Universal Dependencies - English - GUM

s-1

GUM_fiction_giants-1

The Valley of Giants

s-2

GUM_fiction_giants-2

I had buried my parents in their gray marble mausoleum at the heart of the city.

s-3

GUM_fiction_giants-3

I had buried my husband in a lead box sunk into the mud of the bottom of the river, where all the riverboatmen lie.

s-4

GUM_fiction_giants-4

And after the war, I had buried my children, all four, in white linen shrouds in the new graveyards plowed into what used to be our farmland: all the land stretching from the river delta to the hills.

s-5

GUM_fiction_giants-5

I had one granddaughter who survived the war.

s-6

GUM_fiction_giants-6

I saw her sometimes: in a bright pink dress, a sparkling drink in her hand, on the arm of some foreign officer with brocade on his shoulders, at the edge of a marble patio.

s-7

GUM_fiction_giants-7

She never looked back at me — poverty and failure and political disrepute being all, these days, contagious and synonymous.

s-8

GUM_fiction_giants-8

The young were mostly dead, and the old men had been taken away, they told us, to learn important new things and to come back when they were ready to contribute fully.

s-9

GUM_fiction_giants-9

So it was a city of grandmothers.

s-10

GUM_fiction_giants-10

And it was in a grandmother bar by the waterfront — sipping hot tea with rum and watching over the shoulders of dockworkers playing mah-jongg — that I first heard of the valley of giants.

s-11

GUM_fiction_giants-11

We all laughed at the idea, except for a chemist with a crooked nose and rouge caked in the creases of her face, who was incensed.

s-12

GUM_fiction_giants-12

“We live in the modern era!” she cried.

s-13

GUM_fiction_giants-13

“You should be ashamed of yourself!'

s-14

GUM_fiction_giants-14

The traveler stood up from the table.

s-15

GUM_fiction_giants-15

She was bony and rough-skinned and bent like an old crow, with a blue silk scarf and hanks of hair as black as soot.

s-16

GUM_fiction_giants-16

Her eyes were veined with red.

s-17

GUM_fiction_giants-17

“Nonetheless,” the traveler said, and she walked out.

s-18

GUM_fiction_giants-18

They were laughing at the chemist as well as at the traveler.

s-19

GUM_fiction_giants-19

To find anyone still proud, anyone who believed in giants or shame, was hilarious.

s-20

GUM_fiction_giants-20

The air of the bar was acrid with triumph.

s-21

GUM_fiction_giants-21

Finding someone even more vulnerable and foolish than we were, after everything had been taken from us — that was a delight.

s-22

GUM_fiction_giants-22

But I followed the traveler, into the wet streets.

s-23

GUM_fiction_giants-23

The smell of fish oozed from the docks.

s-24

GUM_fiction_giants-24

Here and there were bits of charred debris in the gutters.

s-25

GUM_fiction_giants-25

I caught her at her door.

s-26

GUM_fiction_giants-26

She invited me in for tea and massage.

s-27

GUM_fiction_giants-27

Her limbs were weathered and ringed, like the branches of trees in the dry country.

s-28

GUM_fiction_giants-28

She smelled like honey that has been kept a while in a dark room, a little fermented.

s-29

GUM_fiction_giants-29

A heady smell.

s-30

GUM_fiction_giants-30

In the morning, brilliant sunlight scoured the walls and the floor, and the traveler and her pack were gone.

s-31

GUM_fiction_giants-31

I hurried home.

s-32

GUM_fiction_giants-32

My house had survived the war with all its brown clay walls intact, though the garden and the courtyard were a heap of blackened rubble.

s-33

GUM_fiction_giants-33

My house was empty and cold.

s-34

GUM_fiction_giants-34

I packed six loaves of flatbread, some olives, a hard cheese, one nice dress, walking clothes, my pills and glasses, a jug of wine, a can-teen of water, and a kitchen knife.

s-35

GUM_fiction_giants-35

I sat in the shadow in my living room for a while, looking at the amorphous mass of the blanket I had been crocheting.

s-36

GUM_fiction_giants-36

That granddaughter: her parents both worked in the vineyards, and when she was a child, she would play in my courtyard in the after-noons.

s-37

GUM_fiction_giants-37

When she scraped her knees bloody on the stones, she refused to cry.

s-38

GUM_fiction_giants-38

She would cry from frustration when the older children could do something that she couldn't — like tie knots, or catch a chicken.