[Work in progress - I]

Running


It was all the running. She had been running all her life, which is why her soles were always worn down to a thin sheet separating the ground from her feet.
Why do you like ruins so much? he asked.
Never thought about it, I don’t know.
Because the walls are crumbling.

She had been running from walls, the same ones, perhaps, that rose up between them. For twenty-odd years it had been the same story: he’d ask questions and she’d never know how to answer them, or be constantly surprised by his naïveté.
She remembered the first time she had laid eyes on him in the hospital; how different she thought their relationship would be. She would be the queen, nurturing him and teaching him her life, while he fell in love with her and her old fashioned ways. As it happened, he turned her life around, and not vice versa. She had to learn the new, grudgingly always. He was the new, he could never understand her squeamishness at any novelty she was expected to learn while he experienced it for the first time.

He was a poet, after all, she thought often. Or was he? She was rather too prone to see in him the poet she desired in herself. His littlest remark would instantly become poetry in her mind.

So when he casually remarked, perhaps even laced with the teenage disdain for our mothers’ old habits that creeps into the most loving of sons and daughters, Because the walls are crumbling, she heard it like a metaphor, and found herself a prisoner of her son’s versaic speech.
Her first reaction was to look down. At her feet. These shoes were so comfortable, so comfortable that she had ceased to think of them as shoes and begun to think of them as extensions of her own feet. Running shoes. Well, any shoes could be running shoes if you ran in them.
She thought it funny – not in a laughter inducing way, but in a way filled with irony, like her poetry – that he should have spoken of her shoes as the key to her life. Not that he had spoken of shoes at all; he had merely made a comment about old buildings. Nor had he, we know, meant to make a statement about her life at all. Or his father’s. Nevertheless, when she wanted to see coincidence, she would. It was that way with her. She considered it an asset as a writer to stumble upon the unobvious, the fortuitous, the subtle, what was beneath the surface. Not that she was a writer, any more than the boy’s father had been in the wool business because of his one pair of socks. One swallow did not, indeed, make a summer, but one pair of socks made a child.
It was a long time ago, and their separation had nothing to do with the War, or politics or finances or ambition. She merely found it socially convenient (not to mention the tale giving the boy his first taste of good, homespun imagination) to say that the father had been in the War. Nobody asked questions after that. Nobody even asked her if she was from around here. While it was possible that she had belonged to the erstwhile enemy camp, the mention of the War as she mentioned it was now guaranteed to meet with sympathy. No one would look upon a mother, or a woman with child as an ex-war criminal. Even if she had been a Gestapo in her day, she would still be welcomed into the fold. She was as French as any of these fools around her; perhaps why she was in the War in the first place.
But that was quite incidental to her meeting this man. She was no soldier, she could have been any old peasant girl from across the border. Borders, coasts. She had never said where she was from, he had never asked. The great lingua franca between them was in place, the Great French Tradition that she knew only too well.
It all started with the socks. She was cold. She was adrift in the streets of Marseille in 1941.