Thinking of a Palestinian mum begging for cream for her baby, all of his skin a screeching redness, while I am sitting in a kind of heaven. Yesterday. A spacious theatre. The stage invites immersion in magic. Dressed up, smiling people fill the seats. More dignified than influencer flashy. Nice to be among a few hundred people who will resist whipping out their phones for two hours. I am with a young woman full of plans, recently graduated, about to start her career. She too obviously put a lot of thought into a her outfit for tonight. Before the performance start she asks: ‘Afterwards we will go somewhere and talk, right?’ The play makes her laugh every time a character reveals feeling snubbed or is unable to hide the cravings of his or her ego. A good sign.
I do chuckle here and there. The cast does a fine job.
The play breaks the fourth wall. Meaning that it deliberately suspends the illusion of experiencing the story as real by engaging with the audience. This can easily go very wrong, but they make it work. It’s fun.
They get a standing ovation, but from experience I know this is standard in Slovakia, the crowd enjoys giving standing ovations. For once Slovaks feel allowed to show emotion in public and they grab it with two banging hands.
We talk for hours later. Even flying on swings like little children right next to the Danube and a view of the Bratislava castle at night.
I make her laugh several times since am this overthinking, agitated, alienated Woody Allen type, but without the creepy child abuse accusations.
In fact, what still half ruins this otherwise near perfect evening is a voice telling me:
you could have giving the money of the theatre tickets to some organisation that maybe gets that mum the cream her suffering baby needs.
And now am trying a whole thing about it to
- Diminish my feeling of being a useless onlooker to a genocide, no matter how much I write about it
- Convince myself that I did have a evening that would fit well in a movie like Before Sunrise
My former pro Israeli friend used to say to stuff like this: bad things happen all the time, why torture yourself by thinking about all that sad stuff?
But that mentality is exactly what let him side with Israel.
Still, I feel like am carrying some kind of scary infectious disease to the people around me, because I care. Which excludes me again and again from normal life. Though that young woman seems very fond of me and surprised me this morning by writing me she had a really good time, I am convinced she experiences me as an amusing eccentric slice of adorable insanity. Which I can tell you is not the effect that makes you feel like a highly desired man. To get that effect I usually have to leave all my political views and feelings about this apocalyptic world at the door. But I can fake being ‘light and unburdened’ only for x number of hours. Soon they find out that murdered strangers get more of my attention than increasing my monthly income.
And at the same time that woman still has no cream for her baby.
The Confessor 