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Converging SkewersSeptember 05, 2005 I'm always going on about how fragmented I can get, with the horse person over here, the feminist over there, the science fiction reviewer up here, the Vineyarder down there, the overworked editor chained to a chair, the writer here, there, and everywhere . . . So it's worth noting that I'm currently reading Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, an ornate (one might say post-Byzantine) take on the history and legend of one Count Dracula, known to his contemporaries as Vlad the Impaler for his penchant for skewering those he defeated and those who displeased him. According to a fifteenth-century historian, the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II arrived at Dracula's deserted capital, Târgoviste, and was greeted by "thousands and thousands of stakes bearing dead people instead of fruit." (I will try to remember this the next time someone starts ranting about the barbarism of the twentieth or twenty-first century.) It is said that Vlad learned this and other torture techniques from the Ottoman Turks. Meanwhile, back at the chair, the overworked editor is copyediting the English translation of a collection of stories. The author is Japanese. In one story, the narrator and his girlfriend are shacked up on a nondescript Greek island within sight of the Turkish coast. In the town square is the statue of a Greek hero who plotted an uprising against the Turkish overlords but had the misfortune to be captured. The Turks, it is said, "set up a sharpened stake in the square beside the harbor, stripped the hapless hero naked, and lowered him onto it. The weight of his body drove the stake through his anus and then the rest of his body until it finally came out of his mouth -- an incredibly slow, excruciating way to die." Charming, eh? I hope that this convergence is simply a prank of my muses ("Be careful what you wish for . . ." is stenciled on their T-shirts) and not a sign that impalement is staging a comeback in the international zeitgeist.
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