#253 Walking, Flying--3

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A poem about shopping around the market streets in the course of his travels, Siaghin in Tangiers, Sierpes in Seville, the Champs Elysées. You run into people doing this, and you see their need in their eyes. “Buy it, mister. You can have it half price.” If you catch them lying, well, that’s no matter, and that’s part of the bargain if you fall for it. Life is hard for everybody. John R. St. in Detroit, where life is hard too. B. hints at a story of the Casbah, in Tangiers, at midnight, “where he was truly taken / out of his prone for products.” “Out of his prone”? This got him on his feet, whatever the products were. Something rare and excellent to drink, perhaps.

In Budapest, 1991, the ethnic Hungarians from the stolen land of Romanian Transylvania would come to the homeland capital to line up in the underground subway stations, selling what they had. Gorgeous colored embroidery (we bought some), folk dresses and vests sewn by hand, small wooden toys. Fur hats from the just-departed Russian military, blue fox, brown mink, white ermine, black sable, with Flaming Heart of Lenin pins on the front. These were serious hats, and they would keep your head warm, whatever reservation some elitist American like me may have had about the ethics of fine Russian furs. One man I recall had no crafts, no lifted Russian merchandise—couldn’t sew, eyes too tired and fingers too coarse to learn embroidery. Couldn’t get his hands on Russian military uniforms to sell to the tourists, only just barely beginning to trickle in to the East. But he had a magnificent pair of boots. Tall, soft, brown cowhide, with a thick cuff below the knee, high, sturdy and stylish, the boots a cowherd from the Hungarian plains would wear while riding his warmblood stallion, scuffed just enough to show they were broken in properly, smelling of leather and horses, still with dust in the heels. He stood in line with the men and women offering bright scarves for sale, chess sets, lace, embroidery, bottles of homemade plum brandy, cloudy apple jam, his magnificent boots draped over his arms. The boots would not have fit me. There was a defiant pride in his eyes, and determination not to succumb to the shame and desperation that stalked him. It was only a brief hard moment in history, but people starve quicker than history. There have been countless too many such moments in the slow unwrapping of European struggle. But this was one such moment that I witnessed. You don’t forget it.