Halfmoons...: Over the Jade River

HALFMOONS…

Over the jade river

Ed Salama

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Lincoln Shanghai

HALFMOONS…

Over the jade river All Rights Reserved © 2003 by Ed Salama

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

iUniverse, Inc.

For information address:

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Lincoln, NE 68512

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This is a fiction. Events, character names and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead is a mere coincidence.

ISBN: 0-595-26975-3

ISBN: 9-7814-6208-546-0 (e-book)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

C H A P T E R 1

C H A P T E R 2

C H A P T E R 3

C H A P T E R 4

C H A P T E R 5

C H A P T E R 6

C H A P T E R 7

C H A P T E R 8

C H A P T E R 9

C H A P T E R 10

C H A P T E R 11

C H A P T E R 12

C H A P T E R 13

C H A P T E R 14

C H A P T E R 15

C H A P T E R 16

C H A P T E R 17

C H A P T E R 18

C H A P T E R 19

C H A P T E R 20

C H A P T E R 21

C H A P T E R 22

"True,

I am more clever

Than all the vain characters,

The doctors and masters,

Writers

No doubts plague me, No scruples as well, I’m not afraid of devil Nor of hell,"

—Faust

All alone in his office

"A half moon looked over the city, The city has fallen, Only the hills and rivers remain. In spring,

The streets were green, With grass and trees, Sorrowing over the times. Flowers were weeping, A bird startled my heart, With fear, Fear of departing,

Fires were burning for three months"

—Du Fu,

This is the true story of Nicholas Dimitrius Vassilis that I have been compelled to share with my clients, who are also my friends, because I keep hearing all sort of nonsense about him and the circumstances under which his end came about.

You see, in my barbershop people come to get their hair cut. They sit there reading the papers and believe every thing they read. I have known Nicky since he was a little kid and I still remember the day he was brought in for the first time to get a hair cut. I think that it was 26 years ago, or maybe it was only 20. He came with his mother, or maybe with his father. I think that he cried as many little children do when they come to me for the first time, but sometimes I think that he didn’t cry at all and I thought that he was such a different child. I had cut his father’s hair also when he moved into the neighborhood, or probably that was when he started working for the docks. I remember his mother trying to get a job at the hospital, or maybe it was at the school. So I am trying to remember every thing his father had told me even though his mother usually did all the talking.

It is difficult to remember all the stories you hear if you are a barber. Every client has a story or two. Some have five stories that they keep talking about all the time and I am forced to listen. But I certainly am trying to do the best that my memory allows me to do. After all, I have been cutting hair for over sixty-four years because I had started when I met Irene my second wife, oh God, no, she was my third wife.

Memory is a funny thing when a man is 79, actually I may well be over 80 because my birth certificate was lost, but that is a different story. At any rate, I hope that you don’t believe in what you have been reading about this case. That is the honest advice I have been giving to every one who comes for a hair cut, but because I work only two days a week, many of them don’t have any way of getting the real story of that young man Nicky, and if you have any inquiry, come on the evenings of either Tuesday or Friday, get a great haircut and we can talk. If you

can’t make it to the shop, I work also on Wednesdays but by appointments only.

Sincerely,

George The Barber

C H A P T E R 1  

It was the only painting she had given him and that was exactly two years and eleven days ago.

He kept looking at the painting while his hands were crunching some unseen papers. The shy half-moon trying to pierce through a multi-layered swell of clouds looked down at the green hills where a young and joyous shepherd stood next to the sparkling stream, surrounded by a thousand yellow flowers. The happy shepherd tended to her flock. He used to think that all shepherds are either boys or old men until he got this painting and it had the first female shepherd he could ever see. He knew how to decode the Kanji letters for Shen Yang, where the painting was signed, but forgot how to pronounce the name of the painter. A female painter, could be?

He remembered the day she visited him in London for the first time. She was wearing the red silk blouse that had more golden stars than what you could ever see any time in this wet city. Golden stars shining against her soft, glossy, long, black hair. Seeing her stepping out of the vintage car is, in it-self, an epiphany. He needed to see this, to see her stepping out of the BBB. The B Cube. Big Black Bentley, bigblackbentley, exhaled in one single word to mean her.

His lover.

But after a few moments he left the window open and tried to follow the tunes of his favorite music coming from the stereo system to drop over the city that had symbolized success, adventure, arrival and security. He was amused by the novel idea that did set in his mind suddenly after a successful stock option settlement that had left his bank a dozen million Sterling richer; To splash his music on the big city. The rain had started shortly after her arrival and because the living-room window was still open, the curtain’s edge flew out and got all soaked in the rain. Rain strangely similar to the rain falling now and knocking mercilessly at the closed windows. But here, they have personalized the rain; they call it Monsoon.

That evening, they had talked about how to search for the Buddha within and he asked her about the meaning of Karma and the special beauty she saw in a half-moon. Half way to perfection! Nicky She would titter in what he thought was a pure, innocent, almost childish but somehow a knowing laugh. She came closer to stare him in the eyes, And if you do find the Buddha within yourself, don’t kill him!

She talked about things he had never heard before. Never. They went on for hours before making love in a cold apartment with streetlights penetrating from every window, including the one with the white, soaked curtain.

The city had promised rain almost every evening and it did pour down today also while he labored over three computer terminals and four phone lines in his crowded office. When she left the car, with the Chauffeur holding the door and covering her with a huge umbrella, she had the painting wrapped under her arm and walked rapidly with the sort of a smile that little children do when they are up to something naughty. Her eyes glistened like five-carat diamonds reflecting a million London lights under the rain. She had already finished her Masters at Oxford and was starting her Ph.D., so she always talked as if she is giving a lecture, even in bed. She explained to him a lot of the academic abbreviations, what each means and how much investment in time and money was involved and he asked her how far could each of the abbreviations take a person in life and what would be the best one to have? For this, she could only laugh.

She thought that he was very funny and he blushed and giggled when she told him so.

Then he kept listening in silence with one hand resting on her breast and the other navigating in his hair, awe-stricken, because he realized that he didn’t have any abbreviations.

"The poem has a four-word verse. Dates back to the Seventh century BC. Shih Ching was the Third of the Five Classics. Confucius himself selected and edited these poems: Poems singing the daily life of peasants, their sorrows and joys, occupations and festivities.

A simple language for simple emotions, Nick!"

He felt lightheaded because he had already downed four drinks, at hearing his name echoing against the raindrops knocking on the glass windows. On touching her cheek, she smiled again her sweet smile, just as children do, but that was a bigger than usual smile. He helped her unbutton her delicate silk blouse and his index finger touched two of the golden yellow stars, making no comment before moving on to caress the other warm, almost broidered but bigger, dark stars on her breasts that hardened instantly to his touch. She shivered against his hungry body being burned with an insatiable lust. Her lips were aching as they did since she first saw him and he met them, with sheer determination, halfway. She sighed. His hands were searching for all the scattered stars that have lost their original arrangement and became, forever, separated from the half-moon they once had for company around another planet. She sighed again in a desperate, twisting and recoiling soprano of only two vowels-turned-into-consonants, ahmmmmmms and ohmmmmms that seemed to have neither a beginning nor an end.

Only two twin sounds accompanying the fireworks.

A simple language for simple emotions, he thought.

Later that evening, the painting fell off the side of the sofa when her leg stretched high over his shoulder. After loving her with the power of a tornado, she surprised him by wanting to talk again about the other half of the Shih Ching. He didn’t know that it had another half and looked intensely in her eyes with the orgasmic pain still creeping inside his veins.

The other half was the court poems about the Chinese feudal nobility,

She told him, My favorite one is by that great poet, a noble by birth who wrote Li Sao, which means Encountering Sorrow, an intimate revelation of a soul tormented by failure in the search of the ultimate ideal, Nick.

Peasants. Nobles. England. China. He contemplated the striking similarities as the music came to an unexpected end.

The rain kept falling.

Confucius said, to have friends come from afar is happiness, is it not, Nick?

He nodded in approval to the darkness.

Her voice filled that gap of silence emanating from his dead stereo in the living room.

In the Book of Poetry, she went on, it was written, be apprehensive, be cautious, as if on the brink of a deep abyss, as if treading on thin ice.

But he couldn’t think of poetry and all the time she spoke, he was thinking of lovemaking under a ferocious rain in a living room with an open window. Of the music that stops exactly when they both started groaning making their fused moans the only perceptible sounds on the Thames. Of smart financial moves by sharp men that generate their own orgasmic energy.

Millions.

Hundred millions.

Thousand millions.

Just add a decent number of zeros to any smart formula.

He couldn’t even guess what was she thinking. Even looking her in the eyes, in daylight, didn’t help him guessing, so understanding her was problematic at best. But at that sofa, he needed neither understanding nor any elaborate knowledge. She did most of the talking and he did all the moving. A division of labor, that works.

Later he had turned on the light and warned her not to step on the painting.

The painting had traveled with him across the oceans from London to Singapore. He was seeing, under the half-moon, all the documents he had carefully filed in color-coded covers, being shredded by an imaginary machine that kept gulping every order he had received: Buy. Sell. Hold. Hold. Sell. Buy. Sell. Sell. Cover. Destroy. Destroy. Destroy.

During his last week at the office, his orders were mainly to destroy. So all his energy was mobilized to move in that one direction. He knew what to do. Destruction means safety. Rescue. Salvation. Avoiding an encounter with sorrow.