D: The mad fellow's tale

The vomiting itinerant's hand danced and swayed above the level of
his hunched down head and neck seeking for grip. Ordinarily, I would
give these fellows a wide berth but there was a group of us that
evening and I was on the outside, nearest the bus shelter and passing
close by the man. The fingers found purchase and clasped around the
edge of the glass panel of the shelter, immediately relinquishing their
hold again on touching the gobby spit that drizzled down it. Nip nip
nip as the fingers scrabbled to find another handhold to prop up the
puking drunk. Suddenly, I was gripped; he had a hold of the lapel of my
jacket. The pale, hairy forearm had the strength and scrawn common to
his kind and I felt the pull of the collar on my neck. I fear these
people- they repulse and disgust me- but most of all I fear them; they
may not look like they've much to them but you'd get a beating from
them before ever you saw it was coming. Nevertheless, it pays to be
firm so I slapped his hand in an effort to get him to leave go. I would
have said something too, in a very brisk tone indeed, but there was a
multiple word pile-up at my lips, with no through traffic. The man was
standing head cocked staring me hard in the eye with the tortured and
frightened gaze of a mind and soul that could not know rest. The places
where the skin stretched over his facial bones gleamed white whilst the
recesses of his cheeks seemed as black as coal. His orbits sunk into
darkness and his wet eyeballs seemed to jut almost as far as the end of
his nose. He had greying black hair. He later told me his name: he was
one Albert Ross, and that he had come to the roving life by fate. To me
held fixed by his stare he was just a mad fellow. Before his present
circumstances, he had worked on the ships for a bit, which is how he
met Stan. Stan was a foreigner and a troubled man himself. He had told
Albert his war story and from that day the mad fellow was to drift from
town to town obsessing about what he had heard. He told me Stan's story
because he had a compulsion to do so, and I tell it to you now on
account of being possessed of that same sickness.

Stan had known a Yugoslavian in the war: his name was Xhemail and
before the war he had lived in the region now known as Kosovo. Xhemail
had owned a little farm and he and his young wife were very happy
there. Stan and Xhemail talked late into the night about the
tranquillity of rural Kosovan life. Held in Xhemail's thrall, the
peaceful simplicity and soft, calm voice that hushed and damped down
the ever-burning fire in his own spirit, Stan lost all sense of time
and had to be reminded when it was time to retire. Even then he fought
gravity with his own natural corpulence being augmented by the
reluctance to stand up and leave. And it was with heavy breath and the
warmth of the truest of friendships that he shook Xhemail's hand and
left him there.

Much of Stan's story centres on the mundane: the daily grinds and
simple joys of Xhemail's domestic situation prior to the unusual
circumstances of their acquaintanceship. The farm was a thing of
continental rustic beauty on days when the bright sun shone on it at
noon. Modest by the standards that we have in our farmhouses here, you
could describe it in terms of the view you would see approaching it
from the old dirt track lane that let to the barnyard and the reception
of the house. On a sunny day, a skilled photographer would make a good
picture postcard of the scene that I'll describe to you. Looking from
the rutted track, the foreground had a small, gnarled (and very old)
lone laurel tree on the corner where the roadside verge of thin grass
and gorse continued on away upwards to the next plot as the lane banked
on into the yard. The middle distance was framed on one side by the
open storage barn, it's grey steel roof arching over to perch atop the
mucky white breeze-block walls, and on the other by the poultry shed
all mucky-white with a red painted corrugated steel slanting roof. As
the backdrop, the L-shaped farmhouse building consisted of beautifully
whitewashed, plastered walls with a bright, ermine-red rippled tiled
roof on top of it. A track beside the wing of the farmhouse led via a
wooden gate to the fields and to the right of the track there was an
old tractor and plough.

Xhemail's wife Latifie tended to the affairs of the household with help
from his kindly mother Elena. Elena was a hardy old Slavic woman,
strong as a man from her years of agricultural toil. It was she who
would tend the chickens in the yard with quiet dignity and a fair old
tolerance for honest dirt and squalor. It was herself too who would
break their necks, pluck them and pull out the giblets when the time
came. She'd hunch over her work in that old shed with a knife in her
hand cleaning out the poultry to be taken away for sale. On days when
she prepared the farm fowl, Elena would always boil up the chicken
necks for Mostafa (Xhemail and Latifie's eight-year-old son) and put
them out in a bowl for him so that he could sit and eat them in the
yard, just by the front door of the house. She said very few words to
anyone and was brusque, but she had a real niceness about her that
always came through in her quiet generosity. By Stan's account of
Xhemail's description of his young wife, Latifie would go the same way
as her mother-in-law one day- she had the same quiet, gentle nature and
resilient, hard-working approach to life. Although for the time being,
the two were very different personalities for, although she repressed
it, Latifie was a lusty, energetic young woman with a natural vitality
of spirit and owning much inner strength and charisma. Life for Latifie
was a daily struggle to hold her tongue and maintain a dignified air.
Her husband would chide her for the lively air that she could barely
help but exude, but he confessed to Stan that deep in his heart of
hearts this was the quality that he most admired and loved her
for.

Xhemail talked for hours and Stan listened; he was so bewitched by the
calming timbre of his counterparts voice and the beauty of the
lifestyle, that it must have been nearly hour before he realised that
his mouth was hanging hinged open and collecting spit that required to
be swallowed. So much of Xhemail's life story was completely alien to
Stan, who had been born and brought up in a capital city- the idea of
giving a small child boiled chicken necks as a treat amazed him.
However, what surprised him most of all was the human side to the
story: all those little things that are the same the world over. This
side of things greatly affected Stan; at that time he was a man not
given to travel and had always been suspicious towards
foreigners.

Albert became animated as he told me about the rough protocol that
Xhemail's family followed at mealtimes, and it almost struck me as
though he himself had been there at the kitchen table. He hadn't of
course; he had got the tale from Stan and was telling it to me as a
tertiary source. A tortured wraith of a man at the beginning of the
tale, Albert lost his ashen, ghostly quality and became flesh again as
he relayed this part of the tale. I couldn't swear to you now that the
light hadn't changed or that it isn't my own memory playing with me,
but I'm near certain that the skin on his face and arms took on a
living pink hue while he told me it. His face was the colour of the
grave beforehand and it reverted back quickly enough afterwards. I
realise now that people like Albert and I- those doomed to wander like
strays telling the mad fellow's tale wherever they go- we commune and
rejoin with the living whenever we are relaying the parts of the litany
that marry up with our own life experiences.

The family would gather together at the end of a hard working day: the
men and the boy would clean the dirt of the fields from themselves and
smarten their attire, the women would freshen up from their labours, be
they farm work or household chores. There would be a clatter as each
person took to their chores to order the room and set the table for the
meal. The family would sit in silence as the food was served at table
and they would look to Ishmael (Xhemail's father), as the patriarch,
for their cue to start eating. Ishmael and Elena usually said little at
table through old age and their mutual ease with each other. Whenever
they did speak they spoke quickly in short, barked sentences across the
table and usually their conversation was amongst themselves. Maybe once
a week, Ishmael used to ask Xhemail how the work was progressing in the
fields. At such times Xhemail would tell his father something that
Ishmael must have already heard many times before. In spite of the
predictability of life on the farm, Ishmael would always raise his
eyebrows and feign interest in his son's replies as though he had not
heard of such a thing or as though he had not lived a similar life in
his younger days- which, of course, he had. For the most part Xhemail
and Latifie were respectful towards their elders and would eat in
silence unless spoken to first. From what Stan told Albert, Mostafa was
one of those children who like to pick at their food and play games
with it whilst daydreaming. Try as he may, if he wasn't in the mood to
eat what was put in front of him then he would always find something
else to do with it. Xhemail was a very tolerant man, but he could only
let Mostafa sit there staring at his meal and twirling it around with
his cutlery without eating for so long without feeling he had to say
something. He was not a strict father by nature and often he would find
himself laughing if his son misbehaved. This he would try to suppress
for as long as he could, but whenever the humour got the better of him
he and Mostafa would sit in silence trying to stifle their mirth.
Sometimes the two of them would sit in silence hardly daring to look at
one another for fear of setting each other off. The fellow whom I
presumed mad later told me snippets of his own life story and it seems
that this family set-up struck a chord with his own recollections of
his childhood in Scotland. I nodded sadly in recognition when he told
me because Stan's tale had opened my eyes that evening so that they
might never truly close again. I knew then why the ghost's of men
re-animate when they speak the story to those they choose to enlighten
en-route through this poignant realm of sad, dark reality.

The days, weeks, months, seasons and years passed and fortunes, moods
and social and familial bonds vacillated, but always there was a
halcyon, pacific glow underpinning the lives of Xhemail and his family.
Stan listened in wonderment to all that was said and went into
rapturous dreams of sunlit days in fields of crops and livestock,
freezing winter mornings on which it would feel difficult to motivate
himself, and that satisfied feeling at the end of a hard days toil. He
envied this rural lifestyle without begrudging it to his companion.
When Stan rose to leave, he blessed Xhemail and all of his family, with
whom Stan now felt a common bond and warmth of shared human experience.
He praised God that he had met Xhemail and that he had shared an
evening in the company of this remarkable quietly spoken and mild man.
In fact, when they came and told Stan of the lateness of the hour, he
did not want to leave but, reluctantly, he shook his friend warmly by
the hand before going to retire.

Almost a month after that evening's conversation, Stanislav looked
unblinking at Xhemail across the yard and, on the officer's order, he
fired. Stan shouldered arms as the doctor came over to check. Two
guards untied and took the new scarecrow down from the post, dragging
him away by the arms to be dumped. Then they marched the next one over
to the post and tied him on- this was one that Stan had not met. The
mad fellow's tale was a story of somebody else's madness.