Granta 131 Read online

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  ISSUE 131: SPRING 2015

  PUBLISHER AND EDITOR Sigrid Rausing

  MANAGING EDITOR Yuka Igarashi

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  ISBN 978-1-905-881-88-8

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Sigrid Rausing

  The Gentlest Village

  Jesse Ball

  Position Paper

  John Ashbery

  Life and Breasts

  Ludmila Ulitskaya

  Dreamed in Stone

  Jon Fosse

  Her Lousy Shoes

  Tracy O’Neill

  It was discovered that gut bacteria were responsible

  Kathryn Maris

  The Florida Motel

  Kevin Canty

  Traces II

  Ian Teh

  Mother’s House

  Raja Shehadeh

  After Zero Hour

  Janine di Giovanni

  Observatoires

  Noémie Goudal

  The Battle for Kessab

  Charles Glass

  Release the Darkness to New Lichen

  Peter Gizzi

  Nothing Ever Happens Here

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Krapp Hour (Act 2)

  Anne Carson

  The Archive

  Sebastià Jovani

  The Buzzard’s Egg

  China Miéville

  Model Reconstruction of Ancient Rome

  Sandra Simonds

  Notes on contributors

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  Introduction

  In the film Birdman, there is a note stuck in the frame of a mirror in a seedy dressing room: ‘A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.’ This enigmatic sentence, connected to Raymond Carver’s story ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’ (a play within the film), echoes our title, ‘The Map Is Not the Territory’. The phrase was coined by the scholar Alfred Korzybski in the early 1930s to illustrate the distinction between perception and reality. The pieces in this issue of Granta are all concerned, in one way or another, with the difference between the world as we see it and the world as it actually is, beyond our faulty memories and tired understanding.

  Some of the fiction transcends reality altogether. China Miéville’s ‘The Buzzard’s Egg’, a monologue by a guard in charge of a minor captured deity, is one of them:

  Good morning.

  No? Are you still sulking?

  Fine. Be sullen. It makes very little odds to me. I get my food either way.

  ‘The Gentlest Village’, an extract from Jesse Ball’s A Cure for Suicide, is another:

  — This is a chair, said the examiner. A person is made in such a way that he can sit where he likes. He can sit on the ground,

  she knelt and patted the floor.

  — Or even on the table itself,

  she patted the table.

  These compelling and curiously timeless stories seem to me part of the present zeitgeist. They are not exactly futuristic, but then we live in the future, of course: this world of digital devices, of a creeping loss of privacy, of machine conceptions and unmanned missions to Mars and Comet 67P.

  The non-fiction pieces in this issue remind us of the human cost associated with the divergence of map and territory. Janine di Giovanni writes about the sense of doom in Iraq before the American invasion. The map, for the coalition forces, was political abstractions and doctored reports; the territory real life in a real country. The degree of difference between the two correlates to the calamity that ensued.

  Arenas of conflict in the world evoke their own media clichés. But the Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh’s gentle memoir about the loss of his mother goes beyond the language of occupation, which makes it all the more powerful. Similarly, Ludmila Ulitskaya’s piece, ‘Life and Breasts’, is about cancer, but it is also a terse commentary on the present state of Russia. Like many people who lived through Communism, which made the distinction between image and reality a political art form, Ulitskaya’s writing is stubbornly dedicated to real life in all its surprising details:

  My breast is completely absent: there is even a dent. It has been interred in a special burial ground at the Givat Shaul Cemetery. Lesha Kandel buries all the amputated Jewish appendages from his orthopaedic department there. ‘For some reason, Muslims and Christians seem totally unconcerned where their removed organs or body parts lie,’ is what he said.

  My left breast is at rest in the land of Israel. Perhaps only a first instalment!

  Sigrid Rausing

  THE GENTLEST VILLAGE

  Jesse Ball

  1

  — This is a chair, said the examiner. A person is made in such a way that he can sit where he likes. He can sit on the ground,

  she knelt and patted the floor.

  — Or even on the table itself,

  she patted the table.

  — However, if you are in company, it is best to sit in a chair unless there is a good reason to sit elsewhere. In a chair, one can sit with good posture, that is, with the skeleton set into good order.

  He looked at her with puzzlement.

  — The skeleton, she said, is a hard substance, hard like wood, like the wood of this chair. It is all through the inside of your body, and mine. It keeps us stiff, and allows our muscles something to pull and push on. That is how we move. Muscles are the way the body obeys the mind.

  — Here, she said. Come sit in the chair.

  She gestured.

  The claimant came across the room slowly. He moved to sit in the chair, and then sat in it. He felt very good sitting in the chair. Immediately he un
derstood why the house was full of chairs.

  — They put chairs wherever someone might sit.

  — They do, she said. And if your needs change, you can move chairs from place to place. Come, let us eat. We shall walk to the kitchen, and there we will get the things we shall eat; also, we will get the things on which we shall eat, and the things with which we shall eat. We will not eat our food there; we’ll go to the dining room, or to the enclosed porch. This will be a nice thing for us. Having gotten the food and the implements, we will decide whether we want to eat on the porch or in the dining room. Do you know how we will decide that?

  The claimant shook his head.

  — You do. Think carefully. Say what comes to mind.

  — If it is a nice day, outside …

  — That is one reason, one of many reasons, why a person would choose to sit outside. It is a good reason. It is always best to have a good reason for doing things, a reason that can be explained to others if you must. One should not live in fear of explaining oneself – but a rational person is capable of explaining, and even sometimes likes to do so.

  — Rational?

  — A person whose life is lived on the basis of understanding rather than ignorance.

  — Am I ignorant?

  — Ignorance is not about the amount of knowledge. It is about the mechanism of choosing actions. If one chooses actions based upon that which is known to be true – and tries hard to make that domain grow, the domain of knowledge – then he will be rational. Meanwhile, someone else who has much more knowledge might make decisions without paying any attention to truth. That person is ignorant.

  — A mechanism, she continued, is the way a thing is gone about.

  They went into the kitchen. On the wall was a painting of a woman feeding chickens with millet. The millet poured from her hand in a gentle arc. Around about her feet the chickens waited in a ring, looking up at her. When the arc made its way to the ground, they would eat.

  Beside it was a photograph of a hill. There was a hole somewhere in it.

  The claimant paused at these wall hangings, and stood looking. The examiner came and stood by him.

  — What is different about these? she asked him.

  He thought for a while.

  — About them?

  — What’s the difference between them? I should say. When I say, what is different about these, I am making two groups – them and the rest of the world. When I say between them, I am setting them against each other. Do you see?

  — This one happens less often.

  He pointed to the woman with the chickens.

  — Less often?

  — If you go looking for them, outside the house, he said, you could probably find the other one, no matter when you looked. But, you can’t find this one.

  — Why not? Because it is a painting?

  — A painting?

  — Because it is made by hand – with strokes of a brush? Or for another reason?

  — I didn’t mean that, he said. I am tired. Can I sit down?

  — Yes, let’s go to our lunch. We can return to this later.

  2

  The claimant sat watching her. He was in something she called a window seat. She had her hands folded and was sitting in a chair. They were in a room with what she called a piano. It made loud noise and also soft noise.

  The examiner was a girl. The claimant didn’t know that word, but it is how he saw her. He had known others, he was sure of it. Her soft yellow hair fell about her shoulders, and her bones were thin and delicate. He felt that he could see where the bones were through the skin. His own bones were larger.

  She was helping him. He didn’t know why. It occurred to him that he hadn’t asked.

  — Why am I here? he said suddenly.

  The examiner looked up from her book. She smiled.

  — I was waiting for you to ask that. Actually, she looked at a little clock that lay across her leg, it is just about the right time for you to be asking that. Nearly to the minute.

  She laughed – a small, distinct laugh.

  — You are here because you have been very sick. You almost died. But, you realized that you were sick, and you went to get help. You asked for help, and you were brought here. It is my job to make you better. You and I shall become good friends as you grow stronger, and as you learn. There is much for you to learn.

  — But, he asked, where was I before?

  — In a place like this, she said. Or in some place so different as to be unknowable to us when we are here. I can’t say.

  — Why do I keep falling asleep?

  — You are learning – learning a great deal. It is too much for you, so your body bows out. Then you wake up and you can continue. It will be like this for a time. I have seen it before.

  — Are you the only one like me? he asked.

  — No, no, no.

  She laughed to herself.

  — There is a whole world full of people like us. Soon, you will meet others, when you are ready.

  — How will we know?

  — I will know, she said.

  3

  On the third day, she pointed out to him a gardener. The man was in the distance, trimming a bush.

  — There, she said. There is one.

  He stood and watched the man for at least an hour. The man had gone away, and the claimant stood looking at the bush that had been clipped, and at the place where the man had been. He asked the examiner if the gardener was likely to be in that spot again. Not that exact spot, she said, but another near to it. This was the gardener window, then, he said. I can watch the gardener from here. They are all gardener windows, she said. There are others, and others. It’s a matter of how far you can look, and if things are in the way. She took him to another window. Out of that one, he could see three people in a field, in the extreme distance. They were scarcely more than dots, but they were moving. At this distance, she said, you can’t tell if they are men or women. They could even be children, he said. It might be hard to see a child that far off, she said. They could be, he insisted. The examiner did not tell him: there are no children in the gentlest village.

  On the fifth day, she told him about fire, and explained what cooking was. He found fire to be very exciting. He could hardly bear the excitement of it. She wrote this down.

  On the sixth day, he closed a cupboard door on his hand, and cried. She explained crying to him. He said that it felt very good. In his opinion, it was almost the same as laughing. She said that many people believe it is the same. She said there was perhaps something to that view, although of course it appeared to be a bit reductive.

  4

  She wrote things in her notes, things like: Claimant is perhaps twenty-nine years of age, in good health. Straight black hair, grayish-brown eyes, average height, scars on left side from (childhood?) accident, scar under left eye, appears to be a quick learner, inquisitive. Memory is returning relatively quickly. Claimant is matching given data with remembered data – a troubling development.

  5

  On the morning of the seventh day, he refused to get up. She told him to get up. He refused.

  — What’s wrong?

  — The other day, you said that I almost died. That I was sick and that I almost died.

  — You were sick. Now you are convalescing. You are regaining your strength. You are young and have a long life ahead of you in a world full of bright amusements and deep satisfactions, but you have been sick, and you must regain your ability to walk far and parse difficult things.

  — What did you mean when you said I almost died?

  — It isn’t very much. It is a small thing. The world is full of organisms. You are an organism. A tree is an organism. These organisms, they have life, and they are living. They consume things, and grow, or they have no life, and they become the world in which other organisms live and grow. You almost became part of the world in which organisms live, rather than that which lives. It is nothing to be afraid of – just …r />
  — But it would be the end? he said. There wouldn’t be anymore?

  — It would be an end, she said. Do you remember the conversation we had, the second night? About going to sleep?

  He nodded.

  — What happened?

  — I went to sleep, and then in the morning everything was still here.

  — Death is like that. Only, you work in the world with a different purpose. The world works upon you.

  — How did I die?

  — You didn’t die. You nearly did.

  — How?

  — We will talk about this later, when you have more to compare it with. Here, get out of bed. Perhaps it is time for us to go for a walk. Perhaps we should leave the house.

  He got up and she helped him dress. They had clothes for him, just his size, in a wardrobe that stood against the wall. They were simple, sturdy clothes: trousers, shirt, jacket, hat. She wore a light jacket also, and a scarf to cover her head. He had never seen her do this. I often cover my head, she said, when I go outside. One doesn’t need to, but I like to.

  They went into the front hallway, an area that he had not understood very well. It appeared to have no real use. But now when the door was opened he could see very well why there should be this thing: front hallway. He went out the door and down the stairs and stood by her in the street. He could feel the length of his arms and legs, the rise of his neck.

  Going outside, he thought – it is so nice! The things that he had seen through the window were much closer. He could see houses opposite and, suddenly, there were people inside of them, and lights on. There was no one in the street, though. He walked with the examiner, arm in arm, and they went up the street a ways.

  The houses looked very much the same. He said so.

  — Do you know, she asked – do you know which one is ours?

  He looked back in fright. The houses were all the same. They were exactly the same. He had no idea which one was theirs. She saw his fright and squeezed his arm. I will take you back to it, don’t worry. I know which one is ours.