Joy Kaplan

The widely published Ms Kaplan has been living in Japan for some time and

may be reached at miss_kaplan@yahoo.com. This piece has long lines

(no carriage returns) so you'll definately want to move it to a text

editor (and/or print it out) for reading.

Egyptian Patience

It was all foreseen by the Fisherman's Almanac, second in popularity only to the Koran. Rainstorms in the Colonies were few and distinct and as Eskimos had a rich lexicon to name every possible nuance of snow, the people had developed a special vocabulary

to describe their rains. Storms occurred with such regularity in terms of date and quality that they were assigned metaphorical names. The storms were fixed like stars and thousands of years of recorded observations had culminated in the little pamphlet

published annually. Diotima helped herself to the Almanac, which was kept behind the bar at Brazil, and read the storm charts each morning over coffee with the stern attention her father would give to the stock quotes in the daily newspaper. She carefully

planned the tailoring of her coat to coincide with "The Broom", the first storm of October when the ground was so parched that it would not accept rain and the resulting floods would sweep away the summer's corncobs and orange rinds.

The Broom had come and gone, but the coat was not yet ready. She went to the leathersmith's and drank tea. After twenty minutes of cigarettes and silence the Proprietor told her that it would be necessary to take her measurements. Diotima sighs. Stands. R

aises her arms. A stiff scarecrow. The man takes the ribbon, which had been hanging off of his shoulders like a pet snake, and slowly wraps it about her ribcage. He knows that Diotima takes a great interest in storms. He coaxes his captive by telling her

"The Needle" is coming up next. She tells him about the sharp swift pins of water, how they cause pain to exposed skin and bruise fruits on the branch. He praises her knowledge and reassures her of the many special features of this coat which will protect

her from such aspersions. The Proprietor secretly considers himself to be an artist, completely misunderstood by a European clientele who never invited him to any of their parties and who could not perceive his true talent, the local workforce being comp

rised of vitiators, and often ruminates on the basic fact of the artist's existence that no one asks you to do whatever it is that you do, and just about no one cares once you've done it.

He slowly wraps the measuring tape around her ribcage. Then higher still. It's become a ritual between them. Once an errant finger had brushed her nipple while performing this operation. He didn't apologize and the next week Diotima didn't show. Two weeks

later she returned, asked a shop girl for her coat. After some minutes, the Proprietor came out from the back room, insisted she sit, offered a cigarette, a light, inquired about the health of her parents. This time, as he measured, he did not tighten th

e tape over the bust as he usually did. And Diotima did not focus her eyes on the ceiling as she usually did. She defiantly stared into his honey-colored eyes and as he muttered meteorology she kept a brutal silence. In her peripheral vision she could see

his tentative hands shaking slightly and his expert fingers fumbling with the tape.

Today she is told again that the coat is not yet ready. The Proprietor sends a boy out to get more tea. She must wait the ten minutes for the boy to return. The boy says, "You like it perfect, Madame?" as he stirs two heaping spoons of gritty cane sugar i

nto the amber liquid. As a child in Karkania she used to spend hours in the shallows of a lake under the shade of sheltering birch trees that lined the shore and every step she took in the mud caused a disturbance of the layers of itadel with the sand dun

es at their back, watching long lines of native men carrying large limp baskets of gravel on their shoulders in the green valley down by the River. They perched with their parasols and their opera glasses surveying the construction below for many months,

remarking repeatedly that the long lines of ragged laborers seemed so disciplined moving about in step, that they looked just like ants.

When the Opera House was finally completed, the Emperor sent for Dr. Wacky, her costume assistants and their yards and yards of silk, her wig-bearer and her make-up artists, as well as the entire Opera Company of Edo because the Committee To Save The Colo

nies had never taken into account how their plan to spark a cultural renaissance and revitalize the lost traditions of the Colonies by creating a venue for uplifting re-enactments of ancient pageants could be stymied by a decree made by the Revolutionary

Council which deemed the folklore of the people, (which had been translated into thirteen languages, universally declared to be classic, and anthologized throughout the world), to be subversive, and therefore banned from further publication and performanc

e.

On the appointed day for the Grand Opening of the Opera House, which was supposed to feature the world premiere of the stage adaptation of Ancient Nights of Musk, the lyrical modern response to an ancient tribal creation myth written in a vernacular which

the upper class natives considered to be a devilish tongue of crossed sticks and broken banjo strings and therefore, was re-written into the more dignified standard Pan-Colonial language by an obliging Pontiff, a translation, (which incensed the author,

Haggag Udull, who had been branded as a radical for writing in the language that his people actually spoke, which had been completely suppressed by the educational system and government- controlled publishing industry), which Jaspar would later describe a

s being "from Vulgarian into Barbarian", the same men in long dusty gowns who had carried baskets of gravel to and fro to the pit where concrete was mixed became a frenzied mob bent on destruction, carnage, and Yahooism and now were made to bear books to

feed the fires which the Minister of Information lit himself. The publisher of "Rakoodah Today", which was a monthly, (and second to rumor, was Diotima's main source of information), deplored scandal, so he refrained from reporting the book burning incide

nt for fear of offending his European readership, therefore, Diotima never heard about the riot and she doesn't know yet that those fires burn for her.

Several urgent diplomatic cables later, the Grand Opening was rescheduled and the Mission Statement of the Imperial Foundation For The Opera House Of The Mother Of The World was revised so that instead of "cultural revival and maintenance for the people o

f the Colonies", it's new goal was "to promote intercultural exchange between the People of the Colonies and the Global Community", and the Emperor commissioned Dr. Wacky and her fellow performers to entertain the dignitaries who had all gathered in The M

other of The World for a Gala Musical Event. Kimiyo and Wakako Tanaka stayed on in the Colonies because he was offered a post as Director of N.I.F.S., The National Institute For Silkroadology, and she fell in love with an Art Deco building which had avail

able a fourth floor flat with a large balcony overlooking the River that flowed through The Mother Of The World, and in contrast to their own insular country, the international flavor of the Colonies, which had an official language, a state religion, a f

lag, and a national anthem all designated by the Revolutionary Council, yet impotent against a history of an eternally seeming succession of foreign occupations which gave the country a cosmopolitan character beyond redemption, and while the Council had t

ried to thrust upon the Colonies all the trappings of a modern nation, more than that it seemed to be nothing but an accidental collection of buildings and cars.

Diotima lived many miles down river in the northern capital of Rakoodah, which was populated by the descendants and suspect heirs of obscure princes, sultans, and upstart conquerors whose royal status was not officially recognized by the Revolutionary Cou

ncil, yet somehow managed to retain their airs and privileges in the City, where street signs that had been posted in the last century by the French were read by the thirty per cent of the natives who were educated by a system set up more recently by the

British in order to be better able to serve them, who drank wine produced in vineyards planted by Greeks, which accompanied Turkish style meals enhanced by cheeses from Denmark which would eventually wind up in a sewer system installed by the Americans a

nd flushed by waters provided by a dam (which displaced the ancestors and all but destroyed the cultural heritage of Haggag Udull) built by the Russians, which would soon prove to be follies of extravagant expense because they depended upon defunct aquedu

cts made by the Romans which had been allowed to fall into a state of disrepair beyond their powers of recuperation by a neglectful government which seemed to, more and more these days, conduct itself according to the appalling example set by the Great L

eader of Karkania who, in an astonishingly compressed period of years, was about to lay waste to the world, and although she herself was neither a chanteuse, diplomat, nor person of any great distinction, she was a foreigner, which in the Colonies was eno

ugh, so Diotima and the Tanakas eventually met.

Tanaka-San was not a great conversationalist but he charmed Diotima by pouring her a tiny cup of glittering rice wine and while an incredulous Diotima sat entranced, blinking with the realization that those things floating in her sake were flakes of gold

leaf, the slight man recited a Haiku in her honor:

cherry blossoms on the hill

a bell rang

at the temple

ah, cherry blossoms

I wish I could fall

like you

The moment was captured in a photo which appeared on the society page of "Rakoodah Today", which was a monthly, along side a photo of Jaspar and three of his friends, and now in a leather shop as she watches the muddy colored tea leaves in their slow swir

ling descent, she foresees the dissolution of her own beauty and happiness.

That night at Jaspar's, she will ask him if he's got the latest issue of "Rakoodah Today" and he will answer derisively, "It's a monthly.," with a dismissive wave of his hands and Diotima will inform him that he and his friends from the Sporting Club are

featured on the society page and he will reply, "You mean that photo of The Eight Balls?", and she will tell him that his billiards group is famous now and he will correct her with, "Table tennis.", and she will ask him defensively, "Then why call yoursel

ves 'The Eight Balls'?", and he will tell her, "There are four members on the team, Diotima, you do the math!".

Diotima, pretending to take offense at this teasing, sulks off to the corner and sits on the floor by a little low table covered with coins set down in a geometric design. She begins deconstructing this mosaic and whining about that damn coatmaker because

these things are also part of Wednesday's rituals. She recites Tanaka-San's poem for Jaspar, who answers in kind:

honk of snot

blown into my open palm

plum blossom supreme

so Diotima throws five piastre coins at him, screeching, "Philistine!", collapsing into laughter on the spangled floor cushions, feeling grateful for this perverse man in her life who always,(especially if he hears a bitter edge slither into her voice whe

n she speaks of the deplorable conditions, not for people like them, the lucky ones, the winners of the world who were immune to the afflictions of the City and could escape as often as they liked, but for the majority of the natives who were condemned li

ke captured chess pieces), puts on a radiant face and a falsetto voice and with a sickening sanctimoniousness mocks, "Oh, let's read Dostoevsky and walk barefoot in the forests! We'll wear peasant clothes and eat lots of vegetables!", because he loved the

City and all that she found loathsome, its dirt and decay, were to him a beautiful catastrophe, its very impurity delighted him, and he never allowed her to take herself too seriously.

Jaspar was the only one in the Colonies who ever took her to task, the natives being blind to her faults because they had enthroned her on the pedestal of the blue-eyed, and the other expatriates, although a quarrelsome, gossipy lot, were too keenly aware

of the intense fragility of their polyglot fraternity and their utter dependence on each other's goodwill because in the Colonies, reputation was a form of currency, and nobody dared denounce another for misanthropy, buggery cocaine addiction, spying for

the British, or being an infidel or Jew, no matter how rampant their vices, because they all knew how good they had it and if they never openly challenged each others' crackpot theories it was not because anyone held anyone else in such high regard, , bu

t because as bold and romantic as they were toward the natives, amongst themselves they were deferential and practical. They all dreaded being a social failure in the Colonies because to be outcasted could only mean a return to the veniality of home, plac

es which perhaps lacked facilities such as the dignified French villa, ringed by a grove of prayer plants of monstrous proportions, in the diplomatic enclave of Azarita, which the Faculte Des Beaux Arts had acquired and designated as an Atelier which nati

ve artists were invited to make use of only after years of cultivating the proper connections through flattery and shameless obsequiousness, while foreign artists of mediocre abilities and shabby demeanor would be feted in its galleries and allotted studi

o space within months of their arrival in the Colonies, because if you were a foreigner in the Colonies, you had no rivals.

Diotima loved the City, although it's inefficiency sometimes exasperated her. She knew the coat would not be ready in time for The Needle and she hoped the coat would never be finished because tea at the shop had become part of her Wednesday routine, she

enjoyed the smell of leather and was attracted by, and dimly aware of, an indefinable something, perhaps the puissance of the Proprietor, that set this shop apart from the rest of the leather souk, and gave her a sense of her own importance and an inkling

that at some point in her life she would be called upon to make a choice on some weighty matter that would determine the fate of so many people, or at least she hoped so, because she longed to surpass her Aunt Kristina, the society matron turned benefact

ress who gave speeches, raised funds, and pressed her government to contribute humanitarian aid and surplus cheese to "The Forgotten People of Shak-Shuk" because in all the Colonies, it was the one place where she happened to be confronted by children who

se eyes were crawling with flies. Thanks to her tireless efforts, a lying-in clinic was erected in the village, which failed to improve the infant mortality rate because the conservative husbands of Shak-Shuk would not permit their wives to lift their ski

rts before the all-male staff who were from the City and not to be trusted, so the only women to ever enter were those who would bring trays of food to their men who had established a cafe for themselves in the waiting room of the clinic. In Shak-Shuk she

was received as an ambassador, although she could never remember the Village Headman's name because it was so difficult to pronounce and even after seventeen years into her twenty-five year stay in the Colonies, she would answer, when asked, that her hus

band was on the last year of a two year posting, and it was therefore not worth her while to attempt to learn the local language.

In photos of that period everything is black and white but that's not the truth about Diotima. Her shoes are of contrasting panels of pink and orange in honor of the wayward bougainvillea which almost took over some narrow streets in quiet neighborhoods w

here the larger donkey carts ablets, sheepskins and the building of the library itself had disappeared two millennia ago, and the main duty was now limited to inspection and censorship of all official documents, previously inspected and censored imported

books, and private correspondence that the foreigners tried to send or carry out of the Colonies), The Keeper of the Flame of the Ancient Light House, (which was an enviable honor even though the lighthouse had ceased to stand for centuries, and therefore

, by default, involved supervising The Eternal Flame Of The Tomb Of The Unknown Soldier, which mostly consisted of dressing down the guards who used the sacred fire to light their Cleopatras), met monthly over two years in a room especially set aside as t

heir headquarters in the Harbor Master's, (who was also on the panel), House at the Port of Onions. The panel decided to take the sister-city concept one step further by instigating the formation of "The International Federation of Fredrickian Municipalit

ies", which would band together all of the towns of any size named Frederick which were scattered across the globe.

That the City was called "Rakoodah" was known amongst the foreigners only by specialists and by Diotima, whose evenings of water pipes, hashish, and chess sets spent with local intellectuals, (who would invoke the principle of freedom of speech whenever s

omebody uttered "The Colonies" by barking back a vociferous correction of "Occupied Lotusland!"), in their various cafes, and their dingy little bar no respectable woman would enter, (which she persisted in calling "The El Farol"), had trained her to purg

e her vocabulary of the language of the oppressor, but the other foreigners, and indeed, many of the natives, only spoke of the City as eponymously named after Frederick the First, who was actually the third of that name, but had been first to satisfy the

imperial aspirations of the Karkanians.

The International Federation of Fredrickian Municipalities would convene in the City for a festival. Preparations would clear the Corniche of horse drawn carriages, donkey carts, and all forms of transportation that were potentially scatological because t

he foreign visitors of The International Federation of Frederickian Municipalities must not be exposed to the odors produced by the peasantry, as well as their unruly driving habits. Moreover, The Frederickian Festival would require the formation of ever

so many committees. The day that she received her invitation to serve on a sub-committee was a good day in the Colonies for Diotima because at last she had been called upon to make some crucial decision and she rushed to inform Jaspar, who because he love

d the anarchy of the City, dreaded the impending improvements to the City's broken-backed infrastructure which he thought smacked of suburban banality. He listened to a flushed Diotima gush about how the festival, culminating in a week- long orgy of comme

morative speeches and networking sessions, would forward the cause of international exchange and brotherly love and set an example for all the world---for how could war breakout between nations whose citizenry had consciously initiated and established fri

endships? ---and after she reported to him everything she had read about the project in "Rakoodah Today",( which was a monthly and of which Jaspar opnce had said to her," What's the difference between 'Rakoodah Today' and a child pornographer? The pornogr

apher provides a service!"), and showed him her actual invitation letter printed on high quality paper, his only response was to look out the window absentmindedly and mumble, "Oh, you mean 'Fiesta Fred'?", and to repeat his motto that the enemy of a good

idea is a better idea. Diotima, sensing she had sunk in his esteem, ran to his kitchen, and after a few moments, reappeared in the doorway and casually pulled a carrot out of her ass and began to chew on it. Jaspar, who accepted the half-eaten carrot and

indulge

away, said in a shower of orange-speckled pulp, "Now if you had done that with a stick of dynamite?then I'd be really impressed."

Diotima hopes the coat would never be finished because the shop is located on the corner of the main street of the leather souk and an alley which is fed by a path through the garden, (which had once harbored a colony of indigenous blue parakeets which we

re driven away by an aggressive horde of foreign starlings which had arrived courtesy of a mad poet called Eugene Schieffelin who had been obsessed with the idea of populating the country with every bird mentioned in Shakespeare), of the Greek Church with

the gold dome that had been built on faith, vanity, and fabulous piles of cash but now is mostly frequented by some of her acquaintances as a shortcut between the Elite Café and the Havana Bar. As soon as she steps outside the leather shop she would an

ticipate an encounter. Perhaps she would be escorted to her next errand by a young man who sought her advice because of her willingness to take matters into her heart and dwell on them and to walk through fire with anyone and not shrink back from a night

of grief and despair because she had touched the center of her own sorrow and had been opened by life's betrayals, and because he was very much in love and must marry at once.

Or perhaps she would be taken to an alley unknown to her where a cousin of this man's friend would invite her into the shade, offer her a chair and serve her fresh guava juice and as she waits for the foam to diminish before she begins to sip, this strang

er, (sensing the quality of her attention and the vague disquietude that plagued her, which she could not articulate because other than "Rakoodah Today", which was a monthly, Diotima was not well-read, and she was not well versed in political theory becau

se whenever she joined a group of uppity men discussing the important affairs of the day, they would always change the subject because she was a lady and it wouldn't be polite to bore her with such ponderous things, and besides, Diotima's charming tales

and beguiling presence offered them welcome relief and although many of the local literati and serious thinkers who gathered at certain cafes were at first put off by this talkative, shallow-seeming woman, she soon won them over with her droll observation

s and her unique ability to make each man sitting in a group feel as though she were speaking exclusively to them with great tenderness, intimacy, and empathy), would tell her a story about his uncle who thirty years ago, in the very spot where she now sa

t, had been arrested by the king's government and imprisoned for fourteen years "for reasons which will remain unknown to you" because that's how it was before the Glorious Revolution, anything could happen to you, which is precisely why Diotima loved the

City, because stepping out of a shop or sitting in a café, a new friend, love, adventure, anything could happen to you.

And it felt the same when she drove the Corniche of the City where there were no barefoot children sifting through thigh high mounds of tetanus laden trash piled against dwellings that were crumbling from the inside, no horses with bloody beaten haunches,

no maggoty carcasses hanging from hooks, just the sea which defined the eastern border of the City and had become part of consciousness itself. These drives reminded her that all things are born out of emptiness, shimmer momentarily in empty space, and t

hen dissolve back into the cosmic source. She had only to look at the sea and she knew she would soon be shriven and free, and despite the fact that she wasn't making any money and knew that nothing specific awaited her, she felt easy and abundant, and sh

e also knew, as she drove on this edge of Africa, that there was nothing to do with a day except to live it.