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He came in from the cold, his skin as thin as paper, his head covered with angel hair, arms and legs carried by the wind.
It was around five in the afternoon, exactly five weeks previously, on the fifth day of a cold month. The weak, low-hanging sun had spotted him first, following him all the way to the seat he took at a long oval table, not far from where I was warming my hands around a mug of hot chocolate, my fingers sticky from the cream. Seeing his face turned the chocolate cold. Frozen hands. You could see his veins, his muscles, his bones, his tissue, his structure; you could see what was inside him.
I stared into a face I knew so well that was simultaneously completely and utterly unknown to me. A face like my own.
He put the bag of colours he was carrying on the table. He stretched out a hand to me. It was weak and warm. Ants. I could feel his blood streaming. “How do you do?” A glass shattered into a thousand pieces. I could not let go of his hand; the ants building a bridge between his and mine. “Listen,” he said, the sound of a fallen glass hanging in the air behind us, still tangible. The moment the sound was gone, he asked: “Where did that sound go to?”
I started warming my hands again: sip of chocolate; cream in a two-day beard. I read some headlines that didn’t make sense, trying to regain my own space. His eyes were inside me, watching me from a position I could not occupy. I surrendered to his eyes.
He told me his life story, his words pale and crispy, coming without a hitch. His story was too long to fit one life; his experiences too diverse to fit one man; his adventures too grandiose to fit one time. Centuries passed like the watery reflection of a lantern in a black canal.
The moment he finished his story, he turned into a child and showed me the colours in his bag. There was no room in his excitement to ask questions. Dozens of leaves were spread out on the long, stained, wooden café table, forming a Matisse pattern. He giggled. His blood turned a deeper red. “They have all fallen, fallen softly to the ground.” He clustered the colours; red, orange and yellow dominated. He spoke to me through the colours of the leaves, telling me that he had had to return from the world the sound of the falling glass had gone to, and that his return had to do with solving one question. The colours were clear about that: paper man was a man with a quest.
tagged: God colours blood stars heaven spaciousness
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 Photo: André Platteel
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Today, I am quite immortal. I open my eyes and see a sky full of stars; a landscape that’s totally silent. Wide open. Dark background deepened through the ages. No time. There is no time that can make darkness as deep as this. A thought escapes: this does not exist. It does. Even if I was nothing more than air.
I make a meaningless sound. Wait. Make another sound. Not loud, just for myself. I am trying to follow the rhythm of light and dark above me. And wondering: Is the darkness the silence between words or is it the light that represents silence? It makes a completely different rhyme.
There is no distance between my eyes and the stars; their light burns my retina. My eyes fly. Anything further than ‘none’ falls off the edge of my vision. The Northern Lights are radiant tonight. It’s as if they are leading the other stars in a flight so fast that movement becomes invisible. How can lack of movement be so moving?
I go into the living room. A big space. I see wood that makes a table. The table makes the living room. The living room makes the house. The house makes the street. What if this house decides to move somewhere else?
The light outside has decided to shine on some garbage that’s acting silently, hoping to be left alone. I clean, light some candles and think of her and of the last time I saw her. There is a hole in my thinking.
A sound. And with it returns the memory I failed to retrieve a second ago.
I push a button. A short distance away a door is opening downstairs. A few seconds later she knocks and opens the door of the room, leaving me no time to answer. Long hair; a waterfall of gold. There is a dark blue fly on the table, and the moment she enters the room it takes off, flying like a lost child.
She passes me, speaking with her eyes. My legs are burning. She walks to another part of the room. I had no time to see how she is dressed. There is a wall between my eyes and her. Thin. I could blow it away with my mind. She walks back, heading my direction. Stops half way. Undressed. She stands near a cupboard, a few metres from me. She impresses me.
Outside, the future is humiliated.
She curves her body, her arm resting on the top of the cupboard, her legs crossed, one of her heels curved upwards. She knows her classics. I could liberate her from her pose. Paradise is just a few steps away. To stand here, watching her, seeing her breathe and shape her body, makes me want to be air.
“I can never love you,” she says. “I could never hurt you.” She sounds sure but feels unclear. There are shadows between the words, shadows that behave like time stretching endlessly. Words can create such a feeling of powerless. Still, I feel more than I can see or hear.
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 Photo: André Platteel
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I have to change planes in Budapest, Hungary. I have a cup of coffee in the only bar outside passport control. It is busy and almost everyone is smoking. I join some people sitting at a table not too far from the entrance; my idea is to try to breathe some clean air.
The man next to me is wearing a beautiful, dark blue woollen suit with grey stripes, a hat and dark, shiny leather shoes. He is not old – my age – though he reminds me of my grandfather. He too always dressed up and polished his shoes almost every day. And he wore amazing hats. You had to look carefully to see the differences between the hats he wore; they were all the same colour and shape. They were different, though, I could see. As a kid I loved putting them on and trying to be my grandfather, sitting in a chair pretending I was drinking gin, like he did.
The man starts to talk to me. I tell him I don’t speak Hungarian. He switches to English and tells me that he too is not from Hungary; he tells me that every time he came to this country he got such a warm welcome that he started to learn the language: “To understand their loveliness to me.”
Somehow I have always felt attracted to the central and south-eastern European states.
Although my father knows little about his family, leaving me with blanks about my roots, he does think his grandpa and ancestors were Gypsies. His father told him stories about travelling uncles and brothers selling stuff out of their cars in Romania and Hungary. I could be the son of Gypsies. My father’s skin is Gypsy-coloured, neither white nor black but somewhere in between. And my father too was a travelling salesman.
Actually, I doubt I have Gypsy roots. My father hates music and he hates dancing. And I always felt an affinity for black people. Just recently, someone told me he had met a Nigerian man with the same last name I have. The man told him that it was quite common in Nigeria.
As a child I was always amazed by the stuff my father was about to sell. Nearly every week our house morphed into a kind of wholesale market, full of stuff my father had bought from people who had gone out of business. One week my father bought and had to sell thousands of sausages; another week he bought and had to sell jeans that were decades out of style. But somehow he always succeeded. And on the rare occasion that he didn’t, he went to a bar where other salesman gathered, playing cards and betting their unsold goods in the hope of losing them and winning something more valuable instead.
tagged: consciousness Hungary Romania stars moon uniqueness love family Gypsy
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 Photo: uncle of my father, a travelling salesman.
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