Getting Fit

I was spending nights at the all night cafe. They liked me there. But they couldn't understand how someone like me had no money, no friends, no work, had nothing in fact. I did exercises, noted how strong and lean I was getting. I thought about Beatrix, my annulled Hungarian wife, remembered when she had finally decided she wanted to see me again after I had returned from Greece to Budapest.

I'd had to wait a couple of weeks. We met at the Deak Ference metro station near Macdonalds. Beatrix was surprised. Everything was as before, better than before. She said, "How can we be this way with each other after all the terrible things we say about each other?" I knew the answer. Because I knew the answer I could be with her. Because she didn't know the answer, and could not even listen to the answer, Beatrix was never long with me. I said:

- You think about things, and like the way I think. You want things, you want my company. But you put both thinking and wanting at the service of your ambition to be rich and famous.

- What's wrong with that?

- You should want to be with the man you have decided is best and work if at all to be able to do that.

- I should work to be able to be with you? I don't have to work for that. I can be with you, I can be with anyone.

- I know. You are so attractive. You've worked at making yourself attractive. I'll never get through to you.

- You're arrogant. You think you're better than me.

- I can't get through to you because you put reasoning and desire in the service of ambition. When I tell you it's wrong to do that you say my reasons are useless to you in getting what you want.

- I'm not a hermit like you.

- But you love this hermit.

- I love making him my slave.

So though we love each other it is only a matter of time before she is gone again. She was gone in a week. I think about this at the night cafe. I am unintelligable to these people here in Budapest, who like Beatrix have been indoctrinated into thinking everthing should be put into service of doing things, making money, becoming a success. I cannot communicate with them because reasoning and deciding what should be wished for is for them only to be put at the service of success and money making. They sympathize, they understand, but there is nothing they can do about it. Their direction of what they do is set, predetermined.

An email arrives while I'm at the cafe. A way out I'd been pursuing has worked, possibly. The laws of Israel, not the people administering them, wish my presence there. Not because I'd be a success. The Israeli Agency has put into writing their belief that I was a certain failure. But because they've been pushed, by me and diplomats - people like me sometimes fall into strange company - they've relented. I've slipped through the cracks. The state was founded on the idea of home, of giving individuals a home. Not the idea a group be given a place to be ambitiously enlarged and made more productive. But that is what was happening there now, the views of me and my wife were at war there. I ought to feel right at home.