MAN ALIVE

Maida Vale, Marylebone, Paddington, St John's Wood, Queen's Park, Victoria, Westminster, Paddington, were the libraries most frequented by Boris on his walks around London. It had been a while since he had seen her, and then suddenly there she was again, sitting at a table across from him in Paddington, reading the same edition of the International Herald Tribune. He couldn't help but imagine that she was reading the same page as him, and not just the same page but the same article too, and not just the same article but the same part of the article, the same line, the beginning of the same word. Everything seemed to stop then. The light in the library took on a hue more akin to a dream, or at the very least a balmy dusk, when it was in fact midmorning. He knew he had to act. Now was his chance. He knew, but he did nothing. And he still curses, even now, his behavior that day, although the distance of time has, of course, made it all a lot easier. He can, in fact, actually laugh about it all now, and thereby proceeds to demonstrate. Ha ha. Ha ha. But yes, it still haunts him, like a hungry ghoul sometimes, he says. The ghoul can go get out of here. Go on, ghoul, go on. It's funny, he can remember the girl clearly, he says, and the day that his brother arrived in London too, and even how the city smelled that particular morning, whether at the airport or inside the library, but when it comes to trying to recall that book he was reading, that book whose lines still come to him every now and then, no, he cannot recall the name. At best he can scramble after a line once it appears in his thoughts and try with all his might to hold on to it, reach for a pen, if able, and jot down what he can, before it disappears once again into the aether. Then Boris changes the subject and says he hasn't seen me around much of late. I've been working on the other side of the village, I tell him, ripping up ivy which has overrun the garden beds near the hospital, climbing up and sucking the life from some of the surrounding trees. It's been a monotonous slog. And there's a resident nearby, I tell him, who doesn't appear to approve of me sitting under a conifer tree to eat a sandwich during lunch break. I overheard her the other day hanging out some towels to dry and saying as much to another woman, and that I shouldn't be entitled to a lunch break anyway, but that even if I was legally entitled to one, the least I could do would be to stand and eat my sandwich, if I insisted on being in view, for the residents of the village are, after all, helping pay a percentage of my wages, and by sitting under a tree it makes me look as if I'm lazy, which reflects badly on everyone, don't you know. Boris seems to know the woman in question, laughs, and shakes his head. German she is I'd say. So don't let it worry you. Some of them are still smarting from losing the wars.