IT IS TIME TO ASK FOR FORGIVENESS

I am sitting at this table looking at this very scenery and this table has a great significance for me, it is on the Executive Floor of the Hilton Double Tree Hotel in Kuala Lumpur.
Many memories and I know Memories by their nature would be forgotten but before that happens I would like to ask forgiveness of one person.
She sat here in front of me, sipping her first glass of wine, carrying on a conversation with her infectious laughter. She came twice from Teheran to be with me and we had met each other in London as well.
I told her about Pablo Neruda and she told me about Soheil Nafisi and Ahmed Shamloo. I introduced her to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Latin American magical realism and she told me about Shanameh  and who will ever forget Hafez and the translations we did of his verses together.

 Malignant, the truth, such an immense night, such a lonely land.

I have come again to lonely bedrooms,

to eat cold lunches in restaurants, and again

I throw my pants and shirts on the floor,

there are no hangers in my room

nor portraits of anyone on the walls.

How much of the shadow that is in my soul would I give to get you back

and how menacing the names of the months seem to me,

and the word "winter", what a grim sound of a drum it has.

I had fallen in love with Yangon the city Pablo loved where he found Josie Bliss. In Wellawatta, Colombo, I looked for old men who may have remembered that wandering young Chilean with piercing eyes, to no avail.

Like Josie Bliss who followed Pablo to Colombo and then disappeared for ever, nor Pablo make an attempt to find her, my friend from time to time appears in front of my imagination.
Here is a poem he wrote about her  Loves (1) Josie Bliss

What became of the furious one?
It was war
burning 
the gilded city
that drowned her, so that neither
her written threats
nor her electric blasphemies could get out
to find me again, to persecute me
as they did so many days, in that faraway place,
so many hours
that time and oblivion
took care of, one by one,
until, at last, she can be named as death,
death, bad word, black earth
in which Josie Bliss
will rest in her rage.

She would add up
my absent years
wrinkle by wrinkle, as they probably gathered
on her face from the grief I gave her;
because she was waiting for me on the other side of the world.
I never came, but in the empty
cups,
in the dead dining room,
maybe my silence wasted away,
my faraway footsteps,
and maybe until death she saw me
as if through water,
as if I were swimming in glass, 
slow of movement,
and she couldn't take hold of me
and would lose me
every day, in the pale lagoon
on which her gaze was fixed.
Until she finally closed her eyes - 
when was that?
Until time and death covered her over - 
when was that?
Until hate and love bore her away - 
where?
Until she who loved me in rage,
in blood, in revenge,
in jasmines,
couldn't go on talking to herself,
gazing at the lagoon of my absence.

Now, maybe,
she rests restlessly
in the great cemetery in Rangoon,
or maybe on the banks 
of the Irrawaddy they burned her body
all afternoon, while
the river murmured
things that I might have said to her in tears.

I remember reading this poem to my brother Eliyahu while we were sitting by the River Irrawaddy
I had tears in my eyes.

I too had stood at this beach at Wellawatta, Colombo 6 trying to resurrect some memories.