PREFACE
Karen Mulhallen A Mari Usque Ad Mare (From Sea to Shining Sea)

CANADA WEST
Craig Boyko The Baby
Craig Boyko Eden Towers: A Judicious Summary
Cullene Bryant Voluptuary Sweetness

UPPER CANADA
Deborah-Anne Tunney The View from the Lane
Matthew Tierney The Ones You Love
Colette Maitland Wheels — 1970
Paul Lisson In for a Penny [Portfolio]
Joe Davies Colder with the Wind Chill
Larry Frolick and Donald Weber Kebabistan — The Woman with Seven Heads
Sheree-Lee Olson Word Wall
Ken Klonsky Caroline
Douglas Dolan Lest We Forget

LOWER CANADA
Elise Moser Under the Skin of the Blade

THE MARITIMES
Dawn Rae Downton The Martinmas Ghosts

SOUTHERN TERRITORIES
Adam Ward Plastic Sunrise. Yellow Number Five
Mitchell Marco Sophisticated Animals [Portfolio]
C. Rush Stockton Possum Kingdom

BACK OF THE BOOKCO-EDITOR’S DIARY
Maria Meindl Making History

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

NEWS AND NOTES

GRAPHICS: The front cover image,“ Zeit Gestoppte Schablone” is courtesy of visual artist Paul Lisson. The photograph of Karen Mulhallen is courtesy of Michael Mitchell. The images in Paul Lisson’s portfolio, “Des Traveaux” are courtesy of the artist. The images in the photographic portfolio accompanying the essay “Kebabistan — The Woman with Seven Heads,” are courtesy of the photographer Donald Weber. The drawings in Mitchell Marco’s portfolio, “Sophisticated Animals” are courtesy of the artist

Text by Larry Frolick
Photography by Donald Weber

I did what I saw Don doing. I left the curb and strode across the twin boulevards, zigzagging from side to side like a real professional. I was free, I had my yellow ID card too. The Turkish police and soldiers left me completely alone now. The crowd of Kurds was not so lucky. Every few minutes one of them got dragged away into a patrol car. For nothing. An example to the others, to listen closely whenever the cops spoke.

“Heray! HERAY!” The nearby policeman’s face grew hot with unbridled authority. “Step back!”

“They’re coming,” an American reporter in an orange ski parka alerted his colleague.
A small convoy of private cars drove at good clip through the town, not slowing a whit as they approached the phalanx of clicketing cameras, a reception of about fifty journalists in all. From out of nowhere, Yannis the Reuters guy pounced into the scene like a tomcat, darted across the roadway, and quickly worked his way upstream against the milling crowd, hunched over and snapping off his shots without slowing. He kept his camera stuck to his eye the whole time, a deep instinct telling him exactly where to place his feet as he glided across the deep potholes and over piles of smelly debris.

Galvanized by the sight of him, I raced out of the crowd, trying to grab a picture of him in action. The effort was instructive: as the others froze into a studied tableau, the Greek came alive, in a blur of intention. Volatile, precociously adept, he slid across the scene like a shadow, sensitive to its every cross-current. The Kurdish-Arab mob around him was a pre-violent, living thing, unpredictable and vain. Yannis slipped right through it, sure-footed and rangy, anticipating its abrupt fluxes and war-day jitters.

Here was the crowd.

The faces in the crowd.

The uneasy wet ground under the crowd’s feet.

All moving, jumbled pieces wheeling around like fidgety birds. Ready to explode at any second into the hot picture that everyone wanted.

“Ya ya ya!” The crowds began cheering as the white Renault entered their precincts.

A smiling brown face, airy wave from the closed window.

Talibani, the Kurdish leader from Ankara. Beaming at his adoring crowd.

A few more cars and twenty seconds later they were gone. A roar of spontaneous applause and hoarse cheers. Sharp whistles rose and fell like arrows.

The rain spattered and burst into heavy sheets. We took refuge under the torn canopy of the vegetable shop. Martin the Czech insisted I take the one dry spot. Old world courtesy. The French camera crew stood their ground as the surrounding crowd smiled crazily at the fresh downpour.

“Second convoy, coming soon.” Martin promised.

Now the cops began working themselves up to an unpleasant lather.

They pushed at stragglers in the crowd, rolling their batons more than necessary. Focusing on individuals whose trivial actions they deemed an affront to order, or worse. A white bearded farmer took the opportunity of the lull to thrash his skinny red cow across the road. Its hind leg was hobbled to his arthritic hand by a piece of rough hemp twine. The cow skipped and jigged querulously at each blow and the crowd giggled in relief at the comedy. The farmer, mightily pleased with the attention, flung his whip around more rashly with each stroke. Hard laughter ricocheted like bursts of gunfire through the press of bodies.

The cops stomped this way and that. On the lookout. Frothing, eager to use their steel batons at the slightest provocation. A teenager slow to move off the road got a smart poke in the ribs, another was snatched away summarily.

“Why are they doing that?”

“I don’t think they like the cheering,” Martin replied. “So they keep pushing. Make them move all the time.”

Don trotted up, a big satisfied grin.

“Here, hold this camera. I need your hat.”

“What for?” I took the digital Canon. It weighed a ton.

“I’m working.”

He grabbed my toque and disappeared into the crowd. The second convoy approached and rocketed by, and now the crowd surged after it. The cops grabbed a student who had been too vocal in his enthusiasm, and frog-marched him off to their unmarked car.

“What are they going to do to him?”

“Beat him with their clubs, then let him go.”

It was odd. If you were in the right place or time, you could take any number of pictures of these fateful human escapades. A real smorgasbord of social havoc.

Did you go for that simmering bowl of curried street misery? Or the rare red roast beef of those meaty paratroopers down at the other end of the table?

On one level, nothing had happened. A slam of citified Kurds in baggy suits had ripped through an obscure border town. Big deal. Only that’s how these things usually happened. Hadn’t the twentieth century begun with Lenin’s third class train ride through the Silesian countryside? Maybe the tilt of history had hit its red line today. Right here, on the sloppy streets of Silope. And we were here to witness its fleet and final passing.

I SAW GRANDFATHER’S GHOST come for Grandfather a year ago, the night he died in his sleep. We were all at table that night as well, the whole family. Maybe ghosts are indigestion, insulin spikes; maybe they come on with food. Or with any large assembly of my family. Maybe in our house they’re just what you get for raising a glass in salute.
Here we all were just a year ago, the house in Devon; Martinmas then too, one of the English feasts. This one’s not even one of the great quarter-days when the rents come due and the magistrates are chosen. Not Michaelmas, the festival of St. Michael and all the Angels, just Michael’s bumpkin-cuz Marty, patron saint of innkeepers and rehabilitated drunks. Martinmas is a day of blood and guts, food and drink. Always beer, never wine. A day to stuff your face. Martin’s day is Bacchus’s too, the great slaughtering day of the Anglo-Saxons when they’d run out of feed for their livestock and processed them for winter. It’s not cruelty, Murmur says, but a perfect husbandry; the circle is completed.

Last Martinmas was the beginning of our year here, Evie and me. Louisa and Tally still lived in London then, and they left Lawrence for the day to drive down. Soon enough, Louisa would leave Lawrence for good, would toss her husband away like a hot rock as my mother had done hers. My parents had parted by then, and Evie had sold our apartment and packed us off here. Because she didn’t own it or its troubles, her parents’ house was magical to her. On the plane from Newark she told me we were embarking on a shipboard romance on a liner that never docked. I was doubtful. I didn’t want a romance with my mother. Being her daughter was bad enough.

At dinner last Martinmas, my mother stood suddenly while the maid cleared and launched into her toast to this dreamboat, her ancestral home. I knew it was to be a grand speech, a great occasion: in addition to her cherry-red suit with the brass buttons down the front and the smaller matching buttons on the epaulettes, she’d put on eyeliner and red lipstick. The lipstick was usual; the eyeliner and the suit were not. Most of our year here my mother has styled herself pale and wounded, slouching around in long Irish sweaters with a little ashen powder on her face, but that first night she was all done up. Raymond sat beside her when she rose and raised her glass. He held her hand, and Louisa sat at the foot of the table and sniffed, looking sullen and tragic as she contemplated Lawrence, back in the Mayfair flat with a woman perhaps, and what was to come. Grandfather was at the head of the table, Murmur at his elbow. Grandfather always sat at the head, though Murmur never sat at the foot. It was as if Grandfather wanted Murmur nearby so he could pick at her, but out of a direct sightline where she might stare him down.

Grandfather got up and made flaming coffees at the sideboard while my mother made her speech. Now and then he turned to glare at her. Soon enough, Evie had the Devon house going forty knots, waves slapping up at its dormers as if she and I had never stood still anywhere, had never been rooted to anything in our lives. Hoist up the John B’s sails, See how the main sail sets, I was thinking. Call for the Captain ashore and let me go home. I’d just turned sixteen, I was done with school and I lived in New York, except for this year, and I was hip and grown-up and hoped to get a flaming coffee.

“Wide berth, woman,” my grandfather growled at my mother, cutting her off. My song vanished along with my coffee.

Grandfather looked around the long table, marshalling his audience. “You want to give that woman a wide berth.”

“She’s not that woman, she’s Evie,” Murmur said. Grandmother spoke definitely, in the voice of a navigator who might try to thread us through the treacherous shoals of our family dinners. She sounded as if she were sitting next to Grandfather in their Daimler, pulling her gloves off and unfolding a map. Turn here, Evan, right now. Do as I say.

“He knows who I am, mother,” Evie said icily. “He just wishes he didn’t.”

Grandfather snorted over the hotplate on the sideboard, brandishing a bottle of Courvoisier. “Flaming hothead, that’s what she is. Look at the get-up. Not a get-up, a red-up. Never a thought. Any woman needs a wide berth she’s going to up and leave her husband like that, never a thought for the child.”

My mother made a sharp noise and sat down heavily. My grandfather chided us for failings he flaunted like medals on his own chest: recklessness, appetite, dauntlessness, a swath of rancour wide and choppy as the Atlantic. I hated it. I hated the way he made all our decisions for us. Here he was, starting in on mine. I was sixteen, not a child. The table was spotted blue, sprayed with his burning potions, and I willed the cloth in front of him to burst into flames. Take me away from here, I’d written my dad. He was an American; he’d know what to do.

“A wide berth, Evan?” My mother had recovered. She rose again, throwing her napkin down on her plate. Like Raymond and Louisa, my mother called her father by his Christian name. Perhaps it was their way of righting things. They should never have been born to a man like that — they complained about it still, as if it came down to a delivery mix-up the post office could review and rectify. My mother bristled now. “And how wide was your berth over the years, Evan? How wide did it have to be to fit in all that extra-curricular T&A?”