"Can I help you?" I asked him in Hebrew.
"I am waiting..... " He said, looking around nervously, his eyes not quite looking into mine. "For Tatiyana. She knows I am coming." Then he banged on her door.
"Have a nice night," I said casually, and scurried up the stairs. I could hear his fists banging eagerly against her door. As a I scurried up by the four flights, my gut kept asking me, "Don't you want to go back down stairs and throw something at that man's head? Or slap him back to reality?" It did, but getting physically assault, or physically assaulting someone else, had not been in my plans that night.
This woman is my neighbor, sometimes she washes the stairs just to be nice, she's got a lined face that's still beautiful, and immigrated from the former USSR. And she sells herself, to men who are religious, men who are dogs, men who know what they're doing is beyond despicable but still show their face in our building and pound on her door, asking when their "appointment" is.
It makes me sick and horrified to know that this is happening two flights belonged. But more than the nausea it causes in my throat or the bile it forms in my mouth, what I really want to do is hurl something sharp and hard at her "clients," not an object, but a question: "Do you know the difference between an object and a human," I want to ask them.
