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Ten yards from his door the old man stops to talk to a woman who seems to have halted mid-step. She is leaning her bony frame against a window ledge, trying to hide a hideous, crooked nose under a black scarf. She nods to him and he stands beside her with hands on hips, looking up the street. They avoid each other's eyes and speak slowly, in a language that is both hoarse and bitter, comprised entirely of crackles, every part of the conversation, each small staccato utterance is predetermined and falls without effort into place. I wait just behind him, nodding to her when she looks towards me, but she is unimpressed, her large, black, beady eye keeps glancing down at my western clothing as she dryly recites her news, her caustic opinions.
Can it really have happened this way? Such memories wound. They will not be healed by my apostatising alone, words lead to words lead to words... all of them plucked from the air like so many fruits of appeasement, offered only when imagined to be appropriate. In fact all one has to do is face them down, they are not to be trusted, discard them. Such memories wound, but this is good. In the chilly freshness of that autumnal night I fell asleep beside her to the slow tap-tapping of the cooling oil heater in the far side of the room. Wrapped now in a separate sheet. Touching her slightly with the blades of my shoulder, hoping she might still turn to me. Whispering her name like a mantra under my breath as if this might draw away the bitter columns she had placed between us. Cold, shamed, yet resisting shame's truth, alone, with only the tentative arms of smoking oil curling over me.
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