I The Person: What Is a Human Being?the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn’t quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns

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� is is a strong statement from one of the foremost American novelists of our time. Exploring “the mystery of existence” ful� lls part of our human nature. One of the most important objects of our exploration is surely the human being. � e attempt to fathom the nature of the person and the conditions of our existence may well be the principal pleasure of living. If we do not explore, we betray our human nature, or “our Self ”, as Mailer says. � e discoveries are sure to be fascinating, and perhaps endless though. To know the human being is to know ourselves and other people better.

Virtually all fiction reveals some aspects of the human being, for at center, fiction need characters—ones in conflict with some adversaries or multiple adversaries. Characters, as metaphorical inventions, express selected features of the mystery of existence as possibilities of the human being—our struggles, values, conduct, outlooks, or purposes are explored in each of

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Man’s nature, man’s dignity is that he acts, lives, loves, and finally destroys himself seeking to penetrate the mystery of existence, and unless we partake in some way, as some part of this human exploration..., then we are no more than the pimps of society and the betrayers of our Self.

——from Norman Mailer

The Person: What Is a Human Being?

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the successive sections in this book. Reading about a doctor who makes a house call to diagnose whether a young girl has a contagious disease in The Use of Force, or about a beautiful woman who sacrifices herself to save the lives of a group of travelers in The Heroine or about a foolish but supremely good baker who is the butt of many jokes in Gimpel the Fool is a way of coming to understand ourselves through others, through the characters of � ction.

Some fiction projects role models or reinforce prevailing social values. These are valid purposes of � ction because our culture requires some collective values we can all rely on. Other � ction probes alternative role models and serves to upset short-sighted notions of the way human begins ought to be. Some of the short stories, novellas, fables, tales, and parables in this book may even disturb our common storywriting traditions. By doing so, such anti-stories and experimental fiction challenge the usual assumptions about how stories represent life, such as traditional portrayals of persons in con� ict proceeding in a linear fashion to resolve their problems or arrive at an epiphany or revelation. By challenging traditional storytelling strategies, the authors imply that our disrupted contemporary lives are not appropriately portrayed in traditional ways. Probing and unsettling fiction may in fact “entertain” thoughtful readers, but fiction is more than “just entertainment” or unconnected with the important business of life.

� e stories in this section challenge and expand/enrich our notions of what persons are or can be through their characters. Besides the stories included in this part, we strongly remcommend you � e Use of Force、� e Cask of Amontillado、� e Savant Who Seized Power、In the Region of Ice、Jack and the Beanstalk, and A Father-to-Be.

In � e Use of Force, we can � nd a darker side of human beings. � e doctor, a representative of civilized order and intelligence, is overwhelmed by his own capacity for pleasure from using force on a child patient, a young girl who exhibits her for stubbornness. In � e Cask of Amontillado, the readers share short journey of two men who, while drinking, descend into a wine cellar, where, in the haze the wine drinking produces, the darkest part of man’s nature emerges. A� er a murder, the protagonist joins in the jubilation of a carnival going on above ground. Clearly, the margin between a disturbed mind and a rational one is very slim. � e Savant Who Seized Power is a fable showing us a way in which the nature of a person (or animal) prevails over the relationship one holds with another. In In the Region of Ice, we meet a nun who teaches English at a university contending with a young Jewish boy who disturbs her usual way of relating to students, which is a way of protecting herself against whatever her particular nature avoids. What does she try to avoid, ironically? True commitment to her faith and true involvement in the welfare of another person. We should be disturbed, and most readers surely are.

� en, we encounter Jack and the Beanstalk, a fairy tale which many might regard as beneath serious critical consideration. We follow a young boy’s natural but essential growth process through

E英美文学赏析——小说与读者NGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERTATURE—FICTION AND ITS READERS

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The Person: What Is a Human Being? Ia clearly symbolic caper he successfully completes by in� ltrating a giant’s castle and making o� with a goose, a leather bag of gold, and a singing harp. And � nally, in A Father-to-Be, an urban man in his twenties struggles to maintain his freedom, but in the end submits to the marriage that, for him, is inevitable. An o� en delightful and o� en dreadful learning experience, learning about the human being is one worth pursuing all our life long.

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A&P

John Updike

In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I’m in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don’t see them until they’re over by the bread. � e one that caught my eye � rst was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad so� -looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She’s one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about � � y with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She’d been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before.

By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag—she gives me a little snort in passing, if she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem—by the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the check-outs and the Special bins. � ey didn’t even have shoes on. � ere was this chunky one, with the two-piece—it was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit)—there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn’t quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long—you know, the kind of girl other girls think is very “striking” and “attractive” but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so much—and then the third one, that wasn’t quite so tall. She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders round. She didn’t look around, not this queen. She just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima donna legs. She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn’t walk in her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the � oor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it. You never know for sure how girls’ minds work (do you really think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?) but you got the idea she had


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The Person: What Is a Human Being? Italked the other two into coming in here with her, and now she was showing them how to do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight.

She had on a kind of dirty-pink—beige maybe, I don’t know—bathing suit with a little nubble all over it, and the straps were down. � ey were o� her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it hadn’t been there you wouldn’t have known there could have been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed o� , there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.

She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unraveling, and a kind of prim face. Walking into the A&P with your straps down, I suppose it’s the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high her neck, coming up out of those white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn’t mind. � e longer her neck was, the more of her there was.

She must have felt me in the corner of her eye and over my shoulder, Stokesie in the second slot watching, but she didn’t tip. Not this queen. She kept her eyes moving across the racks, and stopped, and turned so slow it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron, and buzzed to the other two, who kind of huddled against her for relief, and they all three of them went up the cat-and-dog-food-breakfast-cereal-macaroni-rice-raisins-seasonings-spreads-spaghetti-soft-drinks-rackers-and-cookies aisle. From the third slot I look straight up this aisle to the meat counter, and I watched them all the way. � e fat one with the tan sort of fumbled with the cookies, but on second thought she put the packages back. � e sheep pushing their carts down the aisle—the girls were walking against the usual tra� c (not that we have one-way signs or anything)—were pretty hilarious. You could see them, when Queenie’s white shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, or hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they pushed. I bet you could set o� dynamite in an A&P and the people would by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal o� their lists and muttering “Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus, no, ah, yes, applesauce!” or whatever it is they do mutter. But there was no doubt, this jiggled them. A few house-slaves in pin curlers even looked around a� er pushing their carts past to make sure what they had seen was correct.

You know, it’s one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A&P, under the � uorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile � oor.

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“Oh Daddy,” Stokesie said beside me. “I feel so faint.”

“Darling,” I said. “Hold me tight.” Stokesie’s married, with two babies chalked up on his fuselage already, but as far as I can tell that’s the only di� erence. He’s twenty-two, and I was nineteen this April.

“Is it done?” he asks, the responsible married man � nding his voice. I forgot to say he thinks he’s going to be manager some sunny day, maybe in 1990 when it’s called the Great Alexandrov and Petrooshki Tea Company or something.

What he meant was, our town is � ve miles from a beach, with a big summer colony out on the Point, but we’re right in the middle of town, and the women generally put on a shirt or shorts or something before they get out of the car into the street. And anyway these are usually women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and nobody, including them, could care less. As I say, we’re right in the middle of town, and if you stand at our front doors you can see two banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper store and three real-estate o� ces and about twenty-seven old free-loaders tearing up Central Street because the sewer broke again. It’s not as if we’re on the Cape; we’re north of Boston and there’s people in this town haven’t seen the ocean for twenty years.

� e girls had reached the meat counter and were asking McMahon something. He pointed, they pointed, and they shu� ed out of sight behind a pyramid of Diet Delight peaches. All that was le� for us to see was old McMahon patting his mouth and looking a� er them sizing up their joints. Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they couldn’t help it.

Now here comes the sad part of the story, at least my family says it’s sad but I don’t think it’s sad myself. � e store’s pretty empty, it being � ursday a� ernoon, so there was nothing much to do except lean on the register and wait for the girls to show up again. � e whole store was like a pinball machine and I didn’t know which tunnel they’d come out of. A� er a while they come around out of the far aisle, around the light bulbs, records at discount of the Caribbean Six or Tony Martin Sings or some such gunk you wonder they waste the wax on, six packs of candy bars, and plastic toys done up in cellophane that fall apart when a kid looks at them anyway. Around they come, Queenie still leading the way, and holding a little gray jar in her hand. Slots � ree through Seven are unmanned and I could see her wondering between Stokes and me, but Stokesie with his usual luck draws an old party in baggy gray pants who stumbles up with four giant cans of pineapple juice (what do these bums do with all that pineapple juice’ I’ve o� en asked myself) so the girls come to me. Queenie puts down the jar and I take it into my � ngers icy cold. King� sh Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream: 49¢. Now her hands are empty, not a ring or a bracelet, bare as God made them, and I wonder where the money’s coming from. Still with that prim look she lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top. � e jar went heavy in my hand.


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The Person: What Is a Human Being? IReally, I thought that was so cute.

Then everybody’s luck begins to run out. Lengel comes in from haggling with a truck full of cabbages on the lot and is about to scuttle into that door marked MANAGER behind which he hides all day when the girls touch his eye. Lengel’s pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the rest, but he doesn’t miss that much. He comes over and says, “Girls, this isn’t the beach.”

Queenie blushes, though maybe it’s just a brush of sunburn I was noticing for the � rst time, now that she was so close. “My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks.” Her voice kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see the people � rst, coming out so � at and dumb yet kind of tony, too, the way it ticked over “pick up” and “snacks”. All of a sudden I slid right down her voice into her living room. Her father and the other men were standing around in ice-cream coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks on toothpicks o� a big plate and they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them. When my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it’s a real racy a� air Schlitz in tall glasses with “� ey’ll Do It Every Time” cartoons stenciled on.

“� at’s all right,” Lengel said. “But this isn’t the beach.” His repeating this struck me as funny, as if it had just occurred to him, and he had been thinking all these years the A&P was a great big dune and he was the head lifeguard. He didn’t like my smiling—as I say he doesn’t miss much—but he concentrates on giving the girls that sad Sunday-school-superintendent stare.

Queenie’s blush is no sunburn now, and the plump one in plaid, that I liked better from the back—a really sweet can—pipes up, “We weren’t doing any shopping. We just came in for the one thing.”

“� at makes no di� erence,” Lengel tells her, and I could see from the way his eyes went that he hadn’t noticed she was wearing a two-piece before. “We want you decently dressed when you come in here.”

“We are decent,” Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing, getting sore now that she remembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A&P must look pretty crummy. Fancy Herring Snacks � ashed in her very blue eyes.

“Girls, I don’t want to argue with you. A� er this come in here with your shoulders covered. It’s our policy.” He turns his back. � at’s policy for you. Policy is what the kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency.

All this while, the customers had been showing up with their carts but, you know, sheep, seeing a scene, they had all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as peeling a peach, not wanting to miss a word. I could feel in the silence everybody getting nervous,

8

most of all Lengel, who asks me, “Sammy, have you rung up this purchase?”

I thought and said “No” but it wasn’t about that I was thinking. I go through the punches. It’s more complicated than you think, and a� er you do it o� en enough, it begins to make a little song, that you hear words to, in my case “Hello (bing) there, you (gung) happy pee-pul (splat)”—the splat being the drawer � ying out. I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm, and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist its neck and hand it over, all the time thinking.

� e girls, and who’d blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say “I quit” to Lengel quick enough for them to hear, hoping they’ll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They keep right on going, into the electric eye; the door � ies open and they � icker across the lot to their car, Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw material she was so bad), leaving me with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow.

“Did you say something, Sammy?” “I said I quit.” “I thought you did.” “You didn’t have to embarrass them.” “It was they who were embarrassing us.”

I started to say something that came out “Fiddle-de-doo”. It’s a saying of my grand-mother’s, and I know she would have been pleased.

“I don’t think you know what you’re saying,” Lengel said. “I know you don’t,” I said. “But I do.” I pull the bow at the back of my apron and start

shrugging it off my shoulders. A couple customers that had been heading for my slot begin to knock against each other, like scared pigs in a chute.

Lengel sighs and begins to look very patient and old and gray. He’s been a friend of my parents for years. “Sammy, you don’t want to do this to your Mom and Dad,” he tells me. It’s true. I don’t. But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it’s fatal not to go through with it. I fold the apron, “Sammy” stitched in red on the pocket, and put it on the counter, and drop the bow tie on top of it. � e bow tie is theirs, if you’ve ever wondered. “You’ll feel this for the rest of your life,” Lengel says, and I know that’s true, too, but remembering how he made that pretty girl blush makes me so scrunchy inside I punch the No Sale tab and the machine whirs “peepul” and the drawer splats out. One advantage to this scene taking place in summer that I can follow this up with a clean exit, there’s no fumbling around getting your coat and galoshes. I just saunter into the electric eye in my white shirt that my mother ironed the night before, and the door heaves itself open, and outside the


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The Person: What Is a Human Being? Isunshine is skating around on the asphalt.

I look around for my girls, but they’re gone, of course. � ere wasn’t anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn’t get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back sti� , as if he’d just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me herea� er.

Questions on A&P

1. Is Sammie, the narrator, a typical teenager?2. In what way is Queenie an interesting “mixture”?3. Is the fi rst person’s narration reliable in the story?4. How is the theme of rebellion and conformity refl ected in the story?5. What are the symbolic meanings of Herring Snacks and Bathing Suits?

John Updike (1932—2009), a novelist, poet, essayist, and short story writer, creates fi ction rich and accurate in the color and texture of its details and metaphors. For this reason, some early critics felt his work was mostly art without much substance.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and this has become clearer over time. Some of his remarkable novels include Rabbit, Run (1960), Couples (1968), Bech: A Book (1970), Rabbit Redux (1971), A Month of Sundays (1975), Too Far to Go (1979) adapted into a television drama—Hugging the Shore (1983), The Witches of Eastwick (1984), and Facing Nature (1984). Rabbit is Rich (1981) received the Pulitzer Prize and American Book award as well as the Edward MacDowall medal for literature. Short story collections include Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1959), The Music School (1962), Museums and Women (1972), Picked-up Pieces (1975), and Licks of Love (2000).

His realistic stories resemble the subjects of the painter, Andrew Wyeth—ordinary people of average means who live simply and go to church on Sunday. He portrays the experience of life typically as a series of paradoxes, just as we discover in A&P, one of his early stories. He lacks that sense of despair that leaves many writers no choice but to view middle-class life as a horrible vacuum, a metaphor for the end of life and real humanity. Instead, he writes without rancor. One critic wrote, “He is fair to just about everyone.” Like John Cheever, represented by The Country Husband later in this book, Updike fi nds love and beauty somewhere in the middle of suburbia, just as he does in A&P, one of the most widely-read stories in the late 20th century.

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Updike values human intelligence, and he believes that every individual can use it to discover the kind of world he is living in as well as to struggle, sometimes comically, sometimes through the complex labyrinths of everyday life. He finds the world of nature and of man in A&P, for instance, to be a place of intricate and marvelous patterns of meaning. Indeed, we can see in A&P a kind of young knight-errant who, though self-unconscious and anti-heroic, is transformed into a metaphor of intelligence expressed in action and, to some extent, accident.


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The Person: What Is a Human Being? I

Lullaby

Leslie Marmon Silko

� e sun had gone down but the snow in the wind gave o� its own light. It came in thick tu� s like newly-washed wools before the weaver spins it. Ayah reached out for it likeed her own babies had, and she smiled when she remembered how she had laughed at them. She was an old woman now, and her life had become memories. She sat down with her back against the wide cottonwood tree, feeling the rough bark on her back bones; she faced east and listened to the wind and snow sang a high-pitched Yeibechei song. Out of the wind she felt warmer, and she could watch the wide � u� y snow � lling in her tracks, steadily, until the direction she had come from was gone. By the light of the snow she could see the dark outline of the big arroyo a few feet away. She was sitting on the edge of Cebolleta Creek, where in the springtime the thin cows would graze on grass already chewed � at to the ground. In the wide deep creek bed where only a trickle of water � owed in the summer, the skinny cows would wander, looking for new grass along winding paths splashed with manure.

Ayah pulled the old Army blanket over her head like a shawl. Jimmie’s blanket—the one he had sent to her. � at was a long time ago and the green wool was faded, and it was unraveling on the edges. She did not want to think about Jimmie. So she thought about the weaving and the way her mother had done it. On the tall wooden loom set into the sand under a tamarack tree for shade. She could see it clearly. She had been only a little girl when her grandma gave her the wooden combs to pull the twigs and burrs from the raw, freshly washed wool. And while she combed the wool, her grandma sat beside her, spinning a silvery strand of yarn around the smooth cedar spindle. Her mother worked at the loom with yarns dyed bright yellow and red and gold. She watched them dye the yarn in boiling black pots full of beeweed petals, juniper berries, and sage. � e blankets her mother made were so� and woven so tight that rain rolled o� them like birds’ feathers. Ayah remembered sleeping warm on cold windy nights, wrapped in her mother’s blankets on the hogan’s sandy � oor.

� e snow dri� ed now, with the northwest wind hurling it in gusts. It dri� ed up around her black overshoes-old ones with little metal buckles. She smiled at the snow which was trying to cover her little by little. She could remember when they had no black rubber overshoes, only the high

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buckskin leggings that they wrapped over their elkhide moccasins. If the snow was dry or frozen, a person could walk all day and not get wet; and in the evenings the beams of the ceiling would hang with lengths of pale buckskin leggings, drying out slowly.

She felt peaceful remembering. She didn’t feel cold any more. Jimmies blanket seemed warmer than it had ever been. And she could remember the morning he was born. She could remember whispering to her mother, who was sleeping on the other side of the hogan, to tell her it was time now. She did not want to wake the others. � e second time she called to her, her mother stood up and pulled on her shoes; she knew. They walked to the old stone hogan together, Ayah walking a step behind her mother. She waited alone, learning the rhythms of the pains while her mother went to call the old woman to help them. � e morning was already warm even before dawn and Ayah smelled the bee � owers blooming and the young willow growing at the springs. She could remember that so clearly, but his birth merged into the births of the other children and to her it became all the same birth. � ey named him for the summer morning and in English they called him Jimmie.

It wasn’t like Jimmie died. He just never came back, and one day a dark blue sedan with white writing on its doors pulled up in front of the boxcar shack where the rancher let the Indians live. A man in a khaki uniform trimmed in gold gave them a yellow piece of paper and told them that Jimmie was dead. He said the Army would try to get the body back and then it would be shipped to them; but it wasn’t likely because the helicopter had burned a� er it crashed. All of this was told to Chato because he could understand English. She stood inside the doorway holding the baby while Chato listened. Chato spoke English like a white man and he spoke Spanish too. He was taller than the white man and he stood straighter too. Chato didn’t explain why; he just told the military man they could keep the body if they found it. � e white man looked bewildered; he nodded his head and he le� . � en Chato looked at her and shook his head, and then he told her, “Jimmie isn’t coming home anymore,” and when he spoke, he used the words to speak of the dead. She didn’t cry then, but she hurt inside with anger. And she mourned him as the years passed, when a horse fell with Chato and broke his leg, and the white rancher told them he wouldn’t pay Chato until he could work. She mourned Jimmie because he would have worked for his father then; he would have saddled the big bay horse and ridden the fence lines each day, with wire cutters and heavy gloves, � xing the breaks in the barbed wire and putting the stray cattle back inside again.

She mourned him a� er the white doctors came to take Danny and Ella away. She was at the shack alone that day they came. It was back in the days before they hired Navajo women to go with them as interpreters. She recognized one of the doctors. She had seen him at the children’s clinic at Canoncito about a month ago. � ey were wearing khaki uniforms and they waved papers at her and a black ball-point pen, trying to make her understand their English words. She was frightened by the way they looked at the children, like the lizard watches the � y. Danny was swinging on the


13

The Person: What Is a Human Being? Itire swing on the elm tree behind the rancher’s house, and Ella was toddling around the front door, dragging the broomstick horse Chato made for her. Ayah could see they wanted her to sign the papers, and Chato had taught her to sign her name. It was something she was proud of. She only wanted them to go, and to take their eyes away from her children.

She took the pen from the man without looking at his face and she signed the papers in three di� erent places he pointed to. She stared at the ground by their feet and waited for them to leave. But they stood there and began to point and gesture at the children. Danny stopped swinging. Ayah could see his fear. She moved suddenly and grabbed Ella into her arms; the child squirmed, trying to get back to her toys. Ayah ran with the baby toward Danny; she screamed for him to run and then she grabbed him around his chest and carried him too. She ran south into the foothills of juniper trees and back lava rock. Behind her she heard the doctors running, Gut they had been taken by surprise, and as the hills became steeper and the cholla cactus were thicker, they stopped. When she reached the top of the hill, she stopped to listen in case they were circling around her. But in a few minutes she heard a car engine start and they drove away. � e children had been too surprised to cry while she ran with them. Danny was shaking and Ella’s little � ngers were gripping Ayah’s blouse.

She stayed up in the hills for the rest of the day, sitting on a black lava boulder in the sunshine where she could see for miles all around her. � e sky was light blue and cloudless, and it was warm for late April. � e sun warmth relaxed her and took the fear and anger away. She lay back on the rock and watched the sky. It seemed to her that she could walk into the sky, stepping through clouds endlessly. Danny played with little pebbles and stones, pretending they were birds eggs and then little rabbits. Ella sat at her feet and dropped � stfuls of dirt into the breeze, watching the dust and particles of sand intently. Ayah watched a hawk soar high above them, dark wings gliding; hunting or only watching, she did not know. � e hawk was patient and he circled all a� ernoon before he disappeared around the high volcanic peak the Mexicans called Guadalupe.

Late in the a� ernoon, Ayah looked down at the gray boxcar shack with the paint all peeled from the wood; the stove pipe on the roof was rusted and crooked. The fire she had built that moaning in the oil drum stove had burned out. Ella was asleep in her lap now and Danny sat close to her, complaining that he was hungry; he asked when they would go to the house. “We will stay up here until your father comes,” she told him, “because those white men were chasing us.” � e boy remembered then and he nodded at her silently.

If Jimmie had been there he could have read those papers and explained to her what they said. Ayah would have known then, never to sign them. � e doctors came back the next day and they brought a BIA policeman with them. � ey told Chato they had her signature and that was all they needed. Except for the kids. She listened to Chato sullenly; she hated him when he told her it

14

was the old woman who died in the winter, spitting blood; it was her old grandma who had given the children this disease. “� ey don’t spit blood”, she said coldly. “� e whites lie.” She held Ella and Danny close to her, ready to run to the hills again. “I want a medicine man � rst,” she said to Chato, not looking at him. He shook his head. “It’s too late now. � e policeman is with them. You signed the paper.” His voice was gentle.

It was worse than if they had died, to lose the children and to know that somewhere in a place called Colorado, in a place full of sick and dying strangers, her children were without her. � ere had been babies that died soon a� er they were born, and one that died before he could walk. She had carried them herself, up to the boulders and great pieces of the cli� that long ago crashed down from Long Mesa; she laid them in the crevices of sandstone and buried them in � ne brown sand with round quartz pebbles that washed down the hills in the rain. She had endured it because they had been with her. But she could not bear this pain. She did not sleep for a long time a� er they took her children. She stayed on the hill where they had � ed the � rst time, and she slept rolled up in the blanket Jimmie had sent her. She carried the pain in her belly and it was fed by everything she saw: the blue sky of their last day together and the dust and pebbles they played with, the swing in the elm tree and broomstick horse choked life from her. � e pain � lled her stomach and there was no room for food or for her lungs to � ll with air. � e air and the food would have been theirs.

She hated Chato, not because he let the policeman and doctors put the screaming children in the government car, but because he had taught her to sign her name. Because it was like the old ones always told her about learning their language or any of their ways: it endangered you. She slept alone on the hill until the middle of November when the � rst snows came. � en she made a bed for herself where the children had slept. She did not lie down beside Chato again until many years later, when he was sick and shivering and only her body could keep him warm. � e illness came a� er the white rancher told Chato he was too old to work for him anymore, and Chato and his old woman should be out of the shack by the next a� ernoon because the rancher had hired new people to work there. � at had satis� ed her. To see how the white man repaid Chato’s years of loyalty and work. All of Chato’s � ne-sounding English talk didn’t change things.

It snowed steadily and the luminous light from the snow gradually diminished into the darkness. Somewhere in Cebolleta a dog barked and other village dogs joined with it. Ayah looked in the direction she had come, from the bar where Chato was buying the wine. Sometimes he told her to go on ahead and wait; and then he never came. And when she � nally went back looking for him, she would � nd him passed out at the bottom of the wooden steps to Azzie’s Bar. All the wine would be gone and most of the money too, from the pale blue check that came to them once a month in a government envelope. It was then that she would look at his face and his hands, scarred by ropes and the barbed wire of all those years, and she would think, this man is a stranger; for forty years she had smiled at him and cooked his food, but he remained a stranger. She stood up


15

The Person: What Is a Human Being? Iagain, with the snow almost to her knees, and she walked back to � nd Chato.

It was hard to walk in the deep snow and she felt the air burn in her lungs. She stopped a short distance from the bar to rest and readjust the blanket. But this time he wasn’t waiting for her on the bottom step with his old Stetson hat pulled down and his shoulders hunched up in his long wool overcoat.

She was careful not to slip on the wooden steps. When she pushed the door open, warm air and cigarette smoke hit her face. She looked around slowly and deliberately, in every corner, in every dark place that the old man might � nd to sleep. � e bar owner didn’t like Indians in there, especially Navajos, but he let Chato come in because he could talk Spanish like he was one of them. � e men at the bar stared at her, and the bartender saw that she le� the door open wide. Snow� akes were � ying inside like moths and melting into a puddle on the oiled wood � oor. He motioned to her to close the door, but she did not see him. She held herself straight and walked across the room slowly, searching the room with every step. � e snow in her hair melted and she could feel it on her forehead. At the far corner of the room, she saw red � ames at the mica window of the old stove door; she looked behind the stove just to make sure. � e bar got quiet except for the Spanish polka music playing on the jukebox. She stood by the stove and shook the snow from her blanket and held it near the stove to dry. � e wet wool smell reminded her of new-born goats in early March, brought inside to warm near the � re. She felt calm.

In past years they would have told her to get out. But her hair was white now and her face was wrinkled. � ey looked at her like she was a spider crawling slowly across the room. � ey were afraid; she could feel the fear. She looked at their faces steadily. � ey reminded her of the � rst time the white people brought her children back to her that winter. Danny had been shy and hid behind the thin white woman who brought them. And the baby had not known her until Ayah took her into her arms, and then Ella had nuzzled close to her as she had when she was nursing. � e blonde woman was nervous and kept looking at a dainty gold watch on her wrist. She sat on the bench near the small window and watched the dark snow clouds gather around the mountains; she was worrying about the unpaved road. She was frightened by what she saw inside too: the strips of venison drying on a rope across the ceiling and the children jabbering excitedly in a language she did not know. So they stayed for only a few hours. Ayah watched the government car disappear down the road and she knew they were already being weaned from these lava hills and from this sky. � e last time they came was in early June, and Ella stared at her the way the men in the bar were now staring. Ayah did not try to pick her up; she smiled at her instead and spoke cheerfully to Danny. When he tried to answer her, he could not seem to remember and he spoke English words with the Navajo. But he gave her a scrap of paper that he had found somewhere and carried in his pocket; it was folded in half, and he shyly looked up at her and said it was a bird. She asked Chato if they were home for good this time. He spoke to the white woman and she shook her head. “How much longer?” he asked, and she said she didn’t know; but Chato saw how she stared at the boxcar

16

shack. Ayah turned away then. She did not say good-bye.

She felt satis� ed that the men in the bar feared her. Maybe it was her face and the way she held her mouth with teeth clenched tight, like there was nothing anyone could do to her now. She walked north down the road, searching for the old man. She did this because she had the blanket, and there would be no place for him except with her and the blanket in the old adobe barn near the arroyo. � ey always slept there when they came to Cebolleta. If the money and the wine were gone, she would be relieved because then they could go home again; back to the old hogan with a dirt roof and rock walls where she herself had been born. And the next day the old man could go back to the few sheep they still had, to follow along behind them, guiding them, into dry sandy arroyos where sparse grass grew. She knew he did not like walking behind old ewes when for so many years he rode big quarter horses and worked with cattle. But she wasn’t sorry for him; he should have known all along what would happen.

There had not been enough rain for their garden in five years; and that was when Chato � nally hitched a ride into the town and brought back brown boxes of rice and sugar and big tin cans of welfare peaches. A� er that, at the � rst of the month they went to Cebolleta to ask the postmaster for the check; and then Chato would go to the bar and cash it. � ey did this as they planted the garden every May, not because anything would survive the summer dust, but because it was time to do this. � e journey passed the days that smelled silent and dry like the caves above the canyon with yellow painted bu� aloes on their walls.

He was walking along the pavement when she found him. He did not stop or turn around when he heard her behind him. She walked beside him and she noticed how slowly he moved now. He smelled strong of woodsmoke and urine. Lately he had been forgetting. Sometimes he called her by his sister’s name and she had been gone for a long time. Once she had found him wandering on the road to the white man’s ranch, and she asked him why he was going that way; he laughed at her.and said, “You know they can’t run that ranch without me,” and he walked on determined limping on the leg that had been crushed many years before. Now he looked at her curiously, as if for the � rst time, but he kept shu� ing along, moving slowly along the side of the highway. His gray hair had grown long and spread out on the shoulders of the long overcoat. He wore the old felt hat pulled down over his ears. His boots were worn out at the toes and he had stu� ed pieces of an old red shirt in the holes. � e rags made his feet look like little animals up to their ears in snow. She laughed at his feet; the snow mu� ed the sound of her laugh. He stopped and looked at her again. � e wind had quit blowing and the snow was falling straight down; the southeast sky was beginning to clear and Ayah could see a star.

“Let’s rest awhile,” she said to him. � ey walked away from the road and up the slope to the giant boulders that had tumbled down from the red sandrock mesa throughout the centuries of


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The Person: What Is a Human Being? Irainstorms and earth tremors. In a place where the boulders shut out the wind, they sat down with their backs against the rock. She o� ered half of the blanket to him and they sat wrapped together.

The storm passed swiftly. The clouds moved east. They were massive and full, crowding together across the sky. She watched them with the feeling of horses-steely blue-gray horses startled across the sky. � e powerful haunches pushed into the distances and the tail hairs streamed white mist behind them. � e sky cleared. Ayah saw that there was nothing between her and the stars. � e light was crystalline. � ere was no shimmer, no distortion through earth haze. She breathed the clarity of the night sky; she smelled the purity of the half moon and the stars. He was lying on his side with his knees pulled up near his belly for warmth. His eyes were closed now, and in the light from the stars and the moon, he looked young again.

She could see it descend out of the night sky: an icy stillness from the edge of the thin moon. She recognized the freezing. It came gradually, sinking snowflake by snowflake until the crust was heavy and deep. It had the strength of the stars in Orion, and its journey was endless. Ayah knew that with the wine he would sleep. He would not feel it. She tucked the blanket around him, remembering how it was when Ella had been with her; and she felt the rush so big inside her heart for the babies. And she sang the only song she knew to sing for babies. She could not remember if she had ever sung it to her children, but she knew that her grandmother had sung it and her mother had sung it:

� e earth is your mother,she holds you.

� e sky is your father,he protects you.

Sleep,sleep.

Rainbow is your sister,she loves you.

� e winds are your brothers,they sing to you.

Sleep,sleep.

We are together always.We are together always.� ere never was a time,

when thiswas not so.

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Questions on Lullaby

1. Describe the situation in which the storyteller locates Ayah: the time of year, her time of life, the condition of the animals. What is her background, and what has happened to her children? Explain all you know about Ayah from the details of the story.

2. In the passage and Ayah’s life, there is trouble causing many sorrows. What is of that trouble? What are the adversarial circumstances for Ayah and her family from Ayah’s point of view? Silko’s works afford non-Indian readers an intimate look into the conditions and feelings of native Americans caught in a mainstream white culture. What advantages does the storyteller gain from telling this story from Ayah’s perspective? For instance, explain the implications of the sentence describing her point of view of the doctors at the clinic: “She was frightened by the way they looked at the children, like the lizard watches the fl y.”

3. A number of symbols contribute an important dimension to this story that requires alert readers to interpret their signifi cance. To this end, explain the implications of at least these images or symbols: the season, the wool blanket and the Indian blanket, the bar, the snow. What is the signifi cance—and possible irony—of Chato’s having taught Ayah to sign her name, though she didn’t understand English.

4. Throughout Lullaby, Indian ways and values contrast with those of mainstream culture represented by the ranch owner, the hospital, the BIA, and the bar. Make a list of the contrasting values and lifeways. Articulate the theme of the story in terms of the story’s implications about these two cultures. Does the story lead readers to see one culture as victim and the other as villain? Does the story in some way suggest a way in which the interests of the two cultures are reconcilable?

5. Imagine yourself in Ayah’s place. If you were her, what would you do if an official from a government agency came to take your children away? What would you do if your life Partner (as Chato) and you were going to be forced out of your home? What would you do as the “icy stillness from the edge of the thin moon” descended on you and your partner? Are there options you would have that Ayah didn’t have? Do you believe this difference in conditions is right? If anything, what can anyone—the government, ordinary people, and such Indians as Ayah—do to change conditions? Explain how conditions between the two cultures can be changed.

Leslie Marmon Silko (1948— ), born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and raised on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation, was educated at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and later graduated from the University of New Mexico with the highest honors. Her stories come from traditional tales recounted by her great-aunts and great-grandmother, ranging from the Coyote trickster’s tales to accounts of Apache and Navajo raids on the pueblo. After studying American Indian Law for three semesters, Silko began writing about the Native American experiences, earning a reputation for her short stories and publishing a volume of poetry, Laguna Woman (1974),


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The Person: What Is a Human Being? Ifollowed in 1977 by her fi rst novel Ceremony. Her other books include a semi-autobiographical collection of poetry, short stories, family history, myths, poetry, and photographs entitled Storyteller (1981), an apocalyptic view of the American future in the novel Almanac of the Dead (1991), and a collection of essays on contemporary Native American life, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (1996). She received a large award from the MacArthur Foundation and has also taught at Navajo Community College, University of Arizona, and University of New Mexico.

Lullaby, from Storyteller, included in The Best American Short Stories of 1975, depicts the interactions with Ayah’s Navajo family as well as the confl icted interactions between traditionally closely-knit Native American culture with the surrounding urban, materialistic, and sterile mainstream culture. She brings a familiar Silko theme, a Navajo tradition of women maintaining the tribal culture through story and song. A sense of permeating loss pervades this haunting story which describes children being taken away from their mothers to the Indian school without any explanation, young Navajo men losing to a foreign war, babies lost at childbirth, even the loss of husbands, and the end of a way of life. So much loss is evident that an old woman living in her memories sings a lullaby perhaps as to her children as much to herself. The song reinforces an amazing sense of cultural continuity despite what seems an unbearable spirit of quiet dignity.

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The Lady with the Dog

Anton Chekhov

I

It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog. Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov, who had by then been a fortnight at Yalta, and so was fairly at home there, had begun to take an interest in new arrivals. Sitting in Verney’s pavilion, he saw, walking on the sea-front, a fair-haired young lady of medium height, wearing a béret; a white Pomeranian dog was running behind her.

And a� erwards he met her in the public gardens and in the square several times a day. She was walking alone, always wearing the same béret, and always with the same white dog; no one knew who she was, and every one called her simply “the lady with the dog”.

“If she is here alone without a husband or friends, it wouldn’t be amiss to make her acquaintance,” Gurov re� ected.

He was under forty, but he had a daughter already twelve years old, and two sons at school. He had been married young, when he was a student in his second year, and by now his wife seemed half as old again as he. She was a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, staid and digni� ed, and, as she said of herself, intellectual. She read a great deal, used phonetic spelling, called her husband, not Dmitri, but Dimitri, and he secretly considered her unintelligent, narrow, inelegant, was afraid of her, and did not like to be at home. He had begun being unfaithful to her long ago—had been unfaithful to her o� en, and, probably on that account, almost always spoke ill of women, and when they talked about in his presence, they used to call them “the lower race”.

It seemed to him that he had been so schooled by bitter experience that he might call them what he liked, and yet he could not get on for two days together without “the lower race”. In the society of men he was bored and not himself, with them he was cold and uncommunicative; but when he was in the company of women he felt free, and knew what to say to them and how to behave; and he was at ease with them even when he was silent. In his appearance, in his character,


I The Person: What Is a Human Being?the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn’t quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns

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