What I miss from New York

Exactly a year ago I moved from Bereldange, Luxembourg to Manhattan, New York. The contrast coudn't have been sharper. In Luxembourg, restaurants close on Sundays and people look at you funny when you actually walk down the village. And yes, Luxembourgeois are a secretive people (born bankers:)) so your landlady might refuse to tell you anything about your roomies before you actually start sharing the kitchen with them. More than anything, Luxembourg loves its law and order. Busses run on time, sleek, clean and half-empty. Rental bikes are polished, pumped, ready for immediate use (except that locals don't use them at all). Clerks in banks are polite, well-mannered and strictly keep their lunch break, no matter how many customers are waiting in line.

So Manhattan was a true punch in the face. A really good one, though. My husband says New York is a mixture of Mexican and German mentality - everything works but in its own, chaotic way. Now, living temporarily in Bratislava, Slovakia where I graduated from high school exactly 10 years ago, I realize how special New York really is and how much I miss it.

So I decided to make a list of things I miss from New York. In no particular order. Here are the first 3 things:

• Book vendors on Broadway 

In the era of iPad, Kindle, Nook and television, street vendors sell books that 'fall from the sky'. For one, two, three dollars, you can get Vonnegut, Hosseini, Marquez, you name it. The books stay there, between 72nd and 74th street, rain or sleet, night and day, covered by plastic sheets for the night. Apparently, stealing books is not in.

• Coffee section in Fairway 

Fairway is THE supermarket on the Upper West Side. If you don't mind squeezing your way to fresh vegetables, having the cashiers shout over your shoulder in Spanish, or waiting for your coffee (Sumatra organic or regular, miss?) to be ground. The smell of coffee in Fairway is one smell I've associated with New York. (And there are more smells, some less sweet than others)

•  Jaywalking policemen

'Cops' are omnipresent in New York. And not just in Manhattan but also in the Bronx, Harlem, Queens, Brooklyn... I don't remember going anywhere without seeing their patrols. Unlike in Moscow, it does feel good. They behave like humans - you'll see them jaywalking the street, cracking jokes with deli owners, or posing for photographs with tourists.

My favorite story is of a policewoman who just walked away, smiling, when she heard a group of teenagers talk about smoking marihuana (and smoking it afterwards in mid-day Central Park). Cops obviously have bigger problems to worry about in this city than to boss around truant kids who want to be cool.

Luckily, NYC is a much safer city than it was ten, twenty years ago... (TBC)

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What a totally ungifted person can do with the Bamboo Pen



(Thanks to free vector graphics, Adobe Illustrator, New Yorker and my own camera:-))

Source for the Skier: Newyorker.com

The picture of the gun on the Skier's T-shirt comes from the picture I took in front of the U.N. Headquarters in NYC. I just traced it with the pen tool.

Blind Aristotle (by Jaromir Stetina, translated by L.H.)




Source: http://tinyurl.com/5suttyz

 

‘An injury like this has probably never been described in literature before,’ said a district doctor in Gudermesa. ‘The bullet must have entered the skull through the left temple, curved along the inner side of the forehead, shattered the man’s eyes and exited out the right temple. The brain remained intact.’



The doctor yawned. ‘Excuse me. I’ve been operating on people for five days in a row. Go inside. The man’s name is Yavuz Bigayev. The Chechens have already caught the sniper who shot him. Ask Yavuz to tell you what they did to the Russian bastard…’

An oppressive blast of air hit us in the face as we entered the room. The fresh May afternoon breeze stayed outside. All the windows were sealed with adhesive tape. Inside, the injured lay on eight beds with steel frames. We recognized Yavuz immediately. His head resembled a massive, overgrown melon. Bandages that were wound around his head, soaking yellowish blood stains, showed only lips and the right ear. He spoke softly and continuously, as if he weren't badly injured at all.



‘I didn’t know what it was like – to kill people. I didn’t want to know. Then they shelled our apartment building. I lost everything. Stray shrapnel killed my brother Ruslan. So I bought a machine gun and joined Aslanbeck’s unit. My first battle was on New Year’s Eve. I didn’t shoot much. They laughed at me, told me I was a bad soldier and always positioned me at the back line. I’m over fifty, you know. I never did military service. I like books. Before the war I used to work as a librarian at the Oil Institute in Grozny. I had such a great library there. I read almost every book there.

We won The New Year’s battle. We wrecked hundreds of tents and shot thousands of Russian soldiers. I don’t know if I killed anyone. I can’t even say what was going on in my mind. I don’t know if I was scared or angry or just full of regret. Maybe I wanted revenge. I shot from a distance. I was acting like I was obsessed. I didn’t feel tired. When I saw a Russian tank that my friends had set on fire, I screamed like a madman. I screamed because I was excited, seeing Russian soldiers jumping out of the tank with their bodies on fire. I shot at them standing, with my machine gun propped at my side.



We almost didn’t sleep at all. We were always fighting. Sometimes we would pray together in a circle, which made us feel much stronger. In Chechnya we call it ‘zikr’. When you stand in a circle, dancing or praying, it is as if the power to survive, or the courage to die, makes you so much stronger. Sometimes I would go to a basement, cover myself with my fur coat and dream that funny dream of mine….’

An American truck pulls over and unloads a large container in front of my house. I sign a paper which states that I’m inheriting stuff from my uncle who moved to the States years ago where his family lost track of him. I open the container. It’s full of books and manuscripts… but what manuscripts!

Out of forty-six books by Aristotle that were known in ancient times, less than half have survived. But suddenly before my eyes unknown scrolls unfold, containing the 14th and 15th volumes of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. I take out the books, trembling with excitement. I carefully fish out piles of scrolls from the container. The Gospel according to Paul covered in dust. Seven volumes of The Three Musketeers 15 Years later by Alexandre Dumas. I open a tattered notebook, Dostoyevsky’s diary written in prison in Omsk. Chavchavadze’s translations of Pushkin into Georgian. Unknown Koran suras from Mekka.

I wake up deafened by thundering gunfire and crawl out from the basement. A hunched Russian granny emerges from the veil of purple smoke that's engulfing the street. She’s carrying a bucket. I scream at her, ‘Mother, take cover, or you’ll get killed!’ And she disappears again into the thick blanket of smoke. She is desperately looking for water. I am back in my world. The houses around me are on fire, grenades are falling in front of me into the ruins of a furniture factory.

The Russian army uses katyushas against us. They are now much more sophisticated than fifty years ago and make it practically impossible for anyone to hide. The URAGAN launcher shoots 220 mm rockets, each of them weighing 270 kilos. They sometimes launch five, ten, fifteen rockets at a time. The rockets will burst into million fragments that pierce concrete walls. A single rocket reduces all life within two hectares to nothing. Rockets can fall as far as thirty kilometers. When Russians come with the URAGAN, go and hide, and silently pray for survival. It’s toughest for the old - where should they go? They can’t just jump over a concrete bridge into a river. Oh my god! GRAD is not much better, either. It has a smaller caliber – 122 millimeters – and has a firing range of twenty kilometers. We rebels can barely escape, but civilians, they have no chance.

I was sent to sneak along the Sunzha River which flows through the center of Grozny and document Russian positions behind the Caucasus Hotel. I move slowly, jumping from door to door, brushing my shoulders against the houses on a deserted street. Every fifty meters I stumble upon a corpse, gnawed by dogs. Dogs love the flesh of children the most. Maybe it tastes sweeter. There are always more dogs feasting on a child than on an old man. I’m very careful, even though Russian soldiers aren’t supposed to be on this street at all. I step carefully, moving from one shadow to another. Then I hear a sharp crash and see a cloud of black smoke with a white lining, and then nothing. It’s dark, completely dark. I fall on my knees and crawl snake-like to a wall. I sit there, resting the back of my neck against the wall. I touch my face with my hands. They're wet. Maybe blood. I realize I have no eyeballs anymore and can’t lie down unless I want to bleed to death. I decide to wait until they find me. It’ll all depend on who that will be, Russians or my people.

They start to shell the street with heavy grenades, howitzers with 152-millimeter calibers. These grenades weigh almost fifty kilos. One can shatter a house into pieces. The Russians have apparently decided to exterminate the city. Using a launcher they blast a block of houses to pieces, including the people hiding in the basements. Then they send a group of foot soldiers to seize the place and start working on the next block. Systematically. Step by step. As if they were not sons of Ivan the Terrible, but sons of Hitler.

Maybe I’ve gone crazy. I sit for hours and hours, trying not to fall over. I get some rest, half-sleeping. Then half-awake the same dream comes back again. The container with books looks bottomless. I take out more and more scrolls. They fill up my kitchen, living room, balcony, old books, one literary gem after another. I hold the original edition of Kitab Al-Shifa, The Book of Healing by Avicenna. In the preamble, unknown so far, he confesses his admiration for Aristotle. Did you know that his real name was Abū Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā? I step on books and experience an infinite pleasure of discovery. An unknown novel by Francis Scott Fitzgerald lies in front of me about the Great Gatsby who became the Small Gatsby. An unknown version of Waiting For Godot, in which Godot actually comes. As it turns out, Gogol never burnt the second version of his Dead Souls. I hold notebooks written in the Maestro’s minute handwriting. My heart skips a beat when I come across a secret plan to topple Stalin, written in 1937 by Andre Breton and Lev Trotsky. Or when I read Agatha Christie’s confession in which she admits that she never wrote And There Were None but she stole it in 1920 from some New England newspaper. Or when I find Kafka’s first attempt at writing The Process in which the main character’s name is not Josef K. but Karel J.

They found me on the third day. My people. They brought me here, to this hospital in Gudermesa. They operated on me and told me I’d never see again. A while ago they brought to the town the sniper whom they'd captured firing at people on the streets and at our positions from a nine-story apartment building behind the hotel. It’s the one who blew my eyes out. No doubt about it. My commander came to see me and said, ‘You can do whatever you want with him.’ Then a few hours later he came back for me with a car and drove me to a brick factory where he'd been holding Russian captives. I only know his name was Aljosha and he was about thirty. ‘They’ll bring him in a minute. You can do it,’ he said to me.

I sat on a chair in a room and heard cannons shooting nearby. I slid down the chair, put my head on the arm rest and fell into a half-sleep again. It would make me fell better to be in this aware unconsciousness. Books, books, books.

At the bottom of the container I find a pile of clay plates sealed together with duct tape. It’s the complete edition of The Code of Hammurabi. Almost 150 kilos. I haul the books home together with my neighbors and my brother Ruslan who have all come to help. Books and books everywhere. A totally unknown novel by George Orwell with the title 2084 written, at the end of his life when he realized that 1984 was just a weak cup of tea compared to what’s happening in the world at the end of this millennium. An original manuscript of Apollinaire’s Alcohols written in Polish. Well, his mother was Polish, which not many people know. I sit on the steps and read an unknown speech by Boris Pasternak, that he drafted while he was getting ready to receive the Nobel Prize. There’s no mention of him refusing it, which he finally did. I read and suddenly hear a whizzing sound. Then a rumble and then a deadly blast that shatters ear drums and compresses the diaphram. The last thing I see in my dream is my dead brother Ruslan with his throat cut by nickel shrapnel. Above him a notebook, written in pencil, burning in the air. Stories by Isaak Babel, so far unknown. The notebook falls to the ground and smolders among the ruins of our house. Shit.

(to be continued)

Tutoring at Mount Hope

This morning I walked down Jerome Avenue in Mount Hope, central Bronx. I couldn’t help but notice: a car-repair shop with half-drawn blinds sprayed with graffiti; a young Black man strolling casually down the street with his jacket hood pulled up over his head; a teenage Hispanic Mom pushing a stroller and speaking nervously on the phone. The scene had a feel of an early 80s action movie - right before something bad was about to happen. The air was chilly, the sidewalk still covered with early-morning frost. I walked fast, feeling cold and slightly uncomfortable. I had been to the neighborhood several times before, but for the first time I really paid attention to its details: the people, smells, sights, noises. Suddenly the place seemed to have formed a barren, austere picture of a neighborhood where failure is everyday reality.

Mount Hope is a neighborhood that struggles with a relatively high crime rate and wide-spread indoor drug-dealing. Moreover, the area has four homeless shelters, which is disproportionally high compared to the number of its residents. Median household income is lower than in the Bronx as a whole, and so are its rents. Families tend to be larger than in other parts of the city. Foreign-born residents represent about 40 percent of the population. In fact, sixty percent were born in the Dominican Republic, Jamaica or Ecuador. Thirty-two percent of the population is Black, while less than two percent are White, non-Hispanic residents. The neighborhood also has low educational attainment, lower than the Bronx as a whole. Almost half of the population never completes high school.

Mount Hope Community Center lies just two blocks away from the 176th Street subway station. It is a two-story building, which houses a dozen classrooms used for various community programs. One such program offers high-school dropouts a chance to prepare for their GED exams. Two times a week New York Cares sends a small group of volunteers to tutor Mount Hope students in Math, English writing, Social Studies or Science. The building itself is nice, newly equipped with IKEA-style furniture. The classrooms, however, are a far cry from what is typical in American schools. The problem is not that they are simple and pragmatically furnished for any age group. (In fact, the classrooms look much better cared for than any Slovak classroom I’ve ever experienced during my school years.) The fact is that they are anonymous and empty: no creativity, no playfulness, no visible spirit of learning, discovery and self-expression; just a handful of posters cover the walls with homework assignments for ‘What do you want to be when you grow up’. Multiplication tables, drawn sloppily with colorful Sharpies, don’t offer any reason to look at them again. Black-and-white line drawings of Martin Luther King Jr. (colored by students) are tacked haphazardly on the walls and are a sad reminder that his message is still very relevant to this day.

This morning, as I waited for my math student, two assignments on the wall struck me as extremely telling: a boy wrote that he wanted to become a football player, so that he could earn a lot of money and a girl wanted to be a pediatrician, so that she could help children who are allergic to food. Not one poster mentioned professions such as lawyer, teacher, artist and musician. Not a single boy wanted to be an astronaut, an inventor or a builder of modern wonders of the world.

My student, L.G., arrived a few minutes later with a dog-eared textbook full of multiplication problems. As we sat down I asked him if he liked math at all. He said, ‘I don’t know.’ The problems looked scary even to me. No smileys at the end of a chapter, no pictures, no hints or tips how to crack a difficult task. For the next sixty minutes I tried my best to think of all the ‘magic’ my math teacher had taught me many years ago (and made me fall in love with Math then). L.G. noted everything down with his blunt pencil. I could tell he was good at multiplication. What he obviously lacked was an ability to think about the problems creatively, in an ‘out-of-the-box’ fashion. The feeling that the whole place lacked creativity stayed with for a long time after I walked out of the Center and made my way to the subway station.