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Таня Д Дэвис
Gentle voices belonged to a host of transparent creatures, whose contours were recognisably human and even beautiful, but as if made of air and clouds. One of them approached Julia and said in pleasant male voice: «I have the honour to greet you here. We’re all good friends and shall be glad to have you in our company».
Julia smiled and the heavenly transparent creature smiled back at her. «Am I transparent too?» — wondered Julia and at the same moment stopped thinking about it, because it didn’t matter. What really mattered was that she could fly anywhere now, even to China! And she addressed her pleasant-looking companion in a polite voice: «Excuse me, sir, do you happen to know in which direction I should fly to get to Peking?»
Sarah Belch waited for Steve Martin but he never turned up. When she learned about his death in the car accident she sighed with relief. «Saved», — she said to herself and a radiant smile lit up her charming face.
At the cosy office of the Human Soul Travellers Club the Chinese-looking secretary was busy with the two cheques, which Mr. Toffiles had just brought. He was evidently pleased with himself and was happily humming his favourite tune «Everything’s going my way».
«You could have done better business, Mr. Toffiles», — said the porcelain beauty, when she finished counting, — «if you sold human souls, not just transplant organs for operations».
Mr. Toffiles laughed in reply. — «Business in human souls? You know, Margaret, the world has changed greatly over the last one hundred years. Life has lost its spirit and people have become low materialists. They are not interested in pure souls any longer. Who will buy a perfect sinless human soul today? Nobody needs it…»
Mind the Gap
«Breaking down stereotypes is not just realising that people are not the way one thought they were, or that deep down «we are all the same».
It is understanding that we are irreducibly unique and different, and that I could have been you, you could have been me, given different circumstances. In other words, that the stranger as Kristeva says, is in us…»
«The Cultural Component of Language
Teaching» by Claire Kramsch,
British Studies Now, N 8, 1996
West Acton. The doors closed with a characteristic beep of London underground and Tanya began looking through «The Times» she had bought a few minutes earlier at Ealing Broadway. She smiled as her eye fell on a big cartoon: a black man sleeping on a bench with a bulldog by his side, the latter chewing ferociously the sign «No dogs, no Irish, no blacks». «Whatever happened to the melting pot?» — big letters of the headline inquired.
