Passing the mark of a thousand nights, I emigrate again... Not into a place unknown before but yet so uncommonly strange and so well separated from language and foe, so terribly not gemütlich but altogether possible to be lived; in the great distance from all the truth in the world one wanders through the street without experiencing anything as his eyes are always busy with something else, trying to cope with the amazement in its most un-Greek form. The music plays from the most varied locales, but you know it's all a permanent silent inertia as though eternity could be in one place - history is destroyed afresh with the impressive towers that aim to reach the sky one day, so that the poor-spirited can dwell there, to relieve themselves... But sometimes in the streets there're accordeonists like those we used to know back home, they beg for money just like we begged for death, for an irretriveable divorce from every word of truth, for a distance... And those beggars, it's their laughter what impresses me so deeply, a laughter that overcomes all sadness and that becomes a flag in the paviment for the passer-by's to identify themselves with, as though it were an embassy issueing temporary passports for refugees, for those fleeing the estrangement.
There's yet something poetic but harmless about those warm nights, the eventless noise and the lax smell of a very thin light. You can sit and write, but then that isn't really telling your story and therefore you walk down the street with those heavy bags, from city to city, from person to person, throwing books sometimes and picking up rags... You just can't leave them anywhere, and even the children seem so burdened carrying those heavy bags from their own history; only in the early evening, at those very small cafeterias, one can open his bags and organize a garage sale every night, with accordeonists around playing so kindly as to sooth the thickness of one's own skin as not to seem hairsplit. But there're no customers, except for other emigrees... with so little money to buy anything from your heavy bag, so that they only exchange one item for another, tell their own stories, add a piece from somebody else or delete a chapter in their own and trade it for a cup of coffee with a stranger. No dreams of return harvest in you, while you don't plan on staying either and the cafes become stations, train stations, with temporary lockers for your bags, they rent the lockers for hours only and at the end of the day you must bring your suitcase back to your room, in the dampness of the air and the stillness of the hours.
You feel divorced from the pain you felt every morning, the anger, the anguish... your hands become a little spoiled as there's no need to look for the bread of life, Jesus is nowhere to be found around here, except in a Filipino church around the corner and there he's no friend or conversator, he remembers not his way back into the Street of the Prophets... he takes the buses all day long asking for directions, and in the end he winds up in the same garage sales. Looking for a tourist, for a foreigner... who will speak another language and listen to the story with delight and in his mind he will imagine Jerusalem as the palace of a King so full of empty chairs, and he will not notice the graves that always welcome you in. It's strange to tell people that nights are so silent here, so quiet... because it isn't factually true, but the emigrees know it well. There's so much we have forgotten, debts we didn't pay and friends that will no longer call. In the late afternoon you despair in your table, drink the bitter coffee with the slowest depth of your body and look into the abyss... It isn't deep enough, you know it well. But emigrating is a way to live, to continue living and not drunken from glasses of water, from letters and from the burden of the stones, you yourself having become one of them. You prefer not to leave your room, there's just such lack of desire! But remember this is just a train station, and like all stations it leads nowhere while at the same time it never leads back.
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