The Voyeur

By Christopher Konrad

A woman sees Dante everywhere; Karl runs and runs and cannot recapture his lost love; Celine, a Thai trans-woman, falls for an artist who is infatuated with her as he is with Ian Fairweather; an ex-con travels to Germany to meet his favourite author Herta Mueller; a soldier’s wife comes back from the brink; a businessman meets a Muslim woman over a chair incident; Paul, a rat-historian, traces his ‘mischief’s’ origins back to Kafka’s Josephine the Mouse Singer. Whether a soldier’s wife, someone observing life from her veranda in an everyday suburban neighbourhood, or a murder of crows regretting their lost chance at ruling the world, in this collection lies a multivariate of human, and other, experiences and voices that stretch across the borderlines of here and there, of what sounds impossible, but implacably located in the now of everyday life.

This is a bunch of stories inhabited by real people/ beings who are all, in their own ways, undergoing a quest – whether running to or from love, from themselves and others or running towards better versions of themselves. They inhabit the world of literature and art, prisons, hospitals, war or back water towns. They are a multiplicity of wounds and celebrations where some of these stories are too big for more than one page or too many to be contained in one book. The author, as both narrator and voyeur, travels a tightrope strung between sadness and hopefulness.

Many of these stories have been published and several have received awards, including The Soldier’s Wife which won the Tod Hunter Short Story prize.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Jul 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781982290450

Christopher Konrad

Christopher is a Western Australian writer. He has poems and short stories published in many journals and online including Westerly, Southerly, The Honest Ulsterman, Regime, Page Seventeen, Island, Cordite and has poems translated in Chinese. Along with many other awards he twice won First Prize for the Tom Collins Poetry Award (2009 & 2018) and the Todhunter Literary Award (2012) for a short story. He is published in Best Australian Poems 2013. He completed his doctorate in creative writing (2012) at Edith Cowan University. His book, Letters to Mark, was published by Regime Books and his book of poetry Argot, was published in 2016 by Pomonal. His latest book, Blind Summits, co-authored with Ross Bolleter, was published in 2020 by Sunline Press.

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Copyright © 2021 Christopher Konrad.

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Images by: Susanne Konrad

ISBN: 978-1-9822-9044-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-9045-0 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 05/10/2021

For Henrietta, best

friend, wife, without whom

these stories really come to naught.

For Susan Midalia - friend, mentor, inspirer.

Contents

The Soldier’s Wife

The Voyeur

Awake

The Reversal of Karl Haltmann

Falling

Conversations with a Crow

The Not-So-Fecund Moment

Celine

The Meeting

Bus Stop

ORSOVI

The Labours of Men

A Murder of Crows

The Prisoner

Top Secrets

Rene T and Dog Investigations

Days of Quiet ....

Morning Hours

Fellow Travellers

In the Rain

The Historian

At Night

Acknowledgments

The Soldier’s Wife

The soldier was a stallion galloping across a grassy, spring field. Nothing could hold him back. He galloped hard and fast. His mane waved like a flag in the air. In the distance lay a great snow-peaked mountain range. His name was Corporal Jonathon Hawkins. He was a powerful, black stallion.

His wife was a boat. A sailboat sailing, aimlessly, across a summer-still lake. There were no mountains on her horizon, just endless gentle winds wafting and the words of her father who loved her very much. Her father whispered in her hair in her university days. What was she doing there? She did not know, but it was like an endless summer-still lake. There was no child Olivia then.

There was her friend, Rie, who wrote books and lived not far from the soldier’s wife. Rie understood things – perhaps because she had lived much and had gone orange picking in small country towns. Perhaps Rie also understood things because she listened to the news and understood that the world was not round at all but lumpy and full of loopholes and other holes and improvised explosive devices called IEDs, not to be confused with IUDs.

Olivia (many years after she was born to Corporal Jonathon Hawkins and his wife) would have lots of conversations with Aunty Rie (after the so-called war that was not really a war at all). Olivia would do the grocery shopping on the days that her mother could not sail through because she had become what is known as listless. Others had technical names for what Olivia’s mother had become, others like the soldier’s wife’s friend, Antonia, the nurse. Antonia would explain to Olivia that her mother needed to recover, that’s all.

Re-cover what, thought Olivia. The couch? But the couch was still good. It was not worn out and she remembered tumbling off it in play with her father the Corporal (which is what her father told her to call him, yes sir, daddy sir, is what she would say). He would lift her into the air where she could see for miles and fly over great mountain ranges. Then he would plummet her to the earth. Then he would zoom her up again before she could smell the carpet. Her legs like the long bony legs of a stork dangling behind her and she, flying free.

The soldier did not overtly display any of the great qualities of the stallion. He simply was one. No one could saddle him or ride him in that field in which he galloped free. But the sergeant sure did ride him later (as all sergeants are want to do).

But Rie’s view of the world held true. There were lots of loopholes, and worm holes, and potholes, and great vast craters. If you fell into a crater you could fall all the way through to China and pop up like a prairie dog sniffing foreign air. Maybe you would even be upside down.

The soldier’s job was to make sure that there were no holes at the end of his shift, lifting gently the IEDs that Rie knew existed, but of which the soldier’s wife knew nothing. Antonia, the nurse knew about such matters and was good at doing jigsaw puzzles. Putting them together that is. But she, like many of her colleagues, did not know how a jigsaw puzzle that was already complete (which is what the soldier’s wife seemed to be) could be put together. She seemed complete, but everyone knew she was in pieces. So Antonia, like many of her colleagues, used words like recovery and mental health, although, the word ‘mental’ seemed like such an arbitrary and elusive notion, like gentle lapping waves on the shore of a beautiful lake. The nurse looked out over the lake and in the distance, the far, far, distance, she could barely make out a snow-capped mountain range. On the lake, white sail boats skimmed across the surface.

Antonia, Rie and Olivia would have many arcane conversations (later, after they learnt that the stallion had to be put down. No one knew why the soldier had to be put down, but there you are). These conversations were really arcane to only one of these three people. Olivia. Having said that, Rie only knew some things and the nurse simply did her job and did not think about such matters as stallions, lakes and mountains and storks with great dangly legs.

The soldier’s wife’s mother became what they call ‘collateral damage’. She became a lake in the mountains, deep, with currents not seen on the surface, but which, if you should sink down into them, would grip you and carry you deeper down, where your body would never be found again. The sailing boat, which was her daughter, no longer sailed swiftly or lightly across her surface (that all-mother skin) which could hold all the suffering and pain that a world could vomit on you. No, the little boat that was her daughter lay, slightly out of kilter, moored at one of the bays along the shores of the lake.

Rie and Antonia would have many conversations by the lakeside with the soldier’s wife’s mother. They heard how she understood pain (she had given birth to three children, a daughter and two sons). She knew about death. Her husband had died of a rare cardiac infection when he was just 45. So the mother, whose name was Jana, knew much of what went on in Rie’s lumpy world full of holes. She had learnt much of IEDs. What a strange name for such an interesting new mode of killing people. Improvised: 1. Create and perform (music, drama, or verse) spontaneously or without preparation. 2. Produce or make (something) from whatever is available: I improvised a costume for myself; sleeping on improvised beds. What a lovely word. It might have been a can of beer sitting on a low stone wall, like a monkey trap. It could entice some young, naive soldier to pick it up and have a laugh with his mates only to find, one split second later, that half the young man was gone and more collateral damage (as they call it) ripples out into the world across many more lakes.

How many lakes could take so much more improvisation? And yet, this is exactly what Jana had to do. Improvise. Ironically. Like the device (another interesting word) that brought death to her son-in-law and which brought so much more, like a tar-black gift that kept on giving (or taking, in this case).

Oh no, it’s not what you think. Jana’s son-in-law, the soldier, her daughter his wife, was an expert in IEDs. This was not the problem. He knew precisely and exactly how they were made and where they were likely to be located. He knew how to dismantle them. He was what could be called collateral damage.

A fellow soldier (young, fresh and naive, like so many of them) left his part of a tightly and strictly coded grid of which his squad was a well-oiled part. This young, naive man, whose name needs to remain unspoken, left his well-structured military grid when he saw, to his horror, a man’s head spiked on a stick driven into hard baked ground at the base of a hill not far from the grid. As he walked towards the bloodied object (it turned out it was just a dummy’s head, but smeared with real blood) he tripped a very fine wire setting off a series of mines that surrounded the road upon which his orderly grid of men had marched so precisely and so well (until now). Young and naive men are known to fuck up (some research going on about myelin sheaths on this matter).

In any case, the ripple of collateral spread out far and wide from that dummy’s head in that country so far, far away, across mountain ranges, Spring fields, serene lakes and over sail boats skimming across these lakes.

Rie, Antonia, Jana and Olivia would sit with the soldier’s wife on many afternoons chatting and sharing tea and biscuits or sandwiches. Maybe this helped because, every now and then, she would smile and show signs of Antonia’s ‘recovery’. Olivia came to understand that there was no such thing as recovery because Olivia, too, had become