West Wing (Fifth Visit)

Al was seated at the head of the corridor again, just by the door of his new room. Between times he must have been moved there. The door with his name on it with the floral border was closed and we didn’t enter this time. Stan in the chair on the other side turned out to be a Lancashire man. Soon after arrival his wife wheeled up and came over to chat; on the last visit she had also put in an appearance. At the time of their marriage she had been nineteen and Stan an especially handsome twenty-one, as the photos she brought over later proved. The wife herself was in for some respite, she said. Stan had been in the home a number of years. There had been a tragic suicide of the son in his early forties; a daughter had three children, two autistic and one with Aspergers. One of these, or one of the great-grandkids possibly, was a high achiever and worked in robotics. Stan had been a footballer and cricketer, as well as lawn bowler here in Australia. Out near Manchester the wife had been a member of an operatic group and the pair met at church. Al would not have heard any of it, nor been much interested if he had even years past. He sat in the corner of the couch eating the grapes that had been brought in. By the desk of the attendant Doris the jabberer sat facing away with a pair of dolls with her in her chair. She was giving the woman a hard time directing the unceasing stream in her direction. Later she made a number of us laugh when she told the woman to get fucked. At one point the poor Filipina, the attendant, came around the front of the desk to wipe the dolls with a wet cloth for some reason and then dry them for Doris. None of this was noticed by Al. The Australian had seemed a better option than The Age and Al leafed through it reading a number of the columns on a number of the pages. The Business pages he had discarded. Later he leafed through the journal that happened to have been left on the side table, finding some amusement in the description of old Trevor, the tedious bore at Cirino. In the passage Trevor had been described both as a corpse on his feet and a walking ghost. This seemed to have been part of the amusement for Al, who was already near the half way mark of the nine months the doctors at Footscray had given him. The old Nonna who wheeled up during the visit must have been new, just arrived at the home. Coming up close to the couch she had surprised initially. At first she spoke in an Italian that was not understood. Reverting to English, she said she wanted a seat on the couch. Classical sweet old thing. With a little pressing she took a few of the grapes. For the most part she sat looking at Doris and listening to her, grave and stony-faced, shaking her head slowly. In the photos by Doris’s door up near the end of the wing she and her husband looked a fine young Italian couple in what may have been a wedding portrait. The old Nonna either knew, or assumed Doris to be Italian. She spoke to her a couple of times in answer to some of the rattle. The room at the end of the wing on Al’s side of the corridor, opposite Doris up toward the street, held a figure in the bed that was all jaw. There was nothing else, just protruding jaw. The head on the pillow with the sheets up high was tilted far back and the jaw bone pointed at the ceiling. Three Filipinas, two Indians and an African were attending on this visit. The strange thing was the minor kind of shock at the scene. In fact there had been more than a little light-heartedness. It may have been different had Al been more alert.

Hatred Justifiable (Third Visit) May26

Textbook horror story, perfectly routine. When they are unfurled like that before your eyes it’s like some cruel joke that you need to endure to the end, before the flimsy put-on is conceded. The lady clinging to her husband in the corridor, holding tight and hurting him, he said. Just a week and I’ll come back to take you home. From her room across the way Mira wandered in jabbering in Serbo-Croat. (Silence reigned ordinarily from the rooms with their colourful stickers of occupants’ names.) A Chinaman in his chair was slobbering food from his bowl. Attendants passed alert and cautious; complaints came from visitors of your kind. (You wrote friend at the desk. Later it would dawn no friends ever visited here.) Even after almost a fortnight the recognition was instantaneous. Again, like last time at the hospital, the plums and grapes were consumed quickly, greedily, almost half of what had been brought. Somehow the newspaper & ciggies had been forgotten. At that Al punched the air in that old time way of the theatre, swinging his fist laterally close to his chest with some force. One fine moment came at Al’s disgust at the Hearld Sun, which had been fetched from the common room. I hate that paper. HATE it. Again, forceful. You know I never bought it at the supermarket when they didn’t have The Age. The man was still present; still in attendance. It was great to see. The African Mobility Captain got a serve for his rough handling, very likely audible in the corridor where he passed. A recent negligent shave had left one of Al’s sideburns an inch and a half longer than the other.

Publication news: “Up & Down the Tube” — Fleas On the Dog

Hello, hello

Hoping this finds everyone well in the rush of 21, and hopefully the back-end of the Corona.

A publication to announce. Here is a pair of politico micros penned late last year, just published by a punchy Canadian outfit called “Fleas On the Dog.” (It's worth reading their brief review in the intro of recent Canadian short-listed lit. prize contenders.)

“Up & Down the Tube” presents a couple of email responses to a friend’s online surfing—one featuring a notable US historian (canned by Trumpet) and the other that awfully strange species of English Tory that one catches in The House of Lords.


Here is the link—

https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/9a0949f4-1d2a-4a7c-b9fb-a96b9b6bd861/downloads/NF%20_5%20_Up%20and%20Down%20the%20Tube_%20by%20Pavle%20Radonic.pdf?ver=1614992528313

Or


https://fleasonthedog.com
[https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/9a0949f4-1d2a-4a7c-b9fb-a96b9b6bd861/f24b7b68-1424-440e-b21b-697ec9e9d247.jpg]<https://fleasonthedog.com/>
FLEAS ON THE DOG ONLINE | fleasonthedog<https://fleasonthedog.com/>
EDITORS' BIOS. TOM BALL, Senior Editor (tomball33@yahoo.com). Globetrotting Tom Ball has been chased out of more countries than he can remember visiting. A fugitive on the lam with an archaeology degree, he spends his days hiding under rocks writing fiction and other junk for his devoted readers here on Earth and also Mars.
fleasonthedog.com


Cheers & zdravo

Pavle

Z’s Pics (21_Nov25)

 

Hard to recall now whether the first photo had in fact ever been sighted previously, a prize studio portrait of a radiant Bab in her mid/late thirties, strongly reminiscent of the silent screen stars of the earlier era. 

One evening Zdravko had suddenly dealt the pic on Viber like a cardsharp; marking his time it must have been. After coming to ask the year of birth of his great aunt, Zdravko was surprised at her mladolik, youthful appearance.

The beauty shone clearly without need of other comment.

His own mother opposite, leaning on the other side of the stand where the photographer had placed the pair, showed a broad face, closely spaced eyes and nose like a blade. Dear Jovanka, the obedient, dependable niece, in her mid-teens.

It was surprising to come upon aunt & niece featuring in a studio portrait of their own in that early Tito era. Decades later on the visits to Boka that bond and feeling between the pair would pass down at the meeting with Cousin Joke.

It was strange the pride that could be taken in the beauty of parents or partners long after their deaths, even when survivors had aged themselves. It was not uncommon.

Only once one Saturday night after witnessing too much preening at the mirror had Bab made mention of her former beauty. Coming from an elderly woman and without any previous hint from any quarter, the declaration had been especially strange. There was only the wedding portrait in the house, long an object of mystery; the young woman presented had been more or less discounted as herself.

Memorably, in the Analects, Confucius came to lament the common prizing of beauty above virtue. (1)

Z. rebutted the idea that the fine clothing had been provided by the photographer. His branch of the Pavolvici had national costumes even in the previous century, he maintained. Prior to the assault of Mussolini’s troops the cache had been taken to a neighbouring village for safe-keeping. There had been a locally famous Pavlovic ancestor couple generations back; outside chance it may have been possible.

Here it was not a case of national costume, but impressively neat townswomen garb, unlike what might be expected of villagers, even in the case of well-to-do villagers in that corner of old Montenegro.

The second photograph was of Z’s grandfather Luka’s monument by Our Lady in the village, an expensive looking structure that Z himself had raised. For the photo colourful bouquets had been placed either side of the marker.

As the eldest grandson all the love from the old man had flowed to young Zdravko. The reports had come down. In younger days and now in later years that immoderate cherishing was apparent in the man, a boisterous, strong-willed and eruptive fellow—characteristics of Number One Brothers, as in the Chinese example. 

A pair of Number Ones locking horns could be guaranteed to produce a spectacle in Montenegro, even in contemporary times.

After the initial meeting up at the JNA Sailors’ barracks in Pula, Istria, followed not long after by another at the University in Belgrade, there had been a twenty-five year gap. In the noughts Zdravko had compiled a dictionary of our village usage, after which some jesting had raised offence and led to another decade’s gap. Once we picked up again there came a flood of messages to-and-fro, calls & the photographs.

In her early seventies our Jovanka had thrown herself into a well. The unspeakable horror continued to haunt us all. Zdravko’s younger brother Nedjo, who was perhaps most closely attached to his mother, once said a determined suicide could not be prevented. It was Nedjo who had found the photo of his young teen mother with her aunt somewhere and presented a copy to Zdravko, who years later passed it on. Each of us could only ponder the image alone. Even wedding photographs were uncommon pre-war in the Montenegrin hills.

The other two photos Zdravko sent were taken up in Village Uble, both featuring himself and both curious stagings. Uble sat 1,000m above the coast, back in the day only accessible by a rough, winding bridle path and a longer, smoother climb on the other side toward Novi.

Zdravko had returned to Boka after fifteen years in Switzerland, where his younger brother had long been established. Bijela had been chosen for his re-settling, a hundred metres below his maternal grandfather’s house, where his mother had spent extended periods in her youth with her beautiful aunt. Before his father died early, there had been a settling around on the coast above Morinj. Younger paternal cousins of Zdravko’s were established a short distance above on the hill at Bijela.

The first of the village photos was perhaps a spontaneous shot taken by the new Russian girlfriend, as the broad grin suggested. Zdravko was seated on a ridge in his work clobber, holding in either hand a scythe and the greenery newly cropped. A cigarette dangled from his lips.

In younger years, for Zdravko like for the whole of that generation who had forged a place for themselves in one of the cities, within Yugoslavia or out, the pedigree of the selo, the village was mostly a source of shame. The flight from Village Uble had begun in earnest post-war. After the first war some of our villagers had taken up King Aleksandar’s offer of land in Kosovo. The herding out of the Germans & Magyars after WWII led to greater opportunities again up in the flatlands of the Vojvodina. With the living so meagre on Uble, many fled at the first opportunity. For all the better living in other parts, some eventually returned to Boka, if not to the village itself, just as others returned from America and elsewhere.

The last photo was almost as remarkable as the one of our two mothers caught together in the late ‘40s in the photographer’s studio, in Herceg Novi it must have been.

Here in this shot the forester was pictured, the horseman and hunter returned to camp. A merry drunk, perhaps, caught in a moment of high-jinks. Spirited alpha male showing his biceps in the strongman pose, before the burning logs of his ground fire. Flames leaping.

The staging had been arranged in the cleft between a pair of dark hills, evening early. Given the angle, it seemed to have been a selfie.

Some few years before a villager at the upper end of the settlement had famously had his rifle wrestled from him by a leaping wolf. On the barrel were teeth marks to prove it. Through the year there were now only a dozen permanent occupants of Village Uble; the last few winters only two or three households.

Zdravko would not be camping outdoors by his fire. In recent years the old house his father had begun to build in the early ‘60s with his brothers Zdravko had renovated. A road had been brought to the very doorstep, he proudly informed. Other cousins hunted wild swine in the higher hills and with the change of weather there had been bears recently.

The heroics of the ancestors’ daily living continued to captivate those of us who had been touched by them. It was an inheritance that was highly prized, for all that the ways of that life could never be recaptured and hardly even imagined, even by those like Zdravko, who had spent his childhood on Uble.

Zdravko swam now down on the beach below the Bijela house. In earlier time none of our villagers had ever entered the water. The struggling fisherfolk on the coast had always been keen to trade for the potato, cheese & meat from the hills. In his old age Bab’s father, grandad Rade, had thrown himself off the pier at Kumbor.

There was a popular corso now under the lamps along the shore, numerous migrants from all over, Russians in strong numbers. Cafes & fine dining. Essentially, it had now become a suburban life along the three large bays of Boka Kotorska, with views across the water and the hills ringing round.

Up on Bashtik above the lower end of the village, where the folk from that quarter had gone for the summer pastures, the sight was thrown across huge chasms of space, where the small units of time below were eclipsed. On the pastures and in the fields they had all gone barefoot; there had been hunger and privation. All in the midst of a remarkable natural setting.

Three seasons of occupation, from early spring to late autumn, had been the long-held dream, renting one of the houses that were used as weekenders now. With ventures into the surrounding settlements.

 

(1) Confucius’ Analects, Chapter 12. The Master said, "It is all over! I have not seen one who loves virtue as he loves beauty."

 

 

Blanking Out (2nd Visit) May26

 

Smoother engagement today with Al, good focus and clarity. A number of photos were shown and all positive recognition. More thin he appeared, the general woefulness uncomplicated—it stood directly before you no possibility of avoidance, nothing other than immediate. There was little complaint from the man: the food was shit house, yeah; they lorded over him with their regime; nothing he could do about it. Thankfully the plums taken in were consumed with relish, over half a dozen in quick succession. At one point there was concern he was unintentionally swallowing the kernels. Even the less ripe of the remaining dozen would be perfectly OK later in the evening; Al wouldn’t be putting any aside for the morrow. Green grapes had also been brought, though it was the plums that were relished. Getting out to the garden was easier in his chair this time, a spot of sun found by the fence, the tall young tree before us and the Aboriginal flag fluttering behind. There the photos were displayed, the screen shaded for him. Johnnie Good’s pic of the thinking man, as Al had called it, and others of his earlier self only a couple of years ago, one of which made him laugh and the other not recalled. When the wind sprung up more strongly and the cloud came over it was time to retrace the steps. Almost an hour & half in all, though Barry’s ear chewing during the phone call in search of Al’s reading glasses took a good twenty minutes. There was some shared laughter at Barry’s well-known habit on the phone. Thought was the LRB front and rear covers could give reminders of something, the former spark; titles of the pieces in the larger font and the advertising too. A few months before when Al had been taken reading matter out to the flat he often burrowed in immediately, even before taking to the food that was brought and often forgetting his visitor. There was some of that again on the hospital bed. Ordinarily you just blank out, Al explained.

 

Peloponnesus

It was marginally better or marginally worse here than Williamstown? The bay and the beach down there inevitably tipped it in one direction. Remembering unlikely Greek George who first set up Java, the first café apart from what used to be called the Wog Shops. Got a serve for the cheek of $2 coffees suddenly in Yarraville. Such traipsing through the streets every way you turned—young mums pushing sleek prams; the novelty shoppers; lounging retirees with the old academic’s beards and neat kids. Some of the high-vis chaps had graduated from the pub to the cafes for their beers. The old guy from the house beside Aven’s former in Anderson Street was pretty much the only distinct Greek presence remaining in the neighbourhood; at least so far as definable quantity went. Did the renovated church get any patronage at all now? anything apart from funerals? Collecting the regular Yasous the old trooper and always ready to return, never mind his mystification at the ID. In Av’s day there was a son or two and long-suffering scarved wife. Aven herself guessed she must have been considered a terrible whore with all the comings and goings at her place. Decidedly shabby genteel, especially passing against all the sprucing. Shiny faded old windbreaker, fraying trouser legs and scuffed shoes. Possibly the family could afford to deck their patriarch more fittingly now and he stoutly resisted, determinedly retaining the old, worn garb. Wild hair, unkempt beard, worry beads. Lost the thread long ago, well over thirty years; barely into middle-age when he first began receiving the disability support and started circling the streets. The house now was worth at least a cool million, never mind the shabby up-keep. Did the man ever lay eyes on his parents again, brothers or sisters, ever manage a return visit? Didn’t appear to be the case pacing like that, peering at the faces searchingly. The lapse of time had stretched so far, his eyes now losing their colour. Narrow round through the hub, a couple of the outlets that remained Greek backstage allowing him a place at the tables despite the lack of coin. Stupendous when you consider the distinction the man has now attained in that figure he cuts, that rare individuality and uniqueness.

Caught In a Trap

Gotta avoid that look of pity for the world you’re falling into; not a good one. It can easily be sensed when it comes on; perhaps more easily since Johnnie G.’s pic of couple months ago down at Cirino. How difficult and rare was the Buddha evenness, that gold standard you’ve been striving / hoping for this last long while. In fact, truth be told, you can’t manage, not really; it couldn’t reasonably be expected. Did you ever see such a cast of feature in the Balkans? The impressiveness Edith Durham was describing didn’t fall into that category; that was an altogether different kettle of fish. Not that the latter was a lesser form of coping / overcoming perhaps; maybe we didn’t need to concede that. The softening for passing pretty girls was coming off a wee better in these ripe years. You were never a leerer of course, but that didn’t mean easy, admiring glimpses came naturally. We can never see ourselves, Bab used to say. And, Ne vidis sebe, again, when passing judgment on others.

 

 

NB. Edith Durham’s early writings on Montenegro & Serbia, before the latter (High Albania, &etc.) switching to more strongly take the part of the Shiptars against their oppressors.

 

https://www.njegos.org/durham/chapter17.htm