TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Birke

No ash tray? Ok, I’ll take a coffee cup. Good?

She walked back up the first flight of stairs and then on to the secondone, and thentothethirdfloor landingwheredoornumber eleven stood. Birke wished. She wished that sometimes she had a man, like the painting man, who understood that sometimes you have to do things. Why was it always a decision? Why did there have to be a process? He smoked cigarettes because he just did. He grabbed his balls because they were itchy. She didn’t have any scars on her face. But I love Thomas. She felt bad. He is kind and understandable and says that he’s a feminist. You have the kindest eyes I have ever seen, she told him. His eyes, wide and brown, maybe even hazelnut on some days, comforted her. An assuage. An ode to love. And when he made love to her—that’s the phrase he always used—she felt in tunewith him. Inside of her, rhythmic thrusting until the point of com…but where did he learn that? Was that just some decision that he had made long ago, an influence from one of his feminist art teacherswho lecturedabout heteronormativity, whose The Book of Female Orgasms lie threateningly exposed on her desk, at a Gymnasium , where her brash openness and tendency towards sexual liberation played part shock value and part political statement, sparking the liberal development of young men like Thomas? Why couldn’t he just fuck me . Why did he have to think about it, and why did there have to be a reason and a development, a god damn process to our…our love making. She realized that she had been standing in front of her door for a few minutes. Mrs. Rakoczi, the old Hungarian woman, who was either eighty years old or two hundred years old, was making her way up the stairs. If she sees me standing here, staring at the front 223