Random Acts of Heroic Love

by Danny Scheinmann

‘My God, do they always do that?’

  ‘They haven’t done it within living memory.’

  ‘Wow. G’night then.’

  ‘’Night.’

  ‘Leo?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know what I’d like to do?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’d like to phone my job in the morning and quit.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And then I’d like to go on a long walk like your granddad.’

  ‘Good idea. You might get to Bradford.’

  ‘Leo?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re right, there’s no point walking. Where’s your atlas?’

  ‘On the shelf.’

  ‘Can I turn the light on?’

  ‘If you must.’

  Hannah got out of bed, found the atlas and brought it back to bed.

  ‘What are you doing, Hannah?’

  She opened it on the general map of the world and picked up a hairclip from the bedside table.

  ‘I’m going to shut my eyes, and you have to turn it round so I don’t know which way up it is.’

  ‘Hannah, what are you doing?’

  ‘Are you turning it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right, here I go.’ She stabbed her hairclip into the map and opened her eyes. ‘Where did it land?’ she asked.

  ‘In the Philippines.’

  ‘Where, exactly?’

  ‘On an island called Mindoro.’

  Hannah opened her eyes and inspected the map. ‘Mmm . . . Never in a million years would I have thought of going to the Philippines. I wonder what it’s like there?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Leo said.

  ‘Right, tomorrow I’m going to book a flight.’

  ‘You’re nuts.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Can we turn the light off now?’ asked Leo.

  ‘Yes, sorry.’

  ‘Goodnight, Hannah.’

  Something was changing, Leo’s heart was racing. He had no idea why. It could have been anything: the contact of his knee on her thigh, or the residue of the story working through his system. Or maybe it came from Hannah? Had he sensed a shift in her affections? Whatever it was there was something in the air. Perhaps it was a little electron creating random havoc with his emotions as it made invisible connections with its friends on the other side of the universe. So if an electron suddenly begins to spin does it always know why? Does it know what event on the other side of the universe has triggered it? When the pepper began to spin did it know the salt was spinning, or did it just experience a new and bizarre impulse, such as Leo felt now, and wonder where it came from? What was the universe trying to tell him at that moment? As he lay there wondering in the dark, he felt a vision of piercing clarity burn through him as if the world itself had unveiled its secrets. He saw that for every act of love or hatred a whole universe is sent spinning; for every loss, for every pain, for every hope, for every joy, the cosmos shifts. At every level through space and time, from past to future, from amoebas to humans, from particles to galaxies, from what is seen to what is unseen, all things vibrate as one, creating invisible harmonies and never-dreamed-of connections. A calmness and warmth enveloped him. He basked in it for a while, before a dark cloud drifted through his mind.

  If this really was a holistic universe, as Roberto insisted, and all things were, by dint of billions of collisions, spinning together, then why was it still possible to feel so alone? There it was again: loneliness. It hadn’t taken long to blot out his moment of bliss. Was holism a delusion? He remembered one of Moritz’s letters where he said all souls are deluded and the only pertinent question to ask is: what is the best delusion? What belief system will bring most joy to you and those around you? Even if nothing was connected to anything else, wasn’t it more romantic to believe that it was?

  He had put all his efforts into keeping Eleni alive inside him, but what was Eleni, what did she represent? Eleni was the vehicle of love. Eleni herself was not important, she was merely the face of love; somehow he had confused the two. She had gone but love remained. She had set Leo spinning and he would never stop; now it was his duty to make others spin with him. It wasn’t Eleni that he needed, it was love. And to find it he would have to take risks, go into the lion’s den and confront the demons that were stopping him moving forward. There was only one thing troubling him. He got out of bed and wandered towards the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘I need to make a call.’

  ‘Leo, it’s three in the morning.’

  But he had disappeared.

  ‘Roberto, are you awake?’

  ‘I am now. Christ, Leo!’

  ‘I wanted to ask you something.’

  ‘It had better be important.’

  ‘It is to me.’

  ‘OK, what is it?’

  ‘What if an electron that’s already spinning collides with a new electron – what happens then?’

  Roberto sighed. ‘If it was significant then . . .’

  ‘Significant?’ Leo interrupted.

  ‘Not every collision will make an electron change its spin – an electron can have many affairs, if you like, but not all will be significant. If, however, the electron is profoundly affected by another electron it will become entangled with the new partner.’

  ‘Entangled?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the technical term for the relationship: quantum entanglement.’

  ‘I like that. But what happens to the old relationship? Is the electron now entangled with two electrons?’

  ‘That’s a moot point but most of us believe not. Each electron can only be in one relationship at a time.’

  ‘So the original partner is released,’ Leo said triumphantly.

  ‘If you like . . . but, Leo?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re not an electron.’

  ‘No, but I think I’m ready for a significant collision, I want entanglement.’

  ‘I think we all do, Leo, but not at three in the morning.’

  ‘Sorry. Thank you, Roberto, you can go back to sleep now,’ Leo said, and hung up.

  He returned to the bedroom excited. ‘Hannah?’

  ‘Yes, Leo.’

  ‘Are you really going to the Philippines?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I come?’

  ‘Yes. I thought you’d never ask.’

  32

  TWO DAYS LATER LEO AND HANNAH WERE FLYING TO THE Philippines. They descended into the dusty heat of Manila and took a taxi into the vast polluted urban sprawl of the city. The traffic crawled past a shanty town which mushroomed out from the muddy banks of a stream. Children splashed about in the filthy water while their mothers washed their clothes further downstream. The shacks, some of them two storeys high, which butted up against each other along mazy alleyways, were constructed out of tarpaulin and corrugated iron. In some parts of the world a ‘temporary’ home will last a lifetime, but these homes were merely waiting for the day when the annual floods would wash them away. Then there would be a scramble to rebuild nearer to the stream, and within a few days the shanty town would spring up again, with the same people on different patches, as if they had been shuffled by the typhoon.

  Street kids stood at every set of traffic lights begging off the stationary cars. Some of them were no older than five or six. Hannah leant out of the window and gave a dollar to a boy carrying a baby whose bald brown head was burning in the midday sun.

  ‘I’m glad my hairclip didn’t land in Manila,’ she commented.

  They got out at Baclaran flea market where Hannah bought a couple of sarongs while Leo stood nervously over their bags. Then they walked down a teeming boulevard towards the BLTB bus terminal. From here they were to take a coach down to the port of Batangas and from there a boat over to Puerto Galera on Mindoro.

  When at last they came across the dilapidated terminal with its brightly coloured buses and street vendors, Leo stopped
in his tracks. It was Ecuador all over again. He was in Quito with Eleni, lumbering under their huge rucksacks as they tried to find the bus to Latacunga. Eleni is singing a Spanish ditty she had picked up in Guatemala. ‘Porque no me dijiste, cuando me . . .’ the words drowned out by the spluttering roar of an old bus engine. Leo is looking for their bus stop among the rows of buses. Now he sees Eleni wandering down to the middle of the bus, and he calls her back for the millionth time, and she turns round for the millionth time. Later he takes a photo of her with the ice pick in her hand and then puts it back in his rucksack. Cotopaxi looms into sight on their left. The lorry is veering across the road, straight for them, Eleni is screaming. Something new now . . . he is thrown against the driver’s seat in front of him. He sees Eleni launch into the air and smash her right shoulder and chest against the vertical handrail but it does not break her momentum, her body twists to the right and lurches over the barrier in front of her through a spray of shattering glass and crashes hard against the dashboard before falling back down the steps to land with her back against the door and her leg contorted upwards. The lights fade. There is no more.

  ‘I have to get out of here.’

  Hannah grasped his clammy hand in hers. ‘No, Leo, you have to go through it.’ She pulled him into the terminal and led him to their bus.

  Leo was very tense as he sat in the middle of the bus waiting for the engine to start. The Hindu sages say that of all the miracles the greatest miracle of all is that even though we know we are mortal, we live as if we are immortal. Leo felt the paralysis of those who live with their mortality. He tasted the stultifying fear of the unlucky few who see death around every corner. He had lost the bravery of youth, he could no longer proclaim, as he had once done, when warned of the dangers of South America, ‘well, it won’t happen to me’, for it had happened to him and every time he boarded a bus he thought it could happen again.

  But fear was about to liberate Leo. Just like when a doctor tells a man he has a couple of months to live, the man will invariably put his house in order and say all those things he has been meaning to say for some time, so Leo was about to behave as if this day was his last. He turned to Hannah and kissed her. And at precisely the same moment she kissed him. In years to come they would argue about who initiated their first kiss. The only thing they did agree on was that it was the most unromantic place on earth.

  Hannah had taken one look at the terrified man beside her and had known that she had to help him. Was this what love felt like? It was nothing like she expected it to be: there was no wild fluttering of the heart, no aching lust, no bolt from Cupid’s bow. She felt weirdly serene. All she wanted was to play a role in Leo’s happiness. And although they were only one kiss old she couldn’t think of a reason why it would ever end, and for the first time in her life that thought didn’t scare her. It was as if she had been given a gentle nod from eternity.

  When they arrived on Mindoro they took a Land Rover taxi along the rough coastal road until they left all the tourist beaches behind and arrived at a quiet stretch with only one small guest house made entirely from bamboo. It was situated, just as the guidebook had described it, at the far end of the beach, set back twenty metres from the seafront with a couple of palm trees leaning lazily over it.

  They were shown to a room up a spiral bamboo staircase with a magnificent view of the orange sun dropping into the sea.

  ‘Come on,’ Leo said, ‘it’s asking to be swum in.’

  They put on their swimsuits, ran out with their towels to the water’s edge and swam into the dipping sun. A golden fish brushed against Leo’s leg and disappeared into the coral. Eleni was free.

  ‘Oh, Leo, isn’t this fantastic,’ Hannah called out.

  This is how it began and there was no end.

  Epilogue

  My grandfather Moshe Scheinmann was born in Ulanow in 1896. He fought in the Austro-Hungarian Army in the First World War. He was captured by the Russians and sent to a POW camp in Siberia. Determined to see his childhood sweetheart Lotte, he escaped the camp and walked home. It took him three years. No details are known of his journey. He eventually found Lotte and they married and moved to Berlin. In 1939 Lotte sent my father to England on the kindertransport. Lotte was due to follow but never made it. She was killed in Auschwitz.