Las Ruinas Circulares

Taken by hand through the alleyways that stubbornly cease and bifurcate, alleyways carved into blocks of houses built upon each other, stacked and hiding the skies of Prague with balconies of studious eyes

you are taken by hand through corridors, through the mended kitchens wafted in and out with scraps thrown in a pot of dented iron exuding vapors of stew; the boiled and scavenged cabbage, boiled flour and boiled bone stripped.

Your guide waits at the threshold speaking to another smaller soul; the cat that roamed the narrow streets and asked for nothing in return but condescended to a hand upon its back once in a while; keepers of the plague.

You lose the hand that led you down the alleys, your Virgil now a voice in some corner not far off. You turn your head; above, a silent choir of faces point towards the shack within a shack ahead.

You enter and your guide stops you, gently, and gently does his hand envelop yours, a bare room of mold and brick is all you see; nearby, contiguous, the room is waiting, yawning.

The rabbi’s hand lets go and you are alone.

In the vague light, at the hour of anguish, the murmur of Yiddish far off and diffused, a candle ahead distorts your view, but the light is stark yet, and clear, when you witness him, emaciated, half dead but yet resigned to life, an abstract body sitting at the table austere, at the center of that centerless maze (he makes the secret center by his presence) of babies wailing and yawps of hunger and red dust and dreams and typhoid, there sits, muted, speechless, the Minotaur.

His bovine head turns with the weight of centuries; the centuries of human sorrow; one eye, small, oblique, cloudly gazes through you; his wide lip trembles as he turns back; he turns his monstrous head, back to nothing.