Tramp steamer

 Tramp steamer 

Roz is standing at the end of the bed. She takes a sip from her cup of coffee.

    “Where is mine?” I ask.

    “This is yours,” she says. “Sorry. “ Then, “I guess now is the time.”

     “For what?”

     “You haven't been listening to the news?”

     “No.”

     ”Trump. Russia.”

     “Worse than expected?”

     “Than imagined. Could be imagined.”

     “Shit.”

     “I wish we could,” Roz said.

I keep talking about leaving the country before it’s too late. As if there were still tramp steamers that took on passengers to wherever the steamers were going, and they took the better part of a month - or more - to get there. “A month at sea” sounds delicious in my talking, like biting into an apple picked up off the ground in early October: you saw it as you were walking toward the tree - you watched the apple hop off and parachute lightly into the long thick orchard grass.

     Leaving by steamer and ending up somewhere where the dock workers care for your troubles as little as you have cared for theirs, and the taxi driver, and the desk clerk at the hotel and the servers in the restaurant: No one cares for your troubles any more than you previously cared for theirs.

The desk clerk will speak enough English to ask through the gap between his front teeth, “American?”

     “Yes.”

     “Your president is idiot.”

     “Yes, he is.”

     “‘Dangerous’ do you say that?”

     “Yes, I do.”
     “Welcome to Kristovia.”

He will laugh, and in a week or so you will become friends. At least, he will want to help you find a place to rent - “of your own,” he will say - and someone to teach you the language.

“I am sorry,” Roz says. “And I don’t mean about the coffee. But I can’t quit working yet.” In truth, she doesn’t want to quit working, ever.

     Also, she thinks things will get better, they have to. I think, like my new friend Tural, that our tolerance for dangerous idiots is much, much too high.

07.17.18