“This is the force of nonresistance to force,” I thought to myself. “Like Mahatma Gandhi.”
Okay, so I didn’t think it then, but now when I remember it, I think it.
And then she started shouting, baring her teeth, her voice unexpectedly loud and sharp, husky from cigarettes:
“You dirty bastards! I knew you’d do it! Who you think you are, huh, who?” She barely came up to the tall guy’s shoulder, and leaning forward like that she looked even smaller, but somehow, I’m certain, it didn’t matter to her anymore. “Do you think you’d found yourself some stupid bimbo? You know what my name is? Do you? Do you know what’s gonna happen now? Do you know who my father is?!”
All of a sudden a passport appeared in her hand — from back in the day, those green passports with the black-and-white photo and the coat of arms, you know the ones — and she was waving it around. She even smacked him on the nose with it, whacked him in the face as if he were some little twerp. And he was ripped, like I said. At that moment, neither she alone nor the two of us together could’ve done anything to fight them off, we didn’t have a chance. But she slapped him across the face and laughed, kind of brattily, demonstratively, taking pleasure in humiliating him — that was what really did the trick, I figure. That’s what it seemed like to me at that moment, although I couldn’t really understand what was going on. Maybe I’d been KO’d.
K-shev, as he is understood, is a construct, the product of some moment or other of need or threat. In fact, you could say that he’s even ready-made, since part of him has to be thought up, while the other part of him exists in any case: somewhere up there, somewhere invisible. Some K-shev or other was nevertheless real.
And they were freaked out, they jumped when they heard his last name — without even looking at the name in the passport. And since they were drunk on top of everything, it scared the shit right out of them.
We ran between the apartment blocks, then across the bridge toward the train station. We were laughing, and she kept asking: “Did he hit you hard?”
No, not really, I would answer, despite the fact that my teeth were numb. Such a night, of course, is unforgettable. I got home — without the bag of food, as it turned out — but with her instead. I wasn’t hungry anymore. We shut the doors and windows tight, turned out the lights, and the music, cranked up to ten, exploded in our heads.
I, of course, am deeply convinced that the world revolves around me — as its center or at least as the object of its dictatorship. The idea is grandiose and never gets tiresome. Until you finally decide to enter real life.
Like a needle jabbed into your arm, reality stings you, hurting more than your skin and flesh. You realize that you’re nobody. The electricity’s gone out, the darkness is your sudden enemy — an ally and enemy simultaneously because it demands action — you have to protect yourself from the dark. Otherwise the world goes out, along with the artificial light from the power plant. The night once again disintegrates into atoms, changes from cultivated to wild, fitting itself afterward into its original black hues, its cat skin.
Too bad if you find yourself lying on the carpet with your pants down when the lights come back on. With a sticky stain on your stomach — a pathetic wanker.
Such nights, like the night after my escape with Hope from Hope, compensates for all my patheticness for months on end. In the morning, however, she left, which was to be expected. She didn’t like the decor. She liked me, as she said, more than she should have. So it wouldn’t be cool to steal my cash or some valuables from the closet. For that reason she decided upfront, like an honest dude, as she put it — to take off. What kind of dude are you, I asked her, which was also an excuse to touch the crotch of her jeans. I smiled, hoping she’d let me strip her again, even if it was only at the door, a goodbye quickie, standing there like that with my bare feet on the tile. But no.
This girl hadn’t been that girl. In the morning I secretly snuck a peek — I’ll admit it — at her passport. Her name wasn’t K-sheva, of course, but then again I didn’t expect it to be. Her last name started with G.
Yet I had somehow believed in the myth of the father. And that thought, as it turns out, never left me. My obsession with predestination was obviously entering a new phase.
I don’t think I’m an exception. Everyone my age — how many times have they experienced humiliation, how many times have they come face-to-face with violence, so innocently hidden in the ridiculous outbursts of demonic childhood? The pockets shaken down in school, the stolen small change, the backpack scattered on the ground. The ball popped and skewered on the metal spikes of the fence. These dregs are washed away with time, especially when you pass through the key moment when you yourself can and indeed must — inevitably — commit violence.
But I remember, I’ve etched it in my brain, I can’t shake it off, I can’t smile, I can’t get free of it. The cyclical motion in which you change from victim to perpetrator, those gears keep slipping for me. Time doesn’t turn its spokes. The circle of nature that torments or delights you, depending on your participation and role — it all seems senseless to me. Where is it leading, what’s its cause, its reason? What should I hope for, why should I pay a high price since I’ll fail to remember its value, I’ll forget it.
I don’t want to forgive, I can’t forgive. The time taken from me cannot be returned. What if those moments, even those filled with suffering — like that punch in the face years ago — had no meaning? What will happen then with the night after that instant of humiliation, after that second of fear in the crumbling panel block-apartment with its flickering, naked light bulbs? The price of the night with the girl from Hope and my reckless inspiration with her dark, almost black body in the gloom — wouldn’t it, too, be diminished, if the ordeal is diminished? No, I don’t want to, I can’t forget.
The Comsomol could not easily be replaced. I tried sports, I tried other religions. I counted on the army with particular enthusiasm: I was supposed to become a pilot after all! I only later discovered the reason for this attraction, when the dream was already dead.
I’m a good runner and thus I became not a pilot, but a foot soldier.
Every boy dreams of becoming a cosmonaut, but then he takes up something easier: girls. After that, or more or less at the same time, he starts to smoke, although at the beginning, of course, he coughs. Later it becomes clear — you really have to be a complete geek to not replace the cosmonaut with something more realistic. Okay, so I was stuck in that phase for a long time. I remember our classes in Morals and Law in school and the basketball-esque physique of our teacher, a philosopher, six-and-a-half feet tall.
“So, in your opinion,” he asked me pleasantly, although I think he felt like smacking me upside the head, but at the time I didn’t understand why, “what’s the path of evolution, of development? After a just society has been created and all needs have been met — what’s next?”
“After that,” I answered after thinking it over a bit, “man will turn toward the cosmos. He’ll conquer the space beyond the earth.”
“Aha,” my comrade teacher nodded knowingly. And he didn’t hit me.
But he should’ve. I needed to learn at least something in school, even at the price of violence, because there’s no way to save ourselves from violence, it catches up with us sooner or later.
I would go home, take off my backpack, toss it down and separate the one outside from the one inside. I would fall asleep. The nights didn’t have any connection to the days. There were cats wailing in the courtyards like children. The outrageous ecstasies of nocturnal love. I didn’t understand it then, but the consciousness also processed that information, unthinkingly. And that’s how I began to suspect that night was the time for battles, for struggles. But who was the enemy?