Brown Scarf Blues Read Online Free Page B

that friends would give me, my own books if I didn’t manage to sell them or give them away, and after walking out into the street feeling so modern, so twenty-first century, I had a premonition that we were living in pure change, pure change, that in ten years the world will be a very different world. That’s logical enough, so far so good. But then my mind started wandering, and I tried to imagine the most radical change that could happen in the world, the most unexpected, the most implausible. And ultimately I pictured a world where bookstores sell millions of poetry books. Nothing could be more alien to the world we live in. Every bookstore window filled with poetry books, and if someone asked for a novel, they’d be told there are a few shelves of novels in the basement but nobody reads novels anymore, nobody buys them. Publishers would issue books of unpublished verse by once-famous novelists, the complete poetry of Faulkner and even Philip Roth, we have not the remotest idea that Roth writes poems.
    I told my friend Adolfo about this at breakfast, and he said it could never happen. I told him about it at the Café Gijón.
    “Of course it can’t, I know that. But it would be a change.”
    On an empty seat on the subway, I saw an abandoned newspaper. I like to find things in public, especially when I need them, for instance often I’ll need a pen and I’ll find one simply by looking down, or even money, sometimes, scarves, music magazines, just when I wanted to know more about classical music I found six issues of Fanfare , each more than four hundred pages long, on a little backstreet along with another periodical, and now here was another newspaper. It was called ¿Y qué? , which means So What? And on the last page, in the lower right corner, was that day’s flash fiction, which, naturally, began with the person waking up. Here’s what it said:
    7.
    REINCARNATION
    When he woke up he realized he was dead and that his soul had migrated into the body of a cow. "AH! La vache!" he thought and said it just the way his anatomy professor used to say it in the natural medicine classes he took in Paris. Now all he was waiting for was to reach the slaughterer, and he regretted his years as a vegetarian in his previous life.
    8.
    On the third day of the conference, at night, tired, I wrote a story in Haketia. The story’s title means naked, specifically naked from the waist down, a word people would say about children or to children when they would take me for a walk without diapers or without underpants. I wrote the title, “Chumbel,” at the top of the page, and then: Cuando yo tenía quinze años me invito mi tío, que en buen olam esté, a pazar las vacancias en Madrid...
    Chumbel
    When I was fifteen, my uncle, may he be in the Buen Olam, invited me to spend my vacation in Madrid with my cousins. Back then there were still no direct flights between Israel and Spain and I went via Paris. It was my first time flying Iberia and since then, whenever I travel on Iberia I miss my dentist. When I reached the capital city of the Gauls, whom we had studied at school, the stewardess said I wasn’t booked on the next flight to Madrid, but she could put me on the one after that. So I waited alone, sprawled on the floor of the airport corridors. The Madrid airport is called Barajas, which usually means “decks of cards.” I could never figure out what decks they meant, unless it was the baccarat decks we played with on Purim or the decks at the Jewish casino in Tetouan. After we landed at Barajas, I went to collect my luggage. But no battered suitcase arrived, everyone else went off happily with their clothes and I didn’t see mine. I was a shy lad but eventually had to approach the company to ask for my socks. A nice lady came and went thousands of times till she told me my suitcase had wound up in Manchester. My grandfather. He was a tzadik who would travel by ship with all his food and provisions and with ten Jewish men