Ch XIII-Hannah's parable

("You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him for you were strangers in the Land of Egypt.")

Reading time: About 10 minutes

"Do not entreat me to leave you, to return from following you, for wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. So may the Lord do to me and so may He continue, if anything but death separate me and you."-Ruth 1:6

Ruth and Naomi (Jacob Pynas, 1583-1631).

Hannah stepped to the right of her chair at the bar, and she was beside herself.

She tried not to look at the face of Babylon staring at her, so Hannah murmured to no one at the empty bar:

" Goodbye, day. I made it to the night.”

“If I looked like you, I’d stare at myself too, every chance I had,” a voice inside her said as she stared at the woman who looked as if she stepped out of a Bedouin tent, in the back bar’s mirror. She seized her mind at dusk, as he did last night’s dusk and tomorrow’s too.

The ghost she was expecting to appear, the most reliable man in her life and the only one she had ever known, was imminent. Hannah had considered seeing Cyrus, her mother’s Persian psychic, but he did not pick up the phone before it rang. So, another time, or never again, depending on her anxiety level.

“At dusk, I think of nothing else but you,” her ghost’s voice said as he relit embers from a fire she extinguished every dawn— she thought.

“Are you talking to me?” Hannah said.

Dark Man stared back blankly from behind the mirror he took refuge in.

“You are making me nervous; I had a terrible dream,” Hannah responded.” “You wake at dusk and expect everyone wants to listen to your voice, ” she said.

“My will is my will; I don't need to bend or bend you to it,” he responded, his lips not moving, as they never did.

“Last night, you said tomorrow night you would stop; you lied,” she said.

“Rezy, you are the liar, and I know because I taught you well. You most fear losing me again. Who would listen to you without judgment if not me?” Dark Man spoke, watery smoke oozing from his lips.

She could feel the pull from the mirror.

“Resist,” she said to no one, not moving her lips. The maze was pulling her in.

Startled by her image in the mirror, Hannah used the two long nails on fingers on her right hand and picked at her lower lip, pinched off a thread-thin slice of lip skin, and ran her tongue over the tiny dot of the exposed new layer, feeling the slight scar. Then she saw Dark Man glaring back at her from behind the bar’s mirror.

He was paler than yesterday, which is what death can do even to a Dark Man.

The moisture on her lower lip started to fill the shallow crater, and she felt like it might drip. As it bled, it formed a bubble, and she knew the Dark Man would notice and ask for more.

"You have all the tools, Dr. Abir had said.

She knew she was falling and failing but could not see how fast the ground was rising to meet her. Not as fast as Dark Man fell.

She touched her lower lip with the same two fingers of her left hand, which she used for everything, so there was little thought, and there would be no memory of the moment except for the untanned face of Dark Man, which was the only face she could remember.

There was left a single red dot on her ring finger, forming the center of a target’s bulls-eye, but only on her ring finger, where there was also a turquoise oval in a pink-gold setting. The red dot had started to film over, as blood does, except in royals, and had not seeped onto the turquoise’s gold band.

She licked off the red bulls-eye, tasting her salt, like the dinner she knew was coming because the pub owner salted all his meat, as in the old days, before he had installed a walk-in cold room in the basement.

Salted beef, not just her black-and-blue filet, draws out the blood like her nails constantly picking at her skin.

Dark Man was staring hungrily at the red target on her finger.

“Did it hurt Rezy? Smile when you bleed, my little Rezy," he said. “You want to be a rose when you bleed?”

Hannah did not respond to the Voice.

Now surrounded by puffs of smoke in the mirror, she watched the grey cloud sink instead of letting it float above the lustrous stone castle of her mind. When Dark Man had fallen off the balcony and joined the spikes of the iron gates below, she had found adamantine sustenance inside her, like an indestructible rare earth element, one the Dark Man could never pierce nor insult, even secretly: no one else could hear or see him except Hannah.

Perhaps, her voices whispered, in the limestone halls of the concentric circles of the Welsh castle in her mind: this was exactly what she feared most, precisely because it was made of stone and schist, immoveable forever, and one which never reacted even furtively, so it was not possible to smile back at the Dark Man trying to leap over her outer stone wall, not even furtively, even inside; and, only more brutal men and Verdi abated her hatred for herself.

Her fort was built of local stone, and she moated her outer ring and self-guarded with the towers and gatehouses of her self-loathing, overlooked by an inner ward of gatehouses and the massive towers of her inability to see herself or anyone else’s face or heart.

“No man haunts this rose,” Hannah whispered to herself.

Then, she knew what to do: recite Abir's prayer to herself:

“It's not that I don't want you to see me this way or that way.

Just don't look back, Or at me.

I am always watching you and everyone else, too.

I see your face, will not remember it, and I know that you do not see me,

nor my rage,

and my rage is mine.”

She recited her child’s prayer in silence, her lips not moving, because she knew he was coming as dusk was his home, and remembered the poem Michael had written for her after Dark Man fell:

Let the farrago of lies end here:

Let Daniel find honey

Where He silenced the truth

Where there once was a duel over words.

Let Daniel enter the lion’s den

& not be silent:

Daniel’s lord sent His angel,

and he closed the mouths of the lions;

and they did not hurt him

because he spoke the truth before you:

“O’ king, I have don​e thee no harm.”

The truth pleased Cyrus,

and lifting Daniel up out of the pit,

and no injury was found on him

because he believed in his truth.

Let this truth bring the day of healing,

an end to the silence

& find a field of poppies.’

No. more. tears.

There were no more cloudy days. There were just cloudier days.

Since he left, the sun had risen every day, but he seeped through her castle’s keep as the moon rose, the glow of dusk advanced, and the first three stars appeared over the horizon in the eastern sky. She counted them in their summer triangle:

Vega, in Lyre Deneb in Cygnus the Swan , and Altair in Aquila the Eagle.

Four other stars forming an arrow were between Aquila, the Eagle and Cygnus, the swan. She could see the arrow: it was Sagitta, the arrow shot by Hercules halfway between the heads of the Eagle and Swan.

Hannah thought that Hercules was aiming for the Eagle or the Swan. She could not say which one.

He missed them both. She was sure she was connected to Sagitta, or at least her arrow.

Her friends the spikes had found the Dark Man that night as they were looking up in that August sky at crepuscule. Hannah’s arrow had not missed because gravity had pulled him to it.

Hannah could be grave. So, she waitied.

She had waited until the morning to call, until his moans had subsided, and for the Perseid shower would be peaking in the morning tomorrow, so she needed to get some sleep to see the sand grains or pebbles, like Dark Man’s cigar ash, being consumed so many miles above her heads, fast and bright leaving persistent trains in the northeast sky from her window, shooting away from Perseus.

The emaciated bearded man, sitting across from her in the leather chair, with the Damascene, as her mother, told her:

“You half all ze tools.”

All the tools. An abacus, an astrolabe, a canteen for water, it was enough.

Some Verdi in her pocket, and her daily blue pills so she would not shed virus sufficed.

She took a half breath, which wasn’t the one she needed, then watched her right hand, the one she used to shovel food onto her fork with, dive, like a kingfisher dropping off a tree branch, toward her bag resting on the bar.

Feeling her hand move with its own purpose, it reached in and touched the wooden grip’s delicate checkered pattern her right thumb felt for the cylinder release, and it found the small spring-loaded slide lever, located behind the cylinder, that she knew in the dark and pushed forward, and the cylinder to swing out to the side and down exposing six empty holes.

Her left hand reached to the chain on her neck where a single bullet, the dark tip slightly indented in the center, was attached with a clip she had the jeweler fashion. She pulled it off, inserting it into one of the six barrels, and then she spun the cylinder and closed it and heard a clicking sound. Locked, she drew the hammer back, and the cylinder rotated, aligning the next chamber and the single round with the barrel.

In a smooth, single motion, like the blue and orange bird diving for prey, her left hand turned the barrel toward her face, placed the snub nose under her chin, looked at the Dark man, and pulled the trigger.

No sound except the click reached Hannah’s ears, except the waitress's aprons swishing sound of fabric rubbing against their black skirts, mixed with the room’s conversation, stayed level, and no shrieks or lightning bolts: the susurrus was an ambient mask for her recurring wish.

No one even looked up. So she pulled the trigger again. It took only four pounds of pressure, the same amount of hand strength as she needed to lock the forever bracelet on her right wrist; the revolver clicked once more, and the Dark Man smiled a tear at the corner of his eye from inside the mirror.

The white-haired bartender set down a glass in front of her and said:

“I have a Bordeaux pirate saved for you, Hannah.” He set the glass with red liquid in front of her, and she saw Michael at his villa in Kerman, smiling.

Setting the silver revolver down in front of her, with the barrel pointed toward the mirror, and using her left hand, she swept the weapon into the open lips of her bag, which welcomed it and swallowed it.

She knew Dark Man was watching her.

Hannah jabbed the orange nails of her right hand into the palm of her left, steadying herself, and when the pain was insufficient, she excoriated her left thumb, pulling away the dry skin from under her left thumb, which revealed a flesh layer of darker pink and moist skin, and red dots of her.

Tiny dots of soothing red appeared, and the sting was soothing. Then the dots merged and started to form a small dome and pulled her attention away from the Dark Man, who said quietly:

“Hatred is blindness, Rezy,” speaking to her in death, as he had stopped talking to her in life.

“You mean love, Poppou,” she spoke into the mirror.

No one looked up at her except the Dark Man, who brought his hands up, covered in blood, and started to applaud with the blood spattering his white tuxedo coat.

He smiled and said:

“Bravissima Rezy, la mano de Dio,” the rose was not his favorite flower from the fields he grew on his farm west of Baghdad, a lucrative side venture he missed sorely when they fled over the mountains.

“Keep at it; the odds are in your favor,” he said.

She remained silent when she looked at herself in the back bar, letting the dome on her thumb dry.

“Por el amor de Dio, Poppou, echar oju,” summoning her Ladino to protect her from the wraith.

Often, she felt like she was the evil eye, unseen, and deprived of all joys. She was unfortunate because she did not remember who was looking back at her when she gazed in a mirror.

He was often there at dusk to tell her how she revolted him, speaking to her now as if his curtain of silence had never dropped after she had blossomed.

It was not ugliness or a lack of beauty; it was only a strange woman’s face staring back at her, a face she did not know.

“How does anyone ever know anyone else?” she thought, staring in the mirror behind the bartender.

“You never knew anyone, really,” her voice whispered at the woman in the mirror,” who look at who must be Hannah from the mirror, sitting alone at the bar, and it mouthed silently back:

“… I don’t know you…..anyone who thinks they know you—[what a sad surprise.]”

From birth, Hannah was a Jew, not just one; she was a stranger, and every day was a new landscape.

She was wretched in a sea of faces she could see but not remember.

To her right, the portmanteau doors of Stinson’s opened, the light from the street tricking her pupils smaller, and a dark man walked in, turned sharply to his right, and landed on her asteroid sitting at the stool furthest away.

©Philippe du Col 2025 ©Duchess of Orange