She’s Not Here Now - New English Review

by P. David Hornik (February 2015)

Every time, that spring, I looked out my window into the city, I thought of Tara. I thought how strange it was that, even though I’d lived in or near the city for eleven years, she was the only person in it—in the country, for that matter—with whom I had, or possibly had, some connection.

So I would look, from my high window in the north of the city, down into the soft cream-gold and red of the center of the city, and think how somewhere, in that soft mass of buildings, the mite that was Tara existed—she was there.

Whereabouts in Canada? Vancouver. Toronto, too. Mostly Vancouver. That’s really nice, what you play. Thank you. I’ve always liked that kind of music. Oh, really? Yes. I used to play piano….

Of course, I wouldn’t have persisted in meeting with her if I hadn’t been in a faltering, bewildered condition myself. At that stage I saw myself as little more than driftwood, hoping to graze another piece of driftwood in the stream. Also, she was interesting.

She didn’t go to college, but she went to Vancouver and worked as a musician, waitress, barmaid, secretary, sales clerk, switchboard operator. She had boyfriends, was supposed to get married a couple of times but nothing worked out. She went with one of them to Toronto for a while. About three years ago, back in Vancouver, she met Roger—and that was supposed to be it, she thought she’d finally settle down.

But why Jerusalem? I asked again.

Why? She said.

I said: Yes, why. You’re not Jewish, and I gather you’re not a very observant Catholic. So…

She gave a look of round, vague perplexity.

Because I’m a lost soul.

Aren’t lost souls supposed to come to Jerusalem?

And yet, compared to Tara, it was solid ground, it was security. Whether or not I would ever be in a family again, I had been in one, and remained the father of my children whom I saw every week. But Tara… Once she was a girl in British Columbia, I’d think, lying in my bed at night. A girl with shiny blond hair, living along the Pacific…what had happened to her since then? Anchorless, unable to hold onto anything?

I had nothing to do but think, and I thought long thoughts. About how, just at this time of my life when I was the most adrift I’d ever been, I’d met someone who was more adrift. How, just when I felt the most severed from my past I’d ever felt, I’d met someone who was like a stray, northern fragment of that past. How her hair still kept that gleam of northern sun.

The city, at dusk, was so soft and vague it could have dissolved and floated away. Birds—wing spans, rather, dark against silver—floated in the ambience. There were “buildings” out there, but far and faint, as if borderline-real.

Late April. Light falls in a late April dusk, bounces gently off roofs and pine trees, lands and is still. Birds seem weightless, stranded in ether….

Yes, but why not call her?

Call her?

Yes. So she hasn’t returned your calls for two weeks—is that a reason not to call her? Did you expect her to be anything but tenuous, evasive…?

I walked out to the room I called my living room, where there was no light on and it was almost night. I didn’t turn the light on. I went to the phone and dialed in the near-dark.

And again the voice from the hostel: She’s not here now. Yes, I gave her your message. I don’t know…. I don’t know.

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P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator in Beersheva, Israel. In recent years his work appears especially on the PJ Media and Frontpage Magazine sites, and his book Choosing Life in Israel was published in 2013. At present he is working on an autobiography.

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