Tag Love

Tikvah

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There I was just standing there, when what I wanted to do was forbidden.

I wished I had more strength, wished I was more brave, wished I had the strength of my grandmother. Even now I could feel her downy cheek on mine as she had grasped the back of my neck with her surprisingly strong fingers, pressing her lips to my ear.

“Don’t let them break you, Esther. Do what is right.” She had kissed my forehead, the remnants of the perfume she always wore enveloping me in its warm familiarity.

They had dragged her away, a useless old woman, of no benefit, just a drain on finite resources. Dispensable.

I had hated them for that more than anything else. It burned in my chest. And yet…

I stared through the hole in the wall at the shop across the street, a street alien to me now even though it was only a moment away from where we lived. It was brightly lit, swarming with gaily dressed people like so many butterflies dancing above a wildflower meadow. The smell of freshly baked bread teased my nostrils and my stomach yawed and ached with hunger.

“If you don’t take chances,” said the man in the striped pajamas,”you might as well not be alive.”

I had seen him many times before, crouching in the gutter, holding his hand out for anything that a passer by might press into his cracked palm. I doubted he had the strength to stand. Every time we met, I tried to give him something that could be spared without Mutti noticing.

He was leaning against the wall, legs shaking with the effort. “Don’t be like me. Don’t let them break you.”

The words echoed bell-like.

“You have a child?” he asked, his voice barely a croak.

“Yes.”

He beckoned me towards him, pulling me close with surprising strength, whispering in my ear.

“Let me distract them when the gate opens. Get food for your child, for you. Survive.”

The gates were creaking open, the lorry was entering, my heart was thumping. I had to decide, had to decide now. He pushed me away, towards the gate.

“Do it!” he hissed, the potential for his last good deed setting his eyes aflame. “You have half an hour and then they will be back. Do what you must. Do what is right!.”

I remembered my grandmother, the way she lit the candles on Erev Shabbat, the flames illuminating her eyes.

I nodded and ran. I didn’t look back, not even when the bullets ricocheted off the walls, not even when jackboots rang on the cobbles, not even when I heard him scream.

He had just been standing there, and still fought back.

There was still tikvah.

Architect

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Iris felt as if she had been sitting in silence for most of her working life. More often than not, her clients remained enmeshed in their own silent Gordian Knots for much of their allotted fifty minute slots too. Whilst she believed in the process, whilst she stressed to the buttoned-up men and women that it was they that needed to ‘do the work’, and if that meant silence with their thoughts, then so be it, more and more these days, she was finding it hard to prevent her own thoughts from ruminating on her own troubles.

Forty seven years old and not a sniff of a relationship for eight years. Was there something wrong with her? Did the men she met every now and again find her too strong, too professional, were they afraid of her chosen career? She sometimes looked in the mirror and saw shades of Lilith from Frasier staring back at her. Same severely drawn-back dark hair, same black suit, same eyes that could wilt a flower at a thousand paces (her ex-husband’s words that had remained, eating away at her since the bitter divorce). Oh, she had continued with her own psychoanalysis as all good mental health professionals should, but after some time she had used her own silent fifty minutes to mentally redecorate her apartment, to compile shopping lists, to think of the ballet she had so enjoyed last night. She wasn’t, it was fair to say, doing the work.

Don, the jailbird, was waiting in the wings. Just as soon as he got out from his stretch inside for a string of tax infringements, he’d be at her door, smiling and expectant. Much as she enjoyed writing to him and visiting him when the penitentiary allowed, she wondered if their relationship was doomed to failure. His idea of her was of a downtrodden divorcee, a poor shadow of a woman who needed a strong, capable man to protect her. He adored her sweet, feminine ways, or at least the ones she portrayed to him in her letters and on her visits. Observing her female clients over the years had given her plenty of material on which to base her alter-ego. She though of herself as a thief, no better than Don really. She stole people from themselves, and was paid handsomely for the privilege.

Iris stepped out of her court shoes, sighing at the relief of stockinged feet flexing on the shag pile carpet. Shaking her hair loose from its tightly knotted bun, she stared at herself in the mirror. She could do faded, timid, eager to please, if it meant having Don’s strong, capable arms holding her close every night, if it meant that she would no longer be on her own. Hell, most of her clients came to her because they were making compromises every single day of the week, and saw her as their safety net, their place to accommodate all that accommodation. If they could do it, so could she. Anything had to be better than sitting at home in silence with only her thoughts for company.

She checked her calendar, counted the days until Don’s release. Twenty seven. Time enough to hang up her psychoanalyst’s metaphorical hat and reinvent herself. Time enough to learn domesticity. She checked the small ads in the local paper and found just what she needed. ‘How to be a Fifties Housewife: Cookery to please your Man’.

She picked up her phone, found who she was looking for and waited to be connected. “Hello Darrell? It’s Iris here. Yes, I need to resume my sessions with you. Tuesdays at 3pm? Perfect. Looking forward to seeing you then. Bye.”

Fifty minutes of constructive silence once a week was hers once more. ‘Worth it for true love,’ thought Iris.

Wasn’t it?

 

Parallel

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Angelo had been visiting his lover in Long Island for seventeen years. Regular as clockwork, reliable as always, he would take a week’s holiday in March, June, September and December and make the long trip to spend some quality time with Dennis, a British ex-pat who loved all and everything about the good old US of A. Secretly, Angelo would have loved to escape from the clutches of an America that had become an alien concept to him over the years. If he could have achieved his dream, emigrating to the Highlands of Scotland and Dennis’s native home, he would have been one hundred percent happy.

Oh to be young again, to have the conviction that Dennis would be content with him no matter what, that he would move mountains for him. But Dennis had become old and set in his ways, refusing even to leave the small coastal town where he had set up home, paying a fortune for Angelo’s first class flights from San Francisco, just so that he could stay put. Sometimes, just sometimes, it would have been wonderful to open the front door of his second floor walk-up and see his favourite man in the world standing there with his battered Louis Vuitton luggage, with his arms outstretched waiting for a welcoming hug. But it had never happened yet, and never would.

Dennis felt the age-gap between him and his darling Angelo more keenly than he would care to admit, even to himself. Thirteen years was almost indecent, he believed, and even though a smattering of grey had begun to appear at his young lover’s formally jet black temples, he still ruefully believed himself to look like Angelo’s father, rather than his lover. He had no idea what Angelo saw in him. His young paramour was successful in his own right, was independent, didn’t need him, he was sure. There was no way he was going to confess to a fear of heights that had crippled him since childhood, since he had seen his father fall to his early death whilst clearing out the guttering after a particularly violent autumn storm. Angelo’s walk-up with its vast windows and balconies made him feel queasy even just looking at the photos, and after all, there was no way he would even step foot on a plane. Angelo, he just knew, would laugh at him and find a younger, more confident man to love if he ever found out.

Dennis sighed, his finger hovering over the screen of his iPad. Angelo was due to visit soon, he needed to make a decision. The image told him all that he needed to know. It would be perfect for the dressing room, just the right size, the perfect style to match the Shaker-built house that was his pride and enjoy. And besides, it would block out the view across the valley from his side of the bed. He could pretend he was on the ground floor, and that he was safe. He hit the ‘Enter’ button and watched as the transaction completed.

One day, maybe one day, he would explain. But not yet. Definitely not yet. He wanted Angelo to be one hundred percent happy with him for just a little bit longer.