Alter Park
Tears streamed down her rosy cheeks uninterruptedly like rainfall overflows a shallow flower pot, uncontrollably with a mind of its own. At times she let out a sporadic titter or gasped for air unpredictably. Then hovered a lull instigated by the passing of a lazy red bird, impossible to ignore even by a devastated heart, which allowed my ears to adjust to the naked sound of her syncopated breathing.
It was precisely at that moment that I discreetly scooted leftward and extended my arm in her direction, a handkerchief in my hand.
I intentionally omitted any form of speech, but in my mind I murmured, I am the orphaned, exiled senior living alone with my cancer, yet here I am taking on that violently windy Monday and its furious petrol clouds, not shedding a tear. But why is this… 38-year-old woman?… crying her heart out to a sound in her ears concealed to me.
In an attempt to elevate the scene only for my own perception, I imagined it was Glenn Gould’s 1981 Goldberg Variations, clipped to a personal tragedy, that had managed to summon up that torrential state in her.
Instinctively I needed to find out what it was that led to her utter despair, the sort I knew too intimately, that makes one oblivious to the snot covering their weeping face.
The faint fluttering of my handkerchief finally caught her damp peripheral vision.
You are kind, she muttered with a broken voice as she reluctantly removed her earphones, reaching for the kerchief with a half-extended arm.
I could sense she was eager to resume her crying but was hindered by the forced approbation for my slanting crown of white hair and the velvety pockets under my eyes.
She was plump and I was old, the universe’s way of establishing a physical balance that enabled us to initiate a conversation with ease and as equals.
Is it going to be ok? I beckoned with a voice whose worn texture could not have been too different from that of her father.
It will be, she mumbled. It will be, she then asserted with a pronounced tone, more like an affirmation to herself than an answer to my question.
That’s an interesting statement, I remarked, now able to read the sticker on the notebook sat idly on her lap, in what could have seemed like an attempt to soften the tragic winds that engulfed us.
It was in fact devious jest on my behalf.
The sticker red “Trust Israelis”, leaving little room for imagination on the question of her origins and disposition.
It was this unsolicited observation of mine that cast a dry spell on the gushing fountains in her eyes and almost instantly restored her breathing to that of a normal person sitting on a bench.
A sun ray made its way through the sinister arsenal of clouds, like a ballistic missile occasionally pierces through the Iron Dome, I thought.
It was nature’s acquiescence to look at the weeping willow with intent and her at me with slight trepidation.
I could now perceive a glimmer forming at the corner of her eye.
Where are you from? She asked abruptly.
I’m Salim, by the way, I circumvented her maneuver.
I’m from Palestine. What’s your name, if you don’t mind me asking?
Sama. My name’s Sama.
In that moment it seemed like her recent episode had now receded to a thing of the far past.
It is stunning, I observed, how her devastation had almost vanished, apart from her still-humid cheeks and nostrils which she gently wiped off with my handkerchief. She did not succumb to the temptation of blowing her congested nose.
So, do you trust Israelis, Salim?
Granted full license to adjust my position and permissibly stare at her whole, I now perceived her as less plump, more sturdy.
I trust trustworthy people, I corrected.
I am certain there are trustworthy Israelis.
But since you ask, what do you mean to say with that sticker, if I may?
Exactly what it says, she retaliated, with more oomph in her voice.
With the inherent wisdom of my generation I inquired further:
Is it safe to say that it addresses a problem of missing trust? Or that of misplaced trust in others?
You’re not wasting any time, I see, she retorted, forcing a smile with her lips that did not reach her eyes, to alleviate the sharpness of her remark, and with that action she gained more assertiveness.
Don’t you find it rather unsettling that you haven’t asked me why I was sobbing just a few moments ago?
Well, I did ask if you were going to be okay. I would not want to be too invasive, you know, but your sticker is public domain. A public statement, one might say.
After a deep breath she sighed, now adjusting her own position to fully gage my consitution.
I’ve been living with the fact that my cousin, Yuval, will not be coming home. It dawns on me without permission, this fact, and so I sob.
He had been in captivity for more than a year now, and we learned a week ago that he died of a stroke. He could have been saved, granted there was aspirin at hand, or an immediate ride to the hospital. A minor stroke, they said, but it is the absence of means, the sustained absence of a medical reaction that made him yield to his clogged artery.
Unconsciously I was grinding my teeth, lips tight, my right hand clenched to the bench, while her words, her story, dealt my body a deafening blow.
It was her cold, detached tone with which she delivered her deeply personal account that induced the burning sweat which I could sense drizzling from under my arms down to the lowest point of my body.
It felt as though her resilience, this particular resilience she pointed single-mindedly at me without even looking in my direction, was manifesting itself for the first time, prompted by my earlier question and made to exist only for me. As though this inconceivable encounter, that of an old Palestinian man putting her to the test, had prematurely thrust her into the next phase of her mourning.
You must be too familiar with all of it, she interrupted my silent descent into the abyss.
Instinctively I cleared my throat, though not yet ready to rejoin the conversation.
In what felt like minutes but was in fact a handful of seconds, I was processing:
Berlin, that city where I, a Semite who has been witnessing the genocide of my people off a phone I barely know how to use, can end up on a park bench next to an Israeli woman who has recently lost a loved one to death in captivity.
If one could decipher my distraught gaze, one would have read: what a clusterfuck of a situation.
It did console me a little, a consolation laced with guilt, to think that she was also struggling with that painful confrontation, despite her newly acquired state of control over the conversation.
Dizzied by the fatality of it all and a burgeoning hunger, I had to force myself to straighten my back, I crossed my left leg over my right knee resting both my hands and mustered a subservient smirk.
I should start smoking again, I pondered, while moistening my lower lip with the tip of my tongue.
I am indeed too familiar with all of it, I finally declared with an intonation of sympathy that allowed no aperture for elaboration.
What more was there to be said, I thought. She had unloaded her heart, but do I unload mine in return?
How highly probable it was that my intrinsic rage takes an incandescent, uncivilized turn.
With the instant hindsight that only old age enables, my rancor was at once domesticated into reason and I heard myself thinking clearly.
It was not she who murdered my kind, nor was it I who forbade her Yuval medical assistance.
To hell with Zionism still, but she is but a mere porter of an ideology which she needs but does not question nor understand.
The chasm was insuperable and I was too old, too close to the end to mend such benighted pride, I concluded.
For an eternal minute I did not produce a single word, neither did she.
I could use a cup of tea, she announced out of nowhere, in reaction to a ruthless gust. And it looks like you could use a biscuit.
Would you care to join me? I live just outside the park. Also, I must clean your handkerchief of all the misery I’ve inflicted upon it.
A few minutes later the sound of the front door being shut made me realize we were now in her apartment.
She lived alone too, I thought, judging by all the visible idiosyncrasies characteristic of the solitary: a companionless coffee mug in the dish rack, two cactuses, small change strewn by a single set of gloves and an old movie stub.
Before the tea bag had properly infused the warm water in the pot, we had started fornicating like two bonobos at the sole mercy of their reptilian instincts, as if blasphemy was the only reasonable outcome to this most improbable sequence of events.
It would be more truthful to depict that we fucked each other out of our nationalistic pride, or was it latent wrath that endowed me with forlorn youthful vigor?
A grieving Zionist with unresolved paternal issues, I thought.
A stateless Palestinian whose accrued wretchedness did not tame his animal instinct, she must have thought.
A few moans slipped out of our interlocked faces that did not look to kiss, but otherwise we humped in silence, our minds refusing to accept what our entwined bodies had utterly embraced.
A sentimentalist voyeur, had they been in the room which now basked in cloud-kissed afterglow, would have presumed this was some diabolical form of love, but it wasn’t. It was raw, unapologetic human nature on full display.
Post climax I could feel my soul recoil while my body remained motionless. I could sense she felt the same.
There we were, in absolute quietude, both staring at the ceiling in search of an exit.
On the far end of the bed, a waning old man in the winter of his life, who had lost more than can be counted or explained at the hands of a filthy, rapist of a state. On the other end, as if separated by a silky river, lay a mourning woman from that state, at her prime, armed with ignorance and a blind conviction that she and her people were the oppressed victims of unprovoked barbarism.
I could not help but think that my bare phallus with its white crown pulsating up and down to the cadence of my short breath was the perfect visual metaphor of that barbarism, one doubtless she thought she had just conquered.
Collective ideologies, as it always turns out, are brought down to their knees on the whim of individual foible, I thought.
I glanced at her as she put her underwear back on by the kitchen sink, now ugly with shame.
She leered at me, a helpless calf, perhaps ugly with a different texture of shame. Ugliness, unlike beauty, does not fade, I thought.
Here’s your handkerchief, she said, wringing the last drops of water out of it with her manly hands.
Truth be told I have not set foot in Alter Park ever since. I might do so today. It does house my favorite bench, and time is of the essence, after all.
