So This Is Love: Lollipop and Other Stories

This collection provides a wide look at love, but not from a romance novel’s perspective. The best tales … involve love that comes out of the ashes of hatred and misery, like the haunting first story Pavilion 24, which you will read twice and stop for the night because it is haunting. War plays a matchmaking role … out of the seeds of … strife love can still blossom (think Romeo and Juliet), but loss can also follow. … Readers will peruse several times these fascinating tales of love out of the ruins of hate and despair – even when there is no happily ever after.

– Harriet Klausner

This kaleidoscopic collection has much to offer on the aspects of love.

– The Edmonton Journal

This collection … examines love’s many intricacies and, given the stories that follow, begins fittingly with pain – an amputation performed sans anesthetic. Reid is at his best when his subject matter is dire: two abandoned hospital patients in war-shattered Bosnia – one a vengeful Muslim soldier, the other a blind Serbian woman – come to depend on each other in Pavilion 24 … A young woman confronts a terrible memory in the tender, sweet and ominous Soon We Will Be Blind… A war photographer saves a life in the face of nearly a million deaths in Hey, Mister! Throughout, Reid evokes an assortment of settings (Somewhere the rhythmic crescendo of artillery overtook the roar of the motor. It was subliminal – the distant sound of killing) and shifts easily among a wide array of characters. These stories … illuminate the tortured relationship between love and loss.

– Booklist

One of the 100 best books of 2004.

– The Globe & Mail

Oh, the multifarious catacombs of love – how they twist and twine the heart. Reid sets his short stories in faraway places – Italy, Paris, Yugoslavia, Rome, to name a few – while his characters inhabit various states of swoon, adoration, hatred, or despair … In Lollipop, a young woman is admired as she dances, then skinny dips in the dark night sea, her face cut in half, right down the middle in a car accident. … Or another woman: She has good legs – thin, well-bred upper-class Italian legs, and, in tribute, perhaps, to Nabokov, Nikki is my idol, my totem, my fetish, my friend. His dialogue is clean and taut, and his story lines are an intriguing weave of memory and place, reminding us love is ever-changing.

– Emily Cook, The American Library Association

Copyright © 2004, 2006, 2019 by Gilbert Reid

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

Issued in print and electronic formats

ISBN 978-0-9953108-3-4 So This is Love: Lollipop and Other Stories: Paperback

ISBN 978-0-9953108-4-1 So This is Love: Lollipop and Other Stories: EPUB

ISBN 978-0-9953108-5-8 So This is Love: Lollipop and Other Stories: Kindle

Cover and text design by Counterpunch Inc. / Linda Gustafson

Cover image courtesy of NASA

This book was first published in Canada 2004 by Key Porter Books and in the United States in 2006 by Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press.

Editor of the first Edition (Key Porter Books) Janie Yoon.

Published by

Twin Rivers Productions

20 Bloor Street East

PO Box 75070

Toronto, Ontario, M4W 3T3

gjreid@gilbertreid.com

Visit http://www.gilbertreid.com/

For Dianne Rinehart

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

L.P. Hartley

The past is not dead, it is not even past.

William Faulkner

Contents

Pavilion 24

Soon we will be Blind

After the Rain

Irony Is …

Hey, Mister!

Lollipop

The Champion

Bevete Del Vino

The Road Out of Town

Gilbert Reid on Life, Love, and Other Details

Pavilion 24

MAYBE IT WAS THE DELIRIUM, but he remembered it this way.

They had no room and no supplies, so they put the wounded and dying where they could. He was set down on a mattress and a pile of burlap on the floor in Pavilion 24. This was three hours after they’d amputated his right leg just above the knee without anesthetic and without antiseptics.

He lay on the mattress not able to think for a long time, only dimly aware that fine snow was drifting through the holes where the high slanted roof had been shattered by random mortar fire.

The second day he felt more clear-headed and the pain was worse.

The third day the pain had dulled a little and he felt twitchings and aches in the ghostly foot. He wondered if they’d eaten his leg. He’d heard that people were eating human flesh, though he didn’t want to believe it. Strangely, the idea gave him pleasure. Perhaps his leg would have made a good stew or broth.

On the fourth day the doctor brought a young woman. Her head had been shaved and her skull was tied tight in white bandages. She was maybe eighteen or twenty, and he could see she was very good-looking, even with the shaved head and bandages. She was badly bruised but handsome with big gray eyes, strong arched eyebrows, a generous mouth. She could walk, though she was very weak and the doctor held her by the elbow and guided her down onto the mattress next to his. The young woman sat on the edge of the mattress, six inches away, and then swiveled around, lay back, closed her eyes, and put the back of her right hand over her face. Yes, she was a very good-looking young woman, certainly considered beautiful in ordinary circumstances. He wondered if he would ever feel desire again.

The young woman was wearing soft leather boots that must have cost five hundred dollars, faded blue jeans, a black turtleneck sweater, and a brown leather jacket. It was the sort of jacket Jimmy Stewart wore when he played a pilot in one of those World War Two movies. She must have been rich, the young woman, rich and fashionable, probably a student from one of the bourgeois families.

She’s a Serb, said the doctor, looking at him.

Ah, he said, softly, looking at the doctor, then at the girl.

The doctor went away.

For a while he just lay and stared at the roof, at the way the light straddled in sideways and struck the high cross-timbers, at the slanted, broken tiles of the roof itself. It was warm-looking light, though the air was very cold. Before the war, this had been a storage shed used for tractors, tools, greasy machinery, bags of grain, not for humans.

He looked at the girl. She lay still, the hand over her eyes, its fingers curled. A bloodstain had appeared on the bandages.

He looked away. He wondered why the doctor had told him she was a Serb. Involuntarily his hand went down to where he kept his pistol, packed in the burlap at the edge of the mattress. The metal grip felt cold under his fingers. He was beginning to discover sensations again: the touch of his fingers on metal, the smell of snow in the air, sensations that were slowly fighting their way back through the throbbing frontier of pain. Maybe the doctor wanted him to kill the girl. Yes, that was it. Doctors were not supposed to kill their patients. But a wounded, mutilated militiaman, yes, he could do it. No questions would be asked. Not many anyway. He thought he would do it simply – it came to him very clearly – just shoot her.

Bang!

The Serbs had come to his village – really a middle-class suburb – when he had gone to get the car. It was a small raiding party, but they had guns and nobody else did. They went from house to house. They were drunk but methodical. They raped his wife, his two daughters, and his eight-year-old son. Then they shot them all, mutilated the bodies, and departed. When he got back, nothing remained of his family but the bodies. And the writing in large letters in blood on the kitchen wall that told him exactly what the Serbs had done. Just in case he didn’t understand.

Since then he had killed Serbs. It was the only meaning he could give to his life.

Until he was too close to a mortar shell when it landed.

His fingers tightened on the pistol.

The young woman moved. He turned to look at her. Her hand no longer covered her eyes. She turned her head slightly, to look at him. She had big gray eyes, intelligent-looking eyes, but there was something strange about them. Maybe it was the pain.

I’m blind, she said.

Blind?

The head wound … The optic nerve center … Something was severed … They explained. But I’m not sure.

You’re a Serb.

Yes. She turned her face away. I heard him tell you.

Yes. The ghostly leg throbbed. A mortar was firing somewhere; there were distant explosions, probably in the suburbs on the far side of the river. The old man at the end of the pavilion was sobbing.

Are you really blind? He shifted to make the pain easier, but made it worse.

Yes, she said. Maybe it won’t last. Her face was inches away. Big gray eyes, bruises, a few cuts.

He pulled out the valuable box of wooden matches. She winced slightly when she heard him strike the match against the side of the box. He held the flame close, in front of her eyes, moved it back and forth – no contraction of the pupil, nothing at all, just big immobile gray eyes staring at him.

She blinked. Satisfied?

I guess so. He put the matchbox back under the mattress.

What happened to you? The eyes were still staring at him.

A mortar. Lost my right leg. Above the knee.

I’m sorry.

Thanks. He paused. I’m sorry about your eyes.

It may get better. She was very young. The doctor couldn’t say. He’s …

He’s a Muslim. You’re a Serb.

Yes.

He thought for a minute. I don’t think he would do that. He wondered if he would have done that, if he’d had the chance. Would he have blinded the girl? A slip of the scalpel? An extra incision? No, he wouldn’t have done it, he wouldn’t have blinded her; that was the sort of thing a Serb would do. But he would have killed her, let her die, let her rot. He turned away, so he didn’t have to look at her eyes.

No, you’re right. He wouldn’t have done that, she said. Her eyes were staring at the ceiling.

The moonlight lit up snowflakes drifting in under the shattered rafters. It was bitter cold. The pain in his leg was clearly defined now, cutting like a knife, up his thigh, snaking into his belly, into his testicles, and clear up to his shoulders, branching like a tree.

He wanted to shout, to cry, to scream, but he knew it would do no good. He wanted to stuff his mouth with burlap and sob, but he had a clear sense of himself, of his dignity. He held himself in stiff silence. If only he could have a drink of water!

It’s bad tonight, isn’t it? She spoke in a whisper.

What do you mean – bad? His voice was thick with pain.

The cold. The pain.

Does it hurt? He tried to turn to her and grimaced. The blood had welded his amputated stump to the mattress.

No. Your pain. I meant your pain.

He didn’t say anything.

I can feel it from here. You’re trying to hold it in.

He didn’t say anything.

Do you want a glass of water?

He sighed. He waited. The pavilion was silent. No one had come for hours and hours. Where were the doctors? Where were the nurses? Finally, he said, Yes. He hesitated. How are you going to get the water?

You guide me.

So she stood up, finding her balance, and he told her to walk straight ahead to the opposite side of the pavilion, to touch the wall with her left hand, to walk along the wall, to turn the corner, then to stop, then to bend down and touch the bucket, to grope for the faucet with her fingers.

I’ve got it, she said.

Turn it, he said.

I know how to turn a faucet, she said.

He heard the gush of water but could not see it.

It’s freezing, she said. Her voice carried the strange resonance of invisibility, making the empty spaces of the pavilion seem tactile, audible. He was the one who was blind, he thought. He blinked upwards. Snow was still drifting through the holes in the roof, but it melted and disappeared before it reached the debris-cluttered floor.

The water stopped gushing. The silence suddenly seemed very large.

Here I come, she said. Watch for me. Her voice was hollow, echoing from around the corner.

He twisted his head to watch her. She was a shadow, but he could see her clearly. Her right arm was outstretched and her fingers were touching the wall, while the fingers of her left hand were curled around the bucket handle. She looked like a dancer or an acrobat. Her jeans were so tight her legs looked like they were encased in dancer’s tights, and the jacket, with its collar turned up, made her shadow look like that of an Elizabethan courtier. Shafts of moonlight struck the rough stuccoed wall – in the blue metallic light snowflakes slowly drifted.

Stop after a couple of steps, he said. His voice sounded like a stranger’s – a man talking to a blind woman he didn’t know and whom he intended to kill, maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, maybe later. His leg began to throb. God, it was cold!

Here? Still touching the wall, she had stopped.

Yes. He winced. Turn to your left.

Nine o’clock, she said.

Nine o’clock?

A quarter turn to the left. That’s the way they talk to blind people.

One foot at a time she turned, until her back was to the wall.

I see. He winced. He would have to cut himself loose from the mattress.

He saw her press her shoulders to the wall to make sure of her bearings.

She was not stupid, this young Serb, not a peasant barbarian like so many of them. About twenty steps, he said. Straight ahead.

She advanced carefully.

Stop. Put down the bucket.

There! she put down the pail and then edged forward until she could feel the mattress. She sat down, reached out, grasped for the pail, and slowly, very carefully, pulled it towards her.

You learn fast, he said.

I was scared.

I have a glass, he said.

The water’s freezing, she said.

He handed her the glass. She turned it in her hands, dipped it into the water, and reached out, giving him the first drink.

Later the water in the bucket developed a crust of ice. She had moved her mattress against his. She was sleeping, beside him. For a long time he lay awake. Her breath and his breath were both visible in the frosty air. He felt her warmth through the jeans and the jacket. He had pulled some burlap over them both. Animal heat was the only heat they had. Her breathing was even and slow. His leg throbbed. How can she sleep? he wondered. Perhaps she was not suffering pain; perhaps she had brain damage and that made her sleepy – though