About the Night

by Anat Talshir

The man whose eyes once missed nothing could no longer see through the fog.

She had thought that this was how she could spend her life with him, listening to nature, relaxed and full, everything perfect and at peace, nothing cracked, nothing shattered.

“Love?” she sputtered. “Even the mightiest fire becomes ashes. Those butterflies in the stomach crumble, and all that noise becomes a matter of settling scores: you said, you promised, you forgot, you disappeared, you disappointed. Who needs it? And who needs children who look at you like a burden? And who ever came up with this institution of housing a man and a woman in the same home, the same bedroom, for forty years? Look at you, Mano, as free and light as a down comforter. If you marry, you’ll be handcuffed.”

Back when he had been nourished by admiration, he shone, while in his marriage, stuffed to the brim with hostility and enmity, he turned ashen, like a man who imbibed poison with his food on a daily basis.

We are whole and perfect together, not in the sense of being blemish-free but like an old tree that has been there forever. People speak of happiness? Well, we got there and passed right through to the other side.”

To Monsieur Hubert, “they” were a single authoritative entity, lazy and corrupt. It included the state, its institutions, the party, the string pullers, the people with connections. “Monsieur Hubert,” the proprietress of a café who had come to have her hair done pointed out, “now you are a capitalist, but in your soul you remain an Austro-Hungarian anarchist.”

After all, hopes may be nurtured over long years, but it takes only a moment to make them disappear, leaving behind a vast emptiness.

If only she could leave the letter sealed; an unopened letter brought hope while an opened one could bring terrible grief.

“I am not at war,” he said, “so I cannot surrender.”

Who could revive the moments following a devastation? Suddenly, there was an enormous noise followed by silence and darkness, a plunge into the abyss.

He’s a boy in search of himself who winds up leading himself to nowhere.” “Why does he run away?” Munir asked. “He feels that no one really wants him,” Nomi said. “He runs away so that he won’t need anyone. When nobody wants you, you make yourself disappear. That way, you gain control, in a sense. It’s like he’s saying, ‘You want to get rid of me. Well, I’ll get rid of you first. I’ll show you.’”

sacrifice exacted its price systematically, slowly, over the years and, like a crime syndicate, never forgot its due. Such sacrifice led to bitterness, and the bitterness in turn led to physical and mental pains, to chronic fatigue, to a fading away of one’s spirit,

“One must always cast doubts,” George said. “Doubt armies, doubt megalomania; nothing is absolute. Nothing, that is, but the solar system and the stars and the fact that day follows night and night follows day.”

“The difficult can only be tended to with softness.”