Fiction: We´ll Meet Again

Frank Joussen

Frank Joussen

The party wasn’t over. I wasn’t even tired. I could stay up till four or five in the morning in those days. But somehow, I’d had enough, enough booze, enough silly repetitive party games, enough disco music. I shut the door and was standing outside. A German village in the 1970s at two AM – dismal and deserted. The fresh air did me good, though, after the smoke-filled air. Now it started to rain. I drew the zipper of my rain jacket up to my throat and buried my hands deep in the pockets of my jeans. 

Not far to go, I comforted myself. Surely nobody in the street. Hang on, there may be some of the boys in the long driveway leading up to the tenement houses. Bully boys all of them! Well, I’ve got to get past it fast, especially in the dark. Better cross the road …

“Hey, hey you!” someone leaning on the wall of the driveway shouted from the dark.

There´s someone there after all. Probably looking for trouble. Not with me! Some of them threw stones at me a while back.

“Please! Please, can you come over here?”

Only one. And the voice doesn’t sound like trouble at all.

Suddenly I noticed that I was standing in the middle of the deserted street. He, it was obviously a teenage boy, had caught me crossing the street to avoid the tenement bullies. Now I went back towards the block of grey houses.

When I got there, I could see him more clearly. He was squatting in the driveway, leaning against one of the gate pillars, his head tilted backwards. Meanwhile I was looking down at him, straight into his face. It was blood smeared.

“Has someone hit you on the nose?”

“No, no! I get a lot of nosebleeds. Can’t help it!”

I could feel the embarrassment in his voice.

“Hold on, I’ve got some tissues somewhere.”

I opened my fists and started rummaging in my pockets. The raincoat was my first choice – more space to rummage and probably cleaner tissues, too. – Lighter, cigarettes, key, a handkerchief. Cloth, not good for a boy I’d never meet again. – Too many questions from my mum.

“Hang on.”

“Thanks, but you needn’t … Really.”

Now I was in luck. In my left jeans pocket I found two brand new tissues.

“We can take both of these. – Look, hold one under your nose” -  I gave it to him with my left hand and made the other tissue a little wet by pressing it against my rain jacket, – “and you can press the other, the wet one against your neck.”

Almost like a little boy, like my little brother really, he did as he was told. Otherwise, he didn’t resemble my little brother at all. He was a big, black-haired guy, probably a bit older than me.

The bleeding stopped pretty soon.

“You’re soaked!” I said to him when I realized it, “what are you doing here?”

“I was at a party. We danced and all of a sudden my nose started to bleed. Happens to me more and more. The others first gave me some daft babbling and laughed. Then a bit of blood – one drop only – was on the carpet, in the living room. And they threw me out! Just like that!”

“Do you live here?”

“Yes, up there.”

He showed me the third window on the fourth floor. A dim light was visible behind the curtains.

“You’re wondering why I’m not still down here; not going up, right?”

“Yeah, well, maybe it’s because of the nosebleed.”

“Not only. If my old man is still up, there’ll be hell to pay.”

“But why? What can you do against a nosebleed?”

“What can I do about how he hates his life? Only get out of the way. Only not cause trouble. Anything, the smallest little thing means trouble. My blood on someone’s carpet sure means trouble. – Sorry, I didn’t mean to …, you know.”

“It’s all right.”

He gave me only an “ah” as a reply. Looking down, I saw that his nose had started bleeding again. All I had now was the handkerchief. Without hesitation, I took it out of my rain jacket, crouched down beside him and pressed it on him. “You need to hold this against your bleeding nose when you go up there. So as not to – you know, annoy your dad.”

It was pretty dark there in the driveway but I’m sure he tried to look me in the eye. 

“Really? – But how can I give it back?”

“Give me your phone number, I’ll call you after the weekend,” I said.

“Do you have a piece of paper to write on?”

“No, I’ll just memorize it.”

Phone numbers in those days had four digits; even I could hope to memorize one, five minutes away from my home.

“4947! What’s your name?”

“My name’s Paul. What’s yours?”

“Peter.”

“Peter? – Peter and Paul, having the time of their lives on a Saturday night in Littleton!”

“Ha, ha”, he laughed audibly through his nosebleed and finally got up.

“Thanks a lot.”

“Nada!”

“See you. Or rather hear from you, Paul.”

“Sure, I’ll call you on Monday, after school.”

“No, please make that five o´clock. When I’ll be back from work.”

“Oh, okay. Sure. Take care!”

He had already turned in the direction of the big entrance to the tenement block, but waved a short farewell with his left hand over his shoulder. His right one must have still be holding my handkerchief.

I walked the last 500 metres without putting my hands back into my pockets. Somehow, they didn’t feel cold anymore and I noticed that it had stopped raining. I was also looking forward to taking out my key and inserting it into the lock to my quiet home with sleeping parents who trusted me to look after myself and find safely home on a Saturday night.

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Setu, February 2023

Review of VerbalArt – A Global Journal Devoted to POETS AND POETRY

based on Vol.-4, Issue-2, Oct – Dec 2020:GJPP. A Peer-Reviewed Journal. AuthorsPress, ISSN 2347-632X

 

Although the issue mentioned above is my first acquaintance with this peer-reviewed print journal I can already vouch for its very high standard. This value judgement is based on 20 plus years of reading and writing for Indian journals; here I must emphasize that I have not been published in VerbalArt myself and can therefore offer my unbiased opinion. The reasons for my evaluation are twofold. The first category stems from the absolutely flawless professional production of the volume. Dr. Vivekanand Jha and his very experienced team of associate, review and assistant editors have managed to produce a perfect book for AuthorsPress. In this time and age, many readers and authors may take an error-free booklet for granted, but I can assure them that this is not self-evident.

Frank Joussen

The second, more important category is derived from the quality of the contents, i.e. the seventy-nine poems and two reviews written by forty-two authors in the current issue. Not only do these authors hail from different parts the world, they also come from very different backgrounds and walks of life. The simple reason why the reader learns about them is that the editors have granted their authors plenty of space for their short bios at the end of the book. Therefore we know that many of these authors are well-established, multi-award winning writers whose works have appeared in other prestigious journals all over the world. They are all masters of diverse styles and cover a multitude of themes. Together they give evidence that the genre of printed poetry, often reputed to be dead, is alive and kicking. The gratitude of the reading public should therefore not only go to poets who are Nobel Prize winners such as last year’s Louise Glück, but also to well produced printed journals like VerbalArt.

Vivekanand Jha

As to the contents and style, I must emphasize that I can only give a few examples; those left out here are not inferior to the others – neither with regard to language nor to the themes therein. That said, it strikes me first that a number of poems learn from and thereby praise famous writers, without copying their style. The groundbreaking one comes from Joseph Hart: “Proust said that an artist/When he is mature/Will write about the things that he enjoys.” (Proust, p. 56) – Shouldn´t we all keep that in mind? Other famous authors creatively incorporated in this issue are Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Hermann Hesse. The poem which begins with “In the same village as Hesse”, the author aptly combines his observation of nature, i.e. the dancing of gnats at dusk, with philosophical thoughts about life and death (The Same Dance, p. 66). Something similar and equally successful is done by Michael Keshigian when “dried up bulbs”, which the gardener plants despite all the odds and objections, become a metaphor for our necessary belief in love and affection (Wildflowers, p. 67). Susan P. Blevins takes these ideas one decisive step further and includes the whole cosmos in her two poems, her final aim being “Ultimate oneness with creation” (Cosmic Thoughts,  p. 97).

Another theme is social criticism, e.g. in Dhruv Somayajula’s two poems, of which “Social Pandemic” is up-to-date with its, in my opinion correct, criticism of the Covid-19 pandemic as a “social” plague (p. 31), or Gary Beck’s short, but powerful poem “Resources”, which also addresses gross social injustice. - To no one’s surprise, family poems play a large part here, as in most other anthologies and literary journals. Here, however, musing on ‘family’ includes other, philosophical themes, such as the impressive, guilt-ridden second poem by Pankajam Kottarath(Forgive Me, p. 78), the slightly experimental poem by Rajiv Khandelwal, which also addresses the themes of immigration and the Covid-19 pandemic (“Death of a Parent”, p. 79), the loving memory of his brother in James Mulhern’s poem (Brother, p. 49) and others as well.

When I mentioned previously that this issue showcases a variety of different styles I mean that rather conventionally written prose poems stand next to poems which are also written in prose, but have a rather regular rhythm. Half lines and long lines are both found, alongside two poems which use the whole length of the page, like a prose text, but with the important difference that their author, James G. Piatt, does not use capital letters and hardly any punctuation (pp. 46, 47). The effect here, as in poems with indented lines (pp. 61, 79,), poems with half lines and the very experimental visual poem by Jevin Lee Aluquerque, comparable to the work of e.e. cummings and others, have the very important effect of deliberately slowing down the reading process. This effect alone makes them strong poems in their own right. The multitude of newly created images, anaphora, parallelisms etc. enhances this very positive impression.

Not contrary, but complimentary to what I have said before I find it illuminating to stress that many of the poems in this issue are not only beautifully crafted, but also very philosophical. So let me end with a quotation that, to my mind, refers back to the reference to Proust above, but which is even more life-affirming for the individual and humans as social beings:

              Life is like that,

              You do so much, but

              Someone sometime must pick you up (...)

              You move on.

              Surpass your dreams.

              Live the life of your passion.

             

              But someone, at the right time

              Should pick you up

 

              You just try hard to be there,

              At the right place at the right time.

 

(taken from: Nilamadhab Kar, Just try to be there, p. 76).

 

By extension, this holds not only true for life, but also for literature. VerbalArt Volume 4, Issue 2, which also include two very well written reviews of poetry books, is there for all lovers and authors of good poetry – “At the right place at the right time.”

Frank Joussen (Germany)

*** 

Frank Joussen is a German teacher and writer, member of a one-world group. His publications include two selections of his poetry, one of them being a bilingual collaboration with Romanian poet Ana Cicio. He has co-edited two international anthologies of poetry/fiction in India and one of short stories in Germany. His poems and short stories have also been published in a variety of literary magazines and anthologies in India (Poet, Metverse Muse, Prosopisia, Poetry Today, Triveni, Canopy, Celebrating India etc.) Australia, G.B., the Republic of Ireland, Germany, Romania, Malta, the U.S.A., Canada, India, China, Thailand and Japan; some of them have been translated into German, Romanian, Hindi and Chinese. His latest publications include Pulsar (G.B.), Panku Poems (Canada) and Earthborne (Australia), The Poetry Kit (G.B.) and Muse India.

f_joussen@t-online.de

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Setu September 2021

A Hairy Affair

Frank Joussen

Frank Joussen

“Are you crazy?” his long-time girlfriend shouted at him. The small bathroom in their small apartment seemed to throw the question back at him and later he remembered that at the very moment before her outburst he had been wondering why they had not married long ago, and if they ever would.

“Spending all that money on hair restorer! How long have you been using this stuff? What about saving some money for that holiday on the beach with Chris and Pauline? On top of your sentimental old films and old music, you´re wasting your dough on this, this!  It won´t help you one tiny little wee bit, either!”

And she continued to ridicule him, elaborating on his hair in particular and his vanity in general. He could have held a lot against her at that point: her visit to the beauty farm with Sheila and Delia and God knows who, let alone her hairstylist, cosmetics de luxe, what have you. Instead he realized that he had been mechanically pulling hair from his age-old hairbrush.

While she went on he did so, too, only more violently. Otherwise he appeared to be quite calm and unresponsive. While inside he kept moving backwards, traveling far to a long-forgotten fight twenty years ago.

“You´re too stupid to stay in high school, too stupid to find a girlfriend, much too stupid to get the faintest of what I´ve been telling you …” he shouted a not-much bigger, but somehow stouter kid in the middle of a boyish quarrel.

The kid hadn´t said a word either. He´d just started pushing him and hitting him on the head. His efforts to push him back were feeble, at best, and before he knew it he was on the floor of their Scouts home, in the basement of their old church. The other kid was upon him now, two or three others from their group standing by, in a semicircle round his head. All he was doing to protect himself was holding his hands in front of face. It seemed to turn the kid´s hot rage cold. The hitting stopped and slowly, tentatively, he started pulling some of his hairs out.

“Right, Mike, give it to that smart ass. Thinks he´s so clever, we´re just dirt,” the others chimed in. And he knew they had found their real target, like hand in glove, or rather like a knife on a scalp.

“Something special for sure,” Mike confirmed, “something especially ugly!”

Yes, indeed. Ever since he had come on this exchange to America, people had kept telling him that his long curly hair looked “crazy”. Even his aunt, who was looking after him well enough, had agreed and bought him one lotion after another to make it flatter. The only long-term effect had been to make it even drier, more like straw than like hair.

Like plucking a bunch of straw from an unruly cardigan, Mike and the others were by now attacking his long blond curly hair, pulling out tuft after tuft. He couldn´t fight back, couldn´t muster the strength, although he knew deep down that his unmanly weakness enraged them more and more. Until they dispersed unexpectedly, some leaving the room in a hurry.

When he opened his eyes again, the leader of his little group was straddling his head, looking down at him in puzzlement. He sat up with some difficulty and looked at the ugly nest made up of the tufts of his unloved hair.

Back in the here and now, he looked down on the floor and dimly realized that she had thrown down his 100-dollar tablets and tried to crush them under her high heels. She had pulled back and was leaning against the bathroom door, panting more from her rage than her physical efforts.

“Why don´t you say anything, you stupid weakling?” He threw the hairbrush at her but missed even at this close range. Dumbfounded that the brush did not somehow stick in the door like a tomahawk his gaze went down to the spot where it lay, broken and impotent. She started to laugh, a sharp, horse-like laugh. He pushed her aside, storming out of the door.

His last thought in that apartment was that he had probably crushed her against the wall when he had opened that door. Then he ran away from another hairy affair with deeper roots.

Setu, August 2018

An Honest Lullaby: Short fiction by Frank Joussen

Frank Joussen

It had been no more than a kind of public rehearsal, individually and in twos, for the parents and music teachers of her private musical school. There had been twenty-odd adults present and the kids themselves, of course, but as they were usually taught individually they hardly knew each other. She had played one piece together with Miss Dent, her teacher, an elderly spinster with straight hair and an intolerant stare, and one alone. All alone, alone on the makeshift stage, alone in the only functioning spotlight, alone with her mistakes, the abrupt ending half-way through.

Now it was after dark and she was missing. Pauline was a bit of a tomboy, keen on being outdoors, so her dad hadn´t worried all that much. Now he did and had a bad conscience because his wife Mary was at a seminar far away and he hadn´t even told her about the disaster. – What is more, he and Mary had quarrelled a bit over ‘his little’ girl – the gist being that his wife had told him time and again that Pauline was not so little any more and that he should finally acknowledge that or she would give up on him. But little or not, he knew for sure that now he was called upon to look after their daughter, and that´s exactly what he intended to do.

He found her soon enough. She was his daughter after all, a tomboy and a bit of a loner sometimes. Where had he gone to get a break? Into his tree house. She didn´t have one, his wife had objected, but she did have a favourite tree, with branches as big and strong as the trunks of an elephant. You could sit, read, even sleep on these branches. You could also cry on them unmolested, and he thought that was what she had done. If she had, she had stopped meanwhile and composed herself.

“What have you been doing all this time?”

No reply.

“Moping, I guess. Well, that´s understandable, but no solution.”

“No, I´ve been climbing, and sitting here, most of the time.”

“Climbing, aha. Well, that´s something, I guess.”

He wondered how high she had climbed and what thoughts had crossed her mind climbing so high and feeling so low.

“Do you need help to come down?”

“Nope.”

He would have liked to let her jump into his arms, as she´d done so many times when she was little. Wasn´t she a tiny wee bit little any more, at barely eleven, he wondered.

He spoilt her with hot dogs, hot chocolate – she´d declined politely to have a hot bath – and TV till ten. A big exception to the rules, even for a Friday night, but Miss Dent´s reaction to Pauline´s unlucky performance warranted big exceptions, he was sure.

Tugged up in bed, in the warm light of her small reading lamp, he finally found the courage to talk to her, “still sore because of this afternoon at Miss Dent´s school?”

“Sort of.”

“I would be, too, you know. You´re just a beginner – so what did that woman expect? She´s got great ambitions for herself and always wants you kids to put on a marvellous show for her own benefit. - It wasn´t your fault.”

“But it was, dad, let´s be honest.”

“The second piece was much too difficult for you. And in front of an audience …”

“It doesn´t matter, I wanted to play that piece. I wanted it to sound perfect!”

“Perfect?”

“Yes, perfect!”

“OK, let me tell you a little story about perfection.”

“Please, dad, not another of your goodnight, all´s-well- bedside stories!”

“No, promise! It´s rather a story about how long it takes to reach perfection, if ever. Actually, it´s a real-life story, taken from history itself. You´ve got history at school now, haven´t you?”

“You know I have!”

“Well, then. You know I like reading up on famous people´s lives.”

“I know, dad. It´s called ‘biographies.’ Boring stuff!”

“For me it´s not boring. You know I´m not musical myself. Not like you – and mum. But when I read about a famous musician´s life I feel I can understand him better. Anyway, I´ve read this book about Beethoven. You do like Beethoven, don´t you?”

“Dad! He´s the greatest! But what has that got to do with …”

“Wait a little. Beethoven was the greatest, as you say, but he was also a really lonely man towards the end of his life.”

“Yes, but not because he wasn´t a genius. Only because he was deaf!”

“Only because he was deaf? Can you imagine what it´s like being a composer and being stone deaf?”

“No, that´s right. But Miss Dent said he could hear the music inside his head, so it was all right, I guess. I mean, he did compose the Ninth Symphony at the end of his life!”

“Exactly!” He turned away so that she could not see his triumphant smile.

“He was not only deaf when he wrote it, he was of course also stone deaf when he went to the premiere of the Ninth Symphony. And do you know what happened?”

“People just loved it. It became the most famous symphony of all. Its ‘Ode to Joy’ …”

“Yes, yes. But I mean, do you know what happened to Beethoven at that premiere?”

“No.” She sat up straight again in her bed. “Tell me!”

“You see, he couldn´t hear the music, he couldn´t hear the words of the ‘Ode to Joy’.

Witnesses reported that he hung on the singers´ lips. He had it in his head, you´re right, but he longed so much to actually hear especially the words, the music of the ‘Ode to Joy’. And you know why?”

“It´s the highlight of the symphony. It was the first time that a symphony ended on a chorus.”

“Yes, yes. But that´s not the point. You know that Friedrich Schiller wrote the text of ‘Ode to Joy’. It was published as far back as 1786.”

“But what has that got to do with Beethoven´s feelings at the premiere?”

“The premiere was in 1824. The poem was written in 1786. Thirty-eight years between these two dates. Thirty-eight, that´s exactly how old your mum will be next week!”

She nodded solemnly. It seemed to be a real burden for an eleven-year- old to have ‘ageing’ parents.

“And ever since he read the poem, Beethoven had planned, had worked on setting it to music! And now he´d done it, to the utmost perfection. Wasn´t that what we were talking about – perfection!”

“Yes, and he couldn´t even hear it, dad. That´s unfair, that´s cruel!”

“In a way it was. But he could feel it, he could feel every single note and what had been in his heart for so long was finally being heard by everyone!”

“But …”

“But he didn´t even hear the applause, or so it´s reported. At the very end, one of the singers came and gently turned him around, so that he could see people clapping, people applauding him with tears of joy in their eyes!”

They both swallowed hard.

“Dad, do you think he was happy despite his being deaf then?”

“I´m sure he was. I´m sure he went to bed a happy man. And even all these nights before, when he felt lonely, an outsider, a rejected genius, I think whenever he thought of his big ambition to complete this symphony, and especially the ‘Ode to Joy’, I imagine he could feel a fraction of that happiness to come.”

“So, you mean to say, he didn´t give up his dreams despite the obstacles, right?”

“Yes. I mean, Beethoven´s dream lasted the better part of his life. You can follow so many dreams. You can also …”

“But I want to play classical music.”

“OK, then.”

“OK,” she gave him a rather mischievous smile, “for starters, I´m going to fetch the violin out of the tree tomorrow.” She turned dead serious all of a sudden, “do you think it´ll rain tonight?”

“No, dear, no rain. No rain at all.”

Table of Contents, December 2016

Frank Joussen

Frank Joussen is a German teacher and member of one-world and peace groups. He has had numerous publications, e.g.: In North America in anthologies published by Poet Works Press; Big Pond Rumours, Poets Against War, Poets Against the War Canada, The Gazette, Writer´s Lifeline, Raving Dove, New Verse News, The Pedestal Magazine, Kota Press, Raven Poetry, Poetry Pacific. In G.B. in: Poetry Kit Magazine, Caught in the Net, Pulsar, Poetry Scotland, Poetic Hour, The Measure and Memories, a book with twelve “cancer stories” and 144 paintings; in Ireland in: Boyne Berries; in Australia in: New England Review, Ulitarra, Imago, Southern Review, Eureka Street; in India in: Poet, Poetry Today, Metverse Muse, Muse India, Poets International, Canopy, Triveni, World Poetry, Creative Saplings, Literary Ruminations and various anthologies, e.g. “Railonama”, “Celebrating India”, “The Second Genesis” etc.

His first collection, “Building Bridges”, was published by I.D.E.A.S. in Andhra Pradesh in 2008. He also edited a short anthology containing the poetry of three Indian authors plus his own work, again in India, in 2011, and co-edited an international anthology “Family Matters” with Canadian writer Christina Cowling and Indian publisher Nivedita in 2014. He is currently translating and editing an international family anthology in German with contributions of authors from twenty different cultures.

A number of his poems have been translated into German, Hindi, Chinese and Romanian, partly included in the twin selection “The Faces of Love” by Ana Cicio and “Shades of Love” by Frank Joussen, edited by Dr. Olimpia Iacob (Romania).

Authors A-Z