SELECTED PROSE

by
Nora Nadjarian

GOODBYE, MR GREEN

Out of the blue last night, I remembered Mr Green. Mr Green, of all names! Mr Paul Green (B. Sc., Dip.Ed.), Mr Green with his corduroy trousers and his blue shirts, Mr Blue Brown and Green, Mr Earth colours to match his eyes. Karma Chameleon Mr Green, who cared for the environment, who adopted a whale, whose whole face smiled if you asked him about anything to do with recycling.

I remembered my biology book and how I used to doodle in the margins of all the pages and there are just four words which have stuck in my mind: condensation, chlorophyll, gravity and amoeba. That could be five or six words, if you include Human Reproduction.

So nothing really happens when you�re sixteen, and books don�t teach you anything until you grow up and things start happening, and you learn for yourself. Let�s face it, who cares at sixteen when Mr Green tells you things about leaves and oxygen, and why we fly in space and not on earth, and how an amoeba fills its days and nights, crawling all over the floor like a drunkard and a blob. Of course nobody knows for sure if an amoeba enjoys its existence. It doesn�t even have sex, except with itself. And I remember doodling AND A LITTLE BIT OF CHLOROPHYLL TO MAKE YOU BREATHE. An advert for good lungs � breathe in � breathe out-

Life is full of cycles, you always return to the beginning. Three or four years after leaving school, four or five years after he had retired, I bumped into Mr Green at a bus stop downtown.

�Mr Green!� I called out, genuinely pleased to see him. �Is that you? Do you remember me? How are you?� He looked awful, paler than I remembered him, paler and thinner, his eyes still that blue of lakes, his hair gone white, white, white, and his skin so colourless, as if it wasn�t really there at all.

�I wish you�d asked me so many questions when I was your teacher,� he said, and smiled, that smile of long ago, the smile of genuine kindness. I wanted to cry there and then, because he was smiling his �Everything will be all right� smile. �Of course I remember you,� he continued. �You were a dreamer, never a scientist.�

My heart was now beating very fast, and I hoped the bus would never come. I wished that I could impress Mr Green by telling him I had become an astronaut, I was a member of Greenpeace, I had discovered a way to make the hole in the Ozone Layer smaller, I had given birth to triplets, I -

�And what have you done with your life?� he asked, as if reading my thoughts, but his lake-blue eyes were not unkind.

Before I could open my mouth to let out a sound, before I could think of anything remotely interesting or important to say, his bus came, and he got on, with a small wave of his hand, and so disappeared forever from my life. Mr Green, Mr Green, Mr Blue Brown and Green disappeared on bus number 43, and there was nothing I could do about it. I didn�t even get a chance to say a proper goodbye.

What have I done with my life? Good question, Mr Green. I have been learning facts. The facts of life. And life sucks Mr Green, it is not all blue and green. Even tigers yawn out of boredom, and when they�re licking the blood off their claws they are probably thinking that life sucks. Always a dreamer, never a scientist. Yeah. You know what? I am a little amoeba and I have a pseudolife and pseudofriends and a pseudohusband and we have pseudosex and I can�t even conceive. Oh, Mr Green, please come back and smile that �Everything will be all right� smile and I will regurgitate some facts I ought to have learnt from you. All about chlorophyll and the life of the amoeba and everything one needs to know about asexual reproduction. You will be pleased with me, Mr Green. I know you will.

If dried leaves are powdered and digested with ethanol, after concentration of the solvent, one obtains 'crystalline' chlorophyll.

Asexual reproduction does NOT require fertilization. Asexual reproduction is usually faster than sexual. The new organisms are genetically identical to their parents.

Unicellular protists are able to change their shape constantly.

The amoeba forms pseudopods (false feet) with which it flows over a surface.

And then, Mr Green, when you have patiently listened to all this, will you please tell me what to do about my own life, which doesn�t really know where it�s going?

� Nora Nadjarian

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BROKEN

It was well and truly smashed. A broken vase. A broken marriage.

In people�s eyes we were the shattered children, forced to walk barefoot on splinters of adult glass. As if it was our fault, as if we�d broken it playing football or doing handstands in the living room. We weren�t sure when or how it had happened. Had it fallen and broken while mother was dusting? Had father knocked it over like an ashtray, while watching the news on television? We weren�t sure why our life was suddenly and irreparably broken.

I tried to glue it back, like a photograph pieced together after it has been ripped. But the glued bits showed, always. �I�m sorry,� said my father. �I�m sorry,� as if it was all his fault. When I looked in mum�s diary, she had written: �He has broken my heart. And the children, we�ve broken their lives.�

� Nora Nadjarian

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MAGNETS

They played the magnetic poetry game. You are the love of my life he wrote on the fridge one day, with the magnets they had bought at an art gallery in Europe. Every so often, words would appear, be juggled, moved, go missing like teeth on a child�s smiling face.

They left each other messages, but neither of them being particularly gifted in poetry, they would sometimes be mundane. They laughed when the words changed lines or made no sense.

One day it read:

You are love

my life

of

the

Another day:

the life love you are

of my

Gradually, quietly, the words disappeared. And one day, he left.

There were no more games to play, and the fridge door was empty, white, like a hospital bed. She shivered to open it, as if opening it would pour out into her kitchen all the despair in the world.

� Nora Nadjarian

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PAPERS

�Papers?� said the tall, handsome man. It took me a second to realize it wasn�t a question. It was an order. Perhaps he wasn�t handsome, perhaps I�m making it up. I rummaged in the purse strung round my waist to keep the coins in, I took the Kipling rucksack off my back, the rucksack with the hole in one of its pockets, the one I had found in a rubbish bin in the streets of the city. I pretended I had the papers and lost them, or lost them without ever having had them.

�Papers,� he insisted.

All the coins rolled out of the purse and fell on the floor, all of them, the wristbands I make and try to sell, two for a euro, to strange white people in caf�s who tell me thank you, no thank you, and shoo me away with their smiles.

�I don�t have papers,� I said, and my voice shook. �But look at my eyes. All of my history. Look at my eyes. Two for a euro. Two for a euro.� I looked straight at him, and hoped.

I don�t know what I�m doing in this country away from home. Living, making a living, working, not living, not really working, what shall I call it, how can I put it, why am I here. When he asked me for my papers, I should have run. Run to the sea which brought me here, and then swum away from this island, swum to God-knows-where. Floating in the sea feels good, I�ve tried that before, nearly drowned when the boat nearly sank and we had to rely on the salt in the sea to keep us afloat, it felt good to be alive, just me and the sea. If someone could teach me how to empty my head of of all my memories, how do you do that, can you think of something other than the past when you are lonely, because that�s how people travel, in their heads, when they can�t travel any more. That�s all I can do, travel in my head.

And they always ask me for papers. To show them who I am, to prove my existence, to give them my date and place of birth, so that they are sure I now exist here, though I once existed in another country. I ran away once and now I want to run back. And every night I dream I am drowning. I dream I am an old man and I�m drowning, drowning and there�s no hope of being saved, no one, no one � I wake up and my face is wet with sea, with sweat, with tears.

� Nora Nadjarian

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