He had invited me to join him. He assumed because he wanted to go that I would too.
He was my mother’s brother and he had married my father’s sister.
He came from a matriarchy. (The hero of his family was his mother.) My father came from a patriarchy. (The hero of his family was his father.)
He had two daughters with a son in-between. I was an only son between two daughters.
Both of us had been exiles from our birthplace. (His in the northern hemisphere, mine in the southern.)
I belonged to a group that had oppressed others (though I had resisted it, ) and he to a group that had been oppressed (though he had escaped it.)
His gaze was backwards (towards his past mother) and mine was forwards (towards my lost mother.) Get the drift? Two faces on opposite sides of a temple door.
And he was old while I was young. (Relatively.)
Predictably the walls of his apartment were covered with photographs of his mother. A strangely masculine figure, she stared through thick-lensed glasses across the Russian steppes. He was in the bedroom so I paged through his writing. Stereotypical people. Crude humour. What, I hoped, did this say about mine? Night voices drifted from his bedroom: Go, what do I care? Run away again, leave me here while you chase after young women, you impotent bastard!
I dropped him off at the airport. (The one who was in mother went to search for her, and the one who was searching for her stayed put.) As I drove through that disputed city which the Jews call Jerusalem and the Arabs call Al Quds, I thought about all the people who are shut away from their birthplace unable to return, and all those who are trapped in their birthplace unable to leave. There seemed only one sensible thing to do.
I packed my bags and went home.
(And the door stayed open.)
No comments:
Post a Comment