Insignificant Others

By Peter Fleming

This collection of memoirs, essays and wayward observations, often folding multiple literary forms together in its struggle to reveal a common truth between past, present and future, is uniquely pleasing in its eclectic and often frantic combinations of form and purpose. At the same time it struggles to d

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookTrail Publishing
• Release date: May 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637670231

Peter Fleming

Peter Fleming is Professor of Organisation Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is the author of The Mythology of Work (Pluto, 2015) and The Death of Homo Economicus (Pluto, 2017).

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Copyright © 2021 Peter Fleming.

Paperback: 978-1-63767-024-8

eBook: 978-1-63767-023-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021900976

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction

Cover Photo by: Cyril Boyd Photography

Author Photo by: Paul Sparrow

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Contents

1    Nazarene Climes

Incident at Orleans

Ghost of a Christmas Memory

Impoverished

2    Greetings from the Death of History

Expletive Deleted

Minnesota Strange

Little Pink Car

Harry Potter and the Classless Society

King of Knaves

Hell’s Angel

Hitch

My Rubber Allergy

Yer Unmentionables

3    Insignificant Others

Girl in a Bottle

Getting it Up

Wallace’s Big Ship

Inside the Magic Mousetrap

The Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk

Dada

The Girl in the Moon

Who’s Our Mozart?

4    Golgotha

Entropy is the Fate of Everything

The Quality of Mercy

Hip Replacement Surgery

The Little Gulag

The Wandering Rocks.

Diablo Meets the Ghost of Kafka

5    …And I will Make Thee Fishers of Men.

Fanfare for the Uncommon Man

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive, but to justify all that has happened.

The Brothers Karamazov

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

The Gulag Archipelago.

For Tom

Part One

Nazarene Climes

Incident at Orleans

Now then, boys and girls, settle down, draw your comforters up tightly beneath your little chins, and pay no attention to that distant howling; it is but the Yuletide winter wind, and here we are, all together, cozy and snug beneath the golden glow of the candle, safe as bedbugs with cookies and hot chocolate by our sides, and little to trouble us—with the imminent arrival of Santa Claus, or Sinter Klaasen, as he was once known, many, many centuries ago—but the dreams-come-true of the innocent and the blessed.

Little Sinter was born into the clan of the Klaasen elves in the early part of the Fifth Century, the son of the elfish chieftain, Wotan, most revered of the Elfish kings and thus destined for greatness even as he drew his first breath. The Klaasen elves, like elves everywhere in those ancient times, were nomads, believed to have entered eastern Europe by crossing the Volga around AD 370, where almost immediately they were engaged in pitched and bloody battle (what they lacked in heft they made up for in numbers) with the tribes of the Vandals and the Ostrogoth’s, and established an elfish territory in the snow-laden pine-forests between the Carpathian mountains and the Danube, to the west. I need hardly remind you, my young friends, how unequivocally unused the Balkan tribes of these remote, mountainous parts were to aggression on the part of any elfish peoples, whether elves, gnomes, leprechauns, sprites, or even the woodland trolls, nasty, great buggers though they were, all of whom the humans regarded as inferior, not human at all, laughably subhuman, in fact, and thus fair game to the cruelest mistreatment one species can inflict on another, atrocities meted out with the same indifferent aplomb a schoolboy might employ to immolate a column of ants with the business end of a magnifying glass. The Klaasen elves, it might also do me well to reiterate, were the exception that proves that rule, and, of course, history would record that Sinter was the exception to that exception, stupendously so; an elf like no elf before or since, whose virtues have been extolled, and whose inexplicable generosity of heart and soul has been immortalized in song like a great chorus of echoing bells, down through the annals of time, to this very day.

But I get ahead of myself. Don’t be alarmed, boys and girls! The winter announces its dark, turbulent presence with rare ferocity this night. That melodramatic phenomena you just experienced was but the Donner and Blitzen of lightning, as expressed in the Germanic of the Fifth Century, names you will recognize from the fabled story of Sinter and destined (unless I miss my guess) soon to reoccur in the course of this history. Settle now! All is just Donner and Blitzen!

Among his other elfish abnormalities, Sinter grew into young adulthood with an unusual rapport with woodland wildlife—the mountain elk, or reindeer especially—not that elfish folk couldn’t communicate with all manner of inferior species, to employ the Gothic conceit. But rather than a cultivator of the moose, the bear, the mountain lion (or puma), the hare, the squirrel, the chipmunk and the fox, as fodder for the elfish cuisine, Sinter was well-loved by all, consumer of none, inferior or otherwise, which made his peculiar passivity, to say nothing of his truly uncharacteristic jolliness, a great benefit to his elfish tribesmen as we shall soon see.

It must be remembered that, as uncharacteristic as Klaasen ferocity was, when compared to the native kindness of other elfish folk, and certainly when compared to human ferocity… well… it’s easy to see why the Klaasen elves rode into battle—bows drawn, notched, and swords unsheathed—in such a manner as to allow a quick retreat to the haven of the forest, which in time became as much a sanctuary as a home amongst the shadows of the evergreens, surrounded by harmless woodland chirping and fluttering. Recollect also that an entirely clean escape from the Goth, Visigoth, Vandal, and Celtic territories that lay on this side of the Danube was also beyond their grasp. The Roman Empire, once a beacon and terror to the world, had by the Fourth Century been so enfeebled that, far from the empires of Julius and Augustus Caesar, it was now ruled by two branches of a much-diminished family, the Theodosians. The eastern heart of the empire resided in the city of Ravenna, and to the west, the no-less formidable city of Constantinople. With the Caspian Sea closing off the south that left only the frozen north (as though the Balkan territories weren’t inclement enough!) to flee in escape, and the fear among the elfish folk was that no northern destination would be far north enough, short of the North Pole, to provide a safe harbor.

It was during a particularly cruel and harsh winter (a winter perhaps, boys and girls, not so far removed in ferocity from the winter we’re experiencing tonight) that the Hunnish tribes penetrated the territories east of the Carpathian Mountains and brought with them a fresh definition of the word barbarian. And by far the most barbaric of all the Huns, hundreds-of-thousands in number, was the youngest son of the Hunnish chieftain, Rugila.

His name was Attila.

While the Gaul, Celtic, Alan, Goth, Visigoth, Vandal, and Turkic peoples had a long history of mutual animosity toward each other (and needless to say, also toward the dwindling number of dwarves, sprites, and other elfish folk who ventured from the forests at their peril), the dreaded Hun represented a new order of cruelty that struck terror into the hearts of men and elves alike. The tribes of the ancient eastern lands slaughtered away at each other… but politely… if such can be envisioned by the modern imagination… as a game of chess might be played, where people die in mass decimation, but where nevertheless certain rules of conduct are followed for the sake of one and all. It was never difficult to deduce where the abominable Huns had struck—not only were the villages and towns they attacked littered with headless and crucified corpses—most assuredly against the rules of the game—not only were their churches and cathedrals ransacked of their gold and holy relics (not cricket, that!) and then burned to the ground, even the fields of wheat and barley were reduced to valueless, smoking char, inedible to Hun and Goth alike, the soil salted so that nothing would grow there ever again! Missing from the piles of smoking corpses, left behind as though such heights of savagery were not sufficient unto the day, were the youths of the villages and towns—the promise of the future dragged screaming from their beds and enslaved to a tribe that none of their people, barbaric as they were in their own ways, had ever witnessed before. Golden relics, life-sustaining crops, and everything else of value disappeared in an inferno of cold-hearted barbarism—the Hunnish destruction was absolute—to the point of threatening the Huns themselves, who were not renowned for their forward-thinking or long-term planning; this uniquely sadistic form of superior race burned the territories from east to west, from the towers of Constantinople to the Carpathian mountains, then back again, until they were so laden with wealth and with slaves in barren land that there was nowhere to go except the sea, to the south, or off to conquer their way out, through the armies of the Roman Empire, starting to the east in Constantinople, if they could.

With Wotan himself as my witness, my little darlings, and you mustn’t fear the terrible truths of life, as you listen for yourselves to the storm outside—it’s Donner and Blitzen gaining strength with each passing moment—the ancient Huns performed a miracle of their own, with the gathering of another terrible storm. After the Balkan territories began to fall before the Hunnish lust for glory and death, they turned their attention elsewhere, penetrating the forest dwellings of the elfish peoples, whose numbers had been so diminished by the outer holocaust that even the elves, not least the Klaasen elves, were on the verge of extinction.

While the Huns invaded the forests in search of a solution to their predicament, the Klaasen elf Sinter was caught unaware by their forward guard in the village of Orleans where Sinter had been busying himself on a most unlikely mission of his own, and was dragged kicking and screaming into the heart of Attila’s rough encampment on a hill overlooking the doomed little town.

Do you know who I am, elf?

You’re a Hun.

You are wise, little man.

The corpses piled up by your tent are compelling evidence, Sinter replied. Why am I here?

Instead of dead? The flat-faced, black-haired Hun chuckled in the shadows of his tent, gnawing on the bone of a roasted horse, washed down with fermented mare’s milk. "You are wondering why haven’t I beheaded you and hung your head on a stick outside my door? Why are you still here? I have devoted my life to killing better adversaries, elf. Yet here you stand—what’s your explanation?"

The inner working of Hunnish mercy escapes me, Attila.

"Ah! So I’m not unknown to you—your reputation precedes you too. Sinter of the Klaasen elves. The fat jolly elf. The children of Orleans referred to you as Sinter Klaasen as though your tribal name were an honorific of which to be proud. After we separated their heads from their shoulders and burned their village, my troops found gifts of fruit and nuts clutched to their lifeless breasts, distributed by you so I’m told? Dregs of the forest no self-respecting Hun would stoop to eat! Even small, metal objects, forged by elfish hands, whose purpose we could not divine."

They were toys—you… slaughtered their possessors?

That is what we do with sheep, Sinter! roared the Hunnish chieftain, wiping grease from his chin with his palm. That is what they are born for! Certainly not to be mollified with… this word you used… ‘toys’? Is that an Elfish word?

And others, as well.

"But not Hunnish. You arouse my curiosity, elf. Do you think you can appease the likes of the Visigoths, or Vandals with bribes of fruit, trinkets, and… toys? The elves and their kind are a dying race—in a hundred years they’ll be a myth, a rumor, nothing more. "

Bribery is not my mission here, Attila. Nor anywhere.

What then?

Kindness.

Kindness! Attila threw back his enormous head and roared with laughter. "Another word not found in any human tongue!"

Not yet. But I’m not done with the dissemination.

Beyond Attila’s tent, the brutal Yuletide winter (not unlike this one, boys and girls, except without the Donner and Blitzen) continued to grip the rolling fields, the shivering forests, their brine-encrusted needles glistening beneath the misty glow of an enormous, skull-like moon, whose pale luminosity threw the distant Urals into silhouette against the daggers of the stars, three in the Sagittarian quarters with one in backward motion, a wanderer like Eros, child of Aphrodite, drawing back his bowstring to let fly. Horses stamped and snorted great foggy jets, a pearly mist rising from their flanks and backs like strings of swirling ectoplasm. Slowly freeze-drying skeletons swung and rattled from the nearby branches in the howling wind, or sagged on oaken crosses. Many Hunnish warriors stamped and steamed as well, drinking fermented milk and cursing the foulness of the Balkan winter. Even so, the encampment was warm and bright (or at least not frozen to a briny, silver postcard) made so by ten enormous, surrounding bonfires kept well-fueled with the burning fat and flesh of Ostrogoth corpses.

What is the value of this ‘kindness’ you speak of—it is madness! Madness flung in the face of an uncaring, barbarian horde!

"You’re mistaken, Attila, kindness is its own reward and need serve no other purpose than its own. Thanks to kindness, here I sit, in the comfort of your tent, rather than adding fuel to the fire beyond your door. Oh, I don’t mean your kindness, of course, Attila; the lowliest woodland creature knows too well that kindness is foreign to Hunnish nature. Yet (as you say) your curiosity has been aroused, and so I live and breathe."

Yes, Attila grunted with an evil twinkle in his eyes. "But for how much longer? You trespass in Hunnish territory, yet pay no tribute. You’re an enigma to me, elf, and it preys on my mind. I give you your life, and that of your clan, who I have rounded out of the forest for the sake of preserving this mad conceit you profess, which preys upon me no end, that there may one day be room in the human heart for kindness! Will wonders never cease? In many ways, your insanity mirrors the ravings of the Nazarene, Yesu, who was also appended with an honorific, Christo, as a personal appellation. He was crucified in Golgotha. Have you ever seen a man crucified, Sinter? I’ll arrange a demonstration if you like; it may change your mind about the role of kindness in the world of men. It’s a horrifying thing—and this is Attila who tells you so!—yet they say this carpenter, this Jew! died well. He died nailed to a cross more than three hundred years ago yet his legacy grows. How? It piques my curiosity. It’s infuriating. I fear Hunnish common sense might one day go the way of your kind… lost in the mists of time."

All too aware of the stench of burning flesh from without, Sinter replied:

Your name will not be lost in the mists of time, Attila.

"You may take your leave now, little elf. Your safe passage back to the forest Attila guarantees. There you will find your sad little band of brothers, your pathetic tribesmen, also returned unharmed. But it will not always be so. South you cannot go. A great sea lies there, impassable by Klaasen and Hun alike. To the east and west lies the Empire, divided and much diminished since its golden era but still a force to be reckoned with, even by Hunnish cunning. So you must go north. Go now and go far—you cannot go too far. The conditions you will find most hostile, but not nearly so much as the conditions here, if you think the forest will be enough to shelter you from what comes. So go—who knows? Some of you may even survive; then, from the far North, you will be free to distribute your trinkets to your heart’s content. Go now, before I change my mind!"

And so Sinter went, but before going too far he planted a flower in the snow for the barbarians to find. A kind of toy you could say, for their consideration. After that he disappeared into the forest. He went fast and far, and the rest we all know, boys and girls. Thanks in no small part to the Klaasen elves’ fondness for woodland wildlife, both great and small, many of the Klaasen elves successfully fled the Armageddon-to-come, whose thunderheads gathered ominously to the west of the Danube and established a sort of homeland in the fierce ice-fields of the far North, where flowers never grow, where the sun never sets and where like an eternal light they could indeed disseminate the doctrine of kindness as others had before. It is that doctrine we honor now. True to Attila’s suspicions, it is not Hunnish savagery we celebrate, in the yuletide, but human kindness, a kind of golden eternal candlelight, inextinguishable even by the fiercest wind. So now to sleep, boys and girls. The storm will fade away, into the mists of time. Don’t fear the howling outside; it will pass, and the light of human kindness will still shine, the ground it illuminates swept clean of the perfidies of the past, in preparation for a brand new day.

Ghost of a Christmas Memory

I  didn’t know Jenny Green personally, but I knew of her, and I knew her type. It was a type I admired. Likely, I saw her in passing a time or two in the halls of the Metro Labor Council, in Toronto, which was a sponsor of many left-leaning initiatives, including the initiative that cut Jenny’s brief, incandescent life so short, and where I taught adult basic literacy and wrote labor-friendly curriculum for laid-off Trade Unionists during the early eighties when the heavy industry in Southern Ontario had first begun to fall into ruin and decay. In a way, I was there under false pretenses. As an applicant, I’d been sold to the hiring committee as a brother-in-arms, fist-in-glove with the Canadian labor movement by my supercharged, left-wing militant girlfriend, who would soon become my boss, once removed. In fact, I was no such thing. I was more a mercenary journalist, a collector of experience for money, a desperado artist on the lookout for the interesting, the unusual—anything exorbitant in the nooks and crannies of the human heart, which might fuel my desire to write about life. And in that regard, the Canadian labor movement, for good or ill, turned out to be a goldmine.

The skills and training branch of the Council gave me a twelve-week contract to perform work which, by my estimation, I could complete in a third of the time. But I soon figured out that the writing of curriculum was only the more formal aspect of the job and not even the one on which I was necessarily expected to focus my priorities. Sitting in front of a computer on a cold winter’s morning, in the Council’s spacious, comfortable library, with a coffee by my elbow and a cigarette burning in an ashtray—this was the eighties, after all—my work was incessantly interrupted by one charged-up activist lefty after another, who wanted to vent their spleen over the latest outrage perpetrated against the working class here in Canada, or, more and more, on the poor in places like El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Brazil, Chile and ports farther afield, by the Great Satan Ronald Reagan and his barbarian hordes down in Washington DC. With each interruption, I would pause from the task at hand and listen with what I’m ashamed to admit was a feigned sympathy, until after a while the advantages of working from home began to loom large. But my girlfriend (and boss’s boss) advised against it. The main reason I’d been hired, she pointed out, was my much exaggerated pro-labor sympathies, and I would do well if I wanted my career to flourish to get with the program. So when the Metro Labor folk congregated, sometimes by the hundreds, to descend on the U.S. Embassy on University Avenue, or Queen’s Park, or into the garment district in support of striking trade unionists, I went along with them, placard in hand and fist raised in solidarity. Twelve weeks to complete my contract turned out to be not a moment too many.

This girlfriend of mine, Janet D., had earned her own bona fides in spectacular fashion. During her undergraduate years in Labor Studies at McMaster University, she and an equally committed friend, Paula R, noticed that the Hamilton Labor Council, unlike its Toronto counterpart, didn’t have a skills and education branch. So they formed one… just like that. Two undergraduates! It took time, ferocious perseverance, and diplomacy I would not have credited either of them with possessing, but the job got done. And in its creation, they also attracted a loose alliance of like-minded women who gathered, usually at Janet’s house, on a Thursday night to discuss the issues of the day, spit on Reagan’s effigy, and drink wine. They called these meetings, a bit portentously I always thought, The Oak, (they took place around Janet’s oak dining-room table in the parlor of our home) and I was decidedly not invited, even though I lived there, because of my gender to be sure but mostly because my commitment to the cause of the working class was suspect, to say nothing of my fond naiveté regarding the geopolitical realities erupting all around during those tumultuous years. So I contented myself listening to their conversations from my office upstairs while tapping away on my Smith-Corona electric word-processor. Their conversations were well worth bending an ear to—these were smart, motivated young women—most of them went on to sterling careers in education, labor and politics, not least Andrea H., who from an early start championing public housing decided to run for Hamilton City Council, then made the jump to provincial politics, where she was ultimately elected leader of the New Democratic Party of Ontario. Andrea became a household name all over the country, but they all acquitted themselves remarkably well on their chosen paths, these fiery young Valkyrie of The Oak.

Over time, The Oak itself became legendary in both the Hamilton and Toronto Labor Councils, and I think it was the example of these ferocious women that inspired Jenny Green down her own path within the labor movement. The year before Jenny went, Janet had volunteered to join a group of young Canadians on a trip to Nicaragua, ostensibly to aid the coffee-growers whose men were engaged in pitched jungle warfare with Ronald Reagan’s CIA-backed contrarevolusionista, or contras, against the Sandinista Junta of National Reconstruction under the leadership of Daniel Ortega, but in reality to express solidarity with their Central American sisters and brothers in that violence-plagued country. The Nicaraguans were grateful for any support they could get; their little country hadn’t known a moment’s peace dating back to the first American occupation (1912-1933) as part of the larger Banana Wars, partly inspired by the determination of the United States to keep the contemplated building of the Nicaragua Canal an exclusively Yankee concern, employing only Yankee know-how and for the best interests of the USA alone.

During the cold war years, the rallying cry wasn’t bananas, of course, but Communism, and no less so than in Indonesia, Central and South America became the killing field in an enormous clash of ideologies that has not yet quite played itself out, although in modern times it’s understood that ideology had little to do with the genocide. Central America, after all, harbors an enormous wealth of natural resources and cheap labor, which the communists were hell-bent on stripping from the hands of their capitalist counterparts to the north, for no better reason than to turn it back over to the people to whom it rightfully belonged. And that was not the American way. That this clash of ideologies inspired the appalling heights of barbarism attained in those killing fields, should come as no surprise either—one hundred years of warfare is a sure-fire antidote to the fond Christian conceit that every life is sacred, in the eyes of God, and that the golden rule is the royal road to salvation, the continued nurturance and spreading of human kindness. In Nicaragua, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador and Guatemala, local Mayans, to employ an umbrella term for the native Central Americans, were slaughtered with both bayonet and bullet by U.S. backed rebel forces with the same indifference they brought to the burning of the rain forests and the decimation of the crops. In Argentina (and other places) political dissidents, a strange thing to call such a helpless, desperate people, were rounded up by the thousands, drugged, and simply thrown from airplanes into the sea while in Nicaragua the contras beheaded or dismembered the itinerant Mayan coffee growers, women and children indifferently, though not before first raping and disemboweling them—the shredded remains of one and all finally buried in mass graves, or thrown down wells, whether they were still living or dead.

It was for this sorry state of affairs that Jenny Green had signed up, as Janet D. of the fabled Oak had done before her, in order to go down to Nicaragua, pick coffee-beans, and express solidarity with a people who had known nothing but bitter tears for ten generations. Her bravery in the face of the stories the wire services were dispatching around the world was a thing to behold, but the Christmas season was fast approaching, to further fuel Jenny’s desire, in her small way, to participate in the righting of a monstrous wrong, and nothing her family could say would deter her from packing her knapsack with the requisite laborer’s attire and throwing in her lot with the good people of Central America to alleviate as best she could human barbarism with the contents of the cup of loving kindness, made all the sweeter by the approaching season.

I’ll skip the technicalities of harvesting coffee-beans under very primitive conditions in a tropical climate; as you can imagine, the work was dirty and unpleasant. But morale amongst Jenny’s newfound comrades ran high. They willingly broke their backs all day, then laughed and sang the nights away around a blazing campfire, heated also by the gratitude of an indigenous population otherwise bewildered by the mere fact of their presence. Why on earth had these cheerful Canadian children left the comforts of their homes to face incessant hard labor in one of the world’s bloodiest war zones? It was a Christmas miracle, and like miracles both great and small, it beggared explanation. As the Holy Day itself approached, the work at hand fell to nothing, replaced by ceremonial observances in honor of a newborn child in ancient Bethlehem, two millennia and a world removed. Candles were lit, hymns were sung, wistful letters were written to loved ones back home, and tears were shed for all the misery these people had suffered, the horror and heartbreak and cruelty, which seemed to have become the guiding principle in a world gone mad. In the evenings, however, there was still plenty of good Nicaraguan beer to abet in the rejoicing for the fast-approaching day.

On Christmas day, Jenny and her coffee-brigade friends found themselves in Matagalpa, about eighty miles north of Managua, the capital of Nicaragua and, after Guatemala City, the most densely populated place in Central America. The Nicaraguan civil war, to say nothing of earthquakes and the recently departed Hurricane Mitch, had left the city the worse for wear, but still, as a cultural landmark it was plenty cosmopolitan, and for the first time since they’d arrived, the little brigade felt like tourists. They explored the markets and shops, ate goat stew and drank strong, dark Nicaraguan coffee, chatting as best they could with the curious Matagalpans, who like everyone else wondered what they were doing here. It was here that Jenny met 2nd Lieutenant Roger Mendez Zenon, an officer in the Nicaraguan army. Under what circumstances they met was never established with certainty, but one thing was certain: there was a great attraction between them. They liked each other, as young folk of the opposite sex are wont to experience, even though one of them was a soldier on active duty, and the other a modern-age flower child, fierce, lovely and brimming with idealism, and even though the only language they shared, Lt. Zenon’s broken English notwithstanding, was the language of love. They laughed and flirted with each other down the crowded market avenues until Jenny made it understood she wanted to go back to her hotel room to retrieve an umbrella and sturdier boots as the weather was threatening to turn.

It’s impossible to know for certain what happened next, as Jenny was killed instantly, and Lt. Zenon, though he lived a brief while longer, was in no condition to answer any but the simplest questions, so what follows relies very much on circumstantial evidence and conjecture. When they arrived in her room, Jenny changed her footwear and the young lieutenant did what young men tend to do—with only his limited English he attempted to impress Jenny with stories of his life as a soldier, life on the battlefield, probably embroidering his experience with the stuff of romantic adventure, the fictions of heroism in the face of an implacable enemy. Jenny basked in these Othello-like reminiscences of fearlessness and velour, battles lost and won, the most willing of Desdemona’s, and even went so far as to feign interest when he fished out an old Russian hand-grenade from his kit, which he proffered for her admiration. That the hand-artillery—all the artillery, really—the Nicaraguan army was provided with were of Soviet manufacture and mostly dated back to WWII, was perhaps not as much a cautionary warning to the young lieutenant as it should have been, as even in his childhood he had been hardened by the uncertainties of warfare, but when without cause or explanation the firing-pin sprang out of the grenade he knew full well what the consequences must be. One can imagine a blinding golden flash followed by a deafening bang! then flying metal shards everywhere and the sound of shattering glass. The room was shredded through and through with shrapnel from ceiling to floor, but the grenade hadn’t simply exploded spontaneously in Zenon’s hands. That was evinced by the fact that he had time enough to lay Jenny down on the floor, then cover her with his body as protection against the blast that ultimately killed them both. And further, that his plan hadn’t worked was only a matter of the worst bad luck—Zenon’s body was laced through from stem to stern with shrapnel, and even so, he survived for several hours, while Jenny, who was killed instantly, and whom he had tried so desperately to protect, was found to