The hairdresser and the Jew

As he cut my hair he talked about the recent incident with the Turkish boat and the Israelis - saying that the Turks in the boat had been provocative and that Hamas was just a bunch of terrorists - until the man sitting next to me intervened in defence of the Palestinians, and so all the time the hairdresser was cutting my hair, the comments went back and forth and I could hardly say a thing.

Even when his own haircut was over, the other customer chose to stay to continue to talk. He was a Jew, he said, but he did not support what Israel was doing. A lot of his family in Europe had been killed by the Nazis and still he believed that this did not give the Israelis the right to do the same themselves. The hairdresser then said that he had grown up with Jews and so he understood what the Israelis were feeling. They had warned that boat, he said. It was like a puppy dog being surrounded by dobermans, and: what would you do if your neighbours kept slapping you in the face?

This last question he directed to me through the mirror and, in the nature of the situation (since I was stuck in the chair), I had to look back.

Repetition

To illustrate her theory of repetition and disaster, she described the way her walk that morning had contained several features that were a precise repetition of the day before: how she had approached all three sets of lights at the exact same moment in their cycles that she had approached those lights on the previous day - how she had passed a woman near some trees whom she had passed near those same thin trees on the previous day - and how when meeting a person she hadn't seen for a while, this person had smiled and spoken with the same bright, cheerful intonations of sarcasm that this person had used many times on many previous occasions and so, during all of the other more immediate repetitions (which actually followed on from this meeting in the course of the walk), she was unable to enjoy the repetitions for what they were and could only brace herself, as she said, for worse to come.

Suicide isn't news

As she passed me in the park, talking into her mobile, I heard only this: but suicide isn't news.

Prose couplets

She showed me photos of her tiny, purpling, premature twins in their plastic beds.
Later, I saw a woman in high stiletto heels at the doors of a flat. She was holding a baby.

As I watched him run across the road, dodging the traffic, I couldn't help noticing that his artificial leg had affected neither his stride nor his confidence.
Less than two minutes later I was jay-walking myself.

As a friend on Facebook

At the reception a woman approached and said to my friend that she recognised her, that she had just added my friend as a friend on Facebook; my friend said she thought she recognised the other woman too, and so they began to chat.

You're beautiful

She told me that she'd grown used to the noise of her neighbours through the wall. One played Michael Jackson all the time. The other cabaret, and when he played James Brown's You're Beautiful over and over - end to end, as she said, all day and all night - she assumed he was feeling low.

Only three removes

Today I am only three removes from Kafka, having talked to someone who has talked to a concert pianist - a Holocaust survivor - who used to know him (and didn't think him nice).

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