A Beheaded Cart (standard:romance, 1521 words)
Author: samvaknin	Added: Oct 10 2004	Views/Reads: 3286/2169	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
My grandfather had one love: my grandmother. A ravishing, proud, raven-haired woman.

(In Hebrew, the word "Agala" means both cart and the feminine form of
calf. A beheaded calf is among the sacrificial offerings enumerated in 
the Bible). 

My grandfather, cradling an infant's crib, departed. Navigating left and
right, far along the pavement, he reached a concrete, round, post. 
There he rested, sheltered from the humid sun by peeling posters for 
lachrymose Turkish films. He pushed the crib outside the penumbral 
circle and waited. 

Curious folks besieged the old man and his orphaned frame and then
proceeded to buy from him the salted seeds and sweets that he lay, 
meticulously organized, inside the crib. My grandfather smiled at them 
through sea-blue eyes, as he wrapped the purchased sweetmeats in 
rustling brown paper bags. 

My embarrassed uncles built for him a creaking wooden cart from
remaindered construction materials. They painted it green and mounted 
it on large, thin-tyred, wheels borrowed from an ancient pram. They 
attached to it a partitioned table-top confiscated from the greengrocer 
down the lane. Every morning, forehead wrinkled, my grandfather would 
fill the wooden compartments with  various snacks and trinkets, at 
pains to separate them neatly. Black sunflower seeds, white pumpkin 
seeds, the salted and the sweet, tiny plastic toys bursting with 
candies, whistles, and rattles. 

Still, he never gave up his crib, installing it on top of his squeaking
vehicle, and filling it to its tattered brim with a rainbow of 
offerings. At night, he stowed it under the cart, locking it behind its 
two crumbling doors, among the unsold merchandise. 

With sunrise, my grandfather would exit the house and head towards the
miniature plot of garden adjoining it. He would cross the patch, 
stepping carefully on a pebbled path in its midst. Then, sighing but 
never stooping, he would drive his green trolley - a tall and stout and 
handsome man, fair-skinned and sapphire-eyed. "A movie star" - they 
gasped behind his back. Day in and day out, he impelled his rickety 
pushcart to its concrete post, there dispensing to the children with a 
smile, a permanence till dusk. With sunset, he gathered his few goods, 
bolted the fledgling flaps, and pushed back home, a few steps away. 

When he grew old, he added to his burden a stool with an attached
umbrella, to shield him from the elements, and a greenish nylon sheet 
to protect his wares. He became a fixture in this town of my birth. His 
lime cart turned into a meeting spot - "by Pardo", they would say, 
secure in the knowledge that he would always be there, erect and 
gracious. Like two forces of nature, my grandpa and the concrete post - 
older than the fading movie posters - watched the town transformed, 
roads asphalted, children turn adults, bringing their off-spring to buy 
from him a stick of bitter black chewing gum. 

Lone by his cart, he bid the dead farewell and greeted the newborn,
himself aging and bending. Creases sprouted in his face, around his 
dimming sights, and in his white and delicate hands. 

My grandfather had one love: my grandmother. A ravishing, proud,
raven-haired woman. A framed retouched photo of her hung, imposing, on 
one of the walls. In it she stood, defiant, leaning on a carved pillar 
in a faraway place. This is how he must have seen her at first: a 
mysterious, sad-eyed disparity between dark and fair. Thus he fell in 
love and made her his only world. 

This woman sat by his side, adjacent to his azure pushcart, day in and
day out. She said nothing and he remained mute. They just stared with 
vacuous eyes, perhaps away, perhaps inside, perhaps back, to previous 
abodes in bustling cities. 

At first, she seemed to like being his sidekick, confidently doling
confectionery to toddlers, whose mothers remained forever infants in 
her memory. Intermittently, she laid a shriveled hand on his venous 
knee, leaving it there for a split, fluttering, second, conveying 
warmth and withdrawing as unobtrusively. It was enough to restore him 
to his full stature. But then, the municipal workers came and pasted 
funereal announcements onto his concrete pole and the magic was all but 
gone. 


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