Nachoem Wijnberg
Tasks
A man walks into a café,
asks for coffee, puts so much sugar in it that the cup overflows,
drinks the coffee, asks the woman behind the bar for a light
for a cigarette he has already put in his mouth, gets a light, pays.
Early in the morning a man walks into a restaurant
which is being cleaned and asks the first person who looks at him
for a warm meal and a place where he can sit and rest.
Something happens to a man like the death of an only child,
something that makes his life different than he had imagined it thus
far,
and he tells people about it who didn’t intend to get to know him.
A man is left in a forest with two kinds of tree
and at the bottom of some hills there are treeless spaces
with slides and swings and merry-go-rounds which he has to power
himself.
A man is put in possession of a story about his life
until the moment something bad happens to him and it is
left up to him whether he uses it or not.
Nachoem M Wijnberg, one of the best young poets in the Netherlands, has published seven books of poems and two novels, the second of which, De joden (The Jews) appeared in November 1999.
Alissa Leigh is a translator from Russian and Dutch, and is presently working for the Institute of War Documentation / Yad Vashem in Amsterdam.
Translated by Alissa Leigh
Page(s) 191
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