Crusader
A haiku by Vernon Stewart

Flicker of the brush
Passage of the Bedouin
Follows our pale eyes

The old man lowered his pen and notebook, his hands reaching for the familiar leather binding to send him into peace. Across the hospital room slept his wife Sophie, her fragile body coiled up into the cushions of a chair. A blanket swept over her face all except for her eyes, the writer began to sniff the jasmine incense of the desert, the brushing of sand against his skin. His daughters Hayley and Keira stood outside in the hallway with their husbands and children, unable to face their immortal father. His parents loomed somewhere beside him, he imagined, as he glanced side to side, their merciless eyes fixated on their failure as a son. The child they had bred and raised to be a lawyer and a politician, throwing it all away to be a writer. And still, he clung to his notebook, with no intentions of release.   
Everyone he desired to be at his deathbed died in 1939. Throughout his life, he thought they all made their ways to a crater far from the fifteen year old in his Berlin, and fell over when Death rounded a tree into a sight. Many joined the army, others vanished without a letter, and the last lined up behind the guillotine with shackles clutching their ankles.
The old man pressed his hand against his eyes and swiped the journal off the bed. His wife didn’t stir and no nurse or kin of his rushed in to pick it up and place it on the table. He turned over on his side to look out the window, barred like a prison, thinking of the home he left behind with his family name.
“Please!” he heard in the back of his mind, a girl’s voice of transparent desperation.
His parents who hated her, the Gypsy Jew—two strikes against her—with a Moorish gaze and an incandescent smile, and who would spit on her grave, still in death stood beside him with deep hatred in their eyes.  She wrapped her hair like a Muslim in the night then let the dark hair curl at her back in the sunlight. Her father dressed her like a school girl going to college while her mother sung of freedom and creativity. As German as you, she dared with a smile, and laughed herself to sleep with carelessness.  Never in her absence, did he not think of her. Never in her death, did he not mourn her.
He felt a hand on his face from behind, and in his dreams, the writer saw her as an apparition. He refused to look at the person, trying to make himself believe that she was still alive.
“Grandpa?”
He shifted his body so that he could look at his twelve year old granddaughter, as pale as his dying body, with moon-shaped turquoise eyes. Her blonde hair was weaved into two braids and her blue dress was as pretty as a portrait. She was crying as she held the notebook.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” the writer asked her.
She shook her head, not looking at him.
“Why did you throw this on the ground?”
“I can’t write anymore,” he tried to explain, finding the sadness in his own words.
“But don’t you still love it?”
He took her hand.
“I’ll always love it, just like I’ll always love you.”
The room fell quiet for a moment, the little girl staring at him as if she was trying to read his mind.
“When did you meet Grandma?”
“I met her when I worked for the New York Times, remember?”
“How old were you?”
“I was around thirty-five.”
“Did you know that you loved her when you met her?”
“Yes, sweetheart, yes I did. You know, you got your pretty eyes from her.”
She giggled through her tears. “But Grandpa, her eyes are brown! Yours are blue.”
“My eyes aren’t anything special,” the old writer mumbled, “Yours kind of look green now.”
The young girl whirled around to look in the mirror, a girlish fascination at the prospect of having her eyes change color. She gazed into her reflection and saw no such emeralds, but the blue eyes that she was born with. When she turned back around, her mouth open with defiant disappointment, her grandfather had fallen asleep, his back faced to her.
Her shoulders lowered, defeated, as she wiped away her tears. Preparing to leave him, she placed his journal at his bedside with a pen at the ready.
“I love you, Grandpa,” she whispered before she leaned in to kiss his cheek. Stepping towards the door, in the corner of her eye, she saw her grandfather heave a sigh and bury his face into his pillow.
“Please help me!” the voice begged again as he closed his eyes to the night and began to imagine her tear-stained face. She had a scarf wrapped around her face and wore a plain black dress that she would wear to her own funeral, so that if it came to that, she would be ready.
“My parents are gone! I…I went to the market and came back to find them gone!” She was shaking now, her voice rattling with her small frame. Never had he seen her cry or become fearful, so he tried to hold back his own panic and held some kind of bravery that would impress her.
“Do you have any idea where they might be?” he asked.
Her mouth widened like he had sworn at her.
“Are you serious?” she asked, her face petrified at his ignorance.
“Do you need a place to stay?”
She nodded as if he had read her mind.
“Anywhere,” she pleaded. “I’ll sleep under the sink! Just let me hide! Hide me, please—now!”  
He nodded and took her hand, leading her through the hallway to the door that led to the basement. Just as he twisted the knob, he felt a hand grab at his arm. He whirled around to face his parents standing over him like gods, their icy blue eyes burning with all the rage and disappointment he needed to shoot himself.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” his mother hissed.
“I…I…” he couldn’t think of the words to explain his devotion to the girl, or the need he felt to protect her from whatever was hunting her.
“You’re not hiding this trash in our house!” his father snarled. “Do you know what will happen to us if we hide her? We’ll all be killed! Do you want us dead, Vernon?”
The girl fixated her terrified green eyes on the writer, beseeching him to stand up for her, but he trembled, scared for his own sake rather than hers. Finding no use, she focused back on his parents, lowering her body to the floor like a mouse in garbage.
“Please,” she whimpered. “I’ll…I’ll leave now. You’ll never hear from me again. Just…just let me go.”
His father took her wrist and pulled her away from her friend.
“I’m calling the authorities!” he shouted.
Her eyes widened with absolute horror, her fate sealed.  
“Please no!” she screamed as his father dragged her through the hallway. “Please, for the love of God, please don’t do this! I’ll do anything! I’ll do anything, please! Vernon, please help me! I haven’t done anything!” Her screeches fell into pathetic sobs when she fell from his sight.
The writer fell to his knees, lifting his head to his mother.
“Mother, please,” he prayed, tears welling up in his eyes. “Please don’t call the authorities.”
Her face soured at the thought of her despicable son.
“What were you going to do, Vernon? Go off in hiding with that Jewish girl while we paid for your sins with a bullet in our brains?”
“What was her name?”
The writer’s eyes shot open, looking up at his elderly wife with tears streaming down her face, her bottom lip trembling. Never had she heard such a story, such speech from her husband’s lips.
The old man shook his head under the weight of her gaze, disintegrating under the touch of her soft hand.
“Her name was Yael.”
“Yael,” she repeated softly, her eyes fixated on his with a mixture of sorrow and horror. “Were you ever going to tell me?”
“It’s not something I wanted to tell.”
“Obviously, someone did. You said everything in your sleep. I’ve never heard you talk in your sleep.”
“I’m sorry, Sophie,” he whispered. “I…I didn’t want you to know.”
“You said your parents died when you were ten.”
“I wish they had.”
His wife fell silent for a moment, thinking about the right words.
“Did you love her?”
“I was fifteen, Sophie.”
“I don’t care. Did you love her?”
“Yes,” he admitted, his blue eyes staring up at her with the more life she had seen from him in years.
“I’m so sorry,” she breathed, her body trembling.
He nodded. “Come here,” he told her, scooting to the side to give her room on the mattress.
She curled up next to her husband and took his hand.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she whispered.
He kissed her cheek.
“I love you,” he said, closing his eyes to peace while he held her in her arms. He would never have a chance to tell his children the story of his life in Berlin. He would never explain all the guilt he carried with him throughout his life, and all the grief he had, not for his deceased parents, but for the legacy they left behind, and that young girl with the Moorish eyes and dark hair. Only through the dreams of his unconscious did his wife realize, and only through the hieroglyphics of his writing would his children ever discover.