Gargling With Tar

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They used to call me Ilya, all the nuns, all our foster-mothers back in Siřem, because as a baby I would call out iya, iya to people, and since this is Czech for ‘donkey’, they called me Ilya.

I would call out whenever the faces of the nuns at the Home from Home began to break into my dreams of Shadowland.

Shadowland was my earliest childhood. I would sometimes find myself going there. Before the nuns arrived, I lived in the kitchen.

I matured rapidly in the Home from Home’s prayer-filled, god-fearing atmosphere, and spoke Czech well. Monkeyface didn’t speak at all.

The nuns called me Ilya long before their nerves began to shatter.

When I was very little they would even call me ‘Ilya, our long-suffering little donkey’. They liked the way I fussed over my baby brother and ‘wouldn’t have a word said against him’, as they put it.

After the kitchen, Monkeyface and I grew up at the Home from Home, because our parents didn’t give a damn, not a shit, not one sodding shit about us. That’s quite common here.

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