She was sitting there, in this café somewhere in Eastern Europe. She had rings on every finger, countless pearl bracelets and necklaces. Her fur coat lay carelessly on her shoulders, her entire body propped up on her right elbow. She was the very image of an idle and carefree bourgeois. But something in the intensity of her gaze and the strength she put into clenching her jaw masked a very different truth.
She had once been a poet in her youth. Then she joined the liberation forces of her country. She had taken up arms as she had done with her pen, to defend her life, the oppressed and freedom.
She was standing there, in that lost Eastern European café, where her comrade-in-arms, her life partner, had fallen under the bullets. If she looked so intently in the direction of the door, it was because, even after all these years, she still hoped to see him come in and sit at her table. He would then get out two train tickets to Paris. That trip they had planned to take as soon as the war was over. That other life they could have had there, her writing, him publishing.
This other life, I guessed it behind the glossy paper of the photo I had taken that day. That day when she had told me her story.
