Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Garbo's Faces
    Unavailable
    Garbo's Faces
    Unavailable
    Garbo's Faces
    Ebook469 pages7 hours

    Garbo's Faces

    By Rowan Wolf

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    When Nachiketa is 23 his father reveals to him that his mother is the reclusive Swedish film star, “Harriet Brown” (an alias that Greta Garbo often used). No one knows this and no one must ever know.

    Nachiketa and Harriet do eventually meet and together embark on a decades-long spiritual journey of sporadic meetings, prolonged silences, and extraordinary, shared experiences complete with ancient snakes, trolls, and a mysterious white horse that originally belonged to Mark Helprin. And the boy who was once given away will become the person who knows his mother best.

    This is all a lie, of course, but a lie that tells the truth.

    ====

    Prologue

    When my mother was twelve years old, directing imaginary plays from the little outhouse roof in her tenement back yard, she knew that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the world.

    Standing by her living room window, catching a brown and watery glimpse of the East River these many years later, she knew it to be a bad place.

    Whether this knowledge had gathered little by little over the intervening years—cloud by cloud, regret by regret—and just now let on; or whether it had sprung: gray horizon to horizon upon an unsuspecting sky just moments ago, since breakfast, she couldn’t tell. Only that it was so obvious now.

    But she mustn’t let this ruin her day. She slipped into her beige duffle coat, donned her sunglasses, covered her head with a gray and black scarf, patted her coat pocket to hear the keys tinkle, made sure she had her cigarettes, and her lighter, and without as much as a word of good-bye to Claire, headed out for her morning walk.

    ====

    A Gift

    My mother gave me away when I was two weeks old. Yes: I was a gift. That’s what she later told me: a gift. Of course, I was also the unthinkable, in a world that must never know about me, at least not the world which knew and celebrated her. I was to be hidden from it.

    Later I realized that I was also to be hidden from her, the deeper the better.
    “And given sounds so much better than hidden, don’t you think?” she said once after I had come to know her. “And so much better than unthinkable.”

    The original benefactee—if I can be permitted to invent a word—was my father. His name was Jiddu and at that time (I was born April 10, 1928) he was a reasonably well known mystic. Indeed, he was quite famous in his day, even though today, if remembered at all, he seems more myth than man. Still, he has left a bit of a legacy, along with not a few schools and foundations scattered here and there about the world. But the man on the street, were you to mention his name, would look at you blankly, take his time, and then shake his head.

    At first Jiddu argued that she should keep me. “Children should be with their mothers,” he said. “That’s why women give birth and not men.” Besides, would a child not be in his way as much as in hers? This, however, he soon had to admit—even to himself—simply was not true. Sure, to him I would be a burden, an inconvenience and an embarrassment, but to her I would be the end of a career, the end of a successful life.

    So in the end he relented—though, from what she later told me, not all that gracefully—and accepted me: a gift to be hidden.

    You could plainly see that I was his and her son. The color of my hair and the color of my skin were his; the color of my eyes, and the shape of my nose and mouth were hers. If my father had entertained any thoughts of contesting his involvement, he must have abandoned them the moment he saw me. Very much his, and very much hers. Not that I cared then.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRowan Wolf
    Release dateFeb 3, 2018
    ISBN9781370190843
    Unavailable
    Garbo's Faces
    Author

    Rowan Wolf

    I was born Ulf Ronnquist one snowy night in late October, in one of those northern Swedish towns that are little more than a clearing in the forest. Many years later, once I begun to publish my stories, I was casting about for a good pen name. This is how I came up with Rowan Wolf: Ulf is actually an old spelling of the Swedish word Ulv, which in turn is an old word for Varg which means Wolf. Ronnquist, in turn, means "branch of Rowan Tree." So I flipped them and got Rowan Wolf, a name I then used for many years. Once I got my U.S. Citizenship (2002) I decided to use my legal U.S. name, Ulf Wolf, as my pen name as well. Recently, however, I moved back to Rowan Wolf, my initial love as names go, to go along with my site: RowanSongs.com. I have told lies all my life. Initially just to vent my overactive imagination, or to profess innocence (while guilty). A little later I channeled this creative drive into stories. Initially, I wrote them in Swedish, but for the last thirty or so years in English. To date I have written seven novels, five novellas and forty odd short stories, along with songs and poems.

    Related to Garbo's Faces

    Related ebooks

    Fantasy For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Lockdown Stories

      Nov 13, 2020

      Lockdown Stories
      6 min read

    • Article

      Better

      Aug 12, 2019

      Better
      18 min read

    • Article

      Ongoingness

      Apr 21, 2022

      Ongoingness
      8 min read

    • Article

      I Ran Away From Home At 60!

      Feb 20, 2024

      Three decades ago, I celebrated my 30th birthday in the time-honoured tradition of all young people who think they are an adult but have no real idea about life, duty or personal responsibility – I got smashed. In fairness, I had quite a lot to get s

      4 min read

    • Article

      Two Years Of Solitude

      Dec 31, 2021

      Two Years Of Solitude
      12 min read

    • Article

      The Ones We Sent Away

      Aug 7, 2023

      The Ones We Sent Away
      47 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Jan 1, 2024

      I wake from a dreamin which I’m speaking coarselyto my daughter who has taken offher clothes in the middleschool parking lot and is washingher body in ritual preparationto go onto the internet and find outif the rumor she heard abouther favorite YouT

      3 min read

    • Article

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary

      Jun 17, 2020

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary
      7 min read

    • Article

      My Story The Secrets We Keep

      Oct 7, 2020

      My Story The Secrets We Keep
      4 min read

    • Article

      My Story The Secrets We Keep

      Oct 7, 2020

      My Story The Secrets We Keep
      4 min read

    • Article

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary

      Jun 17, 2020

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary
      7 min read

    • Article

      Carrie Fountain

      Mar 1, 2020

      Outside Dublin, Texas the radio stationsdisappear and I’m left alone with the faintvoice of a call-in psychologist talkingto a man in Cleveland about the voiceof the self, the narratives that voicetells, how they can be sharp and wrongand cut to the

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Lost Cause

      Dec 6, 2020

      A Lost Cause
      9 min read

    • Article

      Hecho en El Salvador

      Aug 7, 2023

      Hecho en El Salvador
      5 min read

    • Article

      Lineal Gaps

      Apr 6, 2021

      Lineal Gaps
      15 min read

    • Article

      The Space Between Us

      Oct 9, 2019

      The Space Between Us
      8 min read

    • Article

      That Particular Sunday

      Jul 6, 2023

      That Particular Sunday
      26 min read

    • Article

      Year Of The Rat

      Nov 24, 2020

      Year Of The Rat
      11 min read

    • Article

      Table Talk

      Sep 1, 2023

      Table Talk
      10 min read

    • Article

      A Lifelong Love Affair

      Jan 2, 2024

      Christmas morning, 1959. A skinny 12-year-old kid, one normally almost impossible to get jump-started in time to get him to school before the tardy bell, bounces out of bed at the crack of dawn and thunders down the hall, like a cutting horse after a

      3 min read

    • Article

      Me, My Mom, and Wordle

      Sep 14, 2022

      Me, My Mom, and Wordle
      5 min read

    Reviews for Garbo's Faces

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words