Crowded Buses

Tel Aviv, Israel.

She had an accent, but it wasn't a strong one. To my American ears her melodic vowels might have been nothing more than a foreign variation of our mutual native tongue. Yet as she continued to talk I noticed that there were gaps in her English, as adjectives and nouns were transposed, and a few verbs hovered in the air to wait indefinitely for an actor and a recipient.

There were gaps in her memory as well; she asked me where I was from several times, each time seeming surprised that she was holding a handrail--however feebly--next to a genuine Yankee. Yet each time she seemed happy.

But the gaps were excusable. Details about my own identity didn't really factor into our conversation anyway, as she focused instead on shards of old stories and glimpses of old memories from a world that had flourished and died decades before my birth. This world, she said, was somewhere in Eastern Europe, though the precise location wasn't clear.

"It's been part of every empire at some point or another, and what it is now doesn't really matter. I wouldn't recognize the place; I know that. That world is gone." I was still curious to ask where it was specifically, but asking the question again didn't feel appropriate. To her its new nation-state label was entirely arbitrary; all that mattered was that it had been her home several decades ago. And now that that home was gone, it was as though the place didn't really exist at all.

After she disclosed her vague origins, she paused for nearly an entire minute, as though she were recycling thousands of memories beyond her thick, impenetrable sunglasses. Though the wrinkles on her face where still, her body tightened as did her grip upon the rail. The skin around her knuckles grew whiter than the rest of her skin, which was already a pale, pasty color.

"Then we came to Yaffo after the war." She said this as though it were the conclusion of a long story she had just finished telling me. Then she added abruptly, "This is your stop." She shook my hand as I passed to the door.