Hard Times

Hard Times

by Asher Keren

It hardly could be called despair. Her faded, torn jeans were way beyond even her own despair and her young angelic face was dirty and in need of rest, while her long blonde hair was in need of some conditioner. Those blue eyes she wore were just about as empty as her prayers which she had given up saying a long time ago, but her cotton t-shirt was miraculously clean and her overall shape was befitting a young and beautiful sixteen year old girl-woman. When she passed by me at the bus station today I could hardly wonder what she had been through and why, at such a wonderful age, she obviously knew more about herself and others than most people do at the age of sixty.

I never looked back at her. She was heading straight to the market where old, hand me down clothes are sold together with used DVDs of long forgotten movies, cheap watches, cheap lipstick, cheap cameras and oh yes, almost any kind of knife or dagger you could ever need or fear. Brass knuckles, too.

So, I didn’t need to look back at her because I knew where she was headed. She was headed beyond all of that, to the empty alleyway just behind the stalls where a person such as her could lazily sit, maybe smoke a last cigarette, and doze off in shame.

I wanted to help but I could not. To help one like that, so young and so sad, is to invite failure. What could I offer her? Money? Even if I had it would be gone in a day. Love? Well, I’m older, attached and not quite sure about what love means myself. Friendship? Possibly, but what does friendship mean beyond a good word? ‘They’ say (the books, that is) that friendship means commitment, aid and being there for the other, no matter how difficult. Certainly, I am in no position to offer myself as a friend.

Maybe I should have taken her to a soup kitchen or to a shelter, but honestly I did not think of it when I saw her. Only now, several hours later, when I sit down to write, do I think of the obvious, like simply buying her one of those sandwhiches sold at the stalls. Hopefully, though, I helped her most by just leaving her alone.

I wonder what her name is, Olga, Sveta, Ina or maybe even Kinneret or Amy. I did not hear her speak so it is hard to place her origins, but she is lost all the same. Like so many others wandering around that immense complex of concrete housing devoted to extinguished hope and fallen pride, more popularly know as the New Tel Aviv bus station.

No, it wasn’t despair that passed by me in the form of this young person. It was beyond that. It was beyond caring at all. While I passed her by, out of the building, into the congested Tel Aviv afternoon and towards my car, I understood exactly what she felt. She felt nothing. I imagine our great Zionist thinkers or even our biblical Prophets would have felt exactly the same, had they showed up one day at the New Tel Aviv bus station - the nothingness of a depressed dreamer, just another passerby, not even knowing where to start.