Write Me a Letter

He looks at me with his single surviving eye and pleads: "Write me a
letter".

I smile and remove the women's magazine from his hands. Under "Singles
Ads" it says:

"165/33, feminine, rebellious, striking, looking for a man for serious
relationship, Postal Box Office".

"Write me a letter" - he repeats and his lonely eye gleams.

"Soon, I am going to get my second, more beautiful one" - he adds
apologetically.

We are in a residential caravan in a prison camp, whiling the time
away. I am waiting for my inevitable, unnerving, early release and he
is looking forward to that feminine, rebellious who will discern in his
solitary eye that which he craves to witness in both hers.

I acquiesce and write to her, the mysterious stranger. My writing is
calligraphic and Maurice convinces me that it, alone, should make the
prospect meet him.

And when she does, it will all be different. He will demonstrate to her
that there's a soul concealed in his awkward flesh and how his lonesome
eye grasps colors and sun and light and shadows. Lots of shadows.

At night, he wakes, perspiring, stifling whimpering, panicky sounds,
like beavers struggling to emerge, consuming his insides, driving the
torture wheel called Maurice. He rises from his nightmare and shuffles
to the slimy toilettes on the remainder of his leg. When he is back,
face rinsed, he looks around, alarmed, climbs laboriously into the
upper bunk, and tries to sleep.

But the sirens of that particular patrol car haunt him with red-blue
flashes in the desiccated socket of his long-gone eye. He can't erase
the gunfire sounds, the streaking bullets that carved his flesh with
long, brown scars. The raining glass that gouged his eye erupts
anew.

"I lost my eye in the showers" - he nags the dwindling numbers of his
unwilling interlocutors. They heard it all before - the tale of Maurice
and his magnificent porcelain ball that cost him 5000 New Israeli
shekels.

"I was scared, so I pretended to be violent, so they became afraid of
me. Everyone knew that I am not to be messed with!"

Maurice recounts to me his prime: replete with eye, a serviceable leg,
and human form.

Now he frequents only hookers. He calls them "escort girls". They have
been escorting him a long time now and he is a heaving cyclopedia of
their addresses, official prices, negotiating tactics, and final
offers. "Half an hour" - he lectures me - "and you can come but once.
So you better masturbate before. But you can still strike a bargain
with them even if it happens."

He finds them pretty. As far as he is concerned, they are all
attractive and stunning and he keeps wondering aloud why they ended up
in bed with him. He relishes his good fortune and frequents their
cubicles and sweaty cots. "In Haifa, some of them do it for 50
shekels!" - he gasps incredulously.

Maurice does not neglect his physical exercises.

"Am I triangular?" - he demands to know, swerving on his healthy limb,
a dented nakedness, we are in the showers, avoiding effluence.

I study him closely. He has a well-developed torso, like a miniature
Schwarzenegger. He is trilateral both front and back. His shoulders a
triangle, imposed on squarish chest and powerful hands. I tell him so.
But Maurice seeks second and third opinions. He circles the muddy
pathways of the camp for hours, only a towel to his loins, and pesters
every passerby. They all confirm my observations.

"Your stomach is repulsive" - he tells me earnestly - "Stop eating so
much. Work out!"

I give him the letter I composed and he ponders it gravely. Then he
folds it carefully and withdraws an envelope from his peeling iron
dresser.

"Write me the address, too" - he says - "It must be the same
hand."

I do so obediently. He inserts the letter in the envelope and licks it.
Thus opaque and sealed, he places it gingerly in a drawer.

It joins four identical epistles.

"Maurice, when will you send these letters?" - I demand.

"Soon" - he laughs - "I don't have stamps. Every time I go on detail I
forget to buy them. Tomorrow I will remember. Tomorrow I will dispatch
them and you will write me more. One of them will surely answer.
Something will come out of it."

I suggest to him to address some his missives to the beauties on the TV
soaps. He sign up to my charade enthusiastically and insists: "Write,
write me a letter to them" - he doubles up in laughter.

Maurice carries in a moldy plastic bag a few fading and creased
photographs of himself before. He is surrounded with minimally-attired
knockout adolescent girls. These may be the "escorts". He confesses to
wedding three of them and to fathering a brood.

I notice a sad-eyed kid, sprawled on a sofa, gaping at the camera. It's
unmistakable: a tiny Maurice. You also can't misjudge the expression in
Maurice's single, dewy, eyeball.

But Maurice the Cyclops never cries. His vising headaches merely reduce
him to reclining on his rusty metal bed, turning his back to us,
pretending to be slumbering. His shoulders quaver, yet we never dare
approach him.

"All my women betrayed me." - he tells me every morning, awakened by
the screaming wardens. I wonder what he dreams of that makes him
reiterate so often.

"The minute I entered the pen, they strayed with another. That's why I
divorced them, all three." - he elaborates.

Maurice places little trust in women. They hurt him so. "But they are
so beautiful!" - he utters wistfully, as he measures a new pair of
jeans he bought in his last vacation. They are too loose. I tell him.
He spends the remainder of the evening refitting them and adding holes
and buckles to his belts.

"How is it now?" - he anxiously enquires of no one in particular.

"Much better, Maurice" - I reassure him.

At night, when no one sees, he changes the soggy patch covering his
missing eye. It's nothing but a gauze and two adhesive bandages,
plastered directly over the shriveled, murky hole that's left of the
glistening, jocular eye in Maurice's photos.

He is ashamed and doesn't want to nauseate us. Maurice has a developed
aesthetic sense. He still remembers beauty and wants it in his life.
But all he has right now is a dehydrated wrinkle above a hollow abyss
in his skull. It's where he used to gaze at beauty from. But now it's
dark. Only the muscles that surround it still react to absence. He
mocks himself self-deprecatingly. There's nothing else to do without an
eye, a leg, one's looks.

Maurice is suing the police. In his mind he has won and is already
divvying up the reparations. He is going to buy a flat, a car, and then
a girl. She is bound to adore him and they will live in happiness and
wealth and many children and Maurice will grow with them. "This is my
second childhood" - he hums along with a hit song on the radio. In such
times, Maurice is no longer in jail but in the hereafter, in a world of
warm and loving families.

"I spent fourteen years inside" - he confides - "My father says I am
lucky to have been shot. Maybe this way I will settle down. Maybe I
will have enough money not to work and only raise my children."

The offspring he has already had are held back by his women. The same
females who do not visit him and force him to stagger on the steep
hills of Haifa just to see his kids for an instant and give them gifts.
Maurice saves all his meager pay and uses it to buy his children
presents and himself more clothes.

"Some girls make advances in the cab on the way back to jail" - he
brags - "I tell them that I am doing time for burglaries and this turns
them on. When I returned from my last vacation I met one girl, she fell
for me, she asked me to sit next to her, she twisted her face like
this" - Maurice demonstrates a yielding, kiss-ready, feminine
mouth.

He can't believe his luck: "she is so beautiful" - he moans longingly.
He thinks this can't be true, something must be wrong with the girl,
that this may be a trap. She must be married - he freaks. "We are so
miserable" - he sighs - "The minute we cross the gate, they go looking
for someone else."

Maurice yearns for the olden days, ten years ago, when a woman was a
woman and he was a proper man with eyes to look dames over and legs to
chase them. Maurice isn't good at expressing pain. He prefers to
measure shirts or to ask me to write him letters.

That evening, when I come back from the detail, I find Maurice parked
on his bunk, his ailing leg impossibly extended, weighed down by a
bulky orthopedic shoe. He avoids me, dejected. And then:

"Vaknin" - he calls - "Come here, Vaknin".

I go and sit by him. At his request, I tie his laces: one cross, one
over, and a butterfly. He shuts his eyes while people fuss around him.
And now, the humiliation and the embarrassment - both mine and his. The
intimate togetherness, a man, shoelaces, man, at dusk, a drafty room,
in prison. The closest two can get - sometimes more than carnal. A kind
of love.

"Vaknin, thank you" - he says, inspecting my endeavors critically -
"Vaknin, what shall I do if someone answers my letters? What will
happen then? I am afraid to post them, not to get a response. I only
have a socket. My beautiful eye hasn't arrived yet. I am crippled,
crippled ..."

Maurice breaks into a sob and I move closer and hug him and nestle him
and wait for him to calm down.

But he does not. He is devoured by weeping. He crumbles in my arms, the
tears engulfing both his eyes, ungluing the adhesive bandages and
loosening the gauze. It falls. His triangular rib cage trembles, his
inert leg twitches, and his absent eye, and all his offspring that are
strewn across the city weep through him and the long years and his
father, who is happy he was shot and the wall, the only witness to the
anguished nights of Maurice.

And I weep with him. I, too, weep with him. Together.

==============================

Short Fiction in English and Hebrew

http://gorgelink.org/vaknin/

Poetry of Healing and Abuse

http://samvak.tripod.com/contents.html