Dissonance

We're the closest through a proxy:
a three-year-old, tar-black cat
that should have been a dog.
He follows wherever I go,
surrenders a soft mass of purrs
and blissful dreams into my arms;
the light graze of his breath on my hand
is the secret door to a light-filled room
where you comb my hair, endlessly.

But then I think of something
you told me years ago,
how once, to protect your caged
bird, out of sheer rage, you broke
a cat's back with a stick --
an image of you (Queen of Quiet
and Grace) which somehow
I can't quite place.

Re + ligare

(Lat. "to bind," "to tie up")

A slight delay at the YMCA reception counter. As I'm waiting to show my card, from the corner of my left eye I register someone's physical presence at my side, a little too close. At first I ignore it -- there are always people pushing and crowding at reception desks; but then it becomes clear in that elusive body-informed way that this person is looking at me, on the brink of addressing me. So I turn, and see a tall man in his forties with sharply chiseled features and a slightly hooked eagle-nose smiling at me shyly. He doesn't look me in the eyes and takes a few seconds of embarrassed hesitation before he says in half-whisper, the delicate smile -- strangely nestled in his rough-edged face -- never fading, "What country are you from?"
I follow his downward gaze and see that he's looking at the card I'm holding in my hand, with my name printed on it. "Oh," I say, "I'm Serbian."
"Yes, I saw your name there," he adds, nodding in confirmation of his own guess, that little smile still around his lips.
"What country are you from?" I ask, echoing his smile and trying to analyze his accent mentally. "Show," I point towards his YMCA card, making sure my voice sounds playful. He hesitates a couple of instants, then flashes the card at me but so briefly that I don't manage to see all the letters. His first name begins with an A, his last with an L -- that's all I could make out. I shrug my shoulders and look up questioningly.
"I'm Albanian," he explains in half-whisper, with a tone of someone caught in a misdeed.
"Ah, ok," I smile more broadly, and for a moment I don't know if it's solidarity or awkwardness that snaps tight between us. Just then our cards are checked and we go our separate ways.

* * * * * * * * * *

An hour and a half later, I bump into him, tall and solitary, on the metro platform. In order to round off our abrupt parting a while ago, I walk up to him and wish him a good day, intending to pass by. But he wants to talk, and now he's a little less hesitant so as the train docks in and we get on, he tells me he doesn't go to the Y as much now because of this -- he lifts his right arm in evidence, and I can see that his hand is in plaster, sticking out from the jacket sleeve, wrapped into a sheet of gray plastic. This protects the plaster from the rain; 2 more weeks and he'll take it off. I ask him what happened, he says he slipped and fell. We start the usual immigrant chit-chat (how long have you been here? where were you before? what do you do?), and so I find out he was in New York before Montreal, where he worked as a waiter and liked it there but couldn't stay because of his visa; now he is a shipping clerk, although he would really like to be a bus driver but his French is not good enough. In Albania, he studied for a lawyer, but that's worth nothing here. As he speaks, he keeps his plastered hand hidden beneath a backpack he is holding in his lap.

Then the ball is in his court. He asks me all the questions in the ad-hoc immigrant chit-chat protocol, and I answer them. "I'm assimilated," I conclude triumphantly, although I'm not quite sure that I am, or that, if I am, I like it. I ask him if he ever goes back; his "no" is quick and curt. His eyes shifting around, he adds he hasn't gone once in the last 11 years. (I keep at a safe distance from asking why he left -- there is a clichéd alarm inside my head ringing "blood vengeance!"). He has two brothers and a sister; he doesn't mention parents. The darkness of his black eyes and thick eyebrows hanging over them is singeing the metro floor, despite the faint traces of that built-in smile. Barefoot, I walk the fine line between sympathetic interest and impolite probing for a few more minutes, then it's my stop. I make small pre-disembarking motions, he looks like he's about to say something (or is it my imagination?) but he doesn't. I offer him my left hand, and he gives me a firm, long handshake. His eyes are not shifting now. "Good luck," I say; he wishes me the same, I'm off, and the door closes.

Later, I read the passage in War and Peace where Pierre and Davout exchange a glance which saves Pierre from the execution. A glance, a handshake, a look upwards just in time to see an inverted V of geese coming back after the winter. A momentary re-connection.

Paradise Lost (or: Another Black-and-White One)

~ you shall above all things be glad and young ~



They are so young, and they know it. Or their bodies do. Carefree and supple, they are centimeters away from the edge of a cliff, seemingly unaware of a steep drop down the hillside and into the narrow valley etched in between the Bosnian hills. With that easy panache of youth, they can do anything, they are claiming the roofs of the world as their own. They are not from there, but they belong; the sharp edges of their prettiness seem etched into the scene, almost photoshopped, but they aren't.

(Are his shoes the ones she fell in love with? She told me once the first thing she had noticed about him were the comfortable shoes he was wearing, and she fell in love with them before she fell in love with their owner).

All in oblongs, with her long coat, flat-heeled but feminine pointy boots, and an elongated white woollen head-wrapper, she's holding onto him, her right wrist dimpled lengthwise from a tight grip on his shoulder. She's laughing into him, like someone who's suddenly decided to let go and dive into it, free-falling, but is still a little nervous about that cliff.

He is a square epitome of stability. His freshly-trimmed sharp hair-line, his pressed collar spread neatly around the neck opening of the sweater, his short jacket, and a steadfast crouch with feet hip-width apart, keep them both safe, grounded. His profiled nose almost touching her open face, he looks someplace past her, but he's telling her something under his breath, not letting the free-fall scare her.

And behind and below them, like a drawing on a cellophane-wrapped box of rahat-lokum (my favourite kind, with walnut halves inside), lies scattered the town of Srebrenica, lulled into a lazy winter haze, not dreaming of the future. Such innocence on their snow-lit faces; such casualness in the angled proximity of the mosque and the church below; such happy oblivion before the inevitable wheels of oncoming History.

Such an impossible black-and-white Paradise, which was once real, like his comfortable shoes, like her dimpled wrist, like a wonderfully anonymous winter day in Srebrenica.