You know how it is. The gap between flights is so long you stroll the airport a few times, then settle down at what you think is going to be your gate, well before they have actually announced it. If you are a writer being at a departure spurs you to start another five line story and you open your note book. You become deeply engrossed in getting the first five lines right, and look around to try to trigger the start to your spontaineous novel, and you spot an interesting fellow passenger coming towards your gate.

She was limping. I helped her with her bag. It was a short second flight to London, and I went to her seat at the back of the plane and took her bag down for her. We took the escalator down to the tube station at the airport.

“MIND THE GAP PLEASE!”

It echoed, at every station, she said, on her first tube ride from Kensal Green to Holborn, then onwards to British Museum, where she finally understood what the gap was and could recite the sentence clearly. She’d noticed the gap also in-between the stops, on the big advertisments plastered over the walls, the clothes and glances from fellow tube-takers. The gap, between a small village in Armenia hewn from the earth, a bare stone cottage and grandfather’s rough hands carrying goat’s milk, between the stifling presence of Soviet authority and rules when she had chosen Iran as a place to escape persecution. Iran, where even with its kind people one could not feel any relief from the relentless pressure. After that had come the war with Azerbaijan, and the bullet that had ended her dancing career or her use as a soldier. So she had escaped again. Better prepared.

“MIND THE GAP PLEASE!”

London A-Z, tucked under her arm said nothing about the gap. In her small black leather bag she’d still carried a hunk of cheese from home, a notebook and short pencil. In her first few days of solitary conefinement, in her room in ——-, she had tried to ignore the bug that bites the hardest: loneliness.

In many ways her dry cleaning job was the right metaphor for her arrival in London’s rain, she told me, the rain that had been washing the streets ever since she first got there, folding dry-cleaned clothes next to the plug with frayed wires on the wall adorned with torn pictures of other eras, and shadows cast over them from a street light shining through the front window.

“It is an eleven-step process, dry cleaning,” she said, and looked out of the tube window to check the stop, “about half as many steps as I needed.”

A song was playing from a radio somewhere.

“Come to the museum with me,” she said, “I want to show you what I dreamed of seeing before I came to London.”

“MIND THE GAP PLEASE,” the automated voice declared, as we got off the tube.

“My heritage is Assyrian, we are a disappeared Christian people of the Middle East. This is where I come to close the gap.”

Outside the rumble of an oncoming storm started. She shivered. “I forgot my umbrella,” she said. I hesitated — .

where do you step
when the stepping stones are gone?
shelter is an open mind

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If you want to learn more — much more about the Assyrians click on ‘Put Your Lips Together’ to upload a free copy (only for a limited duration). None of the persons in the haibun above feature in the book. I think.