Tubar

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0 height="100%"><tr> <td valign="top" width=200 BGCOLOR="#99FFFF" TEXT="#F7F7FF"> <bR> </td> <td valign="top" width="100%" BGCOLOR="#33CCFF" TEXT="#080000"> <div> <B>Tubar</B></div> <bR> <bR> <div> <A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="The Glubs and the Noodles">The Glubs and the Noodles</A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="donky.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Donky">Donky</A>   |   <A HREF="no_days.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="No days">No days</A>   |   <A HREF="white.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="White">White</A>   |   <B>Tubar</B>   |   <A HREF="do_ghosts_cry.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Do Ghosts Cry?">Do Ghost's Cry?</A>   |   <A HREF="love47.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Love">Love</A></div> <bR> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> <TABLE BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="2" CELLSPACING="1" WIDTH="504" BORDERCOLORLIGHT="#C0C0C0" BORDERCOLORDARK="#808080" FRAME="BOX" RULES="ALL" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" BGCOLOR=#FFCC33 > <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP BGCOLOR=#FFFF99 HEIGHT= 643 WIDTH="498"><div> <B>This story sounds rather normal; no glubs, no strange concepts, a lot of melancholy.</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>It started a day when I was driving to have a morning walk and as always I was listening to France-Culture (</B><A HREF="http://www.radiofrance.fr" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.radiofrance.fr"><B>http://www.radiofrance.fr</B></A><B>).</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>I was listening the way you do when you are not really listening yet I was getting sadder and sadder.</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>On France Culture, an author was telling his memories of the days when he had been treated for tuberculosis.</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>Tuberculosis was part of my youth, the same way as poliomyelitis was part of a village life.</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>I got some kind of tuberculosis when I must have been between two and three years old; Which implies that as a toddler I had no awareness.</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>But what about my mother, twenty nine year old, living in Sweden, that strange country where people speak Swedish and behave Swedish, not "France", living with a family that considered her as the Babylon hoar that had caught their beloved son, all alone in that cold country, and I am not speaking of the weather, while Europe was mincing through the screws of hell the meat of their youth, what about my mother, how did she endured the tuberculosis of her first born son?</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>She walked and walked with me in a warm pram, through the cold of the Swedish winter. That was the cure.</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>When I was around nine, the most beautiful girl of the village caught poliomyelitis and from being the most beautiful girl she became an object of derision with her one match like leg.</B></div> <bR> <bR> </tD> </tR> </TABLE></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>April 23rd, 2006</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Two days ago my neighbors dog, my friend, died of a heat stroke</B></I></div> <div> <I><B>His name was Pollux</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Donkey was driving. The weather forecast was good; as usual the footless women had declared with a large smile that the week-end would be so sunny and enjoyable. Not enjoyable for the plants. It had not rained for more than a month. Donkey was passed the time when she was getting annoyed by the weather forecast. </B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>She new a number of the weather forecaster and knew that they had their marching orders. Weather was always supposed to be good or to become good, preferably sunny and warm, as consumption would go down if rain and fog was announced. Her friends in the Meteorological Office would prefer to present the weather as they do on the BBC forecast, but this was not England, news were entertainment, fog and rain was only entertainment if they could show a bridge or a warehouse breaking down under the weight of accumulated snow.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Donkey was not smiling. She remembered all the times her grand father would be dotting in his corner about the life in the village; he must have told hundreds of time how life was in the village and yet Donky was not even able to remember the name of the village, vaguely that it was somewhere in Kenya, possibly was it Uganda, that from the village they could see Mt Kenya even if the old man never called it mount Kenya.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Donky remembered how smart she thought she was at that age when she managed not to be cornered by the old man and have to listen to his endless village stories. (</B></I><FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Times New Roman" ><A HREF="http://mpr.jag-minns.com" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://mpr.jag-minns.com"><I><B>http://mpr.jag-minns.com</B></I></A></FONT><I><B>), now the old man was dead, she could not even remember what he looked like, she could not even be sure that he was her grand-father, that was one of the worst stories when he would be started on the long listing of the village bonding. </B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>He always called her “little Bilulu” and Donkey hated that name even if she was not very sure of what a Bilulu could be but she was quite certain that being a Bilulu was not something that would make her more attractive and competitive. She would shout at the old man they said was his grand father that her name was Donky, he would just look at her and have some kind of swashing movement with his hand that was always holding the giraffe hair fly swatters, as if he could not learn to use the aerosol like all civilized humans?</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Why was she driving and suddenly feel as if the old man whose name she could not even remember, whose face she could not see, was sitting next to her, being nearer to her than anybody had ever been? Why was she feeling that sadness, that melancholy, that shame, that she, the successful reporter, she the reporter that had been quoted more than any reporter for two years in a row, she, Donky, whose face was know by hundreds of millions of viewers, she Donky who would give lectures at the most High Brow Universities for very comfortable fees, how could it be that she was sitting at the wheel of her car and feeling like a very ungrateful and dirty Bilulu; </B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>It is true that she had got into the trouble of finding out what a Bilulu was, and she would not tell anybody what her Grand-father was naming her, there would be no end of jokes thereafter if it was to be discovered, but now, if there was one thing she wanted more than anything in the world, it was to feel the wind of the giraffe made fly swatter passing by her head and the old voice, telling her </B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>“Bilulu, Bilulu, be careful of the winds”.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>She had not been careful of the winds, rather she had been flying on the winds. </B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>She had been flying on the winds that lifted her mind to the highest peaks, she had been flying on the winds when the old man died, she had been between two metallic cages with wings when the old man was buried, she had lost her way in the cemetery when she tried to find the grave, and she had not dared go to the register and ask.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>He was buried in what the pure people would call the Afro-American tumulus. He had been buried according to  the tradition, and she was afraid that if she asked for her way somebody would accompany her and they would be standing next to her, that they would be standing next to her and wondering why these strange people did not buy twenty thousand dollar gaskets, why there was no decoration, why there was just a heap of dirty bumpy soil as if somebody was preparing a site for a new water or gas pipe, why the grave site was not weeded, why one could still see the handle of a frying pan, the corner of an old cheap suitcase. She was Donky, she was Donky, she was Donky, the Donky everybody envied, the Donky who got the best service in the metallic wind birds, the Donky that would go through the airport outside of the vulgar crowd, she was the Donky envied by every woman, desired by all the man, would a Donky of that importance be sharing the remains and memories of the old man they said was her grand father with thousands of hundreds of other dirty smelling Bilulu, when she could not even spell the plural of Bululu?</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Disgusting Bilulu living on her Grand father, disgusting Bilulu, but in her heart she knew they were less disgusting than “Little Bilulu”.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>The sunshine had created the usual smog. Donky could not remember if she had ever enjoyed the days her parents used to tell her about, a pure blue sky, a yellow pure sun, a transparent air, she could only remember that greyish throat tickling nose swelling beautiful weather that had already grilled the trees her father had planted at the old home.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>But is was not the smog nor the traffic that was pushing Donky in a deeper and darker melancholy, she was trying to understand why she was feeling so lost and so far away from something that she could not remember, until flashes of joyous groups, of immense windows letting in ice cold air came back to her memory and she noticed that she had been listening to the radio programme where an old writer was reminiscing about his memories of  what it had been to have “the plague”.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>The plague,</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>{ if you do not know what it is, please read BettyMc Donald </B></I><FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Times New Roman" ><I><B>http://www.historylink.org/output.CFM?file_ID=156</B></I></FONT><I><B>) }</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>did her grand father know in his village wisdom that Donky was to beware of the wind, that she would catch the plague when she was seven years old, that the wind would be both the carrier of the plague and the wing that would take away the plague?</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Donky was very literate and she knew what nonsense to start a story on the line “what would it have been if I had been born in that village in Kenya whose name I cannot remember”, but Donky thought “had I not been in the new world, had I been one of the tens and tens of young girls running in the African village, carrying the water buckets on their head, gathering the sticks for the meal fire, a child that started coughing was a child that would be shunned, that would be isolated, that would be cared for if anybody bothered to care for a child, that would be cared for by an old woman who had seen death so often that she did no longer know the  difference between life and death, she would have thinned, they might have bothered to try and feed her on goat milk of they might reasonably have looked at her and decided that as a young future women she was not worth selling a heifer to pay for the trip to the hospital at the capital, and she would have died and she would have brought shame on her family by having so few people attending her funeral”.</B></I></div> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> <I><B><IMG SRC="0f1902c0.jpg" border=0 width="400" height="300" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Donky had run a programme on the “thin people” in Africa. That was at the time when AIDS was so popular and new, newsworthy and still got you a good Nielsen rating even if it was harder and harder to say anything new and enjoyable on the subject.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Donky an her team had been for two weeks in West Africa; </B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Her assistants had been there for two months ahead of her, she had all her lines written, they had found all the nice, tear tearing children, they had written the basis the compassionate words she would utter, the villagers had been paid and a price had been agreed for the follow-up, they had selected amongst the political VIPs that wanted to appear on her programme, they had discussed the menus and made sure that all her lunches had been pre packed and checked and double checked that none included gluten and the red dye N° 2 to which she believed she was allergic, her water bottles had been brought from USA and the thermostat of the cooler had been checked and checked to be sure that her water would be between 16° and 18°.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Donky had been very often to Africa, it was just another country on her list, she did not feel anything special, possibly she regretted that the lifts in the hotels were so slow and that the politicians always waited for hours with long polite chatting until they came to the question they were concerned about, but basically it was just another spot, so long as her assistants had made sure that the airport customs officers had been properly paid and would not start one of there “if you believe that you over rich woman can come and steal from us”, then everything would be OK and boring as usual.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>So she had run her program about the thin people and she managed to be sufficiently credible about the magic powers that the village African doctor was said to have to cure the thin disease that the lookers would not switch to another channel. But she would soon have to drop that line, this stuff about the wisdom and knowledge of the African doctor was getting a bit stretched these days.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Her staff had managed to gather a fair group of prostitutes working the truck line and that would ensure that the men would not walk away to get another beer and pizza. Her staff had checked to the last minute that the policy line of the Editor had not changed about naked breast, but if they were going to syndicate it broadly then ran to tapes, one with bare breasts and one with beautiful tops claiming the truck ladies worker “faith in God”.</B></I></div> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> <I><B><IMG SRC="0f2900b0.jpg" border=0 width="400" height="267" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>She should be sympathetic to the “thin sickness disease people” as she had nearly been one of them at home when she was young, but it was difficult to relate to their difficulties, when she got the plague, her worst memory was that she had gained more than one stone during her cure. So much for the “thin sickness disease”!</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>But she got the plague when she was six or seven. That was nothing very unusual at that time; Sure it was a shame to get the plague as everybody knew that poor people had such unsanitary life in their shovels that for them it was quite normal to catch it. Yet, when she was sent to the cure Centre in the Rockies, most of the other children were from normal families, like hers, some were even from well off families with the driver coming to collect them when they were given some days of permission. </B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>In the Cure Centre, nobody was rich, nobody was poor, and everybody was a brother in the plague. There were them, those kids you know who have the plague, and the others, those who had a normal life.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>In those days they had just begun using chemicals to kill the bugs. The prevalent opinion was that it was a sickness that would be cured by a lot of fresh air, clean air, a lot of lying in deck chairs, packed into thick woollen sheets, ordered to do nothing, just lie there and wait.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Try and get children that are not yet ten year old to lay still for hours!</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Yet Donky could not remember, neither boring hours and days nor days of sorrow or pain. It seemed to her that those where the days when she became alive. In her memory, those where the days of pure joy.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>She could still smile all by herself when she remembered the long afternoon on the open veranda, sneak chatting with the other children, watching the road coming from the valley.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>When some mountain walkers would come up to the health Centre to enjoy the view from the well-known balcony, the children would wait until the mountaineers were well within hearing, then on a signal one of them would start moaning and moaning, then another one would start crying, another one would join in shouting and crying about wanting to see his mother, them it would become a confuse orchestra of children calling for their parents, asking the visitors to bring messages to their beloved parents that they were forgiving them all the bad things they had done now that they were dying, then bandages, rags tainted with some red dye they had pinched from the infirmary would fall out from the open windows until the mountaineers fled in panics and the nurses stormed into the ward, threatening that there would be no dessert for the evening meal, which was rather an empty threat as eating as much as they could and more was considered to be part of the cure.</B></I></div> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> <I><B><IMG SRC="0f3900b0.jpg" border=0 width="400" height="267" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Some children where the real heroes, on day they where scheduled for surgery they would come back and show long scars on their side telling the others of inhuman pain, of bloody knifes being stuck inside their lungs without any pain killer, of errors made and bandages left in there lungs, and all the children would gather around them, at the same time terrified that this could happen to them and longing for the day when they would collapse a lung and they could become the hero of the week.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>From their wing they could see through the windows of the wing for the adults where the group of teenagers where kept. They could not really believe that they would one day be like these grown-up teenagers; they watched them trying to learn the tricks of the adults.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>The teenagers where allowed to go for short walks on sunny days, unaccompanied, if they promised not to run, not to shout, not to play, just as slowly as possible, talking to one another as little as possible and as calmly as possible.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>The old kids, those that were nearly aged ten, were taunting Donky. On sunny days they would watch the adult teenagers going out, apparently the boys in a group, the girls in another group, none looking at the another, and the old kids would ask Donky whether she would also like to come back to the health Centre with a tee-shirt all green on the back. Sure Donky knew what they meant, well, she did not really know what they meant; she understood that they meant some secret that was hidden to her. One day she made the mistake of taking her most “blasé” air and looking as if a green back tee-shirt was the most normal thing in her entourage; she had to pay for it day after days, week after week, everybody knowing that black girls used to have babies already when they were ten. Donky was so afraid that she would carry a baby, she knew that her weight was increasing because she was eating so much and she was growing up, but a night she kept a hand on her belly, terrified that one day she would feel the movements of a bay in her womb, whatever a womb was.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Apparently she did not get pregnant and sadly it appeared that her fears had been on the wrong slope, for today Donky still had no knowledge of what it meant to be pregnant; was it because in her job, this was not timely nor advisable, was it because she had moved so high up on the social ladder scale that such things were left rather to the lower classes and the show business when ratings were declining?</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Donky was amongst the children who where sent back home, without a word, just been sent back home; All children where not sent back home. She wondered even today what happened to the children who were not sent back; She vaguely remembered that some days a bed would be empty and the nurses would be different, until another kid came.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>She did not want to know.</B></I></div> <bR> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> <I><B><IMG SRC="0f4902c0.jpg" border=0 width="400" height="300" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></B></I></div> <bR> <bR> <div> <TABLE BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="2" CELLSPACING="1" WIDTH="403" BORDERCOLORLIGHT="#C0C0C0" BORDERCOLORDARK="#808080" FRAME="BOX" RULES="ALL" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" BGCOLOR=#FFFFFF > <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP BGCOLOR=#111111 HEIGHT= 284 WIDTH="397"><div> <I><B>Two mornings ago, my neighbor was ringing on my door. It was really morning, I did not know what to expect</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Her dog, Pollux had died during the night of heat stroke.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>The weather went brutally from degrees around the frost point, to sunshine, twenty degrees and the animals suffered.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>I should be angry at Pollux, the first day he met my "Save the Animals" dog he bit off half his left ear. But nobody could be angry at Pollux.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I><B>I have never seen a dog love water as much as he did. Yet he could have won a prize as the dogs poorest swimmer.</B></I></div> <bR> </tD> </tR> </TABLE></div> <bR> <div> <I><B><IMG SRC="0f5902c0.jpg" border=0 width="400" height="300" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></B></I></div> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>