I'd passed through Limassol a year before. Mention of it brought to mind dried-plum sweets from the mountainous interior. A certain grandmother that reminded me of my own. Roman mosaics of gods and centaurs paving the very shore of the Mediterranean, their edges crumbling into its ancient, lapping waves.

"Pa, odlično.That's fantastic," I said, attempting good cheer. We were all envious of anyone who could escape the blizzard-choked city, and I felt the pinch of it -- but had hopes that Abu Moses' humor would improve if we shifted to a more pleasing subject.

Instead of mellowing, however, Abu Moses only grew more restless, like someone scurrying from end to end of a steel cage. I figured that I'd come at a bad time -- problems with the girl again, or money perhaps; something that blunted his characteristic verve. Seeing that our visit was unlikely to improve, I slipped my purse across my shoulder and began moving toward the door, when I felt Abu Moses grasp my arm.

"I've got to show you something," he anxiously insisted, and then, as soon as he was sure I would remain, he cut across the living room and begin fitfully rummaging through stacks of paper propped behind a dresser. Tension-filled minutes dripped by, a half-hour nearly, until I began to find Abu Moses' angst unbearable.

"It's here, he muttered, "I know it" -- flinging more pages off the book piles lining the sides of the room. In the midst of mentally charting my departure once again, I heard a huff of recognition: The document had been found. Still, from the tension in Abu Moses' shoulders and his wet brow, it was clear its discovery had brought little relief.

"Read this!" he said urgently, sitting me down beside him on the tweed couch and pressing a set of photocopied broadsheets into my hands. I sighed, having little interest in sifting through some propagandistic tome, and no intention of staying long.

Abu Moses, however, sat erect as a grade-school pupil, flicking through pages, and underlining whole phrases with his blunt finger. I calculated how long I would need to feign interest and remain polite. Then something bizarre caught my eye: On the front page of a news sheet, clearly embossed along the top, was the masthead of the Israeli Communist Party, the text below proclaiming the rights of Palestinians to their civil liberties.

The sight of that document there in that blizzard-bound Balkan den struck me as so incongruous that I could barely assimilate it. Lost in a sort of mental blur, I sat trying to make order of the elements, when all of a sudden I felt Abu Moses catch my shoulder, spearing the headline with his finger as he cried out half-madly:

"You see? You see? They are human beings too! The Israelis. They are human beings too!" -- as if I, with cousins and friends in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, had somehow to be convinced.

And yet this he continued to do, feverishly reading aloud each paragraph, beads of sweat flying from his face, stopping every so often to declare, "We're all the same!" like some sort of anguished challenge to an invisible adversary.

Between one jolt and another, my thinking was not particularly clear that afternoon, and I cannot recall all that happened. I do remember, just then, a sense of unwanted burden, the notion that I didn't know the man well enough to sit through his personal manias and obsessions. That I simply wanted to be somewhere else.

And so I began again to stake out a route to the front door, about to rise, and mentally preparing for the inclement weather when -- without warning -- I was pinned down by something large and round and leaden that had fallen into my lap.

For a split second, my eyesight went blank from fear, or astonishment; when I finally looked down, I saw that it was Abu Moses' head, face buried in my stomach, his torso thrown across my lap like a casualty.

The intimacy of it bewildered me: Neither lovers nor close friends, we had never so much as embraced in greeting. For a second, the notion flitted through my mind that the man was simply suffering from nervous exhaustion. A moment later, I felt the white heat of his tears seep through my woolen trousers, still cold and damp from melted snow. Under the weight of his skull the coarse weave scraped my thighs, but I remained unmoving, under the spell of some vague but pressing sense of being there for some purpose other than my own. A moment later, Abu Moses' shoulders rose and jerked in silent spasms, then gulping sobs.

What are we responsible for remembering? What is the duty of the confessor, of the witness?

Looking back now on that snowy afternoon at Abu Moses' place, the last time I would see him, it took longer than one might expect for me to comprehend what the trip to Cyprus meant. Indeed, months of denial and doubt. What I do know is that in that slim, suspended moment, time and space contracted, everything real had vanished, all that remained was a weeping man, and the act of witness.

In this light, that afternoon, I recall glancing down for a split second -- from what seemed like years away -- at the bare nape of Abu Moses' neck. The brilliantined hair, the squarish skull. How closely his small, compact body resembled that of a young boy.

And how, at that very same moment, he turned a furious, tear-stained face toward me and rasped for a final time: "My God, they are also human beings!" -- glaring up at me with the wounded eyes of a betrayed child accusing his mother of the crime of having no answers. And of colluding in a world that is brutal, and senseless.

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