After about a half hour, a car stopped next to the house. I felt my heart about to explode. A broad-shouldered man, shorter than my father, wearing glasses, opened the gate and came up to the porch. I got out of the chair and extended my hand. He ignored it and sat down in the chair across from me. Tears threatened to appear. The insult burned into my soul. I wanted to run away from there and disappear, to never come back, to never again see these people that hated me without even knowing a thing about me. But I stayed seated. When he began to speak, his voice was as cold as an icy mountain.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I answered.
“Then why are you here?”
“I wanted to meet you. I didn’t even know you existed until today.” I sounded like I was begging.
He must have detected my miserable state, because his voice grew a bit softer as he asked, “Your father never told you about me?”
“No. He never told me about you. He was killed a few years ago in a car accident.”
“I know,” he said.
I was surprised, but I didn’t make a comment.
Suddenly he got up from his chair, turned his back to me, and leaned his body on the porch banister. A moment later, he turned back around and said, “My brother and I haven’t been in contact since before he left the city without saying where he was going. One day he just disappeared. No one knew where he was. My parents died, and I lost my only brother.”
“Why did he leave?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He turned his head away from me. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“No, I’m an only child. I also don’t have any other family. My father never talked about you or his parents, and my mother never mentioned any family.”
“I see. So how did you find me?”
“I met a woman who lived in your parents’ old house,” I said. “She told me.”
“Yes,” he sighed. “Mrs. Jacobs.”
“She spoke about you with a lot of hatred.”
“Yeah,” he said, without adding a thing.
There were so many things I didn’t know. A myriad of questions swirled around in my head, but I knew this wasn’t the time to bring them up.
“What kind of father was he?” he asked suddenly.
I thought about how to answer this complex question and finally said, “Before he died, he was a great father, but after he died, not so much.”
He looked at me and then he said, “I’m starving. Come and eat lunch with us. Michelle must be waiting for us.”
Lunch was, strangely enough, both tense and relaxed at the same time. We talked about a number of subjects, but carefully did not talk about one: the name of my father was not uttered even once. It was obvious that this family was carrying a lot of baggage with respect to my father. And it was also clear that if I wanted to stay in touch with them, it would take time before we would be able to talk about things. After lunch, I got up and made my apologies, saying that I had to get home. Michelle stayed behind to get the kitchen in order, and Ron walked me to my car.
He said, “You need to understand that I am very angry at John. You don’t have anything to do with it, but I need some time to absorb the fact of your existence. I have a lot more questions for you. I want to know everything, but that’s enough for today.”
He took out a business card and offered it to me, then took out another card and asked for my address and phone number. Before I could sit down in the driver’s seat, he grabbed me and briefly hugged me to him, and then, as if his actions had embarrassed him, he ran back toward the house.
I left there feeling strange. Something huge happened to me today. I have a family. Am I happy or upset? Maybe both. My father had a life besides the one I knew, and I have to get used to that. On the one hand, he was a loving father, and on the other, he was a monster. But they were the same person. The loving and caring father was the fruit of my childish imagination and the unknown. The monster was there the whole time. My mother knew it.
When I got home, Roy was there. He welcomed me and came into my bedroom—his bedroom.
Ever since that conversation with Mickey, the atmosphere had changed at home. Roy was still concerned about me, but in a different way. He would leave in the morning, after taking care to make me something to eat. When he came back in the late afternoon, he would close himself off in his room. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure if he was home at all. It felt like he had become just a roommate, and the distance between us felt enormous. The deep, close connection that had formed between us had all but disappeared.
It was seven o’clock in the morning when I woke up the next day. I got dressed, made myself a sandwich for lunch, and left the house. Roy had left a while earlier. A strange car was parked at the end of my driveway, blocking my way out. A man whose face wasn’t visible sat behind the wheel. I debated whether to approach him and ask him to move his car, but recent experience had taught me to be cautious. I stood in place, shading my eyes from the blinding sun. The window rolled down and then I heard him call out, “Eva? It’s me, Ron.”
“Ron? What are you doing here?” I asked. He opened the car door, got out, and started walking toward me.
“I’m sorry to just show up like this. I didn’t sleep all night. I had to see you, to talk to you. I just got in the car without thinking and came.”
“I’m on my way to work,” I said.
“I know, I know. I just thought… You know what, I’ll just hang around until you come back from work and then we can talk.” He began to walk back to his car.
“Wait,” I said. “Come inside.”
“Are you sure?”
“No.” I smiled, opening the door and inviting him in. His steps were hesitant, as if he was afraid of something and was ready to bolt any minute. He needed time to grasp the fact that he was in his brother’s house, and it wouldn’t be easy for him. He walked into the house in silence and immediately looked right and left. His hand felt along the wall until we reached the living room. I invited him to sit down and asked if he would like something to drink. “A glass of water,” he said. He was pale, his throat visibly rising and falling. He removed his glasses and mopped up the sweat that covered his face with a handkerchief he fished out of his pants pocket. He sat down on the couch and looked around the room, as if he wanted to take it all in. I went to the kitchen to get him a glass of water and took my time in order to leave him alone with his private pain, with the memories that must be flooding him. When I turned back to the living room, he lowered his face, resting it on his shaking hands. He was crying—silently and aloud—trying unsuccessfully to choke back his feelings. His whole body shook. He grabbed his face with both hands and let the crying burst forth like a stream. I sat on a chair in the kitchen and let him cry for the both of us.
After he calmed down, I sat down next to him without a sound.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Almost twenty-four,” I answered.
“Tell me about him. What kind of father was he?”
I began to tell him about the father I once had, making an effort to remain a little girl as I described the father I had adored, the one that had medicine for every ailment. Ron wasn’t satisfied. He asked direct questions arising from his knowledge of the man we were talking about. Slowly but surely, the fatherly image of my childhood converged with that of the man I came to know after his death.
“That’s him,” he said finally.
“And there’s one more thing,” I said making a spontaneous decision.
Ron lifted his eyes to me.
“He was a neo-Nazi!” I blurted out.
His eyes opened as wide as teacups. “What did you say?” he bellowed.
“He belonged to a group of neo-Nazis; he was one of their leaders.”
Ron got up from the sofa and began to walk around the room.
“Since when?”
“I don’t know. I found out about a year ago.”
“How did you find out?”
“That’s a different story,” I said after a while. “It’s still hard for me to talk about.”
“I see,” he said and looked into my eyes. I lowered my head and played nervously with a button on my shirt. After a moment, he whispered, “Did he do something to you? Did he hurt you?”
“Not in the way you’re thinking of, but in a lot of other ways, yes.”
Ron sat back down next to me and took my nervous hand in his.
“Tell me about him,” I said.
“Are you sure you want to hear it?”
“Yes,” I answered confidently. “I have to.”
“You will learn that the man you knew during his life is different from the one I knew as a youngster,” he said. Then I heard him mumble to himself, “Or maybe not…”
“We were born and grew up in the house you visited, the one that Mrs. Jacobs lives in now. John was born three years before me. Our house was not a happy one. Our parents worked in menial jobs in order to support the family. My mother was a cleaning woman and my father worked in construction. They would come home late in the evening, bone tired from a hard day’s work. I hardly saw them. When they came in, they were so tired they hardly said a word. They ate, and my father went straight to bed. My mother stayed behind a few minutes, until we went into our rooms, and then she also disappeared until the next evening. That’s what our lives were like. A gray, lifeless routine.
“My father was a weak man. He resigned himself to his life and never had any hopes of escaping it. As time passed, John became a teenager eaten away by anger and frustration and took it out on my father. He ridiculed him, called him names, and once, when he couldn’t bear the misery of his life, he hit him and injured him. Because of that, he spent a year in a juvenile detention center. When he came home, he had become a bully that people chose to stay away from. During the first years, he looked out for me. He was a role model to me, just like he was for you. I admired him for his strength, and for the fact that people were afraid of him. I tried to be like him in every way. But I was physically weaker than him, so he became my protector. If somebody said a bad word about me, they would feel the might of John’s fist.
“John became the neighborhood thug. My parents didn’t have any influence over him. The only figure he spared to some extent was my mother. Every once in a while, he would buy her a present with the money he earned doing odd jobs or money he stole. She asked him to stop, but he continued anyway.
“He dropped out of school before he went to the detention center. I continued to study and graduated high school. I was very lonely. My classmates distanced themselves from me. They were afraid to get into trouble with my brother and preferred to stay away from me as well.
“I was sixteen when my father died. He was killed in a work-related accident. The day they notified us of his death, I came home from school and saw two unfamiliar cars parked in front of the house. My mother was sitting in the living room crying. Two unfamiliar people sat next to her. There were noises coming from John’s and my bedroom. John was going berserk like he never had before in my life. He was smashing anything and everything. He demolished the desk, ripped the sheets to shreds, upended the beds; nothing in the bedroom remained whole. Minutes later, police sirens approached. Two policemen came in and took him with them. It was the first time I was truly scared to death of him. This guy, my brother, was capable of anything. I left the house and closed myself up in the shed in the backyard. I was a teenager with a scared and terrified little boy inside him.
“Life changed after my father’s death. John took my father’s small shoes and grew them to enormous proportions. Now they were shoes made of steel with sharp daggers in the toes. His attitude toward my mother changed. He saw her helplessness and couldn’t bear it. He would yell at her, insult her, sometimes even push her, and she would withdraw deeper and deeper inside her shell. I tried to stay away from him, but he wouldn’t let me. Looking back, I understand that he needed me more than I needed him. I was the only person close to him that really loved him. Yes, I loved him despite his actions. He was my brother.
“My mother died two years later. She had given up on life. She faded away in front of our eyes until she couldn’t take the burden of life itself and closed her eyes by choice. John became my only family; the only one I had in the world. Inside I knew that he wasn’t good for me, but I thought there was no choice—he was the only one left. It was better to be with him the way he was than to be without him. And his attitude toward me also changed. He would beat me, demand that I do odd errands for him, and would find other ways to abuse me. I became his punching bag.
“If I was late coming home, he locked me in my room for hours without food or water. Sometimes he would rip apart my clothes and school books. Other times he would interrogate me about where I was going and decide whether to let me go or not. He became my warden, and the house was my prison. I wasn’t the only one to suffer at his hands; all the children in the neighborhood felt his wrath. He would take things from them, threaten them. Even adults were afraid of him. The kids stopped going out on the street in the afternoon, preferring to spend time in their homes or yards. He strutted around the street like a peacock. But I knew the truth. I knew that hiding inside him was a scared soul that needed someone to give him a feeling of security, and that he acted like a monster so he wouldn’t have to deal with the scary demons inside him.”
“And how did you leave him in the end?”
“He left me—he disappeared, without leaving a trace or clue as to where he was. But before that a few more things happened. When he left, I breathed easy again, but I also wanted him to come back.
“When I was eighteen, I signed up for college. Considering the state of things, it was a really brave step for me to take. John tried to dissuade me, to get me to forget the whole idea. He said that studying would lead me nowhere. When he saw that I was adamant, he threatened not to give me a penny to pay for my studies. But the small inheritance left by my parents was divided equally between us, by law. He couldn’t touch my portion. Despite his threats, I signed up for college not far from our house. I wanted to get away from him, but I didn’t have the courage to go too far away. John never forgave me for deciding to go to school. He saw me as being pretentious and superior. He never stopped teasing me. He’d hide my books, and once he even tore up one of my papers. But the more he threatened, the more it became important for me to graduate and succeed. It drove him crazy.
“The lady you met, Mrs. Jacobs, lived in the house across the street from us with her parents and her brother. The boy was a handsome kid that girls flocked to, and the girl, Beth, was very pretty. She loved to laugh. We could hear her laughter from across the street. She was cheerful, always smiling and always willing to help. John despised this family. They served as a reminder of everything he ever wanted and couldn’t have. He developed an obsessive hatred for the family. One day he bought binoculars and put them down near the window. Every night he would watch them. When I pointed out once that he was invading their privacy and it was against the law, he slapped me so hard that I never made a comment to him about his behavior ever again.
“Watching the family became part of his routine. When evening came and it was dark, he would sit down, take out the binoculars, and watch the family’s house; Beth’s room faced the street, and I knew he was focusing mostly on her. Maybe he hoped that one day he would be able to get close to her. And that day came, except it was the worst day I had ever experienced in my life.
“I had come home from classes that day later than usual, after working at the library to finish up an assignment. It must have been around eight o’clock when I got home. John was sitting by the window as usual at this time of the evening. Suddenly he got up, stopped in the kitchen, took something from one of the drawers, and ran out of the house. I watched him go but didn’t do anything. I took a shower and sat down to prepare the school assignment—the hours flew by without my looking at
the clock.
“The door opened suddenly and he walked into the house. I got up from my desk with the feeling that something had happened. I walked toward him, but he barked at me to get lost and then threatened me with the knife in his hand. I went back to my room and sat down on the bed.
“To this day, I’ve never forgotten the look on his face. For a split second, I saw the bruises and scratches, but mostly I remember his expression. It was the look of madness. Even now, I see that look in my mind any time I think about him. When Michelle called me yesterday and told me that you were at our house, the image of his bruised face popped up, and the things he said to me echoed in my ears like a thunderous bell.
“He didn’t leave the house for two days. He closed himself in his room and only left once. I didn’t understand what had happened to him. He was usually awake by noon and came home in the evening, when he would grab something to eat and sit down to watch the Jacobs’ house. Suddenly everything changed. He stopped watching Beth’s room and would come home after midnight. I didn’t know what he was doing.
“One day I came home from college during the evening. The last remnants of light shone outside. Few people were on the street. I got off the bus and started walking toward home. I remember hoping that John wouldn’t be there. His actions and irregular behavior made me extremely anxious, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything.
“Except I never reached my home that night. I was deep in thought and didn’t notice a group of guys coming toward me, holding baseball bats. Before I realized what was happening, they jumped on me and began beating my entire body. For a moment, I thought they wanted to rob me, and I tried to reach my hand into my pocket to throw them my wallet. But they weren’t robbers; they were waiting for me to beat me up. Beth’s brother was in the mob.
“I knew this was the end and accepted my death calmly. Beth’s brother said, ‘He ruined my sister’s life and I’m going to ruin his.’ I closed my eyes and waited for death to come. Suddenly everything stopped. I woke up in the hospital. My whole body was covered in bandages. Evidently, while they were beating me up, a police car happened to drive by and they ran away as soon as they saw the policemen.
Life in a Box Page 26
