Sunday, April 18, 2004
The Butterflies are Laughing
By Sam Vaknin
My parents' home, it is dusk time, and I am climbing to the attic. I settle on my childhood's sofa, whose unraveled corners reveal its faded and lumpy stuffing. The wooden armrests are dark and bear the scratchy marks of little hands. I contemplate these blemishes, set bright against the deep, brown planks, and am reminded of my past. A light ray meanders diagonally across the carpet. The air is Flemish. The fitting light, the shades, the atmosphere.
There is a watercolor on an easel of a thickset forest with towering and murky trees. A carriage frozen in a clearing, a burly driver, looking towards nowhere, as though there's nothing left to see. No light, no shadows, just a black-singed mass of foliage and an incandescent, sallow horse.
My little brother lies bleeding on the rug. Two gory rivulets, two injured wrists, delineate a perfect circle. They cross his ashen palms and waxen, twitching fingers. It may be a call for help but I have been hard of hearing.
I crouch beside him and inspect the wounds. They are shallow but profuse. Red pain has broken past his skin, his face is wrinkled. I wipe him gently, trying not to hurt.
He stares at me, eyes of a gammy colt awaiting the delivering shot. He radiates the kind of gloom that spans the room and makes me giddy. I cower to my heels, then squat beside him, caressing his silent scream. My palms are warm.
We while the time. His frothy exhalations, my measured air inhaled, our lungs entwined in the proliferating density. The volumes of my childhood mob the shelves, their bindings blue and rigid.
I look at him and tell him it's alright, he shouldn't worry. A mere nineteen, he gives me a senescent smile and nods in frailty. He grasps it all, too much. Shortly, I may have to lift him in my arms and set him on the couch. We are not alone. Echoes of people downstairs. I can't tell who. Mother, our sister, Nomi perhaps. Someone arrives and sparks excited speech and lengthy silences.
I descend the steps, some hasty greetings, I stuff a roll of coarse, green toilet paper in my pants. Back to the horror, to frisk around the crimson wreckage. I wipe my brother wrathfully from floor and carpet and from couch, reducing him to a ubiquity of chestnut stains. I am not content. He is writhing on the inlay, attempting tears. It's futile, I know. We both forgot the art of crying, except from torn veins.
The light is waning. The brown blinds incarcerate my brother behind penumbral bars. His bony hands and scrawny body in stark relief. It is the first time that I observe him truly. He is lanky but his face unchanged. I was no child when he was born but he is still my little brother.
He is resting now, eyes shut, our lengthy lashes - both mine and his - attached to fluttering lids. Birds trapped in quivering arteries flap at his throat. He is sobbing still but I avert my gaze, afraid to hug him. We oscillate, like two charged particles, my little brother and myself. His arms by his side and my arms by his side, divergent. I thrust into my bulging pocket a ball of ruby paper.
There is a clock in here that ticks the seconds. They used to sound longer. It was another time. The hemorrhage stopped. A mournful lace of plasma on his sinewed wrists. It must have hurt, the old corroded blade, no flesh, just coated skeleton. To saw the bones till blood. To hack the skin, to spread it like a rusty butterfly, dismantling slithery vessels. I move to occupy the wooden ladder back, near the escritoire that I received as gift on the occasion of my first year in school.
He nods affirmative when asked if he can rise. I hold him under hairy, damp armpits. I confront him, seated on my grandma's rocking chair, a cushion clad in Moroccan equine embroidery on my knees. I gently hold his hand and he recoils. I didn't hurt him, though.
I wait for him to break, his hand in mine. Thus clenched, our palms devoid of strength, we face a question and a promise, the fear of pain and of commitment. We dwell on trust.
He unfists and bleeds anew. I use the paper ball to soak it up. It's dripping. I gallop down the spiral staircase and collect another roll, adhesive bandages, and dressing. Into my pocket and, speechlessly, I climb back. He is sitting there, a Pharaonic scribe, wrists resting on his knees, palms lotus flowers, but upturned. His gifted painter's fingers are quenched in blood.
I mop and dab, swab and discard, apply some pressure and erase. My brother is calling me in sanguineous tongue and I deface it, incapable of listening, unwilling to respond.
I bind him and I dress and he opens his eyes and gapes at the white butterflies that sprouted on his joints. He feels them tenderly, astonished by this sudden red-white beauty.
I count his pulse and he gives in to my pseudo-professional mannerisms. His pulse is regular. He hasn't lost a lot of blood, therefore.
He tells me he is OK now and asks for water. All of a sudden, I remember. One day, he was a toddler, could hardly walk, I led him back from the clinic. He gave blood and was weeping bitterly. A giant cotton swab was thrust into his elbow pit and he folded him arm, holding onto it tightly.
One jerky movement, it fell and he stood there, gawking at the soiled lump and whimpering. He was so tiny that I hugged him and wiped the tears from his plump cheeks.
I improvised a story about "Adhesa Cottonball", the cotton monster, who forever wishes to return to the soil, her abode. His eyes cleared and he giggled nervously. This sound - his chuckle - is in my ears, obscuring all real-life acoustics.
He gulps down the water silently, his eyes a distant blackness, where no one treads but he, his forest, among the trees, perhaps this carriage and its attending coachman. Where does he want to go, I wander?
My brain is working overtime. My skull-domiciled well-oiled machine, whose parts are in metallic shine, impeccable, unerring, impervious to pain. Machines don't ache this brother, sprawled on the couch, his shoulders stooping, in torn shirt and tattered trousers, my erstwhile clothes, his chest hirsute, his face adorned with budding beard and whiskers.
What story shall I tell him now to clear his eyes? How shall I make him laugh again? What monster should I bury in the sand?
I tell him to pack few things and come with me. He acquiesces but still won't budge. His twin wrist-butterflies are quite inert. He sighs as he buttons his shirt and rolls unfastened sleeves to cover his abrasions. When he gets up I see him as before: a gangling figure, an angular face, two cavernous sockets, big brown mole. He drags his feet.
We both descend. Don't tell our parents, he begs, I promise not to. Enters his room and exits fast, carrying a small plastic bag with severed handles. A pair of worn jeans spill from the top to cover some half-deleted lettering.
We bid farewell and walk placidly to the car. He freezes on the back seat, still cradling his plastic treasure, gazing forward but seeing little.
Nomi is driving while I watch him through the windshield mirror. His inanimate stare, directed at the window, is deflected by transparence. Slumped on the imitation leather seat, he and his trousers bump from one side to another on the winding road.
He falls asleep this way, sack closely clutched, chin burrowing into his hollow torso. At times, he shakes his head in stiff refusal. He is very adamant. Only his hands are calm, as though detached from his rebellious body.
Nomi is negotiating the parking and I touch his shoulder. He opens a pair of bleary eyes and looks at me like he used to when I was still his entire world. I touch once more and gently. When he was two years old , I left home for many years, never to be heard from. The hurt resides still in his eyes, that injury.
I touch a third time, thus pledging to remain, thus telling him my love. I study him at length and he does not divert his eyes.
Suddenly he smiles and dimples collect around his lips. He flings his hands high up and waves his red-white butterflies. He imitates their flight. He plucks their wings. He laughs and I respond by laughing and Nomi joins and the space of our car is filled with laughs and butterflies and butterflies and laughter.
==============================
Short Fiction in English and Hebrew
http://gorgelink.org/vaknin/
http://samvak.tripod.com/sipurim.html
http://www.suite101.com/files/topics/6514/files/worksinenglish.zip
Poetry of Healing and Abuse
http://samvak.tripod.com/contents.html
Anatomy of a Mental Illness
http://samvak.tripod.com/journal1.html
By Sam Vaknin
My parents' home, it is dusk time, and I am climbing to the attic. I settle on my childhood's sofa, whose unraveled corners reveal its faded and lumpy stuffing. The wooden armrests are dark and bear the scratchy marks of little hands. I contemplate these blemishes, set bright against the deep, brown planks, and am reminded of my past. A light ray meanders diagonally across the carpet. The air is Flemish. The fitting light, the shades, the atmosphere.
There is a watercolor on an easel of a thickset forest with towering and murky trees. A carriage frozen in a clearing, a burly driver, looking towards nowhere, as though there's nothing left to see. No light, no shadows, just a black-singed mass of foliage and an incandescent, sallow horse.
My little brother lies bleeding on the rug. Two gory rivulets, two injured wrists, delineate a perfect circle. They cross his ashen palms and waxen, twitching fingers. It may be a call for help but I have been hard of hearing.
I crouch beside him and inspect the wounds. They are shallow but profuse. Red pain has broken past his skin, his face is wrinkled. I wipe him gently, trying not to hurt.
He stares at me, eyes of a gammy colt awaiting the delivering shot. He radiates the kind of gloom that spans the room and makes me giddy. I cower to my heels, then squat beside him, caressing his silent scream. My palms are warm.
We while the time. His frothy exhalations, my measured air inhaled, our lungs entwined in the proliferating density. The volumes of my childhood mob the shelves, their bindings blue and rigid.
I look at him and tell him it's alright, he shouldn't worry. A mere nineteen, he gives me a senescent smile and nods in frailty. He grasps it all, too much. Shortly, I may have to lift him in my arms and set him on the couch. We are not alone. Echoes of people downstairs. I can't tell who. Mother, our sister, Nomi perhaps. Someone arrives and sparks excited speech and lengthy silences.
I descend the steps, some hasty greetings, I stuff a roll of coarse, green toilet paper in my pants. Back to the horror, to frisk around the crimson wreckage. I wipe my brother wrathfully from floor and carpet and from couch, reducing him to a ubiquity of chestnut stains. I am not content. He is writhing on the inlay, attempting tears. It's futile, I know. We both forgot the art of crying, except from torn veins.
The light is waning. The brown blinds incarcerate my brother behind penumbral bars. His bony hands and scrawny body in stark relief. It is the first time that I observe him truly. He is lanky but his face unchanged. I was no child when he was born but he is still my little brother.
He is resting now, eyes shut, our lengthy lashes - both mine and his - attached to fluttering lids. Birds trapped in quivering arteries flap at his throat. He is sobbing still but I avert my gaze, afraid to hug him. We oscillate, like two charged particles, my little brother and myself. His arms by his side and my arms by his side, divergent. I thrust into my bulging pocket a ball of ruby paper.
There is a clock in here that ticks the seconds. They used to sound longer. It was another time. The hemorrhage stopped. A mournful lace of plasma on his sinewed wrists. It must have hurt, the old corroded blade, no flesh, just coated skeleton. To saw the bones till blood. To hack the skin, to spread it like a rusty butterfly, dismantling slithery vessels. I move to occupy the wooden ladder back, near the escritoire that I received as gift on the occasion of my first year in school.
He nods affirmative when asked if he can rise. I hold him under hairy, damp armpits. I confront him, seated on my grandma's rocking chair, a cushion clad in Moroccan equine embroidery on my knees. I gently hold his hand and he recoils. I didn't hurt him, though.
I wait for him to break, his hand in mine. Thus clenched, our palms devoid of strength, we face a question and a promise, the fear of pain and of commitment. We dwell on trust.
He unfists and bleeds anew. I use the paper ball to soak it up. It's dripping. I gallop down the spiral staircase and collect another roll, adhesive bandages, and dressing. Into my pocket and, speechlessly, I climb back. He is sitting there, a Pharaonic scribe, wrists resting on his knees, palms lotus flowers, but upturned. His gifted painter's fingers are quenched in blood.
I mop and dab, swab and discard, apply some pressure and erase. My brother is calling me in sanguineous tongue and I deface it, incapable of listening, unwilling to respond.
I bind him and I dress and he opens his eyes and gapes at the white butterflies that sprouted on his joints. He feels them tenderly, astonished by this sudden red-white beauty.
I count his pulse and he gives in to my pseudo-professional mannerisms. His pulse is regular. He hasn't lost a lot of blood, therefore.
He tells me he is OK now and asks for water. All of a sudden, I remember. One day, he was a toddler, could hardly walk, I led him back from the clinic. He gave blood and was weeping bitterly. A giant cotton swab was thrust into his elbow pit and he folded him arm, holding onto it tightly.
One jerky movement, it fell and he stood there, gawking at the soiled lump and whimpering. He was so tiny that I hugged him and wiped the tears from his plump cheeks.
I improvised a story about "Adhesa Cottonball", the cotton monster, who forever wishes to return to the soil, her abode. His eyes cleared and he giggled nervously. This sound - his chuckle - is in my ears, obscuring all real-life acoustics.
He gulps down the water silently, his eyes a distant blackness, where no one treads but he, his forest, among the trees, perhaps this carriage and its attending coachman. Where does he want to go, I wander?
My brain is working overtime. My skull-domiciled well-oiled machine, whose parts are in metallic shine, impeccable, unerring, impervious to pain. Machines don't ache this brother, sprawled on the couch, his shoulders stooping, in torn shirt and tattered trousers, my erstwhile clothes, his chest hirsute, his face adorned with budding beard and whiskers.
What story shall I tell him now to clear his eyes? How shall I make him laugh again? What monster should I bury in the sand?
I tell him to pack few things and come with me. He acquiesces but still won't budge. His twin wrist-butterflies are quite inert. He sighs as he buttons his shirt and rolls unfastened sleeves to cover his abrasions. When he gets up I see him as before: a gangling figure, an angular face, two cavernous sockets, big brown mole. He drags his feet.
We both descend. Don't tell our parents, he begs, I promise not to. Enters his room and exits fast, carrying a small plastic bag with severed handles. A pair of worn jeans spill from the top to cover some half-deleted lettering.
We bid farewell and walk placidly to the car. He freezes on the back seat, still cradling his plastic treasure, gazing forward but seeing little.
Nomi is driving while I watch him through the windshield mirror. His inanimate stare, directed at the window, is deflected by transparence. Slumped on the imitation leather seat, he and his trousers bump from one side to another on the winding road.
He falls asleep this way, sack closely clutched, chin burrowing into his hollow torso. At times, he shakes his head in stiff refusal. He is very adamant. Only his hands are calm, as though detached from his rebellious body.
Nomi is negotiating the parking and I touch his shoulder. He opens a pair of bleary eyes and looks at me like he used to when I was still his entire world. I touch once more and gently. When he was two years old , I left home for many years, never to be heard from. The hurt resides still in his eyes, that injury.
I touch a third time, thus pledging to remain, thus telling him my love. I study him at length and he does not divert his eyes.
Suddenly he smiles and dimples collect around his lips. He flings his hands high up and waves his red-white butterflies. He imitates their flight. He plucks their wings. He laughs and I respond by laughing and Nomi joins and the space of our car is filled with laughs and butterflies and butterflies and laughter.
==============================
Short Fiction in English and Hebrew
http://gorgelink.org/vaknin/
http://samvak.tripod.com/sipurim.html
http://www.suite101.com/files/topics/6514/files/worksinenglish.zip
Poetry of Healing and Abuse
http://samvak.tripod.com/contents.html
Anatomy of a Mental Illness
http://samvak.tripod.com/journal1.html
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
My Affair with Jesus
By Sam Vaknin
Losing my mind in a bed-sitter. Pipes crackling in the kitchenette, spewing fecal water in the bathroom, only the urinal a tolerable translucence. The cramped space is consumed by a rough-hewn timber bed, prickly wool blankets strewn. The sheets a crumpled ball, spotted with ageing spittle stains. The window looks onto another window. Mine is a corporate apartment in Geneva, a menacing physical presence of solitude and silence crystallized.
On weekend mornings I promenade at length: along the lake shores, traverse the foothills, the sumptuous mansions of the rich, back through the marina and the slums, behind the "Noga-Hilton".
On my return, the flat contracts, the standard issue table, the single chair, my scattered clothing, the metered rotary dial phone, the French and German television channels I cannot understand.
Once weekly, on Monday morns, a woman comes to clean. Her legs are cast in limpid stockings, I smell her cleanser perspiration. A coarse elastic reins her stonewashed hair. She is not bejeweled. She wears a pair of twisted wire-rims. Her husband sometimes tags along, buried under her scrubbing implements.
She hardly ever acknowledges my cornered and abashed existence, like a besuited mummy with gleaming imitation leather shoes. She does my laundry and my ironing, too.
I did not want to die. I sought refuge in numbers, solace in propinquity. I thought I'd join the Jesuits.
I strolled to the United Nations building and met a senior bureaucrat, a member of the order. His angled modest office overlooked a busy "work-in-progress" intersection, but he renounced this distraction. He listened to my well-rehearsed oration and referred me to a monastery at the other end of town.
Ambling along the waterfront, I scrutinized the flower beds, the tourists, and the spout. Even at dusk, I found this city languid.
All shops were closed.
I had a dinner date with a Londoner, a naturalized Iranian oil trader. Throughout the meal he kept rebuking me:
"You sound like someone whose life is long behind him. It is not true! You are so young!"
I drove my shrimps amongst the Thousand Islands in my bowl.
"You are observant, Sir," - I said - "but wrong. I may be possessed of past, but not of future." - I gauged the impact of my harsh pronouncement - "Not necessarily a thing to mourn" - I added.
He rearranged the remnants of his dinner on his soiled plate. I gathered that he was far too experienced to be optimistic.
I visited the friary next morning. A young monk, clad in sportswear eyed me with surprise. I mentioned my referrer and was instantly admitted. We occupied a metal bench amidst a bustling corridor.
He told me about the order. They study several years, embark on charitable missions in far-flung countries, and then take vows.
I reassured him I was celibate and he pretended to believe me.
Gene called and invited me to his bookstore to inspect a new shipment. I used to spend all weekends there, reading, socializing, and devouring unwholesome food in the adjacent restaurant. Shoppers came and went. Gene would register the day's meager intake in his books and lock the entrance door. Sometimes we would proceed to patronize an Old City coffeehouse. But usually I would return to my alcove and wait for Monday.
That day, when I arrived, Gene offered me a cup of lukewarm coffee and said: "Stay with me, please, this evening."
The last client having departed, he bolted the iron shutters and we proceeded uptown, to get drunk. It was a farewell sacrament, Gene having lost his savings and a lot of other people's funds.
He climbed to my apartment and wept throughout the night of his intoxicated desperation. I woke to find him gone.
Thus, my world narrowed. The weather chilled. I couldn't pierce the stubborn rainfall that swathed my windowpanes. Arrayed in heavy overcoat, I sat, a patchwork quilt of light and shade. Or fully dressed, prostrated, the blankets heaped, on my Procrustean bed.
People from Israel stayed at my place. They ate my food and slept and showered. Then they moved off. I traveled back there on vacation. A journalist who did my profile years ago, refused to interview me. He said: "Dead horses do not make a story." My nightmares swelled with equine carcasses discharging jets of ink-black blood.
Come winter, I called on the priory again.
"You must first see the light, see Jesus" - my youthful guide insisted but, ready with a riposte, I rejoined:
"There are many paths to one's salvation and one's savior."
Savoring my worn platitude, he promised to arrange for an interview in Zurich, the regional headquarters.
So many years have passed since then.
Perhaps a dream, perhaps a motion picture snippet, perhaps I am overwhelmed by one of my confabulations. I remember descending from a train, ankle-high in rustling snow, treading uncharted tracks towards an illuminated building, a boarding school. The manageress conducts a prideful tour of speckless premises. Toddlers in flowery pajamas amuse themselves with ligneous cubes and plastic toys.
I can't remember if I have never been there.
That morning, in Zurich, I climbed up a hill, next to the colossal railway, and rang an ornate bell at the gate of an unassuming office building. I was let into an antechamber and led into the quarters of the abbot. He had a kind face, without a trace of gullibility. His desk was neatly organized, framed by heaving bookcases and shafts of graying light.
I was being examined, oblivious to the rules. "Why do you wish to join us?" - he enquired, then - "Follow me". We climbed down to the dormitories of the fresh initiates. He mutely pointed at the crooked berths, the metal chests, the hanging hair shirts. "We fast a lot. We pray from dawn till midnight."
He introduced me to the novices. "They look so happy and resilient" - I noted. He smiled. Echoes of clerical exertion from above rebounded in the cellar.
"We've got some guests" - he clarified, and suddenly awakening - "Have you already eaten?"
We crossed a lengthy passage veined with piping, thrusting agape the heavy oak doors at its end. I entered first, he followed, to face a purple multitude of churchmen. They rose in noiseless unison and waited.
My host declaimed:
"We have a Jewish guest, from Israel today" - he hesitated - "He will say grace for us. In Hebrew."
The hall reverberated. My host impelled me forward. A sea of crimson skullcaps as they rested foreheads on locked, diaphanous digits. I uttered the Jewish prayer slowly, improvising some. The alien phrases recoiled from the masonry, bounced among the massive trestle-tops, ricocheted from the clay utensils, the crude-carved cutlery, the cotton tablecloths. A towering Jesus bled into a candled recess.
The abbot led me to a chair and placed a bowl of nebulous soup in front. He stuck a wooden spoon right in the swirling liquid and went away. I ate, head bowed, maintaining silence, conforming to the crowd's ostentatious decorum. The repast over, I joined the abbot and his guests in the procession to his office. He recounted proudly the tale of my most imminent conversion.
They looked aghast. One of them enquired how I found Jesus. I said I hadn't yet. The abbot smiled contentedly. "He is not a liar" - he averred - "He doesn't lie even when lying leads to profit". "Perhaps the profitable thing to do is to be truthful in this case" - one bitterly commented.
The train back to Geneva crisscrossed a radiant medley, deserted streets spanned by forlorn bridges, and spectral streetlamps. I exited into the ceilinged station, to the ascending roads and winding paths and broader avenues, on to my flat. Immersed in shadows to emerge in light, I gazed at curtained windows tightly shut. I window-shopped and kicked some gravel.
At the entrance to my building I didn't turn on the light. I couldn't face the immaculate stairwell, the doormats, the planted pots of crucible steel. But darkness meant a lethal fall or stepping in the wrong apartment, intruding on the astonished life of someone else (the keys were all identical, I suspected). I couldn't cope even with mine.
I turned around, into the public park, across the inner yard, down to the looping street that bordered on the water. The lake was silver struck and boats bobbed up and down abstracted waves. Moon, cleaved by stooping branches, hills vaporizing into mist. I circumvented them, resting on soggy benches, the stations of my pilgrimage.
The lake and road diverged and I arrested at the slopes. I dithered momentarily and then proceeded to ascend the footpath, liberally dotted with fallen leaves and broken twigs. Submerged in muddy soil, the rich substrate of foliar death, I kicked the ripeness of dispersing acorns.
I stopped in front of Dudley's home - a medieval French chateau - to study yet again its contumacious contours. Inside, behind the gate, Dudley constructed a tiny summer house atop a brook. We oft debated topics there we both knew little of. I never came there unannounced or uninvited.
Moonlight transforms brickwork chateaux into the stuff of magic. They take your breath away and hurl it back at you until it splinters. A canine wail, how apt, as though directed. Ripples of wholeness, happy containment, perfect abundance.
I went back the way I came, booting the same pebbles, hard on my heels, ethereal presence. The night inflamed. I arrived at my apartment, the stacks of documents and books, a glass of opaque water, the stale exhaling carpet, talk shows unfolding in a thick Bavarian accent. I half expect an angry neighbor to tap his wall - our wall - with naked palms. Or, worse, the cleaning lady.
At home, it's almost dawn, a blue horizon. I slit a tidy envelope and draw its innards.
The abbot advises me to prepare to visit Boston in the following week. I am expected there for an in-depth interview. I made a good impression. "Your motives look sincere". In Christ.
==============================
Short Fiction in English and Hebrew
http://gorgelink.org/vaknin/
http://samvak.tripod.com/sipurim.html
http://www.suite101.com/files/topics/6514/files/worksinenglish.zip
Poetry of Healing and Abuse
http://samvak.tripod.com/contents.html
Anatomy of a Mental Illness
http://samvak.tripod.com/journal1.html
By Sam Vaknin
Losing my mind in a bed-sitter. Pipes crackling in the kitchenette, spewing fecal water in the bathroom, only the urinal a tolerable translucence. The cramped space is consumed by a rough-hewn timber bed, prickly wool blankets strewn. The sheets a crumpled ball, spotted with ageing spittle stains. The window looks onto another window. Mine is a corporate apartment in Geneva, a menacing physical presence of solitude and silence crystallized.
On weekend mornings I promenade at length: along the lake shores, traverse the foothills, the sumptuous mansions of the rich, back through the marina and the slums, behind the "Noga-Hilton".
On my return, the flat contracts, the standard issue table, the single chair, my scattered clothing, the metered rotary dial phone, the French and German television channels I cannot understand.
Once weekly, on Monday morns, a woman comes to clean. Her legs are cast in limpid stockings, I smell her cleanser perspiration. A coarse elastic reins her stonewashed hair. She is not bejeweled. She wears a pair of twisted wire-rims. Her husband sometimes tags along, buried under her scrubbing implements.
She hardly ever acknowledges my cornered and abashed existence, like a besuited mummy with gleaming imitation leather shoes. She does my laundry and my ironing, too.
I did not want to die. I sought refuge in numbers, solace in propinquity. I thought I'd join the Jesuits.
I strolled to the United Nations building and met a senior bureaucrat, a member of the order. His angled modest office overlooked a busy "work-in-progress" intersection, but he renounced this distraction. He listened to my well-rehearsed oration and referred me to a monastery at the other end of town.
Ambling along the waterfront, I scrutinized the flower beds, the tourists, and the spout. Even at dusk, I found this city languid.
All shops were closed.
I had a dinner date with a Londoner, a naturalized Iranian oil trader. Throughout the meal he kept rebuking me:
"You sound like someone whose life is long behind him. It is not true! You are so young!"
I drove my shrimps amongst the Thousand Islands in my bowl.
"You are observant, Sir," - I said - "but wrong. I may be possessed of past, but not of future." - I gauged the impact of my harsh pronouncement - "Not necessarily a thing to mourn" - I added.
He rearranged the remnants of his dinner on his soiled plate. I gathered that he was far too experienced to be optimistic.
I visited the friary next morning. A young monk, clad in sportswear eyed me with surprise. I mentioned my referrer and was instantly admitted. We occupied a metal bench amidst a bustling corridor.
He told me about the order. They study several years, embark on charitable missions in far-flung countries, and then take vows.
I reassured him I was celibate and he pretended to believe me.
Gene called and invited me to his bookstore to inspect a new shipment. I used to spend all weekends there, reading, socializing, and devouring unwholesome food in the adjacent restaurant. Shoppers came and went. Gene would register the day's meager intake in his books and lock the entrance door. Sometimes we would proceed to patronize an Old City coffeehouse. But usually I would return to my alcove and wait for Monday.
That day, when I arrived, Gene offered me a cup of lukewarm coffee and said: "Stay with me, please, this evening."
The last client having departed, he bolted the iron shutters and we proceeded uptown, to get drunk. It was a farewell sacrament, Gene having lost his savings and a lot of other people's funds.
He climbed to my apartment and wept throughout the night of his intoxicated desperation. I woke to find him gone.
Thus, my world narrowed. The weather chilled. I couldn't pierce the stubborn rainfall that swathed my windowpanes. Arrayed in heavy overcoat, I sat, a patchwork quilt of light and shade. Or fully dressed, prostrated, the blankets heaped, on my Procrustean bed.
People from Israel stayed at my place. They ate my food and slept and showered. Then they moved off. I traveled back there on vacation. A journalist who did my profile years ago, refused to interview me. He said: "Dead horses do not make a story." My nightmares swelled with equine carcasses discharging jets of ink-black blood.
Come winter, I called on the priory again.
"You must first see the light, see Jesus" - my youthful guide insisted but, ready with a riposte, I rejoined:
"There are many paths to one's salvation and one's savior."
Savoring my worn platitude, he promised to arrange for an interview in Zurich, the regional headquarters.
So many years have passed since then.
Perhaps a dream, perhaps a motion picture snippet, perhaps I am overwhelmed by one of my confabulations. I remember descending from a train, ankle-high in rustling snow, treading uncharted tracks towards an illuminated building, a boarding school. The manageress conducts a prideful tour of speckless premises. Toddlers in flowery pajamas amuse themselves with ligneous cubes and plastic toys.
I can't remember if I have never been there.
That morning, in Zurich, I climbed up a hill, next to the colossal railway, and rang an ornate bell at the gate of an unassuming office building. I was let into an antechamber and led into the quarters of the abbot. He had a kind face, without a trace of gullibility. His desk was neatly organized, framed by heaving bookcases and shafts of graying light.
I was being examined, oblivious to the rules. "Why do you wish to join us?" - he enquired, then - "Follow me". We climbed down to the dormitories of the fresh initiates. He mutely pointed at the crooked berths, the metal chests, the hanging hair shirts. "We fast a lot. We pray from dawn till midnight."
He introduced me to the novices. "They look so happy and resilient" - I noted. He smiled. Echoes of clerical exertion from above rebounded in the cellar.
"We've got some guests" - he clarified, and suddenly awakening - "Have you already eaten?"
We crossed a lengthy passage veined with piping, thrusting agape the heavy oak doors at its end. I entered first, he followed, to face a purple multitude of churchmen. They rose in noiseless unison and waited.
My host declaimed:
"We have a Jewish guest, from Israel today" - he hesitated - "He will say grace for us. In Hebrew."
The hall reverberated. My host impelled me forward. A sea of crimson skullcaps as they rested foreheads on locked, diaphanous digits. I uttered the Jewish prayer slowly, improvising some. The alien phrases recoiled from the masonry, bounced among the massive trestle-tops, ricocheted from the clay utensils, the crude-carved cutlery, the cotton tablecloths. A towering Jesus bled into a candled recess.
The abbot led me to a chair and placed a bowl of nebulous soup in front. He stuck a wooden spoon right in the swirling liquid and went away. I ate, head bowed, maintaining silence, conforming to the crowd's ostentatious decorum. The repast over, I joined the abbot and his guests in the procession to his office. He recounted proudly the tale of my most imminent conversion.
They looked aghast. One of them enquired how I found Jesus. I said I hadn't yet. The abbot smiled contentedly. "He is not a liar" - he averred - "He doesn't lie even when lying leads to profit". "Perhaps the profitable thing to do is to be truthful in this case" - one bitterly commented.
The train back to Geneva crisscrossed a radiant medley, deserted streets spanned by forlorn bridges, and spectral streetlamps. I exited into the ceilinged station, to the ascending roads and winding paths and broader avenues, on to my flat. Immersed in shadows to emerge in light, I gazed at curtained windows tightly shut. I window-shopped and kicked some gravel.
At the entrance to my building I didn't turn on the light. I couldn't face the immaculate stairwell, the doormats, the planted pots of crucible steel. But darkness meant a lethal fall or stepping in the wrong apartment, intruding on the astonished life of someone else (the keys were all identical, I suspected). I couldn't cope even with mine.
I turned around, into the public park, across the inner yard, down to the looping street that bordered on the water. The lake was silver struck and boats bobbed up and down abstracted waves. Moon, cleaved by stooping branches, hills vaporizing into mist. I circumvented them, resting on soggy benches, the stations of my pilgrimage.
The lake and road diverged and I arrested at the slopes. I dithered momentarily and then proceeded to ascend the footpath, liberally dotted with fallen leaves and broken twigs. Submerged in muddy soil, the rich substrate of foliar death, I kicked the ripeness of dispersing acorns.
I stopped in front of Dudley's home - a medieval French chateau - to study yet again its contumacious contours. Inside, behind the gate, Dudley constructed a tiny summer house atop a brook. We oft debated topics there we both knew little of. I never came there unannounced or uninvited.
Moonlight transforms brickwork chateaux into the stuff of magic. They take your breath away and hurl it back at you until it splinters. A canine wail, how apt, as though directed. Ripples of wholeness, happy containment, perfect abundance.
I went back the way I came, booting the same pebbles, hard on my heels, ethereal presence. The night inflamed. I arrived at my apartment, the stacks of documents and books, a glass of opaque water, the stale exhaling carpet, talk shows unfolding in a thick Bavarian accent. I half expect an angry neighbor to tap his wall - our wall - with naked palms. Or, worse, the cleaning lady.
At home, it's almost dawn, a blue horizon. I slit a tidy envelope and draw its innards.
The abbot advises me to prepare to visit Boston in the following week. I am expected there for an in-depth interview. I made a good impression. "Your motives look sincere". In Christ.
==============================
Short Fiction in English and Hebrew
http://gorgelink.org/vaknin/
http://samvak.tripod.com/sipurim.html
http://www.suite101.com/files/topics/6514/files/worksinenglish.zip
Poetry of Healing and Abuse
http://samvak.tripod.com/contents.html
Anatomy of a Mental Illness
http://samvak.tripod.com/journal1.html
Wednesday, April 07, 2004
On the Bus to Town
Written by Sam Vaknin
I must catch the city-bound bus. I have to change at the Central Station and travel a short distance, just a few more minutes, to jail. The prison walls, to the left, will shimmer muddy yellow, barbwire fence enclosing empty watchtowers, the drizzle-induced swamp a collage of virile footsteps. I am afraid to cross its ambiguous solidity, the shallow-looking depths. After that I have to purge my tattered sneakers with branches and stones wrenched out of the mucky soil around our barracks.
But there is still way to go.
I mount the bus and sit near a disheveled, unshaven man. His abraded pair of horn-rimmed glasses is adjoined to his prominent nose with a brown adhesive. He reeks of stale sweat and keeps pondering the clouded surface of his crumbling watch. His pinkie sports a rectangular, engraved ring of golden imitation.
The bus exudes the steamy vapors of a mobile rain forest. People cram into the passages, dragging nylon-roped shopping bags, shrieking children, and their own perspiring carcasses, their armpits and groins stark dark discolorations.
All spots are taken. Their occupants press claret noses onto the grimy windows and rhythmically wipe the condensation. They explicitly ignore the crowd and the censuring, expectant stares of older passengers. As the interminable road unwinds, they restlessly realign their bodies, attuned to seats and neighbors.
Our driver deftly skirts the terminal's piers and ramps. Between two rows of houses shrouded in grimy washing, he hastens towards the freeway. He turns the radio volume up and speakers inundate us with tunes from the Levant. Some travelers squirm but no one asks to turn it down. It is the hourly news edition soon. Thoughts wander, gaze introspectively inverted, necks stretch to glimpse the passing views.
The broadcast screeches to a sickening but familiar halt. Faint cries, the Doppler wail of sirens, air surgically hacked by chopper rotor blades, the voices of authorities grating with shock and panic. The disembodied speech of spluttering witnesses. On site reporters at a loss for words record mere moans and keens. An orgy of smoking flesh.
The breaking news has cast us all in molds of frozen dread and grief. Here burly finger poking nose, there basket petrified in midair haul, my neighbor absentmindedly rotates his hefty ring.
The announcer warns of imminent terrorist attacks on public transport. It recommends to err on the side of caution and to exhaustively inspect fellow commuters. Trust no one - exhorts a representative of the law - be on alert, examine suspect objects, call on your driver if in doubt. Pay heed to dubious characters and odd behaviors.
Our bus is trapped in a honking row of cars, under a seething sun. The baking asphalt mirrors. I am anxious not to be delayed. The wardens warned us: "Never be late. Make no excuses. Even if God himself comes down - be back on time." Latecomers lose all privileges and are removed to maximum security in Beersheba.
I debate the fine points with myself: is mass slaughter ample reason for being tardy or merely an excuse? No force is more majeure that prison guards. I smile at that and the tension plexus slackens.
A febrile thought:
Jailers are ultra right-wing and rabid nationalists. Terrorism must never be allowed to interfere with the mundane, they say. And I rehearse in hopeful genuflection: "You mustn't send a Jewish prisoner to an Arab-infested prison. After all, I was held up by Arab assassins who slaughtered Jews!"
The legalistic side (they are big on it in penal institutions):
How can I prove my whereabouts (on this bus) throughout the carnage? Think alibi. The inmate always shows that he has complied, the warden equally assumes he is being conned, but even he must prove it. A stalking game with predators and prey, but ever shifting roles.
I rise, prying my neighbor loose from contemplation. He eyes me, wicked. I pass a soiled boot above his clustered knees and place it gingerly between two bursting bags. Mustachioed women wipe milky exudation from upper lips with blotted synthetic handkerchiefs. They address me in a foreign, gravelling, language. They use elephantine, venous, legs to push aside their luggage - a gesture of goodwill more than a decongesting measure.
I feel the clammy, throbbing breathing of another on my trousers. Thrusting my other leg, I straddle the passage, two Herculean pillars, a sea of Mediterranean groceries between my calves. Toe by heel, I get nearer to the stuporous driver, a human ripple in my wake.
"I am a prisoner" - I inform his beefy neck.
His muscles tense but he does not respond or turn to scrutinize me.
"I am an inmate" - I repeat - "Can you please confirm by writing in this diary (I point at a grey notepad I am holding) that I was on your bus at this hour? I have no pen." - I add.
He casts a sideways glance at me, monitoring the hopeless traffic jam from the corner of a bloodshot eye.
(Emphatically):
"So, you are a prisoner? What could you have you done?" (,you chalky, myopic, intellectual).
Right behind him, a woman past her prime, face coated, breasts nestled in a pointed bra. The driver cannot keep his eyes off them. She, on her part, seems to be fixated on his tensile musculature. They both start at the sound of my voice:
"Banks".
"Banks!" - the driver mirthfully slaps his bulging thighs and the woman chuckles throatily, lips peeled to reveal pink-tainted teeth. "Come over here, I'll sign it."
In one untrammeled motion, he removes a hirsute hand from the oversized steering wheel, takes hold of my jotter, and opens it. Off goes his second hand. He scribbles laboriously, tongue perched on fleshy lips, ending with a flourishing signature.
People are murmuring throughout the bus. My answer is equivocal. It could imply armed robbery - or fraud - or counterfeit. I may be violent. The innocent looking are the really dangerous. I may even be an Arab, impossible to tell them apart nowadays.
A web of mutters spins from crimson lips to hairy ears, from crumb-strewn mouths to avid auricles. I return to my seat, retracing my erstwhile progress, facing the hydra. With the pad in my back pocket, I am calmer. Que serra, serra.
At the edge of my awareness a shrill, self-righteous female voice:
"Get out now, or I am calling the police."
I open my eyes, trying to pinpoint the mayhem. Somewhat behind me, the altercation draws closer, a portly woman pushing aside strap-holding passengers. She is preceded by a far younger female scrambling, expression hunted, to flee the bully.
She passes me by, her coarse contours defaced by agony, wheezing through luscious lips, one hand supporting heavy bust, the other clutching a sheaf of papers densely written in calligraphic Arabic.
"Driver" - the mob exclaims - "There is an Arab on board!"
"Go down! I am not sharing a bus with a terrorist!" - a woman screams and then another: "Maybe she is dangerous? Did you frisk her when she boarded?"
The driver negotiates the dense circulation, maneuvering among a fleet of barely visible compacts. The noise distracts him. Without braking, he turns around and enquires: "What is it? What's the matter?"
"There's an Arab woman here." - one volunteers to edify him - "She is aboard the bus and may have explosives strapped around her waist". "Get her off this vehicle, she may be lethal!" - another advises.
"I am not forcing anybody down who has paid the ticket!" - snaps the driver and reverts to the hazy windshield.
A stunned silence. They thought the driver was one of them, he doesn't appear to be a peacenik. Someone latches on to the frontal paned partition and expostulates. "It's not reasonable, your decision. Today, you never know. Even their women are into killing, I saw it with my own eyes in Lebanon. They explode themselves like nothing, not a problem ..."
The woman who spotted the ostensible terrorist now badgers the driver:
"Give me your details. I am going to have a chat with your supervisors. You can forget about this cozy job of yours!"
The Arab stands mute, vigilantly monitoring the commotion. A passenger tilts and hisses in her ear: "Child murderer." She recoils from the gathering nightmare and bellows, addressing the jam-packed bus:
"I am a nurse. I tend to the sick and frail all day long, both ours and yours. Every day there's a flood of casualties. Our injured. Our corpses. Your injured. Your corpses. Children, women, shreds, all full of blood ..." - She pauses - "Why do you treat me this way?"
Her Hebrew is rocky but sufficient to provoke a heated debate with supporters and detractors.
"What do you want with this woman? She is just an innocent commuter! Look at yourselves! You should be ashamed!"
Others are genuinely scared. I can see it on their faces, the white-knuckled way they cling to the metal railings opposite their seats, the evasive looks, the stooping shoulders, eyes buried in the filthy flooring.
She may well be a terrorist, who knows?
It is too late to smother this burgeoning conflagration. My neighbor exchanges heavy-accented verbal blows with someone behind us. Women accuse each other of hypocrisy and barbarism.
The driver, pretending to ignore us, head slanted, listens in and steals appreciative glances at his voluptuous fawner. To garner his further admiration, she plunges into the dispute, a brimstone diva with words of fire.
Some passengers begin to push the Arab and shove her with innocuous gestures of their sweaty palms. They endeavor to avoid her startled gaze. She tries again:
"What kind of people are you? I am a medical nurse, I am telling you. So what if I am Arab, is it automatic proof that I am a terrorist?"
My neighbor suddenly addresses me:
"You've got nothing to say?"
"To my mind, if she were a terrorist, she would have blown us all to kingdom come by now."
I let the impact of this sane reminder settle.
"This bus is bursting. The driver skipped a few stations on the way." - I remind them - "She is smack amidst us. She has no bags. She could have detonated herself and demolished us by now."
My neighbor slaps his thighs with furry hands, a sign of pleasure. I am on his side. Some voices crow, encouraging me to proceed: "Let him continue, go on."
But I have got nothing more to add and I grow silent.
The Arab scrutinizes me doubtfully, not sure if she understood correctly. Do I suspect her of being a terrorist or don't I?
"And who might you be to tell us off, if I may?" - scoffs the woman who started it all. Her voice is screaming hoarse, her face aflame with stripes of lipstick smeared and make up oozing. Three golden bracelets clang the rhythm of her scornful question.
"He is a prisoner" - announces the driver's would-be floozy. She eyes both me and her desired conquest triumphantly. The driver studies her in his overhead mirror, then gives a haunted look. Control is lost. He knows it.
"An inmate" - shrieks the agitator for all the bus to hear - "The perfect couple! A felon and an Arab! Perhaps you are an Arab too?"
"I am not an Arab" - I respond calmly - "They are too well mannered for the likes of me and you."
She blows up:
"Son of a bitch, maniac, look who's talking!" - She leans towards me and scratches my face with broken, patchily varnished nails - "A prisoner piece of shit and whoring stench of an Arab stink up this bus!"
My neighbor half rises from our common seat, grabs her extended arm and affixes it firmly behind her back. She screams to her dumbfounded audience: "They are together in it, this entire group, and they are a menace. Driver, stop this instant, I want the police, now!"
I do not react. It was foolish of me to have partaken in this tiff in the first place. Prisoners involved in incidents of public unrest end up spending a week or more in the nearest squalid detention center, away from the relative safety of the penitentiary. Anything can happen in these infernos of perspiring, drug-addicted flesh, those killing fields of hemorrhaging syringes, those purgatories of squeals and whimpers and shaking of the bars, draped tight in sooty air.
I spent a month in these conditions and was about to return, I feel convinced.
The driver brakes the bus, rises, and gestures to the Arab helplessly. She tries to extricate herself by moving towards his cubicle. Some women mesh their hands, trapping her flapping arms, flailing about, her cheeks lattices of translucent rivulets. Her fear is audible in shallow exhalations.
But her captors persevere. They clench her scarf and the trimmings of her coat and twist them around the Arab's breathless neck.
The driver disembarks through the pneumatically susurrating doors. He walks the gravel path adjacent to the highway, desperately trying to wave down a passing car. Someone finally stops and they have a hushed exchange through a barricaded window. The hatchback cruises away.
The driver hesitates, his eyes glued to the receding vehicle. He contemplates the hostile bus with dread and climbs aboard. He sinks into his seat and sighs.
A patrol car arrives a few minutes later and disgorges two policemen. One elderly, stout and stilted, his face a venous spasm. He keeps feeling the worn butt of his undersized revolver. The other cop does the talking. He is lithe, a youth in camouflage, penumbral moustache, anorectic, sinewy hands, his eyes an adulterated cyan. He swells his chest and draws back his bony shoulders, attempting to conceal his meagerness.
"What's going on here?" - his voice a shocking bass. We are silenced by the contrast.
The instigator of the turmoil clears a path and fingers his oversized tunic as she volunteers:
"She is a terrorist and he is a convict and they were both planning to blow this bus up."
"Twaddle!" - roars my neighbor - "She is a hysterical, psychotic, panicky woman! Look what she did to his face!" - he points at me - "And that one, over there," - he singles the Arab out with a nail-bitten pinkie - "her only sin is that she is an Arab, a nurse or something, a fellow traveler, paid her ticket like all of us." The driver nods his assent.
"I am telling you ..." - the stirrer yelps but the officer is terse:
"Continue behaving like this, lady, and it is you I will arrest for disturbing the peace..."
"Another mock cop" - she slurs, but her voice is hushed and hesitant.
"Perhaps even insulting a police officer on duty?" - the policeman hints and she is pacified, retreating, crablike, eyes downcast, towards her shopping.
"Who is the prisoner?" - the veteran cop enquires, his paw atop his gun, caressing it incessantly. I raise my hand.
"You are coming with us. The rest continue to your destinations. You too!" - he addresses the Arab, his civility offensively overstated.
"I want no problems here!" - he warns - "It's Friday, the Sabbath is upon us. Go home in peace. The police has more important things to do than to resolve your petty squabbles!"
Extracted from my window seat, their fingers viselike under both armpits, they half drag me across my neighbor's knees, strewing all over him the contents of the plastic bag in which I keep my wallet and the weekend papers. It hurts.
We alight and the young one taps the folding exit doors. The bus drones its way into the snaring traffic jam. I watch its back as it recedes. The coppers place a pair of shiny handcuffs on my wrists and shackle my ankles too. I stumble towards the waiting squad car. They unlock the rear and gesture me to enter. They push me from behind and bolt the door. The gory rays of a setting sun dissect the murk inside.
I see the officers' backs and necks as they occupy the front seats beyond the meshed partition. One of them half turns and spits a snarl:
"My partner loves you, Arabs."
Only then, my eyes having adjusted, I notice the others in the stifling cabin I inhabit. They rattle their manacles and smile at me wolfishly, a toothy apparition.
"Where are you from, handsome?" - one asks and moves to flank me. His mitt is motionless on my knee.
He has an Arab accent.
==============================
Short Fiction in English and Hebrew
http://gorgelink.org/vaknin/
http://samvak.tripod.com/sipurim.html
http://www.suite101.com/files/topics/6514/files/worksinenglish.zip
Poetry of Healing and Abuse
http://samvak.tripod.com/contents.html
Anatomy of a Mental Illness
http://samvak.tripod.com/journal1.html
Written by Sam Vaknin
I must catch the city-bound bus. I have to change at the Central Station and travel a short distance, just a few more minutes, to jail. The prison walls, to the left, will shimmer muddy yellow, barbwire fence enclosing empty watchtowers, the drizzle-induced swamp a collage of virile footsteps. I am afraid to cross its ambiguous solidity, the shallow-looking depths. After that I have to purge my tattered sneakers with branches and stones wrenched out of the mucky soil around our barracks.
But there is still way to go.
I mount the bus and sit near a disheveled, unshaven man. His abraded pair of horn-rimmed glasses is adjoined to his prominent nose with a brown adhesive. He reeks of stale sweat and keeps pondering the clouded surface of his crumbling watch. His pinkie sports a rectangular, engraved ring of golden imitation.
The bus exudes the steamy vapors of a mobile rain forest. People cram into the passages, dragging nylon-roped shopping bags, shrieking children, and their own perspiring carcasses, their armpits and groins stark dark discolorations.
All spots are taken. Their occupants press claret noses onto the grimy windows and rhythmically wipe the condensation. They explicitly ignore the crowd and the censuring, expectant stares of older passengers. As the interminable road unwinds, they restlessly realign their bodies, attuned to seats and neighbors.
Our driver deftly skirts the terminal's piers and ramps. Between two rows of houses shrouded in grimy washing, he hastens towards the freeway. He turns the radio volume up and speakers inundate us with tunes from the Levant. Some travelers squirm but no one asks to turn it down. It is the hourly news edition soon. Thoughts wander, gaze introspectively inverted, necks stretch to glimpse the passing views.
The broadcast screeches to a sickening but familiar halt. Faint cries, the Doppler wail of sirens, air surgically hacked by chopper rotor blades, the voices of authorities grating with shock and panic. The disembodied speech of spluttering witnesses. On site reporters at a loss for words record mere moans and keens. An orgy of smoking flesh.
The breaking news has cast us all in molds of frozen dread and grief. Here burly finger poking nose, there basket petrified in midair haul, my neighbor absentmindedly rotates his hefty ring.
The announcer warns of imminent terrorist attacks on public transport. It recommends to err on the side of caution and to exhaustively inspect fellow commuters. Trust no one - exhorts a representative of the law - be on alert, examine suspect objects, call on your driver if in doubt. Pay heed to dubious characters and odd behaviors.
Our bus is trapped in a honking row of cars, under a seething sun. The baking asphalt mirrors. I am anxious not to be delayed. The wardens warned us: "Never be late. Make no excuses. Even if God himself comes down - be back on time." Latecomers lose all privileges and are removed to maximum security in Beersheba.
I debate the fine points with myself: is mass slaughter ample reason for being tardy or merely an excuse? No force is more majeure that prison guards. I smile at that and the tension plexus slackens.
A febrile thought:
Jailers are ultra right-wing and rabid nationalists. Terrorism must never be allowed to interfere with the mundane, they say. And I rehearse in hopeful genuflection: "You mustn't send a Jewish prisoner to an Arab-infested prison. After all, I was held up by Arab assassins who slaughtered Jews!"
The legalistic side (they are big on it in penal institutions):
How can I prove my whereabouts (on this bus) throughout the carnage? Think alibi. The inmate always shows that he has complied, the warden equally assumes he is being conned, but even he must prove it. A stalking game with predators and prey, but ever shifting roles.
I rise, prying my neighbor loose from contemplation. He eyes me, wicked. I pass a soiled boot above his clustered knees and place it gingerly between two bursting bags. Mustachioed women wipe milky exudation from upper lips with blotted synthetic handkerchiefs. They address me in a foreign, gravelling, language. They use elephantine, venous, legs to push aside their luggage - a gesture of goodwill more than a decongesting measure.
I feel the clammy, throbbing breathing of another on my trousers. Thrusting my other leg, I straddle the passage, two Herculean pillars, a sea of Mediterranean groceries between my calves. Toe by heel, I get nearer to the stuporous driver, a human ripple in my wake.
"I am a prisoner" - I inform his beefy neck.
His muscles tense but he does not respond or turn to scrutinize me.
"I am an inmate" - I repeat - "Can you please confirm by writing in this diary (I point at a grey notepad I am holding) that I was on your bus at this hour? I have no pen." - I add.
He casts a sideways glance at me, monitoring the hopeless traffic jam from the corner of a bloodshot eye.
(Emphatically):
"So, you are a prisoner? What could you have you done?" (,you chalky, myopic, intellectual).
Right behind him, a woman past her prime, face coated, breasts nestled in a pointed bra. The driver cannot keep his eyes off them. She, on her part, seems to be fixated on his tensile musculature. They both start at the sound of my voice:
"Banks".
"Banks!" - the driver mirthfully slaps his bulging thighs and the woman chuckles throatily, lips peeled to reveal pink-tainted teeth. "Come over here, I'll sign it."
In one untrammeled motion, he removes a hirsute hand from the oversized steering wheel, takes hold of my jotter, and opens it. Off goes his second hand. He scribbles laboriously, tongue perched on fleshy lips, ending with a flourishing signature.
People are murmuring throughout the bus. My answer is equivocal. It could imply armed robbery - or fraud - or counterfeit. I may be violent. The innocent looking are the really dangerous. I may even be an Arab, impossible to tell them apart nowadays.
A web of mutters spins from crimson lips to hairy ears, from crumb-strewn mouths to avid auricles. I return to my seat, retracing my erstwhile progress, facing the hydra. With the pad in my back pocket, I am calmer. Que serra, serra.
At the edge of my awareness a shrill, self-righteous female voice:
"Get out now, or I am calling the police."
I open my eyes, trying to pinpoint the mayhem. Somewhat behind me, the altercation draws closer, a portly woman pushing aside strap-holding passengers. She is preceded by a far younger female scrambling, expression hunted, to flee the bully.
She passes me by, her coarse contours defaced by agony, wheezing through luscious lips, one hand supporting heavy bust, the other clutching a sheaf of papers densely written in calligraphic Arabic.
"Driver" - the mob exclaims - "There is an Arab on board!"
"Go down! I am not sharing a bus with a terrorist!" - a woman screams and then another: "Maybe she is dangerous? Did you frisk her when she boarded?"
The driver negotiates the dense circulation, maneuvering among a fleet of barely visible compacts. The noise distracts him. Without braking, he turns around and enquires: "What is it? What's the matter?"
"There's an Arab woman here." - one volunteers to edify him - "She is aboard the bus and may have explosives strapped around her waist". "Get her off this vehicle, she may be lethal!" - another advises.
"I am not forcing anybody down who has paid the ticket!" - snaps the driver and reverts to the hazy windshield.
A stunned silence. They thought the driver was one of them, he doesn't appear to be a peacenik. Someone latches on to the frontal paned partition and expostulates. "It's not reasonable, your decision. Today, you never know. Even their women are into killing, I saw it with my own eyes in Lebanon. They explode themselves like nothing, not a problem ..."
The woman who spotted the ostensible terrorist now badgers the driver:
"Give me your details. I am going to have a chat with your supervisors. You can forget about this cozy job of yours!"
The Arab stands mute, vigilantly monitoring the commotion. A passenger tilts and hisses in her ear: "Child murderer." She recoils from the gathering nightmare and bellows, addressing the jam-packed bus:
"I am a nurse. I tend to the sick and frail all day long, both ours and yours. Every day there's a flood of casualties. Our injured. Our corpses. Your injured. Your corpses. Children, women, shreds, all full of blood ..." - She pauses - "Why do you treat me this way?"
Her Hebrew is rocky but sufficient to provoke a heated debate with supporters and detractors.
"What do you want with this woman? She is just an innocent commuter! Look at yourselves! You should be ashamed!"
Others are genuinely scared. I can see it on their faces, the white-knuckled way they cling to the metal railings opposite their seats, the evasive looks, the stooping shoulders, eyes buried in the filthy flooring.
She may well be a terrorist, who knows?
It is too late to smother this burgeoning conflagration. My neighbor exchanges heavy-accented verbal blows with someone behind us. Women accuse each other of hypocrisy and barbarism.
The driver, pretending to ignore us, head slanted, listens in and steals appreciative glances at his voluptuous fawner. To garner his further admiration, she plunges into the dispute, a brimstone diva with words of fire.
Some passengers begin to push the Arab and shove her with innocuous gestures of their sweaty palms. They endeavor to avoid her startled gaze. She tries again:
"What kind of people are you? I am a medical nurse, I am telling you. So what if I am Arab, is it automatic proof that I am a terrorist?"
My neighbor suddenly addresses me:
"You've got nothing to say?"
"To my mind, if she were a terrorist, she would have blown us all to kingdom come by now."
I let the impact of this sane reminder settle.
"This bus is bursting. The driver skipped a few stations on the way." - I remind them - "She is smack amidst us. She has no bags. She could have detonated herself and demolished us by now."
My neighbor slaps his thighs with furry hands, a sign of pleasure. I am on his side. Some voices crow, encouraging me to proceed: "Let him continue, go on."
But I have got nothing more to add and I grow silent.
The Arab scrutinizes me doubtfully, not sure if she understood correctly. Do I suspect her of being a terrorist or don't I?
"And who might you be to tell us off, if I may?" - scoffs the woman who started it all. Her voice is screaming hoarse, her face aflame with stripes of lipstick smeared and make up oozing. Three golden bracelets clang the rhythm of her scornful question.
"He is a prisoner" - announces the driver's would-be floozy. She eyes both me and her desired conquest triumphantly. The driver studies her in his overhead mirror, then gives a haunted look. Control is lost. He knows it.
"An inmate" - shrieks the agitator for all the bus to hear - "The perfect couple! A felon and an Arab! Perhaps you are an Arab too?"
"I am not an Arab" - I respond calmly - "They are too well mannered for the likes of me and you."
She blows up:
"Son of a bitch, maniac, look who's talking!" - She leans towards me and scratches my face with broken, patchily varnished nails - "A prisoner piece of shit and whoring stench of an Arab stink up this bus!"
My neighbor half rises from our common seat, grabs her extended arm and affixes it firmly behind her back. She screams to her dumbfounded audience: "They are together in it, this entire group, and they are a menace. Driver, stop this instant, I want the police, now!"
I do not react. It was foolish of me to have partaken in this tiff in the first place. Prisoners involved in incidents of public unrest end up spending a week or more in the nearest squalid detention center, away from the relative safety of the penitentiary. Anything can happen in these infernos of perspiring, drug-addicted flesh, those killing fields of hemorrhaging syringes, those purgatories of squeals and whimpers and shaking of the bars, draped tight in sooty air.
I spent a month in these conditions and was about to return, I feel convinced.
The driver brakes the bus, rises, and gestures to the Arab helplessly. She tries to extricate herself by moving towards his cubicle. Some women mesh their hands, trapping her flapping arms, flailing about, her cheeks lattices of translucent rivulets. Her fear is audible in shallow exhalations.
But her captors persevere. They clench her scarf and the trimmings of her coat and twist them around the Arab's breathless neck.
The driver disembarks through the pneumatically susurrating doors. He walks the gravel path adjacent to the highway, desperately trying to wave down a passing car. Someone finally stops and they have a hushed exchange through a barricaded window. The hatchback cruises away.
The driver hesitates, his eyes glued to the receding vehicle. He contemplates the hostile bus with dread and climbs aboard. He sinks into his seat and sighs.
A patrol car arrives a few minutes later and disgorges two policemen. One elderly, stout and stilted, his face a venous spasm. He keeps feeling the worn butt of his undersized revolver. The other cop does the talking. He is lithe, a youth in camouflage, penumbral moustache, anorectic, sinewy hands, his eyes an adulterated cyan. He swells his chest and draws back his bony shoulders, attempting to conceal his meagerness.
"What's going on here?" - his voice a shocking bass. We are silenced by the contrast.
The instigator of the turmoil clears a path and fingers his oversized tunic as she volunteers:
"She is a terrorist and he is a convict and they were both planning to blow this bus up."
"Twaddle!" - roars my neighbor - "She is a hysterical, psychotic, panicky woman! Look what she did to his face!" - he points at me - "And that one, over there," - he singles the Arab out with a nail-bitten pinkie - "her only sin is that she is an Arab, a nurse or something, a fellow traveler, paid her ticket like all of us." The driver nods his assent.
"I am telling you ..." - the stirrer yelps but the officer is terse:
"Continue behaving like this, lady, and it is you I will arrest for disturbing the peace..."
"Another mock cop" - she slurs, but her voice is hushed and hesitant.
"Perhaps even insulting a police officer on duty?" - the policeman hints and she is pacified, retreating, crablike, eyes downcast, towards her shopping.
"Who is the prisoner?" - the veteran cop enquires, his paw atop his gun, caressing it incessantly. I raise my hand.
"You are coming with us. The rest continue to your destinations. You too!" - he addresses the Arab, his civility offensively overstated.
"I want no problems here!" - he warns - "It's Friday, the Sabbath is upon us. Go home in peace. The police has more important things to do than to resolve your petty squabbles!"
Extracted from my window seat, their fingers viselike under both armpits, they half drag me across my neighbor's knees, strewing all over him the contents of the plastic bag in which I keep my wallet and the weekend papers. It hurts.
We alight and the young one taps the folding exit doors. The bus drones its way into the snaring traffic jam. I watch its back as it recedes. The coppers place a pair of shiny handcuffs on my wrists and shackle my ankles too. I stumble towards the waiting squad car. They unlock the rear and gesture me to enter. They push me from behind and bolt the door. The gory rays of a setting sun dissect the murk inside.
I see the officers' backs and necks as they occupy the front seats beyond the meshed partition. One of them half turns and spits a snarl:
"My partner loves you, Arabs."
Only then, my eyes having adjusted, I notice the others in the stifling cabin I inhabit. They rattle their manacles and smile at me wolfishly, a toothy apparition.
"Where are you from, handsome?" - one asks and moves to flank me. His mitt is motionless on my knee.
He has an Arab accent.
==============================
Short Fiction in English and Hebrew
http://gorgelink.org/vaknin/
http://samvak.tripod.com/sipurim.html
http://www.suite101.com/files/topics/6514/files/worksinenglish.zip
Poetry of Healing and Abuse
http://samvak.tripod.com/contents.html
Anatomy of a Mental Illness
http://samvak.tripod.com/journal1.html
