The Atlas полностью

The bill came to $4.60. He was going to leave six, which would keep a dollar in his pocket after the bus. When the old lady came, she said: Whaieee now e'thing OK?

Nodding silently, he took out seven dollars.

Too much! she shrieked.

Wearily he pushed it into her hand.

T'ank you, t'ank you!

Thank you, he said. As he got up, he watched her fingers tighten ecstatically around the money.

p. xi

Compiler's Note: James Branch Cabell quotation — Let Me Lie, Being in the Main an Ethnological Account of the Remarkable Commonwealth of Virginia and the Making of Its History (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1947), p. 17.

91

"Houses," Roberts Camp section — C. H. Hinton, M.A., The Fifth Dimension (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1906), p. 38.

145

"Spare Parts," first Somalia section, "The principal meteorological factors" — W. Thompson, The Climate of Africa (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 3.

214

"The Atlas," Bible excerpt — New Oxford version, Proverbs 7:25–29.

214

"The Atlas," Qur'-An excerpt — A.J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (New York: Collier Books, 1955), XXVII:41–47.

222

"The Atlas," Sarajevo brochure extract — Sarajevo Tourist Association booklet, "Sarajevo, Yugoslavia: English" (Novi Sad: Munir Ras-idovic, 1985).

230 "The Adas," Lautreamont excerpt — Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and Poems, trans. Paul Knight (New York: Penguin, 1978), p. 281.

248—49

"The Atlas," first translation of Snow Country sentence — Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country, trans. Edward G. Seidensticker (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, Perigree Books, 1981; repr. of 1957 Knopf ed.), p. 3.

249

"The Atlas," second translation of Snow Country sentence — Yasunari Kawabata, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, trans. Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988), p. 228 ("Gleanings from 'Snow Country' ").

249-50

Note: "Translations" of the Kawabata sentence on these pages are mine.

320

"The Hill of Gold," Masada section, "The mind of the righteous": — New Oxford version, Proverbs 15:28.

324

"The Hill of Gold," Masada section, Judith's words — Apocrypha, New Oxford Version, Judith 8:16.

333

"Disappointed by the Wind" — Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, ed. Gary Smith, trans. Richard Sieburth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 6 (letter to Martin Buber).

379

"Fortune-Tellers," Sphere of Stars section, Coptic text — James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 3rd rev. ed. (Harper San Francisco, 1990), "The Concept of Our Great Power" (VI, 4), p. 313.

408

"The Street of Stares," third section, "I look on the blacks as a set of monkeys…" — M. F. Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria 1835— 86 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1979), p. 45, quoted in Eve Mumewa D. Fesl, Conned! (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993), p. 64.

431

"Say It with Flowers" — When I returned to that bar a year later, the woman with ten husbands was still there. It was night. She clutched me fiercely like a bird of prey and drew me in, shrilly and threateningly cawing entreaties. The place was full of men and terrifying laughter. The next year, no one I knew worked there.

Author's Note

"Opening the Book," the New York section of "Cowbells," "Lunch," "Charity," the New York section of "Five Lonely Nights," and "What's Your Name?" first appeared (in more or less that order) in the 1994 special New York issue of Grand Street.

"The Back of My Head" first appeared in an abbreviated form in The Los Angeles Times Magazine in 1992. This story, along with all of this book's other 1992 pieces set in ex-Yugoslavia (except for "Where You Are Today"), was part of four BBC Radio 4 broadcasts which I made in Berlin in 1992 called "The Yugoslav Notes." (The Yugoslavia pieces in The Atlas are accompaniments to the sections "Where Are All the Pretty Girls?" and "It's Not a War" in my essay "Rising Up and Rising Down"). I am happy now to restore "The Back of My Head" to its original form.

"An Old Man in Old Grayish Kamiks" was first presented (in abridged form) in 1994 in a BBC radio program entided "Four Corners."

"The Prophet of the Road" first appeared in The Los Angeles Times Magazine in 1992.

The San Diego section of "Houses" first appeared in Larry McCaftery's anthology Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation [Boulder: Black Ice Books (Fiction Collective Two), 1993).

"Under the Grass" first appeared in 1994 in Grand Street, minus the final "Roma" section which they did not care for.