There are pillars, but they support no walls. There are windows, but then that’s all that there is. Tall and wide, from the floor to the ceiling, open window frames. The need for the doors thus does not exist. The twisted wire around is security enough. Nothing really is a mystery as it is not enough that is hidden. It’s all see-through. Not like a glass though, because that too is brittle. Glass could go on to obstruct the natural flow of life inside and out of her space, her life. It was an open life. No stopping the rain, the sun, the wind. They belong to each other and they do not feel the need to knock on the missing door or tap on the glassless window to pay her a visit. Its limitless entry and exit in her premises. Her place was everyone else’s as well. Yet it seems like a house. Her house.

What you can see from the outside is a table. A chair. And an old woman with grey disheveled hair. She sits there for most part of her day. Sometimes reading with a cup in her hand, can’t say if its coffee or tea. You can see her laugh from one corner of the house at a certain flickering light in the night. Must be watching the late night comedies. And does she laugh loud. Open and unchecked, no fear of having her joy jinxed by an evil-eye passing by. It’s her laughter and it belongs to her and it fits her perfectly well. She does have a room inside the skeletal structure. This is where I believe; she retires for the night, does her business and cooks. This room inside is an anti-thesis to the entire charade of her unwrapped being. This carries secrets, desires and memories maybe. No one has ever been seen with her. Ever since she got the walls put down that is. After the war was over that is. After the allied powers snatched back the order from the Brutal Hitler’s and Mussolinis of the world. The need for guard was over. The need for walls was over. And there she was braving the cold biting country breeze of the winter, the hot summer sun, and the showers. Her eyes forever stuck on the road. In anticipation or without any she as the only one who needed to know.

Margaret Klein was German by birth and belonged to a wealthy family from Munich. She loved her family, her house and her mother and grew up with the womanly desire of a house of her own. Walls she could seasonally decorate with coloured wallpaper. Pink or green or blue, according to what is in vogue. But not yellow. Yellow was pale and jaundiced. She wanted a happy house. Such in which she could live with her happy family. Her handsome husband, her pretty blue-eyed children.

Her wish could well have been the command for Jack Jacob. She met him at the book store he owned.

“Art History? Well let me have a look please.”

He had said without taking his eyes of her face as he randomly handed her the latest edition of the leading magazine about the art structures of today. She laughed at this partly hoping that her face was not a blush with the ardor of his eyes on it. She handed it back to him, “Uhm... I was looking for something on art history.”

“That is exactly what this is. Do observe your reflection in the mirror once again. All forms of art in the world would soon be taking refuge in history.”

Margaret was later surprised at not have taken offense at his nerve. Maybe it was the honesty of his eyes or the confident truth as betrayed by his voice that Margaret had no clue why she bought the book and visited his store again the next week.

This is when it all started. This is where it all started then. They discussed books. Art. Books about Art, Art to do with books. Life of art and vice versa. Love for art, vice versa and more. It was the pleasant July of 1935. For two months they sat at the coffee shop at the end of the street from his store. They downed cups of latte as they talked about the most significant to the most unimportant things in the world. They shared their time, their feelings, and decided to share their future. The yellow Star of David with which Jack was destined to share his fate never occurred to either.

Jack was Jew and there couldn’t have been a worse time for Margaret to fall in love with him. It was just ten years too early. The seventeen-year-old pretty German lass did not see what lay ahead, a very few did anyway. Two months and Jack lost his store. Margaret’s father, a rare humanist in Munich believed it to be the Beginning of the end. For Margaret, life had just begun and she refused to give it up for the whims of one man who assumed to be living the life of the countless. A stubborn soldier like her would have been an asset for the forces of the Third Reich. She however, was loyal to the other side of the coin. To elope was her idea. Jack hesitated to jeopardize her future when his own was so bleak. But she was stern. And they eloped to the countryside on one dark night.

This was Margaret’s House. Her dream was half fulfilled. The other bit had to wait for the war to be over. Wedding is a religious affair and their creed and identity was in conflict. Margaret the exceptional optimist waited for the war to be over. Waited for him to be the owner of his own life as he was tenant of hers right now. Till then they would live in this house. Together as man and wife, married in soul yet in anticipation of permission from the only authority in the universe. And for that they had to linger on.

One of Jack’s Friends had owned a Photo-studio. He still kept his camera and even now did some photographs. Margaret and Jack had some clicked before they eloped. There was the conventional, Jack standing by the chair as Margaret sat or them sitting together, much in love. But the most remarkable one was the one that saw them laughing at some joke that Jack had whispered in her ear. This one was natural, this one was real.

These adorned the walls of her humble little house. Pictures of them all around. It gave them something to hold on to as the ever recent reports on the radio gave them recurrent cues to collapse. The uncertain future in his eyes was in stark contradiction to the hope in hers. At such moments the pictures gave him a reason to smile, a reason to believe that with her there, maybe all was not lost. Margaret bought the bread for them with the little money Jack and his friends had earned in the black market. She hoped best that Jack would stay at home. It was a German house. Margaret’s house. There was no yellow star upon it to take the light out of it. They passed each day behind the walls, closed windows and doors. Living a life on lease. On lease till there would be a knock on the door, a bullet through the window. Jack felt like her offender,

“I wonder where I had lost my mind. You were young I know. I should have been more careful.”
“Love knows no age. Like it knows no race or religion or time. That was our time and we shall have our time again. Trust me!” Margaret always ended the conversation.

They went on living. Living in the shell that their house was, protecting their make-believe world inside against the cruel goings-on outside. The walls were her world and from one corner to the other they traveled together. Today in one corner they remembered the ice-cream vendor at the corner of the street from Jack’s bookstore. They laughed till out of breath on how his moustache would bend and blow with the wind each time he made the effort to take out a carton of the sweet. Margaret insisted that she was convinced that his moustache was not real. And they went into a riotous fit of laughter. The day before, it was Jack’s old and ailing father somewhere in the east side of the wall. He had taken care of Jack from the cradle as his wife passed away and he was the one who gave Jack the courage and advise to elope. He somewhere hoped it would be his son’s route to a life. Old as he was, he could foresee the dilemma of the Jews in Germany. Jack had hoped to take his father along but he wasn’t the sort to hide just yet. The old and infirm were the first ones to lose their lives. As Jack mourned his father in Margaret’s arms, she felt guilt and regret and was somewhere glad that Jack was here with her and not lost in a labyrinth of bullets, explosions and smoke. In the centre of the wall however, lay the foundation of it. This is where lived their love, their endless conversations over the endless cups of latte. They remembered their old reactions, behaviors and the awkwardness of the new love and as they giggled over it all, kissed till the morning light gave them a reason to move from the wall.

She spent too much time in the market that day. “Oh I’m well aware that it is war-time… but for the price of bread to soar up like that?! … This is all there is? But look at the condition…. who can possibly digest these? Ah well… Indeed something should be better than nothing!” These little domestic squabbles made her life more livable. It felt natural. Only the other way round as Jack waited for her at home, not feeling as pleasant at lying there as a vegetable. She believed that he rather be a vegetable than get roasted on the roads.

That day as she reached home, she didn’t have to open the door. It lay there smashed into pieces. Broken windows. The scanty but the only furniture there was scattered all over the room and she didn’t feel the need to ask what happened. There were barely any secrets at that time and Jack being Jew wasn’t even allowed to keep any. This was the year 1939. Jews from all over the countryside were ordered to move to the major cities. Some were forced to move. Jack must’ve been one of those. ‘But no’, Margaret told herself. ‘That is not possible… that was what we were fighting against. To gain our life from the forces who had no authority over them. Jack will never abandon our own personal war. He would have rather died.’ Died. Suddenly, walking away at the end of a gun was a rather acceptable vision for her than to see her love drenched in blood in some corner of some god-forsaken street. That was true. Jack decided to go away than to see her chastised, accused and executed for being in love with a Jew. He hoped she would go back home. To her German family in the posh German town and marry a German officer. He did not weep but the tears could not stop wondering how he had been so sheltered in his life and now how it was all over.

Margaret did what she knew now she was destined to do. Wait. Wait for Him. Wait for some news. Bad news or good. Wait for the war to be over, wait for the inevitable. Wait forever. She did not close her windows anymore. She did not bar the door. She sat by them all day. The pictures on the walls, the broken furniture and the radio. She knew that the war was on, that time passed by only as her radio told her that. She listened carefully all day hoping to get some news of Jack. Some hope of his coming back home. Coming back to her. She bent out of each window as far as she could stretch but never saw him approach. She walked all around the house. She looked in all directions. And waited. Margaret did not go back to her father’s house. Though she wrote letters to her mother now, never revealing her own address if they took her away before Jack came back home. That would be unbearable for her, for him to come back and her not be there to embrace him.

She heard it all from all over. The local women in the markets who claimed to have seen it on the Television at the big shop in the third street. She traded her pearl jewels for that television and stood hooked to it for any news of him. She stood there as the ghettos were formed. As the foreign races were exterminated. As the oldest and the youngest were killed. As Germany took over most of Europe. As America, USSR and the Great Britain went on to save the world. But there was no jack there too. He still did not come back home.

Years went by and the war is now over. The walls of Margaret’s house are even more so immaterial now. She had believed they were to protect her world. They did not. She believed her house stood on the strength of her walls, but the walls were not strong enough to keep Jack safe. And now when Jack would come back home. He would not need them to hide, to feel safe and to live on. Her world is not in her walls anymore. It is beyond them. She got them down. Demolished to the ground. The colour of wallpaper was not a concern anymore. It would have been yellow anyway. Yellow like the band jack must have worn around his arm all these days. It was from behind these walls that they took him away and she did not want him to miss her when he returned. It made it easier for her to look around and she can see him come back home when he does. As the news of war was over on the television she watched the popular American comedies each night and laughed. Laughed twice as hard as she could, her share and Jack’s. She made note of all there is to tell him. Of television, of tragedies and comedies it gave her, of the countryside neighbours, of her letters to her mother. What she did not make a note of was the days that went by. The years that passed by as she waited with bated breath, wide eyes, dry mouth. She lived on the way he would want her to. The way you do when the crisis is over. The way you do when you are alone. But alone she is not. She has the wind, the sun, the ground all over that wait with her.