Three Moments of an Explosion by China Mieville

Author:China Mieville [Mieville, China]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101884720
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 2015-08-03T23:00:00+00:00

THE DUSTY HAT

I have to talk to you about the man we saw, the man in the dusty hat. I know you remember.

Stop for a moment. I know you have a thousand questions, starting with Where have I been? What I want to start with is the man in the hat.

I was late to the conference. I’d had to stay in to watch a builder squint at the cracks in my outside wall and across my kitchen ceiling, cracks that had been there for a long time, ever since I moved in, but that started to spread about a year ago and were making me increasingly uneasy. And then the journey across the city was slow as a bastard so I arrived after the start and tried to creep quietly into the lecture hall but everyone stared at me while I made my way to the seat you’d saved for me. I muttered something apologetic about subsidence. You mocked me sotto voce for being a bourgeois homeowner. I told you to hush and tried to pay attention.

But the man in the hat made us badly behaved. He was sitting in the audience right in front of us and when he got hold of the microphone and started speaking you leaned over to me and quietly pointed out quite how dusty his hat was. So I looked and that was me gone, I started giggling like an idiot and that set you off and we both had to look down at our hands as if we were taking careful notes. I don’t think we fooled anyone.

It was a wide-brimmed dark green felt hat like a cowboy’s or an adventurer’s. Even clean and new it would’ve been unlikely at a socialist conference in a university hall in south London: as it, was it was extraordinary. It was old and pleasingly well worn. It looked loved. But it was just filthy with dust.

“His hat’s that dusty because he can’t take it off to clean it,” you whispered. “Because his wife found out he gave her chlamydia and she put superglue in the brim.”

“His hat’s that dusty because he’s arrived straight from tin-mining in Cornwall,” I whispered. “Climbed straight out of a tunnel.” I mimed flicking the hat’s brim and doubling over coughing.

The man was talking about the deep dynamics of the Egyptian revolution and Tahrir Square. I listened. He was weaving back through the history of the region, getting from there to something about Ukraine, to reflections on austerity in London, backwards again to much older struggles. Startling stuff woven together startlingly.

I said, “His hat’s that dusty because he’s been sitting still for forty years.”

The man said to the room, What you see when you see this will depend on which eye you open. His formulations were like that. A moment later he said, Marat knew and the glass of his windows knew.

I blinked and said something about Hansel and Gretel, that following him talking was like following a breadcrumb trail laid by a lunatic.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.