Once, on the way there, I passed someone—it was impossible to tell if it was a man or woman—with a gas mask on. Maybe it was a joke, or maybe the person didn’t trust the mayor, or maybe he or she had simply gotten used to wearing it, had grown to like it in fact, and was reluctant to part with it now and go back to walking around with a naked face, exposed to everything.

Amour

Amour

I knew her when we were young, and then we lost touch for decades until I saw her again in one of the refugee camps. There are faces that suffering changes beyond all recognition. But there are those who possess something, a defining feature maybe, that can’t be altered or deformed, not by time, or displacement, or any variety of pain. Sophie’s eyes were a deep gray that at times, in certain weather, turned almost violet. When I first saw her thin figure in the line that snaked along the chain-link fence, a blue blanket draped over her shoulders, I couldn’t recall her name or even to which of the disjointed epochs of my life she belonged, but I recognized those eyes. Then I heard her voice and I remembered, and for the little while that our paths remained crossed, what I couldn’t remember or never knew, she told me.

Back then Sophie hadn’t been alone, and despite all the intervening years, with their myriad collapses and disintegrations, I still half expected to see Ezra fly out from the jumble of alleys, bundled in some wretched coat hanging below his knees, wild-bearded, rabbinical and rabid, clutching some loaf or can he’d bartered, or talked his way into, or otherwise Ezra-like negotiated. I’d always liked Sophie, and envied him for having her. And I envied how inevitable their coupling seemed, what a solid fit they made while the rest of us kept coming together and apart, hooking up, falling in love, and then discovering we were only half-baked.