by A G Mogan
I am an orphan. I am an orphan. I am an orphan.
I repeat this sentence over and over in my head, as if repeating it would finally make me believe it. It doesn’t, so I have no choice but to purge it from my head. Soon enough, my familial status is dethroned by endless questions, by the ceaseless struggle to find my meaning, to discover who I am and which road to follow. At such moments, Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg rings deafeningly in my head:
And still I don’t succeed
I feel it and yet I cannot understand it
I can’t retain it, nor forget it,
And if I grasp it, I cannot measure it
The days I spend in Linz after Mother’s funeral bring with them one of the biggest discoveries of my youth, thus fulfilling my brother-in-law’s prophecy. After Stefanie’s betrayal, I walk the snowy, slippery streets for two long, dreadfully cold days, with no particular destination in mind. Yet my body, with its selfish demands, is close to collapsing and forces me, in the name of survival, to seek sustenance. I drag my numb feet through the snow, leaving deep trails behind me, spoiling a perfectly white Linz. I long for hot, sweet tea, but all the cafes, bakeries and restaurants are closed, and going through my pockets I realize I am also broke. The only solution and the most frightening one is to return home.
As I halt in front of the gate, I find myself thanking the outside weather for sending the snow to alter the image of my house. I open the front door and bile reaches my throat. The stench of iodoform still floats in the air. My sorrow returns with renewed strength, causing me to wonder if it will ever fade or will forever cling to my soul like the woody stems of poison ivy climbing trees.
I stand motionless in the middle of the living room and realize that the comforting feeling of returning home has abandoned me as well. I am no one’s son, and the whole wide world is my home now, and it suddenly feels terrifyingly large. It was Mother who represented home for me, and with her disappearance, my sense of belonging has vanished, leaving me reeling, confused, and uncertain, groping for meaning.
I push open the window and let the brisk air flood the room, hoping it will drive away the pungent iodoform smell.
“For God’s sake, Adolf! Where have you been?” I hear Aunt Johanna’s voice behind me. I wince visibly. “You look like a ghost!”
I motion with my hand for her to shut up, but immediately regret my gesture. At least she hasn’t abandoned me and continued to worry. I approach her and clasp her in my arms, realizing that I am not the only one suffering.
“I am fine,” I whisper, barely audible. “I could really use a warm cup of tea.” She kisses my forehead and disappears into the kitchen.
Left alone again, I search for the courage to enter Mother’s room. There is something I need and certainly would find in there. As I open the door, a feeling of relief washes through my veins. The air is fresh and the furniture new. I close my eyes and silently thank my aunt.
Stepping inside the room, I seek to make peace with the sadness invading my soul. And then it comes to me, I must make peace with the possibility that the peace I search for may never be found. The wood crackles in the stove and I lay on the bed, letting the heat warm my frozen limbs. I am about to doze off when an image of Mother’s expression, after receiving the news of her disease, hurtles toward me like lightning in a clear sky. It is God’s willing, my dear children, I remember these being her only words at the time. My cheeks begin to burn like the hot coals in the stove. I jump to my feet and start rummaging through Mother’s possessions.
I have so many questions needing as many answers and am more determined than ever to uncover them.
In a scarlet leather chest Mother always kept hidden in her wardrobe, I finally find what I was looking for. Among the dozens of icons and religious books crammed into it, I detect two books wrapped in black velvet, held together by a worn-out cover titled: The Bible. I pull it out of the chest, and removing the velvet, read each title aloud: The Old and The New Testament. I take the former out of the cover and set the latter at hand, to browse through in the following days. I might be naïve, but somehow I know that I will find the answers to my persecuting questions within these pages. Who is God really? Why did he ignore Mother’s prayers and turn a deaf ear on mine? Why does He let us look like idiotic beggars in our endless monologues to Him?
Taking off my coat and shoes, I throw myself back on the bed. I try to remember what I know about God from the stories Mother used to read to me as a child, but all that comes to my mind is Christmas, when we celebrate the birth of Christ His Son, the Great Flood and Noah’s ark, the first people in Eden, and the slaughter of the poor lambs for Easter. Even as a child, I always wondered at the reason for sacrificing these gentle, innocent animals. Does God enjoy bloodshed? Does He eat them or drink their blood?
When Mother was alive I never called religion into question, feeling that she had an answer for every one of these mysteries. I left this obscure science to her to use in my education as she saw fit. But now, the void left behind with her untimely demise persecutes my conscience and chases me through an endless, intricate maze.
With my hands shaking in anticipation, I flip open the cover of the Old Testament and begin to voraciously scan through its yellow, strange-smelling pages. As I finish reading Genesis, which describes how God created the Earth, plants, animals, and man, I pause to reflect on it.
So, what I read was this: on the first day, God made the Heavens and Earth, and then it was night, followed by morning. He created the vast seas, the grasses and trees, and then there was night again, followed by morning. On the fourth day, God created the Sun to govern the day and the Moon to govern the night.
My first realization hits like a bolt from the blue. How could there be night, and then morning, if the Sun hadn’t been created until Day Four?
The question takes me by surprise, to say the least. So, the Almighty God, who’s known to have immeasurable knowledge and creative force, knows virtually nothing about science and cosmology? Everyone knows night and morning exist due to the Earth’s rotation around the Sun; yet if we are to believe the Bible, Earth was created three days before the Sun, which means there couldn’t have been either night or day in the first three “days” of creation. Something here is awfully putrid.
I then read of God creating the first humans, Adam and Eve. They had three male children: Cain, Abel, and Seth. Cain is a farmer and gives God a part of his harvest as sacrifice, but He is more pleased with Abel’s offering his fattest sheep. Blinded by jealousy, Cain stabs his brother to death.
The second realization stuns me: God has human needs and desires, and He is a despot who likes bloodshed carried out in His name.
The third realization baffles me further. Seth and Cain remain the only people alive for perpetuating the species. But, how are they going to do it? By mating with their own mother? And if so, why doesn’t the book reveal that Eve had more than three children? Moreover, Cain later gets a wife. Where on Earth from? God only created Adam and Eve ─ one man, one woman. They must have procreated beyond the first three males, including females, so only brothers and sisters would be husband and wife. That meant the entire human species was the product of inescapable incest.
No wonder Father had no remorse in marrying his niece and producing retarded off-spring. I escaped this fate, but poor Paula didn’t. I can’t swear by Angela’s state of mind, either.
I am taken aback by all this misleading information and wonder if these mistakes were made out of some ancient scribe’s inattention, or if the book is simply not what it pretends to be: the words of God.
One thing is certain, though …
My curiosity has hit the roof and there is no way to recall it. The uneasy feeling warning me that this book might not be the essential source of truth sticks with me. Even so, I don’t want to dismiss it without properly scrutinizing it.
Goosebumps ripple over my skin and a wave of repulsion washes through me as I read the last pa
ragraph of the New Testament. I lurch from the bed and throw it forcefully to the floor.
“What happened?” my aunt asks, while pushing fresh logs into the fire. She has kept the room warm for the last three days, as I did not leave it, or the bed.
“Did you know?” I shout. “Did you?”
“Did I know what?”
“That your God is a Jew? Did you?” Her eyes widen and her lips part as if to speak, but no words come. “Why in God’s name … why the Hell my own religion is the history of the Jews?” I kick the book with my foot. It hits the wall then falls open to the floor again.
“Adi … listen … ” she finally utters, “everyone knows that our Lord Jesus was born a Jew.”
“No! I meant the Father, not the Son!”
“My dear, God cannot be a Jew, or of any other race for that matter. He is a spiritual being, without such categories attached to─”
“Really? Because to me He is nothing but a vengeful despot, who has nothing better to do than take part in, and side with, the never-ending Jews’ intrigues and political games, in their never-ending war with the Egyptians!”
“Well, it might seem that way, because He decided to help the Jewish people, His chosen people, the Blessed People.” She adopts a pious expression that feeds my anger further.
“Are you out of your mind?”
“But it’s the written word of ─”
“I’ve never thought of you as a moral example, you know … but now … now! Ah! Did you even read your precious Bible?” I scream, grabbing the Old Testament and throwing it into the smoldering fire. The embers sizzle and the escalating flames swallow it greedily.
“No! No! It’s blasphemy!” she screams, awakened from her religious lethargy. She rushes to the stove to rescue the burning book, but the flames bite viciously at her hands and she falls to the floor wailing.
“You placed your hands in the fire for a goddamned book? That’s insane! That’s what religion does to you! If a two-thousand-year-old, filthy Jewish scribe would have said you should jump into the fire to purify yourself and gain God’s favor, then that’s what you would do! What is wrong with you? With all of you? Have you all lost your reason?”
She clasps her head between her hands and laments pathetically. “Oh, son…you have no idea what you’ve done … ”
“Is that so? Tell me then, do you know why you are killing those poor baby lambs for Easter?”
“The tradition says so, it’s a symbol of the Lamb of God, of Christ, who sacrificed himself for us. Including you!”
“Had you read the entire Bible, you would know what it really meant! Another barbarian ritual of the Jewish tribes! Their egotistic minds created an equally egotistic God, who was supposedly taking their side in the long struggle against their Egyptian enslavement. That is, of course, if they ever were Egypt’s slaves! One cannot be too sure about that, after discovering all the mistakes in your filthy ‘holy’ book!”
“What are you saying, son?”
“I am saying that this Jewish God was supposedly walking the alleys the night before the Jewish Easter, killing the first born of each Egyptian family. To protect themselves from God’s wrath, the Jews would kill baby lambs and splash their blood on their gates so that God would know to pass their houses. They made-believe a discontent, unseen force – unseen and unheard to everyone but them – that walked among people, thirsty for blood and revenge. Is this the God you believe in? Is this the tradition you follow? Is this for whom you sacrifice the poor animals and burn your hands in the fire? An imaginary God from a barbaric Jewish history?”
“I know what the priest says, and ─”
“Another retarded, his mind riddled by these filthy worms!”
“Adi, please! You have no idea what misfortune you are drawing onto yourself, onto us … please!” She continues to lament, crossing her fingers in my direction as if I were the Devil himself.
“Oh, another thing, aunt. Why are so many pages in your Bible allotted to circumcision?”
“Because circumcision stands as a covenant with God.”
“A covenant for what?”
“For the privilege of being favored and protected by Him.”
“I see. So God asks you to butcher yourself, to cut a piece of your member to have you in His graces? Are you insane???”
“Adolf! I forbid you to go on! I forbid it!” Her hands are now shaking and the look in her eyes … well, it is the same look I noticed on those peasants coming to church: disturbed, guilt-ridden, frightened.
“Sure, why not? That’s all you can say for want of anything better. Here is what I think. These savages did nothing but preoccupy themselves with all the immoral activities, and the circumcision was far from any powerful divine covenant with the true God, but a simple act meant to facilitate the pleasures of coitus.”
“Good grief, Adolf! You really are a nasty creature, let me tell you! Pray to God! Pray very hard, then He might forgive you!”
“I wouldn’t mention God here, aunt. All that those animals wanted was to satisfy their lusty appetites, so they needed to remove any impediment. They invented a God that behaved just like them, with the same selfish needs and vengeful streak, so that their consciences could be at peace. Instead of creating a God – if creating a God was imperative – who would demand ruthless individual self-criticism, they have created a more attractive and popular one, who perfectly reflected their filthy moral weakness. If in your mind, aunt, God is moral, among those primitives and their God, morality was a lonely thing indeed.”
“How wrong you’ve gotten it all … ”
“So I ask you again: Is this the God you worship?”
She covers her ears and shakes her head with quick movements. “So wrong … so wrong … ”
“How would you like it, Aunt, to be lent to your husband’s house guests, to satisfy their sexual needs? Because that is one of the rules of these filthy Pharisees, and there was no shame, no remorse, no guilt.”
The anguish on my aunt’s face gladdens me, as I deeply hate her piety. What good had piety brought to Mother?
“Christ is my Lord, and I pray mostly to Him. Or are you going to say that He doesn’t have any favorable connection with the Jews either? How else can you explain God’s decision to give His only son to the Jewish people, if not to show to the rest of the world they are indeed the Chosen People?”
“Here is where you are all mistaken! Christ wasn’t born a Jew to show he favored this race, quite the contrary! He chose the Jewish cloak to show how far from the truth they were, to scrutinize the Jewish religion, to cleanse it from all the lies and distorted growths! All his life, he mingled with those who were wrong or misguided, because they were the ones who most needed his teachings, his right ways, the truth! Not to show them favoritism! Even if he was born a Jew, in spirit he always remained a non-Jew.”
Her eyes look as big as onions. “You are half-mad, like that sister of yours! I’m sure of it now!”
“I might be half-mad, but then you are all demented! Just think, Aunt ─ think! Hadn’t Jesus said: Think not that I have come to bring peace on earth: I came not to bring peace, but a sword!?”
“He had, yes.”
“That’s why the Jews denied him! Because he stood for everything they were not, because he repudiated the Jewish traditional system and spoke against the Jewish laws of purification!”
“I still think he was born to them out of the great sympathy he had for this people … ”
“Sympathy, yes. Favoritism, no. Two very different things, Aunt, that can create large scale confusion when misperceived. His sympathy made him incarnate to them. Out of sympathy he wanted to reveal to this nation and the entire world how wrong their religion was ─ nay ─ that they didn’t need religion in their communion with God! Christ wasn’t religious, nor did he create a substitute religion to the old one ─ his followers did, and then named it after him! Christianity is Jesus’s followers invention, still based on the Jewish th
eology of those times! The Son of God’s true teachings were poisoned after his death, out of the Jews’ need for laws to subdue the masses, their need for religious institutions to carry forward the lie of their priority with God, and with that to rule the world by transforming it into a herd of retarded cattle!”
I pace the room and wring my hands as I continue. “What Jesus really showed to the world was that it needn’t churches or religious laws! A true ancient Aryan spirit incarnated in Christ, the unified spirit of all Aryans, of those who set foot on this earth first. The great geniuses knew it all along!”
My anger dances in my bloodstream and I cannot stop it. I march the room diagonally, pausing only occasionally, taking sparse breaths, while continuing with my harangue.
“Jesus Christ was a warrior! A warrior! And what did the Jews do to the one you pretend was born to show them his favor? They crucified him!”
“You are wrong. It wasn’t the Jews that crucified him, but the Romans!” she utters, satisfaction all over her face.
“You’re the one who’s wrong … yet again! Even though the Romans crucified Jesus, it was the Jewish leaders that planned the act itself! They denounced him as a heretic who disturbed their political peace, and asked for his demise. They constrained Pilate, Rome’s procurator, to condemn him to death! The Jewish leadership put the wheels into motion declaring: His blood is flowing over us and our children, thinking that the blood of the poor prophet represented some kind of curse. But I tell you this, Aunt: the Jewish blood was a curse to Christ, not the other way around! The Jewish blood was the real poison! Read your goddamn Bible, Aunt!”
“Holy Virgin … ” she whispers, covering her terrified face with her palms.
I burst into laughter. “What virgin? Please tell me you do not believe that whole Immaculate Conception nonsense!” I mock, but she keeps silent and I notice her moist eyes. “Oh my God! You do, don’t you? For crying out loud! Did Jesus ever say his mother was a virgin when she gave birth to him? No! It was something else he preached over and over again: I am the Son of God, but the rest of you are Sons of God also. His only mission was to help his brothers discover the truth behind the Jews’ religious lies!”
