A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago — John Shaqi
A Thousand and One Afternoons in ChicagoHecht, Ben
General
A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago
Hecht, Ben
Chicago (Ill.) -- Literary collections; Hecht, Ben, 1893-1964 -- Homes and haunts -- Illinois -- Chicago
We happen to be on the same street car. A drizzle softens the windows. She
sits with her pasty face and her dull, little eyes looking out at the
dripping street. Her cotton suit curls at the lapels. The ends of her
shoes curl like a pair of burlesque Oriental slippers. She holds her hands
in her lap. Red, thick fingers that whisper tiredly, "We have worked," lie
in her lap.
A slavey on her day off. There is no mistaking this. Nineteen or twenty
years old, homely as a mud fence; ungraceful, doltish, she sits staring
out of the window and her eyes blink at the rain. A peasant from
southeastern Europe, a field hand who fell into the steerage of a
transatlantic liner and fell out again. Now she has a day off and she goes
riding into the country on a street car.
She will get off and slosh with her heavy feet through wet grass. She will
walk down the muddied roads and drink in the odor of fields and trees once
more. These are romantic conjectures. The car jolts along. It is going
west. The rain continues. It runs diagonal dots across the window.
Everybody out. This is the end of the line. I have gone farther than
necessary. But there is the slavey. We have been talking. At least I
talked. She listened, her doltish face opening its mouth, her little eyes
blinking. She has pimples, her skin is muddied. A distressful-looking
creature. Yet there is something. This is her day off--a day free from
the sweat of labor--and she goes on a street car into the country. So it
would seem that under this blinking, frowzy exterior desire spreads its
wings. She has memories, this blousy one. She has dreams.
The drizzle flies softly through the air. The city has disappeared. We
walk down an incongruous stretch of pavement. It leads toward a forest or
what looks like a forest. There are no houses. The sky asserts itself. I
look up, but the shambling one whose clothes become active under water
keeps her eyes to the pavement. This is disillusioning! "Here, slavey, is
the sky," I think; "it becomes romantic for the moment because to you it
is the symbol of lost dreams, or happy hours in fields. To me it is
nothing but a sky. I have no interest in skies. But I am looking at it for
you and enjoying it through your romantic eyes."
But her romantic eyes are oblivious. They consult the rain-washed pavement
before her and nothing else. Very well, there are other and nicer skies in
her heart that she contemplates. This is an inferior sky overhead. We walk
on.
You see, I have been wrong. It is not green fields that lured the heavy
feet of this slavey. She is not a peasant Cinderella. Grief, yes, hidden
sorrow, has led her here. This is a cemetery.
It rains over the cemetery. There is silence. The white stones glisten.
They stand like beggars asking alms of the winding paths. And this blousy
one has come to be close to one of the white stones. Under one of them
lies somebody whose image still lives in her heart.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account