Excerpt
At first, the face of love for me was the humiliated, broken,
rejected barefoot beggar. Later a quiet rebellion nested itself in my
heart; by then I had grown irritated by helpless love that endured
everything, by the sour stench of passivity, by the endless swallowing
of humiliation. Instead of the hermits’ Christ who resigned
himself to everything, I chose the rebellious Christ.
When I arrived home on the day of the awards ceremony, I found
my mother crying. My father was delivering one of his endless
monologues in a pitch far higher than natural, intoxicated with
himself, circling endlessly around his own words.
“Where were you?” my mother asked.
Silently I handed her the certificate.
“What’s this?” my father tossed out indifferently. “Be first in
your studies!” Then he threw it aside.
That same day, when I was supposed to leave for the reward excursion,
my father attacked me with the long wooden ruler for some
reason — today I no longer remember why, perhaps there was no
reason at all. He beat me until the ruler shattered into pieces. I had
only one aim: to keep the blows from reaching my face. I endured
it without a sound. I looked at him with cold hatred and with a cruel
kind of pity, watching the shameful, helpless rage pouring out of
him. That only enraged him further. He could not bear that I never
humbled myself before him, never begged forgiveness the way my
siblings did. I could not ask forgiveness for something I did not feel
was a sin.
It was around then that the desire to escape awakened within me.
I stepped outside my body, and from then on observed the entire
inner and outer chaos from a distance, the world struggling with
its external and internal laws, and within it my own self, stripped
of meaning. Instinctively I kept away from artificial intoxication
— alcohol, drugs, anything of the sort — not out of virtue but out
of self-defense: I was terrified of losing sight of myself even for a
moment.
Later I tried to direct both myself and my surroundings through
carefully planned or improvised scenarios. At first it was a game;
