(1) Her eyes were fully hidden behind her mirrored Ray Ban sunglasses, her flat nose and her pouching lips, crunched into the shape of a fist’s clasp, as if she was trying to grab my attention, her perfectly dark olive skin gave her a warm reception, but her boxer’s face punched right back in your guts. (2) A white bearded man with a scruffy ball of hair extending to his neck, wearing a baseball cap walked with a stiff torso, but his mousy eyes jittering back and forth, nervously changing and never locking down on any fixed point, seemed to tell me he wasn’t very at ease in the city, but he really was never given the choice, and it was kind of too late now. (3) A table down, a pale woman with tanned sunglasses, with shabby upper arms and scattered sunspots, tears a piece of transparent tape off and tapes another receipt on a letter format blanc sheet of paper, dotting down a note, which she encircles. (4) An Hispanic with dark muscled arms, covered with tribal tattoos, swings his shoulders and hips, hustler style, super fly manner, wearing a small hat with a narrow brim, and in the band sticks a gray feather, while his head marked by a hawk’s nose and wide nostrils, rotates scanning the periphery of his proxemics to catch people noticing his presence. (5) A lanky Chinaman, with a Vietnamese expression, and greasy hair combed backward, his dark blue checkered shirt hanging down to this knees, leans forward to balance the weight of the shiny trash bag on his back. (6) Her dark eyes looked like soft candy rolling down her reddish, girly cheeks, as she bit her thin lips with her canine teeth, and while she straightened her plain red summer dress, I almost melted for her kind impression, until her voice spoke in a deliberate intention and her straight laughter revealed only a shallow confidence, and I deeply disliked her.

alexander remembered his father’s words
spoken to him still being a child
my son, find yourself a kingdom equal to and worthy of yourself
for macedonia is too small for you
ever only since
could he remember the loss of home
for home was macedonia
how can a shelter offer comfort
when it cannot hold oneself
being not appropriate to one’s needs
he took a last glance at his home
then saddled his horse
how can the soil of his land
ever satisfy a god
that is to rule a people
that is to govern the present
when home is a higher future
how can man carry glory
without knowing courage by heart
alexander rode to where the sun rises in the morning
for this is the path to heaven

V sipped his beer, observing two friends dancing with a single girl. The girl rubbed her hips between the bodies of the young men, who had her locked in between them, one kissing her lips, the other’s hands pulled her waist closely against his pelvis. A few minutes later they paid and left the bar. V waited a few moments and followed after them. When he stood outside, he was just in time to see them slip into the little park across the street. V followed at some distance.
V’s latest novel had been a great success, reaching the top five of every bestselling list. His trademark was to invent perversions of ordinary characters by describing the most intricate, common details of their day to day lives. Often journalists and critics asked how he came up with his descriptions, how he was able to see the extraordinary in the ordinary and some politely suggested he was depicting none other than himself. But the truth was that V. was simply an average character with little fantasy or imagination, nor did he possess a lot of life experience. He was by account of everyone who knew him, a very stable and reasonable person who disliked extravagances. His only mischief was perhaps that he was extremely curious.
The phone rang. V answered, it was A. They met an hour later at the Auberge de la Butte. A felt exhilarated, she kept on talking without end, panting in between words. S called me yesterday. You know, I didn’t want to see him anymore after we broke up last month. But we talked for an hour, just as friends, and I realized how much I enjoyed talking to him, so I felt there was no harm in meeting simply for dinner. So we ate at this small restaurant S knew and that serves foie-gras specialties. Before I knew it, it was midnight and we were the last and only guests still present. They didn’t push us out of course, but you could tell from their impatience that we were obviously holding everyone from being able to go home. So we decided to leave and walked without a particular sense for direction until we suddenly stood in front of his apartment. S asked if I wanted another drink perhaps, and before I knew it, we were fucking like animals in the staircase. V had been listening quietly with full attention and expectation. He interrupted A with brief to the point questions. Were you still wearing your clothes or had he undressed you by then? Did you kneel down and suck him? Did he come? Did you use a condom? Did you say anything? did he call you names? A unraveled rapidly the thread of what had happened, answered V’s questions diligently, as V ushered her into the detailed descriptions of each moment. V did not understand how any event could really have meaning, come to life, without the slow sequence of scenes following one another patiently in full detail. It were the details of the single word that brought the fucking in the staircase to its culmination, not the impatient pounding of two lonely people pressed against the wall. A however kept stumbling over her words and excitingly rushed on, while V interrupted her.

I found myself whipping a squashed avocado, mixing the paste with the diced tomato at the beat of the Senegalese song that echoed in the space at the back of a characterless apartment complex. The voice jittered around the inner court from low to high in an unintuitive timing, its irregular beat was fascinating to the rational mind. I estimated the woman of the voice which was high-pitched, to be in her early twenties. I imagined her wearing a boubou, like the Senegalese women in the street, with a Senegalese pattern in bright yellow, gray and black figures that repeated around her waist. Earlier, I had still gotten irritated by the loud speaker voice of a radio or television, being forced to overhear the reciting of Ramadan prayers being broadcasted. Maybe if the recital voice had been of a real human being in their kitchen, the singing recital of a praying man whose humming danced out of the window, I would have been joyfully trying to make out the inaudible words of the distant song. The Senegalese woman had to be cooking I think, as the kitchens were all in the back of the building. The apartments were stapled on top of one another like Lego blocks. While one person was beating his wife, two meters above him, only separated by a concrete slice of 20 centimeter, a man and a woman were fucking passionately, while to their right or left, a man bowed down on his knees with his hands on the rug for prayer, bend in the very same position as the woman being fucked five meters to his right, while coincidentally facing the same direction as the man beating his wife. I listened to the singing of the Senegalese voice again, which sounded unique and solely.

I stared out of the stained window of bus ninety-six onto the pavement of the Rue de Ménilmontant, where three black women sauntered down the street in darkly colored chador garments and leather sandals, twisting their hips and torsos in alternating directions, pacing slowly forward. One of the woman however in particular drew my attention and repulsed stare in consequence, as her face looked so crudely male and miserable, that I was convinced she had to be a Shia cross-dresser. I searched desperately for breasts or a wasp tail, tried to imagine the vaguest of sexual poses or nudity underneath her dress, but the widely shapeless gown hid her body completely underneath and left but mystery to wonder about for me. The only body parts that could clearly be distinguished apart from her strong masculine facial features were her ankles and heels. A thick yellowish layer of callus on the heel bones of her elephant feet in combination with the country side fashion of chador garments here in the city made me believe these women had been burdened by years of carrying water jugs along many miles of Senegalese fields and dirt roads. This impression seemed to be confirmed by their crude peasant faces, that looked hardened and unpleasant, in which every sex appeal or elegance had been worn off by the endless hoarding of water and firewood in the tropical heat. But maybe there was more to these three women than their crude covers that revealed them to be Twelvers. Could it be that the male female was in fact a homosexual protected by his two older sisters, the other two women, who by their mass alone would make you think twice to throw any sneer or vile comment at them and even kept off the disapproving judgment by their imam and elderly. Enlightened by the chanting and praying of endless recitals of Arab which they couldn’t understand, while being on the haji in Mecca, they had been overwhelmed by compassion for their confused and troubled brother in Paris, bought three chador garments, and then and there decided they would not let their little brother out of their sight ever again.

Helmut stood on the navigation deck of the cargo freighter in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and peered out at the horizon and the vast surface of the ocean that was all there was to be seen. His wrinkled skin had darkened from months of salty wind and sun, obfuscating the blue lines of the tattoo on his right shoulder depicting an anchor. Cumulus clouds drifted by in the sky above and sank behind the horizon in the distance. Several illuminated spots on the dark water surface reflected the openings in the cloudy heaven and beams of sun light were clearly visible falling through them. Helmut stared at the endless number of crests that formed on the waves. His attention was caught by a sudden black movement on the surface. The constant change in surface pattern interrupted the trance of Helmut’s thoughts induced by the endless sight of repetitive patterns of waves, crests, that rose and fell, disappearing in the mass of water again. Every now and then, he thought he saw a dolphin jump playfully out of the water, or the vague shower of vapor of a whale’s exhalation sprout into the air, but then again he thought he had mistaken himself. As a sailor in the German navy Helmut had sailed the world for four years, from 1954 to 1958. Ever since he had not been back to the sea and had lived on a farm in Westfalen. He enjoyed listening to songs from his favorite shanty choirs and retold adventures with his comrades from the navy. When he retired last year, his children had offered him a ticket around the world on the Rickmers Singapore. But his memories had betrayed him. Even on board this German ship from the most prestigious German shipping company no body spoke German, and no sailor played the accordion to sing a shanty like they used to. For months, all day Helmut stood here in the sun, on the navigation deck, and stared into the distance.

The chirps of a group of house sparrows sitting on the branches of a dead tree filled the morning, which was covered by a white gray sky. Artaud woke up and listened to the irregular frequency of the birds’ calls marking their territory. The chill of this mid-August summer day morning felt disagreeable. Unwillingly, Artaud expected the summer to bring sun and an azure sky, gay smiles and happy dresses. The evening had been uneventful, which could explain the slightly passive state of mind in which Artaud had woken up. On his way to La Bellevilloise he had coincidentally followed two petite black girls in black and dark blue cocktail dresses, staring with a growing feeling of arousal at the muscles of their oily calves and the lost contours of their slim waists, for several blocks. Arriving at the Rue Boyer the darkest girl had turned around and smiled leaving an impression of regret in Artaud. Now, in the morning, her dimpled cheeks brought back this sense of regret. In those few blocks he had familiarized himself with her back, the gently sexual movement of her hips, the dark curls dancing in the dim light of moon, lanterns and cars passing, and he had developed a certain fondness for the girl. When she had turned her face, smiled and signaled her dimpled cheeks, she had nestled herself comfortably in Artaud’s mind. He knew he would be thinking of her all day, maybe tomorrow, and he would not be able to think rationally of anything else. His Sunday would be completely devoted to thinking about this demoiselle that had flirted before him into the night before.

He stared at her deformed toes, waggling nervously before the shabby couch, in which her lump body had sunk away. Her frowned face stared puzzled at the crossword she had found to occupy herself with. A fire ball of hate welled up in his guts simply watching her. He turned to the book shelves in the living room, her living room, and felt relieved, deeply felt inner joy, the sight of these books gave him an overwhelming pleasure. The fact was that she had the best bookshelves of anyone he knew. Although now, she was a repulsive mass of thoughtless babble, she once, as a student, had been a promising Lacanian psycho-analyst. Her shelves were filled with surrealist literature, existentialist plays, and works by Lacan and Freud. But in the last ten years she had not read a single book of interest anymore, indulging in the mediocre life of a routine-filled job as an editor for a psychological magazine. Georges counted the backs of the books he had lined up in the top right shelves. All the other books he had read already in the long years since they had met. Thirty-two to go, he whispered. He never had loved her, he found no sexual attraction in her body, in her dull eyes, he hated kissing her thin lips, but once a week he kissed those horrid lines in her face. Thirty-two times ten, three-hundred and twenty days, one more year, he crossed the lines in the imaginary wall of the prison of his relationship with her, then he would be free of her, having read all the books in her library, free to leave.

Alas, if only I had been French, I could have saved myself the disillusion, all my purposeless efforts, wasteful spending of weekends and evenings, under a silent reading lamp, quickly pulling my notebook from the table, leaving it balancing on my knees, and only now, after digging in intellectual mud for all these years, that I could have saved, do I realize the simplest of realizations, the thought that I should have started with if I would have only been, but now I have discovered it only at the end of my long journey, to come to the conclusion that it was all along so obvious, if only I had known. Of course, I knew, in a way, a disconnected way, I have known all the separate things to know, but I must have been utterly blind not to see the wholesome form, or what you ironically could call the Logos. Hell, the other, the world, the meaningless searching, the random attribution that was bound to be lost again, the homeless wanderer, the hunger, the importance of chance, all these flowing thoughts of consciousness that swell to the proportions of a river washing away old, established ideas, but they too get flooded by new ones, none remaining, nor leaving any soil for me to stand on myself, constantly grasping for the next thing, but only if I had seen the larger picture, from Heracleitus to Nietzsche to Derrida to myself, from Novalis to Strindberg to Celine to Le Clézio, from Homer to Freud. But now my life of Sisyphus and the feeling that I only now realize, and with every word, every sentence, again, the bubbling mud of sulphuric gases, every new release, another short lived word, it could all have made sense, if only I had been French.

Streets, avenues, alleys, roads, I do not mean just any street like the yellow lines that run in between the orange squares and polygones that form the lettered streets on the city plan of some unknown town, but I mean the cobbled street, with the pothole at the end, in the old city with the blue street name sign reading Osman in faded, white letters, hidden behind the branches of an old chestnut providing shadow for a group of old men playing backgammon, with the ornamental lighting crossing overhead during national celebrations, forming decorative constellations of imaginary stars at holidays commemorating formative dates in the country’s history, with colored, striped sails hovering above, tightened between the antenna poles and street lanterns, broad red and yellow lanes, keeping the space in which shoppers scurry from store to store, cool on a hot, arid Friday afternoon, streets with the aluminum kebab cart parked on the curb, smoking lines of lamb sticks damping under a brightly yellow parasol, the pink faces of mannequins with their fiercely blue eyes and blackened eye lashes, with their chins pointing at the sky. Street corners, not the wholesome idea of street corners anywhere in the world, where similar but separate events take place, not the shared abstractions of any street corner, but that one, single street corner in every color of detail that makes it recognizable by its own fragments, apart from any other, at which you need only the unique smell of roasted chestnuts, like the street corner across from the bridge with the entrance steps leading to the mosque. And shops, not shops in general, not the type of shop every always goes to for their daily shopping, not any shop you will find in any other city, but this one shop in particular, where I always go to buy my grocery shopping, lettuce, a piece of feta and some tomatoes for a salad, the shop with one out of many, that specific owner with his thick, straw mustache and his glancing eyes that always express a continuous joy or pride perhaps, and a smile of recognition even though he doesn’t know my first name, with the wooden crates of fruits stapled on convenient wheel-able carts, that every early morning roll out, rattling, coming to a stop in front of the display window that reads supermarket in red, stocky, western style fonts with a yellow lining, the shop that sells the dried figs that I love, with the dairy cooler in the back of the store humming, buzzing absently, where I go and pull a plastic bag out of its carton box and scoop my favorite kalamata olives out of their tin can with a blue plastic spoon, Ibrahim’s grocery store. I can tell the tale of a city only by the particular details that I happen observe, but only then can I keep the city alive.