Sunday, May 25, 2008

The Art of Seeming











Most patrons sitting around the tables of the sidewalk coffee shop haven't noticed the photographer who stepped out onto the street to take a photograph from a better angle. I've noticed his presence, though. Women see everything. I’m trying to seem natural, as if I haven’t noticed him, but I’m failing. A faint, irrepressible smile at the corners of my mouth is betraying me. What’s there for me to smile about, for heaven’s sake? I lost everyone and everything in the war. I shouldn't be here.

So, in spite of myself, I sit here smiling in order to ingratiate the audience that'll see the photograph. The incongruency is killing me. And the photographer is taking too long over the shot. I’m uncomfortable. The coffee shop has become a stage, and we patrons, actors. This is not me, Israela, here. Posing’s displacing authentic being. Style's eclipsing substance. The stuff of my life is good form rather than real content. They’ll see it in the photograph. I cannot conceal it.

Best to fix my attention on the midday sun, flooding this Tel Aviv sidewalk in bright Spring light. Best to savor the aroma of freshly percolated coffee. Best to enjoy the luxurious laughter of the revellers around me. Hell is other people, claimed Jean-Paul Sartre. Love is other people, countered Martin Buber.

Perhaps if I look directly into the lens of the camera instead of pretending as if the photographer doesn’t exist, I’ll seem more authentic?

Look reality in the eye, Israela. Come on. Be a woman of substance. Assume responsibility. Confront. Repudiate pretension. Live a real existence.

Suddenly, the photographer lowers his camera and gazes directly at me. He steps back up onto the sidewalk and approaches my table.

“Jackie?”, he says, drawing near.

As I said before, I lost everything in the war, even my identity, because the hunt forced me to conceal it and disappear from the face of the continent , as it were. May the concealed, in good time, be revealed. I believed that in the aftermath, I'd recall who I was, what I was, how I was, before I became an imposter, but it still hasn't happened, and so I guess I'm faking it, like many of the others sitting here, to one extent or another.

Who's Jackie? Who's this man? Nobody's called me that before, and if so, I can't remember it.
He pulls up an available chair.
"I thought you were dead", he says, sitting down.
In a sense, the photographer's right, I am, indeed, dead, but how is it possible to explain to him here and now, under these circumstances, that in order to salvage my body from the catastrophe, I had to bury my soul? Survival of the body is paramount, even if the price you pay is your soul. The soul can always come home later.
"If you let me be in your photograph", I tell him, "you'll revive the dead. What's your name?"
And then this stranger says:
"If you let me be in your fiction," he says, "I'll let you be in my photograph."
He extends a hand: "My name's Haim".
I almost gasp. How does he know I'm inventing myself? How does he know my existence is a fiction?
"Well," I say to him, proffering my hand, "that's another story, but first let's order something before this aroma finishes me off for good."

No comments:

Email

igotaname@hotmail.com

About Me