MAKE THEM WAIT

I tell Boris he's the first Boris I've ever met, and ask if there's any Russian blood in his lineage. No, nothing at all, he says. Apparently his mother had a fondness for the works of Boris Pasternak. He was also close, he tells me, to being called Leon. Boris is a strong sounding name, I say, and I remember watching as a boy Boris Becker win Wimbledon at the record age of seventeen years old. Yes, he remembers that too, watching the match surrounded by two of his daughters, eating turkey pies and mushy peas. After a tea break, I watch Boris from a distance working on a wall. He's seated on a plastic milk crate, rolling a piece of rock around in his hand. Then he stops and reaches into his shirt pocket and takes out a pen and a piece of paper, which he unfolds carefully, as if it were a treasure map. He jots something down, recaps the pen, and folds up the paper again, and puts it away out of sight. A small smile comes to his lips, and then a slight shake of the head. I finish my tea and think about approaching him to talk, but something in me makes me think to leave him alone, I don't know why exactly, but there's something incredibly private about the way he's sitting, pondering, and wondering, and trying to imagine, I can't help but think, the next place to place his latest piece of rock ... He looks as if he's reminiscing, or in some kind of meditative state more akin to a monk. And then it's like he all of a sudden comes back again, it happens just like that, all of a sudden, from a private world of a dream to the public world of being - just being - and I seize my chance and walk up to him, and as I do so, I can't help but try to think of something suitable to say, and silly thoughts such as how much has he seen since coming here, to these parts, to this retirement home, come to mind, how many different people have come and gone, that kind of thing, and then, as I get closer, he seems lighter, younger, and I say as much, and for some reason add that he looks as if he's just found out that he's picked the right lottery numbers. That's nothing but another tax, he says, the stupid tax I call it. He tells me he's thinking of his brother again, he can't help it, it just comes, just like that. He remembers picking his brother up from the airport, Heathrow, or Gatwick, he can't remember which. And he remembers a book his brother brought with him, a book highly recommended that he should read. But Boris, for the life of him, can't remember the name of the book, no, it just won't come. He can, however, remember, and easily, what his brother was wearing, for instance - brown jacket, white shirt, red scarf - and the bags he brought with him too, just the couple, if he remembers rightly, one beige and leather, the other a dark canvas  ... But no, not the book, not the book at all ... Not the book that Boris can recall reading in one sitting once he had it in his hands, the book he felt as if he'd almost devoured, once it was in his grasp, no, not the book.