In the end there is only a room. Four walls, a chair, a table, a couch, a window. From this position if you fold your neck down to your left shoulder you can make out a definite patch of blue which is not the incessant colour of the sky, it is the sea which is only three blocks away. It is there, the grace note in his confined existence. He spent his childhood by the sea, a different sea, a different country, but he has always missed its presence. Once he had dreamed of Odessa, the raucous port where anything was possible. It is a good room, everything is compact, useful, sufficient for a single person’s needs. The couch converts into a bed, on hot nights the breeze from the restless body of water makes its way onto his tired face.
He eats his meals out at a café at the end of the street, the same meal every day, he is a regular. The waitress does not bring him a menu anymore, she knows what he will have: chicken with rice. In the evening at home he will eat a couple of slices of bread with a slice of the local cheese. In the morning just coffee. He has never been a big eater. He does not miss luxuries, they have never mattered to him.
In the afternoon he walks along the beachfront. Families are playing on the sand, the children building crumbling towers, the mothers splashing seawater on their bosoms, the fathers smoking and reading the newspaper. Teenagers taunt him, he is an old man with badly fitting dentures and the appearance of a gnome in a fairy tale. He does not speak the language well and the words and phrases he does know are not idiomatic so he has to guess at what the insults might mean, he has to use his imagination.
This country of his last residence, his final resting place after a lifetime on the move, has date palms and orange trees. It has bougainvillea, a messy, colourful shrub that crawls over walls and fences and climbs telegraph poles. The vitality of this plant, its brassy vigour, affronts his senses, he’s used to a monochrome palette. There are fragrances in the air he does not recognise, and odours of cooking oil, scents of tanning creams. After an hour of plodding exercise he returns to his room: to a book, the radio, the sounds of his neighbours fighting, having sex, newborn babies screaming their lungs out.
He has been here for six years. The newborn is in school now, he sees her leave the building with her little briefcase, holding her mother’s hand. She reminds him of his own girls, who had they lived would be mothers, and himself a zayde, his pockets full of little surprises. On bad days he believes that the Itzik who had a wife and children was someone in a story he had once heard, and appropriated to himself. It was too hard to believe that he of all people had been loved. The condition of solitude is a concrete overcoat from which one can never escape. Or he can’t. How had he managed it back in the thirties when he had first seen Beyla walking with her friends in the park? Whatever he had done, he would never be able to pull it off again.
All his life he has been busy, talking and listening. He has had work to do. He has not enjoyed the intimacy of friendship with another person but he has tried love, marriage, fatherhood, and everything came to dust. Whose fault? The times? Other people lived through the same portion of history and succeeded. His sister in Liverpool – the whole bourgeois dream came true for her. Jossel, who he remembered as a sanctimonious bore, had a second lease of life with a younger lady. Of Solly the baby he could not be sure. He used to hear things, matters which made him not so quick to claim him as a brother. Rivka had drawn the short straw. Hadn’t she once broken her doll, a premonition of her own fate? He couldn’t remember.
Now he is silent, there is no one to talk to. No one has anything to say to him, and he has nothing to say. The waitress in the café who wordlessly goes to the kitchen to give his order to the cook does not know his name. He doesn’t know hers, he never asked, she never told him. With other customers she cracks jokes, flirts, angles for tips. With him, she just brings the food. His tongue seems to be shrinking in his mouth; his voice, when he does speak, feels rusty and disused, it needs to be restored to fluency by conversation but he goes for days, sometimes up to ten, without speaking. There is a telephone but it rings only once a month, a routine call from a bored official to ask if he needs anything. He is only doing his duty. The old man has long ceased to be of any use to them, he’s been comprehensively debriefed. One morning he sang a song to a bird, felt foolish and self-conscious, but his ears heard his speech was not broken. He sang the lullaby his mother had crooned to him, and he had crooned to his daughters. Surprising himself, he cried. He has no photographs of his family, they were left behind. When you jump you carry just the clothes on your back. He had left the embassy in the suit he was wearing now. The clothes on his back and a filing cabinet in his brain. It was not an ideological decision, he had not lost faith with the communist system, he had never believed in it. He had jumped before he could be grabbed by the collar and wrenched back into a purer version of communism in the Gulag. Someone didn’t like his face, that was all. And was his a face so easy to love?
He walked out of the embassy in this inconsequential country with its mild climate and the sea as a boundary. Walked out into a room.
On the other side of the city there is a cinema which screens classic movies from a bygone age, films from many countries, subtitled or sometimes dubbed into the local language. A few months ago they had a Dziga Vertov season: Man with a Movie Camera is one of his favourite films and he had taken the bus to the unfamiliar neighbourhood to settle down in his seat in the palace of dreams. Reliving the exhilaration of the early years of the revolution induced in him a nostalgia for the clarity of his former life. How easy it had been, anything was possible. Everyone was young and everyone was suddenly free: from the tsar and from other tyrannical fathers.
He folded into his pocket a flyer which contained a list of forthcoming films. In six weeks’ time that old British picture, The Story of the Forest. He waited. Six weeks passed with no incident. It felt like sixty years. Every day the same, without incident. In other rooms families argued, children wailed, wives sang to the sea. He went back to the cinema and bought his ticket. He took his seat and held his hands together in his lap; they had recently started to tremble. Parkinson’s, he thought, that’s all I need, not to be able to bring a cup to my mouth, to be fed soft food by an indifferent nurse.
The audience was arriving. There were old-timers nostalgic for the films of their youth, students of cinema, young lovers, couples who had nowhere else to go on this rainy evening, solitary types like himself, their purposes inscrutable. Of everyone in the half-empty cinema, the atmosphere heavy with the smoke of cheap cigarettes, only Itzik knew how false the movie was. He had been there, he had seen everything, it was nothing like this, nothing. There were no magical elements, there was instead a spoilt girl and a pompous brother, a group of boys who believed in ideas that were going to crush them.
He remembered Vladimir Propp and the lecture in London to which he had enticed his beautiful niece. The lecturer had spoken at great length about the structure of stories. But I also have a story, he thought. He had told it several times to his handlers. Why here, they had asked him, and why now? To which there was no answer besides, ‘Once I lived with my brothers and sisters in a good merchant’s house in Riga not far from the port, and one day my little sister went out to the forest and our family was undone.’
Which was not the truth either but who says stories are supposed to be true? When you tell a story you are bound by its own internal rules. The truth is an awkward branch that will poke your eye out.
The film ended, a few members of the audience clapped. Some laughed. Some booed. The manager of the cinema decided not to screen that old thing again. It was 1977. No one was interested. These old black-and-white movies felt stale and old-fashioned. Two streets away, people were lining up to see Star Wars. That was the kind of fantasy people wanted these days. Plenty of crash-bangs and lasers.
Outside it was still raining. Itzik waited for his bus. The orange lights of its destination melted in the wet atmosphere. The journey took forty minutes. He watched the unfamiliar city in all its mystifying sociability. What did anyone think and feel? Was it possible for a man like him to believe they actually had these sensations? Where had he gone wrong, when was the slip-up? He got off the bus at his stop. It had stopped raining and the waitress was standing outside the café smoking a cigarette. Here was a person. A tired person in shoes with heels too high for her line of work, a person who must feel all day the discomfort of her situation. Nevertheless, a person who is aware of his existence. He allowed his tongue to move slowly in his mouth to form a greeting.
The waitress had forgotten that he could speak. Nobody knew who he was. Nobody knew anything about him. He was just an old foreigner.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Look at you, you’re wet all over, your coat is splitting at the seams. How old are you? Too old to be out on a night like this.’
Itzik smiled. He hadn’t moved his mouth into such a formation for years. She saw his face slit into a wolfish grin. Cunning, knowing, full of pain and knowledge. It turned out, after all, he was a person!
She later told her boyfriend that she had given it no thought at all when she said, ‘Why don’t you come in for a cup of coffee? You look as though you need warming up.’
It was, she said, just a spontaneous act of kindness and pity, but he seemed so surprised by the gesture that he appeared immobilised, frozen under the dripping awning, the neon of the café’s sign flaming red on his right shoulder until he stepped forward and felt her hand lightly touch his arm as he stumbled through the door.