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without a telescope. We lived on the Acropolis, in a sleeping car. Greeks came and led us back to their hovels for cooked guts, weed and abundant krasi. Back to their teeming hovels.
    You never liked the flat. One has an awareness of themes. The process seems banal and one rejects it. Still one is the dominant factor in one’s environment. I sensed that my work, whether good or bad, would not prosper. It never has. A blunt word and a relationship trembles for a decade. You said:
    — I feel it’s unlucky.
    Our three-roomed flat, self-contained, with a quaking floor. It surveyed London. Regional HQ of the occupying forces would have had the impression, at least, of dominating the Thames Valley conurbation from our living room. Through a good telescope one sometimes saw exciting things quite a long way away. I arose hurriedly from a stretch of dense prose construction and manned the instrument. Quite close a white body, bathed in weak sunlight, lay screened by provoking new foliage. The breeze stirred the trees, veiling and again revealing the white girl in the open window. My thirty-five magnifications conveyed my phantom eye to within stirring distance of the white mounds and the ruddy growth of the crotch. The experience moved me.
    — I feel it’s unlucky.
    Clearly I had to reject your superstitious allegation. Such neo-Gothic imprecations are alien to modern Hampstead. I observed that we were naked. The blast wave from unruly hydrogen fusing anywhere over London would have toppled us like a flake. The hot pulse would have seared us to the clay. I watched the invulnerable sky modulating through glory above the great crystal of guilt. London is ruthless and still. You slept like a child next door. No harmonic waves invaded our flat. I shrieked soundlessly in creative impotence. I loathed that telescope.
    We need our records. We can store very little reality. The powerful scanner, our brain, weaving through space-time, has only a fitful recall unit. Hence the necessity for ritual. The passion is processed into observance and the woman laying flowers on the grave of the one who was everything is probably brooding on the price of beef.
    And yet—themes. They are magnified by duration. We scratch up the tip of a cone of significance and shrug it away. Yet it will fulfil its geometrical prerogative. Or, possibly a closer metaphor, the coded cell must evolve into the mature organism. No matter how stable and dense a biological system it is perpetually secreting its own ruin. The microscopic novelty of sperm and spore will soon invade the flourishing landscape and transform it.
    — I feel it’s unlucky. For us.
    No, really, you’ve got the period wrong. Ours is a modern novel. Not even a novel, a film—you sand I wander not through moral labyrinths but incontrovertible visual reality. The cuts are absolute, replacing Madrid with Athens, the rose-gem of Chartres with the limed cement of a Cretan inn. The dialogue is vernacular and inconclusive. Our motor rides come from Hollywood, our sex from the Latin neo-realists. How can a flat be unlucky? That would imply a schematic life, rooted in a durable locale, where the crack in the fireplace can evolve, over tedious years of inescapable contemplation,into a curse from the cabbala. We hum from flat to flat, city to city—how can ‘unfurnished accommodation’ be unlucky?
    Still our luck decayed. Naive and superstitious it may have been to have located the cause in our new flat, you at least detected a disease. I don’t think I did then. It was in you, in me, in the morning headlines and the Saturday party.
    — I don’t know. I just have a feeling.
    Nevertheless, we successfully defied the curse for several years and when we motored off to the Pyrenees and the Alps, it was not to escape the mysterious sentence but simply to have a look at Europe.
    During the year following our return, our life became intolerable . You left. What? All right, I drove you away.

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