The Twilight of the Bums Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    There are historical reasons for this curious arrangement, this necessary precautionary situation. Tell us, O Fable, when there were no such reasons.

THE TURNCOATS
    Between them the bums can speak and/or understand Turkish, French, Erse, Japanese, Latin, American, Javanese, German, British, Italian, Hebrew, Dutch, Spanish, Yiddish, and even Ladino, that lovely little language which the Sephardim invented after they were kicked out of Spain a few times ago. But none of these have worked. The bums are lost in a big city, and no one has any idea what they are trying to say, it’s a bad dream.
    They make a hand gesture which they believe is the international sign for being lost, for distress, but from every person in this city to whom they perform this gesture all they get in return is the bite of the thumb, a gesture they do not understand a fig.

    It is not understand a fig.
    What is then, Schmartie?
    It is give a fig.
    What does it mean?
    Dunno.
    The old bums are lost, they are lost and tired. They are lost and tired and hungry. They are lost and hungry and thirsty and tired.
    Fooled you, didn’t I?
    What?
    Fooled you, didn’t I? You already said that.
    You expected a certain order based on expectation in the last run of sentences, didn’t you?
    I am tired and thirsty.
    We’re lost.
    The bums sit on a bench. What a lovely city, a small city somewhere, it looks like the western Argentine. What a lovely city, a small city somewhere in the Argentine, or in the Crimea, or in the Persian Alps. But still, provincial beauty notwithstanding, they cannot make themselves understood. And every time they try, the folk bite their thumbs.
    The smaller of the two bums takes off his coat, turns it inside out and puts it on again. Looks ridiculous, all the bits of stuffing and loose thread and stitching are exposed. You do likewise, he says to the fat bum. Turn your coat inside out.
    But it is embarrassing, and very uncomfortable.
    Do it anyway, my mama told me a story once about a lost kid who did this.
    So, what happened to him?
    I don’t know, she died before she could finish the story.
    That fast?
    It was a long story.
    Oh, well then. Fat Bum turns his coat inside out while Small Bum steps behind the bench to reverse his trousers.
    There they sit then, dear Reader, the inside-out gang, our two lost bums, two turncoats on a bench somewhere on earth. What do you suppose happens next? Or do you suppose the bums are already saved? It is up to you to finish the tale.

STEP-MOTHERS

    The bums are, we have been informed, on their farewell tour of selected cities of the European continent. They have said goodbye to Prague and so long to Vienna. In Madrid, they uttered the same sad farewell they uttered the last time they were banished. Today we find them in Berlin of all places. In, of all places, the Botanical Gardens.
    In the Gardens, the old men have come upon a presentation of pansies, a special display of pansies, thousands of tiny faces, living souls of the dead, their colors intense under indirect artificial light, a violent intensity in the blossoms and in the air itself, as if ghost petals extended limitlessly, superblack extension of the fragile velvety petals, the whole vibrating under a huge hand-painted sign in old High Gothic script:
STIEFMÜTTERCHEN
    Then something happens. Something that we can only approximate, that we can only suggest. It happens like this.
    One of the bums suddenly turns to the other, and asks if he remembers a visit they made to a botanical garden in another city, years and years ago.
    The other bum replies that he does remember that visit. In fact, he remembers clearly that it was a display of Easter lilies that attracted their attention then, huge white trumpets, and a smell, almost sickening …
    The first bum closes his eyes and asks the other bum to lead him through the field of stiefmütterchen , the delicate glowing banks of step-mothers , as they