After the Ghetto - E3

I had started sleeping again.

Dreamless nights: I was sleeping much better now. At night I would shove the coffee table against the door frame and put the two huge armchairs face to face. In the past seven years, with Fred and I sharing the tiny caravan, I had to sleep on my single chair, twisted between the worn out arms, with a spring under my arsehole pushing up to get in. With Fred gone, for the first time, I could stretch again. That was almost as good as a proper bed. When I got up the next morning I felt like jumping all over the place. Waking up rested: what a luxury.

A few days after my brother's death I was woken up by someone shaking my shoulder vigorously. I opened my eyes. Bent over me against the daylight, my uncle was filling the whole visual field, his face drowned in its own shade, grey dawn light weakly glowing through his hair. He was dripping wet. He looked like a purposeful Poseidon, his head crowned in shining silver.

Rain was battering the caravan roof.

"I guess you disposed of the body didn't you? I thought I told you to bring it to my place." His voice was low and growling, like something huge moving inside a deep cave.
"You thought well" I said. "You did tell me."
"And? Is there a reason why you didn't follow my instructions?"
I was starving.
"Listen Val, is there a reason why you are here? I need to eat right now and to be frank, I care little for your wounded pride."
I am not afraid of Val. His looks are godly but his eighty-year-old body is human. He straightened up.
"I came to tell you that I know where the phone call was coming from. I also wanted to check on Fred's body. The phone is more recent than I first thought and if I am right, there should be some visible clues on him. Where did you bring him? Not to that horrible place in New Cross?"
"So you know whom he was talking to?"
"No. I said I knew where the call was coming from. Not who was making it."
"I don't get it."
"The phone call that killed you brother was coming from the Ghetto."
"This is ridiculous."
This angered him some more.
"I am a telecommunications specialist. I don't see how you can dispute my conclusions. The origin of the call your brother picked up is Canary Wharf's Ghetto - you can triangulate the signal if you want, I personally have all the evidence I need-. The phone call killed your brother, I also know that, and I know how it did it. It would have killed you exactly the same had you picked it up, even though you don't have any French, unlike the rest of your family."
This is another one of his favorite topics. We come from Wallonia. We should all speak French. It is a question of duty, of honor. I have lived in London my whole life. I care little for honor or duty and, with Fred dead, I do not care for family any more.
"Why are you interested all of a sudden? You've never liked him, you've never been able to exchange two words with him. You kept treating him as if he was some sort of spoiled child. Why try to do something for him now? What's in it for you?"
"You will have to make an effort. You will have to talk to me nicer than that. You will have to listen more carefully to what I am telling you. You don't seem to understand: I am telling you that your brother is dead and that the Ghetto did it. The Ghetto!"
"You always blame the Ghetto for everything."
"They are to blame. In this case I have hard evidence. That phone call..."
"You would blame them anyway, wouldn't you. I don't see why you hate them so much."
"They made their choice. They abandoned us. They abandoned the human race."
"They had an opportunity and they took it. Come on, they are our children!"
"They are not mine. My child is here with me"
"Oh yes, and he's doing so well isn't he? He's a drug addict."
"Well, at least he is trying to cope with his condition. No one said it was easy to be a human being."
"But what's the point? What is the point, Val, of staying a human being when you have another solution? What is the point of going through all this, this ordeal? See where that led my brother? He was so depressed he couldn't even eat properly. If he hadn't died he would have ended up killing himself."
"How dare you make fun of this, how dare you! THIS IS WHAT WE ARE" - Val started shouting - "WE ARE HUMAN BEINGS! THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH IT, THIS IS WHAT WE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE, THIS IS WHAT WE ARE SUPPOSED TO STAY! HAVE YOU GOT NO PRIDE,  YOU AND YOUR BROTHER? HAVE YOU GOT NO SELF-RESPECT? YOU ARE A HUMAN BEING! DON'T YOU WANT TO FIGHT FOR THAT?"
"I would have done what our children did, had I had the opportunity, and Fred too. But you know like I do that we were too old."

I hate it when days start like this. Straight from bed, an argument. For God's sake, I was famished. I didn't even know if I was really angry or if it was caffeine withdrawal. I was trying to get up to push him outside, but something moved behind Val. When I saw what it was my legs refused to lift me.

At the caravan door, his old depressed body standing well upright, his hair that shiny blond they had lost to age these past twenty years, his jaws and fists clenched, his eyes -both of them!- nailed to a spot two feet above my head, my brother was breathing deeply, heavily. I could not tell whether he was struggling for air or trying to control an inner fury. Rain water was pooling around his feet. He was soaked, but alive! My uncle turned around.
"I thought he... I thought you were... he was... I saw him! You told me! You told me he was dead!" he thundered at me, out of himself with indignation.
"He was dead! You were dead! I brought you to Depford! I threw you on these two hunks! I poured perfume on you! Our flask of Fahrenheit!"
But my brother wouldn't answer.
"Well, he isn't dead now" Val said. "If he isn't now then he wasn't before. Death is not something people recover from, you know."
There was nothing I could say to that, except open my arms to mark my puzzlement. Twenty years of boredom. Twenty years of utter dullness since the rise of the Ghetto. After all this time I had no other desire than to die peacefully in the midst of my beloved books. Then the phone call. And now this: zombies. Good, healthy looking zombies.

Val sat down at my sides. Out of his backpack he picked up our phone and put it on a pile of books.

"Well, that just confirms what I thought" he said.

After the Ghetto - E2

Decrepit families. Communities of crumblies. We take care of each other way beyond the use-by date. The Ghetto might be an unnatural creation, but what about us, its leftovers? At seventy-five I was the youngest surviving member of my family after Clem. I was supposed to take care of my incapacitated brother and orders from my authoritarian uncle.

“Bring his body to my house tomorrow” Val had said before leaving. “We will do an autopsy, just in case. I take the phone with me”.

I had nodded. It is the best way to get rid off his kind. Now I was alone with the stinking corpse of my dead brother and sadness fell on me.

It felt like ageing. Suddenly everything was heavy.

It is irrational, this sadness. After decades of scientific dictatorship, after Enlightenment, industrialisation, positivism, Kantism, Einsteinism, rationalism, Darwinism, Dawkinism, the great pantheon of isms, has ripped us all off all feeling, all meaning, has left us agog and panting, poor animal carcasses denied of desires and hunger, still quivering with the will to live but told that this will is irrelevant, that we are no more than old-fashioned mechanisms, too outdated to take the latest upgrades and dumped to rust. Rejected, famished, fighting to go through the day, neither hopeful nor despaired, simply hope-less, unable to breed, our community losing its bounds, talking to each other less and less, looking stupidly inside ourselves until hunger makes itself heard through our drug-induced stupors and throws us on the dump in search of anything carbonated to absorb, what reasons do we have left to mourn? My brother, my beloved brother, had it all: he could get all the love and sex he wanted while I was feeding him, washing him, watching him. To me he was a burden. He never asked me for anything, mind you. I just provided whatever help I thought I should. I have no doubt that everywhere on the dump other humans in the same situation react the same way. His death should have come as a relief - and there was relief in me. But also sadness: deep, shocking, transcendental sadness. I cried. I mourned, for two hours. I haven't felt that way since my sweet Mara left me, twenty years ago, to join the kids in the Ghetto.

This mourning, this is all that remains of my human soul.

I am lucky. Transcendence is a gift. Two hours is more than I could have hoped for. When I felt the wound close, my tears dry up, my stomach gurgle, I stood up from my armchair. I grabbed my brother's body by the feet, I dragged him outside. By the time I managed to pull him on my Tesco trolley I was out of breath and had to rest for a while. Inside the caravan I picked up an old flask of Farenheit perfume. Then I braced myself for the journey.

It was, I remember, the sweetest of evenings -or was it some resonance of my recent mourning, a softness of the heart, a leakage of the soul, resulting from the shock of losing a dear one, from the realization that there was still, on this decomposing world, something I cared for? The sun had disappeared behind the Shard, leaving an amber smear in the dark clouds. In the north, blinking with the lights of a million windows, the pure outline of Canary Wharf Ghetto was rising above the misshapen silhouettes of the dumps, the devastated grounds from which its mathematical perfection had surged. There, where humanity had suddenly become something greater than itself, where almost all the women had fled, where Beauty and Future were said to roam the streets.
"Ah, you would have been happy over there", I told my brother. "You wouldn't have left yourself die like you did."
How wrong I was about the Ghetto, my brother's death, everything!

Pushing my brother's body, absorbing the wonderful spectacle of the Ghetto at night, I made my way through the narrow alleys of Blackheath dump.

I took the long slow climb towards Greenwich Park. I was surrounded by the ghosts of South-East London. All around, under the heaps of rubble and paper, the green wet meadow of Blackheath Commons used to grow. Here the spike of All Saints Church used to pierce the dark clouds in winter and over there, in the East, the grotesque facade of the Clarendon used to blast its thousands lights, smearing the pale fog like fresh paint brushed, adorning the crisp clear summer nights with their tawdry glitter. Only the walls are left, cleanly cut three meters from the ground. The Clarendon's surroundings swarm with depressed old people attracted by the sheltering ghost of luxury. In rusty trailers, makeshift sheds, igloo-shaped brick structures they live the life of poverty we all know -but they still eat in silver and sleep in silk, as if these meaningless rags could keep them afloat while the world is sinking.

The path reached a high point, north of which Greenwich Park appeared: the ruins of the Observatory, the faded Meridian, the defunct Origin of the World. Behind it, across the river, Canary Wharf shone, eclipsing the resplendent half moon.

I took a westward turn and started down. Wider, smoother, the path there was dug with deep dried ruts. As we were going, Dead Fred in his Tesco Trolley was shaking. For a while he looked more drunk than dead.

What was it, I wondered, that he was listening to so intensely on the phone?

This must have been some story, and of the highest form. My brother would not have fallen for less. He was a delicate soul, the kind that feeds on beauty rather than truth. This is what the story must have been: beautiful, full of heroism and love, death, pain, elation and joy. A story where the best people suffer and die for the good reasons. A story full of awe and fear, a tragedy, a story of life as it should be, but also of life as it can be, a story from before the Ghetto, before the dumps, from before that before, before electricity and its parasites, a simple story of men and women, naked in body and mind, a story from before stories themselves.

No, my brother would not have fallen for less. Both of us used to read a lot. Our caravan was full to the brim with our five thousands accumulated books (and a mess of old computers, TV screens, speakers, clothes and frames). There was just enough space for our two enormous armchairs. We had found them on Blackheath dump, near where the Princess of Wales used to be. They were covered in worn-out floral fabric. They were too big for the caravan. We had struggled to shove them in. They had become our whole living space: we ate on them, slept on them, died on them.

With him gone, what was I to do with the vacant armchair? What could I possibly find which would fill such a huge space?

I soon reached Depford. I turned into Pagnell Street where the stench of rotting bodies hit me.

It is sudden like that. One second you are surrounded by the familiar scent of metal, oil, acid, rotting food, dirty waters, unwashed humans. The next, passed the enormous red rusted carcasses of the tractors cemetery, it chokes you as if you were burying your head in the heap of compost flesh. It is a physical contact, that smell: it is a giant, limp, flabby, stinking hand which, as you turn the corner of Pagnell Street, wraps itself around your face.

Although I had passed this street many times, I had never taken a close look at the body dump. The former children playground was all fenced. Tens of braziers were providing a hellish light, full of smoke and jumping shadows. The concrete ground around the fence had been kept clear of rubbish. Two inscriptions spelled in large capital letters could still be seen, stretching over twenty yards:

           I see people sitting, shadows dancing and birds flying

the first one read.

           I touch soft petals and icy puddles, rough hard bark and 
           smooth, green leaves

the other said. Dated from 2012 they were both signed by pupils from Childeric Primary School -pupils today lost to the Ghetto-. I remember wondering what they were looking like over there, trees, leaves, birds, shadows.

Beyond the fence, where swings and scaffolding for kids once stood, is now the mass grave where all the dumps come to drop their dead, from New Cross to Lewisham, from Greenwich to Brockley. Narrow wooden bridges span over the pit like strips of pastry over a giant meat pie.

When I arrived quite a few people where queuing - old people carrying, on a great variety of trolleys, sledges and stretchers, older bodies stripped of their clothes. Among the crowd of old men I was granted this rare and delicious sight: two women, draped in black, their wrinkled faces bathed in tears. They hugged and comforted each other. The men, rushing their business of dumping whomever they had brought, were swarming around them.

I almost ran to the nearest bridge, pushing whoever was in my way. All around me arguments burst out: two men looking like brothers dropped the body they were bringing. A group of five people in their sixties were shouting in each other's face. The tallest pushed the smallest, who bent his knee in the other's groin. In front of me, blocking my way, a fat black guy was unloading three corpses, tipping them over the fence wherever they would fall.
"You're supposed to drop them from one of these bridges" I said.
"Fuck you. You're not happy, go somewhere else".
"A good burial you're giving them. I'm sure they would appreciate".
"Listen" he said, hastily spraying the dead with cheap perfume, "Mind your business, will you? I don't even know these blokes, I'm just doing a job here. I'm the undertaker for Peckham High Street's dump. So move away, there's a woman over there who's been waiting for me her whole life."
"And what makes you think you have a chance? With all the competition?"
"Ah, yes, but how many of them have a job, you reckon, hmm? You have a job yourself?"
He looked at my sheepish face.
"That's what I thought. Out of my way, loser."

It has become so difficult to be a woman on the dumps. For the few who decided to stay, public appearances have become a hassle. Most of them are married and stay indoors like my aunt Nassir, Val's wife. Actually I have not met one single woman in the twenty five years I have spent on the dump. For a widow, staying alone is just too dangerous, even amid a population of pensioners. There is no space for love and no time for sorrow.

I gave up. "I would rather give you a heartfelt funeral than humiliate myself with that horde of dogs" I told my brother. I pushed the trolley onto the bridge. The stink made me retch.

I spotted four fresh naked corpses, almost intact, good looking men in their forties. I jostled Fred on my shoulders and tossed him on top.

I had left him his clothes. He landed with a muffled thud in an awkward position, his face pressed against a hairy armpit, his right arm hugging a chest. "There you go", I said. "They look like the youngest bodies around. I hope you will enjoy them for a little while". I poured the perfume on him. I scratched a match and threw it. Of course the heap is too wet, the weather too cold, the dump too crowded with rats and worms for a body to burn.

Even our cremations are symbolic. Even our symbols show their bare bones.

Behind me the crowd was fighting  for the favours of two sterile females.

This must be the end of a civilization.

After the Ghetto - E1

One day the phone rang at home. I stared at the object for a good ten or twelve rings. In his armchair my depressed elder brother didn't even move. That infuriated me. At last I picked up awkwardly – it had been so long! – and listened to a young, male, tenor voice spitting out words in what I guessed was French.

The tone was very dramatic, with many variations of pace and pitch. It reminded me of old radio dramas; but my leftover French was too poor for me to make sense of it. I hung up.

Across the crowded coffee table Fred looked at me with tired eyes. I told him what I had heard. I felt a bit offended and scared.

"What I can't figure out is how that goddam' phone got to ring in the first place. I mean, look at it: granted, this is a piece of military equipment with its own batteries. But there hasn't been a single network operating in the area since Vodaphone went bust in 2032!"

"Jorge has a phone" Fred replied, his voice plummeting every 3 or 4 words.

"Who has what?"

"Jorge. The neighbour... From there, you know... The Spanish trailer?  With the fried fish?"

"What phone, what phone, how can he have a phone if there's no network?"

"Some landlines are still working... He's got a landline."

"Has he? Does he? What does that have to do with my phone?"

I said "mine" instead of "ours". I couldn't help it. It hurt my brother, this denial of our community of existence. Sometimes, when his depression was running on my nerves, I was doing it on purpose.

He shrugged. "How would I know?"

He turned in his armchair and went back to sleep.

The phone rang again that night, its transparent plastic casing lightening with a faint amber pulse. This time my brother picked up. Although I could not understand what was being said I could hear enough to identify the high pitched male voice.

"Same guy again!" I shouted. "Same voice, same..."

My brother waived me silent.

I knew he could speak French. Recently he had been dating a series of youngish men from various French speaking countries. What I didn't know was how good his French was. His dates were unlikely to involve any kind of conversation. This is another consequence of the abject poverty to which we have been reduced: social rituals have shrunk to their bare essentials. Gone are the long hours spent in nurturing in our sex partner-to-be the illusion that our meeting might be driven by some other, higher, fatal order. Seduction is unaffordable nowadays. Dates are for sex. To get it, you would need but a few words: "Où ? Chez toi. Tourne. Comme ça. Oui. Demain ? Non.”

My brother had been holding that phone for over five minutes without uttering a single word. He seemed unwilling to do anything else. Thus I walked outside in search of something to drink and someone to drink it with. I left him fall into his fatal addiction.

For the next six hours, well after I had come back and fallen asleep in my armchair, he would not let go off that phone. Only when the batteries ran out he gave some sign of life: he disappeared for almost two days. He came back with twenty kilos of battery supply and his face, of which he had always taken so much care, a piece of horror. His left eye was missing.
The next sixty days he hardly moved from his chair. I had to clean around him - I even had to clean him twice, so rancid was his smell. He, in the meantime, gave no heed to anything but the French voice on the phone. Once or twice I saw him react: his face went paler, his hand shook, he shed a few tears.

The last two weeks of my brother's life I had to feed him as if he were a plant or an impotent pet. The infection from his missing eye spread throughout his body. I cleaned it as well as I could, using, instead of the dubious water from the outside barrel, the half glass of vodka I would normally share with him at night. In spite of my efforts his gaping eye socket soon turned brown then purplish. The last three days the stench was unbearable even from outside the caravan. But at no point did my brother show that he was feeling poorly: no complain, no fever, no shaking, no vomiting, nothing. On his last night we were both inside. I had tied an old cloth soaked in chemicals against my mouth to fend off the smell. Fred was listening to his damned phone, the handset in his right hand, the right elbow resting on the arm of his seat. I was reading Gulliver's Travels when, at the precise moment when [....................................], my brother's head slipped from the rest of his hand. His right arm opened at full stretch, his cheek came to lie on his shoulder, his hand opened and dropped the phone. He was dead.

His French had obviously been a lot better than I thought.

As I was leaning over him, someone behind me swore in French.

"What the hell is that smell, God! How you guys can live in a place like this I'll never understand. It stinks worse than inside a monkey's arse."

I turned around. My uncle Val was standing in the doorframe, his tall, square silhouette blocking the night glow, the light of our candle throwing evil shadows on his awesome face.

"I think Fred's dead, Val."

"Dead? How did that happen? When?"

"Just now. I don't know how, he was listening to this goddamn phone..."

"Don't put the name of the Lord to your filthy use. People don't die from listening to a phone. Hang on: a phone? What fucking phone?"

"That phone". I told him about the phone calls, the French voice, the battery hunt, the missing eye, the suspected infection, death. I told him all.

"But, I don't know, at the same time I find it hard to believe that the infection did it. He never looked sick."

"Never looked sick? What about the smell!"

"Yes but... You know what I mean. He never complained."

"Cats don't complain when they're sick. One day they just drop dead."

"Ha, that's the thing. You see Val, Fred wasn't a cat. He was gay and depressed, two states you might never understand. But he was still human."

"Peo-ple-don't-die-from-a-phone-call!" he said again. Val, I recalled, used to work in the phone industry in Belgium.

At that moment the phone rang. We looked at each other. I started towards the handset.

"Don't" Val said. He put his huge hand on my arm. He was starring at the glowing device with what looked like ferocious hunger.

We let the phone ring twenty seven times. When it fell silent, Val took it and examined it thoroughly.

"Army material" he said. "Comes with its own batteries indeed. But who the fuck..."

He put the phone back on Fred's knees. "Anyway. I came here to talk about Clem. He's using again. He's your cousin. You have to do something."

I sighed. Every time this was happening, Val and I had the same conversation.

"I'm sorry for your son" I said. "I wish there were something I could do but you're asking a not-so-former drug addict to lecture him against the overuse of weed and mushrooms. The most likely outcome is that I'll start using again and I'll buy from him. I could do with some weed actually. My hip's killing me."

"If I catch you buying from him, I can guarantee you won't feel your hip any more. He needs help, not  custom. I have enough money for him."

I sighed again, shook my head. "Your son is fifty now Val. And who the fuck needs money anyway.”

It had been ten years. Val was eighty years old. But he still didn’t get it. How hard was it? The disappearance of money was almost a benediction in regards to all the other ones. No more girls. No more children, no jobs, no economy, no energy. What use could money possibly be in such a world?

But for those who had spent their lives cuddling their fortune in the prospect of a comfortable agony, the news was just too big to take. Val was one of them: he had made a lot of money and still had it. He wouldn't admit of its uselessness.

"As for Clem" I added "he's like Fred. What he needs is purpose. Get him a job and a girlfriend and things will start looking different for him. He won't need his props."

Val shuddered in exasperation.

"A job. A girl. Sometimes I wonder if your brother is not the lucky guy."

"My brother’s dead, you moron. What about you? You’re married, for God's sake. And your wife stayed with you!"

"She's dying now though."

I pondered over that.

"I guess she's lucky too" I said.

The Book Sill - L'Anarchiste

L'Anarchiste is an unusual novel in more ways than one. Its structure is articulated in two very distinctive parts : the first part, written or translated in a strangely awkward French, exposes the crisis of a young Cambodian narrator suddenly losing control of violent inner fantasies whilst the second covers in a much plainer language the life of a middle-aged narrator living the poor life of a forgotten refugee in Paris.

Here are a few randomly picked up examples from the early chapters:

p.32 : "L'idée de la mort est dévorante. Impliquée dans l'écoulement du temps, elle nous harcèle sans répit ; mais l'intensité de l'émotion que nous procure l'amour arrive à égaler et à compenser celle de l'idée de la mort". "Impliquée" here is the wrong word, too vague. "arrive à égaler" is awkward, "parvient à égaler" would have been better. "celle de l'idée de la mort" is very awkward too, proper French would avoid at all cost the repeated prepositional structure "de l'idée de la mort".

p.32 :"le type pleure à chaudes larmes, se lamentant à corps perdu". "type" and "chaudes larmes" belong to two different levels of language : "type" is informal, "chaudes larmes" is quite literary. "se lamenter à corps perdu" is improper use of the expression "corps perdu".

p.34 : "C'est pour cela que je ne condamnerai jamais les gens qui s'aiment, même si c'est d'un amour non conventionnel".  There is nothing wrong per se with the sentence; it is simply too common language, with again the use of imprecise words like "gens". A better attempt would have been "Pour cette raison" (replacing the ugly "c'est...que" and the vague "cela") "je ne condamnerai jamais les êtres (far better than "gens") qui s'aiment, fût-ce ("même si c’est" is very common) d'un amour non conventionnel".

p34: "Nous sommes si impuissants devant cette fumée qui est la nôtre". The nasty hiatus "si impuissant" was easy to avoid by using "tellement impuissant" instead, which sounds better.

In spite of these flaws this opening part is a pure dionysiac enjoyment, a jump towards fire, an eruption. In this oneiric tale we attend the surge of the anarchist monster who is (hiding in) A-Chheèm the narrator: his attempt as strangling a prostitute, his fever, his sudden vomiting, the beautiful love scene with his cousin Sinuon and its dramatic conclusion in a psychiatric hospital. We are undoubtedly in a baroque geste, the carnival universe where dreams and reality melt into each other. In this respect A-Chheèm seems related to such heroes as Cendrars’s Moravagine, while to the modern reader he will evoque Louis Althusser’s tragic story or even Léos Carax’s surreal creation Merde (2008).

But while the first part belongs to the impulse, the impetus, the rush upwards, the second is the tale of a collapsing. Starting with the death of a woman, it continues with the narrator’s Don Juan-like exploits, climaxes on the conquest of his sister-in-law whom he calls Mary at the beginning, Mona at the end (1) and “the woman of his life” throughout, moves to the assassination of his best friend Savouth (2) by some Cambodian officials, then tells of the narrator’s revenge and the anti-climax of his escape to France. The chilling conclusion with its atrocious final scene seals the destiny of a weak and coward character whose untidy passions make him unfit for both the revolutionary Khmer society and the Parisian bourgeois culture. As he confesses himself, the only society where his disorderly inner self would have found a way out would have been the half dreamt, half remembered Cambodia from the French colonial period - the very same society he contributed to destroy.

This divide in the book is strikingly akin Cendrars's Dan Yack. Particularly fascinating is this double movement, first towards the sublime then towards the abyss, and how the anarchist monster who is (in) the narrator throws him in turns towards the former and the latter. Reflecting about Dan Yack, Cendrars talked about a movement "outwards then inwards", like an explosion followed by a recoil, both ending up in failure. This, it seems, is exactly what L'Anarchiste takes us through, up to the final pages where even the mutilation falls within a much cruder and grimer version of Dan Yack. Cendrars's main character is a Russian millionaire incapable of finding happiness with or without the riches which life has poured upon his head. L'Anarchiste's narrator is similarly trapped between an inescapable and an unattainable future. For this encaged self, any attempt at breaking through -be it fantasized or real- ends up in blood.

(1) Could this be in relation to Henry Miller’s Mona in Sexus?
(2) Savouth was Cambodia's Education Minister at the time and a close friend to the narrator