The Streets Are Bleeding

“I can see why the American poet wrote a song about devastation,” spoke the first, a woman known for her absolutely enrapturing blue-gray eyes, the kind that reminded one of a storm incoming from the sea, that plucked one from reality and immobilized their mind, transfixing them, rooting them to the spot a moment as they contemplated whether their life choices had been the correct ones.

The man with whom she spoke had no doubt that his life had been chosen for him, and that thus there was no need to wonder such things. He smirked at her softly spoken sentiment, took a sip of the dark void that was the contents of his mug; he preferred his coffee to be bleaker than his life before he fully submitted to the Lord.

“What causes you to think that?” he asks, his voice flat as the land before them.

They sat at a table outside a café too small for people to sit within – comfortably, that is, with the zeitgeist mandating a strong sense of isolation and individualism; too small for moderns to sit within – and overlooked the expansive plains that reached for the horizon. It was the last café before the end of civilization, before the town’s border; it was their favorite café to visit. It reminded them just how close to the brink of the world’s end they lived. In a metaphysical sense, of course. The woman looked at him, her red hair bouncing lightly as she adjusted her gaze from the ornate tablecloth to his oddly unforgettable face. Everything about his face suggested that it would be easily forgotten amongst a crowd, but there was something about the edges of the individual organs on his face that made it seem somehow more surreal than others. To her, at least, this was true. She found her religious friend to be quite an interesting contrast to the world she knew. That someone could hold onto hope so steadfastly, despite the world’s outcry against all potential happiness, was a marvel to the embittered sculptor.

“Haven’t you seen the beauty of an explosion? Of something coalescing in the form of a symphony, sounds that would, in their isolated state, be cacophonous and yet, when brought together, yields beauty?” she inquired.

“I cannot say that I have,” spoke the slightly befuddled man. He enjoyed the sculptor’s company, but at times he felt she could be a bit too metaphorical for his tastes. Like his religion, he preferred little analogy in conversation, if any, and yet the woman whose conversation he enjoyed so much and so often was overfilled with the stuff.

“Oh? Well, my friend, you’ve never seen the stars at night! You’ve never seen fireworks! You’ve never lived, dear Victor!”

“Perhaps that, Alannah, is an overly hefty claim,” he defended softly.

Alannah smirked, her lips curling upwards only at their very ends, her eyes seemingly glittering at her companion’s words.

“Perhaps,” she conceded, “but it is one only I could get away with.”

Within the café, a small radio played the news. It was 1948, late May, and the war for Israel was intensifying to proportions neither had expected. As the two listened to its report, their eyes widened, Alannah’s hand went to her mouth, Victor’s fingers tightened around his cup just enough to force pallor into his knuckles. A misunderstanding between the Haganah and the Arab forces had led to a convent being fired upon by both parties. The nuns had, hoping both sides would understand the papal flag as a sign of peace and goodwill, hung it from a window, but this apparently only escalated the concentration of the fire. This piece of news had been known by Victor, and thus by Alannah, a few days previously, but neither had heard of the event of the following day, during which the nun’s chapel had been blown up. The reporter marked it as part of the Haganah’s strategy to limit the movement of tanks within the city, but Victor and Alannah felt differently.

“My poor sisters,” Victor mumbled, crossing himself. “I wish them well, and that they remain safe under the protection of our Lord.”

Had Alannah not been present, Victor would have recited Psalm 91, but he knew his companion was not religious except in the sense of her art, and so he left it for a later time, for when he returned home and could kneel before his Savior. He felt that they were of equal passion in their fields, he in religion and she in her art. When the news reporter praised the Haganah for their strategy, she huffed, rolled her eyes, and angrily quaffed her tea.

“These feelings welling from within… this is why the American wrote his anthem, Victor. You feel it, yes? The awe that accompanies such things. Yet, it is tragedy,” Alannah uttered in a quiet murmur.

Victor nodded, agreeing wholeheartedly with Alannah. Alannah rose to her feet, entering the café and asking for another teapot to be readied. The man behind the counter nodded, leaning into the kitchen a moment to demand another kettle to be warmed for the beautiful lady. She waited within the café, admiring the photos on the walls, the atmosphere of such a quaint place. Perhaps it was a very modern café, despite its size. It left people exposed, as the governments and the First World War had done. It reminded them of how lonely the world actually was, how disconnected everything was.

Alannah had lost her brothers to both World Wars, and an uncle, and her grandfather to the first. The first twenty-four years of her life had been spent losing people. Her father had always been kept safe from war due to his weak heart. Her mother had become a recluse of sorts, incapable of even seeing Alannah at times. Alannah’s parents lived in Wales now, in the family home that her grandfather had bequeathed to them. Alannah, however, had ventured off to America for a while. She loved the country, in her way, but not enough to stay there. She moved up to Canada for a time, and then she followed a lover to Spain. Of course, she abandoned her former lover after she caught him in bed with his ex-brother-in-law, despite their invitation to join them. She found herself in Ireland, as had Victor, meandering about for a meaning to continue. Continue what? She could not say, though Victor thought he knew but also could not say.

“Miss?” softly called the man behind the counter. “Your tea.”

“Thank you,” said Alannah, giving him an enormous smile that outshone the sun.

“M-my pleasure, miss,” he whispered in reply, his spine shivering from the radiance of his guest. He wished instantly he’d had flowers to give her, or the wooden chalices his mother and uncle used to make when he lived with them in Russia. He was lucky enough to have been the only one of those three to have escaped Stalin’s Purges. Lucky in the sense that he survived; unlucky in that he had survived his family. He had received earlier that week a letter from someone claiming to be his older brother, but such was his mindset that he immediately hurled the unopened envelope into the fire of the stove. Alannah left the threshold of the café, and the Russian sighed longingly.

“Thank you,” said Victor as Alannah poured him and herself more tea.

He had been contemplating the ability of the world to recover from its two decades of, as he and Alannah referred to it, complete and unwarranted madness. He held that a unifying faith could ultimately restore harmony to the denizens of the world. He truly believed such an event to be possible, where all of humankind joined hands in worldwide prayer and thankfulness. That which Alannah perceived as hope, however, was more desperation than a lack of despair. He needed the possibility to exist for him to carry on. It was the rhythm to which his heart beat, God can, God will, an endless cycle. A mockingbird call á la Alannah disrupted his reverie. She set down the teapot and offered Victor another teacup, which he took with the warmest smile he could muster.

“What do you think of this Palestinian madness, Victor?” Alannah asked as Victor stirred his beverage. He thoughtfully placed his spoon on the plate upon which his teacup stood, contemplating the truthfulness of the words coming to mind.

“I think I am tired of war,” he finally responded. “It has grown stale, contemptuous, and it needs to cease.”

“But surely you know the implications of a surrender on either side?”

“Surely?” Victor spoke, taken slightly aback at her choice of words.

Alannah grinned, her eyes sparkling again as they caught steadily streaming sunlight. “Surely, as you are so overtaken with the power of God and whatnot. You must be aware of the religious complications of this contest.”

“You speak of it as a minor contest?”

“Skirmish. Battle. Argument. War.” Alannah’s tone grew sharper the more synonyms she spouted. “What think you of it?”

“I think that they will not stop until the threat of the opposing military is eradicated,” Victor stated with a sigh. “The land they fight over is considered holy by both sides, and so they will fight for the sake of their culture until no culture exists. I think it to be a shameful thing, honestly, that both sides use God as an excuse for the actions of men.”

Alannah snapped, her little patience having been entirely spent, “How do you know they use God as an excuse?”

Victor smiled, shrugging his narrow shoulders. “Because we who believe in God hold tightly to the conviction that He will save us from our enemies, from ourselves, and that we will inevitably be redeemed. Thus, whatever atrocities they commit, they will be forgiven. I shudder to realize the similarities between their thinking and that of the Germans.”

“But how can that be right? How can you say that so coolly?!”

“They are Jews and Arabs, Alannah. This is their nature. Read their books; warfare is, under certain conditions, completely appropriate. “

Alannah’s eyes suddenly reminded Victor of Revelations, and the Welsh-Scotswoman stood so swiftly that her seat was flung back, crashing upon the ground with such force as to leave indentions upon it. She roared, “What of the Torah?! What of the Quran?! Who benefits from this cacophony? I say, ‘No one,’ but I mean ‘None of the Jews nor the Arabs.’ They answer, ‘The men who sell both Jew and Arab their bombs.’ Who is paying? Victor, do you know who suffers? I do. I have been there. I have seen it. Them. Bombs and shells scream as they annihilate; did you know? They scream because they know that what they destroy was once beautiful. They know it. The people they kill know it. The people who fire them knew it once, but now they only see Arabs and Jews, enemies. They ignore the cries of children, ignore that it is to the same God they were born. Their families are screaming in the homes they seek to save; they are dying in the places they want to live!”

With each exclamation her hands gesticulated more feverishly. Victor saw in her eyes the memories she experienced in that moment, the war-torn villages ravaged by long-gone Arab soldiers, the families clutching to their few belongings as they traversed from one site of destruction to the next. In her voice he heard the screams of orphaned children, the sobs of men so broken they could scarcely speak.

Alannah continued, “Is that salvation? They fight to reach Heaven? The Crusaders realized upon their deaths the folly of such sentiment. They realized it too late, as the Jews do now and the Arabs do again. Children are dying. Women are dying. Cities and buildings are dying. Blood is everywhere! It’s what Israel and Palestine smell like: blood. The streets are bleeding, Victor! What God permits this?! What God cherishes this?! What God revels in his children’s death?”

Alannah's storm cloud eyes were raining now, leaving glistening treads down her face.

“This is why you remain an atheist, Alannah?” he asks gingerly. He rises to help her back into her seat, but she has already replaced it to its proper position.

Alannah nods, then, using a finger to flick away the remnants of her tears. “This is why I agree to no God but ourselves. Because our streets keep bleeding, and only we can stop them.”

Victor focused his somber gaze upon his company, somehow knowing this would be the last time he saw her. She had that gleam in her eyes their common friend had warned him about. The one that meant she would be vanishing soon, and would not be returning for a very long time.