the lonely honest man

A man on the street broke my heart open and I can’t stop thinking about him. We had turned a corner heading for my friend’s atelier to surprise-visit her, when out from behind a parked car bounced this large, bounding, fierce-looking black dog. We both stood in front of our much smaller dog and got fierce in turn. The dog’s keeper ran down the street shouting something it took me a while to understand. He was calling, She won’t hurt you! She won’t hurt you! He drew abreast, out of breath, and began to explain his dog was always over-friendly, people got a fright, she wouldn’t hurt a hedgehog, she’s as gentle as milk. In Germany most milk is super-heat-treated longlife and tastes faintly of benzine so I take this with a bar of soap. But the two doggies were gambolling together merrily and the size of the big black hound was no way her fault.

“She’s 13 years old,” he explained. Garrulous. My partner was looking at the dog closely, then at the man. “Did she… didn’t she used to live on such and such street? Over by the park.” Yes, said the guy, she belonged to someone else then. “Yes… Punker dog.” Well, he said modestly: not exactly a punker dog but he had rescued her from this large co-op over by the markets… “This is Sheila,” he said, nudging her with his calf.

“Hello, Sheila,” we said. The man went on to describe some more about her and her gentle nature, how long he had had her. I was feeling tuckered out and my attention soon waned. As we parted he said, it was nice talking with you, and then called out something else which I answered, to my shame, with a fake laugh and a generalised kind of “yeah, right,” because his German was too quick for me and I couldn’t be bothered to figure out what it was he had said.

As we walked on past the florist with its three kinds of pine branches for sale in steel carts out front and its purple pots of heather, I asked, “What was it he was saying at the end?” My partner repeated it. “So was passiert nur selten in meinem Leben.” Such a thing happens only rarely in my life. That is, people are seldom so friendly to him and take the time to chat. I groaned and looked round. The man was, of course, gone, with his big goofy dog, back into the labyrinth of endless cold stony streets. How honest of him, how honourable. How kind and sweet and how little I’d deserved it. Because while he was remarking, like a good-hearted human, that a conversation – even so brief of a streetside conversation about dogs – was a rarity and how nice of us it was to talk with him, when he himself brought so much attentive curiosity, so much willingness to share his history and to lay people’s fears like rice to rest, I had been growing bored and wondering, how much longer do we have to chat with this fellow and his dog, my back is aching, I just want to go home. Now I wish I had heard him and had answered properly. Had given him a hug. Had said, Yes, it’s true: my friend, we are all lonely at heart.