Pain Meets Vulnerability: Chapter 3 Lior's Eyes
The kitchen smelled like burnt sugar and old stories.
Berta’s kuchen sat between them on the table, a golden square cut into careful pieces, the streusel still warm. Steam rose from the coffee cups like it had nowhere else to go.
Lior picked at the crust with a fork. He was a young man going on sixty, eyes the color of winter sidewalks after the plows have come through.
“Berta,” he said, voice low, almost ashamed, “I don’t know which is worse. Most days I walk around and it’s like someone turned the volume off inside me. Nothing gets in. Nothing hurts. And then some days the dial snaps the other way and everything is too loud. Every memory, every face, every room I was ever in. Every flash. Why can’t I figure out which one is better? Why can’t I just pick one and stay there?”
Berta didn’t answer right away. She poured more coffee into his cup even though it was already full, the way old people do when they need time to think. She looked out the window toward the bare maple, then back at him.
“When I was sixteen,” she began, “in Rosengarth, 1914, the Cossacks came through at dawn. Not the pretty kind from picture books. Real ones. They had ridden up from Guttstadt the night before, drunk on the priest’s altar wine. They took the rabbi’s boy first, a thin Jewish child they’d found hiding in the Guttstadt prayer-room, barefoot, clutching his little tallit like a shield. Then they took our horses, then whatever else they wanted. I remember standing in the doorway of our farmhouse, rosary beads cutting into my palm, watching the dust rise behind them while the boy’s cry was smothered by a Cossack’s glove. My mother yanked me inside, slammed the shutters, and we knelt together in the dark kitchen praying the Hail Mary until our knees bled. But the sound of the horses, and that one terrified Jewish child being dragged past our little Catholic village, stayed in my ears - I can still hear him. That was the first time I learned that a heart can scream without ever opening its mouth, and that the same road that leads to Sunday Mass can also carry hell on horseback.”
She cut another piece of kuchen and slid it onto his plate though he hadn’t finished the first.
“Later came the Germans, then the Russians again, then the Germans again. Our village sat on land everyone wanted and no one loved. By the time I was your age, Lior, I had buried two brothers and one little sister who starved in the winter of 1917. I stopped feeling things too. It was safer. You fold yourself up very small inside and you wait for the storm to pass.”
She sipped her coffee, eyes soft.
“Then I married August, another Rosengarth child - I followed a few years after him in 1927. Germans were not popular then. People crossed the street when they heard the accent. We lost the farm anyway. Stalin’s soldiers threw my parents out in ’44, burned the barn, took the cows. Killed the men, and did the unspeakable to the women. I still dream in the dialect of that village. I still smell the linden trees that lined the lane to the church. That place is gone, but it never left me.”
She reached across the table and laid her hand over his.
“The heart, Liebling, is not a room you can lock. It is a house with many windows. If you board them all up, the love inside starts throwing bricks at the glass from the inside, trying to get out. That is what the numbness is: shards on the floor. That is what the too-much feeling is: sunlight finally rushing in when someone tears the boards away. Both hurt. But only one of them is healing.”
Lior stared at the crumbs.
“I don’t know how to let the sunlight in without bleeding,” he whispered.
Berta smiled, small and fierce.
“You bleed. That is how the light knows where the cracks are. You bleed, and you keep the windows open anyway. That is what makes you whole: when the pain and the vulnerability sit down together at the same table and share the same piece of kuchen. They are not enemies. They are two old friends who have been waiting a long time to be introduced.”
She squeezed his hand once, hard, the way people do when words run out.
Outside, the December wind rattled the panes, but inside the kitchen the light was steady and yellow, and the coffee kept steaming. For the first time in a long while Lior let himself cry without hiding his face.
Berta didn’t wipe his tears. She simply pushed the plate closer.
“Eat,” she said gently. “Love tastes better when it’s shared.”
Kelly, Asha’s Siamese, was curled on the radiator cover, seal-point tail wrapped tight around his paws like a question mark. His blue eyes never left Lior’s face. Cats always know.
In the narrow back hallway, Brother Jerome stood motionless, hood pushed back, tears running freely down the grooves of his cheeks. He had come for coffee and stayed for the words.
Above him St. Rita of Cascia hovered between the crucifix and the calendar of saints. When Berta spoke of love throwing bricks, something in the saint broke open.
Berta let the silence settle, then leaned in.
“So, what now?” she asked. “You sit here and wait for the feeling to choose you?”
Lior’s voice was barely a breath. “I don’t know what to do next.”
“You walk forward, child. You share yourself with others, even if it’s only a passing smile on the street. You keep collecting the tears of children. That’s love, child. Why did you think you were doing it in the first place?”
Lior looked up, stunned. “That’s… love?”
“No one ever told you?” Berta said, almost laughing through the tenderness. “Then I’m telling you now.”
St. Rita dipped. She sank through the air until she knelt beside the mute monk, hands pressed to her mouth, shoulders shaking with sobs that had nothing to do with the thorns in her forehead and everything to do with the boy who had just been handed the name of his own heart.
Brother Jerome, voiceless since the war, lifted one trembling hand and rested it on the saint’s shoulder. Please, he pleaded without sound, they’ll hear us.
She only cried harder. Short of mortal sin, those tears were not going to be quieted.
Because the Saint of the Impossible had just heard a survivor be told, for the first time, that carrying other children’s pain was love. And the Impossible had finally happened to her: someone understood her wounds the way she had always understood everyone else’s.
A small scrape sounded behind the hall table. A garden gnome, no taller than a coffee cup, red hat askew, peeked out, wiped a tear with his sleeve, and gave the mute monk a conspiratorial wink.
“We couldn’t make this up if we wanted to,” the gnome whispered, voice like dry leaves on stone, before vanishing back into the shadows with a satisfied smirk.
Brother Jerome closed his eyes, let the saint cry against his shoulder, and decided some eavesdropping is holy.
In the kitchen, Lior rested his damp face on his arms and, for the first time, did not try to hide the shaking. Berta simply refilled his cup and let the room hold them all: the living, the listening, the impossible, and the gnome who would never admit he’d been there at all.
Author's Note: As a disabled survivor using assistive technology,, which changes day by day pending my health - (#zebralife), I pour these chapters from my own experiences and the people I've met along the path of life. . If Lior's eyes reflect your shadows, reach out—resources like RAINN or Support for Men at 1in6.org are lifelines. What's next? Stay tuned. Comments welcome, always.
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