A boon and a bane

I wake up to the sound of grey clouds thundering outside the stuffy room I am sharing with 50 other people. A sliver of the frowning sky is visible from the uncomfortable cot I had miraculously fallen asleep on. My head spins, and my eyes ache from the physical exhaustion I went through in the last 24 hours.

I dare to look around the room with a searing back pain and purple-black bruises lining my limbs. It is 6 AM on the clock that seems to be smiling at me with two holes on the protective glass over it and two scratches joining each other to form a perfect V-shaped mouth. A woman nursing her newborn asked me, “Meneer, is it snowing yet?”. It is April, past the winter months. This place seems to be timeless, but in the worst way possible. The poor lady had no idea of day nor night, least of all about seasons that seem to be changing outside as if there is not a care in the world. I am the most recent addition to this room, came here last night, so my senses are intact and I can still say the day on the calendar.

My eyes dart around the room and I see most people sleeping in uncomfortable positions, or what I think is “uncomfortable”. They might have found their comfort under this roof already. It gives me hope that I too shall. Until I do, I shall find comfort in the hope itself.

Outside I can hear a few people barking in a language foreign to me. I feel my stomach growling from hunger and the need to relieve my bladder which is in a state of complete fullness. The room stinks of human urine and defecation and my head feels dizzy from the living conditions. Somehow, I manage to find my way through the 49 other people to the other side of the enclosure. At the back of the room, I find two barely private trenches. Given no other option, I know that I will be treated no differently from all these people. At this point, I am grateful for a beating heart and my fully functioning respiratory system. I cannot help but notice the leaking holes on the roof from where the drizzle has started to seep through.

Having answered nature’s call, no matter how terrible the way of answering it was, I find some relief. My next concern soon fills my mind: What will I eat? When I come out to the room again, I see the woman from last night trying to hush her child. She opens the buttons to the filthy brown blouse and I look away. She will be nursing her child now. Without a word, I go and sit on my cot. The woman is two feet away and in those two feet, three other people are lying down, soundless.

My thoughts drift to an invaluable childhood memory, a recollection that often soothed me in difficult times. My father was a god-fearing man, spending his days tutoring a few middle graders on Mathematics and trying his best to feed a family of 8. I had three siblings and two spinster aunts who lived with us aside from my parents and myself. On a similar gloomy day, I sneaked out of the house in the afternoon. Everyone was either busy with work or taking advantage of the weekends to get a nap before the dreadful Monday poked its claw into our lives again. I looked forward to Sundays every week. Boys my age were occupied with the thoughts of having a decent physique to charm the local girls or getting scolded for not thinking about their futures after high school. My parents were engaged in raising their three other children, so I had the unfair pleasure of them not having the time to interfere in my life.

I was no different from the guys my age yet a lot different when it came to attraction. I was chasing Aleksander instead of the local girls. Aleksander was a year senior to me; he graduated high school the year before. He had tousled brown hair, a slim frame but not lanky, a full mouth, and eyes the color of the clouds that were preparing for a good downpour. Alex, a name he allowed me to call him, was my best friend. Whom am I humoring after 20 years? He was my lover. On that Sunday, he did not come. There was no way I could communicate with him, lest his parents open the letter and die of broken hearts. Two more Sundays passed and one of our mutual family friends visited my house. With a dark face, he declared that Aleksander had passed away in his sleep three Saturdays ago. A day before we were to meet. My mother gasped, an expression I did not see even when she gave birth to all of my siblings at home. My father mumbled a prayer. And I….well, I stifled my cry for two days before I could find a sufficiently empty house to let it out. Alex and I met officially at a family gathering and only twice in the presence of our family members. As a man, crying and an overt show of expression were not encouraged by my father who I never saw smiling.

The Saturday when Alex breathed his last, I was sitting looking outside the window of the room I shared with two of my siblings, Mark and Daan. Both of my aunts were present in the room apart from me. They started gossiping about how one of them had caught a couple kissing under the roof of an abandoned house across the road. They laughed and sneered while I listened without making eye contact. Having been raised in a religious household, I was not to touch a woman (there was no consideration of a man as my lover) until we were tied in a nuptial bond.

“Did you listen to what we were saying, Ruben?”, asked my eldest aunt. “Hmm”, I said.

“Be careful to not involve yourself in such matters, boy”, added the youngest aunt.

“May my lover be dead before any of you catch us doing anything and God will save us the shame of being judged”, I said and stormed off.

I did not like my aunts and that day, I felt that it was not simply “disliking”. I hated them. Out of contempt, I went around spreading the rumour that my eldest unmarried aunt was secretly seeing a wealthy man and my youngest aunt was suffering from a contagious ailment. I saw how my friends at school listened to me with shock and sympathy but never had the slightest idea that I savoured spreading stupid gossip about those women. At that point in time, none of my statements were true.

Two weeks later, my father returned home with a stony expression, with my eldest aunt at his heels sobbing and apologising vehemently. My mother sat my aunt down and tried calming her. My aunt finally spoke and the words that came out of her judgmental mouth were beyond my belief. She was sleeping with a businessman who had a bungalow to his name and owned two private cars. They were caught red-handed in a dimly lit street, holding hands and touching each other. My father was unfortunately the one who caught them. The talks spread like wildfire and now the parents of my friends started giving me shocking looks, some sympathetic and some judgmental.

Within a week of the above-mentioned fiasco, my youngest aunt lay in bed with rashes spreading on her frail body, her fever a constant. The doctors said it was better to keep her in isolation because their diagnosis said it might be contagious. We now know it was chickenpox.

“Have you eaten anything?”, a voice startled me out of my thoughts. I look up in confusion and see that the nursing woman is speaking to me. “Not since last night”, I say.

“They will not serve food again until the afternoon”, she smiles faintly. I do not know what to say. It feels like a very painful wait. She stands with her baby still hanging on to her breast. Quietly, she comes and sits on the floor beside my cot. There are hardly 5 inches of floor space between me and the next person. She starts speaking again.

Almost in a whisper, she says, “Do you see the woman against the wall there? The one with ginger hair?”. I nod my affirmation.

“She has been picking up arguments with all the seven females in this room since the time she arrived.” The baby fell asleep, and she slowly buttons her blouse back.

When she does not receive an answer, she says her name is Anna and I say mine is Ruben.

“I bet you come from a nice family. The tie and coat kind”, Anna says shyly. I smile in response.

“Do they give you anything to eat at all? Is the food sufficient?”, I ask. Anna laughs quietly as if to say “What a naïve person you must be to ask such a question!”.

I am curious now. I start asking her how the treatment was, if they have seen any atrocities and what they were. These questions, I think, will prepare me mentally for what is to be expected.

She says, “The man is violent and conspires the most difficult living scenarios for us. Today has been so quiet, I wonder what the matter is. The men outside barge into the room as soon as the clock strikes 5:30 AM but no one came in yet.”

Anna says that there have been occasions when she was not allowed to breastfeed her own baby. She received threats of her baby being snatched away from her and she will never see her child again. The woman fears that soon her breastmilk will not have enough nutritional value for the child either. Anna continues telling me the most gruesome details from her days here, how she saw the torture of the other people. By the time she finishes, I notice 5 other people standing and sitting around us nodding. They look sick and tired, to say the least.

I tell them that I heard the man was a monster himself. He did not seem to be a moral person at all. He was unfaithful to his wife on multiple occasions, torturing her. I say that he was sterile, not able to have children of his own. Keep in mind that none of this news had ever reached me. Spreading rumors gave me pleasure, as I had discussed earlier. It gave me power over people who made me feel powerless. I add that the least I wish for him is that he dies in sufferance and pays the price of his actions. At this point, the entire room is awake and quietly listening to my angry rambling without interference.

Two officers barge into the room with dirty bowls of watery soup and a loaf of bread for each of us. They leave as soon as they were done distributing, or rather throwing the bowls at us. While eating, I hear a loud commotion outside. All of us listen, straining our ears despite our hungry stomachs. Since the language was foreign to me, I do not understand what the men are shouting at each other.

I turn around and see two men hugging each other and sobbing while smiling. Soon a few others join them, exchanging happy looks. I am at a loss and so I look at Anna. She is beaming at me. Her baby is awake on her lap from the noises and crying but she is paying no heed. I shoot her a quizzical look.

Anna says, “Meneer, the Führer is dead.”