De Amerikaanse schrijver en essayist Andre Dubus werd geboren op 11 augustus 1936 in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Zie ook alle tags voor Andre Dubus op dit blog.

Uit: Meditations from a Movable Chair (About Kathryn)

“YOU HAVE TO KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE down there. In Louisiana winter, my father played golf every weekend, unless a lot of rain was falling; you can work up a sweat just carrying a golf bag on that flat land. If you want to, you can go into the rice fields or swamps or the woods near the bayou and scare up a cottonmouth. No need to wait for the long hot summer. If you’re a woman, you can be raped on your lawn two nights after Christmas, like my sister Kathryn. She tells me about it on the phone. Two nights after Christmas is a Friday. After work at the bank, she goes to the gym, where she reads on the tread-mill. On the way home, she stops to buy coffee.
“Maybe that’s where he saw me,” she says on the phone. She is long divorced, and has eight grown children and four grandchildren. A daughter lives with her. She gets a pound of rich dark coffee and walks into the lulling winter air and the beginning of her weekend. She drives to her street, one flanked by houses, and when she turns onto it, she sees in her rearview mirror a car turning behind her. She is a calm woman. Yet an instinct tells her to drive past her house. But now she is home, and she turns into the driveway, where her daughter’s car is parked. She drives behind the house, and stops on a concrete slab there, near the back door. The instinct is quelled. She cannot see the front of her house now, nor most of the driveway. She takes a while leaving the car, getting her gym bag and purse and the bag with the coffee. She carries these to the back door; then he is there: a large black man holding a knife, and saying, “Give me your money.” She tells him she has only five dollars, and gives him her wallet. He asks how much is in the house. She says there is nothing in the house. She can feel her daughter in there. To his questions, she answers: Yes, she is married; he is at work; he gets off at seven. She knows it is now around seven-thirty. The man takes her arm and pulls her around to the side of the house. He removes her glasses, flings them. Her neighbours’ house is near. The rape commences, and she thinks how silly this is, to die in her own yard. She no longer sees the knife, and she waits for it. He is talking and she says, “What?” and she hears “Oral sex” and says, “No”; and, to God, she says silently: Don’t You dare do this to me. It doesn’t happen. She lies beneath his heavyweight. He hears something in the house: maybe the shower, maybe her daughter’s footsteps. He says: “Who’s in the house?” “My daughter.” Knowing, oh Lord, the wrong image came to her brain, the wrong words to her tongue. But how cunning can she be? He is raping her, she is waiting for a blade to slash or pierce her body, and she is as conscious of her daughter’s body as she is of her own.”

 

Andre Dubus (11 augustus 1936 –  24 februari 1999)

 

 

De Duitse dichter en schrijver Wolf Wondratschek werd geboren op 14 augustus 1943 in Rudolstadt. Zie ook alle tags voor Wolf Wondratscheck op dit blog.

 

De eenzaamheid der mannen

Er zitten mannen voor een huis op straat
te drinken en te dromen van doden.
Zij zien de vrouwen die voorbijgaan blozen
en spugen vol haat.

Ze doden voor hun eer
en dansen als ze treuren –
alsof de dood geen schrikbeeld was
boven de ingestorte muren

van hun eenzaamheid.
Niet het leven is de tijd
van de liefde. Geliefden raken elkaar kwijt;

zodra ze elkaar beroeren
zijn ze vreemden – en ze gaan onverzoenlijk
wegen die naar doolhoven voeren.

 

Vertaald door Willem van Toorn

 

Wolf Wondratschek (Rudolstadt, 14 augustus 1943)

 

 

Zie voor nog meer schrijvers ook mijn blog van 11 augustus 2023 en ook mijn blog van 11 augustus 2021 en ook mijn blog van 11 augustus 2019 en eveneens mijn blog van 11 augustus 2016 en ook mijn blog van 11 augustus 2011 deel 2.