incendiarystory (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} incendiarystory) wrote,@ 2004-12-09 10:34:00 |
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Why Sleep When I'll Only Dream - CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Inspiration Written In Four Different Languages
Scott fumbled with the change slot on the pink phone between the two doors with the man and the woman on it. He looked back at the table through the small opening that camouflaged his true mission of taking Emily into this ice cream shop. Emily was still where they had sat down near the ice cream selections in the front. She sat at the table engaged in taking the green play-doh and molding it into various shapes trying to find ones that she liked. She did have a satisfied look on her face for brief moments before she would take her hand and flatten her creations.
The phone was proving to be no help in throwing Scott's thinking a line about how to assist Emily. He couldn't think of who to call. His thinking went that if he called any authorities who could help Emily that it would just make her situation worse. She'd be stuck in some hospital in Berlin where the attendants didn't speak English. This would just send her further down the spiral to the state of confusion and self destruction that Emily sat in right now.
He thought about calling Emily's mother back in the United States. Maybe she had seen her in this state before and could provide some assistance on how to break her out of it. This wasn't a number that he had used more than once or twice, however, so he'd have to ask Emily for it. And that too would further arose her suspicions. Scott was worried that anything he said or did that confirmed her thoughts that she was no longer rational would just add to the theory she had generated that everybody thought she was nothing more than a burden.
It began to look more and more like he was on his own. He thanked his prior experiences in Europe that had proved to him that he could effect change using only his own skills. That's the key, he thought, restoring Emily's thoughts that she was an actor in her own life. She seemed to have given up the idea that she mattered. She seemed to have given up the idea that she could change the situation she was in.
He went to the bathroom, the excuse that he had used to break away from the table, and went back to Emily. She looked up from the mess of green that she had made on one of the shop's napkins.
"Don't you feel better creating something?" Scott asked her.
"Actually I do," she said, "but nothing I create is any good. There's no inspiration."
"Emily look around, there's inspiration everywhere..."
"I don't see it," Emily interrupted.
Seeing this attempted path at trying to help Emily was proving futile, he changed his tactic. He would show Emily that Berlin had a pulse like Warsaw had and if she found it she would feel better. He hung on to the hope that her face lit up talking about Berlin itself once and that it possibly could again if they just kept talking about it.
"Remember how you said that I seemed to find beauty in ugly places?" Scott asked.
Emily nodded.
"Well do you want to know how I did it?"
Emily nodded again.
"I felt the pulse of the city. I tried to figure out what made it tick. Like in Warsaw it was the Polish desire for independence. Once you can see it all around, the city makes sense. And do you want to know why I originally thought of this method? Everywhere that I meant, I thought, what would Emily do?"
"Emily wouldn't be able to do anything," she said back, crushing her little fist into the play-doh.
"Don't you see, Emily? You can do anything that you want. I used to think that I couldn't do anything myself or for myself. And it took some really depressed times in Paris and Vienna and even Budapest before I realized that I was trying to enjoy the cities for what they had to offer on the surface. It wasn't until I looked beneath and saw what made each city special that I really appreciated them. Looking back, I realize that you're right. Warsaw is an awful place by itself. I mean, if nothing else it's false. The Old Town there isn't even old. But what's beautiful about it is that it was entirely rebuilt after World War II. Think about it. Think of all of those hands taking a city that was basically flattened to nothing and rebuilding it from scratch because they loved it, it was their city."
"So what's so special about Berlin?" Emily asked as they deposited their empty paper ice cream bowls into the garbage bin and walked back into the street where Checkpoint Charlie stood. Scott noticed that the dough was missing from Emily's hands. She had thrown it out along with the melted milk that had once constituted her ice cream.
"I don't know Emily, you tell me," Scott said, "I feel like I really haven't really done that much since I've gotten here."
"See Scott, I'm holding you back!" Emily cried out. The tears started to fall from her eyes almost instantaneously.
"No, Emily. Emily you're not. I haven't done anything in Berlin because I wanted to do all the things with you. Let's see Berlin. You and me, what do you say?"
"Isn't that what we're doing right now?" she asked, tears still in her voice.
They turned the corner from the ice cream shop and Scott didn't say a word. Nothing he said seemed to be helping at all. Telling his stories to Emily had just made her more upset, he would have to figure out how to get her to pull the beauty out of her own stories.
"Think about Paris," he began. "Surely it couldn't have been all awful. Surely there was something there that grabbed your imagination."
"Well there was something," Emily said.
"What was this something?" Scott asked.
"You're going to think that it's weird. I don't want to tell you," Emily said.
"Well, don't tell me then, just tell it to yourself."
A smile lighted across Emily's face for a few seconds before she blurted out, "the Sacre-Coeur."
"What's the Sacre-Coeur?" Scott asked.
"It's this huge church on the Montremarte in Paris. It's so white that it seems to be brighter than the sun. The hill it's on is the highest in Paris and it overlooks the entire city. While you're walking up that giant hill all you can see is the sun reflecting off it. It's like a beacon guiding you up that hill the entire way. A lot of people don't make it up the hill to actually get to see the cathedral close up."
Emily reached in her bag and pulled out a cigarette. Scott reached into his pocket and pulled out his pack also. As Emily held the tube to her lips, Scott broke out his lighter and lit it for her.
"And, I nearly didn't make it up that hill either," Emily said. "I kept wanting to turn around. It makes your legs burn and your feet hurt walking up that hill. I just bit down on my cigarette like this," she said chomping own on the cigarette she now had in her mouth, kicked my legs up as high as I could ans I beat that hill."
"So it was worth it all, right?" Scott said.
"It was entirely worth it. Inside is this beautiful altar. And the whole thing is lit with nothing but candles. Little flames everywhere but it's enough to see all the paintings by. And then if you climb to the top of the dome, you can see the whole neighborhood in Paris. This great little neighborhood with artist easels set up everywhere and cute little cafes..."
Emily stopped cold.
"But that's..."
She began to bawl again. The tears seemed to come from deeper inside than Scott had ever seen them come from before. Emily's face actually seemed to be deflating with every new spasm that would force more tears to come. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a napkin. Handing it to her, he asked, "but that's what?"
"That little neighborhood," Emily sobbed, "was where Greg tried to rape me. It's like the whole neighborhood, now that I think about it is unsafe and unclean. I've got all of these beautiful memories of the neighborhood looking down on it from Sacre-Coeur but when I was actually down amongst the houses, all the memories I can think of now are that alley and his leering face."
"Don't think about those memories," Scott said abruptly to her trying to get her attention. Think about that shining church on the hill. Think about how good you felt."
"I felt alive," Emily said, "looking down at Paris from up there. I don't feel alive anymore now. It's as if I left myself bleeding on the ground in that alley instead of Greg."
"Emily," Scott said, his voice taking on a grave seriousness, "you're alive right now. You'll feel that feeling again, just like you did at the top of the Sacre-Couer. I looked at your face while you were talking about Paris and it was shining. It's the Emily that I know, it's the Emily that I love. Everybody goes through some tough times. You fight through them."
Emily's sobs temporarily stopped and she seemed to get a little bit angry, "tough times? What I went through in Paris, that wasn't just tough times, it was world shattering."
Scott knew she was right. All of his little experiences with language barriers and missed hostel curfews couldn't even come close to matching what Emily had gone through, even if they were all combined. But then he thought of his one truly traumatic experience of the entire trip.
"Warsaw wasn't a bed of roses for me either. Did you know that I was almost beaten to a pulp by skinheads?"
He looked down at his feet.
"What happened?" Emily asked.
"They were beating the Hell out of this oriental man. I guess he was Chinese, there's a lot of Chinese restaurants in Warsaw. There's a place called the Russian market where there's a whole row of them right besides the Polish restaurants. You'd love the Russian market, all sorts of electronics, and clothes and everything..."
He looked for any expression of excitement in her face and saw none.
"It was really late at night and I was walking through this, in hindsight, terrible neighborhood. Well, at first I didn't know what to do. This group was just kicking this poor guy in the stomach relentlessly. I thought they were going to kill him. There was something in them that said this wasn't intimidation, this was more."
"What did you do?" Emily asked.
"I screamed out in English, 'stop' and 'help.' I didn't think it would do anything because, in Poland not everyone speaks English. But, my screaming woke up some of the neighbors and one of them called the police. But one of them was inches away from my face and he had the same look aimed at me that he did at that poor Chinese guy sprawled out on the ground. If it hadn't been for the police sirens..."
"Scott," Emily said, "don't you see? You were in danger and all, and I don't want to discount that fear. But what happened to me..." She looked down at her arms again and the tears began anew.
"Let's look at what happened to you for a second," Scott said. "You were pushed down in an alley, right?"
Emily nodded.
"And you fought back. You got the upper hand and you made it so he's never going to look at another woman as prey again, right?"
Emily didn't say a word.
Scott put more emphasis on the word as he said again, "right?"
A calm descended over Emily's face as she said, "but don't you understand? I got lucky that time. What if anything had been different about the situation. What if he had..."
"But he didn't Emily, he didn't. You were able to defend yourself. You were able to affect change in the situation. You were that strong person. You are a strong person now."
"I don't feel strong right now," Emily said, "I just feel like I want peace from all this turmoil in my mind. Fighting it is the furthest thing from my mind. Fighting is what got me into this mess in the first place."
"Fighting by itself isn't inherently bad," Scott responded, "especially the personal struggle. Look around you right now, what do you see?"
Emily looked in the direction of the small white house with a sign that said, "U.S. ARMY CHECKPOINT" in large black letters. Behind it stood sandbags that had been there to block small arms fire from the East German side should war ever had broken out.
"I see Checkpoint Charlie," she said.
"And what do you see behind it?"
"It's a picture of an East German soldier. He's so young."
"Think of what that man saw, had to live with on a daily basis. And think about that fact that he was the first line of protection to keep the order in East Germany as it was. He was the one whose job it was to keep those from the West out. Do you think he liked his job?"
"I don't know," Emily said.
"My guess is that he was like most other East Germans and he heard over the Voice of America or Radio Free Europe what was happening in the west. He probably wanted more than anything to get out of East Berlin. And, think about it. It was probably fifty times worse for him than it was for a lot of East Germans because he saw the west every day. He could see into the eyes of the American or German soldier who was manning this checkpoint which is now a tourist attraction but used to be so much more."
"But he staying in East Germany, right?" Emily asked.
"Probably. I don't know his personal story. For all we know, he could have been one of the hundreds who tried everything to go over the wall. One of the hundreds who were shot trying to escape to the West for a better way of life..."
Scott paused, worried that he would upset Emily, who had always been such a staunch defender of how life had been in Eastern Europe. When Emily gave no reaction, Scott continued, "but not everyone tried to escape and not everyone wanted what the West had. I befriended this girl, Ivana, in Warsaw, she worked at a restaurant I really liked. She told me about how, even now, there are people who want to go back to the old ways because it meant you were cared for. But, I think a lot of people stayed in East Berlin - all of the former Soviet Bloc - because they wanted to change it from the inside. They faced tough times every day but they stood firm knowing that one day the sun would shine on them again in a new East Germany, some great combination of having things like in the West and being cared for, as well as possible like in the Bloc. The ideas aren't mutually exclusive."
"Scott," Emily said, "you haven't been to the parts of Berlin that used to be under communist control. There's so much poverty, there's so much despair. It's like its two separate cities."
"But, the people there," Scott said, "if they're anything like the people that I met in Warsaw, they live their lives. They work to make them better in any way they can. Even under communism, they lived their lives. They loved their children and their spouses and, some of them, even their jobs. They were alive in ways that had nothing to do with the government. In a way, they were more alive because they appreciated what they had."
Emily still didn't say anything.
"And just like them, you're alive too, Emily. As long as you're alive, there's hope for a better tomorrow. And your tomorrows will be better because I'm there for you. I don't know. Maybe you can show me that I'm wrong, let's go to that section you went to before. We're only feet away from the former East Berlin now. Look, there's the sign that says, 'YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR.'"
Scott pointed to a sign on their right written in four languages with people crowding underneath it and taking pictures.
Emily walked forward almost timidly as if there was the invisible wall that she couldn't cross. When she got to the other side of the sign, she looked back at Scott and he could see a little bit of the fire in her eyes. She seemed to want to prove him wrong. Scott took solace in the fact that it was there again. He just had to make sure that it wasn't extinguished.
Chapter Word Count: 2788
Daily Word Count: 5949
Total Word Count: 86505
Scott fumbled with the change slot on the pink phone between the two doors with the man and the woman on it. He looked back at the table through the small opening that camouflaged his true mission of taking Emily into this ice cream shop. Emily was still where they had sat down near the ice cream selections in the front. She sat at the table engaged in taking the green play-doh and molding it into various shapes trying to find ones that she liked. She did have a satisfied look on her face for brief moments before she would take her hand and flatten her creations.
The phone was proving to be no help in throwing Scott's thinking a line about how to assist Emily. He couldn't think of who to call. His thinking went that if he called any authorities who could help Emily that it would just make her situation worse. She'd be stuck in some hospital in Berlin where the attendants didn't speak English. This would just send her further down the spiral to the state of confusion and self destruction that Emily sat in right now.
He thought about calling Emily's mother back in the United States. Maybe she had seen her in this state before and could provide some assistance on how to break her out of it. This wasn't a number that he had used more than once or twice, however, so he'd have to ask Emily for it. And that too would further arose her suspicions. Scott was worried that anything he said or did that confirmed her thoughts that she was no longer rational would just add to the theory she had generated that everybody thought she was nothing more than a burden.
It began to look more and more like he was on his own. He thanked his prior experiences in Europe that had proved to him that he could effect change using only his own skills. That's the key, he thought, restoring Emily's thoughts that she was an actor in her own life. She seemed to have given up the idea that she mattered. She seemed to have given up the idea that she could change the situation she was in.
He went to the bathroom, the excuse that he had used to break away from the table, and went back to Emily. She looked up from the mess of green that she had made on one of the shop's napkins.
"Don't you feel better creating something?" Scott asked her.
"Actually I do," she said, "but nothing I create is any good. There's no inspiration."
"Emily look around, there's inspiration everywhere..."
"I don't see it," Emily interrupted.
Seeing this attempted path at trying to help Emily was proving futile, he changed his tactic. He would show Emily that Berlin had a pulse like Warsaw had and if she found it she would feel better. He hung on to the hope that her face lit up talking about Berlin itself once and that it possibly could again if they just kept talking about it.
"Remember how you said that I seemed to find beauty in ugly places?" Scott asked.
Emily nodded.
"Well do you want to know how I did it?"
Emily nodded again.
"I felt the pulse of the city. I tried to figure out what made it tick. Like in Warsaw it was the Polish desire for independence. Once you can see it all around, the city makes sense. And do you want to know why I originally thought of this method? Everywhere that I meant, I thought, what would Emily do?"
"Emily wouldn't be able to do anything," she said back, crushing her little fist into the play-doh.
"Don't you see, Emily? You can do anything that you want. I used to think that I couldn't do anything myself or for myself. And it took some really depressed times in Paris and Vienna and even Budapest before I realized that I was trying to enjoy the cities for what they had to offer on the surface. It wasn't until I looked beneath and saw what made each city special that I really appreciated them. Looking back, I realize that you're right. Warsaw is an awful place by itself. I mean, if nothing else it's false. The Old Town there isn't even old. But what's beautiful about it is that it was entirely rebuilt after World War II. Think about it. Think of all of those hands taking a city that was basically flattened to nothing and rebuilding it from scratch because they loved it, it was their city."
"So what's so special about Berlin?" Emily asked as they deposited their empty paper ice cream bowls into the garbage bin and walked back into the street where Checkpoint Charlie stood. Scott noticed that the dough was missing from Emily's hands. She had thrown it out along with the melted milk that had once constituted her ice cream.
"I don't know Emily, you tell me," Scott said, "I feel like I really haven't really done that much since I've gotten here."
"See Scott, I'm holding you back!" Emily cried out. The tears started to fall from her eyes almost instantaneously.
"No, Emily. Emily you're not. I haven't done anything in Berlin because I wanted to do all the things with you. Let's see Berlin. You and me, what do you say?"
"Isn't that what we're doing right now?" she asked, tears still in her voice.
They turned the corner from the ice cream shop and Scott didn't say a word. Nothing he said seemed to be helping at all. Telling his stories to Emily had just made her more upset, he would have to figure out how to get her to pull the beauty out of her own stories.
"Think about Paris," he began. "Surely it couldn't have been all awful. Surely there was something there that grabbed your imagination."
"Well there was something," Emily said.
"What was this something?" Scott asked.
"You're going to think that it's weird. I don't want to tell you," Emily said.
"Well, don't tell me then, just tell it to yourself."
A smile lighted across Emily's face for a few seconds before she blurted out, "the Sacre-Coeur."
"What's the Sacre-Coeur?" Scott asked.
"It's this huge church on the Montremarte in Paris. It's so white that it seems to be brighter than the sun. The hill it's on is the highest in Paris and it overlooks the entire city. While you're walking up that giant hill all you can see is the sun reflecting off it. It's like a beacon guiding you up that hill the entire way. A lot of people don't make it up the hill to actually get to see the cathedral close up."
Emily reached in her bag and pulled out a cigarette. Scott reached into his pocket and pulled out his pack also. As Emily held the tube to her lips, Scott broke out his lighter and lit it for her.
"And, I nearly didn't make it up that hill either," Emily said. "I kept wanting to turn around. It makes your legs burn and your feet hurt walking up that hill. I just bit down on my cigarette like this," she said chomping own on the cigarette she now had in her mouth, kicked my legs up as high as I could ans I beat that hill."
"So it was worth it all, right?" Scott said.
"It was entirely worth it. Inside is this beautiful altar. And the whole thing is lit with nothing but candles. Little flames everywhere but it's enough to see all the paintings by. And then if you climb to the top of the dome, you can see the whole neighborhood in Paris. This great little neighborhood with artist easels set up everywhere and cute little cafes..."
Emily stopped cold.
"But that's..."
She began to bawl again. The tears seemed to come from deeper inside than Scott had ever seen them come from before. Emily's face actually seemed to be deflating with every new spasm that would force more tears to come. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a napkin. Handing it to her, he asked, "but that's what?"
"That little neighborhood," Emily sobbed, "was where Greg tried to rape me. It's like the whole neighborhood, now that I think about it is unsafe and unclean. I've got all of these beautiful memories of the neighborhood looking down on it from Sacre-Coeur but when I was actually down amongst the houses, all the memories I can think of now are that alley and his leering face."
"Don't think about those memories," Scott said abruptly to her trying to get her attention. Think about that shining church on the hill. Think about how good you felt."
"I felt alive," Emily said, "looking down at Paris from up there. I don't feel alive anymore now. It's as if I left myself bleeding on the ground in that alley instead of Greg."
"Emily," Scott said, his voice taking on a grave seriousness, "you're alive right now. You'll feel that feeling again, just like you did at the top of the Sacre-Couer. I looked at your face while you were talking about Paris and it was shining. It's the Emily that I know, it's the Emily that I love. Everybody goes through some tough times. You fight through them."
Emily's sobs temporarily stopped and she seemed to get a little bit angry, "tough times? What I went through in Paris, that wasn't just tough times, it was world shattering."
Scott knew she was right. All of his little experiences with language barriers and missed hostel curfews couldn't even come close to matching what Emily had gone through, even if they were all combined. But then he thought of his one truly traumatic experience of the entire trip.
"Warsaw wasn't a bed of roses for me either. Did you know that I was almost beaten to a pulp by skinheads?"
He looked down at his feet.
"What happened?" Emily asked.
"They were beating the Hell out of this oriental man. I guess he was Chinese, there's a lot of Chinese restaurants in Warsaw. There's a place called the Russian market where there's a whole row of them right besides the Polish restaurants. You'd love the Russian market, all sorts of electronics, and clothes and everything..."
He looked for any expression of excitement in her face and saw none.
"It was really late at night and I was walking through this, in hindsight, terrible neighborhood. Well, at first I didn't know what to do. This group was just kicking this poor guy in the stomach relentlessly. I thought they were going to kill him. There was something in them that said this wasn't intimidation, this was more."
"What did you do?" Emily asked.
"I screamed out in English, 'stop' and 'help.' I didn't think it would do anything because, in Poland not everyone speaks English. But, my screaming woke up some of the neighbors and one of them called the police. But one of them was inches away from my face and he had the same look aimed at me that he did at that poor Chinese guy sprawled out on the ground. If it hadn't been for the police sirens..."
"Scott," Emily said, "don't you see? You were in danger and all, and I don't want to discount that fear. But what happened to me..." She looked down at her arms again and the tears began anew.
"Let's look at what happened to you for a second," Scott said. "You were pushed down in an alley, right?"
Emily nodded.
"And you fought back. You got the upper hand and you made it so he's never going to look at another woman as prey again, right?"
Emily didn't say a word.
Scott put more emphasis on the word as he said again, "right?"
A calm descended over Emily's face as she said, "but don't you understand? I got lucky that time. What if anything had been different about the situation. What if he had..."
"But he didn't Emily, he didn't. You were able to defend yourself. You were able to affect change in the situation. You were that strong person. You are a strong person now."
"I don't feel strong right now," Emily said, "I just feel like I want peace from all this turmoil in my mind. Fighting it is the furthest thing from my mind. Fighting is what got me into this mess in the first place."
"Fighting by itself isn't inherently bad," Scott responded, "especially the personal struggle. Look around you right now, what do you see?"
Emily looked in the direction of the small white house with a sign that said, "U.S. ARMY CHECKPOINT" in large black letters. Behind it stood sandbags that had been there to block small arms fire from the East German side should war ever had broken out.
"I see Checkpoint Charlie," she said.
"And what do you see behind it?"
"It's a picture of an East German soldier. He's so young."
"Think of what that man saw, had to live with on a daily basis. And think about that fact that he was the first line of protection to keep the order in East Germany as it was. He was the one whose job it was to keep those from the West out. Do you think he liked his job?"
"I don't know," Emily said.
"My guess is that he was like most other East Germans and he heard over the Voice of America or Radio Free Europe what was happening in the west. He probably wanted more than anything to get out of East Berlin. And, think about it. It was probably fifty times worse for him than it was for a lot of East Germans because he saw the west every day. He could see into the eyes of the American or German soldier who was manning this checkpoint which is now a tourist attraction but used to be so much more."
"But he staying in East Germany, right?" Emily asked.
"Probably. I don't know his personal story. For all we know, he could have been one of the hundreds who tried everything to go over the wall. One of the hundreds who were shot trying to escape to the West for a better way of life..."
Scott paused, worried that he would upset Emily, who had always been such a staunch defender of how life had been in Eastern Europe. When Emily gave no reaction, Scott continued, "but not everyone tried to escape and not everyone wanted what the West had. I befriended this girl, Ivana, in Warsaw, she worked at a restaurant I really liked. She told me about how, even now, there are people who want to go back to the old ways because it meant you were cared for. But, I think a lot of people stayed in East Berlin - all of the former Soviet Bloc - because they wanted to change it from the inside. They faced tough times every day but they stood firm knowing that one day the sun would shine on them again in a new East Germany, some great combination of having things like in the West and being cared for, as well as possible like in the Bloc. The ideas aren't mutually exclusive."
"Scott," Emily said, "you haven't been to the parts of Berlin that used to be under communist control. There's so much poverty, there's so much despair. It's like its two separate cities."
"But, the people there," Scott said, "if they're anything like the people that I met in Warsaw, they live their lives. They work to make them better in any way they can. Even under communism, they lived their lives. They loved their children and their spouses and, some of them, even their jobs. They were alive in ways that had nothing to do with the government. In a way, they were more alive because they appreciated what they had."
Emily still didn't say anything.
"And just like them, you're alive too, Emily. As long as you're alive, there's hope for a better tomorrow. And your tomorrows will be better because I'm there for you. I don't know. Maybe you can show me that I'm wrong, let's go to that section you went to before. We're only feet away from the former East Berlin now. Look, there's the sign that says, 'YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR.'"
Scott pointed to a sign on their right written in four languages with people crowding underneath it and taking pictures.
Emily walked forward almost timidly as if there was the invisible wall that she couldn't cross. When she got to the other side of the sign, she looked back at Scott and he could see a little bit of the fire in her eyes. She seemed to want to prove him wrong. Scott took solace in the fact that it was there again. He just had to make sure that it wasn't extinguished.
Chapter Word Count: 2788
Daily Word Count: 5949
Total Word Count: 86505
