The Suffering of Being Kafka | Page 8

perfect couple! A felon and an Arab! Perhaps you are an Arab too?"
"I am not an Arab" - I respond calmly - "They are too well mannered for the likes of me and you."
She blows up:
"Son of a bitch, maniac, look who's talking!" - She leans towards me and scratches my face with broken, patchily varnished nails - "A prisoner piece of shit and whoring stench of an Arab stink up this bus!"
My neighbour half rises from our common seat, grabs her extended arm and affixes it firmly behind her back. She screams to her dumbfounded audience: "They are together in it, this entire group, and they are a menace. Driver, stop this instant, I want the police, now!"
I do not react. It was foolish of me to have partaken in this tiff in the first place. Prisoners involved in incidents of public unrest end up spending a week or more in the nearest squalid detention centre, away from the relative safety of the penitentiary. Anything can happen in these infernos of perspiring, drug-addicted flesh, those killing fields of haemorrhaging syringes, those purgatories of squeals and whimpers and shaking of the bars, draped tight in sooty air.
I spent a month in these conditions and was about to return, I feel convinced.
The driver brakes the bus, rises, and gestures to the Arab helplessly. She tries to extricate herself by moving towards his cubicle. Some women mesh their hands, trapping her flapping arms, flailing about, her cheeks lattices of translucent rivulets. Her fear is audible in shallow exhalations.
But her captors persevere. They clench her scarf and the trimmings of her coat and twist them around the Arab's breathless neck.
The driver disembarks through the pneumatically susurrating doors. He walks the gravel path adjacent to the highway, desperately trying to wave down a passing car. Someone finally stops and they have a hushed exchange through a barricaded window. The hatchback cruises away.
The driver hesitates, his eyes glued to the receding vehicle. He contemplates the hostile bus with dread and climbs aboard. He sinks into his seat and sighs.
A patrol car arrives a few minutes later and disgorges two policemen. One elderly, stout and stilted, his face a venous spasm. He keeps feeling the worn butt of his undersized revolver. The other cop does the talking. He is lithe, a youth in camouflage, penumbral moustache, anorectic, sinewy hands, his eyes an adulterated cyan. He swells his chest and draws back his bony shoulders, attempting to conceal his meagreness.
"What's going on here?" - his voice a shocking bass. We are silenced by the contrast.
The instigator of the turmoil clears a path and fingers his oversized tunic as she volunteers:
"She is a terrorist and he is a convict and they were both planning to blow this bus up."
"Twaddle!" - roars my neighbour - "She is a hysterical, psychotic, panicky woman! Look what she did to his face!" - he points at me - "And that one, over there" - he singles the Arab out with a nail-bitten pinkie - "her only sin is that she is an Arab, a nurse or something, a fellow traveller, paid her ticket like all of us." The driver nods his assent.
"I am telling you..." - the stirrer yelps but the officer is terse:
"Continue behaving like this, lady, and it is you I will arrest for disturbing the peace..."
"Another mock cop" - she slurs, but her voice is hushed and hesitant.
"Perhaps even insulting a police officer on duty?" - the policeman hints and she is pacified, retreating, crablike, eyes downcast, towards her shopping.
"Who is the prisoner?" - the veteran cop enquires, his paw atop his gun, caressing it incessantly. I raise my hand.
"You are coming with us. The rest continue to your destinations. You too!" - he addresses the Arab, his civility offensively overstated.
"I want no problems here!" - he warns - "It's Friday, the Sabbath is upon us. Go home in peace. The police has more important things to do than to resolve your petty squabbles!"
Extracted from my window seat, their fingers vicelike under both armpits, they half drag me across my neighbour's knees, strewing all over him the contents of the plastic bag in which I keep my wallet and the weekend papers. It hurts.
We alight and the young one taps the folding exit doors. The bus drones its way into the snaring traffic jam. I watch its back as it recedes. The coppers place a pair of shiny handcuffs on my wrists and shackle my ankles too. I stumble towards the waiting squad car. They unlock the rear and gesture me to enter. They push me from behind and bolt the door. The gory rays of a setting sun dissect the murk inside.
I see the officers' backs and necks as they occupy the front seats beyond the meshed partition.