A Beheaded Cart

Written by Sam Vaknin

(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 organized, 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 shriveled 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
multicolored 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, gray 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 materialize, 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 woolen
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 graveled 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
center 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
favorite 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.



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


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