The old lady is sitting next to me at a dinner table. I've been watching her silently while she eats. There is a greediness in her manner. Her little hands grab for the platters around her, holding the delicious foods that everyone prepared. She shoves them onto her plate and chews loudly. Whenever I pass on a dish or offer her something to drink, she always says yes thankfully. But she never offers me anything in return. I wonder how a small old lady could have such an appetite. She eats as though she was starving. Was she maybe? And then she starts to talk to me.
She tells me about all the old people imprisoned in their houses, everyone they love dying around them one by one. She tells me how she's trying to resist becoming one of them by still going out often, trying new things. I'm trying very hard to evoke my compassion for her. But when she speaks I can see the food that she put so hastily in her mouth floating around on her tongue. She spits out big chunks of beige coloured, half processed toast with marmalade while talking and I'm scared that one of those chunks will end up on my face.
Then her story gets better. She tells me how she worked in the family business when she was young. It was a company selling the most beautiful expensive cars. People from all over the world would come to buy cars from her father. There were drivers in suits with white gloves and women wearing fur and jewels accompanying their husbands. I don't really believe her. She reminds me of my own grandmother in the way she tries to make a good impression by proving that she hangs out with the elite. It's a typical thing people do when they've had to work their way up all of their lives never ever feeling good enough. But I appreciate the effort and I can see her in my mind, young and beautiful walking between those cars being overwhelmed by the richness of the clients and it takes my mind off of her eating manners for a moment.
But when I ask her wether she had an education the conversation takes a bad turn. She didn't. And she thinks some people getting an education these days are being pampered. They don't know how to work anymore. Old people are wasting away in their houses and nobody does a thing about it. And those foreigners coming to our country get everything they ever wanted. They're being taken care of as if they were on a holiday. In the little park in front of her house people let their dogs shit without cleaning up afterwards so all the flies come and fly around her windowframes and shit on them so the windowframes get black spots and nobody does a thing about it while the foreigners get lemonade and cookies on their arrival. Big glazy beige chunks fly around angrily all over the place.
I don't want to just sit there and nod, so I try to give her a different perspective on the matter, explaining that foreigners aren't fleeing their countries for no reason. But it's of no use. She sneers that she was in the war also, and that she deserves the same treatment. As I think of another thing to say to calm her down without telling her I agree my eye wanders to the piece of tablecloth between our plates and I see the chunks from her filthy mouth piled up and I almost start to vomit. So I just get up and leave while she hisses after me that she knows, because she's seen it with her own eyes and I don't know because I'm young and ignorant.
I tremble as I put the dishes in the dish machine, smiling to the other people who are helping out in the kitchen as though nothing's wrong. But the happy cloud is gone. It seems as though all the joyful feelings I ever had were only confined to my own little safe world. The space I created for myself, the things I wished to see while leaving the bad stuff out. She's right, I have been ignorant thinking that all was fine. The world does not consist solely of people I care about, kind and good-mannered and openminded. There are also these people that you wish you could change their minds or feel sorry for or help out, but all you are left doing is just feeling helplessly revulsed.
