This issue of Litro explores a theme close to Litro’s heart, indeed essential to our very genesis: travel and adventure. Perhaps you don’t think of your daily commute in such terms but Galician writer Luisa Castro manages to take a chair on a journey more intrepid than one might usually with such an item. Watch out for the twists in the Barking line; you never know what they might inspire.

Other writers in this issue range far and wide. Nikesh Shukla returns, this time with a sideswipe at tourist culture as embodied in that fundamentally decadent trip, the safari. Laura Martz tackles drop-out culture in 1980s Amsterdam and Nicholas Hogg shows us a decent southern states man, swerving closer than he expected to the Mexican border, and other borders too.

We unveil works by a couple of stars too: celebrated Israeli writer Etgar Keret gives us another lonely man who turns his daily cafe breakfast into a chance to commune with all kinds of other mistaken souls – providing a sparky start to your day, too, we hope. From the other side of the world, eminent New Zealand poet CK Stead wrote ‘Auckland’, reaching back in time as well as space. And more poetry from English poet Charlie Druce also offers brief adventures in head-on encounters with animals.

Litro Classics may turn into a regular slot: we couldn’t resist including a chapter from that model adventurer Lemuel Gulliver ‘s journals to round off our compendium. This is where he meets a new race neither tiny nor gigantic, but horselike and rather intelligent… We hope you find it all strange enough to want to seek out more Swift, and indeed more adventure of all sorts. And finally, remember to look out for our August issue, whose special guest editor is a big name in the film world.

Sophie Lewis & Dena Ziari

It was written in my diary for the seventh of July, the day I’d be thirty-five: change chair.
So that the group of chairs sheltering the dining-table didn’t clash, that brown chair had to be red. But it had been brown for a long time, four or five months, ever since I’d bought it in a rush. I’d agreed with the shop assistant, again in a rush, to change it as soon as the red one arrived, without allowing for the sluggishness that overcomes those of us who go from birthday to birthday without furniture ever settling down in our houses. Yes, I wanted a red one, but they didn’t have a red one just then, only brown. Coming up to thirty-five without ever having owned a dining-table, I couldn’t wait even a couple of days for another chair to arrive.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, ‘I’ll take this one for now. When the other one comes, I’ll collect it.’
And I spent four, five months gazing at the brown chair, incapable of picking it up and taking it to be changed even when they began to phone almost daily from the shop.

‘The red one is here for you. You can come for it now.’
‘I can’t today. I’ll come tomorrow.’
I wrote down the job to be done on several pages covering several weeks, I went to bed many nights thinking about the chair, I often got up fretting that a polite voice on the phone would say good morning and remind me:
‘Would you like us to deliver it? We can deliver it, too.’
‘No, no, I’ll come.’
‘If you prefer the brown one, you can keep it.’
‘No, really I prefer the red one.’

And the day came to return the chair. A seventh of July like any other, except that on that day I was thirty-five. I swore I wouldn’t let the morning go by without getting the job done. I got up, resolute. I took the brown chair in my arms, I walked downstairs with it and put it into the car, in the front passenger seat, legs in the air. I sat behind the steering-wheel and set off.

I’ve always liked driving. I remembered this wasn’t the way to the shop, but I headed down the road that crossed the river, certain I’d end up in the same place. In this respect Santiago isn’t like other cities. The urban layout is an ancient one, established long ago, and from the surrounding villages you reach the centre along narrow tarmac lanes that go straight from the front doors of the houses to the covered market, and nowhere much else. The radial roads that run from the centre to the surrounding areas aren’t linked by those circular flyovers which weave the spider’s web of a great city. I drove through those patches of green country in the hope of sometime finding the short cut that would take me to the shopping centre, but a little after crossing the river I realized there wasn’t going to be any such short cut. Even so, the beauty of the road that was now taking me into wooded country made it worth going a few extra kilometres to get to nowhere in particular without looking at the clock. The brown chair was by my side, sitting with its legs in the air like a silent, sceptical companion.

I thought for a moment that this was one of the most absurd scenes of my life, a woman who on her thirty-fifth birthday runs away from home, with only a chair for her luggage, towards an unpredictable and unknown destiny. Who’d miss me if I never went back? Would the shop owner really take the trouble to find me? I drove on as I fantasized about reaching a wonderful place, a moist, green meadow where I would get out, set up my chair – the chair I should never have bought – and sit there to look at the view, the city in the distance with the outline of the cathedral, and maybe, around me, as around the oldest city centres, there would be a gradual accumulation of sundry and necessary objects that I still didn’t own and that it was high time I took into my care; in the end that soon-to-be-rejected chair would become the first stone upon which my church would be built, and beside it a man who’d greet me at the door with a kiss, the children I’d have with that man, the walls we’d build to protect them from the cold, the beds we’d sleep in, and finally the table and the chairs we’d buy to sit down and eat on festa days with our guests. The brown chair would be the first stone of my new life, a chair chanced upon, not chosen. I glanced at it by my side in the car, and began to feel sorry to be getting rid of that piece of furniture.

Suddenly, just when I was thinking about turning back, a little tired from driving for kilometres doing nothing but my imagination any good, I looked at the dashboard clock: it was gone half past one. The time when I was born, according to my mother – half past one in the afternoon, the time when all the shops close. I calculated that I was further from the shopping centre than it had at first seemed. I thought I must either rush back to change the chair before they closed or forget all about the matter. But I did the former, of course. I turned back and put my foot down. I didn’t waste time looking for short cuts, I drove like greased lightning back along the tarmac road I’d come down, and in five minutes covered the distance that separated me from the centre and that had taken me half an hour in my impromptu flight. I saw the frightened faces of the people, stepping back on to the verges, the trees I was leaving behind, the moist, green meadows with which I’d had my moment of intimacy and which were now becoming forever alien. Soon I crossed the river and returned to the city. The roads, cluttered with cars and traffic lights, led me straight to the shopping centre. They were hanging up the ‘closed’ sign when I arrived. The shop assistant looked at me, in the relaxed manner of small-town shopkeepers. I took the brown chair in my arms as if it were a sick child.
‘I’m here to change the chair,’ I said, like someone coming into casualty from a long way off, from one of those villages where there aren’t any hospitals, or any shopping centres.
The man looked at the chair and recognised it. He let us in.
‘Come in,’ he said. ‘We were just about to shut.’
The red chair was in an unsorted collection of furniture in a corner of the shop. It seemed faded.
‘Yes, that’s the one,’ I said, and handed my chair over.

It was past lunchtime when I got home. The door in front of me opened by itself, as if in a hurricane, as if someone had sensed me climbing the stairs. Behind the door, young blond children welcomed me expectantly.
‘Happy birthday, Mama.’
I walked with the chair through their shouts and their turmoil to the dining-room, where the brown chair had left its empty space. A man sitting on the sofa folded the newspaper he was reading and came to kiss me.
‘Happy birthday, my dear,’ he said.
I tried to act normally. I put the chair in its place. I went to my diary to cross out the job I’d just done. I asked those people what they wanted for lunch.

Luisa Castro is a poet and novelist. Her career began as a poet in the1980s. Her volume of poetry in Galician, Baleas e baleas (Esquío Prize, 1988), is considered a seminal work. Since then she has written exclusively in Spanish, apart from some short stories, such as this one. Castro has published several novels and one collection of short stories, Podría hacerte daño (Ediciones del Viento, 2005), which was awarded the Torrente Ballester prize. She contributes to El País, El Mundo and ABC, the three most important Spanish newspapers, and to La Voz de Galicia, the most important Galician one.

This story is included in From the Beginning of the Sea (Anthology of Contemporary Galician Short Stories). www.foreigndemand.net

Every night, after she left, he’d fall asleep in a different spot: on the sofa, in an armchair in the living-room, on the mat on the balcony like some homeless bum. Every morning, he made a point of going out for breakfast. Even prisoners get a daily walk in the yard, don’t they? At the café they always gave him a table set for two and sat him across from an empty chair. Always. Even when the waiter specifically asked him whether he was alone. Other people would be sitting there in twos or threes, laughing or tasting each other’s food, or fighting over the bill, while Avichai sat by himself eating his Healthy Start – orange juice, muesli with honey, decaf double espresso with warm low-fat milk on the side. Of course it would have been nicer if someone had sat down across from him and laughed with him, if there had been someone to argue with over the bill and he’d have to struggle, to hand the money to the waitress saying “Don’t take it from him! Avri, stop. Just stop! This one’s on me.” But he didn’t really have anyone to do that with and breakfast alone was ten times better than staying home.

Avichai spent a lot of time watching the people at the other tables. He’d eavesdrop on conversations, read the sports supplement or inspect the ups and downs of the Israeli shares on Wall Street with an air of detached concern. Sometimes someone would come over and ask for a section of the paper he’d finished reading, and he would nod and try to smile. Once, when a sexy young mother with a baby in a stroller walked over to him he even said to her, as he gave up the front page with the banner headline about a gang rape in the suburbs: “What a crazy world we’re bringing our children into.” He thought it sounded like the kind of statement that brings people closer together, pointing as it did to their common fate, but the sexy mom just glared at him with a half-angry stare and took the
Healthy Living supplement too without asking.
Then one Thursday a fat, sweaty guy walked into the café and smiled at him. Avichai was surprised. The last person who’d given him a smile was Maayan, five months before she left him, and hers had been utterly sarcastic, whereas the fat guy’s smile was soft, almost apologetic. The fat guy gestured unmistakably that he’d like to sit down, and Avichai nodded back almost without stopping to think. The fat guy took a seat.

“Meir,” he said “I’m really sorry I’m late. I know we said ten but I had a nightmare morning with the kid.”

It crossed Avichai’s mind that maybe he ought to tell the fat guy he wasn’t Meir, but he found himself checking his watch instead, and saying, “What’s ten minutes? Forget it.”

Then neither of them spoke for a second, and Avichai asked if the kid was okay. And the fat guy said she was, it was just that she’d started a new kindergarten and every time he took her there she had a hard time letting him go.

“But never mind,” he stopped short. “You’ve got enough on your plate without my problems. Let’s get down to business.”

Avichai took a deep breath and waited.

“Look,” the fat guy said. “Five hundred is too high. Give it to me for four hundred. Know what? Four hundred and ten even and I’m good for six hundred pieces.”

“Four hundred and eighty,” Avichai said. “Four hundred and eighty. And that’s only if you’re good for a thousand.”

“You gotta understand,” the fat guy said. “The market’s in the shitter, what with the recession and all. Just last night on the news they showed people eating out of rubbish bins. If you keep pushing, I’ll have to sell high. You’re pricing me right out of the market.”

“Don’t worry,” Avichai told him. “For every three people eating out of rubbish bins, there’s someone driving a Mercedes.”

For some reason, this sentence made the fat guy laugh out loud. “They told me you were tough,” he muttered with a smile.

“I’m just like you,” Avichai protested. “Just trying to keep body and soul together.”
The fat guy wiped his sweaty palm on his shirt, then held it out. “Four hundred and sixty,” he said. “Four hundred and sixty and I take a thousand.” When he saw Avichai wasn’t reacting, he added: “Four hundred and sixty, a thousand pieces, and I owe you a favour. And you know better than anyone, Meir, that in our business favours are worth more than money.”

This last sentence was all Avichai needed to take the outstretched hand and shake it. For the first time in his life, someone owed him a favour. Someone who thought his name was Meir, but still. And when they’d finished eating, as they argued over who would pick up the tab, a warm feeling spread through Avichai’s stomach. He beat the fat guy to it by a tenth of a second and shoved the crumpled bill into the waitress’s hand.

From that day on it happened almost routinely. Avichai would take a seat, place his order and keep a look-out for any new person who came into the café, and if that person started searching the tables with an expectant look, Avichai would quickly wave and invite him or her to take a seat.
“I don’t want to have to take you to court,” a bald guy with thick eyebrows told him.
“Me neither,” Avichai conceded. “It’s always better to settle things amicably.”
“Just remember I don’t do night shifts,” a silicon-lipped bleach blonde announced.
“Just who do you think you are? Do you really expect everyone else to do night shifts, except you?” Avichai grumbled back.

“Gabi asked me to tell you he’s sorry,” said a guy with rotting teeth and bad breath.
“If he’s really sorry,” Avichai countered, “tell him to come and tell me himself. No middlemen!”
“In your email you sounded taller,” a skinny redhead complained. “In your email you sounded less picky,” he snapped.

And somehow everything worked out in the end. He and baldy settled, the silicon lips agreed to ask her sister to baby-sit so she could do one night-shift a week, the bad breath promised Gabi would phone, and the redhead and Avishai agreed they weren’t quite right for each other. Sometimes they picked up the tab, sometimes he did. With the redhead, they went dutch. It was all so fascinating that if a whole morning went when nobody took a seat across from him at the table, Avichai’s heart began to sink. Luckily, this didn’t happen too often.

Almost a month had gone by since the sweaty fat guy when a pockmarked man walked in. Despite the pocked face and the fact that he looked at least ten years older than Avichai, he was a good-looking guy with loads of charisma. The first thing he said as he sat down was: “I was sure you wouldn’t show.”

“But we agreed to meet,” Avichai answered.
“Yes,” said the pockmarked guy with a sad smile, “except that after the way I yelled at you on the phone, I was afraid you’d chicken out.”

“So here I am,” Avichai said, almost teasingly.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you on the phone,” the guy apologised. “Really, I just lost it. But I meant every word I said – you got that? Now I’m asking you to stop seeing her.”
“But I love her,” Avichai said in a stifled voice.

“Sometimes you can love something and you still have to give it up,” the pockmarked guy said. “Listen to someone a little older than you. Sometimes you have to give it up.”
“Sorry,” Avichai said, “but I can’t.”
“Yes, you can,” the guy shot back. “You can and you will. There’s no other way. We both love her, but I happen to be her husband and I’m not about to let you break up my family. Got that?”
Avichai shook his head. “You have no idea what my life has been like this past year,” he told the husband. “Hell. Not even hell, just one great big stale chunk of nothing. And when you’ve been living with nothing for so long and suddenly something turns up, you can’t just tell it to go away. You understand me, don’t you? I know you understand me.”

The husband bit his lower lip. “If you see her one more time,” he said, “I’ll kill you. I’m not kidding either. I’ll kill you.”

“So kill me,” Avichai shrugged. “You don’t scare me. We’re all going to die in the end.”
The husband bent down across the table and socked Avichai in the jaw. It was the first time in his life that anyone had hit him so hard and Avichai felt a hot wave of pain surge up somewhere in the middle of his face and spread in every direction. Seconds later, he found himself on the floor, with the husband standing over him.

“I’ll take her away from here,” the husband kept shouting, as he went on kicking Avichai in the stomach and ribs. “I’ll take her far away, to another country, and you won’t know where she is. You’ll never see her again, you got that, you rotten piece of shit?”

Two waiters jumped on the husband and managed somehow to pull him away from Avichai. One of them yelled to the barman to call the police. With his cheek still glued to the coolness of the floor, Avichai watched the husband run out of the café. One of the waiters bent over and asked him whether he was okay. Avichai tried to answer.

“Do you want me to call an ambulance?” the waiter asked.
Avichai whispered that he didn’t. “Are you sure?” the waiter insisted. “Your lip is bleeding.” Avichai nodded slowly and shut his eyes. He tried as hard as he could to imagine himself with that woman. The one he’d never see again. He tried, and for a moment he almost succeeded. His whole body ached. He felt alive.

Etgar Keret is a leading voice in Israeli literature and cinema. He has published four books of stories and novellas, most recently Missing Kissinger (winner of the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize) and Kneller’s Happy Campers (in 2006 this became an award-winning feature film called “Wristcutters”) and four graphic novels. His books have been published in twenty-six languages. A new film co-written by Keret will be released in 2009.

“Healthy Start” was first published in Tin House magazine. This is its first publication in the UK.
Miriam Shlesinger was born in the United States and has been living in Israel since 1964. She is the translator of over thirty plays from Hebrew into English, as well as an interpreter, and lecturer at Bar-Ilan University.

CK Stead
Lovely for the long ago

child in the night

to hear the huge rain

beating on iron.

No fibre-glass muffle -

only that raw rough

sleep-inducing

din.

We’ve eaten the 12

jars of plums

I stewed and froze

at Christmas.

Now it’s the season

for early apples

autumn dowsings

and olives.

A good crop

they drum down

into the bucket

like ancient rains.

From Collected Poems by CK Stead, published in 2009 by Carcanet Press (www.carcanet.co.uk)CK STEAD was born in Auckland in 1932. He has published thirteen collections of poems and two of short stories, eleven novels and six books of literary criticism. His best-known critical work is The New Poetic (1964). His literary awards include the Katherine Mansfield prize for the short story, the New Zealand Book Award for poetry and the King’s Lynn Poetry Prize. Stead was awarded a CBE in 1985 for services to New Zealand literature.