The Camden Tales

33 - Chinese Wall

-=₪ January 1926 ₪=-

Home / 150 Camden Street / 3.22am

Malka was wide awake. She laid in the pitch-black wanting and willing the night to end but the seconds felt like minutes, the minutes seemed like hours and the darkness of night was endless. She longed for dawn.

Even though she hadn't caught a single wink, she still couldn't make out the room, her eyes couldn't adjust. It was so dark it dulled the senses, the opposite of what she was used to. Someone could have been in the room with her, waved their hand in front of her face and she would have been none the wiser. Darkness had never before made her uncomfortable, in fact it had always been the preferred, but not this night. This night she felt uneasy.

She quickly sat up in the thick, almost tangible blackness and noticed the quiet was betraying her senses also. Usually, she was able to hear the most distant of sounds, but tonight the silence was deafening. She looked towards the direction of the fireplace and felt her pupils' strain to absolute dilation. Even the warm, lingering glow of the dying fire from before had at some point unnoticed, extinguished. She wondered if there was any air to breathe as she was having difficulty. Her impossibly wide eyes moved to the direction of the windows, the drapes so dense she couldn't make out the difference between brick and glass.

Stretching her hand into the void, she searched for the nightstand. Her knuckles rapped against it as they knocked the wood. Her fingers worked their way up the side and over the surface, feeling various items and dismissing them. Her digits then came across something cool and smooth which gave a little chime when touched. She picked up the clock and brought it close to her face, allowed the glowing radium hands to indicate the time. Dawn was coming. She wanted it sooner, quicker, now. She could feel his approach.

Her breathing began to struggle even more. The darkness was too artificial, nothing real was this empty. Feeling a rising panic, she stumbled out of bed and hastily felt her way around it. Reaching for the wall, she shuffled along looking for the drapes. The moment fabric touched her fingertips, she threw open the shroud, pulled away the netting and pushed the sash window up with force, causing it to bang as the weights fell low and wood slammed high.

She closed her eyes, leaned out the window and took in a deep breath of air, anticipating the feeling of life and freshness that would fill her lungs, but it didn't. The air outside was just as suffocating as the air inside. Opening her eyes, she looked about the back garden, but it was too dark to see anything, not even a streetlamp could be seen as her gaze extended beyond. She looked up to the moon, but it was a new moon, a hollow hole where its silver should have shone. Her constant was missing. She looked to the stars, but couldn't see a single one, it must have been cloudy. She started to feel desperate, noticing she couldn't even hear the activity of the nearby canal, the canal was never silent, it never slept. She wondered how the outside night could be just as impossibly dark and quiet as the artificial one of the bedroom.

Her world was shrinking, she felt so empty and alone. The unfamiliarity of the spare bedroom wasn't helping either, reminding her of nights she spent in the orphanage. The longest and darkness nights of her life.

"Where is he?" she whispered as she came back inside and sank to the floor below the windowsill.

The last time they had spoken was four days previous, he had called to say he was preparing for the journey home. During the call he had sounded terribly unwell and sorrowful, despite his efforts to hide it. They had surpassed his eighteen-month prognoses and were now into the extension of "maybe twenty-four" months. Their road together was nearing its end and she believed these two weeks apart had been a grave mistake, it was entirely too much lost time. So, when she told him the gut-wrenching news that she was currently niddah, she experienced a pain like no other when his response seemed to be one of relief. He requested that upon his return she was to be in the spare bedroom, to remain there and to leave him be. He had used very few words to express his wishes and inform of his journey home, all of which had left her sure of one thing, Alfie, wasn't telling her something. She crossed her arms over her stomach and curled up on the floor below the still night.