Tava Testing Signs

Anna Catman

Description

The book contains two short novels.
'Coffee and Margaret' is a book about past migrant experiences, which combines a retrospective gaze with the feeling that much of what happened then and there matters here and now. At the same time the author is trying to capture and describe change as it happens within us as well as outside.
'Tava testing signs' looks at how the human fate may be shaped and the way we perceive it all.

Sujets

• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris AU
• Date de parution: 22 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669831136
• Langue: English

Extrait

Tava testing signs
 
 
 
 
 
 
Anna Catman
 
Copyright © 2022 by Anna Catman.
 

Library of Congress Control Number:
2022914557
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-3115-0

Softcover
978-1-6698-3114-3

eBook
978-1-6698-3113-6
 
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 08/22/2022
 
 
 
Xlibris
AU TFN: 1 800 844 927 (Toll Free inside Australia)
AU Local: [phone] ([phone] from outside Australia)
www.Xlibris.com.au
833170
Contents
COFFEE AND MARGARET
Coffee
Ladies and Freud
Idle Seminar Thoughts
Chocolates, Credit Cards, and Cups
Scanners and Nightmares
Mediator
Clever and Beautiful
Seaweed in the Market.
Conversations with My Seaweed Enforcer
Sivid: The Origins of the Concept
Back to the Seaweed Market
A Sivid Raid
TAVA TESTING SIGNS
Chances
Self-Driving Car
Churchy Conversations
Tava’s Murder
Looking for Witnesses
Conversations with the Ghost
Tolerance and Its States
Bodaphones and Pink Spectacles
Grafting and Rootstock
Chips, Tortillas, and Appropriation
 
Coffee and Margaret
All animals are equal but some more equal than others.
—George Orwell
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
Coffee
O ne day I decided to buy some coffee – in a supermarket, of course. Why of course? It was open, unlike many other shops which may’ve been closed at this time. I couldn’t find what I was looking for and found an assistant. ‘Do you sell coffee beans by weight?’ I said.
‘I beg your pardon?’ he said.
I repeated my question.
‘I beg your pardon?’ he said again.
We tried to understand each other a few more times, and then I got tired. I decided to make one little step at a time.
‘Do you know coffee?’ I said.
‘Yes’, he said.
‘Do you know coffee beans?’
‘Yes.’
Finally, I can ask my key question. ‘Do you sell coffee beans by weight?’
‘No, no.’ He is almost screaming now. I turned away to go, but he is following me, half a step behind me. ‘Only one-kilo bags,’ he says now.
One one-kilo bag of coffee beans is nineteen dollars, but nothing doing, I bought one. What else is there to do in this situation? First, I thought the coffee was awfully over-roasted, almost burned to the point of bitterness. But nineteen dollars isn’t a joke. I got used to it. It was all right, just normal.
As time went by, however, I really craved good coffee. So I decided to pop in a coffee shop nearby to buy myself a cup of coffee, a pleasant place I’d known for a long time, good coffee too. I came in, and what did I see? My husband, of course, and his boss, Margaret. The latter was stroking his sleeve with strange little movements, like she was ironing out some invisible wrinkles. At the same time, she said to me – what was it? – ‘You have to iron, you know. You have to.’
What was it all about? Was she really talking to me? Yes, it turned out that it was about me. I have to iron his shirts. And evidently, I didn’t; she can see it. I stopped and thought about what to say, but can’t find anything, maybe because I had very little time. The shirts look good enough anyway. He cares very little about it. Who exactly will see them?
But while I was looking for words and explanations, the cup of coffee had been ordered – by him. Margaret went on with her speech and said the same thing a few more times.
‘You have to iron his shirts. You have to.’
I’d had enough of it, I think. It is not the best possible situation, and anyway, I am in a hurry. I am almost late for a seminar.
Ladies and Freud
I f anybody asks me something about Freud, I always answer in the same way. I tell them about a book I read once, in my twenties perhaps, something about typos, verbal slips, stutters, stumbles, and other unintentional mistakes and how they are motivated by our subconscious. It’s a famous book by Freud or maybe a part of it published as a book in its own right. All these kinds of unintentional mistakes are in the title of the book I read. They all start with the letter O in the language in which I read it, that is, Russian. Even then, I knew that in the original, it might be different. The only book by Freud published at this time? Anyway, it’s the only one accessible to me. The most important one?
From here, my memory begins fading and breaking down into little pieces, like small mosaic tiles, some of which fit to one another really well, and some don’t. My boss says that to understand Freud, one has to understand who his patients were. She is a woman. One has to understand Freud. Who would doubt it? So who were his patients?’ She makes a long pause so that I can think about who his patients were. But I don’t know, in all honesty.
‘Well, who?’
She says something. Basically, they were well-off Austrian folk who had little other problems in life and lots of subconscious. Why should it matter? But it obviously does, and I read again about Freudian slips, parapraxes, typos, verbal stutters, and other unintentional lapses and mistakes.
Then I think about the abnormal, to my taste, attachment of comparative literature scholars to Freud and also to Foucault. Both names start with an F , by the way. Is it just accidental or supposed to mean something? And how does it relate to that old question of who were his patients?
My thoughts drift a bit on the surface of what was and has become, and I feel an endless irritation about all these seminars dedicated, most of the time, to Freud and Foucault, starting and finishing at odd times, beginning at three o’clock, for example. This is, as somebody told me in another environment – in a meeting where my other job is – a form of covert discrimination. A three o’clock start can’t be good for all these people who have to pick up children from school and is, therefore, discrimination. It is also against me, who has to meet a school bus at home at three o’clock. All these people care about school run and buses and very little about Freud and Foucault, because they just have other things on their mind. And the schedule of whatever it is that starts at three o’clock is designed to separate them from Freud and Foucault. Is it based on moral principles? I wonder. Which part of it is intended?
Freud’s patients were well-off, careless people, and perhaps they didn’t have to pick up anybody from school. Yes. Was it the reason why they were interested too much in how we suppress unintended, shameful thoughts and actions, as they move and float in our subconscious and try to find their way into the conscious? They kind of press outward and make us make mistakes, typos, and verbal slips. Rich ladies fighting their subconscious full of complexes.
What do I want here? Couldn’t I find anything better? An idiot, I am. Or is it just some kind of intellectual inertia, like with all of them? Maybe I’m also very interested in my subconscious more than other things. One has to admit that, if so, I can repress it really well.
Coffee, indeed. There was coffee. I could never understand why it is sold next to the elevator. If one can’t understand obvious things, how can one explain it? If you want to sell and buy coffee, why would you need an elevator and vice versa? If you have to take an elevator, coffee can wait.
Some situations which are, in fact, about coffee, shaped into abrupt, blunt formulas in my brain. For example, look at this idiot next to me. There are many. His awful stupidity consists in the wrong choice, just one wrong choice of the place of residence. Although he made this wrong choice of leaving one country and going to another a long time ago, the consequences are relevant here and now. And he must know he’s made a wrong choice, if he maintains any relationships with those who stayed in the place he left. If they turn off the internet altogether, he won’t know or suspect this, of course. Or will he anyway? There is mail.
The degree of destruction caused is different, of course, for you and everybody else in this situation, as well as all those related to you. But there is a lot of destruction in each case. But at least another, or just any, idiot like this doesn’t have academia to help him escape the situation. Whatever wrong decisions that other idiot made, he must carry his cross until the end and be responsible for them. What does Foucault have to do with it? He must have something in common with it as he does with just about everything.
The three o’clock start meant, usually, that I can’t be there because I can’t miss the school bus. Nor did I have time for coffee after the seminar, enough time only to get a takeaway cup and to swallow it on the run. Once, I bumped into Margaret, and a cup of coffee splashed onto her dress – well ironed, I