There was once a shepherd boy who would play upon a wooden flute as he watched his sheep or sit and cut a new flute as they cropped the slopes. On mornings when the wind was still in the trees, before the muezzin lifted his voice in the call to morning prayer, the sound of the flute would echo down the hillside. From where he sat, the boy saw the ewes and their lambs drifting back and forth across the grass like the clouds in the skies above and from time to time he cast a glance above him to the treeline where mostly only the birds came and went. He also watched the valley below, the boats up and down the river, the road where the soldiers marched or the farmers came to market and the towers of the pasha’s palace that rose above the white-walled town. On some days he thought he could see the pasha’s daughter as she passed at a window.

The day came when a line of men with knives and guns marched out from the forest and spread themselves along the edges of the meadow, driving the sheep before them, snatching away the lambs. When the boy ran to stop them he was cuffed on the head and fell to the ground, then was tied by his wrists and taken. In the next days, in the forest, while the men ate the roasted meat of the lambs and passed bottles from hand to hand at their fires, he heard their talk and knew that these were the bandits who fought against the pasha’s soldiers. Some were dressed in sheep-skin, like him, some were dressed in farmers’ jackets and some in the broadcloth of the towns. One man wore eye-glasses to look at his maps and papers and the others listened when he talked.

Because the boy knew the mountain slopes and the forests, he was allowed to live, and because the man with the eye-glasses was killed by soldiers that winter, the young shepherd led the few bandits who were left. He put by his flute and learnt to shoot a gun, and thought of what he had watched from the hillside, and when two summers had passed his band was known by the soldiers, the farmers and the merchants whose boats they plundered.  In the spring of the third year he entered the pasha’s palace at the head of his men. None in the palace were in any doubt as to who this man was, with his blood-boltered boots, the pistol at his waist and the fierce moustaches that swept down his shadowed face, nor in any doubt as to what he meant for them.

The pasha weighed up the choice between the strangler’s cord in the capital and some face-saving arrangement here in the province and suggested that young bandit marry his daughter. The girl spoke, saying that she could not marry the bandit chief. ‘Years ago, I used to look from the tower of my father’s palace to the hills above where a shepherd boy played songs of love and longing on his flute for me each morning; his face was as bright as the sun and as clear as the mountain stream. But one day I heard his flute no more, and never saw him again. I cannot marry a bandit while that boy still lives in my memory.’

The bandit chief glared at her for a long while and then said, “You may go, then, with your father, back to the capital and to whatever awaits you there. I will not force you for I, too, once had a love like that and I would not lose it for all the world.’

SAMUEL P. WILCOCKS. Wilcocks translates from Czech, German, Romanian and Slovene into English and lives in Giurgiu on the Danube with his family. He received the German Ambassador’s Award for Literary Translation (London) in 2010. His translation of Hugo Loetscher’s Noah and Dietmer Dath’s Die Abschaffung der Arten( The Abolition of Species) are forthcoming from Seagull Books (May and June 2012, respectively).

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The olive tree is dying on its feet. Look at it from below, against the sky, and you could be tempted to hope. The topmost branches are still green, or that silver grey that stamps the olive, but all the rest is brown, brittle deadwood. Look at it from the roof and you wish it straight to hell. To the fire that wood can live next door to all its life without a single caress.

There’s another hell, a cold hell. The hell that’s loss before indifference sets in, the hell that’s love cheated of it purest and most self-deserving desires. This is the hell you now inhabit, opposite the one you wish on the dying tree. The end of all your hopes pinned on the poor tree like stars. The future as you saw it flicked away.

What do you do now? Where do you take your love? The stars look sideways at you, the pin trembles in your hand. One thing is certain; you no longer want any part of this tree. It has betrayed your hopes. You’d like to uproot it now, this minute, put something in its place.

If only you could be certain, it was dead. If death would only sign the certificate. And get the hell out. Ten years ago it travelled from Marseille in your lap, a silver spring I na  punnet, by TGV, by Air France, by slow train and jolting autorickshaw to this spot. Ten years of suns and moons and rain. The great hailstorm of 2008, the flood of the same year. Ten years of delight.

Now this.

It happened quite suddenly. Termites pushed up through the mulch, began their blind religious tunneling. Making mud of wood, knitting an earthen sock for the tree, a sort of crepe funnel that wasn’t there one minute—and then was. By the time you discovered it, it was too late: the tree was ring barked. Drought helped, but white ants did it in, so that even when you scrapped off the brittle casing, exposing those strange meek albino creatures panicked by the sudden light, the tree’s fate was sealed. No path remained for supplies to reach the upper storeys, no way to nourish that living silver, just pale smooth trackless wood under the vanished bark. Inert heartwood, death-of-love wood. Firewood.

Nasturtiums hid the rout, imagine! Brazen ramblers with their orange lipstick and blown-out parasols. Good-time girls hiding the rot under their skirts. So when you woke up to the sickness in the tree and ripped them from the raised bed at its foot, their roots came up so easily the whole gold tangle seemed a farce staged to distract you. From the death of something strong and true and precious. And now you’ve betrayed that thing. Giving back as you were served, giving worse than back, running ahead to betray. Looking to salvage something from the pain, some meaning to the suffering, if only exclusion, as a talisman against loss. Against that blind insatiable tunneling that forever ring-barks you and yours and any living thing that hopes to reach beyond itself.

Let it go, boyo.

Forgive the olive, kiss it going.

But note the going.

Note it well.

Allan Sealy.

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The sense that there could soon be an end to our civilization is something only pregnant women and politicians can really repress. You can hear it in everyone’s voice, even if it’s never mentioned explicitly or only ironically; one man has hopes of singing in grand opera one day and Vera longs for the time when at last she won’t be tied to her two children but free for creativity, whatever that is, and others continue to talk about investments, but the insidious sense that everything could soon come to an end has its effect: for most people, a future beyond that of their own person is hardly a binding category any more.

An almost insurmountable feeling of revulsion at the typewriter, try handwriting, once even a tape-recording, but it doesn’t help — Do I have to have something to say? The obstinate buzzing of a fat fly against the top windowpane is enough to drive me to despair but I don’t get up to open the window; silence would be just as dreary. And when the telephone rings, I let it ring — I’m not here. I don’t know what’s going on.

We abandoned the trip to Mexico (my fourth) after the first evening. We have no future as a couple. I can see that, yes, and not just since I’ve been sitting in this Spanish courtyard garden with a fountain. So I’m sitting here understanding, not at all tired at the moment despite the flights: Zurich – New York, New York– Los Angeles, Los Angeles– Mexico City. Her plain-spoken openness has woken me up; the folk music in the garden doesn’t disturb us, we can say everything to each other. What did I imagine? A poor double room too cramped and with windows giving on to the courtyard so that we have to close the shutters; at least it has a shower. After midnight the music outside stops. Waking up several times in the morning is harder; that is, what we told each other the previous evening is true. Now it just has to be carried through. And, we’re going to remain friends, of course we are …

A lovely day:

The pyramids of Teotihuacan —

Our friendship has already begun.

And then another lovely day:

The pyramids of Cholula —

(That was in January.)

We’ll keep in touch —

MAX FRISCH. Translated by Mike Mitchell.

from the all new Seagull Books catalogue

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