11
September 2016
Alex, Robert
“Nowadays they’d deprive her of her parental rights if they saw the bloody state, she’d leave my backside in,” said Alex. “But the beatings weren’t the worse thing – the daily humiliations and restrictions, the crushing of absolutely anything that a child might want was far worse.”
They were meeting for the second time. Alex liked Robert. It was the first time he had talked so openly with another adult, a man twice his age, about himself, about his childhood, about his problems.
It even occurred to him that he dreamed of talking with his father like this all his life, complaining to him, asking him what to do. But his father had either always been at work, or he’d looked aside in shame when Alex came to him with tears in his eyes for help. Or he’d simply been asleep, and now he was dead.
“She was lecturing me the whole time. She thought that everything I did, the whole time, was wrong, I was just doing it to spite her. When she was lecturing me it was best to keep quiet, not to object, not to get in the way. But even then I’d be shouted at along the lines of ‘Why are you keeping silent?! We’re feeding you, clothing you, why’re you such a stupid, lazy, ungrateful bastard?!?’ And then the belt would come into play for being ‘stubborn and insolent.’ To this day I sometimes shudder at the sound of a belt being whipped out of a pair of trousers.”
Alex took a gulp of water and noticed that his hands were shaking. He again felt very sorry for himself. But nevertheless, he continued:
“In the 1990s, Mom suddenly got into some crank religious sect. She’d met some member of the group, and she started believing their theories, 100 percent, without even bothering to find out what representatives of the other, classic religions thought about it. And from then on she’d use all this new knowledge from her ‘real friends’ to provide cover for all her decisions and everything she did. And the way she saw it, I was just a really bad lot. If it wasn’t for her memories of the twenty agonizing hours spent giving birth to me, I think she would’ve decided that I wasn’t her son at all, that I was just the spawn of the devil.
“Basically, that was the way that she behaved with me. I was forbidden from doing anything: phoning my friends, bringing them home or going to visit them, I wasn’t allowed to get bad grades at school, to lose things, to have any problems. I was brutally punished for the slightest misstep.
“When I grew up and became physically stronger than her, the beatings stopped, or, rather, as was the case with my father, she moved on to throwing heavy objects. She threw the iron, the frying pan, a big glass ball – you know, one of those souvenirs, with a model of a city and snow falling in it if you shake it about.”
Robert nodded that he understood.
“Ours was of Paris. Once I bought the wrong cheese at the shop, it wasn’t the one she’d asked for, and she threw Paris at me! In the name of all the values of some sect,” he smiled sadly, “whilst cursing at the same time!”
Alex broke out into laughter, even surprising himself – he started laughing and couldn’t stop. Barely able to breathe, he continued: “The ball hit me on the ear, smashed against the wall and broke into tiny shards. The pain was deafening, I thought I’d faint or throw up. She ordered me to pick up all the broken glass with my bare hands and she was only satisfied when she saw that they were covered in blood, and that my palms had been cut to ribbons. She thought that was the only way I could be ‘cleansed.’ Tell me, do you believe in God?”
“I’m a Buddhist,” Robert answered simply. “Do you?”
“I’d like to believe, and I often think that it would probably make my life so much easier. But my mother made religion impossible for me for years into the future. So I became a philosopher. To be more precise, I graduated in philosophy at the London School of Economics, and became a journalist for the money.”
Alex smiled bitterly.
“Ever since I escaped my home, I can’t stand any rules or dogmas. Believers have to forgive, right? I don’t know how I can forgive my mother. I hate her. Hate.”
“Have you ever spoken to her about this?” asked Robert.
“Back then, no, of course,” answered Alex. “And later … What would be the point?!?”
Alex leaned back in his armchair.
“Another thing. She always compared me with my cousin, the A-grader. She always pointed to her as an example,” said Alex. “She wanted me to get straight As, and then have a career, and become a big boss. She probably wanted me to achieve what she’d failed to.”
Robert could see what an effort it was for Alex to get out every word.
“She’d beat me half to death for getting a B,” said Alex. “I’d spend ages on the tube, riding round and round on the Circle Line. Hours on end. So as not to go home before my father got back. She didn’t beat me so badly if he was around. Sometimes she beat me so badly that it seemed like she wanted to kill me.”
“What did you shout out when she was beating you?”
Alex shut his eyes tight. He could see his drunken mother in front of him, again slashing with his father’s belt.
Alex could feel that he’d tensed up into a ball. It was as if it was all happening to him again.
“I shouted ‘Mom, don’t! Please! Please, don’t, Mom!’.”
Robert looked at Alex intensely.
“I’d shout ‘I won’t do it again,’ and she’d beat me, asking: ‘What won’t you do again?’
Alex could feel the tears welling up in his eyes.
“I would like to love her,” said Alex. “She’s my mother, after all. She gave me life.”
Alex lowered his head.
“One time she got up on a stool in order to reach up to a shelf in the corridor. Without being spotted, I poured some water on the floor around the stool. I wanted her to slip, fall and crack her head.”
“And what happened?” asked the doctor.
“She didn’t fall. She just got her feet wet,” answered Alex. “And then she gave me a beating. She knew that I hated her. She probably hated herself too. She just didn’t have the backbone to throw herself out of the window. Or to hang herself with that damned belt.” He fell silent, and then added: “That’s probably how it will all end.”
Robert gave Alex a long hard look.
“I want you to do something right now, Alex,” he said gently, but with confidence.
“Yes, of course,” said Alex, without looking up.
“It’s very simple,” said Robert.
Alex looked at the doctor, his attention focused.
“I’d like you, Alex, to imagine your mother before you and say: ‘I love you’.”
Alex raised his gaze, as if looking straight through the doctor. He could see his mother in front of him. The woman whose womb he had emerged from into this world to see the light. Suddenly, he saw himself, tiny and in her arms. He couldn’t have remembered that, he was just imagining that picture. The words flew from his lips of their own accord.
“I love you, mother,” Alex almost whispered.
And in that moment, he got a lump in his throat. A stabbing lump with sharp metal corners that started to slice him to pieces from within.
Alex could physically, clearly feel those scorching, acidic incisions. He again felt that he was tiny and defenseless. A moment later tears were pouring from his eyes. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried. But it didn’t feel unfamiliar. He’d forgotten about the very existence of the doctor who was with him at that moment. The tears broke through from nowhere, pouring in waves from his eyes. His breathing became uneven, disrupted.
“I love you, mother,” Alex said again. But louder this time. And the tears poured even harder. As if, within him, in his soul, the gates had opened – gates that had held back the streams of tears for so many years.
“I love you, mother!” Alex almost shouted through his tears.
Robert, narrowing his eyes, sat motionless in his chair and observed Alex.
Alex sat back in his armchair, covering his eyes with his hands. His shoulders and back merged into the armchair. He went entirely limp, nothing like the confident and gracious man that many of his acquaintances and colleagues knew.
Alex stopped crying just as unexpectedly and abruptly as he had begun. Without wiping his eyes dry, he looked up at Robert and spoke with confidence:
“I want her to die.”
Alex himself was horrified by these words. The remains of his consciousness that hadn’t been fogged over by emotions and memories whispered to him that he would be ashamed of these words. But now, in this moment, in his current state, he wasn’t ashamed. He was saying what he thought.
“I want her to die, Doctor!” shouted Alex, looking Robert right in the eye.
Alex could barely remember how that meeting with the psychiatrist had ended. There were a few words after a long silence from Robert. Alex realized that the doctor had to calm him down before allowing him to leave his office into the hushed light of the street, where he would be met by a normal day in the city of London with its hustle and bustle. He could barely remember the words that he himself spoke. He only remembered that he thanked Robert. And in the doorway, he said: “Don’t worry, Doctor. I’ll be fine. I’ll be back next time. Ask me to tell you about Rachel. I have to tell you that. I don’t have the strength now.”