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(In Hebrew, the word "Agala" means both cart and the feminine form of calf. A beheaded calf is among the sacrificial offerings enumerated in the Bible).

My grandfather, cradling an infant's crib, departed. Navigating left and right, far along the pavement, he reached a concrete, round, post. There he rested, sheltered from the humid sun by peeling posters for lachrymose Turkish films. He pushed the crib outside the penumbral circle and waited.

Curious folks besieged the old man and his orphaned frame and then proceeded to buy from him the salted seeds and sweets that he lay, meticulously organised, inside the crib. My grandfather smiled at them through sea-blue eyes, as he wrapped the purchased sweetmeats in rustling brown paper bags.

My embarrassed uncles built for him a creaking wooden cart from remaindered construction materials. They painted it green and mounted it on large, thin-tyred, wheels borrowed from an ancient pram. They attached to it a partitioned table-top confiscated from the greengrocer down the lane. Every morning, forehead wrinkled, my grandfather would fill the wooden compartments with various snacks and trinkets, at pains to separate them neatly. Black sunflower seeds, white pumpkin seeds, the salted and the sweet, tiny plastic toys bursting with candies, whistles, and rattles.

Still, he never gave up his crib, installing it on top of his squeaking vehicle, and filling it to its tattered brim with a rainbow of offerings. At night, he stowed it under the cart, locking it behind its two crumbling doors, among the unsold merchandise.

With sunrise, my grandfather would exit the house and head towards the miniature plot of garden adjoining it. He would cross the patch, stepping carefully on a pebbled path in its midst. Then, sighing but never stooping, he would drive his green trolley – a tall and stout and handsome man, fair-skinned and sapphire-eyed. "A movie star" – they gasped behind his back. Day in and day out, he impelled his rickety pushcart to its concrete post, there dispensing to the children with a smile, a permanence till dusk. With sunset, he gathered his few goods, bolted the fledgling flaps, and pushed back home, a few steps away.

When he grew old, he added to his burden a stool with an attached umbrella, to shield him from the elements, and a greenish nylon sheet to protect his wares. He became a fixture in this town of my birth. His lime cart turned into a meeting spot – "by Pardo", they would say, secure in the knowledge that he would always be there, erect and gracious. Like two forces of nature, my grandpa and the concrete post – older than the fading movie posters – watched the town transformed, roads asphalted, children turn adults, bringing their off-spring to buy from him a stick of bitter black chewing gum.

Lone by his cart, he bid the dead farewell and greeted the newborn, himself aging and bending. Creases sprouted in his face, around his dimming sights, and in his white and delicate hands.

My grandfather had one love: my grandmother. A ravishing, proud, raven-haired woman. A framed retouched photo of her hung, imposing, on one of the walls. In it she stood, defiant, leaning on a carved pillar in a faraway place. This is how he must have seen her at first: a mysterious, sad-eyed disparity between dark and fair. Thus he fell in love and made her his only world.

This woman sat by his side, adjacent to his azure pushcart, day in and day out. She said nothing and he remained mute. They just stared with vacuous eyes, perhaps away, perhaps inside, perhaps back, to previous abodes in bustling cities.

At first, she seemed to like being his sidekick, confidently doling confectionery to toddlers, whose mothers remained forever infants in her memory. Intermittently, she laid a shrivelled hand on his venous knee, leaving it there for a split, fluttering, second, conveying warmth and withdrawing as unobtrusively. It was enough to restore him to his full stature. But then, the municipal workers came and pasted funereal announcements onto his concrete pole and the magic was all but gone.

My grandma withered, dilapidated by this onerous existence. Eveningtime, she would get up and carry her stool afore, clenched in two twiggy hands, tediously dragging her reluctant self on the long march home. My grandfather observed her, his eyes a moist, eroding guilt. His disintegrating pushcart, the rain-drenched figure of his loved one, the whizzing torment of the desert winds, the sound of the crackling paper bags in her arthritic palms – they all conspired to deny him his erstwhile memory of her.

Each morning, my grandfather woke up to study this ageless image as he glided over her translucent skin, high-arching cheeks, and sleep-fluttery eyelashes. He fended off the intrusions of the world as he smoothed the covers and tucked her figure in. Then, he would get up and make her breakfast, arranging ceremoniously her medicines in multicoloured plastic containers on the tray.

But my grandma rejected his sunup pleas. She wouldn't go on living. One silent morning, she clung to her sheets and wouldn't rise and accompany him. That day, grey and defeated, my grandpa ploughed the pavement with his barrow, unfolded a worn deck chair, and sank in, awaiting my grandmother's reappearance.

When she did not materialise, he left his post much earlier than usual. He emptied the compartments duteously, packed the unsold goods in large canvas sacks, tidying them away behind the two bottom doors of his cart. He then unfurled a polyester sheet above it and sailed home, shoving and cajoling his screeching and scraping workstation.

My grandma was in bed, as he had left her, ensconced in blankets, a suicidal tortoise, glaring at the ceiling as it bled in aqueous abstracts. My grandfather parked his rusting, faded, wagon and climbed home. His wife awoke with startled whimpers, tears streaming silently down her creviced face, tearing his heart with the iron grip of festering love. He hugged her and showered her with panicky little kisses.

She froze and fortified her berth with pillows piled high, staring at him through narrow cracks of oozing sanity.

One day, my grandpa, returning in the evening, left his cart outside, uncharacteristically. He entered and, for a few minutes, he and my grandmother just watched each other wearily. He extended a calloused hand and she dreamily stood up and escorted him to their porch, which overlooked the weed-grown garden.

My grandfather draped her shoulders with a knitted woollen shawl. He tightened it, and then, her shivering hand in his, he sat his love among some cushions he prepared. She glanced aimlessly at a guava tree that shot among the trail of gravelled stones. My grandfather contemplated her awhile and then, with sudden resoluteness, left.

Seconds later he reappeared among the shrubs, saluted her with a sledgehammer he held tenuously with both hands. She strained her face, attentive, consuming his image, like a flower would the sun, or the blind do the sounds.

Gasping and panting, my grandpa heaved the pushcart to the centre of the plot. With repeated, furious, blows, he dislocated its wheels and doors. Reduced to splintered wood and twisted metal, he cocooned it in the nylon throw and left it, devastated by the trees.

Sitting beside, they watched the setting sun diffracted from the green-hued sculpture in the garden. A smile budded in my grandma's honeyed eyes and spread into my grandfather's deep blue gaze.

The cart stood there for years, disintegrating inexorably beneath its blackening shield. Its wheels, now rooted in the soil, it sank into the mildewed ground, another, peculiarly shaped sapling. My grandpa never adjusted the synthetic sheet that swathed it, nor did he dig out the burgeoning wheels.

My grandpa was visiting a pharmacy, replenishing her medications, when my grandma died. With the dignity of the indigent, he never bargained, never raised his voice. Packed in small, white, paper bags, he rushed the doses to his wife, limping and winded.

This time the house was shuttered doors and windows. My grandma wouldn't respond to his increasingly desperate entreaties. He flung himself against the entrance and found her sprawled on the floor, her bloodied mouth ajar. As she fell, she must have hit her head against the corner of a table. She was baking my grandfather his favourite pastries.

Her eyes were shut. My grandpa knew she died. He placed her remedies on the floured and oiled table and changed into his best attire. Kneeling beside her, he gently wiped clean my grandma's hands and mouth and head and clothed her in her outdoors coat.

His business done, he lay besides her and, hugging her frail remains, he shut his eyes.

My uncles and aunts found them, lying like that, embraced.

My grandparents' tiny home was government property and was reclaimed. The sanitary engineers, revolted, removed from the garden the worm-infested, rotting relic and the putrid sheet concealing it.

The next day, it was hauled by sturdy garbage collectors into a truck and, with assorted other junk, incinerated.

Return

Language of Black and Red

by Sam Vaknin

Eli and I sit on ladder-backs next to a luxurious roulette in a casino in Spain. I can almost pick glitters from the heavy, lowered chandeliers. I can practically touch the shiny wooden wheel. I can see the croupier's manicured nails. Lithe young bellhops, clad in ornamental uniforms, place trays on gypsum pillars next to our chairs. We fervently gulp the champagne from the tall, prismatic glasses and nibble at the tiny sandwiches.

We are that lucky that we dare not leave the table, not even to relieve ourselves.

Piles of shiny square chips represent our exceptional streak of winnings. The table supervisor looks very anxious. He shifts restlessly on his elevated seat, hawk-eyeing everyone malevolently. Sure enough, he doesn't like us. He clears all other players, letting us bet in splendid isolation, facing each other.

Eli's upper lip and temples glisten. My armpits ooze the acrid smell of manly perspiration. Easy to tell we are tense or apprehensive or both. We evade each other's gaze. Our hands are shaking and the boys keep pumping us with increasingly inebriating drinks. They want us under the influence. They want us to cough up everything we have and then some. We want to win. We want the casino broke. Our differences are profoundly irreconcilable.

Eli is a quarter of a tough century my senior. His life-swept face is haggard, straggly and raven eyebrows, lips cruel and eyes chillingly penetrating. He finds his sense of humour irresistible. It often is.

My baby face is framed by the plastic quadrangles of my glasses. I broadcast innocence and guile. The reactions I provoke are mixed. Some sense my vulnerability and hasten to protect me. Others find my haughty slyness loathsome. I guess I conjure my defencelessness to con my victims.

It may prove unhealthy to lose our sponsors' money. These people are charm itself and sheer delight – until you breach their pockets. They tend to lose their fabled equanimity. They regard business losses as hostile acts and the perpetrators as lethal enemies. So, they strike first, giving you no chance to err, to apologise, to scrutinise.

We are piling on not be piled in. The dough is multiplying. What if we lose? Eli says he has this thing going for him tonight, a wild card, from nature, and he does not dream to stop even though we reek of the casino's funds, even though two Spanish beauties resolutely scramble over him and heavies in bursting suits forage around obtrusively.

Eli's protruding eyes fixated on the wheel, mesmerically attempting to bring it to a favoured halt.

It smoothly winds down and Eli ignores my furious pestering: our underwriters invested to test and implement a betting method I developed. "I am offended" – I whisper, he ignores me. A febrile Eli has bonded with the table and every number wins, especially his choices.

"Twenty eight!" – he hisses, sidestepping the croupier to fetch his gains. He sprawls on the green felt surface and lovingly enfolds the clacking tokens. Reclining, eyes shut agloat, he savours his unaccustomed fortune. For he deserves a break. To Eli, this is not a game or, as I regard it, merely another path to self-enrichment.

To him, it is a sweet revenge for all the years he wasted, vending decaying fruits, along dusty and sizzling highways. This loot proves his detractors wrong. It loudly states, in black and red: I am here, not to be snubbed.

"Let's play some baccarat" – he sneers – "I am tired of this game."

We stretch our limbs and Eli surveys the killing fields we leave behind. He tremulously stacks the chips on one another, by size and then by colour. We carry them with trepidation all the way to the cashier and convert them to pesetas. Eli halves the tottering mound. He entreats me to deposit one of the two resulting heaps in the strongbox in our room.

He pleadingly commands me:

"No matter how much I beg and threaten, order or cajole – do not be tempted to obey me. Do not bring down this money."

I eagerly acquiesce.

"And now" – he rubs his hands – "Let's fry this fish in its own fat. Let's use some of the profits to dine in the casino's restaurant. Do you know that eateries in gambling dens are the best in the world?"

I don't. It is my first trip away from Israel. But he is right, the food is mouth-watering. A gypsy band of violins plays in the background.

Now, cleaned out gamblers alight by our burdened table and pat Eli's upright back. They greet him eagerly, as though, through him, they humble the much unloved establishment. They questioningly glance at me, a cold appraising look. They recount how they turned pros and swap the numbers of their rooms in the hotel above the gaming halls.

They sound content but look harassed and wiry. Involuntary ticks ravage their hands and faces. They all sport golden rings, red necks enchained with chokers. Their eyes dart restively. They sound as though they are listening and nod their heads in places, right and wrong – but they are distant. Minute or two of pleasantries and off they go to haunt another patron.

The dinner over, Eli fires up a black cigar and sighs. He casts an ominous stare at me for daring to suggest we call it a day.

"Don't be a jinx!" – he rasps – "You don't retire on a night like this with Lady Luck herself in partnership. These are the kind of early hours that casinos fear, I tell you" – and he goes on to rattle off the names of acquaintances turned millionaires. The next day they reverted, he ruefully admits. "Too greedy" – is his verdict – "Didn't know when to stand up."

Now that we've won, can we try out my method?

He snorts.

"It puts me to sleep, your martingale" – he grunts – "Its slowness drives me to distraction. I came here to enjoy myself, not just to profit. If you insist, here is some cash. Go, play your darned system. Just do me a favour, stray to another table."

Eli, returning to our first roulette, is greeted with regal pomp. I wander to a further board with lower minimum wagers. I squash my way into a raucous mob. They screech and squeal with every spin. I place some of my meager funds on red. Despite the tiny sum and nearly equal chances – I waver nauseous and scared. Until the ball reposes and the croupier announces black. Twenty eight.

I lost.

Another dose on red, just slightly larger. Another anxious wait while the croupier employs a silver rake to place the bets. I sneak a peek at Eli's table. It's hard to tell his state. His body tilts in zealous inclination, his shaded eyes impale the imperturbable dealer, his twitchy hands engulf the cards doled out from the "shoe". It's "21" or Blackjack, a pretty basic card game.

On certain rounds, Eli presents his palm, two of its fingers pointing at the "shoe". The dealer acknowledges him discreetly and draws the cards. He lays them gingerly in front of Eli who, exultant, gathers his winnings and tips the grateful worker. I can relax.

My tiny gains accumulate. The hours pass, the tables empty, it's only I and the croupier. My capital is nearly doubled. Eli, his countenance spent, keeps gambling. His bobbing head recoils as he awakes from interrupted slumber. It's just the two of us against the weary staff.

As autumn night is pierced by moonlight, the practiced smiles are lifted, wiped is the feigned civility of all involved. Players and house alike frantically observe each card, each turn of the wheel, the rested ball, the flickering digits of the stressed croupier. We shut our bloodshot eyes between one twirl and another, in intervals when cards aren't dealt and profits aren't paid.

Fatigue-glued to my chair I find it hard to stoop and place the wagers on the fluctuating squares of the roulette board. Eli wobbles towards me, his loosened tie dangling on his much-stained shirt. He undoes the upper buttons and slumps onto a lounger.

The presence of his silence compels me to skip the coming spin. I half turn towards him, rubbing my eyes with sticky hand. We stare at the tarnished carpet until he mutters:

"I am left with nothing."

And then:

"Go get the money from the safe."

But then he had instructed me to ignore such orders. Using my method, I have doubled our funds and more while Eli lost all our money overnight. I feel wrath-struck. I want to grab him by his tainted collar and shake him till it hurts. Instead, I rise, my legs a wobbly and oedematous mass. I stumble hesitantly until the pains subside and I can properly walk, toes hard on heels, to the elevator bank.

When I am back, Eli is slouched, position same, and snores. I could refrain from rousing him, say that I fell asleep in our room, that I lost the key to the safety deposit box, that I stirred him up but he wouldn't budge, I could come up with anything I damn well please, now that he is sound asleep – he will thank me for it, he will want to believe me. It is our last chance.

I regard the rustling plastic bag. I feel the greenish notes inside. Then I jiggle Eli's shoulder. He comes to in panic, surveying the alien landscape. Then, mechanically, he snatches our neatly packed reserve and falters towards his table.

I bide the time to his return, eyes glazed, lips forced into a tortuous smile.

"It's over" – he mumbles – "let's get out of here."

I collect my winnings from the board and proudly display them. He snickers:

"Less than my losses in every minute of this cursed evening."

But that is all we have. We pack our meager belongings and sneak through the back door to the taxi at the head of a nocturnal queue. Eli sprawls across the upholstered back seat for a quick shut-eye. I give the driver the name of our hotel at the heart of Madrid and he embarks on the twisting byways of the mountain slope.

Midway, Eli stops the cab and throws up through the semi lowered pane. The irate cabby refuses to proceed. He points to an antiquated manual meter and demands his fee. I pay him and with emphatic whoosh he vanishes behind a gloomy curve.

Eli and I, left crouching on a foreign hillside, far from any settlement, the night a velvet murk. Eli ascends the road, takes me in tow, two Chaplinesque figures in bargain-basement suits and fluttering cravats. The hours pass and we are no closer to our destination. A rising sun daubs us with pink and wine.

Eli turns to me and vows:

"From now on we play only with your system, Shmuel, I swear to you, only your martingale."

I don't respond. I distrust Eli's ability to keep his promises. This pledge came unsolicited and useless.

Eli drags his feet laboriously, wipes tears from reddened eyes and moans:

"Only your way, I guarantee, never again just gambling wildly. We wager on your brain and win, we win a lot, I'm talking millions. We won't know what to do with it, I'm telling you. After all, how many steaks can one consume? With mushrooming gains, we will occupy the best hotels and bang the greatest stunners, and wear the chicest clothes…"

There is such yearning in his voice. I embrace him warmly and I say:

"Sure thing, Eli, it's bound to happen. You and I, and screw the world. What you have just described is only the beginning. Just stick to my gambling system and it will turn out fine. Casinos everywhere will fear us like the plague…"

"The plague" – Eli reiterates and we stand, cuddled, two silhouettes carved against the inexorably rising day.

Return

On the Bus to Town

by Sam Vaknin

Read the Hebrew original.

I must catch the city-bound bus. I have to change at the Central Station and travel a short distance, just a few more minutes, to jail. The prison walls, to the left, will shimmer muddy yellow, barbwire fence enclosing empty watchtowers, the drizzle-induced swamp a collage of virile footsteps. I am afraid to cross its ambiguous solidity, the shallow-looking depths. After that I have to purge my tattered sneakers with branches and stones wrenched out of the mucky soil around our barracks.

But there is still way to go.

I mount the bus and sit near a dishevelled, unshaven man. His abraded pair of horn-rimmed glasses is adjoined to his prominent nose with a brown adhesive. He reeks of stale sweat and keeps pondering the clouded surface of his crumbling watch. His pinkie sports a rectangular, engraved ring of golden imitation.

The bus exudes the steamy vapours of a mobile rain forest. People cram into the passages, dragging nylon-roped shopping bags, shrieking children, and their own perspiring carcasses, their armpits and groins stark dark discolorations.

All spots are taken. Their occupants press claret noses onto the grimy windows and rhythmically wipe the condensation. They explicitly ignore the crowd and the censuring, expectant stares of older passengers. As the interminable road unwinds, they restlessly realign their bodies, attuned to seats and neighbours.

Our driver deftly skirts the terminal's piers and ramps. Between two rows of houses shrouded in grimy washing, he hastens towards the freeway. He turns the radio volume up and speakers inundate us with tunes from the Levant. Some travellers squirm but no one asks to turn it down. It is the hourly news edition soon. Thoughts wander, gaze introspectively inverted, necks stretch to glimpse the passing views.

The broadcast screeches to a sickening but familiar halt. Faint cries, the Doppler wail of sirens, air surgically hacked by chopper rotor blades, the voices of authorities grating with shock and panic. The disembodied speech of spluttering witnesses. On site reporters at a loss for words record mere moans and keens. An orgy of smoking flesh.

The breaking news has cast us all in moulds of frozen dread and grief. Here burly finger poking nose, there basket petrified in midair haul, my neighbour absentmindedly rotates his hefty ring.

The announcer warns of imminent terrorist attacks on public transport. It recommends to err on the side of caution and to exhaustively inspect fellow commuters. Trust no one – exhorts a representative of the law – be on alert, examine suspect objects, call on your driver if in doubt. Pay heed to dubious characters and odd behaviours.

Our bus is trapped in a honking row of cars, under a seething sun. The baking asphalt mirrors. I am anxious not to be delayed. The wardens warned us: "Never be late. Make no excuses. Even if God himself comes down – be back on time." Latecomers lose all privileges and are removed to maximum security in Beersheba.

I debate the fine points with myself: is mass slaughter ample reason for being tardy or merely an excuse? No force is more majeure that prison guards. I smile at that and the tension plexus slackens.

A febrile thought:

Jailers are ultra right-wing and rabid nationalists. Terrorism must never be allowed to interfere with the mundane, they say. And I rehearse in hopeful genuflection: "You mustn't send a Jewish prisoner to an Arab-infested prison. After all, I was held up by Arab assassins who slaughtered Jews!"

The legalistic side (they are big on it in penal institutions):

How can I prove my whereabouts (on this bus) throughout the carnage? Think alibi. The inmate always shows that he has complied, the warden equally assumes he is being conned, but even he must prove it. A stalking game with predators and prey, but ever shifting roles.

I rise, prying my neighbour loose from contemplation. He eyes me, wicked. I pass a soiled boot above his clustered knees and place it gingerly between two bursting bags. Moustachioed women wipe milky exudation from upper lips with blotted synthetic handkerchiefs. They address me in a foreign, gravelling, language. They use elephantine, venous, legs to push aside their luggage – a gesture of goodwill more than a decongesting measure.

I feel the clammy, throbbing breathing of another on my trousers. Thrusting my other leg, I straddle the passage, two Herculean pillars, a sea of Mediterranean groceries between my calves. Toe by heel, I get nearer to the stuporous driver, a human ripple in my wake.

"I am a prisoner" – I inform his beefy neck.

His muscles tense but he does not respond or turn to scrutinise me.

"I am an inmate" – I repeat – "Can you please confirm by writing in this diary (I point at a grey notepad I am holding) that I was on your bus at this hour? I have no pen" – I add.

He casts a sideways glance at me, monitoring the hopeless traffic jam from the corner of a bloodshot eye.

(Emphatically):

"So, you are a prisoner? What could you have you done?" (you chalky, myopic, intellectual).

Right behind him, a woman past her prime, face coated, breasts nestled in a pointed bra. The driver cannot keep his eyes off them. She, on her part, seems to be fixated on his tensile musculature. They both start at the sound of my voice:

"Banks."

"Banks!" – the driver mirthfully slaps his bulging thighs and the woman chuckles throatily, lips peeled to reveal pink-tainted teeth. "Come over here, I'll sign it."

In one untrammelled motion, he removes a hirsute hand from the oversized steering wheel, takes hold of my jotter, and opens it. Off goes his second hand. He scribbles laboriously, tongue perched on fleshy lips, ending with a flourishing signature.

People are murmuring throughout the bus. My answer is equivocal. It could imply armed robbery – or fraud – or counterfeit. I may be violent. The innocent looking are the really dangerous. I may even be an Arab, impossible to tell them apart nowadays.

A web of mutters spins from crimson lips to hairy ears, from crumb-strewn mouths to avid auricles. I return to my seat, retracing my erstwhile progress, facing the hydra. With the pad in my back pocket, I am calmer. Que serra, serra.

At the edge of my awareness a shrill, self-righteous female voice:

"Get out now, or I am calling the police."

I open my eyes, trying to pinpoint the mayhem. Somewhat behind me, the altercation draws closer, a portly woman pushing aside strap-holding passengers. She is preceded by a far younger female scrambling, expression hunted, to flee the bully.

She passes me by, her coarse contours defaced by agony, wheezing through luscious lips, one hand supporting heavy bust, the other clutching a sheaf of papers densely written in calligraphic Arabic.

"Driver" – the mob exclaims – "There is an Arab on board!"

"Go down! I am not sharing a bus with a terrorist!" – a woman screams and then another: "Maybe she is dangerous? Did you frisk her when she boarded?"

The driver negotiates the dense circulation, manoeuvring among a fleet of barely visible compacts. The noise distracts him. Without braking, he turns around and enquires: "What is it? What's the matter?"

"There's an Arab woman here" – one volunteers to edify him – "She is aboard the bus and may have explosives strapped around her waist." "Get her off this vehicle, she may be lethal!" – another advises.

"I am not forcing anybody down who has paid the ticket!" – snaps the driver and reverts to the hazy windshield.

A stunned silence. They thought the driver was one of them, he doesn't appear to be a peacenik. Someone latches on to the frontal paned partition and expostulates. "It's not reasonable, your decision. Today, you never know. Even their women are into killing, I saw it with my own eyes in Lebanon. They explode themselves like nothing, not a problem…"

The woman who spotted the ostensible terrorist now badgers the driver:

"Give me your details. I am going to have a chat with your supervisors. You can forget about this cosy job of yours!"

The Arab stands mute, vigilantly monitoring the commotion. A passenger tilts and hisses in her ear: "Child murderer." She recoils from the gathering nightmare and bellows, addressing the jam-packed bus:

"I am a nurse. I tend to the sick and frail all day long, both ours and yours. Every day there's a flood of casualties. Our injured. Our corpses. Your injured. Your corpses. Children, women, shreds, all full of blood…" – She pauses – "Why do you treat me this way?"

Her Hebrew is rocky but sufficient to provoke a heated debate with supporters and detractors.

"What do you want with this woman? She is just an innocent commuter! Look at yourselves! You should be ashamed!"

Others are genuinely scared. I can see it on their faces, the white-knuckled way they cling to the metal railings opposite their seats, the evasive looks, the stooping shoulders, eyes buried in the filthy flooring.

She may well be a terrorist, who knows?

It is too late to smother this burgeoning conflagration. My neighbour exchanges heavy-accented verbal blows with someone behind us. Women accuse each other of hypocrisy and barbarism.

The driver, pretending to ignore us, head slanted, listens in and steals appreciative glances at his voluptuous fawner. To garner his further admiration, she plunges into the dispute, a brimstone diva with words of fire.

Some passengers begin to push the Arab and shove her with innocuous gestures of their sweaty palms. They endeavour to avoid her startled gaze. She tries again:

"What kind of people are you? I am a medical nurse, I am telling you. So what if I am Arab, is it automatic proof that I am a terrorist?"

My neighbour suddenly addresses me:

"You've got nothing to say?"

"To my mind, if she were a terrorist, she would have blown us all to kingdom come by now."

I let the impact of this sane reminder settle.

"This bus is bursting. The driver skipped a few stations on the way" – I remind them – "She is smack amidst us. She has no bags. She could have detonated herself and demolished us by now."

My neighbour slaps his thighs with furry hands, a sign of pleasure. I am on his side. Some voices crow, encouraging me to proceed: "Let him continue, go on."

But I have got nothing more to add and I grow silent.

The Arab scrutinises me doubtfully, not sure if she understood correctly. Do I suspect her of being a terrorist or don't I?

"And who might you be to tell us off, if I may?" – scoffs the woman who started it all. Her voice is screaming hoarse, her face aflame with stripes of lipstick smeared and make up oozing. Three golden bracelets clang the rhythm of her scornful question.

"He is a prisoner" – announces the driver's would-be floozy. She eyes both me and her desired conquest triumphantly. The driver studies her in his overhead mirror, then gives a haunted look. Control is lost. He knows it.

"An inmate" – shrieks the agitator for all the bus to hear – "The perfect couple! A felon and an Arab! Perhaps you are an Arab too?"

"I am not an Arab" – I respond calmly – "They are too well mannered for the likes of me and you."

She blows up:

"Son of a bitch, maniac, look who's talking!" – She leans towards me and scratches my face with broken, patchily varnished nails – "A prisoner piece of shit and whoring stench of an Arab stink up this bus!"

My neighbour half rises from our common seat, grabs her extended arm and affixes it firmly behind her back. She screams to her dumbfounded audience: "They are together in it, this entire group, and they are a menace. Driver, stop this instant, I want the police, now!"

I do not react. It was foolish of me to have partaken in this tiff in the first place. Prisoners involved in incidents of public unrest end up spending a week or more in the nearest squalid detention centre, away from the relative safety of the penitentiary. Anything can happen in these infernos of perspiring, drug-addicted flesh, those killing fields of haemorrhaging syringes, those purgatories of squeals and whimpers and shaking of the bars, draped tight in sooty air.

I spent a month in these conditions and was about to return, I feel convinced.

The driver brakes the bus, rises, and gestures to the Arab helplessly. She tries to extricate herself by moving towards his cubicle. Some women mesh their hands, trapping her flapping arms, flailing about, her cheeks lattices of translucent rivulets. Her fear is audible in shallow exhalations.

But her captors persevere. They clench her scarf and the trimmings of her coat and twist them around the Arab's breathless neck.

The driver disembarks through the pneumatically susurrating doors. He walks the gravel path adjacent to the highway, desperately trying to wave down a passing car. Someone finally stops and they have a hushed exchange through a barricaded window. The hatchback cruises away.

The driver hesitates, his eyes glued to the receding vehicle. He contemplates the hostile bus with dread and climbs aboard. He sinks into his seat and sighs.

A patrol car arrives a few minutes later and disgorges two policemen. One elderly, stout and stilted, his face a venous spasm. He keeps feeling the worn butt of his undersized revolver. The other cop does the talking. He is lithe, a youth in camouflage, penumbral moustache, anorectic, sinewy hands, his eyes an adulterated cyan. He swells his chest and draws back his bony shoulders, attempting to conceal his meagreness.

"What's going on here?" – his voice a shocking bass. We are silenced by the contrast.

The instigator of the turmoil clears a path and fingers his oversized tunic as she volunteers:

"She is a terrorist and he is a convict and they were both planning to blow this bus up."

"Twaddle!" – roars my neighbour – "She is a hysterical, psychotic, panicky woman! Look what she did to his face!" – he points at me – "And that one, over there" – he singles the Arab out with a nail-bitten pinkie – "her only sin is that she is an Arab, a nurse or something, a fellow traveller, paid her ticket like all of us." The driver nods his assent.

"I am telling you…" – the stirrer yelps but the officer is terse:

"Continue behaving like this, lady, and it is you I will arrest for disturbing the peace…"

"Another mock cop" – she slurs, but her voice is hushed and hesitant.

"Perhaps even insulting a police officer on duty?" – the policeman hints and she is pacified, retreating, crablike, eyes downcast, towards her shopping.

"Who is the prisoner?" – the veteran cop enquires, his paw atop his gun, caressing it incessantly. I raise my hand.

"You are coming with us. The rest continue to your destinations. You too!" – he addresses the Arab, his civility offensively overstated.

"I want no problems here!" – he warns – "It's Friday, the Sabbath is upon us. Go home in peace. The police has more important things to do than to resolve your petty squabbles!"

Extracted from my window seat, their fingers vicelike under both armpits, they half drag me across my neighbour's knees, strewing all over him the contents of the plastic bag in which I keep my wallet and the weekend papers. It hurts.

We alight and the young one taps the folding exit doors. The bus drones its way into the snaring traffic jam. I watch its back as it recedes. The coppers place a pair of shiny handcuffs on my wrists and shackle my ankles too. I stumble towards the waiting squad car. They unlock the rear and gesture me to enter. They push me from behind and bolt the door. The gory rays of a setting sun dissect the murk inside.

I see the officers' backs and necks as they occupy the front seats beyond the meshed partition. One of them half turns and spits a snarl:

"My partner loves you, Arabs."

Only then, my eyes having adjusted, I notice the others in the stifling cabin I inhabit. They rattle their manacles and smile at me wolfishly, a toothy apparition.

"Where are you from, handsome?" – one asks and moves to flank me. His mitt is motionless on my knee.

He has an Arab accent.

Return

The Butterflies are Laughing

by Sam Vaknin

My parents' home, it is dusk time, and I am climbing to the attic. I settle on my childhood's sofa, whose unravelled corners reveal its faded and lumpy stuffing. The wooden armrests are dark and bear the scratchy marks of little hands. I contemplate these blemishes, set bright against the deep, brown planks, and am reminded of my past. A light ray meanders diagonally across the carpet. The air is Flemish. The fitting light, the shades, the atmosphere.

There is a watercolour on an easel of a thickset forest with towering and murky trees. A carriage frozen in a clearing, a burly driver, looking towards nowhere, as though there's nothing left to see. No light, no shadows, just a black-singed mass of foliage and an incandescent, sallow horse.

My little brother lies bleeding on the rug. Two gory rivulets, two injured wrists, delineate a perfect circle. They cross his ashen palms and waxen, twitching fingers. It may be a call for help but I have been hard of hearing.

I crouch beside him and inspect the wounds. They are shallow but profuse. Red pain has broken past his skin, his face is wrinkled. I wipe him gently, trying not to hurt.

He stares at me, eyes of a gammy colt awaiting the delivering shot. He radiates the kind of gloom that spans the room and makes me giddy. I cower to my heels, then squat beside him, caressing his silent scream. My palms are warm.

We while the time. His frothy exhalations, my measured air inhaled, our lungs entwined in the proliferating density. The volumes of my childhood mob the shelves, their bindings blue and rigid.

I look at him and tell him it's alright, he shouldn't worry. A mere nineteen, he gives me a senescent smile and nods in frailty. He grasps it all, too much. Shortly, I may have to lift him in my arms and set him on the couch. We are not alone. Echoes of people downstairs. I can't tell who. Mother, our sister, Nomi perhaps. Someone arrives and sparks excited speech and lengthy silences.

I descend the steps, some hasty greetings, I stuff a roll of coarse, green toilet paper in my pants. Back to the horror, to frisk around the crimson wreckage. I wipe my brother wrathfully from floor and carpet and from couch, reducing him to a ubiquity of chestnut stains. I am not content. He is writhing on the inlay, attempting tears. It's futile, I know. We both forgot the art of crying, except from torn veins.

The light is waning. The brown blinds incarcerate my brother behind penumbral bars. His bony hands and scrawny body in stark relief. It is the first time that I observe him truly. He is lanky but his face unchanged. I was no child when he was born but he is still my little brother.

He is resting now, eyes shut, our lengthy lashes – both mine and his – attached to fluttering lids. Birds trapped in quivering arteries flap at his throat. He is sobbing still but I avert my gaze, afraid to hug him. We oscillate, like two charged particles, my little brother and myself. His arms by his side and my arms by his side, divergent. I thrust into my bulging pocket a ball of ruby paper.

There is a clock in here that ticks the seconds. They used to sound longer. It was another time. The haemorrhage stopped. A mournful lace of plasma on his sinewed wrists. It must have hurt, the old corroded blade, no flesh, just coated skeleton. To saw the bones till blood. To hack the skin, to spread it like a rusty butterfly, dismantling slithery vessels. I move to occupy the wooden ladder back, near the escritoire that I received as gift on the occasion of my first year in school.

He nods affirmative when asked if he can rise. I hold him under hairy, damp armpits. I confront him, seated on my grandma's rocking chair, a cushion clad in Moroccan equine embroidery on my knees. I gently hold his hand and he recoils. I didn't hurt him, though.

I wait for him to break, his hand in mine. Thus clenched, our palms devoid of strength, we face a question and a promise, the fear of pain and of commitment. We dwell on trust.

He unfists and bleeds anew. I use the paper ball to soak it up. It's dripping. I gallop down the spiral staircase and collect another roll, adhesive bandages, and dressing. Into my pocket and, speechlessly, I climb back. He is sitting there, a Pharaonic scribe, wrists resting on his knees, palms lotus flowers, but upturned. His gifted painter's fingers are quenched in blood.

I mop and dab, swab and discard, apply some pressure and erase. My brother is calling me in sanguineous tongue and I deface it, incapable of listening, unwilling to respond.

I bind him and I dress and he opens his eyes and gapes at the white butterflies that sprouted on his joints. He feels them tenderly, astonished by this sudden red-white beauty.

I count his pulse and he gives in to my pseudo-professional mannerisms. His pulse is regular. He hasn't lost a lot of blood, therefore.

He tells me he is OK now and asks for water. All of a sudden, I remember. One day, he was a toddler, could hardly walk, I led him back from the clinic. He gave blood and was weeping bitterly. A giant cotton swab was thrust into his elbow pit and he folded him arm, holding onto it tightly.

One jerky movement, it fell and he stood there, gawking at the soiled lump and whimpering. He was so tiny that I hugged him and wiped the tears from his plump cheeks.

I improvised a story about "Adhesa Cottonball", the cotton monster, who forever wishes to return to the soil, her abode. His eyes cleared and he giggled nervously. This sound – his chuckle – is in my ears, obscuring all real-life acoustics.

He gulps down the water silently, his eyes a distant blackness, where no one treads but he, his forest, among the trees, perhaps this carriage and its attending coachman. Where does he want to go, I wander?

My brain is working overtime. My skull-domiciled well-oiled machine, whose parts are in metallic shine, impeccable, unerring, impervious to pain. Machines don't ache this brother, sprawled on the couch, his shoulders stooping, in torn shirt and tattered trousers, my erstwhile clothes, his chest hirsute, his face adorned with budding beard and whiskers.

What story shall I tell him now to clear his eyes? How shall I make him laugh again? What monster should I bury in the sand?

I tell him to pack few things and come with me. He acquiesces but still won't budge. His twin wrist-butterflies are quite inert. He sighs as he buttons his shirt and rolls unfastened sleeves to cover his abrasions. When he gets up I see him as before: a gangling figure, an angular face, two cavernous sockets, big brown mole. He drags his feet.

We both descend. Don't tell our parents, he begs, I promise not to. Enters his room and exits fast, carrying a small plastic bag with severed handles. A pair of worn jeans spill from the top to cover some half-deleted lettering.

We bid farewell and walk placidly to the car. He freezes on the back seat, still cradling his plastic treasure, gazing forward but seeing little.

Nomi is driving while I watch him through the windshield mirror. His inanimate stare, directed at the window, is deflected by transparence. Slumped on the imitation leather seat, he and his trousers bump from one side to another on the winding road.

He falls asleep this way, sack closely clutched, chin burrowing into his hollow torso. At times, he shakes his head in stiff refusal. He is very adamant. Only his hands are calm, as though detached from his rebellious body.

Nomi is negotiating the parking and I touch his shoulder. He opens a pair of bleary eyes and looks at me like he used to when I was still his entire world. I touch once more and gently. When he was two years old, I left home for many years, never to be heard from. The hurt resides still in his eyes, that injury.

I touch a third time, thus pledging to remain, thus telling him my love. I study him at length and he does not divert his eyes.

Suddenly he smiles and dimples collect around his lips. He flings his hands high up and waves his red-white butterflies. He imitates their flight. He plucks their wings. He laughs and I respond by laughing and Nomi joins and the space of our car is filled with laughs and butterflies and butterflies and laughter.

Return

The Con Man Cometh

by Sam Vaknin

Swathed in luminosity, we stir with measured competence our amber drinks in long-stemmed glasses. You are weighing my offer and I am waiting for your answer with hushed endurance. The armchairs are soft, the lobby is luxurious, as befits five-star hotels. I am not tense. I have anticipated your response even before I made my move.

Soon, temples sheathed in perspiration, you use the outfit's thick paper napkins to wipe it off. Loosen your tie. Pretend to be immersed in calculations. You express strident dissatisfaction and I feign recoil, as though intimidated by your loudness. Withdrawing to my second line of defence, I surrender to your simulated wrath.

The signs are here, the gestures, the infinitesimal movements that you cannot control. I lurk. I know that definite look, that imperceptible twitch, the inevitability of your surrender.

I am a con man and you are my victim. The swindle is unfolding here and now, in this very atrium, amid all the extravagance. I am selling your soul and collecting the change. I am sharpened, like a raw nerve firing impulses to you, receiving yours, an electrical-chemical dialog, consisting of your smelly sweat, my scented exudation. I permeate your cracks. I broker an alliance with your fears, your pains, defence compensatory mechanisms.

I know you.

I've got to meld us into one. As dusk gives way to night, you trust me as you do yourself, for now I am nothing less than you. Having adopted your particular gesticulation, I nod approvingly with every mention of your family. You do not like me. You sense the danger. Your nostrils flare. Your eyes amok. Your hands so restless. You know me for a bilker, you realise I'll break your heart. I know you comprehend we both are choiceless.

It's not about money. Emotions are at stake. I share your depths of loneliness and pain. Sitting opposed, I see the child in you, the adolescent. I discern the pleading sparkle in your eyes, your shoulders stooping in the very second you've decided to succumb. I am hurting for what I do to you. My only consolation is the inexorability of nature – mine and yours, this world's (in which we find ourselves and not of our choice). Still, we are here, you know.

I empathise with you without speech or motion. Your solitary sadness, the anguish, and your fears. I am your only friend, monopolist of your invisible cries, your inner haemorrhage of salty tears, the tissued scar that has become your being. Like me, the product of uncounted blows (which you sometimes crave).

Being abused is being understood, having some meaning, forming a narrative. Without it, your life is nothing but an anecdotal stream of randomness. I deal the final, overwhelming coup-de-grace that will transform the torn sheets of your biography into a plot. It isn't everyday one meets a cheat. Such confident encounters can render everything explained. Don't give it up. It is a gift of life, not to be frivolously dispensed with. It is a test of worthiness.

I think you qualify and I am the structure and the target you've been searching for and here I am.

Now we are bound by money and by blood. In our common veins flows the same alliance that dilates our pupils. We hail from one beginning. We separated only to unite, at once, in this hotel, this late, and you exclaim: "I need to trust you like I do not trust a soul". You beseech me not to betray your faith. Perhaps not so explicitly, but both your eyes are moist, reflecting your vulnerability.

I gravely radiate my utter guarantee of splendid outcomes. No hint of treason here. Concurrently I am plotting your emotional demise. At your request, not mine. It is an act of amity, to rid you of the very cause of your infirmity. I am the instrument of your delivery and liberation. I will deprive you of your ability to feel, to trust, and to believe. When we diverge, I will have moulded you anew – much less susceptible, much more immune, the essence of resilience.

It is my gift to you and you are surely grateful in advance. Thus, when you demand my fealty, you say: "Do not forget our verbal understanding."

And when I vow my loyalty, I answer: "I shall not forget to stab you in the back."

And now, to the transaction. I study you. I train you to ignore my presence and argue with yourself with the utmost sincerity. I teach you not to resent your weaknesses.

So, you admit to them and I record all your confessions to be used against you to your benefit. Denuded of defences, I leave you wounded by embezzlement, a cold, contemptible exposure. And, in the meantime, it's only warmth and safety, the intimacy of empathy, the propinquity of mutual understanding.

I only ask of you one thing: the fullest trust, a willingness to yield. I remember having seen the following in an art house movie, it was a test: to fall, spread-eagled from a high embankment and to believe that I am there to catch you and break your lethal plunge.

I am telling you I'll be there, yet you know I won't. Your caving in is none of my concern. I only undertook to bring you to the brink and I fulfilled this promise. It's up to you to climb it, it's up to you to tumble. I must not halt your crash, you have to recompose. It is my contribution to the transformation that metastasised in you long before we met.

But you are not yet at the stage of internalising these veracities. You still naively link feigned geniality to constancy, intimacy and confidence in me and in my deeds, proximity and full disclosure. You are so terrified and mutilated, you come devalued. You cost me merely a whiskey tumbler and a compendium of ordinary words. One tear enough to alter your allegiances. You are malleable to the point of having no identity.

You crave my touch and my affection. I crave your information and unbridled faith. "Here is my friendship and my caring, my tenderness and amity, here is a hug. I am your parent and your shrink, your buddy and your family" – so go the words of this inaudible dialog – "Give me your utter, blind, trust but limit it to one point only: your money or your life."

I need to know about your funds, the riddles of your boardroom, commercial secrets, your skeletons, some intimate detail, a fear, resurgent hatred, the envy that consumes. I don't presume to be your confidant. Our sharing is confined to the pecuniary. I lull you into the relief that comes with much reduced demands. But you are an experienced businessman! You surely recognise my tactics and employ them, too!

Still, you are both seduced and tempted, though on condition of maintaining "independent thinking". Well, almost independent. There is a tiny crack in your cerebral armour and I am there to thrust right through it. I am ready to habituate you. "I am in full control" – you'd say – "So, where's the threat?" And, truly, there is none.

There's only certainty. The certitude I offer you throughout our game. Sometimes I even venture: "I am a crook to be avoided". You listen with your occidental manners, head tilted obliquely, and when I am finished warning you, you say: "But where the danger lies? My trust in you is limited!" Indeed – but it is there!

I lurk, awaiting your capitulation, inhabiting the margins, the twilight zone twixt greed and paranoia. I am a viral premonition, invading avaricious membranes, preaching a gospel of death and resurrection. Your death, your rising from the dead. Assuming the contours of my host, I abandon you deformed in dissolution.

There's no respite, not even for a day. You are addicted to my nagging, to my penetrating gaze, instinctive sympathy, you're haunted. I don't let go. You are engulfed, cocooned, I am a soul mate of eerie insight, unselfish acumen. I vitiate myself for your minutest needs. I thrive on servitude. I leave no doubt that my self-love is exceeded only by my love for you.

I am useful and you are a user. I am available and you avail yourself. But haven't you heard that there are no free lunches? My restaurant is classy, the prices most exorbitant, the invoices accumulate with every smile, with every word of reassurance, with every anxious inquiry as to your health, with every sacrifice I make, however insubstantial.

I keep accounts in my unstated books and you rely on me for every double entry. The voices I instill in you: "He gives so of himself though largely unrewarded". You feel ashamed, compelled to compensate. A seed of Trojan guilt. I harp on it by mentioning others who deprived me. I count on you to do the rest. There's nothing more potent than egotistic love combined with raging culpability. You are mine to do with as I wish, it is your wish that I embody and possess.

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