Shame

12

H i, Majsan!

I suppose I should begin by thanking you for your letter even though I have to admit it didn’t make me very happy. But that probably wasn’t the point either. You can calm down, I won’t continue our correspondence alone, but this letter seems necessary to send. It will be the last one.

I beg your pardon if I offended you with my speculations in my last letter, it was really not my intention. On the other hand, I don’t intend to apologise for actually having the opinions that I have. If there’s one thing I’m tired of it’s people who think they’re so perfect in their faith that they feel entitled to look down on that of others and condemn it. And in no way am I condemning your parents’ faith as you said. I’m merely exercising my right to believe otherwise. I plan to keep thinking about things and see whether I can find some good new answers, because maybe we can agree that what we’ve had so far has not created a particularly pleasant world. As I read in a book the prison chaplain gave me: ‘All great inventions and advances have been made based on a willingness to admit that no one has been correct so far, and then put all correctness aside and rethink things.’

As far as my ‘home-made heathen belief’, the simplest answer is that our beliefs are very different, but that’s completely okay by me. The Bible says quite eloquently that only God has the right to judge. Most of us have thoughts about eternity now and then. I don’t understand why we human beings, as soon as we find something to believe in, have to run out and try to convince everyone else that we’re right, as if we don’t dare believe anything by ourselves but have to do it in a group for it to count. Then it suddenly becomes important for everyone to believe the exact same thing, and how do we achieve that? Well, we set up laws and rules that fit into the framework we have erected, and to be included we have to adapt. We quite simply have to stop asking our own questions and hoping to find any answers, since the right ones have already been written down in the laws of the religion. That must be the purest coup de grâce for all types of development, don’t you think? Then it’s merely a matter of power, isn’t it? In any case, that’s what religion is about for me, because no religion was created by any God but by us humans, and history has shown us what people think they can do in religion’s name.

As I read over what I’ve written I realise that I’ve probably offended you in this letter too. I just want you to know that I am also a believer, but my God is not as judgemental as yours. You wrote that considering the fact that I’m serving a life sentence, there is no reason to read my sick speculations. Well, that may be, but I still want to conclude by telling you my version of why I’m sitting here today.

Do you remember that I always dreamed of being a writer? In my childhood home that was just about like dreaming of becoming king, but our Swedish teacher (remember Sture Lundin?) encouraged my writing. After you and I lost contact I moved to Stockholm and there I studied to be a journalist. Not that any of my articles have become immortalised, but I made my living as a journalist for almost ten years. Then I met Örjan. If you only knew how much time I’ve spent trying to understand why I fell so crazily in love. Because looking back it’s inconceivable that I closed my eyes to all the warning signs. And there were certainly more than enough of them. The strangest thing of all is that I felt safe with him, even though everything he said and did should have made me feel exactly the opposite. Even then he was drinking far too much, and he always had money without ever telling me where it came from. Now I realise that it was because he reminded me of my own father and that the ‘security’ came from recognising my own childhood. I felt at home with him and knew exactly how to act. I never fell in love with any of those ‘kind, friendly’ men I had run into over the years, because they made me feel insecure. I never knew how I should act with them. Örjan didn’t like women to be too independent, and I didn’t have to work because he could provide for us with his money. And fool that I was, I tried to adapt myself to his wishes, and about six months after we met I quit my job. Then it was my friends he didn’t want me to see, and to avoid a fight I stopped communicating with them. Of course that made them stop calling me as well. In only a year I lost all contact with the outside world and had become more or less a slave. I won’t tire you with the details, but Örjan was a sick person. He wasn’t born that way, of course, but he had grown up in an abusive home and kept on living the way he had been taught. It began almost imperceptibly. A nasty little comment now and then that gradually became so commonplace that I got used to it. Finally I ended up believing those things, and I began to think he had a right to say them. Then he started hitting me. There were days when I could hardly move, but it served me right, he said, because then he knew where he had me. But he knew that anyway, because I wasn’t allowed to leave the house without asking his permission, which he never gave.

Now this is the hard part, telling you about my dear children. They are still in my thoughts, and so many times I’ve gone over and over all the ‘if onlys’. But 17 years and 94 days ago, I saw no other solution than to take them with me into death, to save them from the hell we lived in, and it was MY fault they were born into it. I could see no other solution. I was so bone-tired of always being afraid. Maybe only a person who has lived in constant fear for a long time can understand how it feels, and how powerless you become in the end. What happened to me was not important, but I could no longer stand watching my children suffer. I was so ashamed of myself and everything I had let happen that I didn’t dare seek help. I was guilty too, after all! I hadn’t stopped him in time! I had seen how he went after the children, and I hadn’t dared stop him then either. I desired nothing more than death, but I couldn’t leave my children with him. At that point my brain was so mixed up that there seemed no other way out. I saw it as our only salvation. I gave them sedatives and suffocated them in their beds. It was never my plan to kill Örjan, but he came home early unexpectedly, and found me in the children’s bedroom. I’ve never been so scared in all my life. I managed to get out and run to the kitchen, and when he caught up with me I had a butcher’s knife in my hand. Afterwards I emptied the petrol can that Örjan kept in the storeroom and lay down with the children and waited. What I remember most strongly about those hours was how I felt when I heard the flames crackling downstairs, slowly but surely destroying our prison. For the first time in my life I felt total peace.

The worst moment I’ve ever had was when I woke up in the hospital a couple of weeks later. I’d survived, but my children were with him on the other side. I survived, but it means nothing to me that I got my life back.

I’m not trying to make excuses for what I did, but it’s some solace to me to try to understand the reason why everything turned out the way it did. My punishment is not being locked up here. My punishment is a thousand times worse and will last the rest of my life. For every second that remains, it’s seeing my children’s eyes before me, remembering the looks they gave me when they saw what I was doing.

There is no hell after death to which your God can condemn us. We create our own hell here on earth by making the wrong choices. Life is not something that ‘happens to us’, it’s something that we create and shape ourselves.

I will follow your wishes and stop writing to you. But I must write one more thing before our paths part once again. If it’s true that you have pain somewhere, then I think you ought to have it examined, and for safety’s sake you ought to do it as soon as possible.

You know I’m here if you need me.

Your friend,

Vanja