Cursed Bunny(61)

Like most Polish people, his parents were Catholics. When he began describing what the dead animals looked like, his mother thought he simply had an overactive imagination; it was only when he could accurately describe what people had looked like right before their deaths that she became terrified. She prayed and consulted with a priest and spent most of the day in church with him, but it was no use. Even in the church, he could see a priest who had died there two years ago and the man whose funeral they had held the other week. His mother brought him back and starved him, and when he complained about being hungry, she beat him.

The beatings had an instant effect, and he no longer talked about the dead people or animals he saw. But making him fast had backfired, as hunger sharpened his sensitivity. Especially when he went to bed on an empty stomach, he would talk to the dead in his sleep or sleepwalk with dead people in the middle of the night. This horrified his mother, who would forbid him from eating all day and lock him in the house, beating him mercilessly. His mother always cried as she hit him and prayed fervently afterward. He knew that his mother stayed home all day with him also eating nothing and not sleeping and crying all night, praying in whispers, and that was why the more he was beaten, the guiltier he felt. In his eleventh year, his mother’s maternal uncle—in other words his grandmother’s brother—passed away. When his mother came back from the funeral, he said goodbye to his mother in the voice of his grandmother’s brother whom he had never met. He had no memory of this himself. His mother did not eat for days after that and was hospitalized, which was why he was sent to his grandfather’s house in this city. This was when I learned for the first time that he was not from this southern city but from the outskirts of Warsaw.

“Then is your mother still in Warsaw?”

“Probably,” he replied. “I never saw her after being sent away to my grandfather’s. Except briefly at my high school graduation. We haven’t been in contact since.”

“And your father?” He had never spoken about his father. His expression was so disconcerted that I apologized. “I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s not that. My father is … how do I say this …” He frowned. “My father was … an uncertain person. Do you know what I mean?”

I did not. I waited.

“When I was with Mother or Grandfather, the purpose of my existence was clear. Does that make sense? Grandfather’s purpose was to survive using the means he learned in the war, and therefore he always had something to do. Check the emergency bags, check the water and cans, at night turn the lights off and don’t make a sound. When the sun rose the next day, he had a clear sense of having survived to see another day. With Mother …” He trailed off and was lost in thought. “With Mother things were bad, but my purpose then was that she was suffering because I was bad, so I had to not be bad. When I said bad things she would cry, she would starve and pray, tie me up on the bed and hit me, and sometimes leave me tied up all night so I wouldn’t go off on a walk with a dead person. So not being bad was my purpose. But my father …” He frowned again. “Well, Father is my grandfather’s son. But he was totally different from Grandfather. I don’t know what he lived for. He didn’t seem happy or anything. He was always doing something meaningless while his mind was elsewhere.” He thought a bit more. “I don’t know about Father. I’m not in contact with him.”

I could finally understand the horrific and cruel clarity of what he considered to be meaningful. The desperation and immense fear that your life, as well as the future to come, hinged on a moment. I could also understand how, in a situation where there was a single person who could kill you but also save you, all your survival instincts would be used toward satisfying that one person.

Once you experience a terrible trauma and understand the world from an extreme perspective, it is difficult to overcome this perspective. Because your very survival depends on it.

Parents who destroy their children’s lives, who suck the life out of their children’s futures, not only for the sake of maintaining their own illusions but also to zealously expand them into the lives of their children—such parents can almost be understood from the perspective of obsession. Following the words “Be grateful I raised you” is the implied clause “instead of killing you or leaving you for dead.” They probably mean it, too. My parents and their parents’ generations, after surviving the Korean War, had always, just like the generation that survived World War II, set their purpose not to live a human life but to have an animal’s instinct for survival.

Still, understanding and forgiving are completely different things.

He whispered, “Will you tie me?”

I nodded.

“Will you be able to leave after the night is over?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Then he said, “What are you going to do after I’m gone?”

I couldn’t answer. He asked again. “Will you go back to your country?”

“No,” I said. “I will never go back again.” My own answer surprised me.

Quietly, he said, “Then I will stay here with you.”

“Thank you,” I whispered back.

When I woke up the next morning, he wasn’t with me. I opened the bathroom door. Just as he had looked when he died, he was hanging by the neck from a radiator, his eyes closed.