Ana's Home - Stories

____"No, my dear, the coffee is absolutely fine."

"Well, if you are sure.." The woman swept her hair behind her ear and expectantly turned the gaze away from him. He knew that she wanted him to take her hand or say something meaningful. She wondered whether he did not want to, or could not. She smiled warmly. He put his hand on top of hers for an instant and then withdrew it.

It was a translucent grey day outside the coffee shop, and the late afternoon hour had the tables for itself mostly deserted. The low hum of quiet conversations around them emphasized the drooping tension between the two.

"If that is how you want, then.. Alright, we have to get along." Her voice trembled only slightly revealing that she had stepped back again, given up on something. She could not ask the question, so she gave the answer herself. She knew that he would never say the word she yearned for, as well as he knew that she had been waiting for certain words to be said. The both knew now and again that they missed each other's lines. Certainly there was hope that the words she wished to hear might come in some future, but these were her words and not his. He did not have any words within.

She looked through the window. The glass was clean, swept by the earlier gust of rain. The air was sparkling, emphasizing the light and deep shades of grey that filled up the street and the sky.

"It's time, I need to go," she said. She rose first and he followed. He paid the bill and went outside to find her. His bearing was composed and his whole bodily movement ascetic. He felt a pang of pain as he held her hand goodbye, feeling that he was half-losing her again, and feeling sorry that he cold not reach out and hold her, prevent her from leaving him. He could not answer her, to her expectancy and to her being, in the way she longed for. She left. He watched her, the only coloured and warmth-emitting image framed by the greyness of the cold street. Neither of them knew if they would ever see each other again.

So ache begun. The memory of embracing arms, a memory slowly tearing away from the flesh, taking a warm essence of living body with them. The sound of the voice, the balm for the secret mind, hungering again to hear the murmur that heals all solitude in the world for an instant. The eyes, the eyes gleaming with laughter, depth, serious presence while talking about the troubles of the times. The love making, forgotten nights with lost dates that left gleaming flecks of sensual masterpieces of closeness, wild invasions across the limits of enjoyment and freedom. The sense of the other, the ultimate presence, the repeated astonishment, over and over again.

Life was good before they met. He was a lawyer, and she was a manager. They were not young, and both had already made their lives fulfilled to a bearable point. Life had been going somehow, and there had been even joyful mornings to it. It seemed that some sort of order was finally there superimposed upon insecurity. Neither of them had had it easy.

They did not know each other, and then they met. It was not a meeting of two needy individuals looking for a dream in the world. It would be hard to say in the first place if they were looking for or looking away from love. He was married, and she was long time divorced. His marriage had plenty of empty slots but it was convenient, considering that it left him time to devote to other interests. Women were not one of them. He was too tried out for seduction.

Her job was demanding although not too innovative, but it also left her a lot of unspent curiosity to explore other issues after hours. Men were not the major one. She loved herself too much for that.

So, when they met, they were rather satisfied people, more or less selfish, and not too interested in the events of the complicated human-to-human world. But they got interested in each other. And who can explain the mystery of intimacy, why two people get drawn to each other with an inexplicable force, why then, why thus, why those two people and not some other two? Before long, before having spoken about it, they knew, each alone, they were in love. And they knew that love was a mortal thing.

In his work, he was a committed lawyer. He chose early not to defend cases where in his judgment the accused one was guilty. Thus he had turned down a number of clients in his career, which made him a lawyer of moderate status, not too noted amongst his peers. He knew that their success would hurt his sense of justice, and he knew the consequences. He did not bother to explain his stand to his colleagues and his wife, growing insensitive to their well-meant advice to sometimes bend his principles. He didn't. He tried once, in his youth: he defended a case of a young woman who used her charm and a tough-childhood story to elbow her way in a private company, but was then caught at her first attempt to commit a fraud. She was guilty, and he knew it. He tried at the time to silence his consciousness; he won the trial, turned down the girl's offer to reward him sensually, and went home feeling void and sick. He did not get sick; the next day he went back to the office and never mentioned the case again. It was a job cleanly done, they said. Yet he grew stricter toward himself afterwards, and lost some of the enthusiasm he regarded his job with. He was incompetent of feeling guilty, so he could not forgive himself, and his self-blaming was too abstract to evoke any stronger emotion.

He was at ease with time and knew that it was better to let it solve things that are out of our control. And years just went by. If there had been an answer he was waiting for to come with time, he certainly had forgotten the question. Life was sufficient, perhaps a bit monotonous, but one certainly could not have everything, and the wisdom of life is to concentrate on what one has, and cherish it.

Certainly he had been once in love with his wife, but that was far off in the past and the traces of that glamour slowly evaporated through time. It was quite a few years back that its last trace drowned between them. They, he and his wife, drowned it deliberately. It was somehow easier to live without ups and downs than to continually make the effort of spurring the old flames and re-living the failure of the other to fulfill one's pleasant expectations. All that was hope and passion died quietly, without drama, on the floor of their drawing room, where all their differences came into the crude light and stayed there, immobile, stooped monuments of earlier decisions. Of course, they did not talk about their differences: they simply went on different ways into different worlds. They both regarded each other as an unspoken, although friendly failure.

He was unfaithful to her occasionally, having very rare and short-lived affairs. From each affair he would soon withdraw, to his cold surprise not finding himself interested enough to maintain the effort secrecy requires. Sex was wonderful, and he did strongly need to touch and to be touched, to immerse himself in a body's beauty and warmth. That joy would diminish all too soon, paling in the black-blazing lack of something significant to connect the lovers. Unbearable tension would collect in him and he would silently withdraw, leaving the other to say the deadly words. Time did change things, and it brought order back into actual life.

Sometimes a thought would cross his mind, if his wife was unfaithful to him, if she had ever been. And except a slight jolt of jealousy, which he would scold and put aside as childish possessiveness, he felt nothing but an unattached curiosity and a good wish for his wife to make herself happy, to perhaps revoke her passion with an unknown lover. And he would let that thought slip from his mind. He never felt the need to know. As for himself, he would never admit to his wife that he has had lovers. It was simply not the thing to do.

His love life with his wife was a decent effort on both sides to comfort each other at minimal personal expense. As if the strain of unbearability between them would grow to a point of bursting; the art of staying together was to sense that moment and just prior to it to do something loveable for the other. Something small, something known to be wanted, and by doing it to trigger the other's happiness. It became a compassionate and reasonable gesture not to hurt the other, and perhaps they persisted in doing it for the sake of that loneliness two people feel when they are alone in the night in bed, naked, and the vast dark world infinitely surrounds them. Then selfishness rekindled something that resembled warmth, for an instant of pleasure. The gloomy solitude that was driving them to intimacy would vanish by the arrival of the morning when they would find each other superfluous again, and rush off to work; and yet there was some sort of bonding there. The hours away from each other gave them strength to go back together. And the continuity of these successful but risky returns, never spoken of and perhaps never thought of consciously, strengthened a feeling of continuity building between them. Now the physical time spent together, the daily decisions to come back to their mutual home as partners, was binding them, although indecisive, although weakening their desires each day. They had time to tame them wisely.

He never left his wife, nor he admitted his desperate thoughts of any sort of change he might have felt possible for him. His wife sensed this, but was fearful and gracious enough to let it pass without a word. He did not leave her and that was enough. She would not open that box and endanger the future they had together, she wished not to face the thought of being deserted, the broken promise that was the sole thing that kept the heart together, no matter how crumbled and outworn, it was the only thing left.

But life did not finish its say. The man and the woman met and fell in love.

There were times of deep sorrow and turmoil when he would have wished to turn back time and prevent this new relationship from happening at all, and he could not do that. He wished to undo things from his farther past, to unsay words, to un-happen events, but he was, as human beings are, utterly helpless. And there were times when he wanted to stop time, bend it like heated wax and make an infinite curve in it which would lead to an ever deepening and continuing ecstasy of pleasure, but he could not do that either. He was banging his head at the staring wall of blank time. His biggest ally, his teacher and friend, betrayed him.

There are changes that love entraps with: suddenly one feels all the things they could have been and desired to become, and their intimate power fills one up again. In the furore of love all past dreams seem possible and life seems too short to be lost on anything else but the fulfilment of one's dreams. In the turmoil of love there emerges the despair of having failed the sincerest goals and having forgotten the ultimate dreams.

People may betray themselves, gradually, at certain key points of life, moments of decision that come quietly and without announcement, and choosing the lesser dream one chooses the less of oneself. Yet he knows that he gave up on something invisible but essential to him and to him only. After each of these decisions of playing down life, cold creeps in and stays. Then one adjusts quietly to a colder world, that is, to a colder self living in a belittled world. Life seems then like an infinite desert where the currents of passions are being drained in the order of day. The decisions taken without a full heart, for the wrong reasons and for the dreams of others who had reality and unfulfilled dreams of their own. Failing them and failing one's self, and keeping on pretending more or less successfully that it was a fulfilment. And then the gravity of days that follow, when one has a lifetime of consequences to look toward to, in open joy or in clandestine misery.

The latter seemed to have followed the key decisions in this man's life. He knew that this was the consequence of his having brought life choices with half a heart, due to circumstances and for the sake of following the rhythm of society. His occasional happiness was mainly based on forgetting himself.

Ad yet, when he asked himself what else he would do at the decisive moments of the past, he still could not find a probable answer. He was unable to imagine himself any different than he was already. And although he was in love more than he ever though capable of, he could not change his core of continuity. Continuity that seemed like an inviolable tablet of commands that repeated one thing: "Change is violence where everyone gets hurt. Harm not. What was must be."

He was willing to do things right; he knew he was imperfect, but he did not know how deeply imperfect he was. His lover herself was not a perfect being. She was a symptom of his love and not its spring. She was sometimes weak and frightened, sometimes petty and overemotional, but he loved her, like one loves the sun.

"You would never decide, would you?"

"I cannot," he said, "I cannot make a decision at this time."

"I understand."

"I hope you do," he said warmly, but with a tremble of disbelief in his voice. "I am awfully sorry that I cannot help you now."

They both looked aside and stayed silent for a while. At that moment they went into different times: she was wearily looking at future, waiting for a thing that was less and less likely to come; she imagined a rainy day when she finally leaves. She wondered if she would have the strength to leave him for good. He was looking at the past with anguish, bonded by the bulk of time spent like a married man to a shadowy woman who was still and always his wife. He still did not desire strongly a way out. And he looked at his lover with fear from her future, because he knew that one day she would give up hope, fatigue would flood in and uproot all, and she would be gone. "But not today, God, not now; just a little bit longer. Time will bring a solution, I cannot," he thought.

She knew he loved her. One thing she could not understand, although the reader might guess well, was why he never left his wife and started a life with her.

The reader may also guess that time was the factor she did not have or could not understand. Time was the element that was binding and unbinding her lover's soul, and each ecstatic moment they shared provoked Time, poking it and disrupting it. So, in the end, his only life tool, Time, turned swiftly against their bond and brought it into cold land. Time bound it and completed it instead of them.

Time also tamed their pain, and they even feebly attempted to be friends for a short while after the separation. They both felt that they had learnt an important lesson, although they were unwilling to try and put it into words.

So, after this affair, which at a late point of their lives brought to an unexpected touch of one of the human dreams, even if they had missed knowing that - one wonders what dream was there for them to look forward to in the long years between now and passing.

Kabul, September 2004

Samuel Verner was a solitary man, and to say that is to describe him in vague words. He made a profession out of his solitude; a profession he did not earn his living by, nevertheless it pleased him to consider it that way.

"What a day!", he exclaimed, although another would discern nothing unusual in the landscape. Samuel was quick to catch the impalpable movement of grass, the few tiny shapes of animals and men in the distance moving on the sandy roads. He watched until he caught a sight of all that was moving, and then satiated, he exhaled deeply, and lowered himself on top of a flat block of rock.

He was sitting down quietly; time passed. It was not a glorious day to have special thoughts or need to make big decisions. His spirits were strangely not running high but went slowly down, like birds approaching the ground in circles. They landed on the icy-humid brown earth. He was still sitting motionless.

"My birthday. Time. Age. Change. How have I changed?", he observed slowly. "Where have all my passions gone? Am I happy? Is this all? Is this all the happiness I am capable of?" he asked himself. He could have spoken the words out loud, no one would have heard him nonetheless. In his mind the words echoed louder than the blackbirds' chirping. He had no answers to that, and he did not like the thought anyway.

The distant view did not seem to compel him anymore; he turned around and slowly took a view of the village he'd come from. A nearby insect could discern a twitch in his face: a mixture of disdain and surfeit, and a general repulsion to look at the village. Samuel observed his house in its awkward position amidst the settlement. It stood at the bottom of the hollow the village occupied, its door path leading straight to a well across the broken ground filled with overflowing underground water the well was positioned on. It was a wet patch of soil, and he had felt it many winters in the bones. He bought the house not on his own accord: it was simply the only available one in the neighborhood at the time when he needed to settle in somewhere. He did not mind its awkwardness after a while. The stripe of land where the village well stood officially belonged to him, but he never took a step to mark the land or put a fence around it. The villagers treaded their path every day to and fro through the mud. He did not mind it. They minded quietly the mud though.

The fences of the village caught his attention: they were brand new, the wood vigorously, youthfully red, shining as if just now taken out from the trees' hearts. The villagers had put the new fences by mutual agreement and shared labor; he himself took part in it, as he liked to think of himself as of a man with a good and generous nature. It was his house only that stood in the middle of the village, strangely alone in the central position, bordered by the mud of the well, and had its fences dark and unmended. Samuel resented walls in his heart and he despised a bit the villagers who took so much care of putting fences in-between them and the world. He did not like fences. The color of the new planks irritated him.

Where were his passions? He took time to remember if he had passions at all in life. He did. First, it was his passionate solitude; he sacrificed so much for it, declined such a plenty of the world to tend his solitary spirit. Nature was his passion as well. Then, why his heart was so cold now, and why he could not revive the spirit in his fingers, the old joys of touch, of sensing, the very feeling of being alive. He did not know. The only thing he did know was that he could not feel himself anymore as alive as he used to.

Samuel Verner was a hermit in spirit and by his own choice, and he never regretted that he did not join the church, although he considered it seriously in his youth. There was too much community and communion in the brotherhood of the monastic life. It seemed to him that the monks were faking solitude, exchanging one unchosen and unwilling community for another. He rejected discipline imposed by other persons. He disdained the possibility that a pledge would hold his life on a certain path, and not his day to day decisions, confirmed each time as of anew. This is how he tried to live, and he lived thus in all his honesty. It was, what he called, an interior monasticism.

Not that he declined the bounty of life, the wine, the pleasures of good cuisine, and the charms of women. He was in love once, with a fresh maiden named Madeleine. He used to take her for solitary walks in a more solitary landscape of the nearby dried marshes; he would hold her hand and talk to her about the sheen of nights away from human settlements, about ideas and images that can emerge only in speechless communion with the stars. Her eyes blazed and she listened silently. She believed in him, he felt it. At that time he believed that he could draw out, like the sculptor draws out elongated limbs from the granite, her being of solitude of the mold of the village. Still, her father rejected him quietly, and under his soft but continuous persuasion she gave him up to marry a young man from a neighboring village. The few times he saw her in the subsequent years, she was too imbibed into being a mother, that none of that solitary being he used to make love to shone through her silhouette anymore. And now, she was ashamed, not of him, but of her former passion and faith in him - he could see that in her eyes, in her quick embarrassment when they would meet. In his mind she was lost into her womb of community, but he found no fault in her choice. Someone had to give birth to beautiful children and to bring up the future of humanity. And she was a beautiful mother to do so.

There was another woman, a widow still in youthful spirits; he loved her deep laughter, and her sensual muscles. Samuel cherished her sunny company, and he spoke again of solitude as a guiding light. She was amused, aroused, impassioned, she lay close to him as no other women had, but after few months she started growing impatient, acquired a new habit of quickly dismissing all his musings, and one day she sent him away, with a childishly tired look in her eyes. He could understand why his first love put him aside, but not the second.

From both relationships Samuel emerged the same man as he entered them. There was no truthful question he could find to the answers he got.

There were times when he would ask himself if he could be loved at all and wholly. But these were merely few moments of weakness, which he ascribed to the relapse of a youth in passing. He was secured in his late middle age, predicting and fulfilling his project of solidifying solitariness. He felt comfortable and good in his skin now. The coming of the age was a confirmation of his past dreams.

Yet today he was sitting on a rock observing the village, and a strange thought passed his mind for the first time: "Was I wrong? Was I wrong all this time? Is there something basically misplaced in my thinking that I took a wrong turn on what seemed like so right path? Have I been wrong?" And the chill of old age passed through Samuel's heart for the first time, entered it and spread through his body. For he knew, if he had been wrong, there would be not enough time to mend the mistake and relive life again. There, looking at the edge of the village, he faced the limits of his own span.

He stood the first blow. Warmth slowly ascended into his heart as he took in the thought of a possible mistake. Yes, he could have been wrong. He was able to face such a thought, if truth it was. He spent all his spirit facing the consequences, so he stood up and walked back home to postpone thinking further, suddenly having decided to fix up the fences of his house. There was something wintry in the air that day. The last thought before falling asleep was a prayer to some gods that he might not had been mistaken.

The next day he woke up tired and bewildered, not remembering any image from his dreams, but feeling somewhat exasperated. He did not took to mending the fences. The turmoil continued for few days, and then he regained peaceful sleep. He was waking up more certain, but certain in what he could not tell. He felt that something was changing. He felt that something had been missing in his life, yet he could not put his finger on it.

Samuel was lying in bed one morning, moving in that zone between dream and wake, musing and sensing and reflecting like a floater in the sky. His heart broke when a thought came to him, that it may have been his cherished solitude that might have misled him. He thought he could see with a little more effort what was greater than solitude, he imagined that a huge black curtain slowly opened before his eyes and something shiny and brutal was coming to blast his sight, but prior to seeing what this was, his eyes blinked and his strength failed him. He laughed quietly, as tired runners laugh when they approach the end of the race, he reached out his hand in the air, and never finished the movement. He lay quietly in peace and sank in what seemed like an overwhelming dream coming from a place that was neither a past nor a future.

In his dream he sprang forth from the earth, driven by what seemed like a movement opposite of his earlier attempt to open the curtains; as if some inner gravity was taking him behind his eyeballs. He caught a glimpse of an infinitely cold cosmos around him, just prior to the sun filling his vision. Drawn to it by powerful force, he looked at his flying body: his whole existence was a fleck of light and it was rushing toward the sun. The sun was melting that speck of life and yet it still retained something like identity, although flat, although amazing and continuous like a gigantic unblinking eye. He looked around and managed to discern, or imagined to have done so, distant suns made of the same matter - assemblages of flecks of light similar and strange to him. His last thought was: "What a little sun I am." And he plunged into the infinite motion of the flame.

The villagers found him dead in his bed, with a twitch on his face that could have been extreme pain or delight. In the yard the well was running high with water and the mud was glassy the morning they took him away.

Febryary 2005, Copenhagen