The Son. Andrej Nikolaidis

wife was cheating him, and who hit him today because he didn’t slap her yesterday? What if that’s how it was? What if Christ simply loathed him? What if he laughed at those grotesque creatures and then breathed his last, adrift in the ocean of sorrow which washed over him, sorrow because of all the misery on Earth. What if that’s how it was? Everything would go down the plughole and there would be nothing but agony, like everything really has gone down the plughole and my life is nothing but agony. Death is the only fact which one can build optimism on – only death can finally bring hope…’

      I stood on the balcony, howling out this tirade, and then stopped myself when I suddenly remembered my father. The terrible thought that I might waken him forced me into silence. I glanced over to his house, but he hadn’t turned on the light or come out onto the terrace. He hadn’t heard me, after all. I had avoided that reproachful question, ‘What are you doing, for goodness’ sake?’; that question which I had always found the most shameful and frustrating. Once again there was no sign of my father. I tried to recall when I’d last seen him, but I couldn’t quite remember: I now wondered if he left the house at all anymore.

      If I don’t wake him, the dogs butchering each other down on the road will, I thought. A huge black tyke was tearing away at an unfortunate hunting dog. And a whole pack of dirty mutts and mongrels had come bolting up behind; canine freaks combining all the worst features of their forebears. The black tyke seized the slender hunting dog by the neck, immediately drawing blood and maddening the black leader’s entourage – that incestuous, degenerate pack. The long-bodied dog died in agony as dozens of jaws rent at it, pulled at its limbs and tore it apart on the sticky, hot asphalt. That will wake my father, I thought, and everything will end in a row, like every other conversation we’ve had since my mother died: without her standing between us as both dyke and bridge. Without her, our relationship was finally reduced to its very essence of mutual antipathy. My father had grated on my nerves even when I was a child, when I would be annoyed by everything he said or did. The trauma I carry with me from my earliest years is my father. I must have had a hundred nervous breakdowns in my childhood, and each of them because of him. Every time my father thought of giving me a goodnight kiss, of coming into my room, stroking my hair and saying something to me which he thought was affectionate – he who never learnt anything about children, who never learnt to live with his child, who never really accepted the fact that he had a child…Every time he stroked my hair and kissed me on the neck after his ‘affectionate’ and fortunately brief monologue…

      He even kissed me that evening after Milan had fallen from the gnarled, enchanted, 500-year-old maple. They said it was me who had talked him into climbing it. I don’t remember that, and I don’t know why Milan climbed the tree that particular day, like I know he had many times before. Perhaps he climbed it to needlessly prove to me once again that he was the elder brother, and thus braver and stronger. It turned out that a man was hoeing around the olive trees on the property next door: he heard our argument and me telling Milan that I hated him and demanding that he climb the tree all the way to the top. Milan refused because it had rained and the bark was wet, and then the man heard me saying I would climb it instead. Soon there came a scream and the sickening sound of a bone breaking.

      The body of his seven-year-old son was at the city mortuary in Bar that time my father leaned over my bed, covering me with the bridge of his body, and said, ‘Don’t cry, we love you.’ I listened to his steps receding, heard my mother’s sobs and the door of their room close. It closed once and for all for me. From that moment on, it was no longer the long hall and the two doors which separated us. Between us lay dead Milan, the blood trickling from his small, fractured skull and being borne away by the water from the old Turkish drinking fountain. From that moment on, we were separated by my guilt. My father never said that to me. He didn’t have to: it was enough for him just to look at me, or even worse, to kiss me. Every evening I awaited my punishment, but it never came. Instead there was the goodnight kiss. Only today do I realise how cruelly I was punished – that kiss was the punishment. I was ‘forgiven’, and it had been ‘decided’ that Milan’s death would never be mentioned in front of me. I was left to take care of my punishment myself. They could just as well have said: We won’t mention it but we know it was your fault, just as you know it was your fault.