Experience, as the old saying goes, is the best teacher’. I have been thoroughly schooled through the hard knocks of life. And I am still being schooled! Each phase of my existence has been characterized by peculiar experiences that have shaped my thought process towards people in my life, my environment and the society in general.
Experiences is a collection of stories about me: my family, friends, and romantic relationships, career exploits and congenital facial disfigurement. The stories depict what I have been through in my over-three-decade period on earth—lessons learnt and what the future holds.
I have been humbled by what my experiences have taught me through the years. They have made me transcend the puerile mindset of mediocrity to reach a mature psyche of sagacity. The stories contain elements tantamount to the lessons of pain, inspiration, bitterness and hard truths borne out of the experiences I have had all through my growing years.
It is a condensed penned-by-me depiction of major experiences reflected in stories that I have chosen to put down in writing: moments I live to remember always. ‘’Your experience is what you have to tell about you when what you thought you knew are already told about’.’
The day I fell in love with an intellectual was when I first met you. Although I didn’t think it was love, call it that at first. I don’t go around meeting people like you all the time, keeping my distance, marking the distances. I think of the people who are ghosts walking the streets, because I too am like a ghost walking the street. These apparitions by day, ghosts at night. Yes, too in ways I am also an apparition by day, and a ghost by night. Sleeping God only knows where. Trying to get by. I relate. I relate more than you know. I fall to the moan in the wilderness, I fall the distance (I am always talking about distance, or, distances, the divide, about the separation between us), to the sea and it captures me in the same way that you did. You did. Never forget that. I fall to the energies in matter whenever I think of you, long for you, and I think of everything that I have lost, and everything that I have gained. Sometimes I think in the end I will be happy. I am happy now, so, what difference does it make if we are together, or, if we are not together. There’s something philosophical, something intellectual even about love. I tell myself that. I think of the rain, I think of the seafront, I think of the beach. I think of you with your family. I have half a family. I have half a life. I think of you visiting your friends with your wife at your side. I think of her cooking. I think of her cooking for you, cleaning for you. Becoming an intellectual because you were an intellectual. This could also be seen for what it is. A love letter from a single woman to a very much older male figure, a very much married life figure in his world of meetings, running meetings.
I think of her with your children, the half that look like her, the half that look like you. I think of your grandchildren. Those who have inherited your staggering intellectual beauties. I think of couturiers. I think of myself as a couturier. Surrounded by their empires. Surrounded by male and female gods, and seamstresses, and designers, and models. My models are the words, you see. The male and female gods the characters in my books. And I work and have the life of a seamstress. Painstakingly putting it all together. You tend to humanise everything. Maybe it is a part of your intellect, or, just your humanity. I’m bemused. You’re detached. I’m amused by many things. You’re attached to work, to seminars, to traveling, to flying from city to city. And I wonder what you find attractive in women. I mean I live the life of a poet, living vicariously through my mother, then sister, then other women, but I live life, I live it vicariously through other women in a rather incomplete way. I can’t really inhabit their lives fulltime. Of course, I know that. I know I can’t be someone other than that person that I am meant to be. So, I am always writing to some man, if you want to know. Fake. Pretend. Pretending that I am still in love with someone is something that I am really good at I have found. I will only admit this to you. And when life becomes torture, I think of you. And when writing becomes torture, I think of you. When my loneliness becomes torture, most of all, I think of you. And I simply don’t want you to think of my life, or, anything in my life, the writing, the loneliness, the hours, the marked silences, as being anything but torture. It can be torture to me, to me, but to no one else in my life.
You’re like some social animal. And your mood is mostly extrovert. I virtually am a fisherwoman. Waiting for her man to return with the catch of the day. Guess there’s no reason for us to see each again, is there. Is there. I am the fisherwoman listening for the sound of a wave, the vibration of the ocean, the genius of the fish, the children to wake up. The children we will never have. I have made believe this life. It feels as if I am going everywhere these days. But the road is fairly quiet. I am traveling alone. I am in the driver’s seat. I wish you would come. I wish you would come. But I am weak. I am a limited kind of human being. Pages come to me in torrents, in torrential downpours, like a tsunami. Pages come to me like you did. You came to me on a summer’s day carrying an obituary. So many things happen to you all at once. So, few things of significance happen to me. You live. You live. I write books. I write books to survive. You cannot be caught up this. You cannot be caught up in me. I thought my life would be different. I am happy. I am. I am. I am happy whenever I think of you. I am. I am. The stage is set then. Whatever happens, happens. I wonder what you are doing, thinking. Your response to everything. The world around you as an intellectual and a philosopher. I haven’t seen you now in months. You’re with your wife, your children, surrounded by your grandchildren. Did you go swimming today, did you answer correspondence. Our letters are so few and far between, but you, you are never far away from my thoughts. I am always thinking of you, what a life shared might have felt like. Been like.
I have nothing to show. I have nothing to show you. No shame. No drama. No change in the way that I feel about you. I get this feeling often when we’re apart (which is more often than not). There is no future in this perhaps. There’s no bridge to the future. Only desire. The desire is very, very real to me. What I feel for you. I get this feeling often. It comes to me from everywhere. While I’m eating, or, drinking tea. You’re water. You’re like water to me. I think of you when I am with other people. I think of you often when I am alone. It is law. This desire is law. I can’t be with you. I can’t be without you. I dream of you. Well, I have the dream of you anyway. Which is more than what most people have. Or, secure in a lifetime. I have the best part of you. And I am not ashamed to speak of the desire I feel for you. Why should I? You belong to another. You will always belong to another.
You let humour into my life. It is enough. It is enough. It is enough. For now, it is enough for me. Good night, my Amadeus. I could mention names to you. You will never know. You could mention names to me that I will never know. You’re a father. You’re a father figure. You’re charismatic and instil fear. You’re go, go, go. You’re a man of action. I am a woman of few words. I am not a mother. Never had those children. Put it way in the past behind me. The chances I had. The people I met. I think particularly of the women you have fallen for, but I don’t even want to go. The one you, like my father, eventually chose to be wife and the mother of your children, the matriarch of your family. You don’t have mental illness, and suicide, and alcoholism, and addiction running through your bloodline in the ways that I do. It is at moments like these that I tell myself it was good thing not to have had any children.
I found you. That is the most important thing. At this late stage of my life I found you. I suspect you have your qualities, exquisite, exquisite, exquisite, and I have mine. And perhaps this is all will ever have. Stolen moments, hurried notes scribbled in a journal, digression, oh, I don’t know. What I don’t know. There are so many things that I don’t know about you. That you will never know about me. All I know is that both man and woman are dangerous. Love inevitably spells danger to me. It is all-powerful to me. It can send me into a stupor. To my bed for days on end. I am built like a poet. Built for the supernatural, not the marrying kind of life. There is such a contrast between the two of us. How you go about living, how you go about your life. I have no life. Only the writer’s life. The poet’s world. Love turns me into a sleeping woman, a depressed woman. I am a rather limited being, as I have said before. I don’t know what you’ve done, what you do with the writing that I have chosen to show you. All I can think of is that you share it with no one, or, share it with as many as you can, or, you only share it with the people closest to you, person closest to you in everything. Your wife.
I can do many things, but I cannot love. You’re so accomplished and brave. You have to be brave in your line of work. I gathered this early on. And when you came, you came out of the blue. I never expected you. I don’t expect you now. Only these intermittent emails. You’re distinguished. You’re distinguished looking. You don’t do anything you don’t want to do. Oh, how you do. How you do. It drives me to despair. It drives me to distraction. How you have purpose. And I lived without purpose for the longest time. You don’t know me. You know absolutely nothing that there is to know about me. You’ll go on living after your death. In your children, in your grandchildren, in your future great-grandchildren. I often do ask myself that sometimes that what have I done. On the surface of things, it is such a small life. Not filled with children and a life and work and illustrious career and spouse to fill the hours. Only writing long sentences. And I can only love from afar. Perhaps that is the hardest thing of all. Going that distance. It’s a trek. It’s a trek. I love you. I do. I will always love you. And in this return to love, there’s a return to the page too in a way. Because in one sense it is always the page that frees me in a very, very intense way. You will never eat anything I cook. We will never go on an official first date. I don’t drink red wine. I never drink. I don’t smoke. But you, you have this heart. It completely exhausts me to the point where I cannot do anything. Where I cannot dream, make plans, or, lists, or fulfil goals, or, even think. And whenever you go, you bring contrast to my life, to my world, to the environment in which I live.
You have everything, or, you seem to have everything. Education, wife, house. I have nature’s bridegroom. The flowers, the trees. Is this my life now? Stolen moments, hurriedly written letters written with mock abandon, the fake pretence of being someone that I am not. I think that I, I love you in a state of empathy, with consideration, with confidence and compassion. I think that I, I love you in a state of flux, in a state of harmony, in a state of my evolution as a novelist. Time is slower. I have all of these hours to fill. You don’t have the same problem. You must have everything because you are a man. I am a woman so I must submit. Submit to you. Submit to man, to the dominant species, to a patriarchal society. I loved it when you said sorry. I know it doesn’t come easy to a person like you. I know you meant it, and I adored you for it. I adore you as I have never adored anyone before. I think of you in stolen moments, in hurriedly written letters written with fierce mock abandon, in the thinking processes of someone who is being the fake pretence of being someone that I am not. I don’t want to think of my health. That is the last thing I want to think about. The cause for concern. The issue at stake. The renal unit, drawing blood, waiting for blood tests, to see the consultant who worked at Groote Schuur. I do not miss the harried nurses working o their feet all day. The confidence of the young doctors with their cute backpacks, product in their hair. Their will always be the jokester. I will always get the jokester. I think of the day of your wedding. I think of your wedding feast. Was it at a hotel? Was it a buffet lunch? Did you dance. Things that it is of course, of course, of course not by business to know. Nothing can ever come of us.
The stress and loneliness, the useless feeling of emptiness and stupor, the burnout over the last months. And now this new trauma. The loss of Rabbit. I am in a state. Disappointed and morose, miserable and stuck in a cocoon, my life literally a bubble. I don’t see you, but you’re everywhere. You move in the right social circles with your wife. I move in no social circles. I don’t read about you. You and your wife read about me. Things I thought that would be lost in this town community. Things that weren’t lost. I think of my madness then in the dark. It is appropriate to think of it in that way. I think of you surrounded, ambushed by your people. How different you are as a man to my father. Taken up by duty and obligation much in the same way he was. So, I live on the edge. Always writing to you from the edge. Pretending to fall in love. Pretending for romance sake. I think about children about having children for the first time in my life. I pretend to be happy. I am so good at it, that I feel elated some days. It is enough to think of you. Not to be with you physically. I am in awe of you. I am afraid that others will see this. There will be more whispers, more derision on the part of women more or less. I think I can take it now. The men feeling sorry for me. Sorry for the men that want to be in my company. There are times when I think I can’t bear this. I can’t bear this scrutiny. As with the madness, I keep my lamentations for the dark too. I think of the wisdom of owls, and I think of another love, before he got married love who collected them. I think of the starlings in the gap figuring out the world around them, and I think of another love.
Before he got married love. I am always falling. I am always falling. Falling into a voyage into eternity. Falling backwards like a leaf concerned with finding the art of wooing gravity in a cocoon, falling with a slightly forward-motion into the sea. I am a lover of Jane Eyre, African literature and the future, chairman. And I am sad. Being together means the physical. Being apart, the separation doesn’t have to necessarily kill me. Time just stands still. And I have the hours to fill with music, I have the hours to fill with writing my novels, getting on with the job of living, and perhaps studying further in a few months, and listening to soundtracks of films I use to watch with my sister who is now in the Czech Republic. Am I bad, for writing about all my loves? I don’t know. I think that any woman on her own would. She would want to be reminded of the sum of happiness in her life. The pursuit of love at all costs, against all odds. I think of you, I think of gravity, I think of the pull and the sway of you in moonlight, in darkness, in light, and of course, I think of the distance between us. It is like a trapeze artist balancing eternity at the end of his nose as he does his act. I am always trying to find the mountain, the valley, the future in everything. You have found everything in house, in wife, in children, in grandchildren. I think of night rides and distances. This physical separation. This distance that divides us completely. Yes, it is good that we have this distance. One look, a glance from you, a glimpse and I’m a goner, I’m afraid. I cannot think. I cannot feel. I cannot ignore you. The brevity of the situation. The art of the seduction, the education at play.
I can’t not think of seeing you. All we had was the briefest of moments. I can’t struggle with that right now. That you’re gone. You’re a hidden thing. You are. You are. One thing about me is that I don’t slip into feeling anxious about you, wherever you are, or, fall into anguish. You can be cold, I’m sure. I can be cold too. I can be aloof. I can be indifferent, and you can be all of those things all of the time. A man has to be, a man who lives in a man’s world. I’ve given up on marriage. I am sure many can see that. Maybe it is a struggle for people who want to be married to see this in someone who so obviously doesn’t want to be married.
I have adopted other mothers’ children. I am sure many can see that too. And now I want to be on my own. And all I seem to do is write. And look, I did the impossible last year. I wrote my first novel. I don’t know if it will be published. I don’t know what will happen to it. But that is also exciting in a way. On some level I can share that with you. I am tired. I really am. I am tired of grieving. I am tired of the affairs of grief. I am tired of losing people that I love. I feel like a second wife sometimes. Hidden in a secret world. A world of the history of complaints. I surround myself with things, objects that please me, images that remind me of you.
Of the laughter and the world of women, and you’re the church standing tall amidst the solitude of the waves pounding the chairs in the pew, or, before the reading stand. I will always be a fan of yours. Like attracts like. Intellect attracts intellect. The light is neon-lit here tonight. You’re I your home. I’m in my house. And the loneliness. It is like an anchor. You’re like a frontier to me. Another marked territory. Oh hell, oh hell, oh hell, I’ve fallen again. Fork in the road, cocoon in hand, you are meaningful, you are occurring, and that is the most important thing to me. That you occur to me on so many levels.
And all I seem to do on the return to my elderly parents’ house is find my truly wild Sargasso Sea, which is my childhood sea that stretches along the inlet of this coast. And I’ll write a book about you if you must know. If you want to know. I’ll write a novel. I’ll make it magnificent. I’ll make you magnificent in it. I’ll make you young. You’ll be reborn. I’ll make you as old, or, as ancient as I want. I get to decide that. It is as if you can see my hair. You can see that its unkempt and dishevelled and I haven’t gone for a blowout in a long time. I feel completely safer around other men. Other women remind me of my mother, my sister and not in a gentle and complacent way either. I feel you have been surrounded by beauty your entire life. I wait, but you do not come. I also do not want you to see me like this. Pale. Bored. Fresh out of hospital. I don’t want you to see the labels that other people have put upon me. Don’t want you to see the burnout, the trauma written all over my face. Remember me as and if you want to remember me. Only if you want to remember me, that is. So, so many have forgotten me. I am hardly worth remembering if you must know. That night. It is my father that kept us apart. Away from each other.
You took my hand in yours. That is all I have. And a fire swept right through single woman me. Right through my entire being. I remember you holding me, me holding onto you as if I would never let you go, but of course, I had to. We were literally surrounded by small children, and people, and someone visiting my father. It is enough to know that I am here, and that you are there. I was disappointed that you thought I was only a good writer. Not a great one. That I didn’t have it in me, I thought that was what you supposed. So, I go in the big night. So, I wait to hear from you. Laugh at you emojis. Suppose in a way that is the highlight of my day. I want you to think of me, but I don’t think that you do. Feel, feel the same way about me as I do about you. There’s too much thunder in my life. Sometimes it can be a good thing. It makes me think. I write, and write and write and it seems to never come to the point of a beginning, or, an end. That bubble, that zone in which I live seems never to come to an end. You’re the most beautiful thing to me. I think of the Parisian rooftops I will never see. Rilke did. Van Gogh did. Rodin did. Perhaps I will too, if I get that far ahead in life. To Paris. Perhaps our silences betray us. Perhaps they are marked by the moan of day caught in the light. I don’t want you to even know the person I was before the day that I met you. I think that you transformed me. I think of the silences a lot. Too much. The hours in a day that I spend at a desk writing about myself, thinly-veiled semi-autobiographical short stories, or, that I write about other people. Or, I write about you. Of course, I write about you. I always write about the person I am in love with, or, am falling for hard. The people I have loved.
a broken world left to explode
wishes dance lightly
on the edge of a broken
world left to explode
dreams of beauty or
neon nights of wonder and
magic fills the air
sorrow, my only
friend that still even cares to
listen to echoes
of love and tragic
loss of any reminder
of whatever hope
kept us alive in
this darkened hell full of those
that wish us endless
harm and grave closure
to the dream of leaving the
shade of lonely love
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
every heartbreak over the years
these are the nights
where your demons
start to play favorites
where they start to conspire
with the section of the brain
that holds all that shit you
can't escape from your youth
every glass is every
heartbreak over
the years
losing your virginity
to some whore that
has a name you can't
remember
having a drink thrown
on you in a restaurant
after a dirty joke
a plate of food dumped
on you by "accident"
the scars from the first woman
that you didn't pull out in time
for and her tears that still ring
in your ears
you can see all the marks
you want to dig up and
down your arms
all the places where a needle
could fill the damn void already
the shotgun has been resting
in the corner for years now
the demons always know
when it's time
----------------------------------------------------------------------
other intentions
i offered to buy
this woman dinner
she obviously thought
i had other intentions
i said no
the steak is on sale
and i'm sure i'll have
a few drinks
but since your mind
went directly to sex
who knows what the
night may hold for us
that was a $75 dinner
i'll never forget
---------------------------------------------------------------------
on a stormy saturday night
she was an old soul
from such a tender age
we would laugh as she
smoked old cigarettes
on a stormy saturday night
she had legs that i always
wanted to wrap around
my head three times
i have always had the
problem of falling in
love with lesbians
she was no different
a little cruel at times
when she would blow me
kisses and flash a little
more thigh as i was
trying to play pool
i got drunk enough one night
that i told her everything
from the dirty dreams
to the lovely poems
to how her perfume stays
with me for weeks on end
i never saw her again
after that night
i'm sure she went on
to make some woman
very happy
over and over again
----------------------------------------------------------
the simple dreams
it's these cold winter
nights in my bed alone,
dreaming of a quiet death
wondering how you are doing
on the other side of the world
never feeling sorry for myself
but also wondering how much
losing does one soul have
to overcome
a few rays of sunshine
a phone call that isn't
looking for money
a howling wind creeping
around every corner
right next door to death
the stubborn never go easy
i'll fall asleep in your arms
tonight, humming a jill scott
song
what i wouldn't give to make
just the simple dreams come
true
J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) was raised by wolves yet managed to graduate high school with honors. He’s been widely published over the last quarter century, most recently at Horror Sleaze Trash, Terror House Magazine, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Beatnik Cowboy and Dumpster Fire Press. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)
After dropping out at sixteen after dropping out at eighteen after working with his hands on the hot tar flat-roofs of the war-era buildings of downbeat Brooklyn the view of Manhattan too far, too far away
he cleans up nice he charms the headmaster of an uptown school he’s hired to teach the children of the über elite.
A boy without background man without a college degree an eye for the youth he talks his way inside homes the rich, celebrity, power brokers of the City he loves woos their daughters wins their confidence.
A few years of Wall Street, Rolex and Armani, silk ties and a fashion model on each arm, man about town, wealth, women he’s living loud until he’s quietly fired for insider trading for stealing and fraud.
He moves on with plans for his own company to help the rich get richer —and himself to women, they come and come and go, they always go, ever the flavor of the month every single month single for the rest of his life. Unlimited
They shared a brain, an eye for the beauty of the pure fresh spring and budding unopened blossoms almost ripe and so sweet.
They shared a house largest residence in the City the power of attorney the yacht, private planes and the action that comes with unlimited access.
On a handshake he took the mansion made it his playground his man cave, his den of iniquity, of cameras hidden in high walls in the glossy bedrooms in the mirrored bathrooms in secret spaces all around watching, filming his partner, his friends all the famous guests in an unlimited springtime fresh flowers just opening their delicate petals under his appreciative eye.
Body Alarm
Roaches and rats underfoot he longs for a toilet seat a crystal flute of champagne small hands on his flesh kneading out stress.
A cinderblock world of dark gray concrete metal table, Metal bunk hard-bolted to the mold-damp wall a future in debt to the system he tells he’s done nothing wrong— and he believes it.
Eight hours a day under fluorescent lights in a tight white tile jailhouse conference room with the best attorneys that much money can buy and he’s going for it bail appeal on Monday— and he believes it.
But instead of winning yet another round for the rich he hangs loose from the empty top bunk by a strip of orange jumpsuit no cameras working no guards checking no no no for a full eight hours nobody hears him die.
The autopsy asks questions regarding the body: red ligature marks where they shouldn’t be three broken bones that shouldn’t be no bunkmate, no night watch and that shouldn’t be the crime scene disturbed the body is deemed inconclusive…
then oh so quickly the media reports the medical examiners’ reports he’s a suicide— and we believe it?
Joining Forces
In a surge of passion a sweetheart huddle a spasm of unity and energy they create something new a time-bomb, an ear blast that is giving birth to the wonder women within.
The girls are older, wiser they are free, they are mobile so easily mobilized into formation, reformation into a show of force into a mob seeking justice from those they blame for all they expected that did not happen and never will.
Girls hand over photos their journals, their scars a long list of grievances and they’re off to the fight finally, the good fight the call to action they’ve been waiting for years in a pink room before a blue screen locked in a life with no future but this.
A show of small hands: they were too young and he was wrong, sick protected, overlooked, a creep and a con man, guilty, guilty, guilty.
Parsing Bill
In the entry to the largest single family residence on the Upper East Side where the upper crust comes to dine, preen, gloat small hands hung up an oil painting a mock portrait of the former leader of the free world in a little blue dress sharp red heels a telling smirk seated seductively in the oval-shaped office of the most important home in America.
The art makes the man the man makes an art of the seduction of power and the portrait serves as a warning to all who enter this upside-down world about who holds the reins and who the noose in small hands.
Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan writes tropical noir with a dark humor. Her poetry has been widely published in literary journals and chapbooks. In 2020, Grandma Moses Press released Florida Man. Her novel The Physics of Grief puts the fun back in funerals while taking a serious look at the process of mourning (QuoScript, UK, 2021).
the bulletin board’s nice eye
the carp was a grant of the fist
that face is the iron
bluh!
the lean scope was a charm
that needle was an eye to laugh
to learn of the laughing hook
that could be the name of thy building
that wood is the pooh
my rose is a penny laser
the bright hammond of the clouds
possibly
a rose of the walking head
a merit of the gallon
the cruising head
is the sun a school?
the brain is the charcoal of the iron
the losing head is the northern huck of the filament
the northern hum of the airah knew bat
to be the featured wool in the stove of the floral earth
the whipping hum is the light of the beryl
the dusk in the circle of the sherry
shark marbles!
pit pip that lock of the laser maid
the cherished ankle
the rose of the mica
the ticking of the feathered serpent
the choral oink of the wandering hum
the light of the fresno bacon
that alpha is the boat of the marble
to can a clark of the eel
bio/graf
J. D. Nelson (b. 1971) experiments with words in his subterranean laboratory. His first full-length collection of poetry, entitled In Ghostly Onehead, is slated for a 2021 release by mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press. Visit http://www.MadVerse.com for more information and links to his published work. Nelson live
A potentially friendly cab driver suddenly turned silent when I showed him the address: 7 Kaspi St. He drove to the neighborhood, gestured brusquely down the street, and left. My companion and I had trouble determining if we were even on the right street, as street names are sometimes printed on the sides of buildings in Cyrillic or on hard-to-find street signs. We asked directions of several people, including a neighborhood delivery truck driver, but everyone shrugged and appeared not to know the place.
Fifty kilometres from Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia, is Gori, a picturesque city at the confluence of rivers, surrounded by mountains. Gori’s claim to fame is that Joseph Stalin was born and went to school here. Many people don’t realize that Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili (იოსებ ბესარიონის ძე ჯუღაშვილი in Georgian), otherwise known as Josef Stalin, was born in Georgia and began revolutionary activities here after abandoning theological studies. Ironically, Stalin enjoyed neither the process of remembering his childhood nor coming back to visit Gori in later years. Busloads of summer tourists visit, though. Although Georgians, understandably, have an uneasy tolerance of Stalin’s fame, the desire to preserve his memory is strong here.
At the centre of town: Stalin Square, Stalin Avenue, the Stalin Museum and a huge poster of his head dominating the upstairs window of a storefront.
Past the peddler selling Stalin novelties on the museum grounds are two interesting things.
One is Stalin’s personal, armored railroad carriage, unrestored, complete with Venetian glass mirrors, carved wooden furniture, a bathtub and toilet, and an office with a phone, table and sofa.
The other is his family’s original house, with intricate woodwork, where Stalin was born into a shoemaker’s family and lived until age four. The family lived above the ground-floor cobbler’s shop. It is now protected by a columned structure with golden yellow stained glass in the roof accented by a hammer-and-sickle design in the corners.
Stalin Family Home, Stalin Museum, Gori
The truly fascinating artifacts are not in Gori, however, but back in Tbilisi. Stalin’s samizdat (underground) printing press is literally underground, 15 metres beneath an old house in the Avlabari district of Tbilisi, a somewhat decrepit neighborhood of bleak apartment blocks and car repair garages.
No. 7 Kaspi St. is now an unofficial museum of early Communism. A few of us attending the 2017 Summer Literary Seminars in Tbilisi agreed to meet at this house one morning. We all got lost on the dusty streets before finally finding each other and the house, whose iron door has a hammer and sickle on it, and were treated to a full tour by none other than the 78 yearold chairman of the Georgian Communist Party, Zhiuli Sikhmashvili.
Energetic and lively, he was happy to show us around the donation-funded museum and talk to us in broken English. Luckily, three people from Poland who spoke both Russian and English showed up soon after we did and were able to translate Sikhmashvili’s Russian so that we got a much more informative tour than we would have otherwise.
The office, crowded with memorabilia and books, had a desk with a pale yellow rotary phone balanced on a stack of papers.
Portraits of revolutionaries working at the printing press, newspapers such as Pravda with Lenin on the front cover, flags, photos and documents occupied several rooms.
In the yard is a replica of the house Stalin was born in, its rooms reconstructed with original furnishings, including a small platen press for handbills and small posters.
But the main purpose and focus of this site is the existence of the large, underground printing press. Between 1903 and 1906 thousands of flyers, pamphlets and newspapers were printed at this location, in Russian, Georgian, Azeri and Armenian.
A large printing press made in Germany in 1893 had been imported from Baku, then disassembled and its parts lowered fifteen metres down a well shaft hidden by a small shed in the yard. At the bottom, a side tunnel of about four metres was dug to connect to another shaft with a ladder up to the underground cellar where the printing press would be. There, the press was reassembled. Not a job for those with claustrophobia!
The house had to look “normal”, so two women lived on the first floor and kept a few chickens in the yard. In case of potential danger, a hidden electric alarm bell would alert those underground. The young Bolsheviks worked in shifts, sending completed material in a bucket up the shaft to the house. Flyers would be hidden in street sellers’ carts, taken to the railway station, and from there would travel to the Caucasus region and beyond.
Down a rusty spiral staircase (constructed for the museum) is a dank cellar lit only by a few lightbulbs, making photography tricky. The press itself is quite rusted, because the cellar flooded a few years ago. The bucket, rope and ladder are still there in their shafts.
Visitors have left coins on the flat surfaces of the press. Leaving coins there seems more like a show of respect for historical objects than the equivalent of tossing a coin into a fountain. In 1906 the police raided the house, but in 1937 Stalin and Beria—the brutal Georgian chief of the USSR Secret Police—reopened the house as a museum. An official, government-funded museum until 2012, it apparently also contains the offices of the current Georgian Communist Party. The day we visited, other people were just sitting outside, reading or writing.
We were careful to remain neutral in our comments so as not to offend our host, while managing to convey appreciation for the history displayed there. We left a donation in thanks for receiving a history lesson and a tour of Communism seen through Georgian eyes.
