Memories from the East
Pearls & Tears
Abdulla Kazim
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© 2012 by Abdulla Kazim. All rights reserved.
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First published by AuthorHouse 01/05/2012
ISBN: 978-1-4678-8268-2 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4678-8269-9 (ebk)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012900213
Printed in the United States of America
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Contents
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About The Author
For the best flower of her country, Thuraya
1
I was six years old. I would turn seven in the coming June, which was just ten days away. I had a toy in my hand and many others in front of me on the ground, ten characters of Naruto anime. These were not all that I had; I had a cupboard full of toys. I liked to collect characters of the anime cartoons I used to watch. I remember having the full character set of Bleach, Death Note, Rorouni Kenshin, and One Piece.
My small black PSP was placed on the tiny white-framed aluminium chair, whose yellow-leathered oval seat and back rest were very comfortable. Just ten minutes ago I had been holding that PSP and playing the Street Fighters IV game. The device was my mother’s gift to me for excellence in my studies the previous year.
I was busy making fantasies about the Naruto characters that were laying in front of me, with Naruto, the main character, in my hand. I fantasised about Naruto having a fight with his friend, Sasuke. As I remember, my fantasies about the battles between the characters and fight scenarios were actually more dramatic and much closer to reality than what is shown in the anime cartoons.
I was quietly mouthing noises that would be actually the result of clashes between heroes on the television, but these noises were not loud enough to prevent my ears from catching the noise that came from the main door of the house. The sound was loud enough to startle me, silence my mouth from making noises, stress my nerves, and cause my eyes to fix on the door of my room, which was fully closed. That noise was caused by the main door slamming loudly. My heart jumped in my chest and I swallowed hard, as I recall.
But then I heard the coughing voice of my father, and my nerves relaxed. I went back to playing with my toy characters light-heartedly. The reason why that door-slamming noise frightened me for a while was that for the past week my father had been acting a little awkwardly towards my mother, and my mother seemed a little sad and always bad-tempered. I couldn’t understand at the time what was happening, but I realized that something wrong was going on between them. The whole of the previous day, my mother hadn’t come home. I asked my father about her, and he replied that her auntie was sick and thus Mother was needed to take care of her.
After a few seconds, I heard some more noises coming from the kitchen, and my thoughts went directly to Father making our lunch. The day before he had made a grilled chicken, which had come out half-burned. He laughed with me, but we ate together in the absence of my mother. I didn’t mind these new noises either. I just felt comfortable hearing my father’s coughing; it made me feel that I wasn’t totally alone.
He had started that coughing attack the previous week, and he still had it. I knew that father didn’t like being sick, and he hated coughing, but for me it was like some relaxing music. I had started observing some quarrelling between Father and Mother about three weeks earlier, and since then my mother had treated me badly; she would shout at me, say bad words to me that I didn’t understand at the time, and would even slap me, the physical agony of which varied from one day to another. I think that was the time Father developed his coughing. He used to protect me always from my mother and all other oppressions in life. He was my guardian and my example.
I was playing in my room and waiting for my father to call me to come and eat with him, as he had done the day before. However, an hour passed since I first heard his coughing, but I did not receive any call from him.
I got bored making stories and scenarios with my toy characters. I collected my Naruto characters slowly and carefully; I always kept my toys in good shape and had never broken any of them. I was praised for that by my father and uncle—for being so tidy a kid and so thoughtful in dealing with the elements of life at such an early age. I opened my toy cupboard, which was divided into two levels. That cupboard was specially allocated for my toy characters; I had different stores for other types of toys. As I said, I was a very neat child. The neighbourhood children I knew used to like to play in my room. They could find the toy they were looking for very easily, but I made strict rules for them: no toy may be broken, and every toy must be returned to its original location when done with. Just a few days earlier, I got very upset with a child who damaged my toy train. I sent him out my room and made a vow not to allow him in ever again.
I sat in front of the open cupboard and started arranging the Naruto characters, placing them in a good way and position. When I was done with this, I paused for a while to look at them, admiring the way I had arranged them. I turned my attention to other character sets in the cupboard. Luffy, from One Piece, was wearing his red sleeveless shirt, but his body had more muscles than were illustrated in the cartoon, and his shipmate, the green-haired Zorro, wore a harsh expression, holding a sword in each hand and one in his mouth. I enjoyed watching Zorro fight in the cartoon: a man holding three swords and using all of them perfectly—what a talent!
I closed the cupboard, went to my desk, and took out my drawing book and a pencil. I browsed through the first few pages of the book. All the pages held my drawings, and all of them were related to cartoon characters. Some were already coloured, while others were not. I sat down on the rugged floor and opened it to a new page. I recall getting that feeling of having missed seeing Mother and Father together and going with them to the fun city. I started drawing, almost unconsciously, two characters standing next to each other and looking at each other with smiles on their faces. Next to them stood a child with a popcorn box in his hand, with a smile on his face as well. When I was done with the characters, I started working on the background—all the different games availa
ble in the fun city. The characters on the paper might have looked like anybody in particular, but for me they represented my parents and me.
All the time I was working on my drawing, which took me about an hour, I could hear noises coming from the kitchen. They were the noises of a knife cutting through meat, as I guessed, because I used to hear my mother making those noises while cooking. I smiled to myself, recalling the grilled chicken pieces Father made the day before; they were very tasty. I hoped that he would serve the same dish again.
I recalled the day before when I had sat with him, just the two of us, father and son, at the table for lunch. I could see glimpses of concealed sadness on his face, although they were concealed by the small happiness of being with his only beloved son. I had always enjoyed talking with father; I just really did. I never sensed any boundaries between me and him, even though I was so young. Between me and my mother there were still boundaries in everything—talking, behaving, and playing. That day Father had told me a story, while I was chewing a piece of chicken in my mouth. He told me a story of a man who lost his heart in a battle and died shortly afterwards, not because he was left with no heart, but because he felt himself inhuman and greatly different from others around him. He was eaten up by his own sorrow. Father might have told this story on purpose, but it was of no interest for me. I continued eating as if I heard nothing.
And then it came finally, my father’s call. Pleasure filled my heart, and I recall myself smiling. I closed the drawing book and placed the pencil on top of it. My father’s voice came again, calling my name. I ran, opened the door of my room, and rushed out. I stopped running and started walking fast. My mother had warned me many times before not to run at home, as I might injure myself by falling on the floor or hitting any of the statues located in most of the corners of the house. But as I walked, my nostrils recognized a strange smell, but I couldn’t name it exactly at that moment. My mind was busy thinking of the food prepared in the kitchen.
I stood at the kitchen door, and my heart fell heavily to my toes. I couldn’t breathe and I didn’t dare to breathe. Father was holding a butcher’s knife in his hand that was fully dyed red.
“Come in,” father said in a calm shaky voice. He followed that with the usual small cough.
Father had never tried to scare me with his tone—never before—but at that moment he put a hell of a fear in my heart. I stepped into the kitchen, not because I wanted to, but because of the heightened fear and confusion raging inside me.
“Come in,” father said again, and then he lifted his eyes to the ceiling for a while.
My mind was totally lost in the scene, and a new set of voices started echoing in my ears. I could distinguish now the smell I had sniffed while walking to the kitchen. The smell was of blood, fresh blood. The echoing noises became louder and louder, little by little. I dragged my shaking legs and stood in the corner of the kitchen. Father had covered the kitchen’s paint in red; he had made it rain in blood.
My eyes fell, and only then could they glimpse the shape of a corpse lying on top of the table. The long slightly brown hair brought to my mind the image of a particular person. In shock, the name of my mother, Huan, echoed in my ears. All of a sudden, the weight of my body was more than my legs could handle, although I always had strong legs and was the best athlete in my class. With my eyes dizzy, I reached back at the wall for support, but suddenly my body betrayed me, and I fell to the ground. I was even more frightened to think that there was something wrong with my body. My eyes were fixed on the hair of the corpse on the table.
“Gerald.” Father’s voice came to rock me once again.
I raised my eyes to look at him. I remember seeing his light-brown thick beard slightly touched by the redness that covered most of his body. Father was never good at chopping meat, and if mother didn’t prepare something at home, he would most of the times make us of the ready-made food that would only require frying. Father pulled now something from the corpse and held it tightly in his hand. He raised that hand towards me.
“Look, Gerald,” he said. “Open your eyes.”
My eyes unconsciously turned to his raised hand. He was carrying an organ, which I was later informed was the heart. The organ was dripping blood on the floor, and that noise hugely alarmed me.
“This is the heart of women,” father went on. “There is nothing in it. No love. No appreciation. Only greed and lust.” He tightly clenched his teeth on the word “lust”.
It was the first time I had seen my father express his anger in that matter. Then, all of a sudden, I heard a huge knock on the main door of our home. Father lowered his hand, which was holding the organ. He looked me in the eyes, and I could see now the same sadness in them that I had seen the day before. His eyes sparkled a little as well, which I later realized was caused by fighting back his tears.
The main door was knocked in with an exploding crack. The noise of a large number of thick-shoed feet came from behind me, and suddenly I saw about ten policemen standing at the kitchen door and in front of me. Sirens were sounding loudly outside in the street, which brought a couple of neighbours out of their homes. A bunch of guns were pointed at my father’s face, and one policeman kept shouting at him in Chinese, ordering him to surrender and raise his hands. Father stood there still; he had surrendered already, before even calling the police, but he refused to raise his hands. A police man approached him, pushed him back, punched him in the stomach, and then handcuffed him, but father did not release a single sound of agony.
Suddenly, I felt a hand rise in front of me before and covering my open eyes. “Everything is going to be all right. You are safe,” a voice said. I was held tight and snatched away from that terrifying scene. The idea of taking me away from that scene was a noble idea, but what I had already seen was more than enough for a sensitive child of my age to have witnessed.
2
Father was tried and found guilty. He didn’t deny any of the charges against him, although the accusation that he was planning to kill me as well was far from the truth. I absolutely believed that my father would never hurt me physically in any way, and I still believe it. Father refused to talk to anybody during his short period of imprisonment; he even refused to get a lawyer. By doing so, father gave up his right to live and surrendered completely to the fate of death in a country where death is very frequent in the name of the government. Father refused to see me as well. All the years of love I had enjoyed came to an end at that point.
My ancestors on my father’s side are originally from Russia. My grandfather was an activist and a writer in Moscow. After receiving many threats, he fled with his life intact to the United States. Within two months there, he found in that new county what he could not find in his own: a good job as a literature teacher in a decent university, respect from the people around him, freedom to write with an open heart, and above all a love that he couldn’t find anywhere else. He got married soon afterwards, and the result was two boys: Leo and Eugene Arsov. Leo was my father. My father was named Leo because of the great passion my grandfather held for the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. Uncle Eugene was a year younger.
My father and uncle lived in the United States and never ever planned to return for any reason to the country of their origin. Father even hated Russia and called it “iced glass with hollow heart”.
Leo and Eugene led a simple life in the United States, the country that welcomed them with an open heart. Uncle Eugene got married at the age of twenty to Elizabeth, who also originated from Russia. She is the sort of lady that brings true happiness to a husband’s life. Uncle started a small hardware business in North Carolina with his wife. Father, on the other hand, liked to live a free life; he liked to know a lot of people and to try many different professions. At one time he started to work as a dancer in a night club, and he even worked for more than a month as a striptease dancer. He used to play tennis a lot, and my unc
le thought he would be a professional player one day.
But father didn’t find the lady he desired in the United States; he always had this vision of finding a beautiful Asian girl.
It was one Sunday when, after leaving church with his brother, father informed my uncle that he was leaving that very day and heading to China, without any given details. And he carried out that deed, in less than twenty-four hours he was in Beijing. Upon reaching a hotel, Father wrote to my uncle explaining the reason of the journey to the Far East: to meet the girl, he once got the number of from a friend, and to pursue love’s trail.
Huan (“happiness” in English) is the name of my mother. She used to work in a perfume and skincare shop in the Beijing Capital International Airport. Father knew nothing about her other than what she told him about herself when chatting with him. In her conversations, mother expressed her feelings to my father. Father was not so certain about those feelings, but what encouraged him to consider them was the marriage of his close friend Paul Norman to a Chinese girl he met in a restaurant in Virginia.
Father wished to make his journey to China a surprise for Huan. Upon reaching the Beijing airport, he looked for the perfume shop. When he found it, he went in and strolled around slowly, looking for the face he wished to see in reality. When he saw her, he walked up to her and, to the surprise of all the staff there, he hugged her from behind and kissed her on the side of her neck. Soon the staff were whistling and applauding. Father asked my mother for marriage at that exact moment.
They got married within a month in China, and father started his new life there. He stopped being the careless person he used to be and gave up his curiosity about trying different professions for the sake of starting a family life. He became a quiet person. He took a job as a software programmer in a small private company. There he learned techniques of game programming, and I recall him sitting for hours in front of his computer working on lines and lines of code that seemed alien to me at the time. I still to this day keep some of his programs.
MEMORIES from the EAST Page 1
