Bataclan

He lies on the bed, toying with the remote. Every channel, every discussion, every image he has seen a thousand times. “Friday night's attacks”, “rising death toll, the number now stands at 127 dead, with more than 300 injured”, “Bataclan” “Carillon”, “scenes of carnage” “we managed to escape”, the sheer number of journalist accents, montages of international leaders condemning the actions, and the sounds of sirens in all the clips. It makes him jump every time a siren passes under the window. It is astounding how one half hour on evening could shake the world this much.

He doesn't want to go outside. It is a ghost town, anyway, no one wants to go outside. The shops are closed, the metro is closed. No one looks at each other - he can see them through his window.

Live feed keeps adding to the death toll, keeps linking to witnesses' stories. Photos of carnage, frenzied videos. People going down, tripping those trying to flee the scene. (Little warnings about graphic content).

The smell of the coffee he made three hours ago is going to make him sick. These walls. But he can't go to the door. He won't close the curtain, (or the window). It looks too obvious, too scared. (“We're staying. We can't cower because that's what they want,” says a man on the television).

Were they still out there? Were they coming for him? Another #porteouverte notification – this one only half a block away. Good heavens, if he only had the strength to get there. Perhaps being amongst people would help. The safest time to travel, actually (so someone said on the tv). Everyone on high alert.

A loud noise.

He jumps. In fact, he is so frightened, he may have soiled himself. It was only a knock at the door, a server who had come to clean the room. Breathlessly, he bids them leave, too hurriedly, too angrily – ashamed of his fear.

They were coming. They'd have to be. Them and every one else. Every single one of the dead, rising from their hastily-donated death sheets, standing in their own blood on the sidewalks. Look around you, they are everywhere! No dignity in death only quantity of corpses. But it's not them. It is the people weeping at the sites of flowers and candles. Not the ones who will, days from now, be taking up arms and waving burning banners. It is those weeping. They accuse him.

What is this you have done?

Three on a Bench

I can tune shopper-buzz out pretty easily when I have to. So I just took the first bench I saw. There was a lady facing the doors taking up a half between herself and her handbag, and a scruffy-looking man on my left who asked me to move up just as I was sitting down. I obliged. We sat a minute. I got out my notes and pen, facing the windows and the other two, one on my right and one on my left, facing the doors. For a moment no one spoke. In the buzz, we formed an interesting tableau of strangers who had no interest in crossing the walls which divided us, and who were closer to each other than we might ever otherwise choose to be, and were politely ignoring the fact. I focused on the work, grateful to be thus excused from smalltalk, but interested nonetheless in the bizarre indifference of us all. Presently, the man to my left spoke.

– Please ma'am do you have some money. I'm want to buy some bread. I live onna streets. I'm want to buy some bread. Please ma'am, some bread.

– No, I don't have any money on me, my daughter has money. In the same tone I always think, but out of self-effacing feigning apology I never speak to beggars out loud, the woman's tone was brusque and at the same time plaintive. It was the sort of tone that one hears on radio stations when the host realises too late that they've allowed a ranter air time.

Disturbed from my work, and pre-empting the inevitable truculence, I turned and said in my apologetic tone, I'm sorry, I don't have cash either. Not strictly true – I had one coin of small change, which I wouldn't part with (because what was worse than giving was frequently the disgust with which such gifts were received), and a note which was intended for my brother-in-law's birthday tomorrow. So, technically speaking, not mine. I returned to my notes. In my head at least, this old lady was feisty and snappy enough to deal with him.

– Please'm. Do you have money. I live onna streets I'm just want to buy some bread.

– If you wait, I will give you something when my daughter comes, said the old lady to my right, in a scolding tone. A surprise, I hadn't expected her to give in, but perhaps, seeing I did nothing to chase him away, she was exasperated and would prefer to shut him up than stick to those the rules which dictate the poisonous They'll Probably Use It To Buy Drugs, and the more socially-aware You're Not Helping Them Get Off the Streets If You Give Them Your Money.

– Please ma'am I'm just want to buy some bread I'm sleeping on the streets, ma'am, he whined.

– I know that. You don't need to tell me again. (I suppressed a giggle).

And so, her brusque tone held off conversation. I flipped between pages. I wrote things down. I was pleased with my progress, vaguely interested to see the end of this piece unfold, and to my knowledge, neither moved. My attention wandered occasionally. Could I buy something substantial at the little pharmacy over there, not a chocolate, but maybe something for this man. Stingy perhaps, but I would never give money. If he wants money for food, I'd get him food. That's the way it is. But after a polite but Don't Forget Me I'm Here sigh, he would try to catch my eye. So I made the gaze vague, pretended to finish the thought that I had wandered after, and returned to my notes.

Time passed. My page filled.

He got up.

– Ma'am I'm coming now. He was getting up.

– Don't be too long, she admonished. I'm leaving now.

I watched him go. Bored of waiting. Suspicious of her promise (I was too). Perhaps to check there weren't any other most likely options for his time while he waited. I wondered what the turnover was per hour. If she pulled a Me, she'd give him a coin whilst he might have gotten at least three times as much if he hadn't chosen to wait. The retired, the student and the beggar on a bench. He returned. What a group we made. We could be a bar joke. At the moment though, I wondered whether we weren't a sad subject for at artist's exhibition.

Time continued.

– The payson you are waiting for ma'am she's not coming.

I heard complaint. But my annoyance was stifled by an urge to laugh.

– She's just in the chemist, the lady said, a trifle impatient. What's your hurry?

This time I couldn't stop the smile. Facing the wrong direction, head bent over books, it didn't matter. I thought of this blogpost I would write when I got home. I wondered whether I had a spare sheet of paper to make notes. There was comedy gold here.

He paused – wisely, I thought.

– The security ma'am. (One had just walked past). They don' wan' tme here. And he lapsed into silence again.

At last she said, Oh there she comes. I pulled myself from my concentration. I'd found a sheet of paper. I heard someone approaching. The old woman said, I was about to send out the boy scouts. (I had thought at first she was saying voice note, which simultaneously would have made her a techno-savvy grandma and a fuddy-duddy old bird in my mind for knowing how ostentatiously to operate her mobile phone.

– I've never met with such a useless bunch of ruddy... (an incoherent sighing mumble). Here. I paid with a hundred, and there's forty-four.

The old lady again, There you are. It was worth the wait. (She sounded as if she was smiling, genuinely happy to fulfil this duty).

He, insignificant once again, Thank you ma'am.

I had my paper. They were getting up.

– What was that?

– He was asking me for money. He's very hungry, she said.

Funny, I didn't recall that he'd ever pushed that detail.

– And you have that face.

– I know. “Try Me”.

I turned. I wanted to see that face. But I only knew her as the pulpy body next to me, head visible under a coiffed measure of scarce hair, though dyed very red.

I feel I could be very preachy about moral values, human dignity or something more important, but it's more likely to be a sermon against myself and the callousness of writers to be content to observe these situations and amuse themselves with thoughts of writing them up.

Story Stew: "Exodus: Gods and Kings"

He looked out over them, a new people, enlivened by a relief so noticeable, it started to look like hope. Their enemies misinterpreted it as a plague of madness brought upon them by the sun-god, and where there was refreshed endurance and docility, they read insolence.

He looked over to his brother. My brother, he thought. I have one of those. That was his own chin he could see in him, the spark of his own eyes, blood of his blood.

“Speak what is on you heart brother,” Aaron said. “Tell me what troubles it?”

“Nothing ttroubles it,” he said, glancing to the men jostling near him. “The people the people the people the people look to me now. And a And a aI am not troubled.” He motioned for his brother to lead on. He seldom spoke but when he had to. Often his speech more impeded action and slowed his interlocutors though they patiently awaited the flooding of his words for the rest of the sentence to break free from his stammer. He was scared of being thought a fool, of being pitied, treated as one the gods had cursed, and it was worse when he was scared. Right now, it was terror.

Aaron reached over and grasped his arm. “Brother,” he said. When whole courts of Egyptians looked over him as if he were a foreigner, slow of tongue and impoverished in common parlance, Aaron knew him. Aaron saw a man of character betrayed and disguised by his tongue. Aaron saw a leader. “Brother, do you now doubt? You, whose witness rekindled our faith by its mere report, we who have not seen the wonders which you know. Can you now begin to doubt?”

“Ido not doubt,” he said, squaring his shoulders,“do not doubt that we weare called. We are called. Momostly Ido not doubt the nnnobility of our cause.”

“A noble death even, is more than any of us dared wish for, brother. We lived and toiled and died in the mud.”

They surveyed the working men. Weakened, and limp as string, it seemed there was nothing more than hope holding them together. Following his gaze, Aaron's face coloured with grief, every personal anguish and each person's pain was his own as if it were his own flesh. That grief, that overwhelming agony was now washed with a stronger determination. This hope, the hope of redemption, salvation. This hope that he had brought, this hope of which he was the emissary. The poor herald who could not speak.

He had never known these people, not as they would want. He viewed them with a foreman's eye, and the eye of a foreigner.

When he spoke, it was gruff, gargled as with great emotion, but the words, curiously came easily. “These men are weak. They are beaten down. They cannot wield swords. They have no strength to do anything.”

Aaron's face changed, a little of that confidence had washed away.

Moses took a breath, readying himself to meet whatever came. “We are truly in God's hands now.”

And he dared not doubt. His God repaid the genocide with genocide, his God banished their sun-god with darkness, though it came not near the camp of the Israelites. The sacred all-sustaining river turned to blood, and the crops, the livestock and the houses of the enemies were ravaged by plague upon plague, though it did not come near God's people. And god by god, the enemies were abandoned. Their own king, their own incarnate deity among men, was failing them, and every time he negotiated for the end, refusal to honour the agreement brought ruin and disaster upon their houses. Their land was brought to its knees, without one god in their temple to turn to but the One outside of it.

And having freed his people, this One remained with them always, teaching them, instructing them, enduring with them when human leaders failed them. He carved his ways on stone for them to learn, and on their hearts (some time after Moses broke both stone tablets at once) for them to love, so that no one would ever be estranged from him or have to guess at his goodness.

__

OR

You could just make a movie where God is a vindictive child, Moses and his merry men have time (and equipment) to take weeks off their oppressive slavery schedule to have Egyptian-slaying training camps, and Moses himself, the circumcised adopted boy is raised in a house of true-blue racists who never notice his is one of the hated Other. Oh, and stone rules endure through the ages, apparently even beyond the (more important) New Commandment given by God (actually) humanly incarnate. Yeah.