by Joy Kogawa
In the instant that he bounds around the corner, the king sees his child. He shakes his heavy mane as he stands upright and roars, “Go back to your slumber, my child. The sun has not yet banished the night.”
“Father!” she cries, her eyes wide. “Father, what is that cut on your brow? That blood on your mane!”
In the twitch of a lion’s tail, he turns from her and leaps from her sight.
The king’s daughter trembles in terror. She has caught the whiff of animal blood in the palace, she has seen the stains on her father’s face. She knows the law of the Lord. All transgressors are sent to the dreaded chambers where God wields his knife and the screams never cease.
She stands in the long vaulted hallway as the first rays of the sun touch the golden skylights, flooding the palace. But the king’s daughter no longer sees the glory. Before her spreads a dark crimson glow.
She waits outside the king’s chambers. She wants to warn the king in case God should appear. She runs to the edge of the forbidden glade. She wants to warn the small animals in case the king should appear. Back and forth she runs till the sinews in her legs grow frayed from the exertion. Everywhere she goes now, under sunlight or birdsong, the king’s daughter feels treachery. She sees God in the marketplace questioning his creatures. “Tell me,” booms the Almighty, “who is it among you who runs on all fours? Who goes to the kill? Who has broken the law?”
In her mind, she hears her father’s plea as he stands before his Maker, his proud head hanging low. “It was beyond my control, My Liege.”
It is God who will decide if King Barnabas will be destroyed or reformed.
“Ah, if I could sing a beautiful song about his greatness and bravery and wisdom, perhaps the Master would not slay him, perhaps the souls of the small animals would forgive him,” she says to herself, and every day she sits at her table by her window, composing a ballad. But the words fail her and her heart grows heavy. She knows she is powerless to change or redeem him. However much she tries, she cannot erase his crimes.
One day the king says to her, “Why are you sad, my daughter? If you have done no wrong yourself, then you have no need to carry a burden.”
It seems strange to her that he, who has done so much wrong, should be aware of the weight of burdens. Why is he not crushed by his? Is he too a victim of himself? Is he, as victimizer, carrying a far greater load than she can ever know?
Oh if the forest creatures could understand that he is as much a victim as his own victims—that he is helpless against himself, weak and blind—if they could see the good within him, they might love him again. But she can hear their rage. “If he is blind to our suffering, let him suffer until he knows ours.”
“Will my suffering suffice?” wonders the princess. “If I am tossed into the flames, will this be an act of atonement? Will their pain be eased if mine is increased?”
“Not at all,” whispers the wind. “It is not for you to usurp for yourself the power that belongs to Love alone. Mortal flesh cannot claim the role of the immortal.”
“Then what must I do?” asks the princess.
As she ponders her questions, to which no answers come, a great melancholy descends upon her. She looks in the mirror through her eyes, which are her father’s eyes, and she no longer recognizes herself. Is she still the good king’s good daughter? Is she the evil king’s evil daughter? She is a child of iniquity, flesh of corrupt flesh. How could she, tainted as she surely must be, know good from evil?
She is desperate for answers. As the child of a lion-man, she knows that to capture the truth she must stalk it downwind, move in obliquely, trap the truth with the sound of twigs snapping before it knows it’s being pursued.
“Father, tell me about goodness. Tell me about evil.”
“About such things, my child, one need not ask.”
“And are you not good?”
“I am a lion.”
“With my own eyes, Father, I have seen the red stream trickling along the forest floor. I have seen the blood.”
The king turns his face from her and beckons to his courtiers. “Sing,” he commands, and at once the trumpets sound, choristers appear and shout together, “The king is virtuous. Long live the king.”
The king’s daughter knows then that her father is lost. “Ah, dear Father,” she weeps as she watches him smiling, nodding, waving to his subjects.
She runs crying to the small animals in the far dense woods. “My friends, what must be done to repay his crime? Tell me what I must do.” But the small animals flee at her approach. They hide in the highest branches and in the deepest burrows and all is still. The leaves do not rustle. And more silent than all the silence is the stream that washes away the scent of blood. She goes to sit beside it.
“Tell me, tell me, is there anything I can do?”
Hour after hour goes by as the weight of her wretchedness overcomes her. What she wants above all is permission to love her father again as she once did. She wants this so intensely that the lines between good and evil are increasingly blurred.
Then one evening at dusk she becomes aware of a strange buzzing sound. As she listens, she begins to understand words, then sentences, whispers, suggestions, and because she is utterly wretched, she wants to believe what she hears.
“It is not the king who has failed,” says the tiny voice, “but the world that is wrong. It is not the king who has failed, but the understanding that is wrong.”
She looks about to see where the words are coming from and notices a gnat flying by her ear. It is one of a swarm of gnats from around the spoor of a large wild animal.
She captures the whispering gnat in her hand and takes it back to the palace, where she puts it in a bottle and wraps it in layers of mouldy comforters. She places it in a trunk in the palace storeroom. She does not dare to ask herself if the gnat might be right. But secretly she goes to the dark room to listen.
“If you want to talk about perversion,” giggles the strangely soothing tiny, tiny gnat, “what about Leda and the swan? What about frustrated spinsters who twiddle their pets? Think about the South Sea island where mature women initiate boys. If you think there’s anything abnormal about the king, just enter the secret fantasies of anyone on the street. People demonize in others what they cannot accept in themselves. Buzz buzz buzz.”
“Tell me more, little gnat,” she says urgently as her thoughts become less and less clear. The gnat weaves tales from other ages and places with other rules, other customs, other laughably quaint moralities, until her mind reels with confusion. “You’ve heard about how Egyptian nobility once had sex with their young?” More and more boldly, like a king entering his castle, the gnat enters the edifice of her thoughts.
“You know that the king is good,” says the gnat one afternoon. “More than all others in the kingdom, you know this. Others may well declare that he is a cunning pretender, but you alone in all the world see the tenderness in his gaze, see the kindness, as he smiles upon the world with his large happy eyes.”
“Yes,” weeps the princess. “About his love there is no doubt.”
Armed with these thoughts, one sleepless night the king’s daughter decides to go to the Master to ask for his mercy. Carrying the gnat in its bottle, she sets out on her journey. She goes first to the jails, then to the gatherings of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Nazi Party, and the altars where children are sacrificed, and into the forest glade where psychopathic killers stalk their prey.
“Come forth, all you who are most feared and despised, all sadists and rapists and murderers, all you who harbour in your bodies raging unquenchable fires. Come forth and be visible. Make your unknown stories known. Bring your love of Wagner, your bowls of milk for your cats, your tender lullabies, your prize roses—bring your full humanity into the clear light of day where you can be greeted as the familiars that you are. Bring with you just one person who has loved you, for when you are loved you are blessed with that presence forever.” She goes next to the fields, and
along the train tracks where people watch as the trains roll on to the gas ovens. “Come all you who stand and stare, all you who click off the late-night news and the sight of children starving and dying. Bring your scholars and psychiatrists and armies of gnats and let us go, one and all, blind and helpless creatures that we are. Let us seek an audience with our Maker, the One who has made us and who loves us as we are.”
Thousands upon millions of maimed, stumbling creatures join the squealing, snorting, braying parade. At its head, let loose from its bottle, flies the now quite strident gnat.
“There isn’t a single undusted corner in my mind,” Eleanor said that September night last year, her voice rising, “not a single spot where I entertain a speck of doubt about child abuse. Not a jot.”
“But what if it’s mainly a cultural problem?” I asked. “Didn’t we burn witches at the stake not so long ago? How do we know we’re not doing the equivalent thing today?”
I had ordered all the gnats in the island to come and sit on the telephone lines, even though I knew they were no match for Eleanor. She could kill them all with her spray can of truth. I’d seen her do it many times. She’d walk into a room thick with petty gossip or misinformation of some sort and—poof!—truth would happen.
“You sound just like Martin,” Eleanor sighed.
“Who?”
“Don’t you remember my sister’s son?”
“Oh yes. Stephannie’s little boy. I haven’t seen him in decades. How is he?”
“Not so little now.”
“I used to wonder how he’d turn out. Is he still a handful?”
“Worse. Much worse. He’s staying with us—temporarily, we hope,” she groaned. “I have to tell myself he is my sister’s son. He has no success in forming lasting relationships at all. Stephannie was shortchanged in the family, I think. I could tell you tons of stories about her and you’d understand where Martin’s coming from.
“I got a letter from her the other day from India,” she continued, “saying we’ve got things backwards over here and North America is, of all the continents, the poorest of the poor, because there’s no sense of community here any more. I believe her. People like your father do the things they do because they’re in hell, they’re isolated. If we could really connect with him, he wouldn’t want to go back to hell. The best model I’ve heard of for people like your father is the Native healing circle. The perpetrator is there, and the parents and kids and the victims and all their families and neighbours, and they each get to talk. We should all do that. I’ve got an idea, Millicent. If you can’t talk with Father, I should come down to Ragland. I think—yes—I should bring Martin along. He’s part of our circle, and we should all talk. Martin has a lot to say.”
“Oh please. I don’t think Father could stand it.”
“You’re wrong, Millicent. What is unbearable is the not talking.”
“It’s—it’s just too unkind,” I said. “He’s so old. Let him have his peace.”
“Peace!” Eleanor’s aggressive voice sounded anything but peaceful. “Oh yes! Peace! I’m all for it. How on earth can we have peace if we don’t deal with this?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Well, well.” Father opened his arms wide to the stocky bearded man standing in the doorway. Martin, with a crooked grin on his face, said, “Hi there, Pops.” Mother pulled herself up from the couch with her cane and clutched Father’s arm anxiously. “Who is this, Father?” she asked tremulously. “Doesn’t he know you are a minister of the church?”
Mother was fairly lucid that autumn afternoon last year, but Martin was a complete stranger to her. I too would not have recognized him. He had a dark, raggedy beard and wore a black leather jacket with silvery chains. Gone was the perky little boy in short pants calling us Auntie Elly and Auntie Mills.
Mother stiffened and tried to pull back when Eleanor hugged her. Father offered Eleanor a chair. She barely looked at him, and sat on the edge of the seat, her whole body leaning away from him, her legs tightly together.
Tea was an awkward affair. When it was finished I said, “Let me show you the town.” Eleanor looked a little relieved as she got up. I wondered if her resolve to question Father had weakened when she’d seen how impossibly aloof Mother was. No matter how hard Eleanor tried to be friendly and intimate over the years, Mother kept the wall of formality firmly in place between them.
It was a warm day. We strolled down to the park, Martin’s longer stride carrying him ahead so that he had to slow down every so often till we caught up. He turned to frown at Eleanor when he heard her say, “Your father’s bizarre predilections.”
“Sensibilities change,” he said. “Thomas Aquinas thought masturbation was worse than rape, you’ll be interested to know. I bet we’ll have adult–child sex legitimized in the next—”
“Never,” Eleanor said icily. “Not in a million years. If we do, it won’t be a world I’ll recognize. Whatever’s left of the sacred will be gone. Sexual abuse—”
“There you go,” Martin interrupted, slapping his forehead. “That word again. Abuse! Please. Use the right term. Call it sexual pleasuring, will you? When I was a kid I loved sex. I’d say to myself, ‘If it moves, fondle it.’ What’s the matter with everyone today? What happened to ‘make love not war’? The body is sensual. Right from birth. It’s built in. Have you ever watched little kids? They love their genitals. I played with myself all the time. That’s the problem. People forget. You know, a few years ago nurses used to rub the winkles of newborns and that was the most natural thing in the world. Even babies masturbate. So if an adult does it with them or to them, why the hell is that shocking? Look, even Kinsey thought it was okay for a kid unless, of course, you told him it was”—Martin threw his hands up in mock dismay—“hey—oh my God kid, you’ve got—yeuch—a penis. Oh bad bad.”
We had reached the flower beds at the cenotaph in the middle of the park. Eleanor and I sat down on a bench, but Martin continued to pace in front of us, one thumb hooked in his belt loop. Some children were swinging in the play area nearby.
“I could get arrested just for going over and talking to those kids.”
“Oh come on, Martin,” Eleanor said impatiently.
“It’s crazy. What’s the message? Anyone who touches you is a devil? What are kids supposed to feel about what they feel? They’d be a lot better off if we’d just enjoy their luscious little bodies. What’s so wrong with kissing, snuggling, even copulating if they want to?”
“You make me shudder,” Eleanor said.
I couldn’t tell if he was being serious or deliberately outrageous.
“I make you shudder,” Martin scoffed. “It’s people like you two goody-goods. You go around damning anyone who’s really alive—adulterers, bisexuals, pedophiles—anyone who dares to be different. It’s envy, isn’t it? Admit it. Your lives are so sanitized you don’t know what’s natural. And you’re jealous. You’re jealous of freedom. All through history it’s people like you. You stoned the witches. Or people like me or your old man. Drown us. Burn us at the stake. You think you have the right. Now that’s abuse of power with a capital A.”
“The truth of the matter—” Eleanor began.
“The truth of the matter,” Martin cut in, “is that ‘the passion for boys and for women derives from one and the same love.’ Know who said that? Plutarch.”
“I know the ancient Greece argument,” Eleanor said. “Ancient Greeks were barbaric. What the powerful wanted, the powerful got. Slaves. Boys for sex. And that’s abuse of power. And let me tell you, Martin, if you want to know what’s natural. Your love map is so distorted you don’t know what healthy sex is.”
“How dare you!” Martin flared. “What makes you the arbiter of health? Why should I be judged by the likes of you? Why should the highly sexed, the sexually gifted, be judged by the dimly sexed? I know, I know, you can’t help it. You were born sexually retarded. People are born the way they are. There’s no virtue in that. It’s genetic
. Child-lovers are born child-lovers. You’ve heard of Klinefelter’s syndrome?”
Eleanor’s eyes were large and piercing with anger, but her voice was measured. “Molesters are not born molesters, Martin. Even if they’re traumatized when they’re very very young. Even if they’re imprinted. There’s choice. That’s what makes us human. Not all molested kids become molesters. And if it were natural, it would still be wrong. It might be natural to steal and kill. But we don’t do it. There’s no justification for pedophiles. None. None. There isn’t a spot in the moral universe where pedophiles can stand.”
I sighed. “But if you knew Father the way I do…. There’s a part of me—there’s such a big part of me that wants to see all this the way Martin…well, not exactly the way Martin does, but….”
“Oh, Millicent, why should you twist yourself into knots? You know the abuse of children is an utter abomination—you know it in every bone in your body. It’s deeply deeply damaging. Permanently damaging. It’s like cracking open the shell of an egg before it’s ready to hatch. It cripples people for their entire lives.”
“Not me,” Martin said.
Eleanor ignored him. “The structure of the imagination gets destroyed. We’ve learned about this. People with multiple personalities, prostitutes, drug addicts, suicides—this is the fallout of abuse.”
“And so it’s open season on pedophiles today,” I said. “They’re the single most abhorred people around.”
“Because they destroy the lives of children. They kill the future. It’s that simple.”
“But if you love someone more than your own life, you go anywhere with them—even beyond yourself, beyond the edges of the known moral universe. That’s what love does, doesn’t it? It goes to the edges and leans out to whoever is lost. Like Jesus. Or even Gamaliel….”
