I couldn't console her.

Now for a personal experience that’s not directly related to the world-class humanitarian organization known as the KGB or the evil, evil CIA . . .


Back in the 1990s, a much younger friend of mine, a non-practicing Jew who was (like me) teaching English in an Eastern European country, was reading a book about the Kabala late one night in a pub. He asked me what my favorite number was, and I said, “Four, like The Four Directions of the American Indians and The Four Seasons,” and he said, “Oh man, you’ve got to change it, Tom -- four’s the Death Number.” So, I said, “Okay, I'll change it back to my original one, Lucky Number 7, like Mickey Mantle and The Seven Sisters.”

A few minutes later, I left him there studying the Kabala and walked down the cobblestone street towards the railway station to catch my number four tram. When I got there it was already there, and several people were standing on one corner of the intersection, looking towards a woman who was standing by herself on the island.

When I stepped onto to the island, something seemed amiss — it was strangely void of people waiting to get onto the tram. Then I heard her sobbing. I looked at the tram and saw that it had come off its rails, probably because it was going too fast when it came down the hill and hit the curve. Somebody came up to me and whispered that the woman's son was under the tram. I watched as a policeman passed by me with a look of horror in his eyes.

I knew that I should go up to the woman and say, “I'm sorry” and hug her, but I couldn't bring myself to do it, because, well, I’m tall and I was concerned that she might not understand English or something. So I left her there sobbing and slowly becoming hysterical and walked over to another island and caught another tram (I seem to recall it was #1), and ended up walking along the river that early morning, watching it flow and looking up at the stars, including, as luck would have it, the constellation known as The Pleiades (which is spoken about in one of my favorite books, “Hamlet’s Mill,” and maybe even “The Iliad”).