In a Concrete Jungle
A flight was boarding at the airport. Although the big liner was standing rather far away — 300-400 meters — from the terminal, no buses were furnished for some reason. As always, the passengers almost ran across the tarmac and crowded around the ramp, waiting for permission to get into the plane. Then, gradually, hundreds of eyes turned one after another to the other side and fixed at two figures walking, oddly enough, without undue haste from the terminal to the same plane across the bituminous apron.
This must have been a married couple — two very old persons. Each of them leaned on crutch: the man held the crutch in his left hand and the woman in her right. So they walked, supporting each other with the free hands. They walked extremely slowly: every step was taking them just a half-foot forward, and they would stop after each step to restore a shaky balance. The man carried a small backpack showing an awkwardly folded woman’s sweater. Occasionally, after a few steps, the woman would take a handkerchief out of her pocket and wipe her companion’s brow. Then they would again lean on each other and continue to go their way. Despite very advanced age and apparent physical feebleness, these people strikingly resembled two children who had got lost in the thick of our indifferent and merciless world. They were walking as if they had been left alone on a devastated planet, with only a companion beside and a tarmac desert around. And somewhere faraway on the other shore stood the monster crowd with a hundred eyes.
This was such a heart-rending picture that the passengers even dropped their intention to storm the ramp: the crowd seemed to have frozen and kept their multicolored eyes on the oldsters. When the intrepid travelers came closer and their faces were quite visible, it became clear what not only physical but also moral efforts this journey cost them: each was wearing a bitterly tense but smiling mask which seemed to be saying, “We are like all of you! We are independent! We are flying on our own business! We need nothing from you!”
The passengers were, as always, a very dissimilar lot: Ukrainians, Russians, many English-speaking people, both Western and Eastern, young and old, richly and not-so-richly attired. And none of them took even a few steps toward these heroes of life, the dramatic heroes of life’s last act, at least to return the quiet smile, help carry the half-empty backpack, or offer two sound hands for symbolic support. They just looked on, some of them cracking an ironic and contemptuous smile: what a sight indeed! Why on earth are they flying somewhere? They had better stay home if they do not want to die on the way. Meanwhile, the boarding began soon, and the lonely travelers were instantly forgotten — the public rushed to the ramp. When the plane landed, these two passengers were helped out by the plane’s crew: somebody must have told them after all. By that moment, the passengers had no time to recall the surrealistic mise-en-scene, for they strove — faster, faster, and still faster — for other transport, other places, other things to do and other diversions. Let age take its natural course: “This is their problem, not ours!” (From generation to generation since Adam and Eve people have repeated the same mistake.)
The old and sick couple among the airport’s cosmopolitan crowd is the symbol of a civilization called for some reason Christian. And who said, for that matter, that we live in a civilized world? A world, where the begging, sick, homeless, and destitute, young and old, wander among their well-off and indifferent counterparts. Is this not the way the world’s poor countries, the countries populated by the greater part of humanity, try to catch up — on their weak feet and with eyes — with the affluent, as if crossing the wide bare tarmac?
I still keep thinking where those old people were going, where the ill wind was taking them. Perhaps it was to pay their last respects to a peer or visit some of their old and feeble kin? Or to a health center? Sometimes, when I look back at the quietly smiling faces of those really courageous people, I think the matter might be different. Perhaps they decided to visit the places where they once were young and happy. Or maybe, one fine day, braving their ailments and weaknesses, they filled an old backpack with which they used to travel in their youth, locked up their tiny medicine chest, and boldly went, as before, touring the world to see something outlandish and magical again. For philosophers claim, for quite a good reason, that human soul surrenders last of all. Of course, if one is lucky, for the opposite is also true.
