Sven Goes to War. Part 12. O mio babbino caro

 

O mio babbino caro

    

The town of S was a thriving metropolis of four streets. Here were:

 

• tea rooms with gilded vaulted ceilings

 

• pool halls, the men from which, tired of all those spinning balls, regularly spooled out into the sunshine to puff from small portable hookahs, still holding their cues aloft so they looked like the rag-end of a defeated medieval army

 

• laundromats managed by petit hussars doling out detergent with all the reluctance of Draco’s Council of Four Hundred in the city-state of Athens

 

•  fruit shops with their colourful shining produce displayed in even more colourful buckets on racks outside their dim interiors, protected from the sun by branded umbrellas, Coca-Cola, Lunn Poly, Camel Cigarettes, Kodak, Prozac, Pan Am

 

•  nail bars staffed by teams of fearsome Vietnamese ladies, identical with their tiny waists and pink, fume-cancelling, face masks and with the pots of their polish flush across their bodies in belts like seventies Soviet secret agents

 

• tiny non-gambling casinos with a single roulette wheel each, the real action taking place out back in drab covered shacks, or in concealed cellars where, under smoke-clogged ceilings, heavily bearded men gazed pitifully at the cards life had dealt them, just one more hand and then I’m done

 

•  jauntily singing barbers, all the barbers sang in this town, taking up and passing along a single aria at closing time, O mio babbino caro, Largo al Factotum, Quando me’n vo

 

•  largely silent hairdressers passing out dusty copies of old magazines to clients, National Geographic, Caravan Club Monthly, Bride Attack!, secretly seething about the popularity of the singing barbers but also secretly a little in love with them and their closing time concerts, leave the door open, it’s always nice at this time to have a little breeze, the noise?, no it doesn’t bother me at all, I can hardly hear it

 

•  fortune tellers in colourful robes, seeing eyes hidden behind mysterious dark glasses, with prophesies that always ended in Flash Gordon cliffhangers, and behind the door, no… she’s gone, the spirits are tired today…, all the better to get their desperate clients to return

 

• shoe shops with fearsome foot-measuring machines that all the children were afraid of, no mother, it’ll eat my foot off, like a crocodile!

 

•  underwear shops the windows of which were filled with scantily clad mannequins the source of many a teenage boy’s fantasy

 

•  along with, and not withstanding the angry owner who would come out and chase off any lingerers with a sharpened broomstick, also the shop where you could get your head and feet massaged and other parts too, so the story went, although this, like many things when the official history of S was published many years later, by none other than Stanley himself, the mostly invisible hero of our story, was proven to be apocryphal.  

 

{For as Stanley wrote, if you wanted to be wanked off, be given the low five, have your monkey spanked, yes it was that kind of official history, one for the perverts and thrill seekers, behind the train yard was where you needed to go. Here the itinerant workers from G would congregate, oyster-skinned skinny men with rope-like miraculous muscles, lured to the town of S by fabulous felicitous stories of limitless work and untold riches and, finding none of either, not even enough for the train fare home, willing to do anything for an easy fast buck.}

 

 

Everybody, or as near to everybody as that word could encompass, in the metropolis of S lived in one of eight very tall sprawling gargantuan buildings and, it was a fact much lamented in all of the above mentioned commercial establishments, that in none of these buildings, each divided into many hundreds of flats, garrets, penthouses, apartments, was there a single lift. 

    Vertical movement, both up and down, was accomplished only by a series of wooden external staircases. 

    “And there is no other means?” asked Sven. 

    He was sitting on the terrace of Soufi’s Al-Arabian Cakes, Sweets and Coffees along with Esta, their cultural attaché and all the Mikes. On either side of their party groups of teenage boys engaged in riotous games of speed-chess, hands flying through the air as battles were won and fought. 

    It was a Thursday afternoon. 

    Their day for CE (Cultural Engagement).

    “Not unless you jump,” said Esta seriously. She was still gazing towards the staircases. Then she pointed at the nets positioned all around the base of the building opposite. “In England you have Beachy Head. In Japan they have seppuku. In S we have jumping from tall building.”

    “Kind of like Spiderman without the spider part,” said Mike Three. The funny one. 

    “And what’s going on there?” asked Sven, pointing. 

    A third of the way up the staircase was an old bent lady, a bulging bin bag in each hand, two tall men in full battle regalia, each with a hard plastic suitcase balanced on their heads, a family with onetwothreefourfivesix children, blocking the way, not so much the children, but the large tea chests they were manhandling up (or down) under the direction of a shouting father, a small yapping dog in his hands, having no other alternative but to use its paws to give direction.

    “This is what we call bloody domino effect,” said Esta. 

    For as people got married, had children, children moved out, family members died, divorces happened, people disappeared, an enforced move would be necessary. And as one moved so had to others. 

    “We call that a fucking domino effect,” said Mike Three. The funny one. 

    “Today,” said Esta, “that family you see at the top of the stairs have had twins. It is a blessing for them but a disaster for many others. I heard Soufi, the owner of this coffee shop talking when I ordered our drinks. As many as two dozen families will have to move.” 

    “I wonder,” said Sven. 

    And that is when he had had his idea. 

 

On that fateful day when he had been captured under the pier by the Bones brothers and been hefted by the armpits, one pit each, to the torture chair in the Martello, Sven had been reading his favourite superhero comic,

 

Removalman!

    

    Mask made from a hessian sack, cape the colour of a tea chest with a large recondite R in its centre. 

    In each weekly episode bad guys planning a raid would turn up at their secret den to find their getaway van had been replaced by a chintz sofa, their cache of weapons by a family of smiling gonks. Or a bank robbery would be stymied by the bank itself having been moved to a new location, a shop selling lower than twenty denier tights in its place.    

    “I don’t get it,” said Mike One.

    They were back at the pickle factory. 

    Sven told the Mikes to turn their backs, told them to turn around again when he was ready. 

    “Removalman!” he shouted and then he performed a perfect replica of the pose of his hero.

 

[Arms straight out, hands folded forward as if gripping the edges of a packing case, knees slightly bent to avoid injury to lower back.]

 

    The cape and the hessian headdress had been easy to fashion. 

    “Everyone loved Removalman!” he said. “And for us it will be the next level of our CE (community engagement). Get these people to love us and the war will be over. Trust me on this. No more fighting.”

 

Mike Three was good with words so it was he who created the advert. Esta translated and organised for it to be placed in the tea shop window.

 

عمال الإزالة!

كل احتياجاتك المتحركة.

لا وظيفة كبيرة جدا أو صغيرة.

معدلات ممتازة.

لا تخجل! جربنا!

 

(The Removalmen!

All your moving needs.

No job too big or small.

Excellent rates.

Don’t be shy! Give us a try!)

 

One week later they received their first commission. One week after that their second. Within two months the removals were taking up all their free time. 

    The only blot on Sven’s happiness was Stanley.

    Had he found Stanley?

    He had not. 

    Had Stanley said in all the souks in all the world you had to walk into mine?

    He had not. 

    Late at night Sven would have imaginary conversations with Stanley in which they each admitted to both their good and bad points and then he, Sven, would compose postcards to Stanley, remembering the postcards he had been himself sent.

 

Dear Stanley,

    Today the Mikes and I moved Frida Daghestani. As I was lugging her record collection down from the 25^th floor, to which she could no longer make the stairs, she told me how she had worked on the Soviet Space Mission in 1963, going to space in a woollen space suit she had knitted herself. Before making her final descent down the stairs to her new home she insisted we help her up to the roof. There, climbing up onto the air conditioning unit, the badger as it is known here, she stretched her crooked hands up into the air. 

    “Once I was even higher than this,” she said and for a second, squinting, I could see her sprinting gaily across the surface of the moon. 

    A young girl again. 

    Free. 

    Miss you, ever yours,

    Sven. 

 

 

    

Dear Stanley, 

    How is life with you wherever you are? I imagine you playing a steel drum somewhere. Were you musical as a child? Or I see you sitting on a toilet straining, thanks to the fibre-free local food. Today we moved Roxana Madani and her three children, Sara, Simin and Soraya. Their father Kamran, part-time tram driver part-time waster, never should have married the bloody fool, had died. 

    Roxana who had long ago, in order to account for their father’s numerous long absences, told her children that their father was a spy, now told them that he had been killed on a dangerous mission, Foreign Embassy, skylight, treacherous slippery roof tiles in stormy weather. But it had been Roxana who had found him, pushed under his own tram for non-payment of debts by the Koshogi Brothers, co-joined twins and grand scions of a gambling syndicate which they ran with ruthless intensity. In her flat she had 306 plastic bath toys, ducks, alligators, frogs, little steamships, mills with working waterwheels, submarines, water lilies, and a lacquered box in which she kept all her hairdressing equipment. In lieu of payment she cut each of our hair and, remembering how you said I had something of the Jean Seberg about me, I asked her to do it in that style, you know like in the poster of À Bout de Souffle you had up in your room in The Swiss Card Sharp Summer School

    Stanley, you always leave me breathless. 

    Yours ever, 

    Sven. 

   

Dear Stanley, 

    I remember how you told me that once you were in love, you were forever in love, that what you had done in the past was no forecast of your future. So let me tell you about Benyamin Turan. 

    By all accounts Turan had always been a bum, a womaniser, a scoundrel, a gambler. At 15 years old he’d had Kiss My Crack tattooed across his bum cheeks and Don’t Mess With Me I’m One Dangerous Motherfucker, across the knuckles of his left, punching, hand (apparently the phrase is shorter in Arabic - لا تعبث معي ، أنا موظر خطير).

    By the time he was 18 he had held up a post train, turned over a laundromat, robbed a pet shop. 

    People said there was no hope for him. It was all going to end badly. 

    Then he met Yasamin and everything had changed. 

    “If you want to stay with me,” she said, “you have to go straight.” 

    “Like an arrow,” he said and two weeks later he was looking around for a premises to open up a shop. 

    “We’ll sell ants,” he said, “ant paperweights, ant deodorant, ant cuddly toys, ant books, Ant and Bee and the Doctor, ant pencil ends, elaborate ant hats, ant jigsaw puzzles.”

    The shop was a roaring success and now they are moving to a bigger apartment. It has a bidet in every room and views over the distant olive plantations! At night they will be able to watch the trees grow, open wide the windows and smell the oil. 

    Dear Stanley I dream of one day when we will be together. That I will find you somewhere out here. 

    That I haven’t made this journey for nothing. 

    Yours in perpetuity,

    Sven. 

 

But perpetuity is a long time and it doesn’t account for people like Captain Newheart, sir! turning up. 

    It doesn’t account for the end of the postcards, the final days of their removal business. 

    Sven’s mission. 

    Perpetuity may suggest a vastness but on the specifics it is strangely silent. 
 
Monserrat Cabellé - O mio babbino caro

 

Picture from Pixabay 

 

Part 13