper towel and put in the last 3 tablespoons of butter. When this is hot and bubbling, add the mushrooms. Cook these over medium-high heat until they are firm-textured and start to brown. Return the saut\u00e9ed onions to the pan and mix into the mushrooms. Remove the pan from the heat, stir in the sour cream, season to taste with salt and pepper, and serve at once.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: Wild mushrooms don't come by the pound; the proportions in this recipe should be taken as a guideline: the more mushrooms, the more butter and sour cream. Olive oil\u2014or, for a genuine Russian flavor note, sunflower oil\u2014can be substituted for half the butter; a clove or two of minced garlic can replace the onion. Fresh boletes are rarely in the market and are hard to find in the woods. Last fall I received as a gift a single large field mushroom. I cooked it this way and ate it out of the pan; it was delicious. The dish is just as tasty (and authentic) made with a mix of different types. This last is a good course to follow if using commercially grown mushrooms, combining some shiitake and/or oyster mushrooms with a larger amount of plain button mushrooms, enhancing them as described here.\n\nMushrooms prepared this way can be tossed with minced fresh dill and/or parsley and eaten hot on buttered toast. We prepare a simple meal by cooking a pound or so of commercial mushrooms, mixing in a more exotic type as described above, and cooking these with several chopped scallions, seasoning the dish with minced garlic, some lemon juice, and a small amount of ground chile pepper. We eat this over steaming rice or kasha.\n\nAlthough it is a fine appetizer made as above, Russian cooks also adapt this dish to make a kind of poor man's caviar:\n\n\"But best of all, kind sir, are yellow-capped saffron mushrooms, chopped finely like caviar, if you know what I mean, with onion and olive oil\u2014delicious!\"\n\n\u2014Anton Chekhov, \"The Siren\"\n\nMUSHROOM CAVIAR\n\n(ADAPTED FROM JEAN REDWOOD'S RUSSIAN FOOD)\n\n1 pound fresh mushrooms   \n4 to 6 scallions   \n4 tablespoons olive oil   \n1 to 2 tablespoons lemon juice   \n1/2 cup sour cream   \nSalt and black and cayenne pepper   \nSeveral sprigs of fresh dill\n\nClean the mushrooms carefully with a soft-bristled brush. Slice thick. Mince the scallions, including all the green except damaged or wilted ends, and saut\u00e9 them over medium heat in 1 tablespoon of the oil. Scrape into a small bowl and reserve. Add the rest of the oil to the same skillet and saut\u00e9 the mushrooms over medium-high heat until all the liquid has boiled off or been reabsorbed and the mushroom pieces are firm and lightly browned.\n\nStir in the saut\u00e9ed scallion bits, add lemon juice to taste (the amount will depend on the type of mushroom), and scrape the mixture out onto a cutting board. Chop it into a coarse-textured \"caviar\" and turn into a bowl. Stir in the sour cream and season to taste with salt, black pepper, and a generous pinch of cayenne. The mixture should be served at room temperature. Just before, mince the dill and mix in, reserving some to sprinkle decoratively over the top. Delicious with pieces of toasted, buttered rye or pumpernickel bread.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: In Please to the Table, Anya von Bremzen and John Welchman give a recipe for a mushroom and egg salad that is essentially this mushroom caviar blended with chopped egg and mayonnaise. It would be better still, I think, with some crisp, crumbled pieces of bacon as well.\n\nAlthough she also calls it a \"mushroom caviare,\" Lesley Chamberlain's take on this appetizer in The Food and Cooking of Russia is to prepare it uncooked. The raw mushrooms are coarsely chopped, mixed with finely minced garlic and the juice of an onion, and seasoned with salt and black pepper. The mixture is placed under a weighted plate in a large bowl and left for several hours to \"cook\" in its own juices. It is then tossed with olive or sunflower oil, lemon juice, and a minced fresh herb\u2014dill or a very small amount of tarragon\u2014just before serving.\n\nOur basic mushroom saut\u00e9 can be transformed into a delicious soup by adding a quart of hot homemade beef or chicken stock and serving it up. Good meat stock is not always available, however, and the Russians have an inspired alternative using dried mushrooms, a method we use to make our own mushroom and barley soup.\n\nMUSHROOM STOCK\n\n1/2 ounce or so dried boletes (porcini, c\u00e8pes)\n\nAlthough rinsing dried mushrooms washes away flavor, unless you dry your own there's no sure way to tell whether they are free of grit. The strategy is this: First soak the mushrooms in water for about 30 minutes (whole dried mushrooms\u2014if you can find them\u2014are said to require much longer), then strain the resulting stock through a paper coffee filter. At this point \u2014and only if you actually plan to use the reconstituted mushrooms\u2014you rinse them. More often, we squeeze out every drop of liquid and discard them. The amount of water depends on the planned use of the stock\u2014it can range from a cup to a quart or more. Hot water extracts the maximum flavor and softens the tougher mushrooms; cold water pampers the more delicate ones and leaves them all with more taste. Any dried mushroom can be reconstituted this way, but not all will provide a flavorful stock\u2014Chinese cloud (or tree) ears, for example, release almost no flavor at all.\n\nMUSHROOM AND BARLEY SOUP\n\n(SERVES 2 TO 4)\n\nMushroom stock made as above,   \nwith 1 quart water   \n1/2 cup (4 ounces) barley   \n1 bay leaf   \n2 teaspoons salt (or to taste)   \n1 large onion   \n1 or 2 carrots   \n2 stalks of celery (with leaves)   \n1 pound fresh mushrooms   \n3 tablespoons olive oil   \n1/2 teaspoon paprika   \n2 cloves garlic, minced   \n1 tablespoon lemon juice   \nA few sprigs fresh parsley or dill,   \nminced   \nLarge dollop of sour cream for   \neach serving\n\nPut the mushroom stock in a pot and bring to a simmer. Add the barley, the bay leaf, and 1 teaspoon salt. Bring the stock back to a simmer, cover, and let cook. Chop the onion and cut the carrots and celery into small dice. Slice the mushrooms thick.\n\nHeat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil in a medium skillet and add the onion. Cook this, stirring, over medium-high heat until translucent, then add the carrots and celery. When these have softened and the onion is edged with brown, turn all this into the simmering soup pot. Pour the remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil into the skillet, and sprinkle this with the paprika and 1 teaspoon salt. Heat over a medium-hot flame; when the pan is hot, add the mushrooms and saut\u00e9, stirring often, until they are firm-textured and at least some pieces are beginning to brown. Add the minced garlic. Cook, still stirring, a few more minutes, and turn this mixture into the soup pot too.\n\nThe soup is ready to serve when the barley is done\u2014in about an hour. Stir in the lemon juice and minced herb and discard the bay leaf. Serve the soup in warm bowls, topping each with a generous scoop of sour cream. This serves four as part of a meal, two or three as a whole one.\n\nRussian cooks have had to find a way to mask frugality behind the appearance of generosity, because to give everybody as many mushrooms as they want at a meal would mean none left over to pickle or salt or dry. So they devised the simple trick of cooking up the mushrooms in a fry\u2014or braise\u2014of potatoes. The delicious result, according to Anya von Bremzen in Please to the Table, is\n\n... the quintessential Russian dacha dish, and many a Russian would kill for it away from home... . For me the dish never fails to evoke the happiest memories of childhood\u2014of my last summer days at the dacha, a lingering sadness at twilight on Sunday evening with the prospect of returning to Moscow drawing near.\n\nBRAISE OF MUSHROOMS AND POTATOES\n\n(SERVES 2 OR 3 AS A MEAL, MORE AS A SIDE DISH)\n\n4 to 6 (about 2 pounds) all-   \npurpose potatoes   \nMushroom stock   \n2 cloves garlic   \n1/2 teaspoon dried thyme   \n1 pound fresh mushrooms   \n2 tablespoons each butter and olive   \noil   \n1/2 teaspoon hot paprika   \n1 medium onion, chopped   \nSalt and pepper to taste   \nA few sprigs of minced fresh dill   \nand/or parsley   \nSour cream (optional)\n\nPeel the potatoes and keep them in a bowl of cold water. Prepare the mushroom stock as directed here, using half an ounce of dried mushrooms and about 2 cups of water. Cut up and put aside the reconstituted mushroom pieces from the stock if they are appetizing and grit-free. Mince the garlic and thyme together. Clean the fresh mushrooms and cut into thick (half-inch) pieces, slicing down from cap to stem. Put the butter\u2013olive oil combination into a large (12-inch) skillet over medium-high heat. Stir in the paprika. Add the mushroom pieces and saute these, turning them often with a spatula, until they begin to brown. Stir in the chopped onion (and, if saved, the pieces of dried mushroom). Continue saut\u00e9ing until the onion begins to color. Stir in the garlic-thyme mixture.\n\nChop up the potatoes into large bite-sized pieces. Put them in the skillet and let them cook, turning with the spatula, until they take on some color. Now add the strained mushroom stock and salt to taste. Cover the skillet and simmer 30 to 45 minutes, until the potatoes are tender and most of the liquid has been absorbed. Season with pepper, stir in the fresh herbs, and serve, if you like, with dollops of sour cream.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: This version of the recipe gets the most from store-bought mushrooms; it's our favorite way of eating them. If you have fresh wild mushrooms, the dish can also be made as a straightforward saute. Prepare it to the point where the potatoes are added. Remove the contents of the skillet and reserve. Heat another tablespoon or so each of butter and olive oil in the skillet and cook the potatoes until they are crisp and deeply golden, about 30 minutes. Return the mushroom-onion-garlic mixture to the skillet, mix well, season to taste, stir in the fresh herb(s), and serve.\n\nTASTING NOTES: DRIED WILD MUSHROOMS\n\nOne autumn, a few years back, the pine woods near home were teeming with painted jacks (Suillus pictus), a situation too rare and tempting to pass up. So, knowing nothing about it, I decided to try drying a bunch of them. I spent an evening brushing them free of debris, cutting them into chunks, and then stringing them into long chains with a needle and a length of sturdy thread\u2014each piece of mushroom tied an inch apart. I draped these in long swags in front of the living room window. In a few days they had turned into small, firm, fragrant pieces of dried mushroom that, sealed up tightly in preserving jars, kept for well over a year. Drying, if anything, improved the flavor of what is not, when all is said, a choice find.\n\nI tell this not to recommend the method but simply to encourage the attempt. The hard part is getting the mushrooms in the first place. According to Antonio Carluccio in A Passion for Mushrooms, the best mushroom for drying is the Boletus edulis (king boletes; in Italian: porcini; in French: c\u00e8pes), for the process actually intensifies its flavor. But there are many others worth the effort\u2014I recommend you turn to my favorite mushroom guide, David Arora's Mushrooms Demystified, for suggestions and proper identification.\n\nSome food writers suggest drying mushrooms in the oven, but what is really needed is a flow of warm, dry air. They should be cleaned carefully with a brush (an unused, soft-bristled paintbrush is ideal), and the larger specimens should be cut into slices about a half-inch thick. These should then be spread out in a single layer on a clean window screen. On hot, sunny days, they can be covered with cheesecloth and brought outside. Otherwise, leave them in a well-ventilated room, in a sunny\u2014or at least warm\u2014place. Turn them over now and then to ensure thorough drying. Then, when they're completely dried, store them in airtight jars or plastic bags.\n\nThe traditional Slavic method is to string the mushrooms up and hang them in garlands before the fire, so that the smoke can add its special savor. Such mushrooms, says Lesley Chamberlain, \"yield a rich stock and all the fragrance of the Russian forest in early autumn.\" However, visions of some future harvest of boletes turning a rich mahogany in my electric meat smoker faded somewhat when we traced a source for smoked Polish mushrooms and found that the woodsy tang carried a little too much of the tar pot for us, at least for our simple mushroom and potato dishes. (We suspect their traditional use is to stretch\u2014and thus enhance\u2014the presence of smoked sausage or ham hocks.) In any case, we preferred the more straightforward mushroom flavor of the unsmoked version.\n\nThis was not our only disappointment. Mushroom drying is an art, not a science\u2014and still very much a cottage industry. That little half-ounce of dried c\u00e8pes you buy at the gourmet store may contain mushrooms picked in different places under entirely different conditions\u2014in some instances in entirely different countries. Given that two mushrooms of the same species picked fresh (even in the same spot!) can vary widely in taste\u2014which is one reason why Jane Grigson can describe the horn of plenty (Craterellus cornucopioides) as \"disappointing\" while David Arora begins a two-paragraph rave by calling its flavor \"superb\"\u2014buying them dried is pretty much a crapshoot.\n\nAfter tasting several varieties of dried mushrooms over the past year or so, we still find it hard to sort out any useful advice except that as a general rule we prefer fresh mushrooms for eating and dried mushrooms for adding flavor to dishes in which they themselves then play little or no part. This, of course, is no radical discovery; what might be is our feeling that when flavor is held to firmly as the sole criterion, we find little use for the dried chanterelle, oyster mushroom, horn of plenty, or shiitake. (The pricey but delicious dried morel is outside our brief.) Ignore evocative catalogue prose and stick to dried boletes or the generic \"Chilean\" mushroom that\u2014though near inedible itself and sometimes full of grit\u2014produces a murky but highly flavorful broth. These last are sold by G. B. Ratto, 821 Washington Street, Oakland, CA 94607; (800) 325-3483, at a price that can't be beat: one pound for $10.\n\nFor all other dried mushrooms, we suggest Festive Foods, 9420 Arroya Lane, Colorado Springs, CO 80908; (719) 495-2339. They have the best prices\u2014and pretty nearly the best selection\u2014of all the mail-order sources we consulted. See their catalogue for the full list; what interested us were the dried porcini from Italy, at $5.50 for two ounces, and smoked Polish boletes\u2014an acquired taste\u2014at $6 for two ounces. These are the ones we would choose for the dishes discussed above.\n\n  Mushroom: The Journal of Wild Mushrooming is full of useful and up-to-date information on finding, identifying, avoiding being poisoned by, and even growing wild mushrooms, along with book reviews and a roundup of mushroom-news-of-the-world. Some of the publication is aimed at those whose interest in fungi lies at a higher level than merely finding and eating them, but each issue has its share of good recipes and the occasional offbeat culinary tip (to make chanterelle-flavored vodka, slip a small thin dry specimen into any bottled vodka and let it sit, the longer the better). This illustrated 42-page quarterly is $16 a year from: P.O. Box 3156, University Station, Moscow, ID 83843.\n\nDANDAN NOODLES\n\nNoodles, the cheapest of all foods, allow every man to be a gourmet. Such is the glory of the food of Szechwan.\n\n\u2014Ellen Schrecker, Mrs. Chiang's Szechwan Cookbook\n\nNels introduced me to the Hong Hing. Spending his days at a publishing job and his nights working on his art\u2014which at that time consisted of lithographs of fried eggs and bead curtains with razor blades replacing the beads\u2014he had neither time nor inclination to cook and, although he didn't have any money either, ate all his meals in restaurants. I don't know what kind of an artist he was, but at locating cheap eats he was a master.\n\nThat summer I was cutting costs myself, saving subway fare by bicycling back and forth between my apartment on East Ninth Street and the financial district and my job on Hanover Square. Some evenings I would meet Nels and go with him to his latest discovery. Even with the way I was cooking then it was hard for me to get supper on the table for the cost of some of the bargain meals turned out at some of his hole-in-the-wall finds.\n\nOf all of these, as far as I was concerned, the Hong Hing was best. It was nothing like my previous experiences of Chinese restaurants. For one thing, the patrons were almost entirely Chinese and the atmosphere was noisy and full of camaraderie. Every now and again, one of the chefs would strike a hanging pan cover with the back of his cleaver with a clang and the whole kitchen would break out into song. Waiters intercepted intruding \"foreign devils\" at the door and attempted to dissuade them\u2014me\u2014from entering by reciting \"no spare rib, no chicken finger, no pork fried rice.\"\n\nIf you persisted, your presence was tolerated, but little effort was made at accommodation. The menu was only in Chinese and the welcoming litany about as much English as the waiters knew. The only way to order was to point at something that another patron was being served. Sometimes this required wandering up and down the entire restaurant, waiter in tow, searching the tables until a dish was recognized or looked affordable and good.\n\nThis method had its pitfalls, to be sure, but the results were worth it, for the Hong Hing was a noodle house, serving a rich and extremely inexpensive array of China's superlative wheat and rice noodle dishes, prepared with a freshness and savory perfection that I have never experienced since. And a plate of meatless but vegetable-rich chow fun, a feast for a king, was only sixty-five cents!\n\nSo, when the cold weather came around again, making supper at the Hong Hing a more arduous excursion, I decided to devote myself to mastering Chinese cooking. I would learn to prepare these dishes myself at home. To that end, I threw out most of my tatty collection of cooking implements, including all my silverware\u2014except spoons\u2014so I wouldn't be tempted to backslide. I then went to Chinatown and purchased a wok (of genuine provenance, carbon steel thickly coated with axle grease), a wickedly edged cleaver, a handful of chopsticks\u2014and plunged in.\n\nAlthough I refused to admit it for several months, this experiment turned out a monumental failure. Part of the reason was the lack of a reliable guide. I had the Joyce Chen Cook Book, about the best there was at the time (1965), but Joyce Chen was writing for middle-class cooks, not poor poets. In any case, it was an endeavor that would have required far greater devotion and ingenuity than I was capable of, at least to succeed in making the food I had come to love at the Hong Hing.\n\nChinese restaurant cooking is a labor-intensive and highly skilled craft, the raw foodstuffs being precisely prepared and then cooked instantly, with astounding precision, over a burst of searing heat. It is a cooking that works wonders with the least expensive of ingredients\u2014but a price must be paid in the coin of dexterity, concentration, and long apprenticeship before it can be successfully mastered.\n\nI produced any number of dishes \u00e0 la chinoise, redolent of sesame oil, sour of soy, and tangy of bean paste\u2014but nothing that even nearly approached those delicate, complex, sumptuously textured yet clean-tasting noodle feasts I had set as my goal. And so, at home at least, my allegiance turned elsewhere... the wok rusted, the cleaver accustomed itself to dicing slab bacon for rice and beans.\n\nHowever, my interest in eating Chinese food never slackened, and I began having thoughts of trying to cook it again when the Szechuan boom introduced me to an entirely different style of noodle dish. Here, in the form of dandan noodles and other cold, spicy-flavored, street-vendor-style noodle dishes, I discovered a more impromptu-seeming saucing, boldly and variously textured, but still not nearly so elaborate in its architecture as the Hong Hing dishes had been. The ingredients were fewer, the dishes themselves much simpler. Here was something I could make in my own kitchen.\n\nThis, as it turned out, was because they had first been sold from pushcarts or tiny stalls by vendors who possessed only the most rudimentary cooking equipment. The noodles were heaped on the customer's plate and the sauce made right there: by seasoning the noodles to the eater's taste with an array of pungent condiments and garnishing them with simple but well-chosen toppings, a wide variety of separate dishes were composed from a limited number of set ingredients.\n\nThe foundation of all these variations was the same simple sauce, a combination of the most familiar of Chinese seasonings: soy sauce, sesame oil, vinegar, and a sweetening agent, the flavors usually heightened and rendered still more pungent with fresh garlic, ginger, hot peppers, and scallions, and a minced fresh herb such as coriander. In dandan noodles, this sauce reaches its perfection through the addition of sesame or peanut paste, imbuing it with a smooth, savory richness that counterbalances the mouth-filling pungency of the seasonings.\n\nThe recipes below\u2014prefaced with a few words about the less familiar essential ingredients\u2014example the making of that sauce and its variations, from which, in one form or another, springs a whole family (though, of course, not the only family) of Chinese noodle vendor dishes.\n\nA NOTE ON INGREDIENTS\n\nChinese black vinegar. A rice vinegar with a distinctive mellow flavor and dark color, it is made in different versions that are well worth exploring. There is no exact substitute. Barbara Tropp, in The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking, suggests using balsamic vinegar; Nina Simonds, in Classic Chinese Cuisine, a third less Worcestershire sauce.\n\nChinese fresh egg noodles. These are increasingly available in the produce section of many supermarkets, although the locally made product found in Chinese markets is superior. If you have access to one, the flat but very thinly rolled kuan dan mian is a good choice for these dishes. Freshly made Italian pasta is the best substitute\u2014otherwise, use a dried durum-wheat spaghettini. Instructions for making your own can be found in Barbara Tropp's The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking.\n\nTo prepare: The only trick is to separate out the strands before cooking, discarding any doughy clumps. Plunge the noodles into a large pot of boiling (unsalted) water\u2014they will be cooked seconds after the water returns to a boil. Drain them in a colander immediately, shaking out as much water as possible. As with any cold pasta dish, \"temperate\" is the better word. Sauce and noodles should be at room temperature, not chilled.\n\nSesame paste. Unlike tahini, the Middle Eastern sesame paste, the Chinese version is made from toasted sesame seeds and is thus richer in flavor and more aromatic (imagine peanut butter made from unroasted peanuts and you'll get some sense of the difference). If you don't have access to an Oriental market, you can toast sesame seeds in a hot, ungreased frying pan and then make your own paste in a food processor fitted with the steel blade. Sesame oil, for fullest flavor, should also be pressed from toasted seeds.\n\nTraditionally, these sauces were made in a mortar, the ingredients added in an order allowing them to simultaneously reach a fine but textured sauce. I simply mince the ingredients of the more complex sauces with a cleaver before pounding them together in our large stone Thai mortar, bought at a Vietnamese grocery. A food processor fitted with its steel blade will do the job in a snap. Finally, all proportions in the following recipes are only suggestions and should be varied to personal taste.\n\nBASIC COLD-TOSSED NOODLES\n\n(SERVES 3 OR 4 AS A LIGHT MAIN DISH)\n\n1 pound Chinese fresh egg noodles (see here)\n\nFor the sauce\n\n4 tablespoons soy sauce   \n1 tablespoon brown sugar   \n2 tablespoons sesame oil   \n3 tablespoons black vinegar   \n1 teaspoon chile powder   \n1 tablespoon minced fresh   \ncoriander\n\nFor the garnish\n\nChopped scallions or Chinese   \nchives (these are like ordinary   \nchives but have a garlicky   \nundertone)\n\nFor the accompaniments\n\nAny or all of: bean sprouts, briefly parboiled and slivered; slivered green beans, carrots, and/or peeled, seeded, and lightly salted cucumbers; chopped peanuts; and boiled shrimp or shredded cooked chicken\n\nMix ingredients for the sauce well and allow the flavors to set\u2014preferably for an hour or two, but for at least 15 minutes\u2014before using. Cook noodles as directed here, draining and shaking off all excess water immediately. Toss the noodles thoroughly in the sauce and set in a large serving bowl. Sprinkle with the garnish. Set out the accompaniments in small separate bowls to surround the noodles.\n\nThis Szechuan dish takes its name from the street on which the vendors originally sold it. Its sauce is similar to the one above, but adds garlic, ginger, toasted sesame seeds, and Szechuan peppercorns (which give it a pleasing, menthol-tinged savor).\n\nT'UNG CHING STREET NOODLES\n\n(SERVES 3 OR 4 AS A LIGHT MEAL)\n\n1 pound Chinese fresh egg noodles (see here)\n\nFor the sauce\n\n2 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds   \n4 to 6 Szechuan peppercorns   \n3 or 4 finely minced scallions   \n1 tablespoon dark brown sugar   \n2 tablespoons sesame oil   \n3 or 4 cloves garlic, minced   \n1 teaspoon chile powder   \n3 tablespoons soy sauce   \n1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger   \n1 tablespoon Chinese black vinegar\n\nFor the garnish\n\nChinese chives (see here) or   \nscallions, finely chopped   \nWhole toasted sesame seeds\n\nFirst make the sauce. Pound the toasted sesame seeds and the Szechuan peppercorns into a powder in a mortar. To bring out the flavors, mix this with the rest of the sauce ingredients and set the result to rest\u2014preferably for an hour or two, but for at least 15 minutes\u2014before using.\n\nCook noodles as directed here, draining and shaking off all excess water immediately. Toss the noodles thoroughly in the sauce and set in a large serving bowl. Sprinkle with the garnish.\n\nTraditionally, these cold-sauced noodles are eaten without any accompaniment, but cold, cooked, slivered chicken is a delicious addition. Tofu is another possibility.\n\nDANDAN NOODLES\n\nAt first encounter, the sauce for dandan noodles seems a wild concatenation of ingredients, but following our progression into complexity, you can see it consists of three basic elements artfully commingled: the noodles themselves, the sauce, and the paste of sesame or peanut, which thickens and enriches it. Dandan noodles are the archetypal street-vendor noodle, since the seed paste adds nutrition and flavor, and gives the sauce a smoother, creamier texture and more luscious flavor, but hardly increases its cost. Two versions are given, since a slightly different harmony is required to accommodate the different, taste notes of the sesame seed and the peanut.\n\nDANDAN NOODLES WITH PEANUT SAUCE\n\n(SERVES OR 4)\n\n1 pound Chinese fresh egg noodles (see here)\n\nFor the sauce\n\n5 or 6 cloves of garlic, minced   \n1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger   \n1/2 cup chunky peanut butter   \n1 tablespoon dark brown sugar   \n2 tablespoons sesame oil   \n1 tablespoon peanut oil   \n1/2 teaspoon chile powder   \n3 tablespoons soy sauce   \n2 teaspoons Chinese black vinegar   \n1/2 cup chicken broth\n\nFor the accompaniments\n\n4 scallions, finely minced (including the green)   \n\u00bc cup finely chopped roasted   \npeanuts\n\nPut all the ingredients for the sauce except the chicken broth into a food processor fitted with the steel blade. Pulsing the blade, blend the mixture into a sauce the thickness of light cream, thinning it with the chicken broth (or water) until it reaches this consistency. Remove from the processor and let sit for at least 15 minutes to allow the flavors to mingle before cooking the noodles. Prepare the noodles as directed here. Drain well, divide into bowls, and spoon over each a generous amount of the sauce. Let each eater add from the accompaniments as desired. (See the cook's note.)\n\nDANDAN NOODLES WITH SESAME SAUCE\n\n(SERVERS 3 OR 4)\n\n1 pound Chinese fresh egg noodles (see here)\n\nFor the sauce\n\n3 or 4 cloves garlic, minced   \n1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger   \n\u00bc cup sesame paste   \n3 tablespoons soy sauce   \n\u00bc cup minced fresh coriander   \n1 tablespoon dark brown sugar   \n1/2 teaspoon chile powder   \n2 teaspoons Chinese black vinegar   \nA grinding of Szechuan pepper   \n1/2 cup chicken broth   \n1 tablespoon toasted sesame seeds\n\nFor the accompaniments\n\n4 scallions, finely minced (including the green)   \n1 cucumber, peeled, halved, seeded, and cut into fine strips\n\nPut all the ingredients for the sauce except the chicken broth and sesame seeds into a food processor fitted with the steel blade. Pulsing the blade, blend the mixture into a sauce the thickness of light cream, thinning it with the chicken broth (or water) until it reaches this consistency. Remove from the processor and stir in the sesame seeds. Let this sauce sit for at least 15 minutes to allow the flavors to mingle before cooking the noodles. Prepare the noodles as directed here. Drain well, divide into bowls, and spoon over each a generous  amount of the sauce. Let each eater add from the accompaniments as desired.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: In both of these versions of dandan noodles, the number of accompaniments recommended is a bare minimum. The actual range of possible additions is quite wide. Szechuan preserved turnip (or vegetables), a spicy-hot Chinese condiment, is popularly recommended, as are any of the accompaniments mentioned with the other sauces. However, no meat is needed and the dish can be made strictly vegetarian by substituting a vegetable broth or water for the chicken broth in either of these recipes.\n\n  For further exploration, see the chapter \"Snacks and Street Foods\" in Ken Hom's The Taste of China, Fu Pei-Mei's Chinese Snacks & Desserts, and the chapter \"Noodle Dishes (for Lunch, Snack, or Evening Meal)\" in Mai Leung's The Chinese People's Cookbook, as well as the books by Nina Simonds and Barbara Tropp already mentioned above.\n\nBOEUF AUX CAROTTES\n\nReading Rudolph Chelminski's The French at Table (a book perhaps better titled Chelminski \u00e0 Table), I came across the following passage in praise of France's original women chefs, \"the mothers of Lyon\":\n\nThey were a hardy, truculent lot, these women, independent, self-reliant and utterly unimpressed by titles, money or the reputations they had made for themselves. No staff, no decor, no apprentices, no pretension and, usually, not even any written menus: just the pot-au-feu bubbling on the back burner, next to the boeuf aux carottes, the poule-au-pot or the blanquette de veau.\n\nFor reasons I'm still not sure I understand, the simple name of one of those dishes\u2014boeuf aux carottes, or, simply, beef with carrots\u2014prosaic though it was, resonated so deeply in my appetite that when I had finished and closed the book\u2014which is in large part devoted to bite-by-bite accounts of meals eaten in some of the best restaurants in France\u2014it was the single culinary image that lingered.\n\nSo vivid was my imagining of it, moreover, that when a search into the usual French sources failed to yield a clue as to its exact composition, those three words were enough to summon up not only the dish but all its individual components, assembling together in a burst of flavor that obediently clustered round the two central players: a gentle braise of chunks of beef, carrot, and onion, slowly simmering in no more liquid than they cared themselves to exude, fragrant with browned beef and onion, plus parsley, garlic, and thyme.\n\nSo the first time I made it, that's how I went about it. I took a couple of pounds of boneless short ribs and ever-so-lightly dredged them in flour seasoned with salt and freshly ground pepper. These pieces of meat were browned in batches in a skillet in olive oil heated almost to smoking and transferred to a large cast-iron casserole. Then, in the same oil, I saut\u00e9ed some onions, cut in fairly good-sized pieces, until they were translucent and edged with brown\u2014scraping up with them any tasty, charred bits of flour and meat still clinging to the skillet.\n\nAll this went into the pot with the beef, and so did a generous pound of carrots (or more\u2014this is a dish that can't have too many of them), peeled and cut into random-shaped, bite-sized chunks. Finally, a small handful of parsley was minced and scattered over, along with a sprinkling of thyme and some minced cloves of garlic, and the seasoning was adjusted with a generous pinch of salt and more grindings of the peppermill.\n\nI cooked the dish very slowly\u2014about four hours at 300\u00b0F\u2014enough heat to sweat out a copious supply of juices that bathed the contents in a rich-tasting, gently thickened gravy, but still leaving the beef juicy and tender, the carrots moist and sweet and, without being in the least mushy, as soft and succulent as a dream.\n\nGood? Yes, even almost delicious. But like many a dish pulled into being by a moment of appetite, it wanted something to be remembered by. It needed... not savor exactly, for it had that in its garlic, pepper, and thyme, but rather some clear flavor-note that would remind me, when I was hungry again, how much I had enjoyed that dish.\n\nThe answer came only after I had cast off spurious but insistent solutions such as reductions of wine or beer (too sour-edged and diffuse in flavor) and such gestes as black olives or chunks of bacon that wrenched the tongue too far from the dish's original inspiration.\n\nReturning to the carrots and beef, the soft, sweet flavor of the one and the rich, gelatinous texture of the other, I found at once what I was looking for: the sharp, citric bite of lemon, to refresh the mouth and keep it interested, even when hunger had started to abate.\n\nAnd so my finished version uses not only the juice of half a lemon but a bit of the peel (some strips of zest, cut from the rind and not too finely minced). The results\u2014given that this is, after all, a very simple dish\u2014were all I could have hoped for: a meal, in this household at least, whose name still, after several makings, inspires anticipation.\n\nLater, when I did find an actual French recipe for the dish in the English edition of La Cuisine: The Complete Book of French Cooking (by the food editors of Elle magazine), I was not in the least put out by the fact that their version was only cursorily similar, a kind of poor man's boeuf \u00e0 la mode. I knew that if I had found this recipe during my original search, the dish would have been made just that once\u2014or even never at all. Appetite knows best. Les m\u00e8res might not agree with my version of the dish, but they would, I think, agree entirely with the course of its inspiration.\n\nBEEF WITH CARROTS\n\n(SERVES 4 TO 6)\n\n1 pound or more carrots   \n2 to 3 medium onions   \nFlour for dredging   \nSalt and black pepper   \n1/2 teaspoon plus a pinch of dried   \nthyme   \n\u00bc cup olive oil   \n2 pounds boneless beef short ribs   \n2 or 3 sprigs fresh parsley, minced   \n2 cloves of garlic, minced   \n1 teaspoon minced lemon zest   \nJuice of 1/2 lemon\n\nPreheat the oven to 300\u00b0F. Scrub the carrots and, if you like, peel them, trimming away the tops. Cut them into bite-sized but not uniform chunks. Put them into a lightly oiled 3-quart casserole. Peel the onions and cut them into bite-sized chunks. Set aside. Take a half-cup or so of flour and season with a generous pinch each of salt, pepper, and dried thyme. Heat the olive oil in a large saute pan until it starts to smoke. Dredge strips of short ribs (or any inexpensive, rich-textured stewing beef) in the seasoned flour, shaking away any excess. Put the meat in the hot oil and turn with tongs to sear on all sides, transferring each piece as it is finished into the casserole.\n\nWhen all the meat has been seared, put the onion in the pan, adding more oil if necessary to keep it from burning. Cook until the pieces are translucent and edged with brown, turning them often with a spatula while at the same time scraping up any burnt bits of meat and flour. Scrape all this into the casserole onto the meat and carrots.\n\nAdd the minced parsley, garlic, and lemon zest to the casserole, pour the lemon juice over, and generously season with more salt and pepper and the reserved 1/2 teaspoon of thyme. Toss well with a spatula to mix the seasonings throughout the casserole. Cover, place in the preheated oven, and cook for about 4 hours, checking occasionally to make sure that the contents remain at a bare simmer and to taste for seasoning, adding more salt and pepper as needed. Serve over cooked rice or egg noodles with a small salad of greens, lots of crusty bread, and cold beer.\n\nAfterword from Madeleine Kamman. After this piece appeared in Simple Cooking, I received a spirited communiqu\u00e9 from the author of When French Women Cook and Madeleine Kamman's Savoie, remembering the boeuf aux carottes of her childhood:\n\nJohn!\n\nThe reason you cannot find boeuf aux carottes too many places is because that was our one protein dish during the war. Your rendition of it is way off. It went like this: poorly defrosted stringy beef, all natural juices lost, browned in beef suet; plus one onion (the Germans loved onions so they all went to Berlin...); plus one clove garlic because what we raised had to last the year and so was kept like a museum piece for months... it was bitter because sprouting; plus lousy old stringy carrots that the Germans exchanged for our lovely little beauties, which went on to relieve the bombed Berlin hunger. Water, period, added as needed. Very little salt because we were also rationed on that essential.\n\nThat was boeuf aux carottes. Since we had no heat, you had to swallow it fast or it would just coagulate and congeal on your plate. My poor mother, who is a National Cooking Treasure, made it by mistake after 1945 and endured the jokes of the whole family. Leave it to Elle to give a recipe for France's most hated dish, which made the Spam donated by the U.S. Forces taste like manna from heaven! So much for the history of this one.\n\n\u2014Madeleine Kamman (who is made of the boeuf aux carottes she ate once a week between June 1940 and May 1945!!)\n\nKITCHEN DIARY: GINGER PEAR CAKE\n\nReading Sheila Hibben's 1946 compendium, American Regional Cookery, Matt noticed that the author seemed to be finding variations of the same cake recipe all over the country. First, it was a ginger loaf from Alabama; next, it was a ginger spice cake from North Carolina. Then the Alabama loaf wandered up North to put in an appearance as a Connecticut ginger cake with stewed apples, baked in a ring mold and served with a whipped cream border and a filling of warm spiced fruit.\n\nThere was something touching and funny about the way it kept popping up, as if the usually reserved Miss Hibben couldn't keep her excitement about the cake from bursting into recipe no matter where in the country she happened to be. And rightly so\u2014for the cake proved both unusual and good.\n\nIt was clearly of gingerbread stock, but more delicately sweetened and with only a dollop of the requisite molasses; the usual spicing was given depth and heat with lots of crystallized ginger. Finally, it was moistened with unsweetened applesauce instead of the familiar boiling water or sour milk.\n\nMatt first made the cake as Sheila Hibben directed, using Wolf River apples from my parents' orchard. We liked it, but we thought its distinct ginger presence might work better still with pear. So we tried it again, using pur\u00e9ed canned pears as a simple \"pearsauce.\" That version produced a moist, tender, and delicious cake, but with only the fragrance of the fruit, not its flavor. Next time, since the canned pears Matt was using were put up in their own juice, she decided to use that liquid as well, to see if it would pull out the flavor. It didn't, but it did produce a wonderfully sticky crust\u2014and we got the pear taste we were looking for when, soon after, we added some pieces of fresh pear to the batter.\n\nThe result was a delicately fruity cake with that chewy crust and real ginger panache. The flavor of the fruit is only hinted at until you bite into an actual chunk: then there it is, rising out of the choir of flavors\u2014the small, sweet voice of pear.\n\nGINGER PEAR CAKE\n\n1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter   \n1/2 cup granulated sugar   \n1/2 cup light brown sugar, packed   \n2 tablespoons molasses   \n1 extra-large egg   \n1 can (16 ounces) pears in un-   \nsweetened juice   \n2 cups all-purpose flour   \n1 teaspoon baking soda   \n1/2 teaspoon salt   \n1/2 teaspoons powdered ginger   \n1/2 teaspoon allspice   \n\u00bc cup crystallized ginger, finely   \nminced   \n2 not-quite-ripe pears, quartered,   \ncored, peeled, and cut into   \n1/2-inch pieces\n\nPreheat the oven to 325\u00b0F. Generously butter a 9 \u00d7 5-inch loaf pan. Cream butter well with sugars; stir in molasses and lightly beaten egg. Mash canned pears into a pur\u00e9e (using fork, food mill, coarse sieve, etc.) and add this to the creamed mixture with the can juices. (This mixture will appear curdled.)\n\nSift the flour, soda, salt, and dry spices into another bowl and toss in the crystallized ginger. Add the wet ingredients to the dry and stir gently but thoroughly to blend. Fold in the pieces of fresh pear. Turn the batter into the loaf pan with a rubber scraper, smooth the surface, and place on a rack set in the middle of the oven.\n\nBake for about 11/2 hours, or until a straw inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean. Let it cool 15 minutes in the pan, then turn it out onto a rack. Serve slices of the cake warm with lightly sweetened whipped cream. Leftover cake reheats nicely and is delicious sliced, toasted, and served with butter for breakfast or tea.\nPOTATO PANCAKE PRIMER\n\nThere's something so sheerly appetite-inspiring about potato pancakes that their appeal must touch something very primal, a culinary nerve whose roots lie deep within. And my guess is that it connects us to that moment in childhood when we first became conscious of the fact that eating was more than mouth pleasure but instead a whole sea of sensation into which we could happily plunge and splash about.\n\nI don't mean by this to suggest that potato pancakes are something we all share in common from childhood\u2014for one thing, I didn't encounter them myself until later on in life. But I do think they are able, more than almost any other food, to evoke an anticipation richly resonant of childhood appetite in all its simplicity and intensity. They are so uncomplicatedly desirable, with their sweetly tender aroma, their gold and glistening presence in the frying pan, a presence that turns to all crunch and tenderness on the tongue, leaving behind it a wake of butter and warmth. Certainly this is the motif that appears, again and again, in passages such as this one, in E. CE. Somerville and M. Ross's The Holy Island:\n\nWhile I live I shall not forget her potato cakes. They came in hot... from the pot oven, they were speckled with caraway seed, they swam in salt butter, and we ate them shamelessly and greasily, and washed them down with hot whiskey and water.\n\nJust as important, they are a dish where appetite and recipe become so entangled that it is almost impossible to know where the one ends and the other begins. The making of potato pancakes is a polymorphous pleasure, an invitation to spontaneous inspiration. The potatoes may be raw or cooked, whole or part, and we can do with them as we will: mash, shred, grate, sliver, or chop, working each particular batch to meet the shape of that night's (or morning's) particular hunger.\n\nFor instance, one of the more satisfying batches I ever made was concocted from the leftover husks of a platter of baked potatoes, skins abandoned by eaters too finicky to pick them up and eat them. Their loss was my gain. The next morning I spread the skins, mouth down, on the cutting board and flattened each with the heel of my fist. I then fried them up, all squat and split-edged, in lots of sizzling butter. Chunky, chewy, crisp, and crunchy, they were, every one, a mouthful of delight.\n\nAs adaptable in content as in form, no sooner have they set the hand to play than do they urge the mind's tongue to go a-tasting, too, choosing among such options as might be rooted out from the back of the refrigerator or the pantry shelf: tiny cubes of carrot or Cheddar cheese, a scattering of parsley, a diced handful of fatty bits left over from Sunday's roast beef. It might fleck them with thyme, dot them with poppy seed or caraway, plump up their savor with garlic or any member of the onion tribe\u2014or, for that matter, with a whole grated apple, enhancing those two famously harmonizing flavors still further with a generous grate of nutmeg.\n\nAll that remains is to cook them up, into whatever fashion appetite has this time worked their protean shape, whether fat mashed-potato burgers or thin, lacy-edged crisps. But do heed this final caution from H. Pearl Adam:\n\nThe way to eat them is almost as potent a reason as their economy for their exclusion from polite tea-parties. They must be served so hot that a piece of cold butter placed between two of them begins to run out before there is time to eat them. The real way, of course, is to have them in the kitchen, straight from the pan, at an honest-to-God kitchen table scrubbed to snow-colour, with a tower of golden Irish half-salted butter whose pet name is Cut-and-Come-Again Primrose, and hot plates large enough to catch the butter-drip from extended chins. Drawing-room editions of this fine work are feeble things.\n\nWe may not be able to serve our potato pancakes with a tower of Cut-and-Come-Again Primrose, but we can move our potato pancakes directly from griddle to heated plate and then eat them at once, with pots of applesauce and sour cream pushed within easy reach. Their magic fades even as it blossoms, melting faster than the butter for which you have paused to slather them. The mouth must seize for enchantment while it can, in hungry, wolfish bites, restrained by no false politesse.\n\nIRISH POTATO CAKES #1\n\n(ADAPTED FROM KITCHEN RANGING, BY H. PEARL ADAM)\n\nCold boiled potatoes   \nFlour   \nSalt   \nButter\n\nMash the cold (and peeled) potatoes on a well-floured pastry board. Knead into them as much flour as they can absorb, along with enough salt to season to taste (a scant teaspoon for every four potatoes is ample). Roll this potato dough out quite thin (an eighth of an inch) and cut into 2-inch circles. Heat an ungreased griddle over medium-high heat, and lay out on it as many as will fit. Gently but firmly shaking the griddle now and then to keep them from sticking, cook them on the first side until a tinge of brown appears, then turn and do the same to the second (about 3 to 4 minutes a side). Serve them with ample butter the moment they come off the griddle.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: This is the simplest possible potato cake, with a gentle flavor and delicate texture. Its success depends entirely on the quality of the ingredients, especially the freshness of the potatoes, which if old and dry can't absorb much flour at all. Leftover mashed potatoes can be used, but the result will be different, since most mashed potatoes already have milk and butter in them. So, this alternative: Take a gob of leftover mash, pat it into a fat, flat patty, and gently press it into a dish of fresh bread crumbs, lightly coating each side. Then fry it up in plenty of butter until golden brown on both sides. Serve at once.\n\nIRISH POTATO CAKES #2\n\n(SERVES 3 OR 4 AS A LIGHT MAIN DISH)\n\n2 eggs   \n2 tablespoons flour   \n1 teaspoon salt   \n4 large (about 2 pounds) potatoes   \n\u00bc teaspoon baking powder   \nBacon fat or lard   \nPlenty of fresh, sweet butter\n\nBeat the eggs together lightly in a mixing bowl, and mix in the flour and salt. Peel the potatoes and grate them into this mixture, stirring occasionally so all the potato bits are covered (this keeps them from turning black). When the potatoes are all grated, mix in the baking powder thoroughly. Heat a skillet over medium heat and grease it with bacon fat or lard (or vegetable oil). When hot, lower the heat and drop the potato mixture onto the skillet by the tablespoonful, pressing each firmly with a spatula. Cook until both sides are crisp and golden. Serve right off the griddle with plenty of butter.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: There are several secrets for perfect potato pancakes, but the most important is to use a heavy cast-iron skillet or griddle, preferably two, and to have them just hot enough to cook the pancakes quickly, but not hot enough to burn them. This takes a little practice, and it's better to start a little low and adjust upward rather than the reverse. Another nice trick is to grate them very fine by using the smallest holes on the grater. This is tedious, but the pancakes emerge lacy-edged and very crisp.\n\nREIBEKUCHEN\n\n(SERVES 3 OR 4 AS A LIGHT MAIN DISH)\n\n4 large (about 2 pounds) baking   \npotatoes   \n4 scallions, minced   \n2 eggs, beaten   \n1 teaspoon cornstarch   \n1 teaspoon salt   \n\u00bc teaspoon grated nutmeg   \n\u00bc cup bacon fat or lard   \nSour cream   \nApplesauce\n\nPeel the potatoes and coarsely grate them into about a quart of cold water, then let them sit about half an hour. Set a dish towel into a large sieve and set this into a large bowl. Pour the potato-water mixture into this and wring out as much liquid from the potatoes as possible, reserving it in the bowl. Empty the potatoes into another bowl and mix with the minced scallion, beaten eggs, cornstarch, salt, and nutmeg. Pour off all the potato water and discard, saving only the sludge of potato starch that by now should have settled to the bottom of the bowl. With a rubber spatula, scrape this into the bowl with the potato batter, and blend in well.\n\nHeat the fat (vegetable shortening can be substituted) in a large, heavy skillet over medium heat. Use a 2-tablespoon coffee measure to ladle in the batter for each pancake and, with the back of the same measure, gently flatten each cake. Cook to a deep golden brown on each side, turning once. Serve each batch from the skillet as cooked, with plenty of sour cream and applesauce.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: For lovers of truly crisp potato pancakes, this German version may well be unbeatable, since the process of soaking out the starch and then wringing out the moisture makes them lighter and crisper, there being that much less residual moisture in the batter. If you like, the scallion can be omitted and a small peeled apple grated into the potato-water mixture, the recipe otherwise remaining the same. For a slightly more complicated but even more delicate version, see the recipe for Kartoffelpuffer in Mimi Sheraton's The German Cookbook.\n\nOVEN-BAKED POTATO AND BUTTERMILK PANCAKE\n\n(SERVES 2 OR 3 AS A LIGHT MAIN DISH)\n\n2 large (about 1 pound) baking   \npotatoes   \n2 eggs, beaten   \n1/2 cup flour   \n\u00be cup buttermilk   \n1 teaspoon salt   \nGenerous dash Tabasco   \n4 to 6 slices thick-cut bacon   \nApplesauce   \nButter\n\nPreheat the oven to 400\u00b0F. While the oven heats, peel and grate the potatoes into a mixing bowl. Stir in the eggs, flour, buttermilk, salt, and Tabasco, working together well with a wooden spoon. Cook the bacon in (by preference) a 12-inch ovenproof cast-iron skillet until it just starts to brown. Remove and crumble the bacon, and pour off all but a tablespoon or so of the fat. Pour the potato batter into the still hot skillet, scatter the bacon bits evenly over the top, and bake in the preheated oven for about 45 minutes, or until the pancake is a deep gold and a straw or cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Serve cut in wedges, with applesauce and plenty of butter. (If you can, invert the pancake onto a platter before serving so the bottom crust emerges crisp; if left underneath, it softens almost at once.)\n\ncook's NOTE: My favorite way to make this is with lots of tiny cubes of fat trimmed from a country ham. Also, I quarter the spuds longitudinally, skin and all, and feed them down the tube of the food processor into its finest grating blade, otherwise proceeding as above. This pancake always takes five minutes more than you think it should to cook\u2014especially since the last half hour is sheer torture. The kitchen fills with an indescribably delicious aroma; every waiting stomach growls in frustrated unison. It's worth the wait.\n\nTASTING NOTES: GREEK OLIVES\n\n\"When the [olive] harvest begins in late autumn,\" writes Robin Howe in The Mediterranean Diet, \"streets are lined with great tubs of olives of all shapes, sizes and colours. There are splendid olives from the island of Lesbos, black and bitter; purple-black olives from Amphissa; mauve, sour-sweet, heart-shaped Kalamata olives; and the celebrated full-flavoured black olives from Kalavala. Chios, the birthplace of Homer, produces a drab-looking dark variety, but appearances are deceptive, for it has a smoky rich and memorable flavor like that of the equally unprepossessing Sicilian wrinkled olive.\"\n\nJust before I began to copy out this passage, I took one such Amphissa olive into my mouth. As you bite through its skin, your tongue encounters a buttery and juicy flesh, one that is meatier and softer in flavor than a Kalamata and without that latter's sharp-edged sourness. Not delicate enough to be confused with an American olive\u2014for it has a distinct olive flavor\u2014it spreads the pungency through a rich-flavored mouthful that makes it mellow; you can easily imagine enjoying a small plateful with some bread and a wedge of Kasseri cheese.\n\nThe miracle is not how good it was but how, living in Maine, I ever got to taste it at all. That is thanks to Sotiris Kitrilakis, who, under the Peloponnese label, imports specialty-cured Greek olives into this country, along with Kalamata kopanist\u00ed, a knee-weakeningly delicious olivada-like spread made of Kalamata olives and wild herbs, and several other items that I will mention in a moment.\n\nBut, first, especially, there are the olives: for here from a single source are eight superbly different types of Greek olives, ranging in color from the blackest of purples to the lightest of greens, representing in their textures and flavors a whole education as to how various\u2014and variously good\u2014the Mediterranean olive can be. No matter that this sample is but a fifth of the different olives produced in Greece\u2014or that one artisan's Kalamata and another's are almost as different as two vintners' versions of Zinfandel. Once you get these olives into your mouth, a set of blinkers falls away\u2014and the olive, any olive, will never be the same.\n\nThat is to say, instead of a series of isolated flavor experiences, you begin to notice how these tastes and textures\u2014and the colors\u2014fit into a discernible range. It is this sense of variations on a theme that allows us to begin to discriminate and compare, as well as simply admire.\n\nFor example, it was knowing the flavor of an Amphissa that allowed me, when tasting a Kalamata, to actually taste the olive itself apart from its vinegar-flavored brine, and to understand why, because of the Kalamata's bitter sharpness, that other, sourer, presence is necessary: each balancing the intensity of the other. The result is a flood of bitter-sour notes\u2014a pungency of pleasure and not of pain. Because of this, the olive has an intensity of flavor the Amphissa lacks: add a few flecks of Kalamata and their presence is made known in a dish of tomatoes or roasted peppers\u2014especially when sprinkled with the brine instead of the usual vinegar.\n\nOn the other hand, the interesting and very labor-intensive Nafplion, a cracked green olive, has a bright tart bitterness unmodulated by any sour agency. I found it too intense for out-of-hand eating, but excellent when pitted and mixed with garlic, olive oil, a little lemon juice, and a pinch of thyme and then spread on chunks of crusty bread. Whereas, almost impossible not to devour from the jar were the dry, oil-cured olives of Thasos, whose slow curing removes all the bitterness, leaving only a melt-in-the-mouth texture and a sweet pure flavor that never wavers at its edges, like other, harsher-flavored oil-cured olives I have tried.\n\nThe Atalanti, a huge cracked green olive dappled in the lightest of purple shades, had a juicy, chewy texture and a complex flavor that began with a surprisingly intense fruity note. It made an interesting contrast when eaten with the Ionian green. Those were likewise stupendously meaty and sour, yet possessed the purest and simplest olive flavor imaginable (and without the tinny edges\u2014indicating a rushed or careless cure\u2014that flaw so many of this tribe).\n\nFinally, what is perhaps my favorite of all of them, the tiny Elitses (the name itself means just \"little olives\"). Grown in central Crete for their flavorful oil, they are delicious when left to ripen and then cured in a simple salt-and-vinegar brine that accentuates their fruity richness. The perfect olive for eating out of hand.\n\nAs I say, an education... and even better, an education in pleasure. Other Peloponnese products also proved very fine. I was so taken with their extra-virgin olive oil that at first I kept my supply hidden in the bedroom closet next to the bottle of twenty-five-year-old Calvados. Their aged wine vinegar is also choice; their roasted red peppers are simply the best ever taken from a jar; and the hand-picked and dried Greek herbs have intense fragrance and taste. Their country olive mix puts all eight olives together in one jar. Consider draining, pitting, and coarsely chopping the contents of this sampler, and then mixing the result with some olive oil, crumbled oregano, and a little of the drained brine. Spoon this heady mixture generously onto garlic-rubbed slices of crusty Italian bread.\n\nHappily, Peloponnese sells its products by mail. Contact The \u00c6gean Trader, 2227 Poplar Street, Oakland, CA 94607; (415) 839-8153, for a free catalogue. It contains other Greek delicacies not mentioned here, including honey, preserves, meze, marinades, cookies, and a variety of Greek cheeses.\nSOUP WITHOUT STOCK\n\nI've mostly ducked the issue of stock by trying not to make dishes that call for it. I don't question that these can be very good, but there is much good eating in this world that doesn't require the time, labor, and raw materials that stock-based cooking does. I might feel differently about this if my way of eating automatically generated the tasty leavings that other kitchens are said to always have on hand\u2014but it doesn't. A roast has become a rare enough treat in my life to send me slipping back to the platter after the company's left to gnaw away the last bits of meat and gristle from the bone and finish up its marrow on some buttered toast.\n\nEven so, no one serious about their cooking can long remain ignorant of\u2014or unaffected by\u2014certain assertions about stock. It seems all a food writer has to do is taste a mouthful of the stuff to start spouting that old-time culinary religion. So, at least, does Stella Standard, who writes in Stella Standard's Soup Book: \"If a soup is made with care, it is made with stock.\" And, fearing the sting of her moral flail might not be enough to effect a conversion, she follows with a homily, unblinkingly insisting that \"all western soups are French in origin\"\u2014and all of them based on carefully simmered stock.\n\nMaybe they are, but it is well to remember that French cooking was not codified by the housewives who invented it but by the chefs who \"perfected\" it. Stockmaking requires kitchens with an abattoir of bones at hand and plenty of slaveys to crack them\u2014who can then be ordered to simmer and skim, skim and simmer, until the air is dank and the garbage pail full. All this for a quart or two of something that is the means to a still distant end: \"Poach the chicken in stock,\" begins, rather than ends, the classic sort of recipe for which it is the ultimate necessity.\n\nStock, in other words, is not something immediately, deliciously edible. Its proselytizers have their stick of guilt, but they have their carrot, too\u2014the promised taste of a whole roast beef in a cup. The idea has sold a million bottles of Bovril, but it happens to be untrue. If you ignore the aroma and guard yourself against the glossy texture, what you find in your mouth when you taste stock is not magic but meat water. Stock is meant to enhance a dish with the presence of meat, not its actual flavor.\n\nThe home cook wants something more at the end of all that work than this: she wants something to eat. And so she makes broth instead. Intended from the start to be a meal, or part of one, broth\u2014unlike stock\u2014is salted and, often as not, contains pot vegetables as well as herbs. It requires not a stockpot full of hacked bones but a casserole fitted with a fowl. All that is cooked is meant to be eaten\u2014bouilli as well as bouillon.\n\nOne of the most delicious soups I ever had in my life was a simple chicken broth flavored with tarragon. It was silky smooth in texture and buttery rich in flavor; I remember it still. But that is a tribute to its maker, who knew that a lot of chicken is needed to make broth good. There is no quart of it to be gotten from any carcass, and cooks who claim they do, no matter how much they brag about their fresh parsley, whole peppercorns, and gelatinous wingtips, really owe their success to the salt jar. The result might almost as well be turned out of a can.\n\nWe know good broth does not come easy. This is why we make it for the rare demanding occasion and use canned broth for all the rest. And although stock and broth originate in very different kinds of kitchens, their use becomes as one when it is not flavor the cook seeks but a smoothing finish to a sauce, gravy, or soup. Says a restaurant chef (quoted in Jim Quinn's Never Eat Out on a Saturday Night): \"Chicken soup is our MSG. Some of it goes in every sauce. It is the base of all our soups.\"\n\nThose three sentences are epitaph to too much of today's home cooking. Used in such unthinking, profligate abandon, broth might as well be MSG, so much alike is their effect (which is why canned broths contain that chemical and bouillon cubes are flavored with little else). They make all things taste good \u2014but make them all taste good in the same blurry way.\n\nSuch knee-jerk use of broth should long ago have been allowed to fade into disuse, and other strategies evolved to take its place. Our culinary sages would have provided our cuisine with the better service if, rather than touting stock past its natural lifespan, they had encouraged a turn to food that could be made without it.\n\nContrary to Stella Standard, there are many good soups that can be prepared without stock, including such traditional French ones as leek and potato, soupe au pistou, and potage bonne femme. But as the presence of meat broth became the sole criterion of a soup's worth, it has now crept into these, too. The result is the current perverse state of affairs, where almost no one makes broth but almost everyone is busy adding it where it doesn't belong, because cooks have come to rely on its plummy presence to provide the requisite guarantee of quality to their cooking.\n\nI discovered this for myself when I set out to make some simple vegetable soups to provide a meatless interlude to what at the time was a rather carnivorous diet. These soups did not need to be substantial, but they had to involve my appetite in an immediate, spontaneous way\u2014I wanted to be able to just go into the kitchen and make them up out of whatever happened to be on hand.\n\nThis did not, at first glance, seem a very difficult stricture. However, my previous reliance on canned broth (broth + carrot + onion = carrot soup) had dulled my culinary instincts. Without it, for far longer than I ever expected, I found myself at sea.\n\nWhen I took those same carrots and went to make a soup out of them with nothing but water and seasonings, I found not only that that liquid was flavorless (at best) but that it also deadened the taste of what it diluted. The carrots' sweet, delicate flavor faded into vegetable water as soon as I thinned the saut\u00e9ed pieces into soup.\n\nUnnerved by this phenomenon, I tried at first to replicate the mouth-coating effect of broth by adding little drops of potions from the flavoring shelf: tamari, Tabasco, cognac, gumbo fil\u00e9. I succeeded, but at the cost also of reproducing canned broth's familiar muddiness.\n\nThis is the simple truth: No other soup pampers the mouth like a broth- or stock-based one. The tongue needs do nothing but loll on its satin pillow. A simple water broth built up of vegetables has its pleasures to offer, but they will not spoil the tongue. It must learn to work for them.\n\nAt first my mouth took umbrage at such a suggestion: \"Water, water, everywhere,\" it snorted, turning away. But I persevered\u2014and learned. Canned-broth-based soups tend toward measliness, using their ingredients as flavoring agents or to add some minimal bulk. But a vegetable soup built from scratch requires an abundance of quality material in the same way that a good meat broth needs meat: heads not leaves of lettuce; bunches of carrots; bags of spinach... .\n\nEven so, it still requires salt and pepper to bring back the flavor and often a pinch of sugar to restore the original sweetness. The question then arises as to why bother making such a simple soup at all. If a bowl of the same steamed vegetable has equal nutrition and more inherent flavor, why dilute it with water just so it can be spooned from a bowl?\n\nMy answer is that while a bowl of vegetables is just a bowl of vegetables, a simple soup is often a busy day's only enjoyable culinary challenge: to feed ourselves something warm, filling, and nourishing, on a moment's notice and out of nothing much at all.\n\nIt teaches you to use your tongue. No vegetable tastes just like the one that rests beside it in the bin. You must hover over, tasting, thinking, seasoning, until the delicate, fragile flavor of your charge\u2014cucumber... bell pepper... celery... onion\u2014ties there, fragrant and savory in the mouth.\n\nThe recipes that follow were originally improvised out of stuff from the cupboard; they represent no classic cuisine. But they are good and honest, with a simple structure that will, I hope, encourage you to try a couple\u2014and then go match them with similar efforts of your own.\n\nFRESH PEA AND POTATO SOUP\n\n(SERVES 3 OR 4)\n\n1 pound fresh peas in the pod   \nSalt   \n11/2 pounds all-purpose potatoes   \n1 medium onion   \n1 tablespoon olive oil   \n1 tablespoon unsalted butter   \n1/2 teaspoon crushed hot red pepper   \n2 cloves of garlic   \n1 small head of romaine or   \nescarole   \nFreshly ground black pepper\n\nRinse the pods and then pod the peas. Put the empty pods in a large pot with 5 cups of water and 1 teaspoon of salt. Bring the water to a boil, let the pods simmer for 1 minute, and then immediately remove the pot from the stove. When the contents are cool enough to handle, pour the liquid through a strainer into a heatproof mixing bowl. Discard the cooked pods.\n\nPeel the potatoes. Quarter each peeled potato and cut each quarter into bite-sized wedges. As each potato is cut up, put it into the pea broth in the mixing bowl. When the potatoes are all cut up, chop the onion into large-sized dice. Then wipe out the pot with a paper towel and put in the olive oil and butter. Let this warm up over medium heat. Sprinkle in the hot red pepper and 1/2 teaspoon salt. When the oil is hot, turn in the diced onion. Stir this occasionally with a spatula until the pieces are soft and translucent.\n\nWhile the onion saut\u00e9s in the seasoned butter and oil mixture, mince the garlic. Wash the lettuce and chop or tear it into bite-sized pieces. When the onion turns translucent, stir in the minced garlic. Let this cook for 2 more minutes, then pour in the potato and pea broth mixture and the peas themselves. Bring to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes. Add the lettuce pieces. Continue cooking until the potatoes are done and the lettuce soft. Taste the broth for seasoning, adding more salt to taste and plenty of freshly ground pepper. Serve and eat at once.\n\nCUCUMBER, LEMON, AND DILL SOUP\n\n(SERVES 4)\n\n3 or 4 small, firm cucumbers   \n1 tablespoon unsalted butter   \n2 medium onions, chopped fine   \n1 tablespoon fresh dill, minced   \nSalt   \nSugar   \n2 cups milk   \n2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice   \nFreshly ground black pepper\n\nPeel the cucumbers and cut in quarters lengthwise. With a spoon, scrape out the seeds. If these are few and tender, reserve\u2014otherwise discard. Cut the cucumber into bite-sized pieces.\n\nMelt the butter in a skillet. Add the onions and cook until translucent. Do not brown. Add the cucumber and, gently stirring, saut\u00e9 this for a minute or two. Then pour in 2 cups of water to make a broth. Stir in the minced dill, reserving 1 teaspoonful. Add the reserved cucumber seeds (if any) and small amounts of salt and sugar to bring out the taste of the cucumber. Cover and gently simmer for 15 minutes. Then pour in the milk to complete the broth and, when this has heated, stir in the lemon juice, a teaspoon at a time, until the broth acquires a mouth-pleasing zest. Add the reserved minced dill, grind pepper over, and let soup rest on lowest heat for 5 minutes before ladling out.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: The soup must simmer without ever boiling or the milk will curdle. (But don't worry if it does\u2014the soup will still taste fine.) The milk broth serves to accentuate the rather elusive cucumber flavor, but the soup can be made with water alone for a more tart, herbal taste\u2014or all milk, for a richer, more delicate one.\n\nSWEET PEPPER AND OLIVE SOUP\n\nRed and green bell peppers   \nOnions   \nOlive oil   \nGarlic cloves   \nKalamata olives plus their liquid   \nSalt and freshly ground black   \npepper   \nSugar (optional)   \nTabasco\n\nChoose a pepper and a half to two peppers for each eater. Stem, seed, and cut them coarsely into large chunks. Take a medium onion per eater and cut that also into large chunks. Heat a small amount of olive oil in a pot. Saut\u00e9 the peppers and onions in it for a few minutes, until both vegetables are soft. During the last minute of cooking, add a little minced garlic (about a quarter to a half a clove per eater). Meanwhile, stone and tear into pieces four Kalamata olives per eater (see note).\n\nRemove the pot from the heat and turn the contents out onto a cutting board or into a mortar. Add the olives and chop with a knife or pound with a pestle until the mass is a very coarse-textured pur\u00e9e. Return this to the cooking pot. Add enough water to make a smooth broth and then blend in 1 to 2 tablespoons of the olive liquid for each eater (see note). Season with salt, pepper, sugar (if necessary), and a few drops of Tabasco. Bring just to a simmer, reduce heat, and let flavors meld for 10 minutes before serving, accompanied by a plain, unsweetened cornbread.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: The balance of red to green peppers will affect the flavor of the soup. I prefer two red peppers for each green pepper. Yellow peppers can also be used, as might a small fresh jalapeno. Kalamata olives come packed in a pungently flavored wine vinegar. If another black olive is used, substitute red wine vinegar, adding a few teaspoons of the ordinary olive brine, if palatable.\n\nSPINACH IN CHICKPEA PUR\u00c9E\n\n(SERVES 4 TO 6)\n\n2 (10-ounce) packages of spinach   \n2 (20-ounce) cans of chickpeas   \nwith liquid   \nOlive oil   \n10 to 12 scallions   \nTabasco   \nSalt and black pepper\n\nStem the spinach and wash the leaves carefully to remove all grit. Shake the leaves well to remove as much moisture as possible and set them to drain in a colander. Pour the chickpeas and their liquid into a bowl and, with a potato masher or the back of a perforated spoon, mash them into a coarse pur\u00e9e.\n\nHeat about 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in a medium-sized pot. Trim away the tops of the scallions and clean the rest, cutting them into small pieces. Put these into the hot olive oil and saut\u00e9 until tender. Add the chickpea pur\u00e9e and enough water to make a thick broth. Taste for seasoning and add a few drops of Tabasco. Bring this up just to a simmer and let the flavors mellow while the spinach is prepared.\n\nHeat a small amount of olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. When hot, spread the spinach leaves over the surface of the skillet and, turning with a spatula, cook until they have shrunk into a wet mass of bright jade green. Put this into a colander set over a bowl. Using a potato masher or the back of a spoon, press as much moisture out of the spinach as possible. Turn the pressed spinach onto a cutting board and slice it into strips with a knife. Pour the spinach juices from the bowl into a small mug, season, and enjoy (cook's treat!). In any case, put the sliced spinach leaves into the soup, minus their liquid. Stir well, taste for seasoning, and, before serving, leave on the heat another 5 minutes so the flavors can meld.\n\nCORN, RICE, AND CHICKPEA SOUP WITH SALSA\n\n(SERVES 2 TO 4)\n\n1/2 cup raw white rice   \n1 (20-ounce) can of chickpeas with   \nliquid   \n2 tablespoons olive oil   \n1 cup corn kernels   \nSalt and pepper   \n1/2 cup or more fresh salsa (see   \nnote)\n\nPut a generous cup of salted water into a small pot, bring to a boil, add the rice, return to a simmer, cover, and cook the rice (about 20 minutes). Meanwhile, pour the chickpeas and their liquid into a bowl and, with a potato ricer or the back of a perforated spoon, mash them into a coarse pur\u00e9e.\n\nHeat the olive oil in a medium-sized pot. Add the chickpea pur\u00e9e and stir until the mixture just begins to bubble. Mix in the corn kernels and enough water (about a scant cup) to turn the mixture into a thick soup. Let this mellow over very low heat until the rice is done. Just before serving, stir the rice into the soup and taste for seasoning, adding salt and plenty of pepper. Serve in heated bowls, with the salsa offered separately to each eater to spoon onto the soup.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: This amount will serve four adequately or two very generously. The chickpea pur\u00e9e makes a wonderfully rich but delicate-textured base, whose flavor is nicely picked up by the corn and rice. The salsa should be served cool to heighten the contrast between the two (bland/hot against spicy/ cool).\n\nSince finding red ripe tomatoes is almost impossible in Maine ten months of the year, we use a salsa out of a jar. (Several fiery, all-natural blends vie for attention these days in most natural food stores.) However, on the rare occasions when we can make our salsa fresh, here is the version we turn to: as good and simple as the soup it is to be added to.\n\nSALSA\n\n(MAKES ABOUT 3 CUPS)\n\n4 large, dead-ripe tomatoes   \n3 or 4 scallions, minced   \n2 or 3 jalapeno chiles   \n2 cloves of garlic   \nSalt   \nJuice of 1 lime   \nBlack pepper   \nFresh cilantro leaves\n\nCoarsely chop the tomatoes, saving all juice. If you have a problem digesting the skins or seeds, feel free to remove and discard them. Stir the tomatoes, their juice, and the minced scallions together in a small bowl. Cut the chiles in half and use the tip of a teaspoon to scrape out the seeds (or, for a hotter salsa, leave these be). Mince together the chile halves, the garlic cloves, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. When this is cut down to a molecular consistency, stir the resulting mash into the tomatoes and scallions. Blend in the lime juice and season to taste with more salt and grindings of black pepper. Let the flavors meld for a few hours before serving, at which time stir in a sprig or so of cilantro leaves, freshly minced.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: This is, of course, more than you will need for the corn, rice, and chickpea soup. However, the remainder will keep for several days in the refrigerator.\n\nA NOTE ON PEA SOUP\n\nNo discussion of soups without stock can afford to ignore the question of dried peas. These make a rich-flavored soup without the use of any meat or meat stock, and yet they can also make good use of a liquid that isn't ordinarily thought of as stock, but which is still produced in many contemporary home kitchens\u2014that used for poaching preserved meat. This is usually too briny and pungent-tasting to put to other culinary purpose, but it tastes so good when used as a pea-soup base that it would be hard to name a Northern European cuisine that utilizes a specific salt meat that doesn't also have a split pea soup recipe specifically conceived to make the best of its remains.\n\nThe examples are legion. In A Taste of Ireland, Theodora FitzGibbon explains how to make one from the cooking liquid of corned beef and cabbage; in Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, Elizabeth David does the same, utilizing pickled pork liquor, and in European Peasant Cookery, Elisabeth Luard describes the Norwegian ertesuppe, which is based on the leavings of salt mutton.\n\nUnderstand this and you also understand why, when such cooking liquid is already at hand, pea soup is so attractive to cooks: it is delicious to eat and both economical and easy to make. The cook just puts in the peas along with any leftover bones or meat scraps and adds a few pot herbs to freshen it all up. The only problem here, if it is a problem, is that this tradition tends to pull the imagination\u2014and hence the cook\u2014in one particular direction. At the mention of pea soup, the knee-jerk reaction is\u2014salted meat, smoked meat, and especially salted smoked fatty meat.\n\nOnce started in that direction, the ultimate destination might as well be erwtensoep, a Dutch concoction containing all of them. For at its most elaborate it is made with a pig's ears and feet, smoked sausage, and bacon, as well as leeks, celeriac, and potatoes. The Dutch are a prosperous people; they have gone on adding good things to that soup and never taking one of them away. Now it is eaten with a spoon\u2014and knife and fork as well.\n\nWhat all this ignores is that split pea soup is, all by itself, hearty, thick, and nourishing. It asks for fat\u2014but no more insistently than bread demands butter, or, for that matter, cake, frosting. A very starchy dish allows a great deal of fat to be comfortably eaten with it... which is sometimes a good thing, but this is not the same as law.\n\nCertainly, if you take all the unctuousness out of pea soup you are left with pea gruel. Appetite can still be asked to accept that idea\u2014but not necessarily persuaded to cross the road for it. However, season this same pur\u00e9e with salt and pepper and float a pat of butter on top\u2014preferably one in which some fresh leaves of marjoram or thyme have been minced\u2014and appetite may at least condescend to pick up a spoon.\n\nA little fat and a little fresh herb: this is the secret to the best of all simple split pea soups. As peas grow old, they quickly lose that faint, sweet, floral note that makes baby peas so delicious; the herb restores not so much the missing freshness as the missing pleasure\u2014which is why a good dried herb can be used, although fresh leaf herb is better still. Mint may be most commonly associated with peas, but there are other herbs worth considering\u2014notably thyme, rosemary, basil, and marjoram.\n\nWe've chosen to share here three traditional split pea soups that make this particular point, for their flavor is characterized as much by their pot herbs as by their salt meat (one of them, in fact, contains no meat at all). Here is winter soup that, unlike canned pea soup, is not at all wintery, for each is well seasoned with bits of bright color and brighter taste.\n\nOnce set on this track, imagination can pick up the thread for itself, substituting\u2014say\u2014olive oil for butter and then working up a split pea soup out of fresh thyme, minced scallion, sweet potato, and red pepper\u2014or whatever. Freed of the necessity of smoked meat, the flavor permutations pea soup makes possible become many\u2014and not at all difficult to compute.\n\nGood plain fare in Sweden is called husmankost, and this in recent years has experienced a revival, as the Swedes who grew up in postwar affluence now discover a yearning to reestablish a connection with their more frugal culinary roots. Salmon pudding, potato dumplings stuffed with pork, seaman's stew, and baked Swedish brown beans all epitomize this cooking, but none more than \u00e4rter med fl\u00e4sk, or yellow pea soup with meat, a thick, rib-sticking gruel that is still eaten every Thursday night by everyone, it is said, from the king on down. The meal is traditionally finished with buttery, crisp-edged pancakes served with lingonberries (see the Kitchen Diary recipe).\n\nThe familiar Swedish version is made with whole dried yellow peas (which makes for a longer-cooking soup) and a piece of lightly cured lean salt pork. Most adaptations call for American salt pork, which is often too salty and too fatty to work well. We suggest trying a lightly cured piece of pork shoulder instead, especially if it still clings to its bone. Lacking that, you might do as we do here and use a meaty smoked country-style ham hock.\n\nSWEDISH PEA SOUP\n\n(SERVES 4 TO 6)\n\n2 cups (1 pound) split yellow peas   \n2 medium onions, finely chopped   \n1/2 teaspoon dried marjoram   \n1 teaspoon ground ginger   \n1 cured pork hock, bone in (about   \n2 pounds)   \nA coarse-textured mustard\n\nWash and pick over the split peas carefully, discarding any suspicious characters. Put them in a large pot and cover with 5 cups of cold water. Bring this to a simmer. Add the onion, dried marjoram, ginger, and pork.\n\nCover the pan and simmer gently for about 2 hours, or until the meat is tender. If fresh marjoram is used, chop it fine and add it during the last 15 minutes of cooking. Remove the pork and slice it thin, discarding the bone and\u2014if no one will eat it\u2014the rind. Serve a portion of meat with each bowl of soup. If the meat is very tender, it can be served right in the bowl with a dab of strong, spicy mustard floated in with it; otherwise it\u2014and the mustard\u2014should be set on a separate plate.\n\nCOOK'S NOTES: The authentic dish is made with whole dried yellow peas. Use them\u2014if you can find them\u2014after an overnight soaking and then a preliminary 15-minute simmer before the soup is made, discarding any husks that float to the surface.\n\nSwedish cooks disagree about every ingredient in this soup except the peas and pork. For some it is the marjoram that is sacrosanct, for others the ginger. Thyme and cloves can be used also. Because of the soup's simplicity, however, the best seasoning choice is the herb with the freshest flavor\u2014better thyme alone, if the marjoram has turned tired and dusty-tasting in a rarely opened jar.\n\nSplit pea soup might not immediately spring to mind as a New Orleans dish, but Creole cooks have long prided themselves on the excellence of their Lenten potages maigres\u2014several of which are built on a foundation of dried peas. Although meatless, these soups are far from meager\u2014the recipe for \"Winter Fast-Day Soup\" in The Picayune's Creole Cook Book calls for dried peas, a head each of lettuce and celery, carrots, turnips, onions, and spinach, plus fresh mint, thyme, and parsley!\n\nThis is that book's split pea soup (with some additional touches taken from a similar recipe in the twelfth edition of Gourmet's Guide to New Orleans, by Natalie Scott and Caroline Merrick Jones)\u2014and, if your mother used to dilute Campbell's green pea soup with milk instead of water, you'll find this hearty Creole soup strikes a surprisingly familiar chord.\n\nCREOLE LENTEN SPLIT PEA SOUP\n\n(SERVES 4 TO 6)\n\n1 cup split yellow or green peas   \n3 to 4 stalks of celery with leaves   \n1 carrot   \n1 medium onion   \n4 to 5 sprigs of parsley   \n4 tablespoons butter   \n1 bay leaf   \n4 to 6 slices of stale French bread,   \ncut into cubes   \n2 cups milk   \nSalt and pepper\n\nWash and pick over the split peas carefully. Chop the celery, carrot, and onion fine, mincing the celery leaf separately with the parsley. Melt 2 tablespoons of the butter in a small frying pan and saute the minced vegetables until the onion and celery turn translucent. Put the split peas, the saut\u00e9ed vegetables, the bay leaf, and the minced parsley and celery leaf into a pot and pour in 3 cups of water. Bring to a simmer and cook gently for 40 minutes, or until the peas and carrot are quite tender.\n\nWhile the soup cooks, melt the rest of the butter in a frying pan and saut\u00e9 the bread cubes until they are toasted on all sides. Remove the soup from the heat. Pluck out and discard the bay leaf. Use the back of a wooden spoon to work the remaining mixture through a wide-mesh sieve to form a coarse pur\u00e9e. (This can also be done in a food mill or, in small batches, in a food processor fitted with the steel blade.) Return this pur\u00e9e to the pot and stir in the milk. Season to taste with salt and plenty of freshly ground pepper. Gently reheat the soup and serve at once, each bowl generously garnished with the croutons.\n\nAlthough the following peppery pottage is\u2014despite its name\u2014made with beans, not peas, we've included it here anyway because it's obviously an English pea soup reworked to island taste and circumstance. This soup is very popular in Jamaica, and there are many recipes for it, some very simple, others more complicated. The red peas by themselves are what make it Jamaican, but the addition of fresh hot red pepper is what makes it unique. Our own version has been worked out of recipes\u2014especially those in Jessica Harris's Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons and Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz's Caribbean Cooking\u2014that also call for the addition of fresh herbs.\n\nRed peas, known in this country as red beans, are available in West Indian and Hispanic groceries. Most cookbooks suggest substituting kidney beans if red beans are unavailable, but kidney beans have a strong, distinctive flavor that is entirely their own. Consider using yellow split peas instead. The resulting soup is very good and visually appealing, the soft yellow of the bean pur\u00e9e flecked all through with bright green herb and hot red pepper.\n\nJAMAICAN RED PEA SOUP\n\n(SERVES 6)\n\n1 pound red peas (red beans)   \n\u00bc pound salt pork   \n1 bunch (6 to 8) scallions   \n1 small hot red pepper   \n2 or 3 leafy celery stalks   \n6 large sprigs of parsley   \n1/2 teaspoon dried or 1 sprig fresh   \nthyme\n\nIf you are using red beans, these should be picked over, washed, and set to soak the night before. When you begin making the soup, they should be drained, the soaking water discarded, and the beans put in a large pot. Add 2 quarts of water and bring it to a simmer, skimming away any scum that rises to the surface. Let the beans simmer unseasoned while the rest of the ingredients are prepared.\n\nCut the salt pork into small cubes. Coarsely chop the scallions, including all of the green except any tired, tough, or soggy ends. Seed, stem, and finely dice the hot pepper. Dice the celery stalks and then mince their leaves with the parsley. Put \u00bc cup of water in a small frying pan and set it over medium heat. When the water steams, add the bits of salt pork and fry until the fat is translucent and beginning to color. Add the chopped celery, hot pepper, and scallions and cook with the pork for a few more minutes, to let them soften. Add all this to the beans, plus the minced parsley and celery leaf and the thyme\u2014crumbling this last in if dried or adding whole if a sprig.\n\nStir well and continue to cook slowly for about an hour, or until the beans are very tender. Remove and discard the sprig of thyme (if used) and pur\u00e9e the rest of the soup either through a food mill or in small batches in a food processor fitted with the steel blade. Do not overprocess\u2014the soup should retain the texture of the peas. Taste for salt and season with a generous amount of bottled hot sauce if a hot pepper has not been used. Reheat and serve.\n\nCOOK'S NOTES: If split peas are used instead of red peas, the preliminary soaking of the beans is not necessary, and the cooking time will be less. Although any Caribbean hot sauce goes well with this soup, if you can find a bottle of Westlow's Bonney Pepper Sauce from Barbados, its mustardy, fiery taste is a perfect flavor match.\n\nJessica Harris's book also offers a recipe for \"spinners,\" simple flour and cornmeal dumplings to be cooked in and eaten with the soup. They're a good reason for searching out this intriguing exploration of the marriage between African and New World cooking.\n\nKITCHEN DIARY: SWEDISH PANCAKES\n\n\"Swedish pancakes\" is the usual translation, but an even better name is the one they use in Sweden: tunna pannkakor, or \"thin pancakes.\" For thin these dessert pancakes certainly are\u2014even more than crepes, which they otherwise resemble, being buttery, delicate, and supple enough for easy folding. They are usually made simply of melted butter, egg, flour, and milk, although a little sugar is sometimes added. Recipes vary widely as to the number of eggs and the amount of butter, but\u2014as Tore Wretman puts it in The Swedish Sm\u00f6rg\u00e5sbord\u2014\"the main rule is that the quantity of liquid should be twice that of flour.\"\n\nOur own version, fitting for a dessert following a hearty bowl of pea soup, is\u2014as the recipes go\u2014rather lean. But since the purpose of the melted butter is to keep the very wet batter from sticking, the quantity may need adjustment to suit the pan. The amount given here is what works in our nonstick skillet. The pancakes are lacy-edged, dapple-brown, and delicious. Although we first tried them with their traditional companion, \u00e4rter med fl\u00e4sk (Swedish pea soup), we find that they make a light and welcome last mouthful to almost any supper, especially when varied as described below.\n\nIn Sweden, these can be made in blini-sized rounds (called pl\u00e4ttar) in a specially indented griddle, which produces a serving at a time. Otherwise, for the sake of convenience, they are made in crepe-sized rounds, one by one, in a small skillet, kept warm and safe on a plate in the oven, and then served folded in quarters. Here is our recipe.\n\nTUNNA PANNKAKOR\n\n(SERVES 4)\n\n\u00bc teaspoon salt   \n1 cup all-purpose flour   \n2 eggs   \n2 cups milk   \n1 to 2 teaspoons sugar (optional)   \n2 tablespoons (or more) unsalted   \nbutter\n\nSift the salt and flour together through a sieve into a small bowl. Mix the eggs and milk (and sugar, if wanted) together in another bowl and whisk gradually into the flour until you have a smooth, thin batter. Do not beat. If possible, let the mixture rest, covered, for an hour or two.\n\nMelt the butter in a small skillet and whisk it into the batter, which should have the consistency of medium cream (you may need to add a little extra milk). Reheat the still buttery skillet until it is hot enough to send a drop of water skipping. Pour in 2 tablespoons of batter. Tilt the pan to spread the batter into a 6-inch round. When it is no longer liquid on top, flip the pancake over and finish on the other side. Remove this pancake to a platter in a warm oven and make the rest following the same procedure. Because of the melted butter in the batter, the skillet should not require additional greasing. Makes 24 pancakes.\n\nCOOK'S NOTES: These are traditionally served with a spoonful of lingonberries preserved in sugar syrup; their tartness nicely complements the buttery but bland flavor of the pancakes. Tore Wretman makes up a torte by layering the pancakes with fresh, sweetened berries and topping this with a generous amount of whipped cream.\n\nWe ourselves like them folded into quarters around a small dab of a choice jam (apricot, cherry, raspberry), sprinkled with fresh lemon juice, dusted with sugar, and eaten with our fingers.\nBREAKFAST CLAFOUTIS\n\nIt's the first week of autumn, and Matt and I are on our hands and knees in a boulder-strewn Maine field that overlooks the tidal estuaries at the end of Pigeon Hill Bay. This place is a short walk down the dirt road that runs past our house, and Matt has already come here in late summer to pick blueberries. There are, in fact, a few dried and wizened blueberries still to be found here... the few never uncovered by the pickers or the birds. But we're here for wild mountain cranberries.\n\nThe mid-morning sky is that pure, translucent blue that in Maine portends the arrival of cold weather, being bright without any hint of warmth. But it is not yet cold, even though a brisk wind blows in off the water. It brings with it what I think are seabird calls and then realize are nothing more than the children playing in the farmyard farther down the road. I also realize, my eyes coming to rest on Matt's bent back, that I am running on idle, looking about and listening, not picking. With a sigh, I bend over and find my hat on the ground, waiting for me. Its bottom is scattered\u2014but far from covered\u2014with tiny crimson berries.\n\nWild mountain cranberries. Despite their color, they aren't all that easy to find. This is partly because the blueberry leaves are turning a brilliant scarlet themselves, and partly because the leaves of the tiny cranberry bushes are as deeply and intensely green as holly. As conflicting primary colors do, these vivid reds and greens are struggling to cancel each other out. You only see their individual brightness when you hold them separately in your hand.\n\nI shift, and notice with chagrin that some equally visible crimson stains have appeared on the knees of my pants. As a boy I was a berrying fool; at forty-eight, the thrill of the hunt has pretty much evaporated. Still, no one hereabouts has yet thought of selling wild cranberries in pint cartons by the roadside. If we want to eat them, we have to pick them ourselves. Fortunately, all we need is a modest amount to make next morning's breakfast. We're going to have a cranberry clafoutis.\n\nClafoutis (more and more spelled \"clafouti\" these days\u2014perhaps because the \"s\" makes the word look plural to American eyes) is usually considered a dessert. From the Limousin region of France, it is traditionally made by filling the bottom of a buttered baking dish with stemmed but unpitted black cherries, covering these with a batter, and baking this in an oven. The result is a custardy, slightly puffed, lightly browned confection, dotted with pieces of the soft, fresh fruit. It is eaten warm or cool, dusted with powdered sugar.\n\nAccording to the new edition of the Larousse Gastronomique, the Academie Fran\u00e7aise originally defined clafoutis as \"a kind of fruit flan.\" This drew protests from the good citoyens of Limoges; it was then redefined as \"a cake with black cherries.\" Neither definition, really, is very helpful. A clafoutis is not a flan or a cake, nor for that matter is it a pancake\u2014as American cookbooks sometimes define it. You come closest to it if you think of it as a very custardy popover, or perhaps as a puffy, crisp-edged custard.\n\nI should pause here to mention that food writers often appropriate the name and the idea of fresh fruit baked in a custardy batter to work out fantasy clafoutis that have only a tenuous connection to the real thing. For example, in The Way to Cook, Julia Child makes a \"Pear Clafouti\" by setting poached pears in a custard-filled prebaked pastry shell and glazing the result with apricot jam. Jacques Pepin's \"Blackberry Clafoutis,\" in the second volume of his Art of Cooking, is a mixture of beaten eggs, blackberry pur\u00e9e, slivered almonds, and raspberry brandy, baked in a cream cheese dough.\n\nThere are many other examples of this, but they have not yet managed to corrupt the original clafoutis, which remains, as Julia herself calls it, \"a puddinglike, peasanty dish,\" put together out of a few good, simple things. As its honest self, it is humbler, less polished, less sharply focused than, say, a cherry pie; yet it is not so generically amorphous as a cherry pudding. It is the French equivalent of a pandowdy or a fruit crumble\u2014which is to say that the identity of a clafoutis is partly fixed and partly a product of circumstance.\n\nThis fruitful confusion ties all the disparate threads of this piece together: the October Maine morning, the wild mountain cranberries, the good citizens of Limoges, the disarray of definitions. It explains the trajectory of circumstances that first brought the clafoutis into our kitchen and the reason it persuaded us finally to keep it there\u2014as opposed to the many other, equally good-tasting dishes that were made, enjoyed, and then forgotten. Because it isn't by accident that a dish finds a place\u2014a permanent place\u2014in any particular kitchen.\n\nI got interested in the clafoutis because of cherries. I love them, and when they are in season I yearn to do something with them other than eat them out of hand. Sweet cherries don't bake all that well, at least into pies; cook them too much and they begin to taste like prunes. I thought that the quicker-cooking clafoutis might capture that unique meaty sweetness before it slipped away.\n\nI had just met Matt then and the clafoutis was one of the first dishes we worked on together. We simplified the traditional version to accommodate a temperamental stove and limited batterie de cuisine by heating the butter in my black cast-iron skillet, rolling the cherries around in it until they were glossy all over, and then pouring the batter over them. The skillet was put straight into the oven and the dish baked for twenty minutes. This was easy to do and the results were good.\n\nTime passed. I moved to Maine; Matt moved up with me; we got married. It has taken us a lot longer to merge our two cuisines than our furniture, but early on we began to notice that we were eating fewer and fewer desserts and more and more enjoying baking something for breakfast together. We began to wonder if our clafoutis wouldn't make a delicious, not-too-caloric morning meal.\n\nThe batter of a clafoutis resembles that of a popover, but with this important difference: you can change the proportions of a clafoutis batter quite a bit... and still produce a clafoutis. For instance, Anne Willan makes a \"Clafoutis Limousin\" in French Regional Cooking that, proportionally, calls for half as much flour, twice as much milk, and twice as many eggs (plus two additional egg yolks) as the standard formula\u2014say, that given in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Anne Willan makes a very rich and custardy clafoutis, indeed.\n\nOur original research into clafoutis recipes had impressed us with this adaptability, this willingness to accommodate a range of needs. No matter that, up to this point, we had followed the traditional method rather closely. Now, to make it leaner and less sweet, we reduced the amount of sugar, eliminated butter from the batter, and substituted low-fat milk for whole. We also replaced the usual vanilla and booze (cognac, kirsch, rum, etc.) with lemon zest, to give what was now a breakfast dish an uncomplicated morning freshness. Finally, for ease of making with the reduced amount of fat, we replaced the cast-iron frying pan with a nonstick skillet.\n\nDuring all this, we had no more sense of making a dietetic clafoutis by reducing the sugar and fat in the dish than we do when we make our cornbread with buttermilk and without sugar. You can make a richer, sweeter cornbread if your taste runs in that direction, but a lean one is perhaps even more traditional and just as good. Our clafoutis remained just what it was\u2014a clafoutis\u2014except, perhaps, in this one thing: it was more our clafoutis. And something else was about to happen that would heighten this feeling of possession.\n\nIt was early summer; the first local fruits and vegetables were arriving at the farmstands. Most people don't think of Down East Maine as plum- or peach-raising country, and they're right. But people do grow them here and I can still remember the intensely luscious aroma of a pint-sized carton of tiny plums for sale at Fairview Farm in North Brooksville. If cherries, why not these?\n\nWe began to work the fruits in: first the plums, then raspberries, blueberries, and, later still, apples and cranberries. Our success prompted us to take a more considered look at the not-very-inviting offerings at the local supermarket. Peaches, when we could find half-decent ones, made a spectacular clafoutis. Hybrid plums, although almost always rather dense and flavorless when eaten out of hand, softened and sweetened during the short cooking time to make a very good one\u2014the best use we've ever found for that fruit.\n\nNot that this dish is mindlessly accommodating\u2014there are better things to do with apples, we discovered, than to make a clafoutis with them, and there were other flops as well. But these failures helped us better understand what we were doing: a clafoutis responds best to juicy, intensely flavored, slightly sour fruit. The flavor of strawberries is too evanescent; that of bananas, too bland. Blueberries teetered on the edge. Apples pushed us to consider pears (more tender and juicier); bananas, by tropical association, canned pineapple.\n\nWe haven't tried pears or pineapple yet, but we will. Winter has set in since I started writing, and the only strictly local fruit still available is a few forlorn apples clinging to the bare boughs of the apple trees, bright, rare spots of color in a world of spruce and snow. What would breakfast be these mornings without the occasional promise of a clafoutis?\n\nThat is how this dish has found a place in our lives. Of course we know that we're not the first to make a clafoutis with other fruit besides cherries, even with cranberries. Brooke Dojny and Melanie Barnard, for example, have a cranberry clafoutis in Let's Eat In. Our clafoutis is ours because, like a comfortable shirt, it has managed to shape itself to our particular fit. Neither well-fitting shirts nor recipes arrive that often in anyone's life, which is why we've been a little skittish about sharing this one. Not because it's so good\u2014although it is\u2014but because it's become so personal.\n\nBy now you can see how this clafoutis is connected to our lives, but you'd have to watch us actually make it to understand how it connects us to each other. The oven heats; Matt puts together the batter at one counter and I cut up the fruit on the other. I put the fruit into the skillet in the melted butter and stir it around. As soon as it softens and begins to release its juice, Matt comes and stands beside me to sprinkle in the sugar. She watches as I stir some more. The chunks of plum or tiny cranberries simmer in their delicately colored syrup.\n\nShe pours the batter over the fruit, puts the skillet in the oven, and goes upstairs for a shower. I grind beans and drip-brew the coffee. Twenty minutes later\u2014only about a half hour since we began\u2014the clafoutis, puffed, brown-crusted, fruit-studded, emerges from the stove. I divide it into two large flat soup bowls while Matt, still glowing from the towel, pours the coffee and then sprinkles the servings of clafoutis with a little powdered sugar. We eat it with a large spoonful of sour cream. It is delicious and flavorful but neither too rich nor too sweet \u2014just what a breakfast clafoutis should be.\n\nBREAKFAST CLAFOUTIS\n\n(SERVES 2 TO 4)\n\nFruit (prepared weight): 4 to 6   \nounces blueberries, raspberries,   \nor cranberries, or 12 ounces   \n(approximately) cherries,   \npeaches, or plums   \nZest from 1 small lemon, grated   \n2 tablespoons granulated sugar,   \nplus additional to sweeten fruit   \n1/2 cup unbleached all-purpose   \nflour   \n\u00bc teaspoon salt   \n2 eggs, any size   \n1 cup milk (low-fat, if wished)   \n1 tablespoon unsalted butter   \nConfectioners' sugar   \nSour cream (optional)\n\nPreheat the oven to 425\u00b0F. Wash and prepare the fruit. Cherries should be stemmed and, if desired, pitted. Plums or peaches should be pitted and cut into bite-sized pieces; commercial cranberries should be cut in half; small wild cranberries, blueberries, or raspberries need only be picked over to remove stem pieces and debris.\n\nMake lemon sugar by mixing the lemon zest with the 2 tablespoons sugar in a small dish. In a large bowl (one with a pouring spout makes things easier), sift together the flour and salt. In a small bowl, beat the eggs gently and whisk in the milk. Add the wet to the dry ingredients a little at a time, whisking smooth. Stir in the lemon sugar. Let the batter rest while the fruit is being cooked.\n\nIn a 10-inch nonstick skillet, melt the butter over medium heat, coating the bottom and the sides halfway to the rim. When the butter is bubbling, add the fruit. Stir until each piece has softened and is coated with butter, about 2 to 3 minutes. Then sprinkle in sugar to sweeten. We use about 2 tablespoons of granulated sugar for all fruit except cranberries (which require about twice as much) and peaches (where we prefer brown sugar). When this sugar has dissolved and turned into a syrup\u2014about 2 minutes\u2014stir up the batter and scrape it carefully into the pan over the fruit. Put the skillet into the oven to bake for about 20 minutes. At this point the clafoutis will be set, golden brown, and puffed up at the edges. Divide into warmed bowls, sift a little confectioners' sugar over each, and top if you like with a spoonful of sour cream.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: In the original version the cherries are left whole, to keep in the flavor and aroma of what is really a very fragile fruit. This, of course, is impractical with several of the fruits we use, but it is always a consideration, which is why we like to cut our plums or peaches in large, bite-sized chunks rather than thin slices. We do pit our cherries, but otherwise \u2014as we do with our mountain cranberries and other small berries\u2014we leave them whole.\nPERFECT PECAN PIE\n\nThe use of pecans in cakes, pies, and candies is very much an American habit. Pecan pie, with loads of cream, will be part of the American-built heaven.\n\n\u2014Tom Stobart, The Cook's Encyclopedia\n\nPerfect pecan pie: the very phrase causes the tongue to quiver with pleasurable expectation\u2014if every tongue to a slightly different savor. Is your quintessential pecan pie dense, chewy, and chock-full of pecans? Or is it custardy soft, with the nuts few and large, to be savored one by one? Is it a dark pie that your taste buds envision, full of the deep flavor notes of molasses? Or one silky light and faintly caramel, with just enough of a taste of sugar to offset the rich, clean flavor of the pecans?\n\nBecause a pecan pie is so simple to make and because its major ingredients\u2014sugar and nuts\u2014can be combined in so many various ways, a pecan pie can be uniquely honed to a razor's edge of perfection against a particular palate: unlike almost any dessert, it is amenable to infinite variation. But all that freedom demands that you know yourself; otherwise you will constantly be seduced by other people's notion of perfect and never realize your own.\n\nI know this, because it happened to me. Searching for my own perfect pecan pie, I kept running aground on what others insisted was the pecan pie recipe: only for me it never was. Those whose first battercakes were sweetened with sorghum molasses insist that that homespun syrup, with its deep, grassy overtones, is the sugar of choice for pecan pie; for me it was a complete nonstarter. On the other hand, New Orleans cooks still make my mouth water with their descriptions of a praline pecan pie, as mouth-melting creamy-rich as that confection ought to be. But the result was so sweet that it made my teeth ache and my head spin. Sadly I had to put aside their recipes, too.\n\nMost Southern cooks insist that perfect pecan pie is made with corn syrup and not too many pecans\u2014a mellow caramel custard in a crust with the pecan halves laid neatly out on top. But there's something about corn syrup that leaves my mouth feeling dry and cheated; none of it\u2014dark or light\u2014goes into my pie at all. In fact, because most pecan pie recipes are based on corn syrup, I originally never cared much for pecan pie\u2014until a chance encounter sent me in search of my own Holy Grail.\n\nThis happened one afternoon almost fifteen years ago, when some friends and I dropped in for dessert and coffee at our local country inn. On the waitress's enthusiastic recommendation, I tried their pecan pie. And it was a revelation: served still warm from its baking pan, heaped with a mound of thickly whipped cream, it was dark and chewy and packed with nuts, full of flavor and yet somehow still ethereal, each mouthful so freshly good that the pleasure of that first bite never dimmed.\n\nI made it a point to return as often as my meager budget would allow, enough to make that pecan pie the eternal standard against which all other versions have since been measured. But, more to the point, since I'm painfully shy about asking for recipes, I knew I would somehow have to re-create this experience with nothing to go on but memory once the inn was no longer a pleasant bicycle ride away.\n\nAlas, that day came along very soon after. And it was ten years before I encountered the first clue that would lead me to my perfect pecan pie\u2014when I encountered the following quote in Karen Hess's notes to her splendid edition of Mary Randolph's Virginia House-Wife:\n\nSUGAR HOUSE SYRUP\u2014This amber syrup \"from the West Indies\" recommended by Mrs. Randolph for preserving is, for all practical purposes, unavailable today. I understand that this was the original base for pecan pie and that the modern versions are nothing as good as the traditional one.\n\nA soft-flavored amber cane syrup\u2014that seemed just the subtle flavor touch I wanted but hadn't yet found in any recipe. Freshly fired with enthusiasm (and enticed with the lure of a pecan pie good beyond modern imagining), I scurried off to do some research, both in the library stacks and in the kitchen. In the former, I hoped to dig up some pecan pie recipes that dated B.C.\u2014\"before corn syrup\"; in the latter, to find the ingredient that best approximated sugar-house syrup\u2014and then see what sort of pie I could make from it.\n\nSo far as the library was concerned, the results were more surprising than helpful. Although several modern food writers talk of pecan pies being around in the last century, I failed to turn up a single recipe dating earlier than the 1920s. In that decade they started cropping up all over the place, just the way carrot cake recipes suddenly start appearing in the 1950s.\n\nWhat I did find in old Southern cookbooks, however, was what was obviously pecan pie's direct antecedent: sugar, or \"chess,\" pie\u2014an egg-and-sugar custard, sometimes with a piquant edge of lemon, baked in a crust. These pies do have a venerable history, since the word \"chess\" is very likely a corruption or misreading of \"chese,\" a then common variant spelling of \"cheese.\" And a \"chese pie\" is what in England is still called \"cheesecake\": that same egg-and-sugar custard in a puff-paste crust. Called cheesecakes because of their cheeselike texture, they first appeared in British cookbooks in the early part of the seventeenth century.\n\nWhile I'd be the last to assert that pecan pies were unknown in the South in the last century, I'd willingly bet that their current popularity is directly connected with the mass production of corn syrup in this one, and then only because that sweetener does not make a superior chess pie. Some cook or other realized that the slightly oily flavor of pecan meat made the perfect foil for corn syrup's drying aftertaste\u2014and the pecan pie as we know it was born. By the 1940s, a generation later, it had become a grand old Southern dessert.\n\nWhile they didn't give me my perfect pecan pie, those old chess pie recipes did get me thinking about sugar\u2014brown sugar, anyway\u2014and how much actual taste it used to have before they figured out how to make it more cheaply by putting some molasses back into white sugar, instead of just leaving in those natural cane flavors, the same subtle tones you can still discern in fine old rum. That's what made those old sugar pies so good. So even while hunting for my ideal syrup, I began to sample different natural brown sugars\u2014Mexican piloncillo, Guyanan Demerara, Barbados brown\u2014each of which delighted me more than the next, but none more than a dark muscovado sugar from Malawi, made directly from the freshly pressed juices of the cane, a soft and rich sugar with a sweetly clean taste.\n\nThe syrup, meanwhile, had been waiting for me all the while, quietly sitting on the local grocer's shelf. This was Lyle's Golden Syrup, a British sugarcane syrup, thick as molasses, but with a delicate flavor and a luscious, tongue-coating texture that reminded me of the much loved barley-sugar lollipops of my childhood.\n\nThe obscure brands of Southern cane syrup I had been hunting out in the Louisiana bayous, though lighter and sweeter-tasting than molasses, still bore its potent blackstrap flavor. Lyle's Golden Syrup, on the other hand, while it hasn't been around long enough to be the real thing (it dates back only to the 1880s), possesses the same amber color and the same preserving qualities for which Mary Randolph had commended the original sugar-house syrup. And, more important, at last I had a focus around which my own perfect pecan pie could begin to take shape: the taste of sugar without its mouth-deadening sweetness; the rich, thick syrupy texture of molasses without its coarse pungency. Lyle's Golden Syrup in combination with natural raw cane muscovado gave me the perfect match to the suave, rich taste of pecan. I had my pie!\n\nThere were only a few further adjustments: I decided to highlight the sugar flavors still further with a splash of a very dark and mellow Haitian rum. And because I wanted a slightly denser texture than the usual pecan pie, I boiled the sugar and syrup together for a minute before blending in the other ingredients\u2014not nearly enough to reach a soft-ball stage, but enough to enhance the moisture reduction that takes place during the regular baking process. (If this step is omitted, the pie simply has a softer texture. Some recipes achieve this by starting the pie off for a few minutes in a 450\u00b0F oven, but in my experience that leads to a burnt crust.)\n\nThe results were all I hoped: a pie that evoked all the pleasure that I remembered from that first, inspirational pecan pie. It may even surpass it; my palate is a lot more knowledgeable and opinionated than it was then. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if I learned that the original pie was made with corn syrup, that it was the rich, dense, pecan-stuffed nature of the pie that so beguiled me... and that memory has since distorted, refined, and improved the raw data my palate provided. Better then that I never did have that pie's recipe, for now I have both the inspiration\u2014and a recipe whose slow evolving has enriched my perfect pecan pie with the flavors of memories that are very much its own.\n\nAnd your perfect pecan pie? I hope less that my solution proves to be yours, too, than that this account has whetted your appetite to go find it\u2014and has conveyed some of the fun and excitement you may well encounter along the way. In the meantime, here are three of my favorite sugar-and-nut pies, plus some hints that may help you fine-tune your own version a few small steps closer to perfection.\n\n\u2022 Other sugars, other nuts: once I realized that what I was searching for was the right sugar/syrup combination to match the taste and texture of pecans, I saw that different balances led to different pies: maple syrup, for example, though way too sweet on my tongue for pecans, would match perfectly against sharper-tasting black walnut meats. Similarly, I could easily imagine a molasses peanut pie or a cane-syrup cashew pie, built on the very same lines as the pecan one.\n\n\u2022 A little cream (about one-fourth to one-half cup) mixed into a pecan pie filling before baking gives it a richer, lighter texture: especially nice when the pie is a very sweet one (as is the maple syrup pie).\n\n\u2022 For a sweeter, lighter pie: add more sugar and use fewer pecans; for a denser, less sweet pie: add more pecans and use less sugar. One of the virtues of a sweet-potato pecan pie is that it is much less sweet and still very light.\n\n\u2022 The buttery flavor and the lard-induced flakiness of a butter-and-lard crust make it the perfect one for a perfect pecan pie. And a Southern pecan-pie authority I know suggests that you roll out the dough a little thicker than usual; a thick, richly shortened crust provides an appetizing balance to the sweetness of the filling\u2014as, in quite another direction, does that mandatory topping of whipped cream.\n\nMY PECAN PIE\n\n1 well-packed cup full-flavored   \nbrown sugar   \nScant 2/3 cup Lyle's Golden Syrup   \n2 tablespoons premium dark rum   \n4 tablespoons butter   \n3 eggs   \n\u00bc teaspoon salt   \n2 cups broken pecan meats   \n9-inch unbaked pie shell   \nWhipped cream for topping\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F. In a large saucepan, heat the brown sugar, Lyle's Golden Syrup, rum, and butter to the boiling point. Stirring constantly and scraping back any foam that clings to the side of the pan, let this mixture boil for about 1 minute. Remove from the heat and let cool while, in a separate bowl, you beat the eggs until creamy.\n\nWhen the boiled syrup has cooled, beat in the eggs, salt, and the broken pecan meats. Pour the mixture into the unbaked pie shell. Bake for about 50 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the center of the pie comes out clean. Cool the pie on a rack. Serve at room temperature with plenty of unsweetened whipped cream.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: Since I originally wrote this piece, I've found it harder and harder to lay hands on the primitively refined brown sugars discussed in the foregoing pages. However, a new product ideally suited for this pecan pie recipe is now widely available in natural food stores. Called Sucanat, it is made entirely from the evaporated juices of organically grown sugar cane, and although the label doesn't say so (preferring to call it \"evaporated cane juice\") this is, in fact, a very simply processed, rich-tasting brown sugar, with all those complex, rummy flavor notes. And Sucanat's one flaw as a cooking ingredient\u2014it lacks ordinary sugar's intense sweetness\u2014is more than compensated for by the Lyle's syrup.\n\nFinally, these days, the rum I pour into my pecan pie is Bacardi black.\n\nSWEET-POTATO PECAN PIE\n\n(ADAPTED FROM 800 PROVED PECAN RECIPES)\n\nFor the pie\n\n1 cup cooked sweet potatoes   \n4 tablespoons unsalted butter,   \nsoftened   \n1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar   \n3 eggs   \n\u00be cup top milk (half-and-half)   \n\u00bc teaspoon cinnamon   \n1/2 teaspoon ginger   \n1/2 teaspoon salt   \n1/2 cup chopped pecans   \n9-inch unbaked pie shell\n\nFor the topping\n\n4 tablespoons unsalted butter,   \nsoftened   \n4 tablespoons packed brown sugar   \n4 tablespoons flour\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F. Put the sweet potatoes through a vegetable ricer. Cream the butter and sugar together and then beat in the eggs until the mixture is smooth and light. Beat in the top milk, the sweet potatoes, the seasonings, and the pecans. Turn into the pastry shell.\n\nMake the topping by blending the ingredients together. Sprinkle over pie filling. Bake until the top is golden brown and the filling firm, about 40 minutes (a skewer inserted in the center of the pie should emerge clean). Serve, if desired, with unsweetened whipped cream.\n\nMAPLE WALNUT PIE\n\n2 tablespoons unsalted butter,   \nsoftened   \n1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar   \n3 slightly beaten eggs   \n1 cup pure maple syrup   \n1/2 cup light cream   \n1 teaspoon vanilla   \n1/8 teaspoon salt   \n2 tablespoons flour   \n1 cup chopped walnuts   \n9-inch unbaked pie shell   \nWhipped cream for topping\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F. Cream the butter and brown sugar together. Beat in the eggs, maple syrup, cream, vanilla, salt, and flour. When this mixture is well blended, fold in the chopped walnuts.\n\nScrape the completed filling into the pie shell and bake for 45 to 55 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the center of the pie comes out clean. Cool the pie on a rack. Serve at room temperature with plenty of unsweetened whipped cream.\n\nA Note on Sources. Lyle's Golden Syrup is available in the imported grocery section of most supermarkets, but can be ordered from G. B. Ratto's, 821 Washington Street, Oakland, CA 94607. A good source for well-priced fresh pecans is Sunnyland Farms, P.O. Box 549, Albany, GA 31703.\n\nTHE BAKER'S APPRENTICE\nAN ARTISANAL LOAF\n\nTruly good white bread satisfies, I think, tike no other loaf, really like no other food at all. It is the one thing we eat that has been wholly shaped to comfort human hunger. Bringing it to the table, wrapped in a linen napkin, is not unlike holding a small baby\u2014the same hand-filling size, glowing warmth, yielding firmness, and salt-and-sour scent. Here, however, the relationship is exactly inverted: it is the infant who is entirely nurturing\u2014and entirely eaten up.\n\nIn this fullness of giving, at least, white bread is different from whole-grain bread. For these, whether made of wheat, rye, oats, or any other grain, retain something of the seed's stubborn unwillingness to be digested. They remain a kind of aerated gruel, filling but not ultimately satisfying. Bakers, of course, have learned to manipulate such breads\u2014to make them dark or light, sweet or sour\u2014so that each has its special occasion when nothing else will do. But a meal can be made of good white bread, if need be, three times a day without exhausting expectation.\n\nI knew this by eating such bread but not by making it. I've been baking bread, off and on, since I was twenty, but until recently I never made a loaf like that\u2014a loaf that truly fed me. It might beguile the mouth and fill the stomach, but it left the self still hungry. No matter how promising the recipe, the result had a certain sameness to it, an inherent insipidity. I never escaped the feeling that I wasn't really making bread at all\u2014just playing at it.\n\nOther people liked my bread but, ultimately, even that was not enough. There comes a critical moment in learning a craft when the pleasure taken in the idea of doing something (\"Look, Ma\u2014I'm baking bread\") is replaced by a total absorption in the thing made: suddenly it has become strong enough to sustain interest all by itself. The thing you have been patiently nourishing begins to nourish you.\n\nI didn't understand this at the time, but I now see that I wanted to make a loaf that would totally absorb my attention in a way that might allow me to forget who was making it in the struggle to make it well: a loaf that would keep drawing me back because I had other questions to ask it, new dissatisfactions with what had only last month, last week, seemed completely right.\n\nIn other words, I wanted to be serious about my bread making in ways that were beyond me. I needed instruction, but I wasn't willing to make the commitment necessary to find it. Nothing meaningful is ever learned that hasn't first thrown the learner against the limits of his character, and one big limitation to my character has always been this: teachers scare me.\n\nI needed a real baker to advise me. But shying away from such instruction, I still struggled to convince myself that I could solve this problem once I laid hands on some as-yet-unrevealed secret, some ever-elusive clue. Surely this was something I could find in a book. Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery, Beard on Bread, Bernard Clayton's Complete Book of Breads, the Time-Life volume Breads in the Good Cook series, Edward Espe Brown's The Tassajara Bread Book\u2014from them I squeezed out every hint and followed up every casual aside. Different ways of kneading, special proofing boxes, genuine baker's yeast, French-made bread pans, oven bricks\u2014each was tried, each left me as confused and ignorant as before.\n\nFinally, after reading Lise Boily and Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Blanchette's The Bread Ovens of Quebec, I became convinced that I could not make good bread because I did not have the right oven. As we shall see, there was some truth to this. At the time, however, I lived in the outskirts of Boston on the second floor of a two-family house. A bread oven, whether indoors or out, was an impossibility. And there, for several years, the matter had to rest.\n\nThe good baguette... is made using old-fashioned methods, the way the French did during the 1930s. The good loaf contains nothing but high quality wheat flour, water and sea salt. The dough is kneaded... slowly, so the dough and the flavor aren't killed by overwork. The dough rises slowly, several times, with plenty of rest between kneadings.\n\n\u2014Patricia Wells, \"Vive la Baguette: As French as Paris,\" The New York Times, October 9, 1983\n\nIf I had not been afraid of teachers, I might, in 1983, when I had come into a little money from my grandfather and quit my job to write about food, have gone to France. Patricia Wells had begun to write from Paris about a small tribe of dedicated artisanal bakers (who also existed here and there in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy, as well as other parts of France) making what for lack of a better word I shall call an artisanal loaf of bread.\n\nThe methods they were adopting were centuries old, but the understanding they brought to them was relatively new. Just as winemakers had begun to use the growing body of knowledge on the nature of fermentation to produce completely natural wines, so were these bakers perfecting ways to naturally ferment flour to produce a leavened bread out of nothing but three essential ingredients: flour, water, salt.\n\nI had been to Paris as a teenager, had eaten French bread. I knew that there was a fundamental difference between the way such loaves were made and how I was trying to make my own, and I had already spent a lot of time trying to discover what that difference was. Recipes, of course, existed\u2014most notably Julia Child's famous version in the second volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. But these bakers did not bake from a recipe; thus, no recipe could teach me what I wanted to know.\n\nThis, I understand in retrospect, was the source of my profound disappointment in Bernard Clayton's The Breads of France. I was ecstatic when it appeared in 1978: here was someone who had actually toured France to observe its boulangers at work. But in a crucial way, Clayton saw nothing at all. Describing his visit to the Poil\u00e2ne bakery, he devotes three pages to a drinking session with Poil\u00e2ne p\u00e8re, two paragraphs to a cluster of grapes\u2014made of bread dough\u2014that graces their specialty harvest loaf, but not a single line to the actual making of the bread.\n\nClayton's concern, after all, was to translate what he saw into recipes, and a recipe is nothing if it doesn't work. Consequently, almost every one of his depends on the automatic effects of commercial baking yeast\u2014even his version of pain Poil\u00e2ne, which in reality is made without any such ingredient at all. Lionel Poil\u00e2ne might just as easily have been speaking about recipe-writing when, as quoted by Joanne Kates in The Taste of Things, he disavowed the use of commercial yeast because it was \"without surprises... definite and calibrated, not so delicate.\"\n\nThese bakers were prepared to let go of what Clayton could not: an approach to bread making that could be captured in a prescriptive formula and replicated by rote. By utilizing the rich mix of wild yeasts that filled the air of their own bakeries to activate an essentially free-form leavening process, they sacrificed a large measure of control in exchange for the chance of active participation in every aspect of the development of the loaf. \"Don't confuse the baker with the pharmacist,\" Poil\u00e2ne is quoted as saying, this time in Narsai David and Doris Muscatine's Monday Night at Narsai's. \"The pharmacist weighs the ingredients, but the baker really doesn't; he uses measures only as guidelines... . The best way to succeed in bread making is to do things as empirically as possible and trust one's senses.\"\n\nBy doing so, however, they were taking a risk: the same factors that now allowed them to manipulate the loaf made the loaf susceptible to other variables that are not under the baker's control\u2014most notoriously, sudden shifts in the weather. \"People complain that it's uneven, but... that's the name of the game,\" says Poil\u00e2ne to Patricia Wells (in The Food Lover's Guide to Paris). \"No two batches are ever the same; a simple storm can ruin an entire baking.\" If even Poil\u00e2ne himself cannot guarantee the quality of his bread from one day to the next, there is no safety net for anyone. Success cannot be guaranteed.\n\nWhy, then, would anyone prefer a natural leavening? In response, it might be argued that at the very center of the artisanal process is not so much insistence on fine ingredients nor mastery of any particular method, but rather a willingness to assume personal responsibility for the thing made. Paradoxically, this means surrendering control, for there can be no responsibility without risk of failure. But willingness to assume that risk restores the baker's artisanal status even as it offers the possibility of creating an incomparably crusty and full-flavored loaf.\n\nIt also makes possible a different relationship with the customer as well. Each artisanal loaf expresses an opinion about those who buy it, for this is the bread the baker not only wants to make but must trust us to want as well. Thus, the baker cannot challenge himself without also challenging us\u2014asking, for example, that we accept the risk of imperfect bread one day for the chance to buy, on some other, a loaf that is good beyond belief.\n\nThe artisanal baker, then, lives in a very different world from the baker who depends on conditioners, foolproof shortcuts, and automated machinery to produce a reliable but essentially silent loaf. Such a loaf is able to speak of nothing much\u2014even flavor. For that becomes a mumble, albeit a sometimes pleasing mumble, of not-quite-distinguishable flavors: citric acid, malted barley, sugar, powdered milk, yeast.\n\nCookbooks, however, are rarely about responsibility\u2014and almost always about control. At the time of which I write, still entirely under their tutelage, this was a distinction I couldn't understand. Instead, I remained obsessed with the idea that such bread depended for its success on secrets that those who wrote about it either were not privy to or would not share. I yearned for some real French bread flour... or even a scrap of Poil\u00e2ne's own levain. But above all, I wanted a wood-fired bread oven.\n\nFor a long time it seemed that I would never get one. But then I moved to Maine and, at about the same time, learned about Alan Scott, a California-based ovencrafter, who was producing small precast cement cores, based on a seventeenth-century English design, for what might prove a movable (if hardly portable) outdoor wood-fired bread oven. We contacted him, purchased one, and helped some abler friends install it in our yard (see here). I was in business\u2014real bread baking could now begin.\n\nThe bread oven, however, proved to be a teacher out of my worst nightmares. It made immediate, huge demands on my small understanding. It not only refused to tolerate mistakes but cruelly punished them with bums and ruined bread. It expected me to know everything and explained nothing. Worst of all, it constantly shifted positions, so what might satisfy it \u2014at least partially\u2014on one day cut no ice the next.\n\nEach time I fired it up, its needs were different. The wind came from a different quarter; the wood burned unevenly; the day turned cool. Nor did anything about it work like an ordinary stove. There was no thermostat, no average heating time. Oven temperature was gauged by holding a hand inside and considering the pain.\n\nA constantly recurring problem, however, was that the bread would be ready, or the oven, but almost never both at once. And since the oven had final say, this meant that I was going to have to relearn how to make my bread. I needed a loaf that could rise and wait awhile without becoming gassy and frail \u2014but that also could go into the oven too early and still find the resilience for one last, compensatory spring. Finally, most important, it had to be a bread that was worth all this work.\n\nFor the time being, I simply gave the bread oven up. In a sense, it had done its work already, for it had, more than I then understood, helped clear my head.\n\nWhat was going on? Well, take the, for me, magical phrase, pane pugliese. Before, all I had to do was to see the recipe for this classic country Italian loaf and a few hours later a splendid replication would be emerging from my kitchen stove. The bread oven, however, had no patience with that kind of cookbook romance. It kept me square in my own back yard, covered with sweat, reaching into its scorching interior to shift about the recalcitrant lumps of dough. There was no pretending here that because a certain recipe originated in Puglia I was somehow hobnobbing with Pugliese bakers\u2014might even be one myself!\n\nNo, if I wanted to romanticize the matter, the best face I could put on was that of a lowly apprentice, sent back to the kneading board with a cuff on the head to learn what I had pretended to know but had been just thoroughly exposed as not knowing: how to make a loaf of bread. Before, it had only been appetite that was passing judgment on my bread, and appetite has a limited span of attention... and an insatiable need to be entertained. This time around I had a teacher with a very different set of demands. Here, it said, is the flour, the water, the salt\u2014now get to work.\n\nAt about this time I happened to read an article on organic gardening, \"Healthy Harvest,\" in Harrowsmith magazine. In it, Doug Whynott distinguishes between what Stuart Hill, one of the experts he interviewed, called \"deep organics\" and \"shallow organics.\" The shallow-organic farmer\n\nproceeds much like the conventional farmer. Both look to outside experts to provide external solutions to their problems... the shallow-organic farmer substituting natural controls for synthetic ones. But the deep-organic farmer... comes to understand natural processes. \"He substitutes knowledge and skill for inputs,\" thereby lessening his reliance on others, like chemical companies, and thus growing in power.\n\nI realized that I was right then passing through the transitional period from being what might be called a shallow artisanal baker toward becoming a deep artisanal baker, and that the catalyst of this transition was the collapse of my blind faith in commercial yeast. I didn't like it, but I was dependent on it\u2014both the yeast itself and the mind-set that came with it. In baking bread, always, the first step had been activating the yeast in its sweet hot little bath. Once it foamed, that was that: the rest was automatic. All I had to do was to follow the recipe.\n\nI had made \"naturally leavened\" bread before, but the methods I was following had been designed to replicate the action of commercial yeast (often using it as well), so as to guarantee the same flawless performance\u2014and thus guaranteeing as well the perpetuity of old, dependent expectations.\n\nNow for the first time I was experiencing the yeast action as an actual ripening of the dough, not as a separate force exerted on a passive and inert mass. This difference may seem one of emphasis only, but it was an important emphasis. Until then, I had thought that you made different breads by following different recipes and\u2014especially\u2014by adding interesting ingredients to the dough: buttermilk, herbs, cheese, and so on. But as I gained a basic understanding of the variables involved in controlling a natural leavening, I found that I could produce subtly\u2014sometimes even dramatically\u2014different bread out of the same basic ingredients.\n\nThis is the loaf I imagine a baker once learned to make as an apprentice, mastered under the different conditions encountered as a journeyman, and finally brought to perfection in his own shop. Such a bread was made less from a recipe than from an ever-adapting strategy, flexible enough to cope with flours of constantly varying quality and strength, with temperamental ovens\u2014and even more temperamental help.\n\nMy own loaf is artisanal in at least this sense: there is no recipe for it. Each time I make it, I build it out of simple blocks of experience that have accrued as the result of a constant conversation between hand and mind, the one making the dough, the other observing and reflecting. Although I bring questions from previous bakings or my reading, the actual experience of making resides in the hands. In a new situation, I literally feel my way.\n\nFor example, I usually make my bread with a hard-wheat flour from Great Valley Mills. One day, however, out of curiosity, I substituted Gold Medal all-purpose unbleached flour. The resulting dough was entirely different from what I was used to; for the first few minutes, especially, everything felt completely wrong. But my fingers were already tentatively finding their way with it, and once they had, the dough immediately began to respond. Confidence returned, and I ultimately produced a loaf that, while lacking some of the flavor and loft of my regular loaf, was clearly its cousin.\n\nOf still more interest have been the effects that intentional changes in method have had on the bread I ordinarily make. By changing the proportions of the ingredients and the fermentation times, I have learned to make three distinctly different loaves\u2014each delicious, each with merits entirely its own, all showing, at the same time, their common origin, for they are brothers and sisters in the same small family.\n\nI've come to care for each member of this family, and so I've become that much more cautious about expanding it. There are only so many loaves I can hope to properly cherish\u2014and the goodness of any loaf is directly related to the amount of individual attention I can give it as I make it. A bread now interests me to the extent that I see how to draw it into the family, link it in its making to the rest. I've forsworn new recipes along with yeast packets, so that each loaf might depend entirely on me.\n\nParadoxically, firing the bread oven has now become more an event than a normal part of our routine. It makes the best bread of all, but a cloche in the kitchen stove makes loaves that are also mine, are also good, and represent a kind of bread making that someone who is, finally, a writer, not a baker, can better attend to.\n\nBread is important to me in a way that other foods that I love are not. It isn't by accident that I went to such lengths to get a bread oven, where I haven't yet built a smokehouse or even planted a kitchen garden. I'm not sure why this is\u2014except perhaps for the reasons given at the beginning of this piece. Bread nurtures me as no other food.\n\nAnd now my bread nurtures me. It wasn't some special ingredient or piece of equipment I had needed but the courage to accept responsibility for each individual loaf. Doing that has finally brought me to that point familiar to all artisans, the moment when the craft that has been patiently fed for so long begins, in return, to feed the self.\n\nAfterword. Master baker Brother Peter Reinhart, in his thoughtful and often slyly funny book on bread baking, Brother Juniper's Bread Book: Slow Rise as Method and Metaphor, devotes several pages of the chapter entitled \"The Artisanal Loaf\" to this piece. The essence of his discussion can be found in the following lines:\n\nJohn Thorne's concerns... represent a desire to restore balance, order, and perspective into our daily lives and to counter the shallowness of the assembly-line mentality. The danger, though, is the demeaning of other perspectives that may fall well between the two extremes of artisanal and assembly-line bread. Few, after all, can sustain the effort of firing a brick oven and tending it for hours, in order to make four loaves of bread. I applaud those who do, but what about the average householder who already has a gas or electric oven and no desire or ability to build and fire a brick oven?\n\nIronically, at the very moment Brother Peter wrote me for permission to quote from \"An Artisanal Loaf,\" Matt and I were preparing to move from Castine and to leave our outdoor bread oven behind. We decided, not without reluctance, that until we have our own home and the time to commit to a wood-fired oven, we would bake bread in the kitchen oven like any other average householder. Consequently, by the time Brother Peter's book was published, I was again without a bread oven, and found myself involuntarily instancing his point.\n\nEven so, I still don't believe that it's an elitist position to insist that the best bread is baked in such ovens. After all, very few people are privileged to eat free-range chickens, and yet it remains a matter of fact that such chickens taste better than battery-raised poultry. To know the substance of that truth, however, one has actually to taste a free-range chicken, which for many of us would mean having to raise it ourselves.\n\nUntil I built my own bread oven and baked bread in it, I didn't truly understand the issues involved in making good bread because I didn't know what good bread was\u2014nor the price that must be paid to have it. Afterward, I understood that as good as this bread was, the effort involved in making it was too much for most amateur bakers. But given the exemplary quality of this bread, I began to ask myself more seriously why so many professional bakers also refuse to accept its challenge. And, rather confusingly, Brother Peter never deals directly with this issue in his book.\n\nAfter all, I probably would never have bothered to construct a bread oven at all if I had been able to go to a local bakery and purchase a freshly baked basic loaf of white bread that (forget wood-fired ovens!) tasted simply of good wheat, salt, and yeast, without any overtones of dough conditioner, ascorbic acid, sugar, or shortening. Living near Boston, I could find such a loaf if I was willing to travel about two hours to get it; in Maine, it proved almost out of the question.\n\nAs it happens, there are small bakeries a short trip from both Castine and Steuben, the town where we now live. Unfortunately, neither produces what I consider an acceptable loaf of bread. I suspect that these bakers simply do not know how to judge their bread. Because our ordinary bread is so terribly bad, a mediocre loaf, freshly baked, will probably receive enthusiastic and near-universal praise.\n\nThis doesn't mean, however, that that bread will necessarily be bought. An acid test of the quality of a bakery's bread is whether customers come primarily for the basic loaf or instead for the cranberry muffins, the \"French\" bread, or the oat-bran, raisin, sunflower-seed loaf. In my own experience, bakers who find that their customers are not willing to buy their basic loaf simply assume that what is wanted is special breads, laden with special ingredients. And so their solution to the problem is: \"Let them eat cake.\"\n\nThe fact that customers prefer a bread with flavor, even if it isn't the flavor of bread, is a clue that these bakers are no longer able to make a basic loaf so good that their customers won't want anything else. This ability has been taken away from the bakers by the companies that sell them their ovens, their baking supplies, and their flours\u2014because to a large extent their standard loaf, especially, is determined by these products.\n\nThese professional bakers are in a not very much better place than the home bread baker who purchases a patent bread flour and patent yeast and follows a patent recipe. Indeed, the people who run both of these Maine bakeries could be more accurately described as running a kind of franchise operation. They think of their bread as made from scratch, but the ingredients they use are not only highly processed but formulated to produce a particular product as well. Control is almost entirely taken from the baker's hands.\n\nShortly after the passage I have quoted, Brother Peter writes: \"I do not feel diminished nor is my finished loaf diminished because I use instant yeast and a regular oven.\" This may very well be true, but where\u2014once such predetermined limitations have been embraced\u2014does the baker then turn for continued inspiration, for the necessary challenge to keep his or her skills sharply honed?\n\nFor Brother Peter, the answer to this question, as can be seen in the subtitle of his book, is to recommend that we allow our dough a slow rise to fully develop its flavor and character. This is a good strategy, but it is not a sufficient answer to our problem. For if I apply the same acid test to his book that I apply to bakeries, I discover that while he does pay warm homage to a simple, plain loaf made of nothing but flour, salt, yeast, and water, he does not linger in its company for long. He is obviously excited about the idea of such bread, but when it comes to real loaves, his enthusiasm is directed instead toward such breads as struan, his imaginative\u2014but also fantastical\u2014re-creation of a Scottish harvest loaf. This contains, apart from the essential four, eight other ingredients: polenta, rolled oats, brown sugar, wheat bran, brown rice, honey, buttermilk, and sesame seeds... and, tellingly, it is not given a slow rise.\n\nBrother Peter writes: \"The brick oven is John Thorne's teacher and apprentice master. The loaf itself is mine.\" The loaf, however, as I learned myself, can be a devious instructor. That this is also so for Brother Peter can be seen from how quickly he abandons not only the simple loaf but also, where necessary, the slow-rise method in order to concoct such ingredient-laden fantasy breads as struan, roasted three-seed bread, wild-rice and onion bread, and Cajun three-pepper bread\u2014loaves that have become, by his own account, the mainstays of his bakery.\n\nI have no quarrel with such breads, but I also have no interest in eating them. I want to eat a very simple, basic loaf, and I want that loaf to be extraordinary. How does the ordinary become extraordinary? Brother Peter ends up, despite himself, finding the extraordinary in the extraordinary. This is understandable, but it's not the miracle I need.\n\nI don't mean to imply that Brother Peter's own basic white loaf is not a good one, but that his book, despite its apparent enthusiasm for such bread, never truly examples what might challenge a baker\u2014with undiminished involvement and enthusiasm\u2014to continually produce it. Our culture, so imaginative in finding ways to innovate, is not so inspired in finding a way to sustain a commitment to providing excellence in humble necessities. Indeed, sometimes it seems to conspire against it.\n\nI, too, required the extraordinary to accomplish the extraordinary. I needed the discipline of the wood-fired bread oven to break away from the conventional perspective where patent-yeast-risen breads are the norm. As soon as I began baking in earnest with my wood-fired oven, the naturally leavened loaf became completely ordinary... because, in that situation, it was what made sense.\n\nBrother Peter is right to ask how this same sense might be made in a simpler way: that is, one more appropriate to the way we live. But to ask a question is not the same as to answer it. His book ultimately serves to reconcile the baker to a world of patent flours and yeasts and hi-tech bakery ovens... and the loaves that they best produce. So the question remains: How in our contemporary world can the making of a simple loaf of bread be made into what is at once an ordinary and an extraordinary event?\n\nNOTES ON BUILDING AND USING AN OUTDOOR WOOD-FIRED BREAD OVEN\n\nAlan Scott, a lanky, soft-spoken Australian, first encountered naturally fermented whole-grain bread at the Blue Mountain Center for Meditation, where Laurel Robertson wrote The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. He helped design and create the center's ovens, an experience that changed the direction of his life. Interviewed in the Food & Drink supplement of the Pacific Sun for September 6-15, 1985, Alan Scott said, \"I am a blacksmith by trade, and fire is one of my tools. But little did I suspect what was opening up for me once a halfway decent oven was built, and I tasted bread baked in the way it is supposed to be.\"\n\nThe immediate result was his founding OvenCrafters in 1984, to design, build, and promote the use of small, heat-retaining ovens in both private homes and artisanal bakeries. Alan Scott travels around the country building these ovens and leading workshops on both building and operating them. He has also been involved with the Aprovecho Institute of Oregon in developing larger ovens to supplement open-fire cooking in Third World countries where fuel is scarce.\n\nIn his continuing search for appropriate ovens for various situations and locales, he has researched and written practical plans for building Quebec clay and Southwest adobe outdoor ovens, an indoor brick pizza/bread oven, and concrete ovens that can be used inside or out.\n\nHowever, the particular oven that originally drew me to write him was his replica of a ceramic oven liner that had once been manufactured in North Devon and imported into this country in the early 1600s. But where the original version had been made of gravel-tempered clay fired like pottery, his was mold-cast of high-temperature calcium aluminite cement. Consequently, it no longer needs to be built into the masonry of a fireplace, possessing sufficient mass to hold heat for most baking needs, even with walls that are only two inches thick.\n\nWe ordered the oven shell in late March of 1988 and drove into Bangor to pick it up on May 16. Although the shell is only two feet wide and a little over a foot high, it weighs a hundred and fifty pounds, and we were a little nervous as to whether we could fit it ourselves into the back of our tiny Honda Civic. Our faces fell when we arrived at the truck depot and discovered a crate almost as large as the car. But one of the freight men, noticing our dismay, produced a crowbar and helped us free the shell and then shoehorn it through the hatchback.\n\nTwo friends, Bob Black and Joyce Cambron, who do home renovation work, volunteered to assemble the oven, guided by a set of instructions provided by OvenCrafters. Because of the small size of the oven and its narrow opening, we decided to place it on a wooden platform\u2014essentially a square, sturdy table\u2014built strong enough for an elephant to tap dance on it. The top of this table had raised wooden sides, allowing concrete to be poured into it to a depth of one inch. On this foundation, while still wet, we set precast concrete slabs, and on these laid three rows of bricks. These provided the platform on which we set the actual shell. We then covered that with a concrete/ vermiculite mixture for added insulation (necessary in Maine, even in summer).\n\nAn oven door was fashioned from a ten-by-ten-inch square of two-inch-thick board, protected from the oven heat by a tacked-on piece of aluminum cookie sheet, trimmed to fit with tin snips. A handle was then attached to the other side. Finally, to protect the whole structure from rain, we covered it with a cedar-shingled roof.\n\nThus, for the cost of the shell ($150), plus shipping (another $125) and some auxiliary construction costs, we owned an operating wood-fired oven for less than $400.\n\nOnce finished, the oven required a breaking-in period of about two weeks and then some further getting used to. The method itself, however, is an easily explained three-step process:\n\nStep one (about ninety minutes). A small hardwood fire is set in the mouth of the oven. When burning freely, it is pushed inside and more wood added. When this larger fire has burnt down to charcoal, which takes about an hour, that is broken into chunks and carefully spread over the entire surface of the oven floor. It is allowed to burn there for about fifteen minutes to heat the floor as thoroughly and evenly as possible.\n\nStep two (about fifteen minutes). The burning cinders are raked out into a small zinc-lined trash can. The oven is swept out with a long-handled brush and then mopped clean with a string mop, which fills the oven with steam. The oven temperature is checked with an ungloved hand by counting slowly until the heat becomes too much to bear. Practice will tell what count produces the best loaf. A too-hot oven can be cooled with a second mopping; a too-cool oven must be refired.\n\nStep three (about sixty minutes). If all is well, the clean oven bottom is sprinkled with cornmeal. The prepared dough is put in place quickly with a bread peel (or a slab of cardboard or shingle). The oven is then closed off with the tin-lined wooden door and the bread left to bake (with an occasional check)\u2014a process that takes from forty to fifty minutes. Success, however, is signaled much earlier, for when all goes well the yard soon fills with the salty-sweet scent of dough becoming loaf.\n\nExperience teaches all, so far as this oven goes, and there is much to learn. The dough, for example, will not bake where the floor has not directly absorbed heat, thus creating a loaf that is half dough, half bread if it has not been checked and shifted in time. Also, a not-quite-hot-enough oven produces loaves that are baked through but pale as a tombstone, which can be quite disconcerting. However, by the third attempt I produced bread not only fit to eat (at least en famille) but possessing all the right distinguishing marks: the thin, crisp crust, the exuberant plumpness, the delicate savor of wood smoke. It is simply astonishingly good bread.\n\nThe small size of this oven is actually quite sensible, for it holds four ordinary-sized loaves without problem. However, nothing has reconciled me to its small mouth. At its narrowest, a mere eight-by-eight inches, it prohibits pizzas and other flat hearth breads and accepts only the smallest vessels for the slow baking of beans or stews. A doorway at least a foot wide and ten inches high would be an enormous improvement. So would a small, pluggable vent in the rear of the shell to help promote the initial burning (which is otherwise very much at the mercy of the day's prevailing winds).\n\nFor more information about this and his other ovens, contact: Alan Scott, OvenCrafters, P.O. Box 24, Tomales, CA 94971; (707) 878-2028.\n\nBAKING NOTES: A READING LIST\n\n\u2022 Edward Behr, The Art of Eating. Edward Behr writes searchingly and well on topics of concern to all serious bread makers, as can be seen from such essays as: \"Millstones, Old Mills, and the Taste of Bread,\" \"Of Wild Yeast, Rhode Island Rye, and Indian Corn,\" and \"The Pursuit of the Fundamental Loaf.\" His food letter, The Art of Eating, is $22 for four quarterly issues from Box 242, Peacham, VT 05862. Back issues are available.\n\n\u2022 Paul Bertolli (with Alice Waters), Chez Panisse Cooking (New York: Random House, 1988). The chapter on bread is a perceptive, thorough, and sensitively written account of natural fermentation methods, including one that nicely points up the affinity of baker to winemaker through the use of wine-grape must as a leavening agent.\n\n\u2022 Roland Bilheux, Alain Escoffier, Daniel Herv\u00e9, and Jean-Marie Pouradier, Special and Decorative Breads (translated by Rhona Poritzky-Lauvand and James Peterson; New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1989). Four professional French bakers show how informative and helpful an instructional manual can be. Here, at last, are closeup photographs showing depth and color of crust, the texture of the crumb, the size and distribution of air holes in standard French loaves. Such meticulous attention to detail characterizes the text as well, which starts with a useful glossary of French baking terms and then provides a technical but clear explanation of the mechanics of French bread baking. Expensive as it is ($59.95), technical as it is, and as full as it is of breads you'll never make and techniques you'll never employ, I can't imagine anyone seriously interested in baking French bread not wanting to get hold of this book.\n\n\u2022 Lise Boily and Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Blanchette, The Bread Ovens of Quebec (Ottawa: National Museum of Man/National Museums of Canada, 1979). An enchanting account of the role of the bread oven in rural Quebec, with a series of photographs that show one being built and then being used. There are instructions for making the bread traditionally baked in these ovens, and of the folktales and songs that have grown up around them. A unique portrait of the central role that bread and bread making play in this culture.\n\n\u2022 Elizabeth David, English Bread and Yeast Cookery (American edition, with notes by Karen Hess; New York: Viking, 1980). Still by far the most thoughtful book on the baking of bread written in the English language.\n\n\u2022 Carol Field, The Italian Baker (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). See my essay on this work in my first book, Simple Cooking. Because she learned the way Italian bakers actually go about their task before translating their methods into a recipe-oriented format, some working backward is possible to those willing to read between the lines.\n\n\u2022 Karen Hess, \"The American Loaf: A Historical View,\" The Journal of Gastronomy (Winter 1987\u201388, pp. 2\u201323). Karen Hess weaves a fascinating exegesis of the American loaf, starting from an 1824 recipe of Mary Randolph's and drawing together many disparate strands of farming and baking practice. Central to the piece is a persuasive case\u2014accompanied by her very instructive method\u2014for the soft-wheat-flour loaf.\n\n\u2022 Tom Jaine, The Three Course Newsletter. Until it suspended publication, this British food journal regularly published\u2014as its \"third course\"\u2014The Barefoot Baker, a compendium of practical bread-baking information, historical documents, and detailed reports on European artisanal bakeries. The back issues are still invaluable but rapidly dating: we need a similar publication from a similarly literate, practicing artisanal baker to take its place.\n\n\u2022 Thom Leonard, The Bread Book (Brookline, MA: East-West Health Books, 1990). Thorn Leonard brings to this book the unique bifocal perspective of an organic wheat farmer and an artisanal bread baker. After explaining that the home gardener can produce enough wheat in a ten-by-ten-foot plot to make twenty-five intensely wheat-flavored loaves, he devotes the first part of the book to explaining how to grow, thresh, and winnow this grain, and then mill it into flour. In the second half, he details the baking of several types of naturally leavened bread (including rye, pita, and several different kinds of pizza), and rounds things off with instructions for building a back-yard wood-fired bread oven.\n\n\u2022 Lionel Poil\u00e2ne, Faire Son Pain (Paris: Manu Presse/Dessain & Tolra, 1982). Even those who don't read French will find the photographs an education in themselves. Otherwise\u2014until that crisply intelligent text finds its translator\u2014turn to the careful presentation of his method by Patricia Wells in The Food Lover's Guide to Paris (New York: Workman, 1984).\n\n\u2022 Laurel Robertson (with Carol Flinders and Bronwen Godfrey), The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book (New York: Random House, 1984). Although the weight of good advice lies rather heavily on its pages, this book contains a clear presentation of the mystical desem natural whole-grain fermentation method, originated in Belgium by Omer Gevaert and practiced here by such bakers as Hy Lerner at Baldwin Hill.\n\n\u2022 Jeffrey Steingarten, Vogue (November 1990). His account of making a naturally leavened loaf in his New York City apartment will amuse, reassure, inform, and inspire any beginning amateur artisanal baker.\nONE LOAF THREE WAYS\n\nEven before I left my bread oven behind me in Castine, I knew that I would have to learn how to transfer its most important lesson to our ordinary kitchen stove, where I was already doing most of our bread baking. It wasn't enough to find the loaf I wanted to eat; I also wanted the act of baking this same loaf\u2014no matter how many times I made it\u2014to remain a continual challenge.\n\nIt's the difference between finding the companion you want to spend the rest of your life with and then learning how to make that relationship work. I already knew that breads made of unbleached stone-ground white flour, water, and salt were the ones I wanted to devote myself to making\u2014and I had begun to learn how to make them. Now I had to learn a way of not taking them for granted, to keep alive the seductive luster that originally fascinated me.\n\nI found the key to this process in an evocative thought of Tom Jaine's: \"Making different sorts of bread is not a question of thinking up outlandish ingredients and flavourings but rather changing the manipulation and cooking of flour, salt, and water.\" For me, progress as a baker would mean coming up with more and more interesting questions to ask the same ingredients... instead of devoting myself to finding a continual source of new ingredients to which I would continue to relate as to an endless series of one-night stands.\n\nIn a certain sense, this was merely making a virtue out of a necessity. I had already discovered that working with a natural leavening process forced me to adapt to different baking conditions and even to small variations in the composition of my flour or leavening. Now I was learning that it also permitted me to vary the kneading, rising, and baking processes to produce related but still distinctly different loaves of bread. For the purposes of this essay, I have defined these loaves as three. All are made from the same basic dough of flour, water, and salt, worked differently to achieve different effects.\n\nWhat follows is not a recipe. I'm not yet able to provide infallible directions for producing a successful replication of my own artisanal loaf. Instead, I have tried to explain as clearly as I can how I go about making it, so that the reader can first discern the single method that links these loaves and then notice the changes in that method that make each one distinct. I've tried to provide enough information so that an inexperienced baker can understand what is happening, but to someone in this situation, the following text can serve at best only as a guide. Sources of more comprehensive instruction can be found in the reading list that precedes this chapter.\n\nThe Equipment. Since we left Castine, my bread has been baked indoors in a bread cloche or, when that is not suitable, on a baking stone. These are described here. Other essential equipment includes a large bowl, a steel dough scraper (a plastic one is also handy), a firm (heatproof) rubber spatula, and a few other ordinary kitchen items. I also suggest, for ease of cleanup, slipping plastic sandwich bags over the faucet handles on the kitchen sink when mixing and kneading the dough, so that these can be operated with flour-paste-covered fingers.\n\nThe Ingredients. I use the unbleached hard-wheat white flour sold by The Great Valley Mills (687 Mill Road, Telford, PA 18969). The resulting loaf has a better flavor and rises higher than bread made from a good unbleached all-purpose flour like King Arthur. However, this is also a matter of taste: a loaf made with a blend of softer flour has a drier, more delicate texture; my first loaf, especially, is moister and chewier and often tastes best a day or so after baking. I use pure sea salt and the water from our well. (I don't write this to make you envious; our well water isn't especially choice. But it is free from chlorine, which can have a deleterious effect on the yeast and synergistic bacteria in your leaven\u2014as, of course, chlorine is meant to do. If you use treated water, I suggest that at least your starter be made from natural spring water.)\n\nThe Leaven. See the discussion of natural leavens in the following chapter. My own is based on the levain used by Lionel Poil\u00e2ne for his natural sourdough loaf and is made as follows: Pour half a cup of water into a bowl. Work into it sufficient flour to make a moist but cohering dough, kneading it just enough to form a smooth, elastic ball. This is the starter, or, as French bakers sweetly call it, the chef. Put this in a small bowl, cover with a damp dish towel secured with a rubber band, and let sit on a draft-free kitchen shelf for three days, removing and remoistening the towel periodically. Once the starter begins to swell and give off a tangy scent, it is activated and can be either used at once or kept in the refrigerator for a week or so. A piece of dough\u2014a new chef\u2014is removed from each subsequent loaf and held to provide the leavening for the next one, regardless of which of the three different loaves I am attempting.\n\nThe Method. All three loaves have the same round shape, contain the same ingredients, are baked for approximately the same amount of time, and are made following what is, essentially, the same method. It begins with 1\u00bc cups of water. This is my basic measure. Experience has taught me that a loaf made with just this amount of water is satisfyingly large but still sized right to be handily manipulated and to fit the baking cloche. Because after the sponge is made I work in flour by the handful, I adjust the amount added in response to the way the dough is developing. Except in the most casual way, I do not measure it. Nor, usually, do I make more than one loaf at a time. At this point, I still make bread best when I give a single loaf my full attention.\n\nI begin just before bedtime, pouring the 1\u00bc cups of cold water into a large bowl. I put the chef in this and squeeze it with my hands until it dissolves entirely away. (The water is cold partly because at this point I don't want to encourage rapid yeast development, and partly because the gluten in the chef otherwise becomes rubbery and hard to dissolve.) Using a firm rubber spatula, I work in twice as much flour as water (another basic proportion) and 1/2 tablespoon of sea salt. This is stirred and turned over until it forms a coarse, wet mass. With well-floured hands, I coax this free from the sides of the bowl and work it into a ball, which is generously dusted with flour and turned out onto the counter. It is much too slack to hold its round shape for long, but enough maybe for me to wash, dry, and flour the bowl, and put the dough back in. This is covered first with a damp dish towel and then with a piece of plastic wrap, the two of them, one on top of the other, secured to the bowl rim with a rubber band.\n\nThis lump of flour is the sponge, which, once ripened and mellowed, will become the foundation of the dough. Hard flour requires this aging time to develop its full flavor and best texture. To accomplish this, it needs a cool environment (about 6o\u00b0F); I use the top of the cellar stairs. To take full advantage of this ripening process, the sponge must be aged longer (as it is with the Poil\u00e2ne-style country sourdough loaf, discussed later). Aged overnight, it produces changes that are more subtly attractive, and immediately noticeable in the feel of the dough.\n\nBy morning, it will be showing signs of life. Some days it will have shot up to the top of the bowl; on others only a practiced eye can discern that it has done anything but collapse into a flaccid puddle. However, on days when the bread will be the best, it will simply have risen\u2014gotten itself up, as it were, just as I have\u2014a little groggy-looking, perhaps, but ready to face the day.\n\nThe first loaf is the least complex of the loaves I make. After its night of slumber, I turn the sponge out onto a floured board and begin to knead into it as much flour as it can absorb, without any effort to force-feed it. I work it in by the handful, adding more each time the dough gets sticky during the course of a thorough kneading. This takes about 12 to 15 minutes; by then the dough is satin-smooth and robustly muscular, and my hands, my instincts, tell me: Stop.\n\nThere is much good advice written on how to knead bread.  The essential thing to remember is that kneading serves two functions in making naturally leavened bread: to align the molecules in the flour so that they can link up into a complex network of gluten and to trap pockets of oxygen in the dough to assist with the fermentation. This means that the dough must be stretched and folded over on itself, again and again and again\u2014the stretching develops the gluten; the folding captures air bubbles in the dough which, with each fold, become progressively tinier.\n\nThe kneaded dough is lightly dusted with flour and set into a large bowl, covered with a damp cloth, and let rise to double its bulk, this time in a rather warm (80\u00b0F) and draft-free environment. There is no timing this (or the following) rise except by observing the resiliency of the sponge to gauge the vigor of the yeast. It can take from one to three hours, but usually no more than two.\n\nThen the dough is gently but thoroughly deflated with floured fingers and briefly rekneaded to ensure that all the air bubbles have been worked out. This is the point at which an egg-sized piece of dough is reserved to serve as the chef for the next baking. For the second rise, the dough is set face down into an impromptu banneton, made by generously flouring a dish towel, draping this in a medium-sized colander, and securing it with a rubber band\u2014an arrangement that makes it easier to transfer the risen dough to the baking cloche.\n\nIn my experience, the extent of the second rise must be left to instinct, or at least instinct honed by practice. The well-timed loaf should reach its maximum size during the first several minutes of baking; this last, desperate thrust is called \"oven spring.\" To prevent an overinflated loaf, the dough should be put in the oven before it reaches the point where its stretched-gluten walls are no longer able to support it; otherwise the loaf might actually sag down onto itself while baking. Using your observations of the dough during its first rise, try to get the loaf into the oven a little before the dough has risen as high as it can while still remaining taut and firm. Actually getting the loaf into the oven without deflating it is a matter of pure skill and still a heart-stopping moment for me (especially with the more delicate, pane pugliese-style loaf that follows).\n\nI bake the loaf in the bread cloche, the base of which has been sprinkled with cornmeal and preheated. A quick deft shake turns the loaf out of the makeshift banneton, so that it now sits rounded side up on the hot base. Then two or three half-inch-deep slashes are made on its surface with a small, sharp knife. It is baked at 450\u00b0F for 15 minutes, and then at 400\u00b0F for another 30, with the top of the cloche removed for the final 10 minutes or so to let the crust brown. It's done when it gives off a hollow sound when tapped on the bottom. The resulting loaf is tightly textured and chewy, with a thick but crisp crust and excellent keeping qualities.\n\nThe advice about how to keep bread is contradictory. One camp\u2014led by James Beard\u2014says to wrap the cooled loaf in plastic and store it in the refrigerator. The other\u2014led by Elizabeth David\u2014rejects this method and suggests instead that you wrap the cooled loaf in a clean dry cloth or invert a porous earthenware bowl (like a flowerpot) over it as it sits on the cutting board. This reflects, I think, the difference between those who want to keep the loaf \"fresh\" as long as possible and those who think that bread should be allowed to gently stale, evolving toward better toast and perfect bread crumbs. These two stands represent attitudes that are as much about reality\u2014philosophical positions, if you like\u2014as they are about bread, and so cannot be easily mediated. We keep our own loaf in a tightly closed brown paper bag.\n\nThe second loaf, based on the recipe for pane pugliese in Carol Field's The Italian Baker, is more difficult to make. It uses the same sponge as the first loaf, but this time I work this into a dough using as little additional flour as possible. The resulting dough is sticky and difficult to handle, but it produces a remarkably light, open-textured loaf with an especially thin, crisp crust. My strategy is to keep hands and counter well floured and to less knead the dough than stretch and fold it. I tug it out as if making a pizza, then roll it up, flatten it down, and repeat the process. After about eight or so minutes of such manipulation, a yielding but still resilient dough emerges\u2014not unlike a baby's bottom minus the baby.\n\nThis dough is given the same first and second rising as the previous loaf, with some extra precaution because of the stickiness. (Don't despair if after the first rising you think you have a pudding, not a dough\u2014the surface becomes silken again once it is worked down and refloured.)\n\nBoth cloche and base should be preheated for this baking, with extra care being taken to avoid burns. Again, the base should be sprinkled with cornmeal and the dough gently turned onto it. This time, before you make the knife slashes, the dough should be firmly dimpled with the tip of the index finger to deflate surface air bubbles\u2014which would otherwise burst through the crust or else form a large air pocket just below it. The bread should be covered with the cloche and baked following the same procedure and timing sequence as the first loaf.\n\nThe advantage of a wet dough is that it encourages rapid gas expansion; given a moist oven environment and high initial heat, it can triple in size. The cloche, by containing escaped vapor, automatically provides the first of these factors\u2014I've found that actually wetting the cloche overdoes this, resulting in a crust so thin and brittle that it shatters as the loaf cools.\n\nThis bread is best eaten the same day it is baked, although if there is any left over, you'll find that it also makes a particularly fine toast.\n\nThe third loaf is my translation of pain Poil\u00e2ne au levain naturel. It is also somewhat complicated to make, this time because the long aging of the dough seems to mute the responses intuition depends on to get things right. Until it comes out of the oven, I'm never quite sure where I stand. This loaf, too, is built up out of the basic sponge, but this time the sponge is ripened for two full days. By then, it has become so malleable as to seem already half-kneaded. The dough is then prepared and set to its first rising the night before it is to be baked.\n\nAlthough much of what I've read about Poilane's method suggests he uses a ripe dough not unlike a fermented version of my second, pane pugliese-style loaf, my own attempts in this direction left me with a dough so flaccid that even after two risings it poured onto the baking stone and barely rose to a three-inch height. Consequently, I prepare and knead the dough as I do the first loaf, finding that the ripening has reduced its capacity to absorb as much flour. The resulting dough is notably soft and pliable, but still firm enough to spring back when prodded with a finger. I put it in a draft-free place to rise overnight at room temperature, and in the morning I briefly reknead it (and reserve the new chef ) before setting the dough in the banneton for a much shorter second rise.\n\nThis is the one loaf I bake on the baking stone, because for reasons I don't understand it doesn't do well in the cloche. The oven and stone are both preheated to 450\u00b0F. Then the stone is sprinkled with cornmeal and the loaf turned onto it and slashed as described above. However, before I shut the door, I use a plant mister to spray the interior of the oven\u2014directing the spray away from the bread itself. I do this again twice, at five-minute intervals, to promote oven spring and a tenderer crust. As soon as the oven is shut, the heat is reduced to 350\u00b0F and the bread baked for about an hour. The resulting loaf has the distinctly sweet, nutty savor and tangy aroma of a fully fermented sourdough.\n\nBAKING NOTES: THE BREAD CLOCHE\n\nNothing, really, can compare with bread made in a wood-fired bread oven, where the sheer intensity of the radiant heat and superheated steam produce a loaf with incomparable depth of crust and fullness of flavor. But, for the home baker, at least, the bread cloche\u2014Sassafras Enterprises' Superstone LaCloche\u2014comes the closest, and comes closer still to replicating the professionally made French-style loaves baked in imported French commercial gas ovens.\n\nThe original Superstone LaCloche consists of a dome (the \"cloche\") and a fitted two-inch-deep base, both made of natural stoneware fired at over 2000\u00b0F. The design is based on an ancient Greek bread oven, in which the dome was set over the bread and then surrounded with smoldering embers\u2014much as chuck-wagon and other frontier cooks baked bread in cast-iron Dutch ovens with campfire coals heaped on the lid.\n\nCeramic radiates heat more evenly than cast iron, however, and so the stoneware cloche even better reproduces the radiant qualities of a true wood-fired bread oven. The combined effect of such heat and the moisture-retaining enclosed baking space encourages maximum oven spring and good crust\u2014producing a loaf with a golden, crackly exterior and a tender, good-textured crumb.\n\nThe bread cloche comes with complete baking instructions, but every baker will alter these as experience directs (for example, in a convection oven). Carol Field, in The Italian Baker, suggests preheating the cloche base at 450\u00b0F before baking, which gives the baker more control over the baking process. She also soaks the cloche itself in water prior to baking, but since the high-fired clay has almost no absorptive capacity, soaking it serves little purpose. Instead, if you wish to try this method, heat the base but not the cloche itself, and then, just before you put in the bread, wet the unheated cloche under the kitchen faucet, letting all excess water run into the sink. Put the dough onto the preheated base, cover with the damp cloche, and put into the oven to bake.\n\nThe bread cloche has been criticized because it can bake only a single loaf of bread. This is true, but that can be a very large loaf indeed, and I have not found this a problem. Sassafras has met the other criticism of the cloche\u2014that it is limited to making round loaves (or small rolls)\u2014by producing a rectangular model for making a single baguette. This produces an even smaller loaf\u2014made from about 1 cup of water and 31/2 cups of flour\u2014but it does so in about half the time of the standard round cloche.\n\nThus, in the same time, the baker can produce two baguette-shaped loaves of the same weight as the single round loaf. (Since two of these cloches will fit in a standard oven, ambitious bakers could produce four loaves during this time.) Sassafras calls this cloche a \"covered baker\" because it is, essentially, a somewhat specially shaped, unglazed clay baker, and, indeed, they also provide recipes for baking a beef tenderloin and a cut-up fryer in this one. (It makes one wonder how a whole roaster would turn out baked in the round cloche.)\n\nThe bread cloche\u2014of whatever shape\u2014has its limitations. Some bread just doesn't do well in it, at least in my experience. This includes loaves made of soft flour and, as described above, my Poil\u00e2ne-style loaf. For these, I suggest using either ceramic baking tiles (also made by Sassafras) or one of the single round or square ceramic pizza-baking stones. (Another firm, Pizza Gourmet, makes an impressively heavy, 14-by-16-inch rectangular stone that is perfect for this purpose.) These stones, although they don't provide the enclosed atmosphere of the cloche, produce excellent pizza and focaccia.\n\nBread cloches retail in the vicinity of $40 and are carried by many good kitchenware stores and by such mail-order enterprises as the King Arthur Flour Baker's Catalogue (which also offers a wide range of good-quality baking supplies and equipment). The address is Rural Route 2, Box 56, Norwich, VT 05055; (800) 827-6836. Sassafras Enterprises can be contacted directly at P.O. Box 1366, Evanston, IL 60204.\nNATURAL LEAVENS: SORTING OUT SOURDOUGH\n\nSourdough bread is much overrated and is difficult to perfect at home.\n\n\u2014James Beard, Beard on Bread\n\nThe problem with sourdough bread is not that it is overrated but that too much nonsense has been written about it\u2014starting with James Beard's own wrong-headed account in Beard on Bread. In the space of two pages he perpetrates so many confusions and outright untruths that his text serves as a handy benchmark for assessing anything else on the subject: the more in agreement with Beard, the more wrong.\n\nBeard's recipe begins with a starter made of flour, sugar, milk, water, and a package of commercial yeast. This is allowed to ferment for a week, until, as Beard himself says: it \"smells to high heaven... if it really takes, it can drive you right out of the room.\" Some of this is then used to start a sponge to which still more sugar is added. After an overnight rising, another package of yeast is mixed in, with sufficient flour to make two loaves.\n\nThis bread, made from overfermented starter and enough commercial yeast to levitate a bakery, is no honest sourdough. The smelly fermentation that Beard at once insists on and loudly bemoans is merely to provide a lactic acid tang. It's this and nothing else that most people now associate with the word \"sourdough\"\u2014and, sadly, the more the bread tastes of it, the more they're convinced they are eating the real thing.\n\nBecause of Beard's reputation\u2014and the book's sheer charm\u2014his perverse misrepresentation of sourdough has had an influence in inverse proportion to its worth. Elizabeth David leaned on it too heavily for her comments on \"American sourdough bread\" in English Bread and Yeast Cookery, thus making them something of an embarrassment in an otherwise masterful book. Nor is she alone.\n\nLet's begin, then, by setting the record straight. Noel Comess, who bakes artisanal, naturally leavened sourdough bread at the Tom Cat Bakery in Long Island City, nicely characterized himself to Stephen Lewis (in Gourmet, October 1990) as a \"micro-farmer\": \"Bakers plant yeast in fields of dough.\" Yeasts are microscopic fungi that live in profusion all about us, waiting for the right conditions to multiply. Those most useful in leavening bread produce enzymes that turn starch into sugar, digesting this so completely that the only waste, besides carbon dioxide, is water (unlike wine or beer yeasts, which produce alcohol instead). Then, lactobacilli, or lactic-acid-producing bacteria, feed on this sugar and work with the yeast to produce the gases and flavoring agents that make sourdough bread the distinctive thing that it is.\n\nCommercial bakers use hybrid yeasts developed for their capacity to quickly balloon the dough with gas, especially when primed with sugar and milk. These yeasts die in the oven before they have a chance to digest much of the actual starch, producing a loaf that inevitably tastes of them and raw flour\u2014something bakers attempt to mitigate by sweetening the bread with malted barley. However, when yeast is given time to digest this starch, the result is a more nutritious loaf (additional protein and B vitamins) and one with superior texture and richer, sweeter flavor.\n\nAlthough some bakers utilize these same commercial yeast strains in combination with a slow-rise method to attain a better-tasting loaf, more and more artisanal bread makers are finding the challenge of either letting nature sow wild yeasts in their dough or obtaining \"heirloom\" strains from other similarly minded bakers worth the inherent risks for the complexity and uniqueness of the ultimate product.\n\nIn the hands of a master baker, the natural synergistic leavening properties of wild yeasts and lactobacilli can produce from a simple dough of flour, salt, and water a whole range of genuine, naturally leavened loaves. Some possess only the faintest whisper of fermentation; others are allowed to develop a full, nutty-sweet flavor and distinctive sourdough tang. Indeed, Old World bakeries have cultivated specialized combinations of local wild yeasts and bacteria for centuries that produce rye loaves with a distinctively emphatic sourness, and they are as careful as French cheesemakers to ensure that their environs remain hospitable to the benign organisms necessary to the proper ripening of their dough.\n\nHowever, there is none of the boozy harshness that characterizes Jim Beard's yeast-milk-and-sugar formula, clearly meant to encourage a drunken orgy of lactobacilli, thus producing as much lactic-acid tang as possible, quite separately from any consideration of the flour-enhancing process that occurs during a legitimate sourdough fermentation.\n\nThe beginning micro-farmer's task, then, is first to initiate such a fermentation from propitious yeasts and next to learn to utilize it successfully as a leaven. Unfortunately, the strategies that best encourage this\u2014what temperatures, what composition and consistency of starters and sponges, etc.\u2014are still far from being sorted out, mostly because the instincts of the baker are essential\u2014and incalculable\u2014components. The result: what seem like frustratingly conflicting instructions or the usual painful dissonance between confidently asserted \"facts\" and personal experience.\n\nMy first encounter with naturally leavened bread was with a commercial whole-grain loaf made after Omer Gevaert's desem method. In essence, this is a leaven (the meaning of the Flemish word desem) made out of a pap of organic grain soaked until soft in spring water and then buried away inside dry grain until it ferments. (Those interested in this method should consult The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book\u2014and the Summer 1987 issue of Tom Jaine's The Three Course Newsletter, which contains an explanatory text by Omer Gevaert himself.)\n\nDesem advocates insist that this method requires natural whole grains (or their flours). Perhaps because of the moral edge that purity gave their argument, I became convinced that a dough made of plain white flour could not spontaneously ferment. Later on, when I read in Faire Son Pain Lionel Poil\u00e2ne's instructions for a loaf with just such a starter, instead of responding with joy, I persuaded myself that it only worked for him because his bakery was already a rich repository of the right yeasts... and that Patricia Wells had gotten his method to work in her own Paris kitchen because she had inadvertently brought these home on her clothing!\n\nEven the success of my own first tentative trials was likewise explained away: our kitchen must be permeated with yeasts from the vigorous Walnut Acres starter that I had previously been using. Only after Matt fermented a simple dough of water and patent white flour in her parents' suburban home (where, presumably, wild bread yeast did not run rampant) was I able to set desem doctrine aside for good.\n\nThis is why the beginning baker must bear in mind that sourdough methods spring from quite separate vernacular traditions, each with its own terminology, assumptions, and different needs. The lumber-camp or chuck-wagon cook who produced a perpetual supply of hot biscuits, flapjacks, and cobblers kept a sourdough batter endlessly fermenting in a small cask, replenishing it as fast as he ladled it out. The farm housewife, once she had turned to commercial baking powder to make her quick breads, used \"salt-rising\" for the yeast-leavened ones\u2014because this technique essentially allowed her to start a fresh fermentation with each new batch of dough.\n\nThe artisanal baker, on the other hand, used some of each day's batch to start a fresh sponge that would ferment overnight or else held back a small piece of dough to be kneaded into the new dough in the morning. Hence the similar but slightly differing traditions of the French levain, the Belgian desem, and the Italian biga.\n\nBecause we bake weekly, retaining a small piece of dough has proven a practical method for maintaining our starter. I kept ours going, loaf to loaf, until last April, when we moved up the coast from Castine to Steuben, another, but smaller, coastal town. Then I let it die out, partly because I knew it would be several weeks before I would be ready to resume bread baking in our new house and partly because I was looking forward to creating a new levain in this new, pristine environment, buried away in a pine woods far from the everyday pollution we experienced in Castine, where a state highway ran right beside our house.\n\nIronically, this new bosky locale, deemed ideal in desem mythology, proved inimical to the right strains of yeast; in try after try I activated starters with a chronic inability to leaven, producing, one after the other, flattish, dense, unappetizing loaves, no matter how much time they were allowed to proof. Obviously, if I had started my bread-baking adventures in Steuben instead of Castine (a distance, as the crow flies, of about fifty miles), my attitude toward natural leavening would have been very different. Now, having seen it flourish under all sorts of conditions and with various ingredients in one place and give a listless performance under what seem exemplary conditions in another, I better appreciate the ambivalent attitude many bread bakers have toward it. Making bread is an involving, emotional business, and a lethargic starter can stir up the complex feeling of rage, confusion, and guilt usually reserved for parents with chronically apathetic children.\n\nAt least with a starter, there need be no anguish over whether the cause is nature or nurture. Just discard the failure and order a packet of \"heirloom\" wild yeasts and their properly synergistic lactic bacteria from a reputable supplier. For the micro-farmer-baker, at least, a fallow batch of dough is always at hand, ready for fresh planting, any time of year.\n\nAnd the good news is that your chef, once started, is virtually inextinguishable\u2014if, at least, you remember, as I sometimes have not, to retrieve a new one at some point before the rest of the dough goes into the oven. Slipped into a small Ball jar with a perforated top and kept in the refrigerator, ours stays fresh for intervals of\u2014at the very least\u2014a week.\n\nStill, if I made bread only once a month or so, I'd master salt-rising bread rather than wait out the three days necessary to start a new chef. Now that I've worked with starters in the form of a batter, a sponge, and a piece of dough, I find their difference lies in means, not in the loaf they finally help make.\n\nIn other words, all methods have the same aim: to encourage the yeast that is right for the task and then help it to get on with it. A simple truth, but one I learned the hard way. The secret of success with a naturally fermented leavening is to find the method that works for you and then to persist in questioning it\u2014the better the questions, the better the bread.\n\nBAKING NOTES: SOURDOUGHS INTERNATIONAL\n\n\"There's something alive in your kitchen and it's ten thousand years old!\" This\u2014to my ear\u2014rather ambivalent-sounding slogan is the battle cry of Ed Wood, retired pathologist, home bread baker, and man with a mission. The something is wild yeast, and he's spent many years traveling around the world, collecting local strains from bakeries that still use it to give their breads a special character and taste.\n\nAlthough he himself baked bread for years using a starter that originated during the California Gold Rush of 1849, he came by this sense of mission relatively recently. In 1983, he was in Saudi Arabia, organizing the pathology laboratory for a new hospital fifteen miles from Riyadh. A radiologist at the hospital turned out to be a medical school classmate, and as they renewed their friendship they discovered they had sourdough in common. The friend's ninety-year-old father had a starter given him by one of the original \"sourdoughs,\" an old Yukon gold prospector.\n\nCalifornia Gold Rush versus Klondike sourdough: a bake-off was clearly called for. Ed Wood had brought his starter with him; the radiologist wrote to his father, asking him to dry a little and send it along to Saudi Arabia. Several weeks later an envelope arrived with a tiny bit of the culture tucked inside. Loaves of bread were made from the two starters, and Ed Wood was intrigued to discover how distinct in texture and flavor the breads from these two sourdough starters were.\n\nThis isn't surprising: over fifty-nine distinct strains of wild yeast and two hundred and thirty-eight strains of bacteria have been identified in sourdough, offering the potential of radically different flavor and performance characteristics in any particular batch. Yeast-leavened bread baking had begun in Egypt ten thousand years ago, utilizing a sourdough starter. Ed Wood began to wonder if, by tracking down bakeries still making bread in the old manner, he could find a yeast culture that had survived from antiquity, handed down\u2014as his friend's had been\u2014from father to son... perhaps the culture that produced man's first loaf of bread?\n\nA bold idea, but Ed Wood was a pathologist, used to calculating such odds. In a recent letter he explains: \"Farfetched? Well, maybe. It's pretty well known that certain wild yeasts and some lactobacilli form a strong symbiotic relationship resulting in a very stable combination. Such cultures resist contamination by other organisms and survive almost indefinitely. In the Middle East and Europe the professions are passed down through the family for generations and this is especially true of bakers. So we looked for the oldest, most ethnic bakeries in the world in the search for a sourdough that had passed from father to son for century after century.\"\n\nIn Egypt, Ed Wood and his wife, Jean, found several such bakeries. Again, the comparison between the loaves of bread made from these ancient starters delighted his palate and stimulated his imagination. If yeast from the village of Hurghada on the shore of the Red Sea produced a very different-tasting loaf from the one made at a tiny bakery in Giza, what about others from Saudi Arabia? Bahrain? France? Austria? Even Russia?\n\nFor two years we scrabbled down medieval streets and back alleys over two continents looking for village bakeries that had outlived history. When we found one, it was an experience beyond words! Gaining access was always a challenge, sometimes a rewarding challenge. Rewarding because it meant overcoming language barriers and suspicions to become acquainted with the people who \"live\" bread. Rewarding because those bakers still nurture sourdoughs that are stepping-stones in the history of man. Each success was a triumph; each sourdough a treasure of unmeasured value.\n\nThese adventures are recounted in greater detail in his book, World of Sourdoughs from Antiquity, which also contains directions for making many of the breads he encountered abroad. The section on the Middle East is especially noteworthy, containing several unusual and appealing Egyptian and Arabic breads. There are, of course, plenty of recipes for various American sourdough loaves, as well as such specialties as Yukon buttermilk waffles, greenhorn biscuits, forty-niner pancakes, and camp muffins.\n\nThe most fascinating part of this story, however, is Ed Wood's decision to make the most interesting of his sourdough cultures available to the American home baker. Through Sourdoughs International, Inc., he now offers nine different cultures, including those from the Red Sea and Giza; another from a 150-year-old bakery on the outskirts of Paris; still another, especially suitable for rye flours, from an Austrian bakery founded in 1795. Also available are his friend's Yukon starter and his own San Francisco one.\n\nThe most recent culture is from Russia, obtained from bakeries in Tarusa, a small town south of Moscow near the Oka River, and in Paleck, a village in Vladimir-Suzdal. About his work with these Soviet yeasts, Ed writes: \"We're just starting to bake with them, but they look great. Leavening time for heavy loaves of whole wheat and rye is two to two-and-a-half hours and the breads are surprisingly moist and light.\"\n\nEd Wood generously sent us several of his cultures to experiment with, but since our bread baking is following its own mysterious course, we've not been able to do them full justice\u2014especially since this would require a side-by-side comparison of loaves made from the different cultures. Even so, we did find that the most complexly interesting flavor came from the Saudi Arabian culture; the California one produced the familiar \"San Francisco sourdough\" taste\u2014delicately tangy and sweet.\n\nBakers requiring a special culture tailored to a particular need\u2014fast- or slow-working; especially sour, tangy, or mild\u2014or who bake with particular flours such as whole wheat or rye will discover what they need among the starters of Sourdoughs International; any sourdough buff will find romance and adventure aplenty.\n\nAs this book went into galleys, Ed Wood wrote to say that he has temporarily suspended publication of World of Sourdoughs from Antiquity while he revises it to incorporate recipes, information, and baking techniques that have come his way since the book was first published. In the meantime, however, his cultures, with complete directions and recipes, are still available for $10.50 each: these include Red Sea Egypt, Giza Egypt, Bahrain, Saudia Arabia, France, Austria, Yukon, San Francisco, and Russia. Write to Sourdoughs International, Inc., P.O. Box 1440, Cascade, ID 83611.\nIRISH SODA BREAD\n\nWhat we liked best in those far-off days were the loaves of the wife who cooked them in her Irish pot-oven. These had a thin skin-like crust, a brownness and flavour all their own, a perfection achieved by no written rules but by years of practice. The dough was put into the heated, floured pot with room left for rising, the upturned lid was put on and a few hot turfs set in it, then the pot was set in the hot ash at the side of the fire.\n\n\u2014The Constance Spry Cookery Book\n\nIrish soda bread, real Irish soda bread, whatever else it might be made of, must have the whisper of peat smoke about it to be genuine, even if that taste is only a memory in the mouth of the eater. For soda bread, even more than the potato, represents what is best about Irish cuisine\u2014true hearth cooking, the love for things simple and good and made on the very fire that warms the cook and keeps her or him company.\n\nIndeed, there is no sense to be made of soda bread except as hearth bread: without the aura of the fireplace behind it, it does nothing that a batch of biscuits can't do better. It is a bread meant to be baked in a cast-iron pot (or bastable or pot oven, as the Irish call it) over a fire, the lid inverted and heaped with coals to give the loaf within a brown and crusty top. Or to be patted flat and set out to bake on a thick iron griddle... or simply put in a steep-sided cake tin and shoved among the coals. It might be made from white flour or brown, oat- or cornmeal, plain or dotted with sultanas or caraway seeds\u2014but always, always with the hint of sod fire as its last, lingering savor.\n\nThis is not mere sentiment speaking. Because peat, Ireland's cheapest and most readily available fuel, is not ideal for firing cookstoves, it is only in living memory in rural Ireland that the hearth lost its central place in the home to the television and the electric range. Traditionally, the Irish farmhouse was a single room and the fireplace its heart, for the slow but steady peat fire in that hearth cast out warmth continually, day and night, the year round. It was let go out only on the first of May, to be ceremoniously rekindled as hopeful emblem of the burgeoning fecundity of the fields outside. Without a source of drying heat, Ireland's damp climate would otherwise rot the thatch, stain the walls, mildew the linen, and fill the bones with chill. To the Irish, a house without a fire is a dead thing, the presence of one a pledge of warmth and conviviality.\n\nIt was on those same coals that the baking and cooking were done, and it is from this hearth cookery that what is so special about Irish cooking comes: simplicity, insistence on freshness, and implicit hospitality. For that single farmhouse room was \u2014in every meaning of the word\u2014a living room: kitchen, dining, and front room all rolled into one. Only the bedrooms were separate (and the privy, of course, which was a shed in the back). There, the cook was not shunted off to some separate place: the cooking was done in full view and the cook included in the general sociality. Except on formal occasions, family and guests ate not at the table but before the hearth, balancing their plates on their knees and setting their mugs on a floor kept scrupulously clean for that purpose.\n\nThe appeal of such a cuisine lies in its informal linking of cooking, eating, talking, and relaxing before the fire into a single seamless pleasure. Here the smell of the cooking food was as present and vivid as the conversation\u2014which, as likely as not, was about that very thing, for the Irish are as pleased to talk about their food as to eat it.\n\nEven the limitations of this cooking, which is necessarily simple and quickly done, are virtues in a culture that places a premium on hospitality, for a passerby can then be assured of place, plate, and welcome, with none of the sense of interruption that comes from squeezing in another chair around an already crowded table. Since the meal itself is no more than cabbage or potatoes, the guest is encouraged to eat to satiety, and because those vegetables are freshly dug, sweet of flavor, and served with good country butter and hot baked bread, the host need feel nothing but pride and happiness in being able to provide such satisfaction.\n\nUnderstanding all this, I think, gives back to soda bread some of the character and flavor that it possessed when it truly was a child of the hearth. Unlike yeast bread, it can be mixed in a minute, set to bake on a stone or in a pot, and be done and ready to slice within the hour\u2014at which point, hot from the oven, it will never taste better. Inexpensive to make, readily adapting to ingredients at hand and a peat fire's slow burn, it was a bread that could easily be taught that uniquely Irish language of open hospitality: to work great generosity from small means.\n\nAnd, like that hospitality, if you will learn to love it for what it can give, you won't hold against it what it cannot. Irish soda bread is the artisanal quick bread. While it lacks the tangy savor of yeast bread, it has a soft, delicate, dairy sweetness to it that makes it the ideal match to good butter, a jar of marmalade or strawberry jam, and a pot of Earl Grey. If your pleasure is a loaf made from scratch, baked in the instant, and the perfect thing to serve for tea, then soda bread will do for you\u2014and it will come from your oven (or off your griddle) with the faint, fine rumor of peat fire and good company.\n\nSoda bread is artisanal, too, in being more complicated to make than its seeming simplicity might make you think. Oh, it is easy enough once you have the knack\u2014it's the learning that's the trick. Even Irish cooks are humbled by the thing, as the legendary Myrtle Allen confesses in Cooking at Ballymaloe House:\n\nI was many years married before I triumphantly put a really good brown soda loaf on the tea table. Of course, this brought me no praise, only a disillusioned grunt about the pity it was I had taken so long to learn the art!\n\nBecause of this, most recipes for it simply don't work, and for the same reason that verbatim instructions from experienced makers are so maddeningly vague. Neither can give you the thing you truly need: a pair of practiced and sympathetic hands.\n\nAs with all breads leavened with baking soda, speed and deftness are required to get the bread into the oven before the gas released by the chemical interaction of the soda and the acid in the soured milk has all bubbled away. Unlike yeast bread, which loves a rough and leisurely knead, the ingredients of soda bread must be quickly worked into a cohesive dough and slipped into the oven still quivering from the final pat.\n\nThe skill is not simply a matter of speed, however, but in correctly gauging the amount of liquid the dough will need to pull together: too little and the dough will not adhere; too much and it becomes gummy, and the bread it produces will be a leaden lump. This is a point, especially, where many recipes will lead you astray, at least those that share the perverse notion that a pound of flour (the standard Irish measure) equals 4 cups of the same (in our measure) when 3 cups is a far closer approximation. A more sensible approach is to expect the flour to absorb from a third to a half its weight in liquid and to mix in most of it quickly and steadily, adding the last bit with careful attention to the needs of the dough and not to measurement.\n\nBut certainly approach your first few loaves of soda bread as practice material, not becoming discouraged if they emerge from their baking soggy and sour. Most likely you did nothing wrong, only did what was right too slowly. After the first two or three loaves, you'll have the pleasure of producing a traditional loaf that is distinctly homemade, rich with crust and flavor, and different entirely from yeast and biscuit breads.\n\nTHE INGREDIENTS\n\nThe Flour. Irish flour is soft flour, which helps make the bread tender and light-textured, not dense and chewy\u2014\"cake bread,\" the Irish also call it, to distinguish it from \"loaf\" or yeast bread. Happily, good soft white flour can be found here, as can the nutty-tasting organic stone-ground whole-wheat pastry flour necessary for making an authentic version of Ireland's celebrated \"brown bread\"\u2014really a whole-wheat soda bread. Not surprisingly, an oat version is made from Irish oatmeal, which is among the best there is. Unexpected, however, is the cornmeal soda bread, which is an obvious first cousin to our own cornbread. In Ireland it is called many things, among them \"pike\" or \"paca\" bread, after\u2014it is said\u2014the ship Alpaca that brought a shipment of cornmeal to Ireland during the great potato famine of 1846.\n\nThe Liquid. The traditional acidic liquid used to moisten the flour and react to the baking soda was real buttermilk, the sour liquid left over from butter-making. For the dairy country that it is, Ireland's farmers traditionally have had little to do with cheese. Milk and cream are used fresh or else allowed to go sour and churned into a tangy butter (see the comments of Liz Jeffries), with the buttermilk being used in baking and drunk as a famous summer thirst-quencher and forever hangover cure.\n\nThis true buttermilk is not the same as our store-bought cultured product, which almost never has the thickness that Vera Young describes in Rosalind Cole's Of Soda Bread and Guinness:\n\nWell, I think the whole secret to making Irish bread is to have the sour milk just the right thickness. You must have the milk like yogurt\u2014thick and almost solid\u2014to get the brown bread and scones really fluffy.\n\nConsequently, many Irish cooks prefer to sour their own milk, mixing a half-teaspoon of strained fresh lemon juice per cup (or two teaspoons per quart) of sweet milk. This is allowed to sit in a warm place for a day or two until it thickens, then refrigerated until used (soon\u2014it does not keep long). Although the clabbered product this method produces is called sour milk, it has a mild, sweet, delicate flavor, producing a fine-textured soda bread.\n\nLeavening. This should be baking soda and only baking soda. Some recipes call for the addition of cream of tartar (the other half of old-fashioned baking powder) as well, or even baking powder itself, as insurance, but the action of the buttermilk and soda should be the only leavening the bread needs\u2014it is, after all, soda bread.\n\nThe Salt. Sea salt, in as fine a grain as possible, so as to mix cleanly into the batter.\n\nEt Cetera. Favored Irish flavorings include raisins and/or caraway seeds. No shortening is used in traditional recipes; however, a tablespoon of butter, cut into the flour before the liquid is added, is said to help the loaf to keep.\n\nTHE METHOD\n\nAlthough you may not care to bake your soda bread in the fireplace, you will find your best success duplicating as nearly as possible the implements with which it was originally made. Soda bread was traditionally baked in a large flat-bottomed cast-iron pot, and is hence formulated (as biscuits also are) to rise best in a tightly enclosed space. This can be replicated by using a cookie sheet with a large ovenproof mixing bowl inverted over it, but this is very awkward to manage when hot. I find the round bread cloche ideal for baking soda bread, perhaps even an improvement over the traditional cast-iron pot oven. The bottom of the cooking surface should be dusted lightly with flour to prevent the bread from sticking, which gives it a characteristic floury look. However, a metal baking pot or cookie sheet can be greased with butter if you prefer instead.\n\nIf the bread is to be baked on a heavy griddle on top of the stove, that implement should also be dusted with flour (or greased) and preheated over a moderate flame. Since the crust will burn before the bread is baked if the griddle is too hot, the flame should not be turned too high\u2014the griddle is just hot enough if it takes three minutes for the dusting of flour to lightly brown.\n\nIt is best to make the dough while the griddle or pot and oven are preheating, so that the finished dough can be turned immediately onto a hot baking surface. The ingredients should be fresh\u2014especially the baking soda, which has surely gone flat if the box has been hanging around for a year or so\u2014often the case with baking soda. Stir the dry ingredients together well, breaking up any lumps. Then, using the handle of a wooden spoon, quickly beat in the liquid, which should be poured into the bowl in a steady stream until the crumbly mass begins to adhere: \"While you put your buttermilk in with your left hand, you worked it in with your right\u2014you didn't want a too-sticky dough, you see.\" With floured hands, gently form it into a single ball, soft to the touch and slightly coarse in texture. Don't expect it to have the velvety flesh of biscuit dough or the resiliency of yeast bread.\n\nTo bake it in the oven. Pat the dough into a round loaf. I happen to like the jagged crevices that appear when the bread is allowed to expand in the oven at its own violent whim, but for a neater, traditional-looking loaf you'll want to cut a deep cross into it, from one side right to the other. And for a bit of gloss to the loaf, brush it with sweet milk before setting it to bake.\n\nSet it in the preheated cooking pot, cover, and return to the oven. Popular wisdom has it that a done loaf sounds hollow when rapped on the bottom\u2014which is a load of codswallop. Insert a cake tester or stiff broom straw into the loaf. It is done if the straw or tester comes out clean. Richard Olney, among others, advises\u2014in the Time-Life volume Breads in the Good Cook series\u2014that you remove the top of the baking pot for the last ten minutes or so of baking, so that the crust will brown. My own experience is that the crust browns and crisps perfectly with the pot left unopened.\n\nTo bake it on the griddle. Pat the dough flat to a cake about one to one-and-one-half inches thick and cut this into four quarters or farls. Set these on a hot and floured griddle (see above) and cook for the same time as given in the recipe, turning each farl over about halfway through the cooking process. Don't expect these to rise as high as the oven-baked bread, but they will have a deliciously thick, double-sided crust\u2014and on soda bread, the crust is a truly wonderful thing.\n\nLet cool and set, then slice thin and serve with plenty of sweet butter and your best marmalade or preserve.\n\nIRISH SODA BREAD\n\n(1 LOAF)\n\n3 cups soft white flour   \n1 teaspoon baking soda   \n1/2 teaspoon salt   \nEnough buttermilk to form a co-   \nherent but not sticky dough   \n(about 1\u00bc to 11/2 cups)\n\nPreheat the oven and baking pot to 425\u00b0F or heat a griddle over medium heat. Combine the ingredients and prepare the dough as directed in the general instructions above. Bake for 45 minutes or until the crust is golden and the bread baked through. Serve as soon as it is cool enough to eat, or wrap it in a clean dish towel to keep it soft until it can be served.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: A sweeter tea bread can be produced by adding 1 tablespoon of sugar and about \u00bc cup of raisins or currants. Or, instead, treacle bread can be made: warm the buttermilk just enough to dissolve \u00bc cup of unsulfured molasses. Mix 2 teaspoons of brown sugar and \u00bc cup of raisins into the dry ingredients, otherwise preparing as directed above. Finally, for seedy bread, mix 1 tablespoon of white sugar and 2 teaspoons of caraway seeds into the dry ingredients, then rub 4 tablespoons of fresh lard or vegetable shortening into the flour before mixing in the buttermilk.\n\nIRISH BROWN BREAD\n\n(1 LOAF)\n\n2 cups stone-ground whole-wheat   \nflour   \n1 cup soft white flour   \n1 teaspoon baking soda   \n1/2 teaspoon salt   \nEnough buttermilk to form a co-   \nherent but not sticky dough   \n(about 1\u00bc to 11/2 cups)\n\nPreheat the oven and baking pot to 425\u00b0F or heat a griddle over medium heat. Combine the ingredients and prepare the dough as directed in the general instructions above. Bake for 50 minutes or until the bread is baked through. Set to cool on a wire rack.\n\nCOOK'S NOTE: While some cooks do insist that this bread should be sliced and eaten hot, most Irish ones say that it must be allowed to cool and \"set\" for about 4 to 6 hours. Also, the proportions of white to whole wheat can be reversed for a lighter bread, or the white flour can be omitted entirely, using 3 cups of the whole-wheat flour to produce a darker, thicker one. Maura Laverty suggests throwing a handful of rolled oats into the recipe to give it a \"lovely nutty texture.\"\n\nIRISH INDIAN-MEAL (OR PACA, PIKE, OR YALLA MALE [\"YELLOW MEAL\"?]) BREAD\n\n(1 LOAF)\n\n11/2 cups soft white flour   \n11/2 cups stone-ground cornmeal   \n1 teaspoon baking soda   \n1/2 teaspoon salt   \nEnough buttermilk to form a co-   \nherent dough (about 1\u00bcto 11/2   \ncups)\n\nPreheat the oven and baking pot to 425\u00b0F or heat a griddle over medium heat. Mix the ingredients and prepare the dough as directed in the general instructions above. Bake for 55 minutes or until the bread is baked through.\n\nOATEN SODA BREAD\n\n(4 FARLS)\n\n1\u00bc cups oat flour   \n1\u00be cups soft white flour   \n1 teaspoon baking soda   \n1/2 teaspoon salt   \nA handful of rolled oats   \nEnough buttermilk to form a co-   \nherent dough (about 1\u00bc to 11/2   \ncups)\n\nPreheat the oven to 425\u00b0F or heat a griddle over medium heat. Mix the two flours, soda, salt, and handful of rolled oats together well, adding enough buttermilk to make a stiff, coarse, but not sticky dough. Pat and poke into a flat round about 11/2 inches thick and with a sharp knife cut this into quarters or farls. Set these on a greased or floured baking sheet and bake for about 30 minutes, or until the crust is golden and the dough baked through.\n\ncook's NOTE: Oat flour is available at most natural food stores.\n\nTo make oaten honey bread, whisk 1 tablespoon of honey, 1 egg, and 2 tablespoons of melted butter into a little of the buttermilk (about \u00bc cup) and use this as part of the total amount of liquid.\n\nN\u00e0 m\u00f3l an t-ar\u00e1n go mbruithtear \u00e9.   \n(Don't praise the bread until it is baked.)\n\nTHE CULINARY SCENE\nMARTHA STEWART\n\nOf all dinners... the impromptu one is ranked the most infallibly successful; the enjoyment therein is proportioned to the absence of ceremony, and to the cordial feeling each guest brings with him.\n\n\u2014Charles Pierce, The Household Manager (1857)\n\nYou've never heard of Martha Stewart? Well, that's all right, she's easy enough to describe. First of all, fall asleep... now I'll tell you what to dream. You're a slender, attractive woman looking years younger than your age. You live in a beautiful old country house in Connecticut, where everything is as glossy as a color photograph: the honey-golden wood floors, the charming patchwork quilts, the hand-rubbed antique furniture.\n\nStep into the kitchen. The sun streams in, glinting off the French copper cookware, the shelves full of turn-of the-century stoneware bowls, the collections of fine old stemware... hand-woven farm baskets... mix-and-match china plates... the half-dozen different stoves.\n\nAnd everywhere you look, every surface in the kitchen\u2014the dining room, the house, it seems\u2014is covered with food. Brilliant-colored pastries oozing fresh fruit crowd against whole roast geese... racks of lamb... spectacular loaves of bread plump as chef's toques... salad bowls brimming with unusual greens.\n\nGuests must be coming for an intimate dinner for six... a Chinese banquet... a Sunday omelet brunch... a pie party... a clambake... a whole country weekend. Relax, you're ready for them. Your expensive frock is attractive and becoming, your skin glows with perfect health, not one golden hair is out of place. How at ease you feel, knowing how glad they'll be to see you\u2014the sort of pretty, winsome woman that every other woman wants as a best friend, every man wants to cosset and gently tease.\n\nWake up! wake up! You're only dreaming! Or, if you prefer, dream on. You'll be joining the millions of others enraptured with the same fantasy: a world where entertaining holds no terror, perfect taste sets no pratfalls, and cooking makes all things good.\n\nAs well as attracting a horde of fans and do-alikes, Martha Stewart has drawn a surprising amount of vituperation from other food writers (sheer jealousy) and social commentators in general (who ought to know better). Most of the people susceptible to Martha Stewart's fantasy of entertaining belong to a world where that activity is not only a social obligation but a professional one: promotion depending as much on commitment to a corporate-sanctioned social life as it does on raw business skill. For many people, this is the occasion of sheer terror, and if Martha Stewart psychs some of them through it, more power to her.\n\nThe interesting thing, really, is how she gets away with it. This isn't the same thing as how she does it, which is easy to explain. Martha Stewart markets on a massive scale the same idea that she once sold person-to-person as a caterer: \"Use my help, my expertise, and my good taste,\" her books all say, \"and entertaining can be a breeze. You too can be a guest at your own party, as I so manifestly am at mine.\"\n\nSo far, so good. But anyone who has ever known a caterer knows that in order to create this illusion of ease, they themselves must work like dogs. Buy a copy of Martha Stewart's Entertaining (over 700,000 copies sold), and you get some enchanting pictures and some useful tips, but after you put it down you still have to do all the work yourself. And having read this book (or one of its many clones), you ought now to realize that entertaining is work\u2014more work, really, than you ever even imagined.\n\nThis is the crux of the matter. Even the most flattering portraits of Martha Stewart show her to be a driven, extremely ambitious woman who has used her enviable capacity to devote enormous amounts of energy to an infinite number of details as a means of squeezing every profitable drop out of her luck, looks, and near-infallible instinct for conspicuous consumption. Perhaps all her millions of readers are the same. But somehow I doubt it. And this being so, why don't they catch the obvious subtext of her oeuvre\u2014if you have to have people over, for God's sake, hire a caterer\u2014instead of falling, over and over again, for the same subliminal message: Buy this book, and this one, and this one, and this one, and the videotape, and, while you're at it, subscribe to my magazine.\n\nIf on the evidence of Martha Stewart's books I had to compose a generic portrait of her readers, I would describe them as female, relatively well-off (maybe even extremely well-off), but newly come by this money and rather insecure about the position it has purchased. I say this because of two noteworthy facts about the photographs in Martha Stewart's books: the absence of actual people (apart from her) in most of them and the overwhelming emphasis on things.\n\nNow, if I understand anything about entertaining, it is about people having a good time with other people. I imagine good food and attractive surroundings\u2014why not?\u2014but mostly I imagine rapport\u2014and the kind of good, witty, interesting interaction that brings rapport about. To the extent that entertaining is not about social obligation, it is about socializing, which means, at bottom, about talk.\n\nThose of us who at social gatherings are too shy to interact tend to walk around and, nervous of catching anyone's eye, stare at things\u2014pluck books out from the shelf, examine the pictures on the wall, peer at the objets d'art on the \u00e9tag\u00e8re. If you know this feeling you can easily visualize a hostess, experiencing this same unease, finding her eyes compulsively drawn, again and again, to the various decorations and canapes set out to enhance the evening, to make sure that they are really all right. Now, by one more leap of imagination, you can understand the powerful narcotizing effect of a book like Entertaining: it soothes the anxiety by reenacting this behavior under conditions of complete tranquillity.\n\nThe nervous hostess-to-be is shown, over and over, through a unique reversal of perspective, not the frightening guests she is setting out to entertain but what she means the guests themselves to see. The photographs that fill Martha Stewart's books create a series of compelling illusions. They use the artful arrangement of foods and festive-seeming objects to craft a facade of tasteful opulence, a simulacrum of welcoming generosity. Her \"signature\"\u2014an antique gardening basket heaped full-to-tumbling with several pounds of ripe strawberries\u2014is just one example of what can be done by bringing the right few things together. No matter that the berries won't be eaten; it's enough that there are so many and that they are a fruit everyone loves. The gesture is meaningless but the effect is guaranteed... especially on the hostess herself. What does it matter how nervous she is if all the objects in her house radiate that arranged marriage of the two most contradictory human impulses: wealth-display and generosity?\n\nMartha Stewart herself, although she radiates WASP-y self-assurance (the Federalist colonial home in Westport, the Barnard College degree, the long blond hair, and the casual haute-preppie outfitting), was actually born in Jersey City of second-generation Polish parents. Her father, a pharmaceuticals salesman, was, according to one man who knew him, \"a very handsome, very driven, and very frustrated man.\" According to Jeanie Kasindorf, \"Martha was his favorite, and although she will never say it, it doesn't take long to realize that the main thing he taught her was how to be a salesman.\"\n\nShe was arranging children's parties for pay at the age of ten; she was modeling before she turned sixteen. It would be only a matter of time before she put the two together. In the meantime, she modeled to help pay for her Barnard education (she graduated with a degree in European and architectural history); met and married Andy Stewart; had a daughter, Alexis, her only child; and tried out a career as a stockbroker, but ended up hating it. \"I liked the sales part of it, the human contact,\" she told Jeanie Kasindorf. \"But I wanted to sell things that were fun to sell.\" Meanwhile, she and her husband had found their 1805 rambling colonial in Westport, completely remodeled it, and called it \"Turkey Hill.\"\n\nIn the mid-1970s, she went into the catering business with Norma Collier, whom she met when each was picked to be one of Glamour's Ten Best-Dressed College Girls. The partnership lasted less than a year. According to Norma, this was partly because Martha Stewart \"was resentful that I wasn't willing to work 128 hours a week.\" The final straw came when she overheard Martha telling Andy that \"I deserve to keep more because I work harder and I'm more talented.\" Norma quit; the catering business was renamed \"Martha Stewart, Inc.\"; it acquired a sheaf of corporate clients and in ten years grew into a million-dollar business. Then there was the book contract for Entertaining, repeated bestsellerdom, the videos, the magazine, history.\n\nTelling the story so briefly, one can almost feel the different parts of \"Martha Stewart\" coming together. If you can be born to succeed, she was born to succeed at this. If Martha Stewart were a man, her drive, her success, her obvious relish of its accoutrements, even the breakup of her \"ideal\" marriage, would be reported without any edge of sneer; as it is, you often feel that one is just barely being suppressed. Attractive women who are also aggressive, demanding, smart, and driven make men nervous, if not hostile, and bring out complicated feelings of envy, admiration, and self-doubt in other women.\n\nIronically, fascinatingly, her career, her genius has found its raison d'\u00eatre in disarming them all. For Martha Stewart, the salesman's first commandment\u2014sell yourself\u2014has taken on an overwhelming, even poignant, totality; her life has become her sales pitch, an act of persuasion. How can you hate someone so eager to bring you into her home, to welcome and entertain you? This\u2014the need to be loved\u2014is the real subject of her books, and, consequently, it's almost impossible to leaf through their pages (the videos are a different matter) without suspending, for the moment, the sneer, the suspicious hostility.\n\nThe successful salesman puts himself into your place only to better persuade you to put yourself in his, to cajole some part of you to help him with his sale. For most of us, I think, Martha Stewart's books succeed in having us want not to be entertained by her but, in some deep, analogous way, to help her. Even as she makes us envy her, she has also learned to make us feel sorry for her\u2014want, even, to become her friend.\n\nMost of her readers, I think, confuse this feeling\u2014or enrich it\u2014with sheer identification; they, pure and simple, want to be her. But this is only fantasy: even they must know that that Martha Stewart is an illusion\u2014although they would perhaps be the last to understand that her books gain their peculiar power from a strong undercurrent of self-pity, both in her and in themselves.\n\nPoor little me. Self-pity, like irony, is a slippery concept, least obvious when it is most compelling, especially in ourselves. If I find self-pity in Martha Stewart's books, it is because of a suspicious sweetness that I feel inside myself when I leaf through them\u2014a feeling, despite myself, of how desirable what she portrays there really is, and which resists all effort to look at its cost. I don't even want to own these things, but some part of me can't help but yearn for the protection that they promise.\n\nYou can't look at the objects that fill all the many interiors of Turkey Hill without realizing that she has recently bought almost everything in them. You're meant to notice this; just as you are meant to feel, as you turn the pages of her books, that she is reaching out and offering all this to you. \"All this\" is not the things themselves; there is nothing here of that tacky feeling you get in the homes of antique dealers where everything you see is up for sale. Martha Stewart would say that what she offers is a form of aesthetic self-improvement, but the bottom line is not knowledge but the release that comes from spending money. This not only gets you nice things, it also provides security from the probing, critical eyes of others, who, in these books, bear the euphemistic name of \"guest.\" Surround yourself with things that these people want and their warm feelings about them rub off on you. We might call this the Scrooge McDuck effect. Donald's uncle is an irascible old pill, but everyone loves him; even in the comics, cash is the irrefutable aphrodisiac.\n\nMartha Stewart uses antique pots instead of piles of cash; this is where aesthetics, taste, comes in. The effect, however, is the same. If you take your house and remove from view everything that is quirky, ugly, or difficult, and heap the polished shelves with unthreatening, desirable objects coveted by your neighbors, surface becomes everything: an impenetrable, calculated, and intensely desirable veneer. The idea isn't to invite people over to see these things but to invite them over to see you. In most homes, the contents are a mirror of the selves that live there; in this home, the mirror reflects nothing but desire. We don't look into it; we look at it and murmur: \"I love it\u2014where can I get one like it for myself?\"\n\nMartha Stewart shows us that if you can't buy happiness, you can certainly sell it... and, I suspect, feel it constantly brush up against you as you do. If we did not so greatly desire what Martha Stewart has, would she desire it herself? Could she maintain the sweetness that first drew her to these things\u2014the copper pudding molds, drabware, creamware, yellowware, Depression glass, antique linens\u2014if she weren't continually offering them to us, keeping them lustrous with the ache of our desire?\n\nFood writers have accused her of appropriating their recipes without due credit. This, whatever the truth to it, is a peculiar charge, for apart from her gala pastries they're rarely of much interest. This, too, I think, is by intent. It is a truism of catered food that it can only appear unique\u2014caterers know that what their clients want is risk-free originality: arresting dishes that never fail to please.\n\nAll too often, in fact, her solution is simply a knee-jerk recourse to richness. In Martha Stewart's Quick Cook, she gives a menu for four that starts with a salad dressed with one-half cup of blue cheese and two-thirds cup of olive oil, features thick-cut pork chops served with a side dish of turnips into which a quarter cup of butter and one-and-a-half cups of heavy cream have been mixed. Dessert is vanilla ice cream over which is poured a chocolate sauce made of twelve ounces of melted chocolate and three-quarters cup of heavy cream.\n\nOur reaction to all this might be different if we could imagine Martha Stewart herself digging into such a meal, but there is something disquieting about the killing richness of such food and the slender appearance of the person who insists we take some. To do so is to feel as if, on accepting an invitation for a piece of pie, your hostess cuts you a slice and then sits down to watch you eat it... all too eager to serve you more.\n\n\"I made this to make you happy,\" her books all say, not \"I made this for us to share.\" I would suggest that one word for what separates those two phrases is self-pity. In Martha Stewart's books, possessions seem to exist only to give her power over others; to maintain the absolute distance between her and us. Become Martha Stewart's guest and\u2014if you lack the self-protection of her determined will\u2014you'll find yourself coming home gorged with food that you didn't mean to eat... just as, under the influence of her books, you may find yourself with armloads of stuff that when you come back to your senses you won't be able to imagine why you bought.\n\nThe danger with all \"self-catered\" parties, hers included, is forgetting that a good time isn't a gift but a joint conspiracy. Fortunately, guests have a way of protecting themselves against hosts and hostesses who forget this. Consider Thomas Carlyle's account of tea with the very different but equally self-absorbed family of Leigh Hunt:\n\nHunt's household in Cheyne Row, Chelsea. Nondescript, unutterable! Mrs. Hunt asleep on cushions. Four or five beautiful, strange, gypsy-looking children running about in undress, whom the lady ordered to get us tea. The eldest boy, a sallow, black-haired youth of sixteen, with a kind of dark cotton nightgown on, who, whirling around like a familiar, providing everything. An indescribable, dream-like household.\n\nWe guests are adept at working up much less conspicuous self-centeredness than this into our own entertainment, as Martha Stewart has, in fact, discovered to her discomfort. After all, when Laura Shapiro called Martha Stewart in Newsweek \"the Barbara Cartland of entertaining,\" she was only saying in print what we might mutter in our companion's ear on our boozy way back home. There are some things a fine old country house and all the stoneware bowls in the world can't protect you from... but being yourself just might.\nSTRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND\n\nMYTHOLOGY & MEATBALLS: A GREEK ISLAND DIARY/COOKBOOK\n\nDaniel Spoerri\n\nIn 1967, the artist Daniel Spoerri, his companion, Kichka, and five cats spent eight months on Symi, a tiny Greek island off the coast of Turkey. This remarkable book is an account of that stay, the food eaten, the people encountered, and the thoughts that all of these (but especially the food) inspired. However, even though it is about food and cooking and is full of recipes, it is not a cookbook; and while it also records much about the people and the history of Symi, it is not really a travel book either.\n\nIt is, in fact, what the title claims\u2014a diary, written from a diary's special perspective, the daily recording of the tremors on that fault line where self (European writer and artist with an unusually fertile and eclectic mind) and world (Greek island, picturesque but also self-absorbed, austere, and untouristed) rub together.\n\nAlso in true diary fashion, the book volleys from the events it records to the associations they evoke, then back to the events again, with the connections personal and often tangential. The latter is especially the case here, because Spoerri's mind is a potpourri of fascinating, obscure, sometimes shocking bits of knowledge\u2014much of it culinary. And giving free rein to a kind of whimsical, unfettered free association, he weaves it all, events and facts together, into a fabric that he then cuts to a distinctly personal fit:\n\nOur pepper mill being broken, I afforded myself the luxury of a brass Turkish coffee grinder, very pretty, but my assertion that I wanted to use it for piperi astonished, and intrigued, the merchant, who would never have imagined it possible to use it for anything but grinding coffee [here a footnote about the peppercorn that wanders off into a cure for hemlock poisoning]. I also drank a bottle of vintage retsina with Dimitri Antonoglou at the taverna of his cousin, Mitzo Antonoglou [here a footnote on that cousin's infallible (and disgusting) remedy for foot scratches, given in the original Symian dialect (a pidgin mixture of Italian, Greek, and Turkish: the publisher has generously provided a section of entertaining and illuminating notes by the culinary scholar Charles Perry, who explains Spoerri's allusions and translates his polyglot quotations)], a wine that, after you are accustomed to \"real\" retsina, has no taste. But the surprise again was the meze: small, deep-fried pieces of shark. (Kichka's comment: \"Merde alors, I missed the shark!\" But to console her I quote from the Larousse Gastronomique: \"The flesh of the shark, though very tough, is used as a foodstuff by the Lapps and by some Negro people who are very partial to it.\")\n\nNot, I think you'll agree, the usual culinary travelogue. Even so, it's not difficult to figure out what's going on. If you have ever, on your own or with a friend, gone to live in an entirely foreign place, you'll know that this experience\u2014exciting as it is\u2014requires incredible stamina, since you are bombarded with a never-ending flood of stimuli that must be somehow absorbed and placed. Even familiar acts become new and strange: using the phone, taking a bath, cooking on the stove. After a certain point, this constant intake becomes exhausting, disorienting\u2014you feel like an oversaturated sponge, longing only to be wrung out. Shirley Hazzard said it best: \"Intimacy with another country is ripened by pleasures but also by loneliness and error.\" What she didn't say is that the pleasure, loneliness, and error can happen simultaneously... almost too much for the system to bear.\n\nThis is when most people pack up and go home. For those who survive it, something shifts inside. The stranger no longer wanders around with mouth, eyes, and ears helplessly agape but instead begins to impose a kind of order on the landscape, working the torrent of sensory impression into a comprehensible, personal design. It isn't that you suddenly become \"Greek\" (or whatever) but that the place begins to seem like home. One day\u2014somehow\u2014it also becomes yours.\n\nThis personal appropriation of Symi is what Mythology & Meatballs is all about, and Spoerri accomplishes it on what is the most difficult turf of all, that of cuisine. For, a thousand glossy travel books to the contrary, it is the cooking and eating habits of another culture that are the hardest to come to terms with\u2014they affect us where we are both most vulnerable and most insistent on clinging to our ways.\n\nFor example, trying to buy some steak in Symi, Spoerri discovers that its two butchers\n\nare savage brutes, worse than cannibals anywhere. They don't sell meat but leftovers from a massacre... . The pound (of meat) you ask for ends up almost double that, and in this pile \u2014you can't call it anything else\u2014you find bones, fat, tendons, and, if you're lucky, even a minute piece of meat you might call steak, all strewn with splinters of crushed bone.\n\nMost, faced with these revolting scraps, would simply give up meat for the duration of the visit. Spoerri, however, grapples with the experience\u2014first wrestling an insight from it and then working that insight into a means of appropriating the experience as his own.\n\nThe insight is an explanation as to why, even though the sale of ground meat is forbidden in Greece, meatballs (keftedes) are so popular. The reason is that Greek butchers feel it their prerogative to include in your order (and charge you for) scraps of meat that are useless for anything else. So Spoerri gets a meat grinder\u2014and, more important, spins this insight into the richly entertaining speculations on keftedes that fill a third of the book. Despite the title of the section, these are less a dissertation than the cranking of this experience through his own mental meat grinder until he (and we, too) can happily digest it.\n\nIt's important to note, however, that this act of appropriation is not the same thing as assimilation: Spoerri is not interested in becoming a Symiote. What makes this book unique is that he does not set out to master Greek or even Symiotic cooking, but continues to be his own cook, while learning to take advantage of what Symi has to offer. His Greek friends are as puzzled as they are appreciative of his efforts, for he takes their ingredients and their dishes and works them to his own taste, after his own manner.\n\nThis act of heresy must also have shocked American reviewers, given the muted reception they gave this book. But, when you think about it, what he is doing is exactly right. We don't travel to a foreign country to adopt its morals or language or customs, but to set our own into a heady ferment out of which we hope to change and grow. Better to come back from Greece with a new depth to our own cooking, with an appreciation for new flavors and ideas, than with a mastery of a few token souvenir dishes we can never hope to prepare with the same authority as an ordinary Greek cook.\n\nIn the same way, since this is a faithful record of his everyday cuisine, the recipes are not usually scintillating on their own \u2014like our own cooking, his gains its interest through the context of the everyday life in which it takes part. Here are recorded the small successes, the lessons of the failures, learning to live within the limitations of what Symi cannot supply, even while gaining appreciation for what it can\u2014eggs laid daily by his hens, fish caught only a few hours before purchase, lamb flavored by the fragrant herbs on which it browsed on the rocky cliffs, soft-shelled oysters gathered for him by sponge-fishers, succulent woodcock and quail. The taste of all this and more is to be found in these pages.\n\nI first encountered this book in 1971, when it had just been published by Something Else Press (whose address was \"in New York City, by the Parking Lot of the Chelsea Hotel\"), as The Mythological Travels of a Modern Sir John Mandeville, being an account of the Magic, Meatballs and other Monkey Business Peculiar to the Sojourn of Daniel Spoerri upon the Isle of Symi, together with divers speculations thereon.\n\nThis Aris reprint excises the entire first section of the original, a record of obsessional artifacts made from objets trouv\u00e9s, Spoerri unraveling their menacing meanings in accompanying texts. There is no doubt this abridgment weakens the effect of the book (although it does not especially affect the travelogue), because if titles are ever hints, surely this one suggests that these pages be read as a modern variation on the theme of The Tempest, with Daniel Spoerri playing the role of Prospero and the texts being records of the various spells he conjures up to take possession of the magic isle, tease Ariel, and torment Caliban. Still, enough of the original remains for a sympathetic reader to experience the effect of the subsequent enchantment.\nTHE SPICE SELLERS\n\nToday, however much we love our work, it is still a mental coat we put on when we take up our tools and remove when we set them down. Artists are another thing, of course, but most of us no longer see our craft as a prism through which to view the world\u2014the way a cabinetmaker might once have seen it\u2014as an act of jointure, as neatly and finely put together as a chair.\n\nConsider the following passage from Patrick S\u00fcskind's Perfume:\n\nFor back then just for the production of a simple pomade you needed abilities of which this vinegar mixer could not even dream. You had to be able not merely to distill, but also to act as maker of salves, apothecary, alchemist, and craftsman, merchant, humanist, and gardener all in one. You had to be able to distinguish sheep suet from calves' suet, a victoria violet from a parma violet. You had to be fluent in Latin. You had to know when heliotrope is harvested, and when pelargonium blooms, and that the jasmine blossom loses its scent at sunrise.\n\nLong after the War of Independence, America possessed a proud class of artisan merchants to whom neither the designation blue- nor white-collar could be neatly applied. Their work was done equally by hand and brain, the one inseparable from the other. This was because for certain tasks the mind thought with the hands, or nose, mouth, or ears... and the experience so acquired produced a mode of thought that was not only uniquely revelatory to its possessors but, made into sayings and proverbs, became coin for all.\n\nRuth and Bill Penzey are such merchants; to correspond with them after having purchased their wares is to experience a pleasant confusion between the subtle but still assertive redolence of their own character and that of the herbs and spices they sell.\n\nIndeed, at times the whole Spice House enterprise seems a colloquy of rare aromas orchestrated by two beings sprung straight from the imagination of Giuseppe Arcimboldo\u2014benevolent avatars made up of laurel sprays, lavender sprigs, saffron threads, nutmegs, cardamom berries, and caper buds, and, for that matter, packets of cream of tartar and jars of pure beef extract.\n\nThis is, of course, mere fancy, but as a metaphor it is accurate enough. The difference between the simple knowledge of a craft and its mastery is the difference between ingestion and a very long period of digestion. The Penzeys have so absorbed the spice trade that I suspect the mere whiff of their astonishing Tung Hing cassia cinnamon brings them back not only to the ancient groves in China that produce it but to the intense, perfumed brightness of that piece of bark when it was still sweet of its particular tree.\n\nThe road to such an understanding is complex, demanding, and ultimately fascinating. Bill Penzey learned the trade from his father, who himself was taught it in Russia at age eleven by an Indian spice merchant named Alladiya. Thus, the knowledge Bill is now passing on to his children is already generations deep:\n\nWe sit for two hours at a time going over an attempt to buy a certain spice, and I try to teach them why they must elevate the level of their dealing in order to elevate the level of their purchases. This gets into the fine art of bargaining with men from different cultures, men with different world views\u2014who have to be paid not only in money, but also in another, higher way. The nature of this payment, of course, is something the kids must learn for themselves. I can't tell them what it is, only that it is there to be paid. Other buyers will come with the same amount of money, and there is only so much of a certain spice to be had of a certain quality. So, they have to learn first what the best is and then\u2014a very different thing\u2014how to get it.\n\nThe most obvious result of this devotion to craft is the exquisite quality of the goods they sell. The firm but delicate presence of the Proven\u00e7al lavender; the aroma of fresh juice that still clings to the dried, cracked Chinese ginger; the nose-filling spiciness of the hand-milled Penang cloves... the list is a long one, with, for me at least, much still to be explored.\n\nBut the Penzeys also believe that understanding is to be shared. They are genuinely curious about their customers and not at all above learning from anyone who enters their shop. Several of their special blends were given to them by strangers, perhaps because such unaffected interest is itself a kind of generosity that is surprisingly often met in kind.\n\nWhen I first wrote them, it was partially because I was seeking a source for Mexican vanilla beans, supposedly as excellent as they are difficult to obtain. They responded by sending me several of them, plus some Tahitian and Madagascar beans for the sake of comparison. And this was not the last of their kindnesses.\n\nNot that such generosity doesn't sometimes exact its price. They delight in presenting you with some unexpected bit of pungency\u2014and then asking not only what you like about it but also what you don't. They know that we sometimes live closer to our dislikes than to what we think we love, and thus have as much to learn from our prejudices as from our pleasures. All teachers should be so crafty; all craftspeople so wise.\n\nAlthough the Spice House itself is easy to find\u2014it's located on Milwaukee's historic Old World Third Street\u2014the exact locus of the Penzey family spice business is harder to pinpoint. All three Penzey children have been called to the trade, and each has chosen to follow it via a separate path.\n\nRuth and Bill, after thirty-three years, have retired to the smaller Kavanaugh Hill Spice Shop in nearby Wauwatosa, where they continue to pursue their interest in exceptional grades of spices. Their daughter Patty, with her husband, Tom, has taken over the Spice House proper. Pam, the younger daughter, is to open a branch in nearby Madison, in conjunction with a restaurant she's planning with her own husband, Brian. Son Bill Jr. has transformed the mail-order operation into a successful business in its own right (catalogue is $2 from P.O. Box 1633, Milwaukee, WI 53201). That he is also a chip off the old block can be seen from the following abridged text from a recent catalogue:\n\nI remember working in my parents' store in my early teens. At that time we had many Indian customers who were new to the U.S. They would come to the store in small groups, wearing their saris, and us kids would run and hide in the back. When my mother was working, she would let us hide, but when my father was there he and I would wait on them together. If the store was busy, I would have to wait on them myself. He felt that there are customers where the role of the sales clerk is to be a teacher, and customers where the role of the clerk is to be a student. These Indian customers were the best teachers. To this day I look at spices through their eyes. Still, at the time, I did not enjoy waiting on them, because unlike most of our customers, they did not smile at us or tell us what a unique and exciting store we had.\n\nInstead, the Indian women would always smell the spices and in most cases look at each other, shake their heads, and murmur something in their native tongue. A few would tell us what was wrong, in English, pointing out the characteristics of really good spices. As time wore on our spices improved. Sometimes an Indian woman would chew a cumin seed or a cardamom pod and not say anything at all. When we first got Ceylon cloves, I actually saw one woman smile. Finally we even received a compliment. An older Indian gentleman told us\u2014through his son, who was acting as translator\u2014\"With spices like these, you will have many snakes on your street.\"\n\nACETARIA\n\nTHE FRUIT, HERBS, & VEGETABLES OF ITALY\n\nGiacomo Castelvetro, translated with an introduction by Gillian Riley, and with a foreword by Jane Grigson\n\nI remember reading, several years ago\u2014I no longer remember where\u2014that Elizabeth David was engaged in writing a book about Italian cooking before the introduction of the tomato. I'm sorry that it never appeared, but some sense of the riches it might contain can be found in this fascinating volume, written in 1614 by Giacomo Castelvetro, an Italian refugee residing in England.\n\nThis was a time when the English were, as Jane Grigson notes in her foreword to this book, \"building Italianate houses, planning Italian gardens, visiting Italy, speaking Italian, reading Italian writers, wearing Italian clothes.\" The young noblemen who as part of their education toured what was then a hodgepodge of separate republics returned with, among other things, an awareness that the center of the cultural universe perceived them as gross and unimaginative trenchermen, wedded to huge slabs of beef, to tables laden with every sort of fruit tart and sweetmeat, and to sitting down to such food several times a day, from breakfast to \"rear-supper.\"\n\nEnglish cooking, even as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century, was already on the defensive. In 1617, Fynes Moryson wrote that \"our longe sitting and discoursing at tables makes men unawares eate more than the Italians can at their solitary tables,\" and went on to explain:\n\nThe Italians esteeme basely of those who live at other men's trenchers, calling them vulgarly Scoccatori di pasti\u2014shifters of meals... . They think it best to cherish and increase friendship by meetings in Gardens and Market-Places, but hold the table and bed unfit for conversation, where men should come to eate quickly and sleep soundly.\n\nBut Italians were not only solitary eaters: their meals were (and still are) made up out of a much greater proportion of vegetables and starch. Whereas the English, Moryson wrote, \"might have a Pullet and some flesh prepared for us, eating it with a moderate proportion of bread,\" an Italian would more likely sit down to a \"Charger full of hearbs for Sallet, and with rootes and like meates of small price [and]... two or three-pennyworth of bread.\"\u2020\n\nAlthough the English were learning, partly as a result of the influx of French and Italian political and religious refugees, to grow and eat more vegetables and fruit, Castelvetro continued to marvel at how many they were still ignorant of and how much they still had to learn about growing the ones they had. It was his hope that his treatise\u2014Brieve racconto di tutte le radici, di tutte l'herbe et di tutti i frutti, che crudi o cotti in Italia si mangiano-might change all this.\n\nIf the art of persuasion alone could have accomplished the task, Castelvetro might have managed it, for he was a charming writer who also knew his beans. At the age of seventeen, he became the traveling companion of his uncle Ludovico Castelvetro, famed humanist and literary theorist whose own violent Protestantism had forced him to flee Italy. Ludovico had suffered serious illness as a youth, which saved him from a career in the law but ruined his digestion; he lived on a diet of simple vegetable dishes, eschewing both meat and wine. Giacomo developed an appreciation not only for his uncle's politics but also for his diet. Although he never became a vegetarian, his interest in botany expanded to include the culinary uses of the fruits and vegetables of the various European countries he visited\u2014which included Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, and, for an extended stay, England.\n\nIn 1611, at the age of fifty-five, Giacomo Castelvetro was saved from the clutches of the Inquisition in Venice through the intervention of the British Ambassador, Sir Dudley Carleton. Castelvetro then fled Italy, and had he gone straight to England, his story might have had a happier ending, for he became for a short time there a political celebrity. But he dawdled, visiting a round of friends on the Continent, and he arrived in London in 1613 to find he had become yesterday's news. He was forced to piece together a precarious existence as Italian tutor (and companion) in the household of Sir Adam Newton at Eltham. There he died, poor, ill, and sad, only a few years later in 1616.\n\nDuring this brief time, Castelvetro pinned his hopes on gaining patronage from the dazzling\u2014beautiful, intelligent, and wealthy\u2014Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford. It was his luck that she had just suffered a crippling (although well-hidden) financial blow that almost completely ended her previous generosity to writers and poets. It was for her that Castelvetro wrote his treatise, knowing her to be a keen amateur gardener, and it is because of such an intended reader, speculates Gillian Riley, the book's translator, that he wrote it in the manner that he did: simply and charmingly, seasoned generously with observation and anecdote and more lightly with botanical and metaphysical theory.\n\nA sympathetic reader will suspect that it was also meant to assuage the homesickness of an Italian expatriate who sorely missed the warmth and gaiety of his native land. The tone of gentle melancholy that pervades its pages (echoed in its own way in Jane Grigson's touching foreword\u2014one of her last, and nicest, pieces of writing) is the first of this book's many pleasures.\n\nIf the English were, at this date, enchanted with Italian literature, music, manners, and art, Castelvetro saw no reason why they might not be charmed as well by Italian produce and especially the delicately simple manner in which it could be prepared. He takes his reader through the seasons, introducing his subjects\u2014mulberries, elderflowers, eggplants, purslane, etc.\u2014one by one, describing each, providing, as he feels it necessary, hints as to its successful cultivation, the benefits of eating it, and often the way in which it might be best prepared.\n\nIt seems even today an embarrassment of riches, perhaps because for all our Italian cookbooks we still do not understand the pleasure Italians take in the simplest of vegetable preparations. After noting that \"most of the salads we eat in summer are made of capucina (head lettuce),\" Castelvetro explains how it might also be cooked: \"Cut the solid heart into four parts, each well oiled and salted and peppered, and roast them on a grid over hot charcoal (not burning embers) and eat them sprinkled with [bitter] orange juice. They are delicious, almost as good as asparagus.\" Another recipe, this time for zucchini: \"Boil them in salted water, and when they are almost done, add a decent amount of sweet herbs, finely chopped spring onions, olive oil, and at least a ladleful of unripe grapes or agresto.\"\n\nIn essence, he offers two basic preparations: a cooked salad in which the vegetable is briefly cooked and seasoned with salt, sour, and savor; and a minestra, or soup (whether wet or dry), which can be exampled by his recipe for preparing turnip: \"We make [them into] an excellent dish, different from the way you do here; they are first peeled, then cut into thin slices and cooked into good broth, and served with grated cheese and pepper.\" Here is another version, this time for artichokes, which is about as elaborate as he cares to get:\n\nIf you do not feel like eating artichokes raw, select some small ones and cut off the tips of the pointed outer leaves. Boil them first in fresh water to take away the bitterness, and then finish cooking them in rich beef or chicken broth. Serve them in a shallow dish on slices of bread moistened with just a little of the broth, sprinkled with grated mature cheese and pepper to bring out their goodness. We love these tasty morsels; just writing about them makes my mouth water.\n\nIf what interested me most about the book was Castelvetro's approach to the vegetables and fruits I know, as opposed to those that are strange to me, it is for two reasons, the first of which I raise only as a question. It is hard not to wonder, given the rich abundance of foodstuffs and culinary strategies developed over the centuries to use them, whether the culinary gifts of the New World\u2014tomato, maize, sweet and hot peppers, potato, etc.\u2014ultimately did more to enrich or to impoverish Italian cooking. This seems especially true in the case of the tomato, which provided a single, simpleminded culinary solution to what before had been a subtle, wide-ranging medley of sweet-sour saucing. Change it these new foods certainly did; improve it\u2014well, at least one starts to wonder.\n\nThe second reason is that Castelvetro made me realize that it is not a lack of variety that characterizes the poverty of our vegetable cooking but a lack of... I want to write intensity... of attention. There were only a few fruits and vegetables in this book that were completely new to me, but many I have never considered eating, from dogwood berries to elderflower blossoms. Castelvetro makes me feel as if I were eleven years old and regarding a pretty girl in the company of an older brother. His interest agitates me because I partly feel it and partly don't understand it. After all, when you come right down to it, it's just a girl.\n\nSo if I am any kind of test case, Castelvetro's message is as appropriate today as it was four centuries ago. And unlike most manuals of sensual appreciation, it is a joy to read. Not only do many of his recipes still have immediate appeal, so does his company. He traveled much and observed keenly, which allowed him to enliven his text with vivid anecdotes: the children learning to swim in the Brenta canals, kept buoyant by huge dried pumpkins used as water wings; the Venetian ladies ogling passersby behind curtains of verdant beanstalks; the attack of constipation that \"was so bad that I went for ten or eleven days without relief, which when it came caused such intense pain that I do not believe a woman in childbirth could have suffered more than I.\"\n\nTo write about Castelvetro is to long to quote him. Here he is on a subject as mundane as the making of a cabbage salad:\n\nI once happened to be in France in the company of a group of ladies and gentlemen, and we came one afternoon to a large village with a good inn, where we proposed to dine. One of the ladies, sitting in the window-seat in the dining room, which overlooked an orchard, said to me, \"Let's go into the garden and pick a salad!\" to which I replied, \"Yes, indeed!\" When we got there we found nothing but cabbages, so the young lady picked one of these saying, \"Well, if there's nothing else, I'll make you a nice salad out of this.\"\n\nHaving never seen or eaten anything like this before, I kept silent and waited for the outcome. First she removed the green outer leaves until she came to the white part, which she proceeded to slice very finely with a razor-sharp knife. She then salted and dressed it in the usual way, and brought it to the table, where it was pronounced excellent, and her ingenuity was much admired by the entire company.\n\nThere are very few culinary works of this age that have the ability to reach so effortlessly across the years (even through what reads as a rather pedestrian translation) and win our hearts. The publisher has given us all this in an attractively designed and profusely illustrated edition that is, to my mind, simply one of the best books about food and cooking I have read all year.\n\nAfterword. This review is\u2014obviously, I hope\u2014the product of an enthusiast, not an authority; I know nothing of seventeenth-century Italian culinary writings, nor can I read Renaissance Italian. Consequently, I was rather discomfited to receive, in response to an earlier review of this book, a letter from Patience Gray\u2014who is conversant in both those areas\u2014taking me to task for unknowingly praising a mountebank, snob, sycophant, and, very possibly, plagiarist.\n\nIn brief, the author of Honey from a Weed and Plats du Jour (see here) and a translator of a previous edition of the Larousse Gastronomique accuses Castelvetro, whom she characterizes as a man who \"never went into a kitchen except to pinch a cook's bottom,\" of working up much of his \"brief account\" out of an earlier work by Costanzo Felici da Piobbico, entitled Lettera sulle Insalate, written in 1366\u201467. According to her, Castelvetro took bits and pieces of this work, rearranged them, intermixed Felici's anecdotes with some of his own, and hurriedly produced what he hoped would prove to be the equivalent of today's trendy culinary best-seller.\n\nAfter the shock subsided, I decided that even if these charges were true, they would have little effect on my feelings about the book, since what most interested me about it was its portrait of the Italian relationship with vegetables and fruit. My opinion about Castelvetro would, of course, become more complex... but not necessarily be lowered. I actually liked him a bit better with a touch of the rogue brushed onto his rather pathetic lifelong predilection for sucking up to the titled rich.\n\nIn her introduction to the book, Gillian Riley does mention the possibility that Castelvetro might have come across a copy of Lettera sulle Insalate, admits that there are some similarities between the two texts, and then makes what seems the rather strange assertion that \"we should not assume from this that Castelvetro took the idea for his own essay from Felici's manuscript\"\u2014which rather dodges the question of how much material he might have taken from it.\n\nI can only bring the matter up; others will have to resolve it. Until they do, we should bear in mind that the reasons we have this book at all are due mostly to sheer contingency: Castelvetro's relationship with England and English nobility; his references to the English and their way of eating; and the romance of the manuscript, buried for so long at Trinity College. It is all that, not intrinsic worth, that made the translation of this manuscript a project for Penguin, a commercial publisher, whereas Felici remains ignored even by scholarly ones. And there is no more point in being surprised at this than at the fact that the first American cookbook to be translated into French was The Silver Palate Cookbook and not, say, James Beard's American Cookery.\n\nStill, Patience Gray's brief description of Lettera sulle Insalate does make it sound like an extraordinary piece of writing:\n\nThis doctor, Felici, living in the wilds of Le Marche, had a wonderful feeling for plant life, which he collected, studied, and introduced to botanical gardens in Urbino, Rimini, and Bologna.\n\nThe edible plants, hidden in this wonderfully disorganized Salad Letter, form a chain beginning with bulbs, roots, then on to shoots, leaves, fruits, flowers, seeds, grains. Nothing to do with the tables of the rich, but with his knowledge of wild plants and their uses as food, as medicine, derived from centuries-old practices of mountain peasants and confirmed by the Ancients \u2014Dioscorides, Theophrastus, etc.\n\nHe passes all this on to his friend Aldrovandi, the letter trav-elling precariously on muleback to Bologna. And, in his many other letters which take the same course\u2014often accompanied by specimens, dead birds, dried plants, seeds, dried fish, rocks\u2014we can witness the rebirth of Natural History (pioneered by the Elder Pliny), and also return to an unspoiled beautiful world in the great solitudes of the mountains of Le Marche.\n\nPerhaps now that attention has been called to it, a publisher might even be persuaded to issue Lettera sulle Insalate (perhaps translated by Patience Gray herself). That would be a bit of irony, both bitter and sweet\u2014agrodolce\u2014a flavor that both of those seventeenth-century Italians would have recognized.\nMONET \u00c0 TABLE\n\nMONET'S TABLE: THE COOKING JOURNALS OF CLAUDE MONET\n\nText by Claire Joyes, photographs by Jean-Bernard Naudin, recipes adapted by Jo\u00ebl Robuchon\n\nGiverny is a small town along the Seine between Paris and Rouen. For most who recognize the name, however, the word means simply one house within that town, the final home of Claude Monet. A man who loved company almost as much as he loved escaping from it, Monet was that strange creature, a gregarious recluse. He used Giverny as he would a canvas to create his own vision of a living place, a contradictory mixture of privacy and display whose seductive intimacy has enchanted visitors ever since.\n\nThe two most important rooms in the house were the studio and the kitchen, and these were created first: the studio in the barn and the kitchen elevated from the basement and walled with blue and white Rouen tiles. Any other kitchen would be dominated by the formidable Briffaut stove, with its several ovens, brass towel-drying rack, and hot-water faucets rising out and up. But this kitchen gets its aura from the windows that open out onto the balcony, letting in the flower garden and a flood of air and light.\n\nThe dining room, right next door, is likewise full of color. Its pale yellow walls are trimmed with glossy chrome yellow, hung with Japanese prints, and punctuated with a huge tile-lined fireplace and two French doors. The chairs match the trim; the formal dining service is yellow edged with blue. Monet mixed the colors and picked the plates.\n\nHe also devised the menus. Painting, gardens, and food were Monet's passions, and as he grew older he devoted himself almost entirely to them. He rose at dawn, had a cold bath beneath the bemused stare of C\u00e9zanne's \"N\u00e8gre,\" which hung in his dressing room, and came down to eat a huge, eclectic breakfast\u2014eggs and bacon, grilled tripe sausages, Dutch or Stilton cheese, toast and marmalade, Kardomah tea. If the light was right that day, he would then retire to his studio and paint.\n\nLunch, served at eleven, was the day's convivial center. It was the meal to which guests were invited and where conversation flowed, but never in a way to impede his eating\u2014slow eaters drove him crazy. Monet had a hearty but picky appetite; as much as possible, he liked to produce what he ate. The foie gras might be from Alsace and the truffles from P\u00e9rigord, but the vegetables and fruit came from the garden, the pike from his own pond, and the ducks and chickens from his own carefully selected stock.\n\nAll this was prepared in the rich, unstinting manner of the French Belle \u00c9poque: the chicken with crayfish butter; the duck in red wine sauce or made into a pie with cognac, sausage, and veal; the pike simmered in a court bouillon of white wine and served in a sauce of butter and shallots. Afterward there was coffee in the studio drawing room, a sip of homemade plum brandy, and a return to painting, Monet working until the gong summoned him to supper. Bedtime followed, inexorably, at nine-thirty.\n\nStill, life was not all painting and eating. The book contains a delightful picture of Monet perched in the back seat of the family Panhard-Levassor, waiting to be driven to market. He also found time to discuss the daily menu, harass poultry breeders, and design and supervise the two-and-a-half-acre walled kitchen garden. There, pear trees were espaliered along the sunny walls and other fruit trees planted: cherry, quince, a special russet for making tarte Tatin, and greengage plum for the homemade brandy.\n\nAs for the rest...\n\nOne could stroll along paths lined with climbing vegetables, along avenues of Milan cabbages, Brussels sprouts, or broccoli, beside rows of romaine lettuces, celery, pale endives or Paresseux de Castillon spinach. One crossroads, marked by a rosemary bush, was bordered with thyme, chives, and savory for the lima beans, and even Belleville garlic for the sauce verte.\n\nAnd on and on.\n\nA wonderful place; in many ways, an idyllic life. The charm of both conspires to lull the critical faculties: this, alas, is not the book it might have been. The photographs are too artful to capture the feel of the house, especially its interior (the flowers come across better, but the book is not about them); we are shown only parts of the kitchen and dining room, and nothing of the cellars, the storeroom, the huge R\u00e9gency-style cupboard that held the precious preserves, the Proven\u00e7al olive oil, and the many spices. Claire Joyes, who lives at Giverny, conveys all this in a prose that, while stiffly translated, has its moments of charm\u2014although she might have told us more about Marguerite, the family cook, whom she knew personally but never quite manages to bring to life.\n\nA third of the text is devoted to chef Jo\u00ebl Robuchon's recreation of the contents of the journals\u2014dishes Monet encountered in his travels, at favorite restaurants, or at the homes of friends\u2014into workable recipes. Here are C\u00e9zann\u00e9's salt-cod bouillabaisse, Millet's recipe for petits pains, Sacha Guitry's boiled pork shoulder, and Monet's own creation, c\u00e8pes baked in garlic and olive oil. These dishes are for the most part attractive, and many are within the reach of the interested (and experienced) home cook.\n\nBut how explain the book's near silence regarding its supposed subject, the cooking journals themselves? We are not told how closely these recipes approximate Monet's, how much of the journals are replicated here, or\u2014most important\u2014who originally kept them. Are these the \"Monet family recipes,\" or are the pages actually written in Monet's own hand? Given the fact that the book implies just that provenance, such reticence can only provoke suspicion\u2014especially since Jane Grigson, in her chapter about Monet's culinary passions in Food with the Famous, doesn't mention them at all.\nCOUNTER REVOLUTION\n\nTHE TASTE OF CHINA\n\nKen Horn, with photographs by Leong Ka Tai\n\nEven the best foreign cookbooks tend to present the cuisines they explain as static, unchanging entities, although cooking in many countries today is in a state of accelerating change. When culinary commentators do notice this situation, their tone is often one of nostalgia, if not outright lamentation\u2014a cry of \"Let me have one more taste before they take my favorite dish away.\"\n\nOn mainland China, however, for most of its occupants these dishes already have been taken away. For decades, an oppressive and puritanical regime enforced a policy known colloquially as the \"iron rice bowl.\" Fine eating was suspect, culinary traditions were abandoned and talented cooks actively discouraged from developing their skills. The state-run restaurants were\n\noften noisy, not very clean, poorly lighted, aesthetically repellent, and in general badly managed... . After waiting in line to get in, I was usually seated at a table still heaped with the debris from the previous diners. Employees were often lackadaisical, discourteous, and even surly to travelers as well as local patrons... [because the policy of the \"iron rice bowl\" presumed] that public institutions, including state restaurants, exist not to serve people but to provide income and security for the employees.\n\nThis policy has since been relaxed, and Ken Horn, followed by photographer Leong Ka Tai, has gone into mainland-China home kitchens, small-town bazaars, big-city markets, and all sizes and sorts of public eating places to report on the enormous culinary sea change that is now taking place.\n\nThese particular chapters (others recount the general history of Chinese cuisine, with a special emphasis on Cantonese cooking) are the best in the book, starting with \"Family Traditions\" and continuing through \"City and Country Fare,\" \"Restaurant Cooking,\" \"Snacks and Street Foods,\" and \"Food for the Body and Soul.\" For all the good things this book has accomplished, the best may be its testimony that appetite has its ways of revivifying what perverse necessity has torn down. Here is a classic cuisine being reconstructed not from the top down by innovative chefs but from the bottom up by peasants, cooking stalls, and home cooks, all enthusiastically embracing the opportunity to bring new life to what in some respects was on the way to becoming, even before the Revolution, a moribund cuisine.\n\nTo understand something of the paradoxical nature in this far-from-programmatic counterrevolution, turn to the full-page photograph of the young man in his early twenties, standing in the middle of a country road, herding a flock of several hundred ducklings with a long bamboo switch. Other pictures in this book have more inherent drama (a mother huddled intently over a bowl of noodles as her child sobs behind her), compelling fascination (the wholesale duck market in Hunan, where countless ducks lie passively on the pavement awaiting their fate), or sheer loveliness (sunshine pouring down from a skylight over the primitive straw-fueled, brick-and-concrete-slab Horn family cookstove), but the one of the duck herder tells a more interesting story, and in a subtler, less theatrical way.\n\nIt takes a minute to put it all together: his age, his intelligent and cheerful demeanor, the touches of Western style about his dress, the macadam on the road, the electric pylons in the background. The eye is presented with an equation whose parts don't quite balance out... as they would have had the road been dirt, the herder a boy or an old woman, or the garb that of peasant dress. But here everything is modern except the event: in today's world, ducks are raised in wire enclosures and young men are put to (or find for themselves) more profitable employment.\n\nYou can find photographs like this of Italian youths, equally unself-conscious (and unresentful) of such an occupation, but these were taken in the 1920s, not the 1980s. This young Chinese stands at the cusp of modernity: a place where human labor, and hence food, is still cheap but where modern production techniques and commercial ingenuity mean an influx of cash\u2014a chance, at least for the moment, for poorer peasants to enjoy themselves as they never have before (and may never again).\n\nIn urban areas, this culinary revolution is given further momentum by the government's policy of keeping rents artificially far beneath market value. But without financial return, there has been no impetus to build new housing\u2014with the result that the average living space in the smaller Chinese cities (it is even less in the larger ones) is one small room for every two people. However, low rents also mean that more than half the average urban household budget can be spent on food, and much of it is street food... which is not surprising, when you consider that everyone who can, from Grandfather on down, spends as much time outdoors as possible, thronging \"the tea shops, the public squares, the streets, the food stalls, and restaurants\u2014conversing, playing mahjong and cards, walking, and, above all, eating.\"\n\nUntil these were banned by the government, a feature of the Chinese urban scene was a prolific number of \"small eats,\" both ordinary street stalls and night markets (food stalls that feed night-shift workers and\u2014especially in the summer, when many flee their hot, airless apartments\u2014casual idlers). Horn describes the effect of the recent rescinding of the government ban in Beijing, which is famous for its street food:\n\nI was struck by the carnival atmosphere of the street scenes, crowded with people sampling the assortment of local and regional favorites... . That one eats better at the sidewalk food stalls in Beijing than at most of the fancy tourist restaurants is an opinion with which I concur. Freshly made pulled noodles are boiled and served, as are homemade jiaozi dumplings, Beijing sausage, Sichuan cold noodles, Tianjin turnovers, Lanzhou noodles, Wenzhou fishball soup, and Xinjiang mutton barbecues\u2014I sampled all of these at the Wangfujing street market in Beijing.\n\nFor poor Chinese, these are exciting culinary times.\n\nHowever, options have also increased for functionaries, academics, and other professionals with what in Communist China might be called a middle-class income. The relaxation of rules regarding private plots has allowed a rebirth of market gardening, giving shoppers greater choice and better quality. These options, along with a more positive attitude toward culinary indulgence, have brought about a renaissance in home cooking for those families with the time and income (and kitchen space) to pursue it.\n\nBecause these changes are erratic and take place at wildly disparate tempos, the cuisine of mainland China defies easy categorization. Fresh bean sprouts, now available in most American supermarkets, there remain a luxury; restaurant cooking, at which the Chinese have always excelled, is in China itself still very uneven at all levels of society. This is partly because of lost talents and partly because a good restaurant is a complex organism, and those don't evolve overnight.\n\nAll this in good time... or so we can hope. But whatever other shape culinary modernity assumes in China we can be sure that it will not be a simple clone of Coca-Cola drinkers and TV-dinner eaters. This is, after all, a country where, on the one hand, the height of sophistication is to own an electric rice cooker and, on the other, a fifth of all arable land in some sections is devoted to raising traditional medicinal herbs. The Chinese still make no clear distinction between the medicinal and culinary properties in the foods they eat, regarding eating as not only a way to keep the body healthy but the primary way to make it so.\n\nNor, given the Chinese passion for many-course banquets (Horn attended one in Kunming consisting of fifty-four dishes, all made with goat!), will there be an end to their delight in culinary pomp. What Chinese cooks do seem to be up to is recreating what was once a rather rigidly formal cuisine into one which features\u2014at all levels of Chinese society\u2014simpler, earthier, and more easily prepared food.\n\nAt least that seems to be the leitmotif that threads its way through the chapters of this excellent book, linking together its many unusual\u2014and unusually well-chosen\u2014recipes. In the opening chapter, \"A Personal Odyssey,\" Ken Horn tells of returning with his mother to his ancestral village, Kaiping, in Canton. They were greeted with a special eleven-course banquet made up almost entirely of just this type of food: simple but elegant-sounding preparations like Chinese water spinach cooked with fermented bean curd, bitter melon stir-fried with lean pork, soybean sprouts also stir-fried with lean pork (the dish is authentically made with pig's intestines, but, Horn writes, \"unsure of my cultural adaptability, they had substituted lean pork\"), long beans prepared with silk squash and crispy cloud ear fungus, a stew of dried oysters, a braised goose dish, and platters of roast duck and roast pig that had been purchased already prepared. The beverage served throughout the meal? Not, as you might think, tea... but instead a clear rabbit broth, laced with spices and medicinal herbs.\nRICHARD OLNEY, ENCORE UNE FOIS\n\nTHE FRENCH MENU COOKBOOK\n\nRichard Olney\n\nRichard Olney's Simple French Food is one of our great cookbooks, a match of sensibility and subject so perfect that even when we go to it for no more than a recipe, it is impossible not to linger awhile in its company... the prose inviting, the author's love and mastery of his subject endlessly compelling.\n\nHis earlier French Menu Cookbook has been overshadowed by this triumph, for while it is a very good cookbook, it is not a great one. Consulting this book, unlike Simple French Food, is an act of stealth\u2014we sneak into the kitchen, peek over the author's shoulder, and then steal away.\n\nNot that we aren't meant to feel welcome. On the contrary, the author is eager to share a wealth of information. Unfortunately, however, when he claps his hand on our shoulder, we feel much like the unfortunate wedding guest cornered by the Ancient Mariner. His flood of advice tends ultimately to dominate, not help, and it is a supremely self-confident cook who, after such an encounter with Olney, can then set him firmly aside and go cook.\n\nIn Simple French Food, this obsessive seriousness was touching and involving, because it was set in contrast to ordinary dishes, which were enriched and made desirable by it. But in this book, with its elegant menus and high tone, he often risks transforming himself into the sort of snob who will impatiently wave away a compliment, completely absorbed in stripping a mouthful of B\u00e9arnaise sauce down to its component parts to find that traitorous little ingredient which kept it from achieving total perfection.\n\nConsequently, I was both surprised and delighted when David R. Godine's revised, updated, and handsomely produced reissue of that book (the original was published by Simon & Schuster) brought about some very happy and informative hours of reading and thinking about food... although perhaps not entirely in the way his new publisher intended. For I read with both editions open in front of me\u2014comparing recipe to recipe, page after page.\n\nThe new edition is in many ways an improvement over the older one. But even better is the opportunity they offer together to set up a tension between two carefully worked-out versions of the same recipe, versions that are almost identical, but not quite. This tension makes Olney seem not quite so difficult a kitchen companion: two quibbling recipes for the same dish give a very different impression than either does when read alone, where it appears as some perfect thing, immutably set in stone. Now, as we watch him tug them here and adjust them there, they suddenly become fragile, volatile acts of a creative culinary imagination.\n\nThis isn't to imply that there are radical changes in the recipes\u2014when Olney wrote the first version of this book in 1970, he had lived in France for almost twenty years and had been producing menu-oriented recipes for Cuisine et Vins de France for the last four of them. He already knew his mind as regards these dishes and he has changed it only in small ways. But it is easy enough to consult several cooks when we want bold contrast between versions of the same recipe: here we get to watch a strongly opinionated cook shift in those opinions, a very different sort of thing.\n\nConsider, for example, his change of tack in the making of boeuf \u00e0 la bourguignonne. The dish is essentially a stew\u2014cheap, gelatinous cuts of beef marinated in red wine and then simmered in it for hours. He still follows the general lines set forth in the first book, but the dish is tightened up. American substitutes are no longer mentioned; now the chunks of beef are larded with fresh pork fat and the dish garnished with crispy bits of pancetta, where before salt pork did duty for both. Likewise, vegetable oil is excised from the new recipe as a possible saut\u00e9ing medium. At the same time, he is even more meticulous in removing every possible amount of excess fat.\n\nBut if he is stricter in some areas he is more permissive in others: before, he called for a bottle of \"good red Burgundy\" for the marinade and cooking; now, he only asks for a \"robust, deeply colored young wine.\" As is generally the case throughout the book, the amounts of butter and oil are reduced and those of the seasonings increased, especially if one takes advantage of his hints as to the composition of the bouquet garni and adds some aromatic wine essence to the final sauce.\n\nIt's important to note that this is a wine book (and still pretty emphatically a French wine book): Mr. Olney may not go so far as to brush his teeth with a light Sauternes, but after reading his collected oeuvre you may well wonder if water or even beer has ever crossed his lips except under duress. Read, for example, his comments on fresh coriander (or cilantro): \"[It] is repellent in the presence of wine [and thus] of lesser interest for the purposes of this book... .\" It would be enough, you would think, to simply note that the French don't do much with it.\n\nHe is almost as dismissive of rosemary, which he now considers a \"vehement\" herb, and corrects the younger Olney on its use throughout. On the other hand, hyssop, once relegated to beguile the occasional \"erudite curiosity seeker,\" has since been put to much good use:\n\nIt is easy to grow and most interesting fresh, its finely chopped leaves, delicately bitter and refreshing, adding liveliness to many a salad or marinated raw fish. The tiny, lacy, labiate flowers of hyssop, clear ultramarine, are ravishing scattered over a salad accented by the yellow of hard-boiled egg yolks, or atop thinly sliced raw salmon or the silver sheen of very fresh filleted fish of the sardine-herring family, the one and the other marinated in a bit of lemon juice and olive oil.\n\nThe wealth of such small contrasts lets us know the cook. If you own the first version of this book, the revised one is worth buying, or if you begin with the new one and come to love it, you will find it equally worth your while to scour the secondhand market for the earlier one. They are both excellent books, but together they make a whole superior to either part.\n\nIf choosing between the one or the other, however, I would opt for the new one: as far as design and production are concerned, David R. Godine has done Olney proud, and the introductory material is greatly enhanced. It is also much more accommodating to the novice cook, as the recipe directions are both better thought out and more concise (thanks, perhaps, to the author's editorial direction of the Time-Life series The Good Cook).\n\nEven so, there are pleasures in the earlier edition missing in the new one, including much helpful, interesting information that once prefaced the recipes. (A little of it is still there, but in abbreviated form, with other parts worked into the introductory material. Still, the former edition ran to 446 pages; the new one has 295. While the page size is larger, it is obvious that substantial cutting has taken place.)\n\nThe most notable absence\u2014since it was the part of the book I remember most fondly\u2014is the preface, in which Olney describes his home in Provence: \"The house, perched halfway up a hillside, its only access from below a somewhat precarious footpath... was a total ruin. Stretching above, the several acres of stone-walled terraces planted to olive trees, once meticulously cared for, are grown wild to all those herbs\u2014rose\u2014mary, wild thyme and savory, oregano, fennel, lavender, and mint\u2014whose names are poetry and whose mingled perfumes scent the air of Proven\u00e7al kitchens and hillside alike.\"\n\nInstead of updating this passage, Olney omitted it entirely. Perhaps the effort to redo it seemed too autumnal... the first edition is dedicated to Georges Carin, \"a great chef and friend\"; this edition is dedicated to his memory (and to that of two other French friends who have also since died).\n\nSo it is that these two volumes together share the changing flavors of a life as well as of a palate. I can think of no more pleasant way to spend a quiet evening, if you are lucky enough to own\u2014or at least get hold of\u2014both these books, than to leaf through them together, listening to this gifted cook as he argues with himself over the stove in his kitchen in Solli\u00e8s-Toucas.\nTHE TASTE OF THE PAST\n\nTHE ROMAN COOKERY OF APICIUS: A TREASURY OF GOURMET RECIPES AND HERBAL COOKERY, TRANSLATED FOR THE MODERN KITCHEN\n\nJohn Edwards\n\n\"Latin Lives Today\" was the motto of my tenth-grade Latin class, and Miss North, our teacher, had us regularly scour the newspapers and popular magazines to unearth evidence of its truth. If she's still out there pounding declensions into stubborn adolescent brains, she'll be making an event of The Roman Cooking of Apicius. Here is a whole book of modern recipes worked up from the very sketchy accounts of the Roman dishes described in various works attributed to Apicius, that legendary Roman glutton, but especially De Re Coquinaria.\n\nTo comment first on the road not taken: There is yet an untouched culinary lode to be mined by some knowledgeable author who, using these (and other Latin) texts as guides, sets out to discover what remnants of the cooking of ancient Rome still linger on in Italy, despite both modernity and the tomato\u2014such, for example, as Horace's porri et ciceris refero laganique catinum (Satire 1.6), a casserole of leeks, chickpeas, and seedcake that can, according to Patience Gray in Honey from a Weed, still be recognized in such Apulian dishes as cece e lasagna.\n\nThis, however, the author did not do. Instead, he has translated the extant Latin texts and, on facing pages\u2014after those eighteenth-century English imitations of Horatian odes and Virgilian eclogues\u2014composed recipes \"in the manner of Apicius.\" Mr. Edwards is himself a British poet (although currently living on an island off the coast of British Columbia) and cannot but be aware of the irony inherent in this comparison. Just as those poems, despite their swains with Latin names and mythological beasties, were unmistakably English, so are his own recipes. For all their being highly flavored with myrtle berries, honey, lovage, and boiled wine, they are utterly contemporary in nature and not truly Roman at all.\n\nThis distinction needs emphasizing if only because the publisher has attempted to convince us otherwise, especially in the \"revised\" paperback edition, which deletes not only almost all of the author's translation of the Roman original but also the name \"Apicius\" from the title\u2014in order to convince us that by following the book's recipes we are preparing \"delectable, poetic dishes from classical Rome, from simple snacks to complete dinners\" and that the book makes \"Roman cooking completely accessible to us in our day.\"\n\nOf course, nothing could be further from the truth. Here is a simple sausage dish from De Re Coquinaria:\n\nForcemeats in a Ring. Fill an intestine with seasoned forcemeats and form it into a circle. Smoke it. When it has turned cinnabar red, roast it a little. Arrange attractively on a serving dish. Last, pour wine sauce for pheasant dumplings over it, but [remember to] add cumin.\n\nThe information we still need to complete this dish would fill a book. What seasonings would turn a sausage bright red when smoked? Roast it for how long? What did Roman wine taste like? What stock was used in the wine sauce and how was it seasoned? The list goes on and on.\n\nTo grasp the problems the author/translator faces in attempting to solve these puzzles, imagine some writer two thousand years hence attempting to resurrect twentieth-century French cuisine with nothing to go on but a badly mutilated copy of the Code Culinaire. This book, a menu reference for French chefs, gives a brief description of specific dishes and their major ingredients, but expects the cook to know the methods, the nature of the ingredients, and the amounts of seasoning each requires to be properly prepared.\n\nThus, for example, it assumes knowledge of what sort of duck is appropriate for caneton aux nouilles \u00e0 l'alsacienne, the exact vegetables on which it is to be nested, and the quantity of each seasoning needed to flavor it, as well as how to make the veal stock with which the dish is sprinkled and the very nouilles \u00e0 l'alsacienne themselves, for the Code is no more specific about such particulars than any of the directions in Apicius.\n\n(This comparison is all the more apt because it is most likely that the texts attributed to Apicius\u2014who was not one but three famous gluttons of the same name who lived in different periods of Roman history\u2014are no more than a collection of dishes of the sort that would, and perhaps did, please one or another \"Apicius.\" The lack in both books of a single guiding palate makes the difficulties to be resolved even more insurmountable.)\n\nIt's also worth noting that the Apicius texts and the Code both describe dishes most usually eaten by the wealthy: neither is a source of information about the cuisine of hoi polloi. When Edwards writes that the Romans \"customarily took three meals a day\" (a simple breakfast of bread and fruit; a lunch of fish, eggs, cold meats, vegetables, and fruit; and a supper that began at four in the afternoon and continued into the evening \"or even into the night\"), he is writing not about all or even most Romans but about the wealthy. The cuisine of Apicius may be typically Roman, but how typical was the Roman who ate it?\n\nThe author further and unnecessarily complicates this issue by insisting that salt, because it is so rarely mentioned by name in the Latin text, was sparingly used in ancient Rome (in fact, although it is not advertised as such, this is a salt-free cookbook), where it is far more likely that the original compiler(s) took seasoning with salt for granted and simply didn't bother to specify it (as often happens in the Code Culinaire).\n\nThis perverse position leads to some fast and loose playing with the spirit of the Latin text, and even with the letter: the author's recipe for garum, the omnipresent Roman fish sauce (their equivalent of catsup), has no salt\u2014but he directs that it must be kept refrigerated. This was not an option open to the Romans: as the original text makes clear (and the author notes elsewhere), it was heavily salted instead.\n\nNor is it only in their saltlessness that his recipes distort the originals. Given the then-primitive conditions for keeping meat, it is most likely that the Romans had a taste for eating it \"high\" (i.e., smelly), and their love of pungent and complex seasoning was in part necessary, not to mask that taste (for nothing can), but to complement it\u2014whereas such intense flavoring interacts with our own bland-tasting viands to a quite different effect. Furthermore, hung meat has a different texture as well as a different taste to it, something else his recipes do not take into account... as they fail to note that rabbit and hare are not interchangeable\u2014the one being a white-meated, tender-flavored animal and the other a red-meated, gamier-tasting one.\n\nLastly, it should be noted that Edwards's recipes understandably sidestep dishes that might turn a contemporary stomach, but whose omission or down-playing distorts our understanding of the balance of Latin cuisine. Given the number of recipes for them, it's probable that the Romans had something of a taste for sterile sow's womb (vulvae steriles), as well as dormice (basted with honey and poppy seeds) and various songbirds (which the Italians still eat with relish). And the conceit of filling each ear of a suckling pig with stuffing before roasting it shows a very different attitude as to what food play was permitted and what forbidden.\n\nAs with any such attempt at imaginative reconstruction, the accumulation of misplaced emphases and unrealized gaps of understanding means that the best we can hope for is to be brought to the doorway of this cuisine and there allowed to smell the appealing scent of spices being pounded and the heady aroma of meat turning on a spit\u2014and to catch brief, uncertain glimpses of steaming platters being quickly carried by. Somewhere in the house there is feasting and merriment, but it is a party we will never join.\n\nThat understood, we are better placed to enjoy what John Edwards actually has accomplished. For he has lingered on the stoop of this house much longer than we, and his best guesses about the contents of those trays have been transformed into a series of carefully imagined dishes that are appetizing, interesting, and not without wit.\n\nWhile contemporary poets rarely pen georgics and eclogues, classics scholars at Oxford University are still given examination questions that require them to translate, say, some lines of Virgil in the manner of Dryden or Pope. It is easy to imagine an examiner with a culinary bent setting the challenge in a slightly different arena:\n\nIUS IN ELIXAM OMNAM. Sauce for all boiled meats. [Mix] pepper, lovage, oregano, rue, silphium, dried onion, wine, boiled wine, honey, vinegar, and a little olive oil. Dry [the boiled meats] and then wrap in a linen cloth [and press out the remaining moisture]. Pour the sauce over the boiled meats.\"De Re Coquinaria: VII. vi. i.\n\nCreate a recipe in the manner of Elizabeth David from the preceding that (a) utilizes these same ingredients, (b) resembles as closely as possible what Latin scholars assume this dish to be, (c) can be prepared in a modern kitchen, and (d) your friends will happily if astonishedly devour.\n\nSound like fun? If so, you'll very much enjoy The Roman Cooking of Apicius. Set aside all this book's donnishness and what you have left is a scholar-poet at play in the kitchen with fresh herbs, sweet spices, honeyed vinegar, and spiced wine. His is the sort of intellectual larking that makes us think, even as we enjoy the game\u2014and, more often than not, the results.\nMY PAUL WOLFERT PROBLEM\n\nCOUSCOUS AND OTHER GOOD FOOD FROM MOROCCO MEDITERRANEAN COOKING THE COOKING OF SOUTH-WEST FRANCE PAULA WOLFERT'S WORLD OF FOOD\n\n1\n\nIn the opening lines of World of Food, Paula Wolfert declares that her passion is the search for great bread. On her trips to France, Italy, and elsewhere, the most important questions on her mind are \"'Where can I find the best bread around here?' 'Who is the best baker?' And nearly always, as soon as I ask, the eyes of my respondent will light up. He or she will utter a name and an address. And then I am off upon the hunt.\"\n\nSo begins the account of how she tracked down one such loaf in a small town in Sicily near Palermo. She had heard tales of this bread, she tells us, even before she left the States, and a Sicilian friend in New York insisted that he make arrangements so that she might get to taste it.\n\nShe demurred at his taking such trouble, but he insisted... and so not long thereafter she found herself being driven out of Palermo in a tiny car to a spring near the town of Monreale, where two women in their eighties\u2014\"their eyes twinkling with pleasure at my arrival\"\u2014had a bakery in a tiny shack. Their bread was made of wheat grown on nearby farms and the water from their spring, where the neighbors still came to fill their jugs. The old women kneaded the dough for forty-five long minutes, and then baked it in a bread oven fired by twigs gathered from olive and lemon trees. The result was a sublime loaf with a chewy texture, crackling crust, and the delicious flavor of wheat.\n\nOur mouth watering, we reach out for a taste for ourselves \u2014only to have our hand pushed away. \"No, I cannot tell you how to find the place,\" she says, floating away from us, as if in a dream. \"And, no,\" she continues, \"I cannot give you a recipe... .\"\n\nThis passage, no matter that it is a depiction of a real event, is also a romance. I mean by this both that the experiences it describes are charged with drama and emotion and that our response to them is so much like the narrator's that we are clearly being asked to identify with her.\n\nAfter all, is not great bread our passion? Would we not also love the task of searching Europe for the very best loaf of it... and many other good things as well? And were we not so shy\u2014so sure that our interlocutors would look at us as if we were idiots\u2014wouldn't we, too, demand of every passerby: \"Take us to your best bakery, confectionery, cheesemonger...\"?\n\nIn Paula Wolfert's world, eyes light up at such commands, addresses are shoved into her hand, strangers spring into automobiles to take her to them... and, never, when she arrives, is the shop closed, the bread all sold, the baker silent and surly. Instead, eyes gleam with pleasure that she has bothered to come at all.\n\nIn our world, travel is exhausting and ofttimes defeating. Meals do not live up to their advance billing. Strangers are indifferent to our curiosity and sometimes even hostile to our desire to appropriate their best things for ourselves\u2014especially when we have nothing more to exchange for them than the cheap coin of a moment's appreciation.\n\nNor do we\u2014you and I\u2014have friends who not only have news of such remarkable things but are willing to go out of their way to make sure we actually get our hands on them, who impatiently shrug off our protests as they place the necessary transcontinental calls. Paula Wolfert, it seems, does have such friends\u2014people, like her, passionate about food. Yet this passage\u2014and, as we shall see, other passages like it\u2014says that she has no similar desire to be that kind of friend to us. Not, of course, that she puts this in so many words.\n\nInstead, she says that she does not really know the way (although she knows someone who could draw a map). She says that, without the local ingredients, the recipe for that bread would be useless (but she gives a recipe for Sicilian semolina bread without explaining why that loaf, made in our oven, would be any more authentic).\n\nAgain and again in Paula Wolfert's writing, we experience this same ritual denial: we are brought to the secret source of some perfect dish; we share her thrill at finding it, her delight in tasting it, her love for the people who have made it; and then we are pushed away. The excuses are different, the message always the same. We, her readers, are not yet\u2014somehow\u2014serious enough to be invited to join the table.\n\nThis seriousness is the single recurrent theme of her four major cookbooks, each still in print: Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco (1973); Mediterranean Cooking (1977); The Cooking of South-West France (1983); and, most recently, Paula Wolfert's World of Food (1988). It is the subject of her narratives and the subtext of the near-obsessive definitiveness that has become the characteristic trademark of her recipes. Not only does each dish have an impeccable regional pedigree but each is also distilled in the alembic of her perfectionism\u2014without regard to cost or effort\u2014until flavor can be intensified and structure refined no more.\n\nThis is true especially of the recipes in her last two books, the ones on which her reputation rests. For as it happens\u2014and certainly in no small part because of the influence she herself has exerted\u2014the making of certain signature regional dishes has become the kind of cooking most desirable to America's new breed of knowledgeable, ambitious, very earnest amateur cooks. They are drawn to Paula Wolfert, more than to almost any other food writer, because they crave to possess not only her recipes but the deep culinary seriousness that such cooking is made to reflect.\n\n2\n\nIn the summer of 1959, Paula Wolfert and her then husband, Michael, both in their early twenties, boarded a Yugoslav freighter and set sail for Morocco. At that time, her acquaintance with foreign food was limited to what she had learned when she had dropped out of college to attend the Dione Lucas Cordon Bleu Cooking School.\n\nMoroccan food\u2014much as she would later come to love it\u2014was not what drew this young acolyte of haute cuisine. That country was just being discovered as the ideal refuge\u2014at once cosmopolitan and picturesque, tolerant and affordable\u2014by young expatriate writers and artists, American and otherwise, who sought to escape the stifling conformity of the fifties.\n\nThis young couple was in the vanguard of a shift in cultural tastes that would soon have graduate students decorating their college apartments not with Utrillo or Bernard Buffet posters but with colorful wall hangings and terra-cotta pottery\u2014acquired with the Peace Corps in Guatemala... on a shoestring trek through Nepal... or during a summer spent on a tiny island in the Cyclades.\n\nThen, and especially to us, the young, these were places that seemed fresh and new, unexplored cultures our imaginations might be among the first to inhabit and possess. And for those with any literary or artistic pretensions, that private itinerary was most likely plotted from one spot to another around the Mediterranean... from Robert Graves's Majorca to Lawrence Durrell's Corfu to Paul and Jane Bowles's Tangiers. What we hoped to imbibe in these cells of Prospero was not only the wine of genius but that even stronger intoxicant\u2014spiritual enlightenment.\n\nPaula Wolfert was among the first of her generation to get there, and her books should be read, at least in part, as authored by a participant in an Age of Aquarius voyage of self-discovery\u2014a search less for recipes than a culinary way of knowledge. The counterculture figures who briefly appear in her earlier books serve only to accentuate how much of Carlos Castaneda, the naive but serious seeker, there is in her own self-portrait\u2014and even more of Don Juan, the trickster shaman, in her cooks.\n\nMy visit to the kitchen of a restaurant [in Marrakesh] would be an unprecedented invasion into a world of jealousy and intrigue... . When I came in [the women] stopped and looked me up and down with a small measure of scorn... . Three of them gave me shy smiles, but one, who was huge, fat, and black, expressed her derision with an outraged sniff... . I knew\u2014I could feel\u2014that the Queen Bee was the best cook, and I wanted her to like me so she would tell me some of her culinary secrets.\n\nIn Paula Wolfert's world, there is an essential difference between such cooks and the rest of us\u2014qualities whose specific characteristics depend on whether the cook in question is a man or a woman.\n\nHer women cooks possess\u2014like witches\u2014a capacity to enchant food through potions whispered down the ages by mothers into the ears of the deserving daughters. These women, like the Queen Bee, are often described as wise, sly, secretive: \"[Madame X] was obsessed with the notion that she must guard her 'culinary secrets,' suspicious of my interest in her knowledge, and totally confident in her ability to deceive.\"\n\nOn the other hand, her men\u2014almost all chefs\u2014form a kind of mystical brotherhood of illuminati, willing to reveal their secrets to all who truly appreciate them. More numerous but less interesting than her women, they can be epitomized by Lucien Vanel of Toulouse, who opened to her \"the kitchen of his restaurant and all the 'secrets' of his mother's famous cuisine Quercynoise\"\u2014something his mother surely would not have done.\n\nThis transfer of understanding, with its accompanying\u2014if only temporary\u2014ticket of admission into the circle of the elect, is a constant motif in her writing. Only in Mediterranean Cooking is it missing, for that is a collection of recipes almost without any explanatory narrative\u2014which may be why it is the least satisfying of her works, a collection of spells without the requisite cast of magicians.\n\nEarly into The Cooking of South-West France, Paula Wolfert travels to a half-abandoned town in Lot-et-Garonne to interview a Gascon restaurateuse. They talk food late into the day, and so a call is made to the local chateau to see if there is a bed to spare. There is, and the count himself invites her to dinner\u2014a feast, really, with wine flowing freely, regional delicacies spread on a groaning board, and guests eating, drinking, and making merry:\n\nThis delirium went on for hours. I felt myself entranced. At one point a young man turned to me. \"You want to know about the South-West?\" he asked. I looked up at him and nodded. \"Welcome,\" he said, gesturing with his hand. \"You are here. This is it.\"\n\nImplicit in this gesture is the unspoken recognition: \"You are one of us.\" Equally implicit is its corollary as regards the reader... but that anxious-making exclusion is left for each reader to deduce for herself.\n\n3\n\nHere is another example of the primal Wolfert scene, this time to be found in Paula Wolfert's World of Food:\n\nAlice Waters... gave me the name of an old friend in Bandol. \"Lulu makes the best bouillabaisse I've ever eaten. Of course you won't be able to send your readers to her, but still you should watch her cook.\"\n\nLulu (who has asked that I not give her full name) is the owner of an important vineyard... .\n\nAgain, three witch-cooks whisper secretively together, slyly glancing at us out of the corners of their eyes. \"Of course you won't be able to send your readers to her,\" murmurs one of them, and another assents, \"Yes, nor even give them my full name... .\"\n\nFamiliar, yes\u2014but there is also a difference worth remarking between the language of this encounter (and the others like it in her last two books) and that describing the visit to the Queen Bee in Marrakesh in her first. That earlier account conveyed the sense of an actual confrontation\u2014of genuine learning, genuine risk.\n\nThe prose above, with its stresses on quality and exclusivity, suggests something entirely different. Accompanying Paula Wolfert into the mysterious Lulu's Proven\u00e7al home is a thrill much more like accompanying a home decorator past the discreet sign posted at the door of certain off-limit shops: TO THE TRADE ONLY.\n\nThis is all the more true since the anonymity-seeking Lulu is none other than Lulu Peyraud, whose cooking skills are, if anything, an open secret in the culinary world\u2014and who, with her husband, Lucien, is proprietor of the vineyard Domaine A. Tempier in Le Plan, easily found on any wine map of Provence. In fact, despite all this talk of anonymity, Paula Wolfert prints Lulu's full name in the book's acknowledgment section and, in her account of her visit, gives what is practically the vineyard's complete address. It is, after all, already available to anyone with a need for it; the Peyrauds have professional reasons to welcome strangers to their door. The coyness about her identity means to convince the reader of Lulu Peyraud's status and, by extension, that of the select few for whom she consents to cook.\n\nIn the same way, an interior decorator would never pretend that it was greater sensitivity to home decor that opened doors closed to the rest of us\u2014but would certainly encourage us to believe that it was just this, not a mere card, that caused the proprietor to come running up, beaming, with \"Mais c'est Paula!\" forming ecstatically on his lips.\n\n\"My friend Lucien Vanel... ,\" \"my friend Michel Bras... ,\" \"my friend the chef Roger Duffour... ,\" \"my friend Andr\u00e9 Daguin...\"\u2014the persona may be still that of the humble seeker, but the prose conveys someone with the food world's most prestigious credentials suddenly appearing in the foyer of an important French restaurant.\n\nPaula Wolfert is not the same woman she was when she set out to write about Moroccan cooking, but she doesn't seem to notice how much she has changed. Her search for culinary knowledge has succeeded\u2014she is now a noted author and cooking authority\u2014but success has also revealed a core of self-absorption at the center of her quest, a confusion between such status and the dedication required to set it aside so as to remain genuinely open to new experiences, fresh encounters.\n\nThis is why her best book is still her first: it is the only one of her narratives to capture a sense of true conversion... a young visitor culinarily transformed, despite her Cordon Bleu training, by the complex and various beauties of that mysterious cuisine. Not that she has forgotten how to look, listen, and learn. But the prose of her recent books strains too much to convey an image that her life is no longer able to sustain.\n\nThough each of her last two books took five years to write, there is more of a feeling of excursion to them than of immersion. The experiences they relate seem plucked from a tiny stock of actual events and plumped into significance. Like holiday snapshots, each is different and yet all somehow the same: the author posed before the predictably picturesque, as she is here in Paula Wolfert's World of Food:\n\nIt wasn't until I went to Sicily and tasted the luscious salted capers of the islands of Pantelleria and Lipari that I understood the appeal of these extraordinary capers.\n\nThe building had been converted into a private restaurant with no name on its door. I was about to have lunch at what the French call \"a precious address.\"\n\nThis is the language of the tourist, intent on making every second of the vacation count. Her followers have not noticed the change because this is how they want her to write. Tourists themselves, they do not wish to plunge after her into another foreign cuisine. Better that she should skim the cream away and give them that, so they can play at concocting their own personal \"worlds of food.\" They love Paula Wolfert because she tells them they can have it all\u2014and proves it by hurrying off to P\u00e9rigord... Corfu... Sicily... Catalonia, to search out the very best of those regions' dishes and bring them back alive.\n\n4\n\n[It is] the best of the recent \"terrines,\" a jewel-like mosaic  \nof bright fresh fruits arranged in an airy almond cream.  \nThe whole is enclosed in a thin casing of G\u00e9noise. It is  \nserved with two sauces, a thin raspberry sauce and a light  \nCr\u00e8me Anglaise... . This dessert is not complicated, but  \nyou should begin two to three days before serving... .\n\n\u2014The Cooking of South-West France\n\nIt is no accident that we have come this far into Paula Wolfert's world of food before considering her recipes. For these require the context of her narratives\u2014journeys taken, cooks approached, ingredients found and savored\u2014for us to understand their appeal... or at least their appeal to those who undertake to make them.\n\nNot, of course, that they are not good: it is that their goodness can carry a steep price. One of the more renowned recipes in Paula Wolfert's World of Food is the delicious-sounding \"Duck You Can Eat with a Spoon,\" in which that fowl is\n\nmarinated in cooked red wine... . The cooked... pieces, soft and succulent, are boned and garnished with rich caramelized baby onions, crisp lardons, mushrooms, and garlic-parsleyed croutons. The sauce resonates with the dark, musky perfume of bitter cocoa and Cognac... .\n\nIn truth, the duck is marinated in a mixture of twelve ingredients, including orange slices, aged red wine vinegar, ruby Port wine, and one-and-a-half bottles of Bordeaux. The sauce (called an \"enrichment\" in the recipe) \"resonates\" with several other ingredients besides the cocoa and Cognac, including juniper berries, shallots, and duck liver. In total, over two dozen ingredients are required, not counting the marinade ingredients or the duck. Two pages of complex instruction are prefaced by an introductory plea: \"Please don't be put off by the length of this recipe, for it is really an easy step-by-step procedure... .\"\n\nThere is something disingenuous about such an entreaty from an author who well knows she is famous for the daunting nature of her recipes. The number of hours required to make them has become so notorious she no longer provides total cooking times. \"I felt it was turning people off,\" she told The New York Times, \"that people were making jokes about me.\"\n\nNot all her dishes are equally difficult, but the simplest can require exotic or pricey ingredients\u2014and all of them are so intensely reworked in her kitchen that no honest cook could ever imagine making Paula Wolfert's version of even a simple French bistro dish without giving her the credit.\n\nNevertheless, many good cooks are willing to give that to her, and gladly. They, too, joke about her fanatical complexity\u2014but fondly, for it is exactly what draws them to her books. They willingly face days of work and endless kitchen mess to replicate these dishes, knowing that at the end of this labor they will be able to produce for their guests (as is most often the case) a culinary triumph... unmistakably stamped PAULA   , with its accompanying \"Big Taste\" guarantee.\n\nMost of us can establish our reputation as \"serious\" cooks without such effort: our neighbors, after all, are rarely much interested in such cooking at all. We do not need to see ourselves as competitive with them, because no overt competition is required. But when our next-door neighbor tastes our extra-virgin olive oil and pronounces it unbelievably delicious, it isn't the small grower in Tuscany who suddenly feels all warm inside. Anyway, wasn't it we who noticed the bottle at Williams-Sonoma, bought it, brought it home, tried it, and knew it to be good?\n\nPaula Wolfert's readers, upscale professionals almost all, live in a different world. Knowledge of cuisine has become culturally fashionable, and their friends already know all about the ingredients we think make our kitchen special, are already bored with dishes we think unique and new. To keep pace with such expertise, cooks who set out to impress need someone like Paula Wolfert at their elbow, enabling them to prepare food of stunning complexity and sophistication without a stumble and then to bring it to the table with proof of pedigree.\n\nSuch readers are willing to accept their lowly place in Paula Wolfert's world of food because they have no interest at all in competing with her. Instead, they mean simply to borrow her status for the night. For them, Paula Wolfert's exclusive \"seriousness\" is more a product for sale than a genuine way of knowledge. It certifies her as an acceptable arbiter of culinary taste, providing her readers with the cues they need and the necessary authentication of the results.\n\nBy buying her book, her followers purchase the right to replace her at the bottom of this culinary hierarchy. As their friends savor their food and listen to the account of its making\u2014this double braising, that double degreasing, the requisite confit prepared months before the dish could ever hope to be made\u2014the cook slips into Paula Wolfert's role: intermediary between the humble eater and the world of secret knowledge whence this dish has come.\n\nThe author herself then becomes the honored tutelary whose twinkling eyes beam down upon the feast. And Andr\u00e9 Daguin and Lucien Vanel and Madame Lulu\u2014who, after all, are known to no one present\u2014quietly fade away into the mists of myth.\n\n5\n\nI have always been drawn to what I call the Mediterranean  \nMyth... a robust, simple, and sensual life far from the  \nmadding crowds of our competitive North Atlantic culture.\n\n\u2014Paula Wolfert's World of Food\n\nI admire Paula Wolfert for being her own person, for her superb palate, for having more culinary smarts than almost anyone else writing about food today. I admire her for her generosity to other food writers, for the way she gives forthright credit where credit is due, for preferring to scout out new dishes, new cuisines, taking new risks instead of resting on her laurels. And I think her sense of how dishes work\u2014and how they can be made to work better\u2014is often astonishingly right.\n\nIt's because of this admiration that, reading through her work, I find it so hard to understand why, with each new book, she seems more at home in the world of Mr. Kenneth than in that of Elizabeth David. Why all the fuss over celebrity chefs, why the self-hype, the big taste, the trademark dishes? Some observers of the food scene feel that all this is built into the system\u2014that's what you have to do if you want to climb to the top. And it's true that these elements have not always been a part of Paula Wolfert's writing; but if my reading is right, the competitiveness that brought them into being has, always.\n\nFrom her first book on, it played sun to her appetite's moon, illuminating the landscape of her world of food with Mediterranean brightness. It is the single common denominator\u2014apart from talent\u2014of her secretive old women and her ambitious young chefs; as much as her palate, it is what draws her to the ultimate ingredient, the consummate flavor, the irrefutable version of a famous dish.\n\nIn this, she is more the child of her times than the victim of food-world celebrity-making; either way, the end result is a confusion between means and ends\u2014a confusion as to what, exactly, her books are about. The Cooking of South-West France is not at all a bad book, but in twenty years or so, readers will open it to find less P\u00e9rigord staring out of its pages than Paula Wolfert herself. The translation of cuisine follows the same rules as the translation of poetry: to the extent that its success depends on the stylistic mannerisms of the translator, as persuasive as these may be to the readers who are dazzled by them at the time, they will grate more and more on those who come later and find them dated and unpersuasive.\n\nThis is why\u2014no matter her claim that she prefers to acquire a dish standing next to the original maker, asking questions and taking notes\u2014we should not mistake her version as replicating what she actually tasted at the time. Even if a recipe points as its source to some dish first eaten outside her own kitchen, none leaves her hands without having been first transmuted into her very personal property.\n\nConsequently, despite lip service to the contrary, there is little in Paula Wolfert's recent writings that attempts to preserve original ways of making and thus to increase the wealth of our shared culinary commons. If you should want the original version of a particular dish\u2014the way she herself found it\u2014you must go, say, to Zakinthos in the Ionian Sea and ask Maria Lykouresis for it yourself.\n\nWhat Paula Wolfert has perfected instead is a method of lifting dishes out of the public domain and patenting them as her own. Such a trademark cuisine delights her followers because it provides them with a series of exclusive possessions... a Paula Wolfert cassoulet to set next to their Lexus sedan, their Movado watch. But it does this by impoverishing the rest of us, and not least because every dish so patented weakens the very concept of such a commons\u2014a pool of dishes shared by all members of a culture.\n\nWe already live in a time that more and more denies good foodstuffs to all but the most advantaged. There is good food out there, but it has to be found and paid for, and this requires both leisure and money. Paula Wolfert's world of cooking takes place almost entirely within this privileged place, even as, paradoxically, its subject is often food that, historically at least, belonged to the less advantaged who can now no longer afford to eat it.\n\nSuch an approach can only confuse our perception of what gives cooking its vitality and life. We have already seen how her \"seriousness\" has had the ultimate effect of transforming her readers from cooks into customers; now it is time to notice that it also awards possession of a dish to the person who can give it the most exquisite flavor... ignoring the fact that history is littered with delicious dishes that lost connection with their roots and thus withered and died.\n\nDishes, too, have souls: they owe their character to the local ingredients out of which they are made, to the hands that have long and familiarly made them, and to the company of other local dishes that time has honed as their best accompaniments. And this is especially true of those quintessential regional dishes whose every element speaks intimately to their native eaters of shared place, produce, history.\n\nPaula Wolfert once knew this; her book on Morocco is tempered throughout with feeling for the vulnerability of this elegant cuisine. Her sensitivity has faded as her livelihood has come more and more to depend on convincing herself and her readers that the souvenirs she has uprooted from such slowly evanescing worlds might survive hydroponically in the corner of her Manhattan kitchen.\n\nEven her famous pages on cassoulet in The Cooking of South-West France ring hollow, for they are absent any meaningful recognition that the ground on which this dish once found its footing is melting away into the air. The dish fades as the world that made it is itself evaporating: the need to preserve meat for which confit was the epicurean solution; the flocks of geese whose feathers were as prized as their meat; the pig waiting outside each door for the daily ration of slop\u2014the list goes on and on.\n\nIf these are fast vanishing even in France, what chance has such a dish to find a foothold here? Cassoulet's caloric content alone, double degreasing or no, says very different things to us than it did to frugal eaters who preferred to heat their bodies with fat and beans than their homes with coal and wood.\n\nFor us, confit and cassoulet are only flavors\u2014and, as flavors, we will eventually tire of them, so long as they are presences without meaning in our lives. What cassoulet needs is not a few gourmet cooks who can make it to perfection but a whole nation of home cooks enough reminded of the consolation of slowly simmered meats and beans to regularly work up such a dish from a country ham bone and the local butcher's garlic sausages.\n\nIn other words, cassoulet, if it is to strike root here, must be made somehow to feel at home. That is what the French did when they came: they turned it into red beans and rice. Paula Wolfert's world of food has no room for such a welcoming... or for such a dish. Choice, rare ingredients, complex methods of flavor enhancement\u2014apply these to it and the dish wouldn't even be red beans and rice anymore. \"Honey,\" we can hear the cooks who make it saying, \"it tastes so good already\u2014why go gild the goose?\"\n\nWhat sort of cooks have we become if our answer to them is: \"To take the dish away from you and copyright it\u2014so that it belongs to us alone\"?\nMEDITERRANEAN ODYSSEY\n\nHONEY FROM A WEED: FASTING AND FEASTING IN TUSCANY, CATALONIA, THE CYCLADES, AND APULIA\n\nPatience Gray\n\nEarly into this truly astonishing book, Patience Gray describes her \"cookstove\" in Apollona, a tiny village on the island of Naxos in the Greek Cyclades:\n\nOutside the dwelling... was an outdoor hearth constructed on a stone shelf at waist level against a wall, roofed over with an escape hole for the smoke. The bricks were cemented at the precise distance to support a large black pot over a twig fire, and there was room below the shelf for stacking driftwood. This was ideal for summer, and as the sea was at the door, I was able to light a fire, start the pot with its contents cooking, plunge into the sea at mid-day and by the time I had swum across the bay and back, the lunch was ready and the fire a heap of ashes.\n\nHere in a short compass we have almost everything that is most wonderful about this author: her awareness of the evocative nature of place and her ability, in order to open herself to it, to cheerfully and unself-consciously adapt herself to the most primitive kinds of cooking. And while she may be very serious about the food she makes, she is refreshingly free of hubris about herself as its maker.\n\nAll that is missing in that passage is her great relish for the various indigenous foodstuffs that have come her way during her stays in the four very different and yet remarkably similar areas of the Mediterranean littoral\u2014Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades, and Apulia\u2014a relish compounded with curiosity and a sure sense of their place in her kitchen and her life.\n\nIn fact, her surety is such that she can share her tenderness for the simplest of weeds without a hint of sentimentality\u2014that is, without condescending to them. She everywhere insists that these foods earn the right to be taken seriously by her, but she also knows she herself has dues to pay if she is to earn their friendship in return:\n\nMost of these [edible weeds] were gathered by cutting a section of the root, thus preserving the plant entire. Washed at the fountain, they were boiled and served with oil and lemon juice, the lemons picked from neighboring groves. During the Lenten fast they were eaten in quantity like vegetable spaghettini, but without the olive oil.\n\nFilling my water jar at the spring, I had a daily opportunity to examine these weeds and ask advice, and began to gather them myself, but at first always offering them for inspection. At the time I was reading the landscape and its flora with as much attention as one gives to an absorbing book.\n\nShe has earned it because she is a practiced cook whose knowledge comes not only from the kitchen and learned texts in several languages, but from an ongoing conversation with the landscape and those who cultivated it; because she is a jewelry maker who has learned to articulate the sensual immediacy of all the raw materials from which she works; and, most important\u2014although this may seem an entirely irrelevant consideration\u2014because she decided twenty and more years ago to share the gypsy life of a wandering sculptor.\n\nHe, Norman Mommens\u2014referred to in these pages solely as \"the Sculptor\"\u2014drew her after him to those parts of southern Europe where there are still small marble quarries where inexpensive slabs of stone are to be had and affordable space (if only outdoors) in which to work them. These places are, almost by definition, both primitive and poor, and their existence was stripped down to the bare essentials (for this day and age) in order to afford the luxury of a life that was entirely their own.\n\nTherefore, although their poverty was of a different order from that of their neighbors, neither was there any great gulf of possession to separate them. While they might be able to afford a two-burner gas stove on Naxos to supplement the outdoor fireplace in inclement weather, or to purchase from the local fisherman one of the larger, tastier fishes that would otherwise be taken elsewhere for sale (the local populace contenting themselves with what they considered their destiny: the tiny, bony fish that were cheap and plentiful)... even so, as the above passage informs us, they drew their drinking water from the same spring, cooked in the same sort of pots, ate much the same food, and\u2014also like their neighbors\u2014when that food became scarce, went without.\n\nThis is the fasting to which the author refers in her subtitle, and whose presence as a major theme in this book is one good reason why it stands alone among the many Mediterranean cookbooks published in the last several years\u2014or, for that matter, almost any other food book at all. Other descriptions of traditional peasant fare have all concentrated on the feasting and have given the fasting short shrift: what Patience Gray conveys with grace and power in these pages is that fasting is a necessary component of any appetite desiring the full measure of experience that eating has to offer. This is not the willful, self-mortifying fasting that is dieting, but a patient matching of one's hunger to the rhythms of earth and season:\n\nOnce we lose touch with the spendthrift aspect of nature's provisions epitomized in the raising of a crop, we are in danger of losing touch with life itself. When Providence supplies the means, the preparation and sharing of food takes on a sacred aspect. The fact that every crop is of short duration promotes a spirit of making the best of it while it lasts and conserving a part of it for future use.\n\nThat hunger sauces the plainest fare will seem no news\u2014until this book arouses in you that deeper, more compelling hunger that comes of riding life's pulse from fast to feast, and evokes the feeling of how that rhythm connects us to the world in a way no other action, however attentive or loving, can ever hope to do.\n\nDuring the summer... we would be pressed to visit a fig or mulberry tree in the next valley and were expected to eat our fill on the spot. The island Greek has a habit of going for long periods, in the fields or on foot or muleback, on a crust of home-baked bread, a hunk of hard goat's cheese and wild pears, honey sweet, stuffed inside his shirt. He then makes the most of a providential event, a ripe fruit tree, a sudden haul of fish, or the killing of a pig. This is a fundamental attitude, and only underlined by Greek Orthodox practice, whose solemn four week Advent fast and six week Lenten one, in fact, corresponded to moments when on Naxos there was hardly anything to eat. Fasting is therefore in the nature of things and feasting punctuates it with a joyful excess.\n\nThe sweetness of the fig plucked from the tree, so ripe that nectar beads at its tip, tasting of honey\u2014or, as some do, of raspberry jam\u2014in the mouth of one whose only meal that long hot day has been a crust of bread... how the mouth surrenders to that sweet and sticky profligacy. This is an appetite whose contours shape it to the source of its pleasure, just as the tongue voluptuously enfolds the sticky finger and sucks it dry.\n\nPoverty, of course, can be a desperate thing, and this book makes no attempt to romanticize desperation; but poverty no more means desperation than vulnerability means being victimized. We are so used to thinking of hunger as the antithesis of appetite, of fasting as a moral purgative, that we have lost the ability to understand it as the underside of the feast, the background that gives it definition and depth. If there is no scarcity, there is no real having, either: it is not hunger that makes men greedy but fear of hunger. Those who accept it as a needful condition earn that true fastidiousness that is attentive, not to what they eat, but to what they truly want to eat.\n\nIn this same way, it is hunger that shapes the intimacy established between the cultivator and his or her small plot. A piece of land upon which all hope of sustenance rests, a mode of planting and tending and harvesting that is accomplished by a ceaseless laying on of hands, creates a union of aggressive and robustly physical intimacy. And through her own participation in these acts, as neighbor, friend, and fellow hungerer, Patience Gray has made that connection real in her own life.\n\nThis relationship between feasting and fasting, which naturally occurs in any deep relationship between small producers and the plots of land that sustain them, is so palpable in this work that she takes only two short passages to set the argument out; then she is content to let it rest. What makes this book so affecting and ultimately convincing is the way this relationship between fasting and feasting is articulated into a constantly renewing source of insight and sensual pleasure; because of it her narrative bursts with life.\n\nIn this regard, it is interesting to compare her account of an olive harvest with a similar description of grape picking recounted in Mary Taylor Simeti's journal of life on Sicily, On Persephone's Island. Ms. Simeti is a talented writer and her book is full of evocative description, as in this passage where she recounts assisting with the grape harvest:\n\nHarvesting grapes is hard work: one must bend double to liberate the low-growing bunches from the clutch of the vine, and the bucket, light at first, gets heavier and heavier as you drag it along the row from vine to vine until, full up, you leave it where it stands (feminine prerogative) and start in on another one. The ripe grapes burst in the picking and the sticky must runs down your arms and gets wiped on your forehead and into clothes and hair, attracting flies and wasps and vinegar gnats that buzz around your temples and down your bare arms.\n\nNow compare this to Patience Gray, busy picking olives:\n\nLike the pains of childbirth, one quickly forgets the olive-picking pains. In childbirth you are on your own, while in the olive field the ordeal is endured in good company. What you need ideally is short thighs and a long back. Adopting a martial attitude\u2014tike the bronze Zeus discovered at Ugento, now in the Taranto Museum\u2014but bending from the hips and keeping the head permanently down, with an extraordinary rapidity you pick up the olives with both hands, the endless olives. The women are on the ground, the men are in the trees.\n\nA casual glance might discern no great difference between these two passages, at least until one considers which of the two one would hire as a harvester. For while the Simeti passage flows from work to discomfort, the motion in Patience Gray is from discomfort to work. We feel Mary Simeti's interest in grape picking fade in the course of only a few sentences, and not only her physical interest but her intellectual interest as well. The demands of the work distance her from the activity around her: as she becomes tired, she quickly draws into herself... and into a privileged distance.\n\nThe passage by Patience Gray, however, is dominated by her delight in the sheer physical act of olive picking: discomfort is mentioned only to be dismissed. That opening sentence is but a girding of the loins; we soon feel the muscles flexing, the body assuming the shape of the olive picker. This first paragraph is a gathering of strength, a drawing in of wind. In the following ones, she plunges to work, and we scurry with her from tree to tree, picking up the olives before the men can lay their nets and hurrying back to gather the olives knocked down into nets already laid.\n\nThis pleasure in the sheer physicality of olive picking can only come from one who shares a hunger for its results: at the beginning is the pain but at the end is the fragrant, fresh-pressed olive oil, darkly golden in its bottles, triumphantly borne home. With it also comes the rich sense of fellowship that a genuine sharing of labor entails, an act accomplished at no one's expense and to everyone's benefit. As she herself says, describing another wine harvest:\n\nOnce a man has leapt into the wine-pit and sweated a whole morning treading the lustrous grapes, friendship declares itself with as generous a flow as the fiery liquid poured from the pit into the bloated goatskins for transport on muleback to the village.\n\nIf I quote these not strictly culinary passages to make my point, it is because there are many writers who can write evocatively and well on food: her own previous (1957) Plats du Jour is a small triumph of that genre. But there is nothing in that (or any other food book I can think of) that conveys the sheer animal satisfaction of earning appetite as does Honey from a Weed.\n\nAnd, outside of food writing, only D. H. Lawrence\u2014in such works as Twilight in Italy\u2014comes to mind as her equal in conveying the rich physical sensuality of Mediterranean life without ever flinching at its salt-and-bitter taste. But in Lawrence it is quickly drowned in a rush of dark thought-like those alpine railway trains that burst onto sunlit mountain meadows and as quickly out of them again into the darkest imaginable tunnels. Lawrence is the better writer, but Patience Gray has found the better balance.\n\nA few words remain to be said about how to read this book. Like many cookbooks it is set out into chapters, each of which is given its separate culinary subject\u2014beans, peas, and rustic soups; fish, shellfish, crustaceans; smoked and salt fish; edible weeds\u2014followed by the recipes that relate to it. At least on first encounter, however, I think it is a mistake to read the book straight through. The narrative is one of intricate connection, with one dish... place... person evoking the thought or memory\u2014and hence description\u2014of another. Each of these should be seen as the stroke of a brush at work at a single picture\u2014a brush that is often at work on many parts of the canvas at once.\n\nEarly in the book, writing about basil, she notes\u2014rightly\u2014that it is impossible to put up for winter eating, for that wonderful spice-edged aroma soon fades whether the leaf be dried or preserved in oil. \"The best way to recall the perfume in winter,\" she concludes, \"is to immure some sprigs at the last moment in a cauldron of peach or quince jam\"; and refers us to her recipe for kyd\u00f3ni glik\u00f3, some three hundred pages on. Who would not, tempted by such a suggestion\u2014and a proffered page number\u2014skip ahead? As it turns out, the jam is made by Kyr\u00eda Erynni (the same woman who had tossed the author's haricot stew to the pigs), who dips fragrant sprigs of basil into the boiling conserve and then shakes off the drops onto the rosy chunks of quince that float on the surface.\n\nThis not only sounds delicious but arouses our interest in quinces, and the author helpfully refers us on to yet another page for her comments on them. And so we turn on\u2014only to discover we have completely lost track of the thought that started us on this journey. No matter\u2014we have merely to turn back a page to discover how the Japanese eat persimmons... or turn ahead to see how the Italians eat figs... or just browse at random, for long before you exhaust this last chapter's treasures, you will catch up another strand that will take you somewhere else.\n\nBut, if the book is studded with fascinating bits of information, the argument itself does not so much develop as present itself in an ever-changing guise: once you grasp it, understanding becomes an act not of progression but of absorption. It is as if what you held in your hand was a ripening piece of fruit. It starts out seeming hard and sour and not much worth eating, but as you wait, watching, it softens and sweetens, filling the air with a delicate scent and letting its juices spill onto your hand:\n\nTurning a corner I came upon an open doorway and the stooping form of a very old peasant carrying a large curved and blackened frying-pan in which were a heap of fungi.\n\nI greeted her and asked how she was going to cook them. \"In the usual way,\" she replied reprovingly. She invited me into the kitchen, a space so bare it reminded me of Naxian rooms. All it contained was a small table, two broken chairs and a black cast-iron stove with pipe in the centre of the room, a pile of sawn-up chestnut wood beside it. She began to slice up the boletus heads.\n\nShe sliced them fine like tripe, simmered them in oil with garlic, mountain savory, thyme, parsley, seasoned them with salt and black pepper, added a spoonful or two of tomato sauce she had bottled and a little stock from boiling the carcase of a scraggy hen. This was simmered and reduced. When fairly dense, some grated pecorino was added\u2014her lunch, eaten with some slices of rough bread.\n\nComing upon this scene on opening the book, you might well notice only its poverty: the bare room, the broken chairs, the carcass of the scraggy hen, the coarse loaf. But now, having read even this review, you find the image ripening before you: a feast is about to be served.\n\nAgain and again in these pages you are brought back to this same place. Like a Zen koan, all is put in a single enigmatic nut: the locale, the person, the dish. You are given everything except what you want most, a mouthful of the meal... or, more even than that, the way to taste it with that old woman's tongue. So, after her fashion, does the author lead us to hunger: the fruit in our hand is ripe, but we do not yet know how to eat.\n\nNo book since Richard Olney's Simple French Food was published in 1974 has revealed more of the sheer possibilities inherent in food writing\u2014the ability of an apprehending appetite to work place, time, and the stuff of eating itself into a sensually pleasing, intellectually stimulating, morally sustaining whole. Brilliantly written and stunningly designed, not only is Honey from a Weed the best food book written in English in this decade; it has already attained the status of a classic. For all of us, it has opened an important door.\n\nPLATS DU JOUR\n\nPatience Gray and Primrose Boyd, with illustrations by David Gentleman\n\nSometime in the early 1980s, browsing among the cookbooks in a dingy used-book store near Boston's South Station, I came across a paperback I had never seen or heard of before. It was practically falling apart\u2014and why not, having been published in 1957!\u2014but I had only to pull it from the shelf to know that I was going to take it home. The faded pink cover showed an illustration of a family\u2014French? Greek? Italian?\u2014sitting down to supper. Grandfather dandles his favorite granddaughter on his knee, Father and Uncle pull corks, Grandmother strokes her cat, and Mother, still in her apron, looks\u2014despite a table heaped with platters\u2014as if she were about to dash back to the kitchen for one dish more.\n\nThis attractively homey foreign air pervades Plats du Jour. I was astonished to learn in Alan Davidson's introduction to this lovingly produced hardcover facsimile edition that though the original was published only in paperback, it sold 50,000 copies during its first ten months of publication. Still, I could understand why. Until Simple French Food, there was really nothing like it\u2014a clearly written, informative guide to good, mostly simple, mostly French supper dishes\u2014each feeling as if it were part of these authors' ordinary daily cooking.\n\nThis approach was unusual enough in the fifties; depressingly, it is even more unusual today. I can think of only a handful of American writers\u2014Edna Lewis, Miriam Ungerer, Laurie Colwin, Sylvia Vaughn Thompson\u2014whose cookbooks have the air of sharing a part of the writer's actual life, rather than dishes (no matter how good) that were called up for the occasion of the book. Having written this, I also ought to add that this impression is partly an illusion, since at least a portion of Plats du Jour was worked up straight from other cookbooks \u2014which perhaps explains why, although I love this book, I don't much cook from it. Its genius lies not in its recipes but somewhere else.\n\nIt resides, most of all, in the genuine hunger the two authors felt for the food they write about. Food rationing had ended in England only in 1954, and both women were eager to revivify a kind of eating that they had learned to love in prewar explorations of the Continent. Theirs were not the usual destinations. Patience Gray had hitchhiked with her sister to Budapest in 1937; then, in 1938, they had both vanished into Romania on a student travel grant. Primrose Boyd was exploring France, Spain, and Holland. A deluxe dinner was a rare treat during these excursions, and both women acquired a taste for the humble, hearty dishes that these pages share.\n\nBut what really drew them to this way of cooking was not any particular dish but a previously unexperienced attitude toward eating. In simple meals, they discovered that \"attention is given not only to the vin du pays, but to the kind of bread, the choice of cheese, and the crispness of the salad, as well as to the preparation of the principal dish.\"\n\nHow does one convey the spirit of this kind of attention in a cookbook? Patience Gray admits in her brief but illuminating new prefatory note that she and Primrose Boyd were too quick to assume their readers knew how to make a good simple green salad; she might have included the ability to find (or make) a decent loaf of bread. There is a chapter on cheese and another on decent vin ordinaire, but really, the nettle was not grasped. The book preaches what its authors could not yet example, only wished might be.\n\nThe result? A very practical, matter-of-fact collection of recipes on the one hand and, on the other, an enchanted dream\u2014captured by David Gentleman in his evocative, gentle drawings. I wrote above that Plats du Jour anticipates Simple French Food, a book\u2014or something like it\u2014that Patience Gray might herself have gone on to write, had she chosen to lead a more ordinary life. However, she didn't; she made a much bolder leap and gave us instead something without antecedent, Honey from a Weed. There, desire and reality form a coherent whole, providing an answer to what, in this, her first book, she could set out only as a vexing puzzle:\n\nContemplating... a preparation as ancient and simple as cotriade \u00e0 la bretonne... in which a variety of fish are poached with onions, potatoes, and herbs, and daily served in the cottages of Breton villages not a stone's throw from the sea, it must be clear that the natural qualities which give this dish its flavour are with us partially absent; besides, the air we eat it in, the stove we cook it on, and the pot we cook it in are different. This is a dish which involves only fresh fish, waxy yellow potatoes, and Breton onions; how much more variation enters the picture when the oil used comes in question, or the wine added to a casserole, or the herbs that we include.\n\nA final word perhaps ought to be said about why I would encourage any serious cook to obtain this book, after I have made it plain that I don't very often consult it and have never actually made anything from it. For me, at least, there is a category of cookbooks to treasure not for what they do but for what they are. This is because the personality of the author somehow gives you the courage to sustain your own culinary persona against the prevailing trends. The very last books that I would let go from my cookbook collection are the ones that \u2014like Ann Rogers's A Cookbook for Poor Poets (and Others) and Miriam Ungerer's Good Cheap Food\u2014fall into this category. Plats du Jour belongs on the same shelf. As soon as I opened it I knew that I very much liked Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd, I liked the way they wanted to cook, and their book made me\u2014as well as happy\u2014think. My other cookbooks, however useful, are just cookbooks; these three books are friends.\nCUISINE M\u00c9CANIQUE\n\nI first encountered the food processor and the microwave oven in the mid-1970s. This didn't happen on the same day or even in the same week or month, but it did happen in close enough proximity to my own newly acquired self-identity as a food enthusiast for the two machines to become forever firmly linked in my mind. At the time, of course, I didn't think of them as twins, or even near relations, although they were impressive in the same way. Both were on the breaking edge of cooking technology; both were designed to make work shorter and easier. Even so, to me\u2014and to others as well\u2014they initially appeared, as kitchen appliances, exactly opposite in virtu. While one was opening whole new culinary horizons, the other was fast becoming the boon tool of the I-hate-to-cook crowd, a hyped-up gadget that did things incredibly fast at the cost of not doing them well.\n\nUpwardly mobile nouveau cuisinier that I was quickly becoming, there was simply no question in my mind as to which was which\u2014even though I knew the attraction I felt for the food processor was not universally shared. Debates about its merits still raged in the food magazines, fueled by complaints from those of the culinary old guard who had so far refused to join the stampede.\n\nNot me. I read their opinions with interest, but distantly. I knew that no matter how convincing the case against the machine might be, I had to have one. All it had taken was a department-store demonstration: the moment I saw that ball of brioche dough take form and leap up onto the whirring blades, I knew, for me, cooking would never be the same. I couldn't afford an actual Cuisinart\u2014not everyone gets a Volvo in life\u2014but I did purchase their own short-lived bargain-basement brand, the quite adequate Omnichef.\n\nIf you were there then, you'll remember the feeling. The food processor was different from other appliances: it compelled belief. Supper guests actually came into the kitchen after dinner to feed it carrots. It was the next best thing to having Paul Bocuse himself come out with the coffee for introductions and acclaim.\n\nAs time went on, most serious cooks gave in and got one; the scoffing now came from somewhere else. The food processor has found such a secure place in our kitchen that it seems hard to believe that fifteen years ago it was the same sort of contempt-generating machine that, until very recently, the microwave oven was for us. Cultural critics of the time coined the phrase \"Cuisinart liberal\" to convey what was wrong with suburbanite reformers: they adopted all the correct positions without having to pay any of the requisite dues.\n\nThey were wrong\u2014cultural critics always are\u2014but they do know how to hurt. The phrase stung because we already knew that our culinary titularies\u2014Elizabeth David, Diana Kennedy, Jane Grigson\u2014didn't own Cuisinarts. Nor did we want them to. The thought of hearing the machine's high-pitched keening in Richard Olney's Proven\u00e7al kitchen would have filled most of us with genuine grief.\n\nThe truth was that we felt that we had come too late to pay our dues. We were only just discovering true French cuisine at the very moment it had started to fade away. Now that its ingredients were available and gifted cooks were coming back home to explain it, few of us could imagine devoting ourselves to the time-consuming, meticulous preparation it demanded. Many of us were, after all, young professionals whose careers were just then getting into gear.\n\nIf the food processor had not been right there, we might have paused, might have asked how the French themselves were managing this. We knew that food and its preparation played a different role in their lives than it did in ours, but our understanding of this was, for all our enthusiasm, essentially shallow.\n\nFor centuries, they had been on to a good thing, and now \u2014almost too late\u2014we were being let in on it. At last, what they could buy, we could buy; what they could do, we could, too\u2014but only because of this machine. What luck for us it was the very same one that, in Roy Andries de Groot's words, had in France \"already brought about the major gastronomic revolution of the past twenty years,\" the style of cooking that was becoming known as nouvelle cuisine.\n\nIf Carl Sontheimer, the entrepreneur who adapted and marketed the machine in America, is a genius, it is for knowing that the time was ripe for this machine and exactly which cooks it was ripe for: those of us who took our cooking seriously. Other manufacturers copied the machine but missed the mark. They colored it pink, softened its formidable lines, and advertised it as another kitchen work-saver, a kind of turbo-blender.\n\nIn truth, the food processor is a work-maker. The sort of things you are drawn to do with it you wouldn't even think of trying without it: shredding your own rillettes, sieving your own quenelles, hand-mounting your own mayonnaise.\n\nIf you had no interest in that sort of thing, a food processor was a mistaken purchase. The Dad who bought one as a surprise for Mom to help her out with the kitchen chores was in for a rude surprise: if Mom didn't own at least one French cookbook, she most likely put the machine away under the counter after the first exploratory spin.\n\nBut to the fledgling serious cook, the Cuisinart, dressed in its spotless kitchen whites, presented itself not only as a tool of professional chefs (which it was) but as a professionalizing one, the one essential shortcut to chefdom. We had only to follow instructions to be jumped straight from commis to gros bonnet... at least in our own kitchen. Or so we thought.\n\nBefore we can begin to understand what the food processor has done to our cooking, we first need to take account of the impact of a tool from an earlier stage of kitchen technology: the cookbook. My generation (by which I mean those who came of age under the lingering aura of the Kennedy presidency) did, I still think, bring a breath of fresh air into the American kitchen. College education had made our minds hungry for new experiences; now our mouths were catching up. We were open to a new kind of culinary adventuring\u2014we wanted to be exposed to the connoisseurship of food as well as the eating of it.\n\nHowever, our strength was also our weakness. We had learned to think in the classroom; the printed page brought what was, for most of us, our first real interactions with culture. Hence, it was also via the printed page that we expected to master French cooking\u2014just as we had done French literature. We might attend cooking classes to polish the edges, but mostly we accumulated cookbooks.\n\nThese first food books had an enormous influence over our sensation-starved sensibilities, and we unconsciously imbued them\u2014and still do imbue them\u2014with a luster that made them seem the equal of other texts that had similarly been transformed into inspirational touchstones. Unfortunately, few cookbooks, then or now, are of the intellectual caliber of the books from which we received what was best about our education. Our understanding of English literature, for example, would have been quite different if it had never gotten beyond anthologies of \"best\" or \"favorite\" poems, prefaced with little potted biographies of the authors.\n\nThis is the way food writing still is. Its great shameful secret is its utter intellectual poverty: it may sometimes tell you things you never knew, but nowhere does it make you think. The contents may have a twentieth-century cast to them, but the mind-set is definitely nineteenth-century. I doubt if there has been a cookbook written in this century that would not be understood by Isabella Beeton (although she might not approve of it); some of them are very fine, but they are so in an increasingly out-of-date way.\n\nThe Elizabeth David of French Provincial Cooking and Italian Food and the Jane Grigson of The Art of Charcuterie are best understood as among the last of the breed of those sensitive, diligent collectors who throughout the last century tramped rustic Britain to transcribe folk songs, one variant after the other, filling up notebooks as others filled museum cases with specimen songbirds.\n\nWhat food writers collect is recipes; like folk songs or stuffed birds, these are considered end enough in themselves. The recipe collection\u2014the cookbook\u2014is the original kitchen machine. If it did not exist, there could be no food processor, no microwave oven... probably no cooking at all as we now know it. Recipes collapse the fullness of lived experience into a mechanical succession of steps that\u2014once parsed small enough\u2014can be followed by anyone. But the result\u2014the made dish\u2014is only a copy, a simulacrum, whose true meaning lies somewhere else.\n\nThis does not much matter in a cuisine whose coherency resides in a complex amalgam of tradition, prejudice, shared skills, and that ultimate common denominator\u2014available ingredients. What is dangerous is when the use of recipes becomes so prevalent that this coherency is lost\u2014because recipe cooking cannot bring it back. Even if a cook internalizes enough familiar recipes so as not to need often to consult her cookbooks, this explains nothing about a cuisine in which all recipes are essentially beside the point.\n\nA food writer writing within a recipe-based cuisine likewise has no choice but to reduce all culinary experience into recipe. Even our best culinary writers present French cuisine as a standard repertoire of recipes, provincial and classical, that all French cooks prepare, some better and some worse than others.\n\nRecipes do play their role in French cooking, without a doubt, but that cuisine is much better explained as a complexly interacting network of artisanal skills. From such a perspective, we might have been brought to understand the French housewife's reluctance to become her own boulanger, patissier, or charcutier \u2014the very tasks that we were ourselves enthusiastically considering embracing.\n\nA trained craftsperson, she knew the skills of such tasks well enough to realize that she simply did not possess the necessary time\u2014even if she did have the talent\u2014to master them. But she was well able to appreciate and judge the execution of those skills by others.\n\nBecause the language of recipe writing cannot capture the fragile ecology of such relationships in an artisanal culture, there is an inevitable rupture between the experience the French have of their cooking and the way that cookbook writers attempt to capture it.\n\nThis rupture can literally rend a book in two: sometimes comically, as in Bernard Clayton's Breads of France, where every artisanal baking procedure the author encounters is blindly translated into the mechanical rote of recipe bread baking; sometimes ironically, as in Madeleine Kamman's When French Women Cook, where the honest, evocative prose convinces any careful reader that the cuisine she describes lives only in the hands of the women who have long nurtured it\u2014directly countermanding the recipes that follow after. Most French cookbooks, however, follow a discreet middle course so that it is not always easy to see where the cracks have been papered over.\n\nThis was especially true with nouvelle cuisine. Its originators, although they had been trained in the traditional methods, had created a cooking that, in part because of its break with tradition and in part because of its ostensible simplicity, seemed especially suited for a recipe-oriented cooking\u2014and for a food processor -oriented cooking.\n\nIn any case, the problem was not easily discernible in any individual recipe, and it was on individual recipes that we tended to concentrate. We treated each one the way we had been taught to read a poem, intensely, producing from each an ingenious personal reading, a kind of edible explication. How we got from the one to the other was of no great moment as long as the results showed brilliance. We were willing to learn ad hoc the necessary skills but even more willing to see them, as opportunity arose, relegated to a machine.\n\nUntil the food processor, this did not matter all that much. Most machines assist the cook without disrupting or denying that hard-earned repository of manual experience whose density gives depth and meaning to the dishes it produces. Just as one electric motor can help turn a steering wheel without robbing the driver of all feel for the road, so can another crank an eggbeater without denying the tactile mastery gained from working a whisk in batter.\n\nThe food processor is different. It is not an electric knife (which had already been invented, only to prove itself nothing much) but a cutting machine. It pushes the cook's hands aside, for it works far too quickly for the body to directly control it. Our responses are simply not fast enough; we learn to count seconds instead.\n\nSet the steel blade in place, fill the container with basil, pine nuts, garlic, and chunks of Parmesan, and switch the motor on. The machine begins to sauce the ingredients so immediately that they seem to flow together; for its operator, there is a genuine sensual delight in the way, so quickly, so smoothly, it pulps the basil, grinds the cheese, and, as the olive oil starts dribbling down the feeding tube, plumps it all into a thick and unctuous cream.\n\nSensual it truly is, but it is the sensuality of observing, not participating. The food processor does not enhance the cook's experience. Instead, that work is divided between the mind, which directs it, and the machine, which performs it. The body's part is reduced to setting out and\u2014mostly\u2014cleaning up afterward.\n\nIn short, no matter what the mind learns, the hand remains as ignorant as ever. And as time passes, the ease by which the machine accomplishes its tasks makes the hands seem awkward when we do put them to use. Anyone who has tried to make pesto in a mortar and pestle after years of concocting it in a food processor knows that the experience can quickly turn into one of helpless frustration. The body just does not know how to go about it: the pestle feels clumsy and ineffectual in the hand, and as the minutes tick by and the contents of the mortar refuse to meld into a sauce, one feels increasingly foolish. Although one knows, from having read books, that this is how it was always done, it doesn't feel right. It simply takes too long.\n\nNo other kitchen appliance makes the body feel so impotent because no other dissolves away so much hands-on kitchen work. A blender may whir at an equally incomprehensible speed, but it remains a gadget, its niche in our cooking small. The food processor, on the other hand, is capable of assuming almost the entire repertoire of kitchen prep.\n\nThe cost of this usurpation was not only the loss of kitchen work by which the body had formerly refreshed itself, exercising genuinely demanding skills and shaping work to the tempo of personal rhythms. There were two other unexpected consequences.\n\nThe first was that, by strength of example, the food processor began to corrode the meaning of all kitchen work. This was true not only of the homes that already had a food processor, for once a kind of kitchen work becomes identified as a tiresome chore by enough cooks, it begins to lie heavy and sullen in the hands of all of them. What could not now be done effortlessly, cleanly, perfectly, became by comparison drudgery, all the more susceptible to replacement by some other, cleverer machine.\n\nThe second consequence was one to which we nouveaux cuisiniers were especially vulnerable. The product of a wealthy, acquisitive culture that could pick the ingredients of its meals almost at will, we had now been given a machine that allowed us to prepare an almost unlimited number of complex dishes without any kind of physical restraint.\n\nFor the same reason, we were equally enticed by any and all new recipes that came our way. The less that cooking comes from hands-on kitchen experience, the harder it is for a cook to gauge the desirability of a newly encountered dish. A cook who makes all chicken broth from scratch will cast a more discriminating eye on a recipe that calls for it than the cook who pours it from the can. The cook who does all her own cutting, chopping, and sieving immediately knows the appropriateness of a new recipe: it must fit the hands.\n\nOn the contrary, freed of the necessity of such choices, our only way of judging a dish's rightness was becoming the wanton appreciation of the tongue and the riot of culinary fad. Appetite has always had a hard time saying no; it needs guidance we were no longer in a position to provide.\n\nNone of this, of course, was the food processor's fault. But just as the automobile changed the landscape of America in ways that no one had expected or prepared for, the food processor shifted the nature of culinary reality... more slowly for the culture at large, but almost immediately in the microculture that was beginning to take food seriously. As it proliferated, it began raising the stakes for all, even for those who did not yet possess one. And it is this effect\u2014in an equally unexpected way\u2014that we have just begun to experience with the microwave.\n\nUnlike the food processor, the microwave has no French ancestry, or even\u2014until relatively recently\u2014any influential food-world friends. It lacks the assertively simple high-tech styling and the haute-cuisine associations that might have provided it with Cuisinart-like cachet. In fact, with its buttons, buzzers, and revolving carousels, the microwave, from the very start, has seemed irredeemably prole\u2014right down to the reason for owning one. For no matter the culinary arguments voiced in its favor, the only truly compelling reason to own a microwave is still the first: it is the best medium yet devised for the almost instant reheating of cooked food.\n\nEven so, what made the microwave seem irresistible to its original purchasers is not all that different from what made the food processor seem so desirable to us. Both fed a fantasy of participating in a cuisine whose rationale had already evaporated, no matter how delicious its dishes. For the first microwave owners, however, that cuisine was the familiar American supper. With its assistance, a family could dispense with a regular cook and even a common dinnertime\u2014and still sit down to the familiar trinity of meat, starch, and vegetable, courtesy of Swanson's LeMenu, served piping hot on a premium plastic plate\u2014no more the TV-dinner tripart, tinfoil, cafeteria-style serving tray.\n\nThe price was the same: the cook was obliged to surrender involvement for convenience. Microwave energy offers no equivalent experience to replace our intuitive understanding of heat; indeed, the body's inability to respond or protect itself means the cooking food must be locked away out of reach. Because microwaves cook food from the inside out, they are unable to provide us with any of radiant heat's familiar, helpful clues. As with the Cuisinart, the cook must count seconds instead.\n\nFood processor, microwave oven... the one speeds preparation by removing it from human hands and human time; the other does the same to the actual process of cooking. As the food processor devours the experience of knife and cutting board, whisk and bowl, the other eats away at an even more primal experience: the putting of food to fire.\n\nThat we nouveaux cuisiniers originally missed the connection is not surprising; we put a very different weight on the meaning of the two types of experience. Our inspiration was, after all, the chef; if there was any experience in cooking that remained crucial to us, it was dexterity before the flame.\n\nWhat we never expected was that as kitchen experience in its entirety became progressively devalued, the aura that still clung to the stove would also necessarily fade. Unnoticed by us, the image of the chef before his range, sweat dripping down his face as hot fat shimmered in his saut\u00e9 pan, was undergoing as radical a change for microwave users as the role of scullion had for us.\n\nAs more and more cooks began to learn how to use their microwave, the conventional oven was progressively being found too hot, too time-consuming, too wasteful of energy, and, above all, too greasy... literally, but figuratively, too, for the description began to embrace as well the meals that it was used to prepare.\n\nUnlike traditional cuisines, recipe-based cooking has never allowed the home cook to shape a meal by reworking the same dish from day to day in response to what her family needs to eat\u2014adding or eliminating meat, throwing in a smaller or larger proportion of chopped greens or a larger or smaller handful of rice. The amounts and the ingredients of recipe dishes are already determined forever by someone else who knows none of the eaters\u2014or their needs or appetites.\n\nThere is something relentless about recipes in this regard: they create a condition not unlike the air temperature in a large office building, where it is always too hot in the winter and too cold in the summer\u2014but if no one is really happy, neither can anyone complain. Recipe cooking likewise gives us too much; whether in the guise of fattening us up or slimming us down, somehow things are always being waved in front of our mouths. This is the purpose of recipes, after all: to arouse appetite. Like central heating, food writing's only task is to make us \"comfortable\"; it might be establishing a climate of self-indulgence or self-denial, but it is still busy making us feel hungry\u2014the only question being what we are to become hungry for.\n\nSo far as reheating was concerned, of course, no food writing was needed to get microwave owners to turn the appetite thermostat up. Because of its original audience, much of prepackaged microwave food was already laden with calories. Turning the thermostat down, however, was quite another matter. Microwave cooking, because it required that all recipes be recast for its peculiar way of heating, offered a glorious opportunity for cookbook writers to play not only on their readers' increasingly compulsive need for cooking to be made easy, but also upon their terror of fat.\n\nThe microwave's chief handicap\u2014that it cooks best what is best cooked inside out\u2014suddenly became a plus. No need to apologize that it can't crisp the fat when there's no fat to crisp\u2014especially when you can harp on the fact that it can steam broccoli in its own moisture to tender doneness before the exterior has a chance to dry out\u2014with not a calorie added or a vitamin lost.\n\n\"An odd thing happened a few years ago as I began to cook a great deal in the microwave oven,\" writes Barbara Kafka in the introduction to her Microwave Gourmet Healthstyle Cookbook. \"It was less hard to lose weight when it started to go up, and it was easier to keep it off... . After a while, I figured it out. The microwave oven doesn't need fat to cook.\"\n\nNeither, of course, do many conventional cooking techniques, and those that do don't always add that many calories to the completed dish. But such language sells microwaves\u2014just as it once sold food processors. As Henri Gault (of Le Nouveau Guide de Gault-Millau) told Roy Andries de Groot in Revolutionizing French Cooking: \"Our French Robot Coupe [the original Cuisinart]... is a precious tool for the easy preparation of the new low-fat, low-starch, low-sugar, yet high-pleasure cuisine. With it, you can emulsify and thicken the sauces... with no use whatsoever of butter or flour.\" All you need is the machine\u2014and some new recipes.\n\nThe fact is, neither can do anything beyond what its user asks of it, but this has not prevented that untampered-with stalk of broccoli from becoming the emblem of the increasingly neurasthenic cuisine of a new, post-gourmet generation of cooks who, unsettled by the preceding generation's inability to come to terms with unbridled consumption, are increasingly shrinking not merely from the conspicuous display of appetite, but even from appetite itself. Harbingers of a new Age of Prohibition, they are at least their parents' children in this: a love of convenience. For them, too, time spent in the kitchen is wasted time.\n\nConsequently, the food processor is no stranger to their kitchen, either\u2014they use it to shred their salads and emulsify their cottage-cheese spreads. But the irony is more poignant in their embrace of a device that in our minds has always meant greasy fast food and the general collapse of cooking into TV-dinnerdom. Because we despised it, they embraced it\u2014as a means of becoming cooks like us. Welcome to the macrobiotic microwave: a work-free, fat-free way of cooking.\n\nPerhaps the clearest display yet of the forces that have brought about this unexpected conjunction is to be found in a piece that appeared in the December 1987 issue of The Atlantic, written by Corby Kummer, an editor of the magazine and its regular food columnist. His account of his conversion to microwave cooking begins with the frank assertion that\u2014despite initial resistance\u2014he now uses that device \"more than any other appliance in my kitchen, including the stove.\"\n\nTo explain how this has come about, he describes in detail how the microwave has completely changed his attitude toward cooking fish. These comments are worth quoting at some length, for they neatly tie together the whole bundle of post-oven cooking attitudes:\n\nFish cooked in a microwave oven is the single best example of how owning one can change your life... . You take it out of the wrapping paper and put it on the plate you plan to serve it on. It needs nothing to make it taste good: no oil, no court bouillon to poach it in, no herbs you forgot to buy. Even a fish as bland as sole reveals itself to be much more interesting than it was when poached in a liquid that drew off its flavor or baked at a heat that dried it out. The inside and the outside of the fish cook at the same time... eliminating the problem of a raw center and a dry exterior... . I used to buy fish only rarely, despite my great fondness for it, out of reluctance to take the time to figure out how best to cook it and for how long. Now I buy any fish that I can find, knowing that I will taste it at its best after a few minutes. And I'll have only the plate to wash.\n\nNo one asked for the emotional gist of this passage would say that it resides in a heartfelt passion for fish. If anything, these words reflect an active resentment at having to cook. In less than a paragraph, that activity is portrayed as one strewn with annoyances, from having to remember to buy the parsley at the one end to having to clean up the frypan at the other... and in between, of having to think, smell, taste, and pay attention to what you're doing.\n\nHere is a culinary voice in which the promise of the food processor has been so completely interiorized that it can state without ironic inflection that \"microwave ovens can't eliminate preparation time. I will admit that as obvious as this lesson seems, it came as an unpleasant surprise. The vegetables still have to be peeled, the onions chopped, the spices retrieved from the back of the cabinet.\"\n\nAt first glance, even given that this attitude might be felt as liberating by readers of The Atlantic, it would still seem that fish would not be the first food with which to justify conversion to microwave cooking. After all, a whole sole can be broiled in a conventional oven in five minutes, a fillet in less. Pan frying takes no longer (and a not-too-fussy cook can usually clean the pan with a wipe of a paper towel).\n\nHowever, precisely because fish cooks quickly and its flesh is so fragile, preparing it by conventional means does require concerted attention\u2014although really no more than is required to not overcook a steak. Unlike steak, however, fish does not possess sufficient prestige with most of us to command such care. Overcook the steak and the cook blames himself; overcook the fish and the cook blames it.\n\nFish cookery, then, is a good index of our culture's resentment at having to cook, which would explain why it is currently available in far greater abundance precooked and prepackaged in the supermarket's freezer case than fresh in the seafood section (if the supermarket has a seafood section at all).\n\nFrozen fish is also preferred because there is no chance that it might stink. Although Corby Kummer does not mention this, one might be forgiven for suspecting a subtext to his thrice-repeated relief at having nothing to wash but his plate: that the microwave owner can buy, cook, and eat fresh fish without ever having to touch it.\n\nContrast such \"great fondness\" for fish with the sentiments of Jeffrey Steingarten, in an essay on the same subject that appeared a few months afterward in HG. Steingarten's feelings about microwave fish cookery were mixed, something that could be anticipated from moments such as this one, when he realized that his pleasure in some medallions of salmon\n\ncame from the marinade of mustard, olive oil, and lemon, which was so good that, having grown weary of steamed fish, I broke the rules and grilled a salmon steak smeared with the marinade in my powerful salamander broiler. The results, I regret, were wonderful... .\n\nWere this an actual debate, one could imagine the nouveaux cuisiniers in the audience leaping to their feet and cheering\u2014here, at last, a moment where new-fashioned restraint gives way to old-fashioned indulgence. Steingarten's prose is studded with such verbal whets\u2014and their implicit permissiveness.\n\nReaders whose expectations of food prose turn on such points of sensual enhancement will find little pleasure in Corby Kummer's article, which evidences no similar moment of appetite in all its paragraphs of instruction. But an increasing number of others will be happy to at last encounter a food writer not given to compulsive lip-smacking, a prose in which culinary temptation is conspicuously absent.\n\nInstead, it is a prose that knows the price of pleasure and is willing to pay for it only with carefully counted nickels and dimes. His basic fish recipe is fish: no herbs, no court bouillon, no oil. \"You can nearly always eliminate fat from any recipe you want to adapt to the microwave oven. If you do want to add it, a spoonful of olive oil or melted butter... drizzled over the fish just before it is served will taste fresher and stronger than if cooked.\" The emphases are mine.\n\nIn the world where this kind of cooking takes place, \"fish\" is a code word. We all know that it is good for us; we all hate to cook it. Frozen fish fingers are one answer, but how much more pleasant, how much more guilt-free, instead to stick a fresh fillet into the microwave, tout nu, and, in a matter of mere seconds, be able\u2014be allowed\u2014to lick our platter clean.\n\nWhat the proponents of this new cuisine do not understand \u2014and what we seem to be in no position to teach them\u2014is that the impoverishment that cooking has undergone in our hands has left them even less able than we to imagine a cuisine not based on the promiscuous use of recipes or the necessary convenience of machines.\n\nWe too are still convinced that by following recipes and using devices like food processors and microwave ovens we are saving time, when what is happening instead is that we are being made more efficient\u2014at the price of a whole realm of experience.\n\nThe argument that these machines are time-saving depends on our own refusal to notice how short-lived is the space that some new technology frees up for us before it is taken away. Otherwise, we would have a huge reservoir of free time, given all that we've supposedly been banking away. But the truth is quite different.\n\nOnce, not so long ago, we were allowed some of the evening to cook supper. Even in the seventies, when Pierre Franey began his \"60-Minute Gourmet\" column for The New York Times, to make a complete dinner within an hour seemed quite a feat. Now it seems an extravagance. Today, twenty minutes is more like it: hence the Times's food editor Marian Burros's column, \"20-Minute Menus.\" Corby Kummer's five-minute fish bake will soon be eating into that.\n\nThe reason we still believe we possess this free time is that we have been persuaded to externalize the experience of cooking into a series of unwanted chores. Whatever the user of the microwave is doing with his or her freed-up time, it is obviously not cooking\u2014and to that very limited extent, he or she has been set free. But for what?\n\nTo understand what has really happened to us, imagine attempting to reverse the process. Imagine wanting to take a whole afternoon to leisurely prepare supper\u2014without food processor, microwave oven, or cookbook. To live, after all, is to experience things, and every time we mince an onion, lower the flame under a simmering pot, shape the idea and substance of a meal, we actually gain rather than lose lived time. Such minutes are not only full and rich in themselves, but they brush a lasting patina of lived experience onto our memory.\n\nAnyone who has seriously attempted to do such cooking knows that it requires more concentrated physical attention than most of us can spare. This kind of commitment is one we are no longer able to give our regularly lived lives, for it has become too dear for casual expenditure.\n\nThe devices making more and more demands on our actual lived time do not themselves provide experience in kind to what they have taken away. What they usually provide instead is a kind of compressed, fictive experience that does not take place in genuinely lived time.\n\nWhat I mean by fictive experience can be compared to the act of watching television. While we view it, it fills us up with an experience of events taking place, but, unlike actually lived experience, this feeling of enrichment soon evaporates when we pull our attention away. This is because, in terms of experience, all we have been doing is sitting on a couch and staring at a machine that, at bottom, we do not take very seriously.\n\nAs cooking has progressively taken on much of this same character\u2014the mind kept busy, the body left essentially uninvolved\u2014it has forced onto our eating the same fictive quality, the living of a pretend life. A frozen microwave entr\u00e9e like Armour's Classic or Swanson's LeMenu dinner might in this sense be viewed as a cookbook brought to its ultimate consummation: a food book that can be opened and its contents devoured.\n\nLike cookbooks, these food packages arouse appetite through glossy photographs, enticing prose, and that sense\u2014conveyed through the general design and pricing\u2014that we are being given the metaphorical equivalent of a good home-cooked meal.\n\nThe mind can feed on metaphors, and it becomes progressively hungry for them the less our own lives are able to provide them. For the mind, it is of little matter that the actual experience of eating the dish has a blank sameness to it, even if for our mouth it is just another frozen dinner. Instead, the mind simply becomes less inclined to consult a dulled tongue when offered an appealing fantasy. It lingers over the fading image of the wrapper and insists it is having a good time.\n\nInvert this insight, and the cookbook reveals itself to us as a kind of pretechnological TV dinner. It, too, stimulates appetite by end-running actual sensual experience and appealing directly to the mind. It, too, wraps endless sameness in metaphors that the brain hungers for, steadily blurring the distinction between actual and fictive experience. \"Look,\" it says to the tongue, \"stop complaining. Tonight we're going to France to have moussaka proven\u00e7ale with Mireille Johnston.\" But the tongue doesn't reply; it has long since stopped paying attention.\n\nAll recipes are built on the belief that somewhere at the beginning of the chain there is a cook who does not use them. This is the great nostalgia of our cuisine, ever invoking an absent mother-cook who once laid her hands on the body of the world and worked it into food for us. The promise of every cookbook is that it offers a way back into her lap.\n\nShe's long gone, that lady. But without the fantasy of her none of this would be bearable. Our cuisine has become a Borges fable or an Escher print, a universe crammed with cookbook writers all passing the same recipes around and around. And each time one passes through their hands, they manage to find a way to make it faster and faster, leaner and leaner\u2014until everything fuses together into a little black box. You put in a piece of fish on a clean plate; a minute later, you take it out cooked, and eat it. You can call that progress, if you want, but you can't call it Mommy.\nLIST OF RECIPES\n\nBEANS, RICE, AND GRAINS\n\nBlack beans and rice with ham hocks and   \ndeviled eggs baked in curry sauce   \nFul medames\n\nBEVERAGES\n\nChampagne punch \u00e0 la Cr\u00e9ole\n\nBREADS\n\nIrish brown bread   \nIrish Indian-meal bread   \nIrish soda bread   \nOaten soda bread   \nSourdough loaf, basic   \nSourdough loaf in the manner of pane   \npugliese   \nSourdough loaf in the manner of pain Poil\u00e2ne\n\nBREAKFAST DISHES\n\nBreakfast clafoutis\n\nCHEESE AND EGGS\n\n(See also Sandwiches and Snacks)   \nBread and cheese pudding (savory)   \nFried cheese   \nHamine eggs   \nK\u00e4se mit Musik (Cheese \"with music\")   \nSoused cheese   \nToasted cheese   \nWelsh rabbit\n\nDESSERTS\n\nCoffee ice cream   \nFresh raspberry cake   \nGinger pear cake   \nLemon ice cream   \nMaple walnut pie   \nMarshmallows, sandwiches of Hershey chocolate,   \ngraham crackers, and   \nPecan pie   \nRaspberry crumble   \nSwedish pancakes (tunna pannkakor)   \nSweet-potato pecan pie\n\nMEAT AND POULTRY\n\n(See also Pasta and Chinese Noodles; Salads)   \nBeef with carrots   \nChicken in a crust   \nChicken with forty cloves of garlic   \nDanish frikadeller in beer   \nHot dogs, grilled over a campfire   \nKeftedes on skewers   \nLamb with forty cloves of garlic   \nMeatballs in tomato sauce   \nMeatballs with spinach and chickpeas   \nMichel Barberousse's chicken with forty cloves of garlic   \nRussian bitki with dill sauce\n\nPASTA AND CHINESE NOODLES\n\nChinese noodles   \n\u2014basic cold-tossed   \n\u2014dandan, with peanut sauce   \n\u2014dandan, with sesame sauce   \n\u2014T'ung Ching Street   \npasta   \n\u2014pan-fried, with olive oil   \n\u2014with capers and black olives   \n\u2014with cheese and pepper   \n\u2014with croutons and prosciutto   \n\u2014with fried eggs   \n\u2014with garlic and hot peppers (di Fuoco)   \n\u2014with garlic, oregano, pecorino Romano,   \nand anchovy fillets (Country-style)   \n\u2014with lemon and olive oil   \n\u2014with parsley, pecorino Romano, and olive oil   \n(Coachman's)   \n\u2014with tomato paste, olive oil,   \nand grated pepper (Klepp's)\n\nSALADS\n\nBelgian endive, wilted in meat juices   \nSteak, Kalamata olives, and roasted peppers   \nTomatoes and corn\n\nSANDWICHES AND SNACKS\n\nBread sandwich   \nChallah crust flakes and sweet butter   \nDripping-fried bread   \nFul medames (see Beans, Rice, and Grains)   \nGrilled cheese sandwich (and variations)   \nPlowman's lunch (classic and variations)   \nPlowman's lunch (McSorley's)   \nSoused cheese   \nTexas toast\n\nSAUCES\n\nSalsa   \nTahini\n\nSOUPS AND STEWS\n\nA\u00efgo bou\u00efdo (garlic and herb broth)   \nCorn, rice, and chickpea soup with salsa   \nCreole Lenten split pea soup   \nCucumber, lemon, and dill soup   \nFresh pea and potato soup   \nGarlic and walnut soup with fresh goat cheese   \nJamaican red pea soup   \nMushroom and barley soup   \nSopa de ajo (Spanish garlic soup)   \nSoupe \u00e0 l'ail (garlic soup)   \nSoupe \u00e0 l'ail bonne femme (garlic soup with vegetables)   \nSpanish meatball soup   \nSpinach in chickpea pur\u00e9e   \nSweet pepper and olive soup   \nSwedish pea soup\n\nVEGETABLES\n\nArtichoke, how to cook an   \nAvocado, how to eat an   \nBelgian endive   \nBrussels sprouts alla Milanese   \nIrish potato cakes, first version   \nIrish potato cakes, second version   \nMushroom caviar   \nMushroom stock   \nMushrooms, basic preparation   \nMushrooms, braised with potatoes   \nMushrooms saut\u00e9ed in the old style   \nMushrooms, wild, how to dry   \nPotato and buttermilk oven-baked pancake   \nPotato pancakes, German-style (Reibekuchen)\n\nA NOTE ON AUTHORSHIP\n\nIt is a pleasant fiction that because the words originated in his or her own brain they are the writer's own creation. The truth is more complex; credit is harder to assign. I only know that I am a different and, in my own eyes, a better writer since I began living with the woman who is now my wife, Martha Lewis Thorne. Matt has considered every word of every draft of the pieces collected in this book, reacting, suggesting, amending, and hence reshaping what appears on every page\u2014except the one you're reading now. At such a level of intimacy, reader and writer can only be finally differentiated by the objective fact of who it is that punches out the words on the computer keyboard. The subjective self who gave them their meaning is a larger, braver, much more interesting person\u2014a transformation that deserves a form of recognition more public and more tangible than what usually appears, however sincerely, as a coda to an acknowledgment section.\nALSO BY JOHN THORNE\n\nSimple Cooking (1987)\nBIBLIOGRAPHY\n\nAbdennour, Samia. Egyptian Cooking: A Practical Guide. 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London: Bantam Press, 1986.\n\nMcGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking. New York: Scribners, 1984.\n\nMcLucas, Suzanne. A Proven\u00e7al Kitchen in America. Boulder: Johnson Books, 1982.\n\nMartini, Anna. The Mondadori Regional Italian Cookbook. New York: Harmony Books, 1983.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. Pasta & Pizza. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976.\n\nMickler, Ernest Matthew. White Trash Cooking. Winston-Salem, NC: The Jargon Society, 1986.\n\nMiddione, Carlo. The Food of Southern Italy. New York: Morrow, 1987.\n\nMintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power. New York: Viking, 1985.\n\nMuffoletto, Anna. The Art of Sicilian Cooking. New York: Doubleday, 1971.\n\nOlney, Richard. The French Menu Cookbook. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970; rev. ed. Boston: David R. Godine, 1985.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. Simple French Food. New York: Atheneum, 1974.\n\nOrtiz, Elisabeth Lambert. Caribbean Cooking. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1977.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. The Food of Spain and Portugal. New York: Atheneum, 1989.\n\nPaddleford, Clementine. How America Eats. New York: Scribners, 1960.\n\nPearson, Haydn S. The Countryman's Cookbook. New York: Whittlesey House (McGraw-Hill), 1946.\n\nThe Pecan Institute. 800 Proved Pecan Recipes. Philadelphia: Macrae, 1925.\n\nPellegrini, Angelo. The Unprejudiced Palate. New York: Macmillan, 1948.\n\nP\u00e9pin, Jacques. The Art of Cooking, Vol. 2. New York: Knopf, 1988.\n\nThe Picayune's Creole Cook Book. 2d ed. (1901). New York: Dover, 1971.\n\nPlotkin, Fred. The Authentic Pasta Book. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.\n\nRandolph, Mary. The Virginia House-Wife. (Facsimile of the first edition, 1824, with additional material from the editions of 1825 and 1826 to present a complete text, with historical notes and commentaries by Karen Hess.) Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina, 1984.\n\nRedwood, Jean. Russian Food: All the Peoples, All the Republics. Felixstowe, Suffolk, England: Oldwicks Press Ltd., 1989.\n\nReinhart, Br. Peter. Brother Juniper's Bread Book: Slow Rise as Method and Metaphor. New York: Aris/Addison Wesley, 1991.\n\nRobertson, Laurel (with Carol Flinders and Bronwen Godfrey). The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. New York: Random House, 1984.\n\nRoden, Claudia. A Book of Middle Eastern Food. New York: Knopf, 1972.\n\nRogers, Ann. A Cookbook for Poor Poets (and Others). New York: Scribner, 1966.\n\nRoot, Waverley (and the Editors of Time-Life Books). The Cooking of Italy. New York: Time-Life Books, 1968.\n\nRorer, Sarah Tyson. Mrs. Rorer's New Cook Book. Philadelphia: Arnold, 1902.\n\nRoss, Janet, and Michael Waterfield. Leaves from Our Tuscan Kitchen. New York: Atheneum, 1974.\n\nSakamoto, Nabuko. The People's Republic of China Cookbook. New York: Random House, 1977.\n\nSchrecker, Ellen (with John Schrecker). Mrs. Chiang's Szechwan Cookbook. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.\n\nScott, Jack Denton. The Complete Book of Pasta. New York: Morrow, 1968.\n\nScott, Natalie, and Caroline Merrick Jones. Gourmet's Guide to New Orleans. New Orleans: Scott & Jones, 1951.\n\nSeed, Diane. The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1987.\n\nSeymour, John. Gardener's Delight. New York: Harmony Books, 1979.\n\nSheraton, Mimi. The German Cookbook. New York: Random House, 1965.\n\nSiegel, F. (translator). Russian Cooking. Moscow: Mir Publishers, 1974.\n\nSimeti, Mary Taylor. On Persephone's Island. New York: Knopf, 1986.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. Pomp and Sustenance: Twenty-Five Centuries of Sicilian Food. New York: Knopf, 1989.\n\nSimonds, Nina. Classic Chinese Cuisine. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982.\n\nSpoerri, Daniel. Mythology & Meatballs: A Greek Island Diary/Cookbook. Berkeley: Aris, 1982.\n\nSpry, Constance, and Rosemary Hume. The Constance Spry Cookery Book. London: J. M. Dent, 1956.\n\nStandard, Stella. Stella Standard's Soup Book. New York: Taplinger, 1978.\n\nSteingarten, Jeffrey. \"Fish without Fire.\" HG, March 1988.\n\nStewart, Martha. Martha Stewart's Quick Cook. New York: Crown, 1983.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014, with Elizabeth Hawes. Entertaining. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1982.\n\nStobart, Tom. The Cook's Encyclopedia. New York: Harper & Row, 1981.\n\nThorne, John. Simple Cooking. New York: Viking, 1987.\n\nThubron, Colin. Where Nights Are Longest: Travels by Car Through Western Russia. New York: Random House, 1984.\n\nTime-Life, Editors of. Breads (The Good Cook, Techniques and Recipes). Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1981.\n\nTorres, Marimar. The Spanish Table. New York: Doubleday, 1986.\n\nTropp, Barbara. The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking. New York: Morrow, 1982.\n\nUngerer, Miriam. Good Cheap Food. New York: Viking, 1973.\n\nVada, Simonetta Lupi. Step by Step Pasta Cookbook. Secaucus, NJ: Chartwell Books, 1984.\n\nVisson, Lynn. The Complete Russian Cookbook. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1982.\n\nVolokh, Anne, with Mavis Manus. The Art of Russian Cuisine. New York: Macmillan, 1983.\n\nvon Bremzen, Anya, and John Welchman. Please to the Table: The Russian Cookbook. New York: Workman, 1990.\n\nWasson, Valentina Pavlovna, and R. Gordon Wasson. Mushrooms, Russia, & History. New York: Pantheon, 1957.\n\nWells, Patricia. Bistro Cooking. New York: Workman, 1989.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. The Food Lover's Guide to Paris. New York: Workman, 1984.\n\nWhynott, Doug. \"Healthy Harvest.\" Harrowsmith, September/October 1989.\n\nWillan, Anne. French Regional Cooking. New York: Morrow, 1981.\n\nWolfert, Paula. The Cooking of South-West France. New York: The Dial Press, 1983.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. Mediterranean Cooking. New York: Quadrangle/New York Times, 1977.\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014. Paula Wolfert's World of Food. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.\n\nWood, Ed. World of Sourdoughs from Antiquity. Cascade, ID: Sinclair Publishing, 1989.\n\nWretman, Tore. The Swedish Sm\u00f6rg\u00e5sbord. Helsingbord, Sweden: Forum, 1983.\n\nZanger, Mark. \"Stock.\" The Real Paper, January 21, 1978.\nINDEX\n\nThe index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages of your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.\n\nAbdennour, Samia, Egyptian Cooking: A Practical Guide  \nAdam, H. Pearl\n\nKitchen Ranging\n\nAfrican cooking  \naglio e olio  \nagrestoand n.  \nAlberini, Massimo  \nale\n\nand plowman's lunch\n\nAllen, Myrtle, Cooking at Ballymaloe House  \nallioli  \nanchovies\n\nspaghetti country-style (Sardinia)\n\nAnderson, Jean, The Food of Portugal  \nAndrews, Colman\n\nCatalan Cuisine\n\nApicius\n\nDe Re Coquinaria\n\napples, and clafoutis  \nArora, David, Mushrooms Demystified  \nartichoke(s)\n\nhow to cook\n\nAtlantic, The  \navocado, how to eat\n\nbagelsand n.  \nbaking\n\nreading list  \nsoda  \nstone  \nSee also bread(s)\n\nBannister, Karyland n.  \nBarberousse, Michel, Cuisine Proven\u00e7ale  \nbarley and mushroom soup  \nBarnard, Melanie, Let's Eat In  \nBarnes, Sally  \nbasil\n\npesto\n\nBatcheller, Barbara, Lilies of the Kitchen  \nbeans, rice, and grains\n\nblack beans and rice with ham hocks and deviled eggs baked in curry sauce  \ncorn, rice, and chickpea soup with salsa  \nfava  \nful medames  \nful medames recipe  \nSee also pea(s)\n\nBeard, James\n\nBeard on Bread\n\nBeck, Simone  \nbeef\n\nboeuf \u00e0 la bourguignonne  \nboeuf aux carottes  \nwith carrots  \nwith carrots, recipe  \nDanish frikadeller in beer  \nmeatballs  \nmeatballs in tomato sauce  \nRussian bitki with dill sauce  \nsalad of steak, kalamata olives, and roasted peppers\n\nbeer\n\nDanish frikadeller in  \nplowman's lunch\n\nBeeton, Isabella  \nBehr, Edward, The Art of Eating.  \nBelgian endive  \nBentley, James, Life and Food in the Dordogne  \nBertholle, Louisette  \nBertolli, Paul, Chez Panisse Cooking  \nbeverages\n\nchampagne punch \u00e0 la Cr\u00e9ole  \nSee also specific beverages\n\nbialysand n.  \nBilheur, Roland, et al., Special and Decorative Breads  \nbitki with dill sauce, Russian  \nblack beans and rice with ham hocks and deviled eggs baked in curry sauce  \nBlanchette, Jean-Fran\u00e7ois, The Bread Ovens of Quebec  \nblueberries\n\nbreakfast clafoutis\n\nboeuf aux carottes\n\nrecipe\n\nBoily, Lise, The Bread Ovens of Quebec  \nboletes\n\ndrying  \nSee also mushroom(s)\n\nBoni, Ada, Italian Regional Cooking  \nBoxer, Arabella, Mediterranean Cookbook.  \nBoyd, Primrose, Plats du Jour  \nbread(s)\n\nartisanal loaf  \nbaking  \nbanneton  \nchallah  \nand cheese pudding  \ncloche, see bread cloche  \ndripping-fried  \ndunking  \nequipment for baking  \nflours  \nFrench and n.  \nfried  \nIrish brown  \nIrish Indian-meal  \nIrish soda  \nIrish soda, recipe  \nItalian  \nkeeping  \nkneadingand n.  \nleavens and n.  \noaten soda  \npane pugliese  \nplowman's lunch  \nrising  \nsandwich  \nsourdough  \nsourdough loaf, basic  \nsourdough loaf, pain poil\u00e2ne style  \nsourdough loaf, pane pugliese style  \nsourdough starter  \nspaghetti with croutons and prosciutto  \nstarterand n.  \ntea (Irish soda)  \nTexas toast  \nwhite  \nwhole-grain  \nSee also baking\n\nbread cloche  \nbread oven\n\nbuilding and using\n\nBremer, David  \nBrillat-Savarin, Anthelme  \nBrock, Alice  \nbroth See also soup(s)  \nBrown, Edward Espe, The Tassajara Bread Book  \nBrussels sprouts, alla Milanese  \nBugialli, Giuliano\n\nBugialli on Pasta.  \nThe Fine Art of Italian Cooking\n\nBuonassisi, Vincenzo, Pasta  \nBurros, Marian  \nButler, K. T..  \nbutter  \nbuttermilk\n\nfor Irish soda bread  \npancake, oven-baked potato and\n\ncabbage  \nCajun corn-and-tomato medley  \ncake(s)\n\nfresh raspberry  \nginger pear\n\nCampbell, Helen, In Foreign Kitchens  \nCapote, Truman  \nCarin, Georges  \nCarluccio, Antonio, A Passion for Mushrooms  \nCarlyle, Thomas  \ncarrots\n\nbeef with  \nbeef with, recipe\n\ncassoulet  \nCastelvetro, Giacomo, The Fruit, Herbs & Vegetables of Italy  \nCatalan cooking  \nchallah  \nChamberlain, Lesley, The Food and Cooking of Russia  \nChambrette, Fernand  \nchampagne punch \u00e0 la Cr\u00e9ole  \nCheddar cheese\n\nWelsh rabbit\n\ncheese(es)\n\nAppenzeller  \nBierk\u00e4se  \nbread and cheese pudding  \nBrie  \nbuying  \nCaerphilly  \nCheddar  \nCheshire  \nchess pie  \ncoachman's spaghetti  \nCotswold  \ncroque-madame  \ncroque-monsieur  \nDouble Gloucester  \nEmmenthaler  \nfondue  \nfried  \ngoat, fresh, and garlic and walnut soup  \ngrilled cheese sandwich  \nGruyere  \nHandk\u00e4se  \nK\u00e4se mit Musik (cheese \"with music\")  \nMonterey Jack  \nmozzarella  \nParmesanand n.  \nplowman's lunch  \nRoquefort  \nsoused  \nspaghetti with pepper and  \ntoasted  \nWelsh rabbit\n\nchefs See also specific chefs  \nChekhov, Anton\n\n\"The Siren,\"\n\nChelminski, Rudolph, The French at Table  \nChen, Joyce\n\nJoyce Chen Cook Book\n\ncherries\n\nclafoutis\n\nchicken\n\nbroth  \nin a crust  \nwith forty cloves of garlic  \nwith forty cloves of garlic, Michel Barberousse's  \nfree-range  \npoulet b\u00e9arnais  \nroast  \nsoup\n\nchickpea(s)\n\nmeatballs with spinach and  \npur\u00e9e, spinach in, soup  \nsoup of corn, rice, and, with salsa\n\nChild, Julia\n\nMastering the Art of French Cooking  \nThe Way to Cook\n\nChinese cooking  \nChinese herbsand n.  \nChinese noodles\n\nbasic cold-tossed  \ndandan  \ndandan noodles with peanut sauce  \ndandan noodles with sesame sauce  \negg, fresh  \nT'ung Ching Street noodles\n\ncider  \ncinnamon  \nclafoutis\n\nbreakfast\n\nclams  \nClark, Douglas  \nClark, Sydney, All the Best in Italy  \nClayton, Bernard\n\nThe Breads of France  \nComplete Book of Breads\n\ncloves  \nCode Culinaire  \ncoffee ice cream  \nCole, Rosalind, Of Soda Bread and Guinness.  \nCollier, Norma  \nColwin, Laurie  \nComess, Noel  \nConstance Spry Cookery Book, The  \nCook & Tell (food letter)and n.  \ncookbooks See also specific authors and books  \ncoriander  \ncorn\n\nrice, and chickpea soup with salsa  \nand tomato salad\n\ncorn syrup  \nCouchod, Paul-Louis, La France \u00e0 table  \nCourtine, Robert, Real French Cooking  \ncrackers and cheese  \ncranberries\n\nbreakfast clafoutis\n\nCreole Lenten split pea soup  \ncroque-madame  \ncroque-monsieur  \ncucumber, lemon, and dill soup  \ncurry sauce, black beans and rice with ham hocks and deviled eggs baked in\n\nDaguin, Andr\u00e9, Foie Gras, Magret, and Other Good Food from Gascony  \ndandan noodles\n\nwith peanut sauce  \nwith seasame sauce\n\nDanish frikadeller in beer  \nDavid, Elizabeth\n\nEnglish Bread and Yeast Cookery  \nFrench Provincial Cooking  \nItalian Food  \nAn Omelette and a Glass of Wine  \nSpices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen\n\nDavid, Narsai, Monday Night at Narsai's  \nde Groot, Roy Andries\n\nRevolutionizing French Cooking\n\nDel Conte, Anna\n\nPortrait of Pasta  \nPasta Perfectand n.\n\ndella Croce, Julia, Pasta Classica  \nde' Medici, Lorenza, The Renaissance of Italian Cooking  \nder Haroutunian, Arto, Middle Eastern Cookery  \ndesem leaven fermentation method  \ndessert(s)\n\nclafoutis  \nclafoutis recipe  \nginger pear cake  \nice cream  \nmaple walnut pie  \npecan pie  \nraspberry cake, fresh  \nraspberry crumble  \nSwedish pancakes, (tunna pannkakor)  \nsweet-potato pecan pie\n\ndill\n\nsauce, Russian bitki with  \nsoup, cucumber, lemon, and\n\nDojny, Brooke, Let's Eat In  \nDouglas, Norman  \nduck\n\nEdwards, John, The Roman Cookery of Apicius  \negg(s)\n\nblack beans and rice with ham hocks and deviled eggs baked in curry sauce  \nhamine  \nnoodles, Chinese  \nomelets  \nspaghetti with fried\n\nEgyptian cooking  \n800 Proved Pecan Recipes  \nempanadas  \nendive, Belgian  \nEngland, Italian influence on  \nEnglish cooking  \nEscudier, Jean-Noel, The Wonderful Food of Provence\n\nFarmer, Fannie\n\nBoston Cooking School Cook Book\n\nfava beans\n\nful medames\n\nFelici da Piobbico, Costanzo, Lettera sulle Insalate  \nfennel  \nField, Carol, The Italian Baker  \nfigs  \nfish\n\ncooking, and microwave  \nspaghetti country-style (Sardinia)\n\nFitzGibbon, Theodora, A Taste of Ireland  \nflours, bread  \nfondue  \nfood processor  \nFord, Ford Madox, Provence  \nForster, E. M.  \nFraney, Pierre, \"60-Minute Gourmet\" column of  \nFrench bread and n.  \nFrench cooking  \nfrikadeller in beer, Danish  \nFritschner, Sarah  \nfruit(s)\n\nclafoutis  \nclafoutis recipe  \nraspberry cake, fresh  \nraspberry crumble  \nSee also specific fruits\n\nful medames  \nFu Pei-Mei, Chinese Snacks & Desserts\n\ngarlic\n\naglio e olio  \na\u00efgo bou\u00efdo (garlic and herb broth)  \nchicken with forty cloves of  \nlamb with forty cloves of  \nMichel Barberousse's chicken with forty cloves of  \npasta with hot peppers and  \npasta with olive oil and  \nsopa de ajo (Spanish garlic soup)  \nsoup  \nsoupe \u00e0 l'ail (garlic soup)  \nsoupe \u00e0 l'ail bonne femme (garlic soup with vegetables)  \nand walnut soup with fresh goat cheese\n\ngarum  \nGaskell, Mrs., Wives and Daughters  \nGault, Henri  \nGerman beers  \nGerman cooking  \nGevaert, Omer  \nginger\n\npear cake\n\nGlasse, Hannah, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy  \nGourmet  \ngrains, see beans, rice, and grains  \ngrapesand n.  \nGrass, G\u00fcnter, The Tin Drum  \nGray, Patience\n\nHoney from a Weed  \nPlats du Jour\n\nGreek cooking  \nGreek olives  \nGrigson, Jane\n\nThe Art of Charcuterie  \nFood with the Famous\n\nGueldry, Joseph-Ferdinand, \"The Blood Drinkers,\"  \nGuthrie, Arlo\n\nham\n\nblack beans and rice with ham hocks and deviled eggs baked in curry sauce  \nin grilled cheese sandwich  \nspaghetti with croutons and prosciutto\n\nHambro, Nathalie, Particular Delights  \nHarris, Jessica, Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons  \nHarrowsmith magazine  \nHazan, Marcella, Marcella's Italian Kitchen  \nHazelton, Nika, The Regional Italian Kitchen  \nHazzard, Shirley  \nHeaton, Eliza Putnam, By-Paths in Sicily  \nHeatter, Maida, Maida Heatter's Book of Great Desserts  \nherb(s) and n.\n\na\u00efgo bou\u00efdo (garlic and herb broth)  \nChineseand n.  \ncoachman's spaghetti  \nsauces  \nSee also specific herbs\n\nHess, Karen  \nHibben, Sheila, American Regional Cookery  \nHill, Stuart  \nHolt, Geraldene, French Country Kitchen  \nHorn, Ken, The Taste of China  \nHorace (poet)  \nhot dogs, grilled over a campfire  \nHowe, Robin, The Mediterranean Diet  \nhummus-bi-tahini  \nhyssop\n\nice cream\n\ncoffee  \nlemon\n\nIrish brown bread  \nIrish cooking  \nIrish Indian-meal bread  \nIrish potato cakes  \nIrish soda bread\n\nabout  \ningredients  \nmethod\n\nItalian bread  \nItalian cooking\n\nJaine, Tom  \njam  \nJamaican red pea soup  \nJarratt, Enrica and Vernon\n\nThe Complete Book of Pasta\n\nJenkins, Nancy Harmon  \nJohnston, Mireille, The Cuisine of the Sun  \nJones, Caroline Merrick, Gourmet's Guide to New Orleans  \nJournal of Gastronomy, The  \nJoyes, Claire, Monet's Table: The Cooking Journals of Claude Monet\n\nKafka, Barbara\n\nFood for Friends  \nMicrowave Gourmet Healthstyle Cookbook\n\nKamman, Madeleine\n\nThe Pleasures of Cooking  \nWhen French Women Cook\n\nK\u00e4se mit Musik (cheese \"with music\")  \nKasindorf, Jeanie  \nKates, Joanne, The Taste of Things  \nkeftedes\n\non skewers\n\nKennedy, Diana  \nKenney-Herbert, Colonel A., Fifty Luncheons  \nKeys, Ancel and Margaret, How to Eat Well and Stay Well the Mediterranean Way  \nknishes  \nKummer, Corby  \nKunitz, Stanley\n\nlactobacilli  \nlamb\n\nwith forty cloves of garlic  \nkeftedes on skewers  \nmeatballs with spinach and chickpeas\n\nLarousse Gastronomique  \nLaverty, Maura, Full and Plenty  \nLawrence, D. H., Twilight in Italy  \nleavens, for bread and n.\n\nbaking soda  \nnatural  \nstarter  \nyeast\n\nlemon\n\ncucumber, and dill soup  \nice cream  \nand olive oil, vermicelli with\n\nLeonard, Thorn, The Bread Book  \nLerner, Hy  \nlettuce  \nLeung, Mai, The Chinese People's Cookbook  \nLewis, Edna\n\nThe Edna Lewis Cookbook\n\nLewis, Stephen.  \nLiebling, A. J., Between Meals  \nlobsters  \nLovece, Frank  \nLuard, Elisabeth, European Peasant Cookery  \nLyall, Robert, The Character of the Russians  \nLyle's Golden Syrup\n\nmaccheroni de fuoco (fiery macaroni)  \nMcGee, Harold, On Food and Cooking.  \nMcLucas, Suzanne, A Proven\u00e7al Kitchen in America  \nMcSorley's Old Ale House, New York  \nMaine, cooking and eating in  \nmaple syrup  \nmaple walnut pie  \nmarshmallow sandwiches, toasted  \nMartini, Anna, Pasta & Pizza  \nMastering the Art of French Cooking (Beck, Bertholle, and Child)  \nMathiot, Ginette, \u00c0 Table avec \u00c9douard de Pomiane  \nmeat and poultry\n\nbeef with carrots  \nblack beans and rice with ham hocks and deviled eggs baked in curry sauce  \nboeuf \u00e0 la bourguignonne  \nchicken in a crust  \nchicken with forty cloves of garlic  \nDanish frikadeller in beer  \nhot dogs, grilled over a campfire  \nkeftedes on skewers\n\nlamb with forty cloves of garlic  \nmeatballs  \nmeatballs with spinach and chickpeas  \nmeatballs in tomato sauce  \nMichel Barberousse's chicken with forty cloves of garlic  \nin pea soup  \nRussian bitki with dill sauce  \nsalad of steak, Kalamata olives, and roasted peppers  \nsalt  \nSpanish meatball soup  \nstocks  \nSee also specific meats\n\nmeatballs\n\nDanish frikadeller in beer  \nkeftedes on skewers  \nRussian bitki with dill sauce  \nsoup, Spanish  \nwith spinach and chickpeas  \nin tomato sauce\n\nMediterranean cooking See also specific countries  \nmicrowave ovens  \nMiddione, Carlo, The Food of Southern Italy  \nmilk\n\nsour (buttermilk)\n\nmint  \nMintz, Sidney, Sweetness and Power  \nmolasses  \nMonet, Claude, cooking journals of  \nMonroe, Sally  \nMoroccan cooking  \nMoryson, Fynesand n.  \nMuffoletto, Anna, The Art of Sicilian Cooking  \nMuscatine, Doris, Monday Night at Narsai's  \nmushroom(s)\n\nAgaricus bisporus  \nand barley soup  \nboletes  \nbutton  \ncaviar  \nc\u00e8pes  \nChilean  \nhow to prepare  \nmorels  \noyster  \nand potatoes, braise of  \nRussian  \nsaut\u00e9ed in the old style  \nshiitake  \nstock  \nwild, how to dry\n\nMushroom: The Journal of Wild Mushrooming\n\nNabokov, Vladimir, Speak, Memory  \nNadeau, Robert (Mark Zanger)  \nNew York City  \nNew York Times, The  \nnoodles, see Chinese noodles; pasta  \nnutmeg\n\noaten soda bread  \nolivada  \nolive(s)\n\nblack  \nGreek  \nKalamata, salad of steak, roasted peppers, and  \nspaghetti with capers and black  \nand sweet pepper soup\n\nolive oil\n\nbuying  \npasta with garlic in  \npasta pan-fried with  \nvermicelli with lemon and\n\nOlney, Richard\n\nThe French Menu Cookbook  \nSimple French Food\n\nomelets  \nonion(s)\n\nplowman's lunch  \nsoup\n\nOrtiz, Elisabeth Lambert\n\nCaribbean Cooking  \nThe Food of Spain and Portugal\n\noven(s)\n\nbread  \nmicrowave\n\noysters\n\nPacific Sun  \nPaddleford, Clementine, How America Eats  \npancakes\n\nIrish potato cakes  \npotato  \npotato and buttermilk, oven-baked  \nReibekuchen  \nSwedish\n\npancetta  \npanzanella  \nparsley, sauce for spaghetti  \npasta\n\naglio e olio  \nbasic cold-tossed noodles, Chinese  \nbuying  \nwith capers and black olives  \nwith cheese and pepper  \nChinese noodles  \ncoachman's (Sicily)  \ncountry-style (Sardinia)  \nwith croutons and prosciutto  \ndandan noodles with peanut sauce  \ndandan noodles with sesame sauce  \neating  \nwith fish  \nwith fried eggs  \nwith garlic and hot peppers  \nwith garlic and olive oil  \nwith herb sauce  \nwith lemon sauce  \nmaccheroni di fuoco (fiery macaroni)  \nand olive oil  \nwith olives and capers  \npan-fried, with olive oil  \nwith prosciutto and croutons  \nsauces  \nserving size  \nT'ung Ching Street noodles  \nvermicelli with lemon and olive oil  \nSee also Chinese noodles\n\nPasternak, Boris  \npastries  \npea(s)\n\ncorn, rice, and chickpea soup with salsa  \nmeatballs with spinach and chickpeas  \nsoup  \nsoup, Creole Lenten split  \nsoup, Jamaican red  \nsoup, potato and  \nsoup, Swedish  \nspinach in chickpea puree, soup\n\npeach(es)\n\nclafoutis\n\npeanut sauce, dandan noodles with  \npear(s)\n\ncake, ginger\n\nPearson, Haydn S., The Countryman's Cookbook  \npecan pie\n\nauthor's recipe  \nhints  \nsweet-potato\n\nPellegrini, Angelo, The Unprejudiced Palate  \nPenzey, Ruth and Bill\n\nand family\n\nP\u00e9pin, Gloria  \nP\u00e9pin, Jacques\n\nThe Art of Cooking\n\npepper(s)\n\nblack, spaghetti with cheese and  \nhot, pasta with garlic and  \nsweet, and olive soup  \nsweet, salad of steak, Kalamata olives, and roasted\n\npesto  \nPeyraud, Lulu and Lucien  \nPicayune's Creole Cook Book, The  \nPierce, Charles, The Household Manager  \npies\n\nmaple walnut  \npecan  \nsweet potato pecan\n\npistache de mouton  \npizza  \nPlotkin, Fred\n\nThe Authentic Pasta Book\n\nplowman's lunch\n\nbread and cheese pudding  \nclassic  \ndripping-fried bread  \ngrilled cheese sandwich  \nK\u00e4se mit Musik (cheese \"with music\")  \nMcSorley's  \nsoused cheese  \ntoasted cheese  \nWelsh rabbit\n\nplums\n\nbreakfast clafoutis\n\nPoil\u00e2ne, Lionel\n\nFaire Son Pain\n\npork\n\nDanish frikadeller in beer  \nJamaican red pea soup  \nmeatballs  \nin pea soup  \nSpanish meatball soup  \nSwedish pea soup\n\npotato(es)\n\nbraise of mushrooms and  \nand buttermilk pancake, oven-baked  \nIrish potato cakes  \nknishes  \npancakes  \nReibekuchen (German potato pancakes)  \nsoup, pea and  \nsweet-potato pecan pie\n\nprosciutto, spaghetti with croutons and  \nProven\u00e7al cooking\n\npub lunch, see plowman's lunch\n\npudding\n\nbread and cheese  \negg, omelet as\n\npunch \u00e0 la Cr\u00e9ole, champagne  \nPym, Barbara, Jane and Prudence\n\nquinces  \nQuinn, Jim, Never Eat Out on a Saturday Night\n\nRaichlen, Steven  \nRandolph, Mary, The Virginia House-Wife  \nraspberries\n\ncake, fresh  \nclafoutis  \ncrumble\n\nRedwood, Jean, Russian Food  \nReibekuchen  \nReinhart, Brother Peter, Brother Juniper's Bread Book: Slow Rise as Method and Metaphor  \nrestaurants, Chinese  \nrice, see beans, rice, and grains  \nRiley, Gillian  \nRobertson, Laurel, The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book  \nRobuchon, Jo\u00ebl  \nRoden, Claudia, A Book of Middle Eastern Food  \nRogers, Ann, A Cookbook for Poor Poets (and Others)  \nRoman cooking, ancient  \nRoot, Waverly, The Cooking of Italy  \nRorer, Sarah Tyson, Mrs. Rorer's New Cook Book  \nrosemary  \nRosen, Michael  \nRoss, Janet, Leaves from Our Tuscan Kitchen  \nRussian bitki with dill sauce  \nRussian cooking  \nRussian mushrooms\n\nsage  \nsalad(s)\n\nBelgian endive  \nsteak, Kalamata olives, and roasted peppers  \ntomatoes and corn\n\nsalsa, for corn, rice, and chickpea soup  \nsalt\n\nbay  \nin bread\n\nsandwich(es)\n\nbread (German)  \nchip butty  \ncroque-madame  \ncroque-monsieur  \ndripping-fried bread  \ngrilled cheese  \nplowman's lunch  \nTexas toast\n\nsardines  \nsauce(s)\n\ndandan noodles with peanut  \ndandan noodles with sesame  \nmeatballs in tomato  \npasta  \nRussian bitki with dill  \ntahini\n\nsausages  \nSchrecker, Ellen, Mrs. Chiang's Szechwan Cookbook  \nScott, Alan  \nScott, Jack Denton, The Complete Book of Pasta  \nScott, Natalie, Gourmet's Guide to New Orleans  \nsesame oil  \nsesame paste, Chinese See also tahini  \nsesame sauce, dandan noodles with  \nSeymour, John, Gardener's Delight  \nShapiro, Laura  \nSheraton, Mimi, The German Cookbook  \nSimeti, Mary Taylor\n\nOn Persephone's Island  \nPomp and Sustenance\n\nSimonds, Nina, Classic Chinese Cuisine  \nSimple Cooking (food letter)  \nsoda bread, see Irish soda bread  \nSomerville, E. CE., and M. Ross, The Holy Island  \nSontheimer, Carl  \nsoup(s)\n\na\u00efgo bou\u00efdo (garlic and herb broth)  \nbones  \nbroth  \nchicken broth  \nchickpea puree, with spinach  \ncorn, rice, and chickpea, with salsa  \nCreole Lenten split pea  \ncucumber, lemon, and dill  \ngarlic  \ngarlic and walnut, with fresh goat cheese  \nJamaican red pea  \nmushroom and barley  \nmushroom stock for  \nonion  \npea  \npea and potato  \nsopa de ajo (Spanish garlic soup)  \nsoupe \u00e0 l'ail (garlic soup)  \nsoupe \u00e0 l'ail bonne femme (garlic soup with vegetables)  \nSpanish meatball  \nspinach in chickpea pur\u00e9e  \nstock  \nSwedish pea  \nsweet pepper and olive  \nwithout stocks\n\nsources\n\nfor equipment  \nfor foods and ingredients  \nfor publications\n\nsourdough bread\n\nbasic  \nleaven and starter  \npain Poil\u00e2ne style  \npane pugliese style  \nSourdoughs International\n\nspaghetti, see pasta  \nSpanish garlic soup (sopa de ajo)  \nSpanish meatball soup  \nspice(s)\n\nChinese  \nSpice House (Milwaukee)  \nSee also specific spices\n\nspinach\n\nand chickpeas, meatballs with  \nin chickpea pur\u00e9e, soup\n\nSpoerri, Daniel, Mythology & Meatballs  \nSpringes for Woodcockes  \nSpry, Constance, The Constance Spry Cookery Book  \nStandard, Stella, Stella Standard's Soup Book  \nsteak\n\nKalamata olives, and roasted peppers, salad\n\nSteingarten, Jeffrey  \nStewart, Martha\n\nEntertaining  \nMartha Stewart's Quick Cook\n\nStobart, Tom, The Cook's Encyclopedia  \nstock(s)\n\nmushroom  \nsoups without\n\nstrawberries  \nsugar(s)\n\nbrown\n\nS\u00fcskind, Patrick, Perfume  \nSwedish cooking  \nSwedish pancakes (tunna pannkakor)  \nSwedish pea soup  \nsweet-potato pecan pie  \nsyrup, for pecan pie\n\ntahini\n\nsauce\n\ntea  \nTexas toast  \nThompson, Sylvia Vaughn  \nThree Course Newsletter, The  \nThubron, Colin, Where Nights Are Longest  \nTime-Life Good Cook series\n\nBreads volume\n\ntomato(es)\n\nand corn salad  \nsauce, meatballs in\n\nTorres, Marimar, The Spanish Table  \nTropp, Barbara, The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking  \ntunna pannkakor (Swedish pancakes)  \nturnip\n\nSzechuan preserved\n\nUngerer, Miriam\n\nGood Cheap Food\n\nVanel, Lucien  \nvanilla beans  \nvegetable(s) and n. See also beans, rice, and grains; salad(s); soup(s); specific vegetables  \nvermicelli with lemon and olive oil  \nViazmensky, Alexander  \nVincenti, Mauro  \nvinegar, Chinese black  \nVogue  \nvon Bremzen, Anya, Please to the Table\n\nwalnut(s)\n\npie, maple  \nsoup, garlic and, with fresh goat cheese\n\nWashington Post, The  \nweeds, edible  \nWelchman, John, Please to the Table  \nWells, Patricia\n\nBistro Cooking  \nThe Food Lover's Guide to Paris\n\nWelsh rabbit  \nWhynott, Doug  \nWillan, Anne, French Regional Cooking  \nwine\n\nchampagne punch \u00e0 la Cr\u00e9ole\n\nWolfert, Paula\n\nThe Cooking of South-West France  \nCouscous and Other Good Food from Morocco  \nMediterranean Cooking  \nPaula Wolfert's World of Food  \nReal French Cooking\n\nWood, Ed\n\nWorld of Sourdoughs from Antiquity\n\nWood, Jean  \nWretman, Tore, The Swedish Sm\u00f6rg\u00e5sbord\n\nyeast(s)\n\nZaborov, Boris, The Artist's Palate  \nZanger, Mark  \nZinik, Zinovy, The Mushroom-Picker  \nzucchini\n\nNotes\n\nA bialy is a bagel that got lost inside a Polish joke: its outside is crusty instead of glossy and the hole in the center doesn't make it all the way through. But, fresh from the oven, it is a delicacy unique to itself, crisp and chewy at once, the center dimple stuffed with translucent onion bits and (if wished) garlic. At the time, these were two for a quarter, and some weeks those two were all I could afford\u2014or would want\u2014for lunch.\n\nVery few cookbooks abetted me in this endeavor, and those mostly by their example rather than their contents. This is because most cookbook writing has yet to escape from the nineteenth century, where it still oscillates between empty-headed flowery prose and mechanistic explanations whose only human quality is the nagging tone of the schoolmaster or the manic euphoria of the village explainer. The true reasons for our culinary failures are beyond their ken: fear of failure or of getting fat or of not getting enough to eat; rage at Mother for not taking good enough care of us; guilt at treating ourselves well. Nor can they necessarily take credit for success, something which is often due almost entirely to the spontaneous delight that the best cooks take in pleasing. Their dishes glisten with a happy generosity that culinary skill can only hope to gloss.\n\nAlso, cookbook explanations rarely convey anything of the process by which we absorb and internalize a new dish. Recipe writing is better suited to programming robots than humans, which is why, following a recipe, we often find ourselves acting like one. A reverie-based cuisine need not be entirely without cookbooks, however, or useful instruction; see Daniel Spoerri's Mythology & Meatballs or Patience Gray's Honey from a Weed (both discussed later in these pages). In my first, never-finished effort, I was trying to write such a book myself... and, I guess, I still am. If I ever manage it, the essay that follows, \"Plowman's Lunch,\" might well serve as its prolegomenon.\n\nWhen Karyl Bannister isn't phoning readers, she's stirring up controversy over the origins of Wellesley fudge cake\u2014or sharing the secret for an easy homemade tortilla chip or the recipe for Uncle Henry's oyster loaf. A rambunctious, very participatory sort of food letter: Cook & Tell, Love's Cove, West Southport, ME 04576 ($12 a year for 10 issues\u2014sample issue $1).\n\nIf there is any merit to these distinctions, then still another might be extrapolated from them\u2014that of Italian-American pasta dishes, made out of the povera tradition of generous servings of pasta, but sauced with plenty of meat and cheese from a newfound abbondanza. This third category\u2014let's call it pasta contadini\u2014is one that is understandably unsettling to rich and poor Italian Italians alike, but no less valid (and no less \"authentic\") for all that.\n\nHow many readers have ever encountered\u2014outside a restaurant\u2014pasta served as a first course? Food writers toss this off so casually that it must be a regular occurrence in their lives. Not in mine\u2014nor in anyone else's I know. Americans don't generally eat pasta as a first course. Why, then, do these books keep mentioning it as if we did? Because the notion of pasta as an appetizer lends more credence to the doctrine of small portions\u2014and genteel pasta eating\u2014just as Anna Del Conte uses it here.\n\nThis puts to the lie, by the by, Giuliano Bugialli's flat dictum in Bugialli on Pasta: \"I cannot state strongly enough that grated cheese is never added to any aglio-olio preparation.\"\n\nThis is no idle fancy. In The Unprejudiced Palate, Angelo Pellegrini writes of working with \"a powerful son of Athens whose reverence for garlic left nothing to be desired. He used it daily internally and externally. He ate it regularly raw and rubbed it on his chest and in his nostrils.\"\n\nArabella Boxer, in her Mediterranean Cookbook, calls them \"foul beans\"\u2014which seems an unfortunate way of putting it, especially since ful itself means \"bean,\" the phrase thus translating into the not-very-explanatory \"bean beans.\" The word medames is colloquial Egyptian and is simply the dish's name, probably deriving from the dammasa, or stewpot, it is made in.\n\nAlso an important limitation: As anyone who has tried to cook with a wok over an American range will know from bitter experience, our gas burners just don't generate sufficient heat for the instantaneous cooking that true stir-frying requires\u2014a fact most Chinese cookbooks don't go especially out of their way to explain.\n\nNoel Comess, an American artisanal baker, says that he never understood why farmers talked interminably about the weather\u2014until he began baking bread (as reported by Stephen Lewis in Gourmet, October 1990).\n\nIf, despite your best efforts, either no rising takes place or the result is flaccid, smelly, and wholly untrustworthy-seeming, dispose of it and purchase a bag of dehydrated sourdough starter from a reliable source such as Walnut Acres (Penns Creek, PA 17862) or Sourdoughs International (see below). Then proceed to make any of the loaves as directed, substituting a small quantity of the powdered starter for the activated dough in the sponge. Be sure to save a small piece of this dough as the starter (or chef) for the next batch.\n\nMy favorite moment after reading much of it comes from Tom Jaine, who speaks of the pleasure of\u2014every once in a while\u2014grasping the dough by its throat, lifting it over the head, and slamming it down onto the counter with a resounding thump. This act is not only rich in symbolism and catharsis, it also accomplishes the two necessary parts of kneading in one dramatic geste.\n\nThe crackling crisp crust that is the hallmark of the French boule or baguette is created in professional ovens by introducing bursts of hot steam through jets at crucial moments in the baking process. Using the moisture from a moist dough in the confined space of the bread cloche has an elegant simplicity that I find much preferable to such melodramatic and (to me) scary tricks as throwing ice cubes onto the oven floor or dropping a red-hot bar of iron into a pan of water beneath the baking loaf.\n\nInterested readers should consult Harold McGee's comments on yeast throughout On Food and Cooking and Edward Behr's essay \"Of Wild Yeast, Rhode Island Rye, and Indian Corn\" in the Spring 1989 issue of The Art of Eating.\n\n\"Just take the full of the little blue jug of milk, as much as you think of flour, a taste of salt and a suspicion of bread soda. And then you mix it\u2014but you don't want to wet it, if you know what I mean,\" says Laura Feeney in Maura Laverty's charming Full and Plenty.\n\nLiz Jeffries, speaking to Rosalind Cole in, again, Of Soda Bread and Guinness. This is a book rich in soda-bread lore (see, for instance, the contribution by Brian McMahon) and good advice. Here's another comment from Liz Jeffries: \"We made griddle bread, too, baked on a flat griddle. We would use sour milk, at least a week old, and sour butter. Butter is much better when it's made from sour cream; the sourer the butter, the better the bread, I'd say. Good butter is what's needed for good food.\" Amen to that.\n\n\"Living with Martha,\" New York magazine, January 28, 1991. All the following biographical material is drawn from that profile, and from Nancy Harmon Jenkins's \"Viewing Women's Lives through a Martha Stewart Fantasy,\" The Boston Sunday Globe, April 28, 1991, and Frank Lovece's \"Lady of the House,\" Trump's, June 1990.\n\nThe information on which this review is based has been gleaned from the book's introductory material and from K. T. Butler's seminal essay on Castelvetro, An Italian's Message to England in 1614: \"Eat More Fruit and Vegetables.\" Italian Studies, II, no. 5 (1938), pp. 1\u201318.\n\nAn Itinerary: 1617 (Glasgow, 1907), Vol. IV, p. 99. (Quoted from K. T. Butler, op. cit., p. 3.) Patience Gray suggests, sensibly I think, that the word Fynes Moryson heard\u2014or remembered\u2014as scoccatori was really scocciatori\u2014i.e., not \"shifters\" but \"disturbers\" of meals. \u2020 Ibid., Vol. IV, p. 173. (Quoted from Butler, p. 4.)\n\nTranslated literally: \"A brief account of all the roots, herbs and fruit that are eaten raw or cooked in Italy\"\u2014the category \"herbs\" here embraces what we might call greens, and this, added to the \"roots,\" subsumes the whole category of vegetables, for which in Italian there is no single, all-embracing word. Herbs, as we know them\u2014basi!, thyme, rosemary, etc.\u2014although they are mentioned, are not, in fact, given separate entries, a misleading aspect of the English title.\n\nThat is, the slightly fermented juice of unripe sour grapes. Since it is unavailable here, it's worth noting that Castelvetro sometimes just squeezes a handful of unripe grapes into a stew or over a salad instead.\n\nThis and all following quotations from Patience Gray are from a personal letter sent to me and reprinted with her express permission. Of course, I take all responsibility for the paraphrases.\n\nSee pages 41-42 of the book for the translator's complete discussion of this matter.\n\nLettere all'Aldrovandi, Costanzo Felici da Piobbico (Giorgio Nonni, ed. Urbino: Quattro Venti, 1982).\n\nHorn devotes the penultimate chapter of The Taste of China\u2014\"Food for the Body and Soul\"\u2014to Chinese medicinal foodstuffs and the vegetarian cooking of Daoists and Buddhists. In Sichuan province, he visits a famous herbal market, which first appeared \"to be one huge spice market, but closer inspection revealed... vendors, both wholesalers and retailers, haggling amid dried carcasses of snakes and skeletons of monkeys, cattle, and goats. All around were mounds of dried citrus fruits, wasp hives, dried starfish and sea cucumber, dried crab and scallop shells. I began counting the various mounds and sacks of plants, roots, and herbs but stopped when I reached two hundred.\"\n\nAnother entertaining example of this: a Greek friend gives her a lesson in the proper cooking of fresh haricot beans, which instruction produces a great and delicious-sounding stew of olive oil, beans, onions, tomatoes, and aromatics. There is so much of it that the author generously decides to share these beans with an elderly neighbor\u2014who, \"brought up with prejudice and believing them to be cooked by me and foreign in consequence, later threw them to the pig.\"\n\nAvailable in the U.S.A. from Books International, 3950 Park Center Road, Herndon, VA 22071. Write or call (703) 435-7064 for current price and shipping charges.\n\nRoy Andries de Groot, Revolutionizing French Cooking (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), p. 74.\nCopyright \u00a9 1992 by John Thorne\n\nAll rights reserved\n\nFirst paperback edition, 1994\n\nNorth Point Press   \nA division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux   \n18 West 18th Street, New York 10011\n\nPublished in 1992 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux\n\nPortions of this book first appeared, some in different form, in Wigwag Magazine,   \nAmerican Food & Wine, The Journal of Gastronomy, Harper's Magazine, and in the   \nauthors' Simple Cooking food letters.\n\nGrateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint copyrighted material:\n\nWilliam Morrow: Excerpt from The Complete Book of Pasta, by Jack Denton Scott. Copyright \u00a9 1968 by Jack Denton Scott. Reprinted by permission.\n\nDoubleday: Excerpts from The Cooking of South-West France, by Paula Wolfert. Copyright \u00a9 1983 by Paula Wolfert.\n\nChiang Jung-feng and Ellen Schrecker: Excerpt from Mrs. Chiang's Szechwan Cookbook, by Chiang Jung-feng and Ellen Schrecker with John Schrecker. Copyright \u00a9 1976 by Chiang Jung-feng and Ellen Schrecker. Harper & Row. Reprinted by permission.\n\nA. 1. Liebling: Excerpt from Between Meals. Copyright \u00a9 1962 by A. J. Liebling, renewed in 1987 by Norma Liebling Stonehill. Reprinted by permission of Russell & Volkening as agents for the author.\n\nThe New York Times: Excerpt from \"Vive la Baguette: As French as Paris,\" by Patricia Wells. Copyright \u00a9 1983 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.\n\nJ. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.: Excerpt from The Constance Spry Cookery Book, by Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume. Copyright \u00a9 1956 by J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd. Reprinted by permission.\n\nSydney Clark: Excerpt from All the Best in Italy, by Sydney Clark. Copyright \u00a9 1968 by Dodd, Mead & Co.\n\nAlfred A. Knopf: Excerpt from Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Vol. 1), by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, and Julia Child; copyright \u00a9 1961 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; reprinted by permission. Excerpt from Beard on Bread, by James Beard; copyright \u00a9 1973 by James A. Beard; reprinted by permission.\n\nDover Publications, Inc.: Excerpts from The Complete Book of Pasta, by Enrica Jarratt and Vernon Jarratt. Copyright \u00a9 1969 by Enrica and Vernon Jarratt. Reprinted by permission.\n\nBill Penzey, Jr.: Excerpt from Penzey's Spice House Ltd. Winter 1991\u201492 Price List, by Bill Penzey. Jr. Reprinted by permission.\n\nPantheon Books: Excerpt from The Tin Drum, by G\u00fcnter Grass. Copyright \u00a9 1963 by G\u00fcnter Grass. Reprinted by permission.\n\nJanice Biala: Excerpt from Provence, by Ford Madox Ford. Copyright 1935 by Ford Madox Ford. Copyright renewed 1962 by Mrs. Janice Biala Brustlein. Reprinted by permission of Janice Biala.\n\nRandom House, Inc.: Excerpts from Speak, Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov. Copyright 1944 by Vladimir Nabokov, Reprinted by permission.\n\nDutton: Excerpt from Jane and Prudence, by Barbara Pym. Copyright by Barbara Pym. Used by permission of the publisher, Dutton, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc.\n\nHarperCollins Publishers: Excerpts from Honey from a Weed, by Patience Gray; copyright \u00a9 1986 by Patience Gray; reprinted by permission. Excerpt from The Cook's Encyclopedia, by Tom Stobart; copyright \u00a9 1980 by Cameron & Tayleur (Books) Limited; reprinted by permission. Excerpts from Paula Wolfert's World of Food, by Paula Wolfert. Copyright \u00a9 1988 by Paula Wolfert. Excerpt from Italian Food, by Elizabeth David; copyright 1954, \u00a9 1963, 1987 by Elizabeth David; reprinted by permission.\n\nSimon & Schuster: Excerpts from The Taste of China, by Ken Hom. Copyright \u00a9 1990 by Taurom Incorporated. Reprinted by permission.\n\nAncel Keys: Excerpts from How to Eat Well and Stay Well the Mediterranean Way, by Ancel and Margaret Keys. Copyright \u00a9 1975 by Ancel and Margaret Keys. Reprinted by permission.\n\nPan Books: Excerpt from Middle Eastern Cookery, by Arto der Haroutunian. Copyright \u00a9 1982 by Arto der Haroutunian. Reprinted by permission.\n\nGrateful acknowledgment is also made to Madeleine Kamman, Colman Andrews, Dr. Edward Wood, and Michael Rosen for permission to reprint material previously published in our food letter, Simple Cooking, and to Patience Gray, carissima amica, for permission to print excerpts from a letter to the authors regarding Giacomo Castelvetro.\n\nwww.fsgbooks.com\n\neISBN 9781466806177\n\nFirst eBook Edition : November 2011\n\nThe Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:\n\nThorne, John.\n\nOutlaw Cook / John Thorne ; with Matt Lewis Thorne.\u20141st ed.\n\np. cm.\n\nIncludes bibliographical references and index.\n\n1. Cookery. 1. Thorne, Matt Lewis. II. Title\n\nTX652.T459 1992\n\n641.5\u2014dc20\n\n92008281\n\n"], ["\nJames Beard\n\nBeard on Food\n\nOther books by James Beard\n\nHors _d'Oeuvre and Canapes_\n\n_Cook It Outdoors_\n\n_Fowl and Game Cookery_\n\n_The Fireside Cookbook_\n\n_Paris Cuisine_\n\n(with Alexander Watt)\n\n_James Beard's New Fish Cookery_\n\n_How to Eat Better for Less Money_\n\n_(with Sam Aaron)_\n\n_The Complete Book of Outdoor Cookery_\n\n_(with Helen Evans_ Brown)\n\n_The James Beard Cookbook_\n\n_James Beard's Treasury of Outdoor Cooking_\n\n_Delights and Prejudices_\n\n_James Beard's Menus for Entertaining_\n\n_How to Eat ( & Drink) _Your _Way Through_\n\n_a French (or Italian) Menu_\n\n_James Beard's American Cookery_\n\n_James Beard's Theory & Practice of Good Cooking_\n\n_The New James Beard_\n\n_Beard on Birds_\n\n_Beard on Pasta_\n\n_James_ Beard's _Simple Foods_\n\n_Love and Kisses and a Halo of Truffles:_\n\n_Letters to Helen Evans_ Brown\n\n_The Armchair James Beard_\nJames Beard\n\nBeard on Food\n\nThe Best Recipes and Kitchen Wisdom\n\nfrom the Dean of American Cooking\n\n_Assisted by Jos_ _\u00e9_ _Wilson_\n\n_Illustrations by Karl Stuecklen_\n\nB L O O M S B U R Y\nCopyright \u00a9 1974 by James Beard\n\nIllustrations Copyright \u00a9 1977, 1983 by Karl W. Stuecklen\n\nIntroductory Note Copyright \u00a9 1999 by Julia Child\n\nForeword Copyright \u00a9 2007 by Mark Bittman\n\nUpdate Copyright \u00a9 2007 by Mitchell Davis\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.\n\nPublished by Bloomsbury USA, New York\n\nDistributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers\n\nAll papers used by Bloomsbury USA are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.\n\nLIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR..\n\neISBN: 978-1-59691-715-6\n\nOriginally published in the U.S. by Knopf in 1974\n\nReissued by Running Press, a division of Perseus, in 2000\n\nThis edition published in 2007 by Bloomsbury USA\n\n10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1\n\nPrinted in the United States of America by Quebecor World Taunton\n\n**Editor's Note** (for pages 5, 236-237, and 291):\n\nCooks should be warned that there is some risk in eating raw or undercooked egg yolks and ground meat. The USDA goes so far as to say that all ground beef should be cooked to an internal temperature of 160\u00b0F, which obviously is not possible in recipes calling for raw meat. \n_Contents_\n\n_Introductory Note_\n\n_Foreword_\n\n_Introduction_\n\nMY WAYS WITH MEAT\n\nA GOOD CATCH\n\nEARTHY SUBJECTS\n\nWHIMS OF TASTE\n\nINSPIRATIONS AND IMPROVISATIONS\n\nSWEETS AND SOOTHING DRINKS\n\nBREAD, CHEESE, AND WINE\n\nHANDWORK AND GADGETRY\n\nHOLIDAYS, PARTIES, AND PICNICS\n\nMEMORABLE MEALS, PLACES, AND PEOPLE\n\nGASTRONOMIC MUSINGS\n\nBEARD ON FOOD TODAY: AN UPDATE\n\nA SUBJECT GUIDE TO THE RECIPES\n\n_Index_\n_Introductory Note_\n\n_I_ t is wonderful for all of us who treasure James Beard to know that his works are being kept alive for everyone to enjoy. What a pleasure for those of us who knew Jim to read him again, and what a treasure and happy discovery for new generations who will now know him. He reads just as he talked, and to read him is like being with him, with all his warmth, humor, and wisdom.\n\nBeard appeared on the American culinary scene in 1940, with his first book, Hors _d'Oeuvre and Canap_ \u00e9 _s,_ which is still in print more than fifty years later. Born in Portland, Oregon at the beginning of this century, he came from a food-loving background and started his own catering business after moving to New York in 1938. He soon began teaching, lecturing, giving culinary demonstrations, writing articles and more books (eventually twenty in all). Through the years he gradually became not only the leading culinary figure in the country, but \"The Dean of American Cuisine.\" He remains with us as a treasured authority, and the James Beard Foundation, housed in his own home on West 12th Street in New York, keeps his image and his love of good food very much alive.\n\nBeard was the quintessential American cook. Well-educated and well-traveled during his eighty-two years, he was familiar with many cuisines but he remained fundamentally American. He was a big man, over six feet tall, with a big belly, and huge hands. An endearing and always lively teacher, he loved people, loved his work, loved gossip, loved to eat, loved a good time.\n\nI always remember him for his generosity toward others in the profession. For instance, when my French colleague, Simone Beck, came to New York for the publication of our first book, my husband and I knew no one at all in the food business, since we had been living abroad for fifteen years. Nobody had ever heard of us, but our book fortunately got a most complimentary review from Craig Claiborne in the _New York Times._ Although we had never met him before, it was Jim who greeted us warmly and introduced us to the New York food scene and its personalities. He wanted friends to meet friends, and he literally knew \"everyone who was anyone\" in the business. He was not only generous in bringing them together, but eager that they know each other. It was he who introduced us to the late Joe Baum of the then-famous Restaurant Associates and The Four Seasons, among other famous restaurants. He presented us to Jacques Pepin, at that time a young chef from France who was just making his way in New York, and to Elizabeth David, England's doyenne of food writers, as well as to many others.\n\nIt was not only that he knew everyone, he was also a living encyclopedia of culinary lore and history, and generous about sharing his knowledge. So often when I needed to know something about grains, for instance, I would call him and if the information was not right in his head, he would call back in a few minutes either with the answer or a source. This capability and memory served him well in his books and articles, as well as in conversation and in public interviews.\n\nJames A. Beard was an American treasure, and his books remain the American classics that deserve an honored place on the shelves of everyone who loves food.\n\n\u2014 _Julia Child_\n\n_April I, 1999_\n_Foreword_\n\nThough I never met him, James Beard taught me how to cook, and\u2014more important\u2014how to think intelligently about cooking. In the late sixties and early seventies there was neither the culture nor the community of nonprofessional food lovers that now exists. Even professionals had a difficult time of it; there were few cooking schools, and most training was on-the-job. Most of us learned how to cook from our mothers\u2014or from cookbooks.\n\nMy mother taught me a few things, as did my grandmother. But cooking became serious for me when, as a senior in college, I fell in with a bunch of women who were avid cooks. These women (one of whom would later become my wife) relied on books by Craig Claiborne and Paula Peck. Within a year or two, completely enamored, I had bought my first cook-books: _The Joy of Cooking_ and Julia Child's Mastering _the Art of French Cooking._ But it wasn't until the mid-seventies that I discovered James Beard, a literate, candid, forward-thinking, life-loving treasure.\n\nOther people gave you recipes, sometimes detailed (Ms. Child), sometimes spare and functional (Mr. Claiborne). James Beard gave you logic, emotion, history, and consideration. He gave you confidence, and he let you relax. In a time when serious cooking meant French cooking, Beard was quintessentially American, a westerner whose mother ran a boardinghouse, a man who grew up with hotcakes and salmon and meatloaf in his blood. A man who was born a hundred years ago on the other side of the country, in a city, Portland, that at the time was every bit as cosmopolitan as, say, Allegheny PA.\n\nSomehow, this boardinghouse kid, who grew up watching real people cook real food, wound up teaching, hands-on, about half the chefs and food writers who started the \"American food revolution\" of the seventies and eighties. In the middle of the latter decade, when he died and the tributes and the foundations began, I was an unknown food writer\u2014at least outside of New Haven, where I lived. But I started to plug into the burgeoning New York scene, where it seemed everyone but me had cooked with Beard, or at least taken some classes at his famous house. The stories were legion, and they made it clear that this man's presence was as inspiring as his writing.\n\nThat presence is gone, but the books remain, and this one\u2014which happens to be the first of his I bought, back around 1975\u2014is quite likely the most fun.\n\nAnd what a prescient book it was. Ceviche? Please, no one outside of Mexico and South America had even heard of it. Crayfish? I guess, if you were from Louisiana. Hummus? What was that? Gravlax? Not a chance. Even pasta with olive oil and garlic had yet to be discovered by Americans. Yet Beard had not only recipes for all of these but also anecdotes and explanations and wisdom to share.\n\nRevisiting Beard _on Food,_ I realize that one reason James Beard was so far ahead of his time was that he had no formal training, and therefore none of the restrictions that came with it; another is that he had regular writing deadlines, which, especially after a few years, drive the writer to constantly seek new and interesting fodder. So his avant-garde qualities were to be expected.\n\nNow, years later, we've caught up to him. We're all experts in the world of ceviche, crayfish, and gravlax, in terms of knowledge at least, if not in skill and perhaps pleasure. Yet Beard's approach remains invaluable to real people cooking real food.\n\nIn part, that's because he always brought his experiences\u2014he traveled the country and the world, especially Europe\u2014vividly home to readers, nowhere more so than in this volume. Take this: \"In summers past, when salmon was at its peak in the rivers, the traditional Fourth of July dinner was boiled or poached salmon with egg sauce and the first new potatoes and green peas of the year.\" Here is a man with links to the nineteenth century, who saw the virtual collapse of honest American cooking after World War II, speaking about a scene that had disappeared from the landscape\u2014but is now reappearing, another _fifty years_ later. The farmers' markets that are a part of Beard's legacy\u2014he was a formidable supporter of the early ones, which were mostly on the West Coast\u2014are now found in most cities and towns, and once again we can look forward to good local and seasonal vegetables.\n\nBut Beard's most valuable legacy is his recipe writing. His recipes worked, but he also had a way of letting you move within them that inspired creativity and learning. Julia was precise; she led you to believe that a single mistake could alter a dish beyond recognition: coq au vin was made just so. In twenty minutes, Beard could make anyone expert at sauteing chicken; he could teach you how to bake bread without breaking a sweat; he even went so far as to popularize the so-called Canadian theory of fish cooking. (This held that no matter what the technique, if you cook fish for ten minutes per inch of thickness you'll have success: an oversimplification, but an effective one.) All of this inspired me to cook without making a big deal of it.\n\nBeard didn't make a big deal out of _anything,_ it seemed. He encouraged the use of good, often simple ingredients. He taught that a recipe could be tweaked an infinite number of ways (check out Beard _on Birds_ for a good example of that), and that for the home cook, confidence, experience, and relaxation in the kitchen were far more important than training or detailed instructions. His passion, his knowledge, his easygoing erudition were instrumental in bringing good cuisine back to America. He can still inspire cooks, both experienced and novice. Since the publication of Beard _on Food_ in 1974, _a_ number of restaurants and other institutions referred to by Beard may have ceased to exist, and the reader is well advised to check before planning a visit. Though less useful, Beard's comments on these restaurants and the food they served are still worth preserving.\n\n\u2014Mark Bittman\n\nApril 2007\n_Introduction_\n\n_B eard on Food _is my selection of the weekly syndicated newspaper columns that I have written over the last four years. I have picked those that express most vividly my beliefs, my pleasures, my memories, and occasionally my prejudices. I feel pretty strongly about certain things and my column gives me the opportunity to be honest and outspoken about my likes and dislikes; to share my impressions, my discoveries in restaurants here and abroad and at other people's tables; and to give recipes that I think are worthwhile. If I write about hamburgers or chili, which might seem rather mundane foods, there's a reason. Both are very American, a part of our traditions, and I happen to think nothing is better than a properly cooked hamburger or a bowl of really good chili. To perfect a recipe, however simple, is the secret of success in cooking.\n\nPeople often say to me, \"How can you get fresh ideas all the time? Isn't it hard to find something to write about every week?\" To me it isn't. Writing a column keeps me constantly aware, interested, curious, and experimental. Fortunately, I'm blessed with keen taste and sight memories, which are easily awakened; I find myself reliving so intensely how something tasted when I was a child\u2014or a young man, or ten years ago, or just last week\u2014that I have the urge to write about it, to share that memory, and perhaps play around with the taste I recall and develop a recipe every bit as good as the dish I remember. Then I am always intrigued by new foods, new equipment, new developments in cooking, and the column gives me a place to talk about them. When I wander into a market (one of my greatest weaknesses, wherever I go), I may see a different cut of meat or an unusual vegetable and think, \"I wonder how it would be if I took the recipe for that sauce I had in Provence and put the two together?\" So I go home and try it out. Sometimes my idea is a success and sometimes it is a flop, but that is how recipes are born. There are really no new recipes, only millions of variations sparked by somebody's imagination and desire to be a little bit creative and different. American cooking, after all, is built on variations of old recipes from around the world.\n\nTravel is an important part of my food life. I have eaten in great restaurants, in fledgling restaurants, in tiny bistros, at roadside stands, in people's homes, and in markets. I remember the first time I went to the Nice market and tasted socca, a wonderful sort of pancake of chickpea flour and oil. How I reveled in it! I couldn't find a published recipe so I experimented until I found how to duplicate that special taste and texture and then told my readers how to make it.\n\nFood is our common ground, a universal experience. My column has brought me floods of mail and a great sense of intimacy with all of you. Many of you have written about your own taste memories in a very nostalgic and touching way, or sent me your family recipes. Often one of these letters becomes the inspiration for a column. I find it stimulating to have this constant exchange of thoughts and opinions and ideas, and I am gratified to know that I can give you pleasure and perhaps help you to become more critical as well as more appreciative of food, because constructive criticism is mighty important.\n\nI hope you will not only read and enjoy this book, but also take it into your kitchen, try the recipes and maybe add your own touches. If I can share with you the delight and excitement food has given me throughout my life, then I will have achieved what I set out to do.\n\n\u2014JAMES BEARD\n CHAPTER 1 _ _\n\n_My Ways With Meat_\n\n_... in which we discover how the hamburger took over America ... encounter the steak of the Tartars, cannibal sandwiches_ , _and a nice piece of London broil ... raise the devil in cooking ... learn how to be canny about beef cuts ... experience the pleasures of pot-au-feu and Irish stew ... are told the secrets of good grilling ... have our meat hot and cold ... track down a good ham, create our own \"charcuterie_ ,\" _become friends with bacon ... make a hash of things and talk turkey._\n\n_Hamburger Can Be Great_\n\nHamburger is so firmly established in America's culinary Hall of Fame that it comes as rather a shock to discover it didn't originate in America at all. The city where it was probably first eaten\u2014Hamburg, Germany\u2014disavows any connection between their kind of hamburger and ours. There, for centuries, chopped beef and onions have been formed into patties and cooked in a little fat on top of the stove, then served, sometimes with gravy made in the pan, as a main course. According to all the great French cookbooks, Germany gets the credit for this dish, which the French call bifteck \u00e0 la hambourgeoise. It is very often served _a cheval,_ or with an egg on top, and very good it is too.\n\nThere are all kinds of theories about how hamburger landed on a bun, the way we mostly eat it today. One school claims that it all started in a New York delicatessen, another that it was first served in that fashion at the St. Louis Fair, while various and sundry persons all claim to know the secret of the original hamburger.\n\nWherever and however the hamburger made its debut, it has certainly taken over the country. Chains like McDonald's, which sell millions of hamburgers a year, have made a billion-dollar business out of it. When I was growing up, there was a chain in the West that served the most elaborate and delicious hamburger imaginable\u2014a four-ounce patty on a toasted and buttered bun, smothered with mustard, mayonnaise, relish, sliced dill pickle, tomato, onion, and lettuce. It was wrapped, diaper fashion, in a paper napkin and slipped into a glassine envelope to prevent the lovely juices from dribbling down your front as you ate. These hamburgers were extraordinarily good, and as I remember, they cost all of fifteen cents.\n\n I have a Favorite _Hamburger_ recipe that I've used for years. It's subtle, it surprises a great many people, and I happen to think it's one of the best ways to cook hamburger. You take 2 pounds of top-quality chopped round or chuck, spread it out on a board, and grate 2 to 3 tablespoons of onion into it\u2014use a fairly fine grater so you get just the juice and very finely grated raw onion. Now mix in about a tablespoon of heavy cream and some freshly ground black pepper. Form into patties \u2014I like a 6-or 8-ounce patty for an average serving.\n\nAs to the cooking, it is my firm belief that a hamburger is best cooked in a heavy skillet with a combination of butter and oil, which prevents the butter from burning when you cook at high heat. I think this gives a crustier, juicier hamburger than broiling, unless you happen to have a really good broiler that browns the meat fast. So take your trusty old black iron skillet or your best copper one or your pet aluminum frying pan, Teflon-coated or not (with a Teflon coating you won't need much fat, just a little bit for flavor), and cook your hamburger in the butter and oil over fairly high heat, giving it 4 to 5 minutes a side, depending on how well done you like it. I like mine crusty on the outside and very rare in the center. Salt this creamy, oniony, peppery hamburger before serving it on a buttered bun or English muffin, or as a main course with sliced tomatoes and onions or some home-fried potatoes.\n\nWith that creamy, oniony flavor running through the meat you won't need any ketchup or condiments. Mind you, the addition of cream means that the meat will not be as pinky-red as usual, but if you want a hamburger that is out of the ordinary, this is it. With a good salad it makes a most satisfying meal.\n\nI'm also very fond of hamburger au poivre, an offshoot of the steak _au poivre_ (steak with coarsely crushed peppercorns pressed into the surface) you find in many French restaurants. I don't advise this for a hamburger sandwich, but _Hamburger au Poivre_ makes a good main dish.\n\n  Form ground beef into 6-or 8-ounce patties (I prefer a generous 8 ounce serving). Grind or crush 1 to 2 tablespoons of black peppercorns (use a coarse pepper mill or a blender, or crack them with a weight), and press a goodly amount into both sides of the patties. Broil, if you like, or saute according to the method given in the previous recipe. When done to your taste, salt the hamburgers on both sides. Then, if you want to be opulent, flame them. Pour a little bourbon or brandy into the hot pan, ignite, and shake the pan until the flames die down. Serve these sensational hamburgers on very hot plates, with the pan juices spooned over them.\n\nI like to accompany them with a baked potato or lyonnaise potatoes (potatoes mixed with a little onion and cooked until crisply brown) and salad. The hamburger may be a humble food, but it takes kindly to being elevated to a more exalted plane of eating. Just try it.\n\n_Beef in the Raw_\n\nI well remember, when I was a young man, walking into a London brasserie and ordering steak tartare, without having the vaguest notion of what I would get. When the patty of finely chopped lean raw beef with the raw egg yolk and all the other trimmings was put in front of me, I took one look at it and thought someone must be playing a joke on me. The waiter asked if I wanted it mixed, and I said I did. He mixed it, I ate it, and ever since I've been a devotee of this unusual dish, which is so much more appetizing than it sounds. Much later I discovered that in New York and other parts of the United States it was considered a superb hangover cure. People in Prohibition days who were wont to wake up with a pretty heavy head from bootleg liquor swore that if they could just get up, and get down a large order of steak tartare, all their symptoms would be cured. Although I doubt this very much, steak tartare does give one a lift. It's the kind of thing to order when you feel there is nothing you really want to eat.\n\nThere's a rather amusing, if unsubstantiated, story about how steak tartare got its name. It seems that the Tartars, the fierce nomadic tribesmen of Mongolia who were followers of Genghis Khan, were supposed to have carried hunks of raw meat under their saddles, to \"cook\" by friction as they galloped. Traveling merchants from Middle Europe picked up this primitive penchant for uncooked meat, and our version\u2014very lean beef or other red meat, scraped, chopped, or finely ground\u2014is said to have come from them, via France and England.\n\nWhen you order steak tartare in a restaurant in this country, you'll find it is served with all kinds of things\u2014raw egg yolk, little mounds of chopped onion, green onion, or shallot, salt, freshly ground black pepper, capers, and sometimes anchovies, mustard, ketchup, Tabasco, and Worcestershire sauce. The Four Seasons and the Forum of the Twelve Caesars in New York mix in a little cognac, as well. The service of steak tartare in either of these restaurants is a truly remarkable table side feat. Using two dinner knives, your capable captain or waiter scrapes the seasonings into the meat, reshapes it into a flat patty, and then works everything else in separately, first the egg, then the onion, the capers, the anchovies, each time raking the meat mixture with the knife blades until the final texture is so fine and smooth it is almost a pomade. In most restaurants you do the mixing yourself, which can be fun, too.\n\nTo me, French mustard is a necessity in steak tartare, for it gives a lovely, creamy quality, but I've never felt ketchup added much. It makes the whole thing rather sweet. Of course, there's nothing to prevent your eating the raw beef with only salt and freshly ground pepper. Provided your beef is impeccably fresh and impeccably lean, and chopped, ground, or scraped within minutes of the time you eat it, so it keeps its color and freshness, it is extremely good eating without any added embellishments. Be sure always to buy sirloin, top round, or fillet cuts which have the necessary leanness, tenderness, and flavor.\n\nGermany makes a great hors d'oeuvre with steak tartare. The meat, seasoned only with salt and pepper, is spread diagonally on half a toast square. Fresh caviar goes on the other half, with lemon on the side. You don't mix the meat and caviar, but eat them together. _(See Editor's Note, copyright page.)_\n\n_ _ The French make a greater ceremony of Steak _Tartare_ than anyone else. Not long ago I watched a waiter in a Cannes restaurant prepare steak tartare. He began with an egg yolk and about _ _ to _ _ cup of olive oil in a soup plate, stirring it very rapidly with a fork until it emulsified, forming a thin kind of mayonnaise. To this he added freshly ground pepper, chopped parsley, chopped onion, capers, and other seasonings, working the mixture constantly with the fork. Finally, he worked in the raw beef, making a very loose, rich, flavorful, and highly seasoned mixture. With French bread, thinly sliced rye bread, or hot unbuttered toast, this makes a most glorious spring or summer luncheon.\n\nAs a matter of fact, I know people who still make mayonnaise this way, in a soup plate with a fork, stirring the oil into the egg yolk a very little at a time and working very fast. The mayonnaise has a thicker, stiffer texture than that made in a blender or with a rotary or electric mixer and some regard that thicker mixture as more authentic, more truly French.\n\nI like to serve a big bowl of steak tartare with cocktails, mixing in some finely chopped garlic and onion and an egg yolk (for cocktail food, you don't want too thin a mixture). I sprinkle the top with chopped parsley or a little rosemary and serve it with plain or Melba toast, or small slices of pumpernickel or rye bread, with little knives for spreading. This is great with drinks, because it provides something substantial for the stomach. If you have friends who swear they'll never eat raw meat, you can fool them by rolling the mixture into tiny balls and rolling these in coarsely chopped toasted pecans, walnuts, or hazelnuts.\n\n_The Way It Was_\n\nOne of the pleasantest things about writing a column is the mail I get. Some of the things I write about seem to strike a universal chord, and I get floods of letters. Often I hear from people who just want to share their own food experiences with me\u2014and how evocative some of their reminiscences are. In response to my column on steak tartare, I got one of the most delightful and nostalgic letters I've had in a long time, filled with an appreciation of food and good living. It came from a Mr. Alexander Shaw, an architect in Bel Air, Maryland, and I'd like to quote some of it because I think you'll enjoy it as much as I did.\n\n\"I've just finished reading your appetite-whetting article on beef Tartare and besides making me drool, it has stirred many wonderful memories of a glorious small-town boyhood only Mark Twain could have described, and my own introduction to beef Tartare. Mine was no sudden British surprise, though Overton's and Simpson's and many others in Europe were to come later, but one of pure evolution\u2014right from the start.\n\n\"Back in the days of Taft, Teddy and Woodrow, yes, back when Bel Air had dirt streets, tree-lined, deep shade patterned with brilliant sunshine, and a population of about eight hundred, we had services you couldn't find in Utopia itself today, such as door to door sales and deliveries. Each day started out early with the milk man\u2014he furnished the cow, you furnished the container. He dipped it warm and frothy from a big can right into your own brown stone bowl, and all you had to do was put a cover on it to keep the cats out. Next came the ice man hawking big chunks of dirty pond ice dug out of mounds of straw. The wagon had canvas sides painted white, lettered with 'ICE' on each side, looking like a big block of melting ice with four wheels on it. Then in rapid succession came other wagons: the bread man, fruit and vegetable gypsies and, on Fridays, old Skinner all the way from Havre de Grace on the Susquehanna, 17 miles away, with 'fresh' fish.\n\n\"But most of all I awaited alternate days for the arrival of the butcher wagon. This I will never forget\u2014it was a large wagon with a rigid top, lots of hooks hanging from the bows, dangling whole, half and quarter carcasses of beef, lamb, veal, and pork. The driver/meat cutter, an unforgettable colored man named Ike, who seemed to always have a thumb or two on the scales with his sales, used to always hand my dog a bone and me some nice scraps of round or sirloin (they didn't sell it ground in those days). And that's how I became an aficionado of raw beef.\n\n\"A few years later Bel Air started to grow up and sported a new diner featuring the first hamburgers, which I ate raw with hot horseradish. And then off to college and the wonderful Christmas holidays with all those cook chicks, peach brandy and needled beer. That's when I met my first real, honest-to-God steak tartare face to face\u2014raw egg, chopped onion, fresh pepper, the works. It had to be at the Rennert, Momenthy's or the Metropolitan Smoke Shop, a 'speak' up on Howard Street. But I could never forget those lunches at the Merchants Club beginning with a dozen Ocean Coves followed by\u2014you guessed it\u2014superb tartare. I think they used chopped sirloin and I have always liked very hot horseradish with it.\n\n\"As I have grown older I have had the good fortune to be able to travel around a bit, and have savored our old friend in many forms from San Francisco to Salzburg, but I certainly must make mention of the huge mounds of ground round at the Optimist Club's oyster roast at the Pikesville Armory each February\u2014served with pumpernickel, salt, pepper, and sliced Bermuda onions and gallons of beer. No fancy name here, just plain Cannibal Sandwich and it justly rivals the oysters in popularity.\"\n\nMy thanks to you, Mr. Shaw, not only for sharing your memories with me, but also for awakening my own. I, too, remember the vegetable man and the ice man, the traveling butcher, and a man who sold fat luscious tamales and drove through the streets calling his wares. One of the most picturesque vendors we had in the West was the hominy man, who came twice a week with big tins of fresh whole hominy and freshly grated horseradish.\n\nHominy (not to be confused with ground hominy grits, for which I have very little affection) is corn steamed with lye to remove the seed germ and hull and swell the kernels. Whole hominy is difficult to find now, except in cans, but it is worth searching for. One of the simplest and best dishes I know is sauteed hominy with cream; it's magnificent with fried chicken (or most any chicken dish), with roast pork or pork chops, even roast turkey or duck.\n\n To make _Sauteed Hominy with Cream: A_ can of hominy will serve two persons well, or three skimpily, so for four to six, wash the contents of two 1-pound, 13-ounce cans of whole hominy slightly. Heat it in 6 tablespoons butter, shaking the pan and tossing the kernels gently so they don't break up. Season well with salt and a good deal of freshly ground black pepper\u2014pepper really enhances hominy. When heated through, add _ _to _ _cup heavy cream, and let it just cook down and blend with the lovely, soft, delicately flavored kernels. Taste to make sure you have enough seasoning, particularly pepper, and serve in a hot vegetable dish sprinkled with a little chopped parsley.\n\nIf you've never tasted whole hominy, you have a new treat in store.\n\n_Steak with a Difference_\n\nOne of the most common restaurant luncheon items these days, to be found everywhere from the greasy spoon to the very elegant and high-priced establishments, is London Broil. Exactly what is London broil? Ask a butcher today and you'll get all kinds of answers. Some will hedge, some will tell you the truth, and others will just offer you any old cut of beef.\n\nUp until the last few years, London broil meant just one thing\u2014broiled flank steak. This is a thin piece of meat with very noticeable long coarse graining that comes from the flank, the part of the animal below the loin section. The fat is torn off and the meat trimmed, leaving a triangular steak about three-quarters of an inch thick in the middle and thinner at the ends. The flank used to be considered a tough cut, and so it is in the lesser grades, but if you buy prime or choice, the two top U.S. Department of Agriculture grades, the flank is an excellent broiling cut with the advantage of being much less expensive than the more glamorous upper-echelon steaks like porterhouse and sirloin.\n\nLondon broil, which is very lean and therefore much favored by dieters, has become immensely popular of late, and the demand for flank steak has risen accordingly. So now supermarkets and butchers are beginning to market all sorts of different cuts under the name of London broil \u2014 sirloin butt or rump steak, rib eye steak, even top round. Don't be taken in or fobbed off. It is the thin, fibrous flank steak that makes the best and most authentic London broil, provided it is cooked and carved correctly.\n\n  For _London Broil,_ a flank steak weighing 2 to 3 pounds will serve four nicely. Rub it with salt, pepper, and maybe a touch of Tabasco, and broil it close to the broiling unit for just 3 to 4 minutes per side, until the outside is nicely charred and the inside juicily rare, as London broil should be. Carve it on the diagonal with a very sharp knife in long thin slices, and serve it with its own juices on well-buttered toast, or alone with a spicy sauce \u2014 pungent tomato sauce, a mustardy sauce, or a zesty sauce diable.\n\n_ _ For _Sauce Diable,_ put  cup tarragon vinegar,  _l A_ cup white wine, 1 finely chopped shallot or green onion, and 1 teaspoon dried tarragon in a heavy pan and cook until reduced by half.\n\nStir in _ _cups brown sauce or a good canned beef gravy, a dash of Tabasco, and 2 teaspoons dry mustard. Bring to a boil and simmer 3 minutes. Season with several grinds of black pepper and strain the sauce. Serve with a sprinkling of chopped parsley or chopped fresh tarragon, if available.\n\nAnother great way to serve London broil is on the lines of a hero sandwich. Split and toast a long loaf of French bread, butter it well, brush it with Dijon mustard and a touch of Tabasco, and arrange thin, thin slices of the broiled steak on the bottom half. Top with the other half and cut it downward in chunks, to be eaten out of hand. The bread must be crisp, the meat rare, and the seasonings zippy.\n\n_ _ Some people like to marinate the steak before broiling. I sometimes use a _Teriyaki Marinade,_ a mixture of _ _cup soy sauce, _ _cup sherry, _l  A _cup peanut oil, 1 to 2 finely chopped garlic cloves, 1 teaspoon grated orange rind and 1 to 2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger root (or a 1-inch piece of finely chopped candied ginger). Leave the steak in this marinade for several hours, turning frequently, before you broil it.\n\nAnother steak that was once rarely seen, but is now appearing more and more in supermarkets, is skirt steak, a very thin steak that comes from the forequarters of the animal, below the rib section. Although it resembles flank steak in many ways and has a good flavor, skirt steak is less tender. A top grade, broiled quickly and seasoned well, then served very rare with mustard or a hot sauce makes another interesting departure from the expensive, thick, well-marbled steak cuts.\n\nBoth flank and skirt steaks may also be braised, advisable if you can't get a top grade. Brown them first on both sides, either under the broiler or in hot fat in a skillet, then add some liquid, such as broth, red wine, water or beer, salt, pepper, garlic and herbs, cover, and cook on top of the stove just long enough to tenderize the meat. The steak will not be rare, but the taste and texture will be delicious. Slice thinly on the diagonal, and serve with the pan juices, baked potatoes, and green beans boiled until just bitey-tender, then smothered with crumbled crisp bacon and a few peanuts, and you'll have an appetizing, economical meal, not as hearty as a pot roast, but equally good.\n\n_What the Devil Is Devil?_\n\nHave you ever wondered just what the devil is devil? So many dishes have the word attached to them that it _is_ rather baffling. Classically speaking, in France a deviled food is one that is grilled, dipped in crumbs, and grilled again until it is brown and crisp and then served with a sauce diable, or devil sauce. In England\u2014and this I take from Escoffier, who cooked there for a great part of his life\u2014most deviled dishes have a very high seasoning as, for instance, deviled roes and deviled sardines, which are not crumbed but seasoned with cayenne, mustard, and Worcestershire sauce and served on toast. As a matter of fact, Escoffier produced a _Sauce Diable,_ a bottled adaptation of the classic devil sauce, which can still be bought in the better food shops, although it is more difficult to find than it used to be.\n\nHere in the United States our deviled eggs are quite different from those of the English. Theirs are fried in slightly browned butter, then the surface is sprinkled with bread crumbs that have been fried in butter with a little dry mustard. The eggs are slid onto a plate, and a drop of vinegar is added to the browned butter, cooked for just a minute, and then poured over the crumbed fried eggs. Ours, of course, are hard-boiled eggs with the yolks removed, mixed with various seasonings, and returned to the whites and served mostly as a cold luncheon dish or an hors d'oeuvre with cocktails.\n\nThen there's another version of deviled\u2014deviled ham or chicken\u2014and how _they_ got to be called deviled the devil only knows. Basically, this is ground ham or chicken, usually with some sweet pickle mixed into it with mustard and other seasonings. It's usually served as a sandwich or cocktail spread and is about as far from the English or French fashion of deviling as one could possibly get. The famous make of deviled ham sold in little cans which you and I have known since our childhood is anything but highly spiced\u2014in fact, it tastes mostly of salt and little else, and why it is labeled \"deviled\" I've never been able to figure out.\n\nThere are other deviled dishes, though, which combine the English and French methods. One is deviled beef bones, of which I am inordinately fond. You usually find these in restaurants where a great deal of roast beef is served, because after the roast beef has been sliced off the bone there are all those rib bones left with tasty bits of meat on them. These meaty bones are dipped in a barbecue sauce or other pungent sauce, broiled, or put in a very hot oven until they are well cooked through, then rolled in crumbs, brushed with butter or oil, and broiled or baked again until lightly browned. They come to you sizzling hot, crunchy with crumbs, and spicy with sauce.\n\nChewing on these delicious morsels of recooked meat is one of the most satisfying gastronomic experiences I know, and the very thought of it sets my taste buds quivering. It is awfully difficult to resist the temptation of taking them up in your fingers and munching on them. If you are well known in the restaurant, they may not regard you askance, but there are times when, for propriety's sake, you have to content yourself with a knife and fork. Just try to scrape every bit of goodness from those beautiful bones. It's well worth the effort.\n\n You can easily make _Deviled Beef Bones_ at home. Just accumulate the bones from two or three roasts (you can freeze them in the interim) until you have a good batch. The bones should have some meat around them, something to chew on. Cut them into ribs, and if you have a meat saw, you can cut the ends off so they look a little neater.\n\nHave ready on a deep plate or pie plate 1 cup _(  l _pound) melted butter flavored with 2 tablespoons tarragon vinegar (or vinegar plus dried or fresh chopped tarragon), and on another plate put 2 to _2  _cups sifted bread crumbs. This will be enough for 8 to 10 ribs. Dip the ribs first in the melted butter, turning them well, then in the crumbs. Press the bones in so the crumbs will adhere. Place them on the broiling rack or on a foil broiling pan, very useful for this kind of thing where the crumbs drip, and broil about 6 to 7 inches from the heat unit so they cook very slowly and the crumbs don't burn. Watch them carefully and keep turning the bones so you get a rich brown coating on all sides. If you are cooking them on an outdoor grill, have them at quite a distance from the coals. Turn them often with tongs and treat them very gingerly, as you don't want all those lovely crumbs to fall off. The cooking time will be 15 to 20 minutes, and the crumbs should get very brown and crispy. Serve the deviled bones with sauce diable (see page 8), and you'll have some of the most delicious eating you've ever known.\n\nYou can devil small broiling chickens, too. Broil them three-quarters done before pressing them in the butter and crumbs, then finish them off under the broiler. Or you can dip squares of honeycomb tripe in the butter and crumbs and broil on both sides until beautifully brown and crisp. So you see there are more ways than one to raise the devil in cooking.\n\n_Tasty, Thrifty Oxtail_\n\n_A_ number of years ago, in one of the most gloriously self-indulgent episodes in my life, I literally ate my way through a book I was working on, _Paris Cuisine,_ for which I tasted and collected recipes from sixty fine Paris restaurants. There was one bistro near where I lived that once a week served a most glorious dish of boned, stuffed oxtail. I begged the patron for the recipe, and finally he let me go into the kitchen and watch it being prepared.\n\nAfter this book was published, people in various parts of this country went to their butchers and asked to have an oxtail boned. You can imagine the reaction! I really think it is a minor miracle that those butchers didn't form a posse, hunt me down and string me up for daring to suggest they might bone an oxtail. Two or three, I believe, did undertake the job, and they are probably still regretting it, for boning an oxtail not only takes deft hands and good knives, but an incredible amount of patience. It's probably just as well that _Paris Cuisine_ is no longer in print.\n\nNow, I'm not going to propose that you undertake this Herculean task. Oxtail unboned makes a very succulent dish, for while there isn't a lot of meat on the joints, what's there is richly gelatinous. When braised, it yields a beautiful, lip-smacking broth or sauce. While there are many different ways to prepare the tail, I enjoy an oxtail ragout most of all. This is not exactly the kind of dish you can eat with delicacy, so I only serve it when I know my guests will revel in it and not be bashful about picking up the bones, gnawing on them and getting the last little bit of goodness.\n\n To make 6 or 8 servings of Oxtail _Ragout_ buy 2 or 3 whole oxtails and have them disjointed\u2014cut into sections. Put the pieces on the broiler rack and broil until they are nicely colored and crispy around the edges, salting and peppering them as they brown, and turning them once.\n\nAlternatively, you may sprinkle them with flour and brown them all over in a heavy skillet in 4 tablespoons oil and 4 tablespoons butter or beef drippings, seasoning them as they cook\u2014but to me, the broiler method gives a better flavor. Remove the oxtails to a plate.\n\nIf you browned them in a skillet, add to the pan drippings 3 large onions, thinly sliced, and saute until limp and golden. (If you broiled the oxtails, saute the onions in a skillet in 6 tablespoons oil and butter or beef drippings.) Transfer the onions to a deep braising pot or Dutch oven, add 3 or 4 halved carrots to the fat in the skillet and saute them lightly, then add these to the braising pot along with 5 whole peeled garlic cloves. Add the oxtails and a bouquet garni\u2014a celery rib, a leek, 2 or 3 parsley sprigs, 2 bay leaves, and 2 teaspoons thyme in a little cheesecloth bag, all tied together so they can be fished out easily later. Add just enough warm water and red wine to barely cover. Bring to a boil over high heat, skim off the scum, reduce the heat, cover and simmer for 3 to _3  l A _hours, adding more liquid if needed. Test the meat for doneness and taste the broth for seasoning, adding salt, pepper, and maybe a touch more thyme if you think it needs more herb flavor. When the meat is really tender, remove the oxtails and vegetables to a hot platter, discarding the bouquet garni, and let the broth cook down over high heat for 2 or 3 minutes.\n\nI like the broth just the way it is, but you can thicken it, if you prefer. Knead together 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour, form into small balls, stir these into the broth and cook, stirring, until thickened. Or, for a more translucent sauce, blend 2 tablespoons cornstarch with _ _cup water and stir in just enough to thicken.\n\nPour the broth or sauce over the meat. Serve with boiled potatoes (my preference) or rice, braised small white onions or turnips, or cooked rutabagas mashed with plenty of butter, crusty bread and red wine.\n\nTo vary this recipe, use 3 cups canned Italian plum tomatoes in place of part of the cooking liquid, add a teaspoon of dried basil and, if you can find one, a split pig's foot. The sweet flavor of the tomatoes and the gelatinous quality of the pig's foot add yet another dimension to the dish.\n\n_Beef, Plain and Fancy_\n\nWhenever I read the weekend supermarket ads in the newspapers, I become more and more amazed by the odd names that are given to cuts of beef these days, like \"California roast\" and \"fillet roast\" or \"fillet steak\" with, in parentheses, \"chuck.\" Now while there are certain basic cuts that have been with us for a long time, these names seem to have become part of supermarket jargon during the last few years, and I, for one, consider them to be most misleading. By custom, the fillet of beef is the tenderloin\u2014and chuck is about as far from tenderloin as anything can be.\n\nIf you were to look at a butcher's chart of wholesale beef cuts, you'd see that the upper part of the animal is divided into chuck, rib, loin, and round; the lower part into shank, brisket, plate, and flank. The tenderest cuts, for roasting and broiling, come from the center portions, the rib and loin (separated into the short loin and the sirloin). It's from here we get our rib and sirloin roasts and our well-marbled, juicy steaks. Beef fillet or tenderloin, a boneless piece which extends the full length of the loin, is sold whole, as a roast, or as steaks. These range from the little filet mignon, cut from the triangular tip of the fillet, to larger, thicker center cuts like tournedos, tenderloin steak, and ch\u00e2teaubriand. Cuts from the fillet are meltingly tender and very expensive, as there are but two tenderloins to each animal. Chuck, the shoulder section of the animal, from neck to rib; and rump and round, the leg section, are naturally less tender and are usually braised or pot roasted.\n\nWhile wholesale cuts are fairly easy to grasp, once you start trying to sort out the many retail cuts for roasting, pot roasting, broiling, and stewing, confusion sets in. Names differ according to the part of the country you are in and the local usage, and many of them bear no linguistic relation to the part of the animal from whence they come. Who would know, for instance, that Delmonico roast is the eye of the rib, a Boston cut a section of chuck, and a New York or Kansas City cut a synonym for a loin strip steak, also known as a shell steak? Buying beef can be baffling, unless you can find out exactly where a certain cut comes from. If you get a good meat chart, which most butcher shops can supply, or the helpful little booklet on basic beef cuts put out by the National Cattlemen's Beef Association in Chicago, you'll be much better equipped to cope with the odd terminology of the supermarket meat section.\n\nNow, I'm not saying that chuck and round can't be roasted. They can, provided you buy prime meat, or treat the meat with meat tenderizer. While a top grade of rump or round won't be as butter-tender as the finest rib or sirloin, it can be very good eating. There used to be a cut of round served in big restaurants called a steamship roast that was tender and delicious when thinly sliced, and you'll sometimes find in delicatessens sliced roast beef that has been cut from the choicest part of the round and roasted rare.\n\n However, if you're buying an average piece of round or chuck in the supermarket, you're better off turning it into _Braised Beef._ Let's say you have a nice 5-pound boneless roll of chuck, which has been covered with some extra fat and well tied. First, brown it on all sides in very hot melted beef fat, or remove the extra fat and brown the meat under the broiler, turning it often, until the outside is slightly charred and richly colored.\n\nThen transfer it to a braising pan or Dutch oven or a large heavy enameled iron pot in which you have put a little melted beef fat. Salt and pepper the meat to taste, and sprinkle with an herb\u2014the favorite is thyme, because it has a pungency that is most effective with beef, but you could use rosemary or summer savory, which would give an entirely different quality. Add a bay leaf, a tiny sprinkling of cinnamon, 1 or 2 onions, each stuck with 2 cloves, 2 to 3 garlic cloves, 1 or 2 sprigs of parsley, and a leek. Pour in 2 cups of wine, beef stock, beer or water, and let this come to a boil. Reduce the heat, cover the pot, and either simmer on top of the stove over very low heat, allowing 30 to 35 minutes per pound, or cook in a 300-degree oven, allowing 35 minutes a pound, until the meat is quite tender. Add more liquid if needed.\n\nRemove the meat to a hot platter and skim the fat from the pan juices. If you want more gravy, pour additional liquid into the pan, bring to a boil, remove the vegetables and bay leaf, and thicken the juices with little balls of butter and flour, kneaded together. Let it cook down.\n\nServe the meat sliced, with onions which have been braised separately with a little beef fat and red wine or Madeira, or with crisply cooked buttered carrots, plain boiled potatoes, the glorious gravy, and red wine.\n\nIf you have some beef left the next day, either make it into sandwiches or serve it cold with a mustard dressing and a good green salad.\n\n_The Pleasures of Pot-Au-Feu_\n\nOne of the greatest of the homely dishes in the repertoire of French cooking is the pot-au-feu, which most Americans would probably call boiled beef. It's simple, certainly, but it is precisely the simplicity of preparation and the honest, appetizing flavors that make this one of the outstanding gastronomic treats of all time. On restaurant menus throughout France you'll see it listed in various ways\u2014 _pot'OU'feu, pot'au-feu_ \u00e1 _I'ancienne_ (which means the old-fashioned kind), or _pot-au-feu riche._ They are all much the same dish with embellishments. The beef cuts vary from time to time and province to province. Sometimes a chicken is popped into the pot midway in the cooking, or an enormous piece of fresh side pork or salt pork may go in, or even a sausage for the last hour or so. These variations in style make it all the more fun to cook and to eat.\n\n  I have found that in making a Pot-au-Feu you get a better result if you make the broth a day ahead.\n\nPut in a pot 2 large marrow bones, an onion stuck with 2 cloves, 2 leeks, a carrot, a bit of fresh or dried thyme, a sprig of parsley (if you can buy Italian parsley with the root still on, use the root as well as the leaves\u2014it gives great flavor), and a head of garlic\u2014not a clove, a whole head. Don't peel it\u2014just take off the papery outer skin and throw it in the pot. Add water to cover, and bring to a boil, then reduce the heat, cover, and cook very slowly for several hours. Taste for salt, and add what you think it needs, then strain the broth, discarding the bones and vegetables, and chill overnight, so you can skim off the fat before adding the meats next day.\n\nAbout 3 hours before you are going to serve your pot-au-feu, put the broth in a 12-quart pot with 1 onion stuck with 2 cloves, a 2  -pound piece of brisket, a 3-pound piece of bottom round, and _2 _ to 3 pounds of short ribs with the bone in, each piece of meat tied so it will keep its shape during cooking. Soak 8 leeks well, removing sand from between the leaves. Cut off the green tops, and tie these in a bundle with 4 parsley sprigs, 3 or 4 sprigs of fresh thyme, and any other herbs you want, such as tarragon, rosemary, or summer savory. (If you can't get fresh herbs, add _Wi _ teaspoons dried thyme and a pinch or two of other herbs to the broth.)\n\nBring to a boil, skim off the scum and any little bits of fat that rise to the surface, then cover and simmer for about 2 hours.\n\nMeanwhile, prepare your other vegetables. For eight servings peel 8 small white onions, and peel and quarter 8 small turnips and 12 to 14 medium-sized carrots. Wash and cut in sixths a curly Savoy cabbage (if you can't get a Savoy, a firm green cabbage will do). After the meats have cooked for 2 hours, add the leeks and cook for 15 minutes, then add the onions, turnips, and carrots, skimming the surface every time you add anything to the pot. In a separate pan, boil 8 well-scrubbed small new potatoes in their jackets.\n\nWhen the vegetables are almost tender, test the meats. If they are done, remove and keep warm. Add the cabbage to the pot and cook for 5 or 10 minutes more, until all the vegetables are tender. Season the broth with salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste, and skim off as much fat as possible, before removing the vegetables. Pour off a good part of the broth, to which the vegetables will have given a lovely sweet flavor, and serve it first in bowls with slices of French bread, cut _ 3 A_ to 1 inch thick and dried in the oven. Pass a hunk of Parmesan cheese and a grater so everyone can grate cheese directly into his broth, which adds a certain zest. Reserve some of the remaining hot broth in another bowl to serve with the meat.\n\nSlice part of the meats and arrange on a hot platter with the vegetables. Serve each person a cut of each kind of beef, some vegetables, and a potato. Ladle the hot broth over the meat and hand around some spicy accompaniments\u2014good mustard, coarse salt, grated fresh horseradish, and the tiny sour French pickles called cornichons.\n\nDrink a fruity red wine with your _pot-au-feu,_ and have a fruit dessert\u2014perhaps cr\u00eapes filled with sauteed apples, glazed with sugar under the broiler, and served with heavy cream.\n\nWith its remarkable combination of flavors, _pot-au-feu_ is a very interesting dish to serve guests for Sunday luncheon or supper, and once your meats and vegetables are ready to go, the cooking is no effort. One of the greatest virtues of this meal in a pot is that you can cook more than you need, reheat the beef next day, and serve it up with crisp home-fried potatoes (you can cook a chicken in the broth, too, and have that next day) or turn the cold boiled beef into a glorious salad or hash.\n\n_Potluck of the Irish_ \u2014 _Stew_\n\nIn the last year or two I seem to have visited restaurants in many parts of Europe, Canada, and the United States, and one of the things I find most fascinating is seeing what other people order to eat. I can't help watching them and listening to them come to their decisions, some of which are a puzzle to me. Why, I wonder, would anyone order some elaborate dish like lobster a I'Americaine or beef Wellington in a tiny restaurant far from civilization, where it is bound to be a disaster, instead of picking something good but simple that is within the restaurant's range? They do, though. There is no accounting for tastes.\n\nI've also been surprised to find how many things have become universal menu standards. Shrimps, for instance, are eternally popular. Chopped beef is a best seller no matter what name it goes under\u2014chopped sirloin, chopped fillet, or plain old hamburger\u2014and whether it is served quite plainly or rather fancily, on a plank with watercress and sliced tomatoes or bordered with duchess potatoes and topped with a broiled mushroom or tomato. It's by all odds America's pet luncheon dish.\n\nAnother luncheon favorite is eggs Benedict, which can be really delicious provided the ham is good, the eggs properly poached, and the hollandaise sauce freshly made. Incidentally, there are a couple of variations on this dish, and though neither can rightfully be called eggs Benedict they are rather fun for a change. Little sausage cakes replace the ham in one, in the other cheese sauce stands in for hollandaise.\n\nSomething that seems to be popular on two continents\u2014and this I do find amazing\u2014is Irish stew. Not only the British but also the French dote on it. It has, in fact, for more than a hundred years been one of the few English dishes regularly ordered in France. Even that great French chef Escoffier had a very special version, made with tiny lamb chops cooked gently in broth with vegetables.\n\nPerhaps the best Irish stew I've ever tasted was in a London restaurant called Lacy's. It broke with tradition in some ways, which is why I feel it is newsworthy enough to give as a recipe. The chef used shoulder of lamb instead of the usual breast, and cooked the meat in a flavorful lamb broth rather than in water.\n\n_ _To make _Lacy's Irish Stew,_ buy 3 to _3 _ pounds lamb shoulder and about 1 pound neck of lamb. Have the butcher bone the shoulder, or do it yourself, but in any case, keep the bones. Put bones and neck in a deep saucepan with 2 quarts water. Bring to a boil, and boil for 5 or 6 minutes, skimming off the scum from the surface. Add 1 medium onion stuck with 2 cloves, 1 large bay leaf, 2 large garlic cloves, 1 tablespoon salt, _  _teaspoon freshly ground pepper, _ _ teaspoon thyme, and a patsley sprig. Bring to a boil again, reduce the heat, and simmer _2  _hours to a strong broth. Strain, and put the broth in the refrigerator overnight. Next day, skim off the fat.\n\nRemove all fat from the lamb shoulder and cut it into pieces 1 inch wide and 2 inches long. Put the meat in a heavy pan with 3 thinly sliced medium onions, 3 leeks, split in half, washed well, and cut in small dice, 1 bay leaf, _ _ teaspoon nutmeg, _ _ teaspoon thyme, and enough lamb broth to come 1 inch above the meat. Bring to a boil, skim off any scum, reduce the heat, and simmer, covered, for 1 hour, then test the meat for tenderness. If it still seems a bit tough, give it another 15 minutes. Then add 4 medium potatoes, finely diced. Cook for 30 minutes, until the stew is slightly thickened by the potatoes, then taste for seasoning. You will probably find it needs salt (1 to 2 teaspoons should be sufficient), a few grinds of pepper, and a touch of nutmeg. Let this cook a little to blend with the stew, and then add 2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley and cook just 1 minute more. This is the kind of stew you serve in bowls or soup plates and eat with a spoon and fork.\n\nLacy's added a nice touch\u2014they put a good thick slice of toast in the bowls before filling them with stew. You could also serve the toast separately, and let your guests dunk. Hot biscuits would be good instead of toast.\n\nI've also found that the stew gets a good flavor and a marvelous color if you add   pound coarsely chopped spinach about 15 minutes before the end of the cooking time. I warned you that this is a totally untraditional Irish stew, but it's all the better for that. It's different and good enough to serve at a buffet party or Sunday supper.\n\n_Barbecuing Is an Art_\n\nWalk down the streets of any town, large or small, on a summer evening when dinner is cooking in many a patio and back garden, and the smell of the scented smoke that wafts on the air will give you an idea of how good the various outdoor chefs are. While some are grilling the it meat to juicy, mouth-watering tenderness, others are merely shrinking it to a charred, hard hunk that would be shunned by anyone with a decent palate.\n\nGrilling, broiling, barbecuing\u2014whatever you want to call it\u2014is an art, not just a matter of building a pyre and throwing on a piece of meat as a sacrifice to the gods of the stomach. For while barbecuing is a very old and primitive way of cooking, it is also one of the most appetizing methods of dealing with meat known to man, and it deserves to be done with some semblance of technique, accuracy, and care.\n\nOne of the greatest mistakes is adding too much fuel. Charcoal briquets, which have become the almost univetsal fuel for outdoor cooking in this country, are efficient and simple to use, but all too few people realize that they give the best results when used economically. If you have a little hibachi, you don't really need more than 12 to 14 briquets (or at the very most 20 to 24) to cook a normal amount of meat for two or three. Even with the big wheeled grills that can do enough for a large family, certainly 30 or 40 briquets will suffice. If you are spit-roasting a turkey, a very large beef roast, a suckling pig, or a whole baby lamb, all of which take longer to cook, you may need more than 40 or 45 briquets, but the extra amount may be added later on as required. Always start your fire in ample time to let the coals form and the briquets burn down to the point where they are veiled in a lovely white ash and exude an even heat. I build my briquets in a pyramid, and if I don't have an electric starter, I use briquets that have been soaked in some form of liquid fuel. I let them burn up, and as they catch, 1 spread them out over the fire bed, touching, which makes for better coals than if you let them burn up in the pyramid and try to spread them out later.\n\nThe secret of good grilling is to have an even distribution of heat. If the briquets are allowed to form the right kind of bed of heated coals and ash, the whole grill will be evenly heated with a surface temperature between 350 and 375 degrees, the ideal medium for cooking.\n\nFour inches below the grill, midway between it and the coals, the temperature will be around 600 degrees, and if you were to check in the coals themselves with a pyrometer, which measures the heat in a fire, you might find it was as much as 1,200 to 1,400 degrees. This is the perfect distribution of heat. From the fiery coals to the midway point the temperature cools off so that by the time the heat reaches the grilling surface it cooks the food steadily and well instead of charring it to a black and horrible mess that is still almost cold inside when you cut into it.\n\nFor properly cooked meat, time the grilling. First measure the meat. If a steak is 2 inches thick, give it 10 minutes a side if you like it very rare. Let it brown gradually on one side, turn, and cook until browned on the other. If you want to char the outside, let it cook to the point of doneness you like, then increase the heat either by bringing up the firebox or by adding more briquets on the outside of the fire, letting them catch and then building them up under the meat so the heat increases all at once. Turn quickly to char both sides.\n\nWhile we all like a good thick grilled steak, don't overlook some of the less expensive cuts like flank or skirt steak which grill quickly and well. Another of my favorites is leg of lamb, boned and butterflied, or spread flat, then grilled like a thick steak after it has been salted and peppered and given some garlic and perhaps rosemary. I also like a succulent pork steak, cut _ 3 A_ to 1 inch thick from the leg with the round bone in. I rub it well with prepared mustard and brush it while it grills with just enough honey and additional mustard to give it a nice crispy glaze\u2014smoked ham steaks can be done in the same way. Ducks, if they are not too fat, can be split and flattened slightly with a blow from the cleaver and grilled\u2014first bone side down, then on the skin side. Watch them carefully to see that the fat that drips into the coals doesn't create a fire that will scorch the delicate skin. If it does drip, there are several things you can do to take care of the flaring up, such as quenching the flames with a spray gun filled with water, but I prefer to put a dripping pan\u2014either a narrow ice-cube tray or a double fold of aluminum foil\u2014in the center of the firebox and push the coals around it. If you are dealing with meat, you would, of course, trim off most of the excess fat first, which isn't always possible with poultry.\n\nThat's just about all there is to outdoor cooking\u2014a good fire, good coals, and patience, for this is one endeavor in which patience, rather than speed, should be your watchword.\n\n_The Cool Delights of_\n\n_Summer Meals_\n\nI happen to think that most foods taste better if they are allowed to cool before being eaten. I purposely plan to cook certain dishes and let them cool to room temperature, without refrigerating, before I serve them. Others I find benefit from being chilled overnight. To me, one of the great joys of summer eating is that I can vary my menus by having a meat hot one night and cold the next.\n\nTake pork, for instance, that most neglected of summer delicacies. A roast loin of pork with a beautiful apricot or apple glaze makes a glorious hot dinner and an even more glorious cold one, after being refrigerated, then brought to room temperature and served thinly sliced with mustard mayonnaise and a string bean salad. You can serve this for a company dinner with great aplomb, and it needs nothing more save bread, fresh fruit to follow, and perhaps a bottle of chilled champagne, for no other wine so complements the rich succulence of pork.\n\nThen, again, what could be better than a plump chicken, roasted until the skin is deliciously crisp, cooled to room temperature, and served forth with a good old-fashioned potato salad? Or chicken marinated in a mixture of soy sauce, chopped garlic, a little sherry, oil, a tiny touch of grated orange rind, and grated fresh or chopped candied ginger, then broiled, cooled, and served with thin onion sandwiches and a tomato salad?\n\nAnother old summer favorite of mine is veal Mediterranean, which can appear first hot and then cold, in the guise of vitello tonnato.\n\n  For _Veal Mediterranean,_ make little incisions with the point of a sharp knife in a 4-to 5-pound boneless rump roast of veal. Cut 3 or 4 garlic cloves into thin slivers and stuff these into the holes, then insert 10 to 12 anchovy fillets, pushing them in very deeply with the garlic. Rub the meat with a little dried basil, and brown it on all sides in a deep pot in 5 to 6 tablespoons olive or peanut oil. Add 3 good-sized onions, peeled and thinly sliced, 1 carrot, 1 leek, and a few sprigs of parsley. Let the vegetables cook a bit, then add a veal knuckle (if you can't get one, two small pig's feet will do, but the veal knuckle is by far the best), _1 _ cups white wine, 1 cup water or stock, a good teaspoon of freshly ground black pepper, and about _ Yl_ teaspoon salt\u2014there's a good deal of salt in the anchovies, but you'll need this little bit extra.\n\nBring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer on top of the stove or in a 300-degree oven for _1 _ to 2 hours, or until the meat is tender\u2014but not soft and mushy, or it won't slice well.\n\nWith this succulent hot veal have buttered noodles with a good sprinkling of grated Parmesan cheese and a cucumber salad dressed with vinaigrette sauce or a mixture of mayonnaise and sour cream flavored with dill.\n\n  For _Vitello Tonnato,_ refrigerate the leftover meat. Strain the pan juices and chill them in the refrigerator overnight so the fat rises to the top and the stock becomes a firm jelly. Next day, remove the fat and put the jelly in the blender with a 7-ounce can of tuna, 1 garlic clove, and 2 or 3 anchovy fillets. Whirl until blended. If you don't have a blender, melt the jelly, flake the tuna finely, chop the anchovies and garlic, and mix them all into the melted jelly, then return to the refrigerator and chill until thick and syrupy.\n\nTake the leftover veal from the refrigerator and slice very thinly. Spoon the tuna sauce over the slices, and decorate with capers. Chill a little, and serve with chopped parsley, chopped fresh basil, if available, and a mustard mayonnaise.\n\nEven without the jellied stock, you can make a delicious tuna sauce for cold veal by mixing a 7-ounce can of tuna, flaked, 6 or 7 finely chopped anchovies, 1 or 2 finely chopped garlic cloves, and 1 tablespoon each of chopped fresh basil and parsley into 1 cup mayonnaise mixed with _ _ cup sour cream. Blend thoroughly, spoon over the cold sliced veal, and garnish with capers and chopped parsley.\n\n  You might serve the vitello tonnato with _Spaghettini Estivi,_ which is best made in summer when you can get beautiful sun-ripened tomatoes. Peel and slice tomatoes and combine with thinly sliced raw onion and a touch of chopped fresh basil or dried basil, then mix with French dressing made with 6 tablespoons olive oil, _V/i _ to 2 tablespoons wine vinegar, and salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste. Chill until very cold.\n\nJust before serving time, cook 1 pound very thin spaghettini (to serve four people) in boiling salted water until just tender to the bite\u2014don't let it get mushy. Drain it well. Toss the hot spaghettini with the ice-cold tomato salad, sprinkle with a little chopped parsley, and serve this fantastic hot-and-cold combination with the vitello tonnato.\n\nWith Italian whole-wheat bread or crisp rolls, a good white wine, thoroughly chilled, and a dessert of fresh raspberries, strawberries, or figs, I can think of no more enticing summer supper.\n\nA _Good Ham Is Hard To Find_\n\nHam isn't what it used to be. Once you could go into a market and find specially cured smoked country and Smithfield hams, but nowadays you seldom encounter a commercial ham that has firm meat with a rich, salty, pungent flavor. The majority palate in this country belongs to the children and younger people who aren't accustomed to the old-style ham we knew. They like something pinky, with only a slight flavor of curing and no definite taste. So most of our hams have a toned-down flavor because water is added to the cure and they are cured quickly. The packers have found that quickly cured hams also sell well because they come \"ready to eat,\" requiring no soaking, preboiling, or baking, no work for the housewife.\n\nHowever, you don't have to be deprived of good ham if you are willing to go to the trouble of tracking it down. There are farms all through the United States that sell country hams by mail, some of the better meat and delicacy stores stock them, and you can often find them advertised in magazines. The South has peach-fed, peanut-fed, even artichoke-fed (Jerusalem artichokes, that is) hams which are cured in a brine, smoked, treated, and aged about three months. Throughout New England, the Middle West, and the Northwest you will find good country hams, and even though some are tenderized and precooked, they still carry a hint of that smoky, salty, old-fashioned flavor.\n\nI'm lucky enough to have a choice of five or six places near me where I can get excellent hams, one within two hours' drive of New York. There's a fine place in Vermont, others in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Many of the country hams I have liked best have come from Virginia and Kentucky. They are cured, smoked, rubbed with coarse pepper, and sewn up in muslin, which keeps out any insect life, and hung from the rafters.\n\nThere's another type of Virginia ham that is totally different from the country hams, and that's the Smithfield, the most distinctive and distinguished ham in America and one of the world's greatest. Years ago, when a ham fair was held in Paris at Easter, the Smithfield was the only American ham shown. Smithfield is a tiny village close to Hog Island, where the first Jamestown settlers kept their pigs, and it is here that the famous ham originated.\n\nTo qualify as a Smithfield, the hams must come from a lean type of hog, part razorback, which has been partially peanut-fed. They must be cured in Smithfield, or within a certain radius, in a way that gives them this extra-special flavor, then aged. An aged Smithfield ham becomes quite moldy, and this mold has to be scrubbed off with hot water and a stiff brush before the ham is soaked, boiled, and briefly baked to give it a glaze. Smithfield ham comes both cooked and uncooked and, to my mind, is much better served cold than hot, very thinly sliced, with beaten biscuits or some kind of bread to enhance its rich, nutty flavor.\n\nWhile other Virginia hams may be cured and treated in the same way, they cannot be called Smithfield. Some of these other hams are aged for two, three, or four years, and people have been known to keep them for as long as twenty, perhaps curing the ham when a child is born and saving it for the son's or daughter's wedding party. These hams are very dry and need a lot of soaking and cooking, but they are interesting and well worth trying.\n\nHam is one of our most fascinating and varied native foods. It differs so widely that there is always a new flavor to discover, and one never tires of eating it. I serve a great many country hams during the year for big cocktail or breakfast parties, and I have my own way of cooking them, which I find works very well for any kind of raw country ham, but not for one that is ready-cooked or ready-to-eat.\n\n  To cook a _Country Ham,_ put it in a roasting pan, fat side down, and add 1 to 1 _ _quarts liquid, either water seasoned with _1 _ cups wine vinegar, 1 bay leaf, and 1 teaspoon thyme, or pure apple cider seasoned with 2 cloves, 1 bay leaf, and 1 teaspoon thyme. For festive occasions I sometimes use a good California sherry or port, which gives the ham a remarkable flavor and finish. No seasonings; the wine has enough aromatics of its own.\n\nCover the pan completely with aluminum foil, crimping it around the edges to seal the ham airtight. Bake in a 350-degree oven, allowing 20 to 25 minutes a pound. At the end of the cooking time, take off the foil, remove any skin, and brush the fat with sieved brown sugar or equal quantities of brown sugar and crumbs, then put it in a 450-to 500degree oven for 10 minutes to glaze.\n\n_The Splendors of Charcuterie_\n\nFor the first time in forty years, New York has a real charcuterie shop, like every town and almost every village in France, and I am delighted once again to have these delicious pork tidbits at my command. The word \"charcuterie,\" as my friend Jane Grigson explains in her excellent book The Art _of Charcuterie,_ is derived from _chair cuit,_ the cooked meat of the pig. The closest thing we have to a charcuterie in this country, outside of New York, is the Italian pork store which sells fresh sausages, sausage meat, and various cuts of fresh and cured pork.\n\nThe killing of pigs and curing of the meat dates back centuries, especially in France. Two thousand years ago the Gallic hams were prized and praised by Roman epicures. The Chinese, too, were partial to the pig. It was, as a matter of fact, a crossbreeding of the small, plump Chinese porker with the skinny, long-legged boarlike beast of Europe that produced our own domestic pig.\n\nWhen I was a youngster, we'd have a pig or two slaughtered each year at a little farm we owned in the country, and the farmer would make various and sundry things for us. We always had our own smoked hams, bacon, and sometimes our own sausage, so sampling the good things of the recently-opened charcuterie in New York brought back all kinds of happy memories. This new charcuterie has two of my favorite sausages, _boudin blanc,_ made with pork and pork fat, and _boudin noir,_ a French blood sausage. _Boudin noir_ is magnificent roasted or broiled and served with applesauce and mashed potatoes; it makes my mouth water just to think of it.\n\nTwo other types of sausage the charcuterie makes for sale are _andouil-lettes_ and cr\u00e9pmettes. _Andouillettes_ are tripe sausages, which you either like or don't like. I happen to think they are a great delicacy, but I have friends who are violently opposed to them on the grounds that this is too intimate a part of the pig to eat. Cr\u00e9pinettes consist of coarsely chopped sausage meat wrapped in caul, the fatty, delicate, almost lacy membrane from the pig's interior. Broiled or sauteed and served with a sauce, or perhaps mashed potatoes and applesauce, the little 3-inch-long crepinettes make delectable eating.\n\nThere are, of course, other kinds of charcuterie you don't have to cook. One is _rillettes_ (see page 246), a smooth rich p\u00e2t\u00e9 of pork preserved in its own fat, to be spread on toast or French bread. Another is _jambonneau,_ a mildly cured little ham from the hock, like a picnic ham, which has been rolled in crumbs and cooked. _Jambon p_ \u00e9 _rsille_ is a jellied mold of pieces of well-cooked ham mixed with a lot of chopped parsley, so you get a brilliant green marbling through the pink of the ham.\n\nI love every part of the pig, from the ears to the feet. After being soaked in brine for several days, the ears are cooked very slowly until tender (there should still be a nice little bite to the center), then rolled in butter and crumbs, broiled or baked until crisply brown, and served with a piquant vinaigrette sauce.\n\n  Pieds de _Pore Pan_ \u00e9 _s_ are cooked in a similar fashion. These are not hard to make, provided you can find the feet at your nearby pork butcher. To serve four, buy 4 meaty pig's feet (8, if they are very small), and wrap each one very tightly in muslin, several thicknesses of cheesecloth, or an old pillowcase. Tie very firmly. Cook the feet in a rich bouillon of 4 cups water, an onion stuck with 2 cloves, a carrot, a bit of celery, a bay leaf, 2 or 3 garlic cloves, a few sage leaves, salt, and peppercorns or freshly ground black pepper, until very tender, from 2\u00bd __ to 3\u00bd __ hours. Cool in the bouillon, or remove to a dish to cool.\n\nWhen cool, remove the wrappings, roll the feet in toasted crumbs, dribble melted butter or pork fat over them, and either brown under the broiler or cook in a 475-degree oven, turning them several times, until brown and crisp on the outside.\n\nServe the pig's feet with a well-flavored vinaigrette sauce and the traditional accompaniments of French fried potatoes and a bowl of watercress. Although you may find it takes a bit of work to remove all the little foot bones and get at the edible part, if you like foods that are gelatinous to the bite and palate, you'll love these tasty little morsels.\n\n_The Friendliest Meat_\n\nI've long said that if I were about to be executed and were given a choice of my last meal, it would be bacon and eggs. There are few sights that appeal to me more than the streaks of lean and fat in good side bacon, or the lovely round of pinkish meat framed in delicate white fat that is Canadian bacon. Nothing is quite as intoxicating as the smell of bacon frying in the morning, save perhaps for the smell of coffee brewing.\n\nWhile bacon doesn't always taste as good as it smells, for there are many grades and varieties, many ways to cook it\u2014and many ways to ruin it\u2014by and large this is probably one of the most satisfactory of our traditional meats. Our ancestors practically lived on it. For the homesteader, a side of bacon was a treasure, for it meant meat, if not variety, a meat that could be eaten for every meal, with the fat used to fry fish or potatoes, or to make biscuits.\n\nBacon has probably more palate appeal than any one other meat. Think of the ever-popular \"BLT down with mayo,\" a toasted sandwich of bacon, lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise. Add some sliced turkey or chicken breast, and you have the noble club sandwich. Then there's that earlier popular snack, the cheese dream, a great combination of Cheddar cheese, bacon, and sliced tomato. Bacon has also figured in the annals of the hamburger. A great favorite of mine at the New York restaurant Maxwell's Plum is a large hamburger with crisp bacon and melted cheese on a well-buttered bun, a superb merger of flavors and textures. You bite into the cheese, and as its smooth melting quality flows into the juicy hamburger, you suddenly hit the crisp bacon\u2014a royal pleasure.\n\nRecently I was sent a beautiful side of Canadian bacon, an excellent loin, that was just delicious baked in a piece, like a small ham. There was this gorgeous bacon, with all the attributes of fine ham, and an even more tender, luscious texture, so, I reasoned, why not use it instead of ham in a Croque Monsieur, that deliciously crisp, crunchy French sauteed sandwich?\n\n  For a Variation on Croque _Monsieur,_ I lightly buttered 2 slices of homemade bread with the crusts on, put between them 2 pieces of Canadian bacon, which I had previously broiled lightly, topped them with 1 healthy slice of Swiss Gruyere cheese (you could use Emmenthaler, Fontina, or even Miinster, but I like Gruyere best for this), pressed the top slice down firmly, buttered the outsides of the bread, and sauteed the sandwich until it was crisp, brown, and buttery on each side, with the melted cheese lovingly embracing the bacon.\n\nGarnished with parsley and a few olives or pickles and eaten hot with a glass of chilled white wine or beer, this is a classic luncheon or snack that can't be bettered, utterly seductive to the bite.\n\nBacon is a most adaptable meat, whether you buy the paper-thin packaged type or the kind that comes in a slab and is cut medium-thick or thick. Personally, if it is a good smoky bacon, I like it cut thick and broiled. With eggs fried in butter and home-fried potatoes, what a breakfast it makes! Medium-thick bacon I sometimes bake in a 350-degree oven until it is not too crisp and not too limp, just in between. To me, bacon that is too crisp loses its quality and flavor and becomes quite disagreeable. For this reason, I recommend broiling paper-thin bacon. You can experiment with timing until you get the texture you prefer.\n\nEven more popular than bacon and eggs in England and Canada is bacon with fried or broiled tomatoes, rather like having a bacon and tomato sandwich without the lettuce and mayonnaise, and with the toast on the side. Four rashers of bacon, four slices of fried tomato, crunchy rye or whole-wheat toast\u2014that's a fine way to start the day.\n\nBacon adds so much flavor to other foods. I love to bard a roasting chicken with bacon slices, draping them over the breast and sides, removing them for the last third of the cooking so the bird can have its final browning and basting. I lace kidneys with bacon on skewers, broiling them together until it is hard to divorce one flavor from the other. Who could imagine sauteed liver without its ally\u2014strips of bacon? And what fisherman doesn't revel in bacon and fresh-caught trout, rolled in cornmeal and cooked in the bacon fat until the outside is crispy brown, the inside moist and tender? Bacon is perhaps the most friendly of all meats because it combines so freely and easily with other foods.\n\n_Glorious Hash_\n\nI doubt if there are many dishes that can be as great\u2014or, if badly made, as horrendous\u2014as hash. It's kind of a universal dish. Just about every cuisine in the world features hash in one form or another. The French do things with chopped meat cooked in various fashions and call it _hache._ The Poles hash veal and turn it into a toothsome meal. Even the Chinese have mixtures of two or three kinds of finely cut meat and vegetables that, while we might not dare to call them by as plebeian a name as hash, follow the same basic principle.\n\nWe in these United States, with our mixed culinary background, have done the most to make hash a glorious thing to eat. I remember a number of years ago stopping at a small country hotel in Minnesota and getting one of the best hashes I ever tasted. It was made with cold roast beef, excellent roast beef to begin with, diced rather coarsely with bits of the fat and cooked in beef drippings with finely chopped onion and chopped cooked potatoes, then seasoned with salt, pepper, and a dash of Worcestershire sauce. The hash came out brown and glazed, crispy around the edges and tender and moist inside, and it was so delicious that I almost ordered another helping.\n\nThen, of course, one of the pleasures of having corned beef is that if you buy enough, there is a nice chunk left for hash. Years ago, when I was in the food business and had a little shop where we featured hors d'oeuvre and other goodies for the table, we made a specialty of corned beef hash on Saturdays and charged a very fat price for it\u2014in those days, an astonishing price\u2014but we made our hash with good corned beef, not too finely chopped, which is the trouble with much hash, and we chopped everything by hand\u2014meat, onions, and potatoes.\n\nWhen I make hash, I like to use two-thirds meat to one-third potatoes, or half and half, with onion to taste and only salt, pepper, and nutmeg for seasoning. You can add a bit of Tabasco or Worcestershire or garlic, but basically it's that wonderful blend of onion, potato, and beef that makes a great hash.\n\nChicken hash has always been a favorite in America, too. There must be a million different versions. Some are merely cut-up chicken in a rich cream sauce with maybe a little onion or tarragon, served with rice or potatoes. In the old days, the Ritz in New York used to make a very famous, very rich chicken hash, served in a border of pureed green peas.\n\nThe other night, I dined on a perfectly beautiful sauteed chicken that had been lightly floured and cooked in butter with white wine, salt, pepper, and a touch of rosemary. I purposely bought more chicken than I knew I could eat, because I wanted to make chicken hash. I served half the chicken and let the rest cool in the pan, then removed it, added _ _cup white wine to the pan juices, heated them, scraping up the brown bits, and poured this over the cold chicken, which I'd put in a bowl.\n\n  Next day, to make _Chicken Hash_ I cut the leftover chicken into rather large dice, which gave me about _2_ \u00bdcups light and dark chicken meat, and added 2 or 3 finely cut-up gizzards. I boiled 5 smallish waxy white potatoes, let them cool, and diced them. I skimmed the chicken fat from the bowl, saving the little bit of gravy at the bottom to add later on, put the fat in a skillet with some butter, and gently sauteed 1 finely chopped large onion until it was pale yellow. Next I added my potatoes and cooked them with the onion, seasoning them with a touch of rosemary, salt, and freshly ground black pepper, then added the chicken and the gravy, mixed everything together well, and let it cook gently for 5 minutes. I then poured in '/3 cup heavy cream and let that cook down.  By this time the hash was nice and brown, so I quickly folded in cup chopped parsley and served it good and hot with a green salad.\n\nIt was so tasty that next morning I reheated what was left, popped a poached egg on top, and had myself one of the best breakfasts I've ever eaten.\n\nThere are all kinds of ways to vary this simple recipe. Sometimes I add \u00bd cup finely chopped sauteed mushrooms, or put in some toasted almonds at the last minute. Or I may leave out the heavy cream and mix in a couple of egg yolks instead, sprinkle the top with grated Parmesan cheese and run it under the broiler for a few minutes to set the egg and brown the cheese, watching it very carefully. Whatever you make it with, a good hash is a joy, and one of the best ways I know to make a simply wonderful meal out of leftovers.\n\n_Turkey Any Time_\n\nCan you remember the days when you tasted turkey only once or twice a year? Then it was the bird featured as the Thanksgiving treat, looked forward to as something very special. All that has changed. Turkey is now an everyday meat, so much so that it has almost replaced chicken in restaurants and lunch counters, for turkey breasts yield more meat per pound and are more practical to use.\n\nEven I was amazed to discover the other day just how many ways you can buy turkey. Whole, fresh or frozen, ready to stuff or stuffed, basted and nonbasted (basted turkeys are those injected with fat to lubricate the breast and keep the meat moist and tender). Smoked and frozen, ready to serve. Then there are frozen turkey breasts, turkey hips, turkey thighs, or the turkey hindquarter, which consists of the leg, thigh, and oyster, the most luscious little morsel in the whole bird. Apparently the producers think so, too, because they brag about including it. If you are a white-meat or a dark-meat fan, you can buy all-white or all-dark boneless frozen pan roasts, or a combination of the two, packed in a disposable aluminum pan.\n\nGround turkey meat, which I first encountered and used in the West, is now generally available and very good to add to a meat loaf or a pate. The flavor is excellent. Some of the best buys are the whole turkey fillet, the choicest part of the breast, sold frozen and ready to cook; turkey steaks, cross-cut from the breast; and turkey cutlets, boned and skinned breast meat, sliced about _ _inch thick, which makes a great substitute for scaloppine in these days when veal is in short supply and enormously expensive. Cooked quickly and sauced like scaloppine, you'll have a hard time distinguishing them from the best-quality veal.\n\nI'm very partial to the frozen turkey breasts, with the skin and bone left on. I like to roast them and serve them for one hot meal, then use the leftovers for turkey in lettuce leaves (see page 251) or turkey salad. Recently, at the suggestion of my old friend and fellow writer Helen McCully, I used the breast for a turkey version of the Italian vitello tonnato.\n\n  To make _Turkey Tonnato,_ buy an 8-to 9-pound turkey breast. This is a pretty large piece of meat, so I'd advise you to use only half of it for your turkey tonnato. Cut it in half. Loosen, but do not remove, the skin on the half-breast, and slip 5 or 6 anchovies under the skin. Make incisions in the meat with a small knife, and stud with little slivers of garlic, as you would do for leg of lamb.\n\nRoast the flavored turkey in a 350-degree oven, allowing about 20 minutes a pound, or until it reaches an internal temperature of 160 to 165 degrees, basting during the cooking with a mixture of half melted butter and half white wine. When the turkey is cooked, let it cool at room temperature.\n\nWhen it has cooled sufficiently, remove the whole piece of breast meat from the bone and check it for salt. The anchovies under the skin practically eradicate the need for salt, but taste at any rate.\n\nNow make 2 cups of your favorite mayonnaise and add to it 1 cup finely flaked tuna, preferably the dark chunk style, which is better for this than the firm solid-pack white meat. Break the tuna into tiny flakes with two forks before combining it with the mayonnaise, 1 very finely chopped garlic clove, and 2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley. If you have some anchovies left, you might chop them and incorporate them with your sauce.\n\nCut the turkey meat in nice thinnish slices, and dip each slice in the tuna mayonnaise. Arrange on a serving dish, and garnish with sliced or quartered hard-cooked eggs. Make a rice salad with cold cooked rice, adding olive oil and vinegar in proportions of four parts oil to one part vinegar, chopped parsley, chopped scallion, and very finely chopped anchovy. Toss well, heap in the center of your serving dish, and garnish with cherry tomatoes or watercress. Serve with the remaining sauce (you can vary the sauce by using 1 cup mayonnaise and 1 cup sour cream, if you wish) for a delicious, inexpensive luncheon.\n\nTo use the other half-breast, you could roast it and, when cold, cut it into thin slices or dice, toss it with toasted walnuts, finely cut celery, and a mixture of half mayonnaise, half sour cream. Serve this turkey salad on greens with hard-boiled eggs and black olives, and thin rye bread and butter sandwiches. With either of these dishes, a chilled white wine is extremely pleasant.\n\n CHAPTER 2\n\nA _Good Catch_\n\n... _in which we extol raw fish and deplore overcooked ..._ _run into the salmon season ... sample salt fish and sardines ... appraise the anatomy of a lobster ... crave the crayfish ... pot the shrimp ... delve the depths of bouillabaisse and clam chowder ... and cultivate a taste for gastropods._\n\n_How to Cook Fish without Heat_\n\nCenturies ago the Polynesians devised a way of cooking fish without fire that was gradually adopted along the Pacific coast of South America and in through Mexico. How it got there we'll never know unless records are unearthed at some future time to tell us how foods migrated from the Orient and South Pacific. In South America and Mexico this preparation of fish is called _seviche,_ sometimes spelled _ceviche,_ and it's so delicious and utterly simple that I can't understand why people in other parts of the globe didn't think of it. Probably because few people had limes and lemons at their disposal in the past as they do nowadays, and without them seviche couldn't be, for the fish is marinated in lime or lemon juice and the citric acid \"cooks\" it. Strictly speaking, it should be lime juice, which has the greatest flavor and does the best job, but lemon juice will do the trick.\n\nAlthough different countries use different fish, for my taste you want a delicate white fish or seviche\u2014sole, flounder, sand dabs, red snapper, most any of the white-fleshed fish from the ocean or the whitefish from the inland waters of the Great Lakes. The fish should be filleted, which means you can use frozen fillets if you can't get fresh.\n\n  For six servings of _Seviche,_ put 6 medium-sized fish fillets in a flat dish and barely cover with fresh lime juice, lemon juice, or a combination of the two. Refrigerate for 5 to 6 hours, at which point you'll find the whole texture of the fish has changed and the translucent uncooked flesh has turned white, firm, and almost flaky, the way it does when the fish is cooked, a miraculous metamorphosis. Drain the fish and reserve the juice.\n\nThere are different ways of dressing the marinated fish for the table. I like to add 3 tablespoons finely chopped canned peeled green chilies, 1 small onion, very finely chopped (if you like garlic, use 2 or 3 finely chopped garlic cloves instead), 2 tablespoons chopped parsley, and 3 or 4 tablespoons olive oil. Sprinkle the top with 1 tablespoon fresh herbs, coarsely chopped\u2014you can use tarragon or basil or, if you live where there are Spanish-American or Chinese markets, fresh coriander, otherwise known as cilantro or Chinese parsley.\n\nTaste the fish to see if the flavor is sharp enough. It should be after the long marination. If not, add 2 or 3 spoonfuls of the reserved lime juice. Season with salt and pepper to taste.\n\nServe the seviche well chilled as a first course or luncheon dish. You can leave the fillets whole or cut them in thin strips and arrange them on greens. Some people put them in scallop shells, a very pretty and appropriate form of presentation.\n\nAnother very good seviche is made with tiny raw bay scallops. They are marinated and dressed in the same way as the fish, or they can be mixed, after marinating, with peeled and chopped ripe tomato, onion and basil, and lots of chopped parsley. Served in scallop shells they make a perfectly delightful, light first course.\n\nThere's a good reason for the popularity of seviche south of the border. It's cool and refreshing with a hint of spiciness, marvelous for hot weather when appetites flag.\n\nIf you shy away from the idea of fish that hasn't been cooked in the usual way, there's another Latin American dish, first cousin to seviche, that is rather different and equally pleasant.\n\n  It's called _Escabeche_ and to make it, take 6 fresh or frozen fish fillets (use the same types mentioned before), salt them lightly on both sides, and marinate in lime or lemon juice barely to cover for 3 /t to 1 hour. Pour off the marinade and reserve, dry the fish well, and dust very, very lightly with flour, a little more salt, and some pepper. Melt 4 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons oil in a skillet. Saute the fish very quickly on both sides until heated through and delicately browned. Remove to a serving dish. Sprinkle with 2 to 3 finely chopped garlic cloves, 1 tablespoon paprika, 1 teaspoon dried cumin seed, 1 teaspoon oregano, 3 or 4 canned green chilies, cut in thin strips, 1 large red Italian onion, sliced paper-thin, and about 2 tablespoons chopped parsley. Add about _ _cup olive oil and 1 to 2 tablespoons of the reserved juice, or to taste, and refrigerate, covered, for 24 hours, until the fish is imbued with the various flavors. Remove the dish and garnish with shredded lettuce, sliced stuffed olives, and perhaps some little green onions, cut in long shreds. Serve with good bread or hot rolls and a cucumber salad, or, if you want a hot vegetable, fresh peas or corn on the cob, for a summer luncheon or supper. You can change the flavor by adding orange juice with the olive oil and lime juice and scattering a little bit of grated orange zest on top just before serving.\n\nFish _for Compliments_\n\nThere's a trick to cooking fish that few people seem to know about. Maybe that is why fish isn't as popular in this country as it deserves to be\u2014it is usually so badly cooked. How often have you been served, in a home or restaurant, a breaded, overfried fillet that tastes like a shingle with crumbs on it? Or poached salmon that is dry, grainy, and flavorless? It all boils down to the same thing\u2014overcooking.\n\nThe Japanese, as you know, eat a lot of raw fish, which means it has to be superfresh. A market in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Julia Child buys most of her fish, caters to the Japanese colony in Cambridge, and if you go late in the afternoon, there is practically nothing left.\n\nNow, I'm not suggesting you switch to raw fish, although for an interesting taste experiment you might try the sashimi served in Japanese restaurants\u2014thin, delicate slices of raw tuna, striped bass, or similar saltwater fish accompanied by a little bowl of soy sauce and green Japanese horseradish for dipping. Once you discover the tenderness and flavor offish in its natural state, you'll see why overcooking is nothing short of a crime.\n\nThe Canadian Department of Fisheries and their Home Service Bureau have made extensive tests on the fish that they (and we) catch in the oceans, lakes, and rivers and have found that they all have something in common. Regardless of the fish or the cooking method there is one uncomplicated rule of thumb that can be followed. Measure the fish, whether it be whole, in steaks, or in fillets, at its thickest point. Then cook exactly 10 minutes for each measured inch of thickness. For frozen, unthawed fish, double the cooking time.\n\nActually, this remarkably simple approach was started some years ago at the University of Washington by Evelyn Spencer. She did a great deal of work on the subject of fish and came up with a method of quick, high-temperature cooking which was tested and adapted by the Canadians. I use their method constantly in my cooking classes and demonstrations and have found it to be infallible.\n\nSo if you are baking fish fillets or steaks, or even a whole stuffed fish, all you have to do is measure the thickness, put the fish in a buttered dish with seasonings, and cook in a 450-degree oven, allowing 10 minutes per measured inch (20 minutes for frozen fish).\n\nIf you are baking them en papillote\u2014that is, in an aluminum foil package with the edges sealed\u2014allow a little extra time for the heat to penetrate the foil, 5 minutes more for fresh fish, 10 for frozen.\n\nTo broil fillets, arrange them on a piece of buttered foil on the broiler pan and use the same rule to gauge the cooking time. Fresh fillets should be cooked 2 to 3 inches away from the heat unit, frozen ones 4 inches away. Be sure to buy thick fillets for broiling. Very thin ones have a tendency to dry out. These are better sauteed or pan-fried. To pan-fry, salt and pepper them, dip them lightly in flour, and fry in about _ _ inch of hot, but not smoking, fat or oil.\n\nA poached fish, which should never be allowed to boil but merely be simmered gently in hot court bouillon or flavored and seasoned water, also gets the same timing of 10 minutes per inch measured at the thickest point, usually behind the head.\n\n_ Poached Trout with Horseradish Cream_ can be made with small fresh brook trout or frozen rainbow trout. Make a simple court bouillon by bringing to a boil in a pan _ _ cup dry white wine, 1 pint water, a sprig of parsley, a slice of lemon, 1 onion stuck with 2 cloves, _ _ teaspoon salt, 2 or 3 peppercorns, _ _ bay leaf, and a pinch of thyme. Reduce heat, simmer 20 to 30 minutes, then strain the liquid. Pour into a shallow pan (such as a skillet) enough of the hot court bouillon to cover the trout. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, add the trout, and let them simmer gently until done, allowing 10 minutes per inch of thickness (or 20 if frozen). When cooked, the flesh should flake when tested with a fork. Remove the trout from the liquid and serve with _Horseradish Cream,_ made by combining 1 cup sour cream with 1 cup freshly grated horseradish or bottled drained horseradish to taste.\n\n_Salute to Salmon_\n\nWhen I was a child, I spent a great deal of time close to the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon, so salmon has always been an important part of my food life. Salmon, with its delicate pink flesh and brilliant silver skin, is not only one of the most decorative but also one of the best fish we have. Alas, because of pollution and the damming and blocking of rivers, much of the salmon that used to come to the East Coast is gone, probably forever, although I did hear some heartening news the other day. Experiments are going on in New England to breed small salmon weighing no more than about 2 pounds, an ideal size for salmon lovers. A whole fish could be cooked in practically any pot, without needing a fish boiler or a specially large pan.\n\nSuch a revival would have great meaning for New England, for here in summers past, when salmon was at its peak in the rivers, the traditional Fourth of July dinner was boiled or poached salmon with egg sauce and the first new potatoes and green peas of the year. It's touching to think that in the days when our country became independent this significant meal celebrated three of the gifts of the waters and the land. Now, of course, salmon from various sources is available for the greater part of the year, new potatoes for nine months, and peas all the time.\n\nSalmon has always been popular in Europe. Wherever you go, you find poached salmon with plain, green, or mustard-flavored mayonnaise, and cucumber salad. In England it is often served at big party suppers. I remember giving a dinner party years ago at a private eating club in London where the first course on the menu, written by the owner-manager, was \"poached young grilse.\" This caused a few people to ask what manner of fish this was, since it tasted like salmon. Well, it was salmon. Grilse is a virgin salmon, supposedly with a finer texture and flavor than any other.\n\nIn Oregon, when I was young, there was a great profusion of salmon in the Columbia River, and if you went to Astoria, at the river's mouth, during the season, you found hundreds of people fishing and hundreds more in the canneries. I vividly remember stopping at a cannery with friends and buying for 50 cents a large measure brimming with salmon cheeks\u2014literally, the cheeks from the salmon heads. Sauteed in butter and oil or broiled with crumbs and butter they are the most delicious morsels, with a very different texture from the body of the fish. Nowadays, salmon are scarcer and salmon cheeks have become practically as expensive as caviar.\n\nThe salmon we had is the Pacific salmon, the royal Chinook, a large fish with a goodly amount of oil, a brilliant color, and superb texture and flavor.\n\nRecently, while spending a nostalgic summer at the Oregon beach, I bought and broiled some fillets of Chinook which were exceedingly thick and practically boneless. With salmon fillets, you must be very exacting about the cooking time. Give them 10 minutes for every inch, measured at the thickest point. As there may be as much as half an inch difference in the thickness of the piece you buy, you should cut and broil it according to thickness. Should your fillet be thicker at one end than the other, it is best to undercook it a bit, because if you broil the thinnest part for as long as the thick, that end of your fish will be extremely dry and tasteless.\n\n  One thing I enjoy most about _Salmon Fillets_ is that the skin on one side becomes a delicious morsel when broiled. I like to rub the fillets quite well with coarse salt, let them stand for 15 to 20 minutes, then place them skin side up on a broiling pan covered with oiled cooking parchment or aluminum foil. I broil them for the required 10 minutes per inch of thickness, 6 minutes of the time on the skin side and 4 minutes on the flesh side, turning the fish very carefully with a pancake turner or large spatula. When you turn the fish flesh side up, you can, if you wish, sprinkle it with a few buttered crumbs, but be careful not to let them burn. You can easily tell when the fish is cooked because the color changes from its raw reddish pink to a paler shade, a lovely deep pink. Broiled fillets should be served piping hot, on hot plates, and if you are like me you'll start by attacking that beautiful crisp skin, which tastes so good.\n\nServe these fillets with lemon butter, hollandaise, or Bearnaise sauce, or with what we westerners call tartar sauce, one which is in many ways different from the classic.\n\n To prepare Tartar _Sauce,_ take 1 cup mayonnaise and add to it _ _ cup finely chopped dill pickle, _ _ cup finely chopped onion, 1 teaspoon finely chopped capers, and a touch of mustard. Blend well and add a dash of lemon juice or tarragon vinegar if it seems to lack sharpness. Let the sauce stand an hour or so before you serve it, and it will gain a great deal in quality as the flavors have time to merge and mellow.\n\nI know I will probably get a load of letters from all of you telling me that you have a different recipe for tartar sauce. Well, I realize that there are as many different versions of this sauce as there are versions of fried chicken. I've had tartar sauce with chopped fresh dill and parsley plus a touch of garlic, and tartar sauce with chopped fresh tarragon and shallots, but this is the one I remember from my childhood, and to my mind it is the best, so I think you should give it a whirl and see how you like it. Add a bit of chopped parsley to the sauce just before you serve it, and garnish your salmon with parsley sprigs.\n\nWith these delectable broiled salmon fillets, nothing is better than crisply fried potatoes, be they homemade French fries or sauteed potatoes. Or, if you can find little new potatoes, leave the skins on, cutting a bellyband from around the middle, and boil or steam them. This gives you a summer meal that couldn't be bettered anywhere.\n\nAnother great Oregon delicacy of my childhood was the local smoked salmon, which was more kippered, or hot-smoked, a method typical of the early Indian way of preparing the fish.\n\nAs I grew older, I learned to appreciate the Atlantic smoked salmon from Nova Scotia, Scotland, Ireland, and Scandinavia with its gentle curing, lovely pale color, and beautiful texture, so delectable when cut with a very sharp knife in long paper-thin slices more or less across the grain, the way you find it in restaurants and food shops where the greatest care and tradition are maintained. Then, as I traveled more, I discovered Scandinavia's gravlax, a superb dish for salmon lovers.\n\n  Gravlax is not hard to make, although it takes patience. To serve six to eight, buy 3 to 3 _ _ pounds center cut of fresh salmon. Ask the fishman to leave the skin on but to split the salmon and remove the backbone and the little bones surrounding it. Place one half, skin side down, in a bowl or casserole, and rub it very, very well with a mixture of _ _ pound coarse salt, 'A cup sugar, and 1 to 2 tablespoons coarsely ground  peppercorns. Rub well into the fish, then place a very large bouquet of fresh dill on top. Rub the second half of the salmon with the seasoning mixture and place over the dill, skin side up. Cover with foil, then weight down with canned goods. Set the bowl on a platter, as the salmon will give forth liquid, and refrigerate for 36 to 48 hours, turning each day to cure evenly and basting with the liquid that accumulates. Weight it down again each time. At the end of the curing time, remove the fish, scrape away the dill and seasonings and dry on paper towels. Place on a carving board (I like to put a bouquet of dill at one end, parsley at the other) and slice thickly on the diagonal, detaching the flesh from the skin as you do so. Serve as an appetizer or a main course for luncheon or supper or with other fish dishes as you would in a Swedish smorgasbord.\n\nThe curing condiments and the dill give the salmon a most exciting flavor, which is perfectly complemented by rye bread and a sweet mustard sauce.\n\n  To make _Mustard Sauce,_ combine 4 tablespoons seasoned German mustard (not hot, but very spicy), 1 teaspoon dry mustard, 3 tablespoons sugar, 2 tablespoons wine vinegar, _ _ cup vegetable oil, and 3 tablespoons finely chopped dill plus a little finely chopped parsley. Whisk well until it has the consistency of a thin mayonnaise. Refrigerate, covered, for 5 hours before serving.\n\nTraditionally, gravlax should be served with akvavit and maybe beer, both freezing cold. In summer, when salmon is at its best and most plentiful, try this marvelous way of serving a superlative fish.\n\n_Try Salt Fish for Breakfast_\n\nIn our present-day pattern of eating, we have almost forgotten a most important part of our food heritage\u2014salt fish, one of the earliest American products to travel back to Europe. Fishermen from Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, England, and the Scandinavian countries ventured far into the Grand Banks of Newfoundland to catch cod, mackerel, and herring which they preserved for the long voyage home by salting and drying. The Norwegians, of course, had long used salt herring from their surrounding waters as a winter food, but it was the Mediterranean countries, where salt cod became a staple of the diet, that cooked the fish most imaginatively. In Portugal alone, it's said there is a salt cod recipe for just about every day of the year, and France and Italy also have dozens of unusual recipes.\n\nOne of the greatest is the French Provengal _brandade de morue,_ which at one time you could buy on Fridays throughout the south of France. In fact, certain delicatessens, noted for making the best brandade, would ship it by bus and train to other towns each Friday. Brandade is traditionally made in a mortar and pestle, although these days a blender or the food processor makes much shorter work of it. Cooked salt cod, heavy cream, olive oil, garlic, and freshly ground black pepper are pounded in the mortar until they become a creamy paste with the texture of fine mashed potatoes. Eaten warm, with little fingers of fried toast, a garlicky creamy brandade is one of the most exciting foods I know.\n\nIn this country, potatoes and salt cod have long been regarded as natural partners\u2014creamed codfish with boiled potatoes, codfish balls, and, finest of all, codfish cakes.\n\n  I was brought up on this simple but wonderful version of _Codfish Cakes_ created by Mother's Chinese chef in Portland. Soak 1 _ _ to 2 pounds boneless salt cod overnight in water. Next day, change the water, then place in a pan in fresh cold water and bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer until cod is just tender and flakes easily when tested with a fork. Drain well and shred with two forks.\n\nCombine the flaked cod with an equal quantity of cooked potatoes, freshly mashed with plenty of butter so they have a rich texture, 1 or 2 eggs, 1 teaspoon ground ginger or 1 _ _ to 2 teaspoons finely grated fresh ginger, and freshly ground black pepper to taste. Mix well and form into cakes about 3 inches across and 1 inch thick\u2014they are very delicate, so handle them carefully. Saut\u00e9 the cakes in plenty of butter in a heavy skillet until crisply brown on both sides. Garnish with a little chopped parsley and serve with freshly made toast and, if you like, with strips of bacon or salt pork, for one of the best breakfasts you've ever eaten.\n\nAs the westward trek of the pioneers opened up this country from coast to coast, and the great native salmon of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans became a part of American eating, salt salmon, as well as salt cod, was quite a common product. One of the most famous of the Hawaiian pupus or appetizers, lomi-lomi, salt salmon almost literally massaged to softness with the fingers, arose because of the New England missionaries, who introduced salt salmon there as a replacement for the salt cod for which they nostagically yearned.\n\nWhile I was summering in Oregon I found to my delight that one can still buy salt salmon bellies and sometimes the delicious fat tips, which are cut from around the head of the salmon and salted. Here's a good way to serve them, in case you are lucky enough to find salt salmon in your fish markets.\n\n  Soak the _Salt Salmon_ in cold water for several hours, then poach in cold water or half cold water and half cold milk until the fish flakes easily. Pour off liquid, keep the fish warm on a hot platter, and top with 1 or 2 pats of butter. Combine in a saucepan 3 tablespoons melted butter and 3 tablespoons flour, cook several minutes, stirring, until golden and bubbling, then stir in 1 cup hot milk and stir until thickened. Add freshly ground black pepper (no salt), stir in _ _ cup heavy cream and 1 or 2 more pats of butter, and simmer 5 to 10 minutes. Taste for seasoning. You may, if you like, add several tablespoons coarsely chopped hard-boiled egg or 2 tablespoons chopped parsley to the sauce.\n\nWith boiled potatoes or crisp toast and a good hot cup of tea or coffee this makes a magnificent Sunday morning breakfast.\n\n_The Sardine, a Small Miracle_\n\nEvery summer, around the beginning of August, one of the most mouthwatering events of the year takes place in New York\u2014the Fancy Food Show. This is a show basically for the trade, which means buyers who come from various shops and stores all over the country to find new and interesting foods. It's a breathtaking spectacle, row after row of booths displaying all the great delicacies of the world. There are untold yards of sausages and other cured meats, caviar, cheese, dried and preserved fruits, just about every kind of canned food you can think of, biscuits, cookies, and enough candy to satisfy the sweetest tooth.\n\nHaving been in Norway recently, I stopped to look at the Norwegian products, and the innumerable cans of sardines made me realize how important the tiny sardine, the young of a fish belonging to the herring family, is in our eating pattern. I can't remember a time when we didn't have Brisling sardines, which are the best known of those from Norway, or sild, another kind not as commonly found. What a boon they have been over the years. One inexpensive little can will provide a snack, a sandwich, or even a salad, and they are great to carry along on an outing. One of my favorite sandwiches is homemade bread, well-buttered, spread with mashed sardines, a few drops of lemon juice, and a thin slice of onion, eaten with a glass of beer or wine.\n\nBrisling sardines are rather different from French, Portuguese, or Maine sardines. They are very small\u2014one can may hold anywhere from six to twenty-six of them, and their good fishy flavor is increased by the slight smoking they get when they are prepared for canning, before being packed in their natural oil or olive oil. When I was in Norway, I discovered the following unusual and delicious way to serve these tiny marvels.\n\n_ Wined Sardines on Toast:_ melt 2 tablespoons butter in a skillet, and cook 1 small onion, coarsely chopped, and 2 crushed garlic cloves until wilted. Add a 3-inch strip of lemon peel, 1 cup dry white wine, and 1 bay leaf. Simmer over low heat for about 10 minutes. Carefully turn two 3\u00be ounce cans of Brisling sardines into a small bowl, draining off the oil. Strain the hot wine mixture over them, and marinate at room temperature for 1 hour. Serve these winey sardines on hot buttered toast, topped with a spoonful of sauteed mushrooms, as a snack, or a luncheon or supper dish for six.\n\n  Another sardine dish that has become almost a tradition at holiday time in Scandinavia is what I call _Scandinavian Special._ This recipe makes quite a lot, but if you refrigerate it in glass jars or a mold it will keep well\u2014omit the onion juice, though, if you're going to keep it.\n\nMash 4 to 5 cans Norway sardines very finely, and season with _ _ teaspoon salt and 1 teaspoon paprika. Blend 1 pound cream cheese with 2 tablespoons lemon juice, _ _ cup chopped parsley, and a little onion juice. Season to taste with salt. Whip the sardines and cream, cheese mixture together really well until light and well blended. Taste. You may need to add a little more lemon juice. Put into a decorative oiled mold. Chill a little, then unmold onto a serving platter, garnish with watercress, and serve with crackers as a first course, or a cocktail spread.\n\n  Sardines are wonderful with drinks, as a snack. Sometimes I combine _ _ cup cottage cheese with   cup sour cream, _ _ cup minced green onion, and 3 tablespoons chopped parsley, blend it well, add 1 teaspoon dried dill or some chopped fresh dill, mound it on a serving dish, and arrange a wreath of Brisling sardines around it and some chopped parsley in the center. Very crisp toast or good Melba toast goes around the mound\u2014or I may put party rye in the oven to dry out until it is curly and crisp and use that.\n\n  Another of my standbys over the years is a Potato _and Sardine Salad._ Cook 6 medium-sized new potatoes in their jackets until just tender. As soon as they can be handled comfortably, slip off the skins and slice them into a bowl. Add 3 tablespoons olive oil, 1 tablespoon wine vinegar, and a touch of salt and pepper. Cool. Meanwhile, coarsely chop 1 red Italian onion. Add this to the cooled potatoes, and season with salt and pepper to taste and 1 to 2 tablespoons chopped parsley. Toss with oil and vinegar and arrange on a bed of greens. Open and drain two 3\u00be-ounce cans of Brisling sardines, carefully remove from the can, and arrange on top of the-potato salad, alternately with quartered hard-boiled eggs. Serve with mustard mayonnaise\u20141 cup mayonnaise mixed with _ _ cup Dijon-style mustard, a dash or two of German mustard, and 1 tablespoon chopped fresh dill or 1 teaspoon dried dill.\n\n_Lobster, Aristocrat of the Ocean_\n\nFew things in the world of food are as fascinatingly constructed, as curious to look at, and as delicious to eat as a lobster. For some reason, lobsters have always been considered luxury food, classed with caviar, squab, game, and all those delicacies one eats at elaborate dinners and on special occasions. I can't imagine why. True, lobster is expensive, but what isn't today? It's worth every penny it costs. Nothing tastes quite like a lobster, and nothing is as succulent when it is properly prepared\u2014and as far as I'm concerned, the simpler the preparation the better.\n\nLobsters abound in East Coast waters from Long Island to far north in Canada, and although they are not as plentiful off the Massachusetts and Maine coasts as they used to be, there are still plenty to be had in Canadian waters. Lobsters are sold in different sizes, all the way up from the delicate little 1-pound ones called \"chicken\" lobsters, which yield 4 or 5 ounces of meat, to enormous monsters weighing up to 20 or 25 pounds. These heavy ones make exceedingly good eating, but you won't find them very often. Lobsters just under _ _pounds are called \"heavy chickens,\" those weighing 1\u00bc to  _ _pounds are known as \"quarters,\" and a 2-pound lobster is referred to in the trade as a \"deuce\" or 2-pounder. At 2  to _2 _ pounds they are \"small jumbos,\" and larger ones up to 5 pounds are called \"jumbos.\"\n\nIf you live far away from lobster country, there are several lobster \"farms\" in Maine and Canada that will air-ship lobsters packed in seaweed that arrive live and kicking for you to cook. Many airports in New England now have shops where you can purchase live lobsters and have them specially packed to take back on the plane with you.\n\nA live lobster is a dappled, dark-green, sort of underwater-camouflage color. When boiled or broiled, it turns a brilliant red, so distinctive that \"lobster red\" has become a recognized color term.\n\nSome people have tender feelings about cooking live lobsters, contending that because they thrash about and carry on when boiled they should be killed before they are put in the pot. Others say a lobster has practically no feeling in its nervous system, which I think is probably true. However, if you are squeamish about plunging a lobster in boiling water, put it in cold water, cover the pot, and bring the water to a full boil so the lobster just wafts away in a dreamy state. If you have no scruples, grasp the lobster behind the head, dip it head first in boiling salted water, cover the pot, and cook it. I find you get the best tesult if, after the water returns to the boil, you allow 5 minutes for the first pound and about 3 minutes for every other pound.\n\nI don't cool the lobsters in the water because I find they then become overcooked. 1 take them out and cool them. Cold lobster, with well-seasoned mustardy mayonnaise and lemon, is my favorite, but I know many people who feel equally strong that nothing beats a lobster hot from the pot.\n\nTo tackle a boiled lobster, first cut off a little piece at the head and drain the liquid from the inside. Then divide the lobster in half, either by cutting the shell with shears or splitting it with a heavy knife and mallet. Inside is a rather weird anatomy. Most of the meat is in the body, along which runs a long black intestinal vein, which should be removed. In the head, behind the eyes, is the tiny stomach sac or craw, which again should be removed. You'll also see in the head little bits of meat, some green matter (this is the liver or tomalley and absolutely delicious) and, if the lobster is female, ruby-red \"coral,\" the undeveloped spawn or roe. Interestingly enough, the spawn is much better raw than cooked, with a remarkable flavor, different from anything you've ever known. When cooked, it is rather dry and is best combined with the tomalley or worked into mayonnaise.\n\nWhen you serve hot lobster, supply large napkins or bibs, shears, lobster crackers, and picks for getting the meat from the claws, plenty of melted butter and lemon, good bread, and either cold beer or chilled dry white wine. From there on, it's every man for himself. Everyone has his own particular fashion of eating a hot lobster, all equally satisfying.\n\nI have always thought that broiled lobster was a much overrated dish, but many people, I know, feel it is the greatest. It must be carefully cooked, or the meat will be dry, tough and tasteless.\n\n  For broiling, the lobster must be split alive. The trick is to make a very deep incision with the point of a heavy knife where head and body meet, which severs the spinal cord and kills the lobster immediately. Then cut right through the entire length of the lobster with the knife and a mallet or with shears, drain it, and remove the vein and stomach. If you want to make a sauce with the tomalley and coral, remove them and fill the head cavity with seasoned bread or cracker crumbs (which may be mixed with shrimp or crabmeat). Salt, pepper, and butter the lobster halves well, put them flesh side up on the broiling pan, and broil about 4 to 5 inches from the heat for 12 to 15 minutes, basting frequently with melted butter, and a sprinkle of salt, pepper, and paprika if you wish.\n\nServe your broiled lobster with melted butter, which you may mix with the tomalley and coral, a touch of lemon juice, and a hint of garlic. Again, bread and foaming cold beer or chilled white wine are all you need with it.\n\n_First Catch Your Crayfish_\n\nWhen I was growing up in Oregon, we children would organize fishing parties at the beach in summer and trek up the Necanicum River with little nets, lots of string, and bits and pieces of fresh liver or part of an ear of corn, which we would put on string as bait. We would sit on the riverbanks and drag in crayfish by the dozen. Our catch was proudly hauled home to be cooked in a red wine court-boullion with plenty of seasonings and eaten for dinner that night with salad and good bread and butter. I can still remember how tasty those juicy little shellfish were.\n\nAlas, in these days of industrial pollution and dirty streams in the Northwest\u2014and many of the European countries, too\u2014crayfish seem to have all but disappeared from our lives, and from menus. Only rarely now do you get crayfish in the Pacific Northwest although in Louisiana and the Delta country they are still eaten in vast quantities, with great gusto.\n\nThe people of Sweden and other Scandinavian countries think so highly of crayfish that they hold annual festivals, albeit some of the countries can no longer supply their own needs but have to depend on imports. August is the traditional time for the festivals, a time of merry uninhibited feasting, with two or three gulps of akvavit and swallows of beer along with every crayfish, so that by the time you get through with a couple of dozen you have done a pretty good job of both drinking and eating.\n\nWhile summering in my native Oregon, I was surprised and delighted to receive a call from my friend John Bennett, a chef in San Francisco. John told me he had been getting marvelous crayfish and asked if I would like some. Would I! Before we knew it a parcel of crayfish had arrived alive and kicking by Greyhound bus. We immediately put on a court bouillon, tossed in the crayfish, and sat down to a superb and nostalgic luncheon of these little delicacies, with Finnish rye bread from the local bakery and ice-cold beer.\n\nThe crayfish came from two men who have formed the Burkhim-Tate Crayfish Company and are sending them to the San Francisco area, so there is new hope for all western lovers of crayfish. They can now feast on these succulent shellfish during the May to September season. The traps are now yielding a daily catch of 30 to 40 crayfish each, and it is hoped that the scope of the catches will increase as the business grows.\n\nIn San Francisco, John Bennett serves the crayfish _a la nage,_ which means they are cooked in a rather elaborate court bouillon and either served warm in the liquid or allowed to cool in it and served cold. In another version, the famous _gratin d'ecrevisses_ that one finds in so many great restaurants in France, the cooked crayfish are taken out of the shells and served in a rich sauce, similar to Nantua sauce, made with the bouillon.\n\n  \"To my mind, one of the simplest and most delicious ways to cook these succulent shellfish is as _Crayfish a la Bordelaise._ For four, you'll need 36 to 40 crayfish. Make a _mirepoix_ by cutting 2 carrots, 2 onions, and 2 ribs celery into fine julienne strips or dice. Melt 5 tablespoons butter in a large kettle, and cook these vegetables in the butter until just wilted. Season with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Add 2 cups dry white wine, let it cook for a few minutes, then add the crayfish and cook them just until the shells turn red, about 8 to 10 minutes. Mix in 1 _ _ cups tomato puree or pureed Italian plum tomatoes, bring to a boil, and let the tomato blend with the other ingredients. Correct the seasoning, and pour the fragrant, steaming mixture into a large tureen or bowl. Serve with saffron rice, a green salad, crisp bread, and plenty of cold beer.\n\nIf you can find or order crayfish in your locality, they are something to hail with joy and treat with reverence. If you can't, you might try substituting a few small lobsters in this recipe, or jumbo shrimp.\n\nCrayfish can also be turned into a very good and pretty salad. Remove the cooked meat from the tails and large claws, and serve on a bed of lettuce with some quartered hard-boiled eggs and two or three of the little red crayfish, in the shell, as garnish. Top with a rich mayonnaise, a remoulade sauce, or a Louis dressing.\n\n_Shrimp in the Diminutive_\n\nYears ago, when I was writing _James Beard's Fish Cookery,_ I learned a lot about shrimp, among other things that no other shellfish even approaches it in popularity. You can find cooked or raw shrimp in supermarkets in the smallest villages as well as fish markets in big cities. Shrimp, especially the ubiquitous shrimp cocktail (with a sometimes pretty badly flavored sauce that I have heard called \"the red menace\"), has become one of the more dominant aspects of American cuisine. In restaurants across the country you can order shrimp cocktail, shrimp salad, broiled shrimp, and shrimp masquerading under the name of \"scampi\", which they are not. Scampi belong to another family of shellfish, _Nephrops norvegicus,_ known in France as _langoustines_ and in England as Dublin Bay prawns.\n\nThe shrimp we eat come from all over the world\u2014from Panama, the Indian Ocean, France, Denmark, and Norway as well as our own Atlantic and Pacific waters and the Gulf of Mexico. Although we have a wealth of shrimp in this country, all too few people know the delights of the very tiny shrimp from the coasts of Alaska, Maine, California, and Oregon, as delicate and delicious as any seafood can be. Maine, I'm happy to say, is making great strides in promoting these little beauties, marketing them frozen in the shell; frozen, shelled, and deveined, both cooked and uncooked; shelled; deveined, and breaded. If you buy these shrimp (the French call them _crevette rose)_ in the shell with their heads on, they are great fun for a cocktail party. Just put out a huge pile of cooked shrimp and let everyone shell for himself. Of course, for a salad or creamed or curried shrimp, it is much easier to buy the shelled shrimp meat and save yourself the trouble, for it takes a lot of these tiny babies to make a pound, and the shelling is a pretty tedious job. One time in Alaska I saw a roomful of thirty or so Indian women, all wearing white cotton gloves to protect their hands while they shelled the shrimp\u2014it was really quite a sight.\n\nThere are two vital points to remember when cooking shrimp. First, there is no reason to ruin the taste and texture by overcooking, no matter how large they are. Plunge them into rapidly boiling salted water, and after it returns to the boil give them no more than 3 to 5 minutes, according to size (for tiny shrimp, 1 minute is enough), then drain them immediately. Do not let them cool in the liquid, or they will continue to cook and get soft and mushy.\n\nSecond, always salt the water well\u2014otherwise you won't get a good-tasting shrimp. I know shrimp live in salt water, but that doesn't salt them enough. For a subtler flavor, try cooking them in court bouillon instead of water. Combine water with white wine or a little wine vinegar, add your favorite herbs and spices, salt, and pepper, and let it cook for 4 to 5 min utes before adding the shrimp. It gives them a delicate and very pleasant taste. You can use the leftover court bouillon to make soup or a sauce for fish, first cooking it down to intensify the flavor and then straining it.\n\nBefore you cook shrimp, I think it is rather nice to devein them, although the Shrimp Association says there is no reason save aesthetics to remove the black vein\u2014it certainly won't harm you if you don't. So take your choice. You can easily remove the vein when you peel the shrimp by cutting through the curve of the shell with scissors and washing the vein out. If you buy frozen shelled, deveined, and cooked shrimp, you won't have that problem.\n\nTiny shrimp make one of the world's greatest shrimp dishes, potted shrimp, which hails from England and is as commonly served there as shrimp cocktail is here. If you try it, I think you might well switch allegiance, for potted shrimp have a definite buttery spicy quality that is quite addictive. You can make this dish, at a pinch, with the tiny shelled canned Icelandic shrimp, but it is infinitely better with the little fresh ones.\n\n  To make enough Potted _Shrimp_ to serve four as a first course, melt 6 ounces butter and pour off and reserve the clear part, discarding the sediment. Toss 1 pound tiny cooked and shelled shrimp in the hot clear butter, seasoning with _ _ to _ _ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg and a pinch or two of cayenne pepper as you do so. Add the seasoning little by little, and taste to see when it is to your liking. The nutmeg flavor should be noticeable but not overpowering, for the butter will absorb the spice as the shrimp chill and the butter solidifies. Ladle the buttery shrimp into small pots, and seal the top with a thin layer of more clarified butter (this will keep them for about a week). Chill in the refrigerator until cold.\n\nServe potted shrimp with cocktails or as a first course with thinly sliced buttered brown bread or homemade Melba toast, or, in the English manner, with thin slices of smoked salmon, which is a most luxurious and elegant way to start a dinner party.\n\nYou can also eat these sweet, delicious little shrimp without any kind of seasoning or sauce to enhance their flavor. I remember years ago that one of the international steamship lines served huge bowls of tiny shelled European shrimp on the bar at cocktail time, and people dipped in and ate them like peanuts.\n\nWhenever I am on the West Coast, I eat my fill of the baby Pacific shrimp. In Vancouver I had them stacked high on half an avocado and bathed with a wondrous Louis sauce. I was served them skewered, four or five to a pick, with Dungeness crab legs, and tartar sauce as a dip. While I was staying at the beach in Oregon I made sandwiches of shrimp mixed with good homemade mayonnaise, and 1 had them for lunch in a spinach roll, which is actually a spinach souffle baked in a jelly-roll pan. While it is not hard to make, it looks and tastes delicious.\n\n  For the _Spinach Roll,_ you will need either 3 pounds fresh spinach or 4 packages frozen chopped spinach. Thaw frozen spinach in a pan over very gentle heat or pour boiling water over it. Drain extremely well, since frozen spinach has a high water content. Fresh spinach should be washed and well picked over, placed in a kettle with no water other than that clinging to the leaves, tightly covered, and wilted down. This takes a very few minutes. Drain it well and chop it coarsely.\n\nPut the very well drained chopped fresh or frozen spinach in a bowl. Mix in 6 tablespoons melted butter, _1 _ teaspoons salt, _ _ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, and 2 or 3 good dashes of nutmeg (nutmeg and spinach have a great affinity). Beat in 4 egg yolks, one by one, then beat the 4 egg whites until they hold soft peaks and fold them thoroughly into the spinach mixture. Taste for seasoning.\n\nLightly butter an ll-by-14-by-\u00bd-inch jelly-roll pan, line it with  waxed paper, butter the paper, and coat it with bread crumbs. Spread the spinach mixture in the pan, even it with a rubber spatula, and sprinkle with a little grated Parmesan cheese. Bake in a 350-degree oven for about 15 minutes or until just firm when touched lightly with the fingers.\n\nWhile the roll is baking, saute _ _ cup finely chopped onion or green onion in 4 tablespoons butter until just limp. Blend in 3 tablespoons flour, and cook for 2 or 3 minutes. Mix in _ _ cup dry vermouth or white wine, stir well, and season to taste with salt and pepper, a dash of Tabasco, and 1 tablespoon chopped fresh tarragon or 1 teaspoon dried tarragon. Gradually stir in 1 _ _cups light or heavy cream or evaporated milk, cook, and stir until nicely thickened. Taste for seasoning. Mix in _ _ cup chopped parsley and _1  _to 2 cups cooked tiny shrimp.\n\nRemove the baked roll from the oven, cover it with a piece of buttered foil, and invert on a board. Peel off the waxed paper. Spread with two-thirds of the shrimp mixture, then very carefully roll up like a jelly roll onto a flat serving plate, using the foil as a pusher. Spoon the remaining shrimp over the center and serve at once to six people.\n\nYou can fill the roll with other mixtures\u2014creamed seafood or asparagus tips or scrambled eggs. It is equally good hot or cold.\n\n_The World's_\n\n_Most Famous Fish Stew_\n\nDuring a recent vacation in Provence, I spent a morning at one of the local fish markets, where stall after stall was crammed with a splendid display of Mediterranean fish. This led me to muse on the one dish which, more than any other, signifies to most people Provence and its coast, and that is bouillabaisse.\n\nLater, I happened to be leafing through some magazines, and in one called _Gastronomie_ I came across a whole issue dealing with many different versions of how bouillabaisse first came to be. It was utterly fascinating, and though I'm not sure which version I believe, or even if I believe any of them, I'll tell you a couple and let you decide.\n\nA major error in one version was the statement that the first bouillabaisse, described as a discovery of the ancient Greeks that traveled to Rome and eventually to Marseille, included tomatoes. Now, as we all know, tomatoes were not introduced to Europe until after the discovery of America and didn't really come into common use until the middle of the eighteenth century, and thus were not even dreamed of in ancient Greece. It's perfectly possible, of course, that the forerunner of this great fish stew did originate in Greece, because the same fish are found there that are available in Provence and southern Italy, but it seems fairly certain to me that it was the Provenyaux who, throughout the years, developed their own pattern for it, a pattern far removed from the original.\n\nThere's another, rather charming version that intrigued me because I have spent some time in the port of Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue, named for the saints who supposedly set sail for Marseille to escape from the Holy Land after the crucifixion\u2014St. Mary Magdalene, St. Mary Jacob, St. Mary Salome, St. Mary of Bathsheba, St. Martha, and St. Trophine among others. The story goes that they ran into a terrible storm that almost tore the boat to pieces and were washed ashore on a deserted beach where, after sleeping for almost two days, they awoke to find fishermen with great pots of this fragrant stew. At this tiny little port in the Camargue, the arrival of the Marys is still celebrated every year at the end of May.\n\nAnyway, I'll go along with the idea that bouillabaisse is one of the oldest seafood dishes known to man. It really cannot be prepared anywhere but around or near the Mediterranean, because to give a bouillabaisse the quality it needs, one must have certain traditional fish such as conger eel, rascasse, and St. Pierre, plus a variety of other ingredients\u2014some people put in one thing, some another.\n\nPerhaps the finest bouillabaisse I know is served at a restaurant that has long been a favorite of mine, I'Escale, 27 kilometers west of Marseille in the village of Carry-le-Rouet. Next to this I'd put the bouillabaisse at the Brasserie des Catalans, in Marseille.\n\nSince we can't make a true bouillabaisse here, we have to be satisfied with our own fish stews or soups\u2014clam and fish chowder and the ciop-pino of California, which is probably our finest effort.\n\n  To make _Cioppino,_ first steam 1 quart clams or mussels in 1 cup red or white wine until they open (discard any that don't) and remove from shells. Strain broth through a fine cloth and reserve. Heat _ _ cup olive oil in a large pot, add 1 large chopped onion, 2 finely chopped garlic cloves, 1 chopped green pepper, and _ _ pound dried mushrooms, soaked in water until soft. Cook 3 minutes, then add 4 peeled, seeded, and chopped tomatoes, and cook 4 minutes. Add the strained broth, 4 tablespoons Italian tomato paste, and 2 cups California red wine, preferably Pinot Noir. Season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Simmer 20 minutes, then taste for seasoning. Add 3 pounds sea bass or striped bass, cut in serving pieces, or thick fillets of firm-fleshed fish, cut in pieces. Cook just until done, then add the clams or mussels, 1 pound crabmeat (or 2 Dungeness crabs, in pieces and sections), and 1 pound raw shelled shrimp. Simmer just until shrimp are cooked. Sprinkle with 3 tablespoons chopped parsley and serve to six, with crisp French or Italian bread.\n\n  A rather simpler shellfish stew, one that I have been teaching my students for over fifteen years and never tire of, is _Seafood Mediterranee._ This is a perfect party dish, quick to make, and invariably popular.\n\nHeat _ _ cup olive oil in a large saute pan or skillet. Add 3 chopped garlic cloves and 6 rock lobster tails, shelled and cut in thirds, and saute them very quickly. Add 1 cup white wine, 2 cups Italian plum tomatoes, 1 teaspoon oregano, 2 bay leaves, _ 1_ teaspoons salt, and _ _ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper. Arrange 12 cherrystone clams around the edge of the pan, hinged side down, bring to a boil, reduce the heat, cover, and cook 5 minutes. Add 1 pound shrimp, shelled but the tails left on, cover, and cook 3 minutes, or until the shrimp are pink and the clams open. (Sometimes clams are a little recalcitrant. Steam any that have not opened for a few more minutes, after removing the other shellfish, then discard any really stubborn ones that have not opened.) Sprinkle the fish stew with 1 cup chopped parsley, and serve in soup plates or bowls, with plenty of French bread to mop up the juices. Serve to six.\n\n_Clam Chowder, Northwest Style_\n\nOne of the most famous of the dishes considered to be all-American is clam chowder. Chowder, as you may know, is derived from the French word _chaudiere,_ and it came to New England by way of the French Canadian fishermen who drifted across the border and were wont to cook up their fish stew or soups in a big pot, or _chaudi_ \u00e8 _re._ The New Englanders picked up other recipes from French Canada\u2014for example, long before Yankee pot roast was ever heard of, they were making various versions of _boeuf \u00e0 la mode._\n\nChowder is a basic theme that has known all sorts of variations. New England clam chowder is made with salt pork, potatoes, milk, and quahogs, cherrystones, or littlenecks. Some New Englanders will tell you that there is only one type of clam you can use, while others recommend a different one. Then we have Manhattan clam chowder, considered by many to be a \"bastard\" chowder. Certainly it must have had a Mediterranean base, because it includes tomatoes and is redolent of herbs that scream Italy or Greece, while the flavor, texture, and quality are entirely different.\n\nOn the West Coast, especially the Northwest where you have razor clams, the chowder is similar to the New England version, although at times light or heavy cream will be used instead of milk, so this becomes, in a way, a much more formal soup. You also find bacon included, rather than salt pork, probably because people here had their own smokehouses.\n\n  I'm going to give you my family recipe for _Oregon Clam Chowder,_ which I think is damn good. It is easy to do and can be made, if necessity bids, with canned razor clams.\n\nDrain _ _cups chopped or ground clams, preferably razor clams, and reserve meat and liquor. If you grind the clams yourself, be sure not to throw away the liquor that comes from them. If you don't have much clam liquor, you can add a bit of bottled clam juice, though there is usually enough.\n\nCut 3 slices of salt pork or thickly sliced smoked bacon into small shreds, and cook in a skillet over medium heat until quite crisp. Remove and drain on paper towels. Add to the fat in the pan 1 finely chopped medium onion, and brown lightly. Thinly slice 2 medium potatoes, and cook in 2 cups boiling salted water until just tender. Add the bacon, onion, clam liquor, and salt and pepper to taste, and simmer 5 minutes. Add 3 cups light cream and bring to a boil. Correct seasoning, add ground clams, and just heat through. Serve with a dollop of butter in each bowl, a mere pinch of thyme, and a little chopped parsley. Serves four to six.\n\nWhile this is not the traditional New England clam chowder, it is awfully good.\n\n_Gastropods for Gastronomes_\n\nI can remember when people referred to the French with great disdain as \"snail eaters,\" and anyone going to France was warned that he might, all unawares, be served snails in a restaurant without knowing what he was getting. Snails were regarded as highly suspect, something to be avoided at all costs. That attitude has changed with the times. In my travels across the country during the last ten years I've found _escargots a la bour-guignonne_ on the menus of restaurants where I certainly didn't expect to discover anything as sophisticated as snails. I've been even more amazed to find that the children of some of my friends just love to eat these mysterious little morsels. There's no doubt about it: snails are becoming ever more popular here.\n\nAccording to a charming legend that goes back a great many years in American gastronomy, someone of French origin who loved snails brought a few to this country\u2014I believe to California\u2014and from that small beginning they spread far and wide.\n\nThere are, of course, different types of edible snails\u2014the sea snail, or periwinkle; the small snails from North Africa that we occasionally see fresh in our markets; the Helix _asperse,_ or common garden snail; and its superior relative Helix _pomatia,_ the larger vineyard snail that is cultivated in France on special snail farms. Some people think those repulsive slimy slugs we find in the garden are edible snails. They are not, although they, too, are mollusks. The edible snail has a beautiful striped shell and a head with delicate feelers that it can tuck back into the shell, shutting itself in. It feasts fastidiously on grass and the leaves of trees and vines.\n\nFortunately, we don't have to go out into the vineyards to catch our snails, nor do we have to go through the processes of preparing them\u2014soaking them in several changes of tepid water to make them cleanse themselves, boiling them for 5 minutes, taking them out of the shells and removing the inedible parts, rinsing them, and cleaning the shells. The Dutch, the Belgians, and the French have done all that for us. They clean, cook, and can the snails and package them for sale with the sterilized shells in an acetate tube, box, or plastic bag, grading them according to size\u2014super extra, extra large, and very large. All you have to do is open a can of these imported snails, rinse them, make the snail butter, and pop them back in the shells to be heated with the butter in the oven to an aromatic, irresistible succulence.\n\nWhen the snails are heated in the shells, they are usually put on metal or pottery snail plates, about the size of a shirred-egg dish, that have small indentations, one for each shell. Or the shells may be put on small baking dishes on a bed of rock salt, although this is not customary.\n\nInstead of heating the snails in the shells, some people prefer to use the enchanting little snail pots sold in cookware shops. These measure about _1 _ inches in diameter at the widest point, just large enough to tuck in one or two snails with a good dollop of snail butter.\n\n  _Snail Butter_ can vary a great deal, but for, let us say, 4 dozen snails, enough for four to eight people (a good snail eater can easily get away with a dozen), cream   pound soft but not melted butter with 2 to 3 tablespoons finely chopped shallots, 2 to 3 finely chopped garlic cloves (or more, if you like the flavor), about _ _ cup chopped parsley, and a little salt and freshly ground black pepper. Some people like very parsleyed snails, while others prefer a rich garlic flavor or the delicacy of shallots. By changing the proportions of these ingredients in the mixture, you can develop a snail butter that is yours alone.\n\nSlip the snails into the shells, and cover them well with the snail butter. Leave in the refrigerator for a number of hours so the butter penetrates and flavors the snails. To heat, arrange the shells on the hollows of the plates and pour a tablespoon of white wine over each one. Bake in a 450-degree oven for 7 to 8 minutes, until the butter, melting and mingling with the wine, gives forth an almost unbearably delicious smell.\n\nNow if you want to be very correct, you'll serve the snails with the special little snail tongs made to pick up and hold each shell, and the rather long, two-pronged forks for fishing them out. Actually it isn't necessary to buy these contraptions. You can use an oyster fork and, protecting your fingers with paper napkins, hold the very hot shells. You will need plenty of French bread to mop up the lovely melted butter. Real snail lovers often sip the last drop of juices from the shell after removing the snail and most of the butter. Drink some red or white wine with your snails\u2014either one goes rather well.\n\nSnails aren't always served in shells or pots. I once had them in mushroom caps that had been half-broiled with lightly garlic-flavored buttet. One or two snails were put in each mushroom cap, finely chopped walnuts were sprinkled over them, and a little dab of snail butter put on top. These were popped in a hot oven for 8 minutes and then served on little rounds of fried toast\u2014bread cut in circles and sauteed in butter until brown and crisp. They were, I can tell you, exquisite.\n\nHowever, to the average American, snails in the shell with snail butter, the classic _escargots_ \u00e0 _la bourguignonne,_ are the thing. You can even buy them ready-prepared and frozen in the shell, butter and all, so you only have to heat them, a sure sign of their widespread popularity and, to me, a mark of great progress for the Ametican palate. \n  CHAPTER 3\n\n_Earthy Subjects_\n\n_... in which we squeeze, shred, spit, and roast a variety of vegetables ... bring out the vegetable plate., .learn new ways with asparagus, radishes, lettuce, and cucumbers ... lament the decline of the tomato ... admire avocados ... bank on mushrooms ... ponder potatoes, onions, and the sweet beet ... meet the cabbage family and its salty sister ... economize with chickpeas and lentils ... go on a bean binge ... and hear a tale of two salads._\n\n_Please Squeeze the Vegetables_\n\nThe longer I cook vegetables, the more I learn about them. In the last year I have discovered a great deal about purees and shredded vegetables, which are among the most delicate and delicious of preparations. I've also found out the advantages of squeezing certain vegetables before cooking them. Why squeeze vegetables? Mainly to remove most of the excess liquid they contain, which makes them much pleasanter to eat.\n\nZucchini, for instance, becomes a totally different vegetable when it is shredded and squeezed. I like to use a Mouli julienne, a marvelous gadget with three interchangeable disks that you can find in the better kitchen shops. By simply turning the handle, you can shred vegetables from extremely fine to fairly coarse. After shredding the zucchini, I put it in a clean dish towel and squeeze until the water oozes out. Then I quickly saute the zucchini in a mixture of oil and butter, maybe with a little garlic and grated cheese, either cooking it until it browns on one side, turning it, and browning the other side, or covering and steaming it. Either way it comes out wonderfully crisp and bitey, with none of that soggy, droopy quality one usually associates with zucchini.\n\nAnother vegetable that takes well to this treatment is the cucumber. Thoroughly squeezed, then steamed in butter with a touch of chopped fresh dill or tarragon and some lemon juice, it is an unbeatable accompaniment to fish, veal, or pork.\n\nSqueezing also benefits chopped mushrooms. If, after chopping, you squeeze the mushrooms well in a dish towel, you'll find they cook more quickly and don't leave a soupy residue in the pan. This is true of any dish that calls for chopped mushrooms, like duxelles (see page 88), and don't, for heaven's sake, throw away those squeezed-out juices\u2014they are just great for flavoring soups, broths, or sauces.\n\nChopped parsley for a garnish will be much nicer and fluffier if you give it a good squeeze after chopping. Squeezing also benefits tomatoes, which today seem to have much more water content than they used to, whether they are those semi-red cannonballs we get in winter or the luscious garden-ripened ones of summer.\n\nPeel the tomatoes, cut the top slice off, then grasp them firmly in your hand and squeeze, so the seeds and most of the liquid dribble out, leaving only the firm flesh to be chopped for a tomato puree or a sauce. Saute the chopped tomatoes in butter, letting them just melt down, and you'll find they take on another quality completely.\n\n  I have a standard Tomato Sauce, which I use for all kinds of dishes. For this you scald 3 pounds tomatoes in boiling water, then peel them, cut a slice off the top, and squeeze out seeds and juices. Chop the flesh rather finely, and put to drain in a colander. Heat 4 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons olive oil, or 6 tablespoons olive oil, in a heavy skillet, add the tomatoes, and let them just melt down over medium heat. As they begin to heat through, add 1 crushed garlic clove (it need not be peeled\u2014all you want is to impart the flavor) or 2 or 3 garlic cloves, if you like garlic extremely well. Season with _1 _ teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon dried basil or several leaves of fresh basil, and a few grinds of black pepper. If the tomatoes are very acid, you can add a tiny fillip of sugar, which will give them a better flavor.\n\nCook the sauce very slowly for   to 1 hour. Then, if you feel it is too liquid and needs strong binding flavor and texture, add a 6-ounce can of tomato paste, which will give you a very thick sauce. (Be careful it doesn't splash on you when it boils up.) Taste for seasoning before using.\n\nIf you can't get decent tomatoes, you can use the 3 5-ounce can of Italian plum tomatoes, cooking them down well to eliminate the excess liquid before adding the tomato paste. They don't have quite the same flavor as fresh tomatoes, but the quality is excellent.\n\nThis is a good, honest, basic tomato sauce, perfect for seafood such as lobster, shrimp, or crab, for cooking chicken, or with vegetables, rice, or pasta. Add a little fish broth, and you have a richly flavored fish sauce. Or add meat broth, or mushroom broth and some chopped cooked mushrooms for enrichment. You might also try this perfectly wonderful luncheon or supper dish, a very great favorite of mine:\n\n  Poach big fat Italian sausages in water or white wine, dtain, then smother them in the tomato sauce and let them cook a little. Serve with rice or pasta, or put them on top of polenta, that Italian cornmeal delight, cover with the sauce, grate Parmesan cheese or a mixture of Parmesan and Gruyere over the sauce, or put some slices of mozzarella on top, and put in the oven until melted.\n\n_Vegetables and the Outdoor Menu_\n\nThe Greeks have a word for and a way with fresh young vegetables that is just right for the summer months when the passing parade in the markets and gardens is too tempting to resist. Many people neglect vegetables because they don't know what to do with them. When I go to the markets here and in Europe, I buy just about every one I can find at the peak of its growth, then turn my haul into large batches of vegetables a la Grecque.\n\nVegetables a la Grecque are as old as time, but surprisingly enough not too well known, although this is one of the simplest and most delicious ways of cooking seasonal vegetables. Little green beans and wax beans, whole green onions or tiny white onions, small firm mushroom caps, halved celery hearts, artichokes, leeks, fingers or cubes of eggplant, sliced or halved zucchini\u2014nearly all the vegetables in our ken except peas\u2014lend themselves to this style of preparation. Since they are eaten cold rather than hot, they can be made in quantity, refrigerated in containers for weeks, and brought out as you want them. It's a great way to take advantage of the seasonal drop in price and to enjoy vegetables all summer long with a minimum of effort. Fall and winter vegetables can be treated in the same manner\u2014halved or quartered fennel bulbs, cauliflow-erets, broccoli buds.\n\n  For Vegetables _a la Grecque,_ you must make a poaching liquid or court bouillon. For 1 pound string beans or 1 large eggplant cubed, or 8 artichoke bottoms or 4 artichoke quarters, combine in a large shallow pan or deep skillet _ _ cup olive, corn, or peanut oil, _ _ cup vinegar,  __ cup dry white wine or vermouth, 1 teaspoon salt, _ _ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, 1 bay leaf, 1 or 2 cloves garlic, a dash of Tabasco, and 1 teaspoon thyme, tarragon, oregano, or basil, whichever you prefer (if you have fresh basil in your garden, so much the better). Let's say you're using green beans, in which case you'd leave them whole but cut the ends off. Place them in the mixture and add water to barely cover. Bring to a boil very slowly, then reduce the heat and poach until they are just crispy tender. Remove from the heat, taste the liquid for seasoning, to see if it needs more salt, then let the beans cool in the liquid. When they are well cooled, transfer to a serving dish and chill lightly in the refrigerator or in a cold place. Serve sprinkled with chopped parsley.\n\nFor a big party, you might cook three or four different vegetables, giving each one an appropriate herb\u2014thyme for beans, oregano for eggplant, basil for zucchini\u2014and serve them as a first course, a salad, or a vegetable course. Or team a couple of them with a grilled steak or hamburgers, some good bread, and fresh fruit for a wonderful outdoor dinner.\n\n  Little white onions can be given a slightly different treatment. This version is not called a la Grecque but _Onions Monegasque,_ after the principality of Monaco. To the a la Grecque poaching liquid add a healthy pinch of saffron, and when the onions are just starting to get tender, mix in 2 tablespoons tomato paste and _ _ cup seedless raisins. Cook until the raisins are puffed and the onions barely tender but still crisp and crunchy. Cool them in the liquid.\n\nI make a lot of these, using about 45 to 50 peeled white onions, refrigerate them in jars, and serve them all summer because my guests love them so much. The saffron gives a distinctive flavor and, blended with the tomato paste, the prettiest color imaginable. You can also cook wax beans in the same manner\n\nAnother good way to prepare summer vegetables is to cook them in beef, chicken, or mushroom broth with salt and pepper until they are crisply tender. Cool them in the liquid (don't overcook\u2014they will continue cooking as they cool), and chill them in the refrigerator until you are ready to use them. Drain, transfer to a serving dish or salad bowl, and give them a generous covering of vinaigrette sauce (3 parts oil to 1 part vinegar with salt and pepper to taste) and some chopped fresh herbs and parsley. Serve these vegetables vinaigrette as a salad or with grilled foods, as part of a cold buffet, or for a picnic. Vegetables cooked in this way do not need to be eaten icy cold, just at room temperature. Remember, the poached vegetables should not be cooked to death. They should still have a slight bite to them and be well marinated so the flavors of the poaching liquid or dressing mingle with and enhance their own natural goodness.\n\nOne of my favorite outdoor meals starts with an hors d'oeuvre table substantial enough to be a full course as well as an accompaniment to drinks, followed by an entree grilled over charcoal, a hearty vegetable dish, then fruit and cheese. I might have little patties of chopped meat, or a tiny club steak, or a ham slice basted with mustard and honey, or grilled fish, with a gratin of potatoes. By serving less meat, a menu can actually be more festive and much more interesting.\n\nA day ahead, make your vegetables a la Grecque or vinaigrette and chill them. Then bring them out in attractive serving dishes along with crusty bread, sweet butter, and some chilled white wine\u2014I like the good, inexpensive California jug wines, or the country wines from France that you can now buy in economical half-gallons.\n\nIf you can buy those unwaxed English-type hothouse cucumbets, the kind that need no peeling, simply slice them paper-thin, sprinkle with salt, and toss in a mixture of half mayonnaise, half sour cream. Leave to wilt for several hours, then sprinkle with chopped parsley or chives. Tomatoes are at their best in summer. Peel and thinly slice several ripe tomatoes, dress them with olive oil and wine vinegar, and sprinkle with chopped fresh basil or chives, or maybe some finely chopped green onions.\n\nSo now you have your vegetables a la Grecque or vinaigrette and your tomato and cucumber salads. Round out your hors d'oeuvre table with any of these other foods: thinly sliced prosciutto and salami; anchovies; herring tidbits; Norwegian sardines, nicely arranged with halved hard-boiled eggs and sprinkled with chopped parsley; Polish sausage, heated in red wine, sliced, and served hot; cold asparagus; cole slaw; potato salad; stuffed eggs with Russian dressing; fresh shrimp or crabmeat with mayonnaise.\n\nThe number of things you can have for an hors d'oeuvre table is endless, and if you don't feel like getting the grill going, a hearty hors d'oeuvre table alone can serve as your Sunday lunch or supper.\n\n_Vegetables, Spitted and Foiled_\n\nIn summer, I'm very often asked what to serve with grilled meats, poultry, and fish. Naturally, one can always count on casseroles and vegetable dishes prepared indoors, but it is rather more fun and a lot more unusual to serve vegetables cooked right on the barbecue grill or spit. I don't know how many of you who have grills with electric rotisseries have tried spit-roasted vegetables, but I can assure you they make pretty exciting eating. While you can't do every sort of vegetable that way, some just seem to be made for it.\n\nTake potatoes. Huge Idahos, spitted and revolved for about an hour in their well-scrubbed skins, taste superlatively good with lamb chops or steak. Big fat yams, which require about the same time as Idahos, take on a wonderful flavor when spit-roasted over charcoal, as do big unpeeled onions. Let the onions revolve for 45 to 50 minutes if you like them very soft, about 25 for crisply soft. Serve with grilled steaks and roast beef. They will be hot and crisp all the way through, neither strong-tasting like a raw onion nor as sweet as one that is fully cooked.\n\nWhole green peppers, so delicious with lamb or pork, are also good for roasting. Don't seed them before spitting, or it will leave too big a hole; seed them when they are done, which takes about 20 minutes. A combination of the peppers and the crispy roasted onions tastes awfully good with, perhaps, a sliced tomato salad.\n\nA whole large eggplant, spitted and roasted, will be creamy and delectable after about an hour, the skin enticingly charred. Split and serve to be seasoned to taste and eaten from the skin. Or try roasting whole acorn or banana squash over medium heat for an hour, then split, seed, and serve. The huge Hubbard squash should be cut in big hunks, speared, and revolved for 50 minutes to an hour over medium heat. I think you'll find that this novel approach to vegetable cookery introduces a whole new world of flavor.\n\nYou can foil vegetables too, which to my mind is often more satisfactory than spit-roasting. For this you take a square of heavy-duty aluminum foil big enough to envelop whatever you want to grill. Put the vegetables and seasonings in the center, bring up the top and bottom edges, fold them together, overlap the folds, and then fold the sides.\n\n  These neat, compact little packages of _Foiled Vegetables_ which don't take up much space, can be tucked around the chicken or meat, at the sides of the grill. To go with chicken, combine fresh green peas and tiny young carrots, not too thick. Wash the carrots well (if they are crisp there is no need to peel them) and place on the foil. Allow 3 to 4 carrots per serving and add _ _ to  __ cup peas, a pat of butter, and salt and pepper to taste. Grill about 30 minutes. Tiny boiling onions, peeled, put in foil with a dab of butter, salt and pepper, and, if you like, a touch of grated Parmesan cheese, also take 30 minutes. Shake the packages once in a while so they don't stick to the foil, and they will come out all steamy and fragrant, even better if you have added a tablespoon of sherry or Madeira before sealing the package.\n\n  For a favorite of mine, _Foiled Ratatouille,_ arrange on each foil square a slice of smallish eggplant, a slice of onion, a slice of tomato, a tiny bit of chopped garlic, salt, pepper, a touch of basil, 2 tablespoons olive oil, and, if you wish, 1 or 2 mushroom slices. Seal well and cook about 30 minutes. Serve with roast lamb, lamb chops or hamburgers.\n\nWhole tomatoes, peeled or not, cook beautifully in foil. I find they are better if you first gently squeeze out juice and seeds. Place the tomato on the foil with butter, pepper, salt, fresh or dried basil, and the merest hint of chopped garlic, if you like it. Seal securely, and cook on the grill from 20 to 25 minutes. I take mine off at 20 before they get too mushy; at 25 they will be semistewed. These are always extremely popular, so make a few extra for seconds.\n\nThen there's that summer favorite, corn, which emerges tender, buttery, and mouth-wateringly good when cooked in foil. Husk young fresh ears, brush well with melted butter, season with salt, seal, and cook over the coals for 10 to 15 minutes, turning two or three times. Once in a while you might add a sprinkling of chili powder, which gives the corn a sprightly quality, or a small amount of chopped green pepper for complementary flavor.\n\nWhen you remove your foil packages from the grill, pop them in small baskets or other containers and serve one to a person, to be unfolded or opened with scissors at the table. It's a simple, effective, and efficient way to cook vegetables outdoors.\n\n_Peel That Pepper_\n\nProbably one of the most versatile and varied vegetables we have, and one that is often overlooked, is the pepper. Peppers belong to the _Capsicum_ family, and are relatives of the eggplant, tomato, and potato. They are believed to have originated in tropical America (they were cultivated more than 2,000 years ago by pre-Incan tribes), spreading to Europe, Asia, and Africa at a fairly early date, so that now they are firmly entrenched in the cuisines of many different countries.\n\nMost familiar to us are the big round or tapering sweet or bell peppers, which are green to start with and then, as they mature, change their face and turn red. Then there are the pale green or light yellow sweet chili peppers, the pimiento pepper, and various and sundry hot chili peppers of all shapes, colors, and sizes, some of them extremely colorful and exotic. These often seem to increase in fieriness as they decrease in size. Such seasonings and spices as Tabasco, paprika, chili powder, cayenne, and crushed red pepper, all made from different hot peppers, are a very important part of our cooking.\n\nI like the green and red bell peppers for garnishing and as a raw vegetable, but I find that more and more I prefer them when they have been grilled or broiled until the skin can be scraped off, a process in which the flesh becomes slightly cooked and much more flavorful. I find the skin of most bell peppers, either raw or cooked, to be rather disagreeable, so now I always grill my peppers before using them, which can be done on a charcoal grill in summer, under the broiler, or over a gas flame. I lay the whole peppers on the grill over the coals, or on the broiling pan close to the broiler, and let the skin scorch and blacken\u2014and I do mean blacken. You must keep turning them from side to side until the entire skin surface is pretty well charred and blackened, and then scrape it off with the back of a silver knife or some sort of scraper. You don't want to tear the flesh, merely to scrape off the skin, which you will find comes off quite easily.\n\nThen remove the stem and the seeds, because in even the sweetest of sweet peppers the seeds sometimes tend to be hot. Cut the peppers in strips or quarters, and you are ready to turn them into a delicious salad or appetizer.\n\n  For _Sweet Peppers with Anchovies,_ remove the skin, stem, and seeds from 12 to 15 bell peppers, and quarter or halve them. Arrange in a flat serving dish. Dress with 8 tablespoons olive oil, 1 to 2 tablespoons wine vinegar (I find the sherry wine vinegar sold in specialty food shops is especially good\u2014it has a lovely, full, nutty flavor), 1 teaspoon or more of salt, and a few grinds of black pepper. Let the peppers marinate in the dressing for several hours. Remove to a serving plate, combine with 2 cans anchovy fillets, drained, and 2 tablespoons chopped parsley, and serve as an appetizer. Or you may serve them in the dish in which they marinated and pass the anchovies and parsley separately. Add tuna fish and capers to this combination for a more substantial dish, or serve just the marinated peppers with capers and parsley as a delightful salad or hors d'oeuvre.\n\nYou can use your basic marinated peppers as a salad, add them to a green salad with some sliced raw mushrooms, or use them to garnish a rice or potato salad. There is no end to the ways peppers can add gusto and flavor to your everyday meals. Skin and seed them, cut in '/2-inch  strips, and saute them quickly in olive oil, adding a dash of wine vinegar just before taking them off the heat, and you have an unusual and inexpensive vegetable for outdoor meals, to accompany roast or barbecued pork chops, or other barbecued meats.\n\nDon't think for one moment that your favorite stuffed pepper recipe won't be twice as good if you take the trouble to skin the peppers before stuffing them. The difference in texture and taste is well worth the effort, and you'll probably be able to cut down a little bit on the baking time. I have a stuffed pepper recipe I use in my classes that you might like to try.\n\n  For Peppers _Stuffed with Anchovies and Raisins,_ remove the skin from 8 green peppers as previously directed (otherwise, parboil them for 10 minutes in salted water). Split in half lengthwise, and remove seeds. Arrange in a baking dish or two baking dishes. For the filling, combine _ _ cup raisins, _ _ cup pine nuts, 16 chopped anchovies, 2 finely minced garlic cloves, _2 _ cups bread croutons (previously sauteed in oil and butter until golden brown), 2 teaspoons chopped parsley, 2 teaspoons dry vermouth, and salt and pepper to taste (go easy on the salt, as the anchovies are salty). Mix well. Fill peppers with this, put 1 teaspoon olive oil on the top of each one, and bake in a 350-degree oven for 30 minutes. Serve as a first course.\n\n_Harvest of Good Eating_\n\nThe months of harvest bring some of the greatest of all treats from the garden and countryside. I'm thinking especially of the big luscious red and yellow tomatoes, sweet peppers, and chili peppers in glowing shades of green, red, and yellow. Tomatoes and peppers, with eggplant and squash, onions, and garlic, are the makings of the French ratatouille, a dish that is the epitome of the wonderful flavor of the fall vegetables.\n\n_ _ Recently I have found that in making _ratatouille,_ the secret is to use equal quantities of everything except garlic, herbs, and seasonings. If you haven't prepared Ratatouille in some time, you might like to try it this way. First, heat _ _ cup oil\u2014it can be olive or peanut oil, but olive oil definitely gives the best taste\u2014in a heavy skillet and very gently saute 5 finely chopped garlic cloves. Add 1 _ _ cups chopped onion, and let that melt down and blend with the garlic, then put in _ _cups coarsely chopped green or red pepper, 1 _ _ cups rather coarsely diced eggplant with the skin on (it doesn't need to be soaked or salted before\u00adhand), and _ _cups zucchini, sliced and quartered, or, if you prefer, shredded on the coarse side of a grater and squeezed in a dish towel to rid it of excess water.\n\nBlend these vegetables together well by mixing them with a wooden spatula and shaking the pan. Then add your seasonings\u20141 tablespoon salt, 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, and 2 or 3 tablespoons chopped fresh basil or 2 teaspoons dried basil. You can also add a touch of cayenne pepper or Tabasco. Cook for about 10 minutes over very brisk heat, stirring almost constantly, then add 1 _ _cups peeled, seeded, and chopped ripe tomatoes, or if you can't get really good fresh tomatoes, _1 _ cups canned Italian plum tomatoes. Let the tomatoes blend in, and cook the ratatouille down to the consistency you like. Some want their ratatouille extremely crisp and chunky, and other prefer it cooked to a thick, soft mixture\u2014it all depends on your personal taste. If you feel it is too dry, you can add a little additional liquid, such as tomato juice, water, or broth, let it blend and cook down, and correct the seasoning.\n\nRatatouille is a theme that has infinite variations. You can add all kinds of other vegetables, according to taste, mushrooms, perhaps, sliced fennel or celery, a few leftover beans, and even a few Greek or Italian olives, or a little grated lemon rind or a squeeze of lemon juice, which gives a lovely fresh, zippy flavor. This is just about the most versatile of vegetable dishes, and one in which you can use your imagination. Served hot, ratatouille is one of the best of all accompaniments to roast lamb or chicken or hamburgers, or you can have it cold, with the addition of a little oil and vinegar and chopped parsley, as a first course, or a light luncheon dish.\n\n  If you are looking for a way to stretch meat\u2014and who isn't these days?\u2014bake Lamb _Shanks with Ratatouille._ Say you have bought half a dozen nice meaty lamb shanks. Trim off the excess fat, dust them with flour seasoned with salt and freshly ground black pepper, and sear them well on all sides in 4 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons oil until they are nicely browned. Add 2 finely chopped garlic cloves, 1 bay leaf, 1 teaspoon dried oregano or tarragon, and 2 cups stock. Cover and simmer for 1 hour. Meanwhile, cook your ratatouille and transfer it to a baking dish. Top with the lamb shanks, and pour the pan juices over them. Cover and bake in a 350-degree oven for 20 minutes, then take off the cover and bake 15 to 20 minutes longer, or until the shanks are tender and a luscious golden-brown.\n\n  Or, how about _Leftover Pot Roast with Ratatouille 7 ._ Put a layer of ratatouille in the bottom of the casserole, then a layer of cold sliced pot roast, then another layer of ratatouille. Cover, and heat in a 350-degree oven for 35 minutes, or until the meat is heated through and the ratatouille bubbling. You can sprinkle the top with grated Gruyere cheese during the last 10 minutes. This, with steamed rice and a carafe of robust red California jug wine, makes a delicious, satisfying, and cheeringly inexpensive dinner.\n\n_The Vegetable Alternative_\n\nEvery now and then I get a letter from one of my readers that is so interesting, or contains such a good idea, that I want to share it with all of you. A few weeks ago I had a letter from Mrs. Theodore R. Roberts of Eugene, Oregon, who wrote, \"In this garden-conscious time, it would be pertinent to revive a once-standard item on restaurant menus, the vegetable plate. As with anything, it can be delectable or appalling, but last evening I discovered a refinement that abolished the problem of having the yolk of the poached egg run into the vegetables.\n\n\"Because of a European trip, our garden was planted late, and just yesterday I picked the first cucumbers and a handful of bush beans of a small size. The beans needed nothing but seasoning and butter, and the cucumbers were served with vinegar, sour cream and chopped chives. I'd been wanting to try a recipe for tortilla _de patatas,_ which we had liked in Spain, and that was the substitute for the poached egg. The potatoes and onions that were cooked and folded into the omelet were not from our garden, but the chopped parsley was. Since I picked enough ever-bearing strawberries to top part of the baking-powder biscuits I baked, for a shortcake, we had a meal that was both enjoyable and economical.\"\n\nI don't know how many of you can remember when every restaurant had a vegetable plate\u2014a collection of various cooked vegetables with a poached egg in the middle. Sometimes it was extremely good eating, and sometimes absolutely miserable. Anyway, Mrs. Roberts's solution is a very attractive one that I think bears adopting.\n\nAs a matter of fact, I have been experimenting more and more this year with vegetables, both hot and cold. Often I combine them, perhaps having two or three different vegetables at a meal. I happen to enjoy them, but I also think it gives a menu a refreshing feeling and a change of pace. If you take pains with vegetables\u2014and there are just heaps of ways to do them\u2014they can be one of the most satisfactory of all courses.\n\nFor instance, when beautiful red peppers are in season, I char them under the broiler, scrape the skin off, and cut the peppers in very thin strips. I put them in a dish, dress them with salt, pepper, oil, and vinegar, and let them stand and marinate, sometimes for several days. They can be served alone, or with a little onion, or with any combination of vegetables, and they are good either cold or hot. I also like to cook green beans until they are crisply tender, have them with butter or olive oil and chopped garlic or basil, save what is left over, and setve them the next day as a cold vegetable with the addition of a little vinegar.\n\nThe other night I had cold green beans with the peppers, and cold beets with sour cream and a little lemon juice. With these two cold dishes I served something which is rather like Mrs. Roberts's Spanish tortilla of potatoes, only this happens to be an Italian version.\n\n  To make a _Frittata of Potatoes,_ first melt 6 tablespoons butter in a large, heavy skillet. When it is just foaming, add 6 well-beaten eggs and 1 _ _to 2 cups sliced cold boiled potatoes (or you can use cold sauteed potatoes if you happen to have some left over), spreading the potatoes around the pan. Add to this 2 or 3 finely chopped garlic cloves, _1 _ teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, and a little chopped parsley\u2014about 1 or 2 tablespoons. Turn the heat down very low and let the egg set around the potatoes, which will take about 10 or 12 minutes. Then sprinkle the top quite lavishly with grated Parmesan cheese, or a mixture of grated Parmesan and grated Gruyere, and run it under the broiler for a couple of minutes to set the top and brown it lightly.\n\nRun a spatula around the bottom of the pan, slip the frittata out onto a platter, and serve it with the vegetables I mentioned.\n\nYou'll have a perfectly delicious and satisfying meal, and I warrant you won't miss meat one little bit. This frittata can be made with practically any vegetable you want\u2014artichoke bottoms, zucchini, onions, peppers, peas, beans, tomatoes, cucumbers\u2014according to what you have in your garden or can find in the supermarket.\n\n_Spring Brings Asparagus_\n\nIn early spring my market is filled with big, beautiful bunches of asparagus, which must surely be one of the most precious members of the vegetable kingdom. Anyone who has ever grown asparagus in the garden knows the thrill of finding the first tender little green shoots sticking up through the ground. Cutting that first crop, rushing it to the kitchen, and feasting on early, home-grown asparagus makes spring a reality.\n\nFor my money, asparagus is one of the greatest gifts of the Old World to the New, and the developments over the last thirty or forty years have made it an even more delicious and varied vegetable. Now we have the jumbo or colossal variety, the slim and succulent stalks, and occasionally a very thin kind similar to wild asparagus that is extraordinarily good if properly handled. I well remember that when I was a child in Oregon we had practically nothing but the giant white asparagus that was grown in California, primarily for canning, for these huge white spears take much more graciously to processing and have a luscious flavor quite different from fresh asparagus.\n\nWhen I lived in Europe, I ate a lot of the fresh white asparagus which is grown widely there and sometimes reaches enormous size. The stalks are peeled carefully, and the cooked asparagus is served either hot or cold, just like the green kind. I recall a restaurant in the countryside of France where the owners grew white asparagus. In season you could have a glorious meal of asparagus, cooked to order, followed by a roast baby chicken, tiny new potatoes, cheese, and dessert. Would that we had asparagus farms where we could get such a service.\n\nThe green asparagus sold in our markets, especially the medium stalks, has to my mind the greatest charm and flavor. To prepare it, first snap the stalks at the point where they break easily, then scale them with a vegetable peeler or a knife, peeling more deeply as the stalk gets coarser to take off a good deal of the skin. Then, if you wish, tie the asparagus in bunches and cook in boiling salted water until crisply tender. Some people like to stand the bunches upright in a deep asparagus cooker, so the stalks cook in the water and the delicate tips steam, which is a good way to treat large asparagus, provided it doesn't get overcooked. I find most people tend to overcook asparagus, and I wish they wouldn't.\n\nI like mine very crisp to the bite, so I lay it flat in a large aluminum or Teflon-lined skillet in boiling salted water and cook it very quickly until it is barely tender, removing the stalks with tongs as they are ready\u2014because some stalks are thinner than others, there may be a variation of a minute or two.\n\nYou can tell when the stalks are done by pinching them, or by shaking the pan to see if the tips bob back and forth. Depending on the thickness of the stalks, asparagus will take from 7 to 12 minutes to cook. This is something on which you can't give a definite rule\u2014you must watch carefully and cook until it is done to your taste and bite.\n\n  To me, hot asparagus needs no saucing but salt and freshly ground pepper, or this simple _Butter Sauce:_ Blend about 2 teaspoons flour and _ _ cup water to a smooth paste, stir in 6 tablespoons butter, bit by bit, cook for a few minutes, and season to taste with salt, pepper, a little lemon juice, and grated nutmeg. You can vary the seasonings as you will. Many people fancy hollandaise on their hot asparagus, but I prefer to have mine cold with good mayonnaise flavored with mustard and lemon juice, a sublime combination of flavors. I've known people who put grated Parmesan cheese and a fried egg on top of asparagus, some like it wrapped in thin slices of prosciutto and sprinkled with Parmesan, others like a cream sauce on the spears, while there are some who cover asparagus with a tomato and garlic sauce, which I think absolutely smothers the delicate and distinctive flavor.\n\n  There's a Chinese way of cooking asparagus that is especially good for thin stalks or the very tiny ones you get late in the season. To Stir-fry _Asparagus_ cut the stalks in diagonal slices about 2 inches long, put them in a sieve, lower them into rapidly boiling salted water, and cook 3 to 4 minutes, then drain. Melt '/t pound butter in a large skillet,  season with salt, freshly ground pepper, a little lemon juice, and 1 or 2 tablespoons soy sauce, put in the blanched asparagus, and toss as you would a salad, letting it cook for several minutes, until buttery, tender, and tasty. I've had asparagus cut in very small pieces, boiled rapidly, and dressed with melted butter, or hollandaise, or cream sauce, which is known as \"asparagus in the style of green peas.\" You can also cook it, dip it in egg and bread crumbs, and deep-fry it in hot fat until it is crisply brown on the outside and deliciously unctuous inside.\n\nWith so many ways to prepare and serve fresh asparagus, it is a crime not to take advantage of its seasonal abundance, rather than using frozen or canned asparagus which is another vegetable entirely, with a much stronger taste. I remember, many years ago, a very fashionable restaurant that was the talk of Los Angeles and Hollywood where asparagus was served with a vanilla sauce, for dessert, which only goes to prove how infinitely accommodating this delectable vegetable can be.\n\nA _Rave for Radishes_\n\nFrom my earliest years I have adored the crispness, colorfulness, and spicy tang of radishes. I can recall my first feeble efforts at gardening, when I planted little rows of radishes and was so thrilled when they came up, and even more thrilled when it was time to pull them and eat them fresh from the ground. Very few things in life have ever tasted better to me.\n\nThen I remember that on my first trip to France I was introduced to that perfect combination of good btead, sweet butter, and the firm, brilliantly red radishes the French always include on their hors d'oeuvre list in the spring, when the radishes are at their finest. I found the contrast of flavors and textures very interesting and satisfying to the taste buds. In England one sometimes finds radishes on the breakfast plate with toast and butter, and that's extremely good, too. I often serve a plate of early spring radishes with their leafy bright green tops still on (I like to eat the tops if they are fresh and tender\u2014there's a lovely bite to them), accompanied by homemade bread and butter, as a first coutse.\n\nAs my palate and I grew more sophisticated, I went to a cocktail party where I encountered a delicious hors d'oeuvre of an anchovy fillet wrapped around a red radish, which I thought was something teally extra special.\n\nAlthough we are most familiar with the tiny red globe radishes or the more elongated ones we buy in the markets, radishes do vary considerably in color, shape, and size, and in flavor from mild to peppery hot. The long white icicle radishes, less strongly flavored, are wonderful eaten freshly pulled and crisp, with a sprinkling of salt. Then there are the huge black radishes which, peeled, grated, and mixed with chicken or goose fat, make a delectable spread for bread. The Japanese use an enormous white radish called _daikon_ which grows 2 or 3 feet long and has a sweet and tangy flavor unlike any other. These radishes are usually served as a garnish, thinly sliced in soups, or grated and served in a tiny bowl to be eaten with or stirred into the dipping sauce for sashimi, those tender little slivers of raw fish; or tempura, batter-dipped, deep-fried vegetables and fish.\n\nRadishes have been cultivated for thousands of years in the Far East, and they are one of the most flavorful of vegetables. As a salad material, their pungent, peppery taste gives piquancy to otherwise dull fare\u2014and it's always nice to know that _3 _ ounces of radishes are only about 17 calories.\n\nWhile radishes are a familiar ingredient in a mixed green salad, recently I found an exciting new way to use them when I attended some classes in Middle Eastern cooking given on the West Coast by my great friend and co-worker, Philip Brown. He made a salad with oranges, I believe Moroccan in origin, that I have since adapted and served to many people. It's very good with lamb, and sensational with curry or other dishes that have a hot seasoning or are rather rich in butter or oil.\n\n_ _ Nothing could be simpler and more beautiful to look at than his _Radish and Orange Salad._ Peel 4 good-sized navel oranges, and either section them or slice them very thinly, being sure to remove all the bitter white pith. Arrange these on a bed of washed and dried salad greens\u2014I prefer the crisp leaves of romaine or iceberg lettuce. Now wash, trim, and shred 1 bunch red radishes. I use a Mouli shredder, a little gadget with a handle that cuts vegetables into lovely, long shreds, but you could use the shredding side of a hand grater. Then kind of drape the radish shreds around the fruit, so you get a glorious color contrast of deep orange, bright green, rosy red, and snow white. Or you can make a wreath of radish shreds around the oranges, or pile them in a mound in the center\u2014here's where you can give your artistic instincts free rein.\n\nAlthough the original dressing for this salad is made with lemon juice, sugat, and salt, I like to use a vinaigrette, made with 8 tablespoons olive oil to 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 1 teaspoon salt, _ _teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, and 1 to 2 tablespoons orange juice. Taste the dressing before adding it to the salad and tossing\u2014you may need mote lemon juice, or lime juice, which is excellent with it. You'll find this vinaigrette has a quite different flavor that enhances the mixture of fruit and vegetables.\n\nSometimes I vary the salad by alternating sections of orange and grapefruit, or orange and grapefruit sections and avocado slices, which combine with the crisp piquancy of the radish in a most subtle way.\n\n_Legendary Lettuce_\n\nWith its long crisp leaves, shading from brilliant light green to pale yellowish white, romaine is not only one of the most distinctive of all lettuces, standing out noticeably in any mixture of salad greens, but definitely one of the greatest, with a delicious flavor and a texture that stays crunchy in a salad longer than any other. Fortunately for us, it is also one of the few greens apart from iceberg that can be bought just about anywhere in the country.\n\nRomaine has a very ancient and quite fascinating history. The name by which we know it, an adaptation of \"Roman\" lettuce, is a misnomer. Originally it was known as cos lettuce (and still is, in England) because it was native to Kos or Cos, one of the Greek Dodecanese islands in the Aegean. Classical mythology has it that Adonis was concealed by Venus in a bed of cos lettuce, where he was killed by a foraging wild boar, and because of this, lettuce was eaten at funeral repasts in ancient Greece and Rome.\n\nThe Latin name for lettuce is _Lactuca sativa,_ derived from lac, or milk, presumably because of its rather milky juice, and this gave rise to yet another legend. According to Apuleius, the eagle obtained its perspicacious vision by touching the juice of a wild lettuce leaf to its eyes before soaring on high, which began an age-old belief that lettuce makes one eagle-eyed.\n\nLegends apart, it's an amusing coincidence that it is to the classical romaine lettuce we owe Caesar salad, which has nothing to do with that great Caesar who conquered Gaul, but was named for one Cesar, a restaurateur of Tijuana, Mexico, who invented it in the 1920s, capitalizing on romaine's ability to hold its crispness through frequent tossings. Now I'm going to tell you the trick to making a true Caesar salad\u2014toss the leaves first with the olive oil, before adding the lemon juice, anchovies, egg, grated Parmesan cheese, and croutons. The oil forms a protective coating that prevents the leaves from wilting when they are tossed with the other ingredients.\n\nIn England, cos lettuce was considered a great delicacy for many years, and often the crisp inner leaves were rolled and munched with thin bread and butter as a teatime delicacy. Romaine cooks very well, too. You can braise it in chicken broth until just tender, then brown it lightly in butter, as you would celery hearts, and serve it as a vegetable.\n\nOr, for your next bread stuffing for turkey or chicken, try adding some shredded romaine\u2014it gives a delightful lightness.\n\nRecently, at a class given by Philip Brown in California, I came across a completely new and different way to cook romaine\u2014in a souffle. This is one of the most delicious romaine dishes I've ever had. The souffle is light, with an unusual flavor, and the little bits of chopped romaine give a pleasant ctunchiness. This is really a complete vegetable course in itself. With a roast of lamb or beef, or a chicken casserole, you need no potato or green vegetable or salad to complete the meal.\n\n  While _Philip Brown's Romaine Souffle_ does take a little time to prepare, the recipe is not involved, and it's a great addition to your repertoire of things to serve for dinner. Another nice thing is that this souffle can wait. You can make it and fold in the egg whites an hour before you bake it. Just hold it in the refrigerator and transfer it to a preheated oven half an hour before serving time, and you'll find it rises perfectly.\n\nCut off the bottom of 1 head of romaine. Wash thoroughly and chop coarsely. Put into a heavy saucepan with a little water and cook until wilted. Drain well and chop finely. Melt 1 tablespoon butter in a skillet, and cook 3 chopped green onions until soft but not brown. Add romaine and cook, stirring, until moisture has evaporated. In a saucepan, melt 3 tablespoons butter, mix in 3 tablespoons flour, and cook for 2 to 3 minutes, stirring. Add 1 cup extra-rich milk, heated, and cook until thickened. Separate 4 eggs. Beat the yolks into the sauce, one at a time, then add 1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese and cook until smooth. Stir in the romaine mixture until well blended. Season with 1 teaspoon salt, teaspoon Worcestershire sauce, and 2 or 3 dashes of Tabasco.\n\nLavishly butter a l'/2-quart souffle dish, sprinkle with grated   Parmesan cheese, coating bottom and sides, and shake out excess. Beat the egg whites until they hold soft peaks, and stir about one-third of them into the romaine mixture, blending thoroughly. Fold in the remainder lightly; if small lumps of egg white remain, that's fine. Pour mixture into the souffle dish, and smooth the top. Sprinkle with a little grated Parmesan cheese, and put into a preheated 400-degree oven. Immediately reduce the heat to 375 degrees and bake for 25 to 35 minutes, according to whether you like your souffle a bit runny in the center, in the French manner, or rather firm. Then rush it to the table, for souffles wait for no man.\n\nA _Vegetable that Keeps Its Cool_\n\nRecently, I read a most amusing news story in the paper. It seems that in Michigan, after experimentation of six months to a year, a seedless pickle has finally been perfected. It's made, naturally, from a seedless cucumber, one that produces a crunchier, crisper, better result.\n\nThis started me thinking about cucumbers and all the different types we have\u2014the little pickling cucumbers, the tiny gherkins and burr gherkins, so delicate and bitey, and the kind that are unfortunately most prevalent in our markets\u2014a watery, overgrown variety, laden with big seeds, that are dipped in wax before they are shipped. These, for the most part, are a quite unattractive vegetable, coarse, seedy, and unpleasant to the bite. In the West you find a different variety, lemon cucumbers, which hardly look like our accepted idea of a cucumber at all. They are about the size and roughly the shape of a duck or turkey egg with a yellow skin and a kind of fresh, lemony overtone that tastes so good you want to munch on them like an apple.\n\nIn the last several years there has been a great surge of the Chinese cucumber\u2014or English hothouse cucumber, as it is often called\u2014a long, slender type often found in the better markets at a special price. These, I consider, are the best of all cucumbers generally found in markets today, and I believe you can now get them all across the country. They are lightly seeded, crisper than the usual kind, and perfect for salads and sandwiches. Slice them paper-thin, salt them lightly, rinse briefly under cold running water, pat dry, and put in a sandwich with salt, freshly ground black pepper, and a flick of mayonnaise, and they are blissfully good for tea, picnics, or even\u2014the way a friend of mine likes to eat cucumbers in summer\u2014for breakfast.\n\nIf you can buy only the big, waxy, coarse cucumbers, they have a much better texture if you peel them, split them in two, scrape out the seeds with a teaspoon, slice them very thinly, salt them slightly, put them in a colander and run cold water over them, then let them drain and give forth their own water for an hour or so before using them. Most cucumbers, except the lemon and Chinese, fare best if cut and seeded before being sliced in the usual manner or cut in long thin strips, whichever you prefer.\n\nIn summer, there's nothing quite as cool and refreshing as cucumber sandwiches, cucumber soup, or cucumber salads. Because the cucumber is about as universal a vegetable as there is, you'll find different versions of cucumber salad all over the world, from the Orient to the deepest part of Central Europe and the Middle East.\n\nIn our country, cucumbers are a traditional part of our eating pattern. For instance, who could think of salmon, hot or cold, without cucumbers? With hot salmon they may be cut into little lozenges, steamed, and served with melted butter and a little chopped fresh dill. With cold poached salmon, they should be sliced paper-thin in the French manner, tossed well with vinaigrette sauce, and sprinkled with fresh chopped tarragon, dill, or parsley. As a first course, this cucumber salad is delicious alone or combined with just a hint of peeled and seeded ripe tomato, finely chopped. One of my favorite salads as a child was thinly sliced cucumber, salted, drained, and washed, combined with the thinnest slices of sweet onion, either the red or the Bermuda, dressed with vinegar, oil, and seasonings or just vinegar, salt, and pepper and left to marinate for several hours before being eaten. The onion added a tangy briskness to the delicate cucumber. Now I often make a Syrian cucumber salad, cutting the cucumbers in long thin shreds and dressing them with yogurt, salt, pepper, a little lemon juice, and a sprinkling of finely chopped fresh mint and parsley. This, too, should marinate several hours before serving.\n\n  O n e of the most famous of all ways to use cucumbers is in a _Scandinavian Cucumber Salad,_ which is just as common there as cole slaw is here and is the accompaniment to many different dishes. First, make a sweet-sour dressing by combining _ _ cup vinegar (I like to use cider or white wine vinegar), 2 tablespoons water, _ _teaspoon salt, 3 tablespoons sugar, about _ _ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, and 3 to 4 tablespoons finely chopped fresh dill or half dill, half parsley. This will be enough for 2 medium-sized cucumbers or 1 Chinese cucumber, which should be sliced as thinly as possible or cut in long julienne strips, according to choice. Pour the dressing over the sliced cucumbers, cover with plastic wrap, and let stand for at least 3 hours before serving, undrained, in the marinating dressing, true Scandinavian style.\n\nSo there you have an international cross section of ways to use one of the most pleasing of all vegetables\u2014one that will keep its and your cool on the hottest day. And if you've never tried this little trick, when you peel a cucumber lay the cut side of the peel on your forehead or cheek on a sweltering day and let its dewy moisture soothe and refresh your skin.\n\n_The Decline and Fall_\n\n_of the Tomato_\n\nThe tomato, one of the greatest food gifts of the New World to the Old, was not eaten in North America until the eighteenth, possibly the nineteenth, century. For some reason it was considered a decorative plant, and the fruit was allowed to go to waste. Thank goodness someone finally had the courage to eat one of those little golden-red globes and proclaim it for its delicious acidity and wondrous texture.\n\nEuropeans were not so laggard. By the time the North Americans took up \"love apples,\" Europeans had been using them for almost a century and a half. If one goes by the fact that many tomato dishes in the French and other cuisines are labeled \"a la Portugaise,\" it seems likely that the Portuguese were the first to cook with tomatoes in any quantity, followed by the Italians and the southern French. One of the notable departures from the rule of classic cuisine in France came when lobster a I'Americaine made its appearance at the Great Paris Exposition of 1861. Ever since there has been much controversy about the antecedents of this famous dish. Some claim it should be spelled \"Armoricaine,\" but Armorique is Brittany, and no less an authority than Prosper Montagne proved that at the time the recipe was created the Bretons shunned the tomato. So perhaps the name was merely a graceful acknowledgment of the tomato's origin.\n\nBy now, the tomato has become our most universal fruit. It goes into the club sandwich, the bacon and tomato sandwich, tomato juice and paste, soup, spaghetti sauce, just about everywhere. Recently I even saw a recipe for a tomato ice cream, not a sweet one, but a frozen mixture of tomato puree and heavy cream, highly spiced and seasoned, which might be rather fun served with seafood, after the style of that undying tradition of American buffet tables, the tomato aspic ring filled with seafood, rice, or chicken salad.\n\nTomatoes have such a variety of uses and fit into so many different parts of the menu that it is hard to see how people ever cooked without them. I did a great deal of research on tomatoes while I was working on my big American cookbook, and I discovered that some of the early tomato recipes were for sweet dishes: compotes, jams, and marmalades\u2014one recipe from the early nineteenth century was for a tomato custard, sweetened, and spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg.\n\nTomatoes were very different then. Naturally ripened, red, and luscious. Lately, this most glorious of fruits has gone into a tragic decline in the United States because it is being produced on a scale and in a manner that makes it an almost total gastronomic loss.\n\nIn England, you can get delicious tomatoes from the Channel Islands. In Italy, France, and Spain, tomatoes are raised properly, for quality and flavor, and they are a joy to eat. But in New York, indeed in most parts of the country, save for a few weeks in summer when local vine-ripened tomatoes are in season, the tomato situation is dismal indeed. We now get tomatoes that are grown for shelf age instead of for the delight of the eye and the palate, tomatoes grown in soil which is not right for them and gives them a woolly texture and an unyielding rocklike consistency. The growers in certain states where the climate favors year-round crops seem to have asserted themselves in a most dictatorial fashion, with a total disregard for public taste, and have persuaded the authorities that their tomatoes alone should appear in our markets. Unless we can grow a few plants in a garden plot or indoors in flower pots, this looks like the end of the line for all of us who have some regard for good tomatoes. I think all tomato lovers should unite and make a forceful presentation of the case for the ripe, flavorful tomato, or we may be forever condemned to that tasteless, colorless little red cannonball that remains unchanging beneath its plastic shroud, until it finally gives up and rots away.\n\nFor a time it seemed as if the saving of the tomato was to be the cherry tomato, which when it first appeared had excellent flavor, texture, and color. Recently this, too, seems to have gone the way of mass production, with a corresponding deterioration in quality. However, should you be able to find, or grow, good cherry tomatoes you'll find they lend themselves to cooking as well as to eating raw. For a new vegetable idea, steam or bake them, and serve them with steak, chicken, or other meats.\n\n  For _Steamed Cherry Tomatoes,_ it is worthwhile, if tedious, to peel them first. Pour boiling water over 1 pint firm cherry tomatoes, let stand 1 minute, then plunge in cold water, and the skins will peel off easily. Place them in the top of a double boiler with 6 tablespoons butter, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh dill. Cover and steam over hot water until just heated through. Serve topped with more chopped dill.\n\nTo bake, melt the butter and toss the unpeeled tomatoes in it until coated. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and put on a baking sheet in a 300-degree oven for 10 to 15 minutes, or until just cooked through but still firm.\n\n  Another favorite trick of mine, when I can get really ripe cherry tomatoes is to make a _Tomato Preserve,_ which harks back to those old nineteenth-century recipes.\n\nRemove the stems from 2 pints very ripe cherry tomatoes, leaving the stem end intact. Pour boiling water over them, let stand for 2 seconds, then slip off the skins.\n\nBoil 4 cups sugar and 1 _ _cups water with 2 slices lemon over medium heat for 5 minutes, scraping the sugar from the sides of the pan with a rubber spatula. Add the tomatoes to this heavy syrup and cook gently at a bare simmer until just cooked, about 15 to 20 minutes. They must stay whole, not break up. Skim off any scum and ladle the cooked tomatoes carefully into a dish. Cool, cover, and chill. These make a delicious cold dessert with heavy cream or over ice cream, or an unusual breakfast preserve.\n\n_The AIL American Avocado_\n\nAlthough they are a standard item in supermarkets today, I can remember when avocados\u2014then called alligator pears\u2014were a very expensive delicacy. They were usually the purple-skinned variety rather than the glossy green soft-skinned ones and the dark type with hard skins that we see now at different times of the year.\n\nThe avocado is indigenous to this hemisphere, and it gave rise to the one great sauce of the Americas that will go down in gastronomic history, the Mexican guacamole. Guacamole (pronounced gwok-ah-moh-lay) is 100 percent Ametican because the principal ingredients are native to these shores\u2014the avocado, the green chili, and the tomato. From Mexico it spread to North America via California, and now it is made and served all over the country, as a dip, a spread, a salad, and a sauce. In certain areas you can even buy a ready-made frozen guacamole in supermarkets.\n\n  There are innumerable versions _of Guacamole._ Here is my favorite. First buy avocados that are soft enough to be mashable but not so soft that they have turned dark. Mash 2 good-sized avocados well with a fork. Add 1 or 2 chopped green chilies, the kind that are sold in cans as \"peeled green chilies,\" removing the tiny seeds that sting your tongue unless you like a pretty hot, zesty flavor.\n\n(For a really spicy guacamole, use 1 very finely chopped jalapeno or serrano chili instead.) Mix in about 2 tablespoons lime juice and 1 to 1 _ _ teaspoons salt, depending on the avocados. You should add enough to bring out the mixture of flavors. If you are not using the guacamole immediately, put the avocado pit in the mixture or cover tightly with plastic wrap to prevent it from darkening.\n\nThat's my recipe for a basic guacamole. You can vary it by adding all kinds of bits and pieces. Peeled, seeded, and chopped ripe tomatoes and finely chopped onion are traditional. Not so traditional but very good are crumbled crisp bacon, chopped roasted peanuts, or chopped salted almonds or coarsely chopped toasted filberts or thin, thin strips of flavorful ham.\n\nYou can also beat in a touch of olive oil or some cumin or finely chopped garlic, and certainly the herb cilantro (fresh coriander) belongs here. A good sprinkling of chopped cilantro with its distinctive, strangely dark flavor (some dote on it, others can't abide it) is a wonderful counterpoint to the smooth, buttery blandness of the avocado.\n\nGuacamole is as versatile as it is delicious. Everyone knows it as a positively addictive spread or dip with tortillas or tostados or corn chips, but try it sometime in salads\u2014seafood salads, chicken salads, vegetable salads. I like to put it in a green salad that contains thinly sliced raw onion and maybe a few slices of green pepper and cucumber, or to slather it over cucumbers, topped before serving with sour cream and a healthy powdering of chopped cilantro or fresh parsley. I also love it as a sauce for chicken that has been dusted with flour mixed with a little bit of chili powder and fried. Then it is sensational on hamburgers or charcoal-broiled steaks and chops, and if you add lashings of chopped green pepper, it tastes wonderful on fish.\n\n  There is a very similar sauce with the delightful name of _Mantequilla de Pobre_ \u2014poor man's butter. Mash your 2 avocados, add 2 chopped, peeled, and seeded tomatoes, 1 tablespoon oil, and 2 to 3 tablespoons lime or lemon juice or wine vinegar with salt and pepper to taste.\n\nThis dates back to the pre-Hispanic days when there were no cattle, and therefore no butter, and it was used as a spread or added to dishes to give the soft texture and rich flavor that butter would. The famous cookbook writer Elena Zelayeta serves it in her home as a dip for _carnitas,_ a great little appetizer of crisp, seasoned pork.\n\n To make _Carnitas:_ Cut 2 pounds very lean pork into small pieces, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and let stand an hour or so. Bake very slowly in a 300-degree oven on a fine mesh rack, to allow the fat to run off, until the little bits of pork are crisp and brown, about 1 _ _ hours. Serve with _mantequilla de pobre._ The contrast between the hot pork and the cold, suave avocado sauce makes a really unusual and exciting cocktail appetizer.\n\n_Mushroom Magic_\n\nI can remember that when I was very young there was a big field about 200 feet from our house in Oregon where in season, especially the fall, mushrooms popped up by the hundreds. Often someone would rise early to gather a five-gallon bucket of these field treasures. They would be quickly sauteed and served on toast for breakfast, and my, how good they were! Our field mushrooms were mostly the little buttons, the wild variety of the mushroom now cultivated commercially on a vast scale in cellars in Pennsylvania and other states. I was told not long ago that the yield in 1970 was 194 million pounds, which would make a tremendous mountain of mushrooms.\n\nWhile increasing amounts of the creamy tan, almost golden mushrooms are now appearing in American markets, more in the West than the East, the majority of the mushrooms we buy are the white button kind. In New York they come in 3-pound wooden baskets lined with blue paper, and when you open one the sight of the freshly picked, glistening, snowy-white caps nestling in a field of azure is a feast for the eyes.\n\nMushrooms are an indispensable part of hundreds of the world's greatest dishes, prized for the delicious flavor, color, and bouquet they impart. Yet though they occur in some of the richest recipes of the _haute cuisine,_ mushrooms are incredibly low on the calorie scale\u2014a whole pound adds up to less than 100 calories\u2014so they can be indulged in with absolute abandon. Weight watchers will find raw mushrooms sprinkled with salt and pepper make a perfect, hunger-appeasing munchable. For years I have been an advocate of eating mushrooms raw. Thinly sliced, tossed with olive oil, vinegar, salt, freshly ground pepper, and a touch of tarragon, they make a most joyous salad, and a few raw mushrooms sliced into a green salad will give it a wonderfully fresh, delightful taste and texture.\n\nIf you prefer your mushrooms cooked, they may be broiled or sauteed, stuffed with all sorts of things, or finely chopped and made into one of the most marvelous mixtures known to man, _duxelles,_ a highly concentrated mushroom paste named for the Marquis d'Uxelles, for whom it was created. In my cooking classes I give my own version of this famous, classic French recipe, one of the most rewarding ways to use a basketful of mushrooms bought at a reduced price when they are a bit past their prime.\n\n  While you don't need pristine white mushrooms for Duxelles, you do need time, patience, and a really large chopping knife to make the preparation easier and speedier. Take 1  to 2 pounds mushrooms, wipe them well with damp paper towels, and chop them very finely, stems and all. Place in a dishtowel and twist the towel until all the liquid has been squeezed out. The liquid may be used to flavor sauces or soups. Melt 10 tablespoons butter in a very heavy skillet (a black iron one is ideal) over low to medium heat. Add the mushrooms and 2 tablespoons finely chopped shallot or onion, and stir until well mixed with the butter. Cook over the lowest heat, stirring every 10 or 15 minutes to move the mushrooms from the bottom of the pan to the top and adding more butter if necessary, until all the moisture has been drawn from the mushrooms and they have become completely dehydrated and considerably reduced\u2014this will take from 1 _ _to 2 hours. At the end of the cooking time you should have a thick dense mass of mushrooms, very dark, almost black in color. Add 2 teaspoons salt, mixing it in thoroughly, and remove the mixture to a bowl to cool. This duxelles, stored in a screw-topped jar, will keep for at least two weeks in the refrigerator, or it may be frozen.\n\nThere are all kinds of ways to use this glorious mushroom mixture. Sandwich it between French crepes, stacked eight or nine high, dot the  stack with butter, heat it through in the oven, and serve sliced in wedges. Or swirl the _duxelles_ in scrambled eggs and serve on a platter for breakfast with bacon, frizzled ham, or sausages on the side. I had this combination once in a vol-au-vent, a huge patty shell filled with golden scrambled eggs marbled with the black of the mushrooms, and it was one of the most elegant dishes imaginable, perfect for luncheon or supper.\n\nI also like to blend _duxelles_ with cooked mashed yellow turnip or potatoes or celery root for a dramatic blend of flavors. You can make a sandwich of it, between slices of well-buttered toast, spoon it over hamburgers, or make it into tiny hot canapes by mixing 4 or 5 tablespoons shredded Gruyere or Cheddar cheese into _ _cup _duxelles,_ spreading the mixture on small rounds of toast and putting them under the broiler until the cheese melts. _Duxelles_ gives a terrific lift to sauces\u2014try swirling it into a cream sauce, a brown sauce, or a brown gravy.\n\n_Potatoes for Breakfast_\n\nI love potatoes for breakfast. They are a marvelous enhancer of bacon and eggs, or ham and eggs, or sausages, or whatever you enjoy eating in the morning, and they happen to be one of my small indulgences when I travel. I usually breakfast very simply at home, but when I'm away I let myself order fruits and ham or sausage or whatever I feel like and really revel in it. It's too bad that we are all so rushed these days we can't find time to savor the first meal of the day. We just grab a glass of juice or a piece of fruit, some toast, and a cup of coffee or tea and call it breakfast. How nice it is to sit down to platters heaped with good hearty food and take one's time, then get up from the table with a feeling of warmth and well-being that makes it easy to face the day's problems.\n\nBreakfast potatoes aren't much effott to make. You can use precooked potatoes or the frozen, ready-shredded potatoes for hash browns. However, to my mind, the old-time boiled potato, not overcooked, works best. I remember years ago sitting in small diners and little country restaurants and watching the cook fry peeled, boiled potatoes in butter on the griddle, chopping them up with a one-or two-pound coffee can as they fried. It was a very deft trick. I've tried it a few times, and I can do it if I really put my mind to it, but I'm not advising that everyone attempt it.\n\nFinding the right potatoes for hash browns can be a problem. Buying potatoes is no simple matter these days. Potato dealers and, to a great extent, potato producers don't take the trouble to sell and grow all the various potato varieties there used to be in the markets. Now you mainly get two types\u2014new potatoes, both the little round red ones and the long white ones, and Idaho baking potatoes. There are usually some local potatoes which you will be told are Oregon potatoes or California potatoes, or Maine or Long Island potatoes, but no one ever tells you what variety they are or how they boil or bake or if they are good for salad. That's something you have to find out for yourself, and it's too bad because the difference between the waxy potatoes for boiling, salads, and refrying and the floury ones that are best for baking is so great that you could save yourself a lot of trouble if you knew more about what you were buying. Maybe we'll have to go back to growing our own potatoes.\n\n  For Hash Brown Potatoes, take the best boiling potatoes you can find, the kind that have a little firmness and waxiness. New potatoes are good, or medium-sized potatoes that do not seem too floury. Boil them, without peeling, in a small amount of salted water in a heavy pan, covered, until they are just barely pierceable. For hash browns, they don't have to be completely cooked, nor need you fry them right away; they can rest overnight.\n\nPeel the boiled potatoes carefully and chop fairly coarsely. For 6 to 8 potatoes, melt 5 to 6 tablespoons butter in a Teflon-lined or black iron skillet, adding a tablespoon of oil if you like. Ptess them down rather well, and cook over fairly brisk heat until a beautiful brown crust forms on the bottom. Then, for a doubly luscious treat, invert the pan on a plate and slide the potatoes out in one big cake. Return the pan to the heat, add 1 or 2 more tablespoons butter, slide the unbrowned side into the pan, and cook until browned on the second side. Salt and pepper both sides well during the cooking. Then slide the cake out onto a hot plate and serve immediately\u2014these potatoes won't wait.\n\nIf you want, you can make separate potato patties in small 5-or 6inch skillets, using about 2 tablespoons butter and 1 tablespoon oil for each one. Shake the pan gently while browning.\n\nYou can also use raw potatoes of the same waxy type. Shred them on a shredder into cold water so they won't discolor. For 5 to 6 potatoes, which will serve four to six people, melt about 5 tablespoons butter in a heavy skillet. Dry the shredded potatoes thoroughly on paper towels, press them down in the pan, and cook in the same manner as the chopped boiled potatoes, or as a shortcut, use the ready-prepared frozen potatoes which come in long shreds.\n\n  Then there's another version, more like the _Swiss Rbsti Potatoes._ Boil potatoes for about 10 minutes, until they are about half-cooked, or peel baked potatoes. Shred the cooked potatoes and cook as before. Turn out on hot plates, and serve with ham and eggs, bacon and eggs, sausage and eggs, finnan haddie, or codfish cakes.\n\nI have been known to breakfast on nothing but these delicious, crispy-brown potatoes, liberally salted and peppered, with fruit, toast, and tea.\n\nNaturally, you don't have to limit breakfast potatoes to breakfast. They are just as good for lunch or dinner with broiled steaks, chops, or hamburgers. In fact, they are my idea of one of the greatest ways to eat potatoes at any time of day, and that's saying a lot, because I'm really enamored of the potato in all its guises.\n\n_The WelLfried Potato_\n\nFrench fries must be one of the most popular foods in the world. Everyone seems to adore them. In Holland you can buy them on the street, with mustard mayonnaise. The Germans like them with mayonnaise, too. In Canada and Britain they are sprinkled with white vinegar. Most Americans smother them with ketchup, but personally, I like mine _au naturel,_ just a well-fried, crisp strip of potato with no flavoring other than salt and pepper.\n\nConsidering the universality of French fries, it's odd\u2014and rather sad\u2014that you so seldom get them as they should be, 100 percent crisp, tender, and freshly made. Mostly, you are presented with a dismal pile of soggy, smelly French fries without enough salt and pepper\u2014so dismal, in fact, that if I see them coming on a plate I usually ask to have them removed.\n\nThere are a few little tricks about making French fries that you might like to know. First, the question of the potatoes. Some people like the mealy Idahos, others the boiling potato that has a slightly waxy quality when cooked. I like either, if they are properly done. You might, just for fun, do a little research with different types of potatoes and see which gives you the most satisfactory result. Try the long white California potatoes, the Idaho, the Maine, all those that come in at various times of year.\n\n To make _French Fries_ to serve four, 4 medium to large potatoes should be ample. If you want a lot of French fries\u2014some kids do\u2014throw in an extra one for the pot. Peel them and cut into long strips from   to _ _ inch wide and thick\u2014or you can cut them in rounds. Or in little wedges if the potatoes are small. One restaurant I know uses wedges of small potato with the skin on, well scrubbed, of course. Potatoes are better if peeled and cut just before you cook them. If you can't do that, put them in cold water, take them out just before you fry them, spread them on a double layer of paper towels or a terry towel, and dry thoroughly. Line a baking sheet or jelly-roll pan with paper towels, and put it in a 200-or 250-degree oven to keep the potatoes hot and ctisp as they are fried.\n\nFor frying, you can use a very large deep skillet with a frying basket, an electric French fryer, or one of the French pots with a basket that can be drained by hooking it onto the handles at the sides. Or you can use a deep saucepan and a sieve.\n\nUnless you use an electric fryer, you'll need a good frying thermometer. The temperature of the fat is tremendously important, and the return to the temperature between each batch is even more important.\n\nThere are two methods of deep-frying potatoes\u2014the one-fry method and the two-fry method. It might interest you to know that the double-fry method was a serendipitous accident that created souffle potatoes, the very puffy slices you get in fancy restaurants. It seems there was a big party that depended on a train arriving. The train was late, so the chef dropped the basket of already fried potatoes into the hot fat a second time, and, to his surprise, they puffed up. Now I'm not going to guarantee that if you fry potatoes twice they'll turn into souffle potatoes, but it's an amusing story.\n\n To make _French Fries,_ vegetable oil or vegetable fat is probably best for deep frying. Heat it to 375 degrees, and heat the basket in the fat. (If you put a cold basket into hot fat, it will naturally cool it off.) See that your potatoes are thoroughly dry, lift the basket out, toss the potatoes in it, and lower the basket slowly into the hot fat, being careful it doesn't splatter. The thickest French fries will take 8 to 10 minutes to cook, those of matchstick size considerably less. Lift the basket and shake the potatoes around once or twice during the cooking so they don't stick. Nothing is worse than a whole mess of potatoes stuck together. When they are nicely browned, remove the basket from the fat, test to see if the potatoes are crisp and tender to the bite, then turn them onto the paper-lined pan to drain. Put the pan in the oven, reheat the basket, check the temperature of the fat, and cook the rest of the potatoes in batches. Sprinkle them with salt and freshly ground black pepper just before serving.\n\nFor the two-fry method, you proceed as for the one-fry method, except that you heat the fat only to 300 to 325 degrees (remember to heat the basket, too). Cook the potatoes in this fat, a few at a time, for 5 to 6 minutes, until they get rather flabby-looking and not brown. Drain on paper towels and leave at room temperature anywhere from 1 to 1 _ _ hours, until you are ready to do your second frying. Then reheat the fat (with basket) to 375 to 380 degrees, toss the pre-fried potatoes into the hot fat by handfuls, and fry for 2 or 3 minutes, until they are the shade of brown you prefer. Be sure to bring the fat back to the proper temperature for each batch or they will be soggy. Keep warm in the oven and season just before serving.\n\nThey'll be crisp, golden-brown, piping hot, and perfectly delicious. I don't think you'll want another thing with them, least of all ketchup.\n\n_Potatoes Without Meat_\n\nIt can be both a challenge and fun to seek out things that are substantial and good enough to replace meat. There's pasta, of course, beans, lentils, and split peas\u2014and also potatoes. How often does one think of potatoes without meat? Yet they are a great food in their own right.\n\n  I have a dish that I dearly love, made with baked potatoes scooped out of their shells (save the shells, cut them in strips, crisp them in the oven, and you have a most delicious hors d'oeuvre) that goes by the romantic name _of Potatoes_ B^ron. Bake 6 potatoes, scoop the pulp from the shells\u2014don't mash it, just break it up coarsely\u2014and mix in _ _pound butter (with all that butter you can see why this is a meat substitute), salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste. Put in an 8-or 9-inch round glass baking dish or pie dish, pour over a good _ _ cup heavy cream, and leave for 30 to 45 minutes so the potatoes absorb the cream, butter, and seasonings. Sprinkle _ _ to   cup coarsely grated Swiss or Gruyere cheese over the potatoes, and place in a 375-degree oven until the potatoes heat through and the cheese melts, forming a golden crust. Serve these rich, creamy potatoes as a main dish with wilted spinach or mustard greens, an interesting salad, and bread and butter, and you'll never miss the meat.\n\n  Then there's that old Irish standby, _Colcannon,_ a real country-style dish. Peel, boil, and mash 6 potatoes. Shred 1 medium head of cabbage. Render all the fat from _ _ to _ _ pound bacon in a big skillet, remove, and toss the cabbage in the fat. Cover and steam the cabbage in the fat until just crisp, remove the lid, and add _ _ cup stock, cover again, and simmer until the cabbage is very tender. Toss the bacon back in and cook it through completely, then remove both cabbage and bacon, drain well, and chop rather coarsely. Combine with the mashed potatoes and taste for seasoning, adding salt and pepper to taste. I like to put this in a baking dish, dot it with butter, and run it into the oven for a minute or two, so it gets a brown crust on the top.\n\nWe seldom think of potatoes in relation to Italian cooking, but one of the exceptions is potato gnocchi, the Italian member of the great family of gnocchi, some of which are made with semolina, some with cornmeal, some with cottage cheese, and some with cream-puff dough.\n\n  For _Potato Gnocchi *_ bake or boil 6 large baking potatoes until tender. Peel, mash well, and chill overnight. Next day mix in 3 egg yolks and 2 teaspoons salt. Turn out onto a lightly floured board, make a well in the center and put in 1 cup flour. Knead thoroughly, adding more flour as needed to make a smooth, elastic dough\u20142 to _2  _cups in all, depending on whether you use all-purpose or unbleached hard-wheat flour. The dough should not be too firm, but it must have an elasticity almost like bread dough. Roll it into long, sausage-like shapes, and slice each one into 1-inch segments. Press your thumb into each segment to curl the edges of the dough\u2014you can also do this with a pencil or a cooking chopstick.\n\nDrop these little gnocchi into 4 quarts of rapidly boiling salted water. Lower the heat and cook them gently, uncovered, for about 3 to 5 minutes, or until the gnocchi rise to the surface. Remove with a slotted spoon to a serving dish, and serve with melted butter and freshly grated Parmesan cheese, or with a good pasta meat sauce, and pass additional Parmesan.\n\nTeam this with a salad of watercress and thinly sliced onion, drink red wine, and finish off with a creme caramel.\n\n_Consider the Onion_\n\nI happen to be crazy about onions, so I can never understand why they are so unpopular with certain people who banish them from their lives on the grounds that they are disagreeable\u2014to the taste and on the breath. I don't see how the kitchen could have survived without onions, for they have been cultivated since prehistoric times. Throughout the world, no vegetable is as indispensable, raw or cooked, as a flavor ingredient in innumerable dishes, or as a pickle.\n\nNo other vegetable is as legendary, either. Onions, we are told, were part of the cargo on Noah's ark. The Egyptians regarded them as a symbol of the sun they worshiped as a god, with the concentric rings of the sliced onion representing heaven, hell, earth, and the universe. If you've never studied the inside of an onion, cut one in half sometime and really look. It is one of nature's most amazing works of art.\n\nOnions were the backbone of many diets in the past. The Egyptians fed vast quantities of them to the builders of the pyramids to give them strength, and Alexander the Great stuffed his armies with onions to give them courage. I also read somewhere that the wives of Irish fishermen used to prepare for their husbands a breakfast of sliced onions, rum, and stout, which taken at dawn would certainly enable one to face the coldest seas.\n\nThe onion is a many-faceted vegetable. There are the tiny pearl onions which we pickle and the Dutch, Belgians, and French eat as a vegetable, although peeling these babies is a pretty monotonous task. Then we have the rather larger white onions that we cook whole for creamed onions, onions a la Grecque, or any number of hot and cold specialties and relishes, medium-sized yellow onions for boiling or to chop and slice and use in different dishes, the mild red Italian onions, the big delicate Bermudas, and the enormous Spanish variety that are in season from fall to late spring. Just the other day I was enchanted to receive a box of these giant golden globes, perfectly matched in size and contour, that flourish in the volcanic soil of Oregon and Idaho. They make absolutely superb eating. I love them raw, thinly sliced, with a hamburger or cold meats or in a hearty, flavorful onion sandwich.\n\nThe day my gift box arrived I happened to have some slightly stale homemade bread, about two or three days old. I sliced this very thin, buttered it well, covered it with paper-thin slices of Spanish onion, sprinkled them with some coarse salt, and pressed another slice of bread firmly on the top\u2014and there was my supper.\n\nI can easily make a whole meal of onion sandwiches, for to me they are one of the greatest treats I know, and they are awfully good with cold chicken or cold roast beef, too.\n\nThink about onions when you are cooking outdoors on the charcoal grill, in spring or summer, for there is nothing quite as good with spitted roast meat, especially beef or lamb, or with steak.\n\n  Put the onions, either unpeeled or peeled and foil-wrapped, just at the edge of the fire to roast. Remove the charred outside, or the foil, and eat this most pungent and delicious of vegetables while it is hot, crisp, and tender, adding some salt, freshly ground pepper, and butter. Onions cooked this way are so much better than those uninteresting French-fried things that are more batter than onion.\n\n  You can also take thickish slices of raw onion, butter them, and grill them over the coals until they are crisply done and slightly glazed. Or you can simmer them in water or bouillon until tender but still firm, then put them on a baking sheet, dot them with butter, sprinkle them with bread crumbs and grated Parmesan cheese, and brown them under the broiler.\n\n  like an onion salad with grilled meats. When beefsteak tomatoes are in season, dip them briefly in boiling water to loosen the skins, then peel them, slice rather thickly, and alternate with hearty slices of Spanish onion. Dribble over this a little olive oil and wine vinegar, sprinkle with salt and freshly ground black pepper, and you have an extraordinarily good accompaniment to your steak. I also take Spanish onion slices, break them into rings, and put them in a bowl, covered with water and ice cubes and about _ _ cup vinegar to each 2 cups water, with some salt and pepper. Leave these, covered, in the refrigerator for several hours, then drain them, toss with your favorite French dressing, and serve icy cold for an unforgettable salad.\n\n  Onions and potatoes combine marvelously. Saute onion rings in butter, and add an equal quantity of boiled, peeled, and sliced potatoes. Continue sauteing until the potatoes are delicately browned and the onions slightly caramelized, then sprinkle them with some chopped parsley.\n\nThis tasty, satisfying onion and potato saut\u00e9 is great with meats grilled over charcoal.\n\n_Beets Can Be Beautiful_\n\nIt always amazes me how people tend to forget or ignore one of the most delicious and versatile vegetables we have\u2014the beet. While beets are most plentiful in summer, they remain in good form all year round, with a color and flavor few other vegetables can equal. When you buy beets, look for the small ones. Older beets take long cooking and are often rather woody.\n\n  Fresh beets must be cooked with a couple of inches of the stem left on, and never peeled before cooking, or they will bleed away much of their beautiful ruby color. Don't even scrub or brush them, as this may puncture the skin; just wash them gently.\n\nCook the beets in boiling water, tightly covered, and let them simmer slowly until tender, which, according to size, takes from about 30 to 45 minutes. Don't pierce them with a fork until you are sure they are tender. Plunge them into cold water, and as soon as they are cool enough to handle, slip off the skins, trim off the root and stem ends, and slice, dice, or cut in julienne strips. Very small beets may be left whole; larger ones should be cut up.\n\nSliced, and dressed with butter, salt, and freshly ground pepper, perhaps a touch of lemon juice if you like, or seasoned and tossed with sour cream, hot beets are so good it seems unbelievable that they are not more popular. Try them, too, with a little grated orange rind and orange juice (which you can thicken with a bit of cornstarch, if you like) for a very interesting flavor combination. I sometimes shred the beets or cut them in thin julienne strips and toss them with finely chopped spinach or their own beet tops, cooked just like spinach, then give them some salt, pepper, butter, lemon juice, and just a touch of nutmeg.\n\nCold beets are another story. The French love beets in salad. In fact, in all their markets you find beets cooked in their skins, ready to be peeled, something I have never seen in this country and would like to.\n\n I love a salad of shredded cooked beets, chopped hard-boiled egg, and thinly sliced onion dressed with homemade mayonnaise, or half mayonnaise and half sour cream, piled on greens, and served with finely chopped parsley or dill\u2014beets and dill have a lovely relationship. Another of my favorites is thinly sliced beets and thinly sliced onions dressed with a vinaigrette sauce with finely chopped tarragon in it.\n\nDid you ever try shredding a little of the sweet beet and tossing it with what I call the bitter salad greens, like endive and chicory and arugola or even watercress, and vinaigrette sauce? It tastes just marvelous. Sometimes I throw in a little finely chopped garlic or thinly sliced onion.\n\n  Beets have a natural affinity for herring and smoked fish. A _Scandinavian Salad_ is a good, hearty buffet or main dish salad, beautiful to look at and to eat, and the longer it marinates the better it gets. Take a 12-ounce jar of herring tidbits and cut them very thinly, then combine them with 1 to _1 _ cups diced cold meat (tongue is good, veal is excellent, or cold beef will do, if you cut it in thin strips), 1 crisp apple, diced with the skin on, 1 cup diced cooked potatoes, and 1 cup diced or julienne beets. Toss well with mayonnaise, or mayonnaise and sour cream, and pack into a mold. Unmold on a bed of greens and sprinkle with chopped fresh parsley or dill (or dried dill). Garnish with quartered hard-boiled eggs and a few tiny beets.\n\nI've always had a fondness for pickled beets, which my mother did in a number of ways. While the cooked beets were still warm, she sliced them and put them into jars with alternating slices of onion, then covered them with good cider vinegar or wine vinegar. These were allowed to mellow a week or so before being eaten. Sometimes she popped sprigs of fresh dill in the jar, or put the beets down covered in vinaigrette mixed with dill and a touch of garlic. We used to drop shelled hard-boiled eggs in the ruby-red vinegar from the pickled beets, let them sit for several days, and use them in salads or as a garnish for various dishes.\n\nOne of the most famous old American dishes is red flannel hash, which has come to be thought of as corned beef hash with chopped beets mixed into it. There's a story to the effect that this was the hash that was made the day after a New England boiled dinner. A writer friend of mine put this in an article once and received a rebuke from an old-time New Englander who said that red flannel hash had not come about that way; the original boiled dinner had been boiled cod with various vegetables, beets being one. Next day's meal, made of vegetables and bits of fish, was the true red flannel hash. Then I read in an old cookbook that only the vegetables from the boiled dinner were made into hash, and since meat was often scarce, the vegetable hash was served with a slice of cold meat. So I guess all we can be sure of is that the beet always played a role in the history of New England eating.\n\n_Cabbage and Its Cousins_\n\nHas it ever occurred to you how many different members of the cabbage family we eat? First, there's the common green or white cabbage that we find in the markets all year round, the splendid Savoy cabbage with its dark-green textured leaves, and occasionally the very young spring cabbage with crispy, brilliant gray-green leaves that look just as if they had been painted. Then there's the red cabbage, which is so beautiful if you slice through its heart and gaze at the intricate red and white marbled interior, a vegetable work of art. There's Chinese cabbage, with long leaves of palest greenish white and a texture quite different from other cabbages, and the Oriental bok-choi, which you'll find in Chinese markets looking more like a rather eccentric version of Swiss chard than a cabbage.\n\nBrussels sprouts are tiny members of the cabbage family that flourish in fall and winter, and then there's cauliflower, which is actually a somewhat freakish variant of the same cruciferous family as the cabbage. Other relatives are good old-fashioned kale, which lasts all winter long, collard greens, the familiar green broccoli, and the less familiar purple broccoli that I find in New York's Italian markets. This is a most spectacular vegetable, purple on top and pale green underneath. When you cook it, just as you'd cook cauliflower, the purple blanches out, leaving a delicate greeny mauve color, but either cooked or raw it tastes wonderfully good.\n\nAnother type of broccoli, called broccoli rabe or rape or broccoli di rapa, is sort of a cross between broccoli, mustard greens, and turnip greens. This, too, can be found in Italian markets in the fall and winter, and you'll recognize it by the long, rather coarse stems with leaves and funny little clumps of buds that look almost like a stunted broccoli.\n\nTo cook  _Broccoli Rabe,_ first soak it well, then cut off the top part with the leaves and flowers and part of the thick stems. Steam them in water for just a few minutes until barely wilted down, then chop them. While you're doing this, melt about 4 tablespoons olive oil (for 3 pounds broccoli rabe), add 2 finely chopped garlic cloves, salt, and freshly ground black pepper, then toss the wilted vegetable in the hot oil, just as you would toss a salad. Add a squeeze of lemon juice, a hint of dill or thyme or basil, and toss again. Serve very hot.\n\nI had this the other night with roast duck, and it was delicious. It makes a great change from the usual cabbage. Actually, I happen to love cabbage, provided it is properly cooked. I think it is so often maligned because most people were brought up to cook it in the old way, boiling it in lots of water until it was soggy and smelly and quite horrible.\n\n To know the true joys of cabbage, just quarter it or cut it thinly, toss into salted water, and cook for only a few minutes until it is barely tender and still crisp. Drain it, drench with butter, salt and pepper it, and give it a bit of lemon juice and a touch of chopped dill or tarragon. Serve it forthwith, and you'll have one of the finest vegetable dishes known to man.\n\n_ _ I also like to shred cabbage as if I was making cole slaw, then render 5 or 6 slices of bacon, cut into tiny pieces, and toss the shredded cabbage in the fat, turning it quickly several times until it braises to a light delicate brown and wilts down with the bacon flavor all through it. I then add a finely chopped garlic clove and a little white wine, cover the pan, and simmer for about 10 minutes, seasoning the cabbage with salt and pepper just before I dish it up.\n\nWhile I prefer all the simple, easy ways of cooking cabbage to a lovely bitey crispness, there still lingers in my mind the memory of some cabbage I once had for lunch in a French farmhouse. The cook had taken an old cabbage, shredded it very finely, and cooked it covered in a small amount of fat from the pork roast and a touch of white wine over very low heat for several hours, very, very slowly, until it was almost a puree. She then seasoned it well with salt, pepper, more white wine, a drop or two of lemon juice, and a pinch of sage. She served it on the same dish with a loin of pork that had been perfectly roasted with the skin left on until it was crunchy on the outside and juicy inside. If you don't think this sounds like one of the most exquisite versions of cabbage one could eat, do me the honor of trying it.\n\n  Finally, I'd like to tell you my way of cooking _Brussels Sprouts,_ yet another vegetable many people dislike because they've usually had them cooked on and on until they go all soft and mushy. I put mine in a bare minimum of boiling water, after trimming and washing them, and cook them rapidly for 5 minutes. Then I drain them well, melt about 4 tablespoons butter in a saucepan, and toss them around in it until the butter turns a deep brown and the smell of the butter and the sprouts mingles in a way that intoxicates the nostrils. With a dash or two of salt and some freshly ground black pepper you have sprouts fit for the gods. Or I might cook them in the same manner and then toss them in olive oil with quite a bit of chopped garlic and a little lemon juice\u2014and I do mean toss, until each one is coated with the fruity oil and an overtone of lemon. Grind some pepper on them, sprinkle with some chopped parsley and dill, and, once more, you'll have really delicious Brussels sprouts. Another of my tricks\u2014and you can use this for broccoli rabe, too\u2014is to toss the sprouts with the oil or butter, garlic, salt and pepper, and a good handful of pine nuts or, if you can't get them, walnuts that have been toasted in butter or oil until they are crisp and crunchy.\n\nA _Plea for Sauerkraut_\n\nIt distresses me to learn that less and less sauerkraut is being eaten in this country. How can this crisp, pungent, versatile vegetable, so long a part of our gastronomic heritage, have fallen from favor? I can't remember a time when I haven't eaten sauerkraut; I couldn't live without it, and I hope I never have to. When I was a child, the man who ran a little farm we owned in the country used to bring us a barrel of sauerkraut right after its fermentation, and we had it all winter long, taking up bowlfuls, washing it thoroughly, and eating it raw or cooked in all kinds of ways.\n\nSauerkraut, you know, not only goes with hot dogs but also with turkey, goose, duck, pork, beef, even fish. The tradition of sauerkraut with turkey on the Thanksgiving menu in Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania dates well back into the beginning of the nineteenth century, possibly even the late eighteenth. Goose and duck are tremendously improved by sauerkraut\u2014the tart, fermented quality balances the fattiness of the bird. It's amazingly good with boiled beef, too. Instead of cabbage, try cooking some sauerkraut in a little bit of the stock from the beef for 30 to 45 minutes\u2014it makes a much more interesting accompaniment. Then there's that great dish of sauerkraut and pork products you find in Germany, France, Switzerland, and the Tyrolean section of Italy under such names as Berner Platte and _choucroute garnie._\n\nI well remember going many years ago to a small brasserie or beer restaurant in Alsace after a very disappointing dinner where I had eaten nothing. I was with an equally disgruntled fellow guest, and we sat down and ordered a special _choucroute a I'Alsacienne._ What an impressive and appetizing sight it was\u2014a great platter heaped with a steaming mound of sauerkraut surrounded by paper-thin slices of pink ham, sliced garlic sausage, and salt pork, garlanded with tiny Strasbourg sausages (which we would call frank\u00adfurters) and perfectly cooked potatoes, all piping hot. We drank steins of beer and ate for at least an hour until we were soothed and satisfied.\n\n  It's easy enough to make _Choucroute Garnie._ First look in your local meat markets for various types of hearty sausages\u2014knockwurst, frankfurters, Polish kielbasa, or Italian cotechino. For six persons or more, wash 3 pounds fresh or canned sauerkraut very well and put it in a deep kettle with 3 cups homemade or canned chicken broth. (If you like, use beer or white wine for part of the liquid.) Add a big chunk of rather lean salt pork, soaked in water to remove the excess salt, 1 or 2 cloves garlic, and about 2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper. Bring to a boil, cover, and simmer for 45 minutes to 1 hour. For your major piece of meat, buy a 3-pound piece of smoked pork loin (sold in most markets nowadays) and roast it in a 325-degree oven for 25 minutes per pound, or until it reaches an internal temperature of 170 degrees. (There is also a ready-to-eat smoked pork loin that only needs heating through in the oven, so be sure to ask if it needs to be cooked or not.) Put 12 frankfurters or 6 knockwurst in with the sauerkraut for the last 20 minutes to heat through and also a ready-cooked Polish kielbasa if you can find one. Boil 12 potatoes in their jackets separately, then peel.\n\nWhen it comes time to assemble the dish, drain the sauerkraut and mound it in the center of a big platter. Slice the pork loin and arrange around the sauerkraut. Garland with the sliced kielbasa and salt pork, the whole frankfurters or knockwurst, and the peeled potatoes. Serve with hot mustard\u2014the Dusseldorf or German-type mustard or the French Dijon mustard.\n\nYou can do a party for as many as twenty people simply by adding more sauerkraut, sausages, and some sliced ham. With dill pickles, rye bread, and beer or Alsatian white wine you will have mighty good eating from this simple fare. If you have only eaten sauerkraut spread on a hot dog, this classic dish will be a pleasant surprise. Or you might try raw sauerkraut with French dressing, surrounded with thinly sliced onion marinated in the dressing and, perhaps, tomato wedges, as a salad with your next grilled steak or with a rack of barbecued spareribs, which take to sauerkraut like peaches take to cream.\n\n_The Versatile Chickpea_\n\nOne of the most interesting of our dried legumes, the vegetable family that includes beans, peas, and lentils, is the chickpea. Chickpeas are comparatively unknown in this country, although they are a very old vegetable, having been grown in India many centuries ago. The Asian, European, and Middle East countries have all absorbed chickpeas into their cuisines\u2014in India they are known as \"gram,\" in Italy as \"ceci,\" in Spain as \"garbanzos,\" in France as \"pois chiches,\" and in the Middle East, with variations in spelling, as \"hummus.\" At one time they were widely used in Turkey to feed horses, and probably camels, too, for they were called \"camel corn\" there. Chickpeas do make a very nourishing horse feed, and I well remember traveling around the countryside of Portugal one day in a carriage and watching the driver, who was very fond of his horses, feeding them vast quantities of chickpeas.\n\nIf you don't know a chickpea when you see one, it is hard and round with a deep yellow color. Dried chickpeas take a good bit of cooking. Soak them overnight and then put them in water to cover with a garlic clove, a sprig of thyme and some salt and bring them to a boil. Then, for _ _pound chickpeas, add _ _ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda, which helps to tenderize them, and cook them until they are very soft, which can take anywhere from 2 to 5 hours. Sometimes you can find them in Italian markets presoaked and ready to cook, but if you don't want to go to all the bother of soaking and cooking them, canned chickpeas work extraordinarily well. Drain them, wash them, and drain again before using. In some Middle Eastern and specialty food shops you may find roasted salted chickpeas in bottles or jars. They are crisp and salty, with a surprisingly pleasant flavor, and make an unusual cocktail nibble.\n\nI like to use chickpeas because there are so many interesting things you can do with them. They can be heated and served, in equal proportions, with spaghetti, sauced with your favorite tomato sauce or simply butter and cheese, a great change from the usual pasta because of the two different tastes and textures. They are also good in vegetable soups, or in salads. For a salad, cook them with plenty of seasoning, drain, cool, and mix with a little finely chopped onion, a touch of minced garlic, olive oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper. The texture, crunchy but soft, is delicious with cold meats like corned beef and pastrami or with sausages.\n\n  Chickpeas combine well with canned beans in what I call a Ranch _Salad._ Mix equal amounts of chickpeas, kidney beans, and the white beans called cannellini with sliced onion, garlic dressing, and a little finely cut celery.\n\n  If you're bored with the usual starchy vegetables, try a Chickpea _Puree._ For eight servings, puree 3 cans drained and washed chickpeas in a blender or food mill or push them through a sieve with a wooden spoon. Combine the puree with a good knob of butter, a tiny bit of finely chopped garlic, salt and pepper to taste, and enough heavy cream to give a consistency like mashed potatoes. Heat through and serve with pork, lamb, turkey, or duck.\n\nEven more delicious is a cold chickpea puree which is treated in rather a different way, a Middle East specialty called hummus bi tahini. Tahini is a sesame-seed paste with a wonderful nutty flavor, and you can buy it in jars or cans in Middle East stores, specialty food shops, health-food stores, and even in some supermarket chains on the East Coast.\n\n  For _Hummus bi Tahini,_ use _ _ pound dried chickpeas, cooked according to previous directions and cooled, or 2 cans chickpeas, drained, washed, and drained again. Put them through a food mill or sieve or whirl them in the blender with the juice of 2 lemons and possibly _ _ cup water, until you have a creamy paste. Finely crush 2 to 3 garlic cloves with 1 teaspoon salt and pound into the chickpeas thoroughly. Then gradually mix in _ _ cup tahini and, if you have not already added lemon juice, the juice of 2 to 3 lemons\u2014the paste should have a good strong lemony flavor, and it should be about as thick as mayonnaise. If too thick, thin with a little water. Let it rest for 20 to 30 minutes, then taste to see if you have enough garlic, salt, and lemon juice. If you like spicy mixtures, add a good slug of Tabasco as well.\n\nTo serve, put the hummus bi tahini in a bowl, pour a little olive oil on top and sprinkle with a fair quantity of paprika and chopped parsley, or just use the oil and a dusting of finely chopped fresh mint.\n\nServe as a cocktail dip or a first course with bread sticks, Melba toast, raw vegetables, or heated pita, that marvelous flat Middle East bread so many stores seem to carry these days. Tear the bread in bite-size pieces for dipping in the paste.\n\n_Look to the Lentil_\n\nWhen you dip your spoon into a bowl of steaming lentil soup, you may well be eating a culinary descendant of the \"pottage of lentiles\" for which Esau sold his birthright. These tiny bean-like seeds, from one of the first plants used for food, are a very ancient form of sustenance. The Egyptians and Greeks cooked these small legumes, and so did the Romans\u2014in fact, Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist, recommended them as a food that produced mildness and moderation of temper. Remarkably, they are just as popular throughout the world today as they were all those centuries ago.\n\nThe lentils we use most in this country are the brown ones from Oregon and Washington, but there are others, like the red variety of Egypt, the green lentils of France, the yellow lentils of India, and some that are almost black. The only real difference in the many varieties of lentil is the size. Compared to ours, those of Egypt and France are quite small.\n\nLentils might have been devised for winter meals. They are a marvelously nutritious, satisfying, and economical food, and to me, their flavor is more interesting and distinctive than any of the beans, except perhaps the fava. In the old days lentils, like other dried legumes, required long soaking and long boiling, so they were rather tedious to prepare. Now, thanks to the processed packaged lentils we buy in our supermarkets, no presoaking is required and cooking takes very little time.\n\n  For six to eight servings, put 1 pound lentils in a 4-or 5-quart pot with 5 to 6 cups water, an onion stuck with 2 cloves, a bay leaf, and 1 tablespoon salt. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, cover, and simmer for about 30 minutes. The important thing with lentils, as with beans, is not to overcook them until they get mushy and have no character. After you have cooked them for 30 minutes, taste to see if they are tender. If not, cook a little longer. Drained, buttered, and served with a sprinkling of chopped parsley, cooked lentils make a pleasant switch from the usual starchy vegetable. For a variation, after draining the lentils, saute them quickly in a skillet in butter, olive oil, or bacon fat with 1 cup finely diced green onions, 1 cup crisp little bits of bacon, and _ _cup chopped parsley, tossing them together.\n\nThis makes a delicious accompaniment to spareribs, pork chops, roast duck, roast lamb\u2014almost any meat, in fact.\n\n_ _ For a one-dish meal on an icy winter's day, could there be anything quite as warming and heartening as a big pot of _Lentil Soupl_ Put a ham or pork bone in a deep pot with 1 pound lentils and twice the usual amount of water or stock\u2014about 2 to 3 quarts\u2014for in this case the lentils need to be cooked until quite, quite soft, about 1 hour. When cooked, put them through a sieve or food mill, taste the puree for seasoning, and add freshly ground black pepper and salt to taste (you won't have to add much of the latter if the meat bone was very salty). Add 1 cup finely chopped onions, 2 finely chopped garlic cloves, 1 teaspoon thyme, _ V <\\ _teaspoon nutmeg, and enough additional water or stock, if needed, to make a good thick soup. Cook this down for another 30 minutes, at a simmer. You can make the soup even heartier by adding thinly sliced frankfurters or knockwurst for the last 5 to 10 minutes of cooking time, and richer by stirring in _ _to  cup heavy cream for the last 5 minutes, blending well. Taste once more for seasoning, and serve topped with a sprinkling of chopped parsley and crisp croutons.\n\nOne of my great joys is a lentil salad. This is something you are seldom served, and I really don't know why, because it is excellent with cold meats such as ham, boiled beef, or chicken. This type of salad is ideal for a picnic or a covered-dish supper because it is no problem to carry and holds up well. In fact, if you don't finish it all the first time, it can mellow in the refrigerator for one or two days.\n\n  For Lentii Salad, put 1 pound lentils in a heavy saucepan with 5 cups water and 2 teaspoons salt. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to a simmer, cover tightly, and cook for just 28 minutes\u2014check by tasting to see that the lentils are tender but still firm. Drain well, then put the lentils in a big bowl and toss, them lightly with 3 or 4 tablespoons olive oil or salad oil. Let cool thoroughly. When the lentils are cold, add 1 large onion, finely chopped, 1 or 2 ribs celery, cut in fine dice, and, if you wish, _ _ cup finely chopped green pepper or pimiento, and fold in gently. Make a dressing with _ _ cup olive oil or peanut oil, 2 tablespoons good wine vinegar (or to taste), _ l A_ to 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, and 1 teaspoon salt, _ox_ to taste, depending on the amount of seasoning you like. Pour this over the lentils and toss lightly, until well blended. Allow to mellow in the refrigerator for several hours. Just before serving, garnish with chopped parsley and perhaps some finely chopped hard-boiled egg.\n\n_Bean Salads for All Seasons_\n\nI always welcome the advent of summer because it offers such an infinite variety in the dishes one can eat, many of which can be prepared ahead and kept in the refrigerator for several days. It's a delight to be able to bring forth an instant source of a good meal, something that can be added to or dressed up for an appetite-tempting lunch or supper.\n\nFor instance, take beans. I love beans in all their colors, shapes, and varieties, and I find them as delicious cold as hot, truly an all-season food.\n\nThe red kidney bean is known to us all through the ranch salad that has been so much a part of our menus for the last few years, and so is the chickpea. I find few people are as familiar with a great favorite of mine, the Italian cannellini, a white kidney bean that you usually find in cans in the Italian food section of supermarkets, so I'm going to give you a couple of recipes for this bean. If you can't find cannellini, you can use white pea beans or Great Northern beans, cooking them according to the package directions until they are just tender, but not mushy. Add an onion stuck with a cloves, a bay leaf, and 2 or 3 cloves of garlic so that they become delicately imbued with these aromatic flavors. Drain them well and add a touch of oil while they are still warm to stop them adhering to each other, then chill until ready to use.\n\n  For a simple _White Bean Salad,_ use either 1 pound pea beans, cooked, or 2 cans well-drained cannellini (these would be 1-pound 4-ounce cans). Make a vinaigrette dressing with 8 tablespoons oil, 2 tablespoons wine vinegar, 1 teaspoon salt, fteshly ground black pepper to taste, _ _ teaspoon dried basil or a little chopped fresh basil, and 2 cloves garlic (crushed and put in a little cheesecloth bag if you want to discard them after they have perfumed the dressing, otherwise finely chopped). Mix into the beans, chill them, then take them out of the refrigerator, and let them warm almost to room temperature before serving. Add extra dressing, if you think they need it, and sprinkle chopped parsley or chives on top for color.\n\nThis is an excellent, standard bean salad that goes with everything, especially such cold foods as stuffed breast of veal, roast chicken, or meat loaf. Add a mixed green salad, too, if you wish.\n\n_ A_ particular passion of mine\u2014and I think of everyone who tastes it\u2014is a Cannelh'ni Bean _and Tuna Salad._ To serve four to six persons, depending on their appetites, use 2 cans well-drained cannellini beans, or 1 pound white pea beans, cooked. Mix them with a vinaigrette made with 6 tables poons oil, 1 _ _to 2 tablespoons wine vinegar, _ _ to 1 teaspoon salt (if your cooked beans have not been previously salted), _ _ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, and _ _ teaspoon dried basil or some chopped fresh basil. Let this sort of melt into the beans, without tossing them too much, which breaks them up. Arrange in a serving dish and top with 1 cup finely chopped onion and two 7-ounce cans white-meat tuna, flaked. Top with additional chopped fresh or dried basil and a goodly portion of chopped parsley, and pour more oil and vinegar\u2014about 3 tablespoons oil and 2 teaspoons vinegar\u2014over the tuna and onions at the last minute.\n\nThis makes a perfectly delicious main-dish salad, with the smooth mealy texture of the beans blending with the crispness of the onion and the flaky tuna. Or, for a summer buffet, you might serve it with a mousse of some kind, ham or chicken perhaps, a green salad, and crusty French bread.\n\n  For another good hearty salad, combine two 1-pound cans of well-drained red kidney beans with 1 to _1 _ cups leftover boiled or rare roast beef, cut in thin strips, _ _ cup very finely cut celery, and 1 minced garlic clove.\n\nToss well with 8 tablespoons oil, 2 tablespoons wine vinegar, with salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste, and garnish with thinly sliced red Italian onion, separated into rings, halved hard-boiled eggs, and some black olives, preferably the Greek ones. Sprinkle with chopped fresh basil and chopped parsley or chives, and serve as a main dish for luncheon.\n\nOr, if you are going on a picnic, pack the salad in a bowl and take it along as part of your _al fresco_ meal\u2014it's more fun and more filling than sandwiches.\n\n_The Bean that Won the West_\n\nNothing could be more American than the pinto bean, that exquisite pale pink bean speckled with brown that is common to the western states and Mexico. This was one of the vegetable crops the conquistadors found when they invaded Mexico, and as they progressed north they came across many pinto beans growing in the part of America that is now California, New Mexico, and Arizona, for this was one of the standard foods of the Indians. They dubbed it \"pinto,\" Spanish for \"spotted\", because of its coloring.\n\nPinto beans can be bought in many of our markets, and if you have never cooked them, you should quickly add this colorful member of the dried legume family to your repertoire. You can use pinto beans in all sorts of bean casseroles, in place of white beans or red kidney beans, for they combine felicitously with roast pork or chops, ham, lamb, duck, or sausage, and they make a good hearty accompaniment to steak or hamburgers. In these days of sky-high meat prices, beans are a boon, not only as a way to stretch the meat you buy, but also as a supplementary source of protein. Pinto beans are especially rich in vitamin B-1, another mark in their favor.\n\nFor those of you who love Mexican food, if you don't know the _frijol pinto,_ which, along with the _frijol negro_ (black bean) and _frijol rojo_ (red kidney bean), is one of the mainstays of Mexican cuisine, I think it's high time you rushed out and bought a package and cooked yourself some _frijoles,_ or _frijoles refritos,_ or _frijoles con queso._\n\n  Let's start with basic _Frijoles,_ beans Mexican style. Put 2 cups (1 pound) pinto beans in a saucepan, and cover with warm water. Bring to a boil, cover, reduce the heat, and simmer very slowly\u2014and I do mean simmer; simmering keeps the beans whole, but if you boil them they are apt to break up\u2014until they are very, very tender, which can take 3 hours or more. (Because pinto beans grow in a very dry climate they take longer to cook than some of the other dried legumes.) Add more water if it cooks away, but not too much\u2014there should not be a lot of liquid left when the beans are done. When the beans are almost cooked, season them with about 1 tablespoon salt, or to taste. Always salt beans after they have cooked, not before.\n\nMelt _ _ cup lard or bacon fat or ham fat in an earthenware casserole or a large heavy skillet. Mash a few of the beans into the fat, then add a little of the bean liquid and more beans. Continue adding and mashing until all _of_ the beans are used, stirring from time to time, and cook until they have the consistency you like. They shouldn't be too dry, but neither should they be soupy\u2014just moistly dry is what you are aiming for. Serve to six, with broiled meat or hamburgers or Mexican food.\n\n  For _Frijoles Refritos,_ or refried beans, allow _ _ cup lard or bacon fat for each 3 cups cooked frijoles. Melt some of the lard in a heavy skillet and mash some beans into it (it is best to do this in stages, first a couple of tablespoons of lard, then a few tablespoons beans, adding more lard as the beans get dry, more beans as the lard is absorbed, this will give you a nice creamy consistency). Stir over low heat until the beans are very hot and crispy around the edges. To my mind it doesn't hurt if you depart from tradition and mix a little chili powder or chopped green chili pepper into your frijoles refritos\u2014it gives them a delicious spiciness.\n\n_ _ Frijoles con Queso, beans with cheese, is just _frijoles refritos_ with little cubes of Jack or Cheddar cheese popped on top and allowed to melt over the beans before they are served. This is wonderfully tasty, even better if you sprinkle it with chopped fresh coriander leaves, the cilantro the Mexicans love and use so much in cooking.\n\n  For a good satisfying casserole made with pinto beans, one of my favorites is _California Beans with Cognac._\n\nSoak 2 cups pinto beans overnight. Drain. Put in a saucepan with 2 finely chopped garlic cloves, 1 onion stuck with 2 cloves, a bay leaf, 1 teaspoon thyme, and boiling water to cover. Cover and simmer gently until very tender. Drain, reserving 1 cup of the bean liquid.\n\nMelt 6 tablespoons butter in a pan, add 1 small onion, finely chopped, and saute until golden. Add 2 cups tomato sauce or canned Italian plum tomatoes, _ _cup cognac, 2 teaspoons salt, _ _ cup chopped parsley, and the 1 cup reserved bean liquid. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer 30 minutes. Mix with the beans, put in an earthenware casserole, and bake in a 325-degree oven until just bubbly. This will serve six. To turn this into a one-dish meal, you can add 1 cup diced cooked ham and 1 pound cooked sausages to the beans and sauce before reheating, or brown 4 thickish potk chops on both sides, place them in the bottom of the casserole, cover with the beans and sauce, and bake until chops are tender.\n\n_The Salad Born at the Waldorf_\n\nWhen the crisp fall apples appear in the markets, I am always tempted to try out all my favorite apple recipes. I love apple dumplings and apple crunch and apples bonne femme, and I have always had a weakness for a Waldorf salad made with those tart and juicy fall apples, a very American dish that was created at the old Waldorf Hotel, which opened in 1893 at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, where the Empire State Building is now.\n\nI remember when I was about nineteen years old marveling at the massive beauty and utter luxury of the old hotel. The great columns and beautiful ironwork, the exquisite furniture and luxurious fabrics, and the wonderful collection of Victorian art were unforgettable. I also remember the first time I had lunch there. I had had a tooth pulled that morning, and I was being very good to myself, so after taking a long walk I decided to treat myself to lunch at the Waldorf. I called and reserved a table by the window facing 34th Street, and I sat there feeling rather awed, because I had never lived in New York until that year and I had heard and read so much about the Waldorf and this was my debut. I've no idea what I ordered except I recall thinking I should have some Waldorf salad. When it came I'm afraid I was a little bit disappointed because it was late for the tart apples, and while the salad was attractive and flavorful, it didn't excite me the way it would have done had the apples been the right type. However, the glamour of the room and the occasion and the overwhelming pleasure of eating in such an elegant atmosphere more than made up for it.\n\nI've been doing a bit of research about the salad called Waldorf, and I've come across some rather interesting facts. Although we always think of a new dish as having been created by a chef, it was the then young maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf, Oscar Tschirky, who originated the Waldorf salad. The name of Mr. Oscar later became synonymous with the Waldorf, and when the hotel moved up to its present site at Park Avenue and 50th Street, he was one of its greatest attractions. I knew Oscar over a period of years, not only in the hotel but away from it. A very good friend of mine had been a longtime patron of the Waldorf and, in fact, kept an apartment there. When she gave a party, Oscar would come up to see that everything was as it should be. He was a very simple man and a man of enormous charm and great appreciation. Whenever I go into the Waldorf, I remember him wandering through the various rooms, smiling and checking to see that things were right.\n\nSoon after the Waldorf opened, it became a favored centet for the enormous and elegant parties given by New York society. When Mts. William K. Vanderbilt had a benefit concert for St. Mary's Hospital for Children, it was held at the new hotel, which had all the facilities she needed. It was a very large and important social occasion. Walter Dam-rosch conducted the New York Symphony Orchestra, and there was a great supper at which Oscar introduced the light, delicious, and different Waldorf salad, at that time a revolutionary combination of foods because most people didn't eat fruit salads as they do now. This may, as a matter of fact, have started the fruit salad vogue.\n\nNo one kept the original recipe, made up on the spur of the moment as many other things have been in culinary history, because no one, least of all Oscar, ever dreamed that this would become a household salad across the country, and something served in every restaurant. We do know that the original salad was different from the one we have now, which includes chopped walnuts. The early version was merely equal parts of diced tart apple and celery bound with mayonnaise and served on greens. Since then, it has seen many variations, some good, some not so good. I happen to think the addition of walnuts was inspirational. It gives another textute and flavor that is most pleasing. I've had it with pecans, which are all right, but don't have the flavor of English walnuts, and I have seen it gussied up with maraschino cherries and a gob of whipped cream on top, and other horrors that make it something absolutely revolting.\n\n  Here is the version _of Waldorf Salad_ that I like. Combine _1 _ cups diced apple (if the apples are beautifully colored, you might keep some of the brilliant red or green skin on) and _1  _cups diced celery, and bind them with about _ _ cup of good mayonnaise, flavored with a touch of mustard. The quality of the ingredients is important. The apple must be tart, crisp, and juicy, with a good bite, the celery cut very, very thinly, not in great chunks, and the mayonnaise homemade and well seasoned with mustard, but no sugar, please. Arrange on a bed of greens, garnish with coarsely chopped walnuts, putting one perfect walnut half on the top, and serve at once.\n\nNothing is worse than a Waldorf salad that sits until the apples become brown and awful. It should always be made and served at the vety last minute. It goes extraordinarily well with game, chicken, and turkey and is delicious with cold meats.\n\nIf for nothing else, Oscar of the Waldorf will always be remembered for his very original salad.\n\n_The Tomato Salad Test_\n\nOne of summer's greatest joys is to pick a sun-warmed, sun-ripened tomato from the vine, dust it off on your sleeve, and eat it like an apple. Savor the wonderful taste of the juice and the seeds on your tongue, and you realize that in a tomato, ripeness is all.\n\nA great French restaurant critic who has been known to write blistering reviews of any he finds faulty says that he tests a new place by ordering a _salade de tomates,_ or tomato salad. This ranks as one of the most frequently eaten hors d'oeuvre in French restaurants, and it can be extraordinarily good or extraordinarily bad. The tomatoes must be ripe, peeled, thinly sliced, and not salted until the very last minute. They may be sprinkled with coarsely ground pepper and chopped herbs, but no salt or oil should touch them until the salad is served at table. Tomatoes that are dressed beforehand form a sort of slimy, gooey sauce that is most unpleasant to eat. To enjoy this classic, simple tomato salad at its best, just take a really good garden-ripened tomato, peel and slice it, and serve it at room temperature with no more enhancing than perhaps some chopped parsley and fresh basil, freshly ground black pepper, then salt, a little olive oil, and, if you wish, a touch of vinegar or lemon juice.\n\nThere are, of course, other approaches to a tomato salad. You may slice the tomatoes thickly without peeling them, give them plenty of pepper and basil and a dressing of oil, a tiny bit of vinegar, and some finely chopped garlic. Or core the tomatoes, cut them in wedges, combine them with good healthy slices of red Italian onion or Spanish onion, and toss with freshly ground black pepper, salt, olive oil, and a touch of wine vinegar. With good crusty French bread you'll have one of the great summer eating experiences.\n\nIf you can buy or grow big, beautiful, round, ripe tomatoes, scoop out the shells and you can fill them with all kinds of good things.\n\n  One of my favorites for a summer luncheon in the garden or to take on a picnic is _Tuna-Stuffed Tomatoes._\n\nFill 6 large scooped-out tomatoes with a mixture of 1 large can solid-pack white-meat tuna, _ _ cup coarsely chopped onion or scallion, 1 teaspoon salt, _ _teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, 1 or 2 tablespoons chopped parsley, 1 or 2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil (or 1 teaspoon dried basil), 4 tablespoons olive oil, and 1 tablespoon lemon juice. (If you like garlic, add 1 or 2 chopped garlic cloves, mix with the oil and lemon juice, then toss with the tuna mixture.) Sprinkle chopped parsley on top of the stuffed tomatoes, and garnish with sliced olives or soft black Greek or Italian olives. For a special party touch, crisscross 1 or 2 anchovy fillets on each tomato. Place on greens for a first or main course with additional vinaigrette sauce. Serve with crisp toasted rolls and butter, and, if it's a hot day, ice-cold beer.\n\n  I also like to fill the big tomato shells with crisply cooked green beans. Toss 1 pound cooked green beans with 4 tablespoons oil, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 1 teaspoon salt, _ _ teaspoon freshly ground pepper, and _ _ cup finely chopped onion. Fill the tomatoes, and top them with a tomato slice and some chopped parsley.\n\nThis makes an easy and filling vegetable-cum-salad course\u2014for instance, with a grilled chicken or teriyaki steak you might just have a big tray of the stuffed tomatoes with French bread and chilled wine or beer and some fresh fruit for dessert.\n\nAnother combination that makes a pleasant lunch or snack is something I discovered at a small, very successful soul food restaurant in Montmartre run by two black Americans. It was known as Greased Pig Salad and it became a very popular hors d'oeuvre with the French.\n\n  For each serving of _Greased Pig Salad,_ arrange on a plate a few very crisp leaves of Boston, romaine, or Bibb lettuce. Top with slices of really ripe tomato and maybe a slice of red onion. At the last minute, add 3 or 4 slices of crisp bacon. Serve this with a good mayonnaise, and you have what is really a bacon and tomato sandwich without the benefit of bread.\n\n_Dutch Treat_\n\nI love to get mail from people who really enjoy food, like the man in Baltimore who described in the most eloquent terms his early food memories and the beginning of his life-long passion for steak tartare. Recently I received another fascinating letter from Max Dekking of La Jolla, California.\n\n\"I, being a born Dutchman,\" he wrote, \"naturally think the Dutch 'Huzarensla' is the greatest of all salads. Huzarensla literally means 'Hussar salad,' named so because when the Hussars, the fierce Russian soldiers, invaded the Netherlands centuries ago, the dish they most of all demanded when stopping in a village or settlement or farmhouse was the Dutch salad-meat dish, which subsequently therefore became known as 'Huzarensla' and is still one of the most famous and most beloved Dutch national dishes. I hereby give you the family's 400-year-old recipe. I would be greatly pleased and honored if sometime soon you would try it and give me your honest opinion of this wonderful meal-in-one salad.\"\n\nWell, Mr. Dekking, I did try your salad, and it's a great meal, just as you said. I have eaten many beef salads, but this one has a quality that is quite different. When I make a beef salad, I use quite chunky pieces of meat and potato, but for this everything has to be chopped very, very fine, so be sure your chopping hand is in good condition when you make it, because you'll have to do a lot of chopping before you finish. This is the kind of salad that should be prepared well in advance and left to mellow in the refrigerator in a bowl or mold for three or four hours before being served. The Dutch unmold it onto a bed of greens and surround it with large chunks of bread (we can't get the bread they eat, which is very good indeed, but you should have the best bread you can buy or bake). Provide plenty of sweet butter for the bread, and a robust Dutch beer or whatever fine beer is available, and finish your meal with a selection of cheeses. This is the kind of salad, incidentally, that is really great for a buffet party. It's hearty, with interesting contrasts of flavor and texture, and it looks most attractive on a platter on its bed of crisp salad greens.\n\n  For Max _Dekking s Beef Salad,_ I'm giving you the proportions he prefers, but I think you might try it his way first and see how you like it and then maybe make your own little variations on the theme.\n\nTo start with, you will need 3 cups very finely chopped cold rare roast beef. Add to this 2 cups very finely chopped cold boiled potatoes (new potatoes, if possible, otherwise the rather waxy type), 1 cup very finely chopped cold cooked beets (you can use canned beets, if you like), _ _cup very finely chopped tart apples, 2 large onions, chopped very fine (and I really mean large onions), _ _cup very finely cut celery, 1 finely chopped shallot (if you can't get shallots, you could use a clove of garlic), and 3 small Dutch sour gherkins or, if not obtainable, 1 large kosher sour dill pickle, chopped very finely.\n\nMake a vinaigrette dressing, using 3 parts olive oil to 1 part white wine vinegar (or rather less, if you don't like the vinegar flavor to be too pronounced), salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste, and perhaps a little Dijon mustard. It's hard to say exactly how much dressing to use, because it should be just enough to bind the salad. I happen to think that it is a good idea to add a tablespoon of mayonnaise to each cup of dressing to make everything hold together better. The salad shouldn't be sloppy, because you want it to be firm enough to hold its shape nicely when unmolded on the platter, so be sparing with the dressing\u2014it's better to serve additional dressing on the side than to use too much in the salad. Mix everything together well, pack into a bowl or mold, and leave in the refrigerator for three hours before serving.\n\nWhen you are ready to serve, unmold the salad on greens and garnish it with 2 hard-boiled eggs, sliced. I like some parsley, too, for garnish, but then I like parsley with everything.\n\nIf your platter is big enough, surround the salad with chunks of bread, or serve the bread separately, as you wish.\n\nAfter the salad, bring on a tray of cheeses. Since you are going Dutch, you might have a Dutch Edam or Gouda, with a good Cheddar and some Swiss Gruyere or Emmenthaler. Follow the cheeses, if you like, with crisp cookies or a cake, and coffee, and you'll have had a simple but excellent meal, the kind of good, hearty, everyday fare we can all eat with appreciation and relish. I think a beef salad is one of the best dishes there is, and I'm very grateful to Mr. Dekking for having reminded me of it, and for giving me a new and different version.\n\n*This recipe comes from one of the most enchanting books I have read in a long time, _The Potato Book,_ by Myrna Davis, published by William Morrow, 1973. \n CHAPTER 4\n\n_Whims of Taste_\n\n_... in which we select the essential herbs and spices ... make a little saffron go a long way ... catch the scent of the vanilla bean ... caper in the kitchen ... salute salt ..._ _unleash the power of pepper ... muse over mustard, olive oil, and olives ... get into a pretty pickle ... and distinguish true flavor from false._\n\nMy _Six Essential Herbs_\n\nIf I had to pick six herbs I couldn't cook without, I'd settle for basil, bay leaf, rosemary, savory, tarragon, and thyme. Parsley too, of course, but that is so universal it goes without saying.\n\nBasil grows so readily in most parts of this country that, come spring, anyone with a patch of garden or a sunny windowsill should invest in a couple of plants. The matchless flavor of fresh basil is a natural ally of tomatoes and the prime ingredient in the Italian pesto, a dark-green paste made from basil leaves pounded with garlic, pine nuts, olive oil, and cheese that is spooned on pasta and rice and into soups. Pesto freezes well, so you can keep it year round. Fresh or dried, basil is exceedingly good with veal and many fish dishes.\n\nBay leaves have a delicate pungency that enhances all kinds of cooking. They are as appropriate a flavoring for a custard or arrowroot pudding as for a stew or sauce. The French pop a couple of bay leaves on top of a pate while it is baking (if you try this, cover them with foil to keep them flat). In Italy, crumbled bay leaves are fried in olive oil with chopped onion, garlic, celery leaves, and tomato to make soffritto, a seasoning for sauces, soups, and stews.\n\nRosemary, asserted the great writer-cook Marcel Boulestin, is not for remembrance\u2014it's for cooking veal. Lamb and beef as well. Put two or three sprays of rosemary on a just-cooked steak, pour on a little warm brandy, ignite, and let burn out to give a terrific flavor to the meat. The French custom of dipping a rosemary sprig in oil and brushing a steak, chop, or fish with it during the broiling is a very subtle flavoring trick indeed. Always pulverize rosemary's needlelike leaves in a mortar before adding them to a sauce or stew.\n\nSavory, or _sarriette_ as it is known in France, where it grows wild in the hills of Provence, is little known and little used in this country. The French often roll little goat's milk cheeses in its tiny, spiky dried leaves. Savory is an excellent herb for lamb, pungent enough to take the place of both salt and pepper if need be, which anyone on a salt-free diet might bear in mind.\n\nThyme is an herb without which no self-respecting cook can exist. It goes in ragouts, sauces, and stocks. There are several varieties of thyme, of which the most familiar is the tiny-leaved French thyme. The lemon thyme is very pleasant, too. An unusual and effective way to use thyme is to blend it with four ounces of cream cheese, a couple of tablespoons of heavy cream, a touch of minced garlic, and a soupgon of salt. Use about a teaspoon of the fresh leaves, half that amount of the dried. Chill and serve as a snack or a non-sweet dessert.\n\nAnd then there's tarragon, a most exceptional and helpful herb. The unique flavor of its pointed leaves belongs with fish, is an absolute must for B\u00e9arnaise sauce, gives vinegar a glorious taste, and is the best friend a chicken ever had.\n\n  One of the greatest\u2014and simplest\u2014chicken dishes I know is _Poulet Saute a I'Estragon._ To serve four, have 2 broiling chickens cut in quarters. Melt 4 ounces of butter with 2 tablespoons of oil in a large heavy skillet with a cover. When quite hot, add the chicken pieces and brown them skin side down first, then turn and brown the other side. This will take about 10 minutes. Salt and pepper them well. Add 8 to 10 finely chopped shallots or 10 to 12 green onions. Lower the heat, cover the pan, and simmer very, very slowly for 15 to 18 minutes, 20 minutes if the chickens are on the large side. Remove the cover, increase the heat slightly, and add 1 cup dry white wine with 4 tablespoons chopped fresh tarragon or 2 tablespoons dried tarragon, and 4 tablespoons chopped parsley. Turn the chicken pieces again, cook briskly for 3 or 4 minutes, turning once, and serve on a hot platter with some crisp toast as garnish and, if you like, tiny new potatoes.\n\nThe whole process takes less than 30 minutes, and you have a dish you could serve with confidence to the most critical group of food buffs. All you need to complete the meal is a salad or green vegetable and a very simple fruit dessert, with possibly some good cheese before the dessert. The same wine you used in the cooking will go well with the chicken.\n\nSome final advice. Dried herbs cannot be used for ever and ever. They don't last that long. Keep them in a dark place, tightly sealed in glass jars, tins, or polyethylene bags, and smell them now and then to see if they are holding their strength. If not, throw them out and get some more. There's no economy in cooking with a spent herb.\n\n_Know Your Spices_\n\nSo often we tend to buy a different spice because a recipe calls for it, use it once, and forget it. Seldom if ever do we try to figure out other dishes that might be enhanced by that particulat spice\u2014or even by the good old standbys like cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and paprika.\n\nTake cinnamon, for instance, one of the most standard of all spices. I'm sure most people never think of putting it in anything but desserts and coffee cakes, yet there are hundreds of Greek, Middle East, North African, and Mexican dishes to which the distinctiveness of cinnamon adds a new dimension of flavor. The Greeks put cinnamon in meatballs and mous-saka, the Moroccans and Tunisians use it in exotic meat pies made with layers of paper-thin pastry, and the Mexicans add it to _picadillo,_ a kind of ground meat hash, and _mole,_ that highly unusual sauce compounded of fiery chilies, spices, and unsweetened chocolate.\n\nEven in our own country, cinnamon crops up in main dishes. My housekeeper, Clay Triplette, who is an expert at southern cooking even though he isn't southern, always adds a good bit of cinnamon, as well as salt and pepper, to the flour in which he dips chicken before frying it, which gives his fried chicken the most haunting, subtle, and delicate flavor. Cinnamon has this trick of bringing out unsuspected nuances in everyday foods. If you're having sliced oranges for breakfast, try sprinkling them with a little powdered sugar and cinnamon. The flavors are most compatible. A dash of cinnamon is excellent in lemon-flavored dishes and a perfect complement to anything involving chocolate.\n\nNext, let's consider cloves, those aromatic little buds that look like tiny brown nails. Cloves are probably the most overused and misunderstood of all spices. While they are invaluable in cooking, they should always be used with great care and discretion, or their strong flavor can become overpowering and coarse. I, for one, think the habit of studding a ham with dozens of cloves to make a pretty pattern is a great mistake. If you must have cloves with ham, a light dusting of ground cloves is much better.\n\nOn the whole, cloves tend to be used here in traditional but rather unimaginative ways, such as in the mixed ground spices for pumpkin pie. Instead, I feel they should be put where they teally make a contribution. If you stick a couple of cloves in the onion with which you are flavoring a pot roast or a stew or beef stock for a soup or sauce, they really give a great lift and change the usual taste to something quite delicious.\n\nI also find that a clove stuck into a baked apple or pear, or a suspicion of ground cloves in the syrup used to poach dried prunes, can turn a rather run-of-the-mill dessert into something special.\n\nNutmeg is so common that we often forget how versatile it is. I own two enchanting little silver nutmeg graters, which elegant people were wont to carry in their pockets in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to grate fresh nutmeg on their food and drink, rather the way it is considered smart nowadays to carry your own small pepper mill. Nutmeg belongs in so many things. A pinch in a bechamel sauce, in creamed chicken or chicken fricassee, or in a cheese souffle heightens the flavor and introduces a piquant overtone. The marriage of spinach and nutmeg, if well adjusted, is remarkably successful, and I find that there are certain cakes, such as spice cakes, in which the assertiveness of nutmeg is a necessity.\n\nThen there's mace, actually the red netlike covering of the nutmeg in its natural state, which turns orange when dried. Mace, removed from the seed and sold either ground or in small pieces, or blades, tastes very similar to nutmeg, but milder and subtler. Ground mace should be carefully checked before use, for it can get rather rancid. Like nutmeg, it is marvelous in spinach dishes, especially creamed spinach and spinach souffle, or in the stuffing for a turkey or chicken. I put mace in pound cake, where its fragrant freshness is a good counterpoint to the rich, heavy, vanilla-ish quality of the cake. I like to pop a blade or two of mace into pickles or other foods preserved in vinegar or vinegar and oil because I've found it gives a pleasing and interesting taste, and I have even been known to use a touch of ground mace, just a dusting, on pot roast.\n\nLastly, there's that universally popular spice, paprika, which I honestly believe many people buy only to sprinkle on food for color, rather than appreciating it for what it really is\u2014one of the world's great flavors. Paprika is a spice of great chatm, with infinite possibilities, and to look on it merely as something to make a dish colorful is to neglect its true culinary qualities. There are so many different kinds of paprika, from hot to sweet, from bright orange to rich red. The finest paprika is Hungarian, and the Hungarians are lavish with it. A goulash may have a whole tablespoon of paprika, sometimes sweet, sometimes part sweet and part hot. Paprika will turn the sauce for a fricassee of chicken to a creamy rose, and it also does something quite wonderful to the flavor of a tomato sauce.\n\nIt pays to know your spices. Take regular inventory, smelling, tasting, and throwing out those that have gone stale and flat from age. Then get out of the spice rut and learn how to use spices intelligently, adventurously, and with a very personal flair.\n\n_The World's Most Precious Seasoning_\n\nI have always been fascinated by the lore of spices, those mysterious and magical seasonings that have been an important part of our culinary practices for centuries. I have written about some of the more familiar\u2014cinnamon and cloves, nutmeg and paprika. Now I'm going to discuss a spice that some of you may not know as well\u2014saffron, which according to an old herbal quoted by the great English food writer Elizabeth David, is a \"useful aromatic of a strong, penetrating smell and a warm, pungent, bitterish taste.\" Saffron is one of the most ancient and esteemed of all spices. Those wily traders, the Phoenicians, introduced it to the south of France and to England, where it still persists after hundreds of years in the saffron buns of Cornwall and old place names like Saffron Walden.\n\nAs a flavoring, a dye, and a medicine, saffron was highly prized in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and even today it ranks as the costliest spice in the world. The minuscule vivid red threads are actually the dried stigmas of the _Crocus sativus,_ a fall-blooming purple crocus that is cultivated in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, and it takes 75,000 flowers, picked by hand, to yield one pound of saffron. One of those little tins you buy for 65 cents contains only about eight-tenths of a gram of saffron, about a teaspoon. It would take 35 of these boxes to make just one ounce, which works out to around $364 a pound. However, to quote Elizabeth David again, \"One grain or 1/437th of an ounce of these tiny fiery orange and red threadlike objects scarcely fills the smallest salt spoon, but provides flavoring and coloring for such a thing as a paella or a risotto or a bouillabaisse for four to six people.\" So, you see, a very little goes a long way.\n\nSaffron occurs in the cuisines of Spain, Italy, southern France, Iran, and India and, oddly enough, in that of our own Pennsylvania Dutch country. How it became a part of that thrifty Germanic farmhouse cooking is rather an interesting story. In 1734 it was brought over by the Schwenkfelders, a group of Silesians, some of whom owned saffron warehouses in Holland. To this day, you'll find a recipe for their traditional wedding cake, colored and flavored with a goodly amount of saffron, in Pennsylvania Dutch cookbooks, and my friend Betty Groff, who lives in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, can recall the days when people there had their own saffron beds.\n\nThe saffron sold in stores and supermarkets is mostly imported from Spain and comes in tiny packets or glass vials, or boxes that look like aspirin tins. For best results, buy the threads, which have the true, intense saffron color and flavor. There's a powdered form of saffron with a lot of color but little strength, and in Spanish groceries you may see something called \"paella seasoning,\" which doesn't taste much of saffron either.\n\nAlways use saffron with discretion. A mere pinch lends an unbelievably delicious quality to such rice dishes as the paella and arroz con polio of Spain, Iranian polo, Indian biryani, and the classic Risotto alia Milanese of Italy, for which I'm going to give you my recipe.\n\n  To make _Risotto alia Milanese_ for four, you'll need 1 cup rice, or maybe a little more, either long-grain rice or the imported Italian Arborio rice. If you use long-grain rice, it's a good idea to wash it first, and dry it on a towel.\n\nNow melt 6 tablespoons butter in a large, deep and heavy skillet, either iron or Teflon-lined. When it bubbles, add 1 small onion, finely chopped. Saute until just wilted down to a delicate pale gold. Add the rice and toss it around with a wooden spoon to coat it well with butter, but do not let it brown. Add _ _ cup dry white wine, and let this almost cook away. Have ready in a saucepan 2 pints hot homemade chicken stock (or canned chicken broth or chicken bouillon cubes dissolved in water). Start adding the stock, about _1  _cups at a time, and let each addition cook away rather briskly, stirring the rice often. As the rice absorbs the stock, add more. Continue stirring and adding stock until the rice starts to get tender, then add a good pinch (about _ _teaspoon) of saffron, which you have pounded in a mortar and pestle and then steeped in about '/t cup hot stock. Stir this into the rice very well, so it  dissolves and distributes its lovely flavor and color.\n\nWhen the rice is tender to the bite and almost dry, stir in 3 tablespoons butter and _ _to  cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese. The grains of rice will be soft, creamy, yet separate, quite different from other rice dishes.\n\nServe the risotto in four heated soup plates, with melted butter and more grated Parmesan for your guests to add as they wish.\n\nIn Italy, risotto alia Milanese is usually offered as a first course, or with certain meats such as osso buco\u2014braised veal shank. I like to serve it as a main course for luncheon or supper, with a rather hearty salad of mixed greens and onion with a hint of garlic in the dressing, and a white Italian wine, followed by a simple dessert of fresh fruit.\n\n_Capers in the Kitchen_\n\nFew things in the gastronomic world seem to baffle the average person as much as capers. In my cooking classes, eight out of ten students ask, \"What ate capers and where do they come from?\" Some think they are pickled nasturtium buds, and, as a matter of fact, they aren't too far off. Nasturtium buds can be pickled in vinegar and used like capers, the main difference being that they have a more peppery taste. However, capers are the pickled buds of a completely different shrub called Capparis _spinosa,_ a plant ancient in origin that grows both wild and in the cultivated state from the Mediterranean area to southeast Asia. The caper plant may even be the hyssop so often mentioned in the Scriptures.\n\nCapers grow on low trailing bushes, very similar to those on which you find wild blackberries, and they like a dry and rocky habitat. The green buds are carefully picked and sieved to separate the sizes, from small to quite large, and then preserved in mild vinegar or occasionally in salt, the way you sometimes find them in Italy or in Italian food shops. These capers are often extraordinarily large, much larger than those we are accustomed to buying in the small narrow green bottles, and they should be transferred to a larger jar and kept in vinegar or white wine. Capers vary a good deal. Some, like the Italian and Spanish, are very big. Others, like the firm round capers grown around Provence in the south of France, are quite small. These have by far the best color and are usually considered the choicest.\n\nI use capers a lot. I like their distinctive, herby flavor and the additional bite imparted by the vinegar which makes them a most piquant and interesting condiment or seasoning.\n\nCertain dishes just wouldn't be the same without capers. They are one of the traditional seasonings for steak tartare, along with onion, mustard, pepper, and salt, and for smoked salmon, and they are used extensively in cold dishes, particularly salads. These tasty little buds add color and a nice spiciness to a beef, crabmeat, or lobster salad, and to the famous _Salade Nigoise of_ France (see page 289). Then there's a most unusual and delicious salad from Greece which consists of nothing but shredded carrots and capers tossed with a mustardy vinaigrette sauce.\n\nWhile it is logical for capers to crop up so often in Mediterranean cooking, surprisingly enough you find them used extensively in Mexico, Latin America, and the Spanish-speaking islands of the Caribbean\u2014especially Cuba, where they are often combined with olives. At a Cuban-owned grocery store near my house I buy a mixture of tiny green olives and huge Spanish capers all in one bottle, delicious in salads.\n\nIn England, capers are always to be found in a famous and rather unusual cream sauce, to which the pickled buds are added at the last minute, as the traditional accompaniment to boiled leg of mutton or lamb. A badly made caper sauce can be as grim and awful as library paste, but when it starts with a base of a good bechamel sauce, with the piquant acidity of the capers coming through, it is a marvelous complement to boiled or poached meats\u2014boiled beef as well as lamb or mutton, and poached chicken.\n\n  Here is my recipe for _Caper Sauce._ Melt 3 tablespoons butter, preferably in a glass or enameled cast-iron saucepan (it is inadvisable to use metal because of the acidity of the capers), add 3 tablespoons flour, and blend well together. Cook 2 or 3 minutes, until the flour is well absorbed by the butter and gently frothing, then add 1 cup boiling chicken or veal broth and stir vigorously over medium heat until thickened. Reduce heat, and simmer 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Season with _ _ teaspoon salt, a touch of freshly ground black pepper, and a healthy pinch of nutmeg. Remove from the heat and stir in _ _ cup warm heavy cream. Return to the heat and simmer (do not boil) for 3 or 4 minutes. Taste for seasoning.\n\nJust before serving, stir in _ _cup well-drained capers, or more if you like them, and merely heat the capers through. You may also add 1 tablespoon chopped parsley if you like\u2014it gives the sauce a nice color. Serve with any of the meats mentioned.\n\n_Salt, Sovereign of Seasonings_\n\nSalt is one of our greatest culinary gifts, an incomparable condiment, an everyday necessity and perhaps the most precious and invaluable of our kitchen staples. It goes into all our foods, even desserts, for a pinch in a cake batter, a pie crust, or the poaching syrup for fruit adds immeasurably to the finished product.\n\nThe very word has become synonymous with excellence. We talk of people being the salt of the earth, or of a man being worth his salt, a phrase that comes from the Latin _salari,_ salt money or pay for work. When we say someone is worth his salt, we mean he is worth his salary.\n\nSalt comes from two sources. One is the sea and the great salt beds or flats that form as the water evaporates. The other is rock salt, found in the earth in a crystalline form. You can buy sea salt in different grinds, but if you are spending the summer by the sea, you might like to make your own. Just fill very flat pans with sea water and leave them in the sun until the water evaporates, leaving a grayish white crust of pure sea salt. It may not be as attractive to look at as the packaged type\u2014which is snow-white, fine, and pours easily because it has magnesium carbonate added to prevent it from clogging in damp or humid weather\u2014but it will be just as salty and good.\n\nThen there is coarse salt, available in different-sized crystals. For use in the kitchen and as a flavoring 1 like kosher salt, a free-flowing, rathet coarse crystallized salt you find in many supermarkets now. It has a good saltiness that appeals to me very much. Other people like the really coarse salt the French call _gros sel._ You often find a little dish of this served with certain dishes such as boiled beef, as a crunchy, delicious condiment. (It's good with raw vegetables, too.) Even larger salt crystals go into salt mills (these resemble pepper mills except that the crusher, the interior mechanism, and the little handle that operates it are made of noncorroding wood, rather than metal) to be ground fine at the table by those who like their salt freshly milled.\n\nCoarse salt is an essential part of one of my favorite fish dishes which is supposedly Oriental but has become quite common here.\n\n  For this _Salmon Orientale_ you will need, for four persons, 4 fillets of salmon. Ask to have a piece of salmon cut toward the tail, not from the thickest part, filleted, and cut lengthwise into 4 pieces of practically the same thickness, each one with skin on the flesh. Measure the thickness by standing a ruler upright beside the fillet\u2014it will be cooked for 10 minutes per inch measured at the thickest point. Rub both sides of the fish quite generously with coarse salt, and let stand for at least 30 to 35 minutes before broiling. Place on a piece of foil, skin side up, on a broiler rack about 4 inches from the heat, and broil for two-thirds of the time on the skin side, one-third on the flesh side. (If your fillets are 1 inch thick, you broil them for 6 minutes on the skin side, then turn and broil 4 minutes flesh side up.) Remove from heat, brush the flesh lightly with oil or butter, and broil _ _to 3  /4 minute more. Remove to a hot platter and serve with dill butter.\n\n  For the Dill Butter, cream 6 tablespoons butter with 1 teaspoon dried dill or 2 teaspoons chopped fresh dill and _ _ teaspoon lemon juice. Beat well together and chill for a few minutes. Put a good spoonful of the butter on each serving of salmon.\n\nIf you are cooking outdoors, you can grill the salmon over charcoal, following the same method and cooking time. Brush the grill with oil (or put the fillets in a basket grill which makes it easier to turn them) and cook skin side down first, then turn and grill flesh side down. With the broiled or grilled salmon you might have boiled new potatoes, or cucumbers which have been peeled, seeded, cut into long strips or small squares, and cooked in boiling salted water until they are just translucent\u2014not soft, they should still be slightly bitey. Drain well and toss with a little butter and freshly ground pepper.\n\nThis makes a most unusual and pleasing main dish for a summer dinner or luncheon, salt-flavored but not salty. It bears out my theory that salt is a flavor as well as a condiment.\n\n_Doing Without Salt_\n\nMany people these days are forced to go on a salt-free diet\u2014or perhaps it would be more correct to call it a salt-restricted or low-sodium diet, for almost everything we eat contains some natural sodium; it's the salt we add in cooking that is the problem. I'm always getting letters asking what can be done to alleviate this gastronomic plight, which is one of the most difficult anyone who loves good food must face.\n\nWhile nothing really takes the place of salt, or high seasoning (for again, many people on a low-sodium diet can't have much seasoning, either), there are a number of things that help enormously. As one who has been from time to time among the salt-deprived (and I happen to like a lot of seasoning in my food), I've discovered a few tricks that really work.\n\nI remember well being on a salt-free diet for several weeks in a French clinic. My daily intake was rigidly controlled, with all my food weighed out. Fortunately, at mealtimes we were given a plate with a pepper mill, a small pot of Dijon mustard, half a lemon, and sometimes fresh parsley, basil, or thyme. I can tell you that when all else fails to stimulate the taste buds, the spicy perfume of freshly ground pepper will do the trick. The proper seasonings, I found, go a long way toward making food so palatable and delicious that you can almost forget the lack of salt.\n\nJust a squeeze of lemon juice on meat, chicken, vegetables, practically any dish, seems to enliven the natural flavor. Season artichokes with a little lemon juice (and, if you're not forbidden it, a touch of olive oil), and you'll never miss the salt shaker. Coarsely ground black pepper and lemon juice bring out all the nuances of a baked potato. So does a spoonful of sour cream or yogurt, or unsalted butter, but over the years I've learned to do without even these. Now I savor the simplicity and earthy goodness of a well-baked, crisp-skinned potato with nothing more than a sprinkling of aromatic, freshly ground pepper.\n\nHere's another little hint for cooking vegetables without salt: add a teaspoon of sugar to the cooking water. It won't make the vegetables sweet, but it will give them a more finished flavor, and when you serve them you can add some chopped herbs and freshly ground pepper, too.\n\nFresh herbs, with their matchless pungency, are one of your best allies. One day for lunch in Iran I was served a beautifully grilled chicken with a plate of fresh herbs in lieu of salad. The chicken had a good flavor and a nice crispy skin, and the contrast of the herbs, which you munched along with it, did something quite extraordinarily exciting to the palate.\n\nIt's well worth growing your own herbs. Basil, chives, thyme, summer savory, tarragon, dill\u2014all have a definite, appetite-provoking flavor of their own, an interesting texture, and when picked in little sprigs or leaves, they give food a delightful visual quality. Take as your flavoring palette little branches of thyme, with their infinitesimal leaves and sharp fragrance; the soft plumy sprays of dill with its delicate bouquet piquant tarragon with those long arrow-shaped leaves, so good on sliced tomatoes; flat Italian parsley, with a form and flavor completely different from the curly type; and fresh coriander, also known as cilantro, which has a taste like nothing else on earth and evokes memories of the cooking of China and Mexico, the Middle East and Portugal.\n\n  One of my favorite salt-free dishes is Herbed _Broiled Chicken,_ done in a rather different way that transfers the flavors to the meat. For four persons, get 2 split broilers. Finely chop _ _ cup green onions and 1 to 2 garlic cloves, depending on how much you like garlic. Combine with _ _ cup finely chopped mushrooms, 2 tablespoons chopped parsley, and freshly ground pepper to taste (I often add 1 or 2 dashes of Tabasco as well).\n\nCream _1  _sticks (6 ounces) unsalted butter (or, if you are on a strict diet, margarine), combine it with the chopped mixture, and then, with your fingers, loosen the skin of the chicken, being very careful not to break or pierce it, and insert the butter mixture under the skin, distributing it well over the flesh. Starting with the chicken bone side up, broil to the degree of doneness you prefer, turning it midway in the cooking and broiling it skin side up until done. Baste the chicken during the broiling to give it more flavor. In summer, I like to make a mixture of creamed butter and chopped fresh herbs and stuff this under the skin, which gives a really fantastic flavor.\n\nIt takes inventiveness to make a saltless diet enjoyable, but it can be done.\n\n_Pepper Power_\n\nFor **** years I have routinely prescribed freshly ground pepper in all my recipes, because I wouldn't dream of using anything else. If you have ever doubted that it is superior to the ready-ground, compare the two for yourself. You will find that ground black pepper packed in jars or cans tends to go stale quickly, and it never has the potent fragrance of crushed peppercorns. For those who care enough about the difference in flavor a pepper mill **** is essential, and pepper mills are so inexpensive these days that anyone can afford to own one. If you don't have one you can crush peppercorns with a small mortar and pestle or with a rolling pin, or you can grind them in an electric blender.\n\nMany people ask me what the difference is between white pepper and black. White pepper is simply ripened more and is stripped of the black outer crust. It is somewhat more intense in flavor than the black but lacks its delightful aroma. Most of the good black peppercorns available in our markets is the variety known as Malabar. Look for jars containing peppercorns of uniform size rather than a mixture of large and small. Some people feel they must put white pepper into white sauces, to keep them chaste, and reserve black pepper for dark sauces. I consider this a lot of nonsense. I prefer flavor to prettiness and use black pepper in whatever I choose.\n\nA third form of pepper, from Madagascar, is making its appearance in specialty food shops. It has been popularized by the French, who call it poivre vert\u2014literally, \"green pepper.\" To describe it I can't do better than quote from Elizabeth David's _Spices, Salt and Aromatics_ in the English Kitchen. \"Poivre vert,\" she writes, \"is exactly what it says it is; pepper which is green in both senses\u2014green because it is unripe, fresh peppercorns, and green in color. Soft as a berry, poivre vert can be mashed to a paste in a moment. . . .\"\n\nWhile we customarily add pepper to our food in moderate amounts, used boldly as the dominant flavor, it can give a dish great distinction. This is the case with one of the most popular of all steak preparations\u2014steak au poivre. Primarily a French dish, it has become thoroughly Americanized and can be found in almost any steak restaurant, where it is sometimes known as \"peppered steak\" or \"steak with crushed pepper\u00adcorns.\" At home you can make it with any good cut of steak, and it needn't be the most expensive. I frequently use club steaks or small shell steaks from my local supermarket. Or I may do one large steak and carve it into slices.\n\n_ _ Traditionally Steak _au Poivre_ is cooked quickly in a very hot skillet, although it can be broiled. Use a 6-to 8-ounce steak,   to 1 inch thick, for each person. Trim off excess fat. Very coarsely grind or crush 1 _ _ to 2 teaspoons pepper for each steak. Press the pepper into both sides of the steaks, and salt well. For 4 steaks heat about 3 tablespoons each of butter and oil in the skillet, or melt down some of the fat trimmings and add a bit of butter and oil. When the fat is quite hot and about to sizzle, put in the steaks. For rare meat, cook over fairly high heat about 3 minutes on each side, turning once or twice. For medium rare or medium, turn the heat down very low and cook 1 or 2 minutes more. The skillet will remain quite hot for that amount of time.\n\nRemove steaks to a hot platter or directly to hot plates. Serve just as they are, or rinse the pan, scraping the bottom and sides, with 3 or 4 tablespoons of red wine, sherry, or Madeira, and spoon over the steaks. Or if you want to be very grand, when the steaks are done add about _ _cup bourbon or cognac to the skillet and ignite, keeping your face averted from the flame. Let the alcohol burn out.\n\nRemove the steaks to a platter, add a little extra liquor to the pan, and pour the juices over the steaks. For a finishing touch sprinkle with chopped parsley.\n\nServe with watercress or a good salad. If you want starch as well, serve mashed potatoes or a baked potato. This makes an extremely satisfying family or company dinner.\n\nRoast duck can be given the same peppery treatment as steak. Press very coarsely ground peppercorns into the breast of a roasting duck 30 minutes before it is done, then run it under the broiler for a few minutes to give it a crusty finish. This produces duck with an exciting and unusual flavor. It is excellent served with turnips and a nice cold dish of applesauce.\n\n_Make Mine Mustard_\n\nI'm an inveterate collector, and over the years, almost without knowing it, I've amassed quite a collection of mustard pots, both the commercial ones and the kind made of silver and glass you find in antique shops. I have a pot that resembles a snail, another shaped like a champagne cork, and several different types from the famous mustard-producing house in Dijon, France, where the mustard is put up in stunning blue-and-white pots. Looking at my pots started me musing on mustard, one of the most versatile flavorings and seasonings we have.\n\nMustard is made by grinding or pounding black or white mustard seed (you're probably familiar with the white seed, used in picklemaking) and discarding the husks. What remains is mustard flour or dry mustard. The word has an ancient origin\u2014it comes from _must,_ the leftovers from the wine pressing, with which the Romans mixed the pungent pounded seed to a paste. The Italian _mostarda,_ which preceded mustard in pots, is a kind of relish made from fruits preserved in sugar syrup to which a great deal of mustard has been added. When you taste these beautifully colored, deceptively innocent fruits you'll be surprised by their pungency and hotness. They can be bought in Italian stores or food specialty shops, and they make a perfectly delicious relish to use in place of mustard with cold meats or chicken, or with boiled beef dishes like the Italian bollito misto, the French pot-au-feu, and our own boiled beef.\n\nYou can buy mustard in various strengths and flavors. The simplest form is the dry mustard which the English, who like their mustard very hot indeed, mix with water, making a fresh batch whenever needed. They like it with all manner of meats, especially sausages and roast beef. (\"Meat,\" says a popular British slogan, \"needs mustard.\") In France, mustard flour is mixed with white wine for the famous Dijon mustard sold throughout the United States in little glass jars or the more attractive blue-and-white pots. Then there are herbed mustards from France and Germany, some mixed with tarragon, and one that contains crushed mustard seeds. The type most used in America for hot dogs, hamburgers, and sandwiches is a darkish brown. It's pungent and spicy but not very hot. Another one, called salad mustard, is light in color and has practically no bite.\n\nYou can use either dry or prepared mustard in cooking, and you'll be amazed how just a touch brings bland food to life. Cream sauce for broiled fish or veal cutlets, for example, is infinitely better if you add some mustard and a few drops of lemon juice. You can also make a remarkably good and piquant sauce for cold foods (fish, shrimp, crab, chicken, and practically all poached vegetables, particularly asparagus and leeks) by mixing mayonnaise with mustard to taste\u2014this can be any type you prefer, as hot or as mild as you like it. This mustard mayonnaise gives extra zip to sandwiches, too. Then here's another simple trick. Split a loaf of French bread lengthwise, spread with butter and brush with mustard, sprinkle with some chopped green onions and parsley, and heat through in the oven as a change from garlic bread.\n\nI well remember, some years ago, visiting one of the great gourmets of France. While I was there, every hour on the hour, he brought in from his apartment windowsill a dish of pieces of hare which he carefully brushed with mustard so it would absorb the spicy flavor before being cooked the next day. A mustard coating on hare, rabbit, or chicken, which is more to our taste, gives the meat a really interesting and unusual flavor.\n\n  To make _Mustard Chicken_ for four, dust 4 half chicken breasts lightly with flour, and saute in a heavy skillet in 4 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons oil until nicely browned on all sides. Remove, spread each piece liberally with mustard (Dijon or herbed mustard or a paste of hot mustard or whatever you like), and put in a shallow baking dish.\n\nIn the fat remaining in the pan saute 1 finely chopped medium onion for a couple of minutes, and add another tablespoon of butter if needed and about _ _ cup finely chopped mushrooms. Saute with the onion, then add 2 tablespoons chopped parsley, and salt and freshly ground pepper to taste\u2014you won't need much pepper because of the mustard. Then blend in 1 cup heavy cream and let it just heat through. Pour the mixture over the chicken, and bake in a 350-degree oven for about 30 to 35 minutes, or until the chicken is tender when tested with a fork. Taste to see if the sauce needs more salt, and add a few drops of lemon juice. Serve at once with fluffy rice.\n\nThis is a simple but splendid dish\u2014the cream gives the sauce a lovely texture, and as it cooks with the mustard it thickens a little more.\n\n_Olive Oil to Taste_\n\nYou've probably been to wine tastings and cheese tastings, but you have to be around Provence, or a similar olive-producing area, to know the importance of an olive oil tasting. Oils differ so much in quality, color, taste, and texture.\n\nI was in Provence at the beginning of the year, the season when the olives are gathered from the trees in the neighborhood of Grasse, Cannes, and Opio. Not far from where I was staying was a wonderful old oil mill, which must be one of the few really old ones still going. Tastes in oil have changed, and in these last few years oil has become quite different from the way it was before. Many more oils are blended, and many people have switched to oils other than olive, but to a true olive oil user and lover, which I am, there's no joy to match that of watching the olives being crushed and then tasting the various oils that come forth.\n\nMy friends and I wanted to buy oil for the kitchen and the Provencal dishes and salads that depend for theit flavor on the essence of the local olives, so one day we went to the old mill and watched the olives being pressed. The mill is run by water power, with a big wheel outside that turns the presses. These are not too big, just about 6 feet in diameter. There's a large cone with a stone wheel that revolves and crushes the olives so the oil flows into the vats below. After this the oil is poured through woven jute mats that look like huge table mats, and pressed to filter it completely. The oil from the first pressing, the virgin oil that brings a premium price in stores, is of the finest quality and a beautiful, brilliant greenish gold. While oils from other pressings may have a very good flavor, they are not as high in quality. Incidentally, in some countries you will find a very green oil, which comes from pressing some of the leaves with the fruit, to give color.\n\nAfter the pressing we briefly and lightly tasted some of the oils, and I found one that was very fruity, with a superb bouquet like a great wine, and a magnificent, round, full olive taste\u2014the type of oil I love most. I know many people who find a fruit oil rather disagreeable to their palate and prefer one that is lighten or has been blended with a tasteless olive oil so there is only a faint hint of the characteristics of the olive, but I want the full flavor or none at all.\n\nWe came home with our prize and the first night used it for a salad made with four parts of oil to one of lemon juice and a great deal of garlic, because the local garlic is very delicate in flavor. You pound it in a mortar and add it to the dressing, and it makes a brisk, wonderful contrast to the rich fruitiness of the oil.\n\nThe dressing was tossed with curly endive, Belgian endive, and a grating of cooked beets from the local market. (The natural sweetness of the beet takes away the sharp bitterness of the greens and gives a most interesting interplay of tastes.)\n\nIf you like, you can add fresh herbs to your dressing\u2014tarragon, chervil, and a bit of thyme are all good\u2014but as far as I'm concerned, the excellence of the salad depends on the excellence of the oil.\n\nThis holds true with many of the dishes of the Mediterranean region such as pizza, whose flavor comes from the oil in the dough and the sauce; pissaladiere, the southern French version of pizza; and ratatouille, that inspired Provencal melange of vegetables.\n\n  If you've never tasted one of the simplest and best of all sauces for pasta, I suggest that next time you hunger for a plate of spaghetti you try _Spaghetti con Aglio e Olio_ \u2014with plenty of oil and garlic. For four, cook 1 pound spaghetti in plenty of boiling salted water until just tender but still bitey\u2014as the Italians say, _al dente._ While it cooks, heat 1 cup of the best olive oil until barely warm. Add 4 to 5 finely chopped garlic cloves (this may sound like a lot, but it is the garlic that makes the dish) and let them soak in the warm oil for 2 or 3 minutes. Drain the spaghetti well, and toss it with the oil, garlic, and freshly ground black pepper to taste. Don't serve cheese with this. The distinctive and complementary flavors of the oil and garlic are all you need.\n\nFor another version of this dish, saute the garlic in 4 tablespoons oil until lightly colored. Combine with _ _ teaspoon ctushed dried hot red pepper and   cup heated olive oil and toss with the cooked spaghetti.\n\nGood olive oil isn't hard to find. If you shop in stores that carry a big selection, get a small can or bottle to test before you buy in quantity. There are excellent Italian, French, and Spanish oils to be had. In fact, one finds better Spanish oils here than in Spain because they export their best. I have also had delicious California oils. These are harder to find than they used to be. The market is getting smaller, since so much oil is sold in bulk for other uses, but if you shop around in California, you can find some really well-flavored olive oils.\n\nBuy your oil carefully, use it wisely, and safeguard the flavor. If you don't use a great deal, buy in small quantities and keep the oil in a bottle with a tight cork or ground glass stopper to prevent it from becoming rancid. Never let seasonings such as garlic and herbs stand in the oil for longer than a few hours\u2014they can also turn it rancid. I don't consider it a good idea to refrigerate olive oil. It congeals and is not pleasant to use, although in many restaurants in Provence it is the custom to freeze tiny containers of the fruity oil and serve it thick and almost solid, along with the hors d'oeuvre. This isn't a practice I recommend, but try it if you like, as a talking point.\n\n_Olives, Anyone?_\n\nOlives are one of our original foods, described by author Lawrence Durrell as having \"a taste older than meat, older than wine, as old as cold water.\" They grow in many parts of the world, among them the Middle East, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, the south of France, Spain, Portugal, Algeria, Morocco, and our own California. Wherever they are found, the local people regard them as the ideal food for nibbling, with or without drinks, and they indeed rate as the most perfectly simple and simply perfect hors d'oeuvre known to man.\n\nIf you dine at the famous Forum of the Twelve Caesars in New York, the first thing put on the table is a bowl, usually a silver one, heaped high with ten or twelve varieties of olives. There might be tiny black olives from Nice, no larger than a peanut; huge luscious green Spanish olives stuffed with pimiento and the little manzanilla olives stuffed with anchovy; the long, pointed calamata olives from Greece, almost purple in color; green unstuffed olives from Spain and California, sometimes called queen olives; and the soft Greek or Italian black olives preserved in olive oil after they are dead ripe. These have a real bitter salty tang that tantalizes the palate, and they are also the most favored cooking olives for Mediterranean dishes.\n\nIn Spain, two types of green olives are gathered for table use, the very large and the small manzanilla. The freshly picked olives are cured by a slow process in which they are first placed in water, changed every day for a fortnight, to get rid of the bitterness, then transferred to old wine or brandy barrels and cured in a strong pickle of sea salt and the softest, freshest of water, in which they will keep for about two years. (There is also a shortcut process in which the olives are first put in a soda solution for a few hours, then in fresh water, and then in the brine.) The green olives you buy in jars are packed in brine, and they can be had in varying sizes, either whole or pitted and stuffed with pimiento, anchovy, onion, or almonds. Once olives have become wet, they should never be left out of their liquid or in the open air more than is necessary, or, as you may have noticed, they tend to shrink a bit and the appearance and flavor are impaired.\n\nBlack or ripe olives are left on the tree until they become dark and oily before being given the brine treatment. California ripe olives are not the same as those imported from other countries\u2014they are a different type and are processed differently. Their brownish flesh is firmer to the bite and has a distinctive flavor\u2014not as tasty as other black olives in my opinion, but they are good to look at and make a most beautiful garnish. Then there is another type of imported black olive that has been dry-packed. These are rather wrinkled and not as pleasing to the eye, but they have a fine sharp flavor. They are reconstituted by soaking in oil or used as they are for cooking.\n\nAnother type of olive harvested here is the green ripe olive\u2014these are small olives picked just as they are on the cusp of being ripe, and their flavor is something else again.\n\nNext time you are having friends in for drinks you might have an olive tasting\u2014set out bowls of all the kinds you can find; it's great fun. Most good olives can be served just as they come from the jar. However, with black ot ripe olives you can give them extra zest by letting them stand in olive oil with a touch of garlic for a day or two, or grating a little lemon peel over them and tossing them in oil\u2014they are extraordinarily good that way.\n\n  If you're an olive buff, you'll like this Cheese _and Olive_ Salad, delicious for a buffet party, with cold meats for luncheon, or to take on a picnic. You'll need imported Swiss cheese\u2014either the Emmenthaler, with great big holes, or the rich-flavored Gruyere, with very few holes. For six to eight servings, finely shred 2 pounds Gruyere or Emmenthaler cheese. Combine with 2 cups finely chopped green onions or scallions and _1 _ cups sliced stuffed green olives, mixing well. Toss with a dressing made from 1 cup olive oil, _ l A_ cup wine vinegar, 4 teaspoons Dijon mustard (you need a strong mustardy flavor for this), 1 teaspoon salt, and _ _teaspoon freshly ground black pepper. Arrange on a green nest of fresh salad greens\u2014Bibb, Boston, butter or leaf lettuce, or romaine\u2014in a salad bowl, piling the salad up nicely. Garnish with more stuffed green olives.\n\n_The Joys of Pickling_\n\nFor as long as I can remember, mustard pickles and watermelon-rind pickles, sweet pickles and dill pickles, all the various types of relishes that were put up for winter and spring eating, have intrigued me no end. I love to sniff the hot spicy vinegar smell, the turmeric-laden air when mustard pickles are being made, the fragrance of the cassia buds that went into some of the sliced sweet pickles my mother used to prepare. It is no wonder to me that we have a National Pickle Week. I think it might well be a National Pickle Month.\n\nWe are surrounded by pickles in our markets and supermarkets, and while some commercial packs are pretty dreary, others are perfectly marvelous. So many foods just scream for a good pickle. Dill pickles, of course, go with ham and corned beef, with sandwiches and sauerkraut dishes, but have you ever tried a thinly sliced dill pickle on a hamburger? It's superb. One of the gteatest emotional pleasures imaginable is to wander down the street munching on a big luscious garlic-laden kosher dill, either fresh or brined.\n\nThen there are the little sour gherkins, or cornichons, you get in France with the pates and other bits of charcuterie served at the beginning of a meal. I also like these tiny crisp sour pickles with boiled beef or other boiled meats for the delicious flavor contrast.\n\nPickles are a joy to eat, but an even greater joy to make. In a cooking class I held in Oregon we had a magnificent team of pickle-makers, two women who meet for two or three weeks every year and pickle to their hearts' content. They gave me a jar of last year's parsley pickles, a typical sweet pickle recipe made with gherkins and tiny pickling onions, spices, and a sweet and sour vinegar bath, but the jars were packed with great clumps of parsley which not only looked beautiful but also imparted a very delicate overtone of flavor. The same women make a curry pickle, with turmeric, curry powder, and cloves adding pungency and bright color, that is fine as an ordinary pickle, even better with such things as curries and chilies.\n\nWhen I was a child, we used to prepare perhaps twenty different kinds of pickles and relishes for the winter. We always had chowchow and mustard pickles, a huge barrel of dill pickles, and some special ones in jars, but those I enjoyed most were oil pickles, or olive oil pickles, which have been favorites in this country for fifty or sixty years. Oil pickles, for my palate and taste, need olive oil, probably because that was the way they were made when I was young.\n\n  To prepare Oil _Pickles_ you can use either very small cucumbers, about 3 inches long and 1 inch in diameter, or cucumbers 4 inches long. You'll need about 10 to 12 of the medium, 4-inch size, or about 30 of the 3-inch ones. Wash them well, and slice on a slicer or, if you are deft, with a knife into slices not over _ _ inch thick. Peel and slice paper-thin 4 or 5 medium onions. Mix cucumbers and onions in a large bowl, and sprinkle with a mixture of _ _ to   cup salt and 1 teaspoon powdered alum. Let them stand in a cool place overnight. In the morning, drain and rinse them thoroughly and put them back in the bowl, which should also be rinsed. Pour over them enough vinegar (I like to use red wine vinegar) to just cover, and let them stand for 1 to 4 hours\u20144 hours is preferable.\n\nDrain off the vinegar and measure it into a kettle. For each cup of vinegar add 2 to 3 tablespoons olive oil and _ _ cup brown sugar. Add 2 tablespoons celery seed and 3 tablespoons mustard seed. Bring the mixture to a boil, and pour it over the cucumbers. Pack into hot sterilized jars and seal. Let the pickles stand a week before you use them.\n\nThese are so crispy and good and different that if I were you I would try them out and, if you like them as much as I do, make another batch so you won't eat them all up before the winter is over. Oil pickles are good with cold meats, such as thinly sliced corned beef or roast beef, and extremely good with fish. Sometimes I make a sandwich with the pickles and cream cheese; it's a delightful snack.\n\nMaking pickles is great fun. Look up a good pickle book and try all kinds\u2014watermelon-rind pickles, curry pickles, dill pickles, bread-and-butter pickles, mustard pickles, and the many other delights that are well worth your time and effort.\n\n_The Fragrant Bean_\n\nThe vanilla bean comes from the pod of a climbing orchid plant native to Mexico that grows about 40 feet tall and flaunts spectacular flowers. The seed pods, from 4 to 8 inches long, must be picked before they get too ripe\u2014otherwise, they burst and all the goodness that is turned into vanilla extract is scattered to the winds. The green pods are cured until fermentation starts and a magnificent perfume develops. I say perfume because when you are cooking with vanilla a heady fragrance permeates the kitchen and you think: \"Oh, if I could just put some of that on my hand or my handkerchief, how wonderful it would be.\"\n\nNowadays very few people seem to use vanilla beans as our mothers and grandmothers did; they mainly use the extract. That seems to me a pity because the bean, though hardly cheap, is so much more versatile. If you put just one bean in a jar with sugar to cover and let it stand for a week, you'll have fragrant vanilla-flavored sugar to sprinkle on fruit or to top something you've baked. I always keep half a dozen beans, split down the edge with a sharp knife, in a tightly corked pint bottle of cognac. After it has stood for a couple of weeks I have a marvelously pungent homemade vanilla extract that has taken on some of the flavor of the cognac as well (you can, if you prefer, use rum, bourbon whiskey, or even vodka instead of cognac).\n\nOften a recipe will tell you to put an inch of vanilla bean in the milk you are scalding for a custard. Before you do this, first run the point of a paring knife down one edge so that it will open and spill the minute seeds into the milk, for these are the source of the flavor. Some companies that make high-grade ice cream use these seeds, and anyone who doesn't know about this practice is apt to think there is pepper or dust or some other foreign body in the vanilla ice cream, whereas it is only the infinitesimally small seeds that have spread through it, giving the ice cream, in my opinion, great distinction.\n\nThat's only a beginning. An inch of vanilla bean added to the simple syrup in which peaches, pears, or pineapples are poached brings out the best in the fruit. A touch of vanilla added to the batter for dessert cr\u00eapes improves it enormously, and if you're making muffins that have a certain amount of sweetness, such as blueberry or pecan muffins, a touch of vanilla helps this batter too. When I make an apple pie, I use butter and vanilla lavishly, and I always put a couple of drops of vanilla with the sugar for baked apples. Try it.\n\n  If you've never made a Vanilla _Souffl\u00e9_ for dessert, here is perhaps the finest way to appreciate the flavor of the bean. For this, melt 3 tablespoons butter in a heavy saucepan and blend in 3 tablespoons flour. Stir until smooth, add just a pinch of salt, and cook the mixture for 2 or 3 minutes, to remove the raw taste of the flour. Scald 1 cup milk with 1 inch of vanilla bean. Remove the bean, and stir the milk into the flour mixture until smooth and thick, then let it simmer 2 or 3 minutes. Take the piece of vanilla bean and another inch of vanilla bean and scrape the black seeds from the inside into your souffle base along with _ _cup sugar. Remove pan from the heat, and stir in 4 lightly beaten egg yolks. Return to very low heat for just a minute or two, stirring until the eggs are just heated through.\n\nRemove to a large bowl and allow to cool while beating 5 egg whites until stiff but not dry. Fold a quarter of the egg whites into the vanilla mixture with a rubber spatula, quickly and thoroughly. Then fold into the rest of the egg whites, but do not overfold. Pour into a 6-cup or 1 '/2-quart buttered and sugared souffle dish\u2014it should be about two-thirds to three-fourths full. Bake in the center of a 375-degree oven for 25 to 35 minutes, according to how you like your souffle. Allow 25 minutes for a souffle that is firm on the outside and slightly runny inside, 35 minutes for one that is firm throughout. If you don't have a vanilla bean, use 1 tablespoon vanilla extract instead, but be sure it is the pure extract, not the synthetic type which doesn't have the same unctuous quality.\n\nServe this delicious puffy souffl\u00e9 to four persons the minute it comes from the oven with, if you want to gild the lily, some whipped cream.\n\n_Flavor_ \u2014 _True or False?_\n\nI am a great lover of garlic, as I am of onions and of nearly all the herbs. I value the good, natural flavors that make food so much more interesting and acceptable to the palate, and I shall never understand why some people will quite happily accept a substitute for the real thing.\n\nTake garlic, for instance\u2014and then consider those abominations, garlic powder and garlic salt. The honest flavor of fresh garlic is something I can never have enough of. On the other hand, should I be unfortunate enough to bite into something seasoned with garlic powder or salt, I find I can taste it for thirty-six hours. I was once given mayonnaise blended with so much garlic powder that it was almost repulsive. It made me feel quite ill and completely spoiled the meal for me.\n\nI consider both garlic powder and salt and onion powder and salt to be among the more disagreeable of the so-called advances in our eating. To me, it is absolutely pointless to ruin good food with these awful ersatz flavors when it is so simple a matter to use the real thing. Dehydrated chopped onion or garlic I find bearable, but, for the most part, I see no reason to use any form of substitute when the vast majority of us live within easy reach of fresh garlic, onions, shallots, or green onions.\n\nPersonally, I have never liked or used a garlic press, because I find it no trouble to chop or mince garlic. A garlic clove is a very easy thing to handle. There are times when you don't even need to peel or chop it, just toss it whole into the pan, where it will spread a delicious seasoning and can be removed at the end of the cooking. Salads take on a marvelous briskness if you rub a clove of garlic on the little crusty button at the end of a day-old loaf of French bread until the crumbs absorb the flavor, and then toss it into the bowl to perfume the greens. The lucky person who gets this little _chapon,_ as it is called, for a delicious final bite will savor it greatly.\n\nFresh garlic is something you can regulate according to your likes and dislikes, from a delicate whiff to a tremendous surge. There are ways to use great quantities of garlic without getting an overpowering flavor, like Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic (see page 235) and Julia Child's wonderful _pur_ \u00e9 _e de pommes de terre a Vail_ in Volume 1 of _Mastering the Art of French Cooking,_ a heavenly combination of mashed potatoes and a sauce containing 30 cloves of garlic. When you tell people how much garlic there is in these dishes, they never believe you, because after the garlic has been cooked slowly for a certain length of time it loses its harsh rawness and becomes something completely delicate and refined. It's hard to say exactly how or at what stage this happens\u2014all we know is that it occurs after a certain application of heat, one of those mysteries which make cooking the most fascinating of pursuits.\n\n  This also happens when you make _Garlic Soup,_ a very simple but superb soup that tastes even better if you use leftover fat from a chicken, goose, or pork roast. Melt 3 tablespoons chicken, goose, or pork fat in a heavy saucepan over low heat. Add 30 peeled garlic cloves (you can use less or more, as you wish), and shake over gentle heat so the garlic cooks without browning. It should just melt in the fat; letting it brown is fatal as the flavor turns bitter. Add 6 to 8 cups chicken stock and season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper. I also like to grate a tiny bit of nutmeg in. Simmer for 15 to 20 minutes, and then force through a sieve or food mill to puree the garlic. Reheat the soup. Beat 4 or 5 egg yolks, and stir in 3 to 4 tablespoons olive oil. Stir some of the hot soup into the egg yolks to temper them, and then stir them very gently into the soup and heat. Do not under any circumstances let the soup come to a boil, or the yolks will curdle. Serve in large soup plates, ladling the soup over pieces of crisp toast, one to a plate. Serves six to eight.\n\nThe robust and beautiful flavor of this soup is something that could never, ever be achieved with garlic powder. So leave those substitutes on the shelf, look at them once in a while with distaste\u2014and then forget about them.\n\n_ CHAPTER 5 _\n\n_Inspirations and Improvisations_\n\n_... in which we whip up simple dishes for the unexpected guest ... explore the perfection of pasta ... the myriad delights of quiche ... the creation of fabulous fondues ..._ _and concoct a refreshing summer salad._\n\n_Impromptu Meals_\n\nHave you ever had friends drop in around mealtime and then realized there's practically nothing to eat in the house but eggs and a can of soup? Of course you have. We've all faced those emergencies when one has to do some quick improvisation. I remember reading in the paper about a woman who kept her wits about her during the last great New England snowstorm. Her family was yearning for, of all things, apple pie. Suddenly she remembered the mock apple pies our forefathers made with soda crackers, sugar, spices, and butter, and she produced one forthwith. It was a huge success, and before the storm was over she'd made it again and again. That's what I call intelligent thinking.\n\nMy own way of coping with unforeseen situations is to keep a special shelf stocked with things I can reach for when I have to make a meal in a hurry or feed unexpected guests. I always have cans of minced clams, salmon, tuna fish, corned beef, corned beef hash, sardines, pimientos, white truffles, evaporated milk, broths and soups, olives, and a selection of pasta from the tiny orzo to the big macaroni (I find I use the thin spaghettini more than anything else). I usually keep frozen crabmeat in the freezer, also vegetables of various sorts and bits and pieces of leftover ham and chicken.\n\n  Recently I picked up a new quickie from Philip Brown, an excellent cook who does demonstrations with me from time to time. Let's call it _Philip's Sardine Special._ Open and drain 2 cans of French or Portuguese sardines\u2014preferably the boneless, skinless kind\u2014and wash them very carefully with warm water, being sure not to break them up. Pour _ _ cup olive oil into a small baking dish and top with 1 large onion, finely chopped. Arrange the sardines on the onions and mix in a 4-ounce can of pimientos, cut in thin strips. Season with   teaspoon salt and _ _ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, and pour on another _ _ cup oil. Bake in a 350-degree oven for 30 minutes. Sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve very hot, with toast. With a salad and some cheese, you have a satisfying meal for four.\n\n  Hash is one of my favorite spur-of-the-moment supper dishes. For _Quick Corned Beef Hash,_ heat 3 tablespoons butter and 3 tablespoons oil in a heavy skillet, add 1 medium onion, finely chopped, and saute until translucent and lightly colored, about 4 minutes. Add 1 can corned beef, coarsely chopped, and 1 can corned beef hash. Blend well. Season with salt and pepper and turn the hash over several times. Add   cup boiling water or _ _ cup heavy cream or evaporated milk, and cook it down quickly. Reduce heat, and cover the pan for 3 or 4 minutes to give it a chance to steam. Remove the cover and loosen the hash from the pan with a spatula\u2014it should have formed a crisp bottom crust. Turn it over, omelet fashion, and turn out onto a hot platter. Top with fried or poached eggs or roll scrambled eggs into it before you turn it out.\n\nServe with heated chili sauce or homemade pickles and hot biscuits, if you have them. For dessert, have ice cream.\n\n  Another swift dish that will also stretch to serve a lot of people is _Spaghetti with Clam Sauce._ Open and drain two 7-ounce cans minced clams, saving the liquid. Heat 4 tablespoons olive oil in a small skillet, add 2 finely chopped garlic cloves, and cook for 4 minutes. Add the clam liquid, raise the heat, and cook down. Bring 2 quarts well-salted water to a boil, and cook an 8-ounce package of spaghettini rapidly until just tender but still bitey. Drain and place in a colander over boiling water. Heat the minced clams through in the garlic broth and add some chopped parsley or chives. Dish the pasta into 4 plates and spoon the clam sauce over it. Sprinkle with more parsley\u2014no cheese on this, please; it's better as it is.\n\nWith a glass of white wine, salad or sliced tomatoes, crisp bread, and fruit to follow you have a top-notch meal, as good as you'd get in an Italian restaurant.\n\n_Perfect Scrambled Eggs_\n\nWhen people invite you in for a quick meal, or if something goes wrong in the kitchen, they are apt to say, \"Oh well, I'll just scramble some eggs,\" as if \"just scrambling some eggs\" couldn't be simpler. As a matter of fact, scrambling eggs is one of the more complex kitchen processes, and there are various schools of egg scrambling. There are those who believe eggs should be scrambled in a double boiler over simmering water, those who believe they should be scrambled quickly, and those who believe that it takes slow and most accurate timing to make the curds tender, delicious, and of varied sizes. Every person regards his particular fashion of scrambling an egg as a mark of his culinary skill, and so it is. My good friend Julia Child once demonstrated her theory of scrambling eggs on television. She lifted the pan from the burner and then lowered it, to adjust the heat and the scrambling process, then as the final moment arrived, she accelerated her tempo to make the eggs come to just the right point. Hers is an extremely good method, provided you have the patience and dexterity.\n\nScrambled eggs can be so delicious, so creamy and rich and eggy, if I may use the word, that it is too bad we don't use them more. They combine well with many things\u2014chopped sauteed mushrooms, finely chopped ham, crisp bacon bits, little slices of sausage, freshly grated Parmesan or Gruyere cheese, chopped herbs, finely chopped peeled and seeded tomatoes\u2014as well as being perfectly splendid on their own.\n\nDepending upon the number of eggs to be scrambled, I like to use a small or large Teflon-coated pan. I have a cast-aluminum Teflon-lined 9inch omelet pan with rounded sides that I use for up to 4 or 5 eggs and a 10-inch pan for larger quantities, which are much harder to make. I disagree completely with those who say you can scramble one egg well. It is an impossibility.\n\n  For _Scrambled Eggs_ I think you should gauge at least 2 eggs per person. Add salt, freshly ground black pepper, and 1 or 2 dashes of Tabasco, and then beat lightly with a fork. For lighter scrambled eggs, I beat in 1 teaspoon of water for every two eggs. I don't like cream or milk added to scrambled eggs, but if I want them extraordinarily rich, I mix in softened butter, as I will describe later on.\n\nIf I am adding ham or bacon, I would use 2 slices of Canadian bacon about 3 inches in diameter and 2 pieces of ham of the same size and _ _ inch thick, precook it lightly, cut into thin shreds, and toss into the pan with a tablespoon or two of butter. Let this warm over low heat, then add, for two servings, 4 beaten eggs and, as you do, increase the heat to medium high. As soon as the coagulation starts, make pushing strokes with a rubber or wooden spatula so you get curled curds. I'm not quite as definite in my movements as Julia Child. I lift the pan off the burner from side to side with sort of a circular motion, while pushing with the spatula. As the heat in the cooking eggs increases, the curds form much faster, and there you have to remove the pan from the heat and work faster with your pushing. That's the ticklish point. You have to know the exact moment to cease applying any heat and rush your eggs from pan to plate, or they will be overcooked, hard, coarse-textured and disagreeable.\n\nNow, if you want very rich eggs, as you push curds in the pan add little bits of softened butter, which will melt in and give you delicious, heavily buttered scrambled eggs such as you have seldom experienced. In some places, they are called \"buttered eggs,\" and that's a very good term.\n\nIf you are adding chopped herbs or mushrooms, lace them in as you scramble the eggs so they become a part of the amalgamation of the creamy curds. Of course, there is nothing wrong with adding chopped parsley or chives or other bits and pieces after you have transferred the eggs from the pan to a plate or platter.\n\nIf you have never tried the combination, cook scrambled eggs with sliced smoked fish for your next Sunday brunch or luncheon. A platter of smoked salmon, smoked eel, smoked sturgeon, or smoked whitefish, with lemon wedges, good rolls or bagels, and a huge pile of creamy eggs\u2014that's good eating. If you like, you can scramble the eggs at the table in an electric skillet or chafing dish, guiding them to a perfect conclusion as you chat with your guests.\n\nI have had, in my time, memorable meals of scrambled eggs with fresh truffles, scrambled eggs with caviar and other glamorous things, but to me, there are few things as magnificent as scrambled eggs, pure and simple, perfectly cooked and perfectly seasoned.\n\n_In Praise of Pasta_\n\nIt's odd how when you're in Italy no meal seems complete without pasta, yet here we're so apt to forget what a wonderfully simple, variable food it is. In these days of rush and hurry, a dish of pasta can be made in nothing flat, and with an elegant sauce, salad, and maybe cheese and fresh fruit you have an exceptionally good dinner.\n\nFor more than six hundred years, pasta, made from the purest and simplest of ingredients\u2014fine wheat and water\u2014has been a staple of the diet of people in many countries, and in all that time its manufacture has stuck pretty consistently to the classic formula and the end result has been something to savor.\n\nCertain things have been added to pasta\u2014artichoke flour; tomato, spinach, and carrot to add color and flavor; eggs to produce the golden noodles of the Central Europeans\u2014but these are incidentals. Generally speaking, pasta is made from hard wheat, the finest from durum wheat, which is high in gluten, or wheat protein, a substance that gives pasta its natural bite and firmness of shape and texture. At various times attempts have been made to produce it from other things, but the results have found little acceptance with lovers of good pasta.\n\nLately though, there have been disturbing signs that pasta in the future may not be what it was in the past. There's a new FDA ruling that petmits a change in ingredient standards, and a major food company is coming out with a type of macaroni for school lunch programs that is \"enriched\" by the addition of corn and soy flours, with a little more than one-third wheat. To me that just isn't pasta. I find it rather shocking that a food that has been a tradition in our lives for so long can suddenly become something quite different, with a different color, taste, and consistency, no longer the archetypal product. Nothing, as far as I'm concerned, can ever take the place of honest pasta made from honest wheat, and when it comes to adding protein, I'd rather eat my pasta with meat sauce or grated cheese, in the usual way, instead of getting it through soy.\n\nI like to know what to expect from the food I buy, and I have always found our commercial packaged pastas to be steadily dependable in constant use, never varying in flavor and quality, good, inexpensive, and easy to cook, if you follow the directions on the box, although for my taste they tend to overestimate the cooking time. I like my pasta to be what the Italians call _al dente_ (to the tooth), ot with a little bite to it, not mushy or soft. Test it by fishing a piece from the water and biting to see if it is cooked to your taste.\n\nI love pasta, and I use a great deal of it, from the tiniest pastina and orzo (which is shaped rather like a large grain of rice) up to lasagne and the huge seashells and rigatoni. It's such fun to play around with all the different shapes and sizes\u2014the little wagon wheels and butterflies, the long thin strips of spaghetti and tagliatelle, and the lovely thin broad noodles.\n\nI cook orzo until it is just tender, toss it with butter and sometimes a little grated Parmesan or Romano cheese, and serve it with grilled foods or a stew instead of potatoes or noodles or rice. It has a nice texture, excellent flavor, and makes a great sauce sopper-upper.\n\nI cook a lot of the thin spaghettini, too. Sometimes I have it with a quick clam sauce or one made with fresh tomatoes simmered in butter with a touch of garlic and basil, or that glorious summer mixture called pesto\u2014fresh basil, parsley, pine nuts, and oil ground to a paste that turns the pasta the most beautiful green as you eat it. Or I might sauce it very simply by soaking chopped garlic in warm olive oil for a few minutes and tossing it with the pasta. This is one of my great favorites.\n\nIf you are feeling extravagant, canned white truffles, shredded and tossed in butter, are wonderful with fettuccine or spaghettini, but just melted butter and freshly grated cheese tastes awfully good, too. All of these can be done in minutes and make a most satisfying meal. I hold no brief for those elaborate sauces that take forever to cook. When anyone tells me he has a marvelous spaghetti sauce that takes three days to make, I run screaming because 1 know only too well that it is going to be over-seasoned, overtomatoed, and overrich.\n\nTo me there's nothing better than to take pasta, be it noodles, spaghet\u00adtini, seashells, orzo, or what you will, blanch it for about 5 minutes in boiling salted water, drain it, and then cook it in rich boiling chicken stock until done to taste. Serve it in bowls with plenty of the broth, a little grated Parmesan or Romano cheese, and a sprinkling of freshly chopped parsley. It's the kind of dish you'll be hungry for when nothing else in the food line seems to appeal to you.\n\n  If you like a good meat sauce for your pasta, probably the most famous is the one the Italians call Ragu Bobgnese. Cut _ _ pound bacon into very small pieces, and cook it gently in a saucepan with 2 tablespoons butter. Add 2 finely chopped or shredded carrots, 2 finely chopped medium-size onions, and 2 finely chopped ribs of celery. Brown lightly, then add 1 pound lean ground beef, breaking it up with a fork so it browns evenly. Then add _ _pound chicken livers, trimmed of all membrane and chopped. Cook for 2 to 3 minutes, then mix in _ _ cup concentrated tomato paste and 1 cup rather dry white wine. Season with 1 teaspoon or more salt, _ _ to   teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, and a generous pinch of nutmeg. Add _  _cups broth (chicken, beef, or broth made with a bouillon cube), cover the pan, and simmer very, very gently for 40 minutes.\n\nUncover, check the seasoning, and stir in 1 cup heavy cream\u2014this is optional; some people prefer the sauce as it is, others like the cream flavor. Heat for a minute. I always add a good tablespoon of chopped parsley, and I have been known to put in a finely chopped garlic clove. You can add such things to the basic sauce at your discretion.\n\nThis sauce Bolognese is good on spaghetti, macaroni, or any pasta, and for lasagne. Alternate in a baking dish a layer of the sauce, a layer of lasagne, a layer of bechamel sauce, well seasoned with nutmeg, some freshly grated Parmesan or Romano cheese, and repeat the layers in that order until the dish is full, ending with bechamel sauce. Top with a heavy grating of Parmesan cheese, and bake in a 350-degree oven until the cheese has melted and the sauce is brown and bubbly.\n\nThe other day I went to a luncheon where pasta was featured, and we tasted a tremendous variety of dishes, one of which I'd like to share with you because it was such a lovely flavorful mixture\u2014an adaptation of the Greek _pastitsio:_\n\n  To make this version of _Pastitsio,_ first cube 1 large (\u00bd pounds) or   2 smallish eggplants and sprinkle with salt. Saute in _ _ to _ _ cup olive oil until delicately brown, shaking the pan well and turning the cubes with a wooden spatula. Drain on paper towels. Parboil and slice 1 pound of Italian sausages, such as cotechino or langanicaa, sold in Italian markets and some supermarkets, or substitute good, not too fat, sausage meat, thinly sliced and browned and well drained. (If you can't get highly flavored sausage, add a chopped clove or two of garlic or a little sauteed onion.) Combine the sausage and eggplant.\n\nCook 1 pound of ziti, a very large version of macaroni, in about 4 to 5 quarts of very well salted boiling water, uncovered. Stir occasionally, because pasta loves to stick to the bottom of the pan. Cook until just tender to your taste, then drain in a colander.\n\nMeanwhile, make the bechamel sauce. Melt _ _ cup butter in a pan, blend in _ _ cup flour, 1 teaspoon salt, _ _ teaspoon nutmeg, and _ _ to  __ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper. Cook until it bubbles, to cook the flour thoroughly, then very gradually add 3 cups hot milk. Stir over medium heat until thickened, let simmer for several minutes, and then stir in another cup of hot milk or _ _ cup heavy cream.\n\nYou will also need three Italian cheeses\u2014grated Parmesan, thinly sliced mozzarella, and a 1-pound container of skim-milk ricotta.\n\nTake a 9-by-13-or 14-inch baking pan, the type you would use for lasagna, and cover the bottom with a layet of sauce. Then add the ziti, half the sausage-eggplant mixture, more sauce, then a little Parmesan, some ricotta, more sauce, the rest of the ziti and eggplant mixture, another layer of sauce, more Parmesan and ricotta, and top it all with slices of mozzarella. Bake in a 375-degree oven from 30 to 40 minutes. Do not overbake. It should have a nice moist quality.\n\nServed with a green salad, this makes a good hearty dinner or supper, or an excellent buffet dish for a party.\n\n_Quiche, the People s Choice_\n\nI can remember when quiche Lorraine was a great novelty. Now every bride attempts it, most restaurants have it on the menu, and it is considered the chic thing to serve guests. Considering the peasant origin of the dish, that's a pretty rapid rise in status.\n\nSeldom, however, do you find quiche Lorraine made by the ttue, classic method. Originally, this open-faced tart from the province of Lorraine consisted of bread dough with a filling of eggs, cream, and usually bacon\u2014no cheese. The idea of including cheese probably crept in because fresh cream cheese sometimes replaced the cream.\n\nIf you are making bread, you might try the classic crust. Roll out btead dough very, very thinly or else take a small chunk and press it into a tart tin or pie pan with your fists. Add the quiche filling and bake according to the recipe I am going to give you. Or go the usual route and make a pastry shell instead.\n\n I personally feel a pastry shell is much better for being prebaked before the filling is added. For _Quiche Pastry,_ sift 2 cups all-purpose flour and _ _ teaspoon salt into a bowl or onto a board. Make a well in the center and add _ _ pound butter, cut in very small pieces, and 1 egg mixed with 1 tablespoon lemon juice. Work this thoroughly with the fingertips (or in a mixer with a paddle, not a beater, attachment) until the butter is incorporated and the dough stiff. Add additional liquid if necessary. Form into a ball and chill for at least half an hour.\n\nRoll out the dough between sheets of waxed paper and line an 8inch or 9-inch pie pan or tart tin (the kind with a removable bottom is good for quiche). Don't pull the dough\u2014just lift it up gently and let it settle in the pan. Trim and crimp the edges, put a piece of foil or waxed paper on the dough, and weight it down with uncooked beans ot rice to prevent the pastry from puffing up during baking. Bake in a 425-degree oven for 18 minutes, then remove the beans or rice and paper, brush the inside of the shell with a little beaten egg yolk, and bake 3 minutes longei. This glazes the center so it won't get soggy. Cool a little before filling.\n\n  For _Quiche Lorraine,_ arrange 6 strips of cooked, well-drained bacon in the baked shell. Beat 3 egg yolks with 2 whole eggs, and combine with _ _ cup heavy cream, _ _ teaspoon salt, and a pinch of nutmeg. Blend well and pour over the bacon. Sprinkle with nutmeg and a touch of freshly ground black pepper. Bake in a 375-degree oven for 20 to 25 minutes, or until the filling is delicately browned and puffy and just set in the center. Remove from the oven, cool for a moment, then cut in wedges and serve. Quiche should be eaten fresh from the oven while it is gently risen and creamy, rather than when it has settled down to flat solidity.\n\nTo vary the recipe, you can cook the bacon until crisp, cut it in pieces, and mix into the egg-cream mixture with about _ _ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese and 1 tablespoon of chopped parsley. Or substitute tiny raw bay scallops for the bacon strips, with a teaspoon of chopped parsley and a bit of fresh chopped dill or dried dill.\n\n  From Lorraine's neighbor, Alsace, comes _Onion Quiche,_ equally good as a first course or as a side dish with roast beef or steak. For this you use finely chopped onions, steamed in butter, and a little grated Parmesan cheese, topped with the egg-cream mixture.\n\n_ _ Elizabeth David makes a _Roquefort Quiche_ that is glorious eating. Crumble about 3  cup French Roquefort cheese into the baked pie shell (don't substitute any other blue cheese\u2014only this works properly), and add the egg-cream mixture. Bake at 375 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes, then reduce the heat to 350 degrees and bake a further 5 to 10 minutes, or until just set.\n\nServe piping hot to quiche lovers, like one friend of mine who is so mad for the dish he vows his theme song should be \"Quiche me, quiche me again.\"\n\n_Vegetable Variations on a Quiche_\n\nNowadays all kinds of things get incorporated into a quiche, from shellfish and smoked salmon to asparagus tips and corn. While this is a long way from the classic quiche Lorraine, it's an enterprising and permissible extension of the basic dish that makes good culinary sense.\n\nTo my mind, nothing is more inviting, especially in spring and summer, than a vegetable quiche, for this versatile dish lends itself eminently well to a variety of seasonal vegetables. Many of these can be used as accompaniments to roast meats and poultry, or to cold meats, as vegetable and starch in one.\n\n  O n e of my favorites is a _Spinach Quiche,_ which makes a good luncheon or supper dish. Thoroughly wash _1 _ to 2 pounds fresh spinach. Place in a heavy pan with no water other than that clinging to the leaves, cover, and wilt down over medium to high heat. By wilting down I mean you should cook it just until the water comes out of the spinach and the bulk is reduced. Drain it very well, pressing to get out all the water the spinach has exuded. Then chop the spinach coarsely and season it with 1 teaspoon salt, a touch of nutmeg, 1 teaspoon dried tarragon, or 1 tablespoon chopped fresh tarragon, and a few drops of lemon juice. Mix very well and taste for seasoning.\n\nHave ready a baked pie shell, made in the same way as the shell for quiche Lorraine (see preceding recipe), and, before adding the filling, spread the bottom of the shell thickly with Dijon mustard. This is a trick I learned from my friend Simone Beck, which she gives in her cookbook _Simca's Cuisine,_ and it gives a wonderful flavor to the finished quiche.\n\nArrange the spinach in the shell, and sprinkle with _ _ cup crumbled feta cheese or shredded Gruyere or sharp Cheddar or finely grated Parmesan. Beat 2 eggs and 2 egg yolks well with 1 cup heavy cream (or use half heavy cream and half plain yogurt, which gives the custard a sharper flavor). Pour over the spinach, using enough to fill but not spill over the shell, sprinkle with 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, and bake in a 350-degree oven for 30 to 35 minutes, or until the custard is just barely set. Let it cool a little and serve just warm to from four to six people.\n\nFor variation number one on this vegetable theme, blanch 2 pounds young fresh green peas for 2 minutes in boiling salted water. Drain quickly, and place in the baked shell (don't brush with mustard this time) with 3 tablespoons grated onion or 2 tablespoons finely cut green onions, 1 teaspoon salt, _ _ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, and, if you have it, 2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh mint. Sprinkle with _ _ cup grated Parmesan cheese, add your egg and cream mixture, as before, and bake 35 minutes at 350 degrees.\n\nThis goes extraordinarily well with lamb or chicken, or any cold meat that you might be serving. It's surprising what a different flavor peas take on when baked this way.\n\n  You can use 1 _ _ cups finely cut green onions, blanched in boiling salted water for 30 seconds and well drained. Toss these with 2 tablespoons melted butter, put them in the baked shell, and top with _ _ cup grated Gruyere or Cheddar cheese and the egg-cream mixture, seasoning the custard to taste with salt, and a dash of Tabasco.\n\n  A Carrot _Quiche_ is rather out of the ordinary, and marvelous with roast lamb or a steak, instead of the usual potatoes. Finely shred 4 to 5 carrots. Blanch for 1 minute in boiling salted water. Drain thoroughly, then mix with 4 tablespoons melted butter, 1 teaspoon salt, a tiny bit of marjoram or oregano, and 2 tablespoons chopped parsley. Brush the baked shell with mustard, put in the carrots, a squeeze of lemon juice, 4 tablespoons grated Parmesan, and the custard mixture. Bake at 350 degrees for 35 minutes, or until just set.\n\nIt fascinates me how versions of the quiche crop up in other countries. The British have a bacon and egg tart, first cousin to quiche Lorraine, and the Welsh have a leek tart. Actually, this is really not as remarkable as it might appear. The proximity of France and Britain and the interchange of the people over the centuries brought about many such culinary transferences.\n\nThere are many similarities between the Welsh language and that of Brittany. The Bretons make annual treks across the Channel in small boats after the harvest season, bringing foods to sell\u2014in particular, long braids of beautiful yellow onions\u2014and after they have been in Wales a day or so, owing to the closeness of the languages, they and the Welsh can understand each other and even carry on fairly intelligent conversations.\n\nThe leek, of course, has a long history in Wales and great symbolic significance. It is said that at the Battle of Agincourt the Welsh soldiers went into battle with a leek proudly pinned to their tunics to proclaim their nationality.\n\n  T o make a Leek Tart, first bake your pie shell. While the shell is baking, take 3 good-sized leeks, split them in half lengthwise and then in half again, and wash them thoroughly to remove all the sand. Finely mince the white and a little of the green part, and saute quickly in 3 tablespoons butter, shaking the pan and tossing the leeks with a wooden spoon so they become soft, but not mushy or completely cooked. Then broil 3 to 4 slices lean bacon until cooked through, but not crisp and crumbly or the bacon will lose its flavor when recooked in the tart. Drain on paper towels, cut in small pieces, and combine with the leeks. Spoon the leek and bacon mixture into the pie shell.\n\nLightly beat 5 medium or 4 very large eggs, add 1 to _ _ cups light cream, half-and-half, or evaporated milk, and mix well together. Season with 1 teaspoon salt, _ _ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, and _ A_ teaspoon nutmeg. Mix well with a whisk and taste\u2014there should be enough salt to season the custard and a nice overtone of nutmeg. Then stir in _ _ to _ _ cup grated Parmesan cheese.\n\n\"Now hold on,\" I can hear you saying, \"Parmesan cheese certainly isn't Welsh.\" It isn't, but if you go back as far as the seventeenth century you will find English, Welsh, and Scottish recipes in which Parmesan cheese is called for, and it has been used consistently over the years as the delicate seasoning cheese it is. It won't become sticky, like other cheeses, and it adds a fine basic flavor to whatever dish you put it in.\n\n  Pour the cheese-flavored custard over the leeks and bacon, put the pie in the center of the oven, and bake at 375 degrees from 25 to 30 minutes, or until just set like a custard pie, not wobbly or overcooked. Remove and cool. If you are serving it as an hors d'oeuvre, cool for 25 to 30 minutes so it will be firm enough to slice into small squares or wedges that can be eaten with the fingers. For a lunch, brunch, or Sunday supper dish, cool only 15 minutes.\n\nTeam it with salad and maybe a fruit dessert, and you have a light but satisfying meal.\n\n_Fondue, the Chameleon Dish_\n\nCheese fondue is a Swiss creation that dates back to the sixteenth century when the German Swiss, who had become Protestant, were battling with the Catholics from central Switzerland, whence cheese comes. There is a legend that after a full day's battle the two factions declared a truce to meet for a communal dinner of a certain milk soup, made with cheese, into which pieces of bread were dipped. As the story goes, a bucket was placed on the borderline between the two regions of Switzerland. One group supplied the milk and cheese, and the other supplied the bread. Thus the tradition of dipping bread into a communal dish was established. Eventually fondue became part of the cookery of French Switzerland, which is close to the Savoy district of France, and it is not surprising that it was known to Brillat-Savarin, the great eighteenth-century gastronomic authority, who wrote about a fondue party he gave in Boston in 1795. After introducing fondue to that city, he reported, it became quite the rage there.\n\nIt is once again the rage throughout the country, and many variations on the fondue principle have come along. Among these is the fondue boutguignonne or what the Swiss call fondue friture, for which one prepares a pot of hot oil and butter or simply hot oil. Into this bits of meat and vegetables or other ingredients are dipped. There is also a fondue orientale, sometimes called a fondue moderne or a fondue chinoise, which is done with a broth for dipping, very similar to the hot broth dish one finds in parts of China\u2014and, of course, in some Chinese restaurants. Fairly recently a chocolate dessert fondue was invented, into which one dips bits of fruit, cake, crisp cookies, and such items.\n\nAs you can see, it is possible to entertain with fondue from beginning to end, as one hostess did for a party in Midland, Michigan, which I attended. For the principal dish she provided two kinds of cheese fondue, one made with Cheddar cheese to which a little bourbon was added instead of the usual kirsch\u2014a stroke of imagination, I thought. (As a matter of fact, I had a very good cheese fondue once that incorporated gin.) So if you are planning to make a traditional cheese fondue\u2014or fondue neuchateloise, as it is known in Switzerland\u2014don't worry about being authentic if you can't find any kirsch. Improvise. Here, then, is the way to prepare a cheese fondue. I will first give a basic fondue and then follow it with the adjustments that make it fondue neuchateloise.\n\n  This basic recipe for _Cheese Fondue_ will serve four persons quite well as a main course and many more than that if used as an hors d'oeuvre. Shred, grate, or dice a pound of Swiss Emmenthaler cheese, and dredge it in 3 tablespoons of flour. Rub the inside of the fondue pot with a cut garlic clove. (The fondue pot itself, which can be made of glazed pottery or earthenware or of enameled iron, is known in Switzerland as a _caquelon.)_ Place the pot on medium heat and pour in _1  _cups of white wine. Swiss wine makes it all the better, but any good dry white wine will do. Keep this over medium heat until the wine is warm, but don't let it boil. The recipe calls for a tablespoon of lemon juice, but I seldom find it necessary. Add the cheese by handfuls, and stir it with a wooden spoon until the cheese melts and the mixture has the appearance of a light, creamy sauce. Add a little freshly ground black pepper and a few grains of nutmeg, and let this boil up for a minute. Transfer the pot to low heat\u2014and this can be an electric table stove or alcohol burner\u2014and adjust the heat so that the fondue continues to bubble.\n\nArrange small cubes of French bread, with the crust on, around the fondue. Invite guests to help themselves, spearing the bread cubes with the fondue forks or the handled skewers now on the market, and as they dip, stirring right down to the bottom. This ritual continues, of course, until the fondue is gone, at which point there will be a crust at the bottom of the pot, which is called a _religieuse._ This is a very special treat, and it can be taken out with a wooden spoon or spatula.\n\n  The traditional _Fondue Neuchateloise_ calls for equal portions of two kinds of cheese\u2014Emmenthaler and natural Gruyere. Do not dredge with flour but proceed to heat the wine and add the cheese as directed above. When the fondue is at the boil, add 3 tablespoons of kirsch mixed with a tablespoon of cornstarch. Lacking kirsch, substitute gin, vodka, or bourbon. Stir in the liquid, and allow the fondue to boil up again.\n\nI have had this dish in Switzerland with only bread for dipping and a crisp chilled Swiss wine to drink. However, you can serve any number of items for dippables. At the party I mentioned earlier, in addition to bread there were also cubes of sausage (bologna and mortadella) and ham, and a large tray of raw vegetables\u2014cauliflower, broccoli, cucumber, scallions, carrots, radishes, celery, and turnips.\n\nThere are many different versions of cheese fondue beyond those given here, and all of them are delicious and an extremely easy way to entertain.\n\n_Rice for a Salad Switch_\n\nIt sometimes seems to me that we have become such traditionalists in our eating patterns we get in some rather depressing culinary ruts. For instance, take potato salad. In a restaurant, a delicatessen, or the picnic hamper, what do you invariably find? Potato salad. Potato salad made with mayonnaise, with French dressing, with bacon dressing. Hot potato salad, cold potato salad. No matter where you go, even in Hawaii where food is so influenced by the Orient, good old potato salad reigns supreme. Not that it isn't one of the greatest salads ever, I'm not disputing that, but it does become a bit of a bore when you have it over and over again. The same thing is true of cole slaw. We have it with mayonnaise, with sour cream, with celery seeds, sweet and sour slaw, hot slaw, and cole slaw with all kinds of other things\u2014seafood, chicken, peppers, apple, even pineapple, which I happen to think is a pretty revolting mixture.\n\nYet how often do you ever encounter a rice salad? Even those who love rice with Chinese, Japanese, and Indian food, who serve it as a starch with poached fish, or broiled chicken, or beef Stroganoff, or as a dessert, never seem to think of it as salad material.\n\nThe success of a rice salad depends, of course, on the rice. You need fluffy well-drained rice with each kernel separate, rice that can be held over. I'm not going to give you a lesson on rice cookery here\u2014I'm sure you don't need one\u2014but I am going to tell you the great secret of preparing rice for a salad. When it has reached the bitiness you like, drain it, add a couple of tablespoons of oil, and toss it well with two forks (not a spoon, which bruises the grains and makes them sticky and gluey) so that the oil coats the cooling rice grains and keeps them separated and fluffy.\n\nThe simplest of all rice salads is the one the Italians often serve with vitello tonnato (see page 23), just plain fluffy rice tossed well with oil, lemon juice or vinegar, salt, and freshly ground black pepper, garnished with a bit of chopped parsley. It's delicious with other cold meats, or with cold meat loaf, cooled herbed chicken, or turkey.\n\n  For the next kind _of Rice Salad,_ you mix in crisp diced vegetables. First, cook 1 cup raw rice by your favorite method, then toss gently with 2 or 3 tablespoons oil.\n\nAdd 1 cup finely chopped green onion or red Italian onion, 1 cup peeled, seeded, and finely diced cucumber, _ _ cup seeded and finely diced green or red pepper, 1 cup peeled, seeded, and chopped tomato, and chopped fresh basil and parsley to taste. Toss well with a vinaigrette dressing made with 5 parts olive oil to 1 part lemon juice or wine vinegar, salt, and freshly ground black pepper. Keep well cooled (not chilled) until serving time. Arrange on a bed of greens and garnish with rings of pepper, strips of green onion, and thin slices of tomato.\n\nThis is superb with foods from the outdoor grill\u2014steaks, chops, chicken, or boned and butterflied leg of lamb.\n\n_ Salade Orientale_ is not just a salad but an elaborate one-dish meal. To serve eight, cook _1  _to 2 cups rice until bitingly tender (not mushy). Drain and season with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Toss gently with 2 to 3 tablespoons oil, using two forks. Leave to cool. Meanwhile, cut 1 _ _cups cooked shrimp into smallish pieces, leaving a few whole ones for garnish. Combine with 1 cup crabmeat and, if you like, _ _ to 1 cup mussels, which have been steamed with white wine and water (or use the canned mussels from France or Scandinavia). For an alternate seafood mixture, you might have bite-size chunks of cooked lobster or lobster tails or raw bay scallops with either shrimp or mussels. To either seafood mixture, add _ _ cup finely cut celery, _ _ cup finely chopped green or red onion, and _ _ cup peeled, seeded, and finely diced cucumber. Toss with the rice and a vinaigrette sauce made with 4 parts olive oil to 1 part wine vinegar, 2 tablespoons chopped fresh or 1 teaspoon dried tarragon, 1 tablespoon prepared mustard, and salt and pepper to taste. Garnish with the whole shrimp, and serve on greens.\n\nWith this unusual salad, have Melba toast made from rye bread, or hot French bread and sweet butter.\n\n Or you can make a _Beef-and-Rice Salad._ To the same amount of oil-tossed rice, add _1  _cups finely diced cold boiled or roast beef, _ _cup finely chopped red onion, _ _ cup diced celery, 1 cup coarsely chopped hard-boiled egg, and _ _ cup peeled, seeded, and chopped tomato. Toss well and dress with a vinaigrette sauce to which you have added 1 crushed or chopped garlic clove, blended well with the oil. Or use instead 1 _ _ cups cold roast pork with  __ cup finely diced celery and  __ cup finely diced crisp green apple. Omit the other ingredients, and don't put garlic in the dressing. Let either salad stand for an hour or so in the refrigerator, toss again, heap on a bed of watercress, and garnish with sliced tomatoes or cherry tomatoes, chopped parsley, and a little chopped thyme.\n\nFor a heartier meal, arrange a ring of stuffed deviled eggs around the edge of the salad bowl, and have crisp breads or toast, and perhaps a hot vegetable dish for balance, such as spinach souffle or green beans with almonds and bits of crisp bacon. \n CHAPTER 6\n\n_Sweets and Soothing Drinks_\n\n_... in which we get in a stew over rhubarb ... fool around with summer berries and cherries ... turn apple pie upside down ... cherish our ice creams and sherbets ..._ _and the richness of syllabub and creme brulee ... improve on pound cake...lead the fight for a good cup of tea ..._ _and get into the heartwarming habit of hot chocolate._\n\n_Rhubarb, Herald of Spring_\n\nRhubarb has always meant for me the coming of spring. The minute I see those enormous leaves and red stalks coming up through the ground and taste the first dish of stewed rhubarb, I know that the earth is once more sending forth good things to eat.\n\nIn my part of the country, Oregon, rhubarb was one of the first members of the vegetable world to emerge\u2014for it is a vegetable, and not a fruit, although we have treated it as a fruit all our lives, in fact, ever since it came into common use about 1835. Actually, both the plant and its root have been used for centuries\u2014in China, where one type of rhubarb originated; in Tibet, whence came rather rare varieties of rhubarb that are used in medicinal compounds; and in Siberia, which gave us the more common variety we know and grow. In the last thirty years, a lot of rhubarb has been grown in hothouses, the main difference being that the stalks are a delicate pinky red, whereas the field kind are deep, almost ruby red.\n\nThe Siberian rhubarb, the old stalwart harbinger of spring that we have had in our gardens for ages, used to be considered a great spring tonic. People took rhubarb and soda tablets, ate rhubarb, and drank sassafras tea in the belief that they were cleaning out their systems, but that habit has all but perished. Now rhubarb is enjoyed mainly as a dessert by those who like its tart acidity\u2014there are many who do and just as many who don't.\n\nThen, of course, there is rhubarb wine. In the Victorian and Edwardian eras, when bars and social drinking were not the customary thing, as they are now, this was one of the many homemade wines prepared and drunk by family and guests. I have friends in Pennsylvania and other parts of the country who still make rhubarb wine in May, when the rhubarb is most plentiful and the stalks big and juicy. One friend got her bottles mixed up one day and put her dry rhubarb wine in Harvard beets, instead of vinegar, which she discovered gave them the most wonderful flavor, so now she uses it that way all the time.\n\nA word of caution about rhubarb\u2014no matter how tempting the crinkly green leaves may look, don't attempt to eat them. They are so full of oxalic acid they can be very toxic.\n\nThough we usually talk about \"stewed\" rhubarb, the best way to cook these long lovely stalks, to my mind, is in the oven.\n\n  To make Baked _Rhubarb,_ take _1 _ pounds rhubarb, trim off the leaves and stem end, wash the stalks, and cut them into pieces 2 inches long. Put these in a pottery or porcelain casserole with sugar to taste (some people like their rhubarb sweeter than others, so I think one should sugar it fairly lightly when cooking, then let everyone add sugar at the table), about _ _ cup water, and a dash of salt. Cover and bake in a 350 degree oven for 35 to 40 minutes, until just tendet, but not mushy, with delicately pink-tinged juice. This baked rhubarb makes a delicious spring dessert served cold with brown sugar and heavy cream, or a little whipped or sour cream.\n\n  Or you can turn your baked rhubarb into that heavenly British dessert called a _Fool._ Bake 2 pounds rhubarb in the oven until it is quite tender, put it through a food mill to get a thick puree, and sweeten to taste. Just before serving, fold the puree into an equal quantity of whipped cream or sour cream and serve very cold in small glass bowls, topped with whipped cream garnished with a little shredded preserved ginger.\n\n  Most people are accustomed to eating rhubarb in a pie\u2014in fact for years it was called pie plant, and there are still some who refer to it by that name. This luscious deep-dish _Rhubarb Pie_ is a favorite of mine, served warm with heavy cream or whipped cream marbleizing the pink juices.\n\nMix 4 cups rhubarb, cut into half-inch pieces, with _  _to _1 _ cups sugar, 4 tablespoons flour or 2 tablespoons quick-cooking tapioca, _ _ teaspoon salt, and _ _ to 1 teaspoon grated orange or tangerine rind. Turn into a deep 9-inch pie dish lined with rich pie crust, and dot with butter. Trim the edges of the pastry, moisten them, top with pastry crust, trim the edges, and crimp top and bottom edges together. Cut slits in the top for the steam to escape. Bake in a 450-degree oven for 15 minutes, then reduce the heat to 350 and bake about 25 to 30 minutes longer. Serve warm or cold.\n\n_The Fruits of Summer_\n\nOne of nature's great gifts to us throughout the summer is an abundance of luscious fresh berries. To me these are still the most seasonal of fruits, despite the fact that some of them can be found in our markets year round.\n\nWe start with strawberries, from the tiny wild ones you can pick for yourself if you're lucky enough to live near a strawberry patch and have the necessary patience, to the giant berries with stems still attached that are flown from Arizona and California to all parts of the country\u2014and even to Europe. At their peak, these magnificent specimens have a full, round flavor that is as different in taste from the tiny wild variety as the berries are in size.\n\nThen there are raspberries, of which the red are perhaps my favorites of all summer berries. The black, which are much scarcer, I have never found to be anywhere near as good as their red cousins. I'm sure they must come from the poor side of the family, for they are seedy and completely undistinguished when set side by side with the red raspberries, which have a most delicate and distinctive flavor, whether you eat them picked fresh in the garden, bathe them in sugar and cream, or preserve them in a fine jam.\n\nThe gooseberry, alas, seems to be bowing out of the fruit picture, despite the fact that it makes a wonderful jam, fruit tart, and fool.\n\nNext to the strawberry, the juicy blueberry is the berry in most plentiful supply. Here is another fruit you can gather wild, if you live where the high-bush or low-bush blueberries grow. Blueberries, mostly the large cultivated variety you find in the markets in pint and quart containers, are probably eaten more often than any other berry, and in a greater variety of ways. They are superb when served, not chilled but at room temperature, with sugar and heavy cream, even better when covered with maple syrup and either sour cream or yogurt, a combination to dream about. Another partnership to delight the palate is blueberries and peaches. Combine ripe sliced peaches with large ripe blueberries, and give them some brown sugar or maple sugar and heavy cream.\n\nI often take a big bowl of the choicest blueberries, sugar them, and then sprinkle them with kirsch or yellow chartreuse. The liqueur adds great zest to the berries. And have you ever tried peppering blueberries? Sugar them well, give them a few grinds of fresh black pepper and a trifling amount of either Grand Marnier or Cointreau, shake them well to let the pepper sort of mix in, and you'll have something surprisingly good and delightfully restoring\u2014the spiciness of the pepper does the most wonderful thing for the flavor of blueberries, and for strawberries, too.\n\nBlueberries crop up in all kinds of intriguingly named baked dishes, some of them going back to the time of our ancestors. There's blueberry buckle and blueberry slump, blueberry kuchen, blueberry crisp, and blueberry pockets. Canada has an extraordinarily good version of blueberry pie made with three crusts instead of the usual two. You line your pan with pastry, put in blueberries and sugar, another layer of pastry, more blueberries and sugar, and cover with the top crust.\n\n  Of the puddings, Blueberry Slump is a typical, fine, old-fashioned dessert, homely and thoroughly pleasing.\n\nCook 1 quart ripe blueberries in a heavy saucepan with _ _ cup water, 1 _ _ cups sugar, and a good _ _ teaspoon nutmeg until well blended and slightly cooked down. Add more nutmeg if the berries seem to need it\u2014this spice goes as well with them as it does with peaches.\n\nWhile the blueberries cook, combine 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1 tablespoon sugar, and _ _ teaspoon salt, and sift well together. Combine with 1 lightly beaten egg, 3 tablespoons milk, and 2 tablespoons melted butter, and blend very, very well.\n\nWhen the blueberries have bubbled and boiled until they are thoroughly broken down, drop spoonfuls of the dumpling mixture you have made into the hot sauce. Cover tightly and cook for 10 minutes, then uncover, transfer the cooked dumplings to a serving dish, and spoon the blueberries over them. Serve with heavy cream, whipped cream, or ice cream. And if you cook the same basic mixture of blueberries, sugar, water, and nutmeg down very slowly, a little more than for the slump, until they are well cooked and quite thick, you have a marvelous hot sauce for ice cream.\n\n_Fooling with Berries_\n\nWhen raspberries and strawberries, gooseberries, blackberries, and loganberries are in season, my thoughts turn to fools. Fools are relatively unknown in this country (fruit fools, that is), although you will find an abundance of them in England and Canada during the spring and summer. The fool, one of the oldest English desserts, is basically nothing more than a mixture of pureed fruit, sugar, and thick cream, the simplest thing in the world. You find it in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century cookbooks, although it was made rather more elaborately then, according to Elizabeth David, the great English cookbook author, who has written a delightful dissertation on the subject of fools and another equally venerable dessert, the creamy syllabub. She conjectures that the name may have come from the French _foul_ \u00e9 _,_ meaning crushed or pressed.\n\nThe Philadelphia Quakers were fools for fools, too. I have a cookbook published in 1855 by Lippincott called The _Philadelphia Housewife_ or A Family Receipt Book by Aunt Mary that has a recipe for the most famous fool of all, _Gooseberry Fool._ No one seems to make it anymore, which is a great pity, as it is one of the most delicate, refreshing, and tempting of all hot-weather desserts, a delicious swirl of green and white.\n\n  If you can buy gooseberries, or grow them in your yard, here is how to make a fool out of them. Take about 1 pound really hard green gooseberries and about 3  cup sugar, and just cook them over very low heat until they are quite soft\u2014you may need to add a few drops of water to start the sugar melting. You don't have to stem the berries, as they will be sieved the minute they come off the heat. When they are quite, quite soft, taste to see that you have enough sugar, then put them through a sieve. Let the puree get quite cold before stirring in 1 cup of very thick cream. If it is not really thick, whip it lightly before adding.\n\nChill this lovely pale green fool until it is very, very cold. This amount will serve four, so double the recipe for a larger group.\n\n  You don't have to cook the berries for a _Strawberry Fool._ Just hull 1 or 1 _ _ pints ripe strawberries and sieve them. Stir about _ _ cup sugar (or to taste) into the puree, and add 1 or 2 tiny drops of lemon juice to accent the flavor. Then whip 1 cup heavy cream and stit it into the pur\u00e9e until nice and smooth. Spoon into a crystal or silver or pottery serving dish, and chill in the coldest part of the refrigerator for several hours.\n\nThe strawberry and gooseberry fools can also be turned into a smooth, mousselike ice cream by freezing them in ice trays in the freezer.\n\n  For a Two-Berry _Fool,_ sieve   pint ripe raspberries and   pint loganberries, and add sugar to taste. Loganberries can be quite tart unless they are dead ripe, when they have a sweetness of their own that needs very little sugaring. Mix the sweetened puree with 1 to 1  __ cups heavy cream, whipped. Pour into your serving bowl and chill in the refrigerator, as before.\n\nA thin crisp cookie or a slice of pound cake (see pages 188-189) or similar dry cake goes very well with any of the fruit fools.\n\n  While we're talking about berries, here's anothet simple summer dessert, a _Strawberry Ice._ Combine 1 to 1  __ cups sugar and _ _cup water, heat until dissolved, and then boil for 5 minutes. Set aside to cool.\n\nHull and pick over 2 pints ripe strawberries, sieve them, and then add to the puree a few drops of lemon juice and 3 to 4 tablespoons orange juice. Stir the puree into the cold syrup and pour into ice trays. Covet with plastic wrap or foil, and freeze in the freezing compartment for 1 to 1 _ _ hours, until the mixture has begun to firm and form crystals. Remove from the freezer and beat up very well with a fork or whisk. Return to the trays, cover again, and freeze until solid but not frozen hard. For a finer texture, repeat the beating process one more time before the final freezing, being sure to beat thoroughly each time.\n\nIf you prefer, you can freeze the ice in an ice ctearn freezer. This takes only about 10 minutes, either by hand or by electricity, and should be done just before you are ready to serve. A delicate ice like this is far better when eaten fresh and a little bit soft rather than firm and hard and crystallized. Should you want a richer texture, whip about _l A_ cup heavy cream and add just before freezing.\n\n_The Strawberry Season_\n\nThe strawberry, which grows all over the world, is not really a true fruit in the strict botanical sense, but a member of the rose family, the genus _Fragaria._ The cultivated strawberries we see in our markets have a father fascinating history. They are descendants of an inspired crossbreeding of the Virginia strawberry _(Fragaria virginiana),_ the native wild strawberry of the eastern seaboard which was introduced into Europe around 1610, even before the Pilgrim fathers settled in New England, and the Chilean strawberry _(Fragaria chiloensis),_ which made the voyage a century later. From their marriage came hybrid strains which were brought back here in the mid-nineteenth century, and the number of varieties that have been developed since then is quite fantastic\u2014especially in California, where strawberries seem to thrive better than anywhere else. Although I will probably be criticized for saying this, I find that the strawberries grown in California, Oregon, and Washington are by far the greatest in this country. Those from Florida do not have the acid quality or the flavor of the others.\n\nWe are lucky in never having a shortage of these incomparable berries, for strawberries in their various sizes and shapes have become a year-round crop, with May and June as the peak months. Sometimes we get the very round smallish berries, deliciously sweet, at other times enormous oval berries, some of which are long and pointed. The choicest of these huge berries come with their long stems intact and can be eaten by the stem with powdered sugar and heavy or sour cream, or yogurt, whichever you prefer. Then we have the Marshall strawberry, a great berry for preserves, with a remarkable perfume and taste, which grows best in Oregon and parts of Washington.\n\nThere are two distinct types of strawberry. One is the cultivated, the other the tiny wild perpetual or alpine strawberry, which the French call _fraises des bois_ or _fraises des quatres saisons._ Europeans favor these little wild berries, which they consider to have a flavor and fragrance superior to the cultivated kind, known in France as _les gros fraises._ Actually, the larger strawberries are extremely good, too, and you will find them in France, in Germany, and in England, where they may be served for tea with clotted cream, one of the most glorious combinations known to man.\n\nThe French have come up with some very unusual ways of serving strawberries. I remember some years ago stopping for dinner with three friends at an inn not far from the famous old walled city of Carcassonne, in southern France. We were introduced to a dish called strawberries Car\u00adcassonne, which you may think sounds strange and shocking, but I can assure you tastes magnificent if properly prepared. Gorgeous big strawberries in their prime of ripeness were arranged in a deep bowl and sprinkled with just the right amount of sugar (I think one must always taste strawberries before sugaring them, because they take anywhere from no sugar at all to a pretty lavish amount.) Then the berries were given a sprinkling of very coarsely ground black pepper\u2014about twelve to fifteen grinds of the mill, and if that startles you, well it may! About _ _ cup of Armagnac, the brandy of the region (for which you could substitute cognac), was poured over the berries, with just a touch of lemon juice. The bowl was gently shaken so that the berries turned over and over and the flavors blended. The trick is not to bruise or break the berries, but just to let them become imbued with the amalgam of flavots. Try this remarkably different approach to ripe strawberries, serve them in individual dishes with a crisp cookie, and I guarantee you'll agree that the pepper does something devastatingly good to them.\n\nIn Venice I encountered peppered strawberries again, this time the wild _fraises des bois._ Instead of the usual liqueur, the berries were laved in sugar, pepper, and a little white wine vinegar\u2014a very delicate homemade vinegar with no sharp acidity\u2014all of which blended together to give the tiny berries a most intriguing sweet-sour-spicy taste.\n\nOne of the most famous of all strawberry dishes is strawberries Romanoff, which must have come from Russia in the old days. Everyone seems to have a different recipe for it, and I have one of my own which I'm going to share with you.\n\n  For four servings of _Strawberries Romanoff,_ hull 1 quart fine ripe strawberries, taste them, and sprinkle with sugar to your liking. Then add the grated rind of 1 orange, approximately _ _ cup orange juice, and _ _ cup port wine. Let the berries stand for several hours in the refrigerator, covered with plastic wrap.\n\nJust before serving, remove the berries and place in a serving dish with some of the juice. If they have thrown a good deal of juice, drain some off and put it in a separate bowl. Whip 1 _ _cups heavy cream, flavor with sugar and vanilla to taste and a few drops of port. Toss the berries with this cream, and serve at once with slices of delicate pound cake or tiny sugar cookies and the extra juice, to be spooned over each serving.\n\nThis is a superbly good dessert that does justice to the long and joyous strawberry season.\n\n_Cherry Ripe_\n\nWhen I was staying at the beach as a child, one of the things I most looked forward to was the great splitwood baskets of Bing cherries, picked from the trees in our backyard at home, that arrived by mail. The cherries from these enormous trees were as big as a small plum, with a deep blackish-red color, an exquisite flavor, and an unforgettable texture, the most delicious fruit one ever sank tooth into, completely and utterly soul-satisfying. From those days on, I have always loved ripe dark cherries.\n\nThe Bing is one of the two great varieties we have in this country. Strangely enough, it is one of the few fruits we grow that was named for a Chinese, a gardener called Bing who developed this large, dark, fine-meated cherry by crossing various varieties.\n\nThe other variety is the Lambert, a development of the Napoleon cherry, which is deep red and very sweet. The best Bings and Lambetts come from the West Coast. After the California harvest is over, the Oregon and Washington cherries start coming in about the third week in June and last into August, so there is a long period of fruition. Nothing, of course, is more blissful than to stand in a cherry orchard, pick a branch of these cherries, pop them into your mouth, and bite into their luscious juiciness. However, with modern methods of packing and shipping, I find that the cherries remain firm and fresh after being shipped across the country and taste almost as good when we get them on the East Coast as they do when freshly picked on the West Coast.\n\nCherries have many uses. The less sweet red cherries are much better for pies, but the glorious Bings and Lamberts are excellent in ice creams, puddings, and various kinds of tarts in which you want extreme sweetness. If you have a mind to, you can freeze cherries on the stem and enjoy them all year round. Take fresh cherries, wash them very well, leaving the stems on, then place them in freezer containers (I find the round or square plastic ones are best) and shake the container so the cherries nestle together tightly\u2014don't shake so hard as to crush them, just gently until they slide into place. Cover them tightly without more ado, and put them in the freezer. When you take them out, you'll find they have tetained all their beautiful natural color. It's fun to use them as a garnish or as a table decoration\u2014people never expect to see cherries out of season that look as if they had just been picked.\n\nIn August, when cherries are at their prime, you have a great opportunity to experiment with Bings and Lamberts. You might like to serve them just chilled, by themselves, eating them from the stem, or to poach them in sugar-and-water syrup, then flame them and spoon them over vanilla ice cream. Or you might try one of the many traditional European dishes made with cherries. Some of these may be new to you, so I am going to suggest one way of using Bings or Lamberts, a French dessert with the unusual name of _Clafouti aux Cerises. Cerises,_ of course, are cherries. What _clafouti_ means I haven't the faintest idea, but that's the name of the dessert, and see if you don't love it as much as I do. In this country, most people consider it should be made with pitted cherries, but I think part of the fun and tradition is not to pit them. Who minds a few pits if the dish is good?\n\n  For Cherry _Clafouti_ wash a scant 4 cups Bing or Lambert cherries. Pit them or not, as you wish. I would say not. Toss them with about 2 tablespoons sugar and 2 tablespoons kirsch or cognac, and let them stand for a few minutes while you cream 1 stick _( _ cup) butter with about   cup granulated sugar. Cream the butter very well and work in the sugar until the mixture is light and fluffy. Beat in 3 whole eggs, one at a time. Add 1 tablespoon grated orange rind and 1 cup unsifted flour. Blend very well, then add 1 teaspoon vanilla. Butter and lightly flour a 9-inch cake pan, pie pan, or spring form. Put a few spoonfuls of batter in the pan to cover the bottom, and distribute the cherries well in the batter, then pour the rest of the batter over the fruit. Sprinkle the top with 1 or 2 tablespoons granulated sugar. Bake in a 400-degree oven for 5 minutes, then reduce the heat to 375 degrees and continue baking until the cake tests done, between 40 and 45 minutes. Let it cool to just warm, and serve cut in wedges. Pass sweetened whipped cream with it.\n\nThis simple, extraordinarily good summer dessert is even more welcome in winter, made with frozen cherries. If you don't have cherries you can make it with fresh prunes, plums, nectarines, or pears, in the same way.\n\nTo me, the cherry season is one of the pleasantest we have, a time to feast on cherries in every possible way\u2014with one exception. I don't like cherries in that awful jellied black cherry salad that you find on so many tables throughout different parts of this country. With all the lovely things you can do with Bings and Lamberts, to trap them in insipid rubbery gelatin is an abomination. So keep your cherries pure and simple, and enjoy them in all their delectable unspoiled ripeness.\n\n_Prunes Are No Laughing Matter_\n\nPeople used to make all sorts of jokes about prunes. They were dubbed \"boardinghouse food\" and not considered to be elegant eating at all, which they really are. I don't know why prunes should strike us as so funny. The French, who have always been great lovers of the fruit (their stuffed prunes are one of the most delicious things you could possibly eat), take them just as seriously as any other food.\n\nThe center of prune growing in France is the town of Agen, and dishes that include prunes are called _a I'Agenaise._ As a matter of fact, it was the French who introduced the prune to California, our own center of prune production. Now, after a hundred years of growing, there are some 100,000 acres of prune orchards in the valleys of California and more in Oregon and Washington. While some people claim that Oregon and Washington prunes are even finer than those of California, it's a matter of opinion, although I do find some of the northern prunes extraordinarily good.\n\nThe prune is a variety of purple plum that we buy fresh during the summer and fall to make prune pies and cakes and preserves. In the valleys where the prunes are dried, the ripe fruit is washed, dehydrated, and processed. When prunes were dried in the open air, there was a good deal of variation among them, but nowadays they are given a very scientific warm-air treatment for about 18 hours that dries the fruit very evenly with controlled humidity. After drying they are graded according to size, then steamed to make them soft, moist, and tender, and packaged in various sizes and styles. You can buy very superior, top-quality jumbo pitted prunes at a premium price. These are wonderful to eat as they are or to use in dishes where the appearance of the prune is as important as the taste. The other prunes are packaged in various sizes from small to extra large, averaging from 67 to 43 a pound, depending on size.\n\nPrunes today are really ready to use, and they don't require all the presoaking of yore. Put them in a pan with an equal amount of water, cup for cup, bring them to a boil, and simmer about 10 minutes, then let them cool in the liquid. Or put them in a jar or bowl with an equal quantity of boiling water and let them stand overnight. Either way you will have nicely puffed prunes to which you may or may not add sugar, according to taste.\n\nI have a special trick with prunes. I put large prunes in one jar and smaller ones in another and puff them with the boiling-water treatment. Next day I drain off the water and cover the prunes completely with sherry or port (you can also use vodka, whiskey, or any liquor you like) and let them age in the jar for about two weeks before using them. I keep jars of these \"drunken prunes\" on the shelf at all times. Being in spirits, they require no refrigeration. For a quick dessert I take them from the jar and serve them topped with whipped cream, or I cook with them\u2014I make a prune cake, stuff baked apples with them, or puree them and mix them into a cake frosting. To make an extremely good hors d'oeuvre, I dry the prunes, put half a walnut, almond, or filbert inside, wrap them in partially cooked bacon, secured with a toothpick, and broil them until the prune is plump and the bacon quite crisp.\n\n  Prunes taste marvelous with pork. One of my favorite roasts is a _Loin of Pork Stuffed with Drunken Prunes._ Make an incision through the center of the eye of the loin and stuff the prunes into it. Salt the loin, and roast on a rack in a 325-degree oven, allowing 25 minutes per pound, until the internal temperature reaches 165 degrees on a meat thermometer. Baste with a little of the prune juice during cooking to give a slight glaze.\n\nWhen the roast is carved, you have a delicious, fruity black core.\n\n  When I have to whip up a dessert in a hurry, I take my drunken prunes and make a _Prune Souffle,_ a very different type from the usual one. Rub prunes through a food mill or sieve to yield 1 cup prune puree (you will probably need no sugar, as they are very sweet and sugar is used in the egg whites). Beat 6 egg whites until they form soft peaks, adding a pinch of salt, and _ _ teaspoon cream of tartar. At the soft-peak stage, gradually beat in 4 tablespoons sugar, and beat until you have a fairly stiff meringue with firm glossy peaks\u2014not too stiff, or it will break. Fold in the prune puree\u2014be sure it is thoroughly mixed with the whites, but don't overfold. Turn mixture into a buttered and sugared 6-cup _(1 _ quart) souffle dish, and bake at 375 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes, or until delicately browned and puffy. Serve with sweetened whipped cream sprinkled with finely chopped pecans or pistachio nuts.\n\nThis serves six, and it is an easy, showy, luscious dessert, not very high in calories, and one of the best ways to use the mighty prune that I know.\n\n_Upside-down Apple Pie_\n\nApple pie has been a tradition in this country for more than two hundred years, and in England long before that. Lovely fresh apples cooked to juicy tenderness, delicately flavored with sugat, perhaps a little bit of lemon peel, butter, nutmeg, or cloves, harbored in a crisp, flaky crust\u2014that's the kind of apple pie that dreams are made of, but how often do we get it? The type we tend to find in restaurants and at lunch counters nowadays, with a bottom crust as tough as cardboard, filled with badly cooked apples spiced with too much cinnamon, seems to be the norm. It is not very good eating.\n\nThe answer, of course, is to make your own. For a few weeks I had fresh firm green apples that cooked beautifully, and I had fun making pies. I tested a couple of recipes that I think should redeem the reputation of the apple pie. The first is borrowed from the French tarte Tatin\u2014and while it is not the authentic recipe I often wonder if anyone can claim that, because every one you find in a French cookbook is completely different. Some are superb and others not so good. Anyway, I decided what I was going to strive for, and the result came out pretty well, even if it does break with tradition.\n\n  Tarte Tatin is baked in a skillet with the bottom crust on top and inverted onto a plate soon after it comes from the oven. You have to handle it quickly and carefully, or the juices will run all over you and the apples with their luscious caramel topping will slide off the crust. To make the pastry for the crust, mix 1 cup flour and 2 tablespoons sugar with _ _ cup (1 stick) very cold butter or margarine, cut into small pieces. Add 1 egg yolk and _ _ teaspoon salt. Work the fat into the flour and egg mixture very quickly with your fingers or a heavy fork (or do it in a mixer with a paddle attachment), breaking up the fat and mixing it with the flour until it is the size of small peas. At this point, you may or may not need additional liquid. Judge carefully. If you add too much liquid, you'll have to add more flour, and that makes a tough crust. If you do need liquid, add a little ice water, a tablespoon at a time, work it in, then see if you can pull the dough into a ball with your hands. If not, add a touch more water. The idea is to get a light ball of dough that can be rolled out without crumbling or breaking apart. Pat the ball rather flat on waxed paper, wrap it up, and chill in the refrigerator from 30 minutes to 2 hours.\n\nWhen you are ready to make the tart, let _ _to  cup sugar melt in a heavy iron or aluminum 8-inch or 9-inch skillet over medium heat until it turns a delicate brown. Remove pan from heat. Arrange on the melted sugar 5 to 8 apples, peeled, cored, and cut in quarters or sixths. The exact number will depend on the size of the apples and the skillet; you need enough to fill the skillet and mound up in the center. Sprinkle them with 2 to 3 tablespoons sugar, and dot with 4 to 6 tablespoons butter, cut in tiny pieces. If you wish, sprinkle with a few grains of nutmeg or cinnamon. Personally, I prefer not to spice the apples for this tart.\n\nCarefully roll out the chilled pastry to a size that will fit inside the skillet. Then, since the exertion of being rolled may make it shrink a bit and you don't want that, let it sit for 5 to 10 minutes to rest (while you are preparing the apples). Lay it over the apples, tucking it down inside the skillet. Make about three holes in the top with a skewer or sharp knife. Bake in a 350-degree oven from 1 to _1  _hours, until the crust is brown and firm to the touch and the apples possibly bubbling up a bit around the edge. Remove from the oven and let it stand 2 minutes, then run a sharp knife around the edge of the tart and invert it onto a plate rather larger than the skillet. Do this quickly and deftly so the apples don't fall off. Should they shift position, push them back into place with a spatula.\n\nCut into wedges and serve warm or tepid. It's much better that way than cold, and it must be eaten fresh. With it you might have thick heavy cream, sour cream, or whipped cream, perhaps flavored with a little grated nutmeg.\n\n  For another, simpler version of this tart, fill a well-buttered ovenproof glass dish with the apples, cut as before. Sprinkle each layer with granulated sugar, little bits of butter, and a few grains of nutmeg or cinnamon. Add _ _ to  __ cup applejack. Roll out the crust, wet the edge of the dish, and fit the crust over it. Crimp the edge, if you wish, make a couple of steam holes on top, and brush with 1 egg yolk beaten with 2 tablespoons heavy cream. Bake at 450 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes (this is to prevent the crust from sinking), then reduce the heat to 350 and continue baking until the crust is beautifully browned and the apples cooked through. Serve the warm or tepid tart from the baking dish, accompanied by applejack-flavored whipped cream or vanilla ice cream. (If you're going to have ice cream, add a touch more applejack to the apples before cooking so the flavor comes through against the ice cream.)\n\nThe combination of apple pie and ice cream is another American custom of long standing, and a delightful one, too.\n\n_Ice Cream City_\n\nEveryone knows Philadelphia as the city of brotherly love where our independence was declared in 1776, but how many of you are aware that it is the ice cream capital of the country, maybe of the world? This has been going on for a pretty long time. When Philadelphia became the seat of government and George Washington the first president, \"iced creams,\" as they were then called, were often served at the presidential Thursday dinners. We have reason to believe that they were not quite the same as our luscious delights made commercially or at home in an ice cream freezer, but mixtures of cream, sugar, and eggs beaten in metal bowls over ice so that they had more the texture of the soft ice cream sold in certain places today.\n\nBy the beginning of the nineteenth century, Philadelphians were ice cream addicts. There is a record of the opening of an early form of ice cream parlor by an Italian who advertised that he purveyed \"all kinds of refreshments, as Ice Cream, Syrups, French Cordials, Cakes, Clarets of the best kind, Jellies etc.\" After the great Exposition of 1876 Philadelphia became known across the country for the excellence of its ice cream, by then a popular American delicacy, and to this day the words \"Philadelphia ice cream\" connote the highest quality. Philadelphia confectioners were famed for their ice cream. Sauter's was one. I can remember that in Reading, Pennsylvania, theirs was the ice cream served at the most elegant parties. Sauter's is gone, alas, and with it those wonderful ice creams and cakes, but you can still get luxuriously rich ice cream, high in butterfat, from Bassett's, another Philadelphia institution noted for inspired and unusual flavors such as casaba melon and Irish coffee.\n\nThen there is Zendler's, a most extraordinary shop run by Mollie and Fred Zendler, who for more than twenty years have supplied Philadelphia's balls and parties with wondrously shaped and tinted ice cream frozen in a collection of over 300 old ice cream molds of every imaginable design and size. Molding and tinting ice cream is practically a lost art, and if you are in Philadelphia you should visit the Zendlers and see their collection. I have about seventy of these old molds that were left to me by a friend who had cherished them throughout her lifetime, and though from time to time I use them for dinner parties, mostly I just leave them heaped in a big bowl where people can enjoy looking at them.\n\nYou can sometimes pick up old ice cream molds in antique shops at a rather exorbitant price, but for general purposes you can use large molds such as melon molds, charlotte molds, and bombe molds sold in kitchen equipment shops. Bombes (not the kind that blow up) are truly spectacular desserts, the kind served at great parties. They consist of various textures and flavors of ice cream, parfait, or sherbet frozen, unmolded, and beautifully decorated or surrounded with spun sugar.\n\n  Another highly decorative dessert is the frozen pudding, of which probably the most popular is _Nesselrode Pudding,_ an indecently delicious confection. To make it, soak _ _ cup currants and _ _ cup raisins for _ _ hour in cognac barely to cover. Drain, reserving the cognac. Beat 5 egg yolks for about 1 minute with a whisk, then add   cup sugar and continue beating, with a whisk or in an electric mixer, until the mixture is very thick, a light lemon color, and forms a ribbon. Heat 2 cups heavy cream in a saucepan just to the boiling point, then beat it into the egg yolk mixture with a whisk or in the mixer. Return to the pan, and cook over medium heat, stirring, until it coats a spoon thickly\u2014on no account let it come to a boil or you'll have sweet scrambled eggs. Remove from the heat and stir in 1 can unsweetened chestnut puree (sold in gourmet shops and some supermarkets) or 1 cup candied chestnuts broken into small pieces. Add the reserved cognac, currants, raisins, and 2 teaspoons vanilla.\n\nNow whip 1 cup heavy cream until it begins to thicken, add 3 tablespoons sugar, and continue beating until quite firm. Fold into the chestnut mixture, making sure they are well combined and thoroughly blended. Lightly oil a 1 l -quart melon or charlotte mold and fill with the mixture. Cover securely. Melon molds have a tight-fitting cover with a handle, and so do some charlotte molds, but if yours doesn't you can seal the mold with foil and Scotch tape. Leave the mold in the freezer compartment for about 5 to 6 hours, or until solidly frozen, and about 15 minutes before serving, transfer it to the refrigerator. To serve, unmold it onto a chilled serving dish\u2014you may have to run a towel, wrung out in very hot water, over the mold to loosen the pudding or dip the bottom of the mold in hot water for just a second, not long enough to melt it.\n\nGarnish the frozen pudding with whipped cream piped through a pastry tube or with candied chestnuts stuck into little nests of whipped cream and a few candied cherries.\n\nThis beautiful dessert, a joy to look at, with an exquisite flavor, is reminiscent of the glorious heyday of Philadelphia's ice cream desserts, so integral a part of our sweet-tooth history.\n\n_The Frost Is on the Sherbet_\n\nWe call it sherbet, and to the French it is _sorbet_ (pronounced sohrbay), a word that I think falls much more pleasantly on the ear. The Oxford Dictionary defines sherbets or sorbets as a variety of frozen sweets (for which, in America, read desserts), and they are probably the earliest known. Originally from the Middle East, sherbet (spelled sharbat in Persia, serbet in Turkey) was a cooling drink with a base of fresh fruit, sweetened, diluted, and chilled\u2014in the far distant past, with snow. The idea was copied later on throughout Europe with sherbet powders, which were used to make drinks and, after freezing was introduced, for water ices made with purees, of fruit and other things, mixed with sugar syrup and frozen.\n\nNothing could be more delightfully apt than this description of a dinner, from the London _Daily Telegraph_ of September 27, 1864, \"The menu meandered gracefully through fish, flesh, fowl and truffles and finally melted away into sorbets.\" Sorbets do indeed melt away, in your mouth, in the most glorious manner, and they make a perfect ending for a good dinner.\n\nWhen I was last in Paris, I dined at a new and charming restaurant called La Cannelle, at 53 Quai des Grands Augustins. It's a very gay, chic kind of place, frequented by the younger set, where dinner is served quite late and you positively must have a reservation. To me, the outstanding thing about the menu was the number of sorbets on the dessert list, and the extraordinarily interesting flavors and combinations. One was a sorbet of cassis, or black currants. In this country, fresh black currants are not grown or sold, and can only be bought imported in jam, the liqueur called creme de cassis, or a nonalcoholic cassis syrup. You can make a cassis sorbet by combining the pureed jam and the liqueur or syrup.\n\nAt La Cannelle the cassis sorbet was served with cassis liqueur poured over it at just the right moment. I was also intrigued by the pineapple sorbet, served on a quarter of fresh pineapple. The flesh had been sliced off, cut in small pieces, and rearranged on the skin with the sorbet on each side so one ate a bite of pineapple and a spoonful of sorbet. One of my friends chose a lemon sorbet, deliciously tart, that had paper-thin slices of fresh lemon, dipped in sugar, pressed into it. The pale yellow sorbet ornamented by the curves of the lemon, skin side up, made a very pretty dessert, and the flavor was accented by Russian vodka, poured over it at the table.\n\nAnother exciting flavor combination was the delicate pear sorbet, made with Bartlett pears and a touch of _eau de vie de poire_ (pear brandy), served with hot chocolate sauce. Two of the most unusual sorbets on the list were the coconut one, which had a little mound of freshly grated coconut on top, and the marron sorbet, crowned by three perfect marrons glaces, or candied chestnuts. If I were making this, I'd add a little bit of vanilla or cognac to the sorbet mixture to bring out the chestnut flavor.\n\nSo now that I've whetted your appetite for these luscious frozen desserts, I'm going to give you the basic method. It's really very simple. The only piece of equipment you need is an ice cream freezer, although in a pinch you can use ice trays, in the freezer. If you have an ice cream attachment for your electric mixer, which is the prize of my kitchen, you can make the sorbet between the main and dessert courses. Sorbets are always best made at the last minute and served soft, not frozen hard. They give off their joyful fruity flavor much more generously. If you make sorbets in ice trays, let them thaw slightly before serving.\n\n  For a basic _Fruit Sorbet,_ boil _ _ cups sugar with 1 cup water until dissolved, then boil for 5 minutes more. Allow to cool. Beat this syrup into 2 stiffly beaten egg whites, and then mix in 2 cups fruit puree. For an orange or lemon sorbet, use the grated rind, juice, and pureed pulp of 3 oranges or lemons, and 2 cups of other pureed fruits (if you use raspberries, strain them to remove the seeds). Then freeze the mixture in ice trays. If you make the sorbet in an ice cream freezer or a sorbetiere, a gadget specially designed for making sorbets, proceed as you would for ice cream, but be sure to take it out before it is solid as a rock, or you will kill the flavor and texture.\n\nFollow the basic method for any sorbet\u2014the possibilities are endless. You could have a different flavor every night, all summer long. Sorbets are really perfect hot-weather desserts, refreshing to the palate, easy to make, and a wonderful conclusion to any luncheon or dinner.\n\n_Syllabubs_\n\nSyllabubs are one of the oldest of all English desserts, and they have been known in this country, especially in Maryland, Virginia, and other parts of the South, since the first American colonies were established. The odd-sounding name itself\u2014sometimes spelled \"sillibub\"\u2014comes from the early English word \"silly,\" meaning \"happy,\" plus a dialect word, \"bub,\" meaning liquor. As you will see, it is a very happy alcoholic dessert indeed. Essentially fragile, it is a concoction of wine, seasonings, sometimes brandy or cognac, and cream, all of which is whipped to a froth. The froth is skimmed off and served in glasses. This makes one of the most delicious, lightest, and punchiest desserts imaginable, particularly pleasant served along with a good piece of sponge cake or a nice crisp shortbtead cookie.\n\nIn their heyday syllabubs were as popular as ice cream is today, a featured dessert when entertaining guests and a favorite family sweet. Here is an early American recipe for it, which is now far more picturesque than practicable, but it gives a good idea of what a simple, homely dessert it started out to be. It is aptly called Country Syllabub and comes from a cookbook published in Philadelphia at the beginning of the nineteenth century.\n\n \"For Country _Syllabub_ mix _ _ pound of white sugar with a pint of fine, sweet cider or white wine and grate in it a nutmeg. Prepare them in a large bowl just before milking time. Let it be taken to the cow and have about three pints of milk milked into it stirring it occasionally with a spoon. Let it be eaten before the froth subsides. If you use cider a little brandy will improve it.\"\n\nWell, I don't think very many of us could produce that dessert nowadays. I, for one, do not have a cow in my garden\u2014to say nothing of the inconvenience of having to rush out of doors as the dinner hour approaches. Although people really did make syllabubs in this and equally quaint ways, most recipes are quite easy, like this one, which is also rather old.\n\n  \"Take a quart of cream and a pint of Rhenish wine [this was Rhine wine] and the juice of four lemons. Sweeten it to your taste. Put in it some lemon peel and whip it up with a small rod. Put it with a spoon into some syllabub glasses.\"\n\nThat is basically the recipe we use today. I am next going to give you a very simple recipe for a traditional syllabub and then a modern one for a glamorous and delicious raspberry syllabub.\n\n  The first of these _Syllabub_ recipes must really be started a day before serving. It calls for 1 small glass _(  _cup) of white wine or sherry, 2 tablespoons of brandy, 1 lemon, _ _ to _ _ cup sugar to taste, _ _ pint of chilled heavy cream, and a few gratings of nutmeg.\n\nShred or grate the rind of the lemon and extract the juice. Put rind and juice in a bowl with the wine and brandy, and leave it overnight. The next day transfer this to a 2-to 3-quart bowl, add the sugar, and stir until it is dissolved. Add the heavy cream very slowly, stirring it continuously to blend thoroughly with the other ingredients. Grate in a little nutmeg. Beat with a wire whisk until it thickens and holds a soft peak when the whisk is lifted from the bowl. This may take 5 minutes or more, but be patient\u2014it will thicken. The result must not be grainy or curdled. Spoon it into 2 or 3-ounce glasses, add a little lemon zest, and serve cool but not chilled. It is much better if it is not refrigerated and is best when eaten soon after whisking, although it can be kept in a cool spot for a whole day.\n\nServe with some dry cookies, shortbread cookies, or shortbread fingers. You will find that you have a dessert that is delicious, unusual, and fun, as well as being historical.\n\n  The second recipe for _Syllabub_ uses fresh or frozen raspberries. If you are using frozen, thaw and drain 1 package, reserving the juice. You won't need any sugar with this, since frozen raspberries are quite sweet as they are. If using fresh berries\u2014you will need 1 pint\u2014place in a bowl, add sugar to taste, and crush lightly. In either case add 1 tablespoon kirsch or a little rose water to the raspberries, or, lacking these, a touch (about _ _teaspoon) vanilla or lemon juice. Let the flavored berries stand while you prepare the cream. Whip _ _ pint heavy cream until it is stiff but not stiff enough to hold peaks. Add to this about _ _ cup white wine, or beat in the juice from the raspberries to which you have added a bit of lemon juice. Beat again so that the cream stiffens slightly more. Then, using a spoon, fold in the raspberries so that they streak the cream with red and are distributed throughout. Spoon into chilled glasses and chill for an hour or two before serving.\n\nServe with ladyfingers, sponge cake fingers, or good sugar cookies. Each of these \"happy-liquor\" desserts will bring cheer to four people.\n\n_Queen of Desserts_\n\nOne of the greatest desserts in the realm of cooking is called creme brulee, and despite its name it is not a French dish but a very old English one. No one seems quite to know when or how it became Gallicized, for over a long period of time it was known simply as burnt cream. The earliest recipe I have been able to find was ptinted in a seventeenth-century cookbook from Dorsetshire. After that it had a rather interesting history and gained considerable renown. Originally, this was a rich custard, a mixture of sugar, egg yolks, and cream cooked over heat, then poured into a dish and cooled. The top was then sprinkled with sugar and the sugar caramelized to a brown glaze with a red-hot salamander, an old type of heavy metal tool which was lowered to the surface of the sugar and moved over it until the intense heat melted and browned the sugar, hence the name burnt cream.\n\nCreme br\u00fbl\u00e9e became a standard dessert at Cambridge University, especially Christ College, where it was made in a special dish designed by the Copeland-Spode Company. This was round, about as wide as a soup plate, an inch deep, and heatproof so that it could withstand the tremendous heat genetated by the salamander. It's amusing to read old cookbooks and to discover the many versions of creme brulee\u2014sometimes it was made with gooseberry or raspberry fool instead of custard.\n\nIn various guises, it became the acknowledged queen of British desserts. I can remember having it at a number of places, including the Houses of Parliament. You still are more apt to find it served in England, although in America we went through a great creme brulee period a number of years ago, and I wish we would again, for to my mind it is without peer\u2014few desserts are more delicious to eat and to look at. There is such a subtle contrast of flavor and texture between the creamy custard and its crisp caramelized topping.\n\nIn the years during which the recipe has been used in the United States, the original recipe has been considerably changed, and I'm not sure it is for the better. Many American recipes call for a topping of brown sugar, and although I have used this from time to time, I've never felt the result was all it should be. So much of the brown sugar you get these days does not have the texture it used to. I now use fine granulated sugar instead, and it makes a much more delicious crust.\n\n_ _ Although the dessert sounds simple, there are a couple of tricky points about the preparation, so I'm going to give you my version of Cr\u00e8me _Br_ \u00fb _l_ \u00e9 _e._\n\nHeat 1 pint heavy cream, the heaviest you can get, to the boiling point. Lightly beat 6 egg yolks with _ _ cup sugar and a pinch of salt, and pour the hot cream over them, stirring constantly with a wooden spatula or wire whisk until well blended. Add 2 teaspoons vanilla or a little mace or any other flavoring you desire. Strain the custard into a 1/2-quart heatproof baking dish, stand the dish in a pan of warm   water, and bake in a 350-degree oven for 25 to 30 minutes, or until the custard is completely set but not overcooked. Do not let the water in the pan boil. Remove from the oven, cool, and then chill thoroughly in the refrigerator.\n\nAbout 1 _ _to 2 hours before serving, sprinkle the top evenly with fine granulated sugar to a thickness of about _ _ inch. Put under the broiler (or use a salamander, if you have one) until the sugar is melted and bubbly, watching carefully to see it does not scorch and burn. Remove, cool, and chill again until serving time. You'll have a hard, highly glazed crust on top of an unctuous, voluptuous custard. This will serve about six. If you have more guests, double the recipe, using 12 egg yolks to a quart of cream.\n\nThis is the method of making cr\u00e8me br\u00fbl\u00e9e that I prefer. However, after combining the cream with the egg yolks and sugar, you may cook the custard gently until the mixture coats the spoon\u2014stir constantly, and be sure it does not come to a boil. Pour into the baking dish, cool, chill, and glaze the sugared top as above. When the custard is cooked this way, rather than baked, the consistency is less firm, so be sure the chilled custard is completely set before sprinkling it with sugar, or the sugar may sink to the bottom of the dish, which is not what one wants at all.\n\nWhile you can certainly serve cr\u00e8me br\u00fbl\u00e9e alone, it is sometimes fun to gild the lily a bit. I like a little cream with it, either heavy cream or whipped cream, flavored perhaps with a touch of cognac. Dry, short, sweet cookies are fine with it, and so is a piece of good honest plain cake.\n\n_Playing Around with Pound Cake_\n\nI remember when I was young, my mother always had a pound cake in the larder. One week it would be a caraway seed cake, with the little pungent flecks pushing through the smooth golden-yellow cake. Another week it might be a citron cake, with thin slivers of citron on the top (never mixed in, lest they sink to the bottom). Sometimes there were chopped walnuts in our cake, or ginger, which gave it an exotic, spicy flavor. Pound cake was our standby. We had it for tea, toasted for breakfast, and as a foundation for fruit desserts, with fresh or poached berries, poached plums or peaches, and slathers of heavy cream poured over everything.\n\nWith its fine grain and buttery richness, pound cake is one of the greatest of all our cakes, deserving of a place of honor next to a fine fruit cake and the delicate French genoise. Pound cake must be just about as old as baking. You find recipes for it, under various and sundry names, in England, the United States, Canada, and other countries where the British ruled. Originally, the cake was made with a pound of butter, a pound of flour, a pound of sugar, and a pound of eggs, hence the name, and according to the proficiency and mixing ability of the baker, it was apt to be a pretty heavy cake, for there were no mixers in those days. Some people beat the eggs in whole; others separated them, putting the yolks in with the butter and sugar and then folding in the whites.\n\nIt seems to me that in the last twenty-five years, as our tastes have changed and we have learned to appreciate more delicate fare, the old, somewhat heavy pound cake has been reevaluated. We still love its delicious, rather stately quality, but we have found ways to improve on this great standard loaf cake. We have played around with the recipes of our mothers and grandmothers and found that we can improve on them. Why not? I am sure that if the great Careme were alive today he would use modern equipment and methods to improve on his superb pastries. I like to fool around with pound cake, and recently I did some experimenting.\n\nFirst I made a real old-fashioned one, laboriously beating in every egg by hand. It rose beautifully, but after it had cooled and I sliced it and took a bite, I thought: \"Glory be! Is this what I always considered to be the be-all and end-all of cakes? It's not the way it used to taste to me.\" Actually, it was not the cake, but my palate, that had changed. In my experimentations I came up with a cake that I think is lighter and more delicious and keeps bet-tet. This pound cake bakes well in a well-buttered and floured angel-cake or tube pan. Loaf pans work perfectly well, if you prefer that shape.\n\n  One trick for making _Pound Cake_ is to sift your flour very well indeed. Sift 3 cups all-purpose flour onto waxed paper, then spoon it gently into a measuring cup. Spoon it back into the sifter, add 1 teaspoon baking powder and a good heavy pinch of salt, and sift twice more, each time spooning it very lightly into the measuring cup. Then, instead of beating all the sugar into the butter, use part of it to make a sort of meringue. Beat the whites of 7 extra-large or 8 large eggs until they hold soft peaks, then very gradually beat in 1 cup sugar, about 2 tablespoons at a time, beating thoroughly.\n\nPut in a large bowl 1 pound very soft butter, and cream with a wooden spoon or your hand until very light and fluffy. Then beat in   cup sugar, using a wooden spoon, a whisk, or the electric mixer with a paddle attachment. Beat in the 7 or 8 egg yolks until light and lemon-colored, and add 2 tablespoons cognac and 1 tablespoon grated lemon rind. Gradually fold the sifted flour mixture into the butter-sugar-egg mixture. Finally, fold in the beaten whites to make a smooth batter, being careful not to overmix.\n\nPour the batter into your buttered and floured tube or loaf pan, and bake in a preheated 350-degree oven for 1 hour. Test with a cake tester to see that it is thoroughly baked. The edges should break away slightly from the pan sides. Remove from oven, and cool on a rack for at least 12 to 15 minutes. A few more minutes won't hurt. Loosen the sides very, very gently with a spatula and invert the cake on the rack to finish cooling. There you have your beautiful pound cake, which you can vary by flavoring it with caraway seeds, mace, nutmeg, or ground ginger, or by putting thinly sliced citron on top just before baking.\n\n_Tea Drinkers, Unite!_\n\nOne of these days I'm going to start a militant organization of tea lovers, dedicated to improving the standards of the tea served in hotel dining rooms and restaurants. I'm a tea drinker, and I've found that getting a good cup of tea in any public place in this country is virtually an impossibility. It's generally assumed that everyone wants to drink coffee, and the tea drinker is given very short shrift indeed.\n\nI well recall ordering tea one morning in a very famous hotel and being given something that was definitely tap water with a tea bag on the side. When I complained, the waitress retorted, \"I knew I was going to have trouble with you. Now I'll have to go downstairs and get some boiling water.\"\n\nThat's the general attitude, yet it is so simple to make a good cup of tea. All you need is boiling water, a pot, preferably of earthenware or porcelain, and tea or tea bags. As the water comes to a boil, rinse the pot to get it well heated, add the tea or tea bags, pour on the freshly boiling water, and let it stand and steep for 3 or 4 minutes. Is this too much trouble? Certainly when you consider the price charged for a pot of tea it shouldn't be. Why, when coffee brewing has been brought to a fine art, should we be forced to accept mediocrity in tea?\n\nAt home I prefer to use loose tea, but away from home I've come to accept tea bags. The trouble is that no restaurant gives you more than one, and the amount of tea in a tea bag is totally inadequate for even a small pot\u2014except in Canada, where the tea bags are larger and hold more than ours. You can always ask for two tea bags, but you'll still get the same old routine\u2014a pot of barely warm water with the tea bags on the side.\n\nI'm slightly cheered to notice that there is a growing increase in the types of tea sold throughout the country, with all the great names in tea such as Twinings, Ridgways, and Fortnum & Mason represented on the shelves of grocery stores and supermarkets.\n\nI always have at least four different types of tea on hand. For breakfast I like Darjeeling, an Indian tea that is also a component of the excellent blend called English Breakfast Tea. For afternoon drinking, I keep a selection, for to me there is nothing more comforting than to come home, feeling a bit tired and weary, and make myself a pot of steaming hot tea.\n\nFirst, there's Formosa Oolong, from an island that produces some of the world's finest teas. It has the wonderful bouquet and slightly exotic flavor characteristic of the true Oolong leaf. Then I have Lapsang Souchong, a smoky Chinese tea cured over peat fires, delicately colored and extremely bracing and pleasurable to the palate and pungent to the nose. I also keep Keemun, another China tea of rather distinctive flavor and bouquet, and that old favorite, Earl Grey, which has an almost orangy aroma, very relaxing and cozy, the kind of tea you like to sip with a toasted muffin or scone or a slice of cake, in the English manner.\n\nI love afternoon tea. I remember, years ago, driving into Westchester to a charming old farmhouse where they served tea and the most delicious cinnamon toast I've ever tasted. They took good bread and toasted it on one side. Then the other side was well spread with butter and sprinkled rather heavily with brown sugar and cinnamon. This was run under the broiler and watched carefully until the sugar melted and mingled with the butter and cinnamon. By the time the almost candied toast had been removed from the oven and cut into strips it was crispy on top and luxuriously rich when you bit into it. I often make this cinnamon toast\u2014it's one of the best contrasts to a good cup of tea you can imagine.\n\nTo me, tea should always be drunk from thin, nicely shaped cups, and I prefer mine plain. Although one is often served cream with tea in the United States, milk is preferable. It blends better and has a pleasanter flavor. For sweetening, I think lump sugar is more delicate and fitting than granulated.\n\nOn a really cold day\u2014or even on a hot one\u2014you might try what used to be called Russian tea, a boiling hot cup of fairly strong tea to which you add a little rum, a slice of lemon, and, if you like, sugar. It's refreshing, relaxing, and delicious.\n\nNow if all tea lovers got together, surely we could prevail on restaurants and hotels to give us a good, hearty, fairly strong cup of tea to satisfy our thirst with its steaming briskness. And when it comes to iced tea, we should insist on having freshly made tea poured over an ample amount of crushed ice and served at once, rather than the usual horrid brew kept all day in a large container until it is stale, tasteless, and full of tannic acid. Tea is such a precious thing that it is well worth fighting for.\n\nMy _Historic Cup of Tea_\n\nThe company whose tea was twice thrown into Boston harbor at the famous tea party, more than two hundred years ago, is still shipping tea to the United States. I discovered this rather startling fact one morning when I was having a cup of remarkably good tea in the offices of the British Travel Association.\n\nSomeone brought in a tin of the tea we were drinking, and I noticed that it was called Boston Harbour tea. \"What's this?\" I asked, and I was told that it came from Davison, Newman, the English company whose tea was dumped overboard in the first and second Boston tea parties, in December 1773 and March 1774.\n\nDavison, Newman is an outgrowth of an old firm that was started about 1650 in a father remote part of London on the Southwark side of the Thames, near the famous George Tavern, one of the most remarkably preserved old inns in London, where the food is still served in great style. They have moved a couple of times since, but they are still in the same area, so when I was visiting London one time I decided to drop in on Mr. Leslie Simons, the present director of Davison, Newman & Co. Ltd. He took time out to show me some of the old files and records of the petitions the firm made to George III to make good their losses on the tea. George, true to form, never paid up, and there is still a debt outstanding for some of that tea. Mr. Simons told me that some schoolchildren in Massachusetts and, I think, San Jose, California, read about the money still owing and raised a little bit which they sent as a token gift to Davison, Newman to help recoup some of their losses, which I found a very touching gesture.\n\nI noticed that in the early days Lapsang Souchong, the great Chinese tea, was selling for three shillings a pound, about forty cents at today's rate of exchange, and Pekoe for four shillings and sixpence, or sixty cents, which says something for the inflationary rise. Davison, Newman no longer ships China teas, only the India Ceylon teas, which are more in demand in America at this point. Boston Harbour tea, beautifully packaged in a tin bearing a replica of the petition to George III, has a small distribution, primarily in New England.\n\nDavison, Newman was also one of the first companies to ship Scotch whisky to the United States, and at one point in their history they maintained a huge sugar plantation in Jamaica. Their sign, indicative of their business and status, is a crown and three sugar loaves, and it has hung outside each of the shops in the three moves they've made over the last three hundred years, so the business came to be known as the Three Sugar Loaves and Crown. In the old days, sugar was sold in these moundlike loaves, round at the top and wider at the base. They were cut in pieces, as needed, and broken up in a mortar and pestle to provide fine sugar for baking, sweetening, or sprinkling on fruit. The company was also one of the earliest chocolate merchants, shipping this and sugar to America as well as tea, so they were very much a part of the early beverage habits of this country from the beginning. I'm very sentimental about some things, and this really struck a chord.\n\nEven though we are regarded as a coffee-drinking nation, there are still a lot of tea fanciers in the United States. After I wrote bemoaning the fact that the tea in most restaurants and coffee shops is badly and carelessly made and at times almost undrinkable, I got a stupendous amount of mail from people who agreed with me that we should all unite and try to force restaurants to give us tea made with boiling water and allowed ample time to steep. No more dragging along a tea bag and a cup of warm water and expecting to make tea out of them at the table.\n\nTo me there's nothing nicer and more soothing than sitting down in the afternoon to a good cup of tea with a piece of cake or a cookie, or a slice of homemade bread, cut paper-thin and spread with unsalted butter.\n\nWhen I was a child, my mother used to make for our afternoon tea a pound cake (see page 188) enhanced by 2 tablespoons of spicy, pungent caraway seeds. Usually you associate that almost indescribable flavor of caraway with bread, but try it in this cake for a change.\n\n_Tea, English Style_\n\nOne of the great joys of being in England, as I rediscovered when I spent a few days in London this summer, is being able to sit in the comfortable lounge of a hotel, in a club, or in certain restaurants and have afternoon tea. To me one of life's social pleasures is being able to take tea with friends, to relax and talk, reminisce if you will, letting the stimulus of the steaming tea alleviate any feelings of fatigue from a long day's shopping or sightseeing and warm the cockles of your heart.\n\nWhen I was a young man studying in London and hadn't much money to spend, I looked forward to the luxury of having tea at that famous old hotel, the Ritz, which in those days cost two shillings and sixpence, then about fifty cents. For this you were given a pot of freshly made tea, wonderful thin sandwiches, toast, and pastries, with the soothing sound of string music in the background. As I couldn't afford to give dinner parties, my way of repaying the hospitality of people who had been nice to me was to invite two or three at a time to tea at the Ritz, which always seemed to delight and entertain them.\n\nSo here I was some forty years later, sitting in the Ritz with a friend who had also loved this very English ritual, drinking tea and eating little pastries and sandwiches that weren't quite as good as those we remembered, but we were content. We were recapturing a shared experience in a place that was part of our long friendship and our lives.\n\nAnother day I had tea at Brown's, a famous old-time hotel that is typically British in its background and clientele. I remember when tea there was presided over by a maitre d'hotel who looked as if he had spent his life as the head butler in some great country mansion. He was exceedingly forbidding to newcomers until he got to know them or found they tipped well! He is long gone, but Brown's still retains some of that feeling of being a country house, and tea is rather a pompous ceremony, much more so than at the Ritz or the Grosvenor House.\n\nThe Grosvenor House is much more cosmopolitan, and in its enormous tea lounge I was fascinated to see Americans, English, Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Italians, and quite a few people in Arab dress having afternoon tea. Afternoon tea is a good time to people-watch, which I find is very important when you travel. Most of us people-watch too little. By watching people and seeing their reactions, you gain new ideas and insights and learn to know them by observation.\n\nThe tea sandwiches at the Grosvenor House were extraordinarily good. They were about 5 inches long and 2 inches wide, made from good moist white bread, not the Kleenex type, which had been cut paper-thin and spread with sweet butter. There were sandwiches made from ripe tomatoes that had been quickly scalded, peeled, the seeds squeezed out so the liquid didn't make the bread soggy, then coarsely chopped and seasoned with a little salt and pepper. There were watercress sandwiches, ham sandwiches, chicken sandwiches, and cucumber sandwiches, which with tomato are my favorites among tea sandwiches. These are made with the long European cucumbers, now appearing in our markets as \"seedless\" cucumbers, which they really aren't although they do have fewer seeds than the ordinary type. If you can't buy them, scrape the seeds from ordinary cucumbers, slice them very thinly, sprinkle them with salt, and let them sit for an hour to draw out the bitter juice. Then dry them on paper towels and put between thin slices of buttered bread with salt, pepper, a tiny squeeze of lemon juice, or just a brush of mayonnaise.\n\nWith the tea sandwiches you are given a hot plate of crisp toast with marmalade and jam and tiny little pastries. You choose the tea you prefer, India, Ceylon, Pekoe, the rather smoky Lapsang Souchong from China, the brisk Earl Grey, or a delicate China tea like Oolong or Keemun.\n\nIn England, teatime is the time for relaxation and good talk. We in America take for granted that it is the cocktail hour, but I strongly recommend a revival of this civilized custom. If we could only resurrect the pleasure of the tea hour and then move on to cocktails later, we'd be much better fortified and prepared for the evening.\n\n_Hot Chocolate_\n\n_A_ steaming cup of hot chocolate with buttered toast is surely one of the most heart-warming, body-warming, and taste-satisfying combinations known to man. When I was growing up in Portland, Oregon, my friends and I used to go to a great place called Swetland's where we would sit and sip some of the most luscious thick hot chocolate I have ever tasted.\n\nLater on, when I visited France for the first time as a young man, I found the French breakfasting on enormous cups of hot chocolate with buttery croissants or good rolls and butter, an enchanting marriage of flavors. It wasn't only the taste of the chocolate but also the way it was served in the old days that was so nice\u2014I remember that at Maillard's, on Madison Avenue in New York, you drank it from delightful white porcelain cups that had \"hot chocolate\" lettered on the sides. Some of those old chocolate cups and mugs were really works of art.\n\nAll that seems to have faded away, and it is just too bad. Chocolate now has become something that is tipped out of a little paper bag into a cup, dissolved with hot water, and served with artificial whipped cream or a marshmallow stuck on top. This is not hot chocolate, and it really pains me to think that a whole generation is growing up never knowing the glories of a truly well made cup of hot chocolate.\n\nChocolate, as you undoubtedly know, was one of the greatest gifts of the New World to the Old. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in Mexico, they found some of Montezuma's courtiers drinking as many as fifty cups of chocolate a day. In fact, it has been surmised that Montezuma's love of chocolate occasioned the first chocolate ice cream\u2014runners were sent to the mountains to bring back snow over which the whipped chocolate was poured. Personally, I think that is stretching history a bit, but it is an amusing, if apocryphal, story.\n\nSince those days, chocolate has always been popular in Europe, and it is still drunk a lot in France and Vienna and throughout Central Europe, although the British tend to favor its less elegant relative, cocoa. Cocoa and chocolate often get confused, probably because both come from the cacao bean. Chocolate is made from the dried, roasted, and crushed \"nibs\" of the bean, which yield a thick liquid very high in cocoa fat. This is partially defatted, cooled, and solidified into a block of unsweetened chocolate, the type used for baking (semisweet baking chocolate has some sugar added).\n\nCocoa is a powdered form of chocolate with practically all the fat removed, so it is much lower in calories.\n\nHot chocolate can be made with sweet chocolate, unsweetened chocolate, or semisweet chocolate. The French use sweet chocolate, the Spanish unsweetened chocolate, and the Mexicans and Puerto Ricans a packaged sweetened chocolate flavored with cinnamon and sometimes blended with finely ground almonds that is combined with milk to make a very rich drink. If you are using unsweetened chocolate, I think that honey, rather than sugar, makes a very pleasant sweetening.\n\n  For each cup of Hot _Chocolate,_ melt a 1-ounce square of unsweetened chocolate in a heavy saucepan (less of a problem if you melt it in a warm oven rather than over direct heat), then mix in 1 cup cold water and honey to taste. Heat over medium heat, beating with a whisk or rotary beater, until it reaches the boiling point and is good and foamy. Serve with a dusting of cinnamon on top, or whipped cream if you like.\n\nThe rotary beater is our modern equivalent of the traditional Mexican _molinillo,_ a little wooden stick with a roughly carved end that is twirled between the palms to beat the chocolate to a froth. The old chocolate pots had rounded bottoms and a _molinillo_ that stuck through a hole in the top, and they made a beautifully foamy chocolate. You can still buy _molinillos,_ and they are rather fun to use.\n\n  To make chocolate with the Mexican cinnamon-flavored sweet chocolate, use 1 ounce per cup and heat with cold water or, for a richer result, warm milk or light cream, beating as before. With semisweet chocolate, melt 1 ounce per cup, then stir in warm milk and a bit of cinnamon, vanilla, or vanilla bean, and heat until it comes to a boil. It is unlikely that you will need further sweetening, but taste and see.\n\n  For another delicious chocolate drink, equally good hot or chilled, for every 4 cups melt 4 ounces semisweet chocolate, then add sugar to taste and 1 cup hot coffee. Blend the coffee with the melted chocolate, and then gradually stir in 3 cups warm milk, beating until it reaches the boiling point and is foamy. Pour into heated cups and serve with whipped cream dusted with cocoa or cinnamon.\n\nIf you let the chocolate cool and then pour it over ice cubes in a tall glass and top it with whipped cream, you'll have iced mocha, as refreshing and welcome on a hot day as hot chocolate on a cold day. \n  CHAPTER 7 __\n\nBread, Cheese,and Wine\n\n...in _which we encounter three honest loaves ... trace the tradition of pita . . . try our hand at sandwiches ..._ _flip over pancakes ... meet the big cheeses of America ..._ _uncork the secrets of wine cookery ... sample an American country wine ... enjoy the youthful charms of Beaujolais ... and the infinite varieties of Champagne._\n\n_Nothing Beats Homemade Bread_\n\nI went to a dinner party the other night where something rather remarkable and heartening happened. After coffee, one of the guests got up and said to his wife, \"We must leave now. I have to set my bread.\" This man had never cooked before in his life. He just had this thing about making his own bread.\n\nWhen you think about it, bread baking makes more sense than some other forms of culinary endeavor. The disappearance of the neighborhood baker and the pushing of those abominable, tasteless, elastic loaves that fill the supermarket shelves are warnings that the day is coming when we'll be forced to make our own bread or write off one of the greatest and simplest pleasures of the table.\n\nTurning out an honest loaf is less work than you might imagine, and soothing therapy as well. All that kneading and punching down will soon get rid of the day's frustrations. Nor do you have to make a big batch. I bake a single loaf at a time, and it keeps up to a week in a plastic bag in the refrigerator. Or I may make two small loaves and freeze one, against the time I'll need it.\n\nProper hard-wheat bread flour is not easy to find in this country, but well worth searching for. There are three or four good commercial unbleached flours with enough hard wheat in them to make a fine loaf, and any number of mills that sell by mail excellent flours, some water-ground. I get a flour made from North Dakota winter wheat from a mail-order house in Pennsylvania (they also have that other rarity, soft-wheat pastry flour).\n\nThe quality of granular yeast has improved considerably, but if you prefer to use fresh yeast, as I do, that may present a problem too. If you can't find it in the stores, try the bakeries. Ask for it casually, as if it had never occurred to you that buying yeast in a bakery wasn't the most normal thing in the world, or they will act as if they are doing you a big favor in selling it to you.\n\n  For a 1-pound loaf of _Homemade Bread,_ weigh a pound of flour or measure 3\u00bd to 3  cups of flour. Put it in a 4-quart bowl and add a good tablespoon of salt, preferably coarse or kosher. I like bread to be salty; it makes a much better loaf. Cream a   ounce cake of fresh yeast with 1 tablespoon sugar, and then add _ _ cup warm water\u2014hot tap water, 90 to 95 degrees. While some say it is not necessary, I like to let the yeast proof (start to bubble) before adding it to the flour. When it has proofed, add another   cup warm water. Make a well in the flour, and pour in the yeast mixture.\n\nMix the flour and the liquid together with a wooden spoon or your hands until the dough leaves the sides of the bowl pretty well clean (with some flours you may need a small additional amount of liquid). Turn it out onto a lightly floured board and, with floured hands, knead away. Pat out the dough, fold it over, and knead again. Be sure to turn it as you knead. When the dough ceases to be sticky, feels firm and silky, and blisters slightly as you work it, it is ready. Put it in a buttered bowl, cover with a clean towel, and let rise in a warm, draft-free spot. A slightly prewarmed electric oven or a gas oven heated only by the pilot light is a good place.\n\nWhen it is doubled in bulk, which takes about 1 to _1  _hours, remove to a floured board and punch down, then knead very well for 3 to 4 minutes, really giving it a beating down this time.\n\nForm the dough into a sausage shape and plop it into a well-buttered 9-inch loaf pan. Cover with a towel and let rise for 45 minutes to 1 hour. Then bake in a 400-degree oven for 40 to 45 minutes. Test by rapping the crust with your knuckles\u2014a hollow sound means it is probably done. Turn the loaf out onto a rack and rap the bottom. If it seems soft and doesn't give off a hollow sound, replace in the pan, upside down, and return to the oven for a few more minutes. Then cool, out of the pan, wrap in a towel, and store in a plastic bag.\n\nI doubt you'll find a better loaf anywhere, and you have the satisfaction of knowing you made it yourself.\n\n_One_ Man's _Bread_\n\nI have always maintained that bread making is one of the most popular\u2014and one of the most misunderstood\u2014subjects in the culinary realm. Now, after reading the response to a column in which I gave a recipe for a loaf of bread I have been baking and enjoying for fifteen years, I'm convinced of it. Never have I received such a deluge of letters, with the returns running about sixty in favor of and forty against what I called a good, honest loaf.\n\nPerhaps I should have pointed out at the time that this bread is in many respects different from the familiar American type, which tends to be light, fluffy, and spongy. Mine is a typically European bread made with flour, yeast, water, and salt but no shortening or milk, the kind you would find on the table in France, Italy, or Spain. It is firm-textured with a good crust, chewy, flavorful, and well salted, the way I like bread to be. The dough requires more kneading than regular bread dough and takes a good deal longer to rise, both the first and the second time. The ideal flour to use for this kind of bread is hard-wheat flour.\n\nThis is not a keeping bread, nor is it intended to be. In most European countries bread is bought every day, sometimes two or three times a day. It is best when eaten fresh or no more than a day or so old, although it will keep for as long as a week if wrapped in a towel and a plastic bag and stored in the refrigerator. It can also, of course, be frozen. You may bake the bread in a loaf pan or shape it into a round loaf and put it on a well-buttered baking sheet. When I bake it in a pan, I usually take it out fifteen minutes or so before the end of the baking time and leave it in the oven, out of the pan, to give a harder, crisper crust.\n\nThis is not to say that bread made with milk and shortening isn't excellent also\u2014it's just another loaf entirely, with a texture and flavor of its own. Here's a recipe for a typical, good American white bread, in case you would like to try one against the other.\n\n  For _American White Bread,_ proof 1 package active dry yeast in _ _ cup warm water (90 to 95 degrees) with 1 tablespoon sugar. If you use a yeast cake instead, cream the sugar and yeast together before adding the warm water. Heat 1 cup milk with 1 tablespoon salt and 3 tablespoons butter until the butter is melted. In a large mixing bowl, combine the yeast and milk mixtures. Mix well. Stir in from 3 to 3\u00bd cups all-purpose flour, just enough to make a stiff dough. Turn the dough out and knead on a floured surface with floured hands until it is no longer sticky, turning the dough often so that it is evenly broken down. Knead for a good 10 minutes, then place it in a buttered bowl, turning it so the top is filmed with butter.\n\nCover and leave in a warm, draft-free place until doubled in bulk, 1 to 1 _ _ hours or slightly more. Punch the dough down, knead it lightly, and form into one large or two small loaves. Place in a well-greased loaf pan or pans and allow to rise again until light and doubled in bulk, from 45 minutes to 1 hour.\n\nIf you want a glazed top, brush with 1 lightly beaten egg white combined with 1 tablespoon water before baking. Bake in a preheated 400-degree oven for 20 minutes, then reduce the heat to 350 degrees and continue baking for another 20 to 30 minutes, or until the bread is well browned and sounds hollow when rapped with the knuckles. Remove from the pan and cool on a rack. If you make this bread with unbleached hard-wheat flour the texture will be more substantial and the flavor better, but you will have to knead it longer and let it rise longer.\n\nSo now you have your choice of breads\u2014firm or soft, chewy or fluffy. Either way, you'll have a fine loaf. Good baking!\n\n_Ireland's Famous Bread_\n\nIf anything could be considered the national food of Ireland, Irish stew and corned beef and cabbage notwithstanding, it would have to be soda bread. You find it on every table in that enchanting country\u2014in homes, hotels, and restaurants. Wherever you go there is soda bread\u2014freshly baked, packaged, even frozen, made with whole-wheat flour or white flour or oatmeal, sometimes with raisins and sometimes without.\n\nTraditionally, soda bread is baked over a peat fire in a three-legged iron pot that can be raised or lowered over the fire in the old-fashioned way. Glowing peat sods put on top of the pot give an even heat for baking. This all-purpose pot, used for just about everything from stews to cakes, is the origin of the phrase \"to take pot-luck,\" and lucky indeed would anyone be to drop in at an Irish cottage or farmhouse and be given homemade soda bread for tea. For soda bread is very different from any other bread you find anywhere in the world. It's round, with a cross cut in the top, and it has a velvety texture and unusual smoothness quite unlike yeast bread and the most distinctive and delicious taste. Sliced paper-thin and buttered it is one of the best tea or breakfast breads I know, and it makes the most wonderful toast for breakfast or for sandwiches.\n\nAfter spending a few weeks in Ireland, I have been playing around with soda bread because I discovered that although the recipes you get in Ireland work well if you are using Irish ingredients, when you are working with our flours you have to change the recipe a bit. After about three or four months of experimenting 1 considered that I had evolved a very satisfactory process, so I gave a little dinner party for three people who are actively engaged in the food business and tried out my latest soda bread achievement on them. I always find this is a good test. I try a recipe for myself, and if it turns out well, I then try it on other people and see their reaction\u2014and I don't always tell them what I'm up to; I just wait and see what they say. If they say nothing, of course I feel quite deflated and strive to do something better. This time I gave my guests both a white and a whole-wheat soda bread, and they were delighted with them, so I think I can safely pass the recipes on to you.\n\n  When you start to make your _Irish Soda Bread,_ set the oven at 375 degrees. This bread doesn't have to rise first like yeast bread. For the whole-wheat loaf, take 3 cups whole-wheat flour and 1 cup all-purpose white flour and mix it with 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 tablespoon salt, 1 very level teaspoon baking soda, and   teaspoon baking powder. The original recipe doesn't include baking powder, but I made this change because I find that in America you get a much better result by adding it. Mix all this very well so that the soda and baking powder are thoroughly distributed, then add enough buttermilk or sour milk (and since sour milk is not easy to come by these days you are better off with commercial buttermilk) to make a soft dough. Most recipes call for 1 cup of buttermilk, but I find the amount varies a good deal and you need closer to 2 cups. You will just have to sense when you have a good soft dough, similar to a biscuit dough. Knead on a lightly floured board for 2 or 3 minutes until it is quite smooth and velvety-looking, and then form it into a round cake. Place it on a well-buttered 8-inch cake pan or well-buttered cookie sheet and cut a cross on the top of the loaf with a very sharp floured knife. Pop it into the 375-degree oven and bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until it has turned a nice brown and sounds hollow when you tap it with your knuckles. The cross on the top will have spread into a sort of deep gash, which is characteristic of Irish soda bread. Let the loaf cool completely before cutting it into paper-thin slices\u2014soda bread must never be cut thickly.\n\nFor the white loaf, use 4 cups white flour, preferably unbleached and the same amounts of salt, sugar, and baking powder as before, but decrease the baking soda to   teaspoon. Mix like the whole-wheat loaf, adding just enough buttermilk to make a dough that is soft, but not so soft that it spreads; it should hold its shape. Knead for several minutes, form into a round cake, cut a cross on the top, and bake as before.\n\n  There are all kinds of ways to vary this basic soda bread recipe\u2014you might add to the white loaf 1 tablespoon sugar and _ _cup golden sultana raisins or dark raisins or currants which you flour lightly and stir into the batter at the last minute. Or you can use chopped walnuts and raisins. These are very pleasant tea breads, and the plain raisin bread makes delicious toast, nice and moist. You can experiment and play around with the bread, using maybe half white flour and half whole-wheat, or add other flours such as rye, soy, barley, in the ratio of three parts to one part white.\n\nAs far as I'm concerned, I like mine plain and simple, served well buttered with some good preserves and a nice strong cup of tea.\n\n_How to Eat a Pita_\n\nPita is a bread that for centuries has been used in the Middle East in place of a plate, or as knife, fork, and plate in one. It has quite a distinctive appearance, round and very flat. To eat it, you tear it across so that it opens into two halves, like an envelope. Often sold as Syrian bread or Middle East bread here, pita is made in two or three different sizes, from small to large. The tradition of pita goes back hundreds of years in the Arab countries, for it was baked and carried with the caravans when cooking was done over open fires. Meat was roasted on spits or skewers, shish-kebab fashion, and people took the spit in one hand and an open piece of pita in the other and slid the pieces of meat into the center. The bread, folded around the meat, made a neat oozeproof package, substituting for both fork and plate.\n\nI find pita great for outdoor parties, so much handier and more versatile than hamburger buns, which are apt to lose their contents when you bite into them. I like to barbecue hamburgers or patties of chopped lamb mixed with pine nuts, garlic, and parsley on skewers (metal, or bamboo ones that have been well soaked in water) and serve them with individual loaves of Arab bread as a novel kind of sandwich. My guests are invariably intrigued to be given food in these edible plates (which have the added advantage of being lower in calories than buns or rolls), and I save on dishwashing afterward! Pita is ideal for almost anything you would put in a sandwich\u2014slices of meat, chicken, ham, or cheese (you can pop it in a hot oven and let the cheese melt inside).\n\nNowadays, pita is sold in plastic bags all over the United States, even in supermarkets, but in case you would like to try your hand at making it yourself, I'm going to give you the recipe. It's extremely simple, and there's only one thing to make sure of before you start: that your oven, which must be very hot, around 500 degrees, will maintain an even heat so the bread puffs up properly. Check with an oven thermometer to see that the temperature stays exactly on the nose. A good reliable oven will keep a pretty steady temperature, but if yours is questionable, give it a long preheating and check it very well between batches of bread.\n\n  To make _Pita,_ combine in a bowl _ _ cup warm tap water, 2 packages active dry yeast, and _ _ teaspoon sugar. Stir until yeast is thoroughly dissolved and beginning to work a little. (If you use 2 fresh yeast cakes instead, add the sugar and beat with a fork until it melts down\u2014you may need more than  __ teaspoon with fresh yeast, maybe 1 teaspoon. Then add the _ _ cup warm water and let if proof.)\n\nSift into a large bowl 6 cups all-purpose flour, bleached or unbleached. I use unbleached myself. Combine with 3 tablespoons olive oil and _1 _ to 2 teaspoons salt (or _2 _ teaspoons if, like me, you prefer salty bread). Beat in 2 cups warm tap water, using a wooden spoon or electric mixer with a dough hook. When well blended, beat in the yeast mixture until completely blended. Turn the dough out onto a floured board and knead about 10 to 12 minutes, until it is very smooth, satiny, and no longer sticky, as good bread dough should be. Oil a bowl, put in the dough, and turn to coat it with oil on all sides. Let rise in a warm place until double in bulk, about _1 _ to 2 hours. Punch the dough down, knead again for 2 or 3 minutes, then roll into a thick sausage about 15 to 16 inches long. Cut this into 15 to 16 equal-size pieces and pat each one into a ball. Roll out on a floured board into circles 6 to _6 _ inches in diameter and three-sixteenths of an inch thick. The precise thickness is important, so measure accurately with a ruler. Place the circles on pieces of foil just large enough to take one round. Let stand at room temperature for 1 hour to rise again. Do not place in a warm spot to hurry the rising.\n\nMeanwhile, preheat the oven to 500 degrees and put the shelf at the lowest point in the oven. Place the foil pieces right on the shelf, without a pan. Bake until the bread starts to brown and puffs up like a weak balloon. This takes about 5 minutes. Remove and serve hot, or put directly into plastic bags which will keep the loaves moist and pliable until you are ready to serve them (reheat them for a minute or two first). This bread also freezes well. To reheat, wrap stacks of 4 to 6 loaves in foil and put in a 375-degree oven for 10 to 15 minutes.\n\n_Super Sandwiches_\n\nOne of the great American arts, which varies from being a triumph to being a disaster, is the art of sandwichmaking. There's more to this than meets the eye. First, the all-important foundation. You must have good, firm bread and sweet butter. Next, the filling. This should be fresh, tasty, pleasing to the palate, and, above all, of an elegant but not excessive sufficiency, for an overstuffed sandwich is vulgar, messy, and difficult to eat. It doesn't matter if the filling is nothing more than peanut butter and jelly. Provided it is the best peanut butter and the best jelly, it can be just as satisfactory as some magnificent fancy of foie gras, truffles, and breast of pheasant.\n\nI love good sandwiches. They may be the tiny, tempting tea sandwiches the English do so well, made of paper-thin slices of buttered bread, and chicken, ham, pate, cucumber, tomato, or radish; hearty fried-egg sandwiches on thick slabs of bread with salt, pepper, and maybe a bit of bacon, ot any of the lusty combinations that have gone down in American gastronomic history, such as the Reuben and the club.\n\nThe Reuben, of course, was named for New York's famous delicatessen deluxe, which I first remember when it was at Madison Avenue and 59th Street. It stayed open practically all night and served really extraordinarily good food. You can find the Reuben all over the country, either as a meal-in-itself sandwich or in a miniature cocktail version, and it varies in quality from excellent to awful. I'm not sure who has the right formula. As I recall, the first ones were not toasted. They were made with corned beef, Swiss cheese, cole slaw, and Russian dressing on pumpernickel, and I think sometimes there was a slice of turkey breast, too. Now the standard version seems to be a toasted sandwich of corned beef, sauerkraut, and Swiss cheese. This is an extremely good sandwich combination, but sometime you might try the other version and compare the results. The club sandwich also used to be rather different. In the last thirty years or so it has evolved into a triple-decker, but as I remember, it was originally made with just two slices of toast, thinly sliced chicken, tomato, and mayonnaise.\n\nOrder a club sandwich today, and you'll get chicken or turkey, tomato, bacon, mayonnaise, and lettuce or not, as you wish. Provided the toast and bacon are crisp and hot and the other ingredients of the highest quality, this can be a divine mixture of flavors and textures.\n\nNot long ago I discovered, right around the corner from my house in New York, a most remarkable little delicatessen-type restaurant that had been there for years and somehow I had neglected to explore. One day when my secretary and I were working through the lunch hout she said, \"I'll just run up to Igor's and get us a sandwich,\" and she brought back from this tiny Arts Food Restaurant, which is run by a couple called Igor and Sonja, a menu that I found startlingly original.\n\nThe sandwiches are imaginative, carefully made, and taste as if someone put them together for themselves, not for the assembly line. That day I had a Volga Special #1, thinly sliced smoked salmon, Russian dressing,  red caviar, and a tiny touch of onion on pumpernickel, and it was one of the best sandwiches I've had in a long time. Another day I picked the Anne G. Special\u2014a really hearty sandwich of cold rare roast beef, Cheddar cheese, broiled tomato, and bacon\u2014and once I had the Brevoort, a combination of turkey, ham, hard-boiled egg, tomato, and homemade Russian dressing. Each one was outstanding, and rated high on all points. I wish more people used this kind of imagination in making and presenting sandwiches.\n\nOne person who does is my friend Teddy Watson. Teddy runs a superb catering business in Portland, Oregon, called Yours Truly, and when she has an order for finger sandwiches for a tea or cocktail party, she scoops out a huge round pumpernickel loaf, fills it with neat layets of the little rye bread sandwiches, puts back the top as a lid, and ties it with a gigantic bow\u2014and the sandwiches stay beautifully moist inside until eaten. You might try this cocktail loaf for your next party.\n\nAnother good idea if you are entertaining a lot of people is to have a sandwich buffet. Put out a variety of good rye and pumpernickel breads and crunchy French rolls (plus one or two homemade breads if you like to bake), sweet butter, relishes, cole slaw, homemade mayonnaise, and all kinds of fixings\u2014thinly sliced ham, roast and corned beef, lobster, shrimp, pates and meat loaf, and a batch of sliced cheeses. Then let your friends run riot and make their own combinations.\n\n_The Pancake Principle_\n\nNot long ago, driving in the Northwest, some friends and I stopped for gas and were attracted by the looks of a restaurant we saw across the street. We went in for a cup of coffee and, although we had already breakfasted, found the menu so fascinating that we weakened and ordered griddle cakes, described on the menu as being made from a recipe handed down from a relative of the owner, known as \"Sigrid the Great\" because she had weighed 298 pounds. If that wasn't enough to sell us, the price was. A stack cost ninety cents, a short stack seventy cents, and a very short stack fifty cents.\n\nOur friendly waitress suggested that, as we weren't particularly hungry, we just split one very short stack between the three of us. When it arrived, it was a dream, a big, tender beautiful pancake which spread over a huge serving plate, accompanied by homemade jam, heated syrup, and whipped butter. After one taste of that pancake, which was light, tender, flavorful, and everything a good pancake should be, had we not already eaten, I'm sure we would all have devoured a stack which was described on the menu as being too much. There was also a pancake sandwich listed, the first time I've ever seen that on a menu, consisting of two of these enormous pancakes with a thick slice of ham tucked in between and a fried egg or two slipped on top. This, with butter and jam, would be a fairly substantial breakfast, don't you think?\n\nIt all made me ponder what a tremendous part and heart of our diet pancakes have always been. Of course, they were not originally American. There were the thick fluffy Scots pancakes served cold or warm-for tea, and the English pancakes, more like the French crepes, which are a built-in tradition for Shrove Tuesday feasting, But ours are most closely linked with our heritage, which was sturdily based on wheat cakes, flannel cakes, and stacks of sourdough pancakes, and you can still see in any restaurant or coffee shop in the mornings people devouring great piles of pancakes. There are pancake houses all across the country where **** pancakes are served in combination with everything from bacon and sausage to steak, chicken, and chili.\n\nThere is something very warm and friendly about the smell of pancakes cooking on a griddle, and the sight of that big comforting stack with its accompanying warm butter and warm honey or maple syrup, little crispy sausages and bacon, does the heart good. This is a great meal.\n\nI think we are lucky in the various kinds of pancakes that nourish our lives and spirits\u2014the thick, light, baking powder or soda breakfast pancakes that puff up and get thick; flannel cakes, which are sometimes cooked very thin on a griddle but still retain that soft, tender texture, like the fabric for which they are named; and those plain, wonderful, old-fashioned sour milk pancakes, for which I'm going to give you a traditional recipe. If you make the batter thinner, you will have a more spreading, thinner cake than if you make it thick and drop it on the griddle in little patties (sometimes called \"dollar-size\" on menus). The large thin ones can be rolled with butter and syrup or preserves and served either for breakfast or for a luncheon dessert.\n\n_ _ Getting sour milk is a bit of a problem nowadays, so we'll use buttermilk instead for _Old-Fashioned Pancakes._ Start by beating 2 eggs until light, fluffy, and lemon-colored. Beat in 2 cups buttermilk rather well, then add 1 teaspoon salt, 2 teaspoons sugar, and 1 cup flour which has been sifted with _ _ teaspoon baking soda and 1 teaspoon baking powder. Then add enough additional flour (about 1 to 2 cups) to make a batter with the consistency of very heavy cream. Add _ _ cup melted butter. This makes a good smooth batter that is better if allowed to rest at least 1 hour. If you are making pancakes for breakfast, let the batter sit in the refrigerator overnight\u2014you may have to add a small amount of extra liquid in this case before baking your cakes.\n\nHave a griddle very hot and well buttered, and spoon on your batter to make cakes of the desired size. Watch them until they show tiny bubbles. When the surface is entirely covered with bubbles, turn the cakes with a large spatula and brown on the other side. Serve hot at once, or butter them well and keep them warm in the oven. They will not wait, and become rather dreary when cold.\n\nI think pancakes should always be served with melted butter and warm syrup or honey, and I rather like to serve a little piece of lemon with them because a few drops of lemon juice on the hot syrup or honey gives you a most intriguing and delicious contrast of flavors, adding another dimension to this honest, homely food.\n\n_Speaking of Cheese_\n\nI'm happy to see that more and more people in this country are becoming addicted to cheese, which, with wine, is such a vital and important part of the good life. New cheese shops spring up every day, and whereas twenty-five years ago there were maybe no more than ten or fifteen well-known cheeses imported, now there must be at least a hundred or a hundred and fifty to choose from. Unfortunately, though, there is no quality control on a great deal of cheese that comes in, and all too often it is carelessly handled and stored.\n\nCheese, as I'm sure you all know, should be kept cool, but not icy cold, and it should be allowed to come to room temperature before being served. One of the great tragedies of most American restaurants is that they give you cheese straight from the refrigerator, so chilled it is practically inedible, or else they try to pass off on you a cheese that is overripe and past its peak. Soft cheeses, especially the great Brie and Camembert of France, reach a point of perfect ripeness, after which they go rapidly downhill, developing a strong smell of ammonia and a most unpleasant taste. There is an art to selecting and serving cheese. In the restaurants in France one is always aware that the cheeses have been carefully chosen and kept at the proper temperature, but I can think of very few restaurants in New York, and even fewer around the country, where cheese is treated as it should be.\n\nWe are not yet accustomed to eating cheese as a course on its own after the entree, as the French do, with an excellent red wine. I wish more people would adopt this pleasant custom, for cheese and wine are natural and great partners. The best of all ways to finish off the bottle of fine red wine you opened for dinner is with a platter of cheese, and bread or crackers. I like French or Italian bread with Gruyere, Pont l'Eveque, Bel Paese, Roquefort, and Gorgonzola, and I prefer English water biscuits or Bath Olivers with Brie, Camembert, and the softer cheeses, but this is purely and simply a matter of taste.\n\nI happen to love all kinds of cheese, from the simple Cheddars to the great soft cheeses of France, and one of my perennial arguments is with a certain type of cheese snob who, while constantly on the lookout _for_ new and \"interesting\" imports, claims that there is no American table cheese worth considering. That's a lot of rot. Anyone who takes the trouble to acquaint himself with the best cheese of this country will find that they are often far finer eating than their foreign counterparts, which frequently, through shipping delays and careless handling, are not all they might be by the time they reach the stores.\n\nAll very well, you may say, but what are these great American cheeses and where do 1 find them? Let's start with one of the least familiar, an Iowa cheese called Maytag, for whose creation thanks are due to the appliance manufacturer of the same name. Maytag ranks as one of the best bleu or blue-veined cheeses in the world and is this country's finest example. It is seconded only by the blue-veined cheese from Langlois, Oregon. To the best of my knowledge, Maytag can only be ordered by mail and as a whole cheese, but it keeps well in the refrigerator if tightly covered with plastic wrap and aluminum foil.\n\nYou think only France can produce good Brie? Not a bit of it. Illinois can lay claim to a first-rate Brie, made under the name of Kolb [now \"Delico\"], that is properly aged, creamy, and rich in flavor. Another outstanding American Brie, one I have enjoyed since my youth, comes from the Marin French Cheese Factory in Petaluma, California. Their cheeses, put out under the Rouge & Noir label, also include a decent Camembert and a small cheese similar to Camembert, about 4 inches across, called breakfast cheese. They are mostly available in the western states, but there are occasional shipments to the East Coast, and a real cheese buff will find them well worth tracking down.\n\nTurning to Ohio, we find another domestic Camembert that makes grand fare when properly aged and not overchilled in storage It hails from the locale that gave us one of our truly original creations, Liederkrantz. This soft, runny, pungent native cheese on the order of Brie or Camembert came about by accident, the way so many great cheeses are born. Liederkrantz must be eaten at its rich and creamy peak before the flavor becomes too sharp and an aroma of ammonia sets in, and it needs about three hours out of the refrigerator to come to room temperature and perfection.\n\nBacktracking westward, we have Teleme, a soft, rich creamy California cheese. Then there's the aged, ripely scented, rather strong cream brick cheese made in both Oregon and Wisconsin. This distinctive all-American product can be found in many of the cheese shops that have sprung up around the country. Again, serve at room temperature to draw out its full nuances.\n\nFinally we come to our many and varied Cheddars. Variously referred to as rat cheese, store cheese, or American cheese, they are for the most part true Cheddars and come in both white and red versions, the difference being that the latter are colored when mixed. Some of the Vermont and New York State Cheddars are extremely well aged and therefore much sharper than the younger, milder Cheddars from Wisconsin and Oregon. Blandness may be to the taste of the majority of cheese eaters in this country, but I happen to prefer that strong, characteristic Cheddar bite.\n\n  One of my favorite cocktail foods is this _Cheddar-Chili Spread,_ tangy and different for a cheese board. Take _ _ pound (2 cups) grated sharp Cheddar at room temperature and combine with 2 chopped canned peeled green chilies, _ _canned pimiento, also chopped, a small garlic clove, grated, _ _ cup softened butter, 3 to 4 tablespoons of brandy, sherry, or bourbon, a few drops of Tabasco, and salt to taste. Mix in the bowl of an electric mixer or mash with a fork until it has a good spreading texture (if too stiff, add cream or milk, a few teaspoons at a time, until **** it has the right consistency). Serve in a crock, or form into a large ball or log and roll in chopped toasted nuts or chopped parsley or chives.\n\nServe with crackers, Melba toast, or sliced French bread and provide a knife to spread it with.\n\nCooking _with Wine_\n\nOne of my pet abominations is the ersatz liquid sold in supermarkets as \"cooking wine.\" I remember during Prohibition encountering a so-called cooking sherry so heavily laden with salt that you could taste nothing else. I hate to think what would have happened to any recipe to which such a noxious potion was added.\n\nThere's only one wine to cook with, and that's the same wine you drink. The old French saying, \"The better the wine, the better the dish,\" sums up the reason for cooking with wine\u2014because it adds flavor. Cooking with wine is not fancy cooking or extravagant cooking, simply good cooking. For the most part only a cup or half a cup of wine goes into the dish, and the rest of the bottle will be left to drink with dinner. The French, who are pretty thrifty folk, pour wine into the pot as readily as we pour stock and that is one reason why their food has gained such a reputation.\n\nHowever, you shouldn't just fling in any old wine and expect it to work miracles. Wines differ considerably in body and flavor. Some are rich, fruity, and heavy, others light, gay, and flowery. Each contributes its own special quality to the food. So if you want the best of all flavors for a stew or sauce, add the wine you will drink with it\u2014a full-bodied red wine like a Burgundy or Pinot Noir for boeuf en daube or coq au vin; a light dry white for poached fish or coquilles St. Jacques. Naturally, this applies only to table wines, not to the fortified ones like sherry and Madeira. It would be pretty preposterous to drink a bottle of Madeira with beef Wellington just because it had a Madeira sauce.\n\nSimilarly, while the rule of thumb about cooking with the wine you are going to drink is a sound one, this certainly doesn't mean that if you were having a bottle of Lafite Rothschild 1953 you'd use half of it to make a Bordelaise sauce. But as the purpose of cooking with wine is to add flavor, the flavor should be that of something eminently drinkable, no matter how simple the food.\n\n  For instance, when I make _Sausages in Red Wine,_ a dish I'm especially fond of, I put 2 Polish sausages or kielbasa in a good-sized skillet with _ _ to   cup finely chopped shallots or green onions, 1 cup water, and enough red wine (a California Zinfandel, perhaps, or a French Beaujolais) just to cover the sausages. Since most kielbasa are already cooked, all they need is to be heated through in the wine. I remove the sausages, cook the wine down a bit, then spoon the lovely winey sauce over the sausages and serve them with a hot potato salad, made with little boiled new potatoes, peeled and dressed with vinegar (or some of the wine from the skillet), olive oil, and a bit of chopped onion and parsley.\n\nThis makes a delicious, easy supper or luncheon, with crisp French bread. Drink with it the same wine you used for cooking, and finish the remains of the bottle with some good cheese and maybe a bowl of fruit.\n\nThere's one very important point to remember about cooking with wine. The wine must always come to the boiling point and simmer anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or so to burn off the alcohol, If you add wine at the last minute, it can leave a rather strange and strong aftertaste. Cooking removes the alcohol and leaves only the flavor.\n\n  In this simple recipe for _Poached Fillets of Fish,_ it is wine that gives the sauce its subtle delicacy. For four persons, poach 4 large or 8 small fish fillets in salted water barely to cover, to which you have added _ _cup dry white wine, a sprig of parsley, and a slice of onion, until they are just cooked through, using the timing principle of 10 minutes per inch offish measured at the thickest point. Remove the fillets to a hot baking dish, strain the liquid, and reduce it to 1 cup by boiling over high heat. Melt 3 tablespoons butter in a pan, blend in 3 tablespoons flour, and cook for 2 to 3 minutes. Stir in the 1 cup reduced fish stock and keep stirring until thickened. Add 2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley, about _ _ teaspoon tarragon, and _ _ cup heavy cream. Stir and heat thoroughly, and taste for seasoning. Pour this lovely sauce over the fish, sprinkle with grated Parmesan cheese, and run under the broiler for a minute to brown lightly.\n\nServe with tiny boiled potatoes and perhaps chopped spinach, and drink the rest of the wine. This might be an inexpensive Mountain White from the Napa Valley in California, a fine Alsatian Riesling, or a Pouilly Fuisse from Burgundy district of France, depending on how much you want to spend.\n\nI am all for drinking and cooking with simple wines that don't cost an arm and a leg, and there are enough of these around\u2014from California, New York State, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal\u2014for anyone to be able to afford to keep a few bottles on hand. Several vintners produce a light, eminently drinkable Mountain Red, the counterpart of the Mountain White. I recently tasted a Zinfandel from California put out by a company which has not used this grape variety before. It was most pleasing, on the lines of the young, fruity wines of Beaujolais, and very reasonably priced.\n\nOne of the joys of wine is tasting. Shop around, try out wines that are new to you, then settle on a good white and a good red inexpensive enough to establish as your \"house wine.\" Wine is a vital part of life and one to be enjoyed to the full, both in the glass and in the food you eat.\n\nAn _American Country Wine_\n\nWhen American wines are mentioned, what comes to mind first of all are probably the fine varietal wines of California, a state that has earned a reputation as great as any wine district in the world. Next, the wines of New York State and Ohio. If you stop there, then you have missed one of the most fascinating of all stories of American winemaking, the story of Philip and Jocelyn Wagner, who have been great movers in the growth of wine culture in this country.\n\nOutside of California, most of the classic European grapes from which the great wines of France and Germany are made find our climate inhospitable, so the majority of growers in other parts of the country had to depend on wines made from native American grapes. The problem was to find vines that would combine the best of both worlds, the quality of the European and the hardiness of the American. For many years Philip Wagner experimented with a new family of European wine grapes made by crossing European vines with certain American species. These French hybrids, as they are called, could be grown successfully in just about any part of the United States. In 1943 Mr. Wagner established Boordy Vineyards on his home property in Maryland, just notth of Baltimore, and began making his own wine from the hybtid grapes. His wine is the kind the French call a _vin de pays,_ a country wine. Bottled soon after the harvest, it is put on the market while it is young, fresh and fruity. This isn't a wine to lay down and keep for years before it reaches its peak, but a light, gay wine to open, drink, and enjoy, the kind that plays an important part in the everyday life of any true wine lover.\n\nUntil recently Mr. and Mrs. Wagner were forced to hold down their production because of limited acreage, so few people outside the Baltimore-Washington area were lucky enough to be able to buy their wines. Then not too long ago they discovered a section of New York State, near Lake Erie, which was particularly well suited for the French hybrids they had developed, and there they started a new vineyard. Now they can produce a much larger quantity of Boordy Vineyards wine, while still keeping direct supervision over the making, bottling, and quality.\n\nI visited the Wagners one day in early June when they were bottling their most recent vintage. We sat on the tree-shaded lawn and tasted the red, white, and rose wines of this and the previous year's vintages, comparing, discussing, and nibbling on little bits of cheese and bread to clear our palates.\n\nThe current red was a light, fruity, beautifully colored wine reminiscent of a young French Beaujolais, the kind you could drink, at room temperature or slightly chilled, with just about any food. The white, very dry, with a crisp, sprightly freshness, reminded me of a wine from the Loire Valley, such as Muscadet or a Sancerre. It's a refreshing, all-purpose white that would be perfect with seafood, chicken, veal, cold meats and summer foods, or in a kir, that delicious ap\u00e9ritif of chilled white wine delicately flavored and colored by a couple of drops of cr\u00e8me de cassis, the black-currant liqueur. While I'm not a fancier of ros\u00e9 wines, the Boordy Vineyards Ros\u00e9, amber-pink and dry, had a definite and pleasing quality. All of the wines tasted clean, fresh, and fruity, and they reflected the personality and standards of the Wagners, who have devoted their lives to perfecting these delightful and reasonably priced young wines.\n\nThe white would be a lovely wine to take on a picnic or have with lunch on a warm day. Your menu might be eggs stuffed with smoked salmon, fresh dill, mayonnaise, and garlic, a freshly roasted chicken, just cooled, and an Alexandre Dumas potato salad, in which you could use some of the same wine. Dumas was not only a great novelist and playwright, but also a great authority on food, and his potato salad is quite different from the usual kind.\n\n  To prepare an _Alexandre Dumas Potato Salad,_ take 4 to 6 good-sized potatoes, preferably the waxy or new type, and boil them in their jackets until just pierceable. Peel while hot, and slice into a bowl. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and pour over the hot potatoes 8 tablespoons olive oil and _ _ cup dry white wine (the one you are going to drink). Let them cool and, just before leaving for your picnic, toss them with 1 tablespoon or more vinegar, _ _ cup chopped parsley, and _ _ cup chopped chives or green onions. Taste for salt, and pack in a plastic container.\n\n_The Endearing Young Charms of Beaujolais_\n\nAll we wine lovers who enjoy the special delights of that magnificently accommodating red wine, Beaujolais, were rejoicing not long ago at the arrival by plane from France of the Beaujolais Primeur. Beaujolais can only be called Primeur if it is bottled before November 15 of the year in which the grapes were picked and pressed, and the advent of the young wine is as exciting as the first day of bock beer in Germany, or the opening of the hunting season in the West. The wine is rushed by truck to the restaurants of Paris and Lyons and other centers of good eating, where it is hailed with great excitement and anticipation.\n\nI tasted the Beaujolais Primeur the day it arrived in New York. By now I have had more than thirty different ones in various restaurants, and I must say they vary a good deal. At its best, this is a fresh, lovely wine with a full bouquet and a delicious fruity flavor, and it must be drunk very, very young. By French law, it can be sold only before December 15 of the year in which it is made, after which this particular wine is supposed to go through a second fermentation in the bottle and may or may not go bad\u2014very often it does. The Beaujolais Primeur is followed early in the following year by the Beaujolais Nouveau, sometimes called Beaujolais de I'annee, which has to be judged for quality and accepted by a jury of tasters from one of the French governmental organizations that supervise and establish the rules for the wine industry.\n\nThe wine of Beaujolais is produced in an area just below the Burgundy district and very close to the Rhone River. While a lot of Beaujolais is made, there's not nearly as much as you see for sale, so it behooves you to be very careful when you pick a bottle labeled Beaujolais. A true, typical Beaujolais is never coarse or harsh, but fruity and full-bodied with the flavor of the earth in it. Be sure you buy and drink it young, for after a Beaujolais reaches two and a half or three years old, it is seldom worth drinking. Beaujolais range in price and quality. First there is the wine simply called Beaujolais, then Beaujolais Superieur, followed by Beaujolais-Villages, which may come from any of thirty-five communes or villages, and finally the Beaujolais worthy of being sold under their own names. Everyone has his preference, but I think Brouilly is one of the finest.\n\nOther names to look for are Chiroubles, Fleurie, Chenas, Julienas, Morgon, St.-Amour, and Moulin-\u00e0-Vent, all exceptional wines to drink with pleasure. I have in the past come across bottles of Julienas and Fleurie that have remained extraordinarily good for a year or two. If you live in a city or town where there are a number of wine stores selling Beaujolais, take my advice and have a tasting of several of them until you find the one that seems to be the most honest, fruity, and full-bodied, then buy yourself a goodly amount of it so that for the next few months you can drink it while it is at its peak.\n\nMost red Beaujolais is best served at cellar rather than at room temperature, which means that here it should be slightly cooled, to give it a rounder, pleasanter, more agreeable quality. Because of its light alcoholic content and gay sprightliness, Beaujolais goes wonderfully well with all foods, and since it is served slightly chilled, it's especially good for summer when heavier reds seem inappropriate. In some of the famous restaurants in the district around the Beaujolais, like Paul Bocuse or the great Mere Guy, very often you'll be served a sausage in brioche with the new Beaujolais, or some excellent ham. I find this is one of the few red wines that is really enjoyable with baked or sliced cold ham.\n\n  And should I have a little wine left in the bottle, I use it up in one of my favorite desserts, _Sharlotka._ For this you need a loaf of stale dark bread, preferably Jewish-style pumpernickel. Remove the crusts and crumble the bread into tiny pieces. Melt _ _ pound butter in a skillet and fry the crumbs slightly. Remove from the heat and mix in _ _cup sugar, _ _ cup red Beaujolais, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, 1 teaspoon grated orange rind, and a pinch of salt. Mix well and add _ _ teaspoon vanilla. Peel and core 10 pippin apples and cut them into eighths. Cook them in a very little water until they are just turning soft. Don't let them get mushy. Butter a mold well, and sprinkle it lightly with the crumb mixture, then alternate layers of crumbs and apples in the mold, sprinkling each apple layer with cinnamon. Cover the last layer of apples with 1 cup tart jelly, then cover that with a last layer of crumbs. Bake in a 350-degree oven for 1 hour. Serve at once.\n\n_Champagne, the Festive Wine_\n\nEarly in April, while crossing to Cannes on the S.S. _France,_ I was struck by the amount of champagne that was consumed aboard\u2014French champagne, naturally. The _France_ has probably the most complete stock of this delightfully festive wine you could find anywhere, some seven thousand bottles in sixty-seven varieties from twenty-eight houses, ranging from the famous names\u2014Bollinger, Moet & Chandon, Veuve Clicquot, Krug, Heidsieck, Mercier, and Mumm\u2014to the lesser-known, such as Gauthier, De Venoge, Canard-Duchene. In fact, if you happened to be a champagne fancier, you could spend a month or more on this supremely luxurious ship and never drink the same wine twice.\n\nChampagne was the bon voyage drink, it was the favored aperitif before lunch and dinner with those passengers who knew that this was the best of all preludes to magnificent food and wine, and it was invariably served at most of the parties I attended, from a private luncheon in the captain's quarters to the head purser's cocktail party on Gala Night. Champagne might have been made expressly for shipboard life. One doesn't want to be stupefied by a lot of alcohol, and the bubbling charm and lightness of champagne fits most graciously into the relaxed pattern of one's days, making the trip more glamorous, gay, and elegant.\n\nI imagine this is also the reason why champagne has become the classic tipple for wedding breakfasts and receptions, especially now that they are so much smaller than they used to be, no longer great crushes of six hundred guests, but intimate parties of relatives and close friends.\n\nChampagne is a wine of infinite variety because every house, through skilled blending, produces a wine with definite characteristics that distinguish it from its competitors\u2014marked differences in flavor, lightness, dryness, and body. There are also many degrees of champagne, from the brittle, almost cutting quality of a nature, the dryest of all, and the polished crispness of a brut to the soft, caressing brilliance of an extra-dry, or the very special cuvees that have softness without sweetness, gentility without cloying ovettones.\n\nThese are the true aristocrats of champagne, the greatest wines of the great houses, like the Cuvee Grand Siecle of Laurent Perrier, Moet & Chandon's Dom Perignon, Louis Roederer's Cristal, and of course the most expensive. If I am drinking one of these superb champagnes, I like it unsullied, so I can appreciate the exquisite flavor and balance. I use a large tulip-shaped glass that has been chilled ahead of time, not one of those squat, abominable saucet-type glasses. A tulip-shaped glass or tapering flute is designed so that the tiny bubbles that are the mark of a perfectly made champagne can spiral upward, slowly releasing the natural effervescence of the wine.\n\nFor those who like their champagne combined with fruity flavors, or rather more alcoholic, I would suggest that most pleasant and enlivening drink, a champagne kir, which consists of a few drops of creme de cassis, the black-currant liqueur, in a glass of chilled champagne, or the following summer punch, a good choice for an outdoor party.\n\n  For _Summer Punch,_ wash and slice 2 cucumbers (do not peel unless the skins are waxed heavily, or wash off the wax coating with hot water if you prefer). Put in a large punch bowl with 8 tablespoons sugar, the grated rind of 4 lemons, _ _ cup lemon juice, 2 cups orange juice, and 2 fifths of cognac. Let stand for 1 hour. When you are ready to serve, add a large block of ice, and pour over it 2 cups Cointreau liqueur and 4 quarts French champagne. This makes enough for forty 4-ounce servings.\n\nFor a punch or mixed drink you naturally would use a less expensive nonvintage brut champagne, not a vintage or the finest cuvee. This also applies if you are using champagne in the kitchen. One of my favorite summer desserts is a refreshing sherbet.\n\n  To make this _Champagne Sorbet,_ you first cook 1 cup sugar with 4 cups water until it comes to a rolling boil. Boil 6 minutes. Add 1 bottle brut champagne and heat (this volatilizes the alcohol). Remove from heat. Stir in the juice of _1 _ oranges and the grated rind of 1 orange. Pour this into an ice cream freezer packed with rock salt and ice, and turn until the sherbet is softly frozen, not hard. Serve immediately. Serves six to eight.\n\n CHAPTER 8\n\n_Handwork and Gadgetry_\n\n_... in which we make friends with a stripper and a zester ... meet the little chief smoker ... turn a mushroom's_ _head . . . sharpen our knowledge of knives ... dissect a chicken ... and invite a robot into the kitchen._\n\n_The Gadgets I Love_\n\nTwo of my best friends are a stripper and a zester. In case that raises some pretty wild visions, let me hasten to say that they are not girls but gadgets, and I couldn't do without them in the kitchen.\n\nThe zester is a handy little tool about 4 inches long with a wooden handle and a slightly curved metal end terminating in five sharp little holes. Draw the sharp tip over the colored part\u2014or zest\u2014of an orange or lemon, and presto, you have thin, thin slivers of the aromatic part of the fruit that contains the oil, and a wonderful spicy scent in your nostrils. I find a zester works much better than a gratet. With a grater, you inevitably overgrate and get too much of the bitter white pith, whereas the zester is foolproof. My zester not only zips the rind from lemons and oranges for me\u2014it also shreds carrots into lovely long thin strips to toss into a dish at the last minute, or into a sauce or a salad. If you want to add color and texture to a green salad with a mound of shredded carrot or beet, this gadget does the job in no time flat.\n\nSo much for the zester. The stripper, its sister under the skin, has a center hole and a sharp-edged groove which cuts a slightly deeper and wider swath. With its aid you can deftly strip long spirals of orange, lemon, or grapefruit zest to drop in a drink, or slice off a smidgen of orange peel to add to a stew. I like to strip off a couple of pieces of lemon peel and pop them into a melange of sauteed vegetables\u2014this adds a marvelous sharp savor.\n\n  The stripper simplifies one of my favorite quick desserts, _Oranges Orientale._ You can use a knife or a vegetable peeler instead, but it's quicker with a stripper. Strip the zest from 2 oranges, and cut it into long, very thin pieces (if you use a knife, be sure to slice off only the colored part of the peel and then shred it finely). Bring 2 cups water and 1 _ _ cups sugar to a boil in a saucepan, reduce the heat, and simmer about 5 minutes. Add the orange shreds to this syrup, bring to a boil again, and simmer for about 10 minutes. Meanwhile, remove any remaining rind and the pith from the 2 stripped oranges and carefully peel another 4 oranges, making sure none of the white part is left on the fruit. Halve all the oranges, remove as many seeds as you can, and arrange in a flat heatproof serving dish. Spoon the hot orange-flavored syrup over them, making sure to get some of the orange shreds on each one. Let the syrup cool, then decorate the top of each half-orange with a candied violet. If you can't buy candied violets, use any candied fruits, such as cherries or pineapple, that will give color contrast to the dish. Serve the oranges cold, and provide a fruit knife or fork or a fork and spoon to make it easier to cut and eat them.\n\nThese are just a couple of my pet gadgets. Another is a spaghetti lifter with sharp sawline points that resembles a pair of tongs with teeth. It's not only great for fishing slippery spaghetti and noodles out of the pot, but it can also be used to toss a salad or to turn meat on the outdoor grill\u2014the teeth get a really firm grip on a steak. This simple and inexpensive device has more than earned its place in my kitchen.\n\n_The Knack of Fluting Mushrooms_\n\nOne of the techniques that most people want to master, once they have learned to cook the more elaborate dishes, is the fluting of mushrooms. You've probably seen in expensive restaurants a beautifully fluted mushroom poised on top of a filet mignon, or garnishing a perfect presentation of fish in white wine sauce. Actually, it's not a terribly hard job to flute a mushroom, and it certainly produces one of the most decorative adjuncts to fine cooking. A dish garnished with fluted mushrooms has a certain flair and finish that you never get any other way. Since mushrooms are so plentiful (and occasionally inexpensive) these days, there is no reason not to invest in a couple of pounds and try your hand. Just keep practicing until you become adept enough to flute with speed and dexterity. You won't waste any mushrooms, either, because there are all kinds of ways to use up those you botch.\n\nEither small or large mushrooms may be fluted, provided they are firm, white, and fresh, with smooth, unblemished caps. Never peel a mushroom that is going to be fluted; you need the skin to get the effect. Actually, you lose a great deal of flavor by peeling, and there is no reason to do it at any time. If the mushrooms are a bit dirty, just wipe them off with damp paper towels, or rinse them very quickly with cold water and pat dry.\n\nThe only essential tool for fluting mushrooms is a very sharp paring knife, preferably one with a triangular blade. Unlike peeling an apple or a potato, in fluting mushrooms the knife remains motionless and you turn the mushroom against it. So take your sharp paring knife in your right hand, holding it with the cutting edge turned away from you. Wrap your fingers around the handle, and steady the mushroom cap, which you hold in your left hand, with the thumb of your right hand. Select a spot about halfway down the knife blade as the cutting edge\u2014with a triangular-bladed knife, the point where it begins to thicken in width is just right. Holding the knife motionless, bring the crown of the mushroom against the knife edge. Press the knife very lightly against the mushroom skin, turning the cap away from you as you cut a very thin strip of skin from crown to edge. If you have turned the mushroom correctly, you will have cut a swirling, very shallow groove. Repeat cuts from crown to edge, spacing them evenly and close together, until you have a handsomely fluted cap.\n\nMushroom fluting takes practice, so experiment whenever you have a free moment or two. Don't wait until guests are coming and try to do it while you prepare a three-course dinner, or you'll be a nervous wreck. Plan on having mushrooms in a dish you're preparing for the family, and get to work. Better yet, buy mushrooms for the recipe I'm going to give you, and keep fluting until you have got the knack. You'll have a great big pile of mushrooms to chop up for a mushroom roll, something that my students learn in one of their cooking lessons. They love it, because it is actually a kind of alien souffl\u00e9\u2014a souffl\u00e9 mixture baked flat in a jelly-roll pan, turned out, filled, and rolled up.\n\n  To make a _Mushroom Roll,_ first grease an 11 -by-15 _ -_ inch jelly-roll pan and line it with waxed paper, leaving an overhang of about 1 inch of paper at each end. Grease the paper and sprinkle with dry bread crumbs. Set aside.\n\nChop 1 _ _ pounds of mushrooms quite finely, put them in a clean dish towel, and twist very hard to squeeze out all the moisture. Put them in a bowl, and mix in 6 tablespoons melted butter, 5 egg yolks, salt, pepper, and nutmeg to taste, and just enough bread crumbs (about   cup) to make the mixture hold together. Beat the 5 egg whites until they hold soft peaks, as for a souffle, and fold quickly and thoroughly into the mushroom mixture. Turn into the prepared pan and smooth the top evenly with a rubber spatula. Bake in a preheated 350-degree oven for 12 to 16 minutes, or until the center feels barely firm when touched. Put a sheet of buttered waxed paper or foil over the top of the roll, and invert onto a warm platter or long board. With the aid of the overhang of waxed paper, carefully peel away the paper adhering to the roll, gently loosening it with the point of a knife where necessary. It doesn't matter if a little bit of the surface of the roll sticks to the paper, since this is the side you will fill. Fill the roll with scrambled eggs, or with asparagus tips that have been cooked in boiling salted water until just done but still crisp to the bite. Roll up with the aid of the waxed paper or foil and serve to six people as a brunch, luncheon, or supper dish.\n\nIf you have some perfectly fluted mushroom caps, use them to garnish the top of the roll. Poach them for a few minutes in salted water and the juice of _ _ lemon, and they will come out beautifully white. For meat dishes, you can saute them in butter the usual way, or brown them under the broiler, basting them well with melted butter.\n\nSo now you know the right way to flute a mushroom. You can cheat and use the stripper but it never looks as professional and perfect as the real thing.\n\nA Cook's Best _Friends_\n\nI defy anyone to cook well without good knives. No piece of kitchen equipment so thoroughly earns its cost and its keep. Buying cheap knives is the worst sort of economy. A good knife, properly cared for, will last a lifetime, which can never be said of the dimestore variety. You'll find the best knives in stores specializing in cooking equipment or housewares sections of the better department stores. Look for those with blades of carbon steel or high-carbon nonstain steel. They can be sharpened to a fine edge, unlike regular stainless steel, and though carbon steel will stain, a bit of abrasive cleanser and steel wool soon removes the marks.\n\nI happen to have a penchant for collecting kitchen knives, and I enjoy using them properly, to do the specific job for which they were designed. I'm always baffled by students in my cooking classes who, aftet being taught the use of each knife, will start chopping with a boning knife or vice versa. It's so easy to sort out the functions of knives. There are only about four that are essential\u2014a paring knife, a chopping knife, a slicing knife, and a boning knife.\n\nLet's begin with the smallest, the paring knife. The best type to buy is the French carbon steel knife with a comfortable, grippable handle, and a triangular blade, tapering to a point. It comes in three blade sizes\u20142 1/2-inch 3 1/2-inch, and 4-inch\u2014and will dice, peel, cut, and do other small jobs.\n\nNext and most important of all is its big brother, the chopping knife, often called the chef's or cook's knife. This also has a triangular blade, but it is much larger and heavier, and the thickness of the blade tapers from base to point so that the knife works for you, bringing the weightiest part down on whatever you're chopping and making the process speedy and effortless. Blade sizes range from a whopping 14-inch to an 8-inch. I find the 12-inch is the best all-purpose size, hefty enough for any job, with the 10-inch or 8-inch size as an auxiliary.\n\nThe cook's knife will even do a pretty good job of carving, though for this you should really have the slicing knife with its long, flexible blade. The Gerber slicing knives, made in Portland, Oregon, have thin supple blades with a high carbon content and carve extremely well. I've used them for years. In the last ten years slicing knives with scalloped edges have appeared on the market, and although I find them useful, I prefer the straight-edged slicing knife.\n\nThe boning knife has a smallish, slim, curving 6-inch blade and a pointed tip, specially designed to work its way between and around bones and meat. It is essential for the finer points of kitchenry like boning chickens and legs of lamb.\n\nAbuse and misuse shortens the lives of knives. Never let your precious knives soak in the sink or put them in the dishwasher\u2014just wipe them off after use with a clean damp cloth and store them in a rack or slotted section of a drawer where they won't bang against each other and blunt their blades. Sharpen them regularly by holding the blade at a 20-degree angle to a sharpening steel and bringing it down in a long sweeping stroke.\n\n  A favorite recipe of mine that requires a good deal of knife work is a Tian _Vengoise. A_ tian is actually a pottery baking dish which in France has given its name to various concoctions known as a tian of this or that. This is called a tian Vengoise because it comes from Vence, in the south of France.\n\nTake your largest French cook's knife and coarsely chop 2 pounds of fresh spinach that has been well washed and trimmed of the coarser stems. Trim, split, and dice or coarsely chop 5 zucchini. Chop 3 garlic cloves. Peel, slice, and coarsely chop 3 large onions. Heat _ _cup olive oil in a large skillet, add the spinach, cover, and let it just wilt down quickly. Add the garlic, onions, and zucchini, toss together lightly with a wooden spoon, then cook until just crisply tender, stirring occasionally. Season with 1 teaspoon salt, about _ _ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, and 1 tablespoon chopped fresh basil or 1 teaspoon dried basil. While the vegetables are cooking, cook 1 cup rice according to your favorite method. Drain well. Combine with the crisply cooked vegetables and arrange in a buttered baking dish. Bake in a 350-degree oven for about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, beat 4 eggs rather well and combine with  __ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese. Pour over the vegetables and continue baking for another 10 minutes, or until the egg mixture has set. Sprinkle additional grated cheese over the vegetables before baking if you like\u2014I think it improves the finished dish. Let the tian cool before serving. It is best eaten tepid or cold and makes a tasty accompaniment to cold meats in summer, to picnic food or to meat or poultry grilled on the outdoor barbecue.\n\n_That Good Old Smoky Flavor_\n\nYet another old-time flavor that is fast disappeating from our food lives is that of hickory, cherry, and applewood smoke. Smokehouses where you can find smoked hams and bacon, smoked turkey, and other goodies are becoming fewer and fewer, and in their place we have an artificial substitute called liquid smoke or smoke flavor, which, as far as this palate is concerned, is absolutely revolting.\n\nIf you live in an apartment or city house, you can't build yourself a smokehouse, and not many of us, alas, can afford to put a Chinese smoke oven in our kitchens. So I was delighted when a West Coast friend acquainted me with the Little Chief Smoker, which has since become an indispensable part of my New York kitchen. This portable smoke cooker is very compact, yet capable of holding an ample quantity of meat, or with the inside racks removed, a 10-to 15-pound turkey, or a couple of chickens or ducks. It is clean, simple to operate, and comes in a carton which you are warned not to destroy, as you will need it for insulation if you are cooking in a garden or basement that is colder than the rest of your house.\n\nThe smoker has a pan to hold the hickory sawdust supplied by the manufacturer. This goes over an electric unit in the bottom of the smoker, and when that heats up, the smoke begins to permeate the tightly covered container. One pan of sawdust lasts about 45 minutes, and you can remove and refill it during the smoking process. If you want a more intense flavor, or a longer smoking time for certain foods, you can put hickory, cherry, or applewood chips on top of the sawdust.\n\nThis little smoker, which is made by the Luhr-Jensen Company of Hood River, Oregon, is one of the most efficient gadgets I have seen in some time. It imparts a good smoked flavor to foods you intend to cook later in the oven, and I have also found that if you put precooked foods in the smoker for a little while they get a really delicious taste. I can think of no drawback, except perhaps that the atmosphere is suffused with an aroma my neighbors claim sharpens their appetites unbearably!\n\nThe other evening I smoked two small loins of pork, which I'd had well trimmed, with the chine bone sawed off and just the tiny ribs left. I rubbed the loins well with salt, pepper, rosemary, and a little gatlic and let them stand for about an hour before placing them on the two lower racks of the smoker. At the end of the first 45 minutes of smoking, I switched the racks so both the loins would be equally impregnated with the smoke flavor, added another panful of hickory sawdust, and let them stay for a further 45 minutes, so the total time was 1 hours. Then I switched the electrical unit off and let the pork rest in the smoker until I was ready to roast it.\n\nIt was roasted in a 325-degree oven to an internal temperature of 155 degrees, which took about another 1^2 hours. I then let the loins sit for 15 minutes before carving them. The pork was sensational, moist inside, with a delicate smoky flavor, and the sawed-off chine bones, which I'd smoked too, were the most deliciously chewy bits you can imagine. This was served with sauteed apples, greenings cored and sliced, cooked in butter, and sprinkled heavily with sugar which caramelized on the slices, and tiny new potatoes baked in the oven with the pork. The pork tasted even better the next night, cold with mustard mayonnaise, tender young ears of corn, and a beet and watercress salad that was a perfect foil for the pork.\n\nFor another dinner I rubbed chicken legs and thighs with oil, salt, and pepper and a little tarragon and smoked them for a little over an hour until they were a luscious brown color and gave off a most tantalizing perfume. These I roasted in a pan with a couple of garlic cloves and a little Madeira, and had them piping hot with ripe sliced tomatoes and sauteed shredded zucchini\u2014another glorious feast.\n\nThe Little Chief Smoker is a great piece of equipment for your backyard, porch, or kitchen. (If you use it indoors, make sure always to place it under the exhaust fan to draw off the fumes.) You can make your own jerky, smoke sausage or cheese, and experiment with meats\u2014and have lots of good eating into the bargain.\n\n_Chicken Anatomy Lesson_\n\nI have always preferred the dark meat of chicken. In former days I would always cook chicken so the dark meat would be done to my taste (juicy, with a hint of pink) and then wonder what to do with the light meat, which was invariably overcooked. Well, chicken in parts solved my problem. I can have dark meat to my heart's content. If I want to be very economical, I buy two or three chickens at a time, cut them up, use the dark meat for broiling, and save the light meat for chicken hash or some other dish in which texture and juiciness don't matter that much. Sometimes I bone the breast meat, beat it flat, and treat it as I would veal cutlets.\n\nEveryone who cooks should know how to cut up a chicken. I have discovered that very few people do know, and it's so simple. Here is the cutting process, which needs only a little patience and a good sharp knife.\n\nFirst, use your finger to locate the joints of the chicken. The major ones are at the point where the thigh joins the body and the point where the wing joins the body. There is also a joint between the leg and thigh, or drumstick and second joint; and there are two joints in the wing. To remove the leg and thigh in one good piece, cut through the skin that connects them to the body, and cut down through the flesh. You will see that the dark meat is separated from the light in this section. Then push away the leg from the body very gently until the \"hip\" joint appears and begins to divide. The joint can now be severed easily. Remove the other leg and thigh.\n\nYou have a choice of severing the wing at the second joint or where it joins the body. I recommend the latter. Again, cut through the skin connecting the wing to the body, and continue cutting through the flesh. Bend away the wing gently until the joint separates. Cut through the joint. Proceed with the other wing. Then cut across the chicken where the lower back and breast divide. It is easy to slice through the little rib bones, and there is just one small joint to sever. You can use poultry shears for this part of the operation. To divide the breast into halves, press it down firmly from the skin side, until you hear a crack. Turn it flesh side up. Remove the breast bone and the small piece of gristle at the end by running your finger along the flesh to loosen it from the bone.\n\nIf you are sentimental and want to preserve the wishbone at the end of the breast, you can cut off that piece at the joints, but if you are a realist, you will simply cut right through the wishbone and divide the breast into two pieces. With a sharp pair of scissors trim the rib bones off the breast. Also trim the back and break it into two pieces. In addition to the pieces you have cut you will also have the neck, gizzard, liver, and heart.\n\nIf I were cutting up several chickens, I would use the backs and necks for a broth and freeze the breasts for poaching or for chicken cutlets. I might use the gizzards, hearts, and livers, adding extra amounts of each, for a sandwich spread. I often use the legs and thighs to prepare a startling, unusual, and delicious chicken dish. (You can, of course, buy legs and thighs alone for this recipe.)\n\n_ Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic_ requires a 3-quart casserole with a good tight cover. Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Rinse 8 to 10 chicken legs and thighs in cold water, and pat dry with paper towels. Peel 40 cloves of garlic (about 3 bulbs) and leave whole. Cut 4 stalks of celery in thin slices. Dip the chicken in olive oil to thoroughly coat each piece (you will need about _ _ cup oil altogether) and sprinkle with 2 teaspoons salt, _ _ teaspoon pepper, and a dash of nutmeg. Put the chicken in the casserole along with the residue of oil. Add the garlic, sliced celery, 6 sprigs parsley, 1 tablespoon dried tarragon, and _ _ cup dry vermouth. Seal the top of the casserole with a sheet of foil, and cover tightly with the lid. Bake for 1 _ _ hours. Do not remove the lid during the baking period. Serve directly from the casserole, or transfer the chicken pieces to a serving dish. With this serve hot toast or thin slices of pumpernickel. Invite your guests to spread the softened garlic on the bread. They will find that the strong flavor has disappeared, leaving a wonderful, buttery paste perfumed with garlic. Serves six to eight.\n\nA _Robot in Your Kitchen_\n\n_A_ few years ago in France I was dining in the restaurant of a good friend of mine, and after dinner he took me back to the kitchen to show me what I consider to be the most wonderful new piece of equipment that has come along in some time. In Europe it is known as the Magimix, and in a matter of seconds it chops, shreds, slices, and grates anything from cubes of raw meat or fish to nuts, vegetables, chocolate, and cheese, makes mayonnaise and even pastry\u2014all rapidly, efficiently, and as if by magic.\n\nThere are two versions of this amazing French machine, the Magimix, which is sold here as the Cuisinart Food Processor, and a larger model called the Robot Coupe. It is rather like having a robot in your kitchen, because it does most of the tiring, time-consuming dogwork for you. The Magimix is a neat machine, about 8 by 7 by 14 inches high with a powerful 500-watt motor and two curved steel blades that fit on a center shaft within a large plastic bowl. All you have to do to operate the machine is turn the cover counterclockwise to start the action, clockwise to stop it, until you get the texture you want. I've made an excellent pastry, a pate brisee, in just 26 seconds. You blend the butter and flour in the machine, add your liquid, turn it on again, and voila\u2014a solid ball of perfect pastry. You can also make a good thick mayonnaise in nothing flat, and cleaning is a cinch, since the cover, bowl, and blades all lift off the base.\n\nThis machine is not inexpensive, but it is a joy to have in your kitchen, and to my mind anyone who really loves to cook will wonder how he ever lived without it. I know I couldn't. It has changed my life completely, and I find I depend on it more and more for many things. For instance, I have always been exceedingly fond of Middle Eastern food, and one of the things I enjoy making is _kibbeh naye,_ a mixture of finely ground raw lamb, onion, bulghur (cracked wheat), and seasonings, which I serve as an hors d'oeuvre or a luncheon dish. I now do the whole thing in the Magimix\u2014grind the lamb, chop the onion, and combine them with the wheat and seasonings. (See _Editor's Note, copyright page.)_\n\n  To make _Kibbeh Naye,_ cut away all the fat and tendons from a leg or shoulder of lamb, then cut the meat in cubes and grind until rather fine. Meanwhile, soak _1  _cups washed bulghur (cracked wheat) in water. Grate or finely chop 3 medium-sized onions. Drain the bulghur through cheesecloth, then squeeze out all excess water. Add to the lamb with the onion, 1 or 2 ice cubes, 1 _ _ to 2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, and _ _teaspoon allspice. Blend the mixture very well and taste for seasoning. If there are any bits of ice left, throw them away.\n\nSpread the kibbeh on a very cold serving platter and decorate with shredded green onions and a few radishes, with perhaps some cherry tomatoes around the edge of the dish to make it look more attractive. Serve it as a spread, with thinly sliced French bread or Syrian pita bread, or if you prefer, wrap the mixture in crisp lettuce leaves. This makes a most delicious, cool, refreshing, and different hors d'oeuvre for your repertoire, and one that is extremely addictive. You just can't stop eating it.\n\n  If the idea of eating raw ground lamb upsets you, you can form it into little balls, saute them in butter over brisk heat, and serve with radishes, scallions, romaine, and endive, with salt, pepper, and cruets of vinegar and oil so everyone can make his own dressing. Or you can put layers of the kibbeh in a baking dish, with some additional, rather fattish minced lamb, pine nuts, and onions and seasonings between the layers and bake it.\n\nThat's good, too, but it is the raw kibbeh naye I most frequently serve, and with the Magimix I can whip it up in minutes.\n\nI also find this magical machine a great aid when I'm grinding almonds or filberts for cookies and cakes and things like that where the ground nuts replace part of the flour\u2014I find if you toast the nuts and grind them freshly they taste immeasurably better.\n\n_ CHAPTER 9 _\n\n_Holidays, Parties, and Picnics_\n\n_... in which we de-calorize Christmas ... have sober thoughts about holiday entertaining ... stir up a plum pudding and a batch of mincemeat ... make gifts good enough to eat ... inaugurate le snack de Noel ... cook our goose ... celebrate Christmas in Provence with thirteen desserts ... and in Barcelona with the Three Kings ... spread a Moroccan feast of couscous and a Middle East mezze table ... and indulge a lifelong passion for picnics._\n\n_Christmas Remembered_\n\nChristmas is the holiday I have always loved the most. Its traditions, foods, and spirit mean a great deal to me. Like most of us, my happiest memories of the season are wrapped up in my childhood. This was the most exciting time of the year. Lovely, tantalizing smells crept from the kitchen, and the doorbell rang constantly as friends dropped by with gifts.\n\nRemembering how Christmas was then, I am disturbed to see how commercial and impersonal it has become now, especially in large cities. Instead of being a time of joy, it is all too often just another giant shopping spree. How weary, frantic, and bad-tempered many of those shoppers look, as they try to cope with lengthy lists, crowded stores and buses, and a haunting sense of spiritual malaise.\n\nI feel very strongly that we are rapidly losing the whole meaning of Christmas and the significance behind the exchanging of gifts. Instead of putting something of ourselves, our love and our skills, into a gift, we are all too apt to rely on a store to provide the idea, the sentiment, the wrapping\u2014even the delivery.\n\nWe could recapture some of the happiness of Christmas past if we just took the trouble to make, rather than to buy, a few of the presents we give each year. My mother believed in making all her own Christmas foods. She prepared Christmas puddings, fruit cakes, and mincemeat a year ahead of time and ladled genetous libations of btandy into them for the next twelve months until they were aged to a ripe, dark mellowness. Come next Christmas, some of these were earmarked for friends, many of whom planned their holiday menus in the expectation of getting one of Mother's mincemeat puddings or cakes.\n\nEveryone in the house had to stir the pudding for luck during the mixing and, while so doing, make a wish. The puddings were so well lubricated with cognac during the twelve months of periodic dousings that by the time they were reheated and served for Christmas and New Year celebrations they had acquired an extraordinary flavor, texture, and quality. I once kept a pudding for two years, and by then it was so saturated with cognac that after eating just a little bit with hard sauce it was hardly possible to move from the table.\n\nHere is another Christmas pudding recipe that was my mother's, a fruity and spirituous concoction which needn't marinate for months, and I love it. She used to make great batches, boil them in two-pound baking powder tins and give them as presents. I prefer to make mine in English pudding basins, tapering pottery bowls with a deep rim under which the pudding cloth is tied. You can often find these in the better kitchen shops. Or you can use stainless steel bowls or molds with simple shapes and designs. I sometimes use a melon mold with a tight-fitting cover. Anything will work as long as you keep in mind the way the pudding will look when unmolded and served.\n\n  For your _Christmas Pudding,_ buy 2 pounds of seeded raisins\u2014the large ones with big fat seeds. Seed them by hand\u2014a tiresome chore, but it makes a better pudding. You will also need 2 pounds sultana raisins (these are made from seedless grapes, whereas the seeded are from muscat grapes and have a different flavor). The raisins sold in health food stores are very good, incidentally. Add 2 pounds currants to make up your 6 pounds of dried fruit.\n\nAdd 4 tart apples, finely chopped,   pound mixed citron, lemon, and orange peel, a little bit of angelica for its beautiful green color, and _ _ pound chopped blanched almonds. Now for another tough job\u2014finely chop 2 pounds of beef suet. Combine all this with 3 cups flour and 3 to 4 cups fine bread crumbs, freshly made, not packaged. For spice, add 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1 teaspoon mace, 1 teaspoon nutmeg, _ _ teaspoon ground cloves, _ _ teaspoon ground ginger, _ _ teaspoon ground allspice, and 2 teaspoons salt. Mix very thoroughly with your hands, then add the juice and grated rind of 3 lemons, 1 cup cognac, 1 cup Grand Marnier or Cointreau and 12 well-beaten eggs. You will notice there is no sugar in this recipe\u2014you don't need it with the sweetness in the other ingredients. Mix very well with your hands, and if there is not enough liquid, add more cognac or Grand Marnier or even beer. It must be well bound together and thoroughly mixed, but not a tight dough. Cover with foil and let stand to mellow for a day or two or even three, before cooking. Then taste and see if it lacks salt, spice, or spirits.\n\nFill your pudding basins or molds with the mixture, leaving some room for expansion. Put on the lids if you are using covered molds, or tie around the basins or bowls cloths that have been wrung out in hot water and dusted with flour. Tie foil over the cloths. Stand on a rack in a deep saucepan, add water to come halfway up the molds or basins, cover the pan, bring to a boil, and boil from 6 to 8 hours, depending on size, adding more water if it boils away.\n\nRemove from the heat and let the puddings cool in the pans. Keep the puddings in a cool place for several weeks or months (not necessarily in the refrigerator, although this is a good place to store them if you have the room). Add more cognac or other spirits to the puddings while they are ripening.\n\nPlum pudding must be reheated for 2 to 3 hours on a rack in a pan of boiling water before being served. Unmold it on a warm serving dish and garnish with candied fruits or whatever you like. Some people stick a sprig of holly or mistletoe in the top, which is a pretty custom but apt to cause a conflagration if you flame it inadvertently along with the pudding. Pour warmed cognac, rum, or whiskey on the pudding, ignite, and serve the pudding flaming at table, either with the traditional hard sauce or the following brandy sauce.\n\n  For _Brandy Sauce_ cream 6 tablespoons butter very lightly. Add _ _ cup powdered sugar and beat in 2 egg yolks. Put in the top of a double boiler over hot water, blend in   cup heavy cream, and cook, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, until the sauce coats the spoon. Pour into a bowl, flavor with brandy (or rum) and serve hot.\n\nNow comes the test, for, as we all know, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I think you are going to approve of this one.\n\n_Let's Make Mincemeat_\n\nMince pies have been part of my gastronomic life from way back. I can remember really fantastic ones made in a deep 10-or 12-inch pie tin lined with rich pastry and filled to the brim with heavily brandied mincemeat mixed at the last minute with finely chopped apple\u2014for in our household there were no apples in the mincemeat. They were added when the pies were made, which I have found gives a much better result. Over the filling went the rich, flaky crust decorated with cut-out pastry leaves and flowers and painted with egg yolk and cream so it baked to a beautiful glossy brown. This noble holiday offering to the delights of the season was quite unforgettable. We would reheat the baked pie slightly, cut into the deliciously flaky crust and breathe in the overpowering bouquet, then eat it in tiny bites, savoring every bit of flavor. Some people put hard sauce on theirs, or cream, or Cheddar cheese, and my father liked both cream and Roquefort cheese on his, but I have always considered that a sacrilege. I have a great deal of respect for a good mince pie, and to me it should be eaten pure and simple.\n\n  This _Mincemeat_ recipe has been in my family for ever and a day, and I consider it is just about the best I've ever tasted. First, take 3 pounds brisket or lean rump of beef and 1 fresh beef tongue weighing about 3 pounds. Boil them in water until they are very tender, cool them in the broth, and skim off the fat. Remove all fat from the meat, and either grind coarsely or chop very finely by hand.\n\nChop _ _ pounds beef suet very, very finely, and prepare 2 pounds seeded raisins, 2 pounds sultana raisins, 2 pounds currants, _ _pound citron, shredded and diced,  __ pound orange peel, shredded, _ _ pound lemon peel, shredded, and _ _ to 1 pound dried figs and dates, cut into small pieces.\n\nPut the meats, suet, fruits, and peels in a deep crock. Add 2 cups sugar, 1 pint strawberry or raspberry preserves, 1 tablespoon salt, 2 teaspoons nutmeg or _2 _ teaspoons cinnamon, 1 teaspoon allspice, 1 teaspoon mace, and a dash of ground cloves.\n\nAdd a fifth of good sherry and enough cognac to make a rather loose mixture of the meats and fruits\u2014it will take 2 bottles. If you don't want to use cognac, you can substitute Irish or bourbon whiskey or even gin or vodka. Mix very well, cover the crock, and let it stand for a month before you use it. Check it each week and add more liquor if it has all been absorbed. Then put it in sterilized jars and seal. This makes a most wonderful Christmas gift for any of your friends who love good mincemeat.\n\nMincemeat will keep for a long, long time, provided you give it plenty to drink. If you keep on adding a bit more booze to it every year, it will keep in the refrigerator for as long as five years\u20141 know, because I've done it.\n\nApart from the traditional mince pie, you can make a deep-dish pie with layers of sliced apple and mincemeat covered with a streusel topping\u2014a crumbly mixture of butter, sugar, flour, and nutmeats. Or make tiny mince pies by cutting out small circles of rich pastry, putting 2 or 3 spoonfuls of mincemeat on them, sealing them very well, and baking them in a 375degree oven until they are nicely browned and crisp. Add these to your gifts of Christmas cookies or have them, reheated a bit, with a cup of coffee or tea. Another trick is to get the mincemeat very hot, flame it with warmed cognac, and spoon it blazing over vanilla, eggnog, or coffee ice cream. For a frozen dessert, make a mousse by combining 1 to _1_ \u00bd cups mincemeat with 1 pint heavy cream, whipped, and an Italian meringue made by beating 2 egg whites until stiff and then beating them until cold with a heavy syrup made with _ _ cup sugar and 2 tablespoons water. Put this in a mold or souffle dish and freeze.\n\n  Or make a Mincemeat _and Apple Flan,_ one of my favorite recipes. For this you'll need a flan case, which is a bottomless round, rectangular, or square metal form which you put on a cookie sheet and line with pastry. After baking, the case can be lifted off, leaving the flan to stand alone.\n\nSo take a 9-inch round or 14-by-5-by-2-inch rectangular flan case and line it with rich tart pastry. Peel and core 6 tart cooking apples, and cut them into sixths. Steam them, covered, in a heavy skillet over medium heat with 4 tablespoons butter and 1 teaspoon vanilla until tender and easily breakable, but not soft and mushy. Cool slightly, then arrange in the pastry shell. Top with a thickish layer of mincemeat, about 2\u00bd to 3 cups. Dot with butter, and bake at 375 degrees for 35 to 40 minutes, or until the pastry is cooked through and the apple and mincemeat flavors well mingled.\n\nCool and brush with an apricot glaze, made by melting a 1 pound jar pure apricot preserves (the kind without any added pectin) in a saucepan, letting it come to a boil, adding a few drops of cognac, and then straining it through a fine sieve. Sprinkle the glazed flan with thinly sliced toasted almonds, and serve warm with cognac-flavored whipped cream.\n\nYou'll have one of the best cold-weather desserts you have ever tasted.\n\n_Gifts They'll Eat Up_\n\nWhen I was young, we always had our big gathering of family and friends on Christmas Eve, and a gay, jolly, wonderful time it was, with a great buffet supper, much good will, and exchanging of gifts and toasts to the holiday season. In our family, Christmas Day was a much more personal celebration. My mother, my father, and I all liked to do things that didn't include the whole family, which I feel was a very good idea. We managed to see a lot more people that way, and if any one of us was invited out for Christmas dinner and wanted to go, we did. Unlike many families, we didn't feel any sense of \"duty\" to each other or to our relatives on Christmas Day.\n\nI discovered that the time I really liked to entertain the most was Christmas breakfast. By that I don't mean the crack of dawn, but around the civilized hour of noon. Whenever I'm in New York at Christmas time I start planning how many people I can squeeze into my house for Christmas breakfast. It's such a nice time to have people in. You don't encroach on the rest of the day's festivities, you give your friends a break from being in their own houses, and you can serve such good, simple dishes. I like at Christmas to give foods that I have made in my own kitchen, which ties in very well with a breakfast party. The homemade goodies you wrap and present to your guests can be things they'll be able to use for their Christmas dinner or supper, or have the next day or week. I very often make p\u00e2t\u00e9s, loaves of bread, and mincemeat and plum puddings, and I enjoy dreaming up imaginative and attractive ways to package them. People, I've found, are delighted and touched to get foods you have made yourself.\n\nHomemade bread is much in favor these days. Those of you who have seen my book _Beard on Bread_ will find in there a number of breads that make excellent gifts. Some keep well, some should be eaten almost immediately, and still others can almost be compared to fruitcakes for their lasting quality.\n\nA good p\u00e2t\u00e9 always comes in handy for Christmas eating and gifts. Every year I make a variety of p\u00e2t\u00e9s, some to give away, some to keep in the refrigerator. The following recipe for my favorite pate makes quite a lot. If you like, you can bake it in small loaf pans, molds, or baking dishes, then keep one and give the others away.\n\n  For My _Favorite P_ \u00e2 _t_ \u00e9 _,_ trim 1 pound chicken livers, cutting away the little tendons. Saute lightly in a heavy skillet in 4 tablespoons butter until just firm. Whirl in the blender with 2 eggs, 6 garlic cloves, 1 medium onion, peeled and cut in small pieces, and _ _cup cognac (substitute California brandy, if you wish\u2014or whiskey will do just as well). Put in a large bowl, and add 2 pounds ground veal (if unobtainable, or too expensive, ground chicken or turkey will do), 2 pounds not-too-lean ground pork, 2 tablespoons salt, and _ _ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper. Blend well with your hands, then add another _ _ cup cognac or brandy, 1 teaspoon thyme, _ _ teaspoon summer savory, a pinch of nutmeg, and a small pinch of cloves. Blend thoroughly. Check the seasoning, but on no account taste the raw texture\u2014saute 2 teaspoons of it in a little butter, turning well until cooked through, then taste. Add whatever additional seasoning the mixture needs before baking. It's much better to take that extra time than to have a badly seasoned pate.\n\nCut 1 pound boiled tongue into long strips,   inch thick, and 1 pound fresh pork fat into strips about  __ inch thick. Line a 2 -quart baking dish with bacon strips. (If you want to make small pates, use two or three small baking dishes, molds, or aluminum-foil loaf pans.) Put one-third of the ground mixture in the lined dish (or divide equally between small pans), and top with strips of tongue and pork fat, then add another layer of the ground mixture, more tongue and pork strips, and cover with a final layer of the ground mixture. Top with more bacon slices and bake in a 325-degree oven, allowing 3 to _3  _hours for 1 large pate, 2 to _2  _hours for small ones. Remove and cool. This pate does not need weighting. When cool, wrap in foil or plastic wrap and refrigerate until ready to use.\n\nTo make a more rustic-looking pate, very easy to slice, form the full recipe into a loaf and bake on a bed of bacon slices in a baking pan. This is a delicious, perfect pate for any season of the year. I love it for lunch with a good salad, spicy pickles, maybe a thin slice of ham, and a glass of wine. For a Christmas buffet, you might follow the pate with a big bowl of chicken salad, rolls, and perhaps a mincemeat souffle or pie.\n\nI also like to make _rillettes de Tours,_ that French country pate that might be described as the essence of the pig. It is simply pork cooked down with plenty of fat until it is meltingly tender, then shredded, seasoned, and packed into little pots. It makes a rich and luscious Christmas food.\n\nBecause of the work involved, it is a bit tedious to make all by yourself. I usually ask a friend to come and help and share the results. We pass a winter afternoon very pleasantly, sitting around my kitchen table, shredding away and talking. I find it a kind of therapy in the midst of the Christmas tush.\n\n  Long, slow cooking is essential for the Rillettes. First heat 3 pounds of leaf lard (pork kidney fat) in a very large pot until it has all melted down. Then add 3 pounds of fresh pork shoulder, loin, or leg, cut into small pieces, and 1 cup of water. Cook this very slowly on top of the stove or in a 250-to 300-degree oven until the meat is so tender that it almost falls apart\u2014this will take about 4 hours.\n\nRemove the pork from the fat, shred it finely with two forks, then season it to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Now mash it with enough of the fat to make a smooth paste. Pack the shredded pork mixture into small crocks, jars, or terrines, mashing it so that it absorbs plenty of fat. This is essential to give it a smooth texture and rich flavor. Ladle enough clear melted pork fat on top to cover the pork and make an airtight seal, then cover the pots with the lids, or tie aluminum foil tightly over them if they have no lids, and store in the refrigerator.\n\nThis will keep well for weeks, provided the sealing layer of fat is not broken. Serve with thin toast or French bread as a first course, or for friends who drop in during the holiday season, bring out your rillettes and your p\u00e2t\u00e9 with plenty of thin toast and plenty of chilled champagne.\n\n_Let's Keep Christmas Simple_\n\nWhy do so many people seem to feel that at Christmas every meal they serve their guests must be a feast? They may entettain simply and sensibly all year, but come the festive season they offer much too much rich food, far beyond what anyone could possibly want. Sooner or later in the round of entertaining I find myself longing for something simple and good to eat.\n\nI've found many of my friends feel as I do, so on many Christmases I've given the kind of party that everyone can enjoy. It's easy, it's unassuming, it's guaranteed not to upset the delicate balance of anyone's digestion, and it is a great contrast to the traditional Christmas celebration.\n\nFirst, I give my guests a well-chilled dry sherry. This may be one of the bone-dry Spanish sherries like Tio Pepe or La Ina or one of the extremely pleasant California cocktail sherries from Almaden or Louis Martini or any of the other well-known American wineries. Then I bring on good healthy servings of oyster stew and continue pouring the chilled sherry because sherry and seafood things go well together. Oyster stew might have been made especially for a Christmas or New Year party\u2014it's a most reviving, nourishing, and delectable dish, and I like to accompany it with piles of hot buttered toast.\n\nAfter the oyster stew I put out a big board of various slicing sausages\u2014salami, Polish sausage, bologna, whatever I find in the market that looks good. I provide sharp knives so everyone can cut off what he wants, and an assortment of mustards. I also like to have another board of cheeses\u2014Swiss Gruyere cheese, a fine Cheddar, and maybe a Brie\u2014and with the cheeses, thinly sliced rye bread and crackers of some kind and a bowl of fruit. I have plenty of iced beer and a bottle or two of red wine fot those who prefer it.\n\nThis, to my mind, makes the best of all Christmas parties because you haven't loaded your guests down with Christmas cheer and Christmas richness and lots of cakes and pies and sweet things. It's novel, it's a perfect combination of food and drink, and each person can take as much or as little as he pleases.\n\n  My recipe for Oyster _Stew_ will make 4 very generous servings or 6 medium-sized ones. You can increase or decrease the recipe, depending on how many servings you need and how lavish you make them.\n\nThe first important thing is to heat the 4 or 6 individual bowls in which you will serve the stew and, when they are quite hot, put a large dab of butter in each one. Keep them warm while you do the cooking, which takes only minutes. Heat to the boiling point 1 pint cream, 1 pint milk, and the liquor from _1  _to 2 pints shucked oysters\u20142 pints is a safer amount: it will give you quite a bit of liquor if you buy the oysters in bulk. Season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper, and add a good dash of Tabasco and to 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce. Now add the oysters and let them just come to the boiling point, so that the edges curl slightly. Don't overcook them\u2014they are awful if you do. Ladle the stew into the hot bowls and serve with hot buttered toast.\n\nIf, on the other hand, you're just having a few friends in for a drink, there's the problem of what to give them. Most traditional Christmas drinks tend to be pretty sticky and gooey and sweet, and, to my taste, quite revolting.\n\n_ _like to do something different\u2014Hot _Spiced Wine._ Stick whole cloves into 4 oranges, making a pattern if you like. Bake the oranges in a 350-degree oven for 15 to 20 minutes, or until they are heated through and the cloves begin to show a little white dust, which looks very attractive. Put the oranges in a large heatproof bowl of silver or pottery with the cut rind of 1 lemon and 2 bay leaves. Heat   to   cup cognac, brandy, or bourbon, pour it over the oranges, set it alight, and let it burn down. While it is burning, pour over the oranges 2 to 3 fifths or   of a gallon jug of a good dry red wine, such as a California Pinot Noir or Cabernet Sauvignon, heated until very hot, but not boiling. Add about _ _ cup sugar and stir it in well\u2014the amount of sugar is up to you; you can sweeten to taste. I like a minimum or none at all, if the wine is good. Stir well and serve warm in mugs or glasses with a little twist of orange peel. With this very pleasant hot drink serve some small dry cookies or cakes or tiny ham, cheese or roast beef sandwiches, or just have cheeses and bread.\n\n_Where's the Turkey?_\n\n_In the Lettuce,_\n\nIn the days when we all led a closely knit family life, there were definite traditions about holidays that were strictly observed. Now it seems that, except for a very few families, the old traditions have flown to the winds and everyone is off hither and yon pursuing his own thing. For most of us, Christmas will begin with everyone gathering around the tree in the early morning for an exchange of presents, followed by a family breakfast, maybe calls on friends and relatives, and then the climax of it all, the noble Christmas dinner with turkey and all the trimmings, mince pies, and the pudding borne in flaming on a platter, garnished with holly sprigs. There was a pattern, almost an unbreakable rule, **** of what the Christmas menu should be. I used to think that a formal sit-down affair like this was an absolute necessity, but lately my thinking has changed.\n\nWhile Christmas\u2014or Christmas Eve\u2014is still, to me, the time to entertain one's nearest and dearest, be they family or close friends, few of us can cope with an enormous meal for twelve to fourteen people without help. Present circumstances call for an extremely different kind of entertaining, so last year I dreamed up a casual, almost snack type of Christmas menu that while festive and fun requires very little preparation or last-minute attention in the kitchen. Although it may not be the feast I grew up with, it does have many of my favorite bits and pieces in it, and it bows to tradition in that the main course is based on turkey. I like it, and so do the friends who come to my house, so I'm passing it on to you as a new idea.\n\nLast year I invited twelve friends for six o'clock on Christmas Day, and we sat around the fire and had magnums of French champagne, which made it all very festive and special, and I set out a big platter of charcuterie\u2014thin slices of Smithfield ham, Polish kielbasa (a sausage you can buy all over the country), salami, pepperoni, homemade  pate\u2014with several different kinds of bread: homemade white bread, rye bread, and the wafer-thin Norwegian flatbread, which I adore with charcuterie, sweet butter, olives, cornichons (the tiny French pickles), and American bread-and-butter pickles. We sat and chatted happily, with no feeling that we had to face a huge dinner, drinking champagne and munching for a couple of hours. When I felt everyone was ready for the main course, I brought on a casserole of a turkey mixture which I'd cooked earlier in the day and warmed up at the last minute in a large decorative casserole.\n\nThis was the fun part of the meal, because the hot turkey was eaten in icy-cold lettuce leaves, which I brought in on a large platter, separated from the head and arranged in piles like an overblown rose. The guests spooned some of the hot filling on the chilled leaves, rolled them up and ate the whole thing like a taco, so there was no need to set a table or provide knives and forks\u2014only some big lap-covering linen napkins were necessary.\n\n  To make the filling for _Turkey in Lettuce Leaves,_ melt 6 tablespoons butter in a large skillet and saute 2 cups finely chopped onion and   cup finely chopped green pepper until wilted. Add a 4-ounce can of green chili peppers, drained and chopped, 1 to 2 tablespoons fresh hot chili pepper, finely chopped, and 4 cups finely diced cooked turkey (you could roast a turkey breast or one of those boneless turkey rolls), and toss well. Cover and simmer 5 minutes. Add 2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil or 1 _ _ teaspoons dried basil, 1 teaspoon salt, or to taste,  __ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, and _ _ cup cognac. If the mixture seems too dry, you can add _ _ cup turkey or chicken broth. Taste, and adjust the seasoning. Arrange in a large heated bowl or casserole, and garnish with _ _ cup chopped parsley and   cup shaved toasted almonds. To eat, spoon onto the leaves of 2 to 3 heads of well-chilled iceberg lettuce and roll up. This will serve ten to twelve, and the contrast between the crisp, icy lettuce and the hot, spicy filling is unbelievably delicious.\n\nWith this as a main course, all you need are some hot rolls and, rather than a salad, either cold vegetables a la Grecque (see page 64) or a hot vegetable mixture of some kind that would go with the turkey and could be reheated at the last minute. Drink your Christmas champagne with this, or switch to a light red wine such as a Beaujolais or a California Zinfandel.\n\nIf you're like me, you always wonder what to do with the candies and cookies and fruit that pour in as gifts at the holiday season. Well, here is the perfect time to use them. After your casual dinner around the fire, have a platter of the Christmas goodies, a bowl of fruit, maybe some cheese and crackers, and coffee with a selection of liqueurs and port or Madeira.\n\nI can recommend this kind of meal (shall we call it le snack de Noel?) as an ideal kind of Christmas dinner if you don't want to do the whole traditional bit. People eat as much as they please. No one goes home with that horrible feeling that he is stuffed beyond belief or comfort. You save yourself a lot of stewing and slaving, and you're free to relax and enjoy Christmas as it should be, a time of closeness and warm, friendly hospitality.\n\nA _Golden Goose for_\n\n_Holiday Feasting_\n\nWhy is it that whenever the Christmas bird is mentioned it is invariably turkey, not goose? Roast goose must surely be one of the most neglected and misunderstood of all fowl in this country, yet in Europe, since Roman times, it has been regarded as the tenderest and most succulent of all the birds that come to the kitchen. The English have a great tradition of goose for the holiday feast, and it has had a long run of popularity in Germany, too. In France, the force-fed goose produces that marvelous delicacy known as foie gras (literally, fat liver), and the well-fattened bird itself is roasted or made into confit d'oie, goose cut into pieces, simmered long in its own fat, then put down in crocks with an airtight covering layer of fat so it can be served all through the year. You can buy canned confit d'oie here to serve with white beans or in that famous French melange of meats and beans, cassoulet.\n\nIn the early history of this country, the goose was a very important bird. Our New England forefathers kept flocks of geese as watchbirds, for they would vociferously sound an alert the minute animal or human prowlers came around. Then, of course, the feathers yielded down for their beds and the larger ones quills for their pens. The goose supplied meat in the winter, and the grease was used as a preventative or balm for chest colds and similar ailments.\n\nPerhaps the reason why goose has been so long neglected is because the quality that could be procured in our city markets was not of the finest. Now, however, we are blessed with a golden goose brought forth by the National Goose Council, raised with an eye to tenderness and flavor and then quick-frozen. These golden geese are available in sizes from 6 to 14 pounds, with the majority in the 8-to 10-pound range, which means they fit easily into a modern oven and make good sense for a small family. I can testify, as one who has served a couple of them for Thanksgiving, that they are extraordinarily fine eating, tender, succulent, and tasty.\n\nThe frozen geese should be thoroughly thawed before roasting, either in the refrigerator, which will take 1 _ _ to 2 days for the very large ones; in cool water for 4 to 5 hours; or at room temperature, which takes 6 to 10 hours for the medium size. For refrigerator or room-temperature thawing, leave them in the original wrap, and after room-temperature thawing, put the goose in the refrigerator until you are ready to cook it.\n\nNaturally, you will remove the neck and giblets from the cavity and make them into a delicious broth for sauce for the goose. It is also a good idea to remove the excess fat from the body cavity, render it, and use it for cooking, for this is one of the most delicate, pure, and flavorful fats we get. Nothing tastes better than potatoes or meat browned in goose fat, and it makes very good pastry, too.\n\n  So now for a _Stuffing for Your Golden Christmas Goose_ that I think enhances the rich meat marvelously well. Saute _ _ cup finely chopped onion in 6 tablespoons butter, add 5 to 6 cups bread crumbs, moistening them in the butter, and blend with 2 teaspoons salt and 1 cup cooked peeled chestnuts or canned chestnuts, 2 cups peeled and chopped apples, and 1 cup coarsely chopped prunes which have been puffed in hot water, or steeped in Madeira for a couple of days (or you may use 1 cup apples and 2 cups prunes, which I prefer). Season with _ _ teaspoon nutmeg and 1 teaspoon thyme, and blend well together. Stuff an 8-to 10-pound goose with this mixture, truss, sew up, or skewer the cavity, and tie the legs together. Place the goose breast side up on a rack in a roasting pan.\n\nRoast for 1 hour at 400 degrees, then reduce the temperature to 350 degrees and roast for another hour, without basting. As the fat renders from the goose, remove it to a jar for future use. After the second hour, reduce the heat to 325 degrees and continue roasting until nicely browned and done. The leg meat should be soft when pressed, and the juices, when the thigh is pricked, should run beigey-pink. Total roasting time for a 6-to 8-pound bird will be _1  _to 2 hours, for the 8-to 10 pound size from 2 to 2  hours, and 2\u00be to 3  hours for a 10-to 12 pound bird.\n\nTo serve with goose, I favor either mashed potatoes or a chickpea puree (see page 106) and something tart and fruity, like more prunes in Madeira or applesauce to cut the fat and balance the richness. As a green vegetable, I like broccoli or spinach. You can thicken the goose broth with flour, arrowroot, or cornstarch to make the sauce.\n\nThere's nothing quite as satisfying as a goose well cooked. If there is any left, serve it the next day with white beans, cooked until tender and dressed with a little of the goose fat, salt, pepper, and chopped parsley.\n\nSo let's drink a toast in French champagne (the perfect wine for this bird) to the golden goose and its long overdue renaissance as a great and glorious specialty for our holiday feasting.\n\n_The Thirteen Desserts_\n\n_of Christmas_\n\nAlthough I've been lucky enough to celebrate Christmas in many parts of the world and to discover the lore, traditions, and foods of the season in different countries, I think that by far the most affecting, the most delightfully Christmas-like Christmases were those I spent in Provence. In this southern region of France the centuries-old traditions seem to have survived unchanged. They are still observed by many families, especially those in the countryside.\n\nThe first great feast is the Gros Souper, or big supper, which takes place on Christmas Eve, a feast day. The Gros Souper is an elaborate evening meal that takes in all manner of very special Provencal dishes. First there is a huge bowl of a aioli, the wonderful garlicky mayonnaise called by some \"the butter of Provence\" (see page 291). On Christmas Eve this is served with snails, salt cod fish either sauteed in olive oil with little onions and garlic and olives or simply boiled and served in one piece, and all kinds of vegetables\u2014artichokes, zucchini, carrots, celery, and potatoes. This is the main part of the meal, and after it comes the dessert that is absolutely typical of Provence and of the season, not one dessert, but really thirteen in all.\n\nLes Treize Desserts, the thirteen desserts, consist of a selection of sweet things arranged on a tray, traditionally served all through that area of France. It makes a perfectly beautiful presentation, and it's customary to taste a little bit of everything for luck.\n\nIn the thirteen desserts you might find candied or dried figs, raisins, glace fruits, shelled and sometimes toasted almonds, toasted hazelnuts, and several different candies\u2014the dark, rich nougat of the area, marzipan fruits, sometimes chocolates, and dates, either plain or stuffed with nuts or fondant. The stuffed dates, rolled in sugar, are exquisite both to look at and to eat. Then there are fruits\u2014small oranges, mandarin oranges, and sometimes winter pears, and either little fruit tarts or a fascinating big tatt that is one of the gastronomic wonders of Provence. It has a filling of spiced and sweetened spinach mixed with a rich custard, masked with the glistening gold of an apricot glaze, and crisscrossed with pastry strips.\n\nFor the final touch, there are crispy, crunchy cakes of fried dough which in many ways resemble the Christmas desserts one finds in Italy, Mexico, and certain other countries. If you'd like to try these wonderful Christmas cakes\u2014and they're great fun to make\u2014here is the recipe.\n\n  For Pompe \u00e0 _I'Huile:_ sift together 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 2 tablespoons sugar, and 4 cups flour. Beat 2 eggs very, very well, and beat into them 1 cup milk. Gradually combine the dry and the liquid mixtures, and then add _ _ cup melted butter. Turn out onto a floured board and knead for about 5 or 6 minutes, or until the dough is very smooth and elastic.\n\nDivide the dough into 28 or 36 balls, and roll them out from 4 to 6 inches in diameter. Have ready a pan of deep fat heated to 370 degrees. Drop the circles into it, and let them brown delicately on both sides. Remove carefully and drain on absorbent paper, then sprinkle them with powdered sugar. Some people like cinnamon, but I much prefer them simply sprinkled with sugar. It's a matter of your own taste.\n\nThese crispy cakes should be served very fresh and almost warm, because they don't keep very well. They're short, crunchy, delicious, and quite different from anything we have at this time of year, and I think you'll find your guests will gobble them up. Arrange them on a tray with a selection of the thirteen desserts, and you have a most unusual Christmas collation to serve with coffee, perhaps for a Christmas Eve open house or a tree-trimming party.\n\nAfter the Gros Souper, the Provencaux will go to midnight mass, and then they rush home to eat another stalwart meal\u2014a Christmas Eve supper-breakfast which can go on well into the dawn. At this you find things like pates and blood sausage and capon or turkey, all washed down with  either the local country wines or another Provencal specialty called \"cooked wine.\" This is actually a mixture of sweet grape juice mixed with marc, the sharp, acrid brandy that is made from the residue left after the grapes are pressed. The combination of the rather bitter brandy and the sweet juice has an extremely exciting quality, but a robust red or white wine would be equally good with this Christmas meal.\n\n_Spain's Great Day for Gifts_\n\nIn Spain, gifts do not come at Christmas but on January 6, Twelfth Night, or Kings' Day as it is called there, the time when we take the tree down and consider the Christmas season at an end. The Kings were, of course, the Three Kings or Wise Men who brought gifts to the Christ child in Bethlehem, and to the Spanish and their children they take the place of Father Christmas.\n\nI happened to be in Barcelona for this holiday not long ago, and I was fascinated by the legends and traditions surrounding it. Between five and six on the afternoon of January 5 the Kings appear in the harbor on a beautiful ship, are rowed to shore, and parade through the city in full regalia with their retinue, much to the delight of the children, who are looking forward to the gifts that will be distributed through the windows that evening. Up until midnight the streets of Barcelona were thronged with people buying gifts and visiting the special gift and candy and sweetmeat shops that are set up only for this occasion.\n\nCertain traditional foods are made just for this holiday. One is a form of Twelfth Night cake, like the galette du rois of France. It is decorated with green angelica and red cherries that resemble the holly leaves and berries of our Christmas cakes, and a crown of icing or gold paper. Baked inside are tiny, tiny charms which, if you are not terribly careful, you can miss and swallow. Each has a particular meaning\u2014they bode good luck or money or poverty or whatever may be in store for the year ahead.\n\nThe candy shops are a picture. One of the Kings' Day traditions is to give marzipan candies, and as I wandered through Barcelona on January 5 I saw marzipan in just about every shape you can imagine. There were long braided strings of marzipan garlic and onions, every sort of known vegetable and fruit, and marvelous little marzipan plates of olives, orange sections, fried eggs, anchovies\u2014all fashioned of tinted marzipan. If you had wanted, you could have reconstructed a whole hors d'oeuvre tray with these pretty little marzipan fruits, vegetables, fish, and meats.\n\nI don't think I've ever seen more of the real spirit of giving and fun than in Barcelona. From the smallest bookstores and boutiques to the big department stores, the shops were packed with people and their excited, eager children.\n\nExcept for two or three pre-Christmas Saturdays in New York, I have never known such a rush to buy and to have the things bought beautifully wrapped\u2014there must have been millions of yards of gorgeous wrapping papers. It made you long to be buying for and giving to a large family yourself. Some of the better shops have for years had a tradition that I think will astound you as it did me. They not only wrap gifts but have a special delivery service of men dressed as the Three Kings who go around after nightfall leaving packages on the windows and sometimes entering houses through the windows to distribute the gifts and candies.\n\nOn January 6, all the children get gifts from their parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, and taxis are at a premium as people go from house to house leaving and receiving presents. It's all very gay and jolly. The weather was mild, so a friend and I sat in an outdoor cafe and watched the promenade of parents with children sporting their new treasures. We were amused to see that in Spain cowboy and Indian outfits seem to have taken over completely from the traditional matador costume.\n\nEating comes second only to giving on Kings' Day. We made luncheon reservations at one of the oldest restaurants in Barcelona, the Antica Casa Solla, which is in Barcelonette, the ancient part of the city near the docks. Thank goodness we did. When we arrived at about one thirty, early for lunch in Spain, there was only one vacant table\u2014all the rest were occupied or reserved\u2014and when we left at three fifteen there was a long line of people waiting to get in. We ate a delicious suckling pig with aioli, a Kings' Day specialty that is a particular favorite in this part of Spain. In the restaurant there was much gaiety and exchange of greetings and eating and drinking. By the time we had finished lunch the long round of gift giving and feasting had begun to tell, and all around us children were falling asleep on their chairs.\n\nKings' Day in Barcelona was a most exhilarating experience. The streets were magnificently decorated, and in the Town Hall there was a great creche with figures made of tiles and enamel, very beautiful and startlingly modern, something I'm sure no American city would ever countenance. At noon there was a big reception at the Town Hall and the House of Deputies. The buildings were illuminated with spotlights, tapestries had been thrown over the balconies, and the army was out in full dress in honor of this happiest of all celebrations.\n\n_Couscous_ \u2014A _Taste of the Exotic_\n\nPeople often ask me to suggest a different but not too expensive dish to serve at a big party. Lately, I have been recommending couscous, the national dish of the North African countries of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. You may have seen, in the better kitchen equipment shops, a couscousier, the traditional pot in which couscous is cooked. It looks like an enormous double boiler with a deep bottom and a perforated top in which the couscous grain, a fairly coarse ground wheat, is steamed over an aromatic spicy stew. There are two types of couscous to be found in gourmet specialty shops and groceries selling Middle East foods\u2014the instant and the long-cooking. I find the latter gives the best results.\n\nI accompany my favorite Moroccan version of couscous with a fiery sauce piquante and a subtly flavored Moroccan chicken dish that is served with pickled lemons.\n\n  As these have to be made ahead of time, first I'm going to give you the recipe for Pickled _Lemons._ Slice 6 lemons just over _ _ inch thick, put in a colander, and sprinkle heavily with coarse salt. Cover with plastic wrap, and drain over a bowl for 24 hours. Wash off salt, pack the lemons into quart jars with coarse salt (about 2 tablespoons per jar), and fill the jars with vegetable oil. Cover jars with lids and let stand from 5 days to 3 weeks, by which time the lemons will be soft, mellow, and not at all bitter.\n\n  Start the _Couscous_ about 2 hours before your party. To serve twelve to sixteen, put in the bottom of the couscousier (if you don't have one, use an 8-quart cooking pot over which you can fit a colander) 1 pound neck or shoulder of lamb cut in  -inch cubes, 2 large onions, thinly sliced, 1 teaspoon each of ginger and turmeric, 2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper, _ _ cup vegetable oil, 2 ounces butter, a pinch of saffron, and enough water to come 2 inches above the ingredients. Bring this to a rapid boil.\n\nLine the colander or steamer top of the couscousier with cheesecloth to prevent the grains from falling through, add 2 pounds long-cooking couscous, and put over the boiling stew. Cover with the couscousier lid or wrap aluminum foil tightly over the colander, and put more foil around the point where colander and pot meet to keep the steam from escaping. Steam 1 hour, then remove the steamer top and run cold water over the puffed-up couscous for 2 or 3 minutes, breaking up the lumps with your fingers. Set aside to drain.\n\nTo the stew in the pot, add 6 scraped and quartered carrots, 4 peeled and quartered turnips, and 4 peeled and quartered potatoes. Cover and cook 20 minutes. Meanwhile, turn the drained couscous into a big bowl and mix in thoroughly, by hand, _ _ cup vegetable oil and 3 teaspoons salt. Replace in steamer. Add to stew 3 thickly sliced zucchini, 1 can drained and rinsed chickpeas, and _ _ cup seedless raisins. Put steamer over stew, cover, and steam for another 20 minutes.\n\n_ _ Start the Moroccan chicken dish, _Djaj M'Kalli,_ the night before. Remove all fat from three 3-pound chickens, and rub them well with 2 tablespoons coarse salt mixed with 3 chopped garlic cloves. Let stand 1 hour. Wipe off salt. Rub chickens with a mixture of 1 cup vegetable oil, 2 teaspoons ginger, 1 teaspoon turmeric, 1 teaspoon black pepper, and a good pinch of saffron. Put in a large bowl with any remaining oil mixture, cover, and refrigerate overnight.\n\nNext day, while the couscous steams, put the chickens in a vety large pot with 3 large onions, grated,  (-pound butter, 3 finely chopped garlic cloves, 2 cups water, and 2 cups chicken stock. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer until chickens are tender, 40 to 45 minutes. Remove chickens and rapidly boil broth down to a thick, rich sauce, stirring often. Add 1 pound soft ripe olives and a few slices of pickled lemon. Carve chickens and return to simmering sauce to reheat.\n\n  Now make the _Sauce Piquante._ Whirl in a blender 2 or 3 hot red peppers with 3 tablespoons olive oil, 1 crushed garlic clove, 1 teaspoon Tabasco, and _ _ cup finely ground walnuts.\n\nNow you are ready to assemble everything. Transfer the steamed couscous to a bowl, and mix in 4 tablespoons butter. Mound the couscous on a very large platter. Drain stewed meat and vegetables and arrange on one side, with carved chicken and olives on the other. Put the stock from the stew in one bowl, the sauce from the chicken in another. Have the sauce piquante and drained pickled lemons in separate bowls. Serve each guest some couscous as a base, a piece of chicken, some lamb and vegetables, and spoon stock over the couscous, sauce over the chicken. Let them help themselves to the lemons and a judicious dab of the blistering-hot sauce piquante.\n\nWith the couscous I serve pita, the flat Middle East bread (see page 206), and a good, chilled rose wine. Dessert can be a cool, refreshing apricot sherbet.\n\nThis Moroccan feast is a beautiful, exciting combination of colors, textures, and flavors, an exotic tour de force that will earn you full marks as an imaginative cook, and it will serve twelve to sixteen people easily. You can serve it buffet style or Moroccan fashion, with the dishes on a low table and the guests seated on cushions around it.\n\n_Introducing Mezze_\n\nI've always been a devotee of hors d'oeuvre, and ever since I visited Iran and other parts of the Near and Middle East, I've become utterly addicted to mezze, the type of hors d'oeuvre you find there. In one particular section of the great bazaars of Teheran are little shops that specialize in mezze, where for almost no money you can feast on a staggering variety of tastes and textures, from savory pastries to tiny bites of fried liver.\n\nNow I'm not talking about the cocktail appetizers we know, but the little platters of different foods you are served in Provence, Greece, Iran, Egypt, and other places as a beautifully presented first course or snack. I remember starting lunch with a table of mezze in a small restaurant in Isfahan, that magic city of exquisite mosques and marvelous architecture. The thing that struck me most was a bowl heaped with tiny sprigs of crisp, freshly washed herbs\u2014tarragon, thyme, basil, mint, parsley, coriander, everything you could possibly imagine\u2014which one munched on along with the bread and other mezze. It was a memorable beginning to the meal, and if you grow herbs in the summer and don't know what to do with them all, there's your answer.\n\nI'm going to mention a few mezze so you will get an idea of what they are like. There are eggplant dishes: eggplant puree made with oil, garlic, parsley, and lemon juice, sometimes called poor man's caviar; another very old version which includes yogurt and sometimes highly seasoned meatballs; fried eggplant with yogurt and mint. Many other mezze are fried\u2014fried mussels, fried cheese, fried brains served cold with parsley and lemon, fried minced chicken balls flavored with turmeric, the fried patties of ground and spiced white broad beans called ta'amia, one of Egypt's national dishes. Then, of course, that wonderful tahini, the sesame-seed paste we buy canned in Greek and health food stores and delicatessens, combined with chickpeas in hummus bi tahini (see page 106), with salt fish, or in a cream salad (which we would call a dip) with yogurt, lemon, garlic, and parsley\u2014and the divine taramasalata of Greece and Turkey, a \"cream salad\" of smoked cod's roe, garlic, oil, lemon, and milk-soaked bread.\n\nLately, since avocados have been introduced to the Middle East, the Israelis have contributed a new mezze\u2014avocado purees mixed with cream cheese, or tuna and mayonnaise, very different from guacamole or the avocado dips we know.\n\nOne of the mezze most people have heard of, and invariably love, is stuffed vine leaves. These, naturally, are grape leaves, which we buy in jars or cans, preserved in brine. Before using them you should get rid of the brine by putting them in a bowl and pouring hot water over them, making sure it penetrates between the leaves. Let them soak for 20 minutes, drain, soak in cold water, drain again, then repeat the whole process one more time.\n\nMiddle East cuisine enchants me. The flavors and combinations of foods are so unusual and delicious. For the last couple of years I've been cooking dishes from A Book _of Middle Eastern Food_ by my good friend Claudia Roden, who was born and raised in Cairo and now lives in London.\n\n  I'm going to give you her recipe for Cold _Stuffed Vine Leaves,_ because it is traditional, honest, and extraordinarily good. Drain a 1-pound jar or can of vine leaves (40 to 50 leaves), and wash off the brine. For the filling, cook   cup long-grain rice by your favorite method, drain thoroughly and mix with 2 to 3 ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped, 1 large onion, finely chopped, or 12 green onions, finely cut (include some of the green part), _2  _tablespoons finely chopped parsley, 2 to 2 _ _ tablespoons crushed dried mint. _ _ teaspoon ground cinnamon, _ _ teaspoon allspice, and salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste. Mix this filling well.\n\nPlace the leaves on a plate, vein side up, and put a heaping teaspoon of filling in the center, near the stem edge. Fold the stem end up over the filling, then fold both sides toward the middle and roll up like a small cigar. Squeeze lightly in the palm of your hand. You'll get the knack after doing a few. Pack the rolls tightly in a pan lined with slices of tomato (this prevents the leaves from sticking to the pan and burning), and slip 3 to 4 cloves of garlic in between them. Mix together _ _ cup olive oil, _ _ cup water, _ _ teaspoon powdered saffron (this is optional), 1 teaspoon sugar, and the juice of 1 or more lemons.\n\nPour this over the rolls, then put a small plate on top to prevent their unwinding. Cover the pan and simmer very, very gently for at least 2 hours, until thoroughly cooked. Add water occasionally, about half a cup at a time, as the liquid becomes absorbed. Let the rolls cool in the pan before turning out. Serve cold, with drinks or as part of a table of mezze.\n\n_Portable Feasts_\n\nEver since I was a child in the Pacific Northwest, I've had a passion for picnics. I can remember picnics at the beach or in the woods when the salty tang of the sea breeze or the fresh sharp scent of the pines seemed like nature's spice for the food we were eating. A picnic can be anything you make it\u2014great baskets of luxurious delicacies served on fine linen with your best glass and china, or just a half-hour halt at some picturesque spot to munch on a sandwich, a piece of Swiss Gruyere or Emmenthaler cheese, a tomato or crisp raw vegetables, and some fruit, with a bottle of wine to wash everything down.\n\nSandwiches might have been invented for this kind of portable feast, and they don't have to be as dull as some people make them\u2014a slice of dried-out chicken or limp roast beef between two pieces of flabby bread is hardly worth the trip. There is a tremendous repertory of really exciting and interesting sandwiches to draw on, all easy to prepare.\n\n  One of my favorites is the Italian _Pan Bagna._ For this you take the large roll known as a hero roll, or a small loaf of French bread, or a hard round roll, split it, and brush the bottom part lightly with olive or salad oil (olive oil gives the most flavor). Let it stand for a little to let the oil sink in, then cover with very thin slices of red or white onion. Top these with green pepper strips, tomato slices, and a few anchovy fillets or, if you prefer, pieces of tuna. Slice a few pitted black olives, strew these on top, and season to taste with salt and pepper. Brush the top half of the roll with oil (if you are a garlic lover, rub it with a garlic clove first to give a little more zing), put the halves together, press down firmly, wrap in foil, waxed paper, or plastic wrap, and take it along with you. The longer it sits, the better it tastes because the delicious flavors have a chance to get together.\n\n  Or you might make Egg _and Onion Sandwiches._ Saute _ _ cup finely chopped onion or green onion in 1 tablespoon butter for a few minutes, until just wilted and soft. Toss in about _ _cup finely chopped mushrooms, if you have them, and cook down with the onions for 2 or 3 minutes. Salt and pepper the mixture, let it cool, then toss with 4 finely chopped hard-boiled eggs and, if it needs binding, a tiny bit of mayonnaise. Spread this on whole-wheat or rye bread, and there's your sandwich.\n\n  I'm also very fond of tongue sandwiches with horseradish butter, for which this delicate meat seems to have a great affinity. Get your butter quite soft, cream it, and beat in grated fresh horseradish to taste and a touch of prepared mustard. Spread a layer of this on a slice of bread, cover with very thin slices of cooked fresh tongue or smoked tongue, and top with another slice of bread for an unusual, piquant combination.\n\n  Then , of course, there is our old friend the onion sandwich. For this I've found nothing is better than oatmeal bread. Spread it with butter, top with paper-thin onion slices, salt, clap the other slice of bread on top, and press down tightly. Take a deviled egg, some cold chicken, or a ripe tomato to eat with your onion sandwiches, have a bottle of wine or beer, and you've got a great picnic.\n\n  To make the Oatmeal Bread, first dissolve 2 packages active dry yeast and 2 teaspoons sugar in 1 cup lukewarm water\u2014110 to 115 degrees. Let stand for 10 minutes, then stir very well. Cream _ _ cup butter in a large mixing bowl, add 1 cup boiling water, and stir until completely melted. Add 1 cup rolled oats,  __ cup molasses, and 1 tablespoon salt. Blend thoroughly and cool to lukewarm. Add 1 egg and beat well. Add the yeast, then fold in _5 _ cups sifted flour. Put the dough in a buttered mixing bowl, turning it so it is well greased on all sides, then refrigerate for at least 2 hours\u2014you can leave it for 3 or 4 hours and it won't hurt. Turn out the chilled dough on a floured board and shape into two loaves. Place in well-buttered 9-by-5-inch loaf pans, and let rise in a warm, draft-free spot until double in bulk, about 2 hours.\n\nBake in a 350-degree oven for approximately 1 hour, or until the loaves are nicely browned and sound hollow when you rap the bottom with your knuckles. Remove from the pans and cool on a rack. This makes excellent sandwiches and the best toast ever.\n\n_Supermarket Picnics_\n\nAny place where there are a few blades of grass and a place to sit down is picnic ground for me. I love eating in the outdoors, and I love a casual picnic just as much as, or even more than, an elaborate gastronomic delight with wines and a great variety of hot and cold foods that has taken hours of preparation. I've enjoyed just about every imaginable kind of picnic, from a small and elegant feast of champagne and caviar to a big homely affair of cold fried chicken, potato salad, baked beans, homemade bread, and chocolate cake, with lots of beer and loads of coffee to wash it all down.\n\nMy favorite summertime picnic is the impromptu one that just happens. You are driving along and suddenly you say, \"Goodness, wouldn't it be fun to have a picnic?\" So you stop and buy some food and just do it.\n\nA few years ago I was taking a long tour through the western states with friends, and one night we had dinner at a place in Idaho where the specialty was chicken, and very good chicken it was. They had an hors d'oeuvre of giblets, so we asked for a double order, kept some overnight in a small refrigerator, and had them for our picnic next day along with a loaf of freshly baked bread we bought on the road.\n\nRecently I have been doing some trekking along the Oregon coast, and I've had several impromptu picnics that I thought you might like to hear about, if you are a picnic buff, too. These are the kind of picnics that are great fun and very easy because you don't have to prepare and pack any food\u2014you just pick it up en route. If you keep in the car a little basket with knives, forks, spoons, napkins, and a can opener and buy plastic or paper plates and plastic glasses at a dime store, you have no waste and no worries.\n\nOne of our most successful picnics was completely unplanned. On that particular day we had driven farther than we had intended and we were hungry, so we stopped at the nearest big supermarket.\n\nFirst we bought a half-gallon jug of California red wine. Then I shopped the cheese counter and found a nice-looking Swiss cheese, some Cheddar and Monterey Jack, and, being the adventurous type, I took a chance on a canned Camembert. The meat section came up with an acceptable Polish sausage and a salami, so I headed for the mustard shelf and picked out a jat of mustard.\n\nThe bread situation wasn't very satisfactory, so I bought some interesting crackers and English water biscuits and a stick of butter. With a basket of cherry tomatoes and some nice ripe plums (there were beautiful strawberries, but I decided on the plums) this turned out to be a most gratifying repast. The sausages, crackers, and wine were good, the cheeses pleasant although not startling, and we sat and looked at the ocean, chatting and having a perfectly delightful time, and there were no dirty dishes, no debris, only the knives to wash when we got home.\n\nAnother day we knew we were going to picnic but we didn't want to make a big production out of it, so we just took along a couple of bottles of white wine in a cooler and some hard-boiled eggs, and once more investigated the supermarket. Supermarkets in the West have marvelous produce, and we bought bunches of beautiful big radishes, scallions, tomatoes, a jar of herring tidbits, canned Norwegian sardines, the kind that have such a delicate smoked flavor, and lemon to squeeze on them, rye bread and butter, and Norwegian flatbread. Rye bread goes so well with any kind of smoked fish\u2014be it sardines, smoked salmon, or kippered sturgeon. With nectarines for dessert we had a perfect picnic, with no trouble, no leftovers, everything disposable and delicious.\n\nPerhaps if there were really good wayside inns in this country, as there are in Europe, the urge to picnic would not be quite as strong, although as far as I'm concerned, I will swap a wayside inn for a picnic any day\u2014unless it happens to be a three-star restaurant with impeccable food and wine. But no matter how famous it was, I don't think it would be half as much fun as hunting a cozy spot to have a supermarket picnic.\n\n CHAPTER 10 _ _\n\n_Memorable Meals Places, and People_,\n\n_... in which we are entertained by a fearless host ... an artist with a fine Italian hand for cooking ... and an American in Provence ... find a welcome in Ireland ..._ _and in Maryland ... stoke up with a smorgasbord breakfast ... delight in a delicacy in Lyon ... take a chance on cullen skink in Scotland .... come out for common markets ... are seduced by socca in Nice ... glory in garlic in Catalonia ... are surprised by bleeding mushrooms in Majorca ... and have a field day offish at Prunier's._\n\n_The Perfect Dinner Party_\n\nI often have people say to me, \"I would be afraid to ask _you_ to dinner.\" Well, why? Everyone has some specialty he does extraordinarily well, be it bacon and eggs or chili or chef's salad or filet of beef en croute, so why should entertaining be such a problem? The thing is to entertain within your scope and not get yourself in an uproar by feeling you have to attempt something beyond it. Even if you serve the simplest of meals\u2014just one course with a bottle of wine and some cheese\u2014that's true hospitality. Hospitality is enjoying a meal with your friends, and enjoyment is the key word.\n\nI'm sure we've all suffered through the nerve-racking experience of dining at a house where the host _or_ hostess, who is doing the cooking, keeps on twitching and nervously getting up and rushing to the kitchen. By the time you sit down to dinner you feel it can't possibly be worth all that effort.\n\nThe perfect dinner party is the kind I attended the other evening. It was given by Maurice Moore-Betty, a man of great charm and distinction who happens to be a well-known cooking teacher and cookbook author. Apart from the fact that the meal was extremely well planned, well cooked, and well presented, what impressed me most was that there was no visible display of dinner being prepared, no air of unease. Our host excused himself twice, briefly, about ten minutes in all, came back, replenished someone's drink, chatted, and then asked us in to the dining room, which makes one enormous open-plan room with the kitchen where he gives classes. The table was beautifully set with silver, glasses, candles, plates for the first course, and two small terrines. As we sat down he brought in the first course, hot asparagus which he had drained and put on a napkin in a silver dish. With this we had our choice from the terrines of hollandaise sauce, which he had made ahead and put on the table while he was away from his guests, and vinaigrette sauce. I didn't try the hollandaise, but the vinaigrette was extremely good with a plenitude of fresh herbs\u2014chives, parsley, and a tiny touch of mint.\n\nWhen we had finished the asparagus, Maurice went on talking with us as he removed the plates and popped them right in the dishwasher. He then brought the wine to the table and took from the oven a large casserole of potatoes boulangere (for which I'll give you the recipe later) and a double rack of lamb, timed to the minute. Without any lull in the conversation, he carved, served us, and we continued our meal.\n\nAfter the main course, he again cleared the table and brought from the refrigerator two desserts, baked pears delicately spiced with cloves and a frozen chocolate mousse, unmolded on a plate, which he took straight from the freezer and cut on a serving table. At the last minute he poured water on the coffee, so right after dessert we had coffee and liqueurs.\n\nBy actual timing, we had been at table just an hour and a half, enjoying good talk, excellent food, and the personal service of our host. A dinner like this, perfectly planned, perfectly cooked, and perfectly simple\u2014no bread, no relishes, no salad, no fuss, no rush\u2014is all one needs. This is the way to entertain; otherwise give it up.\n\nPotatoes boulangere, which means \"potatoes from the baker,\" is something that originated years ago, when people in rural France didn't have ovens, as they do now. They put the Sunday roast of lamb in a dish, surrounded it with sliced onions and potatoes, and took it to the baker, to be cooked in his oven while the family went to church. Afterward, they picked it up, done to a turn, and took it home for lunch.\n\n  To prepare _Maurice Moore-Betty's Potatoes Boulangere_ to serve four, peel and very thinly slice 4 medium-large potatoes\u2014the slices should be paper-thin. Heat 3 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons oil in a skillet, add 2 medium onions, thinly sliced, and cook until golden and soft (not brown), shaking the pan occasionally. Liberally butter a 2-quart baking dish. Put in a layer of potatoes. Drain the cooked onions, saving the liquid from the pan, and put a layer of onion on top of the potatoes. Season with salt and pepper. Continue to make layers of potatoes and onions, seasoning the layers, and end with a top layer of potatoes. Season with more salt and pepper, dot with butter and pour on the liquid from the onions and just enough water to reach the top of the potatoes. Bake in a 375-degree oven until the liquid has been absorbed and the potatoes test tender with a fork, about 30 or 40 minutes. You don't need an elaborate meat dish to complement the good taste of these baker's potatoes, just plain roast lamb or beef, steak, meat loaf, or braised lamb shanks. You can vary the recipe by adding a touch of thyme or rosemary to the seasonings or dotting more butter between the layers.\n\nPotatoes boulang\u00e8re with their crusty brown top and luscious flavor of onion look marvelously appetizing, make very good eating, and take a minimum of preparation and no watching. These are all factors to take into account if you and your guests are going to enjoy a perfect, well-planned dinner.\n\nAn _Artist in the Kitchen_\n\nEvery once in a while you go to someone's house for lunch or dinner and have a meal that is so utterly satisfying in every way that you leave thinking: \"That was exactly what I wanted to eat today!\"\n\nGranted, these occasions don't come too often, so when they do they are all the more to be savored. Recently I had an experience like that, one that was completely unexpected, for I was invited to lunch by someone I had never met. I left well fed and well entertained, feeling that I had found new food and new friends all in one day.\n\nMy new friends are Ed and Ellie Giobbi, a genuine, charming young couple who live with their three children in a rambling country house in Katonah, New York. Ed Giobbi is a well-known artist whose paintings hang in many museums and private collections, and his other passion, next to art, is cooking\u2014the honest, simple, nourishing, and flavorful Italian country cooking he learned from his family and friends here and in Italy. To him, cooking is a joy, a celebration of life, as absorbing and rewarding a pursuit as painting, to which he feels it is closely allied. In fact, he says, if he hadn't been able to cook cheap, nutritious meals for himself when he was a struggling art student he might never have survived the poverty and hardships an artist experiences in his early years.\n\nOne of the remarkable things about the Giobbis is that they grow or prepare about 80 percent of the food they eat. They raise squab, rabbits, ducks, and chickens, grow vegetables, herbs, and fruit, and in summer, when they go to their house on Cape Cod, Ed buys a whole 165-pound tuna which he cans in olive oil. He also cans his own tomatoes, makes pesto, that sublime green sauce for pasta, from the basil flourishing in the herb garden, and even presses grapes and makes wine, an art he learned from his father.\n\nA carafe of Ed's wine was on the table when we sat down on the porch for lunch, and a loaf of bread freshly baked by Ellie. The food Ed had cooked was so unusual and delicious that I'm going to give you recipes for two of the dishes. One used breast of veal, an economical cut which is usually cooked with the bone left in and a pocket cut in it for the stuffing.\n\n  This _Stuffed_ Breast 0f Veal with _Marsala_ had been completely boned, so he started with one latge flat piece of meat that was spread with the stuffing and rolled up like a jelly roll.\n\nFor the stuffing, mix 1 _ _ cups fresh ricotta cheese (if unavailable, put cottage cheese through a rather fine sieve to get the same texture as ricotta), 2 tablespoons chopped parsley (preferably the broad-leafed Italian parsley), 3 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese, 1 lightly beaten egg, _ _ teaspoon nutmeg,  __ pound chopped boiled ham, 1 teaspoon salt, and _ _ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper. Blend well. Lay the veal flat and spread the stuffing ewer the surface, being careful not to get it too close to the edges of the meat. Gently roll as for a jelly roll, tie the roll with string, and sew the ends together to prevent the stuffing, which expands as it cooks, from oozing out. Rub the roll with salt, pepper, and 2 tablespoons butter or olive oil, place in a baking pan, and sprinkle the roll with 1 teaspoon rosemary. Bake in a 450-degree oven, uncovered, for 1 hour, basting often with the pan juices. Add   cup Marsala wine, cover, and cook for 30 minutes more, basting frequently. The roll tastes best cold or tepid, so when you take it from the oven let it rest for at least 3 hours before serving. It is even better the next day. To serve, cut into '/2-inch slices. You'll have a most attractive effect of  layers of stuffing meat, and enough to serve four easily.\n\n  You could serve noodles or cornmeal polenta with the roll, or the unusual vegetable dish we had, _Verdura Mista,_ a really delicate blend of flavors.\n\nPeel and dice 1 very large potato, and cut 1 stalk celery into 1-inch pieces. Wash and chop 1 pound fresh spinach, _ _pound escarole, and _ _pound Savoy cabbage or ordinary cabbage. Put all the vegetables in a deep pot and pour boiling water over them. Let the water return to the boil, then drain the vegetables, saving _ _ cup of the water. Heat 3 tablespoons olive oil in a big skillet, saute 2 finely chopped garlic cloves until they begin to brown, then add the blanched vegetables and salt and pepper to taste. Cover and cook over low heat until vegetables are tender, adding some of the reserved water if the mixture gets too dry.\n\nThis was one of the most enjoyable luncheons I have had in a long time, cooked as Ed believes food should be\u2014with a free hand, creatively, using the freshest ingredients you can get.\n\nAn _American in Provence_\n\nIt isn't often you find an American who has made a reputation as a culinary authority in a country as supercritical about food as France, but Richard Olney has\u2014and rightly. Richard was born in Iowa, but he has lived in France for more than twenty years and is the only regular American contributor to the leading French gastronomic review, _Cuisine et Vins de France._\n\nLike me, Richard is in love with the light, the landscape, and the odors of Provence. He has a tiny house in Sollies-Toucas, a village in the south of France. To reach his house, which is far away from other houses of the village, perched on a crag of rock overlooking the stupendously beautiful countryside and hills of Provence, you must drive up a steep, steep incline. The struggle of getting all the provisions, wine, and fuel up that precipitous hill must be tremendous, but despite the difficulties, some wonderfully good food comes out of Richard's kitchen, which is dominated by a huge stone fireplace where he does a great deal of open-fire cookery and spit roasting.\n\nWhen I was in Provence recently, some friends and I were invited to luncheon by Richard, and after a two-hour drive, we arrived with keen appetites. The remarkable thing about the meal, apart from the excellence of the food, was the way it was cooked\u2014with love and care, but totally without fanfare or any great show of performance.\n\nWe started with a mousseline of merlan and oursins (whiting and sea urchins), a very light fine mousse of the fish and the orange roe of the sea urchins which had been put through a fine sieve, mixed with egg whites and heavy cream, beaten well over ice, then poached in a mold well in advance and finally coated with a natural jelly. Sliced, it was a most delicate coral pink with an unforgettably good combination of fish flavors, herbs, and a touch _of_ Sauternes.\n\nJust before we sat down to the mousseline, Richard put a pheasant on a spit in front of the fire to turn and roast while we took our leisurely time eating the first course and drinking a delicious white Burgundy. When the pheasant was done just to the right point, it was carved and served with shoestring potatoes, sauteed very quickly in butter in a heavy pan until they were almost a pancake, with a crisp brown crust contrasting with the soft white inside.\n\nAnother extremely interesting dish, served as a separate course, was a ragout printanier, a kind of vegetable stew that is one of Richard's specialties. The basic idea is so simple that anyone can follow it, and it's fun to play around with because you can use your imagination in putting together all kinds of combinations of vegetables, adding any herb you prefer.\n\n Our _Rago_ \u00fb _t Printanier_ started with tiny artichokes, so young the choke was undeveloped and didn't have to be removed. Only the stems and tough outer leaves were trimmed away. (These baby artichokes, so tender they can be eaten whole, are usually sold in Italian markets and occasionally in supermarkets, but if you can't find them you could substitute frozen artichoke hearts.) These went into a big saute pan with a large chunk of butter, 4 or 5 unpeeled garlic cloves, some tiny white onions, skinned young broad beans (the Italian fava), salt, pepper, and a pinch or two of summer savory. The pan was covered and shaken often while the vegetables cooked over fairly moderate heat, with an occasional testing, until they reached just the right crisp tenderness. At the last minute, they were given a sprinkling of chopped parsley.\n\nThe habit of serving vegetables like this as a separate course is very typical of Provence. They may come between the first and main courses, or after the main course, which I think is a most civilized idea. If you have a good entree with potatoes or rice, it is so intelligent to feature the vegetables on their own, giving them a chance to shine in their own spotlight, so to speak. You can vary your vegetables according to whatever is in the market\u2014spring carrots, baby zucchini, broccoli, celery hearts, flowerets of cauliflower, tender young peas\u2014taking into account that some will need more, or less, cooking time than others.\n\nWe'd had two beautiful wines with our mousseline and pheasant, and we ended our meal with yet another wine, accompanying a platter of cheeses, as is the custom among wine lovers. It was a perfect luncheon, and as we sat and gazed over the countryside, warmed by the great fire in front of which the pheasant had roasted, I felt blissfully relaxed. This, to me, is true entertaining\u2014simple, gracious, and wonderful.\n\nAn _Irish Welcome_\n\nIreland is a country full of unexpected delights, and not the least of these is finding in remote places extraordinarily good food, cooked with love and care.\n\nOne glorious day in April, when the hedges blazed with the golden blossoms of broom and every little front garden flaunted tulips, azaleas, and all the lovely spring flowers, I drove down from Dublin to one of the most interesting inns I have ever stayed in. It's called Ballymaloe House, and it lies in the rolling farmland of east Cork, near the tiny village of Shanagarry on the Ballycotton road, not far from the town of Midleton. The house is on a 400-acre working farm where owners Ivan and Myrtle Allen raise sheep, cows, pigs, and chickens, fruits, and vegetables. Under 200 acres of glass are grown mushrooms, tomatoes, cucumbers, and strawberries, all of which appear regularly on the inn's menus.\n\nThe house is great fun. It started as a Geraldine castle, and the fourteenth-century keep still stands in its original form, but the main building has been rebuilt, added to, and modernized over the centuries, and it rambles all over the place, with tucked-away rooms and stairways. There are thirteen rooms in the main house, more in the coachyard buildings and gate lodge, and, for passing the time in true country style, there's a swimming pool, tennis courts, a nine-hole golf course, horses to ride, and trout ponds to fish in. What makes Ballymaloe so distinctive, though, is the feeling you get the minute you walk in of being in a private country house. There's no desk where you are obliged to register. You are welcomed warmly and shown to your room, where you find little nosegays of fresh flowers. If the night is cool, there's a comforting surprise\u2014a hot-water bottle in your bed.\n\nThe dining room, called the Yeats Room because the walls are hung with genre paintings by one of Ireland's best-known artists, Jack B. Yeats, brother of the poet, is also open to the public for dinner, Tuesday through Thursday. It has earned high praise and awards in Europe and America for the quality of the food, and small wonder. Mrs. Allen, who does all the cooking herself with the help of four local girls in the kitchen, is an imaginative, creative cook who seeks out the best-quality materials that she can find. Hers is good, honest, flavorful country food, lovingly prepared and well served. She is a follower of my writings and flattered me by telling me that the night I arrived (and she hadn't known I was coming) she had one of my recipes on the menu.\n\nThat evening for dinner I first chose from a two-tiered hors d'oeuvre cart laden with vegetable salads, a finely textured chicken liver p pate, and lots of dishes made from the seafood for which Ireland is famous\u2014cockles and mussels from County Kerry in remoulade sauce, lobster and crab from the west, fresh salmon from the Shannon, and a very good scallop and rice salad. Passing up the soups, I found it hard to decide which of the main dishes to have and finally picked the pork with garlic. The skin had been left on and scored in the English and Irish manner so it roasted to a lovely crisp crackling, and the meat had been rubbed with garlic and then roasted with more garlic cloves in the pan, which gave the pork an unusual, lively flavor. With this there were vegetables from the farm. Finally, another cart arrived with a most tempting selection of desserts, from tiny tarts filled with poached rhubarb to a delicious cream-filled nutted meringue.\n\nNext morning I breakfasted on good Irish bacon, freshly gathered eggs with rich yellow yolks, and a wonderful whole-wheat bread Mrs. Allen had made, not the usual soda bread, but a bread made with yeast, coarse whole meal, and a touch of molasses. It was dark, nutty, chewy, the very soul of bread, and I got the recipe so you could try it.\n\n  To prepare _Myrtle_ Allen's Brown Bread, put 3  cups whole-wheat flour (preferably the stone-ground flour sold in health-food stores) in a large mixing bowl, and place in a warm oven\u2014a gas oven with the pilot light on or an electric oven set as low as possible. Both flour and bowl should be warm when you make the bread.\n\nDissolve 1 _ _ packages granular yeast in   cup hot water (105 to 110 degrees). Blend 2 tablespoons unsulfured molasses with _ _ cup water of the same temperature. Combine the flour, proofed yeast, molasses, and 1 tablespoon salt. Add enough hot water to make a wet sticky dough (about 1 cup or more according to the flour). Put directly into a buttered 9-by-5-by-3-inch bread tin and allow to rise by one-third its original size. Bake in a 450-degree oven for 50 minutes, or until the crust is nicely browned and the loaf sounds hollow when tapped. Remove from the pan and leave on the rack in the turned-off oven for 20 minutes more to give a crustier exterior.\n\nAs I drove away after breakfast down a driveway banked with huge bushes of rhododendrons in brilliant bloom, past soft green fields where sheep grazed, like a scene from an eighteenth-century print, I thought what a delightful way and place this would be to live. I shall carry the memory of peaceful Ballymaloe and its wonderful Irish food and welcome for a long, long time.\n\n_Crab Galore_\n\nI don't think I could ever have my fill of crab, which is my all-time favorite shellfish, but I came pretty close to it one summer in Maryland, where for five straight days I ate crab\u2014I must have had it eight or nine times. It was in Maryland that I came across Phillips Crab House, a restaurant in Ocean City, on the Atlantic, that I consider to be unique and one of the best seafood houses in this country. There are so many things that make it different and distinctive and good.\n\nIt's a family operation, run by Shirley and Brice Phillips with their sons Steven and Jeffery, Steven's wife Olivia, and Shirley's mother, Mrs. Lily Flowers, who is famous for her crab cakes. The Crab House started in the smallest way in 1956 when Mr. and Mrs. Phillips, who operated a seafood packing plant, had such a surplus of crabs that they looked around for a retail outlet and found a tiny shack on Philadelphia Avenue in Ocean City where they opened a four-table restaurant and take-out service.\n\nAs the boys grew up, they brought their friends to help in the kitchen, which led to the Phillipses' practice of hiring mainly college kids whom they could train the way they wanted. The Crab House has now expanded through constant building to a rambling, enormous place seating 1,200 people. During the height of the season, between 7,000 and 8,000 meals are served a day\u2014by the happiest, smartest, most adorable bunch of young girls you've ever seen.\n\nEvery year the Phillipses take on 350 college boys and girls from all over the country (many are repeaters; their present chef came to them when he was sixteen). Of these, 175 are waitresses, handpicked from 2,000 applicants by Shirley Phillips, an enchanting, bright-eyed, slim woman who looks hardly older than a college girl herself. She and her husband love and look after the young people, taking them out in groups of thirty every Tuesday for a day at the beach and dinner afterward so they get to know each other. \"The kids are what made this place\u2014they deserve all the credit for its success,\" Shirley told me.\n\nThat's partly true, but it is undeniably the Phillipses' loving, understanding approach to youth that gives the service at the Crab House such a rare and wonderful warmth and friendliness. The waitresses are told to think of the restaurant as their home and the diners as their guests. They introduce themselves and then write their names on the paper tablecloths so anyone who wants another cup of coffee or the check knows whom to ask for, which I think is a perfectly delightful custom.\n\nEverything about the Crab House is just as personal and pleasant. The dining rooms were decorated by Shirley with stained glass and Tiffany lampshades she collected in the years when they were a drug on the mar ket (she never paid more than two dollars for any of the shades), old trolley-car seats as benches in one room, sewing-machine bases for the wood tabletops, and all kinds of offbeat bits of decor that blend together beautifully in a causal, uncontrived way.\n\nThe Crab House has no beer, wine, or liquor license, but it's easy enough to pick up cold beer or a bottle of wine at the Pub in the shopping plaza across the way to go with your seafood dinner. The menu is medium large, with shrimp, lobster, clams, flounder, chicken, ham, and, naturally, crab galore, served in every way imaginable. You can start with cream of crab or vegetable crab soup, then go on to a claw finger cocktail, tiny, tasty little nibbles that you dip in a spicy sauce. There's crab salad, fried softshell crabs, crab Imperial, crab Newburg, crab Thermidor, crab cakes, and that dish so typical of Maryland and Virginia, hot spiced steamed crabs. These are the local blue crabs cooked with a lot of pepper, salt, and spices and served hot or cold, in the shell, with a mallet and pick for you to crack the claws and winkle out the meat, a lovely messy job. It's basically a rather primitive form of the West Coast's cracked Dungeness crab with mayonnaise. That's a much more elegant presentation, but either fashion this is one of the most absorbing and rewarding forms of eating crab.\n\n  Another Crab House specialty is _Sauteed Crab Lumps,_ a simple and delicious marriage of the flavors of Maryland crab and Virginia ham. For each serving, cook in an individual lidded skillet about _ _ pound back-fin crabmeat in 4 tablespoons butter with a squeeze of lemon juice and seasonings to taste. The Phillipses have their own packaged seafood seasoning, a blend of many spices, but you might use salt, pepper, a touch of onion, a dash of Tabasco, and just a little chopped fresh thyme or savory. Saut\u00e9 briefly, until the crab is just heated through, then cover it with paper-thin slices of Smithfield ham, put the lid on, and simmer for 2 or 3 minutes until the ham is lightly curled at the edges and the flavors blended. This is awfully good served as it is, or on toast.\n\nCrab dishes like this can, of course, be made with Dungeness crab as well as Maryland crab, but if you happen to be traveling on the eastern seaboard during the summer, do make a stop at the Crab House not only to sample their excellent food but also to enjoy the very special atmosphere of this happiest of restaurants.\n\n_Sm_ \u00d6 _rg_ \u00e5 _sbord Breakfast_\n\nPerhaps more than any other meal, breakfast is an expression of a country's personality and manner of living. The average American grabs some orange juice, coffee, and maybe a Danish at a drugstore counter on the way to work. The westerner often takes time for bacon, eggs, hash brown potatoes, toast, and coffee. The British dearly love their bacon, tomato, and mushrooms, or sausage and eggs. Breakfast in France is fleeting\u2014cafe au lait, a croissant, a hard roll with butter and marmalade.\n\nBreakfast in Norway is as staid and unbending as the life pattern of that beautiful but serious-minded Scandinavian country, a firm and formal foundation for the activities of the day. Here breakfast is a cold table or smorgasbord, very similar to the lunchtime smorgasbords of Sweden or Denmark, but without certain things one finds at lunch. It is the Norwegian chance to prepare for the day and ignore lunch, as it is known in other countries. Look in the briefcase of a Norwegian businessman, it is said, and you will find papers and one or two sm0rrebr0d, or open-face sandwiches, on which he will lunch while working.\n\nAlthough I know this statement may well revolt those who can barely open an eye and down a cup of coffee first thing in the morning, I think a cold table with a variety of things to snack on is a great breakfast idea. To me, cold meats, cold chicken, and a little bit of salad are fascinating variations from the usual fare that really intrigue and please my palate.\n\nIf you have never walked into a hotel dining room in Norway, you don't know the excitement of looking at a cold table, sometimes 14 or 16 feet long, beautifully arranged with a tremendous selection of foods, starting with the black breads, crisp breads, and other breads for which this country is renowned. The average loaf of bread in Norway is far ahead of that in most countries, for the people demand good baking and so maintain a high standard of flour.\n\nIn a hotel dining room where a lot of people are breakfasting you may find five or six different kinds of perfectly sliced cold meats\u2014ham, roast and salt beef, lamb, chicken\u2014cold salmon, cured herring with various sauces, and the eternal Norwegian sardines in two or three guises. There will be cheeses with those fascinating Scandinavian scrapers which shave off paper-thin slices, perfect for putting on bread or a roll. Then there is usually a huge basket of boiled eggs (not always boiled to your order), scrambled eggs, and maybe a hot section with grilled sausage, fish balls, perhaps sauteed small fish and salmon.\n\nThen, of course, marmalade and jams, weinerbr0d, which we would call a Danish, orange juice, a big bowl of prunes, and, as a bow to modern civilization, cornflakes and other cereals, and sometimes hot porridge.\n\nThe Norwegians, realizing it takes eye appeal to awaken good appetites first thing in the morning, **** make their spreads a visual feast. Unfortunately, a great many visitors, especially British and American tourists, are not prepared for this kind of breakfast and don't know they are expected to use a number of plates\u2014a different one for fruit and cereal, for meat, for fish, for bread, butter, and marmalade. I have watched people who came upon a Norwegian cold table for the first time stop, stare, walk around it in wonder, look around to see what others are doing, and then dive in, with some often calamitous results. I once saw a couple put prunes and cereal on their plates, add a slice of cheese, some cold ham, a helping of roast beef, then herring with sauce and two or three sardines, also with oil and sauce. By this time their plates were filled. So what did they do? They sprinkled sugar on the cornflakes and poured cream over the prunes and cereal, which oozed into the cheese and meat and fish. Naturally, their breakfast went back to the kitchen uneaten. It reminded me of our buffets at which I've seen guests do this very thing in an equally horrendous way, never stopping to think that even if the hostess does not provide plates, they can still take just one or two things and bring their plate back for the next go-round.\n\nAs a matter of fact, if you are thinking of giving a weekend brunch or lunch, you might well have a buffet based on the Norwegian breakfast. You can buy many of the foods, like herring and cold meats, from the delicatessen, and you might make a herring salad, which is a beautiful buffet dish. A proper herring salad is rather involved, but I often make a shortcut version, usually if I've had roast veal or turkey the night before.\n\n  To make enough _Shortcut Herring Salad_ for four to six, combine a 12 ounce jar of herring tidbits, cut in tiny julienne strips, 1 cup cold tongue (it may be canned), cut in little julienne strips, 1 cup diced cooked veal or cooked breast of turkey or chicken, 1 crisp unpeeled apple, cored and finely diced, half a medium onion, diced, and 1 cup diced cooked potatoes. Add 1 to 2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh dill or 1 teaspoon dried dill, then bind your salad with equal parts of mayonnaise and sour cream, enough to make a pleasantly moist mixture. Arrange on a bed of greens, garnish with quartered hard-cooked eggs, plenty of chopped parsley, and more chopped dill, and, finally, surround it with tiny canned beets, which add flavor and color to your herring salad.\n\nA _French Country Dessert_\n\nOne of the great delights of travel\u2014in this country and abroad\u2014is being able to sample on their own ground some of the superb regional specialties that make eating away from home a continuous adventure. For **** instance, if you travel through the Burgundian and Beaujolais districts of France you will be staggered by the wealth of distinctive foods, an incredible largess. There are the superlative chickens of Bresse, famous all over France, properly fed until their flesh has an exquisite tenderness and always cooked here to perfection. You will also encounter fine hams and sausages. One sausage in particular, called a rosette, is very similar in appearance to a salami, but it has a definite, spicy flavoring all its own. Here, too, you are near the part of the country where Charolais cattle are raised. Charolais beef is regarded as the choicest in France, and if you eat it in its own bailiwick, perhaps as an entrecote Bearnaise, steak with a B\u00e9arnaise sauce, I think you'll agree that it is extraordinarily fine.\n\nGo to the city of Lyon, and you are deep in the gastronomic heart of France. I believe it can claim more famous restaurants and famous foods than any other single city. Near Lyon there is a charming old hill town, Perouges, with one or two extremely pleasant restaurants, and there, as in other parts of this district, they make a special dessert that is wonderfully simple and wonderfully good\u2014galette Perougienne. It is made from a yeast dough rolled very thin and baked very quickly, and it is usually eaten with _cr_ \u00e8 _me fra_ \u00ee _tche,_ the French version of heavy cream. Although we don't have _cr_ \u00e8 _me fra_ \u00ee _che,_ I've found there is a way to approximate it with heavy cream. You put 1 pint heavy or whipping cream and 5 tablespoons buttermilk in a screw-topped jar and shake it steadily, as if you were shaking a cocktail, for a full minute. Let it stand at room temperature for 5 or 6 hours, until the buttermilk has clotted the cream to a thick rich texture with an intriguing flavor somewhere between sweet cream and sour cream, and then refrigerate it. If you can't get buttermilk, you can also whip _ _ cup heavy cream with _ _ cup sour cream to get much the same result.\n\n  Now for the recipe for _Galette Perougienne,_ with some of the variations I have worked out on the classic theme. First, make a yeast dough. Dissolve 1 package active dry yeast in _ _cup warm water (105 to 110 degrees) and add 2 tablespoons sugar. Let this proof while you combine in a large bowl 1 cup all-purpose flour, _ _ teaspoon salt, the grated rind of _ _lemon, 1 lightly beaten egg, and 1 tablespoon softened butter.\n\nAdd the yeast mixture to the flour mixture and blend together very well. When blended, work in another cup of flour, mixing thoroughly. The dough should be quite firm, but not sticky. It does not have to be kneaded, just mixed well with your hands. Or you can make it in an electric mixer that has a dough hook or paddle attachment.\n\nLet the dough stand in a warm place in a greased bowl covered with a cloth until it doubles in bulk, about 1 hour, then divide it in half and roll each half on a lightly floured board into a circle 9 inches in diameter and less than _ _ inch thick. Put each circle in a well-buttered 9-inch cake pan or pie pan, and dot the top of each with _ _ cup butter, cut in small bits. Sprinkle _ _ cup granulated sugar over each circle, and bake in a preheated 450-degree oven for about 6 to 8 minutes, or until just golden in color. While the galettes are still warm and fresh, cut them in small wedges and serve with _cr_ \u00e8 _me fra_ \u00ee _che._ Or spoon sugared strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, or blackberries over the wedges and top with the cream. You can also sprinkle thinly sliced blanched almonds over the buttered and sugared dough before baking. Any of these versions makes an exciting change from the usual dessert.\n\n  Sometimes I roll the dough into an oblong that will fit into a well-buttered ll-by-14-inch jelly-roll pan, sprinkle it lightly with about _  _cup sugar and arrange on it rows of peeled and quartered peaches or halved and pitted Italian purple prunes, sprinkle the fruit with about _ _ to _ _ cup sugar, dot lavishly with butter, and add perhaps a sprinkling of cinnamon, nutmeg, or mace. This I bake at 450 degrees for 5 to 10 minutes, then reduce the heat to 350 degrees and bake about another 20 to 25 minutes, or until the fruit is cooked through (test for tenderness with a fork). I serve this warm, cut in squares, with _cr_ \u00e8 _me fra_ \u00ee _che,_ or with sweetened whipped cream flavored with a touch of bourbon for peaches, cognac for plums. You can, of course, use other fruits, and you'll find the fruit flavor combines with the tender yeastiness of the dough in a most delightful way.\n\n  My final version of the galette comes from the south of France. Roll the dough into 9-inch circles and place in buttered 9-inch pans. Sprinkle each one with about _ _ cup sifted light or dark brown sugar. For each circle, beat 2 egg yolks well with _ _ cup heavy cream, add a pinch of nutmeg or mace, pour this over the brown sugar, and bake in a 375degree oven until the custardy topping is just set, about 12 to 15 minutes. Serve warm.\n\nThe galette is a useful dessert with all the virtues of French country cooking\u2014it is simple, inexpensive, and thoroughly delicious eating, and I think you'll enjoy making it and working out your own variations.\n\nA _Great Scottish Soup_\n\nI recently had one of the best soups I've had in a long time\u2014Cullen Skink\u2014on a trip to Scotland organized by the British Tourist Association. We stayed at one of the world's most luxurious hotels, the Gleneagles, some 60 miles north of Edinburgh. You have probably heard about it, because of the famous golf courses in the vicinity. The hotel is like an enormous country house, with vast bedrooms, even vaster bathrooms, and a ravishing view of lawns, flowers, and trees.\n\nDinner on the night of our arrival had been specially planned, and it was very Scottish indeed. We tasted the famed haggis with bashed neeps (mashed yellow turnips), and we had bashed potatoes, too, I might add, and whiskey with the haggis, but it was the cullen skink that really won my heart. This wonderful Scottish soup is a very good and subtle mixture of pureed potato and leek combined with smoked haddock or finnan had\u00addie (originally, Findon haddock) that had been poached in the potato water and partly pureed as well. A bit of the haddock was kept out, crumbled, and added to the soup at the last minute, so there were nice tender little chunks to munch on as you devoured it\u2014and devour it I did.\n\nFinnan haddie is one of the great joys of Scotland and England. I don't think it ever tastes as good here as it does there. I always look forward to having this lightly cured and smoked fish for breakfast, poached in milk in the Scottish way, with a big slather of butter tossed on just before it comes to the table. With good hot toast, tea, and marmalade, it makes a memorable breakfast.\n\nI also like it cut in small pieces and heated in heavy cream with a couple of cherry tomatoes\u2014rich, but delicious. You can heat the flaked poached haddock with melted butter, cream, and a dash of Tabasco and serve it on hot buttered toast with a sprinkling of chopped parsley, or for lunch, bake potatoes, scoop out and mash the pulp, mix it with flaked finnan haddie, milk, butter, salt, and pepper, stuff the shells, and put in a 375-degree oven for 20 minutes until hot and lightly browned.\n\nPoached, chilled finnan haddie tossed with potatoes, onion, and mayonnaise makes an excellent salad, too. All in all, this is a very useful and varied fish, with a superbly smoky flavor.\n\n  To get back to Cullen _Skink._ I have worked out my own version of the Gleneagles recipe, so you don't have to go to Scotland to taste it. Peel 3 medium to large potatoes (preferably the type that come out floury and dry when cooked) and boil until tender in _1 _ quarts water with just a touch of salt (not much, as the fish is salty) and 2 or 3 leeks, which you have cut in half lengthwise, rinsed well to remove the sand, halved again, and then cut into small pieces. Remove the cooked potatoes and put them through a food mill or potato ricer. Add to the pot _ _ to   pound finnan haddie (sometimes called smoked fillet in our markets) and poach very gently until soft, about 10 to 15 minutes. It should flake extremely easily with a fork. Remove the haddock and put two-thirds of it through the food mill with the little pieces of leek. Combine this puree with the potatoes, mix into the cooking liquid, and blend well. Bring slowly to a boil, stirring so the potato thickens the soup. Taste for seasoning and add salt if needed, freshly ground black pepper, and a tiny bit of grated nutmeg. Stir in 4 or 5 tablespoons butter (more if you want a richer soup), and serve in large soup cups or plates. Crumble the remaining haddock and add just before serving, with some chopped parsley. This will serve six.\n\nFor a richer, creamier soup, stir in _ _to 1 cup heavy cream after thickening with the potatoes, and let it come to a boil. Or, if you would like to serve the soup cold, puree all the finnan haddie, chill the soup overnight, and the next day stir in heavy cream to taste. Garnish with finely chopped chives and parsley.\n\nThis makes a beautiful cold soup, with great body, flavor, and flair, something quite out of the ordinary.\n\nThey say you can't judge a book by its cover. You can't judge a recipe by its name, either. If you should go to Scotland and run across cullen skink on the menu, or partan bree (crab soup), cockaleeky (chicken and leek soup), Forfar bridles (little meat pies), black bun (fruitcake in a pastry crust), or rumbledethumps (a cabbage and potato dish, similar to colcannon), don't turn up your nose at them.\n\nFound, A _Woman Chef_\n\nFor years and years I have been plied with questions as to why there have been no great women chefs. Somehow it never seems to occur to anyone that the reason we have had no female Escoffiers or Montagnes was not lack of talent, but lack of strength and stamina. In the past, embryo chefs started a long period of apprenticeship at the age of eight or nine, spending the first two or three years lifting and polishing heavy copper pots, hauling in coal, and carrying baskets heaped with vegetables, all tasks that a young lady of the same age would find it rather difficult to perform.\n\nHowever, there have always been, in this country and England, women who made their mark in the world of food. We have been blessed with such accomplished cooks as Eliza Leslie, Sarah Tyson Rorer, Mary Lincoln, Fanny Merritt Farmer, and Irma Rombauer, and, more recently, Dione Lucas and Julia Child. France can claim the great Mere Brazier, who reigned over two restaurants in Lyon and earned her three stars.\n\nRecently, I came across another fine cook when I spent two wonderful days at Inverlochy Castle in Scotland, a most attractive Victorian castle, perhaps more of a hunting lodge. Mr. and Mrs. Hobbs, who keep this as a second home and run it as an inn for part of the year, inherited from Mr. Hobbs's father not only the castle, but also Miss Shaw. Miss Shaw calls herself a self-trained cook, because she does everything by sensing it, but I call her as good a chef as most men. She has a great storehouse of her own dishes, which she makes when the right materials are available, for much of the food is raised on the property. For instance, we had delicious, freshly caught crayfish from Loch Lenny, a lake on the estate. Miss Shaw cooked the crayfish very simply in butter with lemon juice, white wine, and a touch of garlic. The sirloin of beef, from the castle's own Aberdeen Angus cattle, was perfectly pink from the point where the fat ended to where the bone would begin. The beef had been properly raised and hung, so the fat had great flavor and texture. One of my companions remarked that this was the first time in ages he had eaten fat with relish. With the beef we had a beautiful crisp Yorkshire pudding and tiny Brussels sprouts dressed with local butter. Dinner ended with Miss Shaw's luscious unmolded souffles, sent in on silver platters.\n\nMiss Shaw is not above eating other people's food. Indeed, in the three or four months after the inn closes, she often vacations in such far-flung spots as San Francisco, Spain, France, and Italy, not so much to pick up recipes as to compare cuisines. It's a joy to find a woman chef who really takes a delight in what she does, whether it be a simple roast of beef or delicate little new potatoes cooked to perfection, or a more elaborate salmon mousse, made with fresh salmon brought in that morning, or perhaps a filet of beef en croute.\n\nAs if Miss Shaw was not talent enough for one inn, Mrs. Hobbs, a charming Danish woman, is herself no mean cook, although naturally her achievements lean more to the Danish kitchen. She supervises the running of the inn and had a hand in the decoration of the rooms and the installation of bathrooms\u2014my bathroom had the largest fireplace you ever saw, and a shower, too, rather a rarity in Scotland.\n\nQueen Victoria once stayed at Inverlochy Castle and pronounced it one of the loveliest houses in the land. Had she been there to taste Miss Shaw's delicious food, she would have been even more complimentary. I have told you how I love poached smoked haddock for breakfast, and that is what Miss Shaw served us, along with hot oven scones and exquisitely good marmalade, also made by her own hand.\n\n  Since I don't have Miss Shaw's recipe for Scones, I am going to give you one that was a specialty of my mother's. Sift 2 cups all-purpose flour, 1 tablespoon baking powder, _ _ teaspoon salt, and 1 tablespoon sugar into a bowl. Add   to 1 cup heavy cream and stir quickly until the dough holds together. Turn out on a floured board and pat or roll out to  -inch thickness. Cut in squares. Place on a buttered cookie sheet or in a buttered 9-by-9 inch pan. Bake in a 450-degree oven for 12 to 15 minutes, or until light and brown.\n\nTo make the scones even richer, melt 4 tablespoons butter in a small skillet and dip each square in the melted butter before placing on the sheet or pan. Serve these delicious scones hot, split and buttered, and have them with good marmalade or raspberry preserves for breakfast or tea.\n\nThen close your eyes and imagine you are at Inverlochy Castle.\n\n_Let's Have More_\n\n_Common Markets_\n\nWhenever I am in Los Angeles, I always make a point of visiting the Farmer's Market. I know that most of my friends who live in this vast, sprawling city are apt to take it for granted and look on it as perhaps rather contrived and touristy, but that is not so. A combination of a country fair, a European marketplace, and an eating festival of foods from around the world, the Los Angeles Farmer's Market is unique in America. Not all of it is great, some things are pure corn, but beyond a doubt you can find there some of the most magnificent marketing in this country.\n\nNot long ago I took a long, leisurely stroll through the market, looking at food people were buying to eat from the various stands\u2014Mexican food, of course, Chinese food, blintzes, sandwiches. One woman was making aebleskiver, which is a sort of Danish fritter or pancake. There was every imaginable kind of food, some good, some mediocre, and, frankly, some pretty awful. I wasn't really as interested in the ready-made foods as in the tremendous variety of fresh things for sale. You'd expect to find good meat markets, and you aren't disappointed. I noticed some of the most beautiful veal I have seen west of the Rockies, extraordinarily fine prime beef, and good lamb. The profusion of fresh seafood from the Pacific is absolutely staggering\u2014petrale sole; the little sand dabs that are so good when sauteed in butter just for a minute or two with seasonings, lemon, and some parsley; red snapper; fresh salmon; tiny shrimp and the superb Dungeness crab\u2014and all beautifully presented. Sometimes you can even find abalone, which is becoming rather a rarity nowadays.\n\nThen the piles of vegetables\u2014practically anything you could possibly want. I was there in the asparagus season, and there must have been five or six different kinds of asparagus, greens of every type, all the different varieties of cucumber, artichokes minuscule and enormous, peas, every sort of bean, and leeks, which used to be very hard to find in Los Angeles but now are there all the time.\n\nThis must be one of the last places where you can buy unborn chicken eggs, the kind you once got in the big fat mature hens you cooked in a fricassee, using the eggs to enrich the sauce. That was a great treat that seems to have disappeared from our lives.\n\nI could lose myself for hours in the specialty shops. There's a bakety shop with every bread you can imagine and at least five or six nut shops.\n\nIn one shop I saw bitter almonds, which you almost never find nowadays, although they are still called for in certain recipes. There are regular almonds any way you could want them\u2014blanched and in their skins, salted, slivered, chopped, and thinly sliced both in the skin and without it, all these versions of just one nut. There were filberts, whole, chopped, toasted; walnuts and pecans; huge piles of macadamia nuts; raw peanuts, toasted peanuts, and the tiny red peanuts; pine nuts; pistachio nuts\u2014the whole gamut of nuts. It's the same with dried fruits; there's just about nothing you could name that can't be had here. Spices like poppy and sesame seed are sold by the pound, and fresh horseradish is ground to your order.\n\nTo watch people eat, to stand in a butcher's shop or by a fruit stall and observe what they buy, is an education in itself, endlessly fascinating. I love the alive, throbbing excitement of the market, the busy movement of the shoppers, the common denominator of food that brings people together from all sections of Los Angeles and other parts of the country, too. How I wish that other American cities would establish this kind of big common market filled with good things to eat and take home, like a huge united nations of supermarkets and specialty markets under one roof. It is my dream to see the continent spanned, from coast to coast, with markets like this. What a great advance for the American table it would be.\n\nThe market makes you just itch to buy and to cook. I happened to be staying with a friend in Pasadena, Philip Brown, who writes cookbooks and gives classes in cooking at California State College, and I thought I'd like to try an Algerian recipe for almond cookies he'd demonstrated in one of his classes. They're just about the best cookies I've ever tasted.\n\n  bought some almonds and tried them out so I could pass on to you _Philip Brown's Soft Almond Cookies._ In a bowl stir l'/t pounds blanched  almonds, pulverized in the blender, 1 cup sugar, and 1 tablespoon grated lemon peel until thoroughly mixed. Make a well in the center, drop in 2 eggs, and stir until smooth. Divide batter in half, and roll each half on a well-floured surface into a cylinder about 18 inches long and 1  inches in diameter. Flour your hands frequently as you roll the dough. Flatten cylinders into oblongs about 2 inches wide and cut into diagonal 1 inch slices. Dust with flour and place about an inch apart on ungreased baking sheets. Bake in a 350-degree oven for about 15 minutes. Cool on wire racks. Make a syrup with _ _ cup sugar and _ _ cup water, let cool, then add 1 tablespoon orange-flower water. Dip cookies into syrup, then roll in confectioner's sugar.\n\n_The Marvel of Markets_\n\nWhen I'm abroad, I always seek out the local markets. It's the best way I know to get a feeling of the region, the foods, and the people. To walk through the great markets in Cannes, Nice, and Grasse is a wondrous experience.\n\nThe Cannes market is covered and about the size of a city block. Leading to it is the Meynardier, a narrow street full of food shops and closed to traffic during the peak market hours. There is one very famous shop called Ernest that makes a bread, rich with butter and eggs, known as pain de _mie._ It has an extraordinarily good texture and is delicious toasted. According to the season, you can buy all kinds of prepared dishes there\u2014picnic foods in summer, the first sauerkraut in September, foie gras at Christmas.\n\nThe fresh produce in the Cannes market, brought in by local growers and from other parts of France, is a constant delight. One day I bought the tiniest of _haricots verts,_ the string beans so beloved by the French, that were no more than 3 inches long. There were tree-ripened peaches, easy to peel and glorious to eat, strawberries, raspberries, and the first little yellow prunes called mirabelles. One whole section is devoted to herbs\u2014practically every herb you can think of\u2014and another to flowers. One Saturday I bought a bouquet of about five dozen magnificent red carnations for just over a dollar. Long-stemmed roses from the greenhouses around Cannes and Antibes were to be had for a song, so all summer long I kept the house where I was living filled with the fragrance of flowers.\n\nThe Nice market is held in a picturesque square that used to blossom with huge parasols that shielded the market people and their wares. Now, alas, it is mostly filled with cars belonging to the shoppers. This is the only place I know where you can buy a type of galette or cake known as _socca,_ about as thick as a pancake and with a most unusual and intriguing flavor. _Socca_ is made from a mixture of chickpea flour, oil, and various ingredients spread in round tins about 30 inches across and baked in huge wood ovens. You buy it at stalls where the owner cuts little strips with a spoon, puts them in a piece of paper, and sprinkles them with pepper. A slice costs half a franc, about ten cents, and even if I've just had a big meal I can't resist stopping at a socca stand and buying a slice to munch on.\n\nThe Grasse market, a real farmer's market, takes place in the Place des Aires, a beautiful square lined with food shops. There's a man in the market who makes fine charcuterie\u2014products made from the pig. One morning he was selling slices of suckling pig that had been boned, filled with a pate of pork and pork liver, reshaped, roasted, and glazed. To one who loves pork as I do, it was irresistible. I bought a big slice and ate it on the spot. If one markets intelligently in France, life becomes very simple. In addition to the superb fresh vegetables and fruits and the bake shops with their astounding variety of breads, there are so many shops where, if you're feeling lazy, you can buy ready-made dishes that are really good eating. I always carry a string bag and a canvas bag, and an hour or so of pleasurable shopping nets me two days of even more of pleasurable eating.\n\nIn the Grasse market I also came across a remarkable service for the cook I wish American markets would copy. The ingredients for a ratatouille, the superb French vegetable stew\u2014onion, eggplant, zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, and garlic\u2014were sold packaged in a plastic bag for the equivalent of 75 cents. You could also buy in a package the greens and vegetables for salade Nicpise, to which you only needed to add the tuna, eggs, olives, and anchovies. Salade Nigoise is one of the best luncheon salads you could have. What is especially good about it is that you can vary it to taste by adding different vegetables, whatever happens to take your fancy. The only constants are the tuna, anchovies, hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, and the famous black olives of Provence.\n\n  For a basic _Salade Nigoise,_ cover a large platter or line a shallow salad bowl with crisp fresh greens. Place in the center one or two 7-ounce cans of tuna in olive oil, well drained. The amount depends on how many people you are serving and how hungry you are. Two cans will usually serve four to six. Surround the tuna with 20 or 30 anchovy fillets, drained on paper towels. Arrange around the edge of the greens 4 to 6 ripe tomatoes, quartered, or 12 to 18 cherry tomatoes, and 4 to 6 hard-boiled eggs, quartered, and add a sprinkling of small black olives (the tiny Niyoise olives, if you can find them).\n\nNow arrange on top of these basic ingredients vegetables of your choice: rings of sliced red onion or _ _ cup finely chopped yellow onion; tiny boiled new potatoes, or boiled sliced potatoes; green pepper rings; green beans cooked just until bitey-crisp; artichoke hearts; pimiento strips. Add a sprinkling of 1 tablespoon fresh chopped basil, if available. Pour over this wonderful melange a dressing made with   cup olive oil, _ _ cup wine vinegar, and salt and pepper to taste, and toss lightly. Serve as a main course, with a loaf of crusty French bread.\n\nThis is one of the most inspired salads I know, and I never seem to tire of it.\n\n_The Flavor of Catalonia_\n\nThe breath of Catalonia, like the breath of Provence, is garlic. Catalonia is the province that takes in the Mediterranean coast of northeast Spain from below Barcelona to the French border. Stretching it, you might also include the Balearic islands of Majorca and Minorca, which have a great deal in common with Catalonia\u2014a taste for garlic being part of it. When I say garlic is the breath of Catalonia, it is because most of the famous dishes of the region are not spicy or herby but highly garlicky.\n\nOn my latest trip to Barcelona, I dined with a Catalan of great distinction, a man who collects and restores antique cars and is also a very fine cook. We discussed the unique relationship of garlic to the various dishes of Catalonia, Provence, and other parts of the Mediterranean where it is so much a part of the eating pattern, and my friend told me that according to one of the foremost chefs of Catalonia, garlic, not onion, should be used with fish, for onion smothers the natural flavor of fish, whereas garlic enhances it.\n\nThis was a new idea for me, but I'm not sure he isn't right. Certainly the two or three fish dishes we ate, in which garlic was the main seasoning, tended to support this theory. One was that singular Spanish delicacy, angulas. These are infinitesimal baby eels, white in color and no bigger around that a strand of spaghetti\u2014in fact, when served they look very much like a bowl of spaghetti. They were cooked with oil, garlic, and a touch of pepper, and the garlic perfectly complemented the delicate little fish and gave them a most distinctive taste. To eat them we were given a special wooden fork that held them securely so they didn't slide off on the way from plate to mouth. After we had finished, the waiter came with a napkin and broke the forks in two in front of us to show that they were thrown away after one use, a nicety that particularly impressed me.\n\nGarlic is also the very soul of ailloli, the Catalan version of the French ai'oli. While both the Catalans and the Provengals claim this rich, garlicky mayonnaise, they make it very differently.\n\nIn Provence you take a mortar and pestle (preferably of white marble) and at least a clove of garlic per person and pound it very thoroughly, then grind egg yolks into the garlic and work in olive oil, drop by drop, until you have a garlic-perfumed sauce, like a thick mayonnaise. Salt is added, perhaps a touch of lemon juice. Bread crumbs are sometimes worked in as well. A'ioli, often called \"the butter of Provence,\" is an integral part of the Marseille fish specialty, bourride, and the star of the Grand Ai'oli, a tremendous spread of poached fish, salt cod, hard-boiled eggs, snails, and all manner of cooked vegetables such as potatoes, carrots, onions, green beans, artichokes, and zucchini, all arranged around the huge mortar of sauce.\n\n  If you would like to make a typical Ai'oh, you don't have to grind away with a pestle and mortar, it can be done in a blender. Put 3 garlic cloves and 2 egg yolks in the blender container with 1 teaspoon salt, and run at high speed for about 30 seconds. Measure 1 _ _ cups of good fruity olive oil, turn on the blender, and pour the oil in slowly until the sauce is thick and thoroughly blended. If by any chance it should curdle, remove the mixture to a bowl, start with another egg yolk and a tiny bit of oil in the blender, then slowly pour in the curdled mixture. (See Editor's _Note, copyright page.)_\n\nIt will emerge as a dense, mayonnaise-like mass, highly fragrant and flavored with garlic, a change from anything you have ever tasted. It makes a magnificent sauce for hot or cold poached fish, cold vegetables, cold fowl, or hot or cold meats such as boiled beef or lamb.\n\nThe Spanish ailloli is even more varied in its preparation and uses. When I had it in Barcelona with grilled rabbit and grilled chicken, there were noticeable chunks of garlic in the sauce, and it was extremely hot to the tongue, with great pungency. I encountered yet another version at a friend's house in Majorca. This one had crushed baked potatoes worked in with the egg yolks and oil, which gave it a different, more solid consistency, and we ate it with tender little snails from the garden, freshly prepared and delicious.\n\n_The Wonders of Majorca_\n\nMajorca is full of surprises. Did you ever see mushrooms that bleed? I never did until I went there. I was invited to lunch in a home where the cook was a local man, imbued with island lore. He found and cooked the wild herbs, fruits, and vegetables, including mushrooms of all the different seasons. As it had been raining a lot when I was there\u2014unusual in winter\u2014he went to one of his secret spots to hunt for the _seta de sangre,_ or bleeding mushroom, which flourishes after rain. It is a rather large mushroom with an upturned cap, dark in color, and when it is cut a red fluid flows out, not as thick and dark as blood, more like a light red wine. We had the mushrooms sliced and sauteed in olive oil with a little garlic and parsley, and the fluid, mingling with the oil, made a reddish sauce for the meaty, extraordinary texture of the seta _de sangre_ and kept it deliciously moist.\n\nWith its rocky hills, sea, and unbelievable variety of landscape, Majorca has some great and unusual food traditions. The markets are full of vegetables, fruits, game, and other things native to the island, including some little birds about the size of a robin that were plentiful and apparently popular. I bought a 10-pound suckling pig that my host and I roasted on an eighteenth-century spit (with a battery-powered twentieth-century motor) until the skin had a rich walnut glaze and the meat was meltingly tender\u2014the best pig I've ever eaten.\n\nThe markets, especially in Palma, sell exquisitely hand-woven baskets in all shapes from flat trays to oval baskets, in which the women carry finished ironing, and huge baskets and panniers of woven grass to hold everything from firewood to clothing. The local pottery, deep brown and ovenproof, is beautiful and cheap but hardly durable enough to survive the rigors of travel. It is best used on the spot. Another specialty and a major export is _ensaimada,_ made from a light coffee-cake dough which is rolled into a strip, stuffed with a candied fruit mixture called \"angel's hair,\" shaped into a ring, baked, and dusted with sugar. It keeps remarkably well, and you see the Spanish tourists from the mainland taking home four or five boxes of it.\n\nFor dinner one night we had a version of the Spanish _ropa vieja_ that was new to me. (The name of this stew translates literally as \"old clothes,\" a Spanish joke.) The Majorcan _ropa vieja_ was made with roast lamb, thinly sliced and recooked in a sauce with onions, garlic, peppers, and other vegetables. At the last moment, deep-fried potatoes were tossed in\u2014they retained their crispness and made a most exciting contrast to the very soft meat.\n\nOne of the most famous island dishes is sopa _mallorquin,_ actually more a vegetable stew than a soup. In the old days it was the mainstay of life on the island and was stretched with cheese, eggs, or, on Sunday, rabbit or chicken\u2014whatever could be had.\n\n  To prepare Sopa _Mallorquin_ for six, toast 12 pieces of thinly sliced bread (dark or protein bread is best), and after toasting dry it in a 300degree oven for 10 to 12 minutes. Saut\u00e9 2 thinly sliced onions and 3 sliced garlic cloves in a little olive oil in a 12-inch skillet, then on top arrange layers of thinly sliced or cut vegetables\u2014carrots, zucchini, broccoli, cabbage, celery, spinach, cauliflower, whatever you like; the onions and garlic are the only two essentials. Salt the layers. When the skillet is about two-thirds full, add stock barely to cover and simmer until just crisply tender, no more; the vegetables must not be overcooked. Put the toast in an ovenproof serving dish, spoon the vegetables on top, and bake in a 375-degree oven for 4 to 5 minutes, then serve. You can grate a little cheese on top, before or after baking, if you like, or serve the dish with pancake-style omelets.\n\nIt's a very variable feast.\n\nMy ultimate surprise in Majorca was a restaurant called El Gato. The menu is Majorcan, French, and international, but whoever wrote it was not strong on spelling. Quiche Lorraine came out Kiche Loran, cassoulet appeared as casula, and cr\u00eapes Suzette as creps susett! Imagine, though, a restaurant in a major city where you can get good service, a linen napkin, a big plateful of fresh hors d'oeuvre, a beautifully grilled piece of denton, one of the scarcest and most expensive of Mediterranean fish, two vegetables, caramel custard, bread, butter, and wine, all for about one-third of what you would pay here. That really is a pleasant surprise.\n\n_Prunier the Great and_\n\n_Other Greats_\n\nThere used to be a tradition of restaurants run by and named for one family. Delmonico was the great name in New York. In Paris and London it is Prunier. Delmonico's is long since gone, but the Prunier establishments, of which there are three, are alive and flourishing. The original restaurant, founded by Emile Prunier in 1872 on the rue Duphot in Paris, is managed by Jean Barnagaud, who married Simone Prunier, daughter of the founder. She herself runs the London Prunier on St. James's Street, while their son is in charge of the fledgling Prunier-Traktir on the Avenue Victor-Hugo in Paris.\n\nThe specialty of this great house is fish, and the whole family has made it their life. You can find just about everything that swims on their menus, and they have a reputation in each capital for being sticklers about the fish they buy; only the freshest will do.\n\nOyster lovers can have a field day at Prunier's. In London they serve the finest Colchesters and sometimes the Galway Bay oysters from Ireland, extraordinarily delicious because of the cold, clean water they inhabit. In Paris there are the three chief varieties of French oysters\u2014Belons, Marennes, and Portugaises\u2014all graded, as is the French custom, according to size. The smallest are usually considered the choicest, and they are listed on the menu in zeros, double, triple, quadruple, down to the tiniest specimens. Oysters are always opened to order and served on trays with a little bit of seaweed and crushed ice to give the impression that they have just been taken from their beds. The French, much heartier oyster eaters than we, think nothing of devouring eighteen or two dozen of these babies at a time.\n\nThe rue Duphot Prunier also has a small retail shop on the premises that sells oysters from heaped bins facing the street, all manner of fresh, salted, and smoked fish, and other superb French shellfish\u2014mussels, clams, lobster, ecrevisses or small crayfish, and langouste, the spiny or rock lobster. They sell caviar, too, and thereby hangs a tale told me by my old friend Simone Prunier.\n\nContrary to what many people think, caviar comes not only from Russia and Iran but from many places in the world that harbor the sturgeon with its precious load of eggs. Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River in our own Pacific Northwest, produces some very good caviar, although very little ever reaches the retail market.\n\nConnoisseurs consider caviar from sturgeon caught in the Gironde, the river that skirts the vineyards of Bordeaux in southern France, to be on a par with that of Russia or Iran. The egg is not as large, but the flavor is delicious. Emile Prunier recognized this many years ago and made it one of the specialties of his restaurant. As a result, Prunier's has an exclusive on the small supply of Gironde caviar.\n\nMadame Prunier, as she is always known, rather than Madame Barna\u00adgaud, is the inspiration for the family restaurants. It is she who travels and tastes and brings back recipes to be tried out in London and passed on to her husband and son. The fish chowder she found in Bermuda is served in all three restaurants, and each interpretation is slightly different but equally good. Then there are her versions of those two famous Provencal dishes, bourride and bouillabaisse, also completely individual and exciting.\n\nThere are meat dishes on the menu at Prunier's as well as fish, but the gamut of seafood is so great and the wines so carefully chosen to complement it that it would be the sheerest folly to order anything else. At the French Prunier's I would recommend starting with the caviar, or oysters in season, or something we seldom see here, oursins (sea urchins), spiny spherical little monsters that contain the most delicately flavored morsels of flesh. Then choose one of the great French fish, daurade or bar or loup de mer, poached and served with a beurre blanc sauce. The Paris Prunier's prides itself on serving the best cheeses and finest fruits of the season, which make a perfect conclusion to a luncheon or dinner of fish.\n\nIn the London Prunier the first course might be oysters or, in summer, dressed crab, a typically English dish in which the crabmeat and roe are seasoned and dressed and served on the back shell with a garnishing of lettuce and capers. After this, a turbot souffle or grilled Dover sole.\n\n_ _ Whether or not you are going to Europe, you can always capture the flavor of Prunier's with Crab _Diable_ from _Madame Prunier's Fish Cook Book,_ a classic compendium of fish and shellfish recipes. For four servings, finely chop 1 small onion and 2 shallots, and saute in 4 tablespoons butter until limp and golden. Remove. Rinse the pan with _ _ cup brandy. Stir in 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard and 1  __ cups rich white sauce. Mix in 1 pound crabmeat, and season to taste. Put in crab shells or individual ovenproof dishes, sprinkle the top with buttered crumbs and chopped parsley, and put in a 425-degree oven for just long enough to brown the crumbs.\n\nIn my travels, I have been fortunate enough to eat some superb meals at restaurants both here and abroad. Though space does not permit my telling you about every place. I have gathered together a sampling of a few of the dishes I have enjoyed most.\n\nThe Berkeley is one of London's truly luxurious hotels\u2014possibly the most luxurious now that the old Berkeley of my youth, which stood on the corner of Piccadilly and Berkeley Street for more than a hundred years, has been replaced by a new deluxe hotel at Wilton Place, in Knights-bridge. Many of the old staff, including the maitre chef des cuisines, Marcel Auduc, are back on the job, keeping up the high standards of food and service for which the Berkeley has always been noted.\n\n  One of M. Auduc's special dishes, named for the Marquis de Lafayette, is Escalopes de _Veau Lafayette._ To make this dish for four, season 4 large veal scallops with salt and pepper, dust them lightly with flour, and saute them quickly on both sides in 4 tablespoons butter until golden brown. Remove to a hot ovenproof serving dish.\n\nPeel and seed 2 ripe tomatoes, and cut in neat slices. Peel and seed 1 small avocado, then cut in crosswise slices. Arrange four rows of the tomato and avocado slices on a baking sheet, overlapping them alternately, season with salt and pepper and sprinkle liberally with grated Parmesan cheese. Put under the broiler just until the cheese colors. Arrange a row of slices lengthwise down the center of each veal scallop, dust with a little more Parmesan, and brown lightly under the broiler.\n\nMeanwhile, take the butter from the cooking pan. Add to the pan _ _ cup port wine and _ _ cup veal, beef, or chicken stock, and bring to a boil over high heat, scraping with a wooden spoon to remove the brown glaze from the bottom of the pan. Let this sauce cook down and reduce, then blend in 1 to 2 tablespoons butter and pour the sauce around the veal.\n\nThe combination of flavors and textures is wonderfully good, and the whole dish couldn't be simpler and quicker to make.\n\nIf the Berkeley is the most luxurious hotel in London, Brenner's Park in Baden-Baden must be one of the most luxurious in all Europe. BadenBaden is a very old spa on the edge of the Black Forest in Germany, and the hotel's grill room, appropriately called the Black Forest Grill, always has local foods on the menu. The Black Forest Fruit Dessert is a delicate, aromatic mingling of liqueur-flavored whipped cream and all kinds of berries, including wild strawberries and blackberries from the forest. You can use any seasonal berries for this\u2014strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries.\n\n  To make four servings, of this Black _Forest Fruit Dessert,_ first put in a bowl 2 pints of seasonal berries, one kind or a mixture, as you prefer. Sprinkle with 2 tablespoons sugar, the juice of _ _ lemon, and 2 tablespoons Grand Marnier, and let stand for a few minutes to absorb the flavors, shaking the bowl now and then so they are well mixed.\n\nWhip _1  _cups heavy cream until stiff, but not too stiff, then whip in 1 tablespoon sugar. Put in a flat bowl or soup plate, and add 2 tablespoons Grand Marnier and 1 tablespoon kirsch or framboise. (If you don't have either of these white fruit brandies, substitute the same amount of cognac or bourbon.) Mix into the cream, stirring briskly, and serve by tossing the cream lightly with the berries and heaping the mixture in 4 dishes. Sprinkle with a few chopped almonds or pistachio nuts or crumbled almond macaroons, and serve with thin sugar cookies, macaroons, or a slice of pound or sponge cake.\n\nThis simple dessert has an intoxicating perfume and a ravishing taste, and if you do the flavoring and stirring in front of your guests, it makes a tremendous impression.\n\nOne of the great standards of German cuisine is Lady Curzon soup which has all kinds of stories attached to it. Some say Lady Curzon, an American married to Lord Curzon, later Viceroy of India, created the soup, others that it was created for her. Strangely enough, we seldom see the soup here or in England, but in Germany it is almost universal. At Hamburg's Vier Jahreszeiten, a beautiful, privately owned hotel that is renowned all over Europe for its superb restaurants, the soup is served in tiny cups, so you have just enough to savor the delicious flavor before the next course arrives.\n\n  For six servings of Lady _Curzon Soup,_ take 4 cups canned turtle soup, the kind with turtle meat in it. The quality varies a great deal, so get the best brand you can. Heat the soup to boiling. Meanwhile combine 2 egg yolks with _ _ cup heavy cream and _ _ teaspoon ot more of good curry powder. Very gradually stir 1 cup of the boiling soup into the egg mixture. Remove the soup from the heat and stir the egg-cream mixture into it with _ X A_ cup Madeira, sherry, or cognac\u2014any one works well. Stir and reheat gently without letting the soup boil. It won't thicken, but will become light and creamy. Pour into hot cups, float a little lightly whipped cream on top, then, if your cups are ovenproof, put them under the broiler for a second to glaze the cream. Otherwise just dust it with minced parsley.\n\nYou can vary the amount of curry powder and cream to taste in this delicate and unusual soup, always remembering that no one flavor should overpower the other.\n\nSome of the best food in France today is coming from intimate mini-restaurants run by owners who are their own chefs. This fruit dessert, so easy and quick that you'll never believe how good it is until you taste it, is typical of the original approach to food that has made Jean Senderens's small restaurant, L'Archestrate, one of the most talked-about places in Paris.\n\n  For _Bananes_ \u00e0 _I'Archestrate,_ slice 6 ripe bananas very thinly. Melt 6 tablespoons butter in a heavy iron pan, and when hot, add the bananas. Saute, sprinkling them with 6 tablespoons sugar, until they brown and caramelize a little and get really crispy. Flame them with _ _ cup warmed cognac, and spoon over vanilla ice cream.\n\nThe London Chop House is a Detroit institution, and one of the greatest restaurants in the United States. When I'm there, I often order for a late supper spaghetti with oyster sauce, a dish that has always intrigued and pleased me. Clam sauce has become rather a cliche, but this oyster sauce is something else again.\n\n  For Chop House _Spaghetti with Oyster Sauce,_ take 1 dozen large or 2 dozen small oysters, fresh or canned. Chop them or not, as you wish. I think they are rather better chopped. Save any liquor from the oysters.\n\nMelt 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons olive oil in a small skillet, add 2 finely chopped garlic cloves and 2 tablespoons chopped onion, and saute until wilted and just beginning to turn golden. Add the oyster liquor plus enough clam juice or white wine to make 1 cup liquid. (If you don't have any oyster liquor, use _ _ cup clam juice and _ _ cup white wine.) Cook this down, then add _ _ cup finely chopped parsley and salt and pepper to taste.\n\nMeanwhile, have ready a large pan of rapidly boiling salted water to cook your pasta. For four persons you will need   pound spaghetti, or 1 pound if your guests are pasta lovers. Add 2 tablespoons olive oil to the water to prevent the strands from sticking together, and boil the spaghetti rapidly until it reaches the stage of tenderness you like. I like mine _al dente._ While draining the pasta well, toss the oysters in the sauce just enough to heat them through. Add more chopped parsley and a touch of chopped fresh basil or a little dried basil. Divide the pasta among 4 plates, spoon the oyster sauce over it, and serve at once.\n\nDrink a good white wine with this. I usually order Muscadet from the Loire Valley, which is light and brisk and goes well with seafood.\n\nQuo Vadis is to me a paragon among New York restaurants, a place of beauty, quiet, and comfort. I have known the owners, Gino and Bruno, for many years, and when I eat there or take friends from out of town, I feel almost as if I'm in my own home.\n\nEvery Saturday during the winter months, Quo Vadis serves for lunch one of my all-time favorite dishes, bollito misto, which sounds more glamorous in Italian than in translation\u2014mixed boil. When this comes rolling out of the kitchen on a cart, it is a dramatic sight. First, there is a fine piece of boiled beef flavored with pot vegetables and herbs, and very often some veal or a veal tongue, or a calf's head or feet for contrast. There is always a large Italian sausage\u2014a cotechino or zampone (a sausage stuffed in a boned pig's foot), and usually a chicken or capon. This is not a dish in which everything is thrown into a pot and then served up; it needs to be prepared with great care, patience, and style. While it bears some resemblance to the French pot-au-feu or the New England boiled dinner, it has certain distinct variations which make it, to my mind, infinitely more interesting.\n\n  To make _Bollito Misto,_ combine in a very large pot (at least an 8 quart size) 4 pounds beef brisket, 2 or 3 onions, one stuck with 2 cloves, 3 carrots, several leeks, 2 garlic cloves, 2 tablespoons salt, a bay leaf, 1 teaspoon thyme, and _ _ teaspoon freshly ground pepper, with an ample amount of water. Bring to a boil, skim off the scum, and simmer for 1 _ _ hours.\n\nAdd 2 veal tongues to the pot, and continue cooking for _1 _ hours, then add a 4-pound roasting chicken or capon and 1 or 2 cotechino sausages. Continue cooking until the meats are tender, removing the chicken if it is cooked first and keeping it warm. Taste the broth for seasoning. Meanwhile, boil additional carrots, leeks, onions and 12 medium potatoes separately in salted water, timing them so they are done at the same time as the meats.\n\nWhen everything is cooked, arrange the meats and vegetables on a large hot plattet, and have a carving board handy for slicing. Give each person a slice or two of each meat, some vegetables, and, if you like, a small cup of the broth.\n\nAs accompaniments, have coarse salt, horseradish sauce, and the traditional sauce verte, a vinaigrette sauce made with 3 parts oil to 1 part wine vinegar, salt, pepper, and finely chopped parsley, chives, and thyme\u2014it should be really thick with herbs. Also traditional are Italian mustard fruits (fruits preserved in a mustard syrup, sold in specialty food shops); their sharp flavor goes well with the meats.\n\nTo do justice to the bounty of a bollito misto, you need at least twelve people, so plan on serving it for a buffet party\u2014it makes a wonderful meal, spectacular, impressive, and something quite out of the ordinary. \n CHAPTER 11\n\nGastronomic Musings\n\n... in which we _play the menu game ... count the invisible calorie ... call French dressing by its true name ..._ _lose our fear of hollandaise ... and take a mouthful of midnight and a bite of heaven and earth._\n\n_The Making of a Menu_\n\nPlanning menus seems to plunge so many people into the doldrums. It must be because they haven't really developed an intelligent approach to their entertaining. Their pattern is always the same\u2014the soup or first course, a hot main dish, vegetable, salad, and dessert, and so on and so on, ad infinitum. First of all, I think you should consider all the relevant factors when you are having guests for luncheon or dinner\u2014the season, the weather, the balance of hot dishes against cold; creamy foods against sharp flavors. Certainly, if you are serving wines, you should plan dishes that will be suited to them.\n\nMenu making is a great game. I think it is a good idea to try out new dishes you find in a cookbook or a newspaper, or eat in a restaurant or at a friend's house. Jot them down in a little menu memorandum book, and make a note that this would be a good dish to go with so-and-so, or follow such-and-such.\n\nRecently, at the home of some Florida friends, I had a dinner that was memorably good because there was a great deal of thought and planning behind it. First we had small portions of a very hot, very concentrated mushroom soup, next a lovely mousse offish with crabmeat around it, and then a platter of cold fillet of beef with foie gras, exquisite to look at, wonderfully satisfying to eat, and a most intelligent choice on the part of our hostess because the beef had been glazed with aspic, arranged on the platter, decorated with glistening chopped aspic, and left in the refrigerator, covered with plastic wrap, well ahead, so there was no fuss or stew.\n\nSo often we forget that cold food is not just for summer, and that a good cold entree or first course is always welcome. Also, it is foolish to plan meals in which everything takes last-minute attention\u2014a roast to come out of the oven or tournedos to be sauteed, vegetables to be tossed in butter\u2014it becomes a great chore. How much easier to plan a hot soup, a baked dish, or stuffed and rolled cr\u00eapes for a first course, and then have a beautiful cold main course with vegetables vinaigrette or mayonnaise, or a tossed salad, perhaps cheese, and either a hot or a cold dessert, depending on your mood.\n\nIt is wonderful to be able to have practically your whole dinner ready before your guests come and relax, knowing things will go smoothly. If you make a great soup, it can be reheated at the last minute. If you have a quiche, you can prebake the shell and then fill it and put it in the oven after the guests arrive. There are so many things in the field of entertaining that are simple and spectacular and good to eat.\n\nA favorite dish of mine, one I serve over and over, is cold roast pork. Sometimes I do it with pork loin; sometimes, if I have a large number of guests, with a fresh ham or uncured pork leg, which I usually have the butcher bone and tie, although I have also made it with the bone in.\n\n  To prepare Cold Roast Pork, let's say you have bought a fresh ham weighing about 8 or 9 pounds, and had it boned. Make a smooth paste with 2 cups toasted ground almonds and hazelnuts (toast for 5 minutes in a 350-degree oven before grinding), _ _ cup dried figs, cut into tiny pieces, _ _ cup chopped seedless raisins, 1 or 2 cloves garlic, 1 teaspoon thyme, 2 tablespoons chopped parsley, and _ _ to _ _ cup cognac. I either grind this very fine or pound it in a mortar and pestle. With a larding needle or a knife with a long thin blade, make long deep crisscross incisions in the pork, down, up, and through the meat, and push the paste into these holes very tightly, so there will be a marvelous marbleized look to the meat when it is sliced. Rub the fresh ham well with olive oil, salt, pepper, dried thyme, and 1 or 2 crushed garlic cloves. Really give it a good massage. Place on a rack in a roasting pan, and roast at 325 degrees for approximately 20 minutes per pound, or until the internal temperature registers 165 degrees on a meat thermometer. Remove from the oven, and let it stand and cool gradually to room temperature before serving. This takes about 4 or 5 hours, but it is much better than refrigerating the pork. Carve into nice even slices so you get a mosaic effect with the stuffing.\n\nWith this delicious and extremely attractive main course, for a summer supper party you might have steaming hot corn, cooked at the very last minute, crisp bread, and perhaps a green salad, accompanied by a light, fruity Alsatian white wine. Follow this with a dessert of fresh peaches poached in simple syrup to which you have added a good slug of bourbon\u2014serve with whipped or heavy cream and some crisp wafers or cookies. If you feel you should have a first course, there are many you could choose from, but frankly, I don't feel you need it with this thoroughly satisfying cold roast pork.\n\n_Calories Do Count_\n\nCalorie counting seems to have become one of our great indoor sports. Today practically everyone you meet is doing the diet thing in one form or another, and so am I. I've counted calories faithfully, and it has really worked. Of course, it is provoking to find that so many of the foods one likes are high in calories, but there are plenty that you can eat with impunity, and often they taste all the better for being left in their unalloyed state, without all the sauces and gobs of butter and cream that put the calorie count up. Vegetables, for instance. A plain boiled or baked potato without butter or sour cream, just some coarse salt and a grind of pepper, is perfect in itself\u2014and only 100 calories. Practically any vegetable has enough natural flavor to need nothing more than salt, pepper, and perhaps a squeeze of lemon juice. I no longer put butter or hollandaise on asparagus. I just enjoy eating it in all its lovely crisp green freshness, hot with salt and pepper or cold with lemon juice and maybe some crumbled hard-boiled egg.\n\nYou can diet without really denying yourself if you know how. Let's take a look at some of the foods we all like and see how they add up. A 3-ounce piece of broiled boneless steak with a little bit of fat on it is 330 calories. If you don't know how big a 3-ounce piece is, it's about an inch thick and 5 inches long by 2 inches wide\u2014not a lot but still a satisfying serving. A 3 ounce broiled lamb chop is 305 calories, and 3 ounces of roast loin of pork, which I just adore, is 310. Or you can have two small pork chops for only 230 calories, provided you trim off every trace of fat, for it's the fat that counts. Now anyone can exist on that. Seafood is even better. A whole cup of crabmeat\u2014and that's quite a big serving\u2014is only 170 calories, and a cup of shrimp about the same. You can have quite a lot of shrimp as a main course without increasing your calorie count very much.\n\nAh, you may say, but what about sweet things? I just have to have something sweet. Well, take melon. Half a cantaloupe is 60 calories, a 7inch wedge of honeydew is 50, and a 2-inch wedge of Cranshaw just 40. Half a grapefruit is about the same. A whole cup of strawberries or blueberries totals 55, and even a banana is only about 35.\n\nIf you were having guests for dinner, you could combine a cup of strawberries, a cup of melon balls, _Yi_ cup blueberries, and a sliced banana, and you'd have a pretty, delicious dessert. Serve it in separate bowls and let your guests put sugar and kirsch on theirs while you have a little artificial sweetener or maybe a drop or two of sherry.\n\nSalads are great diet material, unless you load them with dressing. If you can't eat a salad without dressing, here are two that are good and tasty, but low in calories because they don't use any oil.\n\n  For _Low-Calorie Dressing Number I,_ whirl in the blender 2 cloves garlic, a **** 6-ounce can of tomato sauce, _ _ teaspoon Tabasco, 1 tablespoon soy sauce, 1 teaspoon each of salt and basil and 1 _ _ teaspoons freshly ground pepper.\n\n  For _Dressing Number 2,_ whirl in **** the blender 1 cup tomato juice, 1 hard-boiled egg, _ _ cup skim-milk cottage cheese, 1 small onion, cut up, 1 tablespoon soy sauce, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1 teaspoon tarragon.\n\nNow for things to shun\u2014like chocolate-fudge topping. Two tablespoons add up to 135 calories. A wedge of yellow cake with chocolate frosting is 366 calories, a piece of apple pie 306, one little brownie is 95\u2014and who could be satisfied with just one? Sometimes there comes a day when you just have to sit down and gobble up five or six brownies, and that plays havoc with your calorie count, but if you are careful and eat very little else that day you may not gain an ounce and you'll have given yourself the emotional release of eating something you crave, which can be worthwhile. The other night I succumbed to a particularly luscious custard which was one of the best things I ever tasted. My conscience hurt a bit, but I didn't have anything else, and next day I ate sparingly. For breakfast, melon, a slice of unbuttered toast, and plain tea, then for lunch a nice slice of cold roast beef with mustard and two ripe, locally grown tomatoes with salt and pepper, just about 265 calories in all. I had all I wanted to eat, and I'd made up for the 303 calories of custard the night before, which I was glad I'd had because we all have to be a tiny bit indulgent once in a while.\n\nThe secret of staying on a diet, I find, is to keep counting, and fix in your mind the end result\u2014the svelteness and vigor we all want to recapture and maintain, especially difficult as we grow older. You may have to go without foods you love, but you've had enough of them in the past and you can do without now\u2014just live on your food memories.\n\n_Why Call It French Dressing?_\n\nOne of the great misnomers in our gastronomic world is \"French dressing.\" It's not French, it's not Italian, it's not English, it's not American\u2014it's simply a universal mixture of oil, vinegar, and seasonings for salad. Not only is French dressing a misnomer; in many of its manifestations it is a misconception. Some French dressings take on a ghastly red hue, and others look as if someone had spilled the parsley bin into them. Some have great milky streaks of poor cheese in them, while yet others reek of garlic powder.\n\nWhat we are really talking about is a vinaigrette sauce, and a true vinaigrette is as simple as one, two, three. First, good oil, preferably olive, and that very rich and fruity. Second, good vinegar or lemon juice, but usually vinegar, and that should be either a fine cider vinegar or an excellent red or white wine vinegar. Third, salt and pepper. There is your basic vinaigrette sauce for salad.\n\nNow there's much to be said for proportions in a vinaigrette. You often get one so acid with vinegar you can barely manage to choke down the greens. Other times it will be drowned with a very fruity oil, and that is all you taste. Neither is right. There should be a balance. After years of experimenting, I find that for the most part I want 3 to 4 parts of oil to 1 part of vinegar.\n\n  To make a _Vinaigrette Sauce_ to dress a salad for four, I take 6 tablespoons of very fruity olive oil and 1 _ _ tablespoons of vinegar, 1 teaspoon of salt and about _ _ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper. I blend that together and taste to see whether I want an additional dollop of vinegar in it or not.\n\nThis basic dressing needs no ketchup or Worcestershire sauce or anything else to enhance it, save perhaps one of the few permissible things that do vary a dressing. Garlic, for instance. This should be a fresh clove, and it should be crushed and either rubbed into the salt for the dressing or into a little nubbin of dry bread (called a _chapon)_ which is then popped into the salad bowl. Petsonally, I don't like wooden salad bowls, only those of glass or china, so I never rub my bowl with garlic as many people do.\n\nYou can also impale the crushed garlic clove on a toothpick, put it in the dressing, and remove it before you toss the salad, unless you like to eat garlic\u2014it's very good if you don't mind carrying around a little garlic breath with you afterward.\n\nThere are times when mustard\u2014either dry mustard or the rather hot French-style Dijon mustard that you serve with meat\u2014goes into a vinaigrette sauce. Adjust the amount of mustard to the type of salad. Celery salad, for instance, will take more mustard than a green salad.\n\nThen herbs. I find those that are most agreeable for salads are tarragon, chervil, parsley, chives, and, if you are using tomatoes in your salad, basil. These are the outstanding salad herbs and should be used to your own discretion, either chopped fresh herbs or the dried herbs, crushed well in your hand. There is one other herb that goes very nicely with certain salads, notably cucumber and sometimes tomato, and that is dill. While tarragon is universal, dill is rather limited as a regular salad herb, but it does have its place. Mind you, I don't think you should have a bouquet of herbs in a salad. One, with the possible exception of some parsley as an addition, is ample.\n\nVinaigrette sauce for salad is so quickly made that there is no need to concoct great jars of it, shake it like mad, and keep it in the refrigerator, as some people do. It only gets stale and tastes unpleasant, especially if there is garlic in it.\n\n  The possibilities of a vinaigrette don't end with salad. Marinate cold cooked vegetables in it for a first course, or use leftover beef and make _Beef Salad Parisienne_ for a luncheon or supper main dish. Cut 2 pounds lean cold boiled or pot-roasted beef into slices and then into bite-size squares or strips. Combine on salad greens in a bowl or deep platter with 6 boiled, sliced potatoes, _ _pound cooked green beans, 1 peeled, sliced cucumber, 4 peeled tomatoes, cut in sixths, 2 cups celery, finely sliced, and 1 sliced green pepper. Dress with  __ cup vinaigrette heavily flavored with 1 tablespoon chopped fresh tarragon or 1 teaspoon dried tarragon and 2 tablespoons chopped parsley. Garnish with 6 halved hard-boiled eggs, 1 red onion, sliced, and a dozen cornichons (small sour pickles), and serve to six.\n\n_Who's Afraid of Hollandaise?_\n\nOne sauce that people love to order in a restaurant but seldom attempt to make at home is hollandaise. Somehow the impression has got around that making hollandaise, like making mayonnaise by hand, is a difficult and arduous process, fraught with disaster. Actually, that isn't true. This rich, elegant butter and egg sauce is tricky to make, admittedly (unless you do it in a blender, which won't give you quite as good a result as the handmade version), but all it takes is a little patience, care, and a knowledge of what you're doing. Once you've got the knack of it, you'll never be afraid of hollandaise.\n\nHollandaise and mayonnaise are known classically as emulsified sauces, which means that one ingredient (egg yolks) absorbs another (butter or olive oil) and holds it in suspension, giving you a very thick and creamy mixture. The trick is to coax the egg yolks to absorb the butter or oil without curdling or separating. This takes time, constant stirring or whisking, and, in the case of hollandaise, keeping a sharp watch to see that the sauce doesn't overheat and the eggs scramble.\n\nWhile there are many members of the hollandaise family\u2014Bearnaise, Maltaise, paloise, and mousseline are some of the other sauces\u2014they all start with a perfect hollandaise.\n\n  Make _Sauce Hollandaise_ in the top of a double boiler or in a glass or pottery bowl, over water that should remain hot, but never be allowed to boil, during the whole procedure. For _1 _ cups sauce, put 3 egg yolks into a bowl and add \u00bd __ teaspoon salt, a pinch of pepper or a dash of Tabasco, and 1 tablespoon lemon juice or wine vinegar. Work this with a wooden spatula or wire whisk over the hot water until the eggs and seasonings are well blended and the warmth of the water and the steady stirring have caused the egg yolks to thicken slightly. Have at your elbow on a warm plate 8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, cut into small pieces. Drop one piece of butter into the egg mixture and stir until the eggs have absorbed it and started to thicken, then quickly add another piece of butter and stir again until it is completely blended into the sauce. Continue to add butter, one piece at a time, until you have a sauce of a thickish consistency that coats the spatula or whisk quite heavily. If by any chance you feel the sauce is thickening too fast, add a tablespoon of cold water, which will slow down the process.\n\nShould your sauce get overheated because you've let the water become too hot, it will break and curdle, giving you rather fancy scrambled eggs. If it is just slightly curdled, there are ways to bring it back. Some people recommend stirring in a tablespoon of heavy cream or a tablespoon of very hot water. Others start all over again with a clean bowl and a fresh egg yolk, stirring the curdled sauce into it gradually, over the hot water, which is the method I happen to favor.\n\nOnce the sauce is made, don't let it cool and then try to warm it up in another pan. Leave it in the bowl over lukewarm water and reheat it slowly, covered, letting the water get warm but nowhere near boiling. However, it is my contention that hollandaise should be eaten as soon as it is made and not reheated, because there is always the chance that if it is held, it will develop bacteria, and it's much better to be safe than sorry. So use your hollandaise lavishly and don't try to keep it. You've probably had it on asparagus, artichokes, and eggs Benedict, but try it sometime on poached fish, especially salmon, striped bass, and halibut\u2014it's really delicious.\n\nAfter you have mastered hollandaise, you can move on to the other members of the family. Sauce Bearnaise, hollandaise with a seasoning of finely chopped shallots, parsley, tarragon, and wine vinegar or white wine and lemon juice that has been cooked down until it is almost a glaze, is superb with steak, broiled liver, or fish such as halibut. Sauce paloise, a variation of Bearnaise with finely chopped fresh mint in place of tarragon and a touch of finely chopped anchovy, tastes absolutely glorious with roast leg of lamb, grilled butterflied leg of lamb, or roast venison.\n\nThen there's garlic hollandaise, with a little finely minced or crushed garlic added to the sauce, which gives it a wonderful pungency; mustard hollandaise, sharpened with _ _ teaspoon dry mustard; and sauce mousseline, for which you whip 4 tablespoons heavy cream and fold it into the sauce just before serving to give it a light ethereal texture that is just perfect with delicate foods like fish, poached chicken, or even souffles. One of the most intriguing spinoffs is sauce Maltaise, made like a regular hollandaise but without the lemon juice or vinegar\u2014orange juice and grated orange rind are mixed in instead, giving the sauce a deeper color and an orangy overtone that makes asparagus or broccoli seem like quite another vegetable.\n\nSo there you have the hollandaise family, a rich bunch, calorically speaking, but definitely the aristocrats of the sauce world.\n\n_What's in a Name?_\n\nThings are not always what they seem, especially in the world of food. As I travel around I always seem to be encountering national dishes or snacks that are nothing like the names they go under. For instance, in Florida and around New York, wherever there has been an influx of Cubans, you'll find a snack called _medianoche,_ or \"midnight.\" So what is _medianochel_ It's a very special sandwich with a most unusual and delicious combination of flavors. I love it, because I love roast pork, especially the Cuban and Puerto Rican version. You take a long sort of hero-shaped soft roll, split and butter it, and put on the lower half a good portion of nicely seasoned cold roast pork. On top of that you place an equally healthy portion of a cheese that melts well, such as Swiss cheese (Emmenthaler or Gruyere) or Monterey Jack or even what is known as American Munster, if that's all you can get. Slap on the top of the roll, and put the whole thing in the oven or on a griddle, with a weight on top, so the cheese melts all over the pork. This takes its place alongside the \"poor boy\" and the \"hero\" and all those other honest, hearty sandwiches that are so satisfying.\n\nCologne, in Germany, is a city with all kinds of funny food names. When I was last there, a friend and I went into a bar for a pre-opera snack and he ordered \"two half a hen.\" I thought: \"My heavens, what are we getting?\" A half a hen, or _halve Hahn,_ turned out to be a slice of local cheese with a hard roll, butter, and a glass of beer, a far remove from any chicken I've ever eaten, but a fine snack nevertheless.\n\nIn another restaurant I found a dish called _K_ \u00d6 _lnische Kaviar,_ or Cologne caviar, that wasn't caviar at all, but a portion of cold, highly spiced blood sausage, the kind sold in many German delicatessens and even more supermarkets, served with mustard, a roll, and a couple of tiny dill pickles. How that ever got the name of caviar I'll never know. It's like the Mexican _mantequilla de pobre,_ or \"poor man's butter\" (see page 87), a flavored puree of avocado that in this country would certainly be more a rich man's than a poor man's daily spread.\n\nAnother German menu baffler is Himmel _und Erde_ \u2014heaven and earth. That's actually mashed potatoes with a little cooked apple beaten in, served with fried blood sausage or fried liver sausage, a very nice combination, especially if there's a slice of onion with the sausage. I suppose this has a symbolic significance because there is an old saying that there must be heaven and earth or man cannot thrive, so \"heaven and earth\" means that man can survive.\n\nThen there's the English \"bubble and squeak,\" which doesn't bubble, except perhaps in the frying pan, and has never been heard to squeak. Bubble and squeak is one of those ingenious British ways of using up the leftovers from Sunday's roast beef dinner, cabbage and potatoes and sometimes parsnips. These are chopped up and cooked together in some of the beef drippings. There are all kinds of versions. I've had it with little pieces of cold roast beef thrown in at the last minute, and mighty good it is. So good, in fact, that you might cook extra vegetables for dinner just in order to have bubble and squeak next day for lunch.\n\nA British recipe you'll sometimes find here, too, is almost bound to be misunderstood by people who've never had it before, and if they see it on a menu and order it, they are liable to be furious at what they get. It's called Scotch woodcock, and that must be some kind of Scottish joke, because nary a woodcock is there in this dish. In England it is usually served as a savory at the end of a meal, after dessert, or as an evening snack.\n\n  There are two ways to make _Scotch Woodcock;_ theirs and ours. The Scottish way is to take a slice of well-buttered toast for each person and spread it with 4 finely chopped or pounded anchovy fillets. Then, to serve four, 6 egg yolks, 1 cup heavy cream, and a dash of pepper (no salt\u2014the anchovies are salty enough) are stirred together over hot water in the top of a double boiler until thickened. This rich sauce is then spooned over the toast, sprinkled with chopped parsley, and served at once.\n\nFor the American version, an adaptation of the original, put on the buttered toast anchovy fillets to taste\u2014if you like them a lot, 8 or 10 on a slice; if you're not so fond of them, 3 or 4-Then, instead of making a sauce, beat 6 or 7 eggs with 3 or 4 tablespoons heavy cream and freshly ground pepper, melt 3 or 4 tablespoons butter in a pan, and make very light, creamy scrambled eggs. Spoon these over the anchovies, and top with a little chopped parsley.\n\nEither version is extremely pleasant provided you like anchovies. I happen to love the combination of flavors, and I often have Scotch woodcock for breakfast or Sunday brunch, or I'll serve it with a glass of beer or white wine if friends drop in unexpectedly in the late evening. \nBeard on Food _Today_\n\n_A Brief Update_\n\nIn the months before this book's first publication in 1974, James Beard sifted through hundreds, perhaps thousands, of newspaper articles he had written for syndication to find the many gems that make up Beard _on Food._ The resulting collection provides not only a comprehensive and very personal look at Beard's approach to food, but also a snapshot of the American food scene of the time.\n\nMuch has changed since then. American chefs have become international celebrities, organic food has gone mainstream, and supermarkets have fulfilled the dream of culinary globalization. Yet remarkably little information in this book is out of date\u2014a testament to Beard's adventurous palate and timeless knowledge. Given all of the exciting developments in the twenty-five-odd years since these articles were written, however, we at the Beard House wanted to provide a few updates for today's food enthusiasts, all in the spirit of the great man.\n\nOlive Oil\n\nSince Beard wrote his essay on the subject (\"Olive Oil to Taste,\" page 136), the olive oil market has blossomed. Even California's production of fine oil has taken off again. Due in part to the oil's popularity, not to mention the scale of the international olive oil trade, the International Olive Oil Council enforces strict labeling standards. Although Beard doesn't specify, the freshly pressed oil that he describes would have been extra-virgin olive oil, the top of the line. For more information, visit http://www.intemation-aloliveoil. org.\n\nHam\n\nThankfully, due to the resurgence in premium pork products, a good ham, especially a good country ham, is getting easier to find (\"A Good Ham is Hard to Find,\" page 24). These days, favorite producers, such as Kentucky's Colonel Bill Newsom, are even highlighted on restaurant menus. The National Country Ham Association's Web site, <http://www.countryham.org>, is a good source of information about purveyors.\n\nRaw Ingredients\n\nDue to an increased risk of microbial contamination resulting from changes in the structure and scale of food production in this country, many experts now advise against eating raw meat and raw eggs. If you intend to prepare Beard's steak tartare (\"Beef in the Raw,\" page 4), for example, be sure to purchase the freshest piece of meat you can find from the most reliable source available, and chop it yourself as he advises. The same holds true for Kibbeh Naye (page 236); for the egg yolk, purchase farm-fresh eggs. Even then, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises against serving raw or undercooked eggs to children, the elderly, or anyone with a compromised immune system. For more information, visit <http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dbmd/index.htm.>\n\nCheese\n\nUnfortunately, the Liederkrantz cheese that Beard praises so highly (\"Speaking of Cheese,\" page 212), was withdrawn from production in 1985. Since Beard's time though, American artisanal cheese production has exploded. From goat cheeses, to aged cheeses, to blues, to other pungent Limburger-type cheeses (Bayrisher Bergsteiger Kase, produced by Kutter's Cheese Company, near Buffalo, New York, is a delicious substitute for Liederkrantz), there are literally hundreds of fine cheeses being made in America today. Founded in 1982, the American Cheese Society is perhaps the best source for information about the current state of cheese making. The society holds an annual competition that identifies the best cheeses of year. For information, visit <http://www.cheesesociety.org>.\n\nBeaujolais\n\nAs November approaches, excitement about the arrival of the first bottle of Beaujolais Primeur (now known more commonly as Beaujolais Nouveau) from France is still palpable (\"The Endearing Young Charms of Beaujolais,\" page 220), but the date of its release has changed. The \"fresh, lovely\" wine, as Beard described it, now arrives on the third Thursday of November, just in time for Thanksgiving.\n\nMarkets\n\nCity planners and savvy farmers have heeded Beard's call for more local markets (\"Let's Have More Common Markets,\" page 286; \"The Marvel of Markets,\" page 288). Vibrant markets have sprouted up in big cities and small towns across the country. Plans are even under way to open the James Beard Public Market in Beard's hometown of Portland, Oregon. (He would no doubt have been tickled.) To find information about markets in your area, start with the North American Farmer's Direct Marketing Association at <http://www.nafdma.com>.\n\nHad Beard lived long enough to experience the world of Internet shopping, one can only imagine what the line of delivery trucks outside his West 12th Street town house would have been like. He was an equal-opportunity eater with an enormous appetite for delicious things\u2014from the hautest French cuisine to the humblest roadside snack. Beard's enthusiasm for American cuisine was so great, in fact, that it sparked a culinary revolution. We all eat better for it.\n\n\u2014Mitchell Davis\n\nThe Beard House\n\nApril 2007\n\n_About the Author_\n\nBorn in Portland, Oregon, in 1903, James Beard was destined to find his calling in the food profession. He acquired a sophisticated palate while still a boy, thanks to the good example of his mother, who had run a small residence hotel with a fine kitchen, but he first aspired to be a singer and then an actor. He failed to make his mark as either, and in the late 1930s joined two friends in a catering service in New York. It was called Hors d'Oeuvre, Inc. and led to the publication in 1940 of his first book, Hors _d'Oeuvre and Canapes,_ which remained in print for nearly sixty years and has become a classic. More than twenty cookbooks followed, including the best-selling _James Beard Cookbook, James Beard's American Cookery, James Beard's Theory and Practice of Good Cooking_ and Beard on Bread. In 1946 Beard appeared on television's first cooking program, and in the 1950s he started the classes that grew into his renowned cooking school. Throughout his career he was sought after as a consultant by restaurants and food producers. On behalf of the latter he toured the country continuously, giving lectures and food demonstrations. He was an exponent of simple, honest cooking, using the best ingredients, and an early believer in the existence of genuine American cuisine. By the time he died, in 1985, he was generally acknowledged to be the country's most influential food authority. \n"], [" \nContents\n\nContributors\n\nIntroduction\n\n1 The Echo and the Mirror en ab\u00eeme in Victorian Poetry\n\nNotes\n\n2 The Mirror's Secret\n\nNotes\n\n3 Browning's Anxious Gaze\n\nNotes\n\n4 The Pragmatics of Silence, and the Figuration of the Reader in Browning's Dramatic Monologues\n\nNotes\n\n5 Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric\n\nI\n\nII\n\nIII\n\nIV\n\nNotes\n\n6 Matthew Arnold's Gipsies\n\nThe New Historicism\n\nIntertextual Matters\n\nVictorian Gipsies and \"The Scholar-Gipsy\"\n\nThe Acquisition of Cultural Power\n\nNotes\n\n7 A New Radical Aesthetic\n\nNotes\n\n8 Alienated Majesty\n\nNotes\n\n9 Fact and Tact\n\nNotes\n\n10 'A Thousand Times I'd be a Factory Girl'\n\nI\n\nII\n\nIII\n\nIV\n\nNotes\n\nWorks Cited\n\n11 'The fruitful feud of hers and his'\n\n1 Questioning the Subject: Dramatic Monologue\n\n2 Androgyny\n\n3 The Disappearance of the Object\n\n4 Matthew Arnold\n\nNotes\n\n12 'Eat me, drink me, love me'\n\nSisterhoods and the Female Gaze\n\nGoblin Market and Feminine Guessiness\n\nNotes\n\n13 Browning's Corpses\n\nNotes\n\n14 A E Housman and 'the colour of his hair'\n\nNotes\n\n15 Tennyson's 'Little Hamlet'\n\nNotes\n\nWorks Cited\n\n16 The Disappointment of Christina G Rossetti\n\nNotes\n\n17 Stirring 'a Dust of Figures'\n\nNotes\n\nBibliography\n\n18 'Love, let us be true to one another'\n\nI\n\nII\n\nIII\n\nIV\n\nV\n\nNotes\n\n19 'Poets and lovers evermore'\n\nWhat's in a Name?\n\n'The Fearful Mastery of Love'\n\nFleshly Love and 'A Curve That Is Drawn So Fine'\n\nNotes\n\n20 Swinburne at Work\n\nAnactoria\n\nNotes\n\n21 Naming and Not Naming\n\nI. Becoming A Name\n\nII. Not Naming, But Suggesting\n\nNotes\n\nIndex\n\nThis edition first published 2014  \n\u00a9 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd\n\n _Registered Office_  \nJohn Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK\n\n _Editorial Offices_  \n350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148\u20135020, USA  \n9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK  \nThe Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK\n\nFor details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.\n\nThe right of Valentine Cunningham to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.\n\nWiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.\n\nDesignations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.\n\nLimit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.\n\n _Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data_\n\nVictorian Poets : a Critical Reader / edited by Valentine Cunningham.  \npages cm. \u2013 (Blackwell Critical Reader; 10)  \nIncludes index.\n\nISBN 978-0-631-19913-7 (hardback) \u2013 ISBN 978-0-631-19914-4 (paper) 1. English  \npoetry\u201319th century\u2013History and criticism. I. Cunningham, Valentine, editor of  \ncompilation.  \nPR593.V57 2014  \n821\u2032.809\u2013dc23\n\n2013038471\n\nA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.\n\nCover image: Flora, details from tapestry weaving in wool and silk by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, with verses by Morris on borders, made by Morris & Company at Merton Abbey, 1885. Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester / Bridgeman Art Library.  \nCover design by Richard Boxall Design Associates\n\n# Contributors\n\n **Isobel Armstrong** is Emeritus Professor of English at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Senior Research Fellow at the London University Institute of English Studies. An eminent scholar-critic especially of Victorian poetry, her publications include _Arthur Hugh Clough_ (1962), _The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations_ (1969), _Victorian Scrutinies_ (1972), _Robert Browning_ (1974), _Language as Living form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry_ (1982), _Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Politics and Poetics_ (1993), _Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to late Victorian: Gender and Genre_ (1999), _The Radical Aesthetic_ (2000), _Victorian Glassworlds_ (2008).\n\n **Joseph Bristow** is a Professor of English at UCLA, the University of California, Los Angeles. A specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, with strong lines on gender and gay writing. His books include _The Victorian Poet: Poetics and Persona_ (1987), _Robert Browning_ (1991), _Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man's World_ (1991), _Sexuality_ (1997), _Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885_ (1997), _The Fin-de-Si\u00e8cle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s_ (2005). His many editions include _Victorian Women Poets: Emily Bront\u00eb, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti_ (1995), _Nineteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology_ (1996, with Isobel Armstrong), Oscar Wilde's _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ (2004), _Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions_ (2003), _The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry_ (2000), and _Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: the Making of a Legend_ (2008).\n\n **Timothy A J Burnett** has retired from his job as a manuscript librarian in the Department of Western Manuscripts at the British Library, London. Writing as T A J Burnett, he is the author of _The Rise and Fall of a Regency Dandy: The Life and Times of Scrope Berdmore Davies_ (1981), and the editor of Charlotte Bront\u00eb's _The Search after hapiness_ (sic): _a Tale_ (1969), _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto III: a Facsimile of the Autograph Fair Copy found in the 'Scrope Davies' Notebook_ (1988), and of _The British Library Catalogue of the Ashley Manuscripts_ (1998) \u2013 the collection of the notorious faker-bibliographer T J Wise.\n\n **Mary Wilson Carpenter** is Professor Emerita of English, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She writes as a literary historian about Victorian literature with an emphasis on feminism and gender. Her main publications are _George Eliot and the Landscape of Time: Narrative Form and Protestant Apocalyptic History_ (1986), _Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: Women, Sexuality and Religion in the Victorian Market_ (2003) and _Health, Medicine and Society in Victorian England_ (2010).\n\n **Mary Ann Caws** is distinguished Professor of English, French and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of City University, New York. An art historian, literary critic, and biographer of Proust, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Picasso and Salvador Dal\u00ed, she has edited anthologies on Manifestoes, Surrealism, and twentieth-century French literature. Her many translations of modern French poets include St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9.\n\n **Carol T Christ** became the tenth President of Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts in 2002 after a distinguished career as Professor of English and administrator at the University of California, Berkeley. A strong champion of women's issues and diversity, her critical interests have focussed on Victorian women poets and novelists. As a Professor of English at Smith she teaches seminars on science and literature and on the arts. Her books include _The Finer Optic: the Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry_ (1975), _Victorian and Modern Poetics_ (1984), the Norton edition of George Eliot's _The Mill on the Floss_ (1994), and _Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination_ , edited with John O Jordan (1995).\n\n **Valentine Cunningham** is a Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University and a Senior Research Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His books include _Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel_ (1975), _British Writers of the Thirties_ (1988), _In the Reading Gaol: Texts, Postmodernity and History_ (1993), _Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems, Poetics (2011), The Connell Guide to King Lear_ (2012). He has edited _The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse_ (1980), _Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War_ (1986), _Adam Bede_ (1998), and _The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics_ (2000).\n\n **Eric Griffiths** is a Fellow in English at Trinity College, Cambridge. He teaches, and writes widely about, poetry from the Restoration to the present. Poetry of all sorts: like his critical father-in-the-faith Christopher Ricks, he's a devotee of Bob Dylan. His books are _The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry_ (1989) and his Penguin edition _Dante in English_ (2005, with Matthew Reynolds).\n\n **Antony Harrison** is Distinguished Professor of English at North Carolina State University, at Raleigh, North Carolina. An eminent Victorianist, editor, critical theorist and student of gender, his books are _Christina Rossetti in Context_ (1988), _Swinburne's Medievalism: a Study in Victorian Love Poetry_ (1988), _Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems: Intertextuality and Ideology_ (1990), _Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture: Discourse and Ideology_ (1998), and _The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold_ (2009). He's the editor of _The Letters of Christina Rossetti_ (4 vols., 1997\u20132004), and coeditor of _Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art_ (1992), _The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts_ (1999), and of _The Blackwell Companion to Victorian Poetry_ (2002).\n\n **Geoffrey Hill** is widely regarded as the greatest living English poet. Professor Emeritus of English Literature and Religion at Boston University, Massachusetts; former co-director (with Christopher Ricks) of the Boston University Editorial Institute; currently Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He has published many volumes of poetry since his first, _For the Fallen_ (1959). The best of his agonistic critical writing, amounting to a radically conservative, compellingly ethical and religious philosophy of literature, is generously gathered in his bumper _Collected Critical Writings_ (2008).\n\n **Gerhard Joseph** is Professor of English at Lehman College and the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York. He's a theoretically clued-up critic of modern literature with a special stake in Victorian writing, whose books are _Tennysonian Love: The Strange Diagonal_ (1969), _Tennyson and the Text: The Weaver's Shuttle_ (1992) and the edited volume _Victorian Classicism_ (1982).\n\n **Angela Leighton** is a Professor of English, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge University. A poet in her own right ( _Sea Level_ , 2007), she's a leading feminist critic with main, though not exclusive, interests in the nineteenth century. Her books are _Shelley and the Sublime_ (1984), _Elizabeth Barrett Browning_ (1986), _Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart_ (1992), and _On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Legacy of a Word_ (2007). She has edited _Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology_ , with Margaret Reynolds (1995), and _Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader_ (1996).\n\n **Dorothy Mermin** is Professor Emerita of English, Cornell University, with a concentration on Victorian literature and women's poetry. Her main publications are _The Audience in the Room: Five Victorian Poets_ (1983), _Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry_ (1989), and _Godiva's Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830\u20131880_ (1993). She edited _Victorian Literature 1830\u2013190_ 0 (2001) with Herbert Tucker.\n\n **J Hillis Miller** is Distinguished Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature of the University of California, at Irvine (to which he moved from Yale where he was member of the so-called Yale School of deconstruction, which also included Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom). A very influential American deconstructionist, he started off as a rather straightforward literary-historical critic specializing in the nineteenth-century (best early book: _The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers_ , 1963), but from the later 1970s works of a deconstructive, and soon post-deconstructive cast (he was rather scarred like his colleagues and graduate students by the Paul de Man scandal), have poured out. Representative titles (and concerns): _Fiction and Repetition_ (1982), _Tropes, Parables, Performatives_ (1990), _Ariadne's Thread_ (1992), _Topographies_ (1995), _Black Holes_ (1999), _Others_ (2001), _For Derrida_ (2009), _The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz_ (2011).\n\n **Christopher Ricks** is William M and Sarah B Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University, Massachusetts, and co-director with Archie Burnett of the Boston University Editorial Institute, which he founded. He was Oxford's Professor of Poetry, 2004\u20139. Often hailed as the greatest living Anglophone critic, this very eminent scholar-critic and editor is extraordinarily prolific. He has produced major critical books on Milton (1963), Tennyson (1972), Keats (1974), T S Eliot (1988), Beckett (1993), and Bob Dylan (2003). The advocate of Johnsonian _principles_ rather than critical _theories_ , he's the witty scourge of the over-solemn, the pretentious, and weak theorists. As well as his magisterial editions of Tennyson (one volume 1972; 3 volumes 1987\u2013 after the Tennyson family lifted its embargo against the quoting of the manuscripts), he's produced _Inventions of the March Hare: T S Eliot Poems 1909\u20131917_ (1996), a _Selected_ edition of James Henry, _The Complete Poems of T S Eliot_ (2011, with Jim McCue), and, among many other anthologies, _The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse_ (1987) and _The Oxford Book of English Verse_ (1999).\n\n **David G Riede** is Professor of English at the Ohio State University. A strong investigator of nineteenth-century literary production, with a concentration on the Victorians, his many books include _Swinburne: A Study of Romantic Mythmaking_ (1978), _Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Limits of Victorian Vision_ (1983), _Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language_ (1988), _Oracles and Hierophants: Constructions of Romantic Authority_ (1991), _Allegories of One's Own Mind: Melancholy in Victorian Poetry_ (2005). He has also edited _Critical Essays on Dante Gabriel Rossetti_ (1992).\n\n **Herbert F Tucker** is John C Coleman Professor of English at the University of Virginia. A specialist in nineteenth-century British literature with a close interest in the poetry of the period, he's the author of many flashy critical articles in the area. His books include _Browning's Beginnings: the Art of Disclosure_ (1981), _Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism_ (1988), _and_ _Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse 1790\u20131910_ (2008). He has edited _Critical Essays on Alfred Lord Tennyson_ (1993), _The Blackwell Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture_ (1999), _Victorian Literature 1830\u20131900_ (2001, with Dorothy Mermin), and _Under Criticism: Essays in Honor of William H Pritchard_ (1998) \u2013 Tucker's old Professor at Amherst, the composer of superior satirical songs about Theorists.\n\n **Jennifer A Wagner-Lawlor** is Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies in the Department of Women's Studies at Penn State, Pennsylvania State University. She writes on sonnets, parody, cultural context, women and utopia. Her books are (as Jennifer Wagner), _A Moment's Monument: Revisionary Poetics and the Nineteenth-Century English Sonnet_ (1996); and, as Wagner-Lawlor, _The Victorian Comic Spirit: New Perspectives_ (2000). With Barbara Ching, she has edited _The Scandal of Susan Sontag_ (2009).\n\n **Chris White** is a former teacher of Literature at the Bolton Institute of Higher Education, subsequently Bolton University. She writes with combative force on homosexuality and lesbianism. With her then partner Elaine Hobby (now Professor of Seventeenth-Century Studies at Loughborough University) she edited _What Lesbians do in Books_ (1991), and by herself the no-holds-barred _Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook_ (1999).\n\n **Ann Wordsworth** taught in Oxford's Faculty of English Language and Literature, especially for St Hugh's College and the Department for Continuing Education. A spirited (and in Oxford terms a pioneering) theorist, she was one of the three 1970s founders of the _Oxford Literary Review_ \u2013 the journal founded to ginger up literary study in Britain, but especially in Oxford, by promoting Theory and Theorists, not least Derrida and Harold Bloom. A keen Bloomian, she published many Theory-disposed articles and reviews , particularly in the _Oxford Literary Review_.\n\n **Susan Zlotnick** is Associate Professor of English at Vassar College, New York. She teaches and writes on the intersection of history and literature, especially in Victorian literature and in the case of women's and working-class writing. She's the author of _Women, Writing and the Industrial Revolution_ (1999).\n\n# Introduction\n\nThis collection of critical essays presents some of the Newest New Criticism of the Victorian Poets. It illustrates the range of new, or newish, critical approaches to this extraordinary body of poetry and poetics, to the poets and their ways with their texts, their words, their forms, their modes and sub-genres. Here are Now re-readings and re-interpretations \u2013 contentious often (and often contended) \u2013 driven variously by contemporary ideological interests, including especially gender questions, selfhood and body issues, compelled too by recent textualities promoted by structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction, all applied in critical practice to the grand, and less grand, masters of the traditional canon and to the newer arrivals in the now greatly afforced canon, women, homosexuals, regional and working-class poets.\n\nThe number of Victorian poets now demanding and getting reader attention, the canon of Victorian poets, the authors of the poems now on the syllabus, makes a vast crowd. The bulkier modern anthologies shout the story of currently accepted Victorian largesse \u2013 Christopher Ricks's _New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse_ (1990: 112 poets), Daniel Karlin's _Penguin Book of Victorian Verse_ (1997: 145 poets), my own _The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics_ (Blackwell, 2000: 158 poets). At the core of the canon, as they have been for a long time, are the two uncontestedly major figures, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Victoria's Poet Laureate, and Robert Browning. They're the quality of the quality, assisted by a still highly regarded troupe of male producers: Gerard (Manley) Hopkins , Matthew Arnold and his friend Arthur Clough, Algernon Swinburne, A E Housman and Oscar Wilde, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Bridges and Thomas Hardy. A strong male band rather cleanly divided on educational, which is to say, class lines. On the one hand, the gentlemen poets from the ancient English universities of Oxford and Cambridge \u2013 Tennyson and Fitzgerald (Trinity, Cambridge), Hopkins, Arnold, Clough and Swinburne (Balliol, Oxford), Morris (Exeter, Oxford), Housman (St John's, Oxford), Wilde (Magdalen, Oxford), Bridges (Corpus Christi College, Oxford). On the other hand, the Others, who didn't go to an ancient English university: Browning, D G Rossetti, Hardy, denigrated in their own time, and even after that, as not educated enough, too philistine and uncouth to be taken as seriously as the scholarly gents. But nonetheless a group comprising a coherent all-male school, until it was, as it were, forced to go mixed, with women admitted as literary equals, and sometimes more than equals. Notably, of course, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina G Rossetti, now thought of as very powerful women poets, a canonized pair more and more supported by a host of other women canonistas \u2013 the likes of Felicia Hemans, George Eliot, Emily Bront\u00eb, Mary Coleridge, Augusta Webster, Constance Naden, Lizzie Siddal, Dora Greenwell, Alice Meynell, Margaret Woods, Amy Levy. Many of them, of course, bourgeois, even rather posh and well-off (like Elizabeth Barrett Barrett and Alice Meynell), daughters of vicars (like the Bront\u00ebs), comfortably-off wives (like Margaret Woods, wife of the President of Trinity College, Oxford, or Augusta Webster, wife of a Fellow of Trinity, Cambridge), even undergraduates (like Amy Levy, who spent two terms at the new women's Cambridge College, Newnham). Women put firmly on the literary map not least by anthologies such as _Victorian Women Poets 1830\u20131900_ (Dent, 1994), edited by Jennifer Breen, and _Victorian Women Poets_ , edited by Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds (Blackwell, 1995).\n\nIf not all that long ago the Big Four Victorian Poets were Tennyson, Browning, Arnold and Hopkins, now \u2013 supposing it's not too silly to go on talking in these terms \u2013 they are Tennyson, Browning, Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Though many critics and syllabus-makers would prefer that quartet to play as a quintet, with the fifth chair going to Hopkins, or Swinburne, or Wilde. (My own preference is for Hopkins.) Women critics, and feminist criticism, are, of course, largely responsible for the strong upgrade of Barrett Browning, Christina G, and the other women canonistas. And it's modern shifts of critical interest and ideology, of Theory in other words \u2013 the latest moves in the ever shifting, shoving, tilting, switching politics of reading, of literary history, of canon-making \u2013 which are responsible likewise for the other party and partisan inclusions in the Victorian canon, as well as for the recent/recentish re-readings, re-envisionings of established canon members.\n\nThe present presence of so many proletarian poets in the canon, for example, is the result of potent Marxist and Marxized critical preachments, especially, though not exclusively, as they draw breath in the long shadow of revived historicism, the so-called New Historicism. The House of Poetry now gives bed and board to lots more residents than heretofore, the onetime poetic homeless, rescued from the aesthetic ghetto, working men and women from the provinces, from proletarian quarters of cities, the field, factory and mine, the loom and the kitchen-sink: Ebenezer Elliott the 'Corn-Law Rhymer'; John Clare the poor-boy ruralist; Thomas Cooper the Chartist; charity-boy James ('The City of Dreadful Night') Thomson; Ebenezer Jones another Chartist; Gerald Massey, the 'Red Republican', son of illiterate bargee parents put to work thirteen and a half hours day in a silk mill at the age of eight; Joseph Skipsey, Northumberland coal-miner; John ('Thirty Bob a Week') Davidson; blind Scottish spinner and weaver Janet Hamilton; self-educated Eliza Cook; the 'Factory Girl' from Glasgow, Ellen Johnston; Dundee ploughman's daughter Elizabeth Duncan; Ruth Willis, lame Leicester factory worker; Mary Smith, the one-time domestic servant from Cropredy, Oxfordshire; and so on. (Sterling propagandizing and availability of poems in Brian Maidment's compendium _The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain_ (1987) and Florence S Boos's _Working-Class Women Poets in Britain: An Anthology_ (2008).)\n\nThe hand of Michel Foucault is to be felt everywhere in these canonical recruitments. His Marxized historiographical criticism, all about the rescue of the subjugated, the disregarded and the disapproved, from under the oppressive gaze of marginalizing power, has had great critically recreative effect. It has revitalized older feminisms of course, and is uniquely responsible for the massively important Post-Colonial and Queer Studies of recent times. The post-colonial awareness, which has attended to the blackness of the West Indian Creole Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bront\u00eb's _Jane Eyre_ , the woman liberated by feminist criticism from her house-arrest as 'The Mad Woman in the Attic', nowadays homes in on the blackness of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, of her husband Robert Browning, and for that matter, of Alice Meynell, all offspring of miscegenated planter families in the West Indies. It has made attending to the orientalism of Tennyson's _Maud_ a _sine qua non_ of reading that poem now. Queer (or Q) criticism, a main branch of the big field of modern gender studies, has resulted in the canonizing of once ignored homosexual poets \u2013 chief among these the pair of lesbians Katherine Harris Bradley and her niece Edith Emma Cooper writing under the name of Michael Field (important not least for their major part in the significant Victorian poetic cult of Sappho, whose female pronouns for the desired beloved they restored in their translations and adaptations; 'my two dear Greek women' Browning called them, with large liberal affection). Q studies are also responsible for the way long well-regarded poets Hopkins and Housman and Wilde have been as it were officially re-branded, re-stamped, as gay poets (their homosexuality and homoerotic interests coming to matter as much as if not more than anything else that matters about them). Q interests have made sure that the homosexual tenor of Tennyson's cult of his dead friend Arthur Hallam will be given what's now thought of as due prominence.\n\nSo: new readings, new scenes and focusses of reading, and new tools for reading. The politicized considerations that have burst the old canon's banks to let in onetime occluded and marginalized, even excluded writers \u2013 women, homosexuals, proletarians, the poor and the proletarian, miscegenated women in the attic, political and religious dissenters and nonconformists, the regionally accented, dialect speakers, the many far from and short on what Matthew Arnold, Oxford's massively influential Professor of Poetry, praised as 'the tone of the centre' \u2013 have released for critical attention, indeed made mandatory attention to, literature's dealings as subject matter with questions of gender and race, as well as sharpening up the attention paid to class (that rather long-established British critical interest: less so, traditionally, in the USA). All this is a grand politicizing and historicizing, which inevitably motor an awkward-squad nagging away at the doings of power, and at how selves, persons, their bodies as well as their minds and souls, people in their skin as well as in the societies they inhabit and compose, are, as they say, 'constructed' in literature. This is to see literature, in other words, as a main actor in what Michel Foucault called the 'discourses' that collaborate to imagine and so create persons and societies. 'Discourses', because Foucault recognized the collaboration in these imperious ideological doings of all forms of textual activity. Texts of all kinds, medical, political, religious as well as fictional; art of all sorts, especially in Victorian times painting and the latest medium of representation the photograph, but all modelled on writing, the stuff of literature, which gives literature a main place in these considerations. And Foucault's political analyses greedily, and for his time naturally, inhabit what we now think of as the mid-twentieth-century 'linguistic turn', that granting of precedence to language and its ways in all thinking about cultural production. The textuality, the linguistic work, the rhetoric, metaphoricity, the 'figurality', of the historical, empirical, ideological: it's a contentious convergence, obviously; in fact, a difficult marriage teetering always on divorce.\n\nThe linguistics in question, of course, is that of the most influential linguist ever, the great Ferdinand de Saussure in his early twentieth-century lectures, which became his (posthumous) _Cours de Linguistique G\u00e9n\u00e9rale_ , the famous _Course of General Linguistics_. The linguistics that gave rise to structuralism, and eventually post-structuralism, to the idea of literature, and literary practice, as being above all self-reflexively about itself as writing, the way the text works, the internal play of its words as such, as (in de Saussure's terms) _signifier_ s, not _signifieds_ (or signata), that is words pointing to the world outside. In other words,texts as systems of verbal _difference_ rather than _reference_. The assumption being that a poem is a self-mirroring space, utterly inward looking \u2013 _abysmal_ , as the code has it, that is plunging for meaning deeper and deeper into its own textual self. Hotly self-referential, intra-textual, the poem on this view does as it were squint beyond itself, but always in a textually constrained way: it has outside relations, but with other writings, the writings near and distant, which generate it and which it generates, its 'intertextual' relations. And, according to the influential German theorist, Wolfgang Iser, the text's self-subjectivity builds in possible ways of reading it \u2013 'implicit' or 'implied' readings, which in effect construct an 'implicit' or 'implied' reader. All in all, though, this is the _autotelic_ text, influentially refigured by Jacques Derrida as 'deconstructive', that is made of language at war with itself, with language's ancient and persisting desire for presence and fullness of meaning, for reference to the world; and so here language is stuck on a border, a threshold, where access to meaning and value is frustrated, even barred. The Derridean word for this is aporia: the _aporetic_ text.\n\nSuch textual/intertextual assumptions have animated literary criticism, and not least the reading of Victorian poetry, as much as, if not more so than, the pressing ideological concerns. Together they comprise the interests of what is known as Theory. Interests that are not as innovatory as they are sometimes claimed, but which have certainly been strongly renovatory. Literary criticism proceeds historically, of course, by from time to time refuelling and retooling the persistent Basic Trio of critical concerns, the Big Three (as old as Aristotle) of _text-producer_ , _produced text_ and its meanings, and the _contexts of production_. Literary criticism survives by, thrives on, such shifts. But they are Turns, rather than Breaks. So that contemporary reading practice is always more of a palimpsestic blending than a case of cleanly wiped slates. But still the recent renovations, ideological and textual, have been so loud and deep and wide as to suggest more breaking than mere turning. And resistance to critical _renoving_ (Joyce's portmanteau word for modernism's paradoxical mix of removing and renewing), though historically normal , has never been so strong as recently, because the renovators' polemics about literary ideologies and the ways of textualizing have never, perhaps, been so fierce. Never before so much blood on the coal, which means never such interesting critical times as now.\n\nThe business of this collection of essays is to show some of the new Theorized, and post-Theory, ways of reading Victorian poetry in action, the engagement with the now stretched canon, the application of renovating ideological and textual insistences to canonistas old and new. It welcomes the polemics, the partisanships, on behalf of the new, but also the resistances: that is, the serious contending and argumentativeness of current critical proceedings. Above all it wants to illustrate the exciting range of current critical attention, the bustling play of the exhilaratingly various possibilities of things to notice, things to say, ways of thinking and saying them, now available to readers of Victorian poetry.\n\nIn 'The Echo and the Mirror _en ab\u00eeme_ in Victorian Poetry' Gerhard Joseph, enthusiastic Derridean, explains the notion of abysmality, connecting it with Derrida's concept of _diff\u00e9rance_ (a dual term Derrida coined to denote language as a practice of _difference_ , words as fields of meaning, and of _deferring_ , words as slippery evaders of your grasp as they retreat down the signifying plughole), and linking it with the large practice of self-echoing, self-mirroring, repetivity in poems by Tennyson, Browning and Arnold. Joseph doesn't want precisely to argue that Victorian poets are post-structuralists _avant la lettre_ , but he is arguing the strong applicability to them of abysmality. Characteristically of a lot of users of postmodernist assumptions Joseph is at pains to suggest abysmality has, in practice, a long and established history; not unknown to older criticism (think, e.g., _Tristram Shandy_ ) but needing recent Theory to give it due prominence.\n\nThere's more textual mirroring and echoing in 'The Mirror's Secret: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Double Work of Art' by J Hillis Miller's, doyen of Anglophone deconstructionism (personal friend and colleague of Derrida; founder member of the so-called Yale School of Criticism in which Derrida was a member; in many ways Derrida's echo-chamber): treatment of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poems about mirrors and which are verbal mirrors of his own paintings, as the paintings are mirrors of the poems \u2013 paintings in the mirror of poems, and vice versa. A strong case of modern ekphrastic analysis, that is critique of poems about paintings ( _ekphrasis_ : the literary description of a 'plastic' work of art), poems that are now not uncommonly taken as prime examples of the textually self-mirroring, 'post-modernist' poem. John Hollander, the most thorough analyst of ekphrastic poems, gets an honourable mention.\n\nThree takes follow on what literary history has long accepted as the main sub-genre of Victorian poetry, namely the great Victorian poetic practice of the dramatic monologue. In 'Browning's Anxious Gaze' Ann Wordsworth seeks to shake any sense of successful outcomes for the dramas of perception mounted by the mode's greatest exponent Robert Browning. She reads the anxieties powering Browning's gazing narratives through the lens of Lacan's insistent problematizing of the gaze, but especially with the help of Harold Bloom's influential thoughts about the anxieties of poetic influence, the ephebic, successor poet's struggle with his strong predecessors. (The piece first appeared in the collection of critical essays in the _Robert Browning_ volume of the Prentice-Hall Twentieth Century Views series, edited by Harold Bloom himself with Adrienne Munich.)\n\nIn 'The Pragmatics of Silence and the Figuration of the Reader in Browning's Dramatic Monologues' Jennifer A Wagner-Lawlor inspects the handling by the mode's greatest exponent Robert Browning of what tradition accepts is an absolute of the form, namely the silence of the monologuist's addressee. For Wagner-Lawlor this silence is central to the animation, the construction, of the reader as this poetry's main subject \u2013 the implied reader (and the implicit readings) of Iserian instantiation. This reader is stuck in enticing, suggestive, but frustrating 'dialogue' with the poem, as the original addressees are held in their irkingly loaded silence by their unstoppable addressers. So the dramatic monologue becomes a key modernist business: the poem presenting its subject as 'figuration', metaphoricity, rhetoric, of course, and in the matter of what a literary text is held, modernistically, to be all about \u2013 silence, the withholding of certainties, the insistence upon enigma rather than revelation. As Wagner-Lawlor notes, John Ruskin cantankerously accused Browning of being gratuitous and self-indulgent about: utterly missing what is for her Browning's uncannily far-reaching linguistic and poetic principle.\n\nFor his part Herbert F Tucker's 'Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric' offers an historical and critical repositioning of the genre of dramatic monologue (practised by Tennyson, but still mainly a Browning affair) as a form of lyric. Lyric for Tucker is an affair of over-hearing \u2013 intertextual overhearing, but mainly overhearing by persons \u2013 the implied hearers of these poems, and by us the poems' readers (shades of Wagner-Lawlor's concerns). What's at stake in these poems is 'the intersubjective confirmation of the self': the dramatics of the lyrical. This, Tucker argues, was a great gift to the modernists, especially Yeats, Pound, Frost and Eliot \u2013 all exploiters of dramatic monologue. 'Poetry became modern once again in its return to the historically responsive and dialogical mode that Browning, Tennyson, and others had brought forward from the Romantics'. ( _Dialogical_ is a handy, and still popular, term of approval in Theory-driven criticism \u2013 taken from the Russian critic Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin who notoriously applied it to the novels of Dostoevsky in order to bring them in from the cold, which Soviet Socialist Realism would assign them to.) Tucker is throughout keen to weigh Browning's 'lyricism' within the history of its reception. He suggests that the personal concerns of Browning were why the dominant mid-twentieth-century New Critics, who valued impersonality in poetry and criticism, found Browning so awkward a case. Typically of some post-Theory reading, Tucker wants his story of a particular mode's reception to be an allegory of the problems of reading that mode as such.\n\nAntony Harrison's 'Matthew Arnold's Gipsies: Intertextuality and the New Historicism' looks at the gipsy poems of the extremely important poet-critic/critical poet Matthew Arnold, in particular 'The Scholar Gipsy', the poem rightly regarded as quintessential to Arnold's poetic delvings into the role of the artist in Victorian times. This is an intertextual analysis conducted under the flag of New Historicism: the practice founded by Stephen Greenblatt of reading a literary text in parallel with non-literary texts, here non-aesthetic writings about gipsies; a practice which, according to Greenblatt's original formulation, shows that a literary text's main existence is within a 'circulation of texts' rather than bound into a relationship with real things outside the text. Whether Harrison succeeds in this is as moot as with any of Greenblatt's own 'new-historical' readings. It's a good try, though, even if here, as elsewhere, 'New Historicist' reading seems quite close to Old Historicism \u2013 old historicizing just writ a bit larger, or more shoutily. A common enough charge against 'New Historicist' proceedings.\n\nIn 'A New Radical Aesthetic: The Grotesque as cultural critique: Morris', Isobel Armstrong, experienced materialist and grounded feminist critic, _grande dame_ in fact of Victorian poetry studies, looks at the poetry of Socialist aesthete William Morris in terms of a form his politicized poetry went in for greatly, the Grotesque. The Grotesque was a poetic mode defined powerfully, albeit despisingly, by John Ruskin, so Morris's radical social and aesthetic theory is addressed in dialogue with Ruskin's different and more conservative thinking. Morris's volume _The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems_ provides rich material for discussion of how ideologically contentious sex and sexuality play in Victorian poetry and culture; especially in the matter of hair, the most prevalent synecdoche of the body in Victorian poetry, a dominant of Victorian poets' clamant obsession with the body \u2013 or 'fleshly' consciousness as contemporary body-aesthetics were labelled in Robert Buchanan's stroppy attack on the Pre-Raphaelites and their ilk, 'The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr D G Rossetti' ('By \"Thomas Maitland\"'). A better example of the way this essay has ideology and form intersecting and interacting \u2013 embracing what Hayden White, the pioneer of (post)modern considerations of the rhetoricity of historiography, called _The Content of the Form_ (his title of 1987) \u2013 would be hard to find. It finely justifies the claim of its title in Armstrong's important _Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics_ (1993) that Morris was engaged in 'A New Radical Aesthetic'.\n\nThe important lecture by Geoffrey Hill, 'Alienated Majesty: Gerard M Hopkins', on Hopkins in relation to Walt Whitman , the American poet he was so greatly taken with, is a critique exemplary as a comparative study but also as an awkwardly forthright political one. Whitman the radical democrat, Hopkins the Christian Tory democrat: at first sight similar only in their shared homosexuality, but truly united, as Hill argues in his wonderfully gritty, lexically deep-digging fashion, in their shared interest in what Hill calls _civil polity_ (a subject uniting many of the lectures Hill is giving as Matthew Arnold's successor as Oxford Professor of Poetry). It's a case pushing with canny strategy along, but against, the grain of much recent Hopkins criticism, which Hill plainly feels, if not gone totally astray, is at least often wide of the mark. Loudly rebuking here is Hill's refusal to address Hopkins's, or Whitman's, homosexuality. That major preoccupation of recent criticism is, he implies, a diversion from the main track in reading either poet. Hill embraces Hopkins's politics as a peculiar but still authentic democratic vision, in the face of the now common fleering at this priest as a hierarchical conservative despiser of tramps, the unemployed, farriers and such. And (at first surprisingly) central to Hopkins's Whitmanite affinities is his dutifulness as a never not quite alienated Jesuit: the serious Roman Catholicism of the poet and the poetry cannot be discounted as some modern critique would prefer. Hill is here doing criticism in the modern way as massively political, but his is modern criticism reversed, in the mirror of the usual. Hill is as polemically aggressive as any of the implied critics he's spurning, fights over their ground, but always from the opposite corner. This produces a conservative criticism by no means simplistic, whose wonderfully individualistic strength is to be differently radical.\n\nMy 'Fact and Tact: post-Arnoldian Fact-finding and Modern Q Tactlessness in the Reading of Gerard Hopkins' is a polemical piece (originating in a tribute to the scholar-critic-editor F W Bateson founder and General Editor of the great Longman's Annotated Poets series, which brought out Ricks's _Tennyson_ , the Allotts' _Arnold_ , and the Woolford/Karlin/Phelan _Robert Browning_ ) suggesting as an essential principle and methodology for good reading a combination of the accumulation of _facts_ , as advocated by Bateson's favourite Matthew Arnold ('more and more' fact), and readerly tact (heedful, lovingly attentive critical touch), as suggested by Christopher Ricks (the magisterial editor of Tennyson). The combination gets a test run in relation to the way Hopkins's 'Felix Randal', a main Hopkins poem, and one touchingly about touching between men, has been read \u2013 on the one hand rescued from serious mistaking by the accession of facts about Hopkins's farrier subject and the true meaning of key words in the poem, and on the other misjudged in tactless misprizing at the hands of strong Q critics Joseph Bristow and Gregory Woods.\n\nSusan Zlotnick's essay '\"A Thousand Times I'd be a Factory Girl\": Dialect, Domesticity, and Working-Class Women's Poetry in Victorian Britain' is admirably pugilistic in its multi-focussed restoration work. It brings in from the critical cold the variously regional, dialect-speaking, proletarian, female domesticity, woman factory-worker subject and poeticity. Compellingly centred on the distinguished work of Ellen Johnston, the Scottish 'Factory Girl', this is radical feminist canon-busting. Its politico-historical-critical strengths include its feminizing of the traditionally male scene of regional dialect-speaking verse, and its moving pondering of the mountainous difficulties in the way of the aspirant proletarian housewife-worker poet.\n\n'\"The fruitful feud of hers and his\": Sameness, Difference, and Gender in Victorian Poetry' has Dorothy Mermin doing a classic job of what Jonathan Culler has called 'reading as a woman'. Her big subject is gender in Victorian poetry: how sexual sameness, difference and androgyny play, in both male and female poetry. The great Victorian problematic is the speaking subject (focussed especially in dramatic monologues), and this for Mermin is a necessarily gendered matter. Her forte is the challenging sweeping claim. 'In some important ways all the Victorian poets, male and female, can be read as women'.\n\nMary W Carpenter's '\"Eat me, drink me, love me\": The Consumable Female Body in Christina Rossetti's _Goblin Market_ ' works with feminism's favourite Christina Rossetti poem to bring out the poet's, and the period's, obsession with the variously sexualized female body, especially the body of the fallen woman (of great interest to Christina G in daily life as well as in her poetry). These well-aired (Victorian) contemporary moral and religious questions are shown to be heavily infected by assumptions about class and social hierarchy; by nationalist prejudices too, Carpenter thinks, since fallen Laura's blondeness signs her as emphatically English. Hers is an English female body destroyed by sexuality \u2013 a nationalizing of the body provocation emphasized by the parallel Rossetti poem 'In the Round Tower at Jhansi', about an English officer during the 'Indian Mutiny' who shot his wife and then himself to save her from rape by the dark uprising horde. Here feminist critique segues adroitly into post-colonialist awareness: the obsessive Victorian body a terrifying pivot of multivalent fear and threats.\n\nEntrancing body horrors are Carol T Christ's concern too, in her 'Browning's Corpses': focussing in particular Browning's, and his period's, necrophilia: the constant imminence of death in the poetry, and, in a time of fading faith in Christian orthodoxy's afterlife, a clinging to poetic fictions of bodily resurrection.\n\nStriking bodily matters, and in particular head-hair that especial focus of Victorian body consciousness, are the grave centre of Christopher Ricks's subtly adroit 'A E Housman and \"the colour of his hair\"'. Ricks's concern is with what Housman might have meant by saying four times in his 'Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?' that the gravamen of Oscar Wilde's offence, the cause of his jailing, was 'the colour of his hair'. Ingenious speculation leads to a paralleling of Wilde's outcasting with traditional hostility to Jews for the colour, the stereotyping redness, of their hair. Ricks has been a loud Theory sceptic, declaring that what criticism needs is _principles_ of reading not theories, and he is frequently linked rather with promoting the actual texts of Victorian poets than theorizing about them (and indeed, singlehandedly his unimprovable editions have made Tennyson's poems available in all their detail forever; and his _Selected_ poems of the Irish poet James Henry (2002) does a lovely resurrection job; and Housman editor Archie Burnett's great (2007) edition of Housman letters is a product of the Boston University Editorial Institute Ricks and Geoffrey Hill founded, and which Burnett now co-directs with Ricks). But like Geoffrey Hill, whose poetry Ricks has enthusiastically promoted, Ricks enjoys nothing more than running onto the Theory pitch in order to show the Theory team how to score goals better. Housman, Wilde, homophobia, anti-semitism, the arbitrary making of outcasts to be scourged by oppressive authority: up-to-date concentrations don't come more concentrated than this. But, of course, that anti-Theory Ricks is taking them up does indicate how unavoidable they've become.\n\nIn David G Riede's 'Tennyson's \"Little _Hamlet_ \"' the huge Victorian emotional turmoil of mourning turning into melancholia, so central to the poets' fraught engagement with the self, is cannily analysed in melancholic Tennyson's work, especially 'Maud' (his 'little _Hamlet_ ') \u2013 the poem that with Tennyson's _In Memoriam_ and James Thomson's 'The City of Dreadful Night' makes up the Big Trinity of Victorian sadness poems. This is a finely instructive essay in its rich array of important critical engagements: particularly in relating Tennyson and the Victorians to Walter Benjamin's classic account of Protestant (post-Hamletian) melancholy and its allegorical outcomes; in drawing out the imperialist and orientalist aspects of 'Maud'; and in the consideration of Ruskin's 'pathetic fallacy' indignations.\n\nDifferent, though not unrelated melancholies, are the concerns of Eric Griffiths' 'The Disappointment of Christina G Rossetti', with its stress on the theology-driven, practical Christianity of her tortured selfhood, as she waited Beckettianly for the Second Advent of Christ, which never happened (hopes deferred, in Biblical words, making her heart sick). Here's a continually astute close reading of Christina G's poems, especially good on her verbal repetitions (her _twice-ness_ fondness). Griffiths reads with forceful, even tetchy, combativeness; this is criticism in the midst of contemporary debate. 'Poems do not have insides and outsides', as recent criticism believes they do. Feminist readings are put in their place. It's wrong of Angela Leighton to offer Rossetti's 'doubleness' as gender-specifically female: this is 'normal also for male writers'. Isobel Armstrong is misguided to take Rossetti's prosodic irregularity as revolutionarily feminist. Adrienne Rich mistakenly reads Rossetti's religion as sexual 'sublimation' (Griffiths dislikes Freudianism). Importantly, he wants to get Rossetti's religiosity straight (an often embarrassing subject for secularizing feminism), and he mainly succeeds \u2013 though his refusal to accept that the _sisterhood_ aspects of Rossetti concerns, her large interest in nuns, for example, might be even proto-feminist does not carry a lot of weight.\n\nAngela Leighton's 'Stirring \"a Dust of Figures\": Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Love' takes up Barrett Browning's estranging and estranged _discourse_ of love, in a demonstration where the normality of this woman's great contribution to the Victorian 'language of the heart', to Victorian erotics (Leighton is right to oppose the modern clich\u00e9 about repressed Victorians) cries out for, and gets, definition in its womanly distinctiveness. The impressively calm concentration \u2013 much of Leighton's polemical force comes from her refusal to get heated \u2013 is _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ , Elizabeth Barrett's private courtship poems for Robert Browning. These poems, this poet, are shown ghosted by the 'Mariana' poems of Tennyson. Barrett Browning, a prisoner, in her own words, 'scrawling mottos on the walls', is offered as representing the imprisoned self of the Victorian woman poet: the poet figured as, and figuring in, distance, doubleness and foreignness (metaphoricized first as 'Bosnian' then as 'Portuguese'). Her particular language of the heart: a kind of foreign language, certainly hard to learn, and like all foreign languages easily misunderstood.\n\nIn '\"Love, let us be true to one another\": Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough and \"our Aqueous Ages\"' the serious Q theorist Joseph Bristow brings together Matthew Arnold and Arthur Clough as friends patrolling the fluid borders of gender, where their maleness is much troubled by fear of women and of emasculation. They're as it were together on Arnold's Dover Beach, site of the most famous watery margin of Victorian poetry's many, worried by the female 'bearded well', the 'Fuosich' of the original title of Clough's same-sex College-boy poem _The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich_. The undergirding assumption is that gender is entirely an affair of self-making, as popularized by Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick. Bristow disclaims wanting to present Arnold and Clough as a gay pair, but he certainly convinces about their shared fluctuating masculinity and their poetic intertwining (not least in the appearance of Clough, the 'liminal bachelor' as Kosofsky-Sedgwick calls him, as Thyrsis in Arnold's 'The Scholar Gipsy').\n\nIn '\"Poets and lovers evermore\": the poetry and journals of Michael Field' Chris White carefully complicates the nature of the writing of 'Michael Field', the most celebrated Victorian pair of 'Sapphic', lesbian, lovers and poets, too readily limited and simplified by the enthusiasm of their feminist enthusiasts. White's critical force lies in her sense of the variety of discourses this pair of poets tried out in their never finally resolved quest for the 'lesbian' words to say it: classical scholarly (the translations and versions of Sappho), heterosexual, the language of friendship, Roman Catholic (at the end). White dwells sympathetically on the naming and self-naming issue around Bradley and Cooper's choice of 'Michael Field', and is very informative in her literary-historical story of the deployment of Greek cultural precedent by Victorian gays of all genders.\n\nTimothy A J Burnett's focus is Victorian poetry's most industrious sexual bad boy Swinburne at work on the notorious 'Anactoria', one of the most offending offerings in his publicly horrifying _Poems and Ballads_ volume. This is a Sapphic poem, indeed, as relished by feminist and lesbian critics; but even more one steeped in Swinburne's sado-masochistic fetishism after the Marquis de Sade. These sexual matters are revealingly approached by an analysis of Swinburne hard at work on the first page of his poem. This is close-up textual reading of Swinburne as a most diligently attentive wordsmith. It's important to include in this collection of contemporary approaches because it indicates the kind of reception enabled now by the assiduously garnered textual data in modern editions (the Longmans Annotated Poets, Margaret Reynolds' _Aurora Leigh_ ), as well as putting to flight, to the sword in fact, the old canard that Victorian poets were merely slapdash knockers-off of their verses. That was a lie especially hurtful to Swinburne whose onetime reputation as the 'poet with the fatal facility' gave him awful prominence among the slandered.\n\nAnd, finally, a chronologically forward-looking discussion of what's argued is the perennial and on-going poetic struggle with naming. It's worked by Mary-Ann Caws and Gerhard Joseph through a look at the devotion of the Symbolist and ur-modernist St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9 to High Victorian Tennyson \u2013 an attraction evinced not least in Mallarm\u00e9's prose translations of Tennyson's 'Mariana' and 'Godiva'. Richly Derridean in its interest in a normative aporetic convergence of naming and not naming, the piece is a very good example not only of the now large recognition of Victorian poetry's effect and influence on modern/modernist/postmodernity, but of the proto-modernism of Tennyson (and many of his contemporaries). Modernists on this reckoning are characterized by their naming, which is also a refusal to name; and so also is Tennyson, the loudly 'sonorous' namer. A deceptive sonorousness, because it too, for all its audibility, is what T S Eliot, adapting Lancelot Andrewes, called the 'word unheard', the 'word within a word, unable to speak a word'.\n\nStyle Note: the different practices of the original articles in spelling (English/American), use of inverted commas, and referencing methods have been preserved.\n\n# 1\n\n# The Echo and the Mirror _en ab\u00eeme_ in Victorian Poetry\n\nGerhard Joseph\n\nIn recent French theory, the term _en ab\u00eeme_ describes any fragment of a text that reproduces in small the structure of the text as a whole. Introduced by Andr\u00e9 Gide in a passage of his _Journal_ in 1893, the phrase, which he intended as a characterization of his own reduplicative techniques, had as its origin an ancient visual device \u2013 that of the miniature heraldic shield enclosed within another shield whose shape and inner divisions it repeats exactly. There had, to be sure, been earlier examples of internal mirror effects in painting and literature \u2013 Gide cites the literary instances of _Hamlet, Wilhelm Meister_ , and \"The Fall of the House of Usher.\"1 But in order to distinguish his own strategies from those of simple doubling, he felt the need to fashion a new critical term \u2013 \" _en ab\u00eeme_ \" \u2013 to indicate the idea of multiple replication. From Gide's coinage in the _Notebooks_ and exemplary practice in _Narcisse, La Tentative_ , and _Les Faux- Monnayeurs_ , it is but a short step to the _mise en ab\u00eeme_ of post-Saussurean, post-structuralist theory, where we are invited to follow, in Jacques Derrida's words, \"a book in the book, an origin in the origin, a center in the center\"2 beyond the inmost bound of human thought. In short, the _mise en ab\u00eeme_ generated by Derrida's elaboration of bottomless _differance_ uncovers a frame within a frame in endless replication \u2013 what one thinks of in more homely terms as the Dutch-Cleanser, Quaker-Oats or Morton-Salt effects of commercial packaging.\n\nIt is no accident that the concept was given its initial literary definition in the nineteenth century. In his famous characterization of \"the Piranesi effect,\" for instance, Thomas De Quincey recalls the play within a play in _Hamlet_ and compares this to a room on whose wall is a picture of that room, on whose wall is a picture of that room, on whose wall is a picture of that room . . ., and concludes that \"we might imagine this descent into a life below a life going on _ad infinitum_ \" into \"abysses that swallow . . . up abysses.\"3 And Alfred Tennyson conveys to perfection what Gide meant by _en ab\u00eeme_ in the very context of Gide's heraldic etymology: Lancelot's shield in \"The Lady of Shalott\" with its image of a knight forever kneeling to his lady gives us in microcosm the larger structure of desire in the poem. That is, whatever its history in French theory and literature, the device, or something very much like it, also accentuated itself in English Victorian poetry in the auditory guise of the echo and the visual one of the mirror, sometimes in tandem. It demonstrated thereby the nineteenth-century English sources \u2013 Arnold's tortured and unending \"dialogue of the mind with itself\" \u2013 of modernist reflexiveness.\n\nThe formal expression of man's cognitive self-enclosure for the period is the dramatic monologue, with its limited aperture of the single personality's straitened vista upon the world.4 The very narrowness of the \"single window\" in the monologue, however, makes for a compensatorily rich depth; the outer frame can compose a wildly proliferative inner cosmos, the receding strata of voices, for instance, within Robert Browning's poems. As John Hollander suggests in his exhaustive study of the figure of echo in English literature, dramatic form is an implicit echo chamber whenever a speaker is made to echo a prior voice,5 the typical situation in Browning's monologues. In the simplest and most accessible of the monologues, the speaker's outer voice merely brackets a single interlocutory one \u2013 the Duke's voice, say, in \"My Last Duchess\" containing the implied answers of the Count's envoy. But more often that framing impulse leads Browning to the more dazzling rhetorical acrobatics which attract his sophistical protagonists, those \"wheel within a wheel\" replications their perverse, complex natures require, as his Bishop Blougram insists.6 At his most convoluted (and increasingly in the later monologues), Browning approaches the frame within-a-frame recessiveness that Erving Goffman has anatomized in _Frame Analysis_ , his breakdown of social intercourse at its labyrinthine extreme where only the most patient of listeners can follow.7\n\nWhile others may have their own favorite Browning echo chamber, my candidate for his most recursive Chinese-box instance \u2013 or at any rate the one easiest to exfoliate in brief as a paradigm for auditory regressiveness \u2013 is \"D\u00ees Aliter Visum; or Le Byron de Nos Jours.\" In this maddening tour de force, Browning's _Last Year at Marienbad_ , a woman addresses a famous French poet who out of timidity and a passion for respectability had refused to seize the moment of love with her ten years earlier. Then, they had met by a cliff brow at the seaside; now, she reminisces to him at a windowseat in an enclosed room. As quotation marks envelop quotation marks, point of view becomes ever more recessively entangled until, at the echolalial center of the poem, the woman is imagining what her lover would have imagined himself saying in reply to the speech (sts. xv\u2013xvii) which he had just imagined her making had they indeed decided, as they had not, to marry! And the challenge to the audience becomes even more forbidding in such late monologues as _Balaustion's Adventure, Red Cotton Night-Cap Country; or Turf and Towers_ , or _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society_. Perhaps we have not yet reached, even in the most impenetrable of such later mazes, the systematic vocal dislocations of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute or the deepset games of R. D. Laing's _Knots_. Arguably we are not quite at the seventh remove from the outer voice (\" ' \" ' \" ' \"in print) where John Barth locates the innermost voice of his \"menelaiad,\" one of the auditory experiments in _Lost in the Funhouse_. But Browning is surely moving in such directions, and the pleasurable strain we experience in disentangling the voices of his intricate echo chambers prepares us for the late games of modernist theory and practice, for an epistemological vertigo that stages itself rhetorically as auditory confusion.\n\nThe original sound that the Victorian poet's voice projects into the world is not of course inevitably indecipherable, or so the situations in some of Tennyson's poetry assure us. In a brief, early Shelleyan phase, unmediated sound fills the soul of the Tennysonian bard upon the height (as in, say, \"Timbuctoo\" or \"Armageddon\"), from which remove he is able to \"shake the world\" with prophecy. The sound of the Dying Swan, one of Tennyson's recurring images of the poet's prophetic voice,8 flows forth into the world with such a bracing force, flooding an otherwise desolate wasteland with \"eddying song.\" But very quickly Tennyson's artist figures suffer an \"Icarian fall\"9 from a semidivine to a human condition. As a result, prophecy now floats down from the heights upon a melodic stream to be received by such fallen or \"cursed\" maidens as Claribel, Mariana, and the Lady of Shalott \u2013 artist figures immured within a garden of the mind who try in their turn to reach an audience or a single auditor with their voices. As song flows out of the aesthetic garden, the important question Tennyson considers is how or even whether the bard's inspired flow will be received by listeners in the cities of man. Tennyson conceives of a variety of answers to that question in the course of his career from the perspective both of the artist and of the audience, but for the sake of brevity, I will abstract first the positive and then the negative force of his notion of sound, especially of reverberative sound \u2013 i.e., the echo.\n\nOne of the critical truisms about Tennyson is that he is the poet of the remote in time and space, a poet of the \"far, far away\" \u2013 to echo one of his favorite echoing phrases. \"It is the distance,\" he maintained to his friend James Knowles late in life, \"that charms me in the landscape, the picture and the past, and not the immediate to-day in which I move.\"10 If that recessional quality characterizes his visual sense, it informs his sense of sound as well. Sound like sight is most evocative when it is experienced at a \"far, far\" remove from the original source, and the appeal of echo over simple sound is that the former gives the impression of having traveled great distances, of having bounced off various surfaces on the way to the auditor and of having been rendered numinous in the process. Music, as it moves from the bugle in the lyric \"The splendour falls on castle walls\" (from _The Princess_ ), grows \"thinner\" and \"clearer\" the further it travels, the greater the number of wild echoes it achieves. That is, the artist's sound may dissipate at its source \u2013 it is ever \"dying, dying, dying.\" But the very repetition of the word, like the repetition of \"far\" in \"Far Far-Away\" or \"break\" in \"Break, break, break\"11 denies that death since it implies an endless life in an answering nature and in the ears of distant auditors:\n\nO love, they [the echoes] die in yon rich sky,  \nThey faint on hill or field or river:  \nOur echoes roll from soul to soul,  \nAnd grow for ever and for ever.\n\n(ll. 13\u201316 of \"The splendour falls on castle walls\")\n\nTo the extent that the echo is nature's correspondent instrument to the impulse of human speech and sound, theoretically unto infinity, it implies the emergence of sound's life out of sound's death \u2013 not merely life dying out but also life rolling from soul to soul forward to the starry track. Of the several other instances of a death-and-rebirth pattern one might educe to illustrate Tennyson's treatment of the answering echo, perhaps the most haunting occurs at the conclusion of the _Idylls of the King_. There, the dying wail of the three queens as they escort Arthur toward the distant great deep is answered by a sound from that deep:\n\nThen from the dawn it seemed there came, but faint  \nAs from beyond the limit of the world,  \nLike the last echo born of a great cry,  \nSounds, as if some fair city were one voice  \nAround a king returning from his wars.\n\n(\"The Passing of Arthur,\" ll. 457\u2013461)\n\nBut the Tennysonian echo is not always so expressive of life rolling to and from the limit of the world, especially in works where the poet-figure does not have much of an impact upon or is misunderstood by his \u2013 or rather \"her\" \u2013 audience (since, as Lionel Stevenson demonstrated in a Jungian analysis of the matter, Tennyson in his early poetry habitually rendered himself as an \" _anima_ '' figure in the guise of isolated maidens12). Perhaps the situation in \"The Lady of Shalott\" may illustrate the auditory gap as well as any of the early poems (\"Anacaona,\" \"Claribel,\" \"The Kraken,\" \"Oenone\" or \"The Hesperides\") that one might have chosen. In the 1832 version of the poem, a reaper, arguably representing the audience of the Lady's art, hears the song she sings in her tower:\n\nUnderneath the bearded barley,  \nThe reaper, reaping late and early,  \nHears her ever chanting cheerly,  \nLike an angel, singing clearly,  \nO'er the stream of Camelot.   \n(ll. 28\u201332)\n\nBy the time of Tennyson's 1842 revision, the Lady's \"clear\" song has been transformed into something more mysterious:\n\nOnly reapers, reaping early  \nIn among the bearded barley,  \nHear a song that echoes cheerly  \nFrom the river winding clearly,  \nDown to towered Camelot.  \n(ll. 28\u201332)\n\nWhile the single reaper of the first version hears the song directly, the several reapers of the second encounter it as a reverberation off the river, to which the epithet \"clear\" has now been shifted. It is tempting to read something thematic into this change partly for reasons of interpretive originality: to my knowledge no one has argued for its significance. To be honest, however, the change from straight sound to deflected echo in a single stanza may not by itself be very important, but it becomes so if we hear it as a concomitant and reinforcement of a like change in visual emphasis between the 1832 and 1842 versions of \"The Lady of Shalott.\"\n\nIn the 1832 version of the poem, the Lady\n\nlives with little joy or fear.  \nOver the water, running near,  \nThe sheepbell tinkles in her ear.  \nBefore her hangs a mirror clear,  \nReflecting towered Camelot.  \n(ll. 46\u201350)\n\nThe mirror into which the Lady gazes is primarily that, a literal mirror which is figuratively unremarkable. Since tapestry is woven from the reverse side, a mirror would have been necessary for the Lady to see the design being woven, and that technical craft function is the primary emphasis or is at any rate more obvious in the 1832 than in the equivalent lines in the 1842 version of the poem:\n\nAnd moving through a mirror clear  \nThat hangs before her all the year,  \nShadows of the world appear.  \nThere she sees the highway near  \nWinding down to Camelot.  \n(ll. 46\u201350)\n\nNow the \"mirror clear\" has moved to the first line of the stanza to become associated with \"Shadows of the world\" (l. 48) of which, after catching sight of Lancelot, the Lady becomes \"'half sick'\" (l. 71). Because of that change, both the ontological and aesthetic oppositions of the poem receive sharpened definition, so that the poem is now usually read as a parable concerning the problematics of mimesis in Tennyson's early art. Within that \"parabolic drift\" (Tennyson's term for his figurative methods), the fact that Lancelot's image flashes into the Lady's glass \"From the bank and from the river\" (l. 105) seems crucial. In the semiotic exchange of the poem, the reapers have to decipher a song that echoes off the river, a second order deflection; but the Lady in her reaction to the sight of Lancelot has to contend not only with his mirror image but also with a reflection of that same river's reflection of him, not only with a second but also with a third order reflection,13 i.e. with the _mise en ab\u00eeme_.\n\nIn the historical context of representation theory, it seems important to distinguish between the metaphorical implications of the \"Shadows of the world\" of which the Lady is \"half sick\" on the one hand and the mirror on the other as alternative figures of aesthetic imitation. Both the shadow and the mirror of the poem are traceable back to a Platonic ontological dualism. But while the shadow in the famous parable of the cave in _The Republic_ assumes the possibility of only a single duplication \u2013 one cannot imagine a shadow of an opaque shadow \u2013 that is not true of Plato's mirror. Because a mirror relies upon reflection, there can be a mirror image of a mirror image \u2013 indeed, there can theoretically be an infinite series of reflections of reflections of a single putative original. And that is precisely the inner cosmic play of frames implied by the optical situation of \"The Lady of Shalott\" (not to mention the infinity-of-mirrors conclusion to Orson Welles' _Lady from Shanghai_ ), a perceptual abyss in which the \"original\" image of Lancelot bounces endlessly and without grounding between river and glass, teasing the Lady (or at any rate some recent commentators upon her plight) out of thought as doth eternity.\n\nConsequently, \"The Lady of Shalott\" has of late achieved a paradigmatic force that extends well beyond the status of the poem as a part of Tennyson's early work. I have myself argued that the Lady's movement from mirror to window epitomizes the motion of other nineteenth-century epistemological rebels who seek, at whatever cost, a windowed release from Romantic self-absorption and solipsism,14 while Geoffrey Hartman has read her passion for direct, unmediated contact with the world, her unwillingness to rest content with ungrounded representation, as _the_ best poetic symbol of a Western \"desire for reality-mastery as aggressive and fatal as Freud's death instinct\":\n\n\"I am half-sick of shadows,\" says the Lady of Shalott, and turns from her mirror to the reality of advent. She did not know that by her avertedness, by staying within representation, she had postponed death. The most art can do, as a mirror of language, is to burn through, in its cold way, the desire for self-definition, fulness of grace, presence; simply to expose the desire to own one's own name [Hartman's context is Lacanian], to inhabit it numinously in the form of \"proper\" noun, words, or the signatory act each poem aspires to be.15\n\nThus, when the knights and burghers of Camelot gather around the barge which has floated her body down to Camelot, all they can know of her being is her name, \"The Lady of Shalott,\" inscribed upon the prow of her barge. The Lady thus becomes in death what she was, unbeknownst to herself, in life: a \"floating signifier,\" in Hartman's inspired pun (p. 107). That is, \"The Lady of Shalott\" serves for Hartman precisely what \"The Purloined Letter\" did for Lacan in his now famous seminar on Poe's story \u2013 as an allegory of the signifier floating through the abyss.\n\nTo be sure, such an abyss \u2013 like the _mise en ab\u00eeme_ itself \u2013 is hardly the invention of the present or even the Victorian age, whatever the current fashion of the concept. Possibly alluded to as early as Euripides, it served as a model for Neo-Platonic notions of Being from Plotinus to Macrobius. In the transition from the dualistic Platonic philosophy with its divisions of Being into Ideas and their Forms to a hierarchy with several gradations, the Neo-Platonists evidently preferred Plato's mirror figure to his shadow figure because it is possible to have mirror images of a mirror but not even a single shadow of a shadow; and Richard Rorty, arguing for a \"philosophy without mirrors,\" has recently shown in his influential _Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature_ the systematic centrality of the mirror metaphor in ontology from Plato to Kant.16 There is a running debate these days, chronicled in Herbert Grabes' _The Mutable Glass_ , concerning the extent to which the fashion for mirrors and mirror imagery from the late Middle Ages onward is attributable to the improvement and cheap mass production by the Venetians of glass mirrors and the extent to which that fashion demonstrates a new Hamletic consciousness, a post-Cartesian increase in reflexiveness of thought, and a deep shift in reciprocity of subject and object.17 Within the frame of that debate, if the 1832 version of \"The Lady of Shalott\" with its concentration upon the craft function of the mirror may be said to support the former technological explanation, the 1842 version with its profusion of mimetic reflectors supports the latter epistemological one. Indeed, as Christopher Ricks has shown, the parabolic use of the mirror in the poem is directly imitative of an earlier Neo-Platonic mirror scene, the one in Book III, Canto ii of _The Faerie Queene_ where Britomart in her tower first spies and falls in love with Artegall in a \"wondrous myrrhour.\"18\n\nNineteenth-century adaptations of the ontological and aesthetic mirror are, as I have said, generally traceable to a Platonic paradigm of the twofold remove of art from archetypal forms. Specifically, in the tenth book of _The Republic_ , Socrates explains the mimetic nature of art by an analogy: while the maker of an actual table or bed imitates the Ideas of those things, the artist has another way. \"What way?\" asks Glaucon. \"An easy enough way,\" Socrates replies,\n\nor rather, there are many ways in which the feat might be _quickly_ and _easily_ accomplished, none quicker than that of turning a mirror round and round \u2013 you would soon enough make the sun and the heavens, and the earth and yourself, and the other animals and plants, and all the other things of which we were just now speaking, in the mirror (italics added).19\n\nWhile Plato \u2013 or Socrates for him \u2013 evolves several negative consequences of this turning mirror as an instrument of cognitive deception, one can see its more positive potential for a later Aristotelian tradition of mimesis. Accepting the truth value of sense experience, that tradition would find Plato's whirling mirror quite congenial to the view that the world of objects could be seen accurately and \"easily\" \u2013 could be seen with the visual acuteness Matthew Arnold attributed to a Sophocles who saw life \"steadily\" and \"whole.\" Consider the Arnoldian echo in order to allude momentarily to the third of the major Victorian poets, because in what he does with Plato's whirling mirror Arnold illustrates even more pointedly than Tennyson the distance the West has traveled toward a cognitive nihilism. For in the despairing words of Arnold's Empedocles,\n\nThe out-spread world to span  \nA cord the Gods first slung,  \nAnd then the soul of man  \nThere, like a mirror, hung,\n\nAnd bade the winds through space impel the gusty toy.\n\nHither and thither spins  \nThe wind-borne, mirroring soul,  \nA thousand glimpses wins,  \nAnd never sees a whole;\n\nLooks once, and drives elsewhere, and leaves its last employ.\n\nThe Gods laugh in their sleeve  \nTo watch man doubt and fear,  \nWho knows not what to believe  \nSince he sees nothing clear,\n\nAnd dares stamp nothing false where he finds nothing sure.20\n\nVictorian poetry, then, presents us at key points with the opposition of sound and answering echo and of image and mirrored repetition, and Victorian paintings (say, those of William Holman Hunt) and photographs (especially those of the fascinating, relatively unknown Lady Clementine Hawarden)21 contain comparable iconographic mirrors that raise epistemological questions. When they do, we are, to return to the outer frame of my argument, well on our way to Gide's image _en ab\u00eeme_ \u2013 and beyond, to the infinite play of substitution and replication that, for a highly influential Derrida at any rate, constitutes the fundamental operation of any text. I am not of course asserting the identity of a Victorian and a post-structuralist view of representation: for recent theorists the _mise en ab\u00eeme_ describes the operation of the text as mirror or echo of a previous mirror or echo beyond recoverable origin, which is why the two conceptual metaphors are appropriate pendants for the idea of a textuality beyond which the readers (or reapers?) of the world cannot get. (The Greeks, to be sure, also combined the story of Echo and Narcissus into a single myth.22) Consequently, the _mise en ab\u00eeme_ can have no existence outside of the mirror and the echo. Since it does not partake of the property of objects, it cannot be grounded in them. Representation always appears in the text as the representation of representation, as the mirror of a mirror or the echo of an echo.\n\nIn contrast, the Victorian poet as implied pre-Saussurean theorist would have us believe that the echo has a firm origin in the sound of the bugle, that the images of the world are grounded (if somewhat shakily) in its objects. In \"Le Byron de Nos Jours\" (unlike _Last Year at Marienbad)_ a definable something _did_ happen ten years ago, and the ever so patient reader can unravel what it was; and even for the perplexed Lady of Shalott, a palpable Lancelot does undoubtedly exist beside the river and the bank. In terms of the poet's belief in linguistic referentiality, we are still well within what the post-structuralist mind would deconstruct as a naively confident Metaphysics of Presence. Still, while the structures of representation within Victorian poetry have not brought us to the infinite regress of contemporary theory and lost-in-the-funhouse fictional practice, they do predict, we retrospectively see, the modernist endgame of bottomless indeterminacy.23\n\n#  **Notes**\n\n1 Andr\u00e9 Gide, _Journal 1889\u20131939_ , \"Pl\u00e9iade\" (Paris, 1951), pp. 41\u201342. For a historical treatment of the _mise en ab\u00eeme_ in literary theory, see Lucien D\u00e4llenbach, _Le r\u00e9cit sp\u00e9culaire: essai sur la mise en ab\u00eeme_ (Paris, 1977).\n\n2 \"Ellipsis,\" in _Writing and Difference_ , trans. Alan Bass (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 296. The specific source for the Derridean _mise en ab\u00eeme_ would seem to be Edmund Husserl's Dresden gallery passage in _Ideas_. Husserl's sentences, which become the epigraph that introduces Derrida's _Speech and Phenomena_ , trans. David Allison (Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973), p. 1, read as follows: \"A name on being mentioned reminds us of the Dresden gallery and of our last visit there: we wander through the rooms, and stop in front of a painting by Tenier which represents a gallery of paintings. Let us further suppose that the paintings of the gallery would represent in their turn paintings, which, on their part, exhibited readable inscriptions and so forth. . . .\"\n\n3 Thomas De Quincey, _Collected Writings_ , ed. David Masson, 14 vols. (London, 1896\u201397), X, 344, 416.\n\n4 See F. H. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay_ (Oxford Univ. Press, 1893), p. 229: \"Contact with reality is through a limited aperture. For [we] cannot get at it directly except through . . . one small opening.\" W. David Shaw considers Tennyson's habit of opening different \"windows\" upon the same event throughout _Tennyson's Style_ (Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), and I examine the prevalence of windows and mirrors as metaphor in \"Victorian Frames: The Windows and Mirrors of Browning, Arnold, and Tennyson\" in _VP_ , 16 (1978), 70\u201387. Two other works to which the present essay is indebted in a general way are W. David Shaw, \"The Optical Metaphor: Victorian Poetics and the Theory of Knowledge,\" _VS_ , 23 (1980), 293\u2013324; and Michael Greenstein, \"The Window in Post-Romantic Aesthetics,\" Diss. York University, Canada, 1974.\n\n5 John Hollander, _The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After_ (Univ. California Press, 1981), p. 44.\n\n6 _Bishop Blougram's Apology_ , l. 389. Citations of Browning are from _The Works of Robert Browning_ , Centenary Edition, ed. F. G. Kenyon (London, 1912).\n\n7 _Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience_ (Harvard Univ. Press, 1974). I would like to thank Mary Ann Caws for letting me profit from the manuscript of _Reading Frames in Modern Fiction_ , her phenomenological study of framing structures in the novel from Austen to Woolf (Princeton Univ. Press, 1985).\n\n8 See Catherine Stevenson, \"Tennyson's Dying Swans: Mythology and the Definition of the Poet's Role,\" _SEL_ , 20 (1980), 621\u201335; citations of Tennyson's poetry are from _The Poems of Tennyson_ , ed. Christopher Ricks (London, 1969).\n\n9 The phrase, as well as the generalized theory, is A. Dwight Culler's in _The Poetry of Tennyson_ (Yale Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 27\u20138.\n\n10 James Knowles, \"Aspects of Tennyson, II: (A Personal Reminiscence),\" _The Nineteenth Century_ , 33(1893), 170.\n\n11 On Tennysonian repetition, see \"Tennyson, Tennyson, Tennyson,\" Chapter 1 of Culler's _Poetry of Tennyson_.\n\n12 Lionel Stevenson, \"The 'High-Born Maiden' Symbol in Tennyson,\" _PMLA_ , 63 (1948), 234\u201343.\n\n13 David Martin was the first to emphasize this twofold detachment in \"Romantic Perspectivism in Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shalott',\" _VP_ , 11 (1973), 255\u201366.\n\n14 Joseph, pp. 85\u20136. \"Victorian Frames: The Windows and Mirrors of Browning, Arnold and Tennyson, VP (1978). See also Jennifer Gribble, _The Lady of Shalott in the Victorian Novel_ (London, 1983).\n\n15 Geoffrey Hartman, \"Psychoanalysis: The French Connection,\" in _Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text_ , ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), p. 8.\n\n16 Princeton Univ. Press, 1979.\n\n17 _The Mutable Glass: Mirror Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and the English Renaissance_ , trans. Gordon Collier (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), p. 118. Grabes argues for the technological explanation, while Alastair Fowler in his review of Grabes' study _(TLS_ , August 19, 1983, p. 872) criticizes him for that emphasis, seeing instead \"a most profound alteration in sensibility\" and a new, more reflective mode of consciousness.\n\n18 Ricks, p. 357. The Platonic context of Britomart's mirror is spelled out succinctly in the notes to _The Faerie Queene_ III. ii. 22, 5\u20136 in A. C. Hamilton's recent edition (New York, 1977), p. 320: \"In Plato, _Phaedrus_ 255 d, the lover is said to be a mirror in which he beholds himself; cf. the fountain of Narcissus in the _Romance of the Rose_ [ll.] 1571\u2013602. Britomart's inward-looking gaze projects an image of beauty which arouses love for Artegall; hence the vision of him follows. It leads to self-division; hence she compares herself to Narcissus at 44.6\u20139.\"\n\n19 Trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York, 1932), 596.\n\n20 _Empedocles on Etna_ I. ii. 77\u201391, in _Matthew Arnold: Poetical Works_ , ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry (Oxford Univ. Press, 1950).\n\n21 I have discussed the symbolic opposition of window and mirror in Hunt's _The Awakening Conscience_ as an example of the figural strategies that the Victorian painters employed (Joseph, op.cit., pp. 71\u20132), and Craig Owen considers the same opposition in the work of Lady Hawarden (in \"Photography _en abyme,\" October_ , 5 [1978], 73\u201388).\n\n22 For a most interesting treatment of the convergence of the two figures, see John Barth's experimental story about life \"on the autognostic verge\" \u2013 \"Echo\" in _Lost in the Funhouse_ (Garden City, 1968), pp. 98\u2013103. At the end of the story, he writes, \"Narcissus would appear to be opposite from Echo: he perishes by denying all except himself; she persists by effacing herself absolutely. Yet they come to the same: it was never himself Narcissus craved, but his reflection, the Echo of his fancy; his death must be partial as his self-knowledge, the voice persists, persists\" (pp. 102\u20133).\n\n23 I wish to thank Michael Greenstein and especially Stuart Davis for their generous help at different stages in the composition of this essay.\n\nJoseph, Gerhard. 1985. \"The Echo and the Mirror _en ab\u00eeme_ in Victorian Poetry.\" In _Victorian Poetry_ , 23, iv (Winter), pp. 403\u201312. Reproduced with permission of Gerhard Joseph.\n\n# 2\n\n# The Mirror's Secret\n\n#  _Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Double Work of Art_\n\nJ Hillis Miller\n\nAnd still she sits, young while the earth is old,  \nAnd, subtly of her self contemplative,  \nDraws men to watch the bright web she can weave,  \nTill heart and body and life are in its hold.1\n\nIf Rossetti's Lilith looks only, speculatively, at her own image in the mirror, she also looks self-consciously aware of the looks of all those men whom she draws by her indifference into her fatal net. Rossetti's source here is that text from Goethe which he translated:\n\nHold thou thy heart against her shining hair,  \nIf, by thy fate, she spread it once for thee;  \nFor, when she nets a young man in that snare,  \nSo twines she him he never may be free.  \n(\"Lilith \u2013 from G\u00f6the,\" _W_ , p. 541)\n\nLilith's mirroring of herself and our fatal mirroring of ourselves in the painting are doubled by the mirror imaged on the canvas. Moreover, the painting mirrors a Victorian Pre-Raphaelite boudoir, and also Rossetti's feelings about Fanny Cornforth. The painting, in addition, mirrors the poem, \"Body's Beauty,\" Sonnet 78 of _The House of Life_ , of which it is an \"illustration.\" Or is it the other way around, the poem a \"caption\" for the painting? Ultimately, both poem and painting are mirrors of, mirrored by, other works, echoing before and after, works in painting and in poetry by Rossetti himself, and multitudinous works in a complex tradition \u2013 graphic, literary, and philosophical \u2013 going back to the Bible and to the Greeks, in one direction, and forward, to our day, for example to John Hollander's admirable _The Head of the Bed_. In this tangled network of relations, \"Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show.\"2\n\nThese mirrorings are all, however, in one way or another odd, ambiguous, subversive, irrational. The mirrored image undoes what seeks its image there. Each mirrored image is somehow different from the exact reflection which tells the truth unequivocally, as when I look at my face in the mirror in the morning. There I am, as I am. \"I am that I am.\" The mirror tells me so. I suffice to myself, like God. Or do I?\n\nFar from producing an emblem of such fullness and completion, image matching image, Lilith's subtle contemplation of herself weaves a net, and behind the net there is a gulf. Into this abyss the men she fascinates will fall. This gulf is that \"orchard pit\" which was Rossetti's constant dream, that ugly ditch beside the apple tree with the Lilith or Siren figure in the crotch of its branches, offering a fatal apple and a fatal kiss. Why is it that when we men contemplate not ourselves in the mirror but our incongruous other self, a desirable woman contemplating herself, our own integrity is mutilated, destroyed?\n\nMen tell me that sleep has many dreams; but all my life I have dreamt one dream alone.  \nI see a glen whose sides slope upward from the deep bed of a dried-up stream, and either slope is covered with wild apple-trees. In the largest tree, within the fork whence the limbs divide, a fair, golden-haired woman stands and sings, with one white arm stretched along a branch of the tree, and with the other holding forth a bright red apple, as if to some one coming down the slope. Below her feet the trees grow more and more tangled, and stretch from both sides across the deep pit below: and the pit is full of the bodies of men.  \nThey lie in heaps beneath the screen of boughs, with her apples bitten in their hands; and some are no more than ancient bones now, and some seem dead but yesterday. She stands over them in the glen, and sings for ever, and offers her apple still. (\"The Orchard Pit,\" _W_ , pp. 607\u20138)\n\nIf _Lady Lilith_ mirrors Fanny Cornforth and a certain kind of Victorian decor (its furniture, costume, and psychosocial structures, its domestic economy), this mimetism is peculiar, since this Victorian boudoir, with its mirror, double candlestick, cosmetic bottle, chest, and settee, seems to be out of doors. What is mirrored in the mirror on the wall is not an interior but an exterior woodland scene, a scene of branches going from left to right matching in reverse Lilith's tresses, which spread from right to left. The branches duplicate themselves in smaller and smaller repetitions out to invisibility in a _mise en ab\u00eeme_. The scene in the mirror is in fact the orchard pit. Or is the mirror a window? No, it cannot be so, since the roses and the candles are reflected there. How odd, however, that the Lady Lilith should be combing her hair outdoors, surrounded by all those bedroom appurtenances and by roses and poppies which might be either inside or out. In Eden there was no inside or out, but this scene is the diabolical mirror image of Eden, as Lilith is of Eve.\n\nThe confusion of interior and exterior, mirror and window, is characteristic of all that art Walter Pater called \"aesthetic.\" In such art, nature has been made over into the images of art, and those images made over once more, at a double remove. As Pater puts it in a splendid formulation:\n\nGreek poetry, medieval or modern poetry, projects, above the realities of its time, a world in which the forms of things are transfigured. Of that transfigured world this new poetry takes possession, and sublimates beyond it another still fainter and more spectral, which is literally an artificial or \"earthly paradise.\" It is a finer ideal, extracted from what in relation to any actual world is already an ideal. Like some strange second flowering after date, it renews on a more delicate type the poetry of a past age, but must not be confounded with it. The secret of the enjoyment of it is that inversion of home-sickness known to some, that incurable thirst for the sense of escape, which no actual form of life satisfies, no poetry even, if it be merely simple and spontaneous.3\n\nIn \"aesthetic\" poetry and painting even the most meticulously naturalistic scene, in what Pater calls, apropos of Rossetti, an \"insanity of realism\" (p. 209), is emblematic. Such a scene is absorbed into a spiritualized human interior, inside and outside at once, since the distinction, uneasily, no longer exists, just as the distinction between the spiritual and material no longer exists. To go outside is not to be outside but to remain claustrophobically enclosed, and the interior is no safe enclosure. It is exposed to the dangers of a fatal encounter. The orchard pit is within and without at once, just as the window in Sir John Everett Millais' _Mariana_ (an illustration of Tennyson's \"Mariana\") is also a mirror of her state, and just as the same ambiguity functions in the mirror of Tennyson's \"The Lady of Shalott,\" in this case illustrated by Holman Hunt. Pater, with his characteristic genius as a critic, has once more provided a definitive formulation of this aspect of Rossetti's work:\n\nWith him indeed, as in some revival of the old mythopoeic age, common things \u2013 dawn, noon, night \u2013 are full of human or personal expression, full of sentiment. The lovely little sceneries scattered up and down his poems, glimpses of a landscape, not indeed of broad open-air effects, but rather that of a painter concentrated upon the picturesque effect of one or two selected objects at a time \u2013 the \"hollow brimmed with mist,\" or the \"ruined weir,\" as he sees it from one of the windows, or reflected in one of the mirrors of his \"house of life\" (the vignettes for instance seen by Rose Mary in the magic beryl) attest, by their very freshness and simplicity, to a pictorial or descriptive power in dealing with the inanimate world, which is certainly also one half of the charm, in that other, more remote and mystic, use of it. For with Rossetti this sense of lifeless nature, after all, is translated to a higher service, in which it does but incorporate itself with some phase of strong emotion. Everyone understands how this may happen at critical moments of life; what a weirdly expressive soul may have crept, even in full noonday, into \"the white-flower'd elder-thicket,\" when Godiva saw it \"gleam through the Gothic archways in the wall,\" at the end of her terrible ride [Tennyson, \"Godiva\"]. To Rossetti it is so always, because to him life is a crisis at every moment (pp. 532\u20133).\n\nWhat that \"crisis\" is, cutting off before from after, and dividing the moment too within itself, and what feeling every moment as a crisis has to do with this particular version of the pathetic fallacy, remains to be identified. Window or mirror, as Pater has seen, are means to the same vision. What is seen there is natural, human, and spiritual, all at once. The framed image is always, as Pater's brilliantly chosen quotations from Rossetti indicate, some version of the orchard pit, the \"hollow brimmed with mist,\" the \"ruined weir,\" or that maelstrom into which the lovers are swept in the poetic fragment of \"The Orchard-Pit\":\n\nMy love I call her, and she loves me well:  \nBut I love her as in the maelstrom's cup  \nThe whirled stone loves the leaf inseparable  \nThat clings to it round all the circling swell,  \nAnd that the same last eddy swallows up.  \n( _W_ , p. 240)\n\nIn \"Lady Lilith\" the mirroring of a boudoir which turns out to be an abyssal wood of storm-tossed branches also mirrors the reflection of Lilith in her hand-held mirror. Though the back of that mirror is turned toward the spectator, the image in the mirror on the wall tells him what chasm is no doubt pictured there behind the screen of reflected hair. This chasm is imaged over and over throughout Rossetti's work by way of displaced figures in the \"outside\" framed in a window or in a mirror.\n\nThe other mirrorings are equally alogical. The relation between Rossetti's painting and his poetry is asymmetrical, skewed. This is true not in the sense that one overtly contradicts the other, but in the sense that each exceeds the other, however deliberately they may be matched, as in the case of _Lady Lilith_ and \"Body's Beauty.\" Each says more or less than the other, and says it differently, in ways which have only in part to do with the differences of medium. Either may be taken as the \"original\" of which the other is the \"illustration\" or the explanatory poetic \"superscription,\" writing on top of another graphic form. This relation does not depend, of course, on the chronology of Rossetti's actual creation of the two works in question. In each case, however, the secondary version in the other medium is always in one way or another a travesty, a misinterpretation, a distorted image in the mirror of the other art.\n\nThe relation to \"the tradition\" of the double, self-subversive work of art is, once more, a false mirroring. Whether one takes the more immediate context of Rossetti's other work or, as does John Dixon Hunt in _The Pre-Raphaelite Imagination_ , the wider context of Pre-Raphaelite work generally, or Rossetti's relation to his immediate predecessors, Shelley and Tennyson, or the relation of his work to the whole Western tradition, this relation of work to context, as the passage from Pater quoted above suggests, is not a straightforward copying, continuation, or reflection. It is a strange second flowering after date, a sublimation or rarefaction which is also a swerving, a distortion.\n\nNonetheless, this subversive mirroring is already part of the tradition, traditional even in Plato or Milton, however much that deconstructive mirroring may have been apparently suppressed. \"Aesthetic\" poetry was already a part, though sometimes a secret part, of \"ancient\" and \"modern\" poetry. Pater's chronology of the development of Western poetry in fact describes a synchronic tension within it among patterns which may not be reconciled in any synthesis, dialectic, or historical movement. Rossetti's false mirroring of the tradition does but tell a secret which is already there, everywhere within that \"tradition,\" but often hidden.\n\nWhat is the secret that the distorting mirror always tells and keeps? Loss. All Rossetti's work is haunted by an experience of devastating loss. That loss has always already occurred or is about to occur or is occurring, in memory or in anticipation within the divided moment. It occurs proleptically, antileptically, metaleptically, the feared future standing for the already irrevocable past, and vice versa, in a constant far-fetching reversal of late and early. The longed-for future may not be. The poet of \"The Stream's Secret\" knows or is told by the mirroring stream that it may not be. The past was disastrous, even if it held moments of joy. Those moments have passed, their joy turned into the desolation of their loss. \"What whisper'st thou?\" the poet asks that moving and murmuring, mirroring stream:\n\nNay, why  \nName the dead hours? I mind them well:  \nTheir ghosts in many darkened doorways dwell  \nWith desolate eyes to know them by.  \n(\"The Stream's Secret,\" _W_ , p. 114)\n\nThe loss in question is experienced perpetually in that everlasting moment of crisis (in the etymological sense of division) in which the mind dwells. Of that division the mind makes an emblem in those natural scenes glimpsed through a window or reflected in a mirror. These scenes in turn become human figures which then become those personified abstractions, Life, Death, Time, and so on, which populate, as Pater observed, Rossetti's work. These personifications constitute in their humanized particularity the \"insanity of realism\" in Rossetti. \"And this delight in concrete definition,\" says Pater, \"is allied with another of his conformities to Dante, the really imaginative vividness, namely, of his personifications \u2013 his hold upon them, or rather their hold upon him, with the force of a Frankenstein, when once they have taken life from him. Not Death only and Sleep, for instance, and the winged spirit of Love, but certain particular aspects of them, a whole 'populace' of special hours and places, 'the hour' even 'which might have been, yet might not be,' are living creatures, with hands and eyes and articulate voices\" (Pater, \"Dante Gabriel Rossetti,\" p. 531).\n\nThese personifications result from a process miming the progressive sublimation of aesthetic poetry. They are a further refinement of what is already a transfigured or humanized nature. Their meaning is always some aspect of that absolute loss which is exacerbated, always, by having almost been its opposite, like a swimmer who almost makes the shore and then is swept away:\n\nLook in my face; my name is Might-have-been;  \nI am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell;  \nUnto thine ear I hold the dead-sea shell  \nCast up thy Life's foam-fretted feet between;  \nUnto thine eyes the glass where that is seen  \nWhich had Life's form and Love's, but by my spell  \nIs now a shaken shadow intolerable,  \nOf ultimate things unuttered the frail screen.  \n(\"A Superscription,\" _W_ , p. 107)\n\nThe figure in the glass, \"Might-have-been,\" is one's own face, just as Pater's metonymic \"mistake\" in naming the monster with the name of its creator catches accurately the relation between Doctor Frankenstein and his creature, the made making and unmaking the maker. Rossetti's personifications keep their hold upon him because they are figures for himself. All those persons, personifications, and scenes \u2013 the orchard pit, the ruined weir, the stormy branches \u2013 are one's own face in the mirror, caught in the eternal moment of crisis as the confrontation of a perpetual loss.\n\nLoss of what? Loss as such, total and irrevocable. Absence. To name this loss one's own death or (fear of) castration, or the confrontation with the woman who has (or who does not have) the phallus (Lilith as snake), or the death of the beloved, or that betrayal by the beloved which is always the story of love for Rossetti, is only to conjure one more shadow in the glass, one more frail screen, like all the other images in Rossetti, for \"ultimate things unuttered,\" and, in any literal way, unutterable. It is as if I looked in the mirror and saw nothing there, or were to see an image which is not myself but a figure of my absence or of my incompletion.\n\nPrecisely this happens in a little poem, \"The Mirror.\" Here the poet's failure to find a reciprocating feeling in the lady he loves is imaged as the unsettling experience of seeing what he thinks is his own image in a distant mirror and then finding it is not himself, so that he is for the moment imageless:\n\nShe knew it not: \u2013 most perfect pain  \nTo learn: this too she knew not. Strife  \nFor me, calm hers, as from the first.  \n'Twas but another bubble burst  \nUpon the curdling draught of life, \u2013  \nMy silent patience mine again.  \nAs who, of forms that crowd unknown  \nWithin a distant mirror's shade,  \nDeems such an one himself, and makes  \nSome sign; but when the image shakes  \nNo whit, he finds his thought betray'd,  \nAnd must seek elsewhere for his own.  \n(\"The Mirror,\" _W_ , p. 194)\n\n\"For his own\": the phrase has a straightforward enough grammatical ellipsis and yet, dangling uncompleted in the open as it does at the end of the poem, possessive adjective without a noun, it shimmers with alternative possibilities. He must seek elsewhere for his own image, and the missing noun mimes the absence of what the speaker seeks. As the logic of the figurative relation between first and second stanzas affirms, however, his missing image is a trope for the female counterpart who would complete him. Her absence or indifference, her failure to match feeling with his feeling, is in turn a figure for something missing in himself. It is as if for Rossetti \"the mirror stage\" were not the discovery of one's self (the _Ideal-Ich_ ) in the mirror but the discovery of a vacancy there, an empty glass.\n\nThe structure of \"The Mirror\" is \"the same\" as that in \"Body's Beauty.\" In fact, all Rossetti's work consists of two intersubjective patterns, a desired one \"which might have been, yet might not be,\" and its asymmetrical mirror image, which always and irrevocably exists. This double intersubjective structure is, like all such models, with difficulty distinguished, if it may be distinguished at all, from a solipsistic relation of the self to itself. The Other, however totally other, is still experienced as part of myself or as something I wish were part of myself. In \"Willowwood,\" the four-sonnet sequence within _The House of Life_ , Love grants the Narcissus-like poet the privilege of kissing his beloved's lips. These rise to meet his lips at the surface of a \"wood-side well\": \"her own lips rising there / Bubbled with brimming kisses at my mouth\" ( _W_ , p. 91). It is a phantom kiss, though, and of course he kisses his own imaged lips.\n\nThe desired side of this mismatched pair of patterns is expressed in \"The Stream's Secret.\" It is a wish for future joy, the Might-still-be which stands as a future anterior for Might-have-been. This Might-still-be remains always Not-quite-yet. The mirror, which has been vacant of any images but hollow shadows of unfulfilled desire, will (or will never) become suddenly full, the reflection of a double, completed image. The lovers, in this impossible imaginary encounter, will view their joint image in the stream's mirror and then, no longer needing the mediation of any mirror, will look only in one another's eyes:\n\nSo, in that hour of sighs  \nAssuaged, shall we beside this stone  \nYield thanks for grace; while in thy mirror shown  \nThe twofold image softly lies,  \nUntil we kiss, and each in other's eyes  \nIs imaged all alone.\n\nStill silent? Can no art  \nOf Love's then move thy pity?  \n(\"The Stream's Secret,\" _W_ , p. 117)\n\nThe stream is still silent and does not tell Love's secret, since there is no secret to tell. The mirror's secret is that there is no secret. \"Love's Hour,\" the hour when \"she and I shall meet . . . stands . . . not by the door\" (p. 117), however much the poet strains to believe that it does. The ultimate things unuttered are here and now, on the surface of the stream's mirror, not at the bottom of some abysmal depth. The stream will always remain vacant of any twofold image. Instead there is always, as the present without presence of crisis, the contrary image there. This image is the incongruous double of the desired one. It is the pattern, in fact, of \"Willowwood,\" or, altered, of \"Body's Beauty,\" or, in a different form, of \"The Mirror,\" or, in a different form again, of \"The Portrait,\" or, different still, of \"Love's Nocturn.\" In this antithetical system, I look in the mirror and see not my own image but that of my female counterpart who looks not at me but at herself, subtly of herself contemplative, or, as in \"The Portrait,\" I see her image still remaining after her death. This death is experienced, uncannily, as if my own image should remain in the mirror when I was no longer standing before it:\n\nThis is her picture as she was:  \nIt seems a thing to wonder on,  \nAs though mine image in the glass  \nShould tarry when myself am gone.  \n(\"The Portrait,\" _W_ , p. 169)\n\nIn \"Love's Nocturn,\" the counterstructure takes the form of the poet's imagining that he meets his own image \"face to face,\" as he is \"groping in the windy stair\" leading down to the place where all dreams are.4 That image he would send to his lady's sleep, but he fears another image already usurps his place. His image must return then to the dream-fosse, having enjoyed one kiss not of the lady's lips but of their reflection in her mirror:\n\nLike a vapour wan and mute,  \nLike a flame, so let it pass;  \nOne low sigh across her lute,  \nOne dull breath against her glass;  \nAnd to my sad soul, alas!  \nOne salute  \nCold as when Death's foot shall pass.  \n(\"Love's Nocturn,\" _W_ , p. 72)\n\nI have emphasized the differences among all these versions of the counter-pattern not only to confirm what I said earlier about the relation of incongruity between any work and the context it \"mirrors,\" even the immediate context of other work by the same maker, but also to suggest that this counter-pattern always manifests itself differently. More precisely, each of its exemplars must be aberrant and none must be governed by an archetype. This pattern denies the existence of any archetype or model, the exact repetition of which might turn loss into completion. Ultimately, this structure may never be fixed in a definitive version, any more than Rossetti's personified beings, Love, Death, Sleep, and so on, may be systematized into a coherent counter-theology. Against this perpetually wandering structure is always set the primary structure of lover and beloved meeting face to face in a perfect match.\n\n\"Structure\" here is a misleading term, not only because of its currently fashionable resonances, and not only because it does not cover all that is in question here, but because, like any possible term, it begs the questions it should keep open. It reinstates the metaphysical or \"logocentric\" assumptions that this \"double triangle\" dismantles. This \"structure,\" \"system,\" or \"figure,\" this \"emblem,\" \"hieroglyph,\" \"polygram,\" or \"multigraph,\" is a complexity that cannot be unified. It remains incoherent or heterogeneous, always doubled and redoubled in repetitions that subvert rather than reinforce. Its heterogeneity lies not only in its resistance to conceptual unification or logical interpretation, but in its combining in an uneasy m\u00e9lange: concept (\"speculation\"); figures of speech (the mirror image as image for image); figures, in the sense of persons in their relations (those reflected in the mirror); graphic or representational elements (the mirror itself, the Pre-Raphaelite woman, her landscape); and narrative material (the story of disastrous love Rossetti always tells). How can one name this except reductively, or in a figure that refigures the problem?\n\nPerhaps Rossetti's own final figure for a sonnet, combining as it does graphic and verbal elements, might do best. Having called the sonnet a \"moment's monument,\" carved \"in ivory or in ebony,\" with \"flowering crest impearled and orient,\" like some ornate coat of arms, picture and words combined, he defines the sonnet, in the sestet of his sonnet about the sonnet, as a coin. The obverse and converse of this coin combine a double, simultaneous orientation toward the experiences of the self or \"soul\" and toward that unnameable power, or absence of power, \"Life,\" \"Love,\" \"Death,\" that governs the Soul. It is the coin itself, the double work of art \u2013 not the soul which one side of it reveals \u2013 which is, in all senses of the idiom, \"due to\" the Power. If the coin's face \"reveals / The Soul,\" the \"Power\" is that unutterable thing of which the coin's converse is the revelation. At the same time, the converse acts as a frail screen protecting the Soul from that revelation. Or perhaps one might better say that it is the dumb sliver of metal between which keeps obverse and converse, Soul and Power, apart, both for good and for ill:\n\nA Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals  \nThe Soul, \u2013 its converse, to what Power 'tis due: \u2013  \nWhether for tribute to the august appeals  \nOf Life, or dower in Love's high retinue,  \nIt serve; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath,  \nIn Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death.  \n(\"Introductory Sonnet,\" _W_ , p. 74)\n\nA final, concentrated \"example\" of this double-faced coin is \"Memorial Thresholds.\" This poem substitutes doorway for window or mirror and proposes two possibilities: that the threshold remain permanently vacant, or that it be filled once more, in the memorial reduplication of a d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu, with the form of the beloved. Here, she is imagined as having once actually stood in the same doorway somewhere, of which the new threshold is a repetition:\n\nCity, of thine a single simple door,  \nBy some new Power reduplicate, must be  \nEven yet my life-porch in eternity,  \nEven with one presence filled, as once of yore:  \nOr mocking winds whirl round a chaff-strown floor  \nThee and thy years and these my words and me.  \n(\"Memorial Thresholds,\" _W_ , p. 101)\n\nWhy is it that the doorway, in Rossetti's numismatics of art, remains always empty? What is the meaning of the discovery that the mirror's secret is its vacancy? A placing of Rossetti's double-pattern of presence mirrored by absence in relation to the long tradition of such doublings may help to unriddle the secret of this secret. My discussion must be brief and incomplete because there would be no end to the labyrinthine wanderings of the critic who attempted the absurd task of a topographical mapping of all the \"ways and days\" intricately interwoven in this _topos_ of the memorial threshold, window, or glass.\n\nThe places within this place would include: the glasses of the Apostle Paul in First and Second Corinthians, with their echo of Genesis, a passage in 1 James (l.21\u201325); the paradigm of the mirror in Book 10 of _The Republic_ and the mirror in _The Sophist_ (239d); the speech of Aristophanes in _The Symposium;_ the Narcissus story in Ovid's _Metamorphoses;_ the great passage on \"Speculation\" in the interchange between Ulysses and Achilles in Shakespeare's _Troilus and Cressida;_ Eve's admiration of her own image in Book 4 of _Paradise Lost;_ passages in Rossetti's more immediate predecessors, such as Shelley's \" Alastor\" and \"Epipsychidion\"; the Fuseli of so many nightmarish doors, windows, and mirrors; Tennyson's \"Mariana\" and \"The Lady of Shalott.\" Finally, among Rossetti's contemporaries or successors, there would be: George Meredith, who recapitulates and reinterprets the interplay between Ovid and Milton, Narcissus and Adam, in _The Egoist;_ Baudelaire's Dandy who \" _doit vivre et dormir devant un miroir_ \"5 Whistler's _The Little White Girl_ and Swinburne's poem on this painting, \"Before the Mirror\"; Mallarm\u00e9's _Herodiade;_ a splendid passage at the beginning of Thomas Hardy's _Far From the Madding Crowd;_ Wilde's _The Picture of Dorian Gray;_ Yeats's \"Ribh Denounces Patrick\"; all those mirrors in Picasso; the eerily uncanny moment in Freud's \" _Das Unheimliche_ \" when he sees his own image in a mirror but does not recognize it as his own, and detests it (the reverse of the pattern in Rossetti's \"The Mirror,\" where the image is not his own); Benjamin's essay on the photograph and the loss of aura in Baudelaire;6 Beardsley's illustrations for Belinda's toilet in _The Rape of the Lock_ ; and lastly all those paradigmatic mirrors of our own day, in Jacques Lacan's \"The Mirror Stage,\" or in Luce Irigaray's _Speculum of the other woman_ , an investigation in part of the whole tradition of the mirror-structure from Plato to Freud as it bears on the question of the male interpretation of sexual difference.7\n\nThis seemingly diverse and miscellaneous set of references, discontinuous points in the sky of Western culture, are in fact rigorously organized into a repeated constellation, or rather a double constellation, a Gestaltist duck-rabbit, like that big dipper which is either Charles's wain or the great bear, depending on how one looks at it. In all these texts, a complex asymmetrical structure is present in one form or another, in one degree or another of completion or explicit expression. Indeed, this structure is \"fundamental\" in all Western \"thought\" and \"literature,\" in the sense that it both affirms and endangers any fundament or ground. The structure involves a pair which becomes potentially subverted by a triangular relation among three persons or images, though it remains precariously balanced. This stable triangle is then incongruously mirrored in another triangle which parodies it and so undermines its stability.\n\nThis complex structure is the speculative as such, the reflective or the theoretical, the positing, hypothetically, as an image, of what may be seen and known, in a movement of thinking and seeing which is also a working or making. This movement goes out from itself in order to strive to return to itself in a confirmation of itself by way of an other which is or should be the perfect image of itself, not really other than itself. Even God, it seems, cannot know himself until he has gone outside himself and so can see himself outside himself.8 Speculation (from _speculum_ , mirror), theory ( _theoria_ , seeing, as in \"theatrical\"), art or poetry ( _poesis_ , making), and imitation ( _mimesis_ , miming, as in the great mirror/doorway scene in the Marx brothers' _Duck Soup_ ) \u2013 all come together in the crisscross of reflections in the mirror of this double paradigm.\n\nThe pattern of completion within this paradigm is the perfect mirroring of one male figure by another, by its own image in the glass. To the speculative, the theoretical, the poetic, and the mimetic can be added the self-generating, self-sustaining, and constantly self-transcending relation of the dialectical as another name for this system of reflections. The image of the mirrored and mirroring pair, in the tradition of this motif, oscillates between being the mirroring of male by male, in perfect match, Narcissus completing his own image in the pool, and being the mirroring of male by female, in another form of perfect matching, concave matching convex, as in the androgynous couple in Aristophanes' speech in _The Symposium_.\n\nMy focus here will be on a version of this paradigm which in one way or another adds a third figure, Echo in the Narcissus story, the fascinated male watching the woman who is subtly of herself contemplative in Rossetti's poem, or, as in a novel by a male author with a female protagonist, the intimate relation of indirect discourse in which a male narrator follows the thoughts and feelings of the heroine as she thinks about herself, as in the chapter of \"Clara's Meditations\" in Meredith's _The Egoist_.\n\nSuch a triangle remains stable, a sure support for ontological ground, only so long as it is all male or only so long as the female is defined as the adequate \"image\" of the male, a case of good rather than bad mimesis. An example of the all-male triangle is the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; the One, his filial image, and the relation between them; or God, his perfect image, the Son, and that creation fabricated by God in the image of the Son, so that the world as a whole and every part of it separately has the countenance of God and is signed with his genuine signature. An example of the second would be the definition of Eve in _Paradise Lost_ as created in the image of Adam, who is in turn created in the image of God: \"He for God only. She for God in him.\"\n\nThe female as third, however, or, more dangerously yet, as the doubled pair watched by a male spectator, the woman as two out of three, always introduces the possibility of a mismatching, a deflection of the closed circuit of reflections. The female, according to a sexist tradition going back to Plato and Aristotle, is an imperfect male, missing one member. The female introduces the deconstructing absence, the perpetual too little or too much that makes it impossible for the balance to come right and so keeps the story going, whether it is the story of an unassuaged desire which Rossetti always tells, or whether it is the story of thought which that love story tropologically represents. Theoretically, the woman opens up the triangle beyond any hope of closing it again or of filling the gap. This gap is the echoing cavern where false images are, that place of shades and shadows, for example, in Rossetti's \"Love's Nocturn\" which doubles the real bodies of men, \"as echoes of man's speech / Far in secret clefts are made\" ( _W_ , p. 71).\n\nIt should be clear now, as clear as one's own face in the glass, what this double triangle of mirrored images in Rossetti \"means.\" Or is it? The double triangle records the moment of confrontation with the loss of the _Logos_ \u2013 head sense or patron of meaning, caption. Its meaning is the absence of meaning, decapitation, decollation. God in speculation looks at himself in the mirror of the world, having engendered his material counterpart, the creation, by way of his mirror image, the Son. Man, too, along with the rest of the world, is \"in the image of God created,\" as Lilith says sardonically in Rossetti's \"Eden Bower\" _(W_ , p. 110). Man, then, in imitation of God, as God's mimic or mime, looks in the mirror and sees a sister-image there that does not fit him. Or, in the version of this that has been my interest here, the male writer or artist takes an interest in the situation of the female who looks in the mirror and discovers her lack, the missing man, as when Tennyson's Mariana says, finally, \"He will not come.\" This interest in what is more than or different from himself becomes, for such a male artist, fascination. It is fascination by a plus-value which in the end leads to the loss of all in spendthrift speculation.\n\nThe prolonged instant of specular fascination, drawing the male spectator into the abyss, is a version of what I call \"the linguistic moment.\" This is the moment when signs are cut off from any extralinguistic grounding and become fascinating in themselves, in their self-sustaining and self-annihilating interplay. The momentum of this moment may make it an eternal instant. It becomes the prolonged, persisting time of poise or lack in a present which is no present. It has no presence, since it engages the signs of something missing, that is, signs as such. The sign by definition is the presence of an absence. There is nothing beyond such a moment. It cannot be gone beyond in any dialectical or speculative _Aufhebung_. It remains balanced interminably in sterile repetition, in a horrible parody of the self-engendering and self-mirroring of God.\n\nThe specular encounter, when the male looks in the mirror and does not find his image there, does not even find the answering look of his female counterpart, but sees a woman seeing herself, is the linguistic moment. In this moment occurs the dismantling of that male speculative system which ought to lead to absolute knowledge of the self by itself. Possession becomes dispossession; appropriation, expropriation. The male is entangled in the web of Lady Lilith's hair, drawn by the Siren in the tree into the Orchard Pit, put into a perpetual state of Might-have-been or Might-yet-be. What he writes or paints thereafter is constructed over the abyss of his loss, as Rossetti rescued the manuscript of _The House of Life_ from his self-slain wife's coffin. He had put the manuscript just between her cheek and her hair. Such writing is without ground, like the words whirled by the mocking wind round a chaff-strewn floor in \"Memorial Thresholds,\" in a repetition of the failure of poetic language at the end of Shelley's \"Epipsychidion.\" As in the case of the imagined long love embrace in \"The Stream's Secret,\" the linguistic moment suspends things over the gulf of their absence, as a matter of Might-have-been and Might-yet-be but never Is-now. The Now is an empty mirror, a stream that tells no secrets.\n\nThe speculative moment of fullness and its subversive counterpart are necessary to one another. Each implies the other and is surreptitiously present in any of its expressions. Nevertheless, they may not be combined or reconciled in any way, dialectically or otherwise. Rather, they set up in their relation an ungovernable oscillation that inhibits thought from proceeding, short-circuiting it in a feedback phenomenon. One finds oneself in a double blind-alley of thinking and feeling in which one cannot decide which corridor to take, since each corridor leads, manifestly, to a blank wall. Aesthetic art, the art of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites generally, is, as Pater says, an art which satisfies that strange inversion of homesickness known to some, the desire to get as far away from home, from the \"real world,\" as possible. Home, for Rossetti, figures death, the Orchard Pit. Therefore anyone would wish to escape from it into a world of shadows or of signs referring to prior signs, for example, into that poetry about poetry or strange second flowering after date Pater describes. The world of shadows or of signs, however, lies in the pit. Lilith and her counterparts in Rossetti's work draw men, precisely, into a realm of shadows. Either way, you have had it. The Medusa face of Rossetti's woman, since she draws her power from the annihilating energy of signs, is equally fatal in face-to-face or in mirrored encounter.\n\nTo mention Medusa is to remember Freud's \"Medusa's Head\" and \"The Taboo of Virginity.\"9 According to Freud, the male fears equally that the female will or will not possess the phallus. For Lacan, the phallus is not the penis, but what the penis stands for, the head or source of meaning, and therefore the grounding of the interplay among signs. The double horror of the phallic female makes up an essential part of the mirror structure I am discussing here. It is present, for example, in Herodias' image of herself as a reptile, in Mallarm\u00e9's poem, and in the terror that her own hair inspires in her. It is present as one moment in John Hollander's splendid version of the Lilith story in Canto 7 of _The Head of the Bed_ :\n\nHe dared not move  \nToward her one leg, toward her covered places  \nLest he be lost at once, staring at where  \nLay, bared in the hardened moonlight, a stump  \nPearly and smooth, a tuft of forest grass.10\n\nThe emblem of the girl with the penis is present in Rossetti, too, in the Lilith of \"Eden Bower,\" who whispers to the snake: \"To thee I come when the rest is over; / A snake was I when thou wast my lover./I was the fairest snake in Eden\" ( _W_ , p. 109), or in the monumental figure of _Mnemosyne_. In Rossetti's painting, the shape and position of Mnemosyne's lamp mime an erect phallus. Rossetti's caption for the painting calls attention to the winged mobility of this oddly shaped lamp: \"Thou fill'st from the winged chalice of the soul / Thy lamp, O Memory, fire-winged to its goal\" ( _W_ , p. 229). The doubleness here is the doubleness of the two-faced coin: the soul, on the one hand, and the source of energy for the activity of memory, on the other hand. The relation between soul and memory is that coming and going, toward the past, toward the future, in a perpetual interchange moving toward a \"goal\" it never reaches, by way of a recollection of the permanent \"Might-have-been yet might not be.\"\n\nIn Rossetti's version of the game of \"Phallus, Phallus, who's got the Phallus?,\" the balance among a set of alternating possibilities never comes right. There is always one too many or one too few, not enough to go around, or one left over. This always leaves an Old Maid, or a Wild Card that governs the game but remains outside it, always somewhere else, neither King nor Queen, but Jack of Displacement. If the woman does not have the phallus, there is no ground. If she has it, she must have it as phantasm, as shadow, as that which is never where it is, hence there is no ground. If she has none, then I do, or do I? If she has one, then I must, mustn't I? If she does, then I don't. She's got it. If she doesn't, then I don't, or fear I may not. Either way, I've had it, or haven't had it, in a constant oscillation of possession and dispossession which can never be stilled into a stable, motionless system.\n\nThe Medusa solidifies me, turns me to stone, and so, as Freud says, I have no loss to fear. On the other hand, as he also says, my petrifaction is my horror at my confrontation of an absence, and so I fall into the Orchard Pit. On the one hand, art may be the result of the Medusa's effect, a fixed thing in language or in graphic form of what can then safely be confronted in mirror images or in the shadows of art. This submission to the Medusa is both good and bad, both true and false art, undecidably. On the other hand, art may itself be the Medusa's head that petrifies and makes permanent the flowing and the soft, so that _Mnemosyne_ stands there permanently for the beholder safely to see, as though she were reflected in a mirror. This in its turn is both good and bad, both submission to the Lilith figure and triumph over her.\n\nThe uncanniness of the double mirroring structure lies in this permanent undecidability. Does the art of poetry which presents this system induce a loss? Does it force me as spectator to submit to Lilith's snare? Or does it ward off this loss apotropaically? Does it serve as a frail screen keeping me from unutterable things? Does it save me by mirroring the Medusa or the Lilith figure, freezing her in the double mirror of an art which moves back and forth from painting to poetry in a play of reflections which does not stay still long enough to be caught? There is no way to tell. It is always both and neither. The mirror keeps its secret to the end.\n\nMedusa, it happens, is present as such in Rossetti's work, present as a double work of art in which picture and verse give form once more to all that double system, the two-faced coin of the mirror motif in Rossetti. This double work of art expresses once more the double attitude toward that double system I have tried to catch. With the final ambiguous admonition of \"Aspecta Medusa\" \u2013 against seeing, against theory, and in praise of mirror images \u2013 I shall end:\n\nAndromeda, by Perseus saved and wed,  \nHankered each day to see the Gorgon's head:  \nTill o'er a fount he held it, bade her lean,  \nAnd mirrored in the wave was safely seen  \nThat death she lived by.  \nLet not thine eyes know  \nAny forbidden thing itself, although  \nIt once should save as well as kill: but be  \nIts shadow upon life enough for thee.  \n( _W_ , p. 209)\n\n#  **Notes**\n\n1 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, \"Body's Beauty,\" ll. 5\u20138, Sonnet 78, _The House of Life_ in _Works_ , ed. William M. Rossetti (London, 1911), p. 100. Further citations will be from this edition, identified as _W_ , followed by the page number.\n\n2 William Butler Yeats, \"The Statues,\" l. 22, _Collected Poems_ (London, 1950), p. 323.\n\n3 Walter Pater, \"Aesthetic Poetry,\" in _Walter Pater: Three Major Texts_ , ed. William E. Buckler (New York, 1986), p. 520.\n\n4 See A. Dwight Culler's excellent discussion of Rossetti's motifs of the windy and winding stair: \"The Windy Stair: An Aspect of Rossetti's Poetic Symbolism, \" _Ventures Magazine_ 9, no. 2 (1969): 65\u201375.\n\n5 Charles Baudelaire, _Oeuvres Compl\u00e8tes_ (Paris, 1961), p. 1273.\n\n6 Walter Benjamin, _\"\u00dcber einige Motive bei Baudelaire,\"_ in _Illuminationem_ (Frankfurt am Main, 1969), pp. 201\u201345; trans. Harry Zohn, \"On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,\" in _Illuminations_ (New York, 1969), pp. 155\u2013200.\n\n7 See Luce Irigaray, _Speculum of the other woman_ , trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, 1985); and Jacques Lacan, \"The mirror stage as formative of the function of the 'I,' \" in _\u00c9crits_ , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), pp. 1\u20137.\n\n8 For the Hegelian recapitulation of this movement of speculation and the wordplay it involves, see Jean-Luc Nancy, _La remarque sp\u00e9culative_ (Paris, 1973).\n\n9 Sigmund Freud, \"Medusa's Head,\" trans. James Strachey, _International Journal of Psycho-Analysis_ 22 (1941): 69\u201370; and \"The Taboo of Virginity,\" trans. James Strachey, in _The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud_ (London, 1957), 9:191\u2013208.\n\n10 John Hollander, _The Head of the Bed_ (Boston, 1974), p. 11.\n\nMiller, J Hillis. 1991. \"The Mirror's Secret: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Double Work of Art.\" In _Victorian Poetry_ , 29, iv (Winter), pp. 333\u201349. Reproduced with permission of J Hillis Miller.\n\n# 3\n\n# Browning's Anxious Gaze\n\nAnn Wordsworth\n\nIn _On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History_ , Carlyle writes \"Poetic creation \u2013 what is this too but _seeing_ the thing sufficiently \u2013 the Word that will describe the thing follows of itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. The seeing eye \u2013 it is this that discloses the inner harmony of things. To the poet, as to every other, we say, first of all, _see_.\" Browning agrees, for he writes to Joseph Milsand about his volume _Men and Women_ : \"I am writing... lyrics with more music and painting in them than before so as to get people to hear and see.\"\n\nAnd yet, this act of seeing which Carlyle acclaimed so confidently, how uncannily it manifests itself if one rejects an idealist account of its nature in favour of a psychoanalytical one: how quickly then \"the inner harmony of things\" dissolves, once the matchings of a reflexive consciousness are no longer assumed. For what Carlyle's directive takes for granted are two notions which psychoanalytical theory rejects: the presence of a unified consciousness and the primacy of representation. And this in itself might make one want to reconsider the critical commonplaces that take too easily this matter of making people see.\n\nBrowning's work so hauntingly calls for a more subtle reading than falls to his lot as purveyor of experience \u2013 and yet could the dramatic monologues be discussed at all without assuming \"a literature of empiricism\"? Is it possible to account for their success and the pleasure they provide without the expected appeal to empathy and identification? More precisely, is it possible to draw in a psycho-aesthetics, Lacan's account of \"the pacifying Apollonian effect of painting,\" and coordinate it with Harold Bloom's theory of poetry, the relation of influence and the revisionary processes \u2013 that is, to use two accounts of creative effects that take scant heed of the categories of perception and experience?\n\nAccording to Bloom, the hardest thing in reading Browning is to distinguish the literal from the figurative and vice versa.1 So it is obvious that this matter of getting people to see turns on more than a heightened sense of vision and a tapping of experiential wisdom. How fortunate then that one of Lacan's most interesting seminars, _Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a_ ,2 should be on the scopic drive and that this should show how the gaze, the relation of desire, structures the visual field beyond the organizations of the conscious system.\n\nIt is the factitiousness of the analytic experience that Lacan's work centres on, its indifference to relations of truth and appearance. \"In our relation to things, insofar as this relation is constituted by the way of vision and ordered in figures of representation, something slips, passes, is transmitted from stage to stage and is always to some degree eluded in it \u2013 that is what we call the gaze\" (ibid., p. 73). This drift is not accounted for in theories of geometral vision; for they do no more than map space, and contain so little of the scopic itself that, as Diderot proves, this mapping can be reconstructed without loss for the touch of a blind man. Anamorphosis, the disarrangement of geometral space by a skewed perspective, shows more of what is missed by the reflexive consciousness; hence the power of the anamorphic object in Holbein's painting _The Ambassadors_ , where the viewer is shown his own eclipse as he turns back to see the enigmatic shape as a human skull. However, it is not the presence of symbols which organizes the field of the visible, but the gaze itself, which does not only look but also _shows_ \u2013 that is, forms as desire like the dream (itself a gratuitious showing), and situates the perceiver where he cannot any longer say \"After all, I am the consciousness of this....\"\n\nThere is another dislocation; unconscious desire is not humanized. Lacan makes this clear when he is questioned at the end of a seminar, \"When you relate psychoanalysis to Freud's desire and to the desire of the hysteric, might you not be accused of psychologism?\" Lacan's answer is that there is no original subjectivity at stake: desire is an object in the unconscious functioning, and not to be confused with events and relationships in biographical life (ibid., p. 13). So it is never a matter of relating creative processes to psychobiographical details \u2013 unless perhaps to show a blurring of the process by unmanageable biographical material, as, say, in _The Professor_ or _Oliver Twist_.\n\nSo, art and the spectator, art and artists, are bounded neither by the empirical relations of geometral space nor by shared subjectivities, but, according to Lacan, by the field of the scopic drive \u2013 a field orientated by the eye, whose appetite the painting feeds, and which is satisfied not by representations but by what Lacan calls the _trompe-l'oeil_ and the _dompte-regard_ , the lure and the taming of the gaze. The first, which in poetry might be the lure of _its_ representations (in Browning, \"Men and Women\"), satisfies and attracts, not because of its fidelity to experience, but because through the pretence of representation we glimpse our relation to the unconscious. When Plato protests against the deception of art, his contention is not that painting gives an illusory equivalence to the object. \"The painting does not compete with appearance, it competes with what Plato designates for us beyond appearance as being the Idea\" (ibid., p. 112). What solicits us in painting is shown quite boldly in the pleasure given by a technical _trompe-l'oeil_ \u2013 that moment of shifted focus when the illusion does not move with the eye, when it vanishes as what it feigned and emerges as something else not subject to appearance, in Lacanian terms, the \"objet petit a,\" the unrepresentable object of desire. And this relation between _trompe-l'oeil_ and _objet a_ could also be the unconscious structuration beyond the slide of literal and figurative in Browning's poetry, the troping movement which Bloom shifts across the formal divisions of grammar and rhetoric into the revisionary processes, the inter-play of rhetorical, psychological and imagistic moves which constitutes poetic energy. If the lure of art, its allure, is this glimpsing, then it accompanies the intra-poetic relations that Bloom describes by the uncanny dissolution of precursor-poet into _objet a_ : unconscious and formal processes merge under the auspices of a seeing eye, though not indeed as Carlyle intended.\n\nThe other move that Lacan describes, the _dompte-regard_ , the taming of the gaze, is the _showing_ that gratifies the appetite of the eye; vet this also has no reference to representation, for it is not an optical pleasure that is described. As it functions in relation to the unconscious, the eye is voracious, possessed by _invidia_ , the envy exemplified by St. Augustine as he gazed on his brother at his mother's breast: \"the envy that makes the subject pale before the image of a completeness closed upon itself, before the idea that the _petit a_ , the separated _a_ from which he is hanging, may be for another the possession that gives satisfaction\" (ibid., p. 116). The pacifying effect of art is that it permits the laying down of this gaze by its recognition of the eye's desire. As if the painter said \u2013 how different his tone from Carlyle's \u2013 \"You want to see. Well, take a look at this....\" And this effect, which Lacan calls \"the taming, civilizing and fascinating power of the function of the picture,\" is what has never been well described before, the Freudian sublimation. Might it not be found also in the assuagement of the voracious unrest which marks creative anxiety, in the poet's power to acknowledge desire and lack in the formulations of poet-and-precursor?\n\nThere is one more move in this seminar _Of the Gaze_ which can be drawn in. Critics insist on Browning's power to think himself into character and events \u2013 indeed this virtuosity is seen as his main achievement (\"one's normal processes of judgment are well nigh suspended and one emerges from the experiences of the poem dazzled by the illusion of having actually penetrated an alien being and a remote period of history,\" as J. W. Harper puts it). To settle the question of how the subject places himself within the scopic field, Lacan uses the analogy of mimicry. This is not simply a matter of adaptation \u2013 that is, behaviour as bound up with survival means \u2013 but a series of functions manifesting themselves outside any bio-logistic explanation. Travesty, camouflage, intimidation, all have structural and psychic implications. \"All reveal something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an _itself that_ is behind\" (ibid., p. 99): camouflage, the production of the background; travesty, the breaking up of being between itself and its semblance; intimidation, the extension of being by overvaluation. All the moves suggest that imitation is not a faithful representation, but rather the subject's involuntary insertion within an unconscious function. The parallel between mimicry and art is taken for granted by Roger Caillois, whose work Lacan quotes; it is used with more reserve by Lacan himself. But here too there are implications for Browning criticism. If mimicry (travesty, camouflage, intimidation) were embodied in the representations of the dramatic monologues, Browning would be screened from the full play of influence anxiety while still inscribing the poet-precursor relation within the poems. Character and events would no longer be transcriptions of experience but signs of a defensive energy \u2013 a creative play that slips, passes and eludes capture altogether as representation.\n\nThe difficulty by now, of course, is obvious enough: the factitiousness of Lacanian description could hardly be further from the robust pleasures of recognition that Browning's readers expect. Instead of the assurance of a heightened vision, there is only a glimpse of processes so obscure that consciousness has no sense of them. But there are advantages in such a reading. The narrative ingenuities that are so admired soon pall and yet critics are still ready to accept tacitly Oscar Wilde's verdict: \"Yes, Browning was great. And as what will he be remembered? As a poet? Ah, not as a poet. He will be remembered as a writer of fiction, as the most supreme writer of fiction, it may be, that we have ever had.\"3 No matter, it seems, that Wilde's assumptions about fiction (\"men and women that live\") go unquestioned, and that this in its turn presupposes a neglect of Browning's early poetry and a simplistic account of his poetic development (an overall movement from the confessional Shelleyan monodramas to the achieved objectivity of the later poems after a radical break in 1842). In place of this, it is surely possible to suggest the presence of creative processes which form around the obsessive preoccupations of the belated poet and which gain power from the transindividual linking of art and unconscious functioning. And this would mean questioning idealist accounts of poetic language (its unique power to match human consciousness),4 although substantiating its indifferent and inexhaustible energies. If the monologues are not as Wilde describes them, supreme fictions, but rather fictive substitutions, _trompe-l'oeil_ displacements of creative lack and desire, then reading them would involve a slide away from representations and a recognition of a mimicry whose relation is with the envy of the scopic drive, with the _objet a_ reformed as the precursor. This process centres formally in the play between literal and figurative; its material is not just the historic figure, the event but the use of these representations as displacements \u2013 richly dramatised effects behind whose _trompe l'oeil_ are glimpsed the figurations of desire and lack condensed as the relation to the precursor.\n\nHow is this shown? All the monologues at first reading seem like anecdotes, held together by solid figures, animated by a plot with ironic undertones and psychological nuances. _My Last Duchess_ : the subject seems so clearly and movingly apparent, disturbing only in the ambivalence the reader feels through his own admiration of the Duke's style. Surely then, it is just a matter of seeing how the dramatic irony works out, of making a choice such as is offered, say, in _The Browning Critics_ \u2013 a choice between Browning's witless Duke and Browning's shrewd Duke?5\n\nIf one no longer centres on the referents, the characters, but tries to reconstitute the other scene, then a very different movement emerges \u2013 a beautifully complex play on the obsessive themes that haunt the creative mind, chiefly _invidia_ , the fear, anger and avenges of influence anxiety. Ostensibly, the clash in the poem is between life and art \u2013 the warmth and carnal beauty of the woman and her subjection to the Duke's murderous fantasy. But behind this lies the relation of poet and precursor, doubly disguised insomuch as the precariousness of the belated poet is masked as a helpless subjection to critical misjudgements; in effect, J. S. Mill's critical misreading of _Pauline_ stands in as a cover for Browning's misprision of _Alastor_. At the narrative level the poem can seize a triumph over the tyrannies that master it. The Duke intends the listening envoy to judge his last Duchess as he does, but her erotic charm escapes his description and we see her not as the mute victim of his fantasies but in her own involuntary triumph over them. Nevertheless anxiety is in the poem too. The figurations are entirely unstable and shift from level to level as literal narrative, compensatory fantasy, representations of psychic processes. Though the Duchess is obliterated, her presence hauntingly survives, figuring indifferently as poetic victory over detractors, or as precursor, negated but still active. The poem plays on the aporia between literal and figurative, in a nonrelational movement whose enigmatic activity is beautifully idealised by who but Shelley in _The Defence of Poetry_ :\n\nThe mind in creation is a fading coal which some invisible influence like an inconstant wind awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colours of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or of its departure.\n\nThe Duke unintentionally allows a presence to revive; whereas all he meant to do was draw back a curtain, show a picture, lift a shroud. And amidst the poem Shelley's fading coal is ablaze again \u2013 indifferently, as the presence of the precursor, as the _objet a_ , whatever it is that tames and allures in the pulsations of literal and figurative, that is, in poetry.\n\nIn the monodramas, direct dramatizations of creative experience, this play is not made; but it is in the two poems _Porphyria's Lover_ and _Johannes Agricola in Meditation_ , first printed in Fox's _Monthly Repository_ , January 1836, six years before the supposed break. In _Porphyrias Lover_ , the play of substitutions moves from the narrative surface of character and macabre action to another secret act of violence. By murder the lover transforms his wayward mistress into his puppet-doll \u2013 so too would the poet reduce his precursor. But barbarous action is only one part of the poem, the surface logic of a jealous panic, casting its power over the defiant resistances of sexuality and of the master poem. Under this is the mimicking \u2013 a blackly comic play of the creative mind, shuffling and redealing the cards of our mortality time, change, age, infidelity, death. When played straight, as in Rossetti's _House of Life_ , \"a hundred sonnets on the theme of one lover's fight against time,\" the mind is given its victory in visionary claims like those of Tennyson in section XCV of _In Memoriam_. Time and change are abolished; the erotic moment sustains itself against all mortal erosions, suspends laws, defies death, creates its own space and time. But in _Porphyria's Lover_ , in the redealing of the substitutions, the erotic and creative triumph is got through murder not vision. Death is the trump card. Inconstancy and belatedness are overcome by dealing death to the mistress \u2013 and to the precursor \u2013 controlling them forever. Both the lover who knows time and change are destroying his erotic bliss, and the poet who knows his poems are too late, achieve their desire by an act of violence \u2013 a victory as false as it is vain. The poem turns back against vision and against all experiential wisdoms, against the acceptance of sexual loss, against the solaces of the compensatory imagination. It is derisive and uncanny and has great sustaining energy, for if the dramatic monologues are indeed fictions about influence anxiety and the struggle of the poet to gain priority, then any poem which plays and works this theme, however indirectly, wins the poet some power over his creative anxieties and readies him for his open triumph over them.\n\nThis is not the standard description of the monologues. As _Johannes Agricola_ was printed as a companion poem in the 1845 volume, it might be interesting to take a more orthodox look at this second of the pair. In such terms it is a typical dramatic monologue, and so in studying it we shall be dealing with what Robert Langbaum in _The Poetry of Experience_ calls \"empiricism in literature.\" \"We might even say,\" he writes, \"that the dramatic monologue takes as its material the literary equivalent of the scientific attitude \u2013 the equivalent being, when men and women are the subject of investigation, the historicizing and psychologizing of judgment.\" Hence Langbaum adds Johannes Agricola to Tennyson's St Simeon Stylites as another example of \"religious buccaneering,\" and shows that \"though Browning intends us to disapprove of Johannes' Antinomianism, he complicates the issue by showing the lofty passion that can proceed from the immoral doctrine.\" This brings the reader to the characteristic tension between sympathy and moral judgment which draws him into the dilemma of the monologue, loosening him from his customary moral certainties and offering him the new insights of an empiricist and relativist age. Thus we learn to read from within the material itself, no longer dependent on our own external standards of judgment. It is a logical development of romantic inwardness and is uniquely achieved as an effect of the form, \"that extra quantity,\" Langbaum explains, \"which makes the difference in artistic discourse between content and meaning.\"\n\nClearly the orthodox reading is very different from Bloom's, for whom \"every poem... begins as an encounter _between poems_ ,\" for whom \"acts, persons and places... must themselves be treated as though they were already poems, or part of poems. Contact, in a poem, means contact with another poem, even if that poem is called a deed, person, place or thing\".6 Whether it is with the precursor, or the unconscious, or with both, this encounter engenders poetry, and to recall it restores the sense of Browning's uncanny energy, which the standard description reduces to lessons in nineteenth-century humanism.\n\nIn _Johannes Agricola_ there is the same shift from literal to figurative as in _Porphyria's Lover_ , and the same shuffling of effects, though this time they belong to religious and not erotic experience. Again the subject is not the imaginative triumph unmediated, but rather the triumph deliberately askewed. Johannes is God's child:\n\nFor as I lie, smiled-on, full-fed  \nBy inexhaustible power to bless,  \nI gaze below on hell's fierce bed  \nAnd those its waves of flame oppress  \nSwarming in ghastly wretchedness:  \nWhose life on earth aspired to be  \nOne altar smoke, so pure \u2013 to win  \nIf not love like God's love for me,  \nAt least to keep his anger in.\n\nDo we really hesitate here between sympathy and judgment? Are we not rather drawn in by the recognition of desire to watch the speaker's impermissible bliss as he lies \"smiled-on, full-fed,\" our envy pacified by the poet's acknowledgement? And through the displacement do we not glimpse the poet's desire for such a creative gratification that no rival can threaten him?\n\nPriest, doctor, hermit, monk grown white  \nWith prayer, the broken hearted nun,  \nThe martyr, the wan acolyte,  \nThe incense-swinging child \u2013 undone  \nBefore God fashioned star or sun!\n\nAnd after all, isn't the poem really a brazen mimicry of Shelley's _Ode to the West Wind?_ 7\n\nThe mysterious moment that Bloom places between 1840 and 1842 marks, not a change from solipsism to humanistic concerns, but a displacement of the dramas of creative life on to fictive substitutes. The movement is therefore not from a pastiche of Romanticism to an authentic Victorian voice, but from a poetry too dangerously open to desire and death to a deflection, screening, mimicking of the same themes \u2013 a movement towards the polymorphic, towards processes which play and replay the original themes through parallels and equivalences at a narrative level. It is not an ironisation of the early poems, a progress from delusion to insight. Sordello, like Alastor and Hyperion, dies, not as a punishment but as a gratification of desire. The pattern is a dangerously repetitious one \u2013 both a vicious circle and a dead-end \u2013 and if poetry were only the release of our primordial narcissisms, it would perhaps always involve a surreptitious privileging of beautiful and enigmatic deaths. But great poems are not just narcissistic reveries, and Bloom's theory of revisionism is a powerful attempt at defining a creative process which is as necessary and constitutive to the writing of poetry as the Freudian dream-work is to the encounter with the unconscious. Hence the triumph of _Childe Roland_ over both _Sordello_ and the monologues.\n\nSooner or later, Browning realized the creative cost of the early poems. He never devalued _Sordello_ as a poem, and his fellow poets Swinburne and Rossetti read it deeply, but after it he realigned his material, displacing it onto all the substitutes, imitations, travesties of vatic intensities which flicker in and out of ordinary life \u2013 erotic and religious fantasies, deathbed reveries, self-projections, narcissisms. Browning shifts ground, not because he is too multifaceted and red-blooded to stay with Shelleyan idealism, but because poems like _Sordello_ \u2013 unless achieved through the full processes of revisionism \u2013 can end only in submission to the deathwish. The shift produces a near-inexhaustible defensive play over the now latent theme, the same old one: the desire of the creative mind for priority. And if this is not Browning's greatest poetry, it is only because it is a play which brings him closer and closer to the moment in which the full revisionary process can be achieved.\n\n#  **Notes**\n\n1 Harold Bloom, _Poetry and Repression_ (New Haven, 1976), 175.\n\n2 Jacques Lacan, _The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psvchoanalysis_ , trans. Alan Sheridan (London, 1977), 67.\n\n3 _The Artist as Critic_ , ed. Richard Ellmann (New York, 1968), 345.\n\n4 Movingly described by Geoffrey Hartman in his account of the paradox of the human imagination (\"that it cannot at the same time be true to nature and true to itself\"): \"If poetry, then, is a way of expressing statements of identity, we may not think that the value of simile, metaphor, and poetic symbols in general stands in proportion to 'points of likeness.'... Neither effect nor value come from each relation taken separately; they both exist as a function of an immediately perceived identity, and this identity reposes upon the mind's capacity for non-relational and simultaneous apprehension\" (Geoffrey Hartman, _The Unmediated Vision_ [New Haven, 1954], 45).\n\n5 _The Browning Critics_ , ed. Boyd Litzinger and K. L. Knickerbocker (Lexington, Ky., 1967), 329.\n\n6 Harold Bloom, _A Map of Misreading_ (Oxford, 1975), 70.\n\n7 In Lacanian terms, \"mimicry\" is not, of course, a synonym for the literary term _parody_. See above.\n\nWordsworth, Ann. 1979. \"Browning's Anxious Gaze.\" In _Robert Browning: A Collection of Critical Essays_ , edited by Harold Bloom and Adrienne Munich, pp. 28\u201338. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall Inc. Reproduced with permission of Ann Wordsworth.\n\n# 4\n\n# The Pragmatics of Silence, and the Figuration of the Reader in Browning's Dramatic Monologues\n\nJennifer A Wagner-Lawlor\n\nAlberto Sch\u00f6n has observed that silence is a concept rarely personified: \"There scarcely exists a silence 'made man.' In the various myths it is the divine word that prevails and if anything it is the men who observe the silence (mystic) in an attempt to approach [the] gods.\"1 Silence under such circumstances indicates consensus, and indeed more than consensus \u2013 absolute faith, awe, recognition of an ineffability before which there is no need to talk. The rarity of a silence \"made man\" makes its appearance the more noteworthy \u2013 and in this essay I would like to explore a sighting, as it were, that has been too little discussed.\n\nThe dramatic monologue is a genre that was not invented by nineteenth-century poets, but it was certainly taken up and fully exploited for the first time by them, particularly Robert Browning. Since then, the critical spotlight has been focused primarily upon the figure of the speaker, a typically eloquent rhetorician whose admirably complex manipulations of his auditor have been the study of literary critics. Browning critics have long noted that the typical speaker of a Browning monologue is aggressive, often threatening, nearly always superior, socially and/or intellectually, to the auditor. The auditor on the other hand cannot help but hear, as it were; he is, by generic definition, absolutely silent, a passive receptor of a verbal tour de force that leaves him no opportunity for response \u2013 indeed, that often actively discourages him from doing so.\n\nThe generically mandated silence of the auditor is not, therefore \u2013 to return to Sch\u00f6n's observation \u2013 a mystic silence, or even the silence of a faithful Moses receiving the Word. Far from being a silence of consensus, the auditor's is often a silence of intimidation. This is surely the intent of many a Browning speaker: by silencing his auditor, the speaker accomplishes his own typically narcissistic self-delineation, puts himself in the spotlight, keeps the body of the implied listener, the \"you\" of the poem, not only in shadow but as shadow. Foregrounding the aggression and rhetorical power of the speaker has thus tended to allow the effacement of the second-person addressee in favor of exploring the complex brush-work in the speaker's self-portrait.\n\nRecent linguistic theories of silence, however, make possible closer attention to the shadowy figure of the second-person addressee. Viewed in terms of communicative acts, represented or otherwise, the silent listener is absolutely crucial; the dramatic situation itself is obviously only created by the presence of the other, and he is necessary for the delineation of the speaker's self-portrait.2 Recent work on the pragmatics of silence has outlined the many ways in which silence is clearly not mere absence of speech, but is itself heavy with communicative value; there is communication structured through silence, just as through speech.3\n\nIn particular, what Adam Jaworski calls the \"bipolar valence of silence\" provides an altogether different lens through which to view the dynamics of the dramatic monologue. Turning aside from the success with which the speaker controls his narcissistic self-delineation, this essay will explore how the pragmatic ambiguity of second-person silence in monologues highlights the tension between consensus and resistance. This tension is a central characteristic of the genre \u2013 what any dramatic monologue is \"really about\" \u2013 because it clarifies the genre's ultimate irony: dramatic monologue ends up spotlighting the silent auditor precisely by effacing him/her in shadow. Like a stage whisper intended for all to hear, the shadowy figure who is the auditor cannot help but be seen finally by the figure for whom that auditor is obviously a stand-in \u2013 the reader.\n\nMy argument is that dramatic monologue thus constructs the image of the audience through the very silence it enforces upon the textual auditor. The genre self-reflexively figures its own problems of interpretation, and of the freedom of the reader in the effaced, voiceless shadow of the implied listener, who emerges from obscurity as the figure of the reader. The reader too may be silent, at least at first \u2013 but as the nature of the speech act in which s/he vicariously participates becomes clearer, s/he will not likely remain so. Through the performance of interpretation, the reader distinguishes her/himself from both the speaker and the auditor; in doing so, the reader both fulfills, but also ironically undermines, the speaker's apparent tyranny over the communicative situation that makes up the discourse of the poem.\n\n#  **1**\n\nThe landmark work on dramatic monologue appeared in 1957 from Robert Langbaum, whose book, _The Poetry of Experience_ , outlines the tension in all dramatic monologues between what he called \"sympathy\" and \"judgment.\" That is, the reader's own response to the speaker swings between a sympathetic identification with him, no matter how strange or disturbed that speaker may be, and a more objective, distanced judgment. Since Langbaum published his work, most criticism on dramatic monologue has concerned itself with that speaker and with his verbal self-delineation \u2013 how it is accomplished, how the textual auditor or we, the \"real readers,\" are lured into the speaker's verbal webs, and how irony springs the verbal traps that have been set. It is the will of the speaker that dazzles and disturbs, and the last thirty years of criticism are right in following Langbaum by pronouncing that the dramatic monologue is a post-Romantic resistance to the dangers of Romantic subjectivity.4\n\nThe merits and impact of Langbaum's thesis have always been unquestionable; and yet in focusing upon our relation with the speaker, subsequent analyses of the form have tended to underplay the degree to which we are also sympathetic with the implied listener, who complicates the scheme that Langbaum sets forth. The body of that shadowy figure, the text's implied listener, that \"you,\" is intentionally kept out of the spotlight by the speaker, whose sole purpose is an often narcissistic self-delineation. Two perfect examples of this are the infamous Duke of Browning's \"My Last Duchess,\" and the charismatic title scoundrel of \"Fra Lippo Lippi.\" But suppose one were to ask, rather than the usual \"what does the speaker's rhetoric mean,\" a different question: \"What does the auditor's silence 'mean'?\"\n\nFrom the perspective of linguistic pragmatics, the aggressive narcissism of the speaker, who does not let the auditor speak, sets up a violation of \"access rights\" to discourse. Mary Louise Pratt notes that in any such circumstance, having \"agreed\" to become an audience, we \"at most . . . can indicate our displeasure by some nonverbal means, like facial expression or body posture.\" Indeed, we sometimes learn that despite their silence, the auditors of dramatic monologues do in fact communicate to the speaker: we occasionally discern this when the speaker \u2013 say the Duke or Lippi \u2013 corrects or modifies his remarks in evident response to some gesture or facial expression from the listener. But as Pratt goes on to point out, in such a case \"audiences in this sense are indeed captive, and speakers addressing audiences are obliged to make the captivity worthwhile.\"5\n\nIn most of Browning's monologues, however, this contract of pragmatic obligation and expectation is crucially not the voluntary one that Pratt most often discusses.6 While the reader may be said to have \"chosen\" to \"hear\" a particular dramatic monologue, the textual listener often has not. The listener in the typical Browning monologue recognizes the speaker's superior position of power; given the latter's aggressive, sometimes even menacing nature, the apparent passivity of the silent listener seems at once the more remarkable, and yet the more understandable. Again, think of Browning's Duke of Ferrara. Who would dare to question or pose an objection to the behavior he is revealing to us? The silence of the auditor, a mere envoy, is not so surprising; he is quite simply in no position to dissent.\n\nThis leads to a second point: the auditor is participating not in a voluntary or \"chosen\" silence but in what linguists call \"imposed\" silence, which Paolo Scarpi defines as occurring \"when one of the two [speakers] recognises the influence or supremacy of the other. . . . _Choice_ and _imposition_ can express respectively assertion and recognition of leadership.\"7 The imposed code of silence is grounded in fear, adds Scarpi, and while its pragmatic implication is \"consensus,\" in actuality verbal communication has merely been \"suspended\" by the intimidated listener. Such an imposed silence is dangerous because, as Scarpi puts it, \"it may coincide with oblivion, negation and the loss of the individual identity.\"8 \"Exactly so!\" the narcissistic Browning speaker might agree, as he sets up, usually far from innocently, a system of imposed silence that is necessary for his own self-delineation. The listener's silence means either assent, or, at the very least, a recognition of and acquiescence in a system that places the speaker himself at the center; as Deborah Tannen points out, silence is always a \"joint production\" (p. 100). The silence of the addressee is a perceptibly oppressive one, particularly as by generic definition he is unable to break the situational silence, whether in agreement or disagreement, whether in comprehension or misunderstanding. And caught as we are in the same verbal web as we read, without any clearly discernible response from the textual auditor, we tend to turn always back toward the speaker, complicitous ourselves now in his self-portraiture.\n\nThe position of the addressee is therefore ambiguous, and in the silence that maintains that ambiguity, the speaker can impose what meaning he will. A remarkable acknowledgment of this ambiguity appears at the end of the strange poem \"Porphyria's Lover\"; having strangled his lady with a long strand of her own hair, the speaker wonders aloud that \"yet God has not said a word!\" It is unclear whether the lover expects to hear approval or disapproval from God. Even had God spoken, however, Porphyria's lover would most likely have heard nothing anyway, so maniacally, indeed criminally, extreme is his solipsism.\n\nThe ambiguity of the figure of the addressee is rooted in the ambiguity of silence itself \u2013 and in fact such bivalence is characteristic of the functions assigned to silence by linguists. Jaworski names at least five possible functions of silence in communication, each one bearing positive and negative values. As noted earlier, Jaworski calls this the \"bipolar\" nature of silence, and naturally the value can be assigned only by looking at the context of the speech act. So, for example, silence's \"revelatory function\" may either make something known to a person, or may hide information.\n\nMore relevant to the argument of this essay is the function Jaworski calls the judgmental: positively, silence can signal assent and favor; negatively, it signals dissent or disfavor. This function parallels Langbaum's description of the reader's relation to a monologue speaker as either \"sympathetic\" or \"judgmental.\" But at the level of the poem itself, so tight is the speaker's control that it seems difficult to know which value is to be attributed to the silence of this particular communicative event. Tannen notes that \"whether or not silence is uncomfortable in interaction hinges on whether or not participants feel something should be said, in which case silence is perceived as an omission\" (p. 96). It is interesting to turn this remark back upon Porphyria's lover again, who clearly does see God's silence as an omission \u2013 and yet who does not recognize in his last line's repressed whisper of conscience the voice of God; the lover has effectively silenced even Him.\n\nThe same sort of ambiguity is present in \"Andrea del Sarto,\" in which the silence of the painter's wife, Lucrezia, is motivated not by fear, as in \"My Last Duchess,\" but by indifference. I can never imagine her listening to del Sarto's words, but rather for the whistle-signal of her \"cousin\" outside. Del Sarto's monologue is to some degree a delay tactic to keep her indoors with him for once. While, however, she is temporarily held captive by the painter's desire to speak \u2013 and perhaps by a momentary but shallow sense of politeness \u2013 the apparent irrelevance of his speech to her behavior or thoughts is thematized in the poem precisely as the painter's own, crushing fault. His irrelevance is in fact the gist of his self-portrait \u2013 for which he knows he will be judged as an artist, and for which he judges himself now as a man. The poem exploits the ambiguity of silence: Lucrezia at once humors and dismisses him, as he seems well aware, by sitting with him at all; he wonders, hopelessly, if her acquiescence is a mark of favor. And yet simultaneously, she rejects him by not disagreeing with his negative self-delineation. Her judgment of him, and her worst punishment as well, is implicit in her very silence.\n\n#  **2**\n\nWhile the relevance of the speaker's narrative to the auditor may be ambiguous, that ambiguity of silence in Browning's monologues is clarified when one acknowledges that what is in question here is not a \"real\" conversation, but a literary representation of one, or an imitation speech act. This communicative situation obviously changes everything, from the problem of relevance, to the problem of silence \u2013 and what I will be arguing in the remainder of this essay is that these two problems conflate within the figure of the reader.\n\nWhile the implied auditor of the poem, the \"you,\" remains generically imprisoned within the situational parameters defined by the speaker, and thus remains passively mute, the reader, though aligned with that auditor, is not so compelled. Jack Selzer points out that \"real readers\" may or may not identify with the implied reader of a text \u2013 here, the second-person addressee of a monologue \u2013 and he promotes Iser's \"more flexible account\" of the reading process, which \"allows for an active reader who may well choose to remain quite distinct from the role suggested by the implied reader.\"9 The sooner the reader, \"active and yet text-based,\" as Selzer puts it, recalls his nonidentity with the poem's \"you,\" the sooner the ambiguity of silence may clarify into the active silence of dissent, and the violation of H. P. Grice's maxim of relevance within the Cooperative Principle justified at the extratextual level.10 As Pratt notes, we the actual readers assume in such circumstances that the narrative will be \"relevant\" and worth hearing. But within the context of the poem, even that will sometimes be unclear for the dramatic monologue's addressee. These narratives often seem directed by the speaker toward him/herself, and the dismissal of the relevance of his narrative for the auditor is matched by control of access rights to the implied \"conversation.\"\n\nPratt also points out that the reader of a literary work may in theory always be \"attending to at least two utterances at once \u2013 the author's display text and the fictional speaker's discourse, whatever it is.\" This duality \"is not always exploited by the author\" (p. 174) \u2013 but it is, I am arguing, essential to the very nature of the dramatic monologue. Pratt adds that all literary texts have \"display-producing relevance\" or \"tellability,\" which we the audience, voluntarily reading such a text, will search for. And the distinction of the dramatic lyric is that its relevance may lie less in the particular narratives that make up the poems than in the pragmatic dynamics that these poems do \u2013 indeed must \u2013 highlight. In real speech, the auditor of a narrative will always have the opportunity to respond to the relevance of the speaker's discourse \u2013 even if not to his face. This is obviously impossible in the dramatic monologue, which begins and ends with that discourse. The monologue must assume a relation of consent, a relation of assent as generically preestablished, and it forces the auditor into a position of passive receptivity, whether voluntary or not. The relevance of the speaker's narrative to anyone but himself need not be immediately apparent, and cannot necessarily be found within the poem itself. Sometimes the speaker is, within the context of the poem, nearly speaking to himself, as in \"Porphyria's Lover,\" or, to cite another nineteenth-century masterpiece, in D. G. Rossetti's \"Jenny,\" in which the auditor is the sleeping prostitute. There could be no greater sign of the \"irrelevance\" of speech than the silence of those recipients, one dead, the other asleep.\n\nDramatic monologue's generic demand for silence is, as suggested above, at least a pragmatic violation \u2013 an enforced listening \u2013 and from that source springs the prevailing sense of \"danger\" or threat to the auditor that characterizes so many of Browning's monologue situations. From this violation too may stem the negative response of actual contemporary readers to Browning's work; some readers supposed that the speaker's characteristic pragmatic hostility toward his auditor paralleled Browning's disdain toward the reader. While not accusing him of that exactly, John Ruskin did complain to Browning of the obscurity of his work. The great critic and others, in considering that obscurity willful, also thought it to be a kind of violation of the author-reader contract: \"You are worse than the worst Alpine Glacier I ever crossed,\" groused Ruskin, \"Bright, deep enough surely, but so full of clefts that half the journey has to be done with ladder and hatchet.\"11 An excerpt from Browning's famous response points out how entirely that eminent critic had simply misread his work because they had different conceptions of that contract:\n\nWe don't read poetry the same way, by the same law; it is too clear. I cannot begin writing poetry till my imaginary reader has conceded licences to me which you demur at altogether. I _know_ that I don't make out my conception by my language; all poetry being a putting the infinite within the finite. You would have me paint it all plain out, which can't be; but by various artifices I try to make shift with touches and bits of outlines which _succeed_ if they bear the conception from me to you.12\n\nBrowning expects, in other words, more cooperation from the reader in the bringing forth of meaning than Ruskin and other contemporaries were accustomed to grant. And while Browning's speakers characteristically \"flout\" or \"exploit\" (as Grice would put it) one or more maxims pertaining to the Cooperative Principle, the reader may well be forced to supply the \"logic\" of a monologue's implied conversation by stepping out of the conversational context of the poem. While the silence of the auditor in the poem represents a failure of language, it is a failure any responsible literary reader, searching for meaning or \"tellability\" as Pratt suggests, cannot abide.\n\nAuditor and reader must, therefore, part ways, and the issue of silence is crucial here. For the auditor, silence signals a failure of language, but silence can also, according to Tannen, offer an alternative to the reader: \"Personal exploration is the existence of cognitive activity underlying silence; the failure of language refers to its social function\" (p. 100). Whereas the auditor's silence may represent an involuntary consensus, the silence of the actual reader, who is forced to step out of the place of the noninterpretive auditor, may signify the opposite. This silence is the space of the open resistance of the will of the speaker by the interpretive will of the reader. In pragmatic terms, the reader (unlike, for example, either the \"next duchess's\" envoy or the languid Lucrezia) may become \"impolite\" in a manner that the textual listener, too intimidated or too acquiescent to challenge the speaker's superiority, dares not be.13 In hermeneutical terms, the reader has become an interpreter.\n\nAn intratextual aesthetic communication between two fictional protagonists shifts into an extratextual public communication, or, I could also say, into an inter-textual public communication. These terms I borrow from Ernest W. B. Hess-L\u00fcttich, whose article on the pragmatics of literary communication describes the kind of shift I want to mark:\n\nAs soon as the recipient also takes over the role of an observer of the whole process, for instance as critic, linguist, or psychologist, another metacommunicative level has to be taken into account. . . . This second communicative relationship is by no means a mere addendum, but structurally implied within the text itself. And the role of the audience is by no means only that of passive perceivers: perception is a very active interpreting process.14\n\nThis is \"a structural prerequisite of dramatic tension,\" adds Hess-L\u00fcttich, as well as of \"other classic dramatic devices,\" including irony (p. 237).\n\nThe aggressive monologuist would strategically discourage us from interpretation. But such aggression, while perhaps intimidating the auditor, may well provoke the reader to recall his difference from that auditor, and to disalign him- or herself from the shadowy textual stand-in.15 In responding, in interpreting, the reader is transforming the monologue, at the metacommunicative level, into a kind of dialogue.16 Pratt describes such a situation well:\n\nThe fictional speaker thus produces a lack of consensus, and the author implicates that this lack of consensus is part of what he is displaying, part of what he wants us to experience, evaluate, and interpret. He may intend us to replace the speaker's version with a better one, question our own interpretive faculties, or simply delight in the imaginative exercise of calculating \"what's really going on.\" (p. 199)17\n\nYuri Lotman concurs in this description, asserting that \"between text and audience a relationship is formed which is characterized not as passive perception but rather as a dialogue. Dialogic speech is distinguished not only by the common code of two juxtaposed utterances, but also by the presence of a common memory shared by addresser and addressee\" (p. 81).\n\nIf this is the case, a crucial irony emerges: by discontinuing the sympathetic identification that the reader shared with the listener, the reader does acknowledge the speaker's construction of himself through language; the self-portrait has been successfully completed. However, the textual status of the monologue ends up being crucial for the speaker \u2013 for it betrays him. The speaker, however narcissistic he may be, only exists through figuring himself in language. Only the real reader, distinct from that \"you\" in the poem, has the freedom, gained at the expense of the speaker himself, to realize the speaker's self-portrait fully \u2013 that is, to interpret.\n\nThere is no larger gap or indeterminacy in dramatic monologue than that passive, silent, listening figure. But his very silence is precisely what induces the reader to what Wolfgang Iser calls the \"constitutive activity\" that is interpretation \u2013 that is, indeed, the emergence of the aesthetic object.18 This conforms to Robert Browning's remark concerning the role of what we would now call \"the ideal reader\":\n\nIt is certain . . . that a work like mine depends more immediately [than acted drama] on the intelligence and sympathy of the reader for its success \u2013 indeed were my scenes stars it must be his co-operating fancy which, supplying all chasms, shall connect the scattered lights into a constellation \u2013 a Lyre or a Crown. (Woolford, p. 27)\n\nThis same passage points at the very real influence of the author as well; he, after all, is putting the stars in their places, if not lighting the space between one and another well. It seems no wonder in this light that so many of Browning's monologues are self-reflexively about art itself: the poems are pointing as precisely toward the paradigmatic structure of their own \"correct\" interpretation as the extraordinary passage just quoted, and Browning indicates the way toward a \"process aesthetics,\" rather than toward the more traditional \"product aesthetics.\"19\n\nTo put it another way, while the potential effect or force of a dramatic monologue remains unfulfilled with respect to the auditor, who has been effaced through his own enforced silence, that force is effected at a different level; access is gained in the relation of that utterance to the real reader. The hierarchy set up by the speaker himself is thus undermined by the poem's own status as text, without which it would be difficult in some poems to know that anything had been \"communicated\" to the auditor at all.20 The speaker has therefore both gained and lost, because his demand for identity is accomplished at his own expense, simultaneously undermined by something or someone not in his control, free of the system of silence the speaker has established \u2013 the subjectivity of the real reader. Jack Selzer would call such a figure the \"resisting reader\" (p. 171), a term that he borrows from feminist theorists (particularly Judith Fetterley) in an effort to connect this moment of disalignment from the textual auditor, implied or not, to a more general dialogism.21 But this resistance is obviously gained only through the textual status of the poem itself.\n\nLotman concludes that the \"collective memory\" that textuality alone makes available to the real reader shifts the orientation of the \"structure of the audience\" such that it \"acquires a character that is different in principle\" (p. 84). In the context of dramatic monologue, Lotman's description of the audience's \"character\" acquires a force greater even than that of the pun: it pinpoints the figuration of the audience in and through the dynamics of reading a dramatic monologue. I mean \"figuration\" in two senses here: the emergence of the auditor/reader as a subjective figure standing in opposition to the speaker; and, the troping of audience generally through the emergence of a \"you\" that is not the textual auditor, but the reader outside the text.\n\nThe discernment of the reader rather than the speaker has been an implicit subject of such poems all along \u2013 certainly it has been one focus of the \"drama\" of dramatic monologue. \"And what easy work these novelists have of it!\" wrote Browning to Elizabeth Barrett in 1845:\n\nA Dramatic poet has to _make_ you love or admire his men and women, \u2013 they must _do_ and _say_ all that you are to see and hear \u2013 really do it in your face, say it in your ears, and it is wholly for _you_ , in _your_ power, to _name_ , characterize and so praise or blame, _what_ is so said and done . . <if you don't perceive of yourself,> there is no standing by, for the Author, and telling you: but with these novelists, a scrape of the pen \u2013 out blurting of a phrase, and the miracle is achieved.22\n\nNote in this passage the ambiguity of the poet's admonition \"if you don't perceive of yourself\"; he certainly meant \"by yourself\" \u2013 and yet, in the context of my argument, I cannot help hearing also Browning's insistence on the reader's awareness of him/herself as a figure, both as a subjective self, and as a trope.\n\nThis figuration or troping of the reader is best illustrated by returning to the poem that has become the touchstone of so many discussions of dramatic monologue, \"My Last Duchess.\" I have touched down on this poem throughout the essay, and would like to make the implicit reading constructed over the course of these pages more explicit henceforth. So much attention is paid the Duke and his rhetorical manipulation of the envoy that little attention is paid the third figure present, the painted figure of the Duchess herself. Her \"imposed silence,\" to recall Scarpi's terms, does \"coincide with oblivion,\" since she is both silent and dead. And yet, is she truly oblivious? Literally, of course, the answer is yes. Figuratively, however, reports of her death may have been exaggerated. For what is most remarkable about this figure? That she looks \"as if she were alive\" (l. 2), so much so that \"never read / Strangers like you that pictured countenance\" without \"[seeming] to want to ask, if they durst, / How such a glance came there\" (ll. 6\u201312). The picture so accurately portrays the essential generosity of spirit that brought out the \"half-flush\" (l. 19) that animates her face in life and death alike, that the Duke realizes he has not, in fact, escaped his irritation at and by her at all.\n\nThis painted portrait powerfully provokes the desire for dialogue about its subject, and the reason for this is not simply because the Duchess is so strikingly \"there\" as if alive, but also because she is so silent in her very presence. Her image alone tells a story that strangers \"read,\" and while the Duke would control the interpretation of this visual text, he betrays a recognition that the viewer's interpretation must already have begun. A man obsessed with possession, whether of property or persons, the Duke is finally possessed himself (in the other sense) by the life-like figure, with its immortalized \"glance\" over which he has no more control now than he did before; the sympathetic glance that \"went everywhere\" (l. 24) and the blush that favored all continue to do so. The resistance to the Duke's narcissistic self-delineation, to put it another way, comes from the \"liveliness\" of the painting itself; the Duchess' life-in-death acts upon the Duke as a ghostly provocation, and his acknowledgment of the beauty and candor of her painted face, epitomized by the heightened color of her blushing cheek, belies his story of her supposed betrayal of the Duke himself.\n\nThe constant play of interpretation that the reader requires is made possible, in other words, by the image of the Duchess herself; the glance that sees the joy of the world, and the \"spot of joy\" that marks the spirit that so animated her countenance, are continuously undermining the \"authoritative version\" of the story that would reduce her from subject to object. I argued earlier that it is textuality that betrays the Duke; that betrayal is clearly figured here in the visual text of the portrait, the very \"truthfulness\" of which exposes the need for, even demands, a   \n(re)reading of her gaze. The painting is a textual _trompe l'oeil_ , the subject and object shifting back and forth like figures in a carpet; it is also a figuration of the shifting relationship of reader to text. Far from being effaced, the Duchess is time and time again brought back to life by the Duke's pathological sensitivity to an unguided, and therefore free, reading of that face.\n\nThis portrait is finally an ironical figuration of none other than the actual reader, who like the Duchess is a presence, \"alive\" because s/he is ultimately beyond the control of the Duke's attempted rhetorical and, therefore, hermeneutical tyranny; we, like the Duchess, are at once inside and outside the frame of the Duke's own verbal self-portrait. On the one hand, the will of the interpreting subject, provoked by the silence of the envoy and portrait alike, is constantly reanimated, as resistant to the Duke as that now monumentally indeterminate spot of joy; on the other hand, the reader, like the Duchess, keeps the Duke alive, the dynamics of reading and interpretation in play. She tropes the event of interpretation; the Duke's mistake is to assert what is clearly not true \u2013 that his painting is \"merely an object.\" He ignores what he himself senses in his own compulsion to talk: that the significance, the meaning of the painting, is determined by interpretive operations that are simply beyond his control. Through these operations, the figures of the Duchess and of the reader alike necessarily emerge as strongly as that of the Duke himself.\n\nPerhaps what Browning was attempting to achieve was what Patrocinio Schweikart calls the caring reader, \"absorbed in the text but not effaced by it,\" who \"gains a dual perspective through reading both the self and the text in question, and enacts a reciprocal relationship \u2013 an 'interanimation' \u2013 among author, text, and reader that is mutually respectful and liberating.\"23 The ironic freedom of the Duchess' gaze, preserved forever by the portrait's evidently uncanny likeness and \"liveliness,\" thus tropes the actual reader's freedom as interpreter \u2013 a freedom that is, to go back to Pratt, rooted in the very textuality of this interpretive event: \"Given such a guarantee [that the Cooperative Principle can be restored in any work of literature by the concept of implicature], the Audience is free to confront, explore, and interpret the communicative breakdown and to enjoy the display of the forbidden\" (p. 215).\n\nSuch an achievement makes sense in the context of Browning scholarship that has established both Browning's Victorian fear of the self-imprisonment of the Romantic subject, and his active resistance to tyranny of any sort, whether political or domestic.24 This proposed freedom of the reader through the text may be analogous to arguments from recent Whitman scholars, particularly Kerry C. Larson and C. Carroll Hollis, who have outlined the way in which Whitman's poetry highlights, rather than obscures, the rhetorical or persuasive nature of literature, and foregrounds what Larson calls the \"achievement of assent as an active and indeed central feature of its drama.\"25 Whitman's aim, argues Larson, is to override the mediations between \"I\" and \"you.\"\n\nBrowning certainly does not attempt that kind of Whitmanian conflation. The reading offered here of \"My Last Duchess\" may well prompt one to ask whether then the figure for the author in this text must not be the Duke. But unlike the Duke, Browning is not demanding the \"rhetoric of enthrallment,\" as David E. Latan\u00e9 puts it (p. 28), that goes along with political tyranny; rather, Browning is highlighting a rhetoric not only of obscurity, but also of indeterminacy, which may perplex (hence his \"aesthetics of difficulty\"), but carefully does not enthrall, does not tyrannically demand identity of speaker and listener, any more than of author and reader. His monologues do reinforce a cooperative (or what Schweikart would call \"interanimating\") model of reading by highlighting or even thematizing the inability of the actual reader to remain wholly sympathetic to either the text's speaker or, for that matter, to the text's auditor. And this is, once again, the reader's particular freedom, that s/he can exploit and explore with a variety of interpretive approaches the significant textual silences that s/he alone can make speak.\n\nI began this essay by quoting Alberto Sch\u00f6n: \"There scarcely exists a silence 'made man.'\" What I am suggesting is that in the Browning dramatic monologue the figure of the silent auditor does emerge, in and through the shift from the passive to the active mode of silence, within the reader. The discernment of the second-person auditor is only possible through the reader's own more distant, objective, and possibly resistant response to the speaker. With the full force of irony, the self-image that the speaker would delineate is only achieved when the reader distinguishes her/himself from the shadowy passivity of the listener's silence, and pulls away from a sympathetic association with that manipulated figure. And in turn, the reader, while performing the action of constituting the speaker, will also delineate \u2013 in her own image \u2013 the form of the silent listener. In this kind of poem, silence is \"made man,\" created in the image of the second-person \"I\" that refuses to be effaced, that is, the \"you,\" the reader.26\n\n# **Notes**\n\n1 \"Silence in the Myth: Psychoanalytic Observations,\" in _The Regions of Silence: Studies on the Difficulty of Communicating_ , ed. Maria Grazia Ciani (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1987), p. 9.\n\n2 Psychoanalysts have explored the parallel therapeutic situation: Lacan, for example, asks this: \"Then who is this _other_ to whom I am more attached than myself, since, at the heart of my assent to my own identity, it is still he who wags me?\" (Quoted by Paul Kugler, _The Alchemy of Discourse: An Archetypal Approach to Language_ [Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1982], p. 98.) On the creation of \"ego\" or subjectivity through language \u2013 and the notion that it is only through language that we are conscious, are \"subject\" at all, see: Emile Benveniste, \"Subjectivity in Language,\" chap. 21 in _Problems in_ _General_ _Linguistics_ , trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (1966; Coral Gables, Florida: Univ. of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 223\u201330; Ann Banfield, \"Where Epistemology, Style, and Grammar Meet Literary History: The Development of Represented Speech and Thought,\" _NLH_ 9, no. 3 (Autumn 1977): 415\u201354. For the relation of subject-construction and dramatic monologue, see Rosemary Huisman, \"Who Speaks and For Whom? The Search for Subjectivity in Browning's Poetry,\" _AUMLA_ 71 (May 1989): 64\u201387; E. Warwick Slinn, _Browning and the Fictions of Identity_ (Totowa: Barnes & Noble, 1982); Slinn, \"Consciousness as Writing: Deconstruction and Reading Victorian Poetry,\" pp. 54\u201368 in _Critical Essays on Robert Browning_ , ed. Mary Ellis Gibson (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992); Slinn, \"Some Notes on Monologues as Speech Acts,\" _BSN_ 15 (Spring 1984): 1\u20139; and Herbert Tucker, \"Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric,\" in _Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism_ , ed. Chaviva Ho\u0161ek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 226\u201343.\n\n3 See: Adam Jaworski's _The Power of Silence: Social and_ _Pragmatic Perspectives_ (Newbury Park: SAGE Publications, 1993); Wayne C. Anderson, \"The Rhetoric of Silence in the Discourse of Coleridge and Carlyle,\" _South_ _Atlantic_ _Review_ 49 (January 1984): 72\u201390; and articles by Muriel Saville-Troike, Anne Graffan Walker, and Deborah Tannen in _Perspectives on_ _Silence_ , ed. Deborah Tannen and Muriel Saville-Troike (Norwood: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1985).\n\n4 See Carol Christ, \"Self-Concealment and Self-Expression in Eliot's and Pound's Dramatic Monologues,\" _VP_ 22 (1984): 217\u201326; Lee Erickson, _Robert_ _Browning_ _: His Poetry and His Audiences_ (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984); Constance W. Hassett, _The Elusive Self in the Poetry of Robert Browning_ (Athens: Univ. of Ohio Press, 1982); Robert Langbaum, ___The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic_ _Monologue_ _in_ _Modern Literary_ _Tradition_ __(London: Chatto & Windus, 1957; repr. Norton, 1971); Loy D. Martin, _Browning's Dramatic Monologues and the Post-Romantic Subject_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985); J. Hillis Miller, _The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers_ (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963); E. Warwick Slinn, ___Browning and the Fictions of Identity_ __; Herbert F. Tucker, Jr., ___Browning's Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure_ __(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1980).\n\n5 Mary Louise Pratt, _Toward A Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse_ (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 106\u20137.\n\n6 See Cynthia Goldin Bernstein, \" ' My Last Duchess': A Pragmatic Approach to the Dramatic Monologue,\" _The SECOL Review_ 14 (1990): 127\u201342.\n\n7 Paolo Scarpi, \"The Eloquence of Silence: Aspects of a Power Without Words,\" in Ciani, p. 23.\n\n8 Ciani, p. 37. See also Maeterlink, who says that passive silence is \"the shadow of sleep, of death, or non-existence\" (quoted by John Auchard, in _Silence in Henry James: The Heritage of Symbolism and Decadence_ [University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1986], p. 13).\n\n9 Jack Selzer, \"More Meanings of _Audience_ ,\" from _A Rhetoric of Doing: Essays on Written Discourse in Honor of James L. Kinneavy_ , ed. Stephen P Witte, Neil Nakadate, and Roger D. Cherny (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 166\u20137.\n\n10 See H. P. Grice, _Studies in the Way of Words_ (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989). Chap. 2, \"Logic and Conversation,\" outlines Grice's concept of the Cooperative Principle, its several corollary maxims (such as \"relevance\"), and the many ways in which the \"quasi-contractual basis\" (p. 29) of any conversational situation may be disrupted or pushed aside.\n\n11 December 2, 1855, published in David J. De Laura, \"Ruskin and the Brownings: Twenty-five Unpublished Letters,\" _John Rylands Library Bulletin_ 54 (1972): 326\u20137.\n\n12 December 10, 1855, in W G. Collingwood, _The Life and Work of John Ruskin_ , 2 vols. (London: Methuen, 1893), 1:200. David E. Latane, Jr., outlines what he calls an \"aesthetics of difficulty\"; he discusses the relationship of this aesthetic to audiences and, consequently, market forces, that preferred simplicity, or at least \"accessibility,\"in literature (see chap. 1 of _Browning's Sordello and the Aesthetics of Difficulty_ [University of Victoria / English Literary Studies (No. 40 in the ELS Monograph Series, 1987)], pp. 15\u201339).\n\n13 The pragmatics of politeness, and particularly of the politeness of and in literary texts, are relevant here. See Roger D. Sell's article on this in the collection of essays he edited entitled _Literary Pragmatics_ (London: Routledge, 1991). Tannen also discusses \"silence and negative and positive politeness\" in _Perspectives on Silence_ , pp. 97 ff.\n\n14 Ernest W. B. Hess-L\u00fcttich, \"How Does the Writer of a Dramatic Text Interact With His Audience?,\" in Sell, pp. 235\u20136.\n\n15 For a parallel view from a Browning critic, see John Maynard: \"Most of these generally too open fax receivers,\" says Maynard, \"provoke our contempt. Hearing the silence audible of the listener, we break into our own noisy response. It is almost as if Browning has found a poetic gadget to provoke reader response\" (\"Reading the Reader in Robert Browning's Dramatic Monologues,\" _Critical Essays on Robert Browning_ , ed. Mary Ellis Gibson [New York: G. K. Hall, 1992], p. 74). Maynard concludes that we should read the reader \"not to define the ideal interpretive position, but to explore the range of response \u2013 experiences \u2013 the poem generates. . . . If we begin with the listener in the poem in order to decide where to position the cameras of our various readers, we had better be prepared for a variety of listeners as well\" (p. 76). Also see Latan\u00e9, who explores the dynamics of the audience \"in and out\" of the text; Maynard, \"Browning, Donne,and the Triangulation of the Dramatic Monologue,\" _John Donne Journal_ 4, no. 2 (1985): 253\u201367; and John Woolford, who is one of the few Browning critics who recognizes the significance (both in the sense of \"importance\" and in the sense of \"signifying\") of silence. He anticipates my own argument in suggesting that it is the silence of the second-person consciousness that most severely complicates Langbaum's thesis _(Browning the Revisionary_ [London: Macmillan, 1988]).\n\n16 See Rosemary Huisman's \"Who Speaks and For Whom? The Search for Subjectivity in Browning's Poetry,\" _AUMLA_ 71 (May 1989) for her conclusion that the term \"dramatic monologue\" is a misnomer, given the dialogic relation between speaker and reader that emerges (p. 83).\n\n17 Yuri Lotman is not talking about dramatic monologue specifically, but about literary texts generally when he remarks that \"orientation toward a certain type of collective memory, and consequently toward a structure of the audience acquires a character that is different in principle. It ceases to be automatically implied in the text and becomes a signified (i.e. free) artistic element which can enter the text as part of a game.\" See Yuri Lotman, \"The Text and the Structure of Its Audience,\" _NLH_ 14, no. 1 (Autumn 1982): 84.\n\n18 My description of the pragmatics of dramatic monologue parallels the reading process as described by Iser in his \"Interaction between Text and Reader,\" in _The Reader in the Text_ : _Essays on Audience and Interpretation_ , ed. Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 106\u201319. As Iser says, \"If the blank is largely responsible for the activities described, then participation means that the reader is not simply called upon to 'internalize' the positions given in the text, but he is induced to make them act upon and so transform each other, as a result of which the aesthetic object begins to emerge. The structure of the blank organizes this participation, revealing simultaneously the intimate connection between this structure and the reading subject. This interconnection completely conforms to a remark made by Piaget: 'In a word, the subject is there and alive, because the basic quality of each structure is the structuring process itself.' The blank in the fictional text appears to be a paradigmatic structure; its function consists in initiating structured operations in the reader, the execution of which transmits the reciprocal interaction of textual positions into consciousness\" (p. 119).  \nThere is a fascinating relationship here between the problem of intersubjectivity and recent game theory, as applied to pragmatic or hermeneutic processes. I noticed while researching this paper that the trope of \"game-playing\" \u2013 from \"boxing\" to \"feint\" (Maynard, Sinfield) \u2013 turned up both in discussions of dramatic monologue, and in abstract accounts of the reading process. See Elizabeth W. Bruss, \"The Game of Literature and Some Literary Games,\" _NLH_ 9, no. 1 (Autumn 1977): 153\u201372; John Maynard; Pia Teodorescu-Br\u00eenzeu, \"The Monologue as Dramatic Sign,\" _Poetics_ 13 (1984): 136; Yuri Lotman, \"The Text and the Structure of Its Audience,\" p. 84; Christopher Collins, \"The Poetics of Play: Reopening Jakobson's 'Closing Statement,'\" chap. 3 in _The Poetics of the Mind: Literature and the Psychology of Imagination_ (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 47\u201366.\n\n19 I borrow these terms from Nils Erik Enkvist, \"On the interpretability of texts in general and of literary texts in particular,\" in Sell, pp. 24\u20135.\n\n20 See Wolfgang Iser, _The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978): \"Only when the recipient shows by his _responses_ that he has correctly received the speaker's intention are the conditions fulfilled for the success of the linguistic action\" (p. 57).\n\n21 For a fuller exploration of the \"dialogic element\" in dramatic monologue, see Ashton Nichols, \"Dialogism in the Dramatic Monologue: Suppressed Voices in Browning,\" _VIJ_ 18 (1990): 29\u201351. Here of course lie the full implications of ideology's insinuations through silence, for as Scarpi notes, \"Silence . . . becomes a necessary condition for not being excluded from the 'centre.' The myestes who takes part in the celebration of the Mysteries in silence corresponds to the citizen who obeys the 'law' (and how else but in silence?). Indeed, silence is revealed to be one of the conditions necessary to be admitted to the 'centre.' . . . Silence . . . assumes the form of an adhesion to the 'law' which the initiate carries for ever depicted on his body [in tribal initiations]\" (Ciani, pp. 30\u20131). Silence becomes, Scarpi concludes, a \"discriminating tool with regard to those who are out. . . . It assumes the form of a type of 'discourse' of the order.\" In his _Marxism_ _and Literary Criticism_ (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990), Terry Eagleton also pinpoints the connection between ideology and silence: \"It is in the significant _silences_ of a text, in its gaps and absences, that the presence of ideology can be most positively felt. It is these silences which the critic must make 'speak.' The text is, as it were, ideologically forbidden to say certain things. . . . Far from constituting a rounded coherent whole, it displays a conflict and contradiction of meanings; and the significance of the work lies in the difference rather than unity between these meanings\" (pp. 34\u20135).\n\n22 </> indicate Browning's insertion of material in his own text; August 10, 1845, in _Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning_ , ed. Elvan Kintner, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), 1:150.\n\n23 Quoted by Selzer, \"More Meanings of _Audience_ ,\" p. 171.\n\n24 See the early pages of Woolford's _Browning the Revisionary_ on the dynamics of reading in Browning's monologues. Also interested in the reader's silence is Joseph A. Dupras; see his \" ' My Last Duchess': Paragon and Parergon,\" _PLL_ 32, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 3\u201318.\n\n25 Kerry C. Larson and C. Carroll Hollis, _Whitman's Drama of Consensus_ (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1988), p. 6; also see C. Carroll Hollis, _Language and Style in Leaves of Grass_ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1983). I am grateful to my colleague Paul Naylor for pointing out this connection, and also for commenting on a draft of this essay.\n\n26 This essay is an expanded version of a paper presented at the 1993 Modern Language Association convention in Toronto. The panel, sponsored by the Linguistic Approaches to Literature division, was put together by Professor Cynthia Bernstein of Auburn, and I would like to thank her for her encouragement. I am also grateful to Professor David Herman of North Carolina State University, whose valuable and thorough comments on a draft of this essay helped direct revisions.\n\nWagner-Lawlor, Jennifer A. 1997. \"The Pragmatics of Silence and the Figuration of the Reader in Browning's Dramatic Monologues.\" In _Victorian Poetry_ , 35, iii (Fall) pp. 287\u2013302. Reproduced with permission of Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor.\n\n# 5\n\n# Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric\n\nHerbert F Tucker\n\nHis muse made increment of anything,  \nFrom the high lyric down to the low rational.\n\n( _Don Juan_ III.Ixxxv.5\u20136)\n\nI would say, quoting Mill, \"Oratory is heard, poetry is overheard.\" And he would answer, his voice full of contempt, that there was always an audience; and yet, in his moments of lofty speech, he himself was alone no matter what the crowd.\n\n( _The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats_ )\n\n#  **I**\n\n\"Eloquence is _heard_ , poetry is _overheard_. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude.\" \"Lyric poetry, as it was the earliest kind, is also, if the view we are now taking of poetry be correct, more eminently and peculiarly poetry than any other.\"1 Thus wrote John Stuart Mill in 1833, with the wild surmise of a man who had lately nursed himself through a severe depression, thanks to published poetry and its capacity to excite intimate feeling in forms uncontaminated by rhetorical or dramatic posturing. One listener Mill's characteristically analytic eloquence is likely to have found at once was Robert Browning, who moved in London among liberal circles that touched Mill's and who in the same year published his first work, the problematically dramatic _Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession_ , to which Mill drafted a response Browning saw in manuscript. Browning's entire career \u2013 most notably the generic innovation for which he is widely remembered today, the dramatic monologue \u2013 would affirm his resistance to the ideas about poetry contained in Mill's essays. Indeed, as early as _Pauline_ Browning was confessing to the open secret of spontaneous lyricism, but in ways that disowned it. What follows is emphatically the depiction of a bygone state:\n\nAnd first I sang as I in dream have seen  \nMusic wait on a lyrist for some thought,  \nYet singing to herself until it came.\n\n(ll. 377\u201379)\n\nIn this complex but typical retrospect the poet of _Pauline_ figures as an eavesdropper on his own Shelleyan juvenilia, themselves relics of a dream of disengaged and thoughtless youth from which the sadder but wiser poet has on balance done well to awaken. Browning's enfolding of a lyrical interval into a narrative history sets the pattern for the establishment of character throughout his subsequent work, a pattern knowingly at odds with the subjectivist convention that governed the reading of English poetry circa 1830 and to which Mill's essay gave memorable but by no means unique voice.2\n\nTo the most ambitious and original young poets of the day, Browning and Alfred Tennyson, the sort of lyricism Mill admired must have seemed \"overheard\" in a sense quite other than Mill intended: heard overmuch, overdone, and thus in need of being done over in fresh forms. Among their other generic experiments in the lyrical drama ( _Paracelsus, Pippa Passes_ ), the idyll (\"Dora,\" \"Morte d'Arthur\"), and the sui generis historical epic form of _Sordello_ , during the 1830s Tennyson and Browning arrived independently at the first recognizably modern dramatic monologues: \"St. Simeon Stylites\" (1842; written in 1833) and the paired poems of 1837 that we now know as \"Johannes Agricola in Meditation\" and \"Porphyria's Lover.\" These early monologues were not only highly accomplished pieces; within the lyrical climate of the day they were implicitly polemical as well. The ascetic St. Simeon atop his pillar, exposed to the merciless assault of the elements, stands for an exalted subjectivity ironically demystified by the historical contextualization that is the generic privilege of the dramatic monologue and, I shall argue, one of its indispensable props in the construction of character. Browning's imagination was less symbolically brooding than Tennyson's and more historically alert, and he launched his dramatic monologues with speakers whose insanities were perversions, but recognizably versions, of the twin wellheads of the lyrical current that had come down to the nineteenth century from the Reformation and the Renaissance. The historical figure Johannes Agricola is an antinomian Protestant lying against time as if his soul depended on it; and Porphyria's lover, though fictive, may be regarded as a gruesomely literal-minded Petrarch bent on possessing the object of his desire. Each of Browning's speakers, like St. Simeon Stylites, utters a monomaniacal manifesto that shows subjectivity up by betraying its situation in a history. The utterance of each stands revealed not as poetry, in Mill's terms, but as eloquence, a desperately concentric rhetoric whereby, to adapt Yeats's formulation from \"Ego Dominus Tuus,\" the sentimentalist deceives himself.\n\nWhat gets \"overheard\" in these inaugural Victorian monologues is history dramatically replayed. The charmed circle of lyric finds itself included by the kind of historical particularity that lyric genres exclude by design, and in the process readers find themselves unsettlingly historicized and contextualized as well. The extremity of each monologist's authoritative assertion awakens in us with great force the counter-authority of communal norms, through a reductio ad absurdum of the very lyric premises staked out in Mill's essays, most remarkably in a sentence that Mill deleted when republishing \"What is Poetry?\": \"That song has always seemed to us like the lament of a prisoner in a solitary cell, ourselves listening, unseen in the next.\"3 (\"Ourselves\"? How many of us in that next cell? Does one eavesdrop in company? Or is that not called going to the theater, and is Mill's overheard poetry not dramatic eloquence after all?) Tennyson's and Browning's first monologues imply that Mill's position was already its own absurd reduction \u2013 a reduction not just of the options for poetry but of the prerogatives of the unimprisoned self, which ideas like Mill's have been underwriting, as teachers of undergraduate poetry classes can attest, for the better part of two centuries. Tennyson and Browning wanted to safeguard the self's prerogatives, and to that extent they shared the aims of contemporary lyrical devotees. But both poets' earliest dramatic monologues compassed those aims through a more subtle and eloquent design than the prevailing creed would admit: a design that might preserve the self on the far side of, and as a result of, a contextual dismissal of attenuated Romantic lyricism and its merely soulful claims; a design that might, as Browning was to put it in the peroration to _The Ring and the Book_ (1869), \"Suffice the eye and save the soul beside\" (XII.863). St. Simeon, Johannes, and Porphyria's lover emerge through their monologues as characters: poorer souls than they like to fancy themselves but selves for all that, de- and re-constructed selves strung on the tensions of their texts.\n\n#  **II**\n\nBoth Tennyson and Browning proceeded at once to refine their generic discoveries, though they proceeded in quite different directions. While Tennyson kept the dramatic monologue in his repertoire, he turned to it relatively seldom; and with such memorable ventures as \"Ulysses\" and \"Tithonus\" he in effect relyricized the genre, running its contextualizing devices in reverse and stripping his speakers of personality in order to facilitate a lyric drive. Browning, on the other hand, moved his dramatic monologues in the direction of mimetic particularity, and the poems he went on to write continued to incorporate or \"overhear\" lyric in the interests of character-formation. \"Johannes Agricola\" and \"Porphyria's Lover\" had been blockbusters, comparatively single-minded exercises in the construction of a lurid character through the fissuring of an apparently monolithic ego. The gain in verisimilitude of Browning's later monologues is a function of the nerve with which he learned to reticulate the sort of pattern these strong but simple monologues had first knit. The degree of intricacy varies widely, but the generic design remains the same. Character in the Browningesque dramatic monologue emerges as an interference effect between opposed yet mutually informative discourses: between an historical, narrative, metonymic text and a symbolic, lyrical, metaphoric text that adjoins it and jockeys with it for authority. While each text urges its own priority, the ensemble works according to the paradoxical logic of the originary supplement: the alien voices of history and of feeling come to constitute and direct one another. Typically Browning's monologists tell the story of a yearning after the condition of lyric, a condition that is itself in turn unimaginable except as the object of, or pretext for, the yearning that impels the story plotted against it.4\n\nWhat we acknowledge as the \"life\" of a dramatic monologue thus emerges through the interdependence of its fictive autobiography and its _\u00e9lan vital_ , each of which stands as the other's reason for being, and neither of which can stand alone without succumbing to one of two deconstructive ordeals that beset character in this genre (and that arguably first beset the self during the century in which this genre arose). The first ordeal lies through history and threatens to resolve the speaking self into its constituent influences, to unravel character by exposing it as merely a tissue of affiliations. At the same time, character in the dramatic monologue runs an equal but opposite risk from what certain Romantic poetics and hermeneutics would assert to be the self's very place of strength and what we have been calling, after Mill, the privacy of lyric. A kind of sublime idiocy, lyric isolation from context distempers character and robs it of contour, as Socrates said long ago in the _Ion_ (lyric poets are out of their minds), and as Sharon Cameron, with an eye on Greek and earlier origins of lyric, has said again more recently: \"the lyric is a departure not only from temporality but also from the finite constrictions of identity.\"5 We find this lyric departure superbly dramatized in the valediction of Tennyson's Ulysses, that most marginal of characters, whose discourse poises itself at \"the utmost bound of human thought\" (l. 32). Insofar as we find Ulysses transgressing that bound \u2013 as for me he does in the final paragraph, with its address to a bewilderingly mythical crew of Ithacan mariners and with the concomitant evanescence of its \"I\" \u2013 we find Tennyson trangressing the generic boundary of dramatic monologue as well.\n\nOne good reason why the dramatic monologue is associated with Browning's name rather than with Tennyson's, who technically got to it first, is that in Browning the lyrical flight from narrative, temporality, and identity appears through a characteristic, and characterizing, resistance to its allure. Browning's Ulysses, had he invented one, would speak while bound to the mast of a ship bound elsewhere; his life would take its bearing from what he heard the Sirens sing, and their music would remain an unheard melody suffusing his monologue without rising to the surface of utterance.6 Such a plot of lyricism resisted would mark his poem as a dramatic monologue, which we should be justified in reading as yet another allegory of the distinctive turn on Romantic lyricism that perennially recreated Browning's poetical character. \"R. B. a poem\" was the title he gave in advance to this allegorical testament, in the fine letter, virtually an epistolary monologue, that he addressed on the subject to Elizabeth Barrett; and by the time of \"One Word More\" (1855) he could proudly affirm his wife's lyricism as the privately silencing otherness his public character was to be known by.7\n\nDramatic monologue in the Browning tradition is, in a word, anything but monological. It represents modern character as a quotient, a ratio of history and desire, a function of the division of the modern mind against itself. Our apprehension of character as thus constituted is a Romantic affair; in Jerome Christensen's apt phrase for the processing of the \"lyrical drama\" in Romanticism, it is a matter of learning to \"read the differentials.\" As a sampling of the dozens of poetry textbooks published in recent decades will confirm, the dramatic monologue is our genre of genres for training in how to read between the lines \u2013 a hackneyed but valuable phrase that deserves a fresh hearing.8 In the reading of a dramatic monologue we do not so much scrutinize the ellipses and blank spaces of the text as we people those openings by attending to the overtones of the different discourses that flank them. Between the lines, we read in a no-man's-land the notes whose intervals engender character. Perhaps the poet of the dramatic monologue gave a thought to the generic framing of his own art when he had the musician Abt Vogler (1864) marvel \"That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star\" (l. 52). The quantum leap from text to fictive persona (the dramatic \"star\" of a monologue) is no less miraculous for being, like Abt Vogler's structured improvisation, \"framed,\" defined and sustained as a put-up job. That such a process of character-construction tends to elude our received means of exegesis is a contributing cause for the depression of Browning's stock among the New Critics. But one way to begin explicating a dramatic monologue in the Browning tradition is to identify a discursive shift, a moment at which either of the genre's constitutive modes \u2013 historical line or punctual lyric spot \u2013 breaks into the other.\n\n#  **III**\n\nSince the premier writer of dramatic monologues was, as usual in such matters, the most ingenious, it is difficult to find uncomplicated instances in Browning that are also representative. We might sample first a passage from \"Fra Lippo Lippi\" (1855), a sizeable blank-verse monologue that happens to contain lyric literally in the form of _stornelli_ , lyrical catches Englished in italics that Browning's artist monk emits at odd intervals during the autobiography he is improvising for the night watch. In the following lines Lippo is taking off those critics whom his new painterly realism has disturbed:\n\n\"It's art's decline, my son!  \nYou're not of the true painters, great and old;  \nBrother Angelico's the man, you'll find;  \nBrother Lorenzo stands his single peer:  \nFag on at flesh, you'll never make the third!\"  \n _Flower o' the pine_ ,  \n _You keep your mistr . . . manners, and I'll stick to mine!_  \nI'm not the third, then: bless us, they must know!  \nDon't you think they're the likeliest to know,  \nThey with their Latin?\n\n(ll. 233\u201342)\n\nThe gap for interpretation to enter is, of course, the middle of the second italicized line, marked typographically by ellipsis and prosodically by the wreckage of the embedded snatch of song. Amid Lippo's tale of the modern artist's oppression by his superiors, by religious and representational traditions, and by the Latin learning that backs up both (poetry as overseen?), the apparently spontaneous individual talent bursts forth in a rebellious chant \u2013 which is then itself interrupted by a reminder, also apparently spontaneous, of Lippo's answerability to the authorities right in front of him. Lippo's lyric flower breeds a canker: the poetry we and the police thought we were overhearing turns out to be, through versatile revision or instant overdubbing, a rhetorically canny performance. Or, if we take a larger view, it turns out to have been rhetoric all along, Lippo's premeditated means of affirming solidarity with the unlettered night watch by ruefully policing his own speech in advance and incorporating this police action into the larger speech act that is his monologue.\n\nThe passage is intensely artificial yet intensely realistic, and we should note that its success does not rely on our deciding whether the monologist has forecast his occasion or stumbled upon it. The twist of the lyrical line against itself nets a speaking subject who is tethered to circumstances and, for that very reason, is anything but tongue-tied. Here as throughout the Browningesque monologue, character is not unfolded to comprehension but enfolded in a text that draws us in. Even after nearly four hundred lines we do not grasp Lippo's character as an essence and know what he is; but if we have negotiated the text we know how he does. In the terms of the passage in question, we know his _manners_ , not least his manner of covering up his _mistr_. . . . Lippo's character arises, in the differentials between vitality and circumstances, as a way of life, a mazing text, a finely realized, idiosyncratic instance of a generic method.\n\nA similarly punctuated digression from story, or transgression into lyric, occurs at the center of Browning's most famous monologue, \"My Last Duchess\" (1842):\n\nShe had  \nA heart \u2013 how shall I say? \u2013 too soon made glad,  \nToo easily impressed; she liked whate'er  \nShe looked on, and her looks went everywhere.  \nSir, 't was all one! My favour at her breast,  \nThe dropping of the daylight in the West,  \nThe bough of cherries some officious fool  \nBroke in the orchard for her, the white mule  \nShe rode with round the terrace \u2013 all and each  \nWould draw from her alike the approving speech,  \nOr blush, at least. She thanked men, \u2013 good! but thanked  \nSomehow \u2013 I know not how \u2013 as if she ranked  \nMy gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name  \nWith anybody's gift.\n\n(ll. 21\u201334)\n\nThe framing hesitations of \"How shall I say?\" and \"I know not how\" may or may not come under the Duke's rhetorical control; but a comparable tic or stammer invades his discourse more subtly with the appositional style of the middle lines, which do here with syntax the work done otherwise in Fra Lippo's _stornelli_. Halfway through the monologue, these lines constitute a lyrical interlude around which the Duke's despotic narrative may be seen to circle, with a predatory envy that escapes his posture of condescension. Anaphora and grammatical suspension, time-honored refuges of lyric, harbor recurrent images of the daily and seasonal cycle, of natural affection, and of sexual generation that not only contradict the Duke's potent affiliation with art, culture, and domination but show these contradictions within the text to be contradictions within the Duke. Or rather, to discard the figuration of inside and outside that dramatic monologue at its best asks us to do without, it is these textual contradictions that constitute the Duke's character. The polymorphous perversity he here attributes to his last Duchess is as much an attribute of his own character as is the different, monomaniacal perversity with which he has put a stop to her egalitarian smiles. Each perversity so turns on the other as to knot the text up into that essential illusion we call character. Hence the Duke's characteristic inconsistency in objecting to the \"officious fool\" who, in breaking cherries for the Duchess, was not breaking ranks at all but merely executing his proper \"office\" in the Duke's hierarchical world. Hence, too, the undecidable ambiguity of \"My favour at her breast\": the phrase oscillates between suggestions of a caress naturally given and of an heirloom possessively bestowed, and its oscillation is what makes the star of dramatic character shine. Such a semantic forking of the ways, like the plotting of spontaneity against calculation in Fra Lippo's \" _mistr . . . manners_ \" revision, blocks reference in one direction, in order to refer us to the textual production of character instead.\n\nBecause in grammatical terms it is a paratactic pocket, an insulated deviation from the syntax of narrative line, the Duke's recounting of his Duchess's easy pleasures wanders from the aims of the raconteur and foregrounds the speech impediments that make her story his monologue.9 Moreover, the Duke's listing is also a listening, a harkening after the kind of spontaneous lyric voice that he, like the writer of dramatic monologues, comes into his own by imperfectly renouncing. Lyric, in the dramatic monologue, is what you cannot have and what you cannot forget \u2013 think of the arresting trope Browning invented for his aging poet Cleon (1855), \"One lyric woman, in her crocus vest\" (l. 15) \u2013 and as an organizing principle for the genre, lyric becomes present through a recurrent and partial overruling. This resisted generic nostalgia receives further figuration intertextually, in \"My Last Duchess\" and many another monologue, with the clustering of allusions at moments of lyric release. Here \"The dropping of the daylight in the West\" falls into Browning's text from major elegies, or refusals to mourn, by Milton (\"Lycidas\"), Wordsworth (\"Tintern Abbey,\" \"Intimations\" ode), and Keats (\"To Autumn\"); and the Duchess on her white mule so recalls Spenser's lyrically selfless Una from the opening of _The Faerie Queene_ as to cast the Duke as an archimage dubiously empowered.\n\nAmid the Duke's eloquence the overhearing of poetry, in this literary-historical sense of allusion to prior poems, underscores the choral dissolution that lurks in lyric voice. Furthermore, it reinstates the checking of such dissolution as the mark of the individual self \u2013 of the dramatic speaker and also of the poet who, in writing him up, defines himself in opposition to lyrical orthodoxy and emerges as a distinct \"I,\" a name to conjure with against the ominous: \"This grew; I gave commands\" (l. 45). Toward the end of his career, in \"House\" (1876) Browning would in his own voice make more explicit this engagement with the literary past and would defend literary personality, against Wordsworth on the sonnet, as just the antithesis of unmediated sincerity: \" _' \"With this same key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart_ ,\" once more!'/Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!\" (ll. 38\u201340). Poetry of the unlocked heart, far from displaying character in Browning's terms, undoes it: Browning reads his chief precursor in the English dramatic line as a type of the objective poet, the poetical character known through a career-long objection to the sealed intimacies of the poem \u00e0 _clef_.\n\n#  **IV**\n\nIn 1831 Arthur Hallam gave a promising description of the best of Tennyson's _Poems, Chiefly Lyrical_ (1830) as \"a graft of the lyric on the dramatic.\" The Victorian dramatic monologue that soon ensued from these beginnings was likewise a hybrid genre, a hardy offshoot of the earlier hybrid genre in which the first Romantics had addressed the problem of how to write the long modern poem by making modern civilization and its discontents, or longing and its impediments, into the conditions for the prolonging and further hearing of poetry: the \"greater Romantic lyric.\" The genre M. H. Abrams thus christened some years ago has by now achieved canonical status, but a reconsideration of its given name from the standpoint of the dramatic monologue may help us save it from assimilation to orthodox lyricism by reminding us that the genre Abrams called \"greater\" was not more-lyrical-than-lyric but rather more-than-lyrical. Despite a still high tide of assertions to the contrary, the works of the first generations of Romantic poets were on the whole much less lyrical than otherwise.10 Once we conceive the Romantic tradition accordingly as a perennial intermarriage, which is to say infighting, of poetic kinds, we can situate the Victorian dramatic monologue as an eminently Romantic form. In correcting the literary-historical picture we can begin, too, to see how fin-de-si\u00e8cle and modernist reactions to the Browningesque monologue have conditioned the writing, reading, and teaching of poetry, literary theory, and literary history in our own time.\n\nAt the beginning of Browning's century Coleridge remarked, \"A poem of any length neither can be, nor ought to be, all poetry.\" By the end of the century Oscar Wilde, looking askance at Browning's achievement, took up Coleridge's distinction, but with a difference: \"If he can only get his music by breaking the strings of his lute, he breaks them, and they snap in discord. . . . Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.\"11 The difference between Coleridge's and Wilde's ideas of what a poem should be is in large part a difference that the dramatic monologue had made in nineteenth-century poetry, a difference Browning inscribed into literary history by inscribing it into the characteristic ratios of his texts. Wilde and others at the threshold of modernism wanted Mill's pure lyricism but wanted it even purer. And through an irony of literary history that has had far-reaching consequences for our century, the Browningesque dramatic monologue gave them what they wanted. Symbolist and imagist writers could extract from such texts as _Pauline_ and \"Fra Lippo Lippi\" \u2013 and also, to sketch in the fuller picture, from the Tennysonian idyll and most sophisticated Victorian novels \u2013 lyrical gems as finely cut as anything from the allegedly naive eras, Romantic or Elizabethan, upon which they bestowed such sentimental if creative regard. The hybrid dramatic monologue, as a result of its aim to make the world and subjectivity safe for each other in the interests of character, had proved a sturdy grafting stock for flowers of lyricism; and the governing pressures of the genre, just because they governed so firmly, had bred hothouse lyric varieties of unsurpassed intensity. These lyrical implants it was left to a new generation of rhymers, scholars, and anthologists to imitate, defend, and excerpt in a newly chastened lyric poetry, a severely purist poetics, and a surprisingly revisionist history of poetry.12\n\nThe fin-de-si\u00e8cle purism of Wilde, Yeats, Arthur Symons, and others was polemically canted against the example of Browning; yet it remained curiously, even poignantly, in his debt. Consider, for example, Symons's resumption of a rhetoric very like Mill's, as he praises Verlaine in _The Symbolist Movement_ (1899) for \"getting back to nature itself\": \"From the moment when his inner life may be said to have begun, he was occupied with the task of an unceasing confession, in which one seems to overhear him talking to himself.\"13 The pivotally wishful \"unceasing,\" which distinguishes Symons's formulation from Mill's, also betrays a kind of elegiac overcompensation. Mill had dissolved audience in order to overhear poetry as if from an adjacent cell; Symons, writing at an appreciable historical remove from the achievements of Verlaine, is by contrast trapped in time. Symons's overhearing of poetry resembles less Mill's eavesdropping than the belated Browningesque audition of a poignant echo, and the symbolist movement he hopes to propel is fed by an overwhelming nostalgia that creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates. The nostalgia for lyric that throbs through the influential versions of the poetic past Symons and his contemporaries assembled sprang from a range of cultural causes we are only beginning to understand adequately.14 But we can observe here that the rhetorical pattern into which their lyrically normed historiography fell was precisely that of the poetic genre that had preeminently confronted lyricism with history in their century: the dramatic monologue. It is as if what Symons championed as the \"revolt against exteriority, against rhetoric,\"15 having repudiated the \"impure\" Browning tradition in principle, was condemned to reiterate its designs in writing. The symbolist and imagist schools wanted to read in their French and English antecedents an expurgated lyric that never was on page or lip. It was, rather, a generic back-formation, a textual constituent they isolated from the dramatic monologue and related nineteenth-century forms; and the featureless poems the fin-de-si\u00e8cle purists produced by factoring out the historical impurities that had ballasted these forms are now fittingly, with rare exceptions, works of little more than historical interest.\n\nVirtually each important modernist poet in English wrote such poems for a time; each became an important poet by learning to write otherwise and to exploit the internal otherness of the dramatic monologue. When the lyrical bubble burst within its bell jar, poetry became modern once again in its return to the historically responsive and dialogical mode that Browning, Tennyson, and others had brought forward from the Romantics.16 And upon the establishment of Yeats's mask, Pound's personae, Frost's monologues and idylls, and Eliot's impersonal poetry, it became a point of dogma among sophisticated readers that every poem dramatized a speaker who was not the poet. \"Once we have dissociated the speaker of the lyric from the personality of the poet, even the tiniest lyric reveals itself as drama.\"17 We recognize this declaration as dogma by the simple fact that we \u2013 at least most of us \u2013 had to learn it, and had to trade for it older presuppositions about lyric sincerity that we had picked up in corners to which New Critical light had not yet pierced. The new dogma took (and in my teaching experience it takes still) with such ease that it is worth asking why it did (and does), and whether as professors of poetry we should not have second thoughts about promulgating an approach that requires so painless an adjustment of the subjectivist norms we profess to think outmoded.\n\nThe conversion educated readers now routinely undergo from lyrical to dramatic expectations about the poems they study recapitulates the history of Anglo-American literary pedagogy during our century, the middle two decades of which witnessed a great awakening from which we in our turn are trying to awaken again. Until about 1940 teachers promoted poetry appreciation in handbooks and anthologies that exalted lyric as \"the supreme expression of strong emotion . . . the very real but inexplicable essence of poetry,\" and that throned this essential emotion in the equally essential person of the poet: \"Lyrical poetry arouses emotion because it expresses the author's feeling.\"18 By 1960 the end of instruction had shifted from appreciating to understanding poetry, and to this end a host of experts marched readers past the author of a poem to its dramatic speaker. John Crowe Ransom's dictum that the dramatic situation is \"almost the first head under which it is advisable to approach a poem for understanding\" had by the 1960s advanced from advice to prescription. In Laurence Perrine's widely adopted _Sound and Sense_ the first order of business is \"to assume always that the speaker is someone other than the poet himself.\" For Robert Scholes in _Elements of Poetry_ the speaker is the most elementary of assumptions: \"In beginning our approach to a poem we must make some sort of tentative decision about who the speaker is, what his situation is, and whom he seems to be addressing.\"19\n\nThat such forthright declarations conceal inconsistencies appears in the instructions of Robert W. Boynton and Maynard Mack, whose _Introduction to the Poem_ promotes the familiar dramatic principle but pursues its issues to the verge of a puzzling conclusion. The authors begin dogmatically enough: \"When we start looking closely at the dramatic character of poetry, we find that we have to allow for a more immediate speaker than the poet himself, one whom the poet has imagined speaking the poem, as an actor speaks a part written for him by a playwright.\" But then Boynton and Mack, with a candor unusual in the handbook genre, proceed to a damaging concession that dissolves the insubstantial pageant of the dramatic enterprise into thin air: \"In some instances this imagined speaker is in no way definite or distinctive; he is simply a voice.\" (When is a speaker not a speaker? When he is a \"voice,\" nay, an Arnoldian \"lyric cry.\") With this last sentence Boynton and Mack offer an all but lyrical intimation of the mystification inherent in the critical fiction of the speaker and suggest its collusion with the mysteries of the subjectivist norm it was designed to supplant.20 It may well be easier to indicate these mysteries than to solve them; what matters is that with our New Critical guides we seem to have experienced as little difficulty in negotiating the confusions entailed by the fiction of the speaker as we have experienced in converting ourselves and our students from lyrically expressive to dramatically objective norms for reading.\n\nWhy should we have made this conversion, and why do we continue to encourage it? Why should our attempts at understanding poetry through a New Criticism rely on a fiction that baffles the understanding? These are related questions, and their answers probably lie in considerations of pedagogical expediency. One such consideration must be the sheer hard work of bringing culturally stranded students into contact with the historical particularities from which a given poem arises. Life (and courses) being short, art being long, and history being longer still, the fiction of the speaker at least brackets the larger problem of context so as to define a manageable classroom task for literary studies. To such institutional considerations as these, which have been attracting needed attention of late, I would add a consideration more metaphysical in kind. The fiction of the speaker, if it removes from the study of poetry the burden, and the dignity, of establishing contact with history, puts us in compensatory contact with the myth of unconditioned subjectivity we have inherited from Mill and Symons in spite of ourselves. Through that late ceremony of critical innocence, the readerly imagination of a self, we modern readers have abolished the poet and set up the fictive speaker; and we have done so in order to boost the higher gains of an intersubjective recognition for which, in an increasingly mechanical age that can make Mill's look positively idyllic, we seem to suffer insatiable cultural thirst. The mastery of New Critical tools may offer in this light a sort of homeopathic salve, the application of a humanistic technology to technologically induced ills.\n\nThe thirst for intersubjective confirmation of the self, which has made the overhearing of a persona our principal means of understanding a poem, would I suspect be less strong if it did not involve a kind of bad faith about which Browning's Bishop Blougram (1855) had much to say: \"With me, faith means perpetual unbelief / Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot / Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe\" (ll. 666\u201368). The New Criticism of lyric poetry introduced into literary study an anxiety of textuality that was its legacy from the Higher Criticism of scripture a century before: anxiety over the tendency of texts to come loose from their origins into an anarchy that the New Critics half acknowledged and half sought to curb under the regime of a now avowedly fictive self, from whom a language on parole from its author might nonetheless issue as speech. What is poetry? Textuality a speaker owns. The old king of self-expressive lyricism is dead: Long live the Speaker King! At a king's ransom we thus secure our reading against the subversive textuality of what we read; or as another handbook from the 1960s puts it with clarity: \"So strong is the oral convention in poetry that, in the absence of contrary indications, we infer a voice and, though we know we are reading words on a page, create for and of ourselves an imaginary listener.\"21 Imaginative recreation \"for and of ourselves\" here depends upon our suppressing the play of the signifier beneath the hand of a convention \"so strong\" as to decree the \"contrary indications\" of textuality absent most of the time.\n\nDeconstructive theory and practice in the last decade have so directed our attention to the persistence of \"contrary indications\" that the doctrine espoused in my last citation no longer appears tenable. It seems incumbent upon us now to choose between intersubjective and intertextual modes of reading, between vindicating the self and saving the text. Worse, I fear, those of us who are both teachers and critics may have to make different choices according to the different positions in which we find ourselves \u2013 becoming by turns intertextual readers in the study and intersubjective readers in the classroom \u2013 in ways that not very fruitfully perpetuate a professional divide some latter-day Browning might well monologize upon. I wonder whether it must be so; and I am fortified in my doubts by the stubborn survival of the dramatic monologue, which began as a response to lyric isolationism, and which remains to mediate the rivalry between intersubjective appeal and intertextual rigor by situating the claims of each within the limiting context the other provides.\n\nIn its charactered life the dramatic monologue can help us put in their places critical reductions of opposite but complementary and perhaps even cognate kinds: on one hand, the transcendentally facesaving misprisions that poetry has received from Victorian romanticizers, Decadent purists, and New Critical impersonalists alike; on the other hand, the abysmal disfigurements of a deconstruction that would convert poetry's most beautiful illusion \u2013 the speaking presence \u2013 into a uniform textuality that is quite as \"purist,\" in its own way, as anything the nineteenth century could imagine. An exemplary teaching genre, the dramatic monologue can teach us, among other things, that while texts do not absolutely lack speakers, they do not simply have them either; they invent them instead as they go. Texts do not come from speakers, speakers come from texts. _Persona fit non nascitur_. To assume in advance that a poetic text proceeds from a dramatically situated speaker is to risk missing the play of verbal implication whereby character is engendered in the first place through colliding modes of signification; it is to read so belatedly as to arrive only when the party is over. At the same time, however, the guest the party convenes to honor, the ghost conjured by the textual machine, remains the articulate phenomenon we call character: a literary effect we neglect at our peril. For to insist that textuality is all and that the play of the signifier usurps the recreative illusion of character is to turn back at the threshold of interpretation, stopping our ears to both lyric cries and historical imperatives, and from our studious cells overhearing nothing. Renewed stress upon textuality as the basis for the Western written character is a beginning as important to the study of poetry now as it has been for over a century to the writing of dramatic monologues and to the modern tradition they can illuminate in both backward and forward directions. But textuality is only the beginning.\n\n#  **Notes**\n\n1 John Stuart Mill, _Essays on Poetry_ , ed. F. Parvin Sharpless (Columbia, S.C., 1976), pp. 12, 36. The quotations come from two essays of 1833, \"What is Poetry?\" and \"The Two Kinds of Poetry.\"\n\n2 Ideas like Mill's abound, for example, in Macaulay's 1825 essay \"Milton,\" in _Critical and Historical Essays_ (London, 1883): \"Analysis is not the business of the poet\" (p. 3); \"It is the part of the lyric poet to abandon himself, without reserve, to his own emotions\" (p. 6); \"It is just when Milton escapes from the shackles of the dialogue, when he is discharged from the labour of uniting two incongruous styles, when he is at liberty to indulge his choral raptures without reserve, that he rises even above himself (p. 8). Comparing Mill's writings with T. S. Eliot's \"The Three Voices of Poetry\" (1953), Elder Olson, _American Lyric Poems_ (New York, 1964), p. 2, concludes that \"the study of the question has not advanced much in over a hundred years.\" Olson's conclusion retains its force after two decades. See Barbara Hardy, _The Advantage of Lyric_ (Bloomington and London, 1977), p. 2: \"Lyric poetry thrives, then, on exclusions. It is more than usually opaque because it leaves out so much of the accustomed context and consequences of feeling that it can speak in a pure, lucid, and intense voice.\"\n\n3 _Essays on Poetry_ , p. 14.\n\n4 Genre theorists have often observed this distinction, though usually in honoring the exclusivity of lyric. For Babette Deutsch, _Potable Gold_ (New York, 1929), p. 21, the essential distinction lies between prose and poetry: \"The one resembles a man walking toward a definite goal; the other is like a man surrendering himself to contemplation, or to the experience of walking for its own sake. Prose has intention; poetry has intensity.\" According to Kenneth Burke, _A Grammar of Motives_ (1945; Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), p. 475, \" _The state of arrest_ in which we would situate the essence of lyric is not analogous to dramatic action at all, but is the dialectical counterpart of action.\" Olson, \"The Lyric,\" [ _PMLA_ ], 1 (1969), 65, says of lyrics that \"while they may contain within themselves a considerable narrative or dramatic portion, that portion is subordinate to the lyrical whole. . . . Once expression and address and colloquy become subservient to a further end as affecting their form as complete and whole in themselves, we have gone beyond the bounds of the lyric.\" For a recent view of Browning opposed to that of the present essay see David Bergman, \"Browning's Monologues and the Development of the Soul,\" _ELH_ , 47 (1980), 774: \"For Browning, historicity only prettifies a work. . . . History, the creation of a concrete setting, has never been a major focus for Browning.\" I would reply that history is indeed a major focus for Browning\u2014one of the two foci, to speak geometrically, that define his notoriously elliptical procedures.\n\n5 _Ion_ 534; Sharon Cameron, _Lyric Time_ (Baltimore and London, 1979), p. 208. See also the quirky Victorian theorist E. S. Dallas, _Poetics_ (London, 1852), p. 83: \"The outpourings of the lyric should spring from the law of unconsciousness. Personality or selfhood triumphs in the drama; the divine and all that is not Me triumphs in the lyric.\"\n\n6 Although Browning never wrote such a monologue, he glanced at its possibility in \"The Englishman in Italy\" (1845), with its vision of \"Those isles of the siren\" (l. 199) and its audition of a song \"that tells us / What life is, so clear\"; \"The secret they sang to Ulysses / When, ages ago, / He heard and he knew this life's secret /1 hear and I know\" (ll. 223 \u2013 27). Life's secret, needless to add, goes untold in Browning's text.\n\n7 Letter of 11 February 1845, in _Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845\u20131846_ , ed. Elvan Kintner, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 1:17.\n\n8 Jerome Christensen, \"'Thoughts That Do Often Lie too Deep for Tears': Toward a Romantic Concept of Lyrical Drama,\" _Wordsworth Circle_ , 12:1 (1981), 61. For an appropriately genealogical testimonial to the pedagogical virtues of the dramatic monologue see Ina Beth Sessions's postscript to \"The Dramatic Monologue,\" _PMLA_ , 62 (1947), 516n: \"One of the most interesting comments concerning the dramatic monologue was made by Dr. J. B. Wharey of the University of Texas in a letter to the writer on January 17, 1935: 'The dramatic monologue is, I think, one of the best forms of disciplinary reading \u2013 that is, to use the words of the late Professor Genung, \"reading pursued with the express purpose of feeding and stimulating inventive power.\"'\" Among the earliest systematic students of the genre in our century were elocution teachers; their professional pedigree broadly conceived goes back at least to Quintilian, who recommended exercises in impersonation _(prosopopoeia)_ as a means of imaginative discipline. See A. Dwight Culler, \"Monodrama and the Dramatic Monologue,\" _PMLA_ , 90 (1975). 368.\n\n9 David I. Masson, \"Vowel and Consonant Patterns in Poetry,\" in _Essays on the Language of Literature_ , ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levin (Boston, 1967), p. 3, observes that \"where lyrical feeling or sensuous description occurs in European poetry, there will usually be found patterns of vowels and consonants.\" For more general consideration of the linguistics of lyric, see Edward Stankiewicz, \"Poetic and Non-poetic Language in Their Interrelation,\" in _Poetics_ , ed. D. Davie et al. (Gravenhage, 1961), p. 17: \"Lyrical poetry presents the most interiorized form of poetic language, in which the linguistic elements are most closely related and internally motivated.\" Note that Stankiewicz, following the Russian Formalists, here refers not to psychological inwardness but to the nonreferential, auto-mimetic interiority of language itself.\n\n10 Arthur Hallam, \"On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson,\" in _The Writings of Arthur Hallam_ , ed. T. Vail Motter (New York, 1943), p. 197; M. H. Abrams, \"Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,\" in _From Sensibility to Romanticism_ , ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York, 1965), pp. 527\u201360. On the Romantic mixture of lyric with other genres see Cameron, _Lyric Time_ , p. 217; Christensen, \"'Thoughts,'\" pp. 60\u20132; Robert Langbaum, \"Wordsworth's Lyrical Characterizations,\" _Studies in Romanticism_ , 21 (1982), 319\u201339. Langbaum's earlier book _The Poetry of Experience_ (1957; rpt. New York, 1963), which places the dramatic monologue within Romantic tradition, should be consulted, as should two responses that appeared, almost concurrently, two decades later: Culler, \"Monodrama,\" and Ralph W. Rader, \"The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms,\" _Critical Inquiry_ , 3 (1976), 131\u201351.\n\n11 Coleridge is quoted in Frederick A. Pottle, _The Idiom of Poetry_ (Ithaca, 1941), p. 82. Wilde's comments occur in \"The Critic as Artist\" (1890), in _Literary Criticism of Oscar Wilde_ , ed. Stanley Weintraub (Lincoln, Neb., 1968), p. 202.\n\n12 Victorian writers were divided as to the chronological priority of lyric over other genres. For Dallas, as for Mill, \"Lyrics are the first-fruits of art\" (p. 245), while Walter Bagehot contends that \"poetry begins in Impersonality\" and that lyric represents a later refinement (\"Hartley Coleridge\" [1852], in _Collected Works_ , ed. Norman St. John-Stevas, I [Cambridge, Mass., 1965], pp. 159\u201360). As to the normative status of lyric, however, the later nineteenth century had little doubt. Summaries and bibliographical aids may be found in Francis B. Gummere, _The Beginnings of Poetry_ (New York, 1901), p. 147; Charles Mill Gayley and Benjamin Putnam Kurtz, _Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism_ (Boston, 1920), p. 122; W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, _Literary Criticism: A Short History_ (New York, 1966), pp. 433, 751\u20132. For representative belletristic histories of poetry from a nostalgic, fin-de-si\u00e8cle perspective see John Addington Symonds, _Essays Speculative and Suggestive_ (London, 1893), pp. 393 ff.; Edmund Gosse, \"Introduction\" to _Victorian Songs: Lyrics of the Affections and Nature_ , ed. E. H. Garrett (Boston, 1895); and Arthur Symons, _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_ (1899; rpt. New York, 1958) and _The Romantic Movement in English Poetry_ (New York, 1909). On the influence of F. T. Palgrave's _Golden Treasury_ (1861; rev. 1981), an anthology that \"established, retroactively and for the future, the tradition of the English lyric,\" see Christopher Clausen, _The Place of Poetry_ (Lexington, 1981), p. 67.\n\n13 Symons, _The Symbolist Movement_ , p. 49.\n\n14 Marxian approaches now offer the most promising and comprehensive explanations of the fortunes of lyric as a product of industrial culture, yet recently published Marxian analyses evaluate the social functions of lyric very differently. For Theodor W. Adorno, \"Lyric Poetry and Society\" (1957; trans. Bruce Mayo, _Telos_ , 20 [Summer 1974], 56\u201371), \"The subjective being that makes itself heard in lyric poetry is one which defines and expresses itself as something opposed to the collective and the realm of objectivity\" (p. 59); in contrast, Hugh N. Grady, \"Marxism and the Lyric,\" _Contemporary Literature_ , 22 (1981), 555, argues that \"the lyric has become a specialized, though not exclusive, genre of Utopian vision in the modern era.\"\n\n15 Symons, _The Symbolist Movement_ , p. 65.\n\n16 Olson, \"The Lyric,\" p. 65, in distinguishing the \"verbal acts\" of lyric from those of more elaborated forms, himself acts fatally on the strength of a simile: \"The difference, if I may use a somewhat homely comparison, is that between a balloon inflated to its proper shape, nothing affecting it but the internal forces of the gas, and a balloon subjected to the pressure of external forces which counteract the internal.\" But a balloon affected only by internal forces (i.e., a balloon in a vacuum) would not inflate but explode. That the \"proper shape\" of a poem, as of a balloon, arises not from sheer afflatus but as a compromise between \"internal\" and \"external\" forces is precisely my point about the framing of the dramatic monologue \u2013 as it is, I think, the dramatic monologue's (deflationary) point about the lyric.\n\n17 Wimsatt and Brooks, _Literary Criticism_ , p. 675; see also Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, _Understanding Poetry_ (1938; rev. ed. New York, 1950), p. liv. Don Geiger, _The Dramatic Impulse in Modern Poetics_ (Baton Rouge, 1967), pp. 85\u201395, provides a capable overview of the persona poetics of the New Criticism.\n\n18 Oswald Doughty, _English Lyric in the Age of Reason_ (London, 1922), p. xv; Walter Blair and W. K. Chandler, eds., _Approaches to Poetry_ (New York, 1935), p. 250.\n\n19 Ransom is quoted in William Elton, _A Glossary of the New Criticism_ (Chicago, 1949), p. 38. _Sound and Sense_ , 2nd ed. (New York, 1963), p. 21; _Elements of Poetry_ (New York, 1969), pp. 11\u201312.\n\n20 Robert W. Boynton and Maynard Mack, _Introduction to the Poem_ (New York, 1965), p. 24. On p. 45, to complete the circuit, the authors equate the \"voice\" with \"the poet.\" They thus return us through a backstage exit to Clement Wood's definition of lyric in _The Craft of Poetry_ (New York, 1929), p. 189, as \"the form in which the poet utters his own dramatic monolog.\" Compare the dramatic metaphor in Benedetto Croce's 1937 _Encyclopedia Britannica_ article on \"Aesthetic\": \"The lyric . . . is an objectification in which the ego sees itself on the stage, narrates itself, and dramatizes itself\" (quoted in Wimsatt and Brooks, _Literary Criticism_ , p. 510). For Geoffrey Crump, _Speaking Poetry_ (London, 1953), p. 59, the reverse seems true: \"an element of the dramatic is present in all lyrical poetry, because the speaker is to some extent impersonating the poet.\"\n\n21 Jerome Beaty and William H. Matchett, _Poetry: From Statement to Meaning_ (New York, 1965), p. 103.\n\nTucker, Herbert F. 1985. \"Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric.\" In _Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism_ , edited by Chaviva Ho\u0161ek and Patricia Parker, pp. 226\u201343. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Reproduced with permission of Cornell University Press.\n\n# 6\n\n# Matthew Arnold's Gipsies\n\n#  _Intertextuality and the New Historicism_\n\nAntony Harrison\n\n _In spite of his immense wisdom and his mysterious breadth, [the Gypsy] had a human weight, an earthly condition that kept him involved in the miniscule problems of daily life._\n\nGabriel Garcia Marquez, _One Hundred Years of Solitude_\n\n _Byron found our nation, after its long and victorious struggle with revolutionary France, fixed in a system of established facts and dominant ideas which revolted him. The mental bondage of the most powerful part of our nation, of its strong middle class, to a narrow and false system of this kind is what we call British Philistinism. That bondage is unbroken to this hour . . . ._\n\n_. . . [But] as the inevitable breakup of the old order comes, as the English middle class slowly awakens from its intellectual sleep of two centuries, as our actual present world, to which this sleep has condemned us, shows itself more clearly, \u2013 our world of an aristocracy materialised and null, a middle class purblind and hideous, a lower class crude and brutal, \u2013 we shall turn our eyes again . . . upon this passionate and dauntless soldier of a forlorn hope._\n\nMatthew Arnold, \"Byron\" (1881)\n\nIn l88l Matthew Arnold could still identify with Byron as a poet, gipsy, an outcast wandering Europe and writing verses in futile rebellion against the values and behavior of the social class of England that had produced him. But Arnold's image is, as we all know, a sentimental idealization of the real Byron, and Arnold's implicit identification with him is equally sentimental, if not wholly disingenuous. Approaching the age of sixty, Arnold had served two five-year terms as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, was only three years away from the Chief Inspectorship of Schools, and just two from a Civil List Pension given \"in public recognition of service to the poetry and literature of England.\" With a score of influential books behind him, Matthew Arnold had become a public institution, more of a myth than a man. Yet his identification with the position of social rebel dates from his earliest days. Park Honan describes Arnold passing his fourteenth year (the year he first read Byron) \"in the grandest juvenile defiance of the fact that he was an Arnold.\"1 His rebellious inclinations, notorious during his Oxford years, were never quelled but profitably channeled as he aged. By consistently challenging the dominant (materialist and spiritually barren) ideologies of his era, he gradually emerged as the preeminent intellectual authority of late Victorian England.\n\nBy this account it is perhaps unsurprising that a central, indeed mythic figure in Arnold's poetry of 1843 to 1866 is the gipsy, a cultural outsider. In \"To a Gipsy Child by the Sea-Shore\" (begun in 1843 or 1844), \"Resignation\" (begun in 1843), \"The Scholar-Gipsy\" (1853), and his great elegy \"Thyrsis\" (1866), varied but prominent images of gipsies take on totemic value. These figures have more than merely personal and temperamental significance for Arnold and his poetry. They serve him, ultimately, as crucial ideological tropes, especially insofar as they exploit conventional stereotypes of the gipsies, who were coming increasingly under public scrutiny at mid century. As is clear from the first appearance of a gipsy figure in his work, Arnold imbued these cultural outcasts with a special burden of intertextual and philosophical significance. Investigating the historical and literary contexts surrounding the production of Arnold's poems that feature images of gipsies provides a partial set of answers to the kind of question a new historicist critic might well ask but that seems not to have occurred to commentators with other theoretical orientations: \"Why gipsies?\"3 Exploring the implications of those contexts using new historicist strategies (which I shall describe shortly) reveals that a gipsy trope operates throughout Arnold's cultural criticism, as well as his poetry, to position and define him as a writer whose power \u2013 like that of Byron \u2013 accrues in part from the equivocal quality of his professed estrangement from a society he, unlike Byron, desires not to escape but to transform. Arnold's poetic assaults on the false values of that society begin with a challenge to its most formidable literary titan from the 1840s, William Wordsworth, and quickly proceed to capitalize on the burgeoning popular interest in gipsies during the 1850s and 1860s.\n\n#  **The New Historicism**\n\nJust over two decades ago, \"the structuralist controversy\" unsettled the world of academic literary studies in this country. A decade later the powerful influence of what had previously been an exclusively European linguistic, philosophical, and critical renaissance was visible here as well. The \"controversy\" resolved itself into a growing tradition of competition among theoretical schools and of debate about the value of poststructuralist literary theory. This state of affairs was disrupted, however, by an unexpected development: early in the 1980s \"the new historicism\" emerged as a critical methodology. Practitioners of this revisionist form of historical literary scholarship, especially in Renaissance and Romantic studies, began formulating theoretical grounds for their work. Prominent among them were Louis Montrose, Stephen Greenblatt, and Jerome McGann, whose theoretical and practical criticism was so original and provocative that it changed fundamental ways of thinking about the social and political operations of literature. The effectiveness of their work is apparent: new historicist citicism has proliferated within the last five years in all areas of literary analysis.4 In his 1988 _SEL_ survey of the year's work in nineteenth-century literature, David Riede could thus assert the \"triumph of the New Historicism,\" apparently without fear of contradiction.5 As a result of this methodological \"victory,\" however, the new historicism no longer remains a unitary theoretical phenomenon (and, in fact, it never was one). If publications are to serve as an index, a great variety of new historicisms are now being successfully practiced throughout Anglo-American critical circles.6\n\nDespite such variety, it is possible to hazard a few generalizations. New historicist criticism attempts to refigure the socio-cultural field in which particular literary works were produced, resituating these works in relation not only to other texts (canonical and non-canonical) in a variety of genres, but also in relation to contemporaneous socio-political institutions and events, as well as discursive and non-discursive practices.7 Attention to previously ignored historical particulars surrounding the production and/or reception of a literary work can suggest the kinds of issues or questions the work appeared to respond to at the moment of its composition or publication. Such particulars might also demonstrate how the work intervened not only in ongoing disputes and struggles for dominance in the arena of literary activity, but also in the larger social, political, or cultural debates of the day.\n\nIn refiguring a particular socio-cultural field, the new historicist is not limited to analysis of literary texts, nor exclusively to a single set of procedures. He or she crosses the boundaries of disciplines because the critical inquiries of new historicism often have directly to do with theological, anthropological, political, or sociological matters. The tools of non-literary disciplines can therefore be of immense help in coming to understand the interrelations among a host of events, debates, and values at a given historical moment. Similarly, the new historicist also frequently displays the influence of procedures for textual and cultural analysis provided by other critical methodologies, such as deconstruction, psychoanalysis, or semiotics.\n\nIn this essay, for instance, I focus at first on the intertextual aspects of Arnold's earliest gipsy poems. These works should be viewed as critical responses to Wordsworth's poems (particularly the Intimations Ode and \"Gipsies\"), as well as to his poetic procedures and ideological inconsistencies. I then discuss an array of fictional and non-fictional texts available to Arnold that purported to report facts, but often promulgated myths, about gipsies. These circulated with unusual frequency in early- to mid-Victorian England, and they influenced Parliamentary investigations, blue-book reports, and ultimately the passage of laws directly related to gipsy life and culture. Similarly, I remark on the economic circumstances (the progress of capitalism) that helped to generate such texts and laws. Matthew Arnold's gipsy poems were produced in these literary, social, and political contexts. His central trope in four major poems is thus appropriated not only from Glanvill's _Vanity of Dogmatizing_ , but also from an important controversy that attracted a great deal of public discussion during the period in which the poems were written and published (1843\u201366).\n\nAs these comments may suggest, a basic assumption of new historical analysis is that every expressive act is embedded in a network of material and ideological practices that are historically particular, and that all texts \u2013 literary and nonliterary alike \u2013 circulate, as it were intravenously, within the body of a culture. Consequently, no literary text is to be revered over others because it provides special access to universal (that is, non-historical) truths about human nature or experience. All texts embody definable and historically particular values and ideas. Therefore, recovering the historical contexts surrounding the production and distribution of a text is a crucial task for the new historicist critic.\n\nIf the operations of every text are ideological, manifesting struggles for dominance among systems of values and ideas at a particular historical moment, the critic is similarly trapped by his or her own historical perspectives and ideological dispositions and thus must proceed with an unusually high level of sensitivity to his or her \"situatedness.\" Indeed, as I later argue, Arnold used the gipsy trope so centrally in his poems precisely because he understood this truth. Interested in history as the grounds of cultural exegesis, the new historicist must also be aware of the textuality of history. Not just history as a process, but documentary discussions of any particular moment of history are treated as narratives. The conclusions reached by the new historicist critic are therefore inevitably tentative and contingent upon gaps in the narrative that remain to be filled. Arnold appears also to have understood this perspective on narratives, which we now loosely term \"deconstructive,\" and after 1852 he made use of it as a rhetorical strategy in the gipsy trope to resist ideological consistencies and commitments, and to wrest cultural power from the hands of his middle-class opposition.\n\n#  **Intertextual Matters**\n\n\"To A Gipsy Child by the Sea-Shore\" is a pessimistic, if not morose, elegy that visibly reinscribes and transvalues Wordsworth's Intimations Ode. Arnold's gipsy child, with its \"gloom\" and \"meditative guise,\" is at once muse and philosophical father of the man who speaks in this poem: \"With eyes which sought thine eyes thou didst converse, / And that soul-searching vision fell on me\" (ll.15\u201316). The infant's knowledge of the world, as the speaker projects it, is complete. It has \"foreknown the vanity of hope\" and \"Foreseen [its] harvest,\" yet endures with a \"funereal aspect\" and \"the calm . . . of stoic souls,\" \"drugging pain by patience\" (ll. 39\u201340, 46, 29, 13). Unlike Wordsworth's child who trails \"clouds of glory\" into this world, Arnold's already possesses the sober eye of maturity, its \"slight brow\" surrounded by \"clouds of doom\" (l. 4). And even as the speaker imagines the gipsy child growing up, possibly to forget its stoical infant wisdom, he makes no mention of any pre-corporeal \"joy,\" the real subject of Wordsworth's poem and object of his speaker's \"obstinate questionings.\" In visions of the child's prospective getting and spending \u2013 Arnold's \"winning\" in the \"thronged fields\" (l. 58) of a Darwinian existence \u2013 the speaker refuses to accept the possibility that the child will ever wholly forget its present \"majesty of grief\" (l. 68). The most positive memory the speaker can evoke for this infant employs metaphors of the Fall:\n\nNot daily labour's dull, Lethaean spring,  \nOblivion in lost angels can infuse  \nOf the soiled glory, and the trailing wing.\n\n(ll. 54\u201356)\n\nArnold's reinscription of Wordsworth appropriates his images, along with his abstract and weighty diction, only to subvert his precursor's proclaimed faith in a joy at the heart of human existence. This child's thoughts, unlike those of Wordsworth in his Ode, are not disturbed by \"longings vain\" or any \"superfluity of joy\" (ll. 9\u201310). The gipsy child thus becomes a cipher through whom Arnold can ventriloquize his nihilism, anticipating the critique of Wordsworth articulated in the preface to his edition of Wordsworth's poetry published thirty-four years later: \"His poetry is the reality, his philosophy . . . is the illusion.\"8 As Arnold further explains, \"the 'intimations' of the famous 'Ode,' those corner-stones of the supposed philosophic system of Wordsworth, \u2013 the idea of the high instincts and affections coming out in childhood, testifying of a divine home recently left, and fading away as our life proceeds, \u2013 this idea, of undeniable beauty as a play of fancy, has itself not the character of poetic truth of the best kind; it has no real solidity\" (Super, 4:49).\n\nArnold's intertextual assault upon Wordsworth in his gipsy poems is, however, more complex than this close reading of the language in \"A Gipsy Child\" alone indicates. For Wordsworth had also written about gipsies and viewed them in clear ideological terms. Arnold, who belatedly proclaimed himself a Wordsworthian, certainly knew Wordsworth's poem, \"Gipsies.\" Its 1807 version reads in full:\n\nYet are they here? \u2013 the same unbroken knot  \nOf human Beings, in the self-same spot!  \nMen, Women, Children, yea the frame  \nOf the whole Spectacle the same!  \nOnly their fire seems bolder, yielding light:  \nNow deep and red, the colouring of night;  \nThat on their Gipsy-faces falls,  \nTheir bed of straw and blanket-walls.  \n\u2013 Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours, are gone while I  \nHave been a Traveller under open sky,  \nMuch witnessing of change and chear,  \nYet as I left I find them here!  \nThe weary Sun betook himself to rest.  \n\u2013 Then issued Vesper from the fulgent West,  \nOutshining like a visible God  \nThe glorious path in which he trod.  \nAnd now, ascending, after one dark hour,  \nAnd one night's diminution of her power,  \nBehold the mighty Moon! this way  \nShe looks as if at them \u2013 but they  \nRegard not her: \u2013 oh better wrong and strife  \nBetter vain deeds or evil than such life!  \nThe silent Heavens have goings on;  \nThe stars have tasks \u2013 but these have none.9\n\nThis is an extraordinary work from the pen of the professedly empathetic poet of the \"primary affections of the human heart,\" a poem that reflects \u2013 as Arnold might well have observed \u2013 a wholly Philistine provincialism and lack of curiosity, along with a suffocating captivity to the puritan values of \"Hebraism.\" This poem clearly betrays the liberal, humanitarian ethos that Wordsworth's 1798 poems and his famous \"Preface\" to the _Lyrical Ballads_ define as fundamental to valuable poetry.\n\nThe speaker in \"Gipsies\" begins openly uncomprehending: these people, their customs and their reason for being, are wholly alien to him, as is their community, which Wordsworth describes as a mere \"knot.\" They constitute a \"Spectacle,\" always a disparaging term in his lexicon.10 As a \"Traveller under open sky, / Much witnessing,\" the speaker contrasts his own industrious activity with the gipsies' apparent immobility and passivity, his sensitivity to the natural world with their obliviousness to it: \"they regard [it] not.\" Although an admitted outsider who has only the slightest acquaintance with the gipsy sociality, he sits in judgment upon them. The coda of this poem is stridently didactic. Wordsworth's bourgeois arrogance and insularity, qualities Arnold consistently condemns, are obvious here, and, more importantly, so is the basis of his judgment in the entirely external aspects of the gipsies' lives rather than their inward qualities as \"human Beings.\" In this poem we find Wordsworth demonstrating none of the compassion for his fellows that elsewhere, especially in pieces from _Lyrical Ballads_ , energizes his work. Indeed, the racist overtones of \"Gipsies\" subvert Wordsworth's early liberal and Romantic poetic ethos, which Arnold in his maturity appropriated and revised along classical lines.\n\nThe speaker's ideological stance in this lyric radically diverges from the ideal of human perfection Arnold articulates in his later essays on culture. That ideal, we recall, requires \"an inward spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy\" (Super, 5:108). Refusing any real contact with the gipsies, Wordsworth in this poem hardly embodies Arnold's premier \" _social idea_ \": that \"the men of culture are the true apostles of equality . . . those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time,\" that is, for \"humanising\" knowledge (Super, 5:113). It comes, then, as no surprise that, early in his essay on Wordsworth, Arnold insists that \"composing moral and didactic poems . . . brings us but a very little way in poetry\" (Super, 4:45).\n\nYet the impact \"Gipsies\" made upon Arnold is apparent from linguistic echoes of the poem and transvaluations of its critique of gipsies in \"Resignation,\" begun in 1843 but not published until 1849. A formal and structural revision of \"Tintern Abbey,\" this sinuous lyric finally advocates the supreme value of the poet's life, resigned in several senses: detached or withdrawn from the world; willing to accept all vicissitudes; and willing also to accept the fate of reinscription (re-signing), a fate here enacted upon Wordsworthian texts by Arnold himself. The life of the gipsies in \"Resignation,\" is contrasted with that of the contemplative poet who attains \"not [Wordsworthian] joy, but peace,\" a consequence of \"His sad lucidity of soul\" (ll. 192, 198):\n\nBefore him he sees life unroll,  \nA placid and continuous whole \u2013  \nThat general life which does not cease  \nWhose secret is not joy, but peace;  \nThat life, whose dumb wish is not missed  \nIf birth proceeds, if things subsist;  \nThe life of plants, and stones, and rain,  \nThe life he craves \u2013 if not in vain  \nFate gave, what chance shall not control,  \nHis sad lucidity of soul.\n\n(ll. 189\u2013198)\n\nUnlike this idealized poet, the gipsies \u2013 who, as in Wordsworth's poem, \"In dark knots crouch round the wild flame\" (l. 118) \u2013 appear constitutionally unable to attain tranquillity and detachment. They cannot compare past and present, nor can they \"reason\" about mortality (\"time's busy touch\") and the inevitable \"decay\" of their own culture, as \"Crowded and keen the country grows,\" with \"The law [growing] stronger every day\" (ll.133\u2013135). Inaccessible to the higher poetic consciousness,\n\nthey rubbed through yesterday  \nIn their hereditary way,  \nAnd they will rub through, if they can,  \nTo-morrow on the self-same plan,  \nTill death arrive to supersede,  \nFor them, vicissitude and need.\n\n(ll. 138\u2013143)\n\nThis, despite the fact that\n\nSigns are not wanting, which might raise  \nThe ghost in them of former days \u2013  \nSigns are not wanting, if they would;  \nSuggestions to disquietude.\n\n(ll. 123\u2013126)\n\nAlthough this speaker claims to possess high levels of both semiotic and historical awareness (\"Signs . . . might raise /The ghost . . . of former days\"), and although he is not (like Wordsworth's speaker) wholly unsympathetic to the gipsies' plight, his attitude toward the gipsies remains equivocal. He generates an image of their mindless passivity and fatalism in order to aggrandize the stature of the ideal poet. In doing so, he suppresses any consciousness that their situation is socially and economically determined. As a \"migratory\" underclass, they lack the speaker's privileges of education, leisure, and wealth. They are in no position to make serious life choices at all. Yet Arnold's speaker is aware that their \"decay\" or displacement from the countryside is both a sign and product of the economic times, a result of an expansion of the Anglo-Saxon population directly tied to industrial capitalism. Unlike the speaker of Wordsworth's \"Gipsies,\" Arnold's speaker is sensitive to social and political developments that pose a threat to traditional gipsy culture, and to the extent that they are endangered wandering outcasts, he identifies with them. Like him (and Fausta, his auditor),\n\nThey, too, have long roamed to and fro;  \nThey ramble, leaving, where they pass  \nTheir fragments on the cumbered grass.  \nAnd often to some kindly place  \nChance guides the migratory race,  \nWhere, though long wanderings intervene,  \nThey recognise a former scene.  \nThe dingy tents are pitched . . .  \n........................................  \nThey see their shackled beasts again  \nMove, browsing, up the gray-walled lane.\n\n(ll. 109\u2013121)\n\nThe speaker in this poem exposes his limited political understanding and inadequate social vision, urging the gipsies to recover the \"fragments\" of their past in order to reconstitute their present and future lives as a \"placid and continuous whole.\" This he attempts to persuade \"Fausta\" to do and apparently has himself done. Finally, for him as for Wordsworth, these alien people remain ciphers, despite his partial identification with and incomplete compassion for them.\n\nArnold's attitude toward the gipsies here, hovering somewhat obtusely between idealization and criticism, in fact replicates the extremes of contemporary response to \"the gipsy problem\" in England during the 1840s and 1850s. Ironically, through its critique of gipsy culture as well as through its intertextual resonances, Arnold's position calls attention to the self-righteous provincialism of Wordsworth's attack upon the gipsies some forty years earlier. But Arnold's equivocal perspective in this poem allows for important re-visions of gipsy figures (and gipsy culture) in his own poems of 1853 and 1866.\n\n#  **Victorian Gipsies and \"The Scholar-Gipsy\"**\n\nIn a familiar letter to Arthur Hugh Clough written the year \"Resignation\" was published (on September 23), Arnold laments his sense of personal isolation, angst, distraction, and immobility. He sees himself as a representative product of a corrupt society:\n\nThese are damned times \u2013 everything is against one \u2013 the height to which knowledge is come, the spread of luxury, our physical enervation, the absence of great _natures_ , the unavoidable contact with millions of small ones, newspapers, cities, light profligate friends, moral desperadoes like Carlyle, our own selves, and the sickening consciousness of our difficulties: but for God's sake let us neither be fanatics nor yet chaff blown by the wind.11\n\nThe substance of this critique is, of course, central to \"The Scholar-Gipsy,\" in which Arnold laments \"this strange disease of modern life,\" with its \"sick fatigue,\" \"its languid doubt,\" its manifold \"disappointments,\" \"its sick hurry, its divided aims,\" and \"Its heads o'ertax'd.\" In a distinct turn from his equivocal use of the gipsy figure in \"Resignation,\" Arnold \u2013 some seven years after the initial composition of that poem \u2013 now presents the gipsy as an ideal Other, the speaker's imaginary hero whom he warns to\n\nfly our paths, our feverish contact fly!  \nFor strong the infection of our mental strife,  \nWhich, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest;  \nAnd we should win thee from thy own fair life,  \nLike us distracted, and like us unblest.\n\n(ll. 221\u2013225)\n\nBy 1849 the placid and harmonious, distanced perspective on life maintained by the ideal poet of \"Resignation\" was beyond the grasp of Arnold, who immersed himself compulsively in the public issues of the day. The idealized scholar-gipsy is immune to such issues because he is alien to the society plagued by them. Arnold envied such immunity. In the same letter to Clough, he explains:\n\nWhen I come to town I tell you beforehand I will have a real effort at managing myself as to newspapers and the talk of the day. Why the devil do I read about Ld. Grey's sending convicts to the Cape, and excite myself thereby, when I can thereby produce no possible good. But public opinion consists in a multitude of such excitements. ( _Letters to Clough_ , p. 111)\n\nPerhaps less incendiary than Lord Grey's proposal to establish a penal colony at the Cape of Good Hope, the controversy over the status and future of the gipsies in English society had constituted one such \"excitement\" for the British public since the early 1840s. By 1852 the directions of the public discussion, both in the periodical press and in fiction, had changed significantly.\n\nBeginning in 1842 \"the gipsy problem\" was much in the news. A long controversy simmered over this \"intriguing people who from time out of mind had flouted convention\" (Behlmer, p. 231). As Arnold must have been aware, the gipsy presence in England \"struck some reformers as an intolerable affront to the values of modern civilization,\" precisely those Hebraic middle-class values (industry, wealth, pragmatism, respectability) that Arnold attacks as Philistine throughout his prose works of the 1860s. Attitudes toward the mysterious gipsies generally reflect the social values and cultural dispositions of those who discuss them. During the second half of the century gipsies became the objects of both romantic idealization and \"systematic harassment\" in England (Behlmer, p. 232). Widely considered an \"'alien' race and culture,\" the gipsies \"existed on the fringes of society, and of the economic and political spheres, and this marginality to, or rejection of, a conventional, settled mode of life made them suspect and unwelcome.\" They represented a threatening cultural Other, \"to be feared for the implicit threat their existence posed to a method of thinking that was increasingly to stress immobility and regularity, and to be resented for remaining apart from the pressures towards conformity, whether legal, institutional, cultural or [social] . . . Yet they were also envied for managing to retain some independence and individuality.\"12\n\nIn 1842 _The Times_ featured a number of articles on the gipsies, reflecting the public's inconsistent attitude toward gipsy culture. On October 12 readers were reassured that \"the New Forest Gypsies were an honest lot who, in return for a little straw to cushion their beds, acted as farmers' watchdogs against poachers.\" But a month later \"the same tribe stood accused of suffocating sheep by forcing wool down their throats\" (Behlmer, p. 234). That same autumn two sensational articles described the \"stately funerals and shunning ceremonies in which Gypsy renegades were banished from their tribes\" (Behlmer, p. 235). Even more noteworthy was the retirement in 1847 of the Reverend James Crabbe from his exotic and well-known mission at Southampton (begun in 1829), where he had attempted to care for but also convert the New Forest gipsies.\n\nThe gipsies remained in the news as much for the threat they posed to the values of the respectable middle classes (and the scenery of the English landscape) as for the mysteriousness of their customs and social organization. They were special targets of repression in 1849, when \"England's new county constabularies launched a campaign against mendicancy in all its forms\" and several years later when \"rural police redoubled their efforts to drive all Gypsy tents off public land\" (Behlmer, pp. 235\u20136). Gipsies were much discussed in the reports of the Select Committee on Police of 1852 and 1853. In 1856, when the County Constabulary Act was passed, \"methods of surveillance, harassment and persecution became increasingly efficient, and there are many references to the constant pressures exerted by the police on the travellers, driving them from the rural roads into the towns. On occasions, camps were raided and the people persecuted simply on suspicion they might have stolen something\" (Mayall, p. 155).\n\nBooks and periodical essays about the gipsies appeared regularly throughout the forties, fifties, and sixties, when Arnold was composing most of his poetry. These works exerted a strong influence on popular opinion. In 1843 Crabbe himself published _A Condensed History of the Gypsies_. In the previous year the fifth edition of Samuel Roberts's popular book, _The Gypsies; their Origins, Continuance, and Destination_ (first published in 1836) had appeared, and in the following year the Reverend J. West's _A Plea for the Education of the Children of the Gypsies_ came out. Also in 1844, W. Howitt's _The Rural Life of England_ focused on the lifestyle and movements of English gipsy tribes. During the forties articles on gipsy life were to be found in a wide variety of magazines and institutional organs, from _Fraser's_ (which often published essays by Thomas Arnold), the _New Edinburgh Review_ , and _Sharpe's London Magazine_ to _The Church of England Magazine_.13\n\nThe public interest in gipsy life and customs is most fully revealed by the success, between 1841 and 1851, of fictional and semi-fictional works by George Borrow.14 _The Zincali; or, An Account of the Gypsies of Spain_ (1841), though published by John Murray in a small edition, was hailed as the \"prize book\" of the season by _The Dublin University Magazine_ and went through two additional printings in 1843 when Borrow's new book, _The Bible in Spain_ became an enormous popular success,15 establishing itself as \"one of the great books of mid-century Britain\" (Collie, p. 183) and drawing further attention to _The Zincali. The Bible in Spain_ also raised strong expectations for Borrow's second major work about gipsies, _Lavengro_ , published in 1851. Although reviews of _Lavengro_ were uniformly bad, they were numerous, and, for better or worse, among Victorian readers of fiction Borrow had by mid century aroused a powerful interest in gipsy life, language, and customs.16\n\nInspired in part by Borrow's work, a number of major literary figures became fascinated with gipsies, including Carlyle, Bulwer Lytton, Swinburne, and George Eliot (who published her poem _The Spanish Gypsy_ in 1868). Matthew Arnold was, it seems, even more intimately familiar with Borrow than these writers. Arnold's \"The Forsaken Merman,\" which appeared along with \"A Gipsy Child by the Sea-Shore\" in his 1849 volume of poems, for example, makes use of George Borrow's version of the story from his 1825 review of J. M. Thiele's _Danske Folkesagen_ (Honan, p. 89).\n\n _The Zincali_ appeared during Arnold's first year at Oxford, with its second and third printings coming in 1843, the year Arnold won the Newdigate prize with his poem, \"Cromwell,\" and \"settled on poetry as his _vocation_. This was his calling, his star, his reason for being. . . . He reconciled this [newly] serious view of himself with his idle Oxford days, and though still looking for timewasting pursuits he also wrote\" and read voraciously (Honan, p. 70). In 1844 he picked up a copy of Joseph Glanvill's _The Vanity of Dogmatizing_ , which discusses the Oxford \"lad\" Arnold memorialized as the Scholar-Gipsy. The experiences of this student, as Glanvill describes them, remarkably prefigure those George Borrow mythologized in his much discussed _Lavengro_. The publication of this book in 1851 may have prompted Arnold's work on \"The Scholar-Gipsy\" in 1852 or 1853. (Arnold originally titled the poem \"The Wandering Mesmerist.\") At the time, similarities between Borrow's descriptions of his early life with the gipsies and Glanvill's myth would have struck Arnold with uncanny force.17 _Lavengro_ replicates many passages of _The Zincali_ , which begins, \"I can remember no period when the mentioning of the name of Gypsy did not awaken feelings . . . hard to be described, but in which a strange pleasure predominated.\" Like Arnold's Scholar-Gipsy, Borrow felt a natural kinship with the gipsies and studied their culture extensively:\n\nThroughout his youth he had frequently come across and spent time with groups of gypsies. . . . He had consorted with them on Mousehold Heath and other such places near Norwich; had met them at horse-fairs and prizefights; had lived with them, sometimes, and been accepted by them. . . . In all these places, he had been accepted by the gypsies, partly because he had taken the trouble to learn their language . . . and partly because of a scarcely definable feeling of kinship he and many gypsies immediately felt for one another. (Collie, pp. 162\u20133)\n\nAs Borrow observes at the outset of _The Zincali_ , \"the gipsies themselves account for it on the supposition that the soul which at present animates my body, has at some former period tenanted that of one of their people.\"18 Borrow claims to have been initiated into many mysteries of gipsy culture.\n\nGlanvill's Oxford scholar also joined \"a company of vagabond gipsies\" and learned their secrets. Arnold redacts the story in the notes to his text:\n\nAmong these extravagant people, by the insinuating subtilty of his carriage, he quickly got so much of their love and their esteem as that they discovered to him their mystery. . . . [He told his acquaintances that] they had a traditional kind of learning among them, and could do wonders by the power of imagination, their fancy binding that of others: that [he] himself had learned much of their art, and when he had compassed the whole secret, he intended, he said, to leave their company, and give the world an account of what he had learned. (Allott, p. 357)19\n\nThus, Arnold's scholar is a particular student of \"the secret [of the gipsy] art\" of ruling \"as they desired / The workings of men's brains\" so that they \"can bind them to what thoughts they will\" (ll. 45\u201348). His \" _one_ aim, _one_ business, _one_ desire,\" once the long-awaited \"spark from heaven\" has fallen, is to impart that secret to the world (ll. 152, 120). In the meantime, this mythical figure remains elusive: in and out of the public eye and the social world, glimpsed on occasion by maidens, farmers, housewives, and possibly even by \"dreaming\" speaker of the poem, who ultimately admonishes the phantom Gipsy to flee all contact with those contaminated by \"this strange disease of modern life\" (l. 203).\n\nIf we read \"The Scholar-Gipsy\" in the dual contexts of Arnold's other works about gipsies and public discussions, both factual and fictional, of \"the gipsy problem\" in mid-Victorian England, coming to terms with this difficult poem is increasingly complicated. As David Riede has recently demonstrated, the poem is, on the one hand, so deeply resonant of various literary intertexts \u2013 including Milton, Wordsworth, and Keats \u2013 that its vision is relegated \"to a literary never-never land where it can have no real contact with modern life.\"20 On the other hand, as we have seen, the poem is topical. It presents a comprehensive and damning \u2013 albeit highly generalized \u2013 critique of the cultural values that dominate the historical moment of its composition. A transitional poem, \"The Scholar-Gipsy\" is thus overtly ideological and political. Its subject is the attainment of power in the social world, and any reader of 1853 even superficially acquainted with public issues of the day would have read \"The Scholar-Gipsy\" (as well as Arnold's other gipsy poems) with an awareness of the controversy over English gipsies and seen it as a peculiar extension of the romantic interest elicited by images of gipsies in recent literature, especially the work of Borrow.\n\n#  **The Acquisition of Cultural Power**\n\nDavid Riede suggests that Arnold's removal of his Scholar-Gipsy from the \"gradual furnace of the world\" so that he might live forever\n\nmay anticipate Arnold's later critical strategy of disinterestedness, of removing oneself from the fray to preserve a sense of the ideal, but it also anticipates the problem of that strategy \u2013 anyone so distanced from society cannot be effective or meaningful within it. By corporealizing his ideal in such a tangible form as the Gipsy, Arnold cut off the possibility of absorbing it. The Gipsy and the ideal are preserved, but only on the outskirts of society. Poetic reverie is, in a sense, banished or outlawed, or at the very least rendered irrelevant. It can have no practical influence on life. (Riede, p. 142)\n\nBut as Arnold repeatedly emphasizes (most notably in \"The Function of Criticism at the Present Time\"), practical influence is, from the perspective of the ideal critic \u2013 who is also a critic of the narrow but culturally hegemonic systems of value and belief we know as ideology \u2013 the least desirable kind of influence to have: \"The critic must keep out of the region of immediate practice in the political, social, humanitarian sphere if he wants to make a beginning for that more free speculative treatment of things, which may perhaps one day make its benefits felt even in this sphere, but in a natural and thence irresistible manner\" (Super, 3:275). Throughout his critical writings Arnold, by his example, insists precisely on the need for equivocation \u2013 a free play of ideas which disallows the taking of rigid ideological positions and allows for changes of mind and heart. Insofar as \"The Scholar-Gipsy\" illustrates this repudiation of narrow doctrinalism, it is a poetic manifesto that prefigures the central beliefs and procedures of his later prose criticism.\n\nFrom the outset of the \"Preface\" to _Poems_ (1853) in which \"The Scholar-Gipsy\" first appeared, Arnold decries \"modern problems\" and the consequent \"doubts\" and \"discouragement\" that afflict his contemporaries. \"The confusion of the present times is great,\" he acknowledges (Super, 1:8), and he therefore concludes by idealizing writers like himself who, with steady and composed judgments, reject their own historical eras as \"wanting in moral grandeur,\" ages of \"spiritual discomfort.\" Like the speaker of \"The Scholar-Gipsy,\" Arnold the critic laments that \"it is impossible for us, under the circumstances amidst which we live, to think clearly, to feel nobly . . . to delineate firmly\" (Super, 1:15), and therefore to write significant poetry.\n\nThe \"circumstances\" Arnold cites result from industrialism, which has produced an era wholly dominated by the middle class, which Arnold always disparages in his later essays, but out of which he himself emerged. As he acknowledges in _Culture and Anarchy_ , \"almost all my attention has naturally been concentrated on my own class, the middle class, with which I am in closest sympathy, and which has been, besides, the great power of our day\" (Super, 5:139). Beginning with his prose works of the 1850s, it is, of course, Arnold's ambition to reform and regenerate, indeed to assist in refining and \"perfecting,\" the middle class so that its power in the world may be justified. As John Storey has observed, unlike Marx, who \"attacked the middle class as representatives of an oppressive and exploitative system [,] Arnold attacked them to change them, in order to secure their future \u2013 not to close it.\"21\n\nIn _A French Eton_ (1864) Arnold envisions the day when his goals will have been accomplished:\n\nIn that great class, strong by its numbers, its energy, its industry, strong by its freedom from frivolity, not by any law of nature prone to immobility of mind . . . in that class, liberalised by an ampler culture, admitted to a wider sphere of thought, living by larger ideas, with its provincialism dissipated, its intolerance cured, its pettiness purged away \u2013 what a power there will be, what an element of new life for England! Then let the middle class rule, then let it affirm its own spirit, when it has thus perfected itself. (Super, 2:322)\n\nBut it is Arnold himself \u2013 a cultural outsider but a social insider \u2013 who will direct and control the process of reform. Like his mysterious Scholar-Gipsy, Arnold desires to attain a position of power over middle-class values, behavior, and tastes and \"rule . . . / The workings of men's brains.\" Edward Said is exactly right in asserting that Arnold appears to have viewed society\n\nas a process and perhaps also an entity capable of being guided, controlled, even taken over. What Arnold always understood is that to be able to set a force or a system of ideas called \"culture\" over society is to have understood that the stakes played for are an identification of society with culture, and consequently the acquisition of a very formidable power.22\n\nArnold's appetite for such power becomes, to some extent, suppressed in his prose writings, but explicit in a letter to Clough in 1853, the year of the Preface, \"The Scholar-Gipsy,\" and his altered sense of vocation: \"I catch myself desiring now at times political life . . . and I say to myself \u2013 you do not desire these things because you are really adapted to them, and therefore the desire for them is merely contemptible\" (May 1, 1853; _Letters to Clough_ , p. 135). After 1853, Arnold's desire for \"political\" activity and influence expressed itself in an alternate and finally more secure, prestigious, and enduring line of work to which he was adapted \u2013 that of cultural sage and prophet. In that work, Arnold immediately hit upon the characteristic discursive mode and critical stance that we have already witnessed in the equivocal relationship he deliberately establishes between himself and his Philistine middle-class audience.\n\nThe gipsy, as Arnold manipulates that figure in his poems, develops as a proleptic metaphor for this relationship and for Arnold's self-positioning in his prose works of cultural criticism. The trope initially embodies Arnold's stoicism and early skepticism (in \"Gipsy Child\"). It then serves as a contrast to his image of the ideal poet detached from worldly activity (\"Resignation\"). By 1853, however, the trope projects his realization that attaining power over men's minds requires not merely poetic detachment, but an often ostensibly self-contradictory stance of simultaneous estrangement from society and involvement with it (\"The Scholar-Gipsy\"). Thus, the mid-century interest in gipsies and the controversy surrounding their cultural past and social future at first provided Arnold with an important and intertextually sanctioned poetic metaphor, but eventually suggested an invaluable critical identity whose essential feature was elusiveness and whose central rhetorical strategy was mystification, that is, textual mesmerism.\n\nThe value of the gipsy trope in understanding Arnold's success becomes especially clear if we recall the portions of Glanvill's text that Arnold omits in his own note to \"The Scholar-Gipsy\":\n\nIn the practice of [the gipsies' _Mystery_ ], by the pregnancy of his wit and parts, [the Scholar] soon grew so good a proficient, as to be able to out-do his Instructors. . . . [Upon meeting with two former classmates, he] told them, that the people he went with were not such _Impostours_ as they were taken for, but that they had a _traditional_ kind of _learning_ among them, and could do wonders by the power of _Imagination_ , and that himself had learnt much of their Art, and improved it further then themselves could. . . . [Later, to explain how he knew his friends' exact words spoken in his absence, the scholar told them] that what he did was by the power of _Imagination_ , his Phancy _binding_ theirs; and that himself had dictated to them the discourse, they held together, while he was from them. (Tinker and Lowry, p. 206)\n\nFor Arnold the \"secret\" of the gipsies' \"art\" is inseparable from their position as cultural aliens, their peregrine lifestyle, and their uncertain origins \u2013 in short, the exotic aura surrounding them that confounds expectations of predictability in their behavior.\n\nIn another context, Wendell Harris has demonstrated how Arnold himself cultivates precisely such an aura in the self-representations of his prose works. By promoting singularly elusive values in these works, Arnold was able to gain unprecedented influence over the directions of Anglo-American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Further, the power he acquired was in direct proportion to the gipsy-like, mesmeric qualities as well as the elusiveness of cultural doctrines whose \"secret\" force lay ultimately in their refusal to acknowledge ideology \u2013 that is, any single and consistent, politically implicated system of values \u2013 as power. As we shall see, Arnold's strategy for attaining a position to \"perfect\" the middle classes is exposed in his last major poem dominated by a gipsy trope, \"Thyrsis.\"\n\nIn a lucid discussion of nineteenth-century and contemporary responses to Arnold's cultural criticism, Harris has analyzed the consequences of Arnold's often self-contradictory and mystifying prose: above all, it has succeeded in \"binding\" generations of middle-class readers and thinkers to a liberal humanist system of values. \"Arnold,\" he acknowledges, \"has offered any number of hostages to denizens of the deconstructive abyss. If we wish to demonstrate that the significant words in any discourse appeal to a hierarchy that might be reversed in another discourse, or are employed in several senses, or necessarily imply the existence of their opposites, or are indeterminate in meaning outside the context of each use, Arnold has almost done the work for us.\"23 In other words, the central precepts of Arnold's critical writings are self-deconstructing, consciously deferring precise meaning to such an extent that the ideals and values he propounds in a given essay \u2013 such as \"The Function of Criticism at the Present Time\" \u2013 constitute a \"rich range of perspectives that finally refuse to coalesce\" (Harris, p. 124). Notions such as \"seeing the object as in itself it really is\" and measuring all ideas by \"the best that has been known and thought in the world\" leave themselves open to a wide variety of interpretations, subject only to Arnold's overarching emphasis on \"a free play of ideas.\" Thus, Harris can lament that \"Arnold's manifest failure to bring his major arguments into a convincing unity \u2013 not a unity to defy the deconstructionist, but simply one to satisfy our ordinary practical sense of coherence \u2013 has seemed to authorize readers to detach whatever single slogan especially appeals to them and develop it for their own purposes\" (Harris, p. 125). The articulation of values and ideals in Arnold's prose after 1853 becomes a process of continual deferral, displacement, and redefinition in which (as Marjorie Levinson has argued in connection with Wordsworth's poetry) \"the constitutive and deconstructive moments\" are inseparable.24\n\nBut Arnold's elusive abstractions conform to his wholly relativistic view that social and cultural criticism of genuine value must always operate both synchronically and diachronically. He thus writes to the future as well as the present, engaged with issues of the moment but from a desired perspective of \"timeless\" detachment. He is aware of his captivity to \"the present age,\" while \u2013 like Byron's heroes \u2013 defiantly resisting, indeed denying, that situatedness. As a result, his work is self-reflexive in its use of a language of historical and ideological relativism: \"The Arnoldian program decrees that no one ideology, no one scheme of social reformation, can be exempt from continual comparative evaluation. Nor can any one critical evaluator \u2013 Arnold included \u2013 be presumed infallible. . . . Precisely because all values and beliefs are ideological, no single mode of thought can replace the free play of mind\" (Harris, p. 130).\n\nBecause \"the free play of mind\" must, ideally, be incessant, the notion expressed in \"The Scholar-Gipsy\" that it might end with the appearance of a singular \"light from heaven\" \u2013 followed by the revelation of a \"secret\" to \"control men's brains\" and diffuse that light \u2013 is fallacious, as Arnold makes clear in \"Thyrsis,\" where the figure of the Scholar-Gipsy reemerges. In 1853 Arnold's estranged and mysterious, eponymous hero had appeared in eternal pursuit of the ultimate ideology. Yet, thirteen years later, in \"Thyrsis,\" Arnold revises the conceptualization of this quest in order to accommodate the gipsy stance he has adopted as a cultural critic during those years. Placing supreme value on the free play of ideas, Arnold projects a set of indeterminate and mystifying ideals that constitute an anti-ideology defined poetically as \"A fugitive and gracious light . . . / Shy to illumine\" (\"Thyrsis,\" ll. 201\u2013202). In confessing that \"I must seek it too,\" Arnold insists upon the extent to which this symbol wholly eschews Philistine cultural values:\n\nThis does not come with houses or with gold,  \nWith place, with honour, and a flattering crew;  \n'Tis not in the world's market bought and sold.\n\n(ll. 202\u2013205)\n\nUltimately, Arnold's power over the future was cunningly realized outside of \"the world's market,\" where diverse ideologies compete for dominance. Arnold's triumph resulted from an ostensible rejection of ideology as power.\n\nThrough the deployment of the discursive strategies I have described, Arnold became a \"ruler\" of the structure and values of Anglo-American educational and cultural institutions, not only during his own lifetime but also with later generations. As Park Honan has observed,\n\nin his poetry and critical prose, Arnold introduced a new, subtle, comparative attitude to central problems in Western society and culture, and helped to form the modern consciousness. An understanding of him is really more useful to us than an understanding of any other Englishman of the last century. . . . He is a very great critic: _every_ English and American critic of distinction since his time has felt his impact. (Honan,   \npp. vii\u2013viii)\n\nLike the original Scholar-Gipsy from Glanvill's text, Arnold was able to \"dictate\" the cultural \"discourse\" of his own and later historical eras, in part by appropriating the mysterious influence popular images of the gipsies had attained over the Victorian imagination.25\n\n#  **Notes**\n\n1 Park Honan, _Matthew Arnold: A Life_ (New York, 1981), p. 26.\n\n2 The dates of composition for the four poems by Arnold I discuss in this essay are provided in _Arnold: The Complete Poems_ , ed. Miriam Allott (1979). All quoted passages from Arnold's poems will be cited parenthetically by line numbers from this edition\n\n3 A superficial explanation of Arnold's prolonged attachment to gipsy motifs in his poetry is provided by George K. Behlmer: \"precisely because the Gypsies stood apart from the mainstream of urban-industrial life, they held a special fascination for the critics of that life.\" \"The Gypsy Problem in Victorian England,\" _VS_ 28 (1985): 232.\n\n4 H. Avram Veeser, ed., _The New Historicism_ (New York, 1989), provides a helpful introduction to this methodology. Other important practitioners of the new historicism include Jonathan Arac, Catherine Gallagher, Marjorie Levinson, Leah Marcus, Jane Marcus, Judith Lowder Newton, and David Simpson. For discussion of the interrelations among intertextuality, ideology, and the new historicism, see my _Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems: Intertextuality and Ideology_ (Charlottesville, 1990).\n\n5 David G. Riede, \"Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century,\" _SEL_ 28 (1988): 713.\n\n6 Veeser's collection cited above demonstrates the diversity of new historicist criticism. as well as the array of controversial issues it raises.\n\n7 See Louis Montrose, \"Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture,\" in Veeser, p. 17.\n\n8 All quotations from Arnold's prose works will be taken from _The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold_ , ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor, 1960\u201377). Further citations to volume and page number will appear parenthetically. The present quotation is from 4:48.\n\n9 William Wordsworth, _Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800\u20131807_ , ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, 1983), pp. 211\u201312. The most extensive discussion of Wordsworth's poem in its historical and biographical contexts appears in David Simpson's _Wordsworth's Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement_ (New York, 1987), pp. 22\u201355.\n\n10 For example, see _The Prelude_ , Book 8, ll. 676\u201381.\n\n11 _The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough_ , ed. H. F. Lowry (Oxford, 1932), p. 111.\n\n12 David Mayall, _Gypsy-Travellers in Nineteenth-Century Society_ (Cambridge, 1988), p. 92.\n\n13 See Mayall, pp. 245\u201356, for a useful bibliography of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature on the gipsies in England.\n\n14 In 1857 Borrow published the work that made him famous for later generations, _The Romany Rye_. For a brief summary of pre-Victorian literary treatments of gipsydom, see Simpson, pp. 43\u20136.\n\n15 \"'This is a most remarkable book,' exclaimed _The Examiner_ : 'Apart from its adventurous interest, its literary merit is extraordinary. Never was a book more legibly impressed with the unmistakable mark of genius.' The _Athenaeum_ : 'There is no taking leave of a book like this.' The _Dublin University Magazine_ : 'We have had nothing like these books before . . . _The Zincali_ was the prize book of last season, and _The Bible in Spain_ is likely to be the favourite of the present one.'\" Michael Collie, _George Borrow, Eccentric_ (Cambridge, 1982), p. 177.\n\n16 As is suggested by Collie's account (p. 210) of public expectations of _Lavengro_.\n\n17 See, for example, Collie, pp. 46ff. Dwight Culler also suggests the influence of Borrow upon Arnold, especially in \"The Scholar-Gipsy.\" See his _Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold_ ( _New_ Haven, 1966), p. 193. Allott cites \"The Wandering Mesmerist\" as the original title for \"The Scholar-Gipsy\" on Arnold's list of poems for his 1852 volume (p. 356).\n\n18 George Borrow, _The Zincali_ (London, 1841), p. 1.\n\n19 For the full text from Glanvill, see C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry, _The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary_ (London, 1940), pp. 205\u20136.\n\n20 David Riede, _Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language_ (Charlottesville, 1988), p. 142.\n\n21 John Storey, \"Matthew Arnold: The Politics of an Organic Intellectual,\" _Literature and History_ 11 (1985): 221.\n\n22 Edward Said, _The World, the Text, and the Critic_ (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1983), p. 10.\n\n23 Wendell Harris, \"The Continuously Creative Function of Arnoldian Criticism,\" _VP_ 26 (1988): 122.\n\n24 Marjorie Levinson, \"Back to the Future: Wordsworth's New Historicism,\" _SAQ_ 88 (Summer 1989): 647.\n\n25 Despite a number of recent critics who disparage or deny Arnold's power, Jonathan Arac \u2013 like Edward Said \u2013 convincingly affirms it: \"[I] emphasize not Arnold's weakness but his power, both in those prophetic moments and in the present, for I find that the debate between 'Wittgenstein' and 'Nietzsche' in current criticism is also the struggle for control over one element in the Arnoldian apparatus.\" Further, in his own day, Arnold, \"associated . . . with the power of the growing educational bureaucracy, the traditional university, and the new world of publishing, . . . could feel confident that culture was a power. . . . It is an agency of Enlightenment, like so many of the characteristic modes of power in its time and ours, and like the panoptic eye of Bentham, its vision is productive. Culture produces both the synoptically seen 'tradition' and what Irving Babbitt called the 'all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman' who is the subject of that tradition \u2013 that is, empowered to a certain vision by means of a certain blindness\" _(Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies_ [New York, 1989], pp. 117, 132).\n\nHarrison, Antony. 1991. \"Matthew Arnold's Gipsies: Intertextuality and the New Historicism.\" In _Victorian Poetry_ , 29, iv (Winter), pp. 365\u201383. Reproduced with permission of Antony Harrison.\n\n# 7\n\n# A New Radical Aesthetic\n\n#  _The Grotesque as Cultural Critique: Morris_\n\nIsobel Armstrong\n\nWilliam Morris's _The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems_ , a revolutionary work in Ruskin's sense and probably in ours, was published in 1858, some years after the innovative periods in the work of Arnold and Clough. Yet Morris belongs here [after a discussion of Arnold and Clough] because like them he contends with an individualist and expressive account of poetry and dissents from it. But whereas they orientate themselves through redefining a classical tradition, Morris deliberately aligned himself with what might be called a 'gothic' reading of culture. This early volume, with its debts to Froissart and Malory, is often seen as an anticipation of the 'medievalising' mode of Pre-Raphaelite poetry which came into prominence in the 1860s; or its Arthurian themes are seen to assimilate it to Tennyson's _Idylls of the King_ which began to be published in 1859; or it is elided with the relaxed prolixity of Morris's own later work in _The Earthly Paradise_ (1868\u201370). This later poem, however, is quite unlike Morris's first volume. It is a cycle of alternating classical and Teutonic legends, and advises its readers to 'Forget six counties overhung with smoke' and to retreat into the past or to an idealised past. In it Arnold's poetry of moral composure and consolation seems to have modulated into a source of therapeutic beauty to redress the damage done by work in an industrial society. But _The Defence of Guenevere_ is none of these things. It has no precedent or sequel. Its boldness lies in its seizing of the possibilities of myth and legend which had been theorised through the post-Coleridgean and conservative tradition and redefining them for a radical aesthetics. If Clough is the democratic poet of contemporary realism and Arnold the liberal poet of the history of objectified action, Morris takes myth, the most potent material for conservative poetics, and rethinks it for a different politics. A fresh account of work, gender, consciousness and language shapes this volume. In a deceptively simple language, without density, but with a highly energetic and laconic compactness, it is written with remarkable innovative freedom which extends to both metrical experiment and narrative condensation. Overlaying narrative with drama, with internal monologue and with lyric and ballad refrain, it makes temporality and utterance problematical and enigmatic by exploiting the multiple disjunctions between different forms. Brilliance of colour and intensity of optical detail detach the act of vision and perception from other experience, force them into hyperconscious significance, and make it necessary to consider what the nature of _seeing_ is. Where Tennyson defamiliarises associative patterns, Morris dissociates vision by aberrant distortion and selection.\n\nThese procedures emerge from a dialogue with Ruskin's social and aesthetic theory and in particular with his account of the 'Grotesque' element of gothic art, in _The Stones of Venice_ (1851\u20133). Here Ruskin elaborated an alternative to Arnoldian positions. Morris, of course, wrote under the spell of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and was closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite group: as a comparison between Rossetti's 'The Blessed Damozel' and Morris's 'Rapunzel' suggests, there are strong affinities between them.1 But Morris seems to have cut his way through some of the confusions of Pre-Raphaelite thought, helped by Ruskin who, before he met the group, had defended Pre-Raphaelite painting in letters to _The Times_ in 1851 and 1854, and had probably managed to give there a more coherent account of Pre-Raphaelite principles than they could themselves.2 Morris's reading of Tractarian literature, of medieval texts, of Benjamin Thorpe's _Northern Mythology_ , and his passion for gothic architecture, was given a political focus by Ruskin which is not immediately apparent in Pre-Raphaelite writing in _The Germ_ (later _Art and Poetry)_ or in the journal which Morris himself supported, _The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_ , periodicals which had a short life and a restricted coterie readership in the early 1850s.3 But a brief consideration of the principles of _The Germ_ and its relation to Ruskin does indicate where Pre-Raphaelite thought and that of Ruskin intersect.4\n\n _The Germ_ (1850) was prefaced by W. M. Rossetti's sonnet which asserts that the cardinal principle of all artistic creation must be to ask the question, 'Is this truth?' Accordingly, the aesthetic of _The Germ_ has often been seen as a call for a return to 'nature', a claim made by all new movements, and, helped by a frequently confused and contradictory exposition in the articles of _The Germ_ , one which it is easy in this case to dismiss.5 W. M. Rossetti, writing under the pseudonym John L. Tupper on 'The subject in art', in the first and third issues of January and March 1850, seems to be having it both ways: 'A writer ought to think out his subject honestly and personally, not imitatively, and ought to express it with directness and precision; if he does this we should respect his performance as truthful . . . individual genuineness in the thought, reproductive genuineness in the presentment'.6 This looks like an attempt to square the expression of an inner subjectivity with accuracy of external representation, and an idealist and a mimetic theory consort uneasily. The same is true of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's prose piece, 'Hand and Soul': 'In all that thou doest work from thine own heart, simply'.7 W. M. Rossetti's subsequent gloss, that the piece is about painting what 'your own perceptions and emotions urge you to paint', rather than didactic topics, as a way of affecting 'the mass of beholders', compounds the problem.8 But it is a comparatively bold and innovative attempt to formulate a number of new principles: to move away from expressive theory by attempting to extend a _visual_ theory to language and poetry in general, to move away from the terms in which the 'subject' in art was being discussed by assuming that, just as in painting, no object is _intrinsically_ more suitable than another for depiction in the literary text, and to claim that such an art has social implications \u2013 it can reach all classes if it attends to 'the semblance of what in nature delights'.9 This was something the Rossettis never lost sight of. W. M. Rossetti published _Democratic Sonnets_ in 1907.\n\nThe word 'semblance' denotes the shift being made in Pre-Raphaelite theory: it is a rudimentary attempt to move the ground of discussion from expression to _representation_. In _Modern Painters_ , the first two volumes of which had appeared in 1843 and 1846, Ruskin insisted on the fallacy of mimetic fidelity to the detail of the external world; instead the educated eye of the trained and exact vision, a democratic vision because seeing is the fundamental capacity of us all, paints the _experience_ of what it sees as faithfully as possible.10 Such an account of representation makes self and world indispensable to one another and avoids the one-sidedness which gives primacy either to the human subject or to objects. Hence the rather clumsy attempt we have seen W. M. Rossetti making to hold subject and object in equipoise. But hence also his constant emphasis on the importance of physical, sensory excitement and arousal as well as mental excitement, on response to the external rather than expression, and his belief that any representation contributes to 'the general happiness of man', 'however wild' \u2013 even hangings and executions \u2013 as long as their handling is consistent with 'rational benevolence'.11 Hence F. G. Stephens (also known as John Seward) could argue that 'Closer communion with nature' and 'exact adherence to all her details' was liberating to the eye because all that exists in the external world is open to representation.12 His instance is early Italian painting, but such painting is a model because of its procedures rather than being a style to copy.\n\nThe reason why _The Germ_ looks eclectic, holding together a Benthamite language of 'rational benevolence', a certain aestheticism and even an element of redefined Tractarian thought, can be explained by its attempt to bring the post-Benthamite and Coleridgean traditions together on the ground of visual representation, fusing the aesthetic of the poetry of sensation with a democratic art. It is significant that W. M. Rossetti reviewed Clough's _Bothie_ enthusiastically with a real understanding of its project (he thought, on the other hand, that Arnold's interest in antiquity suggested that he was 'no longer young': Arnold was not yet 30), and that Browning's _Sordello_ was vigorously defended \u2013 'Read Sordello again'.13\n\nThe idea of representation through the visual and, by extension, the verbal sign, is the strength of Pre-Raphaelite thought. It returns to an interest in language which was the possession of earlier decades. For despite the very considerable production of theories of poetry at this time, the framework of expressive theory to which they belonged made form and language a curiously superfluous attribute of poetry. E. S. Dallas, for instance, democratic because he believed that the poetic faculty was common to all men and because a non-didactic poet 'is no preacher of the law, he reads no riot act', was constrained in his avowedly Kantian and idealist account of representation by his understanding that the poet projected internal experience into form.14 Feeling comes first, expression follows as a secondary manifestation of feeling. The link between the manifestation of feeling in language and primary feeling is mysterious because feeling is involuntary and unconscious and therefore unknowable, a private, psychologised Kantian noumenon behind the appearance of language. This psychological account of poetry takes different forms in the 1840s and 1850s and crosses political and religious divisons. One finds it in Keble's Oxford Lectures on Poetry, where the pressure of feeling builds up to the point of madness unless it can be displaced indirectly into symbol. Language is seen rather as a barrier to be crossed than as a representative structure. In fact, for Keble language conceals rather than represents.15 One finds such a view being disseminated in F. W. Robertson's _Two Lectures on the Influence of Poetry on the Working Classes_ (1852). Because the source of poetic feeling is unconscious and 'uncalculating', it can only be given indirect expression in external form in symbol which is mysterious and ultimately inadequate, finding 'finite words for illimitable feeling'.16\n\nRuskin sharpened Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics by developing a notion of representation as the mediation between experiencing self and the world, by formulating an account of Grotesque art in a way which enabled it to open up possibilities for a new kind of myth, and by making the form of art materially dependent on the kind of _work_ undertaken in a society at any given time. Art is a form of labour and does not exist over and against work. In a modern society, he believed, it is thus available to management and organisation by the state, as is any sensible political economy.17 His thought enabled Morris to produce a book of poems exploring the modern Grotesque (for the Grotesque is not confined to its particular historical manifestation in gothic Europe), exploring the ways in which modern poetic form and consciousness are materially shaped by the form and nature of work in nineteenth-century society. Its medieval content, ballad and folk lyric, are not a simple proxy or disguise for contemporary conditions. Nor are they even a form of analysis conducted by the latter-day reflective poet on naive material to expose the modern condition, for that would be to grant the poet a certain exemption from history even as he analyses his condition. As Walter Pater remarked much later of Morris's subsequent work, but in words more apposite to _The Defence_ , this poetry uses that of a past age 'but must not be confounded with it'.18 The poems are not concerned either directly or indirectly with work or politics. Instead they are an attempt to _be_ the form in which modern consciousness shaped by work and labour sees, experiences and desires, to be what it imagines and the myths it needs to imagine with. Its assumption is that a modern consciousness needs to imagine the past in this way, not that the past will be a tool for analysis. For, as Pater saw, this 'past' is 'no actual form of life' but a sublimated form projected above but produced by the 'realities' of another historical situation, the nineteenth century.19 It is significant that the last poem in _The Defence_ is entitled 'In Prison'. These poems inhabit the enclosing perspectives of the modern consciousness which sees only 'the loophole's spark' and hears the wind beyond. Its reading of signification and the visual sign, the banners which flap 'over the stone', seen, but above and beyond the beholder, is conditioned and made problematical by the narrow loophole.20 One of the conditions of the Grotesque, Ruskin says, is distortion, the gap between imagined possibility and realisation.21\n\nA little more needs to be said about the Grotesque as cultural critique before _The Defence_ can be discussed. The Grotesque is not a sign of degeneration or decadence. Indeed, it is the vital possession of a healthy culture and takes different forms in different periods. A key to the modern Grotesque is Ruskin's comment on Holman Hunt's painting, _The Awakening Conscience_. He rebuts the charge of slavish detail, saying that the Pre-Raphaelites aim to paint what is possible within the field of vision. But Hunt's picture, and the intensity and minuteness of its depiction (a girl starting up from her lover's knees as they sit before the piano), pose a problem, and Ruskin's argument is precisely that the picture problematises vision and makes it aberrant because\n\nNothing is more notable than the way in which even the most trivial objects force themselves upon the attention of a mind which has been fevered by violent and distressful excitement. They thrust themselves forward with a ghastly and unendurable distinctness, as if they would compel the sufferer to count, or measure, or learn them by heart.22\n\nOne thinks of Galahad's vision of drops of melted snow on his steel shoes and 'bunches of small weeds' between the tiles of the floor he stares at in 'Sir Galahad, a Christmas mystery story'.23 In 'King Arthur's Tomb', Lancelot measures the walls he rides past as a way of both remembering and of repressing memory.24 The rider in 'The Little Tower' measures time and space by landmarks which are psychological defences but which turn into real defences when he besieges the tower, and ransacks the materials of the landscape he has passed to provide barriers and armaments.25\n\nSuch intensely perceived detail, however, has more behind it than the psychological justification by which we might defend, for instance, Tennyson's 'Mariana' (though it is significant that this, like 'The Lady of Shalott', was a key poem for this group).26 In _The Stones of Venice_ , in his chapter on 'The nature of gothic', Ruskin associated the Grotesque of gothic with a 'Disturbed Imagination'.27 He thought it important enough to devote a whole chapter to it in the third book, and in his own very gothic, detailed and idiosyncratic way he makes it clear that the 'Disturbed Imagination' is one of the essentials for the possibility of a properly free, democratic art. He arrives at this paradox through an argument which is often misunderstood.\n\nTo begin with, his view of gothic is more complex than that of Pugin, who saw a movement from the pure morality of a nobly organised feudal society to religious decline reflected in cultural artefacts.28 Likewise he differs from Carlyle; though he sees the ignoble form of the Grotesque as a sign of the decadence of Venetian religion, he does not concur with Carlyle in believing that there was ever any ideal feudal society of the past.29 Gothic architecture occurs at a time when work and art come together, when the workman was allowed, within the constraints of the social organisation, a limited measure of freedom and spiritual autonomy. Thus the gothic may be a reflection of such freedom but it is also an art of _resistance_ to bondage, of the religious principle and 'revolutionary ornament', a moment when the individual consciousness gave material form to art within a corporate social organisation and found a way of representing certain attributes of freedom.30 Savageness, or energy, Changefulness, or a subtle and flexible refusal of the servile principles of order, Naturalism, or a celebration of fecundity, Rigidity, or an assertion of will and independence, Redundance, or a love of excess and generosity, are all possible forms in combination with the Grotesque. The gothic artist was in bondage, but could give form to this bondage in a way that the modern operative cannot in the division of labour \u2013 'It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men'.31 Then follows the frightful account of the slavery of the modern glass-bead-maker, hands trembling with a fine palsy created during the incessant action of cutting glass rods, so that work mimes and becomes a form of illness in itself.\n\nIt is the Grotesque which affords one of the few modes of self-representation for modern slavery and one of the few forms of representation in cultural production. For the Grotesque, springing from the imagination, is a form of play and the form taken by the play instinct. Because play is a reaction to work and thus a disturbance or movement of the mind it must take a fanciful or distorted form (the analogy is with the displacement of the Freudian joke). But the kind of play we can exercise _must_ be conditioned by the material circumstances of our work \u2013 a typically paradoxical but logical gothic formulation which politicises play. It is _not free_ play, in Schiller's sense. At this point Ruskin's divisions and subdivisions proliferate and often disguise the dialectical nature of the Grotesque and its ideological significance. The Grotesque can take a wholly ludicrous or fearful form and both forms can be culturally healthful or decadent. There are four subforms of Grotesque, which attempt to account for the organisation of work and the economic structure in different societies (free, artistocratic, post-feudal and capitalist-industrial or slave societies: though these are not exact, since Ruskin's point is that very different structures can produce equivalent forms of exploitation and that at times all four kinds of play coexist in the same society). Only two need concern us. There is the Grotesque of those forced to play, with the release of a kind of fantastic extremity in reaction to the captivity and imprisonment of labour. Such release, 'whether in polity or art', Ruskin comments, cannot be exaggerated in importance, clearly believing that this maintains the stability of the bourgeois state.32 There is the Grotesque, always taking the form of the 'Terrible', of those who cannot play at all, either from pride in status, or from repression, or because they are 'utterly oppressed with labour' \u2013 like the glass-bead-makers.33\n\nIt is the last form of the Grotesque which preoccupies him, the Grotesque of those who cannot play, for this is at least a means of giving negation and oppression representation. This Grotesque is forced to experiment with the terrible in an irregular but mystified way, unable to explain it (presumably because oppressed consciousness cannot understand the conditions of oppression), and is characterised by both love and fear of God (dialectically related feelings, where lack is displaced and returns to God as fullness either of desire or dread). Extravagant and distorted excitement and intensity result from the apathy of oppression ('he is stone already') which forces itself to feel.34 Satire and vulgar humour (the dialectical opposite of apathy) which _need_ the proper aggression of indecency to represent the protest against oppression are further manifestations of the terrible Grotesque. The terrible Grotesque is the form taken by working-class protest. But in the nineteenth century, Ruskin says, it can only be represented in daily language and not in art because 'the classical and Renaissance manufactures of modern times' have 'silenced the independent language of the operative, his humour and satire'.35 It is now only the _object_ of study by middle-class authors such as Dickens. In poetry, perhaps, the work of poets such as Thomas Hood would be analogous to this middle-class research into the working class. Not a working-class poet, not quite Fox's gentlemanly looker-on either, but speaking for working-class suffering in poems like 'The Song of the Shirt' or writing popular satirical lampoons such as 'Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg' (1841\u20133), the story of a woman whose money takes the literal form of prosthetic aid in the shape of a solid gold leg, with which she is eventually killed by her husband, Hood is to some extent a ventriloquist for the working class.\n\nThe third and for Ruskin possibly the most important category of the enslaved Grotesque is 'diseased and ungoverned imaginativeness', and a wildness of the 'mental impressions' (one thinks here of the analysis of Hunt's picture). Disorder is the embodiment of the sense of failure and incompleteness of the 'human faculties in the endeavour to grasp the highest truths'.36 It is the condition of the enslaved mind which longs for transcendence of the material but experiences an incomplete transcendence. Ruskin's comment that this is a distorted form of the sublime helps to gloss his discussion here. The sublime moment is an experience of annihilation in the face of overwhelming external circumstance, but is actually invested with power when consciousness comprehends annihilation as meaningful. But different historical conditions govern the sublime and the Grotesque. Logically the conditions of the enslaved consciousness call forth a desire for meaning, for a transcendent explanation of oppression, but oppression itself resists the recuperation of this condition as meaningful and thus a wayward, deviant and fantastic perception is substituted for transcendence, the more fantastic the more the enslaved consciousness strives to overcome its conditions. Indeed, the more consciousness strives to find a norm or an ideal by which the aberrance of the Grotesque can be measured, the more its correctives turn out to become distortions in themselves. The result is the broken mirror of perception, a vision 'with strange distortions and discrepancies, all the passions of the heart breathing upon it in cross ripples, till hardly a trace of it remains unbroken'.37\n\nThis Grotesque takes the form of the fragmentation of dreams (which are akin to madness), visions and the displacement of symbol which registers a gap between the symbolic sign and what it represents. The symbol is either iconographically narrowed and literalised (used as if it were a rebus \u2013 the example Ruskin gives is Jacob's ladder) or else the sign is estranged and representation is seen as the _veil_ of meaning, a meaning we cannot reach or penetrate (we might think here of those accounts of poetry discussed above which make language the inadequate embodiment of inexpressible feeling). Above all the terrible Grotesque manifests itself in superstition and the paralysis of reason and the overexcited fancy in the face of death. For death, disturbing 'the images on the intellectual mirror', is regarded with fear and trembling, with fitful and ghastly images, by the enslaved consciousness.38 An obsession with death is the logical outcome of the oppressed condition for which the literal annihilation of death is its counterpart, and in the face of which it has no means of transcending itself.\n\nAll these forms of the Grotesque can manifest themselves in creative or debased ways. The presence of the Grotesque in its 'full energy' is possible even in conditions of oppression and its morbid but powerful energy is the mark of a particular kind of cultural power.39 But again, Ruskin observes, workmen in present-day England are only allowed expression of the disturbed imagination in 'gesture and gibe, but are not allowed to do so where it would be most useful'.40 That is, it is not incapacity but the social structure which oppresses working-class representation of oppression. Caricature is the vestigial form of the Grotesque generally available. But this tends not to be possible for the working class. One could instance the prevalence of parody and pastiche in nineteenth-century poetry in endorsement of Ruskin's analysis.\n\nThe importance of the theory of the Grotesque is that it is a theory of representation based on a social and not a psychological analysis, seeing psychological experience as determined by cultural conditions. In its gothic proliferation and comprehensiveness, cryptic and idiosyncratic formulations, odd categories and juxtapositions, in its need to totalise and systematise, in its moral indignation, it is easy to see it as a romanticised and anachronistic analysis of unestranged labour, as Ruskin's myth. Though elements of Ruskin's work can be interpreted in such a way, this would be a fundamental misreading. It is uncompromising in its understanding that the cultural production of a whole society and its consciousness will be formed by the nature of its dominant form of work. It does not see art in terms of progression or cultural continuity or a disinterested ethical tradition to which a way must be found of giving access for the underprivileged. It is stark here in its understanding that in nineteenth-century England the working class have been inhibited from actively evolving a form of art which belongs to them. On the other hand, it is unique in its understanding that in oppressed societies art is possible as a form of resistance and finds a cultural space for itself by making the representation of the Grotesque a form of analysis. It is alone at this time in finding an alternative to moral or psychological and individualist theory. Perhaps it owes something to Hegel's _Aesthetics_ , where modern art is made structurally dependent on culture, and where the disjunction of form and idea is seen as the typical representation of modern consciousness, but the attention to labour, though Hegelian in essence, is Ruskin's original contribution.41 _The Stones of Venice_ , with the two lectures on _The Political Economy of Art_ (1857), where Ruskin was concerned with the economic consequences of the integration of art into state organisation, and particularly with the possibilities of trade-union activity, form a political analysis with a coherence which was not to be seen elsewhere, even in the later prose of Morris. Bizarre, perverse at times, this is Ruskin's myth in the sense that it is an imaginative and passionate discourse.\n\nIn what sense is Morris's _Defence of Guenevere_ in dialogue with Ruskin? In what ways might it be a manifestation of the modern gothic or Grotesque? For Ruskin helps one to understand the extraordinary nature of Morris's experiment. At the same time Morris responds to Ruskin with some important modifications of his aesthetic. The Grotesque makes for the double poem because it is the embodiment of distortion. The poem becomes intrinsically a form dislocated by the aberrant vision, which simultaneously calls forth as an absence the possibilities from which it deviates. The representations of the disempowered consciousness constitute expressions of a subjectivity. But since those representations become a form of resistance for the oppressed, resistance embodies critique, as the disempowered discourse exposes the limits of its perceptions in its struggle to find meaning, limits imposed by its form of life. Morris explores these possibilities. One would also expect to find, in an exploration of the modern Grotesque, the experiences and forms which are constitutive for the consciousness which cannot play. We would expect to see, that is, less the portrayal of the condition of oppression than its own _representations_. It is important to see that in _The Defence_ Morris is not dramatising the conditions of a remote medieval society in a state of oppression but finding this notional society as the one which the disempowered modern consciousness _must_ create. It is the Grotesque creation of the longings of modernity, the representations of and by the nineteenth-century subject. So _The Defence_ is an intensely analytical work.\n\nOf the three forms of the modern Grotesque posited by Ruskin \u2013 the forms of a predetermined and involuntary apathy, of mockery and of diseased and involuntary imaginativeness \u2013 one would expect to find only two in the work of a middle-class poet such as Morris. For the representations of mockery belong to the dispossessed and deprived. However, the middle-class poet does ventriloquise the forms of a notional past populace in the sparse, terse, laconic ballad quatrain and the persistent refrain which Morris handles with such virtuosity, the reconstructed language of an imagined peasant class. The operative is present by omission in this poetry through one of Morris's most startling metonymic devices. The overdetermination of the hand seen in dissociation and isolation, and with almost hallucinatory intensity as a virtually estranged object, the woman's hand in particular, is everywhere in this poetry. The blood half-transparent in the hand as it is held to the light ('The Defence of Guenevere'), the veins which 'creep' in the hand ('Praise of My Lady'), hands caressing hair, face, lips, one another, clutching, waving. The hand is invested as erotic sign and yet the hand is also the sign of instrumentality and agency as it manipulates objects, often objects of consumption, cups and clothes, holds shields or swords in disturbing disconnection from the body. The 'hand', of course, names the nineteenth-century operative on whom depends the leisure for the construction of this world of castles and towers and gardens, sinisterly emptied of the signs of servility except for the soldiers designated by their weapons as 'Spears'. The emptiness becomes so insistent that it constitutes a Grotesque technique for revealing repression. The modern Grotesque _cannot_ represent the worker who cannot represent himself except by omission.\n\nThe woman's hand leads to an important modification or extension of Ruskin's gothic here. The sense of lack which returns love or fear to God is directed towards women in this volume as well as to God. In 'Sir Galahad' a compensatory vision of the divine is granted to the knight, who seems specifically excluded from the sexual love experienced by Palomydes and Lancelot. The poem can be read as the transcendence of physical love by spiritual love, as the lesser knights, who have substituted sexual love for spiritual, fail: the poem ends, 'In vain they struggle for the vision fair'.42 Or it can be read as the disturbed and deprived imagination's _substitution_ of spirituality for sexuality as the neurotic intensity of Galahad's longing is displaced into the idealism which conjures the Sangreal and its attendant and subordinated female saints. Sexual longing and desire are scarcely absent from the poems, experienced with a consuming intensity by men for women and by women for men. The void of pathological sexual longing, which empties out the consciousness and fills the self with a sense of powerlessness and loss is the organising feeling in poem after poem. These are perhaps the great poems of desire in the nineteenth century. For Ruskin desire is the central experience of the enslaved consciousness and motivates the modern Grotesque, but by defining desire in sexual terms and introducing the question of gender, Morris takes Grotesque representation into different and problematic areas.\n\nThe taboo on overt reference to sexuality is everywhere broken. A sign of this transgressive movement is the unremitting and exaggerated visual concentration on women's hair, let down and flowing, a Victorian code for released sexual feeling. The position of women in these poems is contradictory and paradoxical. They are disempowered and passive, waiting, longing and dependent on vicarious male action for representation or nullified by male rejection ('The Sailing of the Sword', 'The Blue Closet', 'The Tune of Seven Towers', 'Old Love'). On the other hand, they exert a curiously coercive power, motivating violence even when they are seen as objects of possession ('The Judgment of God', 'The Gillieflower of Gold'). They are horribly punished when they assert themselves ('Golden Wings', 'The Haystack in the Floods'), but they are involuntarily the _distorting_ factors in the social structure in a way which causes profound suffering both to themselves and to men. The cathexis of frustrated passion in 'A Good Knight in Prison', which forces an almost deranged perception of colour and detail as the bee on the sunflower signifying sexuality assumes a disproportionate intensity, issues in appalling carnage when the opportunity to escape occurs. 'Spell-bound' restages repeated phases of mutual longing and separation in the present, the past, the past of that past, in hypothetical, remembered and immediately experienced narrative which insists that mutual suffering is the norm where relationships are pulled awry and deflected by a 'wizard', the superstitious figuring of distortion as magic by the Grotesque imagination which can only mystify explanation and make it fantastic.\n\nThe title poem of the volume, 'The Defence of Guenevere', both a protection or repression of her situation and a representation of her case, as the two senses of 'defence' suggest, epitomises the malfunctioning of Grotesque hermeneutics when women's sexuality is defined in terms of the deviating and distorting element. Both senses of the word 'defence' suggest displacement and this is what occurs. 'God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie': a lie is literally a distortion, and Gauwaine draws out a corresponding distortion in Guenevere.43 She claims that Gauwaine distorts the truth by accusing her of adultery. Her love for Lancelot is a pure love and therefore not amenable to such a description; but her defence becomes progressively more deviant the more she offers a corrective to the 'lie'. She struggles with the contradiction between the intense spiritual importance attached to the liberating power of transcendent mutual passion and the equal importance attached to loyalty in wedlock. The paradox of the 'pure' woman is that the more she argues for the intensity and beauty of her experience, the more she has to repress its sexual nature and the more she argues for the purely legal status of her marriage the less she should have reason to do so if there has been no transgression of it. The more she argues that she has not transgressed the more transgressive she becomes. She is forced into dishonesty and misrepresentation because of the contradictions in which she lives. Guenevere sees her parable concerning the choice between two cloths, one red, one blue, as the representation of the complete ambiguity of choice and responsibility in a situation where the chooser is blind to the implications of her choice: but they are rather a representation of the complete contradiction between one interpretation of sexual loyalty and another. Guenevere's monologue is not in fact about an awakening conscience but about an awakening to incompletely understood contradiction, and that is why it is the title poem. For in this volume it is women who are most exposed to the contradictions of the consuming Grotesque desire for transcendence.\n\nThe numbness of being experienced by oppressed consciousness is redressed by a corresponding need for intensity in proportion to its numbness. Pater, inadvertently expressing the very desire for intensity which is the object of Morris's critical analysis, writes of the 'sharp rebound' in modern art to 'the elementary passions \u2013 anger, desire, regret, pity and fear'.44 In Morris's volume this is not a return to simplicity but a Grotesque recourse and assent to violence. Extreme physical cruelty and torture meet Sir Peter in 'Sir Peter Harpdon's End' when he becomes victim instead of victor in an unexpected reversal. It is the counterpart of the end he had planned for his rival, as the title punningly suggests \u2013 his _aim_ as well as his end or death. His aim goes awry and the peripeteia of his death becomes less a moral reversal or the occasion of pity and fear than an orgiastic exchange of violence. The recurrent violence in the book is either completely brutal \u2013 when Robert is defeated in 'The Haystack in the Floods', his enemies 'ran, some five or six, and beat/His head to pieces at their feet' \u2013 or it is romanticised, like the violent death of the dead lovers bleeding from wounds on horseback in 'Concerning Geffray Teste Noire' \u2013 or it is aestheticised in the pageantry of single combat marked by emblem and favour.45 This is not chivalric but Grotesque combat. The fighter in 'The Judgment of God' is urged by his father to cheat by deflecting the gaze of his opponent: 'Swerve to the left'.46 At the same time he represents single combat as a symbolic economy of simple and straightforward _exchange_ between individuals, of blood for blood, right for wrong, which will terminate the endless cycle of revenge even though he knows that butchery will be the result whether he wins or loses. As if recognising the inadequacy of this analysis, his thoughts are deflected to the love of the woman he rescued from assault. Disregarding the fact that this was a communal rescue he rests his sense of truth \u2013 and identity \u2013 on the private compact between them, assuming that the public combat can be solved 'My father's crafty way'.47 The breakdown of the ethics of single combat comes about from the separation of private from public ethics and identity: in the end the fighter's symbolic status does not synchronise with his actions. But neither can the private, compensatory lovers' compact be independent of communality or seen as a separate economy, for the lady was won in warfare, and belongs to the economy of public exchange, and, it is enigmatically hinted, belongs to the web of aggression which has issued in the duel.\n\nHere Morris extends Ruskin's insights into the structure of oppression. The more complex the social origin and public responsibility for action becomes, the more complex questions of right and wrong, the more isolated the individual will become, interpreting all conflicts on the model of individual responsibility, assuming the paramount importance of his agency in the public sphere, which is supported by a mystified privacy. The model of single combat is not an adequate representation for the complexities of relations in social groups but it is the only one the Grotesque consciousness can arrive at. It is interesting that in the third volume of _Modern Painters_ (1856) Ruskin introduced a typically indirect and two-edged commentary on the Crimean war. He acknowledged the importance of individual heroism and even appeared to glorify the crimson wave of carnage which occurred. But his main point is that such sacrifice could only be justified, not because it led to the defeat of the Tsar but to the realignment of Britain and France in the concord of civilised friendship and social bonds as their traditional enmity was abandoned.48 The Crimean war, the first European modern war, reported and photographed and interpreted by modern media, turned out to possess a complexity far beyond the model of war as a single combat between nations, an understanding dearly bought by its carnage. This traumatic understanding is embodied in Morris's poems, as the Grotesque fascination with violence refuses to match the complexities from which it emerges. Violence is the Grotesque's oversimplification of the complexities to which the numbed consciousness cannot respond.\n\nThe longing for meaning, and the sense of the failure of perception in the oppressed state which calls forth an ever more wayward and pathological fantasy, mean that consciousness pours inventive energy into the vision and the dream, and into the symbol which either reveals too much of the literal or conceals too much of the noumenal. Representation registers a gap between sign and _meaning_. The protagonists of these poems in fact rarely dream ('Sir Galahad' and 'The Wind' are exceptions), but they are _in_ the world of the dream. The terse, gnomic narrative is structured with the gaps, elisions and displacements of dream work, where objects are juxtaposed with startling vividness but without relational explanation in an unremitting and almost tiring metonymic intensity, isolated in space. Temporality contracts or expands with dream logic, a subsidiary part of the narrative suddenly assumes disproportionate importance, or it will be arranged as the interventions of multiple, fractured utterances. The poems inhabit an explanationless world, as actions, events and refrains mismatch with one another. The narrative of 'Concerning Geffray Teste Noir', for instance, deviates from what seems to be the story of an ambush into a secondary tale of the discovery of dead lovers which then assumes primary importance \u2013 what really is 'concerning' the narrator is not Teste Noir but a woman's skeleton and the power of the woman both to disrupt and to confirm masculinity. That _women_ die and become deeply implicated in masculine conflict haunts and disturbs him, as if the death of the woman's body signifies a special negation and horror. He remembers his father's horrified and horrifying reaction to the discovery of women's bones in the burning church of Beauvais, 'Between a beast's howl and a _woman's_ scream' (my emphasis).49\n\nIn 'Golden Wings' the causal relation between Jehane's departure from the castle, its destruction and her murder, is never explained. The 'slain man's stiffened feet' of the final sinister line, protruding grotesquely from the 'leaky boat', may be those of enemy or friend.50 The violation is presented without context, like the 'green' apples (another feminine symbol) which hang against the mouldering castle wall. Even brilliant emblematic and heraldic colour, the epitome of unambiguous signification, obfuscates and confuses. The insistent refrain of 'Two red roses across the moon', incorporating emblems of love and chastity, seems to bring opposites together and to assert the permanence of the signifying colours, gold and red. The refrain punctuates the narrative of a ride to and from battle (where routine slaughter takes place) and the return of a knight to his lady when he has victoriously cut down the enemies in their scarlet and blue. All the actions of the poem occur at noon, the decisive point of division in the day. Gold dominates in the last stanza \u2013 'there was nothing of brown', the stains of battle, the colour of mundane experience, but also the colour achieved from mixing together scarlet and blue.51 This, of course, is exactly what the slaughter has achieved, as the differentiating marks of opposition both within the enemy side and between it and the victors have been annihilated. The totality of annihilation which the dominance of 'gold' seems to require and the necessity for the conversion into 'brown' of all that is other to gold are immediately apparent. So too is the dependence of the refinement of the golden world on brutality. But gold, too, mixed with red, the colour of both love and war by the end of the narrative, would also become brown, and the _same_ colour would signify both the alliance of gold and war and gold and love in a collapse of meaning which throws customary interpretations awry. Grotesque colour here poses a riddle of meaning, and Morris's poems often acquire the arcane and incomplete nature of the riddle, embodying the baffled and fantastic hermeneutic dislocation of the Grotesque consciousness.\n\n'Rapunzel' and 'The Wind' are poems where Morris explores the Grotesque most elaborately. 'Rapunzel' shares the figure of the lady in the tower (Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shalott' and 'Mariana', as has been suggested, motivate many Pre-Raphaelite poems, indicating the intersecting circles of conservative and post-Benthamite thinking which Mill predicted would occur) with Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 'The Blessed Damozel', which was published in the second issue of _The Germ_. It is useful to compare the two poems, since Rossetti's poem works through an immersion in the Grotesque, whereas Morris's poem explores the Grotesque as resistance and objectifies it. Rossetti's poem rests on a simple yet bold reversal. Sensuous longing and physical desire are placed in heaven, itself a physical barrier, a golden bar or rampart, a bar which the bosom of the Damozel can make warm with her flesh, as in Keats's 'The Eve of Saint Agnes' the earthly Madelaine transfers warmth to her jewels. The lover, whose words occur in parenthesis to denote his separation, defines his separation in terms of infinite distance in space and time and the loss of a sense of materiality and physical reality. Rossetti, like Clough but far removed from his empiricism, is exploring the Tractarian orthodoxy concerning symbol. Ruskin, not without reason, had detected signs of Tractarian and 'Romish' thought in the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, and though subsequently assured of the contrary (the Rossettis were Anglicans) it is the case that this poem meditates the notion of presence and the symbol which takes the transcendent mystical body to be represented by the outward sign.52 Newman had said in _Tract 90_ that the material body sets 'bounds', like the Damozel's ramparts, to spiritual presence, and makes us think in terms of degrees of nearness or farness, unlike spiritual presence, which has nothing to do with physical measurement.53 But the Damozel, who asks for the intensity of earthly love in heaven \u2013 'Only to live as once on earth/With love' \u2013 is presented in a deeply physical and erotic way, and certainly makes the speaker aware of degrees of farness as she becomes unobtainable and distant in heaven.\n\nThe poem is asking in what way we perceive the mystical body through the physical body and how we invest the material with significance. The Damozel is literally invested, or clothed, with symbolic garments and emblems, three lilies, seven stars, a white rose. Her robe, 'ungirt from clasp to hem' both conceals and reveals her body.54 It is only through material signs and analogy that the speaker can grasp her language, which is like the voice of stars, the song of birds, the sound of the bell, like and not like, concealing and revealing, steps on the 'stair' which leads from earth to heaven. But if these literal signs 'bridge' the gap between earth and heaven and reach the 'Occult, withheld' experience, there is a sense in which 'likeness' as an identity of mystical and physical simply returns us repeatedly to the material. The promised new knowledge is simply a form of the old, since we can only know through the physical. Hence the acute despair of physical loss which ends the poem: 'And then she cast her arms along/The golden barriers,/And laid her face between her hands,/And wept'.55 Once the physical presence of love is removed there is nothing. The poem is at once a passionate account of the necessity of the incarnation of symbolic meaning, when the seen guarantees the unseen, and a sceptical discourse on the idea of the transfiguration of the erotic by the mystical: there may simply be only the manifestation of the physical or the erotic in all its fullness. The 'robe' which is the physical body conceals and reveals nothing but itself. Thus there is no stair or bridge to the unknown, and the mystical body is a case of the emperor's \u2013 or Damozel's \u2013 new clothes, as the woman's body figures nothing but itself. Perhaps that is why, despite or perhaps because of its beauty, the Damozel can remind us of one of Rossetti's 'stunners'.\n\nThe problem with the occulted nature or symbol for this poem is literally a problem of _translation_. Because there is no reversible relationship between the seen and the unseen, because we necessarily start from the seen and not the other way round we are caught in material representation. When the Damozel is 'translated' to heaven, therefore, she becomes the more intensely perceived as physical and sexual being the more ethereal she supposedly is. With her disappearance the 'clothes' of the Carlylean symbol (for this is a highly eclectic poem fusing a number of discourses of symbol just as it fuses Crashaw-like extravagance and Victorian lushness) do not become infinitely renewable as, in the last stanza, the narration moves from the visible to the merely heard '(I saw her smile.) . . . (I heard her tears.)'. The poem ends with a parenthesis not placed _between_ two linguistic structures but followed by a void. The intensity of affective diction \u2013 'The light thrilled towards her' \u2013 seems to be motivated by an anxiety lest language should break down altogether when the last evidence of the Damozel's presence disappears: 'She ceased'.56\n\n'Rapunzel', like 'The Blessed Damozel' , takes the image of separation as its central figure, as Rapunzel's yellow hair creates a 'path' or 'stair', as the Prince and the Witch call it, between the tower where she is imprisoned by the power of the Witch and the ground below. As in Rossetti's poem, the body of a woman bears the full weight of symbolic meaning, but whereas Rossetti's poem is a discursive and reflective meditation on the symbolic conversion of the body, Morris presents Rapunzel's hair in mysterious metonymic isolation \u2013 it does not even belong to her as she is forced to let it down to the foot of the tower and turn it into a ladder at the Witch's instigation. The golden hair falls 'fathoms' below her, a word which allies with the 'waves' and 'ripples' by which it is described to suggest an amorphous substance out of her control. Like the iconography of Jacob's 'ladder' which Ruskin instances as a form of Grotesque symbol, it is seen with a narrow concentration and enigmatic intensity which literalises its function as stairway. Morris dramatises the fairy story in terse and laconic episodes and disperses the events between several consciousnesses so that no single perspective has authority. Rossetti's poem moves between two visual fields, that of the Damozel and the excluded speaker. Morris persistently triangulates relationships, seen variously from above or below by the participants \u2013 the Prince, the Witch, Rapunzel. The Witch's perspective changes constantly, magically belonging to the tower or the ground. Rapunzel invokes Mary and Saint Michael from the vestigial Christian tradition she brings to her defence: the Prince sees Rapunzel through the eyes of the court and through the song of a minstrel. The power of the gaze is not invested in a single vision but moves erratically as different perspectives intersect and diverge.\n\nThe golden hair, literally a mediating entity as demons or princes climb up or down it, becomes a symbol of mediation, but it is a fetishised symbol. The Victorian fetishising of hair as a sign of sexuality is clearly at issue here, but Ruskin had also used a related metaphor in _The Political Economy of Art_ (1857) which is relevant. Speaking to a Manchester audience and using the idea of weaving as a metaphor for wealth, he talked of the 'golden net' of the world's wealth, entangling and destroying like a spider's web, or liberating when used in the social good. The price of anything never represents its value but 'the degree of desire' rich people have to possess it (in fact, he recommended coming off the gold standard for this reason).57 Thus the net of money is a signifying system for Ruskin. The importance of the hair as fetishised symbol in the poem is not that it can be given a specific meaning but that it is implicated in desire and is substituted for different things in different ways. It is demonised as 'Devil's bats' swing on it like spiders; it is the object of struggle to the death as knights fight over emblems of it.58 It is idealised as 'paths of stars' or a 'golden cord', or narrowly literalised so that it is used as if it _were_ the object it symbolises.59 Or it is seen, as the Prince and minstrel see it, as an obfuscating 'film' or 'veil' of gold, as Ruskin's Grotesque symbol which is experienced as veiling meaning.60 The symbol becomes aestheticised, the opposite of literalisation, as the veil of representation takes on an independent life, creating reference out of its own distortions.\n\nThe minstrel sings of the hair as 'veil', as his refrain has it, existing \"Twixt the sunlight and the shade', made by the 'rough hands' of a warrior.61 The veil is created by the illumination and blind spots of individual vision, but the gaze also depends on the immaterial but palpable play of light and shade in the external world. The song testifies to the complexity of the gaze and the meaning of the hair. The 'veil' of symbol is always, even here, subject to the individual's 'degree of desire'. The minstrel renames Rapunzel as Guendolen, and though she is liberated into a new language, naming the hare-bells as they become more specific than the 'blue flowers' seen from the tower (a subtle way of suggesting a new perspective), her name is imposed on her as much as the name of the Witch Rapunzel, which at least signified the double identity of light and shade. In the song 'Guendolen now speaks no word', and in the life of the court she is subject to the new social taboo of marriage.62 The marriage is a protection, a happy ending, but an equivocal one. The Witch from hell forbids men access to her golden hair.\n\nRapunzel/Guendolen has the vision of the oppressed consciousness which cannot play. Even her tear is absorbed by the marble parapet's 'red stains' as if to emphasise her powerlessness (unlike the Damozel of Rossetti's poem who gives warmth to her golden parapet).63 The Prince, too, though to a lesser extent, is subject. He can only gain access to Rapunzel when he has assumed the warlike identity urged upon him by his guardians in the 'council-hall', when he works rather than dreams. His identity, and that of Rapunzel, is created for him by the Minstrel's song. Even when he sings the song to 'express' his own situation he is mediating another's representation of himself. The oppressed consciousness's fascination with death is apparent after the consummation of love when he asks 'did you ever see a death?'64 This abruptness is typical of the non-sequiturs of the poem, a curious question to ask after a consummation. Love and death seem to come to his mind as linked extremities, terminal moments which are the counterparts of one another.\n\nDeath broods over _The Defence_ , a never repressed nemesis. The Blake-like, gnomic refrain of 'The Wind' asks questions of the life force and energy represented by the wind. Is it sad, kind, unhappy, in its blindness as it seeks out the 'lily-seed'? Its indifferent, predatory purposiveness seems to be not the opposite but beyond or the other side of the death wish, a pleasure principle without awareness of pleasure. This collapsing of opposites occurs throughout the poem, where all experiences, however discrete, are related in contiguity rather than difference. An orange, its juice, we later learn, like blood, lies on a green chair hanging 'with a deep gash cut in the rind', and it is not immediately clear whether the orange is an actual or a represented fruit woven into the cloth, art or life, for the dragons on the cloth 'grin out in the gusts of the wind', moved by action in the external world as if they may be living.65 Memory falls into dream, love is displaced by death, as the inexplicable fantasy of Margaret supersedes memory. Margaret, dead under a bier of life-giving spring daffodils, seems to be associated with cyclical movement of the seasons, and thus with death rather than life, for spring is inevitably superseded in time by another season. Finally, 'in march'd the ghosts of those that had gone to the war', and it is not clear whether these ghosts are part of the Margaret dream or whether they 'really' approach the speaker in a waking vision.66 In either case the ghost is ambiguous here, for a ghost can be the return of the dead or of the living who are ghosts of their former selves. Their heraldic colours, once painted by the dreamer, but now 'faint', and thus unreadable, are the antithesis of the brilliant and hallucinatory colour of objects at the start of the poem. Nevertheless, they are complementary, for a brilliant and fantastic intensity is one of the needs of the consciousness experiencing the faded sense of lack and numbness, of the person who cannot play, the male hysteria which belongs to the heart of stone. This, above all the poems, is Morris's Crimean-war poem. The ghostly return of the ghosts is a return from the death of war to a civil _society_ of death.\n\nRuskin always insisted that the Grotesque was not a sick or degenerate form, though it could be under certain historical conditions. It is Morris's achievement that he analyses the Grotesque through its manifestations, simultaneously inward with and external to it, actively expressing its longings and at the same time analysing the structure of its determining conditions and politics. It is this which gives these poems the energy of resistance, whether it is in the need to break through oppression and escape as Rapunzel and Jehane of 'Golden Wings' attempt to do, or in the need to experience phenomena with extraordinary hyperaesthetic intensity. For intense feeling, grief and madness are forms of resistance rather than disease in Morris's texts. Thus he produces a double poem which both expresses and _reads_ the Grotesque. Ruskin believed that the education of the eye was the essential democratic need, for 'the eye is a nobler organ than the ear' and through it we obtain or put into form 'nearly all the useful information we are to have about this world' ( _The Political Economy of_ _Art_ ).67 He spoke of the distance of the verbal and the written sign in comparison with the ocular, though he was probably one of the first critics to think of the verbal, written and visual sign as texts. The Pre-Raphaelites are often thought to have brought the vividness of the pictorial into their writing, but rather they brought the problematical gaze of the Grotesque vision. Morris's reading of the Grotesque gaze is as much a verbal as a visual matter. The dream syntax and articulation of Morris's Grotesque, whether at the level of a single line or phrase or a syntagmatic sequence of narrative, require a double act of seeing and reading and are highly organised linguistically. Its simplicity is of the utmost sophistication because it is about misprision rather than mastery. His poems compel the reader to go through the processes of interpreting and relating, misprision and adjustment, actively, by refusing explanation and context for the transgressive and disturbing material they present. The associative process envisaged by Hallam and Tennyson commands assent and shocks by subterfuge. Morris's poems ask for dissent and shock by enabling a reader to see the distortions of Grotesque vision even while he remains within them. Popular, immediate, simple in form, democratically accessible, they nevertheless expose the 'ripple', as Ruskin called it, on the mirror. In this way they aim for the democratic self-education of the reading eye. It is interesting that in 'The Wind' Margaret is reading a text before she is so violently deflected by the dreamer.68\n\n#  **Notes**\n\n1 Morris shared accommodation with Rossetti at Red Lion Square from November 1856 until May 1859. See Philip Henderson, _William Morris. His Life, Work and Friends_ , Harmondsworth, 1973, 56\u201378.\n\n2 Letters to _The Times_ , 13 May 1851, 30 May 1851, 5 May 1854, 25 May 1854. _The Works of John Ruskin_ , E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, eds, 39 vols, London, 1903\u201312, XII, 319\u201335.\n\n3 Henderson, _William Morris_ , 30\u20131.\n\n4 _The Germ_ , January\u2013April 1850, first two numbers January and February. Later renamed _Art and Poetry, being Thoughts towards Nature_ , dated respectively March and May 1850. Folded thereafter. _The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_ , 12 monthly nos, January\u2013December 1856.\n\n5 W. Holman Hunt, _Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood_ , London, 1905, 150. Consider Carol T. Christ, _The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry_ , London, 1975, 55, as an example of an intelligent critic who attempts to unify the disparate positions of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood under a discussion of detail and accuracy.\n\n6 _The Germ_ , facsimile reprint with Introduction by W. M. Rossetti, London, 1901, 16.\n\n7 _The Germ_ , 1 (January 1850), 31.\n\n8 _The Germ_ , facsimile reprint, 1901, 18.\n\n9 _The Germ_ , 1 (January 1850), 14.\n\n10 Cook and Wedderburn, III, _Modern Painters_ , 31\u20138, 25\u201332.\n\n11 _The Germ_ , 1 (January 1850), 17\u201318.\n\n12 _The Germ_ , 2 (February 1850), 58.\n\n13 _Art and Poetry_ , 4 (May 1850), 192.\n\n14 E. S. Dallas, _Poetics: An Essay on Poetry_ , London, 1852, reference to Kant, 157; quotation, 291.\n\n15 See my _Victorian Poetry_ (1993), Part I, pp. 71\u20134. See also ibid., p. 341.\n\n16 Rev. F. W. Robertson, _Two Lectures on the Influence of Poetry on the Working Classes_ , London, 1852, 11, 59.\n\n17 See ' \"A Joy for Ever\"; (and its price in the market), Two lectures on the political economy of art', in Cook and Wedderburn, XVI, 5\u2013176.\n\n18 Walter Pater, _Westminster Review_ , N.S., XXXIV (October 1868), 300.\n\n19 Ibid., 300\u20131.\n\n20 W. Morris, _The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems_ (1858), London, 1896 (1858 reprint), 247.\n\n21 Cook and Wedderburn, XI, _The Stones of Venice_ , iii, 135\u201395.\n\n22 Letter to _The Times_ , 25 May 1854, in Cook and Wedderburn, XII, 334.\n\n23 _The Defence_ , 46.\n\n24 Ibid., 26.\n\n25 Ibid., 174\u20137.\n\n26 Millais based a painting on 'Mariana' in 1850. For the Pre-Raphaelite interest in Tennyson see Laura Marcus, 'Brothers in their anecdotage: Holman Hunt's _Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood', Pre-Raphaelitism Reviewed_ , Marcia Pointon, ed., Manchester, 1989, 1\u201321, 15.\n\n27 Cook and Wedderburn, X, _The Stones of Venice_ , ii, 184: see also XI, _The Stones of Venice_ , iii, 178\u201380, paras. 59\u201360.\n\n28 A. W. Pugin, _Contrasts, or a Parallel between the Architecture of the 15th & 19th Centuries_, London, 1836, 3: 'I will proceed, first, to shew the state of Architecture in this country immediately before the great change of religion; secondly, the fatal effects produced by that change of Architecture; and, thirdly, the present degraded state of Architectural taste, and the utter want of those feelings which alone can restore Architecture to its ancient noble position'.\n\n29 Cook and Wedderburn, XI, _The Stones of Venice_ , iii, 134.\n\n30 Cook and Wedderburn, X, _The Stones of Venice_ , ii, 188, 196\u2013201, paras. 9, 17\u201322.\n\n31 Ibid., 196.\n\n32 Cook and Wedderburn, XI, _Stones of Venice_ , iii, 154.\n\n33 Ibid., 155.\n\n34 Ibid., 169.\n\n35 Ibid., 173.\n\n36 Ibid., 166, 178.\n\n37 Ibid., 179.\n\n38 Ibid., 185.\n\n39 Ibid., 187.\n\n40 Ibid., 191.\n\n41 Hegel's _Aesthetics_ is a text composed by his contemporary H. G. Hotho, from Hegel's notes (and students' notes) for lectures given in Berlin in the 1820s. Hotho's editions were published in 1835 and 1842. The first English translation, _The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Art_ , trans. Bernard Bosanquet, was first published in 1886.\n\n42 _The Defence_ , 56.\n\n43 Ibid., 4.\n\n44 Walter Pater, _Westminster Review_ , N.S., XXXIV (October 1868), 300\u201312: 305.\n\n45 _The Defence_ , 222.\n\n46 Ibid., 169.\n\n47 Ibid., 173.\n\n48 Cook and Wedderburn, V, _Modern Painters_ , iii, 410\u201317, paras. 33\u20139.\n\n49 _The Defence_ , 143.\n\n50 Ibid., 214.\n\n51 Ibid., 225.\n\n52 Ibid., 121.\n\n53 J. H. Newman, _Tract Ninety, or Remarks on Certain Passages in the Thirty-Nine Articles_ (1841), A. W. Evans, ed., London, 1933, 69.\n\n54 _The Germ_ , 2 (February 1850), 80.\n\n55 Ibid., 83.\n\n56 Ibid.\n\n57 Cook and Wedderburn, XVI, 'A Joy for Ever . . . lectures on the political economy of art', 86.\n\n58 _The Defence_ , 121.\n\n59 Ibid., 117, 119.\n\n60 Ibid., 121.\n\n61 Ibid., 131.\n\n62 Ibid.\n\n63 Ibid., 115.\n\n64 I bid., 125.\n\n65 Ibid., 188.\n\n66 Ibid., 193.\n\n67 'A Joy for Ever', 90\u20131.\n\n68 This chapter has benefited greatly from my reading of Lindsay Smith's unpublished Ph.D. thesis on Ruskin, _The Enigma of Visibility: Theories of Visual Perception in the Work of John Ruskin, William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites_ , University of Southampton, 1989. [Published as: _Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites_ (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995).]\n\nArmstrong, Isobel. 1993. \"A New Radical Aesthetic: The Grotesque as Cultural Critique: Morris.\" In _Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics_ , pp. 232\u201351. London: Routledge. Reproduced with permission of Taylor & Francis.\n\n# 8\n\n# Alienated Majesty\n\n#  _Gerard M Hopkins_\n\nGeoffrey Hill\n\nAmong the numerous consequences of the era of so-called 'protest art' is the irrational embarrassment of the current reaction against the theme of protest, or of political writing in general. Whatever the excesses and affectations of the 1960s and '70s may have done to harm the cause of poetry, there is nonetheless a real connection between it and politics: as real now, if we could disclose its true stratum or vein, as in the Tudor court poetry of Skelton, Surrey, and Wyatt or in the political sonnets of Milton or in the relation that exists between Wordsworth's 'Preface' to _Lyrical Ballads_ and his tract _On the Convention of Cintra_ , or between Whitman's editorials for the _Brooklyn Daily Eagle_ , and other papers, and _Leaves of Grass_. As the word 'politics' has been rendered so suspect, I have opted in these chapters on alienated majesty1 for the term 'civil polity', gleaned from the title-page of Josiah Royce's last book, _The Hope of the Great Community_ , published posthumously in 1916, where the author is referred to as 'Late Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity at Harvard University'.\n\nCivil polity \u2013 let us make the claim \u2013 is poetry's natural habitat. To approach Emerson, Whitman, and Hopkins in terms of this claim is to place particular emphasis upon the nature of 'alienated majesty', Emerson's fine phrase in which he perhaps spoke more profoundly than he knew of the powerfully inhibiting element in New England society.2 This element simultaneously restricted and enlarged powers of the imagination in Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson, in Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville. Moreover, in all these writers I sense that the alienated majesty is the body and spirit of civil polity itself. The greatest crisis affecting civil polity during their lifetimes was obviously the [American] Civil War, though in Emerson's case the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law by the governing body of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1851 took more out of him \u2013 more even than the death of his son nine years previously and certainly more than was exacted by his sidelines experience of the War itself.\n\nIf the life and work of Gerard Hopkins appear at first sight alien to the New England context, that particular frisson may not be altogether inappropriate to the argument, since aliening, alienness, even alienism \u2013 as well as self-estrangement, the reverse to the brave face of Emersonian self-reliance \u2013 are here being placed under review. Hopkins, however, remains an outsider of a more elusive kind. He comes across as being remarkably whole, even when riven by affliction and desolation; he is the same man in his late poems as he is in his sermons and retreat-notes; his introspection, which is that of the Ignatian _Spiritual Exercises_ , is quite other than the introspection of Emerson, Dickinson, or Melville. His rejection of Whitman is fierce but entirely without affectation, which is more than can be said of Dickinson's.\n\nHopkins was acquainted with Whitman's poetry: a selection, edited by William Rossetti, had appeared in England in 1868; within three years of its appearance Whitman received greetings and praise from Swinburne and Tennyson. In 1874 George Saintsbury reviewed a new British edition of _Leaves of Grass_ in the _Academy_ , a review which Hopkins read. There is no way, of course, that Whitman could have known anything about Hopkins.\n\nOn the face of it, Hopkins represented everything which, in _Democratic Vistas_ , Whitman urged American writers and readers to reject: Europe's 'feudal, ecclesiastical, dynastic world',3 to the idioms of which Hopkins, on first sight, appears to cleave. As a follower of St Ignatius of Loyola and a student of the Ignatian _Spiritual Exercises_ he took into his devotional life and language the terms which, in the 1530s, Ignatius, himself a member of the warrior caste, a _caballero_ , had written into his book of instructions: 'if anyone would refuse the request of such a king, how he would deserve to be despised by everyone, and considered an unworthy knight' ('The Kingdom of Christ').4\n\nI caught this morning morning's minion, king-  \ndom of daylight's dauphin,\n\nand so on.5 Moreover, within the immediate context of late-middle Victorian England, Hopkins, when he allowed his mind to attend to politics (which in fact he did fairly frequently) was, except in certain matters pertaining to Ireland, a thoroughgoing Tory Imperialist: 'I enclose a poem, the Bugler. I am half inclined to hope the Hero of it may be killed in Afghanistan', that is, killed heroically defending some vulnerable outpost of the Empire, the Raj.6\n\nAt the same time, Whitman recognized power when in its presence, and he could scarcely have missed its presence in Hopkins's poetry if only he had read it. A minor _leitmotiv_ in these chapters on alienated majesty is Whitman's 'It is time the English-speaking peoples had some true idea about the verteber of genius, namely power'.7 'Verteber', a form of the word as given in Noah Webster's _American Dictionary_ in 1828 and 1832, would have appealed to Hopkins, who emphasized the 'naked thew and sinew' in his observations on the admirable way in which some writers could use rhythm and syntax; Dryden, in particular, Hopkins admired for this quality, calling him 'the most masculine of our poets'.8 Moreover, Whitman's rejection of Europe and its literature is more qualified by detail than the brief quotation from _Democratic Vistas_ suggests. In a lengthy footnote within that piece, he points to works of world literature including those by Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, and Goethe as providing 'models, combined, adjusted to other standards than America's, but of priceless value to her and hers'.9 Nor is _Democratic Vistas_ , of 1867\u201370, the only place in which we find a greater degree _of finesse_ in his treatment of European literature. In one of his _Brooklyn Daily Eagle_ pieces ('\"Home\" Literature' of 11 July 1846) he condemns William Cowper for teaching 'blind loyalty to the \"divine right of kings\"', a crime for which he would have condemned the then two-year-old Hopkins had his seer's vision foreknown several poems and numerous letters, and he also denounces 'Walter Scott . . . Southey, and many others' who 'laugh to scorn the idea of republican freedom and virtue'. But when he dismisses the 'tinsel sentimentality of Bulwer', the 'inflated, unnatural, high-life-below-stairs, \"historical\" romances of Harrison Ainsworth',10 not only is Whitman forthrightly, entirely, correct in his critical judgement, he is also markedly close in pitch of attention to Hopkins, another fine, albeit informal, critic of modern letters:\n\nIf anything made me think the age Alexandrine (as they say), an age of decadence (a criticism that they sling about between the bursting Yes and blustering No, for want of more things to say . . .), well, it would be to see how secondrate poetry (and what I mean is, not poetry at all) gets itself put about for great poetry.11\n\nOr:\n\nNow [Browning] has got a great deal of what came in with Kingsley and the Broad Church school, a way of talking (and making his people talk) with the air and spirit of a man bouncing up from the table with his mouth full of bread and cheese and saying that he meant to stand no blasted nonsense.12\n\nHopkins disliked what he called 'bluster', as his comic portrayal of Robert Browning's poetry and Charles Kingsley's muscular Christianity reveals; and it is likely that he would have seen Whitman as a blusterer also ('I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world');13 unjustly because, as James Wright showed, in a beautifully appreciative essay, Whitman is one of the most delicate of poets, and with a gift of parody and self-parody to equal Hopkins's.14 But, of course, we know why Hopkins, while admitting that he knew his own mind to be 'more like Whitman's than any other man's living', objected to his American senior. It is because Whitman was 'a very great scoundrel'; and he was a scoundrel, in Hopkins's eyes, because he claimed to be 'indifferent' to moral and doctrinal issues which Hopkins took as matters essential to salvation.15 Whitman understood or appeared to understand sensuality as good; to Hopkins the line between sensuous and sensual was as fine-drawn as it had been for Milton, who introduced the word 'sensuous' into English.\n\nTo repeat: how Whitman would or would not have responded to the poetry of Hopkins is entirely a matter for speculation. It is conceivable that he might have been drawn, as so many readers of Hopkins have in fact been drawn, into the error of regarding him as a wild nature poet of a power to rival Keats and Shelley who unfortunately fell among Jesuits and whose gift was consequently repressed. The contrary opinion needs here to be stated, that the _Spiritual Exercises_ not only saved Hopkins from repression and despair but also gave to his poetry those distinguishing features which set the seal of greatness upon it.\n\nHopkins had dedicated himself to poetry some considerable time before he realized that he most truly and powerfully desired to dedicate himself to the service of Christ and the salvation of his own soul. He told Dixon that he had burnt his early verse 'before I became a Jesuit and resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the wish of my superiors'.16 As to that section of the _Exercises_ headed 'A consideration to obtain information on the matters in which a choice should be made', its particular significance for his situation may have increased rather than diminished during the twenty years in which he was a member of the Society:\n\nOnce an immutable choice has been made there is no further choice, for it cannot be dissolved, as is true with marriage, the priesthood, etc. It should be noted only that if one has not made this choice properly, with due consideration, and without inordinate attachments, he should repent and try to lead a good life in the choice he has made. Since this choice was ill considered and improperly made, it does not seem to be a vocation from God, as many err in believing, wishing to interpret an ill-considered or bad choice as a divine call. For every divine call is always pure and clean without any admixture of flesh or other inordinate attachments.17\n\nThe suggestion may here be made that a poetic gift, working to the pitch evident even in Hopkins's early work, is always inordinate in its demands. There is a certain poignancy in rereading, in this light, Emerson's words from the essay 'Experience': 'if one remembers how innocently he began to be an artist, he perceives that nature joined with his enemy'.18 At the age of fifteen Hopkins 'innocently . . . began to be an artist'; but poetry, such as he was to write in his later years, is not an innocent occupation, even when, as in most cases, it escapes being confronted by the demands of a vocation such as his.\n\nHopkins offered his great ode, 'The Wreck of the Deutschland', composed during the first half of 1876 with the permission and indeed the encouragement of his superior, to the Society, to the English Catholic Church, and to the English people; in the trust, as Norman H. MacKenzie says, that it would 'win over to the truth widening circles of Englishmen'.19 When it failed to win over even the editor of _The Month_ , Hopkins returned, so far as the Society cared or was aware, to the production of 'little presentation pieces which occasion called for'.20 His genius, henceforth, was in hiding; though not in the half-surreptitious way which he attributes to his bird-watching 'heart' in 'The Windhover'.21\n\nThis crucial episode reveals, however, the strength of mind with which Hopkins lived according to the rule. He avoided two errors of romantic sentiment. First, there is no evidence that he ever sided with his genius against his vocation. He did not regret having taken vows. Secondly, he made no attempt 'to interpret an ill-considered or bad choice' \u2013 what Emerson wryly terms the innocent beginnings of the artist's life \u2013 as 'a divine call'.\n\nHere too the line between the understanding and misunderstanding is very thin-drawn; our misunderstanding, not Hopkins's. His early sonnet 'Where art thou friend', of April 1865, has been read as 'in effect a dedication of his poetry to Christ's service'.22 Such a sense of dedication, at that stage in his spiritual life, need not be taken as a misjudgement. If MacKenzie is right in his 'Note on Missing Poems' it was shortly thereafter, in the fall of 1865, that Hopkins began to sense that his 'deepening religious devotion was challenging his future as a secular poet'.23 I interpret 'secular' as 'pertaining to the world of literary success or fame' rather than as 'choosing worldly themes or subjects' since Hopkins's poetry could scarcely ever have been described as 'secular' in the latter sense. The secular world in the other sense, acknowledged and then put aside, figures in the generous letter of understanding and comfort addressed to his former teacher, the Anglican Church historian and minor poet Richard Watson Dixon, in June 1878:\n\nIt is sad to think what disappointment must many times over have filled your heart for the darling children of your mind . . . For disappointment and humiliations embitter the heart and make an aching in the very bones. As far as I am concerned I say with conviction and put it on record again that you have great reason to thank God who has given you so astonishingly clear an inward eye to see what is in visible nature and in the heart such a deep insight into what is earnest, tender, and pathetic in human life and feeling as your poems display.24\n\nSuch a letter may help clarify our understanding in several ways. First, it makes evident that the mind and heart which could offer this kind of consolation in such full measure, and yet measure the rightness of each phrase, would not at this time (just less than two years after the rejection of 'The Wreck of the Deutschland') be deluded into fancying that public fame or notoriety as a poet might be construable as an alternative form of 'divine call'. Secondly, it suggests that Hopkins is able to envisage that talk of poetry could constitute, when called for (which would not be often), part of the dutiful, necessary language of charity, and that, in performing this office, he finds it appropriate to use the commonplaces of natural religion, moral philosophy, and civil polity. Such phrases as 'a deep insight into what is earnest, tender, and pathetic' are, taken by themselves, no different from Josiah Royce's 'very deep insight into the meaning of life'.25 Here, as in a myriad other instances around us, it is context that effects the change in quality. Such language, in Royce's _William James and Other Essays_ , is not the best he can do, merely the best he permitted himself to do, for a Phi Beta Kappa Oration or Commencement Address.\n\nThere are ways of offering up commonplace to the greater glory of God. Hopkins and in his way Whitman can do this; as Lincoln can. Others cannot. What Whitman offers up, in _Drum-Taps_ , are phrases that represent the verbal strivings of the common soldiers of the Union army, as they endeavour to bring home the unspeakable nature of what they have been forced to endure and to witness: 'tumultuous now the contest rages',26 'a desperate emergency',27 'Faces, varieties, postures beyond description',28 'I see a sight beyond all the pictures and poems ever made',29 'O the bullet could never kill what you really are, dear friend'.30 Very finely, these half-defeated phrases of common endurance are matched by long lines of great exactitude: 'The glisten of the little steel instruments catching the glint of the torches';31 and both the half-articulate and the minutely articulate are imperceptibly combined into a formal generosity of cadence that does duty for them both:\n\nComes before me the unknown soldier's grave, comes the inscription  \nrude in Virginia's woods,  \n _Bold, cautious, true, and my loving comrade_.32\n\n'Inscription rude': the rough inscription, that Whitman ensures shall be confronted by his readers although, as his endless revisions to _Leaves of Grass_ make clear, he is himself anything but a rough inscriber.\n\n'Comrade' is a key-word for Whitman: his language is comradely with half-dead phrases ('postures beyond description') as it is with the young men who uttered them and are dead. It is his equivalent of Hopkins's dutiful, necessary language of charity.\n\n'Common', the commonness of common soldiers, their common suffering, the commonness of their slang and platitudes, is a key-term in Whitman's polemic of civil polity, in the transcendent commonness of _Democratic Vistas_ :\n\nGrand, common stock! to me the accomplish'd and convincing growth, prophetic of the future; proof undeniable to sharpest sense, of perfect beauty, tenderness and pluck, that never feudal lord, nor Greek, nor Roman breed, yet rival'd.33\n\nAnd this is to be distinguished sharply from what he elsewhere calls 'the mean flat average':\n\nTo-day, in books, in the rivalry of writers, especially novelists, success, (socall'd), is for him or her who strikes the mean flat average, the sensational appetite for stimulus, incident, persiflage, &c, and depicts, to the common calibre, sensual, exterior life.34\n\nIt will readily be observed that between the two phrases 'grand, common stock' and 'the common calibre' \u2013 as they occur in context \u2013 there stands a _massif_ of contrary implications; and yet the bulk of the divide itself is substantially built up around the word _common_. Both examples occur within some thirty pages of the same work, _Democratic_ _Vistas_. That Whitman here perceives, more clearly than most Whitmanites of the succeeding century and a half, that a 'grand common stock' shall not find its destiny realized in the 'common calibre', the 'mean flat average', is an insight which registers itself semantically rather than discursively. It goes some way towards explaining why Whitman, like Emerson and indeed like Hopkins, invested so heavily in the idea of _genius_. 'Genius' was to them as 'intrinsic value' was to Ruskin. Together, 'genius' and 'intrinsic value' are caught, without hope of success, in the crisis of civil polity to which I have attached Emerson's phrase 'alienated majesty'. For Whitman, in the years following Lincoln's assassination and with emancipation betrayed by reconstruction, it was the mean flat average that increasingly alienated the grandeur of the common stock.\n\n'I find within my professional experience now a good deal of matter to write on.'35 If I did not already know whose words these are, I have no reason to suppose that I could identify the author. They are found in a letter from Hopkins to Robert Bridges (14 August 1879). To the same recipient, Hopkins writes, 'The state of the country is indeed sad, I might say it is heartbreaking, for I am a very great patriot' (16 June 1881).36 Six months later, he writes to Dixon: 'My Liverpool and Glasgow experience laid upon my mind a conviction, a truly crushing conviction, of the misery of town life to the poor and more than to the poor, of the misery of the poor in general, of the degradation even of our race, of the hollowness of this century's civilisation' (1 December 1881).37\n\nConcern for civil polity coexists with Hopkins's ever increasing devotion to the service of Christ and the salvation of his own soul. To understand the nature of this coexistence, the chapter 'Academic Theology and Hopkins's Self-Consciousness' in Walter J. Ong's _Hopkins, the Self, and God_ (1986) helps us; as do Christopher Devlin's notes to his edition of _The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins_ (1959), in which he glosses several passages in Duns Scotus's _Scriptum Oxoniense_ to indicate reasons why Hopkins should care for him so greatly. According to Scotus, 'the self-perfection to which man aspires is in the natural order' although 'the achievement of it requires supernatural aid'.38 The idea that the kingdom of original justice was not rendered wholly inaccessible by the consequences of the Fall had a particular attractiveness for Hopkins, as did the radical suggestion, also originating with Scotus, that 'God the Son's descent into creation' was 'an act of love which would have taken place in one form or another' whether or not the Fall had taken place.39 One can see the consequences of this Christology in the foundation and development of Hopkins's theological politics. He was a commonweal man through and through, and if 'Christ's humanity was God's first intention in creating', a far stronger light is thrown upon the idea of humanity's eternal status in the divine polity than if the Incarnation is understood wholly as an act of redemption consequent upon the Fall.40\n\n'Now _what was the common weal_? what was the joint and common good of that kingdom?'41 Hopkins's rhetorical question was raised and answered, by himself, in the presence of the Sunday evening congregation at St Francis Xavier's Church, Liverpool, 18 January 1880, in a sermon on the text 'Thy kingdom come'. Hopkins's answer to his own question was not straight out of Ignatius:\n\nit was that God should be glorified in man and man glorified in God. Man was created to praise, honour, and serve God, thus fulfilling God's desire in bringing him into being and by so doing to save his soul, thus fulfilling his own desire, the desire of everything that has being. He was created to give God glory and by so doing to win himself glory. This was the good that first commonwealth aimed at, this was its common weal.42\n\nThe foundation of this declaration is certainly that of _The Spiritual Exercises_ , but the final impression and expression have been shaped by Hopkins; as he might have said himself, he has put his own stress on it. I have the feeling, when reading such a passage, that this is something from a very late response to Hobbes: a belated but powerful addition to a sequence which began in the mid-seventeenth century with Bramhall's _A Defence of True Liberty_ (1655) and Clarendon's _A Brief View and Survey of the Dangers and Pernicious Errors to Church and State_ (1676) and was continued in the first half of the eighteenth century by Bishop Butler's _Fifteen Sermons_ of 1726. If there seems something anachronistic, even archaic, in this way of presenting these issues, it should be added that there is something anachronistic, possibly archaic, in anyone's following _The Spiritual Exercises_ , set down in the early 1530s, in the midst of a progressive, increasingly secularist age; which is to say that Hopkins was thoroughly committed to his position and knew that his position committed him to appearing, to hostile Liberalism, two or three centuries behind the times.\n\nOne of the most grievous losses to modern English poetry is the 'great ode' to Edmund Campion which in September 1881 Hopkins told Bridges he had begun,43 but which a month later he told Dixon had been 'laid aside',44 no trace of it remains. St Edmund Campion (beatified in 1886, canonized in 1970) was one of the English Jesuit martyrs of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and Hopkins's ode, described by him as 'something between the _Deutschland_ and [Dryden's] _Alexander's Feast_ , in sprung rhythm of irregular metre',45 had been intended as a celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of Campion's martyrdom, 1 December 1881.\n\nThe late sonnet 'Tom's Garland: Upon the Unemployed' is so unwieldy largely because Hopkins, in 1888, is attempting to compose a variant upon a mid-seventeenth century political sonnet, such as Milton, or perhaps even Hobbes, might have written. Hopkins offers what he calls a 'crib' for the poem, sent to Bridges in February 1888:\n\nMust I interpret it ['Tom's Garland']? It means then that, as St. Paul and Plato and Hobbes and everybody says, the commonwealth or well ordered human society is like one man; a body with many members and each its function; some higher, some lower, but all honourable, from the honour which belongs to the whole.46\n\nThere is little point in objecting that Hopkins has failed to take the individual stress of either St Paul or Plato or Hobbes in so lumping them together, because the added 'and everybody' clearly indicates that the sentence is intended to be read as one of good-humoured exasperation.\n\nEven so, 'Tom's Garland' is to be judged as a passionately serious effort to match navvies' labour with imaginative toil. In terms of consequence and effect this is a far stretch from Coleridge's intention when he wrote, in _The Friend_ , of requiring 'the attention of my reader to become my fellow-labourer',47 though Hopkins's massive strenuosities in this poem may be indirectly derived from that source. We have to say that if, as Ong claims, Hopkins was 'inside his own epoch in history, at home in his own age',48 'Tom's Garland' is a strange way of showing this to be the case, or we must add that his at-home-ness produces some strange metaphysical children, or 'darling children of [the] mind' as he expressed it in his letter to Dixon. MacKenzie observes that the poem may have been influenced by Ford Madox Brown's sonnet 'Work' which he wrote to accompany his painting of the same title. MacKenzie adds that Brown's well-known painting 'illustrated Carlyle's teachings on the need for all men to have some work to do, whether with brawn (like the navvies shown excavating in Hampstead) or brain (like two onlookers, Carlyle and the controversial social philosopher F. D. Maurice)'.49 The problem with the theme of 'alienation' is that, understood purely as a _topos_ , it in no way prevents the philosopher who proposes it from being thoroughly at home in the world he trounces and castigates, like that couple of well-to-do loungers in Brown's painting, pleasantly observing the navvies' labour and seemingly entirely satisfied to have matters remain like that. But 'Tom's Garland' is a much stranger piece of work than Brown's painting. There is a likelihood, it has been observed, that Hopkins intended to write a burlesque element into this poem. There would be good precedent for it, in Milton's political sonnets such as 'On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament', 'On the Detraction which followed upon my writing Certain Treatises', 'A book was writ of late called _Tetrachordon_ ', though it must be added that Milton's three sonnets wed terseness to the burlesque. Whereas they are terse and on target, Hopkins is not. In describing his intentions in 'Harry Ploughman', the companion piece to 'Tom's Garland', Hopkins said that he 'wanted the coda for a sonnet which is in some sort \"nello stilo satirico o bernesco\"', i.e. in the burlesque satirical style, after the manner of the early sixteenth century Italian poet Francesco Berni, known for his comic and satirical attacks on individuals written in the form of the caudate sonnet. Hopkins added, 'It has a kind of rollic at all events'.50\n\nThe noun 'rollic' appears to be derived from the verb 'to rollick', 'to frolic, sport, or romp, in a joyous, careless fashion', a dialect word, introduced into polite letters early in the nineteenth century. This verb and its noun and adjective were employed, throughout the century, by a bevy of second-order humourists, notably in the magazines, _Blackwood's Magazine, Pall Mall Gazette, Macmillan's Magazine, Fraser's Magazine, The Saturday Review_.51 An equally significant word applied by Hopkins to 'Tom's Garland' itself as well as to 'Harry Ploughman' is 'robustious'. The _Oxford English Dictionary_ states that it was in 'common use during the 17th century. In the 18th it becomes rare, and is described by Johnson (1755) as \"now only used in low language, and in a sense of contempt\". During the 19th it has been considerably revived, esp. by archaizing writers'.52 Both 'rollick' and 'robustious' are more appropriate to Hopkins's own gloss on 'Tom's Garland' (provided in his letter of 10 February 1888 to Bridges) than they are to the sonnet itself, which he finally described, in the same letter, as being 'very pregnant . . . and in point of execution very highly wrought. Too much so, I am afraid'.53\n\nIn principle we ought not to object to a sonnet being simultaneously 'robustious' and 'very highly wrought'. Both terms combine well to describe the vernacular artifice of Milton's political sonnets. In principle again, such a combination could, in Hopkins's case, relate closely to one of his sharpest creative realizations: the relation of ' monumentality' to 'bidding'. 'Bidding' is Hopkins's term for 'the art or virtue of saying everything right _to_ or _at_ the hearer . .  . and of discarding everything that does not bid, does not tell'. Hopkins goes on to make one of his most penetrating observations: 'It is most difficult to combine this bidding, such a fugitive thing, with a monumental style'.54 It is the key to what is right and wrong in his own poetic method; to what is strong and weak in Keats's poems of 1819\u201320 ('To Autumn', the unfinished 'Hyperion'); and to what, in Wordsworth or Tennyson, strikes us as noble simplicity rather than mere verbosity or canting. It allows us to realize the very different factors which assure, on the one hand, the triumph of Whitman's 'Song of Myself' and the more limited but real success of Wilfred Owen's half-rhyme and para-rhyme in his ode 'Insensibility'. Whitman knows that if he can say the objective details 'right _to_ or _at_ the hearer', over a sufficiently long span, the bidding will transform itself into its own form of monumentality. Owen recognizes that he can at one and the same time annul and confirm our expectations of customary monumentality:\n\nBut cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,  \nThat they should be as stones.55\n\nAnd he further recognizes that half-rhyme, which sustains order and expectation while maintaining its scepticism of them, also draws bidding power into the extremities of the lines. The genius of Hopkins's own late poetry \u2013 'That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection', 'Thou art indeed just, Lord . . .' \u2013 is itself a structural compounding of bidding with monumentality: 'Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain'.56\n\nIf civil polity is poetry's natural habitat, there are implications for such poems as 'Tom's Garland', which is markedly political and which, by the final line, has revealed itself as one of the most grotesquely unnatural of nineteenth-century poems. There is a natural explanation for this, but this in itself is part of the problem. 'Tom's Garland' is grotesque as Carlyle in 'Shooting Niagara' is grotesque or as Ruskin is in _The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century_. Ong suggests that 'Hopkins, like Newman, had very little if any of the defensiveness which betrays intellectual insecurity and freezes the mind'.57 But Hopkins is _not_ like Newman, and 'Tom's Garland' is rigid with 'intellectual insecurity', or insecure intellectualism, in every line. Hopkins's own description of Scotus's disrelation to his age \u2013 'a kind of feud arose between genius and talent',58 the genius being Scotus, the talent that of his detractors \u2013 is more intimately and painfully true of Emerson and Carlyle. The feud between genius and talent took place within themselves, and the talent was closely attached to projections and self-projections of civic alienation. Alienation \u2013 thrown-ness \u2013 is real and deadly, but Carlyle is not thrown by any aspect of civil polity and Emerson is brutally thrown by polity perhaps only once, in the passing of the Massachusetts Fugitive Slave Law of 1851. Civil polity, in the form of Emerson's 'communities of opinion',59 is sufficiently alienating, simply in and of itself, as Emily Dickinson clearly perceived; you do not need to adopt alienated attitudes to excite its attention. Alienated majesty signifies a reality, however, even if not an actuality. In this it resembles intrinsic value with which it has an oblique interrelationship; a direct link, even, in Emerson's essay 'Self-Reliance'. Alienated majesty is tied by a law of opposites to a variety of Emersonian positives \u2013 'transcendent destiny', 'the integrity of your own mind', 'intrinsic right', 'the independence of solitude',60 'inscrutable possibilities', 'the great and crescive self, rooted in absolute nature',61 'the essence of genius'.62\n\nIt is appropriate to end with a confusion of this term 'genius', at once a word of Romantic elitism and one of the most democratic of attributes. That the word can be associated with democracy is due, in no small part, to the work of Emerson, Whitman, and Hopkins. Democratic does not mean egalitarian. In Whitman's words, 'Great genius and the people of these states must never be demeaned to romances';63 as Emerson writes, 'Genius is power; Talent is applicability'.64 Emerson again, 'The great genius returns to essential man.'65 Devlin observes of Hopkins that his 'view of genius (at least of poetic genius) was that it was a seeming approach to being a whole specific nature, \"so that each poet is like a species in nature and can never recur\"'.66 The issue is held in common by the three writers: it is the endeavour to conceive a uniting of individual genius to the genius of the commonwealth. In the fourth of the sermons preached by Hopkins at St Joseph's, Bedford Leigh (23 November 1879), the Christ presented to us is one who 'by acts of his own human genius' founded 'this Catholic Church . . . its ranks and constitution, its rites and sacraments'.67 It will be objected that a hierarchical institution cannot be democratic, but what it cannot be, in the world's terms, is egalitarian, even though it teaches equality before God. It may be further objected that these are exactly the terms on which Hopkins must be sharply differentiated from Emerson and Whitman. The burden of these three chapters has been to find that objection unsustainable, insofar as all three writers know democracy to be alienated from its proper majesty by the egalitarian and the mean.\n\nHopkins writes in his journal of 1872, 'I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again'.68 In such a passage, he unites one of his most essential terms, 'inscape', with civil polity. He is perhaps like Wordsworth and surely like Ruskin, a Tory democrat. I do not believe, however, that he would have quarrelled with Whitman \u2013 a democrat but no Tory \u2013 when he claimed, of American poets wedded to the American nation, 'of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people'.69\n\n#  **Notes**\n\n1 'Alienated Majesty: Ralph W. Emerson' and 'Alienated Majesty: Walt Whitman', precede this chapter on Hopkins in Hill's _Collected Critical Writings_ , ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008).\n\n2 Ralph W. Emerson, _Essays and Lectures_ , ed. Joel Porte (New York: Viking, 1983), p. 259 ('Self-Reliance'); cf. _Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson_ , 6 vols. to date (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971\u2013 ), vol. 2, p. 27.\n\n3 Walt Whitman, _Complete Poetry and Collected Prose_ , ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Viking, 1982), p. 933; cf. Walt Whitman, _Prose Works (1892)_ , 2 vols., ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York University Press, 1963\u20134), vol. 2, p. 366.\n\n4 _The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius_ , tr. Anthony Mottola (Garden City, NJ: Image Books, 1964), p. 67.\n\n5 Gerard M. Hopkins, 'The Windhover', ll. 1\u20132; cf. _The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins_ , ed. Norman H. MacKenzie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 144.\n\n6 Gerard M. Hopkins, _The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges_ , ed. Claude Colleer Abbott, rev. impression (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 92 (8 Oct. 1879).\n\n7 Whitman, _Complete Poetry and Collected Prose_ , p. 887 ( _Specimen Days_ ); cf. Whitman, _Prose Works (1892)_ , vol. 1, p. 250.\n\n8 Hopkins, _Letters to Bridges_ , pp. 267\u20138 (6 Nov. 1887).\n\n9 Whitman, _Complete Poetry and Collected Prose_ , p. 959; cf. Whitman, _Prose Works (1892)_ , vol. 2, p. 393.\n\n10 Walt Whitman, _The Journalism_ , 2 vols., ed. Herbert Bergman et al. (New York: P. Lang, 1998\u20132003), vol. 1, p. 463; cf. Walt Whitman, _The Gathering of the Forces_ , 2 vols., ed. Cleveland Rodgers and John Black (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1920), vol. 2, pp. 243\u20134.\n\n11 Hopkins, _Letters to Bridges_ , p. 275 (25 May 1888).\n\n12 Gerard M. Hopkins, _The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon_ , ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 74 (12 Oct. 1881).\n\n13 Whitman, 'Song of Myself', l. 1333 (section 52); cf. _Complete Poetry and Collected Prose_ , p. 247 and Walt Whitman, _Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems_ , 3 vols., ed. Sculley Bradley et al. (New York: New York University Press, 1980), vol. 1, p. 82.\n\n14 See James Wright, 'The Delicacy of Walt Whitman', _Collected Prose_ , ed. Anne Wright (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1983), pp. 3\u201322.\n\n15 Hopkins, _Letters to Bridges_ , p. 155 (18 Oct. 1882).\n\n16 Hopkins, _Correspondence of Hopkins and Dixon_ , p. 14 (5 Oct. 1878).\n\n17 Ignatius of Loyola, _Spiritual Exercises_ , pp. 83\u20134.\n\n18 Emerson, _Essays and Lectures_ , p. 482; cf. _Collected Works_ , vol. 3, p. 38.\n\n19 MacKenzie in Hopkins, _Poetical Works_ , p. 320.\n\n20 Hopkins, _Correspondence of Hopkins and Dixon_ , p. 14 (5 Oct. 1878).\n\n21 Hopkins, 'The Windhover', ll. 7\u20138 ('My heart in hiding | Stirred for a bird'); cf. _Poetical Works_ , p. 144.\n\n22 MacKenzie in Hopkins, _Poetical Works_ , p. 270.\n\n23 MacKenzie in Hopkins, _Poetical Works_ , p. 282.\n\n24 Hopkins, _Correspondence of Hopkins and Dixon_ , pp. 8\u20139 (13 June 1878).\n\n25 Josiah Royce, _William James and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life_ (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 52 (repr. of 1911 edn.).\n\n26 Whitman, 'The Artilleryman's Vision', l. 9; cf. _Complete Poetry and Collected Prose_ , p. 450 and _Leaves of Grass_ , vol. 2, p. 506.\n\n27 Whitman, 'I Saw Old General at Bay', l. 4; cf. _Complete Poetry and Collected Prose_ , p. 450 and _Leaves of Grass_ , vol. 2, p. 521.\n\n28 Whitman, 'A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown', l. 14; cf. _Complete Poetry and Collected Prose_ , p. 440 and _Leaves of Grass_ , vol. 2, p. 494.\n\n29 1Whitman, 'A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown', l. 7; cf. _Complete Poetry and Collected Prose_ , p. 440 and _Leaves of Grass_ , vol. 2, p. 494.\n\n30 Whitman, 'How Solemn as One by One', l. 7; cf. _Complete Poetry and Collected Prose_ , p. 454 and _Leaves of Grass_ , vol. 2, p. 554.\n\n31 Whitman, 'A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown', l. 19; cf. _Complete Poetry and Collected Prose_ , p. 440 and _Leaves of Grass_ , vol. 2, p. 494.\n\n32 Whitman, 'As Toilsome I Wander'd Virginia's Woods', ll. 11\u201312; cf. _Complete Poetry and Collected Prose_ , p. 442 and _Leaves of Grass_ , vol. 2, p. 510.\n\n33 Whitman, _Complete Poetry and Collected Prose_ 946; cf. Whitman, _Prose Works (1892)_ , vol. 2, p. 379.\n\n34 Whitman, _Complete Poetry and Collected Prose_ , pp. 974\u20135; cf. Whitman, _Prose Works (1892)_ , vol. 2, p. 408.\n\n35 Hopkins, _Letters to Bridges_ , p. 86.\n\n36 Hopkins, _Letters to Bridges_ , p. 131.\n\n37 Hopkins, _Correspondence, of Hopkins and Dixon_ , p. 97.\n\n38 Christopher Devlin, in _The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins_ , ed. Christopher Devlin (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 340.\n\n39 Devlin in Hopkins, _Sermons and Devotional Writings_ , p. 109.\n\n40 Devlin in Hopkins, _Sermons and Devotional Writings_ , p. 296.\n\n41 Hopkins, _Sermons and Devotional Writings_ , p. 59.\n\n42 ibid.\n\n43 Hopkins, _Letters to Bridges_ , p. 135 (16 Sept. 1881).\n\n44 Hopkins, _Correspondence of Hopkins and Dixon_ , p. 76 (23 Oct. 1881).\n\n45 Hopkins, _Letters to Bridges_ , p. 136 (16 Sept. 1881).\n\n46 Hopkins, _Letters to Bridges_ , pp. 272\u20133 (10 Feb. 1888).\n\n47 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, _Collected Works_ , 16 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969\u20132002), vol. 4, part 1, p. 21 ( _The Friend_ , ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 parts).\n\n48 Walter J. Ong, _Hopkins, the Self, and God_ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), p. 90.\n\n49 MacKenzie in Hopkins, _Poetical Works_ , p. 485.\n\n50 Hopkins, _Letters to Bridges_ , p. 266 (6 Nov. 1887).\n\n51 s.v. 'rollick, _v_.', _OED_ _2_ __. The citations to the magazines are found in this entry and under 'rollick, _n_.'\n\n52 Hopkins, _Correspondence of Hopkins and Dixon_ , p. 153 (2 Dec. 1887). , s.v. 'robustious', _OED_ _2_.\n\n53 Hopkins, _Letters to Bridges_ , p. 274 (10 Feb. 1888).\n\n54 Hopkins, _Letters to Bridges_ , p. 160 (4 Nov. 1882).\n\n55 Wilfred Owen, 'Insensibility', ll. 50\u20131; cf. _The Poems of Wilfred Owen_ , ed. Jon Stallworthy (New York: Norton, 1986), p. 123.\n\n56 Hopkins, 'Thou art indeed just, Lord . . .', l. 14; cf. _Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins_ , p. 201.\n\n57 Ong, _Hopkins, the Self, and Cod_ , p. 92.\n\n58 Gerard M. Hopkins, _Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins_ , ed. Claude Colleer Abbott, 2nd edn. (London: Oxford University Press, 1956). p. 349 (letter to Coventry Patmore, 3 Jan. 1884).\n\n59 Emerson, _Essays and Lectures_ , p. 264 ('Self-Reliance'); cf. _Collected Works_ , vol. 2, p. 32.\n\n60 Emerson, _Essays and Lectures_ , p. 260, 261, 263 ('Self-Reliance'); cf. _Collected Works_ , vol. 2, p. 28, 31, 230.\n\n61 4'inscrutable possibilities': Emerson, _Essays and Lectures_ , p. 475, 487 ('Experience'); cf. _Collected Works_ , vol. 3, p. 32, 44.\n\n62 Emerson, _Essays and Lectures_ , p. 269 ('Self-Reliance'); cf. _Collected Works_ , vol. 2, p. 37.\n\n63 Whitman, _Complete Poetry and Collected Prose_ , p. 19; Whitman, _Prose Works_ (1892), vol. 2, p. 451.\n\n64 _Emerson in His Journals_ , ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1982), p. 304 (Mar.\u2013Apr. 1843); cf. Ralph W. Emerson, _Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks_ , 16 vols., ed. William H. Gilman et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1960\u201382), vol. 8, p. 373.\n\n65 Emerson, _Essays and Lectures_ , p. 280 ('Self-Reliance'); cf. _Collected Works_ , vol. 2, p. 49.\n\n66 Devlin in Hopkins, _Sermons and Devotional Writings_ , p. 278.\n\n67 Hopkins, _Sermons and Devotional Writings_ , p. 37.\n\n68 Gerard M. Hopkins, _The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins_ , ed. Humphry House and Graham Storey (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 221.\n\n69 Whitman, _Complete Poetry and Collected Prose_ 7 ('Preface' to _Leaves of Grass_ [1855]); cf. _Prose Works (1892)_ , vol. 2, p. 741.\n\nHill, Geoffrey. 2008. \"Alienated Majesty: Gerard M. Hopkins.\" In _Collected Critical Writings_ , edited by Kenneth Haynes, pp. 518\u201331. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press.\n\n# 9\n\n# Fact and Tact\n\n#  _Arnoldian Fact-finding and Q Tactlessness in the Reading of Gerard Hopkins_\n\nValentine Cunningham\n\nThe great scholar-critic-editor F. W. Bateson keenly followed Mathew Arnold in linking critical judgement with valuation \u2013 distinguishing the 'best' from the rest, seeing aesthetic judgement as necessarily involving moral and social assessment, ideological and political consideration. 'Value is also fact'. Importantly, his repeated nagging at 'The Mode of Existence of a Literary Work of Art' involved asking what 'constraints' \u2013 'conventions, traditions, and assumptions' (Bateson's global term was 'contexts') were 'imposed by the text'; and so attempting 'to put theoretical limits on interpretation'. Imposing such limits, the formidable theorist Ren\u00e9 Wellek agreed, was 'surely one of the most urgent problems of literary study today'.1 [. . .]\n\nFor help in determining critical limits \u2013 and, I should say, with instructive force for all critical practitioners \u2013 Bateson kept renewing his own and his readers' acquaintance with 'that remarkable passage' at the end of Matthew Arnold's 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time' where Arnold speaks of knowing and judging, and applying now fresh knowledge to the literary object, now invoking principles in treating it, all in the quest for truth about the scrutinised work:\n\nThe English critic of literature . . . must dwell much on foreign thought, and with particular heed on any part of it, which, while significant and fruitful in itself, is for any reason specially likely to escape him. Again, judging is often spoken of as the critic's one business, and so in some sense it is; but the judgement which almost insensibly forms itself in a fair and clear mind, along with fresh knowledge, is the valuable one; and thus knowledge, and ever fresh knowledge, must be the critic's great concern for himself. And it is by communicating fresh knowledge, and letting his own judgement pass along with it \u2013 but insensibly, and in the second place, not the first, as a sort of companion and clue, not as an abstract lawgiver \u2013 that the critic will generally do most good to his readers. Sometimes, no doubt, for the sake of establishing an author's place in literature, and his relation to a central standard (and if this is not done, how are we to get at our _best in the world?_ ) criticism may have to deal with a subject-matter so familiar that fresh knowledge is out of the question, and then it must be all judgement: an enunciation and detailed application of principles. Here the great safeguard is never to let oneself become abstract, always to retain an intimate and lively consciousness of the truth of what one is saying, and, the moment this fails us, to be sure that something is wrong. Still, under all circumstances, this mere judgement and application of principles is, in itself, not the most satisfactory work to the critic; like mathematics, it is tautological, and cannot well give us, like fresh learning, the sense of creative activity.2\n\nIt's a recipe, of course, against critical parochialism, against maintaining narrow approaches to what is envisaged as expanding textual signification, in keeping with the Europeanism of much of the nineteenth century's best criticism \u2013 the Germanism of Carlyle and George Eliot, Arnold's own Francophilia. Arnold is clearly saddened when texts prove incapable of being freshened by new readings. He craves the critical creativity of constant renovation. This creative reading is highly moral. The critic and the criticism are to be fairminded. The critic is to speak the truth. The critic is a person with principles: principles in the fullest sense, it would appear, moral ones intussuscepted by aesthetic ones, in a radical convergence of the moral and aesthetic impossible to unpick, where _fairness_ (as here) and _sincerity_ (a few lines later in the essay) \u2013 key components one would guess in the famous _disinterestedness_ which is repeatedly invoked in the essay \u2013 denote a moralised critical disposition (the critic's person) and a moralised critical practice (the critic's readings). It's a headily enticing mix, cognate with Arnold's notion of literature's intrinsic goodness and the goodness it does readers and cultures: at their best these goods are all at once both aesthetic and moral. And the critic's goal is to 'do most good to his readers', which means 'he' comes armed with principles, rather than with theories. The critic is no abstract lawgiver. 'The great safeguard is never to let oneself become abstract.' So this is a set of theoretical statements giving critical preeminence to things not theoretical; it's a programme for an eminently practical criticism, for an empirical moral-aesthetic work to be performed on knowable textual items \u2013 Arnold's famous seeing 'the object as in itself it really is'. It's a work of judging; of weighing moral-social-aesthetic merit; of striving 'to get at our _best in the world_ ' ('I am bound', he says a little later, 'by my own definition of criticism: _a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought_ _in the world'_ ); and so, in the end, a canon-forming work ('establishing an author's place in literature'). But coming to a 'valuable' judgement is dependent upon knowledge. Valuable judgements will arise as an 'almost insensible' consequence of applying 'fresh knowledge': 'knowledge, and ever fresh knowledge, must be the critic's great concern for himself. Criticism, Arnold summarises in his essay's penultimate paragraph, 'must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge'. The world is big, phenomena are plentiful, the present is 'copious and complex', a 'vast multitude of facts awaiting and inviting . . . comprehension' (as he put it in 'On the Modern Element in Literature'); critics can never know enough; and texts are knowable objects participating in this great copiousness. So the knowing of literary objects not only allows for the bringing up of new knowledge; it relies on it.\n\nWhat Arnold holds out is an exhilarating, if rather daunting, intersubjective (to use a favourite Bateson word) contract between reader and text. It's a vision of 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time' drawn animatedly into Bateson's own early announcement of 'The Function of Criticism'. It would be central to the practices of the Arnoldianly titled Bateson journal _Essays in Criticism_ , which contained that manifesto in 1953. It's a vision Bateson found endorsed in T. S. Eliot's own Arnold-tribute essay also entitled 'The Function of Criticism', and which Bateson is in turn endorsing, and endorsing not least Eliot's very Arnoldian declaration that the 'most important qualification' for critical work 'is that a critic must have a very highly developed sense of fact'.3 Bateson's title for the lead-chapter of his book _The Scholar-Critic_ was 'The Sense of Fact'. The run, the line, of inheritance and tradition was being made clear. And it's furthered by one of Bateson's starriest Oxford disciples, Christopher Ricks, also an editor of _Essays in Criticism_ , in his explicit advocacy in his essay 'Literature and the Matter of Fact' of criticism as an Arnold-Eliot-Batesonian matter of principled empiricism engaging with factuality and factual truth-telling and factual truth-seeking on the part of both texts and readers.4\n\n[. . .]\n\nOf course the nature of Arnold's literary 'object' and the 'knowledge' we're to bring to it \u2013 what Eliot and Bateson and Ricks call 'fact' \u2013 needed some close specifying. And they got it. Bateson, the textual critic, the editor and general editor of texts, well knew the flexible force of the textual crux and the critical ponderability of the necessary emendation. [. . .] But such an empirical and principled recognition of potentials for textual differences and variances scarcely sustains a theory of textual imponderability. The huge range of variant readings in the textual object known as _Hamlet_ does not make it less present as an object for reading, but rather makes it more present, gives the more substance for the critical dredger to get its teeth into. And textual variants come high up Bateson's list of Arnoldian facts. He talked of 'the honourable department of external evidence known as textual criticism'. This was in a large consideration of Arnoldian and Eliotic fact, the article entitled 'Shakespeare's Laundry Bills: The Rationale of External Evidence' (what value Shakespeare's laundry bills might have was, of course, first raised in Eliot's 'The Function of Criticism').5 External evidence and critically applicable 'fact' comprised for Bateson a very wide field. It embraced all the contextual materials which were and are the concerns of traditional literary scholarship \u2013 historical, social, biographical evidence, data from all the various modalities of the modes of production of the literary work, all 'the ancillary disciplines provided by scholarship'. As Wellek had nervously noted, even value was for Bateson 'fact'.\n\nAnd facts were needed precisely as controls. They would work as a preventive to 'neurotic critical fantasy', as the grounds of objectivity in the intersubjective relation between reader and text, a prophylactic against any wilfully free play with signifiers.6 But there was an obvious rub in the Arnold-Eliot enthusiasm for fact and more fact: how to judge, to value, the facts the critic wished to adduce, how to tell a good fact from a bad, how in fact to test relevance (Eliot's 'fact' needed, Bateson said, restatement as ' _relevant fact_ '7). How to stop a boundlessness of factuality which might in practice turn out to be not distinguishable enough from a dubious postmodern vision of utter textual boundlessness.\n\nArnold seems to assume that the classically trained gentleman reader will simply know about which bits of 'fresh knowledge' will be truly refreshing: he'll have the right touchstones, the appropriate touch for what's relevant, by dint of being born into the right cultural group and being exposed to the right kind of Oxonian training. T. S. Eliot is vague, too, though you can tell his critical wind is blowing from more or less the same quarter as Arnold's. A 'highly developed sense of fact' is, he says, 'by no means a trifling or frequent gift. And it is not one which easily wins popular commendations. The sense of fact is something very slow to develop, and its complete development means perhaps the very pinnacle of civilisation. For there are so many spheres of fact to be mastered, and our outermost sphere of fact, of knowledge, of control, will be ringed with narcotic fancies in the sphere beyond'.8 Bateson rejected Eliot's 'unsavoury class consciousness' and 'sheer snobbery',9 and was certainly not one for approving the Winchester\u2013Oxford version of the best pathways in education as they are plainly set out in Eliot's _Notes Towards the Definition of Culture_ (1948). But still he can only invoke 'the more responsible approach of the sensitive adult' \u2013 as opposed to 'adolescent literary enthusiasm'.\n\nThe responsibility and sensitivity of the mature reader. Responsible and sensitive, or as Christopher Ricks's reformulation of this cautionary principle restates it: principled and tactful. 'My enterprise', says Ricks \u2013 the one of respecting 'The Matter of Fact' \u2013 'is partly an argument, partly a plea. I need to add that I don't consider this matter, in my handling of it, to be one of theory but rather of principle and tact'. They mean well, these guiding terms; and one can see clearly enough their point as guides to good practice; but they aren't terribly hard-edged. You can see them letting in more scope for readings and excuses for readings than their proponents would always like. They're all terms with a certain unbuttoning subjectivity about them. Indeed Ricks goes on to say that 'I should myself be grateful for a disinterested theoretical \u2013 better still philosophical \u2013 exploration of the whole business'.10 But as this group of critical guidelines stands \u2013 knowledge/fact brought to bear on textual objects, tested for relevance on the basis of responsibility and sensitivity or principledness and tact \u2013 they certainly have their distinct uses in helping chart and steer criticism through the murky waters of reading, in practice, as well as in theory.\n\nTake the fate of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem 'Felix Randal'. It's an example which springs instantly to mind when there's any suggestion of how 'fresh knowledge' can change (and change at a stroke) the meaning and the reception \u2013 the intersubjective existence, as Bateson would put it \u2013 of a literary text. It's an example, too, which, because of its now central place in Queer Studies, that busy branch of 'theoretical' enterprise, not only takes us right up to the place where distinctions between critical theory and principle cry out to be made (an opposition more or less explicit in the Arnold passage, and one made very explicit in Ricks's engagement with the matter of factuality'11), but which also raises most prominently \u2013 as the many highly ideological post-Foucauldian reading practices which involve political 'outing' of various sorts tend to \u2013 issues very much of relevance, responsibility, sensitivity and tact.\n\nThinking about possibilities and limits for critical practice in relation to 'Felix Randal' is not least attractive because a reading of it once appeared, and in the way of many a confident, and would-be finalising, reading from the mid twentieth century, under the heading 'The Meaning of a Poem'. This claim on _the_ meaning came from Bateson's distinguished literary contemporary George Orwell. [. . .] 'The Meaning of a Poem' was a talk produced in the India Section of the BBC in which William Empson also worked, beamed to India on 14 May 1941, and printed in _The Listener_ , 12 June 1941.12 It's not at all bad, for its time, which is to say given the state of knowledge in 1941 about Hopkins and his poem and the audience to which it was originally broadcast.\n\nAs every commentator has been, Orwell is specially drawn to the word for the horseshoe the dead farrier Felix Randal once 'fettled' \u2013 'Didst fettle for that great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal'. _Sandal_ is heralded as a very happy accident of rhyming, _Randal_ leading to _sandal_. (It never occurs to Orwell, nor indeed to anyone else, that the verbal progression might have been the other way around and that Hopkins could have chosen the name Randal because he wanted to get the metaphoric sandal in.) Very nicely, Orwell points out that sandals mean differently in India than in Britain: 'I ought to perhaps add that the word \"sandal\" is more impressive to an English reader than it would be to an oriental, who sees sandals every day and perhaps wears them himself. To us a sandal is an exotic thing, chiefly associated with the ancient Greeks and Romans. When Hopkins describes the carthorse's shoe as a sandal, he suddenly converts the cart-horse into a magnificent mythical beast, something like a heraldic animal.' This is well said, and a fine recognition of readerly context, a most tactful approach by the Englishman with Burmese experience to differences of knowledge among different implicit readers. It is not the last word on contexts for sandals, however. The atheist Orwell is immune to many of the poem's Christian contexts (not all, but many), and so has not thought of the sandals worn by religious in the Catholic tradition, nor of Jesus's sandals, whose latchet John the Baptist felt unworthy to unloose \u2013 knowledge about sandals which a Christian reader might have thought of in the very first place, and which later readers would vigorously invoke, before thinking of eastern sandals (middle-eastern, so to say, before eastern). But Orwell's adduced acquaintance with Burmese and Indian sandals and sandalwearers does add to everyone's knowledge, as well as clearing things up specifically for Indians. And Orwell is not bad either on other bits of verbal knowledge. He's looked up the priestly narrator's words _fettle_ and _road_ ('Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended') and found they're old (Saxon, pre-Chaucerian) and dialectal. Orwell knows Hopkins made 'technical studies' of 'the old Saxon poets', and here are results from that interest. Applied to Randal's case they suggest old, pastoral, rural activity. It's a view Orwell applies with vigour. The smith becomes a rural blacksmith; encountering _farrier_ and _forge_ as well as _fettle_ has evidently brought old poetic associations with village smithies under spreading chestnut trees springing to mind. And the knowledge brings other contextualities crowding in. Felix Randal becomes 'a man living at a particular moment of time, the latter part of the nineteenth century, when the old English agricultural way of life \u2013 the old Saxon village community \u2013 was finally passing away'. 'The special power' Hopkins 'has of re-creating the atmosphere of an English village would not belong to him if it were not for the purely technical studies he had made made, earlier in his life, of the old Saxon poets.' Orwell's accumulating critical wisdoms, built on the Arnoldian accrual of knowledge, on a great respect for the Eliotic sense of fact, remained, more or less, the story of Felix Randal for some years afterwards. Orwell did not get on to _random_ _(_ _random grim forge_ _)_ as a technical or trade term meaning built of rough and irregular stones \u2013 that would have to wait until W. H. Gardner's curiosity about an adjective which looks regular enough took him to the dictionary where the regular usage suddenly looked most irregular. This piece of knowledge, a fact, which Gardner's third edition of Bridges's collection of Hopkins's poems (1948) made public, straightaway transformed the sense of Felix Randal's character greatly, if not utterly: most readings since 1948 have wanted to keep the regular sense of random alongside the irregular one, to invoke ambivalence, and so to go on talking about Randal's insouciance, his randomness of spirit ('wild and random hardiness': Paul L. Mariani; 'noisy and almost wild enjoyment of life . . . part of the whole scene \u2013 the forge built of random or rough stone': J. R. Watson13). And so perhaps they should.\n\nBut if post-Orwellian readers pondered the difference Gardner's discovery about _random_ made, it would only be to afforce Orwell's sense of an old-fashioned tradesman, and not unsettle the rural scenario he'd built. At least, there was still no suggestion that the poem, which was well enough known to have been written in Liverpool during Hopkins's vexed period at St Francis Xavier's, Salisbury Street, in one of industrial England's greatest cities, actually featured a hero from the big city. In 1959 Christopher Devlin boldly declared that Hopkins 'experienced _Felix Randal_ ' at Bedford Leigh, the small Lancashire manufacturing town with that odd Victorian blend of mill and mine and adjacent fields, where he worked before going on to Liverpool. 'The poem was written in Apr. 1880; but the events described seem to have taken place' some months earlier, when Hopkins was at Bedford Leigh.14 Paul Mariani, a mighty man for dictionary facts ( _randal_ , he found out, is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning shield and so reaches out to the sacramental protection the priest in the poem offers his parishioner; _rand_ is a strip of leather used in the making of shoes; _randall_ is an obsolete variant on _random_ meaning a gallop or a disorderly life; so 'Felix's boisterous, random life is given direction by the viaticum, metamorphosing randal to \"bright and battering sandal\"', which makes one wonder about sensitivity and tact in the applying of 'fact') \u2013 Mariani worries over the Bedford Leigh assumption about a poem patently written in Liverpool. The facts of dating and place of composition bother him enough to make him argue the point: 'The tone of the first line of the poem strongly suggests that Hopkins had learned the news of the blacksmith's death at second hand, as if he had ministered to him for a while, then had not heard from or of him, and only afterwards heard of his death. This suggests that the blacksmith was not from Liverpool, where Hopkins had been stationed for less than four months when the poem was written, but was rather from Bedford Leigh'.15\n\nBut all this, all based upon resorts to facts, or to such facts as existed at the time, simply fell into irrelevance when in 1973 in the _TLS_ Alfred Thomas reported the existence, and the death on 21 April 1880, seven days before Hopkins wrote his poem, of the Liverpool farrier Felix Spence, aged 31, a parishioner of Hopkins who lived at 17 Birchfield Street, was ministered to by Hopkins in his illness, whose death was entered in the St Francis Xavier parish register by Hopkins, and whose name was read out in the church on Sunday 25 April among those who had recently deceased. The _TLS_ piece reproduces a copy of the death certificate from the General Register Office at Somerset House in London, and one of the parish register for 25 April, the Fourth Sunday after Easter, in Hopkins's hand.16 There's no doubt that Felix Spence is Hopkins's Felix Randal. Here, emphatically is knowledge, fresh knowledge, matter of fact, and critically relevant fact, all of it instantly changing our sense of the poem, clearing away Orwell's carefully constructed house of rural cards and the Bedford Leigh school. So much for the temerity of claiming 'The Meaning' of this poem as if for evermore.\n\nAlfred Thomas, the factual bit now firmly between his teeth, had much more of would-be factual interest to offer. The name Randal, he suggests in the same _TLS_ article, was probably suggested to Hopkins by two Roman Catholics he knew of, the renowned English Jesuit Randal Lythgoe, and the 'genial' local Lancastrian Randal Lightbound. Mariani had already hit on Randal Lightbound (he's mentioned in Hopkins's correspondence);17 Father Lythgoe was all Alfred Thomas's own work. Facts, again, and by no means irrelevant offerings, but not possessing the utterly refreshing impact of the unearthing of Felix Spence. Less valuable facts, Arnold might say.\n\nBut just to endorse Arnold's expectation that fresh knowledge would succeed fresh knowledge, it has to be observed that this wonderful Felix Spence _trouvaille_ would not be the last word on the poem. Indeed this discovery of a real proletarian male model for the poem's subject can be seen as actually helping criticism keep on going in its ever renewing expectations. Here, for instance, was a new light, or sidelight, on Hopkins's well recognised use of colloquialisms in 'Felix Randal' and more generally in his poetry. This poem's resort to non-educated turns of speech could now be read as implying a lot more than before about the sort of real contacts \u2013 male, proley, desired, feared \u2013 behind Hopkins's use of such ordinary speech registers. Eric Griffiths's fine sense of how Hopkins used the 'colloquially familiar' in his poems, 'the grind of colloquial against religious idiom', acquires a quiet but distinctly real, as opposed to a merely invented or fantasy, frame with the arrival of Felix Spence on the scene.18 And so does the great interest Queer theorists have taken in Hopkins's dealings with male subjects.\n\nWhat's especially of interest here is how so much of what is offered as 'theoretical' or theorised reading \u2013 neo-historicism, post-colonialism, feminism, Q Studies, _et si qua alia_ \u2013 owes far more to the sense of fact than any instigation from what can be really labelled as theory. Queer Studies, and Colonialism, and Feminism involve, of course, like Bateson's Value, fact. Which is ironic enough, given the historical tendency of literary 'theorists' to despise mere facts, and deplore the Arnoldianism they signify, as belonging to a mere and too humble-minded empiricism. But unsurprisingly, what's greatly apparent from inspections of readings coming under such headings is how greatly they stand in need of the principled checks of sensitivity and tact \u2013 the proper checks of openly factual critical business. If the Felix Spence story is a parable of how fresh knowledge makes all the difference in reading a text, the Queer readings of 'Felix Randal' amount to a parable or allegory of just how necessary is tact \u2013 sensitivity of critical touch \u2013 in handling the facts and the fresh political perspectives on those facts which the new Foucauldianised criticalisms are anxious to trade in. And this latter is a most piquant parable, too, because 'Felix Randal' is so much about tactility.\n\nJoseph Bristow is rather expert, in his influential article of 1992 on 'Hopkins and the Working-Class Male Body',19 at digging out fresh knowledge, but he's less good at making it relevant. With an eye on the bright and battering sandal, he begins with Hopkins's January 1888 'Retreat Notes' about John the Baptist feeling unworthy to undo Jesus's 'shoe latchet' \u2013 a meditation on John as expert in middle-eastern sandals ('I know the difference between a light sandal and the soldier's heavy _caliga'_ ), on Jesus as being 'as well-shod as a traveller, soldier on the march, or farm-labourer in the forest', and on Christ in his big footwear (a man sporting, by implication, the imperial soldierly military _caliga_ , no lame wearer of a _caligula_ , or little boot, he), his heavy tread able to 'grind hearts to powder'. This parallel passage from the notebooks is illuminating fresh knowledge (I haven't found anyone else using it). But it's not made really relevant, as it might be, to 'Felix Randal', being left hanging in the air of a general inspection of weedy Hopkins's liking for huge proletarian males and of a 'masculine poetics' in which various 'stresses' converge: aesthetic (poems made up of stresses), religious (God the Jesuit's trampling master), and homosexual (Hopkins's masterful-submissive relations with big parishioners and men off the street). There's much apparent truth in this general account of Hopkins's work and imagination, but it entails some weird mistakings and strange constructions in reading 'Felix Randal'. This labourer, we're told, 'could be seen \"battering\" out horseshoes'; but he couldn't: the battering is done by the great horse's horseshoes, not by their farrier. And fettling is a matter of smaller blows. 'Even though on the brink of death, the farrier, not the priest, stands out here as an emblem of power'. But, actually, it's the horse, as much as if not more so than the farrier, who is the powerful one ('great gray . . . battering'); the horse drives on out of the poem, leaving the dead smith behind; and the priest comes nowhere in the big body contest. In other words, the critic is failing to perceive the link it looked as if he would make, and which his noticing of the big footwear in Hopkins's meditation on the baptised Jesus points so brightly towards \u2013 namely an association in the poem between the lordly dray-horse and the Jesuit's mighty Christ of the Gospel's footwear encounter. Hopkins evidently turns in his poem from disturbing recollections of the attractively bodied farrier to a more morally acceptable and sublimating vision of the horse's bodily might \u2013 a focus all the more acceptable as an alternative to the smith's somatic attractions because its battering, mastering power can remind Hopkins of Christ, the plough-pulling 'stallion stalwart' hurling aside earthly hearts under his great trampling feet in the poem 'Hurrahing in Harvest'. Alerted by his own footwear delvings Bristow might have remembered that by now well known strange letter of Hopkins, about the May Day horse parade in Liverpool just after Felix Spence's death, in which the handsome horses are admired at the expense of the 'base and bespotted figures and features of the Liverpool crowd', men not at all like the fine and manly Norwegians hanging about the Liverpool streets waiting to take passage to America.20 In Liverpool it was safe for a priest to admire big horses, when he might rather have wished to spend more time with manly Norwegians \u2013 but Bristow eschewed availing himself of that fact too.\n\nThese failures with fact are clear failures of tact. The critic tramples all over the poem. 'Only when the priest has mastered Felix Randal's body can he remain with [that means, I think, _can he recall_ ] the physical power of one who formerly shod \"the great grey drayhorse\".' But there is no mastering of parishioner by priest in the poem at all \u2013 rather there's a most delicate play of tender touchings given, and tender touchings resisted, in a most tactfully presented sequence of worried contacts and might-be touchings between the male priest and poet and his male parishioner and poetic subject. The priest anoints the sick man, in a sacramental touch. He offers him the sacramental bread or wafer, the sweet food of the eucharist, a tender tendering from hand to mouth ('since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom / tendered to him'). It's a relationship of mutual endearing ('This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears'), rooted in bodily exchanges \u2013 the priest's comforting words (which come from his tongue: 'My tongue had taught thee comfort'), the priest's tear-drying touch ('My . . . touch had quenched thy tears'), the returned touch of the tears on the priest's heart ('Thy tears that touched my heart'). The mirrored repetitions and reciprocations of words enact these interactions of the two male bodies: 'endears . . . to us, us too . . . endears'; 'My tongue . . . thy tears, Thy tears . . . my heart'; 'My . . . touch . . . quenched thy tears, Thy tears . . . touched my heart'; 'touch . . . touched'. One verbal juxtaposition and exchange, which is manifestly felt to be pressing in all the time on the encounter, never, however, occurs: _my touch, thy touch_. And, in fact, there is a quenching, a refusal, of touch going on within the acknowledging and the granting of touching. The touch of the priest which quenched Randal's tears was a putting to an end of the very means of the smith's touching the priest in his heart. Within this moving interchange, the touching of the priest by the man, a perfectly acceptable sacerdotal emotionality one would guess, there is emergent a merely human emotionality the priest recognises and everywhere in the poems fears. That's why the priest has to step back, repress himself, resume his role as a 'eunuch for the kingdom of heaven's sake' (the vocation the 'terrible sonnet' 'Thou art indeed just, Lord' chides God about), put an end to his being touched by those tears. Hence, perhaps, those coolnesses which have worried most readers since commentary on this poem began \u2013 the 'O is he dead then', and 'Ah well, God rest him', and the too distancing egotism of 'This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears'. In the context of feared contactings, these sound like a careful denying of aroused interest akin to the self-cautionings of 'The Bugler's First Communion', where the priestly narrator allows himself the luxury of imagining a lovely tactility greater than his religion will condone (the lovely youth 'Yields tender as pushed peach' to the priest's teaching), but then quickly warns himself off ('Let me though see no more of him'). The priest must be for other bodily contacts than these, for prayerful kissings, divinely directed erotic encounters, a tongue-work with God in prayer, no doubt for victory over such earthly temptations ('I have put my lips on pleas/Would brandle [shake] adamantine heaven with ride and jar, did/Prayer go unregarded'). The poet-priest must make tactful withdrawals; is compelled to go very tactfully around the attractions of bodily tactility; is most anxious to remain virginally intact for God.\n\nThis is a far cry from the Q theorists' rather blunt touchings upon Hopkins's sensitivities about these touching matters: the simple, one-way touchings and endearings of Bristow's paraphrasings; the downright 'perversity' of Hopkins's 'unconscious thought' about Christ's body in Gregory Woods's thorough-going follow-ups on Bristow in his _History of Gay Literature_ , with its too knowing talk of the 'exuberant orality' of Hopkins's poems (where knowingness is a poor substitute for knowledge), and its curious dwelling on the disturbingly attractive 'sweat' of Felix Randal, a part, it's alleged, of Hopkins's sexual excitements over smelly labourers.21\n\nThere is no mention at all of sweat in 'Felix Randal'. Woods has imported this proletarian smelliness from other Hopkins poems. The only possible olfactory word in this poem is _sweet_. But communion wafers don't smell. That sweetness is rather a matter of taste. Surely the critic has not misread 'our sweet reprieve' as 'our sweat reprieve'? Perish the thought. But the battering brusqueness of the analysis hereabouts does make a crude mistaking seem more than a little possible. Certainly the traditional critical hesitations abundant in pre-Queer Studies days seem more sensitive to the poem's flustered encounters ('Young and naked innocence existing dangerously poised among surrounding dangers': Charles Williams \u2013 a Christian who knew a thing or two about sexual temptation; 'most complex states of intense feeling': Humphry House \u2013 who lost his faith and so might be thought to know about complex currents of feeling).22 Our undismayed current access to the facts about Hopkins's fraught sexuality, our open eyes to what the letters and journals and sermons as well as the poems seem to be touching on sexually speaking, our licence to raise freely questions which were once thought fit only for critical undertones, indeed the large present 'theoretical' imperative to confront in writings once repressed items of whatever description, are none of them excuse for abandoning critical tact in all its forms. It's not the least of the important instructions arising from this whole post-Arnoldian disposition of critical thought, this Batesonized corner of distinguished critical theorising, that our inevitably widening knowledge about how texts work and what they do makes critical sensitivity, the principledness of tactful handling of texts, all the more necessary than ever.\n\n#  **Notes**\n\n1 Ren\u00e9 Wellek, 'The Literary Theories of F. W. Bateson', _E in_ _C_ , XXIX, ii, 112\u20133.\n\n[. . .]\n\n2 Matthew Arnold, 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time' (= 'The Functions of Criticism . . .' in _The National Review_ , ns I (November 1864)), _Essays in Criticism_ (1865); _Lectures and Essays in Criticism_ , The Complete Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, vol. iii (Ann Arbor, 1962), pp. 282\u20133, as quoted in F. W. Bateson, 'The Sense of Fact', in _The Scholar-Critic: An Introduction to Literary Research_ (1872), pp. _5\u20136_. 'That remarkable passage', in F. W. B., 'The Function of Criticism', _E in C_ , III, i, 3.\n\n3 T. S. Eliot, _Selected Essays_ (1932; 3rd enlarged edn., 1951, 1969 repr.), p. 31.\n\n4 Christopher Ricks, _Essays in Appreciation_ (Oxford, 1996), pp. 280\u2013310.\n\n[. . .]\n\n5 F. W. B., _Shakespeare Jahrbuch_ 98 (1962), pp. 51\u201363; reprinted in F. W. B., _Essays in Critical Dissent_ (1972), pp. 37\u201348.\n\n6 'The Sense of Fact', in _The Scholar-Critic_ , p. 25.\n\n7 'Shakespeare's Laundry Bills', in _Essays in Critical Dissent_ , p. 39.\n\n8 _Selected Essays_ , p. 31.\n\n9 F. W. B., 'Criticism's Lost Leader', in _The Literary Criticism of T. S. Eliot_ , ed. D. Newton-de Molina (1977), quoted in Wellek, 'The Literary Theories of F. W. Bateson', p. 113.\n\n10 'Literature and the Matter of Fact', p. 283.\n\n11 See Ricks's 1985 essay 'Literary Principles as against Theory' \u2013 a not entirely formed piece, I think, but still a forceful one, which preceded the 1990 lecture on 'The Matter of Fact', but succeeds it in _Essays in Appreciation (1996)_ , pp. 31\u20132.\n\n[. . .]\n\n12 'The Meaning of a Poem', in _The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell_ , vol. ii, _My Country Right or Left, 1940\u20131943_ , ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (1968; Harmondsworth, 1970), pp. 157\u201361.\n\n13 Paul L. Mariani, _A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins_ (Ithaca and London, 1970), p. 166; J. R. Watson, _The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins_ (Harmondsworth, 1987), p. 106.\n\n14 In _The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins_ , ed. Christopher Devlin (1959), pp. 5, 279.\n\n15 Mariani, _Commentary_ , p. 170, and nn. 7 and 8.\n\n16 Alfred Thomas, 'Hopkins's \"Felix Randal\": The Man and the Poem', _TLS_ , March 1971, pp. 331\u20132.\n\n17 Mariani, _Commentary_ , p. 170 n. 7.\n\n18 See Eric Griffiths, _The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry_ (Oxford, 1989), pp. 276, 336.\n\n19 Joseph Bristow, '\"Churlsgrace\": Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Working-Class Male Body', _JELH_ , 59/3 _(1992)_ 694\u2013711.\n\n20 Quoted by e.g. Norman White, _Hopkins: A Literary Biography_ (Oxford, 1992), p. 325.\n\n21 Gregory Woods, _A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition_ (New Haven and London, 1998), pp. 171\u20133.\n\n22 Charles Williams, in his introduction to _Poems of Hopkins_ (1930); Humphry House, in his review of Elsie Phare, _The Poetry of Hopkins_ (1933), _TLS_ , 25 January 1934, p. 59; both in _Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Critical Heritage_ , ed. Gerald Roberts (London and New York, 1987), pp. 175, 265.\n\nCunningham, Valentine. 2000. \"Fact and Tact: post-Arnoldian Fact-Finding and Modern Q Tactlessness in the Reading of Gerard Hopkins.\" In _Essays in Criticism_ , 51, I (January), pp. 119\u201338. Reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press.\n\n# 10\n\n# 'A Thousand Times I'd be a Factory Girl'\n\n#  _Dialect, Domesticity, and Working-Class Women's Poetry in Victorian Britain_\n\nSusan Zlotnick\n\nI would not leave thee, dear beloved place,  \nA crown, a sceptre, or a throne to grace,  \nTo be a queen \u2013 the nation's flag unfurl \u2013  \nA thousand times I'd be a Factory Girl!  \nEllen Johnston, \"Address to Napiers' Dockyard,  \nLangefield, Anderston\"\n\nIn 1857, Edwin Waugh penned the most famous dialect poem of the century, \"Come Whoam to thi Childer an' Me,\" an unqualified celebration of the simple domestic joys available to the working man around his own hearth. But it is Waugh's \"Down Again!\" \u2013 a humorous account of childbirth in a working-class family \u2013 that best encapsulates the dialect tradition's problematic relationship with the women it enshrined:\n\n\"What's o' thi hurry, Jem?\" said he,  \nAs I went runnin' by:  \n\"I connot stop to talk to thee;  \nWe'n someb'dy ill,\" said I.  \n\"Who is it this time?\" cried owd Clem;  \n\"Is it Nan, or litle Ben?\"  \n\"Nawe, nawe,\" said I, \"it's noan o' them;  \n _Our Betty's down again!_ \"\n\n(ll. 41\u201348)\n\n\"Down Again!\" presents childbirth from the husband's vantage point and thus ignores the most important actor as well as the true laborer \u2013 the pregnant wife \u2013 in order to focus on the husband's activities during delivery:\n\nI never closed my e'en that neet,  \nTill after break o' day;  \nFor they keep me runnin' o' my feet,  \nWi' gruel, an' wi' tay:  \nLike a scopperil\u00b0 up an' down i' th' hole, _spinning-top_  \nI're busy at th' owd job  \nWarmin' flannels, an' mendin' th' fires  \nAn' tentin'\u00b0 stuff o' th' hob. _looking after_\n\nIt wur getten six or theerabout;  \nI're thrang\u00b0 wi' th' gruel-pon; _busy_  \nWhen I dropt mi spoon, an' shouted out,  \n\"How are yo gettin' on?\"  \n\"We're doin weel,\" th' owd woman said;  \n\"Thou'd better come an' see;  \nThere's a fine young chap lies here i' bed;  \nAn' he wants to look at thee!\"\n\nI ran up i' my stockin'-feet;  \nAn' theer they lay! By th' mon;  \nI thought i' my heart a prattier seet  \nI ne'er clapt e'en upon!  \nI kissed our Betty; an' I said, \u2013  \nWi' th' wayter i' my e'en, \u2013  \n\"God bless yo both, my bonny lass,  \nFor evermoore, Amen!\n\n\"But do tak care; if aught went wrang  \nI think my heart would break;  \nAn' if there's aught i' th' world thou'd like  \nThou's nought to do but speak:  \nBut, oh, my lass, don't lie too long;  \nI'm lonesome by mysel';  \nI'm no use without thee, thou knows;  \nBe sharp, an' do get weel!\"\n\n(ll. 65\u201396)\n\nThe poem never exploits the irony whereby the husband complains of the burdensome toil of fetching doctors and making tea \u2013 \"I never closed my e'en that neet, / Till after break o' day\"\u2013 while his unseen and unheard wife labors in childbirth. Instead, it concludes with a sudden turn toward the sentimental, the father's welcome to his new-born son, and thus reaffirms the strong ties of love and affection that bind the working-class family together. With its unwillingness to make visible the invisible laboring wife, \"Down Again!\" embodies the controlling irony of the dialect tradition: it is a class-based literature that consistently denies working women their class identity by refusing to recognize them as laborers.\n\nWritten by and for the urban working classes of northern Britain, dialect literature reigned as the dominant, even hegemonic, form of working-class expression in the quiescent decades after the mid-century demise of Chartism and before the late-Victorian resurgence of trade union agitation. As Martha Vicinus notes in _The Industrial Muse_ , her pioneering study of working-class literature, it was one of the more successful attempts by the Victorian proletariat to \"create and sustain a distinctive literature in the face of bourgeois economic and cultural control\" (2). Yet, if we understand dialect literature to be a distinct working-class voice, we must at the same time acknowledge it to be a distinctly male one. Like the literary tradition of which it forms a part, dialect writing is an almost exclusively male province: Vicinus could locate \"only some half-dozen volumes\" written by working-class women in the entire nineteenth century (5).\n\nTo explain the disparity between the stacks full of poetry and prose published by working-class men in the nineteenth century and the pitifully few volumes produced by working women \u2013 which if ranged together would scarcely fill up a single shelf \u2013 one has to consider more than just the conditions under which most Victorian working-class women lived. Underfed, undereducated and overworked, the Victorian working-class woman did not have the requisite room of her own, nor the time and energy to pursue what must have seemed like the leisurely self-indulgence of literary creation. But then, neither did the working-class male, who was marginally better fed and educated than his female counterpart, yet suffered from a material condition of life that seems on the face of it just as hostile to the production of literature. If nineteenth-century working-class men and women shared, both metaphorically and literally, the same room, we must look beyond material explanations for the disparity that exists, and this search will lead us back to dialect literature. For one factor, usually ignored, that may have contributed to the silence of Victorian working-class women is the prevailing intellectual and literary conditions among the working classes themselves.1 By examining the poetry of Edwin Waugh, one of the most popular of the dialect poets, and two female worker/poets active in the 1860s and 1870s, Fanny Forrester and Ellen Johnston, this essay aims to show how the dialect discourse was itself inimical to female self-expression. Like the laboring wife in Waugh's \"Down Again!\" working-class women were silenced by the dialect tradition, which, in its adherence to the ideology of domesticity, made it difficult for working women to write of their own experiences as women who worked.\n\n# I\n\nContemporary critics agree that dialect was a profoundly conservative literary movement.2 By offering up either nostalgic portraits of the preindustrial worker or sentimentalized sketches of the contemporary working class home, dialect literature fashioned a potent image of the working class as generally immune to the incursions of industrialism, a fact which has led Brian Maidment to conclude that \"the inspiration of the industrial muse was a complex one, as so little of the [dialect] verse was directly about industrial culture\" (\"Prose\" 31). After the failure of Chartism, the working class and its writers turned inward by turning indoors, embracing the ideology of domesticity, and participating in an apotheosis of the home and family similar to that of the Victorian middle classes. Although domesticity evolved out of the Evangelical movement in the early 1830s, it quickly spread to the larger middle-class world, where it became the dominant \u2013 if frequently contested \u2013 ideology.3 By the 1850s, it began to extend its reach to working-class circles and there remained for the rest of the century, a largely unattainable but nevertheless potent ideal.\n\nImportantly, historians no longer agree that an ascendant bourgeoisie forced the working class to accept the ideological hegemony of domesticity. Taking exception with this interpretation, feminist historians contend that working-class men freely embraced the domestic ideology and adopted a representation of waged work that excluded women in order to restrain female competition in the workplace and hence secure their own imperiled patriarchal interests, challenged by the rise of the self-possessed, wage-earning factory woman. As Barbara Taylor observes in her study of socialism and Victorian feminism, _Eve and the New Jerusalem_ , \"the wage-earning wife, once seen as the norm in every working-class household,\" became in the middle decades of the nineteenth century \"a symptom and symbol of masculine degradation\" (111). Of course, the reinscription of working-class women as, ironically, women who do not work departs radically from laboring-class traditions, in which wives and husbands were considered joint partners in the domestic venture. The invention of the non-working working-class wife did not so much restore the old order of things as engender a new one to fit the new conditions of the nineteenth century. But it quickly, even if incorrectly, became associated with the better times before the coming of the factories. By appropriating the domestic discourse, the dialect poets wedded themselves to a backward-glancing ideology, one that envisioned domesticity as a return to a status quo, the natural order of things believed to have existed before the disruptive birth of the factory system.4\n\nThus, in the process of being imaginatively transformed into a paradise for husbands, the working-class home became a place unaltered by and secure from the unaccountable changes occurring in the outside world. For example, when the wife in Edwin Waugh's \"Come Whoam to thi Childer an' Me\" pleads with her husband to return home, she tempts him with some homespun pleasures:\n\nAw've just mended th' fire wi' a cob\u00b0; _lump of coal_  \nOwd Swaddle has brought thi new shoon\u00b0; _shoes_  \nThere's some nice bacon-collops o' th' hob,  \nAn' a quart o' ale-posset i' th' oon\u00b0. _oven_\n\n(ll.1\u20134)\n\nThe key to the attraction lies not only in the promise of domestic comfort, but in the mythic quality of the moment, its historical indeterminateness: Waugh could be sketching a hearthside scene of fourteenth-century life, since nowhere does the poem acknowledge the existence of an urban, industrial milieu. In the closed world of dialect domesticity, the home became not only an antidote to modernity but the repository of working-class traditions, as if the lost village community, abandoned in the nascent moments of industrialization, had been resurrected inside the worker's cottage.\n\nGiven the alienating conditions of industrial England, it is not surprising that working men would wish to seek refuge from the workaday world of the factories, even if that refuge took the form of poetic fantasies. Nevertheless, despite its considerable surface charm, \"Come Whoam\" implicitly acknowledges the tensions inherent in the domestic ideal, even while it affirms working-class domesticity. Presenting two irreconcilable points of view, the poem takes the form of a dialogue between a homebound wife and an errant husband. Lonely, fretful, and left at home to tend children and darn socks, the wife laments her absent husband:\n\nWhen aw put little Sally to bed,  \nHoo\u00b0 cried, 'cose her feyther weren't theer, _she_  \nSo aw kiss'd th' little thing, an' aw said  \nThae'd bring her a ribbin fro' th' fair;  \nAn' aw gav' her her doll, an' some rags,  \nAn' a nice little white cotton-bo' \u00b0; _bow_  \nAn' aw kiss'd her again; but hoo said  \n'At hoo wanted to kiss thee an' o.\n\nAn' Dick, too, aw'd sich wark wi' him,  \nAfore aw could get him upstairs;  \nThae towd him thae'd bring him a drum,  \nHe said, when he're sayin' his prayers;  \nThen he looked i' my face, an' he said,  \n\"Has th' boggarts\u00b0 taen houd o' my dad?\" _bogeymen_  \nAn' he cried whol his e'en were quite red: \u2013  \nHe likes thee some weel, does yon lad!\n\n(ll. 9\u201324)\n\nWhen her wandering mate finally returns from pursuing his own pleasures, he problematically proclaims both his right to a \"bit of a spree\" and his enduring affection for home:\n\n\"God bless tho' my lass; aw'll go whoam  \nAn' aw'll kiss thee an' th' childer o' round;  \nThae knows that wheerever aw roam,  \nAw'm fain to get back to th' owd ground;  \nAw can do wi' a crack o'er a glass;  \nAw can do wi' a bit of a spree;  \nBut aw've no gradely\u00b0 comfort, my lass, _proper_  \nExcept wi' yon childer an' thee.\"\n\n(ll. 41\u201348)\n\nWith unabashed sentimentalism, the poem embraces a domesticity that it cannot quite endorse: the husband's wanderlust testifies to the limitations of the domestic ideal. The simple comforts offered in the opening stanza fail to satisfy the husband, and even though he insists there's no place like home, he also hints that it's no place he particularly wants to be, thus leaving his wife with the sad futurity of many more such silent, solitary evenings. However, by letting the husband have the last word, Waugh effectively irons over the tensions his poem raises, and \"Come Whoam\" concludes on a note of domestic concord. In the end, the poem contains the contradictions embodied in the domestic ideal, and thus it contributes to the mythologizing impetus of dialect poetry by actively translating the working man's cottage into the husband's castle.\n\n# II\n\nBut however understandable this translation may be, like much dialect poetry \"Come Whoam to thi Childer an' Me\" depends upon the effacement of women's waged labor. While the domestic ideal envisaged every working-class wife supported by her husband, the reality usually fell far short of this goal because, quite simply, only the most prosperous and skilled workers could afford to keep an unemployed wife at home in any degree of comfort, and a large percentage of working-class women continued to add to their families' incomes after marriage. A glance at the few published autobiographies of Victorian and Edwardian working-class women reveals that these individuals did not expect their wage-earning days to end with their marriage vows.\n\nCertainly Lucy Luck, whose autobiography is reprinted in John Burnett's _Useful Toil_ , held no such illusions about married life. Born in 1848 and brought up in a workhouse, Luck eventually marries, bears seven children and never stops adding to the family income. A straw-plaiter by trade, she confesses at the end of her life that \"I always liked my work very much and although I had trouble with it when I first learnt, it has been a little fortune to me. I have been at work for forty-seven years, and have never missed one season, although I have a large family\" (77). While justly proud of her achievements, Luck has no sense that working for five decades and raising a large family is an extraordinary accomplishment. But then, given what we know of the lives of Victorian working-class women, it most likely was not. Contrary to popular belief, women did not stop working when they got married; in fact, they frequently had to stay in the labor market to supplement the family's income until their children were old enough to earn for themselves.\n\nYet domesticity so dominated working-class culture that the domestic ideal was for years accepted as fact by historians, and only recently has scholarship begun to insist on the regularity with which working-class wives continued to earn money after marriage. Of course, women's working patterns varied according to the specifics of regional economies, but in the cotton districts of Lancashire, the center of dialect activity, a long tradition of married women's work existed. But this is a truth one would never grasp from reading dialect poetry.5\n\nMoreover, and perhaps even more problematically, dialect domesticity denied women credit for the unwaged as well as the waged work they performed. Whether earning a wage or not, most working-class women had the primary responsibility of housekeeping, frequently a daunting task in urban settings where, as Robert Roberts recalls in _The Classic Slum_ , a first-hand account of life in turn-of-the-century Salford, housewives fought a constant battle with \"ever-invading dirt\" and \"wore their lives away washing clothes in heavy, iron-hooped tubs, scrubbing wood and stone, polishing furniture and fire-irons\" (37). Yet dialect domesticity consistently refused to elevate housework to the status of work, noble and ennobling human labor that required skill, organization and intelligence. Rather, in its need to set off the domestic realm (the site of natural relationships between men and women, parents and children) from the industrial realm (the site of unnatural, alienated relationships between men and masters, workers and machines), dialect literature reconceived housework not only as \"not work,\" but as one of woman's duties, or, more precisely, one of her natural functions, like breathing and childbearing.\n\nThis conception of domestic work is certainly the unstated assumption in Edwin Waugh's \"Dinner Time,\" a poem about failed domesticity. When the husband returns home for his mid-day meal only to discover the house in a state of disarray, he complains bitterly to his wife:\n\n\"Thou's nought to do, fro' morn to neet,  \nBut keep things clean an' straight,  \nAn' see that th' bits o' cloas\u00b0 are reet\u00b0, _clothes/right_  \nAn' cook one's bit o' meight;  \nBut thou's never done it yet, owd lass:  \nHow is it? Conto tell?\"\n\n(ll. 41\u201346)\n\nThe husband first belittles the wife's labor, and then he devalues it completely; apparently, as the husband subsequently insists, only sheer laziness and a weakness for gossip keep her from it. Although the poem opens with the wife's frantic attempts to put supper on the table, it closes with the husband's threat to leave the home and dissolve the family.\n\n\"No wonder that hard-wortchin' folk  \nShould feel inclined to roam  \nFor comfort to an alehouse nook,  \nWhen they han noan at whoam.\n\nI'm fast: 1 don't know what to say;  \nAn' I don't know what to do;  \nAn' when I'm tired, at th' end o' th' day,  \nI don't know where to goo.  \nIt makes me weary o' my life  \nTo live i' sich a den:  \nHere, gi's a bit o' cheese an' loaf,  \nAn' I'll be off again!\"\n\n(ll. 53\u201364)\n\nNowhere in the poem does Waugh undermine the husband's point of view, so that \"Dinner Time\" obscures the adversities of housekeeping in a working-class home lacking all modern amenities and ignores the talent required to feed, clothe and care for a family. Lady Florence Bell contends in _At the Works_ (1907), an account of late-nineteenth-century life in a Yorkshire iron town, that it was frequently a woman's managerial abilities (rather than her husband's industrial capabilities) that determined the economic well-being of the family:\n\nthe key to the condition of the workman and his family, the clue, the reason for the possibilities and impossibilities of his existence, is the capacity, the temperament, and, above all, the health of the woman who manages his house; into her hands, sometimes strong and capable, often weak and uncertain, the future of her husband is committed, the burden of the family life is thrust. (171)\n\nUnlike Lady Bell, Waugh cannot acknowledge the wife's unpaid domestic duties as valuable, difficult labor because to do so would undermine the home as the antithesis of the factory, the opposition upon which domesticity depended.\n\nUltimately, dialect poetry not only devalued women's contributions to the domestic economy, but it strove to deny their efforts completely by encouraging working-class women to engage in acts of self-effacement and to erase \u2013 as much as possible \u2013 all traces of their domestic labor. Dialect poets usually made this suggestion in the form of the advice poem, a subgenre of dialect poetry in which, frequently, an old man or woman offers household hints to the newly married. Almost invariably, the dispenser of wisdom informs a young bride that although the secret to a happy marriage lies in the spotless purity and perfect orderliness of her domestic arrangements, a well-run home also renders invisible the labor involved in its upkeep. Somewhat ironically, these working-class poets seem to be advocating a fetishized domestic space where only the \"commodity\" (the cooked food, the clean house), and not the labor required to produce it, would be disclosed to the homeward-bound worker.\n\nClearly it is this lesson in concealment that the superannuated uncle in Samuel Laycock's \"Uncle Dick's Advoice to Wed Women\" tries to impart to his newlywed niece when he informs her that:\n\nWhen it's weshin' day, get done as soon as yo' con;  \nAwill assure yo' it's very unpleasant for John  \nTo come into th' heawse ov a nooin' or neet  \nAn' foind th' dirty clooas spread abeawt his feet. . . .\n\nOh! It's grand when one enters th' inside o' the'r cot,  \nAn' fonds 'at th' woife's made it a heaven ov a spot;  \nAn' her stondin' theer, bless her, to welcome yo' in,  \nWi' o 'at's abeawt her as clean as a pin! . . .\n\nLet 'em feel \u2013 when the'r wark's done \u2013 'at th' loveliest spot'  \nAt the'r is under heaven, is th'r own humble cot,  \nAh' ther's lots o' poor fellows aw've known i' mi loife,\n\nAt's bin driven fro' whoam bi a slovenly woife:  \nWhen they'n come in at neet, weaned eawt wi' th'er toil,  \nI'th stead o' being' met wi' a sweet, lovin' smoile,  \nTher's nothing but black-lookin' holes meet the'r een,  \nAn' a woife an' some childer, a shaum to be seen.\n\n(ll. 13\u201356)\n\nAs Laycock's last stanza reveals, it is from the body of the housewife that the effects of domestic labor must primarily be erased.\n\nIn this regard, Uncle Dick's friendly advice does not differ from the \"toothsome advice\" a young married woman receives in Edwin Waugh's poem of the same name. \"Toothsome Advice\" echoes \"Uncle Dick's Advoice to Wed Women\" in its insistence that the ornamental appearance of the wife will attract \u2013 like a sexual magnet:\n\n\"Thou mun keep his whoam pleasant an' sweet;  \nAn' everything fit to be seen;  \nThou mun keep thi hearth cheerful an' breet;  \nThou mun keep thisel' tidy an' clean  \nA good-temper't wife will entice  \nTo a fireside that's cosy an' trim;  \nMen liken to see their wives nice;  \nAn' I'm sure that's so wi' your Jem.\"\n\n(ll. 25\u201332)\n\nBy asserting the desirability of the working-class wife only when she conceals the marks of her class identity (the dirt, the fatigue), Waugh reverses the middle-class fascination with the sexuality of the working-class woman. Moreover, while neither Waugh nor Laycock would demand that the working man, exhausted from his labors, arrive home cheerful and tidy, both expect the working wife to transform herself at the end of each day into a decorative object more befitting a bourgeois matron with a staff of servants than the poor drudge that she frequently was. Evolving as it did out of the peculiar conditions of middle-class life, the domestic ideal never fit the economic realities of the working class, and the only way the dialect poets could make it fit was, oddly enough, by eroding the class differences between middle- and working-class women. The practical and pernicious effect of this erosion was that dialect literature, which claimed a certain authenticity as the voice of the industrial working class, came to define the working-class woman in terms that ignored her class conditions.\n\nA yawning and unbridgeable gap existed between the domestic ideal \u2013 which overlooked women's waged work and devalued their unwaged work \u2013 and the necessities of survival for working-class families in Victorian Britain. The ideal demanded that working-class women reproduce, albeit in a less opulent form, the bourgeois world inside the worker's cottage, a demand that the working-class wife could rarely achieve, and then only through small acts of daily heroism. Drearier than the rosy pictures sketched by the dialect poets, working women's lives were filled with long days of overexertion, as Roberts observes:\n\nrealists among the old working class today remember, and with sadness, not King Edward's \"lovely ladies\" and tea on the lawn at Hurlingham, but the many women broken and aged with childbearing well before their own youth was done. They remember the spoiled complexions, the mouths full of rotten teeth, the varicose veins, the ignorance of simple hygiene, the intelligence stifled and the endless battle merely to keep clean. Unlike many in the middle and upper classes, fondly looking back, they see no \"glory gleaming.\" They weep no tears for the past. (41)\n\nDialect writers, however, were not realists; they were idealists, if somewhat pragmatic ones. Tied to the working-class communities they spoke to and for, they fully understood that every working-class home did not meet the impossible standards of the domestic ideal. Certainly Edwin Waugh, who abandoned his own wife and children to the workhouse and took up with a wealthy Irish widow before penning his famous poem (Vicinus, _Ambiguities)_ , comprehended something of the ideal's tentative nature. Still, the ideal seems to have held emotional and imaginative sway over the British working classes. \"Home, however poor, was the focus of all . . . love and interests,\" Roberts recalls. \"Songs about its beauties were ever on people's lips. 'Home sweet home,' first heard in the 1870s, had become 'almost a second national anthem' \" (53). But whether it was honored more in the breach or in the observance, by focusing almost exclusively on women's role in the home the ideology of domesticity neglected the diversity of working-class women's experience in nineteenth-century Britain, where there were few occupations \u2013 from coalmining to fishing \u2013 in which women did not actively engage. Ultimately, in their single-minded devotion to the domestic ideal, dialect poets robbed working-class women of the realities of their lives as workers.\n\n# III\n\nAlthough the domestic ideal gained currency among the working classes around 1850, its complete ascendancy was neither immediate nor complete, especially among working women. Admittedly, many women saw in the ideal some possible relief from the twin burden of waged work and housework they carried. But not all embraced it, and those who did dispute its imposition lacked a language to articulate their discontents. As historian Barbara Taylor has shown in her investigations of the women who wrote letters to the \"Woman's Page\" of the _Pioneer_ , a popular Owenite trades union journal of the 1830s, working-class women in the early part of the nineteenth century could evoke the traditional language of radicalism \u2013 of the rights of man and woman \u2013 to fight their battles. They could, and frequently did, argue against all \"artificial aristocracies\" _(Pioneer_ 273), whether of class or of gender. But Chartism, the next great wave of working-class radicalism after Owenism, eventually repudiated the revolutionary feminism of its predecessor by heralding the domestic ideal and the ideology of domesticity left working-class women without a solid foundation on which to base a critique of their unequal position in Victorian society at the same historical moment when gender inequities were being reasserted and reinscribed into a system of separate spheres. This situation, which divested women of an oppositional discourse when they stood in the greatest need of it, created myriad difficulties for working-class women writers like Fanny Forrester and Ellen Johnston, two worker-poets whose experiences fell outside the narrow confines of Victorian domesticity.\n\nGranted, neither Fanny Forrester nor Ellen Johnston is usually located within the dialect camp, and thus comparing them to a dialect poet like Edwin Waugh may seem arbitrary at best, misleading at worst. However, I would counter, both women were active during the height of dialect poetry's popularity, and they emerged from the same social and geographical milieu that spawned the major dialect figures. Moreover, the Scottish-born Johnston, heir to the tradition of Robert Burns, occasionally used the Scots dialect; and even though Forrester wrote exclusively in standard English, she published the majority of her poems in _Ben Brierley's Journal_ , a magazine edited by one of the masters of dialect prose, Ben Brierley. Most important of all, the two women confronted the domestic ideal in their work, and their writings record that confrontation. It is through Forrester's and Johnston's texts that we can begin to gauge the formative (and deforming) pressures the discourse of domesticity exerted on working-class women's writings.\n\nTo frame Forrester's and Johnston's later collisions with domesticity, it might be useful to consider first the poetry of a woman who did not write from within or against domesticity. Active at mid-century and publishing in _The People's Journal_ , a magazine run by the reform-minded, middle-class Howitts and dedicated to finding a wider reading audience for working-class poets, a Chorley factory worker who signed herself \"Marie\" was not enmeshed in the Victorian cult of domesticity. Consequently, she could freely configure herself as a worker and a woman without lapsing into contradiction. For example, the subject matter of Marie's \"Labour,\" a Carlylean paean to the creative powers of work, would not alone make it a remarkable poem; however, what distinguishes it from working-class poetry written later in the century is the imagery Marie deploys to realize her vision of the better world that can be created through dint of hard work. Unlike Edwin Waugh, who in \"Down Again!\" effaces the labor of women's childbirth, Marie turns to childbirth as a metaphor for all human labor:\n\nWhen great nature, in sore travail,  \nBringeth forth her child \u2013  \nSome old nation in convulsion,  \nWith new freedom wild! \u2013  \nSome long-borne and huge injustice  \nThat in dumbness stood,  \nPouring out its new-born utt'rance  \nIn a jargon flood!  \n'Tis but nature's heart  \nBeating in her children's bosom,  \nBidding wrong depart.  \nAges are her fleeting moment, \u2013  \nWorld-times are her years \u2013  \nIn immensity she singeth  \n'Mid the shining spheres.\n\n\"Hark, hark, to God's heart beating;  \nTime is on the wing,  \nLabour is the only worship  \nAny soul can bring!\"\n\n(ll. 61\u201379)\n\nSyntactical irregularities aside, by heralding labor's infinite capacity to form worlds anew the poem celebrates creativity as procreativity: work is both natural and \"naturally\" feminine. Instead of envisioning women's work as a perversion of the natural order, Marie can represent woman as a natural worker because women and work were not divorced in her mind.\n\nMarie embraces the larger political struggles of her fellow workers and produces poems full of class-conscious rhetoric, bearing such outsized heroic titles as \"Idealise the Real and Realise the Ideal,\" \"Fellow Workers,\" \"The Indomitable Will,\" and \"Encouragement.\" Like some latter-day figure of Liberty leading the people, Marie writes to advance the cause of the working classes:\n\nThough ignored our lowly lot,  \nScornful glances harm us not;  \nWe accept our homely fate;  \nAnd a beauteous life create; \u2013  \nFrom earth's bosom, brown and bare,  \nFlowerets draw their colours rare;  \nAnd though we are seeming stinted  \nAll our days are rainbow-tinted  \nBy our noble will!\n\nCome there failure or success,  \nWe march on in earnestness;  \nNought can come amiss or wrong,  \nIf the soul be true and strong,  \nOn, and up, courageously!  \nAnd our banner's motto be  \n\"Hope and work, with heart and hand \u2013  \nNaught can finally withstand  \nThose of earnest will!\"\n\n(\"The Indomitable Will,\" ll. 37\u201354)\n\nSignificantly, Marie represents the class struggle from the position of the first person plural and includes herself in the empowering \"we\" of class solidarity. By identifying herself as a worker without needing the qualifying adjectives of gender, Marie reveals an understanding of the word \"worker\" that encompasses both men and women.\n\nIn the two decades dividing Marie from Fanny Forrester, we can place the triumph of the domestic ideal. By the mid-1870s, the confluence of woman and worker called up contradictory and self-defeating images in the poetry of Fanny Forrester, the pseudonym of a young female operative from Manchester who entered a dye-works at the age of twelve and was publishing regularly in _Ben Brierley's Journal_ by the time she reached twenty. Her poetry ranges from somewhat lugubrious narratives of urban living to vaguely Romantic invocations of the pre-industrial past. However, when focused on Manchester life, her poetry reveals the impediments a working-class woman faced when attempting to write about factory girls in the golden age of domesticity.\n\nTo some degree, Forrester was aware of her dilemma. In \"The Lowly Bard,\" published in 1873, Forrester's humble male poet \"mourns the incompleteness of his lyre\" (8), a dissatisfaction justified by his inability to find an appropriate poetic voice for the subject of the poem, working-class women in the industrial city. Although Forrester wishes to make heroines out of mill hands, she knows that they are not conventionally heroic, and the tension between the poetic language of Victorian femininity and the prosaic reality of her female operatives threatens the poem's intelligibility:\n\nO'er great looms slight figures lowly stoop  \nAnd weary shadows cross their girlish faces  \nThat like frail flowers o'er stagnant waters droop. . . .  \nToil, toil to-day, and toil again tomorrow:  \nSome weave their warp to reach a pauper grave!  \nNaught of romance doth gild their common sorrow;  \nYet ne'er were heroines more strong \u2013 more brave.\n\n(ll. 22\u201328)\n\nForrester uses the clich\u00e9d comparison of drooping flowers and mill girls even though she understands the inadequacy of romantic language to capture and record the lives of her weavers. Despite the willowy weakness and fey feminine charm Forrester attributes to her workers, in the end she destabilizes her own characterization of them by acknowledging their strength and bravery. Enmeshed in a representational system that could only see factory women as victims (frail flowers needing the shelter of the domestic nook), Forrester cannot articulate coherently the lives of mill hands like herself, and if she stumbles into contradictions, it is because a working woman in the 1870s was a contradiction, at least ideologically.\n\nUnable to translate her own experiences of survival and success into poetic forms, Forrester invariably depicted the industrial milieu as anathema to female life: her inaugural piece in _Ben Brierley's Journal_ , the three-part \"Strangers in the City,\" which appeared in the spring of 1870, recounts the woeful tale of a young Irish woman who migrates to the city and dies shortly thereafter, worn out by her daily contact with the mill. But this tragic emplotment runs counter to what we know of the outlines of Forrester's life. For in spite of her own early hardships, Forrester eventually became a popular contributor to _Ben Brierley's Journal_ , arousing so much reader interest that in 1878 the magazine took the unusual step of printing a biographical notice, in which, interestingly enough, Brierley acknowledges how extraordinarily disconnected the poetry is from the poet's life:\n\nshe writes of fields and flowers as of things with which her earlier years were unacquainted, as treasures only reflected in books, or dreamt of in her dreams, and with which her soul yearns for companionship. We are assured that beyond the range of Peel Park [in Manchester], outward nature has hitherto been a sealed book to her. (37)\n\nBrierley alludes to the fact that poems with urban settings like \"The Lowly Bard\" and \"Strangers in the City\" stand out as exceptions because most of Forrester's poetry recalls, in a plangent and irreconcilable voice, a sanitized, picturesque world \"where the little brooks are singing through the valleys all the day\" (l. 2) that the poet could never possibly have known (\"Homeless in the City\" 42). He surmises, no doubt correctly, that her inspiration comes from books \u2013 most likely from volumes full of Romantic nature poetry and dialect literature, neither genre providing her with a language for representing the lives of modern mill women with anything other than self-pity or evasion: nature poetry offered a condemnation of the urban milieu while dialect domesticity tendered a similar critique of wage-earning women. Forrester ends up achieving an easy pathos in her poetry but nothing like lyrical truth, and even the pathetic effect she produces is undermined by the contradictions that inevitably emerge between the domestic ideology and certain realities that Forrester cannot completely suppress.\n\n# IV\n\nIt is against the backdrop of domesticity \u2013 which presented working-class women with the problem of representing themselves in a representational system that effectively denied their existence as workers \u2013 that we must set the achievement of Ellen Johnston, a Scottish mill hand born in the mid-1830s. Johnston, who labelled herself \"the Factory Girl,\" is one of the few working-class women to publish a volume of poetry in the mid-1800s and, as far as I have been able to ascertain, the only one who made life in the mills the chief subject of her writing. A self-professed \"self-taught scholar\" (7), Johnston tries to resolve the dilemma facing working-class women writers like Forrester by turning to the Romantic tradition of rebellion, a literary model that encourages the oppositional, confrontational stance Johnston adopts in her 1867 _Autobiography, Poems and Songs_.6 Casting herself as Romantic rebel, Johnston engages in Miltonic inversions, transforming the heaven of working-class domesticity into a hell and, in turn, Blake's \"dark, Satanic mills\" into a personal paradise. As a result, she breaches the walls of the working-class home and lets some light shine into the unexposed and unexplored corners of the domestic ideal.\n\nIn the autobiographical preface to her poems, Ellen Johnston flatly rejects domesticity and reinvents herself as a Romantic heroine. She proudly boasts that \"mine were not the common trials of every day life, but like those strange romantic ordeals attributed to the imaginary heroines of 'Inglewood Forest' \" (5); and, in fact, the story of her life does resemble something out of Byron's poetry or an over-plotted Victorian romance. When her father decides to emigrate to America, her mother refuses to go and, shortly after hearing false reports of her husband's death, she remarries, only to die from the shock when he unexpectedly returns years later. Meanwhile, left fatherless in Scotland, Johnston undergoes the first of her uncommon trials, one she alludes to as \"the mystery of my life\" (9), and while she remains highly circumspect throughout, she manages to convey the fact that as a child she suffered at the hands of her abusive (and perhaps sexually abusive) stepfather, whose attentions forced her as a young girl to run away from her mother's house \"for safety and protection\" (9).\n\nGiven her early history, it is scarcely surprising that Johnston never sentimentalizes the domestic sphere. Indeed, when the home appears at all in her poetry, it does so as a den of terror, as in \"The Drunkard's Wife,\" a harrowing account of her aunt's unhappy marriage to an alcoholic. Ellen Johnston could have scripted her life as a domestic tragedy \u2013 as a cautionary tale about failed domesticity \u2013 but since she sees herself not as a victim but as a bohemian free-spirit, she chooses rather to celebrate herself and her life with Whitmanesque energy, exalting her homelessness and embracing the open road as a symbol of her liberation. She compares herself to a wandering Jew and proudly recalls her life's travelogue: \"I have mingled with the gay on the shores of France \u2013 I have feasted in the merry halls of England \u2013 I have danced on the shamrock soil of Erin's green isle\" (6). Even more daringly, she openly proclaims her moral wanderings and then, true to form, refuses to repent the birth of an illegitimate daughter:\n\nI did not . . . feel inclined to die when I could no longer conceal what the world falsely calls a woman's shame. No, on the other hand, I never loved life more dearly and longed for the hour when I would have something to love me \u2013 and my wish was realized by becoming the mother of a lovely daughter on the 14th of Sept, 1852. (11)\n\nHaving read an abundance of nineteenth-century fiction, Johnston knows that a proper Victorian lady, on becoming a single mother, should engage in some self-destructive display, but she gamely declines to play the role of the shame-ridden woman. Glorifying her outcast state, Johnston rejoices in the motherhood that brands her a fallen woman.\n\nOf course, as a woman who worked in a factory and wrote poetry, Johnston was already outside the categories of conventional representation, at least in the eyes of her upper-class readers, for whom the autobiographical preface was written. \"Self-taught writers were regarded as much as social phenomena as writers of serious poetry\" (85), Maidment reminds us in \"Essayists and Artizans.\" Wealthy Victorians were as interested in the lives of working-class poets as they were in the poetry itself, and Johnston's awareness of the fact that part of her celebrity \u2013 at least among her \"betters\" \u2013 derived from her class status rather than her poetic skills prompted her to write \"An Address to Nature on its Cruelty\":\n\nLearned critics who have seen them [her verses]  \nSay origin dwells within them;  \nBut when myself perchance they see,  \nThey laugh and say, \"O is it she?  \nWell, I think the little boaster  \nIs nothing but a fair imposter;  \nShe looks so poor-like and so small,  \nShe's next unto a nought-at-all;  \nSuch wit and words quite out-furl  \nThe learning of 'A Factory Girl.' \"\n\n(ll. 11\u201320)\n\nSurely for the aristocratic readers of her autobiography, like the Duke of Buccleuch and the Earl of Enniskillen, both of whom appear on the subscriber list, \"the factory girl\" would have been beyond the pale of respectable representation, which situated the pure woman in the domestic space. Perhaps trumpeting herself as a (sexually) fallen women in the autobiography allowed her to be comfortable with what she ideologically already was: a woman who had fallen out of her proper sphere. In fact, one senses that, at least imaginatively, Johnston relishes her status as a fallen woman, finding power and a transformational energy in her emancipation from the constraints of Victorian womanhood.\n\nBy reversing the social and moral hierarchy of working-class domesticity, Johnston's factory poems sustain the rebellious posture that she assumes in the autobiographical preface. \"Kennedy's Dear Mill,\" which Johnston probably wrote as an occasional piece to commemorate a company function, upends the tropes of dialect poetry:\n\nAnd freedom's glorious shrine  \nIs center'd in thy walls;  \nNo tyrant knave to bind,  \nNo slavish chain enthrals.  \nThe workers are as free  \nAs the sunshine on the hill;  \nThy breath is liberty  \nOh! Kennedy's dear mill.\n\n(ll. 40\u201348)\n\nWhile the dialect poets usually figure the working-class home as an escape from the regimentation and regulations of factory life, in \"Kennedy's Dear Mill\" Johnston locates her freedom in a weaving shed, and then, to complete her break with the domestic discourse, she claims to find a home in Kennedy's mill and a family among her fellow mill workers. In Johnston's poetry, the mill rather than the home emerges as the emotional center of her life, so that all the affection and familial loyalty (and even the air of sanctification) that the dialect poets ascribe to the domestic sphere, she transfers to the factory:\n\nThou hast a secret spell  \nFor all as well as me;  \nEach girl loves thee well  \nThat ever wrought in thee.  \nThey may leave thy blessed toil;  \nBut, find work they will,  \nThey return back in a while  \nTo Kennedy's dear mill.\n\n(ll. 17\u201324)\n\nIn fact, to be out of work for Johnston is to be removed from her spiritual home and to become an expatriate from paradise, a \"factory exile\" who writes love poems full of passionate longing for the mill she left behind: \"Thou lovely verdant Factory! What binds my heart to thee? / Why art thou centered in my soul, twined round my memory?\" (\"The Factory Exile,\" ll. 1\u20132).\n\nOne could explain Johnston's factory effusions as a subtle parody of the dialect tradition's over-sentimentalization of the home, but her attachment to the factories seems sincere, grounded both in the treasured freedom she associates with mill life and in the sense of self-worth, perhaps not otherwise available to an unwed mother in Victorian Scotland, it affords her. If one considers the generally low status of the Victorian working-class woman, and the even lower status of domestic labor, factory work provided Johnston with one of the few areas in which she could achieve a certain standing and dignity. Frequently boasting of her prowess at the loom and relating all the praises her various employers have heaped upon her, Johnston seems to be as proud of her weaving skills as she is of her poetic ones; her self-confidence is bolstered by the knowledge that she is a sound craftsman, a skilled worker with words and with wool.\n\nNevertheless, while Johnston may have found in the radical strain of Romantic thought a paradigm that allowed her to validate her identity as a factory girl, she is also liberated by having no specific models from \"high\" art on which to pattern her industrial verses. Although Johnston borrowed the revolutionary posture of the Romantics, the Romantic poets left behind no body of factory poetry with which Johnston needed to contend. But when Johnston takes her subject matter as well as her revolutionary stance from the Romantic tradition, the pressures exerted by male literary models and the ideology of femininity enclosed within them transform her sexual politics. In fact, it is at these moments that Johnston and Forrester most closely resemble one another. Johnston's few non-industrial poems, mixed cocktails of Scott and early Wordsworth, reaffirm certain conservative notions of femininity that her autobiographical material repudiates. In one particularly Wordsworthian effort, the heroine of an ersatz lyrical ballad entitled \"The Maniac in the Greenwood\" is rejected by her lover and confirms her maidenly modesty and innate femininity by going mad. However, at the same time and in the same volume, Johnston's autobiography recounts a life that contains considerably more trying events than an unhappy love affair. Johnston survives incidents of child abuse, periods of unemployment, a bout of illness, and the experience of single parenthood, and through it all she retains a remarkable degree of optimism and emerges from the text as a resilient individual, the spiritual kin of the stalwart Lucy Luck. Like Fanny Forrester's poetry, Ellen Johnston's, when it follows male literary models that embody conventional Victorian notions of femininity, cannot approximate the truth of a working woman's life. Johnston's text, which juxtaposes autobiography and a scattering of poems straining to emulate canonical forms, opens up and lays bare the gap between male literary traditions and the working-class woman's realities.7\n\nPerhaps the lesson to be learned from Johnston's _Autobiography, Poems and Songs_ is that the most revealing source of information we have on working-class women's lives remains the autobiography. Of course, that statement does not intend to deny the obvious fact that an autobiography is a fictional ordering of personal recollections, but it is a fiction that gives us access to the way an individual wishes the world to see him or her. As Susan Stanford Freidman argues, women's autobiographies often reveal a self at odds with dominant cultural representations:\n\nA white man has the luxury of forgetting his skin color and sex. He can think of himself as an \"individual.\" Women and minorities, reminded at every turn in the great cultural hall of mirrors of their sex or color, have no such luxury. . . . Alienation is not the result of creating a self in language, as it is for the Lacanian and Barthesian critics of autobiography. Instead, alienation from the historically imposed image of the self is what motivates the writing, the creation of an alternate self in the autobiographical act. Writing the self shatters the cultural hall of mirrors and breaks the silence imposed by male speech. (39\u201341)\n\nJohnston's autobiography and autobiographical factory poems may be the closest we can come to sharing the private vision of one Victorian woman directly involved in industrial labor in the decades after mid-century.\n\nHowever, in spite of her ample achievements, Johnston may have shattered one hall of mirrors only to have moved to another room in the patriarchal fun house. For while Johnston can exuberantly proclaim that \"A thousand times I'd be a Factory Girl,\" the epic celebration of herself throughout the _Autobiography, Poems and Songs_ comes at a price: she may find a liberating voice in the rhetoric of Romantic rebellion, but that voice traps her into reinforcing the governing cultural assumptions about the immorality of \"working girls.\" Johnston can only present herself to the reader as a fallen woman, and in spite of her avowed enthusiasm for mill life, Johnston nonetheless acknowledges that to be a female factory worker is to have fallen out of one's proper sphere: she upends the domestic ideal only to reaffirm its hegemony in working-class culture. But even if, in the final analysis, she fails to escape the dominance of the domestic ideal, Johnston succeeds in articulating experiences that could not be reconciled with the dictates of domesticity. But who knows how many women, lacking Johnston's daring, confrontational zeal, were dissuaded from writing about their own lives as women and workers? While the discourse of domesticity cannot alone account for the silence of working-class women in the Victorian period, clearly dialect literature, that pure distillation of working-class domesticity, reinforced it. Dialect may have embodied some of the dreams and desires of the Victorian working man, but by refusing to grant the working-class woman her class status, it muted her voice.\n\n# Notes\n\n1 David Vincent first broke with purely materialist explanations to account for the scarcity of working-class women's writings when, in _Bread_ , _Knowledge_ _and Freedom_ , he considered the emotional and intellectual conditions of the working class and argued that their low self-esteem and the lack of \"the self-confidence required to undertake the unusual act of writing an autobiography\" accounted for the absence of working women's autobiographies (8\u20139).\n\n2 In _The Poorhouse Fugitives_ , Brian Maidment contends that dialect poetry \"is largely a search for a lost 'history' of ordinary people, most usually associated in their world with a rural/industrial village life which just pre-dates urbanization and the factory system\" (231). Vicinus points out that the choice of the dialect itself was an attempt to forge a connection with the past: \"the spoken dialect belonged to the past and to the country in the minds of many city dwellers\" ( _Industrial_ 190). And in the preface to his anthology of dialect verse, _Songs of the People_ , Brian Hollingworth observes that after its golden age in the 1850s and 1860s, dialect poetry quickly degenerated into an antiquarian and rather nostalgic attempt to conserve a dying culture and language\" (5).\n\n3 One need look no further than Florence Nightingale's _Cassandra_ for an excoriating contemporary critique of domesticity. Many middle-class women, however, found a way to challenge the domestic ideal from inside through its ideological concomitant \u2013 female influence. For example, domestic ideologues, like Anna Jameson, employed the idea of a woman's moral influence to transcend the domestic sphere and annul the public/private divorce; in her widely-circulated social treatise of 1856, _The Communion of Labour_ , Jameson asks her readers if they wish to deny women \"the power to carry into a wider sphere the duties of home \u2013 the wifely, motherly, sisterly instincts, which bind them to the other half of the human race\" (119). This broad interpretation of domestic ideology gave middle-class women some access to the public sphere, through the limited means of female philanthropic endeavors. Clearly though, the notion of female influence and philanthropy would have been useless in a working-class context.\n\n4 For the fullest analyses of the implications of the working-class adoption of domesticity, see Taylor's chapter on \"Sex and Class in the Post-Owenite Era,\" and Lown.\n\n5 Moira Machonachie quotes the following figures for female employment, taken from the 1851 census: out of a population of 7,043,701 adult women, 2,846,097 were in paid employ and 500,000 worked in family businesses. The prevalence of working wives in Victorian Britain \u2013 and the grave economic consequences for women resulting from the adoption of the domestic ideal \u2013 is discussed by Rose; Lown; Alexander; and Osterund.\n\n6 Julia Swindells fleshes out the literary influences of Johnston's autobiography, particularly her indebtedness to such Romantic figures as Sir Walter Scott.\n\n7 Johnston's celebrations of factory life owe an unacknowledged debt to the \"low\" tradition of the broadside, which as Vicinus notes, often praised the \"liveliness and vitality of factory towns\" ( _Industrial_ 53). But by explicitly aligning herself with Byron, Scott and Wordsworth, Johnston attempts to locate herself within the canonical tradition of English literature, and in this sense, she shares much in common with the working-class writers whom Vicinus identifies as seeing literature as their vocation. I think Forrester's poetry also reveals a desire on the part of the author to \"participate in English literary culture\" (140).\n\n# Works Cited\n\nAlexander, Sally. \"Women's Work in Nineteenth-Century London: A Study of the Years 1820\u20131850.\" _The Rights and Wrongs of Women_. Ed. Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. 59\u2013111.\n\nBell, Florence. _At the Works_. 1907. London: Virago, 1985.\n\nBrierley, Ben. \"Fanny Forrester.\" _Ben Brierley's Journal_ 23 Jan. 1875: 37.\n\nBurnett, John, ed. _Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s_. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.\n\nForrester, Fanny. \"Homeless in the City.\" _Ben_ _Brierley's Journal_ Mar. 1870: 42.\n\n\u2014\u2014 \"The Lowly Bard.\" _Ben Brierley's Journal_ Nov. 1873: 265.\n\nFreidman, Susan Stanford. \"Women's Autobiographical Selves.\" _The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings_. Ed. Shari Benstock. London: Routledge, 1988. 34\u201362.\n\nHollingworth, Brian, ed. _Songs of the People_. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1977.\n\nJameson, Anna. _The Communion of Labour_. London, 1856.\n\nJohnston, Ellen. _Autobiography, Poems and Songs of Ellen Johnston, the Factory Girl_. Glasgow, 1867.\n\nLaycock, Samuel. \"Uncle Dick's Advoice to Wed Women.\" _The Collected_ _Writings of Samuel Laycock_ __. Ed. George Milner. Manchester, 1908. 98\u20139.\n\nLown, Judy. \"Not So Much a Factory, More a Form of Patriarchy: Gender and Class During Industrialisation.\" _Gender, Class and Work_. Ed. Eva Gamarnikow et al. London: Heinemann, 1983. 28\u201345.\n\nMachonachie, Moira. \"Women's Work and Domesticity in the _English Women's Journal_.\" _Studies in the History of Feminism_. Ed. Sally Alexander. London: U of London Dept. of Extra-mural Studies, 1984.\n\nMaidment, Brian. \"Essayists and Artizans \u2013 The Making of Nineteenth-Century Self-Taught Poets.\" _Literature and History_ 9 (1983): 74\u201391.\n\n\u2014\u2014 _The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain_. Manchester: Carcanet, 1987.\n\n\u2014\u2014 \"Prose and Artisan Discourse in Early Victorian Britain.\" _Prose Studies_ 10 (1987): 30\u201341.\n\nMarie. \"Idealise the Real and Realise the Ideal.\" _The People's Journal_ 4 (1851): 175.\n\n\u2014\u2014 \"The Indomitable Will.\" _The People's Journal_ 4 (1851): 63.\n\n\u2014\u2014 \"Labour.\" 1850. Maidment, _Poorhouse_.\n\nOsterund Nancy Grey. \"Gender Divisions and the Organization of Work in the Leicester Hosiery Industry.\" _Unequal Opportunities: Women's Employment in England, 1800\u20131918._ Ed. Angela John. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. 45\u201368.\n\n _The Pioneer, or Grand National Consolidated Trades' Union Magazine_. 1833\u201334. New York: Greenwood Reprint Co., 1968.\n\nRoberts, Robert. _The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century_. 1971. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988.\n\nRose, Sonya O. \" 'Gender At Work': Sex, Class and Industrial Capitalism.\" _History Workshop Journal_ 21 (1986): 113\u201331.\n\nSwindells, Julia. _Victorian Writing and Working Women_. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.\n\nTaylor, Barbara. _Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century_. London: Virago, 1983.\n\nVicinus, Martha. _The Ambiguities of Self-Help_. Littleborough, Lancashire: George Kelsall, 1984.\n\n\u2014\u2014 _The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Working-Class Literature_. New York: Barnes, 1974.\n\nVincent, David. ___Bread_ _,_ _Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography_ __. London: Methuen, 1981.\n\nWaugh, Edwin. \"Come Whoam to thi Childer an' Me.\" _Poems and Lancashire Songs_. Manchester, 1859. 64\u20135.\n\n\u2014\u2014 \"Dinner Time.\" Hollingworth 68\u20139.\n\n\u2014\u2014 \"Down Again!\" Hollingworth 70\u20131.\n\n\u2014\u2014 \"Toothsome Advice.\" _Poems and Songs_. Ed. George Milner. Manchester, 1893. 136\u20137.\n\nZlotnick, Susan. 1991. \"'A Thousand Times I'd be a Factory Girl': Dialect, Domesticity, and Working-Class Women's Poetry in Victorian Britain.\" In _Victorian Studies_ , 35, i (Autumn), pp. 7\u201327. Reproduced with permission of Indiana University Press.\n\n# 11\n\n# 'The fruitful feud of hers and his'\n\n#  _Sameness, Difference, and Gender in Victorian Poetry_\n\nDorothy Mermin\n\nWhen women poets began in the Victorian period to win real acceptance in the ranks of high culture, the problems particular to women writing poetry were to a significant extent those of men as well. Men too, in an age of religious uncertainty and drastic social change, felt excluded from the bardic, prophetic confidence of the past and from their Romantic predecessors' intimate sense of a poetry-sustaining life in nature. As lines of gender demarcation became exceptionally rigid, the gendered division between private and public spheres marked poetry itself \u2013 and especially lyric \u2013 as feminine and private even though publication belonged to the masculine sphere. While most women writers suffered galling constraints on their freedom to move beyond domestic seclusion, many male writers found the public world of bourgeois masculinity alien and disagreeable. On a formal level, the conventional gendering of the speaking subject as male and the object as female, with the wide-ranging polarization it imposed, was problematic for both men and women. But outside conventional gender structures \u2013 assuming one could escape them \u2013 lurked the threat of undifferentiated sameness, with the double danger of sexual transgression (more evident for men than for women, and becoming increasingly clear as the century progressed) and the loss of the essential structures that defined both poetry and the self.1\n\nIn interlocking elegiac verses on her female predecessors, \"Felicia Hemans: To L.E.L., Referring to Her Monody on the Poetess,\" and \"L.E.L.'s Last Question,\" Barrett Browning places herself in a poetic tradition in which women write to one another instead of being written about by men: a world without gender difference, in which identities keep threatening to merge. Both poems describe Landon as projecting or seeking her own image everywhere. \"Felicia Hemans\" begins:\n\nThou bay-crowned living One that o'er the bay-crowned Dead art bowing,  \nAnd o'er the shadeless moveless brow the vital shadow throwing,  \nAnd o'er the sighless songless lips the wail and music wedding,  \nAnd dropping o'er the tranquil eyes the tears not of their shedding! \u2013\n\n(ll. 1\u20134)2\n\nHemans' tearful example creates Landon's tears, which drop into Hemans' eyes so that they seem to be shedding those tears together. Landon's \"Stanzas\" in fact echo Hemans' \"Bring Flowers\": \"Bring flowers! thus said the lovely song; / And shall they not be brought / To her?\"3 \u2013 turning the poem's author into the object of its exhortation. But Barrett Browning wants to break the chain, even as she joins it: \"No flowers for her! no need of flowers, albeit 'bring flowers!' thou saidest\" (l. 8). \"Nor mourn, O living One, because her part in life was mourning\" (l. 17).\n\nBut the first alternative the poem offers is another form of mirroring:\n\nLay only dust's stern verity upon the dust undreaming:  \nAnd while the calm perpetual stars shall look upon it  \nsolely,  \nHer sphered soul shall look on _them_ with eyes more  \nbright and holy.\n\n(ll. 14\u201316)\n\nThe real alternative is Jesus, who projects his qualities onto the dead poet without reflecting hers: \"The whiteness of His innocence o'er all her garments, flowing\" (l. 27). Landon's \"Stanzas\" leave Hemans \"laid\" in the \"breast\" of \"quiet mother-earth\" (ll. 105\u2013107); Barrett Browning substitutes contiguity with a male divinity for absorption into female nature, leaving Hemans \"on\" the \"bosom\" (l. 26) of Jesus.\n\nIf Landon rejoices like Hemans in Jesus, she can hope for the same happy end: \"as thy dust decayeth / May thine own England say for thee, what now for Her it sayeth\" (ll. 29\u201330). She will become in her turn object rather than subject; and what England will say is that her death is quieter and therefore better than her poetry:\n\n\"Albeit softly in our ears her silver song was ringing,  \nThe foot-fall of her parting soul is softer than her.  \nsinging!\"\n\n(ll. 31\u201332)\n\nLandon can only replicate her predecessor after all; and the best replication is silence.\n\nIn \"L.E.L.'s Last Question,\" similarly, the poet is chided for seeking a mirror of herself. The \"last question\" is: \"'Do you think of me as I think of you?'\" Barrett Browning dislikes what she sees as the monotonous emotionality of Hemans' and Landon's poetry, trapped in conventionally feminine themes and tones:\n\nAnd little in the world the Loving do  \nBut sit (among the rocks!) and listen for  \nThe echo of their own love evermore \u2013  \n\"Do you think of me as I think of you?\"\n\n(ll. 11\u201314)\n\nBut her own poem remains trapped in the same theme, if not quite the same tone, echoing Landon's question seven times in nine stanzas, until in the final stanza the poet hears Jesus addressing the question to herself. As in \"Felicia Hemans,\" the poem breaks out of the hall of mirrors only by having God assert his primacy as subject, returning the woman poet once again to the position of silence.\n\nThese poems describe a female poetic tradition that eludes a system of differences geared to the male subject, only to find itself trapped in a world of undifferentiated sorrow and forced to seek a new principle of difference in religion \u2013 Christ's divinity, not his gender \u2013 that also requires their silence. Male poets, too, struggled against the traditionally gendered system of poetic difference and confronted the difficulties and impasses that the struggle entailed. In this essay I shall try to suggest some of the ways in which these issues, which are central to Victorian women's poetry, are played out in the work of their male contemporaries.\n\n# 1 Questioning the Subject: Dramatic Monologue\n\nThe distinctively Victorian form, the dramatic monologue, calls attention to and problematizes the status of the speaking subject. For women poets this is the overriding, inescapable question; and men too formulate it surprisingly often in terms of gender. According to Isobel Armstrong, nineteenth-century women poets (Hemans, Landon) \"'invented'\" the dramatic monologue as a way to counter and control the poetic objectification of woman.4 Women poets most often use dramatic monologues to allow female speakers to express passion, rage, and rebellion against social constraints (e.g., Barrett Browning's \"Bianca among the Nightingales\" and \"Mother and Poet,\" Rossetti's \"Cousin Kate\" and \"'The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children,'\" Webster's \"A Castaway\"), and female speakers in such poems as Browning's \"James Lee's Wife,\" Tennyson's \"Rizpah,\" and Arnold's \"A Modern Sappho\" (the strongest expression of erotic desire in all of Arnold's work) are similar voices of the unimpeded subjectivity that dramatized female speakers, but not female poets in anything that might be mistaken for their own voices, were conventionally allowed.5 In contrast and complement to such affirmations of the female speaking subject who exists only as a fictional construct, Tennyson and Browning in their most famous early dramatic monologues explore the stresses and pathologies of the subject-object relations that actually obtained in poetry.\n\nIn \"Ulysses\" and \"Tithonus\" the integrity of the self turns out to depend on the structures of difference created by gender. Ulysses renounces the roles of husband, father, and ruler for a comradeship that amounts almost to identity (\"My mariners, / Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me\" [ll. 45\u201346]); he is nostalgic for the days when he \"drank delight of battle with his peers\"; he leaves the \"aged wife\" with whom he is mis-\"matched\" (l. 3) to seek \"the great Achilles, whom we knew\" (l. 64); and he loses the selfhood that depends on difference. \"I am become a name\" (l. 11), \"I am a part of all that I have met\" (l. 18), he says as he prepares to sail off into an ever-receding emptiness.6 Tithonus, similarly, is \"A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream\" (l. 8), \"all I was, in ashes\" (l. 23), and like Ulysses he wants to leave a woman from whom he feels an absolute alienation (\"how can my nature longer mix with thine?\" [l. 65]) to return to an undifferentiated sameness: \"I earth in earth forget these empty courts, /And thee returning on thy silver wheels\" (ll. 75\u201376). Insofar as \"Tithonus\" is an allegory of art and the artist, it suggests the hopelessly alien, shimmeringly redundant femininity (woman, goddess, natural phenomenon) of the poetic object. The two poems together represent the desire to escape the dependence of the male poetic subject on the female object, and also the dissolution of self that escape would entail.\n\nBrowning's monologues obsessively explore both the moral corruptness of that dependence and the impossibility of getting away from it. \"My Last Duchess,\" which is generally taken as the prototypical dramatic monologue, is also the prototypical study of the objectification of woman in art; and it shows how speaker, poet, and reader all inevitably participate in the objectifying act. The Duchess embodies the feminine virtues of naturalness, spontaneity, and non-judgmental sympathy, virtues impossible to either the author or the reader of an ironic poem like this one. A male painter turns the Duchess into a work of art; the Duke \u2013 the only person in the poem with the power of speech \u2013 controls the painting both physically and through his explication of it; and the poet himself, with the reader's complicity, controls and explicates the Duke. Anyone who has heard students discuss \"My Last Duchess\" will recall the relish with which they diagnose the Duke's immorality, pounce on his self-betrayals, draw the curtain on the discussion with the self-satisfaction of superiority and control, and perhaps even experience aesthetic pleasure as they do so \u2013 mimicking in every aspect, that is, the Duke himself. Poems like \"Porphyria's Lover,\" \"Andrea del Sarto,\" and \"Cleon\" have similar themes and similar effects in the classroom, while critics and teachers have unselfconsciously indulged in the pleasure of detecting the moral failings of almost every dramatic monologuist in the Victorian canon \u2013 over-exercising the moral \"judgment\" that Robert Langbaum taught us was definitive of the form while forgetting the sympathy he equally enjoined.7 In terms of gender politics, the achievement of \"My Last Duchess\" is to make the male speaking subject the object of scrutiny and control and by doing so to demonstrate the inevitable complicity of poet, reader, critic, and critic of critics (as in this account) in his objectifying act.\n\n\"The Bishop Orders His Tomb\" presents a man who tries to become what women poets felt they had to be: both subject and object of art. Imagining that his existence will be fixed, as women's so often were, in an artistic representation commemorating his death, he endeavors simultaneously to create and to become that work of art:\n\nI fold my arms as if they clasped a crook,  \nAnd stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point,  \nAnd let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth, drop  \nInto great laps and folds of sculptor's-work.\n\n(ll. 87\u201390)8\n\nHaving blurred the boundary between subject and object, his wandering thoughts confound distinctions between life and death (he expects his sculpted self to hear and see and feel), spirit and matter, religion and aesthetics, Christianity and paganism, and male and female: \"Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount\" (l. 95). The poem's heavy-handed insistence on his manifold moral failings reminds us of the almost universal nineteenth-century condemnation of self-consciousness and self-display, particularly in regard to women, and its inhibiting effect on women poets. And as the bishop transforms himself into an object to be looked at, his remembered mistress undergoes the opposite transformation. He recalls her first as the object of his rival's envy, \"so fair she was\" (l. 5), then as his sons' \"tall pale mother with her talking eyes\" (l. 96), and finally as merged with the sons' predatory gaze: \"Ever your [the sons'] eyes were as a lizard's quick, / They glitter like your mother's for my soul\" (ll. 104\u2013105). But in the last line of the poem he reverts to his original pleasure in her beauty as a cause of envy, \"so fair she was\" (l. 125). For his unresponsive sons are leaving, his orders will not be carried out, and he could not in any case turn himself into a stone carving. So conventional gender roles are restored. Throughout Browning's career, the destructiveness of male subjectivity and the impossibility of escaping it prove as unresolvable \u2013 and as poetically enriching \u2013 a subject for Browning as the struggle to become subject rather than object of poetry does for women.9\n\n# 2 Androgyny\n\nAttempts to revise conventional gender roles appear most obviously in poems that work towards an androgynous ideal, which generally turns out to mean appropriating almost all desirable qualities and powers to one's own gender, leaving very little for the other. The woman of the future evoked at the end of _The Princess_ , while growing \"like in difference\" (vii.262), will retain \"the childlike in the larger mind\" (vii.268) and \"set herself to man / Like perfect music unto noble words\" (vii.269\u2013270), while the man will add \"sweetness\" and \"moral height\" to his \"wrestling thews that throw the world\" (vii.265\u2013266). Arthur Hallam in _In Memoriam_ harmonizes oppositions in an ideal unity: public-private, doubt-faith, reason-emotion, body-spirit, God-nature, human-divine, and underlying them all and reflected in almost all of them, male-female. Formally, too, gendered opposites merge, as in _The Princess_ with its admixture of lyric to narrative: elegy was a masculine form and religious doubt a theme reserved for men, but the poem presents itself as a kind of diary: fragmentary, spontaneous, unpremeditated, and as such feminine. But it takes shape around an interlocking series of binary oppositions that are inherently hierarchical: \"O loved the most, when most I feel / There is a lower and a higher\" (cxxix.3\u20134). Ideally, they merge, like \"Sweet Hesper-Phosphor, double name / For what is one, the first, the last\" (cxxi.17\u201318). Hallam is \"Known and unknown, human, divine\" (cxxix.5); \"mixed with God and Nature\" (cxxx.11); \"manhood fused with female grace\" (cix.17). But the fusion is radically unequal: the unknown soars above the little that can be known, the divine incorporates and surpasses the human, Nature fades into an almost transparent veil for God, and manhood fuses not with womanhood but with a single feminine quality, the \"grace\" that perfects the man. The simple \"Sweet-hearted\" woman who thinks that \"doubt is Devil-born\" is juxtaposed to Hallam's complexity: \"Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds\" (xcvi.2, 4, 9). Women appear in the poem as figures for Tennyson's relationship to Hallam, or, in the case of his sisters Emily and Cecilia (whose marriage to another of Tennyson's friends provides the occasion for the epilogue), as links between men: Tennyson's fantasy of Hallam living to marry Emily concludes with Tennyson and Hallam dying at the same time and taken by Christ \"as a single soul\" (lxxxiv.44) \u2013 having apparently forgotten about Emily.\n\nBarrett Browning's and Christina Rossetti's images of androgyny show a complementary exclusiveness. Aurora Leigh's professional accomplishment and personal autonomy are crowned by love and marriage, while Romney loses his eyesight, his ancestral house, his work, and his philosophy. He is allowed to marry and adore, like a woman, but forbidden both man's work and woman's, perhaps because he has tried to combine the two in an androgyny of his own: the philanthropy for which he is so harshly punished encompassed political activity and social theory (defined in the poem as male) as well as visiting sickbeds, feeding and making a home for the poor, and other forms of feminine nurturing. Similarly, the sisters in Rossetti's _Goblin Market_ achieve both heroic action and maternal and sororal fulfillment although \u2013 or rather, because \u2013 the only men in the poem are little goblins who disappear when the sisters have stolen their power. In each case the androgynized version of the author's own gender expands to fill the intellectual, moral, and social space available.\n\nWith more explicit visions of androgyny, however, come a shudder and recoil. In a draft for _The Princess_ , Tennyson wrote:\n\nAnd if aught be comprising in itself  \nThe man, the woman, let it sit [apart]  \nGodlike, alone, or only rapt on heaven\u2014  \nWhat need for such to wed? or if there be  \nMen-women, let them wed with women-men  \nAnd make a proper marriage.\n\n(Poems, 2:290n)\n\nBarrett Browning's two sonnets to George Sand (written before _Aurora Leigh)_ take for granted as Tennyson does that female intellect and genius violate the lines of gender \u2013 Sand is a paradoxically \"large-brained woman and large-hearted man\" (\"A Desire,\" l. 1), \"True genius, but true woman\" (\"A Recognition,\" l. 1) \u2013 and associate androgyny with sexual transgression. Sand is urged to transcend sensuality, first for an angelic purity that would culminate in quasi\u2013maternal same-sex embraces \u2013 \"child and maiden pressed [i.e. would press] to thine embrace / To kiss upon thy lips a stainless fame\" (\"A Desire,\" ll. 13\u201314) \u2013 and then for \"unsex[ed],\" \"unincarnate\" life in heaven (\"A Recognition,\" ll. 13\u201314). The first sonnet foreshadows Aurora's relationship with Marian Erie and her child, in which Aurora plays out the possibilities of taking a male role in the courtship and marriage plots, and the second shows the fears Barrett Browning had to overcome before she could conceive Aurora's triumphant combination of career and marriage. In these sonnets androgyny is allowable only without sex.\n\nIn his four-sonnet sequence \"Hermaphroditus,\" addressed to the statue in the Louvre, Swinburne presents the idea of androgyny literally, sensuously lingering precisely where other poets shied away. As Ovid tells the story, the youth Hermaphroditus refused the love of the nymph Salmacis, but when he dove into her pool she pressed against him until they merged in one body. Fleeing the feminine, he becomes it. Swinburne, like Ovid, takes a male point of view: his androgyne is a feminized man, just as Barrett Browning's Sand is a masculinized woman, and a conventional gender hierarchy is implicit in the poem. The nymph is more a natural object than a woman, and the melting of Hermaphroditus' manhood is presented as effete and shocking. But while for Ovid it is a tale of horror, for Swinburne it is one of delectable sadness:\n\nI saw in what swift wise  \nBeneath the woman's and the water's kiss  \nThy moist limbs melted into Salmacis,  \nAnd the large light turned tender in thine eyes,  \nAnd all thy boy's breath softened into sighs.\n\n(IV)10\n\nThe infusion of female grace that Tennyson admired in Hallam is here literal and complete:\n\nSex to sweet sex with lips and limbs is wed,  \nTurning the fruitful feud of hers and his  \nTo the waste wedlock of a sterile kiss.\n\n(II)\n\nSwinburne in his customary fashion carries a theme other poets approach with trepidation and indirection into full explicitness, and makes it clear why others did not. The androgyne has become almost without disguise the object of the poet's homoerotic desire.11 And while the gendered poetic conventions of difference (the \"fruitful feud of his and hers\") often inhibited fructification for women poets, they had given men endless possibilities for readjustment, renegotiation, and exploration, with an edge of transgressive danger \u2013 possibilities that \"Hermaphroditus\" fulfills and, by doing so, forecloses.\n\n# 3 The Disappearance of the Object\n\nThe basic gender distinction of poetic convention \u2013 male speaker, female object \u2013 troubled women's entrance into poetry. If they are the speakers, who are the objects? They examine this problem in variants of quest romance and the story of Sleeping Beauty. In Rossetti's \"The Dead City\" and Barrett Browning's \"The Lost Bower\" and \"The Deserted Garden\" questers arrive at the magical place but find no object there; Rossetti's speaker leaves, acknowledging failure, and Barrett Browning's bower and garden can be found only by a child, not by a woman.12 Browning's '\"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'\" and Swinburne's \"A Forsaken Garden\" also describe quests that find no gendered object, but these poems are hymns of triumph over old conventions rather than, like Barrett Browning's and Rossetti's, records of defeat.\n\nIn \"'Childe Roland'\" not only has gender vanished; the whole oppositional structure of experience and values has collapsed. Roland confounds the distinction between truth and lies, glorious past and inglorious present, success and failure, innocence and guilt, self and nature, presence and absence, and subject and object. The poem itself seems to confound sense and nonsense \u2013 an appearance Browning encouraged. The poem came on him \"as a kind of dream,\" he said; \"I did not know then what I meant..., and I'm sure I don't know now.\"13 It was written in the shadow of the acknowledged or suspected moral collapse of the two most important male authority figures in Browning's life: his recently widowed father was publicly revealed to have written foolish love letters to a woman who sued him for breach of promise, and the essay he had just written on Shelley was haunted by rumors of Shelley's cruel abandonment of his first wife. These offenses threatened the moral foundations of masculine identity as established in relationships with women. In \"'Childe Roland'\" there are no such relationships: there is only Roland's acceptance of identity in failure with his fellow-questers. He himself (women being absent) is both subject and object of the quest. His arrival at the tower \u2013 or rather, in an allegory of self-recognition, his realization that he is already there \u2013 is also a self-presentation to his \"peers.\" He \"discovers\" himself in the double sense of finding and revealing:\n\nThere they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met  \nTo view the last of me, a living frame  \nFor one more picture!\n\nPresenting himself to their gaze, however, he also looks at them:\n\nin a sheet of flame  \nI saw them and I knew them all.\n\nAnd he asserts his own subjectivity:\n\nAnd yet  \nDauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,  \nAnd blew. ' _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came_.'\n\n(ll. 199\u2013204)\n\nBrowning created what seemed an impossibility to Barrett Browning and Rossetti in their early quest-poems, a speaker who is both subject and object \u2013 and he does so by erasing all forms of difference, starting with gender.14 The mystification surrounding the poem, however, suggests the difficulty of doing so.\n\nIn \"A Forsaken Garden,\" the gendered object, the desiring, questing subject, and the quest itself have all disappeared together. \"Through branches and briars if a man make way\" (l. 14) to this version of Sleeping Beauty's palace or the garden of love, he will find nothing but wind. \"All are at one now, roses and lovers\" (l. 57). Without oppositional relationships, there is no life:\n\nNot a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not;  \nAs the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry;  \nFrom the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,  \nCould she call, there were never a rose to reply.\n\n(ll. 25\u201328)\n\nThe earth will shrink and crumble until absence conjures up a single presence that like the garden itself is also an absence, both subject and object: death. \"As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,\" the poem concludes, \"Death lies dead\" (ll. 79\u201380).15\n\n\"Hermaphroditus\" and \"A Forsaken Garden\" present as theme the blurring of boundaries, the melting of one thing into another, that Swinburne's poetry typically enacts as style. As John Rosenberg says, Swinburne \"is obsessed by the moment when one thing shades off into its opposite, or when contraries fuse.\"16 Good and evil, love and hate, presence and absence, pleasure and pain, male and female, but also sound and sense, sense and nonsense, seriousness and self-parody typically flow into each other. For instance:\n\nOr they loved their life through, and then went whither?  \nAnd were one to the end \u2013 but what end who knows?  \nLove deep as the sea as a rose must wither,  \nAs the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose.  \nShall the dead take thought for the dead to love them?  \nWhat love was ever as deep as a grave?  \nThey are loveless now as the grass above them  \nOr the wave.\n\n(ll. 49\u201356)\n\nIn this intricate dance elements blur and fuse: homonyms (\"whither,\" \"wither\") rhyme and merge in significant relationship; the rose and the sea join in seaweed that looks like a rose; the short final phrase, which seems to float as a syntactically vague afterthought, suggests that the lovers are under both sea and earth; and the word \"love\" pervades the stanza even as love itself is declared to be absent. The foregrounding of sound, the bewildering repetitions, and the speed with which the verses hurry us onward enhance the dislocating effect of such locutions. T. S. Eliot complained that in the lines \"Time with a gift of tears; / Grief with a glass that ran\" (from _Atalanta in Calydon)_ Time and Grief have exchanged allegorical properties, and that Swinburne's poems often offer only \"the hallucination of meaning.\" But that, of course, is the point, as Rosenberg points out;17 Swinburne's unexpected images conjure up images of time's hourglass and grief's tears, and what passes before our eyes is a blur of superimposed objects.\n\nAccording to Robert Buchanan in his notorious attack on \"the fleshly school of poetry\" (in which Swinburne is a prominent member),\n\nthe fleshly gentlemen... aver that poetic expression is greater than poetic thought, and by inference that the body is greater than the soul, and sound superior to sense; and that the poet... must be an intellectual hermaphrodite, to whom the very facts of day and night are lost in a whirl of aesthetic terminology.18\n\nBuchanan notes the influence of _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ behind Dante Rossetti's fleshly sonnets; and critics complained that Barrett Browning's poems, too (especially her early long works, _The Seraphim_ and _A Drama of Exile)_ , were misty, opaque, obscure, foregrounding language rather than objects or ideas.19 The first stanza of \"Felicia Hemans,\" with its long lines, swinging music, suspended syntax, structures of opposition that blur into sameness, and interweaving repetitions of words and sounds, works much as Swinburne's verses do. It simultaneously affirms and denies: \"less\" is affixed four times to Swinburnean monosyllables and negations are immediately negated:\n\nAnd o'er the shadeless moveless brow the vital shadow  \nthrowing,  \nAnd o'er the sighless songless lips the wail and music  \nwedding.\n\n(ll. 2\u20133)\n\nThe poem both enacts and renounces the very idea of \"wedding.\" Don't give life to the dead (ll. 1\u20134); don't bring her flowers (ll. 7\u20138), since flowers belong to different kinds of stories (ll. 9\u201312), but only dust for dust (l. 14) \u2013 but the poem weds itself to its predecessors' music, and it is full of flowers (the word appears six times). Women's poetry, like Swinburne's Time and Grief, superimposes new stories on old ones, as in their variants of quest romance, or in love poems where the half-remembered voices of male lovers haunt our readings and confuse our response, or in the complex argument about women's poetry that underlies the Christian consolation of \"Felicia Hemans\" and \"L.E.L.'s 'Last Question.'\" Such superimpositions recreate an old story only to show how women's versions have to be different; and as with Swinburne unless we see that the mismatch between the new poem and the old ones we sense behind it is precisely the point, the poems will seem thin and shallow, with only the hallucination of meaning.\n\nThe foregrounding of verbal complexity in conjunction with an apparent confounding of systems of difference, in defiance of conventional gender values and to the apparent detriment of discursive meaning, is used by other Victorian poets too, even when gender distinctions superficially remain intact. In Morris' \"The Defence of Guenevere,\" written in the intricately woven form of terza rima, the self-protective strategy of Guenevere's speech is to display herself as an erotic object in order to disguise the fact of her sexual transgression and confound the distinction between truth and lies:\n\nsay no rash word  \nAgainst me, being so beautiful; my eyes,  \nWept all away to grey, may bring some sword\n\nTo drown you in your blood; see my breast rise,  \nLike waves of purple sea, as here I stand;  \nAnd how my arms are moved in wonderful wise,\n\nYea also at my full heart's strong command,  \nSee through my long throat how the words go up  \nIn ripples to my mouth.\n\n(ll. 223\u2013231)20\n\nThe content of speech dissolves into its physical embodiment, while the speaker invites her audience to admire the parts of her body (her eyes, her throat) with which she looks and speaks, and which she cannot herself see. And in Christina Rossetti's \"Sleeping at Last,\" with its wonderfully interweaving repetitions, the dead woman has ceased to be either subject (no more \"pangs\" and \"fears\" [l. 6]) or object (\"out of sight of friend & of lover\" [l. 3]):21\n\nFast asleep. Singing birds in their leafy cover  \nCannot wake her, nor shake her the gusty blast.  \nUnder the purple thyme & the purple clover  \nSleeping at last.\n\n(ll. 8\u201311)\n\nAngela Leighton remarks that \"certain images, of laughter, music, entombment, heartlessness and whiteness, figure, in the work of many [Victorian women] poets, as signs of a condition of suspended reference, of playful nonsense, achieved against the moral cost of what it means to be a woman.\"22 Browning, Swinburne, and Morris achieve a similar kind of nonsense against the moral cost of being a man.\n\nIn Swinburne, says Eliot, \"the meaning and the sound are one thing,\" which for Eliot is almost \u2013 but not quite \u2013 as it should be: for while \"language in a healthy state presents the object, is so close to the object that the two are identified,\" Swinburne goes too far: \"They are identified in the verse of Swinburne solely because the object has ceased to exist.\"23 Swinburne is the extreme case of what appalls Eliot in Victorian poetry. Approached from the perspective of women's poetry, the loss of the \"object,\" which for Eliot means the fall into vague subjectivity or mere Tennysonian music that defined Victorian poetry for modernist critics, carries with it the breakdown of the oppositional structure that required and affirmed the masculinity of the poetic subject. It marks the feminization of Victorian poetry.\n\n# 4 Matthew Arnold\n\nEliot's insistence on \"the object\" echoes Arnold's critical efforts to construct an escape from the impasses of subjectivity. The Greek poets, Arnold says, did not engage in modern poetry's \"dialogue of the mind with itself\" \u2013 a phrase that could define the self-mirroring art for which Barrett Browning admonishes Landon, as well as \"'Childe Roland'\"; instead, they knew how to find \"a sufficiently grand, detached, and self-subsistent object for a tragic poem.\"24 Arnold as critic, like Eliot, wants to assert the independent existence of \"the object\" and to disengage it from feeling and from language; the task of modern criticism is \"'to see the object as in itself it really is.'\"25 In Arnold's poetry, however, the feminine object is often elusive or absent, and the masculine subject is correspondingly problematic.\n\nOne of Arnold's most persistent themes (in \"Mycerinus,\" \"The Scholar-Gipsy,\" _Sohrab and Rustum_ , and many other poems) is the disinclination to grow up into a hard, unpoetical adult masculinity. His juvenilia, like Barrett Browning's, show a marked distaste for the role assigned him by the conventions of gender in both poetry and life. Like Barrett Browning, he seems as a child to have conceived of poetry in large part as a question of travel. Barrett Browning, whose brother went away to school and would be allowed (she wrongly supposed) freedom to range the world, daydreamed of dressing as a boy so that she could be Byron's page, or lead an army against the Turks to liberate Greece and teach their classical language to Greek islanders;26 she saw travel and poetry as male prerogatives. Arnold, who was sent unhappily away to school and knew all too well that men were expected to lead armies and defend and teach classical culture, seems to have daydreamed about staying home. Some poems written when he was thirteen play out this theme. His earliest surviving verses, \"Mary Queen of Scots on her departure from France,\" represents Mary's lament at leaving the \"Land of my earlier, happier days\" (l. 9); she is on a boat heading for Scotland, where she will find (the reader knows) disasters and death.27 \"The First Sight of Italy\" urges an undefined addressee alternately to travel and to stop, and (in the last three of ten stanzas) to come home. And in \"Lines written on first leaving home for a Public School\" the unhappy speaker tries to reassure himself that the thought of home will cheer him along the \"dreary path\" (l. 10) through \"the maze of life\" (l. 22), which he imagines in terms of metaphorical battle (l. 9) and unmitigated gloom. But to travel is also, as for the young Elizabeth Barrett, to be a Byronic poet: the Italy of \"The First Sight\" is \"the Poets' ceaseless story\" (l. 35), and Arnold's early poems show the powerful influence of Childe Harold's pilgrimage through Italy.\n\nIn poems in which travel is structured as a quest, correspondingly, the disturbance of gender roles means that, as in Barrett Browning's \"The Lost Bower\" and \"The Deserted Garden\" and Rossetti's \"The Dead City,\" the speaker arrives at what should be a place of erotic and imaginative fulfillment but finds no \"other\" there. Instead, he finds a mirror in which he sees himself. \"Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse\" begins with a quest-like approach to an enclosed, secluded, magical place, in which the speaker eventually recognizes his likeness to the monks who receive him. He dissociates himself from aggressively masculine \"Sons of the world\" (l. 161) with their \"exulting thunder\" (l. 164), \"pride of life,\" and \"tireless powers\" (l. 167), and ranks himself with the monastic \"children reared in shade\" (l. 169) who cannot leave their secluded childhood home to join the armies, hunters, and \"Gay dames\" (l. 185) of grown-up life. (The fact that the night Arnold spent at the Grande Chartreuse was part of his honeymoon, and that his wife was not allowed to come in with him, reinforces the association of the monastery and the loss of gender opposition.) For a woman, the absence of an object other than the self at the end of the quest exemplifies the exclusion of women from poetry; the speakers leave and cannot return. But for Arnold in the same situation the Grande Chartreuse is a trap, like Childe Roland's tower. \"Fenced early in this cloistral round\" (l. 205), he and the monks cannot leave their \"desert\" (l. 210). Whereas women feel excluded from poetry, Arnold's speaker feels excluded from life.\n\nThe absence of gender opposition can also doom the quest of an Arnoldian lover who yearns for what \"The River\" describes in Platonic terms as the \"twin soul which halves [his] own\" (\"Too Late,\" l. 4). The speaker in _Switzerland_ \"dream[s]\" that \"two human hearts might blend/In one\" (\"Isolation. To Marguerite,\" ll. 38\u201339), and laments that would-be lovers who were once \"Parts of a single continent\" (\"To Marguerite \u2013 Continued,\" l. 16) have broken apart into separate islands. \"A Farewell\" begins at the end of a lover's moonlight journey on horseback across a bridge and up a \"steep street\" (l. 7), \"Led by [Marguerite's] taper's starlike beam\" (l. 8). Marguerite is there, thoroughly feminine, and expecting a thoroughly masculine man:\n\nwomen \u2013 things that live and move  \nMined by the fever of the soul \u2013  \nThey seek to find in those they love  \nStern strength, and promise of control.\n\n(ll. 21\u201324)\n\nBut he is her counterpart, not her opposite: \"the bent of both our hearts/Was to be gentle, tranquil, true\" (ll. 47\u201348). They both have androgynous yearnings:\n\nI too have felt the load I bore  \nIn a too strong emotion's sway;  \nI too have wished, no woman more,  \nThis starting, feverish heart away.  \nI too have longed for trenchant force,  \nAnd will like a dividing spear;  \nHave praised the keen, unscrupulous course,  \nWhich knows no doubt, which feels no fear.\n\n(ll. 29\u201336)\n\nBut the aggressively phallic masculinity he claims to have desired is depicted not only as morally negative but also as antithetical to the qualities of feeling and sympathy that in Arnold's view characterize true poetry; and in fact the lack of masculine firmness \u2013 the strong emotions, the \"feverish heart\" \u2013 that disqualifies him for being loved also implicitly characterizes him as a Byronic poet:\n\nthis heart, I know,  \nTo be long loved was never framed;  \nFor something in its depths doth glow  \nToo strange, too restless, too untamed.\n\n(ll. 17\u201320)\n\nLike Barrett Browning's sonnets to George Sand, \"A Farewell\" suggests that androgyny is tolerable only in a desexualized life beyond this world. The speaker sometimes attributes the failure of their love to Marguerite's sexuality: in \"Parting\" he is driven from her by the thought that she has kissed and embraced other men (ll. 65\u201370), and many years later in \"The Terrace at Berne\" he imagines her having returned to France (home of sexual license) and taken up \"riotous laughter,\" rouge, and lace (ll. 21\u201324). In the afterlife they will be innocent children basking \"in the eternal Father's smile\" (\"A Farewell,\" l. 61), not lovers but brother and sister (l. 78). But meanwhile their love is thwarted by her sexuality and desire for difference and by the unmasculine qualities that make him a poet.\n\nArnold's poetry, like Swinburne's, often haunts the boundary between sea and land where symbolic opposites meet and mingle. This boundary-blurring structure is basic to his poetic imagination, as it is to Swinburne's, although whereas Swinburne glories in confusion, Arnold generally, as in _Switzerland_ , includes an edge of resistance or at least of regret. Two of the poems written when he was thirteen show that this structure was ingrained in his imagination, and that like young women poets when they approached adolescence he had trouble adapting to the gender role thrust upon him by literary and social convention. \"Reply to a declaration that he would not live by the Sea, made in verse by H. H.\" asserts the poet's love for hills and fields and his even greater love for the ocean as a source of poetic scenes and stories, and sets up a series of oppositions:\n\nTo you be the pleasures of soft green fields,  \nAnd tales round the fireside,\n\nBut to me be the murmur of ocean's wild wave  \nAnd the ebb and the flow of his tide.\n\nMay you wake from your sleep at the nightingale's voice  \nAnd I at the sea fowl's cry.\n\n(ll. 45\u201350)\n\nBut he is not really choosing the excitement of the sea rather than the pleasures of domesticity; he means to live at the seashore and look at the life he desires \u2013 as women in Victorian literature so often do \u2013 from a window: \"May you look from your window on Nature's green garb, / And I on the wave dashing high\" (ll. 51\u201352).\n\n\"Lines written on the Seashore at Eaglehurst,\" written at about the same time, imagines naiads moving from undersea halls of coral and glens on the \"wooded shore\" (l. 9), and then pictures the \"barrier firm and stiff\" (l. 29) of the castle-crowned cliff that opposes the waves' attempt to \"lave\" (l. 27) its foot. The ocean (which is male) seems to stand in for the poet: it is driven by imaginative longings for lovely \"scenes\" (l. 36) which make it emulate the boundary-crossing behavior of the female naiads who in generally artistic fashion revel and sing and decorate things with flowers; but \"while his fancy takes its fill / His waves must roll below\" (ll. 39\u201340). Phallic power defends the boundary against the incursions of imagination.\n\n\"The Forsaken Merman\" elaborates this early poem into a story which structures gender and imagination in the same terms. The merman haunts the shoreline like the ocean that \"Still restlessly... struggles on / O'er seaweed fair, o'er shell and stone\" (\"Lines,\" ll. 31\u201332), and is repulsed by the town and church as the ocean at Eaglehurst is by the cliff and the castle, whereas Margaret, like the naiads, has moved back and forth. \"The Forsaken Merman\" sets up and then complicates a set of superimposed oppositions between male and female, natural and human, family and society, human and divine. The location of happiness and virtue shifts back and forth between the chambers of the sea and the white-walled town. Margaret leaves her family to answer the call of religion, thereby becoming \"faithless\" (l. 121) to another set of values; although her Christian faith is a feminine virtue, it leaves her husband to take care of the children; and the merman keeps slipping out of his own point of view to see things from hers, even as she (he imagines) slips from her joy in the town to yearnings for the sea-children whom she at the same time imagines as irrevocably alien: \"the cold strange eyes of a little Mermaiden / And the gleam of her golden hair\" (ll. 106\u2013107). Nothing is stable except sorrow, loss, and the merman's returns to the shoreline across which his imagination endlessly moves like the ocean's \"fancy\" at Eaglehurst. In \"The Forsaken Merman\" the border of sea and land also marks the separation of men and women, but it is a boundary across which conventional gender differences disappear; and the loss of those differences, as in \"A Farewell,\" makes love impossible even as it creates a poem.\n\nArnold's poetry, like that of his major female and male contemporaries, explores the disparity between the gender conventions that structured English poetry and the complexities of gender relations as they were experienced and perceived by Victorian poets. Like Barrett Browning's, the records of his early ventures into poetry show his discomfort with the gender role assigned him by society and poetry alike. Like both Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, he finds the conventional subject-object relations of poetry psychologically difficult or morally offensive. And as for many of his contemporaries, the struggle against them informs much of his poetry even when he finds those relations inescapable, or to be escaped only at great moral cost. More perhaps than any of his male contemporaries, he struggled against the difficulty of a situation in which poetic structures were still framed for male subjects but poetry's qualities were those associated with women.\n\nMany years ago I chose to write my doctoral dissertation on Matthew Arnold, half-consciously inspired by the feeling that his predicament in some ways prefigured my own alienation, as a woman, from the cultural tradition presented and represented to me by the, Harvard English Department. I now think that in some important sense all the Victorian poets, male and female, can be read as women.\n\n# Notes\n\n1 Herbert Sussman remarks that \"much of the best recent work on Victorian masculinities has been produced by feminist critics who have turned their methods to the study of men's art and men's psyches\" (\"The Study of Victorian Masculinities,\" _Victorian Literature and Culture_ 20 [1992]: 366\u201377). Particularly useful studies of male responses to the gender issues of Victorian poetry include Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, \"The Feminization of D. G. Rossetti,\" in _The Victorian Experience: The Poets_ , ed. Richard A. Levine (Columbus: Ohio Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 94\u2013112; U. C. Knoepflmacher, \"Projection and the Female Other: Romanticism, Browning, and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue,\" VP 22 (1984): 139\u201359; Herbert Sussman, \"Robert Browning's 'Fra Lippo Lippi' and the Problematic of a Male Poetic,\" VS 35 (1992): 185\u2013200; and Alan Sinfield, _Alfred Tennyson_ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). Sussman defines the problem as the \"disjunction between entrepreneurial manhood and the romantic ideal of the poet\" (\"Robert Browning,\" p. 186). In _B_ e _a Man! Males in Modern Society_ (New York: Holmes &. Meier, 1990), Peter N. Stearns describes the ideals of manhood moving in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century away from androgyny, as gender was \"being called upon to take on new symbolic importance\" (p. 110).\n\n2 _The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning_ , ed. Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, 6 vols. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1900), 2:81.\n\n3 _Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L_., ed. Laman Blanchard, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1841), 1:5\u20137.\n\n4 Isobel Armstrong, _Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics_ (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 326.\n\n5 According to Lawrence Lipking, \"Prior to the rise of the novel [the poetry of abandoned women] seems the _only_ sort of literature that attracted male and female authors equally\" _(Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition_ [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988], p. xxiii). Men poets used the female voice in such poems, Lipking says, not as the other but to express feelings they couldn't express in the male voice (p. xx).\n\n6 _The Poems of Tennyson_ , ed. Christopher Ricks, 3 vols. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987). Alan Sinfield reads \"I am a part of all that I have met\" in political terms as \"the imperialism of the imagination\": \"Ulysses _is_ the hegemonic: he is the colonizer who requires ever more remote margins to sustain his enterprise\" _(Alfred Tennyson_ , p. 53). Barrett Browning, in contrast, shuddered in revulsion from the Jamaican slave-plantations from which her family had drawn its fortune, although, as with the poetry of her female predecessors, she recognized her own involvement in what she sought to renounce.\n\n7 Robert Langbaum, _The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition_ (1957; New York: W. W. Norton, 1963).\n\n8 Robert _Browning: The Poems_ , ed. John Pettigrew and Thomas J. Collins, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981).\n\n9 On Browning's attempts to examine or escape the position of the male poetic subject who dominates the female object see Knoepflmacher, \"Projection and the Female Other,\" and Adrienne Auslander Munich, _Andromeda's Chains: Gender and Interpretation in Victorian Literature and Art_ (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989).\n\n10 _The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne_ , ed. Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise, 20 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1925). Identity and difference are central themes in _Atalanta in Calydon_. \"I am fire, and burn myself\" (l. 1805), says the murderous mother, Althea: \"I feed and fill my body... even with flesh / Made of my body. Lo, the fire I lit / I burn with fire to quench it\" (ll. 1870\u20132). Identity is destruction, while \"division\" (a recurrent word in the poem) can be bad, as in \"the dividing of friend against friend\" (l. 839), but is also the foundation of language: \"Sweet articulate words / Sweetly divided apart\" (ll. 751\u20132). And yet, \"words divide and rend; / But silence is most noble till the end\" (ll. 1204\u20135).\n\n11 Richard Dellamora says that \"Hermaphroditus,\" \"remarkable for its approach to the experience of the receiver in anal intercourse, is marked with the language of moral anxiety and disapproval\" ( _Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism_ [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1990], p. 83).\n\n12 See Dorothy Mermin, \"The Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman Poet,\" _CritI_ 13 (1986): 64\u201380.\n\n13 William Clyde DeVane, _A Browning Handbook_ (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1935), p. 204.\n\n14 The other two poems that Browning wrote on the first three days of 1852, \"Women and Roses\" and \"Love among the Ruins,\" deal with the failure and the success, respectively, of the male pursuit of beloved women. In \"Love among the Ruins,\" the happy pastoral version of \"'Childe Roland,'\" distinctions collapse in a positive way until at last the happy lovers will \"extinguish sight and speech / Each on each\" (ll. 71\u201372) and conclude that \"love is best\" (l. 84). The Essay describes Shelley as the ideal type of the subjective poet, whose poetry shows not the external world, but himself. Harold Bloom brilliantly explicates \"'Childe Roland'\" in \"Browning's _Childe Roland_ : All Things Deformed and Broken,\" _The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition_ (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971). Knoepflmacher points out that \"it is significant that there should be no females in that poem of pure projection\" (p. 147).\n\n15 Insofar as this is a Christian allusion (like Donne's \"Death, thou shalt die\"), Swinburne's chain of identities, like Barrett Browning's, needs religion to bring it to an end; but this end is not a reassertion of difference.\n\n16 John D. Rosenberg, \"Swinburne,\" _VS_ 11 (1967): 149. On the relation between Swinburne's style and issues of gender, as perceived by Victorian critics, see Thai's E. Morgan, \"Mixed Metaphor, Mixed Genre: Swinburne and the Victorian Critic,\" _VN_ 73 (1988): 16\u201319. Morgan notes that the \"exclusion of anything that appears feminine or effeminate from the canons of good style entails the exclusion of women from the position of speaker or writer, and hence their exclusion from the political power than may be gained through rhetoric\" (p. 18).\n\n17 T. S. Eliot, \"Swinburne as Poet,\" _Selected_ _Essays_ __(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), pp. 284, 285. Rosenberg, p. 133.\n\n18 \"The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti,\" _Contemporary Review_ 18 (October 1871): 335.\n\n19 Buchanan, p. 342. Reviewing Poems (1844), _John Bull_ saw \"a mere conglomeration of glittering verbiage,\" and _The Spectator_ found \"affectation, and a diffusive verboseness,\" complaining that \"sometimes the style, sometimes the metre, and sometimes the images, are so quaint and peculiar that the attention is fixed upon mere secondary objects\" ( _The Brownings' Correspondence_ , ed. Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson, 11 vols. to date [Winfield, Kansas: Wedgestone Press, 1984\u2013 ], 9: 331, 325).\n\n20 William Morris, _The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems_ , ed. Margaret A. Lourie (New York: Garland, 1981).\n\n21 _The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition_ , ed. R. W. Crump, 3 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979\u20131990).\n\n22 Angela Leighton, _Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart_ (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), p. 7.\n\n23 T. S. Eliot, _Selected Essays_ , pp. 283, 285.\n\n24 Preface to First Edition of Poems (1853), _The Complete Prose Works of_ _Matthew Arnold_ , ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor: The Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960\u201377), 1:1, 7. \"Object\" as Arnold uses it is a slippery term; the \"eternal objects of poetry,\" he says here, are \"human actions\" (p. 3), but elsewhere it has very different meanings.\n\n25 _On Translating Homer, Complete Prose Works_ , 1:140; \"The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,\" _Complete Prose Works_ , 3:258.\n\n26 _The Brownings' Correspondence_ , 1:361.\n\n27 _The Poems of Matthew Arnold_ , ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1979). The topic was probably not of his own choosing, since one of his siblings seems to have written a similar poem at the same time ( _Poems_ , pp. 711\u201313), but it is significant that a female speaker is used to express an unambiguously unmanly reluctance to leave home.\n\nMermin, Dorothy. 1995. \"'The fruitful feud of hers and his': Sameness, Difference, and Gender in Victorian Poetry.\" In _Victorian Poetry_ , 33, I (Spring), pp. 149\u201368. Reproduced with permission of Dorothy Mermin.\n\n# 12\n\n# 'Eat me, drink me, love me'\n\n#  _The Consumable Female Body in Christina Rossetti's_ Goblin Market\n\nMary Wilson Carpenter\n\nWhen Alice falls down the rabbit-hole she behaves, as Nancy Armstrong has pointed out, like a typical shopper \u2013 picking out and then putting back a jar of orange marmalade from the shelves of the rabbit-hole.1 Later, she discovers that objects in Wonderland tend to come inscribed with such unsubtle advertising ploys as \"eat me\" or \"drink me.\" Noting that all Alice's troubles seem to \"begin and end with her mouth,\" Armstrong relates Alice's dilemma to \"a new moment in the history of desire,\" a moment when the burgeoning \"consumer culture\" based on British imperialism changed the nature of middle-class English femininity (p. 17). _Alice in Wonderland_ (1865) demonstrates the logic that links the colonial venture to the appetite of a little girl through the image of a \"double-bodied woman\" \u2013 a conflation of non-European women with European prostitutes and madwomen, all three of which were thought to exhibit the same features of face and genitals and, more crucially, to display the disfiguring results of unrestrained \"appetite.\"2 Victorian consumer culture both produced objects of desire and dictated that little Alices must learn to control their desires, in imagined contrast to women of the \"dark continents\" and prostitutes on the dark streets of their own cities.\n\nSo runs Armstrong's persuasive reading of a Victorian \"children's\" classic known to as many adults as children. Christina Rossetti's poem, _Goblin Market_ , first published in 1862, suggests its location in the same intersection of imperialist culture and consumer capitalism that Armstrong elucidates _for Alice in Wonderland_.3 Opening with the sensuous advertisement of exotic fruits hawked by goblin men to innocent young women, Rossetti's poem presents an explicitly articulated image of a marketplace in which female \"appetite\" is at stake. But whereas in Carroll's narrative, according to Armstrong's reading of it, \" _all possibility for pleasure splits off from appetite and attaches itself to self-control_ ,\" in Rossetti's poem female appetite is simply re-directed toward another female figure, where it is provoked, encouraged, and satiated in the undeniably homoerotic text of the poem (p. 20; Armstrong's emphasis). Lizzie urges Laura to \"Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices\" as well as to \"Eat me, drink me, love me\" (ll. 468, 471). While Laura is said to loathe this \"feast\" proffered on her sister's body, it makes her leap and sing \"like a caged thing freed\" (l. 505). The result of Laura's totally unrestrained, orgiastic consumption of the \"juices\" on her sister's body is her restoration to life and health and, I will argue, to desire. The female body in the poem is subject to \"consumption\" as a commodity \u2013 as Laura's near-fatal experience demonstrates \u2013 but it is also \"consumable\" as a regenerative and self-propagating \"fruit,\" as Lizzie's example shows us.\n\nIf _Alice in Wonderland_ is structured on the \"problem\" of female desire in the imperialist marketplace, then Christina Rossetti's _Goblin Market_ presents a startlingly different assessment of female sexual appetite. Yet the drive to evoke and regulate female appetite is not unique to the Rev. Charles Dodgson's children's story or even to children's literature conceived by Victorian clergymen. Charles Bernheimer argues that for nineteenth-century French male artists and novelists, the image of the prostitute stimulated representational strategies to control and dispel the fantasmatic threat of female \"sexual ferment.\"4 These artists associated the female body with \"animality, disease, castration, excrement, and decay\" (p. 2). Bernheimer acknowledges that in writing his book he \"had to confront powerful expressions of disgust for female sexuality\" (p. 4). As the nineteenth century progressed, the fear of \"contamination\" by the prostitute's unrestricted sexuality was given medical justification in France by \"theories of degenerate heredity and syphilitic infection\" (p. 2). Similarly, as Judith R. Walkowitz shows, the passage of the Contagious Diseases Acts in England in the 1860s suggests that prostitution was increasingly perceived there also as a dangerously contaminating form of sexual activity, one \"whose boundaries had to be controlled and defined by the state.\"5\n\nEven closer to Christina Rossetti's artistic context was her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem about a prostitute, \"Jenny,\" which articulates a typical construction of female sexuality as diseased and contagious appetite:\n\nFor is there hue or shape defin'd  \nIn Jenny's desecrated mind,  \nWhere all contagious currents meet,  \nA Lethe of the middle street?6\n\nIf, as Armstrong argues, the 1860s represent a new moment in the history of desire in which consumer culture changed the nature of middle-class English femininity, both producing the desire for objects and structuring femininity in relation to that desire, then what accounts for the radically different representation of female appetite in _Goblin Market?_ How was it possible for Christina Rossetti, devout Victorian practitioner of what Jerome McGann has called a \"severe Christianity,\" to produce a poem in which fear of the contagion of the female body is radically disavowed?7 And is it nonetheless possible to locate a \"deviant counterpart\" \u2013 the \"double-bodied\" figure of the prostitute-cum-African or -Asian woman \u2013 as a structuring figure repressed from _Goblin Market?_\n\nD.M.R. Bentley has recently speculated that Christina Rossetti may have written _Goblin Market_ with the intention of reading it not to children but to the inmates \u2013 \"fallen women\" or prostitutes \u2013 of the St. Mary Magdalene Home, Highgate, where she is known to have volunteered during the 1860s.8 However much this possibility may alter our perception of the poem, Rossetti's intentions are not my concern here. Rather, I would propose that the foundation of Anglican Sisterhoods associated directly with the two churches which Rossetti is known to have attended, and the work of those Sisterhoods with homeless, destitute, and fallen women, gave the poet access to a uniquely feminocentric view of women's sexuality and simultaneously opened her eyes to its problematic position in Victorian culture. In particular, her immediate experience with the interaction between prostitutes and women's religious communities may have constructed Rossetti's representation of a \"marketplace\" in which \"appetite\" puts a woman at risk, but where her salvation is to be found not in controlling her appetite but in turning to another woman.\n\nLike the other \"fruits of empire,\" women's bodies were vended in the streets surrounding the churches, and zealous churchwomen like Christina Rossetti went out to \"buy\" them back. But these shoppers were themselves commodified by the market in which they bargained, their own bodies and appetites implicated in the exploitative sexual economy they sought to resist and evade. In this scene of \"compulsory heterosexuality,\" _Goblin Market_ suggests that female erotic pleasure cannot be imagined without pain, yet the poem not only affirms the female body and its appetites but constructs \"sisterhood\" as a saving female homoerotic bond.9\n\nWhile _Goblin Market_ pushes the normative realm of heterosexual marriage to the margins of its narrative \u2013 invoking husbands only by implication in the final lines of the poem \u2013 that normative realm with its inscription of gender, class, and racial hierarchies is nevertheless exhibited in the poem which followed _Goblin Market_ in its 1862 edition (Crump, I, p. 26).10 In that little-discussed poem, \"In the Round Tower at Jhansi,\" I find a final comment on what _Goblin Market_ is, and is not, about.\n\n# Sisterhoods and the Female Gaze\n\nThe extraordinary homoerotic energies of _Goblin Market_ seem particularly unaccountable in relation to the familiar assessment of Christina Rossetti as a devout Anglo-Catholic spinster who lived out her entire life with her mother, sister, and elderly aunts. William Rossetti described her as a \"devotee,\" instancing her \"perpetual church-going and communions, her prayers and fasts, her submission to clerical direction, her oblations, her practice of confession\" \u2013 a catalog that suggests a religious practice stripped of much social interaction and certainly of all pleasure.11 Yet the histories of Christ Church, Albany Street, and All Saints' Margaret Street, and of the Sisterhoods founded at these two churches produce a very different reading of the Oxford Movement that constructed both Rossetti's religious practice and her poetic texts. Far from McGann's conception of a \"severe Christianity,\" the \"Church\" as represented in these histories appears to have been a hotbed of social reforms and sexual tensions generated by those reforms. The work of the newly formed Anglican Sisterhoods proved to be inseparable from the \"work\" of \"fallen women,\" producing an unprecedented mingling of \"pure\" and \"tainted\" women. Moreover, as Martha Vicinus has noted, the Anglican Sisterhoods empowered women, validating their work and values.12 The feminism and intense homoeroticism of _Goblin Market_ are fully accountable when read intertextually with this unconventional \"social text\" of the Victorian Anglican church.\n\nIn speaking of the homoeroticism of the poem as \"accountable,\" I am assuming, as Mary Poovey states, that \"the representation of biological sexuality, the definition of sexual difference, and the social organization of sexual relations are social, not natural, phenomena.\"13 Rather than reading _Goblin Market_ as \"expressing\" by virtue of the poet's creative genius an \"inner\" and unaccountable desire \u2013 a reading which might be called a humanist Freudian interpretation \u2013 I look for the \"origins\" of Rossetti's representation of female sexual desire in the complex interactions between the social institutions and texts of her culture. Thus, I will argue that the characteristics of the historical institution of \"sisterhood\" unique to Christina Rossetti's churches constituted a social and discursive matrix which enabled the production of a radical subjectivity in _Goblin Market_ : that is, a female speaker or subject of discourse which does not take up the conventional phallocentric position, in which the female body is the object of a male gaze.14 In a text exemplary of the Oxford Movement's \"women's mission to women,\" as I will show, the female body is represented as the object of a female gaze, and in _Goblin Market_ we find a similarly radical female subjectivity.\n\nWhat I will be arguing here is that the writer, though determined by the ideological structuring of her society, may also be emancipated in some degree by exposure to unconventional or disruptive ideological discourses. Such \"uneven developments,\" as Poovey says, result from the different positioning of individuals within the social formation, and from the different articulation of the ideological formulation by different institutions, discourses, and practices (p. 3). While Marxist or materialist readings may position the writer as the \"simple\" subject of the dominant ideology, subjectivities are constituted at the intersection of multiple and competing discourses.15 This multiplicity accounts for such \"uneven developments\" as a powerfully feminist and homoerotic text written by a devout Victorian lady poet.\n\nPrevious attempts to link _Goblin Market_ with Rossetti's associations with \"sisters\" and \"fallen women\" have focused on her involvement with the institution at Highgate, despite William Rossetti's recollection that this work did not begin until 1860, while the manuscript of _Goblin Market_ is dated April 27, 1859. So little is known about the 1850s in Christina Rossetti's life that they have been described as the \"grey years.\"16 Scholars have relied largely on William's reminiscences, but these are often vague and spotty and may also be inaccurate, as demonstrated in his comments to Mackenzie Bell about Christina's church-related work:\n\nShe was (I rather think) an outer Sister \u2013 but in no sort of way professed \u2013 of the Convent which Maria afterwards joined \u2013 Also at one time (1860\u2013'70) she used pretty often to go to an Institution at Highgate for redeeming 'Fallen Women' \u2013 It seems to me that at one time they wanted to make her a sort of superintendent there, but she declined \u2013 In her own neighbourhood, Albany Street, she did a deal of district visiting and the like.17\n\nWilliam's use of the term \"Convent,\" which suggests an enclosed community of women, to refer to the All Saints' Sisterhood which Maria joined in 1873 shows how unacquainted he must have been with the Sisterhood and its activities, for it was primarily a nursing order which occupied an ever increasing number of buildings adjacent to All Saints' Church and administered various institutions both in London and outside it. The headnote, \"House of Charity, \" which Christina penciled in on her poem, \"From Sunset to Star Rise,\" and which William thought referred to the Highgate institution, may have referred to the All Saints' Home run by these Sisters, since the Rev. W. Upton Richards described it as an institution entirely dependent on voluntary gifts and commended to the \"Christian charity of all.\"18\n\nWilliam's statement that Christina did district visiting in \"her own neighbourhood, Albany Street\" may also be misleading, as this implies that she did this kind of work only after March, 1854, when the Rossetti family moved to 45 Upper Albany Street. Since the Rossetti women began attending Christ Church in 1843, it seems probable that Christina participated in its social work and reform efforts well before 1854 (Battiscombe, p. 30). Built in 1837 at the instigation of William Dodsworth, a fiery young preacher who was then the incumbent at the Margaret Street Chapel (whose remaining parishioners went on to build All Saints' Church), Christ Church was characterized by \"zeal\" for social reform from its beginnings.19 According to Canon Burrows, who became the incumbent in 1851, Christ Church became \"the leading church in the [Oxford] movement,\" and the scene of sermons by such well-known preachers as Archdeacon Manning, Dr. Pusey, and Dr. Hook (Burrows, p. 14). Doubtless much more important to Christina Rossetti and her sister Maria was the fact that the first Anglican Sisterhood since the Reformation was founded there.\n\nPusey seems to have been the guiding force for the formation of this Sisterhood, which some thought might \"save\" certain Anglican members from converting to Roman Catholicism while others despaired that it would only further encourage such \"Romanising.\"20 Pusey's desires for the Sisterhood, however, appear to have been intimately linked with his grief for his own daughter, who died tragically on the very day of the meeting which decided to establish such a community (Cameron, p. 31). Pusey thought that for a Bishop to have anything to do with the Sisterhood, which should consist simply of a few young women living together, would be to violate \"the sacredness of domestic charity and devotion\" (Cameron, p. 32). His close and even tender relationship with the Sisters began on March 26, 1845, when the first two aspirants arrived. As Pusey later wrote to Keble, \"We (i.e. Dodsworth and myself) had a little service with them on Wednesday; they were in floods of tears, but in joy\" (Cameron, p. 33).\n\nIf Pusey imagined a sanctified domestic enclave of perpetual daughters, others \u2013 particularly the women who either entered or founded such Sisterhoods \u2013 seem to have had quite a different vision. Far from seeking out an ecclesiastical version of the patriarchal families most of them were leaving, they saw themselves as embarking on a new and independent existence in which they would undertake useful, important work. The Park Village Sisters are reported to have immediately begun to visit the \"low Irish people\" and the brothels in their district (Williams and Campbell, p. 23).21 Before founding the All Saints' Sisterhood, Harriet Brownlow Byron took a nursing course.22 She then began the work of this Sisterhood by taking homeless women and orphan girls right into the house where the Sisters lived, the All Saints' Home. By 1862 this \"Home\" occupied four buildings on Margaret Street, and the Sisters' various enterprises eventually occupied every building on Margaret Street as far as Great Titchfield Street. By 1866 they were conducting an asylum for aged women, an industrial school for girls, an orphanage, a home for incurables, two convalescent homes, and the nursing service for the entire University College Hospital, in addition to teaching in the district nightschool and nursing the sick poor in their own homes.23\n\nUnlike the more successful All Saints' Sisterhood, the Park Village Sisterhood encountered many difficulties, finding itself at the center of fierce religious controversy in Christ Church.24 Throughout the years of 1849 and 1850 Dodsworth \u2013 increasingly convinced that he should convert to Catholicism \u2013 was preaching sermons at Christ Church of such a nature that Pusey said \"he wished he could induce the sisters to read their Bibles during his sermons or shut their ears.\"25 One of the Sisters was actually kidnapped by a \"Miss White\" and taken to a Roman Catholic convent. She was eventually released, only to be assailed and accused of \"apostasy\" the following Sunday as she tried to enter the door of Christ Church (Williams and Campbell, pp. 81\u20132). Christina Rossetti could hardly have escaped involvement in the parish turmoil. She was at this time engaged to James Collinson, who had converted from the Roman Catholic to the Anglican Church to further his courtship of Christina. During the early months of 1850, Collinson decided that he must rejoin the Catholic Church, and upon hearing this, Christina decided to end their engagement. The Rev. Mr. Dodsworth \"romanized\" on the last day of 1850.26\n\nDespite such disruptions, both Christ Church and the Sisterhood moved ahead vigorously with new plans for ministering to the poor. A second church was to be built at the south end of the parish near \"the notoriously evil York Square,\" where brothels flourished because of the nearby Cumberland Barracks (Coombs, pp. 9\u201312). On July 15, 1849, the laying of the foundation stone for \"St. Mary Magdalene\" was planned, with the congregation to make a procession from Christ Church to the site.27 John Keble, who preached the sermon, hinted that troublemakers might be encountered and begged the congregation to \"go reverently... as we pass through the streets of Babylon.\" The \"long tramping procession\" accordingly wound its way silently through the \"sordid district\" (Coombs, p. 13). A little over a year later, in September, 1850, Pusey laid the foundation stone for the \"House of Religion,\" which was to be occupied by the Sisters of Park Village but was also intended to accommodate fourteen homeless women, forty orphan girls, and fourteen \"ladies\" (Coombs, p. 15). This building was very near the site for the new St. Mary Magdalene Church (and therefore near the brothels). On All Saints' Day (November 1) in 1850, Pusey also laid the foundation stone for what would become the extravagantly beautiful All Saints' Church, built on the site of the old Margaret Street Chapel.\n\nChristina Rossetti, her sister Maria, her mother Frances, and her aunts could all have been a part of that unprecedented outdoor procession through the neighboring \"red light\" district to the site chosen for the new church.28 That Christina and one of her aunts were very much caught up in the new fervor for women's work with the needy is known from the fact that they were among some \"ladies of the [Christ Church] congregation\" who joined the Park Village Sisters and others in volunteering to go with Florence Nightingale to the Crimea in December, 1854.29 Nightingale rejected Christina on the grounds that she was too young, but her aunt was accepted.\n\nNeither the Park Village nor the All Saints' Sisters had a mandate for working with \"fallen women,\" but their work with \"homeless women\" and \"orphan girls\" would in fact have been inseparable from work with \"fallen women.\"30 Other Anglican Sisterhoods which were newly forming at this time, however, displayed a predominant interest in work with prostitutes. The first Sister at St. Mary's, Wantage, felt called to penitentiary work and founded a penitentiary there in 1850, despite the distress of the Vicar, who had wanted this Sisterhood to be dedicated to educational work. The Clewer Sisterhood was formed because three women moved into a \"House of Mercy\" in 1851, simultaneously undertaking the religious life and the work of the \"penitentiary.\"31 This \"House of Mercy\" had been founded two years earlier by a Mrs. Tennant, a laywoman living in the village of Clewer who offered to take the \"abandoned women\" of the parish into her own home. She was said to have an unparalleled ability to control the \"most undisciplined and impassioned natures\" of these women and to attach them to herself \"in a marvellous manner\" (Cameron, pp. 58\u20139).\n\nSuch enthusiasm for work with prostitutes and willingness to share living-quarters with them was not confined to religious sisterhoods. Josephine Butler, who led the Ladies' National Association in its campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts, began her career by taking women from the workhouses, jails, and streets of Liverpool into her own home, where she devotedly nursed them herself. Walkowitz reports that by 1878 the LNA leadership had actually grown wary of the \"rescue impulse,\" recognizing by then that there were \"a 'hundred women' who would engage in rescue work for the 'one' who would bravely enter the political arena to combat the acts\" (Walkowitz, p. 133).\n\nThe St. Mary Magdalene Home at which Christina Rossetti worked in the 1860s may have been staffed by lay \"sisters\" who committed themselves to the work but took no permanent religious vows. According to its Annual Reports, St. Mary's \"sisters\" were to be divided into two groups, \"approved sisters\" and \"sisters under probation,\" either of whom were to be free to resign at any time.32 Christina Rossetti's work at St. Mary's in the 1860s appears to have been only a continuation of her involvement with the \"rescue work\" which had appealed to the desires of British women in general, and Anglican Sisterhoods in particular, including the two Sisterhoods associated with the churches attended by the Rossetti women. _Goblin Market_ , written sometime during the late 1850s, is inscribed by the turbulent history of \"women's mission to women\" in the Oxford Movement during this period. In this ecclesiastical \"female world of love and ritual,\" how was the female body and its \"appetite\" represented?33\n\nI would like to begin by noting that ecclesiastical discourse constituted saving \"sisters\" and \"fallen women\" together, as if part of a unitary entity. In a preface to two sermons on penitentiary work, W. J. Butler, Vicar of Wantage, wrote that, \"so soon as the evil [prostitution] was fairly faced... nothing could quell it so much as purity and tender love, that these would foster habits of prayer and industry and faith in virtue and goodness,... the lack of which had occasioned so fearful a moral wreck.\"34 The Sisters' \"purity and tender love\" are defined by the \"moral wreck\" so in need of them.\n\nLike the discourses of nineteenth-century male artists, the discourses of the Oxford Movement also reveal a fear of \"contamination.\" But while the male artists' imagery suggests a fear of physical and moral pollution from the prostitute's body, male clerics appear to have feared that the sisters would be contaminated by the attractions of the \"fallen women\" and their way of life. In a sermon preached at St. Mary's Home, Wantage, in 1861, Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, displays this anxiety by taking as his opening subject the prevailing notion that those who work to reform the corrupted are themselves liable to be corrupted. He also labors to disprove the idea that institutions such as St. Mary's tended to \"discredit homely virtue and to throw a gloss over vice\" ( _On Penitentiary Work_ , p. 5). In a second sermon preached on the same occasion, Henry Parry Liddon indicates that the \"decay\" of prostitution begins with a woman's \"act of rebellion,\" and that this first act of rebellion is generally followed by a second and a third, such that \"you find yourself in the presence of a new and formidable force \u2013 the force of habit\" (p. 19). This habit of rebellion, he suggests, must be met by \"a counter-habit of purity\" (p. 20).\n\nThese sermons thus articulate a fear that, far from experiencing \"disgust for female sexuality\" or \"sexual repulsion,\" the sisters who worked with fallen women might themselves be \"corrupted\" by these living examples of active female sexuality and \"rebellion.\" In an 1867 sermon to the Parochial Mission-Women Association, Canon Burrows' text fairly resonates with the fear that rescue work might encourage the development of an unwomanly sense of authority, and that after going into the streets, mission women might not return exactly as they had been before. Noting uneasily at the outset that he was not often called upon to \"address a body so largely composed of women\" and that there were many \"Managers and Superintendents here today,\" he takes as his theme the imperative of maintaining a proper sense of humility amidst the heady excitement of this mission work:\n\n\"Many of you, Mission Women, must be tempted to think... when you find yourselves associated with rank and talent, the clergy co-operating, congregations applauding, and all men speaking well of you, that surely success is certain; but you come together to-day to the House of God, to humble yourselves.\"35\n\nCommenting that \"yours is woman's work, and a true woman's best work is modest, retiring, humble, self-sacrificing,\" Burrows reminds his feminine audience of \"the special deference to authority\" involved in their \"constitution\" and urges his hearers to be always willing to \"take the lowest place\" and to be \"persistent\" in humility (pp. 7, 9, 11). He mentions that these mission women not only have no house or institution, no official dress, but that they almost always work singly. They go out on the streets and bring women in to the Mission room, the School, the Church. They must never forget, he concludes, that they should be \"the servant of all\" (p. 11).\n\nAlthough always organized hierarchically and on the assumption that class differences were part of God's plan and not to be interfered with, the Oxford Movement actually fostered associations between middle-class church women and working-class women on the belief that the former could help prevent the latter from \"falling.\" In 1856 Upton Richards founded an organization called the All Saints Confraternity for Girls and Young Women.36 According to the 1866 Manual, the association was intended for the \"mutual help and encouragement of Girls and Young Women wishing to lead a Christian life amidst the difficulties and temptations of the world.\" The Objects of the Confraternity further specified that the organization was to help \"carefully brought up\" and pious girls retain their beliefs and good behavior after they were sent out into the world to earn a living.37\n\nThese objectives obviously suggest another possibility for an intended audience for _Goblin Market_ , which certainly can be read as a cautionary tale for girls and young women wishing to lead a Christian life amidst the temptations of the \"world,\" for which read the streets of London. Again, however, my interest is not to speculate on an \"intended\" audience but rather to examine certain texts produced by or for the Confraternity which I believe are paradigmatic of female relations in the Oxford Movement, and to read in them a construction of the female gaze that I think is highly pertinent to the reading of _Goblin Market_. In this construction of the female gaze we may find a \"look\" exchanged between women that constitutes an unorthodox (feminine) subjectivity.\n\nClass difference and hierarchy clearly structured the Confraternity, like all of the Sisterhood enterprises. In 1866 its membership consisted of sixty \"members\" and twenty \"Lady-Associates,\" headed by a \"Superior-General\" or the Rev. Upton Richards, and a \"Sister-Superior,\" who was one of the All Saints Sisters.38 But these rigid demarcations of class and authority do not appear in the Confraternity hymns to the Virgin Mother, or to the Virgin's mother, St. Anne. In a hymn to St. Anne I find a particularly significant revision of Jacques Lacan's construction of the \"mirror stage\" as the moment when the infant first perceives itself as a coherent image. In Lacan's theorization of this moment, the infant is constituted by its perception of this mirrored image, an image which the mother who holds the infant only \"guarantees.\" In short, the infant, not the mother, is the subject here.39\n\nIf we take the Confraternity hymn to St. Anne as textual exemplar, we read in it instead an egalitarian exchange of gazes between the Virgin's mother and the future Virgin Mother:\n\nBlest among women shall thy daughter be!  \nYes, highly favoured above every other;  \nThe little one reposing on thy knee,  \n(Believe, and fear not) shall be GOD'S own Mother.\n\nThe clear, grave eyes that now look up to thine,  \nIn the calm faith that sheds its radiance o'er her,  \nThus shall they gaze upon the form divine  \nOf God's bright Angel, as he stands before her.\n\n( _Manual_ , pp. 65\u20136)\n\nThere are several important points here. For one, it is the gaze of the infant daughter which is represented as guaranteeing the mother's subjectivity. The Virgin's mother looks down on the \"little one reposing\" on her knee, and in the infant's mirroring gaze sees the promise of a future divine motherhood. Rather than beginning (and ending) with the infant and ignoring the mother as anything but \"guarantee,\" it starts (though it does not end) with the mother.\n\nAnother interesting difference is the hymn's explicit construction of the gaze between two feminine subjects. The hymn virtually excludes males from this female exchange, and what is male appears only as prophetic image that grants permission to the mother's gaze: the female child can be taken as \"object\" because she is validated by the divine form of the angel who will announce that she is a virgin mother. The hymn thus authorizes the female gaze to take a feminine object as its focus.\n\nThe infant daughter here, however, obviously functions as subject herself: her look \"up\" to the mother's look is already a gaze upon a future \"form divine\" that is in turn a guarantee of her subjectivity. As such, I think the exchange can be said to undo the hierarchy of mother and daughter as it does of infant and \"mirror.\" How shall we describe the relationship constructed by such an exchange of looks between female subjects? As \"sisterhood\" \u2013 a \"sisterhood\" which represses hierarchical differences and permits the female gaze to feast on the female form.\n\n#  _Goblin Market_ and Feminine Guessiness\n\nCriticism of _Goblin Market_ can be divided into two camps in the reading of Lizzie and Laura: one camp assumes that Laura represents the \"fallen woman\" and Lizzie the \"pure woman,\" or that Laura is a type of Eve and Lizzie a type of Mary; the other camp asserts that the poem does not construct either sister as morally superior and that Lizzie is as much \"redeemed\" by her confrontation with the goblins as Laura is by ingesting Lizzie's \"antidote.\"40\n\nI take my stance very much in this second camp, for it seems to me the poem quite deliberately denies any suggestion of categorical differences between the two women. That is, the text excludes any suggestion of sexual, racial, class, or any other kind of hierarchical difference between the two women \u2013 or girls, since the difference between sexual maturity and childish innocence also seems to be blurred. We cannot find in the text of this poem or in the illustration Dante Gabriel designed for it of the two \"golden heads\" any suggestion of Armstrong's \"double-bodied woman.\" On the contrary, even after Laura has eaten of the goblin fruits \u2013 an act many readers regard as synonymous with a \"fall\" \u2013 the poem constructs them in what Jerome McGann appropriately calls \"unspeakably beautiful litanies\" of identical innocence (p. 253):\n\nLike two blossoms on one stem,  \nLike two flakes of new-fall'n snow,  \nLike two wands of ivory.\n\n(ll. 188\u2013198)\n\nI would like to suggest that the poem excludes difference between the two girls or women in order to focus on women's common plight as commodities in the linked capitalist and sexual economies. By erasing categorical differences between Laura and Lizzie, the poem can construct those various characterological differences among women which make them vulnerable to the market, on the one hand, but which the poem, on the other hand, argues \"sisters\" can also capitalize upon in order to rescue each other from exploitation.\n\nChristina Rossetti's own reflective interpretation of Eve and her \"fall\" in an 1882 work of biblical commentary, _Letter and Spirit_ , is relevant here:\n\nIt is in no degree at variance with the Sacred Record to picture to ourselves Eve, that first and typical woman, as indulging quite innocently sundry refined tastes and aspirations, a castle building spirit (if so it may be called), a feminine boldness and directness of aim combined with a no less feminine guessiness as to means. Her very virtues may have opened the door to temptation.41\n\nSo it appears with Laura in _Goblin Market_ \u2013 her very virtues open the door to temptation. She combines a \"feminine boldness and directness of aim\" with \"sundry refined tastes and aspirations.\" She exhibits a \"castle-building spirit,\" if so we may read the heroic similes which describe her as stretching her \"gleaming neck\" and being like a \"moonlit poplar branch,\" or a \"vessel at the launch / When its last restraint is gone\" (ll. 81\u201386).\n\nBut she also exhibits a \"feminine guessiness as to means.\" Untutored in the deceptive strategies employed in the goblin market, she gets herself in for more than she bargained for. Although her desire to indulge \"refined tastes\" for the exotic and delicious fruits hawked by the goblin men is nowhere condemned in the poem, Laura finds that in consuming those fruits a part of herself has also been \"consumed.\" What has been stolen from her in this shady transaction is her \"desire\" itself, a desire which far exceeds that for real fruits, however exotic.\n\nYet we should not fail to notice how infinitely more potent as locus of desire these \"fruits\" are than that pathetically domesticated jar of marmalade that is supposed to tempt Alice. The very words for these fruits are quite literally mouth-filling and sensuously delectable, but they are also packed with metaphorical and associational meanings. Both a woman and the product of her womb may be called a \"fruit,\" but with what different valences! And \"fruits\" can refer to the profits of any kind of enterprise \u2013 economic, spiritual, or sexual.\n\nThe poem, moreover, specifically links the fruits to \"the fruits of empire\": these are not just common, home-grown English apples and cherries, but also a rich variety of gourmet fruits imported from foreign climes \u2013 pomegranates, dates, figs, lemons and oranges, \"citrons from the South.\" These are luxury fruits that appeal to \"sundry refined tastes\" such as have been cultivated by Britain's colonial empire. That Rossetti associated the availability of such luxuries with the capitalistic exploitation of the poor is clearly indicated in her 1892 commentary on the Book of Revelation, _The Face of the Deep_ , where she identifies her country with the apocalyptic Babylon and assails it with prophetic wrath: \"'Alas England full of luxuries and thronged by stinted poor, whose merchants are princes and whose dealings crooked, whose packed storehouses stand amid bare homes, whose gorgeous array has rags for neighbours!' \"42\n\nAmidst this market with its packed storehouses and gorgeous array, Laura, who has not a single \"copper\" in her purse, is taken in by the crooked dealings of the goblin men. When they tell her she does not need any money because they will be happy with a '\"golden curl,\" she hands over this emblem of her virginity with only a single tear. Her \"feminine guessiness as to means\" \u2013 her naivet\u00e9 about the marketplace \u2013 has condemned her to a loss far greater than she knows.\n\nSo far it would almost be permissible to read the poem as a sort of feminist guide to shopping: watch out for those so-called bargains, sister, especially the ones offered by the funny little men \u2013 you'll be taken for a lot more than you know. But to read it as such a sororal cautionary tale is to neglect what the poem has to say about the importance of looking. While one can get into trouble by satisfying the desire to look and listen, the trouble is precisely the loss of that desire. Christina Rossetti herself wanted to name the poem, \"A Peep at the Goblins,\" but when her brother Dante Gabriel suggested _Goblin Market_ , Christina accepted this as a \"greatly improved title.\"43 Yet while the poem is certainly about the \"traffic in women,\" it also seems to be about the desire to \"peep.\" Even more interestingly, the poem does not appear to condemn this voyeuristic desire in itself but rather to represent its risks in the goblin market.\n\nThus, Laura at first warns Lizzie, \"We must not look at goblin men,\" as well as \"We must not buy their fruits.\" But apparently sensing her sister's weakening control, Lizzie responds, \"Laura, Laura, / You should not peep at goblin men\" (ll. 42, 43, 48, 49). Lizzie sticks her fingers in her ears and shuts her eyes, but Laura lingers and looks, \"Wondering at each merchant man.\"44\n\nWhen she returns after having made her unwittingly disastrous bargain, and \"sucked and sucked and sucked\" the goblin fruit until her lips were sore, Lizzie meets her \"at the gate / Full of wise upbraidings\" (ll.141\u2013142).\" 'Dear, you should not stay so late, / Twilight is not good for maidens,\" she reminds her sister primly, and now already too late tells her the sad tale of Jeanie who \"lies low\" because she loitered so (ll. 143\u2013163). But when Laura first suffers agonies because of the frustration of her \"baulked desire,\" and then, like her \"kernel-stone,\" begins to dry up, dwindle, and face the prospect of a \"sandful\" sterility (how painful that \"sandful\" is!), Lizzie is jarred out of her maidenly correctness by her sister's \"cankerous care.\" After taking the prudent precaution of supplying herself with a silver penny, Lizzie ventures out, \"And for the first time in her life / Began to listen and look\" (ll. 327\u2013328).\n\nThe narrative thus clearly affirms woman's listening and looking \u2013 Lizzie needs to listen and look, the line suggests, or she will remain merely a happy little bird in her closed domestic cage. The decision to confront the goblins of the twilight, to open her eyes and unstop her ears, is as crucial to Lizzie as the recovery of desire will be to Laura. So long as Lizzie remains safely behind her garden gate, she will never know desire or taste its fulfillment and she will be no better off \u2013 though her case will be different \u2013 than her sister, whose desire has been stolen from her. The sisters represent women's double plight in the Victorian sexual economy: either risk becoming a commodity yourself, or risk never tasting desire, never letting yourself \"peep.\"\n\nThe poem demonstrates for us how listening may be as seductive as looking: the goblins laugh when they spy Lizzie \"peeping,\" and they slither towards her in a fascinating cacophony of sounds that fills the ear just as the earlier listing of fruits fills the mouth. These sounds are full of sinister, sexual, spell-binding implications \u2013 snake-like, we might say.\n\nBut looking and listening are not enough to accomplish the poem's desire for Lizzie here. She must also suffer, putting up at first with name-calling, then with what we would call sexual harassment and physical abuse. The goblins push her and jostle her, rip her dress, tear out her hair, and step on her feet. Finally, they try to force their \"fruits\" into her mouth. Under this treatment, Lizzie is transformed into a heroic and unviolated figure. The list of similes here interestingly refers both to colonial and sexual economies: she's like a \"fruit-crowned orange tree\" beset by wasps and bees, or like \"a royal virgin town\" beleaguered by a fleet \"Mad to tug her standard down.\" Laughing in her heart, Lizzie gleefully lets the goblins \"syrup\" her face with their juices, but she keeps her mouth shut. The goblins are unable to penetrate her. When she leaves the glen, the penny jingling in her purse is testimony that she got what she wanted for a smaller price than she thought she might have to pay. The price was only \"a smart, ache, tingle\" \u2013 not so bad, under the circumstances.\n\nEcstatically, she offers Laura the \"juices\" of her sexual knowledge, spread over the surface of her bruised body:\n\nShe cried \"Laura,\" up the garden,  \n\"Did you miss me?  \nCome and kiss me.  \nNever mind my bruises,  \nHug me, kiss me, suck my juices  \nSqueezed from goblin fruits for you,  \nGoblin pulp and goblin dew.  \nEat me, drink me, love me;  \nLaura, make much of me:  \nFor your sake I have braved the glen  \nAnd had to do with goblin merchant men.\"\n\n(ll. 464\u2013474)\n\nLaura clings about her sister, \"kissed and kissed and kissed her,\" and is transformed in her turn. Though the juice is \"wormwood\" to her tongue, and she \"loathes\" the feast, she appears to experience a masochistic orgy \u2013 writhing like one possessed, leaping and singing, and beating her breast. In simile, she streams upward like an eagle toward the sun, like a caged thing freed, like a flying flag when armies run. And then she falls \u2013 falls like a mast struck by lightning, like a tree uprooted by the wind, like a waterspout that falls into the sea. She falls, \"pleasure past and anguish past,\" into a deep sleep, from which she awakens as innocent as ever, and quite healthy.\n\nLizzie appears to have restored her sister by recirculating the erotic energies first set into motion by the goblin market. Inviting her sister to feast on her instead of on the goblin fruits produces a saving satisfaction. But all such exchanges involve the paying of some price, and here the price is pain \u2013 a pain which seems always to originate from the \"goblin merchantmen.\" However, the pain does not seem to be part of a sadistic-masochistic pairing. Rather, the pain which accompanies the women's erotic pleasure appears to be the inevitable effect of that dimly glimpsed other world that frames and constructs the sisters' relationship to each other. Nevertheless, within their own sphere, sisters can do a lot for each other. Or, as Laura teaches the little ones to sing, \"there is no friend like a sister.\"\n\nIn the end, however, we must acknowledge that the poem accomplishes this transformative sisterhood by pushing the heterosexual world to its margins \u2013 husbands are not completely excluded, they are implied in the last paragraph \u2013 and by wiping out all reference to class or racial differences as if they did not exist. That they did exist, and that they determine the vision in _Goblin Market_ of non-hierarchical sisterhood, is demonstrated by the poem which has been placed immediately after _Goblin Market_ in the 1862 volume. This poem, \"In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857,\" carries in its title the specific reference to time and place, and to empire and colony, that has been excluded from _Goblin Market_.\n\nThe title of the poem refers to an incident in what was called the \"Indian Mutiny\" but was actually part of the Indian rebellion against the British Empire, an incident in which a young white officer reportedly shot first his wife and then himself in order to protect her from the threat of rape by \"The swarming howling wretches below.\" These \"wretches below\" are, presumably, the Indian troops. In this poem, then, we find the traces of the imperialist discourse missing from the preceding poem: the purity of the (English) female body here is constituted by its absolute difference from \"The swarming howling wretches below.\" Lizzie's consumable body is, after all, offered to an equally blond sister \u2013 those \"wretches below\" on the London streets have not been invited to the saving feast.\n\nI have suggested that _Goblin Market_ constructs a radically different view of the female body and its appetites, and that the poet's access to the social and discursive matrix of the Oxford Movement's \"women's mission to women\" accounts for this radical discourse. Read in this context, the poem articulates women's common vulnerability to sexual and economic exploitation while affirming the bodies and appetites that are implicated in that exploitation. But \"In the Round Tower at Jhansi\" demonstrates that _Goblin Market_ achieves this seemingly radical vision of women's bodies through its deliberate exclusion of racial and class differences. Like that first and typical woman, Christina Rossetti's work is still limited by a \"feminine guessiness as to means.\"\n\n#  **Notes**\n\n1 Nancy Armstrong, \"The Occidental Alice,\" _Differences_ 2 (Summer 1990): 3\u201340.\n\n2 Armstrong, p. 9. On the \"double-bodied image,\" see also Sander Gilman, \"Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,\" in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. _\"Race,\" Writing, and Difference_ (Chicago, 1985), pp. 223\u201361.\n\n3 All references to _Goblin Market_ are to _The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti_ , ed. R. W. Crump (Baton Rouge, 1979), vol. 1, pp. 11\u201326. Perhaps the \"eat me\" and \"drink me\" labels in _Wonderland_ are already a more restrained and heterosexually-oriented version of Lizzie's \"eat me, drink me, love me,\" for \"Lewis Carroll\" (Rev. Charles Dodgson) not only knew Rossetti well but was extremely enamored of little girls and very likely to have been intrigued by _Goblin Market_. See _The Annotated Alice_ , ed. Martin Gardner (Harmondsworth, England, 1960), pp. 11\u201313, and U. C. Knoepflmacher's \"Avenging Alice: Christina Rossetti and Lewis Carroll,\" _NCL_ 41 (1986): 302, 311.\n\n4 Charles Bernheimer, _Figures of III Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France_ (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989), p. 2.\n\n5 Judith R. Walkowitz, _Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State_ (Cambridge, 1980), p. 3.\n\n6 _The Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti_ , ed. William M. Rossetti (London, 1911), p. 39. D.M.R. Bentley points out that Dante Gabriel turned \"intensively to the fallen-woman theme between 1853 and 1858,\" and that William Rossetti stated that \"Jenny\" was finished toward 1858, though revised in 1869 (\"The Meretricious and the Meritorious in _Goblin Market_ : A Conjecture and an Analysis,\" in David A. Kent, ed., _The Achievement of Christina Rossetti_ [Ithaca, 1987], p. 60). _Goblin Market_ , dated April 27, 1859, would appear to have been written in roughly the same period as \"Jenny.\"\n\n7 Jerome J. McGann, \"Christina Rossetti's Poems: A New Edition and a Revaluation,\" _VS_ 23 (1980): 254.\n\n8 \"The Meretricious and the Meritorious in _Goblin Market_ ,\" p. 58.\n\n9 See Adrienne Rich's foundational analysis of the strategies universally employed by cultures to make heterosexuality compulsory by discouraging and even punishing homosexuality, thus coercing women into \"choosing\" heterosexuality. Rich theorizes that all women remain more attached to their mothers than men do, and that all women are therefore part of a \"lesbian continuum.\" See \"Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence\" in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds., _Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality_ (New York, 1983), pp. 177\u2013205.\n\n10 As Dorothy Mermin comments, \"This is a world in which men serve only the purpose of impregnation\" (\"Heroic Sisterhood in _Goblin Market,\" VP_ 21 [1983]): 114.\n\n11 _The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti_ , with memoir and notes by William Michael Rossetti (London, 1924), p. lv.\n\n12 Martha Vicinus, _Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women_ , 1850\u20131920 (Chicago, 1985), p. 83.\n\n13 Mary Poovey, _Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid Victorian England_ (Chicago, 1988), p. 2.\n\n14 Laura Mulvey, referring to Jacque Lacan's theory, explains how \"the unconscious of patriarchal society\" structures Western narrative so that woman is the object of the male gaze (\"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,\" reprinted in Constance Penley, _Feminism and Film Theory_ [New York, 1988], pp. 57\u201368).\n\n15 Terrence Holt's otherwise insightful reading of sexual and economic exchange in _Goblin Market_ , for example, is limited by its reading of the language of the poem exclusively in relation to a dominant phallocentrism. Not surprisingly, Holt ignores the female homoeroticism of the poem. See \" 'Men sell not such in any town': Exchange in _Goblin Market,\" VP_ 28 (1990): 51\u201367.\n\n16 Georgina Battiscombe, _Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life_ (New York, 1981), p. 76.\n\n17 Mackenzie Bell, _Christina Rossetti: A Biographical and Critical Study_ (Boston, 1898), p. 60. Interestingly, William's letter goes on to document the interaction between Christina's church-related social work and the consumer culture of her day. One thing which occupied Christina \"to an extent one would hardly credit,\" William writes, \"was the making-up of scrapbooks for Hospital patients or children \u2013 This may possibly have begun before she removed to Torrington Sq[uare]: was certainly in very active exercise for several years ensuing \u2013 say up to 1885. When I called to see her and my mother it was 9 chances out of 10 that I found her thus occupied \u2013 I daresay she may have made up at least 50 biggish scrapbooks of this kind \u2013 taking some pains in adapting borderings to the pages etc. etc.\" These scrapbooks, no longer extant but presumably compiled from popular magazines and newspapers, suggest the poet's interest in popular culture.\n\n18 _Poetical Works_ , p. 485. Diane D'Amico, in \"Christina Rossetti's 'From Sunset to Star Rise': A New Reading,\" ( _VP_ 27 [1989]: 95\u2013100) has also pointed out that William was probably mistaken in this surmise, not only because \"House of Charity\" is never used in the records for this institution, but because an Anglican institution for the \"fallen\" was much more usually referred to as a \"House of Mercy.\" Concluding that Christina's note, \"House of Charity,\" probably refers to some other institution \u2013 perhaps the House of Charity in Soho \u2013 D'Amico suggests that the poet probably worked in more than one charitable institution.\n\n19 Canon Burrows described its foundation as \"a time of fervour and revival of church principles.\" By January, 1839, only a year and a half after its founding, for example, the congregation had set up schools in which no fewer than 871 district children were enrolled. See Henry W. Burrows, _The Half-Century of Christ Church, Albany Street, St. Pancras_ (London, 1887), pp. 12\u201314.\n\n20 Allan T. Cameron, _The Religious Communities of the Church of England_ (London, 1918), pp. 28\u201334.\n\n21 Thomas Jay Williams and Allan Walter Campbell, _The Park Village Sisterhood_ (London, 1965), p. 23.\n\n22 Pitkin Guide, _All Saints Margaret Street_ (London, 1990), p. 18.\n\n23 _All Saints' Church, Margaret Street_. Reprinted from _The Orchestra_ (London, [1866]).\n\n24 The Park Village Sisterhood merged with the Devonport Sisterhood in 1856. See Chapter 12 in Williams and Campbell, _The Park Village Sisterhood_ , pp. 112\u201317.\n\n25 Joyce Coombs, _One Aim: Edward Stuart_ , 1820\u20131877 (London, 1975), p. 11.\n\n26 Battiscombe, pp. 55\u20137. Burrows, p. 22.\n\n27 So far as I have been able to determine, there was no connection between this church and the St. Mary Magdalene institution at Highgate.\n\n28 Christina visited Collinson's family (James Collinson himself was not there) at Pleasley Hill during August 1849, but there is no evidence that she was not in London during July 1849. See _The Family \u2013 Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti_ , ed. William Michael Rossetti (London, 1908), pp. 5\u20138; also Lona Mosk Packer, _Christina Rossetti_ (Berkeley, 1963), p. 35.\n\n29 Janet Galligani Casey, in \"The Potential of Sisterhood: Christina Rossetti's _Goblin Market_ ,\" _VP_ 29 (1991): 63\u201378, also gives an account of Rossetti's interest in Nightingale and the \"sisterhood movement,\" but argues that \"sisterhood\" in the poem \"potentially includes the experience of both sexes\" (p. 63).\n\n30 Walkowitz notes that women who moved into prostitution were most often girls in their late teens, living outside the family, in fact often half or full orphan, and frequently having previously been casual maids of all work. See _Prostitution and Victorian Society_ , p. 19.\n\n31 Cameron, pp. 43, 59. Interestingly, these two Sisterhoods which took work with prostitutes as their primary focus grew to be two of the largest Anglican communities (Vicinus, _Independent Women_ , p. 72).\n\n32 First organized under a council formed by the Bishop of London in 1854, this \"penitentiary\" at Highgate was known originally as \"Park House\" but called \"St. Mary Magdalene's\" in order to give it a \"distinctive name.\" See Deed to the London Diocesan Penitentiary, St. Mary Magdalene, London Guildhall Library, MS. 18532 and the Annual Reports of the London Diocesan Penitentiary, St. Mary Magdalene's, London Guildhall Library, MS. 18535. The institution is not listed among those institutions supervised by the All Saints' Sisterhood, nor is it mentioned in accounts of the Park Village Sisters. Cameron notes that \"The House of Mercy,\" North Hill, Highgate, was taken over by the Clewer Sisters in 1901 (p. 65).\n\n33 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, \"The Female World of Love and Ritual\" in _Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America_ (New York, 1985), pp. 53\u201376.\n\n34 _On Penitentiary Work_... . _Two Sermons Preached At the Opening of the Chapel of St. Mary's Home, Wantage, July_ 30, 1861, _by Samuel [Wilberforce], Lord Bishop of Oxford, and Henry Parry Liddon, MA, with a Short Preface on Sisterhoods, by W.J. Butler, MA, Vicar of Wantage_ (Oxford and London, 1861), pp. iv\u2013v.\n\n35 _Parochial Mission-Women Association_. A Sermon Preached at St. James's, Westminster, on June 20th, 1867, by the Rev. H. W. Burrows, B., Perpetual Curate of Christ Church, St. Pancras (Oxford and London, 1867), pp. 4\u20135.\n\n36 Although there is no evidence that Christina Rossetti was a member of this particular organization, a Young Women's Friendly Society was organized at Christ Church for the benefit of servant girls. Tea, Bible lessons, and other \"religious recreations\" were offered on Sunday afternoons ( _Half-Century of Christ Church_ , p. 34). Maria Rossetti not only worked with this society but wrote a series of letters (dated 1860\u20131) to the young women in it, published _as Letters to My Bible Class on Thirty-Nine Sundays_ (London, n.d. [1872]).\n\n37 _The Manual of the Confraternity of All Saints, for Girls and Young Women, in connection with the All Saints' Home, 82, Margaret Street, Cavendish Square_ , 2nd ed. (London, 1866), p. 1.\n\n38 In a notice to the public, the Superior of the All Saints' Home stated that \"women of a superior class are received to be trained for Nursing the Sick Poor in Hospitals; and for Private Nursing in the Families of the rich\" (\"Nurses for the Sick, in Private Families,\" All Saints' Home, 82, Margaret Street, Cavendish Square [1862]). Vicinus comments on the \"upper-class character\" of the All Saints' and Clewer Sisterhoods and notes that both were known as \"fashionable\" ( _Independent Women_ , pp. 55\u20136).\n\n39 Jacques Lacan, \"The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience,\" in _\u00c9crits: A Selection_ , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), pp. 1\u20137. As Jane Gallop notes, \"In Lacanian models she [the mother] is the prohibited object of desire; in object-relations she is the mirror where the infant can find his or her subjectivity. In either case her only role is to complement the infant's subjectivity; in neither story is she ever a subject\" (\"Reading the Mother Tongue: Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism,\" _CritI_ 13 [1987]: p. 324).\n\n40 Helena Michie, for example, speaks of Laura and Lizzie as representing aculturally constructed difference between sisters, in which one sister is the \"fallen\" and the other the \"unfallen,\" one the \"sexual\" and the other the \"pure woman,\" in \"'There is No Friend Like a Sister': Sisterhood as Sexual Difference,\" _ELH_ 56 (1989): p. 404. Jerome McGann typifies the other reading which argues that without Laura's \"precipitous act the women would have remained forever in a condition of childlike innocence\" and that \"Lizzie's timidity is by no means condemned, but its limitations are very clear,\" in \"Christina Rossetti's Poems,\" p. 250).\n\n41 Christina Rossetti, _Letter and Spirit_ (London, [1882]), p. 17.\n\n42 _The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary_ (London, 1892), p. 422.\n\n43 _Poetical Works_ , p. 459; Crump, 1:234.\n\n44 We should not overlook the fact that \"merchant man\" also refers to a cargo-carrying ship.\n\nCarpenter, Mary Wilson. 1991. \"'Eat me, drink me, love me': The Consumable Female Body in Christina Rossetti's _Goblin Market_.\" In _Victorian Poetry_ , 29, iv (Winter), pp. 415\u201334. Reproduced with permission of Mary Wilson Carpenter.\n\n# 13\n\n# Browning's Corpses\n\nCarol T Christ\n\nIn 1801, Pierre Giraud, a prominent French architect and a figure in the Revolution, published a book, _Les_ _Tombeaux_ , _ou essai sur les s\u00e9pultures_ , in which he describes a procedure for dissolving the human body in order to convert it into an indestructible substance with which to make portrait medallions, quite literally, of the dead. The technique was not new; a seventeenth-century German inventor had discovered that the soil produced by the decomposition of human bodies could be used to produce a very fine glass; Giraud proposes substituting industry for nature. He envisions a cemetery, in the middle of which is a crematory oven that converts human corpses to a vitrifiable material. From the glass thus obtained can be made a new form of the human body, incorruptible and imperishable. Giraud writes:\n\nOne need only have a heart to understand how consoling it would be to a sensitive soul to possess a bust of a pleasing material that would have the inestimable advantage of being both the portrait and the actual substance of a father, mother, wife, child, friend, or any other individual who was dear to us.1\n\nUnfortunately, the glass is not sufficiently fluid to make a bust, so Giraud settles upon a medallion. There would be enough glass, Giraud speculates, for two medallions, one which the family could take with them when they traveled, the other to be displayed in the cemetery, where it would have an edifying effect upon visitors: \"How many children would spontaneously, from their earliest youth, be turned away from the path of crime and dissipation at the mere sight of the portraits of their virtuous ancestors\" (p. 514).\n\nThe story of Giraud's medallions bears an interesting similarity to Jeremy Bentham's instructions about his dead body. Bentham left orders that his body be dissected after his death so that mankind might reap some benefit from his disease. He saw his act as an example of the utility principal, one that offered itself in opposition to the contemporary horror of medical dissection. After his body was dissected, however, Bentham, like Giraud, provided for a certain reversal of the dismembering he had authorized. He instructed that his skeleton be reassembled, complete with his mummified head, dressed in his own clothes, and set up for people to view. This effigy he called the auto-icon, a representation, like Giraud's medallions, constituted of the thing itself. It was, to Bentham, a further example of the principle of utility, of the uses of the dead to the living. Obviously, Bentham felt, people after his death would want a representation of him. What better representation than one constituted from his body itself?\n\nThese two anecdotes point to a set of preoccupations characteristic of nineteenth-century attitudes toward death. There was, on the one hand, an intense anxiety and concern about bodily dissolution, reflected in public debates about the proper disposal of corpses and the healthful location of cemeteries, in the widespread fear of dissection, which was seen as a mutilation appropriate only to murderers, in an equivalent repugnance toward cremation, and in an interest in new methods of embalming that would preserve the body intact for as long as possible after death. There was, on the other hand, a taste for elaborate funerary monument seen not only in the newly designed cemeteries of the age but in those mourning objects, intended for the home, so characteristic of the Victorian sensibility \u2013 chimney piece-ornaments, firescreens, funeral teapots, and the like. The two preoccupations are of course related; funerary monument \u2013 a kind of mourning work \u2013 undoes the bodily dissolution that is the work of death. As we can see in Bentham's and Giraud's plans for the disposition of corpses, or, more modestly, the common practice of making mourning jewelry from the hair of the dead, the ideal funerary monument is the body itself, perfectly disposed for the resurrectionary trumpet.\n\nThe value that Victorian culture placed upon the representation of the dead carried important implications for literary representation. Literature, particularly poetry, was often used to perform a kind of mourning work. Much as the Victorians created material objects that were effigies for the dead, Victorian writers often sought to substitute the literary work for the dead body. A reversal of divine incarnation, the flesh becomes word, and the art object presents itself as the auto-icon. One can think of numerous examples \u2013 Tennyson's attempt in _In Memoriam_ to connect body to text in a way that restores Hallam's presence, his identification in \"The Lady of Shalott\" of the Lady's dead body with self-definition as an aesthetic icon, Hopkins' project in \"The Wreck of the Deutschland\" to transform the dead body of the tall nun to the Word of God, or any number of paintings and poems by the Pre-Raphaelites, which present a dead woman's body as the ultimate aesthetic image.2 This focus upon the dead body's construction as image does not occur only in poems of memorialization but in other poems as well, frequently those about poetry. Furthermore, poets do not always maintain the ideal construction of such activity one sees in _In Memoriam_ but reflect upon it critically and ironically. Browning is a case in point. He frequently stages poems in the presence of a corpse. These poems, I will argue, reflect importantly upon his understanding of writing poetry. Like Bentham, he sees the dead body as the object that can constitute its own representation. However, he portrays this attempt as a macabre project on the part of the living to use corpses to support their own fictional construction of reality.\n\nIn his famous comment about \"The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church,\" Ruskin said that he knew of no other piece of modern English, in prose or poetry, in which there is so much told of the Renaissance spirit. Various models for the Bishop's tomb have been suggested, despite the fact that it seems unlikely the Bishop's \"nephews\" will follow his orders, and we all no doubt have in mind an image of a Renaissance tomb, with its recumbent figure on the top, which fits the Bishop's description. Yet the Bishop's imagination of his transformation to his own funerary monument is distinctly Victorian. The moments of fear \u2013 almost panic \u2013 in the poem when the Bishop feels he has lost the assent of his nephews to his plan are marked by a terror of bodily dissolution:\n\nWhat do they whisper thee,  \nChild of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hope  \nTo revel down my villas while I gasp  \nBricked o'er with beggar's mouldy travertine.3\n\nOr, toward the end of the poem:\n\nThere, leave me, there!  \nFor ye have stabbed me with ingratitude  \nTo death \u2013 ye wish it \u2013 God, ye wish it! Stone \u2013  \nGritstone, a-crumble! Clammy squares which sweat  \nAs if the corpse they keep were oozing through.\n\n(ll. 113\u2013117)\n\nThrough the design of his tomb, the Bishop preserves his body intact. He imagines it, like Giraud's medallions, as both image and substance, an auto-icon, which, like that of Jeremy Bentham, will remain in the world he inhabited. The poem treats the Bishop's design with deep irony, understanding his attempt to become his own funerary monument as his last futile grasp at power.\n\n\"The Bishop Orders His Tomb\" is in some ways unique among Browning's poems that concern themselves with the dead body, for the Bishop is contemplating his own death rather than the death of another. Far more frequent in Browning's poetry is the situation in which he positions the speaker in the presence of a corpse \u2013 \"Porphyria's Lover,\" \"Evelyn Hope,\" \"A Grammarian's Funeral,\" \"Gold Hair: A Story of Pornic,\" \"Apparent Failure.\" Browning is typical of writers of the period in this regard; it is characteristic of Victorian literature not only to stage deathbed scenes,4 but to stage scenes in the presence of a corpse \u2013 Victor Frankenstein's galvanization of his creature, Heathcliff's exhumation of Catherine, Dr. Woodcourt's examination of Nemo's body. These moments \u2013 in which a character confronts a corpse \u2013 are often importantly implicated in the writer's understanding of what literature does. In Browning's poetry in particular, the animation of corpses is closely connected to his conception of the dramatic impulse and to the form of the dramatic monologue.\n\nIn his monumental work, _The Hour of Our Death_ , Philippe Aries argues that the nineteenth century was characterized by a fundamental change in social attitudes toward death, a change from a concern with one's own death to a concern with the death of the other, whose loss and memory inspired a new cult of tombs and cemeteries, which, in the most ideal descriptions of their function, became the source of familial and civic virtue (Aries, pp. 409\u2013558). As the examples of Giraud and Bentham demonstrate, this memorialization involves a complex exchange. The living preserve the memory, even the substance of the dead in acts of memorial that are often conceptualized in terms of industrial or social productivity. The dead become thus available for a kind of appropriation through which they inform the identity of the living. This process sometimes involves a deliberate fetishism, one explicitly recommended by several of Comte's disciples in their writings on the cemetery. Pierre Lafitte writes, \"The material object is for us, and for the whole human species, both the symbol and the substance of the deceased\" (Aries, p. 542). Positivism should embrace this spontaneous fetishism, incorporate it into the tomb and the cemetery, and thus give it a public character, in order to develop the sense of continuity in the family, the city, and the race.\n\nIn a poem like Tennyson's _In Memoriam_ , one can see an ideal version of the cult of the dead that I have been describing, and one can see as well the way in which literature in its capacity to re-present the dead can be essentially connected to such memorialization. But there are less ideal ways of construing the relationship of the artist to the corpse, ways with which Browning showed an uneasy fascination.\n\nIn the first book of _The Ring and the Book_ , Browning presents an image of the poet's art as resuscitation. Carefully distinguishing man from God, who alone has the power to create original life, he asserts that man, repeating God's process in \"due degree,\"\n\nMay so project his surplusage of soul  \nIn search of body, so add self to self  \nBy owning what lay ownerless before, \u2013  \nSo find, so fill full, so appropriate forms \u2013  \nThat although nothing which had never life  \nShall get life from him, be, not having been;  \nYet, something dead may get to live again.5\n\nHe names Elisha as his ideal antecedent, who, coming into a house where there is a corpse,\n\nlay upon the corpse, dead on the couch,  \nAnd put his mouth upon its mouth, his eyes  \nUpon its eyes, his hands upon its hands,  \nAnd stretched him on the flesh; the flesh waxed warm.\n\n(I.765\u2013768)\n\nThe story suggests that Browning's ideal image of the poet is the resurrectionist, who, like the physician that Karshish hears of from Lazarus, brings the dead back to life. However, \"resurrecting\" was a specialized profession in the nineteenth century, the stealing of bodies from graves in order to sell them to doctors and medical students for dissection.6 The passage from _The Ring and the Book_ contains besides Elisha another image of the poet, a magician who chances upon some \"Rag of flesh, scrap of bone, in dim disuse\" (l.753) which he animates and then leads forth \"By a moonrise through a ruin of a crypt\" (l.757). Thus, existing together with the ideal sense of the poet as one who, Christ-like, resuscitates the dead, is one who, more like Frankenstein, collects pieces of bodies and galvanizes them into life. Even in Browning's ideal sense, the poet must \"add self to self\" (l.724), own \"what lay ownerless before\" (l.725); the question for Browning is whether such animation of bodies is bringing the dead back to life or robbing graves to create phantoms.\n\nIn the beginning of the Pope's monologue, Browning returns to the image of the corpse in an episode that seems strangely disproportionate to the argumentative burden that it carries. Facing the burden of his decision about the murder of Pompilia, the Pope is reflecting upon the fallibility or infallibility of the judgment of popes. Reading a history of the popes of Rome in anticipation of the day when the next page \"shall be stretched smooth o'er my own funeral cyst\" (10.23), the Pope relates the story of a \"ghastly trial\" (10.29), in which one of his predecessors, Stephen, disinters his rival for the see, places him upon Peter's chair, and appointing a Deacon to be \"advocate and mouthpiece of the corpse\" (10.52), tries the corpse to determine, \"Hath he intruded or do I pretend\" (10.65).\n\nThe grotesqueness of the episode makes it jump out of its context to reflect more generally upon the poem itself. The grisly trial that the Pope relates bears an uneasy relationship to the poetic act in which Browning himself is engaged. Like Stephen, Browning has taken a dead pope from the grave and provided an advocate and mouthpiece of the corpse. Like Stephen, he requests a judgment \u2013 hath he intruded or do I pretend? In one sense, the question raises the issue of historical authenticity that Browning had pondered in the first book \u2013 is this the thing itself, the real Pope resuscitated through the poet's creative powers, the real \"he\" intruding, or is it mere pretense? But what makes the moment in the Pope's monologue such an eerie one is the negativity of the two terms, intrude and pretend, a negativity that makes the Pope and the corpse rivals for a single legitimate power. Thus, if we judge the dead the genuine article, we make the resurrectionist a fraud, but if we judge the corpse a fraud, we give its resurrectionist legitimacy. Unlike the way in which Browning had constructed the poet's authority in Book I as depending on genuine resuscitation, the incident here implies that the dead threatens the legitimacy of the one who disinters him, that only by exposing the pretense, the artifact, the fiction of the corpse, can he secure his own authority. The need to enact this ghastly ritual suggests how fragile this authority is. In order to sustain it, the poet must continually restage such encounters with a corpse, in which his mouthpiece can own what he fears the corpse may possess.\n\n\"Porphyria's Lover\" is a case in point. Many readers have noticed the way in which the speaker, before the murder, attributes all action to Porphyria and presents himself as eerily passive. When Porphyria enters the room:\n\nstraight  \nShe shut the cold out and the storm,  \nAnd kneeled and made the cheerless grate  \nBlaze up, and all the cottage warm;  \nWhich done, she rose, and from her form  \nWithdrew the dripping coat and shawl,  \nAnd laid her soiled gloves by, untied  \nHer hat and let the damp hair fall,  \nAnd, last, she sat down by my side  \nAnd called me. When no voice replied,  \nShe put my arm about her waist,  \nAnd made her smooth white shoulder bare,  \nAnd all her yellow hair displaced,  \nAnd, stooping, made my cheek lie there,  \nAnd spread, all o'er, her yellow hair,  \nMurmuring how she loved me.\n\n(ll. 6\u201321)\n\nIn these lines, the speaker not only presents himself as the passive object of Porphyria's attentions, almost as if he were a small child, but attributes all action and passion that seems his own to her. When he kills her, he reverses the situation; she becomes the passive object of his affection. Yet the way in which his actions mirror those that he had previously projected as hers suggests that the speaker finds in the murder a way to share a single life between the two of them:\n\nher cheek once more  \nBlushed bright beneath my burning kiss:  \nI propped her head up as before,  \nOnly, this time, my shoulder bore  \nHer head, which droops upon it still.\n\n(ll. 47\u201351)\n\nThe psychoanalytic work that has been done with necrophilia argues that its root is a fantasy of emptying the mother of all life until she becomes a corpse, which the necrophiliac then introjects and identifies with himself.7 Fundamental, then, to necrophilia is the drive toward female identification, based upon the fantasy that the mother is in sole possession of authentic life. \"Porphyria's Lover\" in many ways conforms to this description, for the speaker derives all definition from Porphyria in the beginning of the poem, a definition he appropriates in its second half, with even a suggestion of female impersonation: \"my shoulder bore her head.\"\n\nThe necrophilia of \"Porphyria's Lover\" is grotesque, but the poem depends upon such grisly pretense, creating its odd and uneasy humor through the kinship of the lover's animation of Porphyria and Browning's animation of him. Like the trial of Formosus, the poem suggests that the poet secures his own office through grotesque fictionalization of the dead through which he distorts and appropriates its face. \"Evelyn Hope\" provides another example. The poem begins as a conventional lament for the unlived life of a girl dying young. In the first stanza, the speaker seeks to depict her bedroom without change and yet realizes that he cannot do so; the second stanza for the most part dwells upon the life that has been cut off. The third stanza, however, contains a startling shift \u2013 from the unlived life of Evelyn Hope to the unlived life of the aging speaker; her death is a denial of his possibility. The speaker then proceeds to undo his loss \u2013 a loss of something he has never had \u2013 by making a move characteristic of Browning; he appropriates what he presents as an authoritative vision of the future \u2013 \"No, indeed! for God above / Is great to grant as mighty to make\" (ll. 25\u201326). He then uses that vision to project a plot past an event which had seemed to establish final closure. One of the problems of plotting that most engages Browning, as it does a number of his contemporaries, is the projection of narrative beyond death. He does this in a number of ways \u2013 in his representation of mediumship, in his creation of deathbed scenes which establish either a different structure of time or different mode of existence for the speaker, or in his use of resurrection as end-point or subject of poems. In part, of course, this projection of narrative after death is related to the kind of deferral of closure in Browning's poetry that Herbert Tucker has demonstrated so brilliantly.8 The animation of corpses, however, not only defers closure but reverses it, converting a death narrative to a life narrative, to reconstitute the body, as Giraud and Bentham do, in art. This reconstitution has less to do in Browning's poetry with grief for the death of the other than concern for the self. By animating the dead, Browning's speakers seek to secure their own trajectory. In \"Evelyn Hope,\" the speaker asserts his claims not only to her but to much experience beyond the present moment \u2013 of men, ages, climes. His imagination of their future meeting, moreover, involves his memory of her youth and beauty, now dependent on his recall:\n\nBut the time will come, \u2013 at last it will,  \nWhen, Evelyn Hope, what meant (I shall say)  \nIn the lower earth, in the years long still,  \nThat body and soul so pure and gay?  \nWhy your hair was amber, I shall divine,  \nAnd your mouth of your own geranium's red.\n\n(ll. 33\u201338)\n\nHe transforms her loss to his gain.\n\nYet there is clearly an irony in \"Evelyn Hope\" as there is in all of Browning's poems in which the speaker makes so fictional a projection about the dead body. The poems on the one hand enact a fantasy about life's confirmation while they expose its hollowness, a kind of enthroning of corpses that mirrors the death of the self that erects them. The rather grotesque poem, \"Gold Hair: A Story of Pornic,\" presents this irony directly in the story it tells. The poem relates the anecdote of a beautiful girl, who, dying young, begs to be buried with her gold hair untouched. Hair seems to be the feature of the dead body that the Victorians most frequently used as a synecdoche for the intact corpse; indeed, as such, it often functions as a screen for the decaying body. Recall, for example, Lizzie Siddal's hair, which allegedly continued to grow after death; the role that hair plays in \"Porphyria's Lover\"; or even the practice of making mourning jewelry from the hair of the deceased. In \"Gold Hair,\" it first seems as if the girl's hair will function in this way as the enduring token of her beauty, but the priest of the church in which she is buried decides to disinter the corpse when some boys find a gold piece in the vicinity of the coffin. When the diggers lift the rotten planks of the coffin lid, they discover, wedged amid the girl's skull, a mint of money, which she had apparently hidden in her hair. The poem takes a vindictive and gleeful pleasure in exposing the greed of the girl who had seemed \"too white,\" \"an angel before the time\" (ll.I, 67), and the church too gets considerable profit from the demystification; the gold enables it to build a new altar. In \"The Bioeconomics of _Our Mutual Friend_ ,\" Catherine Gallagher argues that the economy of the novel requires the body's deanimation as a condition of valuable life; it transforms corpses to wealth, a process suggested in the utility Bentham finds in dissection or Giraud in cremation.9 Browning's poem, too, accomplishes such a transformation, even in its sardonic rendering of the beautiful corpse, that suggests the need to appropriate the dead body to the use of the living.\n\nUsually, however, the exchanges that Browning portrays are less material, as in the poem \"Apparent Failure,\" in which he portrays his visit to the Paris morgue. Like Dickens, who also made literary capital out of his trips to the Paris morgue, Browning invests and exercises his literary identity in his visit. He begins the poem in response to the epigraph he takes from a Paris newspaper, \"We shall soon lose a celebrated building,\" with the words, \"No, for I'll save it,\" and when he comments that Petrarch's Vaucluse makes proud the Sorgue, the next line, by parallel logic, calls for a writer whose literary habitation of the Paris morgue will ensure its renown. When Browning views the drowned bodies in the morgue, he imagines their slabs as thrones and makes up stories about them. They are, he asserts, suicides, whose investment in political ambition, revolutionary politics, and gambling yielded a poor return. These melodramatic plots, Browning's domestication of the scene in imagining the slabs as beds over which their tenants hang their hats and coats, and the pious resurrectionary sentiment with which he ends the poem are all attempts to make the face of death more comfortable. Browning thus \"owns,\" to use his word, these ownerless corpses, rationalizes their disturbing aspect. But the odd, grotesquely jocular way he addresses them \u2013 \"How did it happen, my poor boy? / You wanted to be Buonaparte / And have the Tuileries for toy\" (ll. 37\u201339) \u2013 signals his discomfort in the face of \"this,\" as he says in Stanza 6, \"poor fellow that is blue\" (ll. 46\u201347). The awkward jauntiness of tone that Browning tries to maintain makes this poem not a very successful one, but it nonetheless reveals the problem that the corpse typically presents in Browning. The corpse seems to require a fictional animation that secures the identity of the observer, as if he must transform the potentiality of his own death through artifact. Yet the clarity of the pretense involved, and the grotesqueness and the exaggeration of the fictions, reveal more pointedly the corpse within.\n\nIn one of the early _Cantos_ , Pound tells the story of one Pedro, who disinters his murdered queen, sets her corpse upon the throne, and compels the very courtiers who had murdered her to do her homage. The story bears an uncanny similarity to that of Formosus and suggests similar anxieties \u2013 that the poet may set up corpses upon thrones to secure his own pretense. Browning's poetry in this, as in much else, provides a parodic reflection of the social transformations of his culture. I wrote at the beginning about the way in which funerary monument undoes the bodily dissolution that is the work of death. Tennyson's and Arnold's elegiac poetry demonstrates the ways in which literature itself was involved in the cult of funerary remembrance so central to the culture. Browning's corpses imply a less ideal construction of the dead body, a fetishism not the source of civic virtue, but of the self's pretense in the face of death. Such pretense paradoxically depends upon the death it seems to wish to efface, a compulsive reencounter with the sight it transforms. The grotesque pretense in which Browning involves his characters as well as the extravagant make-believe of the poetry itself suggests an understanding of art as just such extravagant pretense, exercised to secure the authority it reveals as hollow.\n\nWhen one looks at the history of the dramatic monologue subsequent to Browning, it is striking how often it involves a thematics of the dead. In _The Spoon River Anthology_ and in any number of poems by Hardy, Jarrell, Frank Bidart, the poet makes the dead speak. These poems suggest that not merely Browning's personal psychology or even the social history of the period but an impulse of the form itself is involved with the habitation of corpses. It do the dead in different voices, one might say of the dramatic monologue, to provide an advocate and mouthpiece of the corpse.\n\n# Notes\n\n1 Quoted in Philippe Aries, _The Hour of Our Death_ (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), p. 514.\n\n2 For an analysis of the relation between portraiture and the dead body, see my essay, \"Painting the Dead: Portraiture and Necrophilia in Victorian Art and Poetry\" in _Death and Representation_ , ed. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 133\u201351).\n\n3 Robert Browning, _The Poems_ , ed. John Pettigrew and Thomas J. Collins. 2 vols. (Yale Univ. Press, 1981), 1:414, ll. 63\u20136. All further quotations from Browning's poems are taken from this edition\n\n4 See Garrett Stewart, _Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction_ (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), for an analysis of death scenes in Victorian fiction.\n\n5 _The Ring and the Book_ , ed. Richard D. Altick (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1971), Book 1, ll. 723\u20138. All further quotations from _The Ring and The Book_ are taken from this edition.\n\n6 See Albert Hutter's essay, \"The Novelist as Resurrectionist: Dickens and the Dilemma of Death,\" DSA 12 (1983): 1\u201339.\n\n7 See, for example, H. Segal, \"A Necrophiliac Phantasy,\" _Institute Journal of Psychoanalysis_ 34 (1953): 98\u2013101, and Sidney Tarachow, \"Judas, the Beloved Executioner,\" _Psychoanalytic Quarterly_ 29 (1960): 538\u20139.\n\n8 Herbert F. Tucker, _Browning's Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure_ (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1980).\n\n9 Catherine Gallagher, \"The Bioeconomics of _Our Mutual Friend,\" Zone_ #5 (1989): 345\u201365\n\nChrist, Carol T. 1995. \"Browning's Corpses.\" In _Victorian Poetry_ , 33, iii\u2013iv (Autumn\u2013Winter), pp. 391\u2013401. Reproduced with permission of Carol T Christ.\n\n# 14\n\n# A E Housman and 'the colour of his hair'\n\nChristopher Ricks\n\n'Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?' In 1895, A. E. Housman dealt swingeingly with the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, whose first trial had been in April and who was sent to Reading Gaol in November. His crime: the giving of homosexual offence. The world's judgment (Housman's poem fiercely urged) is as unjust as taking a man 'to prison for the colour of his hair'.\n\nWhy, of all capricious gravamina, did Housman seize upon this? Because, while flamboyantly arbitrary, the colour of one's hair had come to represent just such a cruel perversion of injustice. Arbitrary though punishment for the colour of one's hair is, there was nothing arbitrary about Housman's choosing it as his indictment. For it had become a type of the arbitrarily unjust, and so \u2013 itself by way of being a tradition \u2013 it was the more sharply fitted to the case, a case where there converged with it another good old English tradition, the punitive repudiation that is now dubbed homophobia.\n\nTo bring into play, footnotable play, the precedents _in re_ the colour of one's hair, is not only to see Housman's instance of preposterous crime as at once impertinent and pertinent, but to take the measure of the poem's _saeva indignatio_.\n\nLaurence Housman, who in 1937 (a year after his brother's death) respectfully chose to publish this unreleased poem,1 was right to see it as a poem of protest against society's laws, but he was limited in seeing the poem as that only. The poem's protest, as often in Housman, is partly against that part of life which is society's doing and wrongdoing, but is more largely against all else. Society's laws, yes, but nature's too, and, above all, the laws of 'Whatever brute and blackguard made the world'. This, even a chorus of priests might have to acknowledge:\n\nOh wearisome condition of humanity!  \nBorn under one law, to another bound:  \nVainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,  \nCreated sick, commanded to be sound:  \nWhat meaneth Nature by these diverse laws?\n\n(Fulke Greville, Chorus Sacerdotum, from _Mustapha)_\n\nWhat meaneth Society by these perverse laws? 'The laws of God, the laws of man' ( _Last Poems_ XII): there the sway and the swaying constitute the even-handed scales of Housman's handy-dandy.\n\nOh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?  \nAnd what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?  \nAnd wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?  \nOh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.\n\n'Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;  \nIn the good old time 'twas hanging for the colour that it is;  \nThough hanging isn't bad enough and flaying would be fair  \nFor the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.\n\nOh a deal of pains he's taken and a pretty price he's paid  \nTo hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;  \nBut they've pulled the beggar's hat off for the world to see and stare,  \nAnd they're haling him to justice for the colour of his hair.\n\nNow 'tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet  \nAnd the quarry-gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,  \nAnd between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare  \nHe can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.\n\nIt was not until thirty years after Laurence Housman published the poem that there appeared \u2013 likewise after its author's death \u2013 his essay on his brother's love and friendship, 'A. E. Housman's \"De Amicitia\"'.2 (The Latin has all the decent lack of obscurity of a learned language.) Laurence Housman's words, which manifest a tender probity, are well-known but they remain unexhausted:\n\nI do not pretend to know how far my brother continued to accept throughout life, in all circumstances, the denial of what was natural to him, but I do know that he considered the inhibition imposed by society on his fellow-victims both cruel and unjust. That fact is made abundantly plain in the poem which, after considerable hesitation, I decided to publish, even though its literary merit was not high \u2013 the one beginning  \n'Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?'  \nIt refers quite evidently to those who inescapably, through no fault of their own, are homosexual \u2013 having no more power of choice in the matter than a man has about the colour of his hair, which, as the poem says, he may hide out of sight, or dye to a 'more mentionable shade,' but cannot get away from.  \nHere, then, was a poem expressing contemptuous anger against society's treatment of these unhappy victims of fate, and a sympathy which went so far as to imply no blame. That poem he had left me at liberty to publish: had he objected to publication he would either have so marked it \u2013 as he did one or two others for literary reasons \u2013 or would have destroyed it. My only reason for hesitation was that its meaning was so obvious, that intelligent readers would be unlikely to refrain (nor did they) from making the true deduction; and my brother had relatives still living to whom this might give pain. I felt nevertheless, that the risk must be taken; it was something of a public duty that I should make known so strong an expression of feeling against social injustice [...]3\n\nThis is admirably executed, down to the duly dry touch \u2013 what with prison and infringements of liberty \u2013 of 'That poem he had left me at liberty to publish...' The brotherly paragraphs are truthful, and yet they are not the whole truth. For Laurence Housman's exclusive emphasis, tripled, upon society ('imposed by society', 'society's treatment of these unhappy victims of fate', 'social injustice'), has the effect of narrowing the poem's perturbation, as though \u2013 were society to be so good as to abolish its prohibitive laws \u2013 all would be well. Not so.\n\nHow small, of all that human hearts endure,  \nThat part which laws or kings can cause or cure.4\n\nSamuel Johnson, like A. E. Housman, was a radical conservative, and Johnson's great apophthegm, aware of society's injustices, is aware too of life's condition.\n\nFor one reason why 'Oh who is that young sinner...' should not be seen only as social protest is its famously being a sombre pendant to two poems which Housman did publish, next year (1896), consecutively too: _A Shropshire Lad_ XLIV, 'Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?', and XLV, 'If it chance your eye offend you'. Laurence Housman found in his brother's copy of _A Shropshire Lad_ , alongside XLIV, the newspaper cutting which has since become famous. Dated August 1895, it quotes a letter by a young Woolwich cadet who had committed suicide, racked by cowardice and despair at his sexual nature while spurred to self-slaughter by 'as yet': 'I thank God that as yet, so far as I know, I have not morally injured, or \"offended,\" as it is called in the Bible, anyone else'. When Housman congratulates this dead young man, it is with no sense, no implication, that the man had been wrong to feel shame at his sexual self.\n\nShot? so quick, so clean an ending?  \nOh that was right, lad, that was brave:  \nYours was not an ill for mending,  \n'Twas best to take it to the grave.\n\nHousman these days is liable to find himself harshly judged by the new censoriousness that has replaced the old much worse one; his shade may be told that he was a household traitor to his sexual nature (and others') by lacking pride in being 'gay'. Out, out. But Housman wrote what he meant; the poem praises the young man for doing something not only 'brave' but 'right'; and when it goes on immediately 'Yours was not an ill for mending', there is no reason to suppose that for the poet, in this poem or elsewhere, the ill _was_ an ill for mending, being after all not truly an ill at all but only deemed so by a social injustice that the mending of man's laws would rectify. It is not social condemnation only that gives such balanced obduracy to Housman's line 'Souls undone, undoing others', or to the stanza that had set the soul before us:\n\nOh soon, and better so than later  \nAfter long disgrace and scorn,  \nYou shot dead the household traitor,  \nThe soul that should not have been born.\n\nThere are the clean lines of admiration:\n\nUndishonoured, clear of danger,  \nClean of guilt, pass hence and home.\n\nBut the admiration is along lines which invoke honour (a magnificently positive double negative, 'Undishonoured'), an invocation that resists any emancipated or enlightened insistence that there is in homosexuality no dishonour or guilt of which one should yearn to be 'clean'. So too, Housman's ensuing poem, _A Shropshire Lad_ XLV, comes to an end in praise of the healthy courage that had brought itself to put an end, not to something which was not really sick at all (merely deemed so, socially, wrongly), but to soul-sickness:\n\nAnd if your hand or foot offend you,  \nCut it off, lad, and be whole;  \nBut play the man, stand up and end you,  \nWhen your sickness is your soul.\n\nThe Biblical injunction to be willing to inflict upon oneself the cutting-off of hand or foot is inestimably more grave than to cut one's hair or 'dye it of a mentionable shade'. But 'the colour of his hair' constitutes a tradition, secular and Biblical, that is germane to the conviction that Housman's poem, tragically, should not be restricted to social protest.\n\nIt had been, earlier in the nineteenth century, Macaulay who had given new life to an old association of injustice with the capricious indictment of the colour of one's hair.5 He launched a flight of ferociously precise fancy in his essay on 'Civil Disabilities of the Jews' ( _Edinburgh Review_ , 1831).\n\nThe English Jews are, as far as we can see, precisely what our government has made them. They are precisely what any sect, what any class of men, treated as they have been treated, would have been. If all the red-haired people in Europe had, during centuries, been outraged and oppressed, banished from this place, imprisoned in that, deprived of their money, deprived of their teeth, convicted of the most improbable crimes on the feeblest evidence, dragged at horses' tails, hanged, tortured, burned alive, if, when manners became milder, they had still been subject to debasing restrictions and exposed to vulgar insults, locked up in particular streets in some countries, pelted and ducked by the rabble in others, excluded every where from magistracies and honours, what would be the patriotism of gentlemen with red hair? And if, under such circumstances, a proposition were made for admitting red-haired men to office, how striking a speech might an eloquent admirer of our old institutions deliver against so revolutionary a measure! 'These men,' he might say, 'scarcely consider themselves as Englishmen. They think a red-haired Frenchman or a red-haired German more closely connected with them than a man with brown hair born in their own parish. If a foreign sovereign patronises red hair, they love him better than their own native king...'\n\nAnd so inexorably on, in Macaulay's Swiftian fantasy exposing cruel realities. The Civil Disabilities of the Jews have constituted an incitement to criminal dealings and to the law's injustices. To this intersection (alive in Housman's poem) of hair-colour and the law's injustices, and to an implication of Macaulay's seizing _red_ hair, I shall return.\n\nIn John Locke's earlier supposition in 1689 \u2013 more calm, more level, and no less telling \u2013 it had been black hair that was postulated, this in relation to religious toleration:\n\nSuppose this business of religion were let alone, and that there were some other distinction made between men and men, upon account of their different complexions, shapes and features, so that those who have black hair, for example, or grey eyes, should not enjoy the same privileges as other citizens; that they should not be permitted either to buy or sell, or live by their callings; that parents should not have the government and education of their own children; that they should either be excluded from the benefit of the laws, or meet with partial judges: can it be doubted but these persons, thus distinguished from others by the colour of their hair and eyes, and united together by one common persecution, would be as dangerous to the magistrate, as any others that had associated themselves merely upon the account of religion?6\n\nHere too 'the laws' are crucial; here too there is the yoking, once again scornful, of 'the colour of their hair' with religion, an association which is, I suggest, to be glimpsed in Housman's poem.\n\nBut it is the greatest legal historian, and legal thinker, of Victorian England, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, who furnished the crucial stage by which this yoking of crime and the colour of one's hair, previously pressed into service by Locke and Macaulay, may arrive at Housman and sexual opprobium. Stephen had written on Macaulay, mentioning the argument that 'Jews ought to be allowed to sit in Parliament', in the _Saturday Review_ (18 August 1866). He had written expansively there (9 March 1867) on Locke's letters on toleration, and he further referred to these in the preface to the second edition of his _Liberty, Equality, Fraternity_ (1874).\n\nTwo arguments in Stephen's _Liberty, Equality, Fraternity_ converge.\n\nPondering the age-old intricacy of the relations between morality and the law, Stephen deplored not only Mill's liberalism but his laxity. For Mill, turning a blind eye towards an inconvenient inconsistency, had seen nothing wrong in continuing to find publicly criminal such conduct as should, by Mill's own arguments, have been a matter for private life only. On the general proposition, Stephen is insistent:\n\nOther illustrations of the fact that English criminal law does recognize morality are to be found in the fact that a considerable number of acts which need not be specified are treated as crimes merely because they are regarded as grossly immoral.\n\n'Which need not be specified': Stephen's reticence is not a matter of laying his finger against the side of his nose or upon his lips. His modern editor specifies. 'Stephen here refers to what the Victorians generally called \"unnatural vice\". Sodomy was a capital crime until 1861' (R. J. White).7\n\nStephen proceeded at once to indict Mill for paltering.\n\nI have already shown in what manner Mr Mill deals with these topics. It is, I venture to think, utterly unsatisfactory. The impression it makes upon me is that he feels that such acts ought to be punished, and that he is able to reconcile this with his fundamental principles only by subtleties quite unworthy of him. Admit the relation for which I am contending between law and morals, and all becomes perfectly clear. All the acts referred to are unquestionably wicked. Those who do them are ashamed of them. They are all capable of being clearly defined and specifically proved or disproved, and there can be no question at all that legal punishment reduces them to small dimensions, and forces the criminals to carry on their practices with secrecy and precaution. In other words, the object of their suppression is good, and the means adequate.\n\nYet it is characteristic of Stephen that at this point he should turn away from too eager a prosecution, with a breadth of mind and a genuineness of concession seldom found in a conservative thinker \u2013 and far too seldom acknowledged by liberals to be even possible to a conservative thinker:\n\nIn practice this is subject to highly important qualifications, of which I will only say here that those who have due regard to the incurable weaknesses of human nature will be very careful how they inflict penalties upon mere vice, or even upon those who make a trade of promoting it, unless special circumstances call for their infliction.\n\nThis caveat, which is quite other than a rhetorical move, is a form of 'however' \u2013 one that is duly followed by a further 'however', turning the argument back to Stephen's axis of conviction:\n\nIt is one thing however to tolerate vice so long as it is inoffensive, and quite another to give it a legal right not only to exist, but to assert itself in the face of the world as an 'experiment in living' as good as another, and entitled to the same protection from law.8\n\nSuch is Stephen's judicious position on 'grossly immoral' acts and their criminality. It is in the next chapter of _Liberty, Equality, Fraternity_ that the colour of one's hair enjoys its day in court:\n\nThe rule, 'All thieves shall be imprisoned,' is not observed if A, being a thief, is not imprisoned. In other words, it is not observed if it is not applied equally to every person who falls within the definition of a thief, whatever else he may be. If the rule were, 'All thieves except those who have red hair shall be imprisoned, and they shall not,' the rule would be violated if a red-haired thief were imprisoned as much as if a black-haired thief were not imprisoned. The imprisonment of the red-haired thief would be an inequality in the application of the rule; for the equality consists not in the equal treatment of the persons who are the subjects of law, but in the equivalency between the general terms of the law and the description of the particular cases to which it is applied. 'All thieves not being red-haired shall be imprisoned' is equivalent to 'A being a thief with brown hair, B being a thief with black hair, C being a thief with white hair, &c., shall be imprisoned, and Z being a thief with red hair shall not be imprisoned.'\n\nGiven the prejudice against red hair, it is good of Stephen to invert his instance so that, for once, red hair would be favoured. What is striking, though, and is the sort of thing that might strike such a fancy as Housman's, is that Stephen moves immediately to a relating of red hair to an imaginable psychopathology:\n\nIn this sense equality is no doubt of the very essence of justice, but the question whether the colour of a man's hair shall or shall not affect the punishment of his crimes depends on a different set of considerations. It is imaginable that the colour of the hair might be an unfailing mark of peculiarity of disposition which might require peculiar treatment. Experience alone can inform us whether this is so or not.9\n\nThere is a more than a hint of the sexually aberrant in this odd coupling, with 'the colour of the hair' as possibly 'an unfailing mark of peculiarity of disposition which might require peculiar treatment'. More than a century after Stephen, it has not been many years since the alternative to being taken to prison for this colour of one's hair was the meting out of peculiar treatment to rectify peculiarity of disposition. Aversion therapy against perversion. Oh who is that young patient with the limpness of the wrists?\n\n'For the colour of his hair': what do most readers see? We see red. And this not only because of Macaulay, for Macaulay in his turn had been availing himself, so as to hold anti-Semitism up to ridicule, of the age-old prejudice against red hair. The _OED_ cites, under 'red-haired', George Chapman, _Bussy D'Ambois_ III i (1607), 'Worse than the poison of a red-hair'd man'. Swift needed the commonplace opprobium, in _Gulliver's Travels_ IV: 'It is observed, that the Red-haired of both Sexes are more libidinous and mischievous than the rest'. Even Stevie Smith has a poem 'From the Italian: _An old superstition_ ':\n\nA woolly dog,  \nA red-haired man,  \nBetter dead  \nThan to have met 'em.\n\nThough the colour of the hair is in Housman's poem left unspecified (grossly immoral 'acts which need not be specified'), the reiterated line is calculated to call up an ancient prejudice, prejudice being in any such case the nub.\n\nTake, for instance, the word 'poll': 'To hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade'. A poll of hair may be any colour, but is likely to conjure up red, for not only is 'redpoll' many a species of bird, but there had been Peter Pindar in 1787 ('Large red-poll'd, blowzy, hard, two-handed jades'), and there was \u2013 by a coincidence, in 1895, the very year of Housman's poem and Wilde's trial \u2013 'The celebrated... herd of Red-Polled cattle': 'The Duke of York is getting together a large and choice herd of Red-Polls' ( _Westminster Gazette_ , 29 March 1895).10 There is an onomastic felicity in its having been, exactly a century later, in 1995, a scholar of the name of Whitehead whose book noted the echo of the phrase 'such a head of hair as yours' from Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story 'The Red-Headed League' (1891), a story where the person with red hair is indeed innocent of crime.11\n\nBut if red hair were darkly called up by Housman, there might come with it a further darkness. There is, so far as I know, only one person whose name identifies a colour, and this the colour of hair, and the colour red. (Rufus _means_ red, and so is another story.) _OED_ :\n\n _Judas-coloured_ (of the hair or beard) red (from the mediaeval belief that Judas Iscariot had red hair and beard):  \n _c_.1594 Kyd: And let their beards be of Judas his own colour.  \n1695 Motteux: Observations on the Judas-colour of his Beard and hair.  \n1673 Dryden: There's treachery in that Judas-coloured beard.  \n1879 Dowden: An ugly specimen of the streaked-carroty or Judas-coloured kind.\n\nDryden spat this more than once.\n\n[Now the Assembly to adjourn prepar'd,  \nWhen _Bibliopolo_ from behind appear'd,  \nAs well describ'd by th' old Satyrick Bard:]  \nWith leering Looks, Bullfac'd, and Freckled fair,  \nWith two left Legs, and Judas-colour'd Hair,  \nWith Frowzy Pores, that taint the ambient Air.\n\n('Lines on Tonson')\n\nBut is Judas to be glimpsed in Housman's poem? To the colour of the hair there might be added hanging: 'In the good old time 'twas hanging for the colour that it is'. Yes, 'sodomy was a capital crime until 1861', but there might be Judas's self-infliction too. For to the compound _Judas-coloured_ there may be added the compound _Judas-tree_ : 'From a popular notion that Judas hanged himself on a tree of this kind' ( _OED_ ).\n\nThe Gospel according to Saint Matthew reports that Judas 'repented himself', 'saying, I have sinned' (Housman: 'sinner', 'conscience-stricken air'); Judas 'went and hanged himself' (Housman: 'hanging'); for Judas, there was 'the price of blood', 'the price of him that was valued' (Housman: 'and a pretty price he's paid').\n\nFor there is the further compound, _Judas-kiss_. The Gospel according to Saint Matthew: 'Now he that betrayed him gave them a sign, saying, Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he: hold him fast. And forthwith he came to Jesus, and said, Hail master; and kissed him'. The Gospel according to Saint Luke: 'But Jesus said unto him, Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?' Moreover, the Judas-kiss lent itself to homosexual solicitation; Wilde was to take up the suggestion of it from within _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ , to furnish the concluding antithesis of the poem:\n\nAnd all men kill the thing they love,  \nBy all let this be heard,  \nSome do it with a bitter look,  \nSome with a flattering word,  \nThe coward does it with a kiss,  \nThe brave man with a sword!\n\nHousman, praising the cadet who had bitten a bullet, contemplated unflinchingly the thought of 'The soul that should not have been born'. Those words probably came to him from Saint Matthew:\n\nbut woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born. Then Judas, which betrayed him, answered and said, Master, Is it I? He said unto him, Thou hast said.\n\nMacaulay had needed the same verse:\n\nThe same reasoning which is now employed to vindicate the disabilities imposed on our Hebrew countrymen will equally vindicate the kiss of Judas and the judgment of Pilate. 'The Son of man goeth, as it is written of him; but woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed.'\n\nIn conclusion something must be said of why it matters whether Judas is to be glimpsed in 'Oh who is that young sinner...' One answer is that Judas widens the focus of the poem's burning glass, not away from the laws of man but beyond them to take in too the laws of God. For Judas has always provoked a great unease about divine justice. Did not God's providence, and Christ's mission, need Judas, and is not some gratitude due to him for being, at the very least, of such service? Bob Dylan and Jorge Luis Borges have this much in common, that both have pondered whether Judas Iscariot had God on his side. Here is the thinking of Nils Runeberg, Borges' Nils Runeberg:\n\nSkilfully, he begins by pointing out how superfluous was the act of Judas. He observes (as did Robertson) that in order to identify a master who daily preached in the synagogue and who performed miracles before gatherings of thousands, the treachery of an apostle is not necessary. This, nevertheless, occurred. To suppose an error in Scripture is intolerable; no less intolerable is it to admit that there was a single haphazard act in the most precious drama in the history of the world. _Ergo_ , the treachery of Judas was not accidental; it was a predestined deed which has its mysterious place in the economy of the Redemption.  \nJudas, alone among the apostles, intuited the secret divinity and the terrible purpose of Jesus. The Word had lowered Himself to be mortal; Judas, the disciple of the Word, could lower himself to the role of informer (the worst transgression dishonour abides), and welcome the fire which can not be extinguished. ('Three Versions of Judas')12\n\nFor Judas, 'dishonour abides', unlike for the cadet whom Housman had celebrated as 'Undishonoured'. It is not only society whose injustices cry out. For Housman the great blasphemer, the injustice visited upon a man damned to prison for the colour of his hair might cry out to the fellow-suffering visited upon a man damned for playing his indispensable part in the economy of the Redemption.\n\nTo this cosmic injustice there is no end in sight. Even as I write, the current issue of the _London Review of Books_ (20 February 1997) contains a reply by William Klassen to Frank Kermode's review of _Judas: Betrayer or Friend of Jesus_.\n\nDespite Professor Kermode's suggestion to the contrary, I approached my mandate to write a life of Judas with the firm conviction that Judas was a traitor and that all the Gospels were unanimous in portraying him as such. In time that conviction had to yield to the evidence.\n\nJudas the traitor (Housman and 'the household traitor'). Of Judas it is written: 'It had been good for that man, if he had not been born'. Housman: 'The soul that should not have been born'. But would Jesus's _raison d'\u00eatre_ have lived had Judas not been born? What does God's plan owe to Judas's felicitous culpability?\n\n'He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair'. 'My suggestion', Klassen wrote, 'that Judas was acting as a faithful Jew, carrying out not only God's will as understood by Jesus but also the will of Jesus himself, at least deserves some consideration'. As does the thought that 'Oh who is that young sinner...' is not only a Locke-located, a Macaulay-maculate, and a Stephen-steeped poem, but a Judas-coloured one.\n\n# Notes\n\n1 _A.E.H_. (1937), p. 226: Additional Poems XVIII.\n\n2 Annotated by John Carter, _Encounter_ , vol. xxix no. 4, October 1967. Laurence Housman had died in 1959.\n\n3 _Encounter_ , pp. 36\u20137.\n\n4 Among the lines supplied by Johnson for Goldsmith's _The Traveller_.\n\n5 Here and elsewhere I am grateful to John Gross.\n\n6 _Epistola de Tolerantia_ , (1689); _Letters concerning Toleration_ I; _Locke and Liberty_ , ed. Massimo Salvadori, (1960), pp. 138\u20139.\n\n7 Archie Burnett, whose forthcoming Clarendon Press edition of Housman's poems will be of the greatest interest and value, annotates _abominable_ in 'the nameless and abominable colour of his hair' [Clarendon, Oxford, 1997]:\n\n _OED_ 's earliest example (1366) refers to 'The abhomynable Synne of Sodomye', and the earliest example of 'abomination' 1. (1395) refers to 'abhominacioun of bodili sodomie'. Also Lev. 18:22: 'Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination'.\n\nJohn Sparrow in a letter to the _New Stateman_ , (1942, xxiii 226) related 'nameless' and 'abominable' to legal statutes against sodomy, and added: 'Another echo of this phraseology (and one with which Housman was himself doubtless familiar) occurs in Chapter XLIV of Book IV of Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ : \"I touch with reluctance, and dispatch with impatience, a more odious vice, of which modesty _rejects the name_ , and nature _abominates_ the idea.\"' (Archie Burnett notes that Housman in the preface to his edition of Lucan, alluded to this phrasing from Gibbon.) To these dark glosses there might be added the false etymology which long held sway. Under 'abominable', of which the true etymology is the Latin _ab_ and _omen, OED_ has:\n\nIn med. L. and OFr., and in Eng. from Wyclif to 17th c, regularly spelt _abhominable_ , and explained as _ab homine_ , quasi 'away from man, inhuman, beastly', a derivation which influenced the use and has permanently affected the meaning of the word. No other spelling occurs in the first folio of Shaks., which has the word 18 times; and in _L.L.L_., V. i. 27, Holophernes abhors 'the rackers of ortagriphie', who were beginning to write _abominable_ for the time-honoured _abhominable_.\n\n(There is a grim irony in 'time-honoured'.) _OED_ has a further entry under the false spelling:\n\n _abhominable, abhomination_ , etc., the regular spelling of ABOMINABLE, ABOMINATION, etc., in OFr., and in Eng. from their first use to 17th c, due to an assumed derivation from _ab homine_ , 'away from man, inhuman, beastly', which influenced their early use, and has coloured the whole meaning of the words to the present day.\n\n'The present day': this first fascicle of the _OED_ was published in 1884. The word 'coloured' catches something for my argument.\n\n8 _Liberty, Equality, Fraternity_ , (1873, 2nd edn 1874); ed. R. J. White, (1967), p. 154.\n\n9 _Liberty, Equality, Fraternity_ , p. 186.\n\n10 Notable in the Nineties; the first entry in the _OED_ is 1891: 'The Norfolk and Suffolk Red Polled breed stands highest for dairying purposes. The Red Polls are handsome symmetrical animals of medium size'. Further _OED_ citations for the breed are from 1895, 1896 and 1898.\n\n11 John Whitehead, _Hardy to Larkin: Seven English Poets_ , (1995), p. 60.\n\n12 1944. _Fictions_ , translated by Anthony Kerrigan, (1962).\n\nRicks, Christopher. 1997. \"A E Housman and 'the colour of his hair.'\" In _Essays in Criticism_ , 47, iii (July), pp. 240\u201355. Reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press.\n\n# 15\n\n# Tennyson's 'Little _Hamlet'_\n\nDavid G Riede\n\nTennyson's two great poems of mourning and melancholia, _In Memoriam_ and _Maud_ , can to some extent be seen as distinguishing between \"'normal' mourning\" that eventually finds hard-earned resolution in _In Memoriam_ and the \"'pathological' mourning\" _of Maud_ that is clearly a form of madness (Armstrong, _Victorian Poetry_ , 255). To be sure, the mourning of _In Memoriam_ is so extended and its resolution so dubious that its differentiation from melancholia is not entirely convincing, but the imposed resolution certainly makes it a more \"hopeful\" poem than _Maud_ , which seems to have been written as a sequel to return Tennyson to his accustomed melancholy: \"It's too hopeful [ _In Memoriam_ ], more than I am myself. I think of adding another to it . . . showing that all the arguments are about as good on one side as the other, and thus throw men back more on the primitive impulses and feelings\" ( _Poems_ , ed. Ricks, 1: 8). However sad and perplexed it may be, _In Memoriam_ eventually disciplines the \"primitive impulses and feelings\" with the Christian ideology of the age, exalting \"character\" above the \"abysmal deeps of personality.\" _Maud_ , on the other hand, was a generic experiment designed to represent a pathological condition, evidently melancholia: \"The whole was intended to be a new form of dramatic composition. I took a man constitutionally diseased and dipt him into the circumstances of the time and took him out on fire\" ( _Letters_ , 2: 138). As critics have recognized, Tennyson's \"new form\" was recognizably akin to the spasmodic poems that Ludlow and Arnold characterized as allegories of the poet's own mind, though the word \"dramatic\" evidently distinguishes the diseased mind from the \"poet's own.\" The autobiographical resonances of _Maud_ , however, have long been recognized, and even though the speaker cannot be simply equated with Tennyson or the eponymous heroine with Rosa Baring, the poem is evidently a symbolic representation of the poet's own emotional experience, an allegory of his own mind.\n\nRather than being the representation of a specific woman known to Tennyson, Maud is a complex allegorical signifier of the Romantic beloved. Like the Poet's vision in \"Alastor,\" she is the spectral figuration of the speaker's ego-ideal or \"epipsyche,\" and the speaker's desire for her is allegorized within the courtly tradition as a quest for a queen of Romance (\"Rose of the rosebud garden of girls\" [i. 902]) and for the perfect beauty that is also death (\"Dead perfection\" [i. 83]). Like all allegorical emblems, according to Walter Benjamin, Maud is a multivalent signifier, an emblem of beauty, of death, of \"Honour that cannot die\" (i. 177), of Englishness (\"Bright English lily\" [i. 738]), of wealth and class status and even, \"Cleopatra-like\" (i. 216), of the Oriental erotic temptation explored in many of Tennyson's earlier poems. _Maud_ is, in short, a melancholy allegory very much in the tradition of _Alastor_ and _Endymion_ , and as the erotic pursuit of an insistently Orientalized sexual other, it reiterates Tennyson's fusion of the imperial Romantic imagination with the imperial spirit of the age. _Maud_ is especially important because it is an allegory of both the poet's own mind and Victorian pathology generally. The \"constitutionally diseased\" speaker is explicitly enflamed by the \"circumstances of the time\" and particularly the economic condition of the age, as the poem represents the \"history of a morbid poetic soul, under the blighting influence of a recklessly speculative age\" (Hallam Tennyson, _Memoir_ , 1: 96).\n\nThe allegorical character of _Maud_ is, moreover, strikingly illustrative of Benjamin's thesis that melancholy is generative of allegory: the speaker \"brood[s]/On a horror of shatter'd limbs\" (i. 55\u201356), on a \"corpse in the pit\" (ii. 326), and generally on graves, corpses, and death throughout, beginning with the opening account of the \"Mangled and flatten'd and crushed\" corpse of his father in the \"dreadful hollow,\" pausing also on Maud's mother \"mute in her grave as the image in marble above\" (i. 159), an anonymous funeral urn (i. 303), the \"blacker pit\" of yet another grave (i. 335), and culminating in a grim hallucination of his own buried life in a \"shallow grave\" (ii. 244). The poem is, in effect, the allegory of a consciousness diseased by its own failure to \"bury [it]self in [it]self\" (i. 75) deeply enough and particularly to \"bury/ All this dead body of hate\" (i. 779\u201380).\n\nThe resultant allegory replays in sharper focus the process I have traced in the earlier poems. The multiplicity of meaning associated with Maud and the protagonist's quest imbricates the love story with social issues from the outset. Expressing his disgust with the sordid commodity culture of the age, the speaker's initial desire is not for a woman but for a national cause to heal and unify the diseased spirit of the age, specifically a chivalric, martial spirit to end the economic civil war of each against all:1\n\nWhen a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee,  \nAnd Timour Mammon grins on a pile of children's bones,  \nIs it peace or war? Better, war! loud war by land and by sea,  \nWar with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred thrones!\n\n(i. 45\u201348)\n\nWhen Maud attracts the speaker's attention away from brooding on shattered limbs, it is as a \"chivalrous battle-song\" (i. 383), a bugle call to action:\n\nShe is singing a song that is known to me,  \nA passionate ballad gallant and gay,  \nA martial song like a trumpet's call!  \n. . . .  \nSinging of men that in battle array,  \nReady in heart and ready in hand,  \nMarch with banner and bugle and fife  \nTo the death for their native land.\n\n(i. 164\u201366, 169\u201372)\n\nThe cure for the speaker's \"diseased condition\" is to replace the diseased condition of culture with a return to the chivalric spirit of the feudal past, specifically to replace \"a time so sordid and mean\" (i. 178) with a pursuit \"of Death and of Honour that cannot die\" (i. 177). The call is eventually realized not as an achieved erotic union with Maud but as a call to an Eastern war in the Crimean, and, as in \"Locksley Hall\" and other earlier poems, the melancholic anomie of the hero is subordinated to the demands of a militant ideology. As if recapitulating Tennyson's earlier career, _Maud_ originates in a seemingly contentless melancholia and proceeds through the speaker's literal recollection of the Arabian Nights to a love synonymous with imperial appropriation of an Orientalized other and finally to outright imperial aggression as the hero enlists to fight in an Eastern war.\n\nThe \"germ\" of _Maud_ , as Tennyson said, was the lyric \"O that 'twere possible\" (ii. 141\u2013238), a poem written in 1833\u20134 during his early grieving for Hallam. But despite its emotional origins in Tennyson's mourning, the poem does not move toward a resolution of grief but rather displaces sadness to a mysterious, undeveloped heterosexual yearning that can have no resolution. As a result, it is not so much a poem of grief as a poem of such purely Tennysonian melancholy that Swinburne called it \"the poem of deepest charm and fullest delight of pathos and melody ever written, even by Mr. Tennyson\" ( _Letters_ , 3: 125). Harvie Ferguson has pointed out that in modern thought \"melancholy has no substance of its own, that it is 'only' the sombre mirror in which being reflects itself\" (xvi), and Tennyson's lyric, describing a subject haunted by a vaguely perceived phantom, seems to epitomize a vision of melancholia as the representation of a \"deathlike type of pain\" that is explicitly a reflection of the subject: \"'Tis the blot upon the brain/That _will show_ itself without\" (ii. 200\u2013201). Quite possibly the reference to the brain rather than the mind indicates that Tennyson saw the hero's disease in terms of the age's \"medical materialism,\" but the disease manifests itself in and as diseased signs of the times. As in Carlyle's account of the signs of the times, the deeper meaning is allegorically readable in the signs of the surface, where the infinite bodies forth the finite, and so shows itself without. The speaker can assert his own anguish, but the source of that anguish, its content, remains shadowy and undefined:\n\nThrough the hubbub of the market  \nI steal, a wasted frame,  \nIt crosses here, it crosses there,  \nThrough all that crowd confused and loud,  \nThe shadow still the same;  \nAnd on my heavy eyelids  \nMy anguish hangs like shame.\n\n(ii. 208\u201314)\n\n_Maud_ was written, apparently, to provide a context that would make this lyric \"intelligible,\" in effect to provide a referent, a substance for this nebulous \"it,\" in response to \"a suggestion made by Sir John Simeon, that, to render the poem fully intelligible, a preceding one was necessary. He wrote it; the second poem too required a predecessor, and thus the whole poem was written, as it were, _backwards_ \" (Hallam Tennyson, _Memoir_ , 1: 379).\n\nTennyson's development of a love plot to represent the hopelessness of melancholy yearning is of a piece with the pattern traced in the early lyrics, and with the Romantic love represented by the \"Alastor\" poet's yearning for his insubstantial ideal likeness, with Endymion's longing for Cynthia, and with the \"Kubla Khan\" poet's longing for the Abyssinian maid. More specifically, however, it all but explicitly recalls the emotional entrapment of \"Mariana\":\n\nFor am I not, am I not, here alone . . .  \nLiving alone in an empty house,  \nHere half-hid in the gleaming wood,  \nWhere I hear the dead at midday moan,  \nAnd the shrieking rush of the wainscot mouse,  \nAnd my own sad name in corners cried,  \nWhen the shiver of dancing leaves is thrown  \nAbout its echoing chambers wide,  \nTill a morbid hate and horror have grown  \nOf a world in which I have hardly mixt,  \nAnd a morbid eating lichen fixt  \nOn a heart half-turned to stone.\n\n(i. 254\u201367)\n\nAs in \"Locksley Hall,\" the appropriate response would apparently be to turn from \"feminine\" \"perversity\" to mix with the world (\"I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair\" [\"Locksley Hall,\"l.98]).\n\nIn this case, the speaker does not explicitly embrace the imperialist fantasy of finding some dusky woman to rear his savage race, but he does envision a romance with Maud in strikingly imperialist terms. His fantasy of wedded bliss with Maud is grounded in an actual recollection of the Arabian Nights:\n\n## i\n\nDid I hear it in a doze  \nLong since, I know not where?  \nDid I dream it an hour ago,  \nWhen asleep in this arm-chair?\n\n## ii\n\nMen were drinking together,  \nDrinking and talking of me;  \n\"Well, if it prove a girl, the boy  \nWill have plenty: so let it be.\"\n\n## iii\n\nIs it an echo of something  \nRead with a boy's delight,  \nViziers nodding together  \nIn some Arabian night?\n\n(i. 285\u201396)\n\nAs Ricks points out, it _is_ an echo of some Arabian night, specifically _The Story of Nourredin Ali and Bedreddin Hassan (Poems_ , 2: 537n). In addition, Maud is imagined as an Oriental seductress:\n\nWhat if with her sunny hair  \nAnd smile as sunny as cold,  \nShe meant to weave me a snare  \nOf some coquettish deceit,  \nCleopatra-like as of old  \nTo entangle me when we met,  \nTo have her lion roll in a silken net  \nAnd fawn at a victor's feet.\n\n(i. 212\u201319)\n\nFurther, Maud herself is represented in terms of wealth that resembles the bejeweled version of Oriental splendor set forth in \"Recollections of the Arabian Nights\": she is imagined both as the phantom of \"O that 'twere possible\" and as a gem: \"Luminous, gemlike, ghostlike, deathlike\" (i. 95). She is a \"pearl,\" a jewel (i. 352), a \"precious stone\" (i. 498) with a \"sweet purse-mouth\" (i. 71). Further, as Herbert Tucker observes, the \"exotic images the hero imports for Maud's beauty (the 'Arab arch,' the curiously male peacock's crest) suggest that his fantasies of erotic dominion are imperial fantasies as well\" ( _Tennyson_ , 419). As in the earlier poems, however, the dreams of erotic or imperial conquest are dashed. In fact, Maud's interfering brother, referred to throughout as the Sultan, interrupts the fantasy exactly as the good Haroun Alraschid did in \"Recollections of the Arabian Nights.\" When the Sultan claims possession of his own, he makes inevitable the climactic and disastrous duel that kills the brother and dooms the speaker's love. It is at precisely this defeat of the dream that the \"ghastly Wraith\" (ii. 32) appears to provide the antecedent for the shadowy \"it\" of \"O that 'twere possible.\" Yet this antecedent hardly gives substance to the melancholy shadowed forth as \"it\" \u2013 the problem is not simply that it is not substance but spirit, but that it apparently negates the most likely reading of \"it\" as Maud's ghost, since Maud is still alive when it appears. The mystery only deepens around the meaning of the externalization of the \"blot upon the brain.\"\n\nFinally, as in the earlier poems, the seductive, unmanning imperial fantasy provides, perhaps, languorous reverie:\n\nThere is none like her, none.  \nNor will be when our summers have deceased.  \nO, art thou sighing for Lebanon  \nIn the long breeze that streams to thy delicious East,  \nSighing for Lebanon,  \nDark Cedar, though thy limbs have here increased,  \nUpon a pastoral slope as fair,  \nAnd looking to the South, and fed  \nWith honeyed rain and delicate air,  \nAnd haunted by the starry head  \nOf her whose gentle will has changed my fate,  \nAnd made my life a perfumed altar-flame.\n\n(i. 611\u201322)\n\nBut this feminized, perfumed reverie must eventually give way to the masculine actualities of empire. In the case of _Maud_ , masculine activity is vigorous indeed: the speaker not only kills the Sultan but joins his nation's imperial cause to fight against Eastern iniquities, to fight for the good, \"to embrace the purpose of God and the doom assigned.\" Whether the dreadful warmongering at the end of _Maud_ is attributed to Tennyson or to his speaker, it is certainly consistent with both Tennyson's earlier tendencies and with the psychological movement of _Maud_ from reverie, through erotic and imperial fantasy, to actual imperial warfare and a reassuring solidarity with Englishness: \"I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind\" (iii. 58).\n\nThe longing for a revival of chivalric honor in _Maud_ is consistent with Tennyson's medievalism elsewhere and suggests that his \"poems made on . . . chivalric bones\" (Barrett Browning, _Aurora Leigh_ , v. 198), like Morris's \"Concerning Geffray Teste-Noire,\" are a product of melancholy brooding on the loss of a social ideal in the strife of modern commodity culture. John Lucas has persuasively argued that Tennyson as laureate had no problem as a spokesman for the chivalry idealized in the medieval rhetoric that depicted Victoria as Gloriana and Albert, in Tennyson's words, as \"Scarce other than my king's ideal knight\" (Dedication to _Idylls of the King_ , l.6), but in the 1850s, at the time of Maud, Englishness was clearly aligned with the commercial, commodity culture celebrated at the First Great Exhibition of 1851, but excoriated in _Maud_ as a particularly vile form of civil war (i. 21\u201352). The deepest source of melancholia in _Maud_ is the speaker's inability to align himself with the commercial spirit that he associates with a \"lust of gold\" that is \"Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told\" (iii. 39\u201341), akin to the degrading sexual lust described by Shakespeare as \"Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust\" (Sonnet 129, l.4). From this perspective, the courtly love tradition evoked by representing _Maud_ as \"Queen Rose of the rosebud garden of girls\" (i. 902) is actively antithetical to the conditions of English culture.\n\nA fuller account of the relation of melancholia in _Maud_ to the spirit of the age is, perhaps, best achieved by considering Tennyson's reference to the work as a \"little _Hamlet_ \" (Hallam Tennyson, _Memoir_ , 1: 296). Like Hamlet, the speaker of _Maud_ is melancholy because the time is out of joint, or at least because he is alienated from it. As I have discussed,2 the Victorian age was particularly attuned to Hamlet's melancholia as \"at once the sense of the soul's infinity, and the sense of the doom which not only circumscribes that infinity but appears to be its offspring\" (Bradley, 108), and a similar comment by Coleridge provides a useful suggestion regarding how Tennyson's \"little _Hamlet_ \" might be read as an experiment in genre; speaking of Hamlet's \"morbid excess\" of meditation on his own mind, Coleridge remarks that\n\nThe effect of this overbalance of the imaginative power is beautifully illustrated in the everlasting broodings and superfluous activities of Hamlet's mind, which, unseated from its healthy relation, is constantly occupied with the world within and abstracted from the world without, \u2013 giving substance to shadows and throwing a mist over all common-place activities. It is the nature of thought to be indefinite; \u2013 definition belongs to external imagery alone. Here it is that the sense of sublimity arises, not from the sight of an outward object, but from the beholder's reflection upon it; \u2013 not from the sensuous impression, but from the imaginative reflex. . . . Hamlet feels this; his senses are in a state of trance, and he looks upon external things as hieroglyphics. ( _Lectures_ , 344\u201345)\n\nIn terms of genre, _Hamlet_ seems to have served both Romantic and Victorian poets as a model of what Coleridge represents as the melancholy sublime. Writing of a time when verse drama was effectively defunct, Romantic and Victorian poets characteristically chose closet drama or even, to use the term Tennyson chose for _Maud_ , monodrama, to represent a melancholic monomania akin to Hamlet's. The most obvious English example is Byron's _Manfred_ with its many echoes of _Hamlet_ , but as Bradley and Arnold recognized, Goethe's _Faust_ is an even more significant modern version of the melancholy sublime. The conspicuous Victorian examples are _Maud_ itself and Arnold's _Empedocles on Etna_ , so it is particularly appropriate that Arnold suppressed the Hamlet-like broodings, the melancholy of the modern world, in a phrase that applies equally well to all works that rely on hieroglyphics to shadow forth the \"infinite within,\" to the Romantic and Victorian works I have mentioned, and to the poetic aspirations of the nineteenth century generally:\n\n[T]he modern critic not only permits a false practice; he absolutely prescribes false aims. \u2013 \"A true allegory of the state of one's own mind in a representative history,\" the Poet is told, \"is perhaps the highest thing that one can attempt in the way of poetry.\" \u2013 And accordingly he attempts it. An allegory of the state of one's own mind, the highest problem of an art which imitates actions! No assuredly, it is not, it never can be so; no great poetical work has ever been produced with such an aim. . . . Faust, itself, judged as a whole, and judged strictly as a poetical work, is defective. ( _Prose Works_ , 1: 8)\n\nColeridge's reference to \"hieroglyphics\" and Arnold's to \"allegory\" suggest a generic inheritance from _Hamlet_ of greater significance than the use of dramatic form to depict melancholia. The most significant generic feature in all of these works is allegory or, more specifically, the melancholy allegory described by Benjamin.\n\nBenjamin's discussion of allegory is all the more obviously pertinent to Tennyson's \"little _Hamlet_ \" because it was developed to explain the seventeenth-century German tragic drama that ostentatiously used the same allegorical principles that _Hamlet_ used far more indirectly ( _Origin_ , 191). Benjamin comments that \"for _Hamlet_ , as indeed for all Shakespearian 'tragedies,' the theory of the _Trauerspiel_ is predestined to contain the prolegomena of interpretation\" (228). _Hamlet_ , like _Maud_ , can be seen as a complex meditation and allegorical contextualization to cope with the figure of a ghost, and both revolve around the central character's contemplation of death and burial. \"In the _Trauerspiel_ of the seventeenth century,\" says Benjamin, \"the corpse becomes quite simply the pre-eminent emblematic property\" (218), as in _Hamlet_ the pre-eminent emblematic properties are the dead king, the skull of Yorick, and the open grave of Ophelia, and as in _Maud_ they are the corpses in the \"dreadful hollow\" and, eventually, the speaker's own corpse as he hallucinates his burial.\n\nPerhaps the best way to describe allegory in this sense is to return once again to Coleridge's \"Kubla Khan.\" In Coleridge's headnote the vision of his reverie is described as already formulated in language: \"all the images rose up . . . as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expression, without any sensation or consciousness of effort\" ( _Works_ , 102). This is exactly what Benjamin describes as the spurious claim of the Romantic symbol, \"which miraculously unites the beauty of form with the highest fullness of being\" (164), but as Coleridge's work suggests, it is possible only in an opium-induced reverie. It is a pipe dream, and the only way to fix it in language in the waking world is by an allegory that \"immerses itself into the depths which separate visual being from meaning\" (165). Unlike the symbol, which is momentary and, in Blake's terms, finds \"eternity in a moment,\" allegory is a sequential, temporal progression of signs that seek recovery, or \"redemption\" of the lost fullness of being, so the actual poem of \"Kubla Khan\" does not record the vision but only the allegory of love and the desire for recovery: \"Could I revive within me/Her symphony and song\" (ll.42\u201343). Recording loss, and separation of the sign from being, allegory is necessarily melancholy.\n\nAs we have seen,3 Paul de Man defines post-Romantic allegory, following Benjamin, as the sequential presentation of signs that always point to anterior signs, so that the essence of the allegorical sign is \"pure anteriority,\" and this rather strikingly calls to mind Tennyson's composition of _Maud_ \"as it were, _backwards_.\" As Tucker describes it, _Maud_ \"situates its hero reactively, his phase of passion having been prompted by some action anterior to the text\" ( _Tennyson_ , 413). The poem seems almost uncannily to mesh with Benjamin's account of \"the heart of the allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque, secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world; its importance resides solely in the stations of its decline\" ( _Origin_ , 166).\n\nAs allegory, _Maud_ fits neatly into the series of late Romantic poems of melancholy quest discussed earlier. Like \"Kubla Khan,\" _Alastor_ , and _Endymion, Maud_ is the account of a man seeking a projection of his own ego-ideal (the \"blot\" upon his brain, projected without), a woman who has never really existed. Ricks has described the poem in exactly these terms, noting that Maud appears \"ghostlike, deathlike, half the night long / Growing and feeding and growing\" in the speaker's dreams: \"[T]his unsubstantiality . . . is the poem's peculiar regret. It is a poem about losing someone whom you have never really had. She is at first beautiful, but as a gem, as an epitome of womankind, as a phantasmal pulse, a dreamlike vision\" (Ricks, 52 [252]). Similarly, as Culler notes, Tennyson pointed out that the \"memory [presumably of the hero's betrothed in part i, section vii] is a phantasmal one which he cannot trace to its origin\" (201).\n\nPerhaps it should not be surprising that Tennyson's work resembles that of the baroque German dramatists, since his work was recognized as baroque in his own time. Walter Bagehot famously labeled Tennyson the foremost exemplar of the \"ornate\" poet. His interest in depicting madness, moreover, was bound to involve a representation that ostentatiously separated the language of poetry from \"fullness of being,\" that abandoned the Romantic symbol for an allegorized mode that underscores the alienation of the speaker's mind from actuality. As has always been noted, _Maud_ abounds with what Ruskin called the \"pathetic fallacy,\" figurative language resulting from \"violent feelings\" that \"produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things\" (Works, 5: 205). For Ruskin such imagery is the product of a \"morbid,\" deranged subjectivity, as it seems the natural language of madness. The sequence of pathetic fallacy in _Maud_ , the sequence of morbid signs, produces a kind of morbid allegory, the perfect representation, perhaps, of melancholia.\n\nThe most obvious and most often noted pathetic fallacy in _Maud_ occurs at the very outset, in the speaker's personification, or genitalization, of the blood-red lips of the \"dreadful hollow\" (i. 2). The allegorical significations in _Maud_ may be read in a variety of ways, including, of course, as a sublimation of grief in the imperial work of the nation and as a working through in Freudian or Lacanian terms of the loss of the father emblematized by the hollow. The hollow is, of course, the \"ghastly pit\" (i. 5) in which the father's body was found, and its \"blood-red\" ledges suggest the female genitals as symbolic of death and burial in mother earth, as burial within the self, of birth and the loss of unity with the mother, and of the castrating wound that represents loss of the father and loss of the phallus as ego-ideal. The hollow is, in short, an explicit and overdetermined sign of absence and loss at the origin of the speaker's emotional life, of his desire, and of his quest. As everyone recognizes, however, the imposition of the speaker's consciousness on nature, the rampant excess of figurative meaning in the pathetic fallacy, is above all symptomatic of the speaker's morbid subjectivity, the kind of solipsistic alienation that afflicted the entrapped Mariana, the Lady of Shalott, the soul in \"The Palace of Art,\" and, of course, the buried self hallucinated later in _Maud_ , so the hollow must also be seen as an emblem of morbid solipsism itself, an emblem of melancholy.\n\nThe multivalent significance of this image and others makes it impossible or hopelessly reductive to read a single coherent allegorical plot in _Maud_. Like Hamlet, the speaker thinks \"too curiously,\" but his mad excess of meaning is itself the point. As Benjamin argues, \"Overnaming [is] the linguistic being of melancholy\" (\"On Language,\" 122), and it is also the allegorical poetry of the melancholy sublime: \"With every idea the moment of expression coincides with a veritable eruption of images, which gives rise to a chaotic mass of metaphors. This is how the sublime is presented in this style\" ( _Origin_ , 173). For this reason, \"the basic characteristic of allegory . . . is ambiguity, multiplicity of meaning\" ( _Origin_ , 177). Still, something specific can be extracted from this sublime: clearly the \"dreadful hollow,\" whatever else it may signify, is an allegorical emblem of death, and, coming at the very beginning of the poem, it positions all of the speaker's subsequent comments, like Hamlet's, as a gloomy contemplation of death. Further, the opening lines indicate that in the solipsistic brooding of the speaker, everything becomes an emblem of death: \"And Echo, there, whatever is asked her, answers 'Death.'\" As a further subtle implication that the answer \"Death\" is ventriloquized by the speaker, Echo answers \"Death\" conspicuously where the verse needs to echo, or rhyme with, \"heath\": the off-rhyme indicates the speaker's tendency to hear or understand nature in terms of his own imposition of allegorical meaning, just as when he variously hears the cawing of ravens once as \"Keep watch and ward, keep watch and ward\" (i. 247) and later as \"Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud\" (i. 414). As an emblem both of death and of the speaker's morbidly deranged perception and tendency to allegorize, the \"dreadful hollow\" is an overdetermined emblem of melancholy itself. In addition, if Walt Whitman's ear is to be trusted, the word \"hollow\" especially sounds Tennyson's depths: \"Tennyson shows, more than any poet I know . . . how much there is in finest verbalism. There is a latent charm in mere words, and in the voice ringing them, which he has caught and brought out, beyond all others \u2013 as in the line, 'And hollow, hollow, hollow, all delight'\" (quoted in Culler, 4\u20135).\n\nThe whole of _Maud_ , in its incoherence, seems almost a parody of conventional allegory. Examples of morbid, deranged allegorization, ubiquitous in the poem, include the speaker's moralizing upon the \"lovely shell\" (ii. 49) found on the Breton coast as an ambiguous figure of either the speaker's passive fragility or his \"force to withstand\" (ii. 72). Another example is the whole of the famous lyric \"Come into the garden, Maud\" (i. xxii), with its seeming parody of courtly love allegory as the roses and lilies discourse beneath the \"planet of Love\" (i. 857). The effect of such imagery is to represent the pathological, hysterical structures of the speaker's emotions (Carol Christ, 26\u20137). They represent an allegory of the speaker's own mind, as Tennyson more or less described _Maud_ : \"You must remember always, in reading it, what it is meant to be \u2013 a drama in lyrics. It shows the unfolding of a lonely, morbid soul, touched with inherited madness . . . The things which seem like faults belong not so much to the poem as to the character of the hero\" ( _Poems_ 2: 517). Quite deliberately experimenting with genre, Tennyson produced an \"allegory of his own mind,\" exactly the kind of unpoetic \"multitudinousness\" that Arnold deplored.\n\nThe distinctly modern Victorian quality of _Maud_ is its description of the horrors of commodity culture as an especially vile form of civil war. The attack on commodity culture is overt and obvious, foregrounded at both the beginning and end of the poem with allusions to the contemporary scandals of infanticides for insurance fraud, \"When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee\" (i. 45), and of food adulteration, \"And chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for bread,/And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life\" (i. 39\u201340). The counterfeit representation of bread by \"chalk and alum and plaster\" in itself suggests a kind of anarchic materialized allegory displacing the semiotic system of material culture. The \"wondrous Mother-age\" and its spirit of progress had been a source of hope in \"Locksley Hall,\" but in _Maud_ it is just the reverse:\n\nBut these are the days of advance, the works of the men of mind,  \nWhen who but a fool would have faith in a tradesman's ware or his word?  \nIs it peace or war? Civil war, as I think, and that of a kind  \nThe viler, as underhand, not openly bearing the sword.  \nSooner or later I too may passively take the print  \nOf the golden age \u2013 why not? I have neither hope nor trust;  \nMay make my heart as a millstone, set my face as a flint,  \nCheat and be cheated, and die: who knows? we are ashes and dust.\n\n(i. 25\u201332)\n\nIt is because he _does_ \"passively take the print\" of the age that _Maud_ registers the pathology of the age in the melancholic psyche of the individual. The point is obvious, and universally accepted among Tennyson's readers, that _Maud_ represents not only an individual person \"but a condition \u2013 the condition of England\" (Culler, 207): \"The poem makes the laureate's principal contribution to the Condition of England question, by representing that condition and the condition of its deranged hero as utterly congruent and as reciprocally determined\" (Tucker, _Tennyson_ , 407).\n\nThe work's most profound contribution to the \"Condition of England\" question takes place not at the overt thematic level but in the ideologically inflected form. To a considerable extent the ideological content is imperialist and Orientalist, and perhaps, if we take an offhand comment of Culler's seriously, this is true at the level of form as well, since Culler describes the poem's incoherence, its leaps \"from subject to subject and mood to mood\" as a \"wild Oriental manner\" (196). The incoherence is better seen, however, as a consequence of a general loss of faith, hope, and trust in modern capitalist society. In a world emptied of the presence of God or any transcendental significance, faith is reduced to a foolish \"faith in a tradesman's ware or his word,\" and the individual can have \"neither hope nor trust.\" As Marx's analysis of the commodity powerfully demonstrates, the system of commodity exchange and money is, like all semiotic systems, like language itself, based on an unanchored system of exchange. The thematic references to capitalist economy point to a general loss of faith, hope, and the charity that would mitigate or eliminate the civil war of economic struggle. Loss of faith in the symbolic system of commodity culture, moreover, implies a similar loss of faith in the symbolic exchange of language, and the result is a breakdown of the connections between words and things, and between words and ideas, that deconstructs language to produce the pathetic fallacies of melancholy allegory.\n\n_Maud_ thus enacts, at the level of form, the close connections of melancholy with the systemic problems of a free market economy: \"Such economies alienate workers from their products, efface for consumers the origin of their fetishized purchases, convert desire itself into an exchangeable commodity, and estrange human intelligence from a 'Nature' that at the close of the eighteenth century receded even as the mind mastered so many of its mysteries\" (Guinn Batten, 1). It is perhaps an insight along these lines that leads Tennyson's speaker to idealize the suppression of desire, even if in a strongly Orientalist manner: \"For not to desire or admire, if a man could learn it, were more/Than to walk all day like the sultan of old in a garden of spice\" (i. 142\u201343). More important to Tennyson than the specific economic scandals he drew from Carlyle was Carlyle's proto-Marxist analysis of the dehumanizing cash nexus that takes the place of a stabilizing vision of truth in capitalism. Consequently, it is not surprising that, even without the help of Marx, Tennyson was able to see the end result of economic civil war as the reification of human life, with individuals reduced to wooden automatons moved only by Adam Smith's \"invisible hand.\"\n\nTennyson consequently anticipates both Robert Browning and Edward Fitzgerald in characterizing the modern alienated subject as a puppet: \"We are puppets. Man in his pride, and Beauty fair in her flower;/Do we move ourselves, or are moved by an unseen hand at a game/That pushes us off from the board, and others ever succeed?\" (i. 126\u201328). _Maud_ is the greatest and fullest expression of Victorian melancholy both because it thematizes the sources of melancholy in Victorian culture and, even more, because it reveals the content of Victorian ideology in its allegorical form.\n\nTennyson's poetry overtly illustrates both Victorian melancholy and its sublimation in imperial conquest, but it also illustrates the sublimation of melancholy in aesthetic form by demonstrating the manic pleasures of allegory. Because allegory enables the melancholic simultaneously to fill the hollow of loss with figuration and to expose the truth of history in his own terms, says Benjamin, \"the only pleasure the melancholic permits himself, and it is a powerful one, is allegory\" ( _Origin_ , 185). Strangely, Benjamin describes the pleasures of sublimation in allegory in terms particularly appropriate to my argument about Tennyson's Orientalism: \"The wealth of ciphers which the allegorist discovered . . . may not accord with the authority of nature; but the voluptuousness with which significance rules, like a stern sultan in the harem of objects, is without equal in giving expression to nature\" (184). It is, perhaps, only by chance that Benjamin's simile so propitiously fits my argument, but his general point about the pleasure of allegorization points to a fundamental connection between melancholy and aestheticism that characterizes Tennyson's poems from \"Mariana\" through _Maud_ and that further illuminates the close connection in the later nineteenth century between melancholy and aestheticism.\n\nAlthough the poetry of sensation led others into aestheticism, however, Tennyson was appalled when \"he was attacked with the cry of 'Art for Art's sake'\" and composed an epigram referring to the movement as \"truest Lord of Hell!\" (Hallam Tennyson, _Memoir_ , 2: 91\u20132). At the same time that Tennyson was working on _Idylls of the King_ , Walter Pater, Swinburne, Morris, and D. G. Rossetti were using medieval themes and sources to explore the meeting of the pagan world with Christianity, making what Pater called a \"deliberate choice between Christ and a rival lover\" (191), in which the poets of the \"aesthetic school\" all sided with the rival lover, with pagan sensuality, in order to write an uninhibited poetry of sensation. Tennyson, also using medieval material for the _Idylls_ , pointedly separated himself from \"Art with poisonous honey stolen from France\" (\"To the Queen,\"l.56). Far from abandoning the theme and mode of melancholy, however, Tennyson wrote the _Idylls_ as an allegory of melancholy, a tale \"shadowing Sense at war with Soul\" (\"To the Queen,\" l.37). Though he did not like to be pinned down by too dogmatic allegorical readings, or, as he put it, \"tied down to say ' _This_ means _that_ \"' he acknowledged that \"there is an allegorical or perhaps rather a parabolic drift in the poem\" (Hallam Tennyson, _Memoir_ , 2: 127). In fact, Tennyson evidently conceived of the _Idylls_ as early as 1833 as an allegory in which Arthur would symbolize \"Religious Faith,\" Merlin would symbolize \"Science,\" Mordred would be \"the skeptical understanding,\" and so on. The poem underwent many changes over the decades of its composition, and symbolic meanings tended to shift, but in the finished _Idylls_ , \"Sense at war with Soul\" plainly meant the sensuality of the flesh (Guinevere, Ettarre, Vivien) at war with conscience (Arthur).4 The dialectic of personal desire at war with conscience, of course, constitutes melancholy itself, and the whole of the _Idylls_ quite evidently allegorizes that dialectic. Ultimately, in this allegory, sensation triumphs and sins of the flesh unseat the conscience so that man rolls back into the beast. Still, Tennyson leaves no doubt that failure to obey the dictates of conscience is destructive at both the personal and social level. Gladstone was undoubtedly correct in saying that \"Wherever [Arthur] appears, it is as the great pillar of the moral order\" (quoted in Hallam Tennyson, _Memoir_ , 130). As Gladstone's comment indicates, the conscience in this allegory is very obviously the internalized moral order of the age, and most obviously it rages against the perceived moral decay of the time. Unfortunately, the great pillar of the moral order inevitably sounds priggish to an almost inhuman extent, but the very severity of Arthur's repudiation of Guinevere may be regarded as the rage of the superego against the ego \u2013 the maiming rage that Freud would find to be the necessary but painful condition of civilization. Such a reading of the _Idylls_ undoubtedly states the case too baldly: Tennyson himself allegorized his allegory in an attempt to ward off such readings: \"Poetry is like shotsilk with many glancing colours. Every reader must find his own interpretation\" (Hallam Tennyson, _Memoir_ , 2: 127). For my purposes, however, it is not necessary to examine the subtleties of Tennyson's painted veil but simply to note that the _Idylls_ presents both of the \"two Tennysons,\" the spokesman of Victorian values and the poet of sensation, and that this dialogue of the mind with itself dramatizes the disastrous results when the conscience loses control but, as poetry, also illustrates the disastrous results if the conscience triumphs too fully: in Arthur's extraordinary rebuke to the groveling Guinevere, Tennyson's poetry is reduced to a smug moral superiority \u2013 the voice of a pillar, not a poet. As I will argue in the next chapter,5 the triumph of conscience, or superego, is damaging to the poetry of melancholy because it short-circuits dialectic and leaves the poet little more than a spokesperson for official culture.\n\n#  **Notes**\n\n1 Tennyson's focus on commodity culture is also representative of nineteenth-century allegory as Benjamin understood it. Benjamin's emphasis on allegory as a record of ruin and decay is even intensified in his shift from German baroque drama to the modern world. As Kelley puts it [Theresa Kelley, _Reinventing Allegory_ (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 253] \"whereas decay was [in German baroque culture] a melancholy, plodding affair in [the 'commodified' world] it is very nearly instantaneous and, as such, a shocking sign that decay and ruin, not continuity, make history\".\n\n2 In the book from which this chapter is taken, David G Riede, _Allegories of One's Own Mind_ , 15\u201316.\n\n3 Ibid., 27 ff.\n\n4 For a discussion of Arthur as conscience see Matthew Reynolds, _The Realms of Gold, 1830\u20131870; English Poetry in a_ T _ime of Nation Building_ (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 246\u20137.\n\n5 \"Elizabeth Barratt and the Emotion of the Trapped\", David G. Riede, op.cit., 91\u2013133.\n\n# **Works Cited**\n\nArnold, Matthew. _Complete Prose Works_ , ed R H Super, 11 Vols. (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1960\u20131977).\n\nArmstrong, Isobel. _Victorian Poetry, Poetics and Politics_ (London/NY: Routledge, 1993).\n\nBatten, Guinn. _The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture in English Romanticism_ (Durham NC: Duke UP, 1998).\n\nBenjamin, Walter. _The Origins of the German Tragic Drama_ , trans John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977).\n\n\u2014\u2014. 'On Language as Such, and on the Language of Man', _One Way Street and Other Writings_ , trans Edmund Jephcott & Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1985).\n\nBradley, A C. _Shakespearian Tragedy_ (1904), repr (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1962).\n\nChrist, Carol. _The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry_ (New Haven: Yale UP, 1975).\n\nColeridge, Samuel Taylor. _Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other English Poets_ (London: G Bell & Sons, 1814).\n\nCuller, A Dwight. _The Poetry of Tennyson_ (New Haven: Yale UP, 1977).\n\nDe Man, Paul. _Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust_ (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979).\n\nFerguson, Harvie. _Melancholy and the Critique of Modernism: S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard's Religious Philosophy_ (London: Routledge, 1995).\n\nPater, Walter. _Selected Writings_ , ed Harold Bloom (NY: Signet, 1974).\n\nRicks, Christopher. _Tennyson_ (London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1972).\n\nRuskin, John. _Works_ , ed ET Cook & Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1904).\n\nSwinburne, Algernon. _Letters_ , ed Cecil Y Lang, 6 vols (New Haven: Yale UP, 1959\u201362).\n\nTennyson, Alfred Lord. _Poems_ , ed Christopher Ricks, 3 vols (Harlow: Longman & Berkeley: U of Calif P, 1987).\n\n\u2014\u2014. _Letters_ , ed Cecil Y Lang & Edgar Shannon Jr, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon P, & Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1981\u201390).\n\nTennyson, Hallam. _Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir by His Son_ , 2 vols (1897), repr (NY: Greenwood Press, ).\n\nTucker, Herbert. _Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism_ (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1988).\n\nRiede, David G. 2005. \"Tennyson's 'Little _Hamlet_.'\" In _Allegories of One's Own Mind: Melancholy in Victorian Poetry_ , pp. 75\u201390. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Reproduced with permission of Ohio State University Press.\n\n# 16\n\n# The Disappointment of Christina G Rossetti\n\nEric Griffiths\n\nChristina G. Rossetti sometimes disappoints a reader. The opening line of 'Golden Glories' is extreme, and characteristic: 'The buttercup is like a golden cup'.1 Of course it is, otherwise the flower would be called something else \u2013 'butterelectricshaver' or 'butterfrisbee'. The inane chime brings on a let-down, as when you walk upstairs and overcalculate the number of steps by one; muscular intent comes to nothing, and the foot goes through air. These let-downs are frequent in her writing, in prose as well as verse. A tale for children delights to find a mole has 'handy little hands'; her calendar of devout thoughts for adults, _Time Flies_ , remarks of Saint Philip and Saint James the Less (known as such to distinguish him from Saint James the Great): 'The Gospel tells us little specially of St. Philip, and even less of St. James (the Less)'.2 The earlier work offers 'Athirst with thirst'; 'the dreadful dread'; 'last words, and last, last words'; 'the past past'. She is still at it in her late poems from 'Time lengthening, in the lengthening seemeth long' until 'Eternity to be and be and be'.3\n\nListening in to verbal repetition throughout this poet's work, taking account of how many times she had recourse to phrases like 'day by day', 'point to point', 'star with star', 'fire from fire', the perpetual variations on sameness in her writing, you recognise that, though the buttercup which is like a cup may be a mere slip of her lip or pen, something more than clumsiness speaks through the stumbles. These verbal stubbornnesses hang on in her voice, a characteristic 'accent', as Proust understood that word, a feature of style, which may or may not be deliberated but which is integral to the work and to the person we find there.4 Moments when her verbal needle seems stuck in a groove are rarely sheer collapses but rather the sound of her distinct achievement, her life-work of 'observation, ingenuity, and perseverance'.5 Making such let-downs eloquent is her major subject as a poet. She is not only at times a disappointing poet but also, more thoroughly, a poet of disappointment, as she wrote of herself in 1888:\n\nI am that contented 'droner' who accounts her assigned groove the best. . . . I am bound to avow that even my (small) limited amount of self-knowledge certifies me that some of my actual trials are exquisitely adapted to my weak points. Do you know I suspect I find a grinding groove less galling than you do. I feel at home among anxieties and depression . . .6\n\nTake the groove worn by repetitions in her best-known lines:\n\nIn the bleak mid-winter  \nFrosty wind made moan,  \nEarth stood hard as iron,  \nWater like a stone;  \nSnow had fallen, snow on snow,  \nSnow on snow,  \nIn the bleak mid-winter  \nLong ago.7\n\nThe fivefold 'snow' is especially marked because it repeats the stanza's structural rhyme, giving the second quatrain six recurrences of the long 'o' rather than the two which the scheme requires (the vowel has already arrived in the 'moan' / 'stone' of the first quatrain). The lines stay with us partly because of this unrelenting pressure on the word 'snow', a cumulation which shows how blandly snow builds on itself, each flake so little individually and yet when joined to more of the same becoming a power able to transform the look of things. Snow is, then, like the first Christmas, barely heeded as it starts but in the end important throughout the world, over the world, when the world at last reluctantly takes its drift.8 Some of the imaginative reach of this stanza comes from its not mentioning the birth of Christ; had only these lines survived without a title, we could not have known they concerned the Nativity. Hence the surprise when she opens the second verse with the words 'Our God', the concept of the divine appearing in her poem as suddenly as the Christ-child Himself appeared in fact.\n\nSo universal a feature of poetry as repetition \u2013 of phoneme, rhythm, word, phrase, cadence, stanza-shape \u2013 couldn't by itself help us pick out the accent of Christina G. Rossetti. From the point of view of a poet and theorist like Val\u00e9ry, sensuous, linguistic persistence sheerly defines poetic language as contrasted with language which takes on practical tasks or the toils of abstract thought; poetry begins when 'the sound, I might even say the physique, of [a] little phrase returns inside me, repeats itself inside me . . . I enjoy hearing my lips form it again and again'.9 Not only poets and their readers have the experience of being inhabited by some words, having them shadow or preoccupy your thought, nor is the experience always a serene, aesthetic revel. Wordsworth, in his 'Note' to 'The Thorn', takes a broad view of verbal repetition:\n\n. . . every man must know that an attempt is rarely made to communicate impassioned feelings without something of an accompanying consciousness of the inadequateness of our own powers, or the deficiencies of language. During such efforts there will be a craving in the mind, and as long as it is unsatisfied the Speaker will cling to the same words, or words of the same character. There are also various other reasons why repetition and apparent tautology are frequent beauties of the highest kind. Among the chief of these reasons is the interest which the mind attaches to words, not only as symbols of the passion, but as _things_ , active and efficient, which are of themselves part of the passion. And further, from a spirit of fondness, exultation, and gratitude, the mind luxuriates in the repetition of words which appear successfully to communicate its feelings. The truth of these remarks might be shown by innumerable passages from the Bible and from the impassioned poetry of every nation.10\n\nThere is a magnificent amplitude in his remarks, a sweep which ranges from the splutters of a person struggling in the lime of words (craving and clinging at once \u2013 'fucking mother-fucking fucker' and the like) to inspired utterance, 'the Bible and . . . the impassioned poetry of every nation'. These extremes can meet, as for example in the Book of Job. Wordsworth passes from the kind of repetition which evinces a sense of lack in language to replete, luxuriating repetition with an unruffled 'There are also various other reasons why repetition and apparent tautology are frequent beauties . . .', as if he were merely enumerating more instances of the same phenomenon. Across this anodyne 'various other reasons' he moves between two conceptions of language, conceptions which, were we to treat them as elements of a unified theory, would be not only diverse but contradictory. At first, he speaks as if states of consciousness and their linguistic expression were identifiable apart from each other, so that a speaker might spot a mismatch between them, but in repetition of his second type words are 'not only . . . symbols of the passion, but . . . _things_ , active and efficient, which are of themselves part of the passion'. In these terms, the feeling of 'mismatch' or let-down is harder to explain; there is nowhere between thought and language where we can stand and observe them failing, like two strips of patterned wallpaper, to line up exactly with each other.\n\nRossetti has nothing as sublime as Job, though her lyrics are comparably genuine as they bring together in utterance a 'consciousness of . . . inadequateness' and a grateful iteration which finds its own words somehow successful, felicitous even. A speaker can really feel both these ways and at the same time about words, troublous though this is for a theory of language to describe. As in her poem, 'Ripetizione' ['Repetition']:\n\nCredea di riverderti e ancor ti aspetto;  \nDi giorno in giorno ognor ti vo bramando:  \nQuando ti rivedr\u00f2, cor mio diletto,  \nQuando ma quando?\n\nDissi e ridissi con perenne sete,  \nE lo ridico e vo'ridirlo ancora,  \nQual usignol che canta e si ripete  \nFino all'aurora.\n\n[I thought I would see you again and I'm still waiting for you; / From day to day and always I go about craving you: / When will I see you again, sweet heart of mine, / When oh when?  \nI said 'when?' and I said it again with a perpetual thirst, / And I say it again and want to go on saying it, / Like the nightingale who sings, repeating itself / Right through till dawn.]11\n\nItalian is inherently thick with rhyme, but Rossetti laces her verse with a surplus of chiming, a surplus which both enriches its formality, stresses how rule-governed it is, and at the same time releases through the rules the inflection of a quirky, self-determining voice, a voice dutiful to excess and so not only dutiful.12 Thus, the first three lines are threaded with internal rhymes on 'ancor', 'ognor', 'cor' ('still', 'always', 'heart'), and as these rhymes fall stably just after the middle of the line, they have the effect of confirming the patternedness of her words; they are plushy, quilted even. The sudden intrusion of an extra rhyme in lines 2\u20133 \u2013 'bramando / Quando' (which might louchely be rendered 'for you I have a constant yen / When') \u2013 snags the verse, though it too comes as a surplus, because it is the structural '\u2013 ando' which recurs, recurs twelve syllables before it is due at the end of the stanza. The sound comes too soon, as if in a fit of impatience, an impatience apt to the psychological burden of the poem but skewed across the broader outline of its form. In the first case of internal rhyme, the voice might be said to luxuriate over its prowess within the verse; in the second, it rather seems to kick against its own traces, cramped inside the shape it is making for itself. What is true in this detail remains true of the piece as a whole. When the poet says she has many times said 'when?' and 'vo'ridirlo ancora' ('I want to go on saying it'), what is the nature of her longing to repeat herself? She would have to stop were the beloved to turn up, so perhaps she is too happy in her unhappiness to desire the satisfaction of her desire. Or she could be a Nietzschean, remorselessly willing the eternal recurrence of any and every moment of her life. Had Freud treated her, he might have diagnosed from the phrase an obsessional neurosis, the insistence of a compulsion to repeat whose very nature demonstrates not affirmation but abeyance of an individual will. Then again, any or all of these scriptings for the poem would be rejected by someone who maintained that the 'I' here is a purely 'lyric I' whom it would be a category-mistake to confuse with the historical person who used to sign herself 'Christina G. Rossetti'. The desire to 'go on saying' of a 'lyric I' is not to be understood psychologically but rather as part of the grammar of lyric poetry itself, a form of utterance which inherently strives for self-perpetuation and which gives us not snapshots of a particular person's emotional state at any one time but a permanent algebra of human moods.13\n\nTo reflect on repetition in a poem such as Rossetti's 'Ripetizione', we need the concepts of an empirical and of a 'lyric' self, distinct but related, as we also need to acknowledge the existence of both Wordsworthian kinds of repetition, the clinging lack and the exultant fullness. The poem lends itself to an impassioned voicing; it can speak the demand of a person in real distress, a person who wants an answer from another. Hearing that tune in it, we may be alerted to biographical facts about Christina G. Rossetti; we respond to that aspect of the work which makes it specifically _her_ poem. Equally though, the poem is dextrously composed in the traditional hendecasyllabics of Italian verse with various other marks of self-conscious literariness; there is no linguistic feature of the text which indicates the gender of speaker or beloved, and the enfolding mellifluousness, as it were the contentment of the words one with another, could suggest to us a more equable voicing, one in which the poem answers to itself and entertains with some placidity a future in which there is no satisfaction to come other than the confidence that desire will not fade away into mutism. We should not choose between these versions, for it is through their confluence that the poem has been made. In 'Ripetizione', a composed and a suffering voice are poignantly in each other's earshot; such a doubled consciousness can actually occur to any of us, and does so on those occasions when we hear ourselves thumping a favourite tub, telling a joke we have told before, playing again our tune. It is just that Rossetti has given this doubled consciousness a pleasurably definite shape, as we mostly cannot manage to do.\n\nSchopenhauer raises these details of literary practice to grand heights when he defines the 'nature of the lyric proper':\n\nIt is the subject of the will, in other words, the singer's own willing, that fills his consciousness, often as a released and satisfied willing (joy), but even more often as an impeded willing (sorrow), always as emotion, passion, an agitated state of mind. Besides this, however, and simultaneously with it, the singer . . . becomes conscious of himself as the subject of pure, will-less knowing, whose unshakable, blissful peace now appears in contrast to the stress of willing that is always restricted and needy. The feeling of this contrast, this alternate play, is really what is expressed in the whole of the song, and what in general constitutes the lyrical state. In this state pure knowing comes to us, so to speak, in order to deliver us from willing and stress. We follow, yet only for a few moments; willing, desire, the recollection of our own personal aims, always tears us anew from peaceful contemplation . . . Therefore in the song and in the lyrical mood, willing (the personal interest of the aims) and pure perception of the environment that presents itself are wonderfully blended with each other. . . . The genuine song is the expression or copy of the whole of this mingled and divided state of mind.14\n\nI set aside the many metaphysical commitments Schopenhauer makes in this sharp and lofty passage (the special sense that 'will' has for him, his belief that 'pure, will-less knowing' is possible, and so on). I take the passage simply as a contribution to understanding the grammar of many lyrics. A state of arrested and contemplated 'personal aims' often occurs explicitly in the story of a lyric, as when Keats praises and laments the position of the 'Bold lover' on the Grecian urn: 'never, never canst thou kiss, / Though winning near the goal'.15 The depth of Schopenhauer's suggestion lies in his discerning such a state within composer, protagonist and reader of a lyric. Keats not only envisaged the permanence for the lover of a 'so near and yet so far', he delineated it by curving his words around the line-end \u2013 'kiss, / Though' \u2013 thus dramatising the metrical pause as an instant of ever-verging; nor did he only delineate it, he took pleasure in the interstice and offered it for our responsive pleasure, so that he and we too may analogously experience through language the lover's erotic outreach and its intrinsic curb. Whether or not the lyric has a story which pivots on such a Keatsian stillness, Schopenhauer claims that there is an inherent dynamism in the lyrical state. His account attributes this dynamism to our being in search of a satisfaction beyond the present and simultaneously aware of our own longing as if it were a natural phenomenon whose beauty we observe and wish to preserve (imagine you are hungry and manage to regard your hunger not in relation to your own desires but as something with a place in the world, an endangered species which you wish to maintain in being).\n\nSchopenhauer's formulation would be improved by recasting it into a less psychological vocabulary, for his words could mislead some into believing that he offers a 'reader-response' account of lyricism. The necessary modifications are made by splicing the philosopher's terms with those Wordsworth chooses for his comments on repetition in the 'Note' to 'The Thorn'. The lyric's 'stress of willing' then appears in that repetition which is unsatisfied and craving, a repetition through which language and consciousness present themselves as letting each other down, ill-assorted, unhappily married; the lyric's 'blissful peace' and 'pure perception of the environment' transpire in that other kind of repetition which is fond and grateful, and for which language and consciousness are not extrinsic one to the other but coupled as 'active and efficient' parts of each other. This splicing is justifiable because the demanding, willing consciousness treats language and the natural world alike merely as potential suppliers of something the consciousness lacks; similarly both Schopenhauerian 'knowing' and Wordsworthian gratitude discover themselves _in_ the natural world and language, which they may regard desirously but which they can also leave be. Thus interpreted, the dynamism of lyric appears wholly in the aspect-shifts of verbal design, in the possibility, for example, of voicing 'Ripetizione' now this way and now that, and entails no speculation about the psychology of the writer's empirical self, whether or not, say, she was agitated by love at some time and later placated by a nightingale.\n\nAngela Leighton contrasts Rossetti's work with that of one of her predecessors, L.E.L.: 'She has taken [the] well-worn woman's pose 'to heart', but somehow emptied it of all the cloying appeal of the earlier poet's verse, retaining only the shell \u2013 the exquisite, formal shell of rhyme and metre \u2013 which holds almost no emotional purpose or petition in it at all. . . . Rossetti's most explicitly heart-broken verses verge on being . . . insouciant jests'.16 There is a truth in this, though not put right. Poems do not have insides and outsides; to talk as if they did usually leads to valuing the supposed emotional content (which amounts to no more than paraphrasable sentiment) over the intent processes of composition. Such delusive terms arise from misinterpretation of the aspect-shift inherent to expressively shaped language, by which the utterance may appear demanding or self-replete, afflicted or achieved, and should be understood as both. Nor does the phrase 'insouciant jests' capture that 'archness of expression \u2013 a quality in which the poetess was by no means deficient',17 as William Rossetti demurely says, for the lithe, self-conscious hollowness which Leighton has noticed in the poems is thoroughly souciant, though what it most cares about does not always correspond to a present-day sense of priorities. Angela Leighton's book is on _Victorian Women Poets_ ; naturally then, she compares Rossetti principally with other women. This concentration sometimes has the unfortunate effect, as in other studies of female writers, of attributing a gender-specificity to features of writing which have in fact no such quality. As here, where Leighton implies that to be a 'creature of doubleness',18 is particularly the fate of women who write, whereas this is normal also for male writers, Byron for example. Indeed, it is a speciality in the tradition of masculine self-pity.\n\nConsider a 'Song' Rossetti wrote when she was eighteen:\n\nShe sat and sang alway  \nBy the green margin of a stream,  \nWatching the fishes leap and play  \nBeneath the glad sunbeam.\n\nI sat and wept alway  \nBeneath the moon's most shadowy beam,  \nWatching the blossoms of the May  \nWeep leaves into the stream.\n\nI wept for memory;  \nShe sang for hope that is so fair:  \nMy tears were swallowed by the sea;  \nHer songs died on the air.19\n\nWhy 'alway' rather than 'always'? The _OED_ notes that 'alway' was first confused with and then superseded by 'always', at least 'in prose, _alway_ surviving only in poetry or as an archaism'. The dictionary's last illustrations of the form in prose come from the King James Bible, which is probably where Rossetti found the word in sayings such as 'I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world' (Matthew 28.20). 'In poetry or as an archaism': there's a mine in that 'or'. Perhaps the lexicographer who wrote the note thought of poetry and archaism as options within the same range of thing (as when we offer 'tea or coffee'). That, anyway, is the point of the word in these lines \u2013 poetry survives in this poem _as_ an archaism. 'Song' is an intricate time-loop: two stanzas tell us that something happened unchangingly; it was ever thus, she sang and I wept, but the final lines reveal that this is now a past perpetuity, for both songs and tears are gone. She underlines the 'then' / 'now' contrast by giving the first two stanzas the same rhyme-words, changing to a new set in the last quatrain. Yet the poem which declares the passing of songs is still called 'Song', and is a song, of sorts; it falls into a twisted ballad-stanza, not the 8686 of common measure but recognisably akin to that in its 6886, preserving as it does the abab rhyme-scheme of much folk-poetry. Her voice in the poem reminisces about poetic shapes that have gone before, like someone trying to hum a melody she can't quite get back.\n\nThis is why the 'for' in 'I wept for memory' has such depth of ambiguity: it may be that she wept because she had memories, whether happy or sad, or that she wept because she had once had memories but has now lost even them. Similarly, she 'sang for hope' may mean that she sang because she had hope, or she may have sung for it as people are sometimes required to sing for their suppers. Salt tears return at the close to their natural home, the sea, and songs evaporate into air, into thin air. But then an 'air' in English is another word for a song, which is what the poem's title promised; the piece is back where it started, has eventually itself become a thing of the past, though the past is now its element. Emily Dickinson wrote to Mrs Holland: 'Dear Sister. The Things that never can come back, are several \u2013 Childhood \u2013 some forms of Hope \u2013 the Dead \u2013'.20 The remark is eminently Dickinsonian; it states with electric sternness a series of half-truths. After all, our language speaks not without reason of 'second childhood', and she may have spoken too soon when she denied the resurrection of the dead. Her piercing phrase, 'some forms of Hope', though, goes to a heart of Rossetti's lyricism.\n\nThe customary forms of a poetic tradition, such as the ballad-stanza which she pleats and turns in 'Song', spring eternal in any breast sufficiently familiarised with them, and are 'forms of Hope' just by being designs in time and making it seem, while they last, that time is susceptible of design and not intrinsically waste. Which is not to say that Christina G. Rossetti had what might be called a 'positive outlook'. Heaven forbid. She knew that hope may be a vampire which is not easily laid to rest, and found this side of her writing both wretched and funny, as she wrote to her brother, Dante Gabriel: 'If only my figure would shrink somewhat! For a fat poetess is incongruous especially when seated by the grave of buried hope'.21\n\nThose were different times; they even used the word 'poetess'. Along with its sense of rhythm, it is the past's sense of humour which is hardest to recall. The two senses have close relations with each other, as the importance of 'timing' to both shows. When Rossetti makes her arch joke about the incongruity of being fat and yet known to the public for a fascinating melancholy, she both fills and parodies a r\u00f4le; similar effects occur constantly in her poems. As in 'Maiden-Song', another work which sets poeticality in a persistent but irretrievable past \u2013 'Long ago and long ago, / And long ago', it begins, adding to complete the line, 'still'. 'And long ago still', one of three 'merry maidens' sang out; she\n\nTrilled her song and swelled her song  \nWith maiden coy caprice  \nIn a labyrinth of throbs,  \nPauses, cadences . . .22\n\nThe manuscript shows that she had trouble, as well she might have done, with the word 'cadences'; her editor gives in the textual notes on the last line I quote: 'Pauses, [illegible erasure] < cadences > '. The first two lines here have a familiar swing to them which goes awry in the third and fourth lines, awry to the extent of failing to rhyme at a point where the other stanzas rhyme, coming out with only the assonance of 'caprice' / 'cadences'. The mismatch of these two words is a bold stroke not a blunder, for it enables her to reveal 'cadences' as a portmanteau-word formed from 'maiden ' and 'caprice'. This is thought-provoking: within the framing pastiche-ballad which begins and ends 'long ago', we are to hear a 'labyrinth of throbs, / Pauses, cadences', a complex interiority. There is a temptation to regard this interiority as what is most authentically Rossetti's about the poem. Yet the distinctive swerve on 'cadences' can be heard only through the less wayward rhythms which surround it; if these lines are somehow more 'personal', this personality exists in relation to the rest of the poem not as an item to its container but as a voice singing in an acoustic which has a liveliness of its own, inseparably one with the sound the voice makes within it.\n\nThe lilt in Rossetti's work, which often derives from ballad, folk-song, or nursery rhyme, has been taken by some of her recent critics as representing a conformed world, regular, regulated even. There co-exist (this story goes) with that world and its style of utterance, other, more volatile inflections, a speech which is improperly her own. Critics line up idiomatic speech-rhythms as tokens of the individual and composed verse-rhythms as marks of socialisation, and come to hear her poems as arenas for a combat between self and society; they incline to say that, at least in her rhythmic imagination, she subverts, undermines, interrogates the order of her society. The next steps are easily taken. Her society was patriarchally ordered; literary conventions may be identified with social conventions which they replicate; thus, her voice's off-beats and asymmetries sound the true note of her being-a-woman. There is an appeal to this way of thinking; simplifications have their charm. Yet the implicit notion of how an individual's voice makes itself heard in a language which does not belong exclusively to that individual is incoherent, as if individuality showed itself only in deviation from a norm; the belief that there is something especially female about idiolectal features is groundless; the relation presumed between literary and social conventions does not exist, and, even if it did, it would not follow that a literary variation from the conventional entails a critique of the convention \u2013 artists vary on the past of their arts for many reasons, including a desire to refresh the conventional and keep it alive. What is traditional in Rossetti's poetry is quite as much hers, and hers as a woman, as is her re-inflecting of the tradition.\n\nIt is not agreeable to name individuals guilty of such _b\u00eatises_ , which are anyway endemic in literary criticism at present, but it would be more invidious not to do so. Consider then Isobel Armstrong writing about the idiomatic qualities of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ :\n\nThe aim of 'Sonnets' is to redefine 'the whole/Of life in a new rhythm', as Elizabeth Barrett Browning puts it in Sonnet VII, and the sliding cadences, the deliberate elisions and metrical freedoms which break away from the established regularities of the sonnet form are clearly intentional. The late caesuras and enjambement declare an attempt to dissolve the customary forms and restrictions.23\n\n'Freedoms' stand in antithesis to 'established regularities', 'customary forms' are synonymous with 'restrictions' and need to be 'dissolved'. As Professor Armstrong's chapter is about 'women's poetry', it is not mentioned that all the prosodic features identified may be found in sonnets by Barrett Browning's male predecessors, found so often as to be countable among the 'established regularities of the sonnet form'. Angela Leighton is still more explicit: 'The idea that metrical correctness is equivalent to moral propriety continued into the nineteenth century, at least as far as women's poetry was concerned. Anna Barbauld had laid down the rules, in the previous century, in \"On a Lady's Writing\": \"Her even lines her steady temper show, / Neat as her dress, and polished as her brow.\"'24 Mrs Barbauld was much respected, perhaps especially by men, but her word was not law, nor do her words as quoted here say that 'metrical correctness is equivalent to moral propriety'. Is there reason to believe that this equivalence was thought to apply particularly to women's poetry? In 1861, Ruskin wrote Dante Gabriel Rossetti a sour letter about his sister's poems: 'I sate up till late last night reading poems. They are full of beauty and power. But no publisher . . . would take them, so full are they of quaintnesses and offences. Irregular measure (introduced to my great regret, in its chief wilfulness, by Coleridge) is the calamity of modern poetry. . . . your sister should exercise herself in the severest commonplace of metre until she can write as the public like'.25 Coleridge lived an irregular life, though Ruskin does not equate this with his irregular metres. As it happens, thirty years earlier Coleridge had himself blamed the young Tennyson in similar terms: 'The mischief is that he has begun to write verses without understanding what Metre is. . . . Tennyson's verses are neither fish nor flesh in respect of construction. I can't scan them'; he prescribed for Tennyson, as Ruskin did for Christina G. Rossetti, a r\u00e9gime of exercise in 'well known and strictly defined metres'.26 English writers have failed to hear each others' verse as verse at least since Jonson opined that Donne for not keeping of accent deserved hanging.27 To be misheard is not exclusively a woman's privilege.\n\nThese critics have heard aspects of Rossetti's verse but are led astray by theoretical conceptions and political preconceptions when they try to describe those aspects. She can indeed make poetical graces bitter in the mouth, as when she turns her characteristic, syncopating internal rhymes to acrid effect:\n\nIf I might see another Spring \u2013  \nOh stinging comment on my past  \nThat all my past results in 'if' \u2013 . . .28\n\nwhere the self-interrupting syntax is capped by the premature chime of 'Spring' with 'stinging'. Or again, in her fierce rendering of Psalm 137, notable for the vehement iterations she adds to her original. Where the King James reads 'Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones', she writes:\n\nBy the waters of Babylon  \nTho' the wicked grind the just,  \nOur seed shall yet strike root  \nAnd shall shoot up from the dust . . .29\n\nwhich genteelly veils the infanticidal gloating of the psalm while at the same time spinning from its words a web of violent implication: the 'seed' of God's covenant with Abraham is made vegetable, strikes rather than takes root, as if its very germination willed injury, 'root' accelerates into 'shoot', a precocious burgeoning into vengeance. 'Spring' / 'stinging', 'root' / 'shoot': she speaks of her own woes and those of ancient Israelites with the same impetuosity of internal rhyme. But 'impetuosity' is not the right word, for these anticipative rhymes are timed by a trained ear. The rhythmic catch in her voice is instinct with the experience of time, particularly with the experience of waiting, during which time most makes itself felt. Stanzaic shapes are models of timed experience, periodicities, so premature rhymes, if heard as 'bending the rules', get ahead of themselves, while they also, if heard as extravagantly obedient to the requirements of pattern, school us to patience.\n\nSuch rhymes in her work are instances of lyric's double-aspect, its stilled longing; they show one way she learned to live with unsatisfied desire. As her desire was so religiously set, so informed with readings of the Bible, that for her 'to live' and 'to wait' approach synonymy, her voice naturally takes the same contours whether her subject is the thought of another spring or remembering Jerusalem. Scripture resounds in 'Twice', her most acutely disappointed poem:\n\nI took my heart in my hand  \n(O my love, O my love),  \nI said: Let me fall or stand,  \nLet me live or die,  \nBut this once hear me speak \u2013  \n(O my love, O my love) \u2013  \nYet a woman's words are weak;  \nYou should speak, not I.\n\nYou took my heart in your hand  \nWith a friendly smile,  \nWith a critical eye you scanned,  \nThen set it down,  \nAnd said: It is still unripe,  \nBetter wait awhile;  \nWait while the skylarks pipe,  \nTill the corn grows brown.\n\nAs you set it down it broke \u2013  \nBroke, but I did not wince;  \nI smiled at the speech you spoke,  \nAt your judgment that I heard:  \nBut I have not often smiled  \nSince then, nor questioned since,  \nNor cared for corn-flowers wild,  \nNor sung with the singing bird.\n\nI take my heart in my hand,  \nO my God, O my God,  \nMy broken heart in my hand:  \nThou hast seen, judge Thou.  \nMy hope was written on sand,  \nO my God, O my God;  \nNow let Thy judgment stand \u2013  \nYea, judge me now.\n\nThis contemned of a man,  \nThis marred one heedless day,  \nThis heart take Thou to scan  \nBoth within and without:  \nRefine with fire its gold,  \nPurge Thou its dross away \u2013  \nYea hold it in Thy hold,  \nWhence none can pluck it out.\n\nI take my heart in my hand \u2013  \nI shall not die, but live \u2013  \nBefore Thy face I stand;  \nI, for Thou callest such:  \nAll that I have I bring,  \nAll that I am I give,  \nSmile Thou and I shall sing,  \nBut shall not question much.30\n\nWhy is the poem called 'Twice'? Perhaps the title glances at the proverbial 'once bitten, twice shy', meaning: once I offered my heart to someone, but never again. This burned child does not fear the fire, though; she makes a second offering of her heart, this time to God. The poem does not tell us how to understand the relation, if there is one (or more than one), between the human beloved and the divine. Little happens in the story, or rather, what happens is a momentous let-down, an erotic bathos: the man says 'thanks but no thanks'. The story ends before we know how God responds to the second offer (in this, it is life-like). 'Twice' inhabits what Hopkins, in devout parody of the liturgical 'world without end', termed a 'world without event'.31 In this vacated world, words occur redoubledly; _they_ _are_ what happens twice (at least). Clasped about each other, at once spasmic and psalmodic, her words come back on her : 'I took', 'you took', 'take Thou'; 'Let me fall or stand', 'let Thy judgment stand', 'Before Thy face I stand'; 'you scanned', 'take Thou to scan'; and so on. Such intense recapitulation suggests that the title may have the further sense of a musical instruction to repeat a piece, so that 'Twice' obeys what Beckett called 'the beautiful convention of the \"da capo\"'.32 As in Hebrew lyric, verbal doublings and parallelisms both vent a self-assertive human will and also create with that will's vehemences a shape in which it prepares to conform itself to God's will, so that what she said of Psalm 102 is true of her 'Twice', 'this woeful complaint is still a song: even while he lies under the Divine indignation and wrath the penitent sings and makes melody in his heart to the Lord'.33\n\nHer finest stroke comes when she anticipates the rhyme to come on 'wince' in the third stanza: 'But I have not often smiled / Since then, nor questioned since' \u2013 the understatement of 'not often', the run-on past 'smiled' which insists we don't dwell on the word and so perhaps implies the smile itself was faint, the fall of the voice onto 'since', arriving too soon at the beginning of the line but then re-arriving in its formal place as the terminal rhyme. That repeated 'since' tells how drastic the rejection was: everything since then is merely more 'since'-ness, a long anniversary of what did not come right. The voice turns sharply onto 'since' but with what curve of larynx it is impossible to say: we may hear her as self-pitying, indignant, derisive, numb. The word stands at an ethical junction from which it is possible to move in the direction of many attitudes. Anthony Harrison is sure which route she took: '\"Twice\" operates at a level of cultural criticism different from that of \"Light Love\" and \"An Apple-Gathering\". The attack implicit in its four [sic] brief stanzas is upon the powerlessness of women in a rigid patriarchal society'.34 The one reproachful word the poem utters is 'heedless' which does not add up to much of an 'attack'; Rossetti nowhere specifies the social context of the encounter, probably because she rightly thought such disappointments happen in all societies, nor does she regret her 'powerlessness' because power would have been no help to her (does Professor Harrison suppose she might have _compelled_ the response she desired had she but had a gat to hand?). She does not embark on 'cultural criticism' but submits herself to divine judgment. Readers nowadays may be disappointed by her lack of socio-political pugnacity but these regrets do not excuse misprision of her work. Particularly not when, as with this poem, the work is brave and individually achieved while the pretence that she was engaged in feminist critique just recycles a slack and canting sentimentalism, a refusal to face, or even countenance, the disappointment that waits for all of us, male, female, or excluded middle.\n\nWhy does God appear in stanza four of 'Twice' (as with His arrival in the second verse of 'A Christmas Carol', there has been no sign of Him before)? Today's wisdom is prompt to explain; Rossetti must be sublimating. Adrienne Rich could have fingered her as one who 'like Simone Weil, like St. Teresa, like Heloise, . . . substitutes a masculine God for the love of earthly men (or women) \u2013 a pattern followed by certain gifted imaginative women in the Christian era'.35 In a sense, this is true, as it is equally true that Adrienne Rich substitutes the love of earthly women (or men) for God \u2013 a pattern followed by certain gifted imaginative women in what is called the post-Christian era. Freud's hypotheses about the origins of religious belief have for many become articles of faith, but if we preserve a scepticism even about Freud, we may find more to say about God in 'Twice'. He crosses her mind, I think, because of all human experiences the one which gives you the most piercing sense of what divine judgement might be like is an erotic venture of your self such as she makes in the poem. All of you at such a time is at issue. An extreme of dread, then, is that on the Last Day God might decline to take me back to His place. This is why Rossetti often alludes in this poem to Scriptures about death and judgment.36 Her eschatological shadowings and the specific instance of erotic disappointment figure and measure each other. There was an end of sorts to her world when she was turned down, and the breakage of her hopes can be understood as emblematic of how all human designs are frail; conversely, that fragility is a universal human condition, that the world will end and all suffer some cut-off of what they have known and desired, reminds her she is not the only being on the face of the earth deserving of pity. Nor does the poem quite end with its own concluding words, for a last sense of 'Twice' is an ethical version of the musical _da capo_ : what calm the poem achieves about its own pain is not something possessed once and for all, but will have to be worked towards again, patience being an incessant rehearsal of itself.\n\nWilliam Rossetti remarked of his youngest sister 'She was replete with the spirit of self-postponement, which passed into self-sacrifice whenever that quality was in demand'.37 Self-postponement' is a good word for what shows of her in her writing; formally and substantively, hers is an art of longings delayed but not abandoned. Her renunciations were temporary; she spared herself and others the fanatic altruism of the young George Eliot with her view that 'All self-sacrifice is good'.38 Her foregoings, though, went too far for some later tastes. Virginia Woolf knew what Rossetti lacked: 'she starved herself of love, which meant also life'.39 What this coarse remark means is that Rossetti had, so far as we know, not much of a sex-life which, according to Virginia Woolf, for a woman means not much of a life full stop. Rossetti lived all but her last eight years with her mother, whom she loved passionately, but Woolf doesn't count this, or any of the poet's other intimate and devoted relations, as 'love'; it was beyond Woolf to conceive that a love of God might be love too.\n\nRossetti's prose yields many compounds made with 'self-': 'self-oblation', 'self-mistrustful', 'self-restriction', 'self-sifting'.40 Her values are not comforted or comforting, but they can be respected. When, for example, she writes\n\nAnd as the poor never cease out of the land and are in various degrees standing representatives of famine, this self-stinting seems . . . to be the rule and standard of right living; not a desperate exceptional resource, but a regular, continual, plain duty.41\n\nher words continue to make a sane and decent admonition. It is not necessary to be a Christian to recognise the eloquence, the ardour of the following passage in which she tries to bring out the power of redemption as it re-orients our being in the created world and that world's bearing on us:\n\nNot merely all the inhabitants thereof, but the earth itself is dissolved; and Christ alone bears up the pillars of it . . . In judgment upon man, or in sympathy with him, all is disjointed, unstrung, enfeebled; all faints, fails, groans, travails in pain together . . .  \nAnd Christ, on Whose sinless head our sins were made to converge, willed also that on Himself should centre the short-coming, failure, disappointment, which balk us at every turn.42\n\nShe sounds for a moment like Hopkins, especially in her turning-inside-out of the word 'self-centred' so that it expresses Christ's will 'that on Himself should centre' all the abeyances and thwartings which cross the path of human selves. It is, though, necessary for the appreciation of so great a passage to try to open yourself imaginatively to forms of life and belief which may be very different from your own; this, unfortunately, is something many writers about literature are currently not prepared to do.43\n\nF. D. Maurice was alert and sober about the complexities at issue hereabouts:\n\nTo enter into the meaning of self-sacrifice \u2013 to sympathise with any one who aims at it \u2013 not to be misled by counterfeits of it \u2013 not to be unjust to the truth which may be mixed with those counterfeits \u2013 is a difficult task . . . 44\n\nHe was introducing Charles Kingsley's _The Saint's Tragedy_ , a polemical drama about the life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, who gave up for the religious life her immense earthly wealth and her attachment to husband and children. Charlotte Bront\u00eb had a fair sense of the play's merits and failings: 'Faulty it may be, crude and unequal, yet there are portions where some of the deep chords of human nature are swept with a hand which is strong even while it falters. We see throughout (I _think_ _)_ that Elizabeth has not, and never had a mind perfectly sane'.45 St Elizabeth of Hungary's story became a centre of considerable interest after Kingsley's play (1848), particularly to Rossetti because her one-time fianc\u00e9, James Collinson, decided to produce a large, historical painting on the subject. The life of this medieval saint focussed a more general concern in the late eighteen-forties, a concern that can be put in a word: nuns.\n\nAt the Reformation, religious orders for men and women were dissolved, and for centuries thereafter forbidden in this kingdom. From about twenty years before Kingsley's play, there had been a growing movement to revive these orders. Southey in 1829 lamented that England had no Sisters of Charity such as the B\u00e9guines; small groups of Roman Catholic nuns began to work in England again in the late eighteen-thirties. Marian Rebecca Hughes became in 1841 the first Anglican woman since the Reformation to take religious vows, secretly in the church of St Mary the Virgin at Oxford. The first sisterhood took up residence at 17, Park Village West in Easter Week, 1845; from opposite directions, the nuns and the female Rossettis converged for divine service on Christ Church, Albany Street. By the time Maria Francesca Rossetti entered the novitiate at the All Saints' Sisters of the Poor in 1873, some forty Anglican sisterhoods had been established; they had been mocked in _Punch_ and aroused sufficient concern to require a report from a Select Committee of Parliament on conventual and monastic institutions (1870).46\n\nThere were several kinds of worry about the sisterhoods. Walter Walsh considered them 'not only Popish, but also Pagan in [their] origin', comparable to 'priestesses of Freya'; he hinted that some of them died in suspicious circumstances: 'Nuns are buried within those [convent] walls, though whether their deaths were properly registered or not is more than I can say'.47 Walsh was an ecclesiastical guttersnipe, but many of his concerns were shared by more respectable observers. In _Sisterhoods in the Church of England_ , a Miss Goodman claimed that the religious vow of obedience produced 'spiritual despotism and terrorism' in the communities.48 There was great resistance to all religious vows from many bishops, though, as is the custom of the Anglican hierarchy, their views were inconsistently expressed and went largely ignored by those they most affected. There was, in fact, no solid ecclesial or theological argument against religious orders for women; the suspicion and resentment directed at the sisterhoods expressed rather a foggy, socio-sexual ethos. Bishop Tait opined in 1865: 'I believe no blessing will ever come on work, however self-denying, which is undertaken to the neglect of those higher duties which belong to home life, and which are imposed directly by God Himself'. G. H. Lewes shared the bishop's domestic Erastianism: 'The grand function of woman, it must always be recollected, is, and ever must be, _Maternity_ : and this we regard not only as her distinctive characteristic, and most endearing charm, but as a high and holy office'.49 The unctuous blather about 'higher duties' and 'high and holy office' shows its true nature in Lewes's brutal 'function'. Supporters of the sisterhoods were among the few at that time to credit women with a choice of life not determined by their r\u00f4le in reproducing the species. Thus, J. M. Neale was unusual in saying that virginity ' _is_ a higher and holier state' than marriage and maternity, as Pusey was unusual in defending sisterhoods from the control of the male clergy: 'I think it is a wrong ambition of men to wish to have the direction of the work of women. I should fear that it would be for the injury of both. Women ought to understand their own work, the education and care of young women; or they would not be fit for it at all'.50\n\nVictorian nervousness about groups of women detached from their families and under rules of their own devising was exacerbated by sexual tremors. The period was not one of pre-Freudian 'innocence' about the entanglement of erotic and religious desires; its difference from the twentieth century lies rather in the fact that no single theory of that entanglement had established so powerful a monopoly of explanation as has Freud's in our time. Kingsley speaks out through his mouthpiece, Walter, berating medieval Puseyites: 'I have watched you and your crew, how you preach up selfish ambition for divine charity and call prurient longings celestial love, while you blaspheme that very marriage from whose mysteries you borrow all your cant'. He turns to sub-Shakespearean metaphors of sexual queasiness in characterising the pious aspirations of young women as 'pert fancies; / This fog-bred mushroom-spawn of brain-sick wits', and arranges that Elizabeth's dying words should hint that her heart is set towards reunion with her dead husband, much though the priest, Conrad, tries to stage-manage her as an ascetic saint:\n\n _E LIZ[ABETH]_, Now I must sleep for ere the sun shall rise,  \nI must be gone upon a long, long journey  \nTo him I love.\n\n _C ON[RAD]_. She means her heavenly Bridegroom \u2013  \nThe Spouse of souls.\n\n _E LIZ_. I said, to him I love.51\n\nThe phrase 'the spouse of souls' marks Conrad as thoroughly un-English; no decent Protestant would use such a risqu\u00e9 term. The Bishop of London, for example, had objected to the description in their Rule of the Park Village sisters as 'spouses of our Lord'.52 Something other and more than prudery operates here, though prudery was also at work, nor do we face only apprehensiveness about a volatile mix of female desire and Catholic mysticism. A more general question arises, one which Rossetti touched on when pondering the verse 'God is Love' (I John 4.16): 'Beyond a doubt \"God is Love\": it is my own conception of love which may not in truth be love'.53 Theologians may expand this thought to the vast issue of whether terms understood in and through human experience (such as 'love') can be applied in any intelligibly analogous sense to a God who transcends human experience, but they can hardly make the thought deeper than it is in Rossetti's plain words. The confluence of erotic and religious vocabularies in Rossetti's work, as in many liturgical contexts or in the carping about sisterhoods, puts this question repeatedly and from many angles; that she had no answer to the question does not prove she was unaware of it. Indeed, this might rather show how well she understood it.\n\nThe third of Rossetti's 'Three Nuns' describes a woman's entry into the religious life:\n\nMy heart trembled when first I took  \nThe vows which must be kept;  \nAt first it was a weariness  \nTo watch when once I slept.  \nThe path was rough and sharp with thorns;  \nMy feet bled as I stepped;  \nThe Cross was heavy and I wept.\n\nWhile still the names rang in mine ears  \nOf daughter, sister, wife;  \nThe outside world still looked so fair  \nTo my weak eyes, and rife  \nWith beauty; my heart almost failed;  \nThen in the desperate strife  \nI prayed, as one who prays for life,\n\nUntil I grew to love what once  \nHad been so burdensome.  \nSo now when I am faint, because  \nHope deferred seems to numb  \nMy heart, I yet can plead; and say  \nAlthough my lips are dumb:  \n'The Spirit and the Bride say, Come.'54\n\nShe wrote this section in 1850, and never published it, for reasons which may have included its nearness to the bone of her relation to Collinson but also probably involved its nearness to the knuckle of ecclesiastical controversy about sisterhoods (the poem's 'vigils', 'fasts' and 'vows which must be kept' are all notably Romanizing). Consider the line 'I prayed, as one who prays for life'. She may pray 'for life' in the sense of wishing again for her life before she entered the convent, harking back along some of her rhymes to a world 'rife / With beauty' in which she might have been called 'wife'; she may pray for her life because the struggle with those old desires is so desperate she fears she will die; she may pray for a true life of devotion which she has not yet attained, a life of devotion which she hopes will yield the life eternal. She has at any rate taken a perpetual vow of lifelong prayer. The passage dramatically suggests a complex state of the soul, and yet is aptly quiet in its drama, as in the so hushed intimation of the change that comes over the nun, an intimation carried by Rossetti's extra internal rhyming of 'still', 'still' in the penultimate stanza with the eventual 'Until' at the beginning of the last verse. Henry James took a _novella_ to arrive at a similar, inquiring poise over the many aspects of a woman's disappointment, renunciation and ability to make a new life \u2013 the last sentence of _Washington Square_ : 'Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlour, picking up her morsel of fancy-work, had seated herself with it again \u2013 for life, as it were'.55\n\nThe rhyme-sound which completes the last stanza of 'Three Nuns' ('numb' / 'dumb' / 'Come') is the same sound which completed the opening stanza of the first monologue in the set (she rhymes on it nowhere else in the poems):\n\nShadow, shadow on the wall  \nSpread thy shelter over me;  \nWrap me with a heavy pall,  \nWith the dark that none may see.  \nFold thyself around me; come:  \nShut out all the troublesome  \nNoise of life; I would be dumb.56\n\nWe hear, arching over the whole sequence, how these distinct women have become sisters to each other through a shared life. They remain individuals, though, because Rossetti varies the seven-line stanza they have in common, giving them different rhyme-schemes and syllabic distributions. We also gauge through the recurrence of rhyme how long these women wait in their night-watches, for Rossetti has made 'Three Nuns' not only a sequence but also a cycle. She wrote that 'human life is in two sections, life terminable and life interminable',57 and this sounds gloomier than perhaps she intended, for 'interminable', though meant to mean 'everlasting', somehow doesn't have the same ring.\n\nThe last line of 'Three Nuns' quotes almost the last words of the Bible, Revelation 22.17: 'And the Spirit and the bride say, Come'. The sacred text ends with confidence that Christ will come quickly, as it had begun by prophesying 'things which must shortly come to pass' (Revelation l.1). Rossetti opens her commentary on this book : 'At the end of 1800 years we are still repeating this \"shortly\"'; she discovers in this still repeating a 'fellowship of patience' with Saint John.58 The nun finds it difficult to say the words which say what she longs for; she says them with dumb lips, and perhaps she only quotes them \u2013 they are placed within inverted commas. This is not surprising because the words entail an apocalyptic resignation of the self and its whole world; the most world-weary might find them hard to utter. The words are there, though, in the silence of the page, on her heart's lips, evermore about to be said. This liminal aspect to the utterance is the verge of lyric, for, as Schopenhauer does not make clear in his argument, if it is possible to desire an end to the self and its willing (as it is), that desire will itself by the inherent dynamism of lyric be stilled, known, perpetuated through blissful acquiescence in its own unsatisfaction, its disappointment. For the lyric poem the world ends only in the line next after last.\n\nDora Greenwell remarked: 'A Christian is too deeply pledged to a foregone conclusion to be bold and fearless in tracking out ultimate truth'.59 There are more ways of foregoing a conclusion than Dora Greenwell imagined. Orthodox Christians cannot be pledged to a foregone conclusion because theirs is an eschatological faith, and the Last Things are yet to be. Rossetti had an orthodox Christian temperament, whatever her doctrinal allegiances, which is to say that she spent a deal of her time waiting for the end. Her faith resolves itself not into the atemporal conclusions of a philosophical system but into handling time, both as she went about her daily life and through the composed timing of her poems, such timings as, for example, the suspension across a stanza-break at 'I prayed, as one who prays for life, // Until I grew to love what once / Had been so burdensome' \u2013 how long was the time before 'Until'? Evidently, the break can't be long sustained when reading the poem aloud but the dip or loft of the voice a reader must make to indicate the stretch of sense over the formal break stands for what may have been years passed in attendance.\n\n'How long?' is a question her poems often ask, implicitly or explicitly:\n\nHeaven is not far, tho' far the sky  \nOverarching earth and main.  \nIt takes not long to live and die,  \nDie, revive, and rise again.  \nNot long: how long? Oh, long re-echoing song!  \nO Lord, how long?60\n\nOnce again, anticipative rhyme ('long' / 'song') strains at the leash and accents the verse with her own inflection, individuates not only the verse but also the question 'how long?', a question fundamental to Judaeo-Christian scripture \u2013 Cruden's _Concordance_ lists more than fifty occurrences. Rossetti speaks here as her self and as all believers in the divine promise. If asked 'how long is Rossetti's \"Yet a little while\"?', we ought to answer 'six lines' or 'about twenty seconds' and also 'several thousand years, and still not finished'.\n\nRossetti might not have appreciated, but, having in the relevant sense no 'foregone conclusion', she would have understood one great joke in _Endgame_ :\n\nCLOV: Do you believe in the life to come?\n\nHAMM: Mine was always that.61\n\nOne of her favourite Biblical quotations was Proverbs 13.12. 'Hope deferred maketh the heart sick'; she rarely mentions the second half of the saying, 'but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life'.62 The phrase comes in poems which speak out of her actual woes:\n\nI looked for that which is not, nor can be,  \nAnd hope deferred made my heart sick in truth:  \nBut years must pass before a hope of youth  \nIs resigned utterly.63\n\nShe was eighteen when she wrote this, and may be thought of as looking forward to giving up her 'hope of youth' (the poem ends by reverting to, not resigning, hope). The lyric self is also very old, and the poem can read as if she were freed from hope's exactions. That doubleness of aspect can be heard in the ambiguity of cadence at the end of this stanza, where the voice may collapse on the dactyl of 'utterly', as if despondently, or sustain the word so the rhyme with 'nor can be' is heard and thus not quite 'let go' the word or hope. She also regards her state of deferred hope as the lot of any Christian, so that she adopts the same phrase to stress the patience with which Saint John waited for the second coming, describing his as 'a life . . . of great austerity and mortification; a life surely of hope deferred and desire waited for, and eyes that failed for looking upward'.64 Sometimes her balance of personal and liturgical senses for 'hope deferred' is less than poised. In 'Ye Have Forgotten the Exhortation' an angel tries to comfort a bereaved soul with thoughts of the final perfection of the world; the title is from Hebrews 12.5 which speaks of how God chastens those He loves. The soul is unconsoled by this thought:\n\nANGEL:Bury the dead heart-deep;  \nTake patience till the sun be set;  \nThere are no tears for him to weep,  \nNo doubts to haunt him yet:  \nTake _comfort, he will not forget_ : \u2013\n\nSOUL:Then I will watch beside his sleep;  \nWill watch alone,  \nAnd make my moan  \nBecause the harvest is so long to reap.\n\nANGEL:The fields are white to harvest, look and see,  \nAre white abundantly.  \nThe harvest moon shines full and clear,  \nThe harvest time is near,  \nBe of good cheer: \u2013\n\nSOUL:Ah, woe is me;  \nI have no heart for harvest time,  \nGrown sick with hope deferred from chime to chime. . . .  \nO Lord, my heart is broken for my sin:  \nYet hasten Thine Own day  \nAnd come away.  \nIs not time full? Oh put the sickle in,  \nO Lord, begin.65\n\nAt 'The fields are white to harvest', the Angel alludes to Christ's words about the imminence of the world's end (John 4.35); Rossetti clips and twists the word 'har(ves)t' to thoughts of her 'heart'. To have 'no heart for harvest time' means both that the soul feels her heart is unworthy to be harvested but also, more drastically, that she is no longer in the mood for the second coming; she has waited ages and can't be bothered any more. As Rossetti wrote, 'It is possible to be so disheartened by earth as to be deadened towards heaven'.66 She has 'grown' like a crop, but the crop is worthless, for what she has 'grown' is 'sick'. The 'chime to chime' along which hope has been deferred may be the regular chimes of bells which summon to religious observance; the chimes are also those of verse itself, its vain completenesses, patternings which offer the satisfaction only of themselves, promises, promises. When she asks the Lord to 'come away', we can hardly tell Him apart from death \u2013 'Come away, come away death', as the Clown sings in _Twelfth Night_. Which is only right for He is her death; she will die in Him, of that at least she thinks she can be sure.\n\nImpatience would be a natural response to this writing of hers with its 'tedious indomitable grace'67 of patience. Some readers, the cheerier, the empowering sort, incline to wish she'd give herself a shaking, realise there are plenty more good fish in the sea, and that one should never say die. These are the people whom Florence Nightingale considered noxious in the sick-room, with their 'shower-bath of silly hopes and encouragements': 'I really believe there is scarcely a greater worry which invalids have to endure than the incurable hopes of their friends'.68 The same is true of the sick at heart and their encouragers, for, as Nightingale's shrewd phrase 'the incurable hopes of their friends' suggests, it is hope not hopelessness the heart-sick suffer from. Rossetti volunteered for work with Nightingale in the Crimea but was turned down; her nursing was done only at home, except in that for a poet of her quality, with her cast of attention, the whole earth is her hospital and time itself the patient over whom she keeps her vigil. Writing verse is actually more like nursing than current taste in poetry or poets often care to recognise, like nursing in its detailed, rhythmic solicitudes, its close acquaintance with fevers, and its slowly-learned but steady power to live with the hard truth that sometimes you can do more for others, by way of pleasant distraction or of good advice, than you can for yourself. Poets, like nurses, should not raise expectations. The reason why this is so was well stated long ago by William Empson:\n\nit is only in degree that any improvement of society could prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy. And anything of value must accept this because it must not prostitute itself; its strength is to be prepared to waste itself, if it does not get its opportunity.69\n\nIt was Rossetti's strength as a poet to find tunes for waste and isolation, for the sense of missed opportunities, the drag of waiting, the yearning for a cure, while giving these abysmal states enough shape to make us able to sustain them, even, oddly, enjoy seeing how we look in them. As, for instance, in her poem on 'Ascension Day', which characteristically does not follow the upward trajectory of the ascending Christ but hangs back with the apostles who were left behind, persistent and bereft:\n\nFor as a cloud received Him from their sight,  \nSo with a cloud will He return ere long:  \nTherefore they stand on guard by day, by night,  \nStrenuous and strong.\n\nThey do, they dare, they beyond seven times seven  \nForgive, they cry God's mighty word aloud:  \nYet sometimes haply lift tired eyes to Heaven \u2013  \n'Is that His cloud?'70\n\nThese apostles are living in Victorian England. They stand as if at a great railway-terminus, scanning the crowds, the clouds, which throng before them, waiting for an announcement, wondering if He will be on time, if His train is even now drawing in: '\"Is that His cloud?\"' \u2013 no, that's the sleeper service. There is something absurd about people's behaviour when they are waiting, the ways they try to mask their dependence on something beyond their control, their pronounced unconcern ('It really doesn't bother me if he _never_ comes'), their whistlings, pretended absorption in a time-table, and restlessness. From which it does not follow that the beliefs which keep them waiting are absurd.\n\n#  **Notes**\n\n1 Quotations from Rossetti's poems are from _The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti_ , ed. R. W. Crump, (Baton Rouge, 3 vols., 1979\u201390), and give volume, page and line numbers; thus for this instance, II, _95_ ,l. 1.\n\n2 _Speaking Likenesses_ , (1874), repr., Jan Marsh (ed.), _Christina Rossetti: Poems and Prose_ (1994), 343; _Time Flies, A Reading Diary_ ( _1885_ , repr., 1897), 83.\n\n3 Respectively, 'The Convent Threshold', I, 64,l. 99; 'A Bird's-Eye View', I, 135, l. _59;_ 'The Prince's Progress', I, 105, l. 374; \"The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children\", I l. 177, l. 500; 'Time lengthening . . .', III, 275,l. 1 and l. 7.\n\n4 Proust discusses 'accent' often in _A la recherche_. . . .; see, for example, in the edition of Jean-Yves Tadi\u00e9 et al., (Paris, 1987, 4 vols.), I, 42; I, 543; III, 759\u201361.\n\n5 These are the qualities Florence Nightingale singled out as constituting a good nurse. See her _Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not_ , (1860, repr., New York, 1946), 65.\n\n6 Letter to Caroline Gemmer, 3 January 1888, quoted in Antony H. Harrison, _Christina Rossetti in Context_ , (Brighton, 1988), 82.\n\n7 'A Christmas Carol', I, 216\u2013217,ll. 1\u20138.\n\n8 Two of her comments on snow in _Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the 'Benedicite_ ', (1879), provide apt glosses: 'The beauty of snow needs no proof. Perfect in whiteness, feathery in lightness, it often floats down without hesitation as if it belonged to air rather than to earth: yet once resting on that ground it seemed loath to touch, it silently and surely accomplishes its allotted task; it fills up chasms, levels inequalities, cloaks imperfections . . .', _65;_ 'If aught which endures or which is eternal be likened to snow, it is on occasion of its brief revelation to mortal eyes . . .', 222.\n\n9 I translate from 'Po\u00e9sie et pens\u00e9e abstraite', (Oxford, 1939), repr. in _Oeuvres_ , ed. Jean Hytier, (Paris, 1957, 2 vols.), I, 1325. All subsequent translations are mine, except where otherwise noted.\n\n10 'Note' to 'The Thorn', in _Lyrical Ballads_ , (1800), eds. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, (1963, rev. ed., 1965), 289.\n\n11 III, 311, ll.1\u20138.\n\n12 Isobel Armstrong treats Rossetti's repetitions subtly in her _Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics_ , (1993), 352.\n\n13 The early Nietzsche presents an emphatic version of lyricism along these lines; see _Die Geburt der Trag\u00f6die aus dem Geiste der Musik_ , (Leipzig, 1872), section 5: 'Only this lyrical I is not identical with that of the waking, empirical person, but with that I which alone has true being, the eternal I which rests at the very basis of things', trans, from _Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke_ , ed. Karl Schlechta, (Munich, 1966, 3 vols.), I, 38.\n\n14 _Die Welt as Wille und Vorstellung_ , (1819), trans, by E. F. J. Payne as _The World as Will and Representation_ , (Indian Hills, 1958; repr. New York, 1969, 2 vols.), I, 249\u201350.\n\n15 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', ll. 17\u201318, from the edition of Miriam Allott, (1970, corrected ed., 1975), 535.\n\n16 Angela Leighton, _Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart_ , (Brighton, 1992), 76.\n\n17 W. M. Rossetti, 'Memoir', in _The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti_ , (1904), lxi.\n\n18 Leighton, op. cit., 76.\n\n19 'Song', I, 58, ll. 1\u201312.\n\n20 Letter of late 1881, in T. H. Johnson (ed.), _The Letters of Emily Dickinson_ , (Cambridge, Mass., 1958; 3 vols.), III, 714.\n\n21 Letter of 4 August 1881, in W. M. Rossetti (ed.), _The Family Letters of Christina Rossetti_ , (1908), _95_. The dead Christ is, evidently, her prime 'buried hope'; compare Hegel's astonishing sentence in his account of some unhappinesses of the Christian self: 'Therefore it is only the _grave_ of that in which it lives that can become a presence to this consciousness', trans. from _Ph\u00e4nomenologie des Geistes_ , (1807), ed. Gerhard G\u00f6hler, (Frankfurt a.M., 1970), 131.\n\n22 I,113, ll. 118\u201321.\n\n23 Armstrong, op. cit., 356.\n\n24 Leighton, op. cit., 38.\n\n25 Letter of c. 20 January, 1861, in W. M. Rossetti (ed.), _Ruskin: Rossetti: Preraphaelitism: Papers_ 1854 to 1862, (1899), 258\u20139.\n\n26 _Table Talk_ , ed. Carl Woodring, (Princeton, 1990, 2 vols.), I, 367\u20138.\n\n27 In conversation with William Drummond of Hawthornden, 1618\u201319, repr. in _Ben Jonson_ , ed. Ian Donaldson, (Oxford, 1985), 596.\n\n28 'Another Spring', I, 48, ll. 17\u201319.\n\n29 'By the waters of Babylon', III, 282, ll. 25\u20132836.\n\n30 I, 124\u20136, ll. 1\u20134837.\n\n31 'In honour of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez', in Norman H. Mackenzie (ed.), _The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins_ , (Oxford, 1990), 200.\n\n32 Beckett, _Proust_ , (1931), repr. in _Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit_ , (1965), 92.\n\n33 _The Face of the Deep_ , 90. Compare her comment on one of her favourite Biblical tags: '\"Vanity of vanities\", as \"Solomon in all his glory\" . . . states and restates it, amounts to so exquisite a dirge over dead hope and paralysed effort that we are almost ready to fall in love with our own desolation . . .', _Seek and Find_ , 272.\n\n34 Harrison, op. cit., 124.\n\n35 Adrienne Rich, _On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966\u20131978_ , (New York, 1979), 95.\n\n36 For example: Isaiah 38. 1\u20133; Malachi 3.2; Matthew 5. 29 and 7. 26\u201327.\n\n37 'Memoir', loc. cit., lxvii.\n\n38 George Eliot, _The George Eliot Letters_ , ed. G. S. Haight, (New Haven and London, 1954\u2013178, 8 vols.), I, 268.\n\n39 Diary entry for 4 August 1918, in Anne Olivier Bell, (ed.), _The Diary of Virginia Woolf_ (1977\u2013184, 5 vols.), I, 178.\n\n40 Respectively, _The Face of the Deep_ , 16, 61; _Seek and Find_ , 293; _Time Flies_ , 2.\n\n41 _The Face of the Deep_ , 202.\n\n42 _Seek and Find_ , 169\u201370.\n\n43 For instance, Elaine Showalter observes 'The feminine novelists did share the cultural values of Victorian middle-class women, and they clung to the traditional notion of femininity', _A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bront\u00eb to Lessing_ , (Princeton, 1977), 97. She does not attempt to justify 'clung to', it being clear to her that rational beings could have no other relation to a 'traditional notion'. Isobel Armstrong praises some of Adelaide Anne Procter's poems because 'Neither \"A Parting\" nor \"A Woman's Answer\" retreats to celibacy or virginity as an alternative to marriage', (Armstrong, op. cit., 337), where 'retreats' assumes a view of marriage as the properly 'advanced' state, at least for women. Spinsters, it seems, are backward, except when truly avant-garde practitioners of extra-marital sex.\n\n44 'Preface' to Charles Kingsley's _The Saint's Tragedy_ , (1848), in Kingsley, _Poems_ , (1871, repr. 1889), xix.\n\n45 E. C. Gaskell, _The Life of Charlotte Bront\u00eb_ , (1857, 3rd ed., 1857), quoted from the edition of Alan Shelston, (1975, repr. 1985), 456\u20137.\n\n46 This sketch is indebted to: P. F. Anson, _The Call of the Cloister: Religious Communities and Kindred Bodies in the Anglican Communion_ , (1955; 2nd ed., rev. and ed. by A. W. Campbell, 1964); T. J. Williams and A. W Campbell, _The Park Village Sisterhood_ , (1965); Michael Hill, _The Religious Order: A study of virtuoso religion and its legitimation in the nineteenth-century Church of England_ , (1973); Geoffrey Rowell, _The Vision Glorious: Themes and Personalities of the Catholic Revival in Anglicanism_ , (Oxford, 1983).\n\n47 _The Secret History of the Oxford Movement_ , (1897, third ed., 1898), 165 and 192.\n\n48 Margaret Goodman, _Sisterhoods in the Church of England: With Notices of Some Charitable Sisterhoods in the Romish Church_ , (1863, 3rd ed., 1864), 110.\n\n49 Bishop Tait, quoted in Anson, op. cit., 303; G. H. Lewes, quoted in Showalter, op. cit., 68.\n\n50 J. M. Neale, _Annals of the Virgin Saints_ , (1846), xxvi; Pusey, letter of 14 January 1856, quoted in Hill, _The Religious Order_ , 232.\n\n51 Kingsley, _The Saint's Tragedy_ , loc. cit., respectively, 121, 31, 138.\n\n52 Anson, op. cit., 230.\n\n53 _The Face of the Deep_ , 476.\n\n54 'Three Nuns', III, 192\u20133, ll. 187\u2013207.\n\n55 _Washington Square_ , (1880, repr. Harmondsworth, 1971), 174.\n\n56 Three Nuns', III, 187,ll. 1\u20137.\n\n57 _The Face of the Deep_ , 99.\n\n58 _The Face of the Deep_ , 9.\n\n59 Quoted in Leighton, op. cit., 124.\n\n60 II, 266, ll. 1\u20136. This poem was given the title 'Yet a little while' when it appeared in _Verses_ , (1893); it was untitled on first publication in _The Face of the Deep_ , where it forms part of her commentary on the 'shortly' of Revelation l.1.\n\n61 Samuel Beckett, _Fin de partie_ , (1957), translated by the author as _Endgame_ , (1958), in _The Complete Dramatic Works_ , (1986), 116.\n\n62 In _Time Flies_ , 80\u20131, where the second half is for once mentioned, it is glossed as referring to 'the Cross of Christ Crucified'.\n\n63 I, 51, ll. 1\u20134.\n\n64 _Called To Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied_ , (1881, repr. 1906), 72.\n\n65 III, 229\u201330,ll. 18\u201334, 46\u201353.\n\n66 _The Face of the Deep_ , 527.\n\n67 _The Face of the Deep_ , 68.\n\n68 Nightingale, op. cit., 98, 96.\n\n69 _Some Versions of Pastoral_ , (1935, repr. 1968), 5.\n\n70 II, 232-\u20133,ll. 21\u201328.\n\nGriffiths, Eric. 1997. \"The Disappointment of Christina G Rossetti.\" In _Essays in Criticism_ , 47, ii (April). pp. 107\u201342. Reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press.\n\n# 17\n\n# Stirring 'a Dust of Figures'\n\n#  _Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Love_\n\nAngela Leighton\n\n _This word is not enough but it will have to do._\n\n(Margaret Atwood, \"Variations onthe Word _Love_ ,\" 83)\n\nNot only is the word \"love\" not enough; it is also too much. Its meaning is prolific. Love serves, as Atwood specifies, for the lacy, heart-shaped card, the expensive body lotion, the patriotic war song; even, perhaps, for the cool copulation of slugs. \"Then,\" she adds, \"there's the two / of us\" (83).\n\nVariations on the word \"love\" range from a creed to a clich\u00e9, a psychosis to a social contract, a pious mysticism to a crude commercialism. Personal or political, holy or obscene, literal or metaphorical, to talk about love as opposed, for instance, to sex, marriage or desire, is to have a constant problem of reference. It would be easier not to talk about it at all. Yet this problem of reference is part of the point. Love, in a way, includes sex, marriage and desire, but it also suggests something more: a residue \u2013 sentimental and nostalgic, maybe \u2013 of all the quantifiable terms of our social and sexual politics. Love is something left over: \u2013 just a superfluous word, perhaps.\n\nThe twentieth century's reaction against the Victorians, as well as its obsession with them, tends to focus on the problem of love. The continuing popularity of works such as _The Barretts of Wimpole Street_ , for instance, bears witness to our own fascination with hypocrisy and repression. We flatter ourselves at the spectacle of the Victorians' sexual mystifications. We _enjoy_ the \"repressive hypothesis\" (Michel Foucault, 10) which seems to confirm our superior sexual enlightenment. Yet, it may be, that far from being the detectives of the Victorians' hidden _crimes passionnels_ , we are, ourselves, the criminals; ourselves, the \"Victorians.\" The theory of repression is one which depends on reducing the open possibilities of love to the closed meaning of sex.\n\nMeanwhile, however, our own repression goes unnoticed. Having made no secret of sex, we have, perhaps, to invoke Foucault again (35), made a verbose and degraded secret of love. Sentimentalised, commercialised or simply ridiculed, love is, it may be, our own peculiarly obsessive taboo. We speak of it scornfully, guiltily or coyly. Yet, somehow, we do go on speaking about it. In all its debased and specific variations, love offers us still a possibility of meaning \u2013 a precarious idealism. It is, as Atwood concludes:\n\na finger-  \ngrip on a cliffside. You can  \nhold on or let go.\n\n(83)\n\nPsychoanalytical and feminist discussions of love, while assimilating it into the Oedipal drama, on the one hand, or into the discourse of sexual politics, on the other, have also, often, felt something unaccounted for. Freud has influentially linked love with narcissism, but both Lacan and Kristeva have since wanted to loosen that connection. \"The lover is a narcissist with an _object_ \" (250), Kristeva declares. Feminist critics, particularly in the early seventies, have been emphatic in denouncing the oppressive ideology of romantic love. Shulamith Firestone, for instance, asserts that \"love, perhaps, even more than childbearing, is the pivot of women's oppression today\" (142), and Kate Millett, similarly, dismisses love as no more than a pious Victorian excuse for \"sexual activity\" (37), particularly the sexual activity of women. Other feminist critics, however, have sought to distinguish love from the social and psychological inequalities which vitiate it. Love, for de Beauvoir, when \"founded on the mutual recognition of two liberties\" (677), might still be an ideal for the future. Thus, however much decried or explained, love continues to suggest something over and above the calculable power-structures of society or of the mind \u2013 something, perhaps, to be desired.\n\nIt is this superfluity of meaning which Roland Barthes celebrates in _A Lover's Discourse_. Rejecting the antagonistic or reductive descriptions of love in Christian, psychoanalytical and Marxist discourse (211), he turns, in his linguistic bereavement, to the language of imaginative literature. In particular, he turns to the wordy, profligate, posturing conventions of the literature of Sensibility. It is Goethe's _Werther_ which, above all, offers innumerable examples of the discourse of love. Such a discourse, which indulgently \"puts the sentimental in place of the sexual\" (178) is, in fact, Barthes claims, the scandalous subject of today.\n\nThis reversal of priorities reiterates the principles of a long tradition. As Denis de Rougemont argues in _Love in the Western World_ , romantic love, which is rooted in the courtly literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, constantly resists its material expenditure in either sexual satisfaction or social final gratification. In that postponement, the lover finds time to speak. \"Passion and expression are not really separable\" (173), de Rougemont claims. Rather, it is a passion _for_ expression which characterises romantic love. In this tradition, \"the sentimental\" does not aim to become \"the sexual,\" but rather to postpone it.\n\nJuliet Mitchell, in an essay on \"Romantic Love,\" complains that de Rougemont generalises entirely from the experience of the male. The love of women is different, she claims. For, while man's love is \"the poetic utterance of a free, aspiring subject,\" woman's love remains the \"opiate of a trapped sexual object\" (108). The trouble with this distinction, however, is that it confirms as an absolute the very difference it would condemn. Mitchell's assertion that the \"romantic love of women looks forward, forward to marriage\" (114) is one which seems to assign to women only the bourgeois domestication of love, and denies them its rebellious, imaginative energies. The evidence of women's literature, from the letters of Heloise to the poems of Adrienne Rich, tells a different story.\n\n\" _Marriage in the abstract_ ,\" Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to Miss Mitford in February 1846, at a time when her thoughts might well have been running on marriage, \"has always seemed to me the most profoundly indecent of all ideas. . . .\" She adds: \"I have always been called romantic for this way of seeing\" (III, 160). It is one of the sad ironies of EBB's reputation as a poet that later generations have called her \"romantic\" for quite different reasons. She has gone down in literary history as the invalid poetess, who was swept off her couch, and rescued from a tyrannical father, by a charming poet with whom she eloped to Italy. As testimony to this eminently satisfying romance, she wrote, everyone knows, _one_ poem: \"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways\" (Sonnet XLIII). Many of EBB's most appreciative critics have found the _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ something of a stumbling block. For instance, Alethea Hayter complains of having a \"Peeping Tom sensation\" (105) when reading the Sonnets, though, surprisingly, she never feels it when reading the \"love letters\" (106). Recent feminist critics, such as Gilbert and Gubar and Cora Kaplan, tend to pass over these ideologically unfashionable poems. Somehow, their subject and their inspiration, which lack the larger sexual politics _of Aurora Leigh_ , strike contemporary critics as naked and naive. They are, it is said with wearying regularity, simply too \"sincere.\"1\n\nHowever, it may be that sincerity is an inhibition of our own expectations, rather than a fault of the poems. The story of the popular romance continues to overshadow our reading. But the emotional drama of the Sonnets has, in fact, little to do with a despotic father, an invalid daughter and a miraculous elopement. Instead, that drama is to be found in the close and self-conscious connection with the love letters \u2013 themselves a highly _written_ text. It is as a literary performance, rather than an autobiographical statement, that I want to look again at the writing of these poems.\n\nTo read the Sonnets afresh, in conjunction with the letters, is to become aware of an intricately answering and over-wrought writing of love. In both poems and letters, sincerity of feeling is not so much the motivation as the point in question. The correspondence, which has been hailed as one of the great documents of romantic love, is in fact as prolix and literary as any other substitution of \"the sentimental\" for \"the sexual.\" The passion of these letters is a passion of too many words, at odds with life and the heart's true feelings. For all their intimate wrangling, the general effect of the letters is of a highly constructed and self-referential piece of collaborative writing.\n\nIt is true that Robert's are the more contorted, defensive and equivocal letters. But the idea that Elizabeth was the inspirationally simpler and sincerer poet of the two reflects, as Daniel Karlin (52) points out, much more on Robert's need to idealise her than on any quality of her verse. She no more \"communicates with godlike directness\" (205) than he does. The _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ , in particular, elaborate many of the anxieties of the letters about the possibility of communicating the heart's true feelings. The theatrical landscapes and stylised imagery of these poems distances them, strangely, from the real scene of love. Furthermore, there is a certain, quietly playful instability of reference in the Sonnets, which gives them an air of being very often only half serious.\n\nBELOVED, thou hast brought me many flowers  \nPlucked in the garden, all the summer through  \nAnd winter, and it seemed as if they grew  \nIn this close room, nor missed the sun and showers.  \nSo, in the like name of that love of ours,  \nTake back these thoughts which here unfolded too,  \nAnd which on warm and cold days I withdrew  \nFrom my heart's ground. Indeed, those beds and bowers  \nBe overgrown with bitter weeds and rue,  \nAnd wait thy weeding; yet here's eglantine,  \nHere's ivy! \u2013 take them, as I used to do  \nThy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine.  \nInstruct thine eyes to keep their colours true,  \nAnd tell thy soul their roots are left in mine.\n\n(Sonnet XLIV)\n\nAs Elizabeth waited during those many months of courtship for Robert to visit her, or for his letters to arrive, she wrote the poems which she offered in return for all his flowers, but which she did not show him until three years after their marriage. However, it is not only his actual gifts of flowers which she remembers and requites in this last of her Sonnets, but also the many shared double meanings of flowers throughout the correspondence. Flowers are the connecting image of love and poetry, of passion and expression. The first gift was Robert's, in that opening letter with its extraordinarily direct declaration of literary esteem: \"so into me has it gone, and part of me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew \u2013 oh how different that is from lying to be dried and pressed flat, and prized highly and put in a book . . .\" (I, 3). Yet, of course, the having been \"put in a book\" is precisely the original tenor of these flowers, just as it will be their last in EBB's sonnet. Flowers begin as poems, \"pressed flat and put in a book,\" and only later spring roots in the heart.\n\nThis opening gambit supplies both correspondents with a wealth of playful variations on the theme of flowers. In them, the usual priorities of what is lived and what is written are upset. Poetry, Elizabeth declares, \"is the flower of me.\" She adds that \"the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and the dark\" (I, 65). Between the flower and the root, between poems and life's \"ground,\" there is a discrepancy; just as later, in the sonnet, there is a break between the flower's expression and the \"heart's ground\" from which it comes. These flowers, though once grounded, have been plucked. Obedient to her imagery, Robert repeats the idea: \"this is all the flower of my life which you call forth and which lies at your feet\" (I, 352). But the flower which is uprooted is not really life's; it is poetry's and love's. Robert tells her: \"this is my first song, my true song \u2013 this love I bear you\" (I, 352). Love is already the song, and the flower is already what it might become: a poem. For Elizabeth it did; and, as if in proof of what flowers might be, she returned, so many years later, her own small \"anthology\" of poems, which she had not yet dared \"put in a book.\"\n\nThe play on flowers throughout the courtship offers a continual, delightful, metaphorical substitution of one thing for another: poems, flowers, life, love, memories, flowers and poems, again. The \"ground\" of these figurative transformations ought to be the heart, but it is just as often already a book of poems. Heart and book are subtly interchangeable, as if in quiet acknowledgement of the fact that they were interchangeable at the start: \"I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett\" (I, 3). This witty and self-conscious play on flowers, however, throws into dark relief that comment of Robert's, when he remembered how a \"strange, heavy crown, that wreath of Sonnets (was) put on me one morning unawares\" _(Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood_ , 114). Whether the \"wreath\" was one of laurels for her, or of death to himself, remains to be guessed.\n\nThe _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ were published in 1850 and, as William Going has noted, they resuscitated an outworn genre (19). The amatory sonnet sequence, before the Victorian flowering of the form, was largely confined to the sixteenth century. It is, therefore, as Cynthia Grant Tucker points out, a \"literary mode\" clearly associated with \"a bygone age,\" and riddled with \"old generic postures and conventions\" (353). One of these \"generic postures\" which the Victorians revived, for reasons that may have been socially contemporary as well as imaginatively nostalgic, was that of the woman who waits. One particular poem, which stands at the threshold of the age, seems to have been profoundly influential in the recovery of this pose:\n\nAll day within the dreamy house,  \nThe doors upon their hinges creak'd  \nThe blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse  \nBehind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,  \nOr from the crevice peer'd about.  \nOld faces glimmer'd thro' the doors,  \nOld footsteps trod the upper floors,  \nOld voices called her from without.  \nShe only said, \"My life is dreary,  \nHe cometh not,\" she said;  \nShe said, \"I am aweary, aweary,  \nI would that I were dead!\"\n\n(Tennyson, \"Mariana,\" 90)\n\nTennyson's \"Mariana\" captures, not only the ennui of the woman's waiting, but also the pressure of a literary tradition behind that waiting. Only a woman could be so trapped in hopelessness. But at the same time, Mariana's is no more than an old literary pose \u2013 a waiting, in the courtly tradition, which is almost for its own sake. Tennyson's poem is ghostly with literariness. Not only is it a text, written on the inspiration of another text; but it also seems to want to go back in time to its literary original. The house suffers from the dilapidation of ages, and the past haunts its precincts in those \"Old faces,\" \"Old footsteps,\" \"Old voices.\" The \"dreamy house\" is actually a house _of_ dreams: from the antique. Although the atmosphere of courtly love is curiously decadent for the Victorian poet, and the passion of expectation somehow stale, the \"old generic postures and conventions\" are the same: Mariana waits.\n\nDorothy Mermin writes that a \"woman poet who identified herself with such a stock figure of intense and isolated art would hardly be able to write at all\" (68).2 But this is not quite true. \"I am like Mariana in the moated grange and sit listening too often to the mouse in the wainscot\" (I, 87), Elizabeth informs Robert. The figure of Mariana offers her both a literally apt, and a subtly desirable, description of herself. \"For have I not felt twenty times the desolate advantage of being insulated here and of not minding anybody when I made my poems? . . . and caring less for supposititious criticism than for the black fly buzzing in the pane?\" (I, 263), she asks. Tennyson's imagery of fixation and distraction offers EBB, as it will Christina Rossetti, an eerily appropriate picture of herself. To be the maiden in the tower, the woman at the window, the dreamer in the prison, is to inhabit a literary tableau which is very close to the facts of life. Certainly, Elizabeth waited, and kept Robert waiting. Christina Rossetti made a life's work of waiting \u2013 and turned away any lovers who did come. Her poem \"Day-Dreams\" is \"Mariana\" from another, equally disconcerting, angle:\n\nCold she sits through all my kindling,  \nDeaf to all I pray:  \nI have wasted might and wisdom,  \nWasted night and day:  \nDeaf she dreams to all I say.\n\n(\"Day-Dreams,\" 333)\n\nIt is as if these women poets sometimes choose to inhabit the \"dreamy house\" of Mariana, but with attention turned inwards to its poetic possibilities: to the \"Old voices\" which still echo in the ruined house of love. The \"lover's discourse,\" Barthes claims, \"is no more than a dust of figures stirring according to the unpredictable order, like a fly buzzing in a room\" (197).\n\nIf the love poetry of the Victorians very often stirs \"a dust of figures\" from the antique, EBB's _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ , which have by turns delighted or embarrassed readers for their sincerity, are certainly no exception.\n\nTHOU hast thy calling to some palace-floor,  \nMost gracious singer of high poems! where  \nThe dancers will break footing, from the care  \nOf watching up thy pregnant lips for more.  \nAnd dost thou lift this house's latch too poor  \nFor hand of thine? and canst thou think and bear  \nTo let thy music drop here unaware  \nIn folds of golden fulness at my door?  \nLook up and see the casement broken in,  \nThe bats and owlets builders in the roof!  \nMy cricket chirps against thy mandolin.  \nHush, call no echo up in further proof  \nOf desolation! there's a voice within  \nThat weeps . . . as thou must sing . . . alone, aloof.\n\n(Sonnet IV)\n\nThis is much more Mariana in the moated grange than it is EBB in Wimpole Street. The imagery of courtly luxury and mouldering decay belongs to a long tradition of romantic love, which the poet inhabits like the ruined house itself. She sits, picturesquely, amid a scene of desolation, listening, like her prototype Mariana, for the \"lifted latch,\" and aware of too many echoes. The whole poem is a stage-setting of love in some \"far countree\" of the imagination. Singing, playing, dancing, weeping, are all decorous items of a drama self-distanced in time and feeling. It is this tapestried effect of the language which gives to the _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ their atmosphere of a \"bygone\" passion. This is not a spontaneous, but a remembered and remote poetry of love, haunted by figures stirring from another time, another literature: \"bats and owlets builders in the roof!\"\n\nHowever, at their best, these Sonnets also have a quietly discordant sense of humour. They are not just period pieces. \"My cricket chirps against thy mandolin\" is a welcome interruption of that too consistently \"golden\" music, attributed to Robert, the serenader. Thus the courtly or mythological imagery is frequently subjected to small witticisms and pranks of action. The moments when the instrument proves out of tune, angels collide, a god turns out to be a porpoise, the poet's hair is liable to catch fire, or a mystic shape draws the speaker familiarly \"by the hair\" \u2013 these are moments when the static iconography of courtly love is playfully disrupted, and the once immovable lady is caught up in a quite lively drama. It remains, however, a bookish drama, dependent on the written tangles of the letters, much more than on the actual events in Wimpole Street. The minstrels, princes, angels, palm trees and porpoises of these Sonnets belong to that rarefied, but fertile, drama of the correspondence, where the two poets find occasion to be both in love, and also practising for poems.\n\nTo fix the _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ as an autobiographical record of a true romance is to miss their literary playfulness, their in-jokes, even, at times, their competitive ingenuity. But above all, it is to miss their sense of the other, remote, difficult language of love, which is inherited from a long-ago of literature, and which threatens to substitute its \"Old voices\" for the new; its flowers of poetry for real flowers. This is the danger, but also the \"desolate advantage,\" of writing about love. Through the gruellingly _written_ story of the letters and the Sonnets there is felt, in counterpoint to love's earnest, love's other language, which is separate, strange and insincere.\n\n\"As for me,\" Elizabeth writes at one point, \"I have done most of my talking by post of late years \u2013 as people shut up in dungeons, take up with scrawling mottos on the walls\" (I, 13). The scene of writing, for this woman poet, is the prison; so that, she suggests, all her letters will have the desperate and dissociated quality of a writing on the wall. This, already at the beginning, rejects Robert's idealisation of her as the poet of unmediated expression. Her woman's confinement means that all her writing will seem like vivid, but hardly decipherable, \"mottos.\" Certainly, the experience of reading Elizabeth's letters must soon have disabused Robert of his idealising simplification. As he admits, he was frequently bewildered by her twists of logic. Often, she puts him \"'in a maze'\" (I, 474); he is jealous of her \"infinite adroitness\" (I, 533); he is beaten by her seeming to turn his \"illustrations into obscurations\" (I, 558); till, at one point, he turns on her almost violently, with the declaration: \"Sometimes I have a disposition to dispute with dearest Ba, to wrench her simile-weapons out of the dexterous hand . . . and have the truth of things my way and its own way, not hers\" (I, 562). This peevish insistence on the truth being his own betrays the extent to which Robert felt threatened by Elizabeth's own rhetoric. The \"truth of things\" is at risk in the very similes she wields so dexterously and combatively.\n\nThe quarrels of these lovers are not so much quarrels of feeling, as of etymologies and meanings. They censor each other's scripts, and cavil at each other's turns of phrase. They both, also, contend passionately to have the last word. \"I _must_ have last word,\" Robert insists, \"as all people in the wrong desire to have \u2013 and then, no more of the subject\" (I, 80). But immediately, Elizabeth makes her own claim to be last: \"but suffer me to say as one other last word, (and _quite, quite the last this time!_ ) . . .\" (I, 82). As each new dispute develops between them, the imposition of a last word continues to be laid down. \"Therefore we must leave this subject \u2013 and I must trust you to leave it without one word more.\" She adds, with pointed vagueness, \"too many have been said already\" (I, 179). Too many words is the danger and the temptation of romantic love. Towards the end of the correspondence, Robert admits how often his letters have \"run in the vile fashion of a disputatious 'last word', 'one word yet'\" (II, 1058). Yet, the continuing drama of the last word was to prove a fecund source of poetry to him. The poem he wrote, years later, to thank Elizabeth for her Sonnets, affectionately recalls the contentious wordiness of the letters: it is \"One Word More.\"\n\nThe literature of romantic love is always, in a sense, a word too many. Self-expression becomes its own goal. As de Rougemont puts it, romantic love \"tends to self-description, either in order to justify or intensify its being, or else simply in order to keep _going_ \" (173). One word more is one more poem. Yet, this very creative resourcefulness of words risks being at odds with a sense of the truth. It is perhaps to Elizabeth that Robert ascribes the weary plea of that other poem of a last word, which recalls the furious verbalising of the letters. The speaker of \"A Woman's Last Word\" begs:\n\nLet's contend no more, Love,  \nStrive nor weep:  \nAll be as before, love,  \n\u2013 Only sleep!\n\n(\"A Woman's Last Word\", I, 539)\n\nLove may be, on the one hand, a rhetoric of too many words, but, on the other hand, love also seeks to put an end to words altogether. \"I love you because I _love_ you\" (I, 245), Robert insists, offering the redundancy of the logic as an emotional security. But such security is achieved at the cost of words. As Barthes puts it, \"I love you because I love you\" is a line that marks \"the end of language, where it can merely repeat _its last_ _word_ like a scratched record\" (21). Yet, a poem must be more than \"a scratched record.\" There are times when Robert sounds trapped between the minimalist statement of love, which Elizabeth demands of him, and the one word more that must be written, if poems are to continue. \"I turn from what is in my mind,\" he declares, \"and determine to write about anybody's book to avoid writing that I love and love and love again my own, dearest love \u2013 because of the cuckoo-song of it\" (I, 329).\n\nWhen EBB attempts to write the \"cuckoo-song,\" the reductive obviousness of it risks spoiling the poem:\n\nSAY over again, and yet once over again,  \nThat thou dost love me. Though the word repeated  \nShould seem \"a cuckoo-song,\" as thou dost treat it,  \nRemember, never to the hill or plain,  \nValley and wood, without her cuckoo-strain  \nComes the fresh Spring in all her green completed.  \nBelov\u00e8d, I, amid the darkness greeted  \nBy a doubtful spirit-voice, in that doubt's pain  \nCry, \"Speak once more \u2013 thou lovest!\" Who can fear  \nToo many stars, though each in heaven shall roll,  \nToo many flowers, though each shall crown the year?  \nSay thou dost love me, love me, love me \u2013 toll  \nThe silver iterance! only minding, Dear,  \nTo love me also in silence with thy soul.\n\n(Sonnet XXI)\n\nBetween the silence of the soul and the poem's proliferating figures \u2013 between words which are not enough and those which are too much \u2013 the poet lover must negotiate a kind of truth. In this sonnet EBB fails to find it, perhaps for insisting too much on the \"cuckoo-song\" at the expense of a more playful rhetoric.\n\nThere is one delightful passage in a letter of Elizabeth's where she directly confronts the problem of living and loving so much in words. She is correcting Robert's \"The Book of the Duchess\" and is puzzled at having seemed to have lost a \"bad line\" which she cannot locate in the poem. She realises, with undisguised pleasure, that she must have written the line herself. \"And so it became a proved thing to me,\" she relates, \"that I had been enacting, in a mystery, both poet and critic together \u2013 and one so neutralizing the other, that I took all that pains you remark upon to cross myself out in my double capacity . . . and am now telling the story of it notwithstanding. And there's an obvious moral to the myth, isn't there? for critics who bark the loudest, commonly bark at their own shadow in the glass, as my Flush used to do long and loud . . . and as I did, under the erasure.\" She continues, irresistibly: \"And another moral springs up of itself in this productive ground; for, you see . . . quand je m'efface il n'y a pas grand mal' \" (I, 145).\n\nIn this fine piece of structuralism before its time, the \"productive ground\" of meaning is the act of writing itself. From that \"productive ground\" many flowers may grow, and many kinds of morals may spring. It is indeed a fertile origin. Thus, as Elizabeth cancels her own line, she also cancels herself, her face in the mirror, her role as critic and her role as bad poet. But, in the end, as she gaily tells, someone is left over from all the cancellations, to tell \"the story of it notwithstanding.\" Out of a \"bad line\" she spins a good tale, and out of her self-effacement she irresistibly pursues the proliferating figures of a game of words. In any case, one might ask, what was she doing _writing_ in Robert's poem?\n\n\"'Quand je m'efface il n'y a pas grand mal.'\" The lover's discourse, according to Barthes, \"proceeds from others, from the language, from books.\" He concludes, \"no love is original\" (136). The \"dreamy house\" is haunted by other voices. The text of feeling has been written already. This _d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu_ , or rather, _d\u00e9j\u00e0 \u00e9crit_ , inevitably turns the lover's passion into a pose; the lover's poem into another, older one. Feeling suffers the anxiety of having been preempted by literature.\n\nThe innumerable references to other texts in the letters, as well as the innumerable self-references to the act of writing, bear witness to this pressure. For instance, it is not only Tennyson's \"Mariana\" which supplies a figure of love, but also EBB's own poem \"Catarina to Camoens.\" Catarina was the courtly lady loved by the poet Camoens, but she died while waiting for him to return from his long travels. The poem is the last and only word of one who experienced love so entirely in the \"sentimental\" that all she experienced was a set of lovely phrases. As she repeats the line from one of Camoens' own songs: \"'Sweetest eyes were ever seen!'\" (3, 124), she wonders what use to her either the sweetness of her eyes, or the sweetness of his poem, will be, once she is dead.\n\n _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ , as is well known, is the title that was suggested by Robert, as a disguise. It hints at a translation \u2013 specifically, it hints at Camoens, some of whose works had been translated by Felicia Hemans, and who was well known to the Victorian public in Strangford's translation as well. The title thus serves as a distraction from the autobiographical origins of the Sonnets. But the title hints at Camoens by way of EBB's own, very popular, \"Catarina to Camoens.\" In a sense, therefore, \"from the Portuguese\" means, not only from Camoens, but also from Catarina \u2013 the woman who waited, to no avail. Like Christina Rossetti, in her _Monna Innominata_ sonnets, EBB seems to speak from the generic pose of the unknown lady of the courtly tradition \u2013 anonymous and foreign \u2013 whose indefinitely postponed love becomes the occasion for poems instead. The title thus stresses the effect of distance, in time and place, which the language of the poems themselves underlines.\n\nThat the _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ take their place in a long, self-conscious tradition of literary writing about love is also suggested by one other possible connotation of the title. In 1678, there appeared in English translation a series of five letters, written allegedly by a Portuguese nun to her unfaithful lover. The _Portuguese Letters_ ,3 as they were known, started a vogue for writing \"\u00e0 la portuguaise,\" \u2013 in a style of declamatory despair which later became the stock-in-trade of the literature of Sensibility. Through the posturing rhetoric of the nun's grief there runs a vein of almost self-satisfied achievement. \"And it is not your Person neither that is so dear to me,\" she asserts, \"but the Dignity of my unalterable Affection\" (17). It is in the cause of love alone, that she is driven to tell \"at every turn how my Pulse beats\" (21). That the Portuguese Letters were probably fictitious, and not written by a nun at all, only makes them the more characteristic of a literature in which feeling is a matter of fine words, and truth a matter of convention. The very name of the nun is resonantly premonitory of that most stereotypical name in the literature of Sensibility: \"Ah wretched _Mariane!_ \" (5) she exclaims.\n\nThus the title, _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ , is one that teases with a wealth of literary connotations. It proposes a translation; it remembers another poem; it echoes, perhaps, the highly literary disposition of the Portuguese nun herself. However, the sense of derivativeness \u2013 the sense of a text remembering some other original \u2013 is a connotation which finds support, not only in these specific references, but also in a recurring anxiety about the language of feeling, expressed in the letters of both poets. The \"dust of figures stirring\" in the title of _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ is not just a dust flung in the eyes of \"Peeping Tom\" readers. It is not just a decoy. It is also a quiet revelation. The idea of translation \u2013 of mediating what is remote and foreign \u2013 of writing at a distance from the original \u2013 is an idea that finds considerable support in certain preoccupations of both Robert's and Elizabeth's letters.\n\nElizabeth's early descriptions of herself as a prisoner \"scrawling mottos, on the walls,\" with its admission of a displaced intensity and of an alienated sensibility, is one which then gathers a cluster of related images in the course of the correspondence. Taking her cue, at first, from Robert's unnerving declarations of having a double nature, Elizabeth gradually recognises the same doubleness in herself. Far from being the prototype of the inspirationally direct poet, she too knew the discrepant passage from consciousness to writing, from love to love poetry. That Robert also eventually recognised this equivalent obliquity in _her_ work is perhaps revealed by one of those characteristically answering images between the letters and the poems. Near the start of the correspondence, Elizabeth acknowledges that all Robert's verse is a dramatic displacement of himself: \"your rays fall obliquely rather than directly straight,\" she admits, and adds, humbly, \"I see you only in your moon\" (I, 22). This sense of the moon, as the indirect reflector of light, is remembered, and returned, perhaps, in that resonant line from \"One Word More,\" where Robert calls Elizabeth: \"my moon of poets!\" (I, 742). She too, he seems to admit, has her unknown, dark side, and her own mediations of the light.\n\nThe idea that feeling is often refracted, and expression mediated, is one which finds a recurring description in the letters. After Elizabeth returned that first, over-enthusiastic letter of Robert's, in which, it seems, he declared his feelings for her too impetuously or fulsomely, he retaliated by assuring her, in his reply, that she had mistaken both him and his intentions. Cruelly driving the message home, he stressed that there were \"huge layers of ice and pits of black cold water\" in his character, and that those were his \"true part\" (I, 74). Elizabeth was haunted by the implications of this simile for years. At the time, however, she answered with unaggrieved dignity: \"Well \u2013 if I do not know you, I shall learn, I suppose, in time. I am ready to try humbly to learn \u2013 and I may perhaps \u2013 if you are not done in Sanscrit, which is too hard for me\" (I, 79). A little later, in her frustration at being idealised out of her own true nature, she retorted with a similar image, and begged Robert to \"determine to read me no more backwards with your Hebrew, putting in your own vowel points without my leave\" (I, 87). He, in his turn, jumped at the opportunity offered by her mis-reading and mis-correcting one of his poems: \"So you can decypher my _utterest_ hieroglyphic?\" (I, 153) he mocked, hinting again that the language of his true self might be indecipherable.\n\nThe idea of the illegible script, the strange text, the foreign language, frequently has a double reference, to the heart and to the book, to the self and the poem. Reading and writing thus become the primary gestures of love's drama, subject to all the tricky and deceptive calligraphies of the heart. The difficulty of knowing the true from the false, the sincere from the convention, the familiar from the foreign, is a dilemma exacerbated by the very verbal nature of romantic love. The more the difference is insisted on, the more elusive does it become. Thus, even as Robert expresses his ambition to write the perfectly self-expressive, unmediated text \u2013 \"'R.B. a poem'\" (I, 17) \u2013 he is frustrated by the difference between the two. The self does not translate easily into poetry. For when he reads \"the language\" of himself to himself, he reads a \"spiritual Attic\" (I, 38), communicable to none.\n\nBut it is not only Robert who defensively distances himself in doubleness and foreignness. The same split is felt by Elizabeth. When, towards the end of _Aurora Leigh_ , Romney enthusiastically claims to have understood her at last, after reading her poems, Aurora answers curtly:\n\nYou have read  \nMy book, but not my heart; for recollect,  \n'Tis writ in Sanscrit, which you bungle at.\n\n( _Aurora Leigh_ , VIII, 475\u20137)\n\nThat \"recollect\" goes all the way back to the letters, and is Elizabeth's pointed response to the fear that Robert himself was \"done in Sanscrit.\"\n\nThus, the idea that the language of the heart is hard to learn, easily misunderstood, dauntingly foreign, is one that runs through the letters. Such a language is likely to be archaic and difficult \u2013 perhaps permanently beyond reach. Elizabeth might assure Robert that \"you could turn over every page of my heart like the pages of a book\" (I, 274\u20135), but she cannot promise that the language in which the book is written will be understood. The evidence of many of the letters is that it will not. For if \"writ in Sanscrit,\" it is \"too hard.\" It will remain untranslatable.\n\nThe language of romantic love, even when written in the heart, is a language likely to be foreign, strange, dead. It is written already, out of old codes, old conventions, old poems, perhaps. The difficulty of making it legible again is the constant anxiety of the lover poet. To write about love, originally and uniquely, might be, in fact, to engage in an act of translation. \"I have done some work,\" Elizabeth responds evasively, \"only it is nothing worth speaking of . . . lyrics for the most part, which lie written illegibly in pure AEgyptian\" (I, 145). Her own suggested title for the Sonnets is only another obstructively remote and puzzling derivation to add to all these others: \"from the Bosnian\" she proposed.\n\nThis, then, is the troubling legacy of romantic love. It is the legacy, not of an original passion, but of an old language; not of a sincere feeling, but of a poem. The literature of romantic love, even as it seeks to be the heart's expression, is likely to be something else: mottos, hieroglyphs, Sanscrit, Hebrew, Attic, AEgyptian, Bosnian: \u2013 a \"dust of figures.\" To these one must add the distant, literary, untranslated derivation of EBB's own love Sonnets: \"from the Portuguese.\"\n\n#  **Notes**\n\n1 For two exceptions, see Dorothy Mermin, \"The Female Poet and the Embarrassed Reader: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's _Sounds from the Portuguese,\" English Literary History_ , 48 (1981), 351\u201367, and Angela Leighton, _Elizabeth Barrett Browning_ (Brighton, Harvester, 1986), chapter five.\n\n2 Dorothy Mermin, \"The Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman Poet,\" _Critical Inquiry_ , 13 (1986), 64\u201380.\n\n3 I am grateful to a member of the audience at the \"Victorians and Love\" conference, April 1987, for directing me towards these.\n\n#  **Bibliography**\n\nAtwood, Margaret, _True Stories_ (London, Jonathan Cape, 1982).\n\nBarrett Browning, Elizabeth, ___Aurora Leigh_ __, intro. Cora Kaplan (London, The Women's Press, 1983).\n\n\u2014\u2014 _The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning_ , 6 vols., ed. Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke (New York, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1900).\n\n\u2014\u2014 _The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford: 1836\u20131854_ , 3 vols, ed. Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan (New York, The Browning Institute and Wellesley College, 1983).\n\n\u2014\u2014 _The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett: 1845\u20131846_ , 2 vols., ed. Elvan Kintner (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1969).\n\nBarthes, Roland, ___A Lover's Discourse: Fragments_ __, trans. Richard Howard (New York, Hill and Wang, 1978).\n\nBrowning, Robert, _The Poems_ , 2 vols., ed. John Pettigrew, supplemented and completed by Thomas J. Collins (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981).\n\n\u2014\u2014 _Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood_ , ed. R. Curle (London, John Murray, 1937).\n\nde Beauvoir, Simone, _The Second Sex_ , trans. H.M. Parshley (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972).\n\nde Rougemont, Denis, _Love in the Western World_ , trans. Montgomery Belgion, revised and augmented edition (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1983).\n\nFirestone, Shulamith, ___The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution_ __(1970; revised edition New York, Bantam, 1972).\n\nFoucault, Michel, _The History of Sexuality_ , vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981).\n\nGilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan, _The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination_ (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1979).\n\nGoing, William, _Scanty Plot of Ground: Studies in the Victorian Sonnet_ (The Hague, Mouton, 1976).\n\nHayter, Alethea, _Mrs Browning: A Poet's Work and its Setting_ (London, Faber, 1962).\n\nKarlin, Daniel, _The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett_ (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987).\n\nKristeva, Julia, \"Freud and Love: Treatment and Its Discontents,\" in _The Kristeva Reader_ , ed. Toril Moi (Oxford, Blackwell, 1986).\n\nLeighton, Angela, _Elizabeth Barrett Browning_ (Brighton, Harvester Press, 1986).\n\nMermin, Dorothy, \"The Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman Poet,\" _Critical Inquiry_ , 13 (1986), 64\u201380.\n\n\u2014\u2014 \"The Female Poet and the Embarrassed Reader: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ ,\" _English Literary History_ , 48 (1981), 351\u201367.\n\nMillett, Kate, _Sexual Politics_ (London, Virago, 1977).\n\nMitchell, Juliet, \"Romantic Love,\" in ___Women: The Longest Revolution_ __(London, Virago, 1984).\n\n _The Portuguese Letters_ , in _The Novel in Letters: Epistolary Fiction in the Early English Novel 1678\u20131740_ , ed. Natascha Wurzbach (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 3\u201321.\n\nRossetti, Christina, ___The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti_ __, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London, Macmillan, 1928).\n\nTennyson, Alfred, _The Poems of Tennyson_ , ed. Christopher Ricks (London, Longmans, 1969).\n\nTucker, Cynthia Grant, \"Meredith's Broken Laurel: _Modern Love_ and the Renaissance Sonnet Tradition,\" _Victorian Poetry_ , 10 (1972), 351\u201365.\n\nLeighton, Angela. 1999. \"Stirring 'a Dust of Figures': Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Love.\" In _Critical Essays on Elizabeth Barrett Browning_ , edited by Sandra Donaldson, pp. 218\u201332. New York: G K Hall and Co. Reproduced with permission of Angela Leighton and the Browning Society.\n\n# 18\n\n# 'Love, let us be true to one another'\n\n#  _Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, and 'our Aqueous Ages'_\n\nJoseph Bristow\n\n#  **I**\n\nFew would argue with the claim that Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach' stands as the paradigmatic Victorian poem where the burden of the literary past weighs heavily on each and every anxious line. Caught in the 'Wordsworthian matrix' analyzed by U. C. Knoepflmacher,1 this elegaic lyric revises its chief precursor to such a strenuous degree that it provides an ideal example for a canonical criticism interested in the waning of vatic authority during the mid-nineteenth century. Invoking not only Wordsworth's poems about the feared invasion of Napoleon at Dover in 1803, but also concentrating its attention on Sophoclean tragedy, Arnold's speaker finds himself engulfed by 'the turbid ebb and flow/Of human misery' (16\u201317).2 The poem moves between celebrating a universal model of human tragedy and engaging with a particular understanding of several of the most urgent social and political upheavals of the late 1840s. In one respect, this restless tidal movement enacts a recursive pattern of disaster where the military ambitions of Louis Napoleon III, in reviving those of his uncle, extend both the Oedipal tragedies of Sophocles and the benighted Battle of Epipolae recorded in Thucydides' _History of the Peloponnesian War_. But, in another sense, the speaker's anguish derives from his acknowledgement of an immediate crisis in the Christian world. His eagerness to join with the ranks of Sophocles and Wordsworth \u2013 exemplary figures from the ancient and modern periods respectively \u2013 emerges from the loss of religious faith in Victorian Britain. Horace Mann's 'Report on the Religious Census' (1851) counts among the best-known works from this period that expressed alarm at the millions of working-class non-attendants at church services. So in Arnold's poem we discover what E. D. H. Johnson influentially calls the 'alien vision of Victorian poetry',3 and it is fair to say that 'Dover Beach' condenses a typically mid-nineteenth century set of fears that may be quickly identified in many poems by his contemporaries. Generally regarded, then, as a pre-eminent representative for his age, Arnold's saddened speaker discloses that his nostalgic longing for contact with the glories of the past is built upon his perception of spiritual abandonment in the present.\n\nIt is fair to say that this account of 'Dover Beach' sums up the traditional view of the central place and high status enjoyed by this poem within English literary history. Yet the immense amount of critical attention bestowed upon this famous work has turned it into a monument that represents the most pressing intellectual issues, not just of the mid-Victorian period, but also those of modern liberal humanists who identify in this poem a voice that speaks to a form of universal experience where love promises to mend the ruptures of historical change. Small wonder, then, that 'Dover Beach' serves as Gerald Graff's main example for staging his debate about the transformed climate which subverted many of the longstanding orthodoxies of English studies in the 1980s. Explicating the recent conflicts between traditional and oppositional approaches to the Western tradition, Graff plays off the remonstrations of an Older Male Professor (who claims that 'Dover Beach' concerns 'universal human experience') against those of the Young Feminist Professor (who complains of Arnold's 'phallocentric discourse').4 My concern here, however, is not to allot the poem to either of the camps that Graff schematically opposes against one another. Although my interest lies instead in the sexual ebbs and flows of this and several other poems both by Arnold and by his close friend, Arthur Hugh Clough, the evidence supplied by the works of both poets suggests that masculine desire at this time is neither masquerading as universal nor presenting itself as solely or assuredly phallic. In their writing, masculinity is in an intensely conflicted state. If one question vexes their poetry more than anything else, it is that same-sex comradeship and sexual love for women have rival claims on the affections of their male protagonists. Numerous passages from some of Arnold's and Clough's best-known lyrics and narrative poems disclose that the transition from the fraternal support offered by their public-school (Rugby) and then Oxonian (Balliol) undergraduate community to taking the hand of a woman in marriage was fraught with anxiety, not least because the anticipated pattern of their lives was at this time being disrupted by very rapid alterations in the class structure.\n\nLike many young Victorian men who found themselves at a loss when coming to terms with main upheavals of the 1840s \u2013 the pan-European revolutions, the religious agnosticism pervading British culture, and the potential turmoil promised by Chartism \u2013 Arnold and Clough developed their intellectual life in an atmosphere of disappointment and uncertainty. As Arnold informed his mother, after attending a Chartist rally at Kennington Green, he 'should be sorry to live under their government'.5 In this respect, since his speaker feels overtaken by the pace of history, Arnold makes in 'Dover Beach' a characteristic move to resist its onward march towards democracy. Gazing towards the retreating 'Sea of Faith' (21), his speaker finally appeals to the redemptive spirit of love. What has been until line 28 a solitary voice gains in rhetorical confidence when it locates another presence directly in its midst: 'Ah, love', he declares, 'let us be true/ To one another' (29\u201330). Like Wordsworth, notably in 'Tintern Abbey' \u2013 a poem that provides the template for several of Arnold's lyrics \u2013 this persona shifts his attention away from universal musings to the implied auditor of his noble thoughts. She is the woman \u2013 like Wordsworth's unnamed but implied sister, Dorothy \u2013 with whom he wishes to share 'the world, which seems/ To lie before us like a land of dreams' (30\u201331). Moral resolution and poetic closure are only possible when the silent woman's assumed reciprocity to his desires has been addressed. These culminative sections amount, according to Park Honan, to 'the most deeply felt seventeen lines ever written by a modern poet'.6 But, more specifically, they also express \u2013 as a number of lines warily disclose \u2013 thwarted sexual desires. His meditation upon Sophocles and Wordsworth may be read as the confused outpourings of an intellectual who is not at all well-practised in the art of seduction, and whose discomfort with women is more than a little evident.\n\nOne later poet, together with several commentators on the poem, makes exactly this point. 'Dover Beach' proved memorable enough in 1960 for Anthony Hecht to write a swingeing parody of Arnold's high seriousness. Hecht's unamusing title, 'The Dover Bitch: a Criticism of Life', lays bare the sexual subtext to be discerned in Arnold's revealing metaphors for religious belief. In 'Dover Beach', the 'Sea of Faith/ . . . once . . . /Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled' around the earth (21\u201323). The 'shingles', too, are conspicuously 'naked' (28). There is, in the light of these displaced sexual interests, something coyly Victorian about the repressiveness of this brief poem whose plaintive tones may be thought to linger on a sense of post-coital triste (notably, the 'melancholy, long, withdrawing roar' [25]). 'Dover Beach', therefore, may be viewed as a failed prelude in courtship, since the elegaic tone hints at an unconsummated relationship for where the speaker's displays of erudition would appear to be compensating for his sexual inadequacy. With this point in mind, Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom assert that Arnold 'is too ready to ascribe his own failure of nerve, erotically speaking, to a larger crisis in the history of culture'.7 Compounding various kinds of failure, then, 'Dover Beach' has a distinguished place in the cultural consciousness \u2013 for its post-Romantic sense of belatedness, for the manner in which it bears witness to a fading Christianity, and for its inhibited sexual energies. Yet the 'love' named in the penultimate section of Arnold's poem is not necessarily the 'bitch' of Hecht's invention who 'had read/ Sophocles in a fairly good translation'.8 I want to argue that it could also be the kind of man who was versed in the ancient Greek of the original. And, furthermore, I wish to show how this poem is one among several by Arnold and by Clough that points to some of the most problematic tensions within the ascendant ideology of 'separate spheres' for men and women.\n\nFor 'separate spheres' was from the outset a doctrine that contained the seeds of its own subversion. Although proponents of this system of moral conduct, which came into its own in the late 1830s, insisted that 'woman's mission' was to be subordinate to men, they none the less laid a significant emphasis on woman's superior position, since it was she who was protected from a transforming industrial world where corruption was perceptibly rife. In domestic seclusion, so this argument went, women were unsullied by the everyday hardships of the public realm. It comes as no surprise that writers such as Sarah Lewis and Sarah Stickney Ellis would champion the capacity of women to maintain stability in the home, seeing women's role as a morally regenerative one. In his review of Ellis's influential manual on women's duty, A. W. Kinglake observed that he could not help but 'look at works written by women upon the science of domestic government with a kind of good-humored suspicion . . . by saying that they make us remember that treatise on horsemanship which the tailor detected as having decidedly come from the pen of the chestnut mare.' It is, above all, Ellis's claim that 'England, as a nation, has little to boast of beyond her intellectual and her moral power' to which Kinglake most forcefully objects. For such an assertion, he claims, fails to observe that 'England . . . is illustrious by force of her arms.'9 Kinglake is, in other words, implying that Ellis's patriotic zeal elevates the feminine moral and regenerative principle at the expense of ignoring the masculine one enshrined in the nation's military prowess. In this respect, 'woman's mission' could appear to be staked on very false claims indeed. Commenting on the supreme moral authority ascribed to women by Ellis and Lewis, Judith Newton observes that such writers 'in their tendency to place men at the bottom of industrial capitalist and domestic ills and in their tendency to isolate women like themselves as social heroes, challenged the power relations of their world and in the process entertained a view of mid-nineteenth-century society which middle-class men, by and large, did not share'. But, as Newton's passing comments on Arnold's 'The Buried Life' demonstrate, the female presence that haunts the closing lines of that poem signals that he was only too aware of the increased moral influence exerted by middle-class women at this time. She notes that this alteration in gender relations occurred at a time when 'Classical liberal and middle-class ideology were undergoing a shift.' It was, she argues, a period in which a 'series of booms and depressions sharpened the edge of class conflict'.10 Scholarly young men, to say the least, were feeling more and more embattled, and their sense of dispossession frequently sounds throughout the poetry of this time. In the strained friendship between Arnold and Clough, we can see for sure how the university-educated poet was torn between his Oxonian loyalties and his desire for a consoling form of femininity. The main trouble for these men was that middIe-class women increasingly appeared to have greater moral influence than the post-Romantic poet could readily assert for himself.\n\nThe purpose of this essay, therefore, is to consider how poems such as 'Dover Beach' demonstrate why the need for a scholarly community (enshrined in Sophocles, Wordsworth, and Thucidydes) is wholly incommensurate with another 'love' that could \u2013 I will argue \u2013 be either male or female. Although numerous studies suggest that 'Dover Beach' was written as a tribute to Arnold's wife, Frances Lucy Wightman, during their deferred honeymoon in 1851, there was another 'love' whose presence haunts, if not the 'naked shingles', then the 'Sea of Faith' itself. The 'love' invited to 'Come to the window' (6) and 'Listen' to the 'grating roar/ Of pebbles' could not so implausibly be Clough. For Clough notoriously declined to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles, and so resigned his fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford. In making this suggestion, I am not trying to concoct a previously unknown homoeroticism between Arnold and Clough \u2013 although there was, without doubt, an intense intimacy between them. Instead, my discussion focuses on the pronounced antagonism between same-sex affections and other-sex desires historically situated in what one of Clough's protagonists calls 'our Aqueous Ages'.11 This is, metaphorically, a time of fluidity that alludes to two closely related things. The 'Aqueous Ages' signal change from enjoying the independent life of a bachelor to becoming a respectable married man. They also point to that wider sphere of social and political changes anatomized in each succeeding clause of 'Dover Beach'.\n\nIt is hard not to notice how water saturates the poetry of both Arnold and Clough, either centrally or on its receding margins. Attending to the predominant metaphors of Arnold's lyrics, William A. Madden asserts that this writer may be described temperamentally as a 'poet of water'.12 From 'The Forsaken Merman' to the six short poems comprising the 'Marguerite' sequence, the all-encompasing tide figures as a realm of inestimable loss. On a similar note, Robindra Kumar Biswas celebrates the 'great sea' as 'that subtle and profound symbol of bewilderment, indeterminacy, flux, and chance which dominates' Clough's work.13 This snared metaphorical resource, however, is frequently associated with the threatening \u2013 if not alienating \u2013 presence of women. Yet rarely have critics explored the complexity of the sexual meanings that are carried on the cross-currents of the tides, streams, and rivers that ebb, flow, and course through these poets' works. Only in Tony Pinkney's study of Arnold's Northern seas is there a critical account of the gendered troubles figured by the tidal movements of these writings.14 Pinkney's project is to demonstrate that this sea is the medium incorporating \u2013 or, better, sublimating \u2013 the repressed 'other' of Arnold's paranoid classicism. He is, in other words, saying that the sea \u2013 so frequently associated with the Goths' violent sacking of Rome \u2013 connotes a degrading and anarchic physicality against which Arnold would later pitch his belief in culture. This subversive Gothic element, argues Pinkney, frequently unleashes its repressions, and the thickening medium it condenses takes the form of a fearful and unapproachable femininity. What Pinkney calls the 'oceanic', however, is not solely Arnold's problem. The poetry of both Arnold and Clough discloses acute conflicts within male homosocial desire whenever they draw on these highly manipulable oceanic images.\n\nBut Arnold's and Clough's shared concern with their 'Aqueous Ages' should not obscure the fact that they were writing almost entirely opposed kinds of poetry. The differences of style, technique, and philosophical outlook that lie between them point to one of the major divisions in middle-class poetic practice in the late 1840s and 1850s. Their 'love' was unquestionably structured around a passionate disagreement about the role and function of poetry. In this respect, Arnold's correspondence to Clough, and Clough's 1853 review of Arnold's _Poems_ count among the most significant documents for comprehending a more widespread crisis in mid-Victorian poetry. The strongly felt lack of consensus about what a poem should be led to forms of experimentation that gave rise to such new phenomena as the 'persona' \u2013 the antecedent of the modernist 'mask'. Such transformations in the genre also meant that critical debates about poetry became intensely politicized. For Arnold and Clough, the antithetical nature of their respective poetic practices was so great that it became a decisive factor in the eventual collapse of their friendship. But, as their writings reveal, there was another reason why they had to forgo their love for one another. For in poetry they found a kind of fluidity that they often figured in feminine \u2013 or, more precisely, feminized \u2013 terms. They plunged the depths of a potentially volatile medium where objects of desire and poetic ideals repeatedly failed to coalesce. The genre in which they worked was, in a sense, militating against their gender.\n\n#  **II**\n\nSo, first of all, it is useful to examine the basis of these poets' Oxonian 'love' for one another. In the years immediately following their graduation, Arnold's impassioned attachment to Clough could not have been more effusive. 'Dover Beach' echoes the intimate salutations of Arnold's warmest letters to the friend to whom he had 'clung . . . more in spirit than to any other man'.15 In 1848, when Clough was in Liverpool composing _The Bothie of Toper-Na-Fuosich_ \u2013 to give it its first and, as it turned out, sexually embarrassing title16 \u2013 Arnold concluded one letter with sentences to which 'Dover Beach', according to Isobel Armstrong, bears more than a passing resemblance:17\n\nFarewell, my love, to meet I hope at Oxford: not alas in heaven: tho' thus much I cannot but think: that our spirits retain their conquests: that from the height they succeed in raising themselves to, they can never fall. Tho: this uti possetedes principle may be compatible with entire loss of individuality and of the power to recognize one another. Therefore, my well-known love, accept my heartiest greeting and farewell.18\n\nThe whole letter is full of amatory declarations of this kind: 'my duck . . . my love . . . my well-known love'. Yet if the spirited intimacy of this extract is clear, the selfsame closeness of this friendship consigns some of Arnold's references to secrecy. In part, the compressed grammar is to blame for these obscurities. Although the gist of this passage is that he hopes that their friendship will last forever, the allusion to the 'uti possetedes principle' makes for some confusion. In Arnold's subjunctive declension, it translates as an esoteric 'as if you were to possess principle'; more conventionally, as 'uti possitedes', it refers to an 'as you possess principle'. Either way, the probable object of this principle of possession is Clough, and in the broader context of the letter the desire to lose individuality and recognize another person \u2013 here, presumably, his friend \u2013 is lodged against a wholehearted disappointment in women.\n\nFor these remarks come immediately after ten lines of mock-heroic verse invented by Arnold himself that disparage the female sex. 'Say this of her', Arnold writes in a commanding tone, 'The day was, thou wert not: the day will be, / Thou wilt be most unlovely'. These misogynistic remarks append an earlier comment where he declares on his tiredness with reading in French the 'fade' \u2013 that is, tasteless or insipid \u2013 B\u00e9ranger, and that his exhaustion with this writer compares with a 'feeling with regard to (I hate the word) women'. As he states in the poem he has just penned, B\u00e9ranger's Epicureanism and femininity shall suffer exactly the same kind of 'abhorred decay'. So, taken together, the reference to Oxford, the sexual hostility of his mock-heroic verse, and his desire to be 'in Heaven' with his friend demonstrate only too clearly how their 'love' for each other rests on a bed of disapproval towards women: such beings are too predictable by far, and so prove tiresome. It is altogether preferable to indulge in latinized banter with another university-educated man. One of Arnold's better-known comments strengthens this point. The promixity of these sexually volatile declarations to Arnold's later invective against Charlotte Bront\u00eb's _Villette_ (1853) is hardly accidental. He found this novel, which stakes an urgent claim on woman's professional autonomy, to be 'one of the most utterly disagreeable books I ever read \u2013 and having seen her makes me more so'.19 (Bront\u00eb, it is worth noting, thought Arnold insincere in his charm.)20\n\nArnold's letters to Clough are not usually cited for their same-sex interests. They are instead deployed to uphold two different axioms about his own and Clough's work. The first is to show how his unceasing revulsion with his age, in which he diagnosed a stifling ' _congestion of the brain_ '21, extends his far-reaching dissatisfaction with the culture of midcentury which he bemoans at length in the Preface to his 1853 volume of _Poems_. (There Arnold famously writes: 'The confusion of the present times is great, the multitude of voices counselling different things bewildering', and so on.)22 Second, these letters are often taken as evidence of how Clough's career was marked by failure and inconsistency. 'You ask me', writes Arnold 'in what I think or have thought you going wrong', and then elaborates this view: 'you . . . could never finally, as it seemed \u2013 \"resolve to be thyself\" \u2013 but were looking for this and that experience, and doubting whether you ought not to adopt this or that mode of being persons qui ne vous valaient pas [whom you do not value] because it might possibly be nearer the truth than your own'. This assessment of Clough's unfulfilled vocation \u2013 which Arnold concludes with a self-aggrandizing reference to his own poem, 'Self-Dependence' \u2013 concludes with this crushing judgement: 'You have I am convinced lost infinite time in this way'. Such reproving statements must without doubt have contributed to the impairment of their 'love'.\n\nClough's career after Rugby would indeed appear not to have realized its promise. He failed to excel in his degree and then, several years later, resigned his Oxford fellowship. The life he spent in successive posts \u2013 as head of University Hall, London; as tutor in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and, finally, as Education Officer in London \u2013 may have diminished what brief amounts of time he devoted during his vacations to writing poetry. Yet Arnold found little to praise in the substantial canon of work that Clough produced on his holidays. Arnold declared that Clough's second volume, _Ambarvalia_ , was 'not _natural_ '.23 These sentiments may look odd when Arnold's intense 'love' is taken into consideration. Yet the more one examines Arnold's letters the more it seems that his investment in this friendship was driven by energies that Clough could not return in kind: ' _pray_ remember', he charges his friend, 'that I am and always shall be, whatever I do or say, powerfully attracted towards you . . . I am linked for ever with you by intellectual bonds \u2013 the strongest of all: more than you are with me'.24 Arnold's fierce admiration for Clough is constantly matched by his blighted hopes in this idol of his Oxford days. 'I do not think', he writes in 1853, 'that we did each other harm at Oxford. I look back to that time with pleasure'.25\n\nAlthough Clough's replies to Arnold are not extant, the significance of this friendship to him emerges in a letter to Tom Arnold, dated May 1851. There Clough states that he 'consider[s] Miss Wightman a sort of natural enemy'. 'How can it be otherwise?' he asks, 'shall I any longer breakfast with Matt twice a week?'26 By comparison, in his own correspondence with his fianc\u00e9e, Blanche Smith, Clough's trepidation in making the transition from being a bachelor to a married man comes to the fore. More than anything else, he implores her not to expect a marriage modelled on the commonplace maxims of 'separate spheres' for men and women:\n\nI ask no girl to be my friend that we may be a fond foolish couple together all in all to each other. If one that has dreamt of such unreality will open her eyes and look about her and consent to be what alone in plain fact she can be, a help-mate \u2013 that is a different thing . . . We are companions \u2013 fellow labourers \u2013 to the end of our journey here.27\n\nMarriage, he implies, should enshrine the fellowship that he and Arnold enjoyed in former times. Yet, as his later letters to Blanche Smith indicate, he would eventually capitulate to the orthodoxies of the day. For there she figures as his helpless little girl whom he continues to infantilize. The point is that in the late 1840s Clough was trying to create a vision of an alternative femininity, and the sentiments he expresses here connect directly with the scheme of social and sexual relations laid out in the _Bothie_. In this poem, the arch-radical Philip Hewson marries a Highland lassie, Elspie Mackaye. She embodies qualities that several readers thought made her a most inappropriate partner for a young Oxford graduate like Hewson.28 Their liaison not surprisingly gave offence to some reviewers of a poem that possessed a brazenly arresting mixture of student jargon and experimental hexameters. Elspie is the kind of labouring woman who, 'uprooting potatoes' (II. 5), fires Hewson's imagination, and their future exists in New Zealand where 'hath he farmstead and land, and fields of corn and flax fields' (IX. 200). There they promise to live out a life where Elspie is the newly-born Eve \u2013 the 'sole helpmate meet to be with' Adam in Eden (II. 87). Tom Paulin recognizes that she represents that 'ideal northern maiden' who is 'the British equivalent of an _aisling_ , the visionary embodiment of national freedom in Irish Gaelic poetry'. So Hewson's investment in this foreign femininity, Paulin argues, is a symptom of Clough's 'desire to find a primal purity outside the social structure of 1840s Britain, though it can also be viewed as a form of sexual tourism'.29 The liberating exuberance of the poem, then, deserts the postlapsarian condition of England for the farthest reaches of the globe. And it does so in a prosody that deliberately affronts poetic tradition. Its form could not be more distant from the 'over-educated weakness of purpose' that Clough found in Arnold's _Poems_.30 Clough did not live to see 'Dover Beach' in print \u2013 he died in 1861, the poem appeared in 1867 \u2013 but its tenor is similar to those earlier poems by Arnold that displeased him. He was dismayed at how Arnold's lyrics and poetic narratives advanced 'lessons of reflectiveness' and 'maxims of caution', rather than the 'calls to action' that he felt were needed by an age in transition.\n\nClough's poetry often makes a founding principle of these 'calls to action' \u2013 so much so that the very word 'action' becomes a personification of sorts. The _Bothie_ is an uproariously energetic poem, notably where Elspie expresses her longings for Hewson who, for her, tellingly figures as the sea: 'the sea there,/ Which _will_ come, through the straits and all between the mountains,/ Forcing its great strong tide into every nook and inlet' (VII. 120\u201322). The hydraulic force of this sexually charged 'tyrannous brine' (VII. 130) has overwhelmed Elspie in a recent dream. She recalls how these surging waters tried to 'mix-in' (VII. 132) with her, threatening to change the course of her life. The contrast with Arnold's poetry could not be more stark. In 'Marguerite \u2013 Continued', for example, Arnold's waves once more obstruct consummation. Comparing each individual to an 'enisled' continent (1), the 'water plain' (17) pushes the speaker and Marguerite further and further apart. Although the whole poem resembles 'Dover Beach' in expressing its 'longing like despair' (12), the restless movement of the sea points to a rather different conception of history. The seas that divide continents here are those discussed by Charles Lyell in his controversial _Elements of Geology_ (1838), which explains how land was created when molten lava first collided with water. Lyell's account went far to challenge biblical computations of historical time. In Arnold's poem, the painful 'severance' (22) of each island from an original land mass takes on an aspect of humanity's original fall from grace. 'Who ordered', asks the speaker, 'that their longing's fire/ Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled?' (19\u201320). Controlled by a higher power, the sea exerts three memorable qualities: it is 'unplumbed', 'salt', and 'estranging' (24). No action can, in Arnold's despairing grammar, be taken against it. The poem is, then, a prime example of the 'Stoic-Epicurean' stance that Arnold often adopts to maintain a philosophical aloofness from the ravages of history, and which Clough would not hesitate to mock.\n\nIn its use of a geological conception of historical time, 'Marguerite \u2013 Continued' marks a complicated but revealing intersection with the 'Aqueous Ages' that preoccupy much of Clough's epistolary sequence, _Amours de Voyage_. But this is not the only historical mode that concerns Clough's poem. Mazzini's Italian revolution of 1849 is its immediate point of reference, and it is both to and from this site of struggle that the poem embarks on its intricate amatory, political, and intellectual voyage. Both 'Marguerite \u2013 Continued' and the _Amours_ were composed at roughly the same time, and at least one commentator has suggested that Clough's main protagonist, Claude is an impersonation of Arnold.31 Evidence exists to support this view. The rather haughty Claude propounds a distinctly Arnoldian 'Stoic-Epicurean acceptance' (I. 76). But altogether more intriguing is the view that Arnold's Marguerite poems chart his failed love affair with Mary Claude during his stay in Switzerland in 1847. The name Claude would, then, appear to bring Clough's interest in his friend's amours into focus. Yet the claims made upon the scant information that exists on this matter have created dissension among scholars.32 The name of Mary Claude was doubtless known to Arnold's closest friend, and the _Amours_ may be read as a rather chiding satire on Arnold's stand-offishness towards women. Claude, after all, fails to win his lady, and many of his letters to his friend, Eustace, voice opinions that compare with those oceanic and distinctly sexual disturbances that pulsate throughout Arnold's shorter poems.\n\nClough's satire frequently derives from Claude's scholarly high-mindedness in the face of the revolution led by Mazzini. At one point caught up in bouts of rioting, Claude informs his friend that he has been pondering Nature: the higher power that looks down on such petty disturbances with contempt. The tumult of 1849 concentrates Claude's mind on what J. C. Shairp thought to be the 'blank dejection' evident in Arnold's poetry.33 Claude takes the kind of intellectual position that Clough would later refer to as the 'rehabilitated Hindu-Greek theosophy' that made much of Arnold's poetry so 'dismal'.34 (Arnold told Clough that he had been reading the _Bbagavad-Gita_.35) But even when sending up such philosophizing, Clough's poetry refuses to succumb to the resigned tempo of Arnold's lyrics. Bouncing hexameters ceaselessly mock Claude's despondency:\n\n'This is Nature', I said: 'we are born as it were from her waters, Over the billows that buffet and beat us, her offspring uncared-for, Casting one single regard of a painful victorious knowledge, Into her billows that buffet and beat us we sink and are swallowed'.\n\n(III. 51\u201354)\n\nIn this reverie, Mother Nature figures as the sea. But it is significant that, in the next few lines, she adopts a more identifiably female form. Swayed by the motion of the steamer from Marseilles to Civita Vecchia, Claude drowsily recalls the famed statue of the 'Sleeping Ariadne' in Rome. Yet, instead of retaining her repose, she begins to stare at him 'from the face of a Triton in marble' (III. 57). She is one of a great many well-known figures from classical myth that serve to indicate how his visual perception of the world is mediated through a repertoire of erudite allusions, ones elevating his intellect at the expense of immediate feeling. As this episode demonstrates, however, his learned imaginings contract the very distance that he seeks to impose on his travels in Italy, particularly where his condescending attitude towards his socially inferior fellow tourists is concerned. (Claude finds himself in the company of not so well-educated Cornish tradespeople.)\n\nOutstaring Claude, this image of Ariadne represents a disapproving femininity \u2013 one which, like Mother Nature, threatens to chasten him. It is her reproachful countenance that leads him to reject thoughts of 'growth' \u2013 like the 'grain' that, as he puts it earlier, enjoyed 'force to develop and open its young cotyledons' (III. 40\u201343). Instead, he declares that 'we are still in our Aqueous Ages' (III. _59)_. By this phrase \u2013 which echoes Lyell's introductory discussion of aqueous rocks \u2013 he means that humanity has not progressed as far as it might have thought, since it remains unable to 'compare, and reflect, and examine one thing with another' (III. 44). These sentiments once again suggest the Arnoldian incapacity to act upon the world. Yet the specific representation of femininity in these lines provides an additional gloss on the shape and direction of Arnold's 'Marguerite' poems. Engulfed in Nature's 'waters', human life is trapped within her womb. All that Claude can do is sink back into it. In this respect, the _Amours_ hint at the fear of amniotic flooding in those bitterly mediative poems that Arnold penned to his beloved in Switzerland, the woman who might have been Mary Claude.\n\n#  **III**\n\nBut to see the _Amours_ solely as a punishing satire on Arnold's worst traits while disclosing the conflicted nature of their friendship, may obscure the more general crisis in social and sexual relations that preoccupies nearly every section of this poem. From the outset, Claude's marked apprehensiveness about marriage comes right to the fore! Although he argues that the promise of fathering children \u2013 'those/ Pure and delicate forms' (I. 175\u201376) \u2013 has its attractions, this alone will not compensate entirely for the tiresome company of the 'feminine presence' (I. 169). Searching for an escape-route to a secure, loving, and dignified alternative to marriage, he deplores the constraining possessiveness of the nuclear family. Proposing that he might pursue a 'peaceful avuncular function' (I. 179), enjoying his future nephews and nieces, he decries how 'No proper provision is made for that most patriotic,/ Most meritorious subject, the childless and bachelor uncle' (I. 184\u201385). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observes that 'in the increasingly stressed nineteenth-century bourgeois dichotomy between domestic female space and extrafamilial, political and economic male space, the bachelor is at least partly feminized by his attention to and interest in domestic concerns'. He is a liminal figure whose position within society is potentially quite disruptive. 'At the same time', adds Sedgwick, 'his intimacy with clubland and bohemia gave him a special passport to the world of men.'36 This is the dual masculine identity that Clough explores in the _Amours_ , and he elaborates his thoughts on the bachelor's 'extrafamilial' status in a way that points to considerable fears about unregulated sexual behaviour. That society regards bachelorhood as unconventional surprises Claude in the light of what he calls 'Malthusian doctrine' (I. 183). Malthus was certainly on Clough's mind in 1848, shortly before he started work on this poem. A letter to the poet's sister, Anne, indicates how he saw sexual pleasure as the one thing that could transcend the all too evident poverty affecting the Hungry Forties. Adhering to the view that 'the more wretched a population becomes, the more rapidly it should increase', he observes that to 'live together as man and wife is sometimes the only enjoyment that people can get without immediate ready money payment or certainty of getting into debt for it'.37 But this is not to say that sex adequately compensates for economic deprivation. It belongs, in fact, to the same cycle. For Clough believes that if the material conditions of the working classes are improved, then they will 'find the inclination to refrain' from sexual intercourse. Both the _Amours_ and this letter, therefore, suggest that marriage, sex, and reproduction follow in an unwelcome pattern where physical and material needs are forever sundered. If a man is middle-class and married, he is bound to a woman in whom one has \u2013 as Claude says later \u2013 only 'an _ad-interim_ solace and pleasure' (III. 143). By comparison, if a man is working-class and lacks material resources, he indulges in sex and is consequently saddled with the burden of a large family.\n\nYet it is not only the prospect of marriage that unsettles Claude. His future choice of profession remains equally precarious and unsure. For he, much to his frustration, does not have an inheritance to rely on. In a long section deleted from canto 1, he ponders how his own life might in such politically difficult times turn out to be socially useful: 'What can a poor devil do who would honestly earn him his victuals?' (624: 9). Entertaining all the various options \u2013 such as joining the armed forces, entering the Church, or emigrating to the colonies \u2013 he is appalled by the consequences of each. The army and navy seem redundant, since this is 'an industrial age . . . with \"PEACE\" on the calico banner' (624: 12\u201314). The Church, particularly in its High Anglican forms, strikes him as a 'Vast Eleusianian system of lady-and-gentleman doctrine' propounded by 'Perverts' (624: 45\u201346) \u2013 namely, converts to Rome. And, lastly, the pioneer has to put up with 'occasional Caffres,/ Snowy Canadian woods, penitential Australian acres,/ And the Phlegraean fields, far famed, of the Cannibal islands' (625: 61\u201363). Such thoughts would, within a matter of years, take shape in Clough's own mind as he sought a profession that yielded sufficient income so that the father of Blanche Smith would give his consent to her marriage to an itinerant academic. Arnold, likewise, took a post as an Inspector of Schools so that Mr Justice Wightman would allow his daughter to take the hand of a former Oxford scholar. No matter how satirically he is treated, Claude is surely addressing an issue that had equal urgency for Clough.\n\nSo, in enumerating these divergent professional paths, Claude is expressing the indignation of those young men who have no private income. They find themselves looking in vain for a suitable position after graduating from Oxford. All they can do, it seems, is compete with those who 'make their money from commerce' (624: 3), and who successfully petition for those _laissez-faire_ policies that belittle the prowess of the military in protecting the nation. (It is precisely this issue that vexes the excitable hero of Alfred Tennyson's _Maud_.38) They see the Church increasingly taken over by 'ladylike priests and deacons' (624: 26), contaminated by Tractarian doctrine. And, as a last alternative, these highly educated men recognize that emigration means not only mixing with the natives, but being brought down to their brutish level. This unbending amalgam of class, sexual, and racial prejudices points directly at one thing: an overwhelming feeling of emasculation. Little wonder that Claude remonstrates that 'Starving meanwhile is a quiet and most inexpensive process', one that he 'can but decline to prefer' above all other things (624: 70\u201371).\n\nA short and incomplete poem by Clough sharpens this strained sense of emasculation in the face of the growing power of the masses, not to say the changing structure of class relations in general. It is also here that Clough resorts, like Claude and Arnold, to the sea. Clough's editors provide no date of composition for the unpublished and untitled poem beginning 'The contradictions of the expanding soul', and the extant text is a copy in a fair hand by Blanche Smith. Yet, even if its status within Clough's canon is unclear, the sentiments located in these lines are plain enough. A distressed man discovers himself adrift, like a log, where 'opposing tides' (3) of thought beat and buffet him from every side. He would much prefer to be like a 'strong ship . . . /Well steered' ( _5\u20136_ ). Tossed upon the tide, he is anxious for the 'manhood of our race' (2). In this respect, he appears much like Claude, except here the poem adopts a sombre \u2013 one might say Arnoldian \u2013 tone. At the mercy of the waves, his mind turns to different types of men. The first are the 'lordly scions of nobility' (15) who partly win his admiration since they are 'Manly almost to the inhuman' (20). Yet he is outraged at the 'Impudence' (17) of those laws that grant rights of inheritance to such men 'at the font' (18). The muscular strength of these nobles, which exerts itself most forcefully in the army, shows no fear, only an inexorable will to succeed. Although the speaker in many ways regrets the triumphal status of aristocratic fighters within society, he concedes that 'Earth cannot spare them yet' (27), and so resigns himself to the fact that their might shall retain its authority for many years to come.\n\n#  **IV**\n\nArnold was similarly troubled by the values of brute strength attached to the noble warrior, and he too would find ways of reconciling himself to it. Here it is worth turning to the famous incident in 'Sohrab and Rustum' where the great man of war confronts his equally powerful illegitimate son. When these leaders of opposing armies clash, they are wholly unaware of their filial relation. Having fallen down and then recovered his sword, the elderly Rustum taunts his enemy: 'Girl! nimble with thy feet, not thy hands!/ Curled minion, dancer, coiner of sweet words' (457\u201358). And within a matter of lines he repeats this effeminizing insult (469). This adaptation of an episode recorded in John Malcolm's _History of Persia_ finally leads to a celebration of soldierly honour. For Rustum, who eventually discovers that he has slain his son, declares his tragic loss. The poem closes with an elegaic description of the sun setting above the 'Chorasmian waste' (878) where the Oxus makes its ways down from the Pamirs to the Aral Sea: 'by the river marge . . ./. . . Rustum and his son were left alone' (873\u201374). Resting together, the two warriors form a natural part of this landscape, and like the river that flows beside them they blend with elemental \u2013 if not sexual \u2013 forces that rush forth towards the 'longed-for dash of waves' (889). Echoing Achilles' lament for Patroclus in Homer's _Iliad_ , Rustum's final speech to his dying son amounts to one of the most affirmative moments of close physical affection to be found anywhere in Arnold's poetry. Not surprisingly, this poem found favour with Charles Kingsley who applauded 'Sohrab and Rustum' as 'poetry written by brave men and read by brave men'. Such writing exhibited those qualities of robust manliness championed by Kingsley's pugilistic Christian Socialism. Such was Arnold's gift for adapting a historical story of tragic heroism that Kingsley implores Arnold to 'employ his great powers in giving us [a] translation of Homer'.39\n\nBut when the scene shifts to contemporary Victorian Britain, Arnold's personae find themselves on altogether less firm ground. 'Resignation \u2013 To Fausta' \u2013 a poem that Clough wittily satirized \u2013 reveals that the manly ideal was remote from the demands and desires of those Oxonian men who were searching for an alternative masculinity that would prove as powerful as the military strength embodied in the nobles commanding the armed forces, on the one hand, and as influential as the work undertaken by the captains of industry, on the other. The speaker of 'Resignation \u2013 To Fausta' upholds the belief that all things in nature 'bear rather than rejoice' (270). Here, once again, is the 'Stoic-Epicurean' posture where the poet 'Bears to admire uncravingly' (161) the world that lies before him. From the start, he recoils from those who are 'too imperious' (37) in their desire for power, conquest, and change. Exemplars of such rude force include pilgrims bound for Mecca, the Crusaders, the Goth, and the Hun \u2013 all of whom, he claims, live by the principle of do or die. Each group, he declares, is 'enthrall[ed]' by its 'self-ordained . . . labours' (14).\n\nNot only does the resigned speaker distance himself from these uncivilized victors. His abhorrence of such 'imperious' types is also compounded by a wholesale rejection of Romantic authority. The romantic poet who despicably ' _flees the common life of men_ ' (212) \u2013 a man who, in other words, stands above the 'general life, which does not cease,/ Whose secret is not joy, but peace' (191\u201392) \u2013 has no place within this scheme of things. In making these claims, the poem adopts a structure of address similar to that of 'Dover Beach'. And, once again, the same poetic precursor is there. 'Resignation \u2013 To Fausta' models its landscape on Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey'. In reworking this chief antecedent, Arnold's poem indicates that the Romantic ideal which seeks, in Wordsworth's phrase, to 'see into the life of things' is no longer valid.40 Putting words into Fausta's mouth, the speaker claims how wrong she is to believe that the poet ' _Breathes . . . immortal air_ ' (146\u201347). Instead, it is the duty of the poet to 'scan/ Not his own course, but that of man' (146\u201347). Should he do otherwise, he would implicitly rank among the likes of the Muslim pilgrim, the Crusader, the Goth, and the Hun, all of whom seek either triumph or self-destruction, rather than peaceful and civilized resignation. Arnold's poet attempts to steer a course between Romantic idealism and Gothic violence by declaring how he 'Surveys each happy group which fleets,/ Toil ended, through the shining streets' (166\u201367). Thus he can conclude he is emphatically not ' _alone_ ' (169). One can, to be sure, detect in this ending the conflicted desire to be both integrated within _and_ remain aloof from a class-divided society that characterizes Clough's anxious intellectual who is threatened by aggressive and highly physical men. To be resigned, in other words, is to be somewhere in between, on the one hand, 'each happy group' returning from their labours and, on the other, those 'imperious' brutes who survive through tyranny.\n\nBut, hereafter, Arnold's resigned speaker finds it hard to ensure that his ideal poet is placed both individually above and socially within the ordinary confines of the 'general life'. If confident in his desire to 'bear rather than rejoice', he is ultimately uncertain about what he calls 'action's dizzying eddy whirled' (227). By this he means the fundamental energy embodied in those waters that rush unimpeded through so many of his poems, notably 'The Buried Life', and which has already figured in the 'wide-glimmering sea' (85) in which he and Fausta have bathed their hands 'with speechless glee' (84). Water undoubtedly signals sexual pleasure. But the speaker does his utmost to resist its turbulent force. Here the closing lines compile a sequence of loosely connected clauses that mystify the status of this 'dizzying eddy' by designating it as an unnamed 'something that infects the world' (278). This obscure energy would seem to be just as unstoppably driven as the 'imperious' dynamism embodied in those heartless brutes who in former eras laid siege on centres of civilization. Since it is by nature nebulous, this 'something' has prompted divergent interpretations. (G. Robert Stange, for example, believes that it refers to evil, and thus departs from Arnold's Stoicism.41) The broken grammar of these lines suggests that the speaker is claiming that our resigned lives are not necessarily 'milder' (275) because we have forgotten this agitating and impulsive force. There again, it is possible to see how the 'something that infects the world' can never be forgotten, since it exerts an ongoing transitive power. For it continues to infect. No one can escape it. And the fact that this infection gains such prominence in the closing lines of the poem indicates that its power is altogether greater than the resigned stance which he earlier propounds. It proves, in the end, hard to accept that this persona's passive capacity to 'bear' enjoys moral superiority over the 'dizzying eddy' that invokes 'action'. He is surely as much at a loss as Clough's speaker who, while contemplating the 'contradictions of the expanding soul', bemoans his feminized position within the culture.\n\nClough, however, devised a distinctive style of writing that could go some way towards restoring his strength as both a poet and an intellectual who felt caught between the social authority invested in the trading classes and the enduring magnanimity of the aristocracy. For Clough's greatest resource is his vein of satiric wit that found a suitable target in the man who made him into both an idol and an emblem of failure. Clough's cynical 'Resignation \u2013 To Faustus' makes merciless fun of Arnold's poem. But this satire need not simply be seen as an irreverent answer to Arnold's agonized claims about the poet who wishes to stand implausibly both above and among the populace. Instead, Clough's satire defends another equally d\u00e9class\u00e9 intellectual from confronting \u2013 as Arnold does \u2013 the loss of Romantic authority, and the forms of masculine power invested in that vatic role. Shifting the interests of Arnold's subtitle from the amatory rhetoric of Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_ to the Mephistopholean concerns of _Faust_ , Clough's persona addresses an imaginary 'land of Empire' (1), a classical city that has been overrun by Goths. This world is riven between the muses and the masses \u2013 'A sky for Gods to tread above,/ A soil for pigs below me!' (3\u20134) \u2013 and the gulf between them is embodied in two startling images. To begin with, there is the priest who thinks it 'fit to stop and spit/ Beside the altar solemn' (31\u201332). But surely worse is the working man who heedlessly urinates on any 'Corinthian column' (34) that takes his fancy. Such sights, however, do not make a cynic of the speaker. They are simply viewed as the everyday goings-on from which Nature positively derives its 'emanative power' by imbibing 'mixtures fetid foul and sour' (48\u201349). A 'classic land', he states, is built upon 'dirt' (42). So rather than avert his gaze from the mire, he celebrates it. In other words, he finds that he must with 'resignation fair and meet' (84) learn to 'greet . . . / The dirt and refuse of the street' (85\u201386). Once he can accomplish this, he believes, then the 'columns set against the sky' (85) \u2013 no matter how much urine is sprayed upon them \u2013 will remain 'perfect' (87). All of which points to the fact that the cloudy triumphs of a civilization subsist on the degraded soil of this society. Clough, therefore, is laying bare the repulsive mud and grime that repressively seep from the edges of Arnold's high-minded 'Stoic-Epicurean' stance.\n\nThe only working-class figures who feature among the dignified concerns of Arnold's 'Resignation \u2013 To Fausta' are a band of gypsies: a vagrant and self-contained society that enshrines ideal values exemplifying how one should 'bear rather than rejoice'. In turning to these outcasts, the poem is once again invoking Wordsworth's poetry \u2013 namely, 'Gipsies', dating from 1807. This marginal group represents a life of continuity. They follow the 'self-same plan' (141) in their 'hereditary way' (139). Theirs is an unspoiled world of resignation. But elsewhere in Arnold's work the gypsy returns in a rather different guise, and on both occasions he embodies aspects of Clough. The gypsy provides one aspect of a different kind of manhood desired by both Arnold and Clough that could create bonds within the social fabric that they felt the class divisions of mid-Victorian Britain had riven apart.\n\n#  **V**\n\n'The Scholar-Gypsy', which probably dates from 1853, tells a tale of two hundred years ago when an 'Oxford scholar poor,/ Of pregnant parts of quick inventive brain,' grew 'tired of knocking at preferment's door' (35), and so decided to join the company of travellers. In one sense, this 'scholar-gypsy' is a version of the Arnoldian poet who wishes to be a part of society and yet wants to survey its scene from a cautious distance. But here one can glimpse the image of the midcentury Oxonian who, like Arnold and Clough, looked to a future career in the Church, the army, or in commerce with not a little trepidation. The scholar-gypsy, unlike his fellow graduates, retains his autonomy within the 'wild brotherhood' (38) who live according to their own laws. The scholar-gypsy's resolve \u2013since he possessed ' _one_ aim, _one_ business, _one_ desire' (152) \u2013 contrasts with those Victorian men who 'fluctuate idly without term or scope' (167). It was this verb that Arnold underlined when writing to Clough about both this poem and 'Sohrab and Rustum': 'You are too content to _fluctuate_ \u2013 to be ever learning, never coming to the knowledge of truth. That is why, with you, I feel it necessary to stiffen myself \u2013 and hold fast my rudder'.42 Pinkney points out that here Arnold is holding fast to his rudder because he fears running aground on the viscous mud that figures social and sexual instability. In accusing Clough of being a man who is 'content to _fluctuate_ ', Arnold is feminizing his friend as a Siren, while he remains like 'Ulysses binding himself to the mast'.43\n\nBut if Arnold's friend was thought lacking the 'term or scope' that characterized the mid-Victorian male intellectual, then it is significant that he canonized him in 'Thyrsis' as one who once belonged to a social set that in the past had counted the 'Gipsy-Scholar' (29) among their company. 'Thyrsis' returns Clough to an idyllic Virgilian moment, enshrining him in a tradition of pastoral elegy that is hardly apposite for a writer whose chief precursors were eighteenth-century satirists such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. This use of pastoral elegy to praise Clough would seem to be very much an act of Arnoldian appropriation, where Thyrsis became a figure that idealizes Arnold's and not his friend's poetic and political interests. It is surely significant that, although Arnold was prepared to write a stylized elegy of this kind, he refused to furnish a prefatory memoir to the posthumous edition of Clough's works.44 Following John Milton's 'Lycidas', 'Thyrsis' duly makes it heroic gestures before the elegist discovers that he must finally turn away from the golden age and meet the demands of the present moment. Once the death of this pastoral idol has been recognized as wholly irretrievable, then the darkness of night falls like a shroud over his corpse. Yet, importantly, at this instant the night figures as a woman who \u2013 like one of the Fates \u2013 in 'ever-nearing circles weaves her shade' (132). Her 'slowly chilling breath invade[s]/ The cheek grown thin' (134\u201335). Although this feminized personification may appear to be following the conventions of pastoral elegy, these lines take such pains to underline the power of this deathly femininity that it is fair to claim that 'Thyrsis' discloses how the glories of his blissful undergraduate days have been destroyed by the invasive presence of women. This eerie image may well indicate longstanding fears that marriage would bring about a kind of death.\n\nMarriage certainly terminated the 'love' that Arnold and Clough enjoyed in the countryside surrounding Oxford where the ghostly scholar-gypsy freely roved, retaining that idealized hybrid identity as both a university man and a common fellow. But this drastic change in these poets' lives stood as a figure for other transformations that called their poetic vocation into question. By examining the chief intersections between their poems, we can surely see how the intellectual rewards of an Oxford life were diminished in the face of a society that put less and less faith in the scholar, as the military pre-eminence of the landed lords, the industrial success of commercial entrepreneurs, and the growing Malthusian mass of the working classes affronted him on all sides. Relishing true intimacy only with others of his kind, this type of man was not just fearful of women, he became conscious of his own feminization. This is certainly the case for both poets, even if the sexual adventurousness of Clough's works \u2013 all the way from the early lyrics to the incomplete Chaucerian sequence entitled _Mari Magno_ \u2013 seem remote from the 'long withdrawing roar' that saps the sexual energy of Arnold's speaker in 'Dover Beach'. In his prizewinning poem written at Rugby, 'The Close of the Eighteenth Century', which charts the political ructions of the modern age from the outbreak of the French Revolution, Clough would presciently exclaim: 'Lord, we are wandering on an unknown sea' (174). The 'Aqueous Ages' of the following decades would confirm Clough's need to counter the 'caterwaulings of the effeminate heart', as the eponymous hero of _Dipsychus_ declares (IX. 154). But it would leave Arnold in a state of perpetual regret. 'Love, let us be true To one another': these words are assuredly tinged with nostalgia for the Oxonian companionship that his poetry had increasingly repelled. The more the distance opened between Arnold and his oceanic unconscious, the more vigorous Clough grew in his satirical treatment of that repression. But there is enough evidence to show that Clough's satire emerged from an impulse similar to that which was repeatedly expressed by the man who was the butt of his biting wit. In so doing, Clough was trying to defend himself from the troubling thought that the scholarly bachelor no longer had a privileged place within the social structure. Oxonian men of his and Arnold's generation were left instead with suggestive metaphors of fluidity: the medium in which their sense of displaced authority impossibly tried to take shape.\n\n#  **Notes**\n\n1 U. C. Knoeplfmacher, 'Dover Revisited: The Wordsworthian Matrix in the Poetry of Matthew Arnold', _Victorian Poetry_ 1 (1963), 17\u201326. Equally informative on Arnold's Wordsworthian heritage is David Trotter, 'Hidden Ground within: Matthew Arnold's Lyric and Elegaic Poetry', _ELH_ 44 (1977), 526\u201355. Algernon Charles Swinburne was among the first to remark that 'The good and evil influence of that great poet, perverse theorist, and incomplete man [namely, Wordsworth], upon Mr Arnold's work is so palpable and so strong as to be almost obtrusive in its effects': 'Mr Arnold's New Poems', _Fortnightly Review_ NS 2 (1867), 414.\n\n2 Quotations from Arnold's poetry are taken from _The Poems of Matthew Arnold_ , eds. Kenneth Allott and Miriam Allott, second edition (London, 1979). Line references appear in parentheses.\n\n3 E. D. H. Johnson, _The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry: Sources of Poetic Imagination in Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold_ (Princeton, NJ, 1952).\n\n4 Gerald Graff, _Beyond the Culture Wars: How the Teaching Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education_ (New York, 1992), 38.\n\n5 Arnold, 'To His Mother', April 1848, _Letters of Matthew Arnold_ , ed., George W. E. Russell, 2 vols. (London, 1895), I, 7.\n\n6 Park Honan, _Matthew Arnold: A Life_ (London, 1981), 235.\n\n7 Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom, eds., _Victorian Prose and Poetry_ (New York, 1973), 593.\n\n8 Anthony Hecht, 'The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life', in David J. DeLaura ed., _Matthew Arnold: A Collection of Critical Essays_ (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1973), 54.\n\n9 [A. W. Kinglake,] 'The Rights of Women', _Quarterly Review, 75_ (1845), 112, 115.\n\n10 Judith Newton, 'Making \u2013 and Remaking \u2013 History: Another Look at \"Patriarchy\"', _Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature_ 3:1\u20132 (1984), 131, 129. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall remark that a 'tension between the notion of women as \"relative creatures\" and a celebratory view of their potential power lies at the heart of Mrs Ellis's writing and helps to explain her popularity': _Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780\u20131850_ (London, 1987), 183.\n\n11 Arthur Hugh Clough, _Amours de Voyage_ , III, 359. Quotations from Clough's poetry are taken from _The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough_ , second edition, ed. F. L. Mulhauser (Oxford, 1974). Line references appear in parentheses. Where quotations are taken from the drafts reprinted in the appendices to this edition, relevant page numbers precede line references.\n\n12 William A. Madden, 'Arnold the Poet: (i) Lyric and Elegaic Poems', in Kenneth Allott, ed., _Writers and Their Work: Matthew Arnold_ (London, 1975), 57.\n\n13 Robindra Kumar Biswas, _Arthur Hugh Clough: Towards a Reconsideration_ (Oxford, 1972), 469. It is worth comparing E. Warwick Slinn's analysis of the oceanic images that prevail in _Amours de Voyage;_ Slinn's concern is with the ways in which the persona's subjective identity 'floats helplessly upon the element that allows it differentiation'. Slinn sees in the poem passages where Claude's subjectivity is both passive and active: _The Discourse of the Self in Victorian Poetry_ (Basingstoke, 1991), 104.\n\n14 Tony Pinkney 'Matthew Arnold and the Northern Sea: Goths and Gender in the Poetry', _News from Nowhere_ 5 (1988), 11\u201327.\n\n15 Arnold, 'To Arthur Hugh Clough', 12 February 1853, _The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough_ , ed., Howard Foster Lowry (London, 1932), 129.\n\n16 The _Literary Gazette_ pointed out that Clough had made a blunder in his choice of title; 'fuosich' in Scottish Gaelic meant 'bearded well', and thus stood as a metaphor for the vagina. The title of the poem was adjusted to _The Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich when_ reprinted posthumously: see Biswas, _Arthur Hugh Clough_ , 264.\n\n17 Isobel Armstrong, _Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics_ (London, 1993), 209. Armstrong's respective chapters on Clough and Arnold lay particular emphasis on the tensions deriving from these poets' divergent political interests, rather than the problems of homosocial desire that inform their antithetical attitudes on radical and liberal positions.\n\n18 Arnold, 'To Arthur Hugh Clough', 29 September 1848, _Letters to Arthur Hugh Clough_ , 93. My thanks to Christina Britzolakis for advising me on Arnold's Latin.\n\n19 Arnold, 'To Arthur Hugh Clough', 21 March 1853, _Letters to Arthur Hugh Clough_ , 132.\n\n20 Kathleen Tillotson, '\"Haworth Churchyard\": The Making of Arnold's Elegy', _Bront\u00eb Society Transactions_ 15 (1967), 112, cited in Honan, _Matthew Arnold_ , 219.\n\n21 Arnold, 'To Arthur Hugh Clough', 12 February 1853, _Letters to Arthur Hugh Clough_ , 130. Further quotations from this letter are taken from this page.\n\n22 Arnold, 'Preface' to _Poems_ (1853), 'Appendix A', in _The Complete Poems_ , ed. Allott and Allott, second edition, 669.\n\n23 Arnold, 'To Arthur Hugh Clough' [early part of February 1849], _Letters to Arthur Hugh Clough_ , 98.\n\n24 Arnold, 'To Arthur Hugh Clough', 12 February 1853, _Letters to Arthur Hugh Clough_ , 130.\n\n25 Arnold, 'To Arthur Hugh Clough', 1 May 1853, _Letters to Arthur Hugh Clough_ , 135.\n\n26 Clough, 'To T. Arnold', 16 May 1851, _The Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough_ , ed. Frederick L. Mulhauser, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1957), I, 290.\n\n27 Clough, 'To Miss Smith', [27 January 1852,] _Correspondence_ , 301.\n\n28 J. A. Froude informed Clough: 'I don't believe in your Elspie. If any girl in her position was ever so highly cultivated, she is an exception, and so the moral would be false': 'To Arthur Hugh Clough', 21 January 1849, in Michael Thorpe, ed., _Clough: The Critical Heritage_ (London, 1972), 35.\n\n29 Tom Paulin, _Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State_ (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 66.\n\n30 Clough, 'Recent English Poetry', _North American Review_ 77 (1853), 12\u201324, reprinted in Isobel Armstrong, ed., _Victorian Scrutinies: Reviews of Poetry 1830\u20131870_ (London, 1972), 167. Further quotations are taken from this page.\n\n31 See Eugene R. August, ' _Amours de Voyage_ and Matthew Arnold in Love: An Inquiry', _Victorian Newsletter_ 60 (1981), 15\u201320.\n\n32 On the controversial identification of Mary Claude, see Honan, _Matthew Arnold_ , 144\u201367; and Miriam Allott, 'Arnold and \"Marguerite \u2013 Continued\"', _Victorian Poetry_ 23 (1985), 125\u201343.\n\n33 J. C. Shairp, 'To Arthur Hugh Clough', 14 April 1853, _Correspondence_ , II, 401. Shairp was similarly dissatisfied with Clough's contributions to the collection published jointly with Thomas Burbidge, _Ambarvalia_ , together with the earliest draft of the _Amours_ : see _Correspondence_ , I, 275.\n\n34 Clough, 'Recent English Poetry', in Armstrong, ed., _Victorian Scrutinies_ , 168.\n\n35 Arnold, 'To Arthur Hugh Clough', 4 March 1848, _Letters to Arthur Hugh Clough_ , 71.\n\n36 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 'The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic', in Elaine Showalter, ed., _Speaking of Gender_ (New York, 1989), 248.\n\n37 Clough, 'To Anne Clough', 22 May 1848, _Correspondence_ , I, 209.\n\n38 On the debate about rival forms of aristocratic and bourgeois manhood in Tennyson's _Maud_ , see Joseph Bristow, 'Nation, Class, and Gender: Tennyson's _Maud_ and War', _Genders_ 9 (1990), 93\u2013111.\n\n39 [Charles Kingsley,] Review of Matthew Arnold, _Poems, Fraser's Magazine_ 49 (1854), 140\u20139, reprinted in Armstrong, ed., _Victorian Scrutinies_ , 180, 183.\n\n40 William Wordsworth, _Poetical Works_ , eds., Thomas Hutchinson and Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford University Press, 1969), 165.\n\n41 G. Robert Stange, _Matthew Arnold: The Poet as Humanist_ (Princeton, NJ, 1967), 67.\n\n42 Arnold, 'To Arthur Hugh Clough', 30 November 1853, _Letters to Arthur Hugh Clough_ , 146.\n\n43 Pinkney, 'Matthew Arnold and the Northern Sea', 15.\n\n44 In 1868, Arnold informed Blanche Clough ( _n\u00e9e_ Smith) that he was 'quite sure' that he 'should neither satisfy you nor myself if [he] tried to throw into form for publication [his] recollections of [her late] husband'. In addition, Arnold remarks on the 'special point' she mentions: namely, Clough's 'resignation of his fellowship'; about this delicate matter, Arnold declares that he feels he 'could say nothing': 14 October 1868, _Letters to Arthur Hugh Clough_ , 161.\n\nBristow, Joseph. 1995. \"'Love, let us be true to one another': Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough and 'our Aqueous Ages.'\" In _Literature and History_ __, series 3, 4, I (Spring), pp. 27\u201349. Reproduced with permission of Manchester University Press.\n\n# 19\n\n# 'Poets and lovers evermore'\n\n#  _The Poetry and Journals of Michael Field_\n\nChris White\n\n#  **What's in a Name?**\n\nKatherine Bradley and Edith Cooper were poets and lovers from 1870 to 1913. They lived together, converted to Catholicism together, and together developed the joint poetic persona of Michael Field. As aunt and niece their love was socially structured and sanctioned. As Catholics and classicists they developed a language of love between women. As Michael and Henry their life together is recorded in the surviving manuscript journals. And as Michael Field they presented themselves to the world as Poets. (The capitalization, and the sense of the importance of this activity, is theirs.) But were they lesbians in any recognizable sense? This question relates to a developing orthodoxy of lesbian history and politics, in particular the influential thesis of Lillian Faderman in _Surpassing the Love of Men_ where she discusses Michael Field, an analysis which I will attempt to interrogate in this chapter.1 I want to make an intervention in the interpretative practice employed by Faderman, whereby all loving relationships between women before the 1920s are viewed as romantic friendships, and not as sexualized or erotic. Through connecting questions of homosexual history, politics, and desire, this chapter will offer readings of poems and journal entries that build up a picture of a specific instance of homosexual history.\n\nIn their relationship and their work, Katherine and Edith typify many of the difficulties in deciphering the meaning and nature of love between women. Faderman's comments are based only on published extracts (a slender volume concerned primarily with their lives as Catholics) from their extensive journals covering the years 1869\u20131914. The scale of this material is enormous: thirty-six foolscap volumes, with several others consisting of correspondence and notes.2 It is a remarkable resource, but it is neither assimilable to a linear narrative nor capable of being easily represented here. (There is also the problem that some words and phrases are indecipherable.) It would be a mistake, however, to assume that these journals offer anything like a straightforward access to the 'truth' about the relationship or Katherine and Edith's understanding of it, even given all the usual reservations about the mediated status of autobiography.3 The journals were left with instructions that they might be opened at the end of 1929, and that the editors, T. and D.C. Sturge Moore, should publish from them as they saw fit. It hardly needs pointing out that at some point the journals became directed towards publication. When that was, or to whom the journals are addressed, is never clear. There is, I must assume, no truly 'private' record.\n\nIn the journals and the poetry there are copious references that may be read as lesbian. These texts are dotted with the words 'Sapphic', 'Beloved', 'Lover' and 'Lesbian'.4 Yet it is not possible to infer that such terms indicate a same-sex sexual relationship, while Faderman argues that they are not at all sexual. I intend to demonstrate that these references are not simply definable as 'sexual' or 'non-sexual', but have their origins in more diverse sources. Any such analysis must be hedged around by considering the historically specific treatment of the Sapphic and the Lesbian.\n\nClassical Greek literature and culture provided one way for nineteenth-century homosexual writers to talk about homosexuality as a positive social and emotional relationship. These authors appropriated the works of Plato and the myths of male love and comradeship to argue for social tolerance of same-sex love. For homosexual writers, a culture that was in the nineteenth century regarded as one of the highest points of civilization provided a precedent that was both respectable and sexual. This deployment of a Greek cultural precedent appears in Katherine and Edith's volume _Belleroph\u00f4n_ , published under the pseudonyms Arran and Isla Leigh, in the poem 'Apollo's Written Grief', on the subject of Apollo and Hyacinth. This poem may be understood as a homo-political appeal for tolerance and an expression of the search for the right way of conducting a homosexual relationship:\n\nMen dream that thou wert smitten by the glow  \nOf my too perilous love, not by the blow  \nOf him who rivalled me.5\n\nApollo's love for his 'bright-eyed Ganymede' (p. 160) is presented as the best option for the boy, since he would otherwise have been consumed by Zephyrus or Zeus 'in greed' (p. 160). Apollo's love would not have proved dangerous to Hyacinth who, in 'panting for the light' (p. 159) of the sun-god, 'sufferedest the divine/Daring the dread delight' (p. 159). This poem, therefore, employs the already existing construction and terminology for homosexual love and desire. These myths remained available to readings as homoerotic archetypes or ideals.6 This poem is not explicitly, or even obviously, a lesbian text. All of its characters are male. All the relationships are masculine relationships; between father and son, god and cup-bearer. The absence of women indicates an exclusively masculine world, where women are simply not relevant. One might imagine that alongside this world there exists another where women live together. But some of the language in which the poem speaks of homosexuality has metaphorical relationships to desire between women. The reference to 'the glow/Of my too perilous love' (III, 1, 2\u20133) is not like the more frequent, although usually embedded, phallic references. Where a whole canon of male \u2013 male bondings and loves exists, women had only one classical equivalent to draw upon for expressions and strategies of female \u2013 female love \u2013 the poetry of Sappho. Katherine and Edith as Michael Field, in using one of the male precedents, are taking up an available model in which to talk about same-sex desire. In order for them to use the lesbian precedent of Sappho, that classical antecedent must be recuperated from male appropriations, salaciousness or prurience.\n\nKatherine and Edith wrote at a time when treatments of Sappho's verse were numerous and diverse. There are instances of deliberate suppression of the female pronouns, as in T.W. Higginson's translation published in 1871. In the novels of Alphonse Daudet, Th\u00e9ophile Gautier and Algernon Charles Swinburne, Sappho and Sapphic women were constructed as sadistic, predatory corruptors of innocent women. This emerged from male fantasies about masculine women with phallic sexualities, women who behaved like men with 'innocent' women, which does not threaten the proper balance of power between the sexes, but transplants it. It also participates in a fantasy about unnatural women who are brutalizing and corrupting of true, feminine women, thus marking off men as living in a proper relationship to femininity. And, predictably, there is the erotic value for the man in having two women on display. A standard work on Greek culture describes Sappho as 'a woman of generous disposition, affectionate heart, and independent spirit . . . [with] her own particular refinement of taste, exclusive of every approach to low excess or profligacy'.7 Alternatively, another academic author declared that there was 'no good early evidence to show that the Lesbian standard was low'8 (that is, sexual). In other versions, Sappho was portrayed as a woman falling in love with the fisherman Phaon, committing suicide when that love was unreciprocated.9 The plurality of depictions and appropriations of Sappho indicates the extent to which she and her work became a cultural battleground, much more so than any male homosexual equivalent. Where some writers attempt to recuperate at all costs the great poet from accusations of lewdness, and others concede the love between women, but deny it as being passion of a base nature, Michael Field holds her up as a paragon among women, and puts the passion back into the poet's community of women. Michael Field's 1889 volume _Long Ago_ , a series of poems based on and completing Sappho's fragments, explores the heterosexual version of Sappho, alongside poems on passion between women. They explained, in a letter of 11 June 1889, the thinking behind _Long Ago_.\n\nI feel I have hope that you will understand the spirit of my lyrics you who have sympathy with attempts to reconcile the old and the new, to live as in continuation the beautiful life of Greece. . . . What I have aspired to do from Sappho's fragments may therefore somewhat appeal to your sense of survival in human things \u2013 to your interest in the shoots and offspring of older literature.10\n\nThe reconciliation of the old and the new \u2013 of classical Greek culture and literature and nineteenth-century remakings of those forms and ideas \u2013 forms an important part of the conceptualization of homosexual desire, and more significantly, of the place of homosexuals in a dominantly heterosexual society. In this letter, Michael Field appeals to Pater's own analyses and interpretations in his essays and lectures on Greek studies, art, and literature.11 Greek culture is not perceived as being mere history, a dead past of interest only to scholars and classicists. It is, rather, a potent and valid model for nineteenth-century British culture, which, for many critics and poets, ought to be reflected in the organization and standards of their own society. In addition to the political and cultural virtues of the Greek precedent, many writers, Michael Field among them, found images, texts, and authors that provided a positive framework in which to speak about desire between two men or two women, and this framework did not require the writers to begin from a point of self-justification or to address the dominant cultural ideas about sin and unnatural sexual practices. Greek culture was perceived as a young culture, and the associated discourses that connected youth with purity and innocence preserved Greek culture from accusations of adult vice and knowledge.12\n\n _Long Ago_ contains no references to sin or corruption. Relations between women are taken as a given. The forms of those relationships are complex and in a state of negotiation. There are fickle lovers, women who would rather marry men, quarrels between lovers, reconciliations and erotic interludes among the poems about the public making of poetry:\n\nCome, Gorgo, put the rug in place,  \nAnd passionate recline;  \nI love to see thee in thy grace,  \nDark, virulent, divine. . . .\n\nThose fairest hands \u2013 dost thou forget  \nTheir power to thrill and cling?13\n\nThis is no sexless romance between friends, but an exotic eroticism. The loved/desired woman in the act of lying down is passionate and divine. There is the reference to the pleasure that can be given with hands between women.\n\nIf this is one version of Sappho, there are at least two other Sapphos in _Long Ago_. One is a woman at the centre of a loving community of women, a community which she must keep safe from the intrusions of men. In poem LIV, 'Adown the Lesbian Vales', Sappho is in possession of a 'passionate unsated sense' which her maids seek to satisfy. The relationship between Sappho and her maids is premised upon a need to keep the women away from marriage: 'No girls let fall/Their maiden zone/At Hymen's call' (p. 96). The third Sappho is the heterosexual lover of Phaon:\n\nIf I could win him from the sea,  \nThen subtly I would draw him down  \n'Mid the bright vetches; in a crown  \nMy art should teach him to entwine  \nTheir thievish rings and keep him mine.14\n\nThis seems to be a possessive heterosexual desire, springing from a manipulative battle to win him in a destructive competition with the fisherman's work at sea. But the imagery is also quite sexy. The drawing down echoes the 'passionate recline' of the previous extract. Yet, where the focus in the latter is on Gorgo, here the focus is as much on the vetches as on the fisherman. The supposed erotic object does not stand centre stage. Instead it is the 'I' of Sappho who dominates, shaping the desire, which means annihilating the loved object. Even the seemingly heterosexual Sappho is not, in Michael Field's poetry, shown to be a truly feminine figure existing in a proper relationship to what ought instead to serve as the focus of all their desires, the masculine.\n\nMasculinity in itself is not valued. In poem LXVI. Sappho prays to Apollo about Phaon:\n\nApollo, thou alone cans't bring  \nTo Phaon's feeble breast  \nThe fire unquenchable, the sting,  \nLove's agony, Love's zest.  \nThou needs't not curse him, nor transform;  \nGive him the poet's heart of storm  \nTo suffer as I suffer, thus  \nAbandoned, vengeful, covetous.15\n\nI think this is a very funny poem. OK, Apollo, you don't need to turn him into something or someone else, and maybe you shouldn't curse him, although you could, and I did consider it for a while; just make Phaon like me. As he is, he's feeble and emotionally a bit inadequate, and if you make him like me, a poet, with a poet's emotional turbulence, he'd be much improved. And then I'll probably abandon him, and leave him to stew. Love with a man untransformed by a god just isn't worth the hassle.\n\nThe second and third versions of Sappho come into conflict over the issue of virginity and poetry. The love of Phaon and the inviolate women of the Lesbian community are combined in Poem XVII: 'The moon rose full, the women stood'. Sappho calls to her virginity, her 'only good', to come back, having been lost to Phaon. The inviolate state is 'that most blessed, secret state/That makes the tenderest maiden great', not the possession of a male's sexual attention. Sappho's loss of virginity effectively puts an end to her poetic gift:\n\nAnd when  \nBy maiden-arms to be enwound  \nAshore the fisher flings,  \nOh, then my heart turns cold, and then  \nI drop my wings.\n\nThe connection between poetry and virginity is broached in _The New Minnesinger and Other Poems_ , published by Katherine under the pseudonym Arran Leigh. The title poem discusses the craft of the woman-poet, 'she whose life doth lie/In virgin haunts of poesie.'16 The virgin woman-poet, by virtue of her freedom from men, possesses the potentiality to be 'lifted to a free/and fellow-life with man' (p. 12). There appears to be a contradiction between 'free' and 'fellow-life'. With the stress placed on the 'free', there is a reverbation of the usage of 'enwound' in Poem XX. Heterosexuality as the form of the relationship between men and women is a form of bondage. If this is replaced by the 'fellow-life' of equal comradeship, an idea much employed in this period and derived from Walt Whitman,17 then the bondage, even in relationships between men and women is at an end. But whatever 'realm' a woman endeavours to enclose, she must 'ever keep/All things subservient to the good/Of pure free-growing womanhood' (p. 13). Virginity is not sterile in this formulation: it is simultaneously pure and productive. This version of femininity offers an ambiguous challenge to the terms of patriarchal culture. It exists apart from patriarchal dictates, but includes fellowship and equality with men. It embraces the productiveness of womanhood and an all-women community, and speaks of an equality of potency between men and women. It is the 'fellow-life' that is desired, and not men or heterosexuality. Poem LII goes so far as to produce life as a woman as superior to life as a man, through the figure of Tiresias. He is \"doomed\" to \"forego\"\n\nHis manhood, and as woman, know  \nThe unfamiliar, sovereign guise  \nOf passion he had dared despise . . .  \nHe trembled at the quickening change,  \nHe trembled at his vision's range,  \nHis finer sense for bliss and dole,  \nHis receptivity of soul;  \nBut when love came, and, loving back,  \nHe learnt the pleasure men must lack,  \nIt seemed that he has broken free  \nAlmost from his mortality.18\n\nTiresias, in his youth, is said to have found two serpents, and when he struck them with a stick to separate them, he is said to have suddenly changed into a woman. Seven years later he was restored to manhood by a repeat of the incident with the snakes. When he was a woman, Jupiter and Juno consulted him on a dispute about which of the sexes received greater pleasure from marriage. Tiresias decided in Jupiter's favour that women derived greater pleasure \u2013 and Juno punished Tiresias for this slight by blinding him. Michael Field turn this myth, that is more than a little disparaging about men's enthusiasm for marriage, into a positive valuing of women. Women are not only more sensitive, more feeling, the usual attributes of femininity, they are also more capable than men of experiencing pleasure. That pleasure is not to do with the greater size of women's psyches or souls. Love equals pleasure, and women feel more pleasure. If this is read in the light of the Gorgo poem, above, then that pleasure comes to take on distinctly physical aspects. The other interesting aspect of the Tiresias poem is that it holds both genders together at the same time. At the moment of transition from female to male, Tiresias has a masculine consciousness and a feminine memory, and is an emotional hermaphrodite. While the feminine is better, the moment of transition is one of fullness, with both genders working together. Tiresias is a representation of the absence of any clear split between male and female in Michael Field's Utopian vision.\n\nThe construction of femininity in these poems is more complex than an unequivocal embrace of a non-sexual friendship. Michael Field represent Sappho as a wise, old(er) woman who remembers the rejections of youth and deplores the fickleness of younger women and their susceptibility to men. Her constancy to women, 'Maids, not to you my mind doth change' _(Long Ago_ : XXXIII, p. 52), is contrasted with her reaction to the men whom she will 'defy, allure, estrange,/Prostrate, made bond or free'. To her maids she is a maternal or passionate lover, and to men she is manipulative and fickle. (The attitude to men is complicated by virtue of the poems being authored under the name of a man. The 'male' poet relates sexually to both men and women.) The volume concludes with the poem, 'O free me, for I take the leap', where Sappho flings herself from a cliff with a prayer to Apollo for a 'breast love-free'.\n\nMichael Field's Sappho, therefore, is not the denizen of a lesbian or Lesbian idyll. Rather, she is the subject of a contradiction which emerges from those versions described above. On the one hand, Sappho the poet must be defended from accusations of immorality, while, on the other, Sappho the Lesbian must be salvaged from the Phaon myth. The Lesbian community of women is more than a society of friendship, but is also a site of poetic production and, moreover, the production of the Poet identity. Both are threatened by men and heterosexuality. The 'production' of poetry both images and guarantees the 'free' bonds of the women makers. It is a lesbian writing which, familiarly, needs to think itself as free from men, for the conditions of its own practice. It defines itself as productive, rather than anti- or non-productive, not simply to give itself the dignity that men's poetry has within the canon and practice of poetry, but also to give voice to, and thus 'have', the lesbian desires that are constructed by and construct the poetic product. This is clearly not only an account of Sappho and Lesbos, but a grappling with the nature and practice of the composite poet, Michael Field. The poetry is the result of the joint productiveness of two women.\n\nSexuality is not, therefore, the only interpretative category in play in _Long Ago_. The practice of Poetry is equally important, and it interweaves with sexuality. In the preface to _Long Ago_ there is an ambiguous appeal to 'the one woman'. The volume is jointly authored, yet the voice of the preface is in the first-person singular. This prefatorial voice advocates worship of, and the apprehension of, an ideal of the Poet and the lover in the poetry and person of Sappho. A direct connection is made between Sappho's prayer and the prayer of this first-person voice:\n\nDevoutly as the fiery-bosomed Greek turned in her anguish to Aphrodite, praying her to accomplish her heart's desires, I have turned to the one woman who has dared to speak unfalteringly of the fearful mastery of love, and again and again the dumb prayer has risen from my heart \u2013\n\n\u03c3\u1f7a \u03b4\u03b1\u03bd\u03c4\u03b1  \n\u03c3\u03c5\u03bc\u03bc\u03b1\u03c7\u03bf\u03c2 \u03b5\u03c3\u03c3\u03bf19\n\nHere, the Greek is translated as 'you will be my ally'. The 'one woman' is either Sappho, a lover, or a writing partner. This ambiguity of identity is central to this volume of poetry. In _Long Ago_ Michael Field are writing with Sappho the Poet, and working with Sappho, Aphrodite, and the partner in an imaginary alliance. The preface does not specify who that mastery of love is directed to. But perhaps that is the point. In order to speak 'unfalteringly' of woman's love for woman, it is necessary for Michael Field to work in alliance with other women and other women's formulations of such love. The construction in the preface is both strategic and passionate, not a privatized emotion which continues detached from historical and social concerns. It is political, creating changes in the presentation of love between women on the basis of the available cultural models. Michael Field's appeal to 'the one woman' does not rest upon a static image of monogamous romance, which while apparently neutral and ahistorical is intimately connected with bourgeois values and patriarchal family structures, and which lesbianism has the potential to sidestep or remake.\n\nThis passage begs a series of questions about desire and speech. The dumb prayer rising, an as yet unaccomplished desire, a person who could dare to speak are all potent, and about-to-be, differentiated from the existing 'mastery'. This yearns for something that is both Utopian and physical, and the process of making one necessarily involves making the other. The metaphors of the invocation are all physical. Aphrodite's passion is not abstract, but fiery and residing in her breast. One lover turns to the other, the emotional and physical senses both contained in that reference to that action.\n\n#  **'The Fearful Mastery of Love'**\n\nIf, in the late twentieth century, contemporary lesbians are determined to write our own dictionary of lesbian love and desire, there appears to be no such imperative behind the writings of Michael Field. Michael Field, rather than inventing a vocabulary with an unmistakable precision of meaning, deployed the language of classical scholarship, the language of love belonging to heterosexuality, the language of friendship (but never noticeably the language of blood relatives), and later the language of Catholicism. These differing languages represent a series of modulations both chronologically within their _oeuvre_ and in the different forms of writing they practised. There is no single language which they employ to talk about each other and their relationship. Consequently, there is enough imprecision or ambiguity in the slippage around their words of love and desire for Faderman, misleadingly, to find sufficient material in their writings to call them romantic friends, when the terms 'romantic' and 'friend' are both so sloppy. It is, of course, equally misleading to call them lesbians. Although the term 'lesbian' is historically available, it is not a word they ever used of themselves to indicate a sexual relationship. They did, however, have other terms and metaphors.\n\nIn comparing themselves to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, Michael Field asserts ' _we are closer married_ '.20 Marriage was an available metaphor or conceptualization for both women to apply to their relationship. Following Edith's death, Katherine invoked the words of the marriage service when making an approach to the literary periodical the _Athen\u0153um_ to 'write a brief appreciation of my dead Fellow-Poet, not separating what God had joined, yet dwelling for her friends' delight on her peculiar & most rare gifts'.21 In the preface to _Works and Days_ God is said to have joined Michael Field both as the Poet and as 'Poets and lovers evermore' ( _Works and Days_ p. xix). And, as a last example, to Havelock Ellis, on the subject of his attempts to discover who wrote which piece, they asserted 'As to our work, let no man think he can put asunder what God had joined.'22 Faderman denies that there is any sexual meaning in these statements, insisting that since they were generally so completely without self-consciousness in their public declarations of mutual love',23 the relationship must have been 'innocent'. It is difficult to understand how someone can make a declaration of any kind without being conscious of what they are doing. In addition to this, Faderman makes the error of deciding that their love for one another ' _caused_ them to convert to Catholicism' (p. 211; my emphasis), since this conversion was a way to guarantee being together eternally. Faderman's specious theory appears to be based wholly upon one paragraph in the published journals, written by Edith: 'It is Paradise between us. When we're together eternally, our spirits will be interpenetrated with our loves and our art under the benison of the Vision of God' (p. 324). Faderman derives the whole of their Catholic experience from this brief extract, which was written when Edith was dying. Moreover, Faderman ignores the evidence of the rest of the journals, which reveal their faith as being a good deal more than a mere instrumentalist insurance policy, and the history and pattern of Catholic conversion at that time, with many literary figures joining the Church and some, notably John Gray and Frederick Rolfe, becoming or attempting to become priests.\n\nMichael Field's God is not a cosy, tea-table God, nor an Old Testament God of vengeance for the wicked and just deserts for the righteous. It is a construction of God as an authority that resists what men do \u2013 which is, dividing women in the name of femininity and the family. God provides a ground for Utopian female artistic production. The language of the passage from the published journals raises both their love and their art, equally significant, to the knowledge and approval of God. The act of interpenetration is produced as the highest point of achievement for poet and lover. This is not a safe, lesbian-feminist, metaphor. The act of inter-penetration unites the two women not as Romantic Friends, but interprets the relationship as something that values it as an entering into the other's work and identity. Not surprisingly, Faderman does not comment upon it. It does not fit with the diffuse sensuality she ascribes to Romantic Friends.\n\nFaderman bases the Romantic Friendship hypothesis on a specific construction of femininity. She presents it as the sole form of the relationship between loving women before the development of a female homosexual identity and pathology through political and scientific discourses, such as the work of the sexologists and the gay rights movements in Germany and France. Consequently, Faderman applies a modern version of relations between women to the late nineteenth century which precludes any consciousness of sexual interest. In doing so, she constructs all female friendships along the lines of the dominant culture. Faderman argues that, since sexual relationships between women were unacceptable to the dominant, and since women were constructed as the passionless gender and ignorant of sex, they could not possibly have had the knowledge, language, or experience of lesbian _desire_. Any Victorian woman, she maintains, would have been profoundly shocked by such an interpretation of their feelings, and therefore every woman's expression of love or passion must of necessity have been free from the taint of homosexual desire. Faderman does not even entertain the possibility that these women, knowing that the dominant culture condemned such feelings and relationships, could have developed their own strategies for talking about and explaining such expressions of sexuality. Instead she presumes that innocence is a superior form of loving compared to sexual experiences between women. She practises the condescension of history, and in doing so attempts to dodge the revelation of her own political agenda. Of course, Katherine and Edith did not have available to them the language, politics, and structures of contemporary lesbianism and feminism. But Faderman's insistence that they were too stupid to know any better rests upon a belief in linear progress from one age to the next. Contemporary lesbians, so the argument goes, are much wiser than their nineteenth-century sisters because they of course can see through the mechanisms used to oppress and limit women. By practising this evolutionary politics, Faderman manages to read over the top of all the strategies and devices that Michael Field, among many others, did deploy in order to create a cultural space for themselves. That these strategies did exist is beyond question, and they were various, from the appropriations of Greek culture to Carpenter's assertion that 'homogenic love', encompassing both male and female homosexuality, was a potentially superior social force to heterosexuality.24\n\nBefore going further, I want to make it clear that I am disquieted by the project of going into print criticizing another lesbian. This is an unsisterly thing to do, particularly given the open nature of this forum. Such debates ought not to be conducted in public and in a manner belonging to the practices of non-feminist, gentlemen's club scholarship. _Surpassing the Love of Men_ is an invaluable catalogue of the works of hundreds of lesbians which have been suppressed or ignored. But opposition to the political agenda of the book's thesis and the new orthodoxy, which is finding such currency amongst lesbians, academic and non-academic, is in my view of paramount importance. This version of lesbianism appropriates to itself lesbian history and makes of it a reactionary sexual politics. In the introduction to _Surpassing the Love of Men_ Faderman makes this claim:\n\nIn lesbian-feminism I have found an analog to romantic friendship . . . I venture to guess that had the romantic friends of other eras lived today, many of them would have been lesbian-feminists. (p. 20)\n\nMy guess is that in 'Romantic Friendship' she found an analogue to radical lesbian-feminism. She displays yet another methodological error in her making of history into analogues, since this works to deny the material specificity of the past as well as the present. Both Romantic Friendship and lesbian-feminism are positions distinguished by the desexualized nature of relations between women. This denial of lesbian sexual practice is spelt out by Elizabeth Mavor in _The Ladies of Llangollen: A Study in Romantic Friendship_ , a work which I believe owes a great deal to Faderman's study: 'Much that we would now associate solely with a sexual attachment was contained in romantic friendship: tenderness, loyalty, sensibility, shared beds, shared tastes, coquetry, even passion.'25\n\nThis reading of love declarations between women and accounts of women living together as wholly non-sexual is explained by Faderman as follows:\n\nWomen in centuries other than ours often internalised the view of females as having little sexual passion . . . If they were sexually aroused, bearing no burden of proof as men do, they might deny it even to themselves if they wished. (p. 16)\n\nUndoubtedly, women internalized the prescriptions of dominant ideology, but the leap from saying they took on board these prescriptions to the assumption that this internalization defined and limited all they believed and practised is quite breathtaking. In particular, it seems hardly credible that simply because women did not have penile erections they would not have recognized how sexual arousal felt and what it meant. Yet this is the outcome of the position adopted by Faderman and Mavor, which argues for a female nature utterly distinct from all things male and masculine. Both writers construct a time that is both more innocent and more separatist than our own. Lesbian separatists construct lesbianism and lesbians as superior, more creative, more sensitive, and more human. Romantic Friendship is an expression of lesbian separatism which takes the form of a relationship that is, in Mavor's words, 'more liberal and inclusive and better suited to the more diffuse feminine nature' (p. xvii) \u2013 not concentrated in an erect penis \u2013 and which, according to Faderman, 'had little connection with men who were so alienatingly and totally different' (p. 20). The prescriptions of lesbian-feminism extend even into what happens sexually between women. Two women together escape the oppression of phallic heterosexuality, but to arrive in a Utopian region of non-sexual romance and intimacy they must never behave in a manner which in any way reflects that in which men behave towards women.\n\nParadoxically, the Romantic Friendship hypothesis is a celebration of many of the conventional attributes of femininity as it has been constructed by patriarchy, such as passivity, gentleness, domesticity, creativity, and supportiveness, and which condemns as irretrievably phallic other characteristics generally labelled masculine, including strength, capability, activity, success, independence, and lust. In claiming women-loving women as romantic friends, the hypothesis annihilates from history all those lesbians/lovers who gave histories to (or recognized themselves in the works of) sexologists such as Havelock Ellis,26 or who, alternatively, formed part of lesbian subcultures based on sexual preference and emotional commitment.27 Faderman's model consigns lesbian sexual activity to a male fantasy that routinely appears in pornographic writing. She opposes the pornographic image of women's sexuality to the 'true', non-sexual history of women's relationships which, it is claimed, appears in their diaries and writings. Having lighted upon male pornographic images of lesbian sex, Faderman concludes that if men talk about women having sex through a particular discourse, then since that discourse does not appear in women's writings, women did not have sex together or relate sexually to each other.\n\nI am not arguing that every close relationship between women was a sexual one. The point is that the evidence should be looked at without the limitations of lesbian-feminist presuppositions. The political imperative behind my argument is to avoid having lesbian and gay histories misappropriated yet again, and this time from within the ranks of gay writers. Faderman's work is a revisionist project whose critique is focused on 'non-routine acts of love rather than routine acts of oppression, exploitation or violence'.28 On the basis that these women lovers did not behave like or pretend to be men, this position concludes that they are 'nice girls', not lesbians. As an alternative to this revisionism, I want to try to begin an account of Michael Field's work and relationship that gives them credit for awareness and strategic practice, and which has the potentiality to include within its frame of reference class, race, and power. This will reject the lesbian-feminist invention of a realm and an age of harmonious femininity where all women are equal, provided they do not indulge in politically-right-off sexual activity.\n\n#  **Fleshly Love and 'A Curve That Is Drawn So Fine'**\n\nIn order to develop a framework in which to understand and talk about love between women in Michael Field's work, I will now go on to look at the references to desire between women, and examine the plurality of ways in which they talked about their understanding of sexual and emotional love between women.\n\nTwo instances of desire between women that are constructed as negative and unnatural appear in the journals. Travelling through Europe, Edith falls ill in Dresden, and writes: 'My experiences with Nurse are painful \u2013 she is under the possession of terrible fleshly love [which] she does not conceive as such, and as such I will not receive it.'29 The nurse is presented as not recognizing her experience. Edith, however, does conceive of this love as fleshly. It is certainly within Edith's conceptual framework to apprehend one woman's feelings of physical desire for another woman. This instance of fleshly sin does not belong to the imagination of a pornographer. In this extract, the use of the words 'possession' and 'terrible' cannot be simply read as condemnatory, since any unwelcome sexual attentions may appear to be a terrible possession of the harasser. It is not clear, though, whether Edith would not accept fleshly love in any context, or whether it is this particular instance that is unwelcome.\n\nThe second example concerning fleshly love appears in the manuscript journal for 1908, referring to a painting they saw.\n\nA man named Legrand \u2013 a monstrous charlatan \u2013 who can by a clever trick give the infamies of the worldly Frenchwoman \u2013 especially in unconscious self-conscious exposure to her own sex . . . [as manuscript] female friends together. What is to be expressed is of Satan \u2013 and the means as ugly as the matter. The people round me say 'He must be a Genius' \u2013 I answer to myself A Demon-Spawned Charlatan.30\n\nI have yet to trace this painting, but it obviously enraged Edith. She can read this picture as false and disgusting. The exposure is apparently to the female gaze, but actually for the male gaze. The prurience of that gaze is expressed through that 'unconscious self-consciousness', a wink at the audience, inviting the viewer in to enjoy the scene. This 'clever trick' is that of the pornographer. Two women apparently exist for their own pleasure, but they are actually on offer as double pleasure for the male viewer.31 The unreality of the scene is evident to Edith. Her racism is evident in her ascribing of infamies to Frenchwomen (and German women too, as evidenced by her comments on the nurse). The point is, she recognizes Legrand's painting is a false image of how women behave to one another as 'female friends'. Edith repudiates the way in which patriarchal values frame and perceive relations between women. Legrand is a charlatan; his representation bears no relation to the truth. Yet this rejection is not the same thing as denying the existence of desire between women. However, what that truth is cannot easily be deduced from the writings.\n\nOutside of the treatment of Sappho, which is a minefield of interpretative complexity, there is very little explicit analysis of the relationship between Katherine and Edith. Their primary concern is always with Michael Field the Poet, and it is the name itself I want to focus on now because it reveals to a large extent how they conceived of their practice as poets. That male-authored publications are usually better received and taken more seriously than female-authored works is a truism. Before the adoption of the joint persona they used the pseudonyms Arran and Isla Leigh, which brought them more favourable reviews than they ever had as Michael Field, and also the assumption that they were either a married couple or a brother and sister. Perhaps this misinterpretation is what led them to adopt the single pen-name. Although Katherine and Edith used metaphors of marriage to describe their love, it would be surprising if they had wanted to be publicly portrayed as a heterosexual couple. However, 'Michael Field' cannot be regarded as a true pseudonym, since it was widely known in a literary circle that included John Gray, George Meredith, and Oscar Wilde, as well as their friends Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, that they were two women. Much of their correspondence is addressed to them both under the heading of Michael Field and they often signed themselves with the joint name. The name contains a compelling contradiction: they both deploy the authority of male authorship and yet react against such camouflage. Michael Field is not a disguise. Nor is it a pretence at being a man.\n\nNone the less, they were appalled when they became known to their Catholic congregation as the women behind Michael Field. Edith confronted her confessor, Goscommon:\n\nI say I regret it is known; but that in the same way, I am glad he, as my Confessor, knows, for it will help him to understand some things I feel he has somewhat misunderstood, & also it is for a poet with his freedom of impulse to submit to the control & discipline of the Church.32\n\nThis anxiety for concealment is in marked contradiction to their previous willingness to be known. Wayne Koestenbaum offers the explanation that 'their aliases gave them a seclusion in which they could freely unfold their \"natures set a little way apart\"'.33 Yet that desired seclusion became impossible when they submitted to the authority of the Church. Even though their attempts to develop a framework in which to talk about their love and desires in part depended upon a screen from the world, this effort did not rest wholly upon the use of a male pen-name. Rather, the development of the poetic persona Michael Field gave them another role in which to play out their understandings of their relationship. The persona is distinct from Katherine and Edith, and separate from their pet names Michael and Henry, which were in common currency among friends. Michael Field the Poet is always presented as the highest point of their work.\n\nComplicated shifts took place when they converted to Catholicism. Entering the Roman Catholic Church evokes from Edith the two explicit references to sexuality I have found. In the 1907 volume of the journals she wrote, 'Since I have entered the Holy Catholic Church, I have never fallen into fleshly sin',34 which presupposes that before she joined she had succumbed to such fleshly temptation. Here fleshly sin may be a reference to masturbation, but I am doubtful, given the second reference in 1908: 'When I came into this Church a year ago [I gave] a gift that was a vow of chastity.'35 Not practising masturbation may constitute abstinence from fleshly sin, but chastity in this context seems to involve another person. This may be an indication that before conversion, there had been a sexual or erotic relationship between Katherine and Edith.\n\nThe physicality of the relationship is not so much implicit as embedded, especially in the late poems. An unpublished poem from the manuscript journals, 'My Love is like a lovely Shepherdess', is appended with a note from the writer of the poem, Katherine.\n\nEdith's peach & green embroidered gown came home this evening; \u2013 after seeing her in it I brake into the 1st part of the 1st verse of this song \u2013 then came down &, at my desk, in the evening light, wrote the rest of the verses. Friday July 19th.\n\nThe first part of the first verse reads\n\nMy Love is like a lovely Shepherdess;  \nShe has a dress  \nOf peach & green  \nthe prettiest was ever seen.36\n\nAfter this, the poem goes into a pastoral idyll, where the poet adores the shepherdess through metaphors of spring, morning, and music. But the starting point for the pastoral is the appearance of the beloved. She is 'pretty' (6), 'virgin white' (15), with a 'tender face' (10). The specificity of the poem derives from an identifiable moment in their daily life, which is valued as the proper subject of poetry, although not for publication.\n\nFrom _The Wattlefold_ , a volume of previously unpublished poetry which was eventually published after their deaths in 1930, comes Katherine's poem 'Caput Tuum ut Carmelus'. It opens with these lines:\n\nI watch the arch of her head  \nAs she turns away from me.\n\nAnd continues in the third stanza:\n\nOh, what can Death have to do  \nWith a curve that is drawn so fine,  \nWith a curve that is drawn as true  \nAs the mountain's crescent line?37\n\nThis dwelling on the physical detail of the loved/desired object makes the physical presence the representation of the identity of that object. That fine curve stands in for both the fineness of the inner self and also for how the lover conceptualizes the relationship with the loved. That curve is a combination of art \u2013 it is drawn \u2013 and of nature \u2013 like a mountain, and this is indicative of one way in which the identity of the loved object as loved object is delineated through the poetry. While there are no explicit declarations of lesbian desire, there are these embedded constructions of identity expressed through relationship.\n\nEdith, in one of her last entries before her death, wrote: 'We have had the bond of race, with the delicious adventure of the stranger nature, introduced by the beloved father.'38 Since the word father is not capitalized, I hazard to guess that this is a reference to John Gray, a poet, a convert, a priest, Katherine's one-time confessor, and spiritual adviser to them both. He was also the long-time lover of the poet Marc-Andr\u00e9 Raffalovich.39 The word 'race' here is intriguing, but again there is the notion of natures that are different. Although they had been in correspondence with Havelock Ellis,40 there is no evidence in their work of any belief or interest in sexology, inversion, and the 'third sex'. That said, these remarks do seem to resonate with the notion of belonging to a 'breed apart'.\n\nTheir strategies for making sense of their love do not take the shape of pretending to be or believing themselves to be men, nor of understanding themselves to be romantic friends. In their treatment of their role as Michael Field and of their love for each other, Katherine and Edith construct a position of opposition against the misapprehensions and prejudices of the world. That opposition relies upon their alliance with one another, and with specific cultural formations that they recognize as expressive or reflective of that alliance. This is the impulse behind their declaration of 1893:\n\nMy Love and I took hands and swore  \nAgainst the world, to be  \nPoets and lovers evermore. . . .  \nOf judgement never to take heed,  \nBut to those fast-locked souls to speed,  \nWho never from Apollo fled. . . .  \nContinually  \nWith them to dwell,  \nIndifferent to heaven and hell.41\n\nThe reference to Apollo marks the homoerotic nature of the relationship, and the indifference to heaven and hell seems to suggest they were refusing some large-scale social rules and norms. The roles of poet and lover are both integral to one another and essential to their rejection of the judgement of 'the world'. This is an implicitly political understanding of women as lovers, rather than a private and personal retreat from the world into Romantic Friendship.\n\nThere is no one strategy or organizing principle that they use to define themselves, a point which is demonstrated in the difference between the poem from 1893 and the prefatory poem from the 1875 volume _The New Minnesinger_ by Arran Leigh (alias Katherine Bradley). 'To E.C'. refers to the 'mast'ring power' of the other woman's love, and the writer's need of that love which is 'forever voiceless' (p. vii). The 'lighter passions' will find a way 'into rhythm', and the voiceless need is premised upon the assertion that 'Thou hast fore-fashioned all I do and think' (p. vii). This difference marks the shift from a virtual silence about the love to the opening up of a framework in which to talk about that love.\n\nEdith and Katherine's methods of explaining their love and desire are difficult to decipher because they are so unlike our own modes of explanation. But the fact that we have that trouble does not mean that they encountered the same problem. It is necessary to beware failing or refusing to recognize the complexity of the negotiations these women-loving women made. If we do, as Faderman has done, then all those negotiations made within a hostile dominant culture would lead to a particularly restricted view \u2013 a homogeneous and desexualized version. What I have attempted to do here is to begin the process of mapping out the complicated processes whereby the discourses of lesbianism might have been inscribed in the nineteenth century, and not to fall into a simplistic one-theory-fits-all position.\n\n#  **Notes**\n\n1 Lillian Faderman, _Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present_ (1981; London: The Women's Press, 1985). Page references are included in the text.\n\n2 These journals are held in British Library under the title 'Works and Days' from 1870 on. All British Library manuscript reference numbers and folio numbers indicate these texts. The published journals appeared as _Works and Days_ , ed. T. and D.C. Sturge Moore (London: John Murray, 1933) hereafter referred to as _Works and Days_.\n\n3 See Donna C. Stanton and Jeanine F. Plottel (eds.), _The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice from the Middle Ages to the Present_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Liz Stanley and Sue Scott (eds.), _Writing Feminist Biography_ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986).\n\n4 'Lesbian' is here and elsewhere used to refer to people and things pertaining to Lesbos; 'lesbian' is used throughout to refer to sexual or emotional relationships between women.\n\n5 Arran and Isla Leigh, _Belleroph\u00f4n_ (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), p. 159.\n\n6 Examples of homosexual treatments of Greek literature and culture from the nineteenth century include William Cory, 'Heraclitus' from _lonica_ (London: Smith, Elder, 1858); Charles Kains-Jackson, 'Antinous' from _The Artist and Journal of Home Culture_ , 12 (October 1891); Walter Pater, _Greek Studies: A Series of Lectures_ (1894); John Addington Symonds, _A_ _Problem in Greek Ethics_ (1883).\n\n7 William Mure, _Critical History of the Language and Literature of Ancient Greece_ (1850\u20137), cited in Richard Jenkyns, _Three Classical Poets: Sappho, Catullus, Juvenal_ (London: Duckworth, 1982), p. 2.\n\n8 Gilbert Murray, _Ancient Greek Literature_ (1897), cited in Jenkyns, op. cit., p. 2.\n\n9 The version of Sappho as heterosexual lover appeared in ironized form as early as 1848 in Christina Rossetti's suppressed poem 'What Sappho would have said had her leap cured instead of killing her'.\n\n10 Michael Field to Walter Pater, 11 June 1889, in Laurence Evans (ed.), _The Letters of Walter Pater_ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 96.\n\n11 See Walter Pater, _Greek Studies: A Series of Lectures_ (New York: Chelsea House, 1983).\n\n12 See John Addington Symonds, _A Problem in Greek Ethics_ , the full edition (1901), and _A Problem in Modern Ethics_ (1896).\n\n13 Michael Field, ___Long Ago_ __, Poem XXXV (London: Bell, 1889), p. 56.\n\n14 ibid., Poem V, 'Where with their boats the fishers land', p. 8.\n\n15 ibid., Poem LXVI, 'We sat and chatted at our ease', p. 123.\n\n16 Arran Leigh, _The New Minnesinger and Other Poems_ (1875), p. 2.\n\n17 For nineteenth-century British homosexual usages of Walt Whitman, see, for example, Edward Dowden, _Studies in Literature 1789\u20131877_ (1878), John Addington Symonds, _Walt Whitman: A Study_ (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1893), and John Addington Symonds, 'Democratic Art with Special Reference to Walt Whitman', in _Essays Speculative and Suggestive_ (1893).\n\n18 _Long Ago_ , Poem LII, 'Climbing the hill a coil of snakes', p. 89.\n\n19 Preface to _Long Ago_ , p. iii; translation from Poem 78 in Josephine Balmer, _Sappho: Poem and Fragments_ (unpaginated edition), [p. 58].\n\n20 Mary Sturgeon, _Michael Field_ (London: Harrap, 1922), p. 47.\n\n21 British Library, Add. MS 46803, fo. 100v.\n\n22 Sturgeon, op. cit., p. 47.\n\n23 Faderman, op. cit., p. 210.\n\n24 Edward Carpenter, _Homogenic Love, and Its Place in a Free Society_ (Manchester: Manchester Labour Society, 1894).\n\n25 Elizabeth Mavor, _The Ladies of Llangollen: A Study in Romantic Friendship_ (1971; London: Penguin Books, 1973), p. xvii.\n\n26 Case histories of female sexual inverts contained in H. Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_ , vol. 1, _Sexual Inversion_ (1897) included Edith Ellis and Ren\u00e9e Vivien.\n\n27 Sonja Ruehl, 'Sexual Theory and Practice: Another Double Standard', in Sue Cartledge and Joanna Ryan (eds), _Sex and Love: New Thoughts on Old Contradictions_ (London: The Women's Press, 1983), p. 219.\n\n28 Gayle Rubin, 'Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality', in Carole S. Vance (ed.), _Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality_ (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 301.\n\n29 _Works and Days_ , p. 63.\n\n30 British Library MS, 46798 fo. 25v.\n\n31 See E. Ann Kaplan, 'Is the Gaze Male?', in Ann Snitow _et al_. (eds), _Desire: The Politics of Sexuality_ (London: Virago, 1984), pp. 321\u201338.\n\n32 British Library MS, 46798, fo. 20v.\n\n33 Wayne Koestenbaum, _Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration_ (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 173: he is citing Sturgeon, op. cit., p. 23.\n\n34 British Library MS, 46797, fo. 52v.\n\n35 ibid., fo. 77.\n\n36 British Library MS, 46777, fo. 87.\n\n37 Michael Field, _The Wattlefold: Unpublished Poems by Michael Field_ , collected by Emily C. Fortey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1930), p. 191.\n\n38 _Works and Days_ , p. 326.\n\n39 See, with reservation and suspicion, since he suppresses or refutes any suggestions of homosexuality, Brocard Sewell, _Footnote to the Nineties: A Memoir of John Gray and Andr\u00e9 Raffalovich_ (London: C. & A. Woolf, 1968) and Brocard Sewell, _In the Dorian Mode: A Life of John Gray 1866\u20131934_ (Padstow: Tabb House, 1983).\n\n40 Sturgeon, op. cit., p. 47.\n\n41 _Works and Days_ , p. xix.\n\nWhite, Chris. 1992. \"'Poets and lovers evermore': the poetry and journals of Michael Field.\" In _Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Gay and Lesbian Writing_ , edited by Joseph Bristow, pp. 26\u201343. London: Routledge. Reproduced with permission of Taylor & Francis.\n\n# 20\n\n# Swinburne at Work\n\n#  _The First Page of 'Anactoria'_\n\nTimothy A J Burnett\n\n'He is a reed through which all things blow into music': Tennyson's two-edged compliment ( _Swinburne: The Critical_ Heritage, ed. Clyde K. Hyder [1970], 113), with its imputation of a fatal facility, has dogged Swinburne's reputation. Browning went even further. 'As to Swinburne's verses . . . they are \"florid impotence\", to my taste, the _minimum_ of thought and idea in the _maximum_ of words and phraseology. Nothing said and nothing done with, left to stand alone and trust for its effect in its own worth' ( _Hyder_ 115). Swinburne has been regarded as a poet whose work lacked what Dante Gabriel Rossetti called 'fundamental brainwork' ( _Letters_ , ed. Cecil Y. Lang [1959\u201362], 1.xix). Examination in some detail of part of one of Swinburne's poetical manuscripts, the only records that we have of his compositional brainwork, may throw some light on whether or not this reputation is justified. The poem chosen is 'Anactoria' which was, of course, not only one of the texts which caused the outcry at the publication of _Poems and Ballads_ (1866), but also contains one of Swinburne's most famous phrases: 'the mystery of the cruelty of things'. It is also, conveniently, possessed of a particularly complicated draft.\n\nIn _Notes on Poems and Reviews_ (1866) Swinburne claimed that in 'Anactoria' he had tried to reproduce the spirit of Sappho's Ode 'To a Beloved Woman', a poem which he would have known since his time at Eton. Swinburne was one among the many who have considered Sappho to be the greatest lyric poet of all time. She was also, for him, a symbol of the high calling and immortality of the poet. Her verse, written in the 7th century BC, has survived only in fragmentary form in the quotations of later classical writers and commentators, and in equally fragmentary papyri. It chiefly treats of affection between women, a theme which has caused the modern world to give the name of Sappho's native island to a practice which there is no evidence that she herself pursued. Although Sappho's ode is graphically descriptive of her jealousy at seeing a woman she loved seated beside a man, and although in fragment 28 she calls love the 'giver of pain',1 and although Swinburne incorporated several lines translated from Sappho's poems in _his_ poem, it is not the spirit of Sappho that is expressed in 'Anactoria' so much as that of the Marquis de Sade whose _Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu_ Swinburne had read in 1862.2 This is true not only of the overtly sadistic passages (lines 23\u201336 and 103\u2013144), but also of the philosophical (lines 148\u2013188), where God is portrayed as the supreme sadist, the cause and essence of 'the mystery of the cruelty of things'.\n\nIn the case of the philosophical passages, study of Swinburne's draft reveals that lines 145\u2013154 were added later, while 155\u2013188 are not found in the manuscript at all. These are the lines closest in spirit to the philosophy of the choruses in _Atalanta in Calydon_ , and their appearance out of sequence, as it were, would already have suggested that composition of the two poems proceeded coevally, even if we were not aware that a draft of lines 155\u2013188 is to be found on folio 6b of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, manuscript of _Atalanta_.\n\nTo quote W. R. Rutland, 'No poet ever wrote more supple rhyming couplets in iambic fives . . . The variety of caesura, the variations of enjambement and endstopping, and the skill with which the rhymes carry the sense instead of chopping it up, simply takes one's breath away'.3 Swinburne himself, in a letter to Dante Gabriel Rossetti dated 22 December 1869 referred to ' . . . my _own scheme of movement and modulation in Anactoria, which I consider original in structure and combination_ ' ( _Letters_ , 2:74). Perhaps by examining Swinburne's manuscript in detail we may be able to discern, however dimly, something of how this was achieved.\n\nThere are three manuscripts of 'Anactoria' known to me: the first, a draft, preserved at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, at the University of Texas at Austin, is written on both sides of two folio leaves of blue wove paper (folios 1 and 2), on both sides of two folio leaves of blue laid paper (folios 4 and 5), and on one side only of two folio leaves of blue laid paper (folios 3 and 6). Folios 4 and 6 are watermarked 'Sawston/1858' and 'J & SH/ 1863' respectively. The leaves have been bound in the wrong order, and should be as follows: 1, 2, 4, 5, 3, 6. The second manuscript is the draft of lines 155\u2013188 at the Fitzwilliam Museum mentioned above, and the third is a fair copy in the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana at Geneva. In this last manuscript the poem was originally entitled 'Philocris'.\n\nThe system of transcription employed in order to reproduce the first page of the draft may be simply explained by means of examples. Comparing line 1 of the facsimile4 and of the transcription, it will be seen that Swinburne first wrote _lips_ and then substituted _life_ by writing it over _lips;_ at the same time he changed _are_ to _is_. When he made these changes he had got at least as far as _bitter_ , so the words substituted, _life_ and _is_ , are italicised to show that they are substitutions within an already existing string of words. Swinburne could, theoretically at least, have come back hours or days after completing the line, and made the changes. Further along the line, however, he has written a little over half of what is probably _my_ , abandoned it, and _currente calamo_ substituted _thy_. In that case _thy_ is not italicised. Where, as in line 4, Swinburne has deleted the first substitution and substituted a third version, as in _falters, quickens, strengthens_ , the first substitution is in italics, and the second is in bold face. If there were a third, it would be in bold face italics. A fourth substitution has, happily, yet to occur.\n\nLet us now look at the draft: Lines 1\u201310 may possibly have background inspiration from Sappho fragment 27 ' . . . You burn me, . . .'. In Line 1 we see a change from _lips_ being _bitter_ (Swinburne considers _burnt_ ) with _my_ love to the less concrete _life_ being _bitter_ with _thy_ love. On the other hand in line 3 we see a change from the neutral _their_ to the more specific, and alliterative and sibilant _soft_ , and in fact Swinburne builds up a remarkable accumulation of 's's in the first five lines. In line 4 there is a change from the concept of _sight_ failing to _blood_ faltering \u2013 an avoidance of yet more smooth sibilant alliteration, and the substitution of a more staccato, vivid image \u2013 followed by a change of tack from _falters_ through _quickens_ to _strengthens_ ( _strengthens_ , although it contains two 's's, is a harsher word than _quickens_ ). We also see a move from the abstract _life_ to the concrete _veins_. In line 6 we see a change from the legato _that life is death_ to staccato _it is not death_. In line 7 Swinburne started _I would we twain were_. He then presumably conceived an ending in two iambic feet, and therefore substituted for _were_ the filler O, _thou;_ he then reverted to the first version; abandoned that tack and put the agents of annihilation (the _sea_ and the _fire)_ in the active role, and Sappho and her beloved in the passive; after which, apart from two hesitations ( _sea were_ [something along the lines of _over us_ ] for _sea had hidden_ , and juggling with _fire pyre fire_ \u2013 finally preferring the smoother fricative to the more jerky plosive) the line was in its final form. Lines 8 and 9 gave Swinburne considerably more trouble. The basic concept was that fire should cleanse, purge, destroy Sappho, her beloved, and Sappho's passion together. At the same time he had to find a rhyme word for _fire_. He started with the idea of fire severing life from the lovers, abandoned that (but stored it in his memory), tried _Purged life from lips_ , deleted _life from lips_ (Swinburne seems to have been tempted by the image of lips while composing this section, but to have decided against it; three times he deleted _lips_ or _lip)_ , substituted _us_ , then abandoned the personal approach and substituted the general, holocaustic, concept _Consumed the earth_. It is just possible that there was an intermediate stage _Purged us, the earth_ [and something else besides to be supplied], but I think not. Swinburne then dropped the general concept and returned to the personal with _Laid hold upon us like a new desire_. At that point he had a line that made sense, that rhymed and that led on to lines 9 and 10 _Severed . . . leaves_. Nevertheless, the poet with the fatal facility was not satisfied. Out went _like a new desire_ and in came _as with hands_. Presumably the hands were to be 'of fire', and it was possibly at that juncture that _pyre_ was substituted for _fire_ in the preceding line. _As with hands_ was then deleted, and a new concept introduced: _with the lip that cleaves_ \u2013 the fire's lip, that is. The idea of fire suggested _ash_ , but in the meantime there was a problem to be solved. Swinburne was pleased with the word _cleaves_ , with its ambiguous, twin meanings of clinging on the one hand and separation on the other, but by using it he had lost his rhyme-word with _fire_. After some hesitation over how to begin it, he inserted the otherwise perhaps somewhat redundant line _Wilt thou fear that and fear not my desire?_ Interestingly enough, the final word _desire_ is immediately adjacent to deleted _desire_ from the earlier attempt. There then follows the line that employs the rhyme-word _cleaves_ (again, it is adjacent to its earlier, deleted, appearance) \u2013 a line full of paradox. It is _fire_ that severs the bones, yet by a jump in time the bones are not blackened, but bleached. _Severed_ , too, is an odd word to use of bones parted from flesh by fire, yet that was the concept intended, since Swinburne also tried the word _divided. Severed_ had been lurking in his mind, and on the page, since there it is at the beginning of the aborted version of line 8. Yet _flesh that cleaves_ implies a jump in time in the opposite direction, since flesh cleaves to the bones only before the fire has taken hold. _Bleach_ and _cleaves_ are linked by assonance, but express contrary ideas. It is a complicated line, and it cost Swinburne some pains to wrestle it out. There follows a fairly neutral line, line 10, and then two lines, 11 and 12, where the expression of pain rises to a higher pitch, but it remains a mutual pain. In line 12 the too monotonous _vein aches on vein_ is changed to the more biting _and vein stings vein_.\n\nAt this point the order of composition becomes somewhat hard to follow, but appears to have gone thus: line 1\u201310, 67 and 68, 11\u201314, 64, 69\u201371 as far as _kisses_ , 23\u201334 omitting 29\u201332, then 29\u201332, the second half of 71, 72, and finally 63\u201366. The exact order in which the lines were set down upon the page may be impossible to determine, but it is clear that 67 and 68 were written down, as a couplet, early on, if not first of all, since so many of the other lines curl around them, or are fitted in next to them. Moreover, they appear to be written with a different pen, and in a bolder hand. They relate to a passage of Sappho's own poetry, the 'Ode to Aphrodite', line 1, where the goddess is described as \"poikilothron\" \u2013 richly enthroned.\n\nThere are therefore at this point two opposed, but balanced, concepts in Swinburne's mind at the same time: Aphrodite on her throne offering comfort to Sappho; and the torments that Sappho wishes upon the faithless object of her desire. The latter concept leads on from, and was possibly inspired by, the sentiments found in lines 11 and 12, just as lines 23\u201324 lead on from lines 11 and 12 physically upon the page. The desire for _mutual_ destruction found in lines 7\u201314, however, transmutes itself into a _sadistic_ desire for the lingering and painful death of the beloved. It seems clear that Swinburne was not easy about these notorious lines, and was undecided whether to include them or not, if he did include them, where. In the poem as printed line 14 is separated from line 23 by the passage beginning 'Why wilt thou follow lesser loves?', a passage possibly inspired by Sappho fragment 22. ' . . . Out of all mankind, whom do you love better than you love me? . . .', but which really contributes very little to the poem, unless it be to provide a brief lull of pleading, a change of tone, between the two violent passages. In the draft it is found on folio 2, following a different sadistic passage, lines 103\u2013112. In the fair copy lines 23\u201334 were originally omitted altogether, and were added later in the right hand margin of folio 1. They represent the first appearance of sadism in the poem (albeit quite an early appearance) and Swinburne seems unsure how to handle it. Whatever his difficulty in placing these lines, however, he seems not, on the whole, to have had the same difficulty in composing them. Lines 23 and 24 came easily enough. Swinburne's first attempt at lines 25 and 26 reads: _Thou art over fair; I would the grave might eat / Thy body as fruit_ . . . He then abandoned the envious sentiment at the beginning of line 25, but retained the idea of the beloved's body being consumed like fruit by the earth, reinforcing it with the image of her body being eaten by some loathsome reptile. He began: _And save the worm's no mouth could find thee sweet_ , but no doubt found that trite and banal. He then strengthened it to: _And no mouth but the grave-worm's_ (with its echo of ballad vocabulary) _found thee sweet_ , but still unsatisfied searched for a yet more 'laidly worm', trying first _viper's_ , and then at last, possibly prompted by the genitive 's', arriving at the splendidly sinister and onomatopoeic _And no mouth but some serpent's found thee sweet_.\n\nThe next line, 27, which begins a new passage, and signals a raising of the emotional pitch, came easily enough, as did 28, once Swinburne had made an 180 degree turn from _Subtle_ to _Intense_ , and from _soft_ to _superflux_. He next wrote the first version of what was eventually to be line 34, _By soft red ways_ , and probably _and shuddering_ , before deleting _By soft red ways_ and substituting _Veiled notes and shuddering semitones of death_. At this point it must have occurred to him that _Veiled notes_ etc. would make the perfect end to the whole passage. He accordingly tried to fit in a line which would rhyme with _death_ before the line which he had just finished. He first wrote _Strain out with music_ , then substituted _pangs like music_ for _music_ , followed by _all thy breath_. To strain out with music all the beloved's breath must have seemed too far fetched, or at least ambiguous, but the idea of death accompanied by music, of the beloved's screams and dying sobs being music to Sappho's ears, an idea which seems to have been introduced when _Veiled notes_ were substituted for _soft red ways_ , is one which Swinburne decided to retain for the end of the passage, but which, after one further attempt _With pangs like music_ , he set aside for the time being. The concept that now came into his mind, perhaps suggested by another meaning of 'strain', was that of treading life out as must is trodden out of grapes. He starts with a line-ending _and tread_ , followed by _Thy life out softly till the dregs were shed_. Not happy with that, he tried two line-endings both of which, unfortunately, contain words which are, for myself at least, illegible. The first reads _and [ ] it out like [ ]_ , and the second _and hurt thee sore_ _being [ ]_. Swinburne then turned to a new variation on his theme of prolonged and painful death: _Vex thee with amorous agonies, let slip / And rein thy soul up at the_ \u2013 but there he could go no further. Possibly he was thinking of reining the soul up at the something's lip, for his next attempt, adhering to the equestrian metaphor, was _And curb thy soul's half-lacerated lip_. This, however, would clearly not do, since it meant abandoning the image of holding the beloved in agony on the brink of death, whilst sadistically not allowing her to die. At last everything came right, and lines 29\u201332 were written out with but one hesitation, the incredible line 32 \u2013 _Intolerable interludes, and infinite ill_ \u2013 causing the poet, as far as can be judged from the draft, no trouble at all. After that, it only remained to balance the assonance of line 32 with the alliteration of line 33, and to substitute _Dumb tunes_ for _Veiled notes_ , and the passage was complete.\n\nSurprising as it may seem after the epicene emotions and perverse passions of lines 23\u201334, Swinburne now returned to Aphrodite, whom he had left imperishable upon her storied seat. It is, however, clear from the draft that lines 64\u201366, and the second half of line 71 with line 72, were written after lines 23\u201334. Inspired, perhaps, by Sappho fragment 123, 'I dreamt that you and I had words, Cyprus-born', Swinburne wrote first _For sleeping_ , but was then struck by another concept, that of contrasting Sappho's genius with the beloved's beauty, in the deleted line _For me she loves for my song's sake, but thee_. Abandoning that, he returned to Sappho's dream. The four lines introducing the vision of Aphrodite gave him little trouble, he incorporated the two lines (67 and 68) which he had had set down for so long, and the two and a half lines which he had added earlier, completed line 71, added line 72, and was ready to continue the dream conversation between Aphrodite and Sappho on the verso of the first leaf, incorporating the idea in the abandoned _For me she loves_ . . . into what was to become line 74: _but thou art sweeter, sweet, than song_.\n\nWhat conclusions can be drawn after studying one of Swinburne's manuscripts in this kind of detail? For one thing, and contrary to Browning's assertion quoted at the beginning of this article, it can be seen that Swinburne's text is remarkably stable. Once he has fought his way through a draft he is faithful to the result, and with very minor adjustments the final text found in the draft is the same as the text as printed. In this he may be contrasted with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, haunted, continually seeking an ideal, whose text is very unstable, and who even uses the same poem in different contexts. Beside Rossetti, Swinburne exhibits a sublime self-confidence, and seems to declare 'Quod scripsi, scripsi'.\n\nIt can be observed that Swinburne, contrary perhaps to what is generally believed of him, does proceed from the sense to the sound. He establishes the sense first, then seeks the proper sound, as in the revisions _their_ to _soft_ (line 3), _quickens_ to _strengthens_ (line 4), or _the grave-worm's_ to _some viper's_ to _some serpent's_ (line 26).\n\nTwo different moods and two different concepts can often be seen going forward at the same time and on the same page; on the one hand intense sadistic feelings towards the beloved, and on the other the vision of Aphrodite comforting Sappho. In the printed text these two passages are quite widely separated, and there is nothing to reveal how closely intertwined they were in the poet's mind. It is also possible to see the influence of one passage upon another, separated in the printed version, but clearly written under one impulse, as in the case of the two sadistic passages, lines 7\u201314 and 23\u201334. The fact that Swinburne had difficulty in deciding where to place the latter passage, conscious as he was of the effect that it would have upon his audience, can only be discovered by study of the manuscripts.\n\nIn his choice of vocabulary, Swinburne can move either from the precise to the vague, or from the general to the specific. He is not, as is sometimes supposed, for ever paring away at precision in order to achieve a vague and dreamy music. We are also reminded that poets do not compose logically, starting at line 1, and continuing through to the end. One idea sparks off another, inspiration for a line or lines strikes in the midst of the composition of an unconnected passage. Lines sometimes come into the brain and go down on the page pell-mell, and sometimes in an ordered, logical and apparently serene progression.\n\nFinally it reminds us that we cannot lay hold of the nature of creative genius. We can trace influences, we can follow the course of ideas being worked out, but we cannot account for the sudden appearance, perfectly formed, with no struggle, of 'Intolerable interludes, and infinite ill'.\n\n#  **Anactoria**\n\n## Folio 1\n\n1 My < _lips_ > _life_ < are > _is_ bitter < _burnt [ ] >_ with < m[ ] > thy love; thine eyes\n\n2 Sting me, thy tresses burn me, thy sharp sighs\n\n3 Divide my flesh and spirit with < their > _soft_ sound,\n\n4 And my < sight > blood < falters > _< quickens >_ **strengthens** , and my < life> veins abound.\n\n5 I pray thee sigh not, speak not, draw not breath;\n\n6 Let life burn down, and dream < that life > it is not death.\n\n7 I would < we twain < were > <, **O thou** > **were** > the sea < were > had  \nhidden us, the < fire > _< pyre >_ **fire**\n\n<(> < What > <Why fear it > (<Who >\n\n<Shalt thou>\n\n8 Wilt thou fear that and _fear_ not my desire?)\n\n<Severed > <Purged < _life from lips_ ,> _us, <_<Consumed the  \nearth,> < Laid hold upon us < Like a new desire > <, _as with  \nhands_ _[ ] >_ **with** the lip that cleaves>\n\n<Let fall _< the_ white > the ash>\n\n9 < Severed the > <Divided > _Severed the_ bones that bleach, the flesh that cleaves\n\n10 And let our sifted ashes drop like leaves.\n\n13 Let fruit be crushed on fruit let flower on flower\n\n11 I feel thy blood\n\nagainst my blood; <thy\n\nveins > _< my pain >_ **my**\n\n**pain**\n\n14 Breast kindle breast < [ ] > and either burn one hour.\n\n64 < For in my > <Saw > in her _high_ place in Paphos\n\n<Fill my > <Filling > <Pains thee,>\n\n12 < Pains thee _all through_ , and\n\nvein throbs hard on vein. >\n\nPains thee, <and mouth > and\n\nlip hurts lip, <and > _and_\n\nvein < aches on > _stings_ vein.\n\n67 Saw Love, a burning flame from crown to feet\n\n68 Imperishable, upon her < carven > _storied_ seat.\n\n69 Clear eyelids lifted toward the north and south\n\n70 A mind of many colours and a mouth\n\n71 Of many tunes and kisses: _and she bowed_\n\n72 <Through > _With_ all her subtle face laughing aloud,\n\n23 I would < [ ] > my love could slay\n\nthee; I am satiated\n\n24 With seeing thee live and fain\n\nwould have thee dead.\n\n25 < Thou art over fair;> I would\n\n<the grave might) _earth had_\n\n_thy body as fruit to_ eat\n\n26 < Thy body as fruit,>\n\nAnd < save the worm's > no\n\nmouth < could > _but < the_\n\n_grave-worm's >_ some < viper's >\n\nserpent's < find > _found_ thee\n\nsweet\n\n27 I would find grievous ways to\n\nhave thee slain,\n\n28 < Subtle > Intense device, and\n\n<soft > superflux of pain:\n\n<and tread >\n\n<Thy life out softly < till the dregs were shed > and _<_ _[ ]_ _it out  \nlike >_ **hurt thee sore being** [ ]>\n\n29 Vex thee with amorous agonies <, <let slip > _sharp >_\n\n<And < rein > _curb_ thy soul's < up at the > **_half lacerated lip_**.>\n\n**and shake**\n\n30 Life at thy lips, <with > and hold it there to ache;\n\n<With pangs like music > Strain\n\nout with < music > pangs like\n\nmusic all thy breath>\n\n31 Strain out thy soul with pangs too soft to kill,\n\n32 Intolerable interludes, and infinite ill;\n\n2\n\n34 _< By soft red ways > <Veiled_\n\n_notes >_ _<_ _With_ _ >_ **Dumb tunes** , and\n\nshuddering semitones of death.\n\n1\n\nRelapse and reluctation of the\n\nbreath,\n\n<For sleeping> <For me she loves for my song's sake, but thee>\n\n63 For I beheld in sleep < her > the light that is\n\n158 The whole music of passion\n\n64 In her high place in Paphos, heard the kiss\n\n65 Of body and soul that mix with < laught > eager tears\n\n66 And laughter < through > stinging through the eyes and ears\n\n#  **Notes**\n\n1 All citations of Sappho are from the translation by D. A. Campbell in his _Gree_ _k Lyric, 1, Sappho, Alcaeus_ , The Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1982.\n\n2 In a letter to Richard Monckton Milnes, 18 August 1862, Swinburne wrote, 'I have just read \"Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu\"' _(Letters_ , 1.53). In his notes to this letter Lang points out that Swinburne actually read _La Nouvelle Justine_ , the revised version of 1797.\n\n3 W. R. Rutland, _Swinburne: A Nineteenth Century Hellene_ , 1931, 289\u201390.\n\n4 The first page of the manuscript is reproduced by kind permission of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.\n\nBurnett, Timothy A J. 1993. \"Swinburne at Work: the first page of 'Anactoria.'\" In _The Whole Music of Passion: New Essays on Swinburne_ , edited by Rikky Rooksby and Nicholas Shrimpton, pp. 148\u201358. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Reproduced with permission of Timothy A J Burnett, with thanks to Rikky Rooksby and Nick Shrimpton.\n\n# 21\n\n# Naming and Not Naming\n\n#  _Tennyson and Mallarm\u00e9_\n\nMary Ann Caws and Gerhard Joseph\n\nAs the author of \"in the name of the author\" puts it in the final commentary on a recent group of articles on anonymity, \"The question _what matters who's speaking?_ cannot of course be answered by the author himself (as Barthes reminds us), nor by the writer's own contemporaries (as Foucault reminds us), nor by literary theory (as we ought to remind ourselves). Questions of meaning and value can be answered only provisionally, each time a text is read by close readers like you and me.\" \"Still,\" he maintains, \"when we read a text that really matters, it will matter who's speaking.\"1\n\nWe think so too. In our case, who is speaking an English poem and the name behind it and who is translating them into another language, French. \"Lord[s] of the senses five\" (\"The Palace of Art,\" l. 180), but especially the sense of sound, Alfred Tennyson early in life pondered the mystery of his name's sound, and St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9, the elliptical suggestor, found the epitome of the admired English poet's meaning in the reverberation of that sound through posterity. We thus explore, at the center of Symbolist links between the two major poets, the problem of what and who is named, what and who is not, and what is actually suppressed: sonorous naming, then, and refusing to name, in the name of poetry itself.\n\n#  **I. Becoming A Name**\n\nSince the first half of our collaboration will eventually be about authorial achievement of impersonality, about the \"disappearance of the speaker\" within the poet's name,2 let us open, by contrast, with the resonance of a personal anecdote. Many years ago one of us (Joseph) in a graduate seminar on Victorian poetry heard its teacher, G. Robert Stange, make the offhanded judgment that an Edinburgh newspaper article by Mallarm\u00e9 some two weeks after Tennyson's death in 1892, \"Tennyson, vu d'ici,\" (that is, Tennyson, seen from France), was the most astute contemporary estimate of the English poet's qualities. Since that time, aside from a brief summary in Marjorie Bowden's study of Tennyson's French reputation and influence,3 we have never run across any critical allusion to, much less an evidentiary consideration of, that article's putative importance. If such neglect within Anglo-American criticism be indeed the case,4 perhaps one reason for the silence is the absence until recently of an English version of the article. Originally published in French in the _National Observer of Edinburgh_ on October 29, 1892,5 reprinted in the _Revue Blanche_ of December 1892, and collected in Mallarm\u00e9's _Divagations_ of 1897 and thereafter in his _Oeuvres compl\u00e8tes_ (pp. 527\u2013531; notes 1590),6 the essay was not translated into English, as \"Tennyson, Seen from Here,\" until 2001 by the other collaborator in this essay (Caws), in _Mallarm\u00e9 in Prose_.7\n\nSince \"Tennyson, vu d'ici\" is now readily available in English for the first time, perhaps this might be the moment to look at it in detail, but to do so within the larger context of Tennyson's impact upon Mallarm\u00e9 and upon the nineteenth-century French poetic tradition more generally.\n\nThe fact that Tennyson's early work contributed to the evolution of a Symbolist aesthetic has been something of a critical truism for some time now, at least since H. M. McLuhan's \"Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry.\" Spelling out that connection, McLuhan's essay was given a wide circulation in John Killham's groundbreaking collection of essays in 1960, _Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson_ ,8 that was instrumental to Tennyson's modern critical recuperation. What drew Mallarm\u00e9, as well as Baudelaire, Verlaine, and other Symbolists to Tennyson, was a melopoetic tendency he attributed specifically to the English tongue, a _musi_ _calit\u00e9 int\u00e9_ _rieure_ , in Mallarm\u00e9's phrase, that they prized in Anglo-American lyricism, preeminently in the linked poetry of Edgar Allan Poe and Tennyson. For, following what Baudelaire read as a \"quasi-fraternal [mutual] admiration\" of the two poets,9 the French themselves persistently connected Tennyson with his sound-intoxicated American equivalent and devotee. Poe, for whom its melody was poetry's essence, thus served as an intermediary between a Tennyson who claimed to know the sound values of every English vowel except those in the word \"scissors\"10 and the French Symbolists, who strove for a deconceptualized perception, for a sensate \"purity that knows nothing of the calculations of language.\"11 Whenever Poe himself alludes to Tennyson, it is with a panegyrical verve that knows few bounds: for Poe, Tennyson is the most \"pure\" of the poets; he is \" _the greatest_ [poet] that ever lived\"; the critical neglect in America of Tennyson's \"magnificent genius\" is \"one of the worst sins for which the country has to answer.\"12 And so on, with scarcely interrupted proselytizing until the very end of Poe's life in 1849.\n\nAs a conceptual extension of sheer musicality, the quality that appealed to Poe in such early poems as \"Mariana,\" \"The Lady of Shalott,\" and \"Oenone\" was what he once called their \"etherisity,\" \"a suggestive indefiniteness of meaning, with a view of bringing about a definiteness of vague and therefore of spiritual _effect_.\"13 (It is this \"suggestiveness\" of the image, an amorphousness arising out of the contemplation of a repeated detail that attracted Mallarm\u00e9 [see note 38 below]). We can thus understand how in striving for a _po\u00e9sie pure_ he drew upon both the music of words and their vague associations in Tennyson as well as Poe. For Tennyson is surely, as Angela Leighton has recently said, one of the century's \"most memorable, sensuous, aestheticist voices. It is he who pushes language almost as far as it will go into music, whose rhymes and echoes ring on the other side of sense, who uses refrains and returns like audible embodiments of the tautology of art for art's sake.\"14 And perhaps no early poem of Tennyson's illustrates such linguistic echo effects as well as \"Mariana,\" which Mallarm\u00e9 first translated into French in 1874 in the midst of his translations of Poe, and then re-translated in 1890 (versions which we examine in Part II). As McLuhan said, so representative a work of Tennyson's lyricism \"is there to prove that the most sophisticated symbolist poetry could be written fifty years before the Symbolists\" (p. 70).\n\n\"Mariana\" is one of the two Tennyson works (the other being an 1884 translation of \"Godiva,\" published posthumously) that Mallarm\u00e9, who spent some wretched time as a teacher of English, actually did translate into a prose poem (quoted in full in note 38). It can thus provide us with a perfect distillation of what the Symbolists took from Tennyson: an inclination from univocal verbal meaning toward the suggestive reverberation of sound. Most striking in both the English and French versions of \"Mariana\" is the way in which the elaboration of a concrete, particularized image within the individual verse stanza (or, in Mallarm\u00e9's case, the prose-poem paragraph) leads inexorably to the climactic contemplation, through repetition in verse after verse, of a single epiphanic phrase, \"I am aweary, aweary\" in Tennyson's English, \"je suis lasse, lasse\" in Mallarm\u00e9's French, so that the meaning of the word itself, its \"matter-moulded\" form ( _In Memoriam_ XCV 46),15 approaches the condition of ineffability. If one thinks of other early Tennyson lyrics, one can see that the \"Shalott\"/\"Camelot\" repetitions of \"The Lady of Shalott\" or the \"hearken ere I die\" ones of \"Oenone\" achieve a comparable tendency \u2013 as does the \"dying, dying, dying\" in the bugle song of _The Princess_ or the moment in _The Princess_ when the wind rises and whispers to the Prince, \"Follow, follow, and win.\" As A. Dwight Culler says about such echoing sounds of which Tennyson's beloved mantra, \"far, far away,\" is perhaps the most deliquescent instance, \"Every lyric is . . . in some sense an act of transcendental meditation, operating upon a particular word or phrase and inducing in the reader who can savor its shape or sound a state of transcendent wonder.\"16 Whether or not such an addiction to the way musical echo effects can make \"dying words live,\" as the poem \"Far-Far-Away\" would have it, is the essential Tennysonian impulse, that possibility may at any rate be read as an interpretive backformation of a Symbolist emphasis upon the force of sonal repetition. As verbal meaning yearns for the purity of elemental sound, such a gravitation in both Tennyson and Mallarm\u00e9 moves from an aesthetic of particularity towards an aesthetic of sonal and visual suggestiveness; it generates a tension between the originating image and the general impression, from what is materially present (as in _Coup de d\u00e9s_ , etc.) to the Idea or Ideal, capturing for Mallarm\u00e9 \"the moment when a bird, just some bird, suddenly flies off from some branch, revealing in this moment its quality of being-an-origin, and its power of finding a meaning,\" as Yves Bonnefoy would have it.17\n\nBut such a convergence grows, for the most part, out of a French reading of the early Tennyson, the Tennyson of \"Mariana\" and other early lyrics. When Mallarm\u00e9 comes to write \"Tennyson, vu d'ici\" in 1892, it is in assessment of the entire career \u2013 and in response to a newspaper's call for a French elegiac comment upon the English laureate's death. What strikes us as original in Mallarm\u00e9's assessment is its recapitulation, if in a veiled form, of a Symbolist aesthetic that moves from a tangle of particularities to the mystery of pure sound \u2013 and specifically the reverberating sound, through his audience, of Tennyson's name.\n\nLet us summarize Mallarm\u00e9's argument as it moves toward that name: after describing the incompetence of the French daily press in trying to find the appropriate name of a French equivalent for the celebrated English laureate, Mallarm\u00e9 ventures his own approximations. Knowing how \"falsifying every comparison is, already by definition; and how impossible it becomes as soon as you try to associate two beings, so that the most dissimilar traits shine out, and even the most evident likeness escapes or fades into thin air,\" he nevertheless makes his stab at nominal precision: \"when it is a matter of Tennyson, the names of Leconte de Lisle, tempered by an Alfred de Vigny and in some way or other, Copp\u00e9e\" come to mind. But how fleeting and mistaken, he realizes, even such nominal comparisons as his own are.\n\nNext he tries out the misguided preferences of French popular taste with respect to the poems themselves, a faultiness usually based upon an ignorance of their actual content: there are the well-known allusions in Taine's _History of English Literature_ to the mature Tennyson that do not necessitate a reading public's going back to a particular source, not to mention a close reading of that source; or the _Enoch Arden_ that was drummed into the French student's head, along with grammatical footnotes. Or, in the 1860s' and 70s' version of today's coffee-table book, the contemporary fashion of Gustave Dor\u00e9 meant that there was to be found on every salon table the luxurious folio binding of one of the many versions of the _Idylls of the King_. That is, in France as in England, Tennyson was the foremost of the newly commodified poets in the late nineteenth century.18\n\nSo much for the response of the middle-class reading public: what Pater called aesthetic criticism, or more specifically the informed commentary of a Mallarm\u00e9, can presumably do better, can render a more precise justice against the popular taste. For the poet lives, as Mallarm\u00e9 said on another occasion \"outside of and unbeknownst to advertisement, to the counter groaning under copies, or exasperated salesmen\" ( _Prose_ , p. 30). In a salvage operation from popular reductiveness that foreshadows Harold Nicolson's \"two Tennysons,\" Mallarm\u00e9 prefers _Maud_ , \"The Lotos-Eaters,\" and \"Oenone\"; above all, the many leaves of Tennyson's poetry \"are like so many tombs, the same everywhere, in which _In Memoriam_ is a cemetery for a single dead man.\" As Mallarm\u00e9 singles out now this Tennysonian gem and now that one, the particularity is quickly subsumed under a more general, a more blurred affect of sublimity because of the passage of time: \"what we remember of a great poet is the so-called impression of sublimity he has left, by and through his work, rather than the work itself, and this impression, veiled in human language, pierces through in even the most common translations\" ( _Prose_ , p. 72).\n\nThis movement from sharp particularity to blurred impression quickly fades for Mallarm\u00e9 into an even more generalized condensation beyond the book, from the detailed characterization of a specific poem to the sublimity of a totalized oeuvre caught in the poet's name: thus, \"The name of the poet reconstitutes itself with the entire text which, from the union of words among themselves, ends up forming just one significant text, a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 of the whole soul, communicating itself to the passerby. It surges forth from the wide-open pages of the book which is from then on vain: for, finally genius has to take place in spite of everything, and has to be recognized despite all the obstacles and sometimes even without a reading.\" Thus it is through the very name, the musical and \"chaste arrangements of syllables,\" repeated slowly again and again, \" _Tennyson_ , now said solemnly like this: _Lord Tennyson_ \" on the occasion of the poet's passing, that \"the whole soul\" is called forth. Tennyson's lyric wing is enshrouded within a mysterious reverberation of impersonal sound, within a plangent mantra whereby his very name, transcending his work, becomes what the Symbolists would call a \"pure poem\" \u2013 just as the sheer accumulation of outward circumstance, the clutter of ominous detail upon detail opens upon the melancholic tonal purity of \"je suis lasse, lasse\" at the conclusion of each stanza of Mallarm\u00e9's translation of \"Mariana.\"\n\nIn short, as Tennyson had his Ulysses affirm of himself, both for the common reader who does not read Tennyson and the poet/critic who, having internalized him, no longer needs to, Tennyson is \"become a name\" (\"Ulysses,\" l. 11). In the former case, it is the brand name of commodity culture, while in the latter it is the sublime name of High Art's aesthetic introjection.19 \"Becoming a name,\" that is, can be an evocation of either absence or presence: when Ulysses asserts that for the citizens of Ithaca who \"know not me\" he is become a name, he means that, whatever his past reputation, he is now become merely a name, a signifier without a referent, a simulacrum empty of being, so why remain in Ithaca?20 By contrast Mallarm\u00e9's own sense of the name as the consolidation of the known text is celebratory, an assertion of immediate presence: for the aesthetic critic \"becoming a name\" is not a Ulyssean emptying out but rather an act of symbolization (in Coleridge's, not Paul de Man's sense), an evocation of \"le myst\u00e8re d'un nom\" as Mallarm\u00e9 would put it in the passage from his \"Ballets\" with which we close whereby the name encapsulates the essential present thing, the \"whole soul\" of the poet. (In comparable fashion, the Duke of Wellington's \"name\" is both underscored at various points in Tennyson's \"Ode on the Death of Wellington\" and finally dissolved by the plethora of recurrences and rhymes that the \"people's voice\" [l. 146], ventriloquized by the poet, finds for the hero's \"name.\") Thus, what is most interesting about the Mallarm\u00e9 essay is the way in which it enacts the perspectivist counter-movement in the nineties of 1) an emptying out of the poet's name for middle-class culture and 2) an idealizing, \"fulfilling\" of that name for avant-garde literary culture, of whom in his alienating \"difficulty\"21 we can think of no better a representative than Mallarm\u00e9.\n\nFurthermore, Mallarm\u00e9's foreign meditation upon the mystery of an English laureate's repeated name at the conclusion of his career cannot but remind us of Tennyson's own meditation on the same phenomenon at the very beginning of his life. In a conversation with John Tyndall in 1858, Tennyson famously described a state of consciousness into which he could, as a boy, throw himself by the incantation of his name, a state in which he felt a transcendence of the spirit beyond the body. As he put the matter to his son:\n\nA kind of waking trance I frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been sitting alone. It has generally come upon me thro' repeating my own name two or three times to myself, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost impossibility [sic], the loss of personality being no extinction but the only true life. (Hallam Tennyson, 2:29)22\n\nIt's an odd collocation that comes to mind, this mantra-like repetition of the name at the end of Tennyson's life from the perspective of Mallarm\u00e9, a poet/critic who underlines his foreignness (\"vu d'ici\"), and Tennyson's own internalized repetitions at the beginning of his life. On the one hand, it reminds us of Lacan's notion that our proper name, the aural equivalent of the earlier visual \"mirror\" as we enter the Symbolic register of language, the Law of the Father's \"nom\"/\"non\" (hence, at some stage in Tennyson's mantra, \"Tenny- _son_ \"?), is the source of our life-long _m\u00e9connaissance_ , our self-misrecognition, our sense of strangeness and impersonality in the world, since that name is imposed upon us from the outside23 \u2013 or even Derrida's insistence upon the \"originary violence of language\" implicit in any naming.24 On the other, both Mallarm\u00e9 and Tennyson are saying that the matter-moulded name, in its very movement beyond the texts of this life, leads us beyond personality and in such epiphanic force is liberating, \"is no extinction but the only true life.\" What at any rate the defamiliarization of their naming impulses have in common, we would suggest, is part of an idealizing aesthetic mode that unites Tennyson and the Symbolists, a progress from particularity to deliquescent vagueness, from individuation to amorphous collectivity, from personality to impersonality \u2013 the self-annihilating dispersion of meaning, in the \"pure work,\" that both deverbalizes perception and deperceptualizes words. As Mallarm\u00e9 says in language that might well apply to Tennyson (and that as a matter of fact suggests that both poets prefigure T. S. Eliot's insistence upon the impersonality of poetry):\n\nThe pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, yielding his initiative to words, which are mobilized by the shock of their difference; they light up with reciprocal reflections like a virtual stream of fireworks over jewels, restoring perceptible breath to the former lyric impulse, or the enthusiastic personal directing of the sentence.25\n\n#  **II. Not Naming, But Suggesting**\n\nIn the October 1874 issue of Mallarm\u00e9's _La Derni\u00e8re Mode_ ( _The Latest Fashion_ ),26 that two-year run of a journal entirely written by the Master himself, under many disguises \u2013 running the scale from \"Madame de Ponty,\" \"Mademoiselle Satin,\" and \"Olympia la n\u00e9gresse,\" to \"IX,\" and \"le chef de chez Brabant,\" et al., and a cast of invented readers, eager to know what to wear and prepare and see, and how best to travel-there appeared his translation of \"Mariana\" of 1830. Only the last stanza had appeared previously, in _La Revue Ind\u00e9pendante_ , in February of that year. Mallarm\u00e9 had just finished translating several Poe poems, and the editors of this first Pl\u00e9iade edition of Mallarm\u00e9's works comment that Mallarm\u00e9 reveals himself as a rather indifferent and weak translator \u2013 \"un traducteur assez incertain\" ( _Oeuvres_ , p. 1622). They continue their speculation by supposing that he had to fill a space in this number of _La Derni\u00e8re Mode_ hastily, so he just grabbed his translation of this Tennyson poem and thrust it in, wherever it would fit. It is unlikely, to be sure, that the readers, real or invented, would have known what to make of this very un-French text.\n\nNow Mallarm\u00e9, maker of many pleats, folded much into himself, being a great gatherer, a pleater together or multi-plier.27 Mallarm\u00e9 was a famous gatherer of friends, that is, of his circle, on his celebrated \"Mardis\" or Tuesday evenings, when he would lean on the mantel and hold forth \u2013 but also a gatherer of names. As Jeffrey Mehlman points out in his \"Mallarm\u00e9 and 'Seduction Theory,'\"28 Mallarm\u00e9 had already, if awkwardly, telescoped the names of Salom\u00e9 and H\u00e9rodiade in his _Noces d'H\u00e9rodiade_ , of which only one scene was published in his lifetime. This was, he thought, to have been his masterpiece, which he requested his wife and daughter to destroy upon his death (\"Believe me,\" he said with his last breath, \"it would have been very beautiful\"). Mehlman maintains that this Salom\u00e9/H\u00e9rodiade, a repressive (if dance-prone) heroine has a twin sister in Lady Godiva, celebrated in another of Tennyson's poems, also translated by Mallarm\u00e9, not once but twice.\n\nThat story goes like this: Georges Rochegrosse, who was perhaps planning to do a portrait of the Lady of Chester, asked Mallarm\u00e9, who had made a spontaneous oral translation of Tennyson's \"Godiva,\" to write it out for him, which Mallarm\u00e9 did, sending it almost by return,29 proving that he knew his Tennyson. In response to Mallarm\u00e9's \"Godiva,\" Philox\u00e8ne Boyer, a friend of the painter Rochegrosse, exclaimed, \"That is Tennyson himself in his thought and his very essence\" (\"dans sa pens\u00e9e et dans sa moelle\"). Mallarm\u00e9 was scarcely \"un traducteur incertain\" to all eyes. The reader may well recognize in the Tennyson poem just those accents which would most likely have appealed to Mallarm\u00e9, such as the following:\n\nThe deep air listened round her as she rode,  \nAnd all the low wind hardly breathed for fear.\n\n(ll. 54\u201355)\n\nOf course, Mallarm\u00e9 recognized in this sonorous language what he was longing for in his own tongue \u2013 these were indeed those tones that the English had forgotten to recognize, as they were always innate to it: \"To have given to the human voice such intonations as had never before been heard (without Tennyson, a certain music befitting to the English nation would be lacking, as I see it, and to have made the national instrument yield such new harmonies, instantly recognized as innate to it, constitutes the poet by his task and prestige\" ( _Prose_ , p. 73).\n\nMehlman's interest here is in the contrast between the \"massive return of the repressed\" in Salom\u00e9/H\u00e9rodiade as opposed to the \"progressive and activist ego [of] Godiva\" (p. 108), and in their double reflection on death. The interwoven deaths of Mallarm\u00e9's mother and sister Maria give rise to a long meditation on the interrelation of the heroines and on the relation of death to seduction.\n\nBut our own reflection upon Godiva leads us in a less dark direction. The first thing we see in anyone's speaking of Godiva is this capillary curtain, her loosened locks, as she showers down her \"rippled ringlets to her knee,\" so as to be clothed in her curls and her chastity. Mallarm\u00e9's fascination with tresses is well documented (see his poem on \"La Chevelure,\" beginning \"La Chevelure vol d'une flamme a l'extr\u00eame / Occident de d\u00e9sirs pour la tout d\u00e9ployer\"; _Oeuvres_ , p. 53) (\"Hair in flame of flight at the extreme / West of desires to unfurl it\") \u2013 with its own titular recall of Baudelaire's two poems, in prose and verse, on \"La Chevelure\" (\"the mane of hair\") and its sideways suggestion, at least for us, of this sunset at the day's \"extreme,\" with the theme of the day's waning in \"Mariana.\" Mallarm\u00e9, fascinated by the notion of and the sight of hair in general and in particular, remains terrified of H\u00e9rodiade's Medusa-like \"massive\" head of hair, just as he is of the forest. Everything enters into this madness of the mane, from Baudelaire's elucubrations on Jeanne Duval's abundant hair, curly as that of sheep (\"O toison, moutonnant\" in the verse version of \"La Chevelure\"30) and prose (\"Un H\u00e9misph\u00e8re dans une chevelure\" \"A Hemisphere in a mane of hair\" [l:300\u2013301]), through Mallarm\u00e9's own untitled sonnet beginning with an evocation of an ancient East,31 and his \"Plainte d'automne\" (\"Autumn Lament\"), where he dreams of his dead Maria, reads Latin poems, and thrusts his hand deep into the fur of his cat, that \"pure animal\" (\"[je] plongeais une main dans la fourrure du pur animal\" [ _Oeuvres_ , p. 270]), and suggests for the Baby Jesus in sugar or wax atop the Christmas tree for a supposed Alsatian reader of _La Derni\u00e8re Mode_ some curly ringlets ( _Prose_ , p. 94).32\n\nAll this sends us back to Lef\u00e9bure's famous letter to Mallarm\u00e9 in 1862, ironically signaling the difference between his addressee's poetry and poetic outlook and those of the English Laureate, as well as the difference in their coiffure, Tennyson's locks being curlier than Mallarm\u00e9's ( _Oeuvres,_ p. 1622; see note 2). One photograph of Mallarm\u00e9 in 1863 (Steinmetz, pp. 176\u20137) shows how straight his hair could appear: his ringlets are saved for writing. That letter inaugurates explicitly what was an implicit relation of Mallarm\u00e9 to Tennyson, whom he admired: an admiration which stretched over thirty years. A recent commentator about this stretch has marveled about Lef\u00e9bure's ironic statement concerning the two poets, their writing, and their hair: \"It is hard to imagine that Mallarm\u00e9 and Tennyson spent fifty years (1842\u201392) on the same planet.\" But, he continues, no matter how trivial Mallarm\u00e9's subject matter (face cream, biking costumes, the top hat), \"it's not difficult to remember why deeply unfrivolous poets such as Val\u00e9ry and Celan saw Mallarm\u00e9 as a master, if not the master.\"33\n\nClearly, biking attire and horse riding attire may differ. On Lady Godiva's unforgettable ride, the loosened locks she has wrapped about her to cover her nudity form a curtain, which the human eye penetrates at its peril. Just so the peeping Tom finds his eyes shriveled. Mallarm\u00e9's meditation on vision, in the poet Yves Bonnefoy's words, allies itself with his affection for the night and disaffection for the day,34 even as daytime vision is associated with the despoiling of the essential mystery of poetic obscurity, at its worst a \"viol oculaire\" (ocular rape), as Mallarm\u00e9 said to Robert de Montesquiou about the \"secret\" of his \"H\u00e9rodiade\" \u2013 \"the future violation of the mystery of her being by John's look.\"35 Mallarm\u00e9 writes to Francois Copp\u00e9e (April 20, 1868), \"As for me, it's been two years now since I committed the sin of seeing the Dream in its ideal nakedness, whereas I should have been amassing between it and me a mystery of music and oblivion.\"36 There is spying and there is seeing, and poetic seeing through: the music and its mystery form a protective curtain against unworthy \u2013 read unpoetic \u2013 invasion.\n\nBonnefoy has meditated at length on what photography does to painting, to poetry, and to us all, by the undoing of mysteriousness and the invasion of someone else. Since it reveals in such detail, it manifests its own distance, as if we were invaded by \"an _other_ . . . a no-one-knows-what other, on whom nothing you try to say takes any hold. . . . Non-meaning has penetrated human meaning. . . . someone in us wonders . . . who?\"37\n\nSo Godiva enters into Mallarm\u00e9's poetic scheme of thought. But then why Mariana? First of all, given Mallarm\u00e9's fascination with groupings of all sorts, we cannot fail to appreciate such an extraordinary concatenation of names: his dead sister Marie, his wife Maria, his mistress M\u00e9ry Laurent (whose name was mispronounced \"Mary\" by her protector, the American dentist, Dr. Evans [Steinmetz, p. 181]), Marianne of the French republic, rendering the figure of Mariana and the Latest _Fashion_ , in which she so figures, an even tighter fit. The golden-haired M\u00e9ry was of bounteous proportions, a good thing, since, as Mallarm\u00e9 pointed out in a letter to Eug\u00e8ne Lef\u00e9bure, he only liked \"one sort of fat woman; certain blond courtesans, in sunlight, especially wearing a black dress \u2013 women who seem to shine with all the life they have taken from men\" ( _Selected Letters_ , p. 80; see the photograph of M\u00e9ry Laurent [Steinmetz, facing p. 177]). Around the name of Mariana were thus gathered a bevy of other women close to the Master, whose roles he could assume one after the other, while retaining his masterly mystery. That was precisely what he was doing in his _Derni\u00e8re Mode_.\n\nUnderstandably, Tennyson's \"Mariana\" appealed to Mallarm\u00e9's poetic temperament. The mysteriousness permeating symbolism profited from this romantic inheritance, lending it nuance and suggestion as opposed to statement. With its lengthy suspense, leading to the heroine's exhaustion at the day's end and her own expressed wish to die out, it had a natural, if not fatal, attraction for the poet so entranced with even the vocabulary of the ephemeral; \"I've loved everything that has been gathered up in this word: fall\" (\"J'ai aim\u00e9 tout ce qui se r\u00e9sumait dans ce mot: chute\" [\"Plainte d'automne, _Oeuvres_ , p. 270]). It is once again the noun or name of the notion that is most suggestive.\n\nMallarm\u00e9's initial rendering in poetic prose of Tennyson's \"Mariana\" was printed in October 1874's _La Derni\u00e8re Mode_ as \"Figure d'album no. 1\" \u2013 but there was to be no \"Figure d'album no. 2.\" Mallarm\u00e9 had said that verse was for summer, and prose for the fall and its splendors: \"Avec l'\u00e9clat automnal cesse le vers\"; \"With the splendor of autumn, verse ceases\" (\"Mimique,\" _Oeuvres_ , p. 340). Mariana was translated in the autumn of 1874. Thus, this translation and indeed this \"figure\" were clearly a one-time venture, although the translation was retouched and recast by Mallarm\u00e9 in 1890 for _Le Mercure de France_ (June, 1890). It is the latter version which is reprinted in the Mondor and Aubry edition ( _Oeuvres_ , p. 703), with the comment by Remy de Gourmont that Mallarm\u00e9 had touched it up for the new edition: \"Le ma\u00eetre, en nous la laissant reproduire, a voulu, toujours si soigneux artiste, revoir et retoucher son travail d'alors\" (\"The master, in permitting us to reproduce it, wanted, the always careful artist that he was, to review it and touch up his former work\") ( _Oeuvres_ , p. 1622). It bears within itself several of the same organizing features as Tennyson's famous poem, while having to find, like all prose poems, its cohering principle from within to compensate for its lack of verse, rhyme, and visual shape.38\n\nWhat seems most striking in both versions of the English translation, as in the French original from the beginning to the end, is the stress on the natural waning of the day \u2013 a crucial lean toward death. The initial reference to a tomb (as the French verb \"tomber\") is instantly obvious: \"The rusted nails fell\" translated as: \"Les clous rouill\u00e9s tombaient.\" This overdetermination is carried throughout the poem: \"Ses larmes tomb\u00e8rent . . . ses larmes tombaient . . . L'ombre tomba\" \"le rayon . . . gisait . . .\" \"le jour pencha\" rendering the English \"Her tears fell . . . the shadow . . . fell . . .\" \"sunbeam lay athwart . . .\" \"day was sloping.\" One of the more remarkable changes occurs in a recasting of the fifth stanza of the first version to emphasize the tomb, as clearly as does the omission/suppression of the daylight in the stanza left out. In the re-translation appears an exclamation point added by Mallarm\u00e9, absent in both his initial translation and in Tennyson's poem, and which names the dark drama of the situation quite explicitly: \" Et toujours, quand baissa la lune et que les vents aigus se lev\u00e8rent, haut et loin, dans le rideau blanc, elle vit d'ici \u00e0 l\u00e0 l'ombre secou\u00e9e se balancer. Mais quand la lune fut tr\u00e8s bas et les sauvages vents, li\u00e9s dans leur prison, l'ombre du peuplier tomba sur le lit, par-dessus son front!\" There could scarcely be a clearer reference to the tombal nature of the poem itself than the repeated accent on lowering (\"baissa,\" \"tr\u00e8s bas\") and the echo of \"ombre . . . tomb\" and the final exclamation.\n\nBack to the usual question about Mallarm\u00e9's translation of Tennyson: why that poem? Unlike Mallarm\u00e9's first editors, who suggested that Mallarm\u00e9 had thrust in his Tennyson translation as filler material for the October 1874 issue of _La Derni\u00e8re Mode_ , we think that Mariana finds her appropriate place in this ladies' magazine, much of which is about costume and feminine finery: she fits the pattern perfectly. She is clothed, as Godiva is not, but they both have a mane of hair curlier than that of Mallarm\u00e9, as curly as Tennyson's own, the poet in drag.\n\nThere is, to say the least, a significant gap between the first and second translations, in the latter of which Mallarm\u00e9 simply brings about the blatant and unapologetic omission of the third of Tennyson's stanzas, the only one invoking the presence of daylight. In Tennyson's third stanza, beginning \"Upon the middle of the night,\" Mariana says, for the only time, \"The day is weary . . .\" to announce the refrain: \"He cometh not . . . I would that I were dead.\" What might Mallarm\u00e9's omission point to? What might he be wanting not to name here?\n\nTennyson's third stanza, the one Mallarm\u00e9 cuts out in his retranslation, is significantly the only one in which \"the day\" figures in the original, where the refrain reads from \"my life\" in the first stanza to \"myself\" (\"I am\") in the last, and from night to day: \"My life. . . . The night . . . . The day . . . . My life . . . . The night . . . . My life . . . . I am.\" Mallarm\u00e9 cared immensely about the sound of language: the harmony of being depended on the unity and unison that poetry could bring about. Concerned so about words, he was crucially bothered when they were inappropriate in their sounding \u2013 the major example being his concern with how \"le jour\" projects a sonority longer, richer, and rounder than that of the night, \"la nuit,\" in all its brightness of the \"i\" vowel: \"\u00e0 c\u00f4t\u00e9 d' _ombre_ , opaque, _t\u00e9n\u00e8bres_ se fonce peu: quelle d\u00e9ception devant la perversit\u00e9 conf\u00e9rant \u00e0 _jour_ comme \u00e0 nuit, contradictoirement, des timbres obscur ici, l\u00e0 clair.\" (\"Beside darkness, opaque, _shadows_ is not very deep; what a disappointment we feel, confronted with the perversity that results in the paradox of the dark-sounding _jour_ meaning day and the bright-sounding _nuit_ meaning night\" [\"Crise de vers,\" _Oeuvres_ , p. 364].) Or as Bonnefoy phrases it, \"For, united with others like it . . . the sound _nuit_ will allow many notions to light up each other with reflections come from some other . . . this coming together brought about under the clear sign . . . in the lucidity of pure sound.\"39 Far from disturbing, this continuing night harmonizes sound and sense in the refrain of Mallarm\u00e9's \"Mariana\": \"Ma vie . . . . La nuit . . . . Ma vie . . . . La nuit . . . . Ma vie . . . . Je suis.\"\n\nThe words all rhyme, as does Tennyson's \"my life is dreary . . . I am aweary, aweary,\" and indeed the poem in Mallarm\u00e9 works wonderfully, with the same progression from \"he isn't coming\" (which Mallarm\u00e9, however, varies from Tennyson's invariable \"he cometh not\" to \"il ne vient point,\" \"il ne vient jamais,\" \"il ne vient pas,\" to \"he will not come\" (\"il ne viendra pas\"). Perhaps the most noticeable difference between the two poems is the ellipsis of death in the last stanza: \"oh! Dieu!\" ends Mariana's exclamation. The death wish is totally absorbed and has no need to be reiterated after its preceding strikes and the total obliteration of the so-hated day, as Mallarm\u00e9's re-vision simply suppresses the third stanza. When it is allowed to enter the poem, it is judiciously, if not faithfully placed. First, it is innocuous and clich\u00e9d in its initial position in his fifth stanza, the \"p\u00e9nulti\u00e8me\" (to use one of Mallarm\u00e9's favorite expressions): \"all day\"/ \"tout le jour.\" This is no real daylight, this is just part of a temporal sequence. Then comes the whammy: for in the last stanza, in that loathed hour when the sun breaks in, like a spying eye, that hour is already seen, by Mallarm\u00e9, as dying, before the day slopes or leans to the west. For Tennyson, the sunbeam just \"lay\" \u2013 was simply lying there, with no indication of slope until afterwards:\n\nbut most she loathed the hour  \nWhen the thick-moted sunbeam lay  \nAthwart the chambers, and the day  \nWas sloping toward his western bower.\n\n(ll. 77\u201381)\n\nIt is clear how masculine is the day, unlike the somewhat mysterious Mariana. Now in his version of his \"Mariana,\" Mallarm\u00e9 uses a peculiar verb, applying it to the male sunbeam (\"le rayon de soleil\"), one which in French has a deadly note to it, for it can only mean to lie down dying or dead: \"le rayon de soleil _gisait_ au travers des chambres, quand le jour pencha vers le bosquet occidental.\" So death has entered, quite naturally (\"Nature exists, and cannot be added to\"; _Prose_ , p. 37) right next to the day, leaning to the west in its Mariana-like weariness. It thus needs no repetition in the person of Mariana, who weeps her fatigue, exclaims \"oh! Dieu\" and there ends the translation \u2013 this self-translation, as Mehlman would have it (p. 103). The defective (but highly effective) verb \" _gisait_ \" here stands out as a pointer to the death of day and hope. It is the very entrance of the sunbeam that spells death to the dream. No need to spell it out again at the end, where the drama has its own power, cutting short the verbal expression, as the day is first cut out, and then cut short, made into a prose statue, a _gisant: ci-g\u00eet_ : here lies . . . . Here in the Mallarm\u00e9 rendering lies the day, felled . . . after a long waiting. No, he didn't come. It is a fitting tomb. We know that the prose poem often emphasizes the edges: beginnings and ends, in order to set itself off as a separate unit: so, in Mallarm\u00e9's translation, the extremity of death and the exclamation work to round off the poem, as in the Tennyson original, but with still more drastic atmosphere.\n\nYet we could make a case for there being, in the concision of Mallarm\u00e9's re-translation, with its deliberate literary crime against Tennyson's original, \" _A salvation, precisely on both sides\" (Prose_ , p. 46). For Mallarm\u00e9's elegy to Tennyson, a prose equivalent to his celebrated verse _Tombeaux_ for Poe, Baudelaire, and Verlaine, concludes with a double homage to the two Anglophone poets he revered: Poe and Tennyson. Referring to a \"column of the temple called Poetry,\" he writes of Tennyson: \"Let his shade be received there in the very terms of affectionate hyperbole that in his youth, illustrious but still future, Poe addressed him: 'the most noble poetic soul who ever existed'\" (\"l'\u00e2me po\u00e9tique la plus noble, qui jamais v\u00e9cut\") _(Prose_ , p. 73).\n\nIn her \"Mallarm\u00e9 and the Bounds of Translation,\" Rosemary Lloyd points out the difference between the literal \"prosaic and lowly function of spelling out the name\" described in Mallarm\u00e9's \"Ballets,\" in that the name is \"stated and not evoked,\" and the mystery of every naming evocation that remains crucial to the act of poetry.40 It remains an act never to be taken lightly, so invoking the British poet's name, Mallarm\u00e9 enunciates it slowly, solemnly: \" _Lord Tennyson_.\" And then in his homage to the poet Th\u00e9ophile Gautier, Mallarm\u00e9 salutes the \"final tremor\" in that poet's voice, as it awakens \"for the Rose and the Lily the mystery of a name\" (\"\u00e9veille / Pour la Rose et le Lys le myst\u00e8re d'un nom\"; _Oeuvres_ , p. 55).41 That the \"name\" and the \"noun\" share in the meaning of the French \"nom\" doubles the significance of this mysterious quality of non-literality, of creation as appellation.\n\nA strange and very early poem of Mallarm\u00e9, aptly titled \"Sa fosse est ferm\u00e9e\" (\"Her grave is closed\") and cited by Jacques Derrida in his classic article about the symbolist poet, \"La double s\u00e9ance\" (\"The double session\"), invokes the power of the name as noun:\n\nDe tout que reste-t-il? Que nous peut-on montrer?  \nUn nom!  \n(From all this, what remains? What can be shown?  \nA name!)\n\n_(Oeuvres_ , p. 8)42\n\nMallarm\u00e9's view of poetry, prose and painting was the very opposite of spying. It was and remains a vision sufficiently powerful to share, sufficiently discreet to reveal both poet and poem without piercing the curtain of mystery \u2013 whether created by curls, ringlets, or straight lines \u2013 as all the noble stuff of poetry itself envelops every picture of a genuinely poetic rider.43\n\n#  **Notes**\n\n1 Donald W. Foster, \"Commentary: In the Name of the Author,\" _NLH_ 33 (2002): 395.\n\n2 St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9, \"Crisis in Poetry,\" (1886) trans. Mary Ann Caws, in ___St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9_ _:_ _Selected Poetry and Prose_ __, ed. and co-trans. Mary Ann Caws (New York: New Directions, 1982), p. 75.\n\n3 Marjorie Bowden, _Tennyson in France_ (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1930).\n\n4 Michael Temple in _The Name of the Poet: Onomastics and Anonymity in the Works of St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9_ (Exeter: Univ. of Exeter Press, 1995) does consider the essay in a way relevant to our concern, pointing out that Mallarm\u00e9 espoused a theory of onomastics in \"Tennyson, vu d'ici\" that he had initially developed in a commemorative talk on the occasion of the death of Villiers de L'Isle-Adam (pp. 9\u201311).\n\n5 It was most likely Whistler who suggested to William Ernest Henley, the editor of the _National Observer_ , that Mallarm\u00e9 be invited to write a piece on Tennyson's death in 1892. That was the year that Whistler left London to live at 110 rue du Bac in Paris, a dwelling Mallarm\u00e9 found for him.\n\n6 St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9, _Oeuvres Compl\u00e8tes_ , ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). Hereafter cited as _Oeuvres_ in text.\n\n7 _Mallarm\u00e9 in Prose_ , ed. and co-trans. Mary Ann Caws (New York: New Directions, 2001), pp. 70\u20133. Hereafter cited as _Prose_. All citations of \"Tennyson, Seen from Here\" are from this text, which has also been reproduced in _TRB_ 7 (2001): 255\u20138.\n\n8 H. M. McLuhan, \"Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry,\" in _Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson_ , ed. John Killham (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960), pp. 67\u201385.\n\n9 Charles Baudelaire, _Oeuvres Compl\u00e8tes_ (Paris: L\u00e9vy, 1870), 6:22, as quoted in Bowden, p. 101. But see also the 1862 letter of his friend Eug\u00e8ne Lef\u00e9bure suggesting to Mallarm\u00e9, in a comic vein, the \"slight opposition\" in the work, as well as in the curliness of the hair, between the two poets : \"J'ai remarqu\u00e9 une ressemblance curieuse entre votre portrait et celui de Tennyson, le doux Tennyson, dont la po\u00e9sie, je crois, est un peu le contraire de la v\u00f4tre. Seulement il est beaucoup plus fris\u00e9 que vous\" ( _Oeuvres_ , p. 1622).\n\n10 Hallam Tennyson, _Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir_ (1897; New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 2:231.\n\n11 Yves Bonnefoy, \"Igitur and the Photographer,\" trans. Mary Ann Caws, _PMLA_ 114 (1999): 335.\n\n12 Edgar Allan Poe, _The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe_ , ed. James A. Harrison, 17 vols. (1902; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1965), 14:289; \"the greatest,\" from an unsigned review in the _Broadway Journal_ 2 (November 29, 1845), confidently attributed by Poe's biographers to him as \"the sole editor and proprietor\" of the _Journal; Complete Works_ , 12:180.\n\n13 _Complete Works_ , 16:28. See Gerhard Joseph, \"Dream Houses of 'Etherisity': Poe and Tennyson,\" in _Tennyson and the Text: The Weaver's Shuttle_ (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 26\u201346.\n\n14 Angela Leighton, \"Touching Forms: Tennyson and Aestheticism,\" _TRB_ 7 (2001): 230.\n\n15 All citations of Tennyson's poetry are from _The Poems of Tennyson_ , ed. Christopher Ricks, 3 vols. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987).\n\n16 A. Dwight Culler, _The Poetry of Tennyson_ (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), p. 5.\n\n17 Yves Bonnefoy, \"La Poetique de Mallarm\u00e9,\" introduction to St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9, _Igitur, Divigations, Un coup de d\u00e8s_ (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 40. The English translation is by Mary Ann Caws.\n\n18 In \"Commodifying Tennyson: The Historical Transformation of 'Brand Loyalty,'\" _The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics_ , ed. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (New York: Routledge, 1999), Gerhard Joseph juxtaposes Tennyson's medievalizing use of \"brand\" (for \"sword\") in the _Idylls of the King_ and the fact that an edition of his works was one of the first books (and the only work of poetry) that Frederick Macmillan brought out in 1890 to institute the publishing firm's \"net book\" policy. Through that policy Macmillan would provide certain books to booksellers and lending libraries on trade terms only if they would agree to sell them at a fixed net price rather than at a highly variable discount, as had hitherto been trade practice. In the assertion of such control, Joseph argues, Macmillan indulged in an early instance of what economic historians have described as the \"branding\" of a commodity, in this case the branding of an author.\n\n19 From a Marxist perspective, of course, Mallarm\u00e9's aestheticized idealism will seem a mystification, an expression of a superstructural \"ideology of the aesthetic\" that occluded the material base in which the market rules all. For the relevant argument that a turn from production to consumption models of human behavior in the 1870's accounts for comparable late nineteenth-century transformations in economic theory and, consequently, aesthetic taste, see Regenia Gagnier, _The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society_ (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 1\u201318 \u2013 and, as exemplification, Joseph's argument described in n. 18.\n\n20 Within the context of the entire poem, Erik Gray, in \"Tennyson and Ulysses Becoming a Name,\" _TRB_ 7(2000): 165\u2013173, gives line 11 a more complex meaning: Ulysses, he argues, claims to have so completely earned the heroic epithets that constituted his name, to have so embodied those \"names,\" that he has become them, whatever the blunted imagination of Ithaca's inhabitants. The rest of the poem thus becomes his reassertion of those epithets, those names he has earned at Troy and thereafter, so that by the end he can affirm the confidently tautological \"that which we are we are\" (l. 67), with no distinction between name and being.  \nFor a reading that interprets \"becoming a name\" in light of Althusserian interpellation and Marxist \"ideology\" more generally, see Matthew Rowlinson, \"The Ideological Moment of Tennyson's 'Ulysses',\" VP 30 (1992): 273. The coherence and recognizability of Tennyson's Ulysses depends upon his interpellation, his \"hailing\" by name, in the various discourses of present and past that always already constitute him \u2013 including, for our purposes, the French one of this essay.\n\n21 See Malcolm Bowie, _Mallarm\u00e9 and the Art of Being Difficult_ (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978); and George Steiner, \"On Difficulty,\" in _On Difficulty and Other Essays_ (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), on the four kinds of verbal \"difficulty.\" Mallarm\u00e9, H\u00f6lderlin, and Heidegger, Steiner says, are the best examples of the fourth kind, the ontological, that confronts us with \"blank questions about the nature of human speech.\" \"In ontological difficulty, the poetics of Mallarm\u00e9 and of Heidegger . . . express their sense of the inauthentic situation of man in an environment of eroded speech\" (p. 44).\n\n22 Hallam Tennyson, _Materials for a Life of A. T. Collected for My Children, 2_ vols, (n.p., n.d.), 2:29. We follow A. Dwight Culler in assuming that the name Tennyson threw into the wind would have been \"Tennyson\" \u2013 it could, after all, have been \"Alfred\" (the position of Harold Nicolson, _Tennyson, Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry_ [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923], p. 46), or even \"Alfred Tennyson\"? In _The Poetry of Tennyson_ Culler entitles his chapter on the matter \"Tennyson, Tennyson, Tennyson.\"\n\n23 \"Thus, the subject, too, if he can appear to be the slave of language is all the more so of a discourse in the universal movement in which his place is already inscribed at birth, if only by virtue of his proper name\" (Jacques Lacan, \"The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,\" in _\u00c9crits: A Selection_ [New York: Norton, 1977), p. 148). J. Hillis Miller makes a comparable point in his introduction to Dickens' _Bleak House_ (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979): \"To name someone is to alienate him from himself by making him part of a family,\" p. 22.\n\n24 \"There was in fact a first violence to be named. To name, to give names that it will on occasion be forbidden to pronounce, such is the originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute. To think the unique _within_ the system, to inscribe it there, such is the gesture of the arche-writing: arche-violence, loss of the proper, of absolute proximity, of self-presence, in truth the loss of what has never taken place, of a self-presence which has never been given but only dreamed of and always already split, repeated, incapable of appearing to itself except in its own disappearance.\" (\"Violence of the Letter,\" in _Of Grammatology_ [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974], p. 112). Such a \"disappearance\" of the \"proper\" provides our own most relevant context for Tennyson's mystification of \"Tennyson.\"\n\n25 \"Crisis in Poetry,\" in _St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9: Selected Poetry and Prose_ , trans. Mary Ann Caws, p. 75.\n\n26 Extracted in Caws, _Mallarm\u00e9 in Prose_ , pp. 79\u201394.\n\n27 Pierre Boulez knew this, and played on the word in his superb _Pli selon pli_. Gilles Deleuze's brilliant study, _Le Pli_ : _Leibniz et le baroque_ (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1988), centers on the word's meaning as both fold and pleat. Thus the famous \"explication\" or unfolding of a text, the pleats in a skirting of the issue, the gathers in a fabric or a text, and so on, make their own play on the pleat, otherwise seen) as _The Fold_ (see Tom Conley's translation, _The Fold_ [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993], of Deleuze's _Le Pli)_.\n\n28 Jeffrey Mehlman, \"Mallarm\u00e9 and Seduction Theory,\" _Paragraph_ 14 (1991): 95\u2013109,\n\n29 Jean-Luc Steinmetz, _St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9: L'Absolu au jour le jour_ (Paris: Fayard, 1998), p. 356.\n\n30 Charles Baudelaire, _Oeuvres compl\u00e8tes_ , ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Pl\u00e9iade, 1975), pp. 26\u201327.\n\n31 St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9, _Oeuvres compl\u00e8tes_ , ed. Carl Paul Barbier and Charles Gordon Millan (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), p. 224.\n\n32 As for Tennyson's concern with hair beyond the covering ringlets of \"Godiva,\" see Elizabeth G. Gitter, \"The Power of Women's Hair in the Victorian Imagination,\" _PMLA_ 99 (1984): 936\u201354. Gitter treats the serpentine hair of the seductress Vivien in \"Merlin and Vivien\" and the bartered golden ringlets of the woman in \"The Ringlet\" (where they are \"bought and sold, sold, sold\") as part of a pervasive hair fetishism and taboo within the male Victorian imaginary. As further Tennysonian examples, see the \"streaming curls of deepest brown\" that the (serendipitously, for our own purposes of national comparison) French Mariana draws apart to expose her \"melancholy eyes divine\" in \"Mariana in the South,\" ll. 16\u201319; Aphrodite's \"deep hair / Ambrosial, golden round her lucid throat / And shoulder\" that tempts Paris in \"Oenone,\" ll. 173\u20135; and Tennyson's complaint that Holman Hunt's illustration of \"The Lady of Shalott\" for the illustrated Moxon edition of the poems in 1857 took licence with the control of her hair: \"My dear Hunt . . . . I never said that the young woman's hair was flying all over the shop.\" \"No,\" replied Hunt, \"but you never said it wasn't.\" Quoted in Jennifer Gribble, _The Lady of Shalott in the Victorian Novel_ (London-. Macmillan, 1983), p. 2, from G. S. Layard, _Tennyson and his Pre-Raphaelite Illustrators_ (London, 1894), p. 41.\n\n33 Chase Madar, Review of _Mallarm\u00e9 in Prose_ , ed. Mary Ann Caws, _TLS_ (December 7, 2001): 24.\n\n34 Yves Bonnefoy, \"La Po\u00e9tique de Mallarm\u00e9,\" p. 15.\n\n35 Mehlman, p. 111; see also Sylviane Huot, _Le 'mythe d'H\u00e9rodiade' chez Mallarm\u00e9: Gen\u00e8se et \u00e9volution_ (Paris: Nizet, 1977), p. 5.\n\n36 _Selected Letters of St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9_ , ed. Rosemary Lloyd (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 84. Hereafter cited as _Selected Letters_.\n\n37 Yves Bonnefoy, \"Igitur and the Photographer,\" trans. Mary Ann Caws, _A Painter's Poet: St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9 and the Impressionist Circle_ , ed. Jane Roos (New York: Hunter College Art Gallery, 1999), p. 21.\n\n38 On the prose poem, see Michael Riffaterre, \"On the Prose Poem's Formal Features,\" pp 117\u201333; and Mary Ann Caws, \"The Self-Defining Poem: On its Edge,\" pp. 180\u201397, in Mary Ann Caws and Hermine Riffaterre, _The Prose Poem in France: Theory and Practice_ (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983). Mallarm\u00e9's translation of Tennyson's\"Mariana,\" as published in _La Derni\u00e8re Mode_ of October 18, 1874 reads as follows:\n\nLes endroits \u00e0 fleurs avaient une cro\u00fbte \u00e9paisse de mousse tr\u00e8s-noire, tous de m\u00eame. Les clous rouill\u00e9s tombaient des attaches qui tinrent la p\u00eache aux murs du jardin. Les appentis bris\u00e9s, \u00e9tranges et tristes; le bruyant loquet \u00e9tait sans se lever: sarcl\u00e9e .et us\u00e9e, l'ancienne paille sur la grange solitaire du foss\u00e9. Elle dit uniquement: \"Ma vie est morne, il ne vient point,\" dit-elle; elle dit: \"Je suis lasse, lasse, je voudrais \u00eatremorte!\"\n\nSes larmes tomb\u00e8rent avec la ros\u00e9e du soir: ses larmes tombaient avant que les ros\u00e9es n'eussent s\u00e9ch\u00e9: elle ne pouvait point regarder le ciel suave, au matin ni le moment du soir. Apr\u00e8s le vol\u00e8tement des chauves-souris, quand l'ombre la plus \u00e9paisse causa une somme dans le ciel, elle tira le rideau de sa crois\u00e9e et regarda \u00e0 travers les obscurit\u00e9s plates. Elle dit uniquement: \"La nuit est morne, il ne vient pas,\" dit elle; elle dit: \"Je suis lasse, lasse, je voudrais \u00eatre morte!\"\n\nA un jet de pierre environ du mur dormait une vanne \u00e0 eau noircie; et au-dessus, nombreuses, rondes et petites, rampaient les mousses des marais par grappes. Un peuplier, fort pr\u00e8s, remuait toujours, tout vert argent\u00e9 \u00e0 noueuse \u00e9corce. A des lieues, nul autre arbre ne marquait 1'espace nivel\u00e9, les environs gris. Elle dit uniquement: \"Ma vie est morne, il ne vient jamais,\" dit-elle; elle dit: \"Je suis lasse, lasse, je voudrais \u00eatre morte!\"\n\nEt toujours, quand baissa la lune et que les vents aigus se lev\u00e8rent, haut et loin, dans le rideau blanc, elle vit d'ici \u00e0 l\u00e0 l'ombre secou\u00e9e se balancer. Mais quand la lune fut tr\u00e8s bas et les sauvages vents, li\u00e9s dans leur prison, l'ombre du peuplier tomba sur le lit, par-dessus son front! Elle dit uniquement: \"La nuit est morne, II ne vient pas,\" dit-elle; elle dit: \"Je suis lasse, lasse, je voudrais \u00eatre morte!\"\n\nTout le jour dans la maison de r\u00eave, les portes claqu\u00e8rent sur leurs gonds; la mouche bleu chanta sur la vitre: la souris, derri\u00e8re la boiserie allant en poussi\u00e8re, criait ou, de la crevasse regardait. De vielles faces luisaient par les portes, de vieux pas foulaient les \u00e9tages sup\u00e9rieurs: de vielles voix l'appelaient, elle, de dehors. Elle dit uniquement: \"Ma vie est morne, il ne vient pas,\" dit-elle; elle dit: \"Je suis lasse, lasse, je voudrais \u00eatre morte!\"\n\nLe moineau p\u00e9piait sur le toit, le lent tic-tac de l'horloge et le bruit qu'au vent faisait le peuplier confondaient tous ses sens; mais, le plus! elle maudit l'heure o\u00f9 le rayon de soleil gisait au travers des chambres, quand le jour pencha vers le bosquet occidental. Alors elle dit: \"Je suis tr\u00e8s morne, il ne viendra pas,\" dit-elle; elle pleura: \"Je suis lasse, lasse, oh! Dieu!\"\n\n39 Yves Bonnefoy, \"La Po\u00e9tique de Mallarm\u00e9,\" p. 15.\n\n40 Rosemary Lloyd, \"Mallarm\u00e9 and the Bounds of Translation,\" _Nottingham French Studies_ 40 (2001): 23.\n\n41 And, in his response to Jules Huret's \"Inquiry about Literary Evolution,\" Mallarm\u00e9 stresses how \u2013 unlike the Parnassians, who by showing the object entirely, \"lack mystery\" and deprive the reader of the joy of figuring out the relation between things, his essential requirement for poetry \u2013 the poet should proceed: \" _Nommer_ un objet, c'est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du po\u00e8me qui est faite de deviner peu \u00e0 peu: le _sugg\u00e9rer_ , voil\u00e0 le r\u00eave.\" (\"To name an object is to suppress three-fourths of the pleasure of the poem, which is made up of guessing little by little: to suggest it, that's the ideal\"; _Oeuvres_ , p. 869). This clarifies the more than famous passage in \"Crise de vers\": \"I say: a flower! And, beyond the forgetting to which my voice relegates no shape, insofar as something other than the known calyxes, there rises musically, the idea itself and subtle, absent from every bouquet.\" (\"Je dis: une fleur! Et hors de l'oubli o\u00f9 ma voix rel\u00e8gue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chose d'autre que les calices sus, musicalement se l\u00e8ve, id\u00e9e m\u00eame et suave, l'absente de tous bouquets\"; _Oeuvres_ , p. 368).\n\n42 Jacques Derrida, _Dissemination_ , trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 276; after \"La double s\u00e9ance,\" in _La Diss\u00e9mination_ (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972), pp. 199\u2013317.\n\n43 We would like to thank Herbert Tucker, a reader for _Victorian Poetry_ , for valuable suggestions we followed in both the Tennyson and Mallarm\u00e9 parts of this essay.\n\nCaws, Mary Ann and Gerhard Joseph. 2005. \"Naming and Not Naming: Tennyson and Mallarm\u00e9.\" In _Victorian Poetry_ , 43, i (Spring), pp. 1\u201318. Reproduced with permission of Mary Ann Caws and Gerhard Joseph.\n\n# Index\n\nAbrams, M. H.\n\nabysmality\n\nsee alsomise en ab\u00eeme\n\nAdorno, Theodor W.\n\nAesthetics (Hegel)\n\nAlice in Wonderland (Carroll)\n\nalienated majesty (Emerson)\n\nalienation\n\nAll Saints Confraternity\n\nAll Saints' Home\n\nAll Saints' Sisterhood\n\nallegory\n\nBenjamin on\n\nColeridge\n\nTennyson\n\nAllott, Miriam\n\nAmbarvalia (Clough)\n\nAmbiguities (Vicinus)\n\nAmours de Voyage (Clough)\n\n'Anactoria' (Swinburne)\n\ndrafts\n\nSade influences\n\nsense to sound\n\ntranscription\n\nandrogyny\n\nAnglican Sisterhoods\n\nantinomianism\n\nanti-semitism\n\naporia\n\nappetite\n\nAqueous Age\n\nAries, Philippe\n\nAristophanes\n\nAristotle\n\nArmstrong, Isobel\n\nArmstrong, Nancy\n\nArnold, Matthew\n\nandrogyny\n\nAqueous Age\n\nboundary-blurring\n\nand Clough\n\ncultural power\n\necho\n\nfunerary remembrance\n\ngipsies\n\nideology\n\nmirroring\n\nmisogyny\n\nmultitudinousness\n\nobjectified action\n\nphallic power\n\non readers\n\nreflexiveness\n\nStoic-Epicurean stance\n\nsubjectivity\n\non Villette\n\nwarrior figure\n\non women\n\non Wordsworth\n\nworks\n\n'The Buried Life'\n\n'Byron'\n\n'Cromwell'\n\nCulture and Anarchy\n\n'Dover Beach'\n\n'Empedocles on Etna'\n\n'A Farewell'\n\n'The First Sight of Italy'\n\n'The Forsaken Merman'\n\nA French Eton\n\n'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time'\n\nLetters to Clough\n\n'Lines written on first leaving home'\n\n'Lines written on the Seashore at Eaglehurst'\n\n'Marguerite' sequence\n\n'Mary Queen of Scots'\n\n'A Modern Sappho'\n\n'Mycerinus'\n\n'On the Modern Element in Literature'\n\n'Parting'\n\nPoems, Preface\n\nProse Works\n\n'Reply to a declaration'\n\n'Resignation'\n\n'The River'\n\n'The Scholar-Gipsy'\n\n'Self-Dependence'\n\n'Sohrab and Rustum'\n\n'Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse'\n\n'Switzerland' poems\n\n'The Terrace at Berne'\n\n'Thyrsis'\n\n'To a Gipsy Child by the Sea-Shore'\n\n'Too Late'\n\nArnold, Thomas\n\nArt for Art's sake\n\nAt the Works (Bell)\n\nAtalanta in Calydon (Swinburne)\n\nAtwood, Margaret\n\nAugustine, St\n\nAurora Leigh (Browning, E. B.)\n\nAutobiography, Poems and Songs (Johnston)\n\nBagehot, Walter\n\nBakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich\n\nThe Ballad of Reading Gaol (Wilde)\n\nBarbauld, Anna\n\nBarrett Browning: see Browning, Elizabeth Barrett\n\nThe Barretts of Wimpole Street (Franklin)\n\nBarth, John\n\nBarthes, Roland\n\nBateson, F. W.\n\nBatten, Guinn\n\nBaudelaire, Charles\n\nBeardsley, Aubrey\n\nBeauvoir, Simone de\n\nBeckett, Samuel\n\nBehlmer, George K.\n\nBell, Florence, Lady\n\nBell, Mackenzie\n\nBelleroph _\u00f4_ n (Bradley & Cooper)\n\nBen Brierley's Journal\n\nBenjamin, Walter\n\nBentham, Jeremy\n\nBentley, D. M. R.\n\nB\u00e9ranger, Pierre-Jean de\n\nBernheimer, Charles\n\nBerni, Francesco\n\nThe Bible in Spain (Borrow)\n\nBiswas, Robindra Kumar\n\nBlake, William\n\nBloom, Harold\n\nbody\n\nsee also female body\n\nBonnefoy, Yves\n\nBoos, Florence S.\n\nBorges, Jorge Luis\n\nBorrow, George\n\nBoston University Editorial Institute\n\nboundary-blurring\n\nBowden, Marjorie\n\nBoyer, Philox\u00e8ne\n\nBoynton, Robert W.\n\nBradley, A. C.\n\nBradley, Katherine Harris\n\n'Apollo's Written Grief'\n\nBelleroph _\u00f4_ n\n\n'Caput Tuum ut Carmelus'\n\n'My Love is like a lovely Shepherdess'\n\nThe New Minnesinger and Other Poems\n\nsee also Field, Michael\n\nBramhall, John\n\nBread, Knowledge and Freedom (Vincent)\n\nBreen, Jennifer\n\nBridges, Robert\n\nBrierley, Ben\n\nBristow, Joseph\n\nBront\u00eb, Charlotte\n\nBrown, Ford Madox\n\nBrowning, Elizabeth Barrett\n\nAurora Leigh\n\n'Bianca among the Nightingales'\n\n'Catarina to Camoens'\n\n'The Deserted Garden'\n\n'A Desire'\n\nA Drama of Exile\n\n'Felicity Hemans: To L.E.L.'\n\n'How do I love thee?'\n\n'L.E.L.'s Last Question'\n\nletter to Miss Mitford\n\n'The Lost Bower'\n\nlove letters\n\n'Mother and Poet'\n\n'A Recognition'\n\n'Say over again, and yet once over again'\n\nThe Seraphim\n\nSonnets from the Portuguese\n\n'Thou hast thy calling to some palace-floor'\n\nBrowning, Robert\n\ncorpses\n\ndramatic monologue\n\nGrotesque\n\nHopkins on\n\ninner cosmos\n\nand Mill\n\nmonodramas\n\non readers\n\nRuskin on\n\non Swinburne\n\nworks\n\n'Andrea del Sarto'\n\n'Apparent Failure'\n\n'Bishop Blougram's Apology'\n\n'The Bishop Orders His Tomb'\n\n'Le Byron de Nos Jours'\n\n'Childe Roland'\n\n'Cleon'\n\n'Evelyn Hope'\n\n'Fra Lippo Lippi'\n\n'Gold Hair: A Story of Pornic'\n\n'A Grammarian's Funeral'\n\n'House'\n\n'James Lee's Wife'\n\n'Johannes Agricola in Meditation'\n\n'Last Year at Marienbad'\n\nlove letters\n\nMen and Women\n\n'My Last Duchess'\n\n'One Word More'\n\n'Paracelsus'\n\n'Pauline'\n\n'Pippa Passes'\n\n'Porphyria's Lover'\n\n'R.B. a poem'\n\nThe Ring and the Book\n\n'Sordello'\n\n'A Woman's Last Word'\n\n'Women and Roses'\n\nThe Browning Critics (Litzinger and Knickerbocker)\n\nBuchanan, Robert\n\nBurnett, Archie\n\nBurnett, John\n\nBurnett, Timothy A. J.\n\nBurrows, Henry W.\n\nButler, Joseph\n\nButler, Josephine\n\nButler, Judith\n\nByron, George Gordon\n\nByron, Harriet Brownlow\n\nCaillois, Roger\n\nCameron, Allan T.\n\nCameron, Sharon\n\nCamoens, Luis de\n\nCampbell, Allan Walter\n\nCampion, Edmund\n\nCantos (Pound)\n\nCarlyle, Thomas\n\nCarpenter, Mary W.\n\nCarroll, Lewis\n\nCassandra (Nightingale)\n\ncastration fear\n\nCaws, Mary-Ann\n\nChapman, George\n\nChartism\n\nchildbirth\n\nchivalry\n\nChrist, Carol T.\n\nChristensen, Jerome\n\nChristian Socialism\n\nchurch attendance figures\n\ncivil polity\n\nClarendon, Edward Hyde\n\nclass factors\n\nsee also working-class\n\nThe Classic Slum (Roberts)\n\nClewer Sisterhood\n\nClough, Arthur Hugh\n\nAqueous Age\n\nand Arnold\n\non Arnold's Poems\n\ncalls to action\n\ncareer\n\nclass struggle\n\nfeminized\n\nletters\n\non marriage\n\nstyle\n\nworks\n\nAmbarvalia\n\nAmours de Voyage\n\nThe Bothie\n\n'The contradictions of the expanding soul'\n\nMari Magno\n\n'Resignation \u2013 To Faustus'\n\nsatire on Arnold\n\nand 'Thyrsis'\n\nColeridge, Samuel Taylor\n\n'Kubla Khan'\n\nCollie, Michael\n\nCollinson, James\n\ncommodification\n\ncommodity culture\n\nThe Communion of Labour (Jameson)\n\nComte, Auguste\n\nconsciousness\n\nconsumer culture\n\nconsumption\n\nContagious Diseases Acts\n\nCoombs, Joyce\n\nCooper, Edith Emma\n\n'Apollo's Written Grief'\n\nBelleroph _\u00f4_ n\n\nsee also Field, Michael\n\nCooperative Principle\n\nCopp\u00e9e, Fran\u00e7ois\n\nCornforth, Fanny\n\ncorpses\n\nBrowning, R.\n\ndeath\n\ndramatic monologue\n\nMaud\n\nCounty Constabulary Act\n\nCours de Linguistique G\u00e9n\u00e9rale (Saussure)\n\nCowper, William\n\nCrabbe, James\n\nThe Craft of Poetry (Wood)\n\nCrashaw, Richard\n\nCrimean War\n\nCritical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson (Kilham)\n\nCuller, A. Dwight\n\nCuller, Jonathan\n\nCulture and Anarchy (Arnold)\n\nCunningham, Valentine\n\nDallas, E. S.\n\nDe Man, Paul\n\nDe Quincey, Thomas\n\nDe Rougemont, Denis\n\ndeath\n\nbody\n\ncorpses\n\nEcho\n\neros\n\nfemale body\n\nlove\n\nMallarm\u00e9\n\nmemorialization\n\nobsession with\n\nrepresentation\n\nseduction\n\nTennyson\n\ndeconstruction\n\nThe Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (Morris)\n\nThe Defence of Poetry (Shelley)\n\nDellamora, Richard\n\nDemocratic Vistas (Whitman)\n\nLa Derni _\u00e8_ re Mode (Mallarm\u00e9)\n\nDerrida, Jacques\n\ndeconstruction\n\ndiff _\u00e9_ rance\n\non Mallarm\u00e9\n\nmise en ab _\u00ee_ me\n\nnaming\n\ndesire\n\nconscience\n\nconsumption\n\nenvy\n\nfeminine\n\nFreud\n\ngaze\n\nLacan\n\nlesbian\n\nmasculine\n\nRuskin\n\nDevlin, Christopher\n\ndialect literature\n\ndialogic speech\n\nDickens, Charles\n\nDickinson, Emily\n\nDiderot, Denis\n\ndiff _\u00e9_ rance\n\nDivagations (Mallarm\u00e9)\n\nDixon, Richard Watson\n\ndomesticity\n\ndompte-regard\n\nDonne, John\n\nDor\u00e9, Gustave\n\ndoubleness\n\nA Drama of Exile (Browning, E. B.)\n\ndramatic monologue\n\nauditors\n\ncharacters\n\ncorpses\n\nempiricism\n\nhybrid\n\nand lyric poetry\n\npragmatics of\n\nreaders\n\nas self-portrait\n\nsilence\n\nspeaking subject\n\nsee also Browning, R.; Tennyson\n\ndreams\n\nDrum-taps (Whitman)\n\nDryden, John\n\nDuck Soup\n\nDylan, Bob\n\nThe Earthly Paradise (Morris)\n\nEcho\n\necho\n\nThe Egoist (Meredith)\n\nElements of Geology (Lyell)\n\nElements of Poetry (Scholes)\n\nEliot, George\n\nEliot, T. S.\n\nimpersonality of poetry\n\non readers\n\non Swinburne\n\nword unheard\n\nworks\n\n'The Function of Criticism'\n\n'Notes Towards the Definition of Culture'\n\nEllis, Havelock\n\nEllis, Sarah Stickney\n\nEmerson, Ralph Waldo\n\nEmpson, William\n\nEndgame (Beckett)\n\nenvy\n\neros/death\n\nEssays in Criticism (Bateson)\n\nEve and the New Jerusalem (Taylor)\n\nThe Face of the Deep (Rossetti, C. G.)\n\nFaderman, Lillian\n\nSurpassing the Love of Men\n\nThe Faerie Queene (Spenser)\n\nFar From the Madding Crowd (Hardy)\n\nfather, loss of\n\nFaust (Goethe)\n\nfemale body\n\ndeath\n\nhand\n\nas imperfect male\n\nimperialism\n\nprostitution\n\nsee also hair\n\nfemininity\n\nappetite\n\nconsumer culture\n\nField\n\nideology\n\nimperialism\n\nredundant\n\nromantic friendships\n\nfeminist criticism\n\nfeminization\n\nFerguson, Harvie\n\nfetishism\n\nFetterley, Judith\n\nField, Michael\n\nand Brownings\n\nfemininity\n\njournals\n\nLesbianism\n\nlove between women\n\nRoman Catholicism\n\nSappho\n\nworks\n\n'Adown the Lesbian Vales'\n\n'Apollo, thou alone cans't bring'\n\nLong Ago\n\n'My Love and I took hands and swore'\n\nThe Wattlefold\n\nWorks and Days\n\nsee also Bradley, Katherine Harris; Cooper, Edith Emma\n\nFirestone, Shulamith\n\nFitzgerald, Edward\n\nflower imagery\n\nForrester, Fanny\n\ninBen Brierley's Journal\n\n'Homeless in the City'\n\n'The Lowly Bard'\n\n'Strangers in the City'\n\nFoucault, Michel\n\nFreidman, Susan Stanford\n\nA French Eton (Arnold)\n\nFreud, Sigmund\n\ndeath instinct\n\ndesire\n\nego/superego\n\nloss of father\n\nlove\n\nobsession\n\non religion\n\nworks\n\n'Medusa's Head'\n\n'The Taboo of Virginity'\n\nDasUnheimliche\n\nFrost, Robert\n\nFugitive Slave Law\n\nfunerary monuments\n\nGallagher, Catherine\n\ngame theory\n\nGardner, W. H.\n\nGautier, Th\u00e9ophile\n\ngaze\n\ndesire\n\ndompte-regard\n\nfemale\n\nGrotesque\n\nLacan\n\nmale\n\ngender\n\nsee also femininity; masculinity\n\ngender differences\n\ngenius\n\ngenre theory\n\nThe Germ\n\nGibbon, Edward\n\nGide, Andr\u00e9\n\nGilbert, Sandra\n\ngipsies\n\nArnold\n\nliterature on\n\nmysteries\n\nas Other\n\nstereotypes\n\nGiraud, Pierre\n\nGladstone, William Ewart\n\nGlanvill, Joseph\n\nGoblin Market (Rossetti, C. G.)\n\nappetite\n\ncompulsory heterosexuality\n\ncriticisms\n\nas feminist shopping guide\n\nhomoeroticism\n\nintended audiences\n\nmission work\n\nGoethe, Johann Wolfgang von\n\nGoffman, Erving\n\nGoing, William\n\ngold as symbol\n\ngothic aesthetic\n\nGrabes, Herbert\n\nGraff, Gerald\n\nGray, John\n\nGreek culture\n\nGreenblatt, Stephen\n\nGreenwell, Dora\n\nGreville, Fulke\n\nGrey, Henry George, Earl\n\nGrice, H. P.\n\nGriffiths, Eric\n\nGrotesque\n\nBrowning, R.\n\nconsciousness\n\ncreative/debased\n\ncultural power\n\ngaze\n\nHopkins\n\nideology\n\nMorris\n\nrepresentation\n\nRuskin\n\ntranscendence\n\nGubar, Susan\n\nhair\n\ncolour of\n\nfemale\n\nfetishism\n\nLilith\n\nMallarm\u00e9 on\n\nas symbol\n\nTennyson\n\nsee also red-haired people\n\nHallam, Arthur\n\nHamlet (Shakespeare)\n\nhand, as symbol\n\nHardy, Thomas\n\nHarper, J. W.\n\nHarris, Wendell\n\nHarrison, Antony\n\nHartman, Geoffrey\n\nHawarden, Clementine\n\nHayter, Alethea\n\nThe Head of the Bed (Hollander)\n\nHebrews, Epistle to\n\nHecht, Anthony\n\nHegel, G. W. F.\n\nHemans, Felicia\n\nHenry, James\n\nH\u00e9rodiade\n\nHess-L\u00fcttich, Ernest W. B.\n\nheterosexuality, compulsory\n\nHill, Geoffrey\n\nHistory of English Literature (Taine)\n\nHistory of Gay Literature (Bristow)\n\nHistory of Persia (Malcolm)\n\nHistory of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides)\n\nHobbes, Thomas\n\nHolbein, Hans\n\nHollander, John\n\nHollingworth, Brian\n\nHollis, C. Carroll\n\nHolt, Terence\n\nHomer\n\nhomoeroticism\n\nhomophobia\n\nhomosexuality\n\nhomosociality\n\nHonan, Park\n\nHood, Thomas\n\nThe Hope of the Great Community (Royce)\n\nHopkins, Gerard Manley\n\nbidding/monumentality\n\non Browning, R.\n\ngrotesque\n\nIgnatianSpiritual Exercises\n\ninscape\n\nas Jesuit\n\nletter to Dixon\n\nas outsider\n\npolitics\n\nQueer Studies\n\nrhetoric\n\nsacrifice\n\nsexuality\n\ntactility\n\nand Whitman\n\nworld without event\n\nworks\n\n'The Bugler's First Communion'\n\n'Felix Randal'\n\n'Harry Ploughman'\n\n'Hurrahing in Harvest'\n\node to Edmund Campion\n\n'Retreat Notes'\n\nsermons\n\n'Tom's Garland'\n\n'Where art thou friend'\n\n'The Windhover'\n\n'The Wreck of the Deutschland'\n\nHopkins, the Self, and God (Ong)\n\nThe Hour of Our Death (Aries)\n\nHouse, Humphrey\n\nThe House of Life (Rossetti, D. G.)\n\nHousman, A. E.\n\non homosexuality\n\nQueer Studies\n\non Wilde\n\nworks\n\nLast Poems\n\n'Oh who is that young sinner'\n\nA Shropshire Lad\n\nHousman, Laurence\n\nHowitt, W.\n\nHughes, Marian Rebecca\n\nHunt, John Dixon\n\nHunt, William Holman\n\nideology\n\nof aesthetic\n\nArnold\n\nclass\n\ndomesticity\n\nfallen women\n\nfemininity\n\nGrotesque\n\nimperialism\n\nMarxist\n\nreading practices\n\nromantic love\n\nworking women\n\nIdylls of the King (Tennyson)\n\nIgnatius of Loyola, St\n\nIliad (Homer)\n\nimperialism\n\nIn Memoriam (Tennyson)\n\nThe Industrial Muse (Vicinus)\n\nindustrialism\n\ninteriority\n\ninterpenetration\n\nintersubjectivity\n\nintertextuality\n\nIntroduction to the Poem (Boynton & Mack)\n\nIrigaray, Luce\n\nirony\n\nIser, Wolfgang\n\nJames, Henry\n\nJameson, Anna\n\nJane Eyre (Bront\u00eb)\n\nJaworski, Adam\n\nJob, Book of\n\nJohn's Gospel\n\nJohnson, E. D. H.\n\nJohnson, Samuel\n\nJohnston, Ellen\n\nand dialect discourse\n\nas Factory Girl\n\nand illegitimate daughter\n\nas Romantic heroine\n\nworks\n\n'Address to Napiers' Dockyard'\n\n'Address to Nature on its Cruelty'\n\nAutobiography, Poems and Songs\n\n'The Drunkard's Wife'\n\n'Kennedy's Dear Mill'\n\n'The Maniac in the Greenwood'\n\nJonson, Ben\n\nJoseph, Gerhard\n\nJoyce, James\n\nJudas Iscariot\n\nKaplan, Cora\n\nKarlin, Daniel\n\nKeats, John\n\n'Endymion'\n\n'The Eve of St Agnes'\n\n'Ode to a Grecian Urn'\n\n'Ode To Autumn'\n\nKeble, John\n\nKermode, Frank\n\nKilham, John\n\nKinglake, A. W.\n\nKingsley, Charles\n\nKlassen, William\n\nKnickerbocker, K. L.\n\nKnoepflmacher, U. C.\n\nKoestenbaum, Wayne\n\nKosofsky-Sedgwick, Eve\n\nKristeva, Julia\n\nLacan, Jacques\n\ndesire\n\ngaze\n\nloss of father\n\nmimicry\n\nmirroring\n\nnames\n\nnarcissism\n\nphallus\n\non Poe\n\nsubject\n\nLadies' National Association\n\nThe Ladies of Llangollen (Mavor)\n\nLafitte, Pierre\n\nLaing, R. D.\n\nLandon, L. E.\n\nLangbaum, Robert\n\nLarson, Kerry C.\n\nLast Poems (Housman)\n\nLatan\u00e9, David E.\n\nLaurent, M\u00e9ry\n\nLavengro (Borrow)\n\nLaycock, Samuel\n\nLeaves of Grass (Whitman)\n\nLef\u00e9bure, Eug\u00e8ne\n\nLeigh, Arran: see Bradley, Katherine Harris\n\nLeigh, Isla: see Cooper, Edith Emma\n\nLeighton, Angela\n\nLesbian, as term\n\nsee also Sappho\n\nlesbianism\n\ncovert\n\nFaderman\n\nField\n\nlove\n\npoets\n\nand romantic friendship\n\nsexuality\n\nLetter and Spirit (Rossetti, C. G.)\n\nLetters to Clough (Arnold)\n\nLevinson, Marjorie\n\nLewes, G. H.\n\nLewis, Sarah\n\nLiberty, Equality, Fraternity (Stephen)\n\nLiddon, Henry Parry\n\nLilith\n\nLipking, Lawrence\n\nThe Listener\n\nLitzinger, Boyd\n\nLloyd, Rosemary\n\nLocke, John\n\nLondon Review of Books\n\nLong Ago (Field)\n\nLongman's Annotated Poets\n\nLost in the Funhouse (Barth)\n\nLotman, Yuri\n\nlove\n\nArnold\u2013Clough\n\ndeath\n\nfleshly\n\nas redemption\n\nrhetoric\n\nromantic\n\nbetween women\n\nLove in the Western World (Rougement)\n\nA Lover's Discourse (Barthes)\n\nLowry, H. F.\n\nLucas, John\n\nLyell, Charles\n\nlyric poetry\n\nand dramatic monologue\n\ngenre theory\n\nHebrew\n\nMill\n\nmodernists on\n\nNew Criticism\n\nNietzsche\n\nnostalgia for\n\nreader-response\n\nTennyson\n\nTucker\n\nlyrical drama\n\nLytton, Bulwer\n\nMacaulay, Thomas Babington\n\nMachonachie, Moira\n\nMack, Maynard\n\nMacKenzie, Norman H.\n\nMadden, William A.\n\nMaidment, Brian\n\nMalcolm, John\n\nMallarm\u00e9, St\u00e9phane\n\ncritical acclaim of\n\non death\n\nDerrida on\n\nfriends\n\non hair\n\non 'Mariana'\n\nnames\n\nsound and sense\n\nand Tennyson\n\non vision\n\nworks\n\n'Ballets'\n\n'La Chevelure'\n\nLa Derni _\u00e8_ re Mode\n\nDivagations\n\nNoces d'H _\u00e9_ rodiade\n\nOeuvres compl _\u00e8_ ts\n\nProse\n\n'Tennyson, vu d'ici'\n\n'Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire'\n\ntranslations of Tennyson\n\nMallarm _\u00e9_ in Prose (Caws)\n\nMalthus, Thomas\n\nMann, Horace\n\nMari Magno (Clough)\n\nMariani, Paul L.\n\nMarie, Chorley factory poet\n\nMarquez, Gabriel Garcia\n\nMarx, Karl\n\nMarx brothers\n\nMarxist criticism\n\nmasculinity\n\nalternative\n\nbourgeois\n\nin conflict\n\nphallic\n\npoetic subject\n\nSappho on\n\nmasturbation\n\nMatthew's Gospel\n\nMaud (Tennyson)\n\nallegory\n\ncommodity culture\n\nCondition of England question\n\ncorpses\n\nhero of\n\nimperialism\n\nMallarm\u00e9 on\n\nmelancholia\n\nmourning\n\nOrientalism\n\nMaurice, F. D.\n\nMavor, Elizabeth\n\nMayall, David\n\nMaynard, John\n\nMazzini, Giuseppe\n\nMcGann, Jerome\n\nMcLuhan, H. M.\n\nmedieval themes\n\nMedusa\n\nMehlman, Jeffrey\n\nmelancholia\n\nIdylls of the King\n\nMaud\n\npathetic fallacy\n\nsublime\n\nmemorialization\n\nmemory\n\ncollective\n\nMen and Women (Browning, R.)\n\nLe Mercure de France\n\nMeredith, George\n\nMermin, Dorothy\n\nMeynell, Alice\n\nMichie, Helena\n\nMill, John Stuart\n\nlyricism\n\non 'Pauline'\n\non poetry\n\nStephen on\n\nsubjectivity\n\nMillais, John Everett\n\nMiller, J. Hillis\n\nMillett, Kate\n\nMilton, John\n\n'Lycidas'\n\n'On the Detraction'\n\n'On the New Forcers of Conscience'\n\nParadise Lost\n\nmimesis\n\nmimicry\n\nmirroring\n\nArnold\n\ncentrality of metaphor\n\ndeconstructive\n\ndouble\n\necho\n\nGod\n\nimage\n\nLacan\n\nLilith\n\npaintings\n\nPlato\n\nPre-Raphaelite\n\nRossetti, C. G.\n\nRossetti, D. G.\n\nself\n\nTennyson\n\nvacancy\n\nwomen poets\n\nmise en ab _\u00ee_ me\n\nMitchell, Juliet\n\nModern Painters (Ruskin)\n\nMontesquiou, Robert de\n\nMontrose, Louis\n\nMorris, William\n\nGrotesque\n\nhand as symbol\n\nmedieval themes\n\nworks\n\n'The Blue Closet'\n\n'Concerning Geffray Teste Noire'\n\nThe Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems\n\nThe Earthly Paradise\n\n'The Gillieflower of Gold'\n\n'Golden Wings'\n\n'A Good Knight in Prison'\n\n'The Haystack in the Floods'\n\n'In Prison'\n\n'The Judgment of God'\n\n'King Arthur's Tomb'\n\n'The Little Tower'\n\n'Old Love'\n\n'Praise of My Lady'\n\n'Rapunzel'\n\n'The Sailing of the Sword'\n\n'Sir Galahad'\n\n'Sir Peter Harpdon's End'\n\n'Spell-bound'\n\n'The Tune of Seven Towers'\n\n'The Wind'\n\nmourning\n\nMulvey, Laura\n\nThe Mutable Glass (Grabes)\n\nnaming\n\nnarcissism\n\nNarcissus\n\nNational Observer of Edinburgh\n\nNeale, J. M.\n\nnecrophilia\n\nNeo-Platonism\n\nNew Criticism\n\nNew Historicism\n\nThe New Minnesinger and Other Poems (Bradley, K.)\n\nNew Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (Ricks)\n\nNewton, Judith\n\nNicolson, Harold\n\nNietzsche, Friedrich\n\nNightingale, Florence\n\nNorthern Mythology (Thorpe)\n\nNotes on Poems and Reviews (Swinburne)\n\nobjectification\n\nOeuvres compl _\u00e8_ ts (Mallarm\u00e9)\n\nOn Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History (Carlyle)\n\nOng, Walter J.\n\nonomastics\n\nsee also naming\n\nOrientalism\n\nOrwell, George\n\nOur Mutual Friend (Dickens)\n\nOvid\n\nOwen, Wilfred\n\nThe Oxford and Cambridge Magazine\n\nOxford graduates\n\nOxford Movement\n\npaintings\n\nParadise Lost (Milton)\n\nPark Village Sisterhood\n\nPater, Walter\n\naesthetics\n\nGreek culture\n\nintensity\n\nmedieval themes\n\non Morris\n\non Rossetti, D. G.\n\npathetic fallacy\n\npatriarchy\n\nPaulin, Tom\n\nPenguin Book of Victorian Verse (Karlin)\n\nThe People's Journal\n\nPerrine, Laurence\n\nphallus\n\nPhilistinism\n\nPhilosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty)\n\nphotography\n\nThe Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde)\n\nPinkney, Tony\n\nPioneer\n\nPlato\n\nPoe, Edgar Allan\n\nPoems (Arnold)\n\nPoems, Chiefly Lyrical (Tennyson)\n\nPoems and Ballads (Swinburne)\n\nThe Poetry of Experience (Langbaum)\n\npoliteness\n\nThe Political Economy of Art (Ruskin)\n\nThe Poorhouse Fugitives (Maidment)\n\nPoovey, Mary\n\npornography\n\nThe Portuguese Letters\n\npost-colonialist studies\n\npoststructuralism\n\nPound, Ezra\n\nPratt, Mary Louise\n\nThe Pre-Raphaelite Imagination (Hunt)\n\nPre-Raphaelites\n\nBuchanan on\n\nmedieval themes\n\nmirroring\n\nPater on\n\nrepresentation\n\nRuskin on\n\nwriting/art\n\nProse (Mallarm\u00e9)\n\nProse Works (Arnold)\n\nprostitution\n\nprotest\n\nProust, Marcel\n\nProverbs, Book of\n\npsychoanalytical approach\n\nPugin, A. W.\n\nPusey, Edward B\n\nQueer Studies\n\nRaffalovich, Marc-Andr\u00e9\n\nRansom, John Crowe\n\nreaders\n\nredemption\n\nred-haired people\n\nreferentiality\n\nreflexiveness: see self-reflexivity\n\nreligion\n\nrepresentation\n\nrepressive hypothesis\n\nThe Republic (Plato)\n\nresurrectionists\n\nRevelations, Book of\n\nRevue Blanche\n\nLa Revue Ind _\u00e9_ pendante\n\nReynolds, Margaret\n\nrhetoric\n\nArnold\n\nBrownings\n\nclass\n\ngender differences\n\nGoethe\n\nHopkins\n\nmedieval\n\nof rebellion\n\nSymons\n\nWhite, H.\n\nrhyming, internal\n\nRich, Adrienne\n\nRichards, Upton\n\nRicks, Christopher\n\nRiede, David G.\n\nThe Ring and the Book (Browning)\n\nRobbe-Grillet, Alain\n\nRoberts, Robert\n\nRoberts, Samuel\n\nRobertson, F. W.\n\nRochegrosse, Georges\n\nRoman Catholicism\n\nromantic friendships\n\nRomanticism\n\nRorty, Richard\n\nRosenberg, John\n\nRossetti, Christina G.\n\nandrogyny\n\nAnglican Sisterhoods\n\nbiographical facts\n\nChristianity\n\ncriticisms of\n\ndisappointments\n\ndoubled consciousness\n\non God\n\ninteriority\n\ninternal rhyme\n\nLeighton on\n\nletter to brother\n\nOxford Movement\n\nand prostitutes\n\non Psalm\n\nredemption\n\nRuskin on\n\nverbal repetitions\n\nworks\n\n'Another Spring'\n\n'An Apple-Gathering'\n\n'Ascension Day'\n\n'By the waters of Babylon'\n\n'A Christmas Carol'\n\n'Cousin Kate'\n\n'Day-Dreams'\n\n'The Dead City'\n\nThe Face of the Deep\n\nGoblin Market\n\n'Golden Glories'\n\n'In the bleak mid-winter'\n\n'In the Round Tower at Jhansi'\n\n'The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children'\n\nLetter and Spirit\n\n'Light Love'\n\n'Maiden-Song'\n\nMonna Innominata sonnets\n\n'Ripetizione'\n\nSeek and Find\n\n'Sleeping at Last'\n\n'Song'\n\n'Three Nuns'\n\nTime Flies\n\n'Twice'\n\n'Ye Have Forgotten the Exhortation'\n\n'Yet a little while'\n\nRossetti, Dante Gabriel\n\nloss\n\nmedieval themes\n\nmirroring\n\non sonnet\n\non Swinburne\n\nworks\n\n'Aspecta Medusa'\n\n'The Blessed Damozel'\n\n'Body's Beauty'\n\n'Eden Bower'\n\n'Hand and Soul'\n\nThe House of Life\n\n'Introductory Sonnet'\n\n'Jenny'\n\nLady Lilith\n\n'Love's Nocturn'\n\n'Memorial Thresholds'\n\n'The Mirror'\n\nMnemosyne\n\n'The Orchard Pit'\n\n'The Portrait'\n\n'The Stream's Secret'\n\n'A Superscription'\n\n'Willowwood'\n\nRossetti, Maria Francesca\n\nRossetti, W. M.\n\nRoyce, Josiah\n\nRuskin, John\n\non Browning\n\ndesire\n\nin The Germ\n\non Grotesque\n\nmedieval themes\n\nmyth\n\npathetic fallacy\n\nPre-Raphaelite aesthetics\n\non Rossetti, C. G.\n\nworks\n\nModern Painters\n\nThe Political Economy of Art\n\nThe Stones of Venice\n\nThe Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century\n\nRutland, W. R.\n\nsadism\n\nSaid, Edward\n\nSt Mary Magdalene Home\n\nThe Saint's Tragedy (Kingsley)\n\nSaintsbury, George\n\nSalom\u00e9\n\nSand, George\n\nSappho\n\n'Ode to Aphrodite'\n\n'To a Beloved Woman'\n\nSarraute, Nathalie\n\nSaturday Review\n\nSaussure, Ferdinand de\n\nScarpi, Paolo\n\nSchiller, J. C. Friedrich\n\nThe Scholar-Critic (Bateson)\n\nScholes, Robert\n\nSch\u00f6n, Alberto\n\nSchopenhauer, Arthur\n\nSchweikart, Patrocinio\n\nscopic drive\n\nScotus, John Duns\n\nScriptum Oxoniense (Scotus)\n\nsea imagery\n\nSedgwick, Eve Kosofsky\n\nSeek and Find (Rossetti, C. G.)\n\nself-control\n\nself-parody\n\nself-referentiality\n\nself-reflexivity\n\nSelzer, Jack\n\nsensibility\n\nsensuality\n\nsentimentality\n\nThe Seraphim (Browning, E. B.)\n\nThe Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Devlin)\n\nSeward, John: see Stephens, F. G.\n\nsexual politics\n\nsexuality\n\nappetite\n\nclass\n\nfemale\n\ngender differences\n\nHopkins\n\nlesbianism\n\nlove\n\npurity\n\nsea imagery\n\ntaboo\n\nShairp, J. C.\n\nShakespeare, William\n\nShelley, Percy Bysshe\n\n'Alastor'\n\nThe Defence of Poetry\n\n'Epipsychidion'\n\n'Ode to the West Wind'\n\nShowalter, Elaine\n\nA Shropshire Lad (Housman)\n\nsignifiers/signified\n\nsilence\n\nambiguity\n\nauditor\n\nbipolar valence of\n\nconsensus\n\ndramatic monologue\n\njudgment\n\nSch\u00f6n\n\nwomen\n\nsisterhood\n\nSmith, Adam\n\nSmith, Blanche\n\nSmith, Stevie\n\nsocialism\n\nSocrates\n\nsodomy\n\nSonnets from the Portuguese (Browning, E. B.)\n\nSophocles\n\nSound and Sense (Perrine)\n\nSouthey, Robert\n\nSparrow, John\n\nspeaking subject\n\nspectatorship\n\nSpenser, Edmund\n\nSpiritual Exercises (Loyola)\n\nThe Spoon River Anthology (Masters)\n\nStange, G. Robert\n\nStephen, James Fitzjames\n\nStephens, F. G.\n\nThe Stones of Venice (Ruskin)\n\nStorey, John\n\nThe Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (Ruskin)\n\nsubjectivity\n\nalienation\n\nArnold\n\nfemale speakers\n\nLacan\n\nMill\n\nand objectification\n\nradical\n\nscopic drive\n\nunorthodox\n\nsee also speaking subject\n\nsublimation\n\nArnold\n\nFreudian\n\nHopkins\n\nPater\n\nRossetti, C. G.\n\nRossetti, D. G.\n\nTennyson\n\nsublime\n\nSuper, R. H.\n\nSurpassing the Love of Men (Faderman)\n\nSussman, Herbert\n\nSwift, Jonathan\n\nSwinburne, Algernon\n\nBrowning on\n\nEliot on\n\nletters\n\non Maud\n\nmedieval themes\n\nRossetti, D. G. on\n\nSapphic influence\n\nsense and sound\n\nTennyson on\n\nWhistler's painting\n\nworks\n\n'Anactoria'\n\nAtalanta in Calydon\n\n'A Foresaken Garden'\n\n'Hermaphroditus'\n\nNotes on Poems and Reviews\n\nPoems and Ballads\n\nSymbolist aesthetic\n\nThe Symbolist Movement (Symons)\n\nSymons, Alfred\n\nTaine, Hippolyte\n\nTait, Bishop\n\nTannen, Deborah\n\nTaylor, Barbara\n\nTennyson, Alfred\n\nallegory\n\nandrogyny\n\nassociative process\n\nchivalry\n\ncommodification of\n\non death\n\ndramatic monologue\n\necho\n\nfunerary remembrance\n\nand Hallam\n\nhollowness\n\nlyric poetry\n\nand Mallarm\u00e9\n\nmirroring\n\nmusicality\n\non name\n\nand Poe\n\nRicks' editions\n\nsound and sense\n\nsublimity\n\non Swinburne\n\nSymbolist aesthetic\n\nand Whitman\n\nworks\n\n'Dora'\n\n'Far-Far-Away'\n\n'Godiva'\n\nIdylls of the King\n\nIn Memoriam\n\n'The Lady of Shalott'\n\n'Locksley Hall'\n\n'The Lotos-Eaters'\n\n'Mariana'\n\n'Mariana' translation\n\n'Morte d'Arthur'\n\n'Ode on the Death of Wellington'\n\n'Oenone'\n\nPoems, Chiefly Lyrical\n\n'The Princess'\n\n'Recollections of the Arabian Nights'\n\n'Rizpah'\n\n'St Simeon Stylites'\n\n'Tithonus'\n\n'Ulysses'\n\nsee alsoMaud\n\nTennyson, Hallam\n\nThiele, J. M.\n\nThirty-Nine Articles\n\nThomas, Alfred\n\nThomson, James\n\nThorpe, Benjamin\n\nThree Versions of Judas (Borges)\n\nThucydides\n\nTime Flies (Rossetti, C. G.)\n\nThe Times\n\nTimes Literary Supplement\n\nTinker, C. B.\n\nTiresias\n\nLes Tombeaux (Giraud)\n\nTrilling, Lionel\n\ntrompe-l'oeil\n\nTucker, Cynthia Grant\n\nTucker, Herbert F.\n\nTupper, John L.: see Rossetti, W. M.\n\nTwelfth Night (Shakespeare)\n\nTwo Lectures on the Influence of Poetry on the Working Classes (Robertson)\n\nTyndall, John\n\nUseful Toil (Burnett)\n\nutility principle\n\nVal\u00e9ry, Paul\n\nVanity of Dogmatizing (Glanvill)\n\nverbal repetition\n\nVerlaine, Paul\n\nVicinus, Martha\n\nVictorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (Armstrong)\n\nVictorian Women Poets (Leighton and Reynolds)\n\nVictorian Women Poets 1830\u20131900 (Breen)\n\nThe Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (Cunningham)\n\nVillette (Bront\u00eb, C.)\n\nVincent, David\n\nvirginity\n\nVogler, Abt\n\nWagner-Lawlor, Jennifer A.\n\nWalkowitz, Judith R.\n\nWalsh, Walter\n\nwarrior figure\n\nWashington Square (James)\n\nwater images\n\nsee also Aqueous Age; sea imagery\n\nWatson, J. R.\n\nThe Wattlefold (Field)\n\nWaugh, Edwin\n\n'Come Whoam to thi Childer an' Me'\n\n'Dinner Time'\n\n'Down Again!'\n\n'Toothsome Advice'\n\nWebster, Augusta\n\nWellek, Ren\u00e9\n\nWelles, Orson\n\nWellington, Arthur W.\n\nWerther (Goethe)\n\nWest, J.\n\nWhistler, James A. M.\n\nWhite, Chris\n\nWhite, Hayden\n\nWhitman, Walt\n\nin Brooklyn Daily Eagle\n\non English poetry\n\non European literature\n\nand Hopkins\n\nparody\n\nstudies of\n\non Tennyson\n\nworks\n\nDemocratic Vistas\n\nDrum-taps\n\nLeaves of Grass\n\n'Song of Myself'\n\nWightman, Frances Lucy\n\nWilberforce, Samuel\n\nWilde, Oscar\n\nWilhelm Meister (Goethe)\n\nWilliam James and Other Essays (Royce)\n\nWilliams, Charles\n\nWilliams, Thomas Jay\n\nwomen\n\nabandoned\n\nArnold on\n\nautobiography\n\ncommodification\n\ndomesticity\n\nfallen\n\nlove between\n\nobjectification of\n\nin paid work\n\nrole of\n\nromantic friendships\n\nsilenced\n\nwaiting\n\nworking-class\n\nsee also female body; femininity; gender differences; lesbianism; sisterhood\n\nwomen poets\n\nWood, Clement\n\nWoods, Gregory\n\nWoolf, Virginia\n\nWoolford, John\n\nWordsworth, Ann\n\nWordsworth, William\n\n'Gipsies'\n\n'Intimations' ode\n\nLyrical Ballads, Preface\n\nOn the Convention of Cintra\n\n'The Thorn'\n\n'Tintern Abbey'\n\nworking-class\n\nsee also dialect literature\n\nWorking-Class Women Poets in Britain (Boos)\n\nWorks and Days (Field)\n\nWright, James\n\nYeats, William Butler\n\nThe Zincali (Borrow)\n\nZlotnick, Susan\n"], [" \nTHE COLUMBIA ANTHOLOGY OF\n\nMODERN\n\nJAPANESE\n\nDRAMA\n\nColumbia University Press\n\n_Publishers Since 1893_\n\nNew York Chichester, West Sussex\n\ncup.columbia.edu\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2014 Columbia University Press\n\nAll rights reserved\n\nE-ISBN 978-0-231-53713-1\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nThe Columbia anthology of modern Japanese drama / edited by J. Thomas Rimer, Mitsuya Mori, and M. Cody Poulton.\n\npages cm\n\nAlso includes historical, critical commentaries.\n\nIncludes bibliographical references.\n\nSummary: \"An anthology of modern Japanese drama from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century\"\u2014Provided by publisher.\n\nISBN 978-0-231-12830-8 (Cloth : alk. paper)\u2014ISBN 978-0-231-53713-1 (e-book)\n\n1. Japanese drama\u201419th century\u2014Translations into English. 2. Japanese drama\u201420th century\u2014Translations into English. 3. Japanese drama\u201421st century\u2014Translations into English. 4. Japanese drama\u201419th century\u2014History and criticism. 5. Japanese drama\u201420th century\u2014History and criticism. 6. Japanese drama\u201421st century\u2014History and criticism. 7. Theater\u2014Japan\u2014History\u201419th century. 8. Theater\u2014Japan\u2014History\u201420th century. 9. Theater\u2014Japan\u2014History\u201421st century. I. Rimer, J. Thomas, editor. II. Mori, Mitsuya, 1937\u2013 editor. III. Poulton, M. Cody, 1955\u2013 editor.\n\nPL782.E5C65 2014\n\n792.0952\u2014dc23\n\n2013027559\n\nA Columbia University Press E-book.\n\nCUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.\n\nCOVER IMAGE: Akita Unaku, _The Skeletons' Dance_. (Courtesy of The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum Waseda University)\n\nCOVER AND BOOK DESIGN: Lisa Hamm\n\nWith the exception of figures 2, 4, 5, and 7, which are in the public domain, all figures not otherwise credited are courtesy of Teatro, Corporation Chamomile.\nTo Donald Keene\n\nan inspiration to us all\n\nCONTENTS\n\nPreface\n\nA Note on Japanese Names\n\nIntroduction: The Prelude to Modern Drama in the Meiji Era (1868\u20131912)\n\nMITSUYA MORI\n\nPART I. THE AGE OF \"TAISH\u014c DRAMA\"\n\nM. CODY POULTON\n\n_Kerria Japonica_\n\nIZUMI KY\u014cKA\n\nTRANSLATED BY M. CODY POULTON\n\n_Father Returns_\n\nKIKUCHI KAN\n\nTRANSLATED BY M. CODY POULTON\n\n_The Skeletons' Dance_\n\nAKITA UJAKU\n\nTRANSLATED BY M. CODY POULTON\n\nPART II. THE TSUKIJI LITTLE THEATER AND ITS AFTERMATH\n\nJ. THOMAS RIMER\n\n_The Couple Next Door_\n\nMASAMUNE HAKUCH\u014c\n\nTRANSLATED BY JOHN K. GILLESPIE\n\n_A Nero in Skirts_\n\nMURAYAMA TOMOYOSHI\n\nTRANSLATED BY YUKO MATSUKAWA\n\n_Paper Balloon_\n\nKISHIDA KUNIO\n\nTRANSLATED BY RICHARD MCKINNON\n\n_Fascist Doll_\n\nKUBO SAKAE\n\nTRANSLATED BY YUKO MATSUKAWA\n\n_Restless Night in Late Spring_\n\nENCHI FUMIKO\n\nTRANSLATED BY AYAKO KANO\n\nJapanese Women Playwrights: From Meiji to the Present\n\nYOSHIE INOUE\n\nPART III. WARTIME AND POSTWAR DRAMA\n\nJ. THOMAS RIMER\n\n_A Woman's Life_\n\nMORIMOTO KAORU\n\nTRANSLATED BY GUOHE ZHENG\n\n_The Man Who Turned into a Stick_\n\nABE K\u014cB\u014c\n\nTRANSLATED BY DONALD KEENE\n\n_Ceremonial Clothes_\n\nAKIMOTO MATSUYO\n\nTRANSLATED BY GANSHI MURATA\n\n_Twilight Crane_\n\nKINOSHITA JUNJI\n\nTRANSLATED BY BRIAN POWELL\n\n_Education_\n\nTANAKA CHIKAO\n\nTRANSLATED BY J. THOMAS RIMER\n\nPART IV. THE 1960S AND UNDERGROUND THEATER\n\nM. CODY POULTON\n\n_The Little Match Girl_\n\nBETSUYAKU MINORU\n\nTRANSLATED BY ROBERT N. LAWSON\n\n_Two Women_\n\nKARA J\u016aR\u014c\n\nTRANSLATED BY JOHN K. GILLESPIE\n\n_Poison Boy_\n\nTERAYAMA SH\u016aJI\n\nTRANSLATED BY CAROL FISHER SORGENFREI\n\n_The Dressing Room: That Which Flows Away Ultimately Becomes Nostalgia_\n\nSHIMIZU KUNIO\n\nTRANSLATED BY CHIYORI MIYAGAWA AND JOHN K. GILLESPIE\n\n_The Earth Station_\n\n\u014cTA SH\u014cGO\n\nTRANSLATED BY MARI BOYD\n\n_Living with Father_\n\nINOUE HISASHI\n\nTRANSLATED BY ZELJKO CIPRIS\n\nPART V. THE 1980S AND BEYOND\n\nM. CODY POULTON\n\n_Poems for Sale_\n\nNODA HIDEKI\n\nTRANSLATED BY MARI BOYD\n\n_Tokyo Notes_\n\nHIRATA ORIZA\n\nTRANSLATED BY M. CODY POULTON\n\n_The Attic_\n\nSAKATE Y\u014cJI\n\nTRANSLATED BY LEON INGULSRUD AND KEIKO TSUNEDA\n\n_Five Days in March_\n\nOKADA TOSHIKI\n\nTRANSLATED BY AYA OGAWA\n\nPART VI. POPULAR THEATER\n\nMITSUYA MORI\n\n_Nihonbashi_\n\nIZUMI KY\u014cKA\n\nTRANSLATED BY M. CODY POULTON\n\n_The Rose of Versailles: A Takarazuka Grand Romantic Play_\n\nUEDA SHINJI\n\nTRANSLATED BY KENKO KAWASAKI\n\n_The Sardine Seller's Net of Love_\n\nMISHIMA YUKIO\n\nTRANSLATED BY LAURENCE R. KOMINZ\n\nSelected Bibliography\nPREFACE\n\nWhen we began compiling _The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama_ , our purpose was to introduce English-speaking readers to the richness and depth of modern Japanese drama, from early experiments to the contemporary period, a span of nearly one hundred years. Now that this compilation is complete, however, we see that its significance may well reach beyond our original conception, for in fact, this anthology can be read in several ways.\n\nFirst, of course, each play can, and should, be read on its own, either in or out of chronological order, simply for the intellectual and aesthetic pleasure we believe that each provides. Second, with the help of the introductions to each section, this anthology offers a history of modern spoken drama in Japan, from its beginning in the early twentieth century to almost the present. Inevitably, however, the anthology is incomplete, since we could not include all forms of twentieth-century theater. In addition, most of the plays\u2014in the various social, intellectual, and theatrical frameworks in which they were written\u2014can be regarded as works of artistic ambition rather than simple entertainment.\n\nOne of the sections, on popular theater, contains examples of modern kabuki, a scene from a Takarazuka musical, and a scene from a play written for the _shinpa_ theater that flourished in the early twentieth century. These, we hope, will give the reader a glimpse of yet another aspect of modern Japanese theater.\n\nAnother feature of the modern period in Japan is the participation of women in theatrical productions, as both performers and playwrights, even though men occupied most of those roles. Accordingly, besides some examples of the few dramas written by women, we offer a short history of the women playwrights during this period, by Yoshie Inoue, a leading scholar on modern Japanese theater.\n\nFinally, the plays in this anthology exemplify both the vicissitudes and the accomplishments of larger issues in modern Japanese culture during this period. In a sense, they also provide another kind of history of modern Japan, which, though connected to politics and social issues, produced its own, evolving traditions. The progression of these plays thus reveals a trajectory similar to those found in other artistic endeavors in Japan at this time, ranging from the development of modern fiction and poetry to architecture, painting, sculpture, and printmaking. This progression has three phases: first, a response to the stimulus of imported Western culture; second, an attempt to work creatively within the perceived possibilities of these new modalities; and last, a transcendence into something both truly Japanese and truly contemporary. In a larger sense, then, the theater points to the ways in which Japan, after centuries of isolation, found a secure and respected place in world culture.\n\nThese larger significances are, at best, implicit in the individual works in this anthology, and they should not be sought at the expense of the reader's pleasure in discovering the artistic, social, and theatrical accomplishments of each play.\n\nSome issues this anthology cannot address, particularly the important matter of stage language. Read in translation, these plays have necessarily been stripped of the beauty of the original Japanese dialogue. The central issue of creating an authentic modern stage speech, in a theatrical tradition far more attuned to a rhetoric of illusion and stylization, cannot be illustrated through translated texts. Indeed, in one sense, when read in the original, many of these plays can be seen as a series of experiments, a succession of attempts to create a kind of spoken realism\u2014personal, political, social\u2014that was not present in the Japanese theater until the twentieth century. Reading these plays in English, therefore, may allow the reader to imagine these experiments but not to experience them. Nonetheless, we believe that this anthology offers a sustained look at a rich and diverse century within a long and vibrant theatrical tradition.\n\nSo many friends and colleagues have given help and advice to us while compiling this anthology that would be impossible to list them all. We begin, however, with our heartfelt appreciation to the support shown us by Jennifer Crewe at Columbia University Press, whose enthusiasm has sustained us from the beginning of this project a decade ago. Our editors, Irene Pavitt and Margaret B. Yamashita, have been both patient and forthcoming in helping us make these translations as readable as possible. Paula Locante, at the University of Pittsburgh, was generous with her help in preparing early versions of the manuscript. Joanna Kriese, at the University of Victoria, was essential to preparing the final manuscript. Among those who have given us wise counsel and good suggestions are Dennis Kennedy, Mark Oshima, Yoko Shioya, John Gillespie, Kevin Wetmore, and Carol Sorgenfrei, as well as those who read the original manuscript and recommended it to the press.\n\nFinally, we want our readers to know that we compiled this anthology with the enthusiasm we feel for the accomplishments of modern Japanese theater. It is our greatest hope that our readers will have the same feeling.\nA NOTE ON JAPANESE NAMES\n\nJapanese names follow the customary manner of family name first and given name second. Although authors are usually referred to by their family name, until around the beginning of the twentieth century, literary figures customarily took special names, called _g \u014d_. Tsubouchi Y\u016bz\u014d, for example, chose the name Sh\u014dy\u014d, so most of the time he is called Tsubouchi Sh\u014dy\u014d, or even just Sh\u014dy\u014d. Likewise, we refer to Mori Rintar\u014d as Mori \u014cgai, or just \u014cgai. This is the same when referring to kabuki actors: Ichikawa Danj\u016br\u014d IX, for example, is called Danj\u016br\u014d IX. Some writers used _g \u014d_, and others did not. Therefore, Shimamura H\u014dgetsu and Osanai Kaoru appear side by side as the founders of _shingeki_ , but the former is referred to as H\u014dgetsu and the latter as Osanai.\n\nIn the translations of the plays, names are presented in the Japanese fashion, family name first and personal name second. The names of the Japanese contributors to the anthology, however, are listed in the Western way, personal name followed by family name. In addition, the text occasionally refers to era names ( _neng \u014d_). The dates for those in the modern era are as follows:\n\nMeiji | 1868\u20131912  \n---|---  \nTaish\u014d | 1912\u20131926  \nSh\u014dwa | 1926\u20131989  \nHeisei | 1989\u2013present\nINTRODUCTION\n\nThe Prelude to Modern Drama in the Meiji Era (1868\u20131912)\n\nIn the mid-nineteenth century, Japan, plagued by political and economic corruption, began modernizing its politics, technology, and society. In addition, the Tokugawa government (shogunate) was being pressured by the West to abandon its seclusion policy, according to which it had maintained only limited contact with the Netherlands and China since the early seventeenth century. The United States, Britain, and France demanded that Japan sign a series of unfair trade treaties, and the shogunate had no choice but to agree, faced with the overwhelming power of the West's iron \"black ships\" ( _kurofune_ ). Furthermore, Japan was well aware of China's defeat in the Opium War in 1842. The emperor and the court council, however, did not support the shogunate's slavish attitude toward the Western powers, and young nationalistic samurai even resorted to terrorist acts under the slogan of _sonn \u014d j\u014di_ (revere the emperor, expel the barbarians). Consequently, Japan fell into chaos and was rescued only by the so-called Meiji Restoration (Meiji ishin).\n\nWhen the new Meiji government was established in 1868, top government officials, who had wanted to expel the foreigners, now reversed to _fukoku ky \u014dhei_ (enrich the country, strengthen the military). In this way, the Meiji government began trying to Westernize the government and institutions, as well as industry and the common people's everyday life, through a process called _bunmei kaika_ (civilization and enlightenment). The goal was reached, for good or ill, with miraculous speed, and by the turn of the twentieth century, Japan was generally recognized as the most modern country outside Europe and North America.\n\nThe theater in Japan was modernized as well, with the first notable move in 1872 when the Tokyo municipal government issued a directive stipulating that the theater become more sophisticated and the plays be based on historical fact. In the same year, the municipal government also issued a decree liberalizing theaters in Tokyo, thereby annulling the shogunate's earlier regulations licensing only four\u2014later reduced to three\u2014kabuki theaters in a segregated area of Edo (modern-day Tokyo) close to the Yoshiwara licensed quarters. This was the first effort to recognize the theater (then synonymous with kabuki) as a legitimate cultural activity, which in the past had sometimes even been associated with prostitution.\n\nMorita Kan'ya XII (1846\u20131897), the owner of one of the licensed theaters, the Moritaza, responded to this decree by opening a new kabuki theater in Shintomi-ch\u014d in downtown Tokyo. This theater, later called the Shintomiza, was, in many respects, modeled on Western theaters. For instance, chairs were installed for foreigners, and the stage was entirely Western style except for the _hanamichi_ (flower way), the ramp extending from the main stage to the back of the auditorium, which was used as a performance space.\n\nKan'ya, a progressive young producer of kabuki, used the Meiji period's two most acclaimed kabuki actors, Ichikawa Danj\u016br\u014d IX (1838\u20131903) and Onoe Kikugor\u014d V (1844\u20131903), in an effort to reform the plays. Danj\u016br\u014d wished to make period plays ( _jidaimono_ ) historically accurate and to perform them in a realist style without many of the conventional patterns of acting. He thus asked the most popular kabuki playwright of that era, Kawatake Mokuami (1816\u20131893), to write what were called \"living history plays\" ( _katsurekimono_ ). Kikugor\u014d, in contrast, was more interested in plays about contemporary lives and behavior, known as \"crop-haired plays\" ( _zangirimono_ ), in reference to the Western hairstyle then in vogue. Mokuami wrote the first original _zangirimono_ , _Tokyo Daily_ ( _Tokyo nichinichi shinbun_ ), in 1873.\n\nIn 1878, It\u014d Hirobumi (1841\u20131909), one of the Meiji period's most prominent politicians, made a point of telling Kan'ya and four actors in his company (Danj\u016br\u014d, Kikugor\u014d, Nakaz\u014d, and S\u014dj\u016br\u014d) about the Western theater performances he had seen as a member of the official diplomatic mission that had traveled around the world from 1871 to 1873, led by Foreign Minister Iwakura Tomomi (1825\u20131883). The purpose of the Iwakura mission was to negotiate with Western countries a revision of the unequal treaties, but it was not successful. Consequently, it turned into a fact-finding mission in almost every field that would promote Japan's modernization.\n\nMany of those close to Kan'ya sensed that at one point he was ambitious enough to want to make his Shintomiza Japan's national theater. The culmination of his enthusiasm for Westernizing kabuki was the visit in 1879 by the former president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, to the Shintomiza. In the same year, Mokuami's _The Strange Tale of a Man Adrift: A Western Kabuki_ ( _Hy \u014dry\u016b kitan seiy\u014d-kabuki_) was performed at the Shintomiza. This play was about the various experiences in the United States and Europe of a Japanese man who had been shipwrecked and rescued by an American ship. In one of the scenes, kabuki actors played the Americans, and foreign actors appeared in a scene set in Paris.1 The play, however, was a box-office disaster, and Kan'ya's passion to Westernize kabuki quickly cooled. Mokuami also returned to conventional kabuki dramaturgy. His play in the old style, _K \u014dchiyama and Naozamurai_ ( _Kumo ni magou Ueno no hatsuhana_ ), was a great success in 1881 and is still a popular kabuki play.\n\nSince the theater people were no longer interested in modernizing the theater, in 1886 representatives from the university, business, and government established the Theater Reform Society (Engeki kairy\u014dkai). (In this context, \"theater\" meant kabuki; no one thought of modernizing n\u014d or the bunraku puppet theater.) The Theater Reform Society included quite a few university intellectuals, politicians, and businessmen as supporting members, but no kabuki actors or producers. Many of them had visited Western countries and been invited to theaters there, so they felt that Japan also should have a theater elegant enough for foreign guests.\n\nThe driving force behind the Theater Reform Society was Suematsu Norizumi (1855\u20131920), who had served for several years as a secretary at the Japanese embassy in London and had studied at Oxford University. He later became a son-in-law of It\u014d Hirobumi, who was prime minister at the time and was one of the society's major supporting members.\n\nThe society's manifesto had three goals in mind: (1) to produce good theater in Japan, (2) to make the profession of playwriting honorable and respectable, and (3) to build playhouses suitable for not only theater performances but also music concerts and song recitals. Suematsu himself made his opinions clear in a public lecture, which later was published. He suggested, for example, abandoning the _hanamichi_ and eliminating _onnagata_ (female impersonators), a convention foreign to modern Western theater. Another member of the society, Toyama Masakazu (1848\u20131900), a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, published similar opinions.\n\nTheir views elicited a backlash. Tsubouchi Sh\u014dy\u014d (1859\u20131935), a professor of English literature at Waseda University, and Mori \u014cgai (1862\u20131922), a medical officer in the army and also a poet, novelist, and critic, were in the vanguard of the attack on the society. Both Sh\u014dy\u014d and \u014cgai, the two most respected literary figures in Japan in the Meiji period, insisted that what Japanese theater needed most was good drama suitable for a modern society. To be fair, Suematsu and Toyama wanted good drama as well. But in any event, their call for a theater building similar to the Paris Opera received more attention, as they clearly were more interested in the material conditions of performance.\n\nIn 1887, the year after the society was founded, a special event at which Emperor Meiji would enjoy kabuki performances was planned. He was invited to a celebration of the opening of the teahouse in the garden of Inoue Kaoru, the minister of foreign affairs. As part of the celebration, the emperor also watched Danj\u016br\u014d, Kikugor\u014d, Sadanji, and other kabuki actors perform classical plays, including _The Subscription List_ ( _Kanjinch \u014d_) and _The Village School_ ( _Terakoya_ ). This event was arguably the sole positive achievement of the Theater Reform Society, elevating the social status of kabuki and its actors, who had been treated as being even below the lowest of the social classes in the Edo (also known as the Tokugawa) era.\n\nSUEMATSU NORIZUMI\n\n... The purpose of theater reform is to make theater enjoyable for middle- or upper-class people. But I do not mean that it is made understandable only for them and not for lower-class people. As stated earlier, ideally speaking, theater should be made easy for everyone to understand and should elevate everyone's artistic sensibility. But this is the final goal, and for the time being, theater should be directed to middle-class people.\n\nThen, how should we find actors? Some people have the crazy idea that actors in the reformed theater should be recruited in London or Paris. But it would be more to the point to employ Japanese actors. Even though some reformers are against Japanese actors, they are not inferior to Western ones. On the contrary, they are quite good. Unfortunately, however, their style of acting is different. It is as if the reason for doing a good thing were employed for doing a bad thing. A lot of misleading discussions are taking place now because of the wrong way of doing things. Acting style is something that should be reformed gradually. The style of Japanese actors is, in short, based more on their outer movements than on their inner mind. Their speaking style is artificial....\n\nI have been talking about male actors so far. You may be ready to accept the idea that I am going to propose now, but most people will be surprised to hear it. It is only that female roles should be played by female actors. There is no question about it. Without female actors, theater is not real. Therefore, the reformed theater must use female actors. Where to find and how to educate them, I have not yet considered. So I will not talk about that today.\n\nFROM SUEMATSU NORIZUMI, \"ENGEKI KAIRY\u014c IKEN\" (OPINIONS ABOUT THEATER REFORM), NOVEMBER 1886.\n\nThe Theater Reform Society was reorganized twice, and even Sh\u014dy\u014d and \u014cgai joined the later organization. But nothing new came of it. Kabuki returned to its old, conservative style and gradually began to lose its relevance to modern life. Because of this reversion, however, kabuki acquired the status of classical theater and remained accessible because it continued to be regularly performed year around. In Japan, the theater had to be modernized outside the kabuki world.\n\nMORI RINTAR\u014c (\u014cGAI)\n\nWhat is theater? It is actors enacting a drama on the stage. Drama precedes theater. The former is the primary, and the latter, the secondary. Some say that drama is made for theater. But if this idea gained ground in society, both drama and theater would decline. The reason is that drama is the best of poetry. We Japanese traditionally do not respect drama. But abroad, it goes without saying that drama stands at the center of poetry....\n\nI am not satisfied with the theater in Japan today. It may have been acceptable in premodern times when theater was called _shibai_. But today, in the nineteenth century, we should have certain kinds of theater buildings. Theaters should be securely built. We should not permit theaters made of wood, as they burn easily. Theaters should be clean: people's health should not be affected by bad air in theaters. The stage should be simple. I do not mean that it should be like a n\u014d theater or a Chinese theater. What I mean is that exaggerated makeup and the miming of horseback riding or rowing a boat only by physical gestures should not be accepted. Wave boards or wave curtains should be changed. A lantern signifying the moon also should not be allowed. I am afraid that these attract the audience's attention entirely by their attempting to be as real as possible.\n\nDrama requires a simple stage. This is not my personal opinion. Great critics in the West have been suggesting the like in order to correct prejudices in society. Not a few are critical of the exaggerated stage sets of big theaters in Paris. They not only criticize them but also are trying to build simpler stages. According to a German newspaper, _Grenzboten_ , a public theater in Munich has tried to restore the old style of stage sets. [Here] a play by Shakespeare opened with a Shakespearean-style set. Despite the simple set, the audience thoroughly enjoyed the play. Although there is much to be said about Shakespearean stage sets and their restoration, we should reserve discussion of that for another day.\n\nFROM MORI RINTAR\u014c (\u014cGAI), \"ENGEKI KAIRY\u014c RONJA NO HENKEN NI ODOROKU\" (SURPRISED BY THE PREJUDICE OF THEATER REFORMISTS), _SHIGARAMI-Z \u014cSHI_, OCTOBER 1889. REPRINTED IN _\u014c GAI ZENSH\u016a_, VOL. 22 (TOKYO: IWANAMI SHOTEN, 1973).\n\nAt the end of 1887, the government passed a law expelling antigovernment \"agitators\" ( _s \u014dshi_) from the Tokyo region. Many fled to Osaka, and one of them, Nakae Ch\u014dmin (1847\u20131901), a progressive political thinker, advised the agitators instead to criticize the government in theater performances. One of them, Sud\u014d Sadanori (1867\u20131907), followed Nakae's advice and produced a piece of agit-prop in Osaka in 1888, the year after Emperor Meiji's attendance at the kabuki performances. This agit-prop was called \"agitators' theater\" ( _s \u014dshi shibai_) and was political theater, all of whose performers were amateurs with almost no theatrical experience. Other agitator groups followed Sud\u014d's example. Kawakami Otojir\u014d (1864\u20131911), who boasted that he had been arrested more than a hundred times because of his denunciations of the government, started his agitator's theater in 1891 in Sakai, near Osaka, with the productions of _Useful Stories of Nation Building_ ( _Keikoku bidan_ ), an adaptation of the story of Thebes's revolt against Sparta in ancient Greece, and _The True Story of an Attack on Mr. Itagaki_ ( _Itagaki_ - _kun s \u014dnan jikki_). (Itagaki was the leader of the opposition party.) In bringing these productions to Tokyo later the same year, Kawakami became famous for being the first performer of agitators' theater there. He thus came to be regarded as the pioneer of a new theatrical form (later called _shinpa_ [new school]), even though Sudo Sadanori had always claimed to be the creator of this genre.\n\nWhat Kawakami himself preferred to call _shin-engeki_ (new theater) immediately became popular as a new type of theatrical performance. The audience was particularly attracted to the actors' inflammatory speech, which was addressed directly to them, and the realistic fighting scenes between the opposing political sides, in addition to Kawakami's popular finales of politically and socially satirical songs, called _oppekepe_.\n\nOther new theater people were not so politically minded but instead were eager to pursue a new style of theater outside kabuki. One such actor, Ii Y\u014dh\u014d (1871\u20131932), produced a new play, _A Lady_ ' _s Chastity: A Useful Story of Political Parties_ ( _Seit \u014d-bidan shukujo no misao_), written by the critic and playwright Yoda Gakkai (1833\u20131909), right after Kawakami's Tokyo debut. In this production a female actor, Chitose Beiha, a former geisha, appeared together with male actors. This was the first mixed-gender theater performance since the Tokugawa government in 1629 banned female actors from appearing together with male actors on stage. Later, Ii Y\u014dh\u014d became one of _shinpa_ 's most important actors.\n\nKawakami, however, gradually jettisoned his political radicalism as his popularity increased, and he even began to support the government. When the Sino-Japanese War began in 1894, Kawakami staged a nationalistic play, _The Sublime, Exhilarating Sino-Japanese War_ ( _S \u014dzetsu-kaizetsu Nisshin sens\u014d_), which was a great box-office hit. Eventually, the Kawakami Company went on tour to America and Europe, from April 1899 to January 1901 and again from April 1901 to September 1902.2\n\nKawakami Otojir\u014d and his wife, Sadayakko (1872\u20131946), charmed Western audiences with traditional dance and pseudo-kabuki acting. Sadayakko had been a geisha before she married Kawakami, so she had had some training in traditional dance. But she had never appeared on stage as a professional actress before the American and European tour. At first, she only accompanied her husband on this tour, but in San Francisco, where the Kawakami troupe first landed in the United States, she was urged by the producer to appear onstage to satisfy the curiosity of American audiences.3 Sadayakko continued to perform on tour, and her dancing became the talk of the town in New York and Paris, even attracting such prominent artists as Andr\u00e9 Gide and Pablo Picasso. Andr\u00e9 Antoine, the founder of Th\u00e9\u00e2tre libre, greatly praised Otojir\u014d's sensational _seppuku_ (ritual suicide), which actually had little relevance to the play he was in.\n\nIn contrast, the Kawakami Company's pseudo-kabuki performances looked phony and absurd to the Japanese who saw them in Europe. Consequently, the company's activities abroad were not seriously studied in Japan for a long time. But recently, some Western and Japanese scholars have begun to argue that Kawakami stimulated a new theater movement of symbolism and neo-romanticism in fin-de-si\u00e8cle Europe.\n\nIn 1903, the year after he returned to Tokyo, Kawakami staged three Shakespearean plays: _Othello_ , the court scene from _The Merchant of Venice_ , and _Hamlet_. Both _Othello_ and _Hamlet_ were set in Japan, so, for example, in _Othello_ , Cyprus became Taiwan, a Japanese colony at the time. But most of the characters' lines were faithful translations of the original, and the title of the play remained _Othello_. In these productions, Sadayakko played the heroine, marking her debut as an actress on the Japanese stage. The same year, 1903, two of the best-known kabuki actors, Ichikawa Danj\u016br\u014d IX and Onoe Kikugor\u014d V, died, and another, Ichikawa Sadanji I, died the following year. Many people felt that this was the end of traditional kabuki and that _shinpa_ would come to dominate the Japanese theater scene.\n\nThis turned out to be only half true, however. At the beginning of the twentieth century, _shinpa_ \u2014the offspring of the Kawakami Company's and Ii Y\u014dh\u014d's new theater\u2014gained great popularity with new melodramas that were adaptations of popular novels, such as _Demon Gold_ ( _Konjiki yasha_ , 1897\u20131902) by Ozaki K\u014dy\u014d (1867\u20131903), _Cuckoo_ ( _Hototogisu_ , 1898\u20131899) by Tokutomi Roka (1868\u20131927), _Foster Sisters_ ( _Chi-ky \u014ddai_, 1903) and _My Crime_ ( _Ono ga tsumi_ , 1899\u20131900) by Kikuchi Y\u016bh\u014d (1870\u20131947), and _A Woman_ ' _s Pedigree_ ( _Onna keizu_ , 1907) by Izumi Ky\u014dka (1873\u20131939). By the end of the Meiji period, however, _shinpa_ began to lose ground to a more modern theatrical style, called _shingeki_. Today _shinpa_ is performed only sporadically, in contrast to kabuki, which still is popular.\n\nToday some critics try to credit Kawakami, if not _shinpa_ , with the creation of _shingeki_ , but _shinpa_ was not entirely modern drama. Although Kawakami did call his Shakespearean productions \"straight drama\" ( _seigeki_ ), he removed most of the soliloquies, for he had no idea how to deliver them properly. He died in November 1911, at the age of forty-seven.\n\nIn the year that Kawakami died, Henrik Ibsen's _A Doll_ ' _s House_ was performed in translation in Japan by the Literary Society (Bungei ky\u014dkai), led by Tsubouchi Sh\u014dy\u014d. The first Ibsen production in translation had been staged two years earlier, in 1909: _John Gabriel Borkman_ , staged by the Free Theater (Jiy\u016b gekij\u014d), founded by Osanai Kaoru (1881\u20131928), a Tokyo Imperial University graduate, and Ichikawa Sadanji II (1880\u20131940), a progressive young kabuki actor. In this way, a new kind of modern drama in Japan was introduced.\n\nLITERARY AND PERFORMATIVE THEATER\n\nTheater can be divided into two aspects, variously termed \"inner\" and \"outer,\" \"literary\" and \"performative,\" or \"text\" and \"performance.\" In premodern times in both the West and the East, the text of a play and its performance were not as distinct as they are today. At that time, if a text was published, it was almost always after the performance, and the playwright always belonged, or was closely related, to a theater company. Only in modern times was a play written without being necessarily connected to a performance. (As we shall see in part IV, this premodern, or postmodern, relationship between text and performance has been reappraised in recent years.) Even though kabuki and _shinpa_ cannot strictly be called modern because their texts are closely linked to performance conventions, new types of plays were tried early in the Meiji era.\n\nExamples are the \"living history plays\" ( _katsurekimono_ ) and the \"crop-haired plays\" ( _zangirimono_ ), mentioned earlier. Kabuki and _shinpa_ adaptations of Western stories also were a great box-office draw, as were adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. When _All That Matters Is Money in the Time of Cherry Blossoms_ ( _Sakuradoki zeni no yononaka_ ) was performed by kabuki actors in Osaka in 1885, it was promoted as an adaptation of Shakespeare's _The Merchant of Venice_.\n\nAs the number of adaptations of Western plays to kabuki and _shinpa_ increased, however, there was a tendency to conceal as much as possible the play's foreign origin. That is, a work was regarded as successful if it appeared to be completely Japanese. This tradition continued into the twentieth century, and sometimes the playwright was even accused of stealing plots from foreign literature.\n\nThe version of Ibsen's _An Enemy of the People_ by Hanabusa Ry\u016bgai (1872\u20131906) is an example. It was performed in Tokyo in 1902 with Ibsen listed as the original author, the first performance in Japan of a play attributed to him. But the plot, about farmers protesting river pollution caused by the Ashio Copper Mine in Tochigi Prefecture, had almost nothing to do with Ibsen's original story.4 Clearly, although Hanabusa was a progressive playwright, he seems to have been more interested in attracting audiences through the use of Ibsen's name rather than his choice of what to perform.\n\nHANABUSA RY\u016aGAI\n\nI have heard that legislation regarding the theater will be submitted to the Diet this year. I think that a law to encourage theater would have no effect on its artistic development. Although I do not know the details, I read a report of it in this paper. I remember that the legislation includes a rule stipulating that more than one new play be staged each year. I would say that this is a ridiculous rule. No matter how many new plays might be staged, there is no merit in staging only superficially new plays. To demand that the ignorant producers of the current theater world to do so would be meaningless. The best way to reform the theater is to produce excellent actors and playwrights. The first step for that is to establish a theater that does not depend on financial profit. In this theater, the playwrights should be given enough time to develop. Elizabethan theater was formed with the support of the king. This also would be the best model for Japan's imperial theater, although building it now would be too difficult, for a variety of reasons. Therefore, first, a theater managed by the municipal government should be built, and top-notch writers should be supported, regardless of economic profit. Because the theater includes every kind of art form, it would take more than several decades to reach this final goal without such support. To hasten this process, public support would be the most effective. People have long tired of the current, tasteless, immature theater, and they complain of the lack of real pleasure in going to the theater. Nonetheless, the public pays attention to the material aspects of an enterprise, not its spiritual value, which has a profound effect on forming the character of Japanese people. I urge the authorities to consider this seriously.\n\nHANABUSA RY\u016aGAI, \"SHIRITSU GEKIJ\u014d WO KENSETSU SEYO!\" (ESTABLISH MUNICIPAL THEATERS!), _YOMIURI SHINBUN_ , NOVEMBER 29, 1903.\n\nLikewise, as mentioned earlier, Tsubouchi Sh\u014dy\u014d severely criticized the Theater Reform Society and advocated a kind of new drama. In 1894, he wrote _A Paulownia Leaf_ ( _Kiri hitoha_ ) as an example of the kind of new historical play that he had been advocating. The play is set at the start of the seventeenth century, in the final stage of the fall of the house of Toyotomi. This was a crucial turning point in Japanese history, and Sh\u014dy\u014d's goal was a modern psychological portrayal, especially of the main characters: Yodogimi and Katagiri Katsumoto. _A Paulownia Leaf_ was one of the earliest original plays written by an outsider for kabuki or _shinpa_ , although it was not staged until 1904, ten years later.\n\nTSUBOUCHI SH\u014cY\u014c\n\n... Now, what I believe is fundamentally lacking in our historical plays can be neatly summarized in three points. These three are nothing particular; perhaps most theatergoers have already noted them....\n\nThese three are\n\n1. The forms of epic and drama should be distinguished.\n\n2. The unity of interest should be observed.\n\n3. Characters should be the main cause for action.\n\n...\n\nThe above-stated three points all are based on the apparent difference between epic (or fiction) and drama. This common observation is my first proposal for the future historical play. It is true that reform of the theater has been proposed repeatedly since the Meiji Restoration. Indeed, it has been carried out to a small extent. But no substantial step has been taken in this direction. A few attempts toward theater reform were made in the so-called living history plays [ _katsureki-geki_ ] or agitators' theater [ _s \u014dshi-geki_] and in some plays by those authors who do not belong to established theaters. Likewise, some efforts have been made to reform ideas regarding stage directions, sets and costuming, new styles of speaking, and characterization. Nevertheless, they have generally neglected to make clear this fundamental distinction between epic and drama, nor have they made characters the main cause for dramatic action, and they have failed to create consistent interest for an entire play.\n\nFROM TSUBOUCHI SH\u014cY\u014c, \"WAGAKUNI NO SHIGEKI\" (OUR COUNTRY'S HISTORICAL DRAMA), _WASEDA BUNGAKU_ , APRIL 1894.\n\n_A Paulownia Leaf_ , together with Sh\u014dy\u014d's other historical plays, was nonetheless written in the style of kabuki. Such works were labeled _shinkabuki_ (new kabuki), which came to be recognized as a particular type of this classical theater. Besides Sh\u014dy\u014d, there were other _shinkabuki_ playwrights in the late Meiji era, such as Enomoto Torahiko (1866\u20131916), Oka Onitar\u014d (1872\u20131943), and Okamoto Kid\u014d (1872\u20131939), and, in the Taish\u014d era, Mayama Seika (1878\u20131948) and Hasegawa Shin (1884\u20131963). Kid\u014d's _The Tale of Shuzenji_ ( _Shuzenji monogatari_ , 1911) remains one of the most frequently performed kabuki plays. But regardless of their popularity, such plays did not mark the origin of modern drama in Japan because they are not entirely free from kabuki's performance conventions.\n\nKITAMURA T\u014cKOKU\n\n... What is unique to Japanese plays is the symmetrical harmony throughout a play. In music, sound effects, speeches, movements and behavior, dance, chanting, and in many other things, harmony is the core. Song is accompanied by movements of the legs and gestures by the hands, followed by various complicated demands. One part cannot be the whole, and the whole cannot be expressed by one part. Thus, our plays are in the service of symmetrical harmony. Without it no beauty would emerge....\n\nThere would be no complaints if poetic drama could attract enough readers outside the theater world. But if it is staged, such drama often has problems. Should, then, future writers of poetic drama be familiar with the inner situation of the theater world before they write a play? That would not be the way to produce a great dramatic poet. Such a rule instead would transform a great poet into a small poet. If the poets outside the theater world and the poets inside (conventional playwrights) are to work in different ways\u2014the former being engaged only with writing dramas and the latter with putting them on the stage\u2014a contradiction between the two would be unavoidable. I have come to realize that there is no way to eliminate the defective convention of symmetrical harmony in Japanese drama. [Therefore,] Japanese drama will have much difficulty in the future.\n\nFROM KITAMURA T\u014cKOKU, \"GEKISHI NO ZENTO IKAN?\" (WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF POETIC DRAMA?) _BUNGAKUKAI_ , DECEMBER 1893.\n\nAt the same time, many young writers, mostly poets, felt compelled to express, in the form of drama, their deep and complex feelings toward the new modern age. They wrote first under the influence of European, especially German and English, Romantic poets such as Goethe, Schiller, Byron, and Shelley. Christianity also had a great impact on many young writers at that time. In 1892, Kitamura T\u014dkoku (1868\u20131894) wrote a dramatic poem, _Mount H \u014drai: A Play_ ( _H \u014draikyoku_), that mixed Romantic and Christian ideas. In the poem, the young son of an aristocratic family wanders in the mountains seeking a place to die and, in death, finds the woman of his dreams. This dramatic poem was not intended to be performed and, indeed, was not staged until 1964. But it is regarded as the first attempt, under the influence of modern Western literature, to portray a genuinely modern character, here patterned after Byron's _Manfred_ (1817).\n\nT\u014dkoku's _Mount H \u014drai: A Play_ was the inspiration for Shimazaki T\u014dson's (1872\u20131943) play _The Biwa Player: An Elegy_ ( _Hikyoku biwa_ - _h \u014dshi_, 1893). T\u014dson started out as a poet, and his first anthology, _Seedlings_ ( _Wakanash \u016b_, 1897), was praised as a prime example of Japanese romanticism. After the turn of the century, however, T\u014dson began to write naturalist novels and became much interested in Ibsen. It is said that T\u014dson recommended Ibsen's _John Gabriel Borkman_ to Osanai Kaoru for the Free Theater's opening play in 1909. Mori \u014cgai, the translator of _John Gabriel Borkman_ , also wrote original drama. His romantic _River Ikuta_ ( _Ikutagawa_ , 1910) draws on a story from classical literature about a girl who, courted by two men, dies because she cannot choose between them. The story is based on a legend in the _Man_ ' _y \u014dsh\u016b_, the earliest collection of Japanese poetry. Furthermore, Kan'ami, who created the artistic form of n\u014d in the fourteenth century, is thought to have dramatized this story in the n\u014d play _Motomezuka_. But \u014cgai's drama, unlike _Motomezuka_ , ends before the girl commits suicide, thus suggesting a new life for her. This short one-act play, whose dialogue is simple and poetic, could be said in retrospective to be a forerunner of Mishima Yukio's modern n\u014d plays written after World War II.\n\nIn Europe, a new strain of romanticism emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, mitigating to some extent naturalism's dominance in literature. But naturalism and neo-romanticism were introduced into Japanese literature almost simultaneously, so from the outset modern Japanese drama was tinged by both romantic and naturalist styles. A typical example of a playwright who was influenced by both is Iwano H\u014dmei (1973\u20131920), who advocated \"mysterious semianimalism\" ( _shinpiteki han-j \u016b-shugi_) and wrote a play about a lustful woman, _Tongues of Flame_ ( _Hon \u014d no shita_, 1906).\n\nNevertheless, it was naturalism, or realism, that opened a totally new vista for modern drama in Japan. Productions of Ibsen's _John Gabriel Borkman_ and _A Doll_ ' _s House_ in 1909 and 1911, respectively, prompted young writers in this field to turn to drama as a literary form. It was also at this time that a political event shocked the general public. In 1910, a number of leftists and their sympathizers were suddenly arrested for plotting to assassinate the emperor. The political philosopher K\u014dtoku Sh\u016bsui (1871\u20131911) and several others were sentenced to death and hastily executed in January 1911, even though many of the accused clearly were innocent. This so-called high treason case ( _taigyaku jiken_ ) had a great impact on young writers.\n\nThe Ibsen productions spawned an amazing number of works that can be seen as forerunners of modern realist drama. Examples are a pseudo-Ibsen play about hereditary sickness, _A Fiend for Pleasure_ ( _Kanraku no oni_ , 1910) by Nagata Hideo (1885\u20131949); a family play, _Izumiya Dye House_ ( _Izumiya somemonoten_ , 1911) by Kinoshita Mokutar\u014d (1885\u20131945); a play about Robespierre and the ghost of Danton, _An Incorruptible Madman_ ( _Fuhai-subekarazaru ky \u014djin_, 1911) by K\u014dri Torahiko (1890\u20131924); and plays by the first two female playwrights in Japan, _One Afternoon_ ( _Aruhi no gogo_ , 1912) by Hasegawa Shigure (1879\u20131941), about a strong-willed country girl, and _The Boxwood Comb_ ( _Tsuge no kushi_ , 1912), about a comb maker and his wife, by Okada Yachiyo (1883\u20131962). (See \"Japanese Women Playwrights\" in part II.) Among these plays, _Izumiya Dye House_ \u2014whose author was a scientist and well known for his lyrical poems\u2014was perhaps the first to allude to the high-treason case. All these playwrights were young, and none of them was connected to either the kabuki or the _shinpa_ world. Their plays thus forecast the truly modern drama of the Taish\u014d era, which began in 1912.\n\nTHE COMPOSITION OF THIS ANTHOLOGY\n\nMost of the plays in _The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama_ are _shingeki_ and its successors in the twentieth century. The book has six parts. Part I contains plays in the period from the first Ibsen productions to the Great Kant\u014d Earthquake of 1923, covering most of the Taish\u014d era (1912\u20131926). During this time, many young writers became interested in playwriting and helped establish modern Japanese drama ( _shingeki_ ), although many of their plays were performed by kabuki or _shinpa_ actors.\n\nPart II covers the period from 1924 to 1940. In 1924, a year after the Great Kant\u014d Earthquake, the Tsukiji Little Theater (Tsukiji sh\u014dgekij\u014d) was founded and produced genuine _shingeki_ , which dominated modern Japanese theater until around the 1970s. During this period, proletarian theater also became popular, reflecting the worldwide leftist theater movement after the Russian Revolution. By the 1930s, however, this movement was severely suppressed by the government as Japan became increasingly militaristic.\n\nPart III deals with plays during and after World War II. Because of their leftist tendencies, however, most _shingeki_ companies were forced to disband during the war. Then, after Japan was defeated in 1945, the Occupation forces (dominated by the United States) made Japan into a democracy, and the _shingeki_ companies were again allowed to do what they wanted. This was _shingeki_ 's golden age. Even so, its theatrical form and stance did not change much and continued to follow Western theater in both drama and performance.\n\nThe plays in part IV are from the period beginning in the late 1960s, when _shingeki_ had become orthodoxy and was being viciously criticized by the newly emerging avant-garde theater. This backlash against _shingeki_ is called _angura_ in Japanese, an abbreviation of \"underground.\" The _angura_ movement was clearly antirealist and is usually divided into first, second, and third generations, roughly corresponding to the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.\n\nMany of the playwrights in these three generations, including those of orthodox _shingeki_ , continued to be active during this period. But in the last decade of the twentieth century, a new wave of young playwrights suddenly emerged. They could not be called _angura_ playwrights, for most of their plays seemed to return to the realism of everyday life. Their plays are in part V. They still are at the forefront of theater activities in Japan, although even newer types of plays have been appearing in the first decade of the twenty-first century.\n\nFinally, although the history of theater usually focuses on new theater movements and trends and often neglects popular theater ( _taish \u016b engeki_), popular theater is, in fact, the mainstream in regard to the size of the audiences it draws. Accordingly, we offer examples of modern popular theater in part VI.\n\nMITSUYA MORI\n\n1. Harue Tsutsumi, \"Kabuki Encounters the West: Morita Kan'ya's Shintomi-za Productions, 1878\u20131879\" (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Dissertation Services, ProQuest [BA76372061], 2005).\n\n2. The Kawakami troupe's tour in abroad is meticulously documented in Joseph L. Anderson, _Enter a Samurai: Kawakami Otojir \u014d and Japanese Theater in the West_, 2 vols. (Tucson: Wheatmark, 2011).\n\n3. This is the legendary story of how Sadayakko became an actress in America. But in preparation for the tour, Sadayakko did perform a kabuki dance piece on stage in Osaka. Some critics therefore assumed that Kawakami had foreseen an occasion on which Sadayakko would appear on stage in the United States.\n\n4. The Ashio Copper Mine, located in Ashio, Tochigi Prefecture, was the cause of serious pollution in the 1880s, which was severely criticized by Tanaka Sh\u014dz\u014d, a Diet member.\n\nThe productions of Henrik Ibsen's _John Gabriel Borkman_ , by Osanai Kaoru's Free Theater in 1909, and of _A Doll_ ' _s House_ , by Tsubouchi Sh\u014dy\u014d's Literary Society in 1912, marked the birth of modern drama and theater in Japan. This birth may have taken a longer and more convoluted course than that of fiction in Japan, but it would be a mistake to overlook its impact on Japanese culture. Early productions of Ibsen and other European playwrights in the first decade or so of the twentieth century brought about not just the modernization of Japanese theater but (in the words of one playwright, Mafune Yutaka), the very \"theatricalization of the modern spirit.\"1 By the time of his death in 1906, Ibsen was already the subject of intense interest and debate in the Japanese intelligentsia, and his works had spawned a new movement, naturalism, that had shaken Japanese literature to its foundations, informing the work of such novelists as Tayama Katai and Shimazaki T\u014dson. Ibsen's influence impressed on a generation of Japanese the idea that theater and drama could create a ground for the exchange of artistic, social, and political ideas. Toward the end of the Meiji era, the audiences for Ibsen's plays in Japan represented almost a _Who's Who_ of the country's intellectuals, both men and also many of the \"new women\" ( _atarashii onna_ ), for whom characters like Nora had become the subject of much debate. This was also a movement led by the young: Osanai Kaoru, one of its spearheads, was a mere twenty-nine years old when his Free Theater opened with _Borkman_. Sh\u014dy\u014d, like Mori \u014cgai, represented an older generation, but it was their students, people like Osanai and Shimamura H\u014dgetsu, who were to determine the direction for the culture of the Taish\u014d era (1912\u20131926).\n\nTHE IMPORTANCE OF THE PLAYWRIGHT\n\nIn the final years of the Meiji period (1868\u20131912), drama came into its own as a literary genre, paving the way for what Japanese critics have called the age of \"Taish\u014d drama.\" Although Japan could boast a great tradition of works written for the stage, drama remained largely just a pretext for performance. Ibsen showed, however, that drama could be a medium for the personal expression of its author.\n\nMorita S\u014dhei's (1881\u20131949; pen name of Morita Yonematsu, a novelist and translator of Western literature) impressions were typical of many other writers of his generation. The Free Theater's production of _Borkman_ inspired nearly every writer of this time (including Izumi Ky\u014dka and Kikuchi Kan, whose works are featured in part I, and Yamamoto Y\u016bz\u014d) to try their hand at writing plays. Indeed, the critic \u014cyama Isao listed as many as eighty professional playwrights active in the first four decades of the twentieth century. The leading literary magazines of the day\u2014 _New Tides of Thought_ ( _Shinshich \u014d_), _The Pleiades_ ( _Subaru_ ), _Central Review_ ( _Ch \u016b\u014d k\u014dron_), _Literary Annals_ ( _Bungei shunj \u016b_), and _New Fiction_ ( _Shinsh \u014dsetsu_), to name a few\u2014published plays, and several new magazines appeared that were devoted almost exclusively to theater and drama, including _Kabuki_ , _Entertainment Illustrated_ ( _Engei gah \u014d_), _New Entertainment_ ( _Shin-engei_ ), and _New Tides in Theater_ ( _Engeki shinch \u014d_). These journals' publication of new drama and fiction certainly helped determine the length of new works, so short stories and one-act plays flourished during this period. The pace of modern life also was reflected in the brevity of such forms. Kikuchi Kan, the most successful playwright of this time, noted that not only do truly dramatic events occur rarely in life and are brief in duration but modern audiences cannot spend long hours in the theater, \"making it all the more essential that the playwright gets his point across in as little time as he can.\"2 Accordingly, the one-act became the quintessential form of the modern age.\n\nMORITA S\u014cHEI\n\nI heard spectators criticize the performance for lacking something, that the acting was weak, but none of that troubled me at all. That the actors were poor or deficient in any way was no concern of mine because I could make up for that. Rather, it would have been a problem if they were good. Were they too good, their personalities would have got in the way of what I imagined, breaking the illusion I had created of them in my own mind. That was my impression. particularly of the actors who played Forder and Erhart; the others acted, I thought, to the best of their abilities.\n\nBut that's enough about the actors. I am no critic of good or bad acting, nor do I take any pleasure in speaking about it. But I expected worse, so it was good enough. Perhaps I am wrong in thinking it was good enough. But it's not worth talking about the actors here. Theater stands or falls on its script, so do not go on about the art of acting to me. [...]\n\nAnd so I say the Free Theater's first production was a great success, far more than anticipated. And this was thanks to neither the acting nor the setting, but all due directly to Ibsen himself. Credit thus should go to the two men who brought Ibsen's drama to Japan: to Osanai Kaoru and Ichikawa Sadanji.\n\nFROM MORITA S\u014cHEI, \"HAIY\u016a MUY\u014cRON\" (NO NEED FOR ACTORS), _TOKYO ASAHI SHINBUN_ , DECEMBER 12, 1909.\n\nDRAMA AND PERFORMANCE\n\nFor Morita S\u014dhei and most of his contemporaries, modern drama, even in performance, could be an essentially literary experience that put the audience in direct touch with the author. The performer could either facilitate or get in the way of this experience, but in any case, the reception of the new drama revealed a new critical hierarchy in which the playwright was the god, the director his priest, and the actor the servant to the written message.\n\nAlthough many plays written during this period remained on the page as essentially literary forms of expression (for example, Izumi Ky\u014dka's original plays were never performed during his lifetime), the new drama led to an interest in and, indeed, demanded new techniques for realization on stage. Indeed, the modernization of Japanese theater was a far more complicated task than simply publishing a new work in a literary magazine. New drama required a new theater. It required theater buildings, a cast and crew of artists, and an audience that could support the considerable financial outlay needed to produce the plays. Despite the government's efforts to spearhead theater reform in the 1880s, there was no real public support for it in Japan until well after World War II. Although a host of theater companies sprang up to perform these new plays, with kabuki and _shinpa_ actors eager to stage both Japanese and translated drama, it increasingly was felt that kabuki and _shinpa_ , with their use of such conventions as _onnagata_ (female impersonators), were anathema to the more realist aesthetic of the new theater. The actors' training was especially an issue for the two companies credited with being the vanguards of new drama in Japan: Osanai's Free Theater and Sh\u014dy\u014d's Literary Society.\n\nKOMIYA TOYOTAKA\n\nSince the actors of the Literary Society have no background in either kabuki or _shinpa_ , they are obliged to create new _forms_ [ _kata_ ] as a style of self-expression\u2014this is cause for the actor's freedom, his joy and his pain. For at the same time that he is attempting to invent a new theater, in order to give life to his interpretation of the stage character, he also must create a _kata_ flowing with a life that is a distillation of the relationship between his own sensibility and the form and voice of what he aims to express. I am sad to say, however, that the _kata_ that most of these gentlemen have chosen\u2014the relationship between _form_ and _feeling_ , in other words\u2014is incomplete; it lacks luster and individuality. Maybe they will be all right in the future, but right now they cannot stand comparison with the actors of the Free Theater; they have failed to achieve a match of intent with expression. They have created no better than a dead _form_ , a shallow stereotype that falls short of their interpretation.\n\nFROM KOMIYA TOYOTAKA, \"JIY\u016a GEKIJ\u014c TO BUNGEI KY\u014cKAI\" (THE FREE THEATER AND THE LITERARY SOCIETY), _SHINSH \u014cSETSU_, JUNE 1912.\n\nShould we attempt to train rank amateurs or, instead, use professional actors and hope that they adapt to the new style of acting? Osanai addressed this question in an open letter to Ichikawa Danko,3 the actor who played Erhart in _Borkman_ :\n\nThe most urgent tasks in the theater today are, on the one hand, to \"make amateur actors into professionals\" and, on the other, to \"make professional actors into amateurs.\" It seems that Dr. T. [Tsubouchi] and S. H. [Shimamura H\u014dgetsu] are aiming at the first course. We will pursue the second. These two alternative courses should progress strictly in parallel, without ever converging. The degree of despair at present-day actors must be the same, in both those who aim at the first and those who pursue the second....\n\nRecently, in answer to a statement of mine that \"drama is not all pleasure,\" you wrote in a letter, \"But surely it is not all pain, either?\"\u2014quite a natural question. Challenges like this have come from many quarters, not only from you.\n\nI thought I had explained this by distinguishing between purely pleasurable entertainment and artistic entertainment. I meant to say that it was not a function of drama to provide purely pleasurable entertainment; it was the function of drama to provide artistic entertainment. Entertainment is, of course, entertainment, but artistic entertainment is not as easygoing as purely pleasurable entertainment.4\n\nFor some, like Osanai, the greatest challenge for the New Theater was training actors, but for others, like the playwright Mayama Seika, there would be no revolution in the theater until play texts of sufficient quality were produced. In truth, both were essential, but this \"chicken and egg\" debate over text versus performance exercised the minds of Japanese intellectuals from at least the 1880s until the late 1920s, with dramatists like \u014cgai and Seika advocating \"first the play, then the performance,\" while directors like Osanai reversed this formula in stressing acting and direction over script. Indeed, the debate over text versus performance is perennial, as we have seen since the 1960s with the interest in performance studies, or in the reaction against _shingeki_ 's \"overly literary\" tendency.\n\nTRANSLATED VERSUS NATIVE DRAMA\n\nThe paradigms of modern drama, just like those for Japan's modernization, were imported and, indeed, even felt by some to be as much an imposition on the Japanese people as the unequal trade treaties. It is no surprise, then, that translations of drama played a crucial but also ambivalent role in transforming Japan's theater in the Meiji and Taish\u014d eras. Ibsen may have led the way, but he was accompanied by translations of a host of other European playwrights, including William Shakespeare, Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg, Gerhart Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmanstahl, Maurice Maeterlinck, Frank Wedekind, Oscar Wilde, John Synge, and George Bernard Shaw. Mori \u014cgai, who played a key role in the modernization of Japanese culture, published two volumes of translations of one-act plays in 1909 and 1910, following up with a third volume of his own one-acts in 1912. Mafune Yutaka remarked that these anthologies were considered a bible for the young Japanese playwrights of that day.\n\nBy the end of Meiji, the European works translated by \u014cgai and others give us an idea of the incredible variety of Western drama that suddenly became accessible to Japanese. With so much\u2014and from so many periods, languages, cultures, and genres\u2014flooding into Japan around this time, just as Japanese were becoming accustomed to one style or idea they were struck by yet another. It thus was inevitable that Japanese readers and audiences were, for the most part, oblivious of these plays' historical and social context and the artistic debates that they sparked in Europe. What had been a diachronic development in Europe became flattened into a confusing homeostasis in which contesting forms\u2014lyric and spoken drama, romanticism, naturalism, realism, symbolism, and expressionism\u2014came to coexist in Japan. The sheer force and volume of these translations were such that European culture could no longer be altered to suit a stable Japanese culture but instead became the agent for the transformation of Japanese culture. By the Taish\u014d era, the modernization of theater had passed from an age of freewheeling adaptations ( _hon_ ' _an_ ) of Shakespeare and other Western playwrights' works to one in which faithful translations ( _hon_ ' _yaku_ ) of European drama were slavishly performed with an eye to being as \"authentic\" as possible.\n\nSHIMAMURA H\u014cGETSU\n\nThe value of translated drama has been discussed time and again, and people have come to more or less a consensus on the matter. Theater circles in Japan cannot go on worshipping translated drama forever. The Japanese must create their own modern drama in opposition to translated drama; they must overcome it. This is needed not only from an artistic standpoint but also for patriotic reasons. Even in foreign countries, a nation's art arises in concert with patriotic movements in politics and society. In Germany in the past, and Ireland at present, movements to liberate art have gone hand in hand with movements for the liberation of politics and language. So, considering that such external and extracultural forces have an impact on creation, the Japanese can draw much artistic material from their own society. I refer here not simply to such superficial matters as distinctions in dress or deportment. Such distinctions between Japanese and foreigners regarding their thoughts and feelings today are no real barrier; indeed, people have largely forgotten about such things, regarding them as matters of individual differences. Rather, what I mean here are those aspects that, over and above what has already been mentioned, make a Japanese work of art feel somehow more congenial to us. Were we to take only fiction as an example, it would be readily apparent that it is more a question of the work's being pleasing to us that we feel close to its sensibility, rather than a matter of its being superior or inferior in aesthetic terms. And the same must apply to a play as well. Unfortunately, however, in a very real sense modern drama has not yet been staged in Japan. Thus we have not even had a chance to experience such a sense of identification with any work for the theater. I wish that we could soon experience the like, and for that reason, I hope to soon see a flourishing of native Japanese drama. When I talk about identification with a work, what I mean is a feeling that one's desire to see oneself has been fulfilled, that the Japanese people have been able to see themselves portrayed onstage. It is the feeling of satisfaction, of intimacy in seeing oneself. It goes without saying that this ability to see oneself has been a major feature of all modern art, but when a person, a Japanese, attempts to discover himself in a work of art from a foreign country, one has the sense of being overwhelmed by strangers on all sides.\n\nFROM SHIMAMURA H\u014cGETSU, \"ATARASHII GEKIDAN NO RONGI\" (DEBATES OVER THE NEW THEATER), _KABUKI_ , JUNE 1913.\n\nIn a very real sense, in Japan the history of _shingeki_ became a history of the performance of _foreign_ drama. To the extent that _shingeki_ was a social and political as well as an artistic revolution, there was an expectation that not only theatrical conventions but also traditional thought and behavior would be abandoned for modern, supposedly more \"civilized,\" European values and ways of life. If the model for modernity was increasingly a Western one, it created nearly insurmountable challenges, both artistic and existential, for the Japanese. Can foreign modes of feeling, thought, behavior, and speech ever be assimilated? Should they? What happens to our own identity when we attempt to be someone else, especially someone of another race? How can a modern theater portray contemporary Japanese if everyone on stage is supposed to be a Westerner?\n\nEven as a purely artistic project, Japanese could not learn to emulate the Western masters overnight. For Osanai, Japanese playwrights were still incapable of writing \"social dramas\" ( _shakaigeki_ ) of the caliber of Ibsen, and in his open letter to Danko, he called for a \"true age of the foreign play in translation.\" As we shall see, Osanai once again favored foreign over domestic drama in his inauguration of the Tsukiji Little Theater in 1924, earning considerable enmity from many of his compatriots and colleagues. Two-thirds of the productions by both the Free Theater and the Literary Society were of European drama, and this proportion rose to as much as 80 percent with the Tsukiji Little Theater fifteen years later, at a time when drama was flourishing as a literary genre in Japan. The frustration of Japanese playwrights, whose own work was repeatedly snubbed for productions of foreign drama, can be well imagined.\n\nTHE ELEMENTS OF MODERN DRAMA\n\nKishida Kunio, considered by many as Japan's greatest playwright of the early twentieth century, claimed in 1923 that his country's playwrights \"were able to acquire almost nothing of substance from the influence of foreign drama.\"5 Certainly, the \"anxiety of influence\" delayed, and even distorted, the direction that modern Japanese drama would take, but its features were, at the very least, inspired by translated drama from the West. Ibsen and his contemporaries taught Japanese playwrights that drama could be an author's forum for illustrating social problems and exploring ideas and possible solutions. To do so required a strong theme and well-constructed plots, with psychologically delineated characters in conflict with their feelings, their peers, and their social environment.\n\nKIKUCHI KAN\n\nWhat's that? You're telling me that the plot of Kikuchi Kan's play _Father Returns_ resembles a one-act play by Gilbert Canna? You censure me! Yet your example needn't range so far afield as that. There is another one much closer at hand. It's the novel by my friend Mizumori Kamenosuke, _The Father Who Returns._ He describes there the human circumstances in which a mother takes her two sons and her daughter, in order to wait for their dissolute father, who has left their home, presenting a situation understandable all around the world. And if someone here in Japan thinks that such circumstances could arise only in another country, so that if a Japanese playwright were to use such a topic, peculiar rumors could circulate about a work that he or she has only half digested, insisting that \"it's just a copy!\" well, _there_ ' _s_ a situation that in fact could occur only in Japan.\n\nWanting to put an end to all this, let me repeat this one more time. The same is true for a play or for a novel: the subject matter and the circumstances presented do not by themselves constitute the purpose. It is the theme that arises from these that is important. It is this theme that can reveal the writer's understanding, his outlook on life, and his conception of human feelings, which the writer can freely make use of through his artistic technique. Such constitutes the true substance of his accomplishment. To articulate such things is scarcely necessary for those who have at least some understanding of the arts. To make an issue of the plot of a novel or play, or such things, is to set up a straw man.\n\nFROM KIKUCHI KAN, \"GEKI NO SUJI OYOBI KY\u014cG\u016a\" (THE PLOT AND THE SITUATION IN DRAMA), _SHINBUNGAKU_ , APRIL 1921.\n\nAs Kikuchi Kan's remarks indicate, the themes of modern drama spoke to all people, regardless of race or culture, especially in their growing experience of modernity. In the drama of this period, the family typically stands for a society under stress, and all the plays presented in part I deal with marital or intergenerational discord. In _Father Returns_ , we see the inability of an older generation to adapt to the radical changes of modern society, as well as the increasing distrust of the patriarchy of Meiji Japan when a son rejects his feckless father. In their exploration of sexual desire and adultery, the plays by Izumi Ky\u014dka are representative of the growing cynicism and taste for decadence among many writers of this generation. A major development in works of this period\u2014indeed, one of the hallmarks of modern literature\u2014is a growing interiority and complexity in characterization. The aim of traditional theater had been to present types\u2014representative members of different social classes, ages, and genders; paragons of heroism and virtue; or caricatures of vice\u2014engaged in melodramatic displays of public struggle in which good usually triumphed over evil. The new drama, however, just like the society it reflected, was more morally ambivalent. People, portrayed for the first time as individuals, had to stand or fall on their own judgment and resources in a world in which old certainties and values no longer supported them. The rising urban middle class was a favorite subject for this theater, not least because these characters were close to the experience of the young intellectuals who wrote and saw these plays, but also because more and more members of the working class and provincials were included.\n\nRealism may have become the mark of modernity in drama as in fiction, but it was not a stable expressive mode. For decades, the increasing focus on psychological characterization presented both artistic and ideological challenges for playwrights. On the one hand, the Ibsenesque \"social dramas\" advocated by people like Osanai pointed to a more politically committed theater that regarded psychological family dramas as bourgeois. On the other hand, many playwrights were finding that naturalism and realism failed to adequately describe the depths of human experience. The exploration of personal relationships and extreme emotions promoted styles of drama inspired by the symbolist and expressionist experiments of European playwrights like Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Georg Kaiser, and Ernst Toller. Whether projected against society or inward on oneself, conflict is often considered a sine qua non of drama. But as many have noted, Japanese society typically avoids conflict whenever it can, so many Japanese playwrights in the early twentieth century felt the focus on discord in European drama as somehow unnatural. Maeterlinck's _drames statiques_ \u2014plays more like still lifes, quiet portrayals of mental states\u2014were found by many like \u014cgai, Kinoshita Mokutar\u014d, and Yoshii Isamu to be a more congenial form than Ibsen's argumentative plays. If many Japanese stage characters seemed not to change or undergo a fundamental awakening of consciousness, this might have been less a failure on the dramatist's part than an assertion that such reversals and recognitions were not an accurate picture of what life really was like.\n\nKikuchi Kan and Yamamoto Y\u016bz\u014d have been credited with being the greatest innovators of theme and structure in modern Japanese drama. A third feature that made the plays of this period \"new\" was language, requiring dramatic diction to be reformed before the theater of this period could be called modern. The rhetoric of modernity was resolved by being divided into two forms, confession and dialogue. Confession became the model for the \"I-novel,\" the \"pure\" literature of early-twentieth-century Japanese fiction, and spoken dialogue became the medium of modern drama. As was the case with _genbun itchi_ (the unification of the spoken and written languages) in Japanese fiction, such fundamental reform took decades. We have seen that the first move in this direction was the call for \"straight drama\" by people like Kawakami Otojir\u014d and Mori \u014cgai. For such reformers, modern drama required the eradication of narrative, lyrical, musical, or choreographic elements in favor of spoken dialogue as almost the sole medium of expression. Few languages in the modern world have undergone such radical change as Japanese has over the past century or so. The language of kabuki, for example, was not standard Japanese but a local dialect of the Edo (present-day Tokyo) urbanite, nor was it how people actually spoke but, rather, a highly rhythmic and patterned style of declamation created expressly for the theater to accentuate the force and beauty of its actors. We see in the translations of Shakespeare and the original plays by Sh\u014dy\u014d, \u014cgai, and others during the Meiji era their attempts to discover a modern idiom for the stage. Intriguingly, these attempts trace the development of the Japanese language of drama from the traditional theaters of n\u014d and _ky \u014dgen_, through _j \u014druri_ and kabuki, to something that began to echo how modern Japanese people actually spoke. Initially, translated drama was the model of the new dramatic idiom as well, but increasingly playwrights realized that Japanese people did not speak in the same way as did the characters in Ibsen's, Chekhov's, or Shaw's plays. Instead, the characters in many early Taish\u014d plays often speak stiffly, as if laboring under the influence of their European models or the effort to express their creators' ideas, but in the best work of this period we begin to hear the living voices of people not so different from ourselves.\n\nM. CODY POULTON\n\n1. Quoted in Gioia Ottaviani, \"The Shingeki Movement Until 1930: Its Experience in Western Approaches,\" in _Rethinking Japan_ , vol. 1, _Literature, Visual Arts, and Linguistics_ , ed. Adriana Boscaro, Franco Gatti, and Massimo Raveri (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), 178.\n\n2. Kikuchi Kan, \"Ichimakumono ni tsuite,\" _Engeki shinch \u014d_ 1, no. 2 (1924): 3.\n\n3. Later known as Ennosuke, this actor also played the title character in Kikuchi Kan's _Father Returns_.\n\n4. Osanai Kaoru, \"Letter to Actor D,\" _Engei gah \u014d_, January 1909.\n\n5. Kishida Kunio, \"Taiwa saseru jutsu,\" quoted in Sait\u014d Yasuhide, \"Gikyokuron kara mita kindaigeki,\" _Higeki kigeki_ 43, no. 8 (1990): 30.\n_KERRIA JAPONICA_\n\nIZUMI KY\u014cKA\n\nTRANSLATED BY M. CODY POULTON\n\nIzumi Ky\u014dka, _Kerria Japonica_ , directed by Nakamura Takao, Parco Part 3, September 1992.\n\nKnown for his rich and poetic prose style, Izumi Ky\u014dka (1873\u20131939) wrote romances and fantasies that challenged the work of his contemporaries and that, with the rise of naturalism as a literary movement, tended to be simpler, more direct and realistic, and even autobiographical. Ky\u014dka's inspiration came from predominantly traditional sources\u2014folklore, n\u014d and kabuki theater, the illustrated fiction of the Edo era\u2014but his literature already anticipated the decadent turn in Japanese culture in the Taish\u014d era. He attracted an avid following of younger writers like Tanizaki Jun'ichir\u014d and Kawabata Yasunari, and, even later, Mishima Yukio, Kara J\u016br\u014d, and Terayama Sh\u016bji. In fact, from as early as the mid-1890s, the _shinpa_ theater adapted many of Ky\u014dka's novels to the stage. (See his _Nihonbashi_ and a discussion of _shinpa_ theater in part VI.) Primarily a novelist, as were many of his contemporaries, Ky\u014dka also wrote many plays, mostly during the Taish\u014d era. Many of these original works, like _Demon Pond_ ( _Yasha ga ike_ ) and _The Castle Tower_ ( _Tenshu monogatari_ ), are unbridled fantasies with supernatural characters and elements drawn from ghost stories and legends. Although most of them were never performed in his lifetime, thanks to revivals since the 1960s by the kabuki actor Band\u014d Tamasabur\u014d V and various avant-garde stage artists like Ninagawa Yukio and Miyagi Satoshi, these plays have become the favorites of Ky\u014dka's works and are, in many respects, more accessible to a modern Japanese public than his fiction, which is difficult to read.\n\n_Kerria Japonica_ ( _Yamabuki_ , 1923) is an exception to much of Ky\u014dka's original work for the stage, in that all the characters are human, yet the play displays touches of the grotesque and decadent that can be found in his wildest fantasies. A favorite of Mishima Yukio, who said of it that all the people it portrays are in fact monsters, the play is a study of obsessive love. It was first staged in 1978.\n\n_How like a lovely woman fresh from her bath_ ( _her dark eyebrows, faint mountain crescents_ ) _are the white blooms of the kerria rose, strikingly pale against their deep green leaves damp with rain!_\n\nTime: The present. A morning in late April.\n\nPlace: A back alley in Shuzenji hot spring. Later, also in Shuzenji, a shortcut in the woods to the road to Shimoda.\n\nCharacters\n\nAn ARTIST, Shimazu Tadashi, forty-five or forty-six years old\n\nA LADY, Nuiko, Viscountess Koitogawa, formerly the daughter of the proprietor of the restaurant Yukari, age twenty-five\n\nA traveling PUPPETEER, Heguri T\u014dji, age sixty-nine\n\nA YOUNG BOY and GIRL, festival pages. A SHOPKEEPER of a general store. A GROOM. Fourteen or fifteen VILLAGERS\n\nSCENE 1\n\n_A general store. On one side are three double-petaled cherry trees in full bloom. Inside the closed glass doors of the store are a variety of products for sale_ : _cotton batting, paper, bolts of cloth, dried shiitake mushrooms, patent medicines, soft drinks, and the like. In the earthen entrance, with its door open, are some chairs and a table laid with beer, juice, a keg of sak\u00e9 covered in straw matting, and a bottle of_ sh\u014dch\u016b. _Right beside the store is a rice paddy._\n\n_To the other side of the store is a hedge of cedar over a low stone wall, beneath which flows a small stream. Saffron flowers and weeds grow in the wall. Behind the hedge is a willow in fresh green leaf, its branches drooping over the path. A purple magnolia in blossom would also look good in the background. There is a path between the store and the hedge. The rice paddy, which has not yet been tilled, is covered with green waterweeds. Here and there bloom milk vetch and mustard blossoms. Following the path along the hedge, farther on is a bamboo grove and a tall zelkova tree, in whose shadows the path disappears up the mountain._\n\n_The_ PUPPETEER _is seated, his back to the audience, at the squalid-looking table at the earthen storefront. As he speaks, he rubs his upper lip._\n\nPUPPETEER: Master\u2014Kind master! Pour me another, won't you?\n\nSHOPKEEPER ( _Enters the storefront from behind the glass partition_ ): Why, there ain't no need to be calling me \"kind\"! A simple sir will do me fine. ( _Smiles wryly_.) Don't you think the sun's high enough yet, old man? How do you expect to make a living if you drink like that?\n\nPUPPETEER: Hah, hah, hah. I've done with work for the day already. Pardon me for saying so, but once I'm through here, I'll just stagger off to my little nest in the woods.\n\nSHOPKEEPER: You needn't tell me how unsteady your legs will be, but it's a bit too early to be heading back to that nest of yours!\u2014I have to mind the store today on me own, but this side of the bridge to the public baths don't see much traffic compared to the crush of visitors in Shuzenji. Now's when you ought to be making money.\n\nPUPPETEER: Right you are. First the locals, then the pilgrims from all over the country\u2014aunties and grannies, grandpas with their grandkids, swarms of them, black as the smoke rising from the ritual bonfires, undaunted by cloudbursts like the monsoons of summer.\u2014And then, the boom! boom! of festival drums have drowned out the tinkle-tinkle coming from the little sideshow tents\u2014why would anybody want to come way over here? Cross the bridge, and so long customers! Hah, hah!\u2014I can ply my trade come evening and make some money, but I've earned enough right now for a drink or two, and I don't need no more than that.\u2014And if worse comes to worst, well then, just let me die here. ( _Bows deeply, bumping his head hard against the glass pane._ )\u2014Kind master, pour me another drink!\n\nSHOPKEEPER: You're just like a dying sailor begging Davy Jones to give him water. Maybe that's where the expression \"bottomless cup\" came from.... Drink as much as you like. It's my business, after all. ( _Wipes the neck of the bottle._ )\u2014Just don't go smashing the merchandise there, old man.\n\nPUPPETEER: Let me die in peace. ( _Gulps down the drink and laps up what_ ' _s left on the palm of his hand._ ) Besides, it's the anniversary of the Saint's death.\u2014Reverend K\u014db\u014d, come pick me up and take me away in your automobile with its shiny gold trim!\n\nSHOPKEEPER: It won't be the saint that comes and takes you away, but the town hall, and there'll be hell to pay for that. Easy with the alcohol there. ( _Starts to go inside._ )\n\nPUPPETEER ( _Shouting_ ): Kind master, pour me another!\n\nSHOPKEEPER: It's the Feast of Saint K\u014db\u014d, so I won't have my spuds turn into stones on account of you.1... I hate to be stingy, so be my guest, drink as much as you like. But are you sure you finished the last drop of the one I just gave you?\n\nPUPPETEER: So far, I knocked back five cups. I drank to the snow... and now I drink to the blossoms.... Kind master, three cherries grow under your eaves.... Young trees but in full bloom.... There ain't another house in Shuzenji that can boast such blossoms.\u2014And it costs me nothing to look at 'em. The drink costs me dear, but still this is a fine sight. Damn, that's good!\n\nSHOPKEEPER: Don't spout nonsense. You're drunk, old man....\n\nPUPPETEER: Why, just the occasional cup or two is a libation for the cherries, to ensure they blossom better. A blessing from Saint K\u014db\u014d himself!\n\nSHOPKEEPER: Cut the cheap compliments.\u2014It's awful how nobody passes this way.... Just two children a while back, in a procession over the mountain from Tatsuno, and nobody else since then, not even a horse and his groom.\u2014It's such a bore having to mind the shop.\u2014Ah, I can hear the drums!\n\n( _The drums are the kind held up on a pole by two musicians who beat them in turn on both sides. The sound\u2014boom! baboom! boom!\u2014can be heard dimly in the distance_.)\n\nPUPPETEER: The pipes and flutes, men in formal jackets and _hakama_.\u2014An escort of firemen and pages. In fore and aft, monks burning incense and chanting sutras. The procession of young men in court caps from the Inner Sanctum, carrying the portable shrines.\u2014Hail to the Great Teacher, Diamond of Universal Light! Both right and left of the path are thick with men and women. Offerings fall like rain.... The young ladies of town have come to pray in their best kimonos with their flowing sleeves. An old lady leaps out of the Vajra Bath stark naked!2\u2014Ah, hah, hah, hah! Bet Saint K\u014db\u014d would've been pleased if it were a young 'un instead!\n\nSHOPKEEPER: Shut up! You'll pay for such profanity. ( _Goes inside._ )\n\nPUPPETEER: Hail to the Great Teacher, Diamond of Universal Light! ( _Sipping his sak\u00e9, slumps down._ )\n\n( _Enter the_ LADY, _Nuiko, holding a handbag and a folded umbrella downward by the handle. Her hair is held up with a comb, and her obi is simply tied. She is wearing wooden clogs. She gazes at the late, double-petaled cherry in blossom_.)\n\nLADY: My, how lovely!\u2014Such work for such beauty\u2014( _Pause._ )... You ought to be thanked for it.\u2014You really are so lovely. Such blossoms! ( _So speaking, she follows the path along the little stream. Gazing at the saffron flowers growing on the wall, her attention is turned to the water._ ) Why, it's a carp! Such a big one!\u2014Dear me! He's dead.\n\n( _A longish pause. As the_ LADY _steps aside to avoid the carp, she stops in front of the puppet that the_ PUPPETEER _has left propped against the wall. It is a beautiful and elegant figure of a_ shiraby\u014dshi _dancer, attached by strings to bamboo sticks_.3 _The_ LADY _studies it carefully, saying nothing. The sound of rain_.)\n\nLADY: Ah, it's started to rain. ( _The Japanese umbrella she opens has the insignia of an inn, the Igiku, or Well-Side Chrysanthemum_.) There are dewdrops on the doll's eyelashes, as if she were weeping.... ( _She holds the umbrella over the puppet as if to protect it_.)\n\n( _The_ PUPPETEER _sticks his head out of the shop curtain to stare at the_ LADY. _His mouth is large, his brow is furrowed, his face wrinkled and flushed with liquor and pockmarked with a grizzled five o'clock shadow. Covered in a headscarf, he looked mild mannered, but now he is without it, and with his boxy forehead and gray hair, he is a fright to behold_.)\n\n( _Enter the_ ARTIST, _wearing a thin cape and fedora. His face is long and narrow, elegantly thin, his hooded eyes a little sleepy looking. He sports a slender and well-trimmed moustache that is dappled with gray. His complexion is a little pallid, his expression mild, yet dignified. He is shod in borrowed clogs from the inn he is staying at, and heedless of the rain, he carries only a walking stick. He stops to gaze at the cherries. The_ PUPPETEER _turns back and flops down at the table_.)\n\nARTIST ( _As if unconcerned about the_ LADY _'s_ _presence_ ): A puppet, I see.\n\nLADY: Sir?\u2014Excuse me, but she doesn't belong to me.\n\nARTIST ( _Only now seeming to have noticed her_ ): Excuse me, Madame. Actually, I never thought it was yours. It's just a strange sight to see in this day and age.\u2014In Tokyo, you hardly see such a thing nowadays, not even in the little shrine or temple fairs off the beaten track.... This would be Lady Shizuka, right? Turn her around and there's bold Benkei, with his halberd.... Turn Benkei around and you've got yourself an octopus, sporting a red bandanna, who'll dance you a jig.4 But this one doesn't seem rigged out for such tricks. ( _Nonchalantly leans in under the umbrella that the_ LADY _is holding._ ) Nope, this one is just the dancing girl. Ah, but she's a real work of art.\u2014Take a look, see how fine the workmanship is!... Who's the owner? Who'd leave a lovely thing like this out in the rain?\n\nLADY: The puppeteer, I believe, is over there.\u2014( _Modestly indicating and lowering her voice._ )... The old man's been drinking.\n\nARTIST: I bet he's a master.... Shall we have him perform a bit for us?\n\nLADY: Please don't, sir.... He's had rather a lot to drink, it seems.\n\nARTIST: I see. It would be a bother if the man's as drunk as he looks. Ah, but this puppet is truly a work of art!\u2014If you'll excuse me, Madame. ( _Half muttering._ ) Maybe we'll meet again on my way back. ( _Coolly saunters off in the direction of the mountain path._ )\n\nLADY ( _Following a few steps behind him_ ): Sir! Uh, sir... Which way would you be going?\n\nARTIST ( _Again, as if noticing her for the first time. Speaking softly_ ): Please. ( _Pause._ )... Don't call me \"sir.\" The town's in such pandemonium that I thought I'd take myself to the mountains for a bit.\u2014Excuse me, Madame. ( _Gazing at her with his sleepy eyes._ ) I failed to notice you before, but would you be staying at the same inn as me?\n\nLADY: Yes, near you.... In back, downstairs. Uh...\n\nARTIST: Is that so? Then, you'll excuse me. ( _Again, makes to go._ )\n\nLADY ( _Following a step behind_ ): Sir, on your way here, did you happen to run into a manservant wearing a jacket with the inn's insignia?\n\nARTIST: Yes I did.\n\nLADY: Did he say nothing?\n\nARTIST ( _Slowly crossing his arms_ ): Well... just as I was about to cross the bridge over to the Kikuya and Nodaya inns, on the railing, attached to a long pole, was a straw raincoat.\u2014Seems they were selling a lot of them in the market for the Saint's Day. It was an advertisement of sorts for it, but it looked for all the world like a scarecrow. I stood there looking at it and had to laugh.\u2014I look like a scarecrow myself, mind you. ( _Smiles._ ) Thought of buying one, but it'd have just weighed me down. That was when the manservant from the inn passed me.\n\nLADY: Then what happened?\n\nARTIST: Ah, yes. ( _Uncrosses his arms._ )... \"The lady went that way,\" said the man, then passed me.... I see, he must have been talking about you. I suppose he thought we were a couple and went out together.\u2014If you'll excuse me.\n\nLADY: Well, sir. We're separate now, but late last night we arrived together, you know.\n\nARTIST: With you?\n\nLADY: Yes.\n\nARTIST: I know nothing about that.\n\nLADY: In \u014chito... We came in separate cars, but at the same time....\n\nARTIST: I shared a car.\u2014Ah, come to think of it... there was someone I think who called for the cab, with the most modish hairstyle parted on the side... ( _Half to himself._ )\n\nLADY: A woman... ( _Breathing heavily._ ) That woman, as soon as she got to the inn, sir, she shaved her eyebrows.5 ( _Looks up, suddenly embarrassed._ ) Her hair was done up in curls, like this.\n\nARTIST: Ah hah. ( _Growing more suspicious, yet acting nonchalant_.)\n\nLADY: Sir. ( _Holding out her umbrella, hangs her head. Snow could not be whiter than the nape of her neck_.) None other than I was the lady the manservant from the inn was talking about. ( _Rather excitedly_.) He meant your wife.\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nARTIST ( _Quietly_ ):... Meaning?\n\nLADY: Last night, as soon as I arrived at the inn with you, I told the innkeeper I'm with Mr. Shimazu. You see, I, uh,... ( _Haltingly, pausing a moment_.) I know you from your photographs, your exhibitions.\u2014\"I'm Shimazu's wife,\" I told the innkeeper. \"I followed him on the same train in secret, so he wouldn't see me,\" I said. Of course, what I said didn't make much sense, but I said it.... And the reason I gave was my husband was having an affair and was meeting a woman there.\n\nARTIST: _I_ was.\n\nLADY: Yes, you being my, uh, husband.\n\nARTIST: That was quite impertinent of you! ( _Smiles wryly._ )\n\nLADY: Please forgive me, sir.\u2014\"Book me next door to him in secret, so I can spy on him. I'll make myself look different in case we run into each other in the hallway and I get caught,\" I said.... And right then and there, in front of the mirror stand, I shaved my eyebrows, rearranged my hair, shook off my _haori_ , and retied my obi this way ( _Lissomely turns around and gazes at the bow._ ) loosely, telling him, \"For heaven's sake, keep this a secret.\" Then in the register, after your name I wrote \"his wife.\"\n\nARTIST ( _Frowns slightly, but then generously_ ): One comes to a place like this for rest, so I'll indulge a prank like that, I suppose.... Well, you'll have to excuse me\u2014\n\nLADY: Please, sir, don't be angry with me.\n\nARTIST: What? Have somebody's beautiful wife play a joke on me?\u2014You never know, I might be pleased.\u2014But I really must go.\n\nLADY: What'll I do? Sir, this was no joke I was playing.\n\nARTIST: What do you mean by that? ( _Speaking sharply for the first time._ )\n\nLADY ( _Upset, trembling slightly_ ): I beg you, look. I have something to show you. ( _Pulling forcefully at the sleeve of his cape, she draws him back toward the edge of the stream_.) Look there. ( _She points at the dead carp. It still is invisible to the audience_.)\n\nARTIST: That is awful! How frightful!\n\nLADY: Sir, I feel like that carp. I'm at death's door myself. ( _The_ ARTIST _says nothing. Pause._ ) There are men after me. If they find me, they'll have to take me away.\u2014I happened to recognize you and followed you as far as the inn, then I took it in my mind to do something unpardonable. I was desperate and made up my mind to die.\u2014Anyway, I shaved my eyebrows, changed the way I look, and pretended to be your wife. I was lost, at my wit's end, at that busy inn. Please forgive me.... Never in my dreams would I ever play a trick on you.\n\nARTIST: I suppose there's nothing I can do.\n\nLADY ( _Reluctantly, as if unsatisfied with his response_ ): Can you forgive me?... I know this sounds as if I'm taking advantage of your kindness, but... would you please let me join you on your walk? I'll even follow behind you. If you grant me this wish, no one will notice me, I'm sure.\u2014Sir! ( _Ever so slightly coquettish._ ) Please, let me come with you.\n\nARTIST ( _Firmly_ ): You'd be in the way.\n\nLADY: Ah... but, no. You see, even if I went with you, I'd go only so far as it took to make up my mind to become like that thing there. ( _Points at the dead fish._ )\n\nARTIST: We can't have that happen to you! I have no idea what your situation may be, but you mustn't end up like that.\n\nPUPPETEER ( _Lying face down, then bolting up suddenly_ ): Master! Gimme another drink! Master!\n\nARTIST ( _Hearing, but trying to pay him no attention_ ): I consider it my duty to see that at the very least you do not turn out that way.\u2014If you'll excuse me. ( _Steps away and heads toward the path into the mountains._ )\n\nLADY ( _As the_ ARTIST _disappears into the trees, she hastily runs after him, then holds back, watching him go_ ): Nothing lasts, does it? ( _She looks around, ashamed of her own voice. She opens her umbrella, though there is no rain, as if to hide her embarrassment, then dejectedly heads into the grove of trees along the same path the_ ARTIST _took_.)\n\nPUPPETEER: Master! Another drink!\n\nSHOPKEEPER: Tch! You are a troublemaker, aren't you? ( _Pours him another._ )\n\nPUPPETEER: But this drink\u2014hah, hah, hah\u2014I dedicate to the moon. When the clouds come out, the full moon hides his face. ( _Drains the glass in one gulp._ ) Aaah, whew!... The bill, sir.... ( _Sloppily pulls out a change purse from a string around his neck and tosses down some coins._ ) For Saint K\u014db\u014d and the moon as well. These coins, too, shine like the diamonds of universal dharma. Oof! ( _Stands. He is tall, staggering on a pair of scrawny shins poking through torn gaiters. The_ SHOPKEEPER, _paying him no mind, clears off his table and goes indoors._ ) Oof! ( _Tipsily staggers over to the puppet._ ) My dear Lady Shizuka! ( _Suddenly respectful, he practically collapses to the ground to prostrate himself before the doll. Pause. His drunken eyes take in the dead carp._ ) Ah, brother, you lie there still. Did an otter bite you? A weasel take a nip out of you? Somebody's surely taken a chunk out of you\u2014look at them teeth marks\u2014and now the maggots are making off with what's left. Any stray cat or dog that saw you here would have taken one sniff and left you to rot. Even a dog wouldn't eat you. You had it in you to become a dragon, but some ill karma fell on you that your carcass should be exposed here, food for the worms. Poor thing!\u2014Let me give you a proper funeral. ( _Pulls out the bloated, rotten corpse of the carp. Now the audience can see it._ ) But I don't know what to say for your last rites. How 'bout this: \"A curse on all who think ill of you! Go haunt the lot of them, even charge an admission fee! Amen!\" ( _Wraps the carcass in the headscarf tied around his neck with his change purse, straps it to his waist, and kneels down again._ ) Ah, Lady Shizuka! ( _Unties the ragged cloth around his throat and wraps it over his mouth, like a gag. He has done this so as not to offend the beautiful woman with his breath, stinking of stale alcohol. He raises the doll on its bamboo pole high over his shoulder and heads toward the mountain path._ ) Oof! ( _Tipsily staggers from side to side._ )\n\n( _The_ LADY _steps out slightly from the shadow of the trees, watching this scene_.)\n\nPUPPETEER: Oof! ( _Staggers._ ) Oof! ( _Staggers._ )\n\nLADY ( _Slowly steps from the shadows and crosses the_ PUPPETEER _'s path, as if turning back the way she came, and accosts him_ ): Grandpa, grandpa!\n\n( _The_ PUPPETEER, _tall and red faced, looks eerily at her as if he were possessed_.)\n\nLADY ( _Boldly strides up to him_ ): I no longer have any wishes for this world, nothing holding me back, so please, if there's anything I can do to make your wish come true, I'll do it for you. Please make me a wish, grandpa. ( _The_ PUPPETEER, _still silent and gazing at her as if to consume her with his eyes, eventually picks up a rope lying under a bale of rotten straw by the roadside. He approaches her, with it dangling, swinging limply from his hand._ ) Ah! ( _She steps back. The_ PUPPETEER _sneers at her._ ) I thought it was a snake!\u2014Oh, so what if it is a snake? What are you going to do?\u2014What will you do to me?\n\n( _Saying nothing, the_ PUPPETEER _merely stretches out his wrinkled hand and beckons her. Beckoning her, he backs again into the shadows of the trees_.)\n\nLADY: What will you do to me? What are you planning to do? ( _She follows him into the trees._ )\n\n( _For a while the stage is empty. Five white ducks waddle through the rice paddy in a line, hunting for grub. It is, as it were, a portent of spring's passing_.)\n\nGROOM ( _Leading a horse, emerges from the trees, gazing back the way he came. There are two sacks of rice on the horse's back, donations to the temple. The sacks bear labels on which are written_ : _\"White Rice. Hail to the Great Teacher, Diamond of Universal Light!\"_ ): There was a sight to chill your blood! Why, makes me wonder whether now, even in the noonday sun, this rice I'm carrying hasn't turned to sand. ( _Wets his brows with spittle and fishes out a few grains from one of the sacks_.) Still safe. ( _Listens to the beating of festival drums_.)\u2014Thanks be to Saint K\u014db\u014d! Still, it was awful! Damned devils, they were, scared the life out of me!\n\nTHE STAGE REVOLVES\n\nSCENE 2\n\n_On one side a steep hill where alternate rows, two to three feet wide, of mustard flowers and barley grow. On the brow of the hill bloom bushes of_ Kerria japonica, _a wild rose. Below in a ravine where the foot of the mountain has deeply eroded away, is an expanse of grass where mulberry saplings grow here and there, small and spindly as stalks of rattan._\n\n_On the other side is a wooded mountain with stands of evergreen oak, some trees tall, others shorter, their boughs so thick they seem black with leaf, roiling like eddies of black clouds, in stark contrast to the brightness of the scene on the other side._\n\n_A narrow path wends its way down the_ hanamichi _and between the hills. In the distance looms the Izu mountain chain._\n\n_Alone, halfway up the slope between the kerria roses growing on the cliff and the mustard flowers below, the_ ARTIST _quietly takes a swig from a flask of whiskey._ \u2014 _The call, far off, of a bush warbler. Two, three sharp cries of a cockerel, then, farther away, the belling of a deer. He stands there for some time, seemingly surprised. Then, as if spying on someone, he hides himself among the leaves and flowers._\n\n_The_ LADY _enters. In one hand she holds her umbrella; in the other she clings to one end of the rope. She is leading the_ PUPPETEER, _his headscarf tied like a monkey_ ' _s bit. Strapped crosswise to his back is a black, Western-style umbrella and, vertically, his Shizuka doll. His arms, which hold the puppet_ ' _s bamboo staff, are tied behind his back with the_ LADY' _s rope. Head down, his shoulders slumped, it is as if he were being led to slaughter. Still drunk, stumbling on unsteady legs, he steps forth into the shadows of the deep ravine at the foot of the mountain. The_ LADY _releases the rope, and it falls to the ground. In fact, he wasn_ ' _t bound at all, it only appeared that way. He props his puppet against the trunk of a mulberry and kneels in prayer. Thus, at some distance from the_ LADY, _he unties the headscarf._\n\nPUPPETEER: Lady, honor your promise and grant me what I beg of you. ( _He rises on his hands and legs and grovels face down into the grass._ )\n\nLADY: Are you sure, grandpa?\n\nPUPPETEER: Could I make up such a lie? Please, thrash me as hard as you can.\n\nLADY: Strike you? Are you sure?\n\nPUPPETEER: Thrash me till you draw blood, till I can't breathe no more. I beg you!\n\nLADY: Really hit you? You're sure, are you?\n\nPUPPETEER: Please, don't trifle with me! I can't wait no longer.\n\nLADY:... I won't trifle, in case later you resent what I do.\u2014Well, in that case, since I made a promise, I'll really beat you. Bear with it. ( _She strikes him three, four times with her Japanese umbrella, then five, six more times to follow._ )\n\nPUPPETEER: No good! No good at all!\n\nLADY ( _Whipping him_ ): Like this?\u2014Like this?\n\nPUPPETEER: Too weak! ( _Twisting around to look at her._ ) Let me really have it! Like you were giving me what for.\n\nLADY: Like I, uh, was giving you what for\u2014\n\nPUPPETEER: That's why it's not good enough! Hang on a sec. ( _He removes his padded vest together with his worn and filthy crested jacket, baring his skinny, wrinkled back. He totters to his feet and embraces the tree with his back toward her. He turns around and glares at her._ ) Rip off the parchment so the staff and ribs are exposed. If you just continue swatting me the way you were, you won't even scratch me.\n\nLADY ( _Sighing_ ): Ah!\n\nPUPPETEER: You'll never be able to put any muscle into it if you keeping thinking I'm just some old, drunken beggar. Surely, lady, there's somebody you hate in this world, someone you'd like to thrash the living daylights out of. A mother-in-law, a father-in-law, a brother-in-law, some relative, some stranger, even a friend. You needn't hold back.\n\nLADY: Ah!\n\nPUPPETEER: Think of those bastards and give me what for. All right? Are you ready?\n\nLADY: Ah!\n\nPUPPETEER: Pull yourself together!\n\nLADY: Ah, all right, then! ( _Growing aroused, she begins ripping the parchment off the umbrella, and in so doing, she cuts herself. Her fingers and arms grow pink with the flow of blood to her extremities.\u2014She grasps the umbrella again_.)\u2014You beast! You beast! You beast! You beast, you!!\n\nPUPPETEER: Unh. ( _Groaning faintly._ ) Unh, yeah, right there, uh huh, that's better now. Oh, yeah.\n\nLADY: Is that how you like it? Huh? You beast!\n\nPUPPETEER: No, it ain't enough for you just to whack me 'cross the rump or back that way. Smack me 'cross the head, box my ears, as hard as you can!\n\nLADY: You beast! You beast! You beast! ( _Losing all control of herself, as if possessed, she leaps and dances around, her hair flying, her face growing pale. Beating and thrashing him for all she is worth, she begins to run out of breath_.) Ah! For pity's sake, I can't take it anymore!\n\nPUPPETEER: Can't take it anymore? Good! That's the spirit! Keep it up!\n\nARTIST ( _Following the embankment, descends into the ravine. Though calm, he hastens to stop them_ ):\u2014Madame!\n\nLADY: Why, sir! ( _On seeing him, her frail arms freeze, her legs turn to jelly, and she sinks down and falls half into a faint_.)\n\nARTIST: This is whiskey.\u2014To revive you.\u2014What on earth has been going on here? ( _In shock, the_ PUPPETEER _writhes around on the ground. The_ ARTIST _observes him._ ) I've no idea what this is about, but I do know anything taken too far is wrong.\n\nLADY ( _Gasping for breath_ ): What have I done? I've exposed you to something so base, something no human should ever see, let alone do. Oh, what am I to do? ( _Begins weeping hysterically._ )\n\nARTIST ( _At a loss to stop her, he rubs her hands, her back, in an effort to soothe her_ ): Please, calm yourself.\n\nPUPPETEER ( _Wraps his bloody flesh in his jacket and, panting, bows on hand and knee in the grass_ ): Ah... This must be, er, er, your husband. Would it, ma'am?\n\nARTIST: I'm no one to this lady, particularly. Call me an acquaintance.\n\nPUPPETEER: Then let this old man tell the gentleman\u2014her acquaintance, if you will\u2014what's happening here. Yes, er, forgive me my impertinence\u2014this ain't an easy story to listen to.... In short, this dried-up, decrepit ruin, slimy and black as a strip of eel jerky, was once a young man, and long ago committed a great sin. All for a woman. I was a snake that wound itself around an angel on some high balcony. No, rather, I was a lizard who'd gobbled up a frog in a pond. I'm at a loss for metaphors.... I sucked the very lifeblood out of her.\u2014And when I awoke from my dream, the sin I committed terrified me. There was nowhere I could go.... Exposing myself to the elements, risking life and limb to lose myself, to disappear, I met a traveling monk on the pilgrim's road in Shikoku\u2014surely it was Saint K\u014db\u014d himself\u2014who left me this mysterious gift. This doll attached to this bamboo pole is the image of a lovely woman. I'm sure she's offended every time the old man gets drunk, so I bite on this kerchief to protect her from the fumes from my foul-smelling mouth.... This beautiful young lady is a goddess for these ancient eyes, so every time I see her I'm reminded of my old sin. Were someone able morn and night to punish me, to beat and torture me, then perhaps I could rid myself of at least some of the sin I've piled up. I'm not afraid neither of going to hell in the afterlife. My load of suffering in this life is not enough, so I long for nothing else in all the world. I'd have old wives and women, the kind who'd lie with me in seedy flophouses or under the verandas of village shrines, kick and beat me, but it was never enough. It was a beautiful lady who lost her precious life, all due to the recklessness of this here beggar. So, if I'm not punished at the hands of a young and beautiful woman like her, my flesh and blood scarcely feel a thing.\u2014And when such a wish, the veritable prayer of a ghost or vengeful spirit, comes from someone with my face, anybody in his right mind would run away.... You'd have to be a saint or a genius, a fearless hero or a man of peerless virtue, to listen to a tale like mine!\u2014This ruin you see before you was born sixty-nine years ago, and it's forty-one years to the month and day today that he made this vow.\u2014And here it was just now that this beautiful lady accosted this beggar, called to me, promising me she'd grant me any wish I had, whatever it might be.\u2014I may be no expert, but it's my trade, after all, and I made the most fearsome face I could, but I could see she was afraid of nothing, no ghost or demon crying for vengeance. I told her my wish, a wish I'd borne so long, that I wanted to be exposed like some common criminal on the execution ground. And so we came here, on the roadside to be sure, but in a hidden place in a gully where the mountain has washed away, where I could submit to this blessed beating, this exquisite torture.... Master.\u2014Thank you, lovely lady, thank you most kindly!\n\nLADY ( _For the first time, calm_ ): Does it hurt you, sir?\n\nPUPPETEER: Why, lady, this pain brings as much joy to this besotted face as the caress of a spring breeze, or the sweet nectar proffered by Kannon herself from the tresses of a willow.6... And that it was a beauty like you, ma'am\u2014better yet, somebody like one of them Buddhist she-demons\u2014makes me worship you even more, like you was some kind of angel or goddess. Surely, thanks to the pain you inflicted on me, my flesh and bones have grown soft and supple, my blood courses fast like I was twenty-years old again, and I can live another blessed day with joy in my heart.\n\nARTIST ( _Cocking his head as he listens, he casually lights up a gold-tipped cigarette_ ): Old man, care for a smoke?\n\nPUPPETEER: Why, sir, if sak\u00e9 is holy water, then tobacco is incense burned for a dead man.\n\nARTIST: Have a smoke, then. ( _Holds out a cigarette case encrusted with pearls_.)\n\nPUPPETEER: Now don't it shine like Saint K\u014db\u014d's staff? 'Tis a sin. ( _Crawls out and lights one of the gold-tipped cigarettes._ ) There'll be hell to pay for this. 'Tis a sin, to be sure. I'll fly up on a waft of this here purple smoke and sail off to paradise.\n\nLADY: I have to leave now, sir.... Are you sure all you wanted was to be beaten?\n\nPUPPETEER: Even if the Katsura River turned round and flowed back the other way, I'd tell you no lie.\n\nLADY: Ask me a favor. I feel I still owe you.\n\nPUPPETEER: Had I anything left to ask, it'd be for you to beat and punish me again, another time, three times more.\n\nLADY: Anything else?\n\nPUPPETEER: My utmost desire would be for you, my lovely lady, to beat me day after day and day and night, till my body was pummeled to dust.\u2014But I've sobered up now. Enough of this nonsense.\u2014By day I avoid others, but just like the badgers and otters and goblins, none can begrudge my coming on this mountain trail to Shuzenji, bedding down in a flophouse in Tatsuno along the way, to enjoy a dip in Saint K\u014db\u014d's springs.\u2014Today, I'll let my feet take me somewhere down the road to Shimoda. I spoke of clouds and water, but Heaven's River7 and the runoff in a ditch each have their separate courses, so here's where you and I must part and I'll never see the likes of you again. May the two of you prosper till the end of time.\u2014Lady Shizuka, aye, I'll keep you company.\n\nLADY: Sir, wait. ( _Having made an important decision, she steels herself._ ) I'll follow you down that muddy course for ten years, a hundred even, to make your wish come true each morn and night. (PUPPETEER _, by his visage, wordlessly expresses shock._)\n\nMaster\u2014I left home. I'm the wife of another man. So he won't drag me back, I'd hide myself anywhere, no matter how out of the way it was. As it is, I've nowhere to go.\u2014When I saw that dead carp in the ditch, how dreadful it was, I made up my mind I'd drink poison or drown, commit suicide somehow, no matter how ugly my corpse would look. But maybe it was just out of impatience with me that you said you'd never let me end up that way.... In any case, because of what you said to me back then, I decided not to kill myself.\n\nSir\u2014I am the wife of Koitogawa, a family with a title but no money.\n\nARTIST: Ah, the viscount's?\n\nLADY: What should I say? Why... it was some years ago, back when you had just returned from Europe. With your friends and fans, you used to come often, to Nihonbashi... ( _Gazes at the_ ARTIST _ecstatically._ )\u2014Have you forgotten me? I'm Nui, the daughter at the Yukari Restaurant.\n\nARTIST: Ah, so you're O-Nui?... The little sister, right? I heard folks say how pretty the younger one was.\n\nLADY ( _Wistfully_ ): Yes, master. I'm sure my mention made no more impression on you than someone commenting on how cold it was on a chilly day. I was so shy about being seen by you that I wouldn't even dare stray past the threshold of a room you were in, but I stayed close enough that I never missed a single word of what you had to say at any of your parties. When you held court in the room downstairs, I'd lie face down on the floor above and listen in. And when you were in the room at back, I'd hide out in the bathhouse in the courtyard behind, pressed naked against the wall, listening. Whatever room they put you in, like a mouse, I'd find a spot to hide myself, my heart like a moth drawn the light of your heart. Nobody, not the hardworking maids nor even my worldly sister, ever guessed how I felt about you. My heart was true. My gestures, my whole demeanor, betrayed nothing; I never spoke a word of this to anyone. Only love shames one. That's why from that time on\u2014I wonder if I wasn't even hysterical\u2014people said I was a little strange.... Please, sir, understand what I say.... I truly went a little crazy. When you married, for a whole year all I could do was weep; my hair grew long and wild. It wasn't as if they locked me up, but I just lay there like an empty shell while they tended to me. It annoyed me that I couldn't die.... I felt wretched that I couldn't simply disappear, and so somehow I went on living.\n\n\u2014When I came to my senses, I was already twenty-three. My mother, who had so spoiled me in that big house, had passed away. When blind love dies, the world grows dark. Having been able to have my way so long made me feel obligated to crush that selfish nature of mine. Still, I stayed selfish.\u2014I turned down all the suitors that my brothers and sisters and relatives picked out for me\u2014keen merchants, savvy businessmen, every one\u2014and married into the family I did.\n\nThere was the mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law, one divorced\u2014three women. It's the family tradition, they said, for a wife to serve her husband, so I had to go fetch the water from a well, the house being located in the suburbs.... I cut vegetables. Evenings I went out with the mother-in-law to shop for groceries\u2014I didn't mind those household chores. For savories for supper and sweets for snacks, the boys from the restaurant brought them by bicycle, all the way from my home in Nihonbashi, cases of food, pails of fish, every single day. My mother-in-law would berate the chef, saying the fish wasn't fresh or the omelet hadn't set, that they were feeding us the restaurant customers' leftovers, and sometimes she'd even kick the trays of dishes. At first, knowing I was still so inept, I swallowed my anger, my bitterness, but when this went on for a year, two years, I learned how they really felt.\u2014My husband, for starters... well, they all had their eyes on my money, that is, my share of the family business. The monthly interest\u2014how shall I say it?\u2014it was enough for living costs, but it was never enough for them. Every time a niece had a suitor, or a cousin got married, I lost some heirloom, like a formal kimono or ornaments for my hair. My brocades and white underthings, my black satin and crepe\u2014every single bolt of cloth for my kimonos was sold for summer and year-end gifts, presents to pay off the people they knew with some favor or other. The chest of drawers I brought with me when I married was practically empty by then....\n\nAnd what did my husband do for a living? He wrote poetry, both classical and in the modern style; he wrote plays; he sent letters to the editors of newspapers.\n\nARTIST: It must have been hard on you. But surely he still has prospects.\n\nLADY: But no! His prospects were my inheritance, and they bullied me unless I brought my inheritance to them. If I coughed or complained of a headache, all the in-laws would huddle together and mutter lines like you'd hear in a play or movie, that it was \"that lung disease\" and for the sake of the family they had no choice but to send me back home.\u2014\"Put up with it! Put up with it!\" was all my husband ever said, but I'd have died before I'd finished putting up with what they had in store for me. Finally I came down with a cold that kept me in bed for three days. Then in the hall on the way to get some water to drink, I heard my mother-in-law say, \"Now's our chance.... What say we send her home?\" That cut me to the quick.\n\nARTIST: Cruel, for sure.\n\nLADY: Cruel? Was that all it was?\u2014I was so mad, my cold cleared up completely and I said to my husband, \"Even if I have to fight for it, I'll go home and bring you back my inheritance. But I want you to do something for me, just once\u2014take your mother and throw her out of my room, then grab your one sister by her ponytail and slap the other one hard across the face!\"...\n\nPUPPETEER ( _Slithering out_ ): That's the spirit! That's the spirit!\n\nARTIST: Hah, hah, hah! Bet that made you feel better! Hardly meek, mind you.\n\nLADY ( _Furious, then smiling as if all were forgotten_ ): Hardly.\n\nARTIST: Not then, anyway.\n\nLADY: \"You're a demon!\" my husband suddenly shouted, and he flung me out of the room, grabbed me by the hair and slapped _me_ hard across the face. That night was last night? No, the night before last\u2014had I left that night it would have been too obvious. Sir, if I was as good as a goldfish or quiet as a houseplant, then the house where I was born or one of my relatives would surely take me back, but I have my pride.... Ready to die because there was no place for me, I've found a place to go now. ( _With resolution._ ) I'll follow this old gentleman.\u2014This man understands the sin of making a woman suffer, and now he wants to pay for it by being beaten night and day. I'll become all the women of this world to avenge ourselves on this one man.\u2014He worships this doll of Lady Shizuka as if she were human. He'll offer me the pride and blessing of having been born a woman, and in return, he can have my weak and discarded body, like the carcass of that dead carp he saved from its fate.\n\nARTIST ( _Sometimes nodding, sometimes cocking his head doubtfully_ ): Madame. I mean, O-Nui.\n\nLADY ( _Happy, laughs guilelessly_ ): Ye-es!\n\nARTIST: Is there nothing I can do to change your mind?\n\nLADY: No, sir. Unless you take me by the hand, back to the inn...\n\nPUPPETEER: That's right! That's right!\n\n( _The_ ARTIST _is silent_.)\n\nLADY ( _Turns around_ ): Sir.\n\nARTIST: Madame, you are ill, you're sick. But I'm no doctor and I cannot tell you what to do.\u2014I can't fathom your reasoning, but then again, I don't claim to understand the ways of other people. I've nothing to teach you. Whether it's right or wrong to take you back with me, I can't say at the moment. I'm not leaving you out of cowardice. I'm preoccupied with my own work right now and haven't the freedom to pass judgment on you.\u2014I'm sorry to say I'm weak, and I can do nothing for you. But if you could wait for a month or even a fortnight, then I'd find it in me to do something.\n\nLADY: Master, in the course of just one night I've changed the way I look. My destiny can't wait any longer.\n\nARTIST: Understood. ( _As if no longer able to look her in the eye, he turns to the_ PUPPETEER.)\u2014Old man, promise to keep her company.\n\nPUPPETEER: I'll be her dog\u2014( _He picks up the_ LADY, _then gets down on all fours. The_ LADY _mounts his back. The_ ARTIST _takes her hand so she will not fall_.) I'll be her horse and take her wherever she wants to go.\n\nARTIST: Madame.... May all go as you desire.\n\nLADY: Please give us your whiskey, sir.... Then be witness to our union. ( _Saying nothing, the_ ARTIST _takes out the bottle, pours a cup, and offers it her. The_ LADY _drains the cup in one gulp, then takes a deep breath_.) Grandpa, we need something to go with the toast.\n\nPUPPETEER: I could sing a ditty in place of a formal speech...\n\nLADY: No, bring out that rotten carp you rescued.\n\nPUPPETEER: Surely not!\n\nLADY: Take it out. Have you a knife?\n\nPUPPETEER: I always carry a knife, to fend off dogs and whatever else may come my way. ( _From a bowl wrapped in his waist he pulls out a rusty blade._ )\n\nARTIST: Surely, Madame!\n\nLADY: We'll be traveling together.\u2014I'll have to get used to eating this sort of fare....\n\nPUPPETEER: Now you're talking! I'll have some, too.\n\n( _Shocked, the_ ARTIST _turns his head away. From far off, voices chant \"Hail to the Great Teacher, Diamond of Universal Light! Hail to the Great Teacher, Diamond of Universal Light!\" A young_ BOY _and_ GIRL _enter, in procession_.)\n\nCHILDREN ( _Innocently_ ): Hail to the Great Teacher, Diamond of Universal Light!\n\n( _The two_ CHILDREN _at first enter slowly, the_ GIRL _with her hair tied in a ponytail with purple cloth, the_ BOY _with his hair formally tied back with a long white ribbon. Then, noticing the_ PUPPETEER, _the_ LADY _, and the_ ARTIST, _they suddenly become afraid and hastily race past them, running down the_ hanamichi. _As if they have come to an understanding, the_ LADY _and the_ ARTIST _both turn and look their way. The_ PUPPETEER _also gazes after them, beckoning. The scene created by this ensemble is truly eerie. The two_ CHILDREN _return, as if pulled back_.)\n\nARTIST: Fine children! We need your services.\n\nLADY: Aren't they sweet?\n\nARTIST ( _Removes his cloak and lays it on the grass_ ): Madame, please seat yourself down next to grandpa here.\n\nLADY: Surely we don't deserve this.\n\nARTIST: Of course you do. But if you're sick, then maybe I've fallen a bit ill myself.\u2014Now, seal your oath with a toast.8\n\n( _The_ LADY _and the_ PUPPETEER _sit down side by side. The two_ CHILDREN, _as if in the service of demons, take turns pouring the whiskey. Silence. A cloud passes over, darkening the stage. A bush warbler cries impatiently. Distant sounds of court music. Then, gradually, the cries of \"Hail to the Great Teacher, Diamond of Universal Light!\" draw nigh, and some dozen or so_ VILLAGERS, _old and young, men and women, enter chanting_.)\n\nVILLAGER 1: Hey! Why are you children here?\n\nVILLAGER 2: You're Saint K\u014db\u014d's emissaries. That's why we keep a respectful distance from you.\n\nVILLAGER 3: We follow you reverently.\u2014You mustn't play tricks on us.\n\nVILLAGERS 4, 5, 6 ( _In turn_ ): Come! Come! ( _Surrounding the_ CHILDREN.) Hail to the Great Teacher, Diamond of Universal Light!... ( _Thus they exit off the wings._ )\n\nLADY ( _Takes the cloak, brushes off the dust, and drapes it over the_ ARTIST' _s shoulders_ ): It was only once\u2014perhaps you don't remember? You were drunk and put your hand on mine. This one.... Please take my hand, once more, in memory of me. I wish for no more. ( _Kneels on the grass and bows to him._ ) Dear sir. If only it could be otherwise.\n\nARTIST: And if I could do anything else.\n\nLADY: Grandpa, let's be going.\n\nPUPPETEER: Aye, aye... Farewell, sir!\n\nLADY: Let's go! ( _As they start off, it begins to rain in earnest_.)\n\nARTIST: Wait! ( _Rushing after them, he holds out an open umbrella_.)\n\nLADY: Sir, what about you?\n\nARTIST: A little rain won't hurt me.\n\nLADY: Thank you kindly. ( _Takes the umbrella_.) Oh, to hell with them! ( _She kicks off her clogs and, barefoot, hikes up the skirt of her kimono, exposing fetching scarlet petticoats underneath. She pulls hard on the_ PUPPETEER _'s hand_.)\n\nPUPPETEER ( _Follows on tottering legs_ ): Hail to the Great Teacher, Diamond of Universal Light!\n\nLADY ( _Halfway down the_ hanamichi, _she turns back. The_ ARTIST _sees her off_ ): Master!... Farewell! Pay my respects to the world.\n\nARTIST: Take care of yourself.\n\n( _Wrapping the_ PUPPETEER _'s wrinkled arm around her own, the_ LADY _leads him, holding high the umbrella, toward the curtain at the end of the_ hanamichi. _The_ ARTIST _watches them. From offstage, the_ PUPPETEER _'s voice is heard chanting, \"Hail to the Great Teacher, Diamond of Universal Light!\" Then we hear the_ LADY _also chant, \"Hail to the Great Teacher, Diamond of Universal Light!\"_ )\n\nARTIST: Ah, are we in hell? Or surely, this is a dream. No, it's real.\u2014( _Sees the_ LADY' _s clog._ ) Should I throw it all away, I wonder? My name, everything? ( _Takes the clog in his hands, looking distressed._ ) But no, I've got my work. ( _Throws the clog away._ )\n\n( _The sound of the rain stops. The vesper bell of Shuzenji Temple rings_.)\n\nCURTAIN\n\n1. Saint K\u014db\u014d (K\u016bkai, 774\u2013835) was the founder in Japan of Shingon (Mantrayana) Buddhism, an esoteric sect. He is reputed to have established springs, wells, and reservoirs all over Japan, including Shuzenji hot spring. A folktale has him turning potatoes into stones, to punish stingy farmers who refused to give him alms.\n\n2. Vajra bath ( _tokko no yu_ ) is the hot spring created by K\u016bkai when he struck his _vajra_ staff against a rock.\n\n3. _Shiraby \u014dshi_ refers to a type of female dancer in the Middle Ages who danced in a man's cap and costume.\n\n4. Lady Shizuka was the mistress of Minamoto Yoshitsune (1159\u20131189), the famous general in the war between the Genji and Heike clans, and Benkei was his loyal retainer. Yoshitsune was eventually hunted down and killed on the orders of his brother Minamoto Yoritomo (1147\u20131199), who became the first sh\u014dgun of the Kamakura period. Many tales and plays hail Yoshitsune's exploits.\n\n5. Although outlawed as a practice in 1870, shaved eyebrows traditionally indicated that a woman was married.\n\n6. Kannon is the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, sometimes called the goddess of mercy.\n\n7. The Milky Way.\n\n8. In a traditional Japanese wedding, rather than using rings, a marriage is sealed by an exchange of cups of sak\u00e9.\n_FATHER RETURNS_\n\nKIKUCHI KAN\n\nTRANSLATED BY M. CODY POULTON\n\nKikuchi Kan, _Father Returns_ , 1920s.\n\nAs a novelist, playwright, critic, and book and magazine editor, Kikuchi Kan (1888\u20131948) was one of the most powerful figures in Japanese letters before the war. A student of Irish literature at Kyoto University, his early work as a dramatist during the Taish\u014d era was strongly influenced by George Bernard Shaw and John Synge. His plays, as well as his editorship of _New Tides in Thought_ ( _Shinshich \u014d_) and _New Tides in Theater_ ( _Engeki shinch \u014d_), helped spark the thirst for theater and drama in the first and second decades of the twentieth century. Kikuchi's first hit as a playwright was with a production in 1919 of _The Loves of T \u014dj\u016br\u014d_, about the seventeenth-century kabuki actor Sakate T\u014dj\u016br\u014d and starring Nakamura Ganjir\u014d I, the inheritor of the realistic acting style innovated by T\u014dj\u016br\u014d. This success was followed the next year by a production of _Father Returns_ ( _Chichi kaeru_ ), featuring another popular kabuki actor, Ichikawa Ennosuke II (1888\u20131963), in the title role. (Ennosuke II, formerly called Danko, was the \"Actor D\" whom Osanai addressed in his open letter, quoted in the introduction to part I.) Together with Morimoto Kaoru's _A Woman_ ' _s Life_ ( _Onna no issh \u014d_) and Kinoshita Junji's _Twilight Crane_ ( _Y \u016bzuru_), _Father Returns_ has been one of the most popular Japanese plays of the twentieth century.\n\nKikuchi preferred one-act plays that were critically incisive and realistic and that presented a powerful social message. \"The spirit of modern theater, regardless of where it is from,\" he wrote, \"is a reaction against and attack on existing customs and morals. Here in a country like Japan, customs and morals have latched like a scab onto our social lives. The work of a modern dramatist must be to peel off this scab.\"1 Adapted from _The Return of the Prodigal_ by the minor playwright St. John Hankin, the work has been called a textbook for one-act plays because of its strong dramatic structure, economic dialogue, and psychological realism. On stage, _Father Returns_ lasts no longer than about thirty minutes, but its impact was profound, moving to tears even the confirmed cynic and novelist Akutagawa Ry\u016bnosuke. With great economy, it shows what happens to a family when their father, who had abandoned them some twenty years earlier, comes home. As can be seen in such fictional works as Natsume S\u014dseki's _And Then_ ( _Sorekara_ ) and Shiga Naoya's _Reconciliation_ ( _Wakai_ ), intergenerational conflict and the decline of the Meiji patriarchy was a theme of many writers' works in this period.\n\n_A six-mat tatami room in a modest middle-class house. Upstage center is a chest on which sits an alarm clock, and downstage is a long wooden charcoal brazier where a kettle is steaming. A low dining table has been set out._ KEN'ICHIR\u014c _has just returned from his work at City Hall; he has changed into a kimono and is relaxing, reading the newspaper. His mother,_ OTAKA, _is sewing. It is early October, around seven in the evening, and already dark outside._\n\nTime: Around 1907.\n\nPlace: A town on the coast of Shikoku.2\n\nCharacters\n\nKURODA KEN'ICHIR\u014c, age twenty-eight\n\nSHINJIR\u014c, his brother, age twenty-three\n\nOTANE, their sister, age twenty\n\nOTAKA, their mother, age fifty-one\n\nS\u014cTAR\u014c, their father, age fifty-eight\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: Where's Otane gone, Mum?\n\nOTAKA: Off to deliver some sewing.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: Don't tell me she's still doing that. Surely she doesn't have to anymore.\n\nOTAKA: Yes, but she'll need a decent kimono when she gets married.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c ( _Turning over a page of the paper_ ): What became of that offer you told me about?\n\nOTAKA: They kept begging me to give her away, but it seems she didn't fancy the man at all.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: He had money. Would have made a fine match.\n\nOTAKA: Maybe so, but one can have a small fortune and spend it all and, when all's said and done, still have nothing to show for it. Why, our house had some twenty, thirty thousand yen in bonds and real estate when I first came, but your dad blew it all away living high off the hog. He might just as well have fed it to the wind. (KEN'ICHIR\u014c _says nothing, as if recalling unpleasant memories._ ) I learned the hard way, so I'd rather Otane married for love than money. Even if her husband's poor, so long as he's got a good heart, life shouldn't be too hard on her.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: Ah, but how much better it'd be if he had both.\n\nOTAKA: And if wishes were horses... Otane may be pretty, but we're hardly well to do.... Besides, the smallest wedding outfit these days will easily cost you a couple of hundred yen.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: Otane's had a hard time of it ever since she was a kid, and all because of dad. We ought to make sure at least she's married off properly. Once we've got a thousand saved up, I suggest we give her half of it.\n\nOTAKA: That's hardly necessary\u2014even three hundred would do. I'll feel even more relieved when you get yourself a wife. Everyone says I had bad luck with a husband, but good luck with kids. I didn't know what I was going to do when your dad left us....\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c ( _Changing the subject_ ): Shin's late.\n\nOTAKA: That's because he's on duty tonight. Shin said he's getting a raise this month.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: Is that so? He did so well in high school I'd imagine he's not happy staying a primary school teacher. There's no telling how far he'll go if he sets his mind to it and studies some more.\n\nOTAKA: I've had someone on the lookout for a wife for you too, but so far no luck. The Sonoda girl would be a good match but her family's more respectable than ours, so they may not want us to have her.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: Surely we can wait a couple more years at least.\n\nOTAKA: In any case, once Otane's married off we really do have to get you a wife. That'd fix everything. When your dad ran off, I was left with three babes in arms, wondering what on earth I was going to do.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: There's no sense dwelling on the past. What's done is done.\n\n( _The front door rattles open and_ SHINJIR\u014c _returns. For a mere primary school teacher, he is an impressive-looking young man_.)\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: I'm back.\n\nOTAKA: Welcome home.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: You're dreadfully late tonight.\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: I had so much to do I was at my wit's end. My shoulders ache something awful.\n\nOTAKA: We've been holding supper for you.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: You can have a bath after you've eaten.\n\nSHINJIR\u014c ( _Changing into a kimono_ ): Where's Otane, Mum?\n\nOTAKA: Went to deliver some sewing.\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: Hey, Ken'ichi, I heard something interesting today. Principal Sugita told me that he'd seen somebody who looked like Dad in Furushinmachi.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c and OTAKA: Eh!?\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: Mr. Sugita was walking down the street in Furushinmachi\u2014you know, where all the inns are\u2014when he saw someone ahead, about sixty years old. The man looked vaguely familiar, so he caught up to him and had a good look at him from the side. He could almost swear it was Dad, Mr. Sugita said. If it's S\u014dtar\u014d, then sure as you're born, he'll have a mole on his right cheek. If so, I'll hail him, he thought, but when he got closer, the man slunk off down that side street by the Water God's shrine.\n\nOTAKA: Mr. Sugita was an old friend of your dad's\u2014the two took lance lessons together in the old days\u2014so, if anybody ought to know him, it'd be him. Even so, it's been some twenty years now.\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: That's what Mr. Sugita said. It's been twenty-odd years since he'd seen him, so he couldn't be sure, but then again, this was somebody he'd chummed around with since when they were kids, so he couldn't swear he was completely mistaken.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c ( _An uneasy light in his eyes_ ): So Mr. Sugita didn't call out to him then.\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: He said he was ready to say something if the man had a mole.\n\nOTAKA: Well, I suppose Mr. Sugita was wrong after all. If your dad had come back to this town, then there's no way he wouldn't stop at the old homestead.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: He'd never dare set foot in this door again, let me tell you.\n\nOTAKA: Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, he's dead. It's been twenty years.\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: Didn't you say somebody ran into him in Okayama? When was that?\n\nOTAKA: Why, that was ten years ago already. That was when the Kubo boy, Ch\u016bta, made a trip to Okayama. Your dad had brought some lions and tigers to town for a show, he said. He treated Ch\u016bta to dinner and asked about us. Ch\u016bta said he wore a gold watch on his _obi_ and was all decked out in silk\u2014cut a real figure, he did. But that's the last we've heard of him. That was the year after the war, so I guess it must be twelve, thirteen years ago already.3\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: Dad was quite the eccentric, wasn't he.\n\nOTAKA: Ever since he was young, he had no taste for the family studies4 but preferred to spend his time prospecting for gold and whatnot. So it wasn't just the high life that got him in debt. He lost a small fortune exporting patent medicines to China.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c ( _Looking even more perturbed_ ): Let's eat, Mum.\n\nOTAKA: Yes, yes, let's eat. I clean forgot. ( _Leaves for the kitchen. From offstage._ ) Mr. Sugita must've been mistaken. If he was still alive he'd be getting on. Surely, he would've sent us a postcard at least.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c ( _More seriously_ ): When was it Mr. Sugita ran into that fellow?\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: Last night about nine, he said.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: How was he dressed?\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: Not very well, apparently. Didn't have a coat on.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: That so?\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: How do you remember him?\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: I don't.\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: Surely you do. You were eight then. Even I have a foggy memory of him.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: I don't. I used to, but I made a point of forgetting.\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: Mr. Sugita talks about Dad a lot. Says he was quite good looking when he was young.\n\nOTAKA ( _Bringing supper out of the kitchen_ ): That's right. Your dad was very popular. When he was a page for his lordship, one of the ladies-in-waiting gave him a chopstick box with a love poem inside.\n\nSHINJIR\u014c ( _Laughing_ ): Why the hell would she do that? Hah hah hah hah.\n\nOTAKA: He was born in the Year of the Ox, so that'd make him fifty-eight now. If he'd stayed put here he'd be enjoying his retirement now. ( _Pause. The three begin to eat._ ) Otane should be home soon. It's getting quite cold out, isn't it?\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: I heard a shrike today, mum, in that big elm at J\u014dganji. It's autumn already.... Oh, I've got some news for you, Ken. I've decided to get my English certificate. There aren't any good math teachers, you know.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: Good idea. So you'll be going to the Ericsons'?\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: That's what I thought. They're missionaries, so I don't have to pay them anything.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: In any case, if you want to show the world you can stand on your own two feet, you know you can't rely on your dad's reputation. So hit the books. I was thinking of taking the senior civil service exam myself, but they've changed the rules, and now you have to be a high school graduate, so I've given up the idea. You graduated from high school, so you've got to give it your best shot.\n\n( _The front door opens and_ OTANE _returns. She is a pale-complexioned young woman of above-average good looks_.)\n\nOTANE: I'm home.\n\nOTAKA: You're late.\n\nOTANE: They had more work for me. That's what held me up.\n\nOTAKA: Have some supper.\n\nOTANE ( _Sits. Looking rather worried_ ): When I got back to the house just now, Ken'ichi, there was this strange old man loitering across the road, just staring at our doorway. ( _The other three start._ )\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: Hm.\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: What did he look like?\n\nOTANE: It was so dark I couldn't tell for sure, but he was tall.\n\n(SHINJIR\u014c _goes over to the window and looks outside_.)\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: Anybody there?\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: Uh uh. Nobody. ( _The three children are silent_.)\n\nOTAKA: It was the third day after Obon when he left home.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: I'd rather you didn't bring up the past anymore, Mum.\n\nOTAKA: I used to feel as bitter as you do, but as I get older, my heart's not as hard as it used to be.\n\n( _All four eat their supper in silence. Suddenly, there is a rattling at the front door_. KEN'ICHIR\u014c _'s and_ OTAKA _'s faces register the greatest emotion, but the nature of that emotion differs radically_.)\n\nMAN'S VOICE: Hello?\n\nOTANE: Yes? ( _She makes no move to rise, however_.)\n\nMAN'S VOICE: I wonder\u2014is Otaka there?\n\nOTAKA: Yes! ( _Goes toward the front door as if sucked toward it. Henceforth, we can hear only their voices_.)\n\nMAN ( _Offstage_ ): Otaka, is it you?\n\nOTAKA ( _Offstage_ ): It's you! My God... how you've changed.\n\n( _Their voices are filled with tears_.)\n\nMAN ( _Offstage_ ): Well... you look... well. The children must be all grown up by now.\n\nOTAKA ( _Offstage_ ): Indeed. They've turned into fine young grownups. Come see for yourself.\n\nMAN ( _Offstage_ ): Is it all right?\n\nOTAKA ( _Offstage_ ): Of course it is.\n\n( _Returning home for the first time in twenty years, the haggard father,_ S\u014cTAR\u014c, _is led into the living room by his old wife_. SHINJIR\u014c _and_ OTANE _stare at their father, blinking in disbelief_.)\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: Is this Father? I'm Shinjir\u014d.\n\nS\u014cTAR\u014c: Why, what a fine young man you've become! When I left, you were hardly a toddler.\n\nOTANE: Father, I'm Otane.\n\nS\u014cTAR\u014c: I'd heard there was a girl, but, my, you're a pretty one.\n\nOTAKA: Well, my dear... where to begin? It's a fine thing the children have turned out so well, don't you think?\n\nS\u014cTAR\u014c: They say kids'll grow up even without their parents' help, and I guess they're right, aren't they? Hah hah hah. ( _Laughs._ )\n\n( _But no one joins him in his laughter_. KEN'ICHIR\u014c _remains silent, leaning on the table_.)\n\nOTAKA: Dear. Ken and Shin have both turned into fine young men. Ken passed the regular civil service exam when he was only twenty, and Shin here never fell lower than third place in middle school. The two of them now pull in about sixty yen a month. And Otane, well, as you can see, she's a fine-looking girl. We've had proposals from some fine places, let me tell you.\n\nS\u014cTAR\u014c: Why, that's a fine thing indeed. I myself was doing quite well till about four, five years back. Had myself a troupe of some two dozen, touring the country. Then, when we were in Kure, our show tent burned down and we lost everything. After that nothing went right and before I knew it, I was an old man. I started to miss my old wife and kids, so that's why I crept back here. Be good to me, 'cause I don't expect I'll have much longer to live. ( _Looks at_ KEN'ICHIR\u014c.) What d'ye say, Ken'ichir\u014d? Won't you pass the cup to me? Your dad's not much used to drinking the good stuff these days. Ah, but you'd be the only one to remember my face, wouldn't you? (KEN'ICHIR\u014c _does not respond._ )\n\nOTAKA: Come, Ken. Listen to your dad. It's been years since the two of you met, so you ought to celebrate.\n\nSHINJIR\u014c ( _Takes the sak\u00e9 cup and offers it to_ S\u014cTAR\u014c): There you go.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c ( _Abruptly_ ): Stoppit. You've no right to give it to him.\n\nOTAKA: What are you saying? Ken!\n\n(S\u014cTAR\u014c _gives him a sharp look_. SHINJIR\u014c _and_ OTANE _hold down their heads and say nothing_.)\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c ( _Goading him_ ): We have no father. How could _that_ be our father?\n\nS\u014cTAR\u014c ( _Barely restraining his rage_ ): What did you say!?\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c ( _Coldly_ ): If we had a father, then Mum wouldn't have led us all by the hand to the breakwater and made us jump in with her. I was eight then. Luckily, Mum picked a spot that was too shallow, otherwise we'd have all drowned. Had I a father, I wouldn't have had to go work as an errand boy when I was ten years old. It's because we had no father our childhood was so miserable. Shinjir\u014d, have you forgotten how, when you were in primary school, you cried because we couldn't afford to buy any ink and paper? Or how you cried when we couldn't buy the textbooks you needed and your classmates made fun of you because you'd brought handwritten copies to school? How could we have a father? A real father wouldn't have let us suffer like that!\n\n(OTAKA _and_ OTANE _weep;_ SHINJIR\u014c _fights back the tears. Even the old man begins to lose his rage and succumb to grief_.)\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: But, Ken, see how much our mum's willing to forgive. Surely you can find it in you to let bygones be bygones.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c ( _Even more coldly_ ): Mum's a woman, so I don't know what she thinks, but if her husband's my father, then he's my enemy. When we were kids and times were bad or we were hungry and complained to Mum, she'd say, \"It's all your dad's fault. If you're looking for somebody to blame, then blame your dad.\" If that man's our father, he's the one who's given us nothing but grief since when we were just kids. When I was ten and running errands for the prefectural office, our mum was at home making matchboxes to make ends meet. One month she didn't have any work and the three of us had to go without lunches. Have you forgotten? The reason I studied so hard was so I could show that bastard. I wanted to get back at the man who abandoned us. I wanted to prove to him that I could lose a father and still grow up to be a man. Do I remember him ever loving me? I don't think so! Till I was eight, he spent all his time out drinking, thanks to which he got up to his head in debts, then ran off with another woman. The love of a wife and three children still didn't amount to any more than that one woman. And when he disappeared, so did the passbook with sixteen yen in it that Mum had put away for me.\n\nSHINJIR\u014c ( _Holding back his tears_ ): But brother! See how old Dad's become.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: It's easy enough for you, Shin, to glibly call him \"Dad\"! Just because some stranger you've never seen before comes crawling into our house and says he's our father, you suddenly feel sorry for him?\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: But Ken, we're his own flesh and blood. No matter what happens, our duty's\u2014\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: To look after him, you say? Off he went and had the time of his life. Now he's old and can't get by any longer, he says, so he comes home. I don't care what you say. I haven't got a dad.\n\nS\u014cTAR\u014c ( _Indignantly, but his anger is entirely feigned and carries no power or conviction_ ): Ken'ichir\u014d! How dare you speak like that to your own father!\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: You may be my father, but you sure didn't raise me! You threw away the right to be my father when your children died, there on the breakwater, twenty years ago. Whatever I am today I made myself. I don't owe anybody anything.\n\n( _Everyone falls silent. Only_ OTAKA _'s and_ OTANE _'s quiet sobbing can be heard_.)\n\nS\u014cTAR\u014c: Right then, I'll leave. I've been a man of some means, I'll have you know. I made a small fortune in the past, and no matter how far I've fallen I'm still able to feed myself. Well, sorry for the trouble I've caused you all. ( _Indignantly makes to leave._ )\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: Wait, please. I'll look after you, even if my brother won't. Ken'ichi's your own flesh and blood, so even he'll come 'round soon enough, I'm sure. Wait! I'll do whatever I can to look after you.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: Shinjir\u014d! What has this man ever done for you? I still bear the scars of his beatings, but what have you got to show for him? Nothing. Who paid for your primary school? Have you forgotten it was your big brother who paid for your tuition out of the wretched salary I made as an errand boy? The only real father you ever had was me. All right, go ahead and help that man out if that's what you want. But if you do, I'll never talk to you again.\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: But\u2014\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: If you don't like it, you can leave. And take that man with you.\n\n( _The women continue to cry_. SHINJIR\u014c _says nothing_.)\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: Thanks to the fact we had no father, I scrimped and saved, working late into the night, just so my little brother and sister didn't have to suffer like I did. I put you both through middle school.\n\nS\u014cTAR\u014c ( _Weakly_ ): Say no more. I must've put you all out by coming back. I won't trouble you again. I've got enough wits about me to figure out how to fend for myself. I'll be off, then. Otaka! Look after yourself. I guess it's a good thing I left you, after all.\n\nSHINJIR\u014c ( _Following his father as he attempts to leave_ ): Have you got enough cash on you, sir? Surely you haven't had supper yet.\n\nS\u014cTAR\u014c ( _His eyes shining as if appealing to him_ ): No, no. Thanks anyway. ( _He stumbles at the entranceway and collapses on the lower step_.)\n\nOTAKA: Be careful!\n\nSHINJIR\u014c ( _Helping him up_ ): Do you have some place to go?\n\nS\u014cTAR\u014c ( _Remains seated, dejectedly_ ): Who needs a home? I'll die on the road.... ( _As if to himself._ ) I'd no right to come beating on your door, but still, I got older and weaker and found my feet naturally wending their way back to where I was born. It's been three days since I came back to town, and every night I'd stand outside the door here, but I couldn't bring myself to cross this threshold.... All said and done, I'd have been better off if I hadn't come. Anybody would make a fool of a man who came home penniless.... When I turned fifty, I started to long for my old home again, and I figured I'd bring back a thousand or two at least and beg your forgiveness, but when you're older it's that much harder to make a living.... ( _Stands up._ ) No matter, I'll make do somehow. ( _He weakly gets to his feet and, turning back, gazes at his old wife before opening the door and leaving. The other four family members remain silent for some time._ )\n\nOTAKA ( _Appealingly_ ): Ken'ichir\u014d!\n\nOTANE: Brother!\n\n( _There is a tense pause that lasts some time_.)\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c: Shin! Go, find Dad and bring him back.\n\n(SHINJIR\u014c _flies out the door. The other three wait anxiously_. SHINJIR\u014c _presently returns, his face pale_.)\n\nSHINJIR\u014c: I took the street south and looked for him, but there was no sign of him. I'll go north this time. Come with me, brother.\n\nKEN'ICHIR\u014c ( _Anxiously_ ): How could you have lost him! He can't be lost!\n\n( _The two brothers madly rush out the door._ )\n\nCURTAIN\n\n1. Kikuchi Kan, \"Engeki zuihitsu,\" quoted in Oyama Isao, _Kindai Nihon gikyokushi_ (Yamagata: Kindai Nihon gikyokushi kank\u014dkai, 1968), 2:514.\n\n2. _Nankaid \u014d no kaigan ni aru sh\u014d tokai_: literally, \"a small city on the Nankaid\u014d coast.\" Nankaid\u014d refers to the old provinces adjoining the eastern region of the Inland Sea, from modern Wakayama Prefecture to Hy\u014dg\u014d Prefecture along the Honsh\u016b coast and including the islands of Awaji and Shikoku. Kikuchi no doubt is alluding to his birthplace, Takamatsu, in Kagawa Prefecture.\n\n3. Otaka is referring here to the Sino-Japanese War of 1895/1896.\n\n4. _Ie no gakumon_ is the Confucian learning that would have been a tradition in a samurai family like theirs.\n_THE SKELETONS' DANCE_\n\nAKITA UJAKU\n\nTRANSLATED BY M. CODY POULTON\n\nAkita Ujaku, _The Skeletons' Dance_ , directed by Uchiyama Jun, Mingei, 1983. (Courtesy of The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum Waseda University)\n\nT _he Skeletons_ ' _Dance_ is a remarkable dramatic testimony to a dark event in Japan's modern history: the Great Kant\u014d Earthquake of 1923 and the slaughter of several thousand resident Koreans by vigilante groups during the ensuing chaos. At the time of the earthquake, Akita Ujaku (1883\u20131962) had been on a lecture tour of the T\u014dhoku region. Quickly returning to Tokyo, he was harassed by both the police and vigilante groups. He remained in Tokyo, touring the worst-hit places, for a few days before returning to his native Aomori Prefecture for his own safety. Ujaku's leftist sympathies were no doubt known to authorities, and the suspension of civil liberties after the earthquake led to the murders of several activists, including anarchist Osugi Sakae and the leftist playwright Hirasawa Keishichi.\n\nUjaku was a student of English literature at the Tokyo senmon gakk\u014d (the precursor to Waseda University). His Waseda contacts introduced him to Shimamura H\u014dgetsu and Osanai Kaoru, and he became one of the founding members of Osanai's Free Theater in 1909. His first successful play, _Buried Spring_ ( _Umoreta haru_ ), was written for Sawamura S\u014dj\u016br\u014d's Art Theater (Bijutsu gekij\u014d) in 1913. His early plays are romantic, poetical; their idealism later found expression in a more direct political engagement, which led to his joining the Japan Socialist League (Nihon shakaishugi renmei) in 1921. He was also a regular contributor to the foremost leftist journal of the day, _The Sower_ ( _Tanemaku hito_ ). Although Ujaku's dramatic production, like that of many Taish\u014d writers, declined after the late 1920s, he continued to be active in the theater, in 1934 as the secretary of the Shinky\u014d gekidan, one of the leftist spin-offs from the Tsukiji Little Theater, and as the editor of _Teatoro_ magazine. Like several hundred other _shingeki_ artists, he was arrested in the 1940 purge of leftist theater people.\n\n_The Skeletons_ ' _Dance_ does not portray the earthquake but, rather, its aftermath. It is set in a town, possibly Morioka, to which survivors of the earthquake have been evacuated. A young man bravely defends one of the evacuees, who may be Korean, when vigilantes threaten him. The play is an early example of expressionist theater in Japan, its style inspired by playwrights like August Strindberg, Georg Kaiser, and Ernst Toller. As its notes indicate, Ujaku conceived its staging in the style of Mavo artists like Yanase Masamu and Murayama Tomoyoshi, who designed many productions for the Tsukiji Little Theater and other stages in the 1920s. Ujaku's play miraculously escaped censorship when it was first published in _New Tides of Theater_ ( _Engeki shinch \u014d_) in April 1924, but authorities quickly confiscated issues of the magazine when they realized its content. The play was not performed professionally until 1982.\n\nPlace: Inside the tent of a first-aid station. (Cubist staging could be employed here. It might be interesting to try the \"Mavo\" style.)\n\nCharacters\n\nA YOUTH\n\nAn OLD MAN\n\nA NURSE\n\nA DOCTOR\n\nA KOREAN\n\nVIGILANTES (later, SKELETONS)\n\nA LADY\n\nVarious EVACUEES\n\nOTHERS\n\nOLD MAN: Excuse me...\n\nYOUTH: Are you talking to me?\n\nOLD MAN: Sorry to disturb you at your sleep, but what is this place?\n\nYOUTH ( _Raising his head and glancing at the_ OLD MAN): This is M Station. Where are you going?\n\nOLD MAN: I was headed for Hokkaido, but it's M Station, you say?... What time is it?\n\nYOUTH: It's past two already.\n\nOLD MAN: Will it be dawn soon, then?\n\nYOUTH: Not for another couple of hours.\n\nOLD MAN: Is that so?... What a disaster!... For this to happen, and at my age.... What was that sound?\n\nYOUTH: Nothing, just a train. When did you get here?\n\nOLD MAN: Last night.... Late last night.... Why did this have to happen? It's crazy.\n\nYOUTH: You had a bad time of it, then, in Tokyo, did you? We were both unlucky, I guess.\n\nOLD MAN: \"Bad time\" hardly begins to describe it.... I lost my daughter and my grandchildren.... Besides, I was sick and hardly in any state to be making a trip anywhere.\n\nYOUTH: Is that so? I'm sorry for you.... Where was it your daughter and grandkids died? Honjo?\n\nOLD MAN: No, Muk\u014djima.... I've been living in Muk\u014djima for some thirty years, now.... I heard from a neighbor that my daughter fled with my grandchildren to the embankment. They were pushed into the river by the crush of people....\n\nYOUTH: That's terrible. I heard that happened to a lot of people there. But luckily you managed to get away....\n\nOLD MAN: I'd have been better off dead.... What have I got to look forward to now, with my daughter and grandchildren gone?\n\nYOUTH: You've a right to feel that way.... But in this world of ours, we've got to hang on. If we do, something will turn up.... Mind you, I can't see any light at the end of the tunnel myself... but so long as one's alive, one's got to live.\n\nOLD MAN: Is there somebody sleeping next to me? It feels like somebody's lying on top of my right arm.... Sorry to bother you, but could you have a look for me?\n\nYOUTH: Yes, there is.... You can't move your right arm?\n\nOLD MAN: I haven't been able to for some three years now.\n\nYOUTH: How did you ever manage to come this far?... You should've stayed in Tokyo.... Hello? Could you please move your head there? You're lying on top of a sick man's arm. Please move.\n\n( _The_ MAN _raises his head, opens his eyes and looks at the other two. He appears to want to say something but simply smiles sadly at them and shifts over, then falls asleep as before, lying face up. Two or three other_ MEN _raise their heads and gaze at the_ YOUTH _and_ OLD MAN.)\n\nOLD MAN ( _Breathing deeply_ ): Thank you.... That feels a lot better now.... You must be tired.... I think I'll try to catch some sleep myself before morning.... Hey, what is that racket?... Is there a fire someplace?\n\nYOUTH ( _Laughing_ ): That's no fire. It's a locomotive. We're five hundred miles away from Tokyo here. No earthquakes or fires are going to get you here.\n\nOLD MAN: That so?... But aren't they saying the Koreans are going around lighting fires?... It's really frightening.\n\nYOUTH ( _Firmly_ ): You believe it too? We should have a bit more faith than that. I'm doing what I can to find out the truth.\n\nOLD MAN: Really? But if it's a lie, it's a terrible one.... Is it true that because of the rumors a lot of Koreans have been killed along the railroad tracks?\n\nYOUTH: It is. I've seen a lot since yesterday myself.... I'm sick to my stomach of the Japanese. I thought we were a people with a bit more sense than that, but I feel completely betrayed by what's happened. And deeply disappointed.\n\n( _During this speech, a_ MAN _in back raises his head and looks at the two. His eyes shine strangely_.)\n\nOLD MAN: I know nothing about what happened, but if the Koreans didn't do anything, I feel sorry for them.... Why did they have to take it out on them again?\n\nYOUTH: Because people have no faith. All they do is go around smugly wearing somebody else's clothes. I'm disappointed in the Japanese as citizens, but I won't lose my faith in them as human beings. It doesn't matter where they're from\u2014all humans are, deep down, good and innocent.\n\nOLD MAN: That may be, but I'm Japanese, and I think the Japanese are fine people.\n\nYOUTH: Yes. I too want to think that, but I saw what the Japanese did last night and I didn't want to think that my own countrymen could do such a thing.... If you didn't see what I saw, there's no way you could understand how I feel.\n\nOLD MAN: In any case, it's turned into a nasty world, that's for sure.... Where are you headed from here?\n\nYOUTH: I'm going back to Aomori. I've got brothers there....\n\nOLD MAN: Is that so?... If you don't mind my asking, have you got a job?\n\nYOUTH ( _Laughing_ ): Me?... Why, I'm still a student....\n\nOLD MAN: Is that so?... Still studying, are you?... Good for you....\n\nYOUTH: And what line of work were you in?\n\nOLD MAN: Me?... Nothing special.... I worked for a foundry....\n\nYOUTH: A foundry? You mean, like casting sculptures?\n\nOLD MAN: Well... I was really just a tradesman, after all.... Nothing to write home about....\n\nYOUTH: I know quite a few sculptors myself. There was Y, a poor fellow who was eking a living casting medals and statues of Daikoku. He was living in Muk\u014djima too, I think.\n\nOLD MAN: Y... I think I've heard that name before.... Hey, it sounds like there's some kind of noise. Ever since the fire, my hearing's not what it used to be....\n\nYOUTH ( _Listening carefully_ ): It's nothing. You're just upset. You should try to relax.\n\nNURSE ( _To a first-aid station_ ATTENDANT): Nishimura-san, go to the headquarters and get us some more cotton batting. (ATTENDANT _exits right without speaking._ ) Is there anyone here who doesn't feel well?\n\nEVACUEE: Nurse, call me a doctor.... My stomach hurts so bad I don't know what to do....\n\nEVACUEE: Nurse, bring me a glass of water....\n\nEVACUEE: Nurse, can I board the boat in my state?...\n\nEVACUEE: Nurse, will this ticket let me board the boat for free?\n\nNURSE: Quiet, everybody, please! I can't do anything for you if you all talk at once. ( _To the_ OLD MAN.) Are you getting on the boat tonight?\n\nOLD MAN: I wanted to ask you... Would it be impossible for me to stay here a bit longer?... I hurt so bad, I'm not sure I can go anywhere....\n\nNURSE: Is that so? The doctor will be coming tonight, so I'll have him take a look at you.\n\nEVACUEE: I want a glass of water. My body feels like it's burning all over....\n\nNURSE ( _Drawing a glass of boiled water from a large bucket and handing it to him_ ): There you go. Drink.\n\nEVACUEE: Nurse, me too...\n\nEVACUEE: Me too...\n\nEVACUEE: Me too...\n\nNURSE: You'll just have to wait your turn.\n\nEVACUEE: You're mean...\n\nEVACUEE: A spiteful nurse.... Really stuck up.\n\nEVACUEE: I should never have come here in the first place.... Never in my life have I been treated so badly before.\n\nEVACUEE: Yeah, they were so ever much nicer at O Station.... They can't understand how we feel 'cause they didn't get burned.\n\nEVACUEE: Nurse, could you take this bandage off?... Ever since you put it on, it's been hurting something awful.... Ow!... It hurts!\n\nNURSE: That shouldn't be. It may hurt a bit now, but in no time you'll be feeling better.\n\nEVACUEE: Ah, it hurts!... Ah, it hurts!... I'd sooner be dead than hang around in a place like this.\n\nEVACUEE: Quiet there, you!... This child here is deathly ill.\n\nNURSE: Now, please try to be quiet.... I'm afraid she hasn't long.\n\nEVACUEE ( _To the other_ EVACUEE): Shut up, you old bag!... We ought to kill you instead.... Can't you see this child's going to die?... We're all suffering here....\n\nNURSE: Now, now. I know how you all feel, but try to quiet down now.\n\nLADY ( _Enters tent carrying a basket filled with various things_ ): Good evening, everyone. You must all be tired.\n\nNURSE: Good evening, madam. Thanks for coming. But why at such an hour as this?\n\nLADY: I was up all night last night at Headquarters with the bureau chief's wife. You know? Even the bureau chief's wife stayed up with us!\n\nNURSE: Is that so? Well, we appreciate it.\n\nLADY ( _Looking at the scene inside the tent_ ): Quite a few have left already, it seems. These are gifts from Headquarters.\n\nNURSE: Why, thank you very much. I'm sure they'll all be delighted.\n\nYOUTH: Won't you try to sleep?\n\nOLD MAN: How can I sleep with all this racket?... I don't need anything.... I just want to have a decent rest.... But when I think of my daughter and the grandkids...\n\nEVACUEE: Who is that woman?\n\nEVACUEE: Her? She's brought something.... Get a load of the rock on the ring she's wearing!... Maybe I should ask her to give it to me....\n\nEVACUEE: White collar, crested jacket... A real looker.... What d'ya think? Used to be a professional woman?...\n\nLADY: You must all be very tired, surely.... Please tell me if there's anything you need. Don't be shy, now.\n\nNURSE: This is the wife of the mayor, everybody.... She's been working very hard for us all since the fire....\n\nLADY ( _Laughs youthfully_ ): My, but you flatter me! It's such a poor town, I'm ashamed to say that it's more than I can manage. But if it's in my power, I'll do all I possibly can, so do please speak up and tell me.\n\nEVACUEE ( _To himself_ ): Speak up? Isn't it obvious without our telling you? We don't have anything.\n\nLADY: Anyone hungry?\n\nEVACUEE: I'm not hungry, but I'm dying of thirst here.\n\nLADY: Is that so? Here's a soft drink for you.\n\nEVACUEE: I'm thirsty too, ma'am! I'm thirsty too!...\n\nLADY: I've only five bottles of soft drink here. You'll have to share them among yourselves.\n\n( _The_ EVACUEES _all swarm around the_ LADY _like beggars, attempting to grab bottles of soft drink. The_ LADY _blushes and tries to prevent all the bottles from being taken. The_ EVACUEES _press in on her from all sides_.)\n\nNURSE: Let me handle this, madam.... It's dangerous for you.... Now, settle down everybody! If you don't settle down you'll have to give back what you've got. Are you listening?\n\nEVACUEE: Quiet, everybody!... I've got no need for any soft drink.... Let's give them to the ladies....\n\nEVACUEE: Yeah, give them to the ladies!...\n\nNURSE ( _Taking the basket from the_ LADY): Yes, why don't you do that? I'll give you men some apples instead. ( _She gives the women the bottles of soft drink and apples to the men. The_ EVACUEES _stretch out their arms to receive the gifts_.)\n\nLADY: It's quite a task, isn't it, handing out rations? I feel I understand for the first time how much you all suffered.\n\nNURSE: It's nothing once you get used to it, my lady. Thank you so much. They're all just like children. But I suppose they have a right to be.\n\nYOUTH: You're not hungry?\n\nOLD MAN: No... not much.... I just don't feel like eating....\n\nYOUTH: It's unpleasant having to receive things, but there's something even uglier about the spirit of those who are doing the giving.\n\nLADY: Well, I'll be taking my leave of you all now. Please, do look after them. Farewell.\n\nNURSE: Are you going? Thank you so much, madam. Please give my regards to the people at Headquarters.\n\nLADY ( _Heading out of the tent with her empty basket_ ): It looks like tomorrow will be another fine day.\n\nNURSE: Is that so? Good-bye, my lady!\n\nATTENDANT ( _Enters the tent with a box of cotton batting_ ): Terrible news, Miss Yamada! Some Koreans have been killed in front of Headquarters!\n\nNURSE: Were they up to something, the Koreans?\n\nATTENDANT: They say the Koreans were launching an all-out attack on the home guard.\n\nEVACUEES ( _Practically all the men stand up as one_ ): Koreans!\n\nEVACUEE: The Koreans are here. I might have known it!\n\nEVACUEE: The Koreans are beasts!\n\nNURSE: Now, try to settle down, all of you!... The doctor will be here soon.... It's nothing to worry about....\n\nEVACUEE: Nothing to worry about?... The Koreans want to slaughter us all!... Kill the Koreans!...\n\nNURSE: Miss Nishimura, quickly call the doctor here. Everybody\u2014I'm here to look after you, so settle down until the doctor gets here.\n\nEVACUEE: Let's wait till the doctor gets here....\n\nEVACUEE: Yeah, good idea! Good idea!...\n\nEVACUEE: What should we do, nurse? Will the Koreans kill me?... My house got burned down.... Never would have I imagined we've run into trouble here too, of all places.... Ah, what should we do?...\n\nOLD MAN: Is it true the Koreans are going to attack us?\n\nYOUTH ( _Laughing_ ): Why do they think that? That's a pretty bizarre notion of them attacking the home guard, surely. The Koreans don't have any weapons. How can a people who have been given no weapons dare carry out such a thing? I met yesterday a staff officer from U division, and he told me none of the Koreans had any weapons or bombs or anything.\n\nOLD MAN: Really?... But why, then, would such a rumor be spread?\n\nYOUTH: Because the Japanese have no faith!\n\nEVACUEE: Who is that guy?\n\nEVACUEE: He's a Korean!\n\nEVACUEE: A Korean!... A Korean!...\n\nEVACUEE: Get him! Get the bastard!\n\nOLD MAN ( _Rising halfway up_ ): Really, everyone! You're not making any sense.... This nonsense about Koreans is all a terrible mistake.... You have to tell them....\n\nYOUTH: No, there's no point trying.... They'll all know soon enough.\n\nEVACUEE: Know what?... What will we know?\n\nNURSE: Now, settle down, everyone. The doctor's coming.\n\nDOCTOR ( _Wearing the uniform of a military doctor_ ): What's going on here?\n\nNURSE: They're all upset over the rumors about the Koreans.\n\nDOCTOR: Hm, what could the Koreans do? Gentlemen! Do you doubt the power of the heroic Imperial Army? Fear not, Gentlemen! The home guard division in this city is awaiting its marching orders as we speak....\n\nEVACUEE: A division!... A whole division!\n\nEVACUEE: Awaiting marching orders as we speak!...\n\nDOCTOR: I understand all too well your selfless love for the state.... You yourselves have sent so many devoted soldiers to serve in our forces.... But fear not, Gentlemen!... The Imperial Army would not let them lay a finger on you.... So long as you're here and in my charge, Gentlemen, you must follow my orders....\n\nEVACUEE: That's right! The army's here! We've got the army!\n\nDOCTOR: Good thinking, lads. ( _To the_ NURSE.) How are the patients?\n\nNURSE: Well, that one says ever since we bandaged him up, he's hurting terribly.\n\nDOCTOR: Hm, so long as it hurts he's fine. If the treatment doesn't hurt, then it's not working.... And the others?...\n\nNURSE: Well, that child over there is not in very good shape at all....\n\nDOCTOR: Hm, that won't do.... We'll move him to Headquarters in the morning.... She was a fool to board the train with a child in that condition....\n\nNURSE: Is there anything we can do for her right now?...\n\nDOCTOR: It's too late.... ( _The cries of an_ EVACUEE _can be heard._ ) There's still time before morning. Don't worry, lads. Get some rest.... You mustn't make a fuss....\n\nNURSE: Relax, everyone, and get some rest.... You mustn't cry there.... Your child will be fine.... We're taking her to the hospital first thing in the morning.... So sleep till morning comes.... The rest of you too, get some sleep....\n\n( _The_ EVACUEES _all return to their places and lie down. The sound of the wind whipping the tent can be heard and, far off, the barking of a dog. Then the sound of a marching line of soldiers_.)\n\nDOCTOR: I'll be at Headquarters. Let me know if there's anything that needs doing. You mustn't give the patients anything to worry about.... And don't let them have their way.... Do you understand?\n\nNURSE: Yes, sir. I understand.\n\n( _The_ DOCTOR _leaves the tent, his saber making a rattling noise. The_ NURSE _silently makes her way among the lines of sleeping patients. At the back of the tent, an_ ATTENDANT _begins to nod off. Two, three barks of a dog_.\n\n\u2014 _A longish pause. A group of_ VIGILANTES _enter the tent. They are dressed in a variety of costumes, some in the uniform of reservists, others in old-fashioned tabards, some wearing bandannas, and still others in school uniforms. The one in command is wearing armor and brandishing a sword. They all carry some kind of weapon: a spear or sword or saber_.)\n\nARMOR ( _Gazing around inside the tent_ ): Here?\n\nTABARD: Yeah, here.... This was the place.... Come on in, everyone.\n\nARMOR: Bring the lantern, bring the lantern.\n\nBANDANNA ( _Enters the tent holding the lantern_ ): Where is he?\n\nSTUDENT: Be careful. He might be carrying a bomb.\n\nRESERVIST: You think a bomb or two is going to make me shit my pants?\n\nARMOR: Hush!... Nurse, good evening!\n\nNURSE: What do you want?... You can't come in here.... What on earth is going on here?\n\nARMOR: Actually, nurse, we're looking for somebody. If you'd be so kind, let us in the tent....\n\nNURSE: I can't allow it. The patients are asleep....\n\nBANDANNA: Surely you don't have to say no to everything we ask.... Come on, let's go in and have a look....\n\nNURSE ( _Her lips trembling_ ): You mustn't!... I forbid it!\n\nARMOR: The fact is, nurse, there's a Korean bastard hiding out here.... Somebody saw him get off the train.... For the sake of the fatherland, we have to kill the Koreans....\n\nTABARD: That's right! For the fatherland!... For the peace of our citizens!...\n\nRESERVIST: That's right! For the peace of our citizens!...\n\nBANDANNA: Quit your muttering and get in there, look for him!... Get the bastard!...\n\n( _The_ VIGILANTES _barge among the patients, shining the lantern in their faces. Ashen faced, the_ NURSE _follows after them, looking pale_.\n\n_One of the_ VIGILANTES _stands over a man who is squatting like a puppy behind the_ OLD MAN _and the_ YOUTH.)\n\nBANDANNA: Here he is!... We've got him!... Bring the lantern over!... Look at his face!...\n\nMAN ( _Apparently a laborer in his mid-twenties_ ): I haven't done anything!\n\nSTUDENT ( _Imitating him_ ): I haven't done anything!...\n\nTABARD: Get him!\n\nARMOR: Don't rough him up.... I'll interrogate him.... Hey, dog! You're a Korean, aren't you? Lying to us won't get you anywhere, you know....\n\nMAN: I'm Japanese.... What are you doing?\n\nSTUDENT: \"I'm Japanese!\"... Would any Japanese ever say that?\n\nARMOR: Quiet!... What's your name?\n\nMAN: Kitamura Yoshio....\n\n( _The_ VIGILANTES _laugh_.)\n\nARMOR: Hm! Kitamura Yoshio, eh?... How old are you?\n\nMAN: Twenty-four.\n\nARMOR: So, what year were you born?1\n\nMAN ( _Nonplussed_ ): I... er... I...\n\n( _The_ VIGILANTES _all laugh_.)\n\nYOUTH ( _Suddenly standing_ ): Stop this! On what authority are you asking these questions? Who gave you the authority to do this?\n\nOLD MAN ( _Flustered_ ): Stop this!... Please, stop!...\n\nARMOR ( _Looking at the_ YOUTH): Who the hell are you?\n\nYOUTH ( _Quietly_ ): I'm a human being....\n\nARMOR: Of course, you're human.... I'm not asking whether you're man or beast. I'm asking you what kind of man you are?\n\n( _The_ VIGILANTES _thrust out their lanterns at the_ YOUTH _'s face and mutter among themselves_.)\n\nYOUTH: I'm a student.... And who are you, to come barging into a tent of evacuees and rough people up at this hour of the night?\n\nARMOR: Rough people up? Have we roughed anyone up?\n\nYOUTH: If that isn't roughing people up, then what is? Barging into a tent where evacuees are being treated, disturbing their sleep asking for identification. What right have you to ask where people are from?\n\nTABARD: Right?\n\nARMOR: Yeah, we've got a right....\n\nYOUTH: Who gave you the right to do this?... As far as I'm aware, no one but the army and the police have such a right....\n\nOLD MAN: For heaven's sake, be quiet, man! Talk it over later\u2014I'm sure they'll understand.\n\nRESERVIST: You've got a lot of nerve asking us. Our authority comes from the most reliable of sources. Why, even the prefectural police have given us their stamp of approval.\n\nARMOR: Besides, we're not going to let a few little laws get in our way.... What I'm saying is, we operate under the higher dictates of our loyalty to the state.\n\nYOUTH ( _Laughing_ ): Ha! The state? The state exists somewhere outside the rule of law?... Now, isn't that interesting! So, what is this state you're talking about?\n\nBANDANNA: Who is this upstart?... You've got no business spouting off here, so shut your trap!... We're not going to put up with any nonsense out of you! ( _Thrusts his spear at him._ )\n\nYOUTH:\n\nNo business, you say? Oh, yes, I do,\n\nYou're the ones who have no business here,\n\nWe've got the army, we've got police.\n\nLook at you all!\n\nIn your armor, tabards, _judo-gi_...\n\nDon't you have anything better to wear?\n\n( _The_ YOUTH _looks at the_ MAN.)\n\nCome, stand up tall.\n\nStand up, my man,\n\nMaybe you're right,\n\nMaybe this man is Korean,\n\nBut the Koreans aren't your enemy.\n\nJapanese, Japanese, Japanese,\n\nWhat have the Japanese done to you?\n\nWho have made the Japanese suffer?\n\nNot the Koreans, but the Japanese themselves!\n\nIt's a simple fact\u2014can't you fellows understand?\n\n( _The_ YOUTH _takes the_ KOREAN _'s hand and lays his arm on his shoulder as if to protect him_.)\n\nLook at this man!\n\nHe's a human being.\n\nLook on his face!\n\nCould he have killed innocent people?\n\nOr poisoned your wells?\n\nThis man has enemies too,\n\nBut he doesn't hate you.\n\nYou all understand nothing.\n\nYou know nothing,\n\nNor do you even try.\n\nYour comrades took his friends,\n\nMen without sin, who bore no arms,\n\nMen as obedient and innocent as leaves,\n\nYour comrades cut them down without reason, killed them!\n\nLook at this man!\n\nWhat this man now has,\n\nThe only thing nature ever gave him,\n\nIs his life.\n\nHere is your true human being!\n\nAnd who the hell are you?\n\nAll you fellows have\n\nAre dead, moldering morals.\n\nYour armor, that tabard,\n\nMight have had some value as antiques.\n\nBut what good are they for a living human being?\n\nIf there's any blood coursing in those hearts of yours,\n\nThen you should be wearing your own clothing!\n\nTake off that armor!\n\nTake off that jacket!\n\nYou're all marionettes with no life of your own!\n\nBloated corpses!\n\nMummies!\n\nSkeletons!\n\nBANDANNA: Japanese traitor!\n\nTABARD: Fanatic!\n\nSTUDENT: Enemy of the state!\n\nARMOR: Get them both!\n\nOLD MAN: Stop it, please! I'll take responsibility for this.... Please, you really must apologize to them all.... This is outrageous....\n\n( _The_ EVACUEES _run around inside the tent. The_ WOMEN EVACUEES _weep_.)\n\nNURSE ( _To the_ EVACUEES): Everyone, please leave the tent this minute! You mustn't hurt anyone!\n\nYOUTH ( _To the_ KOREAN):\n\nCome, my friend, take my hand,\n\nIf you're to be killed, then I'll die too!\n\nOh Death!\n\nHow many hundreds, how many thousands,\n\nIn hundreds and thousands of years,\n\nHave been slaughtered for their beloved countrymen?\n\nWe weren't born to fawn and\n\nToady to our stupid compatriots,\n\nWe were born to struggle and to die!\n\nFor the sake of righteousness, for friendship,\n\nWe will die!...\n\n( _The_ VIGILANTES _begin to move about violently. Brandishing their weapons they press in on the two from both sides. Holding aloft his sword,_ ARMOR _faces the_ YOUTH; TABARD _faces the_ KOREAN, _with the_ OTHERS _closing in on either side_.)\n\nYOUTH ( _Speaking quietly but with force; this must not be confused with the notion of heroism_ ):\n\nBehold a new mystery!\n\nFrom strength and friendship\n\nA new mystery gives birth\n\nTo the founding of a new race of men!\n\nRise up and wash away\n\nThe dead and ugly mold you hide!\n\nTear off your mask\n\nYour false, contemptible ancestor worship,\n\nYour heroism,\n\nYour racism,\n\nAnd dance the dance of hideous skeletons!\n\nWait, orchestra!\n\nYou hideous skeletons,\n\nTurn to stone!\n\nTurn to stone,\n\nYou hideous skeletons!\n\nHideous skeletons,\n\nTurn to stone!\n\n( _With his sword still held aloft,_ ARMOR _turns to stone._ TABARD _similarly freezes, sword held high_. BANDANNA _freezes with his spear thrust out._ STUDENT _freezes, holding his bamboo spear._ OTHER VIGILANTES _all turn to stone. The_ DOCTOR, _just about to enter the tent, similarly turns to stone_.)\n\nYOUTH: Dance, skeletons!\n\n( _A sudden blackout puts the tent into darkness. A phosphorescent light illuminates the inside of the tent, revealing ten_ SKELETONS _standing in the same attitude as the_ VIGILANTES _previously_. [Note: _The_ SKELETONS _may be played by the same actors, who can do a quick change of costume_.])\n\nYOUTH: Orchestra! Strike up a waltz for these skeletons!...\n\n( _The_ TEN SKELETONS _begin to dance. Together with the_ OLD MAN _and the_ KOREAN, _the_ YOUTH _stands by, watching_.)\n\nYOUTH: A \"death fantasia\" to comfort the blameless ones, those who died before us...\n\n( _The_ TEN SKELETONS _dance a fantasia. Two or three_ SKELETONS _begin to weaken.... Suddenly, on either side of the_ YOUTH _is heard sharp laughter_.)\n\nYOUTH:\n\nOh, dead ones,\n\nHow right it is for you to laugh!\n\nOrchestra!\n\nA round dance to bid farewell...\n\nTo you hideous skeletons.\n\nDance and dance till you fade away!\n\n( _The_ SKELETONS _begin dancing in a circle faster and faster until the circle is broken and their limbs snap off and fall in pieces to the ground. Sharp laughter. Blackout. The lights slowly come up, vaguely illuminating the tent's interior. The sound of weeping_ WOMEN EVACUEES.)\n\nNURSE ( _Quietly lifting her head_ ): Poor thing.... But it was meant to be....\n\nCURTAIN\n\n1. A trick question to catch out a foreigner: a Japanese would readily answer the reign year ( _neng \u014d_) in which he was born\u2014in this case, Meiji 32 (1899).\n\nWriting from Paris in 1913 and flush with his own fresh encounters with contemporary European theater, the eminent Japanese novelist Shimazaki T\u014dson (1872\u20131943) described the excitement he found among those artists, writers, and intellectuals in his generation seeking a new future for Japanese culture in which Japan could join the larger world:\n\nJust look at the way in which, so long as it promises to be profitable or to help in the development of humanity, our people will not hesitate to recognize the excellence of anything\u2014the passion that the French show toward art, or the philosophy of the Germans, or the Naturalism and the Religion of the Russians or whatever. The fantasies of Maeterlinck, the self-indulgence of D'Annunzio, the labors of Gorky or the cold tears of Chekov\u2014they all touch our young people; they laugh together with them, they sigh together with them. Thus were the dramas of Ibsen greeted; thus was the philosophy of Nietzsche greeted. Some people, observing this, have laughed at our frivolity and lack of clear-cut opinions, but I do not think that is correct. Far from revealing any frivolity and lack of clear-cut opinions among the Japanese people, it is instead proof of their rich endowment of warm sympathy.1\n\nThe kind of enthusiasm that T\u014dson identifies did much to propel the various theatrical experiments undertaken in the Taish\u014d period (1912\u20131926). Ten years after he made these remarks, a defining moment for prewar Japanese theater came on September 1, 1923, when an enormous earthquake destroyed most of the significant performing spaces in Tokyo. And indeed, for significant experimentation in the contemporary Japanese theater during that period, Japan _was_ Tokyo. The renewed theatrical efforts that soon followed brought about the establishment of a new framework in which the contemporary Japanese theater could continue to grow. When examining the work of the playwrights active between 1924 and 1945, we must base much of our judgment on the play texts that remain. Although we have reviews, diaries, photographs, set and costume sketches, and the like, we can only imagine the problems, both financial and artistic, that faced the generation trying to create a truly contemporary theater and then move forward.\n\nOSANAI KAORU'S VIEW OF THE THEATER\n\nPerhaps the best way to understand these issues is to examine the declaration by Osanai Kaoru (1881\u20131928), a kind of manifesto of his views of the state of the theater in 1924. His remarks were composed and published in the context of the construction of the Tsukiji Little Theater (Tsukiji sh\u014dgekij\u014d), a thoroughly up-to-date performance space with some five hundred seats and equipment as sophisticated as could be found in Europe at the time. The project was made possible though the enthusiasm and financial support of Hijikata Yoshi (1898\u20131959), a peer and the son of a millionaire.\n\nRead in retrospect, three of the major issues that Osanai raised in his manifesto reveal more of the range of problems facing the theater than a simple reading of the dramas themselves might suggest, divorced as they are from the context in which they were performed.\n\nOsanai first distinguishes between drama on the page and drama in performance. He undoubtedly is correct when he says that \"theaters do not exist for literature,\" although his own preference was often for \"literary\" plays by Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen. From the vantage point of today's readers, however, the playwriting skills shown by a number of writers active in this period was gratifyingly high. But performance skills were not as well developed, at least for those plays performed in the _shingeki_ repertory. The significance of this issue is perhaps difficult for contemporary theatergoers in the United States to fully comprehend. These days, well-trained acting talent is abundant, but significant playwrights are not. In the Japan of 1924, however, the _shingeki_ actors\u2014as several of the writers cited later point out\u2014were often too young, not sufficiently sophisticated, and relatively unskilled in the necessary means needed to deliver their dialogue with appropriate energy and nuance. Performers in kabuki and _shinpa_ , with longer performing traditions, were highly skilled at presentational performance, although they often seemed less so when they attempted to perform in the representational mode, in which they faced similar challenges. Nevertheless, some of the experimental performances in various types of contemporary drama by kabuki and _shinpa_ actors were well received.\n\nOsanai's second conviction was that his new theater should work for the future of Japanese theater, serving as a kind of \"laboratory.\" In ways that perhaps Osanai did not altogether anticipate, however, the \"future\" of Japanese contemporary theater fractured over issues important in the larger society and, in particular, over the increasing spread of Marxist thought in the arts of the period. (Here there are certain parallels with Europe during the same period.) Contemporary theater in any culture, must, of necessity, gain authenticity and presence through an ability to reflect, at least in some measure, on issues salient in the surrounding society. In Japan, the political, economic, and social stresses already captured by certain earlier playwrights were now becoming even more apparent.\n\nPart of Osanai's concept of a \"laboratory\" doubtless led to his decision to produce only imported plays in translation, a policy that continued through his first two seasons. In effect, he wanted to introduce the contemporary theater of the world to Japanese audiences.\n\nOsanai's personal point of reference was the Moscow Art Theater, where he saw performances during his visit to Europe and Russia in 1912/1913. He shared directorial duties with two others, who maintained their own artistic points of view. One, Aoyama Sugisaku (1891\u20131956), became interested in theater while he was a student at Waseda University and both directed and acted for the company. His acting career, incidentally, extended into the postwar period, and his performances can be seen in such classic Japanese films as Mizoguchi Kenji's _Ugetsu_ (1953) and Kurosawa Akira's _Scandal_ (1956). Apparently Aoyama's chief interest was in productions of high artistic standards, and he maintained no particular political point of view. Hijikata, the third of the triumvirate, now back from Berlin and, briefly, Moscow, where he witnessed the expressionist experiments of Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller, and Vsevolod Meyerhold, had in mind quite a different progressive political model. These competing visions of what might constitute a theater relevant to its time brought about the breakup of the company after Osanai's death in 1928 into what might be seen as two competing camps, literary and political.\n\nNot only did the Tsukiji Little Theater company attract aspiring actors and (once Osanai started to stage Japanese plays) playwrights, but several gifted stage designers also began their impressive careers during this period. It\u014d Kisaku (1899\u20131967), the elder brother of the actor and director Senda Koreya (It\u014d Kunio, 1904\u20131994), designed the stage sets for several of the company's most popular productions, including Maurice Maeterlinck's always popular _Blue Bird_ , in 1925, as well as the settings for the first Japanese drama staged by the company in 1926, _En the Ascetic_ ( _En no gy \u014dja_), by the dramatist and Shakespeare scholar Tsubouchi Sh\u014dy\u014d (1859\u20131935). It\u014d continued his design work for Senda's Actors' Theater (Haiy\u016bza) troupe and other groups in the postwar period.\n\nPerhaps the single most striking contribution was the design for the 1924 production, directed by Hijikata, of Georg Kaiser's expressionist play _From Morn to Midnight_ , created by the artist and playwright Murayama Tomoyoshi, whose work is discussed later in this book. Often cited as the first constructivist stage design in the history of Japanese theater, the set provides vivid angular images that, even in photographs, provide striking evidence of a whole new kind of abstract stage space.\n\nOSANAI KAORU: FOR WHAT DOES THE TSUKIJI SH\u014cGEKIJ\u014c [LITTLE THEATER] EXIST?\n\nFOR DRAMA\n\nTsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d, like all other theaters, exists for drama. Tsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d exists for drama. It does not exist for plays.\n\nPlays are literature. Literature has its own organs\u2014newspapers, magazines, books\u2014things that are printed.\n\nTheaters do not exist for literature.\n\nThe best place to appreciate plays\u2014literature\u2014is a quiet study.\n\nTheaters are organizations which present drama.\n\nTheaters are not places where plays are introduced.\n\nTsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d will look for plays to benefit drama. It will not look for plays to benefit plays.\n\nTsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d earnestly hopes to present something that has value as drama. As regards the value of the plays which Tsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d will use, we will leave this to the literary critics to determine.\n\nThe value of Tsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d will be the value of the drama it presents.\n\nIt will not be the value of the plays it uses.\n\nFOR THE FUTURE\n\nTsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d exists for the future.\n\nFor future playwrights, for future directors, for future actors\u2014for future Japanese drama.\n\nTsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d does not exist for the plays it is using now, for the directors who are engaged in their work now, for the actors who are treading the boards now\u2014it is not for us that it exists.\n\nIt exists for those who come after us. If it does not exist for us, it is not us as we are now but as we shall be in the future.\n\nThe reason for Tsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d using only Western plays for a certain period is not a love of novelty. It is not adulation of the West. It is not despair of Japanese plays.\n\nTsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d is working hard to create a future dramatic art for future Japanese plays.\n\nThe problems of presentation in present-day Japanese plays\u2014in particular, those of established playwrights\u2014can be solved by the training in pictorial technique associated with kabuki and _shinpa_. The proof of this is surely in the fact that kabuki and _shinpa_ actors who have a smattering of the new knowledge to perform such plays without much difficulty and are even achieving great success.\n\nThe future Japanese plays for which we are waiting and hoping must contain problems beyond the scope of kabuki and _shinpa_.\n\nFor the sake of these future plays we must develop our new dramatic art.\n\nLet kabuki tradition remain kabuki tradition.\n\nLet _shinpa_ tradition remain _shinpa_ tradition.\n\nLet the inheritors of their traditions remain such.\n\nThe mission of the Tsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d lies completely apart from these traditions.\n\nIn order to set ourselves apart we must acquire a deep knowledge of these traditions.\n\nIn this sense we will never neglect the study of kabuki or the investigation of _shinpa_.\n\nThis is our path at the present time.\n\nThere may be those who cannot agree with it\u2014this is inevitable.\n\nWe will have our work observed only by those who can.\n\nWe exist for the future.\n\nTsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d does not exist for the Tsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d of the present.\n\nIt exists for the Tsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d of the future.\n\nFOR THE PEOPLE\n\nTsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d does not exist for _litterateurs_. It does not exist for the \"literary world.\" It does not exist for the privileged classes.\n\nTsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d exists for all ordinary people for whom drama is as necessary as food. It exists to make ordinary people happy, to give them strength, to instill them with life.\n\nTsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d is undoubtedly a study center for us.\n\nBut this is said only in reference to us, not in reference to the general public.\n\n(Every kind of theater serves as a study center for those who work in it. If it does not, it is no true theater.)\n\nFor the general public, Tsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d will above all be a center where drama is presented and performed.\n\nTsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d will be a \"little theater\" that welcomes all ordinary people.\n\nTsukiji Sh\u014dgekij\u014d is not isolated in the Japanese theater world. It stands in opposition to the Imperial Theater, Kabukiza, Hong\u014dza, and Sh\u014dchikuza.\n\nFROM BRIAN POWELL, \"JAPAN'S FIRST MODERN THEATER: THE TSUKIJI SH\u014cGEKIJ\u014c AND ITS COMPANY, 1924\u201326,\" _MONUMENTA NIPPONICA_ 30, NO. 1 (1975): 69\u201385.\n\nFinally, in his manifesto, Osanai defines his putative audience. His theater should not perform for the literary world or for the privileged classes but should exist \"for all ordinary people for whom drama is as necessary as food.\" This was perhaps the most difficult task that he assigned his troupe. At that time, there certainly were popular audiences in Japan, but their loyalties were to kabuki, _shinpa_ , and films. In contrast, the Tsukiji audiences were largely drawn from the intelligentsia and increasingly from the progressive intelligentsia, who were enthralled with the efforts of the Japanese stage to join the larger world community dedicated to a contemporary, committed theater. But more general audiences would not follow them in any large measure until after World War II, and then in a considerably different context.\n\nINFLUENCES ON THE JAPANESE THEATER\n\nFor a committed intellectual and playwright like Akita Ujaku (1883\u20131962), the opening of the Tsukiji Little Theater was an epoch-making event. Although many shared his view, few of them could be categorized as \"ordinary people.\" Furthermore, many who were familiar with these plays knew them from the printed page. Most of the plays in part II were written for publication in high-quality journals, rather than composed for immediate production. In that sense, their connection to the literary world remained very close.\n\nIn many important ways, then, the developments in the theater of this period can be categorized as various responses to Osanai's challenges.\n\nThe Tsukiji Little Theater was born amid a larger array of performances available in Tokyo, Osaka, and elsewhere. From an examination of the play texts alone, it immediately is clear that all forms of theater during this period were heavily influenced, either directly or indirectly, by European models. In the same way, Japanese painters during the period chose either the medium of _y \u014dga_ (Western style) or _Nihonga_ (Japanese style) for their work, yet both were influenced by the powerful example of contemporary Western art and its long heritage. Both kabuki and _shinpa_ began to incorporate attempts at psychological depth, and, indeed, some kabuki performers themselves began to experiment with newer dramatic forms. One famous instance was the hugely successful performance of Ichikawa Ennosuke II (1888\u20131963) in Kikuchi Kan's _Father Returns_ , discussed in part I. Ennosuke had traveled to Europe and the United States in 1919, which inspired him to extend his skills beyond the normal range of the kabuki traditions.\n\nAn expansion of the dramatic range of _shinpa_ can also be seen in the work of a playwright like Masamune Hakuch\u014d (1879\u20131962). Hakuch\u014d, a friend of Osanai and a highly respected literary critic and novelist, set out to look more closely at his society, and without undue sentimentality. To the familiar elements of melodrama, inherited partly from those in Meiji kabuki's traditional domestic dramas, he added a complexity of characterization and an irony of expression that expanded the possibilities of the genre. The influences of Ibsen and August Strindberg are evident.\n\nAKITA UJAKU\n\nFrom the darkness, the thick and heavy darkness, comes flickering up in a flash the production at the Tsukiji Little Theater of Reinhardt Goering's _A Sea Battle_ ( _Seeschlacht_ ); and the joy with which we witness this performance is much like the excitement we felt at the moment when the Free Theater presented Ibsen's _John Gabriel Borkman_. Our lives, both during that period when _Borkman_ was produced and now, when _A Sea Battle_ has been staged, have received\u2014at least so far as I am concerned\u2014a powerful inspiration. The period during which _Borkman_ was performed represents the moment when naturalism was imported onto the Japanese stage, while _A Sea Battle_ marks the occasion when expressionism came to our stage, and at precisely the time when our youthful artistic circles reached a standstill, a moment when a call habitually goes out to signal our craving for a new subjectivity. If we think even of the changes that have come to us young people since that earlier period some ten years ago or more, the pent-up excitement we now feel, both in terms of history and of our own subjectivity, comes welling up inside us.\n\nAKITA UJAKU, _YOMIURI SHINBUN_ , JUNE 19, 1924.\n\nThe dramas written for _shingeki_ performance were, of course, intended from the start to be close in spirit to the ideas of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European drama. These reference points ranged from Ibsen and Chekhov for those Japanese writers attempting to stress the importance of psychological elements in their dramas to political models, which, for those Japanese writers interested in writing left-wing political drama, were often from such post\u2013World War I political playwrights as Frank Wedekind, Ernst Toller, and Georg Kaiser. (Bertolt Brecht's work, however, except for one production of Senda Koreya's adaptation of _The Threepenny Opera_ in 1932, was not widely known in Japan until after World War II.) By the same token, those dramatists, like Kishida Kunio, who were interested in portraying the psychological states of their stage characters, were not altogether devoid of concern for social significance, although these concerns or anxieties were often expressed indirectly.\n\nEnchi Fumiko (1905\u20131986), who rose to great fame as a novelist after World War II, was active as a playwright in this period and was, in fact, one of the few significant women playwrights with a certain \"literary pedigree\" to have her work produced at the Tsukiji Little Theater. She, like so many others in her generation, was inspired by her early contact with Osanai, who published a number of her plays in his journal. The play included here, _Restless Night in Late Spring_ ( _Banshun s \u014dya_), was one of the very last productions staged by the company before Osanai's death. The characters are sketched effectively, and the pull between a dedication to art and a dedication to politics reflects what so many _shingeki_ dramatists grappled with in trying to compose dramas portraying the tensions in their contemporary society.\n\nKISHIDA KUNIO AND THE JAPANESE THEATER\n\nKishida Kunio (1890\u20131954), who spent several formative years after World War I in France, placed emphasis on the delicacy of gesture and the poetry of language, characteristics, and possibilities of the modern theater that he admired in the work of the great French director Jacques Copeau in Paris. Kishida's plays often deal with the psychic gaps between Japanese and Western culture. Although his lack of direct political involvement was heavily criticized at the time, in retrospect his characters often capture the confusions and hesitations of his generation. At his most eloquent, Kishida produced a snapshot, if not a critique, of his culture. The annual prize for drama in Japan, the Kishida Kunio Award, is named in his honor.\n\nHaving seen superior theater in Europe, Kishida was quick to point out that the power of Western theater\u2014at least the styles of theater with which he was familiar from his time in France\u2014rested on the interplay between dialogue and movement. Well known as a drama critic, he often stressed their intertwining purposes. But again, the gap between the potentialities of a text and its successful performance in _shingeki_ repertory was not completely closed in Japan until the 1950s and after. Given the long history of stylized acting in the various Japanese traditions, the kind of subtly and suggestive realistic movement sought by Kishida and some of his colleagues remained the greatest challenge for Japanese performers of his generation and was not overcome in his lifetime.\n\nTHE LEFT WING AND THE THEATER\n\n_Shingeki_ plays offering a more direct political statement became more and more important, at least until the government's increasing censorship and control halted them before the war. Yet the rise in popularity of such left-wing plays suggests that Osanai's desire for productions for ordinary people remained unfulfilled. Instead, the political plays were productions for and attended by the intelligentsia and dealt with ideas and social critiques rather than a broad spectrum of human emotions. This aspect of the Tsukiji Little Theater's activity was supported and encouraged by Hijikata Yoshi, mentioned earlier, whose enthusiasm for Vsevolod Meyerhold, Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller, and others whose work he had seen in Germany and the Soviet Union led him to regard political drama as helping raise the larger society's consciousness of social justice and future political action. In this conviction he had an ally in Senda Koreya, a gifted actor and director who also spent time in Germany from 1927 until 1931. Both became central figures in early postwar theatrical activity and are discussed in more detail in part III.\n\nKISHIDA KUNIO\n\n1929\n\nOn their part, the audience may be foolish enough to look only for a \"story\" on the stage. Their expectations when the curtain goes up are aligned with the idea of \"what will happen.\" Yet the words of the characters and their gestures give rise to a piling up of images resulting in a harmony like that of notes of music. For the lines delivered by the actors are not merely a means to tell the story but are each in itself a theatrical moment.\n\n1934\n\nCompare the relative attraction of words and movement on the stage. Whatever else can be said about movement, it is surely mechanical and simple. The training to master movement is not difficult. Words, however, are on an altogether higher level. The training necessary to speak well on the stage _is_ very difficult. Until one masters the act of delivering lines on the stage, one is not really an actor, and the art of speaking remains the most important of an actor's professional necessities.\n\nFROM J. THOMAS RIMER, _TOWARDS A MODERN JAPANESE THEATRE: KISHIDA KUNIO_ (PRINCETON, N.J.: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1974), 136 (1929), 140 (1934).\n\nThe history of the left-leaning, sometimes overtly proletarian, theater in prewar Japan is complex, filled with both opportunities and discouragement. After the demise of the Tsukiji Little Theater company, works of varying political intensity were performed in the Tsukiji auditorium and in various small performance spaces in Tokyo. But by the middle of the 1930s, government censorship had nearly ended political theater. By 1940, left-wing theater companies were forced to disband, and the only professional repertory company permitted to perform on a regular basis was the Literary Theater (Bungakuza), founded by Kishida Kunio and two colleagues, which had opened in 1938.\n\nTo examine the lasting significance of the left-wing theater within the larger prewar _shingeki_ spectrum, we next look at the activities of two of its central figures. The first is the playwright and director Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901\u20131977). Murayama was a kind of Renaissance man, difficult to categorize, as he was at once a brilliant avant-garde artist, set designer, director, critic, and playwright. He understood many of the anomalies in the theater of his time. Based on his experiences in Germany in 1922 and 1923, he, too, felt the weaknesses in contemporary Japanese performance, and his sharp social sense allowed him to articulate\u2014in some ways more sharply than Kishida did\u2014the problems involved.\n\nMURAYAMA TOMOYOSHI\n\nJapan's _shingeki_ is facing a grave crisis now. I would like to think over the ways in which we can escape from this situation.\n\n_Shingeki_ has its roots in the struggle against concepts of art built on old feudalistic attitudes and capitalistic morality. It has been developed on the basis of liberalism, but such liberalism has not been able to grow properly and remains in a very primitive state in Japan today. Here I include the proletarian theater within the larger _shingeki_ movement. As for the proletarian theater movement itself, although it reached the height of prosperity some two years ago after struggling for ten years since its beginnings, it, too, has fallen into a miserable situation, since those involved in the proletarian theater have no ability to adapt themselves to social changes. Their playwrights cannot create plays that truly mirror the present situation of society, and since directors cannot find worthwhile plays to direct, they retreat to the commercial theater. Actors have lost any sense of the proper standards of performance, and the public has abandoned the theater, either by its own volition or by force. The proletarian theater is not going forward; indeed, it is going backward....\n\nHow can we overcome this crisis?\n\nFirst of all, we have to make clear just what kind of theater we should be performing. Even if a new theory of drama is established, this does not mean that effective dramatic works based on that theory can simply spring into being. In general, the nature of the form and content of art is shaped to a great extent by those who make up the audience, who experience the art. At present, the intelligentsia undoubtedly appreciate most of what we produce. Although we cannot expect any organization to enlighten its workers in the near future, what the workers do appreciate is artistically quite different from what we wish to produce. Some say that we should create a highly artistic theater that is firmly based on the principles of socialist realism, a theater that always aims to be appreciated by the workers. But this kind of formula has not succeeded. On the contrary, it has been harmful....\n\nTherefore, I propose that for now, we present a theater that is both progressive and on an artistically high level and that we not try to compromise with the audience. (I am not, to be sure, rejecting workers as an audience. We will heartily welcome them to this kind of theater if they come.) But if we wish to have the general mass of workers as our audience, we must have different repertories and theatrical organizations. We can achieve such results only when we have gained the ability to bring them about....\n\nTherefore, I can think of only one solution: we must dissolve all the _shingeki_ companies and unite them in one professional company. This company is not to be under the thumb of any capitalist sponsor or to be forced to go from one producer to another, seeking a chance to perform. Any restrictions on theatrical activities, no matter what they are or how small they may be, will destroy the art.\n\nFROM MURAYAMA TOMOYOSHI, \"SHINGEKI NO KIKI\" (THE CRISIS OF _SHINGEKI_ ), _Shinch \u014d_, JULY 1934, 126\u201331.\n\nIn his own plays and theatrical adaptations, Murayama sometimes chose what may have seemed exotic subjects to his well-educated audiences (Catherine the Great, Chinese railway workers, striking factory employees, and the like) in order to manifest his Marxist sympathies. For many theatergoers, his work represented the most eloquent efforts of the proletarian theater in the 1920s and after.\n\nThe second central figure is the playwright Kubo Sakae (1901\u20131958), who was able, in both his plays and his critical writing, to look beyond the merely doctrinaire for a more sophisticated rapprochement between art and politics. His conviction that true social criticism must come from a close observation of society, rather than simply imposing a doctrine on those realities, gives his plays a depth that has helped his work, and his example, to outlive his time.\n\nFinally, from the point of view of readers now, particularly in the United States, certain implicit parallels can be observed concerning the influence of European theater in both New York and Tokyo during this interwar period. The often parochial theatrical world in both countries continually responded to the powerful presence of one wave after another of brilliant European theatrical experiments in playwriting, directing, and acting technique, all three of which eventually helped transform theater in the United States and Japan alike. The crucial difference was that many of the celebrated Europeans who brought about these changes and set these new standards often came to the United States and even brought their troupes for performances in New York and other large cities. A few Japanese intellectuals were able to learn, for example, who the great Austrian director Max Reinhardt was and to see his productions in Berlin or Vienna; New York audiences were able to watch his celebrated production of the play _The Miracle_ (1911) in 1924. Many of the great stars, particularly in the English theater, performed regularly in the United States, and with the coming of the Nazis, a number of important figures, including some of the same men and women who were so admired by Hijikata and Senda, found themselves working as exiles in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Even one great director of the Weimar period in Germany, Erwin Piscator, opened an acting school in New York in 1939 and counted among his students Marlon Brando, James Dean, Shelley Winters, and Tony Curtis.\n\nNone of this more or less direct fertilization was possible in prewar Japan, however. Besides the language barrier between Europe and Japan was the prohibitive cost of international travel. A few Japanese\u2014Osanai, Hijikata, Murayama, and Senda\u2014managed to visit Europe, but their students and disciples in Tokyo had to depend on their reports in order to absorb, secondhand, some knowledge of the true potential for an authentic modern theater and Japan's place in it.\n\nKUBO SAKAE\n\nFirst, it must be said that the term \"socialism,\" as employed in this \"new realism,\" does not by any means refer to \"socialism\" in its more expansive meaning. It certainly differs from those theories of a socialistic art suggested by the writings of Marx and Engels. This is because during the period in which they were writing, the kind of socialism that involves the connections between the producers of goods [that have existed in the Soviet Union since 1929] had not as yet come into existence in Japan....\n\nAs long as such connections are not yet established, as my friend Moriyama Kei has emphasized, it is clear that the word \"socialist\" cannot yet be applied to the kind of \"realism\" currently possible here in Japan, since we have not yet reached that stage in our own evolution. And it is not simply a question of misunderstanding the meaning of the word \"socialism\" itself. As Gorky remarked, when a certain writer referred to Gogol as a \"socialist-style realist,\" such a comment represented nothing more than the absurd expression of various literary concepts stuck together in an arbitrary fashion. In the Russia of that period of _Dead Souls_ and _The Inspector-General_ , the characteristics of any real socialism could not as yet have made their appearance. The kind of realism that we know, created under the variety of capitalism in which we now live, is a realism in which censorship prevails, an \"XX realism\"; so if we want to avoid these blanked-out words, perhaps we should simply say an \"anticapitalist\" realism....\n\nWhile among those who support the proletarian theater, there are some who experience a stuffy confusion of concerns over the nature of \"realism\"; others, in the relatively calm environment created by the so-called Hik\u014dkan dramatists, create works that exhibit a kind of \"social realism,\" which allows these dramatists to discreetly maintain their integrity. Among those who have modestly graced the footlights, such works as Mafune Yutaka's _The Weasel_ , Taguchi Takeo's _Kyoto Third Avenue_ , Kawaguchi Ichir\u014d's _Apartment 26_ , Tanaka Chikao's \" _Old Bag_ ,\" and Igayama Masashi's _Noise_ can be identified here....\n\nThis group of young playwrights, in sketching out in their plays the details of episodes from the social life of our times, have now taken a first step in this effort. But they should not be permitted to simply continue on too long in this fashion. This is because a continual repetition of a \"preponderance on social issues\" will inevitably weaken the deep artistic impression their work should make. Writers, in some sense or other, must now find the means to seek out a still stronger theatricality. Such is the fork in the road that awaits them all.\n\nFROM KUBO SAKAE, \"MAYOERU REARIZUMU\" (MISGUIDED REALISM), _MIYAKO SHINBUN_ , FEBRUARY 20\u201323, 1935.\n\nOsanai spoke of the Tsukiji Little Theater as a \"laboratory,\" which is an adequate description of the activities carried out by these small, brave bands of largely young people dedicated to the theater. There were disappointments, and occasional triumphs, but some of the graduates of this sometimes painful process emerged in the postwar period, still enthusiastic and considerably more resilient.\n\nJ. THOMAS RIMER\n\n1. Shimazaki T\u014dson, \"Waga kokuminsei no ketten,\" in _Shinkatamachi yori_ , _zensh \u016b_ (Tokyo: Chikuma shob\u014d, 1987), 6:8\u20139. The translation is from William E. Naff, _The Kiso Road: The Life and Times of Shimazaki T \u014dson_ (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2011), 384.\n_THE COUPLE NEXT DOOR_\n\nMASAMUNE HAKUCH\u014c\n\nTRANSLATED BY JOHN K. GILLESPIE\n\nMasamune Hakuch\u014d, _The Couple Next Door_ , Hatanaka, 1924.\n\nT _he Couple Next Door_ ( _Tonari no f \u016bfu_), a three-act play by Masamune Hakuch\u014d (1879\u20131962) published in 1925, is one of more than twenty dramas that the author composed between 1924 and 1928. Although he had written a few plays before that time, and would write a few more in the early postwar years, this particular period reveals his strong interest in the artistic potential for dramatic situations. This new enthusiasm developed at a time in Hakuch\u014d's career when, over a period of some twenty years, he had already earned a considerable reputation as a critic and a writer of fiction in the naturalist mode, often defined as disguised autobiography, which then was popular with his generation of Japanese writers. In his plays, however, his situations are imagined and, of course, carried out only in the dialogue.\n\nThe play was first published in _Ch \u016b\u014d k\u014dron_ and was first staged in the same year, 1925, by the Shingeki ky\u014dkai (New Theater Society) company, already well known for productions of works by Anton Chekhov and August Strindberg, as well as other plays by Hakuch\u014d. The somewhat melodramatic happenings of the narrative line soon encouraged another production in 1927, this time by _shinpa_ performers.\n\nCharacters\n\nMIDONO SH\u014cICHI, twenty-seven, freeloads off the YOSHIMURAs. Unappealing appearance, with a rather menacing look\n\nISHIKAWA SADAKICHI, about the same age as MIDONO, a delicate-looking writer\n\nYOSHIMURA TORAZ\u014c, forty-two, plain looking and thin, a market speculator\n\nTAMIKO, thirty, YOSHIMURA's wife, looks older than her age\n\nACT I\n\n_Evening in late October. An overstuffed recliner chair sits on a rather wide veranda of a small country cottage. Stage rear is a room in the cottage from which every decoration has been removed, and the room is empty._ MIDONO _steps into the garden, stands near a wooden fence, and appears to look up toward the second floor of the neighboring house_.\n\nMIDONO: Mr. Ishikawa!\n\nISHIKAWA ( _Voice only_ ): Hey... You seem to have been really busy lately.\n\nMIDONO: Yeah, well it's a big mess here. Today I'm really bored. How about dropping over for a visit?\n\nISHIKAWA: If I won't bother you, I'd be happy to.\n\nMIDONO: Great.\n\n(MIDONO _leaves the wooden fence and returns to the cottage. He gets another chair from inside and brings it out to the veranda_. ISHIKAWA _enters slowly from the path by the garden and looks around affably_.)\n\nISHIKAWA: Been a while since it's as clear as today.\n\nMIDONO: Yep. Very nice weather. Have a seat. ( _Puts his hands on the chair_.)\n\n(ISHIKAWA _steps up onto the veranda and stands there looking into the desolate room._ MIDONO _looks in the opposite direction, into the garden_.)\n\nMIDONO: I've neglected the garden, just left it messy as is. Plucked all the cosmos flowers and gave them to the neighborhood kids. A little riper and the persimmons on the tree out back would have been ready to eat. I was really looking forward to that, but last night, they stole them all. I wasn't vigilant.\n\nISHIKAWA ( _Not paying attention_ ): Have you finished cleaning up inside?\n\nMIDONO: Yep.\n\n( _The two face each other and sit down._ )\n\nMIDONO: Night before last in that steady drizzle, it was about 2:00 A.M. when we packed up in a great hurry, loaded the truck, and sent it on. It was a little bit like a war. I was completely worn out\u2014slept all day yesterday.\n\nISHIKAWA: That night I hardly slept, kept getting up, opening the window, checking on all that commotion. I heard Yoshimura's agitated voice now and again. Did his business fail? Is it true?\n\nMIDONO: This time it really looks like it. ( _With deep feeling._ ) Look, business is business, so you could probably expect such a terrible thing to happen at some point. It was bad for him just now, so he might not be able to rebuild his business. This cottage, too, even though he's been putting on a proud face living here, it's not his. Even this one small house is tangled up in odd circumstances\u2014the ins and outs of his business are so complicated we've got no idea what's going on. What's happening in the family, that's between the two of them, but it's been a strained relationship recently. He's now in double trouble. Like this empty house. It's a joke I'm actually here as a caretaker in a house he doesn't really own, but that may be the mixed-up mental state of someone gone belly up. The land is owned by a liquor store called \"Ume-ya,\" and the house is registered under the name of Sakamoto, a T\u014dy\u014d Bank director, who's the key guy behind the bankruptcy. On pure speculation, he threw away the bank's money on the market. So Yoshimura then puts me here as watchdog, swindles the transfer fee out of the owner, and apparently schemes to wheedle funds out of Sakamoto on some pretext or other. Well, he schemed for sure. Sakamoto's a crafty guy himself, and when his bank failed, I think he conspired with Yoshimura to minimize his losses by hiding his assets.\n\nISHIKAWA: What a con man! Even now a year after the bank closed, everything's still up in the air. The local people here are pretty pissed off.\n\nMIDONO ( _In a plausibly serious tone_ ): What the bank did was, of course, inexcusable, but these cunning country folk tend to be easily taken in. Yoshimura often said that. In his own store, he still rips off the bumpkins behind their backs, however shrewd they may be.\n\nISHIKAWA ( _Not really listening closely, he looks back into the empty room_ ): You've taken away all the plush furniture and things.\n\nMIDONO: Yep. Did it, but it was like I was in a fog. Had to hurry out of fear that the creditors would come tomorrow to take possession. Yoshimura was out of his head. He was on my case like a mad man. With all the rain, the important stuff probably got damaged. ( _Suddenly looks at the recliner chair he_ ' _s sitting on_.) Take a look at this. I begged his wife to leave it. Yesterday, I took an all-day nap right here. These cushions are soft, great for sleeping.\n\nISHIKAWA ( _Finally drawn in by_ MIDONO' _s words, looks over at the recliner_ ): Looks like it. His wife often sat there and read the paper.\n\nMIDONO ( _As if making an excuse_ ): Well, it wasn't just for her. When her husband was here once a week, he'd relax by lying right here and dozing off. My guess is he was thinking up his business tricks. In the first place, even when he's here at \u014ciso, he never goes swimming, never takes a walk; god forbid he'd ever read even a single page of a book. Asleep or awake, he's always thinking about money. A real animal.\n\nISHIKAWA: That's a bit harsh. ( _Smiling._ ) I hear he often spends time with geisha.\n\nMIDONO: You saying he's obsessed with them? ( _With a questioning look_.) Who'd you hear that from?\n\nISHIKAWA: No one in particular. That's the rumor.\n\nMIDONO: Isn't that just a figment of your imagination? ( _Lets slip a knowing laugh._ ) Everybody knows that market speculators visit geisha and that geisha commonly sponsor actors. So I'd venture to say there's no need to count on the imaginative power of someone with your good sense. But Ishikawa, the imagination is interesting, don't you think? Nothing at all bad about indulging yourself on an autumn day, lying down on such soft cushions, drifting off.\n\nISHIKAWA: Absolutely. I myself have wanted this kind of plush recliner.\n\nMIDONO: Aha! A completely stable frame of mind is good, you know. Here, sit down and give it a try.\n\n(MIDONO _stands and has_ ISHIKAWA _sit down on the recliner, then sits in the chair where_ ISHIKAWA _was sitting._ )\n\nMIDONO: Look, the Yoshimuras left the recliner for me, so you can't bad-mouth them. A market speculator is hardly going to be a virtuous gentleman, but the actual guy's relatively indifferent to women. For the strong desire for money to flourish, the desire for women has to weaken. Or, uh, maybe not. ( _Falls into deep thought._ )\n\nISHIKAWA: So how long are you going to look after the place? Must be lonely being here all by yourself.\n\nMIDONO: No, I've been alone only since yesterday, so I'm not feeling lonely yet. But I'm not going to be here long like this. Got here to \u014ciso at the beginning of July, and I've been living off the Yoshimuras for the four months since, so I was thinking that even if his business hadn't failed, I'd lay out my own course of action and get out of here. By the way, Mr. Ishikawa, please listen to this one insider story about him. When I was at your place recently, I saw on your desk something you'd written, called \"The Couple Next Door.\" Let me give you more stuff about them.\n\nISHIKAWA: What you saw\u2014that's not about this couple here.\n\nMIDONO: Doesn't matter. I'd like you to listen to me. This morning I lay down on this recliner. I was looking at the autumn sky after the rain let up, and a number of interesting thoughts swirled around, even in a dunderhead like me. Say, I just remembered\u2014in packing up all that fine stuff day before yesterday, I spirited away one bottle of wine. Why not open it and drink up, as a kind of listening fee?\n\n(MIDONO _heads inside. Just as_ ISHIKAWA _stretches out comfortably on the recliner chair,_ YOSHIMURA' _s wife,_ TAMIKO, _dressed plainly and looking older than her age, enters. Her simple, crepe clothes appear to have been soiled by the rain._ ISHIKAWA _doesn_ ' _t notice her at first._ )\n\nTAMIKO: Mr. Ishikawa, did you come for a visit? ( _Her tone is warm and charming_.)\n\n( _Surprised,_ ISHIKAWA _jumps up and greets her with an embarrassed look._ )\n\nTAMIKO: What nice weather it's become! When I stepped outside, it's even a bit too warm.\n\n( _She steps up onto the veranda, looks silently into the room, and, with pursed lips, is immersed in deep feeling._ MIDONO _returns, carrying the bottle of wine and two cups._ )\n\nMIDONO ( _Surprised_ ): Oh, Missus, is something wrong? Are you alone? ( _He speaks quickly._ )\n\nTAMIKO ( _Casually_ ): I suddenly had an errand to do here, so I came alone. I was just thinking, you know, about how exhausting the other night was, and all the baggage we brought home. When we got there, they hardly said they were expecting us when they repossessed everything, just like that. So, as I thought, we should've settled the situation here. How stupid we were!\n\nMIDONO: So you made a fool of yourself.\n\nTAMIKO: Oh, you found a bottle of wine? How nice! I'll have some later. Serve some to Mr. Ishikawa. I'm just going to go in and take a look first.\n\n(TAMIKO _goes inside._ MIDONO _gives a cup to_ ISHIKAWA _and pours the wine._ )\n\nMIDONO: With her here, got to restart my thinking of this morning.\n\nISHIKAWA ( _Not listening, sips the wine and puts down his cup_ ): I need to go. How about dropping by this evening?\n\nMIDONO: Too bad, because I really want you to hear what I was thinking. But OK, I'll bring the bottle over tonight, and we can have a leisurely drink.\n\n(MIDONO _watches_ ISHIKAWA _leave through the garden, then pricks up his ears toward the inside of the house, pours himself more wine, drains his cup, and sits down on the recliner. He keeps his attention focused on the interior of the house._ TAMIKO _returns, her attitude more animated than before._ )\n\nTAMIKO: Where's Mr. Ishikawa?\n\nMIDONO: Out of deference to you, he decided to go home.\n\nTAMIKO: Deference? Because he thinks I don't want to be regarded by others as down on my luck? Silly deference. And yet for all that, he seems interested in us. Whenever he comes over, he looks the place up and down. Renting a room alone, as he does, maybe he's envious of this kind of lifestyle or something.\n\nMIDONO: He's even been envious of my situation.\n\nTAMIKO: He's about the same age you are. But he's really quite different physically. It's a pity that in the bloom of youth he has bad lungs. Probably won't live all that long.\n\nMIDONO: Could be. Did you come to look for something important that you forgot?\n\nTAMIKO: That's right.\n\nMIDONO: Did you find it?\n\nTAMIKO: Yes, indeed. I wonder if you could help me with it.\n\nMIDONO: How can I be of any use?\n\nTAMIKO: Unlike the night when we packed up and fled and with you being just a caretaker, you too may find something worth doing for yourself.\n\nMIDONO ( _Leaning forward_ ): What would that be?\n\nTAMIKO: You'll find out later. ( _Sits down on the recliner._ ) I'm exhausted. Will you treat me to some of that wine? ( _Takes off her black_ haori _and tosses it aside._ ) This was something we really messed up\u2014even my clothing got taken away\u2014this rain-soaked one piece of clothing is all I've got left. The way Yoshimura is down in the dumps is bad enough, but how shabbily dressed I must look to you. I came here not having slept last night, didn't even have a bath, and barely was able even to wash my face.\n\n( _Silently,_ MIDONO _steals a glance at_ TAMIKO' _s face and pours her some wine. She happily drains her cup._ )\n\nTAMIKO: You're thinking, aren't you, how much my circumstances have changed since the other day and how despicable someone is who's been ruined?... I'm too exhausted today to have any troubling thoughts, so I'm not going to toss any puzzles your way or put up any smoke screens. Let me say what's actually on my mind.... You haven't understood my feelings all along, but I've specifically prepared for this kind of thing, anticipating it at any moment. ( _She appears to be calmly enjoying her own words._ ) Yoshimura has, as a matter of course, purchased a geisha's freedom and kept her, but in money matters, he's very shrewd. And people say he's not a guy who any woman can make a fool of and that he's gotten quite conceited about it. But there's something really stupid about him. Clever guys might appear to be clever, but actually it's not so. See, that's why he had to go through this bankruptcy, but I went about tending to my livelihood as always. Whatever reasons there may be, truth be told, I married him for money, so when it ran out, it's only to be expected there'd be a rift in our relationship. Yoshimura lost interest in me long ago, but I haven't been a big impediment to him, and we've kept up appearances and he's gone out of his way not to stir up trouble. I've been a wife in name only. If I left his house, I wouldn't be able to find someone who would take care of me. So if he allows me just to stick around like this, that's to my advantage\u2014it's how I've put up with things till now. ( _Suddenly looks up._ ) Are you listening to me?\n\n(MIDONO' _s facial expression shows that he is._ )\n\nTAMIKO: I'm not talking just for fun. Please listen closely.... It's with the sense that it was an advantage only with my playing around, not being asked to do anything, that I've endured all this up till now as his wife. It's because I'm a weird woman that I think that way\u2014I don't think ordinary wives are like this.... Mr. Midono, either way you want to think about it is OK. Now I'm leaving Yoshimura and will stand on my own two feet. How about standing with me? I've got a little money. ( _She is quiet for a moment, looking at_ MIDONO' _s face as if seeking something._ ) Yoshimura's a sharp cookie when it comes to money\u2014he'll even get right into your breast pocket; he well knows the amount of money in my bank account, not to mention my rings and my wardrobe. When it's necessary, he makes me transfer funds for his business use. It makes sense, doesn't it, that it won't do to keep all this hidden from him? But look, I'm pretty remarkable, don't you think? Unbeknown to Yoshimura, I've squirreled away 20,000 or 30,000 yen.\n\n(MIDONO _listens with interest, becoming excited and fixing his gaze on her face when he hears about the amount of money._ )\n\nMIDONO: Where do you have such a large sum of money? ( _Reproachfully._ ) Because Yoshimura couldn't get hold of 20,000 yen to complete one of his makeshift deals, he's as depressed as if the toy balloons he's kept all this time burst, isn't he? Why wouldn't you give up such an amount of secretly kept money to help your husband in a crisis? First off, if Yoshimura's shop goes bankrupt, wouldn't that really hurt you, too?\n\nTAMIKO ( _Unperturbed, though with more intensity_ ): Are you offended that I'm a woman lacking in wifely affection? Blaming me for that is laughable.... Look, it's not that I didn't think laying out all the money here and now wouldn't make Yoshimura happy, but the moment was a tipping point, and I'm not going back. Are you blaming me for having such deeply rooted feelings?\n\nMIDONO: What's in it for you to become so adamant? You're a married couple, aren't you, not like enemies.\n\nTAMIKO: No, of course, not enemies. Would a mortal enemy buy me things like diamond rings and the most fashionable clothes? ( _Falls silent for a moment, then is irritated._ ) Probably not. How can I make other people understand what I'm feeling? Maybe if I borrow some of Mr. Ishikawa's intelligence, I could find some good words.\n\nMIDONO: I've never heard your husband say bad things about you.\n\nTAMIKO: Is that so?... Well, Yoshimura thinks that with women, you just give them money, so for a woman to run out on him because he's bankrupt\u2014it's only natural that he reaps what he sows. If I'd run out on him last year or the year before when he was sitting pretty, he would have seen it only like one of the cats had disappeared and would've quite routinely picked up another woman with the power of his money. So I've intentionally put up with everything all along, but now he'll finally realize what's what.\n\nMIDONO: That's cruel. Even if you're enemies, kicking him when he's down is cowardly, don't you think?\n\nTAMIKO ( _Smiling derisively_ ): Anyone can say that to maintain a superficial sort of public propriety. Come on, Mr. Midono, what about the sleeping comfort of this soft recliner chair that I coaxed Yoshimura to have especially made? ( _Flirting with him._ )\n\nMIDONO ( _Losing composure_ ): Nice and soft, yes. But so what?\n\nTAMIKO: You attack me for being cowardly, but you, a man, you're the real coward. You feign ignorance, but I know the truth. ( _Savoring her own words._ ) It's clear to me you have no intention of becoming Yoshimura's henchman or trying to pick up on his market speculation. One might think you could work for a company someplace else\u2014you're not a guy who can't work\u2014so why come to my house as a freeloader? Why have you worked here just as an errand boy or caretaker? And why have you come here to \u014ciso for these three or four months leisurely whiling away your days? To recuperate from some physical weakness? Some other lie? You're not like Mr. Ishikawa, are you, what with your robust body. I understand only too well what's in your belly.\n\n(MIDONO, _feeling awkward in her presence, hangs his head and says nothing._ TAMIKO _smiles wholeheartedly._ )\n\nTAMIKO: No need to hold back any longer. I'm going to be straight with you. From the start, I disliked you. I had weird feelings about you, so I tried to badger Yoshimura into getting rid of you. Among the various men going in and out of the house, you were the only one not stuck on himself. Once I knew you wanted to be on my side, I felt this odd attraction to you. It's the first time in my life I'd met someone like you, so I feel I can confide in you even what's locked in my heart of hearts. If you can disparage what I've been saying, then I've missed the mark with you.\n\nMIDONO: Your line of reasoning can't be helped, but there's no way I can dishonor this man who usually helped me. ( _Enunciating deliberately, with pauses_.)\n\nTAMIKO ( _Unexpectedly angry_ ): So does that mean you'll let Yoshimura know what I've been sharing with you? You going to tell him I've got money stashed away?\n\nMIDONO: Not at all, I have no desire to tell him such unnecessary stuff. I'm not sympathetic enough to tell a nasty guy, who'd extort a moving fee from a landlord and homeowner, about the whereabouts of money he could grab. ( _Gathering more confidence, he raises his eyes, heretofore averted, to look directly at_ TAMIKO.)\n\nTAMIKO: Unsympathetic, maybe, but you're afraid of him, of the flat-broke Yoshimura....\n\nMIDONO: You're the one I've gotten uneasy about.\n\nTAMIKO: You think that would happen because you got mixed up with me? ( _Suddenly laughs._ ) That's real funny. Haven't you been on my side all along? Even assuming I'm a bad person, you listened to my requests, you lent me strength, and it wasn't like an imposition for you. It doesn't stand to reason that ordinary people would suddenly reject you. And now you're under orders to take on a role that goes against your nature and hurts your reputation. In religiously sticking to those orders, aren't you a miserable caretaker here? Or else maybe in a strange way you were thinking about dealing with me as my ally. Just because I've left Yoshimura and become free doesn't mean I'd try to tempt you. Make no mistake about that, please; it was just an innocent feeling to try to connect to you. Leaving even a man like Yoshimura is, for a woman, somehow like being at loose ends.\n\n( _Speaking in honeyed tones unbefitting her age, she puts her whole body into flirtatious mode._ MIDONO, _still with his bad thoughts, averts his eyes._ )\n\nMIDONO:... Anyway, are you putting this large sum of money you've hidden from your husband in a bank or something?\n\nTAMIKO ( _Shakes her head_ ): With Yoshimura, you put your money in a bank, but it won't always stay secret. The guy can even sniff out the smell of bills in the house. I spent none of the money I received from him on things like dressing up and looking nice and generously scattering it among close friends. He well knows that.\n\nMIDONO ( _His curiosity piqued_ ): Well, then, Missus, how did you raise such a big sum, and where are you keeping it?\n\nTAMIKO: \"Big sum, big sum\"\u2014you even appear shocked at amounts of 20,000 or 30,000 yen. Couldn't that make you rich in the future?\n\nMIDONO: Taking my future so rashly to such lengths would get me into trouble.... For your husband, wasn't 20,000 yen the amount that would decide whether his shop would sink or swim?\n\nTAMIKO: For me, that sum of money is the basis of my life.... That's why I wouldn't carelessly reveal its whereabouts to someone I can't trust and who won't listen to my requests. ( _She sleepily appears to notice_ MIDONO' _s passionate attitude._ ) I'm so exhausted, I can hardly keep from falling asleep right this minute. How about if I nap here on the recliner? Meanwhile, can you please order some tasty items from the Praying Dragon Pavilion so I can eat as soon as I wake up? The wine's made me sleepy, can't stay awake for love nor money.\n\n( _She stretches out on the recliner, puts her handkerchief to her face, and closes her eyes._ MIDONO _approaches her._ )\n\nMIDONO: Where in Tokyo is Mr. Yoshimura?\n\nTAMIKO: Where? Except for his mistress's place, he's got nowhere to stay. She's probably been trying to repay him for his kindness in feeding her up till now. Good for her! ( _Speaking in a sleepy voice._ )\n\nMIDONO: And you're OK with that and can just fall asleep? And the 20,000 yen, it's all right for you to have that much money?\n\nTAMIKO: Wouldn't that be bad enough, you yelling this and that about the 20,000 yen, but what if a thief or some debt collector overheard you saying this? ( _Appears to fall asleep._ )\n\n( _At that point, a voice announcing_ \" _telegram_ \" _is heard through the front gate._ MIDONO _responds and disappears into the garden._ )\n\nTELEGRAM MESSENGER'S VOICE: Is It\u014d Tamiko here?\n\nMIDONO'S VOICE: It\u014d Tamiko? Haven't you got the wrong house?... Oh, right! It's care of Yoshimura. Right here, right here.\n\n(MIDONO _returns, eyeing the telegram._ )\n\nMIDONO: Missus, it's a telegram. ( _He says it again. When_ TAMIKO _does not open her eyes, he shakes her shoulder._ ) Missus, a telegram has arrived.\n\nTAMIKO ( _Still lying down, in a drowsy voice_ ): Who from? Can you read it, please?... Isn't it from Sawai?\n\nMIDONO ( _Cuts open the telegram envelope_ ): It says, \"Come back now. I'm waiting at the usual place. Umeura.\" And it's addressed to It\u014d Tamiko.\n\nTAMIKO: Umeura? Hm... I understand. Thanks.\n\nMIDONO ( _Stands beside the recliner_ ): So does that mean you'll go back to Tokyo now?\n\nTAMIKO: I'm not sure. ( _Falls back asleep._ )\n\nMIDONO: Who's this person Umeura? It's a name I've never heard.\n\nTAMIKO: Really? I'll introduce you, and you can see for yourself. He's not important.\n\nMIDONO: Missus, have you already given up Yoshimura's family name?\n\nTAMIKO:... That's why I'm no longer \"Missus.\"\n\nMIDONO ( _Changing his mind_ ): Let me order some food. No need to answer the telegram?\n\n(TAMIKO _falls asleep without responding._ MIDONO _sits down in the other chair and stares fixedly at the telegram. Finally tossing it aside, he steps into the garden and disappears. The silence is broken by the sounds of cars and horse-drawn carts. The sliding paper doors in the rear open. A remarkably haggard-looking_ YOSHIMURA _enters, wearing a suit and a felt hat tilted at an angle. He virtually collapses into the chair where_ MIDONO _had been sitting. After a few moments, he sees the sleeping_ TAMIKO. _Finally, he gets up and shakes her. She doesn_ ' _t awaken right away, so he shakes her harder. Opening her eyes slightly,_ TAMIKO _looks at_ YOSHIMURA _as though in a dream and listlessly wakes up._ )\n\nTAMIKO: Sleeping so soundly. ( _Grouchily._ )\u2014What're you doing here?\n\nYOSHIMURA: I also came home to \u014ciso to sleep. Not a wink of sleep the last two nights running.\n\nTAMIKO: Well, relax over there. Drink some wine.\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Sees the wine bottle for the first time_ ): This is good stuff to have. ( _Pours wine into a glass and drains it._ ) When did you get here?\n\nTAMIKO ( _Shaking off her sleepiness_ ): Just got here.... You followed after me, right?\n\nYOSHIMURA: Not so. After leaving you yesterday morning, I was running around here and there settling things, felt I was stripped stark naked, and determined to start doing some kind of small operation. I'm so totally worn out that I suddenly decided to come here and get some sleep.... Maybe it's my long-standing nervous exhaustion acting up, so no way I could sleep in a noisy place like Tokyo. Couldn't sleep on the train, either.\n\nTAMIKO: But don't you have a home in Tokyo where you can relax? I don't have a place like that anywhere where I can relax and sleep.\n\nYOSHIMURA: Nor do I have a place where I can relax and sleep.\n\nTAMIKO ( _Sarcastically_ ): What about that splendid second home in Takasago?\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Appears not to hear her sarcasm_ ): With all the shit that's going on, it's like she's some other person. ( _Without strength._ ) If I could've held on for two more days, I wouldn't have ended up all exposed like this.... Yesterday and today, for two straight days, the market went sky high. This time, especially now, I realize destiny's finally abandoned me.\n\nTAMIKO ( _Unimpressed_ ): She won't let you get near her at Takasago? Is she so coldhearted? ( _Spoken as though thinking aloud._ )\n\nYOSHIMURA: That's not the case, but please don't talk about her now. Here recently, my head's been swirling with all sorts of problems, and everything's happened all at once. Got wrapped up in a major failure, a lost cause, so I gave up on her. So for the time being I thought I'd slip in here. You planned to be here, too, didn't you? ( _Speaks affectionately._ )\n\nTAMIKO ( _With a disgusted expression_ ): I'm planning to head back to Tokyo tonight. You're going to stash yourself here for the time being?... Uh, that's strange. I don't get it. Yesterday didn't I lay everything out with you and decide that I was going to take the opportunity to follow my own path? They took away all the clothes you'd had made for me, so I, too, am now stripped naked. And for me to be around is just to be in the way, definitely an annoyance for you, so, as I said yesterday, please limit it to this and pay no more attention to me.... Because I wouldn't even have dreamed of seeing you here today.\n\nYOSHIMURA: What you were saying yesterday was just in desperation. To leave me at your age can't be a good thing. As you were saying not too long ago, if we're mismatched, even that's OK. Continuing the mismatched marriage for life is, bottom line, much better for you.\n\nTAMIKO ( _Swiping at a horsefly or mosquito_ ): I've had enough of your fake kindness. You shut me up in this kind of place while you were doing your own thing in Tokyo, but from now on things won't go as you want. The woman in Takasago and your Tokyo friends don't think much of you, so why've you tailed after me all the way here? ( _Speaking scornfully._ )... You're totally spineless, you know.\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _In a commanding tone_ ): This is my house. What's the matter with me coming to my own house?\n\nTAMIKO: What! This is your house? That sort of loose talk won't work with me.\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Laughs cheerlessly_ ): Oh, right. Neither one of us has a house.... ( _Suddenly his tired eyes brighten._ ) But you're still listed in my family registry. For sure we're still nominally husband and wife.\n\nTAMIKO ( _Suddenly feeling weird_ ): So what? Are you going to make me your property for good on some legal pretext? So whenever you want, you just crawl under the law even so far as to take someone else's things, and then you go on with your bullying under the pretext of law. You're blocked in on all sides, so you've seized me as a last resort to see if you can squeeze any more money out of me. ( _Using a deliberately joking tone._ )\n\nYOSHIMURA: It's as you imagine. Whether I cut off your hands or slice off your ears, if your body parts can bring in money, that's what I want.... I'm dead serious.... I wanted to drink with Midono, and I've come to \u014ciso to get a solid night's sleep. I didn't expect to run into you. Even with our ill-starred marriage, we can't split completely. I groundlessly suspected that you were somewhere in Tokyo, taking off those wet clothes, wiping off your smudged face, and applying makeup, but in fact, when we parted yesterday, you came here as is. It's totally unexpected. ( _Stares at her as though surprised._ )\n\nTAMIKO ( _Glaring at him_ ): I came here only because I wanted a place where I could sleep without any worries.... I was on the verge of getting some long-awaited, uninterrupted sleep, so I'm pretty pissed that you awakened me just as I was nodding off. ( _As though talking to herself, she closes her eyes and lays down her head._ )\n\nYOSHIMURA: If you're sleepy, go ahead and make yourself comfortable and go to sleep. I can't keep my eyes open any longer either.... We'll get to the important stuff after sleeping.\n\n(YOSHIMURA _lies down and closes his eyes but opens them slightly two or three times in fits and starts, then closes them again, assured that she is still there._ TAMIKO _, too, opens her eyes slightly two or three times, then closes them again, checking whether he is there. Finally, both fall into a sound sleep, breathing evenly_. MIDONO _returns. Looking at one, then the other, and seeing how obliviously they are sleeping, he gives a disgusted look and walks between them into the house_.).\n\nACT II\n\n_Same house._ TAMIKO _'s former powder room. Seedy and without furniture, like the room in act I. Tatami mats have been pulled up, and the floorboard underneath has been turned over._ MIDONO _lifts his dust-covered body from under the floor, wipes the dust from his face with the palm of his hand, and lets out a big sigh._ YOSHIMURA _enters, reading the telegram_.\n\nYOSHIMURA: What the hell're you doing under the floor? Woke up just now to all this racket and came to check it out.\n\nMIDONO: I'm getting something I lost.\n\nYOSHIMURA: Something you lost? What? ( _Peers down._ )\n\nMIDONO ( _Flustered_ ): A silver coin, but it's so dark, I can't make anything out.... It's only one ten _sen_ coin. Doesn't really matter.\n\n(MIDONO _climbs out and tries to replace the floorboard._ YOSHIMURA _stops him._ )\n\nYOSHIMURA: You dropped money down there? Be serious. This was Tamiko's powder room, and she wouldn't ever let me set foot in here. No doubt there are secrets lurking about. ( _Suddenly shows_ MIDONO _the telegram._ ) Look at this. Just found it stuck to my foot. You must know about this telegram.\n\nMIDONO: Yep. I received it.\n\nYOSHIMURA: And you must know this Umeura guy?\n\nMIDONO: I don't.\n\nYOSHIMURA: Come on, you really don't know him?... The reason I had you come here over the summer was to keep an eye out for guys like Umeura. Look, if Tamiko bribed you and you're keeping a straight face about it, you're betraying me. ( _Gives him an intimidating look._ )\n\nMIDONO: Absolutely not!\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _As if thinking out loud_ ): But I've found something promising. Put this telegram back where it fell. Also, keep an eye on her and don't let her go back to Tokyo tonight.... Even this telegram might be turned into something that makes money.\n\nMIDONO ( _Disgruntled_ ): Keeping an eye on your wife isn't exactly why you got me here to this country cottage. If you're going to give me such a disagreeable job, I'll be outta here and back to Tokyo this very night.\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Restraining his anger_ ): I'm scraping bottom here, and even you are thinking of leaving me in the lurch. Even though I've had you, a good-for-nothing guy, all this time and fed you and let you do what you want, not so much as a peep of gratitude.\n\nMIDONO ( _Unmoved_ ): I'm not mercenary like the people around you. But you, always into some big deal, for you to suddenly stoop so low, it's really outrageous. ( _His voice getting stronger._ ) Things like making me monitor your wife, trying to turn that telegram into money, trying to finesse the landlord out of the moving fee\u2014even taking into account your business failures, you're just, at bottom, mean-spirited.... Is that the true character of the owner of the Yoshimura store?\n\nYOSHIMURA: You want to think that, go right ahead. I've lost out on a big deal, so I'm into winning some small ones.\n\nMIDONO ( _Calming down_ ): You still have confidence you can win something? You wife has emotionally split from you, so she's got to be watched? I'm... ( _He hesitates, looking at_ YOSHIMURA' _s face._ )\n\nYOSHIMURA: Whether over money or a house, I've also broken off relations recently with a number of people, one person at a time, but being insulted even by the likes of you, well, that just makes it perfect, tops it all off. Insulted even by the freeloading Midono Sh\u014dichi. ( _As if ridiculing himself._ )\n\n(MIDONO _again tries to replace the floorboard._ YOSHIMURA _looks around the room like a ravenous dog sniffing out food, shrivels up his nose, and looks under the floor. He lets loose with a sneering laugh, as if something_ ' _s occurred to him._ )\n\nYOSHIMURA: You said you dropped a ten _sen_ silver coin, right?... ( _Eagerly._ ) OK, I'll get in there and find it. How about you look, too? Let's hurry while Tamiko's still asleep.\n\nMIDONO: Not worth it. You'll get your clothes dirty.\n\nYOSHIMURA: We might come across something. There may be a vein of gold ore down there someplace. I have this recollection....\n\n(YOSHIMURA _energetically rips up the floorboard._ MIDONO, _making no effort to help, looks on feeling ill at ease._ )\n\nYOSHIMURA: Here recently when Tamiko was cleaning up, she was overly concerned about this room. And she was really touchy about me coming in. Knowing that woman, I wouldn't put it past her to maybe dig a hole down there and squirrel away money. The way she was talking before was a little weird, like she had money in secret. No way a penniless person like her could take on such a confident tone. That's it, got it figured. ( _Looks back at_ MIDONO.) Give me a hand here. Because if I'm right, we'll dig it up right away. Get over to the rice store nearby and maybe borrow a shovel or a hoe or something.\n\nMIDONO: Let's cut this craziness. ( _Regards_ YOSHIMURA _uneasily._ )\n\nYOSHIMURA: What's so crazy? ( _Getting more and more into it._ ) If not for that, the bitch would never have deliberately made the trip today, all the way here to \u014ciso.\n\n(YOSHIMURA _disappears under the floor._ )\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _From under the floor_ ): Strange that you were down here before. Weren't you also trying to sniff something out while we were sleeping? Pretty sly.\n\n( _Worried,_ MIDONO _unconsciously peers underneath the floor._ )\n\nYOSHIMURA: Something's here! ( _Elated._ ) Something's for sure buried here. For sure.... Hurry up and get the shovel. Can't dig it up with my bare hands.\n\nMIDONO: Something's really been buried down there? Amazing. When it comes to your greed, there's no matching your sense of smell. Is it putting off the scent of money?\n\nYOSHIMURA: Scent of money, whatever, it's like super smelly.... Hey, Midono, stop talking shit. Hurry up and get a shovel and a candle.\n\n(YOSHIMURA _partially emerges, the upper half of his body quite dirty; he breathes with difficulty._ )\n\nMIDONO: If it's true something's there, wouldn't it be better to ask the missus first?\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Wipes the sweat off his forehead with a dirty hand and gives him a threatening look_ ): That's for only after I've seen what the hell it is. I won't forgive you if you let the cat out of the bag.... Because I've gotten to the point where I can't trust you, don't even take one step away from here. I'll look in the kitchen myself and bring something to use. You keep an eye out here.\n\n(YOSHIMURA _issues the order and leaves. Once he is out of sight,_ MIDONO _hurriedly climbs under the floor._ TAMIKO _enters languidly, looking as if she_ ' _s still half asleep._ )\n\nTAMIKO: Wonder why the floorboards are turned up? ( _Talking to herself._ )\n\n(MIDONO _emerges, his upper body dirty._ )\n\nTAMIKO ( _Laughing loudly_ ): What the hell're you doing?\n\nMIDONO ( _Not hiding anything_ ): The boss says he found money, and we're about to dig it up.\n\nTAMIKO: Money? Yoshimura's hiding money away in a place like this? Really? He's hidden money from both me and his creditors before, so maybe he's buried it in such a place as a hedge against falling on hard times.... Really incredible. But that's how His Greediness thinks.\n\nMIDONO: That's not it. ( _Lowers his voice._ ) Didn't you say you had in secret something like tens of thousands of yen? Didn't you hide that money here?\n\nTAMIKO ( _Laughs_ ): When would anyone have put money under the floor? You're out of your head, too.\n\nMIDONO: Maybe you're right. A man like your husband would be hardly likely to do something so stupid. ( _Looks around, feeling at a loss._ ) But Missus, when you arrived here a while ago, and I, just by chance, peeked into this room, the tatami mats were turned over and the floorboards pulled up.\n\nTAMIKO: Something weird has got hold of you today, same as Yoshimura. This room had a really bad roof leak, so the tatami was turned up some time ago.\n\nMIDONO: Oh.\n\nTAMIKO: You're dizzy with greed, too. ( _Anxiously._ ) Oh my! You wouldn't tell Yoshimura what we were talking about earlier. I thought you were on my side.\n\nMIDONO: I'm absolutely not saying anything. ( _Looks under the floor._ ) But something's for sure buried down there.\n\nTAMIKO: You're not saying Yoshimura secretly buried money, are you?... So, what is it? Look like money?\n\n(YOSHIMURA _returns with a rusty hoe. Seeing_ TAMIKO, _his facial expression says,_ \" _Oh, shit!_ \")\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Commanding tone_ ): You give a hand too.... We'll talk later. After we dig the treasure up.\n\n(YOSHIMURA _climbs under the floor and digs with the hoe._ MIDONO _helps. Filled with curiosity,_ TAMIKO _looks on._ )\n\nYOSHIMURA: OK, we're getting it. ( _Quite animated._ )... A pot! It's a pot!\n\nMIDONO: It's a pot. A dirty pot. Doesn't look like any money's in there.\n\nYOSHIMURA: Well, wait till you look inside.... Here, I'm pulling it out.\n\n(YOSHIMURA _climbs out holding a small, dark-colored pot. The three surround it and gaze at it._ )\n\nYOSHIMURA: Take a look at the secret unmasked.\n\n( _With a side-glance at_ TAMIKO, YOSHIMURA _removes the lid. All three together stare into the pot._ MIDONO _laughs. The expression on his face despondent,_ YOSHIMURA _keeps his eyes fixed on the pot._ TAMIKO _is seized with blank amazement._ )\n\nMIDONO: Not even one pebble inside.\n\nTAMIKO: Why would this be buried here?\n\nMIDONO: Might be some kind of talisman?\n\nTAMIKO: Well, it's good there's nothing weird inside.\n\n(YOSHIMURA, _bereft of hope, says nothing. He throws the pot to the floor. It rolls around, unbroken._ )\n\nTAMIKO: This was the unmasked secret?\n\n(YOSHIMURA _remains silent._ )\n\nTAMIKO: Did you think there would be some of those small-sized, oval-shaped Edo gold coins or something like that inside?... Big man brings a hoe, and you two together take great pains for this?... Your braggart face, hasn't it become just like the features of this muddy piece of work? My ears and nose, even defiled as they've been, might be worth something. But you, when your body dissipates, it won't amount to one red cent. ( _Laughs._ ) More important, you and Midono should really get all the dust off your clothes and wash up. So you don't look so much the worse for wear. ( _Makes a funny gesture._ ) If people see you, what'll they think?\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Crestfallen, his words lacking strength_ ): Are you going back to Tokyo alone tonight?\n\nTAMIKO ( _Pulling herself together_ ): Well, nothing else is keeping me here.\n\nYOSHIMURA: Are you going because of the telegram from Umeura?\n\nTAMIKO: Won't work to threaten me with Umeura's name. (YOSHIMURA _points to the telegram, but she remains unperturbed._ ) If you think you can use that as a way to threaten me, then better guard it closely and take it to him instead. He just might pay something to take it off your hands.\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Putting on a show of strength_ ): I'm your husband, see! You're legally my wife and I'm your husband.\n\nTAMIKO ( _Not giving in_ ): You would stand behind the law and talk big to me like that? No matter how much you would try to wield authority over me, you're just a mummified person who used to be called Yoshimura Toraz\u014d. You're a ghost. When your stuff was seized from the truck because of your debt, you showed signs of life, but since then, wherever and however you've been lurking about, the life's just drained out of you. Digging under the floor with a rusty hoe, you look like a bag of bones. You look like a ghost tenaciously grasping at money. You might well listen carefully to Mr. Midono or somebody.\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Putting on a show of strength_ ): Winning or losing is the luck of the draw. You don't understand the heart of a man like me.\n\nTAMIKO: OK then, don't sniff around in this cramped, dirty space underneath the floor, but try finding a big gold mine somewhere. Do that, and even beautiful women will flock around and come on to you. Still and all, as a mummy, you really have lost the ability to catch the scent of money.\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _A sneer on his lips, in a weak voice_ ): Real brilliant, talking like a sage about things anybody knows. How about if I let you in on the bond between husband and wife? Think that you, with that face and shriveled-up body, can tempt other men? You're not what you used to be. You're just an empty husk left over after I sucked the lifeblood out of you. ( _Suddenly pulls_ MIDONO _by the hand, points at_ TAMIKO' _s face, and speaks in a wavering voice._ ) Take a close look and tell me about this. Be objective now.... Would a man be tempted by this face? Would a man's heart be attracted by this lusterless, leathery skin? Speak up, no holding back. Even if you desert me and walk out right now, I won't object. Give a real answer to what I've asked\u2014to someone I've had a long relationship with. Let's have your unadulterated critique right here in front of me and Tamiko.\n\n(MIDONO _looks away and remains silent._ )\n\nTAMIKO ( _Covering her ears with both hands_ ): OK, try not to regale us with trivial stuff. ( _Pauses._ ) Since I'm going to leave here, please don't come looking for me. ( _Starts to leave but hesitates, as though somehow reluctant to leave._ )\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Imperiously_ ): Midono, as I asked you before, keep an eye on Tamiko.\n\nMIDONO ( _Lifts his head and speaks calmly_ ): Rather than that, I'd like to excuse myself from the role of caretaker. I'll be returning to Tokyo. Wouldn't it be better for the two of you to live here together?... Even if creditors repossess your Tokyo house and even if there'll be no moving fee from here, you won't have to leave here for the time being. I bought lots of food yesterday. If you stay here for the time being, no need to worry about dying from starvation.... And the food the missus ordered has already come, so there's enough for the two of you to eat and have a good time. Everything's in the kitchen. I'm also giving back the soft recliner chair you left for me, so you can relax there with peace of mind.... ( _As if speaking to himself._ ) I don't need a moving truck or anything like that. I'll just leave with a bag in my hand.\n\nTAMIKO: Mr. Midono, are you really going? Even though I've begged you to stay?\n\nYOSHIMURA: It'll be sad if you run out on me.\n\nMIDONO: In Tokyo, I might look for and dig up a pot that's not empty.... Many thanks for everything.\n\n(MIDONO _says his piece and takes his leave without regrets. Stunned,_ YOSHIMURA _and_ TAMIKO _watch him in silence_.)\n\nACT III\n\n_Evening the same day._ YOSHIMURA _and_ TAMIKO _are sitting opposite each other in chairs on the veranda. In the room behind them is a low dining table with the remains of a meal just finished_.\n\nYOSHIMURA: The insects' cries have calmed down, haven't they?\n\nTAMIKO: Your noticing strong and weak insect cries is a bit odd, isn't it?\n\nYOSHIMURA: Maybe so.... The moon is bright tonight. Sitting here like this just now, I feel like we're marooned on an island. ( _Lazily._ ) Pigging out on an empty stomach has worn me out again and made me sleepy. You look worn out, too. You really have to go back tonight, no matter what? We've eaten together and had wine together, so no regrets here.... If you're really going home tonight, I'll see you off at the station. It'll be the last time. Probably won't ever see you again.\n\nTAMIKO ( _Anxiously_ ): So, what'll you do now?\n\nYOSHIMURA: What I said earlier.\n\nTAMIKO: So until you settle on a goal, you'll be all alone here? Too bad. Would've been better if Midono had stayed for you....\n\nYOSHIMURA: That jerk, he's been taking you and me for fools. He sees us as scum. I can still see plain as day that look in his eye when he left and turned back to look at us.\n\nTAMIKO: You think he took me for a fool, too? ( _Heaving a sigh._ ).... The guy's a cocky sort, isn't he, with a face like a pickpocket's.\n\nYOSHIMURA: When I had money, I wasn't arrogant. If only I'd known how arrogant I could've been with the power of money, I would've been so to my heart's content. Now, look, with a guy like Midono, even if you fall on your knees in front of him, imploring him, he wouldn't hear a word you say.\n\nTAMIKO: You poor thing. ( _Looks at his face as though feeling sorry for him._ ) When I covered my ears, what did Midono say to you?\n\nYOSHIMURA: Nothing really different. But he's also contemptuous of you. It's because he was aware that you'd lost both the power of money to buy him and the youthfulness to entice a man.\n\nTAMIKO ( _Losing control of herself_ ): That's a lie! A lie! The SOB used to come on to me all the time. What's more, he was well aware I had money.\n\nYOSHIMURA: You say Midono came on to you? No bullshit.\n\nTAMIKO: It's not bullshit. The reason he really wanted this recliner is because I always used it. Even more than this chair itself, he yearned for my scent. You didn't know that?\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Gives a forced laugh_ ): Hard to believe but, if that's the case, whatever.\n\nTAMIKO: You've got a bad habit of constantly circulating groundless suspicions ( _Becoming irritated._ ) Midono definitely knows that I've got money. He definitely knows that I've got about 20,000 yen.\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Suddenly reinvigorated with surprise and delight_ ): You have 20,000 yen? Really?\n\nTAMIKO ( _She holds her tongue, as if suddenly catching herself_ ): That doesn't mean the cash is close at hand. I've entrusted it to someone who's putting it where it'll draw good interest.\n\nYOSHIMURA: I see. You may not have the cash at hand, but you must have a certificate or something.\n\nTAMIKO: I'd forgotten that I'd put away the deposit certificate in the bookshelf in my room. Good nobody ripped it off. ( _Speaking almost disinterestedly._ )\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _With a fixed stare_ ): Do you have the certificate with you now? How about showing it to me?... You were approaching the pros and cons of the interest as a woman....\n\nTAMIKO: Are you going to be happy for me that I kept the money secret?\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Laughs_ ): Of course.\n\nTAMIKO:... ( _As though thinking aloud._ ) I'm not thinking about making tons of money or being extravagant or boastful, just about living on that money quietly, in the country. ( _Looks intently at her husband._ ) Both of us are fading physically and we're getting older....\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Losing patience_ ): Who did you entrust the whole amount to?\n\nTAMIKO ( _Casually_ ): To Mr. Sawai.\n\nYOSHIMURA: Sawai? ( _Shakes his whole body._ )\n\nTAMIKO: Didn't you used to say he was the smartest of the sales guys in the store, that he was trustworthy?\n\nYOSHIMURA: However it might've been before, now he's an enemy. He's more or less a member of the gang that did me in.\n\nTAMIKO: I don't know anything about that.\n\nYOSHIMURA:... So, you've always been in cahoots with Sawai to steal my property. Didn't you realize at some point that if Sawai failed, I'd succeed, and if I failed, he'd succeed? That destiny has not shone on me and him equally? ( _He speaks agitatedly but suddenly swallows his anger._ ) However, you totally believed me before when I said Sawai was smart and trustworthy, so maybe it makes sense you'd trust him.... Anyway, can you let me see that deposit certificate?\n\nTAMIKO: I've carelessly blurted everything out, so I have no choice. ( _Reluctantly, she produces the certificate from the folds of her sash._ ) If you're not careful with this, I'll be in trouble. It's important.... Here ( _Quietly hands it over._ ).\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Snatches it away and scrutinizes it with obvious delight_ ): Anyway, with this, we won't end up starving.\n\nTAMIKO ( _Incredulously_ ): So, you won't blow up at me for entrusting the money in secret to Mr. Sawai?\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Paying her no heed, he speaks as though thinking aloud_ ): Tomorrow morning I'll have to go to Sawai's place to get as much money as I can squeeze out of him. ( _Carefully puts the certificate into his pocket._ ) Let me have another glass of wine.\n\nTAMIKO: Amazing. With not so much as a by-your-leave, you would take what is mine?\n\nYOSHIMURA: Even though this was yours, Sawai is not the sort who'd calmly hand it over. Let me handle this.... If I could've gotten hold of this even ten days earlier, I wouldn't have fallen into such wretched circumstances. But now it's just fruitless bellyaching, and I'm going to stop yelling at you.\n\nTAMIKO: Then I'm always to be by your side, just merely subsisting like this? ( _Adds a brief follow-up._ ) I guess there's no other way.\n\n( _Calling out_ \" _Mr. Midono,_ \" ISHIKAWA _enters._ )\n\nTAMIKO ( _Seeing him, she speaks in a cheery voice_ ): Mr. Ishikawa, welcome!\n\nISHIKAWA ( _Approaches and greets_ YOSHIMURA): Is Mr. Midono here?\n\nTAMIKO: Midono suddenly decided to return to Tokyo. He probably won't be returning here. ( _Moves away from her soft chair._ ) Please, do sit down.\n\nISHIKAWA: No, no, I'm fine here. ( _Sits down on the veranda._ ) When I saw Mr. Midono earlier in the day, he didn't talk as though he were going to go home so soon. It's odd.\n\nTAMIKO: He's a whimsical guy, you know. I mean, although you befriended him and, thanks to you, he was happy with his opportunity for study, it's quite rude, isn't it, that he didn't say a proper good-bye.\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _As if suddenly hitting on something_ ): That's right, it's perfect that Mr. Ishikawa is doing us the favor of a visit. I'll bring the pot and let's have him take a look. ( _Leaves his chair and goes inside._ )\n\nISHIKAWA: Pot? Is it a pot with some kind of history?\n\nTAMIKO: It's a filthy, worthless pot. Yoshimura seems on edge or something, probably because his business has taken a bad turn. He's thinking of the pot he dug up as if it's a pot of gold and would bring him good fortune in business. So, Mr. Ishikawa, if you would please shore up his confidence by taking a look at the pot and saying something to make him happy. It may turn out to be a really stupid memory, however.\n\nISHIKAWA: Uh, well... I can't give any kind of expert assessment of antiques. But isn't it strange to dig up something like that?\n\nTAMIKO ( _Abruptly_ ): What time is it now?\n\nISHIKAWA: It just struck seven o'clock.\n\nTAMIKO: It's still quite early, isn't it? I thought the evening was already well under way.\n\nISHIKAWA: Will you be staying here tonight?\n\nTAMIKO: Well, it wasn't in the plans, but Midono went home, so now there's no caretaker....\n\n(YOSHIMURA _enters carrying the dirty pot._ ISHIKAWA _pays more attention to_ YOSHIMURA' _s awkward manner than to the pot._ TAMIKO _also is paying concerned attention only to her husband_ ' _s manner._ )\n\nYOSHIMURA: This is it. Please take a look and give your assessment. I'd say it's not just an ordinary pot.\n\nISHIKAWA: Let me have a look.\n\n( _Takes the dirty pot in hand and looks at it, turning it on its side and upside down and tapping on it with his fingertips. From left and right,_ YOSHIMURA _and_ TAMIKO _look on, as though observing an expert at work._ )\n\nISHIKAWA: It's from a fairly old period, isn't it. And the shape, too, is interesting.\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Delighted_ ): It must be something quite valuable. Me, I'm without refinement, totally ignorant, but the shape is interesting. This dent here is good. What was it used for?\n\nTAMIKO ( _Also paying close attention_ ): What was it used for? ( _Takes the pot and tries to tap on it as_ ISHIKAWA _had done._ ) It makes a good sound. Midono's an idiot. An uneducated guy like that looks at this kind of thing, he's got no clue as to its value.\n\nYOSHIMURA: What was it used for? I wonder if maybe it wasn't used for human bones.\n\nTAMIKO: Surely not!... Surely something precious was inside.\n\nYOSHIMURA: Something more precious.... OK, then, maybe someone's ancestors or descendants put even some of those small-sized, oval-shaped Edo gold coins in there to fall back on if they fell on hard times.\n\nTAMIKO: Strange that there was nothing inside.\n\nYOSHIMURA: Somebody probably took the contents. It's really too bad.\n\nISHIKAWA ( _In deep thought_ ): Something may have been sealed inside and buried to inflict harm to people, to cast a spell. In ancient Western fairy tales, you find the devil sealed in pots.\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Understanding for the first time_ ): Right, that's it! Now I understand. Demon or devil, no doubt it was sealed up in here to prevent him from taking revenge on some person. ( _Takes the pot and heaves it into the garden._ ) After we dug this up and took the lid off, Midono ran out on us. Me and you, we're both wilted, like the wind's got knocked out of our sails.\n\nTAMIKO: Well, I inadvertently showed you something it would've been better if I hadn't. I don't feel now as I did when I came here today.\n\nISHIKAWA: You've done a regrettable thing. If you didn't like that pot, it would've been better if I could have it and take it away.\n\nYOSHIMURA: Whether the pot looks good or is interesting, please put a stop to this bad karma. ( _As he speaks, his eyes take on a look of regret; he scrutinizes the damaged pot and thinks aloud._ ) Just looking at it, it has some elegance\u2014would have been better if I'd left the lid on and tried to foist it off on somebody.\n\nTAMIKO: Instead of a pot with bad karma, Mr. Ishikawa, why don't you take this recliner, if you don't have any objection? Since Midono is no longer here, this chair is no longer needed.\n\nISHIKAWA ( _Delighted_ ): If I could have that, it would be better than anything. Is it all right?\n\nTAMIKO: If I can hand over to you what remains of my life at \u014ciso, I'll feel refreshed, like starting over. Besides this, I don't have anything of my own.\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Forces a laugh_ ): So you'd give the things Midono wanted to Mr. Ishikawa? That's OK with you? You had all kinds of things made for you, and this chair is something you've liked for a long time.\n\nTAMIKO: I no longer have anything now.... Mr. Ishikawa, please take this chair right away.... It's no longer mine. Because now it's yours. ( _Stands up from the recliner and looks down at the clothes she is wearing._ ) Except for these, I'm penniless.\n\nYOSHIMURA: Without that recliner chair, there's no place for you to sleep here tonight. You planning to return to Tokyo tonight, after all?\n\nTAMIKO: Either way.\n\nYOSHIMURA: You feel like spending the night, here together with me?\n\nTAMIKO: But I have no money. I have no choice.\n\nYOSHIMURA: So you think if I go back to Tokyo, it's OK for you to go with me?\n\nTAMIKO: I've got no choice. I'm penniless, so there's no other way, is there, than to entrust what's survived\u2014myself\u2014to you?\n\n(ISHIKAWA _remains, uncomfortably looking out at the garden._ )\n\nTAMIKO: Mr. Ishikawa, you must think we're a strange couple.\n\nISHIKAWA: Not at all, I'm the one who has disturbed you. ( _Abruptly stands up._ ) I have some urgent writing that I have to finish by tonight, so I should say good-bye.\n\nYOSHIMURA: How industrious you are to be working so late.\n\nTAMIKO: Then, for the recliner, we'll get someone to deliver it later. I'm very happy to have a person like you use it. ( _She ends with a flirtatious tone._ )\n\nISHIKAWA: Receiving it is quite something, so if you don't need it, let me pay an appropriate amount to take it.... At any rate, till next time.... ( _Leaves._ )\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Facing_ TAMIKO, _sarcastically_ ): You'll have him sniff your smell that's embedded in the chair?\n\nTAMIKO: Whatever, that's the way it is.... That chair just may be the final resting place of that tuberculosis patient.\n\nYOSHIMURA: You made a lot of picky requests when you had me make that chair, but there's no way you could've thought it'd be used as a deathbed for someone.... ( _Changes his tone._ ) We were interrupted with that disturbance, but isn't Umeura waiting for you to come tonight? It's OK for you to look at that telegram and just toss it aside? ( _Speaks as if grilling her._ )\n\nTAMIKO: Mr. Umeura also is expecting my money. I'm broke, wearing clothes soaked with rain, a sickly face\u2014things have come to this. So why would he welcome me?\n\nYOSHIMURA: Then you'll no longer approach the likes of Umeura, but you'll stick with me through thick and thin? You're fickle, can't rely on what you say.\n\nTAMIKO:... I've counted for a long time on something I've kept close to me, and now I've carelessly handed over to you something as dear as my life.\n\nYOSHIMURA: I see. Your life is something you've had in your breast pocket and nurtured over a long time. ( _Takes the certificate of deposit out and gazes intently at it._ )\n\nTAMIKO: Even though I've handed over things as dear as my very life, instead from you I get no feeling of being given anything more valuable than money. It's discouraging. I'd rather tear up that certificate of deposit right in front of you.\n\nYOSHIMURA ( _Quickly puts the certificate of deposit back into his pocket_ ): Think I'd let you tear this up?\n\nTAMIKO: I won't tear it up. ( _Smiles._ ) But still, I was just thinking, if it were torn up, wouldn't things you can't buy with money come our way?\n\nYOSHIMURA: What utter foolishness.\n\nTAMIKO: It's really true. ( _Suddenly, in a tone of intimacy._ ) Whether we stay here or go home, it's up to you. I'm going to comb my hair and wash my face. ( _Puts her hand to her hair._ ) It's full of dust and must look a sight. ( _Murmuring._ )\n\nYOSHIMURA: Sounds good. I'll wash my face too. That character Midono, leaving like that, where's he gotten to by now?\n\nCURTAIN\n_A NERO IN SKIRTS_\n\nMURAYAMA TOMOYOSHI\n\nTRANSLATED BY YUKO MATSUKAWA\n\nMurayama Tomoyoshi, _A Nero in Skirts_ , directed by Murayama Tomoyoshi, May 1927.\n\nA _Nero in Skirts_ ( _Suk \u0101to o haita Nero_), \"a puppet play in ten scenes\" by Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901\u20131977), was published in the journal _Engeki shinch \u014d_ in May 1927 and was first staged in May 1928 by the Kokoroza (Soul Theater), a short-lived, politically progressive troupe that staged both new kabuki and _shingeki_ plays. Murayama directed the production himself. Although allegedly written for puppets, Murayama employed actors for the premiere.\n\nMurayama used various historical and fictional accounts as sources for his text, which underscores his view of the lasciviousness of Catherine the Great (1729\u20131796) of Russia, whose outrageous conduct he contrasts with that of her common soldiers, who feel solidarity with their supposed enemies.\n\nThe subject of Catherine's private life seems to have been a popular subject in the interwar period and afterward, particularly in the United States. The director Joseph von Sternberg directed _The Scarlet Empress_ (1934), a lavish film starring Marlene Dietrich that was one of her early American successes, and Mae West wrote and performed in the satirical play _Catherine Was Great_ , first produced in New York in 1944 by the legendary Michael Todd. Neither stressed the political and social concerns that Murayama had. In 2008, a highly popular Russian musical yet again took up the subject of Catherine's lurid life.\n\nThe Puppets\n\nCATHERINE II's Skirt from Days Gone By\n\nCATHERINE II's Present-Day Skirt\n\nCATHERINE II's Skirt from the Future\n\nCATHERINE II\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW, head lady-in-waiting\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN, colonel of the Simbirsk regiment\n\nLANSKOI, flag bearer of the Simbirsk regiment, later captain\n\nOFFICER\n\nOLD MAN\n\nSOLDIER ON DUTY\n\nCHAMBERLAIN\n\nEXECUTIONER\n\nPlus many Russian and Turkish soldiers, imperial guardsmen, courtiers, lady's maids, execution officers, executioners, priests, horses, coachmen, and so on.\n\nTime: From early autumn to midwinter, 1788.\n\nPlace:\n\nScene 1. Catherine II's bedroom in her palace at Czarskoe-Selo\n\nScene 2. The Russian army's encampment in front of the Turkish fortress at Kinburn\n\nScene 3. The cemetery behind the Russian army's encampment\n\nScene 4. The same as in scene 2\n\nScene 5. On the Neva River, St. Petersburg\n\nScene 6. A secret room in the Hermitage\n\nScene 7. Catherine II's drawing room in the Winter Palace\n\nScene 8. A prison cell\n\nScene 9. The scaffold\n\nScene 10. The slope in front of the Turkish fortress at Kinburn\n\nN.B.:\n\n\u2022 Compared with the size of the puppets, the stage props should be proportionately very large.\n\n\u2022 This play owes much to the five or six short stories about Catherine II written by Masoch.1\n\n\u2022 Because all the character traits and movements of, as well as the lines spoken by, the characters are puppet-like, unless the director takes pains to direct them very carefully, this play should not be performed by humans.\n\nSCENE 1\n\n_After a quaint, elegant, nostalgic polonaise plays for a while, the curtain quietly rises. The luxurious bedroom of_ CATHERINE II _in her palace at Czarskoe-Selo. The chandelier_ ' _s candlelight dims as the day dawns. The bedroom is behind the heavy purple velvet curtain in the center of the stage. The polonaise continues._ CATHERINE II' _s Skirt from Days Gone By abruptly appears and starts singing a song. It is a small skirt with whalebone hoops and decorated with ivy and moss._\n\n**The Song of the Skirt from Days Gone By**\n\nMy mistress was born in Germany,\n\nAnd came to Russia at fifteen.\n\nShe started studying the Russia language then\n\nBut because she was willful from the time she was born,\n\nShe studied in midwinter in the middle of the night\n\nWearing only a nightgown and not even socks,\n\nSo her small lungs were filled with blood\n\nAnd it was a close call\u2014she almost died.\n\nNow whether it was better for her to have died then\n\nIs not for a mere skirt like me to understand.\n\nIn any case, she quickly recovered\n\nAnd fulfilled her role as\n\nThe link between France and Russia.\n\nGrand Duke Peter, who became her husband, was\n\nA pockmarked good-for-nothing creature\n\nWho loved military parades, military uniforms, and gold buttons\n\nAnd nothing else\u2014that was it.\n\nMy mistress, barely sixteen,\n\nPromptly despised this beast.\n\nLiving in the midst of selfishness, power, and dissolution,\n\nAn existence diametrically opposed to a life lived humanly,\n\nNo one would be surprised if my mistress rotted\n\nBut the extent of her rotting was extraordinary.\n\nWell, do listen to how it went.\n\nFirst of all, my mistress\n\nFell into horrific sexual depravity.\n\nShe pursued men avidly if they were strong and beautiful,\n\nSoldiers or officers,\n\nOr diplomats or artists\u2014\n\nThey all made lots of bothersome work for me.\n\nGourmands need not only delicious things to eat\n\nBut also different dishes to eat daily.\n\nSorikow, Mirowitsch,\n\nAnd Potemkin, who lasted for quite a while, were the first\n\nOf a long list of official lovers who will be remembered throughout history\n\nA list so long that headless me cannot remember them all.\n\nThe Present-Day Skirt and the Skirt from the Future\n\nWill also suffer because of this.\n\nNow, after eighteen years of marriage,\n\nQueen Elizabeth died so\n\nPeter was made czar.\n\nMy mistress, who hated her husband so,\n\nUsed Gregory Orlow, a favorite of hers\n\nWho was luckily the commander of the Imperial Guard\n\nTo suddenly stage a revolt to take the throne\n\nAnd take Peter's life while doing so.\n\nIn this way did the famous reign of Catherine\n\nEmerge onto the world's stage.\n\nNow my mistress, who was a famed beauty\n\nCan't beat aging\u2014she's sixty this year.\n\nThat beauteous figure people swooned over\n\nCan now be mistaken for a barrel of Dutch herring\n\nAnd even emits strange odors.\n\n( _A cock crows._ )\n\nOh dear, it's almost morning.\n\nThat barrel of herring will wake and\n\nAppear from behind that curtain\n\nSo why don't you take a good long look at her yourself?\n\n( _To stage right._ )\n\nOh, Present-Day Skirt!\n\nI bid you all adieu.\n\n( _Exits stage left. The cock crows again. It is light outside the window. From stage right appears the Present-Day Skirt. It is decorated with gems that dazzle the eye\u2014it is a large, stately skirt_.)\n\n**The Song of the Present-Day Skirt**\n\nWell, you are such a chatterbox, Skirt from Days Gone By.\n\nBut then again, sixty years is a long time\n\nAnd it must have been quite eventful.\n\nCompared with that, I have it easy\n\nSince what is present is what you are\n\nGoing to see on stage.\n\nSo my chattering is unnecessary.\n\n( _The morning sun shines on the scarlet woolen cloth on the floor._ )\n\nOh dear, the sun is shining into the room. Let me leave before I'm yelled at from behind the curtain.\n\n( _Toward stage right._ )\n\nOh Skirt from the Future!\n\nAfter the ten scenes in this play,\n\nI leave everything else up to you.\n\n( _Runs behind the center curtain. The Skirt from the Future appears from stage right. It is an insanely decorated, obviously garish skirt_.)\n\n**The Song of the Skirt from the Future** ( _in a hushed voice_ )\n\nIf I tell you too much about the future\n\nThe laws of nature will be messed up.\n\nSuffice it to say that that old woman\n\nBecomes insane because of her hysteria,\n\nAnd though her Turkish conquest finally ends,\n\nShe starts to plan an incredible Indian conquest\n\nBut drops dead suddenly of a stroke.\n\n( _From behind the curtain we hear a yawn._ )\n\nOh dear, she wakes\u2014I mustn't be found.\n\nI invite you to stay, sit back, and watch.\n\n( _Exits stage right_.)\n\nCATHERINE II ( _Shouts from behind the curtain_ ): Pro\u2014ta\u2014so\u2014w\u2014\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW: Yeeess, Your Majesty. ( _Runs in from stage left. Thirty years old and a beauty in the Rubens style, she stands outside the curtain_.) Are you awake?\n\nCATHERINE II: Yes, I'm awake. Help me get up.\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW: Yes, Your Majesty. ( _Lifts the curtain and makes her way through_.)\n\nCATHERINE II: Up-si-daisy. ( _Eventually, she runs outside the curtain. Her voluminous body is encapsulated in a white nightgown trimmed with the highest-quality Flemish lace. Her face is ravaged by her dissolute way of life, but since she had been, after all, a great beauty, she looks far younger than her sixty years. She looks, at the most, forty. Only her eyes are as beautiful and seductive and dignified as in the olden days. Her hair is as white as snow. But in any case, there's no denying that she is a fat and flabby old woman. She goes straight to the full-length mirror and poses in front of it coyly_.) Hmmm. ( _She seems satisfied_.)\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW: You are indeed beautiful, Your Majesty. You are particularly bright and shining this morning.\n\nCATHERINE II: Yes, this morning I think I do look especially brilliant. Look at the color in these cheeks. They're like jewels. The glow comes from deep inside. Those of the lower class and weaklings don't have this glow, you know. Well, maybe the queen of the Amazons had it.\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW: But aren't those Amazons a myth?\n\nCATHERINE II: Don't be stupid. Scholars turn everything they find inconvenient into myths. There's nothing strange about women rising up against male despotism in order to build a nation\u2014I'd say it is the natural thing to do. And it's what I'm trying to do all by myself. Well, in my army, I have a commander like Madame de Mellin, but I just put an old-fashioned refined young lady in a green velvet coat trimmed with gold braid and gave her a saber to keep by her side, and also an ivory walking stick with a gold head to hold. But I'm different. I'm Alexander reincarnated. Just like Nero, I see my whims through to the end.\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW: Would you like to get dressed now?\n\nCATHERINE II ( _Not listening_ ): So what I want are not friends but slaves. And though you won't understand this, the people don't want to be my friends but my slaves. And this is why Russia can flourish. St. Petersburg is built on the dead bodies of serfs, you know. We built it by sinking the columns for this city in the swamp, along with serf carcasses.\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW: Yes, Your Majesty. Slaves, Your Majesty. Only slaves surround you, Your Majesty. They are toys. They are your playthings. They are pet dogs. If you are bored with them, they are things to be tossed aside. And everyone is happy about this from the bottom of their hearts.\n\nCATHERINE II: Now, we can't generalize and say that, can we? Our lives depend on the lives of those serfs. Building a detached palace, say, or going to war\u2014these things we can't do if the serfs aren't around. Just because they are smelly and dirty doesn't mean we can get rid of them arbitrarily. The slaves I can get rid of easily when I'm bored with them are the ones like you. Now kneel! Kiss the soles of my feet! ( _She commands imperiously_. MADAME DE PROTASOW _obeys_.) Yes, now I will get dressed. ( _She puts her arm around_ MADAME DE PROTASOW _'s shoulders in a familiar way, and they exit through the central curtain_.)\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN ( _Enters hurriedly from stage right. She is a lithe and youthful beauty. She stops and stands in front of the curtain wearing exactly the dashing outfit that_ CATHERINE _described a few moments ago. She clicks together her shiny black patent leather boots and speaks_ ): I, commander of the Simbirsk regiment Madame de Mellin, have come to say farewell before going off to the Turkish expedition!\n\nCATHERINE II ( _From behind the curtain_ ): Oh, my dear brave Amazon. Wait a moment for me. ( _To_ MADAME DE PROTASOW.) Powder!\u2014more, more, lots more!\u2014Now the skirt!\u2014( _To_ MADAME DE MELLIN.) Are you off immediately?\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN: Yes, Your Majesty, directly after I take leave of you!\n\nCATHERINE II ( _From behind the curtain_ ): And where do you propose to catch up with Potemkin?\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN: I intend to catch up with the commander at Novgorod, Your Majesty.\n\nCATHERINE II ( _From behind the curtain_ ): And are you taking your whole regiment?\u2014( _To_ MADAME DE PROTASOW.) No, not these shoes! I want those, with the lily decorations!\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN: Yes, Your Majesty. They are waiting in front of the gates.\n\nCATHERINE II ( _Sticks out her made-up face from between the curtains. Her makeup is unseemly and thick for a woman her age, with a thick layer of lipstick on her lips, dark-colored rouge on her cheeks, and three beauty spots drawn on her face. She sticks out her neck and speaks in a hushed voice_ ): That good-looking Lanskoi, he's the flag bearer of your regiment, isn't he?\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN: Yes, Your Majesty.\n\nCATHERINE II: Is he going too?\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN: Yes, he is.\n\nCATHERINE II: Now, now, I dropped the ball on that one, didn't I? I suppose it's too late now. Though the boy's face is a little long, he has a good mouth on him. A good mouth. That mouth and that chin combined. That mouth's like someone pinched it a little; it's pursed just so ( _As she says this she brings her right hand from behind the curtain to gesture this_ ), and that chin, don't you think it looks a little cocky? But it curves up like this, doesn't it? And then his torso, from his chest to his hips, looks ( _As she says this, her left hand also emerges_ ) like this.\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW ( _From behind the curtain_ ): Your Majesty, please don't stick your body out so much. Please wait just a little more, and we'll be done.\n\nCATHERINE II: ( _Returns both hands to behind the curtain_ ): Call that boy over here, won't you?\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN: Do you mean Lanskoi, Your Majesty? I will go immediately. ( _She leaves_.)\n\nCATHERINE II ( _Her head goes back behind the curtain. Soon she finishes dressing, however, and appears on stage with_ MADAME DE PROTASOW _wearing the Present-Day Skirt_ ): I saw that boy at the spring military parade. The Simbirsk regiment was lined up on the left wing. As I was reviewing the troops, my horse suddenly reared. I thought \"uh-oh\" and pulled on the reins, and then there was right in front of my nose, a cute face blushing deeply, looking straight at me. That was that boy. I intended to call for him right after I got back, but it slipped my mind for some reason. The poor thing\u2014still just the regimental flag bearer.\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN ( _Returns, whispering something to_ LANSKOI. LANSKOI _is a vibrant beautiful young officer. He has a little moustache and carries the regimental flag in a bag_ ): I've brought Lanskoi to you, Your Majesty.\n\n(LANSKOI _is in a daze and simply bows deeply_.)\n\nCATHERINE II: Yes, yes, it was you, it was you. You're a lovely boy. Come closer, now. (LANSKOI _nervously approaches._ CATHERINE _places her hand on his chin and brings his face closer to her_.) Stay still. Don't move. Hmm. Yes, yes. I'm Catherine.\n\nLANSKOI ( _Stuttering_ ): Your Majesty, you\u2014how\u2014beautiful\u2014you\u2014are.\n\nCATHERINE II: Good, good. You know, I've had my eye on you for a while. You are a pretty fine soldier.\n\nLANSKOI ( _Prompted by_ MADAME DE MELLIN _as he goes along_ ): I am\u2014simply\u2014Your Majesty's\u2014slave. \u2013Your Majesty's toy.\n\nCATHERINE II: Hmm. Hmm.\n\nLANSKOI: Your\u2014play\u2014thing. Your\u2014pet\u2014dog\u2014\n\nCATHERINE II ( _In great spirits_ ): Do I really seem beautiful to you?\n\nLANSKOI ( _Poked by_ MADAME DE MELLIN): Yes, of course, Your Majesty, you are. You are so very beautiful. You are truly, truly, truly, beautiful.\n\nCATHERINE II ( _To_ MADAME DE MELLIN): Good, good. This man seems to be a man with ample capabilities. Let us make him captain. (LANSKOI _is so surprised he almost drops his flag_. MADAME DE MELLIN _is unperturbed and replies, \"Yes, Your Majesty,\" and bows_.) And I'll write to Potemkin myself, so Madame de Mellin, you take it and deliver it to him.\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN: Yes, Your Majesty.\n\nCATHERINE II ( _Starts writing the letter using the small desk that_ MADAME DE PROTASOW _brings_ ): Madame de Mellin, this is to say that your regiment shall be in reserve till the very end\u2014( _At that moment, outside the military band suddenly starts to play. Everyone is startled, and the music sounds like it is moving farther away_.)\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN ( _Upset, runs to the window_ ): Oh no, my regiment is leaving! (LANSKOI _hears this and runs off like a rabbit_.)\n\nCATHERINE II: What? They're leaving? Without their commanding officer and their flag bearer?\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN ( _Shouts from the window_ ): Stop! Halt! Stop, I tell you! Please halt! ( _But the military band moves farther and farther away, so she is about to run off_.)\n\nCATHERINE II ( _Dismayed_ ): Wait, Mellin! I said, \"Wait\"! The letter, I haven't finished the letter yet! (MADAME DE MELLIN _hesitates a moment but then is about to sprint off_.)\n\nCATHERINE II ( _Overturns the desk as she runs after her_ ): Wait! Mellin! Wait! You fool!!!\n\nCURTAIN\n\nSCENE 2\n\n_The curtain rises as the sounds of cannons, rifles, yelling, shouts of \"hurrah,\" and so on indicate confusion and disorder. The encampment of the Russian army in the front of the Turkish fortress at Kinburn._\n\n_Stage right, in the background, there can be seen half of the fortress and the hill it is built on. Stage left is a cross section of a Russian tent that is torn and broken. Inside, there is only dirty straw strewn on the floor. There are no blankets. There are misshapen buckets and pots hanging. The Russian troops attacked the fortress but were rebuffed, and so the_ SOLDIERS _have just returned, dejectedly._\n\n_Grimy, unshaven_ SOLDIERS _wearing rags walk past, from stage right to stage left. Seven or eight of them enter this tent, bury themselves in the straw, and close their eyes. They don_ ' _t have the energy to speak. In addition, they all are half crazed. After the other_ SOLDIERS _return to their tents, the strains of a polonaise can be heard emanating from a place not far away._\n\nSOLDIER 1 ( _Suddenly laughing in a loud voice_ ): Ahahahahahahahaha.\n\n( _Beat. The delirious ramblings of the_ SOLDIERS _can be heard from inside the lanternless tent_.)\n\nSOLDIER 2 ( _Crying in a low voice_ ): It hurts. It hurts. Oh, it hurts.\n\nSOLDIER 3 ( _In a crushed voice_ ): Hurrah! Charge!\n\nSOLDIER 4 ( _Mumbling_ ): They got it good over there, they do, and vodka drips from their whiskers all the time. Forever and ever it drips from their whiskers. Beef. Pork. Beef. Pork. My, my, it's a very fancy mansion they have there. Dance, Walinka, Walinka, Walinka. And you, cute Maria Demitrievna. May I trouble you to please fetch me that porcelain pipe? Yes, yes, of course. Do you mean this one? What a magnificent pipe it is. Oh, now if you say such things, I get shy, Maria Demitrievna. Let me tell you about this pipe\u2014. Oh, my dear bishop. Why are you crying? Your child died of cholera? Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that. Well, my dear man, if that is the case\u2014\n\nSOLDIER 5 ( _Sings out of tune_ ):\n\nMr. Potemkin and his wooden palace.\n\nHere, Maria, there, Katya.\n\nHaving banquets daily, regardless of day or night.\n\nHere, here, Soldiers, come closer now,\n\nWith this here war\n\nI really want to obtain\n\nThe Grand Ribbon of the Order of St. George. ( _Two or three_ SOLDIERS _add their voices and sing together._ )\n\nEven though I may be Catherine's lover\n\nI need to see active duty\n\nOr else I won't get that decoration.\n\nSo that's why I started this war\n\nAnd even though the Turkish soldiers might be strong\n\nThis is a war that must be won.\n\nOFFICER 1 ( _Hearing the singing, runs into the tent_ ): Hey! Who's singing? Didn't I tell you that anyone singing that song is to be shot to death? Who was it now? Hey, ( _Kicks someone_ ) get up! It was you, wasn't it? ( _He grabs_ SOLDIER 5 _by the collar and drags him out of the straw._ ) You others I'll forgive just this once. If I hear you singing that song again, I'll shoot you all to death, every last one of you. ( _Using the whip he had tucked into his belt, he starts thrashing it around. The_ SOLDIERS _suddenly come to their senses and start crying._ ) Walk! Go outside! You're to be shot dead! ( _He exits the tent as he beats the crying_ SOLDIER _in front of him._ )\n\nSOLDIER 2: It hurts. It hurts. Oh, it hurts.\n\nSOLDIER 4 ( _Starts to cry_ ): Oh the general is too cruel. There's nothing much good even after death, I bet.\n\nSOLDIER 1: Ahahahaha.\n\nSOLDIER 3: Commander! They got me.\n\nSOLDIER 4: Oooh, the horror, the horror. You there, some sympathy for me, please.\n\n( _From afar, the sound of a rifle shot. Two, three_ SOLDIERS, _astonished, sit up_.)\n\nSOLDIER 2: Aahh.\n\nSOLDIER 6: Shot to death!\n\nSOLDIER 4: Oh my God. ( _He crosses himself._ )\n\n( _Beat. Strains of the polonaise again._ )\n\nSOLDIER 7: I'm starving. ( _Hearing this, they all realize that they are about to die of hunger and start moaning_ \" _I_ ' _m starving_ \" _in desolate voices._ )\n\nSOLDIER 4: They have stuff at Commander Potemkin's place. Beef. Pork. Beef. Pork. They have everything there. And vodka drips from their whiskers all the time. Forever and ever, it drips from their whiskers.\n\nFADE TO BLACK\n\nSCENE 3\n\n_A moonlit night in the cemetery behind the encampment. Crude crosses are stuck in the snowy ground; some have fallen_.\n\nLANSKOI _sits on a rock and is in a daze. Occasional cannon sounds. In the darkness, someone suddenly yells._\n\nLANSKOI ( _Shouts_ ): Who's there? ( _No answer._ ) Who's there? If you don't answer, I'll shoot you dead!\n\nOLD MAN ( _Crying as he emerges from a hole toward the rear of the stage_ ): I beg yer pardon, beg yer pardon. I'm to blame, I am. I did wrong.\n\nLANSKOI: You, what were you doing? What's that you're carrying?\n\nOLD MAN: Ahh, beg yer pardon, sir, beg pardon.\n\nLANSKOI ( _Wrests it from the old man_ ): Huh? This is a uniform. You were stripping things from dead bodies, weren't you?\n\nOLD MAN: It's my fault, sir, I did wrong.\n\nLANSKOI ( _After a while, suddenly laughs_ ): Ahahahaha, this is probably better, actually, to be rid of such filthy clothes and be buried stark naked in the snow. But you there, why did you yell?\n\nOLD MAN: Oh, my God, I saw such a frightful thing\u2014\n\nLANSKOI: What did you see?\n\nOLD MAN: Behold, over there, over there. Can you hear that moaning?\n\nLANSKOI: I can't hear a thing. But what are those pale blue things?\n\nOLD MAN: Dead bodies, sir, carcasses. But they're not yet dead.\n\nLANSKOI: Not dead yet? ( _He jumps into the hole. After a while, he climbs out of it._ ) They're all dead, already. But did you drag them there?\n\nOLD MAN: Oh, they died, did they? Until a few moments ago they were alive, I tell ya. They were moaning and twitching as they crawled.\n\nLANSKOI: I see. Yesterday when they dumped thirty-five men who died of illness into that hole all at once, they also threw in some who weren't dead yet. So the ones who were alive probably crawled part of the way out and then gave up the ghost.\n\nOLD MAN: I'm sure yer right. It's horrible, sir.\n\nLANSKOI: What's so horrible? You were the one who was stripping the bodies of their belongings. How can you say such balderdash when you yourself are like the devil?\n\nOLD MAN ( _Shouts_ ): The devil, the devil I am, yessiree. But who's the worse devil: me, who strips dead bodies, or you and yer kind who kill people? Yer lot suddenly showed up in our village and started a war. Yer cannonballs made a mess of our fields and crops. And burned our houses and barns. How can we live if we don't take clothes from them who don't need 'em? I'm an honest farmer, not like you and yer shameful business. Who made us into devils? It was you and yer kind, that's who.\n\nLANSKOI ( _In a small voice_ ): Not I\u2014not I\u2014\n\nOLD MAN: So, take a good look\u2014this is what yer lot made me into. And watch\u2014I'm about to go strip that dead man's body. ( _He hides in the hole._ )\n\nFADE TO BLACK\n\nSCENE 4\n\n_Same as scene 2_.\n\nSOLDIER 4: They have stuff at Commander Potemkin's place. Beef. Pork. Beef. Pork. They have everything there. And vodka drips from their whiskers all the time. Forever and ever, it drips from their whiskers\u2014\n\nSOLDIER ON DUTY ( _Carries everyone_ ' _s rations and slips into the tent_ ): Hey, it's dinnertime, wake up, wake up. ( _Everyone crowds around him._ ) Hey, I have something important to tell you. Someone stand watch at the entrance. ( _To_ SOLDIER 7.) Would you be the lookout?\n\nSOLDIER 7: All right. ( _Goes to the entrance._ ) It's starting to snow.\n\nSOLDIER ON DUTY: Listen up, everyone. We've talked it over with the other regiments and at last we decided to send a messenger to St. Petersburg.\n\nSOLDIER 4: Lord, please protect our poor messenger.\n\nSOLDIER 2: Who's the messenger?\n\nSOLDIER ON DUTY: Lanskoi. That ladies' man Captain Lanskoi.\n\nSOLDIER 3: Good! If it's Captain Lanskoi, that's good! He's the czarina's favorite, so if he says bad things about Potemkin, she'll listen to him. We're like insects to her, but we can still at least make a request.\n\nSOLDIER 4: Our czarina doesn't know what dire straits we're in. So if he tells her how it really is\u2014the truth, I mean\u2014she'll be surprised and shed big tears and say, oh my poor little children, forgive me, I didn't know.\n\nSOLDIER ON DUTY: That's right. That's bound to be right. And we asked Lanskoi to tell her everything. How Potemkin built a magnificent palace and invited twenty foreign beauties there so that they could party with lavish banquets and host balls. All while we're almost dead of hunger because we have no rations. And that many of us are sick and we're dying like flies. While our commander is frolicking, every day more soldiers die, and so we can't even take this one fortress at Kinburn.\n\n( _At that moment, outside the tent,_ CAPTAIN LANSKOI _arrives, dressed as a peasant, with an escort of ten_ SOLDIERS.)\n\nLANSKOI ( _In a small voice_ ): Now, return before you're found out. On my life I swear to see this mission through, so don't worry. Just wait for me.\n\nSOLDIER 8: Oh, Captain Lanskoi. Thank you, thank you. ( _Kisses his hem and cries. The_ SOLDIERS _inside the tent also tumble outside in tears to see off_ LANSKOI. _Strains of a polonaise_.)\n\nCURTAIN\n\nSCENE 5\n\n_St. Petersburg. On the Neva River. In the background we can see the Winter Palace. The river is frozen solid, and on it is a layer of snow. There is a mountain of snow almost fifty feet high. The slope is as smooth as glass, so one could slide down on a sled and play. On either side of the sledding track, fir trees stand in the snow in two tidy rows. There are wooden steps on the backside of the mountain so that one can climb to the top. The curtain rises amid happy cheers, playful shouts, and the jingle of sleigh bells._\n\n_Courtiers in warm clothing are sledding and making lots of noise. The imperial guards are in charge of dragging the sleds up the mountain of ice and pushing them down again._\n\n_The moment the curtain rises,_ CATHERINE II, _along with_ MADAME DE PROTASOW, _sleds down the hill._\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW ( _Getting off the sled_ ): Ahh, that was scary!\n\nCATHERINE II ( _Handing over the sled reins to a guard_ ): Now once more!\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW: Let's stop now, Your Majesty. This is clearly not good for one's health. It feels like one leaves one's heart behind while one's body whooshes down the hill. It must be bad for one's health. Everything in front of one's eyes passes by so quickly, this must not be good for the eyes either. The eyes can't focus.\n\nCATHERINE II: Then why don't you throw away your heart and eyes and hurry up and come with me?!\n\n( _At this moment,_ MADAME DE MELLIN, _wearing women's clothing, appears, riding in a sleigh pulled by a pair of horses_.)\n\nCATHERINE II ( _Shouts_ ): Ah, my dear brave Amazon. ( _Running toward her_.) I'm glad you were able to come. So this means your leg injury has healed?\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN ( _Gets off the sleigh and bows deeply_ ): Yes, Your Majesty. It's healed completely.\n\nCATHERINE II: Show me.\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN: Yes, Your Majesty. ( _Lifts her skirt a bit, lowers her stockings, and shows the scar on her ankle_.)\n\nCATHERINE II ( _Squats and touches it_ ): Hmm, the scar after a bullet passes through you is a strange shape, isn't it? Well, at least it wasn't your face or your chest. So now that you're well, are you going back to the battlefield?\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN: Oh, not a chance! I don't think I'll forget that place till the day I die\u2014that's why I keep twitching nervously.\n\nCATHERINE II: Well, well. You're a miserable thing now, aren't you? But that's fine\u2014I thought as much from the very beginning. You look dashing in uniform, but I like you even more when you're wearing women's clothes. So make sure you don't ever mouth off courageously again. ( _To_ MADAME DE PROTASOW.) Let's go.\n\n( _The two arrive at the top of the ice mountain and slide down with great speed. When they are halfway down the hill,_ LANSKOI _appears stage left, wearing peasant's clothes. At that moment, the sled overturns, and_ CATHERINE II _and_ MADAME DE PROTASOW _are thrown out onto the ice. As everyone grows pale and runs toward them,_ CATHERINE II, _unperturbed, gets up by herself and helps_ MADAME DE PROTASOW, _who feels as though she is about to die, board the sled again, and then they finish sledding down the rest of the mountain_.)\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN ( _Runs over to her_ ): Are you all right? I was so surprised my heart is still beating so fast!\n\nCATHERINE II: I saw that boy. Suddenly, I saw that boy's face. And I was startled so that my steering went awry, and so we fell over.\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN: Who is \"that boy\"?\n\nCATHERINE II: You know, the one who used to be the flag bearer for your regiment. Lan\u2014Lan\u2014\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN: Oh, Lanskoi.\n\nCATHERINE II: Yes, Lanskoi.\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN: Where?\n\nCATHERINE II ( _Looking around her_ ): I saw him somewhere. That boy had such a pale face.\n\nLANSKOI ( _Pushing past people and then kneeling_ ): Your Majesty.\n\nCATHERINE II: It was you, after all. Why are you dressed that way? When did you return from the battlefield?\n\nLANSKOI: I have a secret and important request to make of you.\n\nCATHERINE II ( _Taking his chin in her hand and drawing him near_ ): Well, well... but before I listen to your request, you'll have to listen to me first. ( _Her mouth nears his ear_.) Come to the back gate of the Hermitage at eleven this tonight. ( _To_ MADAME DE PROTASOW.) Let's go home.\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW ( _Limping_ ): I'm not feigning anything, I really fell down. Ah, this is the last straw. Whatever you say, I'm never going to go sledding with Your Majesty again. ( _The two climb into a sleigh drawn by two horses and leave._ )\n\nMADAME DE MELLIN ( _Nearing_ LANSKOI, _who is still kneeling, dumbstruck_ ): Lanskoi, you are a lucky man. I have no idea why you escaped the battlefield wearing such clothes but come to the Hermitage tonight without fail. The czarina has taken a fancy to you. (LANSKOI _grows pale._ ) Now, now, there's nothing to be afraid of. Just do exactly as the czarina says. If you do, she'll grant you your so-called important request just like that.\n\nCURTAIN\n\nSCENE 6\n\nCATHERINE II _'s secret trysting place, a hidden room in the Hermitage. The walls are covered with oil paintings of myths. The furniture is covered in ruby-red cloth, and the candlelight is dim._ CATHERINE _is wearing only a thin pink negligee and is leaning over the long sofa in front of the stove, trying to build up a fire. After a while, from a door, stage left, comes the sound of footsteps_.\n\nLADY'S MAID ( _Outside the door_ ): Now, open the door, and please enter. Happiness awaits you inside. ( _The door opens and_ LANSKOI, _wearing the formal uniform of an army captain enters nervously, like a child_.)\n\nCATHERINE II ( _Without looking back at him_ ): It's cold here. Or maybe I am dressed too lightly.\n\nLANSKOI ( _His voice shaking_ ): Let me\u2014let me fan the flames\u2014Your Majesty. ( _He kneels at her feet and fans the flames with all his might._ )\n\nCATHERINE II ( _After watching for a while his face made red by the reflection of the flames, she puts her hand on his shoulder_ ): Lanskoi, ever since you went away to the battlefield, all I could think of was you. I hope you were thinking of me.\n\nLANSKOI: Yes, yes, Your Majesty. I also\u2014thought of you all the time\u2014yes.\n\nCATHERINE II: I'm a lonely woman, a woman who hungers for love.\n\nLANSKOI: Of course you couldn't be, Your Majesty. You have all sorts of\u2014power.\n\nCATHERINE II: Even if I have all that power, can I order someone to love me?\n\nLANSKOI: Ye\u2014Yes, you can. That is\u2014I'm certain that\u2014you can.\n\nCATHERINE II: You know what it means to love me, don't you?\n\nLANSKOI: Ye\u2014Yes, certainly\u2014I still remember. It means\u2014to become a slave\u2014a toy\u2014a plaything\u2014a pet dog.\n\nCATHERINE II: Yes. But that isn't all. There's more. You'll learn soon. Put your face here. ( _She brings his face close onto her lap and cradles it with both hands._ )\n\nLANSKOI: Your Majesty\u2014I actually\u2014as a representative of the troops of the Turkish expedition\u2014have a serious request\u2014\n\nCATHERINE II: Shhh. Be quiet. I'm not thinking of such things right now.\n\nLANSKOI: But Your Majesty, many lives\u2014\n\nCATHERINE II ( _Covers his mouth_ ): I said, Be quiet. Potemkin wanted to go to war, so I let him. It's Potemkin's war, so he should fight it any way he wants. It has nothing to do with me. Never speak of it again to me. And remember, Potemkin is your senior. What did you just say? That to love me is to become a slave, right? So keep quiet and go over there and lie down. ( _Points to a canopied bed at the back of the room._ LANSKOI _stands up listlessly, goes over to the bed, and falls over._ CATHERINE _covers him with herself._ )\n\nCURTAIN\n\nSCENE 7\n\nCATHERINE II _'s drawing room in the Winter Palace. Outside, it is snowing heavily_. CATHERINE _wears a yellow lounging outfit with lots of lace and toasts her feet by the stove as she reads a letter from Voltaire_.\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW _enters_.\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW: Your Majesty, do hurry up and release him. It's been about a month already.\n\nCATHERINE II ( _Continues to read the letter_ ): Shhh! Oh, Voltaire! My, my, Voltaire, you. Ahahahahaha.\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW: Your Majesty! Aren't you thinking of poor Lanskoi? Let him out of prison quickly, I say.\n\nCATHERINE II: Didn't you hear me say \"Shhh!\"? Ooooh, Voltaire, you old man. ( _Suddenly she stops laughing._ ) You, bring me that document on the desk there. I forgot to sign it.\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW ( _Looks at the document in her hands and is shocked_ ): This is Lanskoi's death warrant.\n\nCATHERINE II: Yes, it is. Now bring me a pen and ink.\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW: You're really going to sign this, Your Majesty?\n\nCATHERINE II: Yes, indeed. Tomorrow morning, I'm having that head chopped right off. Hurry and bring the pen and ink. Have you forgotten? You're my slave!\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW: Yes, Your Majesty. ( _Gives her the pen and ink._ )\n\nCATHERINE II ( _Signs. Claps her hands to summon a chamberlain_ ): Deliver this to Neglujew. This should be executed at seven o'clock sharp tomorrow morning. Tell him I'll come and watch too.\n\nSERVANT: Yes, Your Majesty. ( _Takes the document and leaves._ )\n\nCATHERINE II: Now, I'll be done with this one, too. One needs to destroy one's favorite toys before one gets bored with them.\n\nCURTAIN\n\nSCENE 8\n\nLANSKOI _'s prison cell. Moonlight streams in from a small high window. The one wooden bed has straw strewn over it_. LANSKOI _lies on top of it_.\n\n_From the stone corridor come footsteps, and light from a lantern shines into the cell. Someone opens the iron door and enters. It is_ MADAME DE PROTASOW. LANSKOI _is startled and sits up. His face is pale and drawn but beautifully shaven._\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW ( _In a small voice_ ): It is I, it is I, Madame de Protasow: You poor thing.\n\nLANSKOI ( _Kneeling_ ): Your servant.\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW ( _Notices_ LANSKOI' _s face is beautifully shaven and is surprised_ ): Well, your face\u2014why do you take such care with it?\n\nLANSKOI: The czarina commanded me to do so. The czarina comes here secretly every night\u2014\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW: What? The czarina comes here every night?\n\nLANSKOI: Yes, she comes every night, and if my face is not cleanly shaven, she gets annoyed.\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW: The czarina, every night. I had no idea.\n\nLANSKOI: Every night at around midnight, she comes from behind this stone wall.\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW: Midnight? That's not too far off. We can't waste time. But what a czarina! To have a secret even here. I'm always with her, but she's never said anything to me about this. I thought I knew all her secrets\u2014what a frightening person she is. She may be listening to us from somewhere, even now. But Lanskoi, you are an unfortunate fellow. You are going to be executed.\n\nLANSKOI ( _Surprised_ ): Really?\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW: Yes.\n\nLANSKOI: That can't possibly be true. No. The czarina told me that if I stayed here for a month, she'd let me out right away. She asked me to put up with being in prison because I am a deserter, and the army needs to keep up appearances.\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW: You are going to be executed tomorrow morning at seven.\n\nLANSKOI: That's a lie! A lie! That can't be true. I won't believe it. I can't possibly believe such rubbish.\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW: Today the czarina signed your death warrant. I saw her sign it with my own eyes.\n\nLANSKOI: That's a lie! A lie! The czarina really loves me.\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW: The czarina may well love you. But you are going to be beheaded tomorrow morning at seven. I thought I'd help you escape\u2014that's why I came. So quickly, follow me. The czarina may come at any minute. Hurry. ( _Goes toward the door._ )\n\nLANSKOI ( _Takes two, three steps in her direction but then falls on his knees, half crying_ ): The czarina loves me. You don't understand.\n\nMADAME DE PROTASOW ( _Takes_ LANSKOI' _s hand and tries to pull him out the door_ ): Quickly!\n\nLANSKOI ( _Still kneeling, he moves toward the door but then takes his hand away from hers and starts crying_ ): You\u2014I've never been loved by a woman like the czarina.\n\n( _At that moment, the stone wall stage left makes a sound and starts to move._ MADAME DE PROTASOW _is amazed; she goes out the door, shuts it, and runs away._ LANSKOI _remains in the same position. The stone wall opens, and_ CATHERINE II _appears, wearing a pure-white fur coat over her night clothes, holding a candle._ LANSKOI _doesn_ ' _t move_. CATHERINE _is surprised. She puts down the candle and runs to him and holds him up._ )\n\nCATHERINE II ( _Holding his upper body on her lap_ ): Lanskoi! Lanskoi! My dear, dear Lanskoi. What's the matter with you?\n\nLANSKOI ( _In a small voice_ ): Catherine!\n\nCATHERINE II: Ohh. ( _She embraces him and smothers his face with kisses._ ) No, no, you shouldn't sleep here. You'll catch cold. And besides, tomorrow morning, you have a big mission to accomplish.\n\nLANSKOI: Tomorrow morning.\n\nCATHERINE II: Yes, tomorrow morning. You'll have to do some playacting for me. I'll tell you all about it, so let's go sit on the bed. ( _She leads him to the bed and sits him down and kneels by his feet._ ) You're a brave soldier, so you have to act naturally. In the ruse tomorrow, you'll climb the scaffold and will almost be executed.\n\nLANSKOI ( _Jumping up_ ): The scaffold?\n\nCATHERINE II: Don't be shocked. It's just playacting. The moment you are about to be executed in front of all those people, I'm going to arrive and pardon you. The ministers and the people all are saying that you justly should be executed because you're a deserter, and they won't listen to anything else. If you aren't sentenced to die, then the war with Turkey, which is not going well anyway, will have lots of deserters, and we'll lose. That's what they're saying. But if I pardon you at the last moment, they'll be satisfied. So tomorrow, do this and act naturally for me\u2014you can do it, right? If you can't, you may really have to be executed.\n\nLANSKOI: I believe in you, Your Majesty. That's because I love you with all my heart.\n\nCATHERINE II: Sweet, sweet Lanskoi! After tonight you'll be free from this awful prison cell. And then I'll build you a beautiful little house. I'll have lots of trees planted in the garden, and I'll give you a splendid sleigh. So tomorrow, go to the scaffold calmly. It would be unsightly for my lover to be shaking, my dear sweet Lanskoi, my sweet!\u2014( _She climbs on top of_ LANSKOI. _The candle falls and is extinguished._ )\n\nLANSKOI ( _Joyfully_ ): Catherine!\n\nCURTAIN\n\nSCENE 9\n\n_The execution grounds. The fallen snow glitters as the sun rises. In the center is the scaffold; around it are_ SOLDIERS. _Around them are countless spectators. Among the rows of_ SOLDIERS _are aristocratic women in their beautiful sleighs, adjusting their opera glasses. The priest,_ EXECUTIONER, _and others are strolling around. Eventually, with the sound of a monotonous drumbeat preceding him,_ LANSKOI, _with his hands tied behind his back, is led out. He seems unperturbed and looks happy. Underneath the beheading stand, he kisses the cross a priest offers to him. The_ EXECUTIONER _reads_ CATHERINE _'s decree_.\n\nEXECUTIONER: Simbirsk regiment infantry captain Semyon Mikhailowitsch Lanskoi. For deserting the army attacking Kinburn fortress, you are to be beheaded. Signed, Catherine.\n\n( _Finally_ LANSKOI _stands on the scaffold. He looks stage right, but there is not even the sound of_ CATHERINE _'s sleigh. People try to blindfold him, but he doesn't let them. He kneels in front of the block where he is to lay his neck. And he looks stage right again. The EXECUTIONER picks up his ax. At that moment,_ CATHERINE _arrives in her splendid sleigh, bells jingling merrily. The sleigh stops stage right, near the scaffold._ CATHERINE, _swathed in furs, looks straight into_ LANSKOI _'s face. The EXECUTIONER swings up his ax._ CATHERINE _smirks. The EXECUTIONER shouts as he starts to swing his ax down._)\n\nLANSKOI ( _At that moment, everything becomes clear in his mind, and he shouts as he tries to jump up_ ): Aargh! Shi\u2014\n\n( _The ax falls, and_ LANSKOI _'s head, with bright red blood spewing from it, rolls to_ CATHERINE _'s feet. She laughs radiantly_.)\n\nCURTAIN\n\nSCENE 10\n\n_The slope in front of the fortress at Kinburn. Nighttime. Snowstorm. Several dozen_ RUSSIAN SOLDIERS _are crawling from stage left through the snowstorm_.\n\nSOLDIER A: Can you move?\n\nSOLDIER B: The fortress\u2014are we near the fortress yet?\n\nSOLDIER C: It's right in front of us\u2014right in front of us.\n\nSOLDIER D: Can't move.\n\nSOLDIER E: Ahh.\n\nSOLDIER F: Soon\u2014we can die.\n\nSOLDIER G: Soon\u2014we can die.\n\nSOLDIER H: Don't\u2014don't give up.\n\n( _From stage right,_ TURKISH SOLDIERS _appear, crawling in the same way._ )\n\nTURKISH SOLDIER A: The pain.\n\nTURKISH SOLDIER B: The pain.\n\nTURKISH SOLDIER C: Let's hurry\u2014hurry up\u2014and get shot.\n\n( _The_ SOLDIERS _of the two armies meet in the center of the stage._ )\n\nRUSSIAN SOLDIER A: Who's there?\n\nTURKISH SOLDIER A: Who's there?\n\nRUSSIAN SOLDIER B: The enemy!\n\nTURKISH SOLDIER B: The enemy!\n\n( _Both groups of_ SOLDIERS _try to muster their strength to stand and fight, but they can_ ' _t stand._ )\n\nRUSSIAN SOLDIER B: Wait. Is there anyone who can speak Russian?\n\nTURKISH SOLDIER B: Yeah.\n\nRUSSIAN SOLDIER B: Why did you leave the fortress?\n\nTURKISH SOLDIER B: No food. We haven't eaten anything for five days. There are only twenty-eight of us left.\n\nRUSSIAN SOLDIER B: We don't have food, either. And there are only fifty-six of us. We can't even stand.\n\nTURKISH SOLDIER B: Neither can we.\n\nRUSSIAN SOLDIER B: So, are we supposed to fight?\n\nTURKISH SOLDIER B: What else can we do?\n\nRUSSIAN SOLDIER B ( _Shouts_ ): We can make peace.\n\nTURKISH SOLDIER B ( _Surprised_ ): Oh.\n\nRUSSIAN SOLDIER B: Our commander is our enemy. Our czarina beheaded our messenger. And no one in St. Petersburg said that that was wrong. Everyone in Russia is the enemy of us fifty-six.\n\nTURKISH SOLDIER B: Oh, it's the same with us. Other than us twenty-eight, everyone in Turkey is our enemy. So we killed our commander and our officers, then we came out to be killed.\n\nSEVERAL RUSSIAN SOLDIERS ( _Simultaneously_ ): We also killed ours and came here. We chopped off their heads and came. We torched their wooden mansion and came here.\n\nTURKISH SOLDIER B: So we should make peace.\n\nRUSSIAN SOLDIER B: And we ought to die here together as friends.\n\nTURKISH SOLDIER B: Right, let's die together, holding on to one another.\n\nRUSSIAN SOLDIERS ( _Each saying this_ ): Let's die together. Let's hold on to one another\u2014together\u2014\n\n( _After this, silence. The snowstorm worsens_.)\n\nCURTAIN\n\n1. Because Murayama writes about his indebtedness to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, in this translation of Murayama's play, the spelling of names and places is that used in an English translation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, _Venus and Adonis and Other Tales of the Court of Catherine II_ (New York: privately printed, 1929).\n_PAPER BALLOON_\n\nKISHIDA KUNIO\n\nTRANSLATED BY RICHARD MCKINNON\n\nKishida Kunio, _Paper Balloon_ , Aoi tori, 1926.\n\n(Courtesy of The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum Waseda University)\n\nP _aper Balloon_ ( _Kamif \u016bsen_) is a one-act play by Kishida Kunio (1890\u20131954), first published in 1925 in the journal _Literary Chronicle_ ( _Bungei shunj \u016b_). The play was first produced in 1926, by the Aoi tori (Blue Bird) troupe. Since then, it has been staged several times and is generally considered the most representative of Kishida's short plays.\n\nLike others composed in the same style, Kishida's dialogue in _Paper Balloon_ is poetic and spare, composed with a sense of fantasy that may remind American readers of the playful spirit of Thornton Wilder's play _Our Town_ (1938). The play has only two characters, the Husband and the Wife, and their interplay continues until the end, when the tone becomes more somber. The paper balloon seems to symbolize the whole fantasy played out during the touching dialogue between the two.\n\nCharacters\n\nHUSBAND\n\nWIFE\n\nTime: A bright Sunday afternoon.\n\nPlace: The sitting room facing the garden.\n\nHUSBAND ( _Reading a newspaper on the veranda as he sits in a rattan chair_ ): \"The modern village of Mejiro, recently acclaimed as a Los Angeles in miniature by Mr. Turner, Managing Director of the Fuller Building Supplies Company, U.S.A., has today become an elegant and beautiful residential area.\"\n\nWIFE ( _Sitting on a cushion near the veranda as she knits_ ): What is that about?\n\nHUSBAND ( _Reading on_ ): \"The area, which covers 40,000 _tsubo_ , is ideally situated: Streets are laid out systematically. A sewage system, running water, electric heat\u2014the most hygienic facilities are provided. Tennis courts have been installed. There are many pretty little bungalow-type houses. There are houses that are built in the impressive style of Frank Lloyd Wright. There are even houses built in the graceful, cottage-style Japanese architecture. This residential area is set in cheerful surroundings. Situated on high ground from where one can view Mount Fuji, it is heavily covered with trees.\" ( _Tosses the newspaper aside_.) Look, how about a walk?\n\nWIFE: Never mind. Why don't you go ahead and go over to the Kawakamis.\n\nHUSBAND: I really don't have to go.\n\nWIFE: The mood has to strike me just right or I can't get interested.\n\nHUSBAND: For a walk, you mean?\n\nWIFE: A walk or anything else. ( _Pause_.)\n\nHUSBAND: \"A walk or anything else.\" But do you have anything else to do?\n\nWIFE: No, isn't that all right?\n\nHUSBAND: Sure.\n\nWIFE: Why don't you go visit the Kawakamis without worrying about me?\n\nHUSBAND: I don't feel like it any more.\n\nWIFE: Oh, go on.\n\nHUSBAND: No, I'm not going. I want to stay with you. Don't you understand?\n\nWIFE: Sorry, I understand all too perfectly. ( _Pause_.)\n\nHUSBAND: Ho, hum. So this is the way I spend my occasional Sundays off.\n\nWIFE: I guess so.\n\nHUSBAND ( _Picks up the paper again but isn't really interested in reading_ ): I think it would be fun if some newspaper offered a prize for the best answer to the question of what to do in situations like this.\n\nWIFE: I'll send in an answer.\n\nHUSBAND ( _Still looking at the paper, showing little interest_ ): What will you say?\n\nWIFE: What's the question?\n\nHUSBAND: The question? Well, the question will say, \"How would you spend your Sundays when you have been married a year?\"\n\nWIFE: That's too vague.\n\nHUSBAND: What's vague about it? All right, how would you put it?\n\nWIFE: How to keep the wife from getting bored on Sundays?\n\nHUSBAND: And how not to inconvenience the husband at the same time?\n\nWIFE: All right.\n\nHUSBAND: Do you have a good idea?\n\nWIFE: Why, I sure do. As soon as the wife gets up in the morning, she will take a bath, put on her makeup, get dressed, and then say, \"I'm off to visit a friend of mine for a while.\"\n\nHUSBAND: What happens then?\n\nWIFE: Then her husband is sure to look displeased.\n\nHUSBAND: There's nothing certain about that.\n\nWIFE: I am talking about you.\n\nHUSBAND: When did I look displeased?\n\nWIFE: Don't you?\n\nHUSBAND: Well, let's let that go. What do you do then?\n\nWIFE: He looks displeased, you see. Then this is what I would say: I'm not really very anxious to go, but it would be awkward if they found out later that I had stayed home doing nothing. You see, every time I see her she keeps asking me to come over to her place. \"If it's a Sunday, my husband will be at home. Why don't you and I go see a play together,\" she says. Since you're going to be home anyway, I thought I might as well go today. But of course if you have other plans, I would say and gently sound you out. Very indirectly, you understand.\n\nHUSBAND: Yes, very indirectly. No. I wouldn't mind, but what would I do about lunch, with you gone.\n\nWIFE: I prepared your lunch already.\n\nHUSBAND: What about supper?\n\nWIFE: I'll stop at the Azumaya's on my way out and ask them to deliver a big bowl of rice with chicken and egg on top.\n\nHUSBAND: Oh, not that again. I suppose you're going to be late.\n\nWIFE: Well, I can't be sure. But when ten o'clock comes around, will you get out the bedding and go to bed?\n\nHUSBAND: Do you have any money?\n\nWIFE: As a matter of fact, I'm completely out.\n\nHUSBAND: Well, you'd better take this, then.\n\nWIFE: Thank you.\n\nHUSBAND: It's getting chilly at night. Take your muffler along.\n\nWIFE: Yes, I will.\n\nHUSBAND: Now then. I guess I'll leisurely read a book. Say, would you get the fire started for my bath before you go? Now if I have any visitors, I suppose we still have some cookies left from the last time. I'll skip shaving today. Ho, hum. What a relaxing Sunday.\n\n(WIFE _silently looks down_.)\n\nHUSBAND: What's the matter?\n\nWIFE: You're no good.\n\nHUSBAND: Why?\n\nWIFE: Because.\n\nHUSBAND ( _Tossing the paper aside_ ): All right. Then what would you do in such a case if you were the husband?\n\nWIFE: In what case?\n\nHUSBAND: Would you stop her?\n\nWIFE: I'd certainly try to stop her somehow!\n\nHUSBAND: What would you say to her?\n\nWIFE: I'd say something like, \"If you really don't have to go, how about my taking you to the theater?\"\n\nHUSBAND: I see. What if he suggested that?\n\nWIFE: She ought to go.\n\nHUSBAND: Fine, if she will. But if she didn't want to go, then what? Or even if she did, if the circumstances made it impossible, like today, for instance.\n\nWIFE: Why couldn't we substitute the movies for the theater?\n\nHUSBAND: Movies? Why that's not something a husband and wife go together to see.\n\nWIFE: Why not?\n\nHUSBAND: Ask anyone.\n\nWIFE: That's what's wrong with you. I'm different from other girls.\n\nHUSBAND: Sure you're different. That's all the more reason why it would be unwise.\n\nWIFE: What are you talking about?\n\nHUSBAND: Well, it seems better not to have stopped her if she had wanted to go out.\n\nWIFE: I guess you're right. So why don't you go, to the Kawakamis or wherever else.\n\nHUSBAND: My, you're persistent, aren't you? What was it that you said this morning? When I told you that I was going over to visit Kawakami you said, \"You keep mentioning Mr. Kawakami's name as if you didn't see him every day at your office. Why do you long for him so much? Is there any reason why you can't stay at home on a Sunday, at least?\" What's the point of my being here?\n\nWIFE: What if I did say so?\n\nHUSBAND: Nothing. The question is what is the point of your being here.\n\nWIFE ( _Somewhat peevishly_ ): Well, is something wrong with my being here?\n\nHUSBAND: But there are ways and ways of being here. I read the newspaper, and you start knitting. I heave a sigh, and you heave a sigh. I yawn, and then you yawn. I...\n\nWIFE: That's why I suggested that we go out somewhere, and then you hedge about this way and that...\n\nHUSBAND: Yes, yes. I understand. But surely we didn't get married just so we could go somewhere on Sundays. We ought to be able to get on more cheerfully even if we stayed home.\n\nWIFE: That's because you don't talk.\n\nHUSBAND: Talk? What is there to talk about?\n\nWIFE: Talk is not being; it is an act of doing.\n\nHUSBAND: What on earth! Philosophizing? All right, so let's say that talk is an act of doing. But what about you? You say nothing yourself.\n\nWIFE: That's because you tell me to shut up.\n\nHUSBAND: That's because you talk when I'm doing something.\n\nWIFE: That's not true. You say that even after we are in bed.\n\nHUSBAND: But I'm sorry.\n\nWIFE ( _Softly_ ): Actually I am quite content to be at your side saying nothing. If you'd only pay a little more attention to me, I could wish for no one better.\n\nHUSBAND ( _Looking triumphant_ ): What's for supper?\n\nWIFE ( _Spiritedly_ ): Nothing definite. It all depends on your grade.\n\nHUSBAND ( _Not quite equal to her mood_ ): You are still just a high school girl, aren't you?\n\nWIFE: Meaning what? I've always felt that going to the theater or eating out is fine for Sundays if one has that much leeway. But that's still only secondary in importance. Surely there are any number of things that one can enjoy as a family. Take our garden, for example. Why, it's a disgrace. If you'd lend me a hand, I could so easily have a decent bed of flowers. Just imagine the cosmos in full bloom. It would look beautiful even from the street.\n\nHUSBAND: That's what I mean about your being a high school girl.\n\nWIFE: In that case you're a grade school boy.\n\nHUSBAND ( _Laughing_ ): Is there really something of a school boy in me, now?\n\nWIFE: Sure there is.\n\nHUSBAND: Look, let's go for a walk.\n\nWIFE: It's too late now.\n\nHUSBAND: Oh, just around the neighborhood.\n\nWIFE: Where? Inokashira Park?\n\nHUSBAND: Or even Tamagawa.\n\nWIFE: Let's wait until there is more time. To make it real fun, we ought to make an occasion of it and have lunch out somewhere.\n\nHUSBAND: How much money do you have?\n\nWIFE: Oh, let's not talk about that today.\n\nHUSBAND ( _Counting on his fingers_ ): Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.\n\nWIFE: We really ought to have everything ready in the morning, and plan to be off as soon as we are through breakfast.\n\nHUSBAND: Yes, with plans all laid out the night before.\n\nWIFE: That's right. To have a definite idea as to where we are going.\n\nHUSBAND: It would be fun, wouldn't it, to take a day trip to Kamakura?\n\nWIFE: I have some places I'd like to go.\n\nHUSBAND: Let's see now. There is an eight-something train leaving Tokyo station in the morning.\n\nWIFE: Second class, mind you.\n\nHUSBAND: Naturally. What we ought to do is to get there early and occupy the two seats near the window facing each other. I would put my walking stick and your parasol up on the luggage shelf like this....\n\nWIFE: No, I would rather carry mine.\n\nHUSBAND: I see. Those coming in after us would see us and try to sit as near to us as possible, saying to themselves, \"Oh, boy, look at them at it.\"\n\nWIFE: Oh, silly!\n\nHUSBAND: The train starts to move.\n\nWIFE: Would you open the window?\n\nHUSBAND: Smoke will come in. See that over there. That's the ruins of the Hama Detached Place.\n\nWIFE: My, is that so?\n\nHUSBAND: Shinagawa, Shinagawa! All passengers taking the Yamate line must transfer.\n\nWIFE: Already? I want to buy some caramels.\n\nHUSBAND: OK. Hey, bring me some caramels.\n\nWIFE: Would you like some?\n\nHUSBAND: I guess so. We just passed Omori Station. We should be able to see the company president's home pretty soon.\n\nWIFE: Is that the one? My, what a skimpy house!\n\nHUSBAND: We'll skip Kamata and Kawasaki, and here we are in Yokohama. Well, we have no business here either. Hodogaya, Tozuka, and we are in Ofuna at last.\n\nWIFE: I want to buy some sandwiches.\n\nHUSBAND: OK. Hey, bring me some sandwiches.\n\nWIFE: Would you like some?\n\nHUSBAND: I guess so.\n\nWIFE: Wait, now. Don't be so greedy. Leave some for me.\n\nHUSBAND: Now, get ready to leave. Put your clogs back on....\n\nWIFE: I never had them off, for goodness' sake!\n\nHUSBAND: I suppose the first place to go is the Hachiman Shrine. Do you know about this shrine?\n\nWIFE: Of course I do. I'd rather go to the seashore, though. How about you?\n\nHUSBAND: That would be all right, too. Let me see....\n\nWIFE: Why not get a cab.\n\nHUSBAND: That's an idea. Hey, taxi! Now you go first.\n\nWIFE: That's very kind of you.\n\nHUSBAND: Well, I guess I'll light up a cigarette.\n\nWIFE: But first tell the driver where to go.\n\nHUSBAND: What's the matter with saying, \"To the seashore.\"\n\nWIFE: That sounds a bit strange. \"Driver, to the Beach Hotel.\"\n\nHUSBAND: Won't the Beach Hotel be closed?\n\nWIFE: You know it isn't.\n\nHUSBAND: All right. To the Beach Hotel. Toot, toot!\n\nWIFE: What's all that for. We're already there.\n\nHUSBAND: Goodness, already? Would you take us to a room with a good view?\n\nWIFE: The dining room would do.\n\nHUSBAND: Of course. So, why don't you order something.\n\nWIFE: How about you?\n\nHUSBAND: Anything would do.\n\nWIFE: Two glasses of fruit juice. Be sure they are good and cold.\n\nHUSBAND: Waitress, we are going for a little stroll. There's still some time before noon. We'll be back by twelve, so have something good ready for us.\n\nWIFE: That's the spirit.\n\nHUSBAND: Oh, one more thing. Are there any good rooms available, rooms with a _salle de bain_? We intend to stay here for a while.\n\nWIFE: _Salle de bain_? Oh, you mean a bathroom.\n\nHUSBAND: Sh! Oh, fine. We'll take that. No, we don't have to look at it first. Oh, by the way, doesn't your hotel have airplane service?\n\nWIFE: Please!\n\nHUSBAND: No? Oh, well, it can't be helped. Let's walk. Now for my walking stick.\n\nWIFE: Are you sure you didn't leave it in the train again?\n\nHUSBAND: I handed it to the bellhop. Ah, there it is!\n\nWIFE: Which way shall we go?\n\nHUSBAND: That island over there is Enoshima.\n\nWIFE: What a lovely view!\n\nHUSBAND: Watch your step. You'll fall. Let me hold your hand.\n\nWIFE: People would look at us.\n\nHUSBAND: That's too bad for them. Tired? Well, let's sit down and rest a bit, or if you'd rather, we might go bathing.\n\nWIFE: I think I will.\n\nHUSBAND: Go ahead. Hmm. You look very trim in a bathing suit. Don't go too far out.\n\nWIFE: Don't worry.\n\nHUSBAND: Wait, wait. Stand right there. I'll take a picture of you. Ready? Hey, this is wonderful. ( _Becoming more and more excited_.) I've never seen you so pretty! Just look at that figure! What a marvelous complexion! Stay right where you are. Did you have your hair that long? And your bosom, so round and soft! Why, you're smiling. Look this way. Heavens, were these your eyes, and those lips? ( _He shouts, forgetting everything_.)\n\nWIFE ( _Raising her head for the first time as if about to take him to task_ ): Please!\n\n( _Long silence_.)\n\nHUSBAND: Come over here.\n\n(WIFE _just smiles_.)\n\nHUSBAND ( _Extending his hands_ ): Come over here.\n\nWIFE: No.\n\nHUSBAND: Oh, come on now. Come over here, I say.\n\n(WIFE _rises and takes her husband's hands, swinging them_.)\n\nWIFE: There's no middle ground in you, is there?\n\nHUSBAND: How do you mean? ( _He tries to draw his wife to him_.)\n\nWIFE: Let me go!\n\nHUSBAND ( _Holding his wife's hands_ ): Won't there be a time when you will be tired of me, tired of holding hands with me like this?\n\nWIFE: How about you?\n\nHUSBAND: The fact is I am beginning to like this very much, this holding hands, and when I think of being left alone without you, I get so worried I don't know what to do. This, too, is a fact.\n\nWIFE: Which one represents the truth?\n\nHUSBAND: Both. ( _Pause_.) That's why I feel that something is wrong. But I can't help it. ( _Pause_.) So you sit and knit by me in silence. Are you really satisfied with that? I see no reason why you should be. Maybe in my absence there are times when you sit and brood all by yourself in the corner of a room somewhere. Away from home, I often picture you in my mind sitting there looking lonely. Don't you get sick and tired leading the kind of life we do, in which all we think about is how spend my less-than-hundred-yen paycheck in as grand a manner possible? Maybe you are resigned to the situation, feeling that nothing gained by talking this way. But I know that you have your ideals, and I'd like to know what you think about it at this point. Aren't you wondering what will become of us as we go on living like this? Am I wrong? Or are you dreaming again the dream that you had as a young girl?\n\nWIFE: You are being foolish. ( _She tries to smile, but she begins to cry_.)\n\nHUSBAND: People are all fools. They don't know about themselves. Oh, let's cut out this kind of talk.\n\nWIFE: I haven't cried like this for a long time.\n\nHUSBAND: I go out visiting on a Sunday, leaving you all alone. You're unhappy about it. It's to be expected. Of course you'd like a change once in a while. Why should I make a fuss about movies! Let's plan to go after supper, huh?\n\n(WIFE _nods_.)\n\nHUSBAND: Fine. You want to go take a quick bath?\n\nWIFE ( _Wiping her tears away_ ): No, I'll skip it today.\n\nHUSBAND: Why?\n\nWIFE: Why don't you? You haven't had one in three days.\n\nHUSBAND: Well, I've got a touch of cold. Oh, I think I'll skip it today. Let me see; it's 3:30 now, I think I'll go out for a while before supper instead.\n\nWIFE ( _Sitting down on her cushion again, resentfully_ ): Where are you going?\n\nHUSBAND: Oh, I'll be back in no time.\n\n(WIFE _stares at her husband, starts to say something, but then suddenly looks down_.)\n\nWIFE: All right.\n\nHUSBAND ( _Sheepishly_ ): I'm not going to Kawakami's.\n\nWIFE ( _Embarrassed_ ): It doesn't matter at all.\n\nHUSBAND ( _Kneeling down beside his wife_ ): I suppose you think I'm going out to play billiards.\n\nWIFE ( _Looking the other way_ ): Don't mind me. Run along.\n\nHUSBAND: Are you angry?\n\n(WIFE _begins crying again_.)\n\nHUSBAND ( _At a loss_ ): What's the matter, anyway?\n\nWIFE: I'm sorry. It was my mistake.\n\nHUSBAND What do you mean, \"mistake\"? We are going to the movies afterward, don't you see?\n\nWIFE ( _Heaving a sigh_ ): I understand.\n\nHUSBAND: You understand what?\n\nWIFE: I might as well face up to it.\n\nHUSBAND: To what?\n\nWIFE: I'm sorry.\n\nHUSBAND: Look, something's wrong with you.\n\nWIFE: It's funny, you know. Other wives say they can relax and enjoy things when their husbands are out of the house. But it seemed so odd to me.\n\nHUSBAND: Sure it's odd.\n\nWIFE: But, it's no longer odd to me now.\n\nHUSBAND: What?\n\nWIFE: Men, I guess, are after all made to leave home in the morning and return in the evening.\n\n(HUSBAND _smiles sardonically_.)\n\nWIFE: I wonder why men make such a fuss over the fact that they are staying home, as if they were doing you a favor. Women, I suppose, just can stand for that.\n\nHUSBAND: I'm not making a fuss about it.\n\nWIFE: Anyway, if you have somewhere to go, go, run along. It makes me feel a whole lot better.\n\n(HUSBAND _sits down in his chair again and starts reading the paper_.)\n\nWIFE: I'm afraid to face Sundays.\n\nHUSBAND: So am I.\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nWIFE: You are spoiling me too much. ( _She takes up her knitting_.)\n\nHUSBAND: No, I can't say I am.\n\nWIFE: But you are, really.\n\nHUSBAND: Complicated, isn't it?\n\nWIFE: See how they do it in other families.\n\nHUSBAND: I know how they do it.\n\nWIFE: Follow suit.\n\nHUSBAND: I can't.\n\nWIFE: Women are given to taking advantage of situations, you know?\n\nHUSBAND: I know that.\n\nWIFE: Well, just so long as you do.\n\n( _Long pause_.)\n\nHUSBAND: Actually, I think we are getting along better than many.\n\nWIFE: Just a little more effort, I guess.\n\nHUSBAND: You mean money?\n\nWIFE: Oh, no.\n\n( _Long silence_.)\n\nHUSBAND: How about getting a dog?\n\nWIFE: Won't a bird be better?\n\n( _Long silence_. HUSBAND _yawns_. WIFE _yawns_.)\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nHUSBAND: Would you like me to tell you a story?\n\nWIFE: Yes, do.\n\nHUSBAND: Long, long ago there was a boy and girl. The boy, as soon as he finished school, went to work in an office. The girl was still in high school. Every morning the two saw each other at a suburban bus stop. In time they greeted each other. When the boy got there first, he waited for the girl to come. When the girl arrived first, she...\n\nWIFE ( _Taking it away from him_ ): Went on ahead.\n\nHUSBAND ( _Matter of factly_ ): There were times like that.\n\n( _At this point, the voice of a little girl is heard crying out: \"Oh, dear!\" A big paper balloon rolls into the garden_.)\n\n(HUSBAND, _tossing the newspaper aside, steps off the veranda into the garden and picks up the balloon_.)\n\nWIFE ( _To herself_ ): Chieko-chan at home today?\n\n(HUSBAND _quietly starts tossing the balloon_.)\n\nWIFE: Don't do that. ( _In a loud voice_.) Chieko-chan, come over here. I'll toss the balloon with you.\n\n(HUSBAND _continues to toss the balloon eagerly_. WIFE _rises, brings her clogs around from the front entrance, and then comes out into the garden_.)\n\nWIFE: No, no, don't hit it so hard. ( _She calls to the little girl, who apparently is on the other side of the fence_.) I am ready to play with you now. ( _As she says this, she manages to snatch the balloon away from her husband_.) Chieko-chan, come around from the front.\n\nHUSBAND ( _Chasing his wife, impatiently_ ): Now, let me have a turn. Look here, I tell you....\n\nCURTAIN\n_FASCIST DOLL_\n\nKUBO SAKAE\n\nTRANSLATED BY YUKO MATSUKAWA\n\nMurayama Tomoyoshi, cover design of _Prott_ , January 1932, in which _Fascist Doll_ was first published.\n\nF _ascist Doll_ ( _Fuashito nigy \u014d_) by Kubo Sakae (1900\u20131958) was first presented in 1931 as a Living Newspaper (a theatrical form that originated in Russia and presents factual information on current events). It was a joint production of the New Tsukiji Theater (Shin Tsukiji gekidan), one of the companies formed after Osanai Kaoru's death and the subsequent breakup of his company, and the Left Theater (Sayoku gekij\u014d), which by this time was well known for performances of left-wing plays by Murayama Tomoyoshi and others. Because Kubo's one-character play is short, the program contained other works as well. The occasion for these performances was to honor the formation of the Japan Proletarian Cultural Federation (Nihon puroretaria bunka renmei), which was active until 1934, when all such organizations were prohibited by the Japanese government.\n\nThis early work by Kubo reveals the sort of mordant humor and social consciousness found in his later, full-length plays, among which is his masterpiece, _Land of Volcanic Ash_ ( _Kazanbaichi_ , 1937/1938). Murayama himself directed the production of _Fascist Doll_.\n\n_In the center of the stage, a_ DOLL VENDOR _with a few dolls displayed in his nighttime street stall_.\n\nDOLL VENDOR ( _To the audience_ ): Step right up, step right up, folks. Here we have automated spring mechanism celluloid dolls that are all the rage right now. Ranging from those dolls you know and love and have purchased over the years to the cutting-edge popular versions so new that their patents are still pending, we have a wide array and you can buy any of them for only ten _sen_. Now folks, the factory shifts just ended, so the trains are crammed and crowded. And I don't mean to be disrespectful, but after a hard day's work for a mere pittance, to be shoved and squeezed in the train so that you're hanging on by a strap, it's only human nature to blow your top as soon as you open your front door and to want to belt your wife in the face a couple of times. So why not let five or six packed trains go by, and why not, though our shop is small, take a look at our advertised merchandise and see if anything catches your fancy? If something does, you can buy it and take it home as a present. So don't stop by one of those dangerous spots like commie meetings. Go home: you'll be able to stretch out your arms and legs on a nearly empty train so that your good woman and the little ones will be overjoyed to see you\u2014your home will be safe and sound and your family happy to boot. I know that some folks with no foresight will think, huh, these are just a night vendor's wares and will ridicule me from the start. But our goods are not at all like those of other street stalls. All over the world\u2014well, I'd like to say that, but Russia's in bad shape. Even the other day, in that country, a top-notch doll maker got materials from France and made a rare and spectacular kind of doll called the industrial party doll, but once the authorities, who have no eye for such things, got hold of this, they said, if you sell this, our social order will be disrupted, and so they confiscated the doll\u2014such a sad story. So except that country, but far and wide in the countries of Europe and America, these dolls are flying off the shelves like they've grown wings. These dolls are special merchandise, unique and already tested abroad, as it were. ( _To one part of the audience._ ) Hello, hello, the older gentleman there in the short workman's coat, how about you buy one? This model is old but it's the social democratic doll everyone knows, made of Dutch yellow celluloid and is an especially fine, well-made item. ( _Saying this, he lifts a doll._ ) You have to try it\u2014put some paper money in front of this doll and see. It uses a miraculous and mysterious spring mechanism that takes advantage of the latest scientific advances, so as soon as it sees the money, this doll extends its hands and bows repeatedly as if it were alive\u2014if I may say so myself. Eh? What? This won't be popular in your social circles? Eh? What? I should sell it to some bourgeois fat cat? Oh, be like that. Hey, you over there\u2014you have only enough money for one train ticket in that work apron pocket of yours, right? Customers who can't make up their minds about making a mere ten- _sen_ purchase just take up valuable space, so I ask you not to stand in front of the merchandise. ( _Looking toward another section of the audience._ ) Hello, buddy, you in the work uniform over there, how about this one? It's a bright red energetic celluloid doll, the kind that's popular right now. It's called the left-wing social democratic doll\u2014don't you like it? What? Huh? Your pal Tora from next door bought one? So what? If you buy one, then the two of you will match. Huh? What? When Tora scrubbed it with a rag, the red paint came off and what was underneath was as predicted, bright yellow? Oh, thanks a lot for letting the cat out of the bag. Huh? What? When you tried and showed the doll some paper money, it stretched out its hands and bowed? Hmmm, OK. That's great. Yup, the customers tonight are a class apart. Since you all have good discerning eyes, I guess I have no choice but to switch my plans and bring out the special stuff. ( _He picks up another doll._ ) OK, hold on to your hats. This one is called the fascist doll, and if you want to hear its origins, well, the Mussolini Company of Italy started to sell this doll for the first time in 1920, and it shocked the whole world, that's how splendid and notorious this doll is. It was right after the red commie dolls made of steel sold by the Bolshevik Company were banned in Italy, and those who bought those dolls and those who sold them got yelled at severely by the authorities, so this fascist doll spread over the whole country in a flash. To tell the truth, the doll wasn't that well received by the workers, but those middling farmers and the bourgeoisie\u2014those brave folks who hated anything red\u2014eagerly coveted this doll. The fascist doll, otherwise known as the prop of monopoly capitalism, is made of celluloid, but what celluloid it is! I'm not exaggerating: it's strong and durable, see, just like this ( _Places the doll on the ground and steps on it._ ) You can step on it and kick it, but it won't break. What? Step on it with more force? That's not good. Why? Because it's made of celluloid, so it's not like that red commie doll that was made out of steel. ( _Picks the doll up carefully._ ) So because this doll sells so well, doll makers wanting to follow Italy's example are increasing daily and monthly in places like Hungary, Poland, and Spain. So at long last, this doll is making itself well known in the middle of Europe, even in Germany's Weimar Republic. In countries all around the world, workers are becoming smarter and smarter, so no one wants to buy the social democratic doll any more. So up until now, those who made those yellow celluloid dolls are changing their tune, and most of the clever ones are now exclusively selling this fascist doll using threatening means. Of course a very few of our colleagues are\u2014well, no, we can't say very few but those idiots who can't see past their noses\u2014have shifted to become red commie doll makers, even though they shouldn't do that. I should cut the small talk, but suffice it to say that because of the trends abroad, Japanese in the same business are now eyeing the fascist doll. And so my distributor decided to get ahead of the competition and submitted a patent application before anyone else did. While we wait for the patent to be authorized, for publicity's sake we're slashing prices, so even though I'd like to ask fifty _sen_ , I'm asking forty _sen_ , thirty _sen_ , twenty _sen_ , fifteen _sen_ , how about a rock bottom price of ten _sen_? Step right up, step right up, folks, buy your hearts out. Huh? What? With such a poor spiel, you're not likely to buy the doll, even though you wanted to at first? Huh? You have no clue as to why the fascist doll became popular even in Germany? Gotcha. I look like I'm clueless about what I'm doing? Not likely. The latest news is that for the purposes of expanding fascist doll sales, Germany's dictatorship's publicity value is 100 percent. You can't even begin to know how much more interesting it is than some red propaganda speech. In that country, Germany\u2014I know you know this already\u2014until the spring of last year, the social democratic dolls manufactured by the Hermann M\u00fcller Company, which were so much better than the Japanese social democratic dolls, dominated their market. But this company fell on hard times, and so on one hand they reduced wages and reduced unemployment insurance while on the other hand they made gigantic cruisers and crushed May Day that the commies supported and dissolved that frightful society called the something or other Fighters' League. After all the service they provided with amazing versatility for the financial bourgeoisie, at that point this was no longer simply a social democratic doll. It somehow quickly transmogrified into a fascist doll. Where this doll differs from the Japanese version is not only that this celluloid is very hard and the finish is stupendous, but also, unlike the Japanese version, what makes this doll a keeper is that when you show it small amounts of money, it won't give you a cheap bow. But finally, the Hermann M\u00fcller Company created a big hole in its financial holdings and had to sell itself to the Br\u00fcning Alliance Company. This company is even more of a fascist doll distributor. That's because just behind it lurks the dark horse of this field, the Hitler Company. So the Br\u00fcning Alliance Company is finally putting all its skills together\u2014now that the world economy is so bad, you really can't talk about sluggardly bourgeois democratic parliamentary government. So what if they're called high-handed and despotic\u2014they have to concentrate all their forces and get stuff done lickety-split or else who's going to maintain global security, or German security, for that matter? Eh? What? You're saying that's all security only for the bourgeoisie?\u2014Hey, no heckling here. The Br\u00fcning Alliance Company has been promulgating countless \"emergency orders\" from July of last year to this past October seventh. What? High-handed? How could this possibly be high-handed? This here is written ostentatiously in article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. Ignoramuses won't know this, but the current republic was founded after the kaiser and his whiskers faded away from the international limelight in 1918. Then those German bourgeois folks went around saying that the Weimar Republic's Constitution was the most liberal constitution in the world, and you know what? That's true. So they're doing exactly what that most free constitution dictates, so no one can complain. Ergo, what allows the German president, in times of emergency, to take any military, fiscal, or administrative measures he wants without going through the parliament is article 48. What? You're absolutely opposed to dictatorships? Oh, shut up and listen quietly. So to make it through this unprecedented depression, the whole country has to come together and bear the suffering. Hey, hey, buddy, you over there, don't toss your cigarette butt just anywhere. Our products are made of celluloid, you know. Just like in Japan, in Germany, there's a flood of out-of-work folks. At the end of the year before last, there were two point one million unemployed. At the end of last year, there were three point eight million. At the beginning of this year, there were four point eight million, and this summer there were five million unemployed. At this rate, who knows how far it'll go, but the reason why we have such staggering multitudes of unemployed workers\u2014argh, be quiet, be quiet\u2014it's because those shortsighted commies are taking advantage of the people's dissatisfaction and are preaching incredible nonsense and putting the country in disarray and making the workers play hooky from work. Because they don't work, the national productivity of Germany is decreasing. Because productivity is decreasing, depression happens, and because we're in a depression, people are losing their jobs\u2014argh, shut up, shut up. This is the important part. So, the great thing about this fascist doll that we're advertising right now is its facade of ultranationalism. Japan wants to preserve ultranationalist thought just as much as any country around the world. What? The reason why fascism is nationalist and exclusionist is because it's preparing for a war of aggression? Errh, wait, wait a second, wait I tell you. These \"emergency orders\" that bypass a pesky parliament, on one hand, reduce the taxes on companies and securities so that the current big shot financial bourgeoisie of the world have an easier time of it so that they can work toward rebuilding the economy, but on the other hand, the orders ask the people to bear with it, since the World War I was a while ago, and so relief allowances to disabled soldiers and families of those soldiers who were killed in action are being reduced as much as possible, and the salaries of petty bureaucrats and lower-ranking military men are also being cut, so the plan is to sacrifice the little fish in order to let the big fish live. So this is how it goes: in this capitalist world, all sorts of trendy items like the social democratic doll and the fascist doll keep appearing and serving as props, but like it says in the instructions that come with the red commie doll, fantasies no longer come true. What? You don't think that a celluloid doll like this can be a prop? I'm not kidding, I already did the experiment before your very eyes and showed you how sturdy this is and how it won't break even when you step on it. Are you calling me a liar? I'll show you again. Look, see? Just like this, just like this. Harder, harder. ( _Uses too much force, and the doll cracks and disintegrates underfoot._ ) Oh boy, I did a terrible thing. I wasted a precious piece of merchandise. ( _Picks up the doll remorsefully._ ) Oh great. All those customers I gathered are now scattered. ( _Making his voice even louder._ ) Step right up, step right up, gather 'round everyone, and take a look at the famous automated, spring mechanism, fascist doll. Since we're promoting this item while we wait for its patent to be approved, we're slashing prices, so it's only ten _sen_. They're marked down, folks, and they're selling like hotcakes. Tonight we started out with a hundred of these dolls, but we only have ten of them left. It's getting late, so out of a sense of sacrificial social service, even though we want the popular price to be ten _sen_ , I'll give it to you for eight _sen_ , six _sen_ , five _sen_ , four _sen_ , oh, let me slash the price even further and ask for just one _sen_ , just one bronze one- _sen_ piece. Oh shit, no one's buying even at this price? Won't someone buy one? Buy one?\n\n( _As the_ VENDOR _' s voice grows hoarse because he's still yelling, the stage grows dark_.)\n\nCURTAIN\n_RESTLESS NIGHT IN LATE SPRING_\n\nENCHI FUMIKO\n\nTRANSLATED BY AYAKO KANO\n\nEnchi Fumiko, _Restless Night in Late Spring_ , directed by Matsunami Ky\u014dsuke, Seinen gekij\u014d, November 2004. (Photograph by Kurahara Teruhito)\n\nR _estless Night in Late Spring_ ( _Banshun s \u014dya_) is a one-act play by Enchi Fumiko (1905\u20131986), published in the September 1928 issue of the magazine _Women's Arts_ ( _Nyonin geijutsu_ ) and produced in December of the same year at the Tsukiji Little Theater. As the translator Ayako Kano points out, this was a remarkable accomplishment for such a young woman during this period.\n\nThe conflict in the play is between the attitudes of two women painters concerning their differing commitment to art and politics, thus mirroring in successful dramatic terms one of the important conflicts in Japanese intellectual life at the time.\n\nEnchi wrote a number of plays into the 1930s and then fell silent during the war. Then in the postwar period, she became famous for her series of novels and stories about various aspects of feminine psychology. She also produced a much-admired translation into modern Japanese of the eleventh-century classic _The Tale of Genji_.\n\nNo bird soars too high\n\nIf he soars with his own wings.\n\nWILLIAM BLAKE\n\nCharacters\n\nYUZURU, a middle-aged man\n\nEMI SHIZUKO, a woman around age twenty, the maid\n\nKAYOKO, a woman of twenty-five or twenty-six, YUZURU's younger sister\n\nSHINOZAKI MITSUKO, a woman of twenty-four or twenty-five, KAYOKO's friend\n\nTime: Present (1928).\n\nPlace: Tokyo.\n\n_The second floor of a shabby rental house. Beyond the corridor upstage, the distant lights of the town at night are visible through the tops of a few trees in the yard. (However, when the curtain is raised, the_ sh\u014dji _screens are closed, and thus the distant view is invisible.) To the left at the back of the corridor is the top of a staircase. There are two connected rooms. The room on the left is about eight mats large; the room on the right is smaller. The larger room is the younger sister's room and also her studio. A jumble of frames for Japanese-style painting, brushes, paper, and paint dishes are on one side. A large vase on a tall pedestal holds purple wisteria and yellow Japanese roses past their peak. These scatter sensual colors that do not match the atmosphere of this impoverished room. They are protectively surrounded by a small old folding screen. Nearby stands a frame with a silk canvas painting of these flowers, about three-quarters finished._\n\n_The lights are off in this room. Subdued light from the adjoining room comes in through the open_ fusuma _screen door, and one can perceive dim shapes. The adjoining room is the older brother_ ' _s sickroom, and except for his futon, there is hardly any decoration or furniture._\n\n_It is a night in late spring, with a barely warm wind from the south blowing wildly. Just past nine o_ ' _clock at night._\n\n_When the curtain opens,_ YUZURU _is on his bed._\n\n_For quite a while, only the ominous sound of the wind._\n\n_Suddenly_ YUZURU _starts to cough, like someone suffering from asthma. While coughing, he turns over on his stomach and tries to pour water from a kettle by his pillow into a glass. Finding the kettle empty, he clicks his tongue in frustration and claps his hands. Pause. No answer. After a while, he struggles to his feet holding the kettle. He is a middle-aged man, with a pale face and a skinny frame. He exits to the hallway and walks to the top of the stairs._\n\nYUZURU ( _Croaking like an old man_ ): Miss Emi, Miss Emi.\n\n( _The voice of a young woman answers from downstairs_.)\n\nYUZURU: Could you please get me some water in this kettle\u2014yes, it's all gone.\n\nSHIZUKO ( _From halfway up the ladder_ ): Why didn't you just call me\u2014you shouldn't have gotten up. You'll get worse again.\n\nYUZURU ( _Laughs sadly_ ): No big deal.\n\nSHIZUKO: I'll bring it right away. You should get yourself back to bed. ( _Goes down the steps_.)\n\n(YUZURU, _nervously fidgeting, returns to the room, then looks in his sister_ ' _s room. He keeps his hands in his pockets as if too lazy to take them out. Stands comparing the flowers in the vase and his sister_ ' _s painting._ )\n\nSHIZUKO ( _Comes upstairs with the water. She is around twenty years old, chubby and girlish_ ): Oh no! You're still standing there? It's bad for you. Really. What if you get sick again like night before last?\n\nYUZURU ( _Stumbles back to his bed. Drinks a swig of water_ ): It's all right. As long as I get the injection, it won't be so bad.\n\nSHIZUKO ( _Closes the screen door to the adjacent room_ ): Is that so? It looked like you were in a lot of pain. I'd never seen such a thing; I was scared.\u2014Does this sort of thing happen all the time, then?\n\nYUZURU: Well, it gets this bad only five, six times a year.\n\nSHIZUKO: Gosh. That many times?\n\nYUZURU: It happens just as I'm beginning to relax. So I can't let my guard down.\u2014For a while it looked like I was going to die, didn't it?\n\nSHIZUKO: Yes, it really did. But I was a bit relieved when I saw how calm your sister was.\n\nYUZURU: It's like being tortured. ( _Pause._ ) For almost ten years, this disease has bullied me and the people around me.\n\nSHIZUKO: Is there no way to get yourself cured completely?\n\nYUZURU ( _Jokingly_ ): Short of getting myself killed, no.\n\nSHIZUKO: Oh no. Don't say that!\n\n( _Downstairs, the clock strikes ten._ )\n\nYUZURU: It's ten already?\n\nSHIZUKO: Yes, but that clock's running fast. ( _Pause._ ) She's late, isn't she?\n\nYUZURU: Who? Kayoko?\n\nSHIZUKO: She said she'd be home by nine.\n\nYUZURU: That's not likely once she's left the house. It's the art school's anniversary party tonight, isn't it? That's got to be some party. She won't be back till eleven.\n\nSHIZUKO: You think so?\n\n( _A slight pause._ )\n\nSHIZUKO: Speaking of which, have you heard the rumor about Miss Shinozaki Mitsuko?\n\nYUZURU ( _With eyes shining_ ): That Miss Shinozaki who comes to visit Kayoko?\n\nSHIZUKO: Yes, you know everyone at school is talking about her.\n\nYUZURU: Really. ( _Pause._ ) That she's getting married?\n\nSHIZUKO: That's what they say.\n\nYUZURU: Is that right.\n\nSHIZUKO: And the groom is a leftist scholar of economics, they say. Rumor has it that Miss Shinozaki herself is getting pretty red these days.\n\nYUZURU: Is that so. That's news to me. Did Kayoko tell you?\n\nSHIZUKO: No, I heard it from other people. She's so pretty, you know, she's already broken lots of hearts, and now she's getting married\u2014some say the art school's popularity's sure to crash, like she was some kind of actress. ( _Amused laugh._ )\n\nYUZURU ( _Laughs along listlessly_ ): Indeed, that might happen.\n\n( _A bell rings downstairs._ )\n\nSHIZUKO: She's home. ( _Runs off._ )\n\n( _A long pause. Footsteps coming up the stairs._ KAYOKO _sticks her head in while standing in the hallway. She is twenty-five or twenty-six, a woman with a dark complexion and an intelligent look._ )\n\nKAYOKO: I'm home.\n\nYUZURU: You're early.\n\nKAYOKO: I know. I brought Mitsuko. How are you feeling?\n\nYUZURU: I'm all right, I guess.\n\nKAYOKO: Good. I'll be next door, call me if you need me. ( _Closes the_ sh\u014dji _screen._ ) Come in, come in, don't just stand there.\n\nMITSUKO ( _Offstage_ ): It's all right. ( _Laughs._ )\n\nKAYOKO: Don't be silly. ( _Comes into her room and turns on the light._ ) Ugh, so humid! ( _Opens the_ sh\u014dji _screen._ )\n\nMITSUKO ( _She is twenty-four or twenty-five and beautiful_ ): It really is humid tonight, isn't it.\n\nKAYOKO: Looks like it's going to rain.\n\nMITSUKO: What a nuisance, I didn't bring an umbrella. ( _Looks at the flowers._ ) How pretty. Those are gorgeous flowers.\n\nKAYOKO: They're going to scatter any second\u2014so fragile.\n\nMITSUKO: I like how you've put the screen around it. You should paint that, too.\n\nKAYOKO: You must be kidding. ( _Laughing, goes toward the stairs._ ) Miss Emi, some tea, please.\n\nMITSUKO: It's OK, Kayoko; I'm in a hurry tonight.\n\nKAYOKO: Oh, don't worry. You can stay here if it gets too late.\n\nMITSUKO: No, I can't do that. I've another place to go after this.\n\nKAYOKO: After this? ( _A slight pause._ ) Oh, I remember, you said before that you had something to tell me. All right, I'm listening.\n\nMITSUKO: OK, I'll tell you. ( _Pause._ ) Don't be shocked.\n\nKAYOKO: I won't be shocked. ( _Instinctively._ ) Are you getting married?\n\nMITSUKO ( _Pause_ ): Yes.\n\nKAYOKO: Really?\n\nMITSUKO: You knew?\n\nKAYOKO: Of course I knew. It's been on the grapevine for quite some time.\n\n(SHIZUKO _comes upstairs with tea and sweets._ )\n\nKAYOKO: Thank you, you can put it down there.\n\n(SHIZUKO _leaves._ KAYOKO _pours tea silently._ )\n\nKAYOKO: There you go.\n\nMITSUKO: Thank you.\n\n( _Pause._ YUZURU _listens in on their conversation from the next room._ )\n\nMITSUKO: Kayoko, weren't you angry at me? That I kept it a secret from you?\n\nKAYOKO: Of course not. ( _Pause._ ) So the person in question, it's that Mr. Shimizu they're talking about?\n\nMITSUKO: That's right. Who told you?\n\nKAYOKO: Who? All kinds of people have been telling me about him. But I thought it was pointless to ask you something like that directly, so I kept quiet.\n\nMITSUKO: I wish everyone were like you and left me alone ( _Pause._ ) You know, these past few months, so many awful things have happened, I could hardly bear it by myself. I thought of asking you for advice, just you. But in the end, it comes down to my own attitude, you know? And I'd only cause you trouble if I told you, so I didn't on purpose.\n\nKAYOKO: That's fine. I really think one must solve one's own problems. If you rely on someone else's advice, you'll only regret it later. ( _Pause._ ) But I'm glad for you, that it's been resolved. I heard that your family was objecting, or something like that.\n\nMITSUKO: It was a big fight. ( _Laughs bitterly._ ) They disowned me, you know.\n\nKAYOKO: Really.\u2014That was brave of you.\n\nMITSUKO: They just would not agree to it. ( _Slight pause._ ) But don't ask me any more right now, OK? I'll tell you all about it some time.\n\nKAYOKO ( _Nods_ ): You'll stay in town after you're married, won't you?\n\nMITSUKO: No, that's just it. Shimizu will be going to Kyushu soon. He's been lecturing in all kinds of places, but now they're asking him to go to Fukuoka. There'll be a lot of things to research, so he's really excited about going. That's one reason the marriage question came up so soon.\n\nKAYOKO: I see. But if you go along, it'll be pretty hard for you to keep on painting, won't it?\n\nMITSUKO ( _Silent. Then_ ): I made up my mind. I'm going to stop painting.\n\nKAYOKO ( _Surprised_ ): My, but that's... Really?\n\nMITSUKO: Yes.\n\nKAYOKO: But that would mean wasting everything you've achieved until now.... I don't understand.\n\nMITSUKO: I knew you'd be against it. But I don't want us to part having told you some kind of lie, so I'll tell you everything today. I've kept it hidden from Professor Mizuki and you as much as I could, but for quite some time now, from the time I fell in love with Shimizu, my philosophy has changed completely. (KAYOKO _says nothing._ ) I feel bad for the professor, but I've lost all interest in this kind of painting ( _Points to the frame_ ) or in any kind of conventional art that doesn't connect with modern science. I submitted a piece to the imperial art exhibit last year, but that was just by sheer inertia; even when the acceptance notice came, I didn't feel elated like the first time, and in any case, I just felt disgusted looking at the faces of those fancy ladies and gentlemen, staring vacantly at my painting. That's when it started really sinking in that my painting's of no use whatsoever, except to satisfy my own vanity and the spiritual vanity of the bourgeoisie. And I started thinking that I can't keep messing around with this kind of stuff any longer. Hiding behind the name of art and ignoring the injustice of society in which people live\u2014such egoism disgusts me. Our era is not one where we can wallow in such superficial narcissism. I think it's inevitable that an ordinary artist like me, born in this era, would turn into an ordinary Marxist girl. When I go to Kyushu, I shall use my body and my mind to help Shimizu as much as I can. And I want to start by fundamentally transforming myself to adapt to the proletariat way of life.\n\nKAYOKO ( _As if talking to herself_ ): Can one actually transform one's life so fundamentally?\n\nMITSUKO: At least I can, right now. In fact, I believe right now that I've managed to cut myself off from everything in my past. From now on, I'm no longer the daughter of a country landowner or the last painter in the line of the Shij\u014d school. I'm determined to throw away all those things and devote my whole life to vital and honest work as Shimizu's wife. Right now must be a turning point for my own life. ( _A slight pause._ ) But Shimizu's the one who will guide me in a good direction from here.\n\nKAYOKO: In that case, you've sold your whole past to Mr. Shimizu.\n\nMITSUKO: I suppose you could say that. But I believe in him. ( _Passionately._ ) I'm so grateful he woke me out of my empty dream and led me to this place where I am now. As long as I'm with him, no matter what difficulties we may have, I'll never regret it.\n\nKAYOKO: I have no reason to dismiss something you trust so much. But I myself would never think of what we've been doing until now as just an empty dream. Holding a paint brush isn't messing around; it's not vanity, it's honest labor. It's reality, nothing more, nothing less. If the viewer treats my painting as a mere trifle, that's not my problem. My own feeling when I am trying to paint is always serious, almost unbearably so. ( _Falls silent, then after a pause._ ) I can't help but be serious, in every sense of the word.\n\nMITSUKO ( _Smiling cheerfully_ ): I understand that. I went through that period, too. But I could never lose myself in such insignificant feelings now.\n\nKAYOKO: Insignificant?!\n\nMITSUKO: Well, if insignificant is a bad word, you could call it too leisurely or too quiet. In any case, for myself right now, I just can't think that a life like this, stuck in my room, facing a canvas, cutting off contact with the outside world, is truly real. If I have the time to make washed-out conventional art, to give a bit of refreshment to the bloated guts of the bourgeoisie, it would mean much more for humanity to lend my hand to awakening the blind masses that are starving in the streets. ( _Pause._ ) My own hands have been smeared with paint for so long. I mean to purify them by baptism in soil.\n\nKAYOKO ( _Becomes agitated by_ MITSUKO' _s words but gradually controls herself. She is silent for a while_ ): You and I are quite far apart in how our personalities have developed, aren't we. I guess we weren't meant to keep walking hand in hand through life. ( _Pause._ ) If I told you what I thought, we'd just end up arguing for no good reason, so I won't say anything right now. Just one thing\u2014your decision right now may or may not be the result of a passing infatuation. That's something only time will tell. But in any case, you're willing to draw a clear line in your life. I really envy that. ( _Pause._ ) A person who can decide \"what ought to be\" and can act on that is lucky indeed.\n\nMITSUKO ( _Laughs lightly_ ): Lucky or unlucky, it doesn't matter. I was propelled by an inevitable force.\n\nKAYOKO: And I, on the other hand... ( _Begins but stops._ )\n\n( _Another long pause._ )\n\nMITSUKO: Since I've already upset you tonight, I want to go ahead and talk about you, too. Will you hear me out?\n\nKAYOKO ( _Nods._ )\n\nMITSUKO: I'm worried about your art.\n\nKAYOKO ( _Tries to say something._ )\n\nMITSUKO: Don't worry, even as a believer in \"what ought to be,\" I'm not going to tell you to leave the studio or anything like that. But I want to advise you, since this is a good opportunity, about your artistic style. You say you want to make a career as a painter in the Japanese tradition\u2014but right now you're conforming too much to the conservative style of Professor Mizuki's school, don't you think? Good art must reflect its age in every sense of the word. We worked so hard to master this artistic style, but no matter how you look at it, it's just a remnant of the Edo era. It's completely unsuited to our contemporary way of life. It's too simplistic and too conventional, even for expressing what I know you have in yourself right now.... Don't you think so?\n\nKAYOKO: I know all that. ( _Pause._ ) But there are no easy solutions to this problem. ( _Pause._ ) It's because I've struggled twice, three times as much as you to get where I am today, in material terms and in terms of talent.\n\nMITSUKO ( _Pressing further_ ): But you can't believe that if you stay here in comfort you'd be able to produce art of the first order, right? You don't believe, as our teacher does, that our style of painting is the best?\n\nKAYOKO ( _Pause_ ): Mitsuko, I beg you, leave me alone. I'm thinking about all that myself too, you know.\n\nMITSUKO: Of course, I don't want to force this kind of speech on you, but it doesn't look like we'll have another chance to sit down like this and discuss art.... I just wanted to tell you, as a favor before I cut myself off from conventional art and disappear into the whirlwind of the class struggle. ( _Pause._ ) I don't want to think of you as someone who'd be content with the title \"painter accepted into the imperial exhibition\" and wouldn't try to improve herself artistically. Kayoko, I beg of you, please lead a healthy and honest life, at least in the art world, OK? Please?\n\nKAYOKO ( _Suddenly sarcastically_ ): Thank you. But in any case, I doubt my way of life could be as healthy as yours. ( _Pause._ ) Mitsuko, you're lucky. ( _Gazes at her._ )\n\nMITSUKO: Don't be silly. ( _Starts to laugh but, struck by the gravity of the other_ ' _s facial expression, turns serious._ ) Why?\n\nKAYOKO ( _Does not answer but looks down._ )\n\n(YUZURU _has been listening intently to the conversation in the next room but now suddenly starts to cough._ )\n\nMITSUKO ( _Looking up_ ): Your brother is still sick?\n\n(KAYOKO _nods_. YUZURU _stops coughing_.)\n\nKAYOKO: Mitsuko, you said a moment ago that my life was too quiet and filled with leisure. But from my perspective, you're the one who's leisurely, much more so than I. You have the leisure to be altruistic. ( _Hesitant pause._ ) Far from messing around with a paintbrush, I clutch it desperately; that's the kind of human being I am. Other than painting pictures, I have no way of making a living, no source of self-respect. ( _Pause._ ) That's probably also the real reason I'm stuck in one place and can't move easily. I'm a human being who's not allowed to keep looking ahead and moving forward. (MITSUKO _is silent._ ) I understand everything you're saying. But to me, you seem a bit cruel. ( _Laughs casually._ )\n\nMITSUKO ( _Thinks a little_ ): I'm sorry. I think I've forced my ideas on you. But I couldn't help telling you. Please don't take it the wrong way.\n\nKAYOKO: I know, I know, I understand. ( _Laughs bitterly. A slightly awkward pause._ ) When are you leaving?\n\nMITSUKO: At the beginning of next month.\n\nKAYOKO: That's pretty soon, then.\n\nMITSUKO: Yes, that's why\u2014( _Begins to say more but looks at the clock_.) Oh, it's half past ten already. I have to go. ( _Stands._ )\n\nKAYOKO: Where are you going now?\n\nMITSUKO: Well, you know, it's that big fight over at M University. Professor Sawa being fired because of his political beliefs and our protesting his termination? There's a rally tonight at the youth center, and Shimizu went there to give a speech. I meant to go there after this\u2014I'll stop by again. Sorry to stay so long. Take good care of your brother, OK?\n\nKAYOKO: Thanks. ( _The two go downstairs._ )\n\n(YUZURU _gets up and goes toward the veranda. A long pause._ KAYOKO _goes up the stairs again._ YUZURU _hurries back into his bed. Noticing that_ YUZURU _seems to have been awake,_ KAYOKO _stands quietly by the veranda. She is about to talk to him but stops. Another long pause._ )\n\nSHIZUKO ( _Enters. Clears away the cups, laughing_ ): Is it true, then, that Miss Shinozaki is going to get married?\n\nKAYOKO ( _Standing on the veranda, sullenly_ ): It seems that way.\n\nSHIZUKO: So it was true, then. The rumors kept flying, so I was wondering.\n\nKAYOKO: It's none of your business. Just hurry up and clean that away.\n\nSHIZUKO ( _Taking note of the other_ ' _s mood_ ): Certainly. ( _Hurriedly collects the teacups and tries to stand up and leave. Her sleeve is caught on a branch in the flower vase. The vase tips over, and water splashes on the canvas._ ) Oh!\n\nKAYOKO ( _Agitated, face distorted, runs over_ ): Don't just stand there, hurry up and get a rag!\n\n(SHIZUKO _runs downstairs._ )\n\nKAYOKO ( _Puts the vase back and tries to gather up the flowers. The petals of the wisteria and Japanese rose scatter. Looks back at the painting_ ): Oh! What a mess. ( _With a sponge, she gently wipes off the water. The damage is irreversible. Upset, she stands brooding._ )\n\n( _A downpour of rain begins and gradually grows louder._ )\n\nSHIZUKO ( _Comes upstairs with cleaning rag. Tries to wipe the floor, then notices_ ): Oh! Did something happen to the painting? ( _Peering at it._ ) Oh no, a big mess\u2014what am I going to do? I'm so clumsy. ( _Close to tears._ )\n\nKAYOKO ( _Spitting it out_ ): There's nothing we can do. Just hurry and wipe up the floor.\n\nSHIZUKO: Yes, of course. ( _Cleans._ )\n\nKAYOKO ( _Has come out to the veranda with the flowers in her hand and has been glancing back at the painting but, suddenly upset, shakes the flower branches with full force. All the remaining petals scatter._ )\n\nSHIZUKO ( _A bit taken aback, looks on silently_ ): Oh, I'm really sorry. You worked so hard on that painting, and now\u2014can't it be fixed? (KAYOKO _is silent._ )\n\nSHIZUKO: What am I going to do? And this was a commissioned painting, wasn't it?\n\n(KAYOKO _is silent._ )\n\nSHIZUKO ( _Pleading_ ): If it's just the flowers, I think I can buy them again somewhere\u2014what do you think?\n\n(KAYOKO _silently comes into the room, puts her hands on the frame, and tries to rip out the silk canvas._ )\n\nSHIZUKO ( _Shocked_ ): What are you doing?\n\nKAYOKO ( _Calmly_ ): I'm pulling it out. This painting can't be saved.\n\nSHIZUKO: But you could try again tomorrow to fix it\u2014and then you could\u2014\n\nKAYOKO ( _Not answering, keeps trying to rip without success._ )\n\n(SHIZUKO _finally starts to cry._ )\n\nYUZURU ( _In a severe tone, from the next room_ ): Kayoko!\n\nKAYOKO:\u2014\n\nYUZURU: Kayoko, what are you doing?!\n\nKAYOKO:\u2014\n\nYUZURU: Why don't you answer? ( _Rises and comes over._ )\n\n(KAYOKO _roughly flings down the frame, throws herself over it, and begins to cry._ )\n\nYUZURU: Fool! Look at you. What do you think you're doing?\n\n(KAYOKO _cries even harder._ )\n\nYUZURU ( _Looks at his crying sister with hatred in his eyes. Slight pause_ ): Stop it. That's enough. You've made your point already.\n\nKAYOKO:\u2014\n\n(SHIZUKO _has stopped crying and is looking at_ YUZURU _questioningly_.)\n\nYUZURU: You don't need to do all that. I know well enough what you're thinking. ( _Continuing to cough, laughs coolly._ ) I may be an invalid who's half dead, but my nerves are as sharp as anyone's.\n\nKAYOKO: You've got me wrong.\n\nYUZURU: If you think I got you wrong, I got you wrong. But I think I understand you all too well.\n\nKAYOKO ( _Annoyed_ ): You understand nothing. You\u2014( _Hesitates slightly but then resolutely._ ) you're the one who's picking on me because you heard Mitsuko's getting married.\n\nYUZURU: Stop that nonsense. I know exactly what you're thinking. I know that _you_ ' _re_ upset because Mitsuko's running off to get hitched.\n\nKAYOKO ( _Laughs a little hysterically_ ): You say that, but it's you, you who's suddenly lonely because you lost Mitsuko. I feel sorry for you.\n\nYUZURU ( _Pale_ ): Fool! Try saying that again!\n\nKAYOKO: You think I'm blind?\n\n(YUZURU, _furious, stares at his sister's face. Suddenly the door bell rings._ SHIZUKO, _relieved at the opportunity, runs downstairs._ YUZURU, _finally controlling himself, is about to withdraw to his room without saying anything._ )\n\nKAYOKO: Wait.\n\n(YUZURU _does not answer but slams shut the_ fusuma _door._ )\n\nSHIZUKO ( _From downstairs_ ): It's Miss Shinozaki again.\n\nKAYOKO ( _Doubtfully_ ): Miss Shinozaki?\n\n(MITSUKO _comes hurriedly upstairs. Her clothes are wet from the rain._ )\n\nKAYOKO: My goodness, what happened?\n\nMITSUKO ( _Extremely agitated_ ): I'm sorry. I'm a mess.\n\nKAYOKO: What happened? You're sopping wet. No umbrella?\n\nMITSUKO: No time for that\u2014they've arrested Shimizu.\n\nKAYOKO: But why?\n\nMITSUKO: After I left here, I immediately went to the youth center. It was still early, but they told me the rally was canceled. Things felt kind of tense, so I asked some students from M University who were still there. And they told me that Shimizu had been taken into custody! I was so shocked. They say he mentioned something incendiary during his speech, so some right-wing activist types jumped up on the stage and punched him. And then, of course, Shimizu's friends and students from M University jumped into the fray.\u2014In the end, the police came and took everyone away. They say Shimizu was hurt. But by the time I got there, it was all over. I was so mad!\n\nKAYOKO: Well, then, it was Mr. Shimizu who was the victim of violence, wasn't he. And besides\u2014\n\nMITSUKO: No, no. With someone like Shimizu, the authorities are always hostile. Besides, who knows what kind of connection they've got to those gangs that came to the rally tonight? ( _Pause._ ) It can't be helped. Something like this was going to happen, and it won't be the last time, either.\n\nKAYOKO ( _Has recovered from her own excitement and calmed down again_ ): So what are you going to do tonight? Are you going to go to the police?\n\nMITSUKO: Yes. It may be a lost cause, but I'll go there tonight.\n\nKAYOKO: By yourself?\n\nMITSUKO: No, I phoned various places trying to find Shimizu's friends, but most of them couldn't be reached. Finally I found someone who's willing to come right away\u2014I'm really sorry to trouble you, but since your house is on the way, I told him I'd meet him here. I'm sorry\u2014it's so late.\n\nKAYOKO: I don't care about that. But it must be hard on you. You must be worried.\n\nMITSUKO: It happens to him all the time, they say, but it's the first for me. ( _Laughs a bit._ ) But I'm ready for it. Since I'm going to be his wife, I can expect worse, much worse, much more hardship for me to endure....\n\n(KAYOKO _looks at_ MITSUKO _'s excited face rather coolly._ )\n\nMITSUKO ( _As if swearing to herself_ ): No matter what may come, I will not be defeated. Because we are led by proper reason and inevitable passion.\u2014Deep in our hearts lies a rapture that no one else can see. ( _Suddenly collapses._ )\n\nKAYOKO ( _Shocked_ ): Mitsuko, what's wrong? Mitsuko! (MITSUKO _does not respond._ ) Did she faint? Miss Emi, Miss Emi?\n\nSHIZUKO ( _Comes upstairs_ ): Oh dear! What happened? Did she faint?\n\nKAYOKO: I think so, but in any case... ( _Tries to lay_ MITSUKO _down._ )\n\n(MITSUKO _moans faintly and tries to rouse herself._ )\n\nKAYOKO: Are you all right, Mitsuko?\n\nMITSUKO: Th-thank you. It's nothing. Just a bit...\n\nKAYOKO ( _To_ SHIZUKO): There's wine in my brother's room. Bring it please.\n\n(SHIZUKO _goes and brings wine in a cup. Not moving,_ YUZURU _lies fully covered under his blanket._ )\n\nKAYOKO: Drink some of this.\n\nMITSUKO: OK. ( _Drinks._ ) Thank you. I was just a bit dizzy. ( _Stands up unsteadily._ ) I'm all right now.\n\nKAYOKO: Take it easy. Shall I make a bed for you?\n\nMITSUKO: No, it's all right. I'm fine now.\n\nKAYOKO: But you can't go like that to the police tonight.\n\nMITSUKO: Nonsense\u2014I have to go.\n\n( _The bell rings again._ )\n\nMITSUKO: There he is. Good-bye then. I'll come again to thank you.\n\nKAYOKO: But Mitsuko....\n\nMITSUKO: No, no, it's all right. I'm not that fragile. ( _Runs downstairs._ )\n\n(KAYOKO _and_ SHIZUKO _follow downstairs. The wind and rain are even worse. The stage turns dark. In the darkness, only the noise of the storm continues. The clock strikes two in the morning._ )\n\n(KAYOKO, _in nightclothes, comes upstairs with a lamp in her hand. She opens the sliding door to her brother_ ' _s room and peeks in but then closes the door. She turns over the frame, which had been standing wrong side up, and stands gazing at the painting. A long pause._ )\n\nYUZURU: Is it you, Kayoko?\n\nKAYOKO ( _Surprised_ ): You're awake?\n\nYUZURU ( _Vaguely_ ): Mm. ( _Pause._ ) Quite a storm.\n\nKAYOKO: The lights went out.\n\nYUZURU: Yes.\n\nKAYOKO: I was afraid the roof might leak, so I came to look. ( _Using that as an excuse, looks around the hallway._ )\n\n(YUZURU _tries to call to her but hesitates. A long pause._ )\n\nKAYOKO ( _Suddenly enters her brother_ ' _s room_ ): Please forgive me, brother.\n\nYUZURU: What?\n\nKAYOKO: What I said before. I was wrong.\n\nYUZURU: No need to apologize. You told the truth. But since you know me so well, I was upset that you'd go and expose feelings I was hoping to keep hidden forever. It's me who's being selfish. I should ask _you_ to forgive me.\n\nKAYOKO: No, it's me who's wrong. I got excited over nothing. I feel bad about what I did to you and Miss Emi.\n\nYUZURU ( _Pause_ ): Kayoko, I'm a coward. And I'm certainly not a good brother to you. But I just don't feel like showing my suffering to others. I don't even want anyone touching it with a finger. I want to put a seal on my own suffering, shut it up inside my own breast, and bear it by myself alone. It's a selfish request, but if you feel sorry for an invalid like myself, don't touch what is painful to me, now or ever. Since you know me so well, I can tell you this much. Is that all right? I'm begging you. ( _Pleading._ )\n\nKAYOKO: I know. Say no more, brother. I'll never do anything so foolish again. ( _Pause._ ) But you might misunderstand me because of what's happened\u2014that's what scares me the most. You believe me, don't you? ( _Takes her brother_ ' _s hand._ )\n\nYUZURU: Thank you, Kayoko. I feel so sorry for what I've done to you. I've become such an invalid, restricting your freedom in every way\u2014you have no idea how bad that makes me feel. And yet instead of feeling grateful to you, I always end up abusing you. The more I pity you, the more my feelings become bent and twisted, and I end up lashing out at you. My illness has consumed not just my body but also my soul. It's making me rot from the inside. ( _Sobs._ )\n\nKAYOKO: Brother, let's bear each other's burdens and go on. We're used to working away from the limelight, aren't we? ( _Pause._ ) You know, I've been lying awake and thinking about this, and I've finally come to accept that Mitsuko and I are not going to be walking on the same path.\n\nYUZURU: I won't say anything about myself. But as for you\u2014and you know I'm thinking about this seriously\u2014you should probably get married sooner or later, don't you think? I'm against your staying single like this forever.\n\nKAYOKO: No, but that's impossible. I have no intention of getting married. (YUZURU _tries to say something._ ) No, don't think it's because of you\u2014of my having to support you. Just think of me as someone who can't easily find a good companion as Mitsuko did. ( _Pause._ ) Actually, when I heard that Mitsuko was finally getting married, I felt lonely and frustrated, like being plunged to the bottom of an abyss. Someone beautiful and smart like Mitsuko staying single and devoting herself to art\u2014that had been such a source of strength and comfort to me. But then she surprised us all by finding that lover ( _Pause_ ) and she left. She even turned her back on the conventional art we'd treasured until now. I felt like the two most important principles in my life were suddenly toppled over with her marriage\u2014And then when I thought of your feelings about her, I was just so frustrated and flustered and couldn't help being so ridiculously upset like that.\n\nYUZURU: And I, I was resentful because I thought the way you made Mitsuko talk about all that while I was lying next door was some kind of ruse. ( _Laughs bitterly._ ) It's jealousy. I know your feelings all too well, yet I just can't help myself from thinking like that. What an idiot I am.\n\nKAYOKO: I'm no different. ( _Pause._ ) But now my thoughts are totally calm. Words like leisure and quiet\u2014when she made fun of them earlier, I totally rejected them, but now I feel like they're living inside me in a different way. If she has chosen her path, I have my own path as well. I can affirm that clearly and gladly now. ( _Pause._ ) You missed seeing her expression when she came back here a while ago, the second time, right? (YUZURU _nods._ ) Till now, I'd always envied her and never once felt sorry for her. But tonight, I pitied her somehow. In her excited eyes I caught a glimpse of the proud martyr. And all at once, every one of her gestures started looking like a stage actor's tricks, and I felt the urge to ridicule her passion. (YUZURU _is silent._ ) I don't know about her future, but her current passion for becoming a communist doesn't strike me as very healthy. I can't see it as anything more than a bourgeois girl playing with fire out of boredom. When you think about it, she talks of renouncing the past, but I wonder how well she understands it. And that's exactly why she can throw away the past so easily, or talk of being reborn. When I thought about it like that, I started appreciating my own stubborn personality.\n\nYUZURU: It may be dogmatic, but that's one way of thinking about it. In any case, it's good to trust yourself. There's nothing sadder and more pitiful than losing trust in oneself.\n\nKAYOKO: I'm ashamed I was taken in by Mitsuko's spectacular and flamboyant passion, and I was tempted for a moment to deny my own path. She has the right to keep dreaming of the future. And I'll keep shouldering a past I cannot shake off, in my life and in my art. Who can blame me? I have principles, too. ( _Pause._ ) The more the storms rage on the outside, the deeper the tranquillity I'll maintain on the inside. A pure art transcending the past, present, and future might be born from such quiet detachment, don't you think?\n\nYUZURU: Someone said, \"Humans are inept executors of the will of others.\" It's fine to pursue one's passions. It's also fine to remain quiet. In either case, you should try to grow without losing sight of yourself ( _Pause._ ) Life has many paths. No reason why there should be only one way to live.\n\n( _The light of the candle is extinguished by the wind._ )\n\nKAYOKO: Oh, it went out. ( _Strikes a match and lights the candle._ ) We've been talking too long. Let's go to sleep. ( _Stands up._ )\n\nYUZURU ( _Laughs_ ): The wind seems to have died down a little.\n\nKAYOKO: The rain's letting up, too. ( _Pause._ ) I wonder what's happened to Mitsuko?\n\nYUZURU: Who knows? ( _Pause. As if to change the subject._ ) Tomorrow will be sunny for sure.\n\nKAYOKO: True. This storm might bring a change.\n\nYUZURU: Spring should be over soon. All the gloomy rain and wind, day after day. I can't wait to see the refreshing sunshine of early summer.\n\nKAYOKO: For sure. The beginning of summer's also the best season for your health, isn't it. Well, good night then.\n\nYUZURU: Can you sleep? Do you want some of my Calmotin? ( _Picks up the medicine by his pillow._ )\n\nKAYOKO ( _Takes it_ ): Thanks. Good night then.\n\nYUZURU: Good night.\n\n(KAYOKO _goes downstairs. Darkness as before. The sound of rain_.)\n\nCURTAIN\nJAPANESE WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS\n\nFrom Meiji to the Present\n\nYOSHIE INOUE\n\nAt the end of the twentieth century, several women playwrights appeared who dazzled the public. Although they were thought to be the first in Japanese theater, women playwrights actually have been active since the Meiji period. Very few of them, however, have been included in most drama and/or literary histories. No doubt this is because drama histories are mostly about theater movements rather than individual dramatists and because these women were part of a literary history that still is monopolized by men. Next, then, is a brief history of Japanese women playwrights and their work from the Meiji period to the present.\n\nTHE APPEARANCE OF WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS\n\nBeginning in the Meiji period (1868\u20131912), in addition to kabuki, the new drama ( _shingeki_ ) began to be performed, and so there was a great demand for playwrights. Women playwrights were first noticed in the first decade of the twentieth century, about ten years after their male counterparts. In 1910, Matsui Sumako (1886\u20131919), one of the first trained professional actresses in Japan (since the kabuki performers were male), made a sensational debut, and a year later, performances by the actresses' troupe at the Imperial Theater (Teigeki joy\u016bgeki) were begun. At the same time, Hiratsuka Raich\u014d (1886\u20131971) and other graduates of Japan Women's University (Nihon joshi daigaku) founded the journal _Bluestocking_ ( _Seit \u014d_, 1911\u20131916), a creative forum for graduates of women's schools to write novels, poetry, and plays.\n\nOKADA YACHIYO AND HASEGAWA SHIGURE\n\nThe first two women playwrights in the twentieth century were Okada Yachiyo and Hasegawa Shigure.1 Okada Yachiyo (1883\u20131962), the younger sister of the theater director Osanai Kaoru and the wife of the famous Western-style painter Okada Sabur\u014dsuke, started writing novels in her teens, which were published under the name Osanai Yachiyo. Her first play, _Wasteland_ ( _Yomogiu_ ), was published in 1905 in the literary journal _Morning Star_ ( _My \u014dj\u014d_). Her last play was _A Dressing Table_ ( _Ky \u014ddai_), published in 1949 in the journal _Kabuki_. In all, she wrote thirty-six plays, many of which were first performed by _shinpa_ or kabuki troupes. _The Boxwood Comb_ ( _Tsuge no kushi_ , 1912), _The Thirteenth Night_ ( _J \u016bsanya_, 1922), and _The Repentance of Jirokichi_ ( _Jirokichi zange_ , 1926) are set in the Meiji era and focus on issues concerning women. Yachiyo also worked in children's theater and wrote reviews of contemporary theater, kabuki, _shinpa,_ and _shingeki_ , as well as women's theater, a valuable source for theater historians of this period. After World War II, she founded a study group to nurture up-and-coming women playwrights.\n\nThe first play that Hasegawa Shigure (1879\u20131941) wrote, _Tidal Soundings_ ( _Kaich \u014d'on_), had a fortunate start because Tsubouchi Sh\u014dy\u014d recommended it to Ii Y\u014dh\u014d and Kitamura Rokur\u014d, two important _shinpa_ actors, who performed it in 1908. After this auspicious debut, Shigure wrote a number of plays for kabuki and _shinpa_ , such as _Ka \u014dmaru_, _Chastity_ ( _Misao_ ), _The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter_ ( _Taketori monogatari_ ), and a dance play, _Eshima and Ikushima_. Some of her plays are still performed. Most are lyrical, historical dramas with strong elements of fantasy, but she also wrote plays like her realist drama on a contemporary theme, _One Afternoon_ ( _Aruhi no gogo_ ), published in _Bluestocking_ in 1912, about women who live in farming villages. With the emergence of actresses like Matsui Sumako, as well as the literary movement led by the contributors to _Bluestocking_ , women playwrights were now encouraged to write these kinds of plays. Shigure and Yachiyo also were the editors of _Women's Arts_ ( _Nyonin geijutsu_ , 1928\u20131933), for women writers.\n\nMany of the plays about love and marriage that were written by women in this period were influenced by Maurice Maeterlinck's dramas and Sigmund Freud's dream theories, but not Henrik Ibsen's _A Doll_ ' _s House_ (first performed in Japan in 1911, starring Matsui Sumako as Nora), which strongly influenced women's liberation and the emergence of the \"new woman.\" The reason was that Japanese women playwrights believed that they first had to express their need for free will in discussions of love and marriage.\n\nFROM THE ART THEATER TO THE TSUKIJI LITTLE THEATER AND FROM _BLUESTOCKING_ TO _WOMEN'S ARTS_\n\nAfter Shimamura H\u014dgetsu founded the Art Theater (Geijutsuza, 1913\u20131919) and traveled with his troupe all over Japan, contemporary theater, which until that time had been limited to performances in major urban areas, now began to spread to the provinces. New small theater groups that would have been unimaginable a few years earlier now began to crop up and their audiences grew, in part because after the Russo-Japanese War (1904/1905), the number of well-to-do and very rich people increased. These families sent their children to middle schools, high schools, and (their daughters) girls' schools, where they learned about the theater. Some even began writing and performing plays. In general, as the theatergoing population expanded, it became possible for women, who had had only a marginal role in the theater, to move to a more central position as modern playwrights.\n\nThe founding of the Tsukiji Little Theater (Tsukiji sh\u014dgekij\u014d) in 1924 marked the end of the so-called age of Taish\u014d drama, during which time many well-known women writers\u2014such as Yosano Akiko, Tamura Toshiko, Nogami Yaeko, Yanagihara Byakuren, Kamichika Ichiko, Nakaj\u014d Yuriko, Okamoto Kanoko, and Shiraki Shizu\u2014also wrote one-act plays. Few of their works, however, are still performed.\n\nIn classical theater, the first play, _Chrysanthemum_ ( _Kiku_ ) by Kimura Tomiko (1890\u20131944), the wife of the playwright Kimura Kinka (himself the cousin of two kabuki actors, Ichikawa Ennosuke II and Ichikawa Ch\u016bsha), was performed by Nakamura Utaemon V. Tomiko went on to write plays for kabuki, as well as dance plays, most of which were performed. Although not as famous as Tomiko, another _Bluestocking_ member, Hirotsu Chiyo, wrote historical plays.\n\n\u014cMURA KAYOKO, OKADA TEIKO, TANAKA SUMIE, UEDA FUMIKO, AND OZAKI MIDORI\n\nAmong the women who wrote for _Bluestocking_ , the most famous after Yachiyo and Shigure was \u014cmura Kayoko (1883\u20131953), who was in the first graduating class of Japan Women's University. She studied playwriting under the new kabuki playwright Okamoto Kid\u014d (1872\u20131939), who edited _Stage_ ( _Butai_ , founded in 1930) and nurtured many male playwrights, such as Nukata Rokufuku, H\u014dj\u014d Hideji, and Nakano Minoru, as well as a number of female playwrights. Among \u014cmura's plays are _The Tale of the Purple Lotus_ ( _Shirentan_ , first performed at the Y\u016braku Theater in 1913) and _A Daughter of the Thread Merchant of Honch \u014d_ ( _Honch \u014d itoya no musume_, Imperial Theater, 1927). Because of \u014cmura's connection to Kid\u014d, her plays were quickly produced. Most of them are historical and were performed by kabuki and female troupes.\n\nAnother important early female playwright, Okada Teiko (1902\u20131990), also was a student of Kid\u014d. Her first play was published in the January 1929 issue of the journal _Reform_ ( _Kaiz \u014d_), helped by the influence of her father, a politician who served in the Lower House of the Diet. Okada also published plays in Shigure's _Women's Arts_ , as well as in Kid\u014d's _Stage_. Her _Masako and Her Career_ ( _Masako to sono shokugy \u014d_, 1930, first performed at the Tsukiji Theater in 1933), questions what real independence for women might mean. Plays like _Rice Planting_ ( _Taue_ , Tsukiji Theater, 1932) and _The Class Reunion_ ( _Kurasukai_ , Tsukiji Theater, 1937) were performed as _shingeki_ plays. Before World War II ended, Okada returned to her hometown of Matsuyama and stopped writing for the theater.\n\nTanaka Sumie (1908\u20132000) also was a playwright who got her start in Kid\u014d's _Stage_. Unlike \u014cmura and Okada, she was able to participate in the playwriting workshops run by Kishida Kunio (1890\u20131954) and Kikuchi Kan (1888\u20131948). In her one-act plays, like _A Shimmering_ ( _Kager \u014d_, 1934), _Akiko_ ' _s Face_ ( _Akiko no kao_ , 1936), and _The Bereaved Family_ ( _Izokutachi_ , 1937), Tanaka depicts life in middle-class families, based on her own experience. Her first work, a multi-act play, _Spring, Autumn_ ( _Haru_ , _aki_ , Literary Theater, 1939), was directed by her husband, the playwright Tanaka Chikao. Other plays are _A Wicked Woman and Eyes and Wall_ ( _Akujo to me to kabe_ , 1948), _Gratia, Lady Hosokawa_ ( _Garashia, Hosokawa fujin_ , 1959), and _The White Peacock_ ( _Shirokujaku_ , 1967), which she wrote for the actress Mizutani Yaeko. Both before and after the war, Tanaka wrote radio and film scripts to eke out a living, and after the war she also wrote for television.\n\nThe careers of Ueda Fumiko (1905\u20131986) and Ozaki Midori (1896\u20131971) were different from those of the preceding three playwrights. Ueda Fumiko\u2014better known by her pen name, Enchi Fumiko\u2014is famous as the writer of novels such as _The Waiting Years_ ( _Onnazaka_ , 1957). In her younger years, inspired by Osanai Kaoru, Enchi began to write plays, which were published in the journals _Drama and Criticism_ ( _Geki to hy \u014dron_) and _Women's Arts_. Her play _Restless Night in Late Spring_ ( _Banshun s \u014dya_), a translation of which is included in this volume, was first performed at the Tsukiji Little Theater in 1928. The incident about Osanai Kaoru's dying at a banquet hosted by the Ueda family (Enchi's father, Ueda Mannen, was a famous scholar of Japanese literature) after her play's final performance is well known. Enchi also wrote plays and commentaries about ongoing revolutionary movements, an indication of the appeal of the leftist theater to young people at that time. Finally, however, the Depression forced her to move from drama to fiction.\n\nOzaki Midori is now the focus of much research in women's studies, as her innovative works, many of which were published in _Women's Arts_ , describe modern Sh\u014dwa sensibilities. But perhaps because Ozaki did not have an influential father, as did Okada Teiko and Ueda Fumiko, few of her plays were performed during her lifetime. Nonetheless, the critic Hanada Kiyoteru (1909\u20131974) was greatly impressed with her plays _Apple Pie Afternoon_ ( _Appuru pai no gogo_ , 1930), _Wandering in the World of the Seventh Sense_ ( _Dainanakankai h \u014dk\u014d_, 1931), and _Miss Cricket_ ( _K \u014drogi-jo_, 1932). The inclusion of _Wandering in the World of the Seventh Sense_ in the series Discovering Contemporary Literature (Gendai bungaku no hakken), published by Gakugei shorin in 1969, revived interest in Ozaki's work. In 1998, the film _Wandering in the World of the Seventh Sense_ \u2014 _Searching for Ozaki Midori_ , directed by Hamano Sachi, was released, and in the same year her collected works were published. Even now, her plays retain their originality.\n\nPOST\u2013WORLD WAR II WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS\n\nYAMADA TOKIKO, TERASHIMA AKIKO, MAYAMA MIHO, MIZUKI Y\u014cKO, AKIMOTO MATSUYO, AND ARIYOSHI SAWAKO\n\nYamada Tokiko (b. 1923) is a playwright from the Labor Union Theater movement, which started shortly after Japan's defeat in World War II. Yamada's play _A Good Match_ ( _Ry \u014den_, 1947) was performed by the theater group of the Dai-ichi Seimei Insurance Company. Subsequently, many organizations performed her plays, which dealt with such subjects as women's independence and marriage. The theater company Mingei staged the first production of _Records of the Women_ ' _s Dormitories_ ( _Joshiry \u014dki_) in 1948. Yamada is one of the few playwrights active during the short period after the war when many people thought that revolution in Japan was imminent.\n\nTerashima Akiko (1926\u20132010) promoted writers for radio and television and became a member of the Shinky\u014d Theater in 1948, after having studied at the T\u014dh\u014d Theater Workshop (T\u014dh\u014d engeki kenky\u016bkai). She wrote for both the Shinky\u014d Theater and the Tokyo Art Theater (Tokyo geijutsuza) but later turned to writing scripts for radio and television programs and films.\n\nMayama Miho (1922\u20132006), the daughter of kabuki playwright Mayama Seika (1878\u20131948), was first affiliated with the Zenshin Theater and the Shinkyo Theater troupes. Although she composed only a few plays, in order to work toward her goal of popularizing _shingeki_ , she founded a theater company, the Shinseisaku Theater, in which she remained active, writing and directing plays and overseeing the company. Accordingly, she is regarded as a forerunner of the women playwrights of the 1980s and later.\n\nMizuki Y\u014dko (1910\u20132003), slightly older than those women playwrights writing after World War II, became known soon after graduating from Kikuchi Kan's Playwriting Study Group. At first, Mizuki wrote plays like _A Woman_ ' _s Life_ ( _Onna no issho_ , 1950), which deals with the problems of working women regarding marriage, pregnancy, and the care of aging parents. She also described workers' anxieties caused by the mechanization of labor and similar subjects. Later, Mizuki turned to writing scripts for films directed by Imai Tadashi, including _Till We Meet Again_ ( _Mata au hi made_ ) and _The Tower of Red Star Lilies_ ( _Himeyuri no t \u014d_), and for Naruse Mikiyo's film version of Hayashi Fumiko's novel _Floating Cloud_ ( _Ukigumo_ ).\n\nOkada Yachiyo, too, was an important figure in this period, establishing a new organization for women playwrights in 1948. The organization's newsletter, _Acanthus_ , sought to strengthen the ties among women playwrights, by running playwriting workshops and nurturing young writers, many of whose works were collected in _Selected Plays by Contemporary Women Playwrights_ ( _Gendai jory \u016b gikyoku sensh\u016b,_ privately published in 1954). Later, Himawarisha published four more volumes. The playwrights in this organization differed from the women playwrights mentioned previously because they were well-to-do housewives who had been writing since before the war. They, and Okada, also wrote radio dramas and scripts for the commercial theater, which became an increasingly important outlet for writers at this time.\n\nAkimoto Matsuyo (1911\u20132001), who said she attended only one of Okada's meetings, got her start in playwriting after participating in a playwriting workshop run by the important _shingeki_ playwright Miyoshi J\u016br\u014d (1902\u20131958). Akimoto quickly wrote several plays\u2014including _Ceremonial Clothes_ ( _Reifuku_ ), which is included in this book\u2014depicting postwar Japan and the problems faced by a traditionally patriarchal family. But Akimoto felt undervalued as a playwright and often bemoaned her fate as a radio and television scriptwriter who received no praise from the public. Nonetheless, her play _Kaison the Priest of Hitachi_ ( _Hitachib \u014d Kaison_, 1964)2 was highly regarded by the important critic and occasional screen writer Hanada Kiyoteru and was first performed by the Engeki Theater in 1967. Since that time, many of her plays have been performed.\n\nAriyoshi Sawako (1931\u20131984), who, like Akimoto, explored women's lives, was thrust into the spotlight early in her career. Although she is more famous as a novelist than as a playwright, she also wrote many plays for Kikuta Kazuo's Art Theater, as well as for other _shinpa_ and _shingeki_ companies. When she was a student, Ariyoshi's essay \"On Actors\" (Haiy\u016bron) won a prize in the contest by the journal _Theater World_ ( _Engekikai_ ). After that, she continued to write plays, which were performed at a steady pace: examples are _The Damask Drum_ ( _Aya no tsuzumi_ , a dance play), _The Empress K \u014dmy\u014d_ ( _K \u014dmy\u014d k\u014dg\u014d_, first performed by the Literary Theater in 1962), _Precious Flower_ ( _K \u014dka_, Art Theater, 1963), _Arita River_ ( _Aritagawa_ , Art Theater, 1965), _A Time of Distrust_ ( _Fushin no toki_ , Art Theater, 1969), and _Moss Pink_ ( _Shibazakura_ , 1970). In particular, the plays _The Doctor_ ' _s Wife_ ( _Hanaoka seish \u016b no tsuma_, 1966) and _My Sleeves Not Moist from American Rain_ : _The Death of a Courtesan_ ( _Furuamerika ni sode wa nurasaji\u2014Kiy \u016b no shi_, 1962) have often been performed by _shingeki_ 's Sugimura Haruko and kabuki's Band\u014d Tamasabur\u014d.\n\nMuk\u014dda Kuniko (1929\u20131981) and Hashida Sugako (b. 1925) were television scriptwriters when television was becoming a dominant force in the entertainment industry. These two writers raised the status of those who wrote for radio and television, and because of them, the names of scriptwriters began to be listed in the credits. Muk\u014dda began as an editor but started to write for television in the 1960s, producing more than a thousand scripts, including those for such well-known television drama series as _The Seven Grandchildren_ ( _Shichinin no mago_ , TBS, 1964), _It_ ' _s Time_ ( _Jikan desu yo_ , TBS, 1971), _Daikon Blossoms_ ( _Daikon no hana_ , TBS, 1974\u20131977), and _Like the God Ashura_ ( _Ashura no gotoku_ , NHK, 1979). Muk\u014dda's works, which feature nuanced depictions of the subtle changes in women's emotional responses, as well as portray women characters who tolerate men's weaknesses, are still very popular among male viewers.\n\nHashida Sugako started writing scripts for the Sh\u014dchiku Film Company and then wrote scripts for such television series as _Gazing at Love and Death_ ( _Ai to shi o mitsumete_ , TBS, 1964). The television series that catapulted her to fame was _Oshin_ (NHK, 1983), a story about one woman's life as she progresses from rags to riches. Broadcast all over Asia, _Oshin_ became one of Japan's most famous television series. Hashida's works were based on the moral values of the past and emphasized human relations.3\n\nWOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS SINCE THE 1980S\n\nThe most recent playwright to use realistic forms of expression is Kawasaki Teruyo (b. 1946). _Praying for a Good Catch_ ( _Shioe m \u014ds\u014d_, 1978), which was based on memories of her family home in Kagoshima, received the special drama prize from the Agency for Cultural Affairs and was first performed in 1981 at the Literary Theater. Since then, she has written a series of plays about women and the problems they face in their domestic lives. These include _Nagura_ ( _Group Eight_ , 1987), _Harbor Breeze_ ( _Minato no kaze_ , 1993), and _A Strong Wind in Autumn_ ( _Nowake tatsu_ , Literary Theater, 1995).\n\nTsutsumi Harue (b. 1950), who set many of her plays in the Meiji period, received the Yomiuri Literary Prize (Drama Division) for both _Another Story of Rokumeikan_ ( _Rokumeikan ibun_ ), which received official recognition for her dramatic work from the Agency for Cultural Affairs in 1987, and _Kanadehon Hamlet_ (first performed in 1992).4 The latter work has been revived several times and was performed in New York and London in 1997 and 2001, respectively.\n\nAmong the playwrights who sought new forms of expression are Ichid\u014d Rei (b. 1957), Kisaragi Koharu (1956\u20132000), Kishida Rio (1949\u20132003), Nagai Ai (b. 1951), Watanabe Eriko (b. 1955), Tanno Kumiko (b. 1960), Y\u016b Miri (b. 1968),5 Takaizumi Atsuko (b. 1958), Iijima Sanae (b. 1963),6 and Hitsujiya Shirotama (b. 1967). Like their male counterparts in the 1980s, these women playwrights also created their own companies to perform their work.\n\nThe most remarkable of these women playwrights may be Ichid\u014d Rei, because no woman with this name exists. Instead, it is a name used for all six members of the women-only theater group Blue Bird (Aoi tori, founded in 1974). They write, direct, and perform all their plays together. _Before the Curtain with Beautiful Clouds_ ( _Utsukushii kumo no aru maku no mae_ ) was their first play; their collaboration continued until 1993. The name of the playwright itself is a pun on the phrase \"Take a bow, everyone.\"7\n\nUnlike the others, Kisaragi Koharu was not focused solely on theater work but also appeared on television and worked as a musician. She said that she formed a theater company and wrote plays with the same casualness that others might display when trying to organize a party. In 1976, she founded the student theater company Kiki, which had an immediate success with its first performance, _A Table with Romeo and Ophelia_ ( _Romeo to Ophelia no aru shokutaku_ ). Kisaragi's style was different from that of earlier movements, and since she died at an early age, her legacy is still evolving.8\n\nThe plays that probably will be regarded the most highly by future generations are those by Kishida Rio and Nagai Ai, as they are on the same level as those of today's popular male playwrights\u2014for example, Noda Hideki, Hirata Oriza, and Sakate Y\u014dji. Indeed, Kishida Rio's plays about women and the emperor system\u2014 _Thread Hell_ ( _Ito jigoku_ , 1984)9 and _Permanent Home, Temporary Lodging_ ( _Tsui no sumika, kari no yado_ , 1988)\u2014and Nagai Ai's socially incisive plays since the 1990s\u2014 _Time_ 's _Storeroom_ ( _Toki no monooki_ );10 _The Murderous Malice of Language_ ( _Ranuki no satsui_ ); her Chekhovian _The Three Hagi Sisters_ ( _Hagi-ke no san shimai_ );11 _New Light and Darkness_ ( _Shin meian_ ), a rereading of Natsume S\u014dseki's novel; _Elder Brother Returns_ ( _Ani kaeru_ ), her take on Kikuchi Kan's _Father Returns_ , which is translated in this volume; and _Men Who Want to Sing_ ( _Utawasetai otokotachi_ )\u2014seem to me to be superior to those by the male playwrights of the same generation. That the male playwrights still receive precedence is a sign of the lasting influence of patriarchy.\n\n1. Translations of Okada Yachiyo's _The Boxwood Comb_ and Hasegawa Shigure's _Rain of Ice_ ( _It \u014dri no ame_) are in M. Cody Poulton, _A Beggar_ ' _s Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900\u20131930_ (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2010), 47\u201366, 191\u2013205.\n\n2. Translated in David G. Goodman, ed., _Japanese Drama and Culture in the 1960s: The Return of the Gods_ (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1988), 121\u201375.\n\n3. Yoshie Inoue discusses film, television, and radio drama in greater detail in _Dorama kaidoku_ (Tokyo: Shakai hy\u014dronsha, 2009).\n\n4. \" _Kanadehon Hamlet_ : A Play by Tsutsumi Harue,\" intro. Faubion Bowers, trans. Faubion Bowers, David W. Griffith, and Hori Mariko, _Asian Theatre Journal_ 15, no. 2 (1998): 181\u2013229. A translation by Mari Boyd of Tsutsumi Harue's _Destination Japan_ ( _Saish \u016b mokutekichi wa Nippon_) is in _Half a Century of Japanese Theater_ , ed. Japan Playwrights Association (Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 2008), 10:198\u2013228.\n\n5. A translation by Yuasa Masako of Y\u016b Miri's _Festival for the Fish_ ( _Uo no matsuri_ ) is in _Half a Century of Japanese Theater_ , ed. Japan Playwrights Association (Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 2000), 2:121\u201361.\n\n6. A translation by Sue Herbert of Iijima Sanae and Suzuki Yumi's _Rhythm Method_ ( _H \u014d\u014dch\u014d no hininh\u014d_) is in _Half a Century of Japanese Theater_ , 2:294\u2013366.\n\n7. A translation by David G. Goodman of Ichid\u014d Rei's _Miss Toyoko_ ' _s Departure_ ( _Aoi mi wo tabeta_ ) is in _Half a Century of Japanese Theater_ , ed. Japan Playwrights Association (Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 2001), 3:102\u201328.\n\n8. \" _MORAL_ : A Play by Kisaragi Koharu,\" intro. Colleen Lanki, trans. Tsuneda Keiko and Colleen Lanki, _Asian Theatre Journal_ 21, no. 4 (2004): 119\u201376.\n\n9. A translation by Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei and Tonooka Nami of Kishida Rio's _Thread Hell_ is in _Half a Century of Japanese Theater_ , ed. Japan Playwrights Association (Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 2002), 4:174\u2013221.\n\n10. A translation by David H. Shapiro of Nagai Ai's _Time_ ' _s Storeroom_ is in _Half a Century of Japanese Theater_ , ed. Japan Playwrights Association (Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 1999), 1:180\u2013257.\n\n11. \" _The Three Hagi Sisters_ : A Modern Japanese Play by Nagai Ai,\" trans. and intro. Loren Edelson, _Asian Theatre Journal_ 21, no. 1 (2004): 1\u201398.\n\nThe war years brought many constraints to the theater world. Not only were the left-wing theater companies closed down by the government, but even Kishida Kunio and his colleagues in charge of the Literary Theater (Bungakuza), which continued its attempt to stage plays of literary merit, either foreign or Japanese, sometimes ran afoul of the authorities.\n\nThe influence of the Japanese wartime government was not merely restrictive. The Cabinet Information Office also tried to develop what it termed a new \"national drama\": \"The morality of the emerging new Japan was to be a national morality and this emphasis must be made clear in its drama. A national drama could not devote itself to pursuing artistic ends; it had to help to realize the goals set by the state.\"1\n\nKabuki troupes were sent on overseas tours,2 while _shinpa_ and _shingeki_ troupes were urged to produce wholesome and uplifting plays in tune with the necessary national \"spiritual mobilization.\" An important leader of this movement was Iizuka Tomoichir\u014d (1894\u20131983), who began his literary career as a kabuki scholar, with the aim of encouraging traveling groups within Japan. These \"mobile theater\" _shingeki_ companies did in fact succeed in visiting many small towns and villages, where live modern theater was itself a new phenomenon. Directives called for plays with small casts, minimal scenery, and scripts that were easy to understand, preferably in one act. Ironically, this activity may have helped lay the groundwork for the success of the left-leaning R\u014den (the abbreviation for Kinr\u014dsha engeki ky\u014dgikai)3 in promoting touring theaters in the early postwar period. Even though all these activities from 1940 to 1945 surely involved compromises, they did help employ those involved in the theater, as well as providing at least some hope of a brighter future.\n\nWith the end of World War II in 1945, the practitioners of theater\u2014like those in so many cultural, intellectual, political, and artistic areas important to Japan's early postwar life\u2014quickly began to seek out fresh values. For most of the theater community, the earlier period of official silence lasted for five years. On the surface, this may seem like a relatively short time, but the change in psychic distance between 1940, when most of the theaters were shut down, and the autumn of 1945 was vast indeed.\n\nAs it turned out, in many ways the issues that had faced the _shingeki_ , _shinpa_ , and other troupes and their playwrights in the 1930s had not greatly changed. The craft of acting still had to be brought to a satisfying level; problems funding theatrical troupes remained; and larger audiences had to be attracted to the theater. Between 1945 and 1960, all these concerns were addressed, many successfully.\n\nOn the whole, the practitioners of the modern theater still looked leftward politically. But this seemingly lockstep attitude eventually softened, less because of a weakening commitment to social and political causes than because of an increasing impetus toward more explicit artistic standards, often driven by audiences' expectations, which helped direct their energy away from purely political concerns.\n\nSome of this new energy can be sensed in the writings of Hijikata Yoshi, one of Osanai Kaoru's most important colleagues. Hijikata left Japan for the Soviet Union in 1933, and when he returned to Japan in 1941, he was immediately put in prison, where he remained during the war years. In an article he wrote in 1945, he stressed both the importance of developing a new enthusiasm and the need for carefully reflecting on the dark history of the war years. Like so many of his colleagues, Hijikata was determined to use every strategy to avoid returning to those attitudes so prevalent in the period often referred to as the \"dark valley\" in which so many practitioners of the theater found themselves in the 1930s.\n\nBecause the Occupation and early postwar period was a time of new possibilities for the theater, many of the prominent prewar practitioners\u2014whether playwrights, actors, or directors\u2014now sought to fulfill in new ways their careers begun in the prewar years. And perhaps unwittingly, they brought their older habits and aspirations with them, however much they wished for a clean start. It was, generally speaking, not until the first postwar generation of writers and directors came of age that the paradigms began to shift altogether.\n\nHIJIKATA YOSHI\n\nMY TWO MOTIVES FOR ADVOCATING WHAT I CALL THE \"NEW JAPAN FREE THEATER ASSOCIATION\"\n\nI would like to explain quite clearly my \"personal plan,\" which has given birth to a fanciful, and as yet not inaugurated, vision of a theatrical troupe.\n\nI recently set forth my plan in a recent issue of the _T \u014dmai shinbun_. Here I will explain my motives for advocating such a plan.\n\nNow it goes without saying that the \"theater\" that was Japan has been crushed, yet the \"troupe\" that constitutes Japanese society and those Japanese who make up the \"directors\" and \"performers\" have not all been done away with. Unlike before, they have not been driven away by other theaters. Yet in the wake of all this destruction, they now face a new epoch in which a free and fresh \"theater\" can begin again.\n\nAnd so this \"Japanese theater troupe\" and these \"Japanese directors and performers,\" willing or not, now must volunteer for this reconstruction. And in the midst of this \"theater troupe\" that is Japan, the tiny world of the Japanese theater itself and those who participate in that theater can equally look forward with happiness to their encounter with this momentous period in which we now live....\n\nAs we face this great revolution, I believe that I and my colleagues, and indeed all those who make up the world of the theater in Japan, will surely, to some degree or other, come to celebrate this new frame of mind and the position we can then put forth. Some among my friends, when they think of this new Japan now released to freedom, will carry on their work in the theater with the thought that the future awaits them; they are filled with happiness and are surely trembling with excitement. Yet others, who suddenly find themselves in a world too bright for them, will feel the dream is too dazzling, thinking that at some point or other, we will all surely awake to find ourselves back in the same dark valley as before.\n\nOther friends, who would clear away altogether those roots grown in our place of exile, forget the nature of the enthusiasm and ambition necessary for creativity in the theater, while others, aware that they themselves are somehow fellow conspirators with those criminals who brought this war about, wish in some fashion to hurry so as to somehow try to patch things over. And there are not a few, I am convinced, who, holding that same point of view, have become aware of this situation in terms of their own consciences and so vacillate between whether or not to restore the old ways of doing things all over again.\n\nAnd there must be others among my friends who, in this period when a theater for the new Japan can now be created, have a correct and clear cognizance of the situation and who possess enthusiasm and conviction, hoping to plunge on ahead, yet who at the same time still remain filled with cheerless thoughts, finding themselves still bound by those chains of duty and their debt to the dark days of that past that formed their destiny.\n\nFROM HIJIKATA YOSHI, \"SHIN NIHON JIY\u016a ENGEKI KY\u014cKAI\" (NEW JAPAN FREE THEATER ASSOCIATION), IN _NASU NO YOBANASHI_ ( _EVENING TALKS IN NASU_ ) (TOKYO: KAPPA SHOB\u014c, 1947), 49\u201351.\n\nSENDA KOREYA\n\nSince before the war, the task that the _shingeki_ movement has pursued concerned the establishment in Japan of the kind of drama known in the West since the Renaissance\u2014what in Japan we would term \"modern drama.\" At the least, it can be said that such drama has followed a path that emphasizes such themes as the emancipation of mankind and ideas of democracy. It was just for such reasons that the movement found itself so terribly oppressed before and during the war. We are now heirs to this tradition of _shingeki_ , and as we progress forward, I believe that we should be able to accommodate ourselves to our contemporary society in fine fashion.\n\nFive years have now passed since the war has ended. It seems that once again, at a time when signs of a reaction can be observed that may allow us to attempt to recover from the confusions of this postwar period, we must now tread the path established by the traditions of our movement in the prewar period and make straight the distortions brought about by our unlucky history. We must, I believe, while always adopting a forward-looking stance, seek in our theater to deepen our fundamental knowledge and our theoretical understanding.\n\nNevertheless, because our _shingeki_ is a form of theater, it must also serve to entertain its audiences. Indeed, perhaps the most obvious distortion in our movement has been the fact that so much of our theater has not been entertaining enough. Perhaps the weakest point in our movement so far is the fact that we have failed to create the tradition of an art of the playwright or of the performer capable of truly entertaining an audience. In fact, we have thoughtlessly denied or and thoughtlessly copied the methods employed by our popular theater, kabuki, and the rest. So in such a situation, surely nothing new and fresh can be brought to life. No doubt it is very important that we study the arts of the past, but what we must now try to create is a more \"modern\" kind of pleasure, a pleasure that thrives on the liberation of humanity, a pleasure that is truly democratic.\n\nFROM SENDA KOREYA, \"SHINGEKI WA TANOSHIMU MONO\" ( _SHINGEKI_ IS TO BE ENJOYED), IN _SENDA KOREYA ENGEKI-RONSH \u016a_ ( _COLLECTED ESSAYS ON THE THEATER BY SENDA KOREYA_ ) (TOKYO: MIRAISHA 1980), 2:13\u201314.\n\nSenda Koreya (1904\u20131994), himself intermittently under arrest and unable to remain active during the war years, used his time to write a still-valued book on the training of actors and laid his plans to establish a new theater company, the Actors' Theater (Haiy\u016bza), which, by its very name, revealed Senda's deepening consciousness that the performance aspects of theater, whatever the politics involved, were crucial to its success.\n\nIn an essay he wrote in 1950, Senda stated that he came to realize that the success of the theater rested in a variety of spheres; that despite the importance to him of social activism, the audiences, whatever their prior interest in political and social enlightenment, justifiably sought pleasure and entertainment in any theatrical event. For Senda, this understanding seemed to develop not from any abstract adherence to a set of ideals or principles but from his own experience.\n\nSenda made plans to begin his new company in 1944, and his first public performances at the Actors' Theater were held in 1946, setting a new model for the activities of a progressive _shingeki_ theater troupe. Senda's school for training actors, the Haiy\u016bza Training Institute, was perhaps the most influential organization for training actors in the whole history of _shingeki_.\n\nIn some ways like Osanai before him, Senda was convinced that the theater was one way to provide the kind of \"entertainment\" he felt his audiences wished and deserved, so he set out to produce many of the world's classics at the Actors' Theater. Accordingly, audiences in the early postwar years saw productions of such plays as Pierre de Beaumarchais's _The Marriage of Figaro_ and works by William Shakespeare and Albert Camus, among others. After the mid-1950s, Senda became more and more interested in Bertolt Brecht and staged a number of his plays.\n\nUnlike Osanai, however, Senda placed in his repertory several plays by established Japanese playwrights, such as Tanaka Chikao, who joined the troupe in 1961, and encouraged important new postwar authors and playwrights, such as Abe K\u014db\u014d.\n\nBy the 1950s, three theater repertory companies dominated the field, each favoring particular playwrights. The Literary Theater continued to present plays without any strong ideological coloring, staging many of Mishima Yukio's plays until 1963, when, because of a dispute, he left the company. As noted, Senda's Actors' Theater produced a mixture of classics and avant-garde experiments, notably those of Tanaka Chikao and Abe K\u014db\u014d. The Mingei troupe (People's Art Theater) was founded in 1950 by a group that included the distinguished actor Takizawa Osamu, who became famous for his performances in Arthur Miller's _Death of a Salesman_. The Mingei troupe emphasized plays of social significance and often performed Kinoshita Junji's plays. Taken together, these companies provided three sites where the whole spectrum of theatrical and dramatic possibilities could find a home.\n\nAlthough these productions were usually staged in Tokyo, the development of the labor union\u2013related organization commonly referred to as R\u014den offered inexpensive tickets to its members. Under R\u014den's sponsorship, productions of modern theater now toured the country, often performing in provincial cities where little live modern theater had been seen. The purpose of touring these productions was to provide opportunities for ordinary workers to participate in their country's culture. Even though the motivations for such activities was at least partially political, the ticket buyers soon came to comprise a preponderance of white-collar workers, eager after the deprivations of the war years to experience European high culture. This sustained interest in relatively nonpolitical drama helped broaden the public's taste and lessen to a certain extent the public perception of _shingeki_ as an exclusively leftist phenomenon. This need to attract larger audiences thus branched off in some unexpected directions. Indeed, among the most admired productions during this period were Japanese productions of two American plays: Arthur Miller's _Death of a Salesman_ and Tennessee Williams's _A Streetcar Named Desire._\n\nGiven the fact that so many of the theater practitioners in 1945 were veterans from prewar days, it should not be surprising that the postwar theater productions began with Anton Chekhov. In 1945, as a kind of ceremonial gesture, a group of major theater figures came together to create a new joint production of _The Cherry Orchard_. The postwar theater thus began by returning to its Western roots. The increasing exposure of postwar audiences to the best of Western theater of all periods\u2014from Shakespeare and Moli\u00e8re to Sartre and Brecht\u2014brought new sources of inspiration to Japanese playwrights active during the period. With this came a new consciousness among Japanese directors and playwrights of important ways in which Western classical theater continued to influence contemporary theater in Europe and the United States. Senda himself went so far as to call Shakespeare the father of modern world drama, more important to Japanese playwrights than even Zeami or Chikamatsu.\n\nFrom this consciousness grew a new challenge. A number of early postwar dramatists now began to feel a need to devise strategies capable of integrating at least some elements from the Japanese past, either historical or artistic or both, into what was a predominantly realistic Western-style frame employed in early postwar Japanese drama. The long national theatrical genius for presentational theater, partly buried for half a century or more, now, at least tentatively, began to reassert itself. The first step in these attempts required acknowledging just how difficult it would be to bridge this gap. In 1963, Kinoshita Junji, himself actively involved in such experiments, wrote persuasively about those challenges.\n\nMost of the playwrights represented in part III of this anthology sought, through one means or another, to at least partially transcend or bypass such a purely realistic dramaturgy. But the tensions that these attempts provoked were not fully resolved until some of the next generation's playwrights began writing. Part IV shows that the work of the avant-garde and its use of presentational dramaturgy could lead to still more possibilities and to create openings where certain elements from the classical theater could enter again, often fractured or transformed, thereby creating a new and striking dramaturgical mix. Nevertheless, the years between 1945 and 1965 marked a high point in the quality of dramas largely inspired by Western models, and the work of the best playwrights of the period represents the development of a mature and responsible Japanese theater.\n\nSEEKING A TOTALITY\n\nOf all the plays included in part III, the closest to the model of the well-made play is _A Woman's Life_ ( _Onna no issh \u014d_), by the dramatist Morimoto Kaoru (1912\u20131946). Morimoto began his playwriting career as a disciple of Kishida Kunio and wrote a number of promising plays in the prewar period. He officially joined the staff of the Literary Theater in 1941, where his energy and resourcefulness helped steer the company through difficult times with the censors. His most important work, _A Woman_ ' _s Life_ , remains his most lasting contribution.\n\nWritten and staged in 1945, just before the end of the war, this long play examines the life of a woman who has suffered through the endless political and social vicissitudes of the twentieth century. When the war ended, Morimoto rewrote the play, removing the required patriotic emphasis that appeared from time to time in the original script and replacing those sections with new passages expressing an enthusiasm for the new freedoms of the emerging postwar culture.4 Already ill with tuberculosis, Morimoto died a year later, but this play, in various guises and adaptations, went on to become one of the most popular and beloved plays of the entire postwar period. The text is fully in the realistic mode and concentrates on the emotional life and search for spiritual integrity by its heroine, Kei, a character who provided a defining role for the popular actress Sugimura Haruko.\n\nTHE PAST IN THE PRESENT\n\nKinoshita Junji (1914\u20132006) was another playwright who, as the postwar era continued, searched for an expanded dramaturgy. While many of his plays, such as his drama concerning the Richard Sorge spy case, _A Japanese Named Otto_ ( _Otto to oyoberu Nihonjin_ , 1962), are basically realistic, others sometimes mix naturalistic scenes with more poetic interludes. Kinoshita also wrote a number of experimental plays, in which he attempted to mine material from Japanese history and folklore. In his dialogue, he uses a mixture of the poetic and realistic in order to bridge the gap between historical modes of theatrical expression and present-day speech.\n\nOf those experiments, still the most famous and beloved is Kinoshita's one-act play _Twilight Crane_ ( _Y \u016bzuru_, 1949), in which he re-creates material from a folktale while maintaining in the text the kind of social awareness that had long played an important part in his own personal convictions.\n\nKinoshita continued to write realistic plays of social concern, but the problems of integrating the classical theater's language and dramaturgy continued to preoccupy him until the end of his life. In that regard, the language and dramaturgy of his lengthy play _Requiem on the Great Meridian_ ( _Shigosen no matsuri_ ), first staged in 1977 and frequently revived, was the result of his thinking through this problem. Based on incidents from the great medieval classic _The Tales of the Heike_ ( _Heike monogatari_ ), Kinoshita's attempt to reintroduce the Japanese language on the stage, using elements of Buddhist-inspired chant and other devices, here reached its peak.\n\nKINOSHITA JUNJI\n\nGenerally speaking, all the speeches in old European plays\u2014for example, original Shakespeare\u2014are written logically. As we stated earlier, even if you were to analyze the text with the _shingeki_ realism that we are considering now, the meaning would all hang together. Admittedly, expressions are in poetic form, and there are plenty of exaggerated expressions that one does not find in so-called realistic plays, but these can be seen as artistic exaggerations of genuine feelings. Providing, then, that you have the skills to express them on a large scale, you can imbue it all with realism.\n\nThus when the modern theater movement arose\u2014on account of the nineteenth-century theater management and the star system that grew to accompany it\u2014in order to restore a theater that had grown distant from real lives, it was only natural that its repertory contain Shakespeare plays, written long ago, alongside modern plays. Shakespeare and Moli\u00e8re wrote realistic plays that even we Japanese can see are not meaningless nonsense.\n\nIn Japan, however, _shingeki_ cannot incorporate kabuki into its repertory in the same way. It is very hard to follow logically even the seven- and five-syllable metered speeches of Mokuami, who wrote from the end of the Tokugawa period into the Meiji period and whose work is said to be realistic kabuki....\n\n... These logical speeches [in Shakespeare and elsewhere] are written in verse form, so intonation is added when they are recited. I suppose they are declaimed, really. This intonation is also logical, and thus as the actor emphasizes one place and weakens another, his personal character comes into relief. When he imparts this personality to the audience, what person does he do so as? It is essentially his own understanding, thought processes, and sentiments that the actor is expressing. With most kabuki speeches... it is impossible to say where, logically, emphasis should be applied.... There are, therefore, very many elements in kabuki that are quite unrelated to the realism of _shingeki_.\n\nI seem to have declared that it is only the actors who are responsible, but because of the way that historically the art of the Japanese _shingeki_ actor is cut off from classical theater, I think that this sort of thing is inevitable.... Playwrights, on contrast, should be able to learn methodologically, thinking of the Western tradition as a tradition that they themselves should absorb. In other words, I believe that it should be possible for playwrights, unlike actors, to tune into a world tradition without distinguishing between the Japanese tradition, the European, and so on.\n\nFROM KINOSHITA JUNJI, \"ON _SHINGEKI_ ,\" IN _REQUIEM ON THE GREAT MERIDIAN_ (TOKYO: NAN'UN-DO, 2000), 267\u201368, 270\u201371.\n\nA HEIGHTENED REALISM\n\nAkimoto Matsuyo (1911\u20132001) began her career as a playwright after the war and relatively late in her life, but with the production of her second play, _Mourning Clothes_ ( _Reifuku_ ), in 1949, she began a distinguished career in the theater, with her plays staged by such important directors as Senda Koreya and Ninagawa Yukio. As Morimoto Kaoru does in _A Woman's Life_ , Akimoto concentrates on interpersonal family relationships. In the play, although societal pressures do help tailor individual motivations, the edge in her dialogue moves the larger thrust of the drama in the direction of what David Goodman identified as its deep theme, \"death and the inability to mourn it,\" on both a personal and a national level.5 In some of her later plays, notably _Kaison, the Priest of Hitachi_ ( _Hitachi Kaison_ , 1964), the dialogue moves even further away from prior realistic models, using a shamaness to introduce a kind of dark poetry that Akimoto employs to present her critical vision of the empty spiritual values that she found in Japan's postwar culture.\n\nA SURREAL BLURRING OF REALITY\n\nAbe K\u014db\u014d (1924\u20131993) is better known in the West as a novelist than as a playwright, but throughout his career he wrote a number of plays paralleling in style and ambition the themes and concerns found in his often surrealistic novels. Eventually, in order to carry out and refine his theatrical vision still further, Abe founded his own theater company, the Abe K\u014db\u014d Studio, in 1973. Even his early plays, such as _The Uniform_ ( _Seifuku_ ), written in 1949, already reveal an ambition to break through the received model of the naturalistic play. Political and philosophical issues are presented with irony and a certain ideological bent; indeed, at that time, Abe was still a member of the Japan Communist Party, which was legalized after World War II. Brought up partially in Manchuria, Abe had the ability to observe, and critique, Japanese society using a personal intellectual and ideological framework developed outside the culture. This technique certainly can be seen in the point of view, both sardonic and sharp, that he constructs in his often puzzling and gnomic texts, here represented by his short drama _The Man Who Turned into a Stick_ ( _B \u014d ni natta otoko_).\n\nSTRATEGIES OF TRANSCENDENCE\n\nTanaka Chikao (1905\u20131995), like Morimoto Kaoru, got his start with Kishida Kunio and the Literary Theater, first as a director and then as a promising playwright. In 1951, he joined Senda Koreya's Actors' Theater, and in the early postwar period, he wrote a number of lyrical plays, often colored by his deepening attraction to the Catholic faith. No doubt, the most famous of these works is _The Head of Mary_ ( _Maria no kubi_ , 1959), which chronicles in poetic fashion the psychic and spiritual life in Nagasaki after the atomic bomb. His play _The Plover_ ( _Chidori_ , 1960) explores some of the same concerns, played out in a lyrical and sometimes dreamlike setting.\n\nTanaka's long attachment to French literature found its apogee in his long one-act play _Education_ ( _Ky \u014diku_, 1953), which actually is set in France. Few Japanese playwrights, with the exception of Mishima Yukio, have attempted to write entire plays involving only foreign characters. The establishment of this alternative space, plus his skillful use of a highly poetic and lyrical stage language, allowed Tanaka to portray the urgent need for humankind to grapple with the sometimes ambiguous realities of religious sensibility. In that regard, the play is both ambitious and surprisingly successful.\n\nEach of these playwrights managed, therefore, to expand the parameters of dramaturgy in order to find some means of moving away from the received Western model of the realistic play. In this regard, we should mention one of the most prolific playwrights\u2014and in so many genres\u2014Mishima Yukio (1925\u20131970), and his efforts to move _shingeki_ dramaturgy away from a representational toward a presentational style.\n\nLike Abe, Mishima is better known in the West as a novelist, but his playwriting, always much admired in Japan, continued for nearly his entire career. Both Abe and Mishima were younger than the other playwrights cited in this part of the anthology, and their careers as playwrights started at the beginning of the postwar period when they were still developing their skills and talents for the stage.\n\nMany of Mishima's popular plays were written for _shingeki_ troupes, including perhaps his most popular work for Japanese audiences, _Rokumeikan_ (1962), a sort of Meiji melodrama written for the famous and beloved Sugimura Haruko, who also performed the leading role in Morimoto Kaoru's _A Woman's Life_ , as noted earlier. Both were staged at the Literary Theater. In subsequent productions, the leading role was performed as well by the revered _shinpa_ actress Mizutani Yaeko. Yet even in these relatively realistic plays, Mishima uses a highly poetic, even unnatural, dialogue that sometimes seems to collide with his otherwise realistic dramaturgy. Like Kinoshita Junji, Mishima also experimented with introducing certain elements of classical theater into the dramaturgy of _shingeki_ , notably in his series of modern n\u014d plays. Mishima's writing for the kabuki theater is discussed in part VI.\n\nIn sum, it seems clear, at least in hindsight, that even during the period covered in part III, dramatists often sought to incorporate some elements of the past\u2014historically, linguistically, or theatrically. In addition, I believe, these tentative experiments were conducted well within the framework of the possibilities available in current world theater dramaturgy at the time. In this regard, many of these early postwar writers were unwittingly echoing the initial efforts made several generations earlier by Osanai Kaoru, whose final project, unrealized because of his untimely death, was to be a staging with modern actors of a Chikamatsu play from the eighteenth century.\n\nThe next generation of playwrights deconstructed and reworked these earlier models. Even though many more senior or commercially inclined dramatists continued to create variations on the well-made play, the avant-garde writers\u2014Betsuyaku Minoru, Kara J\u016br\u014d, Shimizu Kunio, and the others\u2014produced something startlingly, and excitingly, different.\n\nJ. THOMAS RIMER\n\n1. Brian Powell, _Japan_ ' _s Modern Theatre: A Century of Continuity and Change_ (London: Japan Library, 2002), 118. His chapter \"Theatre Mobilized\" provides the most comprehensive treatment of this period in English.\n\n2. James R. Brandon offers extensive research on the activities of wartime kabuki troupes, as well as valuable information on some aspects of _shingeki_ , in _Kabuki_ ' _s Forgotten War, 1931\u20131945_ (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2009).\n\n3. The model for R\u014den goes back to the German Volksb\u00fche (People's Theater movement), founded in the 1890s to make subscription tickets available at reduced prices.\n\n4. For some telling details on the history of the play, see Guohe Zheng, \"Reflections _of_ and _on_ the Times: Morimoto Kaoru's _A Woman_ ' _s Life_ ,\" in _Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance_ , ed. David Jortner, Keiko I. McDonald, and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006), 189\u2013203.\n\n5. David G. Goodman, \"The Quest for Salvation in Japan's Modern History: Four Plays by Akimoto Matsuyo,\" in _Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance_ , ed. Jortner, McDonald, and Wetmore, 51\u201363.\n_A WOMAN'S LIFE_\n\nMORIMOTO KAORU\n\nTRANSLATED BY GUOHE ZHENG\n\nMorimoto Kaoru, _A Woman's Life_ , directed by Inui Ichir\u014d, Bungakuza, June 1964.\n\nA _Woman_ ' _s Life_ ( _Onna no issh \u014d_), a long play in five acts and seven scenes, which Morimoto Kaoru (1912\u20131946) finished in 1945, has a complex history. The first performances were staged in April of that year by the Literary Theater (Bungakuza) and directed by the playwright Kubota Mantar\u014d. The play was to have been staged at the Tsukiji Little Theater (Tsukiji sh\u014dgekij\u014d), but because the building had been destroyed by the Allied bombings of Tokyo, another site was selected. The war ended only months later. According to Guohe Zheng, in early 1946, while ill with tuberculosis, Morimoto rewrote the first and last acts, among other changes, in order \"to make the play compatible with the postwar political atmosphere.\"\n\nThe role of Kei was performed by Sugimura Haruko (1909\u20131997), one of the leading actresses of her time, and she was so popular that she was chosen for the role again in numerous revivals of the play. Spanning, as the play does, almost a half century, from the 1920s through the early postwar period, the role of Kei provides several opportunities for the actress playing it to show various facets of the character.\n\nBecause each act takes place at a different point in the narrative, we are able to include one act here, as it is relatively self-contained.\n\nCharacters\n\nKEI, the estranged wife of TSUTSUMI SHINTAR\u014c, now the pillar of the Tsutsumi Trading Company\n\nSHINTAR\u014c, the elder son of the Tsutsumi family, now separated from KEI\n\nCHIIE, the daughter of KEI and SHINTAR\u014c\n\nEIJI, SHINTAR\u014c's brother and the object of KEI's secret love before her marriage to SHINTAR\u014c\n\nSH\u014cSUKE, the uncle of EJI and SHINTAR\u014c on their deceased mother's side and a consultant for the Tsutsumi Trading Company\n\nFUMI, the younger daughter of the Tsutsumi family\n\nACT 4\n\nA midautumn afternoon in 1928.\n\n_The setting sun of a late autumn afternoon is shining on the bushes in the garden._ CHIE, _now twenty-two years old, sits on the veranda staring absentmindedly at the garden._ EIJI, _forty-three years old, enters. He searches inside a briefcase in the corner of the room_.\n\nEIJI: Chie-chan, what are you looking at?\n\nCHIE: Nothing.\n\nEIJI: You seem to be staring into the air.\n\nCHIE: Really? Sometimes I find myself doing that. I don't feel like doing anything, or thinking about anything.\n\nEIJI: The atmosphere in this house is somehow depressing. The autumn weather doesn't seem to be the only reason for this chilly feeling. I feel like I've fallen to the bottom of a pond. The water in some ponds can be too muddy for you to see the bottom. The water here, however, is clear, but still I can't see the bottom. I wonder when the house became like this.\n\nCHIE: I don't know. But it's been like this ever since I began to remember things.\n\nEIJI: It wasn't like this before. Your late grandpa and grandma both liked festival parties, and the whole house was always filled with laughter. Your father liked painting and was always trying to grab someone in the house to be his model. Aunt Fumi wanted to study in Europe after she graduated from music school. Neither your father nor Aunt Fumi has turned out to be any more than a mediocre artist. In any case, the house wasn't like this before.\n\nCHIE: Wow! Really!? It's hard for me even to imagine that this house was like that once upon a time.\n\nEIJI: But times have changed. At that time, my biggest dream was to go to China and become a bandit.\n\nCHIE: Well, Uncle Eiji, you did go to China, didn't you? That means that you're the only one in the house who realized the dream of your younger days.\n\nEIJI: Well, I'm not sure you can say that I've realized the dream of my younger days.\u2014Does your father still paint these days?\n\nCHIE: Sometimes.... When his old habit occasionally reasserts itself, he paints things like potatoes or carrots. But I don't think he paints because he wants to. It seems to me that he does it only because he doesn't have the urge to quit a habit from the past.\n\nEIJI: He paints potatoes or carrots? I see.... There are indeed all sorts of ways of living life in this world, aren't there?\n\nCHIE: Uncle Eiji, where do you live in China?\n\nEIJI: Well, I've lived in different places. At first I was in Beijing. In recent years, I've been in Shanghai. I also lived in Canton and Wuchang for a long time.\n\nCHIE: What kind of jobs did you do when you moved around from place to place?\n\nEIJI: Well, I've done all kinds of jobs. I was once an engineer at a cement company. I also worked as a kind of a coolie. China is really an extraordinary country. But I'll tell you about that some other time.\u2014Have your father and mother been separated for a long time?\n\nCHIE: Uncle Eiji, you don't talk much about yourself, asking only about our family.\n\nEIJI: That's not true. But people grow tired of talking about their own affairs because they know too much about them. So they naturally are curious about other people's lives. I've come back to my own home after a long absence only to find that the master and the mistress of the house are separated. I really don't know where I should stay and settle down....\n\nCHIE: Well, even though I've been living in this house since I was born, I still have never had a sense of being settled.\n\nEIJI: Whom do you like better, your father or your mother?\n\nCHIE: I don't know. When I'm with Mother, I feel sorry for Father; when I'm with Father, I feel sorry for Mother.\n\nEIJI: Does your father walk to work at the Yokohama International Institute every day from his apartment?\n\n(KEI, _forty years old now, enters. In contrast to the active and ambitious impression she gave in act 3, she appears to be calm but somehow inapproachable_.)\n\nKEI ( _Reading a newspaper while coming in_ ): \"The Chinese Government Bans Imports of Japanese Goods...\" \"China Trade at a Halt...\" All Japanese doing business with China will soon be bankrupt, I'm afraid, one after another.\n\nEIJI: Well, the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Zhengting,1 takes the Tanaka cabinet's military intervention in Shandong2 to be a sign of Japan's territorial ambition in China. So more than likely, the situation will stay this way for some time to come.\n\nKEI: Is that so? But in the Jinan incident,3 Japanese properties were vandalized, Japanese nationals were attacked. So doing business was totally out of the question. So why is it that they still think Japan has territorial ambitions in China? The Chinese government has ordered the Chinese Trading Association to register all the goods imported from Japan, even goods under completed contracts. I also heard that transportation by Japanese vessels has been banned. The Nisshin Steamship Transportation's ships are running empty on the Yangtze River.\n\n(CHIE, _who was silently listening, stands up and is about to leave_.)\n\nKEI: Chie-chan, where are you going?\n\nCHIE ( _Without looking back_ ): Nowhere in particular. I'm not interested in talking about China. ( _Goes out._ )\n\nKEI:... That child has gotten thinner recently.... Or is it just me?\n\nEIJI: Older Sister, you and Chie-chan are like the sun and the moon. Wherever you are, Chie-chan is not; wherever she is, you are not.\n\nKEI: It's really hard to raise a child. Some parents have five or even six children and take them all to walk on the street as if that were the most natural thing in the world. Every time I see that, I can't help but be amazed. I wonder how they can look so casual, with so many children.\n\nEIJI: Well, if you take it too seriously, there'll be no end to your difficulties. But if you take it easy, things will take care of themselves and life will go on. Just look at me. My Chinese can hardly get me around without difficulty in China, but I married a Chinese woman and have four daughters with her. I never felt it particularly hard to raise children. But perhaps that's because I've been too busy with my work outside to worry about things at home. For that reason, when I do come home occasionally, we all cherish those precious times together.\n\nKEI: Well, my case is the opposite of yours. The busier I find myself with company work, the further away Chie-chan gets from me. Since the two of us have been living apart, I occasionally have tried to get closer to her when I do find time, but unfortunately things never go the way I intend.\n\nEIJI: But that child seems to understand your circumstances and feelings quite well.\n\nKEI: Exactly. She knows me better than I even know myself. But still she can't stand it. She can't bear the way I look at things, but she tries hard not to betray her feelings about me. It's hard to see her trying so hard.\n\nEIJI: If you care so much about Chie-chan, why don't you get back together with my brother?\n\nKEI: It wasn't I who wanted to separate. After all, this is his house. If I had wanted to separate, I would have been the one who had moved out. Besides, he doesn't want me to move out of this house, either\u2014the fact is that the trading company would be in trouble without me.\n\nEIJI: Is my brother happy with his life now, I wonder?\n\nKEI: Yes, being the person he is, he seems very happy. He had wanted to become a language teacher since he was young, and his job now appears to be fulfilling to him. The International Institute is a school for Indians and Chinese living in Japan. Besides language, he also is teaching Japanese history there.\n\nEIJI: How is he managing his meals?\n\nKEI: He signed a contract with a nearby restaurant and has his breakfast and dinner delivered every day. Once a week, I go and clean his apartment and bring back his laundry.\n\nEIJI: Well, that's a rather elaborate arrangement for living separately. So, you also give him money to help him cover his expenses?\n\nKEI: He's doing his best. Whenever he has difficulties, I have no trouble helping him out.\n\nEIJI: How do _you_ feel about this? Are _you_ satisfied with this way of living?\n\nKEI: Well, satisfied or not... I've never thought of it that way... I've tried my best, and this is the way things have turned out. That's all. It's fine with me.\n\nEIJI:...\n\n(SH\u014cSUKE, _fifty-two, comes in_.)\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: Hello.\n\nKEI: Hello, Uncle Sh\u014dsuke. Welcome.\n\nEIJI: Are you on your way home, Uncle Sh\u014dsuke?\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: Yes. Oh, I'm tired. I get tired very easily these days. I don't know whether it's my age or it's because the wind in the floating world is getting rougher.\n\nEIJI: I think it's because you've been working too hard to make money. The time might have come for you to retire.\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: Yes, I would love to retire now. But I haven't found someone to take over yet.\n\nEIJI ( _Laughing_ ): How about me?\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: If you would be willing to take my place, I wouldn't have any complaints.\n\nEIJI ( _Getting somewhat disconcerted_ ): Oh, we'd better forget about that. Nobody knows when I'd abandon the company and disappear again. Hahahahaha.\u2014By the way, Uncle Sh\u014dsuke, you've remained stubbornly single all your life. Have you ever had any second thoughts about it?\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: Nope. Not really.\u2014But I've been really surprised that my small Jersey Company has also been plagued by labor unrest just like everywhere else.\n\nKEI: My goodness...\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: The world is going to the dogs: the strikes at the City Tram, the labor dispute in the mining industry, banks being robbed. It's like the pandemonium at the end of the Edo period. Where on earth is Japan heading, I wonder?\n\nEIJI: Well, it's heading where it's supposed to.\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: What do you mean, \"where it's supposed to?\"\n\nEIJI: Well, I wish I knew.\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: Come on. Don't talk as if you know it all. It's irritating to me these days to hear that kind of talk.\n\nKEI: Really. If things keep going the way they are now, soon our Tsutsumi Trading Company will also go to \"where it's supposed to.\"\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: I suppose. Chiang Kai-shek has finally come back to power after driving out the communists, with Japanese support. But if things keep going this way, the Nationalist Party will soon collapse after all, in spite of its success in overcoming all its earlier difficulties.\n\nKEI: And in spite of its close relationship with Japan, established by Sun Yat-sen.4\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: The United States is behind Wang Zhengting. As soon as Wang took office as the Chinese foreign minister, the Americans began to talk to Prime Minister Tanaka in an intimidating manner. The Americans have not been popular among the Chinese so far. But now they are trying to curry favor with them and encourage anti-Japanese feelings by giving up some of the U.S.'s special interests in China, those no longer valuable, politically and economically, as in their returning Weihaiwei.5\n\nKEI: I don't quite understand what you're talking about. But who on earth is running Chinese politics, anyway?\n\nEIJI: Well, no matter who is in office, as long as it's oligarchic politics, as we've seen up to this day, it will be business as usual. The only ones who stand to lose are the ordinary people, who are exploited every time something happens.\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: One thing bad about China is that it always tries to use the power of one foreign country to hold back that of another. It has been like that since the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War. The United States, Great Britain, Russia. It's so disgusting.\n\nEIJI: That's right. China must be returned to the hands of the Chinese. All foreign countries involved with China must take their hands off China. Chiang Kai-shek committed a huge blunder in chasing true revolutionaries like Chen Youren6 and Borodin7 into Soviet Russia.\n\nKEI: I don't agree with you, I'm afraid. China can't maintain its independence unless it joins hands with the country most deeply involved with it.\u2014And that country is none other than Japan. ( _About to leave._ )\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: If you are going to make tea, I don't need any.\n\nKEI: No, I should at least get some tea for you. ( _Exits._ )\n\nEIJI ( _Watching her leave_ ): If I remember correctly, she should be three years younger than I... But she looks older than her age.\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: Neither you nor I can even hope to do what she has accomplished in her work. To be prematurely aged for her, I should say, is like a soldier's medal of honor for bravery.\n\nEIJI: Maybe you're right. But isn't she going a little too far?\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: Well, that woman was put in a position where she had no choice but to do what she has done. It's extremely unfair to her to make her do the work when she is needed and then blame _her_ for the effect that the work had on her.\n\nEIJI: But she used to be an idealistic dreamer, a sensible girl. I can't help but feel that I'm looking at an entirely different person now.\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: All of us, when we're young, are idealistic dreamers and full of sensibility. But we get old, our sensibilities dry up and we become completely pragmatic and worldly. What's remarkable about this woman is that she, of her own will, abandoned her dreams and emotions. Moreover, she has never indicated even once how she felt about her decision. That's truly remarkable.\n\nEIJI: I'm amazed, Uncle Sh\u014dsuke. You've never believed that the world has anything that's beautiful, pleasant, or happy, but you don't seem to hold back in praising her.\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: You may say what you want. It's the first time in many years that you've seen again the woman you were once in love with. Did you expect a quieter, more romantic meeting than this? Or do you take pleasure in seeing the woman, who once abandoned you, abandoned by her husband? Whichever is the case, you are wrong, misguided, and pitiful.\n\nEIJI: Well, neither is the case. I'm already more than forty years old and not a person so romantic as to be obsessed forever with my youthful dreams. Still, when I look at the way she is now, I simply can't help but feel disappointed.\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: If you knew who turned her into such a disappointing person, you would probably not feel that way any more.\n\nEIJI: Is there... such a person? Who is it, then?\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: It was your mother and _I_ myself.\n\nEIJI: My mother and...? But why did you do that?\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: When I suggested to your mother that she should let Shintar\u014d take over the family business, she was convinced that Shintar\u014d simply couldn't do the job by himself. And so she wanted this woman to marry Shintar\u014d and help him with the business. In your mother's mind, she was giving this woman a special favor. But she didn't consider how the girl felt about the matter and simply made her do it out of her egoistic love for her own child. Soon afterward, I found out that the marriage was not the girl's wish. I didn't say anything about it because she herself never said anything.\n\nEIJI: I see... Is that what happened?\n\nSH\u014cSUKE:... That woman never revealed a trace of it, of course. She just worked quietly from that day to this. I'm fully aware that as a human being, the woman has her share of shortcomings. But she's perhaps not aware of them because she has devoted her entire self, body and soul, to the battle of her life. These shortcomings are merely the by-product of that battle.\n\nEIJI: I see... I knew _nothing_ about _any_ of this.\n\n(KEI _brings in the tea._ )\n\nKEI: Here's some tea. It's not very high quality, though.\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: Oh, that's fine.\n\nEIJI: Thanks.\n\n(EIJI _silently stares into_ KEI _'s face_.)\n\nKEI: Is there something on my face?\n\nEIJI: Oh, no... Hahaha...\n\n(EIJI _turns his face away from_ KEI.)\n\nKEI: Uncle Sh\u014dsuke, could I speak to Eiji alone for a moment?\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: Right now?\n\nKEI: Yes.\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: That's sort of a rude request. I'll excuse myself, then.\n\nKEI: I'm sorry if I'm chasing you away.\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: No problem. I'll go upstairs to get some sun. When you finish, just yell. ( _Exits._ )\n\nEIJI: What is it, Older Sister? We're together every day. Why do you, all of a sudden... ?\n\nKEI: Eiji, I meant to ask you what business brought you back to Japan this time, but I haven't been able to.\n\nEIJI: Well, no business. As I told you earlier, I just want to take it easy and relax for a while.\n\nKEI: How can you afford to leave your wife and four children alone in China and come all the way to Japan to relax by yourself?\n\nEIJI: Faraway as it may be, Japan is a place I will come back to sooner or later. I can't spend all my time with my wife and children.\u2014They also like to have some time by themselves around the house, without me nagging at them.\n\nKEI: Right now, China is a place where no one knows when or where war will break out. Can your wife and children afford to have you away at such a time?\n\nEIJI: Well, this sounds like an interrogation. Is that what you want to talk to me about?\n\nKEI ( _Ignoring him_ ): Where did you go last night?\n\nEIJI: I don't have to tell you that. I'm not a child and have to ask you for permission for what I do.\n\nKEI: No, you _must_ tell me. As the wife of the heir of the Tsutsumi family, I have to know what my husband's relatives are doing. If my husband were home, he would have asked you the same question. So please tell me.\n\nEIJI: Well, in that case, I'll simply refuse to answer your question.\n\nKEI: So you don't want us to know what you've been doing in China. And you don't want the world to know about the business that brought you back from China this time. Is that right?\n\nEIJI: I'll let you figure it out. At any rate, I don't see why I need to discuss with you what I do.\n\nKEI:... I see... I have no choice then.\u2014There are some visitors at the gate who want to see you. ( _Taking out two business cards and throwing them down on the table._ ) Please go and meet them yourself.\n\nEIJI ( _Startled and suddenly looking around for a split second_ ): Older Sister, did you tell them that I'm here?\n\nKEI: Before I came back to this room, I asked myself whether I should have told them otherwise. But listening to what you have just said, I'm convinced I did the right thing.\n\nEIJI: Damn it! Do you think you understand politics? ( _Standing up and trying to go down to the garden. Two men slowly pace across it._ EIJI _returns to the living room._ ) Older Sister, just a moment ago, Uncle Sh\u014dsuke told me something about you that I didn't know before. For a second, it really shocked me. I was genuinely touched by the bittersweet story, but only for a second. So, you... you can sell even me, no one else but me, Eiji?!\n\nKEI: Please go where you were planning to and think about this. As for whether I have sold you, that's a matter that you can talk about with your friends. As far as I'm concerned, I don't remember ever being your friend.\n\nEIJI: Hahaha. You got the better of me there. You're right. You certainly aren't a friend of mine. Rather, you're more like my enemy.\n\nKEI: Please give me your... wife's contact information. I'll make sure that you won't have to worry about her and your children while you're gone. I'll take care of them.\n\nEIJI: Thank you for your kindness, but I'm afraid your offer is declined. Even if I accepted it, my family would not\u2014they would rather starve to death. Moreover, their anger may cause them to turn on you.\u2014But it's strange indeed: You and I, as I remember, once talked about China in this same room a long, long time ago. It was a rambling and dreamlike talk about China, but it brought us close to each other. To you, China was the place where your father was buried; to me, it was the place where my father found his way to success. Today, though, as we're talking about China again in this room, you and I have become enemies. Time has passed, and people also have changed. It's strange indeed. ( _The two figures are seen pacing in the garden again._ ) Well, those people seem to be in a hurry. I'd better go. Take care. ( _Exits._ )\n\n(KEI _sits there motionless as a statue. Moments later, she suddenly stands up and tries to run after_ EIJI _, when_ CHIE _appears from the hallway._ )\n\nCHIE: Mother!\n\nKEI:... ( _Coming back and sitting down._ )\n\nCHIE: Who are those people who took Uncle Eiji away?\n\nKEI: What is it? If you want to talk to me, please sit down there and don't get in my way.\n\nCHIE: Mother, what did Uncle Eiji do to deserve to be taken away by those people?\n\nKEI: I don't know what your uncle did or what he plans to do in the future. I don't need to know any longer.\n\nCHIE: Mother, couldn't you do something for Uncle Eiji? Couldn't you think of a more gentle way to treat him, instead of throwing him out of the house like that?\n\nKEI: You wouldn't understand even if I told you.\n\nCHIE: No, I already know. Since he came back, Uncle Eiji has never talked about himself. I thought there must be some reason for it. And I assumed all along that you also knew why.\n\nKEI: If I had known, I wouldn't have waited until today.\n\nCHIE: Mother, in doing what you did, don't you feel bad? Isn't Uncle Eiji Father's brother by the same mother? Isn't he a relative you haven't seen for years? You tied him up with your own hand, Mother. Doesn't doing this bother you?\n\nKEI: There're things in life that we must do, no matter how painful or how difficult they are. Your uncle also knows that.\n\nCHIE: No, I can't understand it. Aunt Fumi and Aunt Fusako used to visit us all the time. But now neither of them comes any more. Father moved out to an apartment and has never come back to this house again. Other relatives don't drop in either, even when they pass by. Day in and day out, there are only the two of us. Just when I was _so_ happy that Uncle Eiji unexpectedly returned, you did this to him. I don't understand you, Mother.\n\nKEI: I never expected, either, that I would end up parting in this way from your uncle, whom I hadn't seen for twenty years. But there's nothing that I can do about it. Your grandma once told me: \"We all have our own dreams about life. Sometimes, though, we have to give up those dreams. And family is more important than your own self.\"\u2014But I've just realized today that there's actually something else that is even more important than family, let alone one's own self.\n\nCHIE: But we're all human beings, alive and with blood flowing in our bodies, aren't we? Mother, have you ever found yourself folding your own arms across your chest when you wake up suddenly at night? Have you never, not even once, experienced the irrepressible happiness of life when you see flowers blooming by the road? Mother, you...\n\nKEI ( _Suddenly slapping_ CHIE _'s face._ )\n\nCHIE ( _Stunned, staring at_ KEI _'s face for a moment._ )\n\n(SH\u014cSUKE _comes in. Seeing what is going on, he is at a loss as to what to say_.)\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: What's going on?\n\n(CHIE _suddenly stands up and is about to run away_.)\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: Hey, where are you going?\n\nCHIE: To Father's place. I'll live with Father from now on.\n\n(CHIE _exits_.)\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: Chie! Stop, Chie!... Well, she's gone.\n\nKEI:... That's fine. It's probably better for her, too, as I was saying to myself. So I'm really left by myself. But that somehow makes me feel relieved. Uncle Sh\u014dsuke, you'll finally leave me, too, this time, won't you? Please, go ahead. I won't be surprised if you do.\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: But I'll never leave you. Even if all the people in the world leave you, I'll stay with you.\n\nKEI: Is that so? Well, whatever you want.\u2014They told me that Eiji scattered flyers at the speech rally in the public auditorium. He believes that Japan should take its hands off China. But what's going to happen if we do? To expect a nation of such weakness to remain independent on its own is like expecting a baby to be able to run. Chie doesn't know what she's talking about, and I don't believe that I've done anything wrong.\u2014Even so, I was stunned to hear Chie questioning me like that. What would pass as noble if it's done by other people appears disgusting and offensive if it's done by me. Obnoxious, self-righteous, coldhearted, and inhuman.... I've gradually come to realize how I look in people's eyes, but there's nothing I can do about it. It's only to be expected that people should run away from me. I've come to find myself repugnant.\n\nSH\u014cSUKE: What are you talking about? What should _I_ do if you talk like that? Thanks to you, I came to believe in what people call humanity. Now isn't it ridiculous that even _you_ can't believe in _yourself_? Kei-san, don't give up. To me, you are a... (SH\u014cSUKE _puts a hand on_ KEI _'s shoulder_.... _Then he suddenly takes his hand off. Walking to the veranda, he remains standing there_.)\n\n( _The twilight sky turns darker._ )\n\nCURTAIN\n\n1. Wang Zhengting (1882\u20131961) was China's foreign minister from 1927 to 1928 and the Chinese ambassador to the United States in 1936. He studied in Japan in 1905 and joined Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary United League (Tongmeng Hui) in Tokyo the following year. Later, he studied in the United States and in 1910 earned a master's degree in literature from Yale.\n\n2. Known in Japan as Sant\u014d shuppei, the intervention refers to the three occasions in 1927 and 1928 when, to protect Japanese residents and Japanese interests in China, Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi (1927\u20131929) sent troops to China's Shandong Province (Sant\u014d in Japanese). These interventions led to Japan's further imperialist ambitions in China as well as the anti-Japanese movement among the Chinese.\n\n3. The Jinan incident took place during the second of Japan's three military interventions in Shandong Province. Known in China as the Jinan can'an (Jinan massacre), it resulted from an armed conflict between the Japanese troops and the Chinese Kuomintang army in Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province, in 1928 during the Kuomintang's Northern Expedition against the northern warlords in an attempt to unify China. In 1927, the Shandong warlord Zhang Zongchang allied with Japan to resist the push of Kuomintang forces into northern China. In April 1928, the Kuomintang army arrived in Jinan and engaged in heavy fighting with Zhang's and the Japanese armies. On May 3 of that year, during negotiations to withdraw Japanese forces, the Japanese started firing again on Chinese civilians. They also captured the Chinese diplomats sent to negotiate, including the Kuomintang official Cai Gongshi, who later was disfigured and tortured to death. Fighting resumed between the Chinese and Japanese troops, and not until March 1929 when a cease-fire was arranged did the Japanese agree to pull out of Jinan. More than three thousand Chinese civilians were killed during this conflict. According to some Japanese sources, the Chinese also committed acts of violence and vandalism against the Japanese.\n\n4. Sun Yat-sen (1866\u20131925) lived in Japan for six years, during which time, particularly between 1897 and 1907, he secured considerable Japanese political and financial support for the Chinese republican cause. In Japan in 1897, he began his lifelong friendship with Miyazaki T\u014dten (1871\u20131922), a Japanese pan-Asianist. Miyazaki adopted the Japanese alias Nakayama (Zhongshan in Chinese), by which he is commonly known in China. Through Miyazaki, Sun met the eminent politicians \u014ckuma Shigenobu (1838\u20131922) and Inukai Tsuyoshi (1855\u20131932), the latter giving him living quarters and funds.\n\n5. Morimoto is mistaken here. Weihaiwei (today called Weihai), a port city in China's Shandong Province, was leased to Britain in 1898. Then in 1930, after extended negotiations, Britain returned it to China.\n\n6. Chen Youren is the Chinese name of Eugene Chen (1875\u20131944). Born in Trinidad, he studied law in England and became acquainted with Sun Yat-sen while practicing law in London. Returning to China after the 1911 Revolution, he became the editor in chief of the English-language newspaper the _Peking Gazette_ and, later, the _People_ ' _s Tribune_ in Shanghai. In 1919, he was a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference, where he clearly articulated China's demands, to protect its interests against the world's imperial powers. He later became Sun Yat-sen's secretary until the latter's death in 1925. Although Chen never learned to speak Chinese, this legendary patriotic statesman served several times as China's foreign minister.\n\n7. Mikhail Borodin (1884\u20131951) was a Soviet Comintern agent. He joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903. After the October Revolution, he returned to his motherland, Russia, after years of exile in the United States. From 1919 to 1922, he worked as a Comintern agent in Mexico, the United States, and the United Kingdom. From 1923 to 1927, he was the representative of the Comintern and the Soviet Union to China's National Party government. In 1928, when Chiang Kai-Shek purged the Communists and tried to arrest him, he returned to the Soviet Union. In 1949, he was accused of being an enemy of the Soviet Union and was sent to a work camp in Siberia, where he died two years later.\n_THE MAN WHO TURNED INTO A STICK_\n\nABE K\u014cB\u014c\n\nTRANSLATED BY DONALD KEENE\n\nAbe K\u014db\u014d, _The Man Who Turned into a Stick_ , directed by Abe K\u014db\u014d, Kinokuniya, November 1969.\n\nT _he Man Who Turned into a Stick_ ( _B \u014d ni natta otoko_) was first presented in a production staged at the Kinokuniya Hall in 1967. Later, after Abe K\u014db\u014d (1924\u20131993) formed his own theater company, the Abe K\u014db\u014d Studio, he restaged the play and combined it with two other short plays he had written, _The Cliff of Time_ ( _Toki no gake_ , 1964) and _The Suitcase_ ( _Hako otoko_ , 1969). He then combined the three into a loose trilogy, in which they all were given new subtitles. In this new scheme, _The Suitcase_ represents _Birth_ , _The Cliff of Time_ is subtitled _Process_ , and _The Man Who Turned into a Stick_ becomes _Death_.1 All are evocative puzzles and parables that require an actively involved audience to interpret.\n\n_A hot, sticky Sunday afternoon in June. A main thoroughfare with the Terminal Department Store in the background. Crowds of people passing back and forth._ ( _It is best not to attempt to represent this realistically._ ) _A young man and a young woman sit on the sidewalk curb at stage center front about three yards apart. They are hippies. They stare vacantly ahead, completely indifferent to their surroundings, with withdrawn expressions._ ( _If desired they can be shown sniffing glue._ ) _All of a sudden a stick comes hurtling down from the sky. A very ordinary stick, about four feet long._ ( _It can be manipulated, perhaps in the manner of Grand Guignol, by the actor playing the part of the man before he turned into a stick._ ) _The stick rolls over and over, first striking against the edge of the sidewalk, then bouncing back with a clatter, and finally coming to rest horizontally in the gutter near the curbstone, less than a yard from the two hippies. Reflex action makes them look at where the stick has fallen, then upward, frowning, to see where it came from. But, considering the danger to which they have been exposed, their reactions are somewhat lacking in urgency._ MAN FROM HELL _enters from stage left, and_ WOMAN FROM HELL _from stage right. Both are spotlighted._\n\nCharacters\n\nMAN FROM HELL, a supervisor\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL, recently appointed to the Earth Duty Squad\n\nTHE MAN WHO TURNED INTO A STICK\n\nHIPPIE BOY\n\nHIPPIE GIRL\n\nVOICE FROM HELL\n\nHIPPIE BOY ( _Still looking up_ ): God-damned dangerous.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: In the twilight a white crescent moon, a fruit knife peeling the skin of fate.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: Today, once again, a man has changed his shape and become a stick.\n\nHIPPIE BOY ( _Turns his gaze back to the stick and picks it up_ ): Just a couple of feet closer and it would have finished me.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL ( _Looks at the stick and touches it_ ): Which do you suppose is the accident\u2014when something hits you or when it misses?\n\nHIPPIE BOY: How should I know? ( _Bangs the stick on tile pavement, making a rhythm._ )\n\nMAN FROM HELL: The moon, the color of dirty chromium plate, looks down and the streets are swirling.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: Today, once again, a man turned into a stick and vanished.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: Hey, what's that rhythm you're tapping?\n\nHIPPIE BOY: Try and guess.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL ( _Glancing up_ ): Look I'm sure that kid was the culprit.\n\nHIPPIE BOY ( _Intrigued, looks up._ )\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: Isn't he cute? I'll bet he's still in grade school. He must've been playing on the roof.\n\nHIPPIE BOY ( _Looks into the distance, as before_ ): Damned brats. I hate them all.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: Ohh\u2014it's dangerous, the way he's leaning over the edge.... I'm sure he's ashamed now he threw it.... He seems to be trying to say something, but I can't hear him.\n\nHIPPIE BOY: He's probably disappointed nobody got hurt, so now he's cursing us instead.\n\nSTICK ( _To himself_ ): No, that's not so. He's calling me. The child saw me fall.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL ( _Abruptly changing the subject_ ): I know what it is, that rhythm. This is the song, isn't it? ( _She hums some tune or other._ )\n\nHIPPIE BOY: Hmmm.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: Was I wrong?\n\nHIPPIE BOY: It's always been my principle to respect other people's tastes.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL ( _Unfazed by this, she waggles her body to the rhythm and goes on humming._ )\n\n( _In the meantime,_ THE MAN WHO TURNED INTO A STICK _is coordinating the movements of his body with those of the stick in_ HIPPIE BOY _'s hand, all the while keeping his eyes fastened on a point somewhere in the sky._ )\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _Walks slowly toward stage center_ ):\n\nThe moon is forgotten\n\nIn a sky the color of cement,\n\nAnd the stick lies forgotten\n\nDown in the gutter.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _Also walks in the same deliberate fashion toward stage center_ ):\n\nThe stick lies forgotten in the gutter,\n\nThe streets from above form a whirlpool.\n\nA boy is searching for his vanished father.\n\n(MAN _and_ WOMAN FROM HELL _meet at stage center, several feet behind_ HIPPIE BOY _and_ GIRL, _just as they finish this recitation._ )\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _In extremely matter-of-fact tones_ ): You know, it wouldn't surprise me if this time we happened to have arrived exactly where we intended.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _Opens a large notebook_ ): The time is precisely twenty-two minutes and ten seconds before\u2014\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _Looks at his wristwatch_ ): On the button...\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _Suddenly notices the stick in_ HIPPIE BOY _'s hand_ ): I wonder, could that be the stick?\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _Rather perplexed_ ): If it is, we've got a most peculiar obstacle in our path.... ( _Walks up to_ HIPPIE BOY _and addresses him from behind, over his shoulder._ ) Say, pal, where did you get that stick?\n\nHIPPIE BOY ( _Throws him a sharp glance but does not answer._ )\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: Lying in the gutter, wasn't it?\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: It fell from the roof. We had a hairbreadth escape.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _Delighted to have her theory confirmed_ ): I knew it! ( _To_ MAN FROM HELL.) Sir, it was this stick, as I suspected.\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _To_ HIPPIE BOY): Sorry to bother you, but would you mind handing me that stick?\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: I'm sure you don't need it especially.\n\nHIPPIE BOY: I don't know about that....\n\nMAN FROM HELL: We're making a survey. A little investigation.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: You from the police?\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: No, not exactly...\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _Interrupting_ ): But you're not too far off...\n\nHIPPIE BOY: Liars! You're the ones who threw the stick at us. And now you're trying to suppress the evidence. You think I'm going to play your game? Fat chance! ( _Beating out a rhythm with the stick, he starts to hum the melody_ HIPPIE GIRL _was singing._ )\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _In mollifying tones_ ): If you really suspect us, I'd be glad to go with you to the police station.\n\nHIPPIE BOY: Don't try to wheedle your way around me.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL ( _Looks up_ ): You know, I think it was that kid we saw a while ago.... He's not there anymore.\n\nHIPPIE BOY: You shut up.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _Animatedly_ ): That's right, there was a child watching everything, wasn't there? From the railing up there on the roof.... And didn't you hear him calling his father? In a frightened, numb little voice...\n\nHIPPIE GIRL ( _Trying not to annoy_ HIPPIE BOY): How could I possibly hear him? The average noise level in this part of town is supposed to be over 120 decibels, on an average. ( _Shaking her body to a go-go rhythm._ )\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _To_ MAN FROM HELL): Sir, shall I verify the circumstances at the scene?\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Yes, I suppose so. ( _Hesitates a second._ )... But don't waste too much time over it.\n\n(WOMAN FROM HELL _hurries off to stage left._ )\n\nSTICK ( _To himself. His voice is filled with anguish_ ): There's no need for it.... I can hear everything.... In the grimy little office behind the staircase marked \"For store employees only\"... my son, scared to death, surrounded by scabby-looking, mean security guards...\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _To_ HIPPIE BOY): It's kind of hard to explain, but the fact is, we have been entrusted, for the time being, with the custodianship of that stick.... I wish you'd try somehow to understand.\n\nHIPPIE BOY: I don't understand nothing.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL ( _With a wise look_ ): This is the age of the generation gap. We're alienated.\n\nSTICK ( _To himself. In tones of unshakable grief_ ): The child is lodging a complaint.... He says I turned into a stick and dropped from the roof....\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _To_ HIPPIE BOY): Well, let me ask you a simple question. What do you intend to use the stick for? I'm sure you haven't any particular aim in mind.\n\nHIPPIE BOY: I'm not interested in aims.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: That's right. Aims are out of date.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Exactly. Aims don't amount to a hill of beans. So why can't you let me have it? It isn't doing you any good. All it is, is a stick of wood. But as far as we're concerned, it is a valuable item of evidence relating to a certain person....\n\nHIPPIE GIRL ( _Dreamily_ ): But one should have a few. People don't have enough...\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Enough what?\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: Aims!\n\nMAN FROM HELL: You're making too much of nothing. It's bad for your health to want something that doesn't really exist. The uncertainty you feel at the thought you haven't got any aims, your mental anguish at the thought you have lost track of whatever aims you once had\u2014they're a lot better proof that you are there, in that particular spot, than any aim I can think of. That's true, isn't it?\n\nHIPPIE GIRL ( _To_ HIPPIE BOY): How about a kiss, huh?\n\nHIPPIE BOY ( _Gives her a cold sidelong glance_ ): I don't feel like it.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: You don't have to put on such airs with me.\n\nHIPPIE BOY: I don't want to.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: Come on!\n\nHIPPIE BOY: I told you, lay on the euphoria.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: Then, scratch my back.\n\nHIPPIE BOY: Your back?\n\n(HIPPIE GIRL _bends over in_ HIPPIE BOY _'s direction and lifts the back of her collar._ HIPPIE BOY, _with an air of great reluctance, thrusts the stick down into her collar and moves the stick around inside her dress, scratching her back._ )\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: More to the left.... That's right, there....\n\nHIPPIE BOY ( _Pulls out the stick and hands it to_ HIPPIE GIRL): Now you scratch me. ( _Bends over toward_ HIPPIE GIRL.)\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: You don't mean it from the heart.... ( _All the same, she immediately gives way and thrusts the stick down the back of_ HIPPIE BOY _'s collar._ ) Is this the place?\n\nHIPPIE BOY: Yes, there. And everywhere else.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: Everywhere?\n\nHIPPIE BOY ( _Twisting his body and emitting strange noises_ ): Uhhh... uhhh... uhhh.... It feels like I haven't had a bath in quite some time....\n\nHIPPIE GIRL ( _Throwing down the stick_ ): You egoist!\n\n(MAN FROM HELL _nimbly jumps between the two of them and attempts to grab the stick. But_ HIPPIE BOY _brushes his hand away and picks up the stack again._ )\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Look, my friend. I'm willing to make a deal with you. How much will you charge for letting me have this stick?\n\nHIPPIE GIRL ( _Instantly full of life_ ): One dollar.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: A dollar? For a stick of wood like this?\n\nHIPPIE BOY: Forget it. Not even for two dollars.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL ( _To_ HIPPIE BOY _in a low voice, reproachfully_ ): You can find any number of sticks just like this one, if you really want it.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: A dollar will keep you in cigarettes for a while.\n\nHIPPIE BOY: Me and this stick, we understand each other.... Don't know why... ( _Strikes a pose, holding the end of the stick in his hand._ )\n\nHIPPIE GIRL ( _With scorn in her voice_ ): You look alike. A remarkable resemblance.\n\nHIPPIE BOY ( _Staring at the stick_ ): So we look alike, do we? Me and this stick? ( _Reflects a while, then suddenly turns to_ HIPPIE GIRL.) You got any brothers and sisters?\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: A younger sister.\n\nHIPPIE BOY: What was her name for you? (HIPPIE GIRL _hesitates._ ) You must have been known as something. A nickname, maybe.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: You mean, the way she called me.\n\nHIPPIE BOY: Precisely.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: Gaa-gaa.\n\nHIPPIE BOY: Gaa-gaa?\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: No, that's what my brother called me. My sister was different. She called me Mosquito.\n\nHIPPIE BOY: What does Gaa-gaa mean?\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: Mosquito\u2014that's what my sister called me.\n\nHIPPIE BOY: I'm asking what Gaa-gaa is.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: You don't know what Gaa-gaa is?\n\nHIPPIE BOY: Has it got something to do with mosquitoes?\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: Yes, but it's very complicated to explain.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Excuse me, but would you...\n\nHIPPIE BOY: Yesterday there was a funeral at that haberdashery across the street.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL ( _Looking around at the crowd_ ): But it had nothing to do with any of these people, had it?\n\nHIPPIE BOY: But what about Gaa-gaa and Mosquito?\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Wasn't it Gar-gar rather than Gaa-gaa?\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: She died.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Who died?\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: My sister.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: What happened to her?\n\nHIPPIE BOY: She became a corpse, naturally.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Of course. That's not surprising.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: That's why I don't understand anything anymore. Everything is wrapped in riddles.\n\nHIPPIE BOY: What, for instance?\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: Was it Gaa-gaa or Gar-gar?\n\nHIPPIE BOY: You're just plain stupid.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: By the way, in reference to that stick\u2014she says you look like it. Let's suppose for the moment you do look like the stick\u2014the meaning is not what you think it is.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: Tomorrow people will be calling tomorrow today.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: To begin with, your conceptual framework with respect to the stick is basically\u2014\n\nHIPPIE BOY: I see. Once a human hand grabs something, there's no telling what it can do.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: I missed grabbing it. It's too awful to think that the day after tomorrow will always be tomorrow, even hundreds of years from now.\n\n(WOMAN FROM HELL _returns, walking quickly._ )\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _She stops at some distance from the others_ ): Sir....\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _Goes up to_ WOMAN): Well, what happened?\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: We've got to hurry...\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _Turns toward_ HIPPIES): This crazy bunch\u2014I offered them a dollar for the stick, but they refuse to part with it.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: The child is coming.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: What for?\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: Just as I got into the department store, I heard them making an announcement about a lost child. The child was apparently raising quite a rumpus. He claimed he saw his father turn into a stick and fall off the roof. But nobody seemed to believe him.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Of course not.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: Then the child gave the matron the slip and ran out of the store, looking for his father.\n\n(MAN _and_ WOMAN FROM HELL _look uneasily off to stage left._ )\n\nSTICK ( _Talking brokenly to himself_ ): The child saw it. I know he did. I was leaning against the railing at the time, the one that runs between the air ducts and the staircase, on a lower level. I was looking down at the crowds below, with nothing particular on my mind. A whirlpool.... Look\u2014it's just like one big whirlpool...\n\n( _Actual noises of city traffic gradually swell in volume, sounding something like a monster howling into a tunnel. Suddenly_ HIPPIE BOY _lets the stick drop in alarm._ )\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: What happened?\n\nSTICK ( _Continuing his monologue_ ): I stood there, feeling dizzy, as if the noises of the city were a waterfall roaring over me, clutching tightly to the railing, when my boy called me. He was pestering me for a dime so he could look through the telescope for three minutes.... And that second my body sailed out into midair.... I had not the least intention of running away from the child or anything like that.... But I turned into a stick.... Why did it happen? Why should such a thing have happened to me?\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: What's the matter, anyway?\n\nHIPPIE BOY ( _Stares at the stick lying at his feet with a bewildered expression_ ): It twitched, like a dying fish...\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: It couldn't have... You're imagining things.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _Stands on tiptoes and stares off into the distance at stage left_ ): Look! Sir, look! Do you see that child? The little boy with the short neck, prowling around, looking with his big glasses over the ground?\n\nMAN FROM HELL: He seems to be gradually coming closer.\n\nSTICK ( _To himself_ ): I can hear the child's footsteps... bouncing like a little rubber ball, the sound threading its way through the rumblings of the earth shaking under the weight of a million people...\n\nHIPPIE GIRL ( _Steals a glance in the direction of the_ MAN _and_ WOMAN FROM HELL): Somehow those guys give me the creeps.... Why don't you make some sort of deal with him?\n\n(HIPPIE BOY, _who has kept his eyes glued on the stick at his feet, snaps out of his daze and stands up_. GIRL _also stands._ )\n\nHIPPIE BOY ( _With irritation_ ): I can't figure it out, but I don't like it. That stick looks too much like me.\n\nHIPPIE GIRL ( _Her expression is consoling_ ): It doesn't really look all that much like you. Just a little.\n\nHIPPIE BOY ( _Calls to_ MAN FROM HELL, _who has just that moment turned toward him, as if anticipating something_ ): Five dollars. What do you say? ( _He keeps his foot on the stick._ )\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Five dollars?\n\nSTICK ( _To himself_ ): He doesn't have to stand on me.... I'm soaked from lying in the gutter.... I'll be lucky if I don't catch a cold.\n\nHIPPIE BOY: I'm not going to force you. If you don't want it.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _Nervously glancing off to stage left_ ): Sir, he's almost here.\n\n(THE MAN WHO TURNED INTO A STICK _shows a subtle, complex reaction, a mixture of hope and rejection._ )\n\nHIPPIE BOY: I'm selling it because I don't want to sell it. That's a contradiction of circumstances. Do you follow me?\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: That's right. He's selling it because he doesn't want to. Can you understand that?\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _Annoyed_ ): All right, I guess... ( _He pulls some folding money from his pocket and selects a five-dollar bill._ ) Here you are.... But I'll tell you one thing, my friend, you may imagine you've struck a clever bargain, but one of these days you'll find out. It wasn't just a stick you sold, but yourself.\n\n( _But_ HIPPIE BOY, _without waiting for_ MAN _to finish his words, snatches away the five-dollar bill and quickly exits to stage right._ HIPPIE GIRL _follows after him, smiling innocently. She waves her hand._ )\n\nHIPPIE GIRL: It's the generation gap. ( _She exits with these words._ )\n\n(MAN _and_ WOMAN FROM HELL, _leaping into action, rush to the gutter where the stick is lying. Just then the sun suddenly goes behind a cloud, and the street noises gradually fade. At the very end, for just a second, a burst of riveting is heard from a construction site somewhere off in the distance._ )\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _Gingerly picks up the dirty stick with his fingertips. With his other hand he takes the newspaper that can be seen protruding from his pocket, spreads it open, and uses it to wipe the stick_ ): Well, that was a close one...\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: Earth duty isn't easy, is it?\n\nMAN FROM HELL: It was a good experience on your first day of on-the-job training.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: I was on tenterhooks, I can tell you.\n\n(THE MAN WHO TURNED INTO A STICK _suddenly exhibits a strong reaction to something._ MAN _and_ WOMAN FROM HELL _alertly respond to his reaction._ )\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: There's the child!\n\n(MAN FROM HELL, _greatly alarmed, at once hides the stick behind his back. On a sudden thought, he pushes the stick under his jacket and finally down into his trousers. He stands ramrod stiff for several seconds. Then, all at once, the excitement melts from the face of_ THE MAN WHO TURNED INTO A STICK. MAN _and_ WOMAN FROM HELL, _relieved, also relax their postures._ )\n\nSTICK ( _To himself_ ): It doesn't matter... There was nothing I could have done anyway, was there?\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _Pulling out the stick_ ): Wow! That was a close shave...\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: But you know, I kind of feel sorry for him.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Sympathy has no place in our profession. Well, let's get cracking. ( _Holds out the stick._ ) That crazy interruption has certainly played havoc with our schedule.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _Accepts the stick and holds it in both hands, aloft to make a ceremonial offering_ ): I didn't realize how light it was.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: It couldn't be better for a first tryout. Now, make your report, in exactly the order your learned...\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: Yes, sir. ( _Examines the stick from every angle, with the earnestness of a young intern._ ) The first thing I notice is that a distinction may be observed between the top and bottom of this stick. The top is fairly deeply encrusted with dirt and grease from human hands. Note, on the other hand, how rubbed and scraped the bottom is.... I interpret this as meaning that the stick has not always been lying in a ditch, without performing any useful function, but that during its lifetime it was employed by people for some particular purpose.\n\nSTICK ( _To himself. Angrily_ ): That's obvious, isn't it? It's true of everybody.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: But it seems to have suffered rather harsh treatment. The poor thing has scars all over it...\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _Laughs_ ): Excellent, but what do you mean by calling it a poor thing? I'm afraid you've been somewhat infected by human ideas.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: Infected by human ideas?\n\nMAN FROM HELL: We in hell have a different approach. To our way of thinking, this stick, which has put up with every kind of abuse until its whole body is covered with scars, never running away and never being discarded, should be called a capable and faithful stick.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: Still, it's only a stick. Even a monkey can make a stick do what he wants. A human being with the same qualities would be simpleminded.\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _Emphatically_ ): That's precisely what I meant when I said it was capable and faithful. A stick can lead a blind man, and it can also train a dog. As a lever it can move heavy objects, and it can be used to thrash an enemy. In short, the stick is the root and source of all tools.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: But with the same stick, you can beat me, and I can beat you back.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Isn't that what faithfulness means? A stick remains a stick, no matter how it is used. You might almost say that the etymology of the word faithful is a stick.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _Unconvinced_ ): But what you're saying is too miserable.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: All it boils down to is, a living stick has turned into a dead stick\u2014right? Sentimentality is forbidden to Earth Duty personnel. Well, continue with your analysis. (WOMAN _remains silent._ ) What's the matter now? I want the main points of your report!\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _Pulling herself together_ ): Yes, sir. Next I will telephone headquarters and inform them of the exact time and place of the disappearance of the person in question, and verify the certification number. Then I decide the punishment and register the variety and the disposition.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: And what decision have you made on the punishment? (WOMAN _does not reply._ ) Surely there can be no doubt in your mind. A simple case like this...\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: You know, I rather enjoy wandering around the specimen room, but I just don't seem to recall any specimens of a stick. ( _Shakes her head dubiously._ )\n\nMAN FROM HELL: There aren't any, of course.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _Relieved_ ): So it is a special case, isn't it?\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Now calm yourself, and just think... I realize this is your first taste of on-the-job training, but it's disturbing to hear anything quite so wide off the mark.... The fact that something isn't in the specimen room doesn't necessarily mean it's so rare. On the contrary...\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _Catching on at last_ ): You mean, it's because sticks are so common!\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Exactly. During the last twenty or thirty years the percentage of sticks has steadily gone up. Why, I understand that in extreme cases, 98.4 percent of all those who die in a given month turn into sticks.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: Yes, I remember now.... Probably it'll be all right if I leave the stick as it was during its lifetime, without any special punishment.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Now you're on the right track!\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: The only thing I have to do is verify the certification number. It won't be necessary to register the punishment.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Do you remember what it says in our textbook? \"They who came up for judgment, but were not judged, have turned into sticks and filled the earth. The Master has departed and the earth has become a grave of rotten sticks....\" That's why the shortage of help in hell has never become especially acute.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _Takes out a walkie-talkie_ ): Shall I call headquarters?\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _Takes the walkie-talkie from her_ ): I'll show you how it's done, just the first time. ( _Switches it on._ ) Hello, headquarters? This is MC training squad on earth duty.\n\nVOICE FROM HELL: Roger. Headquarters here.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Request verification of a certification number. MC 621... I repeat, MC 621...\n\nVOICE FROM HELL: MC 621. Roger.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: The time was twenty-two minutes ten seconds before the hour.... The place was Ward B, 32 stroke 4 on the grid. Stick full from the roof of Terminal Department Store....\n\nVOICE FROM HELL: Roger. Go ahead.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: No punishment. Registration unnecessary. Over.\n\nVOICE FROM HELL: Roger. Registration unnecessary.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Request information on next assignment.\n\nVOICE FROM HELL: Six minutes twenty-four seconds from now, in Ward B, 32 stroke 8 on the grid. Over.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _Opens her notebook and jots down a memo_ ): That would make it somewhere behind the station...\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Roger. Thirty-two stroke eight.\n\nVOICE FROM HELL: Good luck on your mission. Over.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Roger. Thanks a lot. ( _Suddenly changing his tone._ ) I'm sorry to bother you, but if my wife comes over, would you mind telling her I forgot to leave the key to my locker?\n\nVOICE FROM HELL ( _With a click of the tongue_ ): You're hopeless. Well, this is the last time. Over.\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _Laughs_ ): Roger. So long. ( _Turns off walkie-talkie._ ) That, in general, is how to do it.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: Thank you. I think I understand now.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: What's the matter? You look kind of down in the mouth. ( _Returns walkie-talkie to_ WOMAN.)\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _Barely manages a smile_ ): It's nothing, really...\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Well, shall we say good-bye to our stick somewhere around here?\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: You mean you're going to throw it away, just like that?\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Of course. That's the regulation. ( _Looks around, discovers a hole in the gutter, and stands the stick in it._ ) If I leave it standing this way, it'll attract attention and somebody is sure to pick it up before long. ( _Takes a step back and examines it again._ ) It's a handy size, and as sticks go, it's a pretty good specimen. It could be used for the handle of a placard...\n\n(WOMAN _suddenly takes hold of the stick and pulls it from the hole._ )\n\nMAN FROM HELL: What do you think you're doing?\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: It's too cruel!\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Cruel? ( _He is too dumbfounded to continue._ )\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: We should give it to the child. Don't you think that's the least we can do? As long as we're going to get rid of it anyway...\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Don't talk nonsense. A stick is nothing more than a stick, no matter who has it.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: But it's something special to that child.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Why?\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: At least it ought to serve as a kind of mirror. He can examine himself and make sure he won't become a stick like his father.\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _Bursts out laughing_ ): Examine himself! Why should anyone who's satisfied with himself do that?\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: Was this stick satisfied with himself?\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Don't you see, it was precisely because he was so satisfied that he turned into a stick.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _Stares at the stick. A short pause_ ): Just supposing this stick could hear what we have been saying...\n\nSTICK ( _To himself. Weakly_ ): Of course I can hear. Every last word.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: I have no specific information myself, since it's quite outside my own specialty, but scholars in the field have advanced the theory that they can in fact hear what we are saying.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: How do you suppose he feels to hear us talk this way?\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Exactly as a stick would feel, naturally. Assuming, of course, that sticks have feelings...\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: Satisfied?\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _With emphasis_ ): There's no room for arguments. A stick is a stick. That simple fact takes precedence over problems of logic. Come now, put the stick back where it was. Our next assignment is waiting for us.\n\n(WOMAN FROM HELL, _with a compassionate expression, gently returns the stick to the hole in the gutter._ THE MAN WHO TURNED INTO A STICK _up until this point has been registering various shades of reaction to the conversation of_ MAN _and_ WOMAN, _but from now on his emotions are petrified into any immobile state between fury and despair._ )\n\nSTICK ( _To himself_ ): Satisfied...\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: But why must we go through the motions of whipping a dead man this way?\n\nMAN FROM HELL: We are not particularly concerned with the dead. Our job is to record their lives accurately. ( _Lowering his voice._ ) To tell the truth, it is extremely dubious whether or not we in fact exist.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: What do you mean by that?\n\nMAN FROM HELL: There is a theory that we are no more than the dreams that people have when they are on the point of death.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: If those are dreams, they are horrible nightmares.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: That's right.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: Then there's no likelihood that they're satisfied. To have nightmares even though you're satisfied; that's a terrible contradiction, isn't it?\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Perhaps it might be described as the moment of doubt that follows satisfaction. In any case, what's done is done... ( _In tones meant to cheer_ WOMAN.) We'll have to hurry. We have exactly three minutes. If we're late, there'll be all hell to pay later on... ( _Starts walking, leading the way._ ) Don't worry. You'll get used to it before you know it. I was the same way myself. Sometimes you get confused by the false fronts people put on. But once you realize that a stick was a stick, even while it was alive...\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _Still turns to look back at the stick, but somewhat more cheerful now_ ): Is the next person going to be a stick too?\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Mmm. It would be nice if we got something more unusual this time.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: What do you suppose those kids who tried to keep us from getting the stick will turn into?\n\nMAN FROM HELL: Those hippies?\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: They didn't seem much like sticks, did they?\n\nMAN FROM HELL: If they don't turn into sticks, maybe they'll become rubber hoses.\n\n(MAN _and_ WOMAN FROM HELL _exit to stage right._ )\n\nSTICK ( _To himself_ ): Satisfied? Me? Stupid fools. Would a satisfied man run away from his own child and jump off a roof?\n\n( _In another section of the stage,_ MAN _and_ WOMAN FROM HELL _reappear as silhouettes._ )\n\nMAN FROM HELL: The sky is the color of a swamp, cloudy with disinfectant. On the cold, wet ground another man has changed into a stick.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: He has been verified but not registered. He is shut up inside the shape of a stick. He is not unlucky, so he must be happy.\n\nSTICK ( _To himself_ ): I've never once felt satisfied. But wonder what it would be better to turn into, rather than a stick. The one thing somebody in the world is sure to pick up is a stick.\n\nMAN FROM HELL: He has been verified but not registered. The man's been shut up inside the shape of a stick. He can't so much as budge anymore, and that's a problem.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: Supposing he begins to itch somewhere. What'll he do? How will he fare?\n\nMAN FROM HELL: I'm afraid a stick would probably lack the talent needed to scratch his own back.\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL: But anyway, you mustn't mind, you're not the only one of your kind.\n\nMAN FROM HELL ( _Steps forward and points his finger around the audience_ ): Look\u2014there! A whole forest of sticks around you. All those innocent people, each one determined to turn into a stick slightly different from everybody else, but nobody once thinking of turning into anything besides a stick... All those sticks. You may never be judged, but at least you don't have to worry about being punished. ( _Abruptly changes his tone and leans farther out toward the audience._ ) You know. I wouldn't want you to think I'm saying these things just to annoy you. Surely, you don't suppose I would be capable of such rudeness... Heaven forbid... ( _Forces a smile._ ) It's just the simple truth, the truth as I see it....\n\nWOMAN FROM HELL ( _Goes up to_ THE MAN WHO TURNED INTO A STICK _and speaks in pleading, rather jerky phrases_ ): Yes, that's right. You're not alone. You've lots of friends... men who turned into sticks.\n\nCURTAIN\n\n1. All three plays were translated by Donald Keene and published in _The Man Who Turned into a Stick_ : _Three Related Plays_ (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1975). Abe's play _Friends_ ( _Tomodachi_ , 1967), also translated by Keene, has been published in several editions, and his translations of additional plays can be found in _Three Plays by K \u014db\u014d Abe_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), which also includes pertinent background material. For more about the Abe K\u014db\u014d Studio, founded in 1973, see Nancy K. Shields, _Fake Fish: The Theater of Kobo Abe_ (New York: Weatherhill, 1996).\n_CEREMONIAL CLOTHES_\n\nAKIMOTO MATSUYO\n\nTRANSLATED BY GANSHI MURATA\n\nAkimoto Matsuyo, _Ceremonial Clothes_ , directed by Okakura Shir\u014d, Haiy\u016bza, August 1949. (Courtesy of Haiy\u016bza)\n\nC _eremonial Clothes_ ( _Reifuku_ ), by Akimoto Matsuyo (1911\u20132001), was published in the June 1949 issue of the theater magazine _Playwriting_ ( _Gekisaku_ ) and, in August of the same year, was first performed by the part of Senda Koreya's Actors' Theater (Haiy\u016bza) company that produced the work of new playwrights.\n\nDavid Goodman described the play as dealing with \"the inadequacy of prescribed forms... for coming to terms with the loss of a parent.\" But, he continued, \"on a metaphysical level, the play reflects the difficulties Japanese society encountered during the immediate postwar period coming to terms with the death of the quasi-familial order set out in the Imperial Rescript on Education.\"1 That is, in Akimoto's dark vision, there now seems little to hold the family, or the nation, together.\n\nAkimoto's later plays often deal with religious themes and the search to find rituals capable of controlling human suffering. In that regard, perhaps her most striking success is _Kaison the Priest of Hitachi_ ( _Hitachib \u014d Kaison_, 1967).2\n\nPlace: In a country town somewhere in Japan.\n\nTime: Early spring, the dawn of one day and the following day, 1948.\n\nCharacters\n\nICHIZ\u014c\n\nKEIKO, his younger sister\n\nTOKUJI, his younger brother\n\nYASUKO, his younger sister\n\nIKU, his grandmother\n\nFUMIE, his former wife\n\nSHIGEMASA, his uncle\n\nMASATAR\u014c, KEIKO's husband\n\nDR. KAJIMA\n\nICHIZ\u014c'S BOSS\n\nTOWN OFFICIALS 1, 2, 3\n\nNURSE\n\nFUNERAL HELPERS\n\nFUNERAL GUESTS\n\nSCENE 1\n\n_The large guest room of_ ICHIZ\u014c _'s house. Stage left are_ fusuma, _sliding paper doors. Stage right are_ sh\u014dji, _paper partitions leading to the other rooms. Upstage is a veranda overlooking a Japanese garden. The outside shutters are closed. Toward stage left of the room are a bed, a small table and chair, and a screen. In the center of the room are a sofa and a desk. The entrance to the house appears to be stage right of the veranda. It is just before dawn, and in the room a bright lamp is lit. Outside, heavy rain is falling. The body of_ ICHIZ\u014c' _s mother, Nobu, is lying on the bed. A_ NURSE _is quietly removing oxygen equipment._ ICHIZ\u014c' _s sisters,_ KEIKO ( _thirty-four_ ) _and_ YASUKO ( _twenty-three_ ), _are sobbing by the bed. Off to one side,_ ICHIZ\u014c ( _forty_ ) _and_ DR. KAJIMA _are standing quietly, lost in thought. Uncle_ SHIGEMASA ( _sixty-five_ ), _Nobu's brother-in-law, is leaning against the_ fusuma, _staring at the ceiling, and_ MASATAR\u014c ( _forty_ ), KEIKO' _s husband, is sitting with his head bowed in sorrow. A long pause._ DR. KAJIMA _bows respectfully to the corpse and walks slowly to the sofa._ ICHIZ\u014c _also bows to the corpse and moves to the sofa. They exchange bows and remain in silence._\n\nDR. KAJIMA: It was just 4:35.\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Bows._ )\n\nDR. KAJIMA: Please accept my deep sympathy.... Please accept my deep sympathy.... I did my best, but...\n\nICHIZ\u014c:... Thank you for your...\n\nDR. KAJIMA:... No, no...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: It, it was so sudden.... I, I just... ( _Swallows a sob._ )\n\nDR. KAJIMA: I know.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: If only I'd noticed earlier.... It was all my fault.\n\nDR. KAJIMA: No, don't say that. It's not true.\n\nICHIZ\u014c:...\n\nDR. KAJIMA: Anyone would feel the same.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Would they?\n\nDR. KAJIMA ( _Sitting down on sofa_ ): Well, my work is finished, but as a friend, if there is anything I can do....\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Thank you, maybe later, but for the moment.\n\n( _A cock crows in the distance, and they both notice it distractedly._ )\n\nDR. KAJIMA: She was sixty, wasn't she?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Sixty-one, actually.\n\nDR. KAJIMA: Too soon, wasn't it?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Ummm.... She lived longer than my father.\n\nDR. KAJIMA: Ummm.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: She was so healthy.\n\nDR. KAJIMA ( _Nodding, but doubtfully_ ): Yes.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Nobody... could have imagined this.\n\nDR. KAJIMA: That's very true.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: It was the first time she'd ever seen a doctor... the first and the last time. ( _His head drops._ )\n\nDR. KAJIMA:...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: All her life she kept working. She never once complained. She never seemed to rest, even in bed. ( _Wipes his tears._ )\n\nDR. KAJIMA:...\n\n( _The_ NURSE _comes up to_ KAJIMA _and whispers something to him_. KAJIMA _nods and goes toward the bed_.)\n\nKEIKO ( _To_ KAJIMA): Thank you so much for everything, Doctor.\n\nDR. KAJIMA: I'm really very sorry. ( _Bows to_ YASUKO, MASATAR\u014c, SHIGEMASA, _and the others_.)\n\nNURSE ( _Drawing the screen around the bed_ ): Will somebody help us?\n\nKEIKO ( _Nods._ )\n\nSHIGEMASA: I will. I'm old enough.\n\n(KAJIMA, SHIGEMASA, KEIKO _, and the_ NURSE _go behind the screen_. YASUKO _and_ MASATAR\u014c _go toward the sofa._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: After I was promoted to department head at the town hall, I promised to take her to a hot spring, but we never had a chance. ( _Wipes his eyes with his handkerchief._ )\n\nYASUKO: Ichiz\u014d. ( _Sobbing._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: lf only she'd lived... another ten years.\n\nYASUKO: Ichiz\u014d, don't.\n\nMASATAR\u014c: Ichiz\u014d, Older Brother, please, don't.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Even though I was here with her, look what happened. It was my fault. ( _Wipes a tear._ ) I thought it was just a cold. She was so strong and determined. She wouldn't stop working. Then it turned into pneumonia. It took only a couple of days. When I told you, it was too late. I was too late, too careless. ( _Cries._ )\n\nMASATAR\u014c: Don't say that. Don't blame yourself. ( _Holds back his tears and quietly leaves by the veranda._ )\n\nYASUKO: Ichiz\u014d, I still can't believe it.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Hmm, I know, me neither.\n\nYASUKO: She's really dead.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: It's happened.\n\nYASUKO ( _Clings to_ ICHIZ\u014c _and cries._ )\n\n( _Pause. The sound of falling rain. A cock crows in the distance_.)\n\nICHIZ\u014c: We gave her such a hard time.\n\nYASUKO ( _Crying, nods._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: She was a wonderful mother.... A mother like that. ( _His voice is choked._ )\n\nYASUKO: Please don't. It only makes it worse.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Well, anyway, the least we can do is pray that she's gone to a better place.\n\nYASUKO: Yes.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: They say we shouldn't feel sad for those who have died... it's not good for their spirits.\n\nYASUKO: Yes, that's true....\n\nICHIZ\u014c: It's in the hands of fate.... We all have our trials.\n\nYASUKO: Yes.... But, somehow I feel we should have been able to avoid this one.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: You're not alone. I feel that, too.\n\nYASUKO: I could see this coming six months ago. Each time I saw her.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Hmm... I could sense something as long as three years ago. ( _Becoming more agitated._ ) Actually, I was sure of it. I knew in my heart that sooner or later, this day would come. I knew it was coming. And here it is.\n\nYASUKO:... ( _Moving away from_ ICHIZ\u014c.)\n\nICHIZ\u014c: I knew this would happen... at least I knew.\n\nYASUKO: Then... why...? But it's a bit late to say... ( _Cries._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Yes, it's too late. But I really feel it's all our faults. We can't blame ourselves enough.\n\nYASUKO:...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: She really had a hard time. There was never a moment when she wasn't worrying about something.... She worried about us right up to the moment she died. But look at us: you Yasuko, Tokuji, wherever he is, and me, did we ever truly try to make things easy for her, to make her happy? Think about it.\n\nYASUKO:... ( _Stops crying._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Starts pacing up and down the room_ ):... Just think of what she said before she died. Remember her life, full of sincerity, love, and sacrifice. The least we can do in return is learn how we should live our lives. If we can't do that, there isn't much hope for us.\n\nYASUKO:...\n\nMASATAR\u014c ( _Comes back quietly and sits on the sofa._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Anyway, we weren't good children.... I mean, look at Tokuji. He isn't even here yet. Where was he when his mother was dying? Maybe he didn't even know she was sick. He doesn't care about her at all. What would people think if they knew that? And you, too, Yasuko. You always say you are busy working, so I haven't mentioned it, but you're not even married yet. At least I took care of my duties as a son. I did as much as I could. I was the only one out of four of us. I wonder what Mother.... I can't let this go. ( _Walks around, getting more irritated._ ) Yasuko, don't you have any idea where Tokuji might be?\n\nYASUKO ( _Shakes her head._ )\n\nMASATAR\u014c ( _Hesitatingly_ ): Well... you know... We did send telegrams to as many places as we could think of...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: And he hasn't turned up! It's always like this.... Yasuko could at least have been in contact with Tokuji. He didn't get in touch with you, so you didn't bother with him. Your cheap \"independence\" really infuriates me.\n\nDR. KAJIMA ( _Puts his head around the screen_ ): Ichiz\u014d, excuse me...\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Goes behind the screen._ )\n\nSHIGEMASA ( _He passes_ ICHIZ\u014c _coming out; his eyes are red and wet_ ): Ah, ah, she's very beautiful.... Her toenails are shining like seashells... ( _Stares at the ceiling._ )... Ah, it's raining... \"Rain at dawn\"... hmmm... \"A person passes on as it rains.\" ( _He takes out a notebook and writes the poem in it._ )\n\n( _Pause. The sound of rain._ )\n\nDR. KAJIMA ( _Coming from behind the screen with_ ICHIZ\u014c): I'll go now. Would somebody come by later and pick up the certificate? I'll prepare it for you.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Thank you.\n\nDR. KAJIMA: You aren't well, Ichiz\u014d. So don't try to do too much. Should I make up your usual prescription?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Yes.... Please.\n\nDR. KAJIMA: Well. Good-bye. ( _Bows to_ MASATAR\u014c, YASUKO, _and the others. Leaves by the veranda. The_ NURSE _and_ ICHIZ\u014c _go out with him._ )\n\n( _Short pause. The sound of rain_.)\n\nKEIKO ( _Coming slowly from behind the screen_ ): Is that... the sound of rain? Ah, it's been raining.... It's cold.\n\nSHIGEMASA: Look, I'm just writing a haiku. ( _Writes and crosses out in the notebook._ )\n\nKEIKO: Yes, maybe I'll write one, too. What about you, Yasuko?\n\nYASUKO: What?\n\nSHIGEMASA: \"Rain at dawn the oxygen tank... pom pom pom\"... hmmm.\n\nKEIKO: Do you know where my coat is, dear? It's cold.\n\nMASATAR\u014c: Uh? Yes. ( _Goes off to the right._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Comes in restlessly and sits at the desk_ ): Er, Uncle Shigemasa, could you send some telegrams? I'll write them now.... To the town hall, relatives, and others. ( _Looks over his shoulder._ ) On your way back, drop into Dr. Kajima's office and pick up the death certificate. Take it straight to the town hall, because we need permission for burial. Then go to the undertaker's and make arrangements for the funeral.... Ah, yes, what about the temple?... Before or after?... Before, of course.\n\nSHIGEMASA: Hmm, well... maybe... ( _His mind is on something else._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Did you hear what I said?\n\nSHIGEMASA: Eh? Yes, yes...\n\nMASATAR\u014c ( _Coming back in_ ): Keiko, I can't find your coat, honey.\n\nKEIKO: What?... Are you blind? ( _Goes off to the right._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Masatar\u014d, can you do your best to find Tokuji? I don't want this to look bad to others.\n\nMASATAR\u014c: Do you have any ideas... ?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: That's why I'm asking you! Go out and look for him, please! Damn.... There must be some way!\n\nMASATAR\u014c: OK... I'll go and look for him.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Well go. ( _Starts writing at the desk._ )\n\nKEIKO ( _Coming back with her coat around her shoulders_ ): Oh... are you going out? Now?\n\nMASATAR\u014c:... To look for Tokuji...\n\nKEIKO: Can you find him, dear?... I know you, the first thing you'll do is go to a bar.... You want a drink now, don't you?\n\nMASATAR\u014c: No, of course I don't... Anyway, I can't just hang around here. ( _Leaves._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Which relatives should I contact? Eh, Uncle Shigemasa?\n\nSHIGEMASA: Don't, don't talk to me just now... ( _He_ ' _s writing in his book._ )\n\nKEIKO: You'd better let them all know, or there'll be trouble later.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Then they'll all come.\n\nKEIKO: Yes, of course, I suppose so.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: It's going to be quite a job... futons, food.... Should I hire someone to help out? What about a hibachi and teacups? We don't have enough here, do we?\n\nKEIKO: Of course not.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: The wake is tonight, so we'll need drinks and food, too... so, so... provide rice and sak\u00e9, quick. I don't want it to look shabby, Keiko.\n\nKEIKO: Do I have to do it?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: It's a woman's job. Besides, you are the oldest sister. And another thing... Yasuko, you go to the bank; then there must be something else... Everybody think about it, make notes so we don't argue later.... Uncle, what are you writing over there?.... Are you listening to any of this?\n\nSHIGEMASA: Eh? I'm sorry...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: You... you're always like this.\n\nSHIGEMASA: What? I... I'm still thinking about her.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: That's your business but this is urgent! Aghhh! I'm the only one who cares about any of this! I have to think of everything... ( _He tears up some paper and throws it on the floor._ ) You're all useless!\n\nKEIKO: Why don't you calm down? Someone from the town hall or the neighborhood will come by later and take care of things.\n\nSHIGEMASA: Anyway, sit down and let's talk about all this. It'll be morning soon....\n\nICHIZ\u014c: What? That's just typical of you... maybe you don't care, but I do!... Besides I'm the head of this house.... I do things my way!... So, Uncle, take these to the post office, drop into Dr. Kajima's on the way back, then the town hall, then deal with the undertaker. Ah, don't forget your seal and the ration card for the rice.\n\nSHIGEMASA: Yes, yes. ( _Leaves to the right._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: And Keiko, you go to the bank.\n\nKEIKO: It isn't light yet!\n\nICHIZ\u014c: I know... I mean after it gets light.\n\nIKU ( _Grandmother, eighty-five, crawls in from the next room_ ): Ichiz\u014d, it's light. Can I have my breakfast.... Please.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Granma... just wait a moment. You shouldn't be in here.\n\nIKU: Ichiz\u014d, listen... Nobu doesn't care about old people. She's the worst daughter ever.... She never gives me food; my clothes are in rags. ( _She tears a piece off her sleeve._ ) Look at this!\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Have some respect. Nobu just died. Look.\n\nIKU: Don't lie. Nobu didn't die. She'll live a thousand years!\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Grandma, that's a good girl, go back in there.\n\n( _Takes hold of_ IKU _and leaves._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Whatever you do, don't let her out of there. Put her to bed.... Aghhhh. What a crowd! I'm ( _Kicks the chair._ ) I'm going mad here.\n\nKEIKO: It's not good for you Ichiz\u014d. It's bad for your heart.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: What?... How can you be so trivial? It's your...\n\n( _The sound of the front door banging open and closed is heard. After a short pause_ , TOKUJI, ICHIZ\u014c _'s brother, about twenty-seven, comes in, wearing a bright suit and flat cap_.)\n\nTOKUJI ( _He mouths a greeting_ ): Hi.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Hello. ( _Takes off his cap._ )\n\nHey... you...\n\nTOKUJI: On the way here.... I just met Dr. Kajima.\n\nICHIZ\u014c:... ( _He nods toward the screen._ )\n\nTOKUJI:... Hmmm.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: About 4:35.\n\nTOKUJI:... ( _He goes behind the screen._ )\n\n( _Pause._ )\n\n( _The sound of falling rain and a cock crowing nearby are heard._ )\n\nKEIKO: Well... It's morning.... Should I open the shutters?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Hmmm, could you?\n\nKEIKO ( _She opens the shutters and breathes deeply_ ): Ahhh, it's really morning. Will this rain ever stop?... I need a nap. ( _Goes off to the right._ )\n\nTOKUJI ( _Coming from behind the screen, grabs a pair of scissors from the desk, and goes back to the screen._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: What are you doing, Tokuji?\n\nTOKUJI:... I want a lock of her hair. ( _Goes behind the screen._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Sighs. Then wanders around the room._ )\n\nTOKUJI ( _Holding a lock of hair on a piece of paper, comes dejectedly from behind the screen._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Tokuji, where were you?\n\nTOKUJI:...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: We were looking all over for you.\n\nTOKUJI: I didn't know... that she's almost completely white... ( _He stops himself from crying._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c:...\n\nTOKUJI: I... I meant to come. I do care...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: How could we get in touch with you?\n\nTOKUJI: The other day, I came as far as the corner.... Just a little while ago.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: You came here only to ask for something.\n\nTOKUJI: That time, I thought maybe she'd be walking outside. I stood on the street. ( _Sobs._ ) But then I changed my mind.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: It's too late now.\n\nTOKUJI:...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: I can't say she died peacefully.... I'm not talking about the pain or fever from her illness.... I'm sure you know what I mean.\n\nTOKUJI:...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: I wanted you to hear what she had to say.... She was really worried about you... as she would be... She said again and again we should help each other and try to get along together. That's what she said.\n\nTOKUJI ( _Whispering_ ): I see.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: But... nevertheless, the fact that you weren't here when she was dying is...\n\nTOKUJI: OK, OK, I didn't...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: You weren't here because that's how you are.\n\nTOKUJI:...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: You ought to think about that. I've told you about this many times, but even so...\n\nTOKUJI: OK, it's enough. I know, I know.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Well, all right then. ( _Paces around the room._ ) You opened that stall in the market and had Mother there from eight in the morning until ten at night.... Without a single day off, in rain and snow.... And you were always changing what you sold. First clothes, then flowers, shoes, china, pictures of film stars... I don't know what else. Mother didn't know anything about business. She was exhausted from trying to remember what she was supposed to be selling. Worst of all, I heard you often messed things up, bringing a truck full of plants to your shoe shop... that kind of stupidity, eh?... Not only that, but I heard you used to shout at her when stuff was stolen from the shop, until she had terrible headaches.\n\nTOKUJI: No, no. That was...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: There's more. She had to sit the whole day in the market, in the filthy air, while you took advantage of her and went off dancing, skating, and playing mahjong. Then at night you'd get drunk and throw up on her, rolling around the street, waking everybody up, starting fights with people.\n\nTOKUJI: Wait, wait... I didn't mean to...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Stop making excuses.... Your sordid life wore her out, mentally and physically. That's why she got ill. I can't think of any other reason.\n\nTOKUJI: You're saying I...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: What have you done since you left the army? You pretend you are suave and exceptional. But all you did was make her suffer.\n\nTOKUJI: I... ( _Starts crying._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _A little more kindly_ ): You've never taken any notice of Mother since you were a child. You were always misbehaving just to annoy her, always complaining and being sarcastic. Those are all your bad points.... Even I can't like you, so think what Mother....\n\nTOKUJI: I was always taking advantage of her, always being selfish. I'd ask for the impossible and get her to try and give it to me. I just wanted to be treated like a spoiled child.... But in the end, I did that because of the way I am; it turned out badly. I thought, behind it all, she understood me, so anything I did would be OK between me and her.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: I can't accept that mentality. Love should be more ethical and natural.\n\nTOKUJI: Ichiz\u014d, that's enough preaching.... Besides, whatever you say, you'll never understand how I felt because you always got special treatment.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Eh? What are you talking about?\n\nTOKUJI: I mean, there's a world that the favorite son can never imagine.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Oh, I know, you think she thought more of me. But our mother had a lot of love and was very fair. Equal love is lost if the one receiving it is twisted. Who is to blame? Some people are loved a lot, and some are loved less, depending on their character and nature.\n\nTOKUJI: I knew that was what you'd say.... \"Nature,\" \"character.\"... You got special treatment because of the house and the family. There's that stupid custom to care for the first son above all else. I wanted to rescue her from that.... But she was always flattering you, hanging on your every word. She was always on edge and looking up to you.... A mother's love is sometimes... vicious.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Vicious? What are you talking about? Watch your mouth.\n\nTOKUJI: You made me say that. You must have known what she was feeling, and inside, you were really pleased about it. You were always flaunting your cheap superiority with your \"character\" and \"nature,\" weren't you?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Aren't you ashamed of yourself?... To be jealous of your own brother?... Keep to the point! All I'm trying to say is you should think carefully about our mother's death and, more than that, about your responsibility.\n\nTOKUJI: Don't make me the only villain in this case. You weren't always so concerned about our parents. There were times when you thought she was just a burden. Do you want to hear more?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: What? What did I do?\n\nTOKUJI ( _Walking around the room_ ): She told me what kind of tyrant you were in the house. While you were out at parties and hot springs, you didn't even give her ten yen spending money, but you used her just like a servant. You were very stylish, changing your shirt every day, but you didn't even let her buy herself a pair of _tabi_ socks. She hated having to show you the bills. There was always a big uproar; you'd complain for an hour and finally throw some money at her, like you were being charitable or something.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Nonsense!\n\nTOKUJI: She used to say she liked Tokuji more than that mean, cruel, moaning Ichiz\u014d. She'd rather work in my stall than for you.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: At least I didn't make her cry because I had problems with a prostitute. It was snowing heavily that night, and Mother was worried about you. I couldn't stop her, and in tears, she went to the town with an umbrella. She humiliated herself by going to every brothel in town to find you. The sight of her that night... I...\n\nTOKUJI: If you want to get rough, OK! You blamed Mother for your divorce from Fumie, but the fact is, Fumie just didn't like you. But you bitched at Mother and bullied her, didn't you? And in the end, you got hysterical and ran around on the tatami in your shoes. You swore at her and told her to get out.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Shut up! So what? ( _His body shaking with anger._ ) Even if there were a couple of ugly scenes, it was a private thing between a mother and her son. It's just a fact of life. Mother and I understood each other. Fumie and Mother didn't get along at all, so I decided to divorce her. Mother tried to stop me, but... underneath, I think she was relieved. I accepted her with my whole heart and forgave her.... That's how close we were.\n\nTOKUJI: Well, fine. But you can't say you didn't notice Mother's illness if your relationship was so \"close.\" She hadn't been well for quite a while, and in fact, I secretly paid for her to go to see Dr. Kajima.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Eh?\n\nTOKUJI: She'd been weak for a long time. She needed rest but was too scared to tell you about it. Do you know why?\n\nICHIZ\u014c:...\n\nTOKUJI: She was worried sick about what your reaction would be if she ever mentioned it.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: That's not true! It's a lie!\n\nTOKUJI: What have I got to lie about? Dr. Kajima can tell you it's true.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: But... Why didn't she... Why?... Tell me!\n\nTOKUJI: You'd better ask yourself that.\n\nICHIZ\u014c:...\n\nTOKUJI: I don't know exactly myself, but I do know why she was so uneasy about your feelings.... You made her that way.\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Grabs_ TOKUJI _by the collar_ ): You're a liar!\n\nTOKUJI ( _Casually pushes away_ ICHIZ\u014c' _s hand_ ): Fool...\n\nYASUKO ( _Rushes in from the next room_ ): Stop this, both of you!\n\nTOKUJI: Yasuko knows about all this, too.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Is that true, Yasuko?\n\nYASUKO: Yes.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Why didn't you tell me?\n\nYASUKO: Because... Mother told me not to tell you.... She said that if she became of no use to you, you'd have nothing to do with her...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: But, but that's stupid....\n\nYASUKO: She kept her sickness a secret so she wouldn't bother you.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: That, that can't be true.... It's impossible.\n\nTOKUJI: I wonder why she was so scared of you?... I can't stand to think of it.\n\nYASUKO: Me neither, I was so upset to see... ( _Starts crying._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Sits on a chair and closes his eyes in pain._ )\n\nTOKUJI: So in the end, she was just a weak, powerless Japanese woman. It made me angry and very sorry.... In fact, I hated it.\n\nYASUKO: What was... the point of her life, anyway?\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Groans with his eyes closed._ )\n\nTOKUJI: Exactly.\n\nICHIZ\u014c:... So I knew absolutely nothing?\n\nTOKUJI ( _Gently_ ): It seems that way.... The fact is, you were just making her submit to you.\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _With his head in his hands_ ): Uhm.... But no...\n\nTOKUJI: Ichiz\u014d, don't be so hard on yourself.\n\nYASUKO: Come on, let's forget all this.\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Groans._ )\n\nTOKUJI: I said too much.... But it's true, and sometimes the truth hurts.\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _His eyes wide in shock_ ): Then... what... what was I supposed to be? Who the hell was I?\n\nTOKUJI: Eh? What's wrong, all of a sudden?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: This is a question of my identity. It's between Mother and me.\n\nTOKUJI: But that's all finished now, isn't it? Let's not drag it up again. I'm tired of it.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: So who was the one obeying? Was it me, or was it Mother? Who was scared of whom? That's what I've been asking myself. And who do you think comes to mind?\n\nTOKUJI: How the hell should I know?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: You just said Mother was a weak and powerless person, didn't you?\n\nYASUKO: Ichiz\u014d, calm down, please. It's not good for you.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Yasuko, keep quiet.... What comes to mind is my mother, who was with us until just yesterday. With her peaceful eyes, her graceful movements, and her slow, thoughtful speech.... ( _He paces nervously around the room._ ) Cool and collected.... She did everything just so... She never worried about what I thought. She was the strong one.... I was scared of her.\n\nTOKUJI: Hum... Hum, you're joking!... That doesn't fit.... But...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Hmm... You just said I was mean and a tyrant. But can't you see that actually, I was being smothered by her. So sometimes I had to fight back.... That was my resistance. Damn! Do you think it helped? It made it even worse. She didn't show any concern, no matter how mad I got. In a fight I always gave in first.... She was always all right, because she had such a strong will.\n\nTOKUJI: Are you all right, Ichiz\u014d?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: \"Ichiz\u014d, you're changed these days, you're so lazy.\" She would stare at me. I would freeze, then run off to the office, holding my bag! \"Is that good enough, Ichiz\u014d? Why don't you do it properly, Ichiz\u014d? You're always the same, Ichiz\u014d.\" I worked really hard, put on a determined face.... \"Come on, Ichiz\u014d, harder!\" She would order me and I would obey.\n\nTOKUJI: Wait a minute...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: No!... I would complain, but not her. Not even once. I would be exhausted, but she never showed a sign of it. She always walked ahead of me.... Just one small step.... Sometimes she'd look back at me... disappointed in me.... It drove me crazy. I hated her.... But even so, I could never catch up to her.\n\nTOKUJI: She was just pushing you on, even at her age.... You should be grateful.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Hmm... Then one day, I realized we were always pushing on harder and harder, out of breath. We were always competing. But both of us hated to lose.... We were both obsessed.... Then she got older, more tired, and her body wore out. But she kept on at the same pace. Because she couldn't stand to show me any weakness. That was what she was like.\n\nTOKUJI: Oh, that's enough, Ichiz\u014d.\n\nYASUKO: Really, Ichiz\u014d, enough. You're scaring me.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: She didn't tell me... even when she got sick.... She pretended everything was all right... to me anyway.\n\nTOKUJI: Well, don't get so worked up about it. I mean, it can't be helped. It was different when she was alive, but now...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: No, she hasn't changed, she's just the same now as she was before... That's finally becoming clear to me.... Of course she was kind to me. She never took her eyes off me. Like she was holding my reins all the time. She looked after me like a prize stallion.... She was always in some corner, keeping an eye on me.... Those eyes... And I went along with it. Because she was stronger than I was.... ( _He sways._ ) It's like I was tied with invisible wires.... Those wires cut into me deeper and deeper every year.\n\nYASUKO: Ichiz\u014d, what's the matter... ?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: She held the ends of the wires.... Yes, now I see it, it was her... ( _He stumbles excitedly around the room._ ) That's how she tamed me, little by little.... A well-trained, obedient pet, with a collar and leash around my neck... You ( _He stares at_ YASUKO _and_ TOKUJI) were hanging on that leash, and so were Keiko, Uncle Shigemasa, Grandmother, and Mother herself. Everybody in the family. No, even this house, too. ( _He looks up at the ceiling._ ) Yes, this... this house, yes, I'm a pet and this is my kennel... forty years... Working like a dog, kowtowing to my bosses, pushing away my friends, and being hard on the people below me.... And what's my reward? This miserable life.... I'm old, I'm sick, and on top of that... ( _He grabs his chest in pain._ ) This... Aghh, agh, I can't breathe...\n\nTOKUJI: What, what's wrong...? ( _Grabs_ ICHIZ\u014c.) What's the matter, Ichiz\u014d?\n\nYASUKO ( _Clinging to_ ICHIZ\u014c): Hold on, Ichiz\u014d, calm down. Somebody get a glass of water. Uncle Shigemasa!\n\nSHIGEMASA ( _Rushes in from the next room with a glass of water_ ): I knew this would happen. Here, Ichiz\u014d, water, take it. ( _He tries to make_ ICHIZ\u014c _drink._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Slaps the glass away_ ): I don't need it. Get away from me! All of you. Get out! Leave me alone! ( _Falls on the sofa._ )\n\nSHIGEMASA: Well, this is it, then?\n\nTOKUJI: Ichiz\u014d, are you all right?\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Groans._ )\n\nSHIGEMASA: Leave him. ( _Takes_ TOKUJI _by the arm and leads him away from the sofa._ ) It's an attack... but you two... He's your brother. You've got to take care of him.\n\nTOKUJI: I know.... It's not like I enjoyed telling him that, it hurt me.\n\nSHIGEMASA: Did it?... Maybe this is the modern way... I don't know....\n\nTOKUJI: What are you talking about?... Uncle Shigemasa, just keep out of this.\n\nSHIGEMASA: Yes,... Yasuko, I'll leave Ichiz\u014d to you. ( _He leaves._ )\n\nYASUKO ( _Covers_ ICHIZ\u014c _with a blanket and wipes his forehead._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Groans._ )\n\nTOKUJI ( _Beckons to_ YASUKO): Yasuko...\n\nYASUKO:...\n\nTOKUJI: Can you come here a minute?\n\nYASUKO: What?\n\nTOKUJI: Don't be angry with me.\n\nYASUKO: You should apologize to Mother and to Ichiz\u014d. Mother's body isn't cold yet.... You should be ashamed of yourself. ( _Cries._ )\n\nTOKUJI: Does this happen to him very often?... Or is he just being hysterical?\n\nKEIKO ( _Comes in from the next room and looks at_ ICHIZ\u014c): He looks like he's asleep.... Let's be quiet.\n\nYASUKO: He's sick.\n\nTOKUJI: I said too much.... Silence can be a virtue sometimes.\n\nKEIKO: Hmm. Tearing Mother to pieces like that was very virtuous, wasn't it?\n\nYASUKO: Is this how a family should behave at a time like this, eh, Tokuji?\n\nTOKUJI: Well, it's a long hard road.\n\nYASUKO: So let's try to go together. We don't have to tear each other to pieces.... Let's talk like friends.\n\nTOKUJI: Right! \"Friends\"!\n\nYASUKO: Let's try from now on. We should be able to be friends.\n\nTOKUJI: You're renting a room because you couldn't stand living here with Ichiz\u014d.\n\nYASUKO:...\n\nKEIKO: Family and also friends.... Hmmm, it's idealistic... but I like it.\n\nTOKUJI: But Ichiz\u014d's becoming more and more difficult to get along with.\n\nYASUKO: It's not his fault, it's because of his health. We haven't cared about him enough.\n\nKEIKO: You know what Ichiz\u014d's sickness is?... It's called neurosis.... I read about it in a magazine the other day.\n\nTOKUJI: Well, I hope you read about the cure, too. You could say something to him.\n\nKEIKO: They said about 45 percent of modern people are neurotic.\n\nYASUKO: How do you cure it?\n\nKEIKO: Well,... perhaps in Ichiz\u014d's case, a wife would be the best thing.... Don't you think?\n\nTOKUJI: Typical.\n\nKEIKO: No, really, I'm serious. He won't be cured by treatment from a quack like Kajima.... Actually, I've really been thinking about this. Remember Fumie? Bringing her back would be the best idea. What do you think, Tokuji?\n\nTOKUJI: Yes, she wasn't that bad.\n\nKEIKO: She's living quite close by.\n\nTOKUJI: Really? How's she doing?\n\nKEIKO: Not so good.\n\nTOKUJI: Eh?\n\nKEIKO: She didn't get along with Mother. But now Mother's gone. Maybe Fumie's got another chance.\n\nTOKUJI ( _Screwing up his face_ ): Hmmm, maybe so, but I can't be quite as blunt as you. What do you mean... chance? Mother's only been dead two hours?... I'm going to wash my face. ( _Leaves to the right._ )\n\nKEIKO ( _Awkwardly_ ): Underneath, Tokuji is really very sincere. Crying that much.... I can't cry like that now.\n\nYASUKO:...\n\nKEIKO: Yasuko, what's on your mind?\n\nYASUKO: Eh?... Hmmm.\n\nKEIKO: Come and see us some time; we'll all be lonelier from now on.\n\nYASUKO: Yes, I will.\n\nKEIKO: You've completely lost touch with us. You shouldn't avoid us that much.\n\nYASUKO: No, It's Just that I've been busy working, but I'll come by some time soon.\n\nKEIKO: Please do.... By the way... ( _Stares at_ YASUKO.)\n\nYASUKO: Eh? What?\n\nKEIKO: Well... since we last we saw you, you've really grown up.\n\nYASUKO ( _Blushing_ ): What are you talking about?\n\nKEIKO: It's true.\n\nYASUKO:...\n\nKEIKO: People grow up so quickly.\n\nYASUKO:...\n\nKEIKO: You were still a baby when father died.\n\nYASUKO:... I didn't know what was happening then.... I was lucky. Not like this time.\n\nKEIKO: That's true.... It's probably a bigger shock to you than to anybody else.\n\nYASUKO ( _Sobbing_ ): It's like she suddenly just abandoned me....\n\nKEIKO: It was so sudden... and you were mother's favorite, which makes it harder on you....\n\nYASUKO:...\n\nKEIKO: You were the youngest and she was devoted to you.... You must be completely shattered by this.\n\nYASUKO: It seems like God's judgment.\n\nKEIKO: No, but... Mother was worrying only about you up to the moment she died.... Never about me...\n\nYASUKO: That's because she was so sure of you.\n\nKEIKO: Do you think so?\n\nYASUKO: That moment was the only time I ever felt that maybe I should have gotten married.... She was so worried and full of regret.... Wasn't she? ( _Wipes a tear from her eye._ )\n\nKEIKO: Well, It's too late now.\n\nYASUKO: But I don't feel that now.\n\nKEIKO: It would have been nice if you had gotten married.\n\nYASUKO: It was just a momentary feeling.\n\nEven so...\n\n...\n\nKEIKO: Why did you refuse that earlier time?\n\nYASUKO: Oh, I... I wasn't talking about that... but...\n\nKEIKO: I'd like to know... because I don't understand you. After you two were introduced, you both said \"yes,\" and you both looked very happy.\n\nYASUKO: I don't want to talk about it.\n\nKEIKO: But that's not fair.... Because since then, I've always felt awkward with his family.... You're so selfish.\n\nYASUKO: I... I'm sorry.\n\nKEIKO: Is it true that you told him you'd marry him only if he'd take Mother too?\n\nYASUKO:...\n\nKEIKO: I heard that a long time afterward from someone in his family.... I was shocked.\n\nYASUKO:...\n\nKEIKO: These days nobody would accept a wife along with her mother.... Are you stupid? Everybody knows that....\n\nYASUKO: I know...\n\nKEIKO: And saying that you didn't want to leave Mother.... You're not a school kid anymore, are you?\n\nYASUKO:...\n\nKEIKO: \"A woman leaves her parents' house and gets on with her life\"..., even the kids in the missionary school know that.\n\nYASUKO: Keiko... you couldn't possibly understand.\n\nKEIKO: Oh?... Try me.\n\nYASUKO: Did you ever really, truly think about Mother?\n\nKEIKO ( _Coolly_ ): Certainly.\n\nYASUKO: Then you should understand what I'm going to say.... Neither you nor Ichiz\u014d really knew Mother's grief. She used to sit on the edge of the veranda and stare into the garden with her eyes full of tears.... I asked her what was the matter. She told me she didn't know why she was sad; she couldn't explain it without crying. She said she felt herself only when she was crying alone. She said maybe women were born to be old and sad. ( _Sobs._ )... When I thought about her life of sixty years, I hated father. It was said he was a combination of grandmother and Ichiz\u014d. Cold, stubborn, and obstinate. And he didn't treat mother like a human being.... Yes, that's right, a few days after they got married, he introduced her to some guests as the woman he'd acquired as a maid!\n\nKEIKO: I heard that story, too.\n\nYASUKO: And his mother slept all day and stayed up all night, keeping her awake.\n\nKEIKO ( _Shaking her head bitterly_ ): That's terrible.\n\nYASUKO: Then father would shout at our mother, blaming her for keeping grandmother awake.\n\nKEIKO: Men!\n\nYASUKO: He told her she could only say \"yes\"; she could forget any other words. He told her he'd beat her.... And he didn't only say it, he did it.\n\nKEIKO: Is that so?\n\nYASUKO: He was a beast.... That's what her life was like, misery and hard work, and all she got in return was white hair and a bent back. I couldn't allow myself to get married for my own happiness and leave Mother to that life. I don't know how you and Ichiz\u014d could get married so easily.... I don't understand.\n\nKEIKO: Oh, don't you?\n\nYASUKO: No, I don't. When I think of what it did to Mother, the idea of marriage makes me sick.\n\nKEIKO:... Aren't you... a bit neurotic?\n\nYASUKO: What, what are you talking about?\n\nKEIKO: Up to a point, even I can understand what you mean. You're still young and naive, but it looks like you were influenced a lot by Mother's pessimism.\n\nYASUKO: Oh! Pessimism... ?\n\nKEIKO: A kind of dislike of people... Yes, Mother definitely had that, always seeing the worst side.\n\nYASUKO: If she did, then that was because...\n\nKEIKO: Yes, because she wasn't a happy woman..... I sympathize with her, but if that gave you a marriage phobia.... Hopeless, I say.\n\nYASUKO: Don't be so rude.\n\nKEIKO: Look, the fact you get so upset shows you aren't aware of it. Your engagements... Mother always wrecked them in the end. No parent wants to let their children go, some stronger than others, but in Mother's case, it must have been a relief for her to talk to you. But her hatred of other people was contagious.... Even if it wasn't intentional... but then again, maybe it was a little bit intentional.\n\nYASUKO: But for what reason?\n\nKEIKO:... Mother was a woman.... And a woman's burden had to be borne silently.... It became a collection of her bitter memories as a woman. She told the stories and you listened. She may have spoken quietly, but she was passionate.... Finally you took on her emotions... they became your experiences, not hers. She wanted you to hate what she hated.... A woman's suppressed emotions are...\n\nYASUKO: Please stop, Keiko. ( _Starts crying._ )\n\nKEIKO: Don't get angry when I'm telling you the truth.... I tried to help you.... So I...\n\nYASUKO: Shut up! ( _Cries._ )\n\nKEIKO: Stop crying all the time.\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Groans and turns over._ )\n\nYASUKO: You, too, you're her daughter, too. How can you talk like that... ?\n\nKEIKO: We're both her daughters, but Mother saw us differently.\n\nYASUKO: Oh? How were we different?\n\nKEIKO: Well, what can I say... ?\n\nYASUKO: If it's true... I shouldn't say this, but... maybe it was your fault....\n\nKEIKO: Really?\n\nYASUKO: Mother said... Keiko was... ( _Stops herself._ )\n\nKEIKO:... \"Not an admirable daughter\"... Was that it?\n\nYASUKO:...\n\nKEIKO: I know that. I accept it. If I was a son, I'd be a mutt, but maybe I'm just a bitch.\n\nYASUKO: Don't talk like that!... It's because you think like that, that Mother's love...\n\nKEIKO: She was cool to me ever since I was born. She never showed me any affection.... She felt a kind of spite toward me. It was always a confrontation with her.\n\nYASUKO: Why... What happened? There must have been something.\n\nKEIKO: No.... You still don't understand?... No, I suppose not. There's no such thing as \"mother's love\"\u2014Every mother is different.\n\nYASUKO: The same old story.... You're such a cheat. You know what you did that broke her heart? Why she never trusted you afterward?\n\nKEIKO: What do you mean?\n\nYASUKO: What do I mean?... Back when you didn't do what she wanted, you ran away with Masatar\u014d instead...\n\nKEIKO: What? That?\n\nYASUKO: Yes.... That drove her crazy. Think about it\u2014That's why she cooled toward you.\n\nKEIKO: What? That's what she told you?\n\nYASUKO:...\n\nKEIKO: That bitch.... She forced me to marry him.\n\nYASUKO: Oh, Keiko, don't lie!\n\nKEIKO: I'll tell you the whole thing, and you decide who was lying, me or Mother.... It was right after father died, and we were very short of money. Ichiz\u014d was still at school; we had nothing... but we had to do something to get by.... Around that time, Masatar\u014d came to our house once. He was a friend of Ichiz\u014d's.... Really, just an acquaintance from school. He was from a wealthy family, and he seemed like he'd be easy to fool. Mother called me into the garden and said I should seduce him into going to Tokyo for a week....\n\nYASUKO: Oh. Keiko...\n\nKEIKO: The look in her eyes... the way she stared at me... at that time she wasn't like... it wasn't like a mother and a daughter, we were two women, and...\n\nYASUKO: No, no, stop it; I don't want to hear this. ( _Cries._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Wakes up groggily_ ):... Is that... Is that true?\n\nKEIKO: Agh!... Don't scare me like that!\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Depressed_ ): Tell me, Keiko.\n\nKEIKO: No, no more. You shouldn't get worked up again.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Whatever you say, it won't surprise me anymore.... I'd rather drag the whole thing out into the light.\n\nKEIKO: No, no... ( _Tries to leave to the right._ )\n\nMASATAR\u014c ( _Enters very drunk_ ): I've searched... I've searched all over Japan... under bushes, below floors, but the enemy is nowhere to be found.\n\nKEIKO: Look, he's drunk again.\n\nMASATAR\u014c: What about her funeral, the funeral... We've got to do it quickly and in good taste.... We're living in the age of atomic bombs now... I'm an atomic BOMB! ( _Marches toward the screen._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: What the hell are you doing? ( _Grabs_ MASATAR\u014c _by the scruff of the neck and pulls him back._ ) Control yourself!\n\nMASATAR\u014c: What? Let go of me!\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Keiko, get him out of here.\n\nKEIKO: No, It's too late now.\n\nMASATAR\u014c: No, no... Everything's shit!\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Tokuji, Tokuji.... Give us a hand here.\n\nTOKUJI ( _Comes in sleepily from the next room_ ): What's all the noise?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Get him out of here and put him to bed.\n\nMASATAR\u014c: What? You won't catch me again.... You cheats!\n\nTOKUJI ( _Holding_ MASATAR\u014c): He's drunk again. Normally he wouldn't have the nerve to say anything.... What happened?\n\nMASATAR\u014c: Who, who's that?... Oh, Tokuji... I'm too choked up to speak ( _Sobs._ )... She's dead.... She was a wonderful mother.... She had Keiko buy two tickets to Tokyo.\n\nTOKUJI: All right, come on stupid, come over here.\n\nMASATAR\u014c: You won't catch me with the same trick twice. I...\n\nTOKUJI: Come on! ( _Takes him to the next room._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c:... How shameful.\n\nKEIKO: He talks like that when he gets drunk.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Shameful! You were too weak. Why didn't you say \"no\" in the beginning, stupid?\n\nKEIKO: Yes, I was stupid... ( _Gradually getting more emotional_ ) to run away for the sake of you and Mother. He was like a wallet that somebody had dropped on the street, and she told me to pick it up... So... Why am I shameful? ( _Bursts into tears._ )\n\nYASUKO: Keiko... ( _Clings to_ KEIKO.) I'm sure, in her heart, she regretted lt. She was sorry for you and blamed herself.... Yes, she must have.\n\nKEIKO: But she never... even up to her last moment, she never said anything to me... I thought that maybe, possibly, in the end, but when I looked into her eyes... she turned away. Her face didn't show anything.\n\nYASUKO: That's because she felt so guilty.\n\nKEIKO: No, it wasn't like that. She didn't look at me because she hated me to the very end.\n\nYASUKO: No, she didn't.\n\nKEIKO: Yes, she did.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Oh, stop it, stop it.... None of it matters.... You've all torn her to pieces.... And I... ( _Cries._ )... I can't... How could you do this to me?\n\nSHIGEMASA ( _Comes in from the next room_ ): Ahhh, we're all guilty, we're all sinful....\n\nTOKUJI ( _Following him in_ ): Stop, Uncle.... They're all crazy enough as it is.\n\nSHIGEMASA: No, I don't mean that.... We should tell everything. That's the only way we'll be redeemed.\n\nTOKUJI: I'm not sure this is such good idea.\n\nSHIGEMASA: I can't pretend to be the only innocent one here.... Let me confess, too.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: What?... There's more?\n\nTOKUJI: After hearing everybody else's stories, Uncle Shigemasa has gone mad, too!\n\nSHIGEMASA: It's difficult to say in front of you, but... Nobu and I were lovers.... No, no, don't misunderstand me. It was after your father, I mean my brother, died.... We were both very serious. I swear to God. ( _Bows low with both hands on the floor._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c:...\n\nKEIKO:...\n\nTOKUJI:...\n\nYASUKO:...\n\nSHIGEMASA: Now... That's a great weight off my chest. Ahhh. ( _Looks up shyly._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Wearily_ ): But, why... with a fool like you... ?\n\nKEIKO: I can't believe it.\n\nTOKUJI: I knew about it.... Maybe it wasn't such a bad thing, Ichiz\u014d.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Wh, what? It's unforgivable.... It's a disgrace! Get out. You made me sick.... Get out!\n\nSHIGEMASA: I'm sorry.... But will you at least accept that I was sincere?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Sincere?... You dirty old man!\n\nSHIGEMASA: Umm... Your mother was a lonely woman in her final years. I helped her; we comforted each other.... She often used to say that, quite honestly, children were of no use. Every child was like a monster, all different monsters. She said you were all like a big noisy, annoying load on her back. She wondered when she'd be able to throw off that load and stretch, to take a deep breath like a real human being.... I could understand that.\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Depressed_ ): All right.... Just shut up.\n\nKEIKO: Well, Mother... she was still a woman.\n\nSHIGEMASA: Hmm... She had a dream to build a small hut on a quiet beach, or at the foot of a hill, and to live on her own... on her own, she said... that hurt me a little though... umm...\n\nKEIKO ( _Laughs_ ):... That sounds nice.\n\nSHIGEMASA: So you've all been talking about her. Some of the things you said were true, but others we'll never know if they are true or not.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Shut up. Just keep quiet.\n\nYASUKO ( _Crying_ ): I don't know... I don't understand.\n\nTOKUJI: Whoever started these confessions is to blame. You should all go back to the beginning again.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: And you should all apologize. Go on, do it.\n\nKEIKO: To whom? We are the ones who were hurt.\n\nSHIGEMASA: If we all confess and forgive each other, that will take care of it; that will be a good ending.\n\nYASUKO: We only felt sad for her... for five minutes after she died!\n\nICHIZ\u014c:... Well, we're not sad anymore. Even if we wanted to be, who is there to be sad for?... For her, we children gave her neither hope nor strength. And for us, her memory gives us neither joy nor happiness. ( _Sobs._ ) The bonds that held us together have fallen to pieces. From now on, each of us can go off in whatever direction he likes, and I... I'm going off now. ( _Stands up unsteadily._ ) I think I'll become a monk.\n\nSHIGEMASA: Ichiz\u014d, Ichiz\u014d... What about the funeral?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: I'll leave that to you. You be the chief mourner, and you bury her.\n\nSHIGEMASA: That's terrible; it's not like you.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: No, no more. I've had enough. I don't want to even see your faces anymore. I'm not going to have anything to do with the funeral or with you.\n\nTOKUJI: Me neither. I'll hold my own funeral for Mother, alone.\n\nKEIKO: Oh... Yasuko, which funeral are you going to go to?\n\nYASUKO: Neither of them.... I'll do it by myself. ( _Cries._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: That's all right. That sounds just like you anyway.\n\nSHIGEMASA ( _Starts crying_ ): Nobu... She's still having a hard time... even now that she's dead.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Well, that's that. I'm going off somewhere far away, on my own. Ah, this is my house... ( _Looking toward the screen._ ) Mother... Who were we, you and me?... What was our forty years together all about? Who are you, anyway?... What kind of a person are you? ( _Walks unsteadily toward the screen._ ) Who was she?... I don't know, I can't see it.... Tell me please, Mother. ( _Looks behind the screen._ ) Mother,... Mother,... Agh, agh. ( _Suddenly jumps back, shaking._ ) She, she moved! She opened her eyes!... She's alive. Alive! ( _Almost falls over._ )\n\n(KEIKO _and_ YASUKO _scream and cling to_ ICHIZ\u014c.)\n\nTOKUJI ( _Rushes behind the screen but quickly comes out, pale and shivering_ ):... Stu, stupid... Stupid... She's... She's not alive.\n\nSHIGEMASA ( _Clings to_ TOKUJI): Tokuji... Tokuji...\n\nTOKUJI: You, you're all stupid... She's not alive... Don't scare me.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Those, those eyes... looked at me... stared at me... ( _Starts to feel a sharp pain in his chest._ ) How, how dare she curse... me!... Agh, agh... I... I can't breathe... ( _Falls over._ )\n\nTOKUJI: Water. Water.... Bring him some water.\n\nYASUKO: Ichiz\u014d,... Somebody, get water\n\nSHIGEMASA ( _Upset, runs off to the right._ )\n\nTOKUJI: Ichiz\u014d, it... it's all right... ( _Holds_ ICHIZ\u014c _up._ ) You're all right.... You made a mistake.... Look, get a grip on yourself.\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Groans with his eyes closed._ )\n\nKEIKO ( _Still clinging to_ ICHIZ\u014c):... Again, Tokuji, once again... Go and have another look... I'm scared.\n\nTOKUJI: No. No, don't be stupid. No.... ( _Shivers._ ) Everybody just calm down....\n\n( _They all fall silent. There's a noise from behind the screen. They all freeze. Silence. Men_ ' _s whispering voices can be heard from the entrance._ SHIGEMASA _comes in with three town hall_ OFFICIALS. _The_ OFFICIALS _sit on the right._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Opens his eyes slightly_ ):...\n\nSHIGEMASA: They're from the town hall.\n\nOFFICIAL 1: We got your notice... It was so sudden... We're very sorry... ( _The three_ OFFICIALS _bow._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Oh... Thank you for your concern....\n\nOFFICIAL 1: It must have been a terrible shock to you....\n\nICHIZ\u014c:...\n\nOFFICIAL 1: We'd like to help if we can... I'm sure we'll be of no use, but if there's anything we can do....\n\nICHIZ\u014c: It's very kind of you... We don't really know what we should do... So if it's not too much trouble....\n\n( _Everybody bows. Lights fade to black._ )\n\nSCENE 2\n\n_The following day. All the furniture has been removed from the room and replaced by some hibachi and cushions on the floor. To stage left hang black and white funeral curtains, behind which the funeral ceremony has begun. Incense is being burned, and a priest can be heard chanting prayers. Mourners come and go through the garden to offer condolences by burning incense._ FUNERAL HELPERS _dressed in black are busy coming and going along the veranda. Pause._\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Dressed in black, enters from the left followed by_ OFFICIAL 1.)\n\nOFFICIAL 1:... You must be tired.... It all takes so long.... ( _Offers a cigarette._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Yes... but maybe I'm just a little tense... Where is my boss, the general manager?\n\nOFFICIAL 1: He'll be here soon.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: I'm very grateful to you for all the trouble you've taken.\n\nOFFICIAL 1: No, no, not at all.... By the way, when the hearse leaves, could you sit in the front car and hold the family memorial plaque...? It should be you, the chief mourner and an assistant mourner side by side.... Normally, your wife would be the assistant... but in your case, maybe your sister.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Oh... yes.\n\nOFFICIAL 1: This is such an old family... such a grand funeral... and you have such wide connections.... The funeral flowers are lined up almost down to the main street....\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Yes... Mother would have been pleased.\n\nOFFICIAL 2 ( _From the veranda_ ): Excuse me.\n\nOFFICIAL 1: Ah... Yes. ( _Leaves with_ OFFICIAL 2.)\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Slowly smokes cigarette_ ):...\n\n(FUMIE, _thirty-two,_ ICHIZ\u014c' _s former wife, dressed in a black kimono, enters from the right carrying condolence telegrams on a tray. She sees_ ICHIZ\u014c _and hesitates._ )\n\nFUMIE: Well... What should I... ?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Uh?\n\nFUMIE:... do with these telegrams?\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _In a restrained voice_ ): So you're still here?... I thought I told you to go as soon as you could.\n\nFUMIE:... I'm sorry... But you looked so busy that I...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: It's so humiliating... you here in front of everybody... Think about my position.\n\nFUMIE:... I'm sorry.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Why didn't you leave yesterday?... That Kajima... He's the one who insisted that you come and pay your respects... for my mother's sake. I said it would be OK, just to save his face... But there are so many people here today. Please, just leave.\n\nFUMIE ( _Sobbing_ ): I'm sorry... I'll go.\n\n(DR. KAJIMA _passes on the veranda._ )\n\nDR. KAJIMA: Ah, Ichiz\u014d... ( _Gives a quick bow._ ) I've just been offering my condolences.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Thank you.\n\nDR. KAJIMA: I wanted to come earlier, but I've been so busy.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Don't worry about it. Thank you for coming.\n\nDR. KAJIMA: This must be difficult for you. Don't strain yourself. ( _Takes_ ICHIZ\u014c' _s pulse._ )... How do you feel?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Not especially...\n\nDR. KAJIMA: Well, take care of yourself. I have some more calls to make, so if you would excuse me now.... ( _Bows to_ FUMIE _and is about to leave._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Er, look... Dr. Kajima?\n\nDR. KAJIMA: Uh?\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Indicates_ FUMIE _with his eyes_ ):... Er, today, there're so many guests here. Take her with you, won't you?\n\nDR. KAJIMA: But Ichiz\u014d, be a little more flexible, please, think of the situation. She just wants to pay her last respects.\n\nFUMIE: I'm sorry, I didn't want to cause trouble.\n\nDR. KAJIMA: No, no. ( _To_ ICHIZ\u014c.) I've met your wife often and had long talks with her at the factory. I'm the medical officer there.\n\nFUMIE: Yes. Dr. Kajima always told me about you. I hear you were promoted to section chief, dear... Congratulations.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Yes, yes... well.\n\nDR. KAJIMA: As a friend, I'm concerned about you, Ichiz\u014d. I don't want to be too forward, but I think you two should talk together a little, especially in view of the present situation.\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Looks disgusted._ )\n\nDR. KAJIMA: Anyway... ( _Looks at his watch._ ) it's late, I must excuse myself.\n\nFUMIE: Thank you so much for your kindness. ( _Tries to see him off._ )\n\nDR. KAJIMA: No, please, it's all right. ( _Leaves._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Disgusted_ ):...\n\nFUMIE: I, I... don't know what to say. ( _Looks apprehensively at_ ICHIZ\u014c.) It's like a dream, seeing you again now... and your mother no longer with us.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: That Kajima and his infernal meddling... to do such a thing to me!... God damn it!\n\nFUMIE ( _Dejectedly_ ): I'll go. It was wrong of me to try to see you, after all the trouble we had. Please forgive me... and take care of yourself.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Oh, it's all right... now go home.\n\nFUMIE: Yes... now that I've seen you're all right and I've paid my last respects to your mother, I'm satisfied. ( _Looks around the room nostalgically._ ) Everything looks just the same as when I was here... so full of memories.\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Angry_ ): Only if you visit.... Everybody looks at this house and sees such a perfect family. Damn! What do outsiders know?\n\nFUMIE: It's been so long since I was last here. Your mother was a great person. Not many people have such character; very few could be like her. You must be very sad. Yes?... ( _Turns away._ ) But you must be strong. Your whole future lies ahead of you; you're in the prime of your life. I wish you every success ( _Moved to tears._ ) and I'll pray for you.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Yes, OK.\n\nFUMIE: If only you'd try and understand my feelings, that would be enough for me. ( _Hesitates slightly._ ) Yes, I know I betrayed both you and your mother when I ran away from this house. But now I feel that finally I'm beginning to understand human nature and the world around me.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Yes, I feel the same way, and I can't stand this anymore. I've got to do something about it, especially now with my mother gone.\n\nFUMIE: I understand how you must be suffering and how it feels to worry all alone....\n\nICHIZ\u014c: I've always been alone... nobody was ever truly honest with me, nobody showed me real affection. No, in fact, I never knew anything at all; I don't know what kind of life I've been leading. What the hell does it all add up to? ( _Paces around the room._ ) Have you any idea how much I suffered, stuck between you two? A battle between a bride and a mother-in-law? An endless quarrel, even when I was at work at the town hall, I got headaches thinking of the atmosphere in this house. She despised you, and you did nothing but oppose her. I was torn to pieces between the two of you. But then, on top of that, you were both against me, trampling on me together. You'd call me weak, stupid, and stubborn. I was so miserable; I don't know how I stood it. I'll never let such a thing happen again.\n\nFUMIE: I'm so sorry I caused you such suffering, I'm sorry. How can I apologize, how...? It was all my fault. How can I apologize... to her, too.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Uh?...\n\nFUMIE: I was such a bad wife, a terrible daughter-in-law.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: But part of the fault was Mother's, I mean, the family's, something fundamental....\n\nFUMIE: No, I was so young and inexperienced. I didn't know anything about the outside world.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Wait a minute... At that time, didn't you say that my family was... feudalistic or something; it wasn't human, that you were being suffocated? You said you needed more freedom or else your soul would be crushed, so your only solution was to abandon me... ?\n\nFUMIE: Please don't talk about it anymore.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Why not?\n\nFUMIE: It's so humiliating... don't.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Eh?... I think there's a misunderstanding here.\n\nFUMIE: Really? Do you?\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _More gently_ ): Yes.... You think I'm angry with you, don't you? But no, no... The fact is what you said was true. You don't need to feel ashamed. Lately... just very recently... I came to understand that.\n\nFUMIE: Well... then... aren't you angry with me?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Uh? Yes... ( _A little stricter._ ) Of course, it was terrible at the time. I was put in a very embarrassing position. Do you think it was easy for me to deal with it?\n\nFUMIE: I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. ( _Cries._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c:... So embarrassing... all this crying.... Somebody is coming.... Shh!\n\n(OFFICIAL 1 _passes along the veranda, casting a slight sideways glance at_ FUMIE. ICHIZ\u014c _closes the_ sh\u014dji.)\n\nFUMIE: You hate me now and always will....\n\nICHIZ\u014c: No... Even then I didn't hate you....\n\nFUMIE: I'm sorry... I don't know what to say....\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Well, it's all in the past now... But Fumie,... there's something I want to... ask you ( _Hesitates._ )... I don't know how to say it.\n\nFUMIE: Please just ask me, it's only you and me\n\nICHIZ\u014c:... Well, I mean... I respect your judgment and your strength in leaving. That's what I wanted to tell you.\n\nFUMIE ( _Disappointed_ ): Ah... that's all you wanted to talk about?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Yes, but don't be so modest.\n\nFUMIE: I'm not being modest.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: I understand now, people have to move forward. You did it three years ago. I guess you were able to see a new life that wasn't possible in this house. That's why you were able to leave here so confidently, so proudly, like it was the natural thing to do.\n\nFUMIE: Don't be so cynical... It sounds very mean.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: No, not at all... Really, I respect you. No, more than that, I have faith in you. I want you to use your strength to help me.\n\nFUMIE:...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Last night when you appeared at the door, I felt like I saw a beam of light, actually, as though it was a sign from God! I had an incredible premonition.\n\nFUMIE: Me too. It was like...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: You felt it, didn't you? I'm not the same person I was before.... You will help me, won't you?\n\nFUMIE: Yes, yes. ( _Her eyes fill with tears._ ) I'll do anything... People, you and me, we all lead lonely lives, don't we?\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Moved to tears_ ): Yes, we do... So I beg you, Fumie, please show me the place, take me to where you ran away to... the place where you found a free life... There, there, let's go as soon as the funeral is finished!\n\nFUMIE:... ( _Looking at_ ICHIZ\u014c.) What are you dreaming of at your age? What's wrong with you, have you gone mad?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: I'm really going to do it!\n\nFUMIE: Your mother's death must have affected you very much... but even so...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: What's the matter?... You're upset... Why?\n\nFUMIE: Because you're being cruel to me, awful.... You shouldn't say that.... ( _Cries._ ) You're teasing me....\n\nICHIZ\u014c: What do you mean, \"teasing you\"?\n\nFUMIE:... Just the thought of that experience makes me shudder... but you want me to go through it all again... No, I won't do it.\n\nICHIZ\u014c:... But Fumie,... I've made up my mind. I want to crush this old and trifling house, destroy it and start a new, brighter life. If I don't, I'll be lost. Free my soul! I want to make a fresh start.\n\nFUMIE: Oh... You don't have to repeat exactly what I said at that time. ( _Bursts into tears._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c:... What's wrong, Fumie?\n\nFUMIE ( _Sobbing_ ):... After I left here, I thought I'd be able to go step by step and build a new life.... But no matter where I went, even in Tokyo, it was the same. Every day working like a dog but getting hardly any money, living from hand to mouth... always afraid of losing my job and being kicked out of my apartment... Everybody seemed to hate me; I was so miserable. Every night I cried myself to sleep.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: But... but there must have been something good about it... some kind of satisfaction... ?\n\nFUMIE: No, not at all. At first I thought so, too. That's why I was always moving around... I was stupid, wasn't I?... And finally I found myself back in the next town.... Strange, it seems I was always being drawn back toward this place, this house\n\nICHIZ\u014c: But why?\n\nFUMIE: Because even this was better than those other places.\n\nICHIZ\u014c:...\n\nFUMIE: Also, I used to often think of your mother.... You know, last night, when I visited your mother's body... she opened her eyes and stared at me... it was like she was saying, \"Fumie, I knew you'd come back....\"\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Shocked_ ):... Wh, what a lot of nonsense... It, it's stupid, stupid....\n\nFUMIE: I know it's not possible... but somehow, it seemed to me... It seemed her eyes moved....\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Stop it! Cut it out!\n\nFUMIE: And... so I felt I had to apologize to her. I was so scared... I told her, \"Mother, it was all my fault. I'm sorry I never listened to you, obeyed you. I was too proud.\" And then she closed her eyes, like she was telling me it was all right.\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Getting irritated_ ): What a stupid... so childish! I've never heard anything like it.\n\nFUMIE: No?... When I first saw her last night, I naturally bowed in respect. She seemed so dignified, her white hair, her thin, tired face....\n\nICHIZ\u014c:...\n\nFUMIE: I'm sure she's still watching us from somewhere. Don't you feel it?\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Shivering_ ): No!... Never... Her life is over. Now my life is going to begin. She's gone, forever....\n\nFUMIE: But we shouldn't forget her, should we? Either of us.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Either of us? You and me?\n\nFUMIE: Yes, everything you've achieved was with her help, wasn't it? You owe it all to her. She made you what you are. She knew what had to be done, and she did it. If we do what she did, we two can be happy again. Yes, that's it. Let's do it.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: You haven't heard anything I've said, have you? Get out! ( _Stamps his feet._ ) I said, go....\n\nFUMIE ( _Laughing_ ):... You're like a spoiled child... You call me childish, but you're the one who's a child.... That's always been one of your best qualities. I remember it well. ( _Laughs._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Irritated_ ): Don't bring that up now; it's not the time. Just don't talk about it, I won't allow it.\n\nFUMIE: OK, I won't. ( _Laughs._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Don't laugh! It's not funny... I have to think of what to do... what should I... I... do... Yes, think, think! ( _Walks around the room._ )\n\nFUMIE ( _Worried_ ): Ichiz\u014d, aren't you finished thinking... ?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Shut up!... I don't want to get stuck here... What should I do first?\n\nFUMIE: What are you brooding about? Remember how well off you are, your position and this good life... I don't know what to do with you.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: I can't stand it. I can't bear it anymore... no more. ( _His eyes fill with tears of regret._ ) One more step and I feel my back will break. I just can't hold it all up any longer. It's too painful.\n\nFUMIE: Well... I'll help you, OK? You just said you don't hate me, which made me so grateful that I cried... You know, I knew that you'd say that to me, because I know that you're not capable of hating another person. So, I'll help you. I'll dedicate all my love and sincerity to you.\n\nICHIZ\u014c:... Wait a minute, I don't quite understand what you're talking about... What is it you're going to do? What have you decided?\n\nFUMIE: Well, I'll... be just like your mother. I'll devote myself to you. If I follow her example, I'm sure that one day, I'll be as strong as she was.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: No, no... that's not what I want to hear!... Don't do that...\n\nFUMIE: You don't feel comfortable with me, do you? Listen, I'll never leave you again... Please, just trust me.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: It's not a question of trust... No, no, I said no... I'm, I'm too confused now... let's talk about it some other time...\n\nFUMIE: All this has upset you, hasn't it? But you know, you must pull yourself together, or else what will happen to this house?\n\nICHIZ\u014c:... Fumie, you... sound just like my mother used to. No, don't imitate her... No...\n\nFUMIE ( _Smiling_ ): I'm sorry... I didn't mean to... but maybe it's just natural... Anyway, from now on, I'll try to help you work harder. It will give me a reason to live, and maybe it will be a way to make it up to your mother.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: What are you.... Get rid of that idea right now.... No, Fumie, no...\n\nFUMIE ( _Sobbing_ ): You don't trust me... That's my fault, isn't it? But made up my mind. I've decided.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Who gave you the right to make such a decision? Who do you think you are? Well, I'm not accepting your one-sided decision, so just forget it!\n\nFUMIE ( _Laughs_ ): You're very strange today.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: You're the one who's strange.\n\nFUMIE: Oh, don't be so rude. Anyway, I've decided, and it's the right decision, I feel it in my bones.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: In your bones?... Oh ( _Staggers._ )... Do whatever you want... You're a monster; devour me if you want to...\n\nOFFICIAL 1 ( _Running in_ ): Did you call... ?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Agh! Mind your own business.\n\nOFFICIAL 1:...\n\nIKU ( _Coming in from the next room_ ): Ichiz\u014d, Ichiz\u014d, everybody is so well dressed... except me. ( _Tears her sleeve._ )... Look, look at these rags. Ichiz\u014d, listen, please let me wear Nobu's black kimono. It was mine originally, anyway. She took it and never gave it back to me. ( _Cries._ )\n\nFUMIE: Oh, poor Iku. ( _Laughing._ ) Come on, Grandma, I'll dress you in it. ( _To_ ICHIZ\u014c.) All right?... Look, Grandma, he said it was all right. ( _Takes_ IKU _into the next room._ )\n\nOFFICIAL 1:... Wasn't that lady your... ?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: The wires. That's... ( _Looks in great pain_ )... the wires, again the getting tighter.... I, I'm suffocating. Agh! Water.... Wire!\n\nOFFICIAL 1 ( _Gripping_ ICHIZ\u014c): Are you all right? Pull yourself together.\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Groans._ )\n\nOFFICIAL 1: Look, I'll go and get somebody.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: No, no... just leave me alone... please...\n\nOFFICIAL 1: You must be exhausted.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Yes... have you ever... been trapped before?\n\nOFFICIAL 1: Er... no.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Oh... then you can't understand... just how tired I am...\n\nOFFICIAL 1: Ah...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: I'd like to sleep... just for a little while...\n\nOFFICIAL 1: Please, hold on for just a little longer.\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Sits powerless_ ):... You know, a man... is a worthless... in fact...\n\nOFFICIAL 1:...\n\nOFFICIAL 2 ( _Stumbles into the room_ ):... The general manager is here. Please... ( _Leaves._ )\n\nOFFICIAL 1: What will you do? Are you all right?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Yes... ( _Walks unsteadily along the veranda to the right with_ OFFICIAL 1.)\n\n( _The sound of the priest chanting prayers can be heard. People are coming and going to burn incense and offer condolences._ ICHIZ\u014c _passes along the veranda to the left, accompanying his_ BOSS _and others._ FUNERAL HELPERS _are preparing cushions in the guest room. Pause._ ICHIZ\u014c, _his_ BOSS, _and the_ OFFICIALS _come into the guest room, followed by_ TOKUJI, KEIKO _,_ MASATAR\u014c, YASUKO _, and_ SHIGEMASA, _all dressed in black._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c:... Please... have a seat.\n\nBOSS: Thank you.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: I must apologize for all this mess.\n\nBOSS: No, not at all.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: I'd like to thank you all very much for taking the trouble to come all this way to express your condolences, especially you, sir. Mother would have been so grateful. Thank you very much. ( _They all bow._ )\n\nBOSS: May I offer my very sincere regrets... I can imagine how you must all be feeling now. ( _They all bow._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: It really was very thoughtful of you to take the time to come and pay your respects. Thank you again. ( _They all bow._ )\n\nBOSS: If it's not too rude... how old was your mother?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: She was sixty-one.\n\nBOSS: Sixty-one? That's most unfortunate. What was the cause of her death?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: She died of acute pneumonia.\n\nBOSS: Hmm. acute pneumonia? Most unfortunate.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: We did everything we could, but... she had a full life....\n\nBOSS: Yes, I'm sure she did... You mustn't be too upset....\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Well, thank you....\n\nBOSS: Pneumonia can be quite painful.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Yes... quite... but finally, she died peacefully... almost as if she had just fallen asleep....\n\nBOSS: Hmm, I see...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: It was as though she'd decided she'd done everything she had to and so...\n\nBOSS: I'm sure she led a full and most satisfying life.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Yes, yes... she had no regrets... we had all grown up....\n\nBOSS: Yes, of course.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: At least... we completed that obligation to our parents, I believe.\n\nBOSS: And most successfully.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: We couldn't have asked more of her.\n\nBOSS: Yes, I see.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: There can be nothing worse than to lose one's parents, even if they lived to be one hundred.\n\nBOSS: Very true.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: In that sense, I'm envious of you. Your parents are both so well. You're very lucky.\n\nBOSS: No, no... I've often felt envious of you because of your fine brothers and sisters.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Oh no, not at all... none of us has amounted to very much.\n\nBOSS: Two sons and two daughters, perfect.... Your mother was blessed with her children, wasn't she?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Ha, umm...\n\nBOSS: Is this... your younger brother?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Yes, this is my brother, Tokuji.\n\nTOKUJI: Nice to meet you. ( _Bows._ )\n\nBOSS: Nice to meet you, too... and what do you do?\n\nTOKUJI: Well... now... ah.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: He... he was discharged just last year and now he's very active in... in the commercial field. Such an ambitious man, so full of character and spirit... Ha, ha... he leaves me lost for words....\n\nBOSS: He must be a great inspiration to you.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Well, I'd rather just believe in his abilities. His character and way of doing things are really quite different from mine. Myself, I take satisfaction in small successes.... But he's a modern young man, so of course he has his faults. However, I'm sure he has a bright future ahead of him. An unknown quantity is a beautiful thing, isn't it?\n\nBOSS: Ah, it's fortunate to be young.... Good luck with all your hard work.\n\nTOKUJI ( _Bows_ ):...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: And... this is my younger sister, Keiko.\n\nKEIKO ( _Bows._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: After our father passed away, she was a great help to my mother. She may not look like it, but she's been taking great care of her brothers.\n\nBOSS: I see...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: As the older brother, I've only had to put up with minor difficulties, but I imagine Keiko, as a woman ( _Tears well up in his eyes_ ), has had a much harder time.... Ah, to be a daughter is a hard thing, isn't it? How can I even repay a tenth of her kindness?... But I should try... Ah, and this is Keiko's husband, Masatar\u014d, a close friend of mine. He and I were in the same law department at university and graduated together.\n\nBOSS: Oh, really?\n\nMASATAR\u014c ( _Bows._ )\n\nBOSS: Nice to meet you... And what field are you in now?\n\nMASATAR\u014c: Well, ah...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: He's so well educated, but he underestimates himself; he doesn't force himself. In fact, I really feel I should do more. It's my duty as a friend to push him harder. At one time, we were both so full of enthusiasm, discussing everything. ( _His eyes fill with tears._ )... We were so full of life.\n\nKEIKO ( _In a small voice_ ): Ichiz\u014d...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Oh, and this is our youngest sister, Yasuko.\n\nYASUKO ( _Bows._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: She's very well established in the field of... er... English typewriting. She tries her hardest not to bother us... it's amazing that even a girl so young can have such a clear path to her life. On the other hand, she is such a serious girl that I really feel I should make her happy as soon as possible.... Now, this is our uncle, Shigemasa. He's like a father to us. He's a very cheerful old soul and something of a poet. Occasionally he judges haiku and _tanka_ competitions.\n\nSHIGEMASA: How do you do? ( _Bows._ )\n\nBOSS: How do you do?... This really is such a close family. I can see how you must all support each other.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Er... maybe, yes. indeed, I am lucky in that way.\n\nBOSS: I presume it must all come from your mother. I can see what a clever mother she was.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Oh, no...\n\nBOSS: I hear she was very brave.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Yes... no... an affectionate mother. Yes, affectionate.\n\nBOSS: Ah, I see.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: When I think of all she did for us... it's beyond description. It's bigger... deeper... there was no obligation, no motive... only Mother could know why; we children cannot begin to imagine it. I sometimes think, \"Yes, this is Mother,\" but then there is... also another mother beside her, and another, and another... it's like that. It was really something... I am not sure you would say a clever mother... I'd rather say an affectionate mother. She must have been affectionate if she wasn't clever, mustn't she?... Yes, if I say that, I can look back on it with a certain amount of satisfaction... yes... Otherwise, I... I wouldn't be able to stand it ( _Sobbing_ )... Maybe that's it...\n\nBOSS: Yes, absolutely, I agree with you.\n\nICHIZ\u014c:...\n\n(IKU _appears, dressed in the black kimono, followed by_ FUMIE.)\n\nIKU: Ichiz\u014d, look, look at this beautiful kimono. Isn't the cloth so smooth? I finally got my kimono back from Nobu. Fumie helped me put it on; she is such a good wife for you... eh, Fumie?\n\nFUMIE: Grandma, don't be rude to our guests.... Come on, won't you greet them?\n\nIKU:... I'm very glad that you came here....\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Ha, ha... this is my grandmother. She's such an innocent, simple person. She seems to be reliving her childhood....\n\nFUMIE: Please excuse Grandmother. Please forgive us... ( _Bows._ )\n\nBOSS: Is this... your wife?\n\nICHIZ\u014c:... Er, yes.\n\nBOSS: I heard that you'd had to leave here, because of illness... ?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Yes... she was sick... for about three years... but now she feels she's able to come back... She's so determined... she...\n\nBOSS: Well, that's good news. She does look healthy, doesn't she?\n\nICHIZ\u014c:... Yes, she's as well as can be expected.\n\nBOSS ( _To_ FUMIE): I'm always indebted to your husband for his hard work and support.\n\nFUMIE: Please excuse me for not having introduced myself before. I've often heard about you from my husband.\n\nBOSS: It's very nice to meet you.\n\nFUMIE: It's nice to meet you, too.\n\nBOSS: Now, if you don't mind, I must excuse myself. Please take care of yourself and, again, please accept my sympathies. ( _Bows to all._ )\n\n(ICHIZ\u014c _stands up first and leads his_ BOSS _out to the right. Everybody follows them. Pause._ MASATAR\u014c _and_ SHIGEMASA _come back together. They sit by a hibachi and smoke quietly._ )\n\nMASATAR\u014c:... Uncle?\n\nSHIGEMASA: Hmm?\n\nMASATAR\u014c:... It's a fine day... isn't it?\n\nSHIGEMASA:... Ah, yes.\n\nMASATAR\u014c: It's like... what can I say... ?\n\nSHIGEMASA: Hmm?\n\nMASATAR\u014c: It's like a New Year's Day, isn't it?\n\nSHIGEMASA: Mmm... a New Year's Day... well, yes and no, that's not quite it.\n\nMASATAR\u014c: You know, I used to be a bit of a poet when I was a student.\n\nSHIGEMASA: Oh, really?\n\nMASATAR\u014c: I think I'd like to... take it up again.\n\nSHIGEMASA: Yes... you should.\n\nMASATAR\u014c:...\n\nSHIGEMASA:...\n\n(TOKUJI _and_ KEIKO _come back in, followed by_ YASUKO.)\n\nKEIKO: That Kajima, he's quite a doctor, isn't he?\n\nTOKUJI: Uh?... ah, yes.\n\nKEIKO: Fumie couldn't have hoped for a better outcome.\n\nTOKUJI: No... ( _He and_ KEIKO _sit by another hibachi_.) Keiko, does this suit look all right on me?\n\nKEIKO:... Not too bad. No one would know you'd rented it.\n\nTOKUJI: Maybe I should have a new suit made.\n\nKEIKO: Yes, do it... this is a good chance. You'll need it for your wedding someday, won't you?\n\nTOKUJI:... \"Ambitious, young businessman\"...\n\nKEIKO: Yes, that's what you look like, actually.\n\nTOKUJI: Thank you.\n\nKEIKO ( _Takes out a compact and rearranges her hair_ ):... You behaved much better today.\n\nTOKUJI:... I didn't have a choice.\n\nKEIKO:... Well, you should keep it up.\n\nTOKUJI: Hmm... Yasuko, come over here and sit by the heater....\n\nYASUKO: No, thanks. I'm not so cold.\n\nTOKUJI ( _To_ KEIKO): You know, Ichiz\u014d deserves some credit after all. He's done a good job as an elder brother. He had his own way of doing it, but that wasn't necessarily wrong.\n\nKEIKO ( _Adjusting her hair_ ): No, of course not.\n\nTOKUJI: I feel a bit foolish now to have been tearful when I heard his speech.\n\nKEIKO:...\n\nTOKUJI: You know, these formal ceremonies once in a while are a good thing. Perhaps we should have them more often.\n\nYASUKO: You mean, you need a formal ceremony before you can speak honestly?\n\nTOKUJI: No, not exactly... I just thought it's not a bad thing.\n\nYASUKO ( _Her eyes fill with tears_ ): It's stupid... absurd.\n\nTOKUJI: Mmmm, maybe... but what you were talking about before, that friendship... I feel that now for Ichiz\u014d. When you see people who are always complaining suddenly change and start being more sensible and generous.... I just can't hate him anymore.\n\nYASUKO: God! Wearing these rented ceremonial clothes!... We look so stupid... like clowns.\n\nTOKUJI: But think about it. Whoever invented these clothes was very smart. They put everybody on the same level, you see?\n\nYASUKO: Great. You've just escaped from your army uniform, and now you're keen on ceremonial clothes? I don't believe it...\n\nTOKUJI: Well, that's straight to the point...\n\nKEIKO: Come on you two. ( _Puts away her compact._ ) I thought you were both friends? Can't you get on just for today?\n\nYASUKO: I'm going to change out of these clothes.... I can't stand this.\n\nKEIKO: Yasuko, that's not a good idea. Wait a bit longer. You'll look out of place.\n\nTOKUJI: It's true. You, the most serious of us all, would look the least serious.\n\nYASUKO:...\n\nTOKUJI: Why are you bothered by these clothes? Be honest! Don't you feel like wearing them?\n\nYASUKO: No, that's not true.\n\n(ICHIZ\u014c _comes back in, followed by_ FUMIE.)\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Ah, good, good... at last, those people are gone. Finally, there's just us left... What a relief. It went fine. You all did very well. Thank you. You saved me... I really appreciate it. If only you were always like that. ( _With tears in his eyes._ ) Anyway, it's all right, everything went OK. It's like we've passed through a gate. The outside world is so solid; it's like a wall, and we couldn't pass through it without finding a gate. And that's not easy.... You can climb up the wall, but if you don't pay attention, you'll fall... and there's nothing you can do about it.\n\nTOKUJI: Ichiz\u014d... You've had a hard time today. You've almost had your back broken by it all.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Hmm... worse than that... I've had my backbone ripped completely out of me... there are no bones left to break. I'm like a snail, crawling from this gate to the next... but I've got no choice now... I've done it for forty years, and I'll carry on... I don't care anymore.\n\nTOKUJI ( _Gently_ ): Ichiz\u014d, stop it, please... We've all followed your instructions today, haven't we?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Yes, that's true... I imagine you pitied me... but actually, I pity you. I led you through that gate today, but after this, how will you pass through the other gates.... You'll be driven into that wall.... When I think of it... but no, you're young, you all have a future in front of you. You won't do what I did. Even if you are driven into the wall, you won't fall.... Once I tried to make a new start, but what other kind of person could I become? I know you know, but don't tell me now.... Oh, I'm so tired... exhausted. I had to take care of everything today, so...\n\nTOKUJI: Ichiz\u014d, sit down here. Please, have a rest...\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Sits down but then immediately stands up again, agitated_ ): I don't want to rest... I want to see it through completely to the end. It's my mother's funeral. We tore her to pieces, and then we held a ceremony for her. But it's a ceremony for all of us, too. ( _Wanders around, looking sad._ ) Yesterday, we were at each other's throats, but today the ceremony's brought us together. That's the point of her death. This is what we get out of it.... By the way, I've called a photographer, and he'll be here very soon. I thought we should have a memorial photograph taken on this occasion.... Let's have a picture of ourselves... something to remember it by. It's good to look back at old photos sometimes.\n\nTOKUJI: Er... I'm not so sure... let's not.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Why not? We'll probably never have the chance again, such a fine day. And we're all dressed in our ceremonial clothes.... It will look like we're all close, reconciled.... To tell the truth, I've been waiting for something like this for a long time.... It took mother's funeral for it to happen, but today is better than yesterday. Why don't we have a picture taken, a happy picture, just for me? Let's do it. But let me sit in the center. I'm the hero of the day.\n\nTOKUJI:... No, I don't want to... no.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Why not? What's wrong with you?\n\nTOKUJI: Something's wrong ( _Stands up_ )... Ichiz\u014d, are you all right?... You look strange... your face...\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Ha, ha... What are you saying? I feel fine ( _Struggling for breath_ )... honestly, I'm all right...\n\nYASUKO: But Ichiz\u014d, you're so pale. ( _Almost crying._ ) Please, sit down....\n\nTOKUJI: Shall we call Dr. Kajima?\n\nICHIZ\u014c: No, don't. He's worthless.... ( _Goes out to the veranda unsteadily._ ) Listen, somebody line up the chairs in the garden, please? We're going to have a memorial picture taken.\n\n(FUNERAL HELPERS _enter and carry chairs into the garden._ )\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Make sure to put the best chair in the center for me.\n\nTOKUJI ( _Pulling_ ICHIZ\u014c _back_ ): Ichiz\u014d, that's not important now. You should lie down... please.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Leave me alone... OK?... I...\n\nTOKUJI: Ichiz\u014d, this is ridiculous. Calm down, please...\n\nICHIZ\u014c ( _Pleads, breathlessly_ ):... It's not ridiculous... how dare you say that?... You're my brother. Don't criticize me, not now... leave me alone... I'm... Don't make a fool of me.... Don't be so hard on me.... Let's not start all that again... no, no more... enough... I'm so ashamed... ( _Grabs his chest in pain._ ) I... I can't... breathe... Agh. agh...\n\nTOKUJI ( _Grabs_ ICHIZ\u014c): What's the matter? Hold on... Hey! Somebody, quick, call the doctor... Bring some water, quick...\n\n(SHIGEMASA, MASATAR\u014c _, and the_ FUNERAL HELPERS _run off to the right in confusion._ )\n\nTOKUJI: Ichiz\u014d, I'll do whatever you want me to do, don't worry... just take it easy.\n\nICHIZ\u014c: Uh... sorry... it's OK just like this... but I... I feel bad. There's a pain... right here. ( _Holds his chest._ ) I can't breathe... What happened to the photographer... quick... or else I... ( _Collapses._ )\n\nTOKUJI: Oh, Ichiz\u014d... ( _Holds_ ICHIZ\u014c' _s head._ ) What... What's the matter... ?\n\nYASUKO: Ichiz\u014d! ( _Clings to him._ )\n\nFUMIE: Darling, what's happened... ?\n\nKEIKO: Ichiz\u014d... he's dying... ( _Holds on to him._ )\n\nTOKUJI: Ichiz\u014d... ( _Crying._ ) Ichiz\u014d, don't... Hold on a little longer... Ichiz\u014d...\n\n(ICHIZ\u014c _doesn't move._ FUMIE _and the others still call his name._ IKU _sits alone in a corner with her back to the audience_.)\n\nCURTAIN\n\nGanshi Murata's colleagues and students at Macalester College collaborated with him on the translation.\n\n1. David G. Goodman, \"The Quest for Salvation in Japan's Modern History: Four Plays by Akimoto Matsuyo,\" in _Modern Japanese Theater and Performance_ , ed. David Jortner, Keiko I. McDonald, and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006), 56\u201357.\n\n2. Translated in David G. Goodman, ed., _The Return of the Gods: Japanese Drama and Culture in the 1960s_ , photo reprint ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2003).\n_TWILIGHT CRANE_\n\nKINOSHITA JUNJI\n\nTRANSLATED BY BRIAN POWELL\n\nKinoshita Junji, _Twilight Crane_ , directed by Okakura Shir\u014d, Bud\u014d-no-kai, October 1950.\n\nT _wilight Crane_ ( _Y \u016bzuru_) is a one-act play by Kinoshita Junji (1914\u20132006), written in a \"literary\" folk-art style.1 The play was published in the January 1949 issue of the journal _Women's Review_ ( _Fujin k \u014dron_) and first staged in April of the same year by the Grapes Society (Bud\u014d no kai), a small company founded in 1947 by the actress Yamamoto Yasue (1902\u20131993) and several of her colleagues. Yamamoto, by then one of the most famous performers in the Japanese theater world, began her career with the Tsukiji Little Theater and was at this time one of Kinoshita's favorite actresses.\n\nThe play, in the words of Brian Powell, soon became \"a phenomenon in Japanese theater,\" appealing to a variety of audiences. During his career, Kinoshita wrote a number of experimental plays using folk stories, which he infused with multiple layers of meaning, ranging from folktale to political allegory, with _Twilight Crane_ the most frequently performed of the series. Indeed, Yamamoto Yasue remained an admired icon in the postwar years through her many performances as Ts\u016b, the mysterious and beautiful crane wife of her unwitting peasant husband, Yohy\u014d.\n\nWith its flexible and poetic text, the play has been staged many times by _shingeki_ companies, n\u014d troupes, and, in 1962, as a very successful opera, with a score by the highly respected Japanese composer Ikuma Dan (1924\u20132001), well known in the West for several film scores.\n\nCharacters\n\nYOHY\u014c\n\nTS\u016a\n\nS\u014cDO\n\nUNZU\n\nCHILDREN\n\n_Snow all around. In the middle of it one small, solitary shack, open on one side. Behind it an expanse of deep red evening sky. In the distance the sound of_ CHILDREN _singing_ :\n\n_Let's make a coat for grandpa to wear,_\n\n_Let's make a coat for grandma to wear,_\n\n_Lah-lala lah, lah lah lah,_\n\n_Lah-lala, lah-lala, lah lah lah._\n\n_The house has two rooms. One_ ( _to the right_ ) _is closed off by_ sh\u014dji. _In the center of the other, visible to the audience, is a square open hearth._ YOHY\u014c _is fast asleep beside it. The singing stops and the_ CHILDREN _come running on._\n\nCHILDREN ( _In unison, as if they were still singing_ ):\n\nCome out and sing us a song, please do.\n\nCome out and play some games, please do.\n\nCome out and sing us a song.\n\nYOHY\u014c ( _Waking up_ ): What's all this?\n\nCHILDREN:\n\nCome out and play some games. Sing us a song, please do.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Are you calling Ts\u016b? She's not in.\n\nCHILDREN: She's not in? Really not in? That's no good. Where's she gone?\n\nYOHY\u014c: Where? I don't know.\n\nCHILDREN: Where's she gone? When's she coming back? Tell us, tell us, tell us!\n\nYOHY\u014c: You're getting on my nerves! ( _Stands up._ )\n\nCHILDREN ( _Running away_ ): Ah! Look out! Yohy\u014d's cross. Yohy\u014d! Yohy\u014d! Silly Yohy\u014d!\n\nYOHY\u014c: Hey! Don't run away. Don't run away. I'll play with you.\n\nCHILDREN: What'll we play?\n\nYOHY\u014c: Well, what shall we play?\n\nCHILDREN: Knocking over Sticks.\n\nYOHY\u014c: OK. Knocking over Sticks.\n\nCHILDREN: Singing.\n\nYOHY\u014c: OK. Singing.\n\nCHILDREN: Snowball Fight.\n\nYOHY\u014c: OK. Snowball Fight. ( _As he speaks, he moves into the_ CHILDREN' _s group._ )\n\nCHILDREN: Bird in the Cage.\n\nYOHY\u014c: OK. Bird in the Cage.\n\nCHILDREN ( _Chanting_ ): Stag, Stag, How Many Horns.\n\nYOHY\u014c: OK. Stag, Stag, How Many Horns. Right, I'm coming. I'm coming.\n\nCHILDREN: Stag, Stag, How Many Horns. ( _They run off repeating this._ )\n\nYOHY\u014c ( _Starting to go after them. To himself_ ): Hang on! It'll be awful for Ts\u016b to come back and find the soup cold. I must look after her\u2014she's precious. ( _Goes back into the house and hangs the pot over the fire._ )\n\n(TS\u016a _glides swiftly in from the back of the house_.)\n\nTS\u016a: Yohy\u014d, really, you are not... ?\n\nYOHY\u014c: Where were you?\n\nTS\u016a: I just slipped out... you are not supposed to do that...\n\nYOHY\u014c: Well, I thought it would be awful for you to come back and find the soup cold. So I put it over the fire.\n\nTS\u016a: Oh, thank you so much. I will start preparing the rest of the meal for you.\n\nYOHY\u014c: All right. So I'm going out to play. It's Knocking over Sticks.\n\nTS\u016a: Really\u2014Knocking over Sticks?\n\nYOHY\u014c: And then, Snowball Fight. And then, singing songs.\n\nTS\u016a: And then... Bird in the Cage. And then, Stag, Stag, How Many Horns?\n\nYOHY\u014c: Yes, yes. Stag, Stag, How Many Horns. You come too.\n\nTS\u016a: I would like to. But I have the meal to prepare...\n\nYOHY\u014c: Leave it! Come. ( _Takes her hand and pulls her._ )\n\nTS\u016a: No.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Come on. Why not? We'll both of us play.\n\nTS\u016a: No, no. No, I say. ( _Laughing, she allows herself to be pulled off._ )\n\n( _The_ CHILDREN' _s singing is heard in the distance._ S\u014cDO _and_ UNZU _appear._ )\n\nS\u014cDO: Her? Is she Yohy\u014d's wife?\n\nUNZU: She is too. He's a lucky bugger, suddenly getting a fine wife like that. Nowadays he spends a lot of his time taking naps by the fire.\n\nS\u014cDO: He used to be such a hard worker\u2014bloody idiot! And now he's got a fine woman like that\u2014in a place like this! Why?\n\nUNZU: Nobody knows when she came or where she came from. She just came... But thanks to her, Yohy\u014d doesn't have to do anything now\u2014and he's made a lot of money.\n\nS\u014cDO: You weren't having me on, were you? When you told me about that cloth.\n\nUNZU: No, it's true. Take it to the town and you can always get ten gold pieces for it.\n\nS\u014cDO ( _Ponders_ ): And you say she weaves it?\n\nUNZU: Yes she does. But there is one thing. Before she goes into the room where the loom is, she tells Yohy\u014d not to look at her while she's weaving. So Yohy\u014d accepts what she says, doesn't peep into the room, and goes to bed. Then the next morning, there it is\u2014all woven, so he says. It's beautiful cloth.\n\nS\u014cDO: Crane Feather Weave\u2014that's what you called it, wasn't it?\n\nUNZU: That's what they call it in the town. They say it's so rare you'd have to go to India to find anything like it.\n\nS\u014cDO: And you're the middleman. I bet you're raking it in.\n\nUNZU: Well\u2014not all that much.\n\nS\u014cDO: Don't come that with me. But... if that's real Feather Weave, we're not talking about just fifty or a hundred gold pieces.\n\nUNZU: Go on! D'you mean it? What is Crane Feather Weave anyway?\n\nS\u014cDO: It's cloth woven from a thousand feathers taken from a _living_ crane.\n\nUNZU ( _Puzzled_ ): But where would Yohy\u014d's wife be collecting all those crane feathers?\n\nS\u014cDO: Hmm. This is the weaving room, I suppose... ( _Without thinking, he goes up into the house and peers into the closed-off room through a chink in the_ sh\u014dji.) Yes, there's a loom there.... Ah! ( _Cries out in astonishment._ )\n\nUNZU: What is it? What is it?\n\nS\u014cDO: Take a look. Crane feathers.... Well. That seems to...\n\nUNZU: So the cloth could be the genuine article.\n\n( _Pause._ TS\u016a _has returned and glides in from the back._ )\n\nUNZU ( _Startled_ ): Ah!\n\nS\u014cDO ( _Thrown off guard_ ): I'm sorry\u2014we shouldn't have come up into the house while you were out...\n\nTS\u016a:... ( _Pause. Watches the two of them suspiciously, with her head inclined to one side like a bird_.)\n\nUNZU: Oh... ah . . we've met\u2014I'm Unzu from the other village\u2014I'm much obliged to your husband for that cloth....\n\nTS\u016a:... ( _Remains silent._ )\n\nS\u014cDO: Yes, well, what happened was... I heard about the cloth from him. ( _Indicates_ UNZU.)... I'm S\u014ddo\u2014from the same village\u2014what I want to know is\u2014pardon me asking\u2014is it genuine Crane Feather Weave?\n\nTS\u016a:... ( _Remains silent. Stays watching them suspiciously; then suddenly, as if she had heard some sound, she wheels round and disappears into the back._ )\n\nS\u014cDO:... ?\n\nUNZU:... ?\n\nS\u014cDO: What do you...\n\nUNZU: What was that? We spoke to her and...\n\nS\u014cDO: She didn't seem to understand a single word.... Everything about her's just like a bird.\n\nUNZU: You're right. Just like a bird.\n\n( _Pause. The dusk gradually deepens. Only the flames in the hearth flicker red._ )\n\nS\u014cDO ( _Looking at the crane feathers_ ): You know... there are stories about cranes and snakes... how they sometimes take human shape and become men's wives.\n\nUNZU: What the...\n\nS\u014cDO: Come to think of it... Ninji from the village had a story like that yesterday... he was passing by that lake in the mountains, in the early evening, four or five days ago, and there was a woman standing at the water's edge, he said... he thought there was something strange about her, so he kept watching without letting her see him. He saw her glide into the water, and then\u2014she turned into a crane....\n\nUNZU: Eh?\n\nS\u014cDO: The crane played around in the water for a while. Then it changed back into a woman and glided away.\n\nUNZU: Ah! ( _Runs out of the house_.)\n\nS\u014cDO: Hey! What're you doing, screaming like that... ( _Instinctively he leaves the house, too._ )\n\nUNZU: So... so... his wife... is... a crane?\n\nS\u014cDO: Shut up you idiot! You don't know that! Don't be such a fool as to even mention it...\n\nUNZU: What am I going to do? I've cheated Yohy\u014d, made a lot of money out of him...\n\nS\u014cDO: Don't worry about it. If that's genuine Crane Feather Weave, we can take it to the capital and make ourselves a thousand gold pieces.\n\nUNZU: What did you say? A _thousand_?\n\nS\u014cDO: And from what you say, Yohy\u014d's got quite greedy recently. If we talk about money, he'll listen all right.\n\nUNZU: I suppose so....\n\nS\u014cDO: So, we've got to get him thinking like us\u2014and he's got to get a steady supply of cloth from his wife.\n\nUNZU: Well... yes... I suppose so...\n\nS\u014cDO: Look, he's back.\n\nYOHY\u014c ( _Returns, tired and happy_ ): Got it.\n\n\"Let's make a coat for grandpa to wear\"\n\nWhat's next? Ah...\n\n\"Lah-lala, lah-lala, lah lah lah\"\n\nThat's right, isn't it?... Oh, I completely forgot to put the rice on for Ts\u016b.\n\nS\u014cDO: Heh, Yohy\u014d.\n\nYOHY\u014c: What is it?\n\nS\u014cDO: Forgotten me? S\u014ddo, from the other village. Unzu\u2014you do the talking.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Ah, Unzu. Is there more money for us to make?\n\nUNZU: Bring me some more of that cloth and you can have as much as you like.\n\nYOHY\u014c: No, there's no more cloth.\n\nS\u014cDO: Why's that?\n\nYOHY\u014c: Ts\u016b said there'd be no more after the last lot.\n\nUNZU: You can't have that\u2014not when I'm going to make more money for you.\n\nYOHY\u014c: I know, I know... but... she's very dear to me.\n\nS\u014cDO: She may be\u2014but you can pile up the money if you get a steady supply of cloth from her.\n\nYOHY\u014c: All right, all right, but she's always a lot thinner after she's been weaving.\n\nS\u014cDO: Thinner, did you say?... Let me ask you a question. It's about Ts\u016b moving in with you as your bride. When was that? Anything special about the way it happened?\n\nYOHY\u014c ( _Takes a moment to absorb the question_ ): When was it now? One evening... I was about to go to bed... she came in and offered to be my wife. ( _Chuckles happily at the memory_.)\n\nS\u014cDO: Mmm... I don't suppose... you've ever had anything to do with a crane, have you?\n\nYOHY\u014c: A crane? Oh, a crane\u2014yes, some time ago... I was working in the fields, when a crane came down on the path. It had an arrow in it and was in a lot of pain. So I pulled the arrow out.\n\nS\u014cDO: Did you now?... Hmm... ( _To_ UNZU.) It's looking like the genuine article more and more.\n\nUNZU ( _Trembles_ ):...\n\nS\u014cDO: And if it is, it's big money.... ( _To_ YOHY\u014c.) You know that cloth... well, the cloth... Unzu\u2014you do the talking.\n\nUNZU: Uh... how shall I put it... if you take that cloth to the _capital_ and sell it, you could get a thou...\n\nS\u014cDO ( _Breaking in_ ): Idiot! Look here, Yohy\u014d, we could make you hundreds of gold pieces next time. Why not get her to weave again?\n\nYOHY\u014c: Did you say \"hundreds\"?\n\nS\u014cDO: Yes, hundreds. ( _To_ UNZU.) We could, couldn't we?\n\nUNZU: Yes, yes. Hundreds.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Really? Hundreds of gold pieces?\n\nS\u014cDO: So talk to your wife a bit more... ( _Notices_ TS\u016a, _who has been watching them from inside the house._ ) Come over here. I'll spell it all out for you. ( _Drags_ YOHY\u014c _into the shadows_.)\n\n(UNZU _follows them._ TS\u016a _comes out of the house and watches them go. A shadow of sadness passes over her face. The_ CHILDREN _come running on._ )\n\nCHILDREN ( _In turn_ ): She's back! ( _To_ TS\u016a.) Come on, let's play. Why were you out? Let's sing songs. Bird in the Cage. Hide and Seek. Songs. Ring-o-Ring-o-Ring. ( _Form a circle round her_.) Come on.\n\nTS\u016a: It's dark already. Enough for today.\n\nCHILDREN: No, no. Let's play. Songs.\n\nTS\u016a ( _Vacantly_ ): Songs?\n\nCHILDREN: Hide and Seek.\n\nTS\u016a: Hide and Seek?\n\nCHILDREN: Ring-o-Ring-o-Ring.\n\nTS\u016a: Ring-o-Ring-o-Ring?\n\nCHILDREN: Bird in the Cage.\n\nTS\u016a: Bird in the Cage?\n\nCHILDREN: Yes, Bird in the Cage. ( _They surround her and begin dancing round_.)\n\nBird in the Cage.\n\nBird in the Cage.\n\nWhen, oh when, will you fly away?\n\nIn the night, before the dawn,\n\nSlip, slip, slip, you slipped away.\n\nWho's behind you? Guess.\n\nWho's behind you? Guess.\n\nWho's behind you? Guess.\n\nWhat's the matter? You're supposed to cover your eyes. Why don't you? Aren't you going to crouch down?\n\nTS\u016a ( _Stays standing, lost in thought_ ): Eh?... Oh. ( _Crouches down and covers her eyes_.)\n\n( _The_ CHILDREN _dance round her singing. All around becomes suddenly dark. Only_ TS\u016a _is left, picked out in a pool of light._ )\n\nTS\u016a: Yohy\u014d, my precious Yohy\u014d. What has happened to you? Little by little you are changing. You are starting to inhabit a different world from mine. You are starting to be like those terrible men who shot the arrow into me, men whose language I do not understand. What has happened to you? And what can I do about it? Tell me, what can I do?... You were the one who saved my life. You pulled the arrow out because you took pity on me\u2014you were not looking for any reward. I was so happy about that. That is why I came to your home. Then I wove that cloth for you, and you were so delighted\u2014like a child. So I endured the pain, and wove more and more for you. And then you exchanged it for \"money.\" I see nothing wrong in this\u2014if you like \"money\" so much. Now you have plenty of this \"money\" you like, so I want us to live quietly and happily together in this little house, just the two of us. You are different from other men. You belong to my world. I thought we could live here forever, in the middle of this great plain, quietly creating a world just for the two of us, plowing the fields and playing with the children... but somehow you are moving away from me. You are steadily getting farther and farther away from me. What am I to do? Really, what am I to do?\n\n( _The singing has stopped. The lights come up. The_ CHILDREN _have gone._ TS\u016a _suddenly looks to the side and hurries into the house as if she were being pursued. Pause._ S\u014cDO, UNZU, _and_ YOHY\u014c _appear._ )\n\nS\u014cDO: So you know what you've got to do. If she refuses to do any more weaving, you threaten her\u2014say you'll leave her.\n\nYOHY\u014c ( _Contentedly_ ): That cloth's beautiful, isn't it? And it's because Ts\u016b wove it.\n\nS\u014cDO: Sure, it _is_ beautiful, so next time we're going to sell it for two or three times as much money as we got for it before. Get it? We are going to sell it for two or three times what we sold it for before. Tell your wife that.\n\nYOHY\u014c ( _Repeating_ ): We're going to sell it for two or three times what we got for it before. How did I do?\n\nS\u014cDO: Fine. For hundreds of gold pieces.\n\nYOHY\u014c: For hundreds of gold pieces. Right?\n\nS\u014cDO: Good. So get her to weave straightaway. Yes, Unzu?\n\nUNZU: Yes. Get her to weave straightaway\u2014tonight.\n\nYOHY\u014c: But Ts\u016b said she wouldn't weave any more.\n\nS\u014cDO: Don't be an idiot. If you sell it for a high price and make a big profit, she's bound to be pleased as well.\n\nUNZU: Yes, yes. She's bound to be pleased as well.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Mmmm...\n\nS\u014cDO: There's something else\u2014listen to this\u2014we're going to take you sightseeing in the capital. Unzu will tell you what a great place the capital is.\n\nUNZU: Yes, yes. It's a great place.\n\nYOHY\u014c: I suppose the capital must be a great place.\n\nS\u014cDO: Of course it is. So have you got it? You're going to make a lot of money and you're having a sightseeing tour of the capital thrown in. Like I've just said, we'll show you masses of interesting things in the capital. Are you with me? Or perhaps you don't want to go to the capital.\n\nYOHY\u014c: No, I _do_ want to go.\n\nUNZU: You want money too, don't you?\n\nYOHY\u014c: Mm. I do want money.\n\nS\u014cDO ( _Noticing_ TS\u016a _in the house_ ): Right. In you go. You know what you've got to do\u2014make her weave straightaway. If she won't, say you're leaving her.\n\nYOHY\u014c:... mmmm...\n\nS\u014cDO ( _Pushing_ YOHY\u014c _into the house_ ): It'll be all right. You're great. ( _To_ UNZU.) We'll get out of sight and watch what happens.\n\n( _The two of them hide again._ )\n\nTS\u016a ( _As soon as the two have disappeared, rushes toward_ YOHY\u014c): Yohy\u014d, come into the house, quickly. You are so wet\u2014you will catch a cold. Supper is all ready. You put the soup on the fire for me, so it is nice and hot. Come on, start eating. Come closer to the fire.\n\nYOHY\u014c:... all right...\n\nTS\u016a: Please, do eat.\n\nYOHY\u014c: All right. ( _Eats_.)\n\nTS\u016a: What is the matter?... Why are you so low?... You really should not do such things\u2014staying out so late, in the cold... Please do not go away anymore. Please do not talk to any strangers. Please.\n\nYOHY\u014c: All right....\n\nTS\u016a: Promise me, will you? Whatever you tell me to do, I will do. Whatever it is, I will do it for you. And you have the \"money\" you like so much....\n\nYOHY\u014c: Yes, I've got money. Lots of it. It's in this bag here.\n\nTS\u016a: There you are. So from now on, let us live happily together, just the two of us.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Yes. I do love you.\n\nTS\u016a: And I really love you too. So, please, please stay as you are now, for ever.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Yes, I love you, I really do.\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nTS\u016a: Have another helping.... What is the matter?... Are you not going to eat any more?...\n\nYOHY\u014c: Mmmm... look, Ts\u016b...\n\nTS\u016a: Mm?\n\nYOHY\u014c: You've done lots of good things in your life, haven't you? You went to the capital quite often....\n\nTS\u016a: Well, not really, just in the sky\u2014( _Pulls herself up short_.) What is it? Are you not going to have any more food?\n\nYOHY\u014c: Mmmm.... ( _Hesitating._ ) look, Ts\u016b...\n\nTS\u016a: Yes?\n\nYOHY\u014c: I want... no, I can't say it.\n\nTS\u016a: What is it? What is the matter?\n\nYOHY\u014c: I want... it's no good, I can't say it.\n\nTS\u016a: Why? What is it you cannot say?... Shall I try and guess?\n\nYOHY\u014c: Yes, yes.\n\nTS\u016a: Well now... you want me to make some of those cakes again....\n\nYOHY\u014c: No, it's not that.\n\nTS\u016a: Wrong? So... you want me to sing you a song. Is that it?\n\nYOHY\u014c: No. Of course I like your singing. But not today.\n\nTS\u016a: Wrong again? So... you want me to tell you about the capital again.... Yes? I have guessed it.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Well, half right, and half wrong.\n\nTS\u016a: Really? Half right, and half wrong?... So what is it? Tell me.\n\nYOHY\u014c: You won't get angry?\n\nTS\u016a: Me be angry? About something to do with you?... What is it? Tell me, tell me.\n\nYOHY\u014c ( _Hesitates_ ): I... I want to go to the capital.\n\nTS\u016a: Eh?\n\nYOHY\u014c: I'm going to the capital and I'm going to make piles of money.... So... I want some more of that cloth...\n\nTS\u016a ( _Startled_ ): The cloth? You cannot...\n\nYOHY\u014c ( _Flustered_ ): No, no, I don't, I don't need it.\n\nTS\u016a ( _As if to herself_ ): I told you... there was to be no more... of the cloth... and you promised me so faithfully...\n\nYOHY\u014c: Yes, you did say that. So I don't need it. I don't need it.... ( _Tries desperately to stop himself bursting into tears, like a child who has been scolded_.)\n\nTS\u016a ( _Suddenly realizing_ ): Ah, those men. Those men that were here just now. It was them was it? Yes, that must be it. They are gradually drawing you away from me.\n\nYOHY\u014c: What's the matter?... Don't get angry....\n\nTS\u016a:...\n\nYOHY\u014c: Ts\u016b...\n\nTS\u016a ( _Blankly_ ): Money... money... why do you want it so much?\n\nYOHY\u014c: Well, if I've got money, I'll buy everything I want\u2014all the good things there are.\n\nTS\u016a: You will \"buy.\" What does \"buy\" mean? What do you mean by \"good things\"? What do you need apart from me? No, no, you must not want anything apart from me. You must not want to \"buy\" things. What you must do is be affectionate to me\u2014and only me. You and I must live together, just the two of us, for ever and ever.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Of course\u2014I like being with you. I really do love you.\n\nTS\u016a: Yes, you do! You do. ( _Hugs_ YOHY\u014c.)... Please stay as you are, like this, for ever. Do not go away from me. Please do not go away from me.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Don't be silly. Who could part from someone like you? Silly, silly.\n\nTS\u016a:... When I am being held tightly by you, like this... I remember how it used to be... the whole vast sky around me, without a care in the world, with nothing to worry about... I feel now like I did then.... this is what makes me happy now\u2014as long as I am with you, I am happy.... Stay with me for ever.... Please do not go to any far-off places, will you. ( _Pause. Suddenly thrusts him away from her_.) You are still thinking about the capital, are you not? You are still thinking about your \"money.\"\n\nYOHY\u014c: Ts\u016b, look...\n\nTS\u016a: Yes, you are. You are, aren't you. As I thought... ( _Suddenly agitated_.) No, no, you mustn't go to the capital. You will never come back. You will never come back to me.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Of course I'll come back. I will come back. I'll go to the capital, I'll make a big profit on the cloth and\u2014oh, yes, you're coming to the capital with me.\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nTS\u016a: Do you want to go to the capital that much?... Do you want this \"money\" so much?\n\nYOHY\u014c: Look, everybody wants money.\n\nTS\u016a: You want it so, so much? You want to go so much? You like money so much more than you like me? And the capital as well? Do you?\n\nYOHY\u014c: What do you think you're... you talk to me like that and I shall stop loving you.\n\nTS\u016a: What did you say? You'll stop loving me?\n\nYOHY\u014c: I don't love you. I don't. I don't love you, Ts\u016b. You get on my nerves.\n\nTS\u016a: Really...\n\nYOHY\u014c: WEAVE THE CLOTH! I'm going to the capital. I'm going to make money.\n\nTS\u016a: That's too much, too much. What are you saying?\n\nYOHY\u014c: Weave the cloth! If you don't... I'll leave you.\n\nTS\u016a: What did you say? You'll leave me? Yohy\u014d, what happened to you?\n\nYOHY\u014c:... ( _Stubbornly remains silent_.)\n\nTS\u016a: Yohy\u014d, Yohy\u014d. ( _Grabs his shoulders and shakes him_.) Do you mean it? Yohy\u014d. Were you serious?\n\nYOHY\u014c:... I will leave you. So weave the cloth.\n\nTS\u016a: Ah...\n\nYOHY\u014c: Weave the cloth. Weave it now! We're going to sell it for two or three times what we got for it before. For hundreds of gold pieces.\n\nTS\u016a ( _Suddenly very alarmed and flustered_ ): Eh? Eh? What did you just say? I heard \"Weave the cloth now.\" Then what did you say?\n\nYOHY\u014c: I said, for hundreds of gold pieces. We're going to sell the cloth for two or three times as much money as we got before.\n\nTS\u016a:... ( _She tilts her head to one side like a bird and watches_ YOHY\u014c _suspiciously_.)\n\nYOHY\u014c: Listen to me. This time the money we get will be two or three times...\n\nTS\u016a ( _Screams_ ): I don't understand any more. I don't understand anything you are saying. It's the same as with those other men. I can see the mouth moving. I can hear the voice. But what is being said... Ah, Yohy\u014d, you've started talking the language that these men used\u2014the language of a different world\u2014that I cannot understand.... What am I to do? What am I to do?\n\nYOHY\u014c: Ts\u016b, what's the matter? Ts\u016b...\n\nTS\u016a: \"What's the matter?\" \"Ts\u016b.\" You did say that, didn't you? You did say \"What's the matter?\" just then?\n\nYOHY\u014c:... ( _Taken aback, he just gazes at_ TS\u016a' _s face_.)\n\nTS\u016a: I heard right, didn't I? You did say that? Eh?... Ah, you are gradually getting farther and farther away from me. You are getting smaller... Ah, what am I to do? What? ( _Out toward where_ S\u014cHO _and_ UNZU _might be_.) Don't go on doing this. Don't! Stop drawing Yohy\u014d away from me. ( _Comes out of the house_.) Where are you? I beg you, I beg you. Don't draw my Yohy\u014d away from me. ( _Turns this way and that_.) Please, please, I beg you, I beg you.... Aren't you there?... Are you hiding? Come out!... Cowards!... Louts!... Louts, that's what you are.... Oh, how I hate you! I hate you.... You're taking my Yohy\u014d.... Come out of there! Come out!.... No, no, I'm sorry.... I shouldn't talk like that.... Please, please, I beg you. I beg you, please. ( _Her strength gradually fails, and she sinks down in the snow_.)\n\nYOHY\u014c ( _Comes out to her, fearfully_ ): What's the matter? Ts\u016b... ( _Puts his arms around her_.)\n\nTS\u016a ( _Coming to_ ): Ah, Yohy\u014d.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Come, Ts\u016b, let's go into the house. It's cold, in the snow... ( _Almost carries her to the fireside_.)\n\n( _For a few moments the two of them warm themselves at the fire, in silence._ )\n\nTS\u016a: You are so keen to go? You want to go to the capital that much?\n\nYOHY\u014c: Look, Ts\u016b...\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nYOHY\u014c: The capital's beautiful. And just about now, the cherry trees must be in bloom.\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nYOHY\u014c: And then there are the oxen, lots of them. Pulling carriages with people riding in them. You've often told me about all this.\n\n( _Pause._ )\n\nYOHY\u014c ( _Yawns_ ): Oh, I'm tired. ( _He stretches out and goes to sleep_.)\n\n(TS\u016a _realizes he has gone to sleep and puts something over him. She stares at his sleeping face, immobile. Then she suddenly rises and fetches a cloth bag from the corner of the room. She empties the contents over the palm of her hand. The bag contains gold coins and they spill out over the floor. She stares at them. All around suddenly becomes dark; only_ TS\u016a _and the gold coins remain, in a pool of light._ )\n\nTS\u016a: This is what it is all about.... Money... money... I just wanted you to have beautiful cloth to look at... and I was so happy when you showed how pleased you were.... That was the only reason I wore myself down weaving it for you.... and now... I do not have any other way of keeping you with me... weave the cloth to get the money... if I do not do it... if I don't do this, you will not stay by my side, will you... but... but... perhaps I have to accept it.... if getting more and more of this money gives you so much pleasure... if going to the capital is so important to you... and if you will not go away and leave me, provided I let you do all these things... well, one more time, I will weave just one more length of cloth for you.... And then... and then you must be content. Because if I weave more, I might not survive.... So you take the cloth, go to the capital... make lots of money and come home.... Yes, come home. You must come back. You must, must come back to me. Then finally we shall be together, the two of us, and we can live together for ever, for ever.... Please let it be like that.\n\n( _The lights come up._ )\n\nTS\u016a ( _Shaking_ YOHY\u014c _awake_ ): Yohy\u014d, Yohy\u014d.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Mmm? Ah... ( _Mumbling._ )\n\nTS\u016a: Listen. The cloth. I will weave it for you.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Eh? What was that?\n\nTS\u016a: I will weave the cloth for you.\n\nYOHY\u014c: The cloth? Ah\u2014you'll weave it for me?\n\nTS\u016a: Yes, I will weave it. One piece only.\n\nYOHY\u014c: You really will?\n\nTS\u016a: Yes, really. I will really weave it for you. So you can go to the capital with it.\n\nYOHY\u014c: I can go to the capital? Really?\n\nTS\u016a: Yes. So you will come back with lots of the money you like so much. And after that... and after that...\n\nYOHY\u014c: Oh\u2014you're going to weave it? I can go to the capital? Oh... yes, I'll come back with piles of money. Piles and piles of money.\n\nTS\u016a:... ( _Staring at how pleased_ YOHY\u014c _is_ ): So\u2014just one thing\u2014the promise you always make. You know you must never peep at me while I am weaving. You know that, don't you? You absolutely must not.\n\nYOHY\u014c: No, no, I won't. Ah, you're actually going to weave the cloth for me?\n\nTS\u016a: Listen to me. I'm begging you. You must keep the promise, you must. Don't look in at me.... If you do, everything is over between us.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Yes, yes, I won't look. Heh\u2014I'm going to the capital. I'm going to make two or three times the money I made last time.\n\nTS\u016a:... Don't... don't look... ( _Goes into the other room where the loom is_.)\n\n( _The sound of a loom is heard._ S\u014cDO _leaps out of the shadows._ UNZU _follows_.)\n\nS\u014cDO: We've done it! She's started weaving\u2014at last!\n\nUNZU: All right but, watching her from the shadows, I began to feel very sorry for her.\n\nS\u014cDO: You're a bloody idiot. We're on the brink of making a lot of money\u2014it's not the time to start feeling sorry for people.... ( _Bounds up into the house and goes to peep into the weaving room_.)\n\nYOHY\u014c: Hey\u2014you can't do that. You're not to look.\n\nUNZU: S\u014ddo, you know you're not supposed to look while she's weaving.\n\nS\u014cDO: Shut up, both of you. If I don't see her weaving, how do I know whether it's genuine crane feather weave or not?\n\nYOHY\u014c: No, no, you can't. She'll be angry with you. Stop!\n\nUNZU: S\u014ddo, stop!\n\nS\u014cDO: Let go of me. Let go! ( _Looks into the room_.) Ah... ah...\n\nUNZU: What is it?\n\nS\u014cDO: Ah... have a look. It's a crane. A crane. A crane is sitting at the loom and weaving.\n\nUNZU: What? A crane? ( _Looks in_.) Ah... ah... it _is_ a crane. The woman's not in there. It's a crane. It's holding a few of its own feathers in its beak and moving forward and backward over the loom... I've never...\n\nS\u014cDO: Well there you are, Unzu. Looks as though we've got it right.\n\nUNZU: I suppose it does.\n\nYOHY\u014c: What is it? What's going on?\n\nS\u014cDO: That's what you're in love with\u2014in there. Right, Unzu, we should have the cloth by tomorrow morning. We can go home and wait.\n\nUNZU: I suppose we can....\n\nYOHY\u014c: Heh, you two\u2014what's in there?... Isn't it Ts\u016b?\n\nUNZU ( _Being hustled off by_ S\u014cDO): It's a crane. There's a crane in there.\n\n(S\u014cDO _drags_ UNZU _off._ )\n\nYOHY\u014c: A crane? Can't be... can there? In the room?... I want to have a look.... No, I mustn't, I mustn't. Ts\u016b will be angry with me.... But what's a crane doing in there? Oh, I do want to have a look.... Would it be wrong to have a look? Ts\u016b, tell me. Ts\u016b, I'm going to have a quick peep.... No, I mustn't, I mustn't. Ts\u016b said I must not look. Ts\u016b, Ts\u016b. Why don't you answer? Ts\u016b, Ts\u016b.... What can have happened? What's happened? Ts\u016b... no answer... I want to have a look... I want to look... Ts\u016b, I'm going to have a little look.... ( _Finally he looks in_.) Eh? There's just a crane in there... no sign of Ts\u016b.... Eh?... What's happened?... Ts\u016b... Ts\u016b... She's not there.... What am I to do?... She's not there. She's gone. Ts\u016b... Ts\u016b... Ts\u016b... ( _He goes out of the house and disappears offstage, searching for her frantically_.)\n\n( _Afterward only the sound of the loom is heard. Blackout. Above the sound of the loom a poem is read aloud._ )\n\nYohy\u014d, Yohy\u014d, where do you go?\n\nOver the dark, snowy plain, hither and thither,\n\nSearching for Ts\u016b.\n\nTs\u016b... Ts\u016b... Ts\u016b\n\nYour voice is cracked and hoarse,\n\nSoon the rays of the morning sun play on the snow,\n\nAfternoon arrives and it is the same:\n\nTs\u016b... Ts\u016b... Ts\u016b\n\nNow in the evening, behind the house,\n\nToday as yesterday the whole sky is a deep, deep red.\n\n( _The lights come up. The sound of the loom continues._ S\u014cDO _and_ UNZU _come on supporting_ YOHY\u014c, _who is in a bad way._ )\n\nUNZU: Yohy\u014d, are you all right? Pull yourself together.\n\nS\u014cDO: I didn't believe it\u2014there you were, lying in the snow\u2014why did you go so far?\n\nUNZU: You'd have frozen to death if we hadn't brought you back.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Ts\u016b... Ts\u016b...\n\nUNZU: He's come round. Hey, Yohy\u014d.\n\nS\u014cDO: Yohy\u014d, pull yourself together.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Ts\u016b... Ts\u016b...\n\n( _Pause._ )\n\nS\u014cDO: Is she ever going to stop weaving?\n\nUNZU: You're right. She usually weaves it all in one night. But this time it's taking a night and a day.\n\nS\u014cDO: Hmm. Perhaps I'll take another look.\n\n( _The sound of the loom stops abruptly_.)\n\nUNZU: It's stopped.\n\nS\u014cDO: She's coming out!\n\n( _The two of them panic and jump down from the house. They hide in the shadows._ TS\u016a _emerges carrying two lengths of cloth. She looks emaciated._ )\n\nTS\u016a: Yohy\u014d... Yohy\u014d... ( _She shakes_ YOHY\u014c _awake_.)\n\nYOHY\u014c ( _Almost calling, as before_ ): Ts\u016b... Ts\u016b...\n\nTS\u016a: Yohy\u014d.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Ts\u016b... ( _Realizes._ ) Ah\u2014Ts\u016b. ( _Embraces her tightly as he breaks into tears_.) Ts\u016b, where did you go? You weren't here and I...\n\nTS\u016a: I am sorry. I took so long, didn't I? I have woven the cloth. Look... here you are... the cloth.\n\nYOHY\u014c: The cloth? Oh, you've woven the cloth....\n\nTS\u016a:... ( _Stares at the delighted_ YOHY\u014c.)\n\nYOHY\u014c: This is great. It's beautiful. Oh, there're two pieces, aren't there?\n\nTS\u016a: Yes, two pieces. That's why it took me until now. So you take the cloth and go off on your trip to the capital.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Yes, I'm going to the capital. You're coming with me, aren't you?\n\nTS\u016a:... ( _Weeps_.)\n\nYOHY\u014c: Yes\u2014you're coming with me and we'll go all round sightseeing.\n\nTS\u016a: Yohy\u014d... you looked, didn't you?\n\nYOHY\u014c: I want to get to the capital quickly. Ts\u016b, you've woven it so well.\n\nTS\u016a: I begged you so hard... and you promised so faithfully... why, why did you look?\n\nYOHY\u014c: What is it? Why are you crying?\n\nTS\u016a: I wanted to be with you for ever\u2014for ever.... One of those two pieces is for you... keep it back and treasure it. I put my whole heart into the weaving so that you could have it.\n\nYOHY\u014c: Really, this is superbly woven.\n\nTS\u016a ( _Grasping him by the shoulders_ ): Keep it back and treasure it. Take great, great care of it.\n\nYOHY\u014c ( _Like a child_ ): Yes, I will take great, great care of it as you tell me to. I always listen to what you say to me. ( _Pleading._ ) Let's go to the capital together.\n\nTS\u016a ( _Shaking her head_ ): I shall be... ( _Smiles and stands up\u2014suddenly she is white all over_.) Look how thin I have become. I used every single feather I could. What's left is just enough to let me fly.... ( _She laughs quietly_.)\n\nYOHY\u014c ( _Suddenly sensing something_ ): Ts\u016b. ( _Tries to embrace her, but his arms enclose only empty space_.)\n\nTS\u016a: Yohy\u014d... take care of yourself... take good care of yourself always, always...\n\n( _In the distance the_ CHILDREN' _s singing is heard._ )\n\nLet's make a coat for grandpa to wear,\n\nLet's make a coat for grandma to wear,\n\nLah-lala lah, lah lah lah,\n\nLah-lala, lah-lala, lah lah lah.\n\nTS\u016a: I have to say good-bye to the children too.... How many times have I sung that song with them?... Yohy\u014d, don't forget me, will you. We only had a short time together, but I will not forget how your pure love was all around me, or all the days when we played and sang songs with the children. I will never, never forget. Wherever I go, I will never...\n\nYOHY\u014c: Heh, Ts\u016b...\n\nTS\u016a: Good-bye... good-bye...\n\nYOHY\u014c: Ts\u016b, wait, wait I say. I'm coming too. Ts\u016b, Ts\u016b.\n\nTS\u016a: No, you cannot, you cannot. And I cannot stay in this human form any longer. I have to return to the sky, where I came from, alone.... Good-bye... take care... good-bye\u2014it really _is_ good-bye... ( _Disappears_.)\n\nYOHY\u014c: Ts\u016b, Ts\u016b, where have you gone? Ts\u016b. ( _Confused, he comes out of the house_.)\n\n(S\u014cDO _and_ UNZU _leap out and hold him back_.)\n\nUNZU ( _Out of breath, to_ S\u014cDO): Heh...\n\nS\u014cDO ( _Out of breath_ ): She's disappeared.\n\n(YOHY\u014c _is in a state of stupor in_ UNZU' _s arms. The_ CHILDREN _come running on._ )\n\nCHILDREN ( _In unison, as if they were singing_ ):\n\nCome out and sing us a song, please do.\n\nCome out and play some games, please do.\n\nCome out and sing us a song.\n\n( _Total silence._ )\n\nONE CHILD ( _Suddenly points up to the sky_ ): A crane! A crane! Look, there's a crane flying up there.\n\nS\u014cDO: A crane?\n\nUNZU ( _Scared_ ): Ah...\n\nCHILDREN: A crane. A crane. A crane. ( _Repeating this, they run off following the crane_.)\n\nUNZU: Yohy\u014d, look, a crane.\n\nS\u014cDO: It looks as though it's having to struggle to stay in the air.\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nS\u014cDO ( _To no one in particular_ ): We've got two pieces of cloth. That's great. ( _He tries to take the cloth that_ YOHY\u014c _is holding, but_ YOHY\u014c _clutches it to himself_.)\n\nUNZU ( _Absorbed in watching the crane fly away, still with his arms round_ YOHY\u014c): It's gradually getting smaller....\n\nYOHY\u014c: Ts\u016b... Ts\u016b... ( _Takes one or two unsteady steps as if following the crane. Then stands stock still, clutching the cloth tightly_.)\n\n(S\u014cDO _also seems to be drawn in that direction, and the three of them have their gaze fixed on a point in the distant sky. From offstage the sound of the_ CHILDREN _singing drifts faintly in_.)\n\nCURTAIN\n\n1. More about _Twilight Crane_ can be found in Brian Powell, _Japan_ ' _s Modern Theatre: A Century of Continuity and Change_ (London: Japan Library, 2002). In addition, see Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, \"A Fabulous Fake: Folklore and the Search for National Identity in Kinoshita Junji's _Twilight Crane_ ,\" in _Rising from the Flames: The Rebirth of Theater in Occupied Japan, 1945\u20131952_ , ed. Samuel L. Leiter (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2009), 317\u201334.\n_EDUCATION_\n\nTANAKA CHIKAO\n\nTRANSLATED BY J. THOMAS RIMER\n\nTanaka Chikao, _Education_ , directed by Tanaka Chikao, Haiy\u016bza, December 1954. (Courtesy of Haiy\u016bza)\n\nE _ducation_ ( _Ky \u014diku_), a one-act play written in 1953 by Tanaka Chikao (1905\u20131995), is the first of his mature plays and indicates his deep interest in portraying his characters' spiritual lives. This continuing commitment can perhaps be best seen in his play _The Head of Mary_ ( _Maria no kubi_ , 1959), set in Nagasaki, which examines Japan's spiritual situation in the early postwar years, with special reference to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, where Tanaka himself was brought up as a child.1\n\n_Education_ was originally written as an exercise piece for young actors working at the Actors' Theater (Haiy\u016bza), an important theatrical company established at the end of World War II in Tokyo by Senda Koreya (1904\u20131994), one of the leading actors and directors of postwar Japan. As with the later _The Head of Mary_ , Tanaka seeks, in _Education_ , to establish the dramatic and linguistic strategies needed to create an ambience in which the tensions of shifting spiritual states can be manifested on stage. The play is set in France, and in an important sense, the text represents a dramatized version of the anguished insights articulated in Charles Baudelaire's poem \"Lethe\" (Le l\u00e9th\u00e9) recited by the heroine, Nellie, during the play. The stage language that Tanaka uses is elevated and somewhat abstract, altogether different from the kind of dialogue written by the Marxist-leaning Japanese dramatists of the prewar period. Jean Giraudoux and Henry de Montherlant come to mind as models. Perhaps this is not surprising, as Tanaka worked for a number of years with the dramatist Kishida Kunio (1890\u20131954), who himself, as noted earlier, studied with the director Jacques Copeau in Paris just after the end of World War I. Tanaka joined Kishida's company, the Literary Theater (Bungakuza), which was founded in 1937.\n\nCharacters\n\nROUALT\n\nHELENE\n\nNELLIE\n\nPIERRE\n\n_A small country house near a wood. The house still retains some of its quality as an old farm house, but it has been refined and modernized in some of its details. There is a kitchen attached to the living room. The fireplace has been lit, but there is electric light for the kitchen table, so that whatever the gloom the years have added to the sobriety of the spot, there are bright areas as well. From the decor, the art works placed about, and the taste revealed by the furniture, the owners of the house are certainly women. There is a certain atmosphere suggesting powder and rouge yet something a bit childish as well, and a sense of purity._\n\n_To the right or left, there is a door leading to a side entrance, and a staircase to the second floor. On the wall, or perhaps on a pillar, a shrine has been installed. A statue of Mary is enshrined there and two candles in their holders._\n\n_It is late afternoon. A clear sky. The sound of a bugle can be faintly heard._\n\nROUALT ( _sixty years old_ ) _lies on the sofa, drinking brandy. He has the bleary eyes of one who likes to drink, and his face is weather beaten through long years of wind and rain, the countenance of an old warrior._\n\n_Sitting across from him is his wife,_ HELENE ( _forty-five years old_ ). _She is short of stature and attractive, with a round face. She sits nervously on the edge of a chair, twisting and untwisting a handkerchief she is pulling at as she stares out at a spot in space. She wears a dark dress, trimmed in lace; there is something artless and full of charm about her, and the glossy pearls she wears around her neck make her a somehow touching figure._\n\nNELLIE, _their daughter_ ( _twenty-five years old_ ), _is wearing a pullover sweater and pants that appear to be tight and too short, the sort referred to as_ \" _toreador pants._ \" _She wears no stockings. All her clothes are a shade of faded blue somehow reminiscent of the color of clothing that prisoners might wear. She has a sharp gaze and is thin lipped. She holds a book of poetry in her hand, and just as though her parents were not there in the room, she looks beyond them as she moves back and forth. She appears to be reading something out loud, but her words cannot be clearly heard._\n\n_The silence seems to continue on for a certain time Then_ ROUALT, _with some confidence, begins to hum occasionally and with a somewhat detached air; he seems amused. As usual, he has apparently shown no sense of concern._ HELENE _slowly wipes the top of the table with her handkerchief. Then she rises._\n\nHELENE ( _Without looking at_ NELLIE): I'd like to go to my own room now if you don't mind.\n\nROUALT: Of course. Go ahead. Right ahead. ( _He had been on the verge of saying that he was waiting for this himself. She starts to leave._ ) Ah. The money! The money. ( _He points with his chin toward the top of the table._ )\n\nHELENE: Nellie. Afterward, will you...\n\nROUALT: How would you like to try making a somewhat longer sound every once in a while? It doesn't actually matter to me what you may want to say. Every time I hear you speak, your voice is beautiful. The older you get, the more charming your voice becomes. Something like moistened snow. Ha, ha... (HELENE _is no longer there. Before she disappears, she kneels before a small shrine on the wall._ ) Helene... ( _There is no response. He turns the bottle upside down in order to catch the last drops. With a certain discontent._ ) Well, you knew I was coming, didn't you? And the maid must have been sent out to buy something, right?\n\nNELLIE ( _Going on with the same movements as before_ ): Yes, I sent her. ( _There is a certain coldness in the tone of her voice._ ) And as always, after four or five drinks, you look as though you're ready to turn in.\n\nROUALT: Well then. If that's the case, then I would be just as happy to leave. ( _With a certain emphasis._ ) But today... today is a little different.\n\nNELLIE ( _Repeating_ ):... a little different? What do you mean by that? ( _Raising her voice._ )\n\n_Je veux dormer! dormer plut\u00f4t que vivre!_\n\n_Dan un sommeil aussi doux que la mort..._ 2\n\nROUALT: What is it that you're reading so intently?\n\nNELLIE: A kind of story.\n\n_Sur ton beau corps poli comme le cuivre_...3\n\nROUALT: Your hips are still too thin. Are you planning to go through your life a barren woman? Or is it that you haven't found a man you can love? Huh? Well such are the times we live in; if two people don't work together, they can't find a way to make a living. Certainly, a girl like you, brought up in luxury, would need a lot of money, right?\n\nNELLIE:\n\n_Pour engloutir mes snaglots apais\u00e9s_\n\n_Rien ne me vaut l'ab\u00eeme de ta clouche;_\n\n_L'oubli puissant habite sur ta bouche..._ 4\n\nROUALT: It might be all right for you to become a doctor. But how about getting a pharmacy license? That might really be good. Or finding a little caf\u00e9 somewhere, and opening up shop?...\n\nNELLIE: Where could I get the money to do that? I certainly can't ask you for any more help than I've been getting. That's why I'm working at the hospital.\n\nROUALT: I know, I know. Anyway, I know you hate me. Why doesn't that maid come back? Shit!\n\nNELLIE:\n\n_L'oubli puissant habite sur ta bouche,_\n\n_Et le L\u00e9th\u00e9 coule dans tes baisers_...5\n\nROUALT ( _Holding his glass, he totters to his feet_ ): I'm asking you now. Isn't she back? And don't be so snobbish. Talk to me.\n\nNELLIE ( _All the more expressionless_ ): The wine seller in the village is pretty far away. ( _Reciting._ ) _Je veux dormir! dormer plut\u00f4t que vivre!_\n\nROUALT ( _Suddenly striking his glass_ ): Do you really hate me as much as all that? You hate your own father.... And if I weren't your real father... if I really weren't, you know, you might think that I was just some pitiful case. So you wouldn't hate me then. Isn't that right...? But more than hating me, you just simply disregard me altogether. You ignore me. A human being. So please. Please, really... Please feel sorry for me, have just that much feeling for me. I can't bear your cold eyes staring at me. No, more than cold. Those eyes are selfish, the most selfish in the whole world. So please stop. Stop this, I ask you. Have some feeling, some feeling for me. ( _Kneeling, he weeps forlornly._ ) For me, who is so lonely. You seem so absolute, so unconditional. It is so frightening... terrifying... frightening...\n\nHELENE: Nellie, shall you and I go out now?\n\nROUALT: Helene, I won't make any more trouble. It's just that I'm getting drunk. Actually, I'm just pretending that I'm drunk, you know. Just to see if I could get some sympathy. I'm showing my true colors.... Ha, ha. ( _He rises._ ) I'm letting you see my real motives, you know...\n\nHELENE: If you don't leave now, then I suppose we'll just have to go away ourselves.\n\nROUALT ( _Taking up his carefree attitude again, he returns to the sofa_ ): Come on now. You have to forgive me if, even for a moment, I'm attempting to show myself as the head of the house. And you know, I'm not all that thick headed a fellow. I get to make just one visit a month. So if I want to make my stay last five minutes or ten minutes more, you don't have to be so mean to me. So then, just a little... I'd like to drink just a little more. And then, today, well, there is one thing more... you see, there's a reason this time. Nellie, those shards of glass on the floor can wait. Come over and sit down in front of me.\n\nHELENE ( _Shuddering_ ): No. Remember that when you finished your business here, you promised to leave. That's the agreement. I do feel sorry for you. Yes. But whatever your reasons may be, I'm afraid to stay any longer under the same roof with you. So I must ask you to respect the proprieties as far as we are concerned. ( _She starts to walk._ ) So then, Nellie. Come on, and tuck that money away. (NELLIE _does not move._ ) Nellie?\n\nROUALT ( _Standing up quietly, he picks up his hat and umbrella, which are near the sofa, pulling along a trunk with one hand. He speaks in a facetious manner as he starts to move_ ): So, dear Helene. Thank you for all you have done for me, and for so long... Today, I... feel on top of things... ha, ha... ( _He begins to leave._ )\n\nNELLIE ( _In spite of herself_ ): No, wait.\n\nHELENE ( _Without turning to look_ ): Nellie! (NELLIE _runs up to take his umbrella and hat from him._ ) Nellie! (NELLIE _pushes her father roughly down where he was sitting before._ ROUALT, _confused, mutters but obeys her._ HELENE, _elated for the first time, leaves, the sound of her footsteps echoing loudly. The bell hanging inside the door rings as she leaves._ )\n\nROUALT ( _Moved_ ): Nellie! ( _He goes to take her two hands in his._ )\n\nNELLIE: Don't touch me. But tell me instead what that \"reason\" is you mentioned.\n\nROUALT: Is it a mercurochrome stain? Tobacco? Look at those fingers, all stained yellow.\n\nNELLIE ( _Turning to him_ ): What is that \"reason\"?\n\nROUALT: Would you like to know? ( _He drinks straight from the bottle._ ) Hey, she's late, isn't she? ( _He makes a point of trying to change the subject._ )\n\nNELLIE: What is it?\n\nROUALT: Mama... don't you want to bring her back?\n\nNELLIE: That's just her way. In thirty more minutes, she'll turn up as if nothing had happened.\n\nROUALT: Is that so?... Listen, Nellie, how would you fancy the two of us taking a trip together? ( _Quietly._ ) Just the two of us.\n\nNELLIE ( _Gloomily_ ): I would like to. And as far away as possible... to a place where there is a wide river.\n\nROUALT: A river? What about the ocean?\n\nNELLIE: The ocean?\n\nROUALT ( _Rising abruptly_ , _he leans over beside her_ ): Yes. Let's go to my island. It's a sulfur island, covered with rocks, but right next to it there is a beautiful green island, with palm trees and covered with jungle. It's an island you could live on. And there are charming natives there. And there's still a hut left there. In the old days... I lived before...\n\nNELLIE: Gamia... Was that her name?\n\nROUALT: Ah, that black Gamia? ( _Suddenly._ ) Oh... what did you just say?\n\nNELLIE ( _Suddenly rising, as she moves away_ ): And what happened to Paula? Paula?\n\nROUALT: Paula? How do you know about these women?\n\nNELLIE: Why? Aren't you taking Paula along?\n\nROUALT: Because this time I'd be the one who would get killed.\n\nNELLIE: Ah... so she ran away, then. Serves you right!\n\nROUALT: Shit! What is that maid doing?\n\nNELLIE: So that's why you want to take me along instead. You've figured it all out, I see.\n\nROUALT: I'm not forcing you. Like any good parent, I am simply saying that this might give you a pleasant diversion. You seem to be satisfied with the fact that in your world, you have to look over your shoulder all the time. And this tiny little house is your nest.\n\nNELLIE: So then... what would happen if I said I really would like to go?\n\nROUALT: Huh...? Well... what kind of...\n\nNELLIE: But I do want to go somewhere. A place where there are no people at all. I want to sleep... I want to go alone... ( _Suddenly calling out._ ) Why, why did mother have me born as a girl?\n\nROUALT: Well, that's just how it was. And remember, you will be loved by someone or other.\n\nNELLIE: To be loved. What does that mean? Isn't that just why all women are doomed to be unhappy? First Mama. Then Jeanne. Then that black girl!... then, finally, Paula. The one who escaped.\n\nROUALT ( _Fiercely_ ): That was different. Now certainly in the case of your mother. To live in a snug, unconventional household and without any constraints...\n\nNELLIE: Snug? Hmm. In order to take care of Jeanne. In order to confine her and suffocate Gambia. And this was the same house in which you buried me and my mother, stifled us in the proprieties. Even though we were alive. That's the sort of house it was. And you thought I didn't know a thing about it. The odor of the black girl, like cheap whiskey, still comes drifting in out of the kitchen. ( _She spits._ )\n\nROUALT: Who told you all this?\n\nNELLIE: I made my own personal investigations. And if I had thought to find a detective agency, there are lots of them.\n\nROUALT: A hint from your mother?\n\nNELLIE: Is that what you think? Anyway, I carried through my plan.\n\nROUALT: So if you followed me around so much, why were you interested in me? Ah, I bet you must have thought I had some money hidden away somewhere. And did you wonder whether there was an illegitimate child of mine somewhere as well? ( _Scornfully._ ) So then. You are that kind of woman, are you...\n\nNELLIE: No, Papa, that's not right.\n\nROUALT: If not, then why?\n\nNELLIE: I just wanted to know who you were as a man. That's all.\n\nROUALT: And so, did you figure things out? What kind of person I am? (NELLIE _does not respond._ ) If you really want to dig out who I was before, so long ago, then you'll have to bring out into the open your Mama's... ( _Looking at her sharply._ )... yes...\n\nNELLIE: What about Mama? What are you talking about?\n\nROUALT: No, no, never mind about all that now. As far as the idea of any illegitimate child of mine, if that were the case, do you think that I would have come to _this_ house? Now listen, Nellie, I've had to bear this shame, this shame as a man, and I've had to swallow the scorn and the defiance of you and your mother. Every time I come by once a month to bring your living expenses. And just why do you think that I am doing that?\n\nNELLIE: Your duty as a husband and as a parent, I suppose. And even if that weren't the case, your duty would be to save as much money as possible, so as not to have the cost of an agent to bring it here, I guess.\n\nROUALT: What a shrew you are!\n\nNELLIE: In any case, I'm sure it wasn't for love.\n\nROUALT ( _Angry_ ): If not for love, then what do you think it was for?\n\nNELLIE: Listen, this isn't your mine in the mountains, you know.\n\nROUALT: Now listen, if this were my mountain, I'd be the one in charge of some hundreds of rowdy men. Now listen, I'm a busy man. Do you think that to get this business taken care of, I would just brazenly come around here because it gives me some sort of pleasure? If there's one thing I would like to take a poke at, it's that frozen-looking face of yours. There's only one thing to say. After today, I'm going back to my island. And I don't intend coming back.\n\nNELLIE: That's because Paula ran away from you, isn't it?\n\nROUALT: Well, sure, why not. Anyway, this is the last time I will see you. I haven't told anybody this, but I've decided to carry this old skeleton of mine back there. In all that twenty-five years since you first came bawling into this world, I've been hiding something in the depths, the very depths of my heart. Just one word.\n\nNELLIE: I don't think there's just one word that can explain all that.\n\nROUALT: What? Yes, yes, there is.\n\nNELLIE: Don't frighten me like that. Please hurry and explain what you are talking about. And you can be just as melodramatic about it as you like. ( _She adopts a contemptuous attitude._ )\n\nROUALT ( _Struggling with his feelings of malice_ ): A woman like you.... You're the perfect substitute for your mother. All right then, I'll go ahead and say what I have to say. And then we'll see if I have any love left for you or not. Nellie, you are not my daughter. (NELLIE _stands up rigidly._ ) So then. Are you surprised? Well... ( _He walks about with a sense of elation._ ) Well, aren't you at least embarrassed about this? Why don't you say something?\n\nNELLIE: I see... well... I somehow feel relieved. I feel happy. And I can't find a thing to say.\n\nROUALT: If you want to find the right words, you might try listening to your mother. Listen to that chaste and proper wife of mine. ( _He goes back to where he was standing before and lights his pipe._ ) The fact that you were born early, after only eight months, yes, you might just ask her about that.\n\nNELLIE ( _She suddenly runs up to him, puts her hands around his neck, and tries to strangle him_ ): You mean you can still talk like that? Can you? And I... my Papa, my Papa... however much...\n\nROUALT: Hey... stop that! ( _With the happiness a father might feel._ ) It tickles!\n\nNELLIE: And however much, however much...\n\nROUALT: Well... stop it now... it tickles!\n\nNELLIE: However much love I feel... I feel... ( _Exhausted, she falls into his lap._ ) Please forgive me... Papa... please forgive me.\n\nROUALT: I did think you just went a little crazy. After all, you're just a young girl. That's just all it is... ( _Hugging her, he pulls her up._ )\n\nNELLIE: Don't touch me! No! No!\n\nROUALT: I really didn't think that my confession would have such an effect on you. ( _He pulls her down beside him, turns the brandy bottle upside down, and examines it._ ) Now in the first place, I didn't want your hysterics to take over. But I did decide to try to give you a good shock, though. At first, that is. I knew that at some point, though, I would really want to confide in you, and without telling your mother. Anyway, that's how I came to feel. And why is that? Because it's not a nice thing if your real father isn't someone like me.... ( _He makes a contrary gesture._ ) Yes, yes, it must be twenty-five years ago by now.... As far as I am concerned, if I thought that the connection with your mother meant that your sense of hatred for me was only a matter of course, then you wouldn't really weigh on my mind, one way or the other. So Nellie, if I now tell you the whole truth, it's really for your sake. Because I want you to know that your father was a better scholar than I ever was, a splendid, quite a brilliant, person.\n\nNELLIE: You don't... you don't have to put yourself down like that.\n\nROUALT: Well, that's how I feel about things. At mining school we were the best of friends. We really got along so well. I guess you could say that I made it through by instinct. But Fran\u00e7ois was the real student. We worked together, and with remarkable results. We found some wonderful stone specimens. It was our job to walk through the mountains, so we both turned black from the sun together. And his eyes were so full of goodness. Yes, his eyes were just like yours. ( _He rises._ ) Well, I'm going to look around here myself. ( _He moves toward the kitchen._ ) Yes, just look around. ( _Looking for something in the cupboard._ ) You're right, there is an unusual odor.... Makes me feel a bit nostalgic. Probably Gamia. Yes, your eyes are just like his.... His eyes were like a lake, clear, I guess you would say. A kind of fresh look, that seemed to go on endlessly. If it was a lake, then the lake had its master. Something mystical about it.... Yes, that's right. The water looked as cool as a desert at night. That's the reality of it. ( _He searches for a bottle of wine and takes a glass from the cupboard._ ) This is the kind of water I drink. I'll guess I'll settle for this wine. And since his eyes were like that, many women fell for him, you know. (NELLIE _turns away._ ) It was really surprising. Everyone came running to him, it seemed. One glimpse was enough. And can you imagine how envious I was about that? Sometimes I wanted to go and kill him, for sure!... That Fran\u00e7ois! ( _He goes back where he was before._ ) And he drank a lot. And he always paid up, you know, even though he was hard up. Everybody loved him. Even when he was completely broke. Even to the point where the women paid for him.\n\nNELLIE: Those women. They were fools.\n\nROUALT: And me? When I came around, not a single woman would pay any attention to me. Can you understand what my feelings were like? So all I did was to drink and drink. Just imagine, then, when an innocent young girl turned up. And now comes the real story.... (NELLIE, _suddenly resuming her frigid attitude, seems to hum to herself, perhaps a jazz tune, but she cannot seem to reveal openly her interest in what is of the greatest concern to her._ ) Now those women we'd been hanging around with were really for hire. The ones who collected at the bar were prostitutes, really. But _this_ young woman really did seem like some sort of goddess to us. (NELLIE _smiles wanly._ ) Things really seemed to be going downhill for her, but somehow she maintained, under some pretext or other, that she was the daughter of some good family, that girl. Do you remember that old country house? Your grandmother's house? At the foot of the hill, covered with grapevines.\n\nNELLIE: I don't remember.\n\nROUALT: The first time I met her... yeah, I seemed to drink in her very soul. I thought that in that girl, there was some kind of inner, uncanny light.... And yes, I saw her as the light of my destiny. Well as far as I am concerned, what an unhappy light it turned out to be.\n\nNELLIE: So this becomes a house full of grubs and worms, where your destiny crumbled and your entrails rotted.\n\nROUALT: Do you mean that as a joke? You see, because of the shame I felt, and my age, I had lost all my self-confidence... what could I flatter myself about? So I took all the money I'd saved up until then, and I bought her presents to make her happy. My heart was beating so fast, I can tell you, when I went to see her. With that thirty-five-year-old mug of mine. And one of the things I brought her was that pearl necklace.\n\nNELLIE: Ah! ( _Almost imperceptibly, she writhes in pain and puts her head in her lap._ )\n\nROUALT: But remember, Nellie, I was all full of myself, thinking she was mine and that the contest was actually already over. That was really stupid of me. ( _Laughing._ ) Ah, that dammed Fran\u00e7ois! Real love\u2014now listen, Nellie\u2014real love comes at the moment when a man and a woman, when they even glance at each other, seem to have feelings that spring from both of them at the same time. Then afterward, of course, all sorts of useless things get added in, but that's just the way things are. Stupid as I was, I did understand that much. So I just gave up. But for the sake of our friendship, I had to congratulate him. But then something unexpected can happen. Fate can be a pretty fierce thing, you know. The winner suddenly vanished from the earth. (NELLIE _raises her head._ ) Pneumonia, you know. It was all over in a couple of days. But in his lover's belly there was a baby, been there for two months. And that was you. But no point in gossiping about all that. Anyway, I knew all about it. And so I openly exchanged wedding rings. With your mother. ( _He turns his own ring around and around._ )\n\nNELLIE: And when Mama agreed to do this, was she the one who asked you? Or did you...\n\nROUALT: Well, of course it was she who asked me.... She didn't have the courage to give birth to a child with no father... and she was afraid of what people might say and for the family name.... And so swallowing her pride, right in front of me, she bowed her head to me, me, worse than if I'd been a perfect stranger, a man she didn't love... even though I did have some money, I was fifteen years older than she was, and a homely fellow at that. So perhaps you know now why your mother hates me...\n\nNELLIE: So you mean that, even though you knew that she didn't love you, you just gathered up your courage and nonchalantly went ahead and married her. What a shameless thing to do!\n\nROUALT: If this is how you are going to take this, then I guess I mustn't protest. After all, you can say that I took advantage of your mother's unhappiness in order to move the situation along. Now just be quiet, wait a minute. Just try to take into account all the things I've told you. But of course, if you naively believe everything that I told you, then my calculations will have gone astray ( _He gives her a comical look._ )\n\nNELLIE: Oh, I understand. I'm supposed to sanction your \"philosophy of life,\" or whatever.\n\nROUALT: Exactly. So, let's continue.... What you really want to say is that however foolish or however good natured people may be, they still may harbor some ulterior motives. So when a tray is passed around, they might be tempted to snatch something away for themselves. Isn't that right?\n\nNELLIE: Yes, I suppose that's so. That's just the way things are.\n\nROUALT: But you see... ( _He looks at her quickly, with real pain._ ) You see, what the human soul really wants is to join with others, with sincerity, submissively. The heart, in all its truth. But to say so doesn't mean that this is all just some simple instinct or some haphazard response.... I can't really explain this very well, but please try to think about what I'm saying in these general terms.\n\nNELLIE: Hmm... and for all that... ( _She holds back a derisive laugh._ )\n\nROUALT: And when this happens, you see, your sense of self, your ego, does not come into play; when you can just trust everything to your heart, then all the selfishness and meanness can disappear. That's what I believe. That feeling that I have of myself, that I am somehow vulgar or worthless... well, even if I can't quite blame it on the will of God, still, there _is_ something above and beyond my offensive self. Perhaps it's fate, but there _is_ something for which I must show reverence. Does that make any sense to you?\n\nNELLIE ( _Finally laughing_ ): Yes, I can follow at least that much. And even if you didn't speak in such an exaggerated and roundabout way, I still can understand how you could fall in love. But you can really say this in a couple of words. So why are you giving yourself such a hard time in trying to explain it?\n\nROUALT ( _Meekly_ ): Is that so... yes, I suppose so. I guess it is my fault... ( _Suddenly._ ) No. No, that's not right. You don't really understand. And your mother doesn't understand, either. To talk about a man and a woman sleeping together, well, that comes at the very end of things. Nellie, so you know what sleeping together really involves? Legs and arms entwined together, so that your very bones seem to squeak....\n\nNELLIE ( _Rising_ ): Stop. Be quiet. That's quite enough. There's nothing exceptional about this.\n\nROUALT: Well, you are a fledgling doctor yourself, so you surely must know each part of the human body in more detail than I do. But adding one piece after another still doesn't make up a living body. A living body has eyes that see, ears that hear, and at the same time there is real red blood running through, pulsing without cease, giving birth to a voice that rises from the heart... all becomes one, working in harmony. Have you ever dissected a body? Never, right? ( _Suddenly, he gives a high laugh, in a bantering fashion._ )\n\nNELLIE: Please stop this. It's stupid. So stupid.\n\nROUALT: So then... the bodies together become like scalpels, wounding each other, and as their blood splashes about in sympathy, both bodies are forced open without mercy. Their very blood courses together, resounding, reverberating. You don't know about this, do you? Well, I told you so! ( _Again, he laughs drily._ )\n\nNELLIE: That's a fate you describe for yourself. And why do you laugh like that? Because that's what you want. ( _Irritated._ ) Love, love as prostitution. You reveal your tastes. Prostitution, isn't it? What stupid nonsense.\n\nROUALT: Are you saying that love is no more than some kind of stupid prostitution? That's not true. It seems there are some good things in that book you're always quoting. Yes, just like it says, that goddess, that goddess who appeals to me so much, she just went right ahead and slept with that friend of mine. Legs and arms all tangled together, just like I said.\n\nNELLIE: Why do you force me to listen to all this?\n\nROUALT: If you're in love, anyone will behave like this. Even a prostitute.\n\nNELLIE: Ha!\n\nROUALT: But you know, I'm not like that. My way of loving, well, not to brag, but it's altogether different. ( _Humbly._ ) I never gave myself to your mother. Myself, that is.\n\nNELLIE: It this true? Is what you are saying true? ( _Suddenly, she is suddenly filled with a strange joy, which soon vanishes._ ) That's a lie. It's Mama who never gave herself to you. What a lie...\n\nROUALT ( _Sincerely_ ): Did your mother ever give birth to a child of mine?\n\nNELLIE ( _Walking around as she begins to think_ ): So then... well, you must have hated my mother. You wanted revenge. Yes... that must be...\n\nROUALT: Revenge? What on earth for? Was there any other man who adored your mother as much as I did? Why, on our wedding night, I put your mother to bed, and in a gentle voice, such a gentle voice, I said to her, \"Sleep well.\" And the next word I said was, \"Good-bye,\" when I left the room. I swear to you. I never touched a hair on her head.\n\nNELLIE ( _With cruelty_ ): Well, you just said that when people fall in love, they all behave like this. So why not with my mother?\n\nROUALT: Why not?... You know I'm sorry for you because you don't yet know that you yourself are a woman. Because that's what it means to be a woman... that's a woman's real nature.\n\nNELLIE: What? And just where is that true nature you are rattling on about? I don't understand what this is all about, but when you speak like this, you seem to be obsessed with the need to show the depths of some transgression of yours.\n\nROUALT: No, no, that's not true. The depth of transgression, the height of benevolence, the range of blessings, I don't really understand that sort of thing. But I do know that at that moment, your mother was in the midst of a dream. Her soul was flickering, as in a cool spring breeze... yes, I could see it myself. I really could.\n\nNELLIE: A dream? What dream?\n\nROUALT: Yes. A dream. She was the kind of person who could have such dreams. Well, after all, women are like that, with dreams. After I said good-bye that night, just as I was about to leave the room... ( _In a perplexed manner_ ) all of a sudden I was assaulted by two fragile arms, hugging me around the neck. Light and soft as a spring breeze, and with an unsteady sigh, her long breaths made my cheeks hot! (NELLIE _walks about in an irritated manner._ ) And just then, a woman's voice, more beautiful than any I've ever heard... in a voice that seemed to be whispering my fate... ( _In a voice emptied of all emotion._ ) She said, \"Fran\u00e7ois... suckle my breast... please Fran\u00e7ois...\"\n\nNELLIE: Fran\u00e7ois? Fran\u00e7ois!\n\nROUALT: That was the name of your mother's lover.\n\nNELLIE: If it had been me, I would have killed her on the spot. My mother.\n\nROUALT: You can't kill a woman who is having a dream. Why is that?... because at that time, a woman is at her most deeply beautiful. So I put your mother back in bed to sleep. Just as though... as though it had been Fran\u00e7ois. I said nothing. And I left. And somehow or other, I was overflowing with happiness. Ah, the echoes of the organ... all wrapped in her bridal address, adorned with white, with reflections of red, green, and yellow falling from the stained glass, a pale angel with a faint blush of the red of her blood! The spirit of a white rose, blooming in that somber room. That there could have been such a blessed day in the midst of my squalid life! And yet such a pitiful day!\n\nNELLIE ( _Bitterly_ ): So then, I see. You made the most of your sentimental feelings. You just put them first. You made use of the natural course of events, and your money, to acquire her as your wife. Well, you wanted to move in the proper social circles. And you thought to augment your strong points. That's about right, isn't it?\n\nROUALT ( _Somehow delighted_ ): So... you see then, that's how I escaped from her bed. I ran to a tavern to have a drink. And I drank, and I drank. I lost any sense of who I was, I collapsed, and I found myself awake in the bed of another woman. That's what happened. So that's how, in the first place, I first became intimate with Jeanne.\n\nNELLIE: I bet there was hell to pay!\n\nROUALT: Ah, no flattery please. And you are surprisingly mean.\n\nNELLIE: And then?\n\nROUALT: And then? If you want to know what happened to me after that, then why not consult a detective? Everything is just as you know it. Once a month, I come back from the island, unless the waves are just too rough, in order to do my duty in terms of financial support. That's why I appear before you both. It's a very ordinary tale, this.\n\nNELLIE: Ordinary? Certainly not. Don't leave the story half finished. Mama is your living sacrifice. You go on the way you do because carrying out your revenge gives you pleasure, bit by bit.\n\nROUALT: Whatever the circumstances, you'll just go on saying what you want. A pallid, weak-kneed child like you, what can you understand of this?\n\nNELLIE: I'm twenty-five. And at twenty-five, I might as well be thirty. You'd better remember that.\n\nROUALT: Well now, as for your uncompleted finished revenge, why do you think that I've just gone on, year after year, well, until this year anyway, when I've become an old man of sixty? Why didn't I just give up? Just why is that? \"The man of the house goes to his work at the mine and can return to his home only once a month.\" What's the point of an excuse like that for your mother? It doesn't make any sense. And actually... the truth is...\n\nNELLIE: The truth... well, what about that?\n\nROUALT: Even if you are betrayed by a woman, you know, well, if you've fallen for her, then you can't forget her. A man has to shoulder the consequences of his original intention. Is that a kind of feeling that you can understand? Can you grasp the kind of suffering that a man goes through, and the fact that he can offer no resistance to those unceasing lashes from that whip... can that mean anything to you?\n\nNELLIE: So for you, it's fate, then... but no, that's nothing more than an evil attachment. And a revolting, devilish tenacity.\n\nROUALT: Now, is that so? An evil tenacity, is it? Well, whatever. So that I could love your mother, I've embraced Jeanne, Gamia, and Paula. I just had to do it. And while I was doing this, I was seeking through them the only woman that I really wanted to hold close. And those others, whose names I don't even remember...\n\nNELLIE ( _Unable to bear this any longer_ ): No, no more...\n\nROUALT ( _Grasping her hands firmly_ ): But you see. ( _She struggles to free herself_ , _but he will not release her but pulls her up, forcing her to listen to the end._ ) And yet you see, as the number of women increased; then surprisingly, Mama's very existence seemed to move further and further away from me. What is the real meaning, the deep significance, of this? What if, just what if, even if I did actually embrace her body, it was to be only a shadow of her that I could touch?... Nellie, could you somehow call _this_ my revenge? My tenacity? That evil attachment? (NELLIE _twists herself as though in pain._ ) So if you would call this my revenge ( _He loosens her hands_ ), then it becomes a revenge against me.\n\nNELLIE: Revenge? By whom? For what?\n\nROUALT: For my loneliness... my loneliness. (NELLIE _grins at him._ ) So, then, you think that's funny? Yes, of course, it's ridiculous.... ( _He, too, gives out a weak laugh._ ) Well, I guess I don't understand any of this myself. In fact... just now, all that rattling on about nature, or fate; that was really a foolish way to lecture you. But in the end, you know, I seem to be the kind of man whose character can't really let him speak of the word \"love.\" And I think it's because, in the end, the only person I can apparently love is myself. And that gives me the creeps. Really. So now I'm really going to leave. I'm really going home, this time. ( _He rises._ ) Please forgive me for all the deceptions I've forced on you, for so long, posing as your father. But you know, it was a rather interesting role to play. So it doesn't matter whether you hate me for it or not. I don't suppose I'll ever lay eyes on you again in this life. I'm going to pack up and go to the harbor tonight. The ship sets sail tomorrow. And listen, I don't need you to worry about me. A second Gamia will appear. And while making rotgut wine, she will take care of me on the island. It sounds good to me. Yes, it certainly does. Hey... ( _Leaning forward, he rises behind her, then puts both hands on her shoulders_ , _speaking in a gentle voice._ ) You feel like a real daughter to me now. And I've changed your diapers two or three times, you know.\n\nNELLIE: Oh, just stop this!\n\nROUALT: Well then.... Starting next month, a notary public, instead of me, will come out here and give you your monthly payments. At least as long as I'm alive.... He promised me he would let me know how you are doing. And if I do kick the bucket, maybe from drinking too much, if I die, then all the proceeds of my mine, all of them, should come to you. And all the bonds as well. So you'll have absolutely no problems with your living expenses. But as for the island, well, I want you to let that second Gamia have it. Can you do this for me? ( _He takes his hat, umbrella, and trunk as he leaves._ ) And finally, as for Mama, you must look after her in my stead. And as for me, that lewd old man who drinks too much, please let her know what I said. Because Mama, you see ( _He hesitates_ )... I really respect her... she gives me a reason for living... the light of life continues to shine out from her.... Well, then, good-bye. ( _He starts to leave._ )\n\nNELLIE ( _Screaming out_ ): Papa! ( _He stops. She wrings her hands._ )\n\nROUALT: Did you say something?\n\nNELLIE: No. It was nothing. I was just thinking how to say good-bye and farewell.\n\nROUALT: Well, how about a farewell kiss perhaps? As a dutiful child?\n\nNELLIE ( _Hugging him fiercely, she speaks rapidly_ ): No. No this is all wrong. I really am your child. You just made up all those things you told me, because you are leaving. It's just your little play you've put together. It's so, isn't it so? Just say it's a lie. A lie. ( _Letting out a sound like a groan, she suddenly pulls away._ )\n\nROUALT ( _Indifferent_ ): Either way you take it is fine, as far as I'm concerned. Whether you're my real daughter or not. Either way. Whichever, it won't change my own sense of loneliness. And by the way, who taught you to kiss like that? I'm sure you wish you could strangle me to death. Or, is that really so different from wanting to fall for me, I wonder? Ha...\n\nNELLIE ( _Rubbing her lip_ ): You smell of wine, of nicotine.\n\nROUALT: Ha. You're just like Gamia, you are. Now there's fire, you know. Be careful! ( _He begins to sing._ ) _Aupr\u00e8s de ma blonde_ won't work for you, with your frizzy hair, _qu_ ' _il fait bon dormir_... ( _Still singing, he leaves._ )\n\n( _The bell tinkles at the door._ NELLIE, _startled, starts to go forward. Then she stops, lights a cigarette, turns on the radio, and sits down on the sofa. There are tears in her eyes, and she seems lost in thought. Softly, she puts one hand to her lips. Then she grabs the money left on the table and puts it in her pocket. She gulps down the wine that is left. Putting one hand behind her head, she stretches out her legs on the sofa. There is something rough in her movements. She watches the smoke rise from her cigarette. The bell sounds again. She stays where she is, just raising her head a little._\n\n_Carrying a briefcase,_ PIERRE _(age forty-eight) now peers in. There is a trace of timidity in his eyes, but there is something tenacious about him, and he is relaxed in a way typical of a scholar. He does not look particularly impressive; he has casually loosened his necktie on his light brown shirt and so has something of the look of a sportsman, with a kind of artless common good manners. He has come by bicycle, and he wipes his forehead_.)\n\nPIERRE: It is all right to come in?\n\nNELLIE ( _Rising_ ): Ah, I thought it was Mama... ( _She turns off the radio._ )\n\nPIERRE ( _Coming in_ ): The front door was shut. A guest?\n\nNELLIE: Yes, there was. And my mother's not here. ( _More formally._ ) Well, welcome, in any case. ( _She shakes hands._ ) Please excuse me, I just suddenly decided to take the day off. And no urgent patients for you?\n\nPIERRE: If so, I'll soon find out. I asked Francis to take over for me, and I just left. Also riding a bicycle, you know, there was some old guy, who seemed to be drunk. He sort of lunged at me. He had an umbrella in one hand, and he held a trunk in the other. He seemed to be in a good mood, just singing away.\n\nNELLIE ( _On her guard_ ): Oh... and what song was he singing?\n\nPIERRE: The sort of song I wouldn't like someone like you to hear, some military song, you know. ( _He takes a package wrapped in paper from his briefcase._ ) And what happened to you?\n\nNELLIE: What? No, no, nothing. ( _She laughs politely._ )\n\nPIERRE: Were you having a drink at the end of a long day? The rims of your eyes are all red. Like you've been crying. But you seem sort of chilly, just as though a rainstorm had just passed.\n\nNELLIE: You don't paint a very attractive picture of me.... There was a fight with Mama. Strange, you know. Excuse me just a moment.... ( _She goes in front of the mirror._ ).\n\nPIERRE: A quarrel, with that good-tempered mother of yours?\n\nNELLIE: She's not always so good natured, Mama. She's really quite a nervous person. That's why we don't get along. That's why we always fight.\n\nPIERRE: If it were me, I would treat her with respect. She's beautiful, like some precious treasure.\n\nNELLIE: Is that so. ( _Painfully._ ) She has the kind of face that men like.\n\nPIERRE: She's like a dark angel. And creatures like these seem to be vanishing from this world we live in. Today, you know, I bought a plate to give her. It's eighteenth century. ( _He unwraps the antique plate and puts it on the table._ ) That's what they said, anyway...\n\nNELLIE: My goodness. Quite a gift, Doctor.\n\nPIERRE ( _Taking a bar of chocolate from his pocket_ ): This is something to eat. I heard recently that your mother is fond of pottery.\n\nNELLIE: Now I'm in trouble.\n\nPIERRE: No you're not. That shelf looks kind of sad and empty, so this will line up very nicely. ( _Stepping away, he looks at the painting on the wall._ ) Do you like Marie Laruencin's paintings?\n\nNELLIE: Yes I do. So I suppose you'll up and buy one for us. Have you and Mama had a good talk? She's really rather reticent, you know.\n\nPIERRE: Do you? I don't really think so. She's really quite affectionate, don't you agree? And she's has such a graceful dignity about her.\n\nNELLIE: Really? I wonder. Men really like that kind of woman, I suppose.\n\nPIERRE: I really can't understand the feelings of a husband who can allow someone like that to remain alone. I really don't. Or is it because he's too possessive? ( _Lightly._ ) So, the one who came here. That was your father, was it?\n\nNELLIE: Yes. And that's why I took the day off.\n\nPIERRE: Just when I came in, you know, it seemed to me there was a smell of tobacco. Not the kind people smoke around here. A sort of beast-like, male smell.\n\nNELLIE: There are all sorts of smells that stagnate in this house. ( _She takes the chocolate out of its wrapper._ ) Thanks so much for this.... And you didn't chatter on a little too much with Mama... about me?\n\nPIERRE: We didn't go on and on. But just a little...\n\nNELLIE: About what?\n\nPIERRE: So you go skiing?\n\nNELLIE: About something like that? And you, Doctor?\n\nPIERRE: Well, not when you get to my age, I'm forty-eight, you know. ( _He takes the plate in his hand._ ) Look at this. They say it came from the Netherlands. Eighteenth century. A piece like this is really beautiful, don't you think. There's something serene about it.\n\nNELLIE: Really? Eighteenth century?\n\nPIERRE: Is it the Virgin Mary?... or perhaps it's Venus. But from the clothing, it couldn't be Venus.\n\nNELLIE: You don't sound really convinced. You're easy prey for those antique dealers, Doctor. ( _She gets up, takes the wine from the kitchen table, turns on the switch to heat the coffeepot, and so forth._ )\n\nPIERRE: It's not impossible for some heathen goddess to become a saint. ( _He takes the plate in his hand and puts it on the shelf._ ) I bought this because I thought that she would enjoy having it. I looked around for an hour and a half, but I never thought I would find a bargain like this. For my sake, you know, you should hold it in your hands, admire it.\n\nNELLIE: Sorry if I seemed rude. But let me ask you, why do you bring a present every time you come?\n\nPIERRE: It's kind of my expression of gratitude. Since you are so nice to me.\n\nNELLIE: Hm...\n\nPIERRE: Nice, and gentle. That's your real nature, you know. Of course, people say exactly the opposite.\n\nNELLIE: Is that so... you're moving right in on me, aren't you? But I'm not particularly taken with you, you know.\n\nPIERRE: Well, be that as it may... ( _Suddenly he sees a fragment of a cup on the floor._ ) Look, isn't that a piece of glass? ( _He picks it up and comes close to her._ ) And forget about the coffee. ( _Extending both his arms._ ) So this is a chance to make some rapid progress, don't you see. ( _Annoyed,_ NELLIE _laughs awkwardly, then faces the kitchen table._ ) Now I'm not saying you have to jump into my arms! Now then... (NELLIE _stiffens and, without looking at him, wrings her hands._ ) I'm not going to hurt you. It's just my way of paying my compliments to you.\n\nNELLIE: Compliments?\n\nPIERRE: Of course. That's perfectly reasonable.... No, wait, that's not quite true. We are parting from each other. This is my final greeting.\n\nNELLIE ( _Fearfully_ ): So then, are you, too, going far away?\n\nPIERRE: Well, there's no one in the office to hold me back. But this is the best way I can say it.... And in the end, as for making any difference.... Hey, now what is it? Why are you making that face? I'm really sorry. Don't make too much of this. It's true, I'm exaggerating a little. I'm not saying that it's a question of any physical distance. It's a kind of psychological parting of the ways. To put it bluntly, it's breaking off our friendship. Me. With you. ( _He laughs._ )\n\nNELLIE: Breaking off?\n\nPIERRE: So that's the reason for this official parting.\n\nNELLIE: I really don't understand.\n\nPIERRE: Yes... there's a kind of nice echo to that sound, \"breaking off.\"\n\nNELLIE: I really don't understand, because you are the one who began to come here.\n\nPIERRE: Since we started to meet each other outside the hospital... no, sorry, I mean since we've started to have these conversations...\n\nNELLIE: Well, today is only the third occasion. But whether there or here, I don't remember your ever complaining.\n\nPIERRE: Of course, you're right.\n\nNELLIE: Even so, why this talk of a parting of the ways?... And what do you mean by \"psychological\"... I simply don't understand what the reason for all this is...\n\nPIERRE: Well, yes, I suppose I can see what you mean. ( _He walks about._ ) Now I understand. It's all right. You can just keep silent and go on living here as you are. Really, there's nothing more for you to do than that.... And then, even if I disappear from your sight forever, you probably won't even notice. And as for me, of course, there is no reason for me to ask you to pay attention to me. But by the way, I do have just a couple of tips for the road, as it were, for you to hear. For practical use. From me, as a fellow companion. It seems that as far as you are concerned, our relationship _is_ merely practical, like handing out directions. So how can I make our parting seem somehow more meaningful? When there seems to be no reason for that...\n\nNELLIE: But why, if we're never going to see each other again... ah, but you are really must be talking about something different.\n\nPIERRE: Now remember: I told you that, far apart or close together, I won't disappear completely. In any case, at the hospital, we'll simply be doctor and assistant. And if you felt like studying a little more, you could earn quite a reputation in the surgery, you know. And to the extent of my meager abilities, I could help you with all that.\n\nNELLIE: I would be the only young woman with any ambitions like that.\n\nPIERRE: Remember, wielding a scalpel isn't something you've already learned as a well-brought up young lady.\n\nNELLIE: But I've always wanted to try something that no one else would try.\n\nPIERRE: Sure. And that's one really good thing about you... ( _Gently, he hugs her_ ; _his hair brushing against her cheek; they stand quietly still. A bugle sounds. In their emotion, they do not move. A moment of silence._ ) Well, don't just stand there dangling your arms.\n\nNELLIE ( _With a certain coolness; still, she is not angry_ ): What do you think I should do, then?\n\nPIERRE: You _are_ troublesome. ( _He is happy to speak._ ) You see, I have to talk to you like a kid. Even though you're twenty-five years old. So, do it this way ( _Putting both her hands on his shoulders._ ) Now, that's right. ( _He hugs her again._ ) It may be better if you don't think of me as a man.\n\nNELLIE: Actually, I never gave it a thought. ( _She quickly drops her arms._ )\n\nPIERRE: How dare you say that! ( _Filled with tender love as he takes in the smell of her hair._ ) Because you didn't know any way to think about it... ah!\n\nNELLIE: What is it?\n\nPIERRE: The smell. The smell of your hair.\n\nNELLIE: Um...\n\nPIERRE: If we really are to part, then you must allow me to keep at least the scent of your hair with me.... There was some poet who wrote about the smell of hay. R\u00e9my de Gourmont, was it? Wonder why he said that? And you know, you don't have one white hair yet. Wait. Ah, yes. A single silver one.\n\nNELLIE: Doctor, when you say you want to go away, what exactly do you mean? Can't you really explain your feelings to me? ( _She takes the silver thread and looks at it._ )\n\nPIERRE: Well... later perhaps. I think you'll just figure it out all by yourself. So, thanks very much then. And excuse me. ( _He lightly hugs her shoulders and returns to the sofa._ )\n\nNELLIE: And you won't give me a kiss?\n\nPIERRE ( _Looking to say something, he looks at her upturned face but then, adopting a moralistic stance_ ): No. No, I won't do it.\n\nNELLIE: Sorry. At a moment like this, I just thought it might be the proper thing to say.\n\nPIERRE: On an occasion like this? Well, your good intentions are quite enough. Is it that you're trying to say? Because you've let yourself become twenty-five years old without ever having let a man at you? I think it's appropriate that I provide a little primer for you.\n\nNELLIE: And what about your wife? Is she good at this? ( _She takes the things no longer needed off the table._ )\n\nPIERRE: Well, I certainly appreciate your showing respect for my wife! I thank you on her behalf! And by the same token, I must treat you honorably as well. So we'll dispense with the idea of a kiss. Still, I do intend to take on the role, more or less, of educating you. Now perhaps this may seem bothersome for you. Ah, and don't put in any milk, please.\n\nNELLIE: Why do you speak of bothering me? On the contrary, I know that you'll always explain everything to me very politely, at least at the hospital or at school. ( _She puts the coffee pot and mugs on the table and faces him._ )\n\nPIERRE: That's not the kind of education I'm talking about. And don't pretend that you don't know what I mean. (NELLIE _looks him full in the face and, more brightly, wrinkles her eyebrows as she pours the coffee._ ) So then... concerning the male sex. Just what is a man? I'm going to educate you about the male's true nature. Remember, I've lived on this earth twice as long as you. You can't go so far as to say I'm an old-timer, but in terms of the world we live in, I have had some valuable experiences. And remember, I'm a doctor. And in the surgery. I'm precise in my investigation of the truth, just as I am when I do an autopsy. I have to know everything about how a human being functions. From both a physiological and a psychological point of view. In the end, I have to know about everything, even pathology, everything.\n\nNELLIE: Um... but when you talk about the human body, you mean just the physical body itself, don't you?\n\nPIERRE: Well, there are various ways to describe all that.\n\nNELLIE: Medicine is the art of taking all those separate things you mention and then connecting them all together, isn't it? ( _With irony._ ) All those scattered parts\u2014an eye as an eye, an ear as an ear, even a heart as a heart\u2014don't constitute a living body in and of themselves. In fact, most people think they can live separately like that, only with their brains. And even somebody who really thinks about all this still may not come to realize that our roots have become somehow separated from the earth. That we are really unsettled. We walk around with a cheerful face, even though there seem to be so many different kinds of people inside us. We're strange creatures, I guess. But be that as it may, since we have to go on living, just as we are, perhaps it's not the fault of our animal nature but of the society around us. I really don't understand. But you know, when we can manage to forget all about those separate parts of ourselves and we can connect them, then when there is a kind of harmony of the whole, then a human being can truly become the real thing. That's what Papa... Papa said.\n\nPIERRE: Your Papa! That mining engineer! So he saw through all the gloom that's affected us since the beginning of this century. Well, what benevolence on his part! A real philosopher! No question about it. Walking around in his mountains, he could let all vulgar considerations of life just slide away. He must be a fine fellow. And your mother, being the kind of lady she is... Yes, I would really like to meet him.\n\nNELLIE: Why?\n\nPIERRE: So as to know you all the better. In order to truly say good-bye to you and to truly forget you, I want to investigate your real nature as thoroughly as possible. Does this sound all too professional?\n\nNELLIE: My true nature, then. Well, just as you please.\n\nPIERRE: Which one do you resemble the most? Your mother? Or your father... ?\n\nNELLIE: Oh, my father. But you know, Doctor, you caught a glimpse of my father, quite by chance... or at least I think so.\n\nPIERRE: What? I did? When was that...\n\nNELLIE: The old drunk, singing the military song...\n\nPIERRE: Military? Ah, you mean... just now, that one... really!\n\nNELLIE: Weren't you surprised? There's nothing to be done about it; he's a heavy drinker.\n\nPIERRE: Well then, you have to respect him as your father. But when you speak about him in a general way, what is the actual situation with him? After all, he only comes home to see you and your mother once a month.\n\nNELLIE: That's the situation. Nothing to be done about it.\n\nPIERRE ( _After remaining quiet for a moment_ ): You love him, don't you.\n\nNELLIE: Yes, yes I do.\n\nPIERRE ( _Just a bit disappointed_ ): Is that so, then.... But when you were growing up, you were left to take care of yourself, weren't you? That is why a proper education is absolutely essential. The kind of education that only a real father can give you.\n\nNELLIE: \"Education, education,\" that's all you talk about. But I've never been able to acquire it. There was nothing I could take in from my surroundings. Papa probably was right. His morals may not be the best, but there's no necessary connection there.\n\nPIERRE ( _Reddening_ ): I'm sorry. I said something stupid.\n\nNELLIE: I'm quite inexperienced, you know. I've just had myself. Myself. So at this point, there's nothing I can do. And I don't know how I might be affected now.\n\nPIERRE: Well, I didn't know you loved your father as much as that. ( _Thinking again._ ) Well, purity is a good thing... but Nellie, happiness for a woman comes from getting married, being in charge of a family...\n\nNELLIE: That doesn't sound like something a real teacher would say. It's just an ordinary idea that anyone would come up with...\n\nPIERRE: What difference does that make? It may be a very ordinary thought, but it's absolute. It's the real truth. Yes it is. And the situation for you is just the same. Wouldn't you like to have a life like that? Or if you don't like that idea, then perhaps something more brilliant, some more unreliable way of getting through this world. That could give you a sense of purpose. Becoming a successful doctor or not is, of course, an altogether different matter. I'm talking about you as a woman. That's what I'm keeping my eye on.\n\nNELLIE: Whether you have your eyes on me or not, you've managed to hit the mark. Most women are like that, whoever they may be.\n\nPIERRE: So you think so? When talent is involved, there's no loss in receiving an education. I have a wife of my own, and even though I myself don't have any outstanding talents, I'm not unreliable, I am an amiable man... ( _She steals a glance at him but does not laugh._ ) It's true, you know. And yet as a man like that, if I can lay the foundations properly for you, one way or another, then when you face such a battle, you won't stumble and let the right person escape from right under your nose. But if you never try, then you'll never allow yourself to be carried away.\n\nNELLIE: I've never found myself wavering like that, not in the way you say.\n\nPIERRE: That's because it looks unbecoming. And the beginning of misfortune. First of all, Nellie, you are a disciple of a cool and rational science.\n\nNELLIE: That's because evidently my nature is too is cool and rational.\n\nPIERRE: What do you mean?\n\nNELLIE ( _Laughing_ ): Well, everyone tells me that it's so. And if I listen to what the head of the hospital tells me, it must be true, because he teases me about it.\n\nPIERRE: The head of the hospital is just a vulgar person. Yes. And in this case he's putting his responsibility off on others. That's because there's a kind of cold war going on. He doesn't really grasp the passions that flow so deeply in the others; he can't see through them. And surprisingly, you understand less than any of the others, isn't that so? You yourself don't seem to realize that you possess such powerful passions yourself.\n\nNELLIE: Even if I did know that, what's to be done about it? Absolutely nothing.\n\nPIERRE: So you pretend not to notice and just get by, don't you.\n\nNELLIE: There's no room for any scenario I know that's right for a woman full of passion like that.\n\nPIERRE: You're making every effort to get the better of me. I see we are in a cold war, too.\n\nNELLIE: Whatever else, you do seem to want to assign this passionate nature to me. Doctor. But there's no reason we have to go to war.\n\nPIERRE: All right. I know I'm the one who started this. But I'm not the one who's loading up now with live shot.\n\nNELLIE: If I thought I were bound to accept your challenge, by showing you the proof that I had blood flowing in my veins, then I suppose you would have thought that things were going well for you, I suppose... as for me, fortunately, I am not shrewd enough to have wanted to let you hear any noises made by an unloaded gun. I'm sorry. Doctor, I'm just a woman, after all, full of common sense and with a strong penchant for prudence. Just an ordinary person. That's what I'm like inside. So, Doctor, I think that you greatly overvalue me. Now as for the head of the hospital, he's an interesting person.\n\nPIERRE: Well you seem to get along with him, which means that you're smart. But a dull-witted person like me, I don't stand a chance.\n\nNELLIE: Are you suggesting you want to take a chance with me? ( _With a sweet smile._ )\n\nPIERRE: That phrase you use isn't really very conciliatory...\n\nNELLIE: But you, you see...\n\nPIERRE: And what do you mean, specifically, by that phrase you just used?\n\nNELLIE: Ah? ( _Now she understands._ ) Well, won't you drink something?\n\nPIERRE ( _Shaking his head_ ): Let's just stop the warfare now. ( _He drinks the coffee. Silence. The western sun shines in from the window and fills the room with light and shadows. A group of small birds are chirping as they return to their nest. Suddenly the room is noisy._ NELLIE _lights a cigarette._ PIERRE _picks up_ NELLIE' _s book._ ) Ah, Baudelaire, I see. ( _He riffles through the pages._ ) So, it is all right for me to stay on like this?\n\nNELLIE: Of course. Why do you ask?\n\nPIERRE: Do you find it interesting to talk to me? Or not? ( _She smiles faintly._ ) I wonder if you are making efforts to make me your partner. After all, I am your teacher. (NELLIE _says nothing._ ) You aren't annoyed? After all, I've visited you three times in two weeks. ( _She remains silent._ ) And I hope that I haven't hurt you in any way, up until now. ( _She shakes her head._ ) I value you so much. I don't think you can have any notion of how grateful I am to you. And you know what I'm like. Every day. I put on a serious face, don't I? Properly, as a doctor at the hospital should. But on a day like this, with just the two of us here, I become so talkative. Perhaps too much. And in fact, I'm somehow tired of my own self-centeredness. That's thanks to you as well. And it's so rare for me to find myself chattering along happily, like some Pierrot.\n\nNELLIE: So, you can't be this way with your wife?\n\nPIERRE: No, and that's why, I really need to thank you so profoundly.\n\nNELLIE ( _Stubbornly_ ): So you can't talk to your wife this way.\n\nPIERRE: No I can't. I'm the one who seems assigned to listen to her complaints. ( _Silence._ ) Apparently any couple seems fated to become that way. Now, of course, I want you to know that she really does look after my needs.\n\nNELLIE ( _Quietly_ ): That puzzle you've posed. About our parting, I seem to be able to unravel it now, somehow or other...\n\nPIERRE: And so?\n\nNELLIE: There are those who pursue what is absolute, pure. What is unsullied, what is beautiful. Yet, you know, it seems to me, that those very qualities can be found in a happiness of the most ordinary kind, in things that are close at hand. And you, too, Doctor, perhaps you have followed this kind of wandering path yourself.\n\nPIERRE: I, too?\n\nNELLIE: A man, you see, when he pursues a woman, he sometimes seeks... well, something that is no more than a phantom. And the sooner he knows this, the better.\n\nPIERRE: While a woman, on the other hand, pursues only the substance of things, I suppose.\n\nNELLIE: And that is because a woman seeks only reality itself.\n\nPIERRE: While, for a man...\n\nNELLIE: No, a man sets out thinking to create that reality. The truth has some objective existence out there, but it can't simply be revealed at one's convenience. By now you have come to some understanding of that. (PIERRE _does not respond. She continues gently._ ) Men are covetous, you know. Really greedy.\n\nPIERRE: Nellie! Go ahead, reproach me. Go ahead and whip me. Yes... ( _As he says this, he throws himself down and kneels. Coming close to_ NELLIE, _he grasps her knees and buries his head there_. NELLIE _softly strokes his hair. Then she gently pushes him back with her fingers._ PIERRE _remains as he was._ ) Listen to those little birds, singing away.... ( _He lifts his head._ ) Listen, Nellie. Somehow or other, there is something missing in you. You are somehow unfulfilled. What is it that is missing? I can't quite understand what it is. And it's the very same thing that attracts me to you.\n\nNELLIE ( _Smiling_ ): I don't understand.\n\nPIERRE: I want to see some sign in you of something brighter, something more vivid, some sign that you are reaching out to the future, for some kind of happiness. That's what I would like to see in you. And that's the kind of person you must somehow become. Because that is the kind of character you're blessed with.\n\nNELLIE ( _Speaking in a mysterious fashion_ ): Actually, when it comes to me, I'm greedy as well, Doctor. ( _She holds_ PIERRE' _s head between her hands and looks at him steadily._ ) I have a hunger for a kind of happiness that no one can understand, not even me myself.\n\nPIERRE ( _Rising_ ): Well, that's just fine then. Nellie, in the future I don't know what kind of happiness you may try to seek for yourself, whatever it may be, but well, when that time comes, please take that plate with the virgin, smash it, and throw it away. Although I guess that when you do become the mistress of your happiness, you probably won't have time to worry about things like that, I'm sure. ( _Going back to where he was before._ ) And for the opposite, when you find yourself in a period of bad luck, it would be good if that plate could be a useful means for you to think about the past. Because at that time, you were still young. And you indeed did have one man, so that, for a brief time at least, you could act on those feelings, grasping that happiness with your own two hands. The plate is not meant to serve as a memory of that man. It is to help you remember yourself. It may seem to you that somehow I am anticipating some sort of misfortune for you. I wonder. But in the end, it's best that you forget all about me.\n\nNELLIE ( _After a silence_ ): Doctor, you _are_ a lonely person, aren't you?\n\nPIERRE: I won't put it quite so starkly as that. But I do enjoy the role of the sad Pierrot. And I believe I can understand why. Some doctors might want to turn to religion. As for me, this Pierrot I play is a dangerous character, prone to temptations of self-rapture. If a woman tells me \"you are covetous\" or \"you are lonely,\" I can simply feel elated, even me, who has had so much experience.\n\nNELLIE: Why do you think that's the case?\n\nPIERRE: Why? \"You are a lonely person, aren't you? So it will be good if I come and comfort you, then.\"\n\nNELLIE: Ah... ( _I see_.)...\n\nPIERRE: Um...well, don't you think I'm right?\n\nNELLIE: Doctor, I didn't mean in that sense...\n\nPIERRE: Yes, it's true, you are like that. Perhaps I misunderstand, but I think that you feel that at my age, I should know better. But it's not a question of age. Because psychologically speaking, people feel young until they die. So please, Nellie, won't you let me teach you something worth knowing? Because when a man tempts a willing woman, the situation for the man is different. We can act without so many words, without any indiscriminate flirting. There's no point going on about it. The most skillful way to handle that situation is to... well... somehow for the man to put on a piteous expression, an appearance of being oppressed. It won't do to seem sentimental. And the man needs to show some coolness, a bit of reserve. Take someone like me. Spellbound, a woman looks at me. She will think, \"I would do anything for him.\" And so a love is born. That's what happens.\n\nNELLIE: Ah... as easy as that.\n\nPIERRE: As easy as that. That's exactly how it is. That's how things get started, for a woman. And particularly when an intelligent woman sees that man for the first time.\n\nNELLIE: Is that so? It appears you've had a lot of practice at this.\n\nPIERRE: Remember, I'm an experienced man of the world. This world.\n\nNELLIE: Um... and so you've come to think that I'll somehow get entangled that way, too.\n\nPIERRE: I've been giving it my best, but no luck so far, I guess. At least it seems that way.\n\nNELLIE: So then, Doctor, you must be setting out to seduce me. In a number of the meanings of that word.\n\nPIERRE: So that's what it comes to, is it? ( _Laughing._ ) Well, let's make good use of my position as your teacher. Still, I'm just playing my role of Pierrot. And today you've played your part of Columbine in a brilliant way, so very cool, so detached. Yet in the end, hasn't something happened today, after all? I'm the one who had to suffer a beating just now. And I was very happy about it. But in fact, things may be better this way. So come after me boldly, with resolution. Boldly.\n\nNELLIE: I'm sorry. I seem to be somehow all stirred up today.\n\nPIERRE: You are a little different from the Nellie I've been used to. Actually, you sound a little annoyed.\n\nNELLIE: Well, maybe so. But Doctor... in the end, you are invulnerable.\n\nPIERRE: What? Invulnerable?\n\nNELLIE: Well yes, the empty bullet simply recoiled back on itself, didn't it...\n\nPIERRE: Ah yes. Yes, I see. But you know, I am honestly trying to put myself in your place. Just as you said a moment ago, I'm your self-styled teacher. And my deepest desire for you, you know, is that you will give your hand, without blemish, to a young man who is suitably gallant. Someone who will really suit you, who will know your worth, a young man who can bring you happiness. (NELLIE _says nothing._ ) Someone who will make your life worth living, someone who will allow you to demonstrate your true value... those eyes of yours, as though brilliantly polished, when they sparkle so beautifully: they show first and foremost the human being you have become. More than anything, they are the best sign of the human being you have become.... How I would like to see you at just such a moment. I'm not the one to make this happen, and of course that happy state is not only limited to the relations between men and women. And perhaps I interfere too much. But while I have this ardent wish, at the same time, because of your gentleness, I have come to realize that perhaps I too must have good feelings, too. Still, nothing can be guaranteed. As for you, of course, you may not feel about it this way at all. These may just be an expression of my own willful feelings. So when you said that I'm a lonely fellow, your words actually gave me a shock.\n\nNELLIE: Even you, Doctor.\n\nPIERRE: It's not a question of \"even me.\" If it comes to that. This is a new discovery. That's why this is an education, don't you see?\n\nNELLIE ( _Protesting_ ): But listen, Doctor. What's wrong with simply pointing out that you feel lonely?\n\nPIERRE: I'm telling you, I'm not complaining. I feel an immense sense of gratitude. To you, Nellie. For your kindness, your friendship.\n\nNELLIE: But I've been trying to tell you.... I'm not that kind of person.\n\nPIERRE: Why do you speak so earnestly like that?\n\nNELLIE ( _As if to herself_ ): There are different kinds of lonely faces...\n\nPIERRE: Eh?\n\nNELLIE: And that face\u2014what did you say before? How guileless it was? Yes, the way that face looks, its appearance. And what lies beneath that appearance.\n\nPIERRE: What do you mean when you say \"beneath\"?...\n\nNELLIE: If the man is, well ( _Teasingly_ ), young, fresh and unspoiled, a bit melancholy, and, on top of that, his face is manly, she will give him the comfort he seeks. But what if he had an air of discernment, was prey to no foolish dreams, and had only a withered face and sagging cheeks?\n\nPIERRE: \"You will catch cold\u2014why don't you go home at once.\" What a defeat.... And I think it's about time for me to leave myself. ( _He finishes the cold coffee left in the cup and pulls his necktie out of his pocket._ )\n\nNELLIE: Ah, but I wasn't talking about you. Perhaps I _am_ doing battle with you.... And you're not playing fair.\n\nPIERRE: No, no, it's all right. I meant to come all prepared. But I see I'm inclined to wishful thinking after all. ( _The bell rings._ )\n\nNELLIE ( _Rising_ ): Ah, it must be the maid. She's really late this time. (NELLIE _exits._ )\n\nPIERRE ( _Also rising, he walks to the decorative shelf_ ): \"No foolish dreams, and only a withered...\" was that it?\n\nNELLIE'S VOICE: You're a little late. Papa already left... is that all you got? The butcher is closed today? Nothing to be done about that, I suppose. Well then, I know it's pretty far, but go to Old Man Emile's... you know, don't you, the place just beyond the church. Some eggs, and then... ah yes, how about borrowing Dr. Pierre's bicycle?... ( _She sticks her head out._ ) Would that be all right, Doctor? Your bicycle, just for a bit... ?\n\nPIERRE: Well, those patients are waiting for me, you know... appendicitis, and a cesarean section, or worldwide influenza...\n\nNELLIE ( _Laughing as she withdraws her head_ ): Hurry up and come back quickly, then. The doctor has to go home quite soon. ( _He shrugs his shoulders._ ) And don't fool around with that delivery boy.\n\nYOUNG MAID'S VOICE: Yes, I know. Eggs, and some carrots...\n\nNELLIE: Simpleton!\n\nMAID: Oh, oh... ( _Her voice recedes._ )\n\nNELLIE ( _Reenters, with a bottle of wine and several cans of food_ ): Well, what can you do. She's just a child.... ( _She puts the wine bottle on the table._ )\n\nPIERRE: Are you going to drink something?\n\nNELLIE: I suppose so. And you too. ( _She takes the cans away, pulls the cork, and brings glasses._ )\n\nPIERRE ( _During this time, he has been looking slowly around the room and has picked something up in his hand to look at, something he finds quite unusual_ ): Let me take a good look around this room. It's the last time I'll see it. If this house had a trellis of roses outside, how exactly a house for a mistress it might be, hidden away like this.\n\nNELLIE ( _Without reserve_ ): You are right. Because a mistress did live here before. A woman of mixed blood, black and white.\n\nPIERRE: Eh? Black and... ( _He can_ ' _t fathom this. Rather timidly._ ) Are you cross with me?\n\nNELLIE ( _Pouring the wine_ ): Please.\n\nPIERRE ( _Returning to his seat_ ): I suppose a situation like that isn't so unusual, after all. It is really quiet here, and the earth has a fragrant smell, just as it should.... But Nellie, why do you adopt such rebellious posture? Just look at your clothes.\n\nNELLIE: Me? Rebellious? What a tiresome idea. Perhaps this outfit doesn't suit you, but I'm just trying to dress up.\n\nPIERRE: Well, in fact, you do look good. And I know it's not by accident.\n\nNELLIE: Father likes this style.\n\nPIERRE: So you dress up this way for your father? In a way, you look a bit boyish. Or perhaps like a mother who works in a factory, possibly with a couple of kids.\n\nNELLIE: Ah, now that makes me feel good!\n\nPIERRE: Why's that?\n\nNELLIE: Because I want children.\n\nPIERRE: And the father?\n\nNELLIE: Why do you talk about that?\n\nPIERRE: You mean, without a husband?\n\nNELLIE: You see, I once seriously considered the possibility of artificial insemination.\n\nPIERRE: But who would...\n\nNELLIE: I... well, what about it? You've never met anyone who said a thing like that to you?\n\nPIERRE: Well...\n\nNELLIE: \"Well...\" Is that all you can say? I've searched around and read up on the whole thing. In fact, I've been to see a gynecologist. And the rate of success is pretty good. You probably know all about this. It's not just one person involved, you know. You make a mixture from two or three men. And there's no contact between the ones giving and the one receiving. So there's no possibility of any personal identification, who is who, and so forth.... Let me gather my courage and tell you plainly. My idea was to add Papa to the mixture. ( _She drinks._ )\n\nPIERRE: Your father... well now, that's quite an idea.... Actually there's something rather sweet and sentimental about that.... It would make him happy, wouldn't it? Your papa, a philosopher, a drunkard...\n\nNELLIE: No, this is not a question of pleasing my father. It is for me... for my own sake.\n\nPIERRE: And, for the offspring... ?\n\nNELLIE: It's so I can love the child.\n\nPIERRE ( _Looking at her intently_ ): So that's how it is. Yes, well, I guess I understand.\n\nNELLIE: As I said to you before, I'm a woman with common sense. I'm not so different from any other ordinary woman. And I'm not that strong-minded at all.\n\nPIERRE: I'm sure you're right. I did figure out that much about you.\n\nNELLIE: That's my true nature, you know. Surprisingly, it's just like that.\n\nPIERRE: It's a little old-fashioned to talk about any \"true nature\" these days, you know. ( _Drinking._ ) This is pretty strong, you know.\n\nNELLIE: It's 87 percent. If you bring a match nearby, you'll start a fire. Sometimes I'm really tired when I come back from the laboratory. I drink this, then go right to sleep.\n\nPIERRE: Out like a light.\n\nNELLIE: Like a light.\n\nPIERRE: You don't have any virginal dreams? Leaving out, of course, the question of artificial insemination...\n\nNELLIE: You're right. I don't.\n\nPIERRE: You know, the last couple of weeks, there have been lots of nights when I couldn't sleep at all. Because I was thinking about you. Apparently just when you were happily snoring away.\n\nNELLIE: Not that happily. I can tell you it was boring. ( _Quietly she begins to hum a song, the one that had been on the radio earlier._ )\n\nPIERRE ( _After a silence_ ): You know, I have a sense that I'm making quite a poor showing here. Now it doesn't matter if my efforts turn out to be fruitless, but still, I can't help wondering why. Maybe it's selfish on my part, but I really would like you to understand.... Do I have to explain all of this explicitly, in my own words?\n\nNELLIE: Mother's late too. ( _She sighs, hoping he will hear._ )\n\nPIERRE: What does it really mean to be in love with someone?... I've thought about it during these past two weeks. I've tried to examine my own feelings. As a man who has a wife of his own, I've thought about it, just as I should, quite naturally.... I've tried to analyze things. The question is, as you put it so well a moment ago, what is the nature of purity? For it must exist. Is there no way, somehow or other, to get at the essence of the thing? There's something, well, unsettled about matters of this nature. Maybe it's all just some sort of illusion in the end.\n\nNELLIE: I have no idea. What I was talking about before...\n\nPIERRE: If you could only somehow get at this purity, extract it, then we human beings could stop wounding each other, I think.\n\nNELLIE: Rather than putting human beings in a test tube and boiling them with an alcohol lamp, it would be quicker to have a good talk with your wife. Wouldn't that be a good thing?\n\nPIERRE: If I tried this with my wife, she would hold her stomach and laugh. ( _It has become quite dark by now._ ) So then, Nellie... don't you... really... don't you have any consciousness of me as a man? ( _She does not reply._ ) You don't, do you. ( _She nods in agreement._ )\n\nPIERRE: Well, how about it then?... Have you ever found yourself in an atmosphere when you could feel as though you had somehow been embraced? ( _She says nothing._ ) Even as an illusion?\n\nNELLIE: No.\n\nPIERRE: I know that you feel no passion for me, but I wonder if have you ever felt anything like real passion? ( _She does not reply._ ) When people use the word \"passion,\" most everyone seems to think that this means something strong, something fierce. But that's not necessarily true. Because, it can be something internal, introspective, you see...\n\nNELLIE: Well of course, it doesn't necessarily mean something overwrought....\n\nPIERRE: That's right. And it can be something that can be very easy to miss. Something vague, indistinct but, in fact, something very powerful... and that's why at first, before you come to take in what you are feeling, there somehow comes a sudden sense of softness, as though your body were being stroked, very gently. (NELLIE _twists herself around in distaste. The twilight thickens, and the sound of evening bells from the church can be heard._ ) There's something yearning, something nostalgic, a feeling that penetrates deep into you.... (NELLIE _unconsciously puts a cigarette to her lips and holds up a match_. PIERRE _leans forward and looks straight at_ NELLIE.) Please say something, Nellie. Please say something to put me at my ease. Please. Just one word. (NELLIE _slowly strikes the match and brings it close to her glass. The flame lights everything sharply, and during the instant it continues to burn, lights up the room._ ) Anything will do. But just speak. Tell me that smoke has just begun coming out of the chimney... or that the grape seeds are so tiny.\n\nNELLIE: Doctor.\n\nPIERRE: What is it?\n\nNELLIE: Doctor, you seem quite content. Just by yourself.\n\nPIERRE ( _Nodding_ ): You mean, without any connection to you.\n\nNELLIE: Yes.\n\nPIERRE: Ah!\n\nNELLIE: I can't really stop you if you are enjoying this. But even if you ask me to say something, I still can't find anything to say.\n\nPIERRE ( _Muttering to himself_ ): Don't worry about it. As long as you can say even that much. Thank you. ( _He presses his hands to his cheeks._ )\n\nNELLIE: It's quite an honor to me, you know, to have been chosen as a student to receive your education in love. And I thank you for this. But now, Doctor ( _She speaks in a prosaic manner_ ), there is one thing that I would like to have you explain to me.\n\nPIERRE: And what's that?\n\nNELLIE: I feel so bored, so weary. Nothing seems to interest me. And so I would like to do something about it. Something. It's embarrassing to say this in front of you, but I really can't devote myself wholeheartedly to the work at the clinic. Under these circumstances, what should I do?\n\nPIERRE: That's the sort of thing you should ask your father about. Ask your papa. I have no idea, myself. ( _He speaks in a rough tone, somehow filled with self-scorn._ )\n\nNELLIE: Why don't you become my father and answer as he would?\n\nPIERRE: As your father?\n\nNELLIE: Yes, that's right. ( _She stares straight at him._ )\n\nPIERRE: Well, that puts me in a spot. What's the prescription, the medicine for that? As a parent, that is. ( _The bell rings._ NELLIE _gets up to see who it is, then quickly returns._ )\n\nNELLIE: It's Mother. (HELENE _comes in._ NELLIE _pushes the switch and the electric light comes on._ ) How far did you go?\n\nHELENE: As far as the church. ( _She places her head veil over her shoulders._ )\n\nNELLIE: Is that so? Excuse me just a moment. ( _She goes upstairs._ )\n\nPIERRE ( _Becoming formal_ ): I hope I'm not intruding. ( _He has already finished tying his necktie_.)\n\nHELENE: No, no, not at all. ( _She seems somehow embarrassed._ )\n\nPIERRE ( _Sitting down again of his own accord_ ): It must have been delightful to go walking in the woods at twilight, I'm sure.\n\nHELENE: Yes. The sheep crowd together as they come home, and the songs of the small birds fall like a shower. And already one or two stars, sparkling.... All of this makes me think of my dead mother, who lived in the country.... I... really... love these forests... so much...\n\nPIERRE: Yes, I see. You can breathe the clean, fresh air, and your beautiful complexion becomes ever more fresh and transparent. (HELENE _says nothing but fumbles with her necklace._ ) And that beauty of yours, you somehow store it up, waiting for that visit from your husband once a month, is that not so.\n\nHELENE: Of course.\n\nPIERRE: And when I think how strong his feelings must be, when he comes one a month to devour that beauty in one day, it brings a sense of happiness, even to me.\n\nHELENE: Yes, it's a blessing for me. I do believe so.\n\nPIERRE: A flawless couple, altogether. And so different from the others around here, who simply confront each other, day after day.\n\nHELENE: Still...\n\nPIERRE: Yes?\n\nHELENE: One thing which concerns me is my daughter... she will never open up her heart to her father...\n\nPIERRE: Ah, is that so? Well, I...\n\nHELENE: Yes. You see, I think she's so self-willed because she's been brought up in the way she has.... It's really as though she had never had a father around at all.\n\nPIERRE: Be that as it may, she's at a marriageable age now. A time when girls are liable to behave in capricious ways. She probably feels seems sulky about him, feels fretful, and so forth. Don't you think so?\n\nHELENE: So... is that how you see it? That she's cynical about him?\n\nPIERRE: I wouldn't worry about it. There's no way that feelings between parents and children can be examined in any logical fashion. Their feelings are likely to be somewhat the opposite of how they appear on the surface.... ( _A pause._ ) At this point, perhaps I might ask how, as a mother, you contemplate Nellie's future. She can certainly exert her energies as a doctor, and that, of course, would be a good thing in and of itself.... (HELENE _says nothing._ ) But actually, she has reached the marrying age. And in that sense...\n\nHELENE: As for that, well, you might want to ask her about the situation directly. I believe that would be best. ( _She smiles faintly._ )\n\nPIERRE: But if it comes to that, then as a mother you would, I suppose, be thinking about leaving your daughter and living alone by yourself. Isn't that true?\n\nHELENE: Of course. ( _With a delicate smile._ ) Of course. But do you think that this child can do that? Go away from me to live alone?\n\nPIERRE: Why not? After all, if she marries, she will have her own resources then.\n\nHELENE: But, Doctor, that child, that child and I have been together for twenty-five years. Twenty-five years, just the two of us. We have never been separated from each other, even for a day...\n\nPIERRE: But suppose that your husband... should he decide to return here and stay permanently...\n\nHELENE: Are you thinking of her father? Outside of me, she feels no affection for anyone. However you try to explain it, the bond of blood is thick between us. Thick...\n\nPIERRE: Still... ( _As he thinks._ ) Ah, I see then.... Well, if that's so, then I guess there is no room for people on the sidelines like me to attempt any unnecessary interference.\n\nHELENE: What is it that you are trying to say to me?\n\nPIERRE: Well, it's just that as far as I can see, rather than her trying to become a doctor, perhaps trying to live her life as an ordinary young woman would, in the end...\n\n(NELLIE _comes back down the stairs. She has changed into a yellow skirt and a silk blouse. She has let down her hair, which hangs freely._ )\n\nNELLIE: What are you two talking about in secret here?\n\nPIERRE ( _Rising_ ): Nellie, you look as beautiful as a princess now. Don't you think so, Helene?\n\nNELLIE: Well, it has gotten a bit chilly. Certainly for the princess part, anyway.\n\nPIERRE ( _To_ HELENE): When it comes to a question of your daughter's happiness, I'll be glad to be of help in any way that I can. Please don't forget what I've said. So then, Nellie, I'll see you tomorrow.\n\nNELLIE: Yes, at the hospital. Ah\u2014what about the bicycle?\n\nPIERRE: There's only one road from here that leads to the church. I'll certainly meet the maid on the way. So good-bye then. ( _As he leaves_ , _to_ NELLIE.) If you're feeling bored, Nellie, you might try skiing. If nothing else, it can give you a sense of purpose, some resolve, a feeling of movement. ( _Mother and daughter go to see him off._ )\n\nNELLIE: Movement, is it? Still, I wonder what the purpose might be. Best regards to your wife.\n\nPIERRE'S VOICE: Good-bye, then. And my best to your father. Good-bye, and see you tomorrow. ( _The bell rings. Mumbling to herself, \"I_ ' _m so tired, and that doctor certainly overstayed his welcome,_ \" NELLIE _returns and throws herself on the sofa._ HELENE _looks down at her, as if to say something, then begins to clear various things from the table._ )\n\nNELLIE ( _Somehow troubled_ ): Just leave things the way they are. The maid can clean up, you know.\n\nHELENE: Of course, you're right.... Did Papa and the doctor see each other here? ( _There is something timid about her question._ )\n\nNELLIE: No.\n\nHELENE: So your father left soon after, I suppose.\n\nNELLIE ( _Shutting her eyes_ ): Why did you go to the church?\n\nHELENE: To pray.\n\nNELLIE: And for what? To pray for what?\n\nHELENE: For you, dear Nellie.\n\nNELLIE: You are always saying that you do things for me, Mama.\n\nHELENE: What do you mean by that?\n\nNELLIE: Nothing.\n\nHELENE ( _Beginning to walk about_ ): There is no other place for me to go.... My, the doctor is such a kind, intelligent man, don't you think?\n\nNELLIE: Really?\n\nHELENE: He seems so solid. He must be a great blessing to his wife.\n\nNELLIE: Well yes, I wonder about that.\n\nHELENE: You know that he's very concerned about you. He went out of his way to say so. ( _She starts to go toward her room._ )\n\nNELLIE: He's an affected mamby-pamby. Papa is much more a man than he.\n\nHELENE: What? Your father?\n\nNELLIE: I said that the doctor is an affected nincompoop. Mama, have you ever prayed for Papa? Prayed for him as a drunkard, besotted with women, all old and rotten? Have you?\n\nHELENE ( _Horrified_ ): Nellie!\n\nNELLIE: Well, I admit I haven't. But who made him the way he is? You did, Mama... and so did I.\n\nHELENE: Your father said something to you, didn't he, while I was gone.... Now I understand fully that at the bottom of your heart, you don't truly love me. And please don't become so angry. I would never, never do an evil thing to you...\n\nNELLIE: Well, my father certainly never would. Or, rather than saying that he never would...\n\nHELENE: Nellie, I have gone on living because of you. Your being here is what kept me alive. If this were not so, why would I have gone on, so shamelessly, somehow content with this useless, narrow life that I have led for so long?\n\nNELLIE: That's a lie. ( _She rises._ ) Which man was it that you chose for the seed that gave birth to me? Which one?... I want you to explain this to me, and clearly.\n\nHELENE: Oh!\n\nNELLIE: Papa told me everything. Even now, you still think back on that first love of yours. It's to that lover that you offer your prayers. The love that you feel for this man ( _Speaking hatefully_ ) makes you look so much younger, so much more beautiful than I am. That's exactly how it is. And all while Papa was on his rocky island or camping out on top of that frozen mountain, my father was whittling away his very flesh and bones. Papa was your victim. You used him as a living sacrifice. I feel so sorry for Papa! Oh, whatever happened, Papa still loved you. He tried to love you so much. And in order for you to remain satisfied with your revenge, he hurried to you once a month, from the island, from the mountaintop, from wherever. Ah! It's horrible. Now, what about that string of pearls around your neck? On that day, that very day, why do you just flaunt them and put on airs all the more? Why, why is that? Isn't it just to make Papa feel ashamed? I feel so sorry for him. He has to bear up under everything, until the end. Until he dies. Loving you all the while. I'm so sorry for him. ( _She leans against the stove as she weeps. Shortly before this,_ HELENE, _as the cruel silence now continues, sits down to listen quietly._ )\n\nHELENE: Until the end... until he dies...\n\nNELLIE: Yes, that's right. Father won't come here again. He's leaving tomorrow for the island. You won't see him again. Now I feel all the more that I would like to apologize to him.\n\nHELENE: I see. So that's the situation. Now I understand.... This is so like him, that's just the kind of clever little performance he'd like to foist off on you.\n\nNELLIE: Clever little performance...\n\nHELENE: Exactly. In fact, brilliant is the word. He wants you to think that you are the daughter of some other man. He wants to appropriate for himself all your love and affection. And what's more, at the same time, you know, he wants to destroy the affection that you and I feel for each other. What an ugly scheme. I can see right through it. He has cleverly pulled you to him, and he's managed to fool you completely. Because even though you look like an adult, you are really still a child. You don't really understand this man who is your father.\n\nNELLIE: That's not so. I do know him. I know who he is. I know him better than you.\n\nHELENE: Don't get up. Just sit down there.... Now it is my turn to speak very frankly to you. Wouldn't you like to hear what I have to say? (NELLIE _sits on the sofa._ ) Your father's true nature\u2014no, let me say any man's true nature\u2014can be found in the story of those circumstances. Let me explain this to you. For the sake of your own education. Are you ready? Compared with men, we women are virtuous, rather like a bunch of sheep, beautiful, just the way the Lord Jesus said we were. And as for Papa's ideas for this cock-and-bull story, well, it's really not so hard to see through the whole thing. He told you, didn't he, that you are not his child? (NELLIE _nods._ ) I see... and that besides him, there was perhaps another. Isn't that right? A friend of your father's...\n\nNELLIE: Someone he was close to.\n\nHELENE: Yes. Someone he was close to. I thought it would be something like that. Yes, and that at the time... there was a group of young men and that he would come with his friend to have a good time with me. And that they came to our family house, which had fallen into ruin and virtually disappeared. Isn't that about it?\n\nNELLIE: And that you deeply loved this friend of his. At one glance. Fran\u00e7ois... Fran\u00e7ois...\n\nHELENE: Exactly. Well, that part is true.\n\nNELLIE ( _Angry_ ): So it _is_ true then?\n\nHELENE: Yes, but there is no reason your father should have felt betrayed. After all, I wasn't yet formally engaged to him.\n\nNELLIE: You mean that he bore a grudge or something like that? That's completely wrong. In fact, it was just the opposite. Unfortunately, I think it is you, Mama, who didn't understand.\n\nHELENE: The other way around? I certainly wouldn't say that. It's really you who don't understand your father. In his heart, he conceals a hard, a frightening, core. There was very little I could do with my meager strength. I could only retract, timidly, no more than a lifeless clod of earth.\n\nNELLIE: He must have become that way because of your love for that young man.\n\nHELENE: Yes. I did love him. So you may be right. But think about it this way: if two people truly love each other, what harm does that do to anyone? And if such a love is not wrong in and of itself, then the very act of living itself cannot be a bad thing.\n\nNELLIE: Then, why didn't you just go ahead and marry him? That man.\n\nHELENE: Ah! To think that my own daughter would look at me with such fierce eyes. And charge me in such cold words. This is a bitter thing for me, Nellie. You are hard on me. I really understand now that you do not love me. ( _She dabs her eyes with her handkerchief._ )\n\nNELLIE: If you really loved him deeply, you would have married him. As a matter of course.\n\nHELENE: But he no longer remained in this world. Don't you know that he died and left me behind? ( _She weeps._ )\n\nNELLIE: Ah yes, pneumonia. In a period of two days.\n\nHELENE: No. That's not true.\n\nNELLIE: What? Why, Papa...\n\nHELENE: Nellie! ( _She stares fixedly at her_ , _speaking in a muffled voice._ ) In a valley in the mountains... he fell... and it may well be that he was pushed...\n\nNELLIE ( _Controlling herself after almost bursting out in panic, she throws herself on the sofa. Her shoulders are shaking. In the midst of her shock, she interrupts_ ): Did Papa... Papa...\n\nHELENE: There is absolutely no proof. The dead do not speak.... Your father said that there was no time for anyone to help him.... Papa did everything he could to comfort me, and so I finished by marrying him.\n\nNELLIE: I see. ( _She rises._ ) And yes, perhaps, within a period of ten days. Without your even wearing mourning clothes for the one you loved.\n\nHELENE: You may have some memory of my family home. A rusted iron gate, a porch half fallen in ruin, a garden gone to seed, where weeds might grow.... In the end, remember, your father had quite a lot of money.\n\nNELLIE: So, then, you are telling me that you sacrificed yourself for the good of the family. That's an excuse that so many women use.\n\nHELENE: Now don't excite yourself. At least listen to me until the end. As far as I was concerned, I wanted to forget everything. I wanted to become the best, the very finest wife to him that I could be...\n\nNELLIE: Now just a moment. Had you... had you already been with Papa?\n\nHELENE: What? What are you saying?\n\nNELLIE: Well, in other words, Father explained to me that you were already pregnant with me. He said that's what you told him.\n\nHELENE: What are you trying to saying to me? Your father really did a good job of pulling the wool over your eyes, I see. I warned you about that a moment ago.\n\nNELLIE ( _Shaking her head_ ): What is all this...\n\nHELENE: It is the mother who knows the father of her child. Isn't that so? I did not betray him. I promised myself to become the best wife I possibly could to him, until the time I entered my bridal bed. I'll swear an oath to you.\n\nNELLIE: What good is an oath like that? It's just for your own peace of mind.\n\nHELENE: You can berate me just as much as you please. Perhaps I only deserve it.\n\nNELLIE: That's enough. Nothing changes the fact that you loved that other man. More than my father.\n\nHELENE ( _Mysteriously_ ): The one who brought that about\u2014the one who made me unable to forget that man... was you, Nellie.\n\nNELLIE: How can you say that? ( _She rises, distancing herself from her mother._ ) How could I have had anything to do with this? I wasn't even born. Please stop these baseless accusations. ( _She sits in front of the kitchen table._ )\n\nHELENE ( _Rising, she goes to pray to the Virgin Mary in an indescribable sense of joy, then, slowly_ ): Ah, the sounds of the organ.... My white wedding dress.... I looked up in reverence at the sight of the blessed Virgin Mary, hugging the infant Jesus, and I felt a powerful sense of grace. And then, that evening, on my bridal bed, an angel appeared, you see, splitting my body, cutting me open. And then my very soul rose up, higher and higher.\n\nNELLIE: A knife! A scalpel! ( _While listening to her mother_ ' _s monologue, she goes to the silver tray, and before she knows it, takes up a knife that is lying there but then, at the sound of her own words, taken aback, drops it again. The sound of sharp metal._ )\n\nHELENE: Ah, how painful it is... how painful.... Then the blood from my whole body burst forth like flowers from the wound... and the blood that I lost flowed together with his blood, brought back together again... such was my dream!\n\nNELLIE: Fresh blood! From him!\n\nHELENE: Yes.... Please, grant me this, Nellie. And I didn't like to talk this way about your father, whom you love so much. But you are the one who made me do it. I have never, never betrayed your father. Please believe me. ( _She returns to her former place._ )\n\nNELLIE: But then, in the end, whose daughter am I? The angel's? Whose?\n\nHELENE ( _Happy, with a delicate smile of victory_ ): The dark angel's!\n\nNELLIE ( _As if mumbling to herself_ ): It's a dream... a dream... it can only be a dream....\n\nHELENE: And from the next day onward, your father, just as you might expect, began coming home only one day a month. \"Just seven or eight minutes at a time.\" Your father turned me into a widow. Because he knew that I would remain a perfectly chaste woman. And so, Nellie, I have lived my life with only you for my companion. And I have gone on living. And I still see the results of my dream, even now. I live that dream through you. What else can I do?\n\nNELLIE ( _With compassion_ ): I won't interfere. Not anymore. So please, Mama, continue with your dream. And in that dream, even if Father should kill someone, I will go on believing that Papa is my real father. And if that is my dream, then you, Mama, you cannot interfere with me.\n\nHELENE: I see. ( _Quietly, she takes off her necklace, and holding it with both hands near her breast, she speaks as if to the pearls._ ) If you, Nellie, will not embrace me, then it is I who will try to embrace you. (NELLIE, _abruptly rises, and picking up her book of poems from the table, moves away. During the following speech, she reverts to the movements and appearance she had at the beginning of the play_.) So, Nellie, I have discharged all those duties I assumed until today.... I'd like to be excused now, to go to my room.... ( _She rises._ ). So Papa won't be coming back again, then?... and so, my dear, what do you think about that? ( _She rubs her hands together, making with a noise._ ) What? You think he will certainly come back? And why is that?... ( _Smiling faintly._ ) Ah yes, I see now. Because Papa, you see.... He likes to see you peeking at my tiny nipples... all open, from the base of my white neck.... Oh, what a pleasure it is! So then now, surely, with that nonchalant face of his, he can come home.\n\n( _Her two voices blend in a state of rapture, as though toying with a selfless sense of gladness and delight. And yet it is a sweet voice, permitted only to a lonely woman, a honeyed voice filled with both shame and romantic longing._ NELLIE, _like a god looking down from a great distance, manages with considerable effort to disregard her mother's disgraceful performance and, somehow or other, manages to loose herself in her book. Then as her speech nears its end,_ HELENE _throws open the door and then vanishes, as though sucked through the space. Somehow relieved,_ NELLIE _leans her back against the door and takes a breath. Soon, she thrusts one hand into her pocket and begins to move about as before. Suddenly she remembers, puts in her hand and finds in the trousers she wore before she changed, the bunch of bills. She knocks on her mother's door, then opens it. Light floods out from within the bedroom. And at the same time,_ HELENE _can be heard singing a lullaby. She is evidently buried away in a rocking chair, all her energy used up, mindlessly singing her song. The voice shows no sign of the pride and romantic longing heard before. It is a voice grown old, a plaintive voice._ )\n\nHELENE: _Dormez_... _dormez_...\n\nNELLIE: Mother... what...\n\nHELENE: _Sonnez les matines_... _sonnez les matines_... _ding_... _ding_... _dong_...\n\nNELLIE: Mama. The money he left. I'll throw it away. I'll wake you up for dinner.\n\n( _She closes the door._ HELENE' _s song can still be faintly heard_. NELLIE _continues to walk around. She raises her voice while reading._ )\n\nNELLIE:\n\n_Je sucerai, pour noyer ma ranc \u0153ur,_\n\n_Le n\u00e9penth\u00e8s et la bonnie cigu\u00eb_\n\n_Au bouts charmants de cette gorge aigu\u00eb_\n\n_Qui n'a jamais emprisonn\u00e9 de c \u0153ur_.6\n\nHELENE'S VOICE: _Sonnez les matines, sonnez les matines,_... _ding ding dong_...\n\nNELLIE ( _Lifting her head as she reads aloud_ ):\n\n_A mon destin, d\u00e9sormais mon d\u00e9lice,_\n\n_J'ai ob\u00e9rai comme un pr\u00e9destin\u00e9;_\n\n_Martyr docile, innocent condamn\u00e9,_\n\n_Dont la ferveur attise le supplice_.7\n\n( _She suddenly pauses_.) _Ob\u00e9rai_... no, no, I won't obey... ( _She begins to walk, then stops again_.) The crime... the crime of being born a woman.... ( _She covers her face with both hands. She allows the book of poetry to fall to the floor. Abruptly, she throws herself into a chair and buries her head in its back. As though in prayer, she puts her two hands together and touches her forehead. Presently, the sound of her whispering voice can be heard_.)\n\nA purpose... a purpose... I am so tired of sleeping, sleeping on like this. Please give me a purpose. A purpose...\n\n( _Her strangled voice, fruitlessly expressing the depths of her very nature, seems to continue endlessly on, mixed with_ HELENE _'s lullaby, blending in turn with the melancholy sound of the bell. Yet now, there can be heard in her a desperate struggle not to give in_.)\n\nNELLIE: I am so weary of this... I pray you to give me a purpose.... Yet if I do not sleep... if I do not sleep, I cannot become as one, whole. I am so weary of this... a purpose... a purpose... ( _As though she would throw herself into some austere penance,_ NELLIE' _s forehead seems somehow about to be pierced._ )\n\nCURTAIN\n\nI want to acknowledge the advice and aid of Mrs. Sachiko Howard, whose help with translating this often difficult text was invaluable.\n\n1. Translated in David G. Goodman, ed., _After Apocalypse: Four Japanese Plays of Hiroshima and Nagasaki_ (Ithaca, N.Y.: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1994).\n\n2. I want to sleep! Not live, but sleep!\n\nIn drowsiness sweet as death itself...\n\nAll the translations of the quoted lines from the poem \"Le L\u00e9th\u00e9\" are from Charles Baudelaire, _Les Fleurs de Mal: The Complete Text of The Flowers of Evil_ , trans. Richard Howard (Boston: Godine, 1982).\n\n3. The gleaming copper of your skin...\n\n4. For nothing silence my sobs\n\nLike the abyss that is your bed;\n\nOblivion occupies your mouth...\n\n5. Oblivion occupies your mouth.\n\nAnd Lethe runs between your lips...\n\n6. I'll suck enough to drown my spite\n\nHemlock is sweet, nepenthe kind\n\nAt those entrancing pointed breasts\n\nWhich have never confined a heart.\n\n7. My destiny is my desire\n\nWhich I obey as if foredoomed:\n\nInnocent martyr, eager prey\n\nWhose fervor hones his agony...\n\nAs we saw in part III, _shingeki_ emerged from the ashes of defeat in 1945 with a renewed sense of mission. It soon achieved unprecedented legitimacy with the establishment of major companies (Literary Theater [Bungakuza], Actors' Theater [Haiy\u016bza], and People's Theater [Gekidan mingei]) and a production system (R\u014den) that ensured stable ticket sales for audiences across the nation. But then political events began to overtake the influence that Japan's prewar generation of theater artists had achieved. Now, in the postwar era, _shingeki_ \u2014which had defined itself as a voice of resistance to traditional theatrical practices and the status quo\u2014became an orthodoxy closely aligned with the Japan Communist Party (JCP) and a 1930s Russian-style socialist realism. But after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, revelations of the gulags began to undermine its leftist loyalties. Abe K\u014db\u014d, for one, was expelled from the JCP when he criticized the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary in 1956.\n\nAs the Japanese emerged from the deprivations of the immediate postwar years, the 1960s marked a watershed, not only in politics and society, but also in culture. The country experienced unprecedented prosperity and economic power that lasted until the 1990s. Although the new generation, which came of age in the 1960s, enjoyed a degree of freedom their parents never had, they also had to confront the legacy of Japan's imperialist aggression in Asia. Especially in the context of its relationship with the United States, as the war in Vietnam grew more intense, this relationship became even more contentious. The major figures in 1960s Japanese theater\u2014people like Terayama Sh\u016bji, Shimizu Kunio, and Kara J\u016br\u014d\u2014were born in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Some\u2014like Abe K\u014db\u014d, Betsuyaku Minoru, \u014cta Sh\u014dgo, and Sait\u014d Ren\u2014were born in Japan's former colonies on the Asian mainland. All had vivid memories of the devastation and defeat wrought by the war, and like Germany's postwar generation, there was a sense that the country had still not come to terms with this experience.\n\nThe decade of the 1960s was bookended by two dramatic events that symbolized the political tensions that postwar democracy and economic reconstruction had left unresolved in Japan: popular resistance to the renewal of the United States\u2013Japan Mutual Security Treaty in 1960 and the shocking suicide of the writer Mishima Yukio in 1970. On both the left and the right, playwrights like Abe and Mishima were distancing themselves from _shingeki_ 's political and artistic orthodoxy. The publication in 1960 of Mishima's short story \"Patriotism\" (Y\u016bkoku) signaled the emergence of an increasingly rightist message in his writing throughout this decade. In 1963, Mishima broke with the Literary Theater, for which he had written several plays, over ideological differences. Likewise, Abe found _shingeki_ a poor vessel for his absurdist vision, and as both a playwright and a director, he attempted to create a more radical and experimental theater. Resistance to the treaty's renewal in 1960 galvanized opposition across political and generational lines, but when the treaty was forcibly renewed by the Kishi government, despite massive demonstrations (330,000 turned out in front of the national Diet on June 18, 1960), this temporary alliance crumbled. Japanese culture finally realized that the old leftist politics had failed to effect the necessary changes.\n\nAvant-garde theater was a showcase for the Japanese counterculture of the 1960s. The decade was distinguished by a search for new ideas and forms to express them, along with a considerable crossover in the arts. Theater practitioners teamed up with graphic designers like Yokoo Tadanori, photographers like Hosoe Eik\u014d, and critics like Shibusawa Tatsuhiko to create a distinctive look that was cocky and erotic, a syncretistic and often a tongue-in-cheek montage of references to recent Japanese history and cultural shibboleths. Some of these people were not only playwrights but actors, photographers, and screen and stage directors, too. Moreover, contemporary culture, like politics, could be found in public\u2014in the streets, parks, and precincts of shrines or temples\u2014and not only indoors.\n\nThe avant-garde theater that emerged in 1960s Japan has been called alternatively _angura_ (underground), the \"little theater movement,\" or simply \"post- _shingeki_ theater.\" The following chronology shows how this movement evolved in tandem with other developments, culminating in the late 1960s in a veritable cultural revolution:\n\n1960 | The United States\u2013Japan Mutual Security Treaty is renewed. The first Japanese version of Samuel Beckett's _Waiting for Godot_ and plays by Terayama Sh\u016bji are produced, including Terayama's radio play _Adult Hunting_ and _Blood Sleeps Standing Up_ , as well as a stage play directed by Asari Keita, who later, with the Four Seasons Theater (Gekidan shiki), directed Japanese productions of such Broadway plays as _Cats_ and _The Lion King_.  \n---|---  \n1961 | Hijikata Tatsumi coins the term _ankoku but \u014d_ (the dance of utter darkness) to describe his style of choreography. (In 1959, he directed himself and Ohno Kazuo in the sensational _Forbidden Colors_ , based on Mishima Yukio's homoerotic novel of the same name.)  \n1962 | Suzuki Tadashi and Betsuyaku Minoru first produce Betsuyaku's _The Elephant_ at the Free Stage (in 1966, the name is changed to Waseda Little Theater).  \n1963 | Kara J\u016br\u014d's Situation Theater (J\u014dky\u014d gekij\u014d) debuts with Jean-Paul Sartre's _The Respectful Prostitute_. The Free Stage produces Sartre's _The Flies_.  \n1964 | The \"bullet train\" ( _shinkansen_ ) opens between Tokyo and Osaka, and the 1964 Summer Olympics are held in Tokyo. During this decade, Tokyo becomes the largest city in the world, with more than 10 million people.  \n1966 | Satoh Makoto, Kushida Kazuyoshi, Yoshida Hideko, and Sait\u014d Ren found the Freedom Theater (Jiy\u016b gekij\u014d), a precursor to the Theater Center 68/71 and the Black Tent Theater (Kuro tento). The Freedom Theater's first production is a pair of plays by Satoh\u2014 _Ismene_ and _The Subway_ \u2014directed by Kanze Hideo.  \n1967 | Terayama Sh\u016bji's Tenj\u014d sajiki (an independent Japanese theater troupe) debuts with _The Hunchback of Aomori_. Kara J\u016br\u014d's Situation Theater begins performing in its trademark red tent at various locations, like the Hanazono Shrine in Shinjuku (Tokyo).  \n1968 | Students demonstrate on more than a hundred Japanese college campuses. Hijikata Tatsumi performs _Hijikata and the Japanese_ : _Revolt of the Flesh_. \u014cta Sh\u014dgo establishes the Theater of Transformation (Tenkei gekij\u014d).  \n1969 | Ninagawa Yukio and Shimizu Kunio establish the Modern Man's Theater (Gendaijin gekij\u014d). Betsuyaku leaves the Waseda Little Theater to become an independent playwright. Tenj\u014d sajiki makes its first overseas tour. Kara, Terayama, and members of their companies are arrested after a fight.\n\nA SYNTHESIS OF THE WESTERN AVANT-GARDE AND JAPANESE TRADITIONS\n\nJust as _shingeki_ had been a reaction against traditional Japanese theater, the theater of the 1960s rejected the European-inspired naturalistic theater that _shingeki_ emulated. Whereas _shingeki_ stood for reason, realism, and \"universal\" (typically Western) values, _angura_ was an experimental and anarchic attempt to revive certain discredited traditions and discover what was uniquely \"Japanese.\" Even so, Japanese artists and intellectuals of this generation did not turn their back on European trends. Western, especially French, intellectual movements such as Dada, surrealism, and existentialism had an immediate (yet not uncritical) impact. The works of Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Herbert Marcuse, and Michel Foucault were translated into Japanese earlier than in most English-speaking countries, and their ideas were hotly debated. Hijikata Tatsumi and Shibusawa Tatsuhiko frequently cited the works of Comte de Lautr\u00e9amont and the Marquis de Sade as inspirations for their work. Any revival of Japanese traditions initially may have seemed like a betrayal of _shingeki_ ideals and a capitulation to what David Goodman calls \"the murky mythologies of militarist ultranationalism\" of prewar Japan.1 Indeed, this seems to have been the culmination of Mishima's reaffirmation of the imperial mystique as a counterdiscourse to the materialist consumerism of postwar Japanese democracy. But increasingly, Japanese intellectuals and artists of the 1960s sought a synthesis of the Western avant-garde and new left ideology in a critical reappraisal of traditional beliefs, folkways, and popular culture, linked to a quest for identity in a world in which conventional ideals, both native and foreign, had lost their credibility. To some degree, Western modernist ideas of the primitive (such as the contemporary Japanese interest in the work of anthropologists like Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss and Marcel Mauss) were used for a new nativism that resonated with the very different kind of ethnology of Yanagita Kunio and Orikuchi Shinobu. A rediscovery, even an \"invention\" of tradition, as well as a certain reverse Orientalism, characterized this revival.2 The critic Tsuno Kaitar\u014d wrote that \"our hope is that by harnessing the energy of the Japanese popular imagination we can at once transcend the enervating clich\u00e9s of modern drama and revolutionize what it means to be Japanese.\"3\n\nThe year 1960 marked the first production in Japan of Samuel Beckett's _Waiting for Godot_. The realism and rationalism that had dominated modern theater in both Japan and the West in the first half of the twentieth century no longer seemed able to explain or give artistic form to the shattering events the world had experienced in the 1930s and 1940s. The absurdist theater provided for playwrights like Abe K\u014db\u014d and Betsuyaku Minoru an aesthetic frame to address horrors like Hiroshima or the atrocities of the Japanese imperial army.\n\nTHE NEW PHYSICALITY\n\nEver since Osanai Kaoru's rejection of kabuki in the 1920s, modern theater in Japan had divorced itself from traditional Japanese performance, but increasingly in the 1960s, certain artists sought inspiration in such premodern theaters as n\u014d and kabuki. The major contribution of the traditional theater to avant-garde performances in the 1960s was a foregrounding of the actor's body as an essential part of the theatrical experience. Once again, the pendulum swung, away from a reverence for the text toward a stress on live performance. This tendency mirrored, and to some extent even anticipated, the rise of performance studies in the West by scholars like Richard Schechner. The restitution of physicality as a cardinal feature of the theatrical experience is one of the greatest legacies of modern performance, and in many respects the Japanese avant-garde was a global trendsetter. A disenchantment with old ideologies, both foreign and native, made many in the Japanese theater at this time turn to the body as the one site that seemed both pure and immediate for the exploration of identity. Even playwrights who were not also performers, like Betsuyaku, felt it essential to write scripts that infused a sense of immediacy and raw theatricality into the performance of their work.\n\nBETSUYAKU MINORU\n\nIn those days, reconciling literature and theater was an issue for me, and one of the theater magazines like _Shingeki_ had a survey asking people, \"Do you consider yourself a writer of dramas, or scripts?\" That sort of thing. If you circled \"drama,\" then you wrote literature; if you circled \"script,\" then you considered the text as no more than a blueprint for performance. I circled \"script,\" but the fact was that such a matter was taken very seriously then. All playwrights were extremely aware of it, making comments like \"this is very literary\" or \"this part is very direct theatrically.\" It was a time then when we could really think afresh about such things.\n\nI'm not sure to what extent we have gone beyond such debates now, but then we all felt compelled to create drama that was theatrically immediate. This, of course, meant our getting rid of theater's narrative qualities. So rather than create extremely fictional, illusionist conditions, it was a time when we put immense effort into creating a connection with the audience, a sense of novelty, having actors pop out from among the spectators, and so on. This made no great difference in the end: popping out from the audience failed to make a real connection between the actors and the audience. I just went along with this trend, scarcely aware of it at the time. My tack was to get on board with what had come before in the traditional theater, ride it out, and see where it took me. But even so, when overly literary elements crept into my work, I unconsciously made notes of them.\n\nFROM BETSUYAKU MINORU, CONVERSATION WITH SAKATE Y\u014cJI, \"SEKAI TO K\u014cSHIN SURU\" (TO COMMUNICATE WITH THE WORLD), _KOKUBUNGAKU: KAISHAKU TO KY \u014cZAI NO KENKY\u016a_ 52, NO. 8 (2007): 9\u201310.\n\nFront and center to the new theatrical style was a carnality that had not existed in Japanese art theater since kabuki. Initially, many of the new theater companies were amateurish, seeking novelty for the sake of experimentation, but gradually an interest in physical training as an essential part of an actor's education grew. Undoubtedly, modern Japanese theater's greatest legacy to the world is _but \u014d_, the dance form created by artists like Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Both artists had studied modern Western dance, particularly the expressionist German _Neue Tanz_ , but increasingly they sought a form more congenial to the Japanese physique. Hijikata later termed his dance style \"T\u014dhoku kabuki,\" after his native region; he felt that _but \u014d_ epitomized the physique, postures, gestures, and habitual actions of the Japanese, people shaped by an agrarian life spent cultivating rice. Many artists fell under Hijikata's spell in the 1960s. One of Kara J\u016br\u014d's lead actors, Maro Akaji, trained with him and in 1972 founded the still active dance troupe, Great Camel Battleship (Dai rakudakan). Like Hijikata, Kara wanted to return theater to the carnivalesque, risqu\u00e9 roots of early kabuki, in which the actor was an outcast gypsy, a \"riverbed beggar\" ( _kawaramono_ ) thumbing his nose at the status quo. If _shingeki_ was governed by reason and a preoccupation with psychological portrayal of character, _angura_ regarded the body as a site to express whatever language had repressed: the unconscious, the erotic, the instinctive, the immediate, the violent, the natural.\n\nKARA J\u016aR\u014c\n\nWhere can we find a way of acting [ _gei_ ] we can revere? I'd go for a restrained style, like the boulevardier who, when told, \"You're on!\" goes from telling a dirty joke backstage straight into his role without missing a beat. One can't become the flesh and blood of other beings just by getting a glimpse into what they are. All you can express that way is a pale imitation of yourself. Acting that flourishes by feeding off the blood of others can be no better than academic. The art we want to offer the world can be bought only with our own blood shed in real life. Thus, acting will always remain something vulgar. That's reality for you. So radical actor training doesn't create some kind of monopolistic system with dynasties of actors [like kabuki], nor is it like the Stanislavsky method, in which amateurs learn how to be \"artistes,\" as if they were being spewed out on a conveyor belt. By acting alone, a radical actor may be vulgar in real life but becomes ultimately a legendary figure. As vulgarity overcomes reverence, the privileged body of the actor must overcome the ordinary body. In that moment, artistic expression makes the raid, the invasion on the city, something real. So long as an actor cannot see or grasp this truth, the theatrical spirit will remain irreconcilably stymied by a dualism that has always existed between politics and art.\n\nFROM KARA J\u016aR\u014c, _TOKKENTEKI NIKUTAIRON_ ( _THEORY OF THE PRIVILEGED BODY_ ) (1970; REPR., TOKYO: HAKUSUISHA, 1997), 17\u201318.\n\nImplicit in Kara's notion of the \"privileged body\" was a duality in which the actor was both social pariah and a medium through which the audience's dreams and desires could be manifested. That is, the performer became a kind of shaman whose metamorphoses and epiphanies created on stage, for all to see, something mythic, ambivalently divine, or demonic, an ambiguous site for nostalgia, longing, transcendence, and even derision.\n\nA restoration of the erotic, carnivalesque spirit of early kabuki was one of the chief achievements of 1960s theater, especially in the work of such artists as Hijikata and Kara. At the same time, certain traditional theater artists teamed up with _angura_ companies to create new works. Kanze Hisao and his brother Hideo collaborated with avant-garde directors like Suzuki Tadashi and Satoh Makoto; their ideas and techniques were instrumental in the injection of a new physicality, as well as discipline, into contemporary performance.\n\nN\u014d's influence on the Japanese avant-garde has been profound. Director Suzuki Tadashi became interested in the possibilities of the classical theater in 1972 after he saw Kanze Hisao perform on a stage in Paris. His productions starring Kanze Hisao and Shiraishi Kayoko in _The Trojan Women_ (1974) and _The Bacchae_ (1979) defined the Suzuki style: a compelling synthesis of the traditional theater's physical presence with _angura_ 's experimentalism. During the 1970s, Suzuki developed what has become his trademark style of intense lower-body and voice training, aimed at restoring to performance the \"animal energy\" he felt that humanity had lost through the overwhelming technologization of modern life.\n\nSUZUKI TADASHI\n\nBecause the theater, in either Europe or Japan, has kept up with the times and has come to use non-animal energy in every facet of its activities, one of the resulting evils is that the faculties of the human body and physical sensibility have been overspecialized to the point of separation. Just as civilization has specialized the job of the eyes and created the microscope, modernization has \"dismembered\" our physical faculties from our essential selves.\n\nWhat I am striving to do is restore the wholeness of the human body in the theatrical context, not simply by going back to such traditional theatrical forms as n\u014d and kabuki, but by employing their unique virtues, to create something transcending current practice in the modern theater.\n\nWe need to bring together the physical functions once \"dismembered,\" to regain the perceptive and expressive abilities and powers of the human body. In doing so, we can maintain culture within civilization.\n\nIn my method of training actors, I place special emphasis on the feet, because I believe that consciousness of the body's communication with the ground leads to a great awareness of all the physical junctions of the body.\n\nFROM TADASHI SUZUKI, \"CULTURE IS THE BODY!\" TRANS. KAZUKO MATSUOKA, _PERFORMING ARTS JOURNAL_ 8, NO. 2 (1984): 28\u201334.\n\nIn his search for a more natural environment in which to create and perform his theater, in 1976 Suzuki moved the Waseda Little Theater to Toga, a mountain village in Toyama Prefecture, where he has hosted an international theater festival every August since 1982. He changed his company's name to SCOT (Suzuki Company of Toga) in 1985. Next to _but \u014d_, the \"Suzuki method\" of actor's training has become modern Japanese theater's most successful export. Actors from around the world have trained with Suzuki and the American director Ann Bogart in workshops for Suzuki exercises.\n\nLike Suzuki, the playwright and director \u014cta Sh\u014dgo found in n\u014d's deliberate pace and stylized gestures an inspiration for his own intense performance style. Although \u014cta founded his Theater of Transformation in 1968, his first work to garner major critical attention was _The Tale of Komachi Told by the Wind_ ( _Komachi f \u016bden_, 1976), a work inspired by a cycle of n\u014d plays about the Heian poet and beauty Ono no Komachi and performed on a traditional n\u014d stage. In contrast to the speed, noise, and garrulousness of modern life, \u014cta wished to restore the sense of silence, tranquillity, and deliberation to theater that he had discovered in n\u014d. \u014cta was perhaps the most radical of the playwrights whose works are presented in this anthology. To a degree greater than that of any of his contemporaries\u2014except perhaps for the dancers of _but \u014d_, in paring down the elements of performance\u2014he eschewed spoken dialogue altogether in a series of works, here represented by _The Earth Station_ (1985).\n\nALTERNATIVE PERFORMANCE SPACES\n\nThe fundamental elements of the theatrical experience\u2014the text, the identity of the actor, the use of performance space, and the relationship between actors and audience\u2014all came under intense scrutiny during the 1960s. To some degree, the matter of where to perform was a practical and economic consideration: few could afford to rent anything more than the \"little theaters\" (often no more than studios or rooms over caf\u00e9s and restaurants) that gave one name to this movement, and many were alienated from the _shingeki_ system, which would have given them access to larger theaters. But it soon became evident that this lack of conventional performance space provided opportunities foreclosed to a theater of realism, with its proscenium arch and \"fourth wall,\" which separated audiences from the actions and actors on stage. For Kara and Satoh, performance in a tent provided a womb-like intimacy between actor and audience that emulated the experience of the circus sideshow or early kabuki. At the same time, it afforded a mobility and freedom for theater artists, enabling them to bring their performances to people in various locales. Both Kara and Satoh took their work on tour throughout Japan and, later, Asia, and Suzuki's move to Toyama to create a more natural environment for the theater was partly inspired by Jerzy Grotowski's Poor Theater.\n\nTERAYAMA SH\u016aJI\n\nTheatres have become entertainment-industry spaces rather than dramatic spaces, and the history of theatre has degenerated from the history of drama into the history of the entertainment industry. I have come to realize that to make drama independent of \"theatre\" facilities, we must discard the idea of \"theatres\" as aspects of inner reality. Our theme as theatre people ought to be to organize the power of the imagination in order to transform all places into theatres. The most important thing in dragging \"drama\" outside \"theatre buildings\" is removing the borderline between fiction and reality. Drama must be at the same level as history, where fiction and reality are often ambiguous.... Revolutions do not have drama. This is because as long as the revolution itself remains a social crisis, it is a dramatization of history.\n\nFROM TERAYAMA SH\u016aJI, \"THE LABYRINTH AND THE DEAD SEA: MY THEATER,\" IN _UNSPEAKABLE ACTS: THE AVANT-GARDE THEATRE OF TERAYAMA SH \u016aJI AND POSTWAR JAPAN_, BY CAROL FISHER SORGENFREI (HONOLULU: UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I PRESS, 2005), 287\u201388.\n\nAlong with Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud was undoubtedly the most influential radical theorist for Japanese theater during this time. His greatest proponent was Terayama Sh\u016bji, a man of protean talents who first won critical acclaim as a poet of classical _tanka_ while he was still in high school. Like Hijikata, Terayama was a native of Aomori Prefecture in the far north of Japan, and his sensibilities were forged by the poverty and unique folkways of this region. In the early 1960s, Terayama wrote plays for radio and the stage, increasingly experimenting with other media such as photography and film. His Tenj\u014d sajiki troupe, a reference to the Japanese title of Marcel Carn\u00e9's classic film _Les enfants du paradis_ ( _Children of the Peanut Gallery_ , 1945), was a company founded in 1967 devoted to the practical applications of Artaud's Theater of Cruelty. With his Tenj\u014d sajiki troupe, he could test the relationship between actor and audience and the limits of theatrical experience. Along with \u014cta and other playwrights, Terayama experimented with language, its distortion, and even its eradication in performance. His later works (often written in collaboration with Kishida Rio) became less text based and more attempts to design novel and disturbing events, like \"happenings,\" intended to break down the boundaries between reality and fiction, actor and observer, while involving the audience in the performance. In the creation of his so-called city theater, Terayama, like Kara, used public spaces like parks and city streets to demonstrate his theory that theater, art, and culture at large should \"infect\" citizens, passing from one person to the next. Even though Terayama never articulated a coherent political stance (and in this respect, he resembled Kara as well), he believed that theater was a place to stage a revolution that was simultaneously cognitive, artistic, and social.\n\nPOST- _SHINGEKI_ DRAMATURGY\n\nIn their exploration of topics such as war, sexuality, violence, and the irrational, the plays of this period are challenging, morally, intellectually, and artistically. Betsuyaku noted how, with its emphasis on the performative, the new dramaturgy also pointed toward a rejection of conventional narrative. _Angura_ drama tends to be nonlinear and illogical, mixing dream and reality. Metamorphosis and multiple role-playing are dominant tropes in such plays. Their shifting and complex temporal and spatial structure frequently draws on myth and archetypes to present multifaceted and unstable characters who sometimes appear as godlike heroes and antiheroes who transcend their times. The plays are richly allusive, like collages, drawing inspiration from history or contemporary news, culture both high and low, and sources both foreign and homegrown. There is a preoccupation with memory (both public and personal) and its loss, as well as a desire for a transcendent eschatology to make sense of the world, yet at the same time a deep ambivalence toward narratives of spiritual redemption or political revolution.\n\nTHE LEGACY OF THE 1960S\n\nMany critics have noted that the political and cultural revolution promised in the 1960s was never realized. The United States\u2013Japan Security Treaty was renewed again in 1970, with scarcely an echo of the protest that had accompanied it a decade before. To a great extent, the energy and fervor of post- _shingeki_ theater faded as the Japanese public in the 1970s and beyond became increasingly complacent, disengaged from political action. Few new playwrights or directors were able to distinguish themselves artistically or ideologically from the generation of the 1960s. Tsuka K\u014dhei, a _zainichi_ (Japanese-born) Korean, was one of the few playwrights of significance to emerge from the 1970s.\n\nNonetheless, the radical experiments of the 1960s had an impact on nearly every kind of theater produced in Japan in the past fifty years. It is safe now to say that the influence of _angura_ on modern Japanese theater has been as great as, if not greater than, that of _shingeki_. Much of the best work from this generation was created in the 1970s and 1980s, and most of these artists are still active. To date, having written more than a hundred dramas and sketches for numerous theater companies\u2014including _shingeki_ troupes like that of the Literary Theater\u2014in addition to fiction and essays, Betsuyaku Minoru is perhaps Japan's most prolific and highly respected playwright. Shimizu Kunio continued to write and direct for both the stage and radio into the new millennium. Kara J\u016br\u014d still writes and performs in his plays, touring in his red tent. Satoh Makoto now mostly directs the work of others and has particularly distinguished himself as a major interpreter of opera. Suzuki Tadashi and Ninagawa Yukio are world famous, frequently touring and directing abroad.\n\nA few of these figures have passed on but still exert a profound effect on a younger generation of artists: Terayama Sh\u016bji died in 1983, but many artists, like Ry\u016bzanji Show (his romanization of his name) and J. A. Seazer carry on his tradition, and Terayama's plays are frequently revived; \u014cta Sh\u014dgo succumbed to cancer in 2007; Hijikata Tatsumi died in 1986, as did Kazuo Ohno in 2010, but former students like Maro Akaji and Tanaka Min, and Amagatu Ushio's Paris-based group Sankai juku, have ensured that _but \u014d_ would become a global phenomenon.\n\nLast, but not least, we should mention the work of Inoue Hisashi, another prolific playwright and novelist who became established in the 1960s. Unlike the others mentioned here, Inoue firmly planted himself in the mainstream of Japanese theater, creating for large audiences accessible entertainments that still express the leftist sentiments and Brechtian theatrics that were features of postwar _shingeki_ in its heyday. Like Satoh and Sait\u014d Ren, Inoue distinguished himself in the creation of musical theater. With a strong narrative thread and well-rounded characters like those in much of _shingeki_ drama, Inoue's _Living with Father_ , included in part IV, nonetheless demonstrates certain thematic and stylistic concerns in common with much avant-garde theater of this time: an interest in the psychological trauma of war and a blurring of the boundaries between the living and the dead.\n\nM. CODY POULTON\n\n1. David G. Goodman, introduction to _The Return of the Gods: Japanese Drama and Culture of the 1960s_ , ed. David G. Goodman, photo reprint ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: East Asia Program, Cornell University Press, 2003), 9.\n\n2. See, for example, Uchino Tadashi, _Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium_ (Salt Lake City: Seagull Books, 2009), 85.\n\n3. Quoted in Goodman, introduction to _Return of the Gods_ , 16.\n_THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL_\n\nBETSUYAKU MINORU\n\nTRANSLATED BY ROBERT N. LAWSON\n\nBetsuyaku Minoru, _The Little Match Girl_ , directed by Suzuki Tadashi, Waseda sh\u014dgekij\u014d, November 1966.\n\nOne of Japan's greatest postwar playwrights, Betsuyaku Minoru was born in 1937 in Manchuria. During the war, his father died and Betsuyaku experienced severe deprivation. In 1946, he was repatriated with his mother and siblings to Japan. He entered Waseda University in 1958 to study journalism but became increasingly involved with the university's theater movement, which, since Tsubouchi Sh\u014dy\u014d's time, has been a center for theater studies in Japan. In 1961, together with Suzuki Tadashi, Betsuyaku established the Free Stage (Jiy\u016b butai), a precursor to the Waseda Little Theater. At the same time, he got caught up in the political demonstrations against the renewal of the United States\u2013Japan Security Treaty. Although he dropped out of university to engage in leftist political action, he soon became disenchanted with the Marxist rhetoric. Like Abe K\u014db\u014d's increasingly absurdist plays, Betsuyaku's first major work, _The Elephant_ ( _Z \u014d_, 1962), a play in the style of Samuel Beckett and Eug\u00e8ne Ionesco, marked a turning point in postwar Japanese drama away from conventional realist storytelling methods. Both the Free Stage and the Waseda Little Theater produced many of Betsuyaku's best plays in the 1960s, including the one featured here, _The Little Match Girl_ ( _Matchi-uri no sh \u014djo_, 1966). Since 1969, when he left the Waseda Little Theater, Betsuyaku has worked mainly as a freelance dramatist, writing plays for other companies, including major _shingeki_ troupes like those from the Literary Theater (Bungakuza) and the Theater Circle (Gekidan en). His drama is distinctive for its spare stage, frequently occupied by only a single telephone pole, like Beckett's bare tree in _Waiting for Godot_ , and nameless characters identified only by their gender or social function: Man, Woman, Doctor, and so on. His language\u2014sparse, prosaic, and colloquial, sometimes dark, often funny\u2014masks the absurdity of his characters' thoughts and actions.\n\n_The Little Match Girl_ , which won the Kishida Kunio Award, is Betsuyaku's most representative play. Drawing on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale (Betsuyaku frequently bases works on fairy tales and even writes literature for children), the playwright places a middle-aged couple in the company of a young woman who claims to be their daughter, dredging up memories of hard times and a tragic loss in the immediate postwar years. As in so much of his work, Betsuyaku's feckless protagonists are at the mercy of their uncertain memories and socioeconomic forces over which they have no control.\n\nCharacters\n\nWOMAN\n\nHER YOUNGER BROTHER\n\nMIDDLE-AGED MAN\n\nHIS WIFE\n\n_At center stage, there is an old-fashioned table with three chairs, a little to stage left a small serving table with one chair. This may be called an old-fashioned play, so it should open on an old-fashioned, slightly melancholy note. The theater gradually goes dark, without its being noticed. From out of nowhere, a song from long ago, on a scratchy record, faintly comes to be heard. Then, unexpectedly as right in the next seat, a_ WOMAN'S VOICE, _hoarse and low, can be heard whispering._\n\nWOMAN'S VOICE: It was the last night of the year, New Year's Eve, and it was very cold. It had already become dark, and snow was falling. A poor little girl was trudging wearily along the dark, deserted street. She had no hat, nor even any shoes. Until a little while before she had been wearing her dead mother's wooden shoes, but they were too big for her, and, trying to dodge two carriages that came rushing by, she had lost both of them. Her little feet were purple and swollen as she put one in front of the other on the stiffly frozen snow. Her apron pocket was filled with matches, and she was holding one bunch in her hand. She had been trying to sell them, but no one had bought a single match from her that whole day. No one had given her so much as a single penny.\n\n( _From stage right, a_ MIDDLE-AGED MAN _and his_ WIFE _appear, carrying evening tea things. They begin to place them on the table, meticulously. In this household the way of doing such things is governed by strict rule, it seems. The_ WIFE _sometimes makes a mistake, but her husband then carefully corrects it. Various things\u2014taken from a tray, from the folds of their kimonos, from their pockets\u2014are carefully positioned. A teapot, cups, spoons, a sugar bowl, a milk glass, kitchen jars of jam, butter cookies, various spices, nuts, shriveled small fruits, miniature plants and animal figurines, and other small things are all arranged closely together. As this is going on, the two mumble to each other._ )\n\nMAN: Setting a table is an art, you know. If you arrange everything just right, even a dried lemon will show to advantage.\n\nWIFE: The people across the street place the powdered spinach next to the deodorizer.\n\nMAN: Hum, what kind of pretentiousness is that?\n\nWIFE: Right... just what I said to them. \"Isn't that pretentious?\" But listen to what they answered. \"In this house we have our own way of doing things.\"\n\nMAN: Their own way, huh? Well, fine. But, even so, there should be some principle... such procedures should be according to rule.\n\nWIFE: That's right. Just what I told them. There should be some principle....\n\nMAN: Hey, what's that?\n\nWIFE: Garlic.\n\nMAN: Garlic is for morning. I never heard of garlic for evening tea.\n\nWIFE: But we saw the sunset a little while ago. Don't you always say, \"Garlic for sunset\"?\n\nMAN: Garlic for sunrise. Onion for sunset.\n\nWIFE: Was that it? Well, then, onions.\n\nMAN: But let's not bother with them.\n\nWIFE: Why?\n\nMAN: They smell.\n\nWIFE: Of course they smell. But is there anything that doesn't? You can't name a thing that doesn't have some drawback. Ginseng may not smell, but it has worms.\n\nMAN: Yes, but those worms are good for neuralgia, you know.\n\nWIFE: I like to eat onions. Then I don't feel the cold. One works for one night. Two for two nights. So three will work for three nights.\n\nMAN: Roasted crickets are good if you are sensitive to cold. I keep telling you that. One cricket for one night.\n\nWIFE: But there aren't any crickets now. What season do you think this is? There's snow outside.\n\nMAN: All right, then, do this. First, heat some sesame oil. Then, after letting it cool, lick salt as you drink it. Lick and drink. Lick and drink. Three times. It works immediately.\n\nWIFE: Isn't that what you do when you haven't had a bowel movement?\n\nMAN: No, then it's soybean oil. In that case you lick and drink four times. You don't remember anything at all, do you?\n\nWIFE: Say... over there... isn't that cheese?\n\nMAN: Hmm, it seems to be. It wasn't there last night. Well... where should we put it? In the old days, we used to put the cheese next to the dried dates, but....\n\nWIFE ( _Picking it up_ ): I wonder when we got this. It's pretty stale, isn't it?\n\nMAN: Yes, getting hard. Didn't there used to be something called hard cheese? Cheese that had become hard.... ( _Thinking_.)\n\nWIFE: Look, teeth marks. You took a bite and then left it, didn't you?\n\nMAN: Ridiculous! Let me see. I'd never do an ill-mannered thing like that. Those are your teeth marks.\n\nWIFE: My teeth aren't that sharp.\n\nMAN: I don't know about that... but it could have been the cat.\n\nWIFE: Well... maybe. In the old days we had a cat. Could it have been Pesu?\n\nMAN: Pesu was the dog. Kuro was the parrot, Tobi was the goat, and the horse was Taro, so the cat... could it have been Pesu after all?\n\nWIFE: The cat was Pesu. Kuro was the parrot, Tobi the goat, the horse was Taro, the dog... the dog... I wonder if the dog was Pesu....\n\n( _A_ WOMAN _appears stage left_.)\n\nWOMAN ( _Quietly_ ): Good evening.\n\nMAN: Huh?\n\nWOMAN: Good evening.\n\nWIFE: Good evening.\n\nWOMAN: Are you having evening tea?\n\nMAN: Well, after a fashion....\n\nWIFE: We never miss having tea in this house, from long ago.\n\nWOMAN: It was that way in my family, too, long ago.\n\nMAN: Ah, well, since you have taken the trouble to come, won't you please join us?\n\nWOMAN: Yes, thank you.\n\nWIFE: Please do. Not just for evening tea, but any time you have tea it's nice to have company. In the old days we frequently entertained.\n\nMAN: Please sit down.\n\n( _The three of them sit down. The_ MAN _pours them tea_.)\n\nMAN: Now then, before tea in your home, I mean before evening tea, do you say a prayer?\n\nWOMAN: Ah... I don't really remember.\n\nMAN: Well then, let's skip that. Actually, saying a prayer before evening tea is not proper. You might even say it is a breach of etiquette. Do you know why?\n\nWOMAN: No.\n\nMAN: Because it's not to God's liking. It says so in the Bible. ( _To his_ WIFE.) Do you remember?\n\nWIFE: No.\n\nMAN: She forgets everything. Because of her age. Sugar? How many?\n\nWOMAN: Yes... well, if it's all right, I'll serve myself.\n\nMAN: Of course. Please do. That's the best way. People should be completely free.\n\nWIFE: In this house we always have guests who visit at night join us for evening tea. Now, after so many years, you are the victim.\n\nMAN: How many years has it been? But you are late in coming... which way did you come from?\n\nWOMAN: I came from City Hall.\n\nWIFE: Ah, City Hall! That gloomy building? Don't you agree that it's gloomy?\n\nWOMAN: Yes, it's gloomy.\n\nWIFE: Gloomy!\n\nMAN: Would you like a sweet?\n\nWOMAN: Thank you.\n\nMAN: We have rich things, too, if you'd prefer. By the way, speaking of City Hall, how is that fellow?\n\nWIFE: What fellow?\n\nMAN: That guy who sits there on the second floor and spits out the window.\n\nWIFE: Oh, he died. Quite a while ago.\n\nMAN: Is he finally dead? He was a problem for everybody. As many as thirteen times a day. People avoided passing that place.\n\nWIFE: Well, no one avoids passing there these days. His son is sitting there now, and that young man is very courteous. But did you come directly from City Hall to our house?\n\nWOMAN: Yes.\n\nMAN: Directly here? That is to say, intending to come to our house?\n\nWOMAN: That's right, directly here.\n\nWIFE: Is that so? ( _A little perplexed_.) Well then... ah... how nice of you to come.\n\nMAN: Yes. You are certainly welcome. We've had very few visitors lately.\n\nWIFE: But what did they say about us at City Hall?\n\nWOMAN: Nothing in particular.\n\nMAN: That we are good citizens?\n\nWOMAN: Yes.\n\nWIFE: Exemplary?\n\nWOMAN: Yes.\n\nMAN: And harmless?\n\nWOMAN: Yes.\n\nWIFE: Well, that's certainly true. We are the best, most exemplary, citizens.\n\nMAN: Last year the mayor went out on the balcony and gave a speech. Then, at the end, he said, \"In our city we are pleased to have 362 citizens who are not only good, and exemplary, but also harmless.\" Those last two are us... really.\n\nWIFE: The city tax isn't much, but we pay it right on time. And we don't put out much trash. And we don't drink much water.\n\nMAN: Our ideas are moderate, too. We are both, relatively speaking, Progressive Conservatives. Those Reform Party people are so vulgar. Neither of us can tolerate that. One of those guys, you know, will yawn without putting his hand to his mouth. Really! In the old days that would have been unthinkable.\n\nWOMAN ( _With feeling_ ): It is really... nice and warm here.\n\nWIFE: Yes, isn't it? And refined, too. We aren't rich, but we try not to be unnecessarily frugal.\n\nMAN: Now, to put it briefly, you've been sent here from City Hall.\n\nWOMAN: No, I wouldn't say that exactly.\n\nWIFE: Perhaps we should say, \"dispatched.\"\n\nWOMAN: No, that's not it. I heard about this place at City Hall. Something that made me want to visit you... so I came.\n\nMAN: I see. I understand. You say that you heard something about us at City Hall. That made you want to visit us. And so, here you are\u2014visiting us. That's certainly logical.\n\nWIFE ( _In admiration_ ): That makes sense. In short, since you wanted to visit us, you visited us. That's different from saying that you didn't want to visit us but visited us anyway.\n\nMAN: It's a goodwill visit, isn't it?\n\nWOMAN: I just had to meet you.\n\nWIFE: My, what a sweet thing to say. Another cup of tea? ( _Offering tea_.)\n\nWOMAN: Thank you.\n\nMAN: In that case, whatever questions you have, or whatever requests, please just tell us. It is our established policy never to disappoint anyone who has come so far. Why are we so healthy in spite of growing old? Why are we so cheerful? So full of humor? Why, though we aren't rich, are we not unnecessarily frugal? How can we be both progressive and conservative at the same time? Why are we such good citizens? Why, to sum it all up, are we us?\n\nWIFE: Go ahead and ask your questions. He will certainly answer them well, whatever they are about, I'm sure.\n\nWOMAN: Thank you. But for right now it's enough just to be allowed to sit here this way.\n\nMAN: Don't you have at least one of these \"questions\"? There are usually three questions for every person.\n\nWIFE: And three for me, too.\n\nMAN: And you know the answers already anyway, right?\n\nWOMAN: Really, I... just to be sitting here... and you have even served me a warm cup of tea....\n\nWIFE: Ah, of course. This lady is interested in the domestic environment... our home's unique domestic environment.\n\nMAN: I see. I understand. This so-called family atmosphere takes some doing. Now, the first thing you can't do without for that homey feel is a cat. Second, a fireplace, or something of the kind. Things like whiskey or home-brewed sak\u00e9, like detective stories or fairy tales, knitting needles and wool yarn, or torn socks and gloves, and, to top it off, some reading glasses... right? We used to have a cat, too, but he seems to have disappeared recently....\n\nWIFE: If you'd given us a little notice that you were coming, we could have borrowed one from the neighbor....\n\nWOMAN: Please, never mind about that. I'm happy just to be here, in a warm place, with such kind people, quietly drinking tea. It's very cold outside. It's snowing. No one is out there.\n\nMAN: I can well believe that. It's supposed to snow tonight. Did you walk all the way?\n\nWOMAN: Yes, all the way....\n\nWIFE: Poor thing. You must be hungry. Please help yourself to whatever you'd like.\n\nMAN: We always like to help those less fortunate as much as we can. That's our way....\n\nWOMAN'S VOICE ( _From no particular direction_ ): The little girl was hungry now. She was shaking from the cold as she walked. The snow came drifting down on the back of her neck, to fall among the beautiful curls of her long golden hair. But from every window the light was shining, and there was the strong and savory smell of a goose roasting. That was as it should be, the little girl was thinking. It was, after all, New Year's Eve. There was a small space between two houses. She drew her body into that corner and crouched down there, pulling her little feet under her. Even so, she could not escape the cold....\n\nWIFE ( _In a small voice_ ): Dear, I think that this lady has something she'd like to say to us.\n\nMAN: Is that so? Well then, please don't hesitate. For that matter... well... if you'd prefer, I could leave. I know that, as they say, women feel more comfortable talking to one another.... ( _Beginning to stand_.)\n\nWOMAN: No, please. Don't go. This is fine. Really. Just this, just sitting here quietly like this is fine. I'm perfectly happy this way.\n\nWIFE: Well, if you say so. But you went to a lot of trouble to come here, and we'll feel bad if we don't do anything for you.\n\nMAN: Right. We wouldn't want you to think we were so insensitive.\n\nWOMAN: No, really, I wouldn't think anything like that....\n\nWIFE: Ah, well, isn't there something you'd like to eat? If there is, I'd be happy to fix it for you.\n\nWOMAN: Thank you, but not just now.\n\nMAN: Well, just as she says... that's fine. She has just arrived, dear, and probably doesn't feel like asking questions or giving orders yet. That's what it is. It's better just to leave her alone. You know what they say about excessive kindness... now what is it they say?...\n\nWIFE: Maybe you're right. ( _To the_ WOMAN.) Just make yourself comfortable. We're not in any hurry.\n\nWOMAN: Thank you.\n\nMAN: But, please don't hesitate...\n\nWOMAN: Yes... well....\n\nWIFE: As if it were your own home....\n\nWOMAN: Yes. ( _The_ MAN _starts to say something, and then stops. There is an awkward silence_.)\n\nMAN ( _Suddenly thinking of something to say_ ): Outside... was it snowing?\n\nWOMAN ( _Nods_.)\n\nWIFE ( _Eagerly pursuing the thought_ ): Powdered... snow?\n\nWOMAN: Yes.... ( _Nods_.)\n\n( _Silence_.)\n\nMAN ( _Again thinking_ ): You're tired... aren't you?\n\nWOMAN: No.\n\nMAN ( _To his_ WIFE): But she must be tired. Why don't you ask her to lie down for a little while?...\n\nWIFE: That's a good idea. Why not do that?\n\nWOMAN: No, this is just fine.\n\nMAN: But....\n\nWOMAN: Really....\n\nWIFE: Well, whatever you think...\n\n( _There is another awkward silence_.)\n\nMAN: Say, I've got an idea. Why don't you sing her a song?\n\nWIFE: A song? I can't sing... not me!\n\nMAN: \"Not me?\" Did you hear that? She's just being shy or too modest. I shouldn't brag about my own wife, but her singing is something to hear. Come on, sing something for her?\n\nWIFE: I can't do that.\n\nMAN: Of course you can. She'd like to hear it, too. Right? Wouldn't you like to hear her sing something?\n\nWOMAN: Yes... but....\n\nMAN: See! Don't be so shy. Go ahead and sing. After all, she has taken the trouble to come. ( _To the_ WOMAN.) She's not much good at anything else... just singing. But she's not bad at it. She's rather good.\n\nWIFE: I don't have a good voice any more... at my age.\n\nMAN: At your age?... Listen to that. Just yesterday she was saying that she could still sing pretty well in spite of her age, because she has always taken care of her voice....\n\nWIFE: But I just meant... for in the family....\n\nMAN: In the family, outside the family, what's the difference? Go ahead and sing. Try that song... \"The snow is.... ( _Trying to remember_.) The snow is.... ( _Thinking_.) The snow is getting deeper... no keeps getting deeper....\"\n\nWOMAN ( _Quietly_ ): I was selling matches...\n\nWIFE: What?\n\nWOMAN: I was selling matches.\n\nWIFE: My, did you hear that, dear?\n\nMAN: What's that?\n\nWIFE: She's selling matches.\n\nMAN: Matches? Ah, I see! Yes... I understand... finally. About buying matches. Well, it would have been better to have said so sooner, but... you went to City Hall to examine the city directory to find the household most in need of matches... and that was us. That's what it is! Fine. I can understand that. And we'll buy them. Buy them all. I don't know if you've got a truckload... maybe two... but we'll buy them all. Here and now. I promise.\n\nWIFE: But we just bought matches. Far too many. Of course, since she took the trouble to come, we should buy some. Yes, let's buy some. But we can't use many.\n\nWOMAN: No, that's not it. I was selling matches a long time ago.\n\nMAN: Ah, a long time ago....\n\nWIFE: Then what are you selling now? If it's something useful around the house, we'll buy some. You've gone to so much trouble.\n\nMAN: That's right. Even if it's a little expensive...\n\nWOMAN: Nothing in particular right now...\n\nMAN: Nothing?...\n\nWOMAN: That's right.\n\nWIFE ( _A little disappointed_ ): Oh... well...\n\nMAN: Ah... I see. You were telling us a story about something you remember from when you were small....\n\nWOMAN: Yes, that's it.\n\nWIFE: About selling matches?...\n\nWOMAN: Yes.\n\nMAN: How old were you?\n\nWOMAN: I was seven....\n\nWIFE: It was terrible, wasn't it?\n\nMAN: And you can't help remembering....\n\nWOMAN: Well, really, until just recently, I didn't understand it.\n\nMAN: You didn't understand?...\n\nWOMAN: It was twenty years ago.\n\nWIFE: You don't say....\n\nMAN: And you had forgotten about it?\n\nWOMAN: I didn't understand. Until just recently, I didn't understand at all. I was married and had two children. One, a boy, is four years old. The other, a girl, is barely two. So far as the girl is concerned, everything is fine, but a four-year-old boy requires a lot of attention.\n\nWIFE: Isn't that the truth!\n\nMAN: A boy of four can take care of himself.\n\nWIFE: Nonsense!\n\nWOMAN: People say that two children are too many at my age. But I don't feel that way.\n\nMAN: You're right. Two is normal.\n\nWIFE: They say you haven't really done your duty till you've had three.\n\nMAN: Well, where are those children?\n\nWOMAN: Don't worry about that.\n\nMAN: Ah....\n\nWIFE: Are they healthy?\n\nWOMAN: Yes, quite healthy...\n\nMAN: That's good.\n\nWIFE: That's the important thing... for children to be healthy.\n\nWOMAN: Then I read in a book....\n\nWIFE: In a book?... My...\n\nMAN: A child-care book?\n\nWOMAN: No... fiction....\n\nMAN: Ah, that's good. When a woman gets married and has children, she usually quits reading books. Especially fiction.\n\nWIFE: What was it about?\n\nWOMAN: Various things.\n\nMAN: Various things, indeed. Those writers of fiction write about all kinds of things, don't they?\n\nWOMAN: Among other things, about a match girl. At first I didn't understand it. I read it again. Then I had a strange feeling.\n\nMAN: Strange?\n\nWOMAN: Yes. After that I read it many times, over and over...\n\nWIFE: About how many times?\n\nWOMAN: Five... or more....\n\nMAN: Then?...\n\nWOMAN: Then I saw it. I was amazed. It was about me.\n\nWIFE: About you?...\n\nWOMAN: Yes.\n\nMAN: It was written about you?\n\nWOMAN: That's right. I hadn't understood.\n\nWIFE: About selling matches?...\n\nMAN:... About the little match girl?...\n\nWOMAN: Yes. It was about me. I was the little match girl.\n\nWIFE: My goodness... that one?...\n\nMAN: But....\n\nWOMAN: After that I remembered many things. Many things gradually became clear....\n\nMAN'S VOICE ( _Low, in a murmur_ ): People were starving then. Every night was dark and gloomy. The town was built on swampland, sprawling and stinking. Here and there shops had been set up, like sores that had burst open. Small animals were killed in the shadows, and secretly eaten. People walked furtively, like forgotten criminals, and now and then, unexpectedly, something would scurry by in the darkness. That child was selling matches at the street corner. When a match was struck, she would lift her shabby skirt for display until the match went out. People made anxious by the small crimes they had committed, people who could not even commit such crimes, night after night, in their trembling fingers, would strike those matches. Directed at the infinite darkness hidden by that skirt, how many times that small light had burned, until it had burned out.... Those two thin legs held a darkness as profound as that of the depths of the sea, darker than all the darkness of that city floating on a swampland gathered together. As she stood there above that darkness, the little girl smiled aimlessly, or seemed empty and sad.\n\nWIFE: Isn't there someone at the door?\n\nMAN: Nonsense! In this cold? Aren't you cold?\n\nWOMAN: No.\n\nMAN: But then, how about that? Seeing yourself revealed in a story gives you a strange feeling, doesn't it?\n\nWOMAN: Yes, very strange. After that I thought about it for a long time. I had suffered greatly. But there is still one thing I can't understand.\n\nWIFE: One thing?...\n\nMAN: What?\n\nWOMAN: Why did I do a thing like that?\n\nMAN: A thing like that?\n\nWOMAN: Yes.\n\nWIFE: Selling matches?\n\nWOMAN: Yes.\n\nWIFE: Well....\n\nMAN: Wasn't it because you were poor? I don't mean to be rude, but....\n\nWOMAN: Still, to do that kind of thing....\n\nWIFE: You shouldn't be ashamed of that. Everyone did such things then. Those who didn't, didn't survive. Children stole things. After I had worked so hard to make hotcakes for his birthday, they stole them. It was like that then.\n\nMAN: You should forget the things from that time. Everyone has forgotten. I've forgotten, too.\n\nWOMAN: But I want you to think back, to recall those memories.\n\nWIFE: Well, even if you try, there are some things you can't forget. But what good does it do to remember?\n\nMAN: I had to do such things, too. Just as you did, I tried to sell things as a peddler. It's not that important. It's nothing to be ashamed of. Really.\n\nWOMAN: But how could I ever have thought of doing such a thing? I was only seven years old. Could a child of seven think of that kind of thing?\n\nWIFE: That kind of thing?...\n\nWOMAN: That kind of... of... terrible thing...\n\nMAN:... what kind of?...\n\nWOMAN: I was selling matches.\n\nMAN: Yes, selling matches... you were selling matches...\n\nWOMAN:... and while they were burning....\n\nMAN:... impossible....\n\nWOMAN: No, it's not.\n\nMAN: I can't believe it....\n\nWOMAN: But that's the way it was. It was me. I was the little match girl....\n\nWIFE: Ah... you were the one....\n\nWOMAN: Yes, do you remember? That time?... That place?... ( _A pause_.)\n\nMAN: But, well, all kinds of things happened then.\n\nWIFE: That's true. All kinds of things. It was very different from now. No one knew what to do. It wasn't your fault.\n\nMAN: It's nothing to worry about. That was all over long ago. An old story. My philosophy is to forget it. Forget everything. Without exception! Everything. If you don't... well, anyway... let life go on.\n\nWOMAN: But I can't forget it.\n\nWIFE: Why?\n\nWOMAN: Because I have remembered.\n\nMAN: I see. Yes, there is such a time in life. Just be patient a while. You'll soon forget. But, let's stop talking about it. Say... I'll make you forget in three minutes. Do you know the story of the kind weasel?\n\n( _The_ WOMAN _does not answer_.)\n\nMAN: How about fixing us another cup of tea, dear....\n\nWIFE: Fine, let me do that. It has gotten quite cold. ( _Taking the pot, she leaves_.)\n\nWOMAN: Are Mother's feet all right now?\n\nMAN: Mother... ah, you mean my wife? No, they still aren't good, particularly when it gets cold. But I'm surprised that you know so much. Things like my wife's trouble with her feet.\n\nWOMAN: I don't mind forgetting that story, either.\n\nMAN: Please do. Just forget it. It happened twenty years ago.\n\nWOMAN: But I would still like to know one thing.\n\nMAN: What?\n\nWOMAN: I'm sure that someone must have taught me to.\n\nMAN: To what?\n\nWOMAN: To do such a thing....\n\nMAN: Ah well, that's probably true. No doubt.\n\nWOMAN: Was it you?\n\nMAN: What?\n\nWOMAN: Were you the one who taught me to?\n\nMAN: Me?\n\nWOMAN: Yes.\n\nMAN: Me?\n\nWOMAN: Yes.\n\nMAN: Me?...\n\nWOMAN: Yes.\n\nMAN:... Why would I have?\n\nWOMAN: Don't you remember?\n\nMAN: What?\n\nWOMAN: Don't you remember me?\n\nMAN: Remember you?\n\nWOMAN: I'm your daughter.\n\nMAN: You?...\n\nWOMAN: Yes.\n\nMAN: Impossible.\n\nWOMAN: There's no doubt about it. I've made inquiries. That's what they told me at City Hall, too. It's the truth.\n\nMAN: It can't be. It's not possible. I don't have a daughter. We did have a daughter... but she died. She is dead.\n\nWOMAN: I don't blame you for making me do that kind of thing. I don't bear a grudge. But I would just like to know. That's all. Why was I doing that? If someone taught me to, who was it? I... if I thought of something like that all by myself, when I was just seven years old... I can't believe that... that would be frightening. Absolutely frightening! I'd just like to know why it bothers me so much that I can't sleep at night.\n\nMAN: But it wasn't me. My daughter is dead. She was run over by a streetcar. I saw it... my daughter... right in front of my eyes... run over and killed. I'm not lying to you. My daughter is dead.\n\nWOMAN: Father....\n\nMAN: Stop it. Please stop it. Your story is wrong. You have things confused somehow. That's it. A misunderstanding. Such things often happen. But a mistake is still a mistake. ( _The_ WIFE _appears, carrying a pot of tea_.)\n\nWIFE: What's going on, dear?\n\nMAN: Well... a little surprise... she has just claimed that she is our daughter.\n\nWIFE: Oh, my! Really?\n\nWOMAN: It's true.\n\nMAN: Don't be ridiculous! Our daughter is dead. Our daughter was run over by a streetcar and killed.\n\nWIFE: That's true. But if she were living she would be just about this girl's age.\n\nWOMAN: I am living. It is true!\n\nMAN: But I saw it happen. I... with these eyes... right in front of me... very close.\n\nWOMAN: I checked on that at City Hall, too.\n\nWIFE: At City Hall?\n\nMAN: Still....\n\nWIFE: But, dear, who can say for sure that she isn't our daughter?\n\nMAN: I can!\n\nWIFE: Why?\n\nMAN: Because I saw it... I...\n\nWIFE: I saw it, too. But we need to remember the circumstances. Our daughter behaved a bit strangely. She often ran out in the middle of the night. The first time, she was just three years old. A fire alarm sounded in the middle of the night, and, when I looked, she wasn't there. We ran out after her, frantic. The bridge over the river outside the village was down. That child, drenched to the skin, was being held in the arms of a volunteer fireman. A bonfire was burning... I didn't know what to do....\n\nMAN: It happened a number of times. She died after we moved to town, so she was perhaps seven.\n\nWIFE: She was seven.\n\nMAN: I didn't know what happened. My wife shook me awake. It was in the middle of the night and it was raining. That child, still in her nightgown, went running out in the street where the streetcar line was, running in the deserted street. I ran after her. I called to her... again and again. Then, just as we turned the corner, there came the streetcar.\n\nWIFE: That's right. It was raining that night... I remember.\n\nWOMAN: Don't you remember me?\n\nWIFE ( _Staring at her intently, then in a low voice_ ): It's her.\n\nMAN: You're wrong.\n\nWIFE: But that kind of thing might be possible.\n\nWOMAN: It's me.\n\nWIFE: Please, stand up for a minute.\n\n( _The_ WOMAN _stands, rather awkwardly. She walks a little_.)\n\nMAN: Just who in the world are you?\n\nWOMAN: The daughter of the two of you.\n\nWIFE ( _To the_ MAN): She looks like her.\n\nWOMAN: There's no mistake. The man in charge of family records examined many thick record books. That's how I found out. He said that my father and mother lived here.\n\nWIFE: What do you think?\n\nMAN: I don't believe it.\n\nWIFE: But let's talk about it a little. Then we can see.\n\nMAN: What?\n\nWIFE: Oh, all sorts of things. But even if, let's say, she isn't actually our child, wouldn't that still be all right? She's had such a hard time.\n\nMAN: I understand that... but....\n\nWOMAN: I... I don't blame you, Father... for that...\n\nMAN: Blame?... Me?...\n\nWOMAN: I can forget even that, now.\n\nMAN: You're wrong. It's all a mistake.\n\nWIFE: That's all right. Let's just sit down. We'll sit and talk.\n\nMAN: Yes, let's sit down. Standing won't get us anywhere. And since you went to the trouble to fix hot tea....\n\nWIFE: Right. Let's have our tea. After that, we'll have a long overdue parent-child conversation.\n\n( _The three of them sit down and begin to drink their tea, in a somewhat pleasant mood_.)\n\nMAN: Well, I don't deny that there's a resemblance. And, if she had lived, she'd have been just about your age....\n\nWIFE: She did live. I can't help feeling so.\n\nMAN: Now, dear, don't say such things so lightly, even joking, because she is quite serious....\n\nWOMAN: What's best is to see that father and mother are well.\n\nWIFE: My, how often have I thought I would like to hear that!\n\nMAN: But, dear, I keep telling you, it is all a mistake.\n\nWOMAN: Ah... I... it is difficult for me to say this, but... ah... my younger brother is still waiting outside.\n\nWIFE: Younger brother?\n\nWOMAN: Yes.\n\nMAN: You have a brother?\n\nWOMAN: Yes. We agreed that, if I found out that you really were our father and mother, I'd call him.\n\nWIFE: But we had only the one daughter.\n\nMAN: She was an only child. Of course, I always wanted a son, very much, but... We never had one.\n\nWIFE: Your real brother?...\n\nWOMAN: Yes, he is. So... your real son.\n\nWIFE: That would seem to follow, but... but we really didn't... have a son....\n\nWOMAN: It's cold outside, and, if it's all right, I wonder if you could call him in?... ( _Standing and moving off stage left._ )\n\nMAN: But... just a minute....\n\n( _The_ WOMAN _reappears, bringing in her_ BROTHER. _She guides him to the small serving table_.)\n\nWOMAN: See, this is your mother.\n\nBROTHER: Good evening, Mother.\n\nWOMAN: And this is your father.\n\nBROTHER: Good evening, Father.\n\nWOMAN: Please sit down. ( _Seats him beside the small table_.)\n\nBROTHER: Yes. ( _Sits_.)\n\nWOMAN: You were probably cold, weren't you?\n\nBROTHER: No, not at all....\n\nWOMAN: My brother has remarkable self-control. He has sometimes stood in the snow all night long. And he'd never even sneeze. Have some tea.\n\nBROTHER: Yes. ( _Taking a large cup, saucer, and spoon from a bag he is holding_.)\n\n( _The_ WIFE, _holding the teapot, pours tea into his cup. While handing him the sugar she observes him closely_.)\n\nWOMAN: He likes tea very much. Two spoons of sugar. Always. Then he drinks slowly. I taught him that. They say it's best for the body, and for the heart, to drink slowly. ( _The_ BROTHER _drinks the tea_.)\n\nWOMAN: Aren't you hungry?\n\nBROTHER: No.\n\nWOMAN: But take something. Since you haven't had anything since yesterday.\n\nWIFE: My, since yesterday?\n\nWOMAN: Yes, my brother's self-control is very strong. He has sometimes gone for over three days without eating. But he never says a word about it.\n\nWIFE: Three days?... But that's not good for his health. Even Gandhi went only two days at the most. Well, there's not much, but please eat all you want.\n\nWOMAN ( _Passing the plate of cookies_ ): Please take one.\n\nBROTHER: Thank you. ( _Bows politely, takes one, and eats slowly_.)\n\nWOMAN: Chew it well. The better we chew our food, the better it is for us.\n\nBROTHER: Yes.\n\nWIFE: You are a good sister. And your brother is very polite.\n\nMAN: He's very sensible. That's an excellent quality.\n\nWOMAN: When you are ready, tell father and mother your story.\n\nBROTHER: All right. But it's not necessary.\n\nWOMAN: Why?\n\nBROTHER: I can tell them later.\n\nWOMAN: My brother is very reserved. Shy. Bashful and uncommunicative besides.\n\nWIFE: But that's good. Not to talk too much is excellent in a man.\n\nMAN: Yes, that's true. Real gentlemen usually don't talk much. Still, to say that it is excellent not to talk misses the point. Speaking from my long experience, I would say that you should talk when it is time to talk. To be more precise, then, it is excellent in a man not to talk when it isn't time to talk.\n\nWOMAN: Mother, won't you tell my brother something about when he was little?\n\nWIFE: But, you know, you're confused about that. We never had a son.\n\nMAN: We never had a son. We had a daughter. And she died. So there are no children. None....\n\nWOMAN: We can't get Father to believe us....\n\nWIFE: But... really....\n\nBROTHER: Mother....\n\nWIFE: Me?\n\nBROTHER: A long time ago, you suffered from a bad case of asthma. I remember that very well. I used to rub your back. You'd be short of breath, and your face would get red. To see you bent over suffering like that was terrible. When I rubbed your back, that seemed to help, though, and you would go to sleep....\n\nWIFE: My, I wonder if that could be true....\n\nMAN: Did you ever have asthma?\n\nWIFE: No.\n\nMAN: Then this story doesn't fit, does it?\n\nWIFE: But when a person catches a cold they cough a little.\n\nWOMAN: That must be it... that mother had a cold, and that's what he's remembering. He has a very good memory. Would you like another one? ( _Offering him the plate of cookies_.)\n\nBROTHER: No, that's fine.\n\nWOMAN: You needn't hold back. This is our home.\n\nBROTHER: All right, then. Thank you. ( _Takes one_.)\n\nMAN: Now... please listen carefully. I want this quite clear.\n\nWOMAN: He remembers everything... many things about Father and Mother in far greater detail than I can.\n\nMAN: That's all very well, but... now listen! We did not have a son! I want to make that very clear. Did not have! That's the truth! We had a daughter. We had a cat. But no son. There... never... was... one. Do you understand? All right. Now, saying that doesn't mean that I want to put the two of you out. So please, just relax. Eat as much as you like. Drink as much as you like. I just want to make this one point. It may seem a mean thing to say, but I think it's important to be sure that it's clear. About this... this house. It is our home! You... are our guests.\n\nWIFE: Dear, don't be so....\n\nMAN: I know. Yes, I know. Please don't misunderstand me. And if we agree on that one point, then we might welcome you as if you were a real daughter and a real son. Wouldn't you say that we have welcomed you almost as we might have a real son and daughter?\n\nBROTHER: And Father suffered from neuralgia. Whenever it got cold, he had a pain in his hips. When that happened, he got irritable. Mother, and Sister, you both knew that. So, whenever he had an attack, you'd go out and leave me home alone with him. His sickness was the cause, of course, but he sometimes hit me and kicked me. At first I would yell, \"It hurts! It hurts!\" and cry. But I soon stopped that. Because, no matter how much I cried, he still kept on. I just learned to endure it. But, from that time on, my arm bends like this. ( _Moves his left arm with a jerk_.)\n\nMAN: I never had anything like neuralgia....\n\nWOMAN: His endurance is remarkable. No matter what happens, he never cries. Here, have another. ( _Offering him the cookies_.)\n\nBROTHER: Thank you. ( _Taking one_.)\n\nWOMAN: He's just naturally mistreated by everyone. He's hit and he's kicked. But he bears it patiently. He keeps quiet; he crouches down, he rolls up on the ground in a ball. But he doesn't cry.\n\nMAN: I have never once used violence against another person....\n\nWOMAN: But, Father, he doesn't hold it against you. I have taught him that that isn't good. It wasn't your fault. You were sick.\n\nMAN: I had no son.\n\nBROTHER: Father, I don't hold it against you. It was because you were sick. That's what made you do it. Sometimes my arm hurts. When it gets cold... just like with your neuralgia... there's a sharp pain, right here. But I put up with it. I accept it. Sister said, \"Please endure it.\" So I do. I endure it.\n\nWOMAN: His body is covered with bruises. It's terrible. But he doesn't complain. He puts up with it. Show Father and Mother... so they can see just how much you've endured.\n\nBROTHER: Yes, Sister. ( _Begins to unbutton his clothing_.)\n\nWIFE: Stop! Please, stop. Don't do that! I understand. I believe you. You probably are our son.\n\n( _The_ BROTHER, _uncovering his upper body, stands up_.)\n\nMAN ( _Standing, solemnly_ ): I see. You're the one. You were born. I wanted it. I always wanted a son. So you were born. Evidently that's what it is. They say that if you want something badly enough you'll get it, don't they? That was you. And I never knew it at all... it's unbelievable. I'm really surprised that you were born. ( _Pause_.) This one... kept quiet about it, and I never knew it. That's clear. And you... you are my daughter. It's no mistake. I thought that you were dead, but you were alive. The little girl I was chasing that evening was someone else. You say that's so, so it must be. It was a dark evening. To me it was just a fluttering white thing dancing in the wind. That wasn't you. You went flying the other way, running somewhere else. And you never came back. That must be what happened. So you are my daughter and son. My real daughter and son. I remember everything. So, then... what do you want? What now?... Since I am your father, what do you want me to do for you? To look at you with affection? To speak to you in a tender, caring voice? Or do you want money? What is it?...\n\nWOMAN: Father?\n\nMAN: What?\n\nWOMAN ( _Quietly_ ): And Mother. We don't want you to misunderstand either. We didn't come here to trick you, or to beg for anything. We really are your son and daughter... that's all....\n\nMAN: Really? And I never knew. ( _To his_ WIFE.) Please ask these people to leave. We must go to bed now. We old people become sleepy earlier than you young people do.\n\nWOMAN: Father.\n\nMAN: Get out.\n\nBROTHER: Not so loud. Please. The children have just fallen asleep.\n\nMAN: Children?\n\nWOMAN: My children. The two-year-old and four-year-old I told you about. I had them come in. It was presumptuous of me, I know. But I couldn't leave them out there in the cold. They were already almost frozen. They couldn't even cry. I felt so sorry for them....\n\nWIFE: Please leave.\n\nWOMAN: Mother... don't be so cruel....\n\nWIFE: Please go. I beg you. just go. I can't stand it. I'll give you money. It's so disagreeable. This is our house.\n\nBROTHER: That's all right with me, Mother, but please think about the children. They're sleeping now, but they're very hungry. My sister has nothing to feed them. We kept telling them, as we came, \"When we see Father and Mother, we'll ask them for something for you to eat.\" We barely got them to walk here. My sister is exhausted. Extremely exhausted. We walked for a long time.\n\nWOMAN: But we are finally able to meet you, Mother. We walked a long way. It was very cold. Snow was falling.... ( _Gradually laying down her head and seeming to fall asleep_.) Just for one look at Father and Mother... that's all we were thinking....\n\nWOMAN'S VOICE: To warm her freezing hands the little girl struck the match she was holding. The tiny stick flickered for a moment, enveloping the area in bright light. The ice and snow glittered a purple color. But, then, the match went out. The little girl remained there, crouching all alone on the cold stone pavement, with the wind blowing, freezing.\n\n( _The_ WOMAN _'s head is on her crossed arms on the table_.)\n\nWIFE: What happened to her? What's your sister doing?\n\nMAN: She's sleeping.\n\nBROTHER: Sleeping. Sometimes she sleeps. Then, sometimes, she wakes up.\n\nWIFE: My, I wonder if she is crying... look....\n\nBROTHER: Yes, she's crying. She cries in her sleep. She's very unhappy.\n\nMAN: Will you please wake her up, and leave? Look, I don't say that out of meanness. If you hadn't come with a strange trick like this, if you had come without saying anything, you would have received a warm welcome. Really. But now listen to me. Are you listening?\n\nBROTHER: Yes.\n\nMAN: Please leave.\n\nBROTHER: But my sister is very tired.\n\nMAN: Are you her real brother?\n\nBROTHER: Yes, I really am....\n\nWIFE: Since when have you thought that?\n\nBROTHER: What?\n\nWIFE: How long ago did you become aware that she was your sister?\n\nBROTHER: That was quite a while ago... quite a while....\n\nWIFE: Please try to remember clearly. It's very important.\n\nBROTHER: But even when I first became aware of it, she was already my sister....\n\nMAN: Already at the time you became aware of it?... Well, that's not a very reasonable story.\n\nWIFE: There had to be something before that.\n\nBROTHER: There were many things. Many things. Then I suddenly realized... she was my sister.\n\nMAN: It sounds like a miracle...\n\n( _Pause. The_ BROTHER _gets up stealthily, takes a cookie from the table, goes back, sits down, and eats it_.)\n\nMAN ( _Lost in thought. To his_ WIFE): Can you remember back to that time? We were sitting somewhere on a sunny hill... the sky was blue, white clouds were floating lightly by, there was not a breath of wind... perhaps dandelions were blooming....\n\nWIFE ( _Prompted to reflection_ ): There was that, too, wasn't there?\n\nMAN ( _In the same mood_ ): And then... some large thing was dead . . alongside the road... what was it?...\n\nWIFE ( _In the same mood_ ): A cow... it was a large, gray-colored cow... just like a cloud....\n\nMAN: Ah, was it a cow? That thing... just like a cloud....\n\nWIFE: How about it, dear?\n\nMAN: About what?\n\nWIFE: These people... should we keep them overnight?...\n\nMAN: Well, I was thinking that, too. We'll let them stay.\n\nWIFE: I feel sorry for them.\n\nMAN: Right, and people like that, no matter how they seem, they are unfortunate.\n\nWIFE: Let's be kind to them.\n\nMAN: Let's do that. Because there's nothing wrong in that.\n\nWIFE: You two. It'll be all right for you to stay here tonight. We'll let you stay.\n\nMAN: Make yourself at home. These other things... well, let's talk about them later....\n\nWIFE: Do you understand?\n\nBROTHER: Yes, but that isn't necessary. Don't worry about us. Just leave us alone.\n\nWIFE: Tell your sister, too, to put her mind at ease.\n\nBROTHER: She already knows.\n\nMAN: She already knows.\n\nBROTHER: She told me that a while ago... that Mother had asked us to stay.\n\nWIFE: Mother?\n\nBROTHER: Yes.\n\nWIFE: Meaning me?\n\nBROTHER: That's right.\n\nWIFE: So... then that's all right.\n\nBROTHER: Is it all right if I take one more?\n\nWIFE: Yes.\n\n( _He eats a cookie_.)\n\nMAN'S VOICE: Good evening.\n\nMAN: Good evening.\n\nMAN'S VOICE: I'm a city fire marshal. Is anything missing in your home? Is anything lost? Has anything disappeared?\n\nMAN: Has anything?\n\nWIFE: No.\n\nMAN: It seems not.\n\nMAN'S VOICE: So everything is in order?\n\nMAN: I can't say that absolutely. You see, this is a very poor household.\n\nMAN'S VOICE: How about your fire?\n\nWIFE: It's all right. We haven't gone to bed yet.\n\nMAN'S VOICE: Not yet? But you're not going to stay up all night, are you?\n\nMAN: We'll check it before going to bed.\n\nMAN'S VOICE: Did you notice?\n\nMAN: What?\n\nMAN'S VOICE: Can you hear the breathing of someone sleeping? Two small ones....\n\nWIFE: Children. There are children.\n\nMAN'S VOICE: Be careful, please. Tonight is especially cold. Be careful that they don't freeze to death while they sleep. The city authorities are drawing special attention to that danger.\n\n( _There is the striking of wooden clappers, which gradually fades. Then, \"Watch your fire,\" is heard from afar. The_ WOMAN _raises her head, as if still half asleep_.)\n\nWOMAN: Father, while I was asleep, how many cookies did he eat?\n\nMAN: Well, one, wasn't it?\n\nWIFE: It was one, definitely....\n\nWOMAN: No, it was two. He ate two. I had counted them. I don't appreciate your letting him do that. Don't you remember, Father, how many times I asked you not to? He knows no limits. If you let him do it, he'll eat far too many. I have only eaten one so far. That's true, isn't it, Mother?\n\nWIFE: Yes, but since there are plenty, don't feel that you have to restrain yourself....\n\nWOMAN: No, I don't mean it that way. I told him about it, but no matter how often I tell him, he doesn't seem to understand. It's the same with Father. I've asked you so often!\n\nMAN: But I didn't....\n\nWOMAN: No, I had spoken to you earlier. But it's not your fault. ( _To her_ BROTHER.) You're the one. Mother, I hate to trouble you, but would you put these away?\n\nWIFE: Yes, but there are plenty.\n\nWOMAN: It will become a habit. Now apologize to Father and Mother.\n\nMAN: Well, that's all right. Your brother was probably hungry.\n\nWOMAN: Everyone is. Everyone is hungry. But people exercise self-control. You... you're the only one... doing such greedy things.... Well, apologize.\n\n( _She gives him a jab with her fingers_.)\n\nWIFE: Please, don't do that! Really, please stop. It's all right. In this house it doesn't matter at all.\n\nWOMAN: Mother, don't interfere. This is our affair. I raised this child. Apologize. Why don't you apologize? Don't you feel ashamed? What did I always say to you?\n\nMAN: Well, I understand your point very well. It's commendable. It's very commendable. However....\n\nWOMAN: Apologize!\n\nMAN: Listen... will you? Here's another way of looking at it. What you say is sound, but don't tell me that if he gets hungry, it's his own fault? Really. Shouldn't you think again?\n\nWOMAN: Please stay out of it. I'm the one who raised him. I taught him better.\n\nMAN: Yes, I can understand how difficult that must have been.\n\nWOMAN: No, you can't understand. You don't know how much I have done for him. From the age of seven. I have done things I'm ashamed to admit in front of other people in order to raise him. ( _To her_ BROTHER.) Why can't you understand? Why don't you listen to me? Why don't you do what I tell you?\n\nWIFE: He seems to obey you quite well.\n\nMAN: That's certainly true. Your brother is very courteous.\n\nWOMAN ( _Becoming more agitated_ ): I'm a despised woman. It's because I became that kind of woman that you won't listen to me, isn't it?\n\n( _She twists her_ BROTHER _'s arm. He stands up slowly and then slowly crouches down on the floor_.)\n\nWOMAN: What did I do that was so shameful? What do you say I did? And if I did, who did I do it for? Just who did I have to do that kind of thing for? Tell me! Please tell me! Compared to what you have done, what does what I have done amount to? Which is worse? Tell me, which is worse? Tell us. Come on, out with it!\n\nMAN ( _To the_ BROTHER): You'd better apologize. Please. Apologize. You shouldn't disobey your sister. You know that she's suffered many hardships to raise you. You understand that, don't you? And that she loves you. It's not good not to obey her instructions. That's bad.\n\nWOMAN: Father! Please be quiet for a while! He doesn't understand yet. What I did... and who I did it for. And how miserable I have felt about doing it... to this very day. ( _To her_ BROTHER.) Listen! What did I keep telling you? Did I say you could sink so low just because you're hungry? Did I teach you to be so rude in front of Father and Mother? Now apologize! Say \"pardon me\" to Father and Mother. I say apologize! Can't you see how ashamed I feel because of what you did? Then, apologize. Apologize! Apologize! Apologize! ( _While saying this, she bangs his head, with a thumping sound, on the floor_.)\n\nWIFE: Please stop that! It's all right. Really, he doesn't have to. Don't be so harsh.\n\nWOMAN: Please stay out of it! ( _Increasingly violent_.) Whose cookie did you eat? Because of you, who won't have any?\n\nWIFE: There are plenty. Plenty. We can't possibly eat them all.\n\nWOMAN: Whose was it? Who won't get any? Please tell us!\n\nMAN: Stop it. I'll go get them immediately. We have plenty ( _Grabbing her arm to stop her_.)\n\nWOMAN: Let go of me, please!\n\nMAN ( _Becoming angry_ ): Stop! What in the world is this all about? What are you doing?\n\nWOMAN ( _Startled, suddenly becoming humble, bowing her head to the_ MAN): I beg you. I'll make him apologize. I'll make him apologize immediately Please forgive him. He didn't mean anything. He'll apologize right now. He's usually more obedient. He's usually a well-behaved child.\n\nMAN ( _A little bewildered_ ): But that's all right. Because we're not really concerned about it.\n\nWOMAN: I'll have him apologize, though, because I don't feel right about it. And, please, forgive him. He's already sorry about it, too, in his heart. He is apologizing. He's crying. It's just that he can't say anything.\n\nWIFE: You....\n\nWOMAN: Please forgive me, Mother. I was wrong. I was a bad woman. I did such a shameful thing....\n\nWIFE: That's not the point. It's all right.\n\nWOMAN: No, it's not all right. But please don't say that my brother is bad. He's feeling sorry. Forgive him. He's basically a gentle, courteous human being. He's usually very self-controlled. Please forgive him. I'll make him apologize. Right now. He was hungry That's all it is. We can't blame him for that. Please don't blame him for that. I'll make him apologize. I apologize, too.\n\nMAN ( _Approaching her tenderly and trying to lift her to her feet_ ): That's all right. Let's stop all this. I understand.\n\nWOMAN ( _Brushing him away_ ): No, please forgive me. Don't touch me! You must forgive me. I'm a bad woman. Please forgive me. ( _Crawling away from him as she says this_.)\n\nMAN: What are you doing? ( _Again extending his hand_.)\n\nWOMAN ( _Retreating in the direction of the_ WIFE): Forgive me, Mother. I did a bad thing. Please forgive me. At least give me your forgiveness.\n\nWIFE: What's wrong?\n\nMAN: What in the world is it?...\n\nWOMAN: Forgive me, Father. ( _Again retreating from the_ MAN.) Forgive me, Father. Forgive me, please. Matches. Please don't strike the matches....\n\n( _She bends down on the floor covering her head, and remains motionless. The_ MAN _and his_ WIFE _stand dazed. The_ BROTHER _rises slowly. They stand quietly for a moment. The_ WIFE _is about to kneel down next to the_ WOMAN.)\n\nBROTHER ( _Quietly_ ): Please don't touch her. She's a woman who can't sink any further. That's why she doesn't want to be touched. ( _He goes to her, hugging her and lifting her to his knee. The_ MAN _and_ WIFE _stand bewildered_.)\n\nWOMAN ( _As from afar_ ): Matches... don't strike the matches.\n\nBROTHER ( _Murmuring_ ): Father bought matches. Father bought matches. Father bought matches; every night... every night... for my sister... night after night for my sister....\n\nMAN: No.... ( _To his_ WIFE.) I didn't do that. I never did such a thing.\n\nBROTHER: But I don't blame you. Whatever you did, I can't blame you. Because my sister said, \"Don't blame him. Don't blame him....\"\n\nWOMAN'S VOICE ( _Low and hoarse_ ): Then the little girl struck the rest of the matches all at once, in a great hurry. In doing this, she hoped that she would be able to hold firmly to her mother. The matches were burning very brightly, lighting up the whole area, so that it became brighter than daylight. There was never a time when her mother looked larger, or more beautiful. She took the little girl in her arms, wrapped her in light and joy, and went climbing high, high up. There was no more cold, hunger, or fear. The two of them were called up to heaven.\n\nMAN'S VOICE ( _Stealthily_ ): Did you notice?\n\nMAN: What?\n\nMAN'S VOICE: You can't hear the children breathing in their sleep any more.\n\n( _There is the striking of wooden clappers, which gradually fades. Then, \"Watch your fire\" is heard from afar. The_ MAN _and his_ WIFE _sit silently at the table, solemnly beginning \"morning tea.\"..._ )\n\nWOMAN'S VOICE ( _A little more clearly_ ): It was a cold morning. The little girl, with red cheeks, and with even a smile playing on her lips, was dead. The New Year's morning sun illuminated that little body. One hand held a bunch of matches, almost entirely burned up. People said, \"She must have tried to warm herself....\" It was true. This child had been very cold.\n\nCURTAIN\n_TWO WOMEN_\n\nKARA J\u016aR\u014c\n\nTRANSLATED BY JOHN K. GILLESPIE\n\nKara J\u016br\u014d, _Two Women_ , directed by Ishibashi Renji, Dai nana by\u014dt\u014d, November 1979.\n\nBorn in 1940, Kara J\u016br\u014d was active in the student theater at Meiji University. He joined the Youth Art Theater (Seinen geijutsuza) after his graduation in 1962 but soon became disenchanted with conventional _shingeki_. After a brief stint working for an Asakusa burlesque house, Kara established the Situation Theater (J\u014dky\u014d gekij\u014d), inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism, in 1963. By the late 1960s, as an actor, director, and playwright, Kara had moved his theater into red tent that was pitched in public places like the Hanazono Shrine in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Together with his wife, the Korean _zainichi_ (Japanese-born) Ri Reisen, and Maro Akaji (who later established the _but \u014d_ company Great Camel Battleship [Dairakudakan]), Kara attempted to create the erotic, intimate, and carnivalesque spirit of Izumo no Okuni's early kabuki theater. Indeed, he regarded himself and his company as the offspring of Okuni's \"riverbed beggars\" ( _kawara kojiki_ ), countercultural rebels, yet belonging to a venerable native tradition of performance untainted by European notions of theatrical and social propriety. With a new company called the Kara Group (Kara-gumi), he continued to write plays and perform in his signature red tent. Absurd, surrealistic, outrageous, and often hilarious, Kara's plays defy easy summary. Many of the characters in his best plays\u2014such as _John Silver_ : _The Beggar of Love_ ( _Jon Shirub \u0101: Ai no kojiki_, 1970), _A Tale of Two Cities_ ( _Nito monogatari_ , 1972), and _Matasabur \u014d of the Wind_: _Kara Version_ ( _Kara-ban kaze no Matasabur \u014d_, 1974)\u2014are engaged in a quixotic quest to recover their personal histories, a quest often overshadowed by darker episodes in Japan's wartime and imperial history. The search for roots in utopian dreams that quickly becomes apocalyptic presents a confrontation with, and even transcendence over, the past. The play here, _Two Woman_ ( _Futari no onna_ , 1978), is a fine example of Kara's bricolage dramaturgy. As Mishima Yukio did before him, Kara has transformed the classic n\u014d drama _Lady Aoi_ ( _Aoi no ue_ ), itself based on an episode from _The Tale of Genji_ , into a contemporary work that explores the nature of madness, love, and jealousy. Kara's version, however, even more radically undermines the idea of a fixed personal identity that has been one of the linchpins of modern selfhood.\n\nCharacters\n\nWOMAN/PATIENT 1\n\nAOI/PATIENT 2\n\nROKUJ\u014c/PATIENT 3/THE MADMAN\n\nK\u014cICHI/MOTHER\n\nKOREMITSU/JIR\u014c, little brother of AOI\n\nNURSE/PARKING LOT ATTENDANT\n\nOLD MAN/REAL ESTATE MAN\n\nYOUTH\n\nNote: The roles of the WOMAN, AOI, and ROKUJ\u014c are to be played by the same actress.\n\nPROLOGUE\n\n_A sandy beach. Rosy music. Pat Boone's 1950s hit song \"Love Letters in the Sand.\" A man loiters about_.\n\nMy beloved Aoi, how are you? I'm here at Izu; the wind has just died down. It's just the right time to write you a secret love letter in the sand. If my thoughts get through to you, please put on Pat Boone's \"Love Letters in the Sand,\" which we once listened to together, and read this my sweet letter to you. It's so full of sweet talk I'd be embarrassed if someone else read it. And, if the wind blows and destroys my love letter in the sand, I'll take it as a sign that the wind is a mailman delivering my love to you far away. Aoi, a gem so fine it wouldn't chafe even mounted in the eye. I've really got the hots for you. If I could, I'd have the mailman carry me on the wind to your arms. And then I'd corner you in the kitchen and really ravish you. So, Aoi, understand how I feel; I am hoping you won't be taking on dumb men. By the time the Fuji Circuit Grand Prix that you like so much begins, I'll be back for sure. Count on it. The hospital at Izu is depressing, so on my lunch break I always head to the beach, try to forget the world of the sick, and think only about you. Don't two-time me. Koremitsu at the hospital, who, as you know, has been my friend since our intern days, was saying that he would like to see you again\u2014now that you are engaged\u2014the next time he is in Tokyo. But he has a weakness for women, so be careful, OK? Aoi, my Aoi, let's definitely go to the Fuji Circuit Grand Prix. I can just see your face, listening to the roar of those huge engines, wearing your straw hat with the red sash. Until then, for a while, we'll be apart. Finally, I should share a perverse confidence with you. Aoi, listen carefully. The fact is that today while on my rounds at the Izu Hospital I met a married woman, someone I didn't know, who called me \"Darling,\" as if she were my wife.\n\nSCENE 1. THE HOSPITAL ROOM\n\n_The patients' lounge\u2014a flimsy affair partitioned by curtains and about as sturdy as a castle made of sand. Beyond a window with iron bars, the sea breeze is blowing. Splendid sunlight._ PATIENTS 1 _and_ 2, _a man and a woman_ ( _or two men_ ), _are playing house. The two bow repeatedly, then one of them sets about making preparations for supper going through the hand motions of slicing radishes. The other says, \"Mother is it ready yet?\" Then_ PATIENT 3 ( _the_ MADMAN)\u2014 _probably an ex-student gone wrong\u2014crawls around on the partition wall. There is also an_ OLD MAN _in a chair in the middle of the room, munching on a pear. He drops a bite of the pear onto the floor and looks intently at something. There is a_ WOMAN, _down on all fours, looking at the same thing. It is unclear what they are looking at_.\n\nCRAWLING MADMAN: Ladies and gentlemen who've gathered here. We must possess the resolve always to pay for our mistakes with respect to our own counterrevolutionary natures. For one counterrevolutionary action, we'll cut off a finger; for the second, cut off another; then another and, again, another. For ten such acts, we'll chop off all ten fingers. The reason we have to be worried is having only ten fingers when we notice eleven counterrevolutionary acts. The problem is where to find one more finger!\n\nOLD MAN ( _Pointing to the_ MADMAN _'s feet_ ): Don't step there.\n\nMADMAN ( _Pointing to the_ OLD MAN _'s finger_ ): It's not that kind of finger. \"My own unseen eleventh finger! That's what I'm looking for.\" Pull that finger back. In paying for your mistakes, you are definitely not to borrow another person's finger.\n\nOLD MAN: You SOB, I thought I told you don't step there!\n\nMADMAN: All you people, what's that you say?\n\nOLD MAN: You're stepping on the performers!\n\n(MADMAN _jumps aside._ )\n\nOLD MAN ( _Gets down on all fours_ ): Are they all right?\n\nWOMAN: Barely. ( _Shows him something she shields with her hand._ )\n\nOLD MAN: Good job.\n\nWOMAN: Not bad.\n\nOLD MAN: That much?\n\nWOMAN: Yes.\n\nOLD MAN: You want to try getting in that much?\n\nWOMAN: Don't you think it'll work out?\n\nOLD MAN: Yes, you can do it. Certainly, you can.\n\nWOMAN: They won't treat me mean?\n\nOLD MAN: You think anyone would treat you mean? They'll be your fans. You'll have fans. Look, they're all black, right? If you were to become one of them, don't you know you'd become the star overnight?\n\nWOMAN: But I want to start at the bottom.\n\nOLD MAN: I'm not so sure that's a good idea.\n\nWOMAN: I have to start at the bottom, or I'll never improve.\n\nOLD MAN: That may be so, but it's a group of circus ants. With your body, no matter how much experience you get at the bottom, you'd be like the Alps to those characters, no?\n\n(WOMAN _cries._ )\n\nOLD MAN: It does no good to cry.\n\nWOMAN: Say, Mister.\n\nOLD MAN: Don't bat your eyes at me.\n\nWOMAN: What about Gulliver?\n\nOLD MAN: Gulliver?\n\nWOMAN: Right. How was it Gulliver became good friends with the Lilliputians?\n\nOLD MAN: They tied him up.\n\nWOMAN: You mean, S and M?\n\nOLD MAN: No, no sexual passion to it.\n\nWOMAN: What about appetite?\n\nOLD MAN: Well, he must have been hungry, also. ( _Drops a bite of pear for the ants._ )\n\nWOMAN: I'm hungry too.\n\nOLD MAN: Want a mouthful of this?\n\nWOMAN: No.\n\nOLD MAN: OK.\n\nWOMAN: I...\n\nOLD MAN: There! Go on! ( _To the ants._ ) Suck the sweet juice, show us the way out. ( _Whereupon he squashes one, and the juice spills over._ )\n\nWOMAN: Once when I was peeping through a microscope, I dozed off. I believe it was in the science laboratory in fourth grade. When we looked at the bees swarming on flower petals, at some point I was drowsy and got lost in the bees' world and found myself in the bee fortress. They were waiting for the queen to be born any minute and getting terribly bloodthirsty; when the newborn queen came, they decided two females was one too many, and they chased me all over the place. When I woke up from the dream, I went home, and even sipping my soup at dinner, I couldn't forget that blood-tingling, flesh-crawling bees' world. It even made my soup taste bad.\n\nOLD MAN: That sort of thing was a good dream?\n\nWOMAN: I don't know whether it was a good or a bad dream unless I dream it some more.\n\nOLD MAN: In that case, you don't have time to be awake.\n\nWOMAN: That's right. I really hoped I could dream it one more time. But it never came back. Not in junior high or high school either. Zilch. So, then, that was it. I thought, from now on, I'd waste my life on men and money. I'd try to become an ordinary woman. But...\n\n(OLD MAN _looks at her inquiringly._ )\n\n(WOMAN _trembles._ )\n\nOLD MAN: Hey...\n\nWOMAN: Yes?\n\nOLD MAN: You all right?\n\nWOMAN: Ari, you know, an ant! Ari, aari!\n\nOLD MAN: Ali? Mohammed Ali has retired, you know.\n\nWOMAN: Ant. I had become an ant.\n\nOLD MAN: An ant?\n\nWOMAN: Ah, right.\n\nOLD MAN: Weren't you a bee?\n\nWOMAN: That's why I can get in without being tied up, can't I? Can't I start at the bottom in the ant circus, even without acting sexy?\n\nOLD MAN: If the ants say it's OK.\n\nWOMAN: But they all said we were ants and to say good morning when you meet one. In the evening, good evening.\n\n(OLD MAN _pauses._ )\n\nWOMAN: They all called that hole the secret exit. Sitting with knees drawn up for two days and two nights and nibbling on cookies, they swore they would wait, like ants in the ground. I have nothing in the way of a political creed, but I can become an ant. I was enticed by their idea of organizing ourselves like an army of ants, and at some point I got mixed in with them. But what with the bugs crawling on the back of your neck, and their not giving me anything decent to eat, I started to see things differently: I thought being taken on by the waiters in a cabaret boiler room would be a hell of a lot more fun than this. But I didn't so much as breathe a word about it. I'd had enough of this whole strategy. From the beginning I planned to make a run for it, if anything happened.\n\nMADMAN ( _Abruptly_ ): Back when the proletarian vanguard stormed the Bastille, what was the Marquis de Sade doing!?\n\n(WOMAN _walks aimlessly toward the window._ )\n\nMADMAN: Nay, what did they do to de Sade! Mindful of the women he sadistically abused with fart-filled bonbons, they went around setting fire to pages of his voluminous manuscripts.\n\nWOMAN ( _Looking at her feet_ ): Hey, the ants are crawling over here.\n\nMADMAN: Nevertheless, that's the reason Justine burned with passion they never dreamed about! Furiously burning like a cathouse sucking on eleven penises! Like a monster pussy sucking in a penis that will be cut off in atonement! ( _Unzips his trousers and sets fire to his pubic hair._ )\n\n( _He falls over in a burst of flame. Silence._ )\n\nWOMAN: Say there.\n\nOLD MAN: What is it?\n\nWOMAN: Is there sand on my back?\n\nOLD MAN: None.\n\nWOMAN: It's full of it.\n\nOLD MAN: Full of it?\n\nWOMAN: Look, when I straighten my back, it makes a sifting noise.\n\n(OLD MAN _pauses._ )\n\nWOMAN: Even then, when I was lying buried in sand, everybody trampled on me. When things got tough, I got scared, and I was grabbed by the police unit that rushed in, so I screamed out that I didn't do anything, that they lured me here, that if anything better comes along I'd quit right away\u2014I blurted out such awful stuff. While I was saying I shouldn't have come and how stupid I was, stuffing my mouth with sand and feeling some remorse, just then a lump of earth toppled over on me, and I really was about to become an ant buried in the ground. And so nobody said a word of criticism to me. First one left and then another until no one was there\u2014that's when he came up. Even while being chased by the cops, he came up and asked me to keep a pass with identity papers and an attached key. And then he piled sand on me and said he'd come again for sure, and he left.\n\nOLD MAN: Well, did he come again?\n\nWOMAN: No.\n\nOLD MAN: He was caught, wasn't he?\n\nWOMAN: Perhaps so.\n\nOLD MAN: Well, then, nothing left but to go home, was there?\n\nWOMAN: But I was there another two days.\n\nOLD MAN: How come?\n\nWOMAN: It really felt good.\n\n(OLD MAN _pauses._ )\n\nWOMAN: I'd suddenly sit up in the dark, grab sand, and pour it lightly on my bare nipples. I felt like a really bad woman, and then I'd squeeze it between my thighs. And when I'd squeeze them tightly together, almost as if to bind them, I felt as if I was giving birth to an outrageous sand monster. Forgive me. Does this sort of talk bother you?\n\nOLD MAN: I'm no longer young and....\n\nWOMAN: You no doubt think this is some lunatic confession, don't you?\n\nOLD MAN: \"Here now, here now, dance of the rabbit.\"\n\nWOMAN: \"Taratta, ratta, ratta, ratta, ratta, ratta.\" ( _Jumps about, kicks wall, and sits down._ )\n\n( _Such actions occur abruptly, symptomatic of schizophrenia._ WOMAN _laughs lightly._ )\n\nOLD MAN ( _Approaching her from the rear_ ): Boo!\n\nWOMAN: You don't scare me, you don't scare me.\n\nOLD MAN: Oh, I'm worn out.\n\nWOMAN: Say...\n\nOLD MAN: Huh?\n\nWOMAN: You see, I...\n\nOLD MAN: Yes, you....\n\nWOMAN: I, I'm not me.\n\nOLD MAN: Hm.\n\nWOMAN: Really!\n\nOLD MAN: Really?\n\nWOMAN: Since that time, I've had his pass and key, and I figured out where he works from his identity papers and paid a visit. To Ochanomizu. The autumn sky was very, very high. While looking down at that ditch of a river, I thought about a lot of things. That this is momentary. And that because it is, I'd just take care of this, then quickly get back home. But a woman who swears such a thing in her heart is, on the other hand, also one who sticks to a dreadful plan. And, when I was allowed into the office, before I knew it, I somehow...\n\nOLD MAN: Before you knew it, what?\n\nWOMAN: It went beyond a brief relationship.\n\nOLD MAN: You got on well with him?\n\nWOMAN: No, not all that well, but before I knew it I'd become his wife...\n\nOLD MAN: That is to say....\n\nWOMAN: That is to say?\n\nOLD MAN: Just like that, he got you in bed, didn't he.\n\nWOMAN: Not so! He didn't get me in bed. I only looked like his wife.\n\nOLD MAN: But a man who wouldn't do it to you is not a man.\n\nWOMAN: That's right. But, there in his office, nothing at all really happened. Even while I was politely allowed in as his wife, he never showed up. I couldn't meet him the next day either. So when I went again after several days, this time he used the old \"not-at-home\" excuse. Then, on the lunch break, when I once slipped in to pilfer the pass and key I'd left behind, this time I was called a thief.... So then I idled about for two or three days when I noticed I was standing in front of that hole that had caved in along with their Operation Ant. I thought I'd return the items I'd been entrusted with right to the hole, or, rather, I'd bury them there. At that point, I was caught by the police, who were reinspecting the scene of the crime. I was asked what this pass was. Of course, he was also contacted.... That's enough.\n\nOLD MAN: Why is that?\n\nWOMAN: I don't want to talk about it.\n\nOLD MAN: Did you want him to say you were his wife?\n\nWOMAN: No.\n\nOLD MAN: But did you want him to say you had some relationship with him?\n\nWOMAN: Yes.\n\nOLD MAN: And?\n\nWOMAN: He said I was troublesome.\n\nOLD MAN: That was his reaction?\n\nWOMAN: From his office they even put out a report of the theft to the police, and no matter what I said I didn't get across to them anymore.\n\nOLD MAN: I see.\n\nWOMAN: Then after several days of life in the detention house\u2014I couldn't take it, so I swallowed the cigarettes they'd given me.\n\n(OLD MAN _pauses._ )\n\nWOMAN: When I did, I ran a temperature, and they sent me to a hospital.\n\nOLD MAN: You were brought here, right?\n\nWOMAN: No. I put in to come here myself.\n\nOLD MAN: Why?\n\nWOMAN: You can hear the rolling of the sea....\n\nOLD MAN: But that's the only good thing...\n\nWOMAN: In addition, when I look at a line of ants, like this, I feel as if I can go anywhere, even to my old science room... and also when I talk about all sorts of things like this, sand monsters come out in swarms from inside my panties and ( _Sings._ ) hey, ta ta ta, ta ta ta....\n\nOLD MAN: One more time.\n\nWOMAN: What?\n\nOLD MAN: Sing that last part again.\n\nWOMAN ( _Sings_ ): Hey, ta ta ta, ta ta ta.\n\nOLD MAN: Thank you.\n\nWOMAN: Not at all, don't mention it.\n\nOLD MAN: I really thank you. I was wondering what I'd do without that nonsense refrain. Your confession is too consistent. There is nothing I can say about it. The only thing I can do is cheer up crazy kids. ( _Stands up and grasps her shoulders._ ) I really thank you. The last part got a little strange. But go ahead, put yourself into it. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it here just as much as you like!\n\n( _A clanging sound. The door has been opened. The_ NURSE' _s voice can be heard from the door._ )\n\nNURSE: Soon we'll be leaving, won't we? I heard so from Dr. Koremitsu, that you have a beautiful fianc\u00e9e waiting for you in Tokyo?\n\n( _Everyone looks in the direction of the voice._ PATIENTS 1 _and_ 2, _who are playing house, and_ PATIENT 3, _the_ MADMAN _who appears to be a student, start to speak all at once._ )\n\nPATIENT 1: Say, have you met his fianc\u00e9e?\n\nPATIENT 2: Well, Daddy, you probably won't like her.\n\nPATIENT 1: Whether I like her or not, I'm his father, you know.\n\nPATIENT 2: But, Daddy, you always say so and....\n\nPATIENT 3: What the hell is medical treatment to a doctor, anyway! What the hell is care to a patient!\n\nNURSE: Please be quiet.\n\nPATIENT 1: Mother, she says to be quiet.\n\nPATIENT 2: Am I not being quiet?\n\n(PATIENT 3 _crawls along the wall_. K\u014cICHI _stands behind the_ NURSE _for some time._ KOREMITSU _also stands behind the_ NURSE _for some time._ )\n\nNURSE ( _To_ K\u014cICHI _and_ KOREMITSU): This is about normal for the abnormal.\n\nKOREMITSU: I wonder if what you mean isn't that rather than the abnormality of normality we face every day, this is somehow more nakedly open?\n\nNURSE: Certainly it's more nakedly open, but is this \"openness\" a step forward? It's like fevers babies get that protect them in their own way. It's also a step backward.\n\nKOREMITSU: In that case, they're still not ready to go out into the world?\n\nNURSE: In stages, they could.\n\nKOREMITSU: If only we could know the number of stages.\n\nNURSE: I won't try to stop you from doing whatever you choose.\n\nKOREMITSU ( _To_ K\u014cICHI): This nurse here, she's a bit critical of what I'm doing.\n\nK\u014cICHI: You mean in this ward lounge?\n\nKOREMITSU: Well, for the time being it is a lounge, but I'm thinking about widening this wall more. In other words, when the patients get up in the morning, their enclosure will be bigger. A meter at a time so it's not noticed, till finally it becomes as big as a gym, and then we'll tear that wall down. In other words, with nothing at all to partition them off, the place will be a really spacious beach!\n\nNURSE: Who would be able to control such a large space?\n\nKOREMITSU: Control....\n\nNURSE: Look, even if you can control it, it doesn't mean a thing at all to the patients. You are thinking that space is freedom, but inside these people, it's too spacious, and they're not free. If you don't take that into consideration\u2014\n\nKOREMITSU: But who can say Adam and Eve weren't crazy?\n\nNURSE: Instead of that sort of thing, I'd worry about how to pay the plasterer who is going to widen the wall a meter at a time.\n\nKOREMITSU: Do that, and you'll douse my ideal, won't you? ( _Touches her rear._ )\n\nNURSE: Stop that, not here! ( _Sweeps his hand away._ ) Shall we go?\n\n( _Starts to leave._ )\n\nWOMAN ( _Taking a step forward_ ): Oh!... Darling...\n\nNURSE: Darling?\n\nWOMAN ( _Pointing at_ K\u014cICHI): Darling...\n\nK\u014cICHI: Me? ( _Pointing to himself._ )\n\nWOMAN: Don't you remember me?\n\nKOREMITSU: Tell her you do.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Y-yes.\n\nWOMAN: I am....\n\nK\u014cICHI: Do you need something?\n\nWOMAN: No, it's all right. ( _Tries to withdraw._ )\n\nK\u014cICHI: You are ( _Looks at the_ NURSE' _s clipboard._ ) Ms. Rokuj\u014d, aren't you?\n\n(WOMAN _says nothing._ )\n\nK\u014cICHI: Do you need something from me?\n\nWOMAN: If I could have you dispose of the sand that's accumulated on my back ( _With her back to him_ ), I think you will understand.\n\n(K\u014cICHI _is puzzled._ )\n\nWOMAN: Or else when I show it like this ( _Lifts up her hair_ ), I think I look like somebody...\n\n( _She is about to turn around, but the_ NURSE _steps between her and_ K\u014cICHI.)\n\nNURSE: Doctor, there's no end to this.\n\n(WOMAN _drops her hair strand by strand._ )\n\nOLD MAN ( _To the_ WOMAN): Do it, like that, like his wife!\n\nWOMAN: Right.\n\nOLD MAN: One more time.\n\nWOMAN: Darling!\n\nK\u014cICHI: What do you want with me?\n\nWOMAN: How many times have I called you \"Darling\"? It's three times. Three times. Please take note, K\u014dichi. The third of these three times surely clinches the truth.\n\nNURSE: How stupid. Let's go.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Yes.\n\nWOMAN: Wait. A little longer. Just a tiny bit.\n\nOLD MAN: Be crazy!\n\nWOMAN ( _Sings_ ): Ta, ta, ta..., ta, ta, ta....\n\n(PATIENTS _laugh_.)\n\nNURSE: Don't laugh without reason.\n\nWOMAN ( _Approaching_ K\u014cICHI): I'm leaving here tonight!\n\nK\u014cICHI: How?\n\nWOMAN: The ants.\n\nK\u014cICHI: The ants?\n\nWOMAN: Yes, I'll join the ant circus, and from their small house I'll come into your world. Look ( _Takes out a tree leaf._ ), I've even received a letter to this effect from the circus director. He's asking me to please come soon and be the star of the company\n\nK\u014cICHI: This is a leaf off a tree.\n\nWOMAN: No. It's a pass to the company. A pass.\n\nNURSE: Let's go. It's a classic insane declaration.\n\nWOMAN: I'm not insane! You're a devil!\n\nNURSE: Cut that out now!\n\nK\u014cICHI: Right, no need to get tough.\n\nWOMAN: Right, it's not good to get tough.\n\nNURSE ( _To_ KOREMITSU): Why aren't you saying anything at such a moment as this?\n\nKOREMITSU: The money for the plasterer....\n\nK\u014cICHI: So that's how it is. Well, it would be good if the director comes for you soon.\n\nWOMAN: He won't come for me.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Oh? He won't?\n\nWOMAN: I have to go. See, the ant circus will ride a boat made of pear peelings. It will go down a stream, and day and night it will splash right along. When the moon shines, it will look like a blue magic lantern to the crabs lurking on the river bottom. That's why, to overtake it, you have to fly along in a sonic dune buggy at two hundred kilometers per hour, racing along, kicking sand, cutting the wind. And then, tonight, I want you to park my dune buggy right beneath this window.\n\n( _Holds out a key._ )\n\nK\u014cICHI: Isn't this an apartment key?\n\nWOMAN: Do people who live in apartments have sonic dune buggies?!\n\nK\u014cICHI: Well, I'll take care of it for now.\n\n( _Takes key._ )\n\nWOMAN: I'm counting on you.\n\nK\u014cICHI: But unless you can slip away like an ant from a small hole in this room, you won't see any dune buggy.\n\nWOMAN: But didn't we once live like ants?\n\n(K\u014cICHI _is silent._ )\n\nWOMAN: Well.\n\nKOREMITSU: Yeah.\n\nNURSE: It's time.\n\n( _Opens door and leaves. Strained silence._ )\n\nWOMAN ( _To the_ OLD MAN): Say.\n\nOLD MAN: What?\n\nWOMAN: I made them think I'm crazy, didn't I?\n\nSCENE 2. THE CORRIDOR\n\n_The cloth at the front of the room falls with a rustle. It becomes a cloth corridor._ K\u014cICHI _and_ KOREMITSU _walk in_.\n\nKOREMITSU: What a blockhead you are.\n\nK\u014cICHI: I'm a blockhead?\n\nKOREMITSU: You're a blockhead. I wonder how a blockhead like you could become a doctor. You took the key, but what do you expect to come of it?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Now it doesn't mean I've taken her virginity.\n\nKOREMITSU: It amounts to the same sort of thing.\n\nK\u014cICHI: I took her key. How much value does a promise sworn to me in a patient's delusion really have? Is it something that she'll forget completely after several delusions? Or will she remember her promise, even if she forgets the delusions?\n\nKOREMITSU: You won't know unless you penetrate that woman's brain. If she begins to feel resentment toward you, it may be a sign of recovery, and if tomorrow she completely forgets about it, she's a normal patient. And besides\u2014\n\nK\u014cICHI: And besides?...\n\nKOREMITSU: Provided deep down she feels resentment toward you while her face shows she's completely forgotten; well, this means she leaves the hospital!\n\nK\u014cICHI: But that deep down feeling you don't understand. How do you propose to penetrate it?\n\nKOREMITSU: While I'm talking about you with her.\n\nK\u014cICHI: You'd use me as a tool?\n\nKOREMITSU: Right you are. As far as that woman is concerned, you are the black jack. What matters to her is where that one-eyed jack is looking.... Anyway, what are you going to do about the dune buggy?\n\nK\u014cICHI: I don't need that old thing.\n\nKOREMITSU: But from now on, wherever you go, won't you see the dune buggy that goes with that key?\n\nK\u014cICHI: If she could just slip out of here like an ant. ( _Darkness._ )\n\nSCENE 3. THE RACETRACK\n\n_The Pat Boone song_.\n\nVOICE: Darling. (K\u014cICHI _is silent._ )\n\nVOICE: Darling! ( _Louder and stronger_.)\n\n( _Suddenly, the sounds of race cars starting up one after another_.)\n\nAOI: What are you thinking about?\n\nK\u014cICHI: I was just thinking about the letter I sent you.\n\nAOI: Look, there! It's Kurosawa. Kurosawa's about to start. There, the yellow Porsche. He had a one-year suspension; this is his first start in a long time. He looks like a gentleman, but that man, once he's in his car, there's no telling what he'll do. ( _She is in pain from morning sickness_.)\n\nK\u014cICHI: Of all the dumb things. You are hurting from morning sickness because you look at Death when you're pregnant.\n\nAOI: That's so. But it doesn't hurt. Not at all.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Looks like it's threatening to rain.\n\nAOI: If it doesn't, it'll surely be a wicked, nasty race.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Did you get over your nausea?\n\nAOI: Argh.\n\nK\u014cICHI: What luck. We come all the way out to the track, and your morning sickness is awful.\n\nAOI: I don't like being a woman.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Why?\n\nAOI: The design of our bodies is a real pain.\n\nK\u014cICHI: God made it. It can't be helped.\n\nAOI: Listen, put your hand on my back.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Like this?\n\nAOI: It would be nice to have some grapefruit.\n\nK\u014cICHI: I'm having Jir\u014d go get some right now. Are you all right? Shall... should we go to the toilet?\n\nAOI: I'm fine, fine. If we go to the toilet, someone will take these good seats you went to such trouble for.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Jir\u014d's slow, isn't he?\n\nAOI: Would you get my handkerchief from my handbag, darling, my handkerchief?\n\nK\u014cICHI: We should have listened to your mother. But we couldn't wait until the ceremony she told us to stay conservative, inconspicuous, not to attract attention, to be newlyweds with a clean slate; but if somebody sees you suffering like this, there'll be no hiding what we did before the marriage then. Aoi, are you all right?\n\nAOI: K\u014dichi, put on that song, that song.\n\n(K\u014cICHI _switches on the Pat Boone song. Sound of a race car passing by_.)\n\nK\u014cICHI: Isn't it growing a little cold?\n\nAOI: A bit.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Shall we go back to the car?\n\nAOI: I'll stay here. But what about the grapefruit?\n\nK\u014cICHI: I'll go see.\n\nAOI: Please don't go.\n\nK\u014cICHI: But after it starts to rain, it'll be too late to go and see.\n\n(JIR\u014c _arrives_.)\n\nJIR\u014c: Hey, Sis.\n\nAOI: You're late, you bum. What about the grapefruit?\n\nJIR\u014c: Here you are.\n\nAOI: What took you so long?\n\nJIR\u014c: Late or not, the parking lot was packed, junk-heap jalopies getting in the way, and cars coming in one after another clogging things up. I could only barely get through to the car, slipping between other cars. It took some doing. Here's the key.\n\nAOI: This is not our key.\n\nJIR\u014c: Oh, this one's your key.\n\nAOI: Look, whose key is it?\n\nJIR\u014c: I met up with my buddies over there, and I'm going to their place for just a little while. You two go home together.\n\nAOI: Hold it.\n\nJIR\u014c: See you later.\n\nAOI: Jir\u014d. ( _Chases after him_.)\n\n( _Sounds of race cars zipping by. An announcer's voice. This noise changes to the sound of waves_. K\u014cICHI _squats down and scoops up a handful of gravel. As he does so, the words of his love letter suddenly flow from his mouth: \"My beloved Aoi, how are you?\u2014\" The_ WOMAN _approaches him_.)\n\nWOMAN: Doctor. Aren't you the doctor?\n\nK\u014cICHI ( _Vacantly_ ): Eh?\n\nWOMAN: It's me. It's me. Rokuj\u014d.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Rokuj\u014d?\n\nWOMAN: Yes. With my hair dyed like this, you might have forgotten me, but look, here I am, the Rokuj\u014d you ran into at the hospital in Izu.\n\n(K\u014cICHI _is speechless_.)\n\nWOMAN: You needn't be so surprised.\n\nK\u014cICHI: But...\n\nWOMAN: Yes, I left the hospital one month ago. The one you were just with, is she the one you're going to marry?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Yes. You said your name was Miss Rokuj\u014d?\n\nWOMAN: Your face says you still don't believe me.\n\nK\u014cICHI: The actual fact is I am surprised. I remember clearly what you spoke to me about....\n\nWOMAN: Oh, you do. When we were at the place by the sea, I spoke of absurd things. It may have been quite annoying to you. But now that I'm back in normal society, please forget all that.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Have you often been to the racetrack?\n\nWOMAN: No, it's my first time. Right now I'm doing cosmetic sales in this town, and by chance, I saw a poster on a telephone pole about some star named Kurosawa who, I thought, really looked like a person I'd met somewhere, so I brought my car right here. Then I unexpectedly bump into you, and we talk about old times. I wish it were that simple, but things are a lot more complicated. Actually, there was some trouble over at the parking lot, and I chased someone as far as here.... Doctor, do you have the key?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Key?\n\nWOMAN: The one who was here a little while ago, he's your brother-in-law, right?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Yes.\n\nWOMAN: Didn't he hand you a key?\n\nK\u014cICHI: What about it?\n\nWOMAN: It's my key.\n\nK\u014cICHI: What did you say?\n\nWOMAN: There was a mix-up in the parking lot. When I went to get a parking coupon, your brother-in-law deliberately moved my car, see, squeezed it to the back so he could get his car out easily. That's OK, but he even took my key.\n\n(JIR\u014c _comes running in_.)\n\nJIR\u014c: K\u014dichi, my sister over there!...\n\n(ROKUJ\u014c _recognizes_ JIR\u014c. _Seeing_ ROKUJ\u014c, JIR\u014c _jumps and tries to flee_.)\n\nK\u014cICHI ( _Grabs him_ ): What's happened to Aoi?\n\nJIR\u014c ( _Struggles to get away_ ): Go see for yourself.\n\n(ROKUJ\u014c s _tands directly in_ JIR\u014c _'s way and slaps him on the face_.)\n\nJIR\u014c ( _Falls over_ ): What the hell are you doing? You slut!\n\nROKUJ\u014c: You little bastard, you think you can take me for a fool!\n\nJIR\u014c: Who the hell is this character? ( _To_ K\u014cICHI.) Don't tell me you know her.\n\nK\u014cICHI: If you have the key, give it back right now!\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Uh, we have to close up now...\n\nWOMAN: I don't have my key...\n\nJIR\u014c: You want the key, it's right here. ( _Produces it_.)\n\nROKUJ\u014c ( _To_ K\u014cICHI): This is the one.\n\n(ROKUJ\u014c _tries to take it_.)\n\nJIR\u014c ( _Draws back_ ): First, decide which you want\u2014my sister or this.\n\n(K\u014cICHI _says nothing_.)\n\nJIR\u014c: She's collapsed with morning sickness!\n\nK\u014cICHI: Anyway, just give it back.\n\nJIR\u014c: So that's how it is. ( _Throws key_.)\n\n(ROKUJ\u014c _picks it up_.)\n\nJIR\u014c: Is that how it's going to be?\n\nK\u014cICHI: What do you mean?\n\nJIR\u014c: You and her!\n\n(JIR\u014c _leaves_.)\n\n(K\u014cICHI _starts to go look for_ AOI.)\n\nROKUJ\u014c: Doctor.\n\nK\u014cICHI ( _Stops briefly_ ): That was inexcusable. I apologize for him.\n\nWOMAN: You don't have to apologize. I don't like you apologizing to me.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Well, take care.\n\nWOMAN: Doctor, I'm no longer angry. Please convey this to your wife and her brother. That I'm not offended. That's right. ( _Opens her bag_.) This is what I'm selling now. Please give it to your wife to show there's no hard feelings.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Thank you. Well, take care.\n\nWOMAN: Also, I'm planning a business trip to Tokyo soon. I have a favor to ask you. If there is someone you know in real estate, I'd like to have them look into an apartment for me.\n\nK\u014cICHI: I can at least ask about it....\n\nWOMAN: Yes, that's all I want. Please. I'll be calling you. I'm sorry to lay this on you all at once.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Well, then. ( _Leaves_.)\n\nWOMAN ( _To self_ ): Oh, and Doctor, how wonderful it wasn't you that got burned to death just before the pit stop.\n\n( _The_ PARKING LOT ATTENDANT _runs in from the_ hanamichi.)\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: We have to close up now...\n\nROKUJ\u014c: Oh. ( _Heads toward_ hanamichi.)\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Is that your car?\n\n(ROKUJ\u014c _suddenly falls down_.)\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Madam! ( _Runs to help her_.)\n\nROKUJ\u014c: Say it once more.\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Huh?\n\nROKUJ\u014c: Madam.\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: What's happened to you?\n\nROKUJ\u014c: Nothing really.\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Do you feel bad?\n\nROKUJ\u014c: A bit nauseous....\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: That's not good. ( _Leans over_.)\n\nROKUJ\u014c ( _Places his hand on her stomach_ ): It's like something being stirred up in there....\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Oh, that's not good. ( _Pulls his hand away_.)\n\nROKUJ\u014c: What's wrong?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: My hands are unworthy of touching a woman's body. They take a tremendous beating in the parking lot. In the olden days, I'd be like a groom for horses. Please, madam, don't take hold of such hands as these.\n\nROKUJ\u014c: You...\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Yes.\n\nROKUJ\u014c: You have a sweetheart?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: No....\n\nROKUJ\u014c: But you must have at least one?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: It's no use.\n\nROKUJ\u014c: Why not?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Not someone like me.\n\nROKUJ\u014c: Why's that?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: I'm lacking something.\n\nROKUJ\u014c: You're not lacking anything.\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: No, I've already given up. It's always a holiday here.\n\nROKUJ\u014c: Holiday?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: It's a long, long Sunday, madam, so I'm accustomed to seeing everything that way. And you're telling me to be attached to someone?\n\nROKUJ\u014c: Are you weeping?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Does it look like I am?\n\nROKUJ\u014c: That, or it could be something else.\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: That's because you're looking at my shadow.\n\nROKUJ\u014c: Your shadow?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Look, it's wavering there, isn't it? ( _Sways his body._ ) But a shadow'll just get blown away by a big storm someday. Then I can tell you who I am, if you want.\n\nSCENE 4. THE ROOM\n\n_While the conclusion of the previous scene is taking place on the_ hanamichi, _the stage is changing into_ AOI _'s house._ AOI _'s_ MOTHER _and_ K\u014cICHI _are in front of the sliding doors. The two are playing cat's cradle. Their shadows fall against the sliding doors_.\n\nMOTHER: Why didn't you come earlier?\n\nK\u014cICHI: I just didn't know there was a call for me at the hospital. How is Aoi?\n\nMOTHER: The rain that day must have cast an evil spell on her. The fever won't go down.\n\nK\u014cICHI: I'm sorry I didn't take better care of her. Even though I was with her, I noticed hardly any change. If only it were a simple cold.\n\nMOTHER ( _Referring to cat_ ' _s cradle_ ): Oh, there, you've got to do it like this.\n\nK\u014cICHI: But isn't it like this? ( _Their game may continue if it takes time for_ AOI _to enter._ )\n\n( _Sounds of sliding doors opening._ )\n\nAOI: Mother, who's there?\n\nMOTHER: It's K\u014dichi.\n\nAOI: The \"cosmetics\" you gave me recently was pomade, not cosmetics.\n\nK\u014cICHI: But I asked for cosmetics, and that's what I bought.\n\nAOI: My face got all chapped from being in bed so long, and when I put some of the stuff on a while ago it got sticky and stuck to the pillow. I was just now cleaning it off with a tissue. That's why I'm so annoyed, see, the things men buy! Where did you pick that stuff up?\n\n(K\u014cICHI _says nothing. The telephone rings._ )\n\nMOTHER ( _Answers_ ): Yes, this is Miyamoto. K\u014dichi? Just a minute, please.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Thanks. ( _Takes telephone._ ) Hello.... Hello....\n\nAOI: Who is it from?\n\nK\u014cICHI:... Hello? ( _Hangs up._ )\n\nAOI: What a strange call. Mother, would you throw out the stuff in this wastebasket? It still smells.\n\nMOTHER: I'l1 go change your ice pack.\n\nAOI: Yes.\n\n( _The_ MOTHER _opens the sliding doors and goes out._ )\n\nAOI: Hey, come here, come a little closer.\n\nK\u014cICHI: How long have you had a fever?\n\nAOI: Since I left you. Also, my stomach sometimes cramps up.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Your fever doesn't seem terribly bad, but I'm concerned about your stomach.\n\nAOI: Tell me, where did you go?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Huh?\n\nAOI: After that, you saw my brother, didn't you?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Yeah.\n\nAOI: I called your place all night long.\n\nK\u014cICHI: I just met up with an old friend.\n\nAOI: Tell me, do you still smell it?\n\nK\u014cICHI: What?\n\nAOI: Put your face a little closer. Doesn't that pomade smell?\n\nK\u014cICHI: No.\n\nAOI: Perhaps you met her?\n\nK\u014cICHI: What are you trying to say?\n\nAOI: At times like this, my intuition is clear. You went to return the key, didn't you?\n\n(K\u014cICHI _says nothing._ )\n\nAOI: I heard it from my brother. That you did everything but beat it out of him, and then he finally handed it over to her.\n\n( _The telephone rings._ )\n\nK\u014cICHI ( _Answering_ ): Yes?\n\nWOMAN'S VOICE: Uh, Doctor? It's me. Excuse me for calling you in such a place.\n\nK\u014cICHI: What is this?\n\nAOI: Who's it from? Who's it from?\n\nWOMAN'S VOICE: Finally today I found a room. This is with your help. Thank you. And one more thing. Tomorrow if possible I'd like to celebrate in that room my new life in Tokyo. Do you think you could come by?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Just now I'm terribly wrapped up with something...\n\nWOMAN'S VOICE: Wait, I also want you to return my key.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Your key? Haven't I returned it?\n\nWOMAN'S VOICE: I don't have it yet. Look, it's the key I once gave you in Izu. Heh, heh, heh, if I can't have it back, I won't be able to ride in the vehicle of my dreams. I'm sorry. That's a joke, just a joke.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Enough's enough, please. ( _Hangs up telephone._ )\n\nAOI: What is she saying to give back?\n\nK\u014cICHI: A key.\n\nAOI: Not this key, is it?\n\nK\u014cICHI: How did you get that?\n\nAOI: When you came back from Izu. I found it stuck in a corner of your suitcase. I didn't think it was the key to your room, but I thought I'd try it once to find out.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Throw it away, Aoi, throw that thing away.\n\nAOI: This is that woman's room key, isn't it?\n\nK\u014cICHI: That's stupid.\n\nAOI: Since when, since when have you taken up with that crazy woman?!\n\nK\u014cICHI: What do you mean? Give it here. I'll throw it away for you!\n\nAOI: No. This is my key! You think you can take it away? Just try. Look, here and here. ( _Laughs in a strangely husky voice_.) Ha ha ha ha, the key you love is here. You can tell by the scent of pomade on it. Let's turn out the lights, shall we? While you grope about catching the scent of my pomade, you can crawl slowly over here. Listen, darling, darling, darling, darling\u2014why do you make me call you as many as four times? Please come closer.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Aoi, pull yourself together, Aoi.\n\nAOI: What are you going to do?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Aoi.\n\nAOI: No. Because my body's still clean and unsullied, ha ha ha, ha ha ( _Gradually her voice turns into_ ROKUJ\u014c _'s_ ), I say no. What're you doing, climbing up on top of me? Isn't your sweetheart waiting for you somewhere? You don't need to be concerned with a woman like me. It's better if you move on quickly. I say no. Don't touch my breasts. I won't have it. I won't. Do you hear me? I'm going to leave here. I'll be leaving this hospital, and when I do, then I'll let you. What do you think you're doing? You're hurting my stomach. Where's my director.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Aoi, it's me. Do you understand? Aoi!\n\n( _Ambulance siren in the distance slowly takes over the slightly feverish dynamic between these two._ AOI _'s hollow laughter._ )\n\nAOI: I won't give you the key. Absolutely not! You think I'd go back to that kind of hospital?!\n\nK\u014cICHI: Aoi.\n\nSCENE 5. ON THE _HANAMICHI_\n\n_The_ PARKING LOT ATTENDANT _and the_ OLD MAN _are drunk, stumbling about and hanging on one another._\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Are we going to get there soon?\n\nOLD MAN: No, not yet, not yet.\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Do you really have a house?\n\nOLD MAN: Do I look like I don't have a house?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: That's not what I meant. Just that before, when I picked up a person who'd fallen over drunk like this, he started to look for his former house, and when we got near the Edo River, he said to cross it....\n\nOLD MAN: Well, did you?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: No way. We couldn't really swim across, so we take an old boat, and when we're about halfway, he thrusts his hands into the water and calls out the name of his dead son.\n\n(OLD MAN _vomits._ )\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Are you all right?\n\nOLD MAN:... Then, what happened then?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Morning came.\n\nOLD MAN: What are you?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Huh?\n\nOLD MAN: I said, what are you?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Let me see.\n\nOLD MAN: What the hell are you!?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: I'm me.\n\nOLD MAN: You lie.\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: You say I lie, but I'm just being myself.\n\nOLD MAN: But not everyone acts like you.\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Is that so?\n\nOLD MAN: They run around frantically just looking out for number one. Are you doing this to drunks!? ( _Makes a sign with his finger to indicate a pickpocket._ )\n\n(PARKING LOT ATTENDANT _looks at a dim light in a room in front of them._ )\n\nOLD MAN: What are you looking at?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: The little....\n\nOLD MAN: You mean the little happiness of home?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: No.\n\nOLD MAN: Then, what, what, what?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: The little flickering flames of the will-o'-the-wisp.\n\nOLD MAN: Hmm.\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Kind of hazy, like they're taking shelter in each one of those apartments over there. Sometimes they're beyond the discotheque and other times in the big appliance stores in Akihabara. I'm sorry, you're not the one who's drunk, it's me.\n\nOLD MAN: Even you can....\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Even I can what?\n\nOLD MAN: Even you can be happy someday.\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: It won't work. Not for me.\n\nOLD MAN: But you're young.\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: No, I'm dead.\n\nOLD MAN: Dead?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Look.... ( _Puts the palm of his hand on the_ OLD MAN.)\n\nOLD MAN ( _Withdrawing_ ): You're young. Still so young, aren't you?\n\n( _Exits._ )\n\n( _Silence._ )\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT ( _Lends his shoulder to an imaginary person_ ): Well, old fellow, let's go.\n\nSCENE 6. THE ROOM\n\n_The echoing sound of an ambulance leaving_.\n\nWOMAN'S VOICE: Doctor, Doctor.\n\n( _Sound of ambulance farther away_.)\n\nWOMAN: Doctor!!!\n\nK\u014cICHI: What?\n\nWOMAN: What happened to you?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Was I having a bad dream?\n\nWOMAN: Yes. You looked really terrible. I didn't intend to wake you up.\n\nK\u014cICHI ( _Gets up_ ): Didn't an ambulance just go by?\n\nWOMAN: There's an emergency hospital right behind here.\n\nK\u014cICHI: I see.\n\nWOMAN: I wanted to invite your wife too. Will you give her my regards?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Yes. May I have some more wine?\n\nWOMAN: Sure. Well, how is she now?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Well, women during pregnancy on occasion will experience some confusion.\n\nWOMAN: Confusion?\n\nK\u014cICHI: She speaks with your, with your voice.\n\nWOMAN: Don't say such a frightening thing to me!\n\nK\u014cICHI: I've seen that sort of spirit medium before, but it never occurred to me that she was capable of such a stunt.\n\nWOMAN: Does she really sound exactly like me?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Not like you, it is you.\n\nWOMAN: Is it acceptable for a scientist to say such things?\n\nK\u014cICHI: It was the same thing with that other spirit medium. I couldn't forget the younger female factory worker who had worked together with me when I was eighteen. So I asked the spirit woman to enter the spirit world and call her back. But you know what became of her? She got separated from herself. In other words, at the moment she entered into the spirit world, she began to look for her real self that had possessed that girl, using the voice of that female factory worker.\n\nWOMAN: But I haven't been looking for your wife or anything like that.\n\nK\u014cICHI: No, but you are always there in the palm of her hand.\n\n(WOMAN _pauses_.)\n\nK\u014cICHI: Do you remember the key you gave me in Izu?\n\nWOMAN: Let's stop talking about that.\n\nK\u014cICHI: You did give me the key, and it's the one that's in Aoi's hand right now.\n\nWOMAN: Really?\n\nK\u014cICHI: That's why, you know, when she closes her fingers around it, she can change into you and also speak with your voice.\n\nWOMAN: I have no intention of being an apparition of a living person, and for that matter, I've got no reason to possess her.\n\nK\u014cICHI: The cosmetics you gave me, wasn't it some pomade?\n\nWOMAN: I wouldn't call it cosmetics, my goodness, Doctor. Didn't I say pomade?\n\nK\u014cICHI: You said pomade?\n\nWOMAN: That's right.\n\n(K\u014cICHI _says nothing_.)\n\nWOMAN: Why are you looking at me like that?\n\nK\u014cICHI: It's that smell.\n\nWOMAN: Huh?\n\nK\u014cICHI: You have on the same stuff now too, don't you?\n\nWOMAN: Yes, the same stuff.\n\nK\u014cICHI: You still have a lot of it?\n\nWOMAN: Huh?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Don't you have ten or twelve dozen in the closet?\n\nWOMAN: What are you getting at?\n\nK\u014cICHI: This is half used already, but I'll return this jar to you. And the key, too, that you left with me at the hospital in Izu. A little while ago, I snatched it from her hand while she was sleeping. I want to return all this to you.\n\nWOMAN: You didn't come to congratulate me, did you?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Here, I've set everything here.\n\nWOMAN ( _Places her hand on his_ ): And then...\n\nK\u014cICHI: And then?\n\nWOMAN: What about the dune buggy?\n\n(K\u014cICHI _pauses_.)\n\nWOMAN: Didn't you promise? That if I could sneak out like an ant, you'd have the dune buggy waiting for me?\n\nK\u014cICHI: You've even got me aboard that invisible vehicle?\n\n(WOMAN _laughs lightly_.)\n\nK\u014cICHI: Why would you do that?\n\nWOMAN: What do you mean?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Why did you say such things back then? I've been thinking about it ever since. And why is it you remember only those kinds of things?\n\nWOMAN: Because you were my you.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Do you think you could speak clearly?\n\nWOMAN: Don't you think everything is clear?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Is this what you mean by being clear? You weren't crazy. You were faking it. You found your way into the field of mental rehabilitation, and finished your training just for fun. And even now, you would \"insert\" me into your laughable experience.\n\nWOMAN ( _Grasps his hands_ ): That's not so.\n\nK\u014cICHI: OK, just try and tell me in what way you were crazy!\n\nWOMAN: In all sorts of ways.\n\nK\u014cICHI: What the hell's that mean?\n\nWOMAN: I... I'm...\n\nK\u014cICHI: What's this climbing all over me!\n\nWOMAN: I can't say it well, but I was thinking only of you. It was a one-way passage. Whether my one-way ticket made me brood like that over you, I can't tell, but at some point everything about the time when I met you somehow or other came into focus for me. And I wanted to know more, to taste more. I had no intention of becoming your wife, but from the time I was told I resemble your wife, it was a greater honor than being in your wife's place. These thoughts will surely not amount to real-life happiness. They're just something really very tiny, like peeking through a microscope, like a brass key and sand and ants being hemmed in together. But from long before, ever since I was a child, I wanted to go back there and was hoping someone would take me.\n\nK\u014cICHI: It's not that I don't understand what you're saying...\n\nWOMAN: Please understand.\n\nK\u014cICHI: But it doesn't have to be me.\n\nWOMAN: If not, why did you entrust the key to me?\n\nK\u014cICHI: The key is....\n\nWOMAN: To me, small as an ant?\n\n( _Sound of knocking on the door._ )\n\nMAN: Excuse me. Miss Rokuj\u014d. Miss Rokuj\u014d.\n\nWOMAN: She's not here.\n\nMAN: You say not, but she's here, isn't she?\n\n( _He opens the door._ )\n\nMAN: Is there a Mr. K\u014dichi here?\n\n(WOMAN _does not answer._ )\n\nMAN: How about it, he's here, isn't he?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Who is this?\n\nWOMAN: It's the real estate man.\n\nK\u014cICHI: What do you mean, coming here so late?\n\nMAN: I'm sorry she badgered me into directing her here at all costs.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Who did?\n\nMAN: She said her name was Aoi.\n\nK\u014cICHI: What are you saying? Aoi's supposed to be in the hospital.\n\nMAN: She was in the hospital? No wonder she was so pale and very much in pain, but she implored me to bring her here.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Well, where is she?\n\nMAN: She's there.\n\nK\u014cICHI: There?\n\nMAN: There, there. My god! She's been eavesdropping on the two of you....\n\nK\u014cICHI: Aoi....\n\n( _Rushes out of the room_.)\n\nWOMAN: Say.\n\nMAN: Yes.\n\nWOMAN: How is it outside?\n\nMAN: It's very....\n\nWOMAN: The wind is whistling?\n\nMAN: Not only the wind.\n\nWOMAN: What else?\n\nMAN: Something.\n\nWOMAN: What something?\n\nMAN: It's really awful.\n\nWOMAN: Then, for a sick person...\n\nMAN: Right, it's rough.\n\n(K\u014cICHI _returns, slumps to the floor_.)\n\nWOMAN: Did you look in the direction of the pedestrian overpass?\n\nK\u014cICHI: No.\n\nWOMAN: She must be there. ( _Goes out_.)\n\n(K\u014cICHI _and the_ REAL ESTATE MAN _remain._ )\n\nMAN: I'm sorry. Perhaps I shouldn't have accompanied her.\n\nK\u014cICHI: How did she know?\n\nMAN: Huh?\n\nK\u014cICHI: How did she know about this place?\n\nMAN: May I have a piece of cake?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Maybe....\n\nMAN: May I have a piece of cake?\n\nK\u014cICHI: The wind is....\n\nMAN: Well.... ( _Nibbles on cake_.)\n\nK\u014cICHI:... blowing from this apartment toward the hospital, isn't it?\n\nMAN: Yes.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Then the fragrance of the pomade may well have wafted that far and....\n\nMAN: No, the fact is she received a phone call.\n\nK\u014cICHI: A phone call?\n\nMAN: Yes. That said you were here.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Who from?\n\nMAN: I don't know. She said that's why she ran over dressed like she was, and she showed me her bare feet stuck with glass.\n\nVOICE: Darling.\n\nK\u014cICHI: What?\n\n( _Stage grows dark_.)\n\nAOI: Darling, I'm here.\n\n(K\u014cICHI _looks up and sees_ AOI _kneeling on one of the ceiling crossbeams. Startled, he is speechless_.)\n\nAOI: I've been here all along.\n\nK\u014cICHI: What are you doing there?\n\nAOI: So you were at her place.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Come down.\n\nAOI: Don't come near me. I'm about to bear your child. I don't want anything to do with a father who'd fool around with that sort of woman. I'm saying don't come near me! A while ago, when I woke up in bed, my key was gone. I knew what had happened. But while I was dozing off again, the phone rang. It was a strange call, someone like me was calling me. Even her face I could vaguely see. And a feeling came over me like I could forgive everything. Because being attracted to a person like me means, after all, that you won't forget me.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Just a minute.\n\nAOI: K\u014dichi, you're the one who will be my husband. Both in the past and now I've decided it would be that way, and that's why I've been intimate with you. And so from now on, too, you are the one who must be my eternal husband. Listen closely, K\u014dichi. I will remove from your eyes forever that woman Rokuj\u014d. Forever! When I do, you and I will be alone, and until that time comes, you are not to approach me. K\u014dichi, she is going to disappear just like that from in front of us.\n\n( _She stands up. The lower half of her body is covered with blood_.)\n\nK\u014cICHI: Aoi! Come down from there!\n\nAOI: Darling, listen well to my voice. Do you know who I am? Look, this key, the key she left there, I picked it up. Now, the key is in my hand again\u2014the wind will be blowing from here to there. Then you will surely smell this very pomade. Well, come on, turn out the lights all over Tokyo, and grope your way over here. (AOI _'s voice_.) I am Rokuj\u014d, your wife, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.\n\n( _She leaps down from the lintel with her full weight and stops with a jerk in midair. She is hanging by her neck; the key slips out of her hand and falls to the floor. Music_.)\n\nSCENE 7. A SANDY BEACH\n\n_The sound of waves from afar. This is the beach by_ KOREMITSU _'s hospital in Izu_.\n\nKOREMITSU: Well, what will you be doing from now on?\n\n(K\u014cICHI _says nothing_.)\n\nKOREMITSU: Any idea? Don't you plan to be at the hospital in Tokyo?\n\n(K\u014cICHI _still says nothing_.)\n\nKOREMITSU: You should take a trip somewhere. Stay for even half a year at such a remote hospital and you have to long for the craziness of the city again.\n\nK\u014cICHI: No, I'm not going on a trip.\n\nKOREMITSU: Well, what are you going to do?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Would you admit me here to room number six?\n\nKOREMITSU: What?\n\nK\u014cICHI: I want to get to the bottom of what that woman was thinking in that room.\n\nKOREMITSU: You're carrying this game too far.\n\nK\u014cICHI: C'mon. Just get me into that room.\n\nKOREMITSU: What can you learn in a place like that?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Things about me reflected in that woman's eyes, things about Aoi, who has died.... When I think about it now, she didn't say the pomade was pomade. She simply handed it to me, but there's no doubt she even had in mind that Aoi would mistake it for something to put on her face.\n\nKOREMITSU: Do you hate Rokuj\u014d that much?\n\nK\u014cICHI: When I think of Aoi, crushed as she was like a ripe tomato, you can't imagine how much.... ( _Utters a groan_.)\n\nKOREMITSU: It simply won't do for me to put you in that room.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Why, why not?\n\nKOREMITSU: I'm telling you, being in that room with your frame of mind, you won't learn a thing about Rokuj\u014d!\n\nK\u014cICHI: You're wrong, you're wrong! What I'd learn is how Rokuj\u014d recovered her health so quickly!\n\nKOREMITSU: If I could answer that question, I would not be this kind of doctor!\n\nK\u014cICHI: You're the one who stirred her up so she'd be obsessed with me.\n\nKOREMITSU: Hey, hey, do you know what you're saying?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Before, why didn't you take charge of the key I got from her? You just let me have it! You took me, your friend, as a guinea pig and used me so that that woman would completely recover!\n\nKOREMITSU: You say that, and you're a doctor in the mental ward?\n\nK\u014cICHI: I am a patient. That's why I'm telling you to just get me in room number six.\n\nKOREMITSU: But look, there's no place here to put the likes of you, a seriously ill person!\n\nK\u014cICHI: There's room number six, room number six.\n\nKOREMITSU: Right now it's filled with less seriously ill patients.\n\n( _The_ NURSE _approaches_.)\n\nNURSE: Doctor, there's someone who says he wants to meet someone.\n\nKOREMITSU: Meet with a patient?\n\nNURSE: No, with you. It's about the patient in room number eight.\n\nKOREMITSU: Ah, that one who wants to pay for his mistakes with his ten fingers?\n\n( _The man comes out. It is the_ PARKING LOT ATTENDANT.)\n\nKOREMITSU: Yes?\n\n( _The_ PARKING LOT ATTENDANT _lowers his head has something wrapped with a large cloth in his hand. Somehow he resembles the patient who had set fire to his pubic hair_.)\n\nKOREMITSU: What's on your mind?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: This. ( _Holds out the cloth bundle_.)\n\nKOREMITSU: What is that?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: It's underwear.\n\nKOREMITSU: You want to deliver it?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Directly, if possible.\n\nKOREMITSU: I wonder if we could manage that.\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Doctor.\n\nKOREMITSU: Yes.\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Concerning my older brother, I believe I have given you letters for some time....\n\nKOREMITSU: Right. I took a look at them.\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: If he wants to grovel against the walls, he can do that in my apartment too. If he wants to set fire to his \"eleventh finger,\" I could even buy him a substitute from an adult toy store.\n\nKOREMITSU: Hmmm....\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Recently I caught the students playing mah-jong and made them confess. My older brother was only caught in the dorm toilet by a med student whose part-time job was hunting up patients. Don't you think a job like that is odd, if crying all alone in the restroom means you're crazy?\n\nKOREMITSU: However, he can't in fact take care of himself, can he?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: I'm thinking I'll give him a ride on the ferry.\n\nKOREMITSU: On the ferry?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: The ferry that crosses the big river. It's a river big as an ocean where once several hundred fingers were washed ashore from a neighboring country. Even with swollen, rotting fingers and the corpses and garbage drifting about in the river, if he just gives himself over to the trip, he'll free himself of the walls where he cringes and buries his voice. I thought he'd understand that. Doctor, my older brother is a fragile man, like a virgin. Did you see his white fingers? Did you hear his cramped, bird-like voice? Those things are stains of the city that fly away when he clings to a rusty deck and gulps down the river wind. Otherwise, how shall the blood-curdling, flesh-tingling juvenile classics make our hearts boil?\n\n( _In the distance, the siren sounds, ending lunchtime_.)\n\nKOREMITSU: Well, anyway ( _To the_ NURSE), look after the underwear for him.\n\nNURSE: Yes. ( _Tries to take it_.)\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: No. You people won't deliver it. You'll only wonder if there isn't something in them and even take out the rubber from the briefs\u2014you would cut open even a tube of toothpaste with a knife\u2014and in the end you'd deliver a discarded husk.\n\nNURSE: Don't be rude.\n\nKOREMITSU: Let's go.\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Doctor. ( _Grabs him_.)\n\nKOREMITSU: What? Why are you putting a hand on me?\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: Please look closely at my face. My older brother looks like me, doesn't he? I'm the younger brother. When we were kids and I'd force my hand into the milk bottle and look at my hand and cry at how weird it looked, my brother would look at me and laugh. But now that hand has become my brother's face. Why? Doctor, why did my wrist look so weird then? And why does my brother act so strange now? It's because he is on the other side. On the inside of the glass bottle\u2014behind the iron bars! And while we're here wasting time, that other side is gradually moving farther and farther away from us.\n\nKOREMITSU: Hey, take it easy.\n\n(KOREMUTSU _pushes the_ PARKING LOT ATTENDANT _away_.)\n\nPARKING LOT ATTENDANT: If you don't believe me, throw me into the hospital for just as long as my brother has been here. And ( _Grasps a handful of sand_ ) I give my word to you on these smoothly crumbling playing cards of sand that even while acting like my older brother, if you put your ear to my breast, you can hear the gong of the ferry crossing the river!\n\n( _Music_. KOREMITSU _and the_ NURSE _exit. The_ PARKING LOT ATTENDANT _stands in silhouette. The sand spills from his hand. Sound of waves. Lights upon_ K\u014cICHI. _He is writing in the sand a love letter he once wrote_.)\n\nK\u014cICHI: My darling Aoi, how are you? I'm here at Izu; the wind has just died down. It's just the right time to continue my love letter to you that I once wrote in the sand. If my thoughts reach heaven, please put on Pat Boone's \"Love Letters in the Sand,\" which we once listened to together, and read this my sweet letter to you.\n\n( _Sound of frothy waves. A woman\u2014it is_ ROKUJ\u014c _herself\u2014peeks out from behind the silhouette of the_ PARKING LOT ATTENDANT. _It's as though she has emerged from his shadow._ )\n\nWOMAN: Doctor.\n\nK\u014cICHI: So it's you, isn't it, the one standing there.\n\nWOMAN: I heard from Dr.. Koremitsu that you were at the beach.... I won't stay long. I'll be going soon.\n\nK\u014cICHI: And you'll call to me again from behind?\n\nWOMAN: No, I probably won't be calling you again.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Are you going away somewhere?\n\nWOMAN: Yes. To a place where you'll be out of reach even if I tried to call you.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Good-bye.\n\nWOMAN: You even went to room number six, didn't you? Dr.. Koremitsu told me. And also that you really have it in for me.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Let's forget it. Haven't I said good-bye? I beg of you, won't you leave me alone? I'm just now writing a letter.\n\nWOMAN: Yes, I know. I read it.\n\nK\u014cICHI: I wasn't writing it to you. I...\n\nWOMAN: It's for Aoi, isn't it?\n\nK\u014cICHI: That's right. I have to choose the right moment when the wind calms and write quickly.\n\nWOMAN: But now, with waves washing up, look, it's completely disappeared, hasn't it?\n\nK\u014cICHI: Then I'll write it any number of times. Any number of times.\n\nWOMAN: No, it's one time only for love letters written in the sand. High tide will be coming on.\n\nK\u014cICHI: Now, you've made me forget what I was writing.\n\nWOMAN: Doctor, look, I know I've been a big nuisance to you, but I've come here because it occurred to me that there was at least one thing I had to give back before we part.\n\nK\u014cICHI: The tide is rising. Look there, the waves are as far as where I was sitting a while ago.\n\nWOMAN: Yes, now the love letter you wrote in the sand, you can no longer see it.\n\nK\u014cICHI: The wind has gotten stronger, hasn't it?\n\nWOMAN: Doctor, no need to write love letters to heaven anymore. I'm the one who had your pass and key, who was looking down that day at that ditch of a river and was mistaken for your wife when I went to your office. I'm right here.\n\nK\u014cICHI: You're Rokuj\u014d.\n\nWOMAN: Listen to my voice, close your eyes and listen to my voice, because the thing I must give back to you is this very voice. My voice that didn't answer when you called to me in that shrine of a sand hole I was in. If you had heard it then, we might have gotten by without taking this sort of roundabout route. But I knew that, unless worked twice as hard at it, the memory of that ant that you've forgotten and forsaken would never cut its way into your heart.\n\nK\u014cICHI: All that is...\n\nWOMAN: Don't talk. Just be silent and look over there. My tongue is the waves in the sea. It has completely licked away the love letter you gave me. Now then, try closing your eyes slowly. It's like there's a big lens above our heads, and sunshine is pouring through, like we're in a big laboratory That's right. That's the spirit. We'll be getting smaller and smaller now, we'll enter the world of the microscope.\n\nK\u014cICHI ( _Intending to kill her_ ): You, you're Rokuj\u014d, Rokuj\u014d from room number six! ( _Grabs her by the neck, and pushes her down_.)\n\nWOMAN ( _Turning the tables and getting on top of him_ ): No, there's no room number six here. No Rokuj\u014d here. We have to go slowly back home, like this.\n\n( _Throws a handful of sand. The two writhe about in the sand, and as though dragged into it, they disappear like ants going back into the sand._ )\n\nCURTAIN\n_POISON BOY_\n\nTERAYAMA SH\u016aJI\n\nTRANSLATED BY CAROL FISHER SORGENFREI\n\nTerayama Sh\u016bji, _Poison Boy_ , directed by Terayama Sh\u016bji, Tenj\u014d sajiki, 1978. (Courtesy of Terayama World)\n\nPoet, playwright, director for stage and screen, photographer, essayist, and novelist, Terayama Sh\u016bji (1935\u20131983) exemplified the experimentalism and edgy imagination of Japanese culture in the 1960s and 1970s. Born and raised in Aomori Prefecture in Japan's north by a domineering mother (his father died in the war), Terayama was already a published poet of classical _tanka_ and haiku in his teens before distinguishing himself as a writer for radio, stage, television, and screen. Chronic liver illness prevented him from graduating from Waseda University and eventually killed him after a brief, yet brilliant, life. His first stage play, _Blood Is Standing Asleep_ ( _Chi wa tatta mama nemutte iru_ ), staged by Asari Keita in 1960, signaled a fascination with sex and rebellion that runs throughout his work. The same year, his radio play _Adult Hunting_ ( _Otonagari_ ; it was made into the film _Emperor Tomato Ketchup_ [1970]), about a children's revolt against society, created a sensation similar to Orson Welles's radio adaptation of _War of the Worlds_ (1938), since many listeners initially seemed unaware it was fiction. Terayama came into his own as a playwright and director in 1967 when he established his troupe, Tenj\u014d sajiki, named after the Japanese title of Marcel Carn\u00e9's classic film _Les enfants du paradis_ (1945). French writers like Comte de Lautr\u00e9amont, Georges Bataille, and, above all, Antonin Artaud were powerful influences on his concept of theater as a countercultural weapon. As Terayama's drama evolved, it became less lyrical and text based and increasingly shocking and metatheatrical, breaking theatrical convention, audience expectations, good taste, and sometimes even the law. His reputation traveled worldwide after tours in Europe and the United States beginning in the late 1960s. Representative plays include _The Hunchback of Aomori_ ( _Aomori-ken no semushi otoko_ , 1967), _La Marie-Vison_ ( _Kegawa no mar \u012b_, 1967), _The Dog God_ ( _Inugami_ , 1969), _Heretics_ ( _Jash \u016bmon_, 1971), and _Lemmings_ ( _Remingu_ , 1979). Like his thirty-hour-long street-theater epic _Knock_ ( _Nokku_ , 1974), the play featured here, _Poison Boy_ ( _Shintokumaru_ , 1978), was co-written with Kishida Rio. Based on a medieval tale (the source for the n\u014d play _The Blind, Stumbling Monk_ [ _Yoroboshi_ ] and possibly even inspired by Euripides's _Hippolytus_ ), Terayama's play portrays the incestuous love of a mother for her son, a perennial theme in his work. Evoking the myths, folkways, and superstitions of his native Aomori, _Poison Boy_ also marks a return for Terayama to more conventional forms of dramatic narrative after more radical experiments like _Knock_ and _Heretics_ , with their encounter of audience and actor.\n\nKishida Rio (1946\u20132003), who is responsible for parts of _Poison Boy_ , was part of Terayama's company from 1974 to 1977, when she began working on her own theater projects. It is not clear who wrote which sections of the final script. She collaborated with Terayama on other works and, with his approval, began to write plays about women's issues and formed her own company. Later, she developed an interest in politics and wrote and staged works critical of Japan's colonial policies in prewar Korea. She worked with such notable directors as Suzuki Tadashi, and her interest in international cooperative projects resulted in several projects undertaken with Singapore's Ong Keng Sen, including a version of _King Lear_ involving actors from many traditional Asian genres speaking their own languages and using Japanese subtitles.\n\nA musical extravaganza based on a chanted Buddhist tale ( _Sekky \u014d-bushi_).\n\nFirst performed in June 1978 at Kinokuniya Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo.\n\nCharacters\n\nSTEPMOTHER / TEACHER\n\nNARRATOR / FEMALE STUDENT\n\nFATHER\n\nSHINTOKU\n\nSENSAKU, SHINTOKU's stepbrother\n\nSIDESHOW BARKER\n\nYANAGITA KUNIO / MALE STUDENT 1/STAGEHAND\n\nMALE STUDENT 2/STAGEHAND\n\nLEADER OF THE SIDESHOW TROUPE, ON CRUTCHES / MALE STUDENT 3/STAGEHAND\n\nBABY-KILLING WOMAN 1 (DEMON / GODDESS KISHIMO)\n\nBABY-KILLING WOMAN 2 (KISHIMO)\n\nSIDESHOW PERFORMER: AIR PUMP SELF-INFLATING MAN / DWARF BOY\n\nISSUN-BOSHI (THE ONE-INCH BOY)/BIG-HEADED LUCKY GUARDIAN DWARF\n\nFEMALE SUMO WRESTLER / KISHIMO\n\nMALE MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENT\n\nKISHIMO / SIDESHOW GO-BOARD GIRL\n\nOBI GIRL / PHANTOM MOTHER 1\n\nDWARF GIRL / PHANTOM MOTHER 2.\n\nLONG-NECKED FEMALE MONSTER IN SIDESHOW / PHANTOM MOTHER 3\n\nPHANTOM MOTHER 4\n\nPHANTOM MOTHER 5\n\nPHANTOM MOTHER 6\n\nSTAGEHAND 1\n\nSTAGEHAND 2\n\nSTAGEHAND 3\n\nSTAGEHAND 4\n\nPROSTITUTE\n\n[In addition, not listed in the script are _a_ BEGGAR, _a BIWA_ CHANTER, and _a_ STUDENT DRESSED IN TAISH\u014c STYLE.]\n\n1. THE MERCIFUL CUCKOO\n\n_A_ KUROGO, _beating wooden clappers, is walking around through the audience seats, the dressing room, the stage, and so on. Near the wings, another_ KUROGO _is setting up a roadside Buddhist altar. The stage is veiled in dusk. After he is done, one_ KUROGO _makes a sound like a cuckoo, singing out \"horo-horo.\" Then the other does the same, as if he is responding to the call. As the second, the third, and more cuckoos join in, darkness falls. All of a sudden, the sound of a temple bell is heard from somewhere. As if this were a signal, the_ KUROGOS _disappear, and the theater is plunged into pitch darkness_.\n\n_When the altar candle is lighted, a_ BEGGAR _is seen, cradling a_ biwa _in his or her arms as though it were his or her child. He or she is playing the_ biwa.1\n\n( _Song_.)\n\nI gaze afar\u2014what flutters by?\n\nLook! A butterfly,\n\nMy mother's ghost\n\nAppears upon my palm.\n\nA hundred times I write her name,\n\nTill hand and tomb become the same.\n\n( _On the temporary stage in the middle of the audience, a_ FEMALE STUDENT _with her back turned is bouncing a ball. A blindfolded_ MALE STUDENT _in a navy blue kimono with a splashed pattern passes by and, without taking off the blindfold, talks to the_ FEMALE STUDENT.)\n\nMALE STUDENT: Well, excuse my abrupt question...\n\n(FEMALE STUDENT, _without turning, keeps bouncing the ball_.)\n\nMALE STUDENT: Are there any railroad tracks around here?\n\n(FEMALE STUDENT _keeps bouncing the ball_.)\n\nMALE STUDENT: I heard a whistle several days ago, and I've looked all over, but no matter where I go, I can't find the tracks. ( _Without being asked_.) I wonder if the train I'm supposed to take has already left, or if it hasn't yet arrived.... Hey, you. Am I lost?\n\n(FEMALE STUDENT _keeps bouncing the ball_.)\n\nMALE STUDENT: I have to hurry; my body is being eaten away by leprosy. I wanted to see my biological mother at least once before I die, so I found a nurse who is supposed to know her whereabouts, but last year on New Year's Eve, the nurse took her three-year-old child and ran away from her husband. All I wanted was to see her face at least once, so I asked them to show me her photograph, and to my surprise, I saw that my mother had no face.\n\n(FEMALE STUDENT, _bouncing the ball, turns around. We see that she, too, has no face. Like pelting rain, the_ CHORUS _sings_.)\n\n( _Song_.)\n\nWeeping and longing for Mother, no longer devout,\n\nWhen suddenly, a temple bell rang out:\n\n\"Go-wong! Go-wong!\"\n\nIt seemed to shout. No time to cry.\n\nA dream or reality? Was it meant to be?\n\nThe present world means nothing to me.\n\nThe Me of the past, my tragic plight.\n\nThe midmonth moon was full that night\n\nWhen Mother died,\n\nWhen Mother died.\n\n( _With each stanza, a light is lit in the sideshow tent. A signboard can be seen, on which is written such things as \"Rare Species and Deformed Specimens,\" \"Tokyo Freak Show,\" \"Issun-b \u014dshi\u2014The One-Inch Boy,\" \"The Two-Faced Midget,\" \"The Go-Board Girl,\" \"The Man with an Upside-down Head on His Neck,\" \"Fukusuke, the Balloon-Headed Dwarf: He's the Guardian of Good Fortune,\" and so on._\n\n_A faceless_ BARKER _checks customers' shoes at the door. The faceless_ LEADER OF THE TROUP _, who is on crutches, pulls the curtain of this one-penny sideshow to reveal the faceless_ SNAKE GIRL. _A few faceless_ CUSTOMERS _are gathering under the signboard. As though blown into hell by a violent wind, the_ MALE STUDENT _stands there, speaking involuntarily_.)\n\nMALE STUDENT: Ah, there's that train whistle again.... I want to see the train that I'm going to take!\n\n( _So saying, he takes off his blindfold. Suddenly, a black curtain falls, closing the eyelids of the stage. Blackout_.)\n\n2. THE SNAKE GIRL\n\nNARRATOR: These are the seven flowers of autumn: Bush clover, Japanese pampas grass, creeping vine, yellow maiden-flower, boneset, balloon flower, and one other that I can't recall.\n\nAfter the evening sun sinks behind the forest of Mount Seto and everything is shrouded in darkness, the sideshow performers who, again today, have had no customers, start putting things away. Issun-B\u014dshi, the one-inch boy who has two faces, is folding a banner.\n\nIt has been many years since the sounds of laughter and applause from inside the show tent spilled out into the precincts of the shrine behind the military base. Now, though the autumn wind blows through the tent, it blows in no customers. Once in a while, neighboring village children run into the tent without paying admission, playing hide and seek, turning over straw mats that are strewn about, or unrolling hanging ones. Long ago, a little girl burst into tears and begged for help, and the crippled shoe-check man who used to drag himself along the ground was so charmed by her that they married. Weeds have popped up among the shadows, growing so tall that their tops have become red. Daily life for the show people is the same as always, except for occasional rumors like the one about the electrician who ran off in the dead of night carrying a bundle wrapped in arabesque-patterned cloth. \"Ah, autumn again,\" says the troupe leader, \"I fear there may be no more lotus flowers.\" Still, if you listen carefully.... ( _Then, as traditional_ jinta _circus music gets louder, the_ VOICE OF THE MALE BARKER _is heard from somewhere, like an auditory hallucination_.)\n\nBARKER: Come one, come all! See our sideshow exhibits\u2014These are the real things\u2014don't settle for fakes!\n\nJust the other day, a lovely, glowing baby girl popped out of her mother's belly, but her whole body is covered in scales. She has a human face and a snake's body. That's right, just take a peek. Come on in, you can pay later, just come on in and take a gander. She's devouring a live rooster right now.\n\nI don't know whether or not she likes them or if she just eats chickens because she's sick, but she eats one every day. Would I lie to you? I'm not making this up. She's a real, honest-to-goodness Snake Girl. I wonder what terrible sins her mother committed to have such karma. Hey, you can pay later, please come on in and take a look.\n\nBe careful, it's dangerous to get too close to her. Sometimes when she sees a young man, a handsome fellow, her sexual instincts are aroused, since she's beginning to grow up.\n\n( _A woman shrieks \"Kyaaah!\" and roaring laughter is heard_.)\n\nBARKER: Yes, now you know, she bites. Hey, hey, look. The lights in the tent are turned off. The Snake Girl will jump out and crawl slowly all over the stage, from one end to the other, using her snake's lower body.\n\nLook carefully and you'll see which part of her snake belly she uses. In the dark, her lovely scales glimmer, looking so pure.... When she slowly raises her snake body to stand tall and erect, making eerie sounds like rain drizzling, please clap your hands. Now!\n\n( _And phantom applause\u2014soon, a gust of wind blows, drowning out the applause. Then silence returns_.)\n\n( _During the preceding,_ SHINTOKU _and his_ FATHER _enter, push aside the door made of straw mats hanging at the entrance of the dressing room, and peep inside. They seem to be discussing something._ FATHER _lights a pipe with a small metal bowl and smokes, but soon he gives it to_ SHINTOKU _so he also can smoke_. SHINTOKU, _although he is still a middle-school student, does not flinch, and deeply inhales. Then_ ISSUN-B\u014cSHI, THE ONE-INCH BOY, _dragging a woman's red obi, comes out of the straw-mat door._ FATHER _and_ SON _can't help looking at it, then hide themselves in the shadows. The obi seems to stretch on forever._ )\n\n( _Song_.)\n\nThe length of an obi measures quite well\n\nThe escape route for wives\n\nTrapped in kimono-shop hell.\n\n( _After_ ISSUN-B\u014cSHI _runs away,_ SHINTOKU _and_ FATHER _boldly push open the straw-mat door. Then, they see that the dressing room is completely empty and nobody is there. A bright light illuminates only a set of Girls' Day dolls displayed on a five-tiered stand_.)\n\nNARRATOR: Driven into a corner by poverty, the troupe started to sell its young women in order to eke out a living.\n\nThe Dog Woman, whose show had been popular in Tokyo, no longer got down on all fours but stood up straight, and the Snake Girl removed her scales. They did up their hair and gleefully left the tent with nary a backward glance, hiding fringed pink _nadeshiko_ flowers in a set of facing mirrors.\n\nTo disguise the sale as an act of pious charity, they used a catchphrase. It was \"We donate mothers to families who lack them,\" but the only buyers were a carpenter from Rice-Selling Town whose wife had deserted him, and a drunken, childless rickshaw driver. However, there had once been a widowed policeman and also a widowed teacher who had each come with their children to buy a second wife.\n\n\"What do you think, Shintoku, about that woman with her hair done up in an old-fashioned chignon?\"\n\n\"...\"\n\n\"I like her. Her face is a little thin, but she has a finely chiseled nose. She is much more beautiful than your dead mother.\"\n\n\"Dad, that's a snake woman.\"\n\nFather laughs and doesn't listen to him, and says, \"What fool takes a sideshow trick seriously?\" and he chooses as his second wife a woman who looks sexy even when she sleeps.\n\n(SHINTOKU, _unable to bear it any longer, takes a black cloth out of his pocket and covers his eyes with it, like a blindfold. In a flash, everything in the sideshow tent is once again gaudily colored._ )\n\n( _Quiet melody, with alternating voices_.)\n\n( _Song_.)\n\nLayered kimono | Upon her breast  \n---|---  \nFirmly placed | One hand is pressed | Spiritual strength | Upon that breast  \nTinged with blue | It gleams: Grotesque!  \n_Namu Amida Butsu_ | Longing for Stepmother's raven hair,  \nSo glossy, black | The boy's beguiled, but should beware!\n\nFor as the Mother sleeps,\n\nHer snakelike spirit writhes\n\nAnd from her body slowly creeps.\n\n(STEPMOTHER _arises, as if abruptly wakened from a dream. Looking around, she loosens her chignon, the hairstyle she kept while she was sleeping, and takes out the fringed pink_ nadeshiko _flower that she had hidden in her black hair_.)\n\n_Nadeshiko_ flower, called Fringed Pink:\n\nOf autumn's seven, the forgotten link.\n\nIt burns upon a woman's skin\n\nAnd leaves a scar like deepest sin.\n\n(STEPMOTHER _starts to walk calmly, having_ FATHER _carry the fringed pink_ nadeshiko _and a package bundled up with cloth that was beside her pillow._ FATHER _follows her happily. A gust of wind blows, and_ SHINTOKU _crouches down, with his face covered._ )\n\n3. THE LONG-HORNED BEETLE: CRIMES AT A NATIONALIZED ELEMENTARY SCHOOL\n\n_A_ KUROGO _erects a blackboard and writes \"morals\" on it with a piece of white chalk. Other_ KUROGOS _bring in school desks. Four_ STUDENTS _, including_ SHINTOKU _, come in and take seats, each in his own way. Before we realize it, the temporary stage in the center of the audience has turned into a classroom._\n\nSTUDENT 1: Kidnapped by a wild goose.\n\nSTUDENT 2: Who was?\n\nSTUDENT 1: My dad.\n\nSTUDENT 3 ( _Smoking a cigarette serenely_ ): Liar. He just died.\n\nSTUDENT 1: He flew off to heaven. Kidnapped by a wild goose.\n\nSTUDENT 3: He was a carpenter who fell off a roof. How dumb can you get?\n\nSTUDENT 2 ( _Laughs_ ): \"There once was a teacher who planned to make all the orphans lift up their hands.\"\n\nSTUDENT 3: \"Among forty-nine\n\nSTUDENT 2: \"Only one boy did pine\"\u2014Hey, raise your hand!\n\n(STUDENT 1 _raises his hand_.)\n\nSTUDENT 2: \"On the way home from school, his classmates all said:\n\nSTUDENT 3: 'You'll never have friends since your father is dead.'\"\n\nSTUDENT 1: \"He's in heaven, I know it, I know it, I do!\"\n\nALL: \"With rocks for his mattress, as stupid as you!\"\n\n(SHINTOKU, _alone without joining in the chorus, keeps a bottle on his knee, as if it were something important. He covers the top with his hand so the inside cannot be seen. From somewhere far away, a_ BOY SOPRANO _is heard, singing, \"Wild geese in the sky/In lines they do fly.\"_ )\n\nSTUDENT 2: Talk.\n\nSTUDENT 3: What about?\n\nSTUDENT 2: Who cares?\n\nSTUDENT 1: The first evening star just came out!\n\nSTUDENT 2: Erased, erased, I erased the evening star. No more evening star.\n\nSTUDENT 3: You can't just decide to erase it.\n\nSTUDENT 1: We'd get lost on our way home.\n\nSTUDENT 2: Yeah, well, my eraser can erase your way home, too. I've bought an eraser that can erase anything.\n\nSTUDENT 1: Huh?\n\nSTUDENT 2: I've bought an eraser that can erase anything.\n\nSTUDENT 3 ( _Stubbing out his cigarette_ ): Let me see it!\n\nSTUDENT 2: No, if I show you, you'll steal it.\n\nSTUDENT 3: No, I won't. I just want a peek.\n\nSTUDENT 2 ( _Shaking his head_ ): You think I don't know what's on your mind? You're gonna rub me out; then you get to be the teacher's pet.\n\nSTUDENT 1: She's really swell, that hot new teacher, ain't she!\n\nSTUDENT 2: You're practically drooling.\n\nSHINTOKU ( _All of a sudden, as if vomiting it out_ ): I hate her!\n\nSTUDENT 2:...\n\nSHINTOKU: Teachers like her, they disgust me!\n\n( _Without being noticed, a_ FEMALE TEACHER _comes in and stands right behind_ SHINTOKU. _Hearing_ SHINTOKU _'s abuse, her beautiful eyebrows bristle up, and a whip in her hand starts to tremble slightly due to her anger._ )\n\nTEACHER ( _Trying to keep her composure_ ): Somebody was smoking secretly again, wasn't he?\n\nALL THREE ( _Banging down their desktops at the same time_ ): Not me, ma'am.\n\n(FEMALE TEACHER, _holding her hands behind her back, circles_ the STUDENTS. _She happens to see the bottle on_ SHINTOKU _'s lap._ )\n\nTEACHER: What's this?\n\nSHINTOKU ( _Hides it quickly._ )\n\nTEACHER: Show me! What's inside?\n\nSHINTOKU ( _Stubbornly keeps his lips tightly shut._ )\n\nTEACHER: So, then I must assume it's a bottle for cigarette butts, right? ( _Takes it in a violent manner._ ) Give it to me. ( _She takes hold of it and discovers an insect inside._ ) Oh, it's a bug, and it's shining like black velvet or enamel. Those long feelers look like a pair of scissors.\n\nSTUDENT 2: Teacher, ma'am, it's a long-horned beetle.\n\nTEACHER: A long-horned beetle?\n\nSTUDENTS 1, 2, AND 3 ( _Imitating the sound of a long-horned beetle_ ): Kicchi, kicchi, gii gii gii.\n\nSTUDENT 3: It bites off a woman's hair and eats it.\n\nTEACHER ( _Touches her hair involuntarily_ ): What a horrible bug! ( _Suddenly she starts to speak in a coaxing voice._ ) Shintoku, why are you keeping a bug like this?\n\nSHINTOKU ( _Without answering, he grabs the long-horned beetle and puts it back in the bottle and covers it with his hand_ ):...\n\nSTUDENT 1: Ma'am, Shintoku said that he was planning to have the bug eat all of his mother's hair! ( _Bursts into laughter._ )\n\nALL: Kicchi, kicchi, gii gii gii.\n\nSTUDENT 3: His mother will become bald!\n\n(STUDENTS _burst into laughter again._ )\n\nTEACHER: Why would you do such a thing?\n\nSHINTOKU: Because she's my stepmother.\n\nTEACHER: Lots of stepmothers are nice. And from what I've heard, your mother is very religious, isn't she?\n\nSHINTOKU: She panders to Buddha to make up for bullying her child.\n\nTEACHER: You know that's a terrible thing to say, don't you?\n\nSHINTOKU ( _Strongly, as if challenging her_ ): Teacher, ma'am!\n\nTEACHER:...\n\nSHINTOKU: My stepmother looks just like you.\n\nTEACHER:...\n\nSHINTOKU: I think that maybe you're really my stepmother, my fake mother. My real mother had short hair that was always warm, like grass in the summer sun. But both you and my stepmother have long, coal-black hair like the feathers of a wet raven.\n\nTEACHER ( _Without noticing, her way of talking gradually begins to sound like the_ STEPMOTHER _'s_ ): Now, I understand your real motive, Mr. Shintoku. You plan to drive your new mother away, although she's finally settled comfortably in your home, isn't that right? Not only that, you're trying to make your mother and your stepbrother Sensaku lose all their hair until they go bald. That's your plan, isn't it? First a divorce, then TB, and after that, freak shows in a fifty-cent sideshow tent, snakes, ill will, ropes, handrails, crippled babies, newspaper articles, and cherry-blossom viewing. Now, pay attention, Class. See how I punish a boy who fails to follow instructions. Let this be a warning. Look carefully. ( _Caustically._ ) Shintoku, drop your trousers and let us see your bare buttocks!\n\n( _Lifts the whip_. STUDENTS, _all together, start to shake their bodies and make sounds of long-horned beetles._ )\n\nALL: Kicchi, kicchi, gii gii gii.\n\nKicchi, kicchi, gii gii gii.\n\n(SHINTOKU _pulls down his pants halfway. Action freezes when the_ TEACHER, _with furrowed brow, lifts the whip_.)\n\n( _In the distance, a_ BOY SOPRANO _can be heard singing an elementary-school song, but transposed into a higher key._ )\n\n( _Song_.)\n\nOh cherry tree, | Oh cherry tree  \n---|---  \nThat grows beside the schoolhouse door  \nMy son it was | Who planted thee  \nMy son who died | In long past war  \nOh cherry tree, | Oh cherry tree  \nThat once our family's grave did grace,  \nMy son it was | Who planted thee,  \nDug up and carried | To this place.  \nOh cherry tree, | Oh cherry tree  \nOnce shorter than a twelve-year-old  \nMy son it was | Who planted thee  \nTwo stories tall | You've grown tenfold!\n\nKicchi, kicchi, gii gii gii.\n\nKicchi, kicchi, gii gii gii.\n\nSHINTOKU ( _Suddenly, all alone, he comes out of the tableau vivant_ ): Now! If I race back home really fast, I can get there before she does. Then I'll be able to see if it's really true that Stepmother is disguised as my teacher. Fly away, you long-horned beetle! ( _He runs off at full speed, as fast as a thrown stone!_ )\n\n4. THE TRANSFORMATION OF KISHIMO, THE MERCIFUL GODDESS WHO DEVOURS HER OWN CHILDREN: A PORTRAIT OF HELL\n\n( _Slowly, chanted narrative accompanied by the_ biwa.)\n\nThe shortcut home from school:\n\nJump the railroad track,\n\nZip through the alley in back\n\nOf the geisha house,\n\nTurn right at the tobacco shack.\n\nAt the second telegraph pole, I halt\n\nAnd do a mental somersault again today:\n\nHer kimono's dyed with letters of red,\n\nHair's twisted round combs behind her head\n\nLike the Mother I recall\n\nAfter her bath when I was small.\n\nNARRATOR: Muttering, \"It can't be...\" Shintoku stops, then follows her for few steps but realizes that it was a mistake\u2014she's not his birth mother\u2014and he rushes into his own house.\n\n( _The sound of the wooden clappers, and a thirty-watt bulb lights up. Seated around a low dining table are_ SHINTOKU _'s_ FATHER, STEPMOTHER, _and_ SENSAKU, _who is the_ STEPMOTHER' _s child from a former marriage. Koto music is heard, overlapping with the continuous announcements on_ \" _Missing Persons_.\" SHINTOKU, _his school bag on his shoulders, hurries in and opens the sliding door, which makes the sound_ \" _gara gara._ \" _He is astonished to see_ STEPMOTHER _sitting there._ )\n\nSHINTOKU: Oh no! How could that bitch be back already?\n\nNARRATOR: He is so surprised that he almost stops breathing. He thought he'd get home before his stepmother, who had been disguised as his schoolteacher today, but she must have taken a shortcut and arrived home early enough to be waiting for him with the dinner already prepared.\n\nSTEPMOTHER: Shintoku, you're so late coming home.\n\nNARRATOR: She says.\n\nSTEPMOTHER: Now, let's have dinner. Go on, be quick and wash your hands and feet.\n\n( _A gust of wind makes the hanging lightbulb swing, and it seems to be about to go out. A short musical performance describes the family. All four people face front, each carrying a rice bowl and chopsticks._ )\n\nSENSAKU: Father, please give me the Mother card of the family of Mr. Ieo Mamoru, the Home Protector.\n\nFATHER: I don't have it. Mother, please give me the child of Mr. Money-Tree Kaneno Narukichi.\n\nSTEPMOTHER: Someone has taken one of my cards. Sensaku, please give me the pet dog of the Nation Protector Kunio Mamoru family.\n\nSENSAKU: I don't have it. Father, please give me the Mother of the Home Protector Ieo Mamoru Family.\n\nFATHER: I don't have it. I already told you that I don't have it. Mother, please give me the Mother of the Money-Tree Kaneno Narukichi family.\n\nSHINTOKU: My turn never comes. Even though I have four matching cards.\n\nFATHER: Mother, please give me the Mother of the Money-Tree Kaneno Narukichi family.\n\nSHINTOKU: I've got that one.\n\nSTEPMOTHER: Well, I don't, and it's my turn. Sensaku, please give me the child of the Nation Protector Kunio Mamoru Family.\n\nSENSAKU: Someone's taken one of my cards. But no matter how long we play, if we can't get any Mother cards, we'll never finish the \"Family Reunion\" game.\n\nSTEPMOTHER: That means...\n\nSENSAKU: Someone's been hoarding them all.\n\nFATHER: All four of the same cards.\n\nSENSAKU: What's more, they're all Mother cards,\n\nSTEPMOTHER: Hoarded in sweaty palms,\n\n( _The_ CHORUS' _s song seems to flow from this line._ )\n\n( _Song_.)\n\nHoarded in sweaty palms\n\nThe Mother cards all look the same.\n\nIn the Family Reunion Game\n\nShall I toss them in the flowing stream?\n\nOr late at night, when others dream,\n\nBury the cards in a vacant lot?\n\nComing or going, ready or not,\n\nStraight across town, to some other place.\n\nLeaving or coming, I crave your face.\n\nA temple novice, a year times three,\n\nOr selling rice, five years for me?\n\nWhat should I do?\n\nWhere should I be?\n\nMy devilish Stepmother's\n\nFresh-washed hair\n\nOn her bare neck again: I must beware.\n\nHateful Hateful\n\nTreated like dirt, I hurt\n\nUntil one day, I become a puppet of clay.\n\nEven puppets of clay\n\nWill surely transform to human form\n\nAfter searching the city for a trace of your face.\n\n5. THE MYSTERIOUS DR. YANAGITA KUNIO\n\nSHINTOKU, _slipping out alone, stares at the long-horned beetle in the bottle, shining in the dark. After one clap of the wooden clappers, the lights on the house upstage go off, and out of the blue, a_ DEMOBILIZED SOLDIER _appears, standing in front of_ SHINTOKU.\n\nSHINTOKU: Oh, it's you, dear old Dr. Yanagita.\n\nYANAGITA: I'm glad you remember me. Indeed, I'm the very same Yanagita Kunio.\n\nSHINTOKU: You're dressed very strangely today, aren't you?\n\nYANAGITA ( _Taking off false whiskers_ ): These long, raggedy whiskers are fake. Yesterday, I wore this pair of pince-nez glasses. I change my appearance every day.\n\nSHINTOKU: The day before yesterday, I saw a picture of you in _Boys_ ' _Club_ magazine. If I remember correctly, you wore a black mask.\n\nYANAGITA: Right. And when we last met, I was an air-pump man in a derby hat. Before that, I was a projectionist at the Station-Front Cinema, and before that I ran the Rising Sun Lunch-Box Shop and supplied lunches to the military academy. And before that I was an astronomer who observed the scattering\u2014from almost two miles up in the air\u2014of flyers promoting a new department store. I have been hanging around you for a long time. It's just that you didn't notice.\n\nSHINTOKU: So, you're not a lightbulb salesman today, are you?\n\nYANAGITA: I decided not to do that anymore. Lightbulbs simply light themselves, but they don't light up a house. On top of that, the more light a bulb casts in the space below where it hangs, the darker the space surrounding it. In the dark, a dwarf will always turn over a tatami mat and start plowing the rice field. Good harvests or bad harvests, they're all due to that demon electricity.\n\nSHINTOKU ( _Overwhelmed by the magician-like movements of his hands_ ):...\n\nYANAGITA: So, starting today, I've decided to change my policy and sell this instead. ( _And he takes out something like a round, black piece of cardboard._ )\n\nSHINTOKU: What is it?\n\nYANAGITA: A hole.\n\nSHINTOKU ( _Surprised_ ): A hole?\n\nYANAGITA: Yes, a hole.\n\n( _The mysterious_ THEME SONG OF THE HOLE _begins to engulf the night._ )\n\nYANAGITA ( _Perhaps he sings_ ):\n\nThis single thing,\n\nIf you stick it firmly on the wall,\n\nYou can dive right through, then fall\n\nInto the other side.\n\nYou can exit anywhere, worldwide\n\nWith nothing but this!\n\nLike rubber, it can expand or shrink,\n\nAs fast as a wink. Take it anywhere\u2014Just think!\n\nFold it small,\n\nAnd it's a peephole through the wall.\n\nSpread it wide upon the floor,\n\nAnd voila! A brand new trap door.\n\nSHINTOKU: It's unbelievable! To think that you can carry around a hole.\n\nYANAGITA: Just watch this trick:\n\nPut it on the ground,\n\nThen lickety-split,\n\nYou slide right down into the hole you've found.\n\nSHINTOKU: Dear old sir! ( _Boldly._ ) Could you please let me buy this hole?\n\nYANAGITA:\n\nI can lend it for free,\n\nBut sell it? That can't be.\n\nIt's being invented,\n\nIt's not yet perfected.\n\nFor instance,\n\nWhat about the lid?\n\nListen, kid: I still don't have a solution.\n\nSHINTOKU:\n\nSo, it's possible\n\nTo let me borrow it, right?\n\nYANAGITA: But only for a day.\n\nSHINTOKU: Thank you, Gramps! ( _He takes the hole in his hands and puts it on the ground._ )\n\nSHINTOKU:\n\nCan I really go down to the underworld?\n\nHow deep is the hole?\n\nIs there a ladder?\n\nWhat if, as soon as I step into it,\n\nI fall down, tumbling head over heels?\n\nThat's what I'm afraid of.\n\n( _Looks inside_.)\n\nWow, it's pitch-dark.\n\nIt's as though the sky is underground,\n\nAnd in it, the galaxy is shining.\n\n( _He looks up_.)\n\n(YANAGITA KUNIO _is no longer there._ )\n\nOh! He's disappeared!\n\n( _Looking around._ )\n\nWell, now's as good a time as any.\n\n( _He dives into the hole. Halfway down_.) Oh!!\n\n(SHINTOKU _cries out. Everything goes black. It is not clear whether his head got stuck or if he fell down head over heels; it is like a great nebula, a black hole in the galaxy. The_ THEME SONG OF THE HOLE _emanates from the underworld, overwhelming the stage_.)\n\n6. OSHIRA-GAMI (THE GUARDIAN GOD OF FARMERS) IN HELL\n\n_In the dark, a sound like digging in the ground. And an echo like water dripping in a limestone cave. After a while, the voices of people in hell calling one another flow in seductively, as if a mandala is being woven by lotus threads. The sounds become a chorus, as though many Buddhist pilgrims are singing hymns of praise at the thirty-three temples sacred to Kannon [Avalokitesvara], the goddess of mercy, as they trace gold-dust words in the dark blue mire of the ground. The sounds spread out._\n\n1: The Lotus Sutra is chanted over and over\n\n2: Birds chirp\n\n3: Chorus\n\nDead Mother's | Grace | Profound  \n---|---|---  \nIn the darkness | Buddha's face | Is found  \nKnown? | Or not?  \nAfter I found it  \nPurple | Clouds surround it  \nMother's paradise  \nIn the next life | I wait | To banish hate  \nFrom my mind | Looking back, I always find  \nMother's black hair  \nIf I look back, | Despair. The world falling into ruin  \nFalling | Don't look back, beware!\n\nPurple _tabi_ , purple footwear.\n\n(SHINTOKU _wanders about, almost like a sleepwalker. In fact, he is hauled by a string held by a_ KUROGO, _who is actually_ YANAGITA KUNIO _in disguise._\n\n_As if turning hell into a freak show, a large two-wheeled hand-drawn cart [such as a son would use to abandon his aged mother in the mountains] and a two-wheeled vehicle [meant to carry an unwanted, abandoned child] roll by. None of the passersby has a face, but since_ SHINTOKU _has his eyes closed, he does not notice. Appearing from behind, several_ MOTHERS _or_ KISHIMO _slowly gather._\n\n_The winter wind howls, making a sound like a flute as it blows through bamboo fences. One_ MOTHER _transforms into a prostitute, beckoning to_ SHINTOKU. _Another_ MOTHER, _carrying a stone Buddhist statue [of Jiz \u014d] on her back as if it were her baby, asks for salvation. Yet another_ MOTHER, _in pilgrim's garb, is ringing a bell. And another, wearing_ monpe _[baggy work pants gathered at the ankles] and an air-raid hood, keeps calling_ SHINTOKU _'s name. They all gradually surround_ SHINTOKU _and form a circle by holding one another's hands._ SHINTOKU, _covering his eyes, crouches. He protectively holds the blue bottle with the long-horned beetle inside on his lap._ )\n\nNARRATOR:\n\nNatural mother\n\nFoster mother\n\nGodmother\n\nStepmother\n\nBird in the cage\n\nBird in the cage\n\nMother in the cage,\n\nWhen will you come out?\n\nBefore dawn, when it's dark throughout\n\nShintoku-maru\n\nPlays the flute. Here's a clue:\n\nGuess who's standing right behind you?\n\n( _A flaming red slip, the long, crepe undergarment of a kimono, decorated with an irregular design of fading letters here and there, like the text of a sutra; but this_ MOTHER _has not tucked up the hem, but rather, she lifts the edges higher so that her bare white ankles peek out from the damp, red lining, as she beckons_ SHINTOKU.)\n\n(SHINTOKU _feels that the person who stands right behind him may be his real mother, but he cannot turn around. Before one notices, a_ WOMAN _dressed in mourning enters and joins the hand-holding circle; she stands right behind_ SHINTOKU. _Her long, raven locks shine in the moonlight of hell_.)\n\nSHINTOKU ( _Still crouching, hands over his eyes_ ): They say that my real mother died because she gave birth to me. She wanted good fortune, and so the gods despised her. There was a fire the night I was born. As Mother Bird held me tightly, the fire engulfed us, and Father Bird said,\n\n\"Shouldst thou survive, bring forth another child.\" But Mother said,\n\n\"Wouldst thou have me abandon this helpless chick?\n\nThough death ensue, my love for it will never die.\"\n\nAnd the grass fire consumed her, and she was burned to death, thus saving my life. I want to see the face of my sainted Mother.\n\nYou who are right behind me, you who I must not see: I want to see your face!\n\n( _Removing his hands that cover his face, he turns around and sees that the person standing right behind him is his_ STEPMOTHER, NADESHIKO.)\n\nSHINTOKU: Oh, you are...\n\n( _Then his_ STEPMOTHER, NADESHIKO, _laughs wildly, and all of a sudden, the voices of the_ CHORUS _flow in_.)\n\nBuddha-house and Buddha-words: Four\n\nCorners of the temporal world: More\n\nHoly saint and sacred horse:\n\nAra-re-ri-uma, of course.\n\nFlowery foam: Rain from an ornamental comb\n\nRobin red-breast\n\nBaby at her breast\n\nBlood-covered breast\n\nBeating her stepchild\n\nStepmother: Oh, what a lovely boy!\n\nSee the lovely baby brother!\n\nRat-a-tat-tat,\n\nTat-tat.\n\nBeat that toy\n\nDrum and flute\n\nHappy baby, oh so cute Dancing\n\nFaceless paper dolls\n\nBaby Boy Pretty boy Boil the boy Eat the boy\n\nGrill the boy and eat the boy?\n\nA Demon's mask, ahoy!\n\nBuddha-house and Buddha-words: Four\n\nCorners of the temporal world: More\n\nHoly saint and sacred horse:\n\nAra-re-ri-uma, of course.\n\n( _Wild laughter, festive music in hell, and a pitch-black shower of cherry blossoms. The_ WOMEN _all become_ MOTHERS _who dance crazily, and one hundred faceless paper dolls used for weather-control magic_ [teruteru-b\u014dzu] _fall from above and writhe in agony_.)\n\nSHINTOKU: Dammit! I've been tricked! Long-Horned Beetle, come out! Come out, and cut these women's hair! ( _He cries_.)\n\n( _Slowly, a_ LONG-HORNED BEETLE _that is nearly ten feet long appears from the dark. After it walks a few steps toward_ STEPMOTHER, _one clap of the wooden clappers is heard, and the nightmare disappears_.)\n\n7. ERASER: SUPPLEMENTAL EDITION\n\n_In a vacant lot in Cat Town\u2014or perhaps in a school gymnasium\u2014a boy digs in the ground, burying something. It is_ STUDENT 2.\n\n_Concentrating intently, he does not notice that a_ WOMAN _appears, standing as close to him as if she were his shadow. One can tell at a glance that the_ WOMAN, _with her tousled hair and pale face, is sick._\n\nWOMAN: What are you doing?\n\nSTUDENT 2 ( _Caught by surprise but laughing it off_ ): Hee-hee-hee. Treasure hunting.\n\nWOMAN: Treasure hunting?\n\nSTUDENT 2: Yeah.... I heard that some guy from India buried a snakeskin wallet around here.\n\nWOMAN: Liar. You were burying something, weren't you?\n\nSTUDENT 2: Were you spying on me?\n\n( _The_ WOMAN _nods_.)\n\nSTUDENT 2 ( _Assuming a somewhat defiant attitude_ ): Since you saw, you didn't need to ask.\n\nWOMAN: Come clean. What were you trying to bury?\n\nSTUDENT 2: An eraser.\n\nWOMAN ( _Peering at it_ ): Oh, I see. But why?\n\nNARRATOR: A vacant lot in Cat Town. It is the time of day when the smoke from the bath house chimney has vanished and the howling of dogs is heard. From behind the unknown woman, the pawnshop's gas lamp shines, making her shadow grow longer. Fearing being noticed by others.\n\nSTUDENT 2: Don't tell anyone. This is not just any eraser. I used it to erase the first star of the evening.\n\nWOMAN:...\n\nSTUDENT 2: I also erased a retired used-clothes salesman who set his bulldog on me in the alley. ( _Stroking the eraser in his hand_.) This is an eraser that can even rub out humans.\n\nWOMAN:...\n\nSTUDENT 2 ( _In a tearful voice_ ): See how this slanted part is worn away? That's the part I used to erase my dad. He caught me smoking, and out of the blue, he just smacked me, so last night, while he was sleeping, I rubbed him out, just like this. ( _Makes the sound_ \"goshi goshi,\" _onomatopoeia for rubbing_.)\n\nWOMAN ( _Half in doubt_ ): Did you erase him from his feet first? Or from his head?\n\nSTUDENT 2: I don't remember. I did it with my eyes closed. And ( _Choked with tears_ ) when I got up in the morning, his futon was empty.\n\nWOMAN: Wow!\n\nSTUDENT 2 ( _Taking out some sheets of blue tissue paper_ ): Look at this. These eraser scrapings are my dad. _Namu Amida Butsu_.\n\nWOMAN: Listen, young man. ( _Very interested_.) I bet that eraser could erase another person, couldn't it?\n\nSTUDENT 2: I'm not gonna lend it to you. I'm gonna bury it.\n\nWOMAN: Please, just one person.\n\nSTUDENT 2 ( _Startled_ ): What?\n\nWOMAN: There's this woman, she's really sick. It's creating a problem for me. I just don't know what to do.\n\nSTUDENT 2: Where is she?\n\nWOMAN: Right in front of you.\n\nSTUDENT 2:...\n\nWOMAN: It's me.\n\nSTUDENT 2: Stop it. That's creepy.\n\n( _And_ STUDENT 2 _steps back little by little. The_ WOMAN _beckons with her hand_.)\n\nWOMAN: Please... please erase...\n\nSTUDENT 2: No. Keep away from me.\n\nNARRATOR: Moving one of her hands behind her and reaching into the knot of her obi, she takes out a small packet and offers him the money in it.\n\nWOMAN:... I'll give you all of this, boy. You can buy a hundred new erasers, OK?\n\nSTUDENT 2: I've made a decision. I'll never erase anything again. Even if I write something wrong, I'll just leave it that way.\n\nWOMAN ( _Fretfully_ ): What a pigheaded boy! Ten years ago my parents sold me to a brothel to cut down on the number of mouths to feed. I'm just a whore living in a three-mat room, and everyone sniggers and gossips about me. Ever since I left home, having sold the setting sun for a couple of cents, I've been obsessed with death. Ten years just flew right by. Listen, crickets are chirping again, somewhere. In my hometown, they're holding the annual festival right now. ( _Covering her mouth, she makes a choking sound and coughs up blood._ )\n\nSTUDENT 2 ( _Surprised_ ): You've got TB!\n\n( _In a gust of wind, a thirty-stringed koto is heard from a secret place, and the_ KUROGO _chorus chants_.)\n\nThe autumn wind blows:\n\nWhose tomb lingers\n\nOn my index fingers?\n\nOn my index finger,\n\nHoly words I'll write:\n\nTo a distant land, take flight.\n\n_Namu Amida Butsu_\n\nPlease fly away\n\n_Namu Amida Butsu_\n\nPlease fly away.\n\n( _Before one notices, in the dark, phantoms of the dead slowly appear, one by one. The_ STUDENT _'s_ FATHER _is in the front, followed by, for instance, a_ FIRST-YEAR MILITARY VOLUNTEER _who was erased because of his attempt to catch a swallow-tailed butterfly, a mentally dim_ GEISHA _who was erased while she was embracing a drunken client behind a telephone pole at Shinbashi stop, and a_ TEEN PROSTITUTE _wearing a loose blue silk crepe obi and with her hair braided in three strands. Manipulated by the invisible strings held by the_ KUROGO, _they approach_ STUDENT 2, _extending their arms as if asking for salvation._ )\n\nSTUDENT 2 ( _In spite of himself_ ): Oh! I was sure I had erased them all, but...\n\n8. THE CURSE OF A STRAW DOLL\n\n_A_ LITTLE GIRL _appears with a straw doll in her hand, looks around to make sure nobody is there, takes out several six-inch nails and a wooden hammer._\n\nSo sad again today, so blue\n\nHammering nails into a straw doll\n\nThis doll I love the most, it's true\n\nHammering nails into a straw doll\n\n( _Saying \"Big Brother!\" the_ LITTLE GIRL _decisively sticks a six-inch nail into the forehead of the straw doll! A_ DWARF BOY [ISSUN-B\u014cSHI] _rolls in doing somersaults. The_ LITTLE GIRL _watches him with delight, then hammers in another nail. The_ DWARF _jumps and does another somersault. Without being noticed,_ DUPLICATES OF THE LITTLE GIRL _appear here and there in the theater. They put straw dolls on the walls and start to hammer six-inch nails into them. The sounds of nails blend into a melody. At its peak, the_ DWARF, _who has been jumping around with each hammered nail, freezes. The_ LITTLE GIRL, _looking at him murmurs involuntarily, \"He's dead.\"_ )\n\nCrescent eyebrows\n\nLike the evening moon\n\nFar past his shoulders\n\nHair grows so soon.\n\n( _Murmuring or singing these lines,_ STEPMOTHER NADESHIKO _appears. She looks around. As if calling out to_ NADESHIKO, _a_ SOLOIST _sings_.)\n\nMarrying into a village of falling flowers\n\nWhat mysterious realm of passion flowers?\n\n( _Answering as though speaking a monologue_.)\n\nI dream of\u2014Not the flesh of my child?\n\nI pine for\u2014Why is it so distant and wild?\n\n( _Soloist_.)\n\nBeckoning to him, I nod to my lap\n\nHis eyes say yes, but I hear a snap\n\n( _Answering as though speaking a monologue_.)\n\nAnd he cuts all thirty koto strings,\n\nThrows out the pick and away he wings.\n\nSTEPMOTHER: Look, look. These are the parings from my child's fingernails. While still suckling at his mother's breasts, in his childlike way, his fingernails clawed into my breasts, purple, and I, cutting the nails, saving the parings, for twelve years saving them in a black lacquer box, those crescent parings still soft and innocent, looking like the evening moon, when I pick them up, my body weakens. What a pity, to be bought from a freak show tent. Is this evil karma from a former life? The curse of the goddess Kanzeon? You were my firstborn son, but bad luck married me into this house, where you must submit to Shintokumaru as the eldest son\u2014compared with you, my delicate flower, he's like coarse summer grass\u2014And thus you are disinherited.\n\n( _As if talking to the fingernail clippings_.) But don't you worry, Sensaku.\n\nI will cast a Mother's curse on that disobedient, defiant Shintoku, a curse to make him die young. Look! Already written on this memorial plank, the fifteen characters of Shintokumaru's posthumous Buddhist name.\n\n( _Sings_.)\n\nCurse the brat and bless my boy,\n\nEndless devotions will you enjoy\n\nOnly you we'll worship, I solemnly swear\n\nOh Kanzeon, please grant my prayer.\n\nYou are these fingernail clippings, rustling like grains of sand in my palm. There was never a morning when you failed to dig into my aching breasts with these crescent-shaped nails. ( _Putting them back into the small, black lacquer box, which she ties with red string_.) Don't worry, Sensaku, your older brother Shintoku is destined to die of leprosy soon. ( _Taking out a six-inch nail_.) If Shintoku dies, you are certain to be the only heir...\n\nAll night long at the inn I wait\n\nWhile the blacksmith forges nails of hate\n\nDawn in Shimizu will seal his fate,\n\nAnd blood-red flowers will sate\n\nThe gods of hell.\n\n(STEPMOTHER _takes out the wooden grave plank on which_ SHINTOKU _'s posthumous Buddhist name is written and raises the hammer in order to pound in a six-inch nail. The blindfolded_ SHINTOKU _enters, believing that he is wandering in hell_.)\n\nSHINTOKU:\n\nPushing onward | A springtime haze  \n---|---  \nTo the edge of hell, to the end of days | A milestone:  \nMy mother's hair | Tousled in sleep | Tightly bound  \nA coal-black heap | Visiting | What have I found?\n\nWho's there? A woman, standing with her back turned to me, here in this unexpected place. From the back, she looks exactly like my biological mother. Could it be? I wonder.... By any chance, might you be my mother?\n\n( _Surprised_ , STEPMOTHER _hides the six-inch nail and hammer behind her back_.)\n\nSHINTOKU: That scent. ( _Approaching her._ ) Yes, it is you. ( _Sighing._ ) At last, I have found you in hell. ( _Embraces her._ ) All day long, Stepmother bullies me, and I can't sleep a wink at night. Mother, I can't help feeling bitter that you abandoned me when you died.\n\n( _Followed by the_ biwa _chanter._ )\n\nMother, I feel bitter, abandoned when you died.\n\nI cried and cried and cried.\n\nBreastfeeding mother\n\nOr perhaps some other?\n\nShintoku hugs her oh, so tight\n\nAnd wonders: will she laugh at his plight?\n\nSTEPMOTHER: I see, Stepmother's really horrible, isn't she? ( _Disguised voice, disguised voice, disguised voice._ )\n\nSHINTOKU: Yes, Mother. She's a demon. I wonder why Father was infatuated with such a woman.\n\nSTEPMOTHER ( _Anger wells up in her. But she lets_ SHINTOKU _caress her as if she were his wife_ ): That woman isn't kind to you, is she?\n\n( _Song_.)\n\nTightly embraced,\n\nWhen this phantom-faced\n\nMother into a woman will tumble,\n\nOver a stone, his foot will stumble.\n\nSHINTOKU: Oh, here's a little black box.... ( _Taking it up and trying to loosen the string._ )\n\nSTEPMOTHER ( _Revealing her true identity involuntarily_ ): Stop, Shintoku! Don't touch that box! ( _Scolds him._ )\n\nSHINTOKU: Oh, no! That voice!\n\nSTEPMOTHER: Yes, this voice is mine! ( _When she pulls out her comb decorated with fake_ nadeshiko _flowers [fringed pinks], her black hair immediately tumbles down to her shoulders. Surprised_ , SHINTOKU _pushes_ STEPMOTHER _and tries to run away, but_ STEPMOTHER _fixes him in her keen, hard gaze._ ) I feel sorry for you, but I'm doing this for my darling child Sensaku, and so I must bestow on you the curse of leprosy, which will make you into a despised outcast. ( _Producing the hammer, she pounds the six-inch nail into the wooden grave plank._ )\n\n( _Song_.)\n\nShintokumaru is eighteen years old | I hammer the nails, striking eighteenfold  \n---|---  \nMonthly fairs on the seventh abound | Seven more nails on the seventh I pound\n\nSorya, one!\n\n( _She drives a six-inch nail into the wooden plank and calls out to_ SHINTOKU, _who involuntarily covers his right eye and falls over._ )\n\nWithout a break, two!\n\nHis eyes become putrid | Leprosy!  \n---|---  \nHis eyes become putrid | Leprosy!\n\n(SHINTOKU, _murmuring \"mumumu\" as he writhes in pain, now covers his other eye as the roar of a Japanese_ taiko _drum comes surging_.)\n\nAt seven shrines, hammering seven nails\n\nAt the holy sanctum, fourteen nails\n\nHateful stepchild, twelve more nails\n\nAt the burial chamber, twelve again\n\nMay your eyes go blind! Twelve more, Amen!\n\nAnd twelve more nails at the Demon's Fen.\n\nDonate a hoe to the water god's purse\n\nTwelve are the nails of a Mother's curse\n\n( _As_ STEPMOTHER _drives in each nail,_ SHINTOKU _covers his eyes and writhes. Before one notices it, two, three, and more duplicates of_ SHINTOKU _appear. As their numbers increase, they wriggle around._ STEPMOTHER _transforms into a child-eating demon/child-protective goddess_ [KISHIMO] _who drives in more and more nails. In response,_ KUROGOS _and_ LITTLE GIRLS _drive more and more nails into straw dolls_.)\n\nA curse | ( _They drive in nails, then call out a meaningless shout._ ) Hei-ya!  \n---|---  \nBlack hair | ( _They drive in nails, then call out a meaningless shout._ ) Hei-ya!  \nNail the Bodhisattva | ( _They drive in nails, then call out a meaningless shout._ ) Hei-ya!  \nA grave | ( _They drive in nails, then call out a meaningless shout._ ) Hei-ya!  \nA red obi | ( _They drive in nails, then call out a meaningless shout._ ) Hei-ya!  \nThree thousand miles ( _They drive in nails, then call out a meaningless shout._ ) Hei-ya!  \nBecause I am your Mother | ( _They drive in nails, then call out a meaningless shout._ ) Hei-ya!  \nI drive in the nails | ( _They drive in nails, then call out a meaningless shout._ ) Hei-ya!  \nMay your eyes be crushed | ( _They drive in nails, then call out a meaningless shout._ ) Hei-ya!  \nStepchild, may you die | ( _They drive in nails, then call out a meaningless shout._ ) Hei-ya!\n\nDie, die, die! _Namu Amida Butsu_\n\nDie, die, die! _Namu Amida Butsu_\n\n( _With the repeated hitting of nails, meaningless shouts, and blood spewing upward, the multiple_ SHINTOKUS _have stopped moving. They lie piled on top of one another._ STEPMOTHER _laughs loudly._ )\n\nThe prayers are granted\n\nAnd the curse is planted\n\nOne hundred and thirty-six points of pain\n\nWhere the nails were driven, with leprosy in flame.\n\nCrushed are his eyes, he cannot see!\n\nOh, pitiful Shintokumaru\n\nA blind leper is he.\n\n( _The duplicates of_ SHINTOKUMARU, _all of whom have become blind, cover their eyes and leave, seeking dim light._ STEPMOTHER, _drawing herself up to her full height and covering the wooden grave marker with her black hair, sees them off. Far away, human voices mimic mountain doves' \"hooo-hooo.\" Blackout_.)\n\n( _Song_.)\n\nBlood blooms red on a straw doll's head.\n\nStrangled poppies bloom blood red.\n\nThat's the language of flowers.\n\n9. THIS CHILD WHOSE CHILD? DEMON'S BAG / DEMON WOMB\n\nNARRATOR: Forensic medicine, a freak show, a little cuckoo.\n\nFall passes and spring comes, then spring passes and another fall comes. At night, the masseurs pass the time. They listen to the sound of the wind and play with the forty-eight letters of the alphabet song, cutting apart the letters with scissors and rearranging the order. I-ro-ha, i-ro-na-shi\u2014colorful, colorless, yu-ri-re-u-su, ro-ke-n-ya-da-i-ba, ghostly apparitions, a-ra-da-ra-ni, a-ra-da-ra-ni-da-ra-no, abra-cadabra, hi-to-sa-ra-i, kidnapped. Where has Shintoku gone? Is he lost or is he hiding? We saw his face on the front page of the special new-year's issue of _House Lights_.\n\nAfter Shintoku contracted leprosy and left home, Sensaku became the head of the household. He polished the family altar and arranged the chrysanthemums and lived up to all of his Mother's expectations I-ro-ha-ni-ho-he-do, chi-ri-nu-ru-wo, the scent of blood and letters dead, chi-ri-shi, chi-bu-mi-no, scattered letters writ in blood, chi-no-mi-go-ya, a babe at breast tossed out.\n\n( _On the temporary stage in the middle of the auditorium, two_ MABIKI WOMEN _are working a threshing machine with their feet. Dusty smoke is rising in thick clouds. Perhaps they have just tossed an illegitimate child into the threshing machine_ \u2014 _a rather long dance scene_ \u2014. _A little away is sitting a_ MIDDLE-SCHOOL STUDENT _with his mouth wide open. His scalp is infected with ringworm._ )\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1: Whose child is this? A demon's bag, a demon womb.\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 2: Break the bag, let the water flow\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1: I don't want to see its father's face.\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 2: Smash it before it's born.\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1: Hush, hush, the cat's place\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 2: A fifteen-year old girl\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1: Deceived by sugared words, telling her, \"how lovely!\"\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 2: Crying and feeling bitter\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1: Abandoned like the obi he bought her\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 2: That he sold to a pawnshop\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1: And never redeemed.\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 2 ( _Looking into the threshing machine_ ): This child is so quiet, it's not even crying.\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1: Well, it's time\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 2: To kill it by threshing it.\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1: Buddha's towel\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 2: Is Indian red\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1: We tried to dye it red but failed:\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 2: The straw doll\n\n( _They step on the machine_ ' _s foot trestle, and again, powdery smoke rises. For a little longer, the sound of the machine is heard going_ \" _gittan battan,_ ,\" _but suddenly._ )\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1: Oh, something\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 2: Got stuck\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1: An obi or a sleeve?\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 2: Or the baby's head?\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1: Why don't you look inside?\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 2: Not me. You do it.\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1 ( _Looks inside._ )\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 2 ( _Looks inside._ )\n\n( _Song_.)\n\nWhat crying babe is this? Abandoned child,\n\nCursed with Grandpa's warts, to be reviled?\n\nOr is it cursed with Grandma's red-stained jowls?\n\nWho powdered its face and oiled its head? And still it howls.\n\nAnonymous Father left a flower\n\nAnonymous Father left a flower\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1: Someone's inside.\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 2 ( _Touching the threshing machine and trying to turn it over_ ): Heavy...\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1 ( _Helping her_ ): It's so heavy that it'll need more than just a little shove to move it.\n\n( _The two of them use all their strength to turn over the threshing machine. From inside the machine_ , STUDENT 2 IN ARMY UNIFORM _tumbles out_.)\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 2: Oh! ( _Jumps._ ) It's all grown up!\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1: Impossible! This can't be the same child. It's someone else.\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 2: Someone else? ( _To_ STUDENT 2.) Who are you?\n\nSTUDENT 2 ( _Stands up quickly and salutes her_ ): No one, ma'am. Just a human being who's been erased.\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1: What?\n\nSTUDENT 2: No one else can see me, ma'am. I'm a man who erased himself with an eraser.\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 2 ( _Laughs_ ): You may think you were erased, but...\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1: We can see you clearly.\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 2: One star on your uniform means that you're a lowly, new recruit.\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1 ( _Touches him_ ): You don't look well, soldier.\n\nSTUDENT 2 ( _Strongly_ ): Liar. You can't see me.... I'm not here, not in this place!\n\n( _From far away, we hear the sound of marching military boots approaching, going_ \" _zakku zakku._ \")\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 1: Hear that? They're coming to get you.\n\nMABIKI WOMAN 2: You shouldn't be idling your time away in a place like this.\n\nSTUDENT 2: Liar! Nobody can see me.... It's not possible.... I'm not going anywhere. I'm not the same as them.... I've become an erased man, an invisible soldier, the scrapings of an eraser. ( _Screaming._ ) Help! Help!\n\n( _Music. The sound of a bugle fades in and, at its peak, fades out_.)\n\n10. A KIDNAPPING BY THE LIFE-MOTHER\n\n( _With accompaniment by mechanical-sounding music that goes \"kara-kuri,\" like metal strings_.)\n\nHey, hey, hey! | The spinning wheel of fate. | Raven on a string:see him gyrate  \n---|---|---  \nShintoku the leper  \nWhere might he abide? | Where can he hide? | Wandering the world so wide.\n\nKara-kuri, kara-kuri, kara-kuri-battan\n\nStepmother, Father, and Son | At home they remain | They never complain  \n---|---|---  \nThey polish the altar each day  \nNi-ichi-tensaku, one, two | The abacus counts anew | Cloud Nine, Seventh  \nHeaven, Hallelu!  \nIf a card blows away | In this Family play | Autumn's here to stay.\n\nKara-kuri, kara-kuri, kara-kuri-battan\n\nShintoku the leper | How does he manage? | His eyes crushed and bandaged?  \n---|---|---\n\nA pilgrim on the pathway to truth\n\nRinging his bell | Did he fall in a well? | Or leap into hell  \n---|---|---  \nOn the railway tracks | In a tragic climax?\n\n_Namu Amida Butsu_\n\nKara-kuri, kara-kuri, kara-kuri-battan\n\n( _With a broom in her hands,_ STEPMOTHER NADESHIKO _appears. At her feet, arranged like a miniature landscape in a box, is a house, a telegraph pole, and the family altar_.)\n\nSTEPMOTHER ( _Staring down at them_ ): Look, look, this is my house. It's almost evening, and the lamp is lit. Sensaku is coming home from school. And behind the telegraph pole, disguised as a traveling medicine salesman, waits a kidnapper. A movie poster is blown over by the wind. Sensaku stops.\n\n( _Suddenly, she sweeps the house, the telegraph pole, and so on, with her broom. The house and the telegraph pole are destroyed and swept away as if they were trash_.)\n\nDarkness falls. It's just an ordinary autumn day.\n\n( _Picking up a handful of soil and scattering it over the stage_.)\n\nLook, look, this is real soil\n\nShould I drive in the stakes, is it worth the toil\n\nTo raise the show tent once again?\n\nMustard flowers | Fatherless children  \n---|---\n\nJust like the old days, when I was little\n\nAnd I couldn't stop crying, the scales were so brittle\n\nSnake scales. I must be crazy, how pitiful.\n\n( _Spreads the soil, vocalizing a sound to represent this_.)\n\n( _Spreads more soil, again vocalizing a sound to represent tossing or spreading it_.)\n\nWhere is Sensaku? He's later than usual today.\n\n( _Slowly, like a phantom, the back entrance of the sideshow tent begins to be visible. Echoes of_ jinta _[typical sideshow brass band music] can be heard, and the_ ATTENDANT _in charge of customers' footwear is cleaning up._ ISSUN-B\u014cSHI [DWARF MAN] _goes this way and that with a portable clay cooking stove fired by charcoal, from which rises the black smoke of grilling a small fish._ AIR-PUMP MAN _is counting coins_.)\n\n(STEPMOTHER NADESHIKO _comes closer to_ SENSAKU, _who is peeking inside through a torn curtain, and touches his shoulder gently._ )\n\nSTEPMOTHER ( _Her voice is heard from offstage_ ): So this is where you've been, Sensaku.\n\n(SENSAKU, s _urprised, turns around._ )\n\nSTEPMOTHER ( _Only voice_ ): You didn't come home, even though it was late, so I've come to pick you up.\n\n( _Walking a few steps while holding_ SENSAKU.)\n\nSTEPMOTHER: Are you hungry? ( _Taking out a package of rice balls. An especially hairy arm is visible_.)\n\n(SENSAKU _nods, feeling scared._ )\n\nSTEPMOTHER ( _Unwrapping the package carefully_ ): Then, eat! ( _All of a sudden, she crams a rice ball as hard as a stone into_ SENSAKU _'s mouth_.)\n\nSENSAKU: Ah, ouch! You'll break my teeth! ( _Screams_.)\n\n(PERFORMERS _in the sideshow freak tent pass by, doing kabuki somersaults in the air_.)\n\nSTEPMOTHER: Ha ha ha. ( _Starts to laugh in a low voice_.)\n\nSENSAKU ( _An idea suddenly strikes him_ ): Oh, I know who you are... !\n\nSTEPMOTHER: You guessed it. I'm Shintoku, your brother.\n\nYour mother's curse turned me into a leper. Look, see how my skin is peeling off in patches. I have a human face but an animal's body. When night comes, you should see how my lovely scales glisten!\n\nSENSAKU ( _Breathing roughly_ ): Why did you come back, Shintoku?\n\nSHINTOKU: To pet you and pamper you. I put on this mask to disguise myself as my stepmother, the one who cursed me and threw me out, and now I've returned. How do I look? Don't you think this red crepe kimono is rather fetching on me?\n\n(SENSAKU _steps back_.)\n\nSHINTOKU: Now, Sensaku dear. Don't run away. Come over here and I'll tell you something nice.\n\n(Biwa _narration comes in_.)\n\nLacking friends, I live in gloom.\n\nWith my red lacquer comb, I groom\n\nThe cuckoo's feathers,\n\nBut they always fall out, and that's my doom.\n\nSENSAKU: No, don't come any closer. ( _He says this, but his voice is trembling and he cannot move. It's as if he were bound hand and foot_.)\n\nSHINTOKU: Oh, Sensaku, your face is so lovely when you're terrified. ( _Comes closer, suggestively_.)\n\nSENSAKU: Don't come near me, I might catch leprosy.\n\nSHINTOKU: Yes, we're brothers. We're one and the same. I will share the joys of leprosy with you. ( _Rips off_ SENSAKU _'s school uniform and pants. Holding tight to the completely naked_ SENSAKU, _he suddenly says_.) Die!\n\n( _Pushes him down._ SENSAKU f _alls head over heels and rolls around._ SHINTOKU _dances crazily like a fool. The freak show tent, which had been unlighted, suddenly appears again, and_ AIR-PUMP MAN, FEMALE SUMO WRESTLER, _and_ LONG-NECKED WOMAN MONSTER _all start to dance at once. A barrel spinning in the air is manipulated by the feet of someone lying on their back. Miniature bulbs blink on and off. The scene is transformed into a night filled with vampires who have been revived by the sacrifice of the totally nude boy_ SENSAKU, _who is like an acrobatic horse in a circus in hell_.)\n\n11. THE RED HOOD OF GANJINB\u014c, THE DANCING MONK WHO SUBSTITUTES FOR YOU AT PRAYERS\n\nYANAGITA KUNIO _appears unexpectedly in the dark, removes his hat and bows_.\n\nYANAGITA: Good evening, everyone. How nice to see you again. I am Yanagita Kunio, and this time, I am disguised as the manager of the Tokyo Municipal Lost and Found Office. In case you were wondering, this time I exchanged my fake beard for a mustache like the one Ronald Coleman has, and I added a pair of pince-nez glasses. I'm trying to mimic the cover of the February issue of _Boy_ ' _s Club._ So I set up this desk and here I wait. Nothing happens except more and more lost items appear. People keep dropping off items they've found; it's a never-ending parade. But not a single person has come in to claim something he's lost.\n\n( _Solo song_.)\n\nJust me and my long lost goods\n\nA dancing monk in a bright red hood\n\n( _Monologue_.)\n\nLost items lack noses and eyes\n\nFaceless items without alibis\n\n( _Solo song_.)\n\nThat bright red hood on the dancing monk\n\nOriginates where? My memory's shrunk\n\n( _Monologue_.)\n\nA thirty-watt lightbulb illuminates\n\nA villain's face. He secretly ruminates\n\nOn his hiding place in the autumn of eternal rebirth\n\nLost items, vanished items, abandoned items, never unearthed.\n\nWell, this lost and found storehouse is as big as a heart, and twice as dark. But is it large enough?! Yes, it is. It all depends on your point of view. In other words, depending on when and where you are, you might say that the entire city of Tokyo is a storehouse of lost property.\n\nWhat's more, it's a cinch to keep the place in order, because there's only one person missing, and that's the person who lost something. Yes, may I help you?\n\n(SHINTOKU _'s_ FATHER, _now shrunken in size, enters, riding in a dwarf-size car._ )\n\nYANAGITA: Oh, it's Father!\n\nFATHER ( _Perhaps singing in a baritone_ ): Indeed, Shintoku's father am I.\n\nYANAGITA: That's good.\n\nFATHER ( _Perhaps singing in a baritone_ ): Pray, let me see with mine eye.\n\nYANAGITA: So, you've finally decided, have you?\n\nFATHER ( _Perhaps singing in a baritone_ ): Decided what, my good man?\n\nYANAGITA: To make yourself into a lost item.\n\nFATHER ( _Perhaps singing in a baritone; bothered_ ): Don't be absurd, how can? ( _Becoming very serious._ ) It's just that I found something, and I thought I should bring it in.\n\nYANAGITA: A lost item?\n\nFATHER: Yes, as a matter of fact, I found this family register. It's the family register of the Oguris, living in 1 ch\u014dme, Kameido K\u014dt\u014d.\n\nYANAGITA ( _Flipping through the pages of a thick book, checking facts, and talking to himself_ ): That can't be right, I'm sure there's some mistake.\n\nFATHER: There's no question about it. This is the Oguri family register.\n\nYANAGITA: But there are 113 households in 1 ch\u014dme, Kameido K\u014dt\u014d, and everyone is duly registered. There's no Oguri family there.\n\nFATHER: Do all 113 households have intact family registers?\n\nYANAGITA: Yes. Not a single one is lost.\n\nFATHER: So, if this Oguri family is registered, you're saying that some other family will be forced out?\n\nYANAGITA: Found items replace those that were lost. They're not additional ones. That's the way things are; it's what we've always been taught.\n\nFATHER: But then...\n\nYANAGITA: Then?\n\n( _In the dark, a line of faces representing wooden or stone seals engraved with names_ [hanko]. _Various unregistered name seals such as Tanaka, Yamada, Nakagawa, Hiyoshi, Kobayashi, and Kud \u014d begin to sing together._)\n\n( _Chorus_.)\n\nI don't understand, and yet At sunset\n\nBlue reincarnation sobs, tearful and wet.\n\nA thoughtless father leaves his fatherless child\n\nA twisted body, deformed and defiled.\n\nAnother country, countless miles away\n\nSeeking my child, gone astray\n\nThe trumpet plays.\n\n( _Sobbing and writhing in the dwarf car,_ SHINTOKU _'s_ FATHER _starts to go crazy, crying, \"Shintoku!\" \"Forgive me!\" He rolls out of the car and again grows tall. Sniffing around on all fours like a dog, he exits. Then, to the strains of a thirty-string koto, the unregistered seals go this way and that as they look for something. Soon, the strangeness of looking for things that are not lost turns into sadness, and the lost people/lost items that were stored in the storehouse slowly cross the stage and pass through the audience as they exit_.)\n\nYANAGITA: Everyone! This is the final showing of lost property. It's not too late.\n\nIf you find the items you lost among those that are here, please hurry back with your seals, because you must sign off with your seal to retrieve them. The storehouse is overflowing with goods. And besides ( _Taking off his false mustache and pince-nez glasses_ ), it's time for me to go back to my original identity as Yanagita Kunio. I will return to my study and continue working on _The Legends of T \u014dno_.\n\n( _Twitching his limbs as if being manipulated by strings._ ) I don't understand, but at sunset, blue reincarnation sobs, everybody, lost items, the world is someone else's lost item, a telegraph pole and a kidnapping, single-minded truth can be found only in the tales told to children by traveling picture-book storytellers, OK, then, good-bye. ( _Disappears_.)\n\n12. WHY DO PREGNANT WOMEN WEAR COTTON BELLYBANDS WITH THE SIGN OF THE DOG?\n\n( _Singing to the_ biwa.)\n\nFlowing river, destiny-bound\n\nFlowing hair, round a comb bound,\n\nThe comb's as high\n\nAs the love god's third eye\n\nHomesick again, and feeling bleak,\n\nSuch longings make the darkness creak.\n\nA long-horned beetle in its lair\n\nCreakily, squeakily cuts off her hair\n\n( _Po-tto! The sound of a thirty-watt Mazda lightbulb as it suddenly pops on. In the light, we see_ FATHER, STEPMOTHER, _and_ SENSAKU _facing one another at the dinner table, with bowls and chopsticks in their hands. Behind them\u2014in darkness as black as a long-horned beetle\u2014a black-framed memorial photograph of the supposedly dead_ SHINTOKU _in school uniform. On closer examination, we see that the person who appeared to be_ STEPMOTHER _is actually_ SHINTOKU _in disguise_.)\n\n( _In a singsong manner_.)\n\nSENSAKU: Father, please give me the Mother of the family of Mr. Ieo Mamoru, the Home Protector.\n\nFATHER: I don't have it. Mother, please give me the child of Mr. Kaneno Narukichi, the Money-Tree Man.\n\nSTEPMOTHER ( _Really_ SHINTOKU): Someone has taken one of my cards. Sensaku, please give me the dog from the family of Mr. Kunio Mamoru, the Nation Protector.\n\nSENSAKU: I don't have it. Father, please give me the Mother of the Ieo Mamoru Family.\n\nFATHER: I don't have it. I already told you that I don't have it. Mother, please give me the Mother of Kaneno Narukichi.\n\n( _Then, with a gesture as she flings open the door, another_ STEPMOTHER _[the real one] comes in_.)\n\nSTEPMOTHER: I've got that card.\n\nSENSAKU ( _Startled_ ): Ah, you?\n\nSTEPMOTHER: Sensaku, look, I have four of the same cards. They all are Mother cards!\n\nSENSAKU ( _Confused, looking again at_ SHINTOKU _disguised as_ STEPMOTHER _, who is right in front of him, and murmuring_): Unbelievable....\n\nSHINTOKU ( _With a faint smile_ ): What happened, Sensaku? You look pale.\n\nSENSAKU: Please let me see the cards you have.\n\nSHINTOKU: These?\n\n( _Holding them out. Four cards come falling out of his hands_.)\n\nSENSAKU: They're all Mother cards! Unbelievable! ( _Also taking hold of the cards offered by_ STEPMOTHER _and looking at them one by one, as if making sure..._ )\n\nSHINTOKU ( _Becoming_ STEPMOTHER _through and through_ ): Sensaku, go and look. Someone seems to have come in the front door.\n\nSENSAKU ( _At a loss for words._ )\n\nSHINTOKU: Can't you hear what your mother says?\n\nSENSAKU ( _Asking for help_ ): Father!\n\nFATHER: I can't see. I can't see anything. ( _Starts trembling_.)\n\n(STEPMOTHER _and_ SHINTOKU _walk closer to each other and look at the blue bottle_.)\n\nBOTH ( _In unison_ ): Oh, no! Not another long-horned beetle, and right here at home, too! What bad luck.... ( _And as if looking in a mirror, they look each other in the face as if they are looking at the reflection of their own face. They each replace a stray hair_.) Shintoku must have left it. ( _Crouching_.) Where has Shintoku been hiding? I thought he died, but since there's another long-horned beetle right here... ( _Startled, noticing each other_.) Oh, who are you?\n\nSHINTOKU: I am Shintoku's Stepmother, called\n\nSTEPMOTHER: Nadeshiko\n\nSHINTOKU: All day long, I avoid other people\n\nSTEPMOTHER: But sometimes I think of Shintoku, whom I killed with my curses,\n\nSHINTOKU: And I tenderly recall him\n\nSTEPMOTHER: Then I hide my face with a parasol\n\nSHINTOKU: And pick thistles in the graveyard\n\nSTEPMOTHER: Plumed thistles, even those with red blossoms\n\nSHINTOKU: Even if compassion burns hotly\n\nNARRATOR:\n\nTogether, they sing a single song\n\nBisected by a filthy curse\n\nSTEPMOTHER ( _All of a sudden behaving like a young girl madly in love_ ): Oh, Shintoku, forgive me. I wanted you to love me.\n\nSHINTOKU ( _As if he has come to his senses_ ): But it took me too long to grow up.\n\nNARRATOR: It took him too long to grow up.\n\nToo early to be a child. Too old to listen to lullabies. Too young to sleep in her arms. Even after eighty, ninety, or a hundred years, those couples bound till death, flowery sex, wet with dew, but Mother and Son, the gods cannot forgive.\n\nSHINTOKU ( _All of a sudden takes off the other's kimono that he is wearing_ ): Mother! Please get pregnant with me and give birth to me again!\n\nFATHER ( _Dumbfounded by what he sees, he calls out_ ): Monsters!\n\n( _He tries to run away, grabbing_ SENSAKU _by the hand. Since_ STEPMOTHER _holds_ SENSAKU _tightly,_ FATHER _ends up falling and somersaulting out. Slight sound of the sideshow_ jinta _music is heard_.)\n\nSTEPMOTHER ( _To_ SENSAKU): There's nothing to fear. You're the only man in this house now. ( _And to_ SHINTOKU.) Shintoku, it's me. Am I beautiful? ( _Acting flirtatiously, looking at_ SHINTOKU, _and turning around._ ) Don't worry. Shintoku already is dead. ( _She says this in a way that makes it clear that she already is insane_.) You are the heir. Look, I have streamers shaped like carp. I bought them just for you, to celebrate. ( _Suddenly looking back at_ SHINTOKU _again_.) One, two, even three more times if possible, I want to give birth to you, I want to get pregnant with you.\n\n( _Chorus_.)\n\nMilk is scarce |  | Sleep is scarce  \n---|---|---  \nLu-lu-lu-lu-bu |  | Lu-lu-lu-lu-bu  \nMilk is scarce |  | Sleep is scarce  \nLu-lu-lu-lu-bu |  | Lu-lu-lu-lu-bu  \nMilk is scarce |  | Sleep is scarce\n\n(SHINTOKU _stares fixedly at_ MOTHER _and takes off all his clothes_.)\n\nSHINTOKU: This is Hell!\n\n( _He is crying and embracing her, and all at once,_ STEPMOTHER _'s black hair turns snow white. Like an avalanche, the_ CHORUS _'s song comes roaring out._ )\n\nMother |  | One  \n---|---|---\n\n( _Japanese_ taiko _drum_.)\n\nTwo |  | Three  \n---|---|---\n\n( _Japanese_ taiko _drum_.)\n\nFour |  | Six  \n---|---|---\n\n( _Japanese_ taiko _drum_.)\n\n( _Emerging from the darkness are a_ MOTHER, _another_ MOTHER, _and more_ MOTHERS. _All wear bright red lipstick and are elaborately costumed as the characters they played. All the characters who have transformed into these various_ MOTHERS _engulf the screaming, naked_ SHINTOKU, _draw him to them, lick their lips, tear him to pieces, and devour him._\n\n_A sutra of the Kishimo goddess, the sound of pilgrims' bells._\n\n_And everything falls endlessly into the labyrinth of the womb; only their voices echo and reverberate against one another, until gradually they all disappear._\n\n_A bell tolls once, telling the time._\n\n_Go-wong! It echoes, and then a blackout_.)\n\n( _In an innocent girl's voice_.)\n\nIf this baby cries, |  | Stuff it in a bag until it dies  \n---|---|---\n\n( _Chorus_.)\n\nI-ro-ha-ni-ho-he-to, A, B, C, D, E, F, G\n\nWind-scattered petals fade, blown from the tree,\n\nTheir scent remains: colors for the nose to see\n\nWind-scattered letters, written in blood |  | From bloody womb, a baby bud  \n---|---|---\n\nWith skin like snow: To the sea I go,\n\nTo make an offering. |  | At Shimizu in Tosa, where the ocean roils,  \n---|---|---\n\nAnd oil boils from the bottom of the sea, to end life's toils.\n\nAt Shimizu in Tosa, where life recoils.\n\nMother | Faceless | A bird summons her chick  \n---|---|---  \nMilk is scarce | Sleep is scarce\n\nCURTAIN\n\n1. An audio recording made in 1978 has a female _biwa_ singer, but the text does not specify who sings.\n_THE DRESSING ROOM_\n\n_That Which Flows Away Ultimately Becomes Nostalgia_\n\nSHIMIZU KUNIO\n\nTRANSLATED BY CHIORI MIYAGAWA, BASED ON A TRANSLATION BY JOHN K. GILLESPIE\n\nShimizu Kunio, _The Dressing Room_ , directed by Suzuki Kan'ichir\u014d, Seinenza, 1978. (Courtesy of Seinenza)\n\nBorn in 1934 and educated at Waseda University, Shimizu Kunio began writing for the stage and screen at the beginning of the 1960s. In 1969, he came into his own as one of the major playwrights of his generation after establishing, with director Ninagawa Yukio, the Modern Man's Theater (Gendaijin gekij\u014d), which produced several of his plays. Shimizu first collaborated with Ninagawa on the 1968 production of his play _Such a Serious Frivolity_ ( _Shinj \u014d afururu keihakusa_). Ninagawa then directed an acclaimed English-language production in Edinburgh and London of Shimizu's play _Tango at the End of Winter_ ( _Tango fuyu no owari ni_ , 1986), starring Alan Rickman, in 1991. Shimizu's _When We Go Down That Great Unfeeling River_ ( _Bokura ga hij \u014d no taiga o kudaru toki_) won the Kishida Award for best play of 1974. In 1976, Shimizu founded his own troupe, the Winter Tree Company (Mokut\u014dsha), with his wife, actress Matsumoto Noriko. Many of his plays are keen and sensitive portraits of women, like _An Older Sister, Burning Like a Flame_ ( _Hi no y \u014d ni samishii ane ga ite_, 1978), and are set in a place evocative of his hometown, Niigata, on the Japan Sea. Considered a literary and theatrical link between older, more orthodox _shingeki_ plays and those that came afterward, Shimizu's psychologically complex and lyrical dramas intertwine memory, desire, and fantasy in a way that distorts reality without rendering the narrative absurd. Madness and an often frustrated quest for personal identity are dominant themes in Shimizu's plays, concerns found in the works of many of his contemporaries, such as Terayama Sh\u016bji. First performed at Jean-Jean Theater in Shibuya (Tokyo) in 1977, _The Dressing Room_ ( _Gakuya_ ) is set backstage, where four actresses are preparing for a production of Anton Chekhov's _The Seagull_. We soon learn that not all is as it seems and that memory is a faculty that flows beyond the body, literally transcending death.\n\nCharacters\n\nACTRESS A\n\nACTRESS B\n\nACTRESS C\n\nACTRESS D\n\n_Darkness. Several mirrors begin to reflect glittering lights as nostalgic music is heard. The mirrors whisper, \"Although the tedium of everyday life deceives you at times, do not embrace sadness and rage. For if you tolerate patiently the sad days, you will without fail be visited by happiness again.... Your heart always lives in the future, Present entities aimlessly recollect lonely thoughts. Life in this world flows away in an instant. And that which flows away ultimately becomes nostalgia....\"_\n\n_From the silent darkness,_ ACTRESSES A _and_ B _emerge almost imperceptibly and face the mirrors to begin applying makeup. They are intensely involved in the process._ ACTRESS A _'s eyes are for some reason terribly burned, and her vision appears to be blurred._ ACTRESS B _'s neck is wrapped in a white bandage with fresh blood soaking through. The two actresses, completely absorbed in the makeup process, are quite serious but at the same time somewhat comical and even slightly sorrowful. Suddenly,_ ACTRESS C _stands up in front of the full-length mirror. She is dressed as Nina in_ The Sea Gull. _She holds a lighted cigarette._\n\nACTRESS C: I am a sea gull.... No, that's not right. I'm an actress. Ah, well....\n\n( _Light slowly grows brighter. It is an ordinary dressing room. She is rehearsing her lines just prior to going on stage_. ACTRESSES A _and_ B _are indifferent to_ ACTRESS C _and remain involved in their makeup process_.)\n\nACTRESS C:... So, he is here, too.... Well, it doesn't matter. He didn't believe in the theater; he always laughed at my dreams, and gradually I too ceased believing and lost heart. And then there was the anxiety of love, the jealousy, the constant fears for my baby. I grew petty, trivial, my acting was insipid. I didn't know what to do with my hands, I didn't know how to stand on the stage. I couldn't control my voice. You can't imagine what it's like to feel that you are acting abominably, I am a sea gull....\n\nNo, that's not right. Do you remember you shot a sea gull? A man came along by chance, saw it, and having nothing better to do, destroyed it.... A subject for a short story.... No, that's not it. What was I saying? I was talking about the stage.\n\nI'm not like that now. Now I'm a real actress, I act with delight, with rapture, I'm intoxicated when I'm on the stage, and I feel I act beautifully. And since I have been here, I've been walking, continually walking and thinking... and I think and feel that my soul is growing stronger with each day. I know now, I understand, that in our work\u2014whether it's acting or writing\u2014what's important is not fame, not glory, not the things I used to dream of, but the ability to endure. To be able to bear one's cross and have faith. I have faith, and it's not so painful now, and when I think of my vocation, I'm not afraid of life.\n\n( _Listening_.) Sh-sh! I'm going. Good-bye. When I become a great actress, come and see me. Promise? ( _Grasps an imaginary hand_.) It's late. I can hardly stand on my feet. I'm exhausted and hungry. ( _Takes a cookie from the dressing table_.) No, no... don't come with me. I'll go alone. When you see Trigorin, don't say anything to him.... I love him. I love him even more than before. How good life used to be, Kostya! How clear, how pure, warm, and joyous\u2014our feelings were like tender, delicate flowers.... Do you remember? Men, lions, eagles, and partridges, horned deer, geese, spiders, silent fish that dwell in the deep, Starfish, and creatures invisible to the eye\u2014these and all living things, all, all living things, having completed their sad cycle, are no more. For thousands of years the earth has borne no living creature. And now in vain this poor moon lights her lamp. Cranes no longer wake and cry in meadows.... Oops! It's already my cue.\n\n(ACTRESS C _suddenly does vocal exercises and runs out of the dressing room_. ACTRESSES A _and_ B _react for the first time_.)\n\nACTRESS A: I am a sea gull....\n\nACTRESS B: No, that's not right. I'm an actress. Ah, well...\n\nACTRESS A: Can you believe she's forty?\n\nACTRESS B: Look, that idiot forgot her hat.\n\nACTRESS A: So she did.\n\n(ACTRESS B _stands up, goes over to the hat, picks it up, and puts it on her chair. She then sits on the hat. The hat, of course, is brutally crushed._ ACTRESS C _reenters in a hurry_.)\n\nACTRESS C ( _Searching_ ): My hat... my hat... my hat... ( _Finds it_.) Ah!\n\n( _She approaches the hat and tries to pick it up_. ACTRESS B _plants herself on the hat_.)\n\nACTRESS C: What's going on here?\n\n(ACTRESS C _pulls at the hat with greater force. Right at that moment,_ ACTRESS B _lifts herself up, sending_ ACTRESS C _reeling off balance_.)\n\nACTRESS C: That's it! I will demand a different dressing room tomorrow.\n\nACTRESS B: I don't care.\n\nACTRESS C ( _Glaring at the area occupied by the two actresses_ ): Rotten, foul air always hovers around here.\n\n(ACTRESS C _exits in disgust_.)\n\nACTRESS A: Did you hear that?\n\nACTRESS B: I heard.\n\nACTRESS A: She called us \"rotten and foul air...\"\n\nACTRESS B:... that \"hovers.\"\n\nACTRESS A: Yeah, \"hovers around here.\"\n\nACTRESS B: We can't be hovering. That sounds disgusting.\n\nACTRESS A: What do you mean?\n\nACTRESS B: Well, if something hovers, it's not solid, is it?\n\nACTRESS A: Either way, it's a useless image.\n\nACTRESS B: It sounds poisonous more than useless. We \"hover....\"\n\nACTRESS A: You are obsessed with \"hovering.\" My pride is beginning to get hurt. That's enough.\n\n( _Short pause_.)\n\nACTRESS B: Anyway, the hats in style these days are abominable.\n\nACTRESS A: Well, you certainly didn't make it any better by crushing it.\n\nACTRESS B: When we were performing, we wore far more elegant hats.\n\nACTRESS A: When we were performing?\n\nACTRESS B: That's right.\n\nACTRESS A: Huh....\n\nACTRESS B: What do you mean \"huh\"?\n\nACTRESS A: You talk like you played Nina in _The Sea Gull_.\n\nACTRESS B ( _Hurt_ ): I told you before, I had one opportunity.\n\nACTRESS A: Only one?\n\nACTRESS B: What about you? You didn't even have a chance to play a gray starling, never mind a sea gull. You used to feel sorry for yourself all the time. \"Ah, I was an eternal prompter....\"\n\nACTRESS A: I can say the exact same about you. Don't condescend to me. I don't run my mouth on lies like you do, but I also had an opportunity... Lady Macbeth.\n\nACTRESS B: Oh my, Shakespeare....\n\nACTRESS A: 'That's right. I was on a tour... some town on the Inland Sea... Lady Macbeth ate too much smelt, the local fish dish, that morning and had a sudden attack of diarrhea. It was serious... she was in a coma by noon.\n\nACTRESS B: I see. There was your big chance.\n\nACTRESS A: I had been carrying a lucky charm from Kasama Shrine for my protection. I prayed to that charm... hurry up and die! Drop dead now!\n\nACTRESS B: Despite your prayer, your enemy miraculously recovered in the afternoon.\n\nACTRESS A: Not really\n\nACTRESS B: She didn't recover?\n\nACTRESS A: No... by afternoon, I was suffering, too.\n\nACTRESS B ( _Amazed_ ): You ate the smelt, too?\n\nACTRESS A ( _Nods_ ): It was destiny. Everyone eats that fish dish in the Inland Sea.\n\nACTRESS B: I would have done the same. I have never been able to avoid destiny.\n\nACTRESS A: Definitely! That dish is delicious.\n\n( _Short pause_.)\n\nACTRESS B: Lady Macbeth... I envy you. You had your chance, if only once. I didn't, even though I attended Macbeth performances over forty, maybe fifty times as a prompter.\n\nACTRESS A: So you know all the lines?\n\nACTRESS B: Of course I do. I recited them more than fifty times. ( _Recites_.) \"Hoarse is the raven that croaks Duncan's final approach within my walls. Come, you spirits that guide human thoughts, unsex me here. And fill me, head to foot, full of warrior cruelty! Thicken my blood; block up all access and passage to remorse, that no sudden strings of conscience shake my dark purpose nor soften its dread effect....\"\n\nACTRESS A: Hold on a minute.\n\nACTRESS B: I was just getting into it.\n\nACTRESS A: Um... is it the postwar version?\n\nACTRESS B: Postwar?!\n\nACTRESS A: Well, it's different from the version I remember.\n\nACTRESS B: How?\n\nACTRESS A: It's different from the beginning.\n\nACTRESS B: You mean the whole thing?\n\nACTRESS A: Yeah.... ( _Striking a somewhat old-fashioned posture_.)\n\n\"The raven himself is hoarse\n\nThat croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan\n\nUnder my battlements.\"\n\nACTRESS B:... \"the fatal entrance\"?\n\nACTRESS A:\n\n\"Come, you spirits\n\nThat tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,\n\nAnd fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full\n\nOf direst cruelty! Make thick my blood;\n\nStop up the access and passage to remorse,\n\nThat no compunctious visitings of nature.\"\n\nACTRESS B:... \"no compunctious\"?\n\nACTRESS A:\n\n\"Shake my fell purpose nor keep peace between\n\nThe effect and it. Come to my woman's breasts\n\nAnd take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers,\n\nWherever in your sightless substances\n\nYou wait on nature's mischief!\"\n\nACTRESS B: \"Nature's mischief\"?\n\n(ACTRESS A _stops reciting_.)\n\nACTRESS B: Go on, please.\n\nACTRESS A: Excuse me if I'm old-fashioned. I'm much older than you. I'm from an era when one felt \"compunctions.\"\n\nACTRESS B ( _Comfortingly_ ): I can understand what you mean, in an indirect sort of way.\n\nACTRESS A: An indirect sort of way?\n\nACTRESS B: Well, it slightly lacks sensitivity.\n\nACTRESS A: Now I'm insensitive. I see. That's why I ended my career being a prompter.\n\nACTRESS B: There you go getting sulky again.\n\nACTRESS A: You think us \"prewar\" people are hardheaded and difficult, don't you?\n\nACTRESS B: Listen, you claim to be an eternal prompter, but weren't you on stage sometimes? I don't mean as Lady Macbeth or Nina....\n\nACTRESS A: Yes, yes, of course... as Nobleman A or Messenger 2 or Gatekeeper 3...\n\nACTRESS B: But those are all male roles.\n\nACTRESS A: I know. For some reason I got only male roles. Maybe because there weren't enough male actors around because of the war. I remember... I was even cast in Macbeth several times as a boy.\n\nACTRESS B: A boy? What were his lines?\n\n(ACTRESS A _hesitates_.)\n\nACTRESS B: What's wrong?\n\nACTRESS A: It's just... my version is old-fashioned,\n\nACTRESS B: I don't care.\n\nACTRESS A: I remember... I also had a part as a gambler.\n\nACTRESS B: You mean a punk?\n\nACTRESS A: Right. In Miyoshi J\u016br\u014d's play _Slashed Senta_. Of course, I wasn't Senta.\n\nACTRESS B: That's a Japanese classic. You don't have to worry about your version being outdated. ( _She insists_.)\n\nACTRESS A: But.... ( _Suddenly brandishing a backscratcher as a sword_.) \"Count me out. In this mortal land, such a manner of gambler should not ever be forgiven. I know that. Yet I insisted on provoking trouble; I want you to know I have no place to escape to or hide in. But please have mercy this night. I wish to be set free. Big bosses, I can make endless excuses because I don't like to kill. I'm not capable of killing...\"\n\nACTRESS B: That's great. Is that your line?\n\nACTRESS A: No, it's Senta's.... \"Are you hearing me, bosses. I am, as you can see, a wanderer with neither a name nor identity. I'm just another insignificant pawn. However, if you worry about your reputation being ruined when the word gets out that the one who conquered this gambling joint was a wanderer, make me into a thief. I'm a thief. Right, a thief. But I am not about to use this money for my own pleasure... dozens of people's lives will be spared by this money.\"\n\nACTRESS B: Look, when do you make your entrance?\n\nACTRESS A: Hush. It won't be long... \"I beg you bosses, look the other way just for one night. I will complete my task, and turn myself over to you. I am humbling myself. I understand your rage thinking that I'm another bum, but you are wrong. Think of me as a peasant farmer's son crying his heart out. Do not think that you gave me this one night's take, but think you gave it to peasant farmers, and let me go. Big bosses, I, Senta of Makabe Village, won't forget what I owe you. Wait.... ( _Looks around and senses danger_.) I don't want to kill. I don't want to destroy life. Can't you understand that?\" At that moment, Takijiro of Shimozuma leaps out on stage....\n\nACTRESS B: Say...\n\nACTRESS A: \"Shut up! Sentaro, what are you babbling about? You don't want to kill? Then I will. I'll rip him apart.\"\n\nACTRESS B: Is that your role?\n\nACTRESS A: No.\n\nACTRESS B: Are we still waiting?\n\nACTRESS A: I'm already on stage.\n\nACTRESS B: What? Where?\n\nACTRESS A: Right around here.\n\nACTRESS B: Around here?\n\nACTRESS A: Yes, here. I came leaping out with Takijiro. In the stage direction it said, \"Takijiro leaps out. Seven punks rush out with him. All have their teeth clenched and remain silent.\"\n\nACTRESS B: Remain silent!?\n\nACTRESS A: Right. Everyone was clenching their teeth... but I had to prompt Senta and Takijiro on top of that, so I couldn't really be faithful to the stage directions.\n\nACTRESS B: I can see what you mean. ( _Clenching her teeth_.) It's kind of hard to prompt doing this.\n\nACTRESS A ( _As if dreaming_ ): But I loved that play. I liked the beautiful women's roles like Otsuta or Omyo... but I was moved by Senta, who gets slashed...\n\nACTRESS B ( _Staring_ ): You don't mean!...\n\nACTRESS A: Mean what?\n\nACTRESS B: That's why your makeup is...\n\nACTRESS A: What about my makeup?\n\nACTRESS B: I've been wondering.\n\nACTRESS A: Wondering what?\n\nACTRESS B: About your eternal role.\n\nACTRESS A: And?\n\nACTRESS B: Is it Slashed Senta?\n\nACTRESS A: Give me a break! I am an actress. I would like a female role. What about you? What's your role?\n\nACTRESS B: It's a secret.\n\nACTRESS A: Well, I know already.\n\nACTRESS B: No, you don't.\n\nACTRESS A: It's Nina. _The Sea Gull_. Right on the mark!\n\nACTRESS B: Wrong.\n\nACTRESS A: I sensed it when you destroyed that hat. You were as nasty as a mother-in-law.\n\nACTRESS B: I said you were wrong.\n\nACTRESS A: \"Nina! My darling.... I'm Trigorin.\"\n\nACTRESS B: Trigorin!?\n\nACTRESS A: \"... these wonderful eyes, this inexpressibly beautiful, tender smile... this sweet face with an expression of angelic purity....\"\n\nACTRESS B: Stop it! That's creepy. Senta is a far better male role, if you must.\n\nACTRESS A: No, I won't stop. Forgive me for my old-fashioned interpretation. \"Nina, things have taken an unexpected turn, and it appears we are leaving today. It's not very likely that we shall meet again. I am sorry. I don't often meet young girls... youthful and interesting. I've forgotten how it feels to be eighteen or nineteen.\"\n\nACTRESS B: That monologue suits you well.\n\nACTRESS A: Be serious. You were also an eternal prompter, weren't you Nina?\n\nACTRESS B: \"Oh, beautiful lake, romantic forest, splendid big sky....\"\n\nACTRESS A: There you go! But I don't recognize the lines....\n\nACTRESS B: Never mind. I'm going to say what I like. \"A beautiful lake romantic forest, splendid big sky. When I stand at the edge of the lake, I am surrounded by majestic and generous nature. But if I could become an actress, I would gladly sacrifice this grand nature and all else.\"\n\nACTRESS A: \"All else\"?\n\nACTRESS B: \"Yes. For the happiness of being an actress, I would endure poverty, disillusionment, the hatred of my family; I would live in a garret and eat black bread, suffer dissatisfaction with myself and the recognition of my own imperfections, but in return I shall demand fame.\"\n\nACTRESS A: \"Fame...\"\n\nACTRESS B: \"Real, resounding fame...\n\nACTRESS A: \"... real resounding fame...\n\nACTRESS B: \"My head is swimming.\"\n\nACTRESS A: \"Nina, I am being called... to pack, I suppose. But I don't feel like leaving.\"\n\nACTRESS B ( _Abruptly raises her head_ ): \"Do you see the house with the garden on the other side of the lake?\"\n\nACTRESS A: \"Where? Oh, yes of course.\"\n\nACTRESS B: Can you really see it?\n\nACTRESS A ( _Trying to focus with her damaged eyes_ ): I should be able to!\n\nACTRESS B: \"It belonged to my mother when she was alive. I was born there. I've spent my whole life by this lake, I know every little island in it.\"\n\nACTRESS A: \"It's lovely here.\" ( _A wig falls at her feet_.) \"And what is this?\"\n\nACTRESS B: \"A sea gull. Konstantin Gavrilovich shot it.\"\n\nACTRESS A: \"A beautiful bird.\" ( _Mimes writing something_.)\n\nACTRESS B: \"What are you writing?\"\n\nACTRESS A: \"An idea occurred to me... a subject for a short story. A young girl like you lives all her life beside a lake; she loves the lake like a sea gull and, like a sea gull, is happy and free. A man comes along by chance, sees it, and, having nothing better to do, destroys it.\"\n\nACTRESS B: My...\n\nACTRESS A: A good story, don't you think? Actually, it's quite common. It can easily happen to a young actress like you. ( _She gives a mean glance to the white bandage on_ ACTRESS B _'s throat_.) Oh, my dear Nina, what has happened to you? That bandage... my goodness, the blood has soaked through it. Has someone shot you, too, like a sea gull?\n\nACTRESS B: Stop it!\n\nACTRESS A ( _Ignoring this, she grabs_ ACTRESS B _'s bandage and rips it open_ ): Look at this! Numerous little cuts on your neck... they look like... you did this to yourself. How horrible! I don't understand. Why would you do such a foolish thing? For a play? For a man? Or for both?\n\n(ACTRESS B _pushes_ A _away_.)\n\nACTRESS A ( _Continues with a cold smile_ ): But Nina, let me give you one piece of advice. Committing suicide for a man is the lowest thing an actress can do. It's fine for countless men to commit suicide for an actress; it's like receiving awards. But the reverse is the most detestable act an actress can commit. Don't you agree?\n\nACTRESS B: When are you going to quit lecturing me? All right, I'll admit that I'm not qualified to call myself an actress. You know, you were lucky. Your wounds were made glorious by the war. Weapons factories, women's volunteer corps, air raids... the whole society looks on the scars of the war with sweet sentimentality.\n\nACTRESS A: Just exactly what are you trying to say?!\n\nACTRESS B: Wow, you are scary.\n\nACTRESS A: If you have something to say, why don't you just come out and say it!\n\nACTRESS B: Oh, I have nothing special to say. I just thought we should really think about which scar is better\u2014the one caused by the bombing, or the one caused by the kitchen knife.\n\nACTRESS A: I see. Beating around the bush is the way of postwar realism.\n\nACTRESS B: Huh, the sly approach is the way of prewar realism, right?\n\nACTRESS A: Shut up, you sewer rat!\n\nACTRESS B: Stuff it, you spiny rat!\n\n( _They throw objects from the dressing table at each other then immediately return to their makeup. A long silence. Frustrated with the results of the makeup, they throw temper tantrums. Long silence_.)\n\nACTRESS A: Um...\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nACTRESS A: I'm sure I'm making a big deal out of nothing, as usual, but what the hell is a spiny rat?\n\nACTRESS B: A spiny rat is just that, a spiny rat.\n\nACTRESS A: Do they really exist?\n\nACTRESS B: Exist? Why do you always ask me things in a stinging way? They exist. They are real. They live on Amami Oshima Island.\n\nACTRESS A: What is their habitat?\n\nACTRESS B: Potato patch.\n\nACTRESS A: Potato patch? Not bad. Their environment is no worse than sewer rats'. In fact, their standard of living is higher than sewer rats'.\n\n(ACTRESS B _is mortified_. ACTRESS D _enters quietly. She is younger than the others. She clutches a large pillow to her chest. She stops, looks around the room, and sits in a chair in a corner. She freezes. [As you must know by now,_ ACTRESSES A _and_ B _are not visible to_ ACTRESS D _because they are dead_. _] They study_ ACTRESS D _intently_.)\n\nACTRESS A: Who is that?\n\nACTRESS B: I don't know. She looks familiar, though.\n\nACTRESS A: One of our acquaintances, maybe?\n\nACTRESS B: What acquaintances?\n\nACTRESS A: What is she holding? It looks like a pillow.\n\n(ACTRESS B _stands up_.)\n\nACTRESS A: Leave her alone.\n\n( _Ignoring this,_ ACTRESS B _goes up close to_ D _and peers at her_.)\n\nACTRESS A: So what is it?\n\nACTRESS B: It's really a pillow.\n\nACTRESS A: Hm...\n\n(ACTRESS D _is staring motionlessly at a fixed spot on the floor_. ACTRESS B _squats down directly in front of her_.)\n\nACTRESS B: She is agonizing over something.\n\nACTRESS A: Agonizing?\n\nACTRESS B: Either that or she has a fever. I wonder if she is using the pillow to exorcise something.\n\nACTRESS A: Exorcise what?\n\nACTRESS B: Maybe her fever comes down when she clings to the pillow.\n\nACTRESS A: I've never heard of such a thing.\n\n(ACTRESS B _studies_ D _persistently_.)\n\nACTRESS A: Come on, leave her alone.\n\n(ACTRESS B _turns to leave_ D.)\n\nACTRESS D: Mamma.\n\n( _Startled,_ ACTRESS B _stops abruptly_.)\n\nACTRESS D ( _Without taking her eyes off the floor_ ): Mamma, did you read my letter?\n\nACTRESS B: Letter!?\n\n(ACTRESSES A _and_ B _look at each other_.)\n\nACTRESS D: I mentioned it in the letter, didn't I? Finally, I've recovered. In our world, talent is of course important, but health is essential. And the best thing for health is sleep. Yes, I consumed sleep. Moorish people have a saying\u2014\"A good pillow for a sound sleep.\" I have taken that philosophy to heart. Mamma, I'm all right now. Really. I'm the perfect picture of health. So don't worry, Mamma.\n\n(ACTRESSES A _and_ B _are dumbfounded. They hastily resume their making up_.)\n\nACTRESS B: Um....\n\nACTRESS A: Yeah?\n\nACTRESS B: If you were her mother, would you stop worrying?\n\nACTRESS A: Probably not.\n\n( _Music is heard from upstage [where the actual stage is assumed to be]. It is the ending of_ The Sea Gull. ACTRESS D _raises her head with a start. She moves to the center of the room as if she were acting. The dressing room seems to transform into a stage. A spotlight on_ ACTRESS D.)\n\nACTRESS D: \"... I'm going. Good-bye. When I become a great actress, come and see me. Promise? It's late. I can hardly stand on my feet. I'm exhausted and hungry No, no... don't come with me. I'll go alone. When you see Trigorin, don't say anything to him.... I love him. I love him even more than before. How good life used to be, Kostya! How clear, how pure, warm, and joyous\u2014our feelings were like tender, delicate flowers.... Do you remember? Men, lions, eagles, and partridges, horned deer, geese, spiders, silent fish that dwell in the deep, starfish, and creatures invisible to the eye\u2014these and all living things, all, all living things, having completed their sad cycle, are no more. For thousands of years the earth has borne no living creature. And now in vain this poor moon lights her lamp. Cranes no longer wake and cry in meadows. May beetles are heard no more in linden groves....\" ( _Impulsively embraces a robe hanging nearby and leaves in that pose_.)\n\n( _The light fades to black. Pause. From a distance, sound of thundering applause. As it dies, the light in the room returns to normal_. ACTRESS C _returns from the stage_.)\n\nACTRESS C: Oh, it itches, itches!\n\n( _As she enters, she takes off her wig and scratches her head violently_.)\n\nACTRESS C ( _Continues_ ): That idiot! I couldn't hear the prompter at all. \"Do you remember? Men, lions, eagles, and partridges, horned deer, geese, spiders, silent fish that dwell in the deep, seahorses....\" Why do I always stumble on this word? Not \"seahorses\" but \"starfish.\"... Well, it's good enough for today. At least both starfish and seahorses live in the ocean.\n\n( _She notices_ ACTRESS D _sitting motionless in the corner, the pillow clutched to her chest_.)\n\nACTRESS C: Kiiko...\n\n(ACTRESS D _nods_.)\n\nACTRESS C: I didn't even notice you. Why didn't you say something? When did you get here? Are you feeling better?\n\nACTRESS D: Yes, thank you.\n\nACTRESS C: Good... ( _She notices the pillow_.) What's with that thing?\n\nACTRESS D: Yes, uh, this is really nothing, but I would like you to have it.\n\nACTRESS C: A gift?\n\nACTRESS D: That's right.\n\n(ACTRESS C _is taken aback by the filthy, stained pillow that_ D _presents to her_.)\n\nACTRESS C: I appreciate your thought, but, I... I have plenty of pillows.\n\nACTRESS D: Please accept it.\n\nACTRESS C: No, really ( _She pushes the pillow back_.) But I'm glad you are back. That new girl has been prompting for me since you fell ill, but her timing is just terrible. Listen, can you start tomorrow?\n\nACTRESS D: What?\n\nACTRESS C: Prompt. For me.\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nACTRESS C: What's wrong? You aren't coming back?\n\nACTRESS D: Look, I... I am completely healthy now.\n\nACTRESS C: Yes, I know. That's why I'm asking you.\n\nACTRESS D: I'm sorry to have troubled you for such a long time.\n\nACTRESS C: Never mind. It was nothing. So, you will prompt for me?\n\nACTRESS D: Prompt?\n\nACTRESS C ( _Annoyed_ ): Yes, prompt.\n\nACTRESS D ( _Annoyed_ ): Haven't you been listening to me? Why don't you understand?\n\nACTRESS C: Understand what?\n\nACTRESS D: I am completely healthy now, therefore...\n\nACTRESS C: Therefore, what?!\n\nACTRESS D: I want it back.\n\nACTRESS C ( _Unsure_ ): What do you want back?\n\nACTRESS D: Well.... ( _Slight laugh as if to say \"you know.\"_ )\n\nACTRESS C ( _Increasingly uneasy_ ): I'm taking care of something for you?\n\nACTRESS D: I wouldn't say \"taking care of.\"\n\nACTRESS C: Speak up. What do you want back from me?\n\nACTRESS D: The role of Nina.\n\nACTRESS C: What?\n\nACTRESS D: What I'm saying is, I want the role of Nina back.\n\n(ACTRESSES A _and_ B _are shocked. They drop their compacts on the floor_. ACTRESS C _also is speechless for a moment_.)\n\nACTRESS C: Um... Kiiko, do you know what you are saying?\n\nACTRESS D: Yes, of course. Why won't you acknowledge my health? Don't I look much better?\n\nACTRESS C: Even if you have recovered completely....\n\nACTRESS D: I've already apologized for causing you trouble for a long period of time.\n\n( _As_ ACTRESS C _searches for words,_ ACTRESS D _stares at her_.)\n\nACTRESS C: You should go back to the hospital. You haven't recovered completely. This is absurd.\n\nACTRESS D: What's so absurd?\n\nACTRESS C: Kiiko... the role of Nina was mine from the beginning. And you were my prompter from the beginning. I don't really want to say this, but you are not ready for Nina.\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nACTRESS C: OK? Do you understand now?\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nACTRESS C: Go home. I'm going out to dinner with some people.\n\n(ACTRESS C _starts to change her clothes_. ACTRESS D, _clutching the pillow, shows no sign off leaving. Mesmerized by the scene,_ ACTRESSES A _and_ B _have done strange things with their makeup. Suddenly aware how horrible they look, they start fixing their faces_. ACTRESS C _hangs up Nina's costume. She is uneasy with_ ACTRESS D _'s glare_.)\n\nACTRESS D: It's all my fault. I got sick at the height of my career. I wrote many letters to him from the hospital bed. Letters of apology. I feel terrible for the author.\n\nACTRESS C: You feel terrible for the author?\n\nACTRESS D: Yes. He wrote such a brilliant role for me.\n\nACTRESS C: You know who the author is, don't you?\n\nACTRESS D: Of course I do.\n\nACTRESS C: He has been dead for seventy years.\n\nACTRESS D: That's a mere rumor.\n\nACTRESS C ( _Amazed_ ): A rumor!?\n\nACTRESS D: I talked to him on the phone the day before yesterday.\n\nACTRESS C: Talked to who?\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nACTRESS C ( _Looking a_ t ACTRESS D _suspiciously_ ): I'm beginning to see it. Go ahead, Kiiko, you can tell me.\n\nACTRESS D: Yes....\n\nACTRESS C: Should I guess it? Maybe the author?\n\nACTRESS D: You are right.\n\nACTRESS C: How wonderful that you spoke to the author. I have done Chekhov numerous times, but never once had an opportunity to talk to him. I doubt I ever will. So what did you two talk about?\n\nACTRESS D: Many things.\n\nACTRESS C: I see. Many things.\n\nACTRESS D: Before we hung up, he asked me to get well soon and return to the stage. He said that he is looking forward to seeing me all healthy and on the stage once again.\n\nACTRESS C: Un-huh.\n\nACTRESS D: That's why I want to play Nina starting tomorrow.\n\nACTRESS C: I don't think so.\n\nACTRESS D: But I'm healthy.\n\nACTRESS C: It won't work.\n\n(ACTRESS D _holds the pillow out to_ C.)\n\nACTRESS C: What are you doing that for?\n\n(ACTRESS D _continues to shove the pillow into_ C.)\n\nACTRESS C: I told you, I don't want it.\n\nACTRESS D: It's my favorite. I slept so well. Now, it's your turn...\n\nACTRESS C: My turn? My turn to do what?\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nACTRESS C: You are demanding I exchange the role of Nina for this pillow!\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nACTRESS C: Where do you get such a mad idea?\n\nACTRESS D: You must be tired.\n\nACTRESS C: I'm not.\n\nACTRESS D: Yes, you are. Very tired. You need rest and sleep for your exhaustion.\n\nACTRESS C: Stop it! Stop....\n\n(ACTRESS C _grabs the pillow and throws it across the room. It flies in the direction_ _OF_ ACTRESSES A _and_ B.)\n\nACTRESS C: I have been an actress for a long time, but this is the first time someone insisted I give up a part for a pillow. I've had enough already. I can't waste my time with you. Go home.\n\n(ACTRESS C _sits at the dressing table and starts removing her makeup_. ACTRESSES A _and_ B _are curiously looking at the pillow on the floor_.)\n\nACTRESS B ( _Smells the pillow_ ): It's sweaty\n\nACTRESS A: I sense her strong determination from it.\n\n(ACTRESS D _approaches the pillow_. ACTRESSES A _and_ B _draw back quickly_. ACTRESS D _picks it up and hugs it affectionately_.)\n\nACTRESS D ( _Mumbles_ ): And I went through the trouble of reserving you a room at the hospital.\n\nACTRESS C: What did you say?\n\nACTRESS D: I said I already reserved a room at the hospital.\n\nACTRESS C: A room at the hospital?\n\nACTRESS D: Yes.\n\nACTRESS C: For whom? ( _Suddenly realizing_.) You mean for me?\n\n(ACTRESS D _nods_. ACTRESS C _is speechless_.)\n\nACTRESS D: I really wanted to get a private room for you, but unfortunately they were all taken. But now I think a large room is better. There is a television set, and you will have a lot of people to talk to. Older people often prefer a large room to a private room. You once said that you were terribly lonely living alone because you had no one to talk to. I thought about that, and came to a real understanding. Loneliness is the worst thing that can happen to anyone.\n\n(ACTRESS C _listens in astonishment, her face still half made up_.)\n\nACTRESS D ( _Continues_ ): If you really think about it, we actresses get so little reward. We sacrifice everything. Day after day we abuse our degenerating bodies, and what we desperately seek always turns out to be an illusion of love. That's why I'm against a prolonged commitment to this harsh profession. We can endure such cruel work only while we are young...\n\nACTRESS C: And you are going to rescue me.\n\nACTRESS D: I don't mean to be righteous, but it's not just me, you know. Women my age all feel the same way. They don't say anything, but they all want to liberate you soon from this brutal profession. The role of Nina must be particularly hard for you, moving around like a butterfly. I feel awful that I forced you to take over the role because of my illness. I apologize.\n\nACTRESS C: Kiiko.\n\nACTRESS D: Yes.\n\nACTRESS C ( _Restrained_ ): How can I make you understand? You are right about the work being hard. Indeed, we sacrifice so much. And the cruelest factor is aging. Year after year your own body goes on betraying you....\n\nACTRESS D: I know....\n\nACTRESS C: Just a moment, that's not what I really mean. There is more to it than your physical being. Youth alone will not bring Nina alive. How can I say this?... What's important is accumulation, all kinds of accumulation. You know, loneliness is also a type of accumulation.\n\nACTRESS D: I can't imagine....\n\nACTRESS C: I don't mean loneliness is an accomplishment. I mean... Um... I'm confused now. Anyway, I am well aware how heartless this profession is. But I made the choice. Nothing else will do. I don't care how brutal it can get. I will enjoy the savagery all the way. Nothing you can say will make me give up Nina. I will perform it two, three hundred more times! I will perform it when I'm an old hag; I'm hungry for brutality! Oh, I sound ridiculous. I'm not making any sense. What am I saying?\n\nACTRESS D: See. You are tired.\n\nACTRESS C: What?\n\nACTRESS D: I reserved a room for you, you know, at the hospital.\n\nACTRESS C: Get out!\n\n(ACTRESS D _stares at_ ACTRESS C.)\n\nACTRESS C ( _Continues_ ): Don't make me angrier than I already am. I'm afraid of talking to someone like you... please... I don't want to be ranting and raving and end up feeling miserable.\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nACTRESS C ( _Pleading_ ): I beg you, please, go home. I'm really tired now. I want to be alone.\n\n(ACTRESS D _presents the pillow_.)\n\nACTRESS C: Stop it!\n\n( _In a rage,_ ACTRESS C _picks up a beer bottle and smashes it on_ D _'s head. The bottle shatters, and_ ACTRESS D _falls_.)\n\nACTRESS C ( _Realizing what she has done_ ): Kiiko....\n\n(ACTRESS C _runs over and takes_ D _in her arms_. ACTRESSES A _and_ B _cannot hide their curiosity_. ACTRESS D _pushes_ C _away and stands up_.)\n\nACTRESS C: I didn't mean to.... How do you feel?\n\n(ACTRESS D _sways_. ACTRESS C _quickly catches her_.)\n\nACTRESS C: Are you all right?\n\nACTRESS D: I... I'm healthy.\n\nACTRESS C: I know.\n\nACTRESS D: Can I have my pillow?\n\n(ACTRESS C _picks up the pillow and hands it to_ D. ACTRESS D _unsteadily starts to leave_.)\n\nACTRESS C: Where are you going?\n\nACTRESS D: Nothing is better for fatigue than sleep.\n\nACTRESS C: Kiiko.\n\n(ACTRESS D _exits, clutching the pillow_. ACTRESS C _sinks down in a chair._ ACTRESSES A _and_ B _are looking at_ C _nastily. Pause. Suddenly_ ACTRESS C _grabs a tissue paper box off the dressing table and throws it across the room. It flies in the direction of_ ACTRESSES A _and_ B _; they dodge it just in time_. ACTRESS C _keeps throwing anything she can get her hands on_. ACTRESSES A _and_ B _run around the room dodging them_.)\n\nACTRESS C: Don't make me laugh! Jesus! I won't be made fun of by that meager actress! Ha, ha... Exchange my role for a pillow? I'm going to laugh so hard I'll burst! Really the nerve! \"Women my age all feel the same way. We all want to liberate you from this brutal profession.\" I don't need to be liberated just because it's the \"in\" thing to do these days. God dammit!\n\n(ACTRESS C _throws more objects. One of them hits_ ACTRESS B.)\n\nACTRESS B: Shit.\n\nACTRESS A: Are you all right?\n\nACTRESS B: Why is everything flying this way?\n\nACTRESS A: Like she is aiming at us.\n\n(ACTRESS C _pours a brandy and gulps it down_.)\n\nACTRESS C: Ha. She thinks she can play Nina? A woman with fish-eye lenses for eyes! She is nothing but shine and gloss.... If we call that passion and youth, then I say this world is full of nothing but grotesque ghosts.... And she is huge. It's one thing to be healthy, but it's another to be an overgrown worthless tree trunk. She does not have the body of an actress. On top of that, she moves slower than a hippopotamus in the zoo. Even it moves faster when entering the water... Nina? Sea gull? Ha, ha... ( _She takes a drink_.) Look at the time. I've wasted so much time. Stupid.\n\n( _She sits at the dressing table and starts applying makeup for going out to dinner. She suddenly stops and stares at herself in the mirror_.)\n\nACTRESS C:... Kiiko, I'm the wrong person to take on. Your pillow doesn't do anything to me. I'm thick skinned. Think about it. I've been acting for twenty years. There is some accumulation in that. You haven't experienced the feeling. That feeling... like blood slowly oozing out from the root of every hair. I've lived through it over and over. I don't expect you to understand... that sensation of blood leaking out from every pore of your body. It's like you have to choose either stabbing your adversary or choosing your own death. Have you heard a human howl? Not scream or curse, I mean howl. Locked in the bathroom of your own apartment... alone... five or six hours... all through the night... it's the cry of a beast... when your dried-up throat breaks your voice, you drink water out of the toilet... then keep howling.... That's how you get a stronger voice.... That's accumulation... of a nauseating kind....\n\n( _Long pause_. ACTRESS C _lights a cigarette and puts on a record. Music. She stands up and takes off her robe. She is in her slip. She looks at herself in the mirror taking various poses_.)\n\nACTRESS C: True, I have sacrificed certain things, but I can justify them. I always know what I'm sacrificing... the battle is eternal, my soldier in the mirror... ( _She hoists a glass_ )... as I sit in twilight late alone by the flickering oak-flame... musing on long-pass'd war-scenes\u2014of the countless buried unknown soldiers... of the vacant names, as unidentified air's and sea's\u2014the unreturn'd... the brief truce after battle, with grim burial-squads, and the deep-fill'd trenches... even here in my room\u2014shadows and half lights in the noiseless flickering flames... again I see the stalwart ranks on\u2014filing, rising\u2014I hear the rhythmic tramp of the armies... ( _She laughs_.)\n\n(ACTRESS D _appears, clutching the pillow, and stands silently in the doorway. Her face is pale_.)\n\nACTRESS A: Look.\n\nACTRESS B: That pillow woman is here again.\n\n(ACTRESS C _turns off the record player_.)\n\nACTRESS C: Let's see....\n\n(ACTRESS C _crosses in front of_ D _to get her clothes_. ACTRESS D _wants to say something to her, but_ C _does not notice. As_ ACTRESS C _gets dressed near_ D, _she murmurs Nina's monologue, during which_ D _tries several times to talk, but restrains herself_.)\n\nACTRESS C: \"... I was afraid you might hate me, Konstantin Gavrilovich. Every night I dream that you are looking at me and don't recognize me. If you only knew! Ever since I arrived I've been walking here... by the lake. I came near the house many times, but couldn't bring myself to come in. Let's sit down. ( _Sits at the dressing table and fixes her makeup and clothes_.) Let's sit and talk.... It's nice here, warm and cozy.... Listen, the wind! There's a passage in Turgenev: 'Happy the man who on such a night has a roof over his head, who has a warm corner of his own.' I am a sea gull.... No, that's not right. ( _Rubs her forehead and stands_.) What was I saying? Yes, Turgenev.... ( _Takes her purse and looks back on the dressing room from the doorway_.) 'And may the Lord help all homeless Wanderers....'\"\n\n(ACTRESS C _exits_. ACTRESS D _wants to follow her but remains and watches_ C _leave. Long pause_. ACTRESS D _slowly looks around the dressing room_. ACTRESSES A _and_ B _are watching_ D. ACTRESS D _stops her eyes on_ A _and_ B. _They stare at each other for a moment. Then_ ACTRESSES A _and_ B _quickly look away and resume their makeup_. ACTRESS D _slowly approaches_ A _and_ B.)\n\nACTRESS D: Good evening.\n\n( _Shocked,_ ACTRESSES A _and_ B _fall off their chairs_.)\n\nACTRESS B: Y... y... you can see us?!\n\nACTRESS D: Yes.\n\nACTRESS A: Then, you too are....\n\nACTRESS B ( _To_ ACTRESS A): That blow before; it got her good. Poor thing.\n\nACTRESS D: Excuse me.\n\nACTRESS A: Yes?\n\nACTRESS D: May I ask a question?\n\nACTRESS B: Go ahead.\n\nACTRESS A: Please.\n\nACTRESS D ( _Looking at their makeup_ ): Were you here doing this every night?\n\nACTRESS B: Well... yes. Didn't mean to invade your space.\n\nACTRESS D: Oh, no. I don't mind.\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nACTRESS D:... I used to feel something.\n\nACTRESS A: What?\n\nACTRESS D: I am not surprised at all to meet you.... It was never clear, but I always felt your existence.\n\nACTRESS A: You mean the stagnant air around here?\n\nACTRESS B: The \"hovering\" air?\n\nACTRESS D: No, nothing like that, but I always heard voices... silent voices when I came in the dressing room every night.\n\nACTRESS A: Silent voices?\n\nACTRESS D: Yes, very low whispers.\n\nACTRESS B: How pathetic. No matter how hard we try, we can't get away from the curse of being a prompter.\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nACTRESS D: Excuse me... may I ask another question?\n\nACTRESS B: Go ahead.\n\nACTRESS A: Don't make it too difficult, though.\n\nACTRESS D: Have you been doing this for a long time?\n\nACTRESS B: Doing what?\n\nACTRESS D: You know, hanging out in the dressing room....\n\nACTRESS B: I'm new. She is an old hand. Very old. Look at those scars. They are from the air raids.\n\nACTRESS D: Oh, my... air raids. You mean in World War II?\n\nACTRESS A ( _Offended_ ): Stop staring at me. You make me feel like a museum exhibit.\n\nACTRESS D: So have you been coming here ever since then?\n\nACTRESS A: It's not like I'm obsessed or anything, but there is no other place to go, so...\n\nACTRESS D: You must be tired.\n\nACTRESS A: What?\n\nACTRESS D: I can see it now. You are far more tired than she is. ( _Indicating_ ACTRESS B.)\n\nACTRESS B: I knew it.\n\nACTRESS A ( _To_ ACTRESS B): Shut up.\n\nACTRESS D: Sleep is best for exhaustion.... This is worn out, but.... ( _She holds the pillow out to_ ACTRESS A.)\n\nACTRESS A ( _Jumping back_ ): Keep it. I can't deal with that.\n\nACTRESS D: You can't deal with a pillow?\n\nACTRESS A: Right. I have no idea why...\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nACTRESS D: Um... isn't it about time?\n\nACTRESS B: Time for?\n\nACTRESS D: Time to go on stage....\n\n(ACTRESS A _and_ B _look at each other_.)\n\nACTRESS D: Which play are you doing?\n\n( _Silence_.)\n\nACTRESS D: Which play?...\n\n( _Silence_.)\n\nACTRESS D:... Well?\n\nACTRESS B: How noisy you are! Chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter.... Can't you ever be quiet? Damn, my false eyelashes came off.\n\nACTRESS D: I'm sorry\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nACTRESS D:... It's Chekhov, isn't it?\n\nACTRESS B: Chekhov?\n\nACTRESS A: Oh, yes. You talked to Chekhov on the phone the other day, didn't you?\n\nACTRESS D: Oh, you were listening?...\n\nACTRESS B: OK, let's assume we are doing Chekhov. Can you guess which play?\n\nACTRESS D: Maybe... _The Three Sisters_?\n\nACTRESS A: How can we do _The Three Sisters_ with just two of us?\n\nACTRESS D: Are there only two of you?\n\nACTRESS B: As you can see, at least here in this dressing room.\n\n( _Long pause_.)\n\nACTRESS D:... I understand now.\n\nACTRESS A: OK, what do you understand?\n\nACTRESS D: You don't have a play, do you?\n\n(ACTRESSES A _and_ B _do not answer_.)\n\nACTRESS D: You just sit here doing your makeup night after night for nothing. You wait here for your turn forever... for the opportunity that will never come. Am I right?\n\n(ACTRESSES A _and_ B _remain silent_.)\n\nACTRESS D: Aren't you embarrassed? I wouldn't stand this misery. I would rather be in a hospital bed.\n\nACTRESS A: Huh, then go back to the hospital! And take your precious little pillow with you. But your bed isn't there anymore. There is no such thing as sound sleep for you anymore.\n\nACTRESS D ( _Shocked_ ): Do you think I really lost my bed?\n\nACTRESS A: If you don't believe me, go find out for yourself.\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nACTRESS B:... You will soon get used to waiting, too.\n\nACTRESS A: Yeah, you will be just like us before long.\n\nACTRESS B: You know, we are not just wasting our time waiting. We keep trying, really We recollect our past accumulations.\n\nACTRESS A: Just a little while ago, we nearly lost our voices recollecting.\n\nACTRESS D: What came out of that?\n\nACTRESS B: All sorts of things... you know, we have a lot of accumulations.\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nACTRESS D:... The long night will begin for me, also.\n\n(ACTRESSES A _and_ B _look at each other_.)\n\nACTRESS A: You will get used to it soon. You can learn from us how to pass time in many ways....\n\nACTRESS B: It may look sluggish to you, but we have a certain routine... right?\n\n(ACTRESS D _suddenly stands up_.)\n\nACTRESS D: But I still think we should do something.\n\nACTRESS B: We are doing something.\n\nACTRESS D: That's not what I mean. I mean... we should decide on an agenda... you know, to prepare perhaps for the day that will come.\n\nACTRESS B: What day is coming?\n\nACTRESS D: We may still get opportunities to go on stage. You never know.\n\nACTRESS A: Yeah, she ( _Indicating_ ACTRESS B) had a similar dream at the beginning. But I tell you, it's never going to happen.\n\nACTRESS D:... You really are tired.\n\nACTRESS A: Stop it!\n\nACTRESS D: You are definitely exhausted. ( _Edges in with the pillow_.)\n\nACTRESS A: God dammit! You want my role, don't you. I won't let you take it away! What kind of person are you? You don't discriminate in your attacks, huh? You can chase me all you want with that pillow. I won't give up my role. Get out!\n\nACTRESS B: Um... excuse me.\n\nACTRESS A: What!\n\nACTRESS B: What are you talking about? Your role hasn't been decided, has it?\n\n(ACTRESS A _is furious. Long silence_.)\n\nACTRESS D: I'm easily misunderstood. Someone encouraged me that to be misunderstood is an asset for an actress. It was a mistake... I don't have the team spirit or the ability to adapt. The fact that I'm misunderstood means that I'm not loved. No one loves me. I'm always alone.... I have always been alone and I always will be...\n\nACTRESS B: Wait a minute. Why are you summarizing your life now all of a sudden? Sure, it's hard being misunderstood, but the opposite is just as bad. Everyone always told me how nice I was; for a while even I believed that I was just a nice person. Then it occurred to me that I'm like the air. Air isn't bad, I know. But no one would say \"I love you madly\" or \"I have faith in your talent\" to mere air... Do you understand?\n\nACTRESS D ( _Stubbornly_ ): It's OK. I've made my decision already.\n\nACTRESS B: What decision?\n\nACTRESS D: From now on, I won't bother you. I will go on by myself. I will wait for the opportunity that may come someday.... It must be destiny... to spend the long night alone. ( _Suddenly breaks into Irina's lines from_ The Three Sisters.) \"Oh, I'm miserable... I can't work; I won't work. Enough, enough! I've been a telegraph clerk, and now I have a job in the office of the Town Council, and I loathe and despise every single thing they give me to do....\"\n\nACTRESS B: Where do telegraph clerk and Town Council come from?\n\nACTRESS A: It's Irina's line from _The Three Sisters_.\n\nACTRESS B: Oh, she's started already\n\nACTRESS D: \"... I'm nearly twenty-four already; I've been working a long time, and my brain is drying up. I've grown thin and old and angry, and there is nothing, nothing, no satisfaction of any kind. And time is passing, and I feel that I'm moving away from the real, beautiful life, moving farther and farther into some abyss...\"\n\nACTRESS A: Hold it.\n\nACTRESS D: What?\n\nACTRESS A: I can't deal with this incredible noise. Who gave you permission to take the role of Irina, anyway?\n\nACTRESS D: Permission?\n\n( _Pause_.)\n\nACTRESS B: The night is forever long.\n\nACTRESS A: Right.... There is no hope for us of ever seeing days filled with sunshine again.\n\nACTRESS B: Then it's not a bad idea to change our ways a little.\n\nACTRESS A: I guess so, since there are three of us now.\n\n(ACTRESSES A _and_ B _look at each other and smile_.)\n\nACTRESS A: You'll be Masha?\n\nACTRESS B: Then you'll be Olga.\n\nACTRESS A: It's been a while since I had a female role.\n\nACTRESS D: Um....\n\nACTRESS B: Throw out that pillow. You are Irina, just as you wanted.\n\nACTRESS A: Let's not rush this. We have plenty of time.\n\n(ACTRESS A _gets up and returns with_ C _'s brandy. Everyone gets a glass. Brandy is poured_. ACTRESS B _runs to the record player, chooses a record, and puts on the music_.)\n\nACTRESS A: Toast. To our night\u2014a long night.\n\nACTRESS B: To our eternal rehearsal.\n\nACTRESS D: And to our forever lost sleep.\n\n( _The tone of the music changes. The three actresses stand close together_.)\n\nACTRESS B ( _Reciting Masha's lines_ ): \"... Oh, listen to that music! They are leaving us... we are left alone to begin our life over again. We must live.... We must live....\"\n\n( _During this speech, the light dims slowly and the three figures begin to look like corpses with pale faces_.)\n\nACTRESS D ( _Reciting Irina's lines_ ): \"A time will come when everyone will know what all this is for, why there is all this suffering, and there will be no mysteries; but meanwhile, we must live... we must work, only work!... Soon winter will come and cover everything with snow, and I shall go on working, working....\"\n\n(ACTRESS A _embraces_ B _and_ D.)\n\nACTRESS A ( _Reciting Olga's lines_ ): \"The music plays so gaily, so valiantly, one wants to live! Oh, my God! Time will pass, and we shall be gone forever; we'll be forgotten, our faces will be forgotten, our voices, and how many there were of us.... ( _The three figures start to fade_.) Oh, my dear sisters, our life is not over yet. We shall live! The music is so gay, so joyous, it seems as if just a little more and we shall know why we live, why we suffer.... If only we knew, if only we knew....\"\n\n( _The dressing room is dark. Then faint moonlight reveals a field of grass. There are countless mirrors resembling tombstones in the field. The mirrors whisper_.)\n\nGlorious Town...\n\nIndigent Metropolis...\n\nImprisoned Souls...\n\nTranscendent Figures...\n\nTranscendent Figures...\n\nCURTAIN\n_THE EARTH STATION_\n\n\u014cTA SH\u014cGO\n\nTRANSLATED BY MARI BOYD\n\n\u014cta Sh\u014dgo, _The Earth Station_ , directed by \u014cta Sh\u014dgo, Tenkei gekij\u014d, January 1985. (Courtesy of \u014cta Mitsuko)\n\n\u014cta Sh\u014dgo (1939\u20132007) was a playwright and director as well as a central figure in the _angura_ counterculture of the 1960s to the mid-1970s. His career can be divided into three periods. During the first, between 1962 and 1968, he tried working in new _shingeki_ theater companies but was not satisfied with the quality of their art.\n\nDuring his second and major period, from 1968 to 1988, \u014cta developed his theater of divestiture through his work as a playwright, director, and head of the Tenkei Theater Company (Gekidan tenkei gekij\u014d, Theater of Transformation). In 1977, he produced the n\u014d-inspired _Tale of Komachi Told by the Wind_ ( _Komachi f \u016bden_), which makes startling use of silence and stillness and won the prestigious Kishida Drama Prize. In 1981, he produced _The Water Station_ ( _Mizu no eki_ ), his seminal play, epitomizing divestiture, and for its performance his company received the Kinokuniya Theater Award in the group category. \u014cta led the Tenkei Theater on international tours of _The Tale of Komachi Told by the Wind_ and _The Water Station_ to Europe, North America, Australia, and South Korea.\n\nIn his third period from 1990 to 2007, \u014cta became a prominent social force in the arts world, providing emerging artists with venues to showcase their art. He served as the artistic director of the Fujisawa Civic Theater in Kanagawa Prefecture, as vice president of the Japan Playwrights Association, and as a professor at the Kyoto University of Art and Design and the chief editor of its periodical, _Performing Arts_.\n\n_The Earth Station_ is the second of \u014cta's groundbreaking works in quietude. In this play, only the Daughters of the Wind actually deliver lines. The other figures remain silent throughout and move at a pace of roughly six and a half feet every five minutes. The free-verse score provides the actors with psychophysical tasks through which silence becomes living presence.\n\nScenes\n\n1. A Girl\n\n2. A Man Looking at a Tree\n\n3. Two Men\n\n4. One of Three\n\n5. A Flask\n\n6. Four Eyes\n\n7. A Woman in Labor\n\n8. An Empty Can\n\n9. A Burial\n\n10. Two Mouths\n\n11. An Interlude\n\n12. A Man and a Woman\n\n13. Distant Thunder\n\nCharacters\n\nGIRL\n\nMAN WHO LOOKS AT A TREE\n\nMAN (A)\n\nMAN (B)\n\nMAN WITH A HUGE LOAD ON HIS BACK\n\nWAITING WOMAN\n\nWOMAN IN LABOR\n\nFIRST HUSBAND\n\nFIRST WIFE\n\nWOMAN WITH AN IRON\n\nOLD WOMAN\n\nSECOND HUSBAND\n\nSECOND WIFE\n\nSISTER\n\nBOY\n\nDAUGHTER OF THE WIND (A)\n\nDAUGHTER OF THE WIND (B)\n\nDAUGHTER OF THE WIND (C)\n\nMAN\n\nWOMAN\n\nMAN WHO TAKES COVER\n\nANOTHER WOMAN\n\n_LIVING WITH FATHER_\n\nINOUE HISASHI\n\nTRANSLATED BY ZELJKO CIPRIS\n\nInoue Hisashi, _Living with Father_ , directed by Uyama Hitoshi, Komatsuza, May 1999. (Photograph by Yakou Masahiko)\n\nA contemporary of playwrights such as Kara J\u016br\u014d and Terayama Sh\u016bji, in his Christianity and his \"old left\" politics Inoue Hisashi (1934\u20132010) nonetheless had more in common with an earlier generation of _shingeki_ playwrights. His appeal also has been more solidly mainstream than that of any of the other dramatists featured in part IV. Partially raised by French Canadian Catholic priests in a Sendai orphanage, he shared with Terayama and Hijikata Tatsumi a strong allegiance to the unique culture of T\u014dhoku Japan. After graduating with a degree in French literature from Sophia University in Tokyo, Inoue began to write comedy skits for Atsumi Kiyoshi (later the star of the popular \"Tora-san\" movie series) at an Asakusa strip club. In 1964, he made a name for himself as the script writer for _Bottle-Gourd Island_ ( _Hyokkori hy \u014dtan-jima_), a popular children's puppet show on NHK, Japan's national television network.\n\nInoue was a prolific writer of fiction, drama, and essays. His first work for the stage, _Japanese Bellybuttons_ ( _Nihonjin no heso_ , 1969), was followed by as many as sixty plays over the course of his career, including _The Great Doctor Yabuhara_ ( _Yabuhara kengy \u014d_, 1973), _Makeup_ ( _Kesh \u014d_, 1982), _Headache, Stiff Neck Higuchi Ichiy \u014d_ ( _Zuts \u016b kakatori Higuchi Ichiy\u014d_, 1984), and _Mokuami Opera_ (1995). One of Inoue's last plays was _Suite Massacre_ ( _Kumikyoku gyakusatsu_ , 2009), about the 1933 police murder of the leftist writer Kobayashi Takiji. Inoue frequently used humor, music, and Brechtian techniques to critically explore Japanese history. In 1979, he won the Kinokuniya Theater Award for two quasi-biographical dramas, _Serious Japan_ : _General Nogi_ ( _Shimijimi Nihon: Nogi Taish \u014d_) and _Kobayashi Issa_. In 1984, he founded his own theater troupe, the Little Pine Company (Komatsuza), to produce his plays. But Inoue was equally prolific as a novelist, winning numerous awards, including the Yomiuri Literary Prize in 1981 for _People of Kirikiri_ ( _Kirikirijin_ , 1981), about a fictional place in T\u014dhoku that declares independence from Japan. _Living with Father_ ( _Chichi to kuraseba_ , 1994) combines Inoue's interest in Japanese history and regional identity (in Japanese, the whole play is in dialect) in a drama about a survivor of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and her relationship with her father.\n\nAUTHOR'S PREFACE\n\nWhen I bring up the subject of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an increasing number of people say, \"It is wrong to dwell on having being victimized, because the Japanese of those days also victimized Asia.\" The second part of this view is certainly accurate. The Japanese did victimize all of Asia. However, I will never accept the first part of the statement because I believe that the two atomic bombs were not merely dropped on the Japanese; they were dropped on the entire human existence. The bomb victims of that time who were burned by the infernal flames represent people throughout the modern world who cannot escape from the existence of nuclear weapons. I write as one among six billion human beings, not out of a feeling of victimization, but rather out of a conviction that it would be a greater wrong to pretend ignorance of the inferno that I know. Perhaps my life will be over when I finish writing about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This work is the first in that series. Please take a look.\n\n1\n\n_Music and darkness slowly envelop the auditorium. After a while, a far-off rumble of timpani sounds from somewhere. Distant lightning flashes._\n\n_Soon a hastily built house nearly as ramshackle as a hut emerges into view, illuminated by the lightning. It is five thirty in the afternoon on the last Tuesday in July 1948. This is the house of_ FUKUYOSHI MITSUE, _on the east side of Hijiyama in the city of Hiroshima. The layout, in sequence starting with stage right, consists of a kitchen; a six-mat living room furnished with a folding tea table, among other items; and an eight-mat room containing a book table and a bookcase. The eight-mat room also has a closet._\n\n_There is a sound of wooden clogs in the entranceway that is visible to the rear of the living room, and_ MITSUE _rushes in. She is twenty-two, wearing an old-fashioned white blouse and neat, splashed-pattern work trousers, and is clutching, instead of a handbag, a shopping bag with a wood-slat opening. As she steps into the living room, lightning flashes again._ MITSUE _stumbles onto the mats still clutching her shopping bag, then covers her eyes and ears with her hands._\n\nMITSUE: Papa, I'm scared!\n\n( _The closet door glides open, and_ TAKEZ\u014c _speaks from the upper half_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: This way, this way. Come into the closet, Mitsue, quickly.\n\n(TAKEZ\u014c _is wearing a white open-neck shirt with a national civilian uniform. He has covered himself with a seating cushion to ward off thunder and tosses a cushion to_ MITSUE, _too_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Why are you dawdling? Put the cushion over your head and quickly hide down here.\n\nMITSUE ( _Startled, but happy_ ): Papa, you're here after all.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Of course I am. I'm here whenever and wherever you tell me to be. What else could I do?\n\nMITSUE: But it's absurd that I'm so frightened. I can hardly believe it.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: What are you babbling about? This way, quickly... ( _A flash of light_.) See, it's coming!\n\nMITSUE ( _Crawling into the closet_ ): Papa!\n\n( _Lightning and thunder are receding into the distance. The conversation heard from the upper and lower halves of the closet is interwoven with the thunderclaps_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Let it flash and thunder as much as it likes! With Papa and the closet and the cushion as your three allies, now you are all right.\n\nMITSUE: But I'm twenty-two already. A real adult doesn't get all scared every time there's thunder. It's embarrassing. It really makes me angry.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Decisively_ ): It isn't your fault.\n\nMITSUE: I don't know....\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: It's true, isn't it, that until a while ago you were a tomboy in the women's junior college athletic club, running around the sports grounds without any worry, even when it thundered.\n\nMITSUE ( _Nodding emphatically_ ): There were only three club members, so I was in charge of everything from sprint to long distance. I was so busy I didn't mind thunder or anything else.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Why did you, who were so brave, get to be so scared and jittery?\n\nMITSUE: I'm not sure. I can't help it.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: And since when did you get like that?\n\nMITSUE: I guess since about three years ago.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Since that atomic bomb, right?\n\nMITSUE: Is that it?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Nodding_ ): Do you know Nobu from the Tomita photo shop?\n\nMITSUE: He often took pictures of us.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: A very good photographer, one of the best in Hiroshima.\n\nMITSUE: He was always doing questionable things, along with you, Papa.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Questionable?\n\nMITSUE: Those days you let the army officers use our whole inn as their gathering place, so there were a great many things that they brought, and\u2014\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: There were. The closets were filled with rice and sak\u00e9, canned salmon and canned beef, cigarettes, and caramels. You lost your mama when you were still a baby, poor girl, so Papa was making sure that even if you didn't have a mother's love, you had everything else....\n\nMITSUE: When you hooked some ladies with the rice and cigarettes, took them to a hot spring, and they were enjoying the bath, Uncle Nobu sneaked up on them to take the photos that he showed to the officers. And then...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Interrupting_ ): That Nobu is now selling third-rate sweet potato jelly at the market in front of the train station.\n\nMITSUE: I know.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Why can't a highly talented photographer like Nobu make a living without acting like a black-market operator?\n\nMITSUE: It's his punishment for taking photos of naked ladies.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Be serious and listen.\n\nMITSUE: Sorry.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Nobu says that ever since then, whenever a magnesium flashbulb goes off, in his mind he vividly sees the moment of the atomic flash, as if seeing a brilliantly taken photo, and it terrifies him so much that he quit photography. In other words, both Nobu and you get shaken up because bursting magnesium and lightning look a lot like the atomic flash.\n\nMITSUE: Is that right.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: That's right. There's a reason for your feeling shaken up, so you mustn't feel ashamed of it. In fact, it is all right for those who have been exposed to the atomic explosion to be rattled by any flash of light, even that of a lightning bug. Indeed, that is the right of those who have been bombed.\n\nMITSUE: Is there such a right?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: If there isn't, I'll make it. One can almost say that if there are any bomb victims who are not rattled by thunder, they're probably impostors.\n\nMITSUE: That's going a little too far.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Well, that's true.... ( _He creeps out to the veranda and peers into the sky_.) Oh, good. The sun is out.\n\nMITSUE ( _Crawls out a little for a look_ ): Indeed.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: The thunder seems to have gone off toward the sea at Ujina.\n\nMITSUE: That's a relief.\n\n( _Reassured, she stands up and brings an earthen teapot and cups from the kitchen_.)\n\nMITSUE: There's barley tea I made before going to the library this morning. Shall we have some?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: A good idea.\n\n(MITSUE _pours out two cups and drains hers at a gulp_. TAKEZ\u014c _raises a cup to his lips but puts it down without drinking_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: I cannot drink it.\n\nMITSUE: Oh, is that right?\n\n(MITSUE _drinks_ TAKEZ\u014c _'s tea, too, with pleasure_. TAKEZ\u014c _looks on intently_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Good heavens!\n\nMITSUE: What is it?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: The bean-jam bun. A little while ago Mr. Kinoshita gave you a bean-jam bun at the library. I sure hope it didn't get crushed.\n\nMITSUE: Oh no.\n\n( _From the shopping bag she was protectively clutching a few minutes ago,_ MITSUE _extracts an object wrapped in newspaper and gently unwraps it. The large bean-jam bun has managed to survive intact._ )\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Wonder struck_ ): It's impressive!\n\nMITSUE: It's from the market in front of the station.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: That is an outstanding bean-jam bun, hard to get these days.\n\nMITSUE: Mr. Kinoshita, too, stopped in his tracks the instant he spotted it. He couldn't move past it, as though he were tied to it, so he bought one, but his legs still seemed heavy so he turned back to buy another and was finally able to resume walking at his regular pace.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: It certainly packs that much power.\n\nMITSUE: Then Mr. Kinoshita came up to me at the library's checkout desk, and said, \"I cannot eat both, so you eat one, Miss Fukuyoshi.\" ( _She breaks it in two_.) Let's eat.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Remember, I cannot eat it.\n\nMITSUE: Oh, that's right, isn't it.\n\n( _While eating,_ MITSUE _wraps the remaining half in paper_. TAKEZ\u014c _swallows hard as he watches, then recovers_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: The young Mr. Kinoshita who gave you that, he was saying that he is a new teacher in the local college of art and science, right?\n\nMITSUE ( _Nodding_ ): Starting this September he will be an adjunct faculty member of the physics department.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Adjunct faculty?\n\nMITSUE: He'll be an assistant professor.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Nodding repeatedly_ ): I saw him wearing milk-bottle glasses and always carrying a big briefcase. And he spoke very calmly, so I was pretty sure he's quite an intellectual.\n\nMITSUE: Until the year of the bomb, he was an instructor at the industrial training institute of the navy arsenal in Kure. He was a naval technician, a lieutenant.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: For a navy man, he is rather down-to-earth.\n\nMITSUE: I guess there are various types in the navy. After the war ended, he says, he was a graduate student for two years at his old school, T\u014dhoku Imperial University, and returned here this month, at the beginning of July. He says that soon after the atomic explosion, he spent a whole day walking the red earth all around the burned-out ruins here in Hiroshima.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: How old is he, I wonder. ( _Guessing_.) Twenty-nine?\n\nMITSUE: Twenty-five. It says so on his library card.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: And you're twenty-two, so it's a good match.\n\nMITSUE ( _Smiles for an instant but is soon swept by anger_ ): What are you saying? Mr. Kinoshita is just a library visitor.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _With conviction_ ): Someone who's just a visitor would not give you a bean-jam bun.\n\nMITSUE: This is stupid; enough already. Well, time to prepare dinner. Will you be staying, Papa?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c That is up to you.\n\nMITSUE: Well then, help me clean up over there.\n\n(MITSUE _puts on an apron and begins to wash a wooden lunchbox_. TAKEZ\u014c _also puts on an apron and takes out a duster but remains quite idle_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Returning to the topic: Mr. Kinoshita gave you a bean-jam bun because he likes you. You need to be clear on that.\n\nMITSUE: Papa, you're looking for too much meaning in that bun.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: It is a meaningful bun. It's just that you don't have the courage to read its meaning.\n\nMITSUE: Mr. Kinoshita gave it to me as an expression of thanks. That's all.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Are you sure?\n\nMITSUE: Papa, you're impossible!\n\n(MITSUE _comes to the living room and speaks in a formal tone_.)\n\nMITSUE: Please come here a moment and sit down.... Four days ago, last Friday in the early afternoon, a person came in, and it was Mr. Kinoshita. He said: \"Do you have any materials related to the atomic bomb? When I went to city hall, I was told to ask at the library.\" Normally, I would simply answer that we don't, but there was something intense about Mr. Kinoshita's voice. So I explained to him: \"The Occupation forces are extremely wary of people gathering materials related to the atomic bomb. Even if we had any such materials, making them public is forbidden. And also, as one of the victims of the bomb, I am doing my best to forget that August. There is no material in that August for a story, or a picture, or a poem, or a novel, or a study: In an instant, people's entire world turned into nothing. That is why we aren't collecting any materials. Not only that, but if any materials remain, we would get rid of them. I have also burned everything that reminds me of Father.\"... The bean-jam bun was simply to thank me for that, and nothing more.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: There are two checkout desks side by side at the library, with a young female staff member sitting at each.\n\nMITSUE: Right, Miss Takagaki and me. What about it?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Ever since the atomic explosion, you've become an entirely different person, a silent and unsociable girl whose eyes are always downcast. About the only time you smiled was after coming home. On the other hand, Miss Takagaki is said to have a cheerful personality.\n\nMITSUE: So what are you trying to say?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Why didn't Mr. Kinoshita address the approachable Miss Takagaki but instead the unsociable you? That is important. It stands to reason that he would normally go to Miss Takagaki.\n\nMITSUE: He's free to go to whomever he likes.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: That's what I'm trying to say. Mr. Kinoshita is not only outstanding but wise. You were always a good-natured and bright girl, a talented woman who graduated second from the top in her college. Mr. Kinoshita saw your true nature at a glance and became interested in you. This is the hidden meaning of the bean-jam bun.\n\nMITSUE: Go on saying crazy things as much as you like. ( _She starts toward the kitchen_.) Stay there and keep up the silly talk for days. I've heard enough.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: What is the one additional meaning hidden in the bean-jam bun?\n\nMITSUE: Please stop talking about the bun.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: This is of the highest importance for you, and so I must pursue the bun's meaning to the end.\n\nMITSUE: Your showing up here all of a sudden and talking silly has given me a headache.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: In the final analysis, you like Mr. Kinoshita, too. You two have fallen in love at first sight and will soon be committed to each other. You are tough on the outside but sweet on the inside. Your heart is like the bun.\n\nMITSUE ( _Shouts_ ): That is impossible!... I've forbidden myself to fall in love with anyone.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: If you didn't care about Mr. Kinoshita, you would have refused on the spot to accept the bun.\n\nMITSUE: Silence at all times! That is the library's principal rule. Do you think I could have held a back-and-forth discussion at the checkout desk? \"Thank you very much for the other day. Please have a bean-jam bun.\" \"I'm afraid I can't.\" \"Don't say that. Please take it.\" \"Accepting a bean-jam bun is forbidden by the regulations.\"... The library director and the manager and Miss Takagaki next to me were all pricking up their ears. There was nothing I could do other than silently accept it.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: You are going to meet Mr. Kinoshita tomorrow. You've arranged to meet during the noon break by the thousand-year-old pine near the library.\n\nMITSUE: I thought of refusing, but...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: You mean you could not hold a back-and-forth discussion at the checkout desk.\n\nMITSUE: True, so I just nodded.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: There, then...\n\nMITSUE: Papa, just wait and see. Tomorrow I will flatly refuse, and tell Mr. Kinoshita not to speak to me again.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Why do you always think about everything backward? There's nothing wrong with your liking Mr. Kinoshita. You like him, and he likes you. If you and he can be together, you'll be happy. This is the true meaning of the bun Mr. Kinoshita gave you.\n\nMITSUE: It's wrong for me to be happy. So don't talk about it anymore.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: I am here as a cheerleader for your love, so I'm not going to back off so easily.\n\nMITSUE: Cheerleader?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: That's right. Think about it. I started showing up at your place last Friday, the day you caught sight of Mr. Kinoshita coming into the library, and your heart unexpectedly skipped a beat. Am I right?\n\nMITSUE ( _Recalls_ ):...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: From that skipped heartbeat my body was created. Again you saw Mr. Kinoshita walking toward the checkout desk, and you gently sighed. Am I right?\n\nMITSUE ( _Recalls_ ):...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: From that sigh were created my arms and legs. Further, you wished quietly for that person to come up to your desk.\n\nMITSUE ( _Recalls_ ):...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: From that wish was created my heart.\n\nMITSUE: Papa, have you been hanging around here lately intending to make me fall in love?\n\n(TAKEZ\u014c _beams_.)\n\nMITSUE: Love is wrong. I can't fall in love. Don't torment me anymore.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: You mustn't suppress your heart so harshly. You'll end up living a flat, flavorless life.\n\nMITSUE: Stop badgering me. I'm busy. I have to prepare dinner. Preparation for tomorrow is waiting, too. We have something called the children's summer-break story club, where for ten days our library staff tells stories to children. Every day, thirty or forty children gather in a cool and breezy pine grove in Hijiyama. Every one of the children likes the sound of our voices and of the wind sweeping through the treetops. They're all looking forward to it, so I must get thoroughly prepared.\n\n(MITSUE _starts vigorously chopping cabbage_. TAKEZ\u014c _watches her for a while, then withdraws toward the entranceway, cleaning up as he goes_. MITSUE _continues to chop energetically.... It slowly grows dark_.)\n\n2\n\n_Amid music, the eight-mat room quietly emerges, dimly lit by a thirty-watt electric bulb_.... _Mosquito-repelling smoke wafts along the veranda_.\n\n_One day has passed, and it is Wednesday, after eight in the evening. Under the lightbulb,_ MITSUE, _wearing a white blouse and work trousers, is writing something with a pencil at the book table._\n\n_Having finished writing,_ MITSUE, _glancing at the text sideways, begins \"the story.\" It is still in its early stages, and she reads it tonelessly, penciling in corrections from time to time._\n\nMITSUE: Our Hiroshima has been known since ancient times as \"the beautiful city on the water that embraces seven rivers.\" Those seven rivers merge in the northern outskirts into a single river called the \u014ctagawa. I used to go every week with my friends from the Japanese literature class out to the villages that line the \u014ctagawa and enjoyed hearing the old stories that were told throughout the region. To tell the truth, we liked even more being treated at the places we visited to such delicacies as soybean-flavored oyster stew, rice with matsutake mushrooms, and devil's-tongue basted with bean paste, and so we enthusiastically roamed all around. The story I will tell you now is one of the old stories we were told at that time by an old villager. If I remember correctly, we heard it over broiled trout.\n\n( _Clearing her throat_.) Now, in a mountainous place not far from the \u014ctagawa there lived a grandpa and a grandma. Because grandpa was a greedy lazybones, a useless fellow who never worked, grandma did everything by herself\u2014from doing laundry and gathering firewood to broiling trout\u2014and so they eked out a living.\n\nOne day Grandma, who had gone out trout fishing, felt terribly thirsty so she drank a mouthful of water from the river. Lo and behold, all the wrinkles instantly vanished from her face. She drank another mouthful, and her back straightened up. She drank yet another mouthful, and turned into a dazzlingly beautiful young woman. After hearing about this from Grandma, who hurried home to tell him what happened, Grandpa exclaimed, \"Why should only you become young again, Grandma? I'll show you what a handsome young buck I'll become: I won't be outdone by you!\" So saying, he flew out of the house and vanished. Night came but he still did not return....\n\n( _The rumbling sound of a mixing bowl is heard from the kitchen._ TAKEZ\u014c, _a twisted towel wrapped around his head and wearing an apron, is grinding up small dried sardines, snatching up a fan from time to time to swat at mosquitoes._ )\n\nMITSUE: Papa?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Ah, it's hot every day.\n\nMITSUE: You're here.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Of course I am. It's been one whole day since I saw you last.\n\nMITSUE: Can you do something about that rumbling? It's bothering me and making it difficult to practice. ( _Enters the kitchen and switches on the light._ ) What are you doing?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Making bean paste mixed with dried sardines, naturally. Look at how fine I've ground up these sardines.\n\nMITSUE: How did you know I wanted to make bean paste with sardines?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: There were the sardines, and there was the bean paste, so it was easy to guess.\n\nMITSUE:...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Now we put in all the bean paste. ( _From a bowl at the side, he chucks the bean paste into the mixing bowl and resumes grinding._ )\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: And then we add finely chopped red pepper. ( _To_ MITSUE.) Red pepper, red pepper.\n\n(MITSUE _picks up chopped red pepper from a small nearby dish and puts it into the mixing bowl._ TAKEZ\u014c _expertly grinds it up._ )\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: One serving coming up of bean paste with sardines, a famous specialty of our Fukuyoshi Inn.\n\nMITSUE ( _Tastes it_ ): Mm, it's good.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Papa hasn't lost his knack, eh? So how does the story you were just telling continue? What happened to greedy Grandpa?\n\nMITSUE ( _Nodding_ ): Grandma, worried that Grandpa hasn't returned even after nightfall, picks up a lantern and goes out to meet him. What does she find at river's edge but a greedy-faced baby bawling his lungs out.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: That won't be popular with children these days. It's too subtle.\n\nMITSUE: It doesn't have to be popular.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: But of course it would be better if it were a little more interesting. I know, this is how you should change it. ( _Narrates._ ) Grandpa doesn't return even after nightfall. He's vanished. Grandma, worried, picks up a lantern and goes out to meet him. What does she find at river's edge but a pair of dentures, nothing else.\n\nMITSUE:...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Surprised at his lack of success_ ): Greedy Grandpa drank too much rejuvenating water. So he passed beyond being a baby and disappeared.\n\nMITSUE: Even _I_ can see that much.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: I think they'll laugh more than at the way yours turns out.\n\nMITSUE ( _Shouts_ ): It's wrong to tamper with the story! Stories told us by earlier generations are to be transmitted to later generations faithfully, just as they are. That was the way of the Folklore Study Group at our Hiroshima Women's Junior College.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Didn't the group catch hell from the prefectural school inspector six years ago? You were told, \"It's wartime, a time of crisis, what's studying old stories good for? If you have so much free time, work in a factory.\" I think the group broke up by the end of 1942.\n\nMITSUE: But the group's original spirit lives on in me even now.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Today at noon you said the same thing when you were quarreling with Mr. Kinoshita.\n\nMITSUE: It wasn't a quarrel, it was a discussion.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: But the folks who came to the Hijiyama pine grove because its coolness makes it ideal for napping were startled awake by your loud voice.\n\nMITSUE: I'm telling you it was just a discussion.\n\n(MITSUE _returns to the eight-mat room and tries to memorize the manuscript._ TAKEZ\u014c _is dividing the bean paste with sardines and packing it into two containers [earthenware, with lids]_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: I hear it was the atomized tile that first got Mr. Kinoshita interested in the atomic bomb.\n\nMITSUE: Yes, that's what he said.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: That year, at the end of August, Mr. Kinoshita had to go home to Iwate Prefecture for a while, so he came from Kure to Hiroshima and, while waiting for his train, wandered all around the burned-out ruins. Noon came, and so he sat down in \u014ctemachi District, around where a temple used to be, and opened his lunchbox. It was then he felt a piercing pain in his backside as something sharp penetrated the expensive cloth used for making navy officers' trousers.\n\nMITSUE: There was an atomized tile at the spot where he sat down.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Taking a look, he saw the tile was covered with what looked like standing thorns. Every one of them was jutting in the same direction. These were no doubt made in a flash of heat, incredibly high heat, which instantly melted the surface. What a hell of a bomb. He must understand this bomb. He must find out what on earth took place in this searing heat. So thinking, Mr. Kinoshita headed toward the station, picking up pieces of atomized tiles all along the way.\n\nMITSUE: He said that, too.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: You kept one of those atomic tiles, I believe.\n\n(MITSUE _lowers a cloth-wrapped bundle from the top of the bookcase_.)\n\nMITSUE: I didn't keep it; Mr. Kinoshita forced it on me.\n\n(TAKEZ\u014c _takes it and unwraps it atop the book table. Inside is a flat confectionery box made of paper._ TAKEZ\u014c _raises its lid and freezes. The confectionery box contains an atomized tile [two inches by two inches], a warped bottle for medicine, and several shards of glass._ )\n\nMITSUE ( _Takes them out for him, but with great reluctance_ ): Fragments of glass extracted from the bodies of bomb victims.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Cruel.\n\nMITSUE: Atomic tile.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Needle-sharp.\n\nMITSUE: Bottle for medicine, warped by the heat.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Terrible.\n\nMITSUE: Mr. Kinoshita says that at his place, there are dozens of beer bottles bent into the same strange shapes, and sak\u00e9 bottles twisted as round as horns. There's also a stone lantern with its melted surface turned to bubbles, and a large clock whose hands are burned into its face.... Because of those things, Mr. Kinoshita is being driven out of his lodgings, though it's less than a month since he moved in.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Really?\n\nMITSUE ( _Nodding_ ): Whenever he comes back carrying the materials, his landlady says \"Bringing in such stuff is creepy. I'll have to charge you more rent because you're sure to break the floor with it soon.\" She keeps making disagreeable remarks. The dinner the day before yesterday, when he brought in atomized tiles in a petroleum can, was especially bad. There was less rice in his bowl and fewer ingredients in his soup, too.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Coldhearted.\n\nMITSUE: That's why Mr. Kinoshita asked me today, \"I have an unreasonable favor to ask you. I couldn't have you keep the atomic bomb materials in the library, could I?\"\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Can't you?\n\nMITSUE ( _Shaking her head emphatically_ ): If General MacArthur said yes, it would be a different story. I felt bad about refusing on the spot so I asked him to let me think about it for a day. So tomorrow I'll have to meet him over the lunch break. What a troublesome visitor.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Hand me a handkerchief.\n\nMITSUE: What?... Here.\n\n(TAKEZ\u014c _starts wrapping a container of bean paste with sardines using_ MITSUE _'s handkerchief._ )\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: I've put Mr. Kinoshita's share of the bean paste with sardines into this pot, so take it tomorrow and give it to him.\n\nMITSUE: Papa, you are awful...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: For some reason, men cannot resist a woman's handkerchief.\n\nMITSUE: You meddler. I'm telling you not to make a fuss over imaginary things.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: In that case, you can give it to your manager.\n\nMITSUE: The manager's wife is very jealous, so I wouldn't want to cause a misunderstanding.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: In that case, you'd better give it to Mr. Kinoshita after all.\n\n(MITSUE _angrily puts it on the book table._ )\n\nMITSUE: Please don't do this again.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Forget about that, and try to remember instead what started the argument with Mr. Kinoshita.\n\nMITSUE: This is what Mr. Kinoshita finally said: \"To explain your own experience of the bomb to the children, couldn't you create a good story using my atomic materials?\"\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Mr. Kinoshita is a person of wisdom.\n\nMITSUE: I told him I couldn't. Because we deeply believe that stories are not to be tampered with.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: That again. I can more or less understand sticking to the stories you've gathered yourselves, but...\n\nMITSUE: But Mr. Kinoshita kept pressing these materials on me and wouldn't give in at all, so I finally yelled, \"I can't do what I can't do.\" That's what happened.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Wait. I've just had a brilliant idea.\n\nMITSUE: Ah, that's your specialty, Papa, and synonymous with unreliability. Whenever you have a brilliant idea, you start a new business, or make a pass at some ladies, or spend the fortune Grandpa left you on anything other than our little inn...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Even if I'd increased that fortune, it all in the end would have been turned into ashes by the bomb. You might say I was farsighted.\n\nMITSUE: That's a truly disrespectful thing to say about people who worked with all their might.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: I know. But you realize you'll end up quarreling endlessly because you insist on telling the stories you gathered. How about putting the information about the atom bomb into stories that everyone knows? That will delight Mr. Kinoshita.\n\nMITSUE: The summer-break story club is intended for children.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: I know. So you tuck the atom-bomb information into well-known stories like those of Momotar\u014d the Peach Boy, or the battle between the monkey and the crab, or Issun B\u014dshi, the one-inch warrior.\n\nMITSUE: How do I do that?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: It's your job to think how to do it.\n\nMITSUE: The Occupation army's eyes are all over the place. Papa, it's because you don't realize the army's power that you talk so nonchalantly.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _With a flash_ ): I've got it again...\n\nMITSUE: I have to memorize the stories. You don't have to stay any longer, but please come again.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Undaunted, grandly_ ): That's it. Because it's storytelling that you'll do, wind will come up to you as you speak and scatter your words in all directions of the compass. Your words will sweep through the hearts of the good children, rise up on the wind into the sky, and become a rainbow. No evidence will remain. The Hiroshima wind that blows through Hijiyama will be your ally.\n\n( _While speaking,_ TAKEZ\u014c _inserts young Kinoshita_ ' _s atomized materials into the two lower pockets and one upper pocket of his apron._ )\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Don't know if this will be useful to you or not, but listen. ( _The story begins._ ) Issun B\u014dshi, the one-inch warrior.... Everyone knows Issun B\u014dshi, who arrived in the capital city of Kyoto by sailing there in a tea bowl. To rescue a princess from a demon, he jumped into the red demon's mouth and, using a sewing needle as a sword, pricked all around the inside of his stomach and finally got the demon to surrender. A strong fellow. Definitely strong. But the Issun B\u014dshi of Hiroshima is stronger yet.\n\nMITSUE: Issun B\u014dshi of Hiroshima?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Nodding emphatically_ ): \"Fukuyoshi Mitsue's Apron Theater\" begins!\n\nMITSUE: Apron Theater...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Nodding again_ ): Putting the apron pockets to good use, you can really boost the stories. Now, up to the point where he leaps into the red demon's stomach, it's the same, but beyond that it's very different. ( _Returning to the story._ ) Issun B\u014dshi of Hiroshima, who has jumped into the red demon's stomach ( _Pulling out the atomized tile from the apron_ ' _s lower-right pocket and raising it high_ ), presses this atomized tile against the demon's underbelly. \"Hey, you demon. Take the wax out of your ears and listen up. What I'm holding is an atomized tile from Hiroshima. You know that on that morning of that day, in the sky six hundred yards over Hiroshima, there exploded something called an atomic bomb. A second after the explosion, there arose a fireball whose temperature was twenty-two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Hey, do you understand what kind of temperature twenty-two thousand degrees is? The temperature of the sun is eleven thousand degrees, so on that day six hundred yards over Hiroshima, there rose two scorching, scorching suns. With two suns appearing low overhead for one to two seconds, everything on the ground\u2014people, birds, insects, fish, buildings, stone lanterns\u2014instantaneously melted. Every single thing bubbled up and melted. Roof tiles melted, too. On top of that, the bomb blast swept in. The bomb blast: at four hundred yards per second, faster than sound. Blasted by its atomic wind, the melted tiles all grew ragged, then they cooled and jutted with jagged thorns, like pillars of frost. The tile is now a grater for radish, nay, a flowerbed of spikes. With these terrible jags, I will grate your liver to shreds. Rub-a-dub, rub-a-dub, rub-a-dub, rub-a-dub.\" And he strikes the red demon who rolls around, pale with agony.\n\n(MITSUE _is frightened._ TAKEZ\u014c _pulls the medicine bottle from the lower-left pocket and raises it._ )\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: At once, Issun B\u014dshi of Hiroshima pulls out a twisted medicine bottle that was warped by the melting heat. \"Hey, you demon. Now I am going to plug up your butt-hole from the inside with this atomized medicine bottle. Drop dead from constipation for all I care.\"\n\n(TAKEZ\u014c _takes a shard of glass from the upper pocket and raises it high._ )\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: \"Hey, you demon. This is a shard of broken glass that pierced a human body. That bomb blast blew to pieces the glass of all the Hiroshima windows and stuck the splintered glass into human bodies ( _The voice turning tearful_ ) till people looked like hedgehogs....\"\n\nMITSUE ( _Unawares, clutching her left upper arm_ ): Stop!\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: \"With this terrible glass knife, I will cut your liver and guts to ribbons....\"\n\nMITSUE: Enough!\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: What an inhuman thing they dropped. Human beings piled up two suns on top of their fellow human beings. ( _Putting away the mixing bowl and other utensils._ )\n\nAdding atom-bomb material to a story may be too painful for the people of Hiroshima after all, no matter what kind of story it is. This has to be kept in mind. I wanted Mr. Kinoshita to be pleased with you, but what I've done is wrong. My brilliant idea was not so good after all.\n\n( _He disappears into the back of the kitchen, carrying the cleared-away objects._ )\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: As a present to Mr. Kinoshita, for tomorrow please just give him the bean paste with sardines.\n\nMITSUE: Thank you for all your help. ( _She looks, but he is not there._ )... Papa? Papa....\n\n( _It slowly grows dark_.)\n\n3\n\n_Amid music, it is raining_.\n\n_The growing brightness reveals the same place on the following day, Thursday, shortly after noon. Rain is dripping from the ceiling, the raindrops accurately intercepted by four or five bowls and teacups placed around the living room, and six or seven more in the eight-mat room. On the stage-right edge of the living room stands_ TAKEZ\u014c, _a small pan in hand, a large pan and a rice-cooking pot at his feet. Wearing the expression of a laboratory supervisor, he is on the lookout for rain leaks in the two rooms._\n\n_He discovers a new leak at the borderline between the living room and the eight-mat room. Humming what sounds like a children_ ' _s song,_ TAKEZ\u014c _deftly threads his way among the bowls and teacups as if playing hopscotch and places the small pan where it is needed._\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Last night's rain was an intelligent rain. It fell during the night and stopped in the morning.\n\n( _He returns to his original position. Very soon he spots another leak over the book table off in the eight-mat room and sets out carrying the rice-cooking bowl_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: The rain that is falling now is a stupid rain. It started falling in the morning and didn't stop even at noon.\n\n( _He moves the book table and puts the rice-cooking bowl in its place but is at a loss as to where to put the book table. He pauses a while holding it._ )\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Rain, rain, won't you stop, your father's a scoundrel, your mother's a trollop.\n\n( _He returns to his original position. As he searches for a place to put it, he catches sight of a piece of stationery and an envelope on the tabletop. He lowers the table, sits down in front of it, and reads the address on the envelope_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: \"Mr. Kinoshita Tadashi, Esquire. Care of Mrs. Takizawa. Second block in Kogomori. Town of Fuch\u016b. Greater Hiroshima.\" Mr. Kinoshita Tadashi, Esquire?...\n\n( _He grins from ear to ear. Then he reads the letter_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Aloud from time to time_ ): \"Please excuse this hastily written letter. Thank you for regularly patronizing the city library.... I am always busy when you visit... ( _A raindrop falls on his head. He covers his head with a large pan to ward off the rain_.) I am writing to you because this is an important matter.... The atom-bomb material that you have collected.... If my place is acceptable.... I live alone so there is room.... The roof does leak somewhat, but.... It is unbearably hot these days.... Please take good care of yourself.... Yours\"\n\n(MITSUE _returns. She is in the entranceway, shaking off the rain from her oilpaper umbrella_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Back already?\n\nMITSUE: Ah, Papa?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Yes, I'm making myself at home. It's barely past noon, what happened?\n\nMITSUE: The story club got washed out by this rain.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Nodding_ ): If it wants to rain so much, it should rain during the night. Poor children.... Did you forget something?\n\nMITSUE: No, I left early.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Do you feel sick? ( _Panic-stricken_.) Don't tell me you're feeling nauseated? And also dizziness, ringing in the ears, constipation, diarrhea.... Is it still the radiation sickness?\n\nMITSUE: I've no sign of it these days.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Well, that's good...\n\nMITSUE: The only thing that keeps on hurting is this. ( _Lightly holding her upper left arm._ )\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Well, that's a relief. ( _Cheered up_.) Maybe that stubborn wretch of an illness has been chased away at last.\n\nMITSUE: That's what it makes you think and you feel relieved, then it suddenly strikes you from behind, so you cannot relax until you die.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Mm, it is a troublesome thing you're burdened with.... Well, will you look at that!\n\n( _Stepping out to the veranda, looks up at the sky_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Thank goodness! At long last it stopped raining. If it rained any longer, I'd have run out of things to catch it with. I could hardly drag the bathtub out here.\n\n( _He puts away five or six bowls and teacups from places where the leaks have stopped, unfolds the tea table, and makes space to sit down_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: So did it go well?\n\nMITSUE: Did what go well?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Bean paste with sardines. Was Mr. Kinoshita pleased?\n\nMITSUE: Ah, the bean paste with sardines...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Didn't he say it's his favorite?\n\nMITSUE: I haven't given it to him yet...\n\n( _She pulls out from her shopping bag a package wrapped in a handkerchief and places it on the tea table._ )\n\nMITSUE: Here it is.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: What is it doing here?\n\nMITSUE: I didn't go to Hijiyama.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Why?\n\nMITSUE: Well, it was raining, and...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: You had your umbrella.\n\nMITSUE: The path was muddy so I might have slipped.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Your clogs have good supports.\n\nMITSUE: The real reason...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: What is it?\n\nMITSUE: I thought it'd be wrong to meet Mr. Kinoshita...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: That again. If you keep on repeating the same thing, people will end up laughing at you.\n\nMITSUE: So I was repairing books in the workroom.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: You can still make it in time, can't you?\n\nMITSUE: Before long I saw Mr. Kinoshita walking from Hijiyama toward the library. I thought it'd be wrong to meet him, so I left work early.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Trembling_ ): If it were a long time ago, I'd smack you one!\n\nMITSUE: Papa, it's better this way. It's wrong for me to love a person.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: If you act so hard on yourself, you'll be all broken up later.\n\nMITSUE: I'm telling you I'll be all right. Don't talk about it anymore.\n\n(MITSUE _begins to clear things away_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: You shouldn't make a fool out of the cheerleader.\n\nMITSUE: What are you upset about?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: You shouldn't be deceiving me with silly lies. Are you going to insist that you don't love Mr. Kinoshita?\n\nMITSUE: I'm saying that...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: It's stupid of me to ask you. ( _Pointing to the envelope and the stationery on the book table_.) \"Esquire.\" This title of politeness clearly reveals your feelings.\n\nMITSUE ( _Shaken for a moment, but then_ ): All women write that way.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Could you write to just any visitor: \"I live alone so there is room...\"\n\nMITSUE: That was just a joke. I intended to throw it away. Please give it back.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: If you don't need it, I'll throw it away.\n\nMITSUE: Papa, you're wicked...\n\n(TAKEZ\u014c _puts the envelope and the stationery into his trouser pocket_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Why is it wrong to love a person? You're certainly not a stunning beauty who bowls men over with her looks. Half the responsibility for that is my own. But a closer look shows that you have respectably pleasant features, and that is to my credit.\n\nMITSUE: What are you talking about.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: In other words, since Mr. Kinoshita likes it, your face will do.\n\nMITSUE: I'm telling you that isn't the problem.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Is it perhaps the radiation sickness? Is it wrong to love someone because you don't know when the sickness might strike?\n\nMITSUE ( _After nodding_ ): And yet Mr. Kinoshita said that if that happens, he will take care of me with all his might.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Well, you two are further along than I thought. ( _With a flash._ ) I know, you are worrying about the baby who will be born. Because it certainly does happen that radiation sickness is passed down to babies.\n\nMITSUE ( _After nodding_ ): If that happens, we'll think of it as fate and do our best to bring up the child...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Are those Mr. Kinoshita's words too?\n\nMITSUE: In a roundabout way, that is the sort of thing he said.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Roundabout or shortcut, that you two can discuss things in such detail.... I am shocked.\n\nMITSUE: That's all the more reason why it's wrong for me to meet Mr. Kinoshita.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: So then the better it goes, the worse it gets?\n\nMITSUE: Yes, you could say that.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: If you don't straighten this out for me, I'll really get mad. The story's gone upside down from last Monday to next Sunday, turning somersaults and tumbling end over end, so I have no idea what is what.\n\nMITSUE ( _Assuming an unusually formal tone_ ): Please take a seat here.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: All right.\n\n(TAKEZ\u014c _spontaneously sits down facing_ MITSUE.)\n\nMITSUE: There were many people instead of me who should have become happy, so I can't push them aside and become happy. For me to become happy would be an unforgivable offense to such people.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: What people are you talking about?\n\nMITSUE: People like Fukumura Akiko, for example...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Fukumura... That girl?\n\nMITSUE ( _Nodding_ ): We were together throughout high school and college. Our last names start with the same Chinese character for \"fortune,\" since Akiko was Fukumura and I Fukuyoshi, so we sat together for eight years and were also on the same sports team. We were together so much that some people called us \"Two Fortunes.\"\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Good thing they didn't decide to be polite and call you \"Miss Fortunes.\"\n\nMITSUE ( _Putting up with it_ ): At college, we started the Folklore Study Group together. Akiko was president, and I vice president. It was also the two of us who, after talking it over, decided on the basic policy that the stories are not to be tampered with.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: That's why you were so insistent.\n\nMITSUE: That's right.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: You were always competing on grades, too.\n\nMITSUE ( _Shaking her head_ ): Running a race was one thing, but I didn't even once outdo Akiko in studying; I was always number two. This may be your fault, Papa.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Don't throw such an arrow at me out of the blue.\n\nMITSUE: Above all, she was beautiful, praised as a beauty at both high school and college.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Wasn't it her mother who was the real beauty? Running a sewing school and being a widow besides\u2014I don't know why but whenever I came face to face with her, I got tongue-tied.\n\nMITSUE: That's why you sent her a letter, didn't you, along with rice and cans of salmon and beef. \"To Madame Fukumura Shizue, from Fukuyoshi Takez\u014d. Might I request the honor of your company in enjoying the night view of cherry blossoms on Hijiyama this spring?\"\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: How do you know about that?\n\nMITSUE: Akiko showed it to me, saying, \"'Madame' is a bit odd, isn't it.\"\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Odd, is it?\n\nMITSUE: It's a word women tend to use.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Such things shouldn't be made public. A deceptively wicked widow she turned out to be.\n\nMITSUE: She treated me as kindly, as if she were my real mother.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: So she should have become your real mother. All she needed to do was to change a single character of her name, from Fukumura to Fukuyoshi.\n\nMITSUE ( _Letting that go, switches to a formal tone_ ): Akiko is the one who should have become happy.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: But why?\n\nMITSUE: She was more beautiful than I, a better student than I, more popular than I, and she also saved me from the bomb.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Saved you from the bomb?\n\nMITSUE ( _Nodding emphatically_ ): It's thanks to Akiko that I'm still alive.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: You're talking nonsense. There was no one in our garden at that time but me and you. Where was Akiko?\n\nMITSUE: She saved me with a letter.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: With a letter?...\n\nMITSUE: Akiko was a teacher then at the Second Prefectural Girls' Junior High. She took her third- and fourth-year students to an airplane factory in Mizushima, in Okayama Prefecture. I'd received a letter from Akiko the previous day and was so happy I spent the whole night writing a reply to her. And then that morning, thinking I'd mail it on the way to the library, I was holding the thick letter and walking through the garden toward the wooden gate in the back...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: As I recall, I was on the veranda. I'd filled a half-gallon bottle with unpolished rice and was pounding the rice with a stick to make it white. I saw you walk near the stone lantern, so I called out, \"Take care of yourself\"...\n\nMITSUE ( _Nodding_ ): I turned around at the sound of your voice and waved to you. It was then that I saw a B-29 beyond our roof and also saw something shining. \"Papa, B dropped something.\"\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: \"It's strange there's been no air-raid warning.\" Saying that, I stepped down into the garden.\n\nMITSUE: \"I wonder what it dropped. Maybe it's propaganda flyers again.\" As I watched, my fingers loosened and I dropped the letter at the base of the stone lantern. \"Oh, no...\" I bent down to pick it up. Then all of a sudden the whole world grew pale.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: I saw it in full face, the fireball as searing as two suns.\n\nMITSUE ( _With pity_ ): Papa.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Its center was a dazzling white. Around it was a great circle eerily colored a mixture of yellow and red.\n\n( _A brief pause_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Prompting_ ): And then?\n\nMITSUE: The stone lantern shielded me from the heat rays of that fireball.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Moved_ ): That stone lantern. Hmm, it was expensive but worth every yen, to say the least.\n\nMITSUE: If I hadn't received the letter from Akiko, I wouldn't have bent down to the base of the stone lantern. That is why I said that Akiko saved me...\n\n(MITSUE _suddenly covers her face_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: What's wrong?\n\nMITSUE: That morning Akiko unexpectedly returned from Mizushima by the first outbound train.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Almost speechless_ ): What...\n\nMITSUE: She suddenly needed a set of duplicating-machine items and a thousand sheets of cheap paper for her evening classes, so she came to the school to get them.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: What happened then? Surely...\n\nMITSUE: She made a quick stop at her mother's place in Nishi Kannon and started out for the school exactly at eight.... The bomb struck her near the Senda branch office of the Red Cross.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Groans_ ): Ooh.\n\nMITSUE: It was one whole day before her mother found Akiko. But by that time, she had been laid out alongside others on the dirt floor of the rear entrance to the Red Cross building.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: What an unfortunate girl.\n\nMITSUE ( _Nodding, she sobs_ ): It seems the back of her work trousers was completely burned off, and her buttocks all exposed, with a little smear of dried excrement...\n\n( _A brief pause._ )\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: That's enough. I think I can understand your feeling that it's wrong to desire happiness as other people do.\n\nMITSUE:...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: But there is also this way of thinking about it: That you ought to live out Akiko's share of happiness...\n\nMITSUE ( _Interrupts, shouting_ ): I can't do that!\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Why can't you?\n\nMITSUE: Because of... a promise to Akiko's mother.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: A promise?\n\nMITSUE ( _Nodding_ ): Something like a promise...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: What kind of a promise?\n\nMITSUE: When I met Akiko's mother, it was three days after the bomb, the late afternoon of August 9.... On the day of the bomb, I ran from Hiroshima to Miyajima and stayed at Mrs. Horiuchi's house until the morning of the ninth.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Mrs. Horiuchi? The name sounds familiar.\n\nMITSUE: The flower arrangement teacher from the time at junior high.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Ah, that old teacher.\n\nMITSUE ( _Nods_ ):...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Lucky the good teacher was there.\n\nMITSUE: Encouraged by the teacher, I left Miyajima in the morning and, traveling through a region that smelled like grilled fish, arrived home around noon.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Sympathetically_ ): It was burned to the ground.\n\nMITSUE: Crying, I gathered Papa's bones.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: You did. Thank you.\n\nMITSUE: After that I went to Akiko's place in Nishi Kannon, but that area, too, was burned to the ground, and Akiko's mother was lying down in a bomb shelter when I arrived. Her back was burned and covered with huge blisters, so she was lying on her stomach looking utterly worn out.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Poor woman.\n\nMITSUE: She was overjoyed to see me, stood up unsteadily, hugged me with all her might, and thanked me for coming. But as she was telling me about Akiko, her face suddenly turned pale, she glared at me, and said... ( _She cannot say it_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: What?\n\nMITSUE: \"Why are you alive?\"\n\nTAKEZ\u014c:... !\n\nMITSUE: \"Why is it that you are alive, and not my child?\"\n\n( _A brief pause_.)\n\nMITSUE: At the end of the month, she died, too...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Look, it isn't much of a consolation to say it, but at that time Akiko's mother was hardly in her right mind to say such a...\n\nMITSUE ( _Vehemently shaking her head_ ): It was unnatural that I survived.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: What are you talking about?\n\nMITSUE: It's unforgivable that I'm alive.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Don't you ever say such a thing.\n\nMITSUE: Please listen!\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: I don't want to listen.\n\nMITSUE ( _Continues regardless_ ): Almost all my friends are gone. Miss Noguchi died standing upright in the water tank where she tried to take refuge. Miss Yamamoto died walking, her tongue swollen black and jutting out as though there was an eggplant in her mouth. Miss Kat\u014d, who had married soon after graduating, died while breastfeeding her baby. The baby, crying, pressed its face against her breasts, but before long, it too passed to the other world without knowing anything of this one. Miss Otowa, employed at the Central Telephone Office, put her arms around two younger workers who had been immobilized by the bomb and said, \"Let's stay here together.\" I hear she kept on comforting them until she died. Three years have passed since then, but my friends still haven't returned. And then there's you, too, Papa... !\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: You and I came to an agreement a long time ago. Think about it.\n\nMITSUE: No. To have died that day in Hiroshima is natural, to have survived is unnatural. That's why it's strange for me to be alive.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Dead people don't think that way. In fact, I too have come completely to terms with what happened.\n\nMITSUE ( _Interrupting_ ): I have no excuse to be alive. Yet I don't have the courage to die, either.\n\n( _Again it starts to rain_.)\n\nMITSUE: And so I will live as quietly as possible and, when the opportunity comes, vanish from the world. Papa, these three years have been a difficult three years. Please give me credit just for having lived through them somehow.\n\n(MITSUE _stands and moves toward the entranceway_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Where are you going?\n\nMITSUE: I left work when I was halfway through repairing books, so I'll go back to the library after all. I don't think Mr. Kinoshita is there any more.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Wait.\n\n( _He takes the envelope and stationery from his pocket and thrusts them at_ MITSUE.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Mail this.\n\nMITSUE:... !\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: By special delivery.\n\nMITSUE: That's absurd...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: This is an order from Papa.\n\n( _With the envelope and stationery_ TAKEZ\u014c _has forced on her in her hands,_ MITSUE _trembles_.)\n\n(TAKEZ\u014c _discovers a rain leak and once again starts placing bowls and teacups_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Rain, rain, won't you stop, your father's a scoundrel, your mother's a trollop....\n\n( _As the rain intensifies, it grows dark_.)\n\n4\n\n_Soon after the music ends, there comes the sound of a motor tricycle engine accompanied by growing brightness. It is the same place on the following day, Friday, at six o'clock in the evening_.\n\n_Teacups used by young Kinoshita and the motor tricycle driver remain on the tea table in the living room._\n\n_The area from the eight-mat room to the veranda is filled with the atom-bomb material that Kinoshita has just brought._\n\n_Placed on the newspaper spread out all over the eight-mat room are cases of melted beer bottles with twisted necks, five or six quart bottles and half-gallon bottles in similar condition, a liquor bottle weirdly warped by the intense heat, a round clock one foot in diameter with hands stopped at eight fifteen, a bride doll with one side burned, and the like. Along the wall at stage left, tea chests, tangerine boxes, and so forth have also been piled up._\n\n_In the garden at stage left there are three upper portions of stone lanterns and, mingled in with them is a large head of Jiz \u014d, the guardian deity of children, with its face melted. As the revving sound of the motor tricycle_' _s engine soon grows quiet and fades into the distance,_ MITSUE _steps into the entranceway, still wearing a smile. She takes the teacups into the kitchen, brings a dishcloth, and starts wiping the tea table, but happens to catch sight of Jiz \u014d_' _s head, and her smile freezes._\n\n_After a while, she fearfully edges to the veranda and looks at Jiz \u014d, then, still barefoot, steps down into the garden and turns Jiz\u014d_' _s face toward herself. Her voice, unawares, resembles a scream._\n\nMITSUE: It's Papa on that day!\n\n( _As though in response,_ TAKEZ\u014c _enters from stage right, pounding his shoulders with a blowpipe used to fan a charcoal fire_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Did someone call, short or tall, big or small?\n\n(MITSUE _grows even more rigid as she compares Jiz \u014d's face with_ TAKEZ\u014c _'s, then abruptly turns Jiz \u014d's face away_.)\n\nMITSUE: You were here.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Nodding_ ): Old jokes seem to misfire. So, did Mr. Kinoshita say he'll bring more atomic material?\n\nMITSUE: He told me this is exactly half of it.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Impressed_ ): He's collected quite a lot. My word, one can't blame his landlady too harshly.\n\n(MITSUE _slaps at the soles of her feet, then steps up into the house. She finishes wiping the tea table and does various chores in and around the kitchen, but continues to grapple with the newly arisen disquiet_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: How many miles did that motor tricycle driver say there are between Mr. Kinoshita's lodgings and here?\n\nMITSUE: He said it's exactly three miles one way, with six traffic signals and one railway crossing.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: In that case, even with the time it takes them to load up at the other end, Mr. Kinoshita should be back here in thirty or forty minutes. At that time, right after greeting him and thanking him for coming again, offer him a bath.\n\nMITSUE: A bath...?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Displaying the blowpipe_ ): On a hot day like this, a bath is a treat that can't be beat.\n\nMITSUE: You've heated up a bath?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: I have.\n\nMITSUE: You think of everything....\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: I didn't spend twenty years as a widower for nothing. Well then, does Mr. Kinoshita like his bath water piping hot or lukewarm?\n\nMITSUE: How would I know that?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Good point. In that case I'll just make it moderately hot, but after the bath, you'll need to offer him something cold.\n\nMITSUE: I've bought a bottle of beer.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: That's good. But for the driver, cold water will do. On a day like this, even cold water is a treat.\n\nMITSUE: I've also bought several pounds of ice.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: You'll need to have the driver leave early. Make sure he doesn't stay too long.\n\nMITSUE: He said he has something else to do next.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Relieved_ ): That is good. You'll also need to have a new towel.\n\nMITSUE: I've bought it.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: You'll need soap.\n\nMITSUE: I've bought that too.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: A pumice stone...\n\nMITSUE: I've bought it.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: A loofah sponge...\n\nMITSUE: I've bought it.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: And a man's bathrobe...\n\nMITSUE: I've... I won't buy that.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Nodding_ ): If you had a man's bathrobe, it would be slightly disreputable. As you're no doubt aware, it's still much too soon to be scrubbing Mr. Kinoshita's back, so don't do it. This, too, has to do with reputation.\n\nMITSUE: Papa, don't you need to put in more firewood?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: I know. So, what is the treat for dinner?\n\nMITSUE: Bean paste with sardines and beer.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: That's good.\n\nMITSUE: A salad of little sardines.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Good, good.\n\nMITSUE: Rice flavored with soy sauce.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Licking his lips_ ): And with the rice comes what and what and what?\n\nMITSUE: Shaved burdock, julienned carrots, and fried bean curd.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Very good.\n\nMITSUE: And for a finishing touch, melon.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _With a sigh_ ): Now I feel like eating too.\n\nMITSUE ( _Gazing at_ TAKEZ\u014c): If you ate, I would be happy, too, Papa.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Abruptly_ ): Will you be able to take a summer vacation?\n\nMITSUE: A summer vacation?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Just now as he was leaving, Mr. Kinoshita mentioned it. \"If you can take a summer vacation, come with me to Iwate. I'd like to go back home once before the new semester starts in September. If I brought you along, my parents would be delighted.\"\n\nMITSUE: If I wanted to take a summer vacation, I suppose I could.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Then by all means go.\n\nMITSUE: I've long wanted to go to Iwate. It's where Miyazawa Kenji is from.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Who is this Kenji?\n\nMITSUE: Someone who wrote children's stories and poems. His books are popular at our library, too. I like poems.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: What kind of poems?\n\nMITSUE: The morning of eternal farewell, January on the Iwate railway, the song of travel among stars....\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Oh, travel among stars.\n\nMITSUE ( _In a lofty tone_ ): \"Scorpion with its red eyes, Eagle with its wings outstretched, the blue-eyed Little Dog, the shining coil of Snake....\" It's a poem that names many constellations.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: I wrote a poem about stars when I was in elementary school.\n\nMITSUE: Did you really?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _In a lofty tone_ ): \"It's night again tonight, and I, counting stars, nod drowsily to sleep. Three stars, four stars, seven stars, eleven stars. Up above, sparkle stars, down below, burglars rustle, in the forest...\"\n\nMITSUE:... !\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: I have to go check up on the fire for the bath, so I'll leave out the rest. I recall it was marked good and put up on the classroom wall. ( _Starts to leave_.) Mr. Kinoshita's inviting you to go to Iwate is a kind of marriage proposal. You understand that. \"In the forest, owl tramps, at the temple badger drums, pon-poko-pon...\"\n\n(TAKEZ\u014c _exits stage right, brandishing the blowpipe_. MITSUE _makes sure that he has left, steps down into the garden, and gazes again at Jiz \u014d's face. Soon she makes up her mind. With a firm tread, she steps up into the house, takes a large cloth wrapper out of the closet, and begins to wrap her personal belongings_. TAKEZ\u014c _enters from stage right_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Mr. Kinoshita needs a shave, so you need to have a razor.\n\nMITSUE: I will not keep anything like a razor in the house. So many of the bomb victims used razors to cut the arteries in their necks and die. There also were people who died thrusting their hands into bathtubs and slashing the veins in their left wrists.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _After observing_ MITSUE): You seem to be packing. And it doesn't look like the kind of packing for a summer vacation journey to Iwate.\n\nMITSUE ( _Nodding_ ): I'm thinking of asking Mrs. Horiuchi to let me help her teach flower arranging. If I leave the house soon, I ought to be able to catch the 7:05 train for Miyajima.\n\n( _Having finished packing,_ MITSUE _runs up to the tea table, lays out a sheet of stationery, and takes up a pencil_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _With restraint_ ): Mr. Kinoshita will be coming back, so reconsider that plan. Whoever heard of inviting a person and then throwing him out? That would be very rude.\n\nMITSUE: I'll leave this letter in the entrance where it's easily noticed, so you don't need to worry.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: What about the feast you've gone to the trouble to prepare? Will you leave it to rot and feed the flies?\n\nMITSUE: I'll have him eat it by himself. That's what I'll write to Mr. Kinoshita.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: What about the bath? Will you write him to please feel free to take a bath?\n\nMITSUE ( _Nodding_ ): And then I'll write... ( _Briefly staring into space and thinking_.) On the way out, please close the shutters, lock the door, and leave the key with the neighbor. And for the final line: I will continue to take care of the valuable materials. But please forget about me. In haste...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: You will quit the library?\n\nMITSUE: I guess so.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: That same troublesome sickness is starting up again.\n\nMITSUE: No it isn't!\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: No, it's a sickness. ( _Steps up to the veranda_.) My existence arose from the heartbeat in your breast, from the heat of your sigh, from the faint glimmer of your desire. And so I cannot allow you to write such a letter.\n\n(TAKEZ\u014c _takes the pencil away from_ MITSUE.)\n\nMITSUE: Give it back, that's a precious pencil. Akiko had the same kind. It was in the pocket of my trousers when the bomb exploded and so it survived.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: You're sick. There's even a name for your disease. Its symptoms, exhibited by those who survived while their friends died, are stubborn feelings of unforgivable guilt over being alive. The name of the disease is \"victimitis.\" ( _Breaks the pencil, then in a vigorous tone_.) I understand your feelings well. But you're alive, and you must go on living. That's why the sickness must be cured quickly.\n\nMITSUE ( _Shaking off her hesitation_ ): Papa, the person toward whom I feel unforgivably guilty really is you.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Incredulous_ ): What... ?\n\nMITSUE: Of course, I feel guilty toward Akiko and my other friends, too. But by focusing on my guilty feelings toward them, I covered up what I had done... I am a despicable daughter who abandoned her father and ran away.\n\n( _She jumps into the garden and, using all her strength, picks up the head of Jiz \u014d_.)\n\nMITSUE: You had terrible burns on your face that time, Papa, your face was melted like this Jiz\u014d. And I abandoned you like that and ran away.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: That story was settled a long time ago.\n\nMITSUE: I thought so, too. That's because until a little while ago, I didn't remember even fragments of what happened that time. But when I looked at this Jiz\u014d's face just now, I remembered it clearly. I'm a daughter who deserted her father in a sea of flames worse than hell, and ran away. Such a person has no right to be happy...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: A ridiculous logic.\n\nMITSUE: Papa, do you remember? When I suddenly came to, the house had collapsed on top of us. I didn't know what was happening, but it was something enormous. Thinking I must escape quickly, I kept wriggling and luckily was able to pull myself out. But you, Papa, couldn't move. You were lying on your back, pinned down by pillars, beams, crosspieces, and dozens of other pieces of timber. I screamed with all my might, \"Help my Papa!\" but nobody came.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Because the same kind of thing was happening everywhere in Hiroshima.\n\nMITSUE: There was no saw, no ax, no hammer. I tried to lift up the wood using pieces of timber as a lever, but it didn't work. I dug at the ground with my fingers, but that didn't work either.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: You truly did your very best.\n\nMITSUE: Soon there arose a smoky stench. I looked up, and saw that our hair and eyebrows were smoldering and crackling...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: You shielded me with your body and countless times put out the flames that were catching hold of me.... Thank you. But if you kept on doing that, we'd both be lost. And so I said, \"Run away!\" You said \"No\" and didn't move. Back and forth it went on for a while: \"Run away,\" \"No.\"\n\nMITSUE: In the end you said, \"Let's play Scissors-Paper-Stone and decide. I'll play the stone so I'll be able to win for sure.\"\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: \"Ippuku, deppuku, chan-chan-chaburoku, nuppari-kiririn, chan-pon-ge.\" ( _Holds out stone_.)\n\nMITSUE ( _Responding with a stone_ ): Same move as ever.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Chan-pon-ge. ( _Stone_.)\n\nMITSUE ( _Stone_ ): A transparent move.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Chan-pon-ge. ( _Stone_.)\n\nMITSUE ( _Stone_ ): It's always been like this, ever since I was little.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Chan-pon-ge. ( _Stone_.)\n\nMITSUE ( _Stone_ ): With this move you let me win.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Chan-pon-ge. ( _Stone_.)\n\nMITSUE ( _Stone_ ): You were sweet and easy, Papa...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Shouts_ ): Why don't you hold out paper? Don't you understand I'm telling you to win quickly and run away quickly, you little mule. Be a good child and run away. ( _Excruciatingly_.) Show Papa one last act of respect. Please. If you still refuse to run away, I'll die right now.\n\n( _A short silence_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: You understand now. It was by mutual agreement that you survived and I died.\n\nMITSUE: But that doesn't change the fact that I abandoned you. I ought to have died with you, Papa.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _Shouts again_ ): You fool!\n\nMITSUE:... !\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: How can you be so stupid? Didn't you learn anything in all those years of schooling?\n\nMITSUE: But...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c ( _With a slap_ ): Listen up. That time, as you were crying, didn't you say: \"It's heartless, it's horrible, why must we part like this?\"... Do you remember?\n\nMITSUE ( _Faintly nods_ ):...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: I said in reply, \"A parting like this must never happen again for the rest of eternity, because it's too heartless.\"\n\nMITSUE ( _Nods_ ):...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Did you hear my last words? \"Please live out my share of life, too!\"\n\nMITSUE ( _Nods vigorously_ ):...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: That is why I am giving you life.\n\nMITSUE: Giving me life?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: That's right. I'm giving you life to have people remember that there were indeed tens of thousands of such heartless partings. Isn't the library where you work also a place to tell about such things?\n\nMITSUE: Huh?...\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: It's your task to tell about the sad things, and the happy things, that human beings have experienced. If you don't understand that, then I won't rely on a fatheaded fool like you any longer. Give me someone else instead.\n\nMITSUE: Someone else?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: My grandchild and great-grandchild.\n\n( _After a short silence,_ MITSUE _slowly goes to the kitchen, and grips a knife. She looks at_ TAKEZ\u014c _for a while, then picks up a burdock and begins to cut it into thin slices. Before long, she suddenly stops_.)\n\nMITSUE: When will you come next?\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: That's up to you.\n\nMITSUE ( _Smiling for the first time in a long while_ ): We may not be able to meet for a while.\n\nTAKEZ\u014c:...\n\n( _The sound of a motor tricycle is heard in the distance_.)\n\nTAKEZ\u014c: Oh no, I forgot to put in more firewood.\n\n(TAKEZ\u014c _hurries away to the rear, stage right_. MITSUE _calls out toward his back_.)\n\nMITSUE: Papa, thank you.\n\n( _As the sound of the motor tricycle approaches, the curtain swiftly descends_.)\n\nCURTAIN\n\nThe translator would like to thank Shoko Hamano for her great help in both translating the Hiroshima dialect of the original and obtaining permission to publish this translation.\n\nJapan's economy, society, and culture have seen such change over the past fifty years that the Japanese themselves typically speak of the decades as if they were generations. Thus groups like K\u014dkami Sh\u014dji's Third Stage (Daisan butai) and Kawamura Takeshi's Third Erotica (Daisan erotika) self-consciously signaled their membership in a \"third\" generation of theater artists in the 1980s. They were following the \"first\" generation of playwrights and directors, such as Kara J\u016br\u014d and Terayama Sh\u016bji, who changed the course of Japanese theater in the 1960s, and the \"second,\" 1970s, generation of dramatists, like Tsuka K\u014dhei and Yamazaki Tetsu. Each \"generation\" staked out a different identity that was somehow unique to its own time. Nevertheless, we can find some general trends during this particularly turbulent period in contemporary Japanese history.\n\nSince the 1980s, many of _angura_ 's (the underground's) innovations in dramaturgy and performance\u2014fragmented narratives; highly physical, metatheatrical, and presentational techniques of acting; and the use of alternative and unusual venues\u2014have become part of mainstream contemporary theater. _Angura_ may have lost energy as a countercultural movement in the 1970s as Japan's youth culture became less politicized and more conformist, but the theater grew in artistic influence even as it became more closely aligned with consumer culture. By the 1980s, as many as 300 so-called little theater groups were active in Tokyo alone, and by 2005, the number of such companies had swelled to 1,600.1 Performances are typically targeted to young audiences, often in their twenties. At the same time, \"little theater\" no longer seems an accurate term for many of these groups or productions. Noda Hideki and his Dream Idlers (Yume no yuminsha, 1976\u20131992), exemplars of 1980s Japanese theater, on one occasion performed before more than 26,000 people in a single day, while a director like Ninagawa Yukio typically stages popular long-run shows in theaters that house more than 1,000. Many contemporary playwrights and actors are celebrities, writing and performing for not only the stage but television and film as well. Indeed, there is now a considerable crossover among the genres, as well as between the traditional and modern theater. Kabuki actor Nakamura Kanzakur\u014d XVIII (1955\u20132012) starred in modern plays written by dramatists like Matsuo Suzuki and commissioned new kabuki plays by contemporary playwrights like Noda Hideki, Watanabe Eri, and Kud\u014d Kankur\u014d. Even _shingeki_ , which seemed on the verge of demise with the deaths of pioneers like Senda Koreya in 1994, Sugimura Haruko in 1997, and Takizawa Osamu in 2000, has won a second life by commissioning plays from Betsuyaku Minoru, Hirata Oriza, and other contemporary \"post- _shingeki_ \" playwrights. Theater, especially in Tokyo, has perhaps never seemed so healthy.\n\nDEVELOPMENTS IN THE 1980S THEATER\n\nIn modern times, theaters in Japan have had to rely almost exclusively on the box office or private subscriptions for financial support (traditionally, only the n\u014d theater received official patronage), but in recent years, public funding for the performing arts has grown considerably, despite the economic downturn of the past twenty years. The New National Theater, devoted exclusively to modern theater and opera, opened in Tokyo in 1997. (The National Theater was opened in 1966 to showcase traditional performing arts.) In the same year, Suzuki Tadashi established\u2014with considerable support from the prefectural government\u2014the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC), about an hour west of Tokyo by bullet train. Since the 1980s, organizations like the Saison Foundation (established 1987), the Japan Arts Fund (1990), and the Performing Arts Development Project (1996) have helped promote international tours of Japanese performing arts groups. Regional development under the Liberal Democratic Party during Japan's economic boom years in the 1980s led to the building of many new theater and concert halls across Japan, a boom that lasted until the end of the twentieth century.\n\nAlthough the history of modern Japanese theater, particularly since 1945, has been essentially a history of Tokyo theater, one notable trend since the 1980s has been the growth of regional theater groups and playwrights. Suzue Toshir\u014d, Matsuda Masataka, and Tsuchida Hideo have been based in Kyoto. After the triple disaster of March 11, 2011, Okada Toshiki abandoned his native Yokohama and moved to Kumamoto, far from the threat of earthquakes and nuclear contamination. Hasegawa K\u014dji hails from, and still practices theater in, Hirosaki, at the northern tip of Honsh\u016b. Still, some places, like Osaka, are facing hard times now as local governments begin to cut arts funding.\n\nOther positive trends have been the increasing presence of women and minorities in the Japanese theater since the 1980s. The contribution of female playwrights to the contemporary Japanese theater is discussed in greater detail by Yoshie Inoue in this volume, and the groundbreaking work of women like Kishida Rio (1950\u20132003), Kisaragi Koharu (1956\u20132000), Nagai Ai (b. 1951), Watanabe Eri (b. 1955), and the collective of playwrights who call themselves Ichid\u014d Rei, from the company Blue Bird (Aoi tori), bear noting here. ( _Poison Boy_ , which Kishida coauthored with Terayama Sh\u016bji, is translated in part IV.) Even though contemporary theater has not created a strong feminist discourse in Japan, the sheer number of female playwrights, as well as all- or mostly women troupes, active in Japanese theater since the 1980s, is indicative of an erosion of ingrained patriarchal structures. At the same time, the ethnic Korean presence, which had its origins in the theater, is growing throughout Japanese culture. For example, Tsuka K\u014dhei's impact on 1970s theater was followed by the work of other Korean _zainichi_ (Japanese-born) playwrights, like Chong Wishing and Y\u016b Miri, and directors for stage and screen, like Kim Sujin and Yang Sogil. There also has been increasing collaboration among Japanese and other Asian theater artists. Kishida Rio worked with the Singaporean director Ong-Keng Sen on productions of _King Lear_ (1994) and a postcolonialist version of _Othello_ , called _Desdemona_ , in 1999. Playwright Hirata Oriza translated into Korean his own play, _Citizens of Seoul_ (1989), about Japan's 1910 annexation of Korea, for a production in Seoul in 1993, and has since worked regularly with Korean playwrights and directors on joint productions.\n\nJapanese theater has never seemed so vibrant or international. Mitani K\u014dki, heir to Inoue Hisashi for capturing mainstream audiences, has been immensely productive as a writer of comedies and musicals for stage, television, and screen. (The name of his company, Tokyo Sunshine Boys, is a tribute to his hero, Neil Simon.) Yet despite the enormous popular success of post-1980s playwrights like Mitani, Keralino Sandorovitch, and Matsuo Suzuki, many have bemoaned the triumph of mindless entertainment and the death of art in contemporary Japanese theater.2 _Angura_ 's promise in the 1960s for theater to enter the public discourse and be a voice for change failed to materialize as succeeding generations capitulated to the status quo, and the artists, in order to survive, needed more and more to pander to commercial imperatives. At the same time, Japanese society has become increasingly conformist, conservative, and isolationist. The worsening economy and the growing instability of Japanese politics have only exacerbated this general trend, which started in the early 1970s. Youthful energy and innocence, qualities typical of 1980s theater, hardly made up for a general lack of interest in social issues or the world beyond or for a chronic sense of historical amnesia.\n\nThe superheated economic growth seen in the 1960s culminated in the boom economy of the 1980s, a time when Japan was (in the words of Ezra Vogel's best-selling book) \"Number One\" and seemingly could do no wrong.3 It was a dreamlike decade, when the real estate value of metropolitan Tokyo exceeded that of the entire United States; easy money was made on the stock market; and life in Japan, especially in its capital, seemed like a nonstop party. All the members of this \"third\" generation of theater artists were born after the war, and very few had ever suffered real deprivation. The sense of festivity, prosperity, and entitlement, in sync with the global postmodernist sensibility of that time, informed the frenetic, noisy theater of playwrights like K\u014dkami Sh\u014dji (b. 1958) and Noda Hideki (b. 1955): light, speedy, ironic, narcissistic, and celebratory. The counterculture had split into numerous subcultures, and inspiration for creative works tended now to come more from new media like television, _manga_ (comics), and anime (animation) than from any preexisting theatrical tradition, political stance, or life experience. Noda and the Takarazuka Revue (as we shall see in part VI) based their hit plays on popular graphic novels.\n\nAlthough not directly involved with the theater culture of this period, two novelists and an artist, all named Murakami, have defined the aesthetic of the past few decades in Japan: Murakami Haruki (b. 1949), for a cool, hipster insouciance that barely masks a heartfelt quest for identity in narratives that confuse fantasy with reality; Murakami Ry\u016b (b. 1952), for his portraits of the contemporary city as a dystopia, filled with crime and sadomasochistic sex; and Murakami Takashi (b. 1963), artist of the aesthetics of \"Superflat,\" in which surface is everything and the categories separating high and popular cultures have collapsed. Allusions to pop culture and in-jokes, a nostalgia for innocence and childhood, an avoidance of psychological depth or \"serious\" issues, and yet occasional hints at more unsettling anxieties all lurk behind what Kara J\u016br\u014d called the \"happiness syndrome\" of Japanese theater in the 1980s.4 At the same time that the contemporary theater critic Tadashi Uchino described K\u014dkami Sh\u014dji's landmark, the _Godot_ -inspired play _Trailing a Sunset Like the Dawn_ ( _Asahi no y \u014d na y\u016bhi wo tsurete_, 1981) as \"an easy distortion of Beckett's metaphysical 'nothing is to be done' principle into 'everything is OK as it is,'\" he labeled Noda Hideki's work of this period as \"a kind of subcultural Disneyland.\"5 Meanwhile, other groups, like Kawamura Takeshi's Third Erotica, began to explore the darker side of middle-class Japanese anomie in such works as _Nippon Wars_ ( _Nippon sens \u014d_, 1984). This rather dystopic view was perhaps more familiar to Westerners than to most Japanese: after all, 1980s Tokyo was the inspiration for the near-future cityscapes of Ridley Scott's film _Blade Runner_ and William Gibson's cyberpunk novel _Neuromancer_. But even those riding the crest of Japan's prosperity at the time knew that it had to end, and many felt a sense of spiritual emptiness at the bottom of the \"Japanese economic miracle.\"\n\nThe 1980s were a turning point for both Japan and the world. The explosion of radioactive gases from the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine in 1986 revived fears of a nuclear apocalypse. The death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989 coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and marked the end of an era, which some have called the \"short twentieth century,\" for both the Japanese and the West. Soon thereafter, Japan's bubble economy burst, and the Soviet Union fell. The first Gulf War in 1991 marked the end of Cold War politics and the beginning of new, more chaotic global tensions. In 1990, a new religious cult, Aum Shinriky\u014d, entered candidates into the national election for the House of Representatives. Five years later and just two months after an earthquake devastated the Kobe region, this cult poisoned thousands of people with sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system.\n\nCHANGES IN THE 1990S\n\nPerhaps as a result, the Japanese have called the 1990s a \"lost generation,\" and with continuing unemployment, increasing economic disparity, homelessness, and the dissolution of the old guarantees of lifetime careers, the first decade of the new millennium seemed to hold out little promise of improvement. Japan's population ages while the country is reluctant to accept immigrants; the national debt rises while the tax base decreases. As the country's economy sank into the long slide from which it has still not recovered, the news was\u2014and remains\u2014filled with bizarre crimes, indiscriminate murders, senseless suicides, shocking cases of domestic violence, family neglect, and school brutality.\n\nThe chief effect of these new economic and social stresses on Japan in regard to a new theatrical vision was a sudden return to realism and an attention to well-crafted, literate drama. It was as if Japan had woken up with a hangover after the long party of the bubble economy. One of the first playwrights to write in this vein was Iwamatsu Ry\u014d (b. 1952), who has worked for some of Japan's finest and most popular actors. He first teamed up as a dramatist in the late 1980s with Emoto Akira and the Tokyo Battery Company (Tokyo kandenchi, established 1977), leaving this company in 1992 to become the playwright and director for Takenaka Naoto. Iwamatsu's desultory dramas have focused on the banal lives of feckless characters. _Futon and Daruma_ (1988), one of his signature works, won the Kishida Kunio Award for best play of that year. Kara J\u016br\u014d compared Iwamatsu to a \"perverted Kubota Mantar\u014d,\" referring to Kishida's contemporary, a prewar dramatist of everyday lyricism.6 Indeed, a kind of eerie realism verging on the absurd pervades the work of Iwamatsu and a number of other playwrights who began writing in this manner, including Suzue Toshir\u014d, Matsuda Masataka, and Hirata Oriza. A stark contrast to the noisy, high-energy comedies that had become staples of 1980s Tokyo, such works were quickly dubbed \"quiet theater.\" If the theater of Japan from the 1960s to the 1980s had been extravagant, exuberant, or even overwhelmed by its own unabashed inventiveness, much of the theater of the 1990s was turning out to be austere, minimalist, constrained, lacking in dramatic flourishes, and wary of making grand statements or attempting to use theater as a vehicle to push any ideological \"message.\"\n\nThe most articulate spokesperson for this style of theater in the past two decades has been Hirata Oriza, who won the 1995 Kishida Kunio Award for _Tokyo Notes_ , first performed the previous year and one of the works featured here. In his appropriately named collection of essays on theater, _Cities Do Not Need Festivities_ ( _Toshi ni wa shukusai wa iranai_ , 1997), Hirata wrote:\n\nMost life has nothing whatever to do with what theater in the past has liked to portray but is grounded instead in quiet and uneventful moments.... We exist as human beings, and that in itself is amazing, even dramatic. Daily life contains all sorts of rich and complex elements: it can be entertaining, touching, funny, even stupid. What I want to do is distill from all those complicated elements an objective sense of time as it is lived\u2014quietly\u2014and directly reconstruct that on the stage.7\n\nMore than perhaps any dramatist of his generation, Hirata has a sense of his place in the history of Japanese theater and what makes his work different from what has come before it.\n\nSome critics, however, have taken Hirata and his contemporaries to task for a conservatism that is both ideological and aesthetic. The characters in \"quiet realist\" plays avoid conflict, their motives remaining opaque sometimes even to themselves. In the avoidance of emotional display is also a reluctance to commit oneself to another person or ideal, which is indicative of the sense of disengagement that many Japanese now feel.\n\nSomething of this emotional detachment is also present in the theater's new dynamics in the current generation of playwrights and directors. The 1960s generation was characterized by a number of charismatic patriarchs\u2014notably Kara J\u016br\u014d, Suzuki Tadashi, Terayama Sh\u016bji, and Hijikata Tatsumi\u2014who gathered about them tribe-like troupes of younger enthusiasts eager to put into practice their masters' ideas. Typically, the \"company style\" of such theater was branded less by rigorous training or tradition than by the personality of their leader and creator. For most of the twentieth century, modern Japanese theater\u2014with the notable exceptions of such mainstream companies as Asari Keita's Four Seasons Theater (Gekidan shiki) and the Takarazuka Revue\u2014was characterized by its inspired amateurism. Playwrights and directors like Kara, Suzuki, and Noda Hideki were not classically trained in established theater schools\u2014such institutions are still a rarity in Japan\u2014but typically were drawn to the theater in extracurricular club activities at university. So, too, was Hirata, but increasingly, even playwrights like Noda and Hirata are straying from the older tribal model of creating theater with their own companies toward a model of workshops and shifting casts of actors, new for every production. Some critics have seen in this new model a growing distrust of group dynamics and a reluctance to form close relationships in Japan, a remarkable trend in a society that traditionally has placed so much value on a sense of belonging.\n\nHIRATA ORIZA\n\nActors need something on which to ground their delivery of dialogue. The basis for dialogue in _shingeki_ , which tried to directly import modern Western theater, is a character's mental state and emotions. A _shingeki_ actor interprets the script, finding sadness, for instance, and expressing the emotion of sadness. It was mainly this modernist approach that the emerging underground or little theater movement in and after 1960s opposed. It claimed that psychology and emotions are not the only driving forces for the way that humans speak. The key words for this movement are \"body,\" \"unconsciousness,\" \"passion,\" \"instinct.\" We can therefore see that the transition from _shingeki_ to underground theater and little theater has been a transition from logos to pathos and eros.\n\nOn the other hand, one can say that the basis of traditional theater, like n\u014d and _ky \u014dgen_, is history. From the age of two or three, n\u014d performers are drilled, without any logical explanations whatsoever, in movement, gesture, and voice projection. The basis of training in n\u014d is that it is the way they've been doing it for six hundred years. That may sound preposterous, but it really is not. All ineffective forms of expression have been eliminated over the course of time, leaving only the present forms [ _kata_ ] for movement and speech.\n\nSo I would say that the basis for traditional theater is ethos, or custom. Then what are the grounds for the new theater trend in 1990s?... The one thing that makes the new theater that appeared in the 1990s different from former trends is its consciousness of others and the surrounding environment. With only logos, pathos, or eros, we can envisage only one facet of human subjectivity. While we human beings speak as subjects, as individuals, what we say is also being dictated to us by our environment. How do we express ourselves under these circumstances? This focus, I think, has been one of the major achievements of 1990s theater.\n\nFROM HIRATA ORIZA, \"KY\u016aJ\u016a-NENDAI ENGEKI TO WA NANIKA?\" (WHAT IS JAPANESE THEATER IN THE 1990S?), IN _ENGEKI NY \u016aMON_ ( _AN INTRODUCTION TO THEATER_ ) (TOKYO: K\u014cDANSHA, 1998), 183\u201385.\n\nHIRATA ORIZA\n\nWhen we carry out the act of speaking, we do so all the while being implicitly aware of the extent to which the other person understands what we say, the size of the room, the number of people listening, the amount of ambient noise, and so on. So while we are expressing ourselves, we are also being dictated to by our environment. For an actor, the most important element of his environment is the other actor, but other elements like the set, lighting, and costume all come into play, determining the conditions under which the delivery of dialogue takes place.\n\nFROM HIRATA ORIZA, _ENGI, ENSHUTSU_ ( _ACTING AND DIRECTING_ ) (TOKYO: K\u014cDANSHA, 2004), 133\u201334.\n\nThe difficulty of social interaction and the prevalence of increasingly antisocial syndromes in Japan today\u2014 _otaku_ (nerd) culture and _hikikomori_ (shut-ins)\u2014are treated in another work featured here, Sakate Y\u014dji's _Attic_ ( _Yaneura_ , 2002). Sakate has been one of the most politically active playwrights of his generation, not afraid to tackle contemporary social or political issues or to examine critically Japan's recent history. His works nonetheless are typical of the revival of well-written and well-wrought plays after a period in which performance was privileged over text. To that extent, Sakate and many of his contemporaries (Nagai Ai, among others) may signify the resurgence of ideals of drama as literature as well as the mirror of society that _shingeki_ had espoused more than a half century earlier.\n\nNot all significant works in the past two decades have been well-made plays, however. Japan's avant-garde has also given birth to various forms of physical theater in which spoken dialogue is attenuated or even absent, as in \u014cta Sh\u014dgo's work. Many theater practitioners and critics have noted that one of the signal characteristics of modern culture in Japan is an estrangement of language from the body. Various styles of theater since the 1960s have attempted to address, if not resolve, a sense that contemporary Japanese are, mentally and physically, divided selves. Since the 1980s, this trend has produced a number of powerful and even violent performance styles that straddle the worlds of dance and multimedia performance art, such as Miyagi Satoshi's Ku Na'uka, Shimizu Shinjin's Theater of Deconstruction (Gekidan kaitaisha), the Kyoto-based collective Dumb Type, and the Osaka-based company Ishinha (Reformers' Group). Some feel that the future of Japanese theater can now be seen not so much in dialogue drama as in the world of dance, which in the past twenty years has departed from _but \u014d_ and is now attempting to capture the essence of what it is to be human in the technologized world today. The relationship of language to the body will always be a central theme and challenge for practitioners of live theater, and in the work of playwrights like Okada Toshiki, audiences in Japan and, increasingly, abroad can see the difficulties that we all face in negotiating body and soul.\n\nM. CODY POULTON\n\n1. Statistics from the 1980s and 2005 are from, respectively, Shichiji Eisuke, \"The Mentality of the 1990s in Japanese Theater,\" in _Half a Century of Japanese Theater_ , ed. Japan Playwrights Association (Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 2000), 2:2; and Tadashi Uchino, \"Japan's 'Ill-Fated' Theater Culture,\" in _Half a Century of Japanese Theater_ , ed. Japan Playwrights Association (Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 2007), 9:1.\n\n2. \u014cta Sh\u014dgo's comments on contemporary theater are in Yamaguchi Hiroko, \"Japanese Drama from Late Sh\u014dwa to the Early 21st Century: Reflections of a Tumultuous Era,\" in _Half a Century of Japanese Theater_ , ed. Japan Playwrights Association (Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 2008), 10:1.\n\n3. Ezra F. Vogel, _Japan as Number One: Lessons for America_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979).\n\n4. Quoted in Nishid\u014d K\u014djin, \"Radicalism in the Theater of the 1980s,\" in _Half a Century of Japanese Theater_ , ed. Japan Playwrights Association (Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 2002), 4:8.\n\n5. Tadashi Uchino, _Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium_ (Salt Lake City: Seagull Books, 2009), 87.\n\n6. Quoted in Shichiji, \"Mentality of the 1990s in Japanese Theater,\" 4.\n\n7. Hirata Oriza, _Toshi ni wa shukusai wa iranai_ (Tokyo: Banseisha, 1997), 182.\n_POEMS FOR SALE_\n\nNODA HIDEKI\n\nTRANSLATED BY MARI BOYD\n\nNoda Hideki, _Poems for Sale_ , directed by Noda Hideki, sis company, February 2002. (Photograph by Aoki Tsukasa)\n\nAward-winning Noda Hideki (b. 1955) continues to enjoy a high profile as a playwright, a director, an and actor. His work falls into two periods: the first from 1976 to 1992, with his Dream Wanderers theater company, and the second from 1993, mainly with his Noda Map production company.\n\nIn the first period, Noda became famous for his \"theater as a sport\" approach to performance, dazzling the audience with high-speed, complex spectacles that celebrated \"boyhood.\" His major productions, such as _The Prisoner of Zenda Castle_ ( _Zenda-j \u014d no toriko_, 1981) and _Here Comes the Wild Beast_ ( _Nokemono kitarite_ , 1984), are characterized by zany wordplay, rapid-fire delivery, and frenetic movement. On his first overseas venture, Noda took the latter play to the 1987 Edinburgh Festival, sparking a concern over language barriers, which in turn has affected the trajectory of his artistic endeavors.\n\nA significant turning point in Noda's career was the year he spent in London, beginning in late 1992. Workshops, especially with the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre de complicit\u00e9, galvanized his interest in physical theater, collaboration, and dramaturgical methods to transcend linguistic transmission difficulties. In late 1993, he founded Noda Map, at which he tried his hand at kabuki and opera as well as devising his own plays. Thematically, his plays have moved beyond the child's dream world to social issues such as nationalism, colonialism, sexuality, and crime. They are darker in tone and more steadily paced; they also rely less on verbal playfulness. Major full-length works include _Kill_ ( _Kiru_ , 1994) and _Pandora_ ' _s Bell_ ( _Pandora no kane_ , 1999).\n\nBesides his spectacular main-stage shows, Noda has produced short experimental plays using simple props, minimal sets, and small casts playing multiple roles. Included in this group are his international collaborations _\u2014The Red Demon, Akaoni_ (1997), _The Bee_ (2008), and _The Diver_ (2009) _\u2014_ and also _Poems for Sale_ ( _Uri kotoba_ , 2002), the work translated in this anthology.\n\n_Poems for Sale_ is a one-hander with five roles. Produced by the sis company at the Spiral Hall in Tokyo in February 2002, it addresses, head-on, female desire, both erotic and otherwise. In doing so, it provides a revisionist view of the much idolized poet Takamura K\u014dtar\u014d (1883\u20131956) and his relationship with his wife, Chieko (1886\u20131938). The celebrated marriage of true minds and passions is shorn of its romanticism as Chieko is shown to devolve into insanity. The paralleling of the personal events leading to her collapse and the increasingly jingoistic radio broadcasts suggests that the couple's relationship is a synecdoche for the emperor's with his people.\n\nIn his second period, Noda deliberately changed his dramaturgy because he wanted to reach a global audience. He knew that his earlier work was nearly impossible to get across to a non-Japanese audience, given its heavy dependence on Japanese wordplay on both local and structural levels. To date, Noda has devised three plays with non-Japanese versions: _The Red Demon, Akaoni_ has been produced in English, Thai, and Korean; _The Bee_ and _The Diver_ he cowrote in English with British playwright Colin Teevan and subsequently wrote the Japanese text himself. The latter two, in particular, indicate the highest point in Noda's development as an intercultural theater artist. Taking heed of his new script-making approach, we have chosen _Poems for Sale_ for this anthology because, unlike his first-phase plays, it loses little in meaning and style when rendered into English and also is a good example of his second-phase experimentation.\n\nCharacters\n\nCHIEKO\n\nMAID, speaks in a heavy northeastern dialect\n\nK\u014cTAR\u014c\n\nHIRATSUKA RAICH\u014c\n\nIMAGAWA BUN SELLER\n\nSCENE 1. CYCLING\n\n_A bicycle bursts through a paper-paned partition. Riding the bike is_ CHIEKO _, who is screaming something while she pedals around the stage. She then drives her bike right through another paper-paned partition and exits_.\n\n_The sound of the bicycle crashing, followed by another even louder noise. From upstage,_ CHIEKO _enters pushing the bicycle._\n\nCHIEKO: Of course I'll take a tumble when I start something new like this. No one's ever been able to ride a bicycle perfectly from the very beginning. You fall off. Falling off is part of riding a bicycle. The Chinese characters for bicycle mean \"a vehicle that falls over by itself spontaneously.\" You see, Mother. Owowowowowow. You keep falling off, and in a hundred years what do you find? Women riding bicycles. Not just riding them, Mother. The day will come when lots of middle-aged women will be riding bicycles near train stations and getting in _everyone_ 's way. Hey lady, you're not supposed to go up that way on your bike. Oh, she's knocking things over, she's hanging things on the handlebars. Oh, something is dripping. Nooo! You mustn't let stuff drip from your bike. Everyone's going to wonder what it is. What is it that's dribbling off your bike? Hey lady! Lady! When the day comes, you middle-aged women'll be grateful to me. I fall off today and the future of Shimo-Kitazawa1 is guaranteed!... ( _She sits down in place._ ) Mother, let me and all women practice full blast until we drop dead. I'm going to practice this summer. I will. I really will, I really will till I drop dead. If that isn't enough, no one will make the grade!...\n\nSCENE 2. THE MAID\n\nCHIEKO _suddenly stands up. She transforms into another identity\u2014that of her own_ MAID.\n\nMAID ( _In a northeastern accent_ ): She's a tough cookie, this one is. And she's only a teenager. What do you make of her? I'm the maid that stayed with her almost until she died, but I can't make heads or tails out of her. Her maiden name's Naganuma Chieko; her married name's Takamura Chieko, or to make things really easy to understand, she's the wife of the poet Takamura K\u014dtar\u014d. She's the Chieko in _Chieko_ ' _s Sky_ , K\u014dtar\u014d's famous collection of love poems. In my home dialect, Chieko is pronounced \"tsarf koh,\" which, with a lot of imagination, sounds like tough cookie. Ohey ohey. Oh ho, it's weird. Chieko eventually goes mad and dies. I can't explore the mind of a cuckoo, but at least as the one closest to her I can tell you what I saw.\n\nSCENE 3. THE VALEDICTORY SPEECH AT COMMENCEMENT\n\n_The_ MAID _goes back to where_ CHIEKO _was sitting, and now_ CHIEKO _bows repeatedly_.\n\nCHIEKO: I beg you. I beg you. Please, please, let me go to the Fukushima School of Higher Education for Women.... Oh so you won't let me go to school after I've abased myself this much.... All right. I'll burn down the house. Yes, this house. Just kidding! Educated women don't commit acts like that. Uneducated women set houses on fire. Uneducated women also cry. They cry over anything and everything. I'm so lonely, owow wehh. Oh that hurts, owowo behh. I wanna sleep, owow wehh. I'm on top of the world, owowo behh. I'm miserable, owow wehh. I can't walk, owowo behh. This picture is so bee-yu-ti-ful, owow wehh. Whatever it is, owowo behh. She says, \"The dog... !\" and bursts into tears. \"The dog... !\" What about the dog? \"The dog... !\" \"What?\" \"The dog... !\" What's this about?\" The girl says, \"The dog... !\" and simply goes on crying. She doesn't make any sense, the stupid thing. That's because she doesn't have any education. Are you going to be happy with that? What if I became like that and cried out, \"The dog... !\" Dear Father, we have plenty of money, enough to fill a wine cellar. What? Women burdened with unnecessary education are impertinent? Father, please look at me carefully. Am I impertinent? I'm pretty good stuff, you know. You've done a fabulous job of bringing me up.... This isn't working. Professor? Professor Kawamoto.... Please explain to him. Tell him how education is necessary for young women of the future. Right... yes, yes.... That's exactly it, Professor. You speak so well... uh-huh, uh-huh, right on the mark. That's exactly what I wanted to convey.... \"The dog... !\" and they squawk. That's it. \"The dog... !\"\n\n(CHIEKO _transforms into the_ MAID.)\n\nMAID: That's how Chieko left Mount Atatara2 behind and matriculated at the Fukushima School of Higher Education for Women.\n\n(CHIEKO _is a freshman. At incredible speed she turns into a senior about to graduate. She reads the address for the graduating class_.)\n\nCHIEKO: We are gathered here today at our commencement. This has been made possible entirely through the thoughtful guidance of our respected principal as well as our dedicated professors. How can we express our fervent gratitude for the love and care that we have received? And do we through our own puny limitations dare forget the precious teachings that we have had the fortune to imbibe here? In departing from this garden of learning, we hope to retain in our hearts the daily instruction we have received so that we may be instrumental in the elevation of society in beauty, harmony, and happiness. As educated modern women, we hope to grow in pride as graduates of this blessed school and contribute to a higher and nobler destiny.\n\nNaganuma Chie, Valedictorian of Fukushima School of Higher Education for Women, March 15.\n\n( _To her parents_.) I beg of you this one and only favor of my life. Please let me attend a women's college in Tokyo. I know. I should be thankful for having been able to attend a school of higher education for women. But everyone says that it's a waste if the valedictorian at commencement doesn't continue her education. The Fukushima School of Higher Education for Women isn't enough.... Who says? Everyone says so. I can hear the chorus as I walk the streets. The people in town are chanting, \"What a waste!\" \"What a waste!\" like a mantra. It's a new religion. It's kinda scary walking around town when you might be assaulted by this \"what a waste-ful\" religion. When I graduate, I promise to return home and marry. I beg you to let me go... This isn't working. I'll have to depend on that old favorite\u2014\"The dog... !\"\n\nMAID: This is how Chieko yet again got her own way and was able to enter a women's college in Tokyo.\n\n( _The_ MAID _switches on a radio. Music is heard. At a small coffee shop called IN_.)\n\nSCENE 4. A TENNIS MATCH WITH HIRATSUKA RAICH\u014c\n\nCHIEKO _is drawing a very large painting. She is totally focused on the canvas for a while. She makes a gesture indicating that she notices someone nearby_.\n\nCHIEKO: Oh, who me? Huh? Yes, of course I know who you are. You're Hiratsuka Raich\u014d.3 Raich\u014d. You are an upperclassman, just one year ahead of me. Uh-huh, I was asked to draw one for the upcoming cultural festival. Yes, that's right. I started learning oil painting when I entered this college. But it's the first time for me to paint such a big painting.... Thank you very much. I believe that painting begins with sketches, ifyouplease ifyouplease ifyouplease. Oh, I am very honored. We all put you on a pedestal and idolize you. Honored? What did you say? On their back? I don't know what you are talking about. What is it? What is \"on your back\"? Huh?\u2014Wait a moment. What for? I don't like this. Huh? Lesbians? I've heard of them. Women who, um, you know. Huh? Lesbians' backstroke? The backstroke? You're saying that if I were a lesbian\u2014a butch\u2014and I slept with you kinda like this... What would I do? You said just now that I'd be the butch. Yeah, I'd want to put my arm around you, so I'd stretch my arm like this. Huh? What if you were also butch? Well, you'd put your arm around me, then I'd follow suit. You would bring your arm around me again, and in reaction I'd do the same like this, and Raich\u014d, I... oh, I am doing the backstroke... Sports? ( _Modestly._ ) I'm not really very good at physical activities. Huh? You want me to be your tennis partner? I'm just a novice tennis player. But if you are willing to have me as your partner, youknow youknow youknow...\n\n( _They begin to play tennis. At first_ CHIEKO _defers to_ HIRATSUKA _and does not hit the ball boldly, but as the match progresses, she begins to forget whom she is playing with. At first she speaks weakly_.)\n\nCHIEKO: Right... right... here goes... Wow! Nice serve... Here... hah! Now take that! Huh? That was in? Just on the line?... Okay, got it... Here goes!... Take that!... Arghh!... Dargonit!!... Woowee!... Oof!\n\n(CHIEKO _'s rapid-fire tennis play shifts into slow motion, and_ CHIEKO _'s speech turns into the_ MAID _'s monologue_.)\n\nMAID: Neither party gave way in that day's game. Their furious \"backstroke\" tennis went down in the history of the women's college. How often in a lifetime does a person get into fights? Whatever she did, in the end Chieko would get herself into a fight. Once her spirit was ignited, she wouldn't quit until she won.\n\n( _Like viewers at a match, the_ MAID _follows the movement of the ball, swinging her head from right to left and back again. The_ MAID _transforms back into_ CHIEKO _and swings the racket in a much wilder way than earlier_.)\n\nCHIEKO ( _Suddenly stops playing_ ): What is the matter? Do you give in? Surely not. You can't give up. Tennis isn't a fight. Huh? Oh, Raich\u014d, you are just as powerful.\n\n( _Glowing with pride,_ CHIEKO _is pleased to shake hands with_ HIRATSUKA.)\n\nMAID: Even this Chieko, though, is beaten by life.\n\n(CHIEKO _suddenly prostrates herself in front of her parents_.)\n\nCHIEKO: I beg you. I truly and sincerely beg you. Please let me stay in Tokyo. I want to paint. There are paintings I want to paint.... God, this isn't working. \"The dog... !\"...\n\nMAID: Needless to say, Chieko's parents already knew that she would never heed their wishes. Chieko's skill at sketching was incredible.\n\nSCENE 5. LIFE AT ART SCHOOL\n\n_A canvas of a tall, imposing nude man is set against the upstage wall. With the painting in the background,_ CHIEKO _is painting a nude male model_.\n\nCHIEKO ( _Tries to draw realistically_ ): Remove your hand. Never mind. How can I draw with your hand in the way... What? Why should I have to shade it over? Come on show me. I said, show me! Darn it. You have balls, haven't you? Take your hand away. THAT hand! You really don't have the balls for being a model! ( _Forcing the model to remove his hand,_ CHIEKO _takes a good slow look._ ) Mmm, you do have balls.\n\n(CHIEKO _finishes the painting_.)\n\nMAID: Having finished her painting to her satisfaction, Chieko went and showed it to Nakamura Fusetsu,4 the instructor at the art school.\n\nMAID-AS-NAKAMURA: Who did this painting? ( _Out of sheer pride,_ CHIEKO _did not speak up_.) You did? The sketch is not bad. ( _Silently,_ CHIEKO _smiled inwardly_.) But this coloring is unhealthy. As long as the lights and shades of color match the picture, it doesn't matter if, for instance, you used all yellows. But you should avoid unhealthy-looking colors. This emerald green doesn't work. Your sketching skills are exceptional, but there's a problem with your color palate.\n\nMAID: Chieko was truly silenced by Nakamura's criticism. Everyone thought that Chieko was in silent rebellion. But the one reason she did not speak up was that she believed that she was color blind.\n\nCHIEKO: Watanabe Fumiko,5 is the sky you are looking at and the one I am looking at the same color? You know, we assume that we are seeing the same thing, but there's no evidence of that. Feeling the same pain, one person might exaggerate and go \"Owowowowow!\" while someone who has lost an arm may just say \"Oof.\" Colors may be like pain. Some may feel the May breeze to be yellow; others may feel it to be light green. It's not only a matter of color; humans change according to light and shade. Do you get me? I look like this when light hits me from this angle. Everyone believes this is me. But from another angle ( _Shining a flashlight from below_ ), I look like this. ( _Under the original lighting._ ) I haven't changed, but I look totally different. See? I am exactly the same as before, but ( _Turning on the flashlight at herself from below_ ) I look different, right? I look different, right? I look different, right? Argh!\n\nSCENE 6. FIRST LOVE\n\nMAID: Looking ghastly different, she happened to make eye contact with Miyazaki Y\u014dhei,6 the man she falls in love with.\n\nCHIEKO ( _In a daze_ ): What? Who is that? The guy looking this way. Watanabe Fumiko, don't you know who it is? ( _With a fearful look._ ) The guy I made exchange glances with when I was looking \"different.\" Miyazaki Y\u014dhei? Miyazaki Y\u014dhei... Miyazaki Y\u014dhei. He's at the same art school? Huh? Is he really that famous? Is he really that talented? Oh, oh no, he's coming this way... This spot? Oh, er well is it? Watanabe Fumiko. Is this spot open? It seems to be. Go ahead..... Gee, where did you hear of my name? Huh? No, no I don't. What is your name? Oh, really.... . Bye now. ( _Miyazaki Y \u014dhei appears to leave._) Huh? What was that about? Watanabe Fumiko, I'm not interested in him. My mind is set on painting. What's the matter, Watanabe Fumiko? What?! He's cool? That man just now? Weeell, I don't know. Huh? Interested in me? That guy Miyazaki is? I don't think so, Watanabe Fumiko. Don't rag me, Watanabe Fumiko. Don't you dare rag me!\n\nMAID: As most of us know from experience, falling in love is hard to distinguish from stalking prey.\n\n( _Standing in an uncertain light,_ CHIEKO _is waiting for someone._ )\n\nCHIEKO ( _Someone appears_ ): Good-bye... ( _She is waiting again for someone._ ) Good-bye... ( _Then her body language indicates obviously that she is waiting for Miyazaki._ ) Oh... Excuse me... ah... ( _She just watches Miyazaki leave._ ) It's Miyazaki Y\u014dhei and Watanabe Fumiko together.\n\nMAID: In this way Chieko's first love ended as simple stalking unnoticed by anyone.\n\nCHIEKO: Watanabe Fumiko, you\u2014. You and your cute girly voice...\n\nMAID: There's nothing wrong with putting on a cute girly voice. A woman with a broken heart cannot understand that.\n\n(CHIEKO _stands in front of a canvas with brush and palette in hand._ )\n\nCHIEKO: Miyazaki Y\u014dhei and Watanabe Fumiko are engaged? For starters, it's weird that an artist would get married at all. Me?! ( _Laughs loudly._ ) You've got to be kidding. I haven't fallen in love, let alone thought of marriage. I declare: Oil painting is my life. I must paint... Wehhhhh... ( _She cries for some length of time._ )\n\nPride should be thrown out without ceremony. When you're a kid, you have embarrassing moments or miserable times when your chest tightens up. Pride is for tossing away... Blehhehh...\n\nSCENE 7. FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH K\u014cTAR\u014c\n\nMAID: Even if you fall asleep miserable with yourself, the despair of youth, unlike cheap liquor, doesn't carry over to the next day. If you sprinkle water on a thirsty soul, it will regain vigor. On that destined morning, the green sun must have shone on the potted gloxinia the color-blind Chieko had. In \"The Green Sun\" Takamura writes, \"It doesn't matter if you draw the sun green. Art enjoys absolute freedom.\"7\n\n( _Carrying the potted gloxinia,_ CHIEKO _visits_ K\u014cTAR\u014c _'s studio accompanied by her friend Yanagi Yae_.)8\n\nCHIEKO: The one with a large chinquapin tree.... Oh, that one? That house?... Is it really all right, Yae? You may know him, but I've never met him before. Huh? Of course, I'm nervous. You see... You know, Takamura K\u014dtar\u014d was an honors student at the Academy of Arts. Everyone's heard about him. After he came back from Paris, I read \"The Green Sun.\" \"It doesn't matter if you draw the sun green. Art enjoys absolute freedom.\" I was encouraged. Huh? A failure? How? An innocent idealist?... Nowadays? In rebellion against his privileged upbringing, he's now living on the fringe of humanity.\n\n( _She stands at the entrance of_ K\u014cTAR\u014c _'s atelier_.)\n\nExcuse me...\n\nMAID: Deciding not to make the same mistake she made with her first love, Chieko resorted to a girly strategy.\n\nCHIEKO: Excuse me... Excuse me... Excuse me...\n\n( _The moment she met_ K\u014cTAR\u014c. _A pause_.)\n\nMAID: With a completely silent Chieko in front of himself, K\u014dtar\u014d talked clumsily on his own.\n\n( _Opening a window, the_ MAID _transforms into_ K\u014cTAR\u014c _seated and talking ineptly on his own_.)\n\nK\u014cTAR\u014c: The rain has let up. I hadn't noticed. ( _Looking outside the window_.) I went to buy some water this morning. On rainy days, water is heavy. The lemons I bought at the same time were light. The heaviness of water, the lightness of lemons. The anxious wait for the girl of one's dreams... oh, sorry.\n\n( _He moves to a different spot and sits down_.)\n\nAfter the rain, the daisies were stuck all over the lawn like tacks. The grass looked just like the carpeting that fallen cherry blossoms make.\n\n( _He again sits down in a different spot_.)\n\nThe freshness after showers reminds me of the terminal station at the far end of the line. Sorrow and a sense of drama permeate the air. Mist rises and someone comes running this way. Ahh, excuse me. I've been babbling on all by myself. What's this? Did you draw this? Is this color called emerald green? I'd like to see your other pictures, too. Oh? _Bluestockings_? Is this the cover of that famous journal edited by Hiratsuka Raich\u014d? I see, then you must be a \"new woman.\"\n\n( _He pulls out a briefcase_.)\n\nThis briefcase is new. When something new starts, the container has to be new too. Haven't you had such an experience?\n\n( _From his briefcase, he pulls out a sheet of copper, a sheet of tin, cellophane tape, and paper and begins to make all kinds of things_.)\n\nI can't foresee what I will start now I'm back in Japan or what will happen here. However, new materials are sure to show new forms of expression. ( _Saying so, he presses the sheet of copper to his face_.)\n\nCopper expresses silence.\n\n( _He puts down the copper sheet and picks up the tin sheeting_.)\n\nThis tin speaks.\n\n( _After making various sounds with the tin sheeting, he puts it down and picks up the paper_.)\n\nPaper talks, too.\n\n( _He makes different sounds with the paper. Then he stretches out the cellophane tape and makes it zing_.)\n\nCellophane tape is a rapping comedian.\n\n( _He pulls out the cellophane tape and sticks it to various things, enjoying the sound it makes_.)\n\nI found all these new materials outside Japan. When I returned to Japan, the first thing I felt was that people here made me feel ticklish. I find the fact that I am Japanese ticklish, not irritating. Merely ticklish.\n\nMAID: Hearing him criticizing her people, she felt negated, too. For the first time she felt like retorting.\n\nCHIEKO: Japanese make you feel ticklish? What about Westerners, then? Do they tickle your funny bone? Ticklish, tickle-shit? A joke? What? Who is always joking? Are you talking about yourself or about Westerners?... Let's take it again from the beginning. In a nutshell, what are Westerners? Are they people who tell good jokes? For example, could you tell me a good joke? Right. Huh? A person in the throes of death has only five minutes left to live. Uh-huh, and what happens? He asks the doctor, \"How should I live out the shrinking remainder of my life?\" The doctor replies, \"You can boil an egg.\"... Is that an amusing answer? Huh? Westerners roll over laughing about this? I'm taken aback. Excuse me? K\u014dtar\u014d, I guess my blood flows slowly through my veins. I'm not exactly that fast on the uptake. Huh?... A poet? Who? Me? What I said? My blood flows slowly... ( _To herself_.) I may have won some points for that. K\u014dtar\u014d was beaming ecstatically. Right, here goes. I'll launch a concerted attack on him. K\u014dtar\u014d, this is what I think. The human brain is a pathetic organ, but the human heart is as cruel as April... ( _She waits for a response_.)... A hit! Maybe.\n\nMAID: It was not Chieko alone who fell in love at that moment. Around the time this couple started living together, I took a peek at K\u014dtar\u014d's journal.\n\n( _The_ MAID _sneaks into_ K\u014cTAR\u014c _'s study and reads his journal out loud_.)\n\nMAID: \"The love stories that have been written about men and women may all be lies.\" \"I choose love with you. Writing this far, I have discovered the perfect circle of love in the word 'love.' Ah the cruelty of perfection.\" \"Watching you as you talked, I felt that you inhabited a child's world. A child's world is always dominated by sight and smell. Think of a child opening a box of caramels. Like this, like this, she opens the box like this. The world is all eyes and nose for her. That's a happy world. You inhabit it.\"\n\nSCENE 8. CHIEKO'S MARRIAGE\n\nCHIEKO: Excuuuse me.... I have an important matter to discuss with you. It may not be something that you need to hear... ( _She stops with her mouth open._ )... I can't say it after all. I'm shy. How shy? For example, even if there's a foreigner sitting next to me who's using an ashtray as his soy sauce dish, I would just watch in silence. Huh? I'm not being mean. I simply cannot speak up. Strangely I become convinced that that, too, is possible and I can't point out his mistake to him\u2014excuse me, that little saucer you have there is really an ashtray. Tomorrow I'm going to leave Tokyo and go back home.... In fact my family wants me to consider a marriage offer. Why do you want to know?... His name is Terada Sabur\u014d. He's a doctor.\n\nMAID: Capturing a man's attention by intimating an offer of marriage is a tried and tested method by young women. On top of that, when the man hears the potential competitor is a doctor... The thought \"My rival is a doctor\" rising in the man's heart has been the same for more than a hundred years. Thus started the best-read collection of Japanese love poetry, _Chieko_ ' _s Sky_.\n\njust can't stand\n\nyour going away...\n\nlike bearing fruit before flowering\n\nlike budding before seeding\n\nlike spring coming right out of summer\n\nplease don't do\n\nsuch an absurd unnatural thing\n\njust the thought of a stereotyped husband\n\nand you who write in a round hand\n\nis enough to make me cry\n\ngetting married? Why you\u2014\n\nyou who are timid like a bird\n\ncapricious as a great wind?\n\njust can't stand\n\nyour going away...\n\nhow could you so easily\n\nhow shall I say?... well...\n\nfeel like selling yourself?\n\n...\n\n(\"TO SOMEONE,\" FROM _CHIEKO_ ' _S SKY_ )9\n\nMAID: What's more, this was not a poem to begin with. It was from a letter K\u014dtar\u014d had sent Chieko. Having sent the letter, K\u014dtar\u014d went off to Cape Inub\u014d10 to do some sketching. What would you do if you received a letter like this from a man? Traditional women would have waited in mesmerized expectation. But Chieko was a \"new woman.\" She chased after him all the way to the cape.\n\nSCENE 9. CAPE INUB\u014c\n\nMAID: At the top of the cape, Chieko maneuvered a coincidental meeting with K\u014dtar\u014d, who was on his way down from his sketching.\n\nCHIEKO:... Oh? Hey? Oohey oohey oohey? K\u014dtar\u014d, isn't it? It's me. Chieko. To meet you at a place like this is almost like a premeditated coincidence. I thought of sketching the evening sights of Cape Inub\u014d. Huh? I'm staying at the Gy\u014dkeikan Inn Woweee. You're kidding. That's an increeeedible coincidence. We're really staying at the same inn?! Ahhh...\n\nMAID: The implication of Chieko's \"Ahhh\" becomes clear when you take a peek at K\u014dtar\u014d's journal.\n\n( _The_ MAID _again sneaks a peek from_ K\u014cTAR\u014c _'s journal kept in his desk_.)\n\nJOURNAL: \"The long, long eternal kiss ends in a flash. That is the miracle of love.\" \"I don't think you were looking at the sea any longer. Since then you have been within a two-inch radius of me, practically as close as if we were the same person. We overlapped as if we were concentric circles. We looked at the same things, we felt the same feelings, we laughed at the same things, we ate the same food. Almost thirty years of age, we loved like high schools kids each time our eyes met. At the Gy\u014dkeikan we swore to talk right through the night and, after half an hour, fell asleep at the same time. That was a 'concentric' sleep, the happiest sleep in the world.\"\n\nWhen people are deeply in \"concentric\" love, they are apt to encounter crude, angular people. The following day on the way back from sketching at the cape, they came across a rough-looking middle-aged woman selling Imagawa buns.\n\n( _A woman toasts buns, and her weird body language indicates that she has them under her observation. After a while, she daringly calls out to them._ )\n\nIMAGAWA BUN SELLER: Hey guv'nor, are you from Tokyo? ( _To passersby._ ) Guv'nor, guv'nor\u2014this is the way we address people around here. There's no one who doesn't know me, and that means there's no one I don't know, either. The two of you there, guv'nor, don't try double suicide. It's no use trying to hide it. I can see it in people. They all say the same thing. That they have no such intention.... But I can see through any faking. In Cape Inub\u014d I teach little children how to read and write. I also take care of all the dogs. In this area when kids and dogs see me, they come up to me.\n\n( _A dog passing by runs off quickly._ )\n\nIMAGAWA BUN SELLER: Huh? Are you going back already? I haven't finished talking. Where are you staying? The Gy\u014dkeikan? In that case, I can show you a shortcut. Aren't you lucky? Come along, this way. This route is faster. Huh? You can see it from here? Trust me. Oh, that's right. Yeah, My studio is nearby. I guess I hadn't told you that I'm an artist. Come on by. ( _Enters._ ) I built this studio. This is the kitchen. ( _She keeps glancing at the walls._ ) What? You noticed? I drew all these pictures. Those are haiku by the pictures. Can you read them? My brushstrokes are stylized. Hey, guv'nor, guv'nor! You should know, this is my studio. It's not a thoroughfare. You like this place. You really like this place... ( _She sighs as if this is a problem._ ) This is a problem. Everyone wants my artwork... I pretended not to know who you are, but I do. You're Takamura K\u014dtar\u014d, aren't you. I've seen you somewhere, too. Don't worry, I have no interest in gossip. I'm an artist. Mr. Takamura, you've contributed some poems to a literary magazine recently. They weren't so hot. ( _Reads in a sugary voice._ ) \"I don't like your going away??\" Writing stuff like that, you're such a little rich boy. I would write, \"If you act like a little rich boy, I'll become someone else's darling.\" An artist would understand what I mean, right guv'nor?\n\n( _The_ IMAGAWA BUN SELLER _exits upstage and enters as_ CHIEKO.)\n\nCHIEKO: That Imagawa bun seller at Cape Inub\u014d. She was funny, wasn't she, K\u014dtar\u014d? She was making out that she was an artist, but she was the epitome of the worldly wise. She lives in a totally different world from us. Why do people become like that? The biddy's studio was like a road. Some old men going home from a drinking party passed through one by one as if it were a thoroughfare. They went through, though they had not been invited. Didn't you think that was weird? The long line continued as if the old men were emerging from their graves in the ocean. The long row of elders marched in a wide circle then seemed to go back to the watery burial site. The presents they got at the party looked like gifts for the dead. Watching them it was easy to understand that life is only about birth, living and dying. They were like that. But we will never become like them. We have nothing to do with the march of the dead heading for their final resting place.\n\n( _The sound of a radio is heard, and one radio appears in the darkness._ )\n\nRADIO: For the past five days, the Japanese flag has been lowered to half mast in honor of the death of the Meiji emperor. Stage performances and music have been forbidden until noon today. Entertainment districts have also been voluntarily closed for the past five days. This evening when the state funeral and the period of national mourning are to end, an incident symbolic of the nation's love for the emperor has occurred. General Nogi Maresuke committed suicide in honor of our ruler. Together with his wife, he followed the emperor in death. It is an extremely painful act yet to be celebrated as an expression of the Yamato spirit... ( _Sound of static._ )...\n\nWhen the whole nation is in mourning, \"Is this 'Love at a Beautiful Seashore'\" scandal permissible? According to the woman owner of an Imagawa bun shop in that locale, \"The beautiful woman seemed so young and lovable. I wondered where she could be going, at which point I noticed a young man walking down from the top of the cape. Their eyes met, and joining hands, they walked off to the inn by the seashore. I intuitively knew who they were... Guv'nor!\" This couple were none other than Takamura K\u014dtar\u014d, the son of the renowned sculptor Takamura K\u014dun,11 and Naganuma Chieko, the woman painter and Bluestockings Society member.\n\nSCENE 10. THE SECULAR WORLD\n\n_Seven years have passed_.\n\nCHIEKO: Seki, what are you going to do? You are pregnant, you miserable girl. What's worse, this Komiya guy has a wife and kids, right. Why did you act as if you're in a cheap love story? He may be a disciple of Natsume S\u014dseki,12 but he is a notorious playboy. I won't forgive you. Break up with him. If you promise to terminate your relationship with him, I'll put in a good word for you at the women's college so that you can become a foreign exchange student at Harvard University. But breaking up with Komiya is the condition. What are you saying? When you are young, an artist without any income seems to shine brilliantly. It's almost as if not drawing an income is a sign of talent. But that's only when you are young. Unlike real artists, the fake ones soon show their true colors. They lose out to the poverty of life. Huh? The dog... ?! What's that about? The dog... ?! What about it? What? I don't follow. Why are you saying that? What you're saying is beyond me... Footloose and fancy-free? Who is? I am? Look, I'm married to K\u014dtar\u014d. As artists, we acknowledge each other's talents and cherish each other in this conjugal relationship and... Huh? Secret? I don't hide anything from him. But I don't want to burden him with your problems, you know. I don't want to soil our pure artistic life together with the odors of the secular world. Oh come on, I can tell him whenever I want. K\u014dtar\u014d and I are leading a liberated life style.... Hi, K\u014dtar\u014d. Huh? I'm not scolding her. We're just exchanging views. Seki wants to study at Harvard. Huh? There's no particular reason, right Seki? You don't have any major problems, right? You look healthy. If anything you've gained weight. Well, out with it. Is there a special man in your life? Of course I think it's all right. Whoever it is, as long as you like him. You know, Seki... Oh really, K\u014dtar\u014d. You shouldn't praise your own wife like that. You feel grateful? Don't be silly. I am content with this life. I'm proud of it.\n\n( _Saying that,_ CHIEKO _sets the meal on the table. It is indeed a poverty-stricken dinner. Sliced cabbage is piled up on all the dishes. Sitting at the table,_ K\u014cTAR\u014c _recites a poem_.)\n\nK\u014cTAR\u014c:\n\ndrenched\n\nin a heavy downpour driven by storm\n\nI bought a pound of rice\n\nthat cost me 24\u00bd cents\n\nfive dried mackerel\n\na piece of salted radish\n\nred pickled ginger\n\neggs from the chicken coops\n\ndried laver like hammered steel\n\nfried fish cakes\n\nsoused bonitos\n\nscalding water\n\nwe devour our supper like hungry demons\n\n...\n\nour supper\n\nbears a more violent force than the storm\n\nour after-supper fatigue\n\nawakens in us a strange carnal passion\n\nmakes us marvel at our whole bodies\n\nflaming up in the downpour\n\nthis is our supper, the supper of the poor\n\n(\"SUPPER,\" FROM _CHIEKO_ ' _S SKY_ )\n\nCHIEKO: Fantastic. With your power of expression, any and every dinner table will become plentiful. Huh? Of course not, Seki. I'm full now. \"Is this all you eat every day?\" What are you saying? This is our supper. What? Don't talk about the family. It's all right, K\u014dtar\u014d. The Naganumas are as well-off as usual. Stop talking about our kid brother, Seki. He's prone to dissipation, but when he reaches the appropriate age, he'll become the head of the family. It's all right, K\u014dtar\u014d, you don't have to worry about such things... uh-huh, go ahead with your work upstairs.\n\n( _Her attitude indicates that she is watching_ K\u014cTAR\u014c _climb up the stairs to his studio._ )\n\nSeki, you talk too much. What if K\u014dtar\u014d picks up on what's happening? Now don't tell him that our family business is on the decline. It's embarrassing. Huh? I have never considered this lifestyle poverty-stricken. Whenever K\u014dtar\u014d finishes a poem or a sculpture, he happily calls out \"Chie, Chie\" and shows me his artwork. That look of happiness on his face is.... Ahh, yes, just as I said.\n\n(CHIEKO' _s attitude indicates that she is watching_ K\u014cTAR\u014c _come down the stairs. He is carrying a sculpture called_ \" _catfish_.\" _She reads._ )\n\n...\n\ncatfish!\n\neven if we run out of coals for the fireplace,\n\nwould you rather be devouring some enormous dream beneath the ice?\n\nthe chips of cypress wood are my kin\n\nChieko is not afraid of poverty.\n\ncatfish!\n\n(\"CATFISH,\" FROM _CHIEKO_ ' _S SKY_ )\n\nCHIEKO: Do you understand, Seki? ( _With the unfinished piece_ \" _catfish_ \" _in her hands._ ) Just as K\u014dtar\u014d writes, I must not be so poor of heart as to be fearful of poverty.\n\n( _The radio comes on._ )\n\nRADIO: Today, the sixth, the whole nation arose in celebration of the Taish\u014d emperor's enthronement. When the emperor left the gate of the Imperial Palace on an official visit to Kyoto, the grassy plot in front of Nij\u016b Bridge was reserved for students gathered to give the emperor a rousing send-off. The road between Nij\u016b Bridge and Tokyo Station was filled with crowds of men and women who wanted to see the ceremonial parade. Convertible streetcars decked with flowers drove through the streets of Tokyo, and a portable shrine was carried around with much fanfare... ( _Static._ )....\n\nIs a scandal permissible when the whole nation is in celebration over the emperor's enthronement? The pregnancy of Hiratsuka Raich\u014d, the head of the Bluestockings Society, has been confirmed. In the face of reports of her pregnancy during her cohabitation with her younger lover, Okumura Hiroshi,13 she declared, \"I will never become pregnant.\" However, this time she confessed that \"I have come face to face with the difficult problem of bearing and caring for a child.\"\n\nRaich\u014d is undeniably pregnant; Harada Satsuki14 is giving birth in July; and Odake Kazue15 is to be a mother soon. Bluestockings, the supposed home to the \"new woman\" (of Japan), is in the family way.\n\n( _Against the background of the radio broadcast,_ CHIEKO _is scolding Seki , who has returned from Harvard._)\n\nCHIEKO: I told you a thousand times to break up with him. What are you going to do, Seki? I put in a good word for you at the women's college so that you were able to go to Harvard. But you corresponded with Komiya all the time and hardly did any study at all in the United States. You ended up in debt and told the creditors that when K\u014dtar\u014d's father visited, he would pay up. That's called fraud. Why did you abuse the good name of Takamura? I never said that. How could I say such a thing to K\u014dtar\u014d? Now pay attention. You keep your mouth shut. I'll take care of this.... I don't know. Keisuke? Mother goes on too much about how he's the eldest son... Seki, leave well alone, OK? You mustn't tell K\u014dtar\u014d about that, either. I'll take care of this.... Mother, I'll take care of this. I'll take care of this. I'll take care of this. I have to take care of this. In his poems, I'm not like this at all.\n\n( _She goes to another spot and lies down._ )\n\nHuh? Er, sorry. K\u014dtar\u014d? This has come at a busy time for you. It's all right. I'm suffering from water retention in the pleura. It's a case of pleurisy. Huh? You've finished the pamphlet?... Customers can buy your sculptures regularly, then. It's a distribution system for sculpture. It's a great idea. You create what you want to make and buyers purchase only what they want. With that income, you can open your one-man show in New York. It's an artist's dream. You don't have to cater to popular demand. Huh? What do you mean?... I see, if that's what you want, that might be better for my health, too. You'll go with me, right? I'll go back to my parents for a while. To where I can see Mount Atatara.\n\nSCENE 11. BIRTHPLACE AND THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION ART EXHIBITION\n\nthat's Mount Atatara,\n\nthat glistening there the River Abukuma.\n\nas we sit quietly like this,\n\nonly the rustle of pine trees from long ago\n\nblows dim-green through our somnolent heads.\n\nlet's stop hiding from that white cloud that looks down\n\non the joy of holding hands, burning quietly\n\namid these vast fields and mountains of early winter.\n\n...\n\nthat's Mount Atatara,\n\nthat glistening there the River Abukuma.\n\nthis is your birthplace,\n\n...\n\n(\"BENEATH THE TREES,\" FROM _CHIEKO_ ' _S SKY._ )\n\nCHIEKO: I'm glad I came back. Looking at this mountain cheers me up. K\u014dtar\u014d, you don't look so good. Huh? So what? Who cares about a mishap like that? Everyone acknowledges the worth of your art. It's just that the distribution system didn't work out. It's too bad. We are artists. We can't expect making money to be easy for us. Huh? Why are you looking at that? I just painted it for kicks. Huh?... Have I shown you my paintings? Haven't I? I didn't realize that. Just that one time right, when we first met, I showed you the cover design for the _Bluestockings_ journal. It's the first time since then, I guess. Eh? For the Ministry of Education Art exhibition? This? Impossible. It's just a practice piece. It won't ever pass. You think so? You think the sketching is well done? Really? A winner? Eh? No, no, it would never win special honors. Impossible... OK. I'll do it. The Ministry of Education Art exhibition. I don't even have to be accepted. But I will submit the piece, because you praise it to the skies.\n\nSCENE 12. REJECTED\n\nCHIEKO, _out of breath, enters running as if she has just arrived_.\n\nCHIEKO: Special honors: Takamura Chieko, Takamura Chieko, Takamura Chieko. ( _Appears to be resigned at not finding her name._ ) Special honors, second level: Takamura Chieko, Takamura Chieko, Takamura Chieko. ( _Searches for her name but cannot find it._ ) Honorable mention: Yoshio Takai, Takagi Kazunori, Takagi Kaede, Takada Seiton, Takahashi Akio, Taka...\n\n( _She goes home_.)\n\n( _Reaching home, she speaks extremely brightly_.) I'm back. Oh, were you waiting for me. K\u014dtar\u014d. Huh? It didn't work out. Too bad for me. Don't worry. I didn't expect anything to begin with.... Thank you. That's right. I'm content with your praise of my sketches. Yes, that's right. I know. It doesn't mean that the best is always recognized. After all, I hadn't tried all my might to make a fine painting. It's just one of the many I painted when I was back at the old home, so rejection is a matter of course. That's right. I'll take up the challenge again. There's next year and the year after that. If I were a winner the first time round, I'd turn into an insufferable brag. I'll paint again. I can always paint again...\n\n( _She stands in front of the canvas. She holds a brush_.)\n\nWhat is it, K\u014dtar\u014d? \"Chie, Chie.\" I can hear you calling me again. Have you finished an art piece? Eh? A sculpture? Or is it a poem today? Uh-huh, it's OK. This is a good time for me to take a break, too. Show me. I'd like to read it.\n\n( _She reads_.)\n\nwhen women cast off accessories one by one\n\nwhy is it they become so beautiful?\n\n...\n\nwhen you stand in silence\n\nyou are indeed a creature of God.\n\nnow and then I am secretly amazed that\n\nyou get prettier and prettier.\n\n(\"YOU GET PRETTIER AND PRETTIER,\" FROM _CHIEKO'S SKY_ )\n\nCHIEKO: Thank you. It's not as if I'm throwing out accessories out of my own choice... Huh? You have another poem?\n\n( _She reads._ )\n\nmy dearest other half\n\npossessing all my trust\n\nsharing the innermost torment of my flesh\n\n...\n\nyou were born for me\n\nYou are mine\n\nI have you I have you\n\n(\"WELLSPRING OF LIFE\")\n\nCHIEKO: Thank you. I was born for you.... Huh? There's more?\n\n( _She reads._ )\n\nI feel my own pain as if it were yours\n\nI feel my own pleasure as if it were yours.\n\nI rely upon you just as myself\n\nI feel my own growth as your growth\n\nI believe I'll never leave you behind\n\nNo matter how fast I walk, and feel easy\n\n(\"US,\" FROM _CHIEKO'S SKY_ )\n\nCHIEKO: This is me. Right, I'll do my best. This is who I am.\n\nSCENE 13. A YOUNG WOMAN MODEL\n\nMAID: Chieko's pride had been severely damaged by the art exhibition's rejection. What about the effect of K\u014dtar\u014d's poetry? \"I believe I'll never leave you behind / No matter how fast I walk, and feel easy\" _..._ had the impact of a heavy body blow. Wasn't K\u014dtar\u014d being rough with her? The fear she had not felt until then, that she might very well be left behind by him, arose in her mind. It was just then that the other incident happened.... I cannot forget that day Chieko shared with me.\n\n( _Concerned about the studio upstairs,_ CHIEKO _cannot stop looking that way. She realizes that the_ MAID _has noticed her concern_.)\n\nCHIEKO: Ohh, you've caught me peeping. Why don't you sit down.... What do you think? I know that his sex drive is stronger than most men's. \"Woman is aflame with lust. I am aflame with lust. Together we blaze with desire. We burn like geothermal fires....\" That sex-crazed man is upstairs with a young naked female model every day. The model's a seventeen-year-old named Yuriko. He's left out from the _Chieko's Sky_ collection his poems about lust. The words he doesn't want people to know, the words that don't sell, he keeps locked up in his drawer. Now listen, you mustn't blab about this, if you're a faithful maid...\n\n( _Saying that,_ CHIEKO _sneaks_ K\u014cTAR\u014c _'s journal out of the desk drawer and surreptitiously reads it, just as the_ MAID _had done before_.)\n\nHere it is. He's been pretending to write poems only for me.\n\nA seventeen-year-old girl\n\nStrips off her clothes as soon as she arrives\n\nAh what a lovely creature of early May\n\nWith the easy freedom of nature,\n\nLike a wild hare\n\nIts ears stand up as it crouches down on a platform\n\n...\n\nAhh, as Rodin wrote in his journal\n\n\"nothing can replace youth\"\n\nThe youth of all phenomena\n\nThe youth of humankind\n\nThe eternal youth that lurks in art\n\n...\n\nTaking some clay in my hand,\n\nMy heart trembling with an exaltation close to envy,\n\nAt the body of a seventeen-year-old that moves like a living hare\n\nI gaze as if to devour it\n\nI gaze at it.\n\nHe gazes as if to devour it. That man is even now gazing as if to swallow a seventeen-year-old.\n\n( _Saying so,_ CHIEKO _sneaks upstairs and listens outside_ K\u014cTAR\u014c _'s studio. He does not come out for a long time_. CHIEKO _descends and whispers to the_ MAID.)\n\nNever mind. Just shout out his name in an extra loud voice. Just do as you're told. You are in my employ, aren't you!\n\nMAID: Yes. Master! Master!\n\n(CHIEKO _peeks into the back. Upset by the premonition that_ K\u014cTAR\u014c _will come, she sits down where she is and pretends to be mad_.)\n\nMAID: I saw everything. From the viewpoint closest to Chieko. I saw her for the first time acting mad just to attract K\u014dtar\u014d's attention. She was not crazy from the beginning. She only pretended to be. That's what I believe.\n\nCHIEKO: I'm all right. I'll pull myself together. I'm the wife of an artist. I am an artist. I should do some oil painting.\n\nSCENE 14. THE COLLAPSE OF THE NAGANUMA FAMILY BUSINESS AND FOUR DEATHS\n\nTELEGRAM 1: Father died.\n\nTELEGRAM 2: Chiyo died.\n\nTELEGRAM 3: Grandmother died.\n\nTELEGRAM 4: Mitsu died.\n\n(CHIEKO _reads the telegrams and picks up her brush again. An announcement from the radio comes on._ )\n\nRADIO ( _Despite the static, some information can be discerned_ ): A fire started in Twin Pines, Fukushima Prefecture, and burned down the southeastern part of the district.\n\nCHIEKO: Keisuke, you are the eldest son of the Naganuma family. You are hopeless. You can't be overwhelmed by a fire. I cannot afford to be called back home each time there is an emergency.\n\n( _The radio comes on._ )\n\nRADIO: Today before noon, a great earthquake hit Tokyo. The damage is extensive. Tokyo now looks like a vision of hell.\n\nCHIEKO: Mother, I'm going to go back to Tokyo. Huh? Don't depend on me so much.... You want K\u014dtar\u014d to sell liquor? He's not the right person for business. Show me the ledger. Half the customers are getting their liquor free. Your way of doing business is just like Keisuke's. I, I'll take care of this.\n\nSCENE 15. CHIEKO SWITCHES FROM OILS TO WEAVING\n\nCHIEKO _decisively breaks her brush. She starts to weave_.\n\nCHIEKO: It's all right. You don't have to worry about anything. I can't stay focused on oil painting. Weaving I've enjoyed since childhood. In addition, textiles sell. Huh? You've written another poem.... That's wonderful.\n\n( _She reads_.)\n\n\u2014in silence, I handle clay.\n\n\u2014rattling the loom, Chieko weaves.\n\n\u2014a mouse runs for a peanut dropped on the floor.\n\n\u2014a sparrow snatches it away from him.\n\n...\n\n(\"KINDS COHABITING,\" FROM _CHIEKO_ ' _S SKY_.)\n\nMAID:... I'm only a maid, but I got angry with K\u014dtar\u014d's optimistic poetry. For the first time I talked to Chieko of my own accord.... Hey, Mrs. Chieko, the master is a selfish beggar. He has you weave while he kneads clay in silence. The only ones who weave and really suffer in this world are you and the crane. Why do his poems always order you about?\n\n( _She reads._ )\n\ndo not let the clay in the workshop freeze\n\nChieko\n\nhowever empty the kitchen is in the evening\n\ndo not forget to stoke up the coals in the fireplace\n\nshould the blankets in the bedroom be thin\n\npile cushions over them.\n\ndo not let the clay in the workshop freeze\n\nin the cold dawn.\n\n...\n\nEven if New Year's should feel hollow\n\nChieko\n\ndo not forget to stoke up the coals in the fireplace\n\nMAID: Shit, this is, you know.... Hey. Before you tell the missus what to do, why don't you shovel some coal yourself. ( _To_ CHIEKO.) Aren't you getting the raw end of the deal? Even if he writes beautiful poetry about you, your life is sucked into his. He's the one that's developing and growing, and once he reaches the top, he'll leave you and go on, on his own. Aren't you afraid of that? That's why I'm raving and ranting for you. Challenging the beauty of _Chieko_ ' _s Sky_ , I'll take up arms against that poetry and spit out some vulgarities. The job of a maid is like that. We wash, clean, take out the garbage, scrub the toilets; we take care of the lowest level of living. What you didn't want to do since childhood, I've been covering for you. But the day Chieko had to say what had to be said, what should happen? She indeed spoke up.\n\nSCENE 16. THE BANKRUPTCY OF CHIEKO'S FAMILY AND OF HER PRIDE\n\nCHIEKO:... ( _She has turned pale from the notice she has received_.) K\u014dtar\u014d, I'm sorry I didn't tell you earlier. My family has gone bankrupt.\n\n( _The sounds of an auction can be heard. The furniture on stage is sold off piece by piece. From the radio, the news of the death of the Taish \u014d emperor is heard. That radio, too, is carted off_.)\n\nMAID:... The name and prosperity of her own family line was the one advantage Chieko had over her husband. When the family business went bankrupt, her pride collapsed.\n\nSCENE 17. SCOLDING HER MOTHER\n\nCHIEKO _is writing a letter to her mother_.\n\nCHIEKO: Mother, it's no good going on and on. I won't help you this time. If you just complain and don't take responsibility for your own affairs, you can't make it in this world. You should be troubled by your own problems. A woman who has no assets or vocation\u2014what right does she have to ask for financial support? \"A woman who has no assets or vocation\"\u2014that's what I have been reduced to. It doesn't matter how many years I study, I can't produce a single painting. What's the difference between that Imagawa bun seller of long ago and me? That biddy I laughed at claimed to be an artist... No, I don't sell Imagawa buns... but I do weave... No. In my mind a kaleidoscope of colors and images are swirling around. But when I face the canvas, I become afraid of mixing and placing colors... Do you know why? Why are you silent?... K\u014dtar\u014d would always praise my sketches... He would... But... but... what?... He never praised the colors I used... So you knew. My emerald green and K\u014dtar\u014d's green sun were totally different. His was merely theoretical. My colors were a true reflection of what I saw... No. It can't be that he and I were looking at different things. I have to be the Chieko he writes poems about\u2014Chieko, the concentric circle. I have to be a woman who, unsurprised by poverty, \"casts off accessories one by one\" and \"becomes prettier and prettier.\" I have to follow without getting left behind. I'm losing it fast. Look after me well, OK. I'm afraid. I'm afraid I'll disappear if I'm not looked after... I'm afraid, I'm afraid.... What? ( _Notices_ K\u014cTAR\u014c.) What is it? Right... I was talking to myself again? Sometimes I was talking in the Fukushima dialect?... I'm probably still upset over my mother's pleading for a loan. But I'm all right now. I feel well. When I've spat out my thoughts, I feel better. I'll rewrite my letter to my mother.\n\n( _Pushing her bicycle, she goes down the hill_.)\n\nMother, Yesterday we both were sad. But you must never be defeated by worldly fate. We must not die. We must live. We must do our best to live. See, Mother, right now, we must stick with it till we keel over\u2014all of us together. I will do my best this summer. I will, I shall. Until I fall down. If that is not enough, then we all will crumble together.\n\n( _The bicycle falls over by itself_.)\n\nI was the one who fell over. A year later, I attempted suicide.\n\nSCENE 18. THE VOICE OF MADNESS\n\nCHIEKO: Huh? Where are you going, K\u014dtar\u014d? To the Sanriku District? You're going to go from the Kitagami River to the seacoast and float on the triangular waves? You want to feel the swinging of the ocean. Huh? You're going to be away for a whole month? Alone? That's all right. It's come up quite suddenly, hasn't it?... No? You've wanted to go off on your own for the past year?... What? I'll be OK... I won't be... I mean it's just a month, right? It'll pass in a flash. What? I could paint while you're away? As a change of pace? I suppose. You're right, K\u014dtar\u014d. Painting might be more restful than medication. I'll give it a try.... How can I possibly paint? It was what I most wanted but couldn't do. Why does K\u014dtar\u014d push me in that direction now? There's no way I can paint. I'll tell him. There's no way I can paint. There's no way I can paint.\n\n(CHIEKO _, maid-like, plants herself in front of_ K\u014cTAR\u014c _confrontationally. But gradually_ CHIEKO _transforms back into her usual self_.)\n\nYou know, when you return, let's visit Ueno and Asakusa together. They were my old haunts when I was gloating over becoming an artist. When I was vibrant and designed the cover page of the _Bluestockings_ journal... What? Has K\u014dtar\u014d left already?\n\n( _In the silence,_ CHIEKO _positions her easel_.)\n\nHow many days have passed since K\u014dtar\u014d left on his northeastern journey? ( _Facing the canvas_.)... There's no way I can paint. You don't have a flair for color. You're no good. You're no good.... The sun is going down.... It's already dusk. You don't have a sense of color. You're no good. You're no good. You'll die soon.... I'm simply exhausted. I want a deep, deep sleep. I'd like to travel to the celestial country.\n\n( _She takes some Adalin sleeping pills_.)\n\nSCENE 19. AN AVALANCHE OF MADNESS\n\nCHIEKO ( _In a Fukushima accent_ ): When I came to, I was there. The me that has always served Chieko... Huh? What do you think you're saying? I was always doing the talking. It's true. I was talking in the Fukushima dialect... What's happening? Where am I? You can build a fence, but it's easy to clear. Fences are for climbing over, easy-peasy. K\u014dtar\u014d, I know. You can't get your work done because you have to take care of me. I know... Serves you right... Serves you right... Serves you right. I'm saying it serves you right, K\u014dtar\u014d! I was underwater until now.\n\n( _Shaking herself._ ) Citizens of Tokyo, gather here! Collect in front of me! You know full well that it's rude to stare at me and grin like that. The emperor is ill! Subjects and citizens of this nation. Gather here! War is about to begin. How dare you grin at me. Serves you right. Serves you right! Serves you right! K\u014dtar\u014d! K\u014dtar\u014d! K\u014dtar\u014d. K\u014dtar\u014d. K\u014dtar\u014d. K\u014dtar\u014d, K\u014dtar\u014d. ( _Toning down a bit, she looks for_ K\u014cTAR\u014c.) K\u014dtar\u014d. K\u014dtar\u014d. Chieko? K\u014dtar\u014d? Chieko? K\u014dtar\u014d? Chieko? K\u014dtar\u014d? Aren't the two of you coming out here? Where have they gone? Huh?... ( _Looking hard and long._ ) You are? Really? Ahh, K\u014dtar\u014d! K\u014dtar\u014d, right. ( _She has become childlike. She is being led by_ K\u014cTAR\u014c.) Where are you taking me? If you say so, that might be better. Oh that's right. This is the same as coming down with pleurisy and going to Mount Atatara? I enjoyed it. I enjoyed that time. I enjoyed it.\n\n(CHIEKO _enters a hospital room._ )\n\nHey where's K\u014dtar\u014d? He's coming back? Where'd he go?... I see. I'll wait for him here.\n\n( _Quiet._ )\n\nThe day after I entered the hospital, I gave up on K\u014dtar\u014d, and having lost my ticket back to the human world, I started making paper-cut pictures\u2014Luscious red and ripe persimmons; gentle, delicate wild flowers; insects lovingly detailed\u2014I conjured up an innocent world as if I was opening a box of caramels in front of my very eyes. I had only myself to face, and embracing myself gently, the drama of my life in this world came to an end.\n\nSCENE 20. DEATH\n\n_A screaming figure in the hospital,_ CHIEKO _is reading out loud_ K\u014cTAR\u014c _'s journal. Mad words stream from her mouth_.\n\nCHIEKO: Citizens of Tokyo, gather here! I went to the hospital and saw Chieko after a period of five months. Her condition was not good, and she has weakened a great deal.... I saw Chieko after five months. I saw Chieko after five months. I saw Chieko after five months. K\u014dtar\u014d, who used to travel all the way to distant Kuj\u016bkuri Beach once a week, did not visit Chieko at her hospital, near Minami-Shinagawa in Tokyo, for five whole months. _Chieko_ ' _s Sky,_ famous as an unusual love story told in verse, was written by a man who, at the end, abandoned his wife in a hospital for five months. Citizens of Tokyo! This is a protest against _Chieko_ ' _s Sky._ During those five months, K\u014dtar\u014d started a correspondence with a woman poet. To a woman Chieko knew nothing of, he sent his writing about his wife. Citizens of Tokyo! To add insult to injury, Chieko was fed the apples that the woman poet sent him in consolation for his suffering. Chieko, in other words I, die in front of K\u014dtar\u014d who visited after five months. Nonetheless, according to this poet, even I, miserable as I am, die a beautiful death.\n\nyou had yearned for a lemon so long\n\nyour clean teeth bit fresh\n\ninto the lemon taken from my hands\n\non a sad white light bed of death\n\na topaz-colored scent arose\n\na few drops of heavenly lemon juice\n\nsuddenly restored lucidity\n\nyour blue limpid eyes smiled a little\n\nhow healthy your strength was gripping my hands\n\nthough there was a storm in your throat\n\non such a brink of life as this\n\nChieko became the Chieko of long before\n\nand drained a lifelong love in one moment\n\nthen for an instant\n\ndrawing a deep breath as once you did\n\non a mountain top long long ago\n\nyour organ stopped\n\nbehind a vase of cherry blossoms in front of your picture\n\ntoday I shall place a cool shining lemon again\n\n(\"LEMON ELEGY,\" FROM _CHIEKO_ ' _S SKY_ )\n\nWill I be able to die so elegantly? On the brink of death, I have to be in love. For a moment I regained my senses and stared at K\u014dtar\u014d. Smiling slightly I gave one deep breath.\n\n(CHIEKO _closes her eyes. At the same moment, the radio begins to blare out a series of news items from the beginning of World War II to the Imperial Rescript on Surrender. The relationship between_ CHIEKO _and_ K\u014cTAR\u014c _may have been analogous to that of the people and the emperor. Slow fade-out_.)\n\nCURTAIN\n\n1. Today Shimo-Kitazawa is a trendy night spot with several well-known little theaters.\n\n2. Mount Atatara is in Fukushima Prefecture in northeastern Japan.\n\n3. Hiratsuka Raich\u014d (1886\u20131971) was a writer, journalist, political activist, and pioneering Japanese feminist. She was the founder of Japan's first feminist journal, _Bluestockings_ ( _Seit \u014d_, 1911\u20131915), whose motto was \"In the beginning, woman was the sun.\"\n\n4. Nakamura Fusetsu (1866\u20131943) was a Western-style painter and calligrapher.\n\n5. Watanabe Fumiko (1886\u20131977) was a Western-style painter noted for floral designs.\n\n6. Miyazaki Y\u014dhei (1889\u20131912) was a Western-style painter and illustrator who married Watanabe Fumiko and changed his name to Watanabe.\n\n7. \"The Green Sun\" (1910) was Takamura K\u014dtar\u014d's manifesto on the issue of individual and national identity in modern art.\n\n8. Yanagi Yae was a friend of Chieko's at Japan Women's University, as well as being a magazine editor and the wife of the painter Yanagi Keisuke.\n\n9. Unless indicated otherwise, this and all other quotations from Takamura's Chieko poems in this play are from _Chieko_ ' _s Sky_ , trans. Soichi Furuta (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1978).\n\n10. Cape Inub\u014d is a scenic spot located near Ch\u014dshi city in Chiba Prefecture. _Inu_ is the Japanese word for \"dog.\"\n\n11. Takamura K\u014dun (1852\u20131934) was a sculptor and the father of K\u014dtar\u014d.\n\n12. Natsume S\u014dseki (1867\u20131916) was best known for his novels _Kokoro_ and _I Am a Cat_ ( _Wagahai wa neko de aru_ ) and is considered to be the foremost Japanese novelist of the Meiji era (1868\u20131912).\n\n13. Okumura Hiroshi (1891\u20131964) was a Western-style painter and jewelry designer and the husband of Hiratsuka Raich\u014d.\n\n14. Harada Satsuki (1887\u20131933) was a novelist whose best-known work is _To a Man from a Woman in Prison_ ( _Gokuchu no onna yori otoko ni_ , 1915).\n\n15. Odake Kazue (1892\u20131966) was a painter, journalist, and member of the Bluestockings Society for nine months until she fell ill.\n_TOKYO NOTES_\n\nHIRATA ORIZA\n\nTRANSLATED BY M. CODY POULTON\n\nHirata Oriza, _Tokyo Notes_ , directed by Hirata Oriza, Seinendan, March 1998.\n\n(Photograph by Aoki Tsukasa)\n\nBorn in Tokyo in 1962, Hirata Oriza is one of Japan's leading playwrights and directors. His first book was an account of an around-the-world trip he made by bicycle while still a high-school student. He began writing plays for his theater company, Seinendan, in his first year at International Christian University, and as an undergraduate, he spent a year in Korea in the 1980s, signaling an abiding interest in Korean language and culture that began long before it became fashionable in Japan. His sympathies for the Korean people are reflected in his first major play, _Citizens of Seoul_ ( _Seoul shimin_ , 1991), which is set in 1910, the year of Korea's annexation by Japan. With its restrained focus on the everyday lives and conversations of ordinary people, this work was one of the first of what critics called the \"quiet dramas\" ( _shizuka na geki_ ), which marked a shift in the 1990s away from the boisterous and festive nature of 1980s Japanese theater toward a new, sober realism. Hirata, however, prefers to call his new dramatic style \"contemporary colloquial theater.\" Since the early 1990s, Hirata's plays have been performed abroad, and many of his works have been translated into several foreign languages. He has also collaborated with Korean, Chinese, French, and Belgian directors and theater companies in productions of his work. A prolific writer and critic of contemporary social problems and cultural policy, Hirata also has been active in academic and political spheres.\n\nAs its title suggests, the play excerpted here, his most famous work (it was awarded the Kishida Kunio Award in 1995) is an homage to Ozu Yasujir\u014d's classic film _Tokyo Story_ ( _T \u014dky\u014d monogatari_, 1953), about an elderly couple who go to Tokyo to visit their children. Like Ozu, Hirata is interested in the dissolution of the Japanese family, traditionally considered the microcosm of Japanese society as a whole. Here, however, the parents are absent, and we are presented with an awkward reunion of the children and their spouses in the lobby of a Tokyo art gallery that is exhibiting the works of Jan Vermeer, which have been rescued from a war-torn Europe. Written in 1994 but set ten years in the future, the work is a commentary on Japan's dubious role in international affairs. At the same time, like Vermeer's paintings, the work is both a manifesto and a wry critique of the realist impulse.\n\nCharacters\n\nAKIYAMA SHINYA, the eldest of the Akiyamas\n\nTOKIKO, Shinya's wife\n\nYUMI, the second eldest\n\nY\u016aJI, the third eldest\n\nYOSHIE, Y\u016aJI'S wife\n\nIKUE, the second youngest\n\nSHIGEO, the youngest\n\nHIRAYAMA EMIKO, curator\n\nMITSUHASHI MIYUKI, donor of paintings\n\nONO KUNIKO, lawyer\n\nSAIT\u014c YOSHIO, friend of MITSUHASHI's\n\nKUSHIMOTO TERUO, curator\n\nKINOSHITA TAKASHI\n\nNOSAKA HARUKO\n\nHASHIZUME MIKIO\n\nTERANISHI RIKA\n\nISHIDA EISUKE\n\nSUDA NAO\n\nMIZUKAMI FUMIKO, college student\n\nWAKITA YURIKO, college student\n\nNote: The numbers assigned to each scene are guides for rehearsal and otherwise have no special function or meaning.\n\nTime: May 2004.\n\nPlace: The lobby of an art gallery.\n\n_A corridor leads directly from stage left to the exhibition rooms. Upstage right is a staircase leading to a mezzanine. The staircase rises in the direction of stage left. The stage area is probably in one corner of the gallery building, a small space connecting the ground and second floors._\n\n_Three sofas_ (A, B, C), _seating three persons each, are arranged on the stage perpendicular to the audience. In this script, each seat is referred to as_ 1, 2, 3, _starting from upstage. Farther upstage is another sofa_ (D), _set parallel to the audience. The seats are referred to as_ 1, 2, 3 _from stage right to stage left. Cylindrical ashtrays are set between seats_ A3 _and_ B3 _and between seats_ C1 _and_ D3. _Beside_ D1 _is a wastepaper basket in a matching design and a magazine rack._\n\n_Although not on stage, a toilet is located offstage down the corridor leading to the exhibition rooms. Apparently_ , _there is a vending machine located at the top of the stairs._ 1\n\nYOSHIE: You know Yuji won't buy any toys for Tar\u014d with batteries.\n\nYUMI: How come?\n\n3.1.2\n\nYOSHIE: If the toy needs batteries, then it stops working when the battery runs out, and then the kid won't play with it.\n\n|   \n---|---  \n|\n\n(ISHIDA, EISUKE, _and_ SUDA NAO _enter from stage right._ )\n\nYUMI: Ah.\n\nYOSHIE: But kids like stuff that moves.\n\n|   \n|\n\nISHIDA ( _Entering_ ): Yeah, but\u2014\n\nYUMI: How old's Tar\u014d? Three?\n\n|   \n|\n\nSUDA ( _Entering_ ): Uh huh.\n\nYOSHIE: Three and a half.\n\n|   \n|\n\nISHIDA ( _Entering_ ): But monks drink. They always have.\n\nYUMI: Ah. Well, then.\n\n|   \n|\n\nSUDA ( _Entering_ ): I know that.\n\nYOSHIE: Yeah.\n\n|   \n|\n\nISHIDA: So, it's not exactly a lie, right?\n\n|\n\nSUDA: Yeah, but it's too weird, that story.\n\n(YOSHIE _moves to_ A1.)\n\n|   \n|\n\nISHIDA: You're getting kinda red, you know.\n\n|\n\nSUDA: Huh?\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: In the face. ( _Sits at_ C3, _facing stage left._ )\n\n|\n\nSUDA: Naw.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: You been drinking?\n\n|\n\nSUDA: 'Course not. ( _Sits at_ B3.)\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: Oh.\n\n|\n\nSUDA: What're you talking about? We've been together all along.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: You're, uh, getting redder and redder.\n\n|\n\nSUDA: Oh shut up.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: Beet red.\n\n|\n\nSUDA: Shut up I say.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA ( _To_ YUMI): She's red, isn't she.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: A bit, I guess.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: There you go.\n\n|\n\nSUDA: You're embarrassing me.\n\nYUMI: So, Tar\u014d's in kindergarten already.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Yep. | ( _A long pause._ )\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: Want a coffee?\n\nYUMI: Did you see the photos? His entrance ceremony.\n\n|   \n|\n\nSUDA: No thanks.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: OK.\n\nYOSHIE: Yeah.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Dad was so excited, you know.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Sorry for making him come all the way to Tokyo.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: No problem. He's not busy.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Really.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Really. Time flies, eh?\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Will you come again next year, Yumi?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Yeah, well, probably.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: You'll be coming when? Around this time, May?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Not sure. Maybe the summer.\n\n|   \n|\n\n(ISHIDA _stands._ )\n\nYOSHIE: Ah.\n\n|   \n|\n\nSUDA: Huh? You going?\n\nYUMI: I'll come when the galleries are doing something good.\n\n|   \n|\n\nISHIDA: Just fooling. ( _Sits._ )\n\nYOSHIE: Ah. I see.\n\n|   \n|\n\nSUDA: What're you doing?\n\nYUMI: Why?\n\n|   \n|\n\nISHIDA: Nothin'. Not bad, eh? A place like this, for a change.\n\nYOSHIE: Nothing special.\n\n|   \n|\n\nSUDA: Uh huh.\n\nYUMI: What?\n\n|   \n|\n\nISHIDA: You know, at night, I fly around in the plane, just looking. From the sky.\n\nYOSHIE: Nothing. ( _Looks at_ SUDA.)\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|   \n|\n\nSUDA: Uh huh.\n\nYOSHIE: Guess we'll be getting more pictures, eh. Lots of 'em.\n\n|   \n|\n\nISHIDA: It's pitch black, and all you can see are the searchlights going round and round.\n\nYUMI: Uh huh.\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|   \n|\n\nSUDA ( _Pausing_ ): You scared?\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: Nah, not us.\n\nYOSHIE: So long as Japan stays out of the war.\n\n|   \n|\n\nSUDA: That so?\n\nYUMI: Ah, yeah.\n\n|   \n|\n\nISHIDA ( _Twirling his arms around like searchlights_ ): Like this.\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|\n\nSUDA: What's that?\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: The searchlights.\n\n|\n\nSUDA: Thought you were a snail for a sec.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: Na.\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: Wouldn't say it was pretty, mind you.\n\n|\n\nSUDA: Hm.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: You know, Berlin. It's a big city.\n\n|\n\nSUDA: Uh huh.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: All pitch black. Like everyone was holding their breath.\n\n|\n\nSUDA: Ah.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: Dead quiet.\n\n|\n\nSUDA: Uh huh.\n\nYOSHIE: I knew he was a crybaby, but I didn't know he hated corners.\n\n|   \n|\n\nISHIDA: I fly round like this, just watching. But can't see anything, 'cause it's dark.\n\nYUMI: Huh?\n\n|   \n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\nYOSHIE: Yuji. Being a crybaby.\n\n|   \n|\n\nISHIDA: They say air raids are scary. If you're on the ground, that is.\n\nYUMI: Oh.\n\n|   \n|\n\nSUDA: Oh\u2014\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|   \n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\nYUMI: Something happen with you and Yuji?\n\n|   \n|\n\nSUDA: Let's go.\n\n3.1.3\n\nYOSHIE: No, we're fine.\n\n|   \n---|---  \n|\n\nISHIDA: OK.\n\n|\n\nSUDA:...\n\n|\n\nISHIDA ( _Makes to stand_ ): What?\n\n|\n\nSUDA: Been sixty years exactly since Saint-Exup\u00e9ry died, so I heard.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: Eh?\n\n|\n\nSUDA: Died in a plane over the Mediterranean, he did. In the war.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: Oh yeah. _Night Flight_ , wasn't it? _Vol de nuit_.\n\n|\n\nSUDA ( _Cutting in_ ): Read a lot about airplanes when you were away.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: _Vol de nuit_? or _Vol au vent_? Which was it now?\n\n|\n\nSUDA: \"Love is to join, to share.\"\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: What's that?\n\n|\n\nSUDA: That's what he said before he died.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: I ain't gonna die.\n\n|\n\nSUDA:...\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: It's not like we're at war or anything.\n\n|\n\nSUDA: In that case, let me join you.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA:...\n\n|\n\nSUDA: I'll join you.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: Sixty years?\n\n|\n\nSUDA: Uh huh.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: That's almost a life span.\n\n|\n\nSUDA ( _Pausing briefly_ ): Uh huh.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA ( _A longer pause_ ): Sixty years, and humans aren't any better.\n\n|\n\nSUDA:...\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: Dead loss, eh?\n\n|\n\nSUDA: Uh huh.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: Your face is red.\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|\n\nSUDA ( _Stretches and lays her hands on_ ISHIDA _'s lap_ ): A snail.\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: Yup.\n\n|\n\n(SUDA _grinds her fists into his lap._ )\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: Stoppit! That's an erogenous zone.\n\n|\n\nSUDA: Dummy.\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|\n\nSUDA: Let's go. ( _Stands._ )\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: OK. ( _Pause. She also stands._ )\n\n|\n\nSUDA: Go to any art galleries in Berlin?\n\n|\n\nISHIDA: Nope.\n\n|\n\nSUDA: How come?\n\n|\n\nISHIDA ( _Exiting_ ): There's a war on.\n\n|\n\nSUDA ( _Exiting_ ): Didn't you just say you weren't at war?\n\n|\n\nISHIDA ( _Exiting_ ): Yeah, well, we're not fighting, but some folks are.\n\n|\n\nSUDA: Same thing, surely.\n\n|\n\n( _The two exit stage left_.)\n\n3.2.1\n\n_A fifteen seconds' pause_.\n\nYOSHIE: I might not be able to see you next year, Yumi.\n\n|   \n---|---\n\nYUMI: Huh? How come?\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE:...\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Going somewhere, next year?\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: I might not be able to see you again, ever.\n\n|\n\nYUMI:...\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: He burst into tears the other day. Y\u016bji.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Huh?\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Said he'd fallen in love with another woman.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Eh?\u2014\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: I was the one who wanted to cry.\n\n|\n\nYUMI ( _Pausing_ ): Hm.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: I feel like my battery's run out.\n\n|\n\nYUMI ( _Pausing_ ): But, there's Tar\u014d to think about.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE:...\n\n|\n\nYUMI: I'm really terrible these days. It's like I take pleasure in other people's misfortune.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: No, surely not.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Oh well.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: I feel like I'm letting down your Mum and Dad.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Hm?\u2014\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: They were so sweet to me.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Don't you worry about my parents.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: No, I just can't help but thinking, what am I gonna say to them?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Does Shinya know about this?\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: No, I don't think so.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: That so?\u2014\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: I think\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Uh huh.\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|\n\nYUMI: I'm feeling kind of hungry.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Uh huh\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: You must be hungry too. You didn't have much for lunch.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Yes.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: What d'you usually do for lunch?\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Uh, well\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: You eat alone, I bet.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Well\u2014yes.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Aren't you lonely?\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: I pack the lunches.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Hm?\u2014\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: One for Y\u016bji, one for Tar\u014d, and one for myself.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: One for yourself too?\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Uh huh\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: To eat at home?\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Sometimes I go to the park.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: It's a nuisance making lunch just for yourself.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Guess I'm just lazy.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Um\u2014\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE ( _Pausing_ ): You know, we're a family, so it's better we all eat the same thing.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\n3.2.2\n\n(IKUE _enters from stage right_.)\n\n|   \n---|---\n\nIKUE: I'm back.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE ( _Cutting in_ ): So, how was it?\n\n|\n\nIKUE: I've had my fill, I think.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Uh huh.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: From now on, you can call me a connoisseur.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: A gourmand, more like it.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Huh?\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Gourmand. You know, food.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Not.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Shinya and the others are here.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Yes, I saw them.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Really\u2014\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Said they'd be along in a minute. ( _Sits at_ A2.)\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|   \n|\n\n(HIRAYAMA _and_ ONO _enter from stage right._ )\n\nYUMI: What d'you do for lunch?\n\n|   \n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Hey, they're gone.\n\nIKUE: Never skip it.\n\n|   \n|\n\nONO: Uh huh.\n\nYUMI: D'you pack one, or eat out?\n\n|   \n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Wonder where they got to.\n\nIKUE: Depends\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nONO: Probably still looking at the pictures.\n\nYOSHIE: A gourmand.\n\n|   \n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Ah.\n\nIKUE: Am not!\n\n|   \n|\n\nONO: Shall we go this way?\n\nYUMI: D'you mean you pack lunch sometimes?\n\n|   \n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Ah, yes. ( _Starts walking to stage left._ ) Does Ms. Mitsuhashi like paintings?\n\nIKUE: Guess I don't.\n\n|   \n|\n\nONO: Well, I don't think she dislikes them. Why? You worried?\n\nYUMI: Figures.\n\n|   \n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: No, not exactly, but...\n\nIKUE: What I mean is, sometimes I eat out, sometimes in the company canteen.\n\n|   \n|\n\n(HIRAYAMA _and_ ONO _exit stage left._ )\n\nYUMI: The canteen can't be any good.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: It's not that bad, really.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: That so?\n\n|\n\nIKUE: It's quite good, actually. We have a lot of choice.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: What d'you do for lunch, Yumi?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Me?\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Yeah\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Well, I pack one, usually.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: You know, I used to make one for Dad, one for Shigeo, and one for myself. Three in all.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Then, when Shigeo moved here, only had to make two. Whole lot easier.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Uh huh\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Shigeo and Dad have quite different tastes.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Oh, I see.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Uh huh.\n\n|\n\nIKUE ( _Speaking at the same time as_ YUMI): Dad likes oily stuff.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Oh\u2014\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Shigeo goes for something light.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Surely it's the other way around.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Uh uh, not our family.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Y\u016bji'll eat anything, right?\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Uh, yeah\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Middle children aren't picky.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nIKUE: That's right. I eat anything too.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: What about eggplants? You won't eat those.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: You eat 'em now?\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Well, it's not normal to eat eggplants.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: What're you talking about?\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Normal people don't eat purple food.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: You're too weird.\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|\n\nYUMI: So Shigeo moved to Tokyo, then Dad retired, so I figured I didn't have to make lunches anymore. It's like I was doing it for Dad and Shigeo, never for myself.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: But it wasn't like that, was it.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: No.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Naturally.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Still, I surprised myself.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Hm?\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: I started fixing up some really fancy lunches. Just for myself.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: You always were a bit of a fuss-pot.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: She used to make lunches for you too, didn't she, Ikue.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Not really. Mum was still in good shape then.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: That so.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Uh huh\u2014\n\n|\n\n3.3.1 | (HIRAYAMA _and_ ONO _return from stage right_.)\n\n---|---\n\nYUMI: That's right.\n\n|\n\nIKUE ( _Cutting in_ ): Mum was fast. At cooking, anything.\n\n|   \n|\n\nONO: Huh?\n\nYUMI: I can be fast too, if I have to.\n\n|   \n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: They're not here\u2014\n\nIKUE: Hey, you never could do the dishes and the cooking at the same time.\n\n|   \n|\n\nONO: They'll be back, I guess.\n\nYUMI: Could so!\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|   \n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Yes, well\u2014\n\nYOSHIE: I'm a lousy cook.\n\n|   \n|\n\nONO: Well, let's wait then.\n\nYUMI: Surely not.\n\n|   \n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Yes\u2014\n\nYOSHIE: Really. I'm so disorganized.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: No kidding?\n\n|   \n|\n\nONO: Sorry. ( _Sits at_ C3.)\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Don't mention it. ( _Sits at_ B3.)\n\n|\n\nONO: Nice work.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Huh?\n\n|\n\nONO: I mean, you must like what you do.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Yes, well\u2014\n\n|\n\nONO: Been here long?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Ever since I got out of graduate school.\n\n|\n\nONO: Ah. ( _Pause._ ) Do any painting yourself?\n\nYOSHIE: Hey, Yumi, why don't you ask her, you know, about\u2014?\n\n|   \n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Uh, no, not at all.\n\nYUMI: Huh?\n\n|   \n|\n\nONO: Never tried?\n\nYOSHIE: You know, what you said back there, when we were looking at the Vermeer.\n\n|   \n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: I just like looking at pictures.\n\nYUMI: Ah\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nONO: Ah\u2014\n\nIKUE: What? What?\n\n|\n\n3.3.2 | HIRAYAMA: I guess.\n\n---|---  \n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\nYOSHIE: I don't quite know how to explain it.\n\n|\n\nYUMI ( _Cutting in_ ): Don't bother\u2014\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: You know, she's kind of technical, Yumi.\n\n|   \n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: What about you? D'you like pictures?\n\nIKUE: Oh\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nONO: Uh, yes. Looking.\n\nYUMI: Enough already\u2014\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE ( _To_ HIRAYAMA): Uh, excuse me?\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Who, me?\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Yes\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Yes?\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: You work here, right?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Yes.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Is it OK to ask a question?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Why, sure. Please.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: There you go\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Yeah, but\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Please. Not sure I can answer you, but\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Um, well, is it true Vermeer had eleven kids?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Huh?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: It's, uh, just something I read?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Is that so?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Yes\u2014\n\n|\n\nIKUE ( _Cutting in_ ): I'll say she's technical\u2014\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: That's not it\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Sorry, but my specialty is contemporary art, so I'm not sure I can give you a good answer\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Oh\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: I'm studying up on that right now. You know, Vermeer, etc.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Uh, sorry.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Not at all. We weren't expecting them. Fact is, I _am_ a curator, I ought to be able to answer these questions.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Ah. Lots of work for you, I guess.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Yeah, well\u2014\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Um, did they have cameras in those days?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Huh?\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Cameras. Said on the plaque that they used them for painting.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Oh, they weren't like our modern cameras. Just a lens, no film.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Oh\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: As I say, I'm not an expert in this area, but I could call out somebody who is.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: No, please\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: There's a fellow called Kushimoto on staff who's an expert in that period. If you don't mind\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: No, really, please\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Are you sure?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Yes. ( _Pause._ ) But, they don't look like they were painted by somebody with eleven kids.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: They're supposed to be everyday scenes, but they seem strangely tranquil, don't you think?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Now you mention it\u2014\n\n|\n\nIKUE ( _Cutting in_ ): Wow!\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Shut up.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Not that I'm an expert\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Uh huh\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Did you notice the light from the windows?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Yes\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: You can only see the spots where the light strikes, sort of highlighted.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Yes.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: That's how he cuts out the world, maybe. From everyday life.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Everything else is in shadow.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Ah, yes\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Anyway, that's my impression.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Ah hah.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Cool!\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Shut up, will you?\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: She was talking about something more complicated earlier.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Eh?\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA ( _Speaking at the same time as_ IKUE): And what was that?\n\n|\n\nYUMI ( _Cutting in_ ): Was not.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Some kind of drafting method that transcended photographic realism, something like that.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Wow!\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Did not. I was reading it out from the guidebook, surely.\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: You're family?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Uh, yes. This one's actually my sister-in-law.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Ah.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Sorry for bothering you with such strange talk.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Not at all. I learned a great deal.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Not at all\u2014\n\n|\n\n3.3.3\n\n(Y\u016aJI _returns from stage left_.)\n\n|   \n---|---\n\nY\u016aJI: Sorry to keep you waiting.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE ( _Cutting in_ ): Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Shigeo not here?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Not yet.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: What about Shinya and Tokiko?\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Back in a sec. ( _Sits at_ D2.) Buying postcards.\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|\n\nYUMI ( _ _To__ HIRAYAMA): My brother.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Ah\u2014( _To_ Y\u016aJI.) Hello\u2014\n\n|\n\n(Y\u016aJI _nods._ )\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE ( _Pausing briefly_ ): She was explaining the pictures.\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Uh huh.\n\n|\n\n(HIRAYAMA _stands._ )\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Thank you very much.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Not at all. ( _Turns toward stage right._ )\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI ( _Pausing briefly_ ): How's Pop?\n\n|   \n|\n\nONO: Well done.\n\nYUMI: Well, Dad's fine, but Mum, you know\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Not at all\u2014\n\nY\u016aJI: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Her nerves.\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Hm. Let's talk about that later.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Really, we don't have to.\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Why?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: We hardly ever have dinner together. You don't want to spoil it.\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: But surely we can't avoid the topic.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Why not?\n\n|\n\n3.3.4\n\n(SHINYA _and_ TOKIKO _enter from stage left_.)\n\n|   \n---|---\n\nY\u016aJI: Ah!\u2014\n\n|\n\nSHINYA: Shigeo not here?\n\n|   \n|\n\nYOSHIE: How was it?\n\nY\u016aJI: Not yet\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nTOKIKO: Good, I guess.\n\nSHINYA: What's he up to?\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nYOSHIE: Wasn't it.\n\nY\u016aJI: No idea\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nTOKIKO: Uh huh.\n\n(Y\u016aJI _stands and goes to_ D1. SHINYA _and_ TOKIKO _sit at_ D2 _and_ D3.)\n\n|   \n|\n\nYOSHIE: Good, eh? To look at pictures. Sometimes.\n\n|\n\n(HIRAYAMA _looks at_ YUMI.)\n\nYUMI: How're you and those corners now?\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Huh?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Corners. You're sitting in one.\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Oh\u2014\n\n|\n\nSHINYA: Now you mention it.\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: That was a long time ago.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: How 'bout Othello?\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Nah, still can't stand the game.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Hates dice, too.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Oh\u2014\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Heard Mum's nerves are bad, eh?\n\n|   \n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: They're taking their time.\n\nSHINYA: Yeah.\n\n|   \n|\n\nONO: Uh huh.\n\nY\u016aJI: You knew?\n\n|   \n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: You've got other things to do, I suppose.\n\nSHINYA: Well, _we_ went back at New Year's.\n\n|   \n|\n\nONO: Not this afternoon. Nothing scheduled after this.\n\nY\u016aJI: Oh, yeah\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Ah.\n\nYOSHIE: Sorry we didn't make it.\n\n|\n\nSHINYA: No, I didn't mean _that_.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: You're an only child, aren't you, Yoshie?\u2014\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Yes, but ( _To_ TOKIKO) so are you. Right, Tokiko?\n\n|\n\nTOKIKO: Ah, but\u2014\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Besides, my folks are in Tokyo.\n\n|\n\nSHINYA: You can make it this summer, can't you?\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: I guess.\n\n|\n\nSHINYA: Bring Tar\u014d.\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Yes.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE ( _Speaking at the same time_ ): Is Mum as bad as that?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: She's fine, really. Same as always.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Really?\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Change the subject, shall we?\n\n|\n\nSHINYA ( _Pausing briefly_ ): What subject was that?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Nothing\u2014\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI ( _Speaking at the same time_ ): We were talking about the folks. You know.\n\n|\n\nSHINYA: Oh\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: You know, we hardly ever see each other, like, so let's talk about something else.\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Something else? Like what?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Something fun. Like, where you went, what you saw.\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI ( _Pausing_ ): Nothing there. To talk about.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Eh?\u2014\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Nothing's happening. Even in Tokyo.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: I'm not talking about Tokyo in particular\u2014\n\n|\n\nSHINYA: Well, everybody's busy.\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|\n\nSHINYA: Kinda boring just talking about work.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: No, work's fine. Anything.\n\n|   \n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Care for a coffee?\n\nSHINYA ( _Quickly_ ): That so?\n\n|   \n|\n\nONO: Uh, no, I'm fine.\n\nYUMI: Sure. We hardly ever see each other, so it's fine, isn't it? To talk about work, anything. Just so we know what everybody's up to.\n\n|   \n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: OK.\n\nIKUE ( _Quickly_ ): I write computer programs all day.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Hm.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: That's it\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI:...\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Job, family, all the same, really\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Is it, I wonder\u2014\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: At least, when it comes to spoiling one's dinner.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Sorry. We're not much of a family\u2014\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: No, really\u2014\n\n|\n\nTOKIKO: But we envy you guys. Lots of brothers and sisters\u2014\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Yes\u2014\n\n|\n\nSHINYA ( _Cutting in_ ): It's kinda hard to talk, you know, when you hardly ever see each other.\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Yeah.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: No problem, really, if you talk only about fun stuff.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Yeah.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE ( _Quickly_ ): If you just look at the spots where the light strikes.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Everything else is pitch black.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: That's right.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Is that what she meant earlier?\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: No, something else, I think.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Oh.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Nothing.\n\n|\n\nSHINYA: What's all that about?\n\n|   \n|\n\n(YUMI _and_ HIRAYAMA _exchange glances._ )\n\nYUMI: Nothing.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Yes.\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Ah, you know what? You should've seen Yoshie back there. Sneezed on the Vermeer.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Not on the picture.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Like this\u2014\"honk!\"\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Did not!\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Isn't that how Yoshie sneezes? \"Honk!\"\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Oh\u2014\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE ( _Cutting in_ ): Do not.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: What if you got spit on the picture?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Ah, yes, well\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: That'd be awful, wouldn't it?\n\n|\n\n4.1.1 | (KUSHIMOTO _enters from stage right_.)\n\n---|---\n\nHIRAYAMA: We haven't run into that problem before\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Ah\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Huh, what're you up to?\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|   \n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Ah, we were waiting for Ms. Mitsuhashi\u2014\n\nIKUE: Yumi, why don't you ask her something more decent?\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: That heir to the collection, Ms. Mitsuhashi?\n\nYUMI: Leave me alone. ( _To_ YOSHIE.) Right?\n\n|   \n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Yes\u2014\n\n(YOSHIE _smiles._ )\n\n|   \n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: So?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: So, no problem, really.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Look, the lawyers and tax accountants can be a bloody nuisance but you gotta play tough. The point is to make her donate the whole collection, lock, stock, and barrel.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Uh, this is Ms. Ono. Their solicitor\u2014\n\nTOKIKO: Nice blouse.\n\n|   \n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: O-oh\u2014\n\nYOSHIE: Think so?\n\n|   \n|\n\nONO: Ono.\n\nTOKIKO: Uh huh. Suits you.\n\n|   \n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Kushimoto. Curator.\n\nYOSHIE: Thanks.\n\n|   \n|\n\nONO: Hi.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: She was here when you came for me, remember?\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Oh. Was she?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Yes.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Play tough, eh?\u2014( _Hits his own head._ ) What the hell\u2014\n\n|\n\nONO: Easy does it.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Same to you\u2014\n\nHIRAYAMA: Uh, uh, excuse me, this is Kushimoto, the gentleman I mentioned?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Oh\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: He's an expert in Dutch painting.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Oh. Yes\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Please, go ahead, ask him anything.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Why, uh\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Can I help?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Please\u2014( _Urges_ KUSHIMOTO _to sit down._ )\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Well\u2014( _Sits at_ C1.)\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Please\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Yes\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: She was asking about, uh, the camera obscura.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Nothing I know about.\n\n|\n\nYUMI ( _Shifts in her seat to face stage right toward_ KUSHIMOTO): Sorry.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Ah, not at all.\n\n|\n\nYUMI:...\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: So, what would you like to know?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Uh, what should I say?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: The camera, tell her.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Ah, well. It's called a camera, but it's not like the cameras today, there's no film so, of course, no picture to develop.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: I see\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Just a box about this size\u2014camera obscura means a dark box, y'see?\u2014with a lens on front here, and you peer in here, and you can see the object here. The light comes in from this direction.\n\n|\n\nYUMI:...\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Same as looking through the finder in our cameras. Twin lens reflex.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: But that's the same as just looking at it with the naked eye, surely.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Yes, but pictures make three-dimensional things two-dimensional, right?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Yes\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: So, the picture is distorted somewhat. Do you follow?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Yes\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: You project your picture through the lens, right? Then, what they did, I guess, was trace it.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Oh, I see\u2014\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Really, Yumi?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Yes, I think so.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: They could actually project images through the lens onto a flat surface, like a wall or a sheet of paper.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Oh\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: To look at things through a lens was really quite a feat in those days.\n\n|\n\nYUMI:...\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: The seventeenth century was, like, the beginning of the modern era. You had Galileo and his telescope, and the microscope, and, I mean, you could use a lens to look at things you couldn't see otherwise. All sorts of things, little things, the universe even. Well, that was the point of view on things\u2014not like, say, God's perspective, but different. In any case, Holland was the center for the development of lenses back then. The Dutch philosopher Spinoza whiled away his time polishing lenses, speculating about God and the universe and all that. Just polishing his lenses like this, and when he looked through the lens it was like he could see the whole world. It was, well, rather a nice time to live, don't you think?\n\n|\n\n4.1.2\n\n_This section begins during_ KUSHIMOTO _'s speech, around \"The Dutch philosopher Spinoza....\"_\n\n|   \n---|---  \n|\n\n(SHIGEO _enters from stage left during_ KUSHIMOTO _'s speech._ )\n\n|\n\nTOKIKO: Ah, there you are!\u2014\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: Sorry\u2014\n\n|\n\nSHINYA: Hey\u2014\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: Sorry I'm late.\n\n|\n\nTOKIKO: We just got here ourselves.\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: Oh\u2014\n\n|\n\n( _A pause._ KUSHIMOTO _'s speech ends._ )\n\nYUMI: Well\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nSHINYA: I see\u2014\n\n|\n\n( _A pause. Everyone looks at_ SHINYA.)\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: Sorry I'm late.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Sure are.\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: Er\u2014\n\n|\n\nIKUE ( _Cutting in_ ): You're late! You're late!\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: Sorry.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: We ate already. Full course, everything.\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: You're kidding.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Really! Really!\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: What's with the girls? In a bad mood, eh?\n\n|\n\n( _There is nowhere for him to sit, so he seats himself on the wastepaper basket._ )\n\n|\n\nSHINYA: Well\u2014I.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: What're you talking about? Girls\u2014you sound like an old man.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Old man!\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: No, I'm not.\n\n(KUSHIMOTO _looks at_ HIRAYAMA, _who makes the V sign._ KUSHIMOTO _also makes the V sign back, but more modestly._ )\n\n|   \n|\n\nYUMI: Typical.\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: I miss something?\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Not really.\n\nONO: Quite something, isn't he?\n\n|   \n|\n\nIKUE: Look at him! Always runs to Yoshie for help.\n\nHIRAYAMA: Well, he is the expert, after all.\n\n|   \n|\n\nSHIGEO: Do not. Come off it.\n\nONO: Yes.\n\n|   \n|\n\nIKUE: Don't spoil him, now.\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Not at all\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nYOSHIE: I won't.\n\nKUSHIMOTO: I'll go get some coffee.\n\n|   \n|\n\nSHIGEO: Why not?\n\nHIRAYAMA: Ah, thanks.\n\n|   \n|\n\nSHINYA: Well. Shall we go?\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Coffee OK?\n\n|   \n|\n\nSHIGEO: Going already?\n\nONO: Oh, uh, thanks.\n\n|   \n|\n\nSHINYA: After all, we were all waiting for you.\n\nKUSHIMOTO: What about you, Hirayama?\n\n|   \n|\n\nSHIGEO: Sorry.\n\nHIRAYAMA: Yes, please.\n\n|   \n|\n\nSHINYA: How's work?\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Right then.\n\n|\n\n(IKUE _touches_ YOSHIE _'s shoulder_. YOSHIE _turns around_.)\n\n|   \n|\n\nSHIGEO: Busy, busy.\n\n|\n\nSHINYA: Oh.\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: That's why I was late today.\n\n|\n\nSHINYA: Glad to hear it\u2014\n\n|\n\nTOKIKO ( _Speaking at the same time_ ): He does look like a businessman now.\n\n|\n\nSHINYA: That so?\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI ( _Speaking at the same time_ ): Business good, I guess.\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: Oh that reminds me, we're gonna make a part for your company.\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Eh? What?\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: Something for a guided missile. ( _Mimes with his arms a guided missile._ )\n\n|\n\nSHINYA: What's that? A bamboo shoot?\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO ( _Miming again_ ): Something to go with a guided missile. Some kinda liquid crystal part for it or something.\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Something, something. Still don't get what you're talking about.\n\nYOSHIE: Having fun?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Uh huh.\n\n|   \n|\n\nSHIGEO: But that's what it is.\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Oh\u2014\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: But ya know, it's kinda sad. We're just a subcontractor.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Eh?\u2014\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: What I mean is, all our workers are refugees from Russia and what have you.\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: Making weapons to kill the folks back home.\n\n|\n\nTOKIKO: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Could be the other way round, though.\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: Huh?\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Maybe you're making weapons to protect them.\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: Ah, well\u2014\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: We're selling to both sides, so ya never know.\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: Yeah, but it's like, ya know, a metaphor.\n\n|\n\nY\u016aJI: Metaphor? What the hell of?\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: Well\u2014\n\n(YUMI _takes out her camera and walks toward stage right._ )\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Look this way. ( _Takes a picture. To_ HIRAYAMA.) Why don't you get in the picture?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Uh, no, uh, I\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: _Please_.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Well, shall I take one of you all?\n\n|\n\nYUMI: No, I took one already.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: I'll take one with you in it.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: No, I'm fine. ( _Pause._ ) Really.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: You sure?\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: In that case, I'll take one of you two. ( _Referring to_ HIRAYAMA.)\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Uh\u2014\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Allow me\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Well. ( _To_ HIRAYAMA.) Please.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Well then\u2014( _Stands with_ YUMI.)\n\n|\n\nYOSHIE: Here goes. ( _Takes a picture._ )\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Thanks\u2014\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Thanks\u2014\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|\n\nYUMI: Shall we go?\n\n|   \n|\n\nSHINYA: We're going.\n\nYOSHIE: Uh huh\u2014( _Stands._ )\n\n|   \n|\n\nSHIGEO: OK. ( _Pause._ ) Hey. I'm stuck.\n\nSHINYA ( _SPEAKING AT THE SAME TIME AS_ YOSHIE): OK\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nTOKIKO: What're you doing?\n\nYUMI: Let's go\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nSHIGEO: I'm stuck.\n\n|\n\n( _It appears he cannot disengage his buttocks from the litter basket._ )\n\nIKUE: OK.\n\n|   \n|\n\nTOKIKO: No kidding!\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: Ah, I'm free.\n\n|\n\nIKUE: Wise up.\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: Sorry.\n\n|\n\nSHINYA: Twit.\n\nYUMI: Thank you.\n\n|   \n|\n\nSHIGEO: Y'know, I once sat on the toilet with the seat up\u2014got stuck. Thought I was gonna die.\n\nHIRAYAMA: Don't mention it.\n\n|   \n|\n\nSHINYA: Go on home, why don't you?\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: Sorry.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: You're not going to war, are you?\n\n|\n\nSHIGEO: Nah, not into that.\n\n|\n\nYUMI: But everybody's going, these days.\n\n(KUSHIMOTO _returns with four cups._ )\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Sorry to keep you waiting.\n\n|   \n|\n\nYOSHIE ( _STARTING TO EXIT_ ): Yeah.\n\nONO: Thanks.\n\n|   \n|\n\nYUMI ( _Starting to exit_ ): Men seem to get a charge out of stuff like that.\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Here\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nYOSHIE ( _Exiting_ ): Some do, don't they?\n\nHIRAYAMA: Thanks\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\n( _The six family members exit stage left_.)\n\n4.1.3\n\n(KUSHIMOTO _sits at_ C1.)\n\n|   \n---|---\n\nHIRAYAMA: Quite the speech there.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Nah\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: These days, even the visitors are getting to be experts, so we really gotta know our stuff.\n\n|\n\nONO: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: And these pictures came on us all of a sudden.\n\n|\n\nONO: So, how many have you got now?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Seventy-four, so far.\n\n|\n\nONO: That many.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Yes, we'd really like to put up the collection once it's been donated, but, well, it might be a while\u2014\n\n|\n\nONO: So I heard.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Sorry about that.\n\n|\n\nONO: Not at all. Well, can't do much about the war, eh?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: That's easy for you to say.\n\n|\n\nONO: I guess\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: I suppose one can't, after all.\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: You were into that, weren't you, Mr. Kushimoto.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Hm?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA ( _Quickly_ ): Some antiwar movement. Before you came here.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Well, not much of a movement, really.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Not involved anymore?\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Nope. Washed my hands of it.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: But they're still at it, aren't they? Those guys out there.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Yeah, well\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\n(KINOSHITA _enters from stage right, and sits at_ D1.)\n\nHIRAYAMA: So, what about them?\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Yeah, well, even those who are fighting can't tell friend from foe anymore.\n\n|\n\nONO: I guess not\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Oh, yeah\u2014\n\n|\n\nONO: It was real hot there for a while, wasn't it? The antiwar movement.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Yes.\n\n|\n\nONO: You were part of it then, I suppose?\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Yes, well, till about five years or so ago.\n\n|\n\nONO: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Dropped out of it a bit early.\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|\n\nONO: Yes, well, what with all the people, goods, and cash pouring in puts Japan in kind of an awkward place, doesn't it?\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Place? Japan never took a position from the start.\n\n|\n\nONO: Oh.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Yes, well, you know K\u00e4stner's story, \"The Zoo Conference\"?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: What? Oh, yes.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: You know, there's this ostrich who sticks his head in the sand so he doesn't have to look at the mess the humans have got themselves into.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Is there now?\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Strauss. The ostrich's name.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: That ostrich is rather like an artist peering into an camera obscura, don't you think?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Oh, really?\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Like this. ( _Mimes peering into a box._ ) Only seeing what he wants to see, composed just the way he likes.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Uh... huh\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\n(KINOSHITA _exits stage right._ )\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Eh?\u2014\n\n|\n\nONO: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: I mean, that's me.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Huh?\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: I'm like the ostrich with his head in the sand.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Oh, but if you were, then surely we're all like that.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Maybe that's the case. Still\u2014\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Kind of serious today, aren't you, Mr. Kushimoto?\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: I am?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Yes\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Sorry.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: That's OK.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Sorry.\n\n|\n\nONO: No, not at all.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: I'll go look.\n\n|\n\nONO: Huh?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: For Ms. Mitsuhashi and Mr. Sait\u014d.\n\n|\n\nONO: I'll join you.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Better you stay here, in case we miss each other.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Shall I go instead?\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: No, I'll go. Besides, you don't know them.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: You're right.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Back in a bit.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Uh huh.\n\n|\n\nHIRAYAMA: Keep her company.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Uh huh.\n\n|\n\n(HIRAYAMA _exits stage left_.)\n\n|\n\n4.1.4\n\nKUSHIMOTO: You know, looking at the universe through a telescope doesn't mean the universe is looking back at us.\n\n|   \n---|---\n\nONO:... ?\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: The pictures to be donated\u2014how much are they worth altogether?\n\n|\n\nONO: Well, I guess that depends on their evaluation.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Yes\u2014\n\n|\n\nONO: If they weren't given away, the estate taxes would be in the millions, I guess.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nONO: But nobody's buying art right now, to be frank with you.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: And what's your cut in this?\n\n|\n\nONO: Huh?\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: How much do you get out of this deal?\n\n|\n\nONO: I'm on salary.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: You know our director'd do anything for good pictures.\n\n|\n\nONO: What're you trying to say?\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Not that I mean to stir up anything. But, you know, I just want to make sure that everything's nice and clear.\n\n|\n\nONO: You should watch what you say.\n\n|   \n|\n\n(KINOSHITA _enters from stage right with a cup of coffee. He sits again at_ D1 _and drinks the coffee._ )\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Sticking one's head in the sand, trying not to see the world, peering into a dark box, you know\u2014chances are if a person does stuff like that, she'll get something in her eye instead.\n\n|\n\nONO: Uh\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\n(HASHIZUME _and_ TERANISHI _enter from stage left._ )\n\nKUSHIMOTO ( _Cutting in_ ): Ya can't always see just what you wanta see.\n\n|\n\nONO ( _Quickly_ ): Uh, I think you'd do well to be more careful of what you say to a lawyer\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nHASHIZUME ( _Entering_ ): That so?\u2014\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Just a warning, that's all.\n\n|   \n|\n\nTERANISHI ( _Entering_ ): Uh huh, well, seems so.\u2014\n\nONO:...\n\n|   \n|\n\nHASHIZUME ( _Entering_ ): Hm\u2014\n\n|\n\nTERANISHI ( _Entering_ ): Seems so, anyway.\u2014\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME ( _To_ KUSHIMOTO): Ah, hello.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: My, my.\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Well, hello\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Hey, you in Tokyo now?\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Yeah\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Well\u2014\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Thought I might run into you here.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Well, you should've dropped into the office to see me.\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Yeah, but, it wasn't like I had any business or anything\u2014\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Ah, 'scuse me\u2014an old acquaintance\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Yeah, but, you know\u2014\n\nONO: Go right ahead.\n\n|   \n|\n\nHASHIZUME: But\u2014\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Sorry.\n\n|   \n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Mr. Kushimoto\u2014we were both in the antiwar movement.\n\n|\n\nTERANISHI: Ah. ( _Sits at_ A1.)\n\n(ONO _takes out a memo pad and begins making notes._ )\n\n|   \n|\n\nHASHIZUME: She's, uh, my fianc\u00e9e.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: We're getting married this summer.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: That so? Congratulations. ( _Moves over to_ B1.)\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Thanks.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: How's your Dad?\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Ah, he died.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Oh.\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Yeah\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Oh\u2014\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Sorry. That's why I went home.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Yes, ah, well\u2014\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME ( _Cutting in_ ): Sorry I had to chuck it all, right in the middle.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: No, fact is we all split up anyway. Would've been the same if you stayed.\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Ah, well\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Yeah.\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: What about you, Mr. Kushimoto? Out of it now?\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Yeah, well\u2014\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Is that so?\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: What about you?\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Same here.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Ain't easy, eh?\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Uh uh.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Care for a coffee or something? In the office.\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: No, we're fine here.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Ya sure?\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Uh, we're thinking of going back to Fukushima, once we're married.\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: That so?\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: My Mum's hired somebody to look after the field Dad left, so, thought we'd take it over.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Not a bad idea.\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Yeah, Mum told me I wouldn't get conscripted 'cause of the farm. Come home, she said.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Ah\u2014\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: That's all they ever talk about now, back home, in the country.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Well, we hear the same thing. You know, businessmen will be the first to get conscripted and so on.\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Kinda pathetic though, at my age, you know. But if it makes my mother happy....\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Well.\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Yeah, well, she's into organic farming and stuff\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Hey, that's all right. Got a good reason, eh?\u2014\n\n|\n\nTERANISHI: But, you see, it was kind of a hobby with me.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Send me something you've grown, will you?\u2014\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Sure\u2014\n\n(HIRAYAMA, MITSUHASHI, _and_ SAIT\u014c _enter from stage left._ )\n\n|\n\n4.2.1 | KUSHIMOTO: What're they growing?\n\n---|---  \n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Quite a variety, I think. Cucumbers, potatoes\u2014\n\nONO: Ah, found 'em, I see.\n\n|   \n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Not bad\u2014\n\nHIRAYAMA: Yeah, just over there.\n\n|   \n|\n\nTERANISHI: Come visit us.\n\nMITSUHASHI: Sorry.\n\n|   \n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Thanks, I'll do that. Go that way on business sometimes.\n\nHIRAYAMA: Don't mention it.\n\n|   \n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Do, please.\n\nMITSUHASHI: So, finished your business? ( _Sits at_ C2. SAIT\u014c _sits at_ B2.)\n\n|   \n|\n\n(KUSHIMOTO _shifts over to accommodate_ SAIT\u014c _next to him._ )\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\nONO: Yes, well, more or less.\n\n|\n\nMITSUHASHI ( _To_ HIRAYAMA): Well, in that case, please take good care of the paintings.\n\n|   \n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Be seeing you, then.\n\nHIRAYAMA: You sure? There's nothing else?\n\n|   \n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Are you going?\n\nMITSUHASHI: No\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Just thought I'd come say hello.\n\nHIRAYAMA: We _are_ talking about quite a sum here. Sure you're not rushing into this\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Well, thanks.\n\nMITSUHASHI: No sense hanging on to them.\n\n|   \n|\n\nHASHIZUME: I'll be in touch.\n\nHIRAYAMA: That may be so, but\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Uh, yes.\u2014Here, I'll give you one of my cards. ( _Offers him a business card._ )\n\nMITSUHASHI: Uh, please try to put up as many as you can.\n\n|   \n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Got a card even, eh?\n\nHIRAYAMA: Yes, of course\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: You bet.\n\nMITSUHASHI: It's good for the paintings to be seen.\n\n|   \n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Maybe I should get some saying \"Farmer.\"\n\nHIRAYAMA: Yes.\n\n|   \n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Good idea\u2014\n\nMITSUHASHI: Well, thanks again.\n\n|   \n|\n\nHASHIZUME: I'll let you know when we move back home.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Please do.\n\n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Well, then\u2014\n\nHIRAYAMA: But\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: I'll see you off.\n\nONO: Ah, I'll be in touch later about the paperwork.\n\n|   \n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Don't bother\u2014\n\nHIRAYAMA: Yes, of course, but\u2014\n\n|\n\n( _A long pause._ )\n\n|   \n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: To the door, at least\u2014\n\nMITSUHASHI: Anything else?\n\n|   \n|\n\nHASHIZUME: Sorry to catch you at work and all.\n\nHIRAYAMA: Surely you needn't have to rush with this?\n\n|   \n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Nah, this ain't work. Not at all.\n\nMITSUHASHI: When I saw the paintings here, I just felt like it.\n\n|   \n|\n\nHASHIZUME ( _To_ TERANISHI): C'mon\u2014\n\nHIRAYAMA: Yes, well\u2014\n\n|   \n|\n\n(HASHIZUME _and_ TERANISHI _exit stage left._ )\n\n|\n\nONO: Your name's Kushimoto, right?\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Hm?\n\n|\n\nONO: Uh\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Yes.\n\n|\n\nONO: What you were saying earlier, that you never know with people\u2014\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Hm?\n\n|\n\nONO: That the universe isn't watching us through a telescope.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: Did I say that?\n\n|\n\nONO: Yes.\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO ( _Pausing briefly_ ): Yes, well, I guess I meant, if only we could all see ourselves. From a distance, I mean.\n\n|\n\nONO:...\n\n|\n\nKUSHIMOTO: If you'll excuse me\u2014( _Exits stage left_.)\n\nCURTAIN\n\n1. This scene starts at the end of 3.1.1, after a conversation in which Yumi tells her sister-in-law Yoshie about her father's aversion to battery-operated toothbrushes.\n_THE ATTIC_\n\nSAKATE Y\u014cJI\n\nTRANSLATED BY LEON INGULSRUD AND KEIKO TSUNEDA\n\nSakate Y\u014dji, _The Attic_ , directed by Sakate Y\u014dji, Rink\u014dgun, May 2003.\n\n(Photograph by \u014chara Taku)\n\nA contemporary of Hirata Oriza and a member of the post-1960s \"fourth generation\" of playwrights, Sakate Y\u014dji (b. 1962) is notable for writing and directing plays that are pointed commentaries on modern life. In 1981, as a student at Kei\u014d University, he joined Transposition 21 (Ten'i 21), a theater company founded by Yamazaki Tetsu, a second-generation playwright and former member of Kara J\u016br\u014d's Situation Theater, who taught Sakate how to use theater as a tool to address contemporary issues. Sakate established his own company, Phosphorescence Troupe (Rink\u014dgun), in 1983, reacting against the apolitical and consumerist trend so typical of the theater of Japan's bubble economy. His work helped chart the return to more sober themes and the well-crafted dramaturgy indicative of the late 1990s. An early work about Japan's lesbian community, _Come Out_ ( _Kamu auto_ , 1987), signaled Sakate's reputation as a critic of modern Japanese mores. _Tokyo Trial_ ( _T \u014dky\u014d saiban_) and _A Dangerous Story_ ( _Kiken na hanashi_ ), both first staged in 1988, satirized Japan's legal system. _Breathless_ ( _Buresuresu_ , 1991), which addressed the Aum Shinriky\u014d cult some four years before its devastating terrorist attack on the Tokyo subways, won the Kishida Kunio Award. His 1993 play, _Capital of the Kingdom of the Gods_ ( _Kamigami no kuni no shuto_ ), deals with the Irish-Greek-American writer Lafcadio Hearn's sojourn in Matsue in the 1890s. In the same year, Sakate staged _Epitaph for the Whales_ ( _Kujira no bohy \u014d_), about the decline of Japan's whaling industry; both plays are part of Sakate's ongoing series of \"contemporary n\u014d\" plays. _The Emperor and the Kiss_ ( _Tenn \u014d to seppun_, 1999), which won the Yomiuri Literature Prize, is set during Japan's occupation and addresses issues of censorship and Emperor Hirohito's responsibility for the war. _The Attic_ ( _Yaneura_ , 2003), an excerpt from which is translated here, won the Yomiuri Literature Prize and is one of Sakate's most frequently performed works. Set in a tiny attic, it is a series of vignettes with different characters who explore with great wit the claustrophobia of contemporary Japanese life, with its crushing pressures to fit in, perform, produce, and consume.\n\nCharacters\n\nOLDER BROTHER\n\nYOUNG MAN\n\nYOUNG WOMAN\n\nGIRL\n\nBOY\n\nYOUNG MAN WITH A BLUE CAP\n\nYOUNG MAN WITH A RED CAP\n\nMAN WITH CRUTCHES\n\nUME\n\nTAKE\n\nMATSU\n\nGENTLEMAN\n\nANCHORPERSON\n\nWOMAN\n\nMAN WITH A CAP\n\nMOTHER\n\nTEACHER\n\nLADY\n\nPEOPLE 1, 2, 3, 4, 5\n\nPROMOTER 1, 2\n\nFORMER ATTIC DWELLER 1, 2, 3\n\nPEOPLE IN DISGUISE 1, 2, 3, 4\n\nPACKED PEOPLE 1, 2, 3, 4\n\nKID'S ROOM\n\nGIRL _is lying in a sleeping bag._ BOY _pokes his head into the Attic_.\n\nBOY: Hello.\n\nGIRL:... What is it?\n\nBOY: Your mom told me you were here.\n\nGIRL: Don't ask her.\n\n(GIRL _shuts the door._ )\n\nBOY ( _Offstage_ ): It's brand-new.\n\nGIRL: What?\n\nBOY ( _Offstage_ ): This is an expensive Attic kit, isn't it.\n\nGIRL: I don't know.\n\nBOY ( _Offstage_ ): Was it easy to set up?\n\nGIRL: Yes.\n\nBOY ( _Offstage_ ): Did you do it yourself?\n\nGIRL: Of course not. It's included in the price.\n\nBOY ( _Offstage_ ): Your head is facing north, isn't it? That's not good.\n\nGIRL: What?\n\nBOY ( _Offstage_ ): I saw your pillow.\n\nGIRL:... I don't care, asshole.\n\nBOY ( _Offstage_ ): You have your own bedroom. Why did you put it on the balcony?\n\nGIRL: It's none of your business.\n\nBOY ( _Offstage_ ): She told me you are climbing up and down the tree in the garden to this balcony.\n\nGIRL ( _About her mother_ ): Big mouth.\n\nBOY ( _Offstage_ ):... Living on a tree. What are you? A gorilla.\n\nGIRL: Leave me alone. I'm sick of it. ( _She makes a thumping noise with her legs in the sleeping bag._ )\n\nBOY ( _Offstage_ ): Is that because you don't want to see your family?\n\nGIRL: There's nothing strange about it. In the Philippines, or other swampy areas in Asia where people live on the water, they build bamboo cabins on the water, a floating house kind of thing. We learned about it in social studies.\n\nBOY ( _Opening the small door, he giggles_ ): Tee hee....\n\nGIRL: Why are you laughing?\n\nBOY: Your mom asked if I was your boyfriend.\n\nGIRL: No kidding. ( _She is angry._ )\n\nBOY: She said this was the first time a boy had visited you.\n\nGIRL: I'm going to kill you.\n\nBOY: May I come in?\n\nGIRL: Shut the fuck up!\n\nBOY: I'll give you a massage. I'm pretty good. You're always so stiff. I've wanted to give you a massage for a while.\n\n( _Without coming out of the sleeping bag,_ GIRL _kicks_ BOY, _who is trying to come in._ )\n\nBOY: I always massage my grandma's neck and shoulders....\n\nGIRL: No. I don't want you to.\n\n( _She kicks him once more. He bends down, looking hurt._ GIRL _worries a bit._ BOY _suddenly takes out a Polaroid and takes a picture of her. While she flinches from the flash,_ BOY _comes in._ )\n\nGIRL: What do you think you're doing?\n\n(GIRL _kicks_ BOY _more and takes the camera from him. She kicks him furiously, trying to push him out._ BOY _squats and resists._ )\n\nGIRL: What are you doing here?\n\nBOY:...\n\nGIRL: I said, what are you doing here?\n\nBOY: I'm not going to ask you why you stopped coming to school.\n\nGIRL: What are you talking about?\n\nBOY: It's been almost a month now.\n\nGIRL: There's no reason, asshole.\n\nBOY: Maybe there's nothing special about being a shut-in.\n\nGIRL: Am I a shut-in?\n\nBOY:...\n\nGIRL: How can you be so sure of that just because I don't go to school?\n\nBOY: Am I wrong?\n\nGIRL: I can't judge that myself.\n\nBOY: So you are a pseudo shut-in.\n\nGIRL: What do you mean pseudo?\n\nBOY: It means you're not a perfect shut-in....\n\nGIRL: Pseudo. ( _She hates it._ )\n\nBOY:...\n\nGIRL: Why did you come here?\n\nBOY: I wanted to give you something.\n\nGIRL: What?\n\nBOY: You read books, don't you? When you're staying somewhere like this?\n\nGIRL: No. I don't want it.\n\nBOY: It's a gift.\n\nGIRL: There's no occasion.\n\nBOY: It's an encouragement gift. ( _He puts a book on the floor._ )\n\nGIRL: For what?\n\nBOY: A sympathy gift.\n\nGIRL: Am I sick or something? Sorry, but I'm physically stronger than you.\n\nBOY ( _Answering \"Am I sick or something?\"_ ): No.\n\nGIRL: I'm mentally sick, then? ( _Opens the book._ ) Oh, I get it. You think I should read the biography of a great person and think about myself? ( _Throws down the book._ ) I don't believe this, it's _The Diary of Anne Frank_!\n\nBOY: It's a good book.\n\nGIRL: Have you read it?\n\nBOY: Yeah.\n\nGIRL: I don't want a secondhand book. I've already read it anyway. Everyone's read _The Diary of Anne Frank_.\n\nBOY: You confine yourself in here like this, but the truth is you're waiting for someone to invite you to come out. And that someone is me.\n\nGIRL: Watch it!\n\nBOY: I mean, I thought I could be your Peter.\n\nGIRL: No! ( _Disgusted._ )\n\nBOY: Remember that time the math teacher left us to study on our own, and the class made fun of us by making me sit beside you in front of the blackboard, and they held a \"wedding ceremony\"?\n\nGIRL: Don't remind me.\n\nBOY: I was pissed off, but to be honest, I felt a little happy, too.\n\nGIRL: The biggest humiliation of my life. They put me in the same category as you.\n\nBOY: I was embarrassed and wanted to escape. I never thought the teacher would go along with it and make a speech as a wedding guest.\n\nGIRL: Don't bring up that bitch.\n\nBOY: I could have escaped, actually. If I'd been alone, I would have run away. But I thought it would hurt your feelings if I left....\n\n(BOY _crawls up to_ GIRL _and holds her down. She can_ ' _t move because she is in the sleeping bag._ )\n\nGIRL: No, no, no!\n\nBOY: Can I kiss you?\n\nGIRL: Wait a minute.\n\nBOY: Can I, if I wait a minute?\n\nGIRL: Well....\n\nBOY: Kiss.\n\n(GIRL _comes out of the sleeping bag and pins_ BOY _to the floor. She beats him._ BOY _starts crying._ GIRL _fumbles in_ BOY' _s bag and takes out a tiny tape recorder and a microphone._ )\n\nGIRL: Just as I thought.\n\nBOY:...\n\nGIRL:... This isn't your idea, is it?\n\nBOY: I'm sorry.\n\nGIRL: I see. Takeda, Ogami, all those bastards. They told you to be nice to me and kiss me and bring back a recording or pictures to prove it, right? Get a life.\n\n(BOY _cries._ )\n\nGIRL: You can go now.\n\nBOY:...\n\nGIRL: Go.\n\nBOY: Are you going to report this to the school?\n\nGIRL: Do you want to me to?\n\nBOY:...\n\nGIRL: Tell them you kissed me.\n\nBOY:...\n\nGIRL: Tell them you fucked me.\n\nBOY:...\n\nGIRL: Tell everybody you fucked the Gorilla. Should I record something? Moan or breathe heavily? Maybe I could roar with ecstasy and beat my chest? Garrrr!\n\nBOY:... Stop it.\n\n(BOY _covers his crotch with his hand._ )\n\nGIRL: What the hell? Do you have a hard-on? Do you? Why on earth?\n\nBOY: Damn it damn it damn it damn it damn it!\n\n(BOY _moves his hand and begins to masturbate._ )\n\nGIRL: Stop it!!! You're crazy! Pervert! Creep! Flasher! Freak! Yuk! Don't look at me. Get away.... Do you know what you're doing? What? Are you trying to show it to me? Gross. Germ. Slowpoke. Puke. No, don't look at me. Scum. Asshole. Don't look. Don't look at me!\n\n(BOY _comes._ )\n\nGIRL: Japan will be ruined. Someone like you will casually go to college, join a company, grow up, get married, and you'll tell your kids, \"When I was young, blah, blah, blah.\" Someone like you, who doesn't even deserve to live, bragging shamelessly, like you were someone you aren't. It won't work. It was exposed long ago. Japan will be ruined. And it's your fault. You'll be killed. I'll kill you. I'm going to kill you no matter what!\n\n(BOY _creeps away._ GIRL _shuts the door and locks it, and takes the microphone that_ BOY _left._ )\n\nGIRL:... At the sound of the tone, the time of my life will be, fifteen years, three months, twenty-six days, fourteen hours, and thirty minutes. Pip, pip, pip, po....\n\nBLACKOUT\n\nHAY FEVER\n\n_There is a futon and a blanket in the Attic_. YOUNG WOMAN _is putting on her underwear._ YOUNG MAN _is still naked._ YOUNG WOMAN _brushes something off her body. There is no trace of postcopulation listlessness in her._\n\nWOMAN: You brought pollen in here again.\n\nMAN:... Pollen?\n\nWOMAN: It's all over.\n\nMAN: That's impossible. I sealed it up. Just as I was told.\n\nWOMAN: It stuck to your body.\n\nMAN: I took off all my clothes and took a shower before I came in.\n\nWOMAN: It was deep inside your body.\n\n(WOMAN _pulls a stuffed animal out from under the blanket._ )\n\nWOMAN: I can't believe you bought this. The baby isn't even born yet. I see. The pollen was on this.\n\n(WOMAN _hits the doll, and it says something. It_ ' _s the kind of toy that talks each time you hit it._ )\n\nWOMAN:... Go down, quickly.\n\n(MAN _goes down out a small trapdoor and puts on his clothes. We can see only his face now._ )\n\nMAN: We should have bought a house with a loft if you were going to buy something like this.\n\nWOMAN: We can use it as a nursery.\n\nMAN: If you want a private room for yourself, you better say so first.\n\nWOMAN:... ( _She drops the stuffed doll_.)\n\nMAN: And why did you get a used one anyway.\n\nWOMAN: Someone gave it to me. A guy who looks like you.\n\nMAN: Me?\n\nWOMAN: We brought it home on our minivan. We stopped at a motel, but we didn't do anything in the room. When we went back to the van, I made love with him. With the guy who looks like you.\n\nMAN: No kidding.\n\nWOMAN: Hmm.\n\nMAN: I know you're kidding.\n\nWOMAN: How? How do you know? Did you follow me? Did you watch me with a hidden camera?\n\nMAN: Maybe.\n\nWOMAN: I haven't be able to use my cell phone lately. You're interfering with my phone, aren't you?\n\nMAN: How?\n\nWOMAN: Some kind of device.\n\nMAN: Never heard of such a thing.\n\nWOMAN: There is.\n\n(WOMAN _pulls out a catalog from under the blanket. She hands it to_ MAN, _who reads aloud._ )\n\nMAN:... Silent Master. A cellular phone communication-jamming device. It deters the cellular phone communication by interfering with radio waves.\n\nWOMAN: It makes the cell phones useless so that the people who shut themselves into their rooms are forced to come out.\n\nMAN: This is a device to block calls in the theater, in case someone forgot to switch off their phone. Nobody uses it in their house.\n\nWOMAN: Enough. I can't live with you. Do you understand.... Just give me the money to raise the baby.\n\nMAN: Are you leaving me?\n\nWOMAN: We've come to an agreement.\n\nMAN: You call this an agreement?\n\nWOMAN: I realized that I'll have nothing to do if I quit my job. No job, no money, nothing to live for. That'll be my life. I can see it when I see my parents. They have nothing. Nothing. Do you understand?\n\nMAN: Is that why you shut yourself in?\n\nWOMAN: Babies shut themselves in their mother's womb, don't they? Human beings are like that from the beginning.... What about dinner?\n\nMAN:... Why not go out once in a while. What would you like?\n\nWOMAN: Korean barbecue. Of course Korean barbecue. You always ask me, and you know my answer. I want to eat Korean barbecue. If I don't, my blood will get thin. Right. It's your fault. You always make me eat beef.\n\nMAN: I'm infected with mad cow disease. I went mad because I ate too much beef. I'll admit it. Satisfied?\n\nWOMAN: You didn't let me go to the seminar on disinfecting beef?\n\nMAN: It's a waste of money.\n\nWOMAN: We have to use some money, it's for the baby.\n\nMAN: It's crazy to be obsessed with a seminar like that.\n\nWOMAN: How can you make love with a crazy woman?\n\nMAN: You are sick.\n\nWOMAN: Yes. I'm sick. It's infectious. It's an infectious disease. You have to quarantine me. Keep me in a barn until I die a slow death.\n\nMAN: You aren't cattle.\n\nWOMAN: If not, I'm your pet. You're waiting for me to get sick. You'll give the baby only cheap hamburgers and make him sick, too. Make his brain shrink so he's easy for you to keep.\n\n(MAN _disappears out the trapdoor._ )\n\nMAN:... You don't need to worry about the baby.\n\nWOMAN: Don't open the window. The baby will be allergic.\n\nMAN: Don't talk about the baby.\n\nWOMAN: I'll deliver a fine calf.\n\nMAN: I called the obstetrics.... You aren't pregnant.\n\nWOMAN: You liar.\n\nMAN: Who's the liar?\n\nWOMAN:... Don't open it.\n\n( _Cherry blossom petals are coming in through the trapdoor_.)\n\nBLACKOUT\n\nTHE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK\n\nGIRL _is standing with a book in her hand. She is talking into a small tape recorder. Beside her is a half-full backpack_.\n\nGIRL: I've read _The Diary of Anne Frank_. I think the years from age twelve to fourteen are the stupidest years of one's life. People of this age are stupid and they think they're somehow different from everyone else, or they just hate grown-ups. Anne is the same.... I think Anne Frank was lucky. Anne was forced to live in hiding, but I think it forced her to think and feel a lot of things. Because I live a carefree life in peaceful Japan, it's hard for me to imagine the life she was forced to live. I mean I have some of the same thoughts as Anne, like \"Why are grown-ups so stupid?\" or \"I'm an independent individual,\" but we definitely are different. The difference is, Anne was happy to hear about the plan to assassinate Hitler, and I'm looking forward to seeing a show on TV. Anne was fed up with potatoes because there was nothing else to eat, and I have an argument with my mother about whether to eat rice or bread for breakfast. Anne felt happy by the window, in the sunshine, and I... Do I ever feel happy?... Maybe not. Even if I do, it's because of something trashy. I can't even remember it now.... What's the city of Amsterdam like? Anne gained eighteen pounds and four inches during the first three months she was in hiding. Even if you live with your breath held, your body grows. Even if you have to use a chamber pot because you can't flush the toilet when someone is downstairs, you can dream. Anne wanted to be famous. She wanted to be a Hollywood star. She wanted to be a writer. She decided the title of her first book would be _Hiding_. \"When I'm writing, I can forget everything. Sadness disappears and new courage wells up.\"... Is that true?\n\nJust before the Allies came to save them, the Gestapo found the secret door, and they were taken to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, where she died in the barracks. What would she say if she saw the Israelis slaughtering the Palestinians?... I don't want to write about myself. Definitely not. My life is too ugly. I can't help it. We live in different times and in different countries. But at least I'm free. I'm sure I am. I keep my stuff in a backpack so I'm ready to leave and start on a journey anytime. I wish I could live every day as if it's the day before a trip.\n\nBLACKOUT\n\nTHE ROOM OF ABSENCE\n\n_The room is full of red light, with an island of white light from a desk lamp. There is a sheet that looks like it used to be white. We hear the sound of wind blowing through a hollow._ MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN _and_ OLDER BROTHER _come in_.\n\nWOMAN: Don't touch anything. He'll notice the slightest change.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: What's that noise?\n\nWOMAN: Air purifier. He's really taking care of the conditions in here.\n\n(MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN _holds out her hands to the white light of the desk lamp as if warming her hands at a bonfire._ OLDER BROTHER _looks at the space_.)\n\nWOMAN: I don't think he'll be back for at least another four hours. He went for a drive, and he's doing his shopping, too. It'll take some time. He goes out only once a month.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: Thank you. I need some time to just look at the scene and get an impression of the actual situation.\n\nWOMAN: I don't know what to do. I have no choice but to turn to professionals for help.... A lot depends on what kind of people they are. The last one was far from professional; he was playing with my son. Betting on horses, playing games, just messing around. I confronted him and found out that he didn't intend to help him go out at all. He actually used to shut himself in.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: I see....\n\nWOMAN: Have you doing this for a long time?\n\nOLDER BROTHER: No.\n\nWOMAN: What I mean by that is that the people with experience are not always so good.\n\nOLDER BROTHER:... I see.\n\nWOMAN: Sorry for babbling on. I don't usually have anyone to talk to about my son.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: When did he get this Attic?\n\nWOMAN:... About two years ago now, I guess.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: It wasn't ten years ago?\n\nWOMAN: No.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: I heard your son had put together his own Attic years before Attics became a fad.\n\nWOMAN: Did you?\n\nOLDER BROTHER: It was on the Web, with your son's address.\n\nWOMAN: It was a lie.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: I know that now. This Attic is a ready-made model you can buy on the Internet. Your son didn't build it.\n\nWOMAN: He couldn't have done it.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: I had great expectations that he might possibly have invented the Attic....\n\nWOMAN: Well, my son lies more often that he tells the truth. Actually, it's no exaggeration to say that he rarely tell the truth.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: When did he start using the second floor?\n\nWOMAN: We gave him a bedroom up here when he was in second grade. And we gave him the entire second floor when he was in the eleventh grade.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: Do you come upstairs?\n\nWOMAN: Less than once a year.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: He told you not to come upstairs?\n\nWOMAN: Yes.\n\nOLDER BROTHER:... I heard that Japan has the world's highest percentage of children who have their own rooms.\n\nWOMAN: More than the USA?\n\nOLDER BROTHER: Yes. In the USA, parents usually let their kids think it's their room, but the room doesn't actually belong to them. If a parent knocks on the door, the kids have to let him in. That's an absolute rule without exceptions. If guests stay in the house, the kids have to give up their rooms for the guests. That's the father's authority as the captain of a ship called home.\n\nWOMAN:... I see.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: I got this all from a book.\n\nWOMAN: His father ran away. He was scared of his son's violence.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: Does he beat you?\n\nWOMAN:... Yes. He behaves exactly the same as his father did when he was drunk.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: What makes him violent?\n\nWOMAN: The first time he beat me, he said he didn't like the way I washed his clothes.... After that, there was no rhyme or reason. When he gets angry, he says things like, \"Why did you have me?\" and that's enough of a reason for him. When I forgot the day that the new issue of the _manga_ magazine _Shonen Jump_ came out, he threw a burning newspaper into the living room.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: He's violent only at home, right?\n\nWOMAN: He had a job, but it lasted only three months. I don't think he can find anyone to beat in the outside world.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: In most cases of domestic violence, the family can't do anything. If antisocial behavior is involved, there are ways for us to deal with it.\n\nWOMAN: Is it too late, then?\n\nOLDER BROTHER: It is essential that we change his environment. We recommend that you to commit him to a private rehabilitation facility.\n\nWOMAN: Will he be all right?\n\nOLDER BROTHER: He'll feel better when he's around fellow patients. The rehabilitation facilities have programs to enforce a well-regulated life and to master vocational skills so that patients can return to society. You can visit them. You'll see the truth in what I say when you observe them. Professionals are working there to rehabilitate adults who shut themselves in.\n\nWOMAN: How much do they pay you as a finder's fee?\n\nOLDER BROTHER:...\n\nWOMAN: It's all a business, isn't it?\n\nOLDER BROTHER: This is not the time for saying things like that.\n\nWOMAN: I don't have any money.\n\nOLDER BROTHER:...\n\nWOMAN: I'll deal with him somehow as long as I'm alive. There's no age limit on being an insurance salesperson.\n\nOLDER BROTHER:... What is your real problem?\n\nWOMAN:...\n\nOLDER BROTHER: I promise I'll keep your secret.\n\nWOMAN:...\n\nOLDER BROTHER ( _He indicates the fourth wall_ ): It looks like something was erased with benzene; there are lots of traces of graffiti. \"Despair,\" \"Death,\" \"Future.\"... Small letters all over the wall. Is it your son's handwriting?\n\nWOMAN ( _She squints at it_ ): No.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: There's someone else, then.\n\nWOMAN: Not my son. Someone else.\n\nWOMAN:... Yes.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: A friend is staying with him?\n\nWOMAN: He doesn't have any friends.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: How long has this person been here?\n\nWOMAN: I don't know. I don't even know if my son is here. There is a bathroom next to his room, and he can come upstairs directly from the kitchen door. Sometimes I don't see him for days.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: Does he ask you for food?\n\nWOMAN: Sometimes.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: Sushi, for example. If he orders sushi, how many people does he order for?\n\nWOMAN: Enough for two, plus extra.... But he always ate a lot.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: Did he buy this Attic to shut in this other person?\n\nWOMAN: You mean he keeps someone here?\n\nOLDER BROTHER: Yes.\n\nWOMAN:... My son is a monster.\n\nOLDER BROTHER:...\n\nWOMAN: I'm afraid of his jump-kick. I never know when he's going to jump and kick me, so I always have to be on guard.... But if I leave, he'll die. I'm his slave.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: You and your son aren't the only parent and child in the world. If your child was taken away, you'd look for her forever.\n\nWOMAN: They might give up, thinking she was abducted by the North Koreans.\n\nOLDER BROTHER:...\n\nWOMAN: If they really look for her, they'll soon find her. There are very few people who would do a thing like this, except my son.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: Are you saying they haven't searched hard enough?\n\nWOMAN:... Please don't make me say things like this.\n\nOLDER BROTHER:...\n\nWOMAN:... Please leave now. I was wrong to ask for your help.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: I don't mind. I'm not really interested. What I really want to know is who invented this Attic. I'm looking for the person who created this.\n\nWOMAN: It's just a toy house....\n\nOLDER BROTHER: Even if you aren't interested in what's going on, you should have figured out something by now. You might have peeked into the room while he was taking a shower. He told you to go buy sanitary napkins. You should have noticed that the noise from upstairs wasn't made by single person.\n\nWOMAN:... I heard a voice on the day before the festival in February.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: A voice?\n\nWOMAN: \"In with the demon, out with fortune\"... A girl's voice. Ever since I heard that voice, if I wake up in the middle of the night I can't fall asleep again. I can't even breathe. I hear the voice, \"in with the demon, out with fortune.\"...\n\nOLDER BROTHER: I'm leaving now.\n\nWOMAN:... Why?\n\nOLDER BROTHER: You know only too well what you need to do.\n\nWOMAN:...\n\n(MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN _smiles faintly_.)\n\nBLACKOUT\n\nMOUNTAIN HUT\n\n_Sound of a snowstorm_. MAN WITH A BLUE CAP _dressed like a mountain climber is sitting in the Attic. The small door opens. Snow blows in._ MAN WITH A RED CAP _dressed like a mountain climber comes in hurriedly._\n\nRED CAP: Ooh, thank god.... ( _Notices_ MAN WITH A BLUE CAP.) Excuse me.\n\nBLUE:... Welcome.\n\nRED: I didn't expect a heavy snowstorm like this. I was worried for a while. Were you heading for camp 5?\n\nBLUE: You, too?\n\nRED: I guess we got lost, huh?\n\nBLUE: Yeah, completely.\n\nRED: Are you alone?\n\nBLUE: I suddenly found myself alone.\n\nRED: Me, too. I usually take the lead, and this time, I showed off and went so fast that I got separated from the others. It happened once before, too.\n\nBLUE: Did they let you go? They should have noticed, since you were in front.\n\nRED: Well, I often break off to relieve myself, you know, defecate\u2014So they didn't care. I usually catch up with them later.\n\nBLUE: It would be embarrassing if they found you pulling down your pants.\n\nRED: Right. I always tend to be loose in the bowels.... And it was cold.\n\nBLUE: I see.\n\nRED: I don't like to defecate in the snow.... Don't worry, I'll go out when I have to.... Phew, I'm feeling warmer now, but I wish there were a fire or something. Well, it'd be strange if there was a fireplace in a hut like this. It's a good idea though, to use an Attic kit as a mountaineering shelter.\n\nBLUE: I wonder how they got it up here.\n\nRED: I heard that they hung it from a helicopter and just dropped it. It's pretty light.\n\nBLUE:... Lodge and loft are similar, don't you think?\n\nRED: Pardon?\n\nBLUE: When I was a child, we had an Attic in our house. We called it the loft. And I always called it the lodge by mistake.\n\nRED: Lodge and loft.\n\nBLUE: They sound similar, don't they?\n\nRED: It's easy to get into the habit of that kind of mistake.\n\nBLUE: Yeah.\n\nRED: But this is really a lodge.\n\nBLUE: It's a loft, and it's a lodge.\n\nRED: It's a lodge, and it's a loft.\n\nBLUE:... So it was you.\n\nRED: What?\n\nBLUE:... I felt someone calling me.\n\nRED: I don't think it was me. I wouldn't yell out loud at the time like this. It's a waste of energy and strains your windpipe, too. Perhaps it was just your imagination?\n\n( _The small door opens as if blown by the wind._ )\n\nRED: It's cold. ( _He closes the door_.)\n\nBLUE: The hinges are broken.\n\nRED: I wonder if they've arrived at the camp.... I was thinking only of myself. What should I do if they all got lost?\n\nBLUE: They might all come to this Attic.\n\nRED: There isn't enough room.\n\nBLUE: What should we do?\n\nRED:... We can make an igloo.\n\nBLUE: Sounds nice. An igloo. We can drink hot toddy and eat mandarin oranges in it....\n\n( _The small door opens again. A_ WOMAN _is standing in the snow. She is wearing a white coat._ MAN WITH A RED CAP _goes to close the door. He is surprised to see_ WOMAN IN WHITE.)\n\nBLUE:... My team?\n\nRED: No. ( _Calls out_.) Come on in. ( _To_ MAN WITH A RED CAP.) Let's make some space. I'll go over there.\n\n(WOMAN IN WHITE _comes in._ MAN WITH A RED CAP _moves to the side of_ MAN WITH A BLUE CAP.)\n\nBLUE: You look so pale....\n\nRED: Are you all right?\n\n(WOMAN _nods._ )\n\nRED ( _To_ MAN WITH A BLUE CAP): Don't you have anything that would give her energy? Some chocolate or an energy bar?\n\nBLUE: Whiskey would be good, too. ( _To_ WOMAN.) You'll be warm soon. ( _To_ RED.) I've recovered my spirits since I came in, too, right?\n\nWOMAN:... ( _She is trembling and huddles in the corner_.)\n\nBLUE: You are all right now. There's nothing to worry about.\n\nRED:... Were you in an accident?\n\nWOMAN:... ( _She shakes her head_.)\n\nRED: You got lost, then?\n\nWOMAN:... ( _Nods_.)\n\nRED: Are you a student? Which mountaineering club are you in?\n\nWOMAN:...\n\nRED: Say something. A silent girl in white. You look like some sort of snow ghost.\n\n(MAN WITH A RED CAP _takes her hands. She doesn_ ' _t say anything._ )\n\nRED: Well, good thing you're real. Your hands are so cold. Do you want to use my body warmer?\n\nBLUE:... Did you hear that?\n\nRED: What?\n\nBLUE: Someone is calling from far away.\n\nRED ( _He listens_ ):... I can't hear anything.\n\nBLUE:... I'm sure someone is calling.\n\nRED: Really?\n\n(BLUE _goes out._ )\n\nRED: Hey.... It's dangerous out there right now.\n\n(RED _tries to follow him, but_ WOMAN _doesn_ ' _t let go of his hands._ )\n\nRED: What are you doing?\n\nWOMAN: Don't go.\n\nRED: You're strange. You are being very strange.\n\nWOMAN: You're the one who's being strange.\n\nRED:... What do you mean?\n\nWOMAN:... Who were you talking to?\n\nRED: What do you mean? He was... a man with a blue hat.\n\nWOMAN: There wasn't anybody here.\n\nRED:...\n\nWOMAN: Nobody was here. But the door opened just now, and a kind of white mist or something went out....\n\nRED: No....\n\nWOMAN:... I've heard about this. Survivors who see ghosts.\n\nRED: I'm not a ghost.\n\nWOMAN: Me, neither....\n\n( _The snowstorm is blowing in the dark_.)\n\nBLACKOUT\n\nMOTHER AND SON\n\n_A room scattered with garbage_. MOTHER _opens the door and peeps in._ SON, _who was asleep under the blanket, wakes up and sees_ MOTHER.\n\nMOTHER:... How can you sleep so much? Are you ill?\n\nSON:... I didn't know you were there.\n\nMOTHER: When you're asleep, your face looks like it did in the old days.\n\nSON: Old days?\n\nMOTHER: When the three of us slept together in that small room.\n\n(SON _yawns._ )\n\nMOTHER: Have you stood up lately? You look shorter than you did before.\n\nSON: Mammals are quadrupeds. Our internal organs aren't really situated for walking upright.\n\nMOTHER: I gave birth to you as a healthy and normal baby.\n\nSON: Did you really give birth to me?\n\nMOTHER: Yeah.\n\nSON: Somehow I find that hard to believe.\n\nMOTHER: You haven't washed your face in a while, have you. It's scruffy.... You should wash your face every morning. A little habit like that can change people. Shall I run a bath?\n\nSON: It's a waste. I haven't moved. I haven't broken a sweat.\n\nMOTHER:... Why not check into some sort of facility? At least then you'll wash your face every morning.\n\nSON: It would be compulsory.\n\nMOTHER: It is compulsory for human beings to wash their face every morning.\n\nSON: I don't mind washing my face every morning, but I don't like to clean toilets.\n\nMOTHER: Don't knock it till you've tried it.\n\nSON: I think I'd do well in a place like that. But when I come back, I'll be like this again. I don't need to bother. I already know.\n\nMOTHER: For appearance's sake, you should at least say hi to the neighbors.\n\nSON: It's actually weirder if someone like me greets them.\n\nMOTHER: Don't go out empty-handed. It's too obvious that you're unemployed.\n\nSON: There's nothing I can do about that. \"Shutting yourself in\" can be a way of saying no to work.\n\nMOTHER: Those who don't work don't eat.\n\nSON: Left to their own devices, the Russians weren't going to work, so they introduced communism and created a system to force them to work.\n\nMOTHER: Really?\n\nSON: The first person to ever shut himself in was a Russian, wasn't it? A nineteenth-century anarchist named Oblomov.\n\nMOTHER: What's an anarchist?\n\nSON: Something that's not good. Nothing that starts with \"an\" is any good.\n\nMOTHER: May I come in?\n\nSON: Yes.\n\n(MOTHER _pretends to come in through the small door but pushes a stuffed animal through instead. It is an ambush, and_ SON _hits the stuffed animal with a slingshot._ )\n\nSON:... How did you know?\n\nMOTHER: How long have I been your mother?\n\nSON: I won't do anything.\n\nMOTHER: I object to violence.\n\nSON: I'm fed up with it.\n\nMOTHER: Really?\n\nSON: I don't want to touch anyone.\n\nMOTHER:...\n\nSON: People change, you know. When I was a kid, I didn't mind touching anything, frogs or crayfish. But now I don't even want to touch a beetle.\n\nMOTHER: I thought you had reverted to childhood, but you can't do what a child does now.\n\n(MOTHER _comes in and finds instant noodles, canned food, packets of cornflakes, and a variety of junk food under the blanket._ )\n\nMOTHER: You've got everything here. It's like some kind of store.\n\nSON: I wish my home were a convenience store.\n\nMOTHER ( _Points at a spot under the blanket_ ): You have something growing there.\n\nSON: Indoor cultivation. Bean sprouts, radish sprouts, and alfalfa.\n\nMOTHER: Oh?\n\nSON: You can grow them all the same way. I'm going to try blueberries and leeks next.\n\nMOTHER: Sounds like you have a lot of time to kill.\n\nSON: I'm looking for a way to support myself.\n\nMOTHER: Uh-huh.\n\nSON: There are certain jobs you can't do without shutting yourself in. Actually, Mom, I'm thinking of making my living on the Internet, pretending I live abroad. I'm going to take a law exam, too.\n\nMOTHER: Oh?\n\nSON: There's also a publishing company interested in my \"shut-in\" lifestyle, and I'm writing an autobiography.\n\nMOTHER: You can't write a book. You don't even read the newspaper.\n\nSON: Has the world changed that much?\n\nMOTHER: Kitano Takeshi is the prime minister.\n\nSON: You're kidding.\n\nMOTHER: Amazing thing is, it sounds true.\n\nSON: Is there a war going on somewhere?\n\nMOTHER: Yes.\n\nSON: I wish there was a war here, too.\n\nMOTHER: Why?\n\nSON: Everything would be burned away and cleared.\n\nMOTHER:... Maybe I'm happy. Usually, a boy finds a girlfriend, gets married, has his own kids, grows up, acts his age, and he doesn't give a damn about his mother. Then the mother feels empty. She quickly goes senile. I didn't have time for it. I had a lot of things to do for you.\n\nSON: You're speaking in the past tense.\n\nMOTHER:...\n\nSON: I thought you were in the hospital.\n\nMOTHER: I was.\n\nSON: You were?\n\nMOTHER: Why didn't you visit me in the hospital?\n\nSON:...\n\nMOTHER: I think I'm going to vanish.\n\nSON: Vanish?\n\nMOTHER: Vanish.\n\nSON: How?\n\nMOTHER: It's a secret.\n\nSON: Shall we die together?\n\nMOTHER: No.\n\nSON: Why?\n\nMOTHER: Never.\n\nSON: I don't want you to die now. I need you to return a video. It's overdue.\n\nMOTHER: Again?\n\nSON: I've seen the detective movie and the samurai movie, but I haven't seen the war movie yet.\n\nMOTHER: I can't. I already did it.\n\nSON:... When?\n\nMOTHER: Half an hour ago.\n\nSON: That's not fair, going by yourself. That's not fair.\n\nMOTHER:... It can't be helped.\n\nSON:... No, it can't, can it?\n\nBLACKOUT\n\nVISIT\n\nGIRL _is typing on a laptop computer, using a bare bulb as a desk lamp. There_ ' _s a knock at the door._\n\nTEACHER ( _Offstage_ ): Hello. It's Haruyama, your teacher.... May I come in?\n\nGIRL: Yes, please.\n\n(TEACHER _comes in, indicates the computer._ )\n\nTEACHER: Homework?\n\nGIRL: No.\n\nTEACHER: Is this an Attic?\n\nGIRL:... Yes.\n\nTEACHER: I've always lived in company-owned houses or apartments. I didn't know what an Attic was like.\n\nGIRL: So you wanted to come in.\n\nTEACHER: Yeah.\n\nGIRL: Wanted to experience how it feels, shutting yourself in?\n\nTEACHER: What are you talking about? It's just a routine home visit. It's soundproof, isn't it. You could play video games as much as you like.\n\nGIRL: I don't play games.\n\nTEACHER: I'm sorry.\n\nGIRL:...\n\nTEACHER: I came to apologize to you. I was thoughtless.\n\nGIRL: What are you talking about?\n\nTEACHER: The \"wedding ceremony.\" I was thinking it could be a trauma for the rest of your life....\n\nGIRL: What's a trauma? Some kind of animal or something?\n\nTEACHER:...\n\nGIRL: Stop talking about it. I don't care, I just think it was stupid.\n\nTEACHER: Yeah. But I guess Takeda and Ogami thought you would feel closer to the other kids in the class....\n\nGIRL: That's a lie.\n\nTEACHER:... Why don't you come to school?\n\nGIRL: I'm aware of this phenomenon of \"shutting yourself in,\" but I'm not like that. I don't go to school because I don't like school. That's all.\n\nTEACHER: Grown-ups don't get to take time off like this.\n\nGIRL: If you aren't allowed to do it when you're grown up, all the more reason I should do it now, don't you think? If I don't go to school again, my parents and the school administration will talk and I'll graduate anyway, isn't that right? It's compulsory education.\n\nTEACHER: How do you know that?\n\nGIRL: You can learn a lot on the Internet. If you write a good report on my grades and conduct, I can pass the high school entrance exam, too.\n\nTEACHER: Your test scores are always high.\n\nGIRL: I have great confidence in your ability to do this.\n\nTEACHER: What about extracurricular activities? Is it just the astronomy club?\n\nGIRL: There are only three members.\n\nTEACHER: You should think how the other two members feel now.\n\nGIRL: You can't see any stars in Tokyo anyway.\n\nTEACHER: Don't you want to talk with your friends?\n\nGIRL ( _Indicates the computer_ ): I chat with a lot of people. There are grown-ups, too, and it's cheaper than talking on a cell phone. Basically I feel more comfortable when I'm alone. That's all.\n\nTEACHER:... I can't say this to anyone but you, but I actually feel the same way.\n\nGIRL: What?\n\nTEACHER: I like to be alone. The happiest time of my life was when I shut myself in, cramming for the college entrance exam.\n\nGIRL: That was your happiest time?\n\nTEACHER: Yes.\n\nGIRL: Grow up.\n\nTEACHER: No I'm still in my adolescence.\n\nGIRL: How can you say that?\n\nTEACHER: Someone said that young people today reach their adolescence at the age of twenty and grow up fully at thirty.\n\nGIRL: You're over thirty.\n\nTEACHER: I can't sleep very well lately. Even when I do sleep, I feel as if I'm on a stretcher being carried to an ambulance.\n\nGIRL: Really? There's a rumor you take naps in the infirmary.\n\nTEACHER: It's true. I'm no good. I've lost my confidence. I'm the lowest of the low.\n\nGIRL: I don't....\n\nTEACHER: You don't agree with that, or you don't deny it?\n\nGIRL:... I don't agree with that.\n\nTEACHER: Say it clearly. Say, \"No, you are not.\"\n\nGIRL:...\n\nTEACHER: I'm bullied, too. Do you think bullying is just between kids?\n\nGIRL: I'm not bullied.\n\nTEACHER: You are! Face it! If it's not bullying to nickname a girl \"Gorilla,\" I don't know what is.\n\nGIRL:... It's cruel to gorillas.\n\nTEACHER: There's bullying among teachers, too. The principal makes me rewrite my papers again and again. He says I should make the event schedule plan by the second. When I complained that it's meaningless, he got furious and reported to the board of education that I have a problematic personality. It's been going on for years. It's affecting me physically. I can't wake up in the morning, and I lost my voice.\n\n(TEACHER _rolls up her sleeve. There are razor scars on her wrist._ )\n\nTEACHER: Look. I have to either retire or kill myself. I've got so many scars that I have to wear long sleeves even in the summer. I can't believe anything anymore. I want to stay in a room and be still. Please let me shut myself in.\n\nGIRL: It's pretty weird for a teacher to shut herself in.\n\nTEACHER: Is it weird?\n\nGIRL:... Weird.\n\nTEACHER: I know what you mean. Whatever I do, people say I look strained. I think so, too. When I speak, everybody senses I'm being forced to speak. Kids know it. That's why. That's why I took part in the mock \"wedding ceremony.\" I was bullied into it.\n\nGIRL: Let's stop talking about it. It's not like I was in some sort of living hell after they did the \"wedding ceremony.\"\n\nTEACHER: I'm the one who should get married. I want to get married and retire and finish this.\n\nGIRL: You can quit.\n\nTEACHER: I don't want be a loser.\n\nGIRL: Is it a matter of winning or losing?\n\nTEACHER: Why do you study? To be a winner in life, right?\n\nGIRL:... That won't get you anywhere. Where there's a winner, there's a loser.\n\n(TEACHER _lies down and weeps._ )\n\nGIRL: I'll show you something.\n\n( _She covers the bulb with a bowl. It_ ' _s dark in the room. Small spots of light through holes on the bowl project on the wall._ )\n\nTEACHER:... What?\n\nGIRL ( _Points at the wall_ ): That's the Milky Way... Ursa Major.\n\nTEACHER:... A planetarium?\n\nGIRL: The Northern Hemisphere in summer.\n\nTEACHER ( _She finds something_ ): Cassiopeia.\n\nGIRL: Where's Scorpio?\n\nTEACHER:... There!\n\n( _The stars blur and fade out_.)\n\nBLACKOUT\n\nRETURNEE\n\nYOUNG MAN _is hanging from the ceiling stretching his body. He looks as if he is floating in the air_. LADY _is speaking._\n\nLADY: Kasper Hauser was found in Nuremberg, on May 26, 1828. He was a wild man with a simple felt hat. He looked like he was sixteen or seventeen years old. He had been kept in a dungeon since he was born, never saw the sunshine, fed only water and poor-quality bread. He was forced to sit down for long periods of time. His bones were deformed.\n\nYOUNG MAN: When I was taken into protective custody, the muscles in my legs had become so weak I couldn't even walk.\n\nLADY: He couldn't speak, but he wasn't an idiot. Doctors examined him and said that he was close to being an innocent young child.\n\nYOUNG MAN: I was in the hospital for a year, and I came back home after fifteen years.\n\nLADY: Strangely enough, he had peculiar abilities. For example, he could distinguish different kinds of metal just by touching them.\n\nYOUNG MAN: Since then, I have gradually been getting well. Well enough to listen to music and take walks in my neighborhood.\n\nLADY: He got an education, learned language and common sense, but he could never believe in religion and loathed priests and clergymen.\n\nYOUNG MAN: I attended my community's coming-of-age ceremony and got a driving license, too.\n\nLADY: He once asked a professor who was teaching him, \"If there is a god almighty, can he turn back the clock?\"\n\nYOUNG MAN: Now I've recovered from the aftereffects and am working on rehabilitating socially.\n\nLADY: Once, he was attacked by someone who cut his face.\n\nYOUNG MAN: I can't remember anything about the time I was confined.\n\nLADY: And on December 14, 1833, he was stabbed to death by a stranger in a small park in Ansbach. No one knows for sure who confined him in the first place.\n\nYOUNG MAN: The only thing I faintly remember is that the TV was always on. Someone turned up the volume, and I could hear the voices. They were always detective movies, samurai movies, or war movies.\n\nLADY:... What is the most enjoyable thing for you now?\n\nYOUNG MAN: I like to hang like this and stretch my body at night.\n\nLADY: Where are you hanging?\n\nYOUNG MAN: The Attic of the world.\n\nLADY: What are you doing, hanging there?\n\nYOUNG MAN: I'm on watch.\n\nLADY: What are you watching?\n\nYOUNG MAN: The whole world.\n\nLADY: What do you hear?\n\nYOUNG MAN: The sound of the earth spinning.\n\nLADY:... Ladies and gentlemen, does this young man shut himself up in the universe of the night? No, he doesn't. This young man is spying on people's private lives through the knotholes on the ceiling and listening to private conversations. He has become the phantom of the Attic.\n\n( _We hear the noise of people. It sounds like a large number of whistles rather than people_ ' _s voices. Sometimes we hear words._ PEOPLE _appear one after another._ )\n\nPEOPLE 1: Someone is spying on me from the Attic. For about three years now.\n\nPEOPLE 2: The ceiling board in the closet was loose, and you can go up and down through it.\n\nPEOPLE 3: He remodeled the Attic without my permission and built a room up there.\n\nPEOPLE 4: There are lots of knotholes as if it had been eaten by insects....\n\nPEOPLE 5: He was staring at me. Holding his breath.\n\nPEOPLE 1: My life leaked out.\n\nPEOPLE 2: He comes down while I'm out and eats the food in my fridge.\n\nPEOPLE 3: He pissed all over there.\n\nPEOPLE 4: He swapped my brand-new electric appliances for secondhand ones.\n\nPEOPLE 5: He swaps everything for fakes.\n\nPEOPLE 1: He's trying to see if I notice it.\n\nPEOPLE 2: These clothes I'm wearing now are cheap imitations that look exactly like the real thing. I can tell by the texture.\n\nPEOPLE 3:... My dog and my kid have changed, too.\n\nPEOPLE 4: I'm the only real thing.\n\nPEOPLE 5: He is going to confine me in the Attic and take my place, too.\n\nPEOPLE 1:... My neighbors are all changed.\n\nPEOPLE 2: Get out.\n\nPEOPLE 3: Get out.\n\nPEOPLE 4: Get out of the Attic.\n\nPEOPLE 5: Get out.\n\n(YOUNG MAN _is pulled down by_ PEOPLE.)\n\nYOUNG MAN: We strongly protest the unreasonable persecution of the Attic users.\n\n(YOUNG MAN _is carried away by_ PEOPLE. OLDER BROTHER _appears and watches._ ANCHORPERSON _appears._ )\n\nANCHORPERSON: Since the Attic regulation passed both Houses, the Attic Club went underground and continues the illegal distribution of the banned Attic. Despite investigations by the authorities, the Attic kit hasn't disappeared from Japanese society and is still out there even today.\n\n( _The_ ATTIC PROMOTERS _enter._ )\n\nPROMOTER 1: The Attic is a culture. Especially the original Attic. It is the Japanese invention that is valued all over the world.\n\nPROMOTER 2: It's all right to use it because we bought it. Isn't that right?\n\n(PROMOTERS _are pushed back by_ PEOPLE, _who have appeared again._ )\n\nOLDER BROTHER: The question is, who is making the Attics?\n\nANCHORPERSON: Elephant Brand, Yanmar, and the copy company in Taiwan stopped producing them.\n\nPEOPLE 1: We should focus on the originals.\n\n(PEOPLE _wearing a sign_ \" _Former Attic Dweller_ \" _stand side by side._ )\n\nFORMER DWELLER 1: I used to be an Attic dweller. But now I drink milk everyday.\n\n( _He drinks a bottle of milk, with his arms akimbo_.)\n\nFORMER DWELLER 2: If there wasn't an Attic, I would never have dreamed of shutting myself up.\n\nFORMER DWELLER 3 ( _He is naked except for the sign_ ): I healed myself by streaking.\n\nANCHORPERSON:... Now I've sneaked into an Attic boycott meeting.\n\n(PEOPLE IN DISGUISE _appear_.)\n\nDISGUISE 1: Even if people are allowed to own Attics, I think we need a registration system.\n\nDISGUISE 2: I demand the wholesale arrest of distributors and the prohibition of sale.\n\nDISGUISE 3: Protect our children.\n\nDISGUISE 4: Attic parties are the most extreme decadence.\n\nDISGUISE 1: This is a revival of dungeons.\n\nDISGUISE 2: My neighbor hid their good-for-nothing child in one.\n\nDISGUISE 3: Attics speak of the darkness of the human mind.\n\nDISGUISE 4: They are possessed by evil spirits. We must keep praying.\n\nDISGUISE 1: They're for sex. How can you think otherwise?\n\nDISGUISE 2: In a small space like that, there is only one thing you feel like doing.\n\nDISGUISE 3: There are people who held wedding ceremonies in them.\n\nDISGUISE 1: I have never seen anything more immoral than the Attic conference. They livened things up by trying to see how many people could get into an Attic at once. It was the most repulsive thing I've ever seen.\n\nANCHORPERSON: How many could get into one?\n\n(PEOPLE _are packed in an Attic._ )\n\nPACKED PEOPLE 1: Exactly thirteen.\n\nPACKED PEOPLE 2: I respect the _Guinness Book of Records_ for rejecting their application.\n\nOLDER BROTHER: I'm looking for the person who invented all this.\n\nPEOPLE:...\n\nOLDER PEOPLE: Haven't you found him yet? The person who manufactured the original Attic?\n\n(PEOPLE _disappear in back of the Attic. The sound of an elevator door opening. The back wall of the Attic that closed a moment ago slides open again from the center. There is darkness and no one is there_. OLDER BROTHER _jumps into the darkness. The sliding doors close_.)\n\nBLACKOUT\n\nELEVATOR\n\n_The sound of the elevator doors opening. The back wall of the Attic slides open from the center._ OLDER BROTHER _comes in._ MAN WITH A CAP _is waiting in front_.\n\nMAN:... Going up.\n\n( _There is a \"ping\" sound and then the sound of the elevator going up_. MAN WITH A CAP _takes out a cushion from the ceiling space and offers it to_ OLDER BROTHER.)\n\nMAN: Please have a seat. Which floor do you want?\n\nBROTHER: Is this an elevator?\n\nMAN: Yes, sir.\n\nBROTHER: Why this shape?\n\nMAN: I don't understand what you mean, sir... ?\n\nBROTHER: Was this like this originally?\n\nMAN: Is there a problem, sir?\n\nBROTHER: People usually stand in an elevator.\n\nMAN: It's more comfortable to sit. ( _Offers tea_.) Would you like some tea, sir?\n\nBROTHER: What great service.\n\nMAN: They serve meals on airplanes, don't they? Which floor do you want?\n\nBROTHER: Who remodeled it to look like this?\n\nMAN: I don't know.\n\nBROTHER: You didn't do it, then?\n\nMAN: I'm an elevator man.\n\nBROTHER: Not an elevator girl?\n\nMAN: I am a man.\n\nBROTHER: Why don't they have a girl?\n\nMAN: Most drivers of vehicles are men.\n\nBROTHER: Leaving room on elevators for the girls.\n\nMAN: This is my job, sir.\n\nBROTHER: They usually have a girl on an elevator.\n\nMAN: Could you tell me which floor you want?\n\nBROTHER: How many floors are there?\n\nMAN: Aren't you getting off?\n\nBROTHER: How many?\n\nMAN: I'm telling you I'll go to any floor you want, asshole.\n\nBROTHER: You actually are operating it, then.\n\nMAN: We are going up and up now.\n\nBROTHER: Just go up as high as you can.\n\nMAN: Is that what you want?\n\nBROTHER: Yeah.\n\nMAN:... I'll take you there.\n\n(MAN WITH A CAP _pushes a button, and the machine roars. The elevator suddenly accelerates upward_.)\n\nMAN ( _Looking up_ ): It's picking up speed.\n\nBROTHER: Just go ahead.\n\nMAN:... Go, go, go. Don't hold back!\n\nBROTHER: Go the whole way.\n\nMAN: I don't want anyone to go higher than me!\n\nBROTHER: How high are we going?\n\nMAN: To the top, of course.\n\nBROTHER: The top?\n\nMAN: I've told you over and over that we are going up.\n\nBROTHER: Go to the highest point.\n\nMAN: Very well, sir.\n\n( _Sudden brake noise and the sound of the elevator stops. The back door slides open. There is a darkness spreading in the back. The sound of water dripping. Wind blows. We hear air noise from far way_.)\n\nMAN: The top floor, sir.\n\nBROTHER:... Where are we?\n\nMAN: The top floor.\n\nBROTHER: What's on the top floor?\n\nMAN: The top floor is just under the roof. What is just under the roof?\n\nBROTHER: An Attic?\n\nMAN: Yes.\n\nBROTHER: It looks like there's nothing here.\n\nMAN:...\n\nBROTHER: All right. Get off.\n\nMAN:...\n\nBROTHER: You are dismissed.\n\nMAN: I can't get off.\n\nBROTHER: You can't?\n\nMAN: This is an Attic.\n\nBROTHER: Why can't you get off?\n\nMAN: We went up and down, but this is still an Attic.\n\nBROTHER:...\n\nMAN: If you want to leave, please go this way.\n\n(OLDER BROTHER _goes out into the darkness in the back_.)\n\nBROTHER:... It's so dark I can't see anything.\n\nMAN: Watch your step.\n\nBROTHER: It's slippery. It's like a cave.\n\n(OLDER BROTHER _calls out_.)\n\nBROTHER: Hey!\n\n( _His voice echoes. The echo dies out, and we only hear the dripping sound of water as though we are in a limestone cave._ OLDER BROTHER _lights his lighter_.)\n\nBROTHER: What's over there?\n\nMAN: I don't know.\n\n(OLDER BROTHER _steps into the darkness and disappears. Then we hear his voice_.)\n\nBROTHER:... Who's there?... Don't hide. Come on out.\n\n(OLDER BROTHER _holds up his lighter to the space. He comes downstage_.)\n\nBROTHER ( _Stares_ ): They're all drawings\u2014Murals?\n\nMAN: They say the first human graffiti was on cave walls.\n\nBROTHER:...\n\nMAN: The sun has never reached this cave.\n\n( _The flame of the lighter flickers in the wind_....)\n\nBROTHER: Horses, reindeer, bears.... They look alive.\n\nMAN: Ancient people knew the drawings on the cave walls would look alive when they were lit with a flickering flame.\n\n(OLDER BROTHER _is staring at_ MAN WITH A CAP.)\n\nMAN: People leave behind evidence of their lives.\n\nBROTHER: Who are you?\n\nMAN:...\n\nBROTHER: Are you the man in the drawing?\n\nMAN: There is something else on the wall that isn't a drawing.\n\n(OLDER BROTHER _finds something engraved in a corner of the murals_.)\n\nBROTHER ( _Reads_ ): The day you choose to be alone is as long as a year you spend adrift.\n\nMAN:... What is it?\n\nBROTHER: My brother. My brother wrote this for a collection of essays in high school.\n\nMAN: Why not draw something yourself?\n\nBROTHER:...\n\nMAN: If there is something you've lost, draw it all over the wall.\n\nBROTHER:...\n\nBLACKOUT\n\nCARDBOARD HOUSE\n\n_The evening casts a red light on a cardboard house. The house is the same size as an Attic. Or the walls of an Attic are covered with cardboard. There is a bicycle horn hanging on the wall._ MAN WITH CRUTCHES _comes._\n\nCRUTCHES: Hello\u2014Hello.\n\n( _He waits for a while, but nobody replies. He tries the horn. One wall is taken away from inside, and we can see into the house.... A lot of furniture, kitchen tools, blankets, and so on fill the house. Almost everything necessary for human life is there. But everything is old and shabby. We can see that it was originally an Attic, but because the back wall is also covered with cardboard, it isn't as tightly sealed up as the original. A blue plastic sheet covering the crevices rattles. A curtain is waving in the wind. It was_ TAKE _who took away the cardboard wall_. UME _is toasting dried sardines on a portable kitchen stove. They sit face to face at a small table with an electric foot warmer, sipping a glass of Japanese sak\u00e9_.)\n\nTAKE:... Welcome.\n\nUME: What is it?\n\nCRUTCHES: I was told to warn you. It's the consensus of the community.\n\nTAKE: Is it?\n\nCRUTCHES: We'd like to ask you to leave because you're spoiling the beauty of the riverbank.\n\nUME: How did you set the criteria for beauty?\n\nCRUTCHES: I don't know. I can't live in this town if I rebel against the neighborhood association. I'm just telling you what was decided.\n\nTAKE ( _To_ UME): He is just doing what he's told.\n\nCRUTCHES: Kids are scarier than the neighborhood association. They're so worked up that there isn't much they won't do. ( _He takes a look_.) They're seeing how things work out around here now, too.\n\nTAKE: They stole empty cans right out of my hands the other day.\n\nUME: You can get eight yen per can at a recycling shop.\n\nCRUTCHES: They kicked and broke my crutches, too....\n\nUME: I see you every once in a while. You've had those crutches for some time now.\n\nCRUTCHES:... Yes.\n\nUME: Why can't we stay here? There are lots of stalls on this riverbank.\n\nCRUTCHES: This isn't a stall.\n\nUME: If stalls are all right, we'll sell something.\n\nCRUTCHES: What are you going to sell?\n\nTAKE: We'll serve tea. The smallest caf\u00e9 in the world.\n\nUME ( _Offers the glass to_ MAN WITH CRUTCHES): Or do you prefer sak\u00e9? We could call it the \"3.3 Square Meter Bar.\"\n\nCRUTCHES: There's no room for customers.\n\nUME: How about a pachinko cash-in booth?\n\nTAKE: A box seat for the fireworks festival.\n\nUME: A ticket booth.\n\nCRUTCHES: Tickets for what?\n\nUME: If you want a ticket to the other world, I'll give you a discount.\n\n(MATSU, _who has been sleeping under a blanket, wakes up_.)\n\nMATSU ( _Still half asleep_ ):... A messenger from the other world?\n\nTAKE: Another of the last surviving human beings is here.\n\nCRUTCHES: Are human beings going to become extinct?\n\nMATSU: Yeah, yeah.\n\nUME: The world is coming to an end.\n\nCRUTCHES: I hadn't noticed.\n\nUME: Look at that.\n\nCRUTCHES: What?\n\nUME: You can see the clouds around Mount Fuji from here.\n\nCRUTCHES: I can't see Mount Fuji itself.\n\nTAKE: On a clear day you can.\n\nUME:... The clouds are glimmering gold.\n\nMATSU: Yes, they are.\n\nCRUTCHES: Are they?\n\nUME: They always shine that way the evening before a disaster.\n\nCRUTCHES: Disaster?\n\nUME ( _Nods_ ): Years ago, before the ANA crash. Before the big Hanshin earthquake, before the day the Aum cult spread the sarin gas in the subway, and the day before 9/11....\n\nCRUTCHES: You can predict things that happen in the United States as well?\n\nUME: I've lived on this riverbank for ten years. I always know, on the evening before when something is going to happen.\n\nCRUTCHES: Then tell it to the people.\n\nUME: I can't do that. These events are inevitable destiny.\n\nCRUTCHES: What do you do, then?\n\nTAKE: Providing is preventing.\n\n(TAKE _opens a small door on the ceiling and pulls down a cloth bag_.)\n\nUME: We are taking all possible measures to control the crisis.\n\nTAKE: We've secured emergency provisions.\n\nUME: We've got a shelter, too.\n\nCRUTCHES: A shelter?\n\nUME ( _Displaying a radio_ ): We can cope with any kind of crisis as long as we stay in here.\n\nTAKE: Earthquakes, lightning strikes, fire, my father, anything.\n\nUME: We can even cope with a nuclear war. It can withstand the explosion and keeps the radiation away, too.\n\nCRUTCHES: Really?\n\nUME: It's the latest model shelter.\n\nCRUTCHES: It wasn't built that way.\n\nMATSU: Well, I don't care if I die.\n\nUME: The Deva god will protect us.\n\nCRUTCHES: The Deva god?\n\nUME ( _Looking at the drawing on the wall_ ): Our guardian god here.\n\nCRUTCHES ( _Peers at the drawing_ ): Does it look like a Deva god?\n\nTAKE: He's carrying a fishing rod. He's that fishing freak from the movies.\n\n(MATSU _looks at_ MAN WITH CRUTCHES _and bursts into tears_.)\n\nMATSU:... The other day, my son visited me for the first time in twenty years. He's about the same age as you. He glared at me.\n\nTAKE: You should be kind to the elderly.\n\nMATSU: Get out.\n\nCRUTCHES:... I've notified you.\n\nTAKE: Be careful tomorrow.\n\nUME: Come visit us again.\n\n(MAN WITH CRUTCHES _exits_.)\n\nTAKE:... People cooled to us after we moved into this place.\n\nUME: They don't like us living in here.\n\nTAKE: It was abandoned; why shouldn't we?\n\n( _The Attic suddenly trembles_.)\n\nTAKE: Earthquake.\n\nUME: It's all right. It's quake proof.\n\nMATSU:... It's the kids.\n\nTAKE: They climbed on the roof.\n\nUME: It can handle the weight of the kids.\n\nTAKE: It can handle an elephant stepping on it.\n\n( _It seems that the Attic was lifted up and then thrown down_.)\n\nUME: They threw us in the river.\n\nTAKE:... We're floating.\n\nUME: Don't panic. We'll float.\n\nMATSU: Oh!\n\nTAKE: We're sinking!\n\nUME: Didn't you say this was the latest model... ?\n\n( _The water comes in from the crevices. They are sinking. The sound of bubbles. The three of them are swaying in the water_.)\n\nBLACKOUT\n\nFACTORY\n\n_The sparks are coming from a grinder grinding an iron frame. What we thought to be the sound of bombing and explosions is actually the sound of hammering and construction. We are inside a small factory. It_ ' _s where the Attics are manufactured. There is an Attic that is put on a worktable for someone to work on. It_ ' _s almost competed except the back and front walls._ MAN WITH CRUTCHES _is working with the grinder._ MAN WITH A CAP _is lying in the Attic. He is drawing something in a corner of a wall with a brush tied to the end of a rod._ OLDER BROTHER _is standing in the corner._ MAN WITH CRUTCHES _stops working._\n\nCRUTCHES: How did you find us?\n\nBROTHER:...\n\nCRUTCHES: You're the first person to discover that this is the place where the Attics are made.\n\nBROTHER: Is that so?\n\nCRUTCHES: Are you going to rat on us?... Do you want money?\n\nBROTHER: I didn't know what I would do when I found the manufacturer.... Now I know. I just wanted to know who it was.\n\nCRUTCHES: It is as you see it.\n\nBROTHER: Just you and your partner?\n\nCRUTCHES: Yeah.\n\nBROTHER ( _To_ MAN WITH A CAP): Are you drawing something?\n\nCAP:...\n\nCRUTCHES: Sorry, but he can't speak or sit up.\n\nBROTHER: It's his job to draw the trademark to complete the product. He also puts in the plugs and turns on the switches.\n\n(MAN WITH A CAP _is using another rod now, taking a dust cloth, touching the tools in the factory, and the like._ )\n\nBROTHER:... Are you brothers?\n\nCRUTCHES: An accident. Ten years ago.\n\nBROTHER:... With your older brother?\n\nCRUTCHES: He's my younger brother.\n\nBROTHER:...\n\nCRUTCHES: We liked bicycles. We often built them by ourselves. We might be the best double riders in the world.\n\nBROTHER:...\n\nCRUTCHES: I don't remember my first love, but I remember his.\n\nBROTHER:... What is the Attic Hunter?\n\nCRUTCHES: I heard that they call it that.\n\nBROTHER: Is it his self-portrait?\n\nCRUTCHES: It was originally a room for him. We made it the perfect size for him to lie inside.\n\nBROTHER:... Doesn't he use one?\n\nCRUTCHES: Looks like he can't be satisfied with his drawings.\n\nBROTHER: How long are you going to continue making them?\n\nCRUTCHES: Until he finishes the last one.\n\nBROTHER:...\n\nCRUTCHES: When we were kids, we wanted to make a time machine. Then we could go anywhere and see anybody. But a time machine is dangerous. We might not be able to come back.... There is only one way to call for help.\n\nBROTHER: What is it?\n\nCRUTCHES: Draw a large version of this picture.\n\nBROTHER: Then what happens?\n\nCRUTCHES: My brother comes to help me.\n\nBROTHER:...\n\nCRUTCHES: That's the rule we made a long time ago.\n\n(MAN WITH A CAP _pushes a buzzer on the factory wall with a long rod._ )\n\nCRUTCHES: Done.... This is the last one.\n\nCAP:...\n\n(MAN WITH A CAP _bushes another buzzer with the long rod._ )\n\nCRUTCHES ( _Listens to the buzzer_ ): It isn't perfect yet.\n\nBROTHER:... I'll take it.\n\nCRUTCHES:... All right.\n\nBROTHER: Can I go in?\n\nCRUTCHES: Go ahead.\n\n(OLDER BROTHER _enters the Attic. He sits beside_ MAN WITH A CAP. OLDER BROTHER _draws a large version of the Attic Hunter. Lights fade out. Deep darkness covers the space_.)\n\nBLACKOUT\n\nMEMORY\n\n_Drops of water are dripping, drawing intricate patterns like a cobweb. The sound of wind blowing through a hollow. We can see two vague shadows in the deep darkness. One of them is_ OLDER BROTHER. _The other is_ MAN WITH A CAP. _He looks like a young man dressed for climbing mountains. We hear faint voices from the darkness._\n\nMAN:... Looks like we're lost.\n\nBROTHER: Yeah.\n\nMAN: What shall we do?\n\nBROTHER: Don't panic at a time like this. Look 360 degrees around you, and you'll find a clue.\n\nMAN: That's just like you.\n\nBROTHER: I should retire soon.\n\nMAN: Why?\n\nBROTHER: I can't take a long vacation. I'm not a student anymore.\n\nMAN:... I'm sure we can find the way back.\n\nBROTHER: Don't you ever get lost?\n\nMAN:... When I get lost, I listen.\n\nBROTHER: What do you hear?\n\nMAN:... Sound of the wind. Sound of water boiling in the kitchen. Sound of a railroad crossing. Sound of an old electric fan. And the sound of you spinning the globe. The sound I heard while I was hiding in the Attic with you.\n\nBROTHER:... I see.\n\nMAN: Do you remember?\n\nBROTHER: Yes, I do.\n\nMAN: Really?\n\nBROTHER: If I get lost in the future, I'll go back there.\n\nMAN:... Haven't you noticed yet? This is it.\n\nBROTHER: Where are you?\n\nMAN: I've been in the same place all along.\n\nBROTHER:...\n\nMAN: My favorite place in the world. The top of the world. The secret base for adventure. The place we promised where we'd meet each other again whatever happens.\n\nBROTHER:... Then I've arrived at last?\n\nMAN:... Yes, you have.\n\n( _The darkness deepens_.... _Only the sound of the wind remains_.)\n\nCURTAIN\n_FIVE DAYS IN MARCH_\n\nOKADA TOSHIKI\n\nTRANSLATED BY AYA OGAWA\n\nOkada Toshiki, _Five Days in March_ , directed by Okada Toshiki, chelfitsch, March 2006. (Photograph by Yokota T\u014dru; courtesy of precog)\n\nOkada Toshiki (b. 1973) is a playwright, director, and novelist. His work for the stage is a unique marriage of performance art and the hyperreal colloquial dialogue innovated by older dramatists like Hirata Oriza. A native of Yokohama, Okada collaborated with the dancer Tetsuka Natsuko to establish in 1997 their own theater company, chelfitsch, which is baby talk, the playwright explained, for the English word \"selfish.\" The distinctively spasmodic gestures and contortions of Okada's performers bear no relation to the text or action being related, thereby signifying a gap between word and deed. This is similar to the gap in modern life between thought and action that Miyagi Satoshi, director of the Ku Na'uka Theater Company, also uses in his bunraku-like productions. Although words no longer seem to reflect our true feelings, our bodies betray us in many subtle ways. Okada's dramaturgy, for which he credits Bertolt Brecht's _Verfremsdungseffekt_ (alienation effect), marks a division between the fictional story or drama spoken by his characters and the actual presence of the actors enacting it. Despite the shock appeal of his physical performance pieces, Okada is still a consummate storyteller and a keen critic of contemporary society. His plays are made up of monologues and dialogues about Japan's disaffected young people and their awkward place in a country beset by economic and political challenges. The language is slangy and idiomatic, a startlingly realistic record of the way that young Japanese men and women speak today and an accurate reflection of their present preoccupations and anxieties. Works like _Enjoy_ ( _Enjoi_ , 2006) and _Free Time_ ( _Fur \u012b taimu_, 2008) address the phenomenon of \"freeters,\" twenty-somethings forced to work in the shadow economy of contract and part-time jobs because the postwar system of lifetime employment no longer exists. _Five Days in March_ ( _Sangatsu no itsukukan_ ), which won the Kunio Kishida Award for best play of 2004, is set during the previous year, during the invasion of Iraq, when Japan once again was forced to reassess its dubious role in international affairs. Against a backdrop of antiwar demonstrations in the streets of Tokyo, a couple uses sex as a way to connect to each other and to the world that they feel they cannot find in politics or any other social activity.\n\nSCENE 1\n\nACTOR 1: So, I'm thinking we're going to start this Five Days in March thing, but on the first day, well, first of all, I'm thinking we'll kick off with setting this story in March 2003, but when he woke up in the morning, this is kind of the story about this man named Minobe, but he was in a hotel when he woke up in the morning, and he thought like, why am I in a hotel, and on top of that there's like this woman, who the hell is she I don't know this chick, and he's all thinking like she's asleep and stuff, and like, but he remembered right away, oh that's right last night, like, oh yeah last night I got totally wasted, and I remember now, this must be the love hotel in Shibuya, he remembered right away.... And so I'm thinking we're going to do the story of the real day 1, oh last night I was in Roppongi, like, um, Roppongi because back in March 2003 was before they made like Roppongi Hills, that's where we wanna start this story, but now Roppongi station is like totally when you're coming up from the subway and when you get above ground, you know how you're going downhill if you want to come toward Azabu, back then right where the Hills are now there's like a pedestrian bridge, but around there, it was a normal, back then, it was still like a normal straight path you could walk right, that's about the time of this story I'm thinking about, this story takes place, but over there, there's like this club with live music, and I'm thinking about starting this story when he went to this club to hear some music, but I was thinking I would talk about how so the live music there was really great but, and also, I mean I say also, but I'm thinking I'll talk about how there was this girl he met that day at the club, and he kind of just afterward with this girl totally hooked up with her or like and, not only that but went crazy and hooked up without any protection and stuff but before that, or like, first off he went to the club on day 1 of the five days in March but like ( _By this moment,_ ACTOR 2 _has entered._ ACTOR 1 _indicates himself and_ ACTOR 2 _as he continues_ ) that day, the two of them, man and man, went to the club, see, that, um, there were two men who were like going to go to Roppongi right, so that's where it starts with the two men, that's how the story starts... The way that road goes downhill toward West Azabu was, around that area where before you get to the part where the slope gets seriously way steep, there's a club that's basically facing the main drag, this pretty minor band from like Canada was playing that night, and the reason why they went to see something like that was because, well, but that club had really awesome music, like that was really awesome, man, actually it was just one of the two of the guys who thought that it was \"a really awesome club\" and was like \"totally really moved, like honestly it wasn't like I had high expectations or anything like that, but while I had left my guard down and wasn't expecting anything special, the music was like unexpectedly really awesome, and I was seriously totally moved,\" they were drinking beer at that moment, but that club was or, rather, that day there was a one-drink minimum, so that's why they were drinking beer or, rather, the music had finished already, and they were just hanging out after and he'd already drunk his one drink so his second drink was, he was on his second beer, but \"But there's this, that music probably, on the level of skill, that and wasn't really, probably if I were thinking along the good-to-lame spectrum, because I'm not really knowledgeable about music, really, so this isn't a professional you know so, but it was pretty much, completely lame probably, this thing of performance or like, yeah, but that's what I was thinking while I was listening to the music and feeling moved, but\" and that was like not necessarily the first time I'd thought that but \"the importance of that kind of thing in the end is _not_ about technique and stuff is, like in live music is like that and, in a way everything has something of that, I think, but I thought that was admirable, or like not admirable but more, that thing itself, that thing in and of itself is, probably really important, was what I was thinking or like, that's what I think, yeah, you understand what I'm saying? Am I drunk, and has what I've been talking about perhaps been complete nonsense?\" I asked, and \"Nah, I get it,\" was what she said, so \"Oh, this girl might actually get it,\" I thought, and \"but I guess it's pretty obvious, for her to be at a club like this is pretty, I mean, she'd have to have that kind of quality to know about this kind of club,\" is what I thought, actually, and convinced myself in that moment, kind of\n\nACTOR 2: Remember he said that there were two men and that one of them had hooked up on day 1, right, but to be accurate it was actually pretty late at night, so really it was the second day, that's the story, but, I mean, the day of the hook-up,\n\nACTOR 1: And then the chick said like \"For me the songs or like the music or like the songs, were good but, they were good but, you know, how in between he made those intros, wasn't that super awesome? I was really impressed\" she said, and I was like \"Oh wow you understand English, I don't understand any of it, huh, then you understood what that the guy was saying, it was like about Iraq, right, that's about all I could catch but,\" and she was like \"Yeah, he was talking about Iraq and stuff, the thing is what he was saying was, um you know, like he came to Japan, right, and he's staying in a hotel, right, and that's like in Shibuya, where he's staying, so this morning he got up early to take a walk because he was in Japan after all, so he first he thought Akihabara, he thought he'd go there first but then, like, in like Shibuya, he ran into the protest coming through, and then so he kinda joined up with it together and marched.\"\n\nACTOR 2: Oh really\n\nACTOR 1: And then like, of course, it was the first time I ever participated in a protest in Japan, but, like, protests in Japan are interesting, unique, really unique, the vocalist, he kept saying,\n\nACTOR 2: Oh really\n\nACTOR 1: That was like interesting, and stuff like that, was what he was saying, there were some people who were playing music on their, like, boom box while they were marching, and stuff like that, and there were a few people were singing along to that music, and stuff\n\nACTOR 2: Yeah, oh really\n\nACTOR 1: Yeah\n\nACTOR 2: You really understand English, were you, like, in America or abroad somewhere?\n\nACTOR 1: Huh, yeah, sort of\n\nACTOR 2: Study abroad program?\n\nACTOR 1: Oh, yeah, right study abroad sort of\n\nACTOR 2: Oh really\n\nACTOR 1: Also on home stay and stuff\n\nACTOR 2: Oh really, huh, where did you go?\n\nACTOR 1: Huh, America\n\nACTOR 2: \"Oh really,\" he said and then, \"Huh, if you were in America, then it must be like, you wanna fuck?\" he said, and the two of them just cabbed over to Shibuya and disappeared... that's how that story went and the other guy, named Azuma, who was with Minobe that night, didn't have anything as palatable as what happened to Minobe happen to him at all, in fact, after the music was over, the trains had stopped running too, so he couldn't get home so, or, like, he could have made it home if he'd rushed but, like Minobe, has suddenly disappeared, he thought, and, like, he started to feel like well, whatever and stuff, he picked up some chick, so he wandered around till morning in the Roppongi area, but that story just now was what happened on the morning of day 5 when Azuma and Minobe met up again, at a diner, at the break of dawn, that's when he'd heard this whole story, no, Minobe ended up staying in the love hotel with that girl for three days straight, spending the whole entire time in Shibuya apparently, but so this story is what Azuma heard from Minobe when they met up after those three days but, \"Did you guys stay in the same place for the whole three days?\" he asked and\n\nACTOR 1: Yeah\n\nACTOR 2: Huh, that's like, don't they get suspicious, do they care? or like, you can do that kind of thing, huh?\n\nACTOR 1: Nah, you can do that sort of thing, or like I didn't know either, but we did,\n\nACTOR 2: \"Oh really, you'd never spent several nights in a love hotel before?\" of course, I'd only ever stayed single nights myself,\n\nACTOR 1: Nah, probably in love hotels like probably anything is a go, right, you can do anything as long as you pay... like in the guidebooks for, like, foreigners, but super poor foreign tourists they say that the love hotels in Japan are these super cheap hotels, and there're a lot of foreigners who stay in them a lot, she was saying\n\nACTOR 2: Oh really\n\nACTOR 1: She did the whole foreign exchange thing and went to America in high school or something, and, like, you know, that guy was talking between songs at the concert that night, she could tell me everything he was saying,\n\nACTOR 2: \"Oh really, so she could speak English\"\n\nACTOR 1: \"That like guy, the vocalist, the hotel he was staying in Japan was in Shibuya but, with the other band members, and they all went out to like take a walk in Shibuya, or was it with everyone or just that guy alone, I'm not sure about that but, and then you know that antiwar protest, he saw it, and then he kinda joined up with it and marched\"\n\nACTOR 2: Oh really, he joined up, so you can join up with those that casually?\n\nACTOR 1: \"I don't know but, and then protests in Japan are like, maybe in foreign countries the police don't really follow them like glue, I don't know, but anyway in Japan they're practically like surrounded by the police, and the protest marches are under watch by them, not exactly but they follow them, and that's what was really interesting about Japanese protests, was the story, apparently, not interesting but like particular\"\n\nACTOR 2: You can just slip in that easily into those protests, huh?\n\nACTOR 1: \"Nah, it might be that that one happened to be an open protest, maybe, I don't know but, also they were playing songs on their boom box and stuff\" is what she was said\n\nACTOR 2: Oh really\n\nACTOR 1: Yeah, so, isn't that amazing? You understand English, did you go abroad to like America or somewhere? I asked, and then she said like \"Yeah sort of,\" study abroad? I asked and then she said like \"Oh yeah, right, sort of study abroad,\" oh really, I said, and because I think girls who speak English are kinda hot and then she said like \"I studied abroad but aside from that I did home stays several times and stuff\" oh really, huh, so where'd you go? I asked, and she said like \"Huh, America\" oh really, I said... and then seriously I don't remember a single thing after that, that's how his story went, this guy Minobe really didn't remember anything but \"Wait, seriously, you don't even remember screwing, isn't that fucked up?\" Azuma asked him but he said, \"Nah, it's not exactly that I don't remember, I mean I have an image of doing it but I'm not sure when that was, it might have been the girl before,\" and Azuma told him, \"That really is fucked up,\" and Minobe agreed, \"Seriously, it's such a waste not to remember,\" but like that's not what he meant by fucked up, you know, and then when he woke up he thought like, \"why am I in a hotel,\" and on top of that there's like this woman, who the hell is she I don't know this chick, and he thought like, \"she's like asleep\" and that's what, but actually he does quickly remember, that's what ends up happening but ( _He exits._ )\n\nSCENE 2\n\nACTOR 3 ( _Entering_ ): So, from here, the story turns over to day 1 of the Five Days in March for Azuma, who got separated from the Minobe guy, but, from the night of day 1 to the morning of day 2, nothing like the hook-up that Minobe had was happening for Azuma or anything, but he was just waiting for the first train with no activity till morning and was apparently just wandering around Roppongi kinda aimlessly, but actually, for Azuma, there was a possibility at the club or like, Azuma that night was secretly, to be honest Azuma thought there was a girl who was maybe going to come to the club, and apparently, there was maybe a chance that Azuma could maybe hook up with that chick, but in the end that girl didn't show up, so after the concert he was like \"Oh Minobe's taken off\" and \"Oh the trains have stopped running\u2014what the heck am I gonna do by myself till morning?\" Azuma thought, so then that's where I thought we'd start, but \"I might as well get out of here\" is where he left the club, but even as he left, there was this lingering thought in his mind, \"Oh\u2014that girl, person didn't show up I guess\" and like \"the Roppongi night is really cold,\" and stuff like that was what was going through his mind, but Azuma hadn't told Minobe, \"There was maybe this kind of girl who might come\" or anything, but he talked to me about it a lot, and that's why I'm able to talk about it, because I'd listened to him so I know, but I had met up with Azuma in the evening of the day after the concert, and I had a little, we met up because I needed to return the money I had borrowed from Azuma, and so now we're going to do when I heard that story from Azuma, that's the thing we're going to do now,\n\nACTOR 2: Nah, really that's not it\n\nACTOR 3: Oh yeah\n\nACTOR 2: Nah, or like, that person was a little, nah, really, there was this like \"I'm gonna pass on this one\" thing, well definitely as a woman's, OK, OK, as a girl's, nah, but really, it wasn't at all like I was thinking about whether this person like \"I wonder if she'll be there\" or like, there was no, this kind of, feeling of the chemistry or anything, in fact just the opposite, the opposite or like,\n\nACTOR 3: Opposite\n\nACTOR 2: \"Opposite, opposite, but it might not have even been the opposite or anything,\" this guy, um, remember there was the concert, well about two days before that, really... \"We just met at a movie theater so it's like, I mean we did chat a little bit for some reason but, already though, just from that little chat it was really like 'whoa,' like truly, I'm sorry but please, thanks\u2014but no thanks, or like, I don't know what to say you know\"\n\nACTOR 3: So she was the kinda girl who was not at all your type\n\nACTOR 2: Nah, or like well, yeah, her appearance was see, so-so, cute, cute or like, what is it, kinda, well it doesn't really matter but, but it's not like, \"I can't because she's cute,\" I mean, it's not like I'm not into ugly girls or anything OK, but it was totally, what is it, nah, first of all really, we met at the movie theater and just chatted a little and there was totally an aura like \"whoa\" really like... ( _By this point,_ ACTRESS 1 _enters._ ACTOR 2 _indicates_ ACTRESS 1 _as he continues._ ) This is the girl here, the person I had secretly been thinking \"she might show up,\" I was talking about this person see, but, um, to explain who she is, it, and also, why I even knew about the concert that night, which was like \"hey, pretty obscure\" that was the thing I was going to talk about next, but and that is related to this person also but,... I think I said earlier that the band playing the concert today was a Canadian band, but right now they're totally, in fact there's this wretchedly minor movie from Canada, it's flopping pretty badly actually, I went to see it right, nah, I, really like to go see movies that I hear is totally a dud, or like, to tell you the truth the more a movie flops to the extent that it doesn't even inspire rumors about how bad it is, the more interested I am, to actually go and watch a movie and to like experience \"Wow, it's true, this is pretty bad,\" and stuff, I know that's cynical of me, but it's kind of a hobby of mine, so then to get to the point, the music for that movie was made by the band we went to see today, there was that, right, so then at the movie theater there were some flyers for the concert, live performances in Roppongi on such-and-such day, it announced, and it was like, through that connection I kind of, in the end, felt compelled, I mean the substance of the movie itself was really run-of-the-mill, kinda, \"the story of an adolescent girl and blablabla\" sort of, \"who cares\" kind of a movie,\n\nACTRESS 1: It was the sort of \"who cares\" kind of, totally, yes\n\nACTOR 2: And you couldn't really say \"but at least the music was good\" either, but (ACTRESS 1 _lurches_ ) nobody's going to this concert, I thought ( _To_ ACTOR 3), it's like weird right, for her to act like she had the chair pulled out from under her here\n\nACTOR 3: Yeah.\n\nACTOR 2: That movie was like, it was a late show you know, that started at 9 o'clock, so then you can't get inside until like around 8:45, or maybe it's later, fifty past, so it was really cold, because it's winter, and I was standing at the entrance of the movie theater wearing my coat but, oh, but the reason why I was standing was that, that day I had two advance tickets to that movie, but the other person was, or like well, she was basically like this, my girlfriend, but she said something like \"Sorry, I just can't get out of work after all\" and couldn't come is what happened, so I was like \"Oh yeah? Drop dead,\" and so then what am I going to do with this extra ticket, was the thing, and so that eventually turned into I'll sell it to someone who doesn't already have a ticket and who's going to buy a ticket at the theater, or it didn't turn into, but I decided that's what I'd do, and so then the first person to show up was, well, her, I asked, \"Oh did you come to see the movie?\" right, \"Do you have a ticket?\" is what I said, oh I kind of don't really know, but I thought maybe she mistook me for a weird, you know, I mean weird, you know, you know, I don't even know but, I said \"Nah, excuse me, today I was planning to come with a friend, you see, so these two tickets, I bought them, right, but like so then the other person kind of couldn't make it, it turns out, so I have one extra ticket,\" I said, \"So, if you like, or like, I'd be really happy if you'd buy my advance ticket,\" but then because she looked young I said, \"But maybe, um, are you a student, because if you are, then the student price ticket you can buy at the box office downstairs might be cheaper, so buying my ticket would be, in that case, you know,\" but then she said, \"Oh I'm not in school now or anything,\" so then it was like, \"Oh really\" and then it was like \"I was going to buy a ticket at the door, so I'll buy it,\" so then, well, I sold it, so that's like,... so then well, we were talking a little until the movie started, \"Do you watch a lot of movies,\" \"Oh, yes, I guess I do,\" kind of stuff, and then well we watched and it was over, and then it was like \"OK then\"... ( _To_ ACTOR 3) so then afterward she kinda, keeps talking to me, or like, kinda, she tried to leave the movie theater with me, you know, saying stuff like \"How did you like it? What did you think of it?\" and when I said \"Nah, it was kinda, well, a normal girl's coming-of-age kinda, yeah, like, who cares kind of movie, wasn't it\" she said something like \"Oh yes, it was kinda the sort of 'who cares,' totally, yes,\" and then she found that flyer and said like \"Oh, they're like playing a concert!\" and \"Oh, it's a concert of, oh, a concert by the band that did the music for the movie, and that was like, oh, this is tomorrow and the day after isn't it, it is, they're doing it, wow, maybe I'll go,\" and you know her saying \"maybe I'll go\" was a total lie, coming out of her mouth like that,\n\nACTOR 3: Yeah\n\nACTOR 2: So then she's like \"So do you want to buy the soundtrack and have a good listen for one?\" like, for one? what's \"for one,\" I thought like,\n\nACTRESS 1: So do you want to buy the soundtrack and have a good listen for one?\n\nACTOR 2: Um, but I don't know about soundtracks\u2014maybe it's just me, but, I don't know, it's kind of like soundtracks are never played for long, or, pretty generally speaking, aren't soundtracks all sort of like that?\n\nACTRESS 1: Oh, yes, it's like I might totally know what you mean, it's like I totally feel it,\n\nACTOR 2: Uh, it's just, I think there's this thing with soundtracks, or is it just me, of generally getting bored of listening to it pretty quickly, what do you think about that, I'm pretty, as far as generalizations go,\n\nACTRESS 1: Yes, there is totally that, yes\n\nACTOR 2: Yes, there was this time I realized that, and since then, I've been trying out this not buying any soundtracks thing,\n\nACTRESS 1 ( _To the audience_ ): \"Uh-huh, Yes I know what you mean, I think that's so like, such a good point, yes,\" isn't this guy totally awkward, I mean I am too so, and that's why I felt this really comfortable feeling with him, like it pulled on my heartstrings, like really, you might be like what do you mean heartstrings, but when I met him, there was this, he just seemed pure, but also, whenever I felt that way toward someone, in the past, they always had a girlfriend, and there was this thing like I thought, so this time's probably the same, so there was that, and then I was like fuck it, I'm just gonna take him, I didn't really know why, I felt so like forceful, but I said ( _To_ ACTOR 2), \"Oh, so I guess I shouldn't buy this soundtrack, huh?\"\n\nACTOR 2: Oh uh but, you should just get it, why not?\"\n\nACTRESS 1: Ah\u2014yes, well isn't there this thing like everybody's got their own taste or, yeah, taste, right? So there's this depending on who you are, it might be OK to buy soundtracks.\n\nACTOR 2: Uh-huh.\n\nACTRESS 1: Yes, um, so do you want to go to the concert with me, day after tomorrow?\n\nACTOR 2: Uh, the day after tomorrow, you mean the band from the movie?\n\nACTRESS 1: Yes.\n\nACTOR 2: Oh\u2014but if it's the music from that movie, this movie fell flat, even in the reviews and stuff\n\nACTRESS 1: Oh, but when you actually see it, it's totally, yes\n\nACTOR 2: So like the music from the movie's probably just as lame\n\nACTRESS 1: Yes the probability is pretty high, I'd say\n\nACTOR 2: Oh but like for me, there's actually enjoyment in going to see flops\n\nACTRESS 1: Oh really?\n\nACTOR 2: Yeah, I mean I don't know.\n\nACTRESS 1: Oh, um, well I like totally lucked out today but, I was so stupid\u2014I should've bought advance tickets, but I didn't and I just showed up here, and it was like super lucky to be able to get this sweet ticket, that would've been like are you out of your mind prices at the door, so I mean I'm totally like thank you so much, you know\n\nACTOR 2: Yeah\u2014\n\nACTRESS 1: Whoa, but if you had an extra ticket today, weren't you planning to take a date, actually, uh\u2014is that like, I'm sorry, um, but can you tell me your name, only if it's OK, I mean if you don't want to you can just forget it but I feel like, won't you tell me your first name, or it could even just be a nickname\u2014it'd be fine if you want to just call me Miffy, but.\n\nACTOR 2: Uh\u2014\n\nACTRESS 1: Yes even like your handle, or whatever would be cool, I'm just asking because there's like I don't know what should I call you thing, um, oh, is this too weird of me, it's really, is there a wigged out feeling like are you like \"oh my god how'd I get stuck with this crazy girl\" what can I do, like, um, um, how about I'll just give you a name, I'm really sorry I'll just choose a really convenient name, is that all right?\n\nACTOR 2: Uh\u2014\n\nACTRESS 1: So let's say Mr. Sato, yes, Mr. Sato, you have a girlfriend, right? Like, oh wow, yes, um, it's totally like, is there a like, the silence is deafening, you know, exactly like, there I've gone and done it again, or like, oh my god I wanna die like, Sato, like, yes, actually, I'm, you know those fake food displays you know what I'm talking about at restaurants, you know not the high-end restaurants, but more like family-type cafeterias, you know, where there's this thing where they have the fake curry and ramen and pancakes, stuff from the menu on display, you know, they're called like dummies or samples or, so that's what I make at work\n\nACTOR 2: Oh really?\n\nACTRESS 1: Yes, so is it OK if I ask you to make a final decision, not like about what we were talking about before but\n\nACTOR 2: Uh, yes\n\nACTRESS 1: And what I mean by final, is that like you really have to pick just one option, there's like three options for me, all right, um, Option 1: Mr. Sato will give me his address\n\nACTOR 2: Uhhhh\u2014( _He exits._ )\n\nACTRESS 1: Option 2: Mr. Sato gives me his e-mail; Option 3: Mr. Sato give me his cell phone number, though it could be your home number too, or are you like \"whoa, no way to any of those\" or what do you think, are you like \"no way\" to all of them?\n\nSCENE 3\n\nACTRESS 1: Yes, anyway that's kind of the way that the young girl failed in her conquest or like sunk even before even getting to the conquest, or like, just sunk, like suicide bomb BOOM, or like, you've really gone and done it again, arg arg arg, you really can't ever leave the house again for the rest of your life, kind of, it's better if you just don't go out like, you have no place on Earth, really I think I really just want to go to Mars and like, but Miffy did succeed in getting Sato's address actually, although it's not certain whether it was his real address, but Miffy was thinking \"I'll write a letter from Mars,\" even though she was pretty sure \"If I were to write a letter from Mars I'd have to address it, and I think there's a pretty big chance that that address is probably fake,\" but she also imagined, \"But even if it runs out to be an unknown addressee, it probably wouldn't be returned all the way to Mars, or like if it were returned, then that would just confirm what I'd predicted, though still, the shock would be pretty great, but mailing from Mars there's a part of you that's like whatever happens to that letter you'll never know, and another part that's like you'll never have to find out that the address was fake and the letter never reached him, Mars is psychologically healthy,\" like Miffy did you blow yourself up at the movies, and afterward, Miffy, she lives with her Mom and Dad in their house right now, but she has her own room and she lives there by herself, but when Miffy came home after blowing herself up she got online at home, Miffy has her own Web site, but she wrote on her journal from her computer, \"Today was an absolutely important day in my life, and the reason why is that, today, I decided that I am definitely going to Mars, something happened that made me realize clearly that I can no longer remain on Earth, although I had suspected this vaguely for a while up till now, but today it's like I really felt it, and what it was that triggered this was something that I cannot write down in detail here, but in one word, I had done it, again, to a mistaken person, and on top of that he turned out to be a really awkward guy, and probably, or like most definitely he thought I was some weird chick, although he himself was the weird one, and I was even weirder than him so, it was really, I've done it again or like, that's why even though I already knew that nobody wanted me to remain on Earth any longer, I had today, furthermore, increased the number of people who thought I should not be on Earth by one person, of my own accord, that's why I was like I should really go to Mars, if I remain on Earth any longer, the number of that kind of people is only going to grow to amazing heights I thought, and I just discovered the other day that there's this thing, apparently, this summer, Mars is going to be closer to Earth than it has ever been, apparently, so I did have the thought that this would be good timing for me to get to Mars, and so I'm secretly making plans and stuff, but when I write posts on my home page about how I really want to get there soon, and I always write these entries in my study, but I mean though it's called a study, it's not as if I actually study there anymore of course, but for me, even though I'm not studying, since my childhood it was, I mean my study, but when I was a kid I studied quite a lot actually, I was among those who actually liked studying quite a bit, but of course I was just a kid, but there's a sense that I feel quite nostalgic for that part of me, or it's a very precious part so, from my point of view, this room should still be referred to as the study, and that's how things are but, to my parents I just call it my room, like normal, but like now, when I'm updating my home page or writing in my diary like this, or reading comic books, or drawing comics, which in fact at times has been the case, since I still do stuff like that in the study, but when I am doing stuff like that in the study, there are times when suddenly I begin to feel like this study is this kind of small spaceship, and like the study is tearing away from the rest of the house and becomes independent and, well, is flying but, I mean it's this tiny little spaceship in the vast outer space and, it's really the air and stuff that's so quiet, transparent or like, the sense of solitude or something is at this really great feeling of, what is it, I'm filled with the feeling that what I love the most is being all alone by myself after all, and if I open the door, in zero gravity, the airless air of outer space would come seeping in, and there's this feeling that if I pull the curtain away from the window right now, there would definitely be the view of the universe, and it's this intense feeling sometimes, and in those moments I am, no matter what anyone else says, free, or like I'm wishing I could always have that feeling you know, or like I totally feel that way, but I should just get carried away by it and really get whisked off to Mars just like that or like, because Earth is all like, there's a war starting, and China's all messed up with this SARS thing, and Earth is all like gonna run out of oil in a few decades, they're saying, but I would still, thinking logically, totally be alive, hello, like, on the one hand, Earth and stuff is, I think it's kind of done, it's already game over, they say that if you breathe the air in areas where they've blown up dirty bombs and stuff you totally get cancer, or like dirty bombs are not cool or like that's why Earth is finished already on so many levels, really, Mars and stuff is way more, I mean I don't think it has to be Mars either but Jupiter and stuff, but definitely we'd be better off thinking about how to seriously escape from Earth to another, like a star somewhere or a planet, starting now, really, for sure, everybody! I tend to get overwhelmed by thoughts like that actually, or like... whoa, it's kind of like, I just thought as I was writing in this diary but, after all, I kind of suddenly fell for this person I met at the theater today, man, or so then I swear it was this, I completely made the wrong move-type-deal, I mean even this diary entry is wrong you know, or like I know this, but I'm doing it anyway, and that's around where I have a hyperactive personality\" and stuff, and when Miffy wrote this and uploaded it, it was March 20 or 19 at like three in the morning or something, right when there was about thirty-one hours left in the forty-eight-hour countdown where the U.S. demanded Hussein's abdication from Iraq, and if this abdication didn't take place within forty-eight hours a war was going to break out, but well this is enough about Miffy,\n\nSCENE 4\n\nACTRESS 2 ( _Enters_ ): This is a separate story but, this story well takes place after more than thirty-one hours have passed and the war had actually started, there's this woman named Yukki, and on March 20 she was, um, so the war on Iraq began on March 20, but at that moment I had some errands to run down at Shimokita so I was by nearby Shibuya station, a little bit in front of the turnstiles for the Inokashira line, but at that moment, there was like, from the station you can see that building with the glass facade right, from there, what is that? there was a huge swelling noise coming from there, like what _is_ that noise, was coming from there, and it turned out to be a protest, but I was just watching from there, but around that time, right around that time, there were tons of marches in places like Shibuya, like pretty frequently, and this Yukki was, during that whole time in that area, she was staying at a fancy hourly hotel, near D\u014dgenzaka, in Shibuya, for five days straight, but\n\nACTOR 3: Um, now we're going to do the story about how Minobe woke up in the morning, and there was some woman he'd never seen before, but from the point of view of a woman named Yukki,\n\nACTRESS 2: At the beginning like on the first day and stuff, it was right after we met right, so we totally had sex like a bunch of times, without any rest between, maybe just talk a little and then right away, next round, kind of, but after about three times, you know he gets tired, right, and just falls asleep, so, I think like maybe I'll sleep, too, then, so I go to sleep, right, and about two hours go by, right, even though really I don't know if it's been two hours or what, but you know the rooms in those places don't have windows, so when you wake up in those kinds of places, you can't tell at all, but then like he woke up and then he like starts touching me again, so I woke up, and as we're kind of groping each other, it's kind of like another round, or like so this kept going on for two whole days, but after a while I couldn't tell any more what time it was on which day and in one of those moments, I mean I had a watch but I hadn't looked at it, like I was not looking at it on purpose, like aren't there times you think you want to be surprised?\n\n\"Oh, it's only the second day, I thought it was already about the fourth day\" and it was like totally, a time warp... after we did it, we'd talk, right, looking at the ceiling, right, and then, it'd be after the second or like the third time, oh, no wait, it was totally more, it was after like the tenth time, but, and this was totally hysterical, he said like \"A while ago we, you know, the first time,\" he said like \"we got carried away and didn't use anything, huh,\" he said and \"do you think it's OK?\" like he says this after all this time, I thought it was pretty hysterical but, hm? OK? Is he talking about STDs? Or babies? It turned out to be babies, but we'd done it easily more than ten times, and not only had we never used anything any of those times, but, right, you know how those places only have two condoms, they only have two, and of course if you want, you can pay additional for more,... but anyway they only come with two, right, you know, that's the convention, but like why is it two, do they have some data about the national average being two, or not two but twice?\n\nThose kinds of places, I mean, if you buy additional ones, they're probably expensive, the Matsukiyo pharmacy would definitely be better, we agreed on that, so we did it two more times, using the guys that came with the room, which, that itself is also pretty hysterical, but and then we went outside once, and when we asked the person at the hotel, we want to leave and come right back, they were like, that's fine, so it was totally OK so, \"I thought it wouldn't be OK, but apparently it's fine,\" \"Oh really? Then let's go outside,\" and we went out, and when we looked at the time, it was the morning of the third day, like ten o'clock or something, really I thought it'd be around the evening of the second day, but, then when I said that, he was also thinking \"Oh I was thinking it was about that too,\" and I was saying like \"I, you know how once in a while it's not at all the time that you thought it was, I really love that,\" and he was thinking like oh really, and said like, \"It's kinda, right, like a time warp, which makes me pretty happy,\" and she was thinking oh really, and then first off, we went shopping at Matsukiyo's and bought about three dozen but, it was pretty unlikely by that time for us to use up all three dozen, totally like in the end, during the second half, our pace totally fell off and, and then, right, we were like, wait a second, have we gone through two whole days without eating anything? and then we were kind of like, \"oh yeah, I totally forgot about that,\" like aren't we really just a couple of beasts? which totally cracked us up, and then we were like what should we eat, and in Shibuya on weekdays, you know you see a lot of those lunch buffet places when you're in Shibuya during the day? We were like, let's go to some place like that and stuff our faces so that we can prepare to fuck our brains out when we get back to the hotel, because we are so-called beasts after all, but it was pretty unlikely by that time for us to use up all three dozen, like in the end during the second half the pace totally fell off, but we did use up two dozen.\n\nACTRESS 1: Yukki and her then boyfriend, well, this guy and Yukki had mutually agreed that they'd be together for five days only, and the two kind of decided that they were going to stick to this restriction, and they spent five days in March together in Shibuya in this love hotel together, but they were really absolutely strict about limiting their fling to those five days and beyond that, they apparently didn't even exchange addresses or phone numbers or e-mail addresses with each other, but the decision to do this hadn't been made at this point, it wasn't until later on this day when they got back to the hotel that they were going to do this, but like they're going to go into detail about that a little later, but like I don't know what the two of them were thinking at this point exactly, but like probably they weren't thinking much at all (ACTRESS 2 _exits_ ), then this Yukki went with the guy to this 950-yen Indian food buffet they have on Center Street, and she was like \"Oh it's a little pricey but whatever,\" and totally stuffed her face, and she ordered a lassi to boot, which cost extra, 250 yen to boot, and she gave him a sip, and the reason why, even though she was like \"Well, it's pricey, but, maybe it's all right,\" was that she was also really kind of having fun, and was thinking, \"Doesn't it feel like we're on a trip? Like even though it's just Shibuya, isn't it fun, like doesn't it feel like we're in a foreign country?\" and \"I really feel like we're sightseeing, somehow it's so much fun, I was thinking, I mean, here we are in Shibuya, but it doesn't feel like Shibuya, seriously this is such a blast, and then, it felt like we were playing into that feeling of it being Shibuya, but not Shibuya, like, for instance, not leaving the restaurant until we'd eaten so much that it was like 'we can't possibly eat any more!' and then we heard this, uh, crazy mounting noise coming from toward the Shibuya Scramble intersection, we heard a noise that made us go like, what the hell, and that was, wow, precisely when this huge protest was going by, oh, and we were like oh look at the protest and we pulled each other by the hand to get closer and the protest was pretty packed, oh, and the impact of being in the middle of it, live, was pretty raw, I thought, but\"\n\nACTOR 3: And, they were like, oh yeah, what about the war, when the huge vision screen on the Tsutaya building was showing the headlines about how the cruise missile air strike on Baghdad had started, and they were like, \"Oh, it's started, after all,\" and watched the march and stuff for a little bit, and pretty much headed right back to the hotel, but, anyway we're going to do a little bit from the march.\n\n(ACTOR 3 _and_ ACTRESS 1 _exit._ )\n\nSCENE 5\n\n(ACTOR 4 _and_ ACTOR 5 _enter._ )\n\nACTOR 4: Oh so now we're going to take it from the protest.\n\n(ACTOR 4 _and_ ACTOR 5 _line up side by side and begin walking_.)\n\nACTOR 4 ( _After a while_ ): Aaaah\u2014\n\n( _After that, they walk for a long time in silence. Then:_ )\n\nACTOR 4:... this was like, me and Yasui are friends and we were lined up walking along in the protest and talking, um so just a little background, the two of us were in the line that was totally, to be frank, the line was actually this wide ( _Indicates a width of about three intervals_ ) but Yasui and I were, this is Yasui-kun by the way, off on the side there's this line made up of people who weren't that into it but who were like we're participating in the march too, and that's more of the line that we were in but... oh, so, we're going to take it from that one part of the protest again, now,\n\n(ACTOR 4 _and_ ACTOR 5 _line up side by side and begin walking_.)\n\nACTOR 4 ( _After a while_ ): Aaaah\u2014\n\n( _After that, they walk for a long time in silence. Then:_ )\n\nACTOR 4: The lyrics go \"You don't have to be Number One,\" but it's like who the hell are you, you know?\n\nACTOR 5: Aaaah\u2014\n\nACTOR 4: I get stuck there listening to that song, you know.\n\nACTOR 5: Ah\u2014, you're kind of, when it comes to those kinds of thing, but I've thought this before but, you know, you're pretty pure, Ishihara-kun\n\nACTOR 4 ( _After a while_ ): \"Aaaah\u2014\"\n\n( _After that, they walk for a long time in silence. Then:_ )\n\nACTOR 4:... Um some background here, the type of people who were really into it were, totally way, in the front part but, all totally bloodthirsty and scary, so that's why we had put some distance between us and those types of people, the other day there was this crazy, when you go toward the street along the park, there's the Disney Store, but the other day in front of the store, the entrance of the store is encased all in glass, right, there were these people standing in front, and you know there was the story about how Israel's massacred tons of Arabs, these people were holding photos of corpses of children so that everyone inside the store could see, showing them to everyone inside the store, photos with the faces all totally mutilated like, \"whoa, that is disGUSting\" kind of photos, and on top of that, shouting into megaphones stuff like, \"Hello good boys and girls, look at what is happening to children your age in the Arab world\" with those disgusting photos on top of that, and then the store clerks and stuff came running out from the back, one woman was practically crying, saying, \"I'm sorry, really, please stop this,\" but they were all, \"Your tears won't save these children's lives!\" and pushing the photos of the corpses even more, parading them like a flag, and jacking the megaphone up to twice the volume, there was like this totally overheated shift, which was like, whoa, merciless, those were the kinds of people who were completely at the very front of the line, or the center, raising their voices, but it's like, \"RA RA RA,\" like they use that kind of voice that's like is that the kind of voice you want to use here, like \"BRING IT ON\" kind of, huh?\n\nAlso, the police are always flanking both sides of the line the whole time, like sticking to the side of the protest but, and this kind of pisses me off, for me, even, it pisses me off, but it's like oh, I'm sorry, for those who are super into it, they practically shoulder tackle them down, saying like \"Koizumi's dogs\" like pretty heated, like oh explosive, like is this OK kind of, does everybody know that, the cops are all black belts in judo, I mean they are, if they know that and still do stuff like that, that's pretty outrageous, I think, here was another war, that's the kind of feeling that was welling up in that place, kind of... oh, so we're going to do it again,\n\n(ACTOR 4 _and_ ACTOR 5 _line up side by side and begin walking_.)\n\nACTOR 5: You know, you don't usually get to take a close look at police uniforms that much, but during this protest, you can take a good look, and, there's a lot to observe and it's like, wow, you know\n\nACTOR 4: Oh the Anna Miller's?\n\nACTOR 5: Not that the police... hey when was it that the uniforms there changed?\n\nACTOR 4: Ah,... Anna Miller's, is, over there by Spain Slope in Shibuya, right?\n\nACTOR 5: \"Oh, right, right\"\n\nACTOR 4: Oh, that place... that reminds me, I haven't been to Anna Miller's these days.\n\nACTOR 5: Did the uniforms change?\n\nACTOR 4: Uh I don't know, at Anna Miller's?\n\nACTOR 5: Right\n\nACTOR 4 ( _In surprise_ ): Huh?\n\nACTOR 5:...\n\nACTOR 4: Have you been there, to the Anna Miller's on Spain Slope?\n\nACTOR 5: Or like, I always knew there was an Anna Miller's on Spain Slope, but to tell you the truth, I am, as of yet, I'm an Anna Miller virgin\n\nACTOR 4: Oh that makes sense, right, right... I'm sorry to bring it up.... Maybe, you're feeling dejected right,\n\nACTOR 5: What can you get to eat at Anna Miller's? Is it fast food?\n\nACTOR 4:...\n\nACTOR 5 ( _Blowing his nose on a tissue_ ): Did Anna Miller's come from America?\n\nACTOR 4: Oh, I don't know about that\n\nACTOR 5: There's no slogan shouting here, no, I mean, it's better that way but.... They're kind of doing it toward the front of the march but\n\nACTOR 4: I'm just guessing but, doesn't Anna Miller's seem like a Japanese thing? That kind of cutesy costume is super Japanese. In America it would be the Bud girl\n\nACTOR 5: I'm allergic to cedar pollen\n\nACTOR 4: Ah yes\n\nACTOR 5: Cypress too, both, but, I didn't wear a mask to the protest because I heard a rumor that that's how people mistake you for a serious protester type\n\nACTOR 4: Ahh\u2014\n\nACTOR 5: \"I've got it pretty bad though right now\" is what I said, but at this moment, I was pretty much at my limit, but we happened to be right then, in front of the Hachiko intersection in Shibuya, about to go under the overpass to turn toward D\u014dgenzaka, and there's a big drug store nearby so I thought I would buy a mask there so, \"Can I take off for a second?\"\n\nACTOR 4: Ahh\u2014\n\nACTOR 5: Hey, I just have to go buy a mask, but\n\nACTOR 4: Oh that makes sense... then I'll wait here\n\nACTOR 5: You can go on ahead, I'll catch up with you\n\nACTOR 4: Ahh\u2014\n\nACTOR 5: Go ahead, I'll catch up with you\n\nACTOR 4: Ahh\u2014, no I'll wait\n\nACTOR 5: Oh, really\n\nACTOR 4: Or like is it better if I went ahead?\n\nACTOR 5: Or like, it's fine for you to go ahead, I'll catch up with you real quick anyway\n\nACTOR 4: Or like, huh, is it going to take a long time for you to buy a mask?\n\nACTOR 5: Nah, it probably won't take long\n\nACTOR 4: Oh really? How many minutes? About five minutes?\n\nACTOR 5: Nah, probably not five minutes, I'm thinking\n\nACTOR 4: Oh really? Then I can wait you know (ACTOR 5 _is like \"Oh really?\"_ ), huh, are there like lots of different kinds of masks?\n\nACTOR 5: Or like you know, there actually are but, I already know which kind to buy, the super solid kind\n\nACTOR 4: Oh is that right\n\nACTOR 5: It'll really be done in a second, so it's fine if you just go on ahead, I'll catch up with you right away\n\nACTOR 4: Oh really\n\nACTOR 5: Yeah, so I'm gonna go for a sec\n\nACTOR 4: \"Oh, all right then I'll be waiting\" and that's it, the explanation about the protest will conclude around here, thank you.\n\nACTOR 5: Um, actually, there's this person named Suzuki who hasn't yet appeared at this stage in the game, but or, like to be accurate, she actually did appear a little bit back then, but nobody has talked about this person yet, not even saying like \"This person is named Suzuki\" or anything, but like I will give a general explanation here, but Suzuki is someone with a really flexible body, but the fact that he's flexible isn't that, or like totally irrelevant to, like, the story that I'm trying to tell right now, but before we get into it we were thinking of maybe taking a little break here for about ten minutes, was the plan.... Just a second ago I think this guy came out here a little bit who was the guy that after Azuma left Minobe at the club, the next day, Azuma met up with a guy who was his mate from his part-time job, well he was the talked-about or like the guy that we're trying to talk about or like we say talk about, but I don't think it's anything that would really cause a sensation, but anyway well, the thing is that the guy I just mentioned is Suzuki, but, I'm thinking about talking about him now, but before that I think we're going to try to take about a twenty-minute break, but I mean, not think we're going to try but, we are ( _He exits._ )\n\nSCENE 6\n\nACTOR 3 ( _Entering_ ): Um, this is about when Minobe and the girl went back to the hotel afterward and decided to limit their relations to five days, but the girl was the one who said like, \"It's like it's totally Shibuya, but it's really fun, kind of like we went on a trip\" and \"It's like Shibuya, but it's like when you're in a foreign city and there's kind of something there that's really evocative mood-wise and really fun,\" she said, and Minobe said \"Oh really\" and then \"Oh, but me too, I kind of know what you mean,\" and by then the two of them were in the hotel but... \"Isn't this fun?\" said the girl, \"Nah, it is fun, for real, totally,\" Minobe said... and then, \"Hm, honestly, how much like money do you have right now?\" Minobe said, \"Yeah, by money I mean not just what you have in your wallet but in the bank and stuff,\" Minobe said, \"And by in the bank, I'm not like seriously asking you about all your assets, I'm not asking that at all, but like in your account that you use regularly your regular checking account and stuff, I was just wondering how much money do you have that you could just withdraw, you know,\" said Minobe, \"Cause I'm like a part-timer, but just now I thought like 'whoa' like work, you're not like a full-time employee at some company, are you?\" is what Minobe said, \"Nah, I'm a part-timer too,\" she said, \"Oh really, huh, are you OK, taking these days off?\" said Minobe, \"Well it's not really OK, but I'll just find my another job,\" the girl said, the girl's name was Yukki, by the way, but it's not as if Minobe and that so-called Yukki chick told each other their names, but really names are really unnecessary, \"When there's just two people together, even without names, you only have one conversation partner so you really don't need names,\" is what Minobe was saying but,... so then ,\"Oh is that right, so you're OK, since you're a part-timer, I'll just do whatever you know so I'm fine... but, no, or like, just a thought or like, it occurred to me, until the money runs out, this is totally fun, what we're doing here, now, this way of life or like, I guess it's not really a way of life or anything, but this daily routine like we're on a trip? Living in a hotel? But it'd be difficult to keep doing this kind of thing, or like we can't keep doing this, you know,\" is what Minobe said, \"Or like I wonder how long the two of us are going to continue doing this kind of thing is like the, until when are we going to do this, is like, huh, honestly, what do you think? I kind of, out of the blue, said the two of us, and we've really just met and look at where we are but, I mean I'm totally fine with it, but Is this OK? Like, don't you have a boyfriend? I mean, it's none of my business but\" is what Minobe said, \"I was thinking we should talk about these things a little bit, not like that, but yeah, I was thinking, soon,\" he said, \"Oh, by the way, wait what? I only have about 2,000 yen in my wallet is the thing, but if I go to the bank, there's some left from my job, but even that is only like 30,000, I think, 'cause my job, the twentieth is the last day on the monthly pay cycle, so right now is exactly the most difficult time you know,\" said Minobe, and then she was also pretty much on the same wave length, and the girl was also a part-timer so, but her payday was the twentieth, so financially she had quite a bit in her bank account, but it's not as if then she could go out and spend that whole amount, of course, is how the conversation started veering, like oh yeah, you're right, and... so in the upshot, the two of them decided, \"OK so three more days, including today? Which means two more nights? For a total of five days and four nights,\" and that was the deal, \"Because financially too, that's kind of the limit\" was the thing, \"Not the limit, but well, a safe amount, if you imagine thinking about this in retrospect, that would be the line,\" was the thing, \"Yeah, maybe that's right, it's kind of a little bit sad, but realistically, you're right\" was the thing \"But three more days, including today, let's, yeah, spend them together,\" and then \"We stockpiled condoms from Matsukiyo just now, so let's go at it with enough vigor to use them all up\" was how their conversation went, but they didn't use up all of them, and after a little bit more than two dozen, that was completely enough on Minobe's side.... \"Yah, well this is probably my estimation, but\" this is what Minobe said to the girl, after one of the times they were having sex, which they did countless times that they really didn't know how many times they did it, they were like lying side by side staring at the ceiling and talking and stuff, right, this was what Minobe said then: \"Yah, well, this is probably my estimation, but probably after three days, we'll leave this hotel and each of us'll go back to our lives, but by then, probably according to my estimation, I think that the war is going to be over, maybe that's naive, nah, but honestly, the difference in power is completely off the charts right, and plus remember the Gulf War, which ended right away, right, they go in all at once and totally nail their targets and finished it off right away, yeah, so probably, I'm thinking, it's going to be over.... The TV, um, this entire time we've been in this hotel, we've been screwing our brains out, yeah, but we haven't watched TV at all, even though we have one, it's kind of, so you know, if it's all right with you, let's agree that we're not going to watch TV,\" said Minobe, to which the girl said, \"Oh, sure,\" and Minobe said, \"Oh, really, is that cool?\" and the girl said \"that's fine\" but \"Oh really? With either of us knowing, three days from now, we'll return to each of our normal lives? And then when we turn on the TV, let's say, we'll think 'Oh the war is over, is that the plan?' I think that's good you know, 'Once it started it was over pretty quickly, maybe that was for the best, in the end,' is what we'll think, and then you'll think like 'oh, it's true, it is over, it's just like that guy said it would be,' and then like 'so were we perhaps like doing it for the whole duration of the war?' and like 'while the two of us were fucking our brains out at this extraordinary pace in Shibuya the war began and ended?' that's like, that kind of thing is totally, think about it that memory will be linked to history, it's quite, wonderful or like, I think that as a memory, there's a high probability that it will be one of those that flash before your eyes before death, I think\"\n\nSCENE 7\n\n(ACTOR 1 _and_ ACTRESS 2 _enter._ )\n\nACTRESS 2: Like he was the vocalist and (ACTOR 1: _\"Yeah\"_ ) the hotel they were staying at when they came to Japan was in Shibuya so (ACTOR 1: _\"Yeah\"_ ) The other band members were also (ACTOR 1: _\"Yeah\"_ ) so they were like taking a walk in Shibuya altogether, or were they all together? But then, you know, there were those antiwar protests right, they saw one (ACTOR 1: _\"Yeah\"_ ), and so they joined it and marched,\n\nACTOR 3: Oh really, he joined up (ACTRESS 2: _\"Yeah\"_ ), so you can join up with those that casually?\n\nACTRESS 2: I don't know but, and then he said protests in Japan are like, maybe in foreign countries the police don't really follow them like glue, I don't know, but anyway in Japan they're practically like surrounded by the police, and they have the protest marches under watch, not exactly, but they follow them (ACTOR 3: _\"Oh really\"_ ), and that's what was really interesting about Japanese protests, was the story, apparently, not interesting but particular\n\nACTOR 1: You can just slip in that easily into those protests, huh?\n\nACTOR 3: Nah, it might be that that one happened to be an open protest, maybe, I don't know but, she said, \"also they were playing songs on their boom box and stuff\" is what she said\n\nACTOR 1: Oh really\n\nACTOR 3: And so then \"That's amazing you understand English, did you go abroad to like America or somewhere?\" (ACTOR 1: _\"Yeah.\"_ )\n\nACTRESS 2: Huh, Yeah sort of\n\nACTOR 3: Study abroad? (ACTOR 1: _\"Yeah.\"_ )\n\nACTRESS 2: Oh yeah, right, sort of study abroad. (ACTOR 1: _\"Yeah.\"_ )\n\nACTOR 3: \"Oh really,\" I said, and because I think girls who can speak English are kinda hot and then she said like \"I did study abroad, but aside from that, I did home stays several times and stuff\" (ACTOR 1: _\"Yeah\"_ ) so then I asked, oh really, huh, so where'd you go? and she said like \"Huh, America\" (ACTOR 1: _\"Yeah\"_ ), \"oh really,\" I said\n\nACTRESS 2: These two... men, or like, if you say men, it kinda sounds like formal, it's not like that, but these two, well, guys, that's also weird for me to say but, these two... one of them, up until that day had spent five whole days without taking a single step outside Shibuya, he had spent the whole time in a hotel, but by hotel I mean Maruyamacho, but not like Mark City, um, if you go to a city in a foreign country for instance, and you're like, I just spent five days in such-and-such place, there was that feeling, I think, and those five days were extremely, sort of, he'd spent those five days in Shibuya with that kind of feeling, but Shibuya is like, you go there pretty often, normally, even if it's just to change trains, but still it was kind of, during those five days, it was a different from always, a special Shibuya, and we were like, or I was like, \"I wonder why it was like that\" and like \"I wonder why it is, it kinda feels like we're on vacation you know\" and \"I think it feels like when you go on a trip to a foreign country\" the whole time while we were in the hotel, of course it wasn't like we were talking the whole time, but there was a good portion of time spent talking during all those days, I mean all those days it was only five days, but at the hotel, we were in the hotel for most of that time, but what happens is that ultimately, or not ultimately but, gradually we spent more and more time talking... at the time we were so full of curry, and we were on our way back to return to the hotel, you know how you go through the Center Street and at the Book First there's that big road off to the left to go to D\u014dgenzaka, toward the intersection where there's that Don Quixote,... right, and so that sensation of \"going home\" was what we were just talking about, we were really just right at that moment, while we were heading back, at first we were like \"I wonder why, it's just the regular old Shibuya but\" and \"Maybe it's because, even though it is a place we go to a lot like Shibuya, we're doing something like staying in a hotel\" I was saying, and then he was saying like \"Maybe because there's the war, and the protests, and the commotion? like stuff going on\"... and then we were saying \"there's also something directional\" and like \"not directional, but\" like \"that sensation of 'going home' you know,\" and like \"Direction\u2014usually, heading toward Shibuya station from here is the direction you go to go home, right, but it's kind of just to say 'let's go home' and walking in this opposite direction is enough to kinda of, just that is, kind of really, like we are on vacation,\" I said,\n\nACTOR 3: Yeah I know, also, though, the war's going on, they're protesting, that kind of commotion? I think that's definitely a part, I was seventeen when the Kobe earthquake happened, and I'm remembering now, at the time I had this strong feeling like \"Why am I in this place listening to this class lecture that's like poo, maybe I'm doing something really bad right now.\"\n\nACTRESS 2: Really\n\nACTOR 3: And now I'll really be thinking \"I was twenty-five when the Iraq war started, but 'why am I in this place having sex that's like poo?'\"\n\nACTRESS 2: Really\n\nACTOR 3: It's not like poo... but can I be honest? it's kinda, I am totally, I've used up too much, like, I'm totally raw from chafing\n\nACTRESS 2: Oh really, is that why you've been moving like that? I was thinking it was the opposite,\n\nACTOR 3: What? ( _To_ ACTOR 1.) Like she thought the opposite, that I wanted to do more ( _To_ ACTRESS 2.) By opposite, you mean you thought I wanted to do it more?\n\nACTRESS 2: Yeah... did we buy too many?\n\nACTOR 3 ( _To_ ACTOR 1): But that's like, you don't move like this when you really want to do it, if you did, it would be too obvious, like practically a monkey\n\nACTOR 1: Yeah\n\nACTOR 3: And like, when it was decided that we would limit this relationship to five days, I'm trying to remember, but what was the flow that led to that, which one of us suggested it first, like those details, who was it again who suggested it and like\n\nACTOR 1: You don't remember\n\nACTOR 3: Yeah, or like it's weird that I don't remember, those kind of touchy subjects, usually I remember normally who said it first and stuff like that is definitely input into my memory, because it's strong, but the fact that I don't remember, I wonder what it means, maybe we both suggested it at once, but there's no way I definitely would have remembered that\n\nACTOR 1: Azuma was at the diner, he was awakened very early in the morning by a phone call from Minobe saying, \"Come to the diner now\" so then he went, and he had to listen to this story, Minobe spent, in the end, four nights in Shibuya with a girl, though it seems like there's the three-night version and the five-night version of the story, it actually was four nights, but after those four night they parted ways, and immediately Minobe called up Azuma, you see, \"I'm at the diner, so come over,\" he said, so well he went, because essentially, Azuma has a lot of time on his hands, so when he got there, Azuma had to listen to Minobe's story about how he fucked his brains out for five days and four nights in Shibuya, so that's where I'm thinking we'll pick it up from now,\n\nACTOR 3: When I woke up in the morning, I was kind of like where the hell am I, and on top of that, there was this, who is this woman next to me, I don't know her, but I remembered right away, oh last night, that's right,... having said that, though, there was always this moment of, wait a second where am I? during the second night and the third night, but of course by then, I didn't have the who the hell is this woman reaction, but... oh but on the second night, maybe there was a moment, when I woke up for a second, like, but there's someone sleeping next to me, and who is it? but even while thinking that, it was always pretty obvious what was going on, I mean she was asleep right next to me, so the third night or the last night the fourth night the thought really didn't occur to me, like who is this, but maybe up till the second night, there was a subtle moment, wait who is she?... so then, and I was pretty proud about this, she's sleeping right next to me. But I didn't lay a finger on her, seriously, during those who is she? moments, even though she was sleeping right next to me in bed, a woman, next to me, just right here, but to like instinctually go to touch her was, well I didn't touch her, and I thought that that was pretty magnificent of me, like wait, underneath it all I'm not just a beast, I'm quite wonderful, because my instinct was to take measures and make sure I was like, oh yeah, I remember this woman before I went to touch her, wow really, I thought I was totally completely magnificent\n\nACTOR 1: Oh really, what? How long does that kind of state of being like \"oh there's a woman net to me but I don't know who it is\" (ACTOR 3: _\"Yeah\"_ ) how long does that last, how many minutes?\n\nACTOR 3: Approximately five seconds\n\nACTOR 1: Oh really\n\nACTOR 3: \"Well yeah, that's about right,\" he said, \"And then when it was decided that we were going to limit this relationship to five days,\" I'm backtracking a little bit, but \"I'm trying to remember how it was that we came to that conclusion like, which of us had first suggested it, like the specifics, where did it come from or like\"\n\nACTOR 1: You don't remember\n\nACTOR 3: No at the end, I guess last night, we talked about that a little bit, the two of us, \"Tomorrow's the end,\" \"Or like it's over in the morning tomorrow, so it's really today,\" we said, and in that moment, \"When it was decided that we should limit this relationship to like five days, what was the train of thought that brought us there?\" was how the conversation started going, but we're going to do that part now,\n\nACTRESS 2: First we were talking about money, \"I have only 2,000 yen\" he said, and I thought what, why is that all you have? but... like at the beginning he asked me \"Hey, honestly, how much like money do you have in the bank right now?\" and I thought why is he asking me that? but it was because he didn't have any money on him but, \"'cause at my job, the twentieth is the last day on the monthly pay cycle, so right now is exactly the most difficult time you know,\" he said, but sure enough, that day was the twenty-fifth or so of March, sure enough, or around there, but he said, \"I have only about 2,000 yen in my wallet, but if I go to the bank, I probably have about 30,000, so afterward we'll divide everything by two, and I'll pay you back,\" and I was thinking, yeah, obviously,... so, because there was this conversation about money, I think we were still at the time like this in the hotel, like we were like this before I knew it, as if we were on vacation, but how much longer shall we do this? that was something we hadn't decided, but both of us, I mean most likely both of us, were not like, let's be proactive about making this decision, but we really should decide pretty soon, we were both thinking, I'm guessing that both of us were, we were both, right, both thinking about it, so then, up until then we hadn't talked about anything like that, but, but the subject of money came up in conversation so, we were like saying, money is so important, how much longer should we do this, we should decide, and then that became a good reason for a break, like this was kind of about the limit for us financially, so we decided on four nights and five days, at the time we were on the third day after the second night, but so then we were like \"OK, we have two more nights,\" and \"it'll be the day after tomorrow, on the day after tomorrow, we'll leave here and each of us'll go home, and hey, by then, I wonder whether the war'll be over,\" we said, \"That almost sounds like 'I wonder if Japan won the soccer match today' and not knowing the results and coming home to watch the news all excited, you know?\" we said, so then, to get back to the story, the fact that we decided on the five-day limit or like, I was talking about this because of the question of trying to remember who it was that suggested that, but... I didn't know but... but I don't remember how that conversation started off, but, during that conversation I do, for example I said, \"That would definitely be best, and like, that would be better definitely\"\n\nACTOR 3: Yeah... nah, I say this because I don't think you'd get mad, but you don't like believe in that, \"forever and a day\" like (ACTRESS 2: _\"No.\"_ ) Oh wait it's reversed, \"now and forever,\" kind of thing, I mean do you want that? You don't think that, right, with me, nah really, you can say \"no,\" because the feeling is mutual\n\nACTRESS 2: No\n\nACTOR 3: No, but it's like, not as if there's a hierarchy between the forever types and other types, like the forever types definitely do not rank higher, you know (ACTRESS 2: _\"Yeah\"_ ), you understand me right\n\nACTRESS 2: I understand\n\nACTOR 3: You understand right, but that in itself is amazing, it's pretty miraculous I think, to have spent five super special days with someone who understands these things, really I ( _To_ ACTOR 1) if everyone understood these kind of things, no one would go to war, I really think that, I thought, but in that moment I didn't think I should say that out loud so I didn't but\n\nACTOR 1: Yeah\n\nACTOR 3: So anyway ( _To_ ACTRESS 2) you understand right, but that's amazing, you know, it's pretty miraculous I think, to have spent five special days with someone who understands these things, really I say super special because, yeah, we were only having sex, that would be one way to look at it, but two dozen plus times, that's not an impressive pace, is it?\n\nACTRESS 2: No\n\nACTOR 3 ( _To_ ACTOR 1): So then ( _To_ ACTRESS 2), so you're always in Tokyo, right, you live here, mainly\n\nACTRESS 2: Yeah\n\nACTOR 3: But I hope we don't see each other again, if it's possible, not even by accident\n\nACTRESS 2: Yeah\n\nACTOR 3: We might run into each other... but really it would be better if we never did\n\nACTRESS 2: Yeah\n\nACTOR 3: I haven't told you anything, my address? Phone number? Cell phone, oh yeah, and e-mail? We haven't even told each other our names. ( _He exits._ )\n\nACTRESS 2: We won't meet again, don't worry, but even more important than whether it'd be OK or not, I mean in the end it was decided that it would be OK but, um, to explain why and how it was decided was, well, for example we might meet again, right, at like the club where we first met and stuff, we were talking about that but he was saying \"No, that won't happen,\" and the reason why was he hadn't come to the club because he wanted to at all, but there was another person who was there with him then, though I hardly talked or anything to that person at all but, he had been invited by that person to the concert, that's why he went, he was totally like \"That was amazing, that was amazing\" from the moment I met him so I assumed that he was definitely a hard-core fan or something, but that wasn't the case, it was just that he usually never goes to places like that so, it's OK, if you think we might bump into each other at a show, that won't happen probably, so ( _She exits._ )\n\nSCENE 8\n\nACTOR 1: And then, the rest is what Minobe was saying to me at the diner, \"what I really wanted to say\" he was so kind of, so insistent... no, you know what, let's not do that story, so then well let's take the morning of the last day, where the two are like, see you later and finish these five days in March, but this story itself will end in about ten minutes, but even when they left the hotel, it would have been best if, at the entrance to the hotel, like you go right and I'll go left, but in reality, in the end they both needed to get to Shibuya station, so they walked there together, and on top of that, on their way, the man was like \"Can we stop by a bank so I can pay you back?\" and since the ATM at the bank, which opens at nine, opens at nine, they timed their leaving the hotel so they could be the first people when the machine opened at nine, but then he was like \"Can we actually stop by the bank?\" and she was like \"Oh, OK,\" so that was that, but and then, when she was wondering which bank, he said like \"the Hokuriku Bank\" and what? you want to go to the Hokuriku Bank, does such a bank exist in Shibuya, but then, actually there is a very large Hokuriku Bank in Shibuya, in the same building as the Lotteria burger joint, wow I didn't know that, and, and so the man withdrew cash from the ATM, and the woman was waiting outside, and the money was safely withdrawn, a total of 20,000 yen, right, if we split everything in half, so then, OK see you, but, they walked to the station together and then at the station, he said, \"Oh I take the Yamanote line,\" and she said, \"Oh I take the T\u014dyoko line,\" and so there they were, like, see ya, and then from there he called up Azuma and told him the story just like this, and that's, well, so something like what I just described took place, and then Azuma that day, essentially, Azuma has a lot of time on his hands, but on that particular day he had a bunch of errands that day, so after listening once through to Minobe's story he was like see ya and left the diner and went to Roppongi, again it was Roppongi... before the intermission, we said we would tell the story about Suzuki and then we went to intermission, I believe, but a lot of other things got stuck in between, but from here we're finally going to get to that story ( _Exits._ )\n\nSCENE 9\n\n(ACTOR 2 _and_ ACTOR 5 _enter._ )\n\nACTOR 2: What we're thinking of doing now is, the story about how Yasui, who was participating in the protest just a while ago, got chewed out, that's what we're thinking of doing but,\n\nACTOR 5: Yes, \"Shibuya is, like geographically speaking, there's the Scramble intersection in front of the Hachik\u014d in front of Shibuya station, and I am really, I'm imagining a map of Shibuya in which the Scramble is the center, but so then, not toward Dogenzaka and not toward where you can see the bus stops on the right, on the right, you should see the way toward Aoyama, but not that way but where you can see bus stops on the left, toward Roppongi Way, or like actually Roppongi Way itself there, if you go all the way, or like, actually for Roppongi Way, it'd be better to make the point of origin not Hachik\u014d but the Moyai statue, that's the better point of origin so, I just realized that now, so if you go all the way down Roppongi Way, straight past Nishi Azabu and stuff, and apparently the club that Minobe and them went to is somewhere along this road but past that, and past Roppongi station for a little bit, is where the American embassy and stuff is, but the protest march came all the way here, though as for the route it took, it might have been, for the march, they came from D\u014dgenzaka toward Aoyama till halfway and then a right turn in the middle, and around Nogizaka, it might have come this way, but the American embassy is in Roppongi, but the address is, however, in Akasaka, but in front of the embassy, they were crowding around with intense ferocity, some with placards and like shouting 'No More War,' and there are a lot of people who live in that neighborhood.... But for the residents, they were doing that kind of thing totally everyday right, also traffic-wise, everyday it totally gets backed up and stuff, right, for these people, so it's like, really, they want them to cut it out\"\n\nACTOR 2: Yes\n\nACTOR 5: Seriously, the stress is totally intense, you know, people who have families with small children, they're there, right, even with cars, some people commute right, there are people who, of course, have babies, you know, although I'm still single myself\n\nACTOR 2: Yes\n\nACTOR 5: But this is the place for them to live their normal lives, right, like me, I still get home really late at night, but a normal housewife and stuff is made to listen this everyday, right, even for me, I totally want to rest up on the weekends, but then what happens is that they're making a racket during the day, right\n\nACTOR 2: Yes\n\nACTOR 5: You gotta, what do you think, peace or whatever is fine, I mean in the end, it's like after all they're just doing it out of a desire for a dramatic event, don't you think?\" this is how he was scolded, and that was the story for ( _Indicating_ ACTOR 2) Yasui-kun but\n\nACTOR 2: Thank you ( _Exits._ )\n\nSCENE 10\n\nACTOR 4 ( _Enters_ ): So here's the story about the woman Yukki afterward when he was like \"Oh I'm on the Yamanote line,\" she was like \"Oh I'm on the T\u014dyoko line,\" as it were, and they were, like see ya, and it ended with good-bye, but after that, but the woman didn't get on the train right away, she kind of wanted to prolong her experience of this different Shibuya, so she was kind of like strolling toward D\u014dgenzaka, going back where they'd come from, but she was thinking, \"Ooh, Shibuya during these last five days was different from always, it was kind of like a familiar town that was unfamiliar, but, but if I get on a train now and take even one step out of here, the next time I come to Shibuya, it'll be the regular old Shibuya,\" so then she kind of wanted to stay in this Shibuya for a little while longer, that's how she felt, so after she had walked all the way to the station, she turned back and returned all the way toward D\u014dgenzaka, when for a moment she was like \"Oh no maybe it's too late, that sensation, it's already beginning to feel like the normal Shibuya, maybe because I walked all the way to the station,\" but then she was like oh no, it's OK it still feels like that Shibuya, but, and then she was like, maybe I'll go all the way back to the hotel where they'd been staying, kind of like how a criminal always returns to the crime scene kind of thing, she thought, \"So then the hotel is like at the top of this hill, but when I was at the bottom of the hill at the street toward Bunkamura looking up toward the hill toward the hotel, the road was kind of like this with telephone poles along both sides of the road, and at the side of the telephone poles were those trash cans, the big guys, and stuff, I think, and then I noticed at the side of one of the telephone poles there was, what I at first thought was this huge black dog, and the dog was kind of crouched around the telephone pole, and it was like, oh, eating something or like sniff sniffing something, but then, my eyes are bad, I wear glasses, I mean I think that's why, but what happened was that it wasn't a dog, but a human being, and not only that, he wasn't down like this ( _On all fours_ ) but like this ( _Squatting_ ), and it turned out to be like a homeless guy who was taking a shit, so then I, I, no not me but that woman named Yukki, was all like 'Oh' and then that person was like 'Oh' and looking over at me, and our eyes met and we were like 'Oh' and ran away, and I thought, I just couldn't believe it, because that was what, it wasn't like I couldn't believe that someone would take a shit on the street, but that person, that person, the fact that for several seconds, I had looked at that person and believed that it was an animal, even though it was a human being, in the end, I just couldn't believe the fact that I had been looking at a human being and seriously believed that it was some kind of dog or animal, I really couldn't believe it, I thought, I couldn't believe it, right, and then I vomited, I mean I wanted to find a bathroom in a store somewhere, but I couldn't make it in time, so I threw up on the street, and then afterward I felt calmer and I hightailed to the station, but by then I, Shibuya had totally turned back to being normal, but that wasn't even important anymore\" that's the way the story went, so now we're going to take it from the final morning of the Five Days in March, where this girl, who's about to go through that, and the guy who was with her, and the guy is withdrawing money at the bank, and the girl is waiting for him, and then that will end Five Days in March. ( _Exits._ )\n\n( _Blackout. When the lights come up,_ ACTRESS 2 _is standing, wearing a spring jacket_. ACTOR 1 _appears, also wearing a jacket_.)\n\nACTOR 1: Here. ( _Handing her 20,000 yen._ )\n\nACTRESS 2: Thanks. ( _Takes the money_.)\n\n( _The two of them start walking._ )\n\nACTOR 1: Well see ya, or oh, but I guess we're both going to the station.\n\n( _Both exit. After a while, blackout_.)\n\nCURTAIN\n\nAs is often pointed out, histories of modern theater consist of the emergence of innovative and artistic theaters, each kind replacing what has preceded it. In contrast, popular theater is rarely discussed in these histories because it is primarily not innovative, even though it constitutes the mainstream of contemporary theater. Only recently have significant forms of popular theater, such as melodrama in the nineteenth century or musicals in the twentieth century, become the focus of academic theater research. These forms, however, are analyzed mostly from a cultural point of view, not necessarily from the perspective of theater history. But theater always must be popular, since it would not exist without spectators. Furthermore, only in modern times did theater begin to be enjoyed in printed form as well as in performance. Since then, theater has been split into two kinds, an entertainment theater and a consciously artistic theater. The former is popular among ordinary people, and the latter is favored by intellectuals.\n\nIn Japan, too, _taish \u016b engeki_, a term equivalent to \"popular theater,\" is new, literally meaning \"theater for the masses.\" One definition of it is \"a kind of theater whose ticket prices are relatively low, whose audiences are not inclined to dig out the deep meaning in the play or reveal the knowledge of old theater styles, and whose story or form of expression is easy for those audiences to understand and accept.\"1\n\n_Taish \u016b engeki_ is popular entertainment theater, so it is also commercial theater, which can survive through box-office income and thus does not have to be subsidized by the government. Accordingly, the term _sh \u014dgy\u014d engeki_ (commercial theater) is used interchangeably with _taish \u016b engeki_. We might say that although both are popular theater, _sh \u014dgy\u014d engeki_ is for upper-class or upper-middle-class audiences, whereas _taish \u016b engeki_ is for middle-class or lower-middle-class audiences. _Sh \u014dgy\u014d engeki_ is presented in a large theaters located in the central part of major cities, and the tickets are quite expensive. _Taish \u016b engeki_ is played in small theaters in the suburbs or small towns for a relatively small admission fee.\n\nPOPULAR ENTERTAINMENT IN MODERN JAPAN\n\nToday Japan has several forms of popular entertainment, generally called _engei_ (entertainment performance). _Engei_ includes _rakugo_ (solo recitations of comic stories), _manzai_ (a sort of stand-up comedy by two or three players), _mandan_ (a one-person talk show), and _k \u014ddan_ (a narrative form of traditional stories). These performing arts are usually differentiated from _engeki_ (theater). But some _engeki_ \u2014such as kabuki, _shinpa_ , and _shin-kokugeki_ (new national drama)\u2014are considered to be popular entertainments.\n\nKabuki, a highly refined traditional theater style, is performed almost daily and constitutes a profit-making enterprise under the management of an entertainment conglomerate, the Sh\u014dchiku Company. There is no doubt that it is still popular. As noted in the general introduction to this book, kabuki once tried, unsuccessfully, to modernize. But those writers trying to create this new type of kabuki play were not _zatsukisakusha_ \u2014that is, professional writers employed by theater companies. For example, Tsubouchi Sh\u014dy\u014d (1859\u20131935), a professor at Waseda University, was one of the new kabuki dramatists, whose plays were termed _shin-kabuki_ (new kabuki). After Sh\u014dy\u014d, Okamoto Kid\u014d (1872\u20131939), Mayama Seika (1878\u20131948), Hasegawa Shin (1884\u20131963), H\u014dj\u014d Hideji (1902\u20131996), and Uno Nobuo (1904\u20131991) are the best-known new-kabuki playwrights. Their plays also are both entertaining and popular. Kid\u014d's _The Story of Shuzenji_ ( _Shuzenji monogatari_ ), Seika's _Treasury of the Loyal Genroku Samurai_ ( _Genroku ch \u016bshingura_), and Hasegawa's _A Lone Sword Enters the Ring_ ( _Ippon-gatana dohy \u014d-iri_) are still frequently performed. Before and during World War II, kabuki troupes even dramatized modern political or military themes in such plays as _Mussolini_ and _Three Heroic Human Bombs_ ( _Nikudan-san-y \u016bshi_).2 After the war, the most popular new-kabuki play may have been _The Tale of Genji_ ( _Genji monogatari_ ), by Funabashi Seiichi (1904\u20131976), which was an adaptation of the famous classical tale of the same title by Murasaki Shikibu.3 Ichikawa Ebiz\u014d (later, Ichikawa Danj\u016br\u014d XI, 1909\u20131965) played the main role of the \"Shining Prince,\" Hikaru Genji, and enthralled packed theaters, and especially his female fans, with his good looks and the play's gorgeous costumes and settings. The popularity of kabuki actors increased with the introduction of television, for some kabuki actors also became TV stars. Matsumoto K\u014dshir\u014d IX (b. 1942) is an example. He has appeared not only in _shingeki_ and television dramas, but even in musical plays, such as _The Man of La Mancha_ and _The King and I_.\n\nMishima Yukio (1925\u20131970) was an exceptional new-kabuki playwright, as he also was a world-famous novelist and the writer of many _shingeki_ plays. His best-known plays include _Five Modern N \u014d Plays_, which are frequently performed in the West, and _Madame de Sade_ ( _Sado k \u014dshaku-fujin_), which once was directed by Ingmar Bergman in Europe and is considered Mishima's most representative play. But he loved kabuki as well and wrote a number of kabuki plays, among them the one featured here, _The Sardine Seller_ ' _s Net of Love_ ( _Iwashi-uri koi no hikiami_ ), a comedy, unusual for Mishima, and quite successful when performed at the Kabuki Theater (Kabukiza) in Tokyo in 1953.\n\n_Shinpa_ also has been under the management of the Sh\u014dchiku Company. As pointed out in the general introduction, most of the early _shinpa_ plays were adaptations of popular novels. The _shinpa_ play in part VI, _Nihonbashi_ , is an adaptation of Izumi Ky\u014dka's novel of the same title. As this one does, many _shinpa_ plays have a tragic ending, hence the term _shinpa higeki_ ( _shinpa_ tragedy), referring to a sad, melodramatic story.\n\nIn addition, _shinpa_ maintained the kabuki convention of using female impersonators ( _onnagata_ ). Although Kawai Takeo (1877\u20131942), Kitamura Rokur\u014d (1871\u20131961), and Hanayagi Sh\u014dtar\u014d (1894\u20131965) were renowned _shinpa onnagata_ , Mizutani Yaeko (1905\u20131979) also gained fame as the first great _shinpa_ actress. Both actresses and _onnagata_ often appeared on the same stage without upsetting the audience.\n\nIn the first few decades of the twentieth century, _shinpa_ was enormously popular, much more than the traditional kabuki theater. But then after World War II, it began to lose its luster, even though such playwrights as Kawaguchi Matsutar\u014d (1899\u20131985) and Nakano Minoru (1901\u20131973) still were popular. Today, _shinpa_ is often performed as a vehicle for important kabuki actors or television stars.\n\n_Shin-kokugeki_ is an offshoot of _kokugeki_ (national drama), a term coined by Tsubouchi Sh\u014dy\u014d. The founder of _shin-kokugeki_ , Sawada Sh\u014djir\u014d (1892\u20131929), was one of Sh\u014dy\u014d's disciples. Sawada later joined the Art Theater Company (Geijutsuza), famous for the group's director, Shimamura H\u014dgetu (1871\u20131918), and for the actress Matsui Sumako (1886\u20131919), but he soon founded his own company in order to realize Sh\u014dy\u014d's ideas. The company had financial difficulties, however, and was able to survive only by presenting plays about sword-fighting heroes, works like _Kunisada Ch \u016bji_. Whereas _shinpa_ attracted middle-class female audiences with plays about the sorrowful fates of their heroines, _shin-kokugeki_ were popular with younger male audiences. Indeed, the great popularity of _shin-kokugeki_ in the 1920s and 1930s led to _onna-kengeki_ , plays about female sword fighters, in which a strong female character overwhelms men with her superior fighting skill.\n\nKUBOTA MANTAR\u014c\n\n[Around 1904 or 1905,] Takada Minoru, Fujisawa Asajir\u014d, and Sat\u014d Toshiz\u014d, who were experts of _shinpa_ since the first performances by the Kawakami company at Asakusaza, were featured at the Hong\u014dza, while at the Masagoza the boss, Ii Y\u014dh\u014d, was leading young and promising actors, such as Murata Masao, Inoue Masao, and Seki Kiyomi. These two theaters were competing from opposite poles. If you would call the Hong\u014dza a pro-government party, the Masagoza could be called an opposition party. Their contrasting stances, however, contributed a great deal to the popularity of _shinpa. Shinpa_ completely dominated over kabuki during this period....\n\nThese actors were concerned not only with plays but also with direction. And soon they created extremely realistic and innovative stage sets, which were called the Hong\u014dza style. Lighting and sound effects were also developed together with scenery. One reason for this was the fact that Takada Minoru and Kitamura Rokur\u014d from Osaka were meticulous on the details of acting. They were not only good actors but also excellent directors, though both were considered to be noisy and fussy actors who invaded even the territory of the playwright. They annoyed even theater critics. It was the time when directors were unknown.\n\nSoon, however, a part of the literary world got interested in Ibsen and the _shingeki_ movement, based on Ibsen, took hold. Kabuki was nothing to fight against for those young literary people who were eager to modernize theater. They considered _shinpa_ as the real enemy, for _shinpa_ audiences were intellectually superior to those of kabuki. (Like the audience of the Tsukiji Little Theater at one time, most _shinpa_ audiences were on the level of college students or higher.) Besides, for those reformists who opened their eyes to modern drama with Ibsen and other dramas, _shinpa_ 's modern dramas looked only superficially realistic, merely telling stories that did not explore the meaning of life. The reformists criticized this fictitiousness before anything else.\n\nThen, what did our _shinpa_ do? That's the point.\n\n_Shinpa_ did nothing.\n\nFROM KUBOTA MANTAR\u014c, \"JO NI KAETE YANAGI-KUN NI\" (TO MR. YANAGI IN PLACE OF A PREFACE), IN _SHINPA NO ROKUJ \u016aNEN_ ( _SIXTY YEARS OF SHINPA_ ), BY YANAGI EIJIR\u014c (TOKYO: KAWADE SHOB\u014c, 1948), 2\u20133, 6\u20138.\n\nPartly because _onna-kengeki_ was _taish \u016b engeki_\u2014theater for lower-middle-class audiences\u2014it tended toward eroticism in the liberal atmosphere of Japanese society after the war and so began to compete with the striptease shows in vogue at the time. Asakusa, the location of the highest-ranking licensed quarters during the Edo period, was the main entertainment district for the _taish \u016b engeki_ companies in Tokyo, as D\u014dtonbori was in Osaka. In addition, before and after the war, many small traveling companies performed plays in the style of _shinpa_ or _shin-kokugeki_ , including the songs and dances between acts. But then they rapidly lost their audiences to television and gradually disappeared during the 1970s, although a few traveling companies still exist. Sometimes, however, an actor from such a _taish \u016b engeki_ company is recognized by his fans, and he rises to sudden stardom in the commercial theater, just as an off-Broadway actor occasionally turns into a Broadway star.\n\nAll these popular theaters are, in a way, modern descendants of kabuki. But even more kinds of popular theater emerged under the influence of the Western performing arts. One that attracted intellectual theatergoers was opera. When the Imperial Theater (Teikoku gekij\u014d) opened as the first completely Western-style theater in Japan in 1911, it was intended not only for kabuki and _shingeki_ but also for opera. The theater organized its own opera troupe and employed an Italian opera director and choreographer, Giovanni Vittorio Rossi (b. 1867). But opera productions at the Imperial Theater were financial failures, and the opera troupe later disbanded. Rossi remained in Japan until 1918, staging operas at smaller theaters, and he had considerable influence on the future development of the Japanese opera world. The most notable result was the so-called Asakusa opera, which presented shortened and popularized operas and was the precedent for, at the beginning of the Taish\u014d era, the Takarazuka opera.\n\nTAKARAZUKA\n\nThe Takarazuka opera (Takarazuka kageki-dan), whose official English name is the Takarazuka Revue Company, was the idea of Kobayashi Ichiz\u014d (1873\u20131957), one of the most successful businessmen in modern Japan. He ran the private railway line running from central Osaka to the hot-spring spa Takarazuka, located in nearby Hy\u014dgo Prefecture. Kobayashi built a huge warm-water swimming pool at the spa so that families would go there by train. Unfortunately, his plan did not succeed, as swimming pools were still new to ordinary Japanese. So Kobayashi had the pool covered and used the space for theatrical performances. In 1913, he organized a song-and-dance troupe of teenage girls, the Takarazuka chorus troupe (Takarazuka sh\u014dka-tai), and the following year he presented his first production: two opera pieces, _Splash_ ( _Donburako_ ) and _The Joyful Dharma_ ( _Ukare daruma_ ), and a dance piece, _Butterfly_ ( _Koch \u014d_). They were quite successful, and the Takarazuka troupe continued to present similar attractions to the spa guests. In 1918, Takarazuka went to Tokyo and performed at the Imperial Theater. The next year, a training school, the Takarazuka Music and Opera School, was approved by the government as a private school of education. At the same time, the troupe acquired a new name, the Takarazuka Girls' Opera Company (Takarazuka sh\u014djo kageki-dan). The term _sh \u014djo_ (girls) was dropped in 1940, and the troupe's current name has been used ever since. All the members of the company are required to graduate from the school's two-year training course, and they continue to be called \"pupils\" of the school even after they become members of the company.\n\nKOBAYASHI ICHIZ\u014c\n\nThe discussion of employing male actors in Takarazuka started long ago. Already at the time of the founding of the company, Mr. And\u014d, the composer, insisted on this. If we had decided to have pupils both male and female at that time, such an irregular company as Girl's Opera, a unique art of Takarazuka, would not have been born. And it might have developed into a genuine opera with male and female singers, or have soon failed.\n\nAt that time, I was not sure of the success of this enterprise. I was aware of only the economic risks and of the dangerous world of young men surrounding girls, so that I made a secure plan\u2014that is, a girls' chorus group like the Mitsukoshi Boys' Music Group, which was already popular. I thought that the Takarazuka Girls' Chorus Group would be an excellent advertisement for the Takarazuka Hot Spring Resort. This was my simpleminded plan at its inception....\n\nI have no ear for music by nature. I know I don't understand music. But thanks to my fifty-year experience of the customer business, I know whether or not an opera will be a box-office hit or whether or not it will draw an audience, even when I nod off watching it in rehearsal. In short, I have no artistic appreciation, but I have an eye for commercial profit. So when we started this business, I praised Mr. And\u014d's works but often refused to include them in the repertoire. Mr. And\u014d complained, saying that an amateur couldn't judge; I understood his feeling. At one time, he ran away and hid himself with all the musical scores he had composed. We were at a loss before opening night. But I have, as a young man, read many novels. I have an ability to make a one-act piece of patchwork from interesting songs out of high-school or college music textbooks. I put together _The Maple Viewing_ [ _Momiji-gari_ ] and _Murasame and Matsukaz_ e overnight. Mr. And\u014d couldn't stand my barbarism and resigned himself to work for Takarazuka, though he complained about me all the time. He was one of the earliest great contributors to Takarazuka.\n\nFROM KOBAYASHI ICHIZ\u014c, _ITSU- \u014c JIJODEN_ ( _AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ITSU- \u014c_) (TOKYO: SANGY\u014c-KEIZAI SHINBUNSHA, 1953), 235\u201338.\n\nIn 1924, Kobayashi built a theater with a capacity of four thousand, with the intention of realizing his vision of _kokumingeki_ (the nation's theater for the people), reminiscent of Sh\u014dy\u014d's _kokugeki_ (national drama). But Kobayashi meant to appeal to a broader public than what Sh\u014dy\u014d had had in mind. Hence Takarazuka, as an all-girl company, attempted to project an image of being \"pure, proper, and beautiful\" ( _kiyoku, tadashiku, utsukushiku_ : the school's motto), lest it be disparaged by the middle class, who at that time regarded actresses as immoral. Kobayashi wanted Takarazuka to perform mainly musical plays, rather than spoken drama, in accordance with his understanding of ordinary people's natural appreciation for traditional Japanese theater. But he believed that the music used should be Western, since the Meiji government's Ministry of Education had decided that the primary schools should have a Western music curriculum.\n\nIn any event, the theater's large seating capacity raised questions about Takarazuka's performance style, so a stage director, Kishida Tatsuya (1892\u20131944), was sent to Paris to seek out a suitable new type of entertainment. The first fruitful result of his study tour was a grand revue, _Mon Paris_ , produced in 1927. It was an epoch-making success. In 1930, Shirai Tetsuz\u014d (1900\u20131983), who also had been sent to Paris, directed another revue, _Parisette_ , which was again a huge hit. Takarazuka's future was now firmly established.\n\nTakarazuka is an interesting theatrical enterprise from a cultural, if not strictly artistic, viewpoint. The first production was staged with only sixteen young girls, but today Takarazuka has five troupes: Hana (Flower), Hoshi (Star), Yuki (Snow), Tsuki (Moon), and Sora (Cosmos), each consisting of roughly eighty members. All are run on the star system, in which the top male impersonator ( _otokoyaku_ ) is \"the top star\" of the troupe and his (her) partner is \"the top female role\" ( _musumeyaku_ ) player. They play the main roles together as long as they remain in these positions, four or five years on average. They then are replaced by younger stars. Since all the members must remain single, those who want to marry must retire immediately.\n\nMost performers remain at Takarazuka for about ten years. After training at the school, their acting ability is evaluated. But the top stars are selected for their charisma, thereby ignoring the company's almost feudalistic view of the upper- and lower-year pupils, or even their individual performing abilities. The company and each production are governed by the conservative moral attitude of the so-called _sumire_ (violet) code\u2014that is, no politics, no religion, and no sex. Until recently, when Takarazuka became a financially independent entity, it had always been under the financial umbrella of the Hanky\u016b Railway Company, with Kobayashi as the founder. Despite the many ups and downs in its long history, especially during and after the war, Takarazuka has remained popular to the present day.\n\nTakarazuka has ten main productions a year, two per troupe, with each lasting a month. Smaller or experimental productions are staged as well. Usually a production is shown first in Takarazuka city and then in Tokyo, although some troupes go to other cities. There are no guest performers, and Takarazuka players are not allowed to perform in any non-Takarazuka productions, including films and television. Each production usually consists of two shows: one musical play lasting about an hour and forty minutes and one revue lasting about an hour. The performance almost always concludes with a gorgeous and colorfully designed parade of all the players in the production, who walk down a huge staircase at center stage. The top star comes down last, wearing a spectacular costume with feather wings. Once in a great while, the production is made up of only one musical play, and one of these is _The Rose of Versailles_ ( _Berusaiyu no bara_ ), the Takarazuka's most important and significant production after _Parisette_. It was first performed in 1974 and became a huge-box office hit. An excerpt from it is translated in part VI.\n\nCOMIC THEATER\n\nAccording to Kata K\u014dji, Japan has had two kinds of comic, or farcical, popular theater. One is _Soganoya kigeki_ , originally based in Osaka, and the other is nonsense or slapstick comedies, which were introduced from the West and performed mainly in Tokyo.\n\nThe Soganoya Company was Japan's first commercial comedy troupe, whose principal performers were Soganoya Gor\u014d (1877\u20131948) and Soganoya J\u016br\u014d (1869\u20131925), both originally low-class kabuki actors. When they established their new theater of comedy in 1904, they pretended to be brothers, though they were not, and soon became very popular. Soganoya comedy ( _Soganoya kigeki_ ) is a uniquely Japanese comedy of manners based on traditional comic and improvisational skits called _niwaka_ in Osaka. Whereas Gor\u014d tended toward social criticism of the ruling class, J\u016br\u014d wanted only to encourage laughter of the kind that in the 1920s was called \"nonsense\" ( _nansensu_ ). Before long, they began to perform separately. Gor\u014d eventually began performing in rather moralistic plays praising Japan's traditions and conservative family values. His company was extremely successful, as it was in perfect accord with ordinary people's social attitudes. It was followed by many similar companies, among which the Soganoya Gokur\u014d Company also did very well. Soganoya Gokur\u014d (1876\u20131940) used actresses instead of _onnagata_ , whom the Soganoya Gor\u014d Company still employed.\n\nAfter Gor\u014d's death in 1948, the Soganoya Gor\u014d Company merged with the Sh\u014dchiku Family Theater (Sh\u014dchiku katei-geki) and other companies and was led by Shibuya Tengai (1906\u20131983). This, the Sh\u014dchiku New Comedy (Sh\u014dchiku shin-kigeki), was enormously successful and remained so under Fujiyama Kanbi (1929\u20131990), Tengai's successor, until the 1980s.4\n\nAnother stream of popular comedy, influenced by Western models, also flourished in the Asakusa entertainment district after the beginning of the Sh\u014dwa era in 1926. Shortly before then, in 1923, the Great Kant\u014d Earthquake destroyed much of Tokyo, and more than 100,000 people were killed. The theater changed completely. Before the earthquake, kabuki actors had often privately performed modern plays, both domestic and foreign. But after the earthquake, these experiments stopped, and most performers confined themselves to traditional kabuki plays. In 1924, the Tsukiji Little Theater was founded, marking the start of genuine _shingeki._\n\nAfter the earthquake, Asakusa opera, too, was supplanted by a kind of vaudeville show, which included song and dance. These performances were based on Western slapstick-comedy films, which a company, the Casino Follies, provided. Enomoto Ken'ichi (1904\u20131970) was the company's star comedian, and his comic shows were termed _acharaka_ , a twisted pronunciation of _achira_ (beyond) the sea. Enoken (an abbreviation of Enomoto Ken'ichi) appeared in many films as well, including Kurosawa Akira's first film after the war, _The Men Who Tread on the Tiger_ ' _s Tail_ ( _Tora no o wo fumu otokotachi_ , 1945), a cinematic version of the famous kabuki play _The Subscription List_ ( _Kanjinch \u014d_). Before the war, Enoken even played a role in a Japanese adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's _The Threepenny Opera_.5 Another popular comedian, who competed with Enoken, was Furukawa Roppa (1903\u20131961). He started his career as a narrator for silent films ( _benshi_ ) and, together with other narrators, founded a comedy company when the talkies took over. His strong point was nonsense comedy, and his company attracted large audiences even during the Great Depression.\n\nIn 1932, Kobayashi Ichiz\u014d established the Tokyo Takarazuka Company, and in 1934, he opened the Tokyo Takarazuka Theater in Hibiya, in the central part of the city. He eventually bought several theaters in Hibiya, including the Imperial Theater, and created an entertainment conglomerate referred to as T\u014dh\u014d (an abbreviation of Tokyo Takarazuka), in competition with Sh\u014dchiku. T\u014dh\u014d dominated Tokyo's Hibiya area, and over the years, T\u014dh\u014d has tried from time to time to hire kabuki actors away from Sh\u014dchiku in order to start what has been called T\u014dh\u014d kabuki. But each attempt failed, and the actors returned to Sh\u014dchiku. Thus, today, all kabuki actors belong to Sh\u014dchiku, except those in the Forward Advance Theater (Zenshinza), a group of leftist kabuki actors.\n\nKikuta Kazuo (1908\u20131973), the most important playwright and producer for T\u014dh\u014d, was originally a company writer for Furukawa Roppa's group, which eventually came under T\u014dh\u014d's management. Before the advent of television, Kikuta's radio dramas had been tremendously popular. _On the Hill the Bell Rings_ ( _Kane no naru oka_ ) and _What Is Your Name?_ ( _Kimi no na wa?_ ) absolutely thrilled the whole nation, which was otherwise severely deprived after the war. Although Kikuta was primarily a writer and producer of popular theater, his best play, _A Port with Flowers Blooming_ ( _Hana saku minato_ , 1943), should be categorized as a _shingeki_ play. His longest-running play, _Diary of a Vagabond_ ( _H \u014dr\u014d-ki_), had featured the actress Mori Mitsuko (1920\u20132012) in the main role since 1961. But in 2010, she turned ninety and finally stopped performing. Such loyalty from fans is typical of popular theater.\n\nToday's successors to Kikuta Kazuo are perhaps Mitani K\u014dki (b. 1961) and Makino Nozomi (b. 1959), although both, unlike Kikuta, preside over their own theater groups as well as write plays for television and commercial theater as freelance playwrights.\n\nPopular theater generally emphasizes the actor more than the text and the surface techniques of acting more than the themes and ideas underlying the text. Although popular theater is very satisfying to watch when performed, it seems shallow when read. Accordingly, the texts for popular theater are rarely retained after production. This is one reason why many popular performances were so rapidly replaced by television programs, whose visual appeal can make a much stronger impression than theater. This also is the reason why we include here only kabuki, _shinpa_ , and Takarazuka plays. They may not be great works of art, but at least they are more readable than other forms of popular theater, and they hold up well in competition with television, which today is where the most popular drama in Japan (and, for that matter, all over the world) can be found.\n\nMITSUYA MORI\n\n1. Kata K\u014dji, \"Warai to namida ga nidai shich\u016b: Taish\u016b engeki,\" in _Dent \u014d to gendai_, ed. Dent\u014d-geijutsu no kai (Tokyo: Gakugei shorin, 1969), 8:96.\n\n2. This is wonderfully documented in James R. Brandon, _Kabuki_ ' _s Forgotten War, 1931\u20131945_ (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2009).\n\n3. For an entertaining account of this play, see Samuel L. Leiter, \"Performing the Emperor's New Clothes: _The Mikado_ , _The Tale of Genji_ , and L\u00e8se Majest\u00e9 on the Japanese Stage,\" in _Rising from the Flames: The Rebirth of Theater in Occupied Japan, 1945\u20131952_ , ed. Samuel L. Leiter (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2009), 125\u201371.\n\n4. For an account of this style of comedy, see Yoshiko Fukushima, \"Illegitimate Child of _Shingeki:_ Comedy Actor Soganoya Gokur\u014d and His _Nonkina t \u014dsan_ ( _Easygoing Daddy_ ),\" in _Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance_ , ed. David Jortner, Keiko I. McDonald, and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006), 171\u201387.\n\n5. For more information on Enoken, see Yoshiko Fukushima, \"Ambivalent Mimicry in Enomoto Kenichi's Wartime Comedy: His Revue and Blackface,\" _Comedy Studies_ 2, no. 1 (2011): 21\u201337.\n_NIHONBASHI_\n\nIZUMI KY\u014cKA\n\nTRANSLATED BY M. CODY POULTON\n\nIzumi Ky\u014dka, _Nihonbashi_ , 1920s.\n\n(The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum Waseda University; courtesy of Nihon haiy\u016b ky\u014dkai)\n\nBy the Taish\u014d era, the novelist and playwright Izumi Ky\u014dka (1873\u20131939) was as famous for his stories and plays about the demimonde as for his ghost stories, and the former\u2014works like _A Woman_ ' _s Pedigree_ ( _Onna keizu_ , 1907) and _The White Heron_ ( _Shirasagi_ , 1909)\u2014quickly became staples of the _shinpa_ stage. _Shinpa_ was a transitional and highly melodramatic form of theater that was modern in its subject matter and, later, its use of actresses. But it still retained many of the conventions of kabuki theater: male specialists for female roles ( _onnagata_ ); the _hanamichi_ , a runway going from stage right through the auditorium, which is used for dramatic entrances and exits; and _geza_ incidental music, to name a few common features. Through the 1890s to 1910s, _shinpa_ adapted, and even stole, a considerable amount of material from Ky\u014dka and other contemporary novelists. By the second decade of the twentieth century, Ky\u014dka himself began writing adaptations of his own fiction and, increasingly, original plays for _shinpa_ , just as its star was falling in critical circles to the more modern, realistic _shingeki_ (new theater).\n\n_Nihonbashi_ began life as a novel about competing geishas in the demimonde of Tokyo's old downtown, or _shitamachi_ , district. In Edo (the old name for Tokyo) days, all roads pretty much led to the \"Japan Bridge\" of the title, but in Ky\u014dka's time it was losing ground to the more upscale districts of Marunouchi, Ginza, and Hong\u014d. The story involves two geishas, the elegant Kiyoha and the much less elegant, feistier Ok\u014d, and two men, Igarashi Dengo, a rough fish merchant who has abandoned his wife and child and ruined his business over love for Ok\u014d, and Katsuragi Shinz\u014d, a neurotic professor of medicine who has fallen for Kiyoha because she reminds him of his elder sister, who became a concubine to pay for his education. Ok\u014d resents Kiyoha's success as a geisha and steals Katsuragi away. In the scene translated here, convinced that Katsuragi has become her patron ( _danna_ also means \"husband\"), she throws Dengo out. The scene shows off Ky\u014dka's gift for portraying strong, passionate, and tragic women: Ok\u014d's tirade ( _tanka_ ) against Dengo provides a couple of famous _miseba_ (showstoppers), in which, in kabuki style, the actor poses and the audience shouts its praise. This also marks a dramatic turning point in the play. The curious exchange between Ok\u014d and her apprentice geisha ( _oshaku_ ) Ochise, in which Ok\u014d pretends to be Katsuragi and Ochise becomes Ok\u014d, sets up the mistaken identity that leads to Ochise's death. Vowing revenge on Ok\u014d, Dengo stabs Ochise because she is wearing Ok\u014d's scarlet _kanoko_ kimono. Ok\u014d then slays Dengo with his own sword and takes her own life, by poison, in the arms of her beloved Katsuragi, who survives but has the blood of more women on his feckless hands. In an act of self-sacrifice not typical of Ok\u014d, she asks Kiyoha to look after him.\n\nFirst published in September 1914 by Shun'y\u014dd\u014d, with beautiful illustrations by Komura Settai, the novel was staged the following March with a script by the leading playwright Mayama Seika. A close look at the stage text ( _daihon_ ) for this first performance reveals, however, that it was the work of several hands. Ky\u014dka's fiction was famous for its lively dialogue and intense dramatic incident, and Seika lifted many of the lines verbatim from the novel for his adaptation. Kitamura Rokur\u014d, an actor whom Ky\u014dka highly respected (he played Ok\u014d in the first production), also crafted much of the dialogue. The text translated here is based on Ky\u014dka's own stage adaptation, which he published in 1917, and is found in the _Complete Works of Ky \u014dka_. The famous _shinpa onnagata_ Hanayagi Sh\u014dtar\u014d made his debut, as Ochise, in the play's first production. _Nihonbashi_ is now a standard of the _shinpa_ repertoire, and Ok\u014d is one of the favorite roles of the leading kabuki _onnagata_ Band\u014d Tamasabur\u014d V. Director Ichikawa Kon's film version, made in 1956, features the brilliant _shinpa_ actor Yanagi Eijir\u014d in the role of Dengo.\n\nACT 3, SCENE 2. THE SECOND FLOOR OF INABA HOUSE\n\nIGARASHI DENGO _is wrapped in a padded jacket tied with a woman's waistband. He has been staring steadily at a fish knife with a wooden scabbard clutched in his hand. He now thrusts the knife into the sleeve of a quilted housecoat rolled up in front of the closet, and leaning back on the bedroll, he throws out his legs, his head hanging down. Then, taking his head in his hands, he glares up at the ceiling. All his actions are abrupt, rough_. OK\u014c _adjusts the cushion in front of the hibachi and sits, half facing_ DENGO. _She straightens herself, as if about to say something important. The sound of a hand drum can be heard in the distance_.\n\nOK\u014c: Go wash your face, why don't you.\n\nDENGO: Heh heh. ( _Sneers._ )\n\nOK\u014c: Hey, stop using my toothpicks like you'd had breakfast in bed.\n\nDENGO: Heh heh. Who'd you be talking about now?\n\nOK\u014c: Oh, you really scare me. You were listening, weren't you?\n\nDENGO: You'd make a man deaf with that racket. You thought I couldn't hear what was going on downstairs? You've got a voice like a gunshot.\n\nOK\u014c: Yeah. I thought that seeing as how you've got such a thick skull, you'd be hard of hearing, too. But please go wash your face. There's something else I have to say, if you don't mind.\n\nDENGO: You want to tell me you're sorry 'cause I found out you've had it off with another man? Hey, Ok\u014d? ( _Sits up._ ) I don't have to wash my face to hear that, surely. If it was all just a dream, it'd be one thing, but if you're asking me to wake up and wash my face for this news, you've got another thing coming to you.\n\nOK\u014c: You think I'm just going to lie back and take it?\n\nDENGO: If you don't, I hope you're ready for the consequences. You're really asking for it, you know.\n\nOK\u014c ( _Resignedly_ ): Go ahead, I'm ready for anything....\n\nDENGO: What I'm saying is, if you don't shut up, I'm not going to leave you in one piece. Bitch! You want to get yourself killed?\n\nOK\u014c: I don't know if I've been killed or coddled, spoken my mind or given a piece of somebody else's. Have I loved and been wronged, have I gone through hell? Sometimes I've wanted to spend the rest of my life with him; other times I've just wanted to die. I don't know anymore. Don't ask. Just get out, go home. I've got a good man now.\n\nDENGO ( _Rises abruptly_ ): What? Go home?\n\nOK\u014c: Yeah, for good. I'm not letting you in here again.\n\nDENGO: You must be crazy, Ok\u014d.\n\nOK\u014c: Don't \"Ok\u014d\" me.\u2014You call me crazy? I am _not._ I've never felt so sane as I do right now.... The good doctor's diagnosis is that I'm madly in love. Madly in love, you hear? Not crazy. I'll stake my life on it. I'll be kind to strangers\u2014you don't have to wash your face. Listen: Ok\u014d of Inaba House has got herself a husband. Mr. Katsuragi is his name. You and I are through.\n\nDENGO ( _Suddenly goes limp_ ): What? A husband? That's all right by me if it's just a husband we're talking about. I got a big heart, so I'll overlook that. I'll be a good boy, or my name ain't Igarashi Dengo.\n\nOK\u014c ( _Looks away and sighs_ ): I've said all I can, so just be a good boy and get out. Right now. Stay away and there won't be any more trouble around here.\n\nDENGO: Nah. If that \"husband\" of yours shows up, what's wrong with my being here? If he drops by without warning, why, I'll just throw this quilt over me and stow away in the clothes closet. That's one of my favorite games from 'way back.\n\nOK\u014c: Be my guest. But if you do, we'll be overrun with roaches. So forget your bedroom pranks and just get yourself straight down the stairs and out the door.\n\nDENGO: Ok\u014d, try saying that again.\n\nOK\u014c: I told you, stop calling me \"Ok\u014d.\"\u2014All right, I'll say it as often as you like.\u2014We'll be overrun with roaches if you don't\u2014\n\nDENGO: What do you take me for? Just what do you take me for?\n\nOK\u014c: A seal in a bearskin, that's what I take you for.\u2014Listen, you staked your fortune on a boatload of lumber, and you left Hokkaido and swam into that harbor over there and set yourself up in the seafood business for a time. Your fishy friends got you a free pass into the best bars on the embankment, didn't they? And once you'd laid eyes on Kiyoha, well, the sky was the limit for you! Like some mole who'd found the wings of an angel. No doubt you tugged on her sleeve and she tugged back, and before you knew it, your eyes rolled and you fell head over heels for her. What a laugh!... If it's somebody Kiyoha threw over, I thought to myself, who cares if he's a caterpillar, or even a cockroach? I'll sew him into the hem of my skirts and wave him in her face just to spite her. And when it happened to be a seal in a bearskin, folks couldn't help but notice. Every tongue in town was wagging. The fact I ended up with you must be one of the seven wonders of the quarter. Better yet, one of the wonders of the world... You remember, don't you? When I listened to your story, it certainly wasn't for love. Nor for the money, no... I did it just to get even with Kiyoha. When the time comes and I get tired of you, I'll call it off, I said. And you made a solemn promise that it was all right by you, didn't you? You've got no grounds for complaint. I'm tired of you, so let's call it quits. Go on, get out! Go home this minute. And don't ever come back. From now on, the two of us don't even know each other. You understand?\n\nDENGO ( _Rubbing his eyes, silently glares at_ OK\u014c. _Finally bursts out laughing_ ): Hah, hah, hah! Crazy dame! Hah, hah, hah! What an outburst! I don't have anything to add to that, that's for sure. A regular little fireball, you are. I love it! Hah, hah, hah! You're so cute when you're mad. ( _Again he leans back on the bedding, his head hanging down, and throws out his legs. Belying his words, he shakes his legs as if to fan the flames of agony in his heart._ )\n\nOK\u014c ( _Sharply_ ): I told you, get out!... This is the Inaba House, Ok\u014d's place. No, it belongs to Mr. Katsuragi. It's his... second residence.\n\nDENGO: I don't give a damn if it's a whorehouse. If I'm in the way, I'll just crawl into the closet. Hah, hah, hah! ( _Laughs mirthlessly._ )\n\nOK\u014c: What's the point of losing my temper? You're a cockroach, not a man. Just listen to what I have to say. If I'm a real geisha, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference whether I've got a patron, a client, or even a guy on the side. But from this day forward, by the grace of the gods, I'm Katsuragi's wife. ( _Sits up._ ) I won't have the smell of another man hanging over my house for three blocks around. Do you really think some animal in a housecoat, like some oversexed badger figurine, is the sort of thing I'd decorate my bedroom with? ( _Bolts up._ ) Look! There's this filthy oaf stinking up my tatami! I don't need your kind in my place. Get out of my way! Just clear off!\n\n( _She yanks on the quilt that_ DENGO _is leaning against. The knife with its wooden scabbard falls out with a clatter._ DENGO _leaps up, fixing his eyes on it._ )\n\nOK\u014c ( _Draws back a step_ ): Hey. Did you have this on you last night?\n\nDENGO: It's for you, bitch. I got a whiff of Katsuragi, you see, and I've made up my mind. If you don't shut up, it'll be this. Understand? ( _Draws the knife from its sheath._ ) How about it?\n\n( _Kicking up her skirts,_ OK\u014c _makes for the stairwell._ DENGO _reaches out and pulls her back by her_ obi. OK\u014c _falls on her haunches, shaking loose the trapdoor over the stairwell, which slams shut. Barred from escape by her own hands, she quietly returns to her seat. Dumbfounded,_ DENGO _stands bolt upright._ )\n\nOK\u014c: Kill me. Go ahead and run me through.\n\nDENGO: Whore! ( _Draws back a step._ )\n\nOK\u014c: Kill me! Do it! Run me through! That's what a knife is for, isn't it? Cut me, slash me, right to the bone, a stroke for every letter in Katsuragi's name. How many does that make? ( _Counts on her fingers._ ) \"K\" for \"kill.\" \"A\" for \"assassin.\" \"T\" for \"torture.\"... Who knows how many strokes it takes? But I'll take it! I'll take it as long as I draw breath. I'll watch you engrave his name on my heart. I'll show you how a woman dies! Go on, stab me. ( _Edging up to him._ )\n\nDENGO: Uh... ( _Retreating._ )\n\nOK\u014c: If the blade can't cut, I'll take off my kimono. ( _Laying her hands on the waistband._ ) Is my skin too thick? Shall I take that off, too? How about it, eh, hairy bear? Shall I scrape off my scales for you?\n\n(DENGO _still retreats inch by inch and, as if unaware of his own actions, raises the trapdoor to his shoulders and tumbles down the stairs._ OK\u014c _turns around in the direction of the noise, then looks about her. Seeing the cherry blossoms arranged in the alcove and adjusting her dress, she takes a sprig in her hand and steadily gazes at it, smiling faintly._ )\n\nOK\u014c ( _To the flowers_ ): There's not a breath of wind, but little cherry blossom, you tremble so.\n\nOCHISE ( _Dashing in, embraces_ OK\u014c): Ok\u014d!\n\nOK\u014c: Well now. Your lessons over for the day?\n\nOCHISE: Why, you talk as if nothing happened! Ok\u014d, I hadn't the faintest idea what to do. We were all huddled together at the bottom of the stairs, at our wit's end.... Well, thank goodness you're through with your bear friend, hm?\n\nOK\u014c: Just forget about it. I've got something to show you instead. ( _From the carefully folded clothes in her dresser, she takes out an undergarment. It has a dappled_ kanoko _design on a scarlet and pale blue ground._ ) Once\u2014I can't remember when\u2014I met Kiyoha on the way back from Ichikoku Bridge, and she was wearing one just like this. With her black hair and pure white skin it was a little on the flashy side, but it suited her. She cut a real figure, she did. Quite the coquette, I can tell you. Oh, I wanted so much to wear something like that myself, but I'd never have looked good in it unless it was maybe a dinner party and I had a dance to perform. So I thought I'd give it to you, and I placed an order at the tailor's to make up one in a hurry. They brought it over last night. You'll look just right in it. Go ahead, try it on.\n\nOCHISE: But Ok\u014d, you'd waste it on me.\n\nOK\u014c: You're my kid sister, aren't you? Might as well be. Go ahead, put it on over top.\n\n(OK\u014c _has_ OCHISE _stand, puts it on, and tidies up her appearance._ OCHISE, _blushing happily, stands before the mirror._ )\n\nOK\u014c: It looks good on you. ( _She says, and then collapses onto_ OCHISE' _s lap._ ) Ok\u014d\u2014\n\nOCHISE:... ?\n\nOK\u014c: Call me Katsuragi. ( _Laughs._ )\n\nOCHISE: Ho ho ho. Madame Katsuragi.\n\nOK\u014c: You make me sound like a prostitute.... No, _Mister_ Katsuragi.\n\nOCHISE: Mr. Katsuragi....\n\nOK\u014c ( _Impersonating_ KATSURAGI, _embraces_ OCHISE): Yes? Or, rather ( _More gruffly_ ), yeah?... Ok\u014d! Let me spoil you, girl.\n\nCURTAIN\n_THE ROSE OF VERSAILLES_\n\n_A Takarazuka Grand Romantic Play_\n\nUEDA SHINJI\n\nTRANSLATED BY KENKO KAWASAKI\n\nUeda Shinji, _The Rose of Versailles_ , Takarazuka kagekidan, 2001.\n\n(Courtesy of Takarazuka Revue Company)\n\nT _he Rose of Versailles_ ( _Berusaiyu no bara_ ) was first performed in 1974 and has remained the greatest hit in the whole history of the Takarazuka Revue Company, an all-female troupe that started to stage theatrical events in 1914. The most recent production of _The Rose of Versailles_ was in 2013. (Takarazuka's productions usually are scheduled to run for no more than one month.) So far, more than 4 million people have seen this play.\n\n_The Rose of Versailles_ has more than a dozen variants, depending on the year of the production and the various performances staged by Takarazaka's five troupes. The translation here, of about half the play, is based on _The Rose of Versailles 2001_ : _A Story of Fersen and Marie Antoinette_ , which was the script used for the production of Takarazuka's Cosmos Troupe in 2001, directed by Ueda Shinji and Masazumi Tani and published in _A Collection of Takarazuka Grand Theater Performance Scripts_ ( _Takarazuka daigekijo k \u014den kyakuhonsh\u016b_, 2002).\n\n_The Rose of Versailles_ is an adaptation of a long series of _shojo manga_ (girl comics) of the same title by Ikeda Riyoko, published in a weekly magazine of girl comics, _Weekly Margaret, How Appropriate!_ in 1972 and 1973. The plot of _The Rose of Versailles_ is based on the actual history of the French Revolution (1789\u20131799), although the main character, Oscar Fran\u00e7ois de Jarjayes, the youngest daughter of General Jarjayes, is fictional. In the play, because the general has no son, he raised and educated his youngest daughter as a son, which allowed her to adopt the outlook of a man. Oscar has served as the royal guard of Marie Antoinette ever since she was married, at the age of fourteen, to the crown prince of France, the future Louis XVI. When Marie Antoinette meets a Swedish noble, Hans Axel von Fersen, they instantly fall in love with each other.\n\nThe main story line of _The Rose of Versailles_ follows Oscar's fateful life and the forbidden love of Fersen and Marie Antoinette in the stormy times before and during the French Revolution. The various Takarazuka versions are divided into plays about Fersen and Marie Antoinette and those about Oscar and Andr\u00e9, who is a grandson of Oscar's nurse and has been secretly in love with her. The excerpt translated here is about Fersen and Marie Antoinette, as the subtitle suggests, although elements of Oscar and Andr\u00e9's story also make up part of the plot.\n\nTakarazuka's adaptations are not entirely faithful to Ikeda Riyoko's original _manga_. In this version, for instance, Andr\u00e9's death, Oscar's demise, and Fersen's appearance in Marie Antoinette's prison cell are not found in the original work. In addition, some of the characters' names are intended to provide comic relief: Duchesse de Monzette sounds like the word _monzetsu_ in Japanese, which means\"to faint in agony,\" and Marquise de Sisina sounds like _shisshin_ , which means \"a fainting fit.\" Andr\u00e9's grandmother, who serves as Oscar's nurse, is named Marron-Glac\u00e9, a reference to the well-known chestnut confection.\n\nThere are several reasons why _The Rose of Versailles_ became Takarazuka's greatest success. First, Ikeda Riyoko's original comic broke all records in sales of _shojo manga_ , thus attracting audiences new to Takarazuka. Second, an important film star, Hasegawa Kazuo, directed the first production, establishing a highly praised stage style with both a presence and a precise form, which was different from and superior to the usual Takarazuka productions. Third, the role of Oscar, a woman who looks like a man, is one of the best created for star performers who portray men in Takarazuka productions. Takarazuka's extravagant production is, of course, perfect for a story about the French court in the rococo period. Finally, the musical hit\u2014from the play known as _Beru bara_ , an abbreviation of _Berusaiyu no bara_ , the Japanese title of the work\u2014has been regarded as a sort of national anthem for young women.\n\nCharacters\n\nHANS AXEL VON FERSEN, a Swedish noble\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE, the queen of France\n\nOSCAR FRAN\u00c7OIS DE JARJAYES (dressed as a man), the commandant of the Royal Guard\n\nANDR\u00c9, son of OSCAR's nurse, MARRON-GLAC\u00c9\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY, an Austrian count, MARIE ANTOINETTE's guardian\n\nMARIA THERESIA, the queen of the Austrian Empire, MARIE ANTOINETTE's mother\n\nGIRODELLE, a major in the Royal Guard\n\nBERNARD CH\u00c2TELET, a journalist of the revolutionary party\n\nROSALIE, BERNARD's wife\n\nLOUIS XVI, the king of France\n\nPART I\n\nSCENE 1. PROLOGUE A\n\n_With a flamboyant overture, the stage curtain opens. Low over the stage hangs a rococo frame of letters spelling the words \"The Rose of Versailles.\" In front of it, pretty young boys and girls sing and dance_.\n\nCHORUS:\n\nBehold, behold, the Rose of Versailles\n\nBehold, behold, the Rose of Versailles\n\nBOY ARISTOCRAT:\n\nSo now, let me tell you this tale\n\nA tale of a man and a woman\n\nDrawn together by mysterious ties\n\nCome and listen to\n\nThe Rose of Versailles\n\nThe Rose of Versailles\n\nThe Rose of Versailles\n\nThe Rose of Versailles\n\n( _The rococo frame rises_.)\n\nSCENE 2. PROLOGUE B\n\n_On the stage is a rococo set with a frame in the center displaying_ MARIE ANTOINETTE _'s portrait. In front of this,_ FERSEN _rises from below on a trapdoor lift, holding the doll Stephan in his arms. He recalls his memories of_ MARIE ANTOINETTE _while he sings with great feeling_.\n\nFERSEN:\n\nHow could I, how could I\n\nPossibly forget her\n\nShe was, she was\n\nLike a rose\n\nHer image still burns\n\nBranding my heart\n\nI still long for her\n\nWandering helplessly\n\nMy world changed\n\nThe moment I met her\n\nHer eyes\n\nHer voice\n\nHer soul\n\nMy life was tied to hers\n\nWhen I recall the wasteland that was my soul\n\nI see the image of my love, smiling so sweetly\n\nWhen I recall the wasteland that was my soul\n\nI see the image of my love, smiling so sweetly\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE:\n\nA seed born\n\nOn the banks of the blue Danube\n\nThe memory of a beautiful rose\n\nBlooming on the banks of the Seine\n\nForever and ever\n\nUnchanging\n\n( _The portrait closes. At the same time both sides of the rococo set transform into portraits of_ OSCAR _and_ ANDR\u00c9. _The two of them step out of their portraits and sing_.)\n\nOSCAR:\n\nLove can be so sorrowful\n\nLove can be so painful\n\nANDR\u00c9:\n\nLove can be such a torture\n\nLove can be ephemeral\n\nTOGETHER:\n\nLove, love, love\n\nBecause of love\n\nThere is joy in life\n\nBecause of love\n\nThe world is one\n\nThat is why people are so beautiful\n\n( _The two, still singing, sink into the floor on the trapdoor lift. The rococo frame rises_.)\n\nSCENE 3. PROLOGUE C\n\n_The entire stage set is looks like a huge rococo chandelier._ FERSEN _and_ MARIE ANTOINETTE _take turns appearing stage center. They sing the song \"Ai areba koso\"_ ( _Because of Love_ ). _Many beautiful girls dance while they sing. The stage rotates_.\n\nFERSEN:\n\nLove can be so sweet\n\nLove can be so strong\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE:\n\nLove can be so precious\n\nLove can be so sublime\n\nTOGETHER:\n\nLove, love, love\n\nFERSEN AND MALE ENSEMBLE:\n\nBecause of love\n\nFEMALE ENSEMBLE:\n\nAhh ahh ahh\n\nThere is joy in life\n\nBecause of love\n\nThe world is one\n\nThat is why people are so beautiful\n\nSHADOW CHORUS:\n\nAhh ahh\n\nSCENE 4. THE SCH\u00d6NBRUNN PALACE\n\n_April 21, 1774. Vienna, Austria. The Hall of Mirrors at Sch\u00f6nbrunn Palace. The_ GRAND CHAMBERLAIN _appears_.\n\nGRAND CHAMBERLAIN: Your Majesty Maria Theresia, the comte de Mercy is here to see you.\n\n( _Grand flowery music_. MARIA THERESIA _appears, followed by a lady in waiting. From the other side of the stage, the_ COMTE _appears_.)\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Your Majesty, I have come to offer you my farewell greetings.\n\nMARIA THERESIA: Comte de Mercy, serve me well. From this day forward, I put my daughter's life in your hands.\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: I am grateful for your trust in me. I will do what I can to guard over Her Highness, the princess.\n\nMARIA THERESIA: She is only fourteen. As a parent, it's unbearable for me to marry off a daughter of such tender age, but as the empress of Austria, I must turn a blind eye to those feelings.\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Your Majesty, I realize this must be hard for you. However, this is the best strategy for ending the long conflict between our Austrian House of Hapsburg and the French House of Bourbon.\n\nMARIA THERESIA: As the empress of Austria, I realize how important goodwill between Austria and France is. However, Marie Antoinette is only fourteen and doesn't adequately comprehend the meaning of this political marriage.\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Your Majesty, just as you are the empress of Austria first and a mother second, Marie Antoinette is a princess of the House of Hapsburg first and a fourteen-year-old girl second.\n\nMARIA THERESIA: This is the fate of one who reigns over her country....\n\n( _The_ CHIEF LADY-IN-WAITING _appears_.)\n\nCHIEF LADY-IN-WAITING: Your Majesty, the princess is ready to depart and has come to bid you farewell.\n\nMARIA THERESIA: So the time for her departure has really come. There are some things left I must tell her before she leaves. Have her come here at once.\n\nCHIEF LADY-IN-WAITING: Yes, Your Majesty.\n\n( _Flowery music. The pretty princess_ MARIE ANTOINETTE _enters the stage, embracing her doll Stephan_.)\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE ( _Overjoyed_ ): Oh mother, look! Isn't this pretty? And it suits me, doesn't it? Oh, I've never worn clothes so beautiful.\n\nMARIA THERESIA:... Comte de Mercy... look at her... such a child...\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Your Majesty, Empress Maria Theresia!\n\nMARIA THERESIA: Marie Antoinette, listen carefully. You're only fourteen years old. You probably have no idea what marriage is like. But I can assure you that it is not as sweet and kind as you expect it to be. From now on, you will be the French dauphine. From the moment you cross the Rhine, you will no longer be an Austrian: you will be French. Please do your best to be beloved by the people of the House of Bourbon and, even more, by all the people of France.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE ( _In high spirits_ ): Mother, please don't be worried. I have my doll Stephan. And the comte de Mercy will be with me and I am my mother's daughter. I will become an honorable queen beloved by her people. I will not do anything that would bring shame to the Austrian House of Hapsburg.\n\nMARIA THERESIA: Oh Marie Antoinette. Please be happy.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Farewell, mother. Farewell, Vienna. Farewell, Austria!\n\n( _Flowery and strong music. On stage, the palace becomes transparent, and a glass carriage pulled by white horses appears_.)\n\nSCENE 5. THE DREAM CARRIAGE\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE _climbs into the glass carriage, accompanied by flowery music. The carriage starts to move_.\n\nCHORUS:\n\nLa li la la lu la la,\n\nLa li la la lu la la, La li la la lu la la,\n\nLa li la la lu la la, La li la la lu la la,\n\nLa li la la lu la la, La li la la lu la la,\n\n(MARIE ANTOINETTE, _overjoyed, starts to sing_.)\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE:\n\nThe light jingling of the tiny bells\n\nMy glass carriage glides through the clouds.\n\nI am a bride doll in a dream\n\nGoing to France, the country I long to see\n\nCHORUS |  | MARIE ANTOINETTE:  \n---|---|---  \nLa la |  | In a big white palace  \nLa la la |   \nLa la la |  | The prince of my dreams is waiting  \nLa la la |   \nLu lu lu |  | I am a bride doll in a dream  \nLu |   \nLa li la |   \nLa lu la la |   \nLa li la |   \nLa lu la la |\n\n( _The carriage rotates. The stage stops revolving. Many guards line up. Using the trapdoor lift, a thirty-two-year-old_ MARIE ANTOINETTE _takes the place of her younger self. She sings_.)\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE:\n\nA seed born\n\nOn the banks of the blue Danube\n\nThe memory of a beautiful rose\n\nBlooming on the banks of the Seine\n\n( _The stage set changes while_ MARIE ANTOINETTE _sings_.)\n\nSCENE 6. THE PALACE OF VERSAILLES\n\n_Spring, 1788. A drawing room at the Versailles palace. The_ COMTE DE MERCY _appears. He gently calls out to_ MARIE ANTOINETTE.\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Your Majesty...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Oh, my dear Comte de Mercy, I didn't know you were here.\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Your Majesty, is there something troubling you?\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Comte de Mercy, recently I have often been dreaming of the past, of the day I left my homeland Austria to come to France.\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: I, too, remember that day and you, sweet and naive, as if it were yesterday.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: I left the Sch\u00f6nbrunn Palace in Austria in April when the flowers were blooming, and in a small palace on the banks of the Rhine, everything I had brought from Vienna, the lace, the ribbons, my crucifix, my rings, even my underwear, everything I wore was replaced by things made in France. Even my doll, my one and only true friend, I had to relinquish to you because I was to be the wife of the dauphin of France.\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Oh yes, that doll. Didn't you call him Stephan? I have kept him all this time.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Have you really? Do you still have him? How mean of you. Please return him to me.\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: I will, when the time is right.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: But it already has been eighteen years. What have I been doing during all this time?\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Your Majesty...\n\n( _The_ DUCHESSE DE MONZETTE, _the_ MARQUISE DE SISINA, _the_ COMTESSE DE LAMBESQUE, _and_ VISCOMTESSE CALONNE, _all followers of_ MARIE ANTOINETTE, _enter flamboyantly._ )\n\nDUCHESSE DE MONZETTE: Ah, Your Majesty, here you are.\n\nMARQUISE DE SISINA: Oh Your Majesty, you look pale. Are you not feeling well?\n\nMESDAMES: Your Majesty... ?\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Well, actually...\n\nDUCHESSE DE MONZETTE ( _Bossily_ ): Comte de Mercy, you're leaving? Well, then, we will be attending to Her Majesty.\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: But...\n\nDUCHESSE DE MONZETTE: Don't you think it would be better if you left?\n\nMARQUISE DE SISINA: Don't you worry about Her Majesty. We will look after her as usual.... There now, you may leave.\n\nMESDAMES: There now, there now, good day.\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Well then. ( _Fleeing from the place, although he would prefer to stay_.)\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Comte de Mercy...\n\nCOMTESSE DE LAMBESQUE ( _Flatteringly_ ): There now, Your Majesty. What shall we do today?\n\nDUCHESSE DE MONZETTE: Oh... Her Majesty has been enthusiastic about gambling these days. Isn't that true, Your Majesty... ?\n\nVISCOMTESSE CALONNE: Well, Your Majesty, let us play cards as usual. I won't lose today....\n\n( _Each tries to curry favor. Suddenly, we hear_ OSCAR' _s voice_.)\n\nOSCAR'S VOICE: Wait. The queen is not feeling well. Please leave, now!\n\nDUCHESSE DE MONZETTE: How rude! Who is it talking to us in such a fashion? Who's there? Show yourself!\n\n( _Lively flowery music_. OSCAR _appears_.)\n\nMESDAMES: Oscar!\n\nOSCAR: Dear ladies, I am Oscar Fran\u00e7ois de Jarjayes, at your service.\n\nDUCHESSE DE MONZETTE ( _Cloyingly_ ): Oscar, we were just...\n\nOSCAR: My mission, as captain of the Royal Guard, is to protect Her Majesty the Queen. I won't take orders from anyone concerning Her Majesty, even from the wife of the duc de Monzette!\n\nDUCHESSE DE MONZETTE: My my, but you're just a woman!\n\nOSCAR: No, I am not a woman.\n\nMARQUISE DE SISINA: But you are...\n\nOSCAR: From early childhood, I, Oscar, have been raised as a boy in order to protect Her Majesty the queen. When I wear the uniform of the Royal Guard, I am a man, both mentally and physically.\n\nDUCHESSE DE MONZETTE: Oscar!\n\nOSCAR ( _Looking at the duchess coolly_ ): Yes. Is something the matter, Your Grace?\n\nDUCHESSE DE MONZETTE ( _Fumblingly_ ): No... I just feel so weak when you look at me that way. I don't know if you're a man or a woman... ( _Trembling_ ) but somehow I feel like my body is on fire.\n\nOSCAR: I'm honored, Your Grace.\n\nDUCHESSE DE MONZETTE ( _Her body shaking_ ): Oooh, I think I am going to faint.... Well then, Oscar. ( _Conceitedly._ ) Come mesdames, Let us take our leave...\n\nMESDAMES: But...\n\nDUCHESSE DE MONZETTE: Oscar commands it. Come, come.... Well then, Oscar, I trust you will execute your duties responsibly.\n\n( _The ladies take their leave. Quiet music_.)\n\nOSCAR: Please, forgive me, Your Majesty, for being so forward...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Oscar...\n\nOSCAR: I, Oscar Fran\u00e7ois de Jarjayes, have come here today to give you a word of warning. I'm prepared for whatever punishment or reproaches you wish to mete out to me.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: What is it? Have you come to speak your mind again?\n\nOSCAR: Your Majesty, you already know that all those nobles are preying on you and exploiting your court. The more luxurious your life is, the more impoverished the people of this country will become. What should go to the people disappears because it is used up by a handful of heartless aristocrats.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Oh, Oscar, thank you. I have finally come to realize that myself. Eighteen years ago, when I came to France to be married, the previous king took me under his wing, and I could do whatever I wanted, every day. I so enjoyed those days. Even though I have three children by Louis XVI, I have remained that fourteen-year-old girl up until now.\n\nOSCAR: Your Majesty, I am glad you understand the situation so thoroughly. Now that I know this, I would like to make another request.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Why so formal? What is it?\n\nOSCAR: Please send Fersen back to Sweden.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Oscar!\n\nOSCAR: Your Majesty, your relationship with Fersen has become court gossip. The rumors have become even more and more outrageous, and the unscrupulous among the aristocracy have been using these rumors to agitate the malcontents. You are the queen of France. As the mother of the French Empire, I beg you to send Fersen back to Sweden.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Dear Oscar, you have been protecting me as a member of the Royal Guard since I was fourteen. And I believed that you, more than anyone else, understood my feelings as a woman. I trusted that you would understand because you yourself are a woman, but I see that at some point you lost touch with your feminine side.\n\nOSCAR: Your Majesty...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: I'm a person before I'm a queen! And I'm a woman with a beating heart! I'm a woman waiting and wanting to love and be loved just like anyone else. I was born to love him. He is the first man I ever wanted to love of my own free will. Oscar, all the blood in my body surges toward him, and even God can't stop this deep red flower from blooming!\n\nOSCAR: Your Majesty...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: I know I'm committing a sin. But still, I cannot send Fersen back to Sweden!\n\nOSCAR: Your Majesty!\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Even if the sun rose from the west!\n\n( _Indignantly,_ MARIE ANTOINETTE _leaves. A distressed_ OSCAR _is left alone. MAJOR_ GIRODELLE _of the Royal Guard appears quietly._ )\n\nGIRODELLE: Commandant... you were brave to speak your mind....\n\nOSCAR: Major Girodelle, Her Majesty spoke harsh words to me.\n\nGIRODELLE: What you said was not without good reason. Ever since the queen came to France to be married, you have been at her side to serve her. That's why you may well give her such considerate advice.\n\nOSCAR: I think I understand the queen's sorrow. It is quite palpable to me. However, even if the queen hates me, I must do my duty devotedly, for I am the commandant of the Royal Guard.\n\nGIRODELLE: Commandant...\n\nOSCAR: Major Girodelle, my trusted aide-de-camp, let us work together to guard the palace.\n\nGIRODELLE: It's my honor. I'll do my best to help you.\n\nOSCAR: Thank you, Girodelle.\n\nGIRODELLE: Commandant...\n\n( _The two shake hands firmly_.)\n\nSCENE 7. A HALLWAY IN THE PALACE OF VERSAILLES\n\n_A hallway of the palace of Versailles with beautiful tapestries displayed_. FERSEN _appears, trying to be inconspicuous. He sings:_\n\nFERSEN:\n\nEven though I know this love doesn't stand a chance\n\nI'm worn out by love and in love with love\n\nI want to believe you\n\nI want love, eternal\n\nIntense, intense love\n\nEven though I know this love shall separate us one day\n\nEven though I know this love shall separate us one day\n\n(OSCAR _approaches_.)\n\nOSCAR: Fersen...\n\nFERSEN: Oscar...\n\nOSCAR: What are you doing here, in the middle of the night? What would happen if people saw you here?\n\nFERSEN: Oscar, laugh at me, this man who's blinded by love. I just wanted to see the queen, even if it is from afar.\n\nOSCAR: Don't be a fool! You're a Swedish aristocrat. Don't forget your social standing!\n\nFERSEN: Oscar...\n\nOSCAR: You know what a turbulent state this country is in. And you're one of the reasons for it.\n\nFERSEN: Now wait a minute. However blinded by love I might be, I am discreet and can tell right from wrong. Ah, the hardships I have endured...\n\nOSCAR: Fersen... despite the hardships, your efforts were not enough. You might not have realized it, but even the king has started to notice.\n\nFERSEN: What? The king?\n\nOSCAR: The king is deeply considerate and mild. He says nothing in public, but the rumors have reached his ears.\n\nFERSEN: Oscar...\n\n( _Sad music._ )\n\nOSCAR: Fersen, she is the queen of France. You know very well that she can't just give up her throne and come running into your arms!\n\nFERSEN: Oscar...\n\nOSCAR: Please go back to your own country! Return to Sweden immediately! It will be for the sake of her happiness.\n\nFERSEN: I won't let you give me any orders!\n\nOSCAR: Fersen...\n\nFERSEN ( _Laughing coldly_ ): To try to explain this agony to you, a woman who has relinquished her femininity, would be a waste of time....\n\nOSCAR: Fersen!\n\nFERSEN: If you knew the agony of being in love, you wouldn't be able to say such cruel things to me!\n\n(FERSEN _is angry and leaves._ )\n\nOSCAR: Fersen... to be rebuked by you is worse than being rebuked by anyone else. Fersen... Fersen... I also am in love.... it is an unrequited love... for you. From the moment we met, at the masquerade ball at the Opera House.... But... you had eyes only for the queen, even though you didn't know who she was. And I have loyally protected the queen as a Royal Guard from the time she was fourteen. Oh dear God, why did you bring together the three of us, born in different countries, here in France?\n\n(OSCAR _sings sadly as she crosses the silver bridge._ )\n\nOSCAR:\n\nI'm on a pilgrimage of love\n\nI'm on a pilgrimage of love\n\nI'm alone, on unfamiliar terrain\n\nI long for love, wandering aimlessly again today\n\nFarther and farther\n\nThrough endless countries\n\nWhere is the love I long for?\n\nWhat is that love I long for?\n\nLooks may be deceiving but\n\nWho can understand this woman's heart of mine\n\nSCENE 8. THE GARDENS\n\n_A waterway in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles. A beautiful moon is reflected in the water, and the overpowering scent of trees in early summer envelopes the area. Seductive music. In a pretty little dreamlike boat,_ MARIE ANTOINETTE _and_ FERSEN _embrace_.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Oh... I live only in the shadows of the night. Fersen, at night, I come to life. During the day, I slumber through court rituals and ceremonies. But when the night comes, at last I awaken. When the sun goes down on the horizon beyond the forest, my heart starts to beat faster and my blood starts to course. This is proof positive that I am alive in this world....\n\nFERSEN: My queen, at the masquerade ball at the Opera House, when everyone ignored me and I didn't know what to do, it was you who so kindly spoke to me. That kindness... it made me feel so...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: I discovered something of myself in you.\n\nFERSEN: My dear queen.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: I am still Austrian. Even though eighteen years have passed, I have not yet been able to become a French woman. Even those subjects who are seemingly obedient think of me as an Austrian woman. So this heart, which I had to protect from such hostility, was moved by...\n\nFERSEN: So you had not a moment of peace...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: I came to France at the age of fourteen, forced into a political marriage. I believed the prince of my dreams would be waiting for me. However, I was used only to dispel the discord between the House of Hapsburg and the House of Bourbon. And they also wanted my dowry.... Can you imagine how miserable I was when I realized this?... I wasn't a human being; I was just a tool.\n\nFERSEN: How sad...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: It was you who comforted my lonely heart.... Fersen... Don't leave me...\n\nFERSEN: I won't leave you, whatever may happen! Even if we burn in hell as immoral sinners...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Oh Fersen...\n\n( _They sing passionately._ )\n\nFERSEN:\n\nLove can be so sorrowful\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE:\n\nLove can be so painful\n\nTOGETHER:\n\nLove can be such a torture\n\nLove can be ephemeral\n\nLove, love, love,\n\n( _While the two sing their painfully sad song, their boat silently floats through the waterway_.)\n\n[ _In scene 9, the orphan_ ROSALIE, _who has been raised in OSCAR's mansion, marries the revolutionary journalist_ BERNARD. OSCAR _and_ ANDR\u00c9 _gradually start to sympathize with the republican ideology of the revolutionaries, so_ OSCAR _requests a transfer from the Royal Guard, which protects the royal family, to the French Guard_ , _which works with the people. In scene 10, the_ COMTE DE MERCY, _troubled by trends in public opinion, tells_ FERSEN _to go home_.]\n\nSCENE 11. CURTAIN\n\n_In front of the curtain, the_ MARQUISE DE SISINA, _the_ COMTESSE DE LAMBESQUE, _and_ VISCOMTESSE CALONNE _appear, consoling the_ DUCHESSE DE MONZETTE _, who is upset and in tears._\n\nMESDAMES: Madame Monzette.\n\n( _The_ DUCHESSE DE MONZETTE _weeps._ )\n\nMARQUISE DE SISINA: Calm down... calm down...\n\nDUCHESSE DE MONZETTE: How can I possibly be calm?! Oscar has been transferred from the Royal Guard to the French Guard! The French Guard is different from the Royal Guard, which protects this palace. The French Guard is in charge of keeping the peace in France... to transfer to such dangerous post right now...\n\nCOMTESSE DE LAMBESQUE: So you say, but it's by Oscar's own wish.\n\nDUCHESSE DE MONZETTE: Is that what you think, too?\n\nVISCOMTESSE CALONNE: That's right, indeed. It is not our place to object to her decision.\n\nDUCHESSE DE MONZETTE: And you?\n\nMARQUISE DE SISINA: Madame la Duchesse, our brilliant Oscar must have had her reasons.\n\nDUCHESSE DE MONZETTE: Then, are you saying that Oscar has abandoned us?!\n\nMARQUISE DE SISINA: Oh, don't say that...\n\nDUCHESSE DE MONZETTE: But it's true! Her resignation from the Royal Guard means that she abandoned us, the aristocracy!\n\nCOMTESSE DE LAMBESQUE: You need to worry, Madame la Duchesse. The French Guard is composed of rough commoners, different from the Royal Guard. Even our capable Oscar will find them uncontrollable, and she'll come back...\n\nDUCHESSE DE MONZETTE ( _Hysterically_ ): You! You all say that we should wait till then?! Should we just watch with folded arms our dear, dear Oscar in danger and do nothing at all?! I won't. My Oscar... oh, Oscar, Oscar, wherefore art thou Oscar?\n\nMESDAMES: Madame Monzette...\n\nDUCHESSE DE MONZETTE: Oh, I'm going to faint away in such agony because I am so, soooo worried.\n\nSCENE 12. THE AUDIENCE ROOM\n\n_The audience room at Versailles. There is a distant view of the extensive palace gardens through the window_.\n\nFRAN\u00c7OISE: Your Majesty. Comte de Mercy has arrived.\n\n( _The_ KING _appears with the_ COMTE DE PROVENCE. _The_ COMTE DE MERCY _and_ FERSEN _appear._ )\n\nKING LOUIS XVI: Comte de Mercy. What is it?\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Your Majesty. Comte de Fersen has come to greet you before his return home.\n\nKING LOUIS XVI: What...? His return?\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Yes, Your Majesty. Because preparations for his engagement to be married are now completed in Sweden, he has been requested to make his way back home immediately.\n\nCONTE DE PROVENCE: What? An engagement? ( _Ironically._ ) Ha, ha, ha... what amusing news I hear. You're still a bachelor?\n\nKING LOUIS XVI: You can't.\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Pardon?\n\nKING LOUIS XVI: You really can't.\n\nCONTE DE PROVENCE: My dear brother...\n\nKING LOUIS XVI: Fersen, can't you possibly postpone your departure?\n\nFERSEN: Your Majesty...\n\nKING LOUIS XVI: The queen will be so sad. She is solely dependent on you. It would not be a problem if the country were at peace, but there is much turmoil now. Would you please give your support to her?\n\nCONTE DE PROVENCE: My dear brother, you know this man and my sister-in-law are...\n\nKING LOUIS XVI: What do you say? Is it not possible?\n\nFERSEN: Your Majesty... Forgive me...\n\nKING LOUIS XVI: Then it really isn't possible, is it?\n\nFERSEN: It is an order from the king of Sweden...\n\nKING LOUIS XVI: Yes... but we will miss you...\n\nFERSEN: Your Majesty...\n\nKING LOUIS XVI: May you be happy...\n\nFERSEN: I wish Your Majesty the best of health... Farewell. ( _Leaves._ )\n\nCONTE DE PROVENCE: Brother, how can you be so friendly to him. Why did you speak to such a man? He is...\n\nKING LOUIS XVI: I know.\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Your Majesty...\n\nKING LOUIS XVI: Don't embarrass me. Fersen is an agreeable man. Any woman would be attracted to him....\n\nCONTE DE PROVENCE: You knew and still...? You and my sister-in-law are married with three children. And even though your wife is...\n\nKING LOUIS XVI ( _Interrupting his brother_ ): Oh, I've just remembered. The door of my room has been creaking since the other day. Let me fix it now....\n\nCONTE DE PROVENCE: Oh brother... ( _Follows him._ )\n\n( _Calm music._ )\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Your Majesty...\n\n(MARIE ANTOINETTE _appears._ )\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Your Majesty. Did you hear what His Majesty said... ?\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: How deeply have I sinned.... My king, please forgive me.... Not knowing how magnanimous your heart was, I have been... I am...\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Your Majesty...\n\n(LE DAUPHIN _and_ LA DAUPHINE _appear cheerfully._ )\n\nLE DAUPHIN and LA DAUPHINE: Maman!\n\nLE DAUPHIN: Maman, I heard that Oscar is going to Paris. She said she'll let me ride on her horse before she says good-bye. I can go, can't I?\n\nLA DAUPHINE: I want to go with him.\n\n(MARIE ANTOINETTE _holds her two children tightly._ )\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Comte de Mercy. From today, I will sever my ties to the past and protect this Bourbon dynasty. For the king, and for our children...\n\n( _Music. Rising_.)\n\n[ _In scene 13,_ ANDR\u00c9 _sees_ FERSEN _off_. FERSEN _lectures_ ANDR\u00c9 _\u2014who is suffering from unrequited love for his lord's daughter_ OSCAR, _who is of a higher class than he\u2014on the nobleness of love_.]\n\nSCENE 14. OSCAR'S SITTING ROOM\n\nOSCAR _'s sitting room_. OSCAR _is sitting in front of a mirror and having her hair combed by her nurse_.\n\nOSCAR: You know what, nanny?\n\nMARRON-GLAC\u00c9: What is it?\n\nOSCAR: They say that nowadays, it is more honorable among commoners to be called _citoyen_ and _citoyenne_ than to be called _monsieur_ and _madame. Citoyen_ and _citoyenne_. Those do not sound bad.\n\nMARRON-GLAC\u00c9: It's none of our concern, what new words are popular with commoners...\n\nOSCAR: You are right. I am an aristocrat after all...\n\nMARRON-GLAC\u00c9: Yes, indeed. I brought you up as a French aristocrat, a young lady of the House of Jarjayes.\n\nOSCAR: A lady...\n\nMARRON-GLAC\u00c9: Yes. It's already late. Good night, Lady Oscar.\n\n(MARRON-GLAC\u00c9 _goes out of the room._ )\n\nOSCAR: Oh Nanny, that mirror and comb I leave to you... if I go to Paris... something may happen that will force me to shed my aristocracy...\n\nOSCAR: Andr\u00e9... Andr\u00e9... ( _Shouts._ )\n\n(ANDR\u00c9 _comes in._ )\n\nANDR\u00c9: What's wrong at this time of night... ?\n\n(OSCAR _walks toward the window._ )\n\nOSCAR: Oh Andr\u00e9. How beautiful these stars are. They are shining as if they are unaware of human despair and the sorrows of this world. Our earthly problems are tiny when seen from the vastness of the universe.\n\nANDR\u00c9: When you were a child, you used to say that a glass carriage filled with happiness would come to fetch you from the Milky Way....\n\nOSCAR: What was my happiness... ?\n\nANDR\u00c9: Oscar...\n\nOSCAR: Andr\u00e9, I didn't make wrong choices in life, did I?\n\nANDR\u00c9: This is not like you. Something is wrong with you tonight...\n\nOSCAR: Andr\u00e9, I must thank you.\n\nANDR\u00c9: Why do you act so formal all of a sudden?\n\nOSCAR: It's not as if I didn't know how you felt about me.\n\nANDR\u00c9 ( _In amazement_ ): Oscar.\n\nOSCAR:... Do you like me?\n\nANDR\u00c9 ( _Camouflaging_ ): Why are you going into this now?...\n\nOSCAR: Be honest with me.\n\nANDR\u00c9:... I like you...\n\nOSCAR: Do you love me?\n\nANDR\u00c9: Yes, I love you.\n\nOSCAR: My existence is next to nothing compared with the giant wheels of history. See, I let myself get away with such emotional dependence.\n\nANDR\u00c9: Oscar...\n\nOSCAR: Yet... do you still love me? Will you vow to love me for as long as you live?\n\nANDR\u00c9: Do you want me to swear a thousand times, ten thousand times? Do you dare make me utter these words and stake my life on them? I love you! Of course I love you...\n\nOSCAR: Andr\u00e9, hold me!\n\nANDR\u00c9: Oscar...\n\nOSCAR: Just this one night I want to be the wife of Andr\u00e9 Grandier...\n\nANDR\u00c9: Oscar...\n\nOSCAR: I want to be called the wife of Andr\u00e9 Grandier, to be the wife of the one who carried a torch for me for more than a decade...\n\nANDR\u00c9 ( _Hugs_ OSCAR _tightly_ ): I am... I'm so glad to have lived to see this day...\n\n( _They hug each other tightly and sing an anthem to love._ )\n\nANDR\u00c9:\n\nLove can be so sweet\n\nOSCAR:\n\nLove can be so strong\n\nTOGETHER:\n\nLove can be so precious\n\nLove can be so sublime\n\nLove, Love, Love\n\n( _Music. Rising_.)\n\nSCENE 15. CURTAIN\n\n_Music. Uneasy and apprehensive_. BERNARD _appears in a state of nervous excitement_.\n\nBERNARD ( _Shouts_ ): Rosalie... Rosalie...\n\nROSALIE ( _Appears_ ): Yes, my dear...\n\nBERNARD: Go to Versailles immediately.\n\nROSALIE: To Versailles?\n\nBERNARD: You must tell Oscar not to come to Paris.\n\nROSALIE: Lady Oscar is coming to Paris?\n\nBERNARD: Yes. It seems that Oscar had requested a transfer from the Royal Guard to the French Guard and has been appointed their commander.\n\nROSALIE: Oh no... the Royal Guard guards the palace, but the French Guard is different because they are the peacekeeping troops of France. What was she thinking to transfer at such a time?\n\nBERNARD: Well at last, the French Guard has received its marching orders but there's going to be trouble. Fed up with troops trying to oppress us with brute force, the citizens are arming themselves and gathering to take a stand. This can't possibly end in peace. So the French Guard led by Oscar will be the first line of attack. Oscar's life is at risk. You must go and stop Oscar.\n\nROSALIE: But... but... I can't!\n\nBERNARD: Do you want to let her die?!\n\nROSALIE: No! But given who and what she is, how she must have suffered and agonized over this....\n\nBERNARD: Rosalie...\n\nROSALIE: Darling, if there was ever an end worthy of her extraordinary life, I think there's no other way than to let her do what she believes. Please, darling, let her go where her heart leads her.\n\nBERNARD: Rosalie...\n\nROSALIE: This is... this is for her sake...\n\n( _Suddenly, gunshots resound in the distance._ )\n\nBERNARD: Oh, those gunshots can only mean...\n\nROSALIE: Darling...\n\nBERNARD: Dash it... too late... Rosalie... we must go...\n\nROSALIE: Yes!\n\n( _They leave in a hurry. Music, rising with apprehension and uneasiness_.)\n\nSCENE 16. THE CITY CENTER OF PARIS\n\n_A bridge in the city center_. ANDR\u00c9 _is pushing back many soldiers of the_ FRENCH GUARD.\n\nANDR\u00c9: Everyone, wait! We must not act recklessly without an order from our commandant! Didn't we promise? The French Guard in disarray will sow seeds of trouble for the future. A little more patience. Don't move until our commandant comes back!\n\n( _A gunshot nearby_.)\n\nGENERAL DE BOUILLE: You troops! What are you all doing here?! Start the attack now!\n\nANDR\u00c9: General de Bouille! We are waiting for the order from our commandant!\n\nGENERAL DE BOUILLE: No need to wait for orders from the likes of Oscar! The battle has begun! I am in charge of the French Guard! I will give the orders!\n\n(OSCAR _appears_.)\n\nOSCAR: Please wait! General de Bouille!\n\nTHE GUARDS: Commandant.\n\nOSCAR: Even if you would give the order, General, I, Oscar, am the commandant of the French Guard, and I will not make my soldiers attack!\n\nGENERAL DE BOUILLE: Silence! This is no time to argue with you, a mere woman!\n\nOSCAR: Women have the right to live and the right to make themselves heard!\n\nGENERAL DE BOUILLE: Such impertinence. Do as you please, then! There are plenty of soldiers even without your guards! You'll be sorry for this later...\n\nOSCAR ( _Taking out her sword and pointing it at_ GENERAL DE BOUILLE): My fellow soldiers! Just as the United States of America won independence from England with its own hands, now we, the people of France, under the banner of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have bravely arisen. Don't move! From this moment, I renounce my title of comtesse and forfeit all that comes with it!\n\nTHE GUARDS: Commandant!\n\nGENERAL DE BOUILLE: You, how dare you...\n\nOSCAR: Silence! If you want to live, close your mouth and listen quietly! Well, my fellow soldiers, make your choice. Will you remain pawns of the king and the aristocrats and point your guns at your own people? Or will you, as free citizens, join the people in this glorious struggle?\n\nTHE GUARDS: Commandant... we will follow you! Our commandant!\n\nGENERAL DE BOUILLE: You... You'll pay for this... Come. ( _Leaves_.)\n\n( _The sound of gunshots_.)\n\nOSCAR: My brave soldiers. Let us join the people and fight for our homeland. May the exploits of the French Guard live on in history, passed down from generation to generation, for as long as men live!\n\nTHE GUARDS: Hurrah!\n\nOSCAR: Load your guns!\n\nTHE GUARDS: Yes, sir!\n\nTHE PEOPLE: Let us join for the fight! Rahh!\n\n(THE GUARDS _leave in high spirits_.)\n\nOSCAR: Andr\u00e9.\n\nANDR\u00c9: You were very brave to make up your mind...\n\nOSCAR: Andr\u00e9! When this battle is over, it will be time for our wedding...\n\nANDR\u00c9: Oscar...\n\nOSCAR: For France... let us fight splendidly.\n\n( _Gunshots resound nearby_. ANDR\u00c9 _leaves_.)\n\nOSCAR: Please forgive me, my queen. Oscar has finally betrayed you, despite the profound confidence you had in me.... Father, please forgive Oscar's disobedience... but someone needs to protect the weak citizens.... Farewell to all these yokes of the past... Farewell to my youth, never to return...\n\n(BERNARD _and_ ROSALIE _hasten in_.)\n\nBERNARD: Oscar...\n\nROSALIE: Mademoiselle Oscar!\n\nOSCAR: Bernard, things are as you have heard...\n\nBERNARD: Thank you. How... how...\n\nOSCAR: We shall unite to restore France to its former glory!\n\nROSALIE: Mademoiselle Oscar. I cannot tell how much the citizens were encouraged by you....\n\nOSCAR: Rosalie. The army is tough! Are you ready... ?\n\nROSALIE: Yes, I am.\n\n( _Suddenly. A bullet hits the bridge girder_. OSCAR _and others lie down_. ANDR\u00c9 _returns_.)\n\nANDR\u00c9: Oscar... Oscar...\n\n( _The sound of gunshots nearby. The citizens run about trying to escape_.)\n\nOSCAR: Andr\u00e9...\n\nANDR\u00c9: Don't come, stay away. The enemy is near. ( _A bullet strikes him_.)\n\nOSCAR: Andr\u00e9...\n\nANDR\u00c9: Oscar... you must live...\n\nOSCAR: Andr\u00e9!\n\nANDR\u00c9: Just take good care of your life. ( _Three shots, and he falls down_.)\n\nOSCAR ( _Screams_ ): Andr\u00e9.\n\n(BERNARD _stops_ OSCAR _from running to_ ANDR\u00c9.)\n\nANDR\u00c9: Oscar... Oscar! Where are you?\n\nOSCAR: Andr\u00e9!\n\nANDR\u00c9: Oscar... waving blonde hair... blue eyes... and looking like the wings of Pegasus... makes my heart flutter.\n\n(ANDR\u00c9 _dies in a flood of bullets, his body riddled with holes like honeycomb_.)\n\nOSCAR: Let me go! Let me go! Andr\u00e9!\n\nANDR\u00c9: Os... car.\n\nOSCAR ( _Shaking off_ BERNARD): Andr\u00e9...\n\n( _Music. Strongly. Blackout, except for_ OSCAR.)\n\nOSCAR ( _Forsaking her grief, stands up resolutely_ ): _Citoyens!_ We must not let his death be in vain! We will fight till the end. For Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity... _Citoyens!_ Let us attack the Bastille first and show our force! _Citoyens!_ Forward! ( _Almost shrieking._ )\n\nSCENE 17. THE BASTILLE\n\n_The set is arranged with the famous painting,_ The Taking of the Bastille. _The French Guard. A dance number representing the attack by the people. A merciless bullet hits_ OSCAR.\n\nROSALIE: Lady Oscar!\n\nOSCAR: Andr\u00e9... lend me your hands. The suffering you've borne, I will try to bear it too... Andr\u00e9... Andr\u00e9... Are you no longer here?\n\n( _A white flag rises in the backstage set._ )\n\nROSALIE: Mademoiselle Oscar!\n\nBERNARD: Oscar... a white flag flies over the Bastille.\n\nOSCAR: Has it fallen at last... France... Vive la France.\n\nROSALIE: Noooooooh! Mademoiselle Oscar! ( _Cries._ )\n\n( _People are rejoicing at a distance: The Bastille has been taken! In hearing that,_ OSCAR _breathes her last. Music. Rising_.)\n\n[ _In scene 18,_ FERSEN, _who is confined in Sweden, receives word of the French Revolution and learns of_ OSCAR _' s and_ ANDR\u00c9 _'s deaths from_ GIRODELLE. _In scene 19, those who consider_ FERSEN _'s attempt to rescue the French royal family to be against Sweden's national interest work against him. In scene 20,_ FERSEN _pleads to his king for permission to leave the country because he is willing to risk his life for love. He is granted permission_.]\n\nPART II\n\n[ _Scene 1 is the prologue. In scene 2, the courtiers abandon the royal family. In scene 3,_ MARIE ANTOINETTE _declares to the people that she will take responsibility as the queen of France. She leaves the palace of Versailles. In scene 4,_ FERSEN _asks Austria,_ MARIE ANTOINETTE _'s homeland, for help but is refused. From scene 5 onward,_ MARIE ANTOINETTE _discovers that she does have ties to her family, but then_ LOUIS XVI _is called to stand trial._ MARIE ANTOINETTE _'s aria is featured in scene 6. (Scene 7 is missing in the book.) In scenes 8 and 9,_ FERSEN _crosses borders as he makes his way to France_.]\n\nSCENE 10. PRISON\n\n_In the prison of the gloomy concergerie. The bells of Notre Dame toll desolately nearby. Alone in the prison,_ MARIE ANTOINETTE _combs her hair. The door opens with a heavy sound and_ ROSALIE _comes in_.\n\nROSALIE: Your Majesty...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Rosalie...\n\nROSALIE: I brought your dinner...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Oh, it's already night... It's hard to tell morning from evening in this dimly lit prison...\n\n(ROSALIE _cries._ )\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Please don't cry.\n\nROSALIE: Your Majesty...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Rosalie. You will be punished if you say \"Your Majesty.\" Call me female convict 280 or Widow Capet.\n\nROSALIE: No, I won't. To me, you will always be my queen.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: But that puts you in a difficult situation. And think of how it may affect your husband... it's already hard for you to tend to me like this...\n\nROSALIE: Your Majesty... this is my husband, Bernard.\n\n(BERNARD _appears._ )\n\nBERNARD: Widow Capet.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Rosalie has been very kind to me.\n\nBERNARD: Not at all. She does what she must do as the warden of this prison.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE:... Bernard... my turn has come, has it not?\n\nBERNARD: Widow Capet.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Be frank. I know it well. I hear Death's footsteps close by.\n\nBERNARD: Please forgive me. I am powerless.... At least, will you please accept your end with the royal dignity...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: I understand. I left Versailles with that resolution.\n\nROSALIE: Please. Partake of some food...\n\n(MARIE ANTOINETTE _shakes her head._ )\n\nROSALIE: You must. You did not eat yesterday, and neither did you eat the day before yesterday. Your body will...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: I will be summoned by God soon. At this stage, why should I make an effort to live?\n\nBERNARD: Your Majesty... please at least try the soup. Rosalie made it for you with all her heart.\n\nROSALIE: Your Majesty... at least a sip.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Thank you, Rosalie...\n\nBERNARD: Please, Your Majesty.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE ( _Takes a sip_ ): Thank you. I can tell this soup was prepared with the warmth of your heart. I am truly blessed till the very end...\n\nBERNARD:... Widow Capet. The last visitor is here...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Who is it? Who could possibly want to meet a prisoner condemned to die?\n\n( _The_ COMTE DE MERCY _comes in when_ BERNARD _and_ ROSALIE _go out._ )\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Your Majesty...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Comte de Mercy. You shouldn't be here.... If you are seen here, you will be punished.\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Your Majesty...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: I want you, at least, to stay alive...\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: I came to return this to you. ( _Takes out the doll Stephan._ )\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Stephan... ( _Hugs it dearly._ )\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: When you came for your marriage from Vienna to Versailles, I took this doll away from you in hopes that you would become an adult as soon as possible... but because you grew up... Your Majesty...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: This doll was me.... And I was just a doll myself, my whole life.\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Your Majesty...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: I was scolded by you often. Such a naughty girl I was....\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Your Majesty... please take good care of Stephan from now on...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Thank you. I will talk to this doll as I used to in the past... but for how long will that be?\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY: Your Majesty... ( _Tries to kiss the hem of her dress._ )\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Comte de Mercy ( _Avoiding him_ ), it is time to say good-bye. I am glad I was able to see you in the end... please take good care of yourself...\n\nCOMTE DE MERCY ( _Unbearably_ ): Your Majesty... ( _Leaves._ )\n\n( _Music. Calm._ )\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Everything is over.... This is... this is all... well, my last bit of work is to die with dignity...\n\n(FERSEN _appears, enveloped in a black mantle_.)\n\nFERSEN: My Queen...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Fersen... Fersen... Why?... Who let you in here... ?\n\nFERSEN: I cannot tell you, for the person will be endangered by doing so...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Am I... am I dreaming... ?\n\nFERSEN: No. This is not a dream. I have come to save you, Your Majesty...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Fersen...\n\nFERSEN: Your Majesty. Everything has been arranged. I, Fersen, promise to guide you outside the country.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Thank you, Fersen... even at the risk of your own life.\n\nFERSEN: Your Majesty...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: I am touched, really, to know that there was still a person who cared about me so deeply...\n\nFERSEN: Please. Your Majesty... the sooner the better.\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Now... now I can die in peace...\n\nFERSEN: Your Majesty...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Please forgive me... since I will not obey you... Fersen... I am the queen of France. My mother has once told me to not be Austrian but to become a splendid Frenchwoman.... I want to honor her words until my last moment. Fersen... I am the queen of France, the widow of the king, and a mother of the little dauphin. My dauphin and dauphine, where are they, and how are they doing?... I cannot possibly abandon my poor children and escape. I am the queen, but at the same time I am a mother, a very ordinary mother. How can I possibly escape and leave them... ?\n\nFERSEN: You are...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Fersen. Please. Let me die, at least on the soil of France where my children are...\n\nFERSEN: No! I cannot forsake the person for whom I risked my life!\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Fersen. We have endured so much until this day, have we not... ?\n\nFERSEN: Your Majesty...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: I beg you. If you still love me, then please let me end my life with dignity as the queen of France. That will be the last proof of your love for me...\n\nFERSEN: My queen...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE ( _Strongly embrace each other_ ): Fersen... Thank you... thank you... ( _Puts the doll in his hands._ )\n\n( _Heavy sound of the door opening._ )\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Oh no... someone is coming... ( _They separate._ )\n\n(FERSEN _hides._ BERNARD _appears with a surveillance soldier._ )\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Bernard... thank you for your trouble...\n\nBERNARD: Widow Capet...\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: I know. Don't say anything more... now... Shall we go?...\n\nBERNARD: Let me accompany you...\n\n(MARIE ANTOINETTE _is about to leave._ FELSEN _loses his self-restraint and steps out._ )\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE ( _Speaking to_ BERNARD, _even though her words of farewell seem to be directed to_ FERSEN): Bernard! I am deeply grateful for your kindness because till the very end I will be able to be as dignified as the queen of France ought to be, just like a red rose blooming in Versailles.\n\nBERNARD: Widow Capet!\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Yes...\n\n(MARIE ANTOINETTE _leaves for the execution ground._ )\n\nFERSEN: Your Majesty... ( _Tries to run after her._ )\n\nROSALIE ( _Appears and stops him_ ): No, you mustn't! I beg you...\n\nFERSEN: Let me go! Rosalie...\n\nROSALIE: Please let Her Majesty go. Please do not cast a shadow on her smile. For that is the end of the queen of France...\n\n( _The people_ ' _s cheers in the distance._ ROSALIE _bursts into tears and leaves._ )\n\nFERSEN: My queen...\n\n( _As if he wishes to have_ MARIE ANTOINETTE _hear his song,_ FELSEN _sings while weeping._ )\n\nFERSEN:\n\nLove can be so sorrowful,\n\nLove can be so painful,\n\nLove can be so torturous,\n\nLove can be ephemeral\n\n( _The silk gauze in the prison becomes transparent_.)\n\nFERSEN and MARIE ANTOINETTE:\n\nLove, Love, Love\n\n(MARIE ANTOINETTE _slowly climbs up the steps to the guillotine_.)\n\nSCENE 11. THE GUILLOTINE\n\n_The guillotine makes use of the grand staircase_.\n\nFERSEN: My queen... you will live in my heart forever. Forever like the red roses that bloom in Versailles...\n\n( _Ascending,_ MARIE ANTOINETTE _pauses midway and turns around_.)\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE: Adieu, Versailles... Adieu, Paris... Adieu... France...\n\n(MARIE ANTOINETTE _disappears as she ascends the staircase. Shouts of joy from the crowd_.)\n\nFERSEN: My queen!\n\n( _With this desperate cry_ , FERSEN _sinks below the floor on the trapdoor lift. Music rising._ )\n\nBACKSTAGE CHORUS:\n\nLove can be sorrowful\n\nLove can be painful\n\nLove can be tortuous\n\nLove can be ephemeral\n\nAhhh... Ahhh...\n\nAhhh... Ahhh...\n\nAhhh...\n\n( _In an instant, the grand staircase turns into the stage of the spectacular finale._ )\n\n[ _It is customary in Takarazuka musicals to have variously costumed and choreographed dance finales that are not necessarily connected with the story of the play. At the very last comes the Grand Finale, in which main characters in the play appear and sing in gorgeously decorated costumes_ :\n\n_Scene 12. Finale A (Rockets)_\n\n_Scene 13. Finale B (Tango of Roses)_\n\n_Scene 14. Finale C (Bolero)_\n\n_Scene 15. Finale D_ ]\n\nSCENE 16. GRAND FINALE\n\nMARIE ANTOINETTE:\n\nA seed born\n\nOn the banks of the blue Danube\n\nThe memory of a beautiful rose\n\nBlooming on the banks of the Seine\n\nForever and ever\n\nUnchanging\n\nLike humans who are mortal\n\nEven flowers will die some day\n\nLike humans who must say farewell\n\nEven flowers will die some day\n\nLE DAUPHIN and LA DAUPHINE |  | DOUBLE TRIO CHORUS:  \n---|---|---  \nShowing loose wisps of hair |  | Ahh...  \nwaving in the morning wind, |  | Ahh...  \nThe valiant figure vanishes in the distance |  | Ahh...  \nHiding the shadows of a hidden sorrow |  | Ahh...  \nROSALIE AND SOFIA:  \nTo love and care for someone unforgettable |  | Ahh...  \nThe beautiful white vision |  | Ahh...  \nOscar, Oscar |  | Ahh...  \nAre you the white rose of our hearts |  | Ahh...  \nOSCAR:  \nWhere is the love I long for |  | Ahh...  \nWhat is the love I want |  | Ahh...  \nLooks may be deceiving but |  | Ahh...  \nWho can understand |  | Ahh...  \nthis woman's heart of mine |  | Ahh...\n\nANDR\u00c9:\n\nStreaming blonde hair\n\nThe figure with the blue eyes\n\nLooking like the wings of Pegasus\n\nMakes my heart flutter\n\nAhh, unforgettable you\n\nI call to the heavens and you answer me not\n\nFERSEN:\n\nHow could I, how could I\n\nPossibly forget her\n\nShe was, she was\n\nLike a rose\n\nALL |  | DOUBLE TRIO CHORUS:  \n---|---|---  \nLove can be so sweet. |  | Sweet  \nLove can be so strong, |  | Strong  \nLove can be precious, |  | Ahhh... precious  \nLove can be sublime, |  | Ahhh... grand  \nLove, Love, Love |   \nAh, because of love, |  | Ahhh...  \nThere is joy in life, |  | Ahhh...  \nAh, because of love, |  | Ahhh...  \nThe world is one, |  | Ahhh...  \nThat is why people are so beautiful |  | Ahhh...\n\nCURTAIN\n_THE SARDINE SELLER'S NET OF LOVE_\n\nMISHIMA YUKIO\n\nTRANSLATED BY LAURENCE R. KOMINZ\n\nMishima Yukio, _The Sardine Seller's Net of Love_ , Kabukiza, 1962.\n\n(The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum Waseda University; courtesy of Nihon haiy\u016b ky\u014dkai)\n\nT _he Sardine Seller's Net of Love_ ( _Iwashiuri koi no hikiami_ ), the second kabuki play by Mishima Yukio (1925\u20131970), is by far his most successful and the most frequently performed of any kabuki plays. It is also Mishima's finest work of parody in any theatrical genre. But _The Sardine Seller's Net of Love_ is more than just a parody of classical kabuki; it also is a warmhearted romantic comedy that leaves audiences glowing. The text is a tour de force of wordplay couched in classical Japanese. Indeed, Mishima fuses sophisticated wordplay with physical comedy so effectively that audiences understand everything that is taking place on stage.\n\nAfter _Hell Screen_ ( _Jigokuhen_ ), in 1953, the Sh\u014dchiku Company left Mishima's choice of material for his kabuki plays entirely up to him. In 1953, thanks in part to a successful revival of the 1698 hit play _The Courtesan and Mount Asama_ ( _Keisei asamagatake_ ), Mishima discovered the joys of Genroku kabuki and its \"cheerful, refreshing, generous, bright, dialogue-based plays.\"1 _The Courtesan and Mount Asama_ dates from the Genroku era, from the 1680s to the 1720s, when the first great actors and playwrights created kabuki as a dramatic art, so plays from that era reflect the exuberance and optimism of a great art in its first flowering.\n\nIn honor of Genroku kabuki\u2014with its disguises, parodies, and playful love affairs\u2014Mishima created the story of _The Sardine Seller_ , borrowing ideas from two medieval tales ( _otogiz \u014dshi_), one of which contains a parody of _The Tales of the Heike_ , in which all the protagonists are animals and fish. Genroku plays proceed at a more rapid pace than do later kabuki, and accordingly, Mishima's play moves quickly from scene to scene.\n\nIn the first scene, Mishima creates the \"ludicrous environment\" essential to comedy, using slapstick, punning, hyperbolic statements made seriously, and easily seen-through disguises.2 To cite just one example of the delightfully absurd environment he creates: toward the end of the first scene, Sarugenji mounts a horse for the first time in his life. Struggling to mount it, he finds himself facing backward. He says,\n\nWhat's this? It's a headless horse! Even poor little sardines have heads. ( _He looks behind him_.) It's like a poem with the prelude stuck on the wrong end. ( _He struggles to turn around and face forward, finally succeeding_.)\n\nIgnorance this impossible is utterly delightful.\n\nThe response to _Sardine Seller_ in 1954 was unanimously positive. It is an \"unpretentious, charming, stylish, elegant, and large-hearted play that summons loud laughter,\"3 wrote the kabuki critic Toita Yasuji. For Mishima, the play was a joy to write, and the actors could sense his upbeat mood from the first read-through of the script. Fans and kabuki producers were suddenly urging him to give up fiction and become a full-time playwright.\n\nUtaemon and Kanzabur\u014d XVII performed _The Sardine Seller_ five times together between 1954 and 1973. Seventeen years passed before Kanzabur\u014d's son, Kankur\u014d (later given the title Kanzabur\u014d XVIII), decided to revive the play in 1990 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Mishima's death. Kankur\u014d had never seen his father perform _The Sardine Seller_ ,4 but his collaborator in this endeavor, Bando Tamasabur\u014d (who played Hotarubi), had played a minor courtesan in 1973 and remembered much of the staging.5 Tamasabur\u014d and Kanzabur\u014d XVIII have performed _The Sardine Seller_ regularly since 1990, and it is now both one of their favorite plays and a great favorite of audiences all over Japan.\n\nCharacters\n\nSARUGENJI, a sardine vendor\n\nEBINA NAMIDABUTSU, his father, a former fish wholesaler, now in retirement\n\nBAKUR\u014c ROKUROZAEMON, a packhorse driver and horse trader\n\nThe MASTER of the Goj\u014d Higashinot\u014din house of assignation\n\nA gardener, really YABUKUMA JIROTA, a retainer of the lord of Tankaku Castle\n\nSAMURAI vassals, really fishmongers\n\nUSUGUMO, a courtesan\n\nHARUSAME, a courtesan\n\nNISHIKIGI, a courtesan\n\nTAKI NO I, a courtesan\n\nRANGIKU, a courtesan\n\nHOTARUBI (Flickering Firefly), a courtesan, originally the daughter of the lord of Tankaku Castle\n\nTOMBO (Dragonfly), an apprentice courtesan ( _kamuro_ ) in the service of HOTARUBI\n\nSCENE 1. THE GOJ\u014c (FIFTH AVENUE) BRIDGE IN KYOTO\n\n_Cheerful, rhythmic music plays as the curtain opens, revealing the stage set. Fifth Avenue Bridge is at the center, with the willows of Yanagigawara visible in the distance beyond the end of the bridge_. ROKUROZAEMON _enters from stage left, leading a horse, and from stage right a palanquin enters. They enter simultaneously and move to the rhythmic clapping of the_ tsuke. _The two have a difficult time passing each other._ EBINA _noisily alights from the palanquin_.\n\nEBINA: Here now, horse trader, what do you mean by this? Your horse is blocking traffic on the biggest bridge in the Imperial Capital. What are you doing?\n\nROKUROZAEMON: Oh, you're Ebina Namidabutsu, aren't you? You must be the father of the famous sardine seller, Sarugenji.\n\nEBINA: I see you must be one of Sarugenji's friends. I'm so glad I ran into you. ( _He pays the palanquin bearers and sends them away. He pats the horse as he speaks._ ) My, what a fine chestnut you've got here. He looks like a three-year-old.\n\nROKUROZAEMON: I've heard that you are retired and wearing priest's robes now but once you were a renowned sardine vendor and, before that, a samurai from the East Country. That's why you have such a good eye for horses. This horse used to be in the stables of a feudal lord, but he injured his hoof and has come down in the world. Somehow I just can't find a buyer for him.\n\nEBINA: I see, I see. That explains why he was too proud to give way in the street. Anyway, I passed on my sardine selling trade to that boy of mine, and I came around to find out how his business is going. Has Sarugenji been doing well?\n\nROKUROZAEMON: Doing well? Well...\n\nEBINA: What are you trying to say?\n\nROKUROZAEMON: Well, what I mean is... Oh, but, look, look! ( _He stares intently at the_ hanamichi _curtain_.) It's Sarugenji himself. What excellent timing. I'm sorry, I've got some important business to attend to. I hope we can meet again sometime soon. ( _He exits stage left, leading the horse_.)\n\nEBINA: What a busy fellow he is.\n\n(Geza _music begins to play_. SARUGENJI _enters from the_ hanamichi _curtain, walking as if in a daze. He calls out his sales pitch in a weak, monotonous voice_. EBINA, _on the main stage, shows his anger at the weak voice_.)\n\nSARUGENJI: I'm Sarugenji from Akoji Inlet in the province of Ise. Buy my sardines.\n\n( _He repeats this spiel several times and enters onto the main stage, where he bumps into his father._ )\n\nSARUGENJI: Oh, hello Dad.\n\nEBINA: What do you mean, \"hello Dad?\" What a pathetic voice. With a voice like that your sardines will rot. Do you mean to sell red-eyed sardines? Why you scoundrel! ( _He beats his son with his closed fan._ )\n\nSARUGENJI: Please forgive me, please forgive me! There's a good reason why I'm like this.\n\nEBINA: Nothing should ever interfere with selling your sardines.\n\nSARUGENJI: Please, just listen to what I have to say. ( _Music accompanies his monologue_.) It happened in early autumn. It was twilight, and I was selling off the last of my sardines here at the Fifth Avenue Bridge. Suddenly a wicker palanquin went past. Just at that moment a strong breeze blew from the river, and the palanquin's brocade blinds flew open. I caught a glimpse of the lady inside and, with that one look, fell hopelessly in love. Now I yearn for her day and night. Because I'm in despair, my voice has disappeared.\n\nEBINA: I see. So lovesickness is the cause.\n\nSARUGENJI: Yes... I feel so ashamed.\n\nEBINA: What a pitiful son you are... nothing at all like your father. But it is just as I always taught you. Our guide on the path of love is none other than poetry. After all, as it says in the great book, the purpose of poetry is to \"move invisible gods and demons and make sweet the ties between men and women.\" Even though I am getting on in years, I, Ebina, will assist you, my son, with your love poems. I am with you, heart and soul.\n\nSARUGENJI: Oh, father, I'm so grateful! Buddha be praised! Buddha be praised!\n\n( _He presses his hands together reverently in thanks to his father. There is humorous business as, hands pressed together, he pursues_ EBINA, _who backs up in a circle as_ SARUGENJI _circles after him. Presently_ SARUGENJI _once again falls into a state of depression. He speaks emotionally._ )\n\nSARUGENJI: But the woman I love is so far above me in station, she's dwelling above the clouds. I am just a humble sardine vendor. No, I'm afraid mine is a hopeless love.\n\nEBINA: It might not be an impossible love. What is the name of the woman?\n\nSARUGENJI: I asked about her and found out who she is. She is called Hotarubi and lives in Goj\u014d Higashinot\u014din.\n\nEBINA: Hotarubi? Hotarubi is a courtesan.\n\nSARUGENJI: Huh?\n\nEBINA: She is called Hotarubi, after the firefly, because she sparkles when night falls. She's a courtesan of great renown, known throughout the city. She truly dwells above the clouds. It must be because I'm such an upright man that I have a son who causes me so much grief.\n\nSARUGENJI: So, does that mean she's a prostitute?\n\nEBINA: Look, there are prostitutes and then there are prostitutes. She does not take customers lower than men of baronial rank. Hmm. I wonder if I can come up with a good plan? ( _He ponders as_ SARUGENJI _fidgets about in a state of agitation._ ) Hey. When you fidget about like that I can't think clearly.\n\n(ROKUROZAEMON _reenters from stage left, slowly leading the horse._ EBINA _sees this and slaps his thigh._ )\n\nEBINA: Yes, I've got it! It's a great plan.\n\nSARUGENJI: You've got it? ( _He joyfully slaps_ EBINA _on the back and sets_ EBINA _coughing._ SAURGENJI _starts rubbing_ EBINA _'s back to assist him, but_ SARUGENJI _'s awkward administrations are ineffectual, and_ EBINA _continues to cough._ )\n\nROKUROZAEMON: It's that old fellow I talked with before.\n\n(ROKUROZAEMON _ties the horse to a tree, hurriedly takes out a small towel, dips it in the river, and puts it in_ EBINA _'s mouth. He then pushes forcefully on_ EBINA _'s back as if trying to suppress convulsions._ EBINA _gets angry_.)\n\nEBINA: Hey, what're you doing?! Stop that! Stop it, I'm telling you! Use Kamo River water to cure a cough\u2014you may think it's a miracle drug but it will never work.\n\nSARUGENJI: Father, while you were scolding him, your cough went away\n\nEBINA: You're right. My cough is gone. Why, aren't you the same horse trader I was talking with a little while ago?\n\nSARUGENJI: Aren't you Rokurozaemon?\n\nEBINA: He told me that his chestnut horse had been in the service of a feudal lord and that's given me an idea. Now then, Sarugenji, your most effective strategy is to impersonate a feudal lord. The lords of the nearby provinces\u2014Hosokawa, Hatakeyama, Isshiki, Akamatsu, Doi, and Sasaki\u2014are too well known for it to work. Among the eastern baron, Danj\u014d of Utsunomiya has not yet visited Kyoto. Furthermore, I've heard that he will soon make his first trip here. We're very lucky in our timing You must impersonate the lord of Utsunomiya.\n\nROKUROZAEMON: And for your horse, use this swift-footed steed.\n\nEBINA: I, Ebina, will lead him.\n\nSARUGENJI: Rokurozaemon, you shall play my chief retainer.\n\nEBINA: And for the attendants and servants to accompany the lead actor\n\nSARUGENJI: Yes, we're fortunate to have fellow fishmongers. We'll have each of our comrades play roles... as soldiers, servants, and so on.\n\nEBINA: Speed is of the essence. My son, you are now Lord Utsunomiya.\n\nSARUGENJI: Bring me my horse!\n\n( _The_ geza _orchestra plays a lively tune._ ROKUROZAEMON _leads out the horse._ SARUGENJI _has difficulty mounting it. He finally manages to mount; he finds himself facing backward._ )\n\nSARUGENJI: What's this? It's a headless horse! Even poor little sardines have heads. ( _He looks behind him_.) It's like a poem with the prelude stuck on the wrong end. ( _He struggles to turn around and face forward, finally succeeding_. ROKUROZAEMON _takes the horse by the bit_.)\n\nROKUROZAEMON: Why you look like a feudal lord...\n\nEBINA:... In all his splendor. (ROKUROZAEMON _and_ EBINA _look at each other. They are amused but pretend to be impressed with_ SARUGENJI.)\n\nSARUGENJI: The grasses and flowers on the Kamo River bank soon wither to autumnal brown.\n\nROKUROZAEMON: At a time like this, firefly hunting is such a pleasure.\n\nEBINA: Now make way... ( _He opens his fan and signals for a change in the stage set_ )... for my sardine-flower lord!\n\n( _The stage revolves_.)\n\nSCENE 2. THE HOUSE OF ASSIGNATION AT FIFTH AVENUE AND HIGASHINOT\u014cIN, KYOTO\n\n_A building with a raised inner room. The back wall consists of sliding doors_ (fusuma) _gorgeously decorated with paintings of flowers and birds. The area in front of the garden is planted with numerous chrysanthemums. The five courtesans sit surrounding_ HOTARUBI _'s apprentice_ (kamuro), _a young girl named_ TOMBO ( _Dragonfly_ ).\n\nUSUGUMO: Tell us, Tombo, is that beautiful lapis jar a gift for Hotarubi?\n\nHARUSAME: I don't know what's inside it, but it must be something quite splendid...\n\nALL:... Mustn't it?\n\nTOMBO: Why don't you try guessing what's inside?\n\nTAKI NO I: It's sure to be something delicious.\n\nRANGIKU: In that case I wonder if it's candied persimmons.\n\nTOMBO: No, it's not.\n\nUSUGUMO: Oh Rangiku, you just said that because candied persimmons are your favorite treat. Of course you're wrong.\n\nNISHIKIGI: In that case, maybe if we say something we hate, we'll get it right. Harusame, what do you think?\n\nHARUSAME: What I hate the most is exactly what all of us hate.\n\nNISHIKIGI: And what's that?\n\nHARUSAME: Shall I try guessing what's inside?\n\nTAKI NO I: I wonder if you'll guess what it is?\n\nHARUSAME: What I hate the most is... of course... men.\n\nUSUGUMO ( _Even though she actually likes men_ ): I agree with you. I hate men. Just hearing the word \"man\" makes my head begin to hurt.\n\nNISHIKIGI: Usugumo, you really do have it bad. I agree. Whenever I hear the word \"man,\" I hate it so much that my body begins to shake violently.\n\nRANGIKU: Does that mean it's not candied persimmons in this jar ( _She puts her sleeve lovingly over the jar_ ), but a hateful, hateful handsome man who'll come out like oil from an oil jar?\n\nTOMBO: You're wrong again.\n\nUSUGUMO: Since we don't know, let's open it up.\n\nTOMBO: All right, all right. ( _She opens the jar, and many beautiful painted shells pour out. Each has a classical poem written on the inside._ )\n\nUSUGUMO: Look at all these shells. I wonder if Hotarubi is hinting that all of us courtesans assembled here are like a group of seashells. Her friends will abandon her for this.\n\nHOTARUBI ( _From inside the sliding doors_ ): I'm not comparing you to the shells.\n\nUSUGUMO: That voice...\n\nALL:... belongs to Hotarubi-san.\n\n( _Music plays as_ HOTARUBI _emerges upstage center from a sliding door._ )\n\nHOTARUBI: Usugumo-san, these shells are used in a game that's played for fun. Classic poems are written inside these beautifully decorated shells, see? ( _She picks up a shell_.) Verses from old poems are written here, and players enjoy themselves by competing in matching first and last verses of the poem.\n\nUSUGUMO: We've had feudal lords and other high-ranking customers, but we've never played the shell-matching game. I've heard that it is about the only thing that princesses have to do to while away their boredom. It seems like an interesting game. Girls, shall we imitate princesses and try playing it this evening?\n\nALL: That's a fine idea.\n\n(TOMBO _spreads out the shells over a wide area_.)\n\nHOTARUBI: All right, let's begin. ( _She reads the first verse of a poem written in a shell._ ) \"Even though I see you in my dreams, morning after morning you are nowhere to be seen.\"\n\nUSUGUMO: Let's see... what was the second verse...\n\nALL: Which shell is it on? ( _They hunt among the shells._ )\n\nHOTARUBI: There it is. The last verse is, \"If only I could depart my own body.\"\n\nUSUGUMO: Oh, what a depressing poem that is.\n\nHOTARUBI: All right, next I'll read the last verse first: \"As the wind blows and blows, they scatter in disarray.\"\n\n( _When she reads this, a gardener appears in the garden. Sweeping with his broom, he looks carefully at the women inside. All the women are busily engaged in searching for the shell with the matching first verse._ HOTARUBI _suddenly looks into the garden, and her eyes meet those of the gardener. She senses something strange about him, and she stands up, but he quickly exits_.)\n\nHOTARUBI: What a strange gardener. ( _She sits down_.) Harusame-san... I've never seen that servant before. Who is he?\n\nHARUSAME ( _Engrossed in the shell game_ ): Hmm. It seems like this could be the first verse: \"I wonder who that unknown servant is, in the spring rain?\" I wonder if this is the matching shell?\n\nHOTARUBI: Yes, I'm quite bewildered. Nishikigi-san, that servant...\n\nNISHIKIGI: What servant?\n\nHOTARUBI ( _Looking around_ ): My goodness, he's gone.\n\nNISHIKIGI: Come now, Hotarubi. You started out playing the shell-identifying game, but have you switched to trying to identify your lover's servant?\n\nHOTARUBI: No, not at all.\n\nUSUGUMO: This shell-matching game is so upper crust. It's not the right game for courtesans. Let's play a game that's more fun.\n\n( _The_ MASTER _of the establishment enters from stage right_.)\n\nMASTER: Now, now, this is no time to be arguing. You've heard that Lord Utsunomiya is coming to visit Kyoto from the East Country. Well, he's already entered the city, and they say he'll pay a ceremonial call on the court this morning. He'll be here soon. There is a lot to do to get this room ready for him. Go to your own rooms and prepare yourselves. Let's show him how beautiful the finest courtesans in Kyoto can be.\n\n( _All the ladies except_ HOTARUBI _stand and exit through the sliding doors upstage center._ )\n\nMASTER: There now, Hotarubi. Don't let the girls' thoughtless comment upset you, all right?\n\nHOTARUBI: You're always so concerned about how I feel. I'm so happy that you care.\n\n(HOTARUBI _, too, exits through the sliding doors upstage center. The_ MASTER _of the establishment remains alone in the room._ )\n\nMASTER: My, my, good and bad fortune are so completely beyond our control.\n\n( _As he ponders the situation, music begins_. EBINA _enters along the_ hanamichi _and stops at the seven-three spot_.)\n\nEBINA: I haven't been to this neighborhood since I took religious vows, but somehow my legs seem to remember the way all by themselves. ( _He strikes his legs with his closed fan_.) Hey, legs! Stop walking so happily. You mustn't resist the progress of age.\n\n( _Music begins again._ EBINA _goes onto the main stage. He knocks on the outer gate. The_ MASTER _descends and opens the gate_.)\n\nMASTER: My goodness, if it isn't Mr. \"Hail to the Buddha\" Ebina. What an unexpected visit. Please come in, come in.\n\n( _They both ascend to the main level of the establishment. After_ EBINA _enters through the gate and onto the raised stage, a stage assistant removes the gate_.)\n\nEBINA: My apologies for having been out of touch for so long.\n\nMASTER: It has been a long time, and your visit is so unexpected. I thought that weasels never took the same path twice. Where is it that you are going now? Surely you must have taken a wrong turn somewhere and lost your way?\n\nEBINA: Please don't talk like that. You can see that I have taken religious vows, and it would be much worse were I to forget my obligations to the Buddha and the Kannon. One can never do as one pleases in this floating world.\n\nMASTER: At least you're not using your age as an excuse. Always the witty one, aren't you, Ebina?\n\nEBINA: Not at all. Today I'm here as a sort of forerunner for a festival carriage. Recently I went to the East Country on business. While I was there, Lord Utsunomiya approached me with a personal request. He told me that during his upcoming trip to Kyoto he wanted to visit this establishment and meet the renowned Hotarubi. He asked me to arrange everything for him. I just heard that he has already gone to make his formal calls this morning. He'll probably be coming here very soon. I wanted to warn you to prepare for his visit, so I put these old legs in motion and came here to give you some advance warning.\n\nMASTER: Thank you for taking the trouble to come all the way over here, but everything is in readiness for his lordship's visit. So, please put yourself at ease on that score.\n\nEBINA: I'm so relieved to hear you say that. Since all is ready this afternoon, after so long a time apart...\n\nMASTER:... Let us burn incense to the Bodhisattva, sitting side by side,\n\nEBINA: And intone the Amida Buddha's sutra.\n\n( _A voice shouts from beyond the_ hanamichi.)\n\nVOICE: Make way for Lord Utsunomiya!\n\nMASTER: My goodness, his lordship is already here.\n\nEBINA: I think we had better go out...\n\nMASTER:... and greet him.\n\n( _The two descend to the main stage level and sit there. Music plays._ ROKUROZAEMON _enters, dressed as a senior samurai adviser. He leads numerous lesser retainers. After them enters_ SARUGENJI, _seated astride the horse and splendidly attired. He is impersonating Lord Utsunomiya. The horse stops at the seven-three spot_.)\n\nROKUROZAEMON: This is the establishment at Fifth Avenue and Higashinot\u014din.\n\nSARUGENJI ( _Wobbling slightly in his saddle_ ): Kyoto looks just as prosperous as I thought it would.\n\n( _The music resumes._ SARUGENJI _enters the main stage, dismounts, and, together with his \"senior adviser,\" enters the establishment._ )\n\nMASTER ( _Clapping his hands to emphasize his commands_ ): His lordship has arrived! Go to the storehouse and get our finest sak\u00e9 cup! The lacquered one, with crickets and autumn grasses on it. Tell the courtesans to come out at once! And bring the sak\u00e9 and dishes that were prepared for his retainers! Quickly, quickly!\n\n( _Inside a voice answers, \"Yes, sir!\" Lower-ranking SAMURAI retainers lead the horse, exiting stage right. From the upstage sliding painted paper doors, the girl apprentice_ TOMBO _enters, carrying a lacquer tray with the cricket sak\u00e9 cup on it. She is followed by the courtesans_ USUGUMO, HARUSAME, NISHIKIGI, TAKI NO I, _and_ RANGIKU. _They sit._ SARUGENJI _stares at them, all agog at their beauty._ 6 EBINA _taps the floor with his fan to warn him to pull himself together. The_ MASTER _has_ TOMBO _take the cricket sak\u00e9 cup._ )\n\nMASTER: My good Lord Utsunomiya. I am so grateful that you have come from so far away to grace our establishment. To begin, please partake of sak\u00e9 served in our finest cup. Now, is there anyone among my ladies that you had particularly in mind? I would be pleased to present her to you.\n\n(SARUGENJI _fiddles nervously with his sak\u00e9 cup_.)\n\nSARUGENJI: I have long heard of Hotarubi, a courtesan so famous that her name is well known even in the far-off East Country. Which of you is Hotarubi? Since you are all so remarkably beautiful, I can't tell which of you she is.\n\nUSUGUMO: Sir, I am that Hotarubi.\n\nSARUGENJI: So, you are Hotarubi? ( _He is about to offer her sak\u00e9, but_ EBINA _immediately signals with his eyes for_ SARUGENJI _to stop._ )\n\nHARUSAME: No, it is I who am Hotarubi. (EBINA _signals that she is not_ HOTARUBI _either._ )\n\nMASTER: Now then, stop your teasing. ( _He rebukes the two_.) Your lordship, Hotarubi is not yet with us.\n\nSARUGENJI ( _Emphatically_ ): What? Hotarubi isn't here?\n\nHOTARUBI ( _From behind the upstage center sliding doors_ ): I'm here and will join you right now.\n\n(HOTARUBI _enters to music. All the other courtesans look jealous_.)\n\n( _He is about to stand up to approach her, but_ EBINA _and_ ROKUROZAEMON _signal him not to stand._ )\n\nHOTARUBI: I am happy to share a drink with you.\n\n(SARUGENJI _is struck dumb with rapture._ HOTARUBI _receives a cup of sak\u00e9 from_ TOMBO, _but he just stares at_ HOTARUBI, _stupefied_.7 HOTARUBI _drinks the sak\u00e9 and offers her cup to_ SARUGENJI.)\n\nUSUGUMO: Truly you barons from the East...\n\nHARUSAME:... don't let your eyes stray to other pretty flowers.\n\nNISHIKIGI: You rush to pledge your troth with sak\u00e9.\n\nTAKI NO I: How jealous...\n\nALL:... we all are!\n\nUSUGUMO: But you know, one of the rules of this house is that we courtesans have the right to request that a newly arrived guest perform for us all. How lucky that you are a warrior from the East. You must be skilled in martial arts. Come on everybody, why don't we ask him to recount for us a tale of his brave deeds in battle.\n\nHARUSAME: What a fine idea, Usugumo. Yes, a tale of battle...\n\nALL:... is our request for you.\n\n(SARUGENJI _,_ EBINA _, and the \"senior retainer\" are in a panic._)\n\nUSUGUMO: Attention everybody, attention! A tale of battle...\n\nALL:... Is about to begin.\n\n( _Clappers sound to signal the beginning of an independent section of the play. A_ j\u014druri _ensemble is revealed at stage left._ 8 _The_ shamisen _player begins his prelude._ )\n\nSARUGENJI: Well, if that's what you'd like...\n\nEBINA ( _Aside_ ): This will be painful.\n\n(EBINA _and_ ROKUROZAEMON _slump down and cover their eyes and ears_.)\n\nNARRATOR ( _Singing_ ):\n\nHe sits in formal position, about to begin the recitation.\n\nSARUGENJI:\n\nAnd so it came to pass, that near the beach at Akashi,\n\nIn a splendid full suit of armor, bound with scarlet cords,\n\nRed Snapper Akasuke raised a great war cry.\n\n\"You who flee before me are none other than Ohsuke of the Long Fins\n\nCome back! Return and fight like a fish!\"\n\n(SARUGENJI _performs dance and pantomime to the following narration_.)\n\nNARRATOR ( _Singing_ ):\n\nWhen summoned thus,\n\nOhsuke of the Long Fins feared to dishonor his name,\n\nAnd he turned his head around in the waves.\n\nAs he approached, Snapper's soldiers drew their bows to the full,\n\nShouting, \"Shoot him through his fin!\"\n\nThe two heroes fought bout after bout in the surf\n\nSurrounded by Red Snapper's oyster and clam minions...\n\n( _Speaking._ )\n\n... Who scattered hither and thither in fear.\n\n\"Let's grapple again!\" shouted Flounder and Snapper,\n\nWhen a wave threw them both up upon the beach.\n\n( _Singing._ )\n\nThey fought on and on, covered all over in sand.\n\nSuddenly Flounder shouted, \"Take this!\"\n\nAnd fitting an arrow to his string he pulled and let fly.\n\nThe shaft penetrated deep beneath Snapper's fin\n\nAnd he writhed in agony.\n\nHis vassal, Brother Octopus,\n\nHis vassal, Brother Octopus, the Lay Priest,\n\nCradled Snapper's fish head in his lap and spoke,\n\n( _Speaking._ )\n\n\"If you have last words to say while you yet live,\n\nEntrust them to me, the Octopus Priest.\"\n\n( _Singing._ )\n\nSnapper spoke in tears and stroked his whiskers,\n\n( _Speaking_.)\n\n\"My dear wife knows that this is the fate of a war fish,\n\nBut my children are still just roe inside her womb\u2014\n\nI so wanted to see my children alive in this world just one time.\"\n\n( _Singing._ )\n\nSaying this, Snapper tragically expired.\n\nAs all the while the salt wind of Akashi...\n\n( _Speaking_.)\n\nResounded with cruel clamor of battle.\n\nALL THE WOMEN: Well done, well done!\n\nUSUGUMO: Yes, but what strange names they are: Red Snapper Akasuke Flounder Ohsuke, and the Lay Priest Octopus. Even among feudal lords and other distinguished patrons, I've never heard names like those before.\n\nSARUGENJI: That battle was my first taste of combat. You were just a little child then, so of course you've heard nothing about it. Now I've fulfilled my side of the house rule, so come, let's share the sak\u00e9. ( _He hands her a sak\u00e9 cup_.)\n\nUSUGUMO: I'm happy to drink with you, although I know I'm not the one.\n\n( _They exchange cups._ SARUGENJI, _beginning to feel the effect of the wine, rests his head on_ HOTARUBI _'s lap. The girls signal each other with their eyes, and exit, leaving the two alone._ )\n\nHOTARUBI ( _Speaking loudly to_ SARUGENJI _, whose head is resting on her lap_): Your lordship, your lordship! It seems you've fallen asleep.\n\n( _Musical accompaniment from the_ geza _begins._ )\n\nHOTARUBI: I'm embarrassed to admit this, but in this hard life I lead, all the men I've met have been like demons. Now I realize that for the first time I'm lucky enough to be with a kind and charming customer and what happens\u2014you ignore me and fall into a drunken sleep. How can you be so heartless?\n\n(SARUGENJI _mumbles in his sleep._ )\n\nHOTARUBI: My goodness, he seems to be talking in his sleep. I couldn't quite hear what he said, but I think he spoke another woman's name. What a hateful man you are. If you're going to talk in your sleep, at least speak loud enough so I can hear you.\n\n(SARUGENJI _groans._ )\n\nHOTARUBI: What was that? Oh, you've fallen asleep again, haven't you?\n\nSARUGENJI ( _Though talking in his sleep, speaking vigorously and clearly_ ): I'm Sarugenji from Akoji Inlet in the Province of Ise. Buy my sardines!\n\nHOTARUBI: My goodness, that was strange. The baron shouted some sort of vendor's cry. Something about the Province of Ise. I do hope he does it again so I can figure out what he's saying.\n\nSARUGENJI ( _In his sleep, but in an even bigger voice_ ): I'm Sarugenji from Akoji Inlet in the Province of Ise. Buy my sardines!\n\nHOTARUBI: What? I know that. That's the spiel of a sardine seller. Could that mean that...? Now that I think about it, he does seem to smell a bit like sardines. ( _She holds her nose._ ) What an unexpected aroma his perfume sachet has. Come now, Sardine Lord, I'd like to ask you some questions. Please wake up!\n\n( _She shakes him awake._ SARUGENJI _opens his eyes, sits up, and speaks in a voice heavy with sleep._ )\n\nSARUGENJI: I was in heaven while I slept, and I'm still in heaven even now that I'm awake. ( _He pinches his own cheek._ ) I sure hope this isn't a dream.\n\n( _He lies down again on_ HOTARUBI _'s lap._ HOTARUBI _slaps him and he sits up._ )\n\nHOTARUBI: Come on, please wake up. Please! You were talking in your sleep so loudly they can hear it all over the city.\n\nSARUGENJI ( _Alarmed_ ): What?! Did you say I was talking in my sleep?\n\nHOTARUBI: Yes, and I want to ask you about what you said.\n\nSARUGENJI ( _Trembling_ ): What do you want to ask me?\n\nHOTARUBI: You're really a sardine seller, aren't you?\n\nSARUGENJI: What? A sardine seller? ( _He claps his hand to his mouth._ ) Now then, what do you mean by making such an outrageous statement to Utsunomiya no Danj\u014d, renowned baron of the East Country? A sardine seller... what might that be? This is the first time I've heard of such thing since the day they cut my umbilical cord.\n\nHOTARUBI: In that case, let me ask you some questions about what you said in your sleep. First, what do you mean by \"Akoji Inlet\"?\n\nSARUGENJI: Hmm, Akoji Inlet... yes. I enjoy poetry and it appears that I've recited poetic places in my sleep.\n\n\"At Akoji Inlet, where girls gather wood for salt fires\n\nIf you cast your net again and again they will appear.\"\n\nI was thinking about that poem when I talked in my sleep.\n\nHOTARUBI: All right. But what does \"Sarugenji\" mean?\n\nSARUGENJI: Hmm.... yes, Sarugenji. Oh, I know. It's from the poem,\n\n\"Like the willows at Sarusawa Pond, I'll take a strand of tangled hair,\n\nFrom my sleeping sweetheart as a keepsake.\"\n\nEven in my sleep, I said I could love none other than you. But you're subjecting me to such a strict interrogation.\n\nHOTARUBI: I have just one last question for you. ( _She can no longer suppress her laughter as she continues._ ) In your sleep you said, \"Buy my sardines,\" What sort of poetic origin do those words have?\n\nSARUGENJI: Hmm... ( _He wipes cold sweat from his brow as he mumbles and he attempts to put the words into a poem._ ) Now then, the words \"Buy my sardines\" that I said in my sleep...\n\nHOTARUBI: Well?\n\nSARUGENJI: Well...\n\nHOTARUBI: Well?\n\nSARUGENJI: Well...\n\nHOTARUBI: Yes, well! Tell me what they mean!\n\nSARUGENJI: What those words mean... yes, that's right! Long ago, the poetess Izumi Shikibu was about to eat a sardine, the fish called _iwashi_. Just at that moment, the courtier Yasumasa arrived. Izumi was embarrassed and hurriedly hid the _iwashi_. When Yasumasa asked her what she had just hidden, she answered with this poem:\n\n\"When one thinks of the nation of Japan, surely none of its people\n\nHave failed to visit Iwashimizu Shrine.\"\n\nHow cleverly she concealed her wish for him to ignore the _iwashi_ using the name of the shrine. Yasumasa was impressed. His face revealed his sympathy for her and he answered her poem thus,\n\n\"Since it is a medicinal fish that warms the body and improves\n\none's looks, by all means you should partake.\"\n\nSo it was that a fish go-between secured a love that grew even closer over time. I'm so inspired by this happy love affair that I must have spoken about it in my sleep.\n\nHOTARUBI: There could never be a sardine seller who knows poetry as well as you do. I suppose then that you must be the true Lord Utsunomiya Danj\u014d.\n\nSARUGENJI ( _Sighing in relief and rubbing his chest to relax himself_ ): That's right. I'm Utsunomiya, the genuine article.\n\nHOTARUBI: Then you're not a sardine seller... ( _She collapses, weeping_.)\n\nSARUGENJI: Why are you crying?\n\nHOTARUBI: Why shouldn't I be crying? I thought you were a sardine seller, and it turns out that you are really and truly the baron.\n\nSARUGENJI: But why would that make you cry?\n\nHOTARUBI: I have good reason to feel the way I do, but until now I've told my story to no one but the master of the house.\n\nSARUGENJI: I want to hear your story, too. Please tell me.\n\nHOTARUBI: Since you are who you are, I guess I'll tell it to you, too.\n\n(J\u014druri _music begins to play_. HOTARUBI _dances and pantomimes to the accompaniment of the passages delivered by the_ j\u014druri _narration._ )\n\nNARRATOR ( _Singing_ ):\n\nI will never forget it... It was ten long years ago.\n\nHOTARUBI: I was born the daughter of the lord of Tankaku Castle in the province of Ki. When I was a young girl, I climbed to the highest tower and gazed all around at the scenery.\n\nNARRATOR:\n\nOff in the distance, on the high road,\n\nI spied a person carrying some sort of heavy load.\n\nHis voice carried beautifully from far away.\n\nHOTARUBI: \"Buy sardines! Buy sardines!\"\n\nNARRATOR:\n\nThis is what he cried.\n\nSuddenly my heart was filled with yearning\n\nAnd it was as if my soul had left my body in pursuit.\n\nI stole out of the castle through a secret passageway\n\nAnd rushed off in the direction of the voice.\n\nHOTARUBI: But though I hurried on and on, it was as though a strong headwind blew against me. I could hear his voice, but he got farther and farther away. I wanted to stop him and tell him of my love, but...\n\nNARRATOR:\n\nSoon I was in the shadow of the trees\n\nAnd his voice was drowned out by the cicadas' raucous trill.\n\nI couldn't see anything.\n\nHOTARUBI: Looking about, it was already dusk. I was lost, and as I lay crying, I heard the honest-sounding voice of a tradesman speaking to me offering assistance.\n\nNARRATOR:\n\nBut the kind-seeming traveler was a slave trader,\n\nA demon in human guise. He captured me\n\nAnd sold me straight off to this brothel.\n\nHOTARUBI: I've managed to live on here for ten long years, and although I've become a high-ranking courtesan, I still recall the sardine seller's loud, clear voice.\n\nNARRATOR:\n\nThe sardine seller is my one true love.\n\nDay and night I pray to merciful Kannon to lead me to him.\n\nI so want to meet this humble sardine seller\n\nAnd become his wife. How I long for him.\n\nHOTARUBI: I thought that today the Wheel of Karma had brought me my salvation, but when I learned that you in fact...\n\nNARRATOR:\n\n... Are a samurai lord, I realized that\n\nI am doomed to a terrible fate\n\nNo matter how long I live on in this useless, floating world.\n\nHOTARUBI: I have no more to say. My lord, I bid you farewell.\n\n( _She pulls out the dagger that samurai ladies always carry and attempts to stab herself._ 9 SARUGENJI _is startled but manages to intervene and physically prevent her from harming herself with the dagger/sword._ )\n\nSARUGENJI: Don't be rash, my lady Hotarubi!\n\nHOTARUBI: No, please let me die!\n\nSARUGENJI: I'm telling you not to go through with it because in truth I am your sardine seller! My robes and swords come from a rental shop. I am of humble birth, and my name is Sarugenji.\n\nHOTARUBI: No, no please don't try to deceive me again. I would rather die!\n\nSARUGENJI: Oh please, don't panic! Stay calm!\n\n(SARUGENJI _himself is in a panic as he shouts these lines, all the while tussling with_ HOTARUBI. _The upstage sliding doors open, and_ EBINA, ROKUROZAEMON, _and the_ MASTER _enter._ )\n\nEBINA: Hotarubi, I heard everything. My son, Sarugenji, is indeed a sardine seller. Because he told me that he wanted so much to meet you, our plan was to turn him into a counterfeit baron. He is a fine young man who loves reading poetry and is himself an excellent poet. And now I have heard from the master all about you and who you are.\n\nROKUROZAEMON: I am dressed as the lord's retainer, but really I'm a horse trader. The chestnut mare that I couldn't sell was useful to my friend, so I joined in the plot and became a fake samurai.\n\nHOTARUBI: So, are you really the sardine vendor?\n\nSARUGENJI: Yes. I carry my load like this.\n\n( _Using his long sword_ , SARUGENJI _mimes carrying a load of sardines around the room._ )\n\nHOTARUBI: Oh merciful Kannon, how can I ever express my thanks. ( _She clasps her hands in prayer._ )\n\nSARUGENJI: From today you are my wife.\n\nHOTARUBI ( _Embracing_ SARUGENJI): Can this be a dream? I'm so happy.\n\nMASTER: But it will cost two hundred pieces of gold to redeem her.\n\nEBINA: This is a real problem.\n\nROKUROZAEMON: But what can we do...\n\nALL FOUR:... to raise the money?\n\n( _They silently ponder the problem. Presently a lively drum pattern is played in the_ geza. JIROTA, _a samurai retainer from Tankaku Castle, enters from stage right. He was on stage earlier in this act, disguised as a gardener. Now he is dressed in splendid samurai robes. He has captured the fake_ SAMURAI _in_ SARUGENJI _'s retinue and tied them one to another, like a string of beads. He leads them onstage by a rope_.)\n\nJIROTA: Princess, I am exceedingly delighted to see that you are in good health. I have witnessed everything from my hiding place in the shadows. I have also captured these false samurai. Now I must beg you to return to Tankaku Castle at your earliest possible convenience.\n\nHOTARUBI ( _Speaking like a princess_ ): Aren't you the gardener who was here earlier?\n\nJIROTA: Yes. My true name is Jirota, and I am a retainer of your clan. Your father and mother ordered me to search for you. I disguised myself as a gardener and sneaked into this establishment to spy it out. We can ascertain your identity for certain using this inscription. If it matches the inscription known to be on the miniature Kannon figurine that the princess had in her possession, then you are the true princess.\n\nHOTARUBI: I have the Kannon figurine right here.\n\n( _She takes a gold brocade packet from her kimono fold and removes a Kannon figurine made of pure gold. She gives it to the_ MASTER, _who hands it to_ JIROTA. JIROTA _compares the inscription on the figurine with the inscription he has brought with him_.)\n\nJIROTA: Yes, they do indeed match.\n\nHOTARUBI: Since they match, return the figurine to me.\n\n(JIROTA _hands the figurine back to the_ MASTER, _who returns it to_ HOTARUBI. HOTARUBI _prays to the Kannon once again in thanks, then carefully puts away the figurine._ )\n\nHOTARUBI: Jirota, untie the false samurai.\n\nJIROTA: Yes my lady, but why on earth...\n\nHOTARUBI: I ordered you to untie them, so untie them at once!\n\n(JIROTA _grudgingly unties the false_ SAMURAI.)\n\nHOTARUBI: Now then, Jirota, since you have urged me to return to the country, I assume that you have brought with you the money necessary to pay off my contract. Am I correct?\n\nJIROTA: Yes, my lady, I have 250 gold coins here with me.\n\nHOTARUBI: Then be a good fellow and pay two hundred gold coins to the master of this establishment.\n\nJIROTA: Yes, my lady.\n\n( _He gives two hundred gold coins in a packet to the_ MASTER.)\n\nSARUGENJI: This is wonderful!\n\nHOTARUBI: That's not all. ( _She points at_ ROKUROZAEMON.) Give the remaining fifty gold coins to this horse trader.\n\nJIROTA: Why on earth should I do that?\n\nHOTARUBI: Do you mean to challenge your master?\n\nJIROTA: No, my lady.\n\nHOTARUBI: Mr. Rokurozaemon, you have just sold your chestnut horse. Bring it here and give it to Jirota.\n\nROKUROZAEMON: Oh, thank you so much! ( _He quickly leaves the building and returns, leading the horse._ )\n\nJIROTA: My goodness, there's no telling what she'll do next.\n\n(HOTARUBI _takes_ SARUGENJI _'s hand, and the two descend the steps and approach_ JIROTA.)\n\nHOTARUBI: Now then, Jirota, tell me\u2014are my father and mother both well?\n\nJIROTA: Yes, my lady, both are enjoying excellent health.\n\nHOTARUBI: In that case I want you to convey to them what I am about to tell you. I, Hotarubi, am going to marry this sardine seller. It is a wife's commandment that once a woman leaves her parental gate, she must never again return home. In the future I will go with my honored husband to sell sardines in the province of Ki. I will call out, \"Buy sardines!\" below Tankaku Castle. Please tell my parents that at that time they should stand high on the castle tower and they can see me.\n\nJIROTA: Oh my god! What a calamity\u2014you have turned heaven and earth upside down! Princess! Princess! Please don't go through with this.\n\n(JIROTA _clutches at_ HOTARUBI _'s sleeve, but she shakes free_. HOTARUBI _and_ SARUGENJI _walk toward the_ hanamichi. JIROTA _begins to follow them_.)\n\nHOTARUBI ( _To_ JIROTA): Kneel before me and move no further. Kneel, I say!\n\nJIROTA: Yes, my lady.\n\n(HOTARUBI _and_ SARUGENJI _walk to the seven-three spot on the_ hanamichi.)\n\nHOTARUBI: Now then, Lord Genji... no, I should say, \"husband, dear\"...\n\nSARUGENJI: Yes, ma'am. ( _He bows abjectly._ )\n\nHOTARUBI: What are you doing, my dear? From today we are sardine-selling husband and wife. Please teach me your sales call.\n\nSARUGENJI: All right. Listen carefully. ( _He straightens up and calls out in a clear voice_.) \"I'm from Akoji Inlet in the province of Ise! Buy my sardines!\"\n\nHOTARUBI: Let me try. How about this? \"I'm from Akoji Inlet in the province of Ise! Buy my sardines!\" ( _They repeat it several times before she gets it right. She turns to face the main stage_.) Come on everybody, why not give it a try?\n\n( _On the main stage_ JIROTA, _the_ MASTER, EBINA, _the false_ SAMURAI, _and_ ROKUROZAEMON, _who is holding the horse by a rope at stage right, all raise their voices and cry out._ )\n\nALL: \"I'm from Akoji Inlet in the province of Ise! Buy my sardines!\"\n\nHOTARUBI: Oh, you all called out so beautifully.\n\nJIROTA: All is lost! I must atone for my failure.\n\n( _He draws his sword and thrusts it toward his abdomen. Everyone except_ HOTARUBI _is in a state of shock_. EBINA _runs over to_ JIROTA _and discovers that_ JIROTA _is uninjured_. EBINA _seizes the sword and inspects it_.)\n\nEBINA: Of course it couldn't cut anything. It's as dull and rusty as a red sardine. Now then, daughter-in-law...\n\nHOTARUBI:... Mr. Ebina. From now on, as husband and wife, we shall spend our evenings at Akoji Inlet, matching shells and their poems.\n\nSARUGENJI: The dish accompanying our nuptial sak\u00e9...\n\nROKUROZAEMON:... Will be sardines laid side by side, auspiciously leaving the heads and tails on.\n\nMASTER: What good fortune for you to be able to say farewell to the pleasure quarter.\n\nJIROTA: This is all too cruel. ( _He sighs dejectedly, and_ EBINA _looks at him_.)\n\nEBINA: Yes, today we have seen the secrets of the magnificent art... ( _The rapping of_ ki _sticks begins, announcing the impending end of the play_ )... of buying and selling merchandise.\n\n( _Drums join the sticks in a lively rhythm as the curtain closes, leaving_ SARUGENJI _and_ HOTARUBI _still visible at the seven-three spot on the_ hanamichi. _The drumming becomes quieter_. HOTARUBI _takes out her Kannon figurine. She unwraps it and prays to it_. SARUGENJI _takes her arm and leads her off, down the_ hanamichi. _They exit together_.)\n\nCURTAIN\n\n1. Mishima Yukio, \"Iwashiuri ni tsuite,\" Kabukiza program, November 1954, in _Mishima hy \u014dron zensh\u016b_ (Tokyo: Shinch\u014dsha, 1994), 869.\n\n2. Neil Schaeffer, _The Art of Laughter_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 160.\n\n3. Toita Yasuji, \"Shinsen na iwashi,\" _Engekikai gekihy \u014d_, December 1954, 42.\n\n4. Nakamura Kanzabur\u014d XVIII, interview with Laurence Kominz, January 21, 2002.\n\n5. Bando Tamasabur\u014d, interview with Laurence Kominz, February 13, 2002.\n\n6. As performed by Kanzabur\u014d XVIII, Sarugenji staggers from girl to girl, enraptured by each one. When he sits down, he struggles clumsily to remove his swords from his sash and place them by his side.\n\n7. As Kanzabur\u014d XVIII plays it, Sarugenji knocks Tombo out of the way before she is able to pour sak\u00e9 for Hotarubi, and pours for her himself.\n\n8. When Kanzabur\u014d XVIII performs the play, there is much comical pantomime by Sarugenji and the _j \u014druri_ chanter as they attempt to communicate about how to perform the battle narration together. This sort of metadramatic conversation between an actor and a musician is almost never done in kabuki plays.\n\n9. Or, as is currently staged, she uses one of Sarugenji's swords that is lying nearby.\nSELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY\n\nThis bibliography supplements the definitive bibliography compiled by Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., \"Modern Japanese Drama in English,\" _Asian Theatre Journal_ 23, no. 1 (2006): 179\u2013205. Most items published before 2006 are listed there.\n\nGENERAL READINGS\n\nCody, Gabrielle H., and Evert Sprinchorn, eds. _The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama_. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.\n\nEckersall, Peter. _Theorizing the Angura Space: Avant-Garde Performance and Politics in Japan, 1960\u20132000_. Leiden: Brill, 2006.\n\nGoodman, David G., ed. and trans. _After Apocalypse: Four Japanese Plays of Hiroshima and Nagasaki_. Ithaca, N.Y.: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1994.\n\n\u2014\u2014, ed. _Japanese Drama and Culture in the 1960s: The Return of the Gods_. Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1988.\n\nJapan Playwrights Association, ed. _Half a Century of Japanese Theater_. 10 vols. Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 1999\u20132008.\n\nJortner, David, Keiko I. McDonald, and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., eds. _Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance._ Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006.\n\nKano, Ayako. _Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism_. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.\n\nKeene, Donald. _Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era_. Vol. 2. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.\n\nLeiter, Samuel L., ed. _Rising from the Flames: The Rebirth of Theater in Occupied Japan, 1945\u20131952._ Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2009.\n\nNara, Hiroshi, ed. _Inexorable Modernity: Japan_ ' _s Grappling with Modernity in the Arts_. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007.\n\nPoulton, M. Cody. _A Beggar_ ' _s Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900\u20131930._ Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2010.\n\nPowell, Brian. _Japan_ ' _s Modern Theatre: A Century of Continuity and Change_. London: Japan Library, 2002.\n\nRolf, Robert T., and John K. Gillespie, eds. _Alternative Japanese Drama: Ten Plays_. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1992.\n\nShea, George Tyson. _Leftwing Literature in Japan: A Brief History of the Proletarian Literary Movement_. Tokyo: H\u014dsei University Press, 1964.\n\nTakaya, Ted T., ed. and trans. _Modern Japanese Drama: An Anthology_. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.\n\nTschudin, Jean-Jacques. _La ligue du th\u00e9\u00e2tre prol\u00e9tarian japonais._ Paris: L'Harmattan, 1989.\n\nUchino, Tadashi. _Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium._ Salt Lake City: Seagull, 2009.\n\nINDIVIDUAL PLAYWRIGHTS INCLUDED IN THE ANTHOLOGY\n\nPART I. THE AGE OF \"TAISH\u014c DRAMA\"\n\n_Izumi Ky \u014dka_\n\n_Demon Pond, The Sea God_ ' _s Villa, The Castle Tower._ In _Spirits of Another Sort: The Plays of Izumi Ky \u014dka_ ( _1873\u20131939_ ), by M. Cody Poulton. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2001.\n\n_The Ruby_ ( _K \u014dgyoku_). In _A Beggar_ ' _s Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900\u20131930_ , by M. Cody Poulton. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2010.\n\nPART II. THE TSUKIJI LITTLE THEATER AND ITS AFTERMATH\n\n_Enchi Fumiko_\n\nKano, Ayako. \"Enchi Fumiko's Stormy Days: Arashi and the Drama of Childbirth.\" _Monumenta Nipponica_ 61, no. 1 (2006): 59\u201391.\n\n_Kishida Kunio_\n\nGoodman, David G., ed. _Five Plays by Kishida Kunio_. Rev. ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2002.\n\n_Paper Balloon, Cloudburst, A Diary of Fallen Leaves, The Two Daughters of Mr. Sawa_. In _Five Plays by Kishida Kunio_ , edited by David G. Goodman. Ithaca, N.Y.: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1989.\n\nRimer, J. Thomas. _Towards a Modern Japanese Theatre: Kishida Kunio_. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974.\n\n_Two Men at Play with Life_ ( _Inochi o moteasobu otoko futari_ ). In _A Beggar_ ' _s Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900\u20131930_ , by M. Cody Poulton. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2010.\n\n_Kubo Sakae_\n\n_Land of Volcanic Ash: A Play in Two Parts._ Translated by David G. Goodman. Ithaca, N.Y.: China-Japan Program, Cornell University, 1986.\n\nZheng, Guohe. \"From War Responsibility to the Red Purge: Politics, _Shingeki_ , and the Case of Kubo Sakae.\" In _Rising from the Flames: The Rebirth of Theater in Occupied Japan, 1945\u20131952_ , edited by Samuel L. Leiter. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2009.\n\n_Murayama Tomoyoshi_\n\nWeisenfeld, Gennifer S. _Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905\u20131931_. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.\n\nPART III. WARTIME AND POSTWAR DRAMA\n\n_Abe K \u014db\u014d_\n\nBolton, Christopher. _Sublime Voices: The Fictional Science and Science Fiction of Abe K \u014db\u014d_. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009.\n\n_The Box Man_ ( _Hako otoko_ ). Translated by E. Dale Saunders. New York: Knopf, 1974.\n\n_Friends_ ( _Tomodachi_ ). Translated by Donald Keene. New York: Grove Press, 1969.\n\nIles, Timothy. _Abe K \u014db\u014d: An Exploration of His Prose, Drama, and Theatre_. Florence: European Press Academic Publishing, 2002.\n\n_Involuntary Homicide_ , _Green Stockings_ , and _The Ghost Is Here_. In _Three Plays by K \u014db\u014d Abe_, translated by Donald Keene. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.\n\nKey, Margaret. \"'Destroying the Audience's Alibi': Empathy and Ethics in Abe K\u014db\u014d's _Mihitsu no koe_.\" In _Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance_ , edited by David Jortner, Keiko I. McDonald, and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006.\n\n\u2014\u2014. _Truth from a Lie: Documentary, Detection, and Reflexivity in Abe K \u014db\u014d_' _s Realist Project._ Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2011.\n\n_The Man Who Turned into a Stick_ ( _B \u014d ni natta otoko_). In _The Man Who Turned into a Stick: Three Related Plays_ , translated by Donald Keene. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1975.\n\nShields, Nancy K. _Fake Fish: The Theater of Kobo Abe_. New York: Weatherhill, 1996.\n\n_You, Too, Are Guilty_. In _Modern Japanese Drama: An Anthology_ , edited and translated by Ted T. Takaya. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.\n\n_Akimoto Matsuyo_\n\nGoodman, David G. \"The Quest for Salvation in Japan's Modern History: Four Plays by Akimoto Matsuyo.\" In _Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance_ , edited by David Jortner, Keiko I. McDonald, and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006.\n\n_Kaison the Priest of Hitachi_. In _The Return of the Gods: Japanese Drama and Culture in the 1960s_ , edited by David G. Goodman. Photo reprint ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2003.\n\n_Our Lady of the Scabs_. Translated by Stefan Kaiser and Sue Henny. In _Half a Century of Japanese Theater_ , edited by Japan Playwrights Association. Vol. 7. Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 2005.\n\n_Kinoshita Junji_\n\n_Between God and Man: A Judgment on War Crimes_. Translated, with an introduction, by Eric J. Gangloff. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1979.\n\n_Requiem on the Great Meridian_ ( _Shigosen no matsuri_ ) _and Selected Essays_. Translated by Brian Powell and Jason Daniel, with an introduction by Brian Powell. Tokyo: Nan'un-do, 2000.\n\nSorgenfrei, Carol Fisher. \"A Fabulous Fake: Folklore and the Search for National Identity in Kinoshita Junji's _Twilight Crane_.\" In _Rising from the Flames: The Rebirth of Theater in Occupied Japan, 1945\u20131952_ , edited by Samuel L. Leiter. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2009.\n\n_Morimoto Kaoru_\n\nPoulton, M. Cody. \"The Road Taken, Then Retraced: Morimoto Kaoru's _A Woman's Life_ and _Japan in China_.\" In _Sino-Japanese Transculturation: From the Nineteenth Century to the Pacific War_ , edited by Katsuhiko Endo, Richard King, and M. Cody Poulton. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2011.\n\nZheng, Guohe. \"Reflections _of_ and _on_ the Times: Morimoto Kaoru's _A Woman's Life_.\" In _Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance_ , edited by David Jortner, Keiko I. McDonald, and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006.\n\n_Tanaka Chikao_\n\n_The Far Fringes of the Clouds_. Translated by John D. Swain. In _Half a Century of Japanese Theater,_ edited by Japan Playwrights Association. Vol. 8. Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 2006.\n\n_The Head of Mary_ ( _Maria no kubi_ ). In _After Apocalypse: Four Japanese Plays of Hiroshima and Nagasaki_ , edited and translated by David G. Goodman. Ithaca, N.Y.: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1994.\n\n_Mama_ ( _Ofukuro_ ). In _A Beggar_ ' _s Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900\u20131930_ , by M. Cody Poulton. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2010.\n\nPART IV. THE 1960S AND UNDERGROUND THEATER\n\n_Betsuyaku Minoru_\n\n_The Cherry in Bloom_. Translated by Robert T. Rolf. In _Alternative Japanese Drama: Ten Plays_ , edited by Robert T. Rolf and John K. Gillespie. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1992.\n\n_The Elephant_. In _After Apocalypse: Four Japanese Plays of Hiroshima and Nagasaki_ , edited and translated by David G. Goodman. Ithaca, N.Y.: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1994.\n\n_The Legend of Noon_. Translated by Robert T. Rolf. In _Alternative Japanese Drama: Ten Plays_ , edited by Robert T. Rolf and John K. Gillespie. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1992.\n\n_The Move: A Play in Six Scenes with a Solemn Epilogue_. In _Modern Japanese Drama: An Anthology_ , edited and translated by Ted T. Takaya. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.\n\n_Sick_ ( _By \u014dki_). Translated by M. Cody Poulton. In _Half a Century of Japanese Theater_ , edited by Japan Playwrights Association. Vol. 6. Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 2004.\n\n_Inoue Hisashi_\n\n_The Face of Jiz \u014d_ ( _Chichi to kuraseba_ ). Translated by Roger Pulvers. Tokyo: Komatsuza, 2000.\n\n_Makeup_. Translated by Akemi Hori. In _The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature_ , edited by J. Thomas Rimer and Van Gessel. Vol. 2, _From 1945 to the Present_. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.\n\n_Yabuhara, the Blind Master Minstrel_. Translated by Marguerite Wells. In _Half a Century of Japanese Theater_ , edited by Japan Playwrights Association. Vol. 6. Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 2004.\n\n_Kara J \u016br\u014d_\n\n_A Cry from the City of Virgins_. Translated by Leon Ingulsrud. In _Half a Century of Japanese Theater_ , edited by Japan Playwrights Association. Vol. 6. Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 2004.\n\n_A Cry from the City of Virgins_. Translated by M. Cody Poulton. _Canadian Theatre Review_ 85 (1995): 45\u201365.\n\n_John Silver: The Beggar of Love_. In _After Apocalypse: Four Japanese Plays of Hiroshima and Nagasaki_ , edited and translated by David G. Goodman. Ithaca, N.Y.: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1994.\n\n_The 24:53 Train Bound for_ \" _Tower_ \" _Is Waiting in Front of That Doughnut Shop in Takebaya_ ( _24-ji 53-pun no \"T \u014d no shita\" yuki no densha ga Takebayach\u014d no dagashiya no mae de matteiru_). Translated by M. Cody Poulton. In _The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature_ , edited by J. Thomas Rimer and Van Gessel. Vol. 2, _From 1945 to the Present_. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.\n\n_The Virgin's Mask_. Translated by John K. Gillespie and Paul H. Krieger. In _Alternative Japanese Drama: Ten Plays_ , edited by Robert T. Rolf and John K. Gillespie. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1992.\n\n_\u014c ta Sh\u014dgo_\n\nBoyd, Mari. _The Aesthetics of Quietude: \u014cta Sh\u014dg\u014d and the Theatre of Divestiture_. Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 2006.\n\n_Sarachi: A Play_. Translated by Robert T. Rolf. _Asian Theatre Journal_ 10, no. 2 (1993): 133\u201362.\n\n_The Tale of Komachi Told by the Wind_. Translated by Mari Boyd. In _Half a Century of Japanese Theater_ , edited by Japan Playwrights Association. Vol. 6. Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 2004.\n\n_The Water Station_ ( _Mizu no eki_ ). Translated by Mari Boyd. _Asian Theatre Journal_ 7, no. 2 (1990): 150\u201383.\n\n_Shimizu Kunio_\n\nJortner, David. \"Remembered Idylls, Forgotten Truths: Nostalgia and Geography in the Drama of Shimizu Kunio.\" In _Inexorable Modernity: Japan's Grappling with Modernity in the Arts_ , edited by Hiroshi Nara. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007.\n\n_The Sand of Youth, How Quickly_. Translated by Robert T. Rolf. In _Alternative Japanese Drama: Ten Plays_ , edited by Robert T. Rolf and John K. Gillespie. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1992.\n\n_Such a Serious Frivolity_. Translated by J. Thomas Rimer. In _Half a Century of Japanese Theater_ , edited by Japan Playwrights Association. Vol. 7. Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 2005.\n\n_Tango at the End of Winter_. Edited by Peter Barnes. London: Amber Lane Press, 1991.\n\n_Those Days: A Lyrical Hypothesis on Time and Forgetting_. Translated by John K. Gillespie. In _Alternative Japanese Drama: Ten Plays_ , edited by Robert T. Rolf and John K. Gillespie. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1992.\n\n_When We Go Down That Heartless River_ ( _Bokura ga hij \u014d no taiga o kudaru toki_). Translated by J. Thomas Rimer. In _The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature_ , edited by J. Thomas Rimer and Van Gessel. Vol. 2, _From 1945 to the Present_. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.\n\n_Terayama Sh \u016bji_\n\nClark, Steven. \"Terayama in Amsterdam and the Internationalization of Experimental Theatre.\" In _Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance_ , edited by David Jortner, Keiko I. McDonald, and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006.\n\n_Knock: Street Theatre_. Translated by Robert T. Rolf. In _Alternative Japanese Drama: Ten Plays_ , edited by Robert T. Rolf and John K. Gillespie. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1992.\n\nRidgley, Steven C. _Japanese Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Sh \u016bji_. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.\n\nSorgenfrei, Carol Fisher. _Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Sh \u016bji and Postwar Japan_. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005. [Includes translations of _The Hunchback of Aomori_ , _La Marie Vison_ , _Heretics_ , and excerpts from _The Labyrinth and the Dead Sea: My Theatre_ ]\n\nPART V. THE 1980S AND BEYOND\n\n_Hirata Oriza_\n\n_Citizens of Seoul_. Translated by John D. Swain. In _Half a Century of Japanese Theater_ , edited by Japan Playwrights Association. Vol. 1. Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 1999.\n\n_Sayonara_. Translated by Hiroko Hatsuda and Bryerly Long. _Comparative Theatre Review_ 11, no. 1 (2011): 22\u201328, <https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ctr/11/1/11_1_22/_pdf>.\n\n_The Scientifically Minded_. Translated by Hiroko Matsuda and Tim Keenan. _Comparative Theatre Review_ 12, no. 1 (2013); 29\u2013118, <https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ctr/12/1/12_29/_pdf>.\n\n\" _Tokyo Notes_ : A Play by Hirata Oriza.\" Translated by M. Cody Poulton. _Asian Theatre Journal_ 19, no. 1 (2001): 1\u2013120.\n\n_Noda Hideki_\n\n_The Bee_ (with Colin Teevan). London: Oberon Books, 2007.\n\n_The Diver_ (with Colin Teevan). London: Oberon Books, 2008.\n\nFukushima, Yoshiko. _Manga Discourse in Japanese Theater: The Location of Noda Hideki_ ' _s Yume no Y \u016bminsha_. London: Kegan Paul, 2003.\n\n_The Red Demon Akaoni_. Translated by Roger Pulvers. In _Half a Century of Japanese Theater_ , edited by Japan Playwrights Association. Vol. 4. Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 2002.\n\n_Okada Toshiki_\n\nPoulton, M. Cody. \"Krapp's First Tape: Toshiki Okada's _Enjoy at 59 E59_.\" _TDR: The Drama Review_ 55, no. 2 (2011): 150\u201357.\n\nPART VI. POPULAR THEATER\n\n_Izumi Ky \u014dka_\n\n\" _At Yushima Shrine_ , a Scene from _A Woman's Pedigree_ , by Izumi Ky\u014dka\" [translation of _Yushima no Keidai_ ]. In _A Tokyo Anthology: Literature from Japan's Mega-City, 1850\u20131920_ , edited by Sumie Jones and Charles S. Inouye. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2014.\n\n_Mishima Yukio_\n\n_Five Modern N \u014d Plays_. Translated by Donald Keene. New York: Knopf, 1957.\n\nGoodman, David G. \"An Aesthetic of Destruction: Mishima Yukio's _My Friend Hitler_.\" In _Inexorable Modernity: Japan's Grappling with Modernity in the Arts_ , edited by Hiroshi Nara. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007.\n\nKominz, Laurence R. \" _Steeplechase_ : Mishima Yukio's Only Original N\u014d Play.\" In _Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance_ , edited by David Jortner, Keiko I. McDonald, and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006.\n\n_Madame de Sade_. Translated by Donald Keene. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1971.\n\n_Mishima on Stage: The Black Lizard and Other Plays_. Translated and edited by Laurence R. Kominz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.\n\n_My Friend Hitler and Other Plays of Yukio Mishima_. Translated by Hiroaki Sat\u014d. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.\n\n_Yoroboshi: The Blind Young Man_. In _Modern Japanese Drama: An Anthology_ , edited and translated by Ted T. Takaya. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.\n\n_Yuya_ , a Modern N\u014d Play. Translated by Jonah Salz and Laurence Kominz. In _The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature_ , edited by J. Thomas Rimer and Van Gessel. Vol. 2, _From 1945 to the Present_. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.\n\n_Takarazuka_\n\nLonginetto, Kim, and Jane Williams. _Dream Girls_. Video distributed by Women Make Movies, 1993.\n\nRobertson, Jennifer. \"The Politics of Androgyny in Japan: Sexuality and Subversion in the Theatre and Beyond.\" _American Ethnologist_ 19, no. 3 (1992): 419\u201342.\n\n\u2014\u2014. _Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan_. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.\n\nStickland, Leonie R. _Gender Gymnastics: Performing and Consuming Japan's Takarazuka Revue_. Melbourne: Trans-Pacific Press, 2008.\n\nYamanashi, Makiko. _A History of the Takarazuka Revue Since 1914: Modern Girl's Culture, Japan Pop_. Folkstone: Global Oriental, 2012.\nPERMISSIONS\n\nThe editors and publisher acknowledge with thanks permission granted to reprint the following material.\n\n_Father Returns_ , by Kikuchi Kan, translated by M. Cody Poulton. Pages 85\u201398 in _A Beggar's Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900\u20131930_ , by M. Cody Poulton. \u00a9 2010 University of Hawai'i Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.\n\n_The Skeleton's Dance_ , by Akita Ujaku, translated by M. Cody Poulton. Pages 134\u201352 in _A Beggar's Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900\u20131930_ , by M. Cody Poulton. \u00a9 2010 University of Hawai'i Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.\n\n_A Nero in Skirts_ , by Murayama Tomoyoshi. Published by permission of Murayama Harue.\n\n_Paper Balloon_ , by Kishida Kunio, translated by Richard McKinnon. Pages 44\u201355 in _Five Plays by Kishida Kunio_ , expanded edition, edited by David G. Goodman (CEAS vol. 51, 1995). Reprinted with permission. Cornell East Asia Series, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14855, USA.\n\n_The Man Who Turned into a Stick_ , by Abe K\u014db\u014d. _B \u014d ni natta otoko_ \u00a9 1969 The Heirs of Abe K\u014db\u014d. Reprinted by permission of the Sakai Agency, Inc.\n\n_Twilight Crane_ , by Kinoshita Junji, translated by Brian Powell. Pages 475\u201390 of _Modern Japanese Literature_ , vol. 2, _From 1945 to the Present_ , edited by J. Thomas Rimer and Van C. Gessel. \u00a9 2007 Columbia University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and Kinoshita Tomiko.\n\n_The Little Match Girl_ , by Betsuyaku Minoru, translated by Robert N. Lawson. Pages 27\u201351 in _Alternative Japanese Drama: Ten Plays_ , edited by Robert T. Rolf and John K. Gillespie. \u00a9 1992 University of Hawai'i Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and Betsuyaku Minoru.\n\n_Two Women_ , by Kara J\u016br\u014d, translated by John K. Gillespie. Pages 293\u2013322 in _Alternative Japanese Drama: Ten Plays_ , edited by Robert T. Rolf and John K. Gillespie. \u00a9 1992 University of Hawai'i Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and Kara J\u016br\u014d.\n\n_Poison Boy_ , by Terayama Sh\u016bji. Reprinted by permission of Terayama Eiko.\n\n_The Dressing Room: That Which Flows Away Ultimately Becomes Nostalgia_ , by Shimizu Kunio, translated by Chiyori Miyagawa and John K. Gillespie. Pages 200\u2013222 in _Alternative Japanese Drama: Ten Plays_ , edited by Robert T. Rolf and John K. Gillespie. \u00a9 1992 University of Hawai'i Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and Shimizu Kunio.\n\n_The Earth Station_ , by \u014cta Sh\u014dgo. Reprinted by permission of \u014cta Mitsuko.\n\n_Living with Father_ , by Inoue Hisashi. Published by permission of Inoue Yuri.\n\n_Poems for Sale_ , by Noda Hideki. Reprinted by permission of Noda Hideki.\n\n_Tokyo Notes_ , by Hirata Oriza, translated by M. Cody Poulton. Reprinted by permission of Hirata Oriza and M. Cody Poulton.\n\n_The Attic_ , by Sakate Y\u014dji. Reprinted by permission of Sakate Y\u014dji.\n\n_Five Days in March_ , by Okada Toshiki. Reprinted by permission of Okada Toshiki.\n\n_The Rose of Versailles: A Takarazuka Grand Romantic Play_ , by Ueda Shinji. Reprinted by permission of Takarazuka Revue Company.\n\n_The Sardine Seller's Net of Love_ , by Mishima Yukio, translated by Laurence Kominz, from pp. 125\u2013147 of _Mishima on Stage: The Black Lizard and Other Plays_ , edited and with an introduction by Laurence Kominz, foreword by Donald Keene, Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, Number 59 (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2007). Copyright \u00a9 2007 the Regents of The University of Michigan. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher. _Iwashiuri koi no hikiami_ \u00a9 1954 The Heirs of Mishima Yukio. Reprinted by permission of the Sakai Agency, Inc.\n"], ["Thiruppavai \u2013 Goda's Gita\n\nThiruppavai - Goda's Gita, Volume 1\n\nSwetha Sundaram\n\nPublished by Swetha Sundaram, 2018.\nWhile every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.\n\nTHIRUPPAVAI \u2013 GODA'S GITA\n\n**First edition. March 25, 2018.**\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2018 Swetha Sundaram.\n\nISBN: 978-1540709776\n\nWritten by Swetha Sundaram.\n\n10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1\n\n# Table of Contents\n\nTitle Page\n\nCopyright Page\n\nFOREWORD\n\nForeword\n\nForeword\n\nDedications\n\nVarahavatara\n\nThe Birth of Margazhi Nombu and The Significance Of Margazhi:\n\nFruit Obtained By Chanting Thirupavai:\n\nClimate Change\n\nPasuram 1:\n\nPasuram 2\n\nPasuram 3\n\nPasuram 4\n\nPasuram 5\n\nPasuram 1\n\nPasuram 2\n\nPasuram 3\n\nPasuram 4\n\nPasuram 5\n\nA Note From Author\n\nOther Books By The Author\n\nThiruppavai \u2013 Goda's Gita Volume 2\n\nPredawn\n\nKrishna The Butter Bandit\n\nFestivities In Gokulam\n\nThe Green Banana And Lentil Diet For Diabetes And Weight Loss \u2013A complete Guide\n\nThe Human Digestive System\n\nThe Role of Hypothalamus and Liver:\n\nThe City Of Bearville\n\nNew Students\n\nSign up for Swetha Sundaram's Mailing List\n\nAbout the Author\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# FOREWORD\n\nIt gives me immense pleasure to write the foreword to this wonderful commentary which is a compilation of all that is the best in all the classical commentaries of THIRUPPAVAI and also lecture by authentic scholars on Thiruppavai by Ms Swetha Sundaram. She also underwent a kalakshepam of the commentary of Periyavachchan Pillai the \"Three Thousand Padi on Tiruppavai\" to enrich this work.\n\nThough there are many books on Aandaal Nachiyar's Thiruppavai, this book thus stands out as a unique one as it encompasses all the commentaries extensively in one place.\n\nFrancis Bacon says:\n\n\"Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.\"\n\nThis book, no doubt, belongs to the third category.\n\nI was very much elated on viewing the author's way of presentation and her pragmatic approach to the chaste verses of Aandaal.\n\nHer interest in studying our ancient scriptures is worth mentioning. She is also learning the works of Bhagavad Ramanuja.\n\nShe has published many other books on various subjects like Krishna \u2013 The Butter Bandit, Green Banana & Lentil Diet, etc which are both informative and educative.\n\nI convey my best wishes to the author and am sure she will get the blessings of Aandaal and Her elder brother Bhagavad Ramanuja.\n\nI am sure, the readers of this book will have a wonderful and sui generis experience of Thiruppavai.\n\nYours sincerely,\n\nV.S.Karunakaran.\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Foreword\n\nDurmukhi Samvatsaram ,Vrucchika Maasam\n\nKaisika EkAdaSi , GitA AvatAra Jayanthi dinam\n\nDecember 10, 2016\n\nI am happy to respond to the request of Kumari Swetha Sundaram of Calgary, Canada to write a foreword for her excellent book \"Thiruppavai \u2013 Goda's Gita\", ANDAL'S Celestial Song on the divine ThiruppAvai Prabhandham of the Soodikkoduthta NaacchiyAr from Srivilliputthur. She is the foster daughter of PeriyAzhwAr.\n\nThiruppallANDu prabhandham of PeriyAzhwAr is considered as the essence of PraNavam and ANDAL's Thiruppaavai is recognised as the quintessence of \"namO NaarAyaNAya\" sabdham. Together, ThiruppallANDU and ThiruppAvai constitute thus the Maha Mantram of AshtAksharam.\n\nKumari Swetha is from an AastikA Family in Srirangam and is a devoted Sishyai of Sri AhObila Matam AchArya paramparai. She is a skilled Instrumentation and Controls Engineer by profession and is working in Calgary, Canada for an Oil and Gas Engineering Corporation. She has links to SuNDapALayam U.Ve. RamabhadrAcchAr Swami and KozhiyAlam Swami Vamsams on her parents' side.She has received SamASraYaNa \u2013BharanyAsa anugraham from HH Srimad Ranganatha Yateendra MahA Desikan, the 46th Pattam Azhagiyasingar and the current pontiff of SrI Ahobila Matam.\n\nKumari Swetha Sundaram is an avid reader of our sampradhAya Grantams and attends many KaalakshEpams as well as santhai classes of illustrious Sri VaishNava AchAryAs and Scholars via skype. She has written an eminently readable book entitled \"KrishNa the Butter Bandit \". It has been well received.The current book on Thiruppaavai released by her is based on the distillation of the essence from her notes from the Marghazhi UpanyAsams of renowned AchAryAs like Srimad Mukkur Azhagiyasingar , Srimad Villivalam Azhagiyasingar , Thirukkudanthai Andavan , Sri U.Ve Mukkur Lakshmi NarasimhAchAr of MattappaLLi AasthAnam and the author of Godhayin Paathai , Sriman U.Ve NavalpAkkam VaasudevAcchAr Swamy ,Sriman Villur NadathUr KaruNAkarAcchAr Swamy and many others. She has also benefited from the attendance of Santhai classes on Swamy Desika StOtra Grantams and divvya Prabhandhams. Currently, she is attending the Kaalakshepam classes on Sri BhAshyam conducted by U.Ve. Sriman Karunakaracchar Swami. Kumari Swetha Sundaram is sharing the excerpts from the Thiruppavai UpanyAsams of legendary AchAryAs and has brought out their rich anubhavams and interpretations of literal and esoteric meanings of the words and groups of words chosen by ANDAL for the Thirty paasurams of Her Sanga Tamizh Prabhandham of ThiruppAvai. This kaimkaryam on the part of Kumari Swetha Sundaram is a welcome illustration of her success in keeping up with our rich traditions of Ubhaya Vedantham while pursuing a busy career in Engineering. It is my pleasure to congratulate Kumari Swetha for her outstanding initiative to bring out this rich monograph and wish her all success in releasing it. The First of the six volumes on Thiruppavai by Kumari Swetha will be released in a few days to celebrate the arrival of this year's Marghazhi Thiruppavai season. This would please our Thiruppavai Jeeyar, GodhAgrajar, Parama Krupa nidhi, AchArya Ramanuja, whose Millennium Thirunakshatram we are celebrating now.\n\nThiruppAvai has 30 Paasurams and it is eulogised as GodhOpanishad since it summarises the sacred meanings of the Upanishads. Govindan, the object of ANDAL's worship in ThiruppAvai has blessed us with Srimad Bhagavad Gita, which contains 700 slOkams. It is also Upanishad Saaram and hence it is revered as GitOpanishad. Both GitOpanishad and GodhOpanishad belong to the noble category of adhyAtmika Saastrams enjoying Bhagavad GuNAnubhavams and the five VedAntic doctrines (artha panchakam) linked to our quest for Moksham. One of the AchAryAs has hence described GodOpanishad as the dispeller of our sins and revealer of the sacred feet of the Lord as our unfailing refuge (\u0baa\u0bbe\u0ba4\u0b95\u0b99\u0bcd\u0b95\u0bb3\u0bcd \u0ba4\u0bc0\u0bb0\u0bcd\u0b95\u0bcd\u0b95\u0bc1\u0bae\u0bcd , \u0baa\u0bb0\u0bae\u0ba9\u0b9f\u0bbf \u0b95\u0bbe\u0b9f\u0bcd\u0b9f\u0bc1\u0bae\u0bcd ) . Swamy ParAsara Bhattar expresses his gratitude to Godhai for Her MahOpakAram in his Sanskrit Taniyan through many SaastrA-ordained namaskArams ( \u0917\u094b\u0926\u093e \u0924\u0938\u094d\u092f\u0948 \u0928\u092e \u0907\u0926\u092e\u093f\u0926\u092e\u094d \u092d\u0942\u092f \u090f\u0935\u093e\u0938\u094d\u0924\u0941 \u092d\u0942\u092f: ) . Swami ParAsara Bhattar expressed his gratitude to GodhA for reminding KrishnA about His sworn duties of offering rakshaNam for those who sought the refuge of His sacred feet instead of lazing away His time enjoying the bliss of the lofty breasts of His dear consort , Nappinnai.\n\nANDAL is an incarnation of BhUmi Devi, who pleaded with Her Lord, Jn\u00c3nappirAn ( VarAha BhagavAn) to bless the suffering jeevans /samsAris through the upadEsam of a laghu upAyam ( easy means) to gain mOksham ( the liberation from the repeated cycles of births and deaths). The ever-compassionate VarAhappirAn responded to His Devi's request blessed the jeevans with VarAha charama slOkam, which is easy to practice for gaining the Parama PurushArtham of Moksham from never ending cycles of births and deaths. BhUmi Devi in Her avatAram as ANDAL expressed Her gratitude to Her Lord through the samarpaNam of the fragrant garland of poems of ThiruppAvai (\u0b85\u0bb0\u0b99\u0bcd\u0b95\u0bb0\u0bcd\u0b95\u0bcd\u0b95\u0bc1 \u0ba4\u0bbf\u0bb0\u0bc1\u0baa\u0bcd\u0baa\u0bbe\u0bb5\u0bc8 \u0baa\u0bb2\u0bcd\u0baa\u0ba4\u0bbf\u0baf\u0bae\u0bcd \u0b87\u0ba9\u0bcd\u0ba9\u0bbf\u0b9a\u0bc8\u0baf\u0bbe\u0bb2\u0bcd \u0baa\u0bbe\u0b9f\u0bbf\u0b95\u0bcd\u0b95\u0bca\u0b9f\u0bc1\u0ba4\u0bcd\u0ba4\u0bbe\u0bb3\u0bcd \u0ba8\u0bb1\u0bcd\u0baa\u0bcd\u0baa\u0bbe\u0bae\u0bbe\u0bb2\u0bc8 ) .\n\nOur Kasthurirangan married ANDAL at Srirangam and then returned to Srivilliputthur ThirumALikai of His divine consort and the Divya Dampatis bless us now from ANDAL's birthplace.\n\nThe essence of ThiruppAvai is that ANDAL observed the month- long Paavai vratam to perform nitya kaimakryam to the Lord and gain the ultimate PurushArtham of gaining the Lord as Her husband. The month chosen to observe this vratam was Maarkazhi. She joined with the young gopa kannikais to observe this noble vratam.\n\nDuring the observance of this Vratam, ANDAL considered SrivilliputthUr as the AayarpAdi in the north, the girls of Her birth place as Gopis and Herself as one of the Gopis and the temple of Vadapatra Saayee as NandagOpan's home and Vadapatra Saayee as Lord KrishNa Himself. This feeling state ( bhAvanai) ripened and led to the divine thirty paasurams of ThiruppAvai. ANDAL shows us the way to observe the Vratam in a spirit of Bridal Mysticism to gain the Lord's ParamAnugraham to serve Him forever at His Supreme abode.\n\nIn the first paasuram of ThiruppAvai, ANDAL invites Her friends to join Her for the observance (anushtAnam) of the upAyam of Prapatti at the lotus feet of Sriman NarayaNan and assured them that they will gain the bliss of MokshAnugraham from their Lord. She instructs that the means and the fruits of their vratam ( PrApya-PrApakankaL) is Sriman NarayaNan alone ( \u0ba8\u0bbe\u0bb0\u0bbe\u0baf\u0ba3\u0ba9\u0bc7 \u0ba8\u0bae\u0b95\u0bcd\u0b95\u0bc7 \u0baa\u0bb1\u0bc8 \u0ba4\u0bb0\u0bc1\u0bb5\u0bbe\u0ba9\u0bcd) and as their Saviour , He will grant them Moksha Sukham and ParipoorNa BrahmAnandam generated by their nitya , niravadhya Kaimkaryams to Him .\n\nLooked at another way, the first Paasuram ( \u0bae\u0bbe\u0bb0\u0bcd\u0b95\u0bb4\u0bbf\u0ba4\u0bcd\u0ba4\u0bbf\u0b99\u0bcd\u0b95\u0bb3\u0bcd ) focuses on AshtAshara MahA Mantram and covers its three meanings: ananya Seshatvam, ananya SaraNathvam and ananya PrApyatvam .\n\nThe Second Paasuram shifts its focus to the mantra ratnam, Dhvayam, the second of the three rahasyams that are sacred for VaishNavAs.\n\nThe third paasuram elaborates on the powerful and redeeming message of Charama slOkam, the third rahasyam blessed to us by one's SdaAchAryan.\n\nThe Fourth paasuram is in the form of a prayer to the SadAchAryans to pour down the rain of Jn\u00c3nam for Bhagavad guNAnubhavam and gaining the fruits of Prapatti.\n\nThe Fifth pasuram houses ANDAL's appeal to her friends to utter ( Cheppu) repeatedly the name of Maayan, Lord KrishNa for Aatma Suddhi ( SrI KrishNAnusamaraNam param) through naama sankeertanam.\n\nThere is yet another way of looking at the build up of these Thirty paasurams (viz)., six sets of pentads to understand their focus.\n\nThe First set of Five points out the ways to perform the Paavi nOnpu .\n\nThe Second set of five Paasurams awakens the gopis, who have recently fallen in love with the Lord.\n\nThe Third set of Five awakens five the gopis, who are deeply in love with Lord KrishNa for a long time and invites them to join the Vratam.\n\nThe Fourth set of paaurams awaken the guards (Dhvara PaalakAs), NandagOpan, NeeLA dEvi and KaNNan.\n\nThe Fifth set of Pentads focuses on the preparations of KrishNa by the gopis to a state in which He can listen to their appeals.\n\nThe Sixth/Final set finds Lord KrishNa seated on His simhAsanam to listen to the Gopis and granting them the desired boons.\n\nThe 29th and the 30th Paaasurams ( \u0b9a\u0bbf\u0bb1\u0bcd\u0bb1\u0bae\u0bcd \u0b9a\u0bbf\u0bb1\u0bc1\u0b95\u0bbe\u0bb2\u0bc7 and \u0bb5\u0b99\u0bcd\u0b95\u0b95\u0bcd\u0b95\u0b9f\u0bb2\u0bcd \u0b95\u0b9f\u0bc8\u0ba8\u0bcd\u0ba4 paasurangaL ) are used by us in our daily ThiruvArAdhanams .\n\nThe 29th Paasuram of SiRRam SiRukaalE is the last of the Thiruppavai Paasurams, where Andal concludes Her Prabhandham in the role of a Gopa Kannikai describing the feelings of fellow Gopis performing the Prapatti nonpu.\n\nIn the 30th and concluding paasuram of \" Vangak Kadal-kadaintha\", ANDAL speaks with Her own voice ( \u0ba4\u0ba9\u0bcd\u0ba9\u0bbe\u0ba9 \u0ba4\u0ba9\u0bcd\u0bae\u0bc8\u0baf\u0bbf\u0bb2\u0bcd \u0baa\u0bbe\u0b9f\u0bbf\u0baf\u0ba4\u0bc1).\n\nIn the 28th paasuram, the angams of Prapatti were alluded to. The 29th Paasuram houses the Prapatti performed by the Gopis. The 30th Paasuram describes the fruits of the performance of the Prapatti ( phala samarpaNam, Phala Sruti Pasuram). The 30th Paasuram reveals the four kinds of excellence of Thiruppavai Prabhandham ( \u0baa\u0bcd\u0bb0\u0baa\u0ba8\u0bcd\u0ba4 \u0bb5\u0bc8\u0bb2\u0b95\u0bcd\u0bb7\u0ba3\u0bcd\u0baf\u0bae\u0bcd). The First of the VailakshaNyam is the excellence of the Subject matter ( Vishaya VailakshaNyam . The second is the superiority of the author , GodhA PirAtti( Vakthaa Vailakshanyam ) . The third aspect of excellence is artha VailakshaNyam or the special meanings of the Veda Mantrams embedded in the divine Prabhandham . The fourth point of excellence is PrayOjana VailkshaNyam or the excellent benefits arising from the recitation of Thiruppaavai .\n\nWe wish Kumari Swetha Sundaram distinct success in bringing out many more books on our noble source granthams like the Current one on ThiruppAvai mined fresh from her rich archives.\n\nNamO SrI Godha sameta Sri Kasturi RanagAya,\n\nDaasan , Oppilaippan Koil Varadchari Sadagopan\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Foreword\n\nSwetha's book, thiruppavai-goda's gita is refreshingly different from other books and commentaries on thiruppavai,in the sense it is aimedto capture the imagination of younger generation persons/children, who are inclined to learn about our sampradaya and encourage them to get involved in knowing more about vedanta and spiritual values we stand for. The book is also different in the style/manner it is written -\n\n-story telling without sacrificing essential principles and the objectives mentioned.\n\n-giving quotations with meanings,which elevates the book above mere story-telling.\n\n-easy style of writing and yet managing to display the zeal/passion of the writer swetha,without which inspiration of the readers cannot be achieved .\n\ni consider it a prievelege to write this foreword to such an absorbing endeavour into which swetha has put her heart and soul. Iam sure by the grace of the divine couple and blessings of our acharyas and teachers who have taught and guided us, this pious and noble journey of swetha will be very successful.\n\nsundapalyam Vasudevan\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Dedications\n\nI dedicate this book to my acharyans; my spiritual instructors. They are my pillars of support.\n\nLakshmI nAtha samArambhAm nAtha yAmuna madhyamAm |\n\nasmadhAchArya paryanthAm vandhE guruparam parAm ||\n\nThe first acahrya in the illustrious Sri Vaishnava Guru Parampara is none other than Lord Srimana Narayana Himself followed by Goddess Mahalakshmi. Our Divine Mother, Goddess Mahalakshmi has taken the role of representing us before the Lord. She argues on our behalf and secures us a place in the eternal abode. She obtained instructions from Lord Sriman Narayana and with His permission, She initiated Sri Vishwaksenar into this Guru Parampara with the sole intention of uplifting us. Sri Vishwaksenar shared the instructions with Sri Nammazhwar. The acharyas, Sri Nathamuni and Sri Alavandar form the centre of the Guru Parampara. Sri Nathamuni was an expert in Vedanta and he was responsible for retrieving the 4000 Divya Prabandham which had been lost to time. He not only retrieved these wonderful works of the Azhwars, but he was also responsible for adding rhythm and music to the compositions. Vedanta and the Divya Prabandham verses are together called as Ubhaya Vedantam. Sri Nathamuni was the first person to become an expert in Ubhaya Vedanta. He shared his knowledge with his disciples. He taught his nephews to sing the Divya Prabandham verses with tune and beat. This knowledge of the Ubhaya Vedanta was the best thing spread by Sri Alavandar the grandson of Sri Nathamuni. Due to their efforts in reviving the lost Divya Prabandham verses, they form the centre of this Guru Paramapara Lineage and must always be worshipped with respect. After Sri Ramanujacharya, the line continues through the 74 Simhasanadhipadis all the way up to my acharyan and it continues to grow into the longest human chain to guide all of us to the abode of Lord Narayana.\n\nGoddess Mahalakshmi holds the esteemed position of an acharyan. She not only initiated the Sri Vaishnava Guru Parampara through Sri Vishwaksenar but, as Goda Piratti, she taught us the simplest of all means which can be performed easily by us to attain Lord Sriman Narayana through the beautiful verses of Thiruppavai. I seek refuge under her divine feet and pray for her guidance.\n\nIt is indeed a divine blessing that this volume on Thiruppavai was completed this year marking the 1000th year celebrating Acharya Ramanuja's Jayanthi. I pay my humble obeisance to Sri Ramanujacharya who incarnated 1000 years ago as a beacon to illuminate the divine path leading up to the eternal world of Sri Vaikuntam. He incarnated as the central gem in the heavenly necklace called the Sri Vaishnava Guru Parampara.\n\nyO nithya-machyutha-padaam-buja-yugma-rugma\n\nvyaamOhadas dadhi-tha-raaNi thru-Naaya mEnE\n\nasmath-gurOr bhagavathOsya dhayaika-sindhO:\n\nraamaanujasya saraNau saraNam prapadhyE.\n\nI take refuge under the lotus feet of Sri Ramanujacharyar who is the ocean of mercy. The great acharya is forever infatuated with the lotus-like feet of our dear Lord and considers everything else to be insignificant and equal to a blade of grass. Sri Ramanujacharya revealed to us the Divine Feet of our Dear Lord as the sole refuge.\n\nSwami Vedanta Desikan aptly states in the above verse from Sri Yathiraja Saptathi that Acharya Ramanuja who is the ocean of compassion served Lord Varadaraja of Hasthigiri with pure water from a well. The divine cloud called Varadaraja absorbed the waters of compassion from that Acharya Ramanuja, and showers this supreme grace upon His devotees even today. Swami Ramanuja is hence responsible for the Lord's Divine Grace to fall upon us. This great acharya taught us the easiest means to attain the Divine Feet of the Lord. Swami Ramanuja is an ocean of mercy to those who come to him with shraddha and also to those who come without shraddha. He blesses everyone without discrimination. Lord Narayana taught Matsya, Hamsa and Hayagreevavatarams but only those people who were present during that period benefitted from His teachings but, Swami Ramanuja's teachings continue to uplift us even after 1000 years have rolled by since the time when Swami Ramanuja incarnated. The word \"compassion\" automatically makes us think about Swami Ramanuja. The philosophy of Acharya Ramanuja has become eternal. By seeking refuge under the divine feet of Swami Ramanuja we obtain Ramanuja ( the younger brother (anuja) of Bala Rama \u2013 Krishna). I pray to Acharya Ramanuja to guide me while writing this book.\n\nRamanuja dhayApAthram jnAna vairAgya bhooshaNam |\n\nsrImath vEnkatanAthAyam vandhE vEdhAntha dhESikam ||\n\nI pay my obeisance to Sri Swami Vedanta Desikan. I worship swami Desikan whose contribution to Vishishtadwaita Siddhantam cannot be ignored. He was the receptacle of the mercy of his acharya Sri Ramanuja and is adorned with the jewels of knowledge and detachment. The name Ramanuja in the above verse refers to Swami Desikan's maternal uncle Sri AthrEya Ramanujacharya popularly known by the name Sri Apullar. The name Ramanuja in the verse can also apply to Acharya Ramanuja.\n\nbhootham sarascha mahaa-dhaahvaya-patta-naadha-\n\nsree-bhakthi-saara-kulasEkhara-yOgi-vaahaan,\n\nbhakthaangirirENu parakaala-yathindra mishRaan,\n\nsreemath paraankusa munim prana-thOsmi nithyam\n\nI pay my obeisance to the twelve Azhwar Sints without whom we wouldn't have the 4000 divya Prabandham. The Sanskrit Vedas are called as 'marai\" in Tamil because it is not easy to decipher the meaning of the verses easily as they contain many hidden meanings. The Azhwr Saints revealed the meaning of the Vedic Verses in Tamil. They composed the pasurams in such a way that it is easy to understand the meaning of the Sanskrit Vedas. I pay my respect to Pey Azhwaar (mahadaahvaya), Poigai Azhwaar (saras), PeriyAzhwaar (Bhatta nAtha), Thirumazhisai Azhwaar (Bhakthisaara), KulasEkaraAzhwaar, ThirupaaN Azhwaar (YOgivaahaan), Thondaradippodi AzhwAr (BhakthAngrirEnu), Thirumangai AzhwAr (parakAla), Emperumaanaar (Acharya Raamaanuja) KooratthAzhwAn (misrA; disciple of Swami Ramanuja) and NammAzhwAr (parAnkusamuni)\n\nI pay my humble obeisance and dedicate this book at the lotus Feet of my Acharyan HH Srivan Sathakopa Sri Ranganatha Yathindra Maha Desikan the 46th pontiff of Ahobila Mutt. I am blessed to have the 46th Srimath Azhagiya Singar as my acharyan. Srimath Azhagiyasingar is endowed with compassion and is a brilliant Vedic Scholar as well as an authority on Dharma Saastram. Srimath Azhagiya Singar is also fluent in a number of languages. Srimath Azhagiyasingar radiates 'vatsalyam' on his disciples. Vatsalyam is a Sanskrit word which depicts the love shown by a parent for his/her child like the way in which a cow showers affection on its calf; it is impossible to find an English word which truly conveys the sentiments conveyed by this Sanskrit word.\n\nIn this period of the kali yuga, our acharyans are the Prathyaksha Deivam (God appearing in person). The qualities of good acharyans are described by the Thiruppavai Pasuram Erra Kalangal.\n\nOur acharyans are not only excellent preceptors but are also excellent disciples who delve deep into the Sri Sookthis composed by their acharyans before instructing us. This quality is conveyed by the line \"marrade pal soriyum vaLLal perum pasukkaL\". Our acharyans are the sath-sishyans (good disciples) who shower their experiences on the auspicious qualities of Perumal as learned from their acharyans. They shower the milk of knowledge upon us. Like milk which is white, the knowledge they impart us is pure. By this way, they ensure the continuity of the Sri Vaishnava Guru Parampara. They make an effort to ensure that their disciples get an opportunity to learn our philosophy. Even if the disciples don't come to them, the acharyans go in search of the disciples and slowly induce the desire in the disciples to learn about our sampradayam. Sage Vaisampayana practised this when he went to the court of King Janamejaya and slowly aspired the king to listen to the Mahabharata. Likewise, Sri Manakkal Nambhi went in search of his guru Nathamuni's grandson Yamunacharya who was a king and turned the mind of Sri Yamunacharya towards the Lord. The efforts taken by Sri Manakkal Nambhi turned Sri Yamunacharya into Swami Alavandar.\n\nLike Sage Vaisampayana and Sri Manakkal Nambhi, my preceptors also make sure that their disciples including me are blessed with the gift of knowledge. When I started learning about the Sri Vaishnava Sampradayam also known as \"Ramanuja Darsanam\", I never even imagined that I would receive the guidance of my preceptors Sri U.Ve V.S.Karunakarachar Swamin, Dr V.sadagopan and Sri Sundapalayam Vasudevachar. I truly feel blessed to have their guidance. All three of them took time out of their very busy schedule to write a foreword for this book in order to encourage me. While writing about Perumal's thirunamam Padmanabhan and Damodaran, I was reminded of their qualities. They have excelled in every field and stand like the Mighty Mount Meru and yet when people like me (thurumbu) approach them, they make themselves approachable and come down to our plane (saulabhyam) to guide us and encourage us.\n\nI had always wanted to study Bagawath Ramanuja's work on the Brahma Sutra \u2013 Sri Bashyam. I was thrilled when I received the invitation/permission to join the Sri Bashyam class conducted by Sri V.S.Karunakarachar Swamin the 28th descendant of Sri Nadadoor Azhvan \u2013 the nephew of Swami Ramanuja. Sri Nadadoor Azhvan was given the Sribhashyasimhasanam in 1137 A.D by Swami Ramanuja. The grandson of Sri Nadadoor Azhvan is Sri Nadadoor Ammal whose kalakshepam on Sri Bashyam have been recorded by his disciple Sri Sudarsana Suri as the \"Shrutaprakasika\". Sri Nadadoor Ammal was also the grand preceptor of Swami Vedanta Desikan and Sri Ghatikashatam Ammal the Acharya of Sri Adivan Satakopan the founder of the Ahobila Mutt. It is hence a dream come true to have received the opportunity to study Sri Bashyam under the guidance of Sri V.S.Karunakarachar Swamin. Sri V.S.K Swamin has mastered both the Sanskrit & Tamil Vedas and has studied the Sri Vaishnava Philosophy under his father Sri U.Ve Srinidhi Swamy. He not only mastered Vedic studies but is also a Mechanical Engineer. He has been giving public discourses from the age of 21. He has participated in many Vidwat Sadas conducted by prominent institutions including Sri Ahobila Mutt, Srimad Andavan Ashramamams of Srirangam and Poundareekapuram, Sri Parakala Mutt etc. The titles and awards conferred upon Swami if listed will take up the space of an entire book. Recently, on the 19th of Jan 2017, Swami received the \"Asthikapravachana Ratna \" award from HH Srivan Sathakopa Sri Ranganatha Yathindra Maha Desikan the 46th pontiff of Ahobila Mutt. Swami is the recipient of many titles like \"Pravachana Bhushanam\", \"Sorkondal\" \"Desika Darshna Chudamani etc. He has received the unique title of \"Shastra-Sahiti-Vallabha\" by H.H Srirangam Srimad Andvan in 2001.\n\nWhatever I have tried to convey through this book are because of the teachings of Sri U.Ve.Karunakarachar Swamin; any deficiencies in this book are because of my own negligence. When Swami found out about my intention to publish my notes taken from various upanyasams on Thiruppavai, Swami arranged a kalakshepam of the commentary of Periyavachchan Pillai the \"Three Thousand Padi on Tiruppavai\" to guide me!\n\nI am often amazed by how many of my doubts are cleared by Sri U.Ve.Karunakarachar Swamin even when I haven't actually asked the questions. I am truly inspired by the way Swami leads his life per the prescribed Vedic ideals. I am in awe, especially to see Swami who is also a Mechanical Engineer and who retired as the Industrial Advisor to Government of India balance everyday life in this fast-paced modern world without compromising any of the Vedic ideals. Swami is a storehouse of knowledge and his lectures are packed with unique information which can never be obtained anywhere else. Swami's triumphs in the field of Engineering, as well as Vedanta, are so many that I will run out of words and space trying to list them in this section.\n\nBefore attending formal lectures, whenever I had any doubts on our philosophy, I turned towards Sadagopan.org and was amazed by the list of books available (over 450 books \u2013 almost all written by Dr V.Sadagopan) on the site and that it contained everything about our sampradayam. I never even imagined at that time that I would receive his guidance! I truly feel blessed to have his guidance. I would also be at a loss without the guidance of my mentor Dr V.Sadagopan. His accomplishments are so many that it is impossible to list them all in this section. On top of the 450 plus book on Vishishtadwaita philosophy, he has also published 50 technical papers and holds six U.S Patents. After his retirement from IBM, He became a consultant to the Dean of Pace University, NY in Cybersecurity, Big Analytics, Cloud Computing and Telemedicine. His particular interests are in Brain Sciences and Human Memory Circuits. He completed his Doctoral Studies at MIT.\n\nDr V.Sadagopan humbly states that his accomplishments were made possible by Sri Hayagreeva Mantropadesaam received from a member of the Thirukkudantai Azhagiyasingar family, who in turn was related to Srimad DevanArviLaagam Azhagiyasingar. He had his samaasrayaNam with DevanArviLaagam Azhagiyasingar and BharanyAsam at the sacred feet of Srimad Villivalam Azhagiyasingar. Despite the number of achievements, Dr V.Sadagopan is very modest; this quality is the first lesson I am trying to learn from him. He always takes the time to encourage people who are trying to learn more about the philosophy of Vishishtadwaita. He focuses his time and effort on \"Vidhya Dhanam\", donating knowledge to uplift others.\n\nDr V.Sadagopan is the president of \"Sri Bhagavad Ramanuja Millennium Foundation Inc.\" This foundation focuses on the delivery of Educational Services by bringing out the Translations and annotated Commentaries of devotional literature that is sacred to Millions of Hindus for many centuries. It covers selected Texts from the timeless Vedas, Upanishads, ItihAsams, PurANams and the two VaishNavite Aagamams like PaacharAtra and VaikhAnasa. These sacred literature form the core of worship of Lord VishNu by the Hindu Community in India and abroad. The mission of the Bhagavad RaamAnuja Foundation is to create and expand a study and research group for these religious texts and make the content available in English. The goal is to expand the awareness of the Religious and Literary significance of these ancient texts by many followers of the Sanatana Dharma ( ancient and eternal codes of Religous peaceful conduct) living in different parts of this universe. There is also a plan to create access to the current and future content as \"Vidya Daanam\" to Sri VaishNavAs following Sri RaamAnuja Darsanam.\n\nLastly but not the least, I would like to write about Sri Sundapalayam Vasudevachar who I am proud to say is my relative. When he found out that I am the great-great-great granddaughter of SundapALayam Sri U.Ve. Ramabhadrachar, Like Sri Manakkal Nambhi, Sri Sundapalayam Vasudevachar contacted me and has been teaching various granthams via skype. I am forever indebted to him for his sincere wishes to teach me everything he has learnt from his acharyans. I have been studying \"bagawath Vishayam\" \u2013 the commentaries on Thiruvaimozhi, commentaries on Goda Stuthi and Adhigara Sangraham from him.\n\nHe holds a degree in engineering and management. He has worked in Top Indian Companies like L&T and many multi-national companies. He has conducted many seminars and workshops on management. He has retired as the executive Vice President from TTK Prestige. He has attended Kalakshepams of Erudite Scholars of Vedanta. He focuses his time on conducting Kalakshepams on Thiruvoimozhi, Paduka Sahasram, Desika Prabhandam to transfer the Knowledge he has obtained by attending kalakshepams of Acharyas like Sri U.Ve. Karunakarachar Swami, Sri U.Ve Madhavachar Swami and Sri U.Ve Navalpakkam Vasudevachar Swami. His first guru was his father from whom he has learnt Divya Prabhandam, Pancha Suktas, Taittariya Upanishad, Desika Stotras, Desika Prabhandam, and Paduka Sahasram. His father had learnt at the revered feet of his grandfather who was the younger brother of Sri Sundapalayam Ramabadhrachar and who had learnt Vedanta from H.H. Srimad Periandavan through Kalakshepams at Srirangam. He is an active participant at the Sripuram Srimad Andavan Ashramam Temple, Bangalore and was appointed to the managing committee by HH Srimad Andavan. His article, \"Paduka sahasram oru arputham\" is serialised in the Sri Ranganatha Paduka magazine.\n\nIn spite of his lofty background, he is very humble and modest. I see him as the epitome of acharya bakthi. It is very moving to hear him speak about his acharyans like HH Sri Thirukkudanthai Srimad Andavan and HH Srivan Sathakopa Sri Narayana Yathindra Maha Desikan the 45th pontiff of Ahobila Mutt. While studying the commentaries on the second Thiruppavai pasuram, on the importance of performing vaachika, manasika and kayika kaimkaryams, I couldn't help thinking about Sri Sundapalayam Vasudevachar who tirelessly performs kaimkaryams at the Srimad Andavan Ashramam Temple and at the Sri Srinivasa Varadharaja Perumal temple in Sundapalayam with enthusiasm.\n\nThis dedication will not be complete without a mention of my parents. It was my mother who first encouraged me to write. Without her love and encouragement, I could have never put the pen to the paper. My favourite time of the day is when I go on short hikes with my parents. My mother would make our hikes, interesting by narrating the stories she had heard that day in spiritual lectures. I fondly recall listening to stories from the life of Swami Ramanujar narrated to me by my parents at dinner time. My mother would feed me spicy dal powder mixed with rice and sesame oil as my first course every evening when my father narrated stories about Swami Ramanujar from the Amar Chitra Katha book. To this day I can't consume dal powder rice without thinking about Swami Ramanujar.\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Varahavatara\n\nVarahavatara is the seed for Thiruppavai. Lord Varaha instructed us on Saranagathi, the message of Thiruppavai. This is the first incarnation when He revealed His lotus feet as the sole refuge. The following paragraph reveals the greatness of the Lord's lotus feet.\n\nVarahavataram is also connected with the holy hills of Tiruvenkatam. Swami Desikan has praised the holy hills of Tiruvenkatam as follows.\n\n\"kaNNan adiyiNai emakku kaattum veRpu\"\n\nThe holy hills of Tiruvenkatam are praiseworthy because, they reveal to even people like us (emakku) who are sinners, the divine feet of our dear Lord. Swami has used the words \"adiyiNai\". Although, \"adiyiNai\" means \"feet \u2014 pair of feet\", the Tamil word \"iNai\" in this verse compares the divine feet with some object. With which item are the divine feet of our Lord compared? The Lord's feet are often likened to lotus, but Swami Desikan is dissatisfied with this comparison. While a lotus bloom is soft and fragrant like the Lord's feet, it lacks everlasting freshness; therefore, the lotus is not an equal to the divine feet of the Lord which never wilt. We then wonder if it would be okay to equate the Lord's feet with gold; like gold, the Lord's feet are attractive and priceless but, the Lord's feet are soft while gold is hard. The Lord's feet are softer than lotus. They are so delicate that, they even bruise when Goddess Sridevi touches them with her gentle hands. Could we then liken the Lord's feet to a golden lotus? A golden lotus is attractive, doesn't wilt, soft and fragrant like the divine feet of the Lord, but, it still lacks the quality to purify a person; a quality exclusively present only in the Lord's divine feet. Therefore, the only equal we can find for the Lord's feet are His feet. Swami Desikan concludes by declaring that, the left foot is equal to the right and vice versa. Such is the quality of the priceless \"thiruvadi\" which are revealed to even sinners like us by the holy hills of Tirumala.\n\nSri Uttamur Swami has provided an alternate explanation for the line \"kaNNan adiyiNai emakku kaattum veRpu\". The line can be interpreted to mean that, Lord Kannan Himself shows to us His beautiful thiruvadi at Tirumala where He divulges to us that, His thiruvadi are our sole refuge to escape the ocean of samsara. The Lord of Tiruvenkatam does abhinayam to indicate to us the power of His divine feet, which can cut the bonds of samsara. At SriRangam, Lord Ranganatha is seen in a reclining posture with one hand placed near His crown and the other hand pointed at His feet. The Lord through this beautiful posture draws our attention to His tall crown which reveals to us that, He is the Supreme Being; at the same time, with His other hand, He directs our attention to His divine feet to urge us to seek refuge in Him. Likewise, at Tiruvenkatam, Lord Srinivasa stands with His right hand pointed towards His feet while His left hand is placed near His calf. The Lord through this posture explains to us that, if we surrender our self to Him, He will make the depth of the fearsome ocean of samsara ankle deep, so that, it is very easy for us to cross this terrible ocean. Lord Srinivasa in the above manner shows us His divine feet at Tirumala as the only refuge which can deliver us from samsara.\n\nAn in-depth analysis of this line, \"kaNNan adiyiNai emakku kaattum veRpu\", generates the experiences of Swami Desikan on Varahavatara taken by the Lord of Tiruvenkatam. 'Kannan' refers to Varaha Perumal; as in Tamil, \"Kann\" means \"Bhumi\". This line refers to Varahavatara when, Perumal incarnated as Varaha to uplift the Earth, which had been hidden under the ocean by Hiranyakshan. After defeating Hiranyakshan, and saving Bhumi, Perumal rested in Venkatachalam where He asked Garudazhwar to bring His sporting grounds called \"Kreedadri\" from Sri Vaikuntam; thus, He turned Tiruvenkatam into Varaha Kshetram.\n\n\"Kann\" in Tamil also means \"gnanam\". Lord Varaha is called as \"Gnanapiran\" because He gives us the right knowledge to attain Moksham. In the following Mudhal Thiruvandhadhi pasuram, Sri Poigai Azhwar eulogises Lord Varaha as the guiding light shining forth with the right knowledge which shows us the way to attain salvation.\n\nUnak kurampaiyin uLpukku iruLneekki,\n\njn~aanach chudar_koL_ee naaLthORum, Enaththu\n\nuruvaa ulakidantha oozhiyaan paadham,\n\nmaruvaadhaarkku uNdaamO vaan\n\n\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\n\nLord Varaha is the one who bestows us with the right knowledge which is required by us to reach Paramapadam. He is the one, who not only destroys our ignorance but, also gives us \"mathi nalam (knowledge with bakthi)\" as mentioned in the following Thiruvaimozhi pasuram , which is essential for us to attain salvation.\n\nuyarvu aRa uyar nalam* udaiyavan yavan avan*\n\nmayarvu aRa madhi nalam* aruLinan yavan avan*\n\nayarvu aRum amarargaL* athipathi yavan avan*\n\nthuyaraRu sudar adi* thozhuthezhu enmananE! (2) 1.1.1\n\nThe name \"Kannan\", thus reminds us of Varaha Perumal who gave us instructions through Bhumi Piratti on how His devotees can attain Him with ease, by just offering to Him \"poo maalai\" (flower garland) and \"pa maalai\" (anthology \u2013 a collection of songs). Varahavatara was the seed for the incarnation of Goddess Bhumi Devi as Goda Nachiar who gave us instructions in the form of Thiruppavai. Hence, Varahavatara is very closely tied with Thiruppavai.\n\nThe Lord didn't speak when He incarnated as a Matsyam (fish) or a kurmam (tortoise) but, He spoke to us when He incarnated as a Varaham (wild boar). The Lord taught us prapatti (self-surrender) through the Varaha Charama slokam. The two slokams called Varaha Charama Slokams, support the Dwaya manthram and the Krishna Charama slokam rendered by Lord Parthasarathy in the Bagawad Geetha.\n\nLord Varaha promised Goddess Bhumi Devi that, 'Oh Bhumi Devi! When my devotees realize that, this entire universe is my body because it cannot exist independent of me and they know me as the one who is eternal because I do not have births or deaths, and thereby when they understand that, I am their sole saviour and surrender to me with firm faith, while they are still healthy and meditate upon me as the cause of all, and knows me as the Supreme Controller who commands from within, as the only one who is fit to be worshiped, as the one who is omnipresent and the one who is always near them, then, I will think about them when they are facing their last moments on Earth, when due to the distress they face while dying, their mind slips into oblivion and they lie in a comatose state like a log or a stone; I will go to them and lead them by the archirAdhi margam (Path of Light) to my abode called Parama Padham and bless them to enjoy performing eternal service to me.'\n\nThus, the Lord has allayed our fears that we would be incapable of focusing our minds on Him on our death bed. He has promised to remember His devotees on their death bed. Swami Desikan has examined the purport of the Varaha Charama Slokam in one of the chillarai rahasyams called, 'Rahasya SikhAmaNi'\n\nLater, Lord Varaha also appeared as Lord Srinivasa and through His posture, pictorially depicted the Varaha Charama slokam. To this day, all devotees to Tirumala must first visit the shrine of Varaha Perumal before paying their obeisance at the shrine of Lord Srinivasa for the pilgrimage to be counted as being complete.\n\nThe Sri Vishnu Sahasranamam sthothram praises the Lord as \"MahA VarAhO GovindhO\". The name Govinda follows the name maha Varaha thus clearly stating that Sri Varaha Perumal is \"Govindan\". The word \"Go\" means Earth and \"Vindan\" means rescuer. Sri Varaha Perumal is glorified as the \"rescuer of Earth\". He not only rescued Earth but, He also gave us simple, easy to follow instructions so that we too can be rescued by Him from this ocean of samsara.\n\nLord Varaha stands on top of the Tiruvenkatam hills as Lord Srinivasa to pictorially reiterate the import of the Varaha Charama Slokams.\n\nThus, through these lines, Swami Vedanta Desikan praises the holy hills of Tirumala since they reveal to us the divine feet of Lord Varaha which are our sole refuge as per the promise made by Perumal in the Varaha Charama slokam.\n\nGreatness of Lord Varaha\n\nAzhwar has said that the only good he has seen is Gnanapiran. He is Yagna Varahan. In the end of the Thiruvaimozhi, Swami Nammazhwar eulogises Lord Varaha as Kola Varaham; i.e., beautiful Varaham. Even when He incarnated as a boar, He was very beautiful. Swami Nammazhwar asks us, 'after I have given my heart to Him, how can I let go of Him?'. We can see from Swami Nammazhwar's statement that Lord Varaha has attracted the hearts of even mahans.\n\nThe Vedic manthram \"Trinipadame chakrame vishnur gopa vedam on Trivikrama.channo vishnu urukramaha.\" Praises the Lord's Trivikrama incarnation. The adjective \"urukramaha\" reveals Him as the one who measured all the worlds with just two steps and asked where He should place His third step! It is evident that the Lord must have taken a huge form during Trivikrama avatara if He measured all the worlds with just two steps, but, He took a larger form during Varahavatara because the Earth stuck to His face like a very small mole!\n\nAzhwar further asks Perumal, 'Piran un perumaipirar ar arivar?' Does the above verse indicate Azhwar's pride that only He knows about Lord Varaha? No, it means that other than Perumal no one else is capable of fully realisingHis greatness. Azhwar states that 'Ignorant people like us can't grasp your greatness. Most of us think that your Trivikrama avatara was great, but, it is nothing compared to your varahavatara!'\n\nThe Lord didn't speak when He incarnated as Matsyam and kurmam but, He spoke when He incarnated as a wild boar and gave us the Varaha Charama Slokam. He taught us how to perform prapatti through the Varaha Charama Slokam. He conveyed this once again through the Rama Charama Slokam and Krishna Charama Slokam during Rama and Krishnavataras proving that sidhantam never changes even when the avatara changes.\n\nVarahavatara reveals the dayai (compassion) of Lord Sriman Narayanan and Goddess Bhumi Devi. As soon as the Lord commanded Lord Brahma to begin creation, He decided to incarnate so that He can show the easiest path to salvation. While He was thinking so, Goddess Bhumi Devi worried about the welfare of her children who would dwell on Earth. She wished for the Lord to incarnate quickly and give her children the Saranagathi Shastra to attain salvation; with this is mind, she came up with a plan.\n\nDuring this time, the Sanakadhi Munis went to Sri Vaikuntam to worship the Lord.The Sri Vaikuntam visited by them is called \"karya Vaikuntam\" as it exists within the boundaries of the material Universe. Karya Vaikuntam is different from the Sri Vaikuntam called as Paramapadam. Like the many TTD Lord Srinivasa temples constructed in many cities to help devotees who are unable to visit Tirumala, Karya Vaikuntam exists within the boundaries of this Universes to help the sages and the celestials who are not eligible to travel to Paramapadam. Sri Vaikuntam is known as \"tripad vibhuthi\". It has many parks and gardens filled with Tulasi and other flowering bushes. Jealousy and anger don't exist at Sri Vaikuntam but, it was here that the Sanakadhi Munis cursed the Dwara Palakas Jaya and Vijaya for refusing them entrance into Sri Vaikuntam. When Sri Vaikuntam is bereft of anger and jealousy, what caused the Munis to curse the dwarapalakas?\n\nPrakruthi is influenced by three gunams called satva, rajo, tamo; these three gunas influences our emotions. During pralayam, these three gunams exist in equal percentage while during creation, the three gunams exist in different proportions and thereby exert an influence on our character. Sri Vaikuntam is made of \"shudha satvam\" which makes it stay free of anger and jealousy. It is said that at Sri Vaikuntam when Perumal strolls through the gardens where there is a tulasi plant between two flowering bushes, He stops near each tulasi bush to narrate the greatness of Tulasi to Goddess Mahalakshmi. The Flowers feel happy that they are near Tulasi as otherwise, the Lord wouldn't stop near them. Instead of feeling envious of Tulasi, the flowering bushes appreciate the greatness of Tulasi. When even the flowering bushes stay free of envy and ire, why did the Sanakadhi Munis curse the gatekeepers?\n\nThe sanakadhi Munis were not actually angry. They expressed anger because the Lord, who is also their Antaryami made them do so. Water is naturally cool, but when heat enters the water, it starts to boil. Paramatma is known as the fifth cause. Our Body, senses, manas, jeevatma and Paramatma all cooperate to perform a task. The proper working of the first four causes is controlled by Paramatma. He is, therefore, the Supreme Cause.\n\nThe following anecdote is narrated to explain that the Lord is the Supreme cause.\n\nWhen Swami Embar rendered spiritual discourses, people thronged to the lecture hall except for one person. Even when the other devotees urged him to attend, he never came. One fine day, to the surprise of everyone, when they called him, he immediately left with them to attend the lecture. At the lecture, he listened attentively and cried happily. He lamented that he had wasted time by not attending the earlier lectures. All the disciples of Swami Embar were surprised at the change in the attitude of the newcomer. Swami Embar seized the opportunity to teach everyone that Perumal is the Ultimate Cause. He asked his disciples, 'who is the reason for this change? Can we give credit to the devotees who made him come here?'\n\nSome disciples immediately answered that credit must be given to the devotees who influenced the newcomer.\n\n'Definitely not!' some argued. 'He himself is the reason for the change.'\n\n' Acharyan is the reason for this change,' some said. 'He would not have stayed here if the lectures hadn't been delivered in an interesting fashion.'\n\n'You are all wrong!' Said Embar. 'Paramatma is the reason for this change. He has willed for the newcomer to undergo this change and join this sat sangam.'\n\nThe moment the Sanakadhi Munis cursed the two gatekeepers, they repented their mistake. At this instant, Perumal appeared before them. He looked resplendent with a lotus in one hand and Mahalakshmi seated on a beautiful swing on His vakshasthalam. He came on top of Garudazhwar to grant darshan to the Sanakadhi Munis. He who is searched by the Vedam appeared before the Munis. The Vedic verses convey many important concepts in a humorous fashion. The following story is narrated by the Vedas to highlight that it is very difficult to have darshan of Perumal.\n\nThe deities in charge of Vak and Manas once had an argument.\n\nVak said, 'It is impossible for you to express anything without my help. Hence, I am superior.'\n\n'But, you can't speak without my input!' rebuked Manas.\n\nThey decided to ask Lord Brahma to judge whether Vak was superior or Manas.\n\n'Manas was created before Vak,' said Brahma. 'Without any doubt, Manas is superior.'\n\nVak is the wife of Brahma. She felt insulted by Brahma's verdict. She cursed Brahma, 'Since you have decided that I am inferior, I won't be of any use to you!'\n\nAs a result of the above curse, the manthras to invoke Lord Brahma are never uttered aloud.\n\nVak and Manas then decided on a race. The one who could find Paramatma first would be declared the winner. They started running. After a while, Vak gave up and after a long time, she saw Manas return.\n\n'Did you see Paramatma?' asked Vak eagerly.\n\n'I went very far but, I couldn't find Him.'\n\n'We are both equal!' declared Vak. ' Neither of us could reach Him!'\n\nManas agreed with Vak and the two of them returned home.\n\nThat Paramatma who couldn't be found by Vak and Manas appeared before the Sanakadhi Munis. He admitted that He had caused the Munis to curse Jaya and Vijaya. The Dwara Palakas lamented that they had to be separated from the Lord as a result of the curse. The Lord then gave them a choice of spending many births on earth as the Lord's devotees or spending only three births on Earth but as the Lord's foes. The Dwara Palakas prayed to be away for only three births even if it meant that they had to be the Lord's enemies.\n\nWhen the above discussions were happening, it was the evening twilight hour on Earth. Sage Kashyapar was preparing for the evening sandhyavandhanam when his wife Diti approached him with the intention of begetting sons. The evening twilight hour called as the \"sayam sandhi\" is a period which can either elevate us or ruin a person depending on the deeds performed at this hour. This is the reason we light the lamps at this hour and recite slokas like the Sri Vishnu Sahasranamam. As during this period, Diti approached Sage Kashyapar, he cursed that she would beget two sons who would torment the three worlds.\n\nThe curse took effect when Jaya and Vijaya took birth as Hiranyakshan and Hiranyakashipu. They started tormenting everyone. Hiranyakshan decided to hide the Earth under the water. At this same instant, Bhumi Devi wishing to make Perumal incarnate upon Earth quickly so that He can give everyone the saranagathi shastra, jumped into the ocean. The moment she jumped into the ocean, the Earth, which was under her control vanished under water; as this happened at the very instant when Hiranyakshan had placed his hand upon the Earth, he assumed that he had pushed it into the water. Like Goddess Sita Devi, who entered Lanka to save the women of the celestial worlds from Ravana's prison, Bhumi Devi jumped into the ocean for our sake. She jumped into the ocean to lift us out of the ocean of Samsara.\n\nThe moment Bhumi Devi disappeared, the Lord out of His immense love for her, decided to incarnate. He incarnated in the form of a wild boar and jumped out of Brahma's nostril.\n\nLord Vishnu appeared as a small boar from the nostril of Lord Brahma. As soon as Lord Vishnu in the form of a boar jumped out of the nostril of Lord Brahma, Lord Vishnu grew in size and assumed a very large form. This is the Varaha incarnation.\n\nWhy did Lord Varaha appear from the nostril of Lord Brahma? Everything in this universe is created by Brahma. To respect this rule, He appeared from Brahma's nose. Also, each of the five elements is associated with one of the five sensory perceptions. Fire is associated with shapes, sky with sound, water with taste, air with touch and Earth with the smell. Smell is perceived with the help of nose; therefore Lord Varaha appeared from the nostril of Lord Brahma as the purpose of His incarnation was to find Earth.\n\nWhy did He assume the form of a Boar? Of all the animals the boar has a good sense of smell; not only does the boar have a good sense of smell but it also likes the Earth. Hence, Lord Vishnu appeared in the form of a boar to display His love for Bhumi Devi. Andal Nachiar has praised the Lord's Varaha incarnation as \"manam illa panni\". By this statement, she has conveyed that He incarnated as a boar and that there is none who is equal (upamanam) to this boar. Also, when He incarnated as a boar, He didn't feel bad that He had to take the form of a wild boar. He took this form with enthusiasm that He even fooled all the common wild boars into thinking that He was one of them. He wasn't influenced by ego (abhimanam) to think that it was beneath Him to be a boar. When the demon Maricha took the form of a deer in the Ramayana, all the other deer ran away from him because they could sense that he wasn't one of them, but, when the Lord incarnated as a wild boar, all the other wild boars went near Him with love because they felt that He was one of them.\n\nAfter Lord Varaha destroyed the asura Hiranyakshan and rescued Earth from the deluge waters, Bhumi Devi was very pleased with Lord Varaha as He had rescued the object for which she is the deity. She appeared on top of the Earth and she was supported by Lord Varaha on His divine shoulders.\n\nGoddess Bhumi Devi was very happy that Lord Varaha rescued Earth, but at the same time, she expressed distress because her children were suffering in the miserable ocean of Samsara. She requested Him to save all the creatures who would be created on Earth. She felt worried that the creatures influenced by their past karmas would take repeated birth and experience the distress caused by the \"tapa trayam\".\n\nThe three types of tapa trayam are\n\nAdhyadhmikam: Sufferings experienced by us because of our association with people, work, society etc. These problems are created because of our interaction with others.\n\nAdhiboudhikam: Sufferings which are beyond our control like troubles we face due to pest damage, pathogens etc.\n\nAdhideivikam: Sufferings caused by natural calamities like storms and Earthquakes.\n\nGoddess Bhumi Devi requested the Lord to show us the way to escape the three types of tapa trayam. She knew that the three troubles could be escaped only when we reach Sri Vaikuntham. Therefore, she asked the Lord to tell her about the way by which every single jeevatma can escape Samsara permanently.\n\nLord Varaha's Instructions To Escape Samsara:\n\nThe Lord mentioned that by singing His praise we can escape Samsara. For every letter in the song, the Lord grants us one thousand years in heaven. Even when the jeevatma is in heaven, the jeevatma will continue to sing the praise of the Lord and is not distracted by heavenly pleasures. This jeevatma is saluted by Devendra every single day. After the jeevatma's time in heaven, it is automatically elevated to Sri Vaikuntham.\n\nThe second method is by offering beautiful flower garlands to the Lord. Only fragrant flowers are to be offered. Fragrance represents pleasant smell and is, therefore, a symbol of Goddess Bhumi Devi.\n\nGoddess Bhumi Devi gives us everything we need to worship the Lord. She gives us fruits, flowers, incense, sandal and so on. As she wanted to demonstrate the proper way to worship Lord Vishnu, she made a note of the Lord's instruction and waited for 27 chatur yugams to pass by before incarnating as Andal. She chose the time of her incarnation carefully as she wanted to incarnate as the daughter of Periazhwar.\n\nPeriazhwar was a Bhattacharya. Only men who have undergone rigorous Vedic training are eligible for the post of Bhattacharya. Qualification equivalent to present day PhD. is required to be accepted as Bhattacharya. Periazhwar was thus highly qualified. He was a great scholar. After analysing all the Vedic method of worship, he decided to cultivate a flower garden and make beautiful garlands for the Lord. He chose \"pushpakaimkaryam\" as the best option to worship the Lord.\n\nGoddess Bhumi Devi's\n\nIncarnation As Goda:\n\nSri Vishnu Chitta walked into his garden with a large basket in hand. It was the Tamil month of Adi (mid July-mid Aug). He had an unexplained sense of euphoria. The star Poorva Phalguni (Pooram) was in rising that day. He felt as if he was about to receive divine blessing. The weather was very pleasant with a gentle breeze flowing from the nearby forested area called \"Shenbaga Thoppu\". He gazed with reverence at the majestic temple gopuram which had been built by his disciple the Pandya king Vallabha Pandian. Beyond the temple gopuram, he saw the Western Ghats which appeared blue. The temple itself was nestled amidst many groves and coconut orchards.\n\nHe walked through his flower garden gathering flowers for the Lord. He had collected many varieties of jasmine flowers, ylang-ylang, Indian Magnolia, red and yellow jungle geranium flowers and sweet marjoram. As he collected the flowers, his mind kept returning to Baby Krishna. 'How lucky were Yashoda and Nanda Gopan!' he exclaimed. 'What could be happier than raising the Lord as one's own child?' he wondered. He looked at the flowers he had collected and was amazed to see that yield had exceeded the normal capacity of his little garden; the yield seemed to have increased by at least four times! He walked towards the part of the garden dedicated to growing holy basil. The fragrance from the many bushes of the holy basil plants filled the air. Today, along with the characteristic spicy smell, to his surprise, there was another scent. He was unable to determine what the fragrance reminded him off. It was a medley of perfume emitted by a bouquet of flowers like blue lotuses, red lotuses, jasmine, night-blooming jasmine, a hint of sandalwood and much more divine odour.\n\nHe meandered through the thickly grown holy basil plants in search of the divine fragrance. It grew stronger as he moved towards the centre of the patch with a very large holy basil plant. To his utter surprise, he saw an eagle circling in the sky above the plant as if it was circumambulating the plant! He stopped near the large holy basil plant; the smell was the strongest near this plant. He gently searched through the branches. Was there a jasmine creeper growing amidst the plant? As he was parting the branches, he was startled by a sound. He stood still and listened keenly.\n\n'Coo,'\n\nIt sounded like an infant. Amazed by the sound, Sri Vishnu Chitta turned in the direction of the sound. It seemed to be originating from the base of the plant. He got down on all fours and looked under the plant and there he found the child.\n\n'It's a child!' He exclaimed. 'Who would leave a child here?'\n\nHe crawled under the bush and lifted the child in his arms. It was a beautiful baby girl. He noticed that her eyes looked like red lotus petals As he picked her up, he became aware that the divine fragrance he had smelled earlier, was emanating from her. The infant felt very light, fragrant and attractive. 'She is just like a garland!' He exclaimed. The sense of joy he had experienced earlier, multiplied exponentially.\n\nJust then, a voice ordained him to raise the baby as his own daughter. He felt very happy to have received this divine gift. 'I have to take her home immediately to my wife!' He thought. As he carried her through the garden, he couldn't help thinking that the infant looked attractive and was fragrant like a divine garland. 'You are Kotha aren't you?' he asked her. Kotha in Tamil referred to a garland. She replied by smiling at him.' She is cuter than Baby Krishna! '\n\nHe raised her as his own daughter. Over time her name came to be referred as \"Goda\" in Sanskrit. He was happy that the meaning of her name meant \"wealth of knowledge\" in Sanskrit.\n\n'We have been blessed by the appearance of Goda!' he told his wife. 'The plants are covered in beautiful blossoms that I can't even see the leaves anymore! I feel as if she has come to help us with the floral service we are offering to Lord Vatapatra Sayee! The plants are all healthy and don't exhibit any sign of disease or pest!'\n\nHe raised her by imbibing in her, devotion for Lord Krishna. His wife, in turn, nurtured her by imbibing in her devotion for Sri Vishnu Chitta who was not only Goda's father but also her preceptor.\n\n''You should have seen how your father debated in the King's court and established that Lord Sriman Narayanan is the Supreme Being! The Vedic verses flowed from his mouth like a river! It almost felt like the Vedic verses came to him in person asking to be quoted!'\n\n'What happened after father won the debate?'\n\n'The King was extremely happy and paid his obeisance to your father and asked to be accepted as your father's disciple. He also promised to build the temple for Sri Vatapatra Sayee and help your father in his service to the Lord. Not only that but the king wished to celebrate your father's victory by arranging a special procession by making your father ride the well decorated royal elephant. The procession proceeded through the capital with royal honours. The citizens gathered on either side of the streets to pay their respects to your father. Do you know who else came there to see your father's victory march?'\n\n'Who?' asked Goda excitedly.\n\n'Lord Sriman Narayanan appeared on Garuda, along with His consorts Sri and Bhumi Devi , the other deities and the Nithya Suris who serve Him at His eternal abode of Sri Vaikuntam. Oh , how I wish you could have been there!' she said not realising that Goda was there as Goddess Bhumi Devi.\n\n'What happened when father saw the Lord?'\n\n'Any other person would have felt very proud that even the Lord had come to see their victory march but your father is not such a common person. Instead of feeling proud, he started to worry for the Lord's welfare. The immense love he felt for the Lord made him forget that the Lord cannot be harmed. He started to worry that if all the people look at the resplendent form of the Lord, their looks could cast ill luck upon the Lord.'\n\n'What did he do then?'\n\n'He performed benediction for the Lord and composed the \"Thirupallandu\". You have heard him recite these verses in the temple haven't you?'\n\n'Yes, I have.'\n\n'Because he performed the benedictory rite for the Lord out of love, people started to refer to him as \"Periazhwar\". They felt that because of the love he feels for the Lord, he is even greater than the other Azhwars! '\n\nAs the years rolled by, Goda accompanied him into the garden when he gathered flowers to offer to the Lord of SrI Villiputhur. He narrated to her stories from Srimad Bagawatham while gathering flowers. She would run through the garland looking for the beautiful floral specimen. 'Oh look!' she would exclaim. ' the golden lotuses have blossomed! Lord Vatapatra Sayee should definitely have them!' After they returned home, she would tie the flowers into a very beautiful garland which Sri Vishnu Chitta offered to Lord Vatapatra Sayee of SrI Villiputhur.\n\nWhen Goda turned five, keeping with the traditions and customs of their time, Sri Vishnu Chitta wished to find her a groom. That day while gathering flowers with Goda, he wished to broach the subject.\n\n'Father, you have to tell me the episode of Gopika Geetham from Srimadh Bagawatham,' reminded Goda. 'Yesterday you stopped with Lord Krishna's disappearance when the Gopis gave into pride.'\n\n'let me recap a little...' said Sri Vishnu Chitta. 'Lord Krishna used to call the milkmaids by playing on His flute.\n\n'Listen carefully!' urged a girl. 'Krishna is playing on His flute!'\n\nThe girls eagerly turned in the direction of the music and to their utter joy, they found many Krishnas with the Srivatsa mark on His chest coming towards them! There was a Krishna for every single gopi!\n\nThe gopis stood in an evergreen glade; each with a Krishna in their arms. The moon showered his rays like a cool spotlight. The grass felt like velvet to touch. There was no sign of weed or thorns in the soft velvet grass. The group danced in a circle. Heavenly music was played by the Krishna in the centre of the circle while the gopis with their Krishna danced around the central figure in glee. The night air was perfumed with the scent of sweet smelling night blooming flowers. Each gopi had eyes only for the Krishna standing in front of her. They gazed into His eyes with pride and thought, 'He is enchanted by my beauty!'\n\nNo sooner did this thought enter their mind, Krishna vanished from their view! The music stopped and the spotlight vanished. The girls searched for Krishna. The Krishna in their arms had vanished along with the Krishna in the centre of the formation!'\n\nHe stopped to look at his daughter. 'is this where I stopped yesterday?'\n\n'Yes,' nodded Goda. 'What did they do when Lord Krishna disappeared? They must have felt very sad!'\n\n'Yes, 'said Sri Vishnu Chitta. 'The gopis were unable to bear the pangs of separation. They started to sing a song pleading with Krishna to return but, they found a way to ease their pain.'\n\n'How?'\n\n'They pretended to be Lord Krishna and enacted the deeds performed by the Lord.\n\n'The mayan who kicked the cartwheel when He was an infant has thrown dust in our eyes!' cried a girl kicking a stone pretending to be Krishna kicking the cartwheel.\n\n'Didn't He carry Trin\u00e2varta like this,' asked another girl as she dragged her friend pretending to fly through the air.\n\n'My brother said He threw the ass like so at the fruit tree, killing the demon,' said a milkmaid as she pelted the nearby trees with stones.\n\nIn this way, the maidens eased their pangs of separation. This act of pretending to be someone else is known as \"anukaranam\". They were so absorbed in their reenactments that they became like Krishna. They saw Him in the acts performed by their friends and no longer felt separated from Him.'\n\n'Can mimicking the deeds of the Lord really ease one's pain when they feel tormented at being separated from Him?'\n\n'Yes my dear,' said her father. 'A similar anecdote is narrated in the Ramayana. Trijada consoled Sita Piratti by narrating her dream.\n\nThirunarayur Maatru Sevai: Perumal Dressed As Thayar and Thayar As Perumal\n\n'I saw Lord Rama along with Lakshmana dressed in white and adorned with beautiful garlands; they arrived on a beautiful ivory palanquin tied with a thousand swans. I saw you along with Lord Rama like the rays which are inseparable from the Sun. I also saw Ravana mount a chariot driven by donkeys and ride towards the Southern direction. The Southern direction is marked by Yama's abode. The good omens in my dream tell me that Lord Rama will soon come to rescue you and Ravana's downfall is very near!'\n\n'Really?' asked Piratti. 'Did you really see all this in your dream?'\n\n'I did! So, cheer up; Ravana's end is approaching.'\n\n'Your dream has made me very happy!' Said Piratti but, she started to sob.\n\n'Why are you crying? I just told you that everything will be all right!'\n\n'I know but, I am feeling sad for Lord Rama.'\n\n'Why should you feel sad for Lord Rama? He is going to find you.'\n\n'I just realised the troubles He must be facing to rescue me only to not find me when He comes here!' She replied between sobs.\n\n'But, you will be here. Why won't He find you?'\n\n'I have been constantly meditating upon Lord Rama. By the time He arrives at Lanka, I would have turned into Lord Rama and hence He won't find me here. There will be two Ramas, but, no Sita. The world will no longer be able to see Sita Rama!'\n\nTrijada started to laugh.\n\n'What's so amusing? Do you find my distress hilarious?'\n\n'You have forgotten one important fact.'\n\n'What's that?'\n\n'You would turn into Lord Rama because you are constantly meditating upon Him but, the same rule is also applicable to Him. He is constantly thinking about you that He would have turned into Sita and so, there will always be Sita and Rama!'' Sri Vishnu Chitta stopped narrating. They had completed their task of gathering all the flowers and had to gather the holy basil. It was also time for him to tell Goda that he must look for a groom to wed her.\n\n'Child,' he said. 'Do you realise that it will be time for you to leave your parents' home and enter the home of your husband? Your mother and I with the blessings of Lord Vatapatra Sayee will find you the best groom! What do you think about our neighbour's son Padmanabhan? I hear that he is very smart and is learning the Vedic verses quickly.'\n\n'Father! ' exclaimed Goda. She sounded shocked. 'How can you think of giving me away to a mortal when I am meant for Lord Vatapatra Sayee?'\n\n'I don't understand you,' said Sri Vishnu Chitta.\n\n'I will marry only Lord Krishna. I won't wed anyone else. '\n\n'How is that possible? Let us be practical,' said Sri Vishnu Chitta. 'Lord Krishna lived in the Dwapara Yuga. We are in the Kali Yuga. How can He wed you now?'\n\n'Lord Krishna might have been in the Dwapara Yuga but, he is here as Vatapatra Sayee!'\n\n'Goda, ' said Sri Vishnu Chitta. 'Lord Vatapatra Sayee is in the form of an idol. How can you marry Him in this form? He won't even converse with you!'\n\n'Are you saying that He won't converse with me because He is in the form of an idol?'\n\n'yes,' agreed her father.\n\n'But, didn't you tell me that Lord Sarngapani of Thirukudanthai who is also in the form of an idol conversed with Sri Thirumahizai Azhwar? Didn't Sri Yathothakari The Lord of Thiruvekka also converse with Sri Thirumahizai Azhwar?'\n\nSri Vishnu Chitta stood still unable to decide how to respond to her question. He finally said, 'That may be but, how will you make Him break His silence?'\n\n'Didn't you tell me about the Katyayani Ritual performed by the milkmaids of Vrindavan to get Lord Krishna as their husband? With your permission, I would like to perform a similar ritual, the Pavai Nombhu praying to Goddess Mahalakshmi so that I can wed Lord Krishna.'\n\nSri Vishnu Chitta noticed that they had neared the holy basil plant under which he had found Goda. He stood still remembering the occurrences of that eventful day. His reverie was shattered when a flock of parrots flew over them tweeting the names \"Krishna\" and \"Govinda\". One parrot flew down and perched upon the shoulder of Goda. \"Rama, Rama,' it tweeted.\n\nSri Vishnu Chitta laughed. ' I see that you had been busy teaching the parrots Hari Nama Sankeerthanam!' He was overwhelmed by his daughter's devotion. He looked at her large, beautiful eyes. Her eyes reminded him about the Ramayana slokam when Lord Hanuman looked at Goddess Sita for the first time and decided that Goddess Sita and Lord Rama were the perfect match but felt that the goddess was more beautiful than the Lord. 'Who am I to say that the Lord won't come to her? ' he thought. He recalled the day when he had been blessed with the vision of the Lord after winning the debate in the king's court.\n\nSri Vishnu Chitta decided to let his daughter try. 'How will you perform this ritual?'\n\n'You just taught me about anukaranam; I will pretend to be a milkmaid. My friends will be the other milkmaids from Vrindavan. The temple of Sri Vatapatra Sayee will be the house of Lord Krishna. Sri Vatapatra Sayee Himself will be Lord Krishna!'\n\nSri Vishnu Chitta was moved by her devotion. He placed his palm on her head and blessed her. 'I pray to Lord Vatapatra Sayee to make your wish come true!'\n\nGoda Becomes Andal\n\nGoda Nachiar came to be called as Andal because of the following incident. She helped her father Periazhwar every day to make beautiful flower garlands for the Lord. She would then stand in front of a mirror and wear the garland to make sure that it was flawless. Periazhwar was unaware of the fact the Goda wore the garlands before offering to the Lord; when she looked in the mirror, she saw Lord Krishna wearing the garland.\n\nOne day the temple Bhattacharya returned the garland to Periazhwar because it had a hair in it. Periazhwar felt distressed that he had caused displeasure to the Lord. He undertook a severe fast and prepared a second garland for the Lord. The following day he noticed that Goda tested the garland by wearing it. Periazhwar advised his daughter that it was prohibited to wear the garland meant to be offered to the Lord. He then made another garland and offered it to the Lord.\n\nThat night the Lord came to Periazhwar in his dream and told him that the garland offered by Periazhwar lacked fragrance. The Lord said that He didn't like the garland and told Periazhwar that He would accept garlands only if they were worn by Goda. Periazhwar woke up in the morning and didn't understand the meaning of the dream. How could he offer garlands to the Lord after they have been worn by his daughter? To his utter surprise, all the citizens of the village visited him in the morning and told Periazhwar that the Lord had appeared in their dreams and had asked each one of them to make sure that Periazhwar offered garlands to the Lord after the garlands have been worn by Goda. Thus every morning the citizens brought a palanquin to the house of Periazhwar and waited till Goda tested the garland in front of the mirror. They then carried the garland to the temple in the palanquin. Thus Goda came to be called as \"Andal\" as she had won the Lord's heart and ruled over Him with her love for Him.\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# The Birth of Margazhi Nombu and The Significance Of Margazhi:\n\nAs Goda Nachiar wanted to show us the proper way to reach the feet of Lord Krishna, she combined the Pavai Nombhu ritual with the Katyayani Ritual. She chose the month of Margazhi as this is the month in which the Sun enters Sagittarius. This month is the dawn for the celestials (devas). This month is known as satvik month as the devas have satva gunam during this period. During normal times the celestials try to throw obstacles in our path to prevent us from reaching the Lord, but during Dhanur Masam as they are full of satvik tendencies they refrain from causing hurdles for us. The first day of Margazhi dawns when the full moon is around the star mrigasiras. As the full moon falls on the day when the ruling star is mrigasiras, the month also came to be called as Margazhi. Traditionally this day represents the death of ego and thus chosen as the perfect day for us to approach a good Acharyan to get spiritual instructions.\n\nCarrying out a good deed like doing Bagawath Aradhanam on just one day of Margazhi yields fruit equal to the fruit obtained by performing the same deed for 10,000 years! Any new endeavours started on this month yields success. Thus, Goda Nachiar gave as a string of poetic garland in the form of Thirupavai and taught us how to perform the Pavai Nombhu during the divine month of Margazhi.\n\nNachiar addresses all of us in her pasurams. 'We are going to worship the Lord. His blessings will dispel the darkness of samsara. Come join me, let us take a dip in the lake called Krishna!'\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Fruit Obtained By Chanting Thirupavai:\n\nAnyone who gets up before Sunrise and sings /chants the Thirupavai pasurams will obtain the blessing of Lord Vishnu; even if the person recited the pasurams without devotion. In ancient days the milkmen would bring their cow with them and milk the cow at the homes of their customer. The cow gives milk only when its calf is present nearby. As the milkmen do not travel with the baby calf, they use a toy straw calf to trick the cow into providing milk. Perumal is like the cow and we are like the straw calf when we chant Thirupavai. We remind Him of Goda Nachiar but unlike the cow, He is not tricked into blessing us, but He willingly blesses us since He promised Goddess Bhumi Devi that He would elevate us from Samsara if we offered either devotional music or flower garland to Him. Since the reason for Him to bless us when we chant Thirupavai is because of His fondness for Goddess Bhumi Devi, we should chant the Thirupavai Pasurams composed by her and not waste time composing our own music.\n\nNachiar wakes up the young girls by describing to them the fruit obtained by performing the ritual. Lord Krishna is the divine fruit. He is the only one who can not only grant all our wishes but, also free us from samsara. He is the divine wish-fulfilling tree called the Parijatha!\n\nPerumal is called the Parijatha tree by Sri Narayana Bhattadri in Narayaneeyam.\n\n\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\n\nDasakam: 1 Shlokam: 8\n\nLord Krishna Gives all Benefits\n\n\u0928\u092e\u094d\u0930\u093e\u0923\u093e\u0902 \u0938\u0928\u094d\u0928\u093f\u0927\u0924\u094d\u0924\u0947 \u0938\u0924\u0924\u092e\u092a\u093f \u092a\u0941\u0930\u0938\u094d\u0924\u0948\u0930\u0928\u092d\u094d\u092f\u0930\u094d\u0925\u093f\u0924\u093e\u0928 -\n\n\u092a\u094d\u092f\u0930\u094d\u0925\u093e\u0928\u094d \u0915\u093e\u092e\u093e\u0928\u091c\u0938\u094d\u0930\u0902 \u0935\u093f\u0924\u0930\u0924\u093f \u092a\u0930\u092e\u093e\u0928\u0928\u094d\u0926\u0938\u093e\u0928\u094d\u0926\u094d\u0930\u093e\u0902 \u0917\u0924\u093f\u0902 \u091a\u0964\n\n\u0907\u0924\u094d\u0925\u0902 \u0928\u093f\u0936\u094d\u0936\u0947\u0937\u0932\u092d\u094d\u092f\u094b \u0928\u093f\u0930\u0935\u0927\u093f\u0915\u092b\u0932: \u092a\u093e\u0930\u093f\u091c\u093e\u0924\u094b \u0939\u0930\u0947 \u0924\u094d\u0935\u0902\n\n\u0915\u094d\u0937\u0941\u0926\u094d\u0930\u0902 \u0924\u0902 \u0936\u0915\u094d\u0930\u0935\u093e\u091f\u0940\u0926\u094d\u0930\u0941\u092e\u092e\u092d\u093f\u0932\u0937\u0924\u093f \u0935\u094d\u092f\u0930\u094d\u0925\u092e\u0930\u094d\u0925\u093f\u0935\u094d\u0930\u091c\u094b\u093d\u092f\u092e\u094d\u0965\u096e\u0965\n\nnamraaNaaM sannidhatte satatamapi\n\npurastairanabhyarthitaana-\n\npyarthaan kaamaanajasraM vitarati\n\nparamaanandasaandraaM gatiM cha .\n\nitthaM nishsheShalabhyO niravadhikaphalaH paarijaatO hare tvam\n\nkshudraM taM shakravaaTiidrumamabhilaShati vyarthamarthivrajO(a)yam .. 8\n\nHe is the divine wish-fulfilling tree which can make all our dreams come true.\n\nSwami Vedanta Desikan has also addressed Lord Ranganatha as the Parijatha tree in Sri Ranganatha Paduka Sahasram slokam 201.\n\npAdhapAdhupahruthA raGhUdhvahAdh\n\nAlavAlamiva pITamAshrithA\n\naBhyaShEchi BhavathI tapODhanai:\n\npArijAthalathikEva pAdhukE!\n\nLord Ranganatha is the Parijatha tree. All trees are planted in a specially prepared soil bed called as \"pathi\" in Tamil. The throne of the lord's padukai is the soil bed on which the Lord rests. The water from the Ganges from the head of Lord Siva feeds the soil when he bows down to worship the Lord. Great Sages like Vasishta have planted the Lord in the fertile soil called Raghu vamsam and have fed him with water during the coronation bath.\n\nAs soon as the elders permitted the young maidens to perform the pavai nombu and arranged for Krishna to escort them to the Yamuna, the girls felt elated. They expressed their joy by running outside to see the Moon rise. They had been sneaking out of their homes when it was dark to see Krishna, but now they could go out without any fear.\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Climate Change\n\nThe fragrance emitted by the lilies filled the air. The night blooming jasmine opened their buds releasing their scent as if to welcome the cuckoo birds to their nest on the arbour. The setting sun cast a warm, orange glow across the village. The scene would have transported anyone to seventh heaven; especially, a poet or a painter. Lamps lit in every home spread their warmth and good cheer.\n\nRadha watched the evening scene through a window in her home. She didn't feel joy; the setting Sun scorched her lovesick heart. The fragrance emitted by the Jasmine irritated her. To block the scent, she started to shut the windows. Her heart heaved in her bosom as she moved through the house closing the windows. When she reached the front veranda, the cows had started to return home. She stood still for a few minutes. The cowherds were not amongst the cows. As they followed the herd, they would come only after the five hundred thousand cows reached home. Radha looked behind her to see if her parents were nearby; her father was busy preparing for the evening prayers and her mother was in the kitchen. She felt relieved. Today might be the day for her to see Him.\n\nShe opened the door stealthily and slowly stepped on the verandah lest her ankle bracelets should ring. As she was about to step on the threshold, she saw a shadowy figure lurking behind the tamarind tree. She peered hard at the figure. Could it be that her parents anticipated her move and were waiting to catch her? Twilight had set in, making it hard to see. Should she step outside or not? Just then, the neighbours turned on their porch light. The figure appeared to be startled and hurried over to the side of the tree visible to Radha. The yellow skirt was clearly visible. It was a girl trying to conceal herself behind the huge tree.\n\n'Lalitha!' gasped Radha under her breath. She took one quick look to make sure her parents were occupied. Having ascertained that no one was around, she quickly stepped outside and hurried over to Lalitha.\n\n'Lalitha!' hissed Radha as she tugged at the girl's hand.\n\nLalitha nearly jumped out of her skin. 'You startled me!' She hissed back.\n\n'Sorry,' whispered Radha. 'I want to see Him too!'\n\nThe girls gazed in unison at the cattle.\n\n'Oh! Why don't they hurry!' sighed Lalitha.\n\nThey strained their eyes to catch a glimpse of Krishna. 'Do you know what colour clothes He is wearing today?'\n\n'No,' replied Lalitha. 'I heard that He is dressed in yellow'\n\n'I can't wait to see Him with the garland of forest flowers draped across His shoulders!'\n\n'Radha! What are you doing outside at this hour?'\n\nThe girls turned around to face Radha's mom.\n\n'I am speaking with Lalitha.'\n\n'I am sure that wasn't your intention,' her mother answered looking at the cattle. 'why couldn't you meet Lalitha inside? Come inside immediately and Lalitha, please go home or I will call your mom!'\n\n'What will people say?' asked her mother as she dragged Radha inside the house. 'It is not right for you to steal glances at Krishna! And.. how many times have I told you to not close all the windows! Open the windows and finish your chores.'\n\nRadha sighed. Would she ever be allowed to see Krishna! How nice would it be if she with her friends could sport around the woods with their darling Krishna!\n\nThe following morning, Radha accompanied her mother to the river. They noticed the women engaged in serious conversation near the river bank.\n\n'Is everything okay?'\n\n'Oh! Good you have come,' said Vrnda Devi. 'We were discussing the effect of climate change.'\n\n'Climate change?'\n\n'Yes, haven't you noticed that the days have become hotter and the rains are postponed?'\n\n'My sufferings are more severe than climate change!' Thought Radha. 'Who cares about my scorched heart?'\n\n'The boys have to take the cattle to far-off pastures in search of grass,' mentioned Charulata. 'It was decided at the town meeting that all the young girls of our community must perform the Katyayani Ritual. If the ritual is properly performed, we will be blessed with good rainfall at the end of a month.'\n\n'Radha will definitely participate,' assured her mother. 'How many girls are there?'\n\n'Around five hundred thousand.'\n\n'Five hundred thousand!'\n\n'The more the better. Group prayers have a better outcome. Every single girl has to perform the Katyayani Ritual to save our community. Our economy depends on dairy farming. Lack of rainfall will adversely affect our livelihood due to drying up of pastures.'\n\n'But, how do we chaperone five hundred thousand girls?' The task of managing 500,000 girls seemed very daunting. 'The girls in the company of their friends would become ill-disciplined and mischievous.'\n\n'That has been decided by the town elders too,' replied Charulata. 'They have asked Krishna to escort the girls to the Yamuna. Have you seen how beautifully He manages the 500,000 cattle?'\n\n'That's a relief !' said Radha's mom. 'Our girls will be safe with Krishna.'\n\nRadha's mom only prevented Radha from seeing Krishna because she was worried that people would gossip. Personally, she didn't mind if Radha spent time with Krishna.\n\nRadha's face lit up when she heard the name 'Krishna.' 'What luck! She thought. 'We will be able to run around with Krishna and that too with the permission of everyone!' It felt as if a gentle breeze blew through her heart, subduing the scorching heat she had felt.\n\n'Do you know how Krishna reacted when his father asked him to chaperone the girls?'\n\n'Tell me. What did he say?'\n\n'It was very funny! I wish you had been there. Where were you?'\n\n'I was out of town visiting some relatives. Tell me what Krishna said'\n\n'His father called him aside and asked him to chaperone the girls. We were very surprised to see that he looked horrified and the moment he replied, everyone started laughing!' narrated Vrnda Devi as she started to laugh.\n\n'Tell me,' urged Radha's mom. 'You can laugh later.'\n\n'He said......' the gopis standing near them burst into laughter. They laughed so hard that tears rolled from their eyes. Radha's mom started to laugh too. The laughter spread through the little gathering like wildfire. Finally, Vrnda Devi collected herself. 'He said, \"Mom has asked me to stay away from girls. If I go near them....\"'again she started to laugh.\n\n'Come on tell me.'\n\n'If I go near them, my ears and nose will fall off! It was very funny the way He said it. You should have been there!'\n\n'Does it mean He didn't agree to chaperone them?'\n\n'We convinced Him to accompany the girls.'\n\nThe gopi girls through the infinite compassion of Lord Krishna obtained permission from the village elders to spend time with the Lord. This incident shows that Lord Krishna is not only the means but also the end.\n\n'Make sure you send Radha to the meeting tonight,' said Vrnda Devi.\n\n'Where is the meeting?'\n\n'Here, on the banks of the Yamuna. Goda is the team leader. She has some important information for the girls regarding the ritual.'\n\n'What a relief that Goda will guide them! She is a divine child!'\n\n'Of course, she is. After all, her parents obtained her from under the shady branches of the holy basil shrub. It will be wonderful if the girls spend time with her and imbibe at least a drop of her devotion for the Lord!'\n\n'She spends all her spare time making beautiful garlands for Lord Narayana. Like father, like daughter! Her father spends his time cultivating a flower garden to serve Lord Narayana and Goda helps him by making the most beautiful garlands!' chimed in Mallika a friend of Vrnda Devi.\n\n'Mom, may I go to Lalitha's house for a min?' asked Radha.\n\n'What for? You still have your chores to finish.'\n\n'I need only a min!' Pleaded Radha.\n\n'I know about your min. One min by your calculation will turn into a whole hour. I don't understand what you girls talk about that you don't pay any heed to time!'\n\nHer mother laughed when she saw Radha look glum. 'Don't look so glum. You will be able to chat away your evening!' her mother laughed.\n\nRadha felt impatient. The time seemed to crawl that day.\n\n'See who that is,' said her mother when there was a knock on their door.\n\nRadha hurried over to the front door and jumped happily when she saw her friend Lalitha standing outside their door.\n\n'Mom, it's Lalitha,' she yelled.\n\n'We just need a few min. I promise,' pleaded Lalitha with Radha's mother.\n\n'Alright,' smiled Radha's mom.\n\nThe girls immediately rushed outside into the garden. Radha was surprised to see their friend Shyama waiting for them under the jasmine arbour.\n\n'We stopped by to let you know about the meeting tonight,' started Lalitha.\n\n'I already know about the meeting,' interrupted Radha.\n\n'Not that....about the agenda.'\n\n'I know about that too. Goda will instruct us about the dos and don'ts of the ritual.'\n\n'Will you stop interfering!' hissed Shyama. 'Let Lalitha speak.'\n\n'There is a secret agenda which Goda is going to discuss tonight!'\n\n'Really? A secret agenda? What is it?'\n\n'We will discuss in secret on how we can obtain Krishna as our husband!'\n\n'Really!' exclaimed Radha. 'But, how will it be possible? I am sure there will be someone to chaperone our meeting.'\n\n'She will speak in codes which only we will understand.'\n\n'What if some of us can't understand?'\n\n'It will be easy for us to understand and she will try to explain if our elders are not around. We will find out tonight.'\n\nRadha returned home to her chores. She could hardly contain her excitement. Her mother had to stop her from adding jaggery to the soup and salt in the pudding. The much awaited evening arrived.\n\n'May I leave now?' asked Radha.\n\nHer mother scrutinised her. 'Is this how you plan to attend the meeting? Wash your face and change your clothes. Wear your blue silk skirt with your pearl jewellery set. I won't let you walk into such an important meeting in shabby clothes!'\n\nRadha quickly washed her face, brushed her hair and wore her blue silk skirt. She put on her necklace first, bangles and was wearing earrings first on her right ear lobe when her friends called on her. In her excitement, she left with mismatched earrings on her ears!\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Pasuram 1:\n\nParamapada Nathan\n\nThe young maidens had spent their time in sweet anticipation. It seemed like they had waited forever for the warm, orange glow of Sunset and the moment it arrived, they broke into a run and reached the shores of the Yamuna. The river looked charming in the twilight with fully blossomed water lilies and roosting aquatic birds. A gentle breeze from the river carrying the sweet perfume of water lilies welcomed the girls.\n\nThe girls arrived at the designated spots in groups. There were so many girls that it looked like they outnumbered the sand particles present on the river bank. Some of them brought with them tiny lamps which they set afloat in the river. The flame from the floating lamps looked like tiny golden pearls sewn on the dark, velvety Yamuna. A few others brought with them torches and hanging lamps to provide illumination but, they needn't have bothered; the girls looked so eager that the joy they felt in their heart illuminated their faces. It looked as if there were 500,000 moons that day shining upon the river bank! Their animated chatter disturbed the roosting birds from their perch. Many girls sat down on the sandy banks on small mats they had brought with them. A few climbed on top of the rocks and made themselves comfortable while a few others found dead tree stumps to sit upon. As soon as it was ascertained that all of them had arrived, their leader Goda addressed them. Her sweet voice held their attention. They gazed upon the beautiful face of Goda with love and devotion. Goda looked pleasant like the full moon while her companions surrounded her like the starry constellations. Like the constellations which form starry clusters, the girls sat together in subgroups.\n\nGoda had asked anyone who wished to obtain Krishna as their husband to attend the meeting. As soon as the meeting was announced, the girls rushed out of their homes eager to join their friends on the river bank, however, in their hurry, they forgot to dress properly. Some girls wore earrings on just one lobe, some wore their waist belt as a necklace. Some wore one anklet; some forgot to tie their waist belt properly. The girls gathered on the river bank dressed haphazardly; Goda felt happy to see them. She started the meeting by addressing them as \"nerizhayeer\" which meant well-dressed maidens. It wasn't a sarcastic remark; Goda felt that they were indeed well-dressed because they wore the best ornament... their charming smile. She looked at one young maiden who had forgotten to tie her waist belt. One end of her belt was pinned to her skirt while the other end had fallen down and was touching her feet.\n\n'Why didn't you tie your belt properly before starting from home?'\n\nThe girl looked puzzled. She immediately looked at her waist and realised that her belt had come undone. 'I did secure my belt properly but, the belt must have come to life when I rushed to this meeting to hear the glories of Krishna. The belt must have decided to touch my feet thinking that as I am a devotee of Krishna, it can attain salvation by falling at my feet!'\n\nGoda smiled in reply. She continued to address the girls, ' Oh lucky girls of Gokulam!' she exclaimed as she gazed at their eager faces. 'They are indeed lucky!' she thought. 'Not everyone gets a chance to take birth during the period of the Lord's incarnation and that too, interact so closely with Lord Krishna. Oh! They are indeed very lucky! They have witnessed Lord Krishna steal butter! Didn't I hear one of them tell me the other day how mother Yashoda tried to discipline Him? She had caught Him butter handed with butter in His mouth. When she raised her hand to spank Him, He had started to cry fake tears. Overcome by His tears and mesmerised by His cute looks, His blue complexion with red lips with white butter in His mouth, she had stood spellbound admiring Him. She had come out of her trance only when her friend had asked her not to give into Krishna's fake tears.\n\n'Naughty child!' Yashoda had said. 'Did you think I won't spank you?' As she raised her hand again, Krishna had folded his palms together and had begged for her forgiveness! How lucky is Yashoda to have witnessed this divine pastime? Will Paramapada Nathan ever beg like little Krishna? Even the Nithyasuris, the eternally liberated souls cannot get the experience enjoyed by the citizens of Gokulam!' Goda decided to address the lucky girls.\n\n'Children of Gokulam,' she started only to be interrupted by a girl called Padma.\n\n'Don't address us as children,' said Padma.\n\n'Why not?' questioned Goda.\n\n'If we are children, we will lose the eligibility to perform the ritual and, if you say that only children can attain Krishna, what will happen when we grow older?'\n\n'I addressed all of you as children because you are all devotees of the Lord. True devotees are equated with children because like children they do not have false pride. A child will mingle easily with everyone without any concern for status or qualification. Children also easily forgive when they argue with their friends and make-up quickly. They do not hold a grudge.\n\nWe have all gathered here to learn about the proper procedure to perform the Pavai nombhu ritual,' started Goda.\n\n'Before we start,' interrupted Charulata. 'Please tell us the qualifications required to perform this ritual.'\n\n'How many of you want to spend time with Krishna? How many of you want to marry Krishna?' Asked Goda.\n\nAll the girls raised their hands.\n\n'Your desire to attain Krishna is the only qualification required to complete this ritual. I can see that you deeply desire to wed Krishna from your appearance. In your zeal to come here and listen to the way by which we can attain Him, you have all come here dressed haphazardly.\n\nThe first thing we must do every day is to be up before Sunrise and take a cool dip.'\n\n'We have obtained our wish!' exclaimed the girls. 'We can spend time with Krishna and no one can say anything! Our elders have asked Krishna to accompany us to the Yamuna every day'\n\n'Don't forget that what we have obtained is temporary. What will happen after the ritual is completed? When you attain the right age, your parents will get you married to grooms selected by them. How will you spend time with Krishna after you leave Vrindavan to reside with your husband? We need to complete the Pavai Nombhu ritual successfully in order to be with Krishna forever. We have gathered to talk about the ritual,' reminded Goda.\n\n'Is it necessary to take a cool dip? It is winter and the weather is very cold,' complained a girl called Campakalata.\n\n'Of course, we must get up very early and take a cool dip,' answered Radha. 'Sage Gargar once made fun of us. He said that we will never get Krishna if we sleep till 8 am. He can only be attained by those who wake up before Sunrise during Brahma Muhurtham and take a cool dip in the Yamuna.'\n\n'Not just the physical act of bathing,' said Goda, 'but, we must also submerge ourselves in devotion. The experience we get when we perform devotional service to the Lord is called \"neeratam\"; i.e., we must take a cool dip in the beautiful pond called Narayana and submerge ourselves in the act of contemplating upon His divine attributes. His auspicious qualities are like the cool, refreshing waters of the holy rivers. We will perform this ritual called the \"Pavai Nombhu\" to surrender ourselves to Him. Our communion with Him obtained after performing saranagathi is like taking a refreshing dip in the river on a hot summer day. The lake called Lord Krishna removes the distress we feel due to the effects of tapa trayam.'\n\n'Hear hear!' cheered the girls in unison.\n\n'Krishna whom we all love is the medicine which will cure the disease called Samsara.'\n\n'What you say sounds like a doctor prescribing ice-cream as the medicine!' Exclaimed Mallika.\n\nAll the girls laughed.\n\n'It's definitely wonderful that the prescribed 'medicine' for us is our sweet Krishna!'\n\n'Do you all remember the forest fire a few years ago?'Asked Goda.\n\n'The fire after Krishna danced on Kalingan?' Asked Vanjula.\n\n'Yes. The asuras who were trying to harm Krishna felt that they were unable to hurt Him if they approached only Him. They thought they could injure Him if they attacked all of us simultaneously when we were with Him. This is why they created the forest fire to harm us......'\n\n'Their plan was thwarted!' interrupted Vanjula.\n\n'Yes,' concurred Goda. 'Krishna swallowed the fire and saved us. In a similar manner, He will save us from the three terrible fires called as \"tapa Trayam\".'\n\n'What is \"tapa Trayam\"?' Asked Padma. 'And where are these fires burning?'\n\n'They are the three types of troubles which afflict us in this material Universe. The three types of tapa trayam are\n\n1. Adhyadhmikam: Sufferings experienced by us because of our association with people, work, society, etc. These problems are created because of our interaction with others.\n\n2. Adhiboudhikam: Sufferings which are beyond our control like troubles we face due to pest damage, pathogens, etc.\n\n3. Adhideivikam: Sufferings caused by natural calamities like storms and Earthquakes.\n\nThe Lord showed that He will relieve us from the pain caused by the tapa trayam by swallowing the forest fire.\n\nLook at the beautiful moon. ,'Goda directed the girls' attention to the beautiful moon. 'This is the month of Margazhi, we are in the bright half of the lunar phase. This is the month of \"Margazhi Thingal\" when the full moon rises when the star Mrigasiras is in ascendant signifying the death of the ego. The word \"Thingal\" means moon. This is the best time to begin spiritual training.'\n\n'Why is this a good month to obtain spiritual training?' asked Lalitha.\n\n'Krishna has said in the Bagawath Geetha that among months, He is the month of Margazhi;\" masanam marga-sirso 'ham\". \"Margazhi Thingal\" in Tamil refers to \"Marbhu kazhiyara Naal\" i.e. the day when the false ego is destroyed. This is the best time to approach a preceptor for obtaining right knowledge. Do you know the proper way to approach a preceptor?'\n\n'No. How should we approach a preceptor?'\n\n'We must approach a teacher in the same way a poor person approaches the rich for a loan; with humility.'\n\n'Tell us more about this month,' asked the girls in unison. 'Why is this month special?'\n\nGoda felt happy that the girls were interested in her speech. 'Can anyone tell me the other name for this divine month?' She questioned.\n\n'Dhanur masa,' answered Mallika.\n\n'Chaapa masa,' replied Radha.\n\n'Both are correct answers. Can you tell me why this month is known as chaapa masa?'\n\n'It is the month when the constellation Sagittarius is rising; hence, this month is called Chaapa masa.'\n\n'True but, there is another meaning. It is Chaapa masa because, it is \"chape maha asaha\"', mentioned Goda.\n\n'What does \"chape maha asaha\" mean?' asked the girls. They felt happy to learn from Goda. All the girls sat around Goda in a circle on the sandy banks of the Yamuna. The fragrance of herbs and tulasi leaves carried by the gentle breeze sharpened their minds. To their surprise, a parrot flew down from a nearby tree and sat on Goda's shoulder.\n\n'Look at that parrot!' exclaimed Shyama. 'It's looking attentively at Goda! Maybe it has come to learn about the ritual too!'\n\n'Parrots are very special,' replied Goda. 'They are better than the cuckoo bird.'\n\n'Parrots do look beautiful with their colourful plumage but a cuckoo definitely sings better,' said Mallika.\n\n'No parrots sound better than the cuckoo,' said Goda.\n\n'How can you say so? A cuckoo has a sweeter voice.'\n\n'I am not talking about the sound of their voice....'\n\n'What else is there to compare if not their appearance or voice?'\n\n'A parrot repeats that which has been taught to it whereas a cuckoo makes up its own song.'\n\n'Well, that only proves that a cuckoo is better!'\n\n''No, it does not. A parrot represents a student who follows the teachings of his/her preceptor and only repeats what he/she has learned but, on the other hand, a student who is like a cuckoo doesn't follow the instructions of his/her preceptor but likes to invent philosophy. It is not good to invent new philosophies based on our mental thought process because it is very easy to slip and go the wrong way. Our purpose in life is to attain Lord Narayanan; when our preceptors show the ease with which He can be attained, is there any need to try our hand at inventing new paths which could end up taking us away from Him? Now tell me, is the parrot better or the cuckoo?'\n\n'Parrot,' answered Shyama.\n\n'Definitely the parrot,' replied Mallika.\n\n'Enough about parrots and cuckoos,' laughed Padma. 'Pray tell us what \"chape maha asaha\"' means.'\n\n'It is Chaapa masa because; this is the month when the arrow is seated on the bow. The Mundakopanishad states, \"pranavo dhanuh saro hy atma brahma tal lakshyam\" i.e, The Pranava Manthram is the divine bow on which the arrow called atma is seated. The target of this arrow is none other than our Krishna. Taking aim at The Lord with this bow and arrow refers allegorically to the act of performing saranagathi (self-surrender).'\n\n'I didn't understand the meaning conveyed by Mundakopanishad,' said Lalitha. 'Your father must have taught you some anecdotes from our Ithihasas and Puranas to help you understand the concept. Can you use one such anecdote?'\n\n'I will try to explain with the following narrative from the Ramayana,' said Goda.\n\nThey listened attentively to every word uttered by Goda.\n\n'One day at Chitrakootam, The Lord and Piratti were resting by the warm glow of the fire when they heard a loud clamour. They saw dust ascend into the sky followed by large herds of elephants and deer running away from the tumult.\n\n'Lakshmana, find out the reason for this disturbance,' directed The Lord.\n\nLakshmana climbed a huge Sala tree and scanned the horizon for any unusual activity. His astute eyes fell upon the huge army with chariots, elephants and foot soldiers marching under the banner of Ayodhya. He descended the tree quickly and addressed The Lord with concern.\n\n'Extinguish the fire immediately. Let Piratti take cover in a safe place. Get your bow and arrow ready. Bharata the son of Kaikeyi is marching here after his coronation ceremony with the intention of making his kingdom bereft of enemies!'The Lord pacified Lakshmana. '\u0915\u093f\u092e\u094d \u0905\u0924\u094d\u0930 \u0927\u0928\u0941\u0937\u093e \u0915\u093e\u0930\u094d\u092f\u092e\u094d \u0905\u0938\u093f\u0928\u093e \u0935\u093e \u0938\u091a\u0930\u094d\u092e\u0923\u093e | \u092e\u0939\u093e \u0907\u0937\u094d\u0935\u093e\u0938\u0947 \u092e\u0939\u093e \u092a\u094d\u0930\u093e\u091c\u094d\u0928\u0947 \u092d\u0930\u0924\u0947 \u0938\u094d\u0935\u092f\u092e\u094d \u0906\u0917\u0924\u0947 || \u0968-\u096f\u096d-\u0968 what is the use of my bow and arrow when Bharata is marching here wielding a bow with the arrow locked on it? Don't you understand that he is coming here with a bow and arrow?'\n\n'Yes, I do understand the mode of his approach. This is why I am urging you to be ready for battle!'\n\n'Don't you understand that Bharata marching here with a bow and arrow shows that he wishes to surrender? I am not talking about the regular bow and arrow we use in battle; the bow he wields is the Pranava Manthram, his atma is the arrow locked on this bow and of course the target of this arrow is me.' Goda paused her narration to observe her friends. 'Do you understand the significance of Chaapa Masa now? This month represents saranagathi; i.e, seeking refuge under the lotus feet of Lord Narayana. It is the act of surrendering ourselves to Him. Once we surrender, we should realise that the onus of protecting us rests with Him. With the help of a good Acharyan we must perform saranagathi at the divine feet of Lord Sriman Narayana.'\n\nThe girls looked at the beautiful moon sailing through the night sky. They understood the significance of the divine month. They were glad to get instruction from Goda.\n\n'This day is \"Mathi niraintha naal\",' said Goda.\n\n'Yes,' agreed a girl gazing at the moon. 'This day is bathed in moonlight. The moon is mathi. As this day is bathed by the moonlight, it is \"Mathi niraintha naal\".'\n\n'I am not talking about that moon,' pointed Goda.\n\n'Which moon are you talking about?'\n\n'Moons,' replied Goda. 'Each one of you looks brilliant like the moon that it seems like this day is drenched in moonlight!'\n\n'We have heard that the full moon day is the \"Mathi niraintha naal\". It is an auspicious day to start any new venture or ritual,' uttered another girl. 'People who follow the injunctions laid out by the scriptures, always refer to the panchangam (religious calendar) to choose an auspicious day to start new ventures.'\n\n'Seeking spiritual guidance is a new venture performed for our benefit and starting our spiritual pursuit on this auspicious day is beneficial as the time is conducive to learning. \"Mathi\" also refers to budhi or intellect. Margazhi is the dawn for the Celestials. This month refers to the start of the Sun's Northwards journey (Uttarayana) which is the daytime for the Celestials. Dawn is the period when satvik (good) tendencies are present in everyone. Thus, on this Margazhi day, our intellect is full of satvik tendencies making it easier for us to grasp the spiritual knowledge we have obtained from our preceptor,' mentioned Goda. 'The full moon also cautions us to be careful.'\n\n'in what way does it caution us?' Questioned a girl.\n\n'Lunar Eclipse occurs only on full moon days. Like the lunar eclipse, our intellect can be eclipsed by false ego if we give into pride. We must remain without feeling proud that we have obtained spiritual knowledge which has made it easy for us to receive the blessings of Lord Narayana. We must perform this vratam with humility. Ego is truly destroyed only when we realise that the true purpose of our existence is to serve other devotees.' Cautioned Goda. 'We must not give into hypocrisy. Our mind, words and our deeds must coincide with our thoughts.'\n\n'Now that we have understood the significance of this month, what should we do tomorrow?' inquired a girl.\n\n'We must get up early for our neeratam,' stated Goda.\n\n'We do this every day. What can be special about taking a dip?'\n\n'Not any dip, this is a holy dip,' replied Goda.\n\n'We take holy dips every day since we bathe in the Yamuna.'\n\n'Yes but, I didn't mention about taking a dip in the Yamuna. Lord Narayana is the pond. Neeratam is the act of approaching Him. It is also the pursuit of spiritual knowledge. It is the act of performing saranagathi which as mentioned earlier is available to everyone. The fruit of taking this dip is freedom from samsara. This neeratam is submerging ourselves in Bagawath Gunam. ' Goda felt happy when she looked at the pleasant faces of her friends. Their smiling countenance made the moon look very pale in comparison.\n\n'I am happy to see your beaming faces,' said Goda. 'because, those who approach our Lord will always have a happy countenance.' (Neriyazhir refers to the well-bedecked appearance of the young girls but in this pasuram, this word does not refer to the jewels worn by the girls but, reveals to us the pleasant smiling faces of the girls.).\n\n'Oh, you are all very lucky girls!'\n\n''Why?'\n\n'You are here in Gokulam and, spend time with Lord Krishna. The Lord who is sought by all the great sages is easily accessible to us here in Gokulam!'\n\n[Similarly, anyone who receives the opportunity of participating in Sat sangams is able to remain close to our Lord and is therefore considered to be lucky even if they are not present in Gokulam. People who live in Divya Desams experiencing the Lord's Archavataram Divya mangala Vigraham are equally lucky. It is stated in our Guruparampara that Sri Parasara Bhattar felt worried to leave for Sri Vaikuntam because he did not wish to give up on his anubhavams at Sri Rangam enjoying the beautiful Divya Mangala Vigraham of Nam Perumal Lord.]\n\n\"Sirmirgal\" refers to young girls but this does not mean that Thirupavai has to be practised only by young girls. Thirupavai should be practised by everyone including men but they must do so by adapting the enthusiasm of the young girls. It is mentioned that Brahmins who undergo proper Vedic training will always remain young like a child. Their ability to retain their childlike appearance shows that like children they too are devoid of the ego. Goda is aware of this fact and therefore addressed her friends as \"young girls\".\n\nGoda wasn't satisfied with calling the girls as just \"lucky\" so, she again addressed them as, 'the lucky maidens belonging to the wealthy community of Gokulam!'\n\nThe citizens of Gokulam are wealthy because every single item in their village was touched by Lord Krishna. Similarly, people living at the Divya Desam are lucky because everything around them is drenched by Bagawath and Bagawatha Kataksham.\n\n'I will now go over our agenda,' stated Goda. 'We are gathered here to worship Lord Narayana......'\n\n'I thought our intention was to spend time with Krishna!' interrupted a girl.\n\n'Of course, our agenda is to obtain the grace of Krishna but, we cannot say this out loud. What will happen if our elders hear us talk about Krishna? We have to use code words. We have to say we are here to obtain the grace of 'Narayana' so that our elders will not stop us from completing the ritual!' rebuked Goda.\n\n'But, we want Krishna, not Narayana!'\n\n'Krishna is Narayana!'\n\n'Give us the reason behind your statement. How can you be so sure that Krishna is Narayana?'\n\n'Yes, how can you state that Krishna is Narayana? Asked Vrnda. 'Narayana is the Supreme Being. He is the Supreme Controller who controls the entire Universes. He is the antaryami who controls everyone and everything. Lord Brahma, took birth on a lotus which appeared from the navel of Lord Narayana. Even the great sages find it very hard to have darshan of Him. He is beyond the grasp of our sensory perception. The Vedic verses convey many important concepts in a humorous fashion. The following story is narrated by the Vedas to highlight that it is very difficult to have darshan of Perumal.\n\nThe deities in charge of Vak and Manas once had an argument.\n\nVak said, 'It is impossible for you to express anything without my help. Hence, I am superior.'\n\n'But, you can't speak without my input!' rebuked Manas.\n\nThey decided to ask Lord Brahma to judge whether Vak was superior or Manas.\n\n'Manas was created before Vak,' said Brahma. 'Without any doubt, Manas is superior.'\n\nVak is the wife of Brahma. She felt insulted to be put down in front of Manas. She cursed Brahma, 'Since you have decided that I am inferior, I won't be of any use to you!'\n\nAs a result of the above curse, the manthras to invoke Lord Brahma are never uttered aloud.\n\nVak and Manas then decided to have a race. The one who could find Paramatma first was to be declared as the winner. They started running. After a while, Vak gave up. After a long time, she saw Manas return.\n\n'Did you see Paramatma?' asked Vak eagerly.\n\n'I went very far but, I couldn't find Him.'\n\n'We are both equal then,' declared Vak. 'Neither of us could find Him!'\n\nManas agreed with Vak and the two of them returned together.\n\nThey agreed with each other that Lord Narayana was beyond their powers of perception. Now, are you saying that our Krishna is Lord Narayana?'\n\n'He is beyond our powers of perception. We cannot perceive Him unless He out of His immense compassion for us, enables us to see Him. Lord Narayana has chosen to spend time with us here in Gokulam. Don't you recall how He incarnated?'\n\n''In the prison to Devaki and Vasudeva.'\n\n'The Lord appeared as their son in the prison. Devaki and Vasudeva got up from their seats and their eyes fell on a pair of lovely feet! A tiny pair of infant's feet and pink like a pair of lotus blooms! Devaki and Vasudeva got up with tears of joy and rushed towards Him. Their gaze went up to His beautiful ankles adorned with gold ankle bracelets decorated with tiny golden bells. The yellow silk garment with red border against His blue ankles stole the hearts of Devaki and Vasudeva They proceeded to look at His calf. This was the feet of the dear Lord, with which He had measured the three worlds as Trivikrama! They saw Goddess Sri Devi residing in the Srivatsa mark on His chest; the wonderful child incarnated with His wife. Who else other than Lord Narayana can appear with Goddess Lakshmi on His vakshasthalam? Do you know what else Devaki and Vasudeva saw?'\n\n'What?' Asked the girls eagerly.\n\n'He incarnated as the son of Devaki and Vasudeva along with His consort. Devaki and Vasudeva obtained Goddess Sridevi as their daughter-in-law on the same night! Parents await the birth of their grandchild after their son has been married. Devaki and Vasudeva did not have to wait very long; for, on the Lord's lotus-like navel they found His son Brahma sitting on a lotus bloom chanting the Vedas!'\n\n'Really?' Asked the girls in awe.\n\n'Yes, to describe the child Brahma on the Lord's navel, Sukacharyar used the word 'balakam' in the slokam \"Tam adbhutam Balakam\" in Srimadh Bagawatham. The word \"Ka\" is used to denote Brahma. Sukacharyar could have used \"Balan\" to depict the divine child, but he specifically used the word \"Balakam\" to draw our attention to Lord Brahma present in the navel of the Divine Child. Both the words \"bala\" as well as \"balakam\" mean child. The word \"balakam\" is used in the sloka to describe the divine child who appeared with \"Bala Ka\" i.e. child Brahma! Who else other than Lord Narayana can appear with child Brahma on His lotus-like navel?'\n\n'Tell us more about how Lord Narayana has incarnated as our Krishna?' Asked Anjana.\n\n'Do you recall the day when He ate mud?'\n\n'My brother Subala told me about the incident! He said that he had never seen Yashoda look so dazzled!'\n\n'What happened?' Asked Lalitha.\n\n'Krishna and His friends were eating the fruits in the yard. Balarama looked at Krishna and saw that instead of eating the fruits, Krishna was eating tiny balls of wet Earth....'\n\n'Is the butter thief also fond of eating mud..!' laughed Lalitha.\n\n'Balarama looked at Krishna's lips smeared with wet mud. He ran inside to get Yashoda.\n\nYashoda was in the backyard. She was harvesting fresh spinach. She dropped the leaves and ran to the front yard. She found Krishna sitting under the tamarind tree looking guilty. His beautiful red lips were smeared with wet mud.\n\n'Krishna!' She cried. 'You are old enough to know that you shouldn't eat mud!'\n\n'I didn't eat mud,' He lied.\n\n'Open your mouth at once!' she commanded as she sat in front of Him to look into His mouth. Krishna reluctantly opened His mouth and Yashoda saw the entire Universe in His mouth for the second time! She saw the five elements, the solar system, all the beings, the mountains, continents and the oceans of Earth, she saw a Gokulam in His mouth and herself. The Yashoda in His mouth was looking into the mouth of a Krishna and all of the above was repeated inside the mouth of the second Krishna and so on. She felt her head spin. 'Am I hallucinating!' she thought. She sat down on the ground with her hand on her forehead.\n\nBy revealing the entire Universe in Him, He showed Yashoda that He is the antaryami of all and that He is the Supreme Controller.\n\nNow tell me, who else other than Lord Narayana could be our Krishna?'\n\n'There is no doubt!' The girls agreed unanimously.\n\n'Also, think about the manner in which He entered Gokulam. He was carried by Vasudeva while Adisesha himself used his hoods as an umbrella and shielded Him from the raindrops. The Yamuna miraculously parted and allowed Vasudeva to carry the Lord across her to Gokulam. Thus did the Lord of Sheerabhdhi arrive at Gokulam. He considered Yashoda to be Devaki and that Sheerabhdhi Nathan reclined next to Yashoda. Lord Narasimha who appeared from the pillar has now appeared as our Krishna, the son of Yashoda. Let us perform devotional service to Him so that He can grant us moksham.'\n\n'What will we get after we attain salvation?' Asked Shyama.\n\n'Don't you know this? ' Asked Goda. 'You will be able to experience Lord Narayana and submerge yourself in enjoying His auspicious attributes. You will get Paripoorna Bagawad Anubhavam.'\n\n'Didn't you just tell us that Krishna is Narayana?' Asked Shyama.\n\n'Yes, I did. Are you still not convinced?'\n\n'I totally agree with you that Krishna is Narayana. As Krishna is Narayana and we are able to experience Him here itself, why should we take the trouble to attain salvation?'\n\n'Can you experience Krishna without any interruption here?' Asked Goda.\n\n'It is impossible!' sighed Radha. 'He is too fond of spending time in the forest where we are not allowed to go!'\n\n'Radha is correct,' stated Goda. 'We are unable to spend all our time with Krishna. Our own parents prevent us from spending time with Him. Radha, didn't your parents prohibit you from even looking at Krishna?'\n\n'Don't remind me! I feel nervous that they may come here any moment and take me home!'\n\n'Even if your parents did allow you to spend time with our Krishna, we faced problems getting past the cruel man!'\n\n'Who is the cruel man Goda?' Asked Padma.\n\n'The cruel man holding a sharp spear! Don't you know who this man is?' Asked Goda. 'I am talking about Nanda Gopan the king of cowherds. I often wonder how his attitude changed. The cowherds, in general, have a soft nature because they are always with cows. It is prohibited by shastras for cowherds to use sharp instruments to herd the cows. They can only entreat the cows to move. Although as the king of the cowherds Nanda Gopan must refrain from wielding sharp weapons, he is always found with a well-sharpened spear in his hand.'\n\n'We did wonder about the spear! Why does he carry this spear?'\n\n'He was a very gentle and kind hearted man. He started to carry a spear after the incident with Putana. He was shocked to see the huge body of Putana lying inside his home after she had been killed. This was the very first instant he took up a sharp weapon. After Putana was killed, He discussed with others about a way to remove her huge form from his house as she was too huge to fit through any door/windows. The people suggested that her body parts should be chopped and then carried outside the house for disposal. Nanda Gopan then ordered his men to bring axes to chop the dead Putana's limbs but as soon as they struck her body with an axe, the blade became blunt. Nanda Gopan, therefore, ordered a group of men to dedicate their time to sharpening the axes. After disposing of the body, Nanda Gopan became over protective of Krishna. After the constant assassination attempts by the Asuras sent by Kamsa, Nanda Gopan became very cautious and killed even a fly which tried to near Krishna as he was afraid that the fly might be an asura in disguise! As Putana came in the form of a young woman, Nanda Gopan no longer trusts Krishna with any woman. Who knows, if he sees us approach Krishna, he may chase us away thinking that we are another Putana!'\n\n'You have crushed my hopes!' Sighed Kunkuma.\n\n'How?'\n\n'You just reminded me that King Nanda is very overprotective of Krishna. How can we expect him to allow Krishna to accompany us to the Yamuna?'\n\n'We can expect Krishna to accompany us because He is also the son of mother Yashoda.'\n\n'How does that help us? Aren't mothers more protective than fathers?'\n\n'Mother Yashoda is like queen Kausalya.'\n\n'In what way?'\n\n'When sage Vishwamitra asked Emperor Dasaratha to allow Rama to accompany him to the forest, the Emperor refused. The Emperor finally agreed only after sage Vasishta asked him to obey Sage Vishwamitra. ..'\n\n'True but where does queen Kausalya figure here?' Questioned Kunkuma.\n\n'The sage could persuade the Emperor to send Lord Rama with him but, if the queen had disagreed, the sage couldn't have taken Lord Rama with him because, according to the shastras, a mother's wishes shouldn't be overruled. Even though Queen Kausalya knew that she had the authority to stop Lord Rama from accompanying the sage, she didn't disagree because she raised Lord Rama to serve the people. Mother Yashoda is also like Queen Kausalya. Even if Nanda Gopan disagrees, Yashoda will force him to send Krishna with us because she wishes all of us well.'\n\n'But Goda, you forget that mother Yashoda too can prevent Krishna from coming to us. What will happen if she once again binds Him to a mortar ?'\n\n'I agree with you,' said Goda. ' We have other hurdles in our path too.'\n\n'Aren't the above obstacles enough? What more do we need?'\n\n'Oh but we have a bigger obstacle which we have to try to overcome as long as we are on Earth,' said Goda.\n\n'What is it?'\n\n'When we see one of us with Krishna, we immediately feel jealous of the other girl.'\n\nThe girls became silent. They couldn't disagree with Goda. How could they? It was well known that they fought to keep Krishna to themselves.\n\n'When we feel envious of others who are spending time with Krishna and when we show our disappointment by arguing with them, we commit Bagawatha Apacharam. Our disappointment further makes us even express our anger against Krishna. When we are facing so many interruptions to spending time with Krishna, how can we expect to experience Him to the full extent here? We are bound by our karmas. Even our punyas prevent us from experiencing Krishna here. The only place where we can experience Him fully is at Sri Vaikuntam.'\n\n'How can we attain moksham?' Asked Radha.\n\n'We must be freed from our karmas. Our karmic account including the merits we have accumulated must come to zero. Only then we will be able to attain salvation.'\n\n'What should we do to make our karmic balance zero?'\n\n'We must approach Krishna. When we perform devotional service to Him, pleased with us He will shower His mercy upon us by nullifying our karma.'\n\n'Is it possible to overcome all the obstacles you had mentioned earlier and perform devotional service to our Krishna, the darling child of the wide-eyed mother Yashoda. That Mother Yashoda whose eyes widened from constantly drinking in the beauty of her son with her eyes while also watching over Him! That naughty Krishna who always pulls pranks when He is around Yashoda but, who becomes very obedient when Nanda Gopan is around! How can we perform devotional service to Lord Narayana who has incarnated as the little lion cub growing up under the watchful eyes of Yashoda and Nanda Gopan?'\n\n'He will make it happen,' assured Goda. 'When our elders prevented us from spending time with Him, they faced many troubles. The weather became inclement and affected their livelihood. To rectify the situation, they themselves because of Krishna's grace has made it possible for us to spend time with Krishna by recruiting all of us to perform this ritual. Isn't it marvellous that they have arranged for Krishna to chaperone us? This is truly an auspicious day!'\n\n'Yes, ' said Mallika. 'We understand the importance of this day. You explained it very well.'\n\n'Not just that, but, this is an auspicious day because we have good thoughts. We wish to perform good deeds to help our community. Above all, we have been blessed with wisdom to approach only Lord Narayana. We haven't made the mistake of going to other deities for our wishes to be fulfilled.\n\nWe must not show-off that we are the best in following the injunctions laid out by our scriptures. We must serve our preceptor and other devotees with humility. Did you know that those who serve the Lord's devotees are enveloped in a divine fragrance which is desired even by the lotus flower?\n\nWe shouldn't feel proud that we have obtained the grace of the Lord because attaining the Lord's blessings is only the first step in our spiritual journey. The true purpose of our training is experienced only when we realise that we exist to serve the Lord's devotees. By following the above practices, we should meditate upon Lord Sriman Narayanan holding His divine weapons in His four hands and with Goddess Mahalakshmi seated on His vakshasthalam.....'\n\n'One minute,' interrupted Mekala. She was one of Goda's friends. She looked very worried. She shared her concerns with everyone.\n\n'I understand the greatness of this month and that we must begin spiritual training to obtain the grace of Lord Narayana. We can experience Him without any interruption after attaining moksha (salvation) but, do we have the qualifications to attain moksham by performing devotional service?'\n\n'Why not? Asked Kokila.\n\n'Devotional service is Bakthi Yoga. I have heard that not everyone can perform the means like Bakthi Yoga and Karma Yoga to attain moksha. In order to perform bakthi yoga, one must undergo Vedic training. As women, we do not have the eligibility to enrol in Vedic studies. When we can't learn the Vedic Hymns, how can we practice Bakthi Yoga?'\n\n'That's very easy,' said Goda. 'Our answer is Sanyasa...'\n\n'Hold on !' Said Mekala. 'I know for a fact that women cannot enter sanyashrama.'\n\n'What do you think is meant by Sanyasa?' asked Goda.\n\n'Wearing ochre-coloured robes, withdrawing oneself from the community and meditating upon the Lord. Sanyasahrama is called as Mokshashrama as the practice of this ashrama yields moksha but sanyasa could only be taken up by Brahmin men who have undergone Vedic training'\n\n'Very true,' Goda agreed as she continued, 'but, the word \"Nyasa\" means approaching The Lord in order to completely surrender ourselves to His care. Thus, nyasa refers to saranagathi. Performing saranagathi per the Vedic instruction is called as sanyasa which is sam + nyasa.'\n\n'But aren't we supposed to meet certain qualifications to perform saranagathi? Are there any restrictions to perform saranagathi?'\n\n'The option to perform saranagathi is available to everyone irrespective of caste, creed or gender.' Assured Goda.\n\n'Are there any supporting scripture which proves that saranagathi is available for everyone irrespective of caste, creed or gender?' asked a girl.\n\n'The Ramayana shows us that saranagathi is available to everyone,' answered Goda. She continued to explain. 'The Ramayana mentions the saranagathi performed by a crow (Kakasura) thus, proving that saranagathi is even available to animals and birds. The Ramayana also narrates about the saranagathi performed by Vibhishana a Rakshasha and the brother of the evil king Ravana, a brother of a sinner who had separated Piratti from The Lord but, in spite of his relationship with Ravana and the fact that he belonged to the Rakshasha creed, The Lord accepted his saranagathi.'\n\n'What will happen when we surrender to Him?'\n\n' Yashoda's little cub who has the complexion of a rain-bearing cloud, with beautiful eyes with a red line as if someone had drawn a line with a red eyeliner, the one who looks radiant and shines with the combined effulgence of both the Sun and the Moon......'\n\n'Why does He have the combined effulgence of the Sun and the Moon? Isn't it better that His effulgence is cool like the Moon and not scorching like the Sun?' Interrupted the girls.\n\n'His effulgence is definitely cool like the moon to His devotees,' assured Goda. 'It only appears like the scorching Sun to the enemies of His devotees. Also, Sun is very important to the continuation of life. What will happen to this world if the Sun stopped shining for a few days? Can we live without the Sun? Surya Bhagawan is the embodiment of the Vedas. He blesses people with wealth. Who did you think Satrajit the father of Sathyabhama Piratti worshipped? Satrajit obtained the priceless syamantaka gem which gave him around 600 tolas of gold from Surya Bagawan. The Lord has the Sun and the Moon as His eyes; this shows that He controls them as their antaryami. The Sun and the Moon rise without fail out of fear of the Lord. They tremble at even the mere thought of disobeying Him!\n\nWhen we surrender to Yashoda's son Krishna; He will bless us and save us from samsara. His eye which is the Sun will burn our karmas and He will shower us with His blessings.\n\nWe won't accept blessings from anyone else except, from Lord Narayana. Neeratam is saranagathi. We need firm faith (Maha Vishwasam) for the saranagathi to be accepted by The Lord. Therefore, we will not accept blessings from anyone else. Only our lord Sriman Narayana has the capacity to grant us the Supreme Purushartha called moksham.\n\nLet us complete this ritual with the sole intention of pleasing our darling, Krishna. By singing His praise we will obtain fame! We are not seeking glory nevertheless, we cannot stop others from praising us. Fame will follow us even though we do not wish for it. It is involuntary like burping, we do not have the capacity to stop fame from surrounding us when we sing the praise of Lord Sriman Narayanan.'\n\n'We are glad that Narayanan Himself is the means and will give us everything! We don't have to do anything then!' exclaimed the girls in joy.\n\n'Yes Narayanan will give everything but, we have to put in a little effort too,' replied Goda.\n\n'What should we do?' asked a girl eagerly.\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Pasuram 2\n\nWhile all the girls were enjoying Goda's speech, Badhra felt that she was at the wrong meeting. The more Goda spoke about attaining the divine feet of Lord Narayana\n\nafter being liberated from this material Universe, Badhra was convinced that the agenda did not suit her. It was not too late to leave. She quickly got up from her seat and started to walk away. Badhra's close friends who also shared her sentiments followed her. Goda was surprised by Badhra's abrupt departure.\n\n'Badhra!,' she called the girl who was walking away from the gathering. 'Why are you leaving?'\n\nTo the relief of Goda, Badhra stopped. 'This meeting is not for me,' she blurted feeling very conscious of all eyes upon her.\n\nThere was murmuring in the crowd. The girls were shocked that there were some who did not wish to perform the ritual to attain Krishna.\n\n'Did even such people who did not love Krishna live in Gokulam?' They asked one another.\n\n'Why not? I thought you wanted to marry Krishna?' Asked Goda.\n\n'Definitely! I do want to marry Krishna but I feel that the agenda has drifted towards attaining salvation. Why would I desire salvation?'\n\n'Doesn't everyone wish to be freed from this material Universe?' asked Goda.\n\n'Not everyone. Lord Hanuman refused salvation when Lord Rama offered him residence at Sri Vaikuntam. Lord Hanuman preferred staying on Earth because it is only on Earth that we can listen to the glories of the Lord in the form of kalakshepams. Tell me Goda,' said Badhra. 'Does your Lord Narayana steal butter at His divine abode of Paramapadam? Do you know what I do first thing early in the morning? I start to churn curd because the churning noise attracts Krishna. Look around you....every inch of the Earth is covered in Krishna's footprint. When I can play with Krishna, sport with Him here on the banks of the Yamuna, why would I wish to leave Gokulam to go to Paramapadam? When even the Nithyasuris wish to live here so that they can watch the playful pastimes of our Krishna, why would I wish to leave Gokulam? Even Goddess Mahalakshmi wished to see Krishna. Even though she is always in the company of Lord Narayana, she plotted to make our Krishna pay her a visit at Sri Vaikuntam. When such is the greatness of our darling Krishna, why would I desire to see Him as Lord Narayana?'\n\nThe girls sat up straight. This was a new angle they hadn't considered. They hadn't analysed the merits of salvation. They accepted based on Goda's words that it would be nice to break free from samsara but, after hearing Badhra's comments they felt doubtful.\n\n'When did Goddess Mahalakshmi plot to make Krishna pay her a visit at Paramapadam?' Asked Lalitha.\n\n[Note: As the Thiruppavai pasuram is based on Goda's anukaranam, there are often references to events which took place after Lord Krishna left Gokulam]\n\n'Badhra, you speak sweetly. The words which come out of your mouth are like nectar. Tell us how Goddess Mahalakshmi plotted to make Krishna visit her,' said Goda.\n\n'Once at Dwaraka, Arjuna visited Lord Krishna,' started Badhra. ' It was customary for Arjuna to stay in a room facing the front yard of Krishna's mansion. On one day, a few hours before dawn, a Brahmin entered the yard and yelled at Krishna.\n\n'We don't have a proper ruler! We are ruled by the enemy of Brahmins and as a result, my children die as soon as they are born! He has failed as a ruler. Due to some mistake committed by Him, my children die. Ask Him to answer me! Let Him bring my children back from dead!'\n\nArjuna went outside to see who was making such accusations. He was surprised to see a learned Brahmin who was steadfast in practising the Vedas.\n\n'Who are you? Why are you crying?' asked Arjuna.\n\n'I am a Brahmin. I have lost eight sons as soon as they were born. Untimely death in a kingdom results when the king doesn't govern properly,'\n\n'There is no king here,' said Arjuna, 'only a cowherd which is why He doesn't answer you but don't worry because I am here!'\n\n'and who are you?'\n\n'I am the great warrior Arjuna who wields the bow called Gandiva. I wrestled with Lord Siva and obtained the Pashupathastram. I am capable of travelling to all the different worlds; I will search for your children everywhere in this Universe. Is your wife about to deliver a child? '\n\n'Yes in another weeks' time.'\n\n'call me when the time comes. I will personally come and guard your home. No being can enter without my knowledge. I promise that I will save this child of yours; if I fail, I will enter into the fire and offer my life as a sacrifice.'\n\nAt the right time, the Brahmin informed Arjuna. Arjuna covered every inch of the Brahmin's home with special arrows. He stood outside the delivery room with his bow in hand. Soon Arjuna heard the cries of a newborn baby. The next instant the Brahmin rushed outside and cried, 'the child has vanished!'\n\nArjuna ran here and there looking for signs of the intruder. He then turned to the Brahmin and said, 'I can travel to every world there is. I will return with your child!'\n\nArjuna travelled to all the lokams including Yama lokam. Failing to find the child, he returned to Dwaraka. As he had failed, he decided to fulfil the promise made to the Brahmin. He lighted a fire in Krishna's front yard and decided to enter it. Before entering the fire, he thought fondly about Lord Krishna and cried because he wondered if he would ever get another birth as Krishna's friend. At that moment, Lord Krishna appeared before him.\n\n'Arjuna, why are you lighting a fire? It is summer, are you feeling cold even in this heat wave?'\n\n'Krishna,' said Arjuna, 'I have failed to keep up my promise and must enter the fire!'\n\n'What promise?'\n\n'I promised a Brahmin...'\n\n'the man who always laments in my yard whenever his infants die?'\n\n'Oh! Do you know about him?'\n\n'He heard that I retrieved my guru's son and the six sons of mother Devaki. He wishes to bring his children back to life as well.'\n\n'Why didn't you help?'\n\n'I am not a king. I am a cowherd...'\n\n'Did you hear me say so? I am sorry I didn't mean it in a bad way.'\n\n'My dear Arjuna, I wish everyone would call me as a cowherd. My favourite name is \"Gopalan\". I didn't help because if I started to revive the dead, as soon as someone dies, people will bring the dead body here asking me to resurrect them. Everything happens per a person's karma. I don't like to interfere with their karma. But, come with me I know where the children are.'\n\n'Why are you interfering now?'\n\n'Because you are my devotee and I don't wish for you to enter the fire. I interfere to release my devotees from the jaws of karma.'\n\nArjuna got inside Krishna's chariot. They met the Brahmin down the road. Thinking that they must be travelling to bring his child back, the Brahmin walked towards the chariot. Krishna asked the Brahmin to ride with them.\n\nThe Brahmin sat next to Krishna with pride and looked around him to see if any of his friends were watching him travel with the lord.\n\nThe chariot started its aerial ascent. Soon they travelled beyond Brahma's Satya Lokam and reached the boundaries of the Universe called the Loka-Loka mountains. As they crossed the boundary, they were engulfed by darkness. Lord Krishna released His Sudarsana Chakra which illuminated the path. To the wonder of Arjuna, they arrived at the banks of River Viraja, crossed it and entered Sri Vaikuntham!\n\nLord Krishna entered the hall followed by Arjuna and the Brahmin. Even after arriving at Sri Vaikuntham, the Brahmin did not realise the futility of material life but kept searching for his children amongst the denizens of Sri Vaikuntham. As they entered the great hall of Paramapadam, they saw Lord Narayana seated on Adisesha with Sri Devi on one side and Bhumi & Neela Devis on the other side. The Brahmin's children were playing on the lap of Pirattis!\n\nParamapada Nathan stepped down from His throne and embraced Lord Krishna. Arjuna was mesmerised by this amazing sight.\n\n'We have come to take the Brahmin's children to Dwaraka. Why did you bring them here?' Asked Krishna\n\n'Ever since I descended as you on Earth, Pirattis do not stay here. They keep leaving to the banks of Yamuna to witness Rasa Lila! They find the form with the peacock feather crown most attractive. They personally took these children to make you come here for a visit!'\n\nNow, do you understand the greatness of Lord Krishna ?' asked Badhra. 'Krishna and Narayana may be one and the same but, even Goddess Mahalakshmi was attracted by Lord Krishna's pleasing form.'\n\n'This reminds me of an anecdote that happened to an actor who lived in the neighbouring village,' said Lalitha.\n\n'Why? What happened to him?' Asked Badhra.\n\n'He was a very talented actor but, he felt inhibited if his wife was in the audience hall. He would never allow her to attend his plays. One day, he was playing a unique role. His wife wished to see him in his costume but, he wouldn't agree to come home in his costume or allow her to attend the play. The wife had to play a prank on him to fulfil her wishes. A few min before the curtain call, she sent him an urgent message through a messenger that she had slipped and was suffering from a head injury. Her moments on this Earth were numbered and if he desired to see her, he must come immediately. The poor actor rushed home in his costume that very instant!'\n\nGoda waited for the laughter to die down before continuing with her instructions.\n\n'I agree with you that we are indeed blessed to enjoy Lord Krishna's company here on Earth but, our enjoyment is not permanent. Our life on Earth must come to an end. Isn't it better that we attain salvation at the end of this lifetime instead of being reborn somewhere else where we may lose the opportunity to enjoy the divine qualities of the Lord?' Asked Goda.\n\n'How can we go wrong when we are devoted to Krishna? Why would we get a birth in which we would be separated from Him?'\n\n'Haven't, you heard about the story of Jata Bharata?' Asked Goda.\n\n'Yes, I have.'\n\n'Then don't you know that it is not easy to attain the Lord through our efforts?'\n\n'What do you mean?'\n\n'After ruling for many years King Bharata retired to the forest. He set up an ashram on the banks of River Chakra in Salagrama Divya Desam near the ashram of Pulastya Maharishi. Bharata started to meditate upon the Lord. One day he found a pregnant deer near the river but as it heard a lion roar; the deer tried to jump across the river in fright and prematurely delivered a fawn. The mother deer abandoned the fawn. King Bharata took pity on the fawn and raised it. He became very attached to the deer. He spent his waking hours finding fresh green grass for the deer. He wouldn't let it wander away from his eye sight. He followed it everywhere afraid that some wild beast might kill it. Even if he did not see the deer for a few seconds, he started to worry about it. He thought about the welfare of the deer even on his death bed. Thus as he died thinking about the deer, he took birth as a deer in his next life.\n\nKrishna has mentioned that whatever one thinks about while breathing their last, they will attain that in their next birth. This is what happened to Jata Bharata. He was a great devotee of the Lord and performed Bakthi Yoga with the complete understanding about his swaroopam and about the swaroopam of Perumal and yet, he failed when he failed to remember the Lord on his deathbed.\n\nKrishna has also confirmed that only those who breathe their last while focusing their mind upon Him will attain salvation.'\n\n'How can we be sure that we will be able to focus our mind upon the Lord?' Asked Shyama. 'What will happen if we fail to think about Krishna for even a second and it Is the second when we leave this world?'\n\n'This rule is only for people who perform Bakthi Yoga and not for those people who have performed Saranagathi at the Lord's divine feet. Only those Bakthi Yogins who leave their last breath thinking about the Lord reach His divine feet whereas this is not a requirement for one who has performed prapatti; i.e, surrender themselves to the Lord. Anthima Smruthi is not required for Saranagathas. '\n\n'You are right,' agreed Badhra. 'It will be better if we could always stay with our Lord even after our life on earth comes to an end.'\n\n'This is why we should perform saranagathi,' explained Goda. 'So that when our life on Earth comes to an end, we are freed from this material existence.'\n\n'We understand the need to perform saranagathi,' said Badhra. She returned to her seat. 'I apologise for interrupting the meeting. Please let us know what we should do to successfully complete the ritual.'\n\nAfter seeing the look of appreciation on the faces of the young girls gathered on the banks of the Yamuna, Goda continued with her instructions on what must be done to obtain the grace of Lord Narayana in her second pasuram.\n\nGoda closed her eyes to recollect the message which must be conveyed to the gathering. Suddenly, she was overwhelmed by past memories. The river bank along with the girls was no longer in her view. She found herself gazing into those beautiful eyes. They looked beautiful like the lotus flower. They weren't just beautiful but were expressive. Gazing into those lovely eyes she could feel love. 'oh! Am I looking into the ocean of love ?' she wondered.\n\n'are you okay ?' He asked her. 'you are no longer under the ocean.'\n\nThe moment she heard His voice, she started to cry.\n\n'why are you upset? I have rescued you.'\n\n'have you? ' she asked Him. ' Does a mother consider herself to be saved when her children continue to suffer? I am not submerged under the ocean but, my children will have to endure great difficulties in samsara now that creation has begun. When will they be rescued?'\n\n'I promise to save them if they follow my instructions...\n\n'That won't do,' she interrupted. 'you can't expect them to follow difficult instructions. It is equivalent to making a sparrow fly with a palm fruit tied around its neck! Give us something very easy to follow.'\n\n' sthithE manasi susvasthE sarIrE sathi yO nara: dhAthusAmyE sthithE smarthA visvarUpam cha maamajam (1)\n\ntathastham mriyamANam thu kAshtA paashaNa sannibham aham smarAmi madh bhaktham nayAmi paramAm gathim (2)\n\nThey must perform jnana yagnam i.e perform prapatti. They must surrender to me with faith and firmly believe that I will definitely protect them. If they think about me with love when they are young, healthy, offer me even a single flower and utter my name with love, I promise that when they are on their deathbed and even when they are incapable of thinking about me, I will remember them and when it is time for them to die, I will take them away from samsara to Sri Vaikuntam.'\n\nGoda's eyes were wet with tears of joy. He had promised her to save her children. He would never renege on His promise. The instruction He had given her were very simple; they must perform prapatti, offer flowers to Him with love and sing His names with love. She opened her eyes and looked at her companions.\n\n'Our object of worship is Lord Narayana. We must do devotional service to Him and request Him to grant us moksham,' started Goda.\n\n(\"Pavai\" refers to the deity who is the object of worship and therefore refers to Lord Narayana in this pasuram and the method (vratam) to attain Him)\n\n'Why is it essential to do devotional practices to obtain His grace?' interrupted a girl. 'why should we perform a devotional service?'\n\n'How else will you show your love for Him? When you know someone loves you, how do you reciprocate their love?\n\nWe all agree that Krishna loves us. He has done so much for us that even if we showed our affection for Him, it will not even equal a portion of the affection He has for us!\n\nWhen this Earth was submerged under the ocean, the Lord incarnated as Varaha Perumal. Out of the numerous forms, He could have chosen, do you know why He chose the form of the boar?'\n\n'Why?'\n\n'The boar has a keen sense of smell. As smell is associated with Earth, to show His love for Earth, He took the form of a boar. He is \"manam illa panni!''\n\n'Goda,' addressed Radha. 'In the Tamil language \"manam illa\" means shameless. Why did you call Him shameless?'\n\n'By \"Maanam illa\", I meant \"upamanam illa\" and \"abhimanam illa\". He has no equal in this or any Universe, therefore, He is \"upamanam illa panni\"! Have you ever seen such a boar? He took such a gigantic form that the earth stuck upon His nose like a mole! The form He took as Trivikrama when He measured all the worlds with just three strides was very small next to the form of Varaha!\n\nHe is also \"abhimanam illa panni\"! He is the Lord of this Universe. The Sun, Moon and the stars move around their orbit per His command. The celestials including Lord Brahma and Lord Shiva obey His order. When such is His greatness, He still incarnates for our benefit to free us from samsara. And, what does He do when we attain salvation? He treats us as His equal and makes us enjoy everything equally with Him. Even the Nithya Suris treat us with respect even though they are the eternally liberated souls while we had just been freed from samsara.\n\nWhen Lord Krishna drove the chariot of Arjuna, He allowed Arjuna to place his feet on His shoulder. Any other king in the place of Lord Krishna would have never agreed to be another's charioteer and even if they had to drive the chariot for another king, they would never do the things that Lord Krishna did. Lord Krishna would even groom the horses and feed them. Grooming the horses is the job of a stable boy and yet Lord Krishna performed these tasks because of His love for the Pandavas. King Salyan was also asked to drive the chariot of Karna but he never missed an opportunity to insult Karna. Salyan continuously harassed Karna and treated him as his inferior. When even an ordinary King like Salyan who is not even an emperor feels superior to his colleagues, how should the Lord of the Universe who has no equal to Him feel? Yet, His love for His devotees makes Him conceal His superior nature and mingle with them like their own. When the ordinary boars saw Lord Varaha, they moved closer to Him thinking that He was one of them. Therefore He is \"abhimanam illa panni\" because He is devoid of false ego. The boars moved closer to Lord Varaha whereas when Maricha took the form of a deer, all the other deer moved away from him because they feared him. Even though Maricha looked like a deer, his thoughts, and deeds were that of an asura and the other deer could sense this.\n\nThe Lord of the Universe has come down to our plane. Not only has He come here for our sake but, He is willing to do our bidding. Don't you recall how Krishna would entertain us by juggling pots whenever we felt bored? What will happen if we ask a king to juggle for us? '\n\nGoda was happy to see that tears of joy flowed from the eyes of her companions. They were moved by the auspicious qualities of the Lord.\n\n'When we perform devotional service and show our love for Him, He uses it as an excuse to save us. He is impartial. As He treats all of us the same, He will not treat us special by granting us salvation unless we do devotional service and request salvation, He uses our request as an excuse to save us. We all know the story of Dadhipandan. The Lord granted Moksham to both Dadhipandan as well as his pot because Dadhipandan asked the Lord to grant them moksham. Lord Narayana only grants us moksham if we ask for it. He wanted to grant moksham to Yashoda but, she never asked Because Yashoda was devoted to Krishna, He decided to save her. She was content in spending time with baby Krishna. One day Yashoda asked Krishna to study. Krishna decided to use this incident to grant her moksham.\n\nYashoda sat with Krishna on her lap. She was decorating His hair with peacock feathers. He was getting ready to leave with His friends to go to the forest to herd cattle. Yashoda wanted Krishna to stay at home. She felt very uncomfortable to send her baby boy to the forest where numerous Asuras might be waiting to harm Him. She wished for Him to stay at home and attend school instead. It would be easy for her to arrange home schooling so that she can watch over her child.\n\nShe stroked Krishna's hair with love and said, 'darling, stay at home and attend school. You should spend time learning shastras so that mommy can feel proud of you. Don't you want to make mommy proud?'\n\n'Why should I learn shastras?' queried Krishna innocently.\n\n'So that you can know about Bagawan'\n\n'Who is Bagawan?'\n\nYashoda looked at the Supreme Lord of the Universe sitting on her lap pretending to be an innocent little child. She didn't see the Supreme Being but, only saw her baby boy. 'Sweetie, He is the Lord of the Universe. We see Him when we go to the temple. Shastras will teach you everything about Him'\n\n'Mommy, why should we know about Bagawan?' asked Krishna trying to make her say the word \"moksham\".\n\n'If we know about Him we will learn the proper way to approach Him with love and detachment from this world. This is called as \"Bakthi\" and \"Vairagyam\"'\n\n'What do we get if we approach Him with love and detachment?'\n\n'Moksham!' replied Yashoda\n\nKrishna smiled at her happily and said, 'granted!'' narrated Goda. 'Do you now see the importance of performing devotional service?'\n\n'Yes we do,' the girls agreed.\n\nGoda looked at the gathering with love. She once again addressed them as lucky denizens of Earth. 'How lucky are we? We are here on earth during the period of Krishnavataram and that too, we are all young and fit to be Krishna's girlfriends!'\n\nThe phrase vaiyathu vazhweergal is similar to the phrase \"nallorgal vazhum SriRangam\" used by Azhwar. People in SriRangam spend their time enjoying the Divya Mangala Vigraham of Namperumal that they shudder at the thought of attaining salvation. Usually, people work hard in one region and enjoy the fruits of their efforts in another but, to people living in SriRangam and other Divya Desams, both areas are the same. They worship The Lord on earth and also enjoy Him in this world itself.\n\n'We are lucky because we have taken birth on Bhulokam. '\n\n'Are we really lucky?' Asked Shyama. 'What is so great about residing on Earth? It can definitely not equal residing at Swarka Lokam or Satya Lokam.'\n\n'You have forgotten to add Sri Vaikuntam to the list,' said Goda. 'It is definitely better to live on Earth than to reside at Swarka Lokam or Satya Lokam. '\n\n'In what way?'\n\n'We have Divya Desams on Earth. Can you name one Divya Desam at either Swarka Lokam or Satya Lokam? If they have to have darshan of Perumal, they have to leave their worlds and travel to Sheerabhdhi Divya Desam. '\n\nNamperumal\n\n'That may be true about Swarka Lokam and Satya Lokam but, what about Sri Vaikuntam? Sri Vaikuntam itself is a Divya Desam.'\n\n'True,' said Goda. 'At Sri Vaikuntam we can see the Lord as Paramapada Nathan but, like Badhra said, can we see Him as our Krishna? On Earth, we can see His Arcavatara Divya Mangala Vigraham but, we don't see His Arcavatara form at Sri Vaikuntam. His Arcavatara Divya Mangala Vigraham is a testament to His love for us. Why else would He come reside in this form and help us to experience His beauty? The holy rivers Ganga, Yamuna, Cauvery, Krishna, Godavari, Saraswati flow upon Earth. We have seven oceans on Earth. The great sages like Vasishta, Parasara, Vyasa, Shuka Brahmam, have walked upon this Earth.\n\nWe perform many yagams on Earth. The Celestials too are ordained by the Vedas to perform such sacrifices to worship the Lord but, the sacrifices do not yield fruit when performed at Swarka Lokam. For this reason, they have to come down to Earth to perform the sacrifices prescribed by the Vedas. When the Celestials come down to earth, they do not go to just any place but, they come to Bharatha varsham. Only rituals and sacrifices performed in Bharatha Varsham yield fruit. We are hence blessed to have taken birth here.\n\nThe great devotees of the Lord, the Azhwar saints have walked upon this Earth. This Earth is covered by the foot dust of the great devotees of the Lord; this reason alone is sufficient to prove the greatness of earth over the other lokams. We are blessed because we have taken birth upon Bhulokam. I will tell you about yourselves.\n\nThe moment the Lord decided to incarnate on Earth to reduce Bhu Bharam, Lord Brahma had ordained all the celestials to also take birth on Earth to serve the Lord. Some of us were the celestial women, some of us are the deities in charge of the Vedic Hymns. Others were the sages who after seeing Lord Rama at Dandakaranyam, desired to take birth us women in order to experience Him. All of us who have gathered here have thus taken birth per the command of Lord Brahma to perform devotional service to the Lord. We have been blessed with the right knowledge so that we could carry out devotional service. Above all, we have realised that our Krishna is Narayana. While other people like our parents don't realise His true identity, we have been blessed to know Him as Lord Narayana.\n\nAny place becomes significant when it is blessed by the presence of even one devotee of the Lord; then, think about the greatness of Gokulam! 500,000 devotees of the Lord have gathered here with love waiting eagerly to perform devotional service! Each one of us is hence lucky for taking birth in this great community! That too, we are all just under the age of six. Goddess Sita wed Lord Rama at the age of six. We too are at the right age to wed our Krishna. Now tell me, aren't we all lucky to be here?'\n\n'Definitely!' The girls agreed unanimously. Their voice reverberated through the river bank spreading good cheer.\n\n'Do you know what else I referred to when I said \"vaiyathu vazhveergal\"?'\n\n'Please tell us,' requested the girls.\n\n'\"Vaiyam\" is not only Earth but is also a reference to a vehicle. Our body is the vehicle referred to by Vaiyam...'\n\n'Why is the body referred to as Vaiyam?' Interrupted Vishnu Priya.\n\n'I will explain to you. The Katopanishad gives the following analogy.\n\natmanam rathinam viddhi sariram ratham eva ca\n\nbuddhim tu sarathim viddhi manah pragraham eva ca\n\nindriyani hayan ahur visayams tesu gocaran\n\natmendriya-mano-yuktam bhoktety ahur manisinah\n\n\u0906\u0924\u094d\u092e\u093e\u0928\u0902 \u0930\u0925\u093f\u0928\u0902 \u0935\u093f\u0926\u094d\u0927\u093f \u0936\u0930\u0940\u0930\u0902 \u0930\u0925\u092e\u0947\u0935 \u0924\u0941\u0964 \u092c\u0941\u0926\u094d\u0927\u093f\u0902 \u0924\u0941 \u0938\u093e\u0930\u0925\u093f\u0902 \u0935\u093f\u0926\u094d\u0927\u093f \u092e\u0928\u0903 \u092a\u094d\u0930\u0917\u0939\u092e\u0947\u0935 \u091a\u0965 \u0907\u0928\u094d\u0926\u094d\u0930\u093f\u092f\u093e\u0923\u093f \u0939\u092f\u093e\u0928\u093e\u0939\u0941\u00ed\u0935\u0937\u092f\u093e\u0902\u0938\u094d\u0924\u0947\u0937\u0941 \u0917\u094b\u091a\u0930\u093e\u0928\u094d\u200c\u0964 \u0906\u0924\u094d\u092e\u0947\u0928\u094d\u0926\u094d\u0930\u093f\u092f\u092e\u0928\u094b\u092f\u0941\u0915\u094d\u0924\u0902 \u092d\u094b\u0915\u094d\u0924\u0947\u0924\u094d\u092f\u093e\u0939\u0941\u0930\u094d\u092e\u0928\u0940\u0937\u093f\u0923\u0903\u0965\n\nOur body is the chariot, budhi (intellect) is the charioteer, the sense organs are the horses while our mind is the reins used to control the horses, the jeevatma is the passenger. The objects of perception is the path upon which the horses called the sense organs are attracted to travel upon. This vehicle with the horses, reins , driver is given to the jeevatma so that it can attain its target. The destination of our journey is the divine feet of Lord Narayana. Those who allow the senses to deviate them from the true path, misuse the chariot and are unable to reach the final destination.We are \"vaiyathu vazhveergal\" because we do not misuse the chariot. We truly exist in the body called \"Vaiyam\" because we have realised that the purpose of our body is to serve Lord Narayana.\n\nThe ritual we are about to perform is also very special and unique.'\n\n'In what way?' Asked Badhra.\n\n'Through our ritual, we perform mangalasasanam (benedictory rite) for our Lord. We seek the welfare of our Lord and His devotees. We wish for the rain of prosperity upon His Divya Desam. This makes this ritual very unique because it is not like the ritual performed by Indrajit.'\n\n'What kind of ritual did Indrajit perform?'\n\n'Indrajit performed a yagam so that he could destroy Lord Rama and Lakshmana. The fruit sought by Indrajit was the destruction of the Lord and His devotees. Our ritual is not like the yagam performed by Indrajit. We will perform the ritual with love for the welfare of the Lord and His devotees.'\n\n'Now that we have learnt about our swaroopam, I will instruct you on the dos and don'ts of the ritual.\n\nListen carefully to my instructions on how to obtain the grace of Lord Narayana.' Urged Goda.\n\n'Enough about Narayana!' said Shyama. 'Tell us about our Krishna. Use the name 'Krishna' when you speak about Him.'\n\n'Shhh,' shushed Goda 'We can't openly speak about Krishna. Our elders will stop us from performing the ritual if they find out that our intention for performing this ritual is to obtain Krishna as our husband. There may be spies watching us! I will speak in code so that they will think we are chanting the names of Lord Narayana while we know it is about our darling Krishna. You will understand if you listen carefully!'\n\n' Prahlada instructed his father Hiranyakashipu about the nine forms of devotional service. First and foremost among the nine is listening about the Lord's glories. Only by listening we can improve our gnanam which will help us to attain salvation. How can we be sure that we have been blessed by the Lord? The Vedas show us an easy test by which we can be assured that we have the Lord's blessings...'\n\n'What is this test?'\n\n'The moment we show eagerness to listen about the Lord's glories and even when we do not understand the hymns but, listen to the recitation of the Vedic Hymns with enthusiasm, we can be assured that we have obtained the Lord's blessings. All of you must hear about the glories of the Lord who sleeps lightly at His abode in the middle of the milky ocean.....'\n\n'Why should we praise of Perumal when He is sleeping?'\n\n'Don't you know that He looks very attractive when He rests on Adisesha? Sage Vishwavithra was mesmerised by Rama's beauty when he went to wake Lord Rama in the morning. The sage stood near Lord Rama admiring His attractive form and exclaimed how lucky queen Kausalya was that she got to wake Lord Rama every day!'\n\n'Fine, but why should we praise His \"thiruvadi' feet?'\n\n'Because they are unique and glorious! The Lord's feet freed Ahalya from her curse. They gave life to Parikshit. Because of the \"Apandava\" weapon shot be Ashwatama, Parikshit was stillborn. The baby was charred and looked like a piece of charcoal but, the moment Lord Krishna touched him with His foot, the baby came alive. Also, do you all remember how Krishna kicked the cartwheel when He was just a baby?'\n\n'How can we forget? After the ceremony, Krishna who knew about the presence of Chakatasura pretended to be tired. Yashoda gently rocked Him in her arms till He pretended to be asleep. She then made a makeshift swing with her saree and tied it to the yoke of the antique cart purchased for the bathing ceremony. Little did she know that Chakatasura was present as one of the wheels. She placed the baby in the swing. She asked a few children who were playing nearby to keep an eye on Krishna. As soon as she went away, Krishna woke up and started to cry. He kicked with His legs and one of His feet gently touched Chakatasura. There was a loud crash as the axle broke and the wheel dislocated from the cart breaking into bits and pieces!'\n\n'When Krishna killed Putana who had entered His house in the form of a beautiful woman, do you all remember what happened?' Asked Goda.\n\n'Can anyone ever forget Putana?' Exclaimed Charulata. 'Putana's body took the shape of a demon when she died. Asuras like Putana have to chant a manthram in their minds to retain the form they had assumed. As she felt Krishna drawing out her breath, she could no longer chant the manthram and hence took her natural form when she died.'\n\n'Demons keep chanting a manthram in their mind in order to retain the form they had assumed. Upon death, the demons get their original form since they are no longer able to chant the manthram,' said Goda. ' When Putana was killed, she fell down in her original form and King Nanda had to arrange for men to dismember her body parts to take her huge body to be cremated but when Chakatasura was killed there was no sign of his body! '\n\n'You are right!' Exclaimed Charulata. 'I never wondered till now about what had happened to his body! Why wasn't his body found?'\n\n'This was because Krishna had used His feet to kill Chakatasura. The demon obtained Moksham as he came in contact with Krishna's feet. The contact with Krishna's thiruvadi purified even the demon's body and turned it into shudha sattvam! As a result, it too was transported to Sri Vaikuntham! Krishna's feet had purified even the demon's body! This is the glory of Perumal's thiruvadi (The Lord's divine feet)! Now, do you all understand why it's important to celebrate the Lord's feet?'\n\n'Definitely!' the girls agreed unanimously.\n\n'The Lord descends from Paramapadam and rests on the ocean of milk so that He can be accessible to the Devas and also hear His devotee's cry for help. He comes down in steps to help us. His coming down to us is called as \"avataram\" i.e incarnation.\n\nParamatma has five forms or states or five types of incarnations; Para, Vyuha, Vibhava, Antaryami and Arcavatara are the five forms or modes of Lord Vishnu. To explain the difference between the forms, let us take the example of a person who is feeling thirsty and is in search of water.\n\nKokila, your house is very far from the Yamuna. When you are feeling thirsty, will you come all the way to the Yamuna or draw water from the well or dig a new well or drink water stored in the pot at your home? Or will you try to inhale the water vapour present in the air?'\n\n'I will drink from the water pot.'\n\n'Para form of the Lord can be compared to the water which surrounds the cosmos which cannot be easily reached to quench thirst. The presence of cosmic water is beyond our imagination. The para form of Lord Vishnu is comparable to the cosmic waters. This form is beyond the reach of our mind making it unsuitable for meditation. Lord Narayana exists in His supreme abode of Paramapada as Paramapada Nathan along with His three consorts Sri Devi, Bhu Devi and Neela Devi Nachiars surrounded by a host of nithyatmas (eternally liberated souls) and mukthatmas (liberated souls). Paramapada is also known as Sri Vaikuntham. This location is unaffected by time.\n\nVyuha is compared to the milky ocean which cannot be reached easily to quench thirst either. Paramatma emanates into four beings; Vasudeva, Sankarshana, Pradyumna and Aniruddha. Vasudeva has all the above mentioned six primary (mukhya) gunas and is the complete form of the Supreme Brahman. From Vasudeva emanates Sankarshana with jnana and bala alone while the other four attributes remain inactive in Him. Similarly, from Sankarshana comes Pradyumna with aishvarya and virya. From Pradyumna emanates Aniruddha with shakti and tejas.\n\nThe Vyuha forms are not separate from one another. They are one and the same. They are just different forms assumed by Paramatma to project, maintain and withdraw the universe. It is hard to meditate on these forms as well. The cosmic creation is cyclic in nature. The universe is projected, maintained and then withdrawn by Paramatma. The term \"vyuha\" means splitting and describes the division of Paramatma's six attributes into three pairs for the purpose of creation, maintenance and dissolution of the universe.\n\nVibhava forms are like flash floods. The flash flood appears suddenly and then disappears completely. The water in a flash flood is available only if the person is present at the location and at the time when floods occur. Lord Vishnu incarnates in this world due to his compassion for all creatures. He incarnates to uphold dharma, show everyone the path to liberation, to protect the righteous and to destroy the wicked. The ten incarnations of Lord Vishnu \u2013 Matsya, Kurma, Varaha, Narasimha, Vamana, ParasuRama, Rama, Balarama and Kalki are examples of vibhavavataram. Rama incarnated during the Treta Yuga. Only people, who lived during the time period of the incarnation, experienced Rama avatara.\n\nAntaryami is like the subsoil water. It is not easy to access water that is below the soil surface. In this form, He exists as the soul of all jeevatmas. He cannot be easily experienced making it very difficult to meditate on this form.\n\nArchai form is like the water stored in the pot. This is the iconic embodiment of Paramatma. He exists as idols in temples. It is very easy to meditate upon this form. The idol has to be consecrated properly per all the sacred scriptures and the temple has to be constructed properly per the agamas; only then is the idol empowered with the divine presence of Paramatma. His unlimited compassion for all human beings causes him to exist in the archai form. He bestows His grace on His devotees and accepts their devotional worship. Now , does everyone understand the greatness of Arcavatara?\n\nIn my first song, I had mentioned about Lord Narayana i.e His Para form. In this song, I am making reference to His Vyuha form by referring to Sheerabhdhi Nathan.'\n\n'Goda, you promised to speak to us about our Krishna. You said that you will speak in codes which will be about our Krishna but, now you have started to speak about the Lord of the Milky Ocean!' complained Manjari.\n\n'Listen carefully, ' said Goda. 'Do you agree that milk is abundant in the Milky Ocean?'\n\n'Of course! Why else would it be called as the Ocean of Milk?'\n\n'Isn't any place where milk is abundant also an ocean of milk?'\n\n'I guess so...'\n\n'Aren't we part of the dairy farming community blessed with a surplus of milk? Who is the Lord of this community? Our little prince Krishna! Hence, our darling is the Lord of the Milky Ocean. Now do you understand? Previously I had mentioned that the Lord of Paramapadam is our Krishna. Now I am trying to show that our Krishna is the Lord of Sheerabhdhi. '\n\n'What did you mean when you said that Krishna is a light sleeper?' Asked Manjari.\n\n'Krishna never experiences deep sleep. He is constantly looking out for us. The moment the elephant Gajendra called Him, He rushed to his side from Sri Vaikuntam. He needn't have travelled to the lake but, He could have saved Gajendran from Sri Vaikuntam itself. Also, as the Lord is omnipresent, He could have appeared from anywhere near Gajendran but, He chose to rush to Gajendran's aid from Sri Vaikuntam. Do you know why He did this?'\n\n'Why?'\n\n'Gajendran did not call the Lord to be rescued. The king of the elephants was not worried about dying. He had entered the lake to pluck a golden lotus to offer to the Lord when he was attacked by the crocodile. For thousand years he tried to free himself from the crocodile. Even while fighting with the crocodile, he kept the lotus bloom fresh by dipping it in water every now and then. The moment Gajendran realised that he lacked the capacity to free himself from the crocodile, he called to the Lord with love so that he can offer the lotus bloom to Him. The Lord reciprocated to Gajendran's love by rushing to his side. The Lord wouldn't have been able to display His affection for Gajendran if He had materialised next to the elephant.\n\nFrom the moment Gajendran called Him, the Lord always strains His ears even while sleeping so that He won't miss the calls of His devotees. The moment someone calls Him with love, He will rush to their side.\n\nHe is constantly thinking about how He can perform the Rasa Leela dance with all of us. He is always counting the number of asuras He has killed so far and is making plans to finish the rest.\n\nDo you know what else He is thinking about? He is wondering how He is going to grant the old hunchback's wish to perform the Rasa Leela dance with Him!' Laughed Goda. 'He is also making plans to grant salvation to even those who hate Him and also to fools. He hopes that by granting such people salvation He would be able to incite our desire to attain Him. He wishes to show us that we can approach Him with confidence for He will definitely make our wish come true!\n\nLord Krishna doesn't sleep because He is eagerly waiting for His friends to come play with Him. '\n\n'What else should we do other than listening about His glories?'\n\n'We must eulogise the Lord as per our preceptor's instruction, serve Him and His devotees, we must become His servant and His friend, we must offer everything to Him and must spend time meditating upon the divine attributes of the Lord.\n\nEvery ritual requires discipline. Upavasam refers to fasting but, it actually means staying close to the Lord. When we fast, we do not feed our body with food but feed out atma when we contemplate upon the Lord; on the other hand, by indulging in external stimuli, we feed our body but, not our atma.\n\nOn the days when we perform rituals, upavasam is necessary so that we can focus our senses on our Lord and thus feed our atma instead of our body. During the thirty days of the Pavai Nombhu ritual, we won't eat butter or milk...,' instructed Goda.\n\n'When did we have butter and milk to eat? Krishna eats all the dairy products. We don't even know if butter is in a liquid form or solid form!' exclaimed Padma.\n\nThe others laughed.\n\n'Didn't you listen to Goda? She said that we won't eat butter and milk. I have heard that people drink milk not eat it but, what do we know? We haven't even seen a drop of milk in our homes? The little butter thief consumes all our dairy products!' exclaimed Mangala.\n\nAll the girls laughed merrily when they visualised Krishna stealing the dairy products. Goda felt very happy to hear her friends speak about the pastimes of Krishna.\n\n'We will wake up early and take a holy dip before the sun rises,' continued Goda.\n\n'Won't it be better if we go at the crack of dawn for our dip? It won't be very dark.'\n\n'That won't do, 'replied Goda. 'Krishna rushes to His devotees when He learns that they get up before the sun for their bath during the month of Margazhi. During the time of Ramayana, Lord Rama wished to hurry back to Ayodhya because He felt concerned that Bharata would be taking his morning dips in the icy cold waters of the Sarayu before sunrise.'\n\n'You are right,' agreed Radha. 'If we get up before the Sun rises to take a dip in the cold waters of the Yamuna, Krishna will rush to our side. He will beg us to stop tormenting ourselves. He will say, 'When I am here, why should you trouble yourselves in this way.' This is the best method to attract His attention.'\n\n'What else should we do?'\n\n'We shouldn't line our eyes with collyrium or decorate our hairdo with flowers.'\n\n'Why?' asked the girls. 'It is expected of girls to wear collyrium and flowers. It is considered to be a sign of auspiciousness. Why must we stop wearing these items?'\n\n'Collyrium represents gnanam. Collyrium improves eyesight and is an allegorical expression for gnanam. Lining one's eyes with collyrium refers to performing gnana yoga. Since we are determined to perform saranagathi and have understood that Lord Sriman Narayanan is the up\u0101yam(means) as well as upeyam (the end), we will not try to perform gnana yoga. Our chosen path is that of prapatti. Similarly, we wear flowers because it is pleasing. Bakthi yogam is pleasing like wearing flowers. We will not try bakthi yogam as well. We will focus only on saranagathi margam and rely upon the Lord to save us,' said Goda. 'This is what I meant when I said that we must not wear collyrium or flowers. We should take up a vow to do only good things. We will refrain from gossiping. We shouldn't speak ill of others. We must refrain from passing slanderous remarks about others. Did you know that Sita Piratti has still not complained about the Rakshashis to The Lord? We should follow in her footsteps and not make any complaints even when we have a reason to do so. If someone caused us any harm, we shouldn't pray to the Lord to destroy them. We shouldn't be a brown nose.\n\nWe should follow in the footsteps of our ancestors. We should do everything good that was followed by our ancestors and not do those things that are not part of the traditional customs. We must do charitable work and must never turn people away from our door empty handed. If we do all these, we can obtain the grace of Lord Narayana. We should make offerings to The Lord without expecting anything in return from Him.'\n\n'Is it always best to follow in the footstep of our ancestors? If so, didn't Prahladan disobey his father Hiranyakashipu?' Asked Shyama.\n\n'Very good question!' applauded Goda. 'We should follow the instructions of our ancestors only when the instructions are not against our shastras. Hiranyakashipu told Prahladan to not worship Lord Narayana hence as the instruction was against the shastras, Prahladan was not required to obey his father. It was Hiranyakashipu who did not follow the traditions of his ancestors. He was the son of Sage Kashyapa and should have worshipped Lord Narayana but, Hiranyakashipu formed his own tradition which was against the shastras and he forced the people to worship him instead of Lord Narayana.\n\n\"Seyyadhana seyyOm\" should be understood very carefully. We shouldn't use this phrase for our convenience to go against the shastras. For example, it is wrong for a Brahmin boy to say that he won't perform the sandhyavandhanam because he has to follow in his father's footstep and that his father never performed sandhyavandhanam.\n\nI will try to explain with the following anecdote from the Ramayana. After Lord Rama was sent to the forest, Bharatazhwan was asked to rule the kingdom. Even Lord Rama asked Bharatazhwan to rule the kingdom. It wouldn't have been wrong if Bharatazhwan had accepted their request and had become the emperor. Do you know why he refused?'\n\n'Because of his love for Lord Rama?' Asked Padma.\n\n'Not just that but he refused to start a new tradition. He told Lord Rama that none of their ancestors had crowned their younger son as the emperor when the elder son was qualified to be the ruler. Bharatazhwan refused to break tradition and said that \"seyyaadhana seyyOm\".'\n\n'Goda, explain to us the phrase \"theekkuRaLai chenrodham\" ' asked Shyama.\n\n'It means that we won't lie to harm others but that we can lie to bring good to others. We should be very careful with this rule because we shouldn't benefit in any way from the lie. If there is any benefit for us from the lie uttered, we should reexamine the untruth to make sure it is uttered for the highest good.\n\nAlso,' continued Goda. 'I will explain \"neyyuNNOm and paaluNNOm\" to all of you. If we consume ghee and milk, it will be only after offering to our Krishna. We will accept prasadam from Him but, we will not eat anything which has not been offered to Him. We won't wear flowers but, if Krishna offers to decorate our hair with flowers, we will accept it. '\n\n'Has Krishna ever offered to decorate anyone's hair with flowers?' asked Campakalata.\n\n'Don't you remember what happened during the Rasa Leela?' asked Goda. 'During the Rasa Leela dance, after Krishna vanished from everyone's view, we searched for Krishna. We saw two pairs of feet leading away from the circle. One pair of feet belonged to Krishna and another pair was smaller feet of a girl. We followed the footmarks and arrived at a location surrounded by flowering trees. There, on top of a rock, we found a few flower petals scattered on the rock. Don't you remember what we said to each other? We said, 'this is where Krishna must have decorated the hair of the other girl with flowers! Isn't she the lucky one! How many flower garlands must she have offered to Him in her previous births to have received such an honour!'\n\n'We won't drink milk or ghee. Drinking milk or ghee indicates obsessing about one's body. We will refrain from doing such deeds. Lord Yama laughs at those who obsess about their body because they are focusing their energy on something which doesn't belong to them; similarly, Bhumi Devi mocks those who bury wealth because wealth doesn't belong to them. The sole proprietor of everything is Lord Sriman Narayanan. We should understand that we are subservient to Him and hence focus on eulogising The Lord's divine feet. If we truly desire His divine feet we won't seek other things in life. A bee, which drinks the nectar from a lotus will not seek cactus, like that, those who desire The Lord's lotus like feet will not seek anything else in life.'\n\n'Yes, we are very lucky!' The girls agreed. 'There are many people who do not get to spend time with The Lord like us.'\n\n'We should worship The Lord together and share our collective experience,' continued Goda.'Ears that don't listen to his glories are like ant hills on earth. Eyes that don't see Him are like peacock feathers. We have been given sense organs only to experience Him; therefore, let us start our worship. We should not ask for anything in return as the fruit of our worship. We should be like Prithu Maharaja.'\n\n'What did Prithu Maharaja do?'\n\n'Prithu Maharaja and Indra waged war against each other. The Lord appeared before them and made them reconcile their differences. As Prithu Maharaja stopped the war instantly without asking any question, The Lord was very pleased with him and offered him a boon but, Prithu refused to ask for boons. The Lord insisted that he must ask for a boon and wished to grant him salvation but, Prithu said that he will accept salvation only if he can listen to the Lord's glories at Sri Vaikuntam. We must be like Prithu and realise how lucky we are to be able to listen to the Lord's glories. Prithu said that the only thing he wanted from The Lord was ten thousand pairs of ears to listen to The Lord's glories. The greatest of all wealth is the ability to listen to the glories of The Lord. We should meditate upon the lotus feet of The Lord, sing his praise and listen to his glories. Devotees are always attracted by The Lord's thiruvadi like Thirupan Azhwar and don't worship other deities for boons. We must refrain from worshiping other deities. We must sing the praise of the Lord resting in the middle of the milky ocean\n\nWe must sing the praise of the Lord's divine feet. His Padukais have a higher status than even His charming face among His devotees.'\n\nThis is why Swami Desikan composed 1000 slokams about The Lord's padukai but, how can we relate Paduka Sahasram to this pasuram as paduka represent shoes which are different from feet? Swami Desikan logically proved that \"thiruvadi\" refers only to Paduka; when we visit Ashramams we get Acharya Sripada Teertham which is given to us from the water used to wash the Padukai (wooden sandal) of our Acharyan. No one calls this as \"Paduka Teertham\" but we always refer to it as \"Sripada Teertham\".Feet and padukai are considered to be one and the same.\n\n'Are you using the words padukais and feet interchangeably? Aren't padukais sandals?'\n\n'I will give reference from the Valmiki Ramayana,' said Goda. 'Thiruvadi is The Lord and Padukai is Lakshmi and we use the words interchangeably because they are never separated. Bharata said that he will feel happy only when he gets the chance of sporting the Lord's feet on his head. He got this opportunity when The Lord gave him His sandals. Why would Bharata feel happy with the Lord's Padukai on his head if the padukai and the Lord's divine feet are not one and the same? Paduka Devi said that 'I am above all devas since the devas accept satari from The Lord but, as the Lord is standing over me He is superior to me.' Therefore Paduka shows us that He is the Supreme Being.\n\nWe must donate to scholars as well as the needy,' instructed Goda. Aiyyam is donation given to scholars. This is a respectable donation as before donating we seek the blessings of the scholars. Picchai is regular donation given to the needy.'\n\n'Goda, do you mean that we must give sambhavanai to scholars as well as donate necessary items to the needy?'\n\n'Yes,' replied Goda. 'We must realise that we are only an instrument in the hands of The Lord and therefore not take pride in the amount of donation made by us. \"Aandhanaiyum\" means according to capacity. We would instantly assume that \"aandhanaiyum\" means that we must give as much as possible according to our capacity but, the actual meaning is that we must keep donating till the receiver gets tired of accepting!'\n\n'Has anyone ever donated according to this pasuram in the past?' asked the girls.\n\n'Emperor Raghu was known for making such donations. Emperor Raghu performed a yagam called Vishwajit after conquering Persia. At this yagam, he donated his personal property without keeping anything for himself. After Emperor Raghu finished giving his entire possessions, a young man called Kautsan approached him for donation.\n\nKautsan looked at the emperor and said, 'I don't think I can accomplish my task after seeing the situation here!'\n\nThe emperor was surprised to hear Kautsan say so. The emperor asked him, 'what were you expecting to obtain here?'\n\nKautsan then narrated his story, 'I just graduated from my gurukulam. I wanted to offer guru dakshina but my guru refused to accept dakshina as he knew that I am very poor. I couldn't leave without giving dakshina and therefore kept insisting that my guru should accept dakshina. My guru became irritated when I wouldn't listen to him. He, therefore, asked me to give 1 crore gold coins for every subject I had learned from him. I learnt 14 subjects from him and per his instructions have to give him 14 crore gold coins! I wasn't worried since I thought that I could approach you for donation but, as soon as I arrived you offered me water for arghyam in a clay pot. It was then that I realised that you had given away your personal property and was left with only a clay pot instead of a gold pot! I will approach someone else for the money. Please give me leave.'\n\n'I can't let you leave without receiving donation from me!' said the emperor, 'Please stay here for a few days while I find out a way to provide you with 14 crore gold coins.'\n\nEmperor Raghu discussed with his ministers to identify rich kingdoms in the neighbourhood. He wanted to invade a rich kingdom to gain wealth for Kautsan. As he had already brought every kingdom under his control there wasn't another kingdom left on this Earth to be conquered. Emperor Raghu then turned his attention on the celestial Kubera who was known as the \"God of Wealth\". The emperor approached his guru Sage Vasishta and sought his blessings and approval for invading Kubera's kingdom. He requested the sage to specify an auspicious time for his endeavours. Sage Vasishta told the emperor to start at 4 am on the following day in order to be successful. The emperor was worried that he might miss the wake-up call and therefore slept on his chariot that night outside the city limits.\n\nAt 4 am the following morning, the emperor was ready to start on his journey when his treasury officer approached him.\n\n'Maharaja, please stop!' yelled the treasury officer while running towards the chariot.\n\n'What is the urgency? Don't you know it is bad luck to stop someone who is embarking on a journey?'\n\n'I came to inform you about a wonder! It is raining gold coins in the city!'\n\nLord Kubera felt happy that Emperor Raghu was even ready to wage war with him in order to donate money to the needy. Hence, he rained gold coins. The gold coins kept raining down without a break. The emperor called for Kautsan. He asked Kautsan to take as many gold coins as he wanted. Kautsan asked for 14 sacks and packed 1 crore gold coins in each sack. After packing the 14 sacks Kautsan was happy and said that he was ready to leave. Kautsan did not take any gold for his personal use. He only packed the fees requested by his guru in the sacks.\n\nThe emperor was unhappy that Kautsan did not pack any gold for his personal use. The emperor hence asked Kautsan to take gold for himself. 'What will you do after you pay the fees to your guru? You are young. You will have to find a bride and start a family. Take some more gold coins to support your family.'\n\nKautsan said, 'I don't even need a single gold coin. I will lead the life of an unchavarthi. All I want are these 14 sacks to pay my tuition fees.'\n\nThe emperor tried to reason with Kautsan, 'You will have to start a family soon. You need money to raise your children and feed your family. Therefore plan for your future and take some gold with you.'\n\nKautsan still refused to accept the coins. The emperor became angry and soon an argument ensued between Kautsan and the emperor. The emperor was trying to force wealth on Kautsan while Kautsan refused the wealth. This was a very strange witnessed by everyone. Normally the donors do not force wealth on the needy. The donors would be happy if the needy replied that they do not need anything. The needy also do not feel satisfied with any amount of wealth donated to them. Hence it was very strange that the needy Kautsan refused wealth while the donor Emperor Raghu tried to force Kautsan to accept wealth. We must donate like Emperor Raghu' Said Goda. 'Bali Chakravathi too is known for making charitable donations. He never refused alms to anyone. Usually, people think they must offer according to one's capacity but, this is not true. We must be like Emperor Bali. He knew that the young Brahmachari was Lord Vishnu and if he donated he would lose everything he owned and yet he gave alms to Lord Vamana. . If we are unable to donate, we should at least direct the people requesting donation to a good donor.'\n\n'Like RangaSwami!' Exclaimed Manjari.\n\n'Who is RangaSwami?\n\n'Haven't, you heard that in the neighbouring village there were two men called Srinivasan and RangaSwami? Both of them were very wealthy but, RangaSwami was a miser. If anyone approached RangaSwami for money, RangaSwami would point his finger towards the house of Srinivasan and directed the person to seek alms from Srinivasan. Srinivasan never complained because he was very generous. One day RangaSwami died. Yama Kinkaras took RangaSwami to the court of Yama. At the court, Chitra Guptan listed the sins committed by RangaSwami. He told Lord Yama that in spite of being very wealthy RangaSwami never donated any money to the needy. Lord Yama wanted to find out if RangaSwami did at least one good deed. Chita Guptan replied that the only good deed performed by RangaSwami was to point a finger at Srinivasan's house and direct the needy to collect funds from Srinivasan. Lord Yama directed his people to roast RangaSwami in a vat of boiling oil but, instructed them to keep the finger which RangaSwami used to direct the needy to the house of Srinivasan outside the vat and apply cooling lotion on it since RangaSwami performed good deed using his finger. As RangaSwami was about to be dragged into the torture chamber, one of Lord Yama's ran inside and told them that they had brought the wrong RangaSwami and the man they were about to torture wasn't supposed to die. As a result, Lord Yama instructed his men to return RangaSwami to our world. RangaSwami returned to life and got up as if waking up from a nightmare. He was terrified. He realised that only his finger had been treated well because he used his finger to direct people to the house of Srinivasan while the rest of his body would have been deep fried.\n\nThe following day a poor man approached RangaSwami for money. RangaSwami asked the man to wait while he went inside. The poor man thought that RangaSwami has had a change of heart but, RangaSwami returned wearing only a loin cloth. He used his entire body to point towards the house of Srinivasan as he felt that now if he died Yama's soldiers would have to treat his entire body with respect!' Laughed Manjari. 'We shouldn't live a life like RangaSwami. We can't expect to hold on to everything we have and still gain marks for good deeds. Only by donating we can gain merits for good deeds.'\n\n'Manjari, did you forget the other instruction already?' asked Kokila.\n\n'What did I forget?'\n\n'Our vow that we will not speak ill of anyone?'\n\n'Oops!' said Manjari.\n\n'Goda, please continue,' said Kokila.\n\n'We must contemplate on the path to attain salvation. We should feel happy once we are on the right path. We should be happy that we have received an opportunity to follow practices like the Ekadashi vratam. We shouldn't grumble that we are unable to consume food on Ekadashi. We should happily follow our vratams like the Margazhi Nombu and Ekadashi vratam. We should look forward to these auspicious days.' said Goda. ' But above all, there is one very important thing which we must definitely follow. Without doing this, any ritual we perform will not yield us the fruit we seek.'\n\n'What is it?' asked the girls.\n\n'We must perform Hari Nama Sankeerthanam. We must sing the glories of the Uthaman who measured this Universe with just three strides.'\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Pasuram 3\n\nMallika had been listening attentively to Goda's lecture. As the lecture progressed, she started to feel very worried. She had a nagging doubt. Unless her doubt was cleared, she knew that she would never be able to sleep peacefully.\n\nTrivikrama\n\n'Goda, please specify the sankalpam we should make before starting this ritual,' asked Mallika.\n\n'I told you that our sankalpam is a secret and should not be said aloud as the spies sent by the village elders might be nearby! Our elders have asked us to pray for rain but, we will secretly pray to obtain Lord Krishna in our hearts!'\n\n'I was afraid that you might say this,' said Mallika. 'I went to Sage Gargar's ashramam today to supply dairy. As he was teaching his students, I happened to hear his lecture. I heard the following story narrated by the sage. Once, due to an argument between Devendra and Brihaspathi, Brihaspathi disappeared from Heaven. It seems that the Devas can't use their mouth to eat like us. Their hunger is only satisfied when offerings are made in a Yagnam. To ensure a steady supply of food, Brihaspathi performs a Yagam every day at Heaven. The Devas went hungry since they couldn't locate Brihaspathi. Therefore, they asked Vishwakarma's son Vishwaroopan to act as the substitute Brihaspathi and perform the Yagam. Vishwaroopan agreed to perform Yagam but, the Devas continued to be hungry. They conducted an investigation and found that Vishwaroopan's mother belonged to the Asura clan. As a result, he chanted the manthrams to offer oblations to the Devas aloud while secretly chanting manthrams in his heart to send the oblations to the Asuras. As the manthrams chanted in secret in one's heart is more powerful, all the oblations went to the Asuras.'\n\n'Yes, it is right that the manthrams chanted in one's heart are more powerful than the manthrams chanted aloud,' agreed Goda\n\n'I feel we will run into trouble! Outwardly we will chant the manthram to get rain while in our heart we will all say \"Krishna Siddhayatham\". As a result, we will obtain Krishna but, there will be no rain! How can we use the facility provided by our elders to promote our own wishes and thus cheat them from getting rain?'\n\n'If we obtain Krishna, He will not only give Himself to us but, He will also make it rain. He is like a large departmental store; He will provide dharma, artha, kama and moksham. He will make sure that we reach Sri Vaikuntham while also making sure that we lead a happy and comfortable life in this world itself,' assured Goda. 'When a person performs a yagnam to attain Swarka lokam, even though their target is to attain Swarkam, the Vedic Manthrams pray for the performer and blesses the performer with a long and happy life on this Earth. When even the yagams yield other benefits to the people, won't Krishna bless us with every kind of opulence after accepting our atma which was the oblation offered to Him in the yagnam called \"atma samarpanam\"?'\n\n'What if we make a mistake while chanting the manthram for the Sankalpam?' asked Mallika. 'I also heard Gargar narrate the effects of chanting the manthram incorrectly today at his ashramam. In the story I told earlier, when the Devas found that Vishwaroopan was cheating them, Devendra killed Vishwaroopan. As a result, Vishwakarma became very angry and decided to perform a Yagam to beget a son who would kill Devendra. Vishwakarma made a mistake while chanting the manthram; instead of asking for a son who would kill Devendra he chanted \"let me get a son who would be killed by Devendra\". As a result, the second son born to Vishwakarma was also killed by Devendra! What if we make some such errors?'\n\n'Don't worry about making an error! It is very easy to rectify errors. All we have to do is meditate upon Lord Trivikrama and think about the way by which He measured all the worlds including Bali Chakravarthi with just three strides!'\n\nGoda started to sing a melodious song praising Lord Trivikrama. After she finished her song, she continued her lecture.\n\n'The Vedas prescribe a manthram to meditate upon Lord Trivikrama in order to rectify mistakes which are made while performing yagams. As it is difficult for common people to chant manthrams, we are told that we can get the same effect by singing the song \"ongi ulagaLandha\" on Lord Trivikrama,' explained Goda. 'I mentioned about the importance of performing Hari Nama Sankeerthanam for the successful completion of our ritual; the Lord is like a bar of gold and His names are like gold jewellery. If we have an emergency we can sell the bar of gold to get funds but, we cannot wear a bar of gold. On the other hand, we can wear the jewellery as well as liquidate it during emergencies to get cash. Even if the Lord is not nearby, by chanting His names we can easily get relief from any danger and, chanting His names is also very enjoyable.\n\nDraupadi was 1000 mile away in Hastinapuram while Lord Krishna was in Dwaraka. When Dushashana tried to humiliate Draupadi by disrobing her saree, she cried \"Govinda\" and was immediately saved by the name of Lord Krishna; the Lord provided so many sarees that Dushashana fell down from exhaustion!\n\nDo you know why the Vedas are given a high status?'\n\n'Is it because they are eternal and not created by any human being?'\n\n'Because each and every letter of the Vedas refers to the Lord's names,' said Goda. 'We will sing the praise of the Lord who will definitely prevent us from making any mistakes. If we do make any errors, He will correct them for us. Let us all sing the song \"ongi ulagaLandha\" on Lord Trivikrama.'\n\n'Goda, what is the meaning of the song?' asked Mangala.\n\n'If we sing the praise of the Lord who incarnated as the fish called \"ongi\"...'\n\n'What type of fish is \"ongi\",' interrupted Radha.\n\n'\"Ongi\" is the name for dolphin (fish) in Tamil.,' replied Goda. 'The Lord is Uttaman because He incarnated as the fish called \"ongi\" and later as Trivikrama.'\n\nMost people think that most of the Lord's incarnations took place in North India whereas the Acharyans incarnated in South India. This is not true, as the first incarnation is Matsya Avataram which happened in Pandya Desam in South India. Goda also incarnated in Pandya Desam hence she sings the praise of \"Ongi\". The 1st pasuram speaks about His Para avataram, 2nd Pasuram about Vyuha Avataram and third pasuram about Vibhava Avataram. The 1st Vibhava Avataram is Matsya Avataram.\n\n'I thought by \"ongi\" you meant the sudden transformation of Vamana into Trivikrama,' asked Padma. 'I have heard that the tender bamboo shoots which are covered by frost spring to life the moment the Sun's warming rays touches them. Like this, the Lord springs to action when His devotees approach Him and seek His aid.' Said Padma.\n\n'You are correct, Padma,' agreed Goda. ' The \"Ongi\" in the song, also refers to the sudden transformation of Vamana into Trivikrama,' replied Goda. 'Through Vamanavataram, The Lord showed us that everything is His property. The essence of the astakshara manthram is to realise that The Lord is the sole proprietor. Through Vamanavataram, The Lord enacted the astakshara manthram by measuring all the worlds with just two strides and by claiming Bali with His third step. Vamana-Trivikrama incarnation pictorially depicts the purport of the astakshara manthram.'\n\n'Goda, is it right to call the cheater Vamanan as Uthaman?' objected Charulata.\n\n'Charu, thanks for asking this question. I have the same query,' agreed Kokila. 'It's acceptable to call Lord Rama as Uthaman but, how can you say that Vamanan is Uthaman? He appeared as a Brahmachari but, was He a brahmachari? How can one be a Brahmachari when a lady has taken her place in their heart? To conceal Goddess Lakshmi who was seated on a swing on His vakshasthalam, He covered His chest with a piece of black deer skin!'\n\n'But His supreme qualities were revealed during this incarnation! When Devendra asked His help to retrieve His lost property, He could have told Devendran to approach Bali for alms. The Lord knew that Bali would not refuse alms to anyone and would have definitely given back the property of Devendran if he had begged. The Lord didn't make Devendran beg because He never does anything which would degrade His devotees. He protected Devendran by not allowing him to see alms from Bali but , instead, He Himself went to Bali and asked for alms. Have you ever seen anyone who would leave their self-pride and self-respect for the benefit of someone else?\n\nMatsyavataram\n\nThere are three types of people. The first type is the lowest because they ruin the livelihood of others in order to earn money. The second type makes sure that others are also able to earn money. The best type, sacrifice their livelihood and status for the sake of others. Therefore, Vamanan is Uthaman because, though everything is His property, He came down to beg alms from Bali in order to protect Aditi's saranagathi.'\n\n'We won't agree! He may have been good to Devendra which is not surprising but, He cheated Bali! Vamanan cheated! He showed His tiny feet to Mahabali and begged Bali to give Him land equal to three strides measured by His tiny feet,' said Lalitha.\n\n'Yes that is correct but, He didn't cheat!' said Goda. 'He even made Sukracharyar warn Bali Chakravarthi. Sukracharyar revealed the identity and purpose of Lord Vamana to Bali.So, Lord Vamana didn't cheat Bali.'\n\n'Of course, He did! The moment Bali agreed what did He do? He became Trivikrama! He grew very tall and measured all the worlds and this Earth with just two strides! What do you call this behaviour? I say He cheated! If He showed tiny feet to Bali, He should have measured with His tiny feet!' argued Shyama. 'Don't call Trivikrama as Uttaman!'\n\n'What did you expect Him to do? He was just a child and He grew up very fast! Some children do grow up very fast!' retorted Goda. 'He felt very small because He had to seek alms from Bali but the little child felt immense happiness when Bali agreed to His request. As He was feeling very happy, He no longer felt small. His emotional state made Him grow tall!' replied Goda.\n\n'I won't agree with you. I still feel that He threw dust in Bali's eyes!'\n\n'Please tell me the things Bali donated to Vamana ?' asked Goda.\n\n'He measured the Earth and the heavens with His feet which Bali donated to Him.'\n\n'That just makes two strides. What did He measure with His third stride?' enquired Goda.\n\n'He placed His foot on Bali's head and claimed Bali as His property.'\n\n'Now tell me, what did He do with the donations He received from Bali?'\n\n'He gave the Heavens to Devendra.'\n\n'What did He do with Bali?'\n\n'He sent poor Bali to Patala Lokam!'\n\n'Of all the worlds, Patala Lokam is the most beautiful and the most enjoyable world!'\n\n'Get out of here! How can Patala Lokam be the most enjoyable? Isn't it located below ground?'\n\n'It is a misconception that Patala Lokam is engulfed in darkness. It is a very beautiful world and better than Devendra's Swarka Lokam! Lord Trivikrama informed Bali that even Devendra was not aware of the wonderful qualities of Patala Lokam. Trivikrama donated the beautiful Patala Lokam to Bali Chakravarthi. Trivikrama crowned Bali as the king of Patala Lokam. There was a beautiful palace in Patala Lokam ready to be occupied by Bali Chakravarthi. Bali was taken by surprise when He saw the palace doorkeeper.'\n\n'Why was Bali surprised to see the doorkeeper?'\n\n'The doorkeeper was none other than Vamana Himself! He was guarding Bali's palace. His radiance illuminated the entire Patala Lokam! He was shining like one thousand Suns! He claimed Bali as His own with His third step. As Bali became His property, He personally protected Bali just like the way in which a bridegroom protects his bride after receiving her hand in marriage. He gave the Earth and the heavens to Devendra but He never gave Bali to Devendra! He could have handed down Bali as a slave to Devendra but instead, He kept Bali to Himself. Bali became His cherished treasure. He guarded Bali and protected Him from evil influence. You can also say that He gave Himself to Bali. The Rishis perform severe penance trying to catch a glimpse of Him; but, Bali obtained the grace of Paramatma very easily! Bali could see the beautiful Lord shining like a blue sapphire everywhere in Patala Lokam! Bali obtained the priceless blue sapphire for giving up the Earth and heavens to Devendra. Isn't this equivalent to trading a lemon for a diamond?' asked Goda. 'The Lord in the form of Vamana Murthy to this day stays outside Mahabali's mansion in Patala Lokam guarding him.\n\nOnce, prior to Ramavataram, Ravana decided to go on a rampage and annexe all the kingdoms. He arrived at Patala Lokam and asked Vamana to move aside so that he could find Mahabali.\n\nVamana said, 'Stop! You are not allowed inside to see my master.'\n\nRavana looked at the short security guard and laughed. He said, 'Dwarf, make way, I have to see your master!'\n\n'My master is no ordinary man! He even made donations to Lord Vishnu. Step away before you are hurt.'\n\n'I will make you move!' said Ravana and tried to push past Vamana.\n\nVamana tapped Ravana with His stick and hurled Ravanan like a football making him fall inside Lanka.\n\nThe same Lord Vishnu was also present as the commander in chief of the Devas called as Upendra when Ravana waged war against the Devas. Devendra asked Upendra to help them. The Lord threw His disc at Ravana but, the disc returned to The Lord's hands without harming Ravana as The Lord did not hurl the disc with the intention of harming Ravana. He only pretended to participate in the war against Ravana.\n\n'I am sorry,' said Upendra, 'I cannot help you since I have to respect the boon granted by Brahma to Ravana.' Saying so, the Lord walked away without helping the Devas.\n\nHe did not destroy anyone during Vamana Avataram. He didn't do samharam but sought alms knowing very well that people may speak ill of Him and claim that He cheated. Therefore He is Uttaman. In fact, at Tirukovalur, The Lord holds His disc in His left hand and the conch in His right hand to indicate to Mahabali that He did not come to kill Mahabali but, only to bless Him.\n\nGoddess Mahalakshmi doesn't like it when The Lord destroys people. She was very unhappy when He killed Hiranyakashipu during Narasimha Avataram. Therefore The Lord promised her that He will give people additional chance. This is why in Ramayana He let Ravana retire from the battlefield when Ravana ran out of weapons and He gave 100 chances to Shishupala. One of His names is Srishaha which means that He is controlled by Sri.\n\nThe Lord didn't want to kill Mahabali since Bali was also the grandson of His dear devotee Prahalad. Mahabali was also a great devotee of the Lord. When Mahabali took the kingdom of Devendra, Aditi performed saranagathi requesting The Lord to help her sons. The Lord had to help Aditi since she performed saranagathi and yet, He had to protect Mahabali. Therefore, the Lord decided to seek alms and came in the form of a dwarf called Vamana to the sacrifice hall of Mahabali seeking a donation. When The Lord placed His divine foot (3rd step) on Mahabali's head, Prahalada was very agitated; he rushed towards the Lord and asked the Lord how he could do such a thing?\n\n'why do you look agitated? I am only blessing Mahabali! Asked Lord Trivikrama\n\n'Of course, I know you are blessing Mahabali but, I have a bone to pick with you! When you killed my father Hiranyakashipu did you ever think of blessing me in the same manner in which you are blessing my grandson?'\n\n'I did bless you! I placed you on my lap and placed my hand on your head to bless you!'\n\n'That is why I am not feeling happy! You placed your hand on my head but, why didn't you place your divine foot on my head?'\n\n'I did place my foot on your head when I measured all living creatures with my 1st step.'\n\n'Then why did you place your divine foot on Mahabali's head once again? You placed your lotus foot on his head twice!'\n\n'He didn't realise that I had placed my foot on His head with my 1st step and as He requested me to place my foot on His head once again, I had to oblige.'\n\n'You have proved that you are partial by honouring Mahabali by placing your lotus foot on his head twice!' Thus, even Prahalad felt jealous of his grandson Mahabali.\n\nDo you now understand that the Lord did not cheat Mahabali but, conferred upon Mahabali His blessings by placing His lotus foot upon the head of Mahabali? With His previous two steps, The Lord also placed His divine foot upon the heads of all living creatures to bless them even if the creatures did not seek The Lord's blessings. Such is the compassionate nature of Trivikrama! What was the need for Him to touch other creatures with His divine feet? He didn't discriminate between the creatures to see if they were qualified to receive His blessings but, blessed them all equally.'\n\n'We can see that the Lord honoured Mahabali and conferred upon Bali the most Supreme blessing,' the girls agreed.\n\n'The Lord in Surya Mandalam is called as \"Uthi\" which means that He is not affected by any sins. Hence the name \"Uttapa\" refers to the name of The Lord and indicates that He repels sins. At Sheerabhdhi, the milky ocean, He is called as Uttharan and during Trivikrama Avataram, He is known as Uttaman. The names Uttharan & Uttaman are the comparative/superlative degree of Uthi.'\n\n'I am not happy!' Exclaimed Manjari. 'I came here to only hear about our Krishna but you keep singing about Narayana, Sheerabhdhi Naathan and now Trivikrama!'\n\n'But, this song does make references to our Krishna.'\n\n'How?'\n\n'Measuring the worlds also refers to being omnipresent. Lord Krishna measured the worlds when He revealed His Universal form during this incarnation.'\n\n'We agree with you but, you haven't yet explained how our community will be blessed with good rainfall?' asked Mallika.\n\n'\"theenginRi naadellaam thingaL mum maari peydhu\" When we sing the glories of the Lord who incarnated as the fish called \"ongi\" and later as Trivikrama, the entire region will be blessed with favourable rainfall.'\n\n'What is favourable rainfall?' asked Mallika\n\n'An example of favourable rainfall is shown by the following story. Once, a potter finished making a batch of pots; he went to the temple and prayed that the weather should remain sunny so that his pots could dry properly. At the same time, a farmer had finished sowing seeds in the same village. The farmer also went to the temple and prayed for rain so that his seeds could germinate. If it rained the potter would be ruined and if the weather remained dry the farmer would be ruined. favourable rainfall would bring prosperity to everyone by raining at the appropriate time and thus helping both the potter as well as the farmer.\n\nHave you heard about the Ashwamedha Yagam?\n\nThe procedure for Ashwamedha Yagam is very complicated. The king becomes tired while performing this Yagam. To rejuvenate the king, a short break is incorporated into the Yagam in the form of a debate between the Hota and Brahma. The same set of questions is also chanted as manthram by Brahmins during the Shradham ritual. There is a total of twelve questions. The first question is about good rainfall.\n\nQuestion 1: Kigiswid dasit poorvachitihi? What is essential for everyone?\n\nAnswer 1: The sky is essential for everyone as it carries the rain bearing clouds to shower rain to make the Earth prosperous. Anyone who listens to this question will not be affected by famine in the region they live.\n\nGood rain showers should come only when the people of the country wish for rainfall thereby preventing crop damage from heavy as well as scanty rainfall.\n\n\"Nikamenakamena parjanya varshatu\" is a Vedic manthram which means, 'It should rain whenever we wish for rain without causing hindrance to others. Nine days of dry weather followed by one day of rainy weather like clockwork is considered to be the ideal weather pattern.'\n\nIt should rain in such a way that good seeds like that of paddy should germinate very fast and attain rapid growth (ongu) to become large plants. The fish which live in the stagnant waters of the paddy fields should find it difficult to swim in the water due to the thick growth of paddy plants.\n\nAs a result of the rains, the ponds will be covered with lotus blooms making the honey bees rush to the lotus blooms. Due to a large number of flowers to drink honey from, the bees will feel intoxicated after drinking the sweet nectar and fall asleep inside the lotus blooms!\n\nAll the cows in the village will look fat and healthy after feeding on the green pasture. As soon as the milking bucket is placed under their teats, they should rain milk and make the bucket overflow. The cows in our village are also special because they have been blessed by Krishna's touch. His blessings have made them grow so big that they look as big as an elephant! Imagine the amount of milk these cows will shower upon our community!\n\nEveryone will be wealthy. Wealth in Tamil is called as \"selvam\" because as it enters someone's home it says \"I am leaving\" \"selvom\". Wealth never stays permanently in one place but, when we sing this song, we will be blessed with sufficient wealth that the wealth will never leave our homes. By chanting the names of Lord Narayana and thinking about His Trivikrama Avataram we get the complete blessings of our Lord. It is His natural quality to ensure that His devotees get the best in life. He is known as \"nediyon\" i.e. a tall person but, He reduced His height to seek alms from Bali in the form of Vamana. He did this to protect the saranagathi of Aditi as well as to bless Mahabali. He sought as alms His own property. Even though He is the Lord of all, He sought alms from Mahabali. Thus, by just chanting His names, we are protected from all evil. He will grant us abundant wealth to live comfortably without having to eke out a living. Be convinced that when we pray to get Lord Krishna as our husband, He will make sure that the village is blessed with rain thus ensuring the prosperity of our community.'\n\n'What is meant by everlasting wealth?' Asked Charulata. 'We can enjoy wealth as long as we live in this world but, when we die, not even our body comes with us. We have to leave our wealth behind. When the wealth we have accumulated is separated from us at death, how can we call it as everlasting wealth?'\n\n'The everlasting wealth is not any wealth you may have inherited from your forefathers nor any wealth you could claim as your earnings but, it is the priceless blue sapphire!'\n\n'What blue sapphire?'\n\n'I will explain in just a few minutes. There are two types of wealth; the first type is that which is short-lived. This kind of wealth is everything which is present in this Universe. The second type is the everlasting wealth. This is the beautiful blue sapphire we call as Krishna! When we surrender to Him, He gives Himself to us. We already saw how He guarded Emperor Bali in Patala Lokam. Emperor Bali got the priceless blue sapphire. Like the emperor, when we perform prapatti with firm faith in Him, we too will get the blue sapphire. The everlasting wealth is Lord Sriman Narayanan. Once we get this wealth, all our needs are taken care of not only here, but even when we leave our body behind at the time of death, we continue to enjoy this wealth at Sri Vaikuntam and it will shower us with perpetual bliss!\n\nWhen we worship our beloved Krishna, He will not only shower His blessings upon us but, He will bring prosperity to the land we live in. Even though He will surround us with material wealth, He will also bless us to develop detachment and guide us to His eternal abode of Sri Vaikuntam where we can be truly happy. Hence, sing the names of our Krishna, eulogise Him and worship Him with love.'\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Pasuram 4\n\n'H ow beautifully you sing!' The girls turned towards the speaker enthusiastically. They knew that He would accompany them from the following morning but, no one had expected to see Him at their meeting.\n\n'Krishna!' exclaimed Goda. As she looked into His beautiful eyes, she found herself gazing into an ocean of love that she had seen aeons ago. The water from the Yamuna had collected into small pools in which red lotuses grew. His eyes resembled the fresh lotus buds. She went back in time to the period of Varahavataram. Even when He had incarnated as a boar, He was unable to hide His beautiful lotus-like eyes. Who has ever heard of a boar with beautiful eyes? But, that's how He had incarnated. \" maha VarAha: sputa padma lOchana: \".\n\n'Aren't you going to speak with me?' He asked breaking Goda's reverie.\n\n'You have proved that you are Azhi mazhaikanna!' Exclaimed Goda.\n\n'What is that?' He asked.\n\n'As if you don't know! Look at you,' she said. 'You are like the beautiful rain clouds. It's a wonder that people seek rain clouds when you are here!'\n\n'In what way am I like the rainclouds?'\n\n'Look at you!' She said. 'You are as dark as the rainclouds. The moment you appear, you are surrounded by peacocks. They open their feathers and dance around you in joy. Everyone knows that they perform the rain dance when they see the rain clouds. The sky is clear tonight but here they are dancing around you! The peacocks are better than people! They have recognised the Supreme Raincloud!'\n\n'Goda is right!' Exclaimed Radha. 'Till you appeared here, we hadn't seen a single peacock!'\n\n'Is that all or do I share more similarities with the clouds?'\n\n'Like the rainclouds which shine when lightning is produced, you shine due to the presence of Goddess Sri on your vakshasthalam. Lightning appears momentarily but, you are always present with the effulgent Goddess Sridevi! She gives you a golden sheen. You are naturally dark but, Goddess Sridevi gives you a golden glow which makes you appear with a golden colour! You remind us of a gold ore; the rocks are dark but, they have streaks of gold in them giving them a golden colour!'\n\nThe other girls applauded. 'Goda, what a beautiful comparison!'\n\n'Yes !,' encouraged Krishna.\n\n'You contain the Supreme Waters called as \"mercy\"! You shower your compassionate grace upon us whenever you see us! Whenever you look at us, your eyes are filled with tears due to the love you have for us!'\n\n'My eyes are never wet with tears!'\n\n'I disagree! Even now your eyes appear wet. Why are your eyes wet? They reflect the love you feel for all of us. Don't I know that tears of joy flow from your eyes the moment you see your devotees!\n\nYou work hard to remove the enemies of your devotees and you shed tears of joy when you see your devotees experience happiness when they have been freed from the clutches of their enemies.'\n\n'When have you seen me shed tears of joy?'\n\n'Haven't I?' Asked Goda. 'Every time when you embrace one of us with love, how come our clothes become wet with your tears? When Sri Kuchela visited you at Dwaraka, didn't you embrace him with love and didn't everyone say that the tears from your eyes which fell upon Kuchela's head were like the holy water poured upon a king during the coronation ceremony! Didn't people later say that with your tears which fell upon Sri Kuchela, you had indicated to him that you were making him the king of immense wealth?'\n\n'I can't argue with you!' agreed Krishna. 'Your speech is nectar to my ears!'\n\n'Then hear me say more!'\n\nThe other girls sat around Goda and Krishna enjoying their conversation.\n\n'You are like the splendid rain-bearing clouds which travel towards land to shower the rainwater and which announce their arrival majestically with the sound of thunder and shine forth in the sky with the lightening appearing amidst them.'\n\nYou do look dark like the rain clouds. Goddess Sridevi seated on your vakshasthalam looks brilliant like lightning. When you decide to enhance the knowledge of your devotees like Dhruva, you touch them with your conch, which reverberates like thunder. The sound from your conch is but the sound of the Vedic hymns!\n\nIs that all you have, you wield the effulgent disk called Sudarsana in your hand with which you can destroy your enemies without even going in search of them! On top of this, you also hold the bow called Sarnga which is capable of raining arrows upon your enemies! It was with this bow that you showered arrows upon the Rakshasas in Janashthana during Ramayana. The arrows from your bow came down upon them with great intensity like rainfall during stormy weather! Unaided by anyone, You destroyed the 14,000 rakshasas and thus saved the great sages who were tormented by the Rakshasas!'\n\n'What do you need from me?' He asked. 'People usually praise me as Srinivasan when they require wealth. They praise my divine weapons when they require my protection. You have eulogised me as Srinivasan and you have also celebrated my weapons. What boons do you seek from me?'\n\n'Krishna! You have hurt our feelings!' Exclaimed Goda. 'Why would you think that we would seek ordinary material benefits from you? Don't you know that we seek only You? You are the Supreme Paramatma who is eternal. We the jeevatmas are eternal too though our body gets destroyed at the end of each birth we take. You have been taking care of us for aeons by making us experience the fruit of our karma. Due to your Supreme Grace, in this birth, we have obtained right knowledge and are able to stay devoted to you. The only thing we ask from you is that we should continue to stay devoted to you!'\n\n'But, you must ask something from me. Ask me for anything,' said Krishna.\n\nA girl called Parankusa Nayaki started to speak. ' Don't you know why Goda extolled you as the husband of Goddess Sri? Only the One who is the husband of Sri i.e., Lord Srinivasan can be the permanent everlasting fruit (purushartham). You are compared to the rainclouds to highlight your compassionate nature which makes you accessible to your devotees. Singing your praise makes us feel happy! What else will we seek other than the opportunity to sing about you?'\n\n'Nayaki,' called Goda. 'Sing the song Oru Nayakamai for Krishna.'\n\n'Yes please sing this song,' pleaded the other girls. 'It is very funny but so true!'\n\n'What does the song mean?' Asked Manjari.\n\n'There was once an emperor,' narrated Nayaki. 'He received tribute from every kingdom on Earth but, the emperor had an enemy who invaded his kingdom. Luck finally abandoned the emperor and in a very short time, he lost everything he owned. He ran away from the battlefield and sought refuge in a dense jungle. The only possession the king had was an earthen bowl. The king was overcome by hunger but felt shy to seek alms in daylight. He decided to beg for food at night so that the people will not recognise him. At night, the king took the earthen bowl in one hand and proceeded towards a village but, ill fate still haunted the king. It happened to be a starless new moon night and a black dog had decided to sleep in the middle of the path. Even if it had been a white dog, perhaps the king would have seen it but, luck wasn't on the king's side and the king stepped on the dog. As it was startled, the dog bit the king and in the chaos, the king dropped the earthen bowl and thus lost his last possession! This is the fate of everyone. We don't know for how long our lucky streak will last and when the tables would turn. This is what happens to people who run after material wealth. On the other hand, once we have obtained our true wealth called Krishna, we will never lose Him!'\n\n'We know about your generosity, 'continued Goda. 'You will definitely grant us anything we ask for but, we do not know what to ask that would highlight your generous nature to others. We also have no idea about what is best for us whereas, you have our best interest in your heart. If by chance, being ignorant, we ask for something which is not good and other people come to know about the boons we have obtained were to mock you for granting such ordinary things, our hearts will shatter into a thousand pieces because we had been responsible for making someone pass derogatory comments about you! Don't make us ask you for a boon but, bless us according to your Supreme Capacity!'\n\n'Hmmm...shall I make you the next Indra, Brahma or Kubera so that you can lead a comfortable life surrounded by wealth?'\n\n'We the jeevatmas are eternal,' said Parankusa Nayaki. ' When you make up your mind to create, you activate us by giving us bodies per our past karma. You turn us from microscopic state to macroscopic state with the various forms but, the life you have given for us on this earth is momentary like a flash of lightening. Once we have realised the transient nature of our life on Earth, why would we waste our time going after material wealth which is also short-lived?\n\nWorldly wealth also comes with the following seven defects. It is hard to earn wealth and hence causes sorrow while earning wealth. After we have earned wealth, it continues to give us hardship while enjoying it. What happens to us after we have enjoyed wealth? We face more distress like food poisoning after eating spoilt food. The duration of our enjoyment is also very short. The moment we start using wealth, it starts to diminish; when we notice that the amount of wealth we have accumulated is being used up, we start to worry that we don't have enough. We hence have no peace of mind while earning wealth or while enjoying it. Above all, it pulls us away from you. We don't want to get caught in this endless pursuit of accumulating ordinary wealth. We seek only you and the opportunity to sing your glories!'\n\n'You can't try to give us the position of Indra or Kubera,' said Goda. 'We know the nature of these worlds. During Maha pralayam, all the worlds including Brahma's Satya Lokam will be destroyed! The celestials have no peace of mind as well. They are constantly worried that someone may take over their positions. Moreover, they give into false pride because of the power they wield over others and such thoughts pull them away from you. This is not what we want! We should live without any such lowly desires. We only seek to be with you and experience the Supreme Bliss! This is what we want.'\n\nKrishna remained silent for a few minutes. He thought, 'I shouldn't have told them to ask me for anything. They don't have a guidance of an Acharyan and they do not know the messages conveyed in the Vedas. They forget that they are atomic in size while I am omnipresent. How can they exist with me everywhere? It is true that they can experience Supreme Bliss at Sri Vaikuntam but, they can't serve me in every way. They can't do the service rendered by Garuda, Vishwaksena or Adi Sesha! Also, they can't be my equal in every way; they should understand that only I can create, maintain and destroy this Universe.'\n\nKrishna looked at the gathering. 'Dear girls, ' He addressed them. 'You do not know what to ask. You should seek the guidance of a good acharyan and ask me the right thing under his guidance.'\n\n'Why should we look elsewhere when you are here? We request you to be our acharyan. You are the husband of Sri. Goddess Sridevi never feels envy and makes it possible for all of us to attain you. Because you are the husband of Rukmini, you have to accept us!'\n\n'If I grant your request, will you sing the \"Ongi Ulagalanda\" song once more?' Asked Krishna.\n\nThe girls joined in the chorus and sang the pasuram with Goda. When they finished singing, Krishna had vanished from their view. He decided to show the gathering the truth in Goda's song.\n\n'What is that?,' asked Radha as a brilliant light flashed across the sky.\n\n'Goda, we can see the effect of the song you taught us!' exclaimed Lalitha. 'It looks like lightning.'\n\n'Who is that?' shrieked Rangavalli. Everyone turned towards Rangavalli. To their amazement, they saw a divine being standing amidst them. The divine being made his way towards Goda.\n\n'I heard about your plans to worship the Lord,' he said. 'You mentioned that by singing His praise, the surrounding area will be blessed by good rain showers. As you are the Lord's devotee, I am here to serve you by bringing rain showers. Please command me and I will fulfil your wish.'\n\nThe girls were dumbfounded to see a deity ready to obey Goda's commands.\n\n'Our Goda is definitely great!' they whispered amongst themselves. 'We have no doubt now. Our village will be saved and at the same time, we will get Krishna as our husband!'\n\n'I had heard from sage Gargar that the celestials seek to serve the Lord's devotees,' said Mallika to her friend Shyama. 'The sage mentioned that according to the Purusha Suktam, the devas will appear before those people who have sought refuge under the protection of Lord Narayana to find out if they could be of any help. How lucky are we that we are getting guidance from Goda!'\n\nIn another corner, Rangavalli and Madhumanjari were speaking in subdued tones. 'Now I know why there are no sanctums for the Navagraha Devatas in the Vishnu temples, ' said Madhumanjari.\n\n'Why?'\n\n'When we worship the controller of the Navagraha Devathas, where is the need to worship the controlled Navagraha Devathas?'\n\nThe old 108 Divya Desam temples in India do not have a sanctum for the Navagraha Devathas.; the only exception is the temple of Koodalazhagar in Madurai.\n\n'Today we have seen the Vedic verse come true,' said Rangavalli. 'The Vedas say that those people who have faith in Lord Vishnu as the Supreme Being and realise that He is their sole protector will be saluted by other deities. Look at that deity waiting to serve Goda!'\n\n'Who are you?' asked Goda.\n\n'I am the deity responsible for bringing rain showers. How can I help you?'\n\n'You must rain everywhere without any discrimination,' replied Goda.\n\n'Definitely! I will rain upon all the regions inhabited by good people.'\n\n'That's not what I asked you,' corrected Goda. 'You must rain everywhere even if the area is populated by sinners.'\n\n'But, I can't rain upon sinners,' objected the deity. 'It is against the Lord's command. As per His instructions, I cannot bring rainfall to regions which are settled by sinners. I have to obey the Lord's orders.'\n\n'I agree that you cannot disobey the Lord's command but, you are here because you wish to comply with the requests made by me. Therefore, you must rain upon all including upon sinners,' decreed Goda. She asked him to shower rain everywhere even in the area inhabited by sinners showing us her maternal affection for all jeevatmas.\n\nThe deity thought for just a moment and then decided to obey Goda.\n\n'How should I bring rain showers? Do you have any criteria for me to follow or can I make it rain as per my own criteria?'\n\n'The Lord is most merciful at the time of creation, 'stated Goda. 'During this time, His complexion is very dark like dark rain clouds. The Lord who looks like dark rain clouds, causes the shower of mercy to fall upon this Universe. You must emulate this form of the Lord. When you are ready to bring rain showers, you must look as dark as the Lord during the time of creation.'\n\n'That can be easily arranged,' promised the deity.\n\n'You must drink water from the middle of the ocean (azhi). You must drink so much water that we should be able to see the ocean bed bereft of water.'\n\n'Why do you insist that I must drink water from the middle of the ocean? Couldn't I drink water closer to the shoreline?'\n\n'The middle of the ocean has pure water since it is free from pollution. The shoreline is usually polluted due to the increase in human activities,' explained Goda. 'On your way back to the shore, you should announce your approach by rumbling. You must try to sound like The Lord's Panchajanyam. To show us that you have consumed enough water, your body should look as dark as the body of Lord Narayana.'\n\nGoda didn't say that \"you should look dark like Narayana\" but, said that his body should look dark like the thirumeni of Narayana. The reason Goda said that his body should be like the thirumeni of Narayana and not that he should look like Narayana is because he can only try to dress like Narayana. He will not be able to be as compassionate as Lord Narayana.\n\nOnce a year Namperumal at Sri Rangam dresses up like Thayar; his costume is known as Mohini Alankaram. Sri Parasara Bhattar always favoured Ranganayaki Thayar. Once, when The Lord dressed up as Mohini, He sent for Bhattar. After Bhattar arrived, The Lord expected Bhattar to state that The Lord looked exactly like Thayar but, Bhattar replied that even though The Lord dressed up like Thayar, He lacked the compassionate glance of Thayar in both His eyes. This he explained was because, one eye of The Lord is the Sun used to scorch enemies and only the other eye, which is the moon is cool and is full of compassion. Bhattar stated that both the eyes of Thayar, on the other hand, were cool like the moon and she showered compassion even on Her enemies. Similar to The Lord being unable to look like Thayar, the deity in charge of rain will never be able to look like The Lord.\n\n'You must produce brilliant lightening. The bright flash should resemble the effulgent Sudarsana Chakra in the hands of the broad-shouldered Lord. The thunder produced by you should sound like the Conch Panchajanyam.'\n\n'I will definitely carry out your instructions to the 't',' he promised.\n\n'The rain showers produced by you should resemble the shower of arrows rained by Lord Rama upon His enemies but, unlike the Lord's arrows, the rainfall produced by you should be made to fall upon Earth with the intention of benefitting everyone,' requested Goda. 'But, please rain only after we finish our morning bath and ensure that the showers do not hinder any devotees. Everyone should feel happy with the rainfall.'\n\nThe deity prayed his respect to Goda and vanished from their view. The girls felt jubilant. Their elation knew no bounds. Everyone was in a celebratory mood but, Vishnu Priya felt concerned.\n\n'This is a serious matter,' thought Vishnu Priya. 'The deity of rainfall was just here in person because we were planning to perform the Pavai Nombhu Ritual. This must be a very important ritual if the deity appeared in person before all of us. Such a ritual must be carefully planned and it must be carried out properly. There may be many obstacles in our path. Are we old enough to handle the hurdles which we may face?'\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Pasuram 5\n\nAfter Goda finished conversing with the deity of rain, Vishnu Priya approached her. 'Look at all of you,' she said. 'You are all too young to follow through with such rituals. Let us go home. We can perform this ritual next year.'\n\nHer statement stunned the gathering.\n\n'Why would you say so? 'the girls exclaimed in unison. Their voice reverberated through the banks of the Yamuna.\n\n'Don't you want to help our village?' they demanded.\n\n'Do you not believe in the powers of the ritual? Did you not see Krishna and the deity of rain speak with Goda?'\n\n'I am afraid of obstacles in our path. Good deeds are always hindered by someone or other.'\n\n'What makes you say so?'\n\n'Well....' started Vishnu Priya. 'I am sure you have all studied the Ramayana. The coronation ceremony of Lord Rama was fixed by King Dasaratha after consulting with the citizens. The citizens of Ayodhya expressed joy when they heard that Lord Rama will soon become the emperor. The date of the ceremony was fixed by Brahma Rishi Sage Vasishta. You all know that he is no ordinary rishi. Lord Rama performed bagawath Aradhanam. He prayed to Lord Ranganatha and yet what happened? He had to renounce the kingdom and live in the forest. If even Lord Rama faced such hurdles, what will happen to us? The date for the ceremony was fixed by Brahma Rishi Sage Vasishta and yet the coronation ceremony never took place! I suggest that we return home, mull over the matter and prepare ourselves to perform the ritual next year.'\n\nGoda laughed. 'Is this your reason for wishing to postpone the ritual?'\n\nVishnu Priya nodded her head.\n\n'Lord Rama did not face any obstacles,' declared Goda.\n\n'but..,'\n\n'Lord Rama went to His balcony and looked at everyone who would attend the coronation ceremony,' continued Goda. 'As He scanned the faces, He realised that Bharata was not present amongst them. Neither did He see Hanuman, nor Sugreeva or Vibhishana. How could He go through with the ceremony when His dearests were not with Him? He had also made a vow to crown Paduka in order to establish the greatness of paduka before He Himself could be crowned. He wished to perform the coronation ceremony of Sugreeva and Vibhishana before His own ceremony. Therefore, He started the chain of events which led to the coronation ceremony being cancelled and He left to the forest to fulfil His agenda. The coronation ceremony was cancelled because it was His wish that it shouldn't take place till He had crowned Sugreeva and Vibhishana as kings and till He was surrounded by Sugreeva, Vibhishana, Bharatha, Shatrugana and Hanuman.'\n\nGoda glanced at all her friends. She could see that some of them felt convinced while the faces of a few others were lined with doubts. She decided to allay the doubts of everyone.\n\n'The Lord makes personal sacrifices so as to fulfil the wishes of His devotees,' assured Goda. 'That's what Lord Rama did. If you are still not convinced, I will tell you an easy way to repel all hurdles. We only have to meditate upon Krishna and worship Him. We must sing His praise, contemplate upon Him and worship Him with flowers. If we worship Him sincerely, He will take care of everything because He is our Mayan!'\n\n'Do you mean that He is an illusionist?'\n\n'No. Of course not! He is Mayan because He does amazing deeds. He revealed His four arms to mother Devaki as soon as He took birth. Did Lord Rama ever do such amazing deeds?'\n\n'You are right,' agreed a girl. 'His deeds are beyond the grasp of our mind.'\n\n'Very true,' said Goda. 'Every time we look at Him, we feel as if we are seeing His pleasing form for the first time. We never get tired of looking at Him!'\n\n'Yes, even after spending time with Him for so many years, we still find something new to love about Him every second we look at Him!' said Radha.\n\n'He mesmerises us with His deeds which are astounding! Do you remember how He showed the entire Universe in His mouth to mother Yashoda? 'Asked Goda.\n\n'How can we forget? She was brushing His teeth. She asked Him to open His mouth wide so that she could scrape His tongue and what she saw in His mouth cannot even be explained by words! Yashoda saw the entire Universe in His mouth! She saw the five elements, the solar system, all the beings, the mountains, continents and the oceans of Earth, she saw a Gokulam in His mouth and herself. The Yashoda in His mouth was looking into the mouth of a Krishna and all of the above was repeated inside the mouth of the second Krishna and so on. She felt her head spin. 'Am I hallucinating!' she thought. She sat down on the ground with her hand on her forehead. When she came to, Krishna was sitting on her lap. She looked at Him with affection and forgot about her vision! Only He can reveal His characteristic and then conceal His nature and pretend to be an ordinary child!'\n\n'Yes, mother Yashoda narrated the incident to some of the elders. Did you know what they told her?'\n\n'What?'\n\n'Aayar putthiran allan Arumdhaivam, Baalakan Maayan yenRu mahizhnthanar! They said, 'Yashoda don't think that He is your son. Know Him as the Supreme Being, Lord Sriman Narayanan! He is the one who consumes everything and everyone and keeps everyone safe in His tummy at the time of the universal deluge!\n\nHe didn't just stop with the above incident,' mentioned Goda. 'He continued to reveal His nature to everyone. He had made it a point to listen to bedtime stories. Once, mother Yashoda narrated the Ramayana. Do you know what happened?'\n\n'No, what did He do?'\n\n'Yashoda massaged Krishna's legs with fragrant oil. She then gave Him a warm bath and got Him ready for bed. Yashoda and Rohini got the two boys ready for bed as Krishna went to sleep only if Balarama was near Him.\n\n'Mommy, tell us a story, 'asked Krishna.\n\n'There was an ancient city called Ayodhya.'\n\n'Hmmm..' said Krishna to indicate to His mother that He was listening.\n\n'It was ruled by Emperor Dasaratha who had three wives. The king did not have any children. He performed a yagnam and a deity appeared out of the fire and gave the king a large vessel full of yummy kheer......'\n\nYashoda continued with her narration of Ramayana. She soon came to the point in the story where Sita was kidnapped by Ravana.\n\n'The evil ten-headed Rakshasha caught hold of Sita Devi and carried her away...'\n\n'Soumitri!' thundered Krishna suddenly. 'Soumitri! Where is my bow?' He roared looking at Balarama.\n\nYashoda jumped out of her skin when she heard Krishna's voice. The sound of Krishna's voice was mature and commanding. He revealed to Yashoda that she was narrating His story. He showed her that He is Lord Rama now incarnated as her son Krishna. The next moment, He concealed His nature. 'Is this what Lord Rama said to Lakshmana?' asked Krishna innocently. He showed His mother a glimpse of His true self. As she wasn't ready to grasp His true identity, He masked His nature and became Yashoda's little son. '\n\n'What else did He do?' asked the girls. Even though they knew about all the deeds performed by Krishna, they wished to hear about them from Goda.\n\n'Once, Yashoda tried to make Him attend school. She said, 'Krishna, don't you want to make mommy proud? You must go to school.'\n\n'Why mommy?' He asked innocently.\n\n'So that you can learn about the shastras.'\n\n'What will I get by learning shastras?'\n\n'You will obtain true knowledge and detachment.'\n\n'Why do I need it?'\n\n'So that you can know about the Supreme Lord, Sriman Narayana.'\n\n'Who is He?'\n\n'You have seen Him when we go to the temple. He is omachi,' she said as she stroked His head not realising that He is the Supreme Being.\n\n'Why should I know Him?' questioned Krishna.\n\n'To get moksham.'\n\n'I will give you moksham,' said Krishna looking quite serious. 'Just gimme butter and I will give you moksham!'' concluded Goda. She paused to meditate upon Krishna sitting on Yashoda's lap pretending to be a little child. 'Did Lord Rama ever do anything like this?'\n\n'He brought back people who had died,' continued Goda. 'He got back the son of Sandipani Maharishi who had been swept away at Prabhasa Teertham twelve years ago. He studied and mastered all the 64 arts from Sandipani maharishi in just 64 days! He brought back the 6 sons of Devaki and we have heard about how He retrieved the sons of the Brahmin when Arjuna failed to prevent them from being kidnapped!'\n\n'Yes, we remember that story. Goddess Mahalakshmi had desired to see Krishna and had taken the children in order to make Krishna go to Paramapadam with a peacock feather in His hair, wearing yellow silk and a garland of forest flowers!'\n\n'And didn't we also listen about how He protected Draupadi from Dushashana by generating sarees?'\n\n'Yes, where did He get the sarees from? Which manufacturing centre did He visit? Did He go to Arani, Kanchipuram, Dharmapuram or Benares?' asked Madhumanjari. 'He generated the sarees without any thread or loom! Each saree was of a different colour with fashionable borders!'\n\n'That's not all,' said Goda. 'He spends His time stealing the hearts of young maidens. Yashoda's friend once complained to her that Krishna entered their home one day and asked her daughter to give Him her bangles. The girl was mesmerised by His charm and immediately handed over her gold bangles. Do you know what He did with those?'\n\n'Did He give them to another girl?'\n\n'He used them to buy wild jamun fruits?'\n\nThe girls all laughed merrily when they saw Krishna trading gold bangles for jamun fruit in their mind.\n\n'Please tell us how He interacted with the vendor selling Jamun fruits,' asked a girl.\n\n'After He gave the girl's bangles to the vendor?'\n\n'No, no, the time He used a handful of rice to buy jamun fruits when He was only a toddler,' said the girl.\n\n'Oh, she was very lucky! Krishna ran inside to grab payment for the fruits. She saw Him return with rice in His hands. She looked at the grace and beauty with which He ran. She looked down and saw the beautiful footprints of Krishna. To her amazement, she saw in the dust, His footprints displaying at the base of His large toe on His right foot the mark of a disc; Sudarsana Chakra which cuts down the six modes of the passion of His devotees that prevent them from reaching Him. At the bottom of the middle toe of that same foot a lotus flower; the flower increases the thirst of His devotees to reach His feet and drink His grace like bees that drink the nectar from the flowers. At the base of His small toe was displayed the mark of a thunderbolt; the thunderbolt assures the devotees that it will smash the sins of His devotees accumulated like a mountain and turn them to dust so that the devotees need not be afraid of reaching the Lord. In the middle of His heel was the mark of an elephant goad; He brings the mind of His devotees under control like the elephant handler who controls the elephant with the goad. The joint of His right large toe showed the mark of a barleycorn, representing all kinds of enjoyable wealth. Her eyes filled with tears of joy as she recognised the significance of the footprint,'\n\n'And then what happened?'\n\n'To her joy, she saw Him return. He held His palms together and in them, He was holding grains of rice. As He ran towards her, He spilt many grains of rice here and there. The tiny bells on His ankle bracelets rang merrily. The golden belt on His hips with bells on it swayed as He ran toward her. She saw His earrings move rhythmically. His butter smeared face, beautiful lotus-like expressive eyes stole her heart. 'What a miracle!' she thought. 'Here is the Lord of the entire Universe pretending to be a child! Oh... He looks very cute and adorable! I feel very blessed to see Him; He has stolen my heart ....how can I ever look at anything else?' She wanted to hold the divine child in her arms and kiss His cheeks.\n\nHe came near her and bent down to put the grains of rice in her basket. 'There I have paid you,' He said.\n\nShe looked down and instead of rice she saw her basket shining with precious kaustuba gems!'\n\n'Was that all!' exclaimed a girl. 'He joined His palms together and begged her to give Him jamun fruits before His mother returned!'\n\n'If you can't find Him, look for Him near the bathing ghats of the Yamuna. You will find Him for sure near the Yamuna sporting in the pure, holy waters! exclaimed Goda.\n\n'Why did you say pure and holy to describe the Yamuna?'\n\n'Think about it; the Ganges is considered holy because she originated when lord Brahma washed the toenail of Trivikrama but, she hasn't obtained contact with The Lord after that but, the Lord spends almost all the time taking dips and swimming in the Yamuna. The Yamuna has constant contact with the Lord! I even wonder if Krishna is black because He takes a dip in the Yamuna or if the Yamuna gets her dark colour because of her contact with the dark Krishna! She is, therefore, holier than Ganga!\n\nThe Yamuna is very pure compared to the River Godavari. Lord Rama lived on the shores of Godavari for twelve years with Sita Piratti and Lakshmana. When Ravana kidnapped Sita Piratti, Piratti requested the Godavari to inform Lord Rama. The Godavari was afraid of Ravana and hence failed to pass on the message to Lord Rama. Thus, she lost her sanctity. Whereas, Yamuna flowed in the backyard of Kamsa; yet she made way for Vasudeva to pass with the divine child unaffected by her flood waters. Thus, Yamuna is very pure! Anyone who does not stand up to support truth and dharma is not pure just like river Godavari. For example, if a man does not ask his wife to stop tormenting his aged parents he becomes impure.'\n\nGoda sang this song as a gopi. How could a gopi have known that the Yamuna allowed Vasudeva to cross the river since even Kamsa did not know about this? Nanda Gopan assumed Krishna to be his own son and only became aware of the fact that Krishna is the son of Vasudeva when Akrurar informed him. Therefore how could a gopi know these things? The gopi girls came to know of these secrets because River Yamuna shared her secrets with them!\n\nRiver Godavari was very upset that she lost her sanctity. She pleaded with Goda to help her. Goda asked her not to worry since River Godavari shared the first half of her name \"Goda\" with her she regained her sanctity!\n\n'Doesn't the word Mayan also refers to the dark complexion of Krishna? In Tamil \"Maa niram\" means dark complexion; therefore, Mayan should mean the one with a dark complexion,' asked Kalindi.\n\n'Yes, He is Mayan because He is very dark!' Exclaimed Goda. 'He is focused on making His complexion darker!'\n\n'How?'\n\n'He always plays in the dark Yamuna also called as Kalindi. Her dark waters when they touch His thirumeni, enhance His black complexion. Goddess Mahalakshmi keeps looking at Him from her seat on His vakshasthalam..'\n\n'Why should Goddess Mahalakshmi's glance make him dark? Doesn't she have a golden complexion?' interrupted Badhra.\n\n'She is golden hued but she has black eyes,' explained Goda. 'Her black eyes cast a black radiance on Him to enhance His dark complexion. This beautiful blue sapphire is our lamp! He is the lamp made out of precious gems! Other lamps are easily extinguished but, a lamp which has the precious gem as its source cannot be extinguished. He emits rays of light and good cheer to dispel the darkness of ignorance which surrounds us! He shines brilliantly only here on Earth...'\n\n'Why does He shine brilliantly only here?'\n\n'Think about it,' said Goda. 'Paramapadam is the world where ignorance or darkness cannot enter. His effulgence at Paramapadam goes unnoticed like a lamp turned on at daytime.'\n\n'Could you please explain further?'\n\n'thOnRum aNiviLakkai could be split as thonrum maNiviLakkai or as thonrum aNiviLakkai. maNiviLakkai means like a lamp made out of rubies that shine beautifully. Krishna incarnated with brilliant effulgence. A lamp made out of precious gems shines because of reflecting the gem's radiance. It is not required to add oil to this lamp or even to clean it. Bagawan is like this self-illuminating lamp. The lamp made out of precious gems shines without oil; like this, Krishna blesses us even if we do not offer Him anything. aNiviLakai means, Krishna incarnated as the decorative lamp of Thiruvayarpadi. Bagawan is unable to show His quality of compassion at Sri Vaikuntham as all the Nityatmas and Muktatmas are always happy. He incarnates to show His quality of compassion which makes Him shine like a lamp in a dark room that dispels darkness.'\n\n'It is very clear now,' said the girls.\n\n'What a wonder that Paramapada Nathan as Krishna out of compassion for mother Yashoda allowed Himself to be tied to a mortar? thaayai(k) kudal viLakkam seydha dhaamOdharanai(th) Lord Krishna blessed more women than men during Krishnavataram. As soon as He incarnated as a child with four arms, Devaki said, 'Please, let Kamsa not find out that you have arrived. Let not his evil gaze fall on your beautiful form today!' Devaki continued, 'You are the sustainer of this and other Universes. You are beyond comprehension and because of your grace towards us; we have been blessed by you to behold this beautiful form of yours! Still, our mind is agitated for we fear that Kamsa will rush in any moment and behold you! We pray to you to appear as a normal infant.'\n\nHe immediately concealed His form to obey His mother Devaki. At the age of 24, Lord Rama obeyed his father's wishes and left for the forest; but, this divine child obeyed his parents within a few minutes of his appearance and concealed his divine form! The Lord felt very bad that He had not listened to the words of His mother Kausalya when she urged Him not to go live in the forest. According to the Vedas, if the mother gives instructions which contradict the instructions given by one's father then, that person must choose to obey his/her mother's words only. Lord Rama was unable to obey the commands of mother Kausalya. As soon as mother Devaki requested Him to hide His divine appearance, He did not argue with her. He could have argued that He was capable of destroying Kamsa then and there but instead, He appeared instantly as a normal human child. He felt happy that He could obey the words of His mother! To dispel His mother's fear of Kamsa, He appeared with only two arms till the time when Kamsa was killed by Him.\n\nWe must meditate upon our Krishna who is the abode of compassion. Despite being the Supreme Personality, to His devotees, He is also easily accessible. We should worship Him with fresh, fragrant flowers and meditate upon Him.'\n\n'Is this why we should take a holy dip early in the morning before beginning our worship?' asked Lalitha.\n\nMannargudi Raja Gopalan\n\n'thooyOmaay vandhu does not just mean physical purity but, also refers to approaching the Lord with the intention of seeking His company and not with the ulterior motive of seeking boons from Him. When we go to temples we should ask the Bhattar to perform archana in The Lord's name instead of asking him to perform archana for our benefit by telling him our gothram, nakshatram etc. \" thoomalar\" means offering the Lord flowers grown by us, in our Yard. If we are unable to grow flowers then we should buy flowers but, we should never steal flowers from the garden of our neighbours to offer the Lord. He prefers if we offer flowers free from thorns because He worries about us being pricked by thorny bushes while gathering the flowers.\n\n\"Thoomalar\" also refers to controlling our senses and not harming other people/living beings by our mind, words or deed. Dhama pushpam, sama pushpam and satyam ashta vidha pushpam are the Lord's favourite flowers. Dhamam pushpam is living without ego or superiority complex. Dhamam pushpam is obtained when we do not try to get credit for every deed we do or when we do not try to be the centre of attention.\n\nSamam pushpam is treating everyone equally.\n\nSatyam ashtavida pushpam is always speaking the truth which is for the benefit of others. If we worship Him like this, He will rush to us immediately!'\n\n'We cannot trust Krishna!' Some of the girls exclaimed. 'He has sent the deity of rain to pull wool over our eyes! He will say that He has fulfilled our wishes by providing good rainfall and escape from giving Himself to us! We need Him, not just rain!'\n\nGoda asked the girls, 'Why aren't you able to trust Krishna completely? Why do you feel that He will cheat us? Aren't you convinced even after listening about His pastimes?'\n\n'Of course, we trust Him but, we are afraid that our karmas might stand in our way. Because of the multitude of sins, we have committed in the past we won't be able to attain Him. Krishna will not come to us; because He will blame our past karmas and say that He cannot bless us!'\n\nShyama narrated an incident from Mahabharata, 'Have you heard about the meeting between Udhankar Maharishi and Dwarakadeesha? After the Mahabharata war, Lord Krishna went to the ashramam of Udhankar. The Maharishi asked Krishna to provide relief for his thirst whenever the Maharishi felt tired and thirsty. Lord Krishna agreed and returned to Dwaraka.\n\nThe Lord then instructed Devendra to provide the rishi with a cup full of amrutham whenever the rishi felt tired. Devendra agreed but did not want to comply with Krishna's request. Very soon Udhankar felt very thirsty and he meditated upon Lord Krishna. As per The Lord's instruction, Devendra came with amrutham but, he came in the guise of a Chandala and gave amrutham to the rishi in a cup made out of a dog's skin. Devendra said that he had come per the instruction of The Lord and requested the rishi to accept the drink. The rishi did not believe Devendra and refused to accept Amrutham. He once again meditated upon Dwarakadeesha. Lord Krishna appeared before the rishi and asked him if he felt refreshed. The rishi asked Krishna why he had played such a mean trick on him by sending a Chandala to give him drink out of a cup made out of dog's skin. Lord Krishna then explained about Devendra's ploy and rebuked the rishi stating that the rishi should have accepted the drink as Devendra had said that he had come per Krishna's instruction. The Lord was upset that the rishi did not believe in Him completely and had missed out on the opportunity to drink amrutham. He then blessed the rishi that whenever the rishi felt thirsty it will rain and asked the rishi to collect the rain water. Krishna thus outwitted even a Maharishi like Udhankar, therefore, how can we trust Him?'\n\n'Udhankar did not have \"Maha Vishwasam\", firm faith,' replied Goda. 'He did not trust The Lord completely; if he had trusted Krishna he would have accepted amrutham from Devendra. We are not like Udhankar. We believe that The Lord will definitely save us. We have a weapon to prevent the sins from even coming near us. This weapon is Hari Nama sankeerthanam! If we perform saranagathi and surrender to Him, He will make sure that we accept Him when He comes to us. If we surrender to Him, we will not react like Udhankar when he refused amrutham. His Nama sankeerthanam will remove the obstacles in our path which prevent us from reaching Him.\n\nSri Mettu Azhagiyasingar - Ugra Narasimha At Srirangam Temple\n\nHe does try to pull wool over the eyes of people but, He does not trick His devotees who surrender to Him. He acts as a Mayan in order to protect His Bagawathas from the harm caused by others.\n\nIn Vishnu Puranam, Parasarar Maharishi tells us the following story of Prahaladan. Prahaladan was a great devotee of The Lord. He wished that his father Hiranyakashipu should treat him with affection. The Lord wanted to make Prahaladan's wish come true. As Hiranyakashipu hated Prahaladan because he was always chanting the names of Lord Narayana and because Hiranyakashipu couldn't be changed easily, The Lord came in the guise of Hiranyakashipu. He showered affection upon Prahaladan so that Prahaladan should think that his father Hiranyakashipu was treating him with love. After many such years of treating Prahaladan with affection, when the right time arrived, as Lord Narasimha, the Lord killed Hiranyakashipu. The Lord acted as \"mayan\" by even disguising Himself as Hiranyakashipu in order to please His dear devotee Prahaladan! This is the reason Hiranyakashipu is present on the lap of Sri Ugra Narasimha in the temples. Any offerings or archanai offered to Lord Narasimha in this form is also automatically offered to Hiranyakashipu. As the Lord also appeared as Hiranyakashipu, in the above form, as Ugra Narasimha, the Lord accepts offerings in the form of Narasimha as well as Hiranyakashipu. This is why we see the idol of Hiranyakashipu in temples but, not of Kamsa or Ravana. The Lord by appearing as Hiranyakashipu for the sake of Prahalada shows us that He will take any form in order to please His devotees.'\n\n'Tell us about the ways by which He confused Kamsa,' requested the girls.\n\n'He as \"mayan\" confused Kamsa a lot when He incarnated as Lord Krishna. The Lord commanded Yoga Maya to transfer Devaki's seventh child to the womb of Rohini. Thus, the people thought that Devaki's pregnancy had been terminated. Kamsa felt confused because he was unsure if he had to count this pregnancy as the seventh child or not.\n\nThe Lord also chose midnight to incarnate. According to the Chandogya Upanishad, we the jeevatma are the self of our body; the jeevatmas also have a self which is none other than the Supreme Brahman. Thus, the real self of our body is the Supreme Self within us the jeevatmas. Thus when we sleep we are in union with our real self. Our Lord metes out punishment to certain wrong-doers by taking away their ability to fall asleep. The people who do not deserve sleep are as follows.\n\na) Those who steal others wealth\n\nb) Those involved in illegal activities\n\nOur Lord thus punished Kamsa by incarnating at midnight and disturbed Kamsa's slumber. Kamsa had not been able to sleep as he was anxious about the Lord's incarnation. He spent months suffering from chronic insomnia. For the first time since the time he had heard about Devaki's pregnancy, he fell into a deep slumber overcome by the powers of Yoga Maya. This slumber was cut short and Kamsa spent the rest of his life unable to sleep. Krishna arranged for Yoga Maya to inform Kamsa that The Lord had incarnated thus making a life filled with worry for Kamsa.\n\nYou were worried about hurdles arising in our path, do you know how to prevent them?' asked Goda looking at Vishnu Priya. 'By repeatedly chanting His names, we can avoid all obstacles. Even if we chant His names or slokams mechanically without paying attention to their meaning/words eventually we will start to focus our mind on Him. When we eulogise Him and surrender to Him, our past sins (Sanchita Karma), as well as new sins which try to cling to us because of the errors committed by us, are destroyed like dust in the fire.'\n\nThe Lord has five states which are Para, Vyuha, Antaryami, Vibhava and Archai. The first four pasurams refer to one of the five states. The first pasuram talks about Para Vasudevan, the second about Vyuha Avataram as Sheerabhdhi Nathan; the third pasuram is dedicated to Vibhava avataram and the fourth to Antaryami. The fourth pasuram speaks the glory of those people who meditate upon the Antaryami. This fifth pasuram speaks about Archavataram referred to by \"vada Mathurai mannum mainthanai\" i.e. He is always present in the Divya Desams like Vada Mathurai. The Lord is very fond of Mathura and of water from the Yamuna.\n\nHope coursed through the vein of the girls. They felt confident that by performing the ritual, they will not only obtain Krishna as the everlasting wealth but, their community too will be blessed with prosperity.\n\n'Is everything clear now?' Asked Goda.\n\n'We feel very confident that all our wishes will come true; especially our wish to be always with Krishna!'\n\n'If you have all understood my instructions clearly, let us disperse. Be ready tomorrow morning. Come to the meeting place early in the morning. You must all be ready to join me so that we can complete this ritual successfully.'\n\n'don't worry,' they said. 'We will all get up very early in the morning. In all the excitement, we won't even be able to sleep tonight!'\n\nAfter the girls dispersed, night faded away. Goda was waiting for her friends at their designated spot. She was joined by many of her friends but, there were ten girls who weren't ready to join Goda.\n\n'Why are we missing ten? Let us go to their homes and find out why they haven't joined us. We must make them join us.'\n\nGoda left in search of the ten girls while some of her friends followed her and the rest remained at their meeting place.\n\n#\n\n#\n\n# Esoteric Meaning\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Pasuram 1\n\nThiruppavai is popularly known as Godopanishad because it contains the essence of the Upanishads. In just 30 pasurams, Andal Nachiar has given to us the complete meaning of the Upanishads. The Bagawad Gita expounded by Lord Krishna is referred to as the Geethopanishad for it is the essence of the Upanishads but, the Godopanishad is superior because the entire meaning of the Upanishadic texts is covered in just 30 pasurams. The 30 pasurams are very easy to understand unlike the 700 slokas contained in the Geethopanishad.\n\nSri Ranga Ramanuja Muni the 16th-century scholar is celebrated for his commentaries on the Dasopanishads (the ten principal Upanishads). It is the norm to confer the title of \"Bashyakarar\" upon those scholars who have written commentaries for the Brahma Sutram or the Upanishads. Sri Ranga Ramanuja Muni didn't receive the title of \"Bashyakarar\" even after writing commentaries for the ten Upanishad. He was dejected that his work wasn't recognised. At this time, Sri Andal Nachiar appeared in his dream and asked him to write a commentary for Thiruppavai. As soon as this work was completed, he was bestowed with the title of 'Upanishad Bashyakarar' thus proving that Thiruppavai is indeed Godopanishad!\n\nArtha Panchagam:\n\nThe Upanishads are part of the gnana kandam of the Vedas. The gnana kandam is the research about our Supreme Lord and the means to attain Him. It contains the essence of the artha panchagam which are the key to achieving salvation. Through the Thiruppavai pasurams, we are taught about the 'Prapya Prapaka Sangraham'; we learn about the auspicious qualities of our Lord who is our sole target and we learn about the \"Artha Panchagam\". The artha panchagam teaches us about ourself, Paramatma, the hurdles in our path, the means to attain Him, and the target attained. The artha panchagam are listed below.\n\n1. Atma Swaroopam: We should know who we are and the reason we take birth. We are the jeevatmas who depend on Paramatma for existence. We take birth only to attain Him. We exist only to experience Him. Our true swaroopam is realised when we serve Him.\n\n2. Paramatma Swaroopam: Who is the Supreme Lord? Lord Narayanan is the Supreme Lord. We should further learn about His swaroopa, roopa, guna, vibhava and aishwaryam. The entire Universe is His swaroopam, His Divya Mangala Vigraham is His roopam, His auspicious qualities like sousheelyam are His gunam, He is the Lord of ubhaya vibhuthi i.e leela vibhuthi (this Universe) and nithya vibhuthi (His eternal abode called as Sri Vaikuntam). He is eternal. He does not undergo any changes.\n\n3. Upaya Swaroopam: The means by which we can attain His divine feet. There are four main means; Bakthi Yoga, Gnana Yoga, Karma Yoga and Prapatti.\n\n4. Prapya Swaroopam: What should be done after attaining the Lord's divine feet?\n\n5. Virodhi Swaroopam: The things like ego, ignorance, karma etc which prevent us from reaching the Lord by forcing us to take birth over and over again?\n\nSesha-Seshi Bhavam:\n\nIt is said that at Sri Rangam we can see the Lord as sarva seshi (The Supreme Master). Srirangam has the unique pranavakara vimanam under which Lord Ranganatha rests on Adisesha who is a sesha bhutan of the Lord. The Lord at this Divya Desam reveals to us that He is the Supreme Master. Most people misinterpret the word \"seshan\" to mean servant but, this word actually means the one who works to glorify the seshi or the one whose existence glorifies the seshi; Moola prakruthi is also a seshan for the Lord but, Moola prakruthi cannot be understood in the sense of a servant because it is insentient matter. Moola Prakruthi is a sesha because its existence glorifies the Lord. The relationship between seshi and seshan can be easily understood by examining the relationship between the body and the soul. When we praise someone for their physical /mental capabilities, it is evident that the body of the person is performing the physical/mental tasks but we praise the person (soul). The activities done by the body increases the glory of the soul. Through the thirty pasurams, Sri Andal Nachiar teaches us that we exist as the \"sesha bhutams\" of the Lord and because of the relationship of seshi-sesha, she teaches us the activities we must do to please our Lord. We should work to enhance the Lord's glory. She also shows us the best way to attain Him. There are four major paths for attaining salvation; Bakthi Yoga, Karma Yoga, Gnana Yoga and Prapatti. The first three paths cannot be followed by everyone. Sri Andal Nachiar hence reveals to us the path of prapatti which can be easily followed by everyone. She highlights the greatness of \"Hari Nama Sankeerthanam\" which will eventually bless us with the guidance of a good acharya who will help us to perform prapatti at the Divine feet of our Lord thus enabling us to escape samsara.\n\nThe Greatness Of The Day Selected For The Ritual:\n\nAccording to the Vedas, the day when we take our first step towards Perumal is described as the best day. Like Thirumazhisai Azhwar who sang \"andru naan pirandhilen pirandhapin marandhilen\"\n\nIn the following pasuram from Thiruchanda Vritham, Sri Thirumzhisai Azhwar speaks about the saulabhyam of Lord Sriman Narayanan.\n\nAzhwar says that the Lord exists in the Divya Desams to induce love for Him in the jeevatmas. The jeevatma truly takes birth when it is blessed with the right knowledge about the Lord. The birth of the right knowledge guides the jeevatma to perform devotional service with love. This birth of the knowledge leading to devotion arises in the jeevatma due to the unending efforts of the Lord. Until the jeevatma is blessed with this knowledge to perform devotional service, even if it exists it is equal to being non-existent.\n\nSri Andal Nachiar starts off by praising the day when they decided to perform the ritual to attain Lord Krishna as the best day, because, this was the day when they received the right knowledge and felt the need to perform devotional service to the Lord because of bagawath and acharya sambandham.\n\nThe Greatness Of The Month:\n\nAccording to the Vedas, a day when the sky is overcast is considered to be bad because it is mandatory for everyone to see the Sun before consuming food for that day. The speciality of the month of Margazhi is that during the nights, the moon is brilliant while during the daytime, the Sun is bright. The first people to see the Sun are the people of the Yadu clan as they wake up early to take their cattle for grazing; it is no wonder that Lord Krishna chose them as His companions! Lord Rama incarnated in the solar race while as Krishna He incarnated in the Lunar race. Even though He belonged to the lineage of the lunar dynasty, He chose the Yadus because they are early risers and spent His childhood in their company. The day He entered Gokulam was the day the Sun really rose in Gokulam. Likewise, the month of Margazhi is very special because, on this day when we take our first step to reach Him, the divine Sun called Krishna rises in our hearts. The presiding deity of this month is Kesavan. It is suggested that chanting the name Kesava before starting any new ventures, will lead to the successful completion of the venture. The month of Margazhi with the presiding deity as Kesavan is hence the best month to take our first step towards attaining Perumal.\n\nSri Ranganayaki Thayar - SriRangam\n\nThe most important thing required to attain Perumal is Goddess Mahalakshmi's blessings. The first Thiruppavai pasuram starts with \"Margazhi Thingal\" and the last pasuram ends with \"Madhavanai Kesavanai\". Both the first and the last verse of Thiruppavai have the syllable \"ma\". The syllable \"ma\" refers to our Supreme Mother , Goddess Mahalakshmi and invokes her blessings. Her cool glance destroys our sins and makes us eligible to attain Perumal. The month of Margazhi is hence special because it is the month which has the Supreme Grace of Goddess Mahalakshmi. Swami Namazhwar in the following verse from the Thiruvaimozhi tells us that the cool glance from the eyes of Goddess Mahalakshmi who is always seated on a lotus will destroy all our sins.\n\nShe is always present with our Lord and makes Him accept our prapatti. Swami Nammazhwar reveals the importance of performing prapatti at the Divine Feet Of the Divya Dampathis in the following Thiruvaimozhi Pasuram. Swami surrenders to Lor Srinivasa because He is never separated from Goddess Mahalakshmi. She is forever present on His vakshasthalam. The Supreme Being is identified as Lord Sriman Narayana because He has Goddess Mahalakshmi on His vakshasthalam. The Divine Mother has taken her seat next to the Lord's heart so that she can control Him in order to make Him accept our saranagathi.\n\nThe Controller Of The Sun And The Moon:\n\nThe Lord's eyes are compared to the Sun and the Moon in this pasuram. Hrishikesha is one of the names of the Lord. The usual meaning provided by many for \"Hrishikesha\" is, \"the one who controls our senses is Hrishikesha\" but \"Kesham\" also means \"effulgence\" in Sanskrit. Hence, \"Hrishikesha\" means the one who makes others happy by showering His effulgence on them. This name refers to the Lord giving His powers to the Sun and the Moon, thus, blessing us with Sunlight during the day and moonlight at night. This explanation is found in the Vishnusahasranama commentary by Sri Chinmayananda and by Sri P.Sankaranarayanan. This is also explained in the Vishnupuranam Puranam commentary by Sri Vishnu Chitta also known as Engal Azhwan; the verse is shown below.\n\n\u0915\u0947\u0936\u094c-\u0924\u0947\u091c\u0938\u0940 \u0915\u0903\u0906\u0924\u094d\u092e\u093e \u0924\u0938\u094d\u092e\u093f\u0928\u094d \u0936\u0947\u0924\u0947 \u0907\u0924\u093f \u0915\u0947\u0936\u0903\u0964\u092e\u094b\u0915\u094d\u0937\u0927\u0930\u094d\u092e\u0947 \u0915\u0947\u0936\u0935\u0928\u093e\u092e\u0928\u093f\u0930\u094d\u0935\u091a\u0928\u0947 \u0938\u0942\u0930\u094d\u092f\u0938\u094d\u092f \u0924\u092a\u0924\u094b \u0932\u094b\u0915\u093e\u0928\u0917\u094d\u0928\u0947\u0938\u094d\u0938\u094b\u092e\u0938\u094d\u092f \u091a\u0948\u0935 \u0939\u093f\u0964 \u0905\u0902\u0936\u0935\u094b \u092f\u0947 \u092a\u094d\u0930\u0915\u093e\u0936\u0928\u094d\u0924\u0947 \u092e\u092e \u0924\u0947 \u0915\u0947\u0936\u0938\u0902\u091c\u094d\u091e\u093f\u0924\u093e\u0903\u0964\u0964 \u0907\u0924\u093f\u0964\u0964)\n\nKesau-tejasi ka:atma tasmin shete iti kesa mokshadharma kesavanaamanirvachane\n\nSuryasya tapatho lokaanagressomasya chaiva hi Amsavo ye prakaasante mama te kesasamgnitha \u0964\u0964 iti \u0964\u0964\n\nSunlight is required for life to continue on Earth. Lack of Sunlight causes death and decay. Like the Sun, the Moon is also required for prosperity on Earth. The Moon is the deity in charge of plants and medicinal herbs on Earth. Without moonlight, the plants will not grow well. When the moon is worshipped through the yagam called Somasava, that community is blessed with good quality livestock. The Lord's eyes are like the Sun and the Moon because He is the supreme Controller (antaryami) of the Sun and the Moon. As their antaryami, it is the Lord who blesses us with the life-giving Sunlight and Moonlight. Hence, the day when Lord Krishna who incarnated in the Lunar Dynasty and is called as the Yadava Suryan is worshipped is the best day to start our endeavours to escape samsara. We truly take birth only when we worship the Lord. The days we spent when we never worshipped the Lord are not even counted in determining our age.\n\nTrue Age:\n\nThe following anecdote highlights the above point. Once there was a congregation of sages on the banks of the Ganges River. Among the Sages were present Sage Vasishta and his seven-year-old grandson Sage Parasara. After the congregation had started, they were joined by Sage Markandeya who had lived through seven kalpams. The moment Sage Markandeyar joined the group, he prostrated before Sage Parasarar.\n\nSage Parasarar felt embarrassed. He was just a child of seven and didn't understand why Sage Markandeyar paid obeisance to him. 'You have seen seven kalpams while I am only seven years old. Is it right for you to pay obeisance to me?'\n\n'Parasara, it was right for me to pay obeisance to you. All the sages who have gathered here will agree with me. Do you know how a person's age is calculated? The age is not dependent on the number of years they have lived but, the number of years they have spent in contemplation of Perumal. I may have lived for seven kalpams but, I spent only the last five years meditating upon Perumal while, ever since you took birth, your thoughts were occupied upon Perumal. In this manner, I am your junior!'\n\nThe Holy Dip:\n\nThe act of submerging oneself in contemplating about the auspicious qualities of Perumal is \"neeratam\". Goda called her friends to take a holy dip in the first pasuram but, there is no mention of the girls taking a dip in the Yamuna but, the last pasuram shows the completion of the ritual when they worship the Lord. Did they not take a holy dip? They took a holy dip in the last pasuram when they worshipped the Lord.\n\nThe Best Way:\n\nGoda said that \"margazhi thingal mathi niRaindha naal\". Margazhi should be interpreted as Margashirsha which when split into two words margam + shirsha refers to the best way. Through this pasuram, she teaches about the best way to attain our Lord. In the Bagawad Geetha, Lord Krishna has taught us the Karma, Gnana, bakthi and Prapatti margam. The best among these is Prapatti. Sri Andal Nachiar instructs us clearly that we must perform prapatti at the divine feet of Lord Narayanan because He is the only one who can truly save us from samsara. He is the only one who can grant us moksham. She didn't talk about the other paths which are not easy to follow but showed us the easiest/quickest path to attain Him.\n\nThe Guidance Of A Preceptor:\n\nIn order to obtain the right knowledge about the artha panchangam and to develop detachment from the material Universe, we have to seek the guidance of a good acharyan who will teach us the gem among manthrams called the \"astakshara manthram\". Andal Nachiar refers to the Astakshara manthram when she tells us that \"Narayanane namake parai tharuvaan\". The name Narayana hints to us the supreme qualities of the Astakshara Manthram. The manthram elevates us to Sri Vaikuntam by blessing us with the right knowledge. Thirumangai Azhwar started eulogising Perumal by singing prabandhams as soon as he received the upadesam of the astakshara manthram from Perumal. He tells us this in the 1st pasuram of Peria Thirumozhi given below.\n\nThe above pasuram also explains the characteristics of a sadacharyan. \"Neeratam\" refers to chanting Acharya Taniyan every day immediately after showering /bathing in the morning. While chanting the taniyan, the disciple must imagine that he/she is being purified by the Sripada teertham of the Acharyan. By becoming the disciple of a sadacharyan, the disciples become \"neriyazhir\"; the disciple wears the qualities of athma gunam as jewels. The disciples realise that they are the seshans of lord Narayana and that they exist to serve other Bagawathas. These good disciples are like the young girls of Thiruvayarpadi (Gokulam).\n\nAyarpadi refers to the place where people listen about the divine qualities of Lord Narayana with joy. They easily understand spiritual instructions. Thus, the residence of a good Acharyan is similar to Thiruvayarpadi. The disciples are addressed as \"sirmirgal\" to show that like a child they are devoid of ego.\n\nSamasrayanam:\n\n\"Kurvel Kodun Thozhilan\" refers to the Acharyan. \"Vel\" is a name used to denote any weapon and not just a spear. An Acharyan is shown to wield weapons and perform harsh acts. This is the literal meaning of the Pasuram but, it actually refers to the act of samasrayanam performed by an Acharyan when he brands his disciple with the marks of the Lord's conch and discus in order to destroy our sins by using the heated brands.\n\nIn the book Prapanna Parijatham, Swami Nadadoor Ammal mentions the use of five weapons to brand the disciples; the five weapons are the conch and the discus on the shoulders, the bow on the forehead, the sword on the chest and the mace on the stomach. This practice of branding existed even before the time period of Swami Ramanujar. The Vedas mention that those people who do not bear the marks of the Lord's weapons are not allowed to enter Sri Vaikuntham. Branding is similar to immunisation; we bear the discomfort of needles to gain protection similarly we should bear the discomfort of heat to destroy our sins. (When I underwent samasrayanam, it did not cause any discomfort when the heated brands were placed on my shoulders. I hardly felt them being placed.) The Lord accepts offerings only from those people who have had their Samasrayanam. This is indicated by the following incidents in Ramayana.\n\nGuha Perumal was a hunter. He offered honey, wild fruits and grains to the Lord when Lord Rama camped on the banks of the River Ganges. Lord Rama was very fond of Guhan and considered Guhan as His brother. Even though Guhan was a dear friend, the Lord refused to accept the offerings as Guhan did not have Acharya sambhandham. The Lord said that He was fasting that evening and asked Lakshmana to fetch water from the river. In the same Ramayana, the Lord met with Sabari who belonged to the class of hunters. He accepted the fruits offered by her because she had Acharya sambhandham and had undergone samasrayanam.\n\nBagawathas should follow the example of the Lord and should not accept food from people who do not have Acharya sambhandham. Once, Swami Nadadoor Ammal went on a pilgrimage to Tirumala with his disciples. On their way as they shared their food with another group of Sri Vaishnavas, they ran out of ration. They arrived at the foothills of Tirumala and started their trek on an empty stomach. The elderly and young children were feeling tired. At this same instant, curd rice was offered to Lord Srinivasa in a large silver vessel. As soon as the food was offered to the Lord, the vessel with the curd rice vanished. The temple authorities were perplexed at the mysterious disappearance of the vessel. At the foothills, a young Brahmachari approached Swami Nadadoor Ammal with the silver vessel full of curd rice and offered it to the group. Swami Nadadoor Ammal said that he would accept the food only if the Brahmachari could prove that he had undergone samasrayanam by chanting Acharya Taniyan. The young Brahmachari mentioned that His Acharyan was Swami Anathazhwan and proceeded to chant a beautiful taniyan. Satisfied with the Brahmachari's narration of the taniyan, Swami Nadadoor Ammal accepted the food. The Brahmachari requested swami Nadadoor Ammal to take the empty silver vessel to the temple stating that he had an errand to run in Lower Tirupathi.\n\nAs Swami Nadadoor Ammal and his disciples were making their way up to Tirupathi feeling well refreshed, the Lord of Tirumala spoke through the temple priest and asked swami Anathazhwan to receive the Sri Vaishnava goshti. Swami Anathazhwan made preparations in a hurry to receive Swami Nadadoor Ammal and wished that he had more time to make proper preparations. When the two swamis met, Swami Anathazhwan was surprised to see the silver vessel missing from the temple being returned to him by Swami Nadadoor Ammal. They came to realise that the Lord had carried the food to Swami Nadadoor Ammal as He couldn't bear to see Swami Nadadoor Ammal who always offered food to the Lord with the love of a mother go hungry. The Lord also wanted to accept Swami Anathazhwan as His Acharyan. Thus, the Lord fulfilled His wishes through this incident. The above incident shows us that Bagawathas do not accept food from people who do not have Acharya sambhandham. Even Lord Srinivasa was asked to prove that He had acharya sambhandham.\n\nCharacteristics Of A Sadacharyan:\n\nA good Acharyan always appears with a happy countenance. The Acharyan is referred to by the name of Nanda Gopan. He always appears young since he is constantly meditating upon the Lord. This is per the pasuram, \"muppu unnai sinthiparkillai Perumale!\"\n\nIn the above mudhal thiruvandhadhi pasuram, Sri Poigai Azhwar says that when the Lord is meditated upon, the dangerous karmas lose their hold on the jeevatma. The karmas are destroyed and as a result, those who constantly meditate upon Lord Sriman Narayanan do not suffer from the effect of old age and the path to the divine abode is revealed to them.\n\nMother Yashoda represents all the manthrams like Thirumanthram and Dwayam. Like a loving mother who guides us in life, the manthrams guide us to the proper route and reveal to us the divine qualities of Lord Narayana which cannot be easily seen.\n\nBy regularly chanting the manthrams instructed by our Acharyan, we shine with effulgence and appear like a young lion.\n\nLord Narayana is our Acharyan because He has come to us in the form of our Acharyan. Only Lord Narayana is the only one capable of granting us moksham.\n\nOur Acharyan is like a dark rain bearing cloud who rains upon us his instructions which are cool and refreshing. They never tell their disciples that the subject matter is beyond their level of understanding. The acharyans come down to the plane of the disciples and explain even hard to understand concepts in such a manner that the disciple retains the knowledge with ease. Swami Vedanta Desikan was approached by a prince who wished to learn the philosophy of Vishishtadvaitha but, was unable to participate in formal lectures due to lack of time. Swami Desikan accepted the prince's request and taught him the essence of the entire philosophy through the book called \"Tatva Sandesam\".\n\nThe Acharyan has kind honest eyes. He always blesses us and prays for our welfare. He shines with the effulgence of both the Sun and the Moon. To us, he appears cool and full of compassion like the Moon but, shines like the Sun while debating with people promoting a false religion.\n\nIf we are blessed with such a sadacharyan, we must perform the Tirunakshatra Utsavam every year without fail.\n\nAndal Nachiar finishes the pasuram by stating that for people like us \"namake\" Lord Narayanan will grant \"parai\" which is Moksham. By \"namake\" she refers to people like us who only seek Lord Narayana and do not ask for anything else from Him. It also refers to people like us who have been blessed with acharya sambhandham. Thus only Lord Narayana can grant us Moksham but, in order to obtain the boon of moksham from Him, we must have acharya sambandham. He is the means as well us the end.\n\nIn the 14th manthram ,3rd valli of the Katopanishad, Lord Yama instructs Nachiketas on the importance of having the guidance of a sadacharyan.\n\nLord Yama instructed Nachiketas on attaining salvation and in the above manthram, he not only addressed Nachiketas but, everyone who is interested in attaining salvation. He says, 'Those who wishes to be freed from the slumber called ignorance can do so by seeking the guidance of a preceptor. Only the guidance of a preceptor blesses the disciple with the right knowledge which will yield salvation.'\n\nIn the above verse, the word \"varan\" could be interpreted as a boon or as a guru. Per the context of the verse, the meaning intended by Lord Yama is a \"guru\". This is because a guru himself is a boon because he gives the disciple the boon called \"knowledge'. The knowledge about Brahmam is not very easy to grasp or follow. It is like the tip of a double-edged razor sharp sword; it is not easy to walk on this sword without the guidance of a preceptor.One wrong move and everything is lost. The guidance of a preceptor teaches us to turn a blind-eye to the external material stimuli which try to attract our senses and focus our mind and senses on the Lord.\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Pasuram 2\n\nThe first pasuram taught us about the means and the ultimate goal to be attained. In the second pasuram, we are instructed on what must be done by us and about the activities we must not perform in order to attain salvation. We are told to perform vaachika, manasika and kayika kaimkaryams i.e our words, mind and deeds should all focus upon Lord Narayana. Apart from these, we must refrain from performing the deeds prohibited by the shastras. They are as follows.\n\n  1. Akruthya karanam: causing mental/physical injury to others, eulogising human beings, speaking untruths and eating prohibited food items.\n  2. Kruthya karanam: Abandoning duties prescribed by the shastras like reciting slokas, performing sandhyavandhanam and fasting on Ekadashi.\n  3. Bagawath apacharam: worshipping other deities or equating them with lord Sriman Narayana, considering the incarnation of the Lord as Rama or Krishna as human births, analysing the metallurgy of the Lord's arcavatara Divya Mangala Vigraham, stealing temple wealth etc.\n  4. Bagawatha apacharam: Offending other devotees of the Lord.\n  5. Asahyapacharam: Unforgivable offences committed against the Lord and His devotees\n\nVaiyaththu Vaazhveergaal refers to the people who treat their Acharyan with gratitude as it was the Acharyan who helped them perform Saranagathi at the divine feet of Perumal.\n\nAs disciples, it is our duty to sponsor all the charitable causes supported by their Acharyan. We must try to be an ideal disciple and follow in the footsteps of Sri Ananthazhwan. A brief history of Sri Ananthazhwan is given below. It is impossible to think about Lord Srinivasa of Thiruvenkatam without thinking about Sri Ananthazhwan; a prominent acharya in the Sri Vaishnava Guru Parampara who was steeped in acharya bakthi that, he was considered to be another Madhurakavi Azhwar.\n\nThe gentle breeze from the Cauvery River filled the air with the divine fragrance of tulasi leaves and jasmine, the divine fragrance carried from the garland of Namperumal. The streets around the temple looked charming. The sweet smell of the agnihothram fire enhanced the serene atmosphere. Parrots and peacocks flocked to the surrounding orchards while spotted deer played in the orchards and woods. Pious men and women walked through the streets well decorated with beautiful rangoli with eagerness to attend the kalakshepam rendered by Swami Ramanujar. The kalakshepam hall was packed with eager disciples who concentrated on every word uttered by the great Acharya. They not only focus their mind on the words of their acharyan but, paid attention to the expression on Swami Ramanujar's face in order to understand the essence of the commentaries on the Thiruvaimozhi pasurams.\n\nSwami Ramanujar had started to explain the ten verses on Thiruvenkadam composed by Swami Namazhwar with the intention of seeking nithya kaimkaryam.\n\n'enthai thanthai thanthai* thanthai thanthaikkum munthai,* vaanavar* vaanavarkOnodum,* sinthupoo makizum* thiruvENG kadatthu,* antha milpugazk* kaarezil aNNalE. '\n\nWhile reciting the above pasurams, the disciples noticed tears flowing from Swami Ramanujar's eyes. They looked at one another trying to decipher the reason for the tears in the eyes of the great acharyan. Was it tears of joy or sorrow? Which line in the above verse provoked the Acharya to shed tears? The attentive disciples correctly determined that the line ,' sinthupoo makizum* thiruvENG kadatthu' had caused Swami Ramanujar to shed tears. They wished to know if Swami cried because he was feeling happy or because he was feeling depressed.\n\n'We wish to know the reason for the tears in your eyes while reciting the line \"sinthupoo makizum thiruveng kadatthu\" '\n\n'I feel dejected at the thought of the flowers growing on the Thiruvenkatam hills which fall to the ground because there is no one there who is dedicated to gathering the flowers and offering them to the Lord of Thiruvenkatam. Is there anyone amongst you who is willing to go to Thiruvenkatam and do pushpa kaimkaryam to the Lord of the Seven Hills?'\n\nThe disciples looked at one another. They understood the need for someone to do service to the Lord of Tirumala. In the time period of Swami Ramanujar, it wasn't an easy task to travel to Thiruvenkatam. The roads were treacherous, crawling with fierce thieves and wildlife. Some disciples refrained from volunteering as they were worried about living in a remote area quite far from civilisation. Others felt distressed even at the thought of leaving Sri Rangam. They felt great love for Lord Ranganatha and couldn't bear the thought of not being able to worship Namperumal every day. The disciples who were very close to Swami Ramanujar felt distressed at the thought of leaving their acharyan. They would even give up Lord Ranganatha but, they couldn't even think about staying away from their dear acharyan. While the disciples were fidgeting and trying to avoid looking at their acharyan lest they should be nominated by him, Sri Ananta Suri got up, walked towards Swami Ramanujar, paid his obeisance and said, 'if it would please you, I wish to go to Thiruvenkatam and offer pushpa kaimkaryam to Lord Srinivasa.' His words struck wonder at the hearts of everyone who had gathered there.\n\n'You are Ananthan Pillai!' Swami Ramanujar exclaimed as he embraced Sri Ananta Suri. From that moment, Sri Ananta Suri came to be known as Ananthan Pillai or Ananthazhwan. 'You are the only one in this assembly who is courageous enough to undertake this task.'\n\n'When do you plan to leave?' Asked a disciple.\n\n'Immediately, with the permission of our acharyan.'\n\n'Don't start immediately,' advised another. 'Wait till your wife gives birth as she is not in a condition to undertake a trek to Thiruvenkatam.'\n\n'What you say is true but, it would be much difficult to travel with an infant and we shouldn't put off following the command of our acharyan for even a second. I will start to Thiruvenkatam immediately with my wife.'\n\nThus, without wavering, for even a second, Sri Ananthazhwan left behind the beautiful island town of SriRangam which hosted the blue sapphire called Ranganatha. He volunteered to leave his acharyan behind in order to put his acharyan's mind at peace by offering service to Lord Srinivasa. The couple trekked to Thiruvenkatam with joy. After all, they had been given a chance to serve their acharyan. They soon arrived at Thiruvenkatam.\n\nThey gathered flowers from the surrounding hills and Sri Ananthazhwan tied them into a beautiful garland for Lord Srinivasa. He had a beautiful garden constructed close to the temple. The seedlings grew very fast nourished by Sri Ananthazhwan. He raised flowers in neat rows. He spent his mornings gathering the flowers with great care and by tying them into huge flower garlands with the help of strings taken from the banana tree. One day, it occurred to Sri Ananthazhwan that the trees would stop flowering once the rainy season comes to an end. He felt concerned at the thought that after a few months with no rain, there wouldn't be any flowers to offer to the Lord. He decided to construct lakes and pond to store the rain water for his garden. The water from the artificial lake would be sufficient to water the garden to nourish the flowering plants. It was one thing to make plans about digging a lake and totally another to actually carry out the plan. With no help available, Sri Ananthazhwan himself had to dig the lake while his wife volunteered to carry the excavated dirt in baskets to be dumped at a far off site.\n\n'Let me participate in this service to our acharyan too,' she requested.\n\n'It is back-breaking work and not suitable for women in your condition.'\n\n'We are working to serve our acharyan. When this is the reason for working hard, through the blessings of our acharyan, my health will not be affected. Fill smaller baskets with the excavated earth and I will haul it away.'\n\nLord Srinivasa watched with joy the services the couple were performing to support their acharyan's wish to perform pushpa kaimkaryam. He looked with compassion at the wife of Sri Ananthazhwan who was pregnant and in no condition to haul the dirt away from the excavated lake. The compassionate Lord Srinivasa decided to help the couple by taking part in the kaimkaryam which was being carried out with the intention of pleasing Swami Ramanujar.\n\nSri Ananthazhwan filled a basket with excavated earth and passed the basket to his wife. Sri Ananthazhwan's wife started to walk with the basket to the site which had been selected by them for dumping the earth. It was quite far from their garden. She had to walk along the weather-beaten pathways that wound through the hills. As she turned a corner, she heard someone who asked her to stop. As she turned around, she saw a hunter. He looked as dark as the rain-bearing clouds. He had decorated His coiffure with peacock feathers. He carried a bow with a quiver bag for His arrows. On His waist belt hung a conch and a sword.\n\n'You shouldn't carry such heavy load in your condition. I have been watching you. I know where to dump the earth.' Without waiting for her response, He snatched the basket from her and ran towards the dump site.\n\nAnanthazhwan's wife returned to the excavation site.\n\n'You have returned very soon. Did you dump the earth in the location I showed you or did you dump it somewhere nearby?'\n\n'I didn't get a chance to go to the site. A hunter snatched the basket from me saying that, I shouldn't be working in my condition and ran away towards the dump site. I didn't have the strength to stop Him. He has interrupted the service I was performing!'\n\n'I will deal with the hunter,' said Sri Ananthazhwan as he tossed his spade down. 'Let us go and find Him.'\n\n'There He is,' showed Sri Ananthazhwan's wife.\n\nThey saw the hunter walk towards them with the empty basket.\n\n'Why did you snatch the basket from this lady?' questioned Sri Ananthazhwan. 'Don't you know it's wrong to prevent people from serving the Lord?'\n\n'I do not know anything about your rules. All I know is that it is not right to let a woman in her condition do such laborious task.'\n\n'What do you know about us?' thundered Sri Ananthazhwan. 'Don't pretend to be compassionate and hinder the service we are performing for the Lord. I command you to leave us alone. If you further thwart our work, I will hit you with my spade!'\n\nThe hunter hurried away without arguing with Sri Ananthazhwan.\n\n'He won't hamper you anymore. I have filled another basket for you to carry.'\n\nSri Ananthazhwan's wife carried the second basket and walked slowly towards the dump site. As she neared the same corner where she had met the hunter earlier, she was startled by Him as He once again grabbed the basket from her without giving her a chance to speak. She once again returned and complained to Sri Ananthazhwan.\n\n'Is He still troubling you?' roared Sri Ananthazhwan. 'I will teach Him a lesson.' So saying, he grabbed his spade and went in search of the hunter.\n\nHe soon came across the hunter along the forest path. 'Didn't I warn you to leave us alone? How dare you show your face here again!'\n\nThe hunter did not wait to reply. He threw down the basket and started to run towards the temple with Sri Ananthazhwan pursuing Him through the jungle path. They soon arrived at the temple premises. The hunter started running around the temple. Unable to keep up with the hunter, Sri Ananthazhwan threw his spade at the hunter with the intention of stopping him but, the spade hit the hunter on His jaw. The hunter rubbed His jaw as He ran away without stopping to look at Sri Ananthazhwan. The hunter turned a corner and vanished from view. He was nowhere to be seen. Sri Ananthazhwan gave up his pursuit and returned to his wife. 'The hunter won't trouble us any more.'\n\nHe looked at the Sun and realised that the excavation had to wait until the next day since he had to tie the flowers he had gathered from the garden for Lord Srinivasa. Lord Srinivasa, who had appeared in the form of a hunter before Sri Ananthazhwan, wished to reveal His leelai to Sri Ananthazhwan. He commanded a Sri Vaishnava at the temple to bring Sri Ananthazhwan with him to the sanctum. The Sri Vaishnava found Sri Ananthazhwan in his garden tying flowers. He paid his obeisance to Sri Ananthazhwan and conveyed the Lord's message. He expected Sri Ananthazhwan to start with him to the temple immediately, but, to his surprise, Sri Ananthazhwan refused to come.\n\n'I have to tie these flowers for the Lord. If I delay, they will wilt before they can be offered to the Lord. Please let Perumal know that I will see Him when I come with the flower garland.'\n\nThe messenger stood speechless. He looked at the mound of flowers which by themselves resembled a hill. 'How long will it take to tie these flowers?' wondered the messenger. He did not know of anyone who refused to obey the lord's command. The messenger returned to the temple and conveyed that Sri Ananthazhwan would only pay the Lord a visit after he had tied together all the flowers into a garland.\n\n'Go tell Him that, the flowers can wait. I do not care if they wilt. Tell him that I command him to appear before me immediately!'\n\nWhen the messenger mentioned that the Lord didn't care even if the flowers wilted, the image of Swami Ramanujar with tears in his eyes while reciting \"sinthupoo makizum* thiruvENG kadatthu\" flashed through the mind of Sri Ananthazhwan.\n\n'I have already told you once that I cannot abandon my pushpa kaimkaryam. Let the Lord know that, I cannot come before Him now!' replied Sri Ananthazhwan to the perplexed messenger.\n\nOnce again the messenger carried Sri Ananthazhwan's refusal to Lord Srinivasa. Perumal feigned anger and responded heatedly. 'Ask him for whom is he tying the garland? If he doesn't come this instant, tell him that, I will not accept his garland!'\n\n'Tell Lord Srinivasa that I do not care if He accepts my garland or not. It is my duty to tie the garland and I will not neglect my duty!'\n\nThe Lord once again responded angrily. 'Ask him, to please whom is he tying the garland?'\n\n'I am only tying this garland to please my acharyan Swami Ramanujar!'\n\nThe messenger once again brought Lord Srinivasa's message in reply to Sri Ananthazhwan's. 'The lord doesn't want you to stay at Thiruvenkatam for even a second; since you do not obey His divine command.'\n\nTo the messenger's surprise, Sri Ananthazhwan remained cool and composed. 'tell the Lord that He too is a visitor to these hills like me. He has come here a few thousand years ago from Vaikuntam while I have come here recently. This makes both of us visitors to this hill which means that He doesn't have the right to evict me. Moreover, I came here to serve my acharyan. Unless my acharyan asks me to return, I will not leave these hills, even if it is the will of the Lord to send me away!'\n\nLord Srinivasa smiled when He heard Sri Ananthazhwan's reply. He felt very happy to witness Sri Ananthazhwan's acharya bakthi and his perseverance to perform floral service to the Lord as per the wish of Swami Ramanujar. He waited eagerly to see Sri Ananthazhwan. After tying the garlands, Sri Ananthazhwan walked to the temple carrying the garlands in a basket on his head.\n\n'The Lord will be very angry with me,' he thought. 'It is better that I do not meet the Lord's eyes today. I should give Him a chance to cool down.'\n\nSri Ananthazhwan entered the sanctum, but, without even looking at Lord Srinivasa, he left the basket at the Lord's feet and turned to go.\n\n'Don't you wish to see me wear your garland?'\n\nSri Ananthazhwan turned around when he heard the divine voice and to his shock, saw a gash on the Lord's jaw.\n\n'I wished to show you that I had appeared before you as the hunter.'\n\nSri Ananthazhwan felt horrified when he realised that he had hit the Lord with a spade. 'I can get a doctor to cure human beings whose bodies are Prakruthik in nature, but, how can I find a cure to heal your aprakruthik Divya Managala Vigraham? Oh! What have I done! I came here to please my acharyan by serving you but, alas! I have instead hurt you! What will I tell my acharyan?'\n\nLord Srinivasa consoled Sri Ananthazhwan. He asked for a paste made out of the foot dust of His devotees to be applied on His chin to heal the wound. To this day, this paste is offered to devotees and is called \"Sripada Renu\".\n\nThe great Acharya won the heart of Perumal with his Acharya bakthi. He was definitely another Madurakavi Azhwar and surprisingly, he also shared the same birthday as Sri Madurakavi Azhwar. He led his life in such a way that every act he performed, taught us the importance of Acharya bakthi and Bagawatha paratantriyam.\n\nComing back to Thiruppavai, a sadacharyan will never expect any money from us as he doesn't seek material wealth but, we should aim to sponsor the causes supported by our acharyan. By the young age of twenty, Swami Desikan had mastered all the shastras. At the age of 21, Swami was married and practised the duties prescribed for a householder. He led a simple life detached from material comforts. He lived by \"Uncha Vritti\" seeking alms of grains. Even when he was invited by his friend Sri Vidhyaranya Swami to accept a scholarly position in the court of Vijayanagara, Swami refused as he wanted to stay away from material benefits. Swami wrote the famous slokam called \"Vairagya Panchakam\" in reply. In the fifth sloka, swami concluded by saying that he hasn't accumulated wealth in his life and nor has his father left him a large estate but, he is in possession of the Supreme Wealth handed over to him by his great great great great grandfather Lord Brahma. This wealth is Lord Varadaraja who is keeping vigil on top of the Hasthigiri Hill.\n\nThere are many anecdotes from Swami's life which illuminate his excellent qualities. Once, while seeking alms, a person dropped a few gold coins into Swami's pot when Swami wasn't looking so as to help him. Swami's wife found the coins while washing the rice and brought them to Swami. He threw the coins away saying that they were just worms.\n\nSwami composed Sri Stuti at the sanctum of Sri Perundevi thayar in Kanchipuram to help a poor bachelor gain enough wealth to get married and start a family. In the time period of Swami Desikan, the bridegroom had to pay a dowry to the bride's father. This was because, the girls were revered as Goddess Mahalakshmi and since, after the wedding, the girls would leave their parent's home, the bridegroom compensated for taking away the \"Goddess\" with a dowry. When Swami finished composing Sri Stuti, gold coins rained down from the temple roof. The bachelor helped himself to the coins and he was very surprised when Swami wouldn't even take a single coin for himself!\n\nWe are forever indebted to our acharyan for guiding us along the right path; we shall never be able to repay their kindness. It is impossible to donate funds in proportion to the guidance received from our Acharyan; we can do so only if there are another Vaikuntham and another Narayanan in existence. As our Acharyan showed us the way to Vaikuntham, if we want to return the favour, we can do so only if are able to show him the way to another Vaikuntham. As this is not possible since there is only one Vaikuntham, we are forever indebted to our Acharyan. Even Lord Krishna Himself cannot repay an Acharyan. The people live with the feeling of indebtedness and gratitude for their Acharyan are referred to as \"Vaiyaththu Vaazhveergaal\". These people who think about their Acharyan with devotion and gratitude will be blessed with the wealth of knowledge.\n\nNaamum nam paavaikku seyyum kirisaigal keliro\n\n\"Pavai\" refers to our Acharyan who is the \"Prathyaksha Deivam\"(God appearing in person). Andal Nachiar asks her friends to listen to her instructions about the kaimkaryams we should do for our Acharyan.\n\nPaarkadalul paiya thuyinra Paramanadi paadi\n\nTo please our Acharyan we should sing the glories of the Lord resting in Thiruparkadal. Our acharyan can also be referred to as the Lord resting in Thiruparkadal. Sheerabdhi or Thiruparkadal refers to the divine qualities of Perumal. Our Acharyans find solace in Perumal's divine qualities/ attributes and therefore take rest under the shade of His lotus like feet. Our Acharyans find nourishment in speaking about the qualities of Perumal and spend their time contemplating about the divine qualities of Perumal. As a result, they do not worry about the samsaric life. Therefore our Acharyan is the Lord who rests on the milky ocean of Thiruparkadal. Serving such an acharyan is superior to even the experiences obtained in Sri Vaikuntam.\n\nNeyyunnom paalunnom naatkale neeradi\n\nWhile following the ritual, we are required to fast. We shouldn't consume rich food like ghee and milk. Consuming milk has the following secret meaning.\n\n\"Pal\" in Tamil is the name for milk but, it also refers to gender as well as the body. Paalunnom refers to books or other media which promote our interest in bodily pleasures. We should refrain from paying attention to this type of media. We should desist from seeking materialistic desires called \"sirrinbam\" temporary pleasures in Tamil and only contemplate on Perumal who is \"perinbham\" i.e perpetual bliss. We should not seek any objects which fuel our materialistic desires like spending money on beauty products.\n\nGhee is hidden inside milk and is obtained after making curd from milk, obtaining butter from curd and finally by melting butter. The ghee in milk is not easily seen. Similarly, our atma is hidden inside our body called milk. We should not waste time contemplating on our atma which yields only kaivalyam. Kaivalyam is equal to death to the atma as there is neither joy nor sorrow.When people start to focus their mind inwards on the atma which is different from their body, they start to appreciate the greatness of the atma and they realise that it is the epitome of gnanam. At this stage, they fail to realise that the Atma may be eternal but simply meditating upon our atma will not give us everlasting bliss. The state attained where a person is engrossed in experiencing his/her own atma is called as kaivalyam. When we attain salvation, we experience our Lord and He bestows upon us eight auspicious qualities so that we may experience the Supreme Bliss; in contrast, when a person attains the state of kaivalyam, the senses become dormant. Due to the dormancy of the senses, we won't be able to experience anything other than the atma in kaivalyam. Even the atma is not experienced to the full extent. The enjoyment is incomplete and this state is temporary. Even if punyam and papams are destroyed when a person attains kaivalyam, they still carry the karma vasanai (memory imprint) which ties them to samsara.\n\nThe following anecdote explains the concept of kaivalyam. A man started from his village to attend a wedding. While travelling, he dreamt about the five-course wedding dinner. He had to pass through a desert in order to reach his relative's village. He started to feel exhausted travelling through the desert which seemed endless. To his relief, he arrived at an oasis in the middle of the desert. He freshened up at the oasis and decided to stay there permanently enjoying the palm fruits. He forgot about the wedding. Instead of proceeding on his journey, at the end of which he would have been treated to a delicious five-course meal, he decided to stay at the oasis. Kaivalyam is like the oasis which prevents us from reaching our target.\n\nHence, drinking milk refers to worldly pursuit while consuming ghee refers to the difficult to attain and yet the impermanent state of kaivalyam where we experience our self. Both bodily pursuits and the pursuit to attain kaivalyam must be avoided. Only people who are pure can contemplate on their atma; to make themselves pure, they meditate on Perumal using Him as Panchagavyam but they don't realise that meditating upon Perumal is tastier and also has a purifying effect!\n\nNaatkale refers to dawn. Esoterically, daytime refers to Sri Vaikuntham, night refers to samsara and dawn refers to the time spent listening to the instructions provided by a sadacharyan. Neeradi refers to chanting Acharya taniyan with devotion.\n\nMaiyittu ezhudom malarittu naam mudiyom\n\nUndertaking severe penance to follow gnana yoga in order to reach Sri Vaikuntham is referred to as Maiyittu ezhudom. As this is not possible for us to do, we should not follow these practices. malarittu naam mudiyom tells us that it is not possible for us to reach Sri Vaikuntham by following bakthi or karma yogam. We have to stay steadfast in our belief that the saranagathi performed by our Acharyan will yield us moksham.\n\nSeyyadhana seyyom\n\nWe should not practice those things which were not followed by our Acharyans and by our ancestors like worshipping other deities. We should do all activities to please the Lord and should not expect any benefits in return.\n\nthhekuRalai chenRodhom\n\nWe should not speak ill of other devotees as doing so will cancel our saranagathi. We should not worship anyone other than our Lord Sriman Narayanan as the Supreme Deity. Worshipping other deities or mistreating Bagawathas cancels our saranagathi.\n\nAiyamum pichchaiyum aandhanaiyum kai kaatti.\n\nWe should share our Acharya's instructions with the people who approach us to gain a share of the knowledge.\n\nUyyumarrenni ugandhelor empaavai\n\nWe should spend time chanting/contemplating on the Dwayam manthram after receiving mantropadesam from our Acharyan. The Dwayam manthram is referred to as 6 in \"uyyumaru\" because it has six padams. We should stay happy and contented after learning the Dwaya manthram because there isn't anything else other than the Dwayam manthram which could make us happier. Dwayam is given a high status as it was first obtained by Piratti from Perumal at Thiruparkadal. This meaning is also indicated by \"Paarkadalul paiya thuyinra paramanadi padi\". Paraman means the Supreme Being but it also means \"Para Ma yasya saha Parama\" and refers to lord Sriman Narayanan who is identified as the Supreme being because He is never separated from the Divine Mother, Goddess Mahalakshmi. Thus, Dwayam has to be chanted by meditating on the Lord in the company of Piratti.\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Pasuram 3\n\nSwami Vedanta Desikan\n\nOngi ulagaLandha uththaman pEr paadi\n\nnaangaL nam paavaikku(ch) chaatri neeraadinaal\n\nShastras are called as \"ulagam\". Thus the above lines speak about the glories of our Acharyans. The first line states that our Acharyans are \"uttamans\" because they spend the time to analyse the shastras before instructing us. Even though our acharyans are superior to Perumal, they are easily accessible to us. They state with great conviction the correct summary of the Shastras in debates. Lokam in Sanskrit is the name for that which is used to see things. Pramanam is knowledge while prameyam is that which is known; for example, biology is a body of knowledge which helps us to learn about life-forms, biology is pramanam and life-forms are prameyam. To perceive any object in this universe, we need tools which help us to see the objects. Our eye is a tool which aids us to see the objects around us. To see microscopic forms we need a microscope while a telescope helps us to see the distant objects like the stars. We also use inference to learn about objects. When we see smoke, we infer that fire must be present. How do we learn about the Supreme Brahmam? Can we perceive Him or can we know Him through inference? Neither perception nor inference can help us to know God. Then how do we learn about him? The tools used to know Brahmam are called as shastras. Since we use Shastras to see the things which cannot be seen normally, Shastras are called as lokams. The Tamil translation of Lokam is Ulagam. \"Ongi ulagaLandha\" praises our acharyans who study the shastras in depth and teach us about God. From this Sanskrit word, Lokam with its root Lok originated the English word \"look\". There is nothing greater than singing the praise of one's Acharyan. Madurakavi Azhwar did this when he sang Kanninum Siruthambu to sing the glories of Swami Nammazhwar. If we lead our life in singing the praise of our Acharyan with devotion then we shall be blessed with the following.\n\ntheenginRi naadellaam thingaL mum maari peydhu\n\nThe Acharyans give us knowledge which is referred to as rain in the above line. They lead us along the right way and if everyone living in a country gets access to the teachings of a good acharyan then, the country will be free from violence and everyone will be a law abiding citizen.\n\nPillai-Pillai Azhwan was a disciple of Sri Kurathazhwan (Kuresa). He often argued with other devotees and cursed them. Sri Kurathazhwan felt sorry that his disciple regularly committed Bagawatha Apacharam. He decided to correct his disciple and one day asked Sri Pilla-Pillai Azhwan if he would give him a donation. Sri Pillai-Pillai Azhwan was overjoyed to have obtained an opportunity to serve his acharyan.\n\n'Promise me that you will not speak ill of other devotees and not even curse them in your mind. This is the donation I seek from you.'\n\nSri Pillai-Pillai Azhwan promised but, one day, out of habit, he thought ill of another devotee. He immediately realised his mistake and felt that he didn't deserve to be the disciple of Sri Kurathazhwan. When he didn't go to the class, Sri Kurathazhwan went in search of Sri Pillai-Pillai Azhwan and when he found the reason for Sri Pillai-Pillai Azhwan's absence from the class, Sri Kurathazhwan told him that because he had immediately realised his mistake, he was definitely on the right path and asked him to return to class.\n\nThose who do not have an acharyan face the danger of mistaking one's body as the atma thus leading to recurring samsaric births but, the association with a sadacharyan removes this danger. There will be no room for discrimination as the people will learn to treat everyone equally. \"mum maari peydhu\" refers to obtaining mantropadesam along with meaning for the three main manthrams known as rahasyathrayam (Thirumanthram, Dwayam and Charama Slokam). Meditating upon these three manthrams, not only brings us prosperity but also grants us salvation.\n\nOngu peRum senN nel oodu kayalugaLa(p)\n\nThe rain of rahasyatrayam leads to the growth of good seedlings which are the people who seek refuge under the Lord's divine feet. Lord Narayanan is like a farmer who keeps sowing new crops every year without fail even if the crops were destroyed by heavy rains in the previous year. Like this, Perumal keeps on trying to raise good crops (us) who will seek refuge under His feet. He keeps creating this Universe even when the previous creation fails to yield Him good result. With the grace of a good acharyan, good crops are raised to please Perumal. Fish always stays wet similarly Perumal's eyes are always wet as they are filled with compassion for us. Perumal will look at us who are the beautiful crop with His compassionate glance since we have acharya sambhandham. His compassionate grace nourishes us.\n\npoonguvaLai(p) pOdhil poRi vandu kaN paduppa(th)\n\nAcharyan's blessings will make Perumal referred to as \" poRi vandu\" the \"golden bee\" to rest in our heart happily. The heart is often called as Hrdayathamarai or the \"heart-lotus\". This line speaks about realising the Perumal as our antaryami. We are able to realise our antaryami because we have acharya sambandham.\n\nthEngaadhE pukkirundhu seerththa mulai patri\n\nvaanga kudam niRaikkum vaLLal perum pasukkaL\n\nMany acharyans frequently incarnate in this world to shower the milk of knowledge on all of us even if we do not seek knowledge from them. The acharyans are called as \"vaLLals\" because they always speak about the divine qualities of Perumal. VaLLals usually refer to philanthropists who live to donate to the needy. Acharyans are vaLLals because they live to bestow the knowledge about Perumal's qualities. They fill our heart and mind with images of Perumal. They bring the Perumal who is in Sri Vaikuntham to come and reside in our minds. Thus they are vaLLal. It is impossible to put a price on the wealth they have given us; therefore we can never match the wealth provided by them, with our sambhavanai (fees).\n\nneengaadha selvam niRaindhElOr empaavaai\n\nThrough the grace of our acharyans, we will gain intelligence. Intelligence obtained by receiving the right knowledge is the supreme wealth as it can never be destroyed or stolen. Even if we exchange our knowledge with someone else it will only grow in size and never diminish. In order to clear the doubts of other people, we will be forced to refer to more books thus increasing our wealth of knowledge. A person who has this permanent wealth would have obtained the wealth of \"Kaimkarya Sri\" and will dedicate his/her life to perform Bagawath/Bagawatha kaimkaryams.\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Pasuram 4\n\nSwami Nadadoor Ammal Blessing Child Desikan\n\nAazhi mazhai(k) kaNNaa onRu nee kai karavEl\n\nArjuna recited the following slokam when he requested Lord Krishna to instruct the Bagawad Gita.\n\nkarpanya-doshopahata-svabhavah\n\nprcchami tvam dharma-sammudha-cetah\n\nyac chreyah syan niscitam bruhi tan me\n\nBagawad Gitaverse-02-07\n\nThis Slokam is chanted by Sri Vaishnavas while requesting an Acharyan to accept him/her as a disciple and perform samasrayanam. The slokam has to be adjusted for the word \"sishyaha\" as it is in masculine gender by women. This fourth pasuram was composed by Andal Nachiar for us to use in place of the difficult Sanskrit slokam to request an Acharyan to accept us as his disciple. The pasuram also speaks about the characteristics of a good Acharyan.\n\nAn Acharyan's eyes should be wet with happiness when we serve Perumal. His eyes should also be wet when he notices that we do not strive to attain Perumal's divine feet. The Acharyan should provide good instructions even if the disciple doesn't have the mentality to accept good instruction. The Acharyan should correct the errors made by the disciple.\n\naazhi uL pukku mugandhu kodu aarthu Eri\n\nSwami Ramanujar said that 'Swami Alavandar is an ocean of nectar. I dip in this ocean and obtain the best gems to give to my disciples.'\n\nThis means that the acharyan should study the granthams written by the poorvacharyas, understand the concepts and state with great conviction those instructions to his disciples.\n\noozhi mudhalvan uruvam pOl mey kaRuththu(p)\n\nWhile listening to the lectures of our acharyan we feel as if we are in the presence of Perumal Himself. To reach Moksham one must follow the words of an acharyan. Even if an acharyan made a light passing remark, it must be accepted by the disciple. The following anecdote from the Sri Vaishnava Guru Paramparai illustrates this.\n\nSri Nathamuni used to say the following words to his disciples.\n\n'Kulapadiyil mazhai peithal kuruvi kudithu pom\n\nVeeranathil mazhai peithal nadellam vilayum'.\n\nThe meaning of the above verse is, ' If it rains in the impression made on the ground by a horseshoe only a sparrow can quench its thirst but if it rains in Lake Veeranam, the entire country will flourish.\"\n\nThe disciples did not understand the purport of the above verse but they guarded the saying carefully and passed it on to their disciples. Nathamuni's disciple Uyyakondar memorised the verse and passed it to his disciple Manakal Nambi who in turn passed it to Alavandar. Peria Nambi learnt the verse from Alavandar and he taught it to Swami Ramanuja. Swami Ramanuja felt that the verse must have a deeper meaning. He decided to visit Lake Veeranam where he found that there were 74 canals feeding the surrounding fields with water from the lake. Hence, whenever it rained in the Veeranam catchment area all the surrounding area were fed by the rain waters making the region prosperous. Swami Ramanuja immediately understood that he must spread the Sri Vaishnava Philosophy in such a way that a maximum number of people are benefitted. He, therefore, established 74 Simhasanathipadis to spread the teachings of his acharyans.\n\npaazhii am thOLudai(p) paRpanaaban kaiyil\n\nOf the twelve names of Perumal chanted daily while wearing the thiruman, the eleventh name is Padmanaban and the twelfth is Damodaran. Padmanaban denotes the superiority of Perumal; this name reveals Him as the creator of Lord Brahma and Lord Siva. Lord Brahma appeared on the lotus that appeared from the navel of Lord Padmanaban and Lord Brahma, in turn, created Lord Shiva; thus, as Padmanaba, Perumal shows us that He is the chief of both Brahma and Shiva.\n\nLord Krishna incarnated as the son of Devaki and Vasudeva. He appeared with His consort even though He incarnated as a child. Devaki and Vasudeva obtained Goddess Sridevi as their daughter-in-law on the same night! Parents await the birth of their grandchild after their son has been married. Devaki and Vasudeva did not have to wait for a long time because on the Lord's lotus-like navel they found His son Brahma sitting on a lotus bloom chanting the Vedas! To describe the child Brahma on the Lord's navel, Sukacharyar used the word balakam in the slokam \"Tam adbhutam Balakam\" in Srimad Bagawatam. The word \"Ka\" is used to denote Brahma. Sukacharyar could have used \"Balan\" to depict the divine child but he specifically used the word \"Balakam\" to draw our attention to Lord Brahma present in the navel of the Divine Child. Both the words \"bala\" as well as \"balakam\" mean child. The word \"balakam\" is used in the sloka to let us know about the divine child who appeared with \"ka\"! His name Damodaran, on the other hand, reveals His simplicity and ease of accessibility; this quality is called as saulabhyam in Sanskrit.\n\nAs a child, Krishna was bound to a mortar by Yashoda. Yashoda did not tie Krishna but Krishna allowed himself to be tied to the mortar. If he had wished to remain untied, she could have never accomplished this feat. His glory increased because he let himself to be tied by Yashoda; His coming down to our world is similar to heads of states interacting with common people to gain popularity, the only difference is that Paramatma is not looking to gain popularity. He has only our interest in his heart and works to help us. After Krishna brought down the two Yamalarjuna trees with the mortar He was tied to, Yashoda inspected Krishna to make sure He wasn't hurt by the falling trees. 'How did you manage to drag the mortar? She questioned Him.\n\nShe looked at His waist and was shocked. She hadn't tied the rope tightly but somehow the rope had scarred Krishna's waist. His smooth waist now displayed the rope marks. Krishna sported the rope marks with pride to show us the ease with which we can approach Him and even bind Him if only we felt an ounce of love Yashoda had for Him.\n\nOur acharyans contemplate on both the names of Perumal. They know about Perumal's superiority and this understanding of His Supreme Nature makes them appreciate the ease with which as Damodara, Lord Krishna allowed Himself to be tied to the mortar.\n\nSwami Nammazhwar taught about the auspicious qualities of Lord Sriman Narayana to his disciple Sri Madurakavi Azhwar. The first ten pasurams in Thiruvaimozhi highlight the Superior nature of Perumal which shows that His swaroopam is beyond the grasp of our senses but He allows us to see Him when we are devoted to Him. He makes Himself easily accessible to us. To describe the supreme quality of sousheelyam, Sri Nammazhwar recited the following pasuram enjoying the scene when Lord Krishna allowed Himself to be tied to the mortar by Yashoda. Swami Nammazhwar was overcome by Perumal's saulabhyam and he fainted for six months! He was able to appreciate the quality of saulabhyam because he understood the Supreme Nature of Perumal!\n\naazhi pOl minni valamburi pOl ninRu adhirndhu\n\nAn Acharyan shines with the effulgence of the Sudarasana Chakra and sounds like the Conch Panchajanyam while establishing the paratvam(superiority) of Perumal in debates. At around the age of five, Swami Desikan wished to accompany his uncle Sri Apullar to attend the kalakshepam of Sri Nadadur Ammal. Sri Apullar arrived at the venue with Swami Desikan after the kalakshepam had started. Sri Nadadur Ammal paused to inquire about the child. After a few minutes when he had to continue with the kalakshepam he couldn't recall the verse he should continue with. None of the other devotees gathered there could recall the verse either and to everyone's amazement, child Desikan mentioned the last verse Sri Nadadur Ammal had uttered before taking a break. Sri Nadadur Ammal placed child Desikan on his lap and blessed the child proclaiming that he will be a great Vedanthacharya. Sri Nadadur Ammal blessed him saying that 'Pratishtapita Vedanta Prati- Kshipta Bahir Mathaa Bhooyaah Traividyaa Maanyas Tvam Bhoori Kalyaana Bhaajanam'. The above verse meant that Swami Desikan would establish the Vedanta Shastras, remove the doubts sown by atheists and people trying to twist the meaning of the Vedas and that Swami Desikan would be revered by the Vedic Scholars who have learnt the three Vedas.\n\nWhen Swami Ramanuja was in Karnataka, King Bittideva converted from Jainism and became a follower of Swami Ramanuja. The Jain saints became angry when they lost the royal patronage; they challenged Swami Ramanuja to a debate at the shrine of Sri Yoga Narasimha in Thondanur. One thousand Jain saints attended the debate and all of them spoke simultaneously. Swami Ramanuja had asked for a curtain to be drawn screening him from the Jains, he answered the questions posed by the one thousand Jain saints from behind the curtain. One of them out of curiosity looked behind the curtain and was amazed to see Swami Ramanuja in the form of Adisesha with one thousand hoods! The Jains accepted defeat and many of them became followers of Swami Ramanuja.\n\nAt Sri Rangam, Swami Desikan was asked to participate in a poetry contest. As Swami was busy teaching his students during the day, the only time he had was at night. He composed the Padhuka Sahasra Stotram with 1008 slokams during the last quarter of the night and won the contest. Peria Perumaal conferred the title of \"Vedanta Desikan\" and Peria Piratti \" Sarva Tantra Svatantra\" in recognition of Swami's victory. They also conferred the title \"Kavitarkika Simhan\" on Swami Desikan.\n\nthaazhaadhE saarnga mudhaiththa sara mazhai pOl\n\nAn Acharyan must bless his disciple with many kalakshepams/upanyasams and shower his disciple with divine knowledge similar to the way in which Lord Rama showered His enemies with a rain of arrows. The acharyans instructions are compared to arrows because they destroy our ignorance.\n\nvaazha ulaginil peydhidaay naangaLum\n\nThe instructions provided by the Acharyan are always easy to practice. The disciples can easily live per the instructions of their acharyan. The acharyans lead their life as per the shastras and set an example for us. Even if the instructions are hard to follow, a disciple must strive hard to practice the rules as prescribed by the acharya according to the Shastras.\n\nOnce, a restaurant owner attended a discourse rendered by HH Srimad Mukkur Azhagiyasingar (44th Jeer of the Ahobila Mutt). Jeer mentioned during the discourse that anyone who invites a person to consume food on Ekadashi will go to a special type of hell. The restaurant owner met with Jeer the following day and requested him to mark all the 24 Ekadashis on the calendar so that the restaurant could stay closed on Ekadashi.\n\nEvery single day a restaurant remains open is profitable for the owner. Ekadashis would also fall during different days of the week making it difficult for the owner to announce ahead of time the days when the restaurant would be closed. Despite these difficulties, the owner followed the instructions of his acharyan.\n\nLike the rain waters which come from the clouds, an acharyan causes the rain of wisdom and truth about Perumal to fall on us. This rain gives us the wealth of attaining the Lord's divine feet.\n\nmaargazhi neeraada magizhndhElOr\n\nThe disciples should lead a happy life feeling grateful to their sadacharyan for showing them the right path. The sadacharyan should also feel happy that he was able to save the chetanams and show them the right path that leads out of samsara.\n\nBy listening to the past times of the Lord and by following the instructions prescribed by the acharyan, a person develops strong belief that Lord Sriman Narayana is the only Supreme Being who can uplift the jeevatmas to Moksham. This belief gives courage and determination to a person seeking Moksham.\n\nThis pasuram must be chanted by disciples while requesting an Acharyan to guide them.\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Pasuram 5\n\nSwami ramanuja Bestowing Sribashyam Simhasanam To Nadadoor Azhwan\n\nPerumal has five states which are Para, Vyuha, Antaryami, Vibhava and Archai. The first four pasurams refer to one of the five states. The first pasuram talks about Para Vasudevan, the second about Vyuha Avataram as Ksheerabhdhi Nathan; the third pasuram is dedicated to Vibhava avataram and the fourth to Antaryami. The fourth pasuram speaks the glory of those people who meditate upon the Antaryami. This fifth pasuram speaks about Archavataram referred to by \"vada Mathurai mannum mainthanai\" i.e. He is always present in the Divya Desams like Vada Mathurai. Perumal is very fond of Mathura and of water from the Yamuna.\n\nThe first Pasuram also shows that Perumal is our upayam(means). The second pasuram lists the code of ethics to be followed by the Bagawathas. The third pasuram shows that Perumal showers His devotees with anushangika palan(incidental fruit) to help them lead a comfortable life on earth while also granting them the supreme fruit of salvation. Even when the devotees don't ask for anything from Perumal, He blesses them with every kind of opulence. The fourth pasuram highlights the greatness of Bagawathas. Even the deities rush to serve bagawathas. The fifth pasuram is about the importance of performing bakthi.\n\nThe first pasuram spoke about the glories of an acharyan, the second about getting an acharyan's thiruvadi sambhandham, the third about chanting the names of acharyan with devotion, the fourth pasuram teaches about the proper way to approach an acharyan. In the fifth pasuram, Andal Nachiar tells as that by chanting the names of our acharyan and staying devoted to him, the obstacles in our path to reach Perumal are removed automatically.\n\nmaayanai mannu vada madhurai maindhanai(th)\n\nEven though an acharyan is a jeevatma like us, they perform amazing deeds and also save us from samsara. The life of our acharyans is filled with many miraculous incidents.\n\nAt Thiruvaheendapuram, Swami Desikan meditated on the Garuda Manthram and had the darshan of Sri Garudazhwar. Sri Garudazhwaar presented Swami with an idol of Lord Hayagreevar. By the grace of Lord Hayagreevar, Swami composed many Vedantic works. Lord Hayagreevar was the thiruvaradhanai murthy of Swami. Once while travelling with this murthy, Swami was unable to buy any fruits to offer as naivaithiyam to Bhagawan. Swami couldn't seek alms either as it was raining heavily. Swami offered a few drops of water to Perumaal and took rest on the verandah of a house. The house owner was a grocery merchant. Even after seeing Swami, he did not offer any food or water to Swami. The merchant was busy counting his profit. After the merchant went to bed he was awakened by a noise. The merchant was surprised to see a white horse feeding from the bags of grains in his storage. Realising that it was impossible for a horse to enter through locked doors, the merchant felt that this had something to do with Swami. He woke-up Swami and asked him to withdraw the spell he had cast because of which a white horse was feeding on his grains. Swami was surprised by the house owner's request but, understood that Lord Hayagreevar had come in the form of a horse to teach a lesson to the owner. Swami requested the householder to bring some milk; he offered the milk as naiveithiyam to Lord Hayagreeva and the horse vanished. Swami did not ask anything other than milk from the merchant.\n\nOnce a snake charmer tried to incite his snakes to bite Swami Desikan. At that instant, Swami composed Garuda Dandakam and an eagle swooped down from the sky and carried away the snakes! The snake charmer apologised to Swami and appealed to him to return his livelihood. Swami chanted the Garuda Dandagam again and the eagle returned the snakes.\n\nThe acharyans can even change the worst of the people to turn a new leaf and are hence are called as mayans in this pasuram. They live in Divya Desams like Vada Mathurai performing Kaimkaryams to Perumal.\n\nthooya peru neer yamunai(th) thuRaivanai\n\nThey are like sacred water bodies and can purify us by just looking at us. There was a Brahmin in SriRangam whose son started to follow \"shunya-vadam\". He converted to the new religion and cast away his sacred thread. The Brahmin was upset to see his son go down the wrong path. One day, the Brahmin was amazed and overjoyed to see the son wear the sacred thread and practice sandhyavandhanam. The Brahmin wondered what had caused this change of heart. When he asked his son, the boy replied, 'today I met Sri Kurathazhwan and when the acharya looked at me, something stirred in my heart and I realised my mistake.'\n\naayar kulaththinil thOnRum aNi viLakkai(th)\n\nAyar kulam refers to Aryar kulam. To make the lyrics sound poetic, poets often leave a letter in a word. For example in the following pasuram sung by Thirumahizhai Azhwar, \"vari Kesane\" is used by Azhwar instead of \"vari Kesavane\". Our acharyans incarnated as the self-illuminating lamp to dispel our ignorance.\n\nthaayai(k) kudal viLakkam seydha dhaamOdharanai(th)\n\n\"thaay\" refers to manthrams. Acharyans regularly chant manthrams, protect the meaning of the manthrams and pass it on to us through mantropadesam. They ensure that the disciple is eligible to learn the meaning of the manthrams before performing mantropadesam.\n\nSwami Ramanujar had five Acharyans. Swami learnt the meaning of the asthtakshara manthram and the dwaya manthram from Sri Peria Nambhi, the meaning of every single slokam in Ramayana from Sri Peria Thirumalai Nambhi, the meaning of the Thiruvaimozhi prabandham composed by Sri Nammazhwar from Sri Thirumalai Andan, the meaning of the remaining 3000 Divya Prabandham pasurams from Sri Azhwar Thiruvaranga Perumal Arayyar and the charama slokam (verse 66 of 18th chapter of bagawath geetha ) from Sri Thirukoshtiyur Nambhi. The above five acharyans were the disciples of Swami Alavandar.\n\nSri Thirukoshtiyur Nambhi did not teach Swami Ramanujar immediately. He tested Swami Ramanujar for eighteen times before accepting him as his disciple. Swami Ramanujar trekked around 60 kilometres from Sri Rangam to Thirukoshtiyur only to be turned away by Sri Thirukoshtiyur Nambhi. This happened for seventeen times and on the eighteenth trip to Thirukoshtiyur, Swami Ramanujar was able to learn the meaning of the charama slokam from Sri Thirukoshtiyur Nambhi. The meaning of the manthrams are guarded by the acharyans and are passed on to only eligible disciples who are able to appreciate the manthrams.\n\nThe acharyans respect the manthram and guard it. As a result, they obtain manthrasiddhi. Srimath KAdandhEthi Andavan was born in the year 1829. He had obtained great siddhi by chanting the astakshara manthram with devotion that once he travelled by a palanquin with no one lifting the front side of the palanquin! He also used to worship Lord Hayagreeva with love and devotion. He worshipped the lord by chanting the Hayagreeva Manthram with kollu sundal (horse gram curry) placed on his head, Lord Hayagreevar in the form of a white horse appeared and consumed the sundal.\n\nthooyOmaay vandhu naam thoomalar thoovi(th) thozhudhu\n\nWe should approach an acharyan with bakthi and with the intention of performing acharya kaimkaryam. Agni is also the name of a person who leads us forward. An acharyan is called as Agni since our acharyan leads us along the spiritual path. Performing acharya kaimkaryam is therefore very essential.\n\nIn the following Thiruvaimozhi Pasuram, Swami Nammazhwar shows that serving acharyans and other devotees is the highest fruit a person can obtain. Azhwar states that even the experience we get at Sri Vaikuntam after being released from samsara cannot equal the happiness we get while serving our acharyan in this world. The best service we can do is to study the texts composed by the acharyans in our guru parampara. The acharyans are like the nthyasuris; they have incarnated to uplift us from this ocean of misery. They are even better than the nithyasuris because while the nithyasuris spend time in personally experiencing Perumal, our acharyans guide us towards Perumal and share the experience of enjoying Perumal's qualities with us.\n\nvaayinaal paadi manaththinaal sindhikka(p)\n\nWe should regularly chant acharyan's taniyan and their glories. We should think about the good qualities of the acharyans and the anushtanams performed by the acharyans with awe since we are unable to live like them.\n\npOya pizhaiyum pugudharuvaan ninRanavum\n\ntheeyinil thoosaagum cheppElOr empaavaai\n\nAll our past sins accumulated in the sanchita karma account, most of our prarabhdha karma along with any sins waiting to cling to us in the future will all be destroyed when an acharyan performs samasrayanam just like the way by which cotton is destroyed in a fire. People who lead others along a path are often called as Agni. An acharyan is like the sacred fire and through his teachings, melts away the frosty ignorance clouding our knowledge.\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# A Note From Author\n\n\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\n\nThank you very much for purchasing and reading Thiruppavai Goda's Gita.\n\nI thank you in advance for posting a review I would love to read about your thoughts about the book. Your reviews will also help raise the book's ranking so that more people can enjoy Goda's Gita.\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Other Books By The Author\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Thiruppavai \u2013 Goda's Gita Volume 2\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Predawn\n\nThe much awaited morning finally arrived. Goda had been unable to sleep as she was filled with sweet anticipation. Outside, the sky was still dark like soft velvet. The stars twinkled like diamonds sewn on a lush velvet cloth. The moon was lower on the Western horizon. Soon, the sky will be filled with a rich medley of yellows, pinks and orange hues. Goda rushed outside with joy. Her friends were also rushing out of their homes. The grass felt soft and moist with dew to touch. The cool air from the Yamuna embraced them and welcomed them once again to the banks of Yamuna.\n\nAs before, Goda took her place under a tamala tree. The silence which is a characteristic of the predawn hour was broken by animated chatter. The girls had been unable to sleep after the meeting. The hour seemed to crawl by. The meeting had finished quite late and even though they had to return to the banks of the Yamuna in just a few hours, the girls didn't look sleep deprived. They felt vibrant and energized.\n\nThey were asked to stand together in groups of ten while Goda took their head count. 'Four hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety,' said Goda. 'That doesn't sound right,' she said as she recounted. 'We are missing ten,' she announced with concern. 'We have to wait for them.'\n\n'Why?' asked Padma. 'We had announced that everyone should gather here at this hour. Why should we wait for the latecomers? It's their fault!'\n\n'We need them,' said Goda. 'Our team is not complete without them. We have gathered here not to perform a ritual but, to submerge ourselves in the ocean called Krishna. We are here to experience the auspicious qualities of Krishna. When we bathe in rivers and large water bodies, we make sure that we go with a spotter so that someone is there to pull us to safety. ....'\n\n'That's true for regular rivers,' interrupted Padma. 'Why should we need a spotter to take a holy dip in the lake called Krishna?'\n\n'Krishnanubhavam too can overwhelm us suddenly. Too much joy is also difficult to handle by an ordinary person. This is why we form a group to experience His divine qualities. Also, each one of us experiences Krishna in a unique way and when we share our experiences, the end result is a very vibrant and unique one.'\n\n'That may be true but, I don't think we should unnecessarily delay the start of the ritual just because these ten girls are missing!' said Shyama.\n\n'Shyama, 'said Goda. 'At Sri Vaikuntam, the nithyasuris enjoy serving Paramapada Nathan and yet they are eager for more people to join them from samsara. When even the nithyasuris work to help us attain liberation and don't feel satisfied with their service till their experience is shared with all of us, shouldn't we wait for our friends? The best things are enjoyed when we share with everyone.'\n\n'What should we do now?' asked Padma. 'How long should we wait?'\n\n'Why do you think they are late?' asked Champaka Latha. 'Are they still sleeping?'\n\n'They are not sleeping,' answered Goda. 'They are meditating upon Krishna in solitude. They are submerged in their experience that they haven't realized that it is morning. A few of you come with me; we will go to the girls homes and bring them here. There is no point in waiting for them here. They have to be awakened from their experience. Who is the first one on our list?'\n\nPasuram 6\n\n\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\n\nGoda followed by some of her friends went in search of the first girl on their list. The dark, black sky slowly started turning into a velvety dark blue sky. The birds had started to stir in their nest and the silent atmosphere was filled by chirping sound.\n\nThe group soon arrived at the girl's house. They gently knocked on the front door.\n\n'Chirp, chirp, chirp,' tweeted some birds from a nearby tree as if in response to Goda's knock.\n\n'I can't believe this girl is still sleeping!' said Champaka Latha. 'I know her very well. She is very enthusiastic and is crazy about Krishna!'\n\n'That's the problem,' said Goda. 'As she is inexperienced but, keen on meditating upon Krishna, she doesn't realize that one must share their experiences with other devotees. This is why there are group prayers and rituals to bring devotees together.'\n\n'She reminds me of Chintayanthi,' said Padma. 'Do you remember Chintayanthi?'\n\n'Who can forget that dear girl!' answered Goda.\n\n'She was too shy to join us when Krishna called us by playing on His flute. She had just been married and she wasn't born in our village. She was a newcomer and was very shy. She was afraid to leave her house as her in-laws were home. She wasn't plucky, but, her heart ached to be with Krishna and her heart melted while she listened to Krishna's flute. She enjoyed the divine music and the more she listened to the sweet tunes, her punyas just melted away. At the same time, she also felt unhappy because, like us she hadn't been brave enough to run after Krishna. Her distress at not being with Krishna melted her papams and before the end of the night, she left this world and attained salvation!'\n\nThe girls again knocked on the door.\n\n'Who is it?' asked a girl from inside. She sounded annoyed at being disturbed from her sleep.\n\n'It is us!' said Goda. 'Come on, it is already late and we have to go to the Yamuna.'\n\n'It is not late!' protested the girl. 'It is still night. Go away and come back at dawn.'\n\n'But it has dawned!' exclaimed Goda.\n\n'How do you know it has dawned?' demanded the girl without getting up from her bed.\n\n'Can't you hear the birds chirping in their nests?'\n\n'Yes, but they are chirping because you have disturbed them. You are worse than Parankusa Nayaki!' she said, 'like her, you do not sleep at nighttime and neither do you nap at daytime. You spend every waking hour thinking about Krishna and submerged in your experience, you do not pay any attention to your surroundings! You are very eager to start the ritual and blinded by your keenness, you are not even able to see that it is still night! Neither do you sleep nor do you let anyone sleep; you have not only woken me up but, you have also disturbed the birds!'\n\n'We didn't disturb them. They are up because it is dawn. They are summoning all devotees to worship Perumal and to attend kalakshepam.'\n\n'Do birds attend kalakshepam too?' questioned Padma who was standing outside with Goda.\n\n'Haven't you heard about the two swans who advised a king to seek knowledge from Sage Raikvar? The Upanishads mention many stories in which birds too show interest in learning about Perumal. In another Upanishad, a young boy wished to learn brahma vidhya and when he approached his acharyan, his acharyan assigned to him the task of herding cattle. The acharyan had 300 cows and he promised to teach the boy brahma vidhya only when the cows multiplied into 1000. The boy patiently herded the cattle without questioning his acharyan. Many years rolled by and one fine day, he was addressed by a bull which was part of the herd.\n\n'Haven't you noticed that there are more than 1000 cows in this herd now?' Asked the bull. 'It is time you learnt brahma vidhya from your acharyan but, before you approach him, I will teach you a quarter of the knowledge your acharyan is about to teach you.'\n\nThe boy started towards the ashram after studying under the bull and while he was enroute, he was stopped by a cormorant which taught him the next quarter from the syllabus. So, yes, birds too attend kalakshepam.'\n\n'What is their favorite subject?' asked Padma.\n\n'Why, the study of the meaning of the ashtakshara manthra,' replied Goda. 'That reminds me,' she continued. 'Pillay,' she addressed the girl sleeping inside. Come on, please don't keep us waiting.'\n\n'I refuse to believe that it has dawned,' replied the girl. 'Tell me, did someone wake you up or did you get up on your own?'\n\n'The bird...,' started Goda\n\n'I refuse to accept that birds are up because it has dawned...'\n\n'Listen,' said Goda. 'We were awakened by the bird'\n\n'Which bird?'\n\n'The bird called Narayana...'\n\n'When did Perumal incarnate as a bird?'\n\n'His very first incarnation was as a swan. Hamsavataram is the first incarnation.\n\nHaven't you heard of the verse\n\nsuparnav etau sadrisau sakhayau\n\nyadricchayaitau krita-nidau ca vrikshe\n\nekas tayoh khadati pippalannam\n\nanyo niranno 'pi balena bhuyan\n\nThe verse says that Krishna exists as antaryami in each and every one of our hearts even if we are sinners. He loves us and never abandons us. He has accompanied us on every one of our births. He stays with us as antaryami and witnesses our acts waiting patiently for that moment when we may turn to Him for help. There are two birds in the body-tree; Krishna the antaryami and the jeevatma.\n\nThe bird called Krishna woke us up. He said, 'Arise it has dawned. You have to perform the ritual. Do you not remember that you have taken a vow to get up very early in the morning?'\n\nHe woke us up to do neeratam at Brahmamuhurtham.'\n\n'You must have been dreaming,' replied the girl.\n\n'As per our sampradayam, dreams are also part of reality. Do you not know this fact? We were also awakened by the conch being sounded in the temples.\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Krishna The Butter Bandit\n\n#\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# Festivities In Gokulam\n\n\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\n\nThe day dawned bright and early in Gokulam. Arunaksa awoke with a start as he remembered his cow. As he looked towards the shed he found to his utter amazement his cow nursing her new born calf! Overcome with joy at the sight he offered his prayers to Lord Vishnu. He was puzzled because he couldn't recall the events of the previous night. He certainly did not remember delivering the calf. 'It was just a nightmare!' he thought. Such was the power of Vishnu Maya! Along with Lord Vishnu, Goddess Lakshmi had entered Gokulam. Her divine gaze bathed every nook and corner of Gokulam. Signs of prosperity started to manifest beginning with the safe birth of the calf. The pastures near Gokulam had been turned a beautiful shade of green. Fresh grass grew everywhere to the delight of the cowherds.\n\nYashoda awoke and to her wonder found a beautiful baby boy looking like a blue sapphire next to her! She had no recollection of the previous night either! She pinched herself to see if she was still dreaming! She gazed at Him with awe! Her heart brimmed with love and affection. She admired the way the morning rays made His beautiful feet glow. They looked like giant pair of pink coral! She couldn't take her eyes off His feet. She forced her eyes to look at the rest of Him. Her eyes bathed in His beauty. 'Is this a dream?' she thought as she pinched herself, 'He is really here! My baby!' she hugged her son and fed Him. Tears of joy flowed from her eyes as she nursed Him. 'What a beautiful baby!' she thought. 'Oh! He smells sweet like the lotus flower!'\n\nBalarama woke up his mother Rohini. Before she could lift him in her arms, he was off and ran outside the house on his was to see Krishna! A puzzled Rohini followed him wondering how he had opened the front doors. She saw that he had run next doors to Yashoda's house and followed him inside. She entered the front hall and didn't find Balarama there. She called out to Yashoda, 'Yashoda, it is me, Rohini. I am looking for my son Balarama.'\n\n'He is in here,' replied Yashoda. 'I was just about to call for you! Come in, there is a surprise for you!'\n\nAs Rohini entered Yashoda's room, she saw Balarama sitting next to Yashoda who was holding the most beautiful baby boy in her arms! Rohini's heart filled with love for the baby! Million times more than what she had felt for her own son Balarama.\n\nSoon news of Krishna's birth spread through Gokulam. The citizens in their zeal decorated the streets with bright flags. They tied a couple of banana trees on either side of the front gate of every house. The doorways of every single house were decorated with a garland of mango leaves. The village looked enchanting in the coral rays of the Sun. It dawned earlier than usual; the Sun was eager to catch a glimpse of Lord Krishna. There was a gentle breeze. The moon could still be seen in the Western horizon. He lingered on longer to take a peep at the divine child. He had stayed behind the clouds all night and he felt that he missed out on a wondrous opportunity to see the Supreme Being in the form a beautiful child. There was a tug of war between the morning star Venus and planet Jupiter. Venus wanted to rise early but Jupiter didn't want to set early; why should he Jupiter, set early and give up on his time with the baby? The lotus buds started to open in the ponds as the night blooming water lilies reluctantly went to sleep. The birds were all awake and chirping merrily in the groves.\n\nThe children gathered around the streets and sprayed coloured water on everyone. There were peals of laughter and signs of festivities everywhere. Everyone was dressed in their best clothes. Each person celebrated as if Krishna was his or her son! The streets looked very colourful. Peacocks started to dance as they mistook the water from the spray guns to be rain. The young girls decorated their front yard as well as the streets with bright rangoli; beautiful patterns created with dry flour mixed with bright colouring and flower petals. The older ladies were busy cooking tasty treats and milk sweets. The women loaded beautiful handmade baskets with homemade sweets and flowers from their yard and hurried to greet the new born.\n\nThe citizens felt overjoyed. The grace of Lord Vishnu had fallen down as rain the previous night and had washed away their ignorance. A strange feeling of joy stirred in their hearts. They felt overjoyed and ran hither and thither unable to express their joy. They threw butter on everyone and sprayed everyone with milk. They jumped and danced in the streets. The women had decorated their hair beautifully with pretty hair styles which came undone when they danced in the streets. The flowers from the women's hair fell down on the streets; it looked as if the previous night Gokulam was drenched in a floral rain! The necklaces and chains the women were wearing got tangled. The bangles on their hands jingled merrily in tune to the jingling of their ankle bracelets. The golden belt on their waist came undone. Aindavi and Kirtida hurried through the merry crowd to see Yashoda and her son. They were one of the best friends of Yashoda. Their arms were laden with gifts. They laughed and danced through the crowd. The women dancing in the streets rubbed colour on their faces. Their face was flushed with excitement and looked colourful with streaks of red, green and blue colour on it. They pushed through the crowd eager to see the darling of Gokulam.(Note: See Pasuram 1 by Azhwar Saint Periazhwar in Tamil under chapter The Experience of Azhwars and Other Acharyars. This pasuram describes the joy felt by the citizens of Gokulam when they heard about the birth of Krishna.)\n\n'I heard that they have named their son Krishna,' said Aindavi, 'Vena told me that Krishna is dark like Yashoda. In fact, she said that He is darker and has a beautiful blue hue!'\n\n'Blue hue!' exclaimed Kirtida. 'I have never seen anyone with a blue hue! I know of people with yellow, pink or red tint but never blue!'\n\nJust then they spotted Mallika and Anjana returning from Yashoda's house.\n\n'Have you seen the baby?' Aindavi called out to them.\n\nExcitement and joy showed on the faces of Mallika & Anjana.\n\n'We have never seen such a beautiful baby!' exclaimed Mallika. 'I always thought that my Sanandhana was the cutest baby but now it is definitely Krishna!'\n\n'He is a darling!' said Anjana. 'We think that from the forehead up, he looks like Nanda but He looks more like Yashoda ; especially his eyes; they are big and expressive like Yashoda.'\n\nKirtida asked them, 'we heard that the baby has a beautiful blue shade! Is it true?'\n\n'Oh yes!' said Anjana, 'blue like a sapphire!' She continued, 'We didn't have the heart to leave but we couldn't stay there all day. Yashoda's parents and sisters are visiting and there is a line-up of people to see the baby!'\n\n'He looks quite big and looks as if He is at least few months old!' said Kirtida.\n\n'If we didn't know about our Yashoda we would have felt that she had kidnapped someone else's baby! He definitely doesn't look tiny like a new born infant!' added Anjana.\n\n'He has lush hair! Dark, long and curly hair. He is not at all bald like an infant!' mentioned Kirtida.\n\n'Oh! We better hurry then,' said Aindavi.\n\nMallika warned them, 'watch out! Their front yard is very slippery. We fell down and couldn't hold the baby in our arms. We didn't want to get mud on Him.'\n\nAindavi and Kirtida continued on their way and reached the house of Yashoda. They could hear musicians playing auspicious music and dancers dancing jubilantly to the tune. They saw the gopis rushing to the house of Nanda and Yashoda to see the child Krishna. The front yard of Nanda's house was a huge puddle. The children as well as the adults had sprayed coloured water everywhere in jubilant celebration. There were huge puddles of yellow, red and green slush. There were peals of laughter as each gopi fell down in the slush. It was difficult to tell the colour of their clothes. The clothes were saturated with all the different colours in the puddles. It looked as if everyone was wearing multi-coloured clothing!\n\n'They were right, the yard is very slippery!' said Kirtida.\n\n'Looks like the kids have been spraying coloured water on everyone!' added Aindavi.\n\nThey tried to step through the slippery yard carefully but soon fell down. In their excitement to see baby Krishna, they got up only to fall again. In their eagerness they didn't even notice the children who were laughing at them! It was as if mother Earth had plotted with the children of Gokulam; she thought that if the citizens of Gokulam fell in the mud, she might have a chance to touch Krishna if one of them by mistake got mud on the baby! (Note: See Pasuram 2 by Azhwar Saint Periazhwar in Tamil under chapter The Experience of Azhwars and Other Acharyars.)\n\nYashoda's front yard and living room was imprinted with colourful footsteps. The footsteps looked very decorative like bright rangoli. The people wiped their feet before entering the viewing room. The house was filled with animated chatter. The viewing room was decorated with beautiful floral garlands.\n\nNanda welcomed all the guests. He took them to see Krishna. Everyone was overjoyed to look at the beautiful baby. Krishna was wide awake; He had been waiting eagerly to see His dear devotees. He was lying in a beautiful golden cradle decorated with precious gems. It was an antique cradle handed down from one generation to the next in the family of Nanda. Krishna's grandmother Variyasi bent down and asked Him playfully, 'where is your father?'\n\nIn reply, Krishna looked at Nanda with His beautiful eyes. Everyone exclaimed at this gesture.\n\n'Yashoda your son is very intelligent!' exclaimed Kirtida. 'He understands what we say and speaks with His eyes! Oh, I want to hold Him in my arms but I am afraid I might wrinkle Him! He looks soft and tender.'\n\nThe guests saw Yashoda rock the cradle of Krishna. It was a beautiful cradle decorated with strings of pearls. The Gopis along with Yashoda sang songs to Krishna.\n\n'Oh! Look at His pink feet!' exclaimed Gopi Chandralata.\n\n'The pink feet are in contrast to His blackish-blue body!' said Manjari.\n\n'I have been chasing bees away from the cradle,' said Yashoda, 'the bees swarm around Him mistaking Him to be a giant blue lotus!'\n\nUninvited and unseen by everyone, the celestials and the divine sages had gathered around the cradle. They watched as the Gopis sang melodiously. They were astounded at the sights in Yashoda's house. Afraid that the house might feel stuffy with all the people gathered around the cradle, to make it comfortable for baby Krishna, Vayu the God of wind caused a gentle breeze to flow through the house.\n\nSome of the Devas appeared as men and women; they visited Lord Krishna and presented many gifts to Him.\n\nLord Brahma appeared as a learned personality. 'I come to see the son of King Nanda,' he said.\n\nThe gopis and gopas were so happy that none of them thought about enquiring about how Lord Brahma came to know about the child.\n\n'I bring this cradle for your son', said Lord Brahma as he brought forth a small golden cradle decorated with precious gems.\n\n'It is very small!' exclaimed king Nanda. 'The child might outgrow this cradle very soon.'\n\n'Don't worry about the size; this is an expandable cradle.'\n\nLord Shiva presented a chain for His beautiful waist with the Lord's five weapons dangling from the chain.\n\n'This chain with the Lord's weapons as charm is for you to put on your son on the fifth day', said Lord Shiva.\n\nUnknown to Yashoda, the Lord's actual five weapons were present as the charms dangling from the chain.\n\nGoddess Durga who is none other than Yoga Maya presented the best quality collyrium for His eyes, Goddess Sridevi presented a garland made out of Tulasi leaves. Lord Kubera presented a beautiful umbrella for the cradle.\n\nSage Markandeya looked at the beautiful baby. He commented to the divine sage Narada, 'this is the baby I saw floating on a banyan leaf in the deluge waters! He lay on the leaf after swallowing the entire Universe!'\n\n'He is the refuge of all! He is the only one who can save us all from the samsaric cycle. Look how He is lying in the cradle pretending to be a new born! He the unborn is pretending to be a new born baby! This form of His is very pleasing to the eye!' replied Narada.\n\nThe Devas heard Gopi Manjari comment that Krishna looked as beautiful as baby Vamana. The Devas laughed when they heard this and said to each other, 'Of course He looks like child Vamana because He is Vamana!'\n\nThe Sun and the moon came closer to the cradle. It suddenly became very bright around the cradle. The Sun said, 'I am speechless! He is the first cause of all...the creator! The Lord who reclines on a snake bed in the middle of the milky ocean and He is here in this cradle appearing to be an innocent child!'\n\n'He is the one who killed the demon Ravana with his bow Sarnga!' said the Moon\n\n'Why speak of His bow when with just His nails He finished the demon Hiranyakashipu!'\n\nAt this, Krishna looked at the celestials especially the Sun and the moon with His beautiful lotus like eyes. With the arrows shot from His eyes, He asked them, 'what are you all doing here? Return to your tasks immediately before I find replacements to take on your jobs! Return immediately before the people see through my act!' The celestials immediately understood His message and with a heavy heart returned to work. As per His command the Sun and the Moon shine on this world. Per His command the nine planets move in the celestial sphere thus influencing the lives of all living beings either positively or negatively as per the accumulated karmas of the living beings.\n\nRaja Nanda was jubilant; he donated many milk-cows decorated with gold ornaments and seven mountains of sesame seed, covered with jewels and cloth embroidered with gold to the Brahmins.\n\nAfter concluding all the Vedic ceremonies and charities Nanda sat down in his living room with his brothers Upananda, Abhinanda & Sunanda. His father Parjanya and his father-in-law Sumukha were present there as well. Arunaksa and Sudakshina were amongst those present as well. After discussing about a myriad of things the topic of tax collection was broached. Every year all the citizens of Gokulam take the tax collected to the king of Mathura.\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# The Green Banana And Lentil Diet For Diabetes And Weight Loss \u2013A complete Guide\n\nSwetha Sundaram and Viji Sundaram\n\nForeword 1\n\n\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\n\nMother and daughter entrepreneurs, Ms. Swetha and Mrs. Viji Sundaram have written, \"The Green Banana and Lentil Diet The Complete Guide\".\n\nThis book is a simple to read monograph, written by two non-medical professionals. This is a remarkable example of putting together, observed, acquired information, to a good use. Type-2 Diabetes mellitus is a chronic complicated metabolic disease of great public health importance worldwide. Ms. Swetha and Mrs. Viji Sundaram have introduced the subject of diet, diabetes and obesity, under a variety of headings. Sequence of topics discussed, simplicity of explanations, close relationship of topics discussed to the pathogenesis of diabetes, role of diet in the management of obesity and complications of diabetes, makes this book a valuable reference book. Mrs Viji Sundaram has written many recipes of tasteful delicacies. Inclusion of glycemic contents of common foods, adds to the value of this monograph on diet and diabetes.\n\nIn this book titled, they have tried to advocate this combination diet for the management blood sugar and thereby the clinical complications associated with type-2 diabetes. The book is a simple to read, well-illustrated, with relevant and useful information. They have provided a table to illustrate the glycemic load per serving of various commonly consumed food. They also emphasize the importance of dietary fiber and low glycemic foods in the effective management of blood sugar levels and diabetes. One can see that in the table describing the glycemic load of foods, lentils have a very low glycemic load per serving (less than 10). The information in this supplement, taken together with the various recipes provided in the book provides the readers an opportunity to explore the role of diet, exercise and life style changes as key modalities of achieving weight loss and for effective management of hyperglycemia. We look forward to many more such simple to read, illustrated, observation based guidebooks, for the better management of healthcare.\n\nAs founder of several professional platforms related to healthcare, I admire their attempt to put together a compilation of their personal experiences in the form of an interesting dietary guidebook for management of personal weight. I hope the readers find the information provided in this book useful in maintaining their health.\n\nGundu H. R. Rao\n\nEmeritus Professor\n\nLillehei Heart Institute\n\nUniversity of Minnesota\n\nFounder CEO South Asian Society on Atherosclerosis and Thrombosis\n\nGlobal Alliance of Traditional Health Systems\n\nForeword 2\n\n\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\n\nLet your food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food \u2013 Mahatma Gandhi\n\nThis book emphasizes on balanced diet. The authors narrate the various groups of carbohydrates obtained from various foods and types of blood glucose responses.\n\nThis book has South Indian vegetarian diet plan which emphasizes use of green banana and lentils in a meal plan for weight loss, which in turn can prevent or delay development of diabetes Mellitus.\n\nThis diet has resistant starch which can improve insulin sensitivity and this helps lower blood glucose levels. The various uses of spices and there antioxidant properties have been narrated in simple language.\n\nIndian cooking oils like sesame, coconut are in use over centuries and to be used in minimum quantities.\n\nThe benefits of healthy fats (omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids) are also emphasized. Hence it tells us to stick to traditional diets and to be in moderation while eating food.\n\nThe book reflects the potential harmful effects of aspartame and the potential harmful effects of soy (the most genetically modified food).\n\nThe book explains the importance of eating on a banana leaf (environment friendly). The book is in simple language and can be easily read by common man. The recipes are simple and easily prepared.\n\nDr Nagmani Srinivas\n\nB N Y S\n\nConsultant -Naturopath\n\nJnana Sanjeevini Medical Center.\n\nDr. T Kamala\n\nB.Sc;MBBS;CDE;FEDM;CCEBDM;CCGDM;FACE;\n\nConsultant - Diabetes, Endocrinology and Medicine,\n\nJnana Sanjeevini Medical Center.\n\nDr. S.S. Srikanta,\n\nMedical Director,\n\nSamatvam: Science and Research For Human Welfare Trust\n\nJnana Sanjeevini Diabetes Hospital And Medical Centre\n\n2, 1A Cross Marenahalli, JP Nagar Phase 2, Bangalore 560078, India\n\nPhone: 91-80-26493040, 26493060; Web: jsindia.org\n\nEmail: samatvam@gmail.com\n\nAuthor'S note\n\nThere are so many different kinds of diet out there but, none suitable for a South Indian vegetarian like myself. How does any vegetarian customize a paleo diet or a high protein diet to meet their needs? Most of the food they normally eat would be classified under the food prohibited by their diet plan. In the name of diet and good health, how long can a person live on raw vegetables and fruits? After years of experiment my mom has come up with the perfect diet incorporating the powers of lentils and green bananas. She helped us to turn our attention towards traditional foods which harvest the powers of lentils and green bananas!\n\nWe personally tried this diet last year and to our utter amazement the pounds just melted off! The weight came off in a healthy way and there was a significant improvement in the numbers in the blood work! My mom has been battling type II diabetes for years as it runs in her family. She has been trying to avoid diabetes by staying on a strict diet and exercise regimen without taking any medication. By following the above diet, her blood sugar levels came down effortlessly from 8.1 mmol/L to 6.7 mmol/L (145.8 mg/dl to 120.6 mg/dl)! She ate to her heart content and yet her blood sugar level came down! The veggies prepared with lentil helped her to stay full for more than 6 hours without the need to consume the next meal! She started preparing late afternoon snacks out of green bananas and lentils. It kept us so full that we could even go without dinner! We felt energetic and our body felt light!\n\nI suffer from severe neck pain and muscle aches as I spend majority of my day on the computer. By staying on the above diet, my joint/muscle aches and pain evaporated!\n\nInspired by our own personal success which was very easy to achieve, we decided to share our ideas with everyone through our book. Who said that dieting has to be hard? It is about finding the right balance to indulge our taste buds in delicious fare while achieving perfect health and a slim waistline!\n\nThere are enough recipes in this book to please vegans and vegetarians. Most of the recipes are also best suited for people suffering from gluten sensitivity. I invite everyone to give this diet a try and then share their success stories.\n\nAs an engineer I am trained to analyze data and arrive at scientific solutions. In this modern age, the gap between engineering and medicine is very narrow that, it is just not possible to isolate the two fields any more. The human body itself is a fantastic machine. The brain is nothing but a central control room, the nervous system is the body's electrical system sending and receiving signal from various organs and the brain, the heart is a mechanical pump, the blood vessels are the pipes which carry fluid, like in any industrial plant we have a waste removal/treatment unit which are the kidneys and the intestine, the lungs are the pneumatic system with structural support provided by the musculo skeletal system. The sense organs are the sensors. The pipes in industry have a thermal insulation to prevent damage due to extreme weather, we have the skin and adipose tissue serving this purpose. The human body is an excellent control system with numerous alarms and feedback signals. In fact it would be very easy to reduce the functions of the human body into a set of P&IDs (Piping and instrument diagrams). I am trained to analyze data and use a scientific approach to arrive at optimal conclusion. This has enabled me to understand the many scientific studies conducted to study the effect of diet and nutrition on human health.\n\nHowever, as with any new diet and exercise program, please consult with a Qualified Medical Practitioner before following the suggestions in this book.\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# The Human Digestive System\n\n\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\n\nIn order to understand about diabetes, we have to understand how our body works; especially, our digestive system and the endocrine system.\n\nThe process of digestion starts to take place when we chew food. The salivary glands produce the enzyme salivary amylase which begins to break down starches and simple sugar in the mouth. This is primarily the reason why we taste sweet when we chew carbohydrates. The swallowing reflux, helps to move the food from the mouth to the oesophageal passage.\n\nA wave like contraction is produced in the muscle of the oesophagus which push the food down the oesophagus and into the stomach. After the food enters the stomach, the stomach starts to churn to breakdown food physically. It also produces acids and enzyme to digest food. The digestive fluid produced by the stomach is called the gastric juice. The gastric juice helps to digest protein. Food is converted to a creamy paste called chyme. How fast glucose enters blood stream is determined by the speed at which the chyme is emptied by the stomach. The addition of fats in food increases the time spent by food in the stomach and hence delays the appearance of glucose in the blood stream. The chyme is then pushed into the small intestine where all the macro/micro nutrients are absorbed. The pyloric sphincter controls the amount of chyme which can enter the first part of the small intestine called the duodenum.\n\nThe ducts from the gall bladder and the pancreas supply bile juice and enzymes into the duodenum in order to digest the nutrients. The chyme is acidic when it enters the small intestine due to the presence of gastric juice. The chyme is neutralized as it moves through the small intestine. The bile juice helps with the digestion of fat. It acts just like soap on grease and helps to emulsify the fatty acids. The nutrients present in the chyme is thus broken down into smaller molecules to help with absorption. The small intestine is 5-6m in length. Digestion takes place in the stomach and in the first 1 metre of the small intestine. The rest of the small intestine helps with absorption. The inner wall of the small intestine is made up of a number of small fingers like projection called villi. The presence of villi increases the surface area of the small intestine and helps to make the absorption of nutrients more efficiently. The carbohydrates are broken down into maltose.\n\nThe pancreas secrete the enzyme protease to digest the protein into smaller amino acids. Fat digestion is completed in the small intestine. The bile juice is reabsorbed at the ileum and recycled to the liver and gall bladder. The food then passes into the large intestine. The large intestine, recovers water and electrolytes from the digested food. The gut friendly bacteria live in the large intestine. They digest the undigested carbohydrates into fatty acids and produce small amounts of vitamin K and B. These fatty acids and the vitamins are absorbed by the blood vessel. The undigested food collects in the rectum. It stimulates a response to help with their removal through the anus.\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# The Role of Hypothalamus and Liver:\n\n\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\n\nThe liver is a very important organ and plays a crucial role to help maintain health. The liver produces bile juice, cholesterol, helps metabolize fats, protein and carbohydrates, stores glycogen, vitamins and minerals, and helps to remove toxins. It stores glycogen as an energy reserve and converts glycogen to glucose when required by the body. The gallbladder is located beneath the right lobe of the liver. The gallbladder acts as a tank to store bile juice. The hypothalamus in the brain controls hunger and satiety. When there is a drop in blood glucose level, the liver sends a signal to the hypothalamus. An empty stomach also secretes the hormone gremlin which triggers the hypothalamus to trigger the sensation of 'hunger'. The hormone leptin on the other hand is triggered by the fat stores in our body after we finish eating. The leptin, signals to the hypothalamus that we have eaten and makes the hypothalamus to trigger the sensation of satiety.\n\nA type of protein called type 2 GLUT (GLUT2) is found in the cell membrane on liver and beta cells of the pancreas. The GLUT2 has an affinity for glucose and acts as a sensor to send signal to the beta cells to release insulin hormone to reduce blood sugar levels. The process of breaking down glucose is called as glycolysis. This process produces a compound called ATP (adenosine triphosphate). The ATP is converted to ADP and the ADP is also converted back to ATP. ADP is adenosine diphospahate. The increase in ATP and ADP ratio within the cell, prevents the potassium ions from moving across the cell membrane. As the positive charge increases within the cell, calcium channels transport calcium ions into the cell. The intracellular calcium concentration, triggers the beta cells to release insulin. The beta cells in the pancreas produce insulin while the alpha cells produce a hormone called glucagon. When the blood glucose level is very low, the pancreatic alpha cells secrete the hormone glucagon. This hormone acts upon the glycogen stored in the liver to produce glucose.\n\nDuring fasting, the body produces glucose from the liver by secreting the hormone glucagon. In healthy individuals, the pancreas produces a steady supply of insulin in low dosage. This supply helps to dispose of the glucose produced by the liver so that the blood glucose level is not elevated. After consuming food, in a healthy individual, the production of glucagon is suppressed by the secretion of insulin. In a person with diabetes, there is no steady production of insulin. Therefore when a diabetic fasts, the glucose produced by the liver is not disposed of resulting in a high blood glucose level. The insulin taken in the form of injection is not very effective in suppressing glucagon hormone. When a diabetic consumes food, insulin hormone is not secreted to lower blood sugar level; because of this, the production of glucagon hormone is not suppressed. This results in the liver adding more glucose to the blood stream on top of the glucose available from the food. From the fasting blood glucose test it can be determined if a person if healthy or diabetic by checking the level of glucose in the blood stream. The unused glucose present in the blood stream is removed by the kidneys. This results in high levels of urine sugar. Please see the following pictures. (Ref: <http://spectrum.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/3/183.full#F1>)\n\n#\n\nBearville\n\nThe Mystery Of The Bee Thief\n\nSwetha Sundaram\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# The City Of Bearville\n\nWhen we travel on the highway from Banff to Yoho National Park, at the point where the highway enters through the mountain pass beyond which lies the Canadian province of British Columbia, if one were to get off their vehicle and hike up the mountain lying towards the right-hand side of the highway, one may come across the waterfalls which hides the entrance to Bearville . I say that one \"may\" come across the waterfalls and not that one would come across because the entrance is guarded by the spirit of the mountain.\n\nIf one were to be allowed by the spirits to view the cascade falls and walk through the watery curtain which hides the small tunnel, they would enter Bearville.\n\nWhat's so special about Bearville, you may ask me. This is where all the bears from around the world have their residence. Before you tell me that it's impossible for a polar bear, grizzly, brown, black, and Himalayan bears to all have their residence in one place, I must tell you that these are not ordinary bears you would see in the zoo or while hiking through the national /provincial parks. These are special bears. They are civilized, talking bears who have built beautiful houses in Bearville and live in harmony with each other. Human beings can't enter Bearville and neither can the ordinary bears and ordinary forest creatures. Then, how do I know about Bearville you ask me? Well, that's a long story for another day.\n\nBearville is nestled in the Canadian Rockies hidden from common eyes. It is an area developed by the bears. They have made beautiful dens on the side of the mountain. The dens have windows, doors and even furniture!\n\nThere are many secret bear cities around the world just like Bearville. The bears travel through secret tunnels in the mountains across the continent of North and South America. If a bear wished to travel to the Himalayas, he or she would travel through the secret tunnels in the Canadian Rockies and arrive at the northern most exits near the Arctic Sea. The polar bears would then ferry the bears across to Europe, and from there the bears will once again take secret tunnels and arrive at the Himalayan bear city. They could travel outside the tunnels through forested regions but, they prefer to travel by the secret tunnels in order to avoid encountering humans and normal wildlife.\n\nIn the middle of Bearville is the town square. The centre of attraction of the square is a large clock which works on the same principle as a sundial but, this is a curious clock because on its face are marked the months of the year. The bears (they do share some biological traits with the common bears) like to sleep from December to March. In March, when all the population of Bearville wakes up, there is a big celebration to welcome spring.\n\nThe bear cubs attend school where they undergo vocational training. The school is called, \"Cub Scout Training School\". The bears learn things like apiculture, fishing, wilderness training, and a special program called surviving the Arctic. Of course, they also learn arithmetic, science and astronomy. Not even bears can escape Math!\n\nThere are also other magical animals which live in Bearville though the majority of the population is bears. Suparna the Bald Eagle is in charge of security. It is his responsibility to keep an eye on the security of Bearville and to ensure that non-magical bears and humans do not enter its limits.\n\nTommy the grey jay delivers the newsletters while the mail is delivered by a group of pigeons. The bears make paper from vegetables at home; they use potatoes mostly unless they want coloured paper in which case they would use carrots, berries, red cabbage or spinach. They use a wooden pen with a wooden nib for writing. They make ink from berry juice. So, if the cubs are very hungry, they can eat their homework! Willy Woodpecker is hired by the bears to make intricate carvings in their wooden furniture.\n\nMost importantly, I must introduce you to the three little bear cubs, the main characters in our story. Bertie is a grizzly bear cub. He attends the Cub Scout training school with his friends; Mitsy the little black bear cub, Ted the brown bear cub (he hates to be called as Teddy!) The three little cubs often get into exciting adventures and solve mysteries. Go ahead, flip the page so that we can read about their first mystery; the mystery of the bee thief.\n\n|  |\n\n---|---|---\n\n# New Students\n\n\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\n\nOn a beautiful, bright sunny day, Bertie was sitting in his apiculture class. Miss Bernice was teaching them about the different types of bees. Bertie felt bored. Frankly, he didn't Care about apiculture. He would rather become a fishing bear when he grew up and spend his time swimming in the streams in search of salmon. He glanced at Mitsy. She was busy taking notes. He looked at the faces of each of his classmates. Most of them seemed bored. Bertie looked at Ted who was a back bencher; he had dozed off. Bertie looked at the clock in the class room and sighed. They had to endure the \"buzz\" for another quarter of an hour.\n\n'Miss Bernice,'\n\n'Bertie sat up straight. The assistant principal Mr Blue was standing at the door.\n\n'Sorry to interrupt you but you have two new students.'\n\n'This late in the year?' asked Miss Bernice.\n\nAll the bear cubs sat up straight.\n\n'They are transfer students. Their father is a diplomat and he is stationed in Bearville. '\n\n'Where are the cubs? Come on, let's not keep them waiting.'\n\nMr Blue stepped aside and to the surprise of the class, two little bear cubs who were neither white nor black stepped into the class. Patches of their fur were white while they also exhibited some black patches.\n\n'What are they?' asked Peggy.\n\nMcKay the brown bear, who was also the class bully, sniggered.\n\n'They are little Panda Bear cubs from China.' explained Mr Blue. 'I will leave them in your custody. Good afternoon,' said Mr Blue and left the class.\n\n'Come in dears,' welcomed Ms Bernice. 'Introduce yourself to the class.'\n\n'My name is Jia Pan-Pan,' said the male Panda cub. 'This is my sister....'\n\n'Jia Yeu-Yeu...' interrupted his sister but stopped when McKay burst out laughing.\n\n'Mr. McKay!' called Ms Bernice sternly. 'Pray share with us what's so amusing! '\n\n'Pan-Pan and Yeu-Yeu. ..' he laughed. 'Eww.Eww!'\n\n'I am sure that they think your name is funny too! If you don't behave, I will give you detention!' threatened Ms Bernice. 'Now,' said Ms Bernice to the Pandas. 'Welcome to Bearville.' She then turned to address the class. 'Who will volunteer to help the Pandas?'\n\n'I will.' jumped Bertie. He was feeling irritated with McKay. 'They can sit next to me,' he offered.\n\n'Thank you, Bertie,' said Ms Bernice.\n\nBertie was glad when the class ended in five minutes. Ms Bernice dispersed the class after giving them their homework assignment. They had to choose an apiary and spend a month observing bee-keeping. Their reports were due at the end of the month.\n\nAs it was their last class for the day, Bertie decided to take the Pandas around Bearville. As soon as they walked out of the class, Mitsy and Ted rushed over to them. They were soon surrounded by most of their classmates.\n\n'Why do you look half and half?'asked Peggy a black bear cub.\n\n'Is it deficiency?' asked Murray. 'My mom says vitamins make our fur nice and shiny.'\n\nYeu-Yeu and Pan-Pan looked forlorn. For the first time in their young lives, they felt conscious of their appearance.\n\n'Come on! Leave the Pandas alone!' snapped Bertie. 'Where are your manners?'\n\n'Bertie, ' called Mitsy. 'We want to come with you and the Pandas too.'\n\n'I never told you my name did I?' asked Bertie.\n\n'No you didn't but Ms Bernice called you Bertie,' said Pan-Pan.\n\n'Well.....these are my friends Mitsy and Ted.'\n\n'Do all bears look like you in China?' asked Mitsy.\n\n'Mitsy! Not you too!' yelled Bertie.\n\n'It's a perfectly normal question!' retorted Mitsy. 'And, I think they look adorable!'\n\n'Only the Panda bears,' replied Yeu-Yeu.\n\nAfter everyone had been introduced, Bertie suggested that they go to the town square and have a honey Popsicle.\n\n'We can't', said the Pandas in unison. 'Mom will be waiting for us. Why don't you come home with us? Mom would love to meet our friends.'\n\nEven though meeting grown up bears wasn't considered to be fun, the cubs were curious to meet adult Pandas. The group started towards the Panda's home. They had to pass through the town square.\n\n'Watch out,' cautioned Mitsy. 'McKay and his friends are blocking our way.'\n\n'Don't worry Mitsy,' assured Ted. 'They won't fight when I am around.'\n\nTed was quite big. He was bigger than all the cubs in school. Mckay maintained a safe distance when Ted was around. Sure enough, McKay and his friends made way to let the group pass. After they had gone a few yards, McKay yelled, 'what's black and white that looks like a cub?'\n\n'A mutant baby of a zebra mama and a papa bear,' yelled his friend.\n\nPan-Pan and Yeu-Yeu looked sad. Yeu-Yeu started to cry.\n\n'There there,' said Mitsy comforting her. 'Ignore McKay, he is the real mutant.'\n\n'I can easily catch you McKay' threatened Ted. He took one step towards Mckay which sent the team of bullies running away from the little group.\n\nMitsy stopped to collect some mountain flowers that grew by the side of the road. She soon had a bouquet of buttercups, gilardia, and ox-eye daisy. 'There we go,' she said. 'A little welcome gift for your mom.'\n\nYeu-Yeu looked at Mitsy with admiration. How did Mitsy even think to get a gift for her mom? Most cubs were not so thoughtful.\n\n# Don't miss out!\n\nClick the button below and you can sign up to receive emails whenever Swetha Sundaram publishes a new book. There's no charge and no obligation.\n\n<https://books2read.com/r/B-A-XDYF-XQBS>\n\nConnecting independent readers to independent writers.\n\n# About the Author\n\nSwetha Sundaram lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. She is an Instrumentation and Controls Engineer working in Calgary. She graduated from B.S. in Engineering Honours Program from University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. She writes on a variety of subjects; some of the topics include, Sri Vaishnavism, health & diet, history and children's books. She believes in promoting love and equality. She has travelled to many countries and has lived in many different countries. Apart from writing, her hobbies also include sketching, gardening and reading.\n\nRead more at Swetha Sundaram's site.\n"], ["\n\nMy Wild Ride from Outlaw Biker to Undercover Cop\n\nWAYNE \"BIG CHUCK\" BRADSHAW\n\nWITH DOUGLAS P. LOVE\n\n_For Pearl and Barb,_\n\n_to feel goodness glowing inside, where love and loyalty meet._\n\n_To the men and women on the thin blue line:_\n\n_keep the faith. Better days are coming._\n_Invictus_\n\n\"Out of the night that covers me,\n\nBlack as the pit from pole to pole\n\nI thank whatever gods may be\n\nFor my unconquerable soul.\n\nIn the fell clutch of circumstance\n\nI have not winced nor cried aloud.\n\nUnder the bludgeonings of chance\n\nMy head is bloody, but unbowed.\n\nBeyond the place of wrath and tears\n\nLooms the Horror of the shade,\n\nAnd yet the menace of the years\n\nFinds, and shall find, me unafraid.\n\nIt matters not how strait the gate,\n\nHow charged with punishments the scroll,\n\nI am the master of my fate:\n\nI am the captain of my soul.\"\n\n\u2014William Ernest Henley\n\n## FOREWORD\n\n_By Renzo Gracie_\n\nMy chosen profession has provided me with the opportunity to meet a staggering number of people, including Middle Eastern royalty, famous actors, other sports stars and many more. Occasionally I meet extraordinary people known only to their friends\u2014remarkable individuals with amazing stories to tell. Wayne \"Big Chuck\" Bradshaw is one of those individuals. His life story is almost unbelievable.\n\nBig Chuck is the only person in America to have gone from being an enforcer in one of the most feared motorcycle gangs to becoming a sworn police officer and decorated undercover narcotics detective. What makes his story even harder to believe is that he made many arrests and took down drug dealers on the same Jersey Shore turf where he once rode as an outlaw biker with the Pagans. If he wasn't a close personal friend and confidant, I wouldn't believe it to be true.\n\nI consider myself an avid reader and was honored when Big Chuck asked me to write the foreword for his book. Although I thought I knew this gentle giant, I couldn't put the book down as I read of his difficult time in the U.S. Army, his wild days with the Pagans and then his distinguished 20-year police career.\n\nWayne Bradshaw is most assuredly unique. I dubbed him \"Big Chuck\" because of his physical size. After we became friends I came to realize he was bigger than life in ways other than his muscular 250-pound frame. Big Chuck managed to cram several lifetimes of experiences into one action-packed existence.\n\nBig Chuck grew up in a sheltered suburban community in Middletown, New Jersey. He dreamed of proudly serving his country and volunteered for the U.S. Army Infantry near the end of the Vietnam conflict. He trained as a rifleman and planned on going into the Special Forces someday. But the army instead sent him to Germany, where he became involved in a series of violent situations that shook him to the core. In the First Infantry Division he learned to meet violence with violence. His years in the army forever changed him.\n\n_Jersey Tough_ traces the amazing course of Big Chuck's life. It describes his youth and his decision to enlist in the army at the age of 18, when some teens were fleeing to Canada or finding other ways to avoid going to Vietnam. It takes us through his rough three years in the army, his return to the States, and his descent into the dangerous and unpredictable world of outlaw motorcycle gangs. His strength, his size and the violent skills he learned in the army brought him to the attention of the feared Pagans Motorcycle Club, which is believed to be the most dangerous and violent motorcycle gang in the country. Big Chuck describes the constant turf wars with other one-percent motorcycle clubs, including the ferocious Hells Angels and the Breed. He was made an officer in the club, an enforcer and a sergeant-at-arms in the Sandy Hook chapter of the Pagans, which ruled the Jersey Shore. I still have trouble seeing this gentle, hulking, intellectual man in such a role.\n\nIncredibly, he survived two years with the Pagans and managed to leave the gang alive, with no physical scars and no criminal record. Although he was once arrested by the Middletown Police Department, he was never found guilty of a crime and moved on to become a sworn police officer in the very same department. The hard-earned street skills he learned with the Pagans MC gave him unique skills as an undercover narcotics detective. He made arrests at an astonishing rate.\n\nThe Big Chuck I befriended and personally taught Brazilian Jiu Jitsu to is a humble, deeply intelligent man, who rarely if ever talks about his violence-filled stint in the army and his time riding with the Pagans. We talked about his work as a police officer and Patrolmen's Benevolent Association leader who fearlessly stood up for his men time and again. I know him as a loyal and accomplished Jiu Jitsu student and someone who always went out of his way for my family and friends.\n\nFrom a tumultuous criminal lifestyle to a career as an undercover narcotics detective, Big Chuck has seen life from many angles. Big Chuck Bradshaw is my American brother.\n\n### CHAPTER ONE\n\n## GOING UNDERCOVER\n\nGlenn Frey's \"Smuggler's Blues\" was getting serious airtime, and New Jersey was at the very peak of the powdered cocaine revolution, when I reported to the Monmouth County Narcotics Task Force (MCNTF) in the spring of 1985. Like many other task force members, I was on loan from one of the local police departments operating within Monmouth County, the Middletown PD.\n\nThe MCNTF was a busy agency, with jurisdiction in some of the roughest places in the state, including Asbury Park. The city that was once a vacation spot for the rich and famous had fallen on some serious hard times, and drug dealing, street crime and even murders were routine.\n\nIn the '80s Asbury Park had all the charm of a war-ravaged city\u2014gritty, dark streets punctuated by the occasional boarded-up building, real estate \"for sale\" signs that looked like they'd been hanging for years, and gutters littered with trash. It was a great place to live, if you were a rat. During the summer, tourists would still gravitate to the famous boardwalk, which was adjacent to the old Convention Hall, Paramount Theatre and arcade\u2014massive structures from the 1920s and '30s that had fallen into disrepair decades earlier.\n\nAt night, locals and tourists alike packed dimly lit nightclubs to listen to up-and-coming artists, including Bruce Springsteen, a regular at the Stone Pony, the famous nightclub one block from the Atlantic Ocean. A few blocks away, other aspiring stars played at the Wonder Bar, with its weird smiling clown logo. Springsteen's \"Born to Run\" ruled the land, and perhaps the nearby boardwalk, too. The Boss sang dark and resonant themes about the Jersey Shore and breathed life into the dying city, at least for the summer.\n\nAsbury Park's residential area, barely a mile away from the boardwalk and the nightclubs, was ignored by the tourists, for good reason. The landscape there was punctuated by burned-out buildings, rusting junk cars and streetlights that hadn't worked in years. That was the part of town where I'd be spending my time with the MCNTF.\n\nWhat set me apart from most of the other undercovers was my years with the outlaw Pagans Motorcycle Club, which counted Asbury Park among its territories. We had ruled the bars and nightclubs there with an iron hand and would rain down a serious beating on any other motorcycle club that dared to come into the city. As a Pagan, I used to hang out on those very streets where the drug deals occurred, engage in wild bar fights as needed and pick up chicks who found it sexy to be riding with a bad-boy biker on a chopped Harley.\n\nNow I was going back to some of the same places I used to ride in as a Pagan, only this time with a badge and a gun. It felt weird for me, because just seven years had passed since I'd left the Pagans. No doubt it felt weird, too, for some of the other task force members who knew about my days as an outlaw biker, a one-percenter.\n\nThe task force had money, an array of confiscated undercover, or UC, vehicles and access to skilled prosecuting attorneys. It was a happening operation. Still, my world was quite unlike that of \"Sonny\" Crocket and \"Rico\" Tubbs in _Miami Vice_ , which was all over the tube at the time. There were no Ferraris, yachts or \"go-fast\" boats for us.\n\nIn order to get diverse (and hopefully talented) undercover operatives, local police agencies were asked to \"loan\" officers to the requesting task force. While on assignment, the \"loaners\" would continue to be paid by the department that employed them. When they completed their assignments, they would return to their departments\u2014bringing their undercover experience, and contacts, with them. It was one of those rare things in the police world, a plan that really worked. Oftentimes, loaners couldn't function as undercover operatives. Loaners who couldn't cut it would sometimes recognize the problem themselves and volunteer to return to their agencies. Sometimes they wound up doing low-key surveillance duties or desk work.\n\nMost loaners were good street cops from within the county. We worked crazy shift hours and often had to face confrontations late at night and alone. We dealt with all manner of situations, usually weary from the lack of sleep. And we frequently dealt with investigators from the prosecutor's office. Sometimes they had similar experience and had transferred to the prosecutor's office. But mostly they did not\u2014and were there because of some political connection. Some of these men and women had no concept of what a real cop did on the street. Joining the task force, they suddenly became detectives and perceived themselves as cool. They had not paid their dues, and it showed. There was a rivalry between the men who came up through the ranks in the police department and those who had been assigned from the prosecutor's office. Some of those prosecutors had also investigated police brutality claims, adding even more tension.\n\nMy team included some very tough and skilled undercovers. The real leader was Rick Coutu\u2014another police department loaner who was on temporary assignment to the task force. A couple of the guys were members of the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office, where we were based. The police department loaners like Rick and I didn't care for them, and they didn't much like us. Still, we had each other's backs; you couldn't survive on the street any other way. In most cases, the county investigators were good and ambitious cops. But a handful were not of the same caliber, either untrained or uncaring, or both. Some of them you just wanted to strangle.\n\nRick Coutu, who was from Red Bank, was exceptionally street-smart, hard-core tough and a total adrenaline junkie. He was of average height and build but very fit. His thick, wavy hair and intense eyes commanded everyone's attention. Very little happened in Red Bank\u2014a two-square-mile community on the banks of the Navesink River\u2014that Rick didn't know about. Ultimately, the team trusted him\u2014I trusted him\u2014because he was incapable of letting people down. He had focus and nerves of steel. I was willing to follow that guy anywhere, even if that meant going into hostile territory unarmed.\n\nGetting caught with a handgun in New Jersey at the time would land you in more serious trouble than any street-level drug bust. Prosecutors routinely sought stiff sentences for criminals caught with both hard drugs and a gun\u2014and judges were more than willing to hand down those rulings. Just about the only people carrying guns were the cops; if you were working an undercover operation and trying to keep a low profile, you went in unarmed.\n\nLoaners drifted in and out of the MCNTF, usually sent by a local police chief to sharpen up an up-and-comer for his detective bureau. Some PDs sent their problem children because they hated the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office and creating conflict was just part of the game for them.\n\nMike Panchak, aka \"Pancakes,\" from the Eatontown Police Department, and Rick and I were in it for the rush. We made our own hours, and there was certainly no reason to be in the office before noon. Everyone on the task force dressed down, and most guys sported beards and earrings. I didn't like how my beard grew out, so I stayed clean-shaven and went with a basic blue-collar look.\n\nLike the rest of the new guys, I had to work out an undercover persona for myself\u2014an image that would be believable to people on the street, and one that I could maintain under any circumstances. How would I dress, and how would I act during undercover operations? I knew that I wanted something simple, an easy fa\u00e7ade that I could slip into whenever needed. Undercovers have to maintain focus at all times\u2014getting drug buys done, for example, while keeping detailed mental notes about what's happening around them. Everything done while undercover would eventually have to be written up in case reports. UCs are often interrogated by the dealer, and there's no margin for error in responses.\n\nThe undercover persona I selected came naturally; I based it on my years as a sergeant-at-arms for the Pagans Motorcycle Club, based in Atlantic Highlands on the Jersey Shore. I knew that drill because I'd lived it. I would wear the same clothes I'd worn in the past: cutoff T-shirts, black jeans and engineer boots. And I'd stick with the same Jersey tough attitude I already had.\n\nMy clothes, attitude and tattoos allowed me to fit in seamlessly. I was the UC operative who didn't need much training, outside the usual administrative briefings.\n\nTwo years earlier, when I'd first joined the Middletown Police Department as a cop, I was very wary during my first night on the street. I had no idea at the time if the guys would back me up or not, because of my history with the Pagans. At the MCNTF, I had a new worry: the group had access to the FBI's files on Pagan members. That meant my file in the MCNTF was thick and not altogether favorable.\n\nWorking with the MCNTF often involved policing the notoriously crime-ridden area around Springwood Avenue in Asbury Park, just a mile and a half from the oceanfront boardwalk. The area was so bad it was actually featured on _Ripley's Believe It Or Not!_ as the most crime-infested block in the U.S. ever. No one, not even armed cops on patrol, felt safe there.\n\nLocal officials were so troubled that they renamed Springwood \"Lake Avenue\" for a while, hoping it might make a difference in how it was perceived. The name change didn't make a damned bit of difference for the people who lived there\u2014or the cops who tried to keep order. The task force was charged with going in and cracking down on some of the many drug dealers who had managed to operate with impunity for years.\n\nThe neighborhood was almost entirely African-American, which meant white guys like me looked distinctly out of place. If you were white, there could be only three reasons for being there: (1) you were a cop; (2) you were seriously lost and potentially in more danger than you could ever dream; (3) you were buying drugs.\n\nThe Asbury Park Police were ever-present, but it would have taken a full company of officers to clean up the place. Periodically, we'd send an undercover cop and an informant down there to buy some heroin\u2014typically just a couple of dime bags, which sold for $10 apiece and were usually in glassine or cellophane packages stamped with names like \"Murder\" and \"Hot Shot.\"\n\nThe undercover would then try to persuade the target to let him come back alone for more product, a practice we called \"doubling.\" Repeat buys of small amounts of drugs confirmed that the dealer was in play without financially crippling the unit. We got to the big dogs by bagging the up-and-comers, then flipping our targets into informants after they were arrested.\n\nOne hot and humid June day, one of our UCs, Rob Uribe, attempted to buy a dime bag from a dealer, only to get ripped off. When Uribe went to make the buy, the dealer grabbed the bill and ripped it in half, leaving him with a torn $10 bill\u2014and no drugs. When the UC arrived at our prearranged meeting place, all he had to show for his efforts was half of a $10 bill; the dealer still had the other half.\n\n\"Fuck them,\" Rick Coutu shouted. \"If we let them rip us off, we might as well pack it in. We've got to hit back.\"\n\nIn one sense, the rip-off was no big deal. The unit hadn't invested much time in the investigation, and there hadn't been a financial loss, either. But it didn't bode well for our ability to work the neighborhood, and that was enough to infuriate Coutu and some of the other guys. Rick argued that if we let a single dealer in this neighborhood get away with ripping off one of the undercovers, we'd be plagued by people trying to rip us off for the balance of the summer. Our effectiveness as a unit would be compromised, and that had him pissed off.\n\n\"I say we go back in\u2014but this time in force,\" Coutu continued. \"We drive right up to the crowd, take out clubs and threaten them wholesale for ripping us off. We'll act like we're crazy motherfuckers and see what gives. We want them to think that they fucked with the wrong people.\"\n\nRick's plan was insane. Six members of the task force would hit Lake Avenue, two each in three undercover vehicles. The area was mostly residential, with run-down two-story wood-frame houses on narrow pieces of property surrounded by rusty chain-link fences and a handful of storefronts\u2014liquor stores, barbershops and restaurants that sold cheap fried chicken and pizza. We'd be carrying props\u201440-ounce bottles of malt liquor and bottles of cheap wine, all wrapped in brown paper bags.\n\nOnce at the location, we'd jump out of our cars, clubs in hand, and challenge the crowd, threatening them loudly and angrily for not making good on the earlier drug deal. Before things got too out of control, plainclothes detective Rusty Swanick would pull up in one of the unmarked police units to bust us. The six undercovers would scatter, dispersing through the crowd and down side streets\u2014making it impossible for the detective to grab more than one of us.\n\nThe only question that remained was who was going to get taken down and roughed up by the plainclothes cop. I was the unlucky one picked by Swanick. The two of us had never clicked, and now he was going to have some fun at my expense. In fairness to Swanick, he was a good, tough cop. He knew his neighborhood and was respected on the street. He was a stocky six-footer with what at the time was called a singles-bar mustache. In this not-so-well-conceived plan, he would have to get it right or my partners and I could be in real danger.\n\nI didn't breathe a word of dissent to this \"plan\" but knew it was madness. The Lake Avenue crowd was a large and dangerous one to be messing with under any circumstances\u2014and we were deliberately going to swoop in to incite the guys who hung around there, armed only with wooden clubs and baseball bats. We would be vastly outnumbered, and we had no idea how the crowd would react. Only one of us\u2014Swanick\u2014would be carrying a firearm.\n\nI couldn't believe that someone as level-headed as Rick would even think of such a thing. It was a true barometer of how really charismatic Coutu was. If anyone else had suggested a plan like this, they would have been laughed at. How flawed and wild was this scheme? My mind was racing. What if we jump out and get shot? What if Swanick crashes his car and doesn't get there when he's supposed to? What if the scattering undercover officers walk into a group of hood rats who want to have some fun with the Caucasian outsiders? What if I really have to hit someone with the tree branch and wind up facing an internal affairs investigation? What if we hit someone with our vehicles when we drive into the crowd, or if an undercover or two suddenly go missing?\n\nThere was no doubt that Rick's plan would convince even the most jaded street dealer to believe we were street thugs, not cops. Cops follow rules, and they run operations that give them a clear tactical advantage. They don't send in a half dozen guys with clubs to threaten three hundred hardened street thugs. Only a crazy-assed bunch of drugged-up criminal white boys act like that.\n\nThere was another major risk factor, too: we knew that the area we were headed to was teeming with Five Percenters, a street gang with a noted history of violent assault and murder, and little regard for handgun laws. Five Percenters were often under 18 and didn't fear the legal system. If you got shot down here, the first suspects were the Five Percenters. And if one of them carried a piece, he was a dangerous hombre.\n\nThe Five Percenters group was formed in Harlem by Clarence Smith, aka \"the Father,\" or \"Clarence 13X,\" in 1963. Asbury Park's African-American youth had been targeted by the gang, and anyone who elected not to join was guaranteed a daily beat-down. The gang had a bizarre philosophy, and some of us wondered why anyone would buy in. Still, the threat of certain retribution kept the group's numbers up. The gang made serious cash through the drug trade, and its members were a dangerous force to be reckoned with. In the crowd we intended to threaten, I was sure there would be at least 20 or so Five Percenters.\n\nIt was about 4 p.m. that June day when we launched our operation and headed toward Lake Avenue. The sun was sinking, but the temperature was still about 90, and everyone in Asbury Park seemed to be outside in an effort to beat the heat and humidity. I was driving a ratty, old two-door Ford Thunderbird, with Tom Perez, an undercover from the prosecutor's office, riding shotgun. Like some other military veterans, I had been a serious student of Sun Tzu's classic book, _The Art of War_. Coutu's punitive expedition, or at least the charade of it, violated every tenant of the Chinese general's rules of engagement. Those who ignore the art of war usually pay for it dearly. This was in my head during the breakneck ride with Perez that afternoon.\n\nThe corner of Lake and Ridge Avenues was swarming with people when we arrived, with dozens of locals hanging around the fried chicken place and a handful of other stores nearby. All three of our cars screeched to a stop in the heart of the strip. Some corner-dwellers had to jump out of the way to avoid getting hit.\n\nWe all got out of our vehicles, absolutely skied on pure adrenaline. Wielding clubs, we demanded to know who'd ripped off our buddy. The crowd parted and we briefly held the upper hand. But it didn't take long for the street toughs to realize that we were vastly outnumbered, and some serious smack talk started to come back at us.\n\nAs I waded into the group to see who was talking shit, a man of about 50 years old, wearing a white button-down short-sleeved shirt, quietly walked up to me. He cocked his head to one side and said, \"You white boys is crazy, but you gonna be dead soon if you don't get out. Someone be comin' for you right now, ya hear?\" He chuckled to himself, turned, and disappeared into the crowd.\n\nMy gut told me that this guy was serious and I had better watch my back. It was also clear that our ruse was working: we weren't cops to these cats, but invading thugs. We were in deep, perhaps too deep. One thing was certain: there would be no witnesses here to whatever level of violence was headed our way.\n\nI didn't have time to react before I spotted Swanick's unmarked sedan racing up the flat, two-lane street and braking to a stop at the corner, just a few yards away from me. Perez melted into the crowd. The other UCs piled into two cars and sped away. Swanick had a freebie here, a person he could jack up to the delight of the many bystanders: me.\n\nStone-faced, the detective grabbed me and shoved me up against a painted cement-block wall outside a barbershop, punching me repeatedly and leaving me with bruised ribs and a bloody lip. Then he pushed me face-down onto the pavement and ordered me to stay spread-eagled there, which I did. I cursed at him as he tossed the inside of my Thunderbird on the pretense of looking for drugs.\n\nThe detective walked back to me and yanked me up onto my feet. Staring at me, and still showing no sign that we knew each other, he threatened to take me down if he ever saw me again. He shoved me into the driver's seat and ordered me out of town.\n\nI swung a quick right turn off Lake Avenue onto Ridge Avenue, only to find it choked with cars.\n\nA black male, wearing a white T-shirt and about 19 years of age, approached my car. He was average in size and had shaved his unusually round head. His demeanor was casual, and I knew that I had seen him, or at least a picture of him, somewhere. I just couldn't recall the circumstances.\n\n\"You still looking for something?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yeah, jump in,\" I said, watching as he opened the passenger side door, pulled the passenger seatback forward and hopped into the back of the Thunderbird, where he wouldn't be seen. His decision to sit behind me provided him with a huge tactical advantage and put me in immediate danger. I had no idea if he was armed, and I immediately started wondering if I'd just allowed a hitter from the Five Percenters to get into my car. I couldn't see his hands from my position, and I tried to recall if I'd seen any telltale bulges under his shirt. Suddenly, everything I said and did became critical to my survival.\n\nA cold shiver traveled up my spine. Because of the adrenaline rush I was on, I'd made a catastrophic tactical error by allowing a potential assassin to get behind me. I pictured him pulling out a blade and carving me up. I certainly wasn't a cop to him. I was some lowlife who was likely carrying cash. My thoughts ran wild. I had to be able to document every move I made for the police report that I'd be filling out\u2014if I survived. This was no time to panic. I had never seen this guy before. But for some reason, I got the sense that he liked me, or at least was willing to take my buy money. Maybe he'd seen Swanick trying to reshape my face and rib cage and decided we had something in common.\n\nStill wondering about my passenger's intentions, I looked down the street and observed a man and woman walking toward me, between the parked cars along Ridge. The woman was pushing a baby carriage with a young child in it. The dude was very muscular and tough-looking, in his mid- to late 20s, with a comb pushed into his long, bushy hair. He was wearing blue jeans and a sleeveless white undershirt.\n\nWithout missing a step, he reached under the baby carriage, pulled out a large-caliber pistol and walked toward my car. Standing next to the driver's door, no more than three feet away, he pointed the gun at my chest. Nearby, the baby started to cry. Still seated and unable to react, I tried to maintain my composure.\n\n\"The fuck you doing here. I don't fucking know you,\" he said.\n\nKeeping my hands where he could see them, I said, \"I came to do business. I am here for the summer. You do me, you can take me off, but if you want to do business I am here for a couple of months more.\"\n\nThis guy was solid with the weapon. He wasn't a shaker. When an untested street thug pulls a pistol on you, he is jerky and usually loud. They try to intimidate, and yelling helps them calm their own fears. But this guy wasn't like that.\n\nI wondered if this could be the guy the old man was trying to warn me about. This shooter was considering his options and trying to decide if he should pull the trigger. I was clearly in serious danger and had no apparent backup. I was alone. It would have been profoundly easy for him to shoot me and escape. Even if there was a witness other than the woman pushing the baby carriage, no one in this neighborhood would ever finger this guy.\n\nMy no-name passenger got out of the car's back seat and walked around to the driver's-side window. He put one hand on the rearview mirror and leaned in through the open window. \"You motherfuckers really is crazy, you know that? Can't believe you ain't been capped yet.\" Then he walked off to talk with the shooter.\n\nThey were too far away for me to hear their conversation, but I didn't dare move a muscle. I could see that my back-seat passenger didn't have a gun under his T-shirt. But I couldn't tell if he was carrying a knife or not. One thing was clear: I was deeply relieved to have him out of my car. I swore to myself that I would try to avoid a repeat of that scenario.\n\nNodding to the teen with the shaved, round head, the dealer said, \"He say you looking for a quarter. You got cash to show me?\"\n\nI pulled out a rolled wad.\n\nThe dealer weighed his options for what felt like an endless period of time. All I could do was sit still and maintain a distant look. Without a word, he lowered the gun and then put it back in the stroller. He seemed not to notice the baby, who continued to cry. The woman paid no attention to the child, either.\n\n\"Can I get a quarter ounce, or an eightball at least?\" I asked the man with the stroller.\n\n\"Wait here,\" he said.\n\nI watched as the shooter walked to the other side of the street and disappeared. While I waited for him to come back, I tried to figure why this other cat seemed so familiar. Because of the round shape of his head, I tagged him \"Cannonball Head.\"\n\nSeconds later, the gunman came back with a plastic baggie full of white powder\u2014what looked like a solid quarter-ounce of coke. We briefly negotiated the price, and I gave him cash. He turned around and walked down the street, his girlfriend pushing the stroller behind him.\n\nCannonball Head had little to say, other than to tell me to look for him the next time around. \"Be careful with that shit, boy,\" he said mockingly.\n\nI sat silent for a few seconds, deeply thankful that I had survived. I also tried to memorize what the two men looked like and how they were dressed. I knew I had reports to write and mug shots to review. I wanted to make 100 percent sure that I correctly identified the men who were responsible\u2014and ensure that the court case was solid. I also knew that there'd be a defense attorney looking to embarrass me on the witness stand.\n\nI thought back to Rick Coutu's plan and how things had gone down. One thing was certain: the plan had worked but had morphed in its own direction. That was the thing about UC work. No matter what plan someone crafted beforehand, the bad guys on the street seemed to have a habit of changing things up. UC work was all about dealing with unexpected situations. It was a great scene for adrenalin junkies\u2014for a while. Later, I'd realize that the stress from encounters like that takes its toll on a person. If the physical encounters don't kill you, the emotional stress will.\n\nMy UC partner, Tom Perez, appeared out of nowhere and jumped into my vehicle. I wondered how long he'd been nearby and if he'd watched what had just gone down with Cannonball Head. I said little as we drove back to an industrial park about a mile away for a prearranged meeting with Rick and the other UCs.\n\nI wanted to do a field test on the powder I'd bought from the gunman. All undercovers carry in their surveillance vehicles small test kits designed to evaluate product in the field\u2014to reveal if a drug is real or counterfeit\u2014and, if it is real, its relative potency. The cocaine test kits were about half the size of a pack of cigarettes. Each one contained two small capsules of chemicals and a thick plastic bag for mixing the suspected drug and the chemicals. When the chemical comes into contact with high-grade cocaine, the mixture turns a deep blue.\n\nWith Perez looking over my shoulder, I took a small amount of the powder I'd bought on the street and placed it into the test kit, carefully breaking open the glass-like capsules one at a time. The mixture immediately turned cobalt blue. This meant to me that the gunman was a solid cocaine dealer.\n\nWe had succeeded in our mission, and miraculously no one on either side had got hurt. The target I'd made the buy from could be taken down at any time: he was a real player, and there was no informant to protect. By then, it was late on a Friday afternoon. We had the weekend off, and the case work would resume on Monday morning. Though it sounds strange, task force members rarely worked weekends, since that meant overtime, which the brass wanted to avoid.\n\nMonday morning, back in our headquarters at the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office, I walked past a \"Top 10 Most Wanted\" poster and immediately realized why Cannonball Head had looked familiar. His face was on it: he was wanted for murder, as a hit-man for the Five Percent street gang. During our encounter, I'd known that I was in serious danger, but it wasn't until that moment in the hallway that I realized how close I'd come to death. I had been lucky as shit.\n\nCannonball Head became our top priority, and all efforts were focused on bringing him in. The one solid connection we had, and the man who could potentially lead us to Cannonball, was the guy I'd bought the coke from, the man who'd hidden the gun in the stroller. We decided to take him down immediately.\n\nBased on my information, the MCNTF obtained an arrest warrant for the dealer, whom we'd now identified as a guy named Jerome Minter. To protect the identities of the task force members, local police were asked to pick him up, take him to the Monmouth County jail for processing and then bring him to the task force's headquarters for questioning.\n\nA uniformed officer walked Minter into an interrogation room containing two chairs and a desk, and handcuffed him to a steel rail that was bolted to the wall.\n\n\"Fuck you, you goddamned fucking asshole,\" he shouted as I walked in the door.\n\n\"You don't have to like me,\" I told him. \"But you should hear me out. After that, I walk.\"\n\nHis look softened slightly but he said nothing.\n\n\"You see your charge sheet? See anything about a piece being shoved into my face? See anything about endangering a minor by putting a piece in a stroller?\n\n\"No, you don't,\" I continued. \"You just see the drug charge that you and I know is legit. I could burn you on the piece. But to do that I would have to fuck over your woman. I take this up with DYFS [New Jersey's Department of Youth and Family Services], they'll take your woman's kid away. But you don't see that charge, do you? You know why? Because I may be the one fucking person in your fucked world who gives a fuck about that kid. Now let's get this straight. I forget, forever, all the shit about the piece, the kid and his mom. And you give me Cannonball Head's location. No one will know you gave him up. You have my word. He set you up with me anyway. How the fuck you want to play it?\"\n\nMinter looked at me from the corner of his eye and sat silently, considering my offer. Then he gave me what I needed. There was no further conversation between us. But his eyes silently telegraphed two words: \"Thank you.\"\n\nOutside the interrogation room, I passed on the location to the prosecutor's office, which handled Cannonball Head's takedown. It felt good to get the killer off the street.\n\n### CHAPTER TWO\n\n## BLOWING THE SHOT\n\nThe Monmouth County Narcotics Task Force operated out of a nondescript three-story office building down the street from the massive Superior Court building in Freehold. Our sprawling offices\u2014nothing more than cubicles for each investigator, separated by rows of chest-high dividers, were on the second floor and directly below the County Prosecutor's offices.\n\nOne afternoon in June, Tom Perez, Rick Coutu and I were working on some paperwork when the receptionist walked in and said there was a white guy out front named Mike Hanson who claimed to have information about an African-American drug dealer in Asbury Park. Perez asked the receptionist to bring him upstairs.\n\nIt sounds odd to have someone walk in off the street and offer up information about a drug dealer. But the truth was that it happened on a fairly consistent basis. Sometimes you'd see someone trying to offer up information on criminal activity as a way to get a reduced sentence or obtain a \"get out of jail free\" card in some unrelated court case. Other times, guys would find themselves in a dispute and try to rat the other individuals out.\n\nWhile the receptionist walked Hanson upstairs, one of the detectives ran a quick computer check on him for \"wants and warrants.\" He came up clean. Tom met privately with Hanson and quickly decided that this guy had the potential to become a serious informant. He brought him back to where Coutu and I, along with a couple of the other guys, were working.\n\nHanson introduced himself to the four of us and shook our hands; there was no bravado in his tone or mannerisms. Judging from his clothes and the multiple tattoos on both arms, Hanson was a hard-core biker. Wearing jeans, black T-shirt and construction boots, he stood about six foot one and weighed about 180 to 190 pounds. He had long, thick brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard.\n\nThe biker told us he was there to talk about \"Mr. Brown,\" an African-American drug dealer who worked the streets in Asbury Park. We knew exactly who he was talking about; we'd been trying to take down this guy for a while because he seemed to move a lot of product. But we hadn't been able to get close to him.\n\nHanson sat across the table and looked at the four of us. He seemed to focus on me, in part because I, too, was dressed like a biker and had multiple tats. All of us were wearing casual clothes to help us fit in during undercover operations; elsewhere on the floor, detectives wore jackets and ties. Perez said little but gave me a nod; whatever developed, Hanson was going to be my new confidential informant, or CI.\n\nHanson described how he wanted to help us take down his drug dealer\u2014who coincidentally happened to be a good friend of his. The biker explained that he'd gotten hooked on heroin as a result of being with Mr. Brown, and he was convinced that the only way to kick his habit was to get his dealer off the street\u2014for a long time.\n\nHanson's story was hard to believe, and I told him so.\n\n\"We have no charges against you,\" I said. \"Is this a revenge thing? If it is we have to move very carefully. These things become ambushes way too easily.\"\n\n\"It isn't like that at all,\" Hanson said. \"If I don't take this guy off the street, I will never give up my habit.'\n\n\"Are you so tight with him that you can make me fit in?\"\n\n\"Yeah, but we have to fix up in the room in front of him,\" he said, meaning that both of us would have to cook and shoot a load of heroin into our veins in front of the dealer.\n\nHanson assured me that if we passed Mr. Brown's test, we could buy some real weight from him\u2014like a \"bundle,\" for starters. A bundle is equal to 10 glassine bags of heroin.\n\n\"I respect you for doing this, man, but if you think I am putting a spike in my veins you got it wrong,\" I told him. \"I want this fucker gone. He is the real deal. But I am not going to shoot anything into my veins.\"\n\n\"Then he'll never go for it,\" my new CI said. His look telegraphed defeat. It was clear that there was no other way to do a buy with Mr. Brown.\n\n\"Where would this likely go down?\" I asked.\n\n\"A motel room,\" he said. \"It'll be a room in some motel in Asbury Park.\"\n\nI asked Hanson if he wanted a cup of coffee. The two of us walked over to a lunch room with round white tables, chairs, a coffee machine, microwave and refrigerator. We chatted casually. I needed to know that I would be able to work with Hanson out on the street; I also needed to know that I could control him, no matter what the circumstances.\n\nMy mind was racing. This was too good to be true; I wanted to take down Mr. Brown, but there was no way I was going to shoot up heroin, no matter what kind of bust I could make. As I talked to him, I realized that Hanson was agenda-free; he really did just want his dealer friend off the street so that he could get off drugs.\n\n\"Hey, bro. What if we cook up and blow the shot?\" I asked. \"I had friends in the army shoot dope, I know the drill. I know how to cook it up, and I know how to draw the syringe. We just turn our back. Once the works are filled, he ain't gonna have to see the last act. How about that? Can you hack it? Can you blow the shot? Because if you don't, this case is shit. You are getting named in a police report. I cannot bullshit you; I think you are a stand-up guy.\"\n\n\"I can hack it,\" Hanson said. \"I'll blow the shot. It won't be the hardest thing I've ever done.\"\n\nOver the next couple of weeks, the team kept Mr. Brown under surveillance from a distance, and I continued to meet with my CI. He was cold as ice, and I believed I could trust him when the buy went down.\n\nHanson made contact with the dealer on a Thursday and arranged for a meeting in a run-down two-story motel that offered hourly rates\u2014along with dingy rooms, dim lighting and filthy patterned carpeting. Late that night, we parked in the lot and took one of the exterior wrought-iron staircases up to the second-floor room where Mr. Brown was supposed to be waiting.\n\nMy CI knocked on a wood door with peeling red enamel. The room's curtains were drawn, but the lights were on and we could hear muffled voices inside. The dealer, dressed in dyed black jeans and an unbuttoned black sport shirt, opened the door a few inches and stared out at Hanson and me with dark-colored, uncaring eyes. There was another guy in the room, sitting in a threadbare chair in a corner.\n\nThe seediness and squalor were appalling. The smell of the burned junk, the way this seemingly innocuous powder can hollow out a man, struck me. My informant had thick black tracks hideously marking his skin. If he wore a short-sleeved shirt, anyone would be disgusted. What woman would love him? He had the demeanor of a schoolteacher but the scars of a craven addict. How scarred were the souls involved in this _danse macabre_?\n\nShowing no hint of concern, Hanson made the brief introductions and said that each of us would be buying a bundle\u2014but that I would be paying for both of us. Mr. Brown seemed okay with that. It didn't make much difference to him where the money was coming from.\n\nI asked if we could fix up a little\u2014just a taste\u2014to keep Mr. Jones away, and Mr. Brown insisted that I shoot up in front of him. There was drug paraphernalia on the round table, including needles, syringes and cotton.\n\nHanson and I both tensed up when there was a knock on the door. It was Mr. Brown's girlfriend, a woman in her early 20s, wearing a tight top, shorts, high heels and lots of gold jewelry. She gave him a kiss, walked over to the bed and leaned back on the headboard. She was hot as a pistol and clearly distracted the dealer.\n\nI handed over cash for the two decks we were buying and gave Hanson two bags of smack. We each emptied the contents of two envelopes into a spoon, and used the syringe to add a small amount of water. Next we held the spoons over lighters and carefully heated the mixture. We stirred the heroin into the water, using the plastic top of the syringe. When the mixture started to bubble, we knew it was done, or \"cooked.\"\n\nHanson and I grabbed small bits of cotton off the table, rolled them between our fingers until we had tiny round balls, and dropped them into the liquid mixture. We poked the needles into the centers of the cotton balls and pulled back on the plungers to suck all the heroin into the syringes.\n\nTaking pieces of yellowing surgical tubing from the table, we tied off our upper arms to make the veins more apparent. We put one end of the tubing between our teeth, held the other end with our right hand, and pulled until we started to cut off circulation. I looked over at Mr. Brown for a second and saw that his attention was focused more on his girlfriend than on us.\n\nThank God for the bombshell, whoever the hell she was.\n\nHanson and I sat on the foot of the bed, ready to do the shot. My CI successfully blew his shot, allowing the heroin to run harmlessly down his forearm and onto the already stained bedspread. Mr. Brown seemed unconcerned about my CI, whom he knew to be a junkie; he was more interested in my actions.\n\nBut as I casually turned my back to Mr. Brown, I inadvertently stabbed myself in the arm\u2014exactly what I didn't want to do.\n\nMy mind raced, and I wondered who else had used the dirty needle that was now stuck in my arm. For all the insane risks I ever took, this was the most extreme. I was potentially under attack from something microscopic in size but every bit as deadly as a razor or knife.\n\n_Fuck, fuck, fuck,_ I silently screamed. _I have a dirty goddamned needle in my arm_. I would have preferred a knife fight or a shootout. I felt as if a white-hot poker was stabbing me in the gut.\n\nI quietly pulled the needle out and shot the junk onto the floor. Mr. Brown had looked away just long enough for me to cover my actions. He saw the blood on my arm from where the needle had gone in and took that as proof positive that I'd done the shot.\n\nGetting stuck with that needle was skeevy, and it freaked me out. I understood the risks, and I'd volunteered for this job. But this was insidious and creepy. Fuck. Blood-borne pathogens. Would I contract hepatitis, herpes or some other sexually-transmitted disease? If I did get sick, what then? Wild thoughts raced through my brain.\n\nMy CI and I left Mr. Brown's hotel room with 16 bags of heroin. Hanson told me not to worry too much about the needle, because he thought they were clean. But it was very tough indeed to trust a junkie biker's word that I was safe from infection. AIDS, thank God, hadn't yet reached the heroin crowd in Asbury Park. It was only a few short years later that AIDS became rampant there.\n\nHours later, I was back at headquarters, checking in the drugs as evidence. My plan was to go back and \"double up\" Mr. Brown, buying twice the quantity of drugs to further bolster my case against him. Fixing up in his presence was no longer necessary; I had passed the test. But I never got a chance to do another buy from Mr. Brown, who was believed to be the biggest heroin dealer in Asbury Park. The next day, Middletown Police Chief Joe McCarthy ordered me to leave the task force and return to the police department. He knew I loved my work with the undercover unit, but he was ordering me off, effective immediately, for reasons that had nothing to do with me.\n\nEven before I got the news that I was done with the case, something felt off in the task force offices. Some of the senior officers weren't there, and that was unusual.\n\nCaptain Harry Valentine called me into his office and asked me to shut the door.\n\n\"Bradshaw, I'm sorry to have to tell you, but Chief McCarthy wants you back in Middletown,\" the captain said. \"Gather your personal items, do what you need to do and then get out of here. You're not to return. Understand?\"\n\n\"Captain, what the hell. What's going on?\" I asked.\n\nValentine had little to say. But apparently the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office had put together a series of indictments against three Middletown Police Department detectives\u2014Steve Xanthos, Kevin McCauley and Pat Greeves\u2014for violently assaulting a couple of meth dealers while on a drug raid. Xanthos was known for making heavy-duty arrests, but his tactics weren't always the cleanest. McCauley and I had been friends for years, and I was surprised to hear about him. No doubt, Chief McCarthy was pissed. His force was now down by three detectives, and he had a major public relations problem on his hands. The chief wanted nothing to do with the Monmouth County prosecutor, and that meant that I couldn't continue on the MCNTF.\n\nNow I realized why the task force offices had seemed so quiet. A number of the guys had apparently taken some time off to avoid having to tell me about Chief McCarthy's decision. Valentine was the low man on the totem pole, and so he'd been stuck with the task. I tried calling headquarters in Middletown to find out what the chief had in mind for me. But oddly, it seemed that some of the commanding officers there had also left early. I wasn't going to learn anything more about my next assignment tonight. I literally had no idea what my next assignment was going to be.\n\nWhat a roller-coaster I was on! I'm on the verge of really smacking some home runs, then the pinch hitter takes my spot in the lineup. What did this say about my personality, that no one in the brass wanted to look me in the eye? Did they think I was deranged, a risk to flip out? If so, they needn't have worried. It had been a hell of a summer. A real blast. I was in no position to even make a case with Chief McCarthy\u2014he valued loyalty, and I wouldn't have the job if it weren't for him sticking his neck out. I'd heard there was an opening in a new, smaller undercover operation. I would shoot for that and enjoy the remainder of the summer. Besides, my friend was one of the indicted detectives. And lest I forget, McCauley had invited me along on the ill-fated narcotics raid that resulted in his arrest. Lucky for me, I had been busy that night in Asbury Park.\n\nMy MCNTF partners wasted no time taking me out for a proper farewell celebration, complete with a visit to a strip club in Eatontown that I could have done without, an elaborate steak dinner and some sorrowful goodbyes early the following morning.\n\nOn Monday morning, I reported for work at the Middletown Police Department. There, the chief saw me and called me into his office for a quick conversation.\n\n\"I know you liked it out there and were kicking ass. But there's no way in the world we can have a guy like you helping those motherfuckers,\" McCarthy said.\n\nI had no choice but to agree\u2014and truthfully, I was worried about my buddy McCauley.\n\nThe chief pulled one of the lieutenants into the conversation. \"Hey, Danny, you know that three weeks of vacation you've got for Bradshaw, right? You've got that in the books, right?\n\nThe lieutenant gave me a quick glance. It was clear he had no idea what the chief was talking about. But it was the chief.\n\n\"Yeah, absolutely!\" the lieutenant responded.\n\n\"Great,\" the chief said before turning to me. \"Okay, then take three weeks off and when you get back, the next opening at the Bayshore Narcotics Task Force is yours.\"\n\nI couldn't complain. I suddenly had much of August off.\n\n### CHAPTER THREE\n\n## THE POLITICS OF CONTRABAND\n\nOne month later, I started work with another undercover unit\u2014the Bayshore Narcotics Task Force, responsible for driving down illicit drug activity in the northern section of Monmouth County. I was excited to be part of the group, even though it was a tiny, low-budget operation.\n\nA group of local police departments had teamed up to form the BNTF, with each one providing staff on a rotating basis. There were only three of us in the unit when it started. John McCabe, a detective lieutenant from Hazlet, was the group's supervisor; he brought John \"Jack\" Mullins with him from Hazlet. I was the only one who had any undercover experience, with three months' worth under my belt, but all of us had spent some time on the streets and knew the area and its residents well. Other officers had already nicknamed Detective Lieutenant McCabe \"Father John\" because he had an uncanny ability to be able to get suspects to confess to just about anything without using excessive force. Soon the Keansburg Police Department sent over another officer, Armand \"Armie\" Ertle, and the Union Beach PD sent over Alton Bennett, giving us a total of five.\n\nWe worked out of the Holmdel Police Department, which\u2014like many small municipal police forces\u2014was housed in the town hall. The two-story V-shaped building was just five years old; it had a light-colored stone fa\u00e7ade and dark shingled roof. It was located on Crawfords Corner Road, not far from the Garden State Parkway, which made it easier for us to move around the area. The task force operated out of a room in the basement, across the hall from the police gym.\n\nHolmdel had an upscale population of about 16 thousand and a low crime rate\u2014which made the police headquarters a great place for us, since we didn't need to worry as much about low-level criminals seeing us and later identifying us as cops. Most of our operations and arrests would take place miles away, in the communities of Middletown, Keansburg and Union Beach.\n\nThe transfer energized me. We were like a special-ops team, with very loose supervision. It was all about the character of the undercover operatives, their mutual trust\u2014and, as always, results. I was on cloud nine. I had gone from an outlaw motorcycle culture, with jail always hanging over my head like a Sword of Damocles, to law enforcement with a nice amount of heady danger associated with it. I sincerely liked and respected my co-workers, and they returned the sentiment. We were determined to make this task force the highlight of our careers. I felt like I was born to it.\n\nOn my first day there, I met the supervisor, McCabe. He wouldn't be part of the task force's everyday operations but would have full authority over the unit. McCabe was average in both height and weight, with a very mild personality. I got the sense that he could be a quiet but strong leader. He and I talked for a bit in the office and came up with the idea of going undercover as members of an outlaw biker gang\u2014which would be easy for me. It wasn't long before he suggested that Jack Mullins and I go out for a drink in Hazlet. We'd be working together closely, relying on each other, so it made sense for us to get to know each other.\n\nThough Jack had no prior undercover experience, I was sure he'd quickly get up to speed and make a superb undercover. He was street-smart, a born raconteur and had prior military experience with a top-notch outfit in the Philippines. He also looked like a perfect fit as an outlaw biker.\n\nJack and I headed for a quiet, out-of-the-way bar for lunch and a couple of drinks. We grabbed two bar stools, ordered pizzas and draft beers and watched a little of the baseball game that was playing on the TV. We were having a great time, telling war stories and laughing like hell. Jack could put away multiple drinks without it showing. We spent half the afternoon at the bar, sipping brews together.\n\nSuddenly Jack looked me straight in the eye and said, \"I'm feeling like I should kick your fucking ass. I've fucking heard about you, all your fucking stories, and I'm fucking done with it.\"\n\n\"I know you're fucking around, man,\" I said.\n\n\"I'm not fucking around at all. You need a beating, and I am the perfect person to do it,\" Jack said. \"It'll get things started out right.\"\n\n\"You're fucking serious?\"\n\n\"Fucking right I am,\" he shot back. \"I will beat you out to the parking lot, you motherfucker.\"\n\nThere was no way I was going to let this go, cop or no cop. I stood, walked out of the bar and headed to the parking lot around back\u2014ready to pound him into the pavement.\n\nJack came at me with fists held high. Just before he got within striking distance, he stopped and burst out laughing. \"You thought I was serious?\" he asked. \"Everyone knows about you, you're the last person I would ever want to fight. You're killing me, man.\"\n\nMcCabe had been right to send the two of us out that day.\n\nI can only imagine the stories Jack must have been told about me. Police agencies are a bit like beauty parlors, places where gossip is told and retold\u2014and often embellished at every step. As a former member of an outlaw motorcycle gang who rode through town on a custom Harley, got into bar fights on a regular basis and otherwise wreaked havoc on the Jersey Shore, I was no doubt real fodder for coffee break meetings in the field. The fact that I was a black belt martial artist also added to my tough guy image. Inevitably, the myth is much bigger than the man. I knew that going into the game, so I played things as low-key as I could. I rarely attended police-related drunk-fests and avoided confrontations with co-workers.\n\nThe following day, the Bayshore Narcotics Task Force began its work in the field. As awesome as the whole assignment was, we needed to show real results or our credibility would be compromised. We also needed to make allies of every police chief, patrolman and detective we came into contact with. We needed these guys to want to turn over low-level criminals to us so that we could use them as confidential informants. The only way we could do that was to be liked and respected\u2014and treat our word as our bond. The unit had a lot of spirit, but not much in the way of equipment. We had one crappy old sedan and an old blue full-sized Chevrolet van\u2014the sort used by tradespeople, with two seats up front and a large open cargo area. Like the MCNTF, we had no electronic surveillance equipment.\n\nI felt that our best disguise was as bikers, and so we went with the idea that we were a chapter of the Norsemen Motorcycle Club. The guys were cool with the idea, but there was one obvious element missing: we had no motorcycles, and the powers that be weren't willing to provide us with any. Somehow we managed to wing it. The van helped a lot, because motorcycle clubs always rode with a cargo van just in case one of the expensive custom bikes broke down. There was nothing worse than seeing a hand-painted and chromed motorcycle on the back of a tow truck.\n\nJack and I soon made our first bust using that van. We were driving down a highway near Union Beach in the Chevy when we saw two guys in their early 20s hitchhiking. We stopped to pick them up and headed down toward their destination, Keansburg.\n\n\"Hey, you got any dope?\" I asked.\n\n\"As a matter of fact, I do,\" one of the guys said, reaching into his pants pocket and pulling out a very large bag of marijuana. Jack and I were stunned. We sat quietly while the guy pulled out rolling papers and made a joint. Maybe we were too quiet, because they immediately became suspicious.\n\n\"They're cops,\" one of the guys whispered.\n\n\"Fucking right,\" I said. I hit the brakes and brought the van to a quick stop on the side of the highway. One of the guys hopped out of the back and tried to make a run for it, but I caught him, tackled him and brought him back to the van in handcuffs. Jack had the other guy in handcuffs, too. Both men had been unarmed.\n\nAs we headed over to the Keansburg Police Department to book them, Jack and I gave each other a quiet look. We were worried that these guys might be locals, able to describe us and our van to their buddies. But we had no problem maintaining our cover. The hitchhikers were from another part of the state, and there was no way they would be back here anytime soon. They were soon processed for felony-weight possession of a controlled substance.\n\nIn my biker days, I couldn't have cared less if someone was carrying some weed. Even as a cop, carrying a small amount of marijuana was no big deal to me. But this case was different because of the quantity they were carrying and the casual manner they demonstrated. I was struck by their sheer stupidity.\n\nBig Bad John Jankowski, a known drug dealer who had long avoided arrest, was target number one for the BNTF.\n\nJankowski was a major-league cocaine dealer, and his coke was always of high quality. He was a huge guy\u2014a brutal one, too, and skilled with a shotgun. He lived in Union Beach, in northern Monmouth County, and had a brother, Stan Jankowski, who was a cop with the Middletown Police Department. The word on the street was that Stan fed his brother inside info to stay ahead of the law. But I knew Stan, and I knew that the word on the street was 100 percent bullshit. What kept the police away from Big John's door was his reputation for violence and his excellent street sense.\n\nNo one would give up Big John, no matter how much jail time was at stake. They all knew that this bad actor liked shotguns and wasn't afraid to use them. The trick was coming up with a plan to take him down without getting any of us shot or killed. I was also determined that the BNTF was going to take Big John down without any help\u2014or knowledge\u2014from the MCNTF. Though the two agencies had the same goals, there was considerable interagency competition; I didn't want my former task force involved, and no one else did, either.\n\nBig John had a modus operandi that was tough to penetrate as well. He sold virtually everything himself, right out of his house. Unless you were a close and trusted personal friend, you couldn't score from him. The only way he'd deal with someone new was if the buyer brought his girlfriend or wife with him. If the cops were surveilling his house, the drug buys would always appear innocent enough; he was just having a couple of people over for a visit. But the woman was there for another, more sinister reason, too\u2014satisfying Big John's sexual desires.\n\nAfter a buyer made a few scores with Big John, they'd realize that he had the best product and the best prices in town. They'd also see that he was reliable, with a solid supply of drugs. Buyers knew a good thing when they saw it, so they would keep coming back. Once Big John knew that a buyer was even slightly dependent on him, he'd change the rules of the game.\n\n\"Just have your girl come,\" Big John would tell the buyer. \"I don't want you near my house. It's too hot. If I see you instead of her alone, you got a real problem with me.\"\n\nAnd no one wanted a problem with Big John.\n\nWhen the wife or girlfriend visited, Jankowski would demand that they give him oral sex\u2014or there'd be no deal. The dealer would lay out a nice railroad-track line of coke on his living room table and tell the girl that she had a choice: snort the coke and give him head or leave empty-handed. Most girls wound up doing the deal John's way; most of them were too afraid to ever tell their husbands and boyfriends what had happened, for fear that someone would end up dead.\n\nThat Big John used women in such a demeaning way was galling to all of us. I had multiple channels of information that corroborated his quasi-rape MO. We all possessed a deep appreciation for dark, and I mean real dark, humor. But there were no jokes about Big John's method of sexual fulfillment. It made taking him down an almost sacred obligation. Some cops felt that these women put themselves in harm's way by getting involved with serious dope dealers. Don't buy cocaine and Big John won't rape you, they argued. That was one view, but it wasn't universal. Most saw John as the ultimate bully and abuser of the vulnerable. These girls may have been wrong, or weak, but they didn't deserve the treatment they were getting from this asshole.\n\nJack Mullins and I spent weeks brainstorming and working our CIs, trying to get one of them to give us something on Big John. We were determined to get the dealer, no matter how long it took.\n\nThen, in the spring of 1986, we heard about Steve Zukka, who went by the street name of \"Shoes\" because of his bizarre habit of stealing people's footwear. He insisted that he'd known Big John for years and was adamant that he could help us take down the dealer\u2014if we could get him a girl to take with him on the drug buy. Shoes was 140 pounds, about five foot eight, with long, greasy hair and several missing front teeth. He was related to organized crime thug Vinnie Calabro and would often sleep in Calabro's low-budget pool house. Otherwise, Shoes had no real home, and he rarely showered. The guy was largely invisible in Union Beach.\n\nSitting in the task force's modest office, Mullins and I tossed around different ideas for coming up with a female companion for Shoes\u2014a tough task indeed. We had no access to female undercover officers in the BNTF, and we knew that my former unit, the MCNTF, wouldn't supply us with one unless they assumed full control over the operation.\n\nMullins and I hit on the idea of using a dispatcher for the Holmdel Police Department who also happened to be a \"special\" police officer, meaning that she could work as a uniformed officer during peak summer periods, when the department was at its busiest. Essentially, the \"specials\" were part-time police officers, with less training than full-fledged officers, and often belittled as \"rent-a-cops.\"\n\nThe Holmdel dispatcher, Kerri Adams, was slender, with long, straight hair and a decent figure. To be sure, hanging with Shoes would be difficult for anyone to stomach, but she would get the chance to work a major undercover drug case. Maybe we could convince our superiors to green-light using Adams for this operation.\n\nA couple of other elements had to be factored into the equation, too. First, Kerri was too pretty, too \"normal,\" to play Shoes's girlfriend. I worried that Big John wouldn't believe that Kerri and Shoes were actually a couple. Why would a girl like Kerri ever spend time with a guy like Shoes\u2014much less sleep with him? In addition, rumors were circulating that Kerri was involved with a high-ranking member of the department. If true, how would that play into the equation?\n\nI took the dispatcher aside and asked if she'd be willing to work with us, which she was. It was the kind of willingness that comes from seeing how cool UC work looked in the movies and on TV. She was blissfully unaware of how down and dirty this game could get, and I was hesitant to tell her. She had the nerve to do two very difficult things: be seen as Shoes's girlfriend and buy coke from a genuine bad guy.\n\nWe took the plan to McCabe, the task force's leader, whose response was lukewarm at best because of the dispatcher's minimal training and lack of experience in the field. Still, he agreed to take the plan to Holmdel Chief of Police Bruce Phillips.\n\nChief Phillips agreed to go along with the plan and promised to take the heat if something went wrong. We all knew that it was a risky move and that we'd be putting a police dispatcher in harm's way. If it went bad and Big John swatted Shoes like a fly and raped our UC, there was going to be hell to pay.\n\nStill, Mullins and I intended to be there every step of the way, ready to step in if Jankowski, or Shoes, did anything unexpected. There was an upside to this case, too. McCabe and Phillips wanted to take Jankowski down in a big way, and they knew that we wouldn't get many opportunities.\n\nWith close surveillance from Mullins and me, Shoes took his \"girlfriend\" to Big John's house in Union Beach one Thursday evening. It was a large, comfortable two-story house with a wraparound porch, set close to the street. Shoes was clearly in love with his newfound friend, while Kerri did her best not to projectile vomit when she was close to him. It was hard to tell what bothered her more\u2014his odor or his appearance. Mullins and I watched from a distance. It was a quiet evening, and both of us listened intently for any indication that the buy was not going down as planned.\n\nAfter about 15 minutes, Shoes walked out with Kerri at his side. The two of them hopped into her car\u2014a ratty old Honda Civic that we used for undercover work\u2014and drove to our prearranged meeting spot behind a quiet commercial complex on Florence Avenue. Mullins and I followed in our UC vehicle, another nondescript sedan.\n\n\"We fucking did it!\" Shoes said as I watched Kerri get out of the car and walk over at a slower, more controlled pace. She looked happy at having made the drug buy, too. Or maybe it was that she'd put a few feet between her and our ripe-smelling CI. She held up an eightball\u2014an eighth-ounce of high quality coke.\n\n\"Oh, man, that's beautiful,\" I told Kerri as Jack listened to Shoes's rapid-paced version of what had happened.\n\nBig John was going down. I was sure we'd be able to do a second buy.\n\nThe four of us started making plans for Shoes and Kerri to make a return visit to Big John's a few days later. Within hours, Jack and I had the coke safely locked away in an evidence locker and the written reports completed\u2014with some help from Kerri.\n\nLater that night, I went over the evening's events in my head. I was pretty sure Big John wasn't buying that Shoes and Kerri were boyfriend and girlfriend. The combination was just too odd. I had a hunch that he was thinking ahead to the day when he was going to tell Shoes to take a hike and insist that Kerri make a buy on her own. Kerri was attractive, and Big John was no doubt going to go back to his usual modus operandi. She would do one more buy from the dealer, and no more.\n\nThe next night, a Friday, Big John held a poker game in his house. It would prove to be his last night alive.\n\nHe had invited over a small group of his friends, including Ricky Jefferson, an up-and-coming white boxer who could hit like a mule and never seemed to bleed. Jefferson was there with his black transgender girlfriend. Jefferson's reputation in the ring ensured that no one ever dared talk to him about his sexual orientation.\n\nAfter a few hours, the other guys left\u2014but Jefferson and his girlfriend stuck around for few more lines and drinks. At some point, someone picked up a ball-peen hammer and caved in Big John's head.\n\nIt was around dinnertime Saturday night that Mullins called me to say that Big John had been murdered.\n\n\"We know who killed him,\" Mullins said to me during the call.\n\nAn involuntary shiver ran through me, and I wondered if he could be right.\n\nI reflected on the bizarre conversation I'd had with Shoes Thursday night, about an hour after he and Kerri made the buy from Big John. Shoes suggested that he and I rip off Big John's sizeable drug stash.\n\n\"I did good, didn't I, man?\" Shoes said to me.\n\n\"Fucking right, man. You even set it up for next week,\" I said. Shoes had stunned Mullins and me by arranging for him and Kerri to go back to Big John's house to \"double up\" and make a second buy. \"Gotta hand it to you, Shoes. No one can ever say you ain't got balls the size of boulders,\" I continued. \"Anything else you want to talk about?\"\n\n\"Yeah, but just between you and me,\" he said.\n\nWe ducked behind a parked commercial van to get away from Kerri, Mullins and our backup team. Mullins shot me a glance as if to ask, \"What the fuck is Shoes up to now?\"\n\n\"Man, I just know Big John is sitting on two kilos of blow as we speak. He keeps it in the kitchen, inside a cupboard,\" Shoes told me.\n\n\"Is that right? How the fuck you know where he keeps it?\" I asked. \"I know he didn't show you. Also, how can you be so sure how much weight he's sitting on? If you think we are going to rip the house on a search warrant, guessing he's holding weight, you gotta stop going to the movies, man.\"\n\n\"It ain't like that,\" Shoes said, gesturing with his hands as he continued his rant. \"I got a friend, he fills me in. No, fuck no, no warrants. I want to sneak in and steal the whole load. You and me. I can move it. Make some serious cash. You know you can trust me to be straight with you. We been through so much. John thinks no one got the balls to do him like that. But I do. I got the balls and I won't get caught by that fuck. A 4 a.m. in-and-out. We can be set, big-time.\"\n\nGod help this stupid man. Shoes had no plan and even less of a chance of surviving if Big John even got a hint that he was thinking about ripping him off. Still, I wanted to hear more about the supposed stash.\n\n\"Okay, you go in and take him off,\" I said. \"What the fuck you need me for? Some kinda wheelman?\"\n\n\"It's not gonna happen, but that asshole might wake up at the wrong time, to take a shit or some bullshit like that,\" Shoes said. \"You gotta whack that bitch out. I don't know anyone else could handle it. He could use an ass-kicking anyway. You're the perfect person to give it to him.\"\n\n\"Well, no shit. I don't know whether I should be flattered or pissed,\" I said, shaking my head at the absurdity of this conversation. I wondered what Mullins's reaction would be.\n\n\"Shoes, I ain't selling my badge for that scumbag's yayho. No fucking way. Don't ever fucking talk to me about it again. You got balls; start using your brains.\"\n\nMy crazy CI looked deflated. I reached over and put my hand on his shoulder.\n\n\"Man, I...\"\n\n\"Shoes, we are still good. We all get carried away in this shitty business,\" I said. \"Next week, we double the cocksucker. When we take him down we'll set it up so you can see him going down, he just can't see you.\"\n\nShoes walked away, but he was a simple read. He wanted to rip off Big John, and he was convinced that he could get away with it. Later I related the conversation to Mullins. Both of us thought he was nuts. Within a week, we'd double Big John and get him off the street. Shoes's plan would become history.\n\nWith Big John dead, Mullins was now convinced that Shoes was to blame. The CI had gone ahead with his half-assed plan on his own, the dealer had discovered him and things had gone bad. Mullins and I agreed that we had to go pick up Shoes for questioning\u2014and we had to get him now. Mullins said he'd swing by my place in Keansburg in a half hour or so to pick me up. I glanced at my watch. It was 8:30 p.m.\n\nI was in my garage working out when Mullins called. The detached garage sat about 50 feet away from the two-story house that I shared with my wife, Jane, a tall, Nordic blonde who worked as a hostess in a nearby restaurant, and with my 125-pound dog, an Akita named Bushi. I'd converted the structure into a gym, and I routinely worked out in there\u2014mostly doing weights and practicing my Korean Karate. The concrete floor was covered with mats. On this night, I'd been working on some karate kicks and other moves as the dog relaxed in the corner and kept one eye on me.\n\nAfter a while, I headed inside to get cleaned up and put on some jeans and a black T-shirt. In the kitchen, I scribbled a note to Jane that I was going out working and likely wouldn't be home for a while. Working late at night and occasionally on weekends was all part of my undercover work with the BNTF, and she knew it. Perhaps more importantly, Jane and I weren't all that close anymore.\n\nMullins swung by my house to pick me up, and we headed over to Vinnie Calabro's house, a big, glitzy bi-level in a large development. We were amped up, and the more we talked, the more we liked Shoes for the murder. He had the motivation and the opportunity.\n\nA Virgin Mary statue was on the lawn in front of Calabro's house, something that I always found amusing, given his involvement with organized crime. Shoes slept in the pool house, which was part storage shed and part lounge for those enjoying the big in-ground pool. The structure held a sofa, a couple of chairs, a coffee table, and a bathroom and shower that Shoes somehow seemed to ignore. Vinnie put up with his degenerate nephew living out there only because he was family; the less he saw of Shoes, the better. Mullins and I had never once seen Shoes inside the main house.\n\nMullins pulled our van into the driveway, threw it into park and shut off the engine and lights. We walked around the right side of the house and into the backyard like we owned the place. Calabro had never once complained about Mullins and me\u2014two thuggish-looking bikers\u2014wandering around his property; he wasn't scared of us. And besides, he had his own legal battles to contend with.\n\nShoes was just walking out of the pool house when Mullins and I turned the corner. We immediately hijacked our 140-pound CI and tossed him in the back of the van.\n\n\"What the fuck is going on?\" I asked him. \"Big John is dead\u2014his head was caved in. You got any idea how that may have fucking happened? You went into his house without me, didn't you?\"\n\nMullins seemed certain that Shoes was to blame, and he jumped in before the guy had a chance to react to my questions. There was no doubt in Mullins's tone or line of questioning. \"We know you fucking killed him,\" he said without any trace of emotion. \"We want to know how and when you did it.\"\n\nShoes came unglued but said nothing for a few seconds. His face told the story. He'd had no idea what had happened to Big John. Mullins and I knew immediately that he hadn't done it. He also gave us a very credible alibi.\n\n\"I didn't touch the guy. I swear! What, you think I'm crazy?\" Shoes said. He was adamant, saying that he never got near Big John's house, that he had nothing to do with the murder and that he couldn't believe we were looking at him for the crime.\n\nPeople who are guilty of something act different than someone falsely accused. Very few people are clever enough actors to feign innocence. Trained interrogators often know right away because of the \"tells\" people give upon accusation. Shoes passed our test, and it was clear that someone else out there was responsible for taking out Big John.\n\nI was deeply relieved that Shoes wasn't involved. To be sure, bagging Big John's killer had its allure. But God knows what Shoes would have said if he'd been arrested. Any chance of keeping a lid on the admittedly shaky decision to use Kerri on this assignment would have been blown in a big way. I also hadn't been relishing the idea of having to explain to a prosecuting attorney how Shoes had invited me to become his accomplice in knocking off a drug dealer. How could a CI see an undercover cop as the perfect partner for a drug theft and possible drug-related murder?\n\nBecause of our involvement in the undercover buy, Mullins and I had to stay away from the investigation into Big John's murder; we needed to ensure that no one outside of the investigating officers knew anything about Shoes's involvement in our drug buy\u2014or the involvement of our special police officer, Kerri. We were very concerned about reporters covering the murder. If word got out that Shoes had worked with cops on the drug buy, his life could easily be placed in jeopardy. The Union Beach Police Department, which had jurisdiction, turned over the investigation to the major crimes unit within the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office.\n\nUnion Beach's McCabe gave the prosecutor's office the full case file on our investigation into Big John, including the intel we'd developed through our CI, surveillance photos and more. He also told them about our use of the special officer in the drug buy; he laid it all out for them. The unit used our files as the basis for its murder investigation, and things seemed to be going well for a while. But then there was a major screw-up that put our CI's life in danger.\n\nAs the media began probing Big John's murder, Monmouth County Prosecutor John Kaye disclosed to a reporter for the _Asbury Park Press_ that his narcotics officers had already made a drug buy from the dealer. The investigation was supposed to have been kept confidential.\n\nSteve Zukka, aka Shoes, had told people that he was among the last to have seen Big John alive. It wouldn't take an FBI investigator to put two and two together and start asking if Shoes had been a participant in the drug buy that Kaye had described.\n\nWe complained, loudly, up the chain of command. But the damage had been done, and Shoes was in danger. There wasn't much we could do for him; our task force didn't have the monetary resources or manpower to relocate him and give him a new identity. Shoes was pretty much on his own. He was meat on the street.\n\nSomehow, Shoes was able to lie low and escape death. And Mullins and I were able to breathe a sigh of relief.\n\nPretty quickly, the major crimes unit determined that Big John and Ricky Jefferson had gotten into a heated argument over some bullshit thing that _seemed_ important after a shitload of coke and booze had been ingested by the two men. The boxer took a hammer to the dealer's head and literally beat his brains out.\n\nJefferson pleaded not guilty, setting the stage for a salacious murder trial complete with testimony from his transgender girlfriend, who enjoyed using a range of fingernail polish colors throughout the course of the trial. She vamped for the media while Jefferson remained stoic. But Jefferson went down hard, found guilty of premeditated first-degree murder.\n\n### CHAPTER FOUR\n\n## CLOWNS TO THE LEFT, JOKERS TO THE RIGHT\n\nAfter the Big John takedown, we had a lull. We were partly dependent on street cops for some of our leads, and there just wasn't much happening. When we had a \"hot\" CI, someone who was providing solid information to the task force, we'd work around the clock. Sometimes we wouldn't sleep for three days. Now we had no hot CIs, and Mullins and I were getting impatient. Mullins decided to hit the phone.\n\nArmed with literally dozens of reports on drug arrests from nearby towns, Mullins would track down the targets and cold-call them, not unlike someone working in a boiler room operation selling penny stocks. Each time, he'd tell the individual that he was a trucker who was continually on the road and needed to make a score. Most of the people he reached would simply hang up or tell him to go fuck himself\u2014clearly the prudent thing to do, given that they were already facing drug charges. But he didn't care, and he'd keep calling them back for weeks. He used the same story each and every time; he was one of the most tenacious individuals I knew.\n\nOne day, Mullins's continued cold calls paid off. Hunched over his loose-leaf binder full of arrest records and fooling with a pen in one hand, he was on the line again, with a streetwise white kid named Tom Mason, who'd been picked up by local law enforcement for selling LSD. Mason lived with his mother in Aberdeen, and it was the mother who always picked up the phone.\n\nSuddenly, Mullins's tone changed, and he stopped twirling his pen. He shot me a glance, and I instantly knew that Mason had agreed to a meet. The target was ready to do a deal for a substantial amount of LSD. It was clear that Mason didn't want anything to do with the stranger on the other end of the phone, but my partner's smooth-talking and Mason's greed were just too good a match. Better yet, there was no informant to protect in this case. If the deal went down, we could make an arrest as soon as we wanted; there would be no need for a cooling-down period. I high-fived Mullins and asked him to fill me in on the call.\n\nMason had agreed to a meet the following night, a Thursday, in the parking lot of an elementary school in Aberdeen. It was late June 1986, and the school was closed for summer break. The plan was for Mullins to meet Mason in the far corner of the school's parking lot, which wasn't visible from the road. We would get the kid into the back of our cargo van and have him sit on the folding chair we had back there.\n\nWe were psyched about the meet because we knew that the sale of a significant quantity of LSD could bring a heavy jail sentence. We could paint a grim picture for Mason of the jail time he was facing and then flip him, giving us a way to bring down his supplier. Unbeknownst to us at the time, the enhanced penalties for selling drugs at the school were in effect at the time\u2014even though school was closed and no kids were around. We would never have done the deal there had school been open.\n\nMullins and I needed a cover story for the meet, and we opted to be bikers again. We would tell the kid that Mullins was, indeed, a long-distance trucker\u2014but that he was also the vice president of the Norsemen Motorcycle Club, and I was its president. We needed a large quantity of drugs for a major biker bash that was going down the following weekend in East Keansburg. The key was keeping Mullins silent. Although he convincingly looked like a biker, he could not talk the talk.\n\nAs we headed over to the school for the meeting the next day, I told Mullins, \"Keep your fucking mouth shut. Just grunt, and I'll fill in the blanks.\"\n\nHe grunted roughly in response.\n\nI pulled the van into the lot adjacent to Strathmore Elementary School on Church Street and drove to the secluded area in the back. Mullins and I both scoped out the school grounds to make sure there were no kids hanging out in the playground or ball fields. But it was after dark and no one was around. The two of us sat in the van and waited.\n\nMason drove into the lot about 20 minutes later and parked a couple of spaces away from our van. He slowly got out of the late-model Mercedes-Benz E-Class and scoped out the area before walking in our direction. I assumed he was driving one of his parents' cars. He was in his early 20s, with straight, very long dark-brown hair. Mullins got out and slid the rear door open, showing Mason the folding chair.\n\n\"I have to fucking get over one hundred bikes into a fucking park, keep the motherfucking pigs off our ass and get these crazy fuckers high. You have any fucking idea how much of a bitch this is?\" I asked Mason, who'd never seen me before and had no idea who I was.\n\nMullins grunted in agreement.\n\nThe expression on my target's face told me all I needed to know. He was interested in making some quick money off me and didn't really care who I was.\n\n\"Man, you want to make some serious money? Let's get these fuckers smashed,\" I said. You gotta come in on at least a hundred hits. Bare fucking minimum. These fuckers are sick. You know, man, some guys just drink and howl at the moon, but some got to get out there.\"\n\nMason had no difficulty with the quantity; price was his issue. Rule number one for undercovers is to always haggle over the price. No one agrees to pay the price first proposed by a dealer. After some negotiating, we had a deal.\n\n\"This fucker's alright, isn't he?\" I said to Mullins.\n\n\"Fucking A,\" he grunted back.\n\nEverything was going smoothly. Mullins was doing what I'd asked of him and keeping quiet. And Mason seemed ready to do a deal. But the deal wasn't done yet, and I hoped that we could wrap this operation up quickly. The dealer did not look like a Don Juan, and I wondered if I could close the deal by offering him sex with a biker chick.\n\n\"Hey man, Juicy Lucy gonna be hot out there. Why don't you come? I'll have her show you a good time,\" I said.\n\nTurning to Mullins, I continued, \"That fucking chick is flat out wild. Whatcha say, bro, this cat and Juicy Lucy?\"\n\n\"Fucking A,\" he grunted.\n\nSuddenly, I sneezed.\n\nMullins looked my way and said, \"God bless you.\"\n\nMason looked like he'd been punched in the face. His eyes opened wide, and he looked at Mullins and then at me. Would a bad-ass outlaw biker say \"God bless you\" to another biker? There was only one answer: no.\n\nI was sure it was only a matter of milliseconds before Mason bolted out of our van.\n\nI smashed Mullins in the right shoulder with my left fist. \"God bless me? You motherfucker, when has God ever blessed me?\"\n\nBefore our target had a chance to react, I turned to him and said: \"Are we good? If you're bullshit, a lot of bikers are gonna be on me. That means I'm on you. But if we're square, Juicy Lucy will be there with her fucking tongue out.\"\n\n\"We're square,\" Mason said.\n\nWe set up another meeting for late in the afternoon the following day. Mason jumped out of the van, got in his car and drove away, leaving Mullins and me sitting in the dark van, cursing at each other. I was still pissed at the \"God bless you.\" And he continued to find the humor in it. He was also pissed that I was angry at him\u2014because in the end we'd been successful.\n\nThe truth was, I thought Mullins's slip of the tongue was funny, too. But I also knew that Mason could have easily realized that we were undercover cops and pulled a weapon on us. We were lucky\u2014this time.\n\nThe following day, a Friday, we met Mason behind a local supermarket. Both of us were dressed as bikers. I was wearing my black leather jacket with the sleeves cut off and a grimy T- shirt underneath. Mullins was wearing jeans, a black T-shirt and black leather engineer boots.\n\nRight on time, our target pulled into the parking lot in the Mercedes\u2014and rolled into the spot next to our van.\n\nMason threw the van's sliding door open and flopped into the folding chair. He pulled a vial out of his pocket containing more than 150 LSD tabs and asked if Lucy was still coming to our party.\n\nI pulled out my gun and put it in his face.\n\n\"We're cops, you stupid asshole,\" I said, as Mullins pulled out his badge.\n\nMason's face went ashen and his eyes briefly darted toward the door handle, which was beyond his reach. He opted to stay in his seat.\n\nMullins hopped out of the van, opened the sliding door and pulled Mason out while I kept the gun pointed in the target's direction. Mason was in handcuffs within seconds. Turning this guy would be no problem, provided he had someone of real substance to give up.\n\nMy partner explained to Mason that he would be behind bars at the Monmouth County jail through the weekend\u2014and not in some quiet holding cell at the nearby Aberdeen Police Department. A judge likely wouldn't arraign him or set bail on such heavy charges until Monday. Mason would no doubt make great entertainment for gangbangers.\n\n\"I've heard of guys similar to you going queer in one night, and you have at least three nights,\" I told Mason. \"But maybe you can fight that shit off. What do you think?\"\n\n\"I can't go to jail, man,\" he pleaded.\n\n\"Okay, maybe you do go to jail down the road,\" I said. \"It's likely. Judges see LSD on a sheet and they picture their darling daughter grinning insanely and jumping out a window. But that's light years away, and we aren't gonna look for blood if you help us.\"\n\n\"We will see to it you go home tonight,\" I continued. \"No heavy bail, on my word. No county jail, but you gotta give me some very good reason to save your virgin ass. Now is not the time to protect someone who would never do the same for you.\"\n\nMason thought about it for a few seconds. \"I can take you to the drug house right now,\" he said. \"Just keep me out of County, okay?\"\n\n\"I give you my word. If you come through for me, you can sit next to me when I call the judge for bail.\"\n\nWith Mason sitting in the back, we drove off to the drug house, which was located in a middle-class neighborhood in Marlboro and supposedly contained a cornucopia of cocaine, LSD and marijuana. Mullins and I knew we were taking a calculated risk; we had no intelligence on the owners of the house, or the people who may be inside, other than what Mason was telling us. Still, we knew the guy was scared, and his only way out of his predicament was to feed us good intel.\n\nWe pulled up in front of a sprawling, well-maintained two-story colonial on a tree-lined street. The house was set back about 40 feet from the road, and several late-model cars were parked in the driveway. It looked like a small party was going on. A typical drug house was so filthy that you had to beat the cockroaches away even during the middle of the day. Clearly that wouldn't be the case tonight.\n\nMullins turned around and warned Mason that he was fucked if anything went wrong. He was going to introduce us and then keep his mouth shut.\n\nMason only nodded in response. He turned, grabbed the door handle, and slid the van's side door open.\n\n\"Get back here,\" Mullins quietly hissed at me.\n\n\"Fuck you! I'm getting my head straight,\" I replied. Like other undercovers, I spent a minute or two getting focused before heading into any kind of a meet, in much the same way an actor would get into character before stepping on stage.\n\n\"Get the fuck back here now,\" he growled.\n\nFurious that I'd lost my focus, I walked back to the van.\n\n\"What the fuck is it?\"\n\n\"Hey, jerk-off, your handcuffs are hanging off your belt behind your back. Great undercover man you are,\" he said.\n\nI reached back and felt the cold metal cuffs dangling over my belt. Fuck. Mullins was right. I couldn't believe my blunder. I tossed the cuffs to Mullins, who put them in the front of the van.\n\nBoth of us laughed nervously. We were now even for the \"God bless you\" moment. I took a moment to get my focus back and somehow felt more confident than I'd been before.\n\nMason walked me in, quickly introduced us to his supplier\u2014a guy in his early twenties with long, disheveled hair\u2014and let me take the lead while he headed into the kitchen to get a drink. Judging from the home's d\u00e9cor and the pictures on the tables, the place was owned by the guy's parents. While they were away, the son was using his parents' place to party and make some cash for himself.\n\nAbout a half dozen men and a couple of women were in the living room, none of whom I'd ever seen before. There was some coke on the coffee table, and the supplier made it clear that he had loads of both coke and LSD.\n\nI launched into biker mode, telling the group how I had a bunch of boys coming into town for the weekend and how they were all \"in real need.\" I played it tough, made suggestive comments to the girls and looked hard at their stoned boyfriends, who made no effort to confront me or otherwise get me to back off.\n\n\"Hey, this looks like a great place to party. I look forward to coming back, boys.\"\n\nMy comments drew no response, but it was clear from the looks I was getting that they didn't want me back, under any circumstances. Maybe they objected to me wearing a black Harley-Davidson baseball cap or drinking their beer. I headed for the door, tossing an arm around Mason's shoulder as we left.\n\nThe three of us headed back to the Holmdel Police headquarters to process Mason, place the confiscated drugs in the evidence vault and figure out our next steps in taking down the supplier. Mason's bail was low, so he was soon released from custody\u2014just as we'd promised.\n\nNew Jersey's undercovers rarely worked on Saturdays or Sundays, and Mullins had some personal business that he needed to attend to; I didn't ask what it was, and didn't want to know. We huddled with our supervisor, McCabe, and agreed that I would go back and hit the house with Armand \"Armie\" Ertle.\n\n\"Armie, we are going to give a gift to our long-suffering taxpayers,\" I said. \"There's no need for drug-buy money this time. It's time for the Norsemen Motorcycle Club to collect.\"\n\nThe next night, a Saturday, Armie and I rolled on the house in Marlboro. Just like before, we were dressed like bikers and using our UC van. But there was no Mason this time.\n\nI knocked on the door and then let myself in, as if I was family, with Armie right behind. I knew Armie was loaded for bear and hoping for some action. But I was hoping that this was going to be a simple takedown, with no need for violence\u2014more of a \"scoop and run\" operation.\n\nAbout a half dozen people were hanging out in the living room, with drugs sitting in plain sight on the coffee table, just like I'd seen the previous evening. I spotted the dealer, flashed a Kansas City bankroll\u2014a $100 bill wrapped around a wad of singles\u2014and asked him to bring out a load of coke.\n\nThe dealer disappeared into another room and returned with a sizeable number of individually wrapped glassine envelopes of cocaine. He dumped them on the kitchen table and waited.\n\n\"Fuck it, give me all you have. I'll take it off your hands,\" I said, holding my bankroll at eye level.\n\nThe dealer glanced at one of his party guests.\n\n\"This isn't cool, man,\" the guy said.\n\nThe dealer hesitated.\n\n\"I fucking told you I would pay for it,\" I said. \"Now let's get this fucking done before there's a problem. My friend is getting tired. He can be an asshole when he's tired.\"\n\nThe target turned and left the room again, returning a minute later with what appeared to be the rest of the stash of coke.\n\n\"Okay, let's load this up,\" I said to Armie.\n\nBoth of us promptly filled our pockets with coke. Armie said nothing. But the wide grin on his face said it all: he was psyched, and no one was going to get in our way.\n\nThe supplier took a couple of steps toward us and asked for payment.\n\n\"I ain't paying you shit, motherfucker. You take one more fucking step toward me\u2014any of you fucks\u2014and I'll fuck you all up and burn this shithole down. With you motherfuckers in it.\"\n\n\"Let's fuck them up anyway,\" my partner shouted.\n\nNo one moved. The supplier and his buddies were frozen in fear. Armie and I weren't even armed but were relying purely on our acting skills. It was a performance worthy of Bruce Willis, if only we could keep it going for another minute or two and make it out alive.\n\nThe supplier and his buddies did what they thought was the prudent thing: they allowed us to leave, carrying their coke in our pockets. I tucked my cash back into my pocket alongside the coke and followed Armie outside.\n\nWe walked with a slow but deliberate pace toward our van, which was parked on the street. Each of us took a glance or two back to make sure that no one was following us or coming out the front door with a shotgun. The supplier and the others stayed inside, and we left without incident.\n\nArmie and I gave each other a high-five when we were safely away from the house and headed back to BNTF headquarters to log in the drugs. The following day, uniformed officers returned to the house to arrest the supplier on felony drug sale charges. He was subsequently convicted.\n\nLater that night, Armie and I treated ourselves to steak and good Scotch. It wasn't until the first burn of Scotch hit us that we realized what a crazy and dangerous stunt we'd pulled. We'd known nothing about the supplier and the other men in the house before we walked through the front door. Like the Bible says, \"Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves.\"\n\nAs I sat there, twirling the ice in my Scotch, I thought back to my days in the Pagans Motorcycle Club, some nine years earlier. If I was fearless tonight and able to pull off my undercover persona as a member of the Norsemen Motorcycle Club, it was because I'd learned how to act like\u2014and be\u2014a tough guy while riding with the Pagans. I wasn't acting the part so much as simply reverting back to deeply ingrained behavior that I'd learned at an earlier age.\n\nI could tell, looking at Armie as he hammered back one Scotch after another, that he was relieved to have survived the drug buy. Both of us were fearful that night. But there was a difference between us in the way we handled it.\n\nMy time in the Pagans, and my years in the army, had hardened me. I knew fear. But now I recognized the emotion and controlled it. My response in dangerous situations was measured. Fear heightened my senses and sped up my reaction times. I knew exactly what I'd do if someone pulled a buck knife or a gun on me, because I'd confronted those situations in the past. And if someone pushed me far enough, I could kill.\n\n### CHAPTER FIVE\n\n## GROWING UP CHUCK\n\nSometimes I wonder what my dad, Herbert \"Bud\" Bradshaw, expected me to be when I grew up. Pro sports is a pretty good bet\u2014at least judging from what he enjoyed watching on TV at home in Middletown, New Jersey. I'm pretty sure that he was royally pissed with me when I was riding with the Pagans. And I guess he was pleased to see me turn things around and become a cop. But he never had all that much to say to me one way or the other. My brother Mike and I were expected to find our own way forward, for better or worse. Growing up, I thought I had an idyllic childhood in Middle America. But maybe, just maybe, my upbringing had some flaws that I didn't recognize at the time.\n\nMy dad, who was born in nearby Fair Haven, had wanted to name me after John Wayne\u2014which explains where my first name comes from. But my mother wanted to name me after my father's father, Charles Bradshaw. At least on paper, my dad won the battle over what my name was going to be. But my mom, Pearl, won out at home\u2014which was perhaps more important. Growing up, I was known as Chuck.\n\nBud Bradshaw ran a milk delivery business until the first 24-hour convenience stores put a stranglehold on competitive costs and he was forced to shut it down. He later ran for, and was elected, tax collector for the Town of Middletown. He would go on to become the town administrator\u2014quite an accomplishment for a quiet guy who kept to himself and never attended college. Pearl stayed at home, taking care of me and Mike, who is a year and a half older than I am. Mom\u2014who was also born nearby, in Rumson\u2014spent much of her time trying to keep Mike and me from killing each other during the fights that broke out with some regularity.\n\n_My brother, Mike, left, and me with the family dog, Toughy, around 1962._\n\nMy dad's heritage was English and Irish, two groups that have been fighting each other for centuries. My mother's heritage was German and Russian\u2014the two of which have also been fighting each other for centuries.\n\nThe family home was in a fairly isolated part of town that was dotted with small farms back in the 1950s. It wasn't uncommon to find a horseshoe while digging to plant a shrub or replace one of the many posts that held up the split rail fence out front. Our three-bedroom home was adjacent to the street; in the back was the small warehouse and cold storage that my dad needed for the milk business.\n\nWe had few neighbors, and aside from Little League baseball and Pop Warner football, I was mostly a loner as a kid. My brother, more socially adept, made friends with the few kids our age in the area. Somehow, I was frozen out of opportunities to hang out with any of Mike's friends. To this day, I don't know what he told our peers about me, perhaps that I was adopted from a gang of feral dwarves or that I was growing a reptilian tail. But as the Cold War continued between the United States and Russia, Mike and I were engaged in our very own cold war.\n\nDuring the summer, we took turns working on the truck with my dad as he delivered fresh bottled milk to homes around Middletown\u2014carrying four quarts at a time in one of those open wire baskets that haven't been made in decades\u2014and leaving the ice-cold bottles in small insulated metal containers outside his customers' front doors. My dad's milk delivery truck was small, with room only for the driver and one passenger. It was either Mike or me, not both. It wasn't as if either one of us was going to fight for the opportunity to ride along with Dad on his early morning runs. The Marxist principal of no pay for work was strictly enforced.\n\nMike and I were both left alone to deal with breakfast on our respective workdays. My mother would be damned if she was getting up that early\u2014around 5 a.m.\u2014to see to it that we got a nourishing breakfast. Indeed, given the number of fights that she broke up between the two of us, it's amazing that she even got out of bed sober and stayed that way during the day. Valium hadn't been invented yet, and the notion of going to a therapist for counseling to deal with your day-to-day challenges was unheard of.\n\nEvenings were often spent with the family, sitting in the living room, watching TV. During the summer, watching Yankee games was our routine. My father had first dibs on what was watched on the black-and-white TV in the living room, and that meant every televised New York Yankees game in its entirety. After 1964, the Yankees sucked but Bud was undeterred. He just ramped up the swearing at the tube. My father wanted second baseman Horace Clarke tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail. Those were among his more gentle thoughts about that study in baseball mediocrity.\n\nMy mom was unfazed by all the Yankee games. She quietly and serenely devoured books like a Benedictine monk devoured scripture. She could converse on any number of subjects, at any depth. She was considered wise. I suppose that was the one thing I coveted in my mother. Without ever saying anything to me, and strictly leading by example, she got me hooked on books. It was during my youth that my intense thirst for the written word was born.\n\n_My brother, Mike; Mom; Dad; and me at my parents' 50th wedding anniversary._\n\nIn those innocent days, my mom would take me to Woolworth's, the local five-and-dime store, where I would buy Classics Illustrated Comics. They weren't comic books per se but more graphic novels that were suitable for young readers. I read the Classics Comic version of Cooper's _The Last of the Mohicans_ until it crumbled away in my hands. As soon as the Middletown school librarian approved, I read the unabridged version. I still remember reading it while the sporting world was rendered breathless by Cassius Clay knocking out Sonny Liston in Maine. It was a damn tough read. But in my mind's eye I was in a war canoe paddling at the foot of Glens Falls, and there was nothing better for me than being transported to a faraway place like that.\n\nAs a kid, I often spent time playing solitary games or going for walks with my dog, Snoopy, a brown-and-white beagle. I doubt if anyone from the neighborhood even owned a leash for their dog, much less used it. I learned how to enjoy quiet time alone; I was the one person that I trusted the most.\n\nOne day, I took Snoopy on a walk through the fields and woods near my house. As I emerged from the woods, I crossed paths with John Mangione, who was a couple of years older than I was and already an accomplished house burglar at the age of 13. He was also the first child I ever heard say to his mother (or any adult for that matter), \"Go fuck yourself.\" Papillon's life in the notorious French penal colony on Devil's Island would have been akin to living in paradise compared to what I'd experience if I ever said anything of the sort to my mother.\n\nOn that particular day, Mangione was carrying a 12-gauge shotgun when he confronted me. I knew that the shotgun had been a gift from his father, and it struck me as odd that his dad would have given him any kind of firearm, much less a shotgun. The teen jacked a shell into the chamber and pointed the barrel at my chest, with his finger on the trigger. I innocently told him he should never point a loaded gun at anyone.\n\nMangione raised the gun so that he could sight along its long barrel.\n\nWhen I looked like I was going to shit in my pants, the kid lowered the weapon and laughingly meandered into the woods, much to the chagrin of the animals who lived there.\n\nWith the exception of my early run-in with my shotgun-carrying neighbor, there is little doubt that growing up in the '60s was both idyllic and innocent. We practiced nuclear air raid drills in elementary school, crawling under desks or sitting next to a cement block wall in a hallway with our hands over our ears\u2014as if that could have done anything to save our lives.\n\nHell, this was the time of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), when both the U.S. and the Soviets had aircraft with nuclear payloads airborne 24/7, 365. There was little to no dissent about it, either; the threat of a nuclear World War III was very much on the minds of the Americans living in the 1960s. We believed that America was the land of the free and the home of the brave; it was a nation that was all about mom and apple pie and, of course, baseball. The fact that the heathen communists in Russia didn't even play baseball was reason enough to exterminate them, as far as I was concerned.\n\nBut the new medium of black-and-white television gave us a much more frightening scenario to scare us into wanting all things Soviet to be no more. There beyond the fuzzy reception and horizontal lines on our heavy wood-wrapped consoles, we observed the face of the enemy. Nikita Khrushchev, fat, bald and intimidating, banged his shoe on the wooden podium of the United Nations, shouting at America, \"We will bury you.\"\n\nWe took his words to heart. I knew deep down that when I was of age, I would be training to kill Russians. Those of us growing up in the era of the Beatles on _The Ed Sullivan Show_ spent our waking hours with a radioactive nuclear background music \"blowing in the wind.\"\n\nOne day in November 1963, I remember feigning illness to stay home from school. I must have put on a first-rate act, because second-rate performances held unpleasant disciplinary consequences. While my father was napping that afternoon, the front door burst open and our neighbor Mr. Stobo came running in to say the president had been shot. The world stopped for a few days and Walter Cronkite took over the airwaves. Then Jack Ruby amazingly sauntered in and killed Lee Harvey Oswald. Even at my tender age, it was very apparent something had gone terribly wrong, and that life in the U.S. was going to be different for everyone.\n\nAs my brother and I got a bit older, we found new ways to amuse ourselves\u2014often at the expense of those around us, including my dad. Once, Mike and I found a way to remove the device that controlled the flow of gas in the oversized globe-shaped cigarette lighter that our father used. Removing the \"governor\" on the lighter ensured that the flame would be far larger than ever needed. When we were done with our modifications, we placed the lighter near my father's easy chair and waited out of sight to see what would happen next.\n\nDad reached for the lighter and used it to light up one of the many Winstons he needed to calm his nerves from sharing his home with Mike and me. The lighter sent out a truly prodigious flame, nearly igniting my father's hair. My brother and I fell to the floor, laughing uncontrollably. Our pleasure was short-lived; we were both confined to our rooms for a week.\n\nMuch of how we spent our time was left to our active and untamed imaginations. Once, we created our own day of the living dead, using nothing more than ketchup. Mike generously applied it to my face and limbs and then helped position me on the side of the road. It didn't take long for a middle-aged couple to pull over and check on what looked like a child lying in a bloody heap. As they bent down over me, I jumped up, screaming maniacally, my \"bloody\" limbs flailing. Leaving the Good Samaritans frozen in shock, I ran into the woods, laughing so hard that I choked.\n\nOur \"good fun\" led to some unanticipated and near-tragic consequences for our neighbors the Kluins. Somehow, in the intellectually barren dark days prior to video games and the internet, Mike and I got instructions to build a UFO. Using clothes hangers to construct the base, plastic dry cleaner's bags for the hot air balloon sections, lighter fluid and some other odds and ends, we created our contraption. We launched it one Saturday night in the middle of summer and were shocked to see that it was actually capable of flight\u2014uncontrolled flight, that is.\n\n\"Shit, Mike, this thing is going to burn the Kluins' house down,\" I shouted as our UFO crashed onto the roof. The gasoline-soaked cotton rags used to \"power\" the craft's flight continued to burn majestically. We had a choice: run and warn the Kluins that we'd just set the roof of their house on fire, or stand where we were and contemplate the potential risk we were in. We stood there and watched, wondering what the food would be like in reform school.\n\nSomeone was watching over us that evening, as a gust of wind suddenly blew the burning remains of our craft onto a vacant lot next door. Mike and I stayed mum in the following weeks as the Kluins and our parents speculated about what might have caused that large and unsettling scorch mark on those roof shingles.\n\nWhen I turned 17, I followed in my brother's footsteps and obtained a driver's license. What my parents didn't know is that I had been preparing myself for the occasion for months, \"borrowing\" my mom's car and using it to make beer runs for myself and my friends. The drinking age in New Jersey at the time was 21, but it was easy enough to get over that hurdle. We would simply drive to nearby Red Bank, about five miles away, find a drunk on the street and negotiate with him to make a buy for us\u2014he'd be rewarded with a cheap bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 or Ripple.\n\nMiddletown High School was so overcrowded those days that the administration ran two shifts, one in the early morning and another that began at 12:10. I attended the second session, and it wasn't unusual for me to imbibe just before showing up for class.\n\nAround the same time, I had my first real girlfriend, Gina, a semi-hot Italian girl who went to the same high school. Gina taught me the night moves as I gallantly laid her down on my black leather jacket in a secluded area called Dutch Neck.\n\nMy pursuit of scholarly perfection aside, I needed money. In those formative years, I learned that money doesn't talk, it screams. Gina, bless her heart, could not be asked to _walk_ to our den of assignation. I needed wheels. I needed a job. I sought and found one as a dishwasher at a local pizzeria, Luigi's in Red Bank, saved up some cash and bought a used Ford Maverick.\n\nAt least I was mobile, and outside of a bad case of dishpan hands, life was good. But my days of working in Luigi's kitchen soon came to an abrupt halt. There was other work for me.\n\nMaria, the very tough widowed owner of Luigi's, called me into a meeting one night; her boyfriend, the bartender, was also there. Maria explained that the neighborhood around the pizza place had become something of a jungle, a high-crime area where her delivery boys were often beaten up and robbed because of the cash they carried. But the area was also lucrative, and she wanted to continue making deliveries there.\n\n\"Chuck, what's your height and weight?\" Maria asked.\n\n\"Six foot one, 225 pounds,\" I said.\n\n\"You boxed Golden Gloves.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, I didn't bring home the crown, but I learned to mix it up.\"\n\n\"I heard you want to buy a motorcycle, be some kinda Hells Angel or something,\" Maria continued.\n\n\"I'll start with getting a bike first, but yeah, I do like that kinda shit.\"\n\n\"I know. So stay away from my niece, she's a nice, proper Italian girl.\"\n\n\"You mean me, try to deflower the little princess? I wouldn't think of it.\"\n\n\"You are 'promoted' to pizza delivery as of now. Bring me some of those hoods, I mean friends, of yours, and they are hired, too,\" Maria continued. \"If some toes get stepped on or heads bloodied, I won't be crying about it. But I will not stand for another delivery guy getting slapped around and giving up my money. Do what you got to do; I can watch your back. I know some people in town hall.\"\n\nMy boss viewed me as some kind of biker thug\u2014and, oddly, an asset to her business.\n\nI promptly called two guys\u2014one a friend named Mike who'd managed to grow a full beard by the time he was 16, and the other an acquaintance, Billy. Like me, Mike was into motorcycles, beer and girls of lesser morals. He loved to fight. I mean, this cat reveled in it. Lean and not too tall, he made up for what he lacked in size with sheer violence. He had major balls and was loyal to a fault. Maria hired him on the spot.\n\nBilly was another story. He was bigger than me, older by a couple of years and his past suggested a familiarity with gray prison bars. There was no question that he was a thug, and there was no need to worry about whether he'd be beaten or robbed while doing his deliveries. It was more of a question of how much he'd come back with and how much he'd keep for himself. I made my misgivings about Billy clear to Maria.\n\n\"I think I know who this Billy guy is,\" she told me. \"There is no doubt in my mind he is gonna steal from me. But you and Mike won't, and it will take some time before he starts taking enough that I have to sack him. He won't mind being fired. He never did a job he wasn't fired from. By the time Billy's reign of terror ends, it will be years before anyone even dreams of robbing one of my guys. It will make the job that much easier for you and Mike.\"\n\nWhen Luigi ran the pizza place, no one in their right mind would have ever dared steal from him. He had a fiery temper and a colorful background, from what I could learn. No one dared touch or say a bad word about Maria while he was alive, either.\n\nMike, Billy and I went to work with a different attitude that night. Billy supplied us with his \"combat\" weapon of choice, a thin, semi-flexible piece of BX armored electrical cable wrapped in black electrical tape.\n\n\"Be careful you don't kill someone with this, huh?\" Billy said. \"My conscience will bother me for about three seconds.\"\n\nWhen making deliveries to the shakier parts of town, we carried our weapons in plain sight. Not one of us got robbed.\n\nDrunk customers were sometimes inclined to make disparaging remarks about our mothers or ethnicity. The three of us looked forward to those moments, and their aftermath. We'd normally use some of our hard-earned cash to have a few drinks after work. Then we'd drive over to the offending party's house and throw a brick through their picture window or break their car windshield. The picture window was a favorite target during the bitter cold winter months. We would drive by the next day to see cardboard or plywood where the glass window had been, providing the inhabitants with minimal protection from Jack Frost.\n\nBilly was bored and was dying to smack someone, anyone, with his wire cord while on the job. On at least five different occasions, I walked into what felt like ambush scenarios. But each time it happened, my potential attackers thought twice and opted to leave me alone. Suddenly it wasn't Caspar Milquetoast delivering pizza anymore; I was something much more powerful. I had respect on the street, and it felt good. I wanted more.\n\nJust as Maria had predicted, Billy started stealing increasing amounts of money from her. Eventually, she grew tired of the losses and sacked him as promised. Mike, handsome, witty and fearless, began a new career as a bricklayer. That lasted until he became a heroin junkie and was ultimately done in by a one-inch-long needle housing essence of opium.\n\n### CHAPTER SIX\n\n## LIFE DURING WARTIME\n\nI captained the freshman football team for the Middletown Lions when I was 15 and still in junior high school. Because of overcrowding in the growing bedroom community, junior high was spread out among the Middletown School District's seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade schools. Mirroring the 48-square-mile community, the school district was a vast melting pot, with students who were rich and poor, African-American and white. Characterwise, I was still a very straight and seemingly well-adjusted teenager who was interested in girls, football and my grades, in that order. But my ability to play football, which I loved and which defined my life, was in the process of being derailed.\n\nI injured my cervical spine in the Pop Warner league, and as early as freshman year, in 1968, it was causing me pain. I was also aware that at the high school, butt blocking and butt tackling was how it was done. This meant sticking your face mask into your opponent's chest on every block or tackle\u2014a practice that was banned just a few years later due to the vast number of spinal injuries. I wondered how long I'd last.\n\nThe Vietnam War was raging at the time, but it was distant to me, both in miles and in relevance. I knew I'd have to register for the draft soon, but registering was the furthest thing from my mind. Southeast Asia came into increasing focus for me one evening in a banquet hall in Middletown, where an awards assembly was being held for the high school football team. The Middletown Lions had won the state championship, and everyone in town wanted to celebrate. As a member of the freshman team, I had never had any real contact with the varsity team. They were the stuff of legends, larger than life. I was trying to pump up my mojo, because over the next three years, I would have to attempt to live up to their legacy. Elected officials from Middletown, who had a real sense of community and genuinely cared about the town, were at the event in force.\n\nOne award recipient, who was going to West Point Military Academy, was roundly applauded by the audience. Then a town councilman took the podium, holding a wrinkled paper in his hand. He said it was a letter from a former football player who had recently been killed in action in Vietnam; he wanted to read it to the crowd.\n\nIn the letter, the soldier described the men he fought against as cowards who often used women and children as shields. He wrote that the enemy didn't have the courage to fight and that the war was winnable\u2014if U.S. forces would be allowed to take it to the enemy. He spoke of how much he loved his country and how proud he was to be fighting alongside such good and decent men.\n\nSuddenly we heard the sound of a woman openly weeping. It was the mother of the slain soldier, sitting in the audience with her husband and younger children. Her husband was attempting to comfort her and had one arm around her shoulder as he held her hand.\n\n\"Okay, I think we've heard enough,\" the husband said.\n\n\"No, I don't think we have heard enough,\" the councilman said as he lifted the letter up and continued to read to the astonished crowd. Finally, he seemed to catch the collective atmosphere in the room and stopped. With a puzzled and confused demeanor, he surrendered the microphone and walked away from the podium.\n\nWhen I entered Middletown High School in 1969, marijuana, LSD, long hair, loud music and defiance of authority were the order of the day. Bruce Springsteen, who was born just a few miles away in Long Branch, was a key player in a riot involving the Middletown Police as well as a bunch of students from my hometown. Springsteen and his newly formed band, Steel Mill, flew into a rage when the Middletown Police ordered them to stop playing at 10 p.m. Springsteen started throwing things on the stage, and the crowd started rioting. From what I've heard, Springsteen is still pissed about that night at the Clearwater Swim Club and won't let any members of the Middletown Police Department moonlight as security for him.\n\nMeanwhile, my football career as offensive tackle was about as well coordinated as Dick Nixon's last administration, and between the neck smashing, the butt blocking and the abusive, loud and foulmouthed coach, I soon found myself thinking about leaving the team. By that point, each butt block sent tingling electrical shocks from my neck through my arms and down to my wrists. I was worried, but the coach wasn't.\n\n\"You're just not tough enough,\" he shouted at me.\n\nWell, the coach was right. I wasn't tough enough. I had this sickening love of my cervical spine, and I wanted to reach the age of 21 able to walk and use all four limbs. Fuck it. I quit. The coach was furious that I would leave the team. A 225-pound high school lineman was rare in those days. I was out, and there was no going back.\n\nI was heartbroken, and my father\u2014who was well known in town and proud of his son's position on the Middletown Lions football team\u2014was crushed. For reasons that I may never fully understand, he took my decision to leave the team personally; our already brittle relationship was now on a razor's edge. I got the feeling that he thought I was, well, a pussy for quitting.\n\nMy dad seemed unapproachable on any subject not sports-related. He was universally quiet, and I sensed he was angry and somehow unhappy. His mood impacted my brother and my mom as well. I knew that people in town considered my mom a noted beauty. But somehow he was never able to show any sort of appreciation to her, despite her round-the-clock housework. I can't remember a single moment growing up when he thanked her for making dinner or cleaning the house or making sure that his two sons had clean clothes to wear. And he was mostly a hostile critic of his sons. Despite his gruff exterior, I knew that he loved us\u2014he just would never take the simple step of saying so. Like so many men of his generation, Bud Bradshaw was completely unable to demonstrate love to either his wife or children. I can't even remember him talking during our family dinners; he would only express displeasure when something wasn't to his liking. I suppose a lot of men his age acted the same way; I didn't think much of it at the time.\n\n_The Bradshaw family home in Middletown has been vacant and abandoned in recent years. Bud Bradshaw ran his milk delivery business from a building behind the house._\n\nWith football gone and my dad uninterested and remote, I became acquainted with a crowd from another part of the large town I grew up in\u2014the blue-collar, hard-drinking brawlers. In my eyes, the older guys in this crowd were almost legendary tough guys. Some rode chopped Harleys, some drove pickup trucks and they all loved to drink keg beer, eat thick steaks and brawl. The opposite of bullies, they sought out only tough opponents.\n\nIn the summer, parties began in the afternoon. Eight-ounce boxing gloves were handed out, and\u2014amid flowing beer, marijuana smoke and the latest from the Allman Brothers\u2014we beat the crap out of each other. When we weren't fighting, the girls kept the food flowing as the guys talked about their landscaping and construction jobs, how much somebody could bench press and, of course, the new Model 74 Harley.\n\nHalfway through my senior year, in January 1973, I turned 18 and was able to legally start drinking (the state had lowered the drinking age from 21). School suddenly became more fun, as I could now enjoy a few beers before heading off to the afternoon session. I became a creature without controls. Large and muscular from weightlifting, I had a battered motorcycle to ride and some money in my pocket. Life was a drunken blur.\n\nI drank when delivering pizza and drank after boxing at parties. My brother was off to college, and my parents (well-meaning as they were) could not stem the tide of wild rage that coursed through my veins. My father was forever taciturn, obsessed with golf and watching the Yankees. My mother desperately sought to keep me on some kind of path toward happiness and a white-collar job. Somehow, both were reduced to being bystanders in my race toward... something. I knew only that the race had to be wild, dangerous and unpredictable.\n\nThen I was sick with the flu. Lying around my parents' house, I found a copy of Norman Mailer's _The Naked and the Dead_. It all but burned my brain. The central character was Sam Croft, a cold-blooded killer who looked death and hardship straight in the eye and overcame them. Croft was a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army Infantry. I all but memorized the parts of the book that involved Croft. It fired my imagination, and nothing could stop me from entering the Army Infantry. The administration at Middletown High was only too happy to provide me with a diploma; it only required the teachers to sign off on my passing their courses. My parents seemed pleased, too. Maybe they knew I was an accident waiting to happen, and hoped the army would help straighten me out.\n\nBy the end of March, I was beginning basic training in Fort Knox, Kentucky, home of the Seventh Calvary and perhaps best known as the location of the United States Bullion Depository. The 109-thousand-acre base covers parts of Bullitt, Hardin and Meade Counties and for decades was the home of the U.S. Army Armor Center, where the army and marine corps trained on tanks.\n\nThere was no backslapping or high-fives as I enlisted. The Vietnam War was still on, though winding down. The overwhelming mood of the country was either weary of our lack of success or completely opposed to the war. When I opted for infantry, in the face of aptitude scores that were very highly regarded, I cannot recall a single person\u2014including my recruiter\u2014who thought I was making a sound decision. My grand plan was to complete the required infantry school, apply for airborne, then try out for Special Forces. At the time, you needed to be at least a buck sergeant (the lowest grade) to even apply.\n\nThough full of bravado, I was aware that I had a real learning curve ahead of me. I had read Robin Moore's _The Green Berets_ and was well aware that more than a little seasoning was needed to make the grade\u2014one of only a handful of accurate personal assessments I made in those days. In my limited understanding, Special Forces seemed the best route to being a Sam Croft sort of soldier. But much more than that, Green Berets seemed free. I know that may appear to be odd, but in their elite unconventionality, they were outside the paradigm and, in my mind, able to express themselves quite differently than conventional soldiers. But these proved to be nothing more than intellectual ramblings when confronted with the harsh realities that defined the American army as the Vietnam conflict ground to its brutal conclusion.\n\n### CHAPTER SEVEN\n\n## WELCOME TO THE MACHINE\n\nThe army recruiter picked me up at my house early on the morning of my induction ceremony. I gave my mom a small hug and said \"See you later\" to Dad. The recruiter watched from a few feet away.\n\n\"What's up with your father?\" he asked a while later.\n\n\"Nothing,\" I said.\n\n\"You didn't see it, but your dad put his hand out for you to shake, then pulled it back.\"\n\nThe recruiter and I headed to Newark for the swearing-in. Next stop was Newark Airport to catch a plane to some city in Kentucky, followed by a bus ride to the base. It was the first time I'd ever even been on a plane.\n\nI had entered a completely alien world, and I was utterly alone. Things were exactly the way I wanted them, or so I thought at the time. Most of the men in my training company were from Detroit and the surrounding suburbs, anxious to get away from a city that had a grand history but seemed headed for higher unemployment rates. Suddenly I was being referred to as \"the big white boy\" from New Jersey.\n\nAt Fort Knox, I didn't stand out or fall short. I was simply another green recruit, and I started to realize just how inconsequential a human being I was; in the army, I was truly just a number, and nobody much cared what happened to me. I didn't suffer the fate of Cordell O'Keefe, who was ridiculed for being obese and nicknamed \"Hog Head\" by a drill sergeant. The drill instructor's Southern twang made it sound more like \"Hoeg Head.\" Nor did I stand out as one of those macho guys who would constantly pester certain trainees into buying or using grass. By and large, basic training was a positive experience. I was starting to get comfortable with the idea of soldiering.\n\n_My first day in the U.S. Army, at Fort Knox, Kentucky, during the spring of 1973._\n\nAs new recruits, we were instructed to avoid the Patton Club, a nightclub on the base for enlisted men, named after the famous general. But one of my new friends and I opted to go despite the restriction\u2014and we promptly got pulled into a fight. Black/white tensions ran higher in the club than they did on the base. I had offered to buy a beer for an African-American soldier, but the offer was not viewed kindly, and my buddy and I retreated to another part of the club. Things continued to go downhill as a white solider was attacked after he asked an African-American soldier to stop groping his wife.\n\nMy buddy and I decided to leave before we got hauled in by military police. But we couldn't get out the door before soldiers from another training company exchanged words with the two of us. Though it wasn't racial in nature this time, it was still a wild and verbal free-for-all. Minutes later the MPs arrived, and soldiers scattered in all directions.\n\n_Break time during training at Fort Polk, Louisiana, during the summer of 1973._\n\nThe next stop for me, along with hundreds of other trainees, was Fort Polk, Louisiana, and we were \"lucky\" enough to be there in the middle of a Southern summer. It was ridiculously fucking hot and humid. The base, which covers almost two hundred thousand acres, is about 10 miles east of Leesville, Louisiana, and some 17 miles north of De Ridder, in Beauregard Parish. We boarded buses and headed for Tiger Land, deep in the heart of old Dixie. \"Fort Puke Lousyana,\" as we called it, boasted wooden barracks dating back to World War II, snakes and some of the world's largest cockroaches.\n\nFor some reason, I got there a couple of days before most of the other recruits. I was given a bunk in an ancient shack-like dorm with the most immaculately shined wooden floor. Two steps down, in the rear of the building, was a primitive latrine and shower area, with no walls or partitions between any of the stalls. Worse still, there were two inches of green and smelly water covering the floor. There was no way to avoid the green flood when you were using the john; you just had to deal with it.\n\nWhen the training company was finally at full strength, equipment was drawn and we waited for what we were sure would be two very hot and challenging months of training, starting at the end of June and continuing through the end of August. The men were a diverse lot from all parts of the country, roughly 60 percent Hispanic and black, and 40 percent white.\n\nI look back at those two months in Southern hell as some of the happiest days of my life. We were being trained for combat in hot places, and the conditions could not have been more realistic. We speed marched, patrolled, shot every conceivable weapon, rarely slept and became razor-sharp. My 225-pound weight dropped by more than 40 pounds, leaving me hardened steel at 182 pounds. Before you could even eat chow, you needed to complete a circuit on a rusty set of parallel bars. This was the army I had dreamt of: hard-core and run by combat veterans who commanded respect by their every action.\n\nIn retrospect, \"Fort Puke\" training seems a real no-bullshit time in my army career. We were learning the craft of light infantry tactics and survival, setting up L-shaped ambushes and navigating by topographical map and compass by night\u2014all while removing the chiggers that burrowed into our feet and ankles, and avoiding the venomous snakes and scorpions.\n\nWhen the training ended in late August, we were dispersed and given 10 days' leave before heading to the bases we'd been assigned to. My parents were set to pick me up at Newark Airport. I patiently watched them meander through the crowd in my direction. My mother headed right toward me, then walked by as if I wasn't even there. Though I'd been gone only five months, I was lean and tanned and 182 pounds, and she couldn't even recognize her own son.\n\nThe 10 days' leave was a blur. My friends seemed dull, and in my mind I was headed for great adventure. They were headed for boring white-collar jobs in the suburbs, the next generation of Ward and June Cleaver in _Leave it to Beaver._ I never expressed it, but I felt an odd sense of contempt for my friends. They were working, making money and learning trades. They had girlfriends and seemed to have purposeful futures. I, on the other hand, was leaving behind everything I knew. I didn't expect to ever even come back to New Jersey, except maybe to visit, and I liked the soldiering. The spit-and-polish barracks stuff sucked, but creeping around a forest at night, hunting a dangerous enemy\u2014that rocked. It seemed like a perfect kicking-off point for whatever the rest of my life had in store.\n\nTwo sets of papers arrived for me during my leave\u2014the first promoted me to private first class, and the second assigned me to Mechanized Infantry, First Infantry Division Forward, Cooke Barracks, in G\u00f6ppingen, West Germany.\n\nSoon I was hopping on another plane out of Newark, this time headed about eight hours east to Frankfurt for processing, and then on a train south to my new \"home\" in G\u00f6ppingen (pronounced _Gerpinggen_ ), some 20 or 30 miles east of Stuttgart. As I rode south on the train, I was struck by the orderly, green countryside. G\u00f6ppingen seemed clean and inviting, though Cooke Barracks wasn't much of a step up from Fort Polk.\n\nSoon after I arrived, Specialist Fourth Rondell \"Rodney\" Black introduced me to the Old Man, Captain Harry Timpson. Timpson looked more like your local pharmacist than someone whose troops may have to fight against a Russian rifle company. But his looks were deceiving, and he was a tough guy worthy of our respect\u2014just like most of the other officers in the company. Platoon Lieutenant Edgar was six foot six, wiry and muscular, a West Point graduate and as tough, intelligent and fair as anyone I have ever met. The other platoon lieutenants were comparable to him and equally capable. But my platoon sergeant, Max Koncha, was one of the most interesting men in the U.S. Army. He was respected by all the men, for all the right reasons.\n\nKoncha didn't talk about himself all that much, and none of us had a clue where he was born. There was speculation that he was from either Germany or the USSR. What I quickly learned from my new buddies was that he'd fought in World War II on both sides of the Eastern Front. He was with the Russians at Kursk for the largest tank battle in history of warfare. He was in Indochina with the French Foreign Legion long before the region was called Vietnam, and then he was with the U.S. Army Infantry during the Vietnam War. Sergeant Koncha, the mad Russian.\n\nThe drab light-brown building housing our company would have fit quite well into any run-down urban tenement block. The three-story structure held four platoons, each cordoned off by chest-high dividers like those found between office cubicles. Six-foot-tall gray steel lockers and steel-framed cots were laid out in rows. The lockers contained everything we owned\u2014clothes, personal belongings, books and boots. Behind the barracks was our low, rectangular mess hall.\n\nThe rank-and-file soldiers were compartmentalized\u2014not by the officers but by societal peer pressure. Many of those in the unit were returning veterans from Vietnam who brought their drug- and alcohol-abuse problems with them. Some of the veterans were hardened men who'd served time in the country's rice paddies and jungles. The rest were mostly young men who'd joined the army under threat of incarceration from local police. There were a few, like me, who thought that the army was a route to excitement and adventure. Again, Hispanic and African-American soldiers outnumbered whites. Until I went to Germany, I never even knew what a Chicano was. Many of the Puerto Ricans were from New York City. Over time, I came to respect the Hispanics. With few exceptions, they were loyal to each other, tough as nails and never backed down from a fight, even if their opponent was much bigger. Unlike the African-Americans, the Hispanics weren't under any pressure from their peers to avoid contact with white soldiers.\n\nMany of my fellow white recruits were drug-heads, heavy users of hashish, speed and heroin. Some, from the South, were derogatorily labeled as rednecks, goat ropers or hicks. Other whites were labeled either as \"white boys\" or \"rabbits,\" meaning those who were cowards and did not like to fight whenever the odds were less than advantageous. Mostly, the guys within these groups had each other's backs. Since I did not fit any of these groups, my back was exposed.\n\nNot surprisingly, the showers and toilets at Cooke Barracks were quite basic. Sometimes they were violent places as well. There were several open toilet stalls, which offered no privacy, and a handful of closed stalls. The shower room had about eight spigots, reminiscent of those found in a high school locker room. Since each group of soldiers had its own musical preferences, battling boom boxes were the order of the day. Control over the music was usually settled by a good beat-down from whichever group outnumbered the others. Soul music won out most often.\n\nMy second night in the barracks, I was awakened by someone trying to break into my locker. It was Toby Jeffries, a meek white soldier. When I grabbed him and shouted at him to stop pulling at my lock, he babbled almost incoherently that I should let him go because he was looking for his girlfriend. Ultimately, Jeffries collapsed onto his bunk. The next day, I asked one of the other guys what was going on with Jeffries.\n\n\"Take a look at his hand,\" he said.\n\nI quickly realized that Jeffries was missing the trigger finger on his right hand. From what I could learn, the soldier had cut off his own finger with a buck knife, hoping to get a medical discharge. But his plan failed miserably; he was given an Article 15 disciplinary proceeding for destruction of government property and ordered to shoot with his middle finger.\n\nHow the fuck, I wondered, could this guy deal with the pain of self-amputation? Guys in my platoon explained that he'd bought the strong barbiturate methaqualone, which was sold in Germany as Mandrax. The drug is both a sedative and hypnotic; it acts as a central nervous system depressant. Mixed with beer, it turns you into a staggering zombie, oblivious to pain. Jeffries simply popped a couple of pills, downed a couple of beers and chopped off his finger. The other men did nothing to stop the guy, of course, because they wanted to see if he was going to go through with it.\n\nJeffries was far from the only Mandrax zombie prowling around Cooke Barracks; he was just one of the more colorful ones. Eventually, he was cashiered out on a dishonorable discharge for drug use.\n\nI wondered how such a situation could be allowed to continue. How could credible and experienced officers allow this festering situation to go seemingly unnoticed, especially when they knew they'd have to depend on soldiers like Jeffries in the field? For one thing, the senior NCOs and officers weren't around the barracks at night; they retired to their more comfortable and quieter housing. Sure, there was an NCO stationed at the entrance to the barracks\u2014the \"charge of quarters,\" or CQ, who was theoretically responsible for our welfare. Officers tended to come by a couple of times a night to check on the CQ. It all sounded like an ideal system that would keep everyone safe.\n\nBut there were roving gangs of inebriated soldiers, some of whom had reputations for \"fragging,\" or rolling grenades in the direction of their superior officers. Others were known for serious brutality. Either case could render a CQ deaf, dumb and blind\u2014at least for the length of his shift. No one wanted to be publicly associated with incidents of racial violence or drunken behavior, because it could mean disciplinary action or worse. So people hid the problems and did their best to ensure that others didn't see them as well.\n\nMy promotion to private first class had pushed my pay to more than $300 a month. But the promotion came at a price. Since I didn't mix with any of the white groups on the base, and I obviously wasn't black or Hispanic, I had to be a rat, an informant to the Criminal Investigative Division, or CID. At least, that was the fiction created by one of my squad mates who was trying to find a way to bolster his own credibility. The guy claimed that he found a piece of paper from CID that had fallen out of my pocket. The fictional piece of paper \"got lost,\" but other guys in the platoon still believed his story, and I was seriously frozen out. In a way, it didn't bother me, since I just wanted to be a soldier anyway. Still, I was always wary of being ambushed by men who worried about me ratting them out.\n\nEach morning, we had our Physical Training (PT) calisthenics and a four-mile run, followed by breakfast. Then the entire company gathered on a grassy open area adjacent to the barracks. The First Sergeant\u2014whom we referred to simply as \"Top\"\u2014oversaw muster and delivered the orders of the day. He typically ended the formation by naming those individuals who had to report for urinalysis or drug-related issues. This did not affect those whose alcohol problems were so severe (sadly, most NCOs) that they looked like they were one step ahead of downing a Sterno can by the railroad tracks. Most of the white NCOs had faces severely lined by years of alcohol abuse, thin, stick-like arms, and paunches. When PT ended, they huffed cigarettes and looked very close to death. The African-American and Hispanic NCOs seemed to fare better, but some were classic drunks as well. Three things quickly became evident: alcohol abuse was not a sin, drug use was and there was a hell of a lot of both.\n\nAlthough the African-American and Hispanic soldiers had their share of drug burnouts, alcohol was clearly the drug of choice. That it tended to make violence more palatable seemed all the better. A large percentage of the white soldiers, however, were totally immersed in the drug culture. They were not even trying to play the game. They had tuned in, turned on and dropped out. They were obvious in their preference, and fell out to formation, to use one First Sergeant's words, dressed like \"Joe Shit the Rag Man.\"\n\nJos\u00e9 Presca was a Mexican-American drug dealer and gangbanger who joined the army to escape a jail sentence. He was large in build, usually high as a kite, and very clever and calculating. His buck knife was said to have found its way into many a rival dealer's stomach. He knew I was no informant. And since I actually liked soldiering, I was beyond suspicion in terms of drug involvement.\n\n\"Let's go do a mission,\" Presca said one evening, using code to signal his desire to go somewhere to smoke hash.\n\n\"Yeah, man, okay,\" I said, wondering what would happen next.\n\n\"These people here think you a lifer,\" he said. \"But I know better, homes. You should come with me one weekend. I have this problem, you see. The Man knows I am doing business, so when I come in from off post they look at me. But I am not stupid. I can still bring in what I need. But these eyes are always looking at me, homes. They would never look at you. I am telling you, homes, they all thinking you a lifer. I can take you to meet my people, there are lots of women too. You can make _bookoo_ [beaucoup] money. No one would fuck with you, if I put out the word you are my P.\" _P_ was short for partner.\n\n\"Man, I don't know...\"\n\n\"What's not to know? You way smarter than these people here. I know how to keep these things very cool. You would have to be way-out loco you turn this down, P.\"\n\n\"What are we talking about moving here, Jos\u00e9?\"\n\n\"P, it is not cool to talk of this if you are not in. But if you were in? Dope, homes. Could be some morphine, some gray and brown,\" Presca said, referring to heroin or smack. \"You know, P, small, easy to hide. But _bookoo_ bucks.\"\n\n\"You respect I got to think on this, right, Jos\u00e9?\"\n\n\"Yeah, I respect that. Just don't be thinking too long.\"\n\nPresca and I walked side by side in the dark. \"Yo, homes, let me tell you about me and my Ps back in the world. Some of the shit we did, homes.\"\n\n\"Where, L.A.?\" I asked.\n\n\"East L.A.,\" he said.\n\n\"Don't know nothin' about that place, P.\"\n\n\"I know that,\" Presca continued. \"You don't know nothin' about nothin', homes. So me and my Ps, we see this fine-looking bitch coming off the bus. She was going to walk to another bus. We surround her, P. We tellin' her she got to give it up to the group. P, we talkin' some fine pussy here. She starts cryin' and shit, she pregnant and all that.\"\n\n\"What the fuck, P. Man, this shit's heavy,\" I protested.\n\n\"We settle for her blowin' all of us. Part as friends, like,\" Presca said. \"After she got on it, it was looking like she diggin' it, P.\"\n\n\"Sweet Mary's ass, man, I can't go there, no way. No disrespect to you, P.\"\n\n\"It's cool, P. It's just a thing, homes, just a thing,\" Presca said as we continued walking.\n\nJos\u00e9 Presca was one of the biggest dealers on the base and wanted me to move heroin and morphine. I realized that turning him down carried risks every bit as large as the ones facing me if I carried the dope. In some ways, it was a very tempting offer. Presca was a likable guy\u2014if you could somehow compartmentalize and ignore the violence that was part of his life. There'd be no more worries of people targeting me on the base, and drugs and women would be plentiful. But was I ready to become a heroin trafficker? I had just gotten to this base a few weeks earlier, and already this crazy shit was happening. Would I get carved up like a Christmas turkey if I refused?\n\nIn time, I turned Presca's offer down. I was very concerned about the potential danger I was putting myself in, but still couldn't convince myself to become a drug trafficker. When he realized I wasn't interested, Presca simply smiled and explained that he could never understand why anyone would walk away from such an offer.\n\nPresca wasn't the only dangerous character in my platoon. Big T, also known as \"Troubleman,\" was easily the most feared man on the base. Terrence Williams stood six foot five and weighed 280. He was so nasty that his superiors had refused to promote him year after year; amazingly, he was still a private first class at age 28. Williams had done hard time prior to the army and was known to have fragged his Second Lieutenant in Vietnam. He was said to have a loaded .45-caliber pistol; soldiers weren't allowed to carry loaded weapons when they weren't doing specific types of weapon-related training.\n\nIn time, I came to believe all three things about him but could only prove that he did, indeed, carry a loaded pistol. Big T was the unchallenged and true leader of the African-American soldiers on base. He was militant, intelligent and very charismatic. He used his minions like pawns in a chess match. Sometimes he created violent dramas just for his own amusement. Other times he could be introspective and almost charming. His demeanor changed in a second, and letting your guard down with him could cost you big-time. Having him as a squad member was akin to swimming daily in a stream with a water moccasin.\n\nBig T was so feared that Sergeant Koncha wouldn't even shake his bunk to wake him up for PT\u2014and Koncha had been known to knock bunks over. Maybe German tanks at Kursk and Indochinese guerillas were easier to deal with than Troubleman.\n\nWhen I wasn't dealing with the likes of Presca and Big T, I squeezed in time to play on the company's football team. Though it was called flag football, our games were played with nine-man formations and had more in common with the gladiator games in Rome than something played on the Great Lawn in New York's Central Park. At least the gladiators had shields. With me playing offensive center, our team won the base championship. I even managed a couple of touchdown catches, as centers were eligible in those games. You just had to see through the red stuff dripping down your face.\n\n### CHAPTER EIGHT\n\n## HEAR NO EVIL\n\nIn October, 1973, the First Infantry Division Forward participated in Operation Reforger (which stood for \"Return of Forces to Germany\"), a yearly joint military exercise utilizing American, German, Canadian and British forces. Thousands of men participated in this fast-moving month-long war game between 1969 and 1988, when the military started scaling it back. My entire company was to proceed by railhead to an undisclosed location in the countryside. We were scheduled to depart at around 1 a.m., using our armored personnel carriers for the short ride to the local train station. The APCs would be loaded onto large flatbed freight cars for the 12- to 15-hour ride to the area where the operations would be conducted. No one had a clue where we were headed.\n\nBy 10 p.m. that night, most of the men in my assigned squad were in our barracks, readying their gear for weeks in the field. Boom boxes were blaring, there was constant shouting among the men and some of the guys were dragging their asses back to the barracks weary and drunk. In the field, we wore drab olive fatigues, flack vests, canteens, boots, camo helmets and heavy coats to help keep out the cold. Each of us carried a parka for protection against the rain that was sure to fall, a sleeping bag, the all-important rubber inflatable mattress, C-rations and shelter halves\u2014two men, each carrying a shelter half, would put them together to form a tent in the field. Most of the time I carried a brown wood-handled switchblade with a six-inch blade. Even though people could see the switchblade's outline in my pocket, no one challenged me about carrying it\u2014at least when we were on base. But I couldn't carry the switchblade on Reforger or any field exercise like it, because the blade would have been confiscated, along with drugs and alcohol, during the stringent \"health and welfare inspection.\"\n\nNone of us were armed while we were on post, nor were we allowed to carry any privately owned firearms. Only law enforcement and security personnel on the base were allowed to have weapons. We would pick up our weapons from the Arms Room right before we left for Reforger.\n\nBig T and three members of his posse showed up at the barracks after midnight, drunk, loud and decidedly not funny. One of the men, Willie Kane, was determined to impress Big T at the expense of one of the other men in the squad, Private First Class Jimmy Woodson. Knowing Woodson was a soft target, Kane began beating the shit out of the kid with his fists. Woodson fell to the ground, whimpering and making no effort to fight back. Kane kicked the kid several times as Big T stood by with a bemused smile on his face. Dozens of men watched the beating take place, but none stepped in to stop Kane or defend Woodson. Eventually, an African-American NCO, Sergeant James Roland, walked in on the fight and intervened\u2014drawing shouts and threats from both Big T and Kane.\n\nRoland ignored the shouts and left the barracks without any indication that he intended to punish Kane for the beat-down he'd just witnessed. A few feet away, another soldier, Carlos Campeno, sat quietly on his bunk, shaking his head and looking disgusted. I wondered if he was pissed at Kane for beating Woodson or angry at Woodson for not even attempting to defend himself.\n\n\"What the fuck you looking at, Campeno? You want some?\" Kane shouted.\n\n\"You trying to scare me, Kane? 'Cause I'm not going to lay down like him,\" Campeno said.\n\n\"Just letting you know,\" Kane said.\n\n\"We can get it on anytime you want, Kane,\" Campeno said. \"Just so you know, you got your people, but I got my people, too.\"\n\nKane quieted down.\n\nThe Latinos had their people, the African-Americans had their people and I had no people. No matter. What was clear was that I'd be spending a good chunk of the next month inside a cramped APC with my four African-American squad members\u2014Big T, Kane, Terry Brown and Demarco Percell, along with Woodson, Campeno and Frank Procter.\n\nIndividually, I got along well with all four men. Only T was bigger than me; Percell and Brown were comparable in size and Kane was slightly smaller. I will never forget Brown and Percell saying that they considered me their friend. I had to know that if any of the other \"brothers\" were around, they wouldn't be openly friendly toward me. They also said that they wouldn't fight every African-American guy on this base for me\u2014prompting me to wonder what people had been saying.\n\nWhen it was time to head out around 1 a.m., each squad crammed into a single APC. The squad sergeant stood in the command cupola, while the driver sat below him, maneuvering the vehicle on its tank-like treads. Though technically an armored vehicle, the M113 APC had a relatively thin and soft skin\u2014not at all like the bulletproof troop transport vehicles used today. We knew that the vehicle could easily be penetrated by an enemy machine gun round, which would ricochet around and likely kill or maim several men. But riding on one of the rough metal benches in an APC certainly beat walking through the German wilderness, especially when the forecast called for miserably cold, wet weather.\n\nWe carried M16s, M16s fitted with M203 grenade launchers, M60 machine guns and the M79 grenade launcher\u2014what's known as a \"blooper gun\" because of the popping sound it makes when fired.\n\nOn the ride to the train station, I took turns with Kane, Brown, Percell and Big T standing in the cargo hatch opening of the APC. Woodson looked like shit, with a black eye and large bruises on his face. He'd limped into the vehicle and silently slumped into a seat.\n\nTrue to his name, Troubleman was watching me. I was scared of him and the other guys but did my best not to show it. It wasn't long before he launched into another of his very hard-line militant diatribes against white people, and authority in general. If he thought I was going to take the bait, he was wrong. I was contemplating what my chances would be in a fight against Big T or one of his buddies. Even on my best day, I knew that both Big T and Percell could beat me in a straight fight. I knew I could make Percell suffer, but not enough. A fight between Brown and me would probably result in a stalemate. I knew that I could take Kane, and he knew it, too. Kane hated the fact that I was tougher and stronger than he was, and that likely made him the most dangerous one of the four.\n\nThe lumbering APC rolled into the rail yard, and we loaded onto the eastbound train. The train pulled out right on time and rolled through idyllic-looking small German towns and verdant green forests. We arrived and off-loaded along with thousands of other troops and pieces of equipment. Amazingly, given the size of the operation, the off-\u00adloading went smoothly.\n\nMy squad sergeant was Staff Sergeant Anders, who was tough as nails and had a Combat Infantry Badge\u2014an award given to infantrymen and Special Forces soldiers who had personally fought in active ground combat. When drinking, he was one of Big T's cohorts and the only person who drank with the man and still dared to vehemently disagree with him. Anders was a complex man, an alcoholic who was quite well read. He was a militant African-American, but in a much more intellectual manner than Big T. He didn't stop the black power rhetoric that was rampant in the squad; nor did he foster it.\n\nWhen Anders was around, things seemed to function more smoothly. I liked him, and he went out of his way to praise me for any extra efforts I attempted. On the first night of the Reforger exercise, we set up a defensive perimeter. I suggested a placement of an M60 machine gun that was at odds with what Anders had proposed, and was surprised to see him agree with me and change the placement. It was a small gesture, but an important one for me. I would go all out for this guy, no matter what the circumstances. Sergeant Anders's skills in commanding his men seemed apparent to everyone around him; I suspected that he would have quickly moved up through the ranks if he wasn't an alcoholic.\n\nAnders ordered Campeno and Procter to stay with the APC for maintenance and security while the rest of us went out on a lengthy patrol. Walking through the woods with weapons and packs built up a powerful thirst for more than the water in our canteens. It would only be a matter of time before we'd be moving frenetically from one point to another in our APCs and not doing as many foot patrols. If we wanted to get hammered, now was the time.\n\nAs with any field maneuvers, the first thing that took place at Reforger was a \"health and welfare inspection\" in which military police aggressively searched all the vehicles and men for booze and drugs. Any drugs or alcohol found in common areas\u2014like our APC\u2014were simply destroyed. There was never any investigation as to who may have stashed it. The vast majority of contraband found during these searches was beer, wine and hard liquor. Easily hidden items like speed or smack, of course, usually escaped detection. The checks were extremely thorough, and I was always amazed when several days later someone produced a bottle of Scotch. But most alcohol was found.\n\nAnders led our squad in a search for booze, eventually finding a _Gasthaus_ \u2014a small inn with a restaurant, bar and a few hotel rooms for rent. These places were often patrolled by senior NCOs or regular officers to ensure that soldiers didn't get hammered while out on patrol. Ironically, the officers often enjoyed drinking at the bars while supposedly securing them.\n\nOur sergeant successfully bribed the two drunk NCOs at our _Gasthaus_ , buying a half dozen large bottles of cheap local wine. As we continued our patrol, the wine flowed freely for all of us except Woodson, who was still walking with a slight limp. Anders eventually realized that we might be lost\u2014yet another reason to continue drinking. We were still drinking when a patrol walked past us headed in the opposite direction. The soldiers in that unit were all white, and sober.\n\n\"Hey, soldier, where the fuck are we?\" Anders demanded, as he grabbed one of the men by his shoulder straps and pulled him closer.\n\nIgnoring Anders's rank, the soldier slapped the topographic map out of his hand and pushed the sergeant away\u2014causing his liter of wine to drop to the ground. Drunk and angry about the loss of the wine, I launched myself at the nearest member of the patrol, threw him to the ground and pummeled his face. Brown and Percell also went on the attack and had no trouble beating their opponents.\n\nBig T and Sergeant Anders pulled me off my bloodied victim, and we went running up the path we'd seen the patrol come down. We were confident that the guys in the other patrol weren't going anywhere for a while, and radioing for help was out of the question. Somehow, the battery for their PRC-25 field radio had gone missing, along with the spare. The radio weighed some 24 pounds and consisted of two parts, metal boxes called \"cans.\" The upper can held the battery while the lower one held the separate battery pack. Two metal clips held the cans together, making it quick and easy to remove the battery.\n\nThat night, we were allowed to skirt light discipline and build a fire. Big T was dispensing some of the wine we had left. It didn't take long for word of our stash to spread, and soon there were about 10 soldiers hanging around the fire; I was the lone white one. I held my canteen cup out for a drink, and T filled it, deliberately giving me more than some of the others.\n\n\"You see, not all white boys are the same,\" Big T said. \"I been trying to tell you. Drink up, man, you got more coming.\"\n\nThere were no dissenters, and Anders sat there smiling.\n\nT launched into one of his black power sermons and I headed off to my sleeping bag. I found his proselytizing vaguely comforting that night.\n\nEarly the next morning, the field operations began anew. Big T managed to stow the last bottle of wine in a safe location, just in case we had an opportunity to do some more drinking. As fate would have it, we were ordered to stand down for at least several hours in a clearing adjacent to a dirt road. With no foot patrols, our squad got out of the APC and opened the last bottle. Big T was still doing the honors, and Procter was drinking with us, as the sun started to sink closer to the horizon.\n\nHailing from Arizona and weighing in at about 150 pounds, Procter was generally a harmless, gregarious drunk. But he could become loud. Now, having missed the previous evening's revelry, he was making up for lost drinking time. Procter and Big T were seated next to each other on a bench inside the APC as others milled around outside, near the vehicle's cargo ramp. While Big T launched into another political lecture for the group, Procter filled and refilled the cup from his canteen. It wasn't long before he was lit.\n\n\"You're prejudiced man,\" Procter shouted at Big T, who was seated to Procter's left. He repeated the remark time and again as he pawed at Big T's shoulder\u2014angering him more every time. It was growing difficult to see, because the sun had set and the only light we had was the soft glow from the APC's power source.\n\nBig T suddenly erupted in anger and backhand-slapped Procter while they were still seated next to each other. Then he rose and began to smash the kid's face flat. I watched as Big T grabbed Procter by his hair and dragged him out of the APC.\n\nKane, sitting across from me on another bench, was clearly unnerved and fighting off a sense of shock. Slowly, he pushed the barrel of his M16 up to my chest and in a quivering voice said, \"Don't do anything, man.\"\n\nSergeant Anders screamed for T to stop, but his plea was ignored. T was in a zone, and anyone who dared intrude would be in imminent mortal danger.\n\nT grabbed Procter by the hair and dragged him onto the forest floor, smashing the guy with his other fist as he went. Procter was gurgling blood but the beating continued.\n\nSuddenly Big T looked up and stared at us. No one did or said anything.\n\nAnders broke the silence to announce that we'd received orders to move out. Procter was left at the edge of the clearing while the sergeant set up a first-aid pickup. We all silently boarded the APC as T went back to his drunken speech. Anders did nothing but ordered all of us to stay seated in the cargo area.\n\nA half hour later, Procter was picked up by medics and taken to the rear area for treatment. His wounds were serious enough that he could not return to Operation Reforger.\n\nThe unit knew there would be an inquiry into the man's severe beating. I knew that most of the men would immediately disavow any knowledge of the incident. Procter must have somehow fallen while out on patrol. The other black guys in the unit wouldn't think of ratting on Big T. The only person in question was me, and I'd already made up my mind. There was no way I would risk my life to tell anyone what happened that night.\n\nAfter our patrols ended, we returned to base and piled out of the APC to bed down for a few hours of rest on our air mattresses. No one said anything about Procter, and no one came to investigate, either.\n\nThe next night, Big T came over to me and asked if he could see me back inside the vehicle. Kane was already there when the two of us climbed inside.\n\n\"You ever hear that rumor about me carrying a .45?\" Big T asked, standing just inches away from me. Kane stood off to the side, his hands resting on his waist.\n\n\"Yeah, I've heard it,\" I said.\n\n\"What'd you see between me and Procter?\" he asked.\n\n\"I saw an argument. Beyond that, nothing,\" I said.\n\nT nodded his head, but Kane grinned. He knew that I was fucked and wouldn't get out alive if I even whispered to anyone about what happened. My only way to stay alive was to shut the fuck up and not say a word. I was furious with myself, with them and with the whole fucking army that night. I turned to stare at Kane.\n\n\"The reason I didn't see anything is because I don't give a fuck,\" I told Kane. \"I don't give a fuck about you, about him or myself. Fuck Procter and fuck the army. And Kane, fuck you!\"\n\nI stormed out of the APC, walked into the forest and screamed an oath at the world.\n\nThe next morning, our unit saddled up and we resumed our war games.\n\nAfter about a week of literally ripping up the German countryside with our APCs, tanks and other heavy vehicles, we were ordered to bring our vehicles back to base so they could be repainted. They had all been a deep forest green. Now, using patterns, we were quickly spray painting them for use in the desert. It was an emergency atmosphere: the 1973 Yom Kippur War was on, and we were preparing for deployment to the Middle East. But very little information trickled down, and the orders to redeploy never came.\n\nWhile we waited for word from higher-ups, several German police vehicles came into the camp. Armed with warrants, the police arrested two of the men in our division, a slim Chicano who had a reputation for brutality and carried a knife, and his close friend, a white guy from California who was noted for his fighting prowess and was usually drunk. Every time the two of them were together, we'd usually wind up hearing some story about a person getting beaten or stomped into a jelly-like mass. Apparently the two men had savagely beaten a local man in a bar, and the authorities had successfully tracked them down. Later, we learned that they were both given 10-year jail sentences in German prisons. For me, the arrests meant there were two fewer violent individuals to deal with. But there were plenty of others in this shark tank.\n\nOne winter day, the entire unit was transported to Oberammergau, south of Munich and deep in the Bavarian Alps. The area's beautiful mountains, deep snow and quaint villages with expensive boutiques draw thousands of tourists every winter. The village was so beautiful, in fact, that the U.S. Army was forbidden from entering it except on direct orders. We were billeted at some sort of training base and began training for winter warfare. After we completed a small round of war games, we were told that we'd begin learning how to ski the following day. Some of us were excited to learn in this playground of the rich and the famous. But not everyone was so thrilled.\n\n\"Fuck that motherfucking shit. You won't see my ass skiing down no goddamn mountain,\" one of the men said.\n\nWe were driven to a resort with a bar, at the base of some very steep mountain slopes. After arguably the briefest class ever given in downhill skiing, we were taken to the mountaintop, and told to start.\n\nA tough Chicano sergeant announced he would go first. \"I ain't scared of this fucking shit,\" the sergeant announced as he pushed off on his ski poles.\n\nThe instructors had directed us to ski downhill in a series of turns to help keep our speed under control. But the sergeant ignored that concept and instead headed straight downhill, with his ski poles tucked firmly up into his armpits\u2014much as one would see from world-class downhill skiers. His technique worked for a bit. Halfway down, he lost control and became airborne, his legs and arms flailing wildly before he hit the snow hard.\n\nOthers followed the sergeant, with similar results. My roommate, fearing that he, too, would crash on the way down, looked around for a trail that wasn't as steep. He found one, and had a good run going until he realized that the trail ended in a ski jump. We watched with morbid curiosity as he flew off the end of the ski jump and landed somewhere out of our view. We worried briefly if he was still alive. But our first priority was finding our own, and safe, way down the mountain.\n\nI found a suitable slope and pushed off. Much like the sergeant who had gone first, I aimed straight down the mountain, poles tucked. I tried to turn once, only to wipe out in the snow and draw laughter from some of the other men.\n\nPissed off, I stood up, ignored the instructor's advice again, and headed straight down. As I rapidly gained speed, I started to rethink my decision\u2014but it was too late. I was headed for the picture window at the lodge's bar and could make out the faces of people sitting there enjoying an after-ski drink. I had a decision to make: continue straight and go through the window or wipe out in front of everyone.\n\nI crashed right outside the bar, landing hard in the packed snow. I felt an intense pain on my outer right thigh, and wondered if I'd broken a bone or worse. Gently patting the area, I discovered a can of C-rations in the thigh pocket of my fatigue pants. I pulled the crushed can out of my pocket and stared at it: pork and lima beans.\n\n### CHAPTER NINE\n\n## ROCKIN' ROBIN\n\nAfter returning to base in G\u00f6ppingen, we were told that new dormitory-type barracks would be ready in the spring. So we wintered in our old barracks amid battling boom boxes and Mandrax zombies. A lot of the men seemed anxious to move into the new quarters, but I had deep-seated concerns. Drawing a room with Big T, Kane or Brown would be a nightmare. These guys partied late all the time, and they were hooked up with some of the most violent and militant soldiers on the base.\n\nThere wasn't much I could do about the matter, and so amid the din from the boom boxes and shouts from the men, I immersed myself in the books that I kept stashed in the bottom of my locker: _The Dogs of War,_ by Frederick Forsyth; _The Seven Minutes,_ by Irving Wallace; _Uhuru_ and _The Honey Badger,_ both by Robert Ruark; and _Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan,_ by Carlos Castaneda.\n\n_Journey to Ixtlan_ was one of my favorites; it had been given to me by one of the guys I knew on the base, and it rocked me. Castaneda writes about his apprenticeship to a teacher named don Juan, whose age is impossible to know. Don Juan speaks of being a hunter and a warrior, and how a man's only real reason for life is to hunt power\u2014power to make him stronger inside. He teaches that life is a beautiful and mysterious thing, and that it can be taken from you in an instant. So rather than lament its risks and dangers, a hunter lives as a warrior, strategically maneuvering through each moment and living life to its fullest. Being a true spiritual warrior is the only task worthy of our manhood. Toltec wisdom, in short: the creator left us with two options, and only two\u2014misery or strength. You choose.\n\nWhen the barracks were completed the following spring, we learned who we would be paired up with. I drew Brown as my roommate. The good news was that he was being sent back home to tend to a family issue, so I would be alone for a while.\n\nThe dorm scene played out to a different tune. Now the boom boxes were replaced by state-of-the-art stereo systems, played at high volume behind closed doors in semi-private rooms.\n\nThe newfound privacy also meant that the men didn't have to be inconvenienced any longer when shooting smack or smoking blocks of hash. Smoking hash was easy. All you needed to do was get a can of soda or beer from the dispenser, drink or pour out the liquid and then form the can into the shape of a canoe. Then you'd take the rank pin from your collar and poke holes in the can. Finally, you'd crumble a large chunk of morphine green or Turkish black hash onto the can, and begin your smoking pleasure. Spoons for cooking heroin were easily stolen from the mess hall during meal time.\n\nWe fell into a routine that blended field operations with hours upon hours of hanging around our barracks and almost invariably getting into trouble, either with drugs or fighting among ourselves. Our five-day work week of training was punctuated by guard duty stints and mini field exercises that would include two or three 10-mile walks and all-night patrols. Although I drank the hearty local beer, I was a very lean (for me) 195 pounds.\n\nFull-scale field exercises were about a month in length and happened in May, October and February on sprawling American bases at Hohenfels and Grafenw\u00f6hr, which had large cement barracks where we could spend a couple of nights in before going back out into the woods. When we were out in our APCs, we used a sleeping bag along with an inflatable air mattress and our \"shelter halves\" to protect ourselves from the elements\u2014if we were lucky enough to be able to sleep lying down. Other times, we grabbed a few hours' sleep inside our vehicles.\n\nOne night, we were out practicing an assault on a steep hill covered in pine trees. My new lieutenant, Robin Bailey\u2014whom we referred to as \"Rockin' Robin\"\u2014suddenly herded the entire platoon into APCs and roared off into the night, leaving me and a green new guy on the hilltop in pitch darkness.\n\n\"What now?\" Private First Class Jerry Gormley asked as the sound of the rumbling APCs grew fainter.\n\nThe two of us pooled all our German marks and walked toward the nearest town, the lights barely visible in the distance. No one in our unit seemed interested in finding us, so we figured we would have to find our own way home.\n\nAfter walking for an hour or so, we made it to a small _Gasthaus_ serving beer to five or six local farmers in a bustling metropolis of about 30 residents. Though the inn's proprietors weren't particularly happy to have machine-gun-toting soldiers at their tables, the cash seemed to help, and we were soon being served an excellent local brew by our hostess. Gormley and I figured that our unit would realize they left us behind\u2014and would eventually show up to collect us. But the two of us wound up sitting there drinking, and then eating, for hours, with no sign of our buddies.\n\nEventually the local farmers grew tired of my buddy and I chatting up our hostess, and one of them challenged me to arm wrestle. The farmer was both angry and lit after having a few beers, and I got the feeling that I needed to win this challenge\u2014or face the group's wrath.\n\nMotivated primarily by fear, I slammed the stunned farmer's wrist flat on the table. I had been told that twisting the wrist inward was the secret. It is. I then offered to buy everyone a beer (with my buddy's money, of course). All went well, and a short while later we all shook hands as the bar closed. But we had a problem\u2014the sleeping gear was on the APC, and we had no means of communication with the unit and not much cash. Our newfound female friend agreed to let us sleep on the wood benches in the restaurant. The next morning, we awoke and were allowed to shower and shave in her personal bathroom. She refused to accept any money from us.\n\nWith no one showing up to rescue us, we decided to walk in the general direction that the APCs had headed in the previous night. We walked for hours down dirt roads through the forest. Then we saw a convoy of American vehicles heading toward us.\n\nI flagged down a jeep with a captain in the passenger seat, staring down at some topographic map, and asked him where our unit was located. He said that they were at least 10 miles ahead of us. But when I asked him to make contact or otherwise assist us, he announced that he'd just received new orders and had to leave immediately. He and the rest of the convoy roared down the dirt road, abandoning Gormley and I once again.\n\nWhat had started off as an amusing little adventure was slowly turning into a nightmare. We couldn't understand why our unit wasn't trying to track us down, and why the captain couldn't have at least put in a call to headquarters about us. We walked for hours more, hoping to find a train or bus stop.\n\nEventually, we stumbled upon a German air force base, where we were promptly taken to the base commander, a squared-away-looking colonel and jet fighter pilot. After I explained our situation, including the brush-off from the American convoy, he became very agitated. He grabbed the phone and lit into every American military official he could find until he was able to take care of the problem. We were taken to a railhead and placed on a train to Cooke Barracks, where we hung out until the unit returned from maneuvers.\n\nIn a bizarre twist, the army actually accused Gormley and me of \"desertion\" and attempted to bring us up on formal charges. They refused to listen to what Gormley and I had to say about being left in the woods and our efforts to get reunited with our unit. I had no choice but to retain a criminal defense attorney, who successfully tracked down the German air force colonel, who was now in San Diego. The colonel was apoplectic and vowed to fly back to Germany to speak in our defense at any proceedings called by the army. My superiors said nothing to me but subsequently withdrew the charges. It was all as if nothing had happened.\n\nA few weeks later, word came down that Brown would soon be returning to the company, and my solo time would be up. Because of a great deal of grumbling, the roommate structure was going to be rearranged across the board. In Brown's absence, I made a strong case for rooming with another African-American soldier, with whom I got along well. That worked out, for me. But it was bad news for the new roommate Brown was paired with\u2014and would sexually assault.\n\nWhen that happened, the company was put on lockdown and an investigation was done. But witnesses said little and the investigation didn't get very far. Both men were transferred out to different companies. The incident triggered animosity within the company, and a cold chill permeated the barracks. Though some saw this as a purely racial matter, it was far different to me. I had African-American friends, white friends and Latino friends. Hell, Brown and I were friends\u2014though he probably wouldn't have acknowledged that in public. This was about predators and prey, and the game continued 24/7.\n\nAs time slid by, Kane and I shared an uneasy but nonconfrontational existence. He was growing more vocally militant and aggressive, clearly unnerving a lot of white soldiers. One late morning in May, when I was walking alone in the huge motor pool in Hohenfels, he called me over and asked for a favor. He told me he wanted to have a private conversation with a white sergeant. He'd just been promoted to E-4, which was one rank below sergeant. Was he crazy enough to actually assault an NCO while we were on the base\u2014and in the middle of the day? Kane's face held a sly smile, and he asked if I could close the loading ramp on the APC he was working out of. I did so, and walked away thinking that there was no way he'd dare go that far.\n\nBut Kane did, indeed, assault the sergeant, leaving him with two black eyes. Not surprisingly, he was immediately charged with a court-martial offense. I was, of course, the last person to see the two of them before the incident\u2014and the only witness other than Kane and the sergeant. When Kane's case came to court, I was called upon to testify\u2014and did so honestly. Kane was furious with me for testifying. He was found guilty as charged and taken away in handcuffs by military police\u2014only to be given a second chance by superiors and allowed to return to the unit.\n\nWhile Kane was locked up in a military stockade, I became acquainted with a white soldier from Cook County, Illinois, known simply as \"Doc.\" My new friend proudly carried around in his wallet the newspaper clippings describing his deeds of derring-do as a criminal prior to enlisting. Some three or four months later, the two of us wound up getting arrested by MPs on the base after a fight; both of us were charged with assault. I was found guilty and knocked down a pay grade, which I later recovered. Doc, who had a long rap sheet, was sentenced to do time in the army's correctional facility in Mannheim, Germany.\n\nAfter the verdict was handed down, Doc was sent back to the barracks with a police escort, to collect his belongings. He asked me to help him pack. Doc's prison escort was the heavyset Sergeant Chesty, who had signed out a .45-caliber pistol and nine rounds of ammunition just in case things got out of hand with Doc. Chesty seemed bored watching Doc pack his few belongings and so was amusing himself by playing quick-draw with his loaded .45. What he had somehow failed to remember was that at some point before getting to the barracks, he had racked the gun\u2014pulling back and releasing the slide mechanism on the pistol to load a round into the chamber. The .45 was ready to fire. Chesty had apparently missed the firearms safety course that every new recruit is required to take.\n\n_Me outside Cook Barracks in G\u00f6ppingen, Germany. The second-floor window (over my left shoulder) is where the incident with the stray .45-caliber bullet took place._\n\nTime and again, the sergeant acted like a modern-day Wyatt Earp, pulling the pistol from his holster and spinning it back into place. Then he pointed the pistol at me, loosely forming a grip and said, \"Hey, Brad.\" He pulled the trigger with the pistol pointed at my chest. The gun went off with a deafening explosion, and I felt a burn on my wrist. My eyes darted to both Doc and Chesty. All three of us were covered in white dust, but otherwise we were okay. The bullet had grazed my wrist, ricocheted off the rock-hard plaster wall, flown out an open window and disappeared. The company was away on a training exercise at the time, and we were the lone witnesses to the gun's firing.\n\nThe unintended discharge of a .45-caliber pistol on the base was a serious offense, and we all knew that Sergeant Chesty could soon be joining Doc in jail if the incident was reported\u2014or if he couldn't return all nine .45-caliber rounds that he'd been given. I glanced at Doc, telegraphing my amazement at the sergeant's stupidity. Neither one of us held any animosity toward Chesty, nor did we see any point in getting the guy in trouble. No one said anything, but we all went to work cleaning up the mess from the wall and moving a locker to cover the large hole left by the bullet. We then \"found\" a .45-caliber round to replace the spent one that was lost. Chesty babbled his undying thanks to Doc and me and proceeded to escort the prisoner to jail. It was the last time I ever saw or heard from Doc.\n\nLife on the base increasingly fell into a rhythm for me\u2014grueling days of training on our base or some other army facility in the German countryside, visits to assorted bars and nightclubs during weekend leave (and dealing with the inevitable hangover afterwards) and the occasional trip to a whorehouse like the House of Three Colors in Stuttgart.\n\nThere were also some memorable longer trips, including one that several of us made to Paris via bus. We took in some of the tourist sites\u2014the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and the Palace of Versailles\u2014and enjoyed some very nice (and relatively inexpensive) French wines. And we amused ourselves with a side-trip to Pigalle, where we found some women of the night at 1 p.m. But all of the activity seemed to take place against a never-ending stream of violence. At least, those are my most vivid memories, the ones that made the biggest impression on me during my tour of duty.\n\nDuring one unforgettable training mission to Hohenfels, I caught the flu. It was the only time during my three-year tour of duty that I ever got that sick. Excused from the normal routine, I was allowed the privilege of just lying in my sleeping bag on a cot. My temperature was between 103 and 104 degrees, and the mess hall and bathrooms were a long walk down a dark pathway from my company's sleeping area. At no time did I ever receive so much as a gesture of kindness from anyone in my squad. A couple of guys filled up my canteen, using a nearby faucet, but that was it.\n\nWeak and with no appetite, I just lay in my cot, sweating profusely into my sleeping bag hour after hour. I tried to keep hydrated using the water in my canteen and periodically stumbled to the latrine to relieve myself.\n\nI asked my squad leader if I could get sent back to the rear, as I was feeling very weak, but he said \"Top\"\u2014the top sergeant\u2014wouldn't send anyone to the medical unit unless their temperature hit 105 degrees. That was apparently the way they did it in Vietnam, at least according to Top. My sergeant's experience had apparently been different. During his two tours in 'Nam, soldiers were sent to the rear if their temperatures hit 102. One way or the other, there wasn't anything he was willing to do about my plight.\n\nLate during my second night in the cot, some of the African-American men in my unit were viciously fucking around with some of the white guys, deliberately choking out people who were sleeping\u2014or feigning sleep\u2014in their cots. We were in a darkened, open dormitory-style area housing some 70 men. I could hear what sounded like five or six men in the distance, clearly drunk and up to no good. It sounded like Big T, Brown, Kane and a couple of their buddies. As they moved around the space, I heard muffled screams and commotions as items went flying. I knew PFC Woodson had already taken a beating from the group, and it sounded like they were moving on to their next intended victim.\n\nMonths earlier, I'd decided to carry a switchblade with me when I was on base, and I had it with me that night in my sleeping bag. I held the weapon in my left hand, with the blade pointed down. I could feel the cool steel against the inside of my wrist. I was weak, but I had all the strength and determination I needed to stab someone in the face. I wasn't scared to act. In fact, I wanted blood on my knife that night. Deep down, I was angry. Maybe I was angry with the U.S. Army for turning a blind eye to the violence in its ranks. Maybe I was done with watching some of my buddies getting beaten up. Maybe I was just done with all the shit in Cooke Barracks.\n\nI remember that I was determined to brutally punish my attacker\u2014even though I assumed that would be the end of my army \"career.\" I didn't care. Fuck them. If I was on my own, so be it. I heard the guys move closer and slightly shifted the grip on my knife.\n\nFor reasons that I will never know, the group passed me by that night, and my carefully sharpened steel blade wasn't dirtied. Maybe it was better that way. Sometime later, the barracks quieted down and I fell asleep. The next morning, I awoke in my sleeping bag, which was drenched with my sweat. My switchblade was still laced in my fingers. The choked and beaten soldiers sported only minor battle scars and were seemingly possessed of a collective amnesia. It was the same sort of amnesia that was suffered by the NCOs who had heard, or perhaps even witnessed, the violence that night and done nothing to stop it. I had a feeling that I would soon see still more violence in my unit.\n\n### CHAPTER TEN\n\n## A VIEW FROM THE ABYSS\n\nOne evening during the winter of 1974, before turning in to my bunk in Cooke Barracks, I noticed that Sergeant Bill Collins was assigned as CQ, or Charge of Quarters, tasked with guarding the entryway to our three-story barracks, which held about a hundred men. The CQ sat in a chair in the entryway, next to the stairs that led up to the second and third floors. There was no back door, so everyone had to pass by him.\n\nI'd always been impressed with Collins because he had a large row of service ribbons, as well as a torso severely scarred by shrapnel. Collins was a battle-hardened tough guy, and we'd often gone drinking together when we were off duty. With Collins on duty as CQ tonight, I was pretty confident that I'd get a good night's sleep. It was midweek, and we all had to be up at 5:30 a.m. for our daily physical training and four-mile run. Collins had the balls to deal with anyone daring to come in drunk and loud.\n\nTwo identical buildings held the men of B Company. There were another two that held C Company. All four fronted on an open field used for training, and they were about 30 yards apart from each other. Inside, all of the rooms in the barracks had the same layout, with oversized casement windows on the wall directly opposite the door and bunk beds placed on either the left or right side of the room. The bunks were all covered in the same white sheets and thick green wool blankets.\n\nShouting from a bunch of very drunk men awoke me from a sound sleep around 1:30 a.m. I recognized Kane's voice and some of the other guys', too. The group was crashing around and literally shaking the walls. It was as if a battle was taking place in the hallway. So much for my faith in Collins. I wondered where the fuck he was.\n\nKane, Big T and a couple of other guys were trying to kick in the door to a room occupied by two black guys\u2014my friend Bo Peters from South Carolina, and Sean Smith, a soft-spoken guy from Dallas. Their room was on the first floor, just a few doors down from mine. Peters was a ferocious dude, and at one point the two of us had roomed together. We got along well. Smith generally kept to himself and rarely if ever made trouble. He had befriended a German woman in her 20s who lived near the base, and there were rumors that he'd sometimes smuggle her onto the base late at night, though I'd never seen her.\n\n\"Come on, man. You gotta share with a brother, don't you think,\" Kane shouted amid kicks and punches to the steel door. \"A brother gotta share. You gotta share that pussy.\"\n\nKane and the others wanted to share Smith's girl\u2014no matter whether he and his girlfriend were willing or not. Gang rape was what they had in mind, and the only thing between them and their \"prize\" was the heavy metal door to Smith's room. The girl had taken a big risk even coming onto the base, but there was probably no way that she could have anticipated this kind of trouble.\n\nAs the shouting and the pounding on the door continued, I put on my fatigue pants and boots and went out into the corridor. I was terrified of being attacked by the men but even more troubled by the idea of ignoring what was going on. I figured I could find Sergeant Collins, who had to be close. Maybe he'd just wandered away from the barracks to break the monotony of sitting all night. Still, it was the middle of the night, and noise like this carried\u2014though probably not as far as the officers' quarters. What the fuck was going on, and why wasn't someone stopping it?\n\nKane had managed to break through the door to Smith's room, and he and the others were headed inside. Big T brought up the rear, holding a .45 pistol in his right hand. All eyes were on the girl, and I quietly walked past the door, hoping they wouldn't spot me. There was no way that I dared intervene, especially with Big T carrying a gun.\n\nThe girl was sitting on the bed, with one of the green blankets wrapped around her like a shawl. She was white, with long dark-brown hair. Smith and Peters were sitting on each side of her, looking glum. For a split second, the girl stared at me, silently screaming for help. Her look telegraphed both panic and fear. Peters saw me, too, and subtly shook his head no. His message was clear: move along, and don't intervene.\n\nI kept walking, going through the foyer and past the CQ's empty chair. Kane and the others hadn't seen me walk by. Where the hell was Sergeant Collins? I went outside and ran down to the adjacent barracks looking for him. But he was nowhere to be found.\n\nI stood alone in front of my barracks, the cold German air filling my lungs. It was pitch black, and no one was around. The noise and shouting inside the barracks had stopped.\n\nIntervening in any way, be it by a phone call to the MPs, or by busting in there myself, seemed out of the question because of the risk to my own life. It didn't take a Ph.D. to imagine what was going on inside that room, or what the aftermath would be for the victim.\n\nI went back to my bunk and fell asleep. There was nothing I could do that night\u2014or at least that's what I thought at the time. Little did I know that the image of that woman would stay with me forever.\n\nThe next morning, I wondered what my next steps should be, if any. The safest thing for me to do, by far, was to shut up. That much was clear. I wondered if Collins had deliberately deserted his post at the barracks, or if\u2014perhaps\u2014there was some good explanation for why he wasn't there. That was unlikely, for sure. Should I report the incident and expose Collins's desertion from his post, knowing full well that that would be the end of my \"career\" in the army, and perhaps of my life? Where did my sense of morality begin or end?\n\nReporting the incident would certainly have destroyed Sergeant Collins's career, and it would have sent the most dangerous men on the post, including one with a handgun, looking for vengeance or determined to neutralize the threat\u2014me. I was also fairly certain that the case (if any) was certain to come down to a \"he said/she said\" scenario, with the men who assaulted the woman insisting that the sex was consensual. I very much doubted that she would have the nerve to stand up to the men and tell the truth about what happened that night. There was no way that Smith would be able to protect her, and I was positive that he wasn't going to be reporting the rape to anyone, no matter if it was his girlfriend or not. Ultimately, he valued his life more than hers. If it went down as consensual sex, that would still be a serious violation, because soldiers aren't allowed to bring any outsiders onto the base. But I doubted that the charge would result in any of the assailants going to jail. There was also the possibility that someone could catch Big T with a loaded weapon in his possession. But it seemed highly unlikely that someone would be able to do that and live to tell about it.\n\nI was way too inured to the oxymoron of military justice at this point; there was no justice in the U.S. Army. Doing the right thing held only one certainty: I would be a pariah, a rat with no real hope that so much as one single person would support me.\n\nThe next day was business as usual in the barracks, with no indication that anything criminal had occurred the prior evening. All was forgotten, at least for most of the men in the barracks. If I hadn't seen her eyes, maybe I, too, could have pretended it never happened. There were probably about 100 men in the barracks that night, virtually all of whom pretended to sleep through screaming, banging, crashing and ultimately gang rape. I saw not one single person even so much as put the lights on in their room, and I wondered why.\n\nAs a 19-year-old hanging out in my bunk in Cooke Barracks in G\u00f6ppingen, Germany, I didn't really spend much time thinking about the violence or the racism that I encountered. It was simply part of my experience. No doubt, it wasn't the environment that I had dreamt of before I decided to enlist. But truthfully, who can imagine from the outside what the army is _really_ like?\n\nLater, I wondered if what I experienced was commonplace in the army or not. Were all the U.S. Armed Forces around the world as violent, and sometimes evil, as they were in the late 1970s in Germany, right after the Vietnam War?\n\nFor the most part, Cooke Barracks was closed off from the prying eyes of the press. We were thousands of miles from home, in a base that was largely removed from German society and its norms. In some sense, it was a microcosm of American society, with blacks, whites and Hispanics living together. But unlike back home, we lived together in close quarters 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with access to virtually unlimited quantities of booze and drugs. We had no choice but to deal with each other all the time.\n\nThe U.S. Army, the great green machine, had forced all of us together, no matter what we had been accustomed to back home. Some of us wondered what the army was even doing in Germany and whether it would even be possible for our relatively small number of soldiers to ward off a full-scale, Soviet/Eastern Bloc offensive through the plains of central Germany, the Fulda Gap. We were training for a war that most of us figured we'd probably wind up losing\u2014though we rarely talked about it. Many black soldiers quietly wondered why they should be the ones in harm's way when the nation didn't seem all that grateful or willing to provide the sort of opportunities that were commonplace for people with white skin.\n\nThe officer corps was almost completely comprised of white, college-educated men, while the majority of the rank-and-file soldiers were black and Hispanic. In the combat arms branches, such as infantry, the blacks and Hispanics usually outnumbered, or were at least on par with, the number of white soldiers. They also tended to be considerably more street-smart; they enlisted at a slightly older age, too.\n\nMany of the black men whom I knew were fine soldiers. But there was a small percentage who were militant, violent and truly intimidating to those around them.\n\nNo doubt, the level of violence that I experienced in the army hardened me and perhaps set the stage for my decision to enter a motorcycle gang, where the violence was even greater. For years, I wondered why I seemed to be surrounded by violence in the army, and why my experience was so different from others who followed similar paths. I suspect that there was something about my size and level of fitness that made me the perfect target. Someone who stood over six feet and weighed a muscular 195 pounds was a more impressive target than someone who stood five foot six and weighed 150. No one would be impressed if you took out one of the wimpy Southern kids in the barracks. But they may well be impressed, and feel intimidated, if you took out someone who was big and fairly muscular, like I was. I was large enough to merit a \"pat on the back\" for the guy who took me on, but not so large as to be a serious threat to someone. Bullies don't like to lose fights.\n\nTo be certain, any honest soldier who served could likely tell people stories of racial intimidation and violence. Going into the army, I had no idea that sort of thing even existed. I doubt I would have enlisted had I known what was happening inside Cooke Barracks.\n\nThe weird thing is that I can't really complain about the violence I experienced in the army. Ultimately, it made me stronger, both physically and mentally. Maybe I should send my recruiter a fruit basket.\n\n### CHAPTER ELEVEN\n\n## THE DEEPEST RING OF HELL\n\nAt approximately 0630 hours one spring morning, the men of Bravo Company were headed back to our barracks, nearing the end of a required four-mile run. Wearing white T-shirts, fatigue pants and combat boots, we ran in step with an NCO calling cadence. Charlie Company was running in the opposite direction\u2014and in tight quarters with us.\n\nA black soldier from Charlie Company, one I'd never even talked to, grabbed and pulled my arm.\n\n\"I don't play that shit,\" I said, before nailing him with a very clean right cross. The move sent him flailing at speed through his formation. Before he even had time to stand, both companies stopped dead in their tracks and started glaring at each other.\n\nSeconds later, a black sergeant from Charlie Company began walking in my direction, clearly hoping to retaliate. My platoon's Sergeant First Class Tre Mallard, a tough white Cajun, stepped in front of him and took a stance telegraphing his willingness to fight. Mallard ordered the other sergeant to stand down, which he did\u2014but only after giving me an angry stare. This wasn't over by a long shot.\n\nStriking me would certainly have meant a court-martial and serious trouble for the sergeant from Charlie Company. Or at least it should have, under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Under those rules, he was obligated to protect his men and to see to \"the good order of the situation.\" But there was no threat to the sergeant's men when he came toward me. The soldier I'd hit was being helped to his feet, and I'd simply stood my ground. In my mind, I'd reacted as I had to. But clearly the soldier would have had to even the score or face serious ridicule (or worse) for letting himself get battered by a white soldier. There was no way that I wanted to provoke a full-fledged fight between the two units. I knew full well that I would have been in deep trouble had I done so.\n\nThe soldier who yanked my arm did not know me; the two of us had never had any beef. My guess is that he attacked me simply because he saw me as a soft target. No doubt, my counterattack surprised him\u2014though one can only speculate what he expected me to do.\n\nI suppose most black soldiers believed that their white counterparts were simply inferior as street fighters. Whatever success I enjoyed in this altercation probably had a lot to do with his shock at being counterattacked. I certainly didn't have any special fighting skills at that point in my life, and I never possessed that natural knockout punch that some men seem to be born with.\n\nI was frightened by the violent and militant black men who were often trying to stare me down; I was frightened a great deal of the time there, and for good reason. But for me, there was a greater fear than that of a physical beating. It was the fear of looking in the mirror and seeing a coward, a pussy. I wanted to view myself in the way Sergeant Jackson from Fort Polk likely viewed himself: with a grim, fire-eyed defiance of any weakness related to battle, either armed or unarmed. So it would seem my greater fear won out.\n\nFor days I heard rumors of my impending death at the hands of some of the black soldiers from C Company. But for reasons that were never clear, no one came after me. In the end, the original attack was just another act of random violence, the sort that I saw repeatedly during my tour of duty. The violence hardened me in a way that I didn't fully understand at the time. As time went on, I would slowly become numb to the danger. My sense of fear lessened a bit each time, and so, too, did my sense of caring for the men around me. I suppose I would expect that to happen in men who've seen combat and risked their lives in the field. But we were all on the same side\u2014and still on friendly soil.\n\nOne Saturday afternoon, I watched as a fight broke out at the mess hall between a white private and a black sergeant assigned to my squad. Most of the men were off the base, enjoying weekend leave. The two men had apparently gotten into some debate inside the mess hall. The white soldier was in civilian clothes, and the sergeant, who was on duty, was in his fatigue uniform.\n\nI watched from a hilltop some distance away as the sergeant left the mess hall and ran across the commons into our barracks, where he changed into civilian clothes and then came back outside\u2014where he stood and waited for the white soldier to come out. The sergeant then laid a solid beating on the soldier, who looked scared to death and never even attempted to fight back. Eventually, he fell to the ground, where he was kicked in the face. A handful of the victim's buddies had no choice but to stand by and watch the incident transpire; they were surrounded by a large group of blacks who were making it clear that they, too, wanted a slice of the pie. The fight soon ended, with the victim lying bloodied on the ground. The sergeant walked back into the barracks, changed into his uniform and continued with his duties.\n\nNo one ever reported the incident, and there was no indication that it was ever investigated by anyone. Sadly, I was among those who saw the fight and did nothing. I never even considered reporting the matter, because I knew that doing so would put me in grave danger. My personal survival took precedence over my sense of honor and morality that day, a fact that still sickens me. The immortal Dante tells us that the deepest ring of Hell is reserved for those who protect their neutrality in times of danger. I suppose I knew at the time that, no matter what I did, no single individual would be capable of affecting any change in the violent environment in which I lived.\n\nThe U.S. Army would have to make sweeping changes in policy impacting all levels of the force, ranging from the rank-and-file troops up to the officers, who needed to be more hands-on and confront what was really happening in the ranks. Alcoholic NCOs had to be treated and dealt with. Violent and verbally abusive soldiers had to pay a real and harsh yet fair punishment for their transgressions. And everyone needed to accept that the only color that could be recognized for any reason was green\u2014the color of our uniforms. Personally, I believe that the army made dramatic changes, and that a soldier's world today is far different than the dysfunctional environment I experienced. One thing is clear: U.S. forces have been very effective in the battlefield since 9/11.\n\nI had no idea how the army would treat me if I stabbed someone with a switchblade knife. Yet I rarely went anywhere without one. I certainly had never stabbed anyone before and was quite certain a very long jail sentence would await me if I did. The real reason I carried it was simple: I was frequently scared, and I hoped that the nasty presence of the blade would preempt its use. I should have realized that carrying it for a long enough period of time almost guaranteed I'd end up in a perilous no-win situation. Still, fear often trumps sound reasoning, and the fear I felt was real.\n\nSome weeks later, I was walking alone on the base on a Saturday afternoon, off duty, and was about to enter my dorm. I had been assigned a new roommate, a black guy who had some time in and seemed like a decent roommate. A group of black soldiers in civilian clothes was hanging around the entrance to Cooke Barracks, mostly members of my company. Big T was among them, holding court and passing around a couple of bottles of Thunderbird. I foolishly had hopes of making it inside unnoticed.\n\n\"Hey, Bradshaw, how the fuck are you,\" Kane shouted as I walked past him and headed into the barracks. \"Lookin' forward to catchin' up with you later, bro!\"\n\nAfter being court-martialed for beating up the sergeant in the motor pool at Hohenfels, Kane was back\u2014and in my face. I was the sole witness who'd testified against him, and he'd spent some hard time in a military prison before returning to base and hooking up with his old buddies, including Big T. I'd spoken up and done the right thing, and now I was in serious danger once again. I really had only myself to blame.\n\nMy new roommate was still putting his locker in order, and we chatted briefly before I dug out my well-worn copy of Frederick Forsyth's _The Dogs of War_ and dropped onto my bunk to read. Minutes later, I heard a group of loud and drunk men outside my door. I put the book down on the green blanket and waited for the inevitable.\n\nThe door burst open, with Big T and Kane leading the way. The other wine-drinking members of the group followed close behind. Kane was holding the heavy end of a broken pool cue.\n\n\"Bro, ya know that 90 percent of all black men go to jail,\" Big T said, looking in Kane's direction. \"Jail is part of the black experience, and you need to be part of that. This is the white fucker who should be dealt with. So be black and do what you know has to be done.\"\n\nMy roommate stood still, not certain of what he should do\u2014if anything. The men behind Kane were shouting encouragement, urging him to take me on. For a split second, I sat paralyzed on my bunk. Then I grabbed the switchblade from under the pillow, stood and flipped the blade out, ready to finish whatever Kane started.\n\nKane stared at me, looking euphoric. He glanced down at the blade, lunged at me with the pool cue and missed. I lunged, too, but struck air.\n\nA sergeant who was part of the group tackled Kane and urged him to give it up. Kane looked determined to continue even as some of the men grabbed him and dragged him out of the room. Big T looked at me with a smirk before turning and exiting the room with the others.\n\nSomeone closed the door as they exited, and I stood there, still firmly holding the switchblade in my right hand. My roommate and I looked at each other but said nothing.\n\nIt was almost as if Kane and I had become gladiators, forced to play roles that neither of us wanted, in a very real game that we couldn't stop. Kane had no choice but to demonstrate that he wasn't going to let me get away with testifying against him in court-martial proceedings. And I had no choice but to defend myself by whatever means were necessary, even if that meant using a weapon that I should never have had. Kane and I had both entered the army to be soldiers, pure and simple. Yet we were fighting against each other, and not some enemy, real or perceived, of the United States. We were both in our own personal hell.\n\nI was fortunate that the sergeant had broken up the fight when he did. Had I stabbed Kane, everyone in the room that night would have testified against me, and I would have gone to prison, disgraced and dishonorably discharged. No one would have dared to speak in my defense, especially since the switchblade that probably saved my life was illegal to possess.\n\nCuriously, no one said anything to me afterwards\u2014not my roommate or any of the other witnesses. It didn't seem to make any difference in how I was treated by the men, either. In the end, it was just another day in the army. No blood had been shed, and so it was hardly worth the bother of conversation.\n\nOne night during the late fall of 1975, I was hanging out in the barracks, pleasantly intoxicated and drifting off to sleep, when my friend Steve Comer got into a heated exchange with another soldier from C Company about some small thing. The two of them began to grapple, but the other soldier was able to break free and take off, with Comer in hot pursuit. Wondering what was going on, and thinking that my buddy may need some help, I took off after him.\n\nChasing across the grassy commons after Steve, I ran headlong into an off-duty NCO from C Company who was walking with a bunch of soldiers, all of whom happened to be African-American. The NCO fired a slick left jab to my eye, the opening salvo in a serious beat-down. I never left my feet, but went to a knee a couple of times, only to recover and get hit with another brutal onslaught.\n\nI fought back, but it was immediately clear to all of us on the field that night who the victor was. Still, the fight continued long after the NCO had demonstrated to everyone present that he was a stronger, tougher, more able fighter than I was at the time. There was no reason for the NCO to continue, and yet he did, inflicting blow after blow against someone who had made the unforgivable mistake of crashing into him in the dark.\n\nAfterwards, Comer and some of the guys took me to the emergency medical facility on the base, where I learned that my orbital socket was fractured. The next day, I learned that the NCO in question was a member in good standing at Smokin' Joe Frazier's gym in Philadelphia. Perhaps not surprisingly, I learned, he had studied with savage diligence.\n\nMPs were dispatched to investigate, and I told them that I'd taken a bad fall down the stairs in the barracks. Not believing the story for a second, they chuckled and left, shaking their heads.\n\nI lost an important part of myself that day. When the fight was over, my sense of compassion for others was gone, replaced by an emptiness and a steel resolve to protect myself no matter what the cost, and no matter who might get hurt. I had become so inured to the perpetual violence surrounding me that I simply accepted it. There was no point for me to hope for justice or dream of some kinder, gentler world. Life was a brutal struggle, interspersed with a few brief periods of fun to keep you ready to get back into the fray. Weakness in any form is the enemy, and fear is a weapon that can be used against you. In my Brave New World, the rules were simple: prepare for battle, and never show weakness. Author Joseph Conrad was right\u2014most men went to their graves ignorant to the last of what the world held in perfidy and violence.\n\nThe NCO felt the need to demonstrate his boxing prowess on the unskilled and vulnerable. Even if he had justification to strike me, and perhaps he did, he went way too far. Filled with his own bloodlust and adrenaline, my attacker was perhaps the most important teacher I could have had. Through all the blood and pain, I had learned to break through and see life in a radically different way, to live each day as a warrior, to be the proverbial tough guy.\n\nIt seemed an eternity since I'd lain in bed with the flu in my parents' house, reading Norman Mailer's _The Naked and the Dead_. I'd revered Sam Croft at the time as the cold-blooded killer who looked death and hardship straight in the eye. Now I embodied some of the same elements as the character I had once revered; I had learned to put my feelings and conscience aside, to file them away for a while and forget about them. It wouldn't be until another great teacher, Renzo Gracie, entered my life that I would once again find my soul.\n\n### CHAPTER TWELVE\n\n## QUIET DAYS IN KEY WEST\n\nI was psyched to be 90 days to ETS, or End Term of Service, when I would be discharged from the army and head back to the States. The closer I got to my discharge, the more careful I became about my behavior\u2014and avoiding any sort of altercation that could delay ETS.\n\nI'd saved up about a month of leave time, which would allow me to get out earlier than normal. As I counted down the days, I circled the base with clipboard and papers in hand, going through the army's elaborate and time-consuming process of making sure that everything was in order before I was discharged. That meant paying off my tab at the base commissary, returning gear and making sure that all my service medical records and administrative/personnel files were in order\u2014performance evaluations, certificates, and DD Form 2586, \"Verification of Military Experience and Training.\"\n\nFinally, my time was up and I grabbed a train from G\u00f6ppingen back to Frankfurt and hopped on a plane for the eight-hour flight back to Newark. I needed to go back to Fort Dix to complete the final step of the discharge process. In one of life's little ironies, someone failed to call my name from the long list of men and women being discharged, and I sat in a waiting room for six hours. It was only after I stood up and started asking what was going on that the clerk realized I'd been forgotten and got things straightened out.\n\nI headed back to my parents' house and moved back into my old bedroom, which looked just the way it did when I'd left three years earlier. But I was different, and it felt weird to be back. My parents probably felt the same way. None of us were at ease.\n\nOne morning, my mother quietly walked into my room\u2014probably to drop off some laundry that she'd done\u2014and woke me from a deep sleep. I snapped awake and jumped up, ready to attack her. She was stunned and promptly left the room. The moment affirmed what both of us already knew: I was different from the teenage boy she'd said goodbye to after I enlisted.\n\nMy always-reserved dad looked at me differently, too. Bud had something to celebrate now with his buddies at his weekly poker games: his son was a veteran, just back from Germany. I knew I'd fallen short of his expectations by quitting the high school football team. He'd wanted\u2014no, _expected_ \u2014me to become a county or state football champ. But at least I'd served our great nation and was a veteran. That was something. Otherwise, Dad was the same as he'd always been.\n\nI'd been home for about three weeks when a friend of mine, Henry Rathmaker, suggested that we take his Camaro, drive down to Key West, Florida, and have some fun. I had no idea at the time what the Florida Keys were. Still, with no job and nothing holding me in New Jersey, I gladly accepted, and we headed south together. It didn't take long to pack, because I had next to nothing.\n\nRathmaker and I rented a cheap two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of the Marine Hotel, with a balcony overlooking the turquoise waters of the Straits of Florida, for just $175 a month, including utilities. The hotel, with its Spartan accommodations and peeling paint, was far from a four-star resort. Still, it had its own swimming pool, and the receptionist promised that if you showed your key across the street at the Sands, you could get access to the small private beach there. I wound up spending countless hours on that gem of a beach and the adjacent wooden pier, hanging out, drinking beer and enjoying some of the passing sights\u2014including the attractive female tourists. Palm-tree-studded beaches, bikini-wearing American girls; I felt like I had died and gone to Heaven.\n\nMy buddy and I shared the apartment for about two months until he got a job offer up north and hit the road. I kept the place even though it was bigger than I needed. But I realized that I had to stick to a budget if I intended to keep living the good life without a job. My skills, limited to soldiering and fighting, were not in high demand in sleepy Key West.\n\nI bought a used 10-speed bike for transportation and calculated that if I limited myself to just one meal a day, I could hold out pretty much indefinitely. I knew I could grab cheap takeout food from a Cuban place in town. I allowed myself a generous $6 a day for booze. The Blue Parrot sold cheap beer and even provided a container to go for my bike ride home. After all, it wasn't like I could get into much trouble pedaling my rusty 10-speed. While the tourists were watching the sunset at Mallory Square, I was visiting the low-end bars, where you could buy six shots of tequila for a dollar.\n\nWith Rathmaker gone, my apartment felt more humble and emptier than before. I had a black-and-white TV with a wire antenna on top, and a sleeping bag on the bed. Most of my clothing was army surplus\u2014two pairs of fatigue pants cut into shorts, some green T-shirts, a couple of sleeveless undershirts and a pair of sneakers. No underwear. The women who shared my bachelor lair didn't find it all that quaint and cozy, which helped to ensure that they weren't overly interested in returning.\n\nI went to the unemployment office to collect what I felt was my just due. I hadn't yet acquired my current belief that it's abhorrent to collect unemployment insurance when able and healthy.\n\nThe office clerk reasonably explained that, in order to stay eligible, I needed to show proof that I'd attempted to find work at a minimum of five locations a week. The skills of bayoneting, shooting, drunken brawling and topographical land navigation were nowhere to be found in the want ads. I had no comment for the clerk but likely looked perturbed, as I had no idea how to find work in Key West\u2014or any of the Florida Keys for that matter.\n\nThe clerk cocked his head to one side, frowned and asked me what was bothering me. I told him what I had been doing for the last three years.\n\nCould I prove it? he asked.\n\nI showed him my Department of Defense DD214 separation papers.\n\nThe clerk acquiesced and agreed to give me the benefits, job search or no job search. Come in every other Friday with the papers filled out, he instructed, promising not to look too closely. It was worth about $75 a week to me, which wasn't bad given my $175-a-month rent.\n\nKey West had an amusing Conch Train that gave tourists a pleasant, low-speed ride around the island. It ran on rubber tires, not steel wheels, and was powered by a V8 gasoline engine, not steam. But tourists seemed to like it, in part because it was cheap and ran right by all the island's places of note, including Hemingway's former home. The train typically carried a mix of elderly retirees, milk-white tourists who'd just arrived from the mainland, a handful of lonely and bored single women and the occasional stoned freak laughing like a hyena. I watched it for a while and devised a battle plan to identify and then meet women who might find a well-tanned young stud interesting\u2014well, at least for an afternoon or evening.\n\nI'd noticed that the train picked up speed in front of Smathers Beach. I learned to get on my bike in advance and then race the train as it went past the beach, passing it at full speed, shirtless and sweating from exertion in the hot sun. If I saw anyone of interest, I'd just happen to stop for a cold beverage at the very point where the train stopped to let off its passengers. Admittedly, my act was extremely shallow. But it was also great fun, and an excellent way to pick up women in this era before AIDS. Of course, if I couldn't find anyone of interest on the Conch Train, there were plenty of other places to look, including the beach, swimming pool and bars.\n\nI affected a sort of sad yet heroic pose. Deeply scarred by life's injustices and moving on from a tragic love affair, I was in need of the right tourist woman to fuck me into being a whole man. It's a role that's been done a thousand times, but as with good cop/bad cop, simple playacting often works. The target just needed to have the seed of wanting to believe. I suffered my fair share of rejections. But rejection never bothered me for long since there were plenty of other transient women in Key West. It wouldn't take long before another sexy woman would come along, and I'd move on to my next target.\n\nMy time in Key West was certainly pleasant enough. I'd recharged my batteries and found out what it was like to sleep deeply in the clean salt air without worrying that some armed man was going to bust into my room and try to murder me. But in time, chasing the Conch Train grew lame. If I didn't live there, I would have found it difficult to believe a small city could be so tolerant, laid-back and peaceful. I didn't even make it a year. Relaxing in paradise didn't fit, kind of like a dinner jacket with one sleeve too long. I missed the adrenaline rush that I'd gotten on almost a daily basis in the army. I missed the action, and maybe I even missed the danger. Whatever the issue, staying in Key West was not in the cards for me.\n\nIt was Helen Keller who told us, \"Life is either a great adventure, or it is nothing.\" I had no real idea what was to come, but I didn't want it to be boring.\n\nI headed back to Middletown with no plan, no job skills and no prospects for work. I moved back into my parents' place, got a job doing construction work and played third base on a local softball team. I went out most nights and often wound up spending the night at a friend's house.\n\nMy brother, Mike, had opened up a karate school across the street from the train station in nearby Red Bank: Bradshaw's Karate. He worked at a bank during the day and was at the school, running classes, most nights and weekends. Like many karate schools, it was a basic storefront operation with a small counter up front, wood paneling on the walls and a large carpeted area that we used for training and grappling. I trained there regularly, studying Korean Karate under my brother and his buddies and doing some heavy-duty weight lifting. Mike had a sense of business acumen that I clearly didn't have, and some superb fighting skills. He had trained under a local legend. He also was being instructed by a very tough group of Jamaicans from a brutal and prestigious school in New York City. I was reveling in the training and couldn't have cared less about any sort of career advancement.\n\nThe Jamaicans were the elite students of famed karate star Tadashi Nakamura. On weekends they would come down to the Jersey Shore in a group, their girlfriends in tow. The women were terrific fighters as well, smiling like jungle cats while they taped up their wrists for ju-kumite, or free fighting. The Jamaicans spoke of the warrior code and Bushido. They were traditionally educated and well schooled in oriental martial discipline and philosophy. But more importantly, in my mind, they walked the walk. They considered themselves classical warriors in a modern world. There wasn't a phony bone in any of their bodies. Training and fighting with them was a test of your mettle every time, and the standards they set for my brother and I were the very same ones they set for themselves.\n\nThese were the hardest and toughest men and women I had ever had the great good fortune to associate with. Humility and self-deprecating humor were the order of the day. Showing off or acting disrespectfully was not tolerated.\n\nOne sweat-soaked Saturday afternoon, Venezuelan Santiago Vasquez came into the school. He was in incredible physical condition and warmed up doing full splits. He told us he wanted a \"friendly\" sparring session and asked if we would be amenable taking turns fighting him\u2014five of us, in all\u2014with short breaks between each bout. Assured of his prowess, he made it clear with his body language and facial smirk that this was a splendid idea. As the kumite began, Vasquez's smirk evaporated, replaced by despair as he went toe to toe with fighters who wouldn't back down no matter what the circumstances. After the fight, Vasquez's body was bruised, but his self-esteem was devastated.\n\nVasquez broke down in tears in front of the group. In many gyms, his tears would have been perceived as pathetic or unmanly. Not so on that night. Ultimately, the way in which he handled himself earned him real respect from the group.\n\n\"A tiger can't help being a tiger,\" one of the Jamaican fighters explained. \"His nature compels him to seek combat. The Chinese say that when two tigers fight, one dies and the other is seriously injured.\"\n\nHe continued: \"Our warrior nature also compelled us to end this combat, since in this world a superior person seeks justice. And an act of kindness is the highest form of action, and is the mark of the superior man. Understand, my friend: you are not fighting normal people here.\"\n\nVasquez became a member and quickly a real leader in the school. Later he became a renowned undercover narcotics police officer in Kansas City, Kansas.\n\nThe sun was starting to dip lower in the sky one hot day in August as I got onto the Garden State Parkway on my new deep blue 1975 Harley-Davidson Sportster, twisted the throttle and ran it up through all four gears. The 900-cc bike always sounded great on the open road. I'd used some of the money I'd made in construction as a down payment on the Harley. I had already started to customize it by adding an extended chrome front fork.\n\nI was headed northwest to my brother's apartment in Matawan, off exit 120. Mike and I both played on a softball team sponsored by the United Counties Trust Company, where Mike worked during the day. I played third base, and Mike played center field. We were scheduled to play the River Plaza Fire House softball team, and my brother had decided to invite both teams to his place for a beer party the night before the game.\n\n_The gang of five\u2014me on the left, my grandfather Bill, my father Bud, and my brother Mike in the foreground. Mike's son, Michael, is on my grandfather's lap._\n\nMike lived in one of the many nondescript apartment complexes that were sprouting up in the Central and North Jersey areas\u2014perhaps not the best place to have a beer party for a bunch of young guys. The walls were paper-thin, and your neighbors were literally just a few feet away in each direction. Mike was the corporate type and not at all the sort of person who would draw undue negative attention from the rest of the yuppies-in-training that he worked with.\n\nThe team that Mike and I played on was pretty chilled out. But the other team was captained by my cousin, Bill Hendricks, who was known to be a mediocre player with a competitive edge and a volatile temper. Bill had spent three years as an MP in Germany, most of it prior to my arrival. I had visited him at his posting and seen the healthy respect he received from his fellow soldiers. He had also endured some brutal and violent encounters, and survived using much the same methods as I had.\n\nAs the party progressed, we continued drinking heavily. It was as if Budweiser was going to stop making the stuff the next day\u2014which definitely wasn't the case. We'd already purchased the keg that we'd be drinking at the game the following day. The voices got louder, prompting us to crank up the music time and again so that it could be heard over the din.\n\nOne of the guys came up with the brilliant suggestion of having a friendly boxing match on the second-floor landing. It was too long a walk to head down to one of the grassy areas adjacent to the apartment building, and too far from the booze. I peered down over the rusty three-foot metal railing surrounding the landing. It was about a 20-foot fall to the concrete sidewalk below.\n\nMike dug around in his closet, came out with two pairs of 16-ounce boxing gloves and offered to referee the matches. I was fortunate enough to be called for the first match; I'd be representing my team, and my six-foot-three, 215-pound cousin Bill would be representing the other team. I briefly wondered what my brother's neighbors were thinking about this crowd and why they didn't call the police. No matter to me. The fight was on, and I was fully confident that Bill would not hold back just because we'd grown up together and were relatives. No doubt he loved me. But he was also intent on knocking me out. If my front teeth were collateral damage in the action, so be it. We didn't have any mouthpieces anyway.\n\nMy corner man shouted words of encouragement\u2014to stick and move. Perhaps more sage advice would have been \"Don't do it,\" or \"Try to avoid getting knocked over the railing.\" No matter. The Heavyweight Championship of Who Gives a Shit was poised to begin.\n\nBill and I both attempted the \"stick and move\" strategy for about two seconds. Then we moved to the center of the landing and punched each other as hard as we could. My brother briefly attempted to break a clinch but was promptly launched backward through his open apartment door, landing ass-first on the floor. One of the neighbors also tried to intervene, at least until Bill and I gave him an angry look and he silently retreated into his apartment. We continued beating each other until we couldn't breathe or punch, thus ending round one.\n\nThe second round ended the same as the first, and neither of us wanted a third round. So we ponied up to the beer supply and tried to drink, though we both had serious pain when opening our jaws from the trauma of the temporal lobe area being smashed; the only cure for this pain was drinking more beer.\n\nThe game the next day is a bit of a blur, a blend of angry hangovers and a hot and humid summer day. Bill participated in only three or four fistfights\u2014not bad, given that his team got shellacked and someone certainly needed to pay. Bill and I almost had a much-anticipated rematch several times, but each time one of us cooled down just enough to save face and not have to relive the fun-filled festivities of the prior evening. We ended the day with an empty vow that we were done with each other as comrades. Later, Bill came to be a trustworthy and reliable ally who stood with me without question when serious threats came my way.\n\nSometime after my discharge from the army, I began to evaluate my friends and relatives using what I called \"the foxhole test.\" In a foxhole, confronted by a powerful enemy, would I trust this person with my life? I believed I could judge people on my own, using just my intuition. I resolved that I couldn't be close to those who failed the test. Ironically, there were few people that I was able to judge one way or the other; I was brooding, unsmiling and compassionless. Few people wanted anything to do with me.\n\nI landed the perfect job, working for a person who looked and acted menacing and didn't care about upward mobility\u2014contractor Tom Rondell, a shrewd, divorced ladies' man who was building a small development of upscale houses. His method of obtaining maximum profit was to find the cheapest contractors possible\u2014and then browbeat them to give him the best possible prices. His goal was simple: build a new house cheaply and quickly, and sell it for the highest amount the market would allow. My responsibility was simple as well: ensure that Tom didn't get shorted by his grossly underpaid workers and make sure they didn't beat the shit out of him. \n\n### CHAPTER THIRTEEN\n\n## BEYOND GOOD & EVIL\n\nThe phone rang one fall morning. It was my longtime friend Bob Grant, a well-educated guy who was tough as nails and could be a serious problem for his opponents in a bar fight. Though capable of significant violence, this guy was affable, gregarious and fun when drunk. He was also a married homeowner and businessman in Middletown with assets to lose and a reputation to uphold. \"Have I got a story for you,\" he said, inviting me to have a beer with him later in the day.\n\nGrant and I were in the army during roughly the same time period, though he was discharged about six months before me. He was an MP with a ferocious reputation for violence\u2014and for not getting caught when dispensing his own form of justice. Once, after I got out of the army, I was picked up by local police after I got into a fistfight and foolishly left an ID bracelet with my name on it next to the dude I had knocked out. Grant's subsequent advice for me was pretty simple: avoid carrying any kind of ID during that sort of mission: no patches, no dog tags, nothing.\n\nOver a couple of beers, Grant described to me how he'd been hanging out one evening in Fair Haven at a bar called the Lock, Stock & Barrel, drinking Scotch and talking with another guy. Grant said that one of his more colorful stories included the word _fuck_. But one well-dressed young woman at the bar was appalled at his use of the word\u2014and opted to confront him.\n\n\"Excuse me, but would you mind refraining from using that sort of language?\" she asked.\n\n\"I don't know, honey, exactly which language would you prefer\u2014French?\" Grant replied. \"Well, shit; don't speak a word of it.\"\n\n\"You did it again. You have a really foul mouth.\"\n\n\"Hey, let's start over again,\" Grant said.\n\n\"I don't think so!\" she angrily replied.\n\nBefore Grant could reply, the bartender pointed at him and shouted, \"You are flagged. Pay up and get out! Now!\"\n\nAlmost immediately, the bartender started to move toward Grant. Pissed, Grant picked up a drink glass off the bar and hurled it at the man's head. He missed.\n\nThe glass struck and shattered the huge mirror that hung behind the bar. Shards of glass rained down behind the very large, well-built and now startled bartender. Grant took his cue and headed for the door, crossing the street and going down to the cold, swiftly moving river, which was nearly a mile wide. Hearing police sirens in the distance, he ran down the embankment, \"borrowed\" a rowboat he found tied up along the shore and quickly rowed across the river.\n\nSoon he had disappeared into the dark, moonless night. Grant felt certain that no one in the bar knew his name and that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to identify him. He'd driven a friend's car to the bar that night and so couldn't be identified that way, either.\n\nGrant ditched the boat on the other side of the river and walked the seven miles to his house without seeing anyone. Once home, he grabbed a beer and hung out with his wife, who was still awake.\n\nThe doorbell rang around 3 a.m., and his wife hopped up to see who was there. She instantly recognized their visitor and opened the door. In walked Middletown Police Officer James Pressfield, a trusted lifelong friend of Grant's who'd noticed that the lights were on and was hoping for a cup of coffee.\n\nHalf-drunk and still high on adrenaline, Grant made a bad mistake: he opened up and described to the officer what had just happened at the bar. Pressfield seemed to love the story and reveled in the details, laughing uproariously at Grant's description of his escape across the river and long, long walk home. Pressfield assured Grant and his wife that the police would never catch him.\n\n\"You are home free, my man. Nothing to fear,\" Pressfield said. \"Relax and go to bed, and don't worry about those bozos across the river. They can't catch anything bigger than cold.\"\n\nGrant thanked his buddy and retired to bed soon after the officer returned to patrol.\n\nBut, Grant continued, things went very differently.\n\nAt 8:30 the following morning, the doorbell rang again. Two detectives from the Middletown Police Department stood at the door, explaining to Grant and his wife that they wanted to take custody of him immediately in connection with the incident in the bar. Grant sleepily feigned ignorance of any wrongdoing, but the lead detective cautioned him to stop talking.\n\nThe detective then described, in great detail, what Grant had done the previous evening. The description matched nearly word for word what Grant had said to Officer Pressfield.\n\n\"We aren't looking for bail here, just formally charging you,\" the detective said. \"We'll give you a lift back here, if you promise to play nice.\"\n\n\"I will cooperate completely, but can I ask one question?\"\n\nThe detective wryly grinned. \"Let me guess. You're gonna ask how did we figure all this out? Did someone tell us?\"\n\n\"You must be reading my mail.\"\n\n\"Listen, you look like an intelligent person. My partner and I start work at eight. Need I connect the dots?\" The implication was that Pressfield had left Grant's house, completed his patrol and then reported what had transpired to his superiors. As soon as the shift change had taken place, the detectives were sent out to make the arrest.\n\nGrant was furious at Pressfield\u2014and pissed at himself for trusting his friend of many years. After his processing in the Middletown Police Department's headquarters, he spoke with the arresting detective.\n\n\"Honestly sir, I have only one confession to make,\" Grant said to the detective. \"I don't trust anyone with dangerous information, but I would trust my closest friend. James's betrayal hurts worse than this arrest.\"\n\nThe detective didn't hesitate in his reply: \"If James is your friend, you don't need enemies. If this was involving a serious injury or a major theft, that's one thing. But no one was hurt at the bar\u2014luckily, I might add. And the rowboat was recovered from the dock where it was tied up. It really makes a good story. But I don't like rats, even when they help me clear cases.\"\n\nThe detective paused for a second, and then continued: \"But in a way I'm almost glad it happened. Want to know why?\"\n\n\"Tell me,\" Grant replied.\n\n\"Because, without anyone getting hurt, I know I can never trust your pal James,\" the detective said. \"He does this to you, I'm nothing to him. Stand-up he most certainly is not.\"\n\nWhen Grant had finished telling me the story, he seemed energized. He wanted payback against Pressfield but knew it was going to be a serious problem. It's one thing to have a bar fight, but quite another to put a beat-down on a sworn police officer. It also didn't take a genius to figure out that the cops would come looking for Grant if something suddenly happened to Pressfield.\n\nWe ordered another round of beers, and I gave the matter some thought.\n\nTurning to face my buddy, I said, \"You can have no knowledge of any act of revenge whatsoever. If these fucking cops even suspect you, and they will, James being the pussy that he is, you are fucked. They will bust your balls for all eternity. Trust me; James does not get a pass on this because he's hooked up with the blue mafia. I'm flying a black flag on this and we will not discuss it again.\"\n\n\"You ain't flying anything on this without me,\" Grant said.\n\n\"You'll just have to shut the fuck up,\" I said. \"Not to worry, though, no doubt I'll need a favor from you someday. Anyway, this one will be fun.\"\n\n\"What do you guess you're gonna do?\" Grant asked.\n\n\"I have no idea what you are talking about.\"\n\nMy assessment of James Pressfield completely changed after hearing from Grant about the bar incident. Though Pressfield was big and carried himself like a tough guy, I believed that deep down he was a pussy. The cop used his size, badge and gun to bully and control people\u2014and there were plenty of people in Middletown who agreed with that assessment. At that point, Pressfield and I had known each other for years through our mutual friendship with Grant, and we'd gotten along pretty well. But behind my back, I knew that he quietly boasted of having taken me down. That was pure fiction. If Pressfield was as tough as his reputation, he was going to get an opportunity to prove it\u2014in the dark, with no witnesses but me, his attacker.\n\nI happened to know that the cop lived in a rented farmhouse on a large, run-down estate in southern Middletown; I'd been there for Grant's bachelor party, years earlier. You had to drive down a long road\u2014some parts gravel, and others just dirt\u2014and go past the empty former manor house to get to Pressfield's place. There was a sharp right-hand turn in the road, and then a quick left, which forced drivers to slow almost to a crawl. Large trees and thick brambles bordered the road on both sides. Past the sharp turn, there was a good 300 yards of gravel road before you reached Pressfield's house. The entire property, and the road itself, were unlit.\n\nThe south side of town was largely a cow pasture at the time; the north was far more populated (and well lit). I knew this part of town quite well because my parents' home was only a mile away from Pressfield's. It was common knowledge that most of the Middletown Police Department's marked units were assigned to the northern half of town because that's where most of the action was.\n\nDespite its remote location, Pressfield never worried about trouble anywhere near his house because he was six foot three, weighed 220 pounds and was a cop. By regulation, he was armed with at least a handgun 24 hours a day, seven days a week.\n\nMy \"plan\" was simple: I intended to ambush Pressfield on the dark road to his house after the end of one of his four-to-midnight shifts. I was familiar with the Camaro he drove. There were two variables\u2014timing and whether or not he'd be alone. I wondered if he would drive straight home or stop to suck down some free drinks at Mulrain's Tavern on Route 35, right across the highway from the Middletown Police Department. If he picked up some chick in the bar on the way home, then I was going to abort. Otherwise, it was game on.\n\nLate one cloudy summer night, I walked the five miles to Pressfield's house from my place in Belford and began planning my makeshift assault. There was no Comanche moon, and the place was both dark and silent. I found a couple of fallen tree limbs and placed them across the road to force the cop to stop his car and remove the obstruction. My years in the army had taught me a few things about tactics in the field. The obstruction didn't seem that unnatural; it looked like the limbs had been knocked down by the wind. When he got out, I'd have an opportunity to see if there was anyone with him or not. From my vantage point behind a tree about 30 feet away, where I waited in the shadows, it would also be easy enough to see if he was being followed by a friend in another vehicle.\n\nAs I sat in the darkness, I thought about a book I had read only a few weeks earlier, _Beyond Good and Evil_ , by Friedrich Nietzsche: __ \"One has to test oneself to see that one is destined for independence and command\u2014and do it at the right time. One should not dodge one's tests, though they may be the most dangerous game one could play and are tests that are taken in the end before no witness or judge but ourselves.\"\n\nThere was a part of me that was looking for an excuse not to assault Pressfield. The whole event was out of character for me, and I wondered time and again if I should just call the whole thing off and walk back home. But Nietzsche's words kept echoing in my head. It was as if Nietzsche was telling me that this was one of life's tests.\n\nBy 12:30, there was no sign of Pressfield, and I settled in\u2014it was going to be a while. Then, at about 2:20 a.m., the Camaro's round headlights appeared in the distance. There was no indication of anyone following. I was sweating bullets. It was highly likely that Pressfield had spent the last couple of hours drinking, which meant that he'd be half in the bag and likely quite tired, too. Alcohol is not your friend when speed and split-second thinking are needed.\n\nI was wearing a long-sleeved dark sweatshirt and blue jeans. I wore a rubber mask\u2014the face of a wizened and deformed bald old man\u2014and black leather driving gloves. I carried two other things with me: a small flashlight and a roll of quarters. I had no real \"weapons\" with me that night\u2014no knife and no gun. I wanted this to be a good old-fashioned beating and something he'd remember. For me, it was all about personal honor and justice.\n\nPressfield slowed the car as soon as the headlights picked up the branches blocking the road. I could see the reflection of the car's red brake lights coming on. He flicked on the high beams and slowed to a stop about six or eight feet from the obstruction. I heard the door pop open and watched as the overhead light inside the vehicle came on. There was only one person in the car: my intended target.\n\nHe got out slowly, wearing a white T-shirt and his uniform pants\u2014the outfit that cops generally wore when drinking publicly after a shift. The uniform shirt cannot be worn off duty. He sighed loudly and muttered a few curses as he walked toward the tree limbs.\n\nI immediately left my hiding spot and took several quick strides toward him. I grabbed the roll of quarters out of my pants pocket and held it tightly in the palm of my right hand. The weight of the coins would make my punch even more powerful. Next, I pulled the flashlight from my sweatshirt, flicked it on and held it so that it would illuminate the mask from below and make me appear even more threatening. Even the topography worked in my favor: the field by the edge of the rutted road was six or eight inches higher than the dirt tracks, forcing Pressfield to look up at me.\n\nThe cop saw me the instant I turned the flashlight on, but he seemed unable to move or otherwise react, at least for a second or two. I could hear his breathing become labored. He inhaled and exhaled in fits and starts. Slowly his eyes rose to meet mine, and he began to shout\u2014not for help but out of fear. James the rat realized that he was alone and would have no choice but to fend for himself. His house, his refuge, was barely a thousand feet away. But it didn't make any difference how far it was, because there was no way he could make it there. Oddly, he made no effort to reach for his gun.\n\nWith one more stride, I closed the distance and punched Pressfield in the nose. I could feel the soft cartilage break from the blow, made heavier by the roll of quarters, and watched as he fell back and landed on his ass.\n\nI immediately straddled him and struck him time and again in the area around his left eye. I wanted him to be flying his \"look, world, I got the shit kicked out of me\" flag for an extended period.\n\nPressfield started blubbering like some preschool child who'd just been bitten by a pit viper. His pathetic demeanor only fueled my adrenaline and made the blows come harder and faster.\n\nHe was broken, both mentally and physically.\n\nWith my boot across his throat, I pulled Pressfield's off-duty .38-caliber revolver from his waistband and threw it into the darkened, overgrown field. I made sure he could see the area where I'd tossed his gun so that he wouldn't be able to claim it was stolen. Then I reached inside the Camaro to shut the engine off, removed the keys and tossed them into the field.\n\nI gave Pressfield a kick in the balls with my black engineer boot, picked up the flashlight that I'd dropped a few feet away, and walked into the dark night. I stopped by the creek at Poricy Park to toss the flashlight into the black water. I held on to my $10 worth of quarters, intent on using them over the next few days. Money was money.\n\nI have little doubt that Pressfield claimed to his fellow officers and anyone else who would listen to him that he'd been sucker punched and beaten by a gang of 10 or more men. Being such a tough cop, he likely claimed that some of his former arrestees were possible suspects.\n\nI learned from Grant that he was briefly questioned about the assault, but he literally knew nothing about it and the cops had no evidence of any sort. All they had to go by was the partial description from Pressfield and maybe some boot prints left in the soil\u2014but there was nothing else, and no apparent motive.\n\nI have long believed that you cannot reveal what you don't know, and so I never told Grant what I did.\n\nBig tough James Pressfield quit his job with the Middletown Police Department shortly after the beating. Years later, after I joined the very same police department, I heard from some of the guys that Pressfield had never seemed to recover from the savage beating he'd taken that night from a cowardly mob of young thugs. It seems Pressfield couldn't find the light at the end of the tunnel. Too bad. If he does find it someday, I hope it's a train.\n\n### CHAPTER FOURTEEN\n\n## WHISKEY JOE & THE BREED\n\nA few months later, I started renting a bungalow with a former army buddy, Steve Comer, in the blue-collar community of Keansburg. The 'Burg offered great water views north toward Manhattan, a cheap little amusement park that was popular with summer tourists, and not much else. Many houses there were not much more than summer bungalows that had been converted into year-round homes, and more than a few were in dire need of maintenance. Old cars and the occasional motorcycle sat outside them. Our place was down by the water, in a neighborhood with tiny yards.\n\nComer and I were hanging at a local bar one night in the late fall of 1976 when we saw \"Whiskey Joe,\" a member of the Breed Motorcycle Club, sitting at the bar, drinking\u2014no surprise\u2014straight whiskey. Steve had been \"rehabilitated\" of his once-violent nature during a brief stint in military prison following a fight. After we shared a few drinks, he suggested that we ask Whiskey Joe about riding with his outlaw club, which had been formed in Asbury Park in 1965 and was at one time among the strongest and most feared biker gangs in the Northeast.\n\nWhiskey, who had long, thick black hair combed straight back and a thick black beard that covered much of his face, was easy to talk to. He was wearing typical biker clothes\u2014blue jeans, a T-shirt and engineer boots. After some casual banter, I asked him if he and the Breed were looking for more riders. He chuckled and said yes. Over a few more drinks, Steve and I agreed to pick up Whiskey in our car, or \"cage,\" and make the half-hour drive up to a bar in Perth Amboy to meet some of the guys.\n\nThe Breed had a well-deserved reputation as a nasty bunch, aligned with the Hells Angels. The club colors\u2014the jackets bearing the club's emblems\u2014displayed a red-and-white American flag with a circle of stars in the area where the blue field and 50 stars would normally be. The Breed was about as patriotic as Sherman's burning down of Atlanta and Columbia was a demonstration of zealous patriotic duty. They were a bona fide one-percent outlaw gang, and they made no effort to conceal that fact in any manner.\n\nMotorcycle clubs in the U.S. are considered \"outlaw\" clubs when they aren't sanctioned by the American Motorcyclist Association, or AMA, and don't adhere to the association's rules. Rather, outlaw clubs have their own set of bylaws that provides the foundation of the outlaw biker culture. Story has it that at some point the AMA said that 99 percent of all motorcyclists are law-abiding citizens. That gave rise to the notion of \"one-percenters,\" the outlaws who didn't follow the rules.\n\nThe one-percent patch, typically sewn onto the sleeveless jacket worn by members of outlaw clubs, is one to be taken seriously. Only a bona fide outlaw biker would dare display it. It is earned, not bought. One-percenters play the game for keeps.\n\nI cringe these days when I see movies and TV shows depicting outlaw bikers as buffoons, latent queens, cretins or swollen-bellied drunks who can't get out of their own way. Bikers may lack book smarts, but they are street-savvy and fearless. Day in and day out, they wear their Breed or Pagan colors, billboards displaying their membership to all they come into contact with. Making that bold statement, and walking the line on it, makes for a cunning and oftentimes vicious category of being. To dismiss any bona fide outlaw biker as pathetic loser or mental lightweight is a dangerous underestimation.\n\nFlying the colors is a gigantic \"fuck you\" to all citizens and every cop. The outlaw may individually like some citizens and even certain cops. But for the rest of the non-outlaw world and most non-aligned clubs, the insignia, be it a winged death's head (Hells Angels), a Fire God (Pagans), a skull with crossed pistons (Outlaws) or a sombrero-wearing gunslinger (Bandidos) is a massive and heartfelt \"go fuck yourself.\"\n\nMost outlaw bikers see themselves as modern versions of the 19th-century mountain man\u2014dangerous, tougher-than-life anachronisms, forced to put up with modern laws that need not apply to them. They live life on their own terms. They have no need for government, police or other societal norms. They need only their bikes, brothers, women and the open road. As to women, the ditty \"My bike's number one, you're number two. Don't call me, I'll call you\" is roundly applauded.\n\nAnyone foolish enough to take on a member of any outlaw club will find the club's wrath coming down on them. Club members stand for each other unconditionally. A club member is a member for life, and never forgotten or unfairly dismissed. They'll tell you that they would rot in jail before ratting to the Man about any club business or other club member. Why, then, would a young guy from Middletown be interested in joining the Breed? For me, joining an outlaw club was the ultimate act of defiance. Like Thomas Carlyle. Grim Fire-Eyed Defiance.\n\nI had neither grievance with nor hatred for any specific entity or person. The circumstances of my life had left me with an overwhelming emotion: defiance. And the bikers were its true outward essence. The average American male who pays his taxes and plays the game, follows the rules and plays it safe at all times, seeking security at every turn, knows this in his heart: _What I wouldn't give_ , he thinks, _for one day telling everyone that I feel like telling it to: \"FUCK YOU._ _What I wouldn't give to have one day when I can grab that woman who is batting her eyelashes at me, throw her down on the floor and have a wild pile-driver fuck. What I wouldn't give for one day with the wind in my face, surrounded by my comrades in arms, taking what we want and doing what we want, as our just due._\n\nThat was how the Pagans lived life. Fuck the cops, tell your woman\u2014your \"bitch,\" as they would say\u2014to shut the fuck up, and drink, drug and fight as you see fit. No guilt, no remorse, just outright defiance. Well, like the Jamaicans say: everyone want go Heaven, nobody want die.\n\nAll outlaw clubs have a system allowing \"hang-arounds,\" guys who tag along with gang members with an eye toward eventually getting into the club. They are generally treated respectfully if they act properly. Each hang-around has to be sponsored by a bona fide club member, who is responsible for him. If the hang-around doesn't piss people off, he's allowed to become a \"prospect,\" the next step toward becoming an actual member. Prospects are like recruits in the military: they go through a training period before being accepted. Military recruits and biker gang prospects are both treated like shit\u2014ordered around and humiliated on a regular basis. But that's where the similarity ends. One is training to be a member of the legions defending the U.S. Constitution. The other is training to be a cutthroat member of the legions of the damned.\n\nIf you are a prospect for a bona fide outlaw motorcycle club, you're obligated to follow any order given to you by a superior\u2014no matter what. I knew how to take orders from my time in the army. I had tough-guy killers like Sergeants Koncha, Mallard, Jackson and others who gave me orders. Those men earned the right to issue orders in the crucible of battle. I was honored to do what I was told by those men, who had survived combat and come back whole to show others how to do the same. But I had a problem being pushed around by someone whose greatest accomplishment in life was knowing how to use a socket wrench\u2014at best. That seemed dishonorable to me, and I wasn't willing to do it. If I was going to get into a motorcycle club, it would be on my terms.\n\nSteve, Whiskey and I drove in my cage to Perth Amboy, a blue-collar city with a feeling of rot. It was bitterly cold outside when we arrived at a workingman's bar, the type where there's a hearty crowd even at 6 a.m., enjoying that liquid breakfast of champions, a shot of Fleischmann's rye whiskey with a beer back.\n\nWith Whiskey leading the way, Steve and I met a couple of guys from the Breed and heard of another who was on the way. All three of them went by their nicknames\u2014\"Grip,\" \"Crimes\" and \"Cisco.\"\n\nI would come to find out that Grip earned his nickname because, after he drank enough wine, there was absolutely no crime he would not commit; he would lose his \"grip.\" The guy had a pinched face and a swarthy complexion and seemed perpetually dyspeptic. If I had a daughter, I would chain her up rather than let her spend time in this guy's company. Crimes had one leg missing and was quite adept at moving with a prosthetic. The story was that he'd lost the leg in some kind of motorcycle accident. But the perpetual angry look on his face, coupled with his demeanor, made me wonder if he'd eaten the missing appendage. Cisco would have cast perfectly for a prison drama in need of Aryan Brotherhood stand-ins. Whiskey was the life of the party. His speed-and-whiskey-induced charm kept the action rolling.\n\nA loud crashing sound came from the bar's front door. Enter \"Wild Billy,\" who chose to smash the door open with a kick rather than use the knob. Billy was a snazzy dresser\u2014bare-chested, his black leather jacket open so all could admire his triple-canopy chest hair. The guy seemed pissed off about something. But Whiskey assured me that Billy was always pissed off because he worked on a garbage truck\u2014and hated it.\n\nThe six of us grabbed a table and started doing some drinking together. Since Steve and I could not be trusted with any information about club business, the banter was light. Whiskey even got some laughs from the group. This was not the kind of discussion where you gave your opinion on the latest popular books or offered insightful commentary on political issues. Steve and I kept a low profile, nodded when appropriate and answered the few questions posed to us truthfully. Getting caught in a lie with any once-percenter was not a smart thing to do.\n\nI was trying to get the guys to drink to the point where things would get interesting. They, in turn, were looking for signs of whether we had the \"chops\" to be part of the Breed. They were also suspicious that we might be Pagans trying to infiltrate their group. If that had been the case, we would have been risking serious bloodshed\u2014or death. There was reason to believe that we could be Pagans, because Keansburg, where Steve and I lived, was considered Pagan turf.\n\n\"Zorro,\" a smaller and slightly darker-complexioned version of Father Christmas, showed up sometime later. He immediately referred to Steve and me as Pagans\u2014even though we'd never even met a Pagan\u2014and never let up with shitty comments about it. Whiskey thought he was awesome. I wanted to punch him in the throat.\n\nThe evening ended without incident, and Whiskey Joe assured Steve and me that it was okay for us to hang around with the other guys in the club. He told us to catch up with him the following Friday at the same place. Because of the constant turf warfare between the Breed and the Pagans, members of both clubs were very careful about where and when they got together.\n\nThat following Friday, Whiskey told us that we'd be going on a long ride upstate to Troy, New York, which was frigidly cold. I had the misfortune of drawing Crimes as my cage partner for the trip. He did little more than grunt at any comment or attempt at conversation, and I spent hours asking myself what I was doing with a member of the Breed. Still, some strange force seemed to be pulling me deeper into the outlaw lifestyle. It was as if I needed to work some kind of risky high-wire act.\n\nOur first stop in Troy was a motorcycle show, where we hooked up with some of our new buddies, including Whiskey, Grip and Cisco. Though no one was wearing colors or otherwise identifying themselves, it seemed clear that there were a bunch of other members of the Breed at the event. It was easy to identify who the heavies were\u2014and it was also obvious that there was a great deal of sizing up and glaring taking place between certain subgroups. The tension was thick. Still, the cops seemed not at all intimidated. We were only at the show briefly before being commanded to head to a local nightclub by one of the Breed's leaders\u2014a soft-spoken, muscular guy who stood six foot 10.\n\nThe nightclub was upscale and vast, with several bars, loud live music, a serious crowd, including lots of well-dressed women, and plenty of dancing. It also had some king-sized bouncers working at the entrance who said nothing and allowed all the Breed members to go inside without objection. The Breed leader, \"the Giant,\" had donned his colors, as had all the other members. Steve and I were the only hangers-on there.\n\nThe Giant towered next to me at the bar. I found him to be an interesting drinking companion. There was probably not enough whiskey in Texas to get him drunk, but he gave it his all anyway. The cost for all this booze didn't seem to be an issue for the Breed leader or any of the other guys. Somehow the bartenders got very forgetful about collecting what we owed.\n\nNone of the guys from the Breed were willing to do any dancing\u2014despite the sexy chicks on the dance floor. Bikers don't dance. Pussies dance, jerk-offs dance, but not real bikers.\n\nAfter more than a few drinks, the Giant explained that he had to start his \"dime\" soon\u2014a 10-year jail sentence\u2014and so drinking good booze, and lots of it, was a good way to spend some of the free time he had left. As he drank his whiskey, the Giant explained that the sentence stemmed from a guilty verdict in a rape case, and that doing the dime was actually not so bad an outcome. It was all part of doing business, and if you couldn't handle it, you shouldn't play at that level.\n\nWhile I was busy chatting with the Giant, I couldn't help but notice Crimes playing a bizarre game: calling himself \"the Kissing Bandit,\" he kissed and groped only those women at the bar who had dates with them\u2014with impunity. He had strategically placed himself near the Giant and another member of the Breed, \"Ape.\" Weighing well in excess of 350 pounds, Ape was perhaps the most revolting person that I've ever seen\u2014grossly fat, with long, unkempt hair and beard and clothing to match. He was a mammoth stinking asshole. But with the Giant and Ape nearby, none of the men at the bar dared to protect their dates from Crimes. Under Ape's amused countenance, a lot of women fell victim to the kissing bandit, their dates sheepishly looking away.\n\nHoping to curb some of Crimes's moves, I asked the Giant what he thought about his buddy's antics. The Giant just sadly shook his head and said, \"It ain't my way of doing business, but Crimes has had my back more than once. I would kill a motherfucker if they put their hands on my old lady like he's doing. But as you can see, they don't seem too concerned, now, do they?\"\n\nIn the wee hours of the morning, the Giant decided he was done and headed out. Crimes decided that the rest of us should head over to Ape's house to continue the evening's festivities. On the way there, Crimes got so excited about his kissing bandit exploits that he rolled the car window down and began firing his pistol wildly. It didn't make a damned bit of difference to him where the bullets landed, so long as he didn't hit anyone from the Breed. With his drunken demeanor, it was highly unlikely that he was actually going to hit anyone or anything.\n\nApe's sprawling old house was spacious enough for about 14 of us in all, including 10 Breed members, a couple of women the guys had picked up at the bar, and Steve and me. Crank (crystalized methamphetamine) and beer were plentiful, and the conversation was mostly about the savage beatings that Breed members, including Ape, claimed to have laid on Pagans. Thankfully, Zorro wasn't there, so Steve and I didn't have to defend ourselves against claims of being undercover Pagans.\n\nIt wasn't long before Ape brought out a film projector and showed the most disgusting bestiality films that I've ever seen. He howled with laughter, even seeing to it that the women there watched as well. His film \"collection\" seemed to be his pride and joy.\n\nIf there was a way to do it, I would have volunteered for electroshock treatments to rid my mind of the images I saw at Ape's place.\n\nAfter returning from the frozen north, Steve and I continued to spend occasional evenings with Whiskey Joe, whom we both truly liked, and some of the others, most notably Grip and Cisco. The winter was the time for Northeastern bikers to dismantle, repaint and repair their choppers.\n\n### CHAPTER FIFTEEN\n\n## ENTERING THE LITTLE BIGHORN\n\nMost guys with Harleys tend to put them away for the winter under a cover in their garage. For Steve and me, things were different. Our Harleys were the most valuable and important possessions we owned\u2014and we kept them in the living room of our bungalow year-round. That was where we cleaned them and did basic maintenance. Motorcycle parts were strewn all over the living room floor. It wasn't like we were inviting the guys over to have a Super Bowl party anyway.\n\nThat winter, Steve needed to have some serious work done on the front end of his dark-blue Shovelhead Harley, something that the two of us couldn't pull off in our living room. Steve told Cisco that he'd put a longer front fork on the bike and that he needed someone to adjust the rake on the front end to keep the bike properly balanced, and Cisco agreed to take care of it.\n\nWhat we hadn't expected was Cisco's decision to break into our place to retrieve the part for repair. He smashed a window by the front door, reached in and opened the door. From what we could tell, he left only with the bike's front end, but it was kind of hard to tell if anything else was missing. Steve and I were pissed, and we knew that Cisco was making a statement\u2014that he was dominant, the alpha dog.\n\nNeither of us was intimidated by this guy, and we wanted to make sure he got that message, no matter whether we were hang-arounds or not. I am sure that Cisco was rarely challenged by the people who crossed his path. He was tall, muscular, never smiled and looked like a hard-core outlaw. But Steve and I had seen this act before, and we weren't going to stand still for someone breaking into our place.\n\nTwo days later, Steve and I were sitting in my cage with Cisco and Whiskey Joe, and Steve decided the time was right to bring up the break-in.\n\n\"This is fucking bullshit,\" Steve said. \"I asked for help with my front end, but this is my house.\"\n\n\"I would kill the motherfucker who breaks into my house,\" I said. \"I got no problem with Cisco coming in anytime, but fuck breaking in. What the fuck?\"\n\nBoth Steve and I spoke with more bravado than we felt. But we had no choice. We knew that Cisco would keep coming back for more if we didn't put an end to this now.\n\n\"I couldn't give a fuck to what some fucking hang-around thinks,\" Cisco said. \"These fucks ain't wearing a patch. Whiskey, I am seriously losing patience with this shit.\"\n\nSteve and I looked at each other but said nothing.\n\n\"Everybody calm the fuck down,\" Whiskey Joe said, laughing. \"Cisco, you got to understand these cats are going from a triple-A club to the big leagues overnight. You guys better learn how to deal with patch holders right quick. This shit is real. It's not a fucking game. Figure it the fuck out.\"\n\nBefore we broke up that day, we agreed to meet at Whiskey's place and get together with \"Crazy Horse\" and the guys on Staten Island\u2014very solid Breed territory that Crazy Horse ran with an iron fist. Afterwards, Steve and I headed back to our bungalow, where we had cardboard covering the broken window and a nice chill breeze blowing through the place.\n\nI had a vague idea of what Crazy Horse was like, and it wasn't pleasant. Even the Giant and Ape shook their heads in serious respect for his violent and tormented state. \"That Crazy Horse is a sick fuck, but he takes care of business,\" the Giant said that night in Troy. \"You don't have to ever clean up after him.\"\n\nThe original Crazy Horse was a brilliant military leader of the Sioux Indian Nation. Given to trances and prophetic omens, he was both a shaman and a gifted killer feared for his excellence in combat. He was a believer in the spirit Wovoka, who gave the Sioux Nation the ghost dance. He was a serious problem for General George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Little Big Horn. The Crazy Horse I met on Staten Island was a brutal and psychotic megalomaniac\u2014and far worse in real life than I had imagined in my pre-meeting nightmares. He shared only a name with the leader of the Sioux Nation.\n\nWe drove to Staten Island in two separate cages. Steve drove my car, with me riding shotgun and Whiskey stretched out in the back seat. We followed a car with Crimes, Cisco and Grip inside. When we were close to the Staten Island nightclub, Crimes pulled over to the curb and Steve pulled in right behind him. Steve and I wondered why we were stopping, but Whiskey told us to just sit tight.\n\nSteve and I watched as Crimes and Cisco got out of the car, walked across the street and confronted a group of about six men and women who'd been hanging out chatting. Crimes and Cisco pulled out handguns, and we could see them collecting belongings from each member of the group. Then they slowly sauntered back to our cars as the group watched them in stunned silence.\n\nCisco headed over to us and popped his head in through the open back window, looking at Whiskey. \"We just took them off for their drugs and money,\" he said calmly, handing Whiskey a wad of cash and a small plastic bag of marijuana.\n\nWhiskey stuffed the cash in his pocket and reached forward to jam the weed into the pocket of my black leather jacket. \"Hold on to this shit,\" he said.\n\nCisco and Crimes headed back to their cage and we drove to the nightclub. There were several places on the same block, so we had our choice of where to party. A group of men and women, all wearing Breed colors, were standing outside one of them.\n\nCrazy Horse stood about six feet tall, with a wiry build and wavy black hair that hung to the middle of his back, and the colors he wore were extremely faded\u2014an obvious sign of being with the Breed for many years. His flowing, long hair reminded me of some historic image of an American Indian on horseback\u2014only this guy was not the sort of person you want to smoke a peace pipe with. He looked at Steve and me as if we were pieces of shit, but said nothing to us. His \"bitch\" just sneered at us.\n\nSteve and I shared a look as we asked ourselves what we were doing here in the company of these people, and wondered if any of the six people who'd just been ripped off by Cisco and Crimes had called the police. Steve whispered that he didn't think anyone in the group had taken down my license plate number. Both of us had visions of a lengthy stay at Rikers Island. Now if we could just leave and celebrate away from this plague of locusts that we had stupidly decided to party with.\n\nCrazy Horse turned around and headed toward the workingman's club nearest to us, his woman in tow. The bouncers stood aside and made no attempt to collect the cover charge from anyone in our group. All the upstanding citizens behind us had no choice but to pay. We followed Crazy to the bar, where he pushed people aside and swept their glasses and bottles to the floor with a sweep of his arm. This was our territory now.\n\n\"Me and my fucking crew need beers,\" Crazy announced. \"Give them Bud, in bottles, not glasses. Give me that whiskey and a bunch of shot glasses, too.\"\n\nThe bartender did exactly as he was told and didn't ask for a dime.\n\n\"Get me a fucking tire iron, hang-arounds,\" he said. \"And make it fucking quick.\"\n\nCrazy fired one of the shot glasses at the lights over the pool table to emphasize that he wanted the tire iron immediately. Broken shards dropped onto the table as stunned patrons backed away but said nothing. The bouncers, too, were silent.\n\n\"What kind of tire iron do you want?\" I asked sarcastically. My comment was not well received, and I decided that I would be wise to find a tire iron promptly. Steve and I made our way quickly toward the door. Behind us, we could hear Crazy Horse shouting something about \"fucking hang-arounds.\"\n\n\"Fuck, Steve, maybe we should just drive away,\" I said to my buddy once we were outside. \"That motherfucker is stone crazy, and he is going to bring all manner of trouble down on our asses.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but these fucks will kill us for sure if we run off,\" Steve said. \"We got to show some balls here.\"\n\nI knew Steve was right. The Breed would have come after us in force if we had fled.\n\n\"I am not gonna show them nothing like fear,\" I replied. \"If we have to go down, let's go looking that motherfucker in the eyes.\"\n\n\"If we make the night, you want out of this shit?\" Steve asked.\n\n\"Fucking right. Best get out early before we get one goddamn inch deeper.\"\n\nThe two of us shook hands and popped open the trunk to my car to look for a tire iron. I thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that I left a tire iron in the trunk. If Jesus knew what that tire iron was for, he would no doubt take it up with me later, assuming that I got to Heaven one day. I was pretty sure I wasn't in any danger of bumping into Crazy Horse there.\n\nSteve snuck the tire iron past the bouncer and presented it to His Majesty, who was screaming at people, telling them not to leave the bar, because the party had just started. Whiskey Joe and the other members of the Breed seemed not to care about his shouts. They'd evidently seen this show more than once before. But dozens of bar patrons seemed unsure what to do; they stood quietly and tried to avoid body or eye contact with anyone wearing colors.\n\nCrazy took the tire iron and smashed out what was left of the lights above the pool table. Then he used it to smash open the change reservoir from the inside of the pool table. Bits and pieces of the table went flying as the guy continued to hammer at it with the tire iron while screaming some nonsense at the crowd. His woman and a couple of the other chicks that were hanging with us pocketed the coins. No one seemed to see anything, and the formidable-looking bouncers were nowhere to be found.\n\n\"Let's get the fuck out of this dump,\" Crazy Horse suddenly announced. \"We gotta take this party to the usual spot.\"\n\nI guess even Crazy Horse felt a little awkward about sticking around in the place he'd just ripped off\u2014not to mention destroying both the expensive pool table and the light fixture that once hung above it. All of us headed out to our cages. Just as the three of us were about to get back into my car, I saw a bunch of New York Police Department officers approaching us. Two of them headed straight for Crazy Horse\u2014one holding a pair of handcuffs.\n\nOne cop grabbed Crazy Horse by the arm and shoved him face-first onto the trunk of a nearby police vehicle. Other cops came in close and took multiple shots at his body. His woman was tossed to the ground as another officer put a knee on her back and reached for an arm. Crazy Horse laughed hysterically, shouting to Whiskey that the cops were arresting him on a warrant for some prior scuffle with the law.\n\nThe cop closest to me slammed the car door on my leg as I was trying to get in. My leg hurt like hell, and I bent down to rub it. At the same time, I reached into my jacket pocket, pulled out the bag of marijuana and tossed it under the car. I had almost forgotten about the drugs, with the Wild West show going on around me.\n\nThe cops demanded ID from all of us, which we provided. All of us, even Whiskey, addressed them as \"Officer\" and were firmly polite.\n\n\"I guess you didn't see my leg, no problem,\" I said to the cop who'd slammed the door on me. \"I just got out of the army. Shit happens in jobs like this. We're clean, if you want to check.\"\n\nThe officer took a good, long look at my military ID card. It seemed just enough to keep him from getting real shitty with me and seeing what would shake out. I had no idea that I'd be the one playing tough cop in just a few short years.\n\nNo one had spotted the bag of grass I'd tossed under the car, and I figured I was good.\n\nThe cops told Steve, Whiskey and me to get the fuck out of Staten Island right fucking now.\n\nWhiskey insisted on taking the wheel this time. He was determined to find the precinct that the cops would take Crazy Horse to. Fortunately, he had plenty of cash to bail out our fearless leader, thanks to the armed robbery the guys had pulled off just a few hours earlier. Foot to the floor, Whiskey blasted through five red lights in a row. We actually beat the cops back to the precinct. I suspect that the cops spent a little extra time with Crazy Horse outside the bar, adjusting their captive's attitude.\n\nMuch to our relief, Whiskey told Steve and me to head back to New Jersey, and he would handle springing the boss. \"We'll catch up this week and get you guys straightened out, one way or the other,\" he said.\n\nAs we headed west over the Outerbridge Crossing, Steve and I contemplated how much more time we could stand hanging with the guys from the Breed.\n\n\"We've got to get my front end back and then tell Whiskey this shit ain't working for us,\" Steve said. \"I am not reliving this shit again. No fucking way. We'll be doing time before the summer is out.\"\n\n\"Whiskey ain't going to take this well,\" I replied. \"Cisco will go off the wall\u2014and Grip, Zorro, Wild Billy. Shit. We will make some serious enemies, man, if we walk.\"\n\n\"If?\" Steve asked.\n\n\"When,\" I replied.\n\nThe two of us sat silently for a while, contemplating our immediate future.\n\n\"You know what, man? We did not survive that shit overseas to get pushed around in the world,\" I said. \"We did not expect this shit, and fuck all these motherfuckers. If Whiskey don't see it, fuck him, too. I don't remember him explaining shit about being slaves to these fucks. I would be much happier dead than prospecting for Crazy Horse.\"\n\n\"Looking at it that way, yeah, man, there is no way. None,\" Steve said.\n\n### CHAPTER SIXTEEN\n\n## GOOD EVENING, MR. MOLOTOV\n\n\"Whiskey,\" I said, \"this shit is over for Steve and me. Over, and no chance of it turning around. He needs the front end of his bike, and we part ways. No bad blood, but this ain't for me and him.\"\n\n\"I need my parts back, man,\" Steve echoed. \"I got the money, but I'm with Chuck. No way I'm staying with this. No fucking way at all.\"\n\nSteve and I had set up a meet with Whiskey Joe at the Globe Bar on East Front Street in Red Bank, with the goal of making a graceful\u2014and healthy\u2014exit from the Breed. At the time, the Globe Bar was a classic gin mill where the most popular order was a shot with a beer back. The meeting took place early one evening in March, right before the start of the riding season, and the three of us were sitting at the big rectangular bar, with a pool table behind us. Steve and I were both drinking beer, and Whiskey was drinking his usual\u2014whiskey, straight.\n\nWhiskey had no immediate response for us but instead just sat there and slowly had a couple of shots.\n\n\"Can't handle it, huh,\" he finally said, leaning forward and resting his elbows on the bar.\n\n\"Yeah, can't handle it. Right, Whiskey. We just can't hack it,\" I said, with a slight edge. I thought that if I showed weakness at any point with any members of the Breed, they would seize on it like a squad of jackals.\n\n\"What's the problem, nobody served you coffee yet?\" Whiskey said.\n\nSteve and I knew we were taking a risk by even raising the idea of leaving the motorcycle club. We'd observed some pretty serious criminal acts, and knew many members of the Breed\u2014and where they lived and got together for meetings. It was no secret that various police agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, wanted to know more about the club's members.\n\nGuys in the Breed wore colors at sporadic times, usually when they were together and rolling as a pack. They took security very seriously and took pains to make sure they weren't followed when going to someone's house or apartment. We routinely entered and exited buildings through alleyways and basements to throw off any undercovers who might be trying to follow us. At first, I thought that members of the Breed were just playing some kind of game on Steve and me. But after a while I realized that this was cold, hard reality and absolutely not a game.\n\nLeaving the Breed wasn't going to be a game, either. We knew that Whiskey Joe would take some real heat for bringing in two hang-arounds who quit under suspicious circumstances. But leaving wasn't up for discussion. Steve and I were determined to get out, no matter what the consequences.\n\nWhiskey and I glared at each other but said nothing.\n\n\"We got no problem with anyone in your club,\" Steve said. \"It's all the way cool there. We don't feel like we fit in. We don't know jack shit about anything anyway. And we sure as shit ain't giving the fucking Man anything. We just want to cut it clean.\"\n\nWhiskey had another shot and brooded for a while. I sensed what I always did about him: he was a hard man, smarter than he appeared. A real no-bullshit tough guy. And we'd put him on the spot. He'd vouched for us, and now were we betraying that trust by wanting to leave. He was pissed off and planning out his next move.\n\nI don't think he thought we'd \"pussied out.\" But he would be stung by the club for bringing us in. Finally, he made his play.\n\n\"Then one of you guys got to meet Front End John up north. You can't just kiss us goodbye. Negotiate with him. Tell him you can't handle it, or whatever the fuck you want to say. But somebody got to show, somebody's gotta explain. I ain't doing it for you,\" Whiskey said. \"I got my own shit to explain 'bout this fucking bullshit.\"\n\nSteve caught my eye and asked me to go for a quick walk with him. We headed back toward the men's room.\n\n\"I know you, you fuck,\" Steve said, standing inches from me, his finger in my face. \"You're gonna go up there and take care of this shit with Front End John, right? You're thinkin' that, right?\"\n\n\"You're reading my mind,\" I said. \"I ain't afraid of these cocksuckers, and only one person needs to go. You got this girlfriend you're all in love with, and I really don't give a fuck about anything. Yeah, let me put this shit to rest.\"\n\n\"Did you ever stop and think how fucking stupid you are?\" Steve asked.\n\n\"No, tell me how the fuck stupid I am.\"\n\n\"Front End John is the front end of a car,\" Steve said emphatically. \"You go meet these fucks and you are going to have an accident with all the right witnesses. You will meet a Front End. Just not a human one.\"\n\nSteve and I said nothing further and walked back to our bar stools. I had learned the hard way how to deal with danger in life. There is but one way: attack danger like a good infielder plays a ground ball. You go after it. You don't back up and let it play you. Whiskey had no problem with my defiant attitude. He was a tough infielder as well.\n\n\"No fucking meeting, no fucking negotiations,\" I told him. \"You owe Steve his front end. Give it back. We forget this ever even started.\"\n\nWhiskey leaned forward and stared at me. I could smell the booze on his breath.\n\n\"You bought yourself a real problem,\" Whiskey said. \"No walking away from this one, no fucking way. Give me a call. You know, so you can pay for your front end. Season's starting. You can't ride without half the bike.\"\n\nWhiskey threw down some money on the bar and stood to leave.\n\n\"I got the bar bill,\" I said. \"Don't look so sad. We're going to be getting together real soon.\"\n\nA few days later, Steve called and told me that he'd tried and failed to get his front end back. He described how he'd called Whiskey's house and first gotten the guy's wife on the phone. She verbally abused him for a while before handing the phone to Whiskey, who cranked up the volume and made it clear that there was no chance of Steve ever getting the part back, no matter what he did.\n\nSteve was furious, in part because we were getting close to riding season and he really wanted to get his Shovelhead out of our living room and back on the road. The plan that the two of us hatched over the phone wouldn't have won any awards from army tacticians. Basically, it was a frontal assault that would be mounted by Steve and me and our buddy \"Lesh,\" who owned an auto repair shop in town. We were going to drive up in front of Whiskey's modest two-story house on West Street in Red Bank, hit the car horn until someone came out and demand that we be given the front end back. If that didn't work, we were going to toss a Molotov cocktail onto Whiskey's front porch. What better way to get some action?\n\nThere were some challenges with the plan. We had no idea if Whiskey would be home. Would other people be there? Would anyone be armed? How were we going to get away, given that the house was in the middle of town and just a couple of blocks from the busy commercial areas around Riverside Avenue and West Front Street? Was Steve's front end even in the house? And there was one other issue: the Red Bank Police Department was two blocks away, on Monmouth Street. You could walk from police headquarters to Whiskey's house in four minutes.\n\nShortly after nightfall, Steve, Lesh and I hit the road, heading into Red Bank in Lesh's car to do some reconnaissance. We'd fortified ourselves before the trip with a liberal dose of alcohol. The lights were on in Whiskey's house, and there were a couple of cars parked out front. Otherwise, things looked quiet, so we decided to go ahead with our plan. We went back to Lesh's place and swapped cars, using Steve's for this trip. Lesh, who was psyched to be part of some real action in town and didn't worry about consequences, hopped in the back seat, holding a Molotov cocktail and a lighter.\n\nI pulled the car right up in front of Whiskey's house and hit the horn. Steve yelled for Whiskey to come out. Instead, Whiskey's wife came out.\n\n\"Go fuck yourselves,\" she yelled from the porch of the wood-frame house, which was set back about 20 feet from the road. She gave Steve the finger to punctuate her statement.\n\nLesh took her response as a firm no and immediately lobbed the firebomb onto the porch, where it exploded in flames and set the porch on fire. Whiskey's wife beat a hasty retreat inside.\n\nThe flames started to spread, and the roof over the porch also caught fire. I hit the gas and we sped off into the night.\n\nBack at Lesh's place, we switched cars again. Steve, Lesh and I returned to Whiskey's place in my cage to see what was going on. I was behind the wheel, and Steve was riding shotgun\u2014literally carrying a loaded shotgun that was pointed out the passenger-side window of the car as we drove back into town at around 8:30.\n\nWe found Whiskey and a bunch of his buddies standing outside the house, working to put out the fire. Some other members of the Breed were there, too.\n\nSmall-arms fire rang out as I drove past. We ducked and sped away\u2014but not before the car was struck by several bullets.\n\nSome perverse voice told me to pull a K-turn on Wall Street and make one last pass in front of Whiskey's place. I was stunned to see my nemesis walking across the street alone\u2014and wondered if he'd been using the pay phone at the Brothers Tavern. I'd seen him do that before as a way of ensuring that the authorities couldn't trace his calls.\n\nMy mind flashed back to the shitty conversation we'd had when I told him I wasn't going to run with his wolf pack. I flashed to the kissing bandit, the armed robbery of those people in Staten Island and Crazy Horse's intimidation of countless others. I snapped, put the pedal to the metal and aimed the car straight at Whiskey. He was going to meet my Front End John.\n\nA split second before impact, Whiskey jumped up. He rolled across the hood and slammed into the windshield before rolling off and crashing onto the pavement. I left him there and continued driving. But Red Bank Police cars were blocking the street ahead, and five cops immediately took the three of us into custody.\n\nThe cops seemed unsure what to do with us. They knew Steve and me, knew that we were ex-military and had stood with them in bar fights. We had nothing but respect for the police. But they also knew that this insane scene demanded action. Whiskey and his wife had already identified us as the ones responsible for the Molotov cocktail. Then there was the issue of possessing a loaded shotgun in a vehicle, and my attempt to run over Whiskey, which had been witnessed by three police officers. In the face of overwhelming evidence, we took full responsibility for what we'd done.\n\nWe were taken to a large, open room in the police headquarters. A couple of officers were sitting at their desks, looking at us. Two other officers and a detective lieutenant confronted us and demanded to know what was going on. \"You guys are usually good eggs but this is way out of line,\" he said. \"Loaded shotguns, gunshots in my town... This shit is fucking getting sorted out.\"\n\nSuddenly the door smashed open, and in walked a limping and apoplectic Whiskey Joe. Pointing at me, he screamed, \"You missed me, you motherfucker!\" He turned his attention to the cops and continued his tirade. \"Just where the fuck were you, you goddamn motherfuckers, when these pussies were trying to burn down my house? I pay your fucking salaries, you lazy mother\u2014\" Whiskey never got a chance to finish his sentence: three police officers grabbed him by the arms and removed him.\n\n\"Get the fuck outta here, don't look back. Just disappear. And make sure you stay away for a while,\" one of the cops told us. \"Your ass just got yanked from the fire. Get moving.\"\n\nThe three of us walked out of police headquarters without a word to anyone. We worried that someone in charge would change his mind and call us back inside.\n\nI walked back to my car, which was still parked by Whiskey's house. When I got there, Milo Esteves, president of the North Jersey Breed at the time, was leaning on my car. The two of us were alone.\n\n\"Did you ever have a problem with the Breed Motorcycle Club before?\" he asked.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Well, you sure fucking do now,\" he said.\n\nCompletely drained by the evening's events, I met his stare and said, \"Okay.\"\n\nI hopped in my bullet-ridden car and drove away, wondering about my life expectancy.\n\n### CHAPTER SEVENTEEN\n\n## SHAKING THE TIGER'S TAIL\n\nThings were quiet for two or three weeks, with no visits from members of the Breed. It was hard to believe that Whiskey and his buddies would let Steve and me get away with the firebombing, but maybe they were just hanging low for a while.\n\nI continued to hang out at the Globe Bar in Red Bank with my friends. One rainy night in late March, I was having a beer there when the phone rang. The bartender picked it up.\n\n\"It's for you,\" he said, handing the phone across the bar to me. I'd never received any phone calls at the Globe before; this was truly a first, and I wondered if the caller would be friend or foe.\n\n\"You haven't been coming around,\" Jake Slater said casually. \"We never see you.\" A legendary figure on the Jersey Shore, Slater was the very persona of a tough biker, a man feared by all who crossed his path, and respected by some.\n\n\"I've been busy,\" I said. \"But when are you getting something together?\"\n\n\"Tonight, as in now,\" Slater said. \"I'll give you directions, you gotta come by. Some of the guys want to meet you.\"\n\n\"Okay, give it to me. I'm in.\"\n\nI'd met Jake on a couple of occasions. He lived in Atlantic Highlands, where he pretty much ruled the community. Jake stood about six foot three and weighed a muscular 260 pounds. His black hair was moderate length and wavy, and he always had a beard\u2014sometimes a full one, sometimes a Fu Manchu. He was missing one of his front teeth, which gave him a gap-toothed smile. Jake always wore a black leather glove on his right hand, with silver metal studs on it, and a matching chap on his right forearm.\n\nSlater reminded me a bit of Big T from my army days. Both men were naturally massive in size, loved violent domination and were charismatic and intelligent. Both could also be disarmingly charming one moment and sadistic and deadly the next. I genuinely liked Slater and enjoyed the brief time I'd spent with him. I knew he was being seriously courted by the Pagans Motorcycle Club, and I was still a little gun-shy from my time with the Breed, so I never attempted to locate him or frequent the places where he could often be found drinking truly prodigious amounts of rye whiskey.\n\nI paid my tab at the Globe, headed out and hopped into my old Ford Galaxie for the short ride to Slater's designated meeting place, his buddy Steve Stone's house in the Port Monmouth section of Middletown. About 12 people were there when I arrived late that evening; I only knew two from high school and around town. A few others I recognized as members of the Asbury Park chapter of the Pagans Motorcycle Club. No one at the house was wearing colors, and the mood was light and friendly. What was perhaps most remarkable about the gathering was the setting: the interior of the house had been gutted, and we were looking at wall studs, outlets and plumbing. There was no Sheetrock in the place, at least not the parts that I saw.\n\nThis felt like a different crowd than the Breed, and I didn't get the sense that these guys would be watching bestiality films or looking to stick people up at gunpoint. The conversation was all about bikes, bars, bitches and not taking shit from anyone. This was a tough group, and the Pagan reputation for ferocity didn't seem in question. But there were no kissing bandits here.\n\nI also got the sense that I was being observed by some of the guys, and wondered if I was being vetted as a potential member of the Pagans. I knew that the club was looking to expand its territory, and the North Jersey coast was in play.\n\nAfter spending a couple of hours at the house, the group decided to hit a bar in Keansburg, where I lived. Keansburg was an interesting choice as a place to party for the likes of us\u2014a square mile of bungalows and bars, split evenly between Italians and Irish at the time, with a distinctly lower-end blue-collar feel. It was a very close-knit community, with outsiders only nominally welcome. The place was legendary for notorious bar fighters, and the police had a reputation for helping to ensure that outsiders who caused problems didn't want to return anytime soon. Going to Keansburg guaranteed that this was going to be an interesting evening.\n\nWe rode to Keansburg in several different vehicles, with Slater and another guy in one car, Stone driving a van and me alone in my car. Jake picked a bar called Memories, which had a reputation as a bucket of blood\u2014a place where fights between patrons were as commonplace as shot glasses and beer mugs.\n\nMemories was doing a brisk business for a weekday evening. It seemed as if the patrons weren't sure what to do with us and so opted to leave us alone. Jake was acting quite differently from when he had left the house. Later, I learned that he was hitting the \"green\" heavily on the way over. The Pagan drug of choice was parsley-laced PCP, which we referred to simply as \"green\" because of its color. I'd tried the stuff only once and sworn to never use it again. Green is smoked like marijuana, but the PCP it contains leaves a man so high that pain means nothing. Satan laughs and spreads his wings every time someone consumes green.\n\nSlater shelled out for multiple rounds of shots for the group, and we were soon in an alcoholic glow, some burning brighter than others. As I swallowed another shot, I noticed that Slater was getting into a game of pool with one of the locals. A couple of guys were standing at the far end of the table as Slater crouched low to break with the cue ball. One of the men leaned down as well so that he could follow Slater's break. Jake struck the cue ball low and hard, driving it up off the table and straight into the man's face.\n\nThe injured man bellowed loudly with a mix of anger and pain. Slater immediately flipped his cue stick around so that he was holding it by the thin end, and began smashing the untouched balls in the rack, sending them flying everywhere.\n\nA wild brawl broke out as Slater and the rest of our guys took on the locals with everything that was at hand, including smashed beer bottles, pool cues, beer mugs, bar stools, feet and fists.\n\nBodies flew and tables broke as the brawl continued. Everyone seemed to be moving in slow motion around me as I focused on taking out the men directly in front of me. My army days came back to me as I picked my shots and avoided the flying limbs and projectiles.\n\nCountless police vehicles screeched to a halt outside the bar. The Keansburg Police had issued a mutual aid call, asking all the surrounding towns to send as many available units as possible. There were squad cars from Middletown, Union Beach and Hazlet\u2014and all the cops were ready to mix it up with us. They were determined to bring a quick end to this brawl, and it didn't seem to make much difference to them how it all ended.\n\nThat night at Memories was like a western film fight. When we got outside, there was a wild light show from the flashing red lights on all the police vehicles. The police weren't the only ones who had shown up in force. Drinkers had descended on Memories from other nearby bars, and they, too, wanted a shot at us. Some of the bar patrons threw empty beer bottles in our direction. If the cops hadn't been there, we would likely have faced a very different, and brutal, kind of street fight that evening.\n\nAs police flooded into the bar and brought things under control, Slater went to speak to a member of the Middletown Police Department whom he seemed to know. Later, I learned that the cop was the brother of the guy Stone who had been in the bar with us and who hadn't fared so well in the free-for-all.\n\nWhile Slater was talking to the Middletown cop, I got into it with one of the officers from Keansburg, telling him to go fuck himself after he seemed to be showing off to the large and angry crowd. I instantly regretted my remark, because I'd long vowed not to piss off the cops. But I was stoned on adrenaline that night, and the two of us shared some very angry looks. I wondered if I'd just put a bull's-eye on my back. Years later, the two of us would become good buddies, both working undercover drug operations.\n\nNo one was anxious to point the finger at anyone else, and it seemed impossible for police to start identifying and cuffing those responsible for starting the brawl. Soon enough, we were allowed to get into our cars and drive out of Keansburg.\n\nStone and Slater were among the first to leave in the van. But Stone didn't get far before crashing into a utility pole. He wound up with a compound fracture to his leg. Slater was pretty banged up but otherwise okay. While the police were focusing their attention on the one-car crash, I headed off in the opposite direction\u2014happy to make it away from the bar after that raucous hell ride of an evening.\n\nThe next day, I got a call from Slater, who wanted to take me to lunch. Apparently I'd passed my vetting at Memories. The two of us hung out at a luncheonette in Middletown before heading over to Riverview Hospital in Red Bank to visit Stone. We listened to him harass the nurses about not getting enough pain meds until Slater tired of his act and we left. Later, as we drove back to Middletown in Slater's cage, he told me about the possibility of establishing a new chapter of the Pagans Motorcycle Club to provide muscle for the area of Monmouth County near Sandy Hook. The president of that new chapter, the Sandy Hook Pagans, was going to be one Jake Slater.\n\nThe Pagans Motorcycle Club was not a large group, with a membership estimated to be between three hundred and four hundred at any given time. Membership constantly fluctuated depending on the number of members who were in jail. Several other clubs were larger, including the Hells Angels, the Outlaws and the Bandidos, but the Pagans made up in ferocity what they lacked in numbers.\n\nAlthough the Pagans would state emphatically that the East Coast, from Maine to Florida and west as far as Ohio, was solid ground belonging to their club, the territory was interspersed, with areas held by other outlaw clubs, some defiant, some working to get along. The Warlocks were in Pennsylvania and Delaware, which was very strong Pagan turf. And the Warlocks were very hard-core. They operated in a manner just short of war, and any meeting of members by coincidence was a powder keg of tension.\n\nThe Hells Angels had a large and tough chapter in NYC, but if they strayed into Long Island, the Pagans felt justified in retaliating. The Breed also teamed up with the Hells Angels, and so the Pagans were always at war with both the Breed and the Hells Angels. But the Breed were the ones most hated by the Pagans. At the time, the Feds had what they called the \"Big Four\" on their radar: the Hells Angels, Bandidos, Outlaws and Pagans.\n\nI knew very little about either the Breed or the Pagans when I was to starting to get involved with them. I didn't care about the history of any of the outlaw motorcycle clubs at the time\u2014or what others thought of them. If I liked the guys, I would ride in an outlaw club.\n\nOne thing was certain, and I learned it very quickly: I was surrounding myself with some very bad hombres. These were not idle threat makers or phonies. Jail and violent death were a daily part of life. It would be a very unwise practice indeed for any life insurance company to provide a policy for any outlaw bikers.\n\nLike most chapters, the Sandy Hook Pagans Motorcycle Club would be small in number\u2014comprised of Jake Slater, me and six others. Out of the eight men, only three appeared physically intimidating and cause for concern in a street fight\u2014Jake, me and a guy named Ray Wolfe.\n\nNone of the clubs would ever disclose the actual number of members they had, but only big-city chapters had large numbers of soldiers. And in Pagan gatherings, chapters would mingle so that a small chapter could appear more formidable than it really was. Each chapter was run a bit like a Lions or Kiwanis Club: meetings were held at scheduled times, and each chapter had a president, a vice president, a sergeant-at-arms, a secretary and a treasurer.\n\nIt was very unclear at first whether the Sandy Hook Pagans would become a reality. What was clear was that the Pagans Motorcycle Club wanted to expand its influence, and the Jersey Shore was its target. Slater seemed perfectly suited to become the president of the new club, a tough-guy biker with a solid reputation for violence.\n\nBut none of us were willing to do any prospecting. So it was up to Slater to convince the national president of the Pagans, Paul Ferry, aka \"Oouch,\" along with the 13 board members and most of the other club presidents, that the Sandy Hook Pagans should be granted instant club colors. That had never been done before, and the decision would be made by a group of men who had all prospected. Oouch had taken over for John \"Satan\" Marron, who was doing life in a maximum security prison in Virginia for a double murder. If Slater was successful but then something went wrong later, his ass would be on the line.\n\n### CHAPTER EIGHTEEN\n\n## THE SANDY HOOK PAGANS\n\nAbout two weeks later, word came down from Slater that the eight of us needed to meet at Stone's house late one afternoon. We were told that we should bring our Harleys and that we would be meeting with Pagan leaders about setting up the new Sandy Hook chapter.\n\nWhen we got to the house, two U-Haul trucks were parked out front, and Slater told us to load our custom choppers onboard\u2014and to then get in the back of the panel trucks with our bikes. Suddenly we realized that this was going to be a clandestine meeting and we weren't supposed to know where it would take place. Slater was going to drive one of the trucks, and \"Vinny,\" the president of the Asbury Park chapter, would be driving the other. Vinny had spiderweb tattoos on both of his elbows. I was told at the time that they indicated membership in the Aryan Brotherhood, but I never asked and so had no idea if that was true. Others say the tattoos are worn by men who have done, or are doing, jail time.\n\nInside the U-Hauls, the Harleys leaned heavily on their kickstands, and we used some blocks of wood as wheel chocks to prevent them from shifting. We also loaded some bottled beer on board, figuring that we'd want something to drink during the ride. We had a hunch that we were going to visit with Pagan leaders in their secret headquarters on Long Island.\n\nThe vans were loud, but the ride was okay\u2014better than we'd expected. The overhead light in the cargo area was left on, and we were able to move around the area, standing or sitting on the bikes, drinking beer and talking. The ride continued for about two hours, most of it on highways, judging from the road noise.\n\nWhen the rear doors were finally opened, we found ourselves in an industrial area off the Long Island Expressway, in a compound surrounded by an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with concertina wire. It was close to dusk, with long shadows across the property and distant noise from the highway. In the center of the compound was an unpainted concrete-block structure with a flat roof, a steel entry door, a larger garage door and no signage of any kind. The fencing was reminiscent of the stuff used around county jails, and I wondered if the security was designed to keep people in or out, or perhaps both. A couple of Harleys and trucks were parked near the structure. But otherwise there was no clue as to what the building might have been used for. As Slater commanded, we pulled our bikes off the U-Haul trucks and parked them behind the building.\n\nA member of the Asbury Park Pagans wearing colors motioned to us to follow him, and we entered the Pagan equivalent of the White House; our group would indeed be meeting with the national president of the Pagans. We were in a large meeting-hall-type space, with doors in the rear that apparently led to other rooms deeper inside the building. The room had a large bar along one wall, with plenty of tables and chairs. The walls were covered with lavish woodwork, and numerous elaborate plaques on the walls honored fallen members. The space itself was quite comfortable. But the occupants made me wonder if I was going to live through the night.\n\nAbout 30 or so Pagans, most of them wearing colors, gathered around us\u2014furious that non-members were being given access to this very special place, where we had no right to be. Some of them held \"war clubs\"\u2014thick, heavy wooden walking sticks with the Pagan war god carved into the top as a handle. The war clubs were quite artistic and highly valued by members. They also looked stout and able to inflict serious danger on anyone daring to challenge a Pagan.\n\n\"Who the fuck are you?\" demanded an angry, bearded Pagan with a large beer belly and very wide girth. He stood just inches from my face and casually swung a war club in his right hand. \"Who the fuck are you to walk into my house?\"\n\nThe others shouted at us from all angles and made equally threatening gestures. Nobody in our group had any sense of what was going to happen at this meeting, but I certainly hadn't expected a bunch of angry men to be staring us down and threatening our lives. My senses were telling me that I was in serious danger, but I was determined to stand my ground. I did not react in fear or anger but tried to point out that I'd come with Jake Slater, and that I'd been invited. My remarks prompted more screaming and acrimony, but no one hit me with a war club.\n\nNone of the Pagans bothered Slater, who walked right through the crowd and headed for the back of the room, where he just stood around for a few minutes, fiddling with something in his hands.\n\nWe waited. Though the potential for a shit storm was clear, I wasn't all that worried about getting smashed up by one or more Pagans, and the guys I was with seemed equally nonchalant about the danger. Somehow, we'd felt comfortable coming to the Pagan headquarters because we were with Slater. But now the guy had physically distanced himself from us and we were left to fend for ourselves.\n\nI wanted to partner up with the Pagans and had no problem if they wanted to see if I was a pussy or not. I had pumped iron for years and started learning Korean Karate from my brother Mike and his Jamaican friends, and felt very confident in a street fight. This would be my first chance to show I had steel. I wanted to show that I was as hard and tough as the hardest, toughest man in the Pagans. This club was seeded with some very dangerous men. It also was home to some members who didn't appear as intimidating but were in fact assassins.\n\nLooking back, I now realize that we were probably in far more danger than I thought. No one knew where we'd gone that day, and we'd spent hours traveling in the back of two U-Hauls. What if this meeting didn't go down as planned, and they decided we weren't worthy of being Pagans? Would anyone have been able to track down the seven of us if we'd gone missing? It would have been real easy for those guys to get rid of us and our bikes.\n\nThings simmered down a bit when a door at the rear of the building opened and Oouch, the national president, came into the room and embraced Slater. He walked in with a posse that treated him with deference. Oouch acknowledged our presence with a nod, grabbed Slater and several of the other men nearby and retreated into the back room for a private meeting.\n\nOouch, pronounced \"Ooch,\" was well built and stood about six feet tall, with long, fairly thick black hair that reached his back, full sleeve tattoos and a genuine air of command. Over time, I learned that he was respected as the natural leader that he was. He never seemed loud or abrasive and held a calm intelligence.\n\nThere seemed nothing for the rest of us to do until Oouch finished his meeting with Slater.\n\nI turned to look at the heavy-set Pagan who'd been threatening me with the war club and asked if I could buy both of us a beer. Beer cost the same at all Pagan venues at the time\u2014just 35 cents for a bottle. He agreed, and the two of us walked over toward the bar.\n\nThe private meeting between Oouch and Slater continued for hours, and our guys just quietly hung at the bar, sipping beer and undergoing periodic rounds of questioning from the members. With no windows in the building, no clocks on the walls and no one with a watch, we had no idea how much time had passed. We just sat, bought beers for everyone, and waited. The fact that we were buying all the beer seemed to reduce the tension a bit.\n\nStill, there was an air of suspicion of the seven of us from New Jersey, and it was clear that people who were not prospects or patch holders did not normally gain entrance to this building. The issue of prospecting never came up, at least not in a way that reflected on us. Had these guys been aware of my negative personal attitude on prospecting, I am certain that our meeting would have had a decidedly different flavor.\n\nSlater eventually emerged from the private room in the back and told us it was time to leave. We walked outside as a group and were shocked to realize that the sun was coming up; we'd been in the building all night. Slater said we'd be riding back to New Jersey on our bikes, and that he and Vinny would lead the way in the U-Hauls. Some members of the Asbury Park Pagans who'd been in the headquarters would be joining us for the ride home; they all donned their colors before getting on their Harleys.\n\nWe left the compound and turned onto a secondary road. Within two blocks, three marked Nassau County Police Department vehicles pulled up behind us, switched on their emergency lights and pulled us over. They asked for the usual documents\u2014license, registration and insurance cards\u2014and asked where we were coming from and where we were going. Though we'd been drinking, I guess we weren't drunk enough to warrant any roadside sobriety tests. They checked out our IDs and sent us on our way.\n\nTraffic was moving quickly on the Long Island Expressway (LIE) westbound, and we quickly settled into formation, staggered on the left and right sides of the lanes and riding behind the U-Hauls.\n\nMost drivers gave outlaw bikers a wide berth, and that was true for most of the people who were on the LIE this morning\u2014there were not many chopped bikes on the road, and damned few outlaws. But a group of wasted college kids decided to hassle us, driving very close to the bikes at a speed close to 80 miles per hour. They flipped us the bird and inched closer to the bikes, a risky maneuver no matter what the circumstances.\n\nOne of the Asbury Park Pagans was riding in front of me in the left lane when the car sped up and came between some of the bikers. He turned back to look at the vehicle for a second, then reached into his vest pocket, pulled something out and hurled it at the vehicle. I couldn't see what he threw, but I knew it had to be pretty small.\n\nThe sedan's windshield suddenly imploded, showering the car's four occupants with glass. I watched as the stunned driver lost control and the vehicle started to fishtail across the highway. We continued cruising west and I never got a chance to look back and see what happened.\n\nLater, we stopped for gas and I asked the Asbury Park Pagan what had happened. I told him that I never saw anything leave his hand.\n\n\"I whipped a spark plug at the shitheads,\" he said casually. \"I think it's the ceramic part that causes the glass to explode. I never ride anywhere without them in a handy pocket.\"\n\n\"Yeah, man,\" I replied. \"Shit, one second there was a windshield there, and the next second there was nothing. Holy fuck.\"\n\n\"You're not worried about those fucks, are you?\" he asked.\n\n\"Nah, fuck no. I just never seen anything like that shit before.\"\n\n\"Stick around and you will see shit you won't believe, all the fucking time,\" he said.\n\nSeveral days later, Slater called us together for the first official meeting of the Sandy Hook Pagans in our new Atlantic Highlands clubhouse. He had secured a nondescript one-story cement-block building off Avenue A. It was just a few blocks from the town's business district, which included several bars and the Atlantic Highlands Police Department. We were literally within walking distance of police headquarters. But no one saw that as any kind of a problem.\n\nThe flat-roofed building had four commercial-grade garage doors along the front, along with one steel entry door. It was adjacent to another building that also had a row of garage doors along the front. The space, which looked like it was intended for storage for a plumbing or landscaping company, was big enough to hold our prized Harleys. There was also room for tables, chairs and a couple of slightly used couches for the eight of us. That was about it; there was a bathroom, but no shower.\n\n_Me standing in front of the former Pagan clubhouse, just a few blocks from the police headquarters in Atlantic Highlands. We used the building for weekly meetings and met there before rides to Asbury Park and other locations._ (Photo by Douglas P. Love)\n\nSlater walked to the back of our new clubhouse and announced to the group that the Pagans Motorcycle Club had green-lighted the creation of the new Sandy Hook chapter. Now was the time for us to decide if we wanted in or not, he said. Once we had our colors, it would be too late for us to back out; we would be \"patched\" members of the outlaw motorcycle club. You could be granted a \"retirement\" after 10 years. What he didn't say was that in 10 years the odds were overwhelming that you would be either dead or enduring a nice, long stint in prison.\n\nNo one voiced any objection, so Slater went ahead and named the officers of the club (there was no election) and handed out the patches, which were to be sewn onto a sleeveless, collarless denim jacket. Over time, the jacket would fade and naturally show its age; it was never supposed to be washed. We were to wear the colors proudly and treat them as something even more valuable than our custom choppers.\n\nThe colors for the Pagans Motorcycle Club included a series of four patches grouped together on the back of the vest. At the top was a patch that said simply \"Pagans,\" with either blue or red letters on a white background. Below it was an image of the Pagan Fire God, a sort of angry Norse icon. And below that were two square patches, one with the letter _M_ and another with the letter _C_ , signifying Motorcycle Club. We were also given a diamond-shaped image that was imprinted with \"1%,\" meaning that we were now members of an outlaw one-percent motorcycle club. Only a true, no-shit outlaw biker would dare to wear this on a patch or even on a T-shirt. It was a statement in itself.\n\nThe patches were new and shiny in a motorcycle club in which old and faded was revered. Indeed, some members had colors so faded and worn that they could only be read by someone standing just a few feet away. Normally, a biker would carry his colors with him for life; they were his most important possession, and there were dire consequences to anyone who lost them. Even cops knew enough not to screw with a biker's colors\u2014or to be prepared for a serious reprisal. Wearing Pagan colors gave a man instant respect on the street; Leo DiCaprio might be able to travel anywhere in the world and buy yachts and mansions with his millions, but no one commanded more respect, no one was more feared, than a one-percenter.\n\nAs expected, Slater said he would be president and Stone would be vice president. Two other guys were named secretary and treasurer, and I was named sergeant-at-arms\u2014responsible for enforcing club rules and adjusting a member's attitude as needed. There were only three members of the Sandy Hook Pagans who didn't serve as one of the group's officers.\n\nThe chapter would have mandatory club runs on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day. All members would be required to participate in those rides unless they were in jail or hospitalized. All the club's members would also have to pay the agreed-upon dues, and everyone's Harley had to be up and running by April. It was also understood that members had to obey orders from their superiors in the club's chain of command. Anyone who violated club rules would be subject to being made a prospect\u2014essentially removing any status they may have earned within the club.\n\nSlater also made it clear that we were never allowed to get into a car, or cage, with our colors on; they were only to be worn when we were on our Harleys. Violators would be beaten.\n\nAnd so I began my new life as a Pagan. As a veteran club member explained to me, I was never supposed to work, ever; I was too good to work. I would have a \"bitch\" who would be working and providing for me. We were warriors of the Fire God. And God help those who dared fuck with a Pagan. Nevertheless, many Pagans held down jobs\u2014everything from working a garbage truck to owning an auto body shop. The choice belonged to individual club members, and some worked and some didn't. There was no stigma attached to having a woman put bread on the table. Wives and girlfriends were untouchable. They were with the Pagan they were with. Women who were just hanging with the club were available. There was a clear delineation between a wife or a girlfriend and just a \"bitch\" hanging with the club.\n\n### CHAPTER NINETEEN\n\n## LIFE WAS EASIER WHEN I WAS CRUEL\n\nOne Saturday morning near the end of March 1977, we met up at the garage clubhouse for the first official ride of the Sandy Hook Pagans. We were headed to Philadelphia to see a motorcycle show inside the Spectrum, an indoor arena that had opened a decade earlier and was the first arena that Bruce Springsteen ever played, in 1976. The arena was packed with row upon row of motorcycles, including dozens of chopped Harleys loaded with brilliantly shining chrome; most of the bikes were for sale.\n\nThe Philadelphia Police Department had a very large presence and was strictly enforcing a \"no gang colors\" policy. In a way, the policy was a very good idea, because it showed that the cops were ready to make war no matter how fucking tough you and your club thought you were. The police were more heavily armed than the gangs, and they successfully kept a very volatile situation under control.\n\nNot wearing gang colors hardly prevented one-percenters from displaying other articles, such as leather forearm gauntlets with club insignia. And since this was a very large gathering of warring tribes, most members of any given gang stayed close to one another. You would need to be blind not to discern the gang members in the crowd. Every outlaw club was represented by a sizeable group, and there were innumerable men who could only be described as ferocious in both appearance and attitude.\n\nThe Pagans were strongly represented, but other powerful clubs were represented, too. The Wheels of Soul were there in significant numbers; this was a very rare breed of outlaw motorcycle club because it had both white and African-American members. Traditionally, outlaw clubs were more akin to the Aryan Brotherhood and about as minority-friendly as the Ku Klux Klan.\n\nThe Wheels of Soul looked very heavy indeed. Their leader was large enough to be an object of morbid curiosity. I briefly wondered how he wound up as an outlaw biker rather than a mauler of running backs and quarterbacks before some national stadium audience. He was white, stood nearly seven feet tall and weighed at least 350 pounds. Although he wasn't overly muscular, he looked hard and thick\u2014like a cement truck. And I thought he'd be equally difficult to stop in a street fight.\n\nWe didn't take on the Wheels of Soul, but we did beat the shit out of six or seven guys who happened to be standing on the steps outside the arena. We'd spent a couple of hours looking at the bikes and decided to head out to a local watering hole. As a group of about 10 of us were leaving, we saw some guys on the steps and beat them up. I have no idea what the rationale was behind the slugfest, but I simply did as I was told.\n\nThe men fought back, but not aggressively. Because there were more Pagans nearby, I suspect they didn't dare try to win a skirmish against us, only to find themselves losing a bigger and more dangerous battle against our buddies. They took their beatings like good dogs, and clearly had no intention of going to the police or otherwise filing any complaint about our behavior. What was clear was that they weren't patch holders from another club; they were just a group of wannabe outlaws who somehow offended a patch-wearing Pagan and paid for it.\n\nAbout 50 of us descended on a tavern that catered to a blue-collar crowd and sold mostly shots and beers. I didn't see anyone in the place who wasn't a Pagan, and all of us were drinking heavily. Many in the crowd wore faded colors\u2014longtime members. I tried to avoid getting involved in any serious conversations, worried that I would end up hearing something that I wasn't supposed to.\n\nThe bar owner, a man in his fifties, and his wife were serving beer to the crowd with astonishing speed\u2014and collecting money at the same speed. Though clearly stressed about the quality of the clientele, the husband-and-wife team also seemed pleased to be raking in wads of cash. It wasn't unusual for bar owners to make a substantial amount of money off one of our parties, but it always came with the risk that we'd get pissed off about something and opt to destroy the place. It was a risk they took, whether they knew it or not. Sometimes even bar owners, employees and patrons can find themselves part of the demolition project. In this case, all was going well\u2014at least for a while.\n\nI was standing by the jukebox when the bar's front door opened. In sauntered a slender white male who was about 30 years old and fashionably dressed, with a neck scarf tied demurely around his neck. The man bumped into a veteran Pagan, who promptly landed a series of hard punches on him and threw him out the door. Few of the Pagans in the bar even noticed what was going on. The bar owner appeared mildly concerned, but there were no broken bones, and it didn't look like this was going to result in a police response. What made the incident seem odd to me was that the guy seemed okay with the idea of taking a few hits to his face.\n\nMinutes later, the same man walked back in the door with the same beatific smile on his face, and not looking all that bad given the hits he'd sustained. Again he bumped into the same veteran Pagan, who most people would have been inclined to avoid at all costs. This time, two very adept Pagans laid a quick and nasty beating on the man, who crashed to the floor\u2014but kept on smiling as if Farrah Fawcett was playing his trombone. He was pushed through a gauntlet of uninterested outlaws and hurled through the door; he crashed onto the pavement head-first. I caught another worried look on the owner's face. But he seemed unsure what to do, if anything. With 50 Pagans in the bar, he may well have thought it dangerous to start hassling one of them.\n\nThen, for a third time, the same man walked back into the bar. Personally, I made it a point to affect a sniper's calm whenever I was within the bowels of the Fire God Nation. But I will confess that seeing this grinning pain-junkie mince back in a third time was a remarkable and bizarre sight that got my full attention. This time, a gigantic and truly furious Pagan slammed his way through the group and grabbed the offending character as if he was an oversized Raggedy Ann.\n\n\"No!\" the burly, sweat-soaked bar owner screamed at the top of his lungs, drawing the full attention of everyone in the place\u2014including the one oversized Pagan he was hoping to reach.\n\nThe scream had its desired effect, and my fellow Pagan walked the victim to the door, sternly pushed him to the street and ordered a couple of prospects to make sure that he not re-enter.\n\nThe bar owner truly saved the guy's life, and he was not given any grief whatsoever for screaming an order at a member of the Pagan Nation. Somehow, the man had earned the quiet respect of the Pagans he'd been serving, and the group was willing to dial back its level of violence. I later learned that there really was no code of conduct for such situations. Under slightly different circumstances, the bar owner may have found himself under attack, too. If the right combination of alcohol and green were consumed, even respectful conduct by a citizen could lead to violence.\n\nBecause we hadn't prospected, we were being watched closely by the leaders of the Pagans, and they expected us to make our presence known in New Jersey. Slater knew that there'd be all manner of hell to pay for him personally if he didn't make sure the club was active. We had to show the Pagan colors while riding together with other club members, support other clubs and get into at least some trouble on a regular basis. The trouble often revolved around a night of drinking at a bar.\n\nSince Thursday nights were our club meeting nights, we would meet for a while at our headquarters off Avenue A, where we invariably wound up complaining about someone who owed back dues, talking about any rumored police activity that might impact us and occasionally getting serious about war party plans involving the Hells Angels and my former buddies with the Breed.\n\nOne Thursday evening soon after our Philadelphia trip, Slater told us we'd be riding up to a bar farther north to help support the North Jersey chapter, whose membership had been decimated by members serving extended jail terms. We parked our bikes in front of a dingy bar and went inside for a few beers.\n\n\"Pagans! I was a Pagan once,\" one guy said, laughing, as we walked in the door.\n\nIf he had been a Pagan, he would have known better than to joke about it. As the sergeant-at-arms, I knew I needed to have a talk with him immediately. As I got closer to him, he started reciting scripture to me.\n\n\"Zip it on the Pagan stuff or I am going to visit you with a little of the old shit fuck, and you ain't gonna like it,\" I said.\n\nThe guy immediately changed the subject, and I thought, _Another soul saved\u2014at least for the evening_.\n\nMost of the women at the bar looked like they'd been through one or more wars. There were only two of note, and both were riding with Pagans. One of them was white, the other Hispanic. The white chick was stunning, in a white, sleeveless undershirt that showed off her physique. She had long, sharp fingernails and wore a hat that would look perfect on an Irish cabbie; it hung on the side of her long, wavy blonde hair. Both women stood toe-to-toe with the guys and struck an attitude of \"let's just get wasted and fuck with somebody.\"\n\nJust when I thought the evening would prove to be a quiet one, the two women began to beat the shit out of each other for reasons unknown to anyone else in the bar. They threw wild punches, gouged skin with their fingernails and eventually dropped to the floor, grappling and rolling as each sought the upper hand. Both had stamina and a palpable hatred spurring them on.\n\nThe Pagans who were with these two were enjoying the spectacle too much to consider stopping it. Indeed, no one wanted it to end, and certainly the two women weren't ready to quit. But as the fighting continued, even the Pagans decided that this battle had to stop. Two men waded in and pulled the snarling adversaries apart.\n\nAt that point, I headed outdoors for some fresh air. I've never smoked, and most of the bars I visited during my years as a Pagan were invariably smoke-filled. Outside, one of the North Jersey prospects was guarding our bikes against the very real possibility of a Breed attack. A similar attack had recently taken place at a nearby watering hole, so the prospect was attentive and ready for action.\n\nAs I was looking at something on my bike, an African-American man, about 30 years old, approached and asked if there was anything he could do for me. I said no and hoped he'd just leave.\n\n\"I can boost a stereo, or steal anything you want, real quick-like,\" he said.\n\n\"Yeah, thanks, but I don't want anything.\"\n\n\"You wanna fuck me in the ass?\" he inquired.\n\n\"No, I don't want to fuck you in the ass, in the mouth or any fucking where.\"\n\n\"You sure 'bout that? Dragon fucked my ass in Rahway [state prison] for years. He sure liked it,\" the guy said.\n\n\"Good for Dragon. Now get the fuck lost.\"\n\nBefore we got on the highway, we stopped to top off the gas tanks in our Harleys. Custom bikes have small gas tanks, so running out of gas is a real concern. We all filled up on premium. I was riding the last bike in line, and the station attendant asked me to pay for all of the gas he'd pumped.\n\n\"I ain't fucking paying,\" I told him.\n\nHe didn't repeat the question, and simply let us all ride off into the night. It was better to lose a few gallons of gas than risk a beating from a bunch of Pagans.\n\nThe reality was that you had to be ruthless and not care too much about the fate of others if you rode with the Pagans. This was a club that had ordered a member to execute a highly ranked Mob soldier in front of several Philadelphia police officers. He knew the cops would witness the murder, but he shot the guy anyway. Being a member of the Pagans was all or nothing. Mere citizens were expendable. It wasn't that citizens were hated\u2014just that they weren't considered any more important than a pawn in a chess game. They could be sacrificed for a greater good\u2014at least as \"good\" was defined by the Pagans MC.\n\nA few days later, I was awakened by my girlfriend, Jane, who would later become my wife. She said she'd been attacked at Marine Park in Red Bank.\n\nJane tearfully explained that she'd been hanging in the park with friends smoking weed when some young guys came by and demanded that she hand it over. When she refused, one of the guys slapped her in the face and took the joint. I was pissed that anyone would treat my girlfriend like that, so I grabbed my Pagan colors and car keys and headed to the park with Jane in tow.\n\nIt didn't take long before I found a guy who not only confirmed my girlfriend's story but offered to give me the thief's home address. He even offered to show me the way there if he could just hang out and watch the action, which I agreed to.\n\nWith turn-by-turn directions shouted out by my new buddy, it took only a few minutes to reach the place on the busy Route 520 in Red Bank. I banged loudly on the front door using a clenched fist\u2014what's known in karate as a hammer fist.\n\nAs soon as the guy started to open the door, I hit it hard with a front thrust kick that sent the door flying inward and propelled the thief backward into the middle of his living room. He landed on his ass and immediately curled up into the fetal position, afraid to even start something with me.\n\nJane and my new buddy from the park followed me in and closed the front door behind us. A black Labrador retriever crouched under a coffee table, barking loudly but staying put. I threatened to kick the dog, though I never would have followed through on that threat. Dogs and other animals have nothing to fear from me; it's men that can get me pissed off.\n\nI swore at the thief, who remained curled up on the floor, and landed some kicks and punches on him. The truth was, I had no intention of seriously beating the guy or leaving any lasting injuries. My plan was to inflict some damage on his belongings and send a strong message that violence against my girlfriend amounted to violence against the Pagans MC, which would not be tolerated.\n\nOne punch bloodied the guy's lip. I ordered him to kiss Jane's feet, but quickly abandoned that plan as blood dripped onto her boots. My next stop was his kitchen, where I tossed dishes onto the floor and pulled some stuff out of the refrigerator, creating an instant feast for the dog, who'd decided that we weren't so bad after all.\n\nI was about to use a front snap kick and take out what appeared to be a new and expensive console TV when the offender crawled with remarkable agility to the front of the screen and begged me on his knees to leave the TV untouched. He got his wish and received a kick to his solar plexus instead. I am certain he thought this was a good trade-off.\n\nI promised he would be spared any further contact with the Pagan Nation if he refrained from slapping my girlfriend and didn't contact the police, two requests that he vowed to comply with.\n\nWe left a couple of minutes later, and I dropped my enthusiastic new friend off back at the park. He was thrilled to have been able to be an observer and seemed to admire me for teaching the thief a lesson.\n\n\"You guys do this shit all the time, man?\" he asked.\n\nI sagely nodded my head. \"Yeah, but it's only taking care of business, man.\"\n\nSeveral weeks later, Slater invited me along on another trip to Long Island to visit Oouch, the Pagan president. This time, the plan was to meet him at his home. Slater borrowed a customer's blue Volkswagen Bug. Jake always had a stable of vehicles available to him, thanks to his auto body shop business in Atlantic Highlands. He routinely \"borrowed\" his customer's vehicles, and the car we were in was one of them.\n\nWhat I didn't know was that Slater had made a deal to buy two ounces of methamphetamine from the club, which he would then re-sell in New Jersey. I was simply along for the ride as he made the pickup. Selling drugs was one way that some club members were able to afford their lives of leisure and custom bikes. I just wasn't into that kind of work, though I, too, was looking for a new way to generate some cash. I had grown tired of working for the home builder, even though keeping his men in line wasn't all that difficult or time-consuming.\n\nThe directions to Oouch's home were probably straightforward. But Slater \"got lost\" along the way, and we spent more than an hour and a half driving around Long Island as he searched for Oouch's house. Eventually we got there. Looking back, I'd guess that Slater simply wanted to ensure that I didn't know the precise location of Oouch's house; the trick worked, and I had no idea where we were.\n\nThe ranch house was on a wooded lot. Slater and I were greeted by Oouch at the front door and invited inside the comfortable home. Several other Pagans were in the place, and Slater disappeared into the back of the house for hours. I sat and chatted with Oouch for part of the time, making casual conversation about the Pagan Nation. We talked about the club's history and recent expansion, and some of the other outlaw clubs, too. He smiled kindly at my naivet\u00e9 and was an adroit speaker. I made sure to never ask penetrating questions in any regard; the more you knew, the more you put yourself in danger.\n\nAs the sun rose the next morning, Slater and I were headed back to New Jersey, two big guys in one very little car. Later that day, I circled back to Slater's house and visited him and his very attractive, dark-haired girlfriend, Jean. It was only then that I learned that the leader of the Sandy Hook Pagans had received on consignment a couple of ounces of methamphetamine made and produced by the club during our visit to Oouch's place.\n\nUnfortunately for Jake, he knew relatively little about drugs other than the green that he used from time to time and the powders that he snorted, and he had inadvertently left the meth in direct sunlight. When he awoke later in the day, he found that he had two bags of useless fluid. I never spoke to Slater again about the matter, but I'm sure he had to make good on the deal and pay his fellow Pagans for the destroyed meth.\n\n### CHAPTER TWENTY\n\n## THE WOMAN IN THE WHITE DRESS\n\nLooking for a way to make some quick money, I started thinking about doing collections work as the muscle for a loan shark in Bayshore, New Jersey. Donning club colors and asking people to pay what they owed plus the vigorish, or \"vig\" (interest), was a very easy way to make money, as I'd learned from the Philadelphia Pagans.\n\nIn Philly, there was a very large and nasty group of Pagans who were already working with some elements of the Mob, doing collections. Pagans were almost overqualified for collecting money from deadbeats who were stupid enough, or desperate enough, to borrow money from illegitimate enterprises. Intimidating people who borrowed from the Mob was child's play for the Philadelphia Pagans. More broadly, Pagans were known as nomadic killers; they were hard to locate, with clubhouses that were not openly visible and locations that changed in an instant. Pagan colors, unlike those for some of the other outlaw clubs, also didn't show area affiliations; there was nothing on the vest to indicate whether the individual was from New York or Philadelphia, for example.\n\nThrough acquaintances, I'd heard of a guy in Bayshore who needed muscle, Carl Redler. The guy dressed like a bum and lived with his elderly mother on the second floor of a cheap motel. But he was remarkably intelligent and worth tens of millions of dollars. Heavyset and standing about five foot 10, he sported cheap jackets that resembled leather but were made from polyester. He kept his dark-colored hair slicked back, like the Fonz. During the day, you could find him in a bar in Bayshore\u2014one of the many properties he owned\u2014where he'd happily cash anyone's paycheck, no questions asked. He was also willing to loan money to anyone who asked.\n\nBut Redler's easygoing demeanor was severely challenged by anyone who dared to fall behind on his payments. Screwing this guy on the money you'd borrowed\u2014even the vig on the amount\u2014was foolhardy at best.\n\nMy work for him was perhaps even easier than my construction job. It usually didn't take any more than a very nasty slap, shove or verbal threat of mayhem to collect on past-due payments. So I made enough money to keep my bike in good repair and pay for a round or two of drinks when needed. I was always bewildered by the guys who were behind on their payments to Redler\u2014including the gamblers, who had this never-ending belief that they were going to hit the jackpot any day.\n\nJust as the summer of 1977 began, a nightclub called the Playground opened in the busy little city of Long Branch. Attached to a motel, the bar was across the street from the beach and boardwalk, and booked the hottest nightclub shows on the shore. It offered everything a Pagan could want\u2014gorgeous girls, complete with free motel rooms right next door; unlimited inexpensive drinks for anyone wearing colors; and needed visibility for the club.\n\nThe manager somehow thought he'd end up dead if he didn't immediately agree to all of our requests. It wasn't true (I would have known of any threat against him, as sergeant-at-arms for the club) but it kept the drinks flowing and the motel rooms available when needed.\n\nWe were ecstatic at the find, and we quickly realized that we needed to take steps to ensure that we remained on good terms with everyone, which meant that there would be no brawls or activities that had the potential to destroy the club's interior. Over time, the Playground became our place, and Pagans from other more distant clubs would often travel to Long Branch just to hang out with us.\n\n_Getting ready to head out to Long Branch during the summer of_ 1977 _._\n\nThe Sandy Hook Pagans became part of the scene at the club, and we got along with the management, bouncers, patrons and even the band members who played there. Our many visits to the club helped solidify the perception of our chapter as \"the Hollywood Pagans,\" cruising the Jersey Shore, hooking up with hot women and hanging at upscale clubs. I don't recall a single act of violence by the Pagans at the Playground. When the itch for a street fight came on strong, we simply moved to a different venue.\n\nThe woman in the white dress stands out among all the chicks that we hung with at the Playground. Led by Jake Slater as usual, we happened to get to the club early that Thursday evening and were having a round of brews before the band went to the stage. A woman walked in who was so staggeringly hot that she had the attention of every Pagan in attendance plus all the other guys in the nightclub. She wore a white dress with light-reflecting trim that showed off her fabulous shape, and a pair of sexy shoes with stiletto heels.\n\nI looked away from her briefly and sipped at my bottled beer, trying not to get caught staring in her direction. Then I felt a light hand on my shoulder and turned to see her standing next to me and looking into my eyes.\n\n\"Chuck, is that you?\" she asked.\n\nStunned, I quickly realized that I'd graduated from high school with this girl. It was Bridgette, who had once been my best friend's girlfriend. Back then, I'd felt that I had about as much of a chance scoring with her as being asked by the Russians to become their next cosmonaut. Now, wearing outlaw colors, I was in a different position.\n\nBridgette kissed me on the lips, and we chatted about our pasts for a few minutes. I caught Slater glancing in my direction; his look telegraphed shock that I knew this chick well enough to get a kiss.\n\n\"Chuck, I like to make it with more than one guy,\" Bridgette said, clearly no longer the girl I knew in high school. \"I just know you have some friends.\"\n\nIt took me a second or two to react to her bombshell proposal. \"Would this cat and that guy be alright?\" I asked, pointing to a couple of other Pagans at the bar.\n\n\"Oh yeah, your place or mine?\" she said.\n\n\"Well, it just so happens I have a standing arrangement for a room in the back, in the motel,\" I replied. \"Grab a drink and I'll set it up. This is Jake. He can entertain you for a minute.\"\n\nI beelined it to the motel lobby, where I found both the nightclub manager and a female front desk manager. I asked for my usual room upstairs.\n\n\"No can do,\" came his sheepish reply.\n\n\"What the fuck. Why not?\"\n\n\"Convention weekend. Booked solid. I am really, really sorry,\" he replied with a fearful stutter.\n\n\"Who the fuck's in my room?\"\n\n\"I checked them in,\" the female front desk manager offered.\n\nI walked behind the front desk and grabbed the spare key to my room off the rack. It was time for me to handle this personally. \"They are going to have to find another place to park their asses, whoever the fuck they are,\" I said before heading toward the stairs.\n\n\"I don't think you'll have a problem,\" the front desk manager said with a sheepish grin.\n\n\"I saw what you lined up, and believe me, I understand. But what are you going to do? They paid cash for the night,\" the club manager shouted at my back.\n\n\"I'll deal with this. Not to worry.\"\n\nUpstairs, I banged on the door to my room and announced, \"It's the police. Open up.\"\n\nI heard some hushed voices in the room and someone scurrying around. Seconds later, the door opened. A man with a towel wrapped around his waist stood there looking blankly at me. He took a few steps back as he realized that I wasn't a police officer after all, but a Pagan wearing colors.\n\nI handed the man $50, told him there'd been a mix-up about the room and said that he would have to leave. In those days, $50 was plenty to find a good room, and he seemed willing to accept both the money and my order to leave. Then I noticed a man pretending to be asleep in the bed, the covers pulled up to his chin. What the fuck was going on here?\n\nI pushed aside the guy in the towel, strode into the room and yanked the covers off the bed\u2014revealing a guy dressed in lingerie.\n\nNow I better understood the front desk manager's comment about me likely not having a problem getting the room's occupants to vacate. I repeated my order to get out of the room, now. Both men scrambled to comply, tossing on street clothes and stuffing their things into overnight bags. Seconds later, they were on their way toward the door.\n\nI grabbed the $50 back from towel man as he headed through the door. They would be on their own for motel accommodations.\n\nI stopped at the front desk to tell the manager that the room was now mine, and that I'd appreciate it if someone could change the sheets and give us some new towels. Next, I walked back into the Playground, collected Bridgette and my two buddies, and went back upstairs.\n\nAIDS didn't exist at the time, and many sexual mores had been kicked to the curb during the '70s. Women had easy access to effective contraception, and the mood on the street was \"just do it, baby.\" Being a Pagan truly enhanced my ability to be with certain types of women; it also shut the door to other types. The vibe between me and a woman was established very quickly. Plenty of women were turned off by the biker image. But there were plenty for whom the bad-boy biker held serious appeal. It made little difference to me at the time which way things went. The Jersey Shore was, and perhaps still is, a target-rich environment.\n\nNo doubt, there were Pagans for whom group sex was common. But that wasn't the case for the Sandy Hook chapter; we simply didn't roll that way. I also carried as baggage the image of that German girl being raped, and anything that vaguely reminded me of that scene was a nightmare.\n\nBut any deep-seated repulsion I had for pulling out my junk in close proximity to other males melted in Bridgette's presence. She looked even better unclothed than she had downstairs. The four of us fucked and sucked for what seemed like an eternity. Then there was a knock on the hotel room door.\n\nI pulled my pants on and walked out onto the second-floor landing. It was the manager.\n\n\"Does your, uh, girlfriend have a boyfriend, about six foot three, with a black beard?\" he asked.\n\n\"Hold on,\" I said, returning to the room to ask Bridgette.\n\n\"Yeah, so?\" she replied.\n\n\"Yeah, that's him,\" I told the manager. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Well, he is on his way up. He seems pissed off.\"\n\nI walked back into the room and shut the door. \"A good time has been had by all, but why don't we let these two lovebirds work it out?\"\n\n\"Fine with me,\" Bridgette replied as the door crashed open and her mad boyfriend walked in. He seemed ready for a fight\u2014until he got a look at the three outlaw bikers standing around. Then his attitude seemed to change.\n\n\"It's cool, guys. Go have a beer,\" Bridgette said. \"I'll deal with it. Really, he's no problem.\"\n\nShe kissed us all and we said our farewells as her boyfriend stood quietly in a corner of the room, hands on his hips, looking down.\n\n### CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE\n\n## SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL\n\nI never did learn all the details of the story about \"Boo,\" the member of the Asbury Park Pagans who had his colors stolen by the Breed on Staten Island. But I knew the basics: Boo had been riding his Harley across Staten Island when some members of the Breed spotted him and gave chase. Boo pulled off the highway and ducked into a bar, hoping to slip out the back and escape\u2014but got caught in the process. They beat the shit out of him. When they were done, they left him for dead and rode off with his colors.\n\nThe Breed must have done some ferocious job on the guy, because he was a scary motherfucker without compassion for anyone or anything\u2014with the possible exception of the satanic dog he often rode with.\n\nJake was furious and immediately hatched a plan to get Boo's colors back by abducting a member of the Breed and holding him for ransom. The actual kidnapping took place a few days later, outside a motorcycle show in Asbury Park\u2014nominally Pagan territory, and a dangerous place for the Breed to be hanging out. But a Breed member called \"Thunderstorm\" was there. A bunch of the guys confronted him and forced him at shotgun-point into a van, where he was trussed up like a deer for a ride into the New Jersey countryside.\n\nAs sergeant-at-arms, I was summoned to the isolated cottage in Colts Neck where Thunderstorm was being held by Jake and five other Pagans. When I got there, the guy was trussed up, blindfolded and beaten, lying on his side in the cottage's bathroom tub. Two of the guys were standing guard over him with the aforementioned shotgun and a bowie knife, and several of them were talking about various ways to torture our prisoner including skinning him alive and burning him to death.\n\nI didn't know or care about Thunderstorm, and I knew that at least a couple of the guys in the room were ready to do whatever Jake wanted\u2014even if it meant being involved in a murder. But there were two other issues that seemed relevant. If we killed Thunderstorm, we wouldn't have anything to trade for Boo's colors. And if we tortured or killed a member of the Breed, the fighting between the clubs would become lethal, and any one of us could wind up dead.\n\nAs sergeant-at-arms, I was expected to participate in whatever plan was decided on. Unlike the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Pagan law has no provision for refusal to follow illegal orders. I had no intention of getting myself killed for this asshole, but I was going to try to finesse the situation if I could.\n\nTwo of the guys got fed up with all the talk about torture. They grabbed Thunderstorm from the tub and dragged him out to the living room. They put a thin blanket over his head and torso and drenched it with gasoline. Thunderstorm started to shake violently and pleaded for his life.\n\nSuddenly, the large plastic sheet on the floor beneath the man seemed irrelevant. If this plan went ahead, the whole cottage would be burned to the ground. I grabbed Slater and told him that we needed to talk, privately. We went into the kitchen.\n\n\"Bro, fuck that motherfucker, but we should play it cool and not fuck this guy up. We got to stop the shit,\" I pleaded.\n\nSlater gave me a look that was uniquely his, one that blended a threat with a condescending cocking of the eyebrow and a sardonic smile. \"Yeah, and what the fuck are you suggesting about dealing with this piece a shit?\"\n\n\"Listen, I am talking low so fuckhead can't hear. We keep this guy tied up, but let's at least give him some water,\" I said. \"Bro, when I was in the army, capture and torture was a heavy topic. But the best reason not to torture this fuck is because if you or any one of us gets taken, they won't feel obligated to skin us alive\u2014not if we treat this guy okay. I am not complaining about harming some motherfucking member of the Breed. But I am talking straight strategy. The kind of shit a president does looking out for his bros.\"\n\nSlater nodded, smiled and said, \"Sometimes you surprise me.\" He halted the abuse and even ordered one of the guys to get Thunderstorm some water.\n\nThunderstorm pleaded with Slater to let him go and swore that he would quit the Breed the second he was released. Eventually, it was decided that we would go ahead with the plan to swap our prisoner for Boo's stolen colors. There was only one condition: Thunderstorm would have to remove the Breed tattoo, a rectangular red-and-blue flag that covered the outside portion of his left upper arm. Because there was no way for us to surgically remove it without severe physical harm, it was agreed that we would scrape black ink over the area to cover it. Thunderstorm readily agreed.\n\nSlater contacted one of the Breed's leaders, and they agreed to meet for the swap in downtown Red Bank, not far from where Whiskey Joe and I had had our showdown\u2014and literally a few blocks from the Red Bank Police headquarters. Jake handled all the negotiations after conferring with some of the very hard-core guys in our group.\n\nWith bikers on both sides carrying loaded shotguns and driving heavily armed war wagons, Thunderstorm was swapped for Boo's colors without incident. We didn't see one Red Bank squad car, a lucky break for all involved\u2014especially Thunderstorm.\n\nIn the late 1970s, the Orchid Lounge in the heart of gritty Asbury Park had a clientele that was overwhelmingly African-American. Most whites knew better than to walk through the door, which was popular with members of the Kingsmen Motorcycle Club, an all-black, non-one-percenter club whose members proudly rode Japanese motorcycles. Though we weren't exactly friends, the Sandy Hook Pagans did have an open invitation from the Kingsmen to hang out with them at the Orchid Lounge. The only white males I ever saw at the Orchid were fellow members of the Pagans. Even as guests of the Kingsmen, we were always on the very cusp of a bloodbath. Still, they were good company and we genuinely enjoyed hanging with them.\n\nOne day before an Orchid Lounge drink-fest, I ran into a couple of guys in Asbury Park who thought it would be \"really cool\" to have some colors-wearing Pagans come to a party that their girlfriends were throwing at a nearby home on the following Thursday evening\u2014which also happened to be meeting night for the Sandy Hook Pagans. The party was going to be in someone's backyard, and there would be a live band playing. Frankly, I thought the guys were crazy for inviting Pagans to a house party, but it was their call, and I cheerfully agreed.\n\nAt the Orchid later that evening, I extended the invitation to the members of the Kingsmen MC. I painted a picture of sexually liberated chicks and lots of booze, and they immediately made plans to join us.\n\nThat Thursday evening, I briefly met up with some of my Pagan brothers at our clubhouse in Atlantic Highlands before getting on our Harleys for the half-hour trip south to Asbury Park. Along the way, one of the guys had trouble with his bike, so we all sat and waited while he sorted out the problem and got it roadworthy again. It was after midnight when we finally rolled into the city by the sea.\n\nAs we got closer to the address that I'd been given, members of the Kingsmen MC raced past us in the opposite direction, headed away from the house party. We saw red lights from marked police cars in the distance, and heard more police responding at high speed with sirens blaring. It was clear that some serious shit had gone down, but we had no idea what.\n\nDozens of partyers were rioting and fighting with the cops in the home's front yard and in the street when we arrived. The cops had their nightsticks out and were making it quite clear that they would restore law and order, no matter how many citizens had to be taken down. Before we could dismount, a group of police from nearby Long Branch descended on us. It looked like the Asbury Park cops had called for mutual aid from other departments. One of the cops grabbed my handlebars with his left hand while holding a nightstick at the ready in his right.\n\n\"If you don't take this bike and get the fuck out of here, I'm gonna hook it and you fuckers are going down hard,\" he said.\n\nNone of us wanted to see our bikes taken away on the back of a tow truck for the trip to a police impound. We all looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders and rode to a nearby nightclub, where we drank without incident.\n\nI had no remorse for the problem my invitation seemed to have caused. The Kingsmen were stand-up and knew very well how the game was played. A week or so later, I had a beer with some of the Kingsmen members and we talked about the party. They said the sexy and seemingly willing white women were less than sexually liberated when it meant crossing racial lines, and the white guys seemed intimidated and defensive. As a result, the scene got real ugly, real fast.\n\nWhen the cops came, the white guys at the party got shitty with them for failing to protect residents against the intruding bikers. The complaints from the crowd prompted the cops to focus their attention on the invited partygoers\u2014and ignore the bikers, who didn't seem to be doing anything wrong. While the partygoers and the cops fought it out, the Kingsmen jumped on their bikes and headed out of town. They thought the night was a blast and were not in the least put out by the cops or circumstances; it was just another night on the other side of life.\n\nThe Jersey Shore area where the Sandy Hook Pagans rode was mostly rural until after World War II, when it blossomed and became a major rail hub to New York City. Economically, the area was unusually diverse, spotted with wealthy enclaves including Highlands, Rumson, Deal and Wanamassa, and impoverished areas including Keansburg and much of Asbury Park. In the half hour it took us to ride our chopped Harleys from Atlantic Highlands to the bars and nightclubs in Asbury Park, we would cruise by weathered summer bungalows; dark, rat-infested apartments; and stunning high-end homes surrounded by manicured lawns and privet hedges.\n\nMost nights that we rode together as a club were spent at dive bars. But on some evenings we'd check out more upscale places\u2014like Tradewinds, a sprawling oceanfront club with a beautiful pool and the very best entertainment on the Jersey Shore. It was just a short ride from Atlantic Highlands.\n\nOne hot Saturday night in 1977, a bunch of us headed for Tradewinds. Members of other Pagan clubs had heard about our plan and decided to join us. As usual, Jake Slater was in the lead. When we got there, Jake palmed a wad of money to one of the preppy young bouncers out front, and a dozen of us headed inside the packed club. The bouncers seemed uncertain how to handle our presence, and they paced nervously. Somehow, the hours spent in climate-controlled gyms, building those biceps and pecs that drove the teen girls giggly, were not so formidable in the presence of outlaw bikers wearing colors. The girls for the most part seemed to be doing their best to look cool and check us out when they thought we weren't looking. The males at the bar seemed to be drinking faster.\n\nThe tension in the air was the sort we enjoyed the most, as the girls seemed drawn to the bad-boy bikers in their midst and the males grew increasingly jealous. We knew that it was only a matter of time before a brawl started, that some jock three sheets to the wind would say or do something tragicomic, thus opening the doors to what the thugs in _A Clockwork Orange_ called \"a bit of the old ultra-violence.\" I was pacing my drinking because I felt, given the numbers, that we would be fighting for a while. You can't fight at your best if you're half in the bag. Most of our guys seemed similarly inclined. Still, the mood among us was loose and jovial.\n\n_Me and my custom Harley-Davidson Sportster during the summer of '77 outside my parents' Middletown home._\n\nThe way we gauged the climate for battle was simple: when a high enough percentage of the people in the nightclub started giving us glares of outright hostility, or began mocking us, the time for confrontation was growing near. Our policy was the same as that of the Prussian general and military theorist Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz\u2014a brutal frontal attack, followed by more of the same. We also shared the Prussian's penchant for total war. This did not mean we shot and sliced the enemy (at least not under the circumstances presented by the Tradewinds crowd) but that we were completely and ruthlessly committed to the task at hand. We knew our opponents were woefully unprepared for the battle that was sure to come.\n\nAround 2 a.m., a chant rose from the crowd to \"kick the Pagans' asses.\" Ironically, we hadn't done anything to provoke the anger. We had been hanging out at the bar, drinking and talking among ourselves. Though there were plenty of young chicks in the place, we hadn't bothered any of them. It was as if we presented an alien aura, and our unsmiling and sardonic attitude toward the patrons seemed to fuel their passions. Many of them were also drinking heavily.\n\nSome muscular 21-year-old guy shoulder-checked one of our men, Snake, near the bathroom. Snake was considerably shorter than the guy who bumped him. But what the 21-year-old didn't know was that this particular Pagan would strike if given the slightest provocation\u2014which is why he had that nickname. Snake head-butted his antagonist and beat him with his fists and elbows into a limp, bloody pile on the floor. A bunch of the other jocks jumped into the fray and were quickly dispatched with the aid of wooden bar stools and fists.\n\nSomeone in the back flicked on all the emergency lights in the club, and many of the patrons headed for the doors rather than get involved.\n\nWe, too, thought that the fight was pretty much over. Jake told our guys to saddle up and get out of town before the cops arrived. He and I hung around near the bar for another few minutes, talking to one of the bouncers who'd actually stood with us against the crowd.\n\nThe two of us looked out the exit doors and saw a mob standing there, demanding revenge. We glanced at each other for a split second before moving to take care of business. Jake threw the doors open and walked outside, with me a half step behind.\n\nSlater dropped two guys with one punch to each of them from his massive right hand. He then swung his helmet like some Roman gladiator, shattering the faces of several more attackers. That seemed to be the end, or at least that's what we thought. Exhausted and exhilarated, we walked toward our motorcycles.\n\nAs I turned my head to say something to Jake, I saw some big guy racing toward him, ready to attack. I threw my helmet like a Nolan Ryan fastball and caught the guy in the center of his face. The impact knocked the attacker off his feet, and he crumpled onto his back in the street. I grabbed him by his arm and pulled him onto the sidewalk so he didn't get run over. His face was a mess, blood pouring from his nose and mouth.\n\nJake and I turned and continued walking toward our Harleys. We'd find another bar to finish out the night.\n\n_Me and my faithful companion, Big Foot._\n\nMore than a decade later, at a Tai-Chi seminar in Red Bank, I ran across the guy I'd dragged off the street. By then, I was heavily into the martial arts and working as a cop in Middletown. When I walked into the event, several old friends were standing off to the side with amused looks on their faces. They said nothing to me but seemed intent on observing what I was doing. After a few minutes, I introduced myself to the guy standing next to me. He told me his name\u2014Chris Stevens\u2014and said that we'd met before, in Sea Bright.\n\nSuddenly, I realized that Stevens was the man I'd hit with the helmet. His father and my dad were actually good friends. Chris and I later trained in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu against each other, quite aggressively. Neither of us ever spoke of that night in Sea Bright, and he never made any effort to get even with me for the injuries that he still wore.\n\n### CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO\n\n## ALL THINGS MUST PASS\n\nThe orders came down from Jake Slater, as they usually did: it was time to ride to Long Island for a war party. There would be no questions, and attendance was mandatory. When we arrived on the island late that night, we gathered in a pitch-black industrial park near the Long Island Expressway. The guys from the Pagan national headquarters had heard rumors that a group of Hells Angels was coming onto the island as part of an effort to flex their club's muscle and expand into our territory. Though most of us had ridden there on our Harleys, we had a couple of war wagons with us, loaded with clubs and at least a few shotguns. The cars varied; there were some sedans, and one of the guys had a Chevy El Camino.\n\nThe Sandy Hook Pagans rarely ran drugs, but some clubs used drug sales as a way to generate cash. The bigger your club's territory, the more cash you could generate. The Pagans had long owned all of Long Island, but the Hells Angels had control over New York City and wanted to expand their territory to the east.\n\nI don't know who handled the battlefield logistics for the Pagans that night, but whoever it was seemed to have at least some military experience. A bunch of us were directed to take up positions in an L-shape that would have allowed us to ambush the Hells Angels if they started anything. I was carrying a 12-gauge pump shotgun with a sleeve of extra shells.\n\nSurprisingly, the night ended quietly. Some members of the Hells Angels did ride into town, but they kept their distance and there was no confrontation. I put the shotgun back into the trunk of our war wagon, and we all rode back to Atlantic Highlands in the still of the night.\n\nI had seen my share of Hells Angels, and it seemed to me they were very much like us in appearance. Our colors were different: the Hells Angels used leather jackets while we used denim, and their jackets carried a patch on the lower portion of the back\u2014more accurately, a \"bottom rocker panel\"\u2014that announced what chapter of the outlaw gang they rode with. We were at war for territory with both the Hells Angels and the Breed. That was the way it had been for years, and likely would remain well into the future.\n\nThere were a couple of other times when we believed we'd clash with the Hells Angels. I remember one day when there was a motorcycle rally on Long Island that drew mostly non-one-percent motorcycle enthusiasts. We'd heard that the Hells Angels were going to attend the rally in a show of strength. The move was unacceptable, and we had no choice but to respond. So we gassed up our bikes, loaded our war wagons and headed across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to the island.\n\nAfter a tense period, we learned that the Hells Angels were elsewhere, and there would be no chance of conflict. Some of the guys were so anxious for a fight that they got into a brawl with enthusiasts attending the rally. The enthusiasts had done nothing wrong but had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Several of them got punched out because they were around pissed off Pagans who had no one to fight. The enthusiasts meekly accepted their beatings and dared not fight back. No one was in a good mood. The beer didn't even taste good.\n\nIn time, I could feel myself beginning to burn out. As a club, we'd all been running too fast and too long in the hopes of proving to the national leadership that we were worthy of wearing colors. The tension was evident, and I was certain that it would only get worse. One of the chapter's members had already been demoted to a prospect, and our vice president was in deep shit because he couldn't find his colors. We were all feeling something of a sensory overload, and it was taking a toll.\n\nSlater was on a wild ride of pure, unadulterated megalomania. He fed off the dark landscape that we patrolled on our choppers. His capacity for long party nights riddled with ultra-violence fueled his ego. He led from the front, to be sure, was generous with his money and could be downright charming. But he was hypoglycemic, and alcohol turned him into an utterly fearless and less than tactical general. Jake consumed whiskey and soda in large beer mugs that seemed to unleash a fury within. Add green to the mix and, as William Shakespeare said, \"Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war.\"\n\nJake was capable of acts of wanton cruelty. And then, in seconds, he could shift gears and talk kindly to a person in a wheelchair. If sufficiently sober, he would also spend time with a child stricken with cancer and conduct himself with remarkable compassion. He seemed to follow some sort of inner guide that none of us could understand or predict. But he was mostly dark and violent. He certainly possessed a high IQ and could be amazingly perceptive. Being his sergeant-at-arms meant keeping my head on a swivel and never showing weakness. When you rode with Jake, you were always watching your every move\u2014and ready for the unexpected.\n\nWe knew that some of the more hard-core patch holders in the Pagans condescendingly referred to us as the Hollywood Pagans\u2014banging uptown pussy and riding the Jersey Shore like we were living the lyrics from some Bruce Springsteen song. To prove we were more than that, we were committed to performing random acts of brutality. Slater was more than willing to make a bold statement, and I was 100 percent in support of this position at the time\u2014provided that those random acts were showered down on other outlaw bikers. But Jake didn't see a difference between the outlaws and normal citizens. That disagreement created a divide between us that I could see, feel and taste.\n\nJake also had a personal demon that compelled him to dominate all those around him. No matter how close to him you were, unless you were a higher-ranking member of the Pagans, he would at one time or another brutalize you. I saw full beer cans thrown with velocity into a member's face and watched other members get slammed in the face with the metal-studded leather forearm guard that Slater habitually wore. Usually it happened only once. I knew my day would come.\n\nAt one point, Slater was charged with the brutal knife slaying of an African-American. The charges seemed ironclad until witnesses became ghosts and some very well-paid lawyers laid waste to the remainder of the evidence.\n\nHe was once the victim of an unprovoked attack in which he was seen beaten to the ground by a lone baseball-bat-wielding attacker. Witnesses later told me that Jake seemed all but dead, but suddenly he got off the ground and shook the beating off\u2014a feat few of us could manage.\n\nOne of Slater's rare but memorable losses was to \"Black-Tar\" Larry. A laconic roofer who liked to drink alone and wasn't considered a tough guy, Larry was trying to enjoy a beer at Vacation Bar in Highlands when Slater and some of his friends made their drunken entrance. Larry put up with Jake's boisterous intimidation for a while. Then he snapped and did the unthinkable, furiously attacking Jake with his fists. Jake was stunned and beaten senseless in short order; it was truly an old-fashioned ass-whipping. But beating the crap out of a Pagan legend is almost certain to trigger retribution, and death. Larry and his family disappeared. There were rumors that he had moved to South Carolina.\n\nIn truth, I was intimidated by Jake. Still, I never showed him any fear. I actually went out of my way to demonstrate a willingness to engage in a fight with him rather than hanging back. My time came at the Pagan farm in the Allegheny Mountains near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.\n\nUnder club law, every Pagan owned a share of the Pagan farm, a wooded and surprisingly bucolic piece of hilly property with a trout stream coursing through the middle, one small structure and a motorcycle track for those who dared. There was no sign out front, just a dirt road leading off into the wilderness. Members were allowed to camp out there anytime they wanted to. Pagans were expected to haul in whatever they needed and leave the property in pretty much the same condition they found it in.\n\n_Getting ready for a run with the Pagans_ MC _, during the summer of_ 1977 _. That's me on the left._\n\nWe rode in with Pagans from throughout the Northeast one hot summer weekend. It was a long, tough ride for us, on custom bikes with rigid frames that telegraphed each and every vibration and bump in the road.\n\nAs we cruised south into the Allegheny Mountains, my mind wandered and I started thinking about \"Self-Reliance,\" a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay that was one of my favorite pieces of writing at the time. Even during my years with the Pagans, I had continued my reading\u2014quietly, of course, and when there was no chance that any other members of the club were around. I could only imagine the look of bewilderment, segueing into suspicion, that would accompany any sort of philosophic discussion. The simple fact that Emerson was loved by a lot of Special Forces types would have no bearing on the matter. Pagans don't dance, and they don't sit around reading old books. I didn't hide my passion for reading, but I certainly didn't flaunt it, either. The author's words had real life in my head especially during protracted rides. I clearly remember passages such as: \"I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformance and consistency. Let these words be gazette and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the Gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us never bow and apologize more.\"\n\nThere were other phrases that resonated with me as well: __ \"Let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor and Woden... in our Saxon breasts.\" Also: \"And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments who protect it, is the want of self-reliance...\"\n\nA loud bang suddenly brought me back to reality. The engine on Slater's bike threw a connecting rod and literally blew apart. We were only a few miles away from the farm. Jake, who surprisingly wasn't hurt in the incident, helped some of the guys push and lift the bike into the back of someone's van. He rode the last few miles in a cage.\n\nI was exhausted when we arrived and had a hard time just getting off my bike and walking around. None of us brought much along with us\u2014a sleeping bag at best. Everyone was doing meth. Most people stayed awake, partying with a combination of drugs and alcohol. On the first night, I tried to catch a couple of hours of sleep on the ground, but someone tossed fireworks next to my head. On the second night, I slept in the trunk of someone's car to get out of the pouring rain\u2014but only after turning my colors inside out and putting them safely aside. You can never be in a cage with your colors on, and that includes in the middle of a rainstorm.\n\nJake decided to fuck with me during a mandatory club meeting near the trout stream. We were walking along the edge of the stream, bullshitting about something, when he gave me a violent shove. I turned my body sideways and slightly backward as I fell, and he, too, lost balance. I crashed down into the waist-deep water and put two hands down onto the rocks to steady myself. Slater swung at my head with his powerful right hand, but his balance was off and he missed. I lowered my body into a football lineman's crouch and drove him sideways into the water.\n\nSuddenly, Slater didn't have the upper hand, and it was obvious that things weren't going as planned. A nearby group of Pagans were intently watching the fight. I could have attacked and either beaten or drowned my adversary. Instead, I backed down and stood by his side. He seized on the face-saving gesture, and both of us laughingly got out of the creek. We headed off to the beer wagon, soaking wet and more wary of each other than ever.\n\n### CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE\n\n## BLOODY FINGERS\n\nJake and I walked into an upscale bar and restaurant on Ocean Avenue in Sea Bright one Tuesday evening with another Pagan, whose street name was \"Jet.\" Because we were wearing colors, we immediately drew some raised eyebrows from patrons. We ignored the looks and headed for the bar, which was several steps down from the restaurant and offered views of the adjacent Navesink River through floor-to-ceiling windows. Sea Bright had numerous seafood restaurants and was crowded with a mix of tourists and locals throughout the summer.\n\nWe were just going to tie the load on, an uneventful evening of polite conversation. You know, our usual banter: Is the theater really dead? Is analysis really worthwhile? Is dark pink the new red? Which film will win Best Musical?\n\nJet looked like a biker, with long hair and a real thick beard. He was old for a Pagan, maybe 35, slender and about six feet tall. He vowed that he was going to buy a Harley soon (it was a requirement for club members), but I had my doubts. The only time I'd seen him riding a motorcycle, he'd lost his balance and crashed after about 50 feet.\n\nA guy standing next to me at the bar started bullshitting with me about nothing and everything. He tossed some cash down on the bar and treated us to a round of drinks. Almost invariably, men seem to have this innate desire to try to impress bikers with stories of illegal activities or some prior incarceration. They try to paint themselves as \"bad guys,\" as if to gain our admiration. This guy, who called himself \"Fingers,\" told me that he'd boosted a few safes over the years. His tales of nefarious deeds went on from there. He had done time sparingly, but was a master thief\u2014or so he claimed.\n\nIt was pretty clear that Fingers was fabricating the stories as he went. If a cat was real, you could see the respect he held for doing time like a solid con. Outlaw bikers were always part of any serious penal institution's population. And outlaw bikers uniformly behaved as solid cons, always high up in any prison's hierarchy. When I went to a prison to visit with Pagans who'd been locked down, I was always struck by the ease with which they assimilated into the prison's way of doing things. Some seemed as happy as jaybirds. They drank, drugged, pumped iron (with the aid of anabolic steroids) and had sex both conjugal and of the kind that brings nightmares to law-abiding citizens. If you got nicked for more than a nickel (a five-year sentence), prison would be your home for a long while. So you learned the jailhouse patois, sharpened your shank, worked on your bench press and covered your body with ink. When you eventually got released, you would look and sound like one of Attila's front line soldiers. A few violent incidents were all that you needed to complete the portrait of the ex-con outlaw biker.\n\nEventually I grew tired of listening to Fingers's fictional stories. To see how far he'd go, I asked the guy if he happened to know a biker named Jake Slater.\n\n\"Yeah, I know Slater,\" Fingers said, going on to describe how he'd once committed an armed robbery with him.\n\nSomehow, Fingers didn't recognize his former co-conspirator, even though he was standing right next to me and could easily overhear the conversation. I turned to face Jake and quietly asked if he knew our drinking buddy. Slater stared at Fingers the way a Doberman pinscher does before attacking its prey and confirmed that he'd never seen this guy before.\n\nOblivious to what was happening around him, Fingers then talked about how he'd ridden on the back of Jake's Harley\u2014\"riding bitch.\" I knew that had never happened, and would never happen, because Jake never carried an extra helmet. The only way he'd ever have another guy on the back of his bike was if it were a Pagan who'd been shot and desperately needed to go to the hospital. But Jake seemed willing to give this bullshit artist a pass and not call him on his lies. We decided to call it a night and head for the door. Jet needed to use the men's room and said he'd meet us outside.\n\nAs Jake and I waited in the parking lot, we heard an old pickup starting up in the darkness. Its engine revved, and the driver whipped the Chevy Silverado around 90 degrees and started heading in our direction. The truck's rear tires were spitting gravel as it gained speed. It was Fingers\u2014and he was looking for a trifecta, taking out three Pagans in one drive-by.\n\nI glanced over at the bar and saw Jet emerging, carrying an empty half-gallon wine bottle in his right hand. He took a couple of steps toward us and then fired the wine bottle at the driver's side window with near-perfect speed and aim. The window exploded, spraying Fingers's face with broken glass. The truck slid sideways to a halt, with Fingers dazed and bloodied.\n\nJake walked to the truck, opened the door and beat the shit out of the guy with his fists.\n\nThe three of us drove away together in Jake's cage as if we had not a care in the world. We never talked about the incident again.\n\nNow, I look back and wonder if that guy in the parking lot was really me.\n\nIt wasn't long afterward that five of us were arrested by the Middletown Police Department on weapons charges.\n\nAround 3:30 a.m. one summer Tuesday, Jake and I walked into the Sandy Hook Diner on Highway 36 in Middletown along with three other Pagans\u2014Sandy Hook George, Asbury Park George and a prospect. We chowed down on steak, eggs and burgers. There was no doubt that we were loud and boisterous, but we left the handful of other customers alone. Jake picked up the tab for all of us, as usual.\n\nWe were just getting into our cages when five marked units from the Middletown Police Department screeched to a halt in the diner's parking lot\u2014all with their emergency lights on. The cops jumped out of their cars and shouted at us to shut the engines off and get out of the cars\u2014immediately. All of us were forcefully tossed up against the cars and patted down. The flashing red lights from the police cars nearby made it hard to see in the early morning light.\n\nThe police searched all three cars, even though they didn't have any legal reason to do so. At worst, we'd disrupted the peace inside the diner. But it was highly unlikely that the waitress would have had any problems with us, given the huge tip that Jake left for her. The cops found a hunting knife and a piece of a tree limb in the trunk of my car. In one of the others, they found a front strut off a Harley. They identified yet another \"deadly weapon\" in the back of the third car.\n\nSoon enough, all five of us were in handcuffs and tossed into the back seat of the waiting police cars for the short trip to the Middletown Police headquarters, where we were fingerprinted and tossed in the small gray cells. Jake placed a call to a bail bondsman that he knew, and we were released before lunch.\n\nWhether the charges were serious or not, the bust put us on the defensive and made it quite apparent that the Middletown Police Department was not going to stand for any activity from the Sandy Hook Pagans. Their tactic was successful, too; we wound up steering clear of Middletown after that incident\u2014even before the charges were adjudicated in the Monmouth County courthouse.\n\nThe five of us spent thousands of dollars on attorneys' fees, the bail bondsman and lost work. The trial lasted a full week, in part because five trial attorneys were involved (one for each of the defendants). Fortunately for us, the judge barred the prosecutor from discussing our membership in the Sandy Hook Pagans. The prosecution had to make its case solely on the basis of what happened in that parking lot outside the diner. With the attorney unable to paint us as \"dangerous\" members of an outlaw motorcycle gang, it was next to impossible to prove that a tree limb or a motorcycle strut was, in fact, \"a dangerous weapon.\" The case quickly fell apart and the charges were ultimately tossed out.\n\nIronically, before the case went to court, I'd wanted to just plead guilty and be done with the matter. I was willing to pay a fine, or maybe do some community service. But the Monmouth County prosecutor refused to plead the case out without a mandatory jail term, which I was unwilling to accept.\n\nHad I pleaded guilty, I would have had a felony conviction on my record and been barred from ever becoming a police officer. The prosecutor had no idea at the time that he was actually doing me a favor. He might have seen things differently if he'd known that I would become a sworn member of that Middletown Police Department five short years later.\n\nThe manner in which the cops handled themselves at the Sandy Hook Diner that night made a lasting impression on me. Those officers were tough guys. Indeed, they were downright nasty to the five of us. But they were professional, and they didn't overstep their bounds. As Pagans, we respected strength and guts in men. Those officers embodied both of those traits. There were equal numbers of officers and Pagans at the diner, and the cops stood tough and took care of business. Nobody was sent to the hospital, and nobody had their colors stolen on the way to the police lockup.\n\nYears later, when I was a patrolman in Middletown, I sat down for coffee with a group of veteran cops in headquarters and listened quietly as two of them told war stories. They described how they'd confronted a large group of hostile Pagans and arrested them, ripping up their colors with buck knives and beating the shit out of a couple of the biggest ones. I was fascinated by the story, and believed it, at first. But then they described how the whole thing had gone down at the Sandy Hook Diner. I suddenly realized that I was one of the Pagans they were talking about. I laughed quietly to myself as the embellished storytelling continued; I never did disclose that I was one of those arrested\u2014though my mug shot was probably still on file somewhere in police headquarters.\n\nOver time, Jake grew increasingly unpredictable\u2014maybe because he'd been drinking more. No doubt he was adding some drugs to the mix as well. He would erupt like an Indonesian volcano for no apparent reason. His mood swings seemed random, and people tended to avoid giving him bad news of any sort.\n\nOne night, Jake and I were out at his favorite watering hole\u2014Joey Miles, on First Avenue in Atlantic Highlands. Jake was always in this bucket-of-blood-and-beer joint just a few blocks away from the Sandy Hook Pagans' clubhouse\u2014and down the street from the Atlantic Highlands Police Department. Somehow, it didn't matter that the police department was literally within walking distance. Indeed, Jake was just one of a number of ferocious guys who hung out at Joey Miles. Jake was in rare form this evening, surprising even some of the tough guys by choking and slapping around a couple of the regulars hanging at the bar.\n\nSuddenly, I heard a commotion and turned around to see Jake getting into it with one of the guys at a pool table, Alexi Plotnikova.\n\nJake grabbed a cue ball off the table and, holding it in the palm of his hand, started pounding Alexi's face with it over and over. I could hear the breaking of soft cartilage and bones in the man's face from where I stood, some 20 feet away at the bar. Women in the bar started screaming as Alexi fell to the floor, his face a bloody mess.\n\nFearing that Slater would kill the guy, I walked over and shouldered myself between Jake and his victim. Alexi was trying to stand up, and Jake was leaning over him, ready to continue the beating. I grabbed Plotnikova by his arm and hauled him to the bar's back door. He was groggy and could barely see where he was walking as blood poured from his nose and face. I walked him outside and released his arm, letting him slowly drop to the ground.\n\n\"Don't fucking come back in,\" I told him. \"Leave now. Leave or that guy will fucking kill you.\"\n\nJake was still furious, and I saw him throw a beer mug as I walked back in.\n\nSomeone\u2014most likely one of the other bar patrons\u2014had called the cops, and several marked units, red lights flashing, rolled up out front. Rather than come in, the cops stood outside and one of them used a loud hailer to order all of us to come out. It was a bizarre move, and said something about the timidity of the Atlantic Highlands Police, or at least some of its members.\n\nJake looked at me and motioned for me to join him. It was clear he wanted to fight the cops, which struck me as a profoundly stupid idea. The two of us walked outside, along with about six other tough guys who'd been hanging at the bar. All of us were unarmed.\n\nThe Atlantic Highlands police retreated a few steps back toward their cars. One of them shouted to Slater that he couldn't go around beating up people and busting up a bar.\n\n\"Fuck you,\" Slater countered.\n\nThe whole scene was ridiculous, like something out of a cheap movie with a horrible screenplay. The cops had no plan to deal with us and seemed unwilling to take us on. While we contemplated our next move, several Middletown Police units rolled up. Someone had called for mutual aid.\n\nThe men from Middletown jumped out of their cars with \"hats and bats\"\u2014wearing helmets and carrying riot batons\u2014and spoiling for a fight. Jake shot me a glance, and we watched as men from both departments gathered between two of the marked units and talked. We couldn't tell what was going on, but we heard raised and angry voices from the Middletown guys. Then the Middletown police returned to their cars, turned their emergency lights off and drove away.\n\nTwo of the men from Atlantic Highlands walked over and negotiated with Jake. Eventually he agreed to leave the bar and go into police headquarters the following day to be arrested. The rest of the guys with us quietly dispersed into the darkness.\n\nThe next day, I headed over to the Pagans clubhouse to meet up with Jake. On the way, I was stopped by an Atlantic Highlands cop who arrested me for aggravated assault. The same charge was filed against Jake. We were arraigned in night court that evening before a large crowd of locals.\n\n\"Take them to the county jail,\" Judge Norman Peer said. \"There will be no overnighters in my jail.\"\n\nThe cops treated us like mass murderers with huge bounties on our heads. We were both trussed up with large leather belts around our waists. Each belt had a big ring on the front, and they threaded the handcuffs through the ring so that we had very restricted motion with our hands. Jake and I also had to loop our arms together, which meant that we had to move in concert. Even a simple action like getting into the back seat of a car was difficult.\n\nNone other than the Atlantic Highlands chief of police and a patrolman drove Jake and me to the Monmouth County Correctional Institution in Freehold, a concrete bunker-type building with heavy rolls of concertina wire surrounding it. There, we were processed in\u2014checked for contraband, stripped bare to shower in front of the guards, hosed down with some kind of disinfecting wash. Next, we were given khaki prison garb and thin, plastic-covered foam mattresses.\n\nWe were taken to a large dormitory-style area that housed about 60 inmates, all clad in the same khaki shirts and pants. In the corner were one showerhead and tile drain, one sink and one open toilet. Those were the only facilities for use by all 60 of us in that part of the jail. There was a table in the middle of the room that held the remains of a board game and a few copies of _Woman's Day_ magazine (there were no women, of course, in the unit). Otherwise, there was absolutely nothing to do, with no TV and no books available to us. The building was a shithole, dark and dank with an unhealthy smell that seemed to emanate from the moisture dripping from the walls. As Pagans, we had nothing to fear from any of the men there. But others would likely have found the place on par with Attica or the Louisiana State Penitentiary, albeit on a much smaller scale.\n\nAs soon as I sat down on my bunk to contemplate theorems on quantum turbulence, or when the fuck was I going to eat next, my name was called. I had to go see some jail official about a paperwork question. I was taken to a room and left alone with four African-Americans who were also apparently there to see the same person. Two of the bigger prisoners stared at me with looks of pure malevolence. Would I meet their stare, or avoid it by glancing to the floor? How I reacted would determine how they'd treat me.\n\nTwo of the men's names were called, and suddenly I was alone with one of the guys who had been staring at me, and a smaller guy who seemed indifferent to what was going on. I stared back at the larger prisoner, and we locked eyes. He smirked, showing a couple of gold teeth.\n\nAnother name was called, and then I was alone with Gold Teeth. He walked up to me and continued trying to stare me down. Without a word, I head-butted him, bringing my full weight onto the bridge of his nose. As he staggered back, I brought my right knee up into his balls.\n\nStunned, Gold Teeth staggered back and tried to maintain his balance. The guy had been so confident in his ability to intimidate people that he'd allowed himself to be a soft target. I could easily have punched him in the throat and killed him. A guard came to the door and called my name. I never saw Gold Teeth again, and he never ratted me out to the corrections officers.\n\nAfter a fitful sleep, Jake and I were bailed out the next day.\n\nPlotnikova must have given a more detailed description of what happened at Joey Miles to investigators at some point, because the charges against me were eventually dropped. I can only assume that he realized he would have been dead that night if I hadn't stepped in to stop Slater from beating him. Slater was later found guilty of multiple charges against him in connection with the assault and sentenced to 10 years in prison.\n\nLater that summer, the owners of the Playground nightclub in Long Branch decided that they'd had enough of the Sandy Hook Pagans and kicked us out. From what we heard, one of the investors in the club had gone to see how business was doing and was pissed off to see that there were a bunch of horny, thirsty outlaw bikers hanging out there with their Harleys parked out front.\n\nThe owners left it to the club's manager to explain that Pagan colors were no longer allowed. My heart was pretty much covered in leather at that stage of my life, but I can still remember how terrified the man looked as he told Jake and me that we were no longer welcomed there. Neither Jake nor I really gave a shit about the club anymore anyway. Fearful that he'd be beaten or worse, the manager even offered to lock our colors in the club's safe. We declined and left without incident. There were plenty of other bars on the Jersey Shore.\n\nSoon afterwards, the Orchid Lounge in Asbury Park also became off-limits to us. For a while, members of the Kingsmen Motorcycle Club had been able to serve as peacekeepers between us and the bar's 100 percent African-American patrons. But many of those patrons were armed and had done time; they were tough guys, too, and knew how to play this game.\n\nOne night, about 10 of us roared up to the Orchid on our Harleys, bent on an evening of hard drinking. As soon as we got off our bikes, the club's bouncers told us to fuck off. Jake and I stood by our bikes, playing it cool and considering our next moves. Some of the other guys casually walked around the parking lot and picked up bottles and other make-shift weapons.\n\nSeconds later, an alcohol-fueled group of men who clearly weren't intimidated by our colors emerged from the bar. They were hot and ready for a fight. Some of them carried bottles, too, and I was certain that some were armed with knives. I couldn't see any guns, at least not from where I stood.\n\nBoth sides started shouting obscenities at each other, and a large piece of cement ricocheted off one of our bikes. Police sirens ripped through the air\u2014lots of them, and from different directions. Weapons immediately clattered to the ground, and the angry mob we faced quickly melted away. Some went back into the bar, while others disappeared down the street. The bouncers shouted at us to get the fuck out of town before the cops arrived. The sirens were growing louder by the second, and we knew that it wouldn't be long before the first officers got there. We hopped on our bikes, kick-started them and took off.\n\nAs I rode north along the waterfront, a cool breeze blew through my hair. There was still a piece of me that enjoyed being out with the guys, riding where and when we wanted. I had no responsibilities in life and liked it that way. But the steady diet of violence was eating away at me; I knew that I had to either make a change or accept that this was my life.\n\n### CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR\n\n## BURNED BUT NOT BROKEN\n\nJake Slater and I, along with some other members of the club, had started hanging out at an Asbury Park club called the Alamo, where a new blues-rock vocalist and guitarist from Wilmington, Delaware, was playing\u2014George Thorogood. Located in a converted two-story residence, the Alamo was about a quarter mile from the city's oceanfront boardwalk. Two bouncers flanked the front door, and a long bar ran down the right-hand side of the first floor. There was a stage at the far end of the bar for live acts, and a TV over the counter that was used for showing old boxing films. We tried to keep a somewhat low-key presence there, so we seldom wore our Pagan colors when the Alamo was our destination. But, colors or no colors, Jake drew attention wherever he went.\n\nOne night, we got word that another outlaw motorcycle gang was going to the same club incognito. Hells Angels, Outlaws, Bandidos and other outlaw biker gangs were not welcome in any of Asbury Park's clubs. Asbury Park was Pagan territory, and it was rare for another club to challenge us. When another gang came into Pagan territory, it was up to the local club's members to take care of business. It was a simple, and oftentimes brutal, gang rule that left some bikers with permanent scars, or worse.\n\nThree of us\u2014Jake, another biker I knew only as Vinnie and I\u2014decided to go to the Alamo to see if the rumor about outsiders coming into town was true. Short in stature, Vinnie didn't look particularly threatening. But the well-used buck knife that hung from his thick leather belt told another story of frequent combat with other men; Vinnie was a skillful knife fighter. His arms were covered with spiderweb tattoos, and his bug eyes gave him a rather odd appearance, like that of a malevolent lemur. Oddly, Vinnie was also known for always showing up on time; he kept his watch 10 minutes ahead of the actual time.\n\nSoon after we walked through the door to the Alamo, we noticed five legit-looking bikers giving us the once-over. I couldn't tell if they were Hells Angels, Warlocks or Breed. But they weren't weekend warriors; they were real. Both sides kept it peaceful inside the club. Since things were quiet, at least for the moment, I began chatting up a blonde at the bar. Shortly before closing time, the five mystery bikers quietly walked out. Jake and Vinnie __ followed them. I walked out a few seconds later, after saying goodnight to the woman.\n\nBy the time I cleared the door, a full-scale street brawl was already underway as Vinnie and Jake fought with the gang of five. There was diagonal parking out in front of the Alamo that was normally packed with cars and people. But at this late hour, the parking spots and tree-lined street were empty\u2014and that's where the fight was happening.\n\nVinnie pulled his buck knife from its sheath and slashed one of the mystery bikers across the face. Jake grabbed a piece of a wooden barricade\u2014the kind used by police for crowd control\u2014and fiercely swung it at two of the others, taking them both down. Though unarmed, I ran into the fight, intent on taking out one of the two bikers still standing. Dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, this dude wasn't particularly big. But he looked like a tough guy, a thug, and I got the sense that he knew how to use the long buck knife in his right hand. Calm and focused, he stood staring at me.\n\nAs soon as I came within striking distance, he lunged at me with the knife, aiming for my face. I jerked my body back to avoid the thrust, just as one of the other bikers careened into my shoulder and fell to the side. I threw an adrenaline-laced overhand right that caught my attacker on the bridge of his nose. The impact caused his nose to virtually explode, shattering the soft cartilage and sending blood everywhere.\n\nMy attacker lunged at me again, but his move was slow and off-balance\u2014he was disoriented and in pain after my blow to his nose. I grabbed his right wrist and yanked the knife away from him as he wobbled on unsteady legs. Shifting my grip on the knife handle, I slashed backward across his upper chest and to my left. The biker was now bleeding profusely from both his nose and his chest. He lifted his arm to wipe at the blood dripping from his chin before dropping into a crouch. Suddenly, he got knocked into me as Jake and another bloodied combatant continued fighting nearby.\n\nThe stunned biker and I grappled, tripped and fell to the street. He landed on top of me, and I could feel the warm blood from his nose running onto my face and chest. I frantically bucked and pushed him off me. The man had no fight left at this point, and he collapsed onto his side. He tried to get up but fell. Slowly, he staggered to his feet, still bleeding profusely from his nose and torso, and backed away from me. His fight was over. I glanced over at Vinnie and saw that his opponent was lying on the street and also bleeding heavily.\n\nJake, Vinnie and I scanned the scene and shared quick looks at each other. The fight was over. The five mystery bikers were either lying in the street or quietly skulking away from the scene. We knew it was time to leave before the boys in blue arrived and started asking questions.\n\nThe three of us hopped into a car Jake had \"borrowed\" from one of his customers; we knew it would need some serious cleaning to get all the blood out. From what I'd been told, Jake never got complaints from clients about blood stained-interiors or other issues.\n\nThere was no joyous celebration of our decisive victory. We were spent and coming down from a high that only people in certain lifestyles and occupations experience. This was grim stuff, and any loud bravado about it would have been unwise.\n\nWe drove north along the Jersey Shore, passing through Long Branch and Monmouth Beach before finally arriving back at our club's headquarters in Atlantic Highlands about 45 minutes later. Only the three of us were there that night. I grabbed a hose and used it to get all the blood and bodily fluids off my face, arms and clothes. When I finally went to sleep that night, it was as if I had slipped into a coma.\n\nAt one time, I had found that sort of street fight truly exhilarating. Now it left me feeling cold and empty. There could be no real reason for this shit. I knew that the hard-core older members of the club still thrived on fighting. But I felt like my fighting days were done. It didn't feel like another night on the other side of life. It felt like _muerte_ , death.\n\nLater that week, four of us got together on the street outside that club in Asbury Park\u2014Jake, me and a couple of guys who'd ridden down from Pennsylvania\u2014to talk about dealing with the offending club's trespass into Pagan territory. We'd heard that a bunch of guys from the same gang, a war party, had gone back to the Alamo the very next night, looking for trouble. No question, the Sandy Hook Pagans needed to do something to kick the mystery bikers' asses out of town. The hard-core cats we met for this meeting were old-school: three guys who were likely in their 30s but looked at least a decade older. I was just 22 at the time. The men had no apparent sense of compassion for anyone or anything not connected to the Pagan Nation. Their gap-toothed smiles seemed devoid of mirth. They were killers, pure and simple.\n\nSince we'd received no assistance in the brawl from the staff and regulars in the nightclub, no one felt that we owed them anything. The discussion turned ugly real quick. Someone brought up the idea of shooting a grenade into the club. There was no real concern for any collateral damage that might occur\u2014like, say, the death of the blond woman I'd been chatting with. But this wasn't the time for polite conversation. For the Sandy Hook Pagans, this was a time to get the job done. I wondered if they were really serious about the rocket-propelled grenade.\n\n\"Are we talking about some Chi-Com shit, like an RPG, M203, LAWS rocket or what? Maybe an M79?\" I asked.\n\nThe looks I got were, in a word, withering.\n\n\"If you know so fucking much, you can be the shooter,\" one of the guys said.\n\nThis was no place for arguing the pros and cons of this attack on a nightclub in the heart of New Jersey. Not only were these guys serious, but they actually wanted me to be the one with my finger on the trigger. I'd trained with some of those weapons in the army, and I knew what they could do. There wouldn't be much left of the nightclub, or the people in it.\n\nI said nothing, and we rode our Harleys out of town that night without taking any immediate action. But I'd already made up my mind. I wasn't going to do this, regardless of the personal consequences. I had drawn a mental line in the sand and would go no further. It was time for me to end my involvement with the Pagans. I just couldn't get past the idea of the collateral damage in the nightclub, of killing nameless and faceless people that I didn't know. To continue wearing my colors meant either an extended stay in prison or death.\n\nI had no compunction whatsoever about taking down another biker. That was just part of the life. But the people at the Alamo were just ordinary people. They were the innocents.\n\nI knew that continuing down the road as a Pagan was certain to end very badly. If I could survive leaving, the possibilities were not so bad. I had no criminal convictions, though some charges were still pending. Simply disappearing from New Jersey wasn't an option; I didn't have the money to leave. I was seriously alone, with no allies save my own stubbornness. I felt like the nation state of Israel\u2014surrounded and dwarfed by enemies who would revel in my death. I had no doubt that if I left, a Pagan war party would be coming for me. If that was the case, I would be in either the emergency room or the morgue.\n\nAt the time, I didn't really fear an extended stay in jail, either. I knew how to take care of myself, and I figured that I'd probably be with some other Pagans anyway. My decision to leave, which meant turning in my colors to Jake, wasn't all that courageous, but it was necessary. I knew full well that you couldn't just leave the Pagans without some penalty. I had heard tales of quitters receiving a goodbye beating accompanied by a RICO-like property confiscation. The beatings were severe and victims would often wear the results on their faces and bodies forever. To make matters worse, I wasn't just a soldier in the Pagans, I was the Sandy Hook chapter's sergeant-at-arms, responsible for enforcing the club's rules.\n\nI wondered if Jake would send \"Tennessee\" and some other Pagans to visit me.\n\nTennessee was an enigmatic Pagan. I have no idea which chapter he rode with, and I rarely saw him, even on a motorcycle. Clean-cut, medium height and weight, the guy looked like a school teacher. He wore his blond hair straight and long and had a neatly trimmed beard. He was, in fact, an assassin for the Pagans\u2014and someone who had completed many hits over the years. I had no idea how the guy amassed sufficient piles of cash to buy chromed choppers, oversized pickup trucks and a very comfortable house\u2014and didn't dare ask. People who knew this cat's personal information usually died of lead poisoning.\n\nSeveral months earlier, Tennessee had introduced me to another occupation that outlaw bikers were overqualified for: ripping off drug dealers. If you play for the legion of the damned, it can be an easy way to make spending money and have some laughs along the way. It all depends on who you target. If you rip off a Colombian cartel's courier or mule, your family could be spending thousands on a funeral. But ripping off jerks who have no clue what they're doing and see themselves as the stars in some TV crime drama is not so tough.\n\nAbsent the chance for one big score, we went for the soft targets. Odd as it sounds, my time in the Pagans spent ripping off drug dealers was actually good training for my later work in undercover narcotics. I damned sure had the right instructor. Tennessee and I didn't talk about it much at all. We just did it for pocket money and kicks.\n\nOften it started with a stripper calling Tennessee and tipping him off with the information needed to do the rip. The pole dancers were always heavily compensated for their work with him. My partner was adamant about treating them politely and fairly. He reasoned, and I agreed completely, that most dancers were not drug addicts or wanton sluts; most were very good company and knew how to enjoy life. The ones who stuck around were a cunning lot indeed. They were quite capable of extracting information from the well-lubricated gangster wannabes.\n\nA small cadre of them genuinely liked Tennessee. He was clean, wealthy, handsome and most importantly, generous. He was a paragon of confidentiality. Meanwhile, the knuckle draggers feared him; he was the consummate bad boy.\n\nArmed with the proper dancer-gleaned intelligence, we rarely broke a sweat. Typically we would visit the dealer like any narcotics user. We would take possession of the drugs, about $600 worth (usually a couple of eightballs). When it was time to pass over the payment, we would pocket the flash roll (wad of money) and threaten his life or the lives of anyone else present. The question the dealer needed to answer was: Is it worth going to war with the Pagan Nation over a couple of eightballs? Not once was the answer yes. Mainly because Tennessee was crafty and able to smell a rat with astonishing accuracy. Also, we scared the shit out of people. They wrote off the loss as shrinkage.\n\nOne day Tennessee called me for a meet. We had a much more lucrative score set up. This would likely net about two kilos of Colombian cocaine. That's four and a half pounds of the precious powder, which sold at around $100 a gram at the time. This was an amount of product worth battling over, which was an anomaly for us\u2014we usually ripped off amounts that gave our victims an out. This was different. I could have quit my day job, if I'd had one. Like Oscar Wilde said, \"Work is the bane of the drinking class.\" But if I had learned any lesson at all from this line of work, it was that there is no free ride in the drug business.\n\nI met Tennessee at a shot-and-beer joint in Long Branch. The guy radiated poise. His face and demeanor betrayed no emotion. His eyes held as much compassion as a tiger shark's; you had to look more closely to see the danger signals. I strutted in, all biceps, black boots and motorcycle helmet, wearing the face of doom. We sat at the bar, away from the craven drinkers, who seemed pickled and very much at home in this dreary, smoke-filled pub. The bartender knew to give certain customers a wide berth.\n\nTennessee explained the situation of the score, which was much like a military operation. A dancer named Nadine had positioned herself to overhear a cocaine dealer spill his secrets. Tennessee made a circle with his thumb and forefinger. \"This cat is an asshole, a big asshole. His name is Miguel Vargas. Must have made a couple mid-level scores. Now he thinks he's a player. We are doing the planet Earth a real favor, taking this shithead off the board. Anyone stupid enough to allow some split tail to overhear his play deserves to get clipped. We ought to send a bill for services rendered to the State Police.\"\n\n\"Nadine, huh? Place outside Camden?\" I asked.\n\n\"Yeah, the very one. Known her for years. Solid and fearless. This bitch knows how to keep a secret. Never let me down, not once,\" he said.\n\nTennessee looked straight at me. \"She's special. Some drunken cat stepped over the line with her recently. Even threatened her husband, a man I respect. I heard the drunk took a terrific beating. Some biker types took axe-handle swinging practice on him. I'm told he may never experience sexual gratification again. Sad thing, that.\"\n\n\"I can see the compassion dripping off you, brother. Maybe you can wash it back with some beer.\"\n\n\"I have yet to recon the location, so this plan, limited as it is, is in play in all directions,\" he said. \"Clearly this rip deviates from the nickel-and-dime shit we play on occasion. The only reason I would consider this play is because of the target. Vargas is a soft target who thinks he's hard as a rock. His confidence makes him vulnerable. He likes to brag about no one having the _cajones_ to take him off. He's a nail sticking up that needs hammering down. I don't like the way he treats the girls, either. I ain't no cop, and those girls got to fend for themselves, but this shitbird just rubs me the wrong way.\"\n\nI thought about it for a couple of seconds. It seemed unusual for Tennessee to go after someone in this fashion\u2014and that made it all the more intriguing for me. \"Okay, I'm in,\" I said.\n\n\"Why did I know you would feel that way? Onward. Asshole is set to meet a couple of Colombians at a set location. It's a sprawling and isolated horse farm in Colts Neck. What's unique is the exit/egress. There's a one-mile dirt road that is the only way in or out. Unless you know about the feeder road. The entrance and exit to this drivable track is obstructed by brush. If you don't know it's there, it's all but hidden. Asshole thinks he's the only person on earth who knows about it. Probably right, if he could shut the fuck up. Now we know. We watch the Colombians make the deal, then watch them split. If we can get to the asshole with the Colombians gone, we do the rip. We abort if we cannot spend alone time with Vargas. We can solid this up when we recon the area of operations. So, tough guy, is this your cup of poison?\"\n\n\"Pass me the hemlock.\"\n\nThe night we set up for the rip, it was summertime warm. Nadine learned not just the location but the time the sale was to be made. She was in her own car, and Tennessee and I were using his pickup truck. We were parked on the feeder road, safely away from the shotgun shack where the deal was going down. We needed Nadine to help us. She was going to drive to a pay phone after the Colombians left via the main road, and\u2014using a disguised voice\u2014tell Vargas that the cops were headed his way. Tennessee and I would take him down when he went for his wheels. If he had the blow with him, we would rip him on the spot. If he secreted it in the shack, we could be reasonably assured no real surprises awaited us inside.\n\nTennessee was a real believer in the concept that you can never gain enough intelligence when doing a job. He would rather wait and risk losing a takedown than go in hoping everything would be okay. He must have given the Viet Cong some real headaches during his tour of duty. It was as if he'd never left southern Asia.\n\nI was armed with a 12-gauge street sweeper. Tennessee had a .44-caliber pistol like the one Dirty Harry carried, complete with a shoulder holster, and a razor-sharp bowie knife. He explained that if the location of the drugs became an issue and Vargas was going to play it tough and not give it up, we had to get the info right away. He was going to make Vargas sing castrato if necessary. Tennessee felt that every second we spent dealing with the job brought us closer to a bust or the arrival of unforeseen circumstances.\n\nThere were plenty of things to hide behind out near the shack, and we had both found good cubbyholes from which to view the targeted area and stay well concealed. We arrived an hour before the meet time and settled in. The Colombians, who were about 15 minutes late, cruised up in a freshly waxed El Camino. Two swarthy middle-aged men wearing casual clothes sauntered up to the shack and knocked politely. One held what looked like a bowling ball bag. The door opened and they walked inside. Five minutes later, they exited the building, walked back to their vehicle and drove off.\n\nThough we couldn't see her, we were confident that Nadine would have seen the two men exit and gone to make her call from the pay phone. At the same time, Tennessee crouched down and started moving low and fast like a jungle cat toward Vargas's pimp-mobile. Pulling his bowie knife from its sleeve, he shredded the front and rear tires on his side of the vehicle. He then crept off toward his hiding spot close by.\n\nAll we had to do was wait for Vargas to split after Nadine's tip\u2014or so we thought. Tennessee suddenly stopped mid-stride and went prone and pressed his ear to the ground. He then lifted his head and looked over at me. He shot his arm straight up with his fist clenched, telegraphing that he wanted me to stay absolutely still. I signaled back. He pointed to his ear with his forefinger, then pointed to the dirt road. We could hear the approach of a vehicle way in the distance.\n\nThe vehicle emerged. It was a late-model beige ragtop Cadillac. It stopped nose-to-nose with Vargas's pride and joy. All four doors opened and out popped four very heavily armed African-American men looking very serious indeed. Tennessee and I didn't need a scorecard. Our rip was getting ripped! Two gangsters went to the front door, two went around back. I ran and dove into Tennessee's hiding spot.\n\nTennessee was grinning and shaking his head. \"Can you believe this shit?\"\n\n\"What do we do, rip the rippers?\"\n\nHe was quick to reply: \"No. Fuck no. Those cats are fucking stone cold. We have to write it the fuck off.\"\n\n\"Should we just make a dash for the feeder road?\" I asked.\n\n\"Yeah, but first I have to kick the tiger's balls. Head for the road, I need a couple seconds more.\"\n\nThere was a lot of shouting going on in the shack. As I ran, I kept an eye on Tennessee. That son of a bitch. He ran over to the Cadillac and ripped all four tires with the bowie knife. Now no one at the party could drive away. It was sure to make for some very interesting conversation. We split before the festivities began.\n\nLater at the bar with Nadine, we did some shots and beers and laughed like hell about the whole thing. We were all disappointed about the money, but as Tennessee said, \"Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you.\"\n\nThere was another time, one warm day in Shark River Hills, some three miles southwest of Asbury Park, that I had a chance to speak with Tennessee. We were there for a meeting between my chapter of the Pagans and the North Jersey guys. Quiet and soft-spoken, he seemed to never display anger or toughness. The others seemed enemies of the strength he drew from deep within. We were standing apart from the group when I asked him a question about some mundane club matter. He ignored it.\n\n\"Did you know some people think you might be a Fed?\" Tennessee asked.\n\n\"Some people aren't exactly friendly, but I never thought anyone would think that,\" I said.\n\n\"I know you're not.\"\n\n\"Good, because I'm not,\" I shot back.\n\n\"If you were, I would know,\" Tennessee said. \"There's no Feds in this club, yet.\"\n\n\"I seriously doubt anyone with a badge is going to prospect. I know I didn't, and it may look bad. But a cop prospecting, I don't see it.\"\n\n\"You will,\" Tennessee continued. \"The federal government is not going to put up with barbarians howling through the streets.\"\n\nI backed up a step and shifted my stance a bit. I looked at him and asked, \"Why are you telling me this?\"\n\n\"Because I see a person who has no idea how deep the pit is that you jumped into,\" he said, looking off into the distance. \"Listen closely. There are two things that fuck you up good around here. One is you getting all filled up with yourself. You start believing in your own myths. A Pagan gets his ass kissed all the time out there. Getting your ass kissed leads to blindness. Do not run afoul of club business, and pay your debts inside the club. In this club there is a machine within the machine. Understand?\"\n\n\"Yeah, I think so,\" I said.\n\n\"Two, a lot of people conduct business and let club people know all about it. They will only work with club people. Me? I never deal with club people in business. I do what I am asked by the right people. But no one, I mean no one, knows how I operate. Lucky you, bro, I am going to do some business with you. But today let's just enjoy some cold beer.\"\n\nI'd gotten into the habit of calling people \"bro\" during my years with the Pagans, and for good reason: it meant that you didn't need to learn a fellow Pagan's name. Club members often used the term, and only another Pagan was a bro. No one else was ever referred to in that manner. Not getting familiar with, or close to, others in the club was part of my personal strategy to survive. I'd decided that the less I knew about my associates, the better. Some guys in the club had nicknames sewn onto their colors. Nicknames ran the gamut from amusing to not-so-amusing. You didn't choose your nickname, nor did you have to have one. No one in my chapter used one. Still, the nicknames of Pagans I knew included \"Sir Lancelot,\" \"Terrible Ted,\" \"Boob\" and \"Boo.\" A couple of other guys went by \"Grizzly\" and \"Dogman.\" But generally Pagans generally referred to other club members simply as \"bro.\" There was one Pagan I never got along with, for reasons that I could never figure out; his name was \"Bandit.\" He was tall, heavyset and had a bad attitude. Every time the two of us got together, he was on my case. Maybe it was because I'd never prospected and he resented me for it.\n\nI had one question for Tennessee. \"Bro, I been looking to straighten things out between me and Bandit, but I can't seem to find him. Can you reach out for this cat?\"\n\n\"If you want to talk to him, you need to conduct a s\u00e9ance,\" Tennessee said. \"He had a really hot night a few days back. His fucking house burned straight to the ground. Aren't you glad you asked?\"\n\nWe walked over to a van that was playing some Pink Floyd and had a cooler filled with beer. We each grabbed one, and Tennessee gestured for me to follow him. When we were out of earshot he said, \"I am going to tell you something. If you ask me how I know what happened, we will never talk business of any kind again. Got it?\"\n\n\"I read you lima charlie,\" I said. Loud and clear.\n\n\"Good. When I was in Vietnam I kept a fragmentation grenade on the top strap of my web gear. If capture seemed likely, I was going to pull the pin on the motherfucker. I don't do cages, not in Asia and not here. You need to hear this in case you feel like just quitting this club or cutting a deal with the cops some day.\n\n\"Bandit didn't have problems with just you,\" Tennessee continued. \"He had problems period. Too much hitting the green. He owed money all over the club, and when anyone asked him about it, the response was the same: 'Go Fuck Yourself.' Bandit was big and bad and had a nasty temper. But that describes most everybody around here. But he stood out, and not in a good way. The guys made one last attempt at reason that resulted in another string of F-bombs. So one night just after dark a group of Pagans showed up at Bandit's house. They kicked in the back door and walked in. Bandit was married, but he was alone that night. They started the party without her.\"\n\nTennessee described how Bandit was overpowered and then smashed to the floor face-first, screaming and cursing. One of the guys pulled Bandit's belt off and used it to bind the man's hands behind his back. Another grabbed a kitchen towel and shoved it into his mouth, muffling his screams. Someone grabbed a large glass Pepsi bottle off the kitchen counter.\n\n\"Two of the guys pulled Bandit's pants down to his knees while his upper body was still pinned to the floor,\" Tennessee said. \"The guy with the glass bottle starts screaming at Bandit. \"'Fuck me, huh? Fuck me? No. Fuck YOU! Now let's see who is getting fucked here.'\"\n\nThe Pagan slammed the top of the bottle into the biker's ass. Then he stepped a couple of feet away and kicked the bottle in even deeper with the heel of his boot.\n\n\"Bandit started shrieking, but the towel absorbed most of the noise,\" Tennessee said. The bottle-wielding Pagan then lifted his right leg high and slammed his boot down onto Bandit's tailbone, causing the bottle to shatter in his rectum. A puddle of blood began to form beneath the prone figure, who was writhing in agony.\n\n\"Hey, Bandit, a pain in the ass for a pain in the ass,\" Tennessee recalled. \"We are going to give your wife a pain in the ass, too. We'll save the bitch for dessert.\"\n\nTennessee continued: \"The group doused the first floor of the house with gasoline and torched the place, with Bandit still on the kitchen floor.\n\n\"So, you still happy to be part of the band?\" he asked.\n\nI stood silent, and Tennessee and I finished our beers.\n\nMonths had passed, but Tennessee's story about Bandit remained permanently etched in my memory. As I considered my decision to leave the Pagans, I thought about Bandit's fate and hoped that I wouldn't meet a similar end.\n\nIf my decision to leave the Pagans cost me my life, well, I only had myself to blame.\n\nThe next day, I called Jake and told him only that I needed to see him. We arranged a meeting at his girlfriend Jean's house in Atlantic Highlands, where he'd been staying. Jean's place was only a few blocks from our clubhouse. It was a big, comfortable home with a wraparound porch, on a sloping piece of property just minutes off the busy Highway 36. Jake was still the unofficial sheriff in that town; the local cops were afraid of him and didn't dare tread where they weren't wanted. It was a warm Indian summer day in the fall of 1978.\n\nA buddy of mine who knew Jake, Jon Friedman, had agreed to give me a ride over there, at great risk to himself. Jon wasn't a big guy, perhaps five foot 10 and 200 pounds, but he was very tough\u2014and handsome, too. He'd never had enough money to buy himself a Harley, and he tended to hang on the fringes of the Pagans. I confided in Jon a lot because he knew all the guys I was riding with but was quiet and knew how to play the game. He was also a fighter, and he always had my back.\n\nJon was the one guy I knew who had the fucking balls to drive me to Jake's place. No one else would do that. No one.\n\nI barely acknowledged Jon as I hopped into his Chevy for the ride over. I held the colors in my hand for the entire ride, never once putting them down. I was in my own world, scripting the details of my upcoming meeting with Jake.\n\nMy colors, nothing more than a sleeveless denim vest with the Pagan logo sewn on the back, were perhaps the most valuable thing I owned, and I was ready to give them up. I'd only had my colors for about two years. But we tended to wear them a lot, and so mine were already looking faded. There was nothing all that unusual or special about them; they were virtually identical to those worn by the other members of the Sandy Hook Pagans, though mine had picked up a few bloodstains over time.\n\nI knew I'd be dead if I showed Jake even a hint of fear; he could sense it even at a distance. I had to put my game face on and quickly get in and out. Would I be fighting a life-and-death brawl the second I handed him my denim colors? Would he be armed? Would anyone else be there\u2014Tennessee or some other assassin? Would Jean's blue Volkswagen Beetle be in the driveway, or would she be at work? I liked her, and she would no doubt see me as a betrayer. Would she be there, giving me snake eyes?\n\nIf I'd had the money and the wherewithal, I would have sent the colors to Jake by FedEx, insured, along with a handwritten note saying \"Suck on this\"\u2014and caught the very next flight to Phuket, Thailand. There were no known Pagans in Thailand at the time. But I had no funds and no skills outside those needed to be a mercenary.\n\nI wondered, too, what life would be like for me after I handed over my colors. Certainly I expected retribution of the violent sort. I had made one firm decision that was etched in stone: I would not involve anyone else. No enlisting others to shield me from the storm coming, regardless of how it shook out.\n\nUnlike most of the guys I rode with, I never felt myself drunk with power because of my club status. If people felt less inclined to deal with me because I was no longer this revered motorcycle thug, so be it. No doubt I would make associations with worthier people, as I was no longer a Pagan. For certain, it was going to be entertaining to see how some people who had been my \"friends\" would react to my clubless status.\n\nWe passed the flagpole that stood in the center island between the four lanes of traffic on Highway 36. A couple minutes later, we arrived at Jean's house. Jon pulled up in front, shut off the car and tossed an arm over the back of the seat. He knew enough to stay put.\n\nWearing a pair of jeans and white T-shirt, Jake was sitting on the wooden front porch when we arrived, his black engineer boots resting on the red brick stoop. There was no one else around. His eyes narrowed and focused on me as I got out of the car, carrying my colors, and strode across the small front yard and up the steps. He stood up but otherwise made no move and offered no greeting.\n\nThe two of us stood toe to toe on the front porch. \"I ain't into this shit anymore,\" I said, looking straight at him while handing over my colors.\n\nJake's stare burned into me; he was silent as a cobra. He took my Pagan vest but otherwise stood rock solid.\n\nI turned around and walked back to Jon's car, not knowing what to expect and not knowing if I'd still be alive the next morning. The two of us drove away without saying a word.\n\n### CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE\n\n## THE WARRIOR'S SPIRIT\n\nSlater never did come after me, nor did he send Tennessee. I can only speculate why there was no effort to retaliate. Perhaps it was because Jake's sentencing in the Plotnikova case came soon after I left the Pagans. Being in prison would certainly have been a diversion, though he could easily have gotten word out to other club members if he'd wanted to.\n\nThere may have been other factors at play, too. For one, I didn't have any knowledge of murders or major drug transactions that would have made me a liability. I'd also learned that Jake opted not to tell other club members for some time that I'd left the Pagans. Maybe he was reluctant to make my departure known because he'd vouched for me and was loath to explain his miscalculation to those higher up the chain of command. I knew, too, that he genuinely liked me. Perhaps he thought that I'd reconsider and ultimately rejoin the Pagans.\n\nJake knew that I could defend myself, too, and that might have been a factor, though that seems unlikely. The Pagans had certainly killed others more dangerous than me. If the club's leadership truly wanted me dead, I'd be six feet under. For whatever reason, no one came after me, and for that I am thankful.\n\nMy decision to leave the Pagans was an obvious turning point in my life\u2014but danger and numerous tests of character were still ahead. In many ways, my years in the army and riding with the Pagans proved an extraordinary training ground for my subsequent 20 years as a police officer.\n\n_My brother, Mike, and me at his karate school in Red Bank with three of his Jamaican connection fighters._\n\nI had done my time in hell and was eager to put things right.\n\nNo longer being a notorious outlaw biker changes your social calendar, and your life. Your aura is weaker; you simply are not hot shit anymore. I embraced this newfound anonymity. There was a freedom to not having to be the nastiest lion in the pack. But there was a void as well. And nature abhors a vacuum. I filled the void with something that was challenging and required a strong sense of focus\u2014the martial arts.\n\nI spent more time training with the Jamaicans, karate star Tadashi Nakamura's elite, at Mike's school in Red Bank. These men were first-class gentlemen and ferocious fighters who seemed impervious to pain and fatigue. Clearly the group's leader was Leroy Bennett. He was a taciturn gentleman with a compelling edge to his voice when he spoke. I can still hear his Jamaican accent as he uttered commands in Japanese. Bennett, his brothers and his friends rocked my world, as well as pushing my spiritual and physical envelope. They were an inspiration to me and reminded me of the words of a Van Morrison song, \"Tupelo Honey,\" which talks about having insight and being unstoppable on the road to freedom.\n\nMy time in the army brought me from a place of innocence to a feeling that life was a battleground, a place where only the strong survived without any real sense of what it was to really even be alive. I wasn't too far off, but my concept of what constitutes strength was where I was wrong. My time with the Pagan Nation was a completely different situation. I willingly and knowingly walked into the wolf's lair and ran with the wolf pack. I did that of my own free will. I could not shake the idea that I had so easily adopted the ways of those so brutal and in so many ways decadent and destructive. I can console myself with the notion that I was thrown to the wolves during my military experience and that the ways of brutal survival are not so easily shed. But, and it's a big but, a lot of people went through a similar experience and didn't wind up on the dark side. And I do not believe that people can lie to themselves with any tangible success.\n\nIn my mind, the scales had to be evened. I wasn't a contributor to anything positive or in any way enduringly good. This was serious spiritual baggage; it gnawed at me, and it leapt out at me in the wee hours of the morning, when I struggled to sleep. I could train Korean Karate and lift weights until complete exhaustion, as I often did, but my journey to wholeness was incomplete.\n\nOne of the people I trained karate with was Dan Horkelor, a CPA by training and a superb fighter in his spare time, who lived in nearby Tinton Falls.\n\nDan was lean, maybe 175 pounds, and about six foot two. He spoke with a very educated, polite flair and would likely appear ripe for a beating in the wrong environment; he looked like a geek. But Dan had the most powerful kicks and punches that I've ever seen. He had mentally broken down the kinesiology of martial arts movement and was able to attack with devastating efficiency. He had a side kick, reverse punch combination that crushed the toughest and most skilled opponents. To me, Dan was an iconic figure. He had real credibility among the leaders in East Coast martial arts.\n\nThe combination of his very meek appearance and deadly martial skills fascinated me, so periodically I'd try to strike up a conversation with him in the gym, to no avail. At first I think he saw me as uninteresting, an uneducated knuckle dragger. Then things changed.\n\nOne evening after a spirited karate session, Dan and I went out for a couple of beers. I was excited to get some face time with the guy, whom I saw as a true living legend. But I wasn't looking to talk fighting techniques with him. I wanted to pick his brain on literature germane to oriental spiritual philosophy. I told Dan of my thirst for books that could help me grow philosophically and emotionally from the field of oriental spiritual discipline.\n\n\"I have been really into Castenada,\" I told Dan. \"I recently saw a book by a Buddhist scholar named Suzuki who thinks Castenada is really writing about oriental philosophy using a divergent background.\"\n\nDan just smiled. \"I am familiar with Suzuki. But not that subject. Are you serious about understanding oriental spiritual discipline?\"\n\n\"More serious than you can imagine. What's the point of training so diligently and not understanding the concepts that drove the creators who put their lives on the line to spread their message? There is no doubt there are deep underlying principles at play here.\"\n\n\"Not understanding is akin to driving a car, but only in circles. I would strongly recommend Nitobe's _Bushido_. This is the code of the Japanese warrior. It's almost poetic. Then the _Hagakure_ , the bible for samurai. It was written in parables\u2014like the Western Bible\u2014about the year 1590.\"\n\nDan also recommended I reread _Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan_ , by Carlos Castaneda. It had nothing to do with the Code of the Bushido or anything oriental, but it had everything to do with the Toltec's concept of the warrior. Find the nexus between the first two books and the third, Dan urged.\n\n\"Drink in the contents and apply them to your life,\" he encouraged. \"You have to expand your consciousness. The world may not at all be what you currently feel it to be. More importantly there is a way of life, a way of personal conduct that you can embrace. It can make you whole.\"\n\nDan had given me the key to the door of oriental wisdom. It was a gift more important than anything he could have taught me in Mike's school. I attacked Dan's recommended books with a zeal I had never felt before. I sensed I was on the cusp of something truly cathartic and at the same time life-enriching. As I searched to find the nexus between the books, a new way of being unfolded in front of me.\n\nI realized that all of the trials I'd been through, both in the military and with the Pagans, were trials that I could use as a foundation for a new, more deeply insightful way of living. I would never even attempt to explain it to another living person. It wasn't the sort of thing that one explained anyway. It was too intensely personal and important. I had the building blocks, three books that burned deep inside me. Not only did they set in motion a new and exciting view of life, they also helped drive an unquenchable love for the written word that continues to this day. I began to devour books and see the past and present world in a crescendo of different voices.\n\nI identified three key concepts from the books Dan recommended:\n\nThe _Bushido:_ \"A man can weep tears from the beauty of watching a cherry blossom fall from the branch of its origin. That same man could cut another man in half with his Katana and feel only the touch of justice.\"\n\nThe _Hagakure_ : \"A samurai is in need of but three qualities. All things are extensions of these qualities: Compassion\u2014One must merely compare themselves to others and put them ahead of you. Courage\u2014One must view danger and death and move forward. Wisdom\u2014One must listen to others, truly listen.\"\n\n_Journey To Ixtlan_ : \"We have inherited but two and only two choices from the creator: strength or misery. Choose.\"\n\n### CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX\n\n## SHOOTING AT THE WRONG CLUB\n\nWith my Pagan connections and colors gone, I needed to find another way to make a living. I wasn't even a qualified laborer on a construction site. If I used a hammer and nail, my thumb was constantly at risk. I had no mechanical skills whatsoever and didn't even own any tools. I doubted the army was looking for me to re-enlist. I was still a tough guy, though, and knew I had the look and skills to be a bar bouncer.\n\nI began work in October 1978 at what can best be described as a fight club on Route 35 in Sayreville, New Jersey, called Loose Encounters. It was quiet on weeknights and a drunken and drugged free-for-all on the weekends. The music was by New Wave bands like the Cars and the B-52s. Across the traffic barrier and on the other side of Route 35 was another club that played different music but was identical in outward appearance.\n\nForget what you may think of tough guys dispatching drunken scoundrels to the delight of sexy young women. The reality for bouncers is far different. The pay sucks, the fair maidens are usually not that \"fair\" and if things go bad and some drunken loser gets hurt, the club manager will blame you. I worked weekday nights alone, my only \"backup\" the club manager, who was of absolutely no use in a fight. He was good-looking and cocky, and had plenty of \"nose candy\"\u2014cocaine\u2014if any of the Jersey girls caught his eye. I generally had little to do with him and hung out in the nightclub's outer lobby, where there was a small TV and a pay phone. As people walked through the front door, I checked for IDs and forbidden intoxicants.\n\nOne evening, while the manager and I were watching TV in the lobby, the ultimate big-haired Jersey girl strutted in, wearing a short, ass-hugging skirt and stiletto heels, and noisily chewing gum. When I asked her for ID, she fed me a line of bullshit. Good looks or not, she wasn't getting in. But the horny manager saw things differently and escorted her in. A few minutes later, the manager was back in the front lobby, looking glum. His best pickup lines had apparently failed him.\n\n\"That drunken bitch is trouble,\" I said.\n\nSeconds later, the chick was back and headed straight for the pay phone. \"This fucking club fucking sucks,\" she said, looking disdainfully at both the manager and me. \"I wouldn't come to this fucking shithole if it was the last place on earth. Fuck this fucking place.\"\n\nShe was right: the club _was_ something of a shithole. Still, no one had dragged this woman in. She'd walked in of her own accord. The club manager was apoplectic. He grabbed her by the back of her neck, quick-marched her through the lobby door and smashed her with real force face-first into the pavement. Damn! Her face was bleeding, she was crying hysterically and she was kicking her high-heeled stilettos. She really got whacked.\n\nThe manager retreated to the sanctity of his office. Even though I truly disliked the woman, I went to help her. She pushed me away and screamed that her brothers and the cops would retaliate. I watched as she stormed over to her car, got in and took off down Route 35.\n\nSometime later, the woman came back trailed by two cops who seemed quite anxious to help her. The police told her that all she needed to do was identify her assailant, and they would make an arrest.\n\nShe looked angrily at me but said nothing. All I could think of was the scene at Joey Miles, where I'd gone to the aid of Plotnikova and ended up getting arrested for aggravated assault. The cops went inside with Big Hair and looked around. But the woman was unable to identify her assailant, perhaps because the manager had retreated to his office, as he often did when trouble broke out. With no one to arrest, the woman left, and so did the cops.\n\nWhile working as a bouncer, I also found the time to get married to my girlfriend, Jane. We stayed married for 19 years before calling it quits in 1999; we never had any kids together. In the classic movie _Network,_ Peter Finch says, \"I was married to 30 years of shrill, shrieking fraud.\" My marriage wasn't shrill or shrieking. It also wasn't a fraud. But it wasn't a great and passionate love affair, either. It just _was_.\n\nJane was always around when I was a biker. She didn't demand leading-lady status. But she had my back. When I was released from the county lockup, she was there with a mug of gin and tonic that would make a rhino stutter.\n\nShe proved a theory I had and still firmly believe in: if you treat the right woman honorably, there exists on this earth no creature with greater loyalty. This trait that I so highly value was alive and well in Jane's persona. So if infidelity wasn't an issue and neither of us wanted children, why then did we get divorced? Because life is complex, and people are true creatures of change.\n\nWe shared a love of travel to lush, secluded and sometimes dangerous locales. Her father was an executive at Exxon Oil and an accomplished sailor who took his family to tropical destinations. Jane could do serious travel, and never complained about canceled flights, venomous snakes, rabid monkeys or _banditos_.\n\nThere exists no shortage of material on movies and TV shows concerning the reasons why divorce is so prevalent in police marriages. The paradigm is usually a cop whose heart has turned to leather because of the horrors he is a part of. He frequently misses spending time with the Mrs. and winds up working to the neglect of wife and family. To be sure, that is probably accurate in some cases. More often it's the increased attention he gets from women after getting the uniform, badge and gun. I didn't \"run bimbos\" like some of my cop buddies. I had friends who literally had two and three wives\u2014one legal and two more very close relationships. Each woman was supposedly unaware of the others.\n\nIn our case, it was just a mutual agreement that we were both still young enough to start new relationships and put sexual and emotional passion back on the table\u2014with new partners. We simply didn't have the spark any more. Although I haven't communicated with Jane for many years, I'm certain she's doing well.\n\nWorking at the club gave me time to continue reading the _Bushido_ and the _Hagakure_ , as well as keep training at my brother's gym. I wound up staying for almost two years, doing a good deal of training and reading during the period. Still, I had a nagging, uneasy feeling about the job. Somewhere deep down, my gut was telling me that this place was trouble and that I should be thinking of another career change, even if it meant working at McDonald's.\n\nI was the lone bouncer one evening when a short and very drunk white guy, about 30 years old and wearing a leather jacket, walked through the door. He didn't need to be asked for his identification. He needed a cab ride home to sleep it off. He was also very angry, and being told that he couldn't enter the club because he was too drunk didn't go over well, either.\n\nThe guy tried to walk around me, but I blocked his path, gave him a push toward the door and told him to leave. I even offered to call him a cab. But he went ballistic and let out a stream of obscenities. I opened the door and shoved him outside.\n\n\"Fuck you,\" he said. \"I'm coming back with a gun. You are a dead man.\"\n\nIt certainly wasn't the first time that I'd been threatened. The odd thing was that I hadn't done anything all that bad this time. I didn't think much about it and went back to watching TV. About 45 minutes later, the lobby door burst open.\n\n_My one foray into bodybuilding in Little Silver, New Jersey, in_ 1980 _._\n\n\"Call the cops,\" a man frantically screamed. \"Someone's shooting up the club across the street. He must be killing people. Someone call the cops now! Oh my God, oh my God.\"\n\nI dialed the phone, got the Sayreville Police on the line and handed it to the guy, who looked like he was going to pee on himself.\n\n\"It was a short guy with a leather jacket,\" he told the police dispatcher. \"He pulled up to the door of the club and just went crazy. He emptied the gun. He just kept shooting into the lobby. Then he got back in his car and drove away like nothing happened.\"\n\nI immediately recognized the description and realized it was the guy who had threatened me earlier that evening. I'd narrowly missed getting blown away by the nut because he got confused and went to the similar-looking club on the other side of Route 35. The only outward difference between the clubs was that one sat on the northbound side of the divider and the other on the southbound side. That cat had made good on his threat; he was just too drunk to realize that he was on the wrong side of the highway. The next day, I went to a job recruitment center. I never went back to the club.\n\nStill without any skills, I worried what the woman in the job center would be able to find for me. After a brief chat, she mentioned that the Department of Defense was looking for security personnel for Fort Monmouth, in Eatontown. I had a chance to get the job because I was an army vet. I worried that a background check might turn up my time in the Pagans; I knew that the FBI was aware I'd been a member.\n\nSurprisingly, my application went through, and I was soon wearing a navy blue DOD uniform and working alongside mostly World War II veterans. I was ecstatic and realized that I suddenly had a chance to set a radically new course for myself. I vowed to put it all on the line for the good guys. Somehow I'd lived through my time as a Pagan and emerged unscathed, with no felonies on my record. I'd been spared for reasons that I didn't even know. I was one of the lucky ones, and now I wanted to right the scales of justice, where I felt a real debt was owed.\n\nI went to work at Fort Monmouth in September 1980 and spent three years there as a DOD guard. I worked night shifts and enjoyed hearing a mix of war stories from the veterans there. Eventually, I was promoted to sergeant. During the day, I took classes in everything from computer science to creative writing at Brookdale Community College. And I continued to work out every evening at my brother's gym, further honing my martial arts skills.\n\nI knew that I'd never make any real money as a security guard\u2014there was no opportunity for advancement\u2014so I looked for job opportunities. I wanted more than a 10-year-old car in the driveway and a Naugahyde couch in my living room. Then I heard there were openings for police officers. Ironically, I was perfectly positioned for the job because of my status as a veteran and my experience as a DOD security guard. I took the state civil service exam and\u2014thanks to my veteran status\u2014rose to the top of the list of job applicants. I had my choice of where I wanted to go to work. I could go to the Middletown Police Department or somewhere else in Monmouth County if they didn't want me. I was number five on the county list.\n\nTo be sure, the Middletown PD had just cause to reject me, given my arrest at the diner while wearing Pagan colors. But the money and benefits were very good in Middletown, and they had the reputation of being the toughest department in the state, ranking just below the New Jersey State Police. Working for a department that seemed fair in dealing with people, kept order and didn't put up with shit from bad guys appealed to me.\n\nMoreover, my father was the town administrator in Middletown and a close friend of its police chief, Joe McCarthy. Some people thought the fix was in because of the relationship between my dad and McCarthy. But my father had a strict personal policy about favoritism, and I knew there was no way that he was going to get involved on my behalf. He'd told me that quite clearly. My father hated my involvement with the Pagans; if I suffered a career setback because of it, so be it. I'd have to take it as a life lesson and move on. I respected both his judgment and candor, and realized that Joe McCarthy would have to decide.\n\nThe Middletown police chief was something of a legend. He was street-smart, loved to fight and was that rarest of creatures, a sober Irishman. The guy seemed to thrive on controversy and stress. Maybe he'd even entertain the idea of having a former member of the Sandy Hook Pagans on his force.\n\n### CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN\n\n## THE MAN IN THE DUSTER\n\nChief McCarthy called me in for a sit-down meeting in his office before deciding if he'd hire me or not. The chief was sky-high on adrenaline. Gentleman Gerry Cooney had just knocked out Ken Norton, and McCarthy was thrilled by the prospect of a future Irish heavyweight champion. He seemed to admire two qualities above all others in men: toughness and loyalty. The two of us bonded almost instantly. He liked the fighter in me and sensed that I'd be loyal. His street instincts were sharp, and I knew I'd get a shot at balancing my inner scale of justice.\n\nMcCarthy told me to find an attorney who could get the arrest in the Sandy Hook Diner incident expunged, and he'd hire me. Just remember to stay loyal, he admonished me. I thanked him, got the charges expunged and joined the department a few weeks later. I spent a few days working in headquarters before entering the police academy in Freehold.\n\nOne day, McCarthy told me to hang out in the dispatch area, where dispatchers took the emergency calls and assigned patrol cars. A shift lieutenant ran the show. About an hour after I got there, a police officer came in with a prisoner in handcuffs, a big, burly white guy about 40 years old. It was alleged that the guy had repeatedly raped his 12-year-old daughter.\n\nThe arresting officer walked the prisoner in, and I watched as the two disappeared down a long, steep flight of stairs to the basement for processing\u2014which included the customary mug shot and fingerprinting.\n\nChief McCarthy was in the dispatch area, talking to the shift lieutenant, when the officer came back upstairs and reported that the prisoner refused to have his fingerprints taken. McCarthy asked what the man was being charged with, and the officer described the rape charge.\n\n\"Bradshaw and I will fingerprint him,\" the chief bellowed, motioning for me to follow him downstairs. I recalled the time I'd been fingerprinted with Jake after the diner arrest some six years earlier.\n\nMcCarthy grabbed the prisoner and tried to guide the man's fingers over the print card. The prisoner wrenched his hand to the side, smudging the card. The chief told the man not to do that again. McCarthy then repeated his move, and the prisoner smudged a second card. Without saying a word, the chief slammed his elbow back into the prisoner's head. The bad guy crumpled to the ground.\n\n\"See him try to hit me, Bradshaw?\"\n\n\"Yes, Chief,\" I said.\n\nThe two of us reached down and grabbed the prisoner by his arms and dragged him up the flight of stairs and into the area holding three jail cells. On the count of three, we tossed him into the cell and left him there in a heap.\n\n\"Thanks for the help,\" Chief McCarthy said before heading back to his office.\n\nA few days later, I reported to the Monmouth County Police Academy on Highway 33 East in Freehold for training. The county facility did double duty, functioning as both a police and fire training facility. The head drill instructor there reminded me of Louis Gossett Jr.'s character, Marine Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley, in the 1982 movie _An Officer and a Gentleman_. He certainly had all the vernacular of the movie down.\n\nThe class was co-ed and included several Vietnam and military vets who weren't worried in the least about a DI at a police academy; all of us with military training had seen, and learned to deal with, men who were a good deal fiercer than this dude. Week after week of the academy passed by. In many ways, the training was all politically correct and felt good. But I wondered if the training would really be of much help when we were out on the street, trying to catch the bad guys. Like everyone else, I just wanted to complete my training and go to work.\n\nIn mid-December 1983, I graduated from the academy and headed off to work in the Middletown PD. Suddenly I was going to be working alongside the very same men who had arrested me that night at the diner. A handful of them had been involved with the actual arrest and knew what had gone down. Others had simply heard stories, embellished by the officers in much the same way that fishermen exaggerate theirs. The local newspaper had unwittingly complicated things by describing me as a black belt in a piece about some of the new officers joining the force.\n\nDonning the uniform and reporting to work in the very building I was once jailed in is difficult to describe. I was excited and wanted to give it hell. But clearly some of my workmates were far less enthusiastic about my arrival. Behind my back, there were mutterings from some of the officers that I was \"just a Pagan with a badge.\"\n\nIn truth, I just wanted to fit in. I was very well aware that I was under a microscope and that anything I did wrong would get plenty of attention. I was also aware that I needed these guys to have my back. You cannot survive on the street alone in this business unless you have a lot of experience, savvy and just a bit of old-fashioned luck. Even then, it's tough. So I kept to myself and showed deference to the experienced and respect to supervisors.\n\nI reported for my first tour, which was the midnight shift. My superior officers and squad mates were cordial. Most had lengthy careers under their belts, and my first briefing was without excitement. I was given the keys to a patrol car, assigned a sector to cover and sent off into the chill night air. I didn't even have time to familiarize myself with the controls for the emergency lights and siren or figure out how to detach the shotgun from its mount before responding to my first radio call\u2014a woman dying from a drug overdose.\n\nI made it to the call and pretended to know what I was doing, checking for a pulse and finding none. Other officers and an ambulance were also on the way, and it wasn't more than a couple of minutes before they were on scene. One of the other officers explained to me how I should write up the incident report, which I did. Then I headed off and found a quiet park, where I sat and figured out how the car worked. Most police academies include a whole section on learning how to operate a police car in an emergency situation, including high-speed driving techniques. But that wasn't the case at the bare-bones Monmouth County Academy.\n\nMaybe it was fortunate that local residents had no idea what we learned, or didn't learn, before graduating from the academy. A couple of years later, Middletown and other Monmouth police departments implemented the radical concept of sending new officers out with a training partner to better learn the ropes.\n\nSeveral days later, I was in the downstairs locker room at headquarters with some of the other uniformed officers when Jim Wladyco walked over to me. This guy was massive and covered with tattoos. I knew that he had been a hang-around with the Breed but not a member of the club. At one point, he'd supposedly stolen the colors from the vice president of the Sandy Hook Pagans. Another time, he'd put his pistol in Slater's face, no doubt because Jake was doing something crazy and dangerous. I was curious how this impromptu meeting was going to play out and thought it had the potential to get really ugly because of my history.\n\nWladyco reached out, shook my hand and introduced himself. \"Welcome to the force,\" he said. \"I used to ride with the Breed. I made a killing running guns for them. But those days are long over.\"\n\nI shook his hand, we talked a little about the department and that was it\u2014no disparaging remarks about my time as a Pagan, no crude jokes. There was nothing but small talk between us. Still, I wondered if he'd be willing to support me out on the street if I ever ended up in some bad situation. I got the answer to that question some weeks later, when the two of us were out on the pistol range, which was in a large, wooded area adjacent to the police academy. Wladyco was the range supervisor.\n\nAfter shooting a course with the rest of the squad, I walked over to the table where Wladyco was seated to give him my score. I bent down and grabbed a pencil to jot my numbers down on his clipboard.\n\n\"Look,\" he said.\n\nI glanced up and saw a cocked and locked .45-caliber pistol in his hands, pointed at my family jewels. Before I could react, he pulled the trigger and the handgun went off. The sound was deafening\u2014but I was still standing, and in one piece. Wladyco started laughing hysterically as the patrolmen around me glanced at each other awkwardly and tried not to react.\n\nThe round was a blank.\n\nWladyco wouldn't have pulled a crazy stunt like that in front of the guys if he had any ulterior motives about taking me out some day; this guy would have my back, if I ever needed it. I took his action in stride and tried to joke with him\u2014though deep inside I was still reeling.\n\nOver time, I came to know Jim Wladyco as a quiet guy with a great sense of humor\u2014at least most of the time. He tended not to hang out with cops when he was off duty, though I seemed to be an exception to that rule. He also tended to carry exotic weapons (including an AK-47 with a folding stock) while on the job, which was fine with me. I'd been comfortable around guns for years, and having a little extra firepower in the field could never hurt.\n\nI enjoyed my first week on the job, and it felt like I might be able to fit in with the men, most of whom I had little if anything in common with.\n\nOn Christmas Day, roughly two weeks after I left the academy, I responded to a call that could have had a serious impact on my tenure with the department. It was a bitterly cold and windy day. Right after the shift change, at about 3:15 p.m., I was dispatched to a wealthy neighborhood in the southern part of town; there was an intruder\u2014a \"dangerous-looking\" African-American man who was trying to enter someone's house. Another officer was riding with me that day.\n\nJust as we pulled up to the large house, the dispatcher radioed us again, reporting that she'd received a second call from the homeowner, this one more frantic, saying that the man was again trying to get in. The two of us agreed to split up\u2014I took the front door, and the second officer headed around the left side toward the one in back. As I walked toward the home, I turned to see an African-American male, about 40 years old and wearing a long coat, reminiscent of the duster coats once used by ranchers. He walked straight toward me without saying a word.\n\nI stopped dead in my tracks, identified myself as a police officer and ordered the man to halt. As I did so, I reached down, put my right hand on top of my gun and unclipped the leather strap that held it in the holster.\n\nHe ignored my order and continued walking. At the same time, he reached into his coat and pulled out something that glinted in the waning afternoon sun. I cleared leather, aimed at center of mass, applied light pressure to the trigger\u2014but held fire.\n\nIt wasn't a gun but a wallet that he'd been reaching for. A metal chain on the side of the wallet is what caught the light.\n\nThe man explained that his car had broken down on the nearby Garden State Parkway and that he'd left it to get help. This was in the days before cell phones. Freezing cold and unable to find anyone to give him a hand, he'd tried to get inside.\n\nI called to the other responding officer, and we assured the frantic homeowner that there was no problem. I took the man to headquarters, where he was able to warm up and make some phone calls. A tow truck was dispatched to pick up the broken-down car.\n\nAs I drove to my apartment that day, I thought about how easily I could have made the wrong call and shot an innocent and unarmed man who was simply trying to drive somewhere to share Christmas dinner with family. I'd taken a chance when I opted not to pull the trigger. A man's life hung in the balance as I made a split-second decision. Polite and respectful, that man in a duster coat taught me an invaluable lesson on pulling the trigger.\n\nFor two years, I continued to patrol. The long hours that I'd spent with my dad delivering milk as a kid came in handy because I'd already learned most of the street names in town. I grew closer to the other guys on the force and continued to demonstrate loyalty to the always-colorful Chief Joe McCarthy. I made some small busts, responded to numerous calls about heart attacks and other health emergencies, and improved my marksmanship at the range. I continued training Korean Karate and working out with weights as well.\n\nUnderneath, I was desperate to do something more to prove my worth. Undercover narcotics was what I needed. That was where I could balance the inner spreadsheet against my years in the Pagans. I was young, too, and needed the adrenalin rush that came with living life on the edge.\n\nLooking back on my initial two years in uniform, I know I learned the basic methods of patrolling. But I failed in terms of doing _effective_ police work. I didn't really get it, I suppose, until after I'd worked undercover. My attitude changed. After two wild years undercover, I no longer had any desire to impress people or to prove my loyalty and bravery in any way. I had worked with so many solid cops from all over\u2014agents from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and the State Police, and all the city officers who did the real dirty work\u2014and managed to earn their respect, as they earned mine.\n\nI realized after the Christmas Day incident that I was a touch too authoritative, too black-and-white and by-the-book. I hadn't yet learned that good police work is usually done in more of a gray area. Over time, I learned that most people respond better to honey than to vinegar. I could bull my way through a situation using my gun, badge and strength, or I could take a kinder and more thoughtful approach that resulted in fewer conflicts and better results.\n\nAs a patrolman, I responded to plenty of calls about loud parties lasting late into the night and pissing off the neighbors\u2014for good reason. In the early days, I'd demand to see the homeowner and officiously order him to turn down the music \"NOW.\" But that put the homeowner in an awkward position, and they'd often try to save face with their party guests by defying me. Ultimately, I'd win the confrontation, but not before some kind of verbal conflict or a fight. My \"in your face\" style got the job done, but not without a lot of conflict. Later on, I learned to handle the call in an entirely different way that rarely failed. I would find the homeowner and ask to see them privately, away from the other partygoers.\n\n\"Look, man, I need a favor from you,\" I'd tell the homeowner. \"Do this for me and maybe someday I can help you out with a problem or a ticket. Listen, it's your neighbors complaining, and if the shoe was on the other foot, you would be pissed if someone screwed up your Saturday night. So please, I am asking for your help. Kill the music, and you and I are friends.\"\n\nThe response from my new method usually yielded amazing results. I could quietly stand back and watch as the homeowner would start berating the partiers, demand the music be turned off and comply with whatever I may have requested. Not only were the results better, my new policing method wasn't as stressful. The conflicts were gone, and I made solid connections in the community.\n\nIn time, I truly started to feel that I was a force for good. I stood for the weak and defenseless and punished the truly deserving. I broke out of the rock-hard shell I'd created during my years in the army and with the Pagans and engaged the compassionate and fair-minded part of me that had been extinguished by that sea of violence.\n\nMy new method was to be the muscular, hard-looking \"bad\" cop in appearance, but kind and understanding in action. Coming on strong and then being kind seemed to put people in a better space. Being a good guy was now my true persona.\n\nOne of the younger guys on the job was finishing a tour with the Monmouth County Narcotics Task Force. This cat was a friend of mine and filled me in on undercover work. I wanted in badly, made my request and waited. I'd been on the job less than two years, but I was older than most of the other guys when I joined and anxious to get more bad guys. The MCNTF had jurisdiction in some of the roughest neighborhoods in the state, the same ones that I'd hung out in as a Pagan. Perhaps more important, I knew how to blend in with the people there, because I'd been one of them. I didn't need to assume some undercover persona; I simply needed to adopt the same persona that I'd had only a few years earlier.\n\nThe trouble was that the MCNTF had a very tenuous relationship with the Middletown PD. The task force prosecuted the big cases and also prosecuted cops\u2014some with zeal. There was real bad blood brewing, and it was only fitting that I should be in the middle of it. In the end, it was Chief Joseph McCarthy who would decide who went undercover. He chose me, and dissent be damned. My time at the MCNTF was the precursor to my hell ride at the Bayshore Narcotics Task Force.\n\nI have seen cops try to do undercover work and admit they were too spooked to continue. It takes a certain type of person to walk unarmed into enemy territory, with no real backup and no trimmings of authority. No gun, no badge. Just your wits and balls.\n\nI believed that I could fit in and pull off undercover work because I had been a criminal, at least for the two years I ran with the Pagans. Now, running with the righteous, I was given the extraordinary chance to redeem myself. Not for the affirmation of others, but for me personally. Where I stood morally mattered to me intensely. It was the fuel that pushed me to take down drug dealers like Big John and so many others who treat the world as if they are predators picking off sheep.\n\n### CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT\n\n## COCAINE & CADILLACS\n\n\"What the fuck are you doing, trying to take someone down for a fucking eightball? That's fucking ridiculous,\" the confidential informant said. \"I can set up a buy for a _pound_ of coke.\"\n\nI'd already given a nickname to this CI. His name was Rocky LoPresti, but I called him Rocky the Lying Squirrel. I didn't believe Rocky had the connections that he claimed. He laughed in my face when I talked to him about buying eightballs on the street, and told me that that quantity was so small it wasn't even worth bothering with. I had serious doubts at the start whether I'd be able to work with this fuckhead, much less have any success. But I was wrong.\n\nRocky proved to be a very hot CI, one of the best that I ever dealt with. We worked around the clock for three days straight during the fall of 1985 and scored some major buys from some very bad people.\n\nThis white kid looked like you'd plucked him out of a college class at Rutgers. He was an innocuous-looking 22-year-old with shaggy, curly black hair. He lived with his mommy and daddy in a mansion near the Superior Court building in Freehold and constantly talked big. I thought he was full of shit. First impressions can be deceiving, and this kid proved to have a very agile mind and truly amazing connections.\n\nThe usual way for undercover narcs to get to the big dealers was to tag a lesser target who was more vulnerable and then use them to roll the network up from the bottom. Sometimes we got to arrest the big guys at the top, and sometimes those major arrests went to other agencies. You couldn't allow it to matter to you if another group of dealers moved in to fill the void. That's just the way it was. You just kept doing your work. In the end, the vast majority of people in the game are pawns\u2014the low-level dealers on one side, and some of us narcs on the other. But sometimes things went in a different direction indeed.\n\nRocky ID'd a guy named Larry Gaines as a high-value, and dangerous, target. A skilled martial arts figure, he'd been operating out of Middletown and had partnered with a Pagan, my old \"friend\" Tennessee, the quiet and slightly-built cat who had engineered the Pepsi bottle enema and subsequent murder of our fellow Pagan. Gaines had a guy named Robert Williams on his payroll, a chubby five-foot-10 guy in his early 30s, with a wispy beard and fairly long hair. Working as Gaines's mule seemed to be a second job for Williams, a way for him to pick up extra money, and it ultimately proved both dangerous and stupid.\n\nRocky arranged for me to buy a pound of coke from Williams. The deal would go down in the parking lot of an A&P supermarket in Port Monmouth, where I'd meet Williams at his car in the early evening. I was supposed to walk over to Williams's car and show him the buy money, and he would hand me the package. Another cop, Alton Bennett, was going to back me up on site, observing the deal from his undercover vehicle. We had multiple marked units stationed nearby but staying out of sight.\n\nAs people walked by with their shopping carts full of groceries, Bennett watched Gaines pull into the parking lot in his Cadillac Seville, get out of the car and walk over to Williams's car. The two of them talked briefly before Gaines walked back to the Seville.\n\nI pulled into the lot a few minutes later, parked at the end of the lot by the street and walked over to the vehicle Rocky had described to me a few hours earlier. Williams was sitting in the car, just as planned. I showed him a wad of cash, and he pulled out the brick of coke and handed it to me.\n\n\"You're under arrest, fuckhead. I'm a cop with the Bayshore Task Force,\" I said, sticking my Smith & Wesson in his face.\n\nBennett radioed to the marked units, and four of them descended on the parking lot from different directions. They picked up Gaines and assumed custody of my handcuffed prisoner, Williams. We ordered tow trucks in and put both Gaines's Cadillac and Williams's cars on the hook; they would be searched later, back at headquarters.\n\nWe also executed a search warrant on Williams's house, where we found a half pound of coke, a scale and other drug paraphernalia. Bennett and I hoped to turn Williams and get him to talk about Gaines. But Williams was too afraid and immediately lawyered up. Gaines spent the evening practicing karate kicks and punches in his cell, successfully freaking out the cops guarding him.\n\nWe knew going in that the case against Gaines was weak. Bennett and I were pretty confident that he'd dropped the coke off with Williams in the parking lot right before the buy went down. But Bennett wasn't able to see Gaines carrying anything, and our evidence against him was mostly circumstantial. Charged as Williams's co-conspirator on felony drug sale charges, Gaines had lawyered up with an expensive defense attorney who'd gotten a bunch of dealers off in the past. In court, the case would weigh heavily on Bennett's testimony.\n\nThe case went to trial months later, with both Williams and Gaines represented by tough attorneys. As the prosecutor built his case, he ordered Bennett to get the pound of cocaine out of the evidence vault and bring it into the courtroom to show to the jurors. The prosecutor displayed the drugs on his table in the front of the courtroom and had Bennett testify at length. The defense attorney then grilled Bennett on the stand. This process continued for hours. When the judge called a brief recess, everyone left the courtroom. Bennett, who seriously needed a break, walked out along with the attorneys.\n\nNo one thought about guarding the evidence that was sitting there in plain sight\u2014not Bennett, who had signed for the contraband, or the prosecutor, the judge or the court guards. Somehow they all thought that everything was going to be fine because we were in the Monmouth County Courthouse. Gaines's hot sister, who'd been in the courtroom to observe the proceedings, thought differently. During the break, she walked up front, snagged the pound of coke and casually walked out of the courtroom without anyone noticing. When the recess ended and people returned, someone noticed that the drugs were missing and the entire courthouse was immediately placed under lockdown.\n\nBennett, who technically had possession of the drugs because he'd signed for them, was surrounded by sheriff's deputies and the prosecutor, who promptly read him his Miranda rights. No action was taken against the court guard who'd been in the room, and of course the prosecutor didn't think that he was at all responsible\u2014even though he was the one who'd directed Bennett to bring the drugs into the courtroom and had the drugs on the table in front of him. The courthouse guards, police and other law enforcement personnel launched a massive search of the building. Bennett's ex-wife, who happened to be a security officer in the courthouse, was among those engaged in the search.\n\n\"How are you, dear?\" Bennett said as he saw her approaching him in a corridor.\n\n\"You really fucked up again, didn't you?\" she asked before continuing the search.\n\nA sheriff's deputy subsequently found Gaines's sister, along with the drugs, in a courtroom phone booth. The woman was arrested, and the drugs were placed back in the vault, where they stayed under lock and key for the remainder of the trial. Ironically, she could have flushed the drugs down a toilet and destroyed the case against her brother. But she was greedy and wanted to keep the coke.\n\nNo one ever apologized to Bennett about what happened that day.\n\nGaines was subsequently found not guilty and released. He'd lost his Cadillac to the county and had been forced to shell out tens of thousands for a defense attorney, but he was free. Williams was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the drug sales.\n\nLater, I found out that Tennessee had been at the A&P the night the drug deal with Williams went down. Bennett and I hadn't seen him.\n\n### CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE\n\n## PASS THE FUCKING PEAS\n\nIn 1986, after working undercover for more than a year, I was sent to a week-long training class on advanced narcotics work at the State Police training facility in Sea Girt, New Jersey. Sometimes truth seems odder than fiction, and this was one of those moments.\n\nOne of the classes was run by a veteran New Jersey State Police detective who'd done some very heavy undercover work inside an organized crime family. I knew he'd taken an enormous risk doing that work, so this dude was a hero to me. Like many who put their lives on the line for real, he was quite humble.\n\n\"How many of you have done undercover work?\" asked the tall, lean detective.\n\nI raised my hand, the only one to do so in a room of about 40 cops, young and old.\n\n\"You have the look of someone who's been there a while,\" he said, staring me straight in the eye. \"We try to keep assignments like that to six months. How long you been under?\"\n\n\"About 13 months. I figure two years to close it out.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I get it,\" he said. \"Big cases to clean up, huh?\"\n\nI knew the guy was being friendly, not sarcastic, and nodded my head.\n\n\"Well, you think about it, 'cause you're a serious candidate for burnout. This is how you're going to know you need out. You will be at a family dinner. Your family will be there, mother and father. Your grandparents and aunts. Without even a thought you will look at your mother and say, 'Mom, pass me the fucking peas.'\"\n\nIt was good for a laugh. But it stuck with me. And some months down the road, when I was still undercover and having dinner with my mother and father, my brother's family and his kids, I looked at my mother and said, \"Mom, can you pass the fucking carrots?\"\n\nThe kids laughed; the adults, not so much.\n\nIt's the little things that you notice when you're doing undercover work. When you're a cop, the community generally opens its arms to you\u2014especially the merchants. But if you're working undercover, you are lucky if you get the _worst_ table in the restaurant. You look like a thug, because that is the role you're playing as if your life depended on it. And the universe conspires to remind you of who you are. If you have a hot informant, you might run with them for days, with little sleep. You feel like crap, but you soldier on. You get pulled over by cops who bust your balls.\n\nThe New Jersey State Police pulled me over once during my years undercover: two State bulls together. I told them that I was working undercover and that my ID and weapon were in a briefcase on the back seat. They let me show them my ID\u2014at gunpoint. Then they relaxed but got sarcastic.\n\n\"Man, you really look like shit,\" one said.\n\n\"Thanks. I'm supposed to. It's easier to keep breathing this way,\" I replied.\n\n\"Man, you _do_ look like a piece of shit,\" the other one chimed in. \"You really do look like shit. He's not kidding, ya know.\"\n\n\"Are you done?\" I asked. \"Or do you want to go issue some tickets to the taxpayers?\"\n\nThey left, after delivering some other snide comments.\n\nMonths after my \"pass the peas\" moment, I started to wonder if I _was_ getting close to burning out. The doubts began when Jack Mullins and I set up a six-pound marijuana buy with a Jamaican cat and saw the meet go down in flames because we were drunk.\n\nThe two of us were supposed to meet the Jamaican at a construction site off Route 35 in Hazlet. Workers had just completed the foundation, and the site was a mess, full of piles of dirt, construction equipment and pieces of lumber and debris. A big strip shopping center was adjacent to the property. The plan was that I would play the big-shot construction supervisor and Mullins would be one of the guys working for me.\n\nWe intended to meet the target late in the afternoon, after the regular workers had gone home, and take him down with his haul of weed. The rip was set to go down at about 4 p.m., right after the site had closed down. In this case, we didn't have to worry about burning an informant, and it was going to be an out-and-out rip. But we fucked it up and our target got away. We had no one to blame but ourselves.\n\nMullins, Alton Bennett and I were all scheduled to testify before a grand jury at the Monmouth County Courthouse on some of our drug cases late that morning. Normally, grand jury presentations are quite routine\u2014a prosecutor tells the 23 grand jurors what the proposed charges are and then presents a bare-bones case, usually with just an arresting officer or victim. The prosecutor doesn't have to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt\u2014that happens later, in a court of law. The grand jury process merely assures that the prosecution has sufficient evidence to present a case; the legal standard is lower. Most of the time, grand juries issue \"true bills of indictment,\" with few if any questions. Serving on a grand jury can almost be fun for citizens, because it's a window into a world they don't often see. It's less fun for those whose paychecks get interrupted. Grand jury presentations were a piece of cake for me.\n\nAfter we testified under oath, the three of us decided to go out to get lunch together. We headed to a fancy restaurant for food and drinks. We always carried cash for a number of reasons. We never knew when we were going to make an undercover drug buy. And our superiors understood that some of the money we had would be used on food and drink\u2014all as part of our work undercover. The more successful undercovers had access to larger amounts of cash; it was a results-oriented system. The tuxedoed bartender and ma\u00eetre d' thought they had the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels entering their sophisticated establishment. We walked to the bar, looking every bit a one-percent biker crew in search of whiskey. The bartender looked blankly at us while drying some glasses, and we each ordered white wine. Looking a bit bewildered, he poured a chardonnay for the three of us.\n\nWanting to be friendly, I asked a well-dressed older gentleman next to me what he was drinking. \"Gin martini,\" he said. \"But never more than two at any given time. They will sneak up on you. By God, they can bite.\"\n\nOddly, none of us had ever had a martini, and it seemed like a nice idea to try one, or maybe two. Mullins ordered gin martinis for all of us. Bennett, who rarely drank, gagged on his and declared it \"turpentine.\" He went back to his wine. Mullins and I were heavier drinkers, and we decided to stick with the martinis. We drank them down as fast as the bartender could make them, even as the older guy sat there, shaking his head.\n\nAs we walked outside, the combination of the fresh air and the heavy alcohol content of multiple martinis hit us; Mullins and I were plastered. Bennett dropped us off at headquarters, but not before urging us to call off the buy from the Jamaican. But neither of us could find a phone number for the target. We hopped into our undercover car and headed for the construction site.\n\nMullins and I were both able to get out of our car without difficulty. But we found it incredibly hard to maintain our footing as we walked across the construction site, stumbling on each and every pile of dirt and bit of debris along the way.\n\nThe dealer pulled up and we both turned to meet him. It didn't take him more than a couple of seconds to realize that we were sloshed. When Mullins got closer to the dealer, the guy also caught a whiff of the alcohol on his breath. That was it. He told us both to fuck off, hopped back into his car and drove away. He was gone before we even had a chance to object.\n\nThen we saw our supervisor, Lieutenant John McCabe, pull up in his unmarked vehicle. It seems he'd been parked in the shopping center next door and managed to observe the entire sad sequence of events. Mullins and I both hung our heads in shame, ready for a well-earned dressing-down and feeling like two busted school kids.\n\nMcCabe smiled at us and said, \"You guys have been under real pressure for a long time. It's okay if you blow one. As long as it's just one. I'll drive you home. No problem.\"\n\nTo say we would jump through a wall of fire for that man is not saying enough. Sometimes leadership is about action _not_ taken.\n\nMiddletown Detective Captain Frank Gleason, a highly placed, venerated and anachronistic commander, walked into the detective bureau one day and tasked me with taking down a man in Highlands, a borough of Monmouth County, who allegedly had 50 pounds of marijuana in his apartment.\n\n\"Take care of it, ASAP,\" Gleason told me. \"Make me proud. Get it done, old boy.\"\n\nSeveral hurdles stood between me and bringing this supposed criminal to justice: none of the cops I knew had ever heard of the guy; we had no informant; we had no one who even had a clue about any big marijuana shipment in the county; the Bill of Rights strongly suggests that we have a very good reason before asking a judge for a search warrant; and, lastly, the commander who gave us the name had no absolutely no other information about him.\n\nAbsent any intelligence and without any informants, Mullins and I decided to try something outlandish. The first stop was a local pizza joint to pick up a cheese pie. The idea was that Alton Bennett, a sort of demented-looking mountain man, would attempt to deliver pizza to our target and try to either gain access to the apartment or see something that we could then use to get a search warrant or otherwise make some progress. Mullins and I would do the surveillance from our undercover vehicle.\n\n\"I didn't order a pizza,\" the suspected dealer said, staring at the odd-looking delivery guy holding a cheese pie.\n\n\"But aren't you Jimmy Healey?\" Bennett asked.\n\n\"Yes, but I didn't order any pizza.\"\n\n\"Well, can you let me in so I can show you this, maybe someone else here ordered it?\" Bennett continued.\n\nThe two men started arguing at the door to the apartment, as Bennett did his best to get inside, and the suspect continued to state\u2014accurately\u2014that he didn't order any pizza and didn't want any.\n\nBennett was so upset about not making any headway that he absentmindedly started gesturing with his hands\u2014and wound up with the pizza box being held vertically, so that the pizza slid to one end of the box. Mullins and I started laughing hysterically as we observed from the car. Bennett seemed increasingly infuriated by his inability to get inside.\n\nSuddenly, Healey threw his arms up in the air, yelled something and slammed the door shut. Bennett stormed back to his car, opened the door and threw the pizza in like a Frisbee. The three of us wrote up a report about our creative, but ultimately failed, effort and moved on.\n\nIn the late spring of 1987, Mullins and I began working with an informant to set up an undercover drug buy in Keyport, a bedroom community overlooking Raritan Bay, just west of Hazlet and Union Beach. The informant, an African-American in his late 20s who worked on a garbage truck, had a sheet with some violent crimes on it, including assaults. He'd been picked up on drug charges and was trying to work them off by serving as an informant for us. He was way too slick for my taste. From my days riding with the Pagans, I knew that the assaults on his record were just the ones that he'd been _caught_ for doing; I was sure there were plenty more.\n\nThe buy was supposed to go down in a run-down part of Keyport where a tightly packed cluster of two-story residential buildings covered several blocks. Mullins and I checked it out early one morning and realized that it was something of a labyrinth. It would be virtually impossible to do surveillance on anyone inside the complex. The area also happened to be predominantly African-American, meaning that the white undercover members of the task force would immediately stand out. There was no way anyone on the surveillance team could remain stationary; they'd have to be in a car and mobile.\n\nI would be going in alone, with only the informant at my side.\n\nAs usual, I intended to wear my biker stuff\u2014blue jeans, a ratty T-shirt, a baseball cap with the Harley-Davidson logo and a pair of work boots. I ignored the black engineer boots that I usually wore and instead grabbed a pair of tall, tan-colored construction boots with laces. I didn't tell Mullins, but I'd also decided to carry my five-shot Charter Arms snub nose in an ankle holster. Normally I didn't go into a buy carrying a gun, but this time was different.\n\nI drove down to Keyport in my undercover car late one Tuesday afternoon and parked adjacent to the residential complex. I met the informant outside, and he walked me through a maze of narrow alleys and corridors. We went down one corridor, then another and then a turn down a third. Finally, we walked to the end of a hallway where there were three doors. The informant opened one of them, and we went down a flight of stairs into a dingy and dimly lit basement.\n\nI immediately had the sense that something was wrong. There was no furniture around\u2014no chairs, no couches. This wasn't a location for a drug buy but for a robbery. I always carried at least $200 or $300 in cash, and sometimes much more. An eightball was going for around $225; a quarter ounce went for around $450.\n\nI heard voices and then footsteps as a half dozen men came down the basement stairs and stood facing me. They were street-hardened thugs, intimidating just by their presence. There were six of them, and only five shots in my Charter Arms. They stood there, playing it cool, smiling and joking and looking at me the way the jaguar looks at the bush pig; the hunter was being hunted.\n\n\"Shit, these motherfucking laces,\" I said, casually dropping onto a knee and reaching for my boot with both hands. I pulled the Charter Arms out of the holster and brought it up on the men, cocking the trigger as I stood.\n\n\"I know at least one of you fuckers is packing,\" I said. \"I ain't going down in this place.\"\n\nThey all held their ground and let me move past them, my finger never moving off the trigger. All of them had the pleasure of being aimed at for at least a full second.\n\nI backed out of the basement and up the stairs and made my way outside. None of them attempted to follow me. Mullins spotted me soon after I emerged. I hopped into his car, and we took off. I never saw, or talked to, the informant again.\n\nLater that day, I put in a call to the county prosecutor's office and told the attorney that the informant was full of shit\u2014and might have just tried to get me killed. Any chance the guy had of working off his charges disappeared after my call. That afternoon probably wound up costing him a couple of years in prison.\n\nOne thing seemed certain that day: The cats that came down into the basement were for real. I knew just by their demeanor. They knew, too, that I had a hair-trigger pistol, cocked and locked. No one seemed alarmed or tried to play cocky, either. Nope. They were players.\n\nClosing in on two years undercover, I knew I had used up my share of luck. Besides, I really wanted to get a decent table at a restaurant.\n\n### CHAPTER THIRTY\n\n## RENZO COMES TO TOWN\n\nI went back in the bag for two years, working as a uniformed officer, before I was made a detective again in September 1988 and got assigned to the youth crimes unit. I was okay with being a uniformed patrolman, pulling cars over for vehicle and traffic code violations and responding to various emergencies. But I preferred being a detective and was happy to be out of the marked unit. I had more freedom to pursue the cases and causes that interested me most, and that sense of personal freedom was important to me, too. In the youth crimes unit, I worked primarily with the administrations of the two big high schools in town. I had steady eight-to-four hours Monday through Friday, and an unmarked unit. It was a pretty nice gig that allowed me to feel I was making a decent contribution to my community.\n\nI said goodbye to our Chief Joe McCarthy, who was forced to retire due to mandatory civil service age requirements. That gave the politicians in town a rare opportunity to hand-select his replacement\u2014someone who'd be loyal to them.\n\nOver time, I started to believe that the cops in town needed stronger union representation, and I thought about running for an elected position in the Middletown Patrolmen's Benevolent Association. I knew that becoming a PBA leader could hamper my career, but I cared about the men and liked the independent, no-nonsense manner in which the department had been run for many years.\n\nThen, in 1993, I saw Middletown Police Officer Mike Hoydis come under attack for an incident involving a fleeing murder suspect, and I decided that it was time to become active in the union. Police in Connecticut had put out an all-points-bulletin (BOLO) advising officers to be on the lookout for a man who had murdered his wife with a pair of scissors and was believed to be fleeing south in his car. From what we heard, he was still believed to be wearing his blood-stained clothes.\n\nHoydis spotted the guy's car, radioed for backup and gave chase. The suspect led Hoydis on a wild car chase through town, and the cop was finally able to stop him, with help from Red Bank Police, on the border between Red Bank and Middletown. Adrenalin pumping, Hoydis yanked the guy from his car and punched him several times before backing off and putting the man in cuffs. The suspect was put in the back of a squad car and taken into police headquarters, where he was processed in.\n\nUnder interrogation by a Middletown detective, the suspect provided a full statement admitting to his wife's brutal murder. \"Have I or anyone else associated with your arrest mistreated you in any way?\" the detective asked, following departmental protocol.\n\nThe suspect said that the detective hadn't mistreated him, but that one of the cops who arrested him\u2014Hoydis\u2014had slugged him a few times.\n\nThe Monmouth County prosecutor was outraged and ordered his office to investigate. But the investigation stalled because none of the cops on the scene would testify against Hoydis, and it was just the suspect's word against the officer's.\n\nThe prosecutor refused to let the matter die. He had his investigators call the Red Bank Police officers into an office, where they were shown copies of their financial records and warned that they could be suspended or indicted for interfering with an investigation if they didn't tell the truth about what happened. They folded and, under duress, admitted that the alleged killer was hit a few times but didn't sustain any injuries.\n\n_Outside the Middletown Police Department headquarters with one of the agency's marked vehicles._ (Photo by Douglas P. Love)\n\n\"We have the goods for assault and official misconduct. Plead him out. He gets fired, no pension, health benefits and no honorable release, just no jail,\" the prosecutor told Hoydis's attorney. Official misconduct is a second-degree felony, on par with non-aggravated rape or selling heroin. It's punishable by five to 10 years in jail and up to $100,000 in fines.\n\nHoydis pleaded out to avoid the roll of the dice in the courtroom. Most of the cops thought he should have gone to trial, since all that he did was throw a few punches at someone who was fleeing police after a murder. They figured jurors would side with the cop.\n\nHighlands Police Chief Howard Brey publicly declared that he wanted to hire Hoydis\u2014that he thought the cop was a hero for bringing in a dangerous, fleeing felon. But the prosecutor squelched the hiring, too. Hoydis eventually got a job in the private sector as a financial advisor.\n\nI'd seen enough and decided to get actively involved with the union, with an eye toward becoming president. Soon enough, I was elected the union's sergeant-at-arms (yes, the same position I'd held in the Pagans) and made head of its board of trustees.\n\nNot long afterward, I was transferred back to patrol division, in November 1993. I worked in patrol for another four years before getting transferred back to detective division in 1997. My assignments seemed to change based on my responsibilities with the union. I was a detective from 1997 to 2002 and then transferred back to patrol. I finished out my last year with the department, 2002\u201303, as a beat cop\u2014which was okay because it kept me close to the action.\n\nMy transfer out of the youth crimes bureau in 1993 outraged the administrations of the two high schools I was working with\u2014perhaps because I was leading the department in arrests on a monthly average. I was visible and doing my job, and that seemed to matter to the high school principals. Both sent letters to the press objecting to the move\u2014and one newspaper even wrote an editorial objecting to the transfer.\n\nBut none of it made a difference to the police department's administration. I had been doing some serious weight training along with my continued Korean Karate, and that was where my energies would now go, along with my union work.\n\nThe world-famous Brazilian Jiu Jitsu expert Renzo Gracie has a great saying about BJJ: \"Look at the lions, the most dangerous of beasts. The lion is savagely adept at killing animals even much larger. A pure killing machine. Now take the lion out onto the ocean, where sharks hang out. Drop him into the water. The lion is just another meal.\"\n\nAt its simplest, BJJ is applied kinesiology. The practitioner attacks the joints or spine of his opponent by placing his body in a position to leverage its entire weight, often using his hips to bend one part of his adversary's body in a particular direction, causing the joint or spine to break. So the fight becomes one man versus just one of his opponent's appendages.\n\n_Renzo Gracie, me, and Carlos Gracie Jr. at Renzo's home in Holmdel, New Jersey, around 2004._ (Photo by Barbara Bradshaw)\n\nThough simple enough in theory, it can take years to become an expert in BJJ\u2014and not everyone is ready to take that trip. I was ready, and I started training with Renzo Gracie in 1993, when a business opportunity brought him to the Jersey Shore, and we met and became close friends.\n\nToday, I'm one of the senior practitioners of Renzo Gracie's Brazilian Jiu Jitsu family\u2014and one of the first six people in the United States to train with him. I often train others in the skills that I've patiently acquired from Renzo and other experts, including Karl Pravec, the \"Silver Fox\"\u2014a second-degree black belt in BJJ who also happens to have a master's degree in finance from Columbia University.\n\nRenzo and I walked in different circles, and when I met him, I didn't expect him to be interested in becoming my friend. But he seemed eager to pursue the relationship, and he became my \"Mr. Miyagi\" (the mentor in the movie _The Karate Kid_ ). He was, and still is, my personal consigliere and the greatest positive influence both in terms of hand-to-hand combat and dealing with the challenges that life throws at all of us.\n\nWhen Renzo arrived, few people outside the martial arts world had any clue who he was. Only hard-core martial arts types in New Jersey had heard of the Gracie family from Rio de Janeiro, or Renzo in particular. It was like suddenly having immediate and personal access to a great sporting figure whom you'd never even dreamt of meeting, like baseball's Ty Cobb, football's Jim Brown, or hockey's Wayne Gretzky.\n\nThis gregarious and outgoing yet supremely confident fighter immediately earned the complete respect of all who came to train. Since the only people who knew who Renzo was were Special Forces types and ranking martial artists, he had classes filled with people who theoretically should have been able to hold their own in a fight with him, or perhaps win. I was a ranking black belt who weighed in at 240 pounds, while Renzo weighed just 178. We had Navy SEALS in the group, too, as well as some of the hardest street fighters around.\n\nRenzo smiled while he destroyed us all so quickly and so efficiently that we were in total awe. This was a guy who was a legendary street fighter in Brazil, where no-rules, no-size-category fighting had gone on for years. Yet he stood undefeated. A shatteringly adept killer, Renzo was and continues to be highly sought after by Special Forces troops around the globe for his instruction.\n\nPerhaps more important to me, Renzo is also one of the (if not the) most caring, decent and honorable people I have ever known. I value his close friendship now as I did then\u2014way more valuable than gold. We share a passion for books and literature, too\u2014though most people who train at one of Renzo's academies probably wouldn't think of him as a learned man who enjoys reading.\n\nRenzo's charisma and skills in fighting were earned on the very violent and mean streets of Rio de Janeiro, where on one occasion he was shot three times with a handgun by a drug-dealing thug. The gunshots didn't stop him, and he used his BJJ skills to beat the shooter to near-death. His brutal and bloody no-rules defeat of the legendary Oleg Taktarov in the U.S. prompted Senator John McCain to call for, and subsequently see enacted, a ban on no-rules fighting.\n\nIn Brazil, Renzo fought a grudge match against a notorious fighter backed by powerful drug cartels. Renzo dominated the fight\u2014despite getting stabbed by a spectator during the actual match. Ultimately, Renzo laid a beating on his opponent with his bare fists, and an all-out riot began. Rio de Janeiro, too, banned no-rules fights. That made Renzo responsible for the banning of real, true-to-life no-rules fighting both in the United States and Brazil. He has never lost a fight where rules are exempted, whether on the streets of New York or the beaches of Rio, or in the ring.\n\nI had a detached garage at my home in North Middletown where I would often train with some of the guys from the Middletown PD. It had electricity, so we could continue using it late into the evening. And it was large enough for the hard-core weightlifting equipment I had as well as an open area for practicing Korean Karate. When BJJ came to town, I overhauled the space and put in thick rubber mats more suitable for grappling. I had the perfect spot and location to practice with my friends when not attending classes. It was our sanctuary, and on any given day, a world-renowned BJJ expert such as Renzo Gracie, Ricardo Almeida or Craig Kukuk could be working out with us.\n\nIt was during one of our countless training sessions that Renzo started to call me \"Big Chuck,\" a nickname that stuck. In BJJ circles, I am known simply by Renzo's nickname. No one calls me anything else.\n\nJiu Jitsu is never forced. The adept practitioner merely attacks whatever appendage presents itself. It is practiced full-speed, and the person having his joint manipulated must signal submission by \"tapping out\" (smacking the mat or tapping the opponent) quickly before his body part snaps. Many of the moves are taught and used on the ground. Here, only the skilled practitioner has the advantage, as few people have a clue about how to fight from the ground or their back. A BJJ fighter is lethal even while lying on his back. We say: Take your opponent to the ground, where you can swim and he drowns.\n\nOne of the principal moves is called the triangle. Lying on his back, the practitioner wraps his legs around his opponent's neck, cutting off the carotid arteries on each side. The opponent loses consciousness in three to five seconds. The closing of the carotid arteries by arms or legs is a safe way to finish the combat. If the hold is released quickly, no permanent damage is done.\n\nAnother move is the figure four, in which you grab the opponent's wrist, reach under your opponent's arm with your other hand, circle around and grab your own wrist and then\u2014slowly\u2014begin to apply pressure to your opponent. Do it too quickly and your opponent's shoulder will be forever damaged. Do it slowly and you gain control of your opponent, no matter how big he or she may be.\n\nThe sessions with Renzo created a fierce comradery born from shared risk and brutally difficult training. In BJJ you have to trust your training partner with your life and health. The moves we practiced were designed to break bones, break necks and destroy your opponent's knees. We went full force, and tapping submission quickly was the only way to save yourself from injury. It was training on the edge. Everyone suffered injuries, and no one placed blame.\n\nOften, after weekend sessions, we would grab our wives and girlfriends and feast in the local restaurants. Anyone was welcome to train with us. We had just one rule that could not be broken: you had to conduct yourself in a humble manner and treat your training partners with real respect. Violate that rule, and you risk a beating before banishment.\n\nIn this environment, in front of no judges other than ourselves, we became warriors of Renzo Gracie Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. To a man, we would have happily caught a bullet for our leader, Renzo. Honor and loyalty were not token concepts to us. Death before dishonor was not a clich\u00e9. We lived it.\n\nAt that time, only a rarefied few had knowledge of Gracie Jiu Jitsu\u2014and anyone hoping to learn the art had to go through brutal training that few would even entertain. We literally sacrificed body parts to learn the skill. But if you knew the techniques and the other guy didn't, well, the fight was pretty much over before it started. Gracie Jiu Jitsu gave me an ability to subdue virtually any bad guy that I came across\u2014without resorting to weapons. I brought people into the Middletown Police Department cells in handcuffs, which seemed far preferable to sending them to the hospital or the morgue.\n\nThe patrol squad I was assigned to was okay, and I liked my co-workers for the most part. But I could never understand why so few of them opted to train with Renzo. Maybe they were scared of getting hurt. But somehow it made more sense to me to train in a controlled environment with experts and not have to worry so much about getting hurt when I was out in the field, confronting a violent felon.\n\nThe few who trained with Renzo became remarkable fighters who were very adept on the street.\n\n### CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE\n\n## DENNIS THE MAD DOG\n\n\"Where the fuck is Mad Dog?\" Dave Lentz shouted as he slammed down the phone.\n\nThe two of us were standing inside Dave's office at his Red Bank fighting academy. I'd gone there after my shift one evening in late 1993 to work out with Dave and a few other guys, including my longtime buddy George Sammett, who owned a successful tree-trimming company in town. None of the guys had arrived yet, and I'd wandered into Dave's office to say hi.\n\nI'd just walked past \"Mad Dog\" outside the school seconds earlier. That was the nickname Dennis Downey had adopted in his on-again, off-again career as a professional kickboxer. A career sadist and convict who'd been in and out of jail for assaults and thefts, he managed to fit in a couple of paid fights in Atlantic City when he wasn't behind bars. Mad Dog stood about six foot two, weighed 210 pounds and was a natural heavyweight, with very solid leg kicks. His long hair, demonic eyes and thick beard created a sinister appearance that he positively reveled in.\n\nDave and I checked the school's classroom and then ran to the front door. Mad Dog had bolted. Dave told me he'd just gotten off the phone with George Sammett's wife, Kathy, a pretty, petite brunette who didn't have a single enemy in town. Kathy was crying and absolutely beside herself, he explained. She'd found George beaten to a pulp and barely conscious in the gym they had in a massive, two-story garage behind their house. The structure also served as the base of operations for George's business. She knew that Mad Dog had been there earlier in the day and believed he was responsible for the assault, but she had no proof.\n\nKathy told Dave that she'd gotten George into the house but that he was in really bad shape and she wanted to take him to the hospital. He'd refused.\n\nThe next morning, I met George and Kathy in the emergency room at Riverview Hospital. She'd finally convinced her husband, who had uncannily good boxing and Jiu Jitsu skills and would be a tough opponent for anyone, to get treatment.\n\nGeorge was usually a witty and gregarious guy. The man I saw in the ER was obviously in bad shape, groggy and barely able to move. He'd clearly been subject to a severe beating. In the gym, George and I had fought dozens of times, and I'd won maybe twice. Most of the time I tried to end the bouts in a stalemate. Whoever had done this to him was either incredibly powerful or had gotten the drop on him.\n\nGeorge thought nothing of allowing people who were broke to come to his house and spend the day chopping firewood or doing other menial work to make $100. He'd always be around, and was confident that he could maintain control no matter what the circumstances.\n\nKathy explained that Mad Dog had come by the house early in the day, and that he and George had gone out to the garage, which was tucked into the woods behind the house, to work out. George didn't need to be at a job site until later in the morning, and he rarely missed an opportunity to improve his fighting skills. Kathy said that she got worried about her husband after she didn't see or hear from him for a couple of hours, and she went back to the garage to see what was going on. She found George on the floor in the training area, barely conscious and moaning in pain\u2014the first time she'd ever seen him that way.\n\nGeorge groggily said that Mad Dog had suggested that they do some sparring, and he had agreed. The fighter asked George to put up a 75-pound heavy bag so he could warm up his legs before the fight.\n\nWhile George was hanging the bag, Mad Dog whipped a near-lethal round kick to George's temporal lobe that knocked him to the floor. George said he couldn't remember much of what happened next but that he did recall Mad Dog throwing a weighted barbell onto him while he was lying prone. He also dimly remembered a series of kicks and punches raining down on him.\n\nThe incident didn't make a lot of sense unless something had been taken while George was down or the beat-down was part of some larger plan that Mad Dog had in mind. George was my friend, but I was also a cop, so I did what made sense: I filed an assault report that day and began an investigation. In the course of talking to George and Kathy, I also learned that Bob Smith, a local plumbing contractor, was supposed to have come by that day but, as far as George and Kathy knew, had never shown up.\n\nAs I drove away from Riverview Hospital, I thought back to the time in about 1991 when I ran into Mad Dog deep in Hartshorne Woods, a hilly and wooded 787-acre Monmouth County park. Located just south of Sandy Hook, the park overlooked the Atlantic Ocean and the Navesink River. It contained miles and miles of hiking trails and the remains of World War II\u2013era concrete bunkers that once housed heavy artillery to protect the entrance to New York Harbor.\n\nMy Akita, Bushi, was a handful, and I had to keep him on a short leash at all times; letting him run untethered was not safe, for either animal or man. As we meandered through the trails, I heard an odd thumping sound coming from a deeply wooded area. Bushi started to growl with real malice as we walked closer, and almost ripped my shoulder socket out trying to attack something.\n\nWhen I turned a corner, I saw Mad Dog standing in karate pants and wearing 16-ounce boxing gloves, kicking and punching a tree. He looked deranged. Mad Dog took a couple of steps toward the dog, but then thought twice and stopped in his tracks. Bushi seemed anxious to eat him for dinner.\n\n\"Hey, that's a nice dog,\" he said, keeping both eyes on the Akita.\n\n\"Yeah. Looks like he wants a piece of you.\"\n\nMad Dog had the distinction of serving in a Florida chain gang during one of his many arrests. He'd been caught hanging around local Veterans of Foreign Wars halls and stealing money off aging combat veterans. The guy could be charming. But most of the time he affected a wild persona, exuded true menace and was more than willing to fight the police.\n\nIn addition to holding the leash on Bushi, I was carrying my Smith & Wesson that day. I had nothing to fear from Mad Dog. But I wondered about the safety of the young women who jogged these trails alone. I yanked on Bushi's leash and we continued on our way. I couldn't help but think that this guy was a danger to everyone who lived in the area. It was just a matter of time until something bad, really bad, happened involving Mad Dog.\n\nFollowing a series of interviews, I learned that Smith, the plumbing contractor, had indeed gone to the Sammetts' house that morning. He'd pulled into the driveway, saw Mad Dog by George's house and rolled down the window to say hello. Without saying a word, Mad Dog kicked the driver's-side rearview mirror off the truck and punched Smith in the face. Smith put the truck in reverse and left. He could meet up with George some other time, when Mad Dog wasn't around.\n\nMy guess is that Mad Dog had planned to knock out George and enter the house, where he would have raped Kathy, who weighed maybe 110 pounds and would never have been able to fight him off. It was only the plumber's arrival that stopped Mad Dog from entering the residence and carrying out his plan. Mad Dog also knew that Smith could have placed him at the residence, which was not at all what he wanted.\n\nI'd known Kathy for years and would have been horrified if something had happened to her. I needed more than an aggravated assault case to put Mad Dog behind bars\u2014and keep him away from Kathy for years to come. So I went back and talked to George and the plumber again.\n\nGeorge searched his memories and recalled that he'd had two $50 bills in his pocket when Mad Dog arrived that morning\u2014the money that he was going to use to pay the man for his labor. But the two bills went missing. I obtained sworn statements from both George and Bob Smith, and used them to get an arrest warrant for Dennis \"Mad Dog\" Downey on charges of aggravated assault and strong-arm robbery. The combination, along with Mad Dog's long criminal history, would have serious repercussions in a court of law.\n\nNow all I had to do was arrest a very violent guy who was likely to become desperate when he was made aware of the robbery charge. Mad Dog was living in a shotgun shack in Highlands, much of which was blue collar and depressed. It had five times as many bars as churches.\n\nDetective Lieutenant Timothy Lake, Detective Sergeant Richard Dieckmann and I decided to pick up Downey around 6 a.m., when we expected him to still be sleeping\u2014and hence less volatile. There was some tension between the three of us, in part because of my union activities, and in part because I didn't much care for the way the other two handled themselves.\n\nLake and Dieckmann wanted me to sit in the car while they made the actual arrest. But there was a jurisdictional issue at play here, too. The Borough of Highlands had its own police force, and we would be on its turf. When we arrived at the scene, a patrolman from Highlands decided that the bungalow was too small for five men, and that no more than two men should do the takedown. The cop knew me because of my martial arts training and wanted me at his side. Lake and Dieckmann had no choice but to cool their heels outside.\n\nMad Dog was already up and wearing work clothes when we knocked on the door. He saw the Highlands cop first and smiled as he opened the door. He asked about the officer's health, and then turned to me, asking how I was doing. I told him I had paper on him for the George Sammett beating.\n\n\"I know you and George are tight, Detective,\" Mad Dog said. \"But me and him, we just had a rough sparring session. You know. I have a fight lined up with Dennis Alexio, man. I needed the training; George is like one of the only people that can hang with me. He just, you know, came up short. Walked into a kick. He's alright, isn't he?\"\n\nDennis \"the Terminator\" Alexio is a former world kickboxing champion, and I had no doubt that Mad Dog was scheduled to fight him.\n\n\"Dennis, George is hurt, but he's going to make it. But between you and me, bro? I don't think you could beat Sammett in a straight fight even if you had a hatchet in each hand. But that's not what this about. You're thinking it's all bullshit. A he-said/she-said about a sparring match. Think the fuck again. I am taking you for strong-arm robbery. You know, bro\u2014the two U.S. Grants you stole from his pocket after you suckered him.\" I suggested that I had also figured out his plan to take Kathy that day.\n\n\"Fuck that shit, fuck it. This is bullshit. I never stole nothing from that man,\" Mad Dog said. \"I got nothing going on with Kathy, and that cunt knows it.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, tell it to the jury,\" I said. \"With these charges and your record, getting close to any women will be a distant thought. You can sit with your Aryan Brotherhood inmate friends and lie about pussy all you want. You sure as shit will have plenty of time to discuss it. By the time you max out, you will forget what to do with pussy. One more thing, hope you ate steak last night. They don't serve that kind of food where you will be hanging your dick.\"\n\nMad Dog bladed on me, turning perpendicular and positioning himself for an attack. I could feel the tension in his body. The patrolman and I bladed as well. We expected this fight was going to get bloody and dirty, real quick.\n\nBut Dennis Downey decided to fight another day. He turned his back to me, put his hands together for the cuffs and offered no resistance. He went to jail without incident.\n\nProcessing Mad Dog back at the Middletown Police Department was a trip. He had a big audience, as men from the incoming and outgoing shifts were coming through. He started some rambling dissertation about wanting to go out west and live with the grizzly bears after clearing his name. After we got Mad Dog's photos and fingerprints, I locked him into the Gray Bar Hotel.\n\n\"Dennis, I really hope you do go out west, if you survive the jail time,\" I said. \"You take your act out to Wyoming, and some sheriff's officer is going to put a rifled deer slug right between your eyes. He will get a huge medal for it. Your act won't play so well out there.\"\n\nMad Dog pleaded out the charges and accepted 10 years in the Trenton State Prison, New Jersey's only maximum security facility and a real shithole. Dennis Downey failed every parole hearing he had and wound up doing every day of his dime sentence, with not one day off for good behavior. I guess that shouldn't have come as a surprise.\n\n### CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO\n\n## A CLASSIC HOT CALL\n\nThe dispatcher's voice telegraphed urgency and danger. She directed me to a bungalow in a gritty, blue-collar area of Port Monmouth, where a 25-year-old steroid user had taken an unknown quantity of LSD and was completely out of control and howling like a wolfman. The guy's 19-year-old girlfriend\u2014the one who placed the call\u2014was screaming for her life.\n\nI flicked on lights and siren in the patrol car and jabbed the throttle hard. It was just after 2 a.m. one summer night in 1998, and the location was only a few minutes away from me. Other cars were also being dispatched, but I was the closest responding officer.\n\nThis was a classic hot call. On the way there, I went through different scenarios of how the incident could go down, and my adrenaline was pumping. I didn't want to hurt this guy, but I had no problem taking him down if his girlfriend was in imminent danger. My gut told me this was going to turn into a cage fight\u2014my strength and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu skills against this Muscle Juice maniac high on LSD.\n\nNo matter how skilled one gets in handling confrontations, one thing is certain: anything can happen, and often does. If God stays out of it, the better fighter will usually win. In this case, there would be no referee to stop the fight. Wolfman could easily be armed with a butcher knife or worse, anything the mind snakes of LSD may prompt. This was going to be either a decided victory for me or a real disaster.\n\nLights were on inside the house, and I heard howling as soon as I pulled up. I hopped out and saw Dieckmann's car screeching to a halt. The shrill sound of sirens told me that a couple of other marked units were closing on our location fast.\n\nThe shouting and howls got louder when we pounded on the door. The house looked really small, and I realized that the space inside would likely be tight and cluttered. The chances of someone getting hurt would be high if three or four of us walked in together. I asked Dieckmann for permission to try to take the guy down by myself\u2014one on one\u2014and he agreed.\n\nI threw the bungalow's front door open and stepped into a 12-by-12-foot room serving as living room, dining room and kitchen combined. The young brunette who had called the Middletown Police Department was crouched in a corner of the room, crying hysterically, shaking, her arms over her head. Wolfman, a big, muscle-bound guy, stood in the middle of the room, wearing only a pair of gym shorts. He was sleeved up, with tattoos on both arms.\n\n\"Hey buddy, what's going on here? Your girlfriend is freakin' out,\" I said. \"How about if you and me talk this one out.\"\n\nWolfman squared off in front of me and started howling again, louder than before. His girlfriend shrieked and crouched tighter into a fetal position in the corner. I shifted my stance, and he squared up to me again so that we stood parallel to each other. Every time I moved, he squared up and kept an eye on me. The seconds were ticking by, and I knew he was going to attack if I didn't make a move\u2014and now.\n\nWolfman started throwing his arms up in the air and stomping his feet on the floor.\n\nI maneuvered around just a bit so that my opponent was standing in front of a low wooden coffee table. A quick shove was all it took to make him tumble backward over it. When Wolfman fell, he landed on his back. He immediately rolled over so that he could get back to his feet\u2014and that gave me the opportunity I was waiting for. As soon as he was on his knees, I dropped my full weight onto him, forcing him to fall face-first to the floor.\n\nI immediately brought my right shin across his lower back and leaned all of my weight onto this controlling knee. I then drove my left arm through his right shoulder/armpit area. Now my left arm was through, and I brought it toward my right arm. My right fist was gripping Wolf's right wrist. I used a thumbless grip, with my left hand grabbing my right wrist.\n\nNext, I switched knees and placed my left shin across the back of his neck and straightened my right leg, putting all my body weight on the back of his neck. I then slowly began pulling his right wrist toward his spine and upward.\n\nWolfman's entire body went stiff as a plank; his shoulder was a fraction of a movement away from being ripped from its socket. I was in control, and I could have easily crippled him for life with a hard pull inward and upward\u2014but I held my position. His eyes were bulging but he was in too much distress to yell or howl.\n\n\"Yo, Sarge! Get in here,\" I yelled.\n\nDieckmann and the guys were in the door before the words left my mouth. I kept the pressure on while they shackled Wolfman's arms and legs.\n\nWolfman was arrested for disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor. I could also have charged him with assault for his menacing behavior\u2014but I decided to give him a break. We transported him to Riverview Hospital, where he was given a drug to negate the effects of the LSD. He sustained no injuries from the takedown and was served with a summons at the hospital and released.\n\nThe next day, the Wolfman and his girlfriend walked into the Middletown Police Department to thank us for the way he'd been taken down, without a beating and without weapons.\n\nI had a choice that night, and I could easily have gone into that bungalow with a side-handled baton, a PR-24, and beaten the shit out of the guy. That's what some of the guys on the force may have felt compelled to do. But that wasn't my style. My days of hurting people for no reason were over.\n\n\"Car 41, Car 43, Car 47, Car 48, Car 49, respond to a report of a fire at King's Row assisted living, 1800 Route 35,\" the male dispatcher said in a no-nonsense manner that telegraphed urgency.\n\nDetective Mike Rubino and I, who'd been out working as part of the street crime unit, were just a couple of minutes away in an unmarked unit. We hit lights and siren and headed toward the complex, which was home to dozens of elderly residents, some of them infirm. The dispatcher had just sent five of Middletown's seven sector cars to the fire scene, leaving just two available for patrols. It was rare for that many cars to be sent to one location.\n\nRubino and I were the first officers who pulled up in front of the sprawling two-story complex on the south side of Route 35. We saw smoke rising from the rear of the facility. There were some people milling about out front, and we ran to the entrance closest to where we'd seen the smoke. A maintenance worker directed us to the residential corridors, and we started working the doors.\n\nSome doors were open. But in other cases, residents had locked themselves inside and we had to kick in doors to get them. The doors were strong and resisted. I was able to get through them by using kicks I'd learned doing martial arts. But even then, it was tough work and took rigorous effort.\n\nMy partner and others wrapped wet towels around their faces so they didn't take so much smoke into their lungs. But I couldn't keep the towel in place and work the doors, so I just continued without a towel. I was able to get a couple dozen residents out before needing a break.\n\nI headed for the front lobby, where some firemen and EMTs had gathered. As I walked there, I grew light-headed, and my legs felt like rubber. The EMTs grabbed me, gave me oxygen and placed me on a gurney for a ride to the hospital. I spent two nights there, recovering from smoke inhalation. Later, I was given a proclamation from the New Jersey State Legislature for heroism.\n\nThe impact of the Columbine school massacre in April 1999 was felt across the U.S., including the two high schools in Middletown, where bomb threats were starting to occur\u2014much to my dismay and that of school administrators and parents. Every couple of days, someone would call in a bomb threat, and the high school would be closed down for the rest of the day as a precaution. The students may have thought it was funny the first couple of times, but everyone else was getting increasingly frustrated. It had gotten so bad that the principals had my personal cell phone number, and we were meeting on a regular basis.\n\nOne sunny morning in May, the principal called and said that he'd received another bomb threat, this one written on the wall in the boys' room. It read, \"There is a bomb hidden near the cafeteria. It will go off at 11:00 a.m. You have been warned.\"\n\n\"Are you worried about this?\" I asked the principal. \"Do you believe it, even a little bit?\"\n\n\"No. I think it's pure crap,\" he said. \"But what if I'm wrong? Can't we bring in a bomb dog?\"\n\n\"The reality is that the County Sheriff's Department has about three of them, for the entire county,\" I said. \"To really do a credible check would take about three days, covering the entire place. But... I have a dog.\"\n\n\"What, like a dachshund?\" The principal chuckled.\n\n\"No. An Akita. He's real scary-looking, but he wouldn't harm a soul,\" I said, thinking out loud and hoping my somewhat harebrained plan wouldn't get me in serious trouble. The one thing I was sure of was that my new Akita, Mujo, had the perfect temperament for this job. He was huge and looked ferocious\u2014but the worst he was going to do was slobber on someone. \"If we keep this between you and me, I'll walk him in, scare the crap out of everyone, walk him right back out. I don't tell my people, you don't tell yours. This bomb scare stuff is getting old, fast.\"\n\n_On protective detail for President George Bush Sr. during a campaign run in_ 1992 _. The propane tanks in the background were an obvious danger\u2014and gave me grave concern about POTUS's safety._\n\n\"Okay, every kid in this place knows when you show up\u2014the grapevine in school is real fast. Let's go for it,\" the principal said.\n\nI went home, changed into black jeans and a shirt, put the leash on Mujo and asked him if he wanted to go for a ride in the car. He bounded into the back seat of my unmarked unit and promptly stuck his big head out the window. When I got to the school, I cruised slowly in front of the place, still with Mujo staring out the back window. I parked, hauled Mujo out of the car and headed inside the high school. It was about a 50-yard walk to the administration office, but the bell had just rung and the hallways were packed with kids trying to make their way to their next class. The oversized black dog sauntered down the hallway as students flattened themselves against the lockers to the left and right. Mujo seemed interested in sniffing out a treat or two from the students.\n\n\"Nice doggie,\" one girl said as she extended her hand to Mujo.\n\n\"Freeze,\" I said. \"This is a bomb dog; he will rip off your hand.\"\n\nThe girl's face went white with fear, and she flattened herself against the lockers with some of the other kids.\n\nOne of the older female staffers seemed ecstatic as I walked into the administration office with Mujo. \"Praise the Lord for a miracle. I have been so worried. That door over there has been open, and it's not supposed to be. I am so worried the bomb is in there,\" the woman said.\n\n\"Not to worry, ma'am, my trained bomb dog will clear the area.\" Mujo all but pulled me into the oversized closet, used to store brooms, cleaning supplies and a three-foot-tall stuffed lion\u2014the school's mascot. Suddenly Mujo had something to play with\u2014and destroy. I yanked the stuffed animal from his mouth as he sat there, tail wagging.\n\n\"Thanks be to the Lord, we are safe,\" the staffer said as we continued to check out the administration area with my \"bomb dog.\"\n\n\"As I said, ma'am, not to worry.\"\n\nWe headed out of the office and back down the hallway. A 16-year-old girl walked up to Mujo, carrying a backpack in her hands. Mujo immediately tugged at his leash and headed toward the girl, sticking his nose in her bag\u2014and no doubt smelling her lunch.\n\nI theatrically yanked the knapsack away from Mujo and his newfound friend. \"Are there any explosive materials in this?\" I asked.\n\n\"No, please, no,\" she said trembling.\n\n\"The bomb dog was hitting on something, young lady. Were there any fireworks in there recently?\"\n\n\"Oh my god, no. Please, my boyfriend, he didn't mean to do anything. I was just carrying them,\" the girl said, now on the verge of tears.\n\n\"No problem, young lady, just give it a nice cleaning and be more careful in the future.\"\n\nI noticed the principal standing nearby, and giving me the sign to bring this visit to an end. I took the hint and announced that I would walk the dog down the main corridor as a safety check.\n\nI walked Mujo down the hallway while classes were in session. He was clearly enjoying himself and had no interest in leaving. I, on the other hand, was anxious to wrap up the visit and get the hell out unscathed. We exited a few minutes later, and I walked Mujo back to the car. I could feel hundreds of eyes on us from inside the classroom.\n\nI brought Mujo back home, gave him a treat, changed back to my original attire and went back to my normal activities. For the rest of the school year, until the third week of June, when school ended, not one bomb threat was issued from that high school. Mujo was batting a thousand for bomb searches. He retired that day from his bomb dog life, secure in the knowledge that he had done some good.\n\nA few days later, I casually mentioned to my supervisor, Lieutenant Rubino, that I'd used Mujo to help bring the bomb threats under control. \"Oh, I almost forgot to tell you,\" I said before describing what happened.\n\n\"Are you fucking nuts?\" he asked before shaking his head and walking away. He'd already heard more than he wanted to know.\n\n### CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE\n\n## TOO LATE\n\n\"Hey, Chuck, the phone's for you,\" one of the guys in headquarters shouted. It was the principal of the Middletown High School, and he was calling to tell me about a sexual predator.\n\nA 15-year-old had walked into the principal's office earlier that day to say that Guy Marganti, the father of one of her classmates, had sexually abused her during a booze-filled party in his house the previous evening. The principal said he had no reason to question the girl's story and that he wanted it investigated.\n\nLater that day, I met with the teen and her mom to take the girl's sworn statement. She tearfully described how she and a bunch of her friends often went to the house because Mr. Marganti would give them booze and let them party in his finished basement without complaints. Some of them had even started to bring their own liquid refreshments with them. She explained that Marganti, who had a teenage daughter himself, would often hang out with the kids in the basement, and that he knew all of the girls on a first-name basis. They ranged in age from 13 to 17.\n\nApparently the parties had been going on for quite some time. The teens liked having what they thought was a \"safe\" place to hang out and drink, and they'd kept quiet about it. Mrs. Marganti, who was apparently addicted to some kind of painkiller, generally hung out upstairs in the kitchen and didn't care about the parties that were going on literally beneath her feet.\n\nI wasn't all that surprised to hear about the scene; I'd noticed a drop in juvenile alcohol offenses in that part of town, around Port Monmouth, and had been wondering what was going on.\n\nOver the next few days, I tracked down numerous other teens who'd been seen at the Marganti parties and took statements from each of them. A bunch of the girls made a point of telling me that I should talk to a 15-year-old named Michelle Dooley. They said that she seemed to have an especially close relationship with the 40-year-old, five-foot-eight Marganti.\n\nDooley came into police headquarters one morning, accompanied by her mother, who wore fancy clothes and drove a fancy car\u2014but stank of booze and seemed pissed off to be anywhere near cops. I wasn't surprised; I knew this family from its previous run-ins with the law. Michelle Dooley's brothers were known thieves, and her father seemed perfectly okay with fencing anything that his two boys brought home. The father hated police in general\u2014and me in particular, because I'd arrested the boys in the past.\n\nWith tears and nervous glances at her mother, Michelle eventually admitted to me that Marganti had been wining and dining her for months; that he'd taken her to New York on more than one occasion and even bought her a diamond ring; and that they were lovers. She seemed reluctant to give up any incriminating information about her \"boyfriend,\" who was some 25 years her senior.\n\nMichelle Dooley was a pretty, post-pubescent teen who had the maturity of a 12-year-old. She was different from the rest of her family\u2014na\u00efve in a way and still a little girl at heart. I really liked her a lot, and it broke my heart to hear what she'd gone through. Rarely have I been so motivated to bring down a criminal. Maybe Marganti gave her the love and respect that she couldn't find at home. I could only guess at what prompted her to give in to his advances. I wasn't a psychologist or social worker, and it didn't really make a difference in the end. My role was to pursue the sexual predator who had preyed on this young girl and try to bring him to justice.\n\nAll the statements that I'd gathered in the case, including the one from Michelle, painted a picture of a middle-aged sexual predator who took advantage of the fact that he had a teenage daughter to attract other teens to his house. The finished basement had a separate entrance so that the teens could come and go as they pleased. There were wood-paneled walls, a large refrigerator and several couches where they would hang out.\n\nAt one point in the investigation, Michelle's dad called me and tried to start ordering me around, admonishing me to get all the paperwork done properly in the case. His attitude, and the fact that he'd somehow missed the fact that his teen daughter was having a months-long affair with someone his age, infuriated me\u2014and I told him as much. It was the last time I heard from the guy.\n\nOne of the parents I interviewed described to me how she'd seen Marganti and the Dooley teen making out on a beach in Port Monmouth one night. The woman made it clear that she didn't want to \"get involved\" and most certainly didn't want to testify in any courtroom.\n\nGirls were coming out of the woodwork to accuse Marganti. But those cases only involved improper sexual touching\u2014nothing that would have put the guy behind bars for any length of time. I wanted him to do some heavy time in a state prison for what he'd done to the Dooley kid. But a social worker on the case had already warned me that the girl was going to be a reluctant, and ultimately awful, witness on the stand.\n\nThe Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office agreed to take the case but cautioned me going in that it would be a hard one to get a conviction on because there was no physical evidence and everything hinged on Michelle Dooley's testimony.\n\nThe case went to trial the following year. Marganti had hired an expensive and highly skilled defense attorney whom I knew. I testified at length for the prosecution. In a stunning twist, the defense opted not to cross-examine me, and I was dismissed from the courtroom. I was shocked that he let me go and wondered why. The only thing I could guess was that he was worried about additional damage to his defense if he kept me on the stand for even a minute. I'd never seen that happen before in my entire career. Michelle Dooley's testimony, which had been shaky going in, fell apart on the stand, and the jury delivered a not-guilty verdict. Marganti went back to living his life as if nothing ever happened.\n\nAnother year passed. I got a call from one of my buddies in the department with some devastating news: Michelle Dooley was dead. The teen had gotten her hands on a gun and used it to shoot herself in the head. That poor, vulnerable girl was gone.\n\nMichelle couldn't handle explaining her conduct in a public forum. It broke her.\n\nWhat cuts me so deep is this: she didn't see her own beauty, her own niceness. And she had it. She was a nice, young girl. She didn't hurt people, she didn't act cruelly. She got used for base reasons. She was a throwaway, until the day she took a handgun and shot herself in the head. Women rarely use a gun to end it. Pills or razored wrists, that's the female way. Men take a shooting iron and blast a bullet to their heads.\n\nHow tortured inside was Michelle? Many believe that there is justice in the hereafter, that the scales are evened. They had better be. If this teenage girl isn't set free of torment when she is in the hereafter, then this entire world is a meaningless playground for too many people worth less than shit.\n\nWhat is it like to be a cop, a detective, a patrolman?\n\nYou are in a profession where ever admitting to being wrong, even when you commit the most human of mistakes, can cause you to be publicly placed in stocks. If you are involved in any sort of controversy, expect to be Monday-morning quarterbacked in a uniquely nasty fashion.\n\nCops are the lowest part of the criminal justice system. They must face the inequities of society as a sort of whipping post. If your life is turning to shit, and you have run out of elements to lay into, they are your last stop. People speak to cops and make demands of them that these same people would find unspeakable if they later saw the videotape. Wearing the badge, I have been spat on, slapped, called every disgusting adjective known to man\u2014all for the high crime of being sent there to help.\n\nAt times, the badge was the only thing that held me back from administering my own type of justice, using the skills that I'd honed with the Pagans. I arrested one guy for taking his eight-year-old son's arm and holding it over an open flame on the stove as a way of disciplining the child. He held his son's arm there until the roasted meat started to melt onto the stove top. Hours later, that same man asked me what I could do about getting him a reduced bail. I wanted to turn his face into hamburger. But I didn't.\n\nThe badge stopped me from crushing the face of a gentleman who told me that he fucked his 12-year-old daughter because she \"was asking for it.\" The badge stopped me from slapping the face of a motorist who smoked a red light simply because he drove an expensive Mercedes-Benz and felt he was entitled.\n\nI have worked with too many cops to lie about the nobility of it. It is noble only if you make it so. The job is a unique method of making a difference in the world every day, in real time, no bullshit.\n\nBut I hate the clich\u00e9 of \"making a difference.\" I despise the touchy-feely, politically correct jargon of this disappointingly non-enlightened age. All too often, cops conform to the images they are molded into by mass media. But if you are a mid-level business professional, a sanitation worker, a small-business owner or a supermarket cashier, you can easily be as noble as any of the \"brave police officers\" called to the profession.\n\nFollow the words from the _Hagakure:_ make compassion, courage and wisdom your everyday goal. Weep at nature's beauty and cut down those who spit on justice. And, like the Toltec warrior, understand that the Creator really did give us two choices, strength or misery, and choose strength. I do not follow these precepts as I should. I am often too weak, but I will never end my trying. It remains the only task worthy of my manhood.\n\n### CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR\n\n## WORKING THE PILE AT GROUND ZERO\n\nThe gray dust that covered lower Manhattan when the Twin Towers fell still sits deep within my lungs\u2014just as it does in the lungs of the thousands of other volunteers who raced to the site that day. None of us got too hung up about safe breathing apparatuses. We just wanted to help.\n\nI was hanging out in the Middletown Police Department's detective bureau, complaining about how the New York Giants had let themselves get hammered by the Denver Broncos on _Monday Night Football_ , when the first TV broadcast hit about a plane striking one of the towers. When the second plane hit, the NFL, like so many other things, became as trivial as old dreams.\n\nDetective Jerry Wiemer and I hopped in a car and raced to Mount Mitchell, a scenic promontory in Atlantic Highlands with clear views of lower Manhattan. We watched the towers fall from there. It seemed as if all of Manhattan was covered with a grayish-brown smoke. We stood in stunned silence, unable to comprehend the disaster that was taking place miles away. Jerry and I both knew that countless residents from Middletown and nearby areas worked in the Twin Towers and the Financial District, commuting daily by train or via the ferry that ran from the Atlantic Highlands Marina to either Jersey City or Hoboken. The ferry terminal was only two miles from our hilltop location.\n\nBack at headquarters, all of the detectives were ordered to change from street clothes into uniforms and await orders. The department's leadership had no idea how we would be used that day, but one thing was clear: we'd be needed.\n\n_On the ferry on September 11, 2001, heading to lower Manhattan._\n\nThe Federal Bureau of Investigation had information\u2014which ultimately proved false\u2014that some of the ferries used to transport commuters to the Wall Street area were going to be targeted by passengers with bombs. I volunteered, along with Jerry, Mike Rubino, Cliff O'Hara and a few other guys, to go to New York and help secure the ferry lines. We were given the green light, and we headed out to the ferry terminal at the marina.\n\nShell-shocked commuters were fleeing New York in droves, and the ferries coming into Atlantic Highlands were packed. We checked on the ferry passengers for a while and then started hearing that police volunteers were needed for the work at Ground Zero. Early information was spotty at best, and rumors and facts were blended. The best information seemed to be coming from the workers themselves, while senior leaders back at Middletown Police headquarters were relying on other sources that appeared way off the mark.\n\nAround 4 p.m. on Tuesday, September 11, we headed back into New York along with members of the department's Special Weapons Assault Team to render any assistance that we could. There was a Catholic priest on the ferry who was going over to help. \"Father, what should we do to the people who did this to us?\" I asked.\n\n\"Nuclear war. Exterminate them,\" he said. \"They are burning and killing innocent civilians. They...\" He couldn't continue.\n\nLower Manhattan was a frightening chiaroscuro of twisted metal, in places where it couldn't be, yet was. Smokey and desolate, with bits of paper flying everywhere and tossed about in the acrid smoke. The ash was several inches deep, and we were covered with gray soot that invaded our being.\n\nWe stopped at a fire station to use the bathroom and found a small group of firefighters with a thousand-yard stare in their eyes; they were the only survivors from their house.\n\nGround Zero, lit with klieg lights powered by generators, was a thick pall of smoke and ruin. We assembled at nearby Stuyvesant High School to prepare to work in rescue teams. Cops and other people who had already been working on the pile filtered in, soot-covered and exhausted. Nothing seemed to work. Even the toilets were backed up. The air became fetid.\n\nOur small volunteer group separated from the SWAT team. Rather than sit and wait for some organizer to put us to work, we headed off to Ground Zero, intent on doing what we could. There, a New York City Police Department supervisor thanked us heartily for our efforts but said that we should stand down until daylight. \"We have to assess how to even proceed with the start of a rescue,\" he told us. \"It's too risky in the dark.\n\n\"Our guys are exhausted,\" he continued. \"Please come back. I'll get you a ride to Jersey City. I'm told there's one train on your line that's still running. You can get out while it's still possible tonight.\"\n\nSeven of us hopped onto the back of an NYPD pickup truck and sat in the cargo area, atop jerry jugs full of gasoline used to keep the generators going. The sergeant jumped in and drove us through the eerily empty Holland Tunnel. We were literally the only vehicle going through the tunnel in either direction. He dropped us off near the train terminal in Jersey City, waved goodbye and headed back to Ground Zero.\n\nWe had an hour to kill before the train left and decided to look for a bar; all of us were in dire need of a beer or two. Though we had our uniforms on, technically we were off duty. We noticed a couple of young guys with long hair who were clearly pipe heads\u2014drug users. Normally, the guys would have deliberately steered clear of us. But this was 9/11, and everything was different. One of them walked over to us.\n\n\"Just back from the towers?\" the guy asked.\n\n\"Yeah. Any place to get a beer around here?\" Rubino said.\n\n\"Yeah, man, one place open that will be cool for you. I'll walk you there.\" The man took us to an upscale pub in a newly gentrified section of Jersey City.\n\n\"Hey guys, thanks,\" he said. \"You know. For going over there to help.\"\n\nFor that moment, the guy wasn't a pipe head, he was one of us, an American. The whole nation seemed to come together that day. I wonder if that's what it felt like for Americans the day Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.\n\nWhen the seven of us walked into the bar, we got a standing ovation from a room full of complete strangers. We hadn't said anything, but they immediately knew where we'd been from the gray dust that so thoroughly caked our uniforms. People started buying us drinks, far more than we could consume. Women kissed us, men shook our hands and many said, \"God bless you.\" The owner gave us a case of beer and refused to even consider taking money.\n\nA short while later, we headed back to the train station and boarded the one headed for Middletown. Somehow, the conductor arranged for us to have our own car. I got home about 4:30 a.m. and was back to work with the rest of the guys at 8 a.m.\n\n_Me with Detective Barry Grimm and Detective Lieutenant Michael Rubino in the Holland Tunnel on September 11, 2001. The tunnel was completely empty and eerily silent as we headed back to New Jersey._\n\nThe mood was somber in headquarters that day. The chief was manic and determined to micromanage everything that we did. Our task that day was to check all the ferry and train stations for anything that looked out of the ordinary. Nothing was running to New York City, and any car left overnight in one of the parking lots likely belonged to someone who'd died in the World Trade Center. We took down the plate numbers and passed the information along to a group back at headquarters that was working on victim identification and notification of families. Middletown was the hardest-hit single community in the country in terms of deaths on 9/11. The brokerage house Cantor Fitzgerald, with offices in the World Trade Center, had a number of employees who lived in Middletown; some died, and others survived. We were tasked with notifying the survivors' families that they had been located.\n\nIt was a very strange aura that hung over the land anywhere in the tri-state area. Crime had come to a standstill. People appeared to be moving at a much slower pace, and it seemed many were reaching deep within to try to cope.\n\nAmid the devastation, the words of the stoic philosopher Epictetus on our mortality comforted my soul:\n\nWhat God/Zeus would say to Epictetus if he but could. My son and servant whom I love, I wish I could provide for you a body that would not so easily be shattered. But mortals possess bodies like clay vessels, and easily broken. I would love to give to you, Epictetus, a home never destroyed by the storms. But alas I cannot. But I can give you something much better, a treasure, a piece of the Gods. The faculty of using the appearances of things, the faculty of desire and aversion. If you take care of this faculty and consider it your only possession, you will never be hindered, never meet any impediments, you will not lament, you will not blame, you will not flatter any person.\n\nRubino was in contact with relief workers actually moving debris on the pile. He told me the guys were exhausted and happy to have cops from anywhere relieve them. The chief, meanwhile, was towing the bureaucratic line that the relief effort was going smoothly, and that only those who were trained for rescue efforts should be there. Having seen the actual site, I was stunned. How many people could there be who are trained to deal with mass-casualty disasters in which skyscrapers are brought down by jet aircraft?\n\n_A view of the lower fa\u00e7ade of the World Trade Center with first responders on September 11th._\n\nMy experience, as well as Cliff O'Hara's, suggested that no one really knew how to proceed, and they were winging it using ingenuity, guts and lots of manpower. So, on September 13, Mike Rubino, Cliff O'Hara, Jerry Weimer, Steve Dollinger and I, along with several other men, took personal days and headed back to Ground Zero\u2014despite opposition from the chief, who feared that someone could get hurt and trigger a worker's compensation claim. I couldn't fathom the chief's position and thought I was in some kind of twilight zone. We left police headquarters under the glare of doom from higher-ups.\n\n_Building 7 comes down right in front of me._\n\nThe Middletown Police Department routinely worked with the team from the nearby coast guard station in Sandy Hook, so our group arranged to hitch a ride on a cutter from Sandy Hook to lower Manhattan. Normally, the waters south of Manhattan would have been a busy hub of activity. But that day, there was nothing moving on the water. There were no recreational boats, no ship traffic and no commercial or private planes overhead. We were on the only boat moving through the area. An occasional air force fighter would fly by high overhead, as well as a few helicopter gunships.\n\nWe went straight to Ground Zero and regrouped near a fire engine parked outside a tall building. Some of the other volunteers were trying to figure out the best route onto the rubble pile. One of our guys, Larry Hall, grabbed a seat on a folding metal chair; seats were at a premium.\n\nSuddenly, a chorus of panicked screams came from the nearby building.\n\n\"Run, run! It's coming down!\"\n\nHundreds upon hundreds of rescue workers\u2014and anyone else nearby\u2014started running for their lives. Pieces of debris began falling around us, and we all thought we were going to get buried alive or crushed. Hall tripped as he was getting up from the chair. He fell forward, landing face down, and suddenly had shoe and boot marks on his back as people ran over him.\n\nI grabbed the guy under his left arm and hauled him to his feet, just as others smashed me to the ground. I went down hard on my surgically repaired right knee. Afraid of being trampled\u2014or potentially getting killed by a falling building\u2014I stood and began to run with the group of panicked humanity. The pain in my knee caused me to view the world through multicolored dots. The people who trampled others were not cowards or uncaring persons. Hell, they'd volunteered to be there, just like us. What took place was primal, a fear of being buried alive or crushed like an insect.\n\nTo this day, I'm not quite sure what happened. I believe that the American Express building suffered some kind of internal structural collapse but remained standing. Some debris cascaded down, and it truly was a close call. We never could have outrun the carnage had that building actually collapsed; we were way too close.\n\nAfter catching my breath, I realized my knee was stiffening and giving me some real pain. I went to an aid station nearby, and they wanted to take me to a hospital. I refused, saying I wanted to go back on the line, and they relented when I walked away showing more confidence in my knee than I felt inside.\n\nI worked for hours as part of a bucket brigade, removing debris piece by piece from the pile. No one knew if we were standing on something firm or something that would give way under our weight. Somehow, none of us seemed to care about our own safety. It was all about clearing the pile of debris and trying to get to any survivors, or victims, who might be buried there. At one point, I stared down through an opening in the debris and could see the remains of a parking garage far below me. I kept working.\n\nI was there when members of the city's sanitation department raised a symbolic American flag on the site.\n\nThe sights, sounds and smells will stay with me forever. It was at once a terribly sad day and yet an awesome one, too, as strangers got together and did what they could. I watched as well-coiffed women in expensive clothes lugged drinking water from trucks to the pile for the thirsty, dust-caked volunteers. No one yelled, no one barked orders.\n\nI worked the bucket brigade until my knee became so sore I was a liability. I then secured the gear for the rest of our group and guarded the perimeter as heavy construction equipment, including backhoes and cranes, was brought in.\n\nAt one point, soldiers turned over two Middle Eastern males to me. They looked every bit like jihadists, had no ID and claimed they were Armenians. But they were unable to explain why they needed to be so close to the rubble pile. I turned them over to a very tough-looking and decisive sergeant from the NYPD. I never learned what became of those two men, but I am pretty confident that they cooperated with the cop.\n\nA white stretch limousine slowly made its way through the rubble and heavy machinery, looking very out of place. It had no front license plate but carried a special plate bearing the New York Yankees logo\u2014the one in red, white and blue, with the baseball, bat and top hat. When it got closer, I walked over, stopped the vehicle and asked the driver what he was doing at Ground Zero.\n\nThe driver popped out and said, \"Mr. Steinbrenner wanted to get coffee to the workers. Can you help me?\"\n\nThe entire vehicle was loaded with tray upon tray of Styrofoam cups, all filled with hot coffee. There must have been hundreds filling the interior and the trunk of the 10-passenger stretch. I hobbled over and started helping the driver unload his cargo. Other volunteers came over and pitched in, too.\n\n### CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE\n\n## THE GREAT JAKE SLATER\n\nI pulled into the lot for the Middletown Police Department right around 7:30 a.m., parked my Nissan Altima in one of the spots up by the communications tower and walked down to the sprawling one-story brick headquarters that had been my home base as a cop for the past 20 years. The year was 2003, and it was my last year on the force. I took an exterior stairwell down to a steel basement door reserved for police personnel and headed for the locker room.\n\nDonning my uniform and gear, I headed for a large conference room where one of the sergeants would do the daily briefing before we started our shift at 8 a.m. The meeting was attended by all the officers who would be out on the shift, along with dispatchers, plainclothes detectives and other support personnel. The noise associated with the shift change triggered some shouting from the prisoners in the nearby cell block. All of us were inured to this and generally paid no attention to it. This time, though, one of the voices seemed strangely familiar to me.\n\n\"That your boy in there?\" Lieutenant Cortland Best, a 30-year veteran of the force, asked.\n\nI didn't recognize the prisoner's bellowing bass voice at first. Then it hit me. The voice belonged to one of the most feared motorcycle outlaws alive, the ferocious and feared former leader of the Sandy Hook chapter of the Pagans Motorcycle Club, Jake Slater.\n\nThe lieutenant knew me well\u2014and he was also aware of my history with Slater. I often referred to my superior as \"Lou,\" short for lieutenant.\n\n\"Lou, are you telling me that's Slater?\" I asked.\n\nBest nodded. \"He's being held on a warrant. He isn't very happy about it at all.\"\n\n\"Mind if I have a word?\"\n\n\"Go ahead,\" he said.\n\nI nodded at the two uniformed officers guarding the prisoners and headed back to Slater's cell. Like all the other cells, the one Jake was in was equipped with one wooden bench, a cheap blanket and a utilitarian toilet. Its cement-block walls were painted in an institutional yellow.\n\nSlater looked a little older but otherwise just as I'd remembered him. Standing six foot two, with a massive, muscular upper body, he was still a hard-core tough guy. He exuded menace and had a predatory air. He was wearing the same sort of clothes that I remembered: jeans, a sleeveless undershirt and black engineer boots. He had shaved his head and sported a graying Fu Manchu beard with the chin whiskers grown long.\n\n\"Remember me?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" he said, leaning on the gray steel bars, a look of doom on his face.\n\n\"You want a bottle of spring water, rather than that toilet shit?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Thanks.\"\n\n\"I'll bring you some,\" I said casually. \"You know, guys like us got to slow down. Getting old. Let the young guys do the heavy lifting.\"\n\n\"You're right, but make sure you watch your back. Some people who you think are your friends, aren't. You can't let them fuck with you.\"\n\nI nodded and said, \"Don't go anywhere. I'll be back with your water.\"\n\nWhen I returned, Slater and I talked briefly about some of the guys we'd known and ridden with, and I noticed that his mind wasn't as sharp as his body. Soon I headed back to the briefing.\n\nAs the sergeant gave us the rundown\u2014a private detective working a case in town, a car crash at a major intersection, a couple of breaking-and-entering cases and the chief wanting the cars washed\u2014I thought about Jake and my time in the Pagans.\n\nIn a way, looking at him was like looking into some crystal ball and seeing what I would have been had I continued to ride with Slater and the Pagans rather than becoming the first man in the U.S. to leave an outlaw motorcycle gang and become a decorated police officer. It was a place I most clearly didn't want to be.\n\nBut for the grace of God, it could have been me incarcerated that humid summer day in the Gray Bar Hotel. To be sure, Slater was anything but pathetic; he was still practiced in the art of intimidation. But upon closer inspection, you could sense he was close to rot. The world had passed him by. He was going to have to make a lot of noise to get the attention that had come his way so easily before. Rap gangsters and tattooed white kids with sideways ball caps and pipe-cleaner arms were the \"in\" bad boys.\n\nI thought back to some of the great Hollywood westerns, like _The Wild Bunch_ , the 1969 classic about an aging outlaw gang on the Texas-Mexico border, and about Patrick Floyd \"Pat\" Garrett, the American lawman, bartender and customs agent who became famous around the turn of the century for killing Billy the Kid. How did aging outlaws deal with getting old and not being very special anymore?\n\nThe warrior/sage Tecumseh said, \"The hardest thing about growing old is that people don't fear you anymore.\"\n\nAnd I no longer feared the great Jake Slater.\n\n## EPILOGUE\n\nThe warm tropical sun beats down most days in my new home in southwest Florida. When I married Barbara in 2008, I went from single with no children to having a large family, with three grown kids and a slew of grandkids\u2014which is a blast. The number of grandchildren just went up to seven. And I have never even changed a diaper. Renzo Gracie still teases me on that score. Hell, I have never even said no to any grandchild over the age of 10. They must wonder who this far-out old man really is. I hesitate to say read the book. My father, Bud, passed away in 2010, and my mom, Pearl, is in an assisted-living facility in New Jersey. My brother, Mike, is married and still living in New Jersey.\n\nI was recently interviewed by a reporter for the local Fox affiliate here in Florida about the biker massacre in Waco, Texas. She observed during a break that I must have had countless incidents in which I should have wound up dead during my days in the army, biker clubs and undercover narcotics. I realized that a day hasn't gone by during which some situation or another doesn't remind me of how very fortunate I am.\n\nI'm reminded of one of the iconic films of my generation, _Apocalypse Now_. One of the many memorable scenes is the \"Charlie don't surf\" segment, in which Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) tells one of his soldiers, \"What do you know about surfing, Major? You're from goddamn New Jersey.\"\n\nThe end of that scene hits home for me. Kilgore kneels in the sand on the beach and speaks lovingly of napalm. Then Captain Willard, played by Martin Sheen, narrates: \"He [Kilgore] was one of those guys that had a weird light around him. You just knew he wasn't gonna get so much as a scratch here.\"\n\n_Discussing women's defensive tactics with the hosts of_ Fox 4 Rising _in Cape Coral, Florida, around 2009. I was a regular on the show for three and a half years._\n\nWhen I was traveling toward Ground Zero soon after September 11, 2001, that phrase about coming back without a scratch drifted through my mind and rattled my senses. Detective Jeffrey Barner and I were discussing the risk factors at the devastated site. Suddenly Barner's face went blank for a second.\n\n\"That's you, man,\" he said, referencing the scene in _Apocalypse Now_. \"Oh yes, man, that's you. You have that weird light, I've felt it for a long time.\"\n\nI had no reply. But two days later, when debris was raining down on my head during that partial building collapse at Ground Zero, and I was running for my life, the thought soothed my mind.\n\nOddly, retiring to South Florida has not ended the close calls for me. I still find myself in some strange and dangerous situations under the semi-tropical sun. But there's some space between the incidents here and my dangerous past that I'm thankful for. One night, Barbara and I experienced\u2014and then put down\u2014an attempted home invasion at gunpoint. Another time, some gangbangers tried to box in my vehicle in an attempted carjacking on a desolate roadway. That was quickly solved by my constant companions, Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson. My grown stepson, Bernard, was there with me that day; it was one that he likely won't soon forget.\n\n_Me and my wife, Barbara, during a Mexican vacation in 2006._\n\nAt another point, I was involved in an alleged kidnapping involving a Russian Muay Thai fighter wanted for crimes in Central Europe and a famous retired member of the New York Yankees\u2014anyone who has followed the team over the last 20 years would be well aware of him. We did not part as friends from our benighted meeting. Too bad; I dig the Yankees. If he reads this: hint\u2014dark sunglasses and backward baseball cap isn't as threatening as you may think.\n\nLike William Holden in _Network_ (my favorite movie), I designed to write my memoir and do what one does in the autumn of one's years. Or, as Charmian is told in Robert Stone's _Dog Soldiers_ , \"I desire to serve God... And to grow rich, like all men.\" I know that I am being dragged into this digital age, no happier about it than a Luddite. Anachronistic to the end, I roar like a lion in defiance at the winds of change, and they ignore me universally. But I will continue to roar until the next phase takes me.\n\nJerry Garcia nailed it: \"What a long strange trip it's been.\"\n\n## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\nAs you read through _Jersey Tough_ , you may have noticed that there are very few pictures of my Pagan times. Simply put, using a camera would likely have gotten me killed. Some members were wanted felons or on parole and forbidden from associating with other Pagans. Pagan hierarchy considered pictures with a person wearing colors to be club property.\n\nWhen you attempt to write your first book as you are nearing sixty years of age, it is reasonable to expect a great deal of polite smiles and a good many condescending glances. I got a few of those, but mostly people were very supportive:\n\nMy wife Barbara's support was, at times, heroic due to my ongoing scorched earth war with all things computer. The battle lines are drawn, and I am losing; but the war drums always beat.\n\nRenzo Gracie, to whom I owe _Giri_ (a debt so steep it is all but unpayable); the gift of your love and friendship has deeply enriched my life.\n\nIf there was no Mike DeGiglio, there would be no book. I owe you _Giri_ also, my brother.\n\nCharles Varrone, the undisputed heavyweight champion of life and _mero mero_ of KB Security Consultants Inc. A book about you would unleash a thousand ships.\n\nMy brother, Michael, and his wife, Elaine, both of unflinching belief in this project.\n\nToni Cariero, who had to hear about this project in triplicate. A sage for our times.\n\nJonathan Cariero, the first proofreader. I think he still likes me even after removing a layer of the onion.\n\nThe four doctors who against all odds keep me straining at the leash of life. Dr. Rocky Seckler, Dr. John Ardesia, Dr. Ronald Gardner and Dr. Brian Arcement. All have gone beyond the call of duty.\n\nMy trusted agent and friend, Frank Weimann. If you value your money, do not play poker with this man.\n\nThe crew at ECW, indefatigable and creative. Jack David. For his vision. Erin Creasey, Crissy Calhoun and Susannah Ames. For dealing with my Quixotic and often mercurial personality. Emily Schultz, I thought you would cut me with a sword. But with grace, you pointed me to a star.\n\nGeorge Sammet. When this cat has your back, you can sleep very tight.\n\nKarel Pravec and Frank \"The Tank\" Camiscioli, the warriors of Silver Fox Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Academy. Fighting from your foxhole would be an honor. Josh Madama and Milo Esteves, in the foxhole to our right. Come one, come a thousand.\n\nDouglas P. Love. Welcome to the jungle.\n\nLouis Wesolowsky. Filmmaker extraordinaire. LouisWes.com.\n\nCliff O'Hara. A rock.\n\nTo the countless standup cops, prosecutors, lawyers and selfless citizens, it has been a distinct honor to have shared the same space with you.\n\nTo my dear family and many friends, my very humble thanks.\n\n## ABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\n**Wayne \"Big Chuck\" Bradshaw** is an Army veteran, former member of the outlaw Pagans motorcycle gang, and 20-year veteran of the Middletown New Jersey Police Department. After he retired, he began teaching self-defense classes to women. Bradshaw lives in Florida, with his wife, Barbara.\n\n**Douglas P. Love** is a writer, editor, and publicist who lives in New York.\n\n## TRY ANOTHER GREAT READ FROM ECW PRESS...\n\n THE ASSIMILATION In the early 1990s, Maurice \"Mom\" Boucher and his fellow Montreal Hells Angels, reputedly the most ruthless and vicious bikers in the world, subdued all comers except the tough-as-nails members of the Rock Machine. Founded by Salvatore Cazzetta, an ex-friend of Boucher, the Rock Machine had every intention of standing up against the Hells Angels. Seven years of bloody conflict, which left over 160 people dead and countless injured, was the result. Heavily outnumbered, the Rock Machine appealed to the worldwide Bandidos Motorcycle Club, who rivaled the Hells Angels in terms of membership and strength. In January 2000, the Rock Machine ceased to exist and became a probationary Bandidos chapter \u2013 the first to be established on Canadian soil.\n\nBiker Edward Winterhalder was assigned by the Bandidos to coordinate the transition. Although the stage had been set for an end to the biker war and a positive outcome for all, it was anything but. Starting with the arrest and unsuccessful deportation proceedings of Winterhalder by the Canadian authorities, more intrigue, assassinations, and double-crosses, Winterhalder found himself in a situation even he found impossible to control.\n\nECW digital titles are available online wherever ebooks are sold. Visit ecwpress.com for more details. To receive special offers, bonus content and a look at what's next at ECW, sign up for our newsletter!\n\nCopyright \u00a9 Wayne Bradshaw, 2016\n\nPublished by ECW Press\n\n665 Gerrard Street East\n\nToronto, ON M4M 1Y2\n\n416-694-3348 / info@ecwpress.com\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process \u2014 electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise \u2014 without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.\n\nTo the best of his abilities, the author has related experiences, places, people, and organizations from his memories of them. In order to protect the privacy of others, he has, in some instances, changed the names of certain people and details of events and places.\n\nlibrary and archives canada cataloguing in publication\n\nBradshaw, Wayne (Wayne Evans), author\n\nJersey tough : my wild ride from outlaw biker to undercover cop / Wayne \"Big Chuck\" Bradshaw.\n\nIssued in print and electronic formats.\n\nISBN 978-1-77041-261-3 (paperback)\n\nISBN 978-1-77090-842-0 (pdf); ISBN 978-1-77090-843-7 (ePub)\n\n1. Bradshaw, Wayne (Wayne Evans). 2. Pagans (Motorcycle club).\n\n3. Motorcycle clubs\u2014United States. 4. Motorcycle gangs\u2014United States.\n\n5. Gang members\u2014United States\u2014Biography. 6. Police\u2014New Jersey\u2014Biography. I. Title.\n\nhv6439.u5b73 2016 364.106'60973 c2015-907281-6\n\nc2015-907282-4\n\nCover design: Michel Vrana\n\nInterior images: courtesy of the author\n\n### Contents\n\n  1. FOREWORD by Renzo Gracie\n  2. Chapter One: Going Undercover\n  3. Chapter Two: Blowing the Shot\n  4. Chapter Three: The Politics of Contraband\n  5. Chapter Four: Clowns to the Left, Jokers to the Right\n  6. Chapter Five: Growing Up Chuck\n  7. Chapter Six: Life During Wartime\n  8. Chapter Seven: Welcome to the Machine\n  9. Chapter Eight: Hear No Evil\n  10. Chapter Nine: Rockin' Robin\n  11. Chapter Ten: A View from the Abyss\n  12. Chapter Eleven: The Deepest Ring of Hell\n  13. Chapter Twelve: Quiet Days in Key West\n  14. Chapter Thirteen: Beyond Good & Evil\n  15. Chapter Fourteen: Whiskey Joe & the Breed\n  16. Chapter Fifteen: Entering the Little Bighorn\n  17. Chapter Sixteen: Good Evening, Mr. Molotov\n  18. Chapter Seventeen: Shaking the Tiger's Tail\n  19. Chapter Eighteen: The Sandy Hook Pagans\n  20. Chapter Nineteen: Life Was Easier when I Was Cruel\n  21. Chapter Twenty: The Woman in the White Dress\n  22. Chapter Twenty-One: Sympathy for the Devil\n  23. Chapter Twenty-Two: All Things Must Pass\n  24. Chapter Twenty-Three: Bloody Fingers\n  25. Chapter Twenty-Four: Burned but Not Broken\n  26. Chapter Twenty-Five: The Warrior's Spirit\n  27. Chapter Twenty-Six: Shooting at the Wrong Club\n  28. Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Man in the Duster\n  29. Chapter Twenty-Eight: Cocaine & Cadillacs\n  30. Chapter Twenty-Nine: Pass the Fucking Peas\n  31. Chapter Thirty: Renzo Comes to Town\n  32. Chapter Thirty-One: Dennis the Mad Dog\n  33. Chapter Thirty-Two: A Classic Hot Call\n  34. Chapter Thirty-Three: Too Late\n  35. Chapter Thirty-Four: Working the Pile at Ground Zero\n  36. Chapter Thirty-Five: The Great Jake Slater\n  37. Epilogue\n  38. Acknowledgments\n  39. About the Author\n  40. Copyright\n\n## Guide\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Title Page\n  3. Content\n  4. Copyright\n\n"]]